MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by teecha | 2026-01-01 01:47:09+00:00
not an expert, 2 years of serious lifting, but this is probably a good adage for the average person from my current understanding

training to failure puts you at higher risk of injury and there are diminishing returns as you approach your 1 rep max and/or failure

hypertrophy can happen with more reps or more weight

strength gains are usually just focused on progressive overload

though, of course, hypertrophy will happen either way and contributes to increased strength, but this seems to be further confirmation that you can gain muscle size either way
by kpil | 2026-01-01 01:47:11+00:00
Good question.

There seems to be strong lobbying for insects as human food, in particular from companies that would be happy feed us with their own shit as long as it's cheap and they could get away with it

The green-left seems to enjoy that idea. Exactly why is hard to tell - especially on HN, but let's say I don't think it's rational.

So I guess, successful lobbying?
by positron26 | 2026-01-01 01:47:17+00:00
Not just relative to other billionaires, relative to the average American, he never went after get rich quick schemes, has a reputation less dirty, values life-long relationships more, and fell to not one of so many traps and dynamics that see many successful people trash their own legacy.

The internet citizen is so often convinced that everyone with a high net worth is crooked, cheated to get where they are at, and would be even more morally corrupt if only they weren't so undeserving as to be incompetent of the ways to do so.

So often the ambitious can believe that to succeed one must perform ultra sexy acts of innovation multiplied by inhuman hours of naive young team members. This pressure can drive us to be impatient, reckless, and unscrupulous.

When we look at most startup CEOs who make it big, we say "don't try to emulate them" because we know they took huge risks and rolled at least a few good numbers. A person can emulate Warren Buffet. It's just patient and prudent, avoiding self-deception for decades. Yet it is excruciating. If not for Warren Buffet, so many would say, "It's not worth it" or "It will never work because you'll slip up."

Being at least an anecdote that being honest and right can work out in the long run is a herculean counterweight against the vast traps of cynicism that can lead many to defeat themselves before they even try. It's tough to keep going or commit to that path, especially as your options keep going up. Few else tried because it takes an entire lifetime. Making it work saved a lot of people from a lot of imprudent choices and will continue to save more. That is heroic.
by XJ6w9dTdM | 2026-01-01 01:48:04+00:00
Exactly yes, that's what I was going to comment. You sometimes need to debug at every layers. All abstractions end up leaking in some way. It's often worth it, but it does not save us from the extra cognitive load and from learning the layers underneath.

I'm not necessarily against the approach shown here, reducing tokens for more efficient LLM generation; but if this catches on, humans will read and write it, will write debuggers and tooling for it, etc. It will definitely not be a perfectly hidden layer underneath.

But why not, for programming models, just select tokens that map concisely existing programming languages ? Would that not be as effective ?
by parineum | 2026-01-01 01:50:17+00:00
> Global poverty reduction has slowed to a near standstill, with 2020–2030 set to be a lost decade - World Bank.

"Slowed to a near standstill" means it's still moving in the right direction.

There may have been some global event in the 2020s that maybe had a bit of an impact on the global economy.

> Please note that if you exclude China, the trend of poverty reduction is laughable.

If you exclude the area of the world that used to be extremely poor but has benefitted massively from the wealth generated by creating products for the billionaires abroad, why would you exclude that?
CodeWeavers CrossOver coupon code for 2026
by twickline | 2026-01-01 01:51:18+00:00
Hello Everyone,
I want to share my CodeWeavers coupon / promo code, the code is ( TOM15 ) and its good for a instant 15% discount off any product in CodeWeavers online store.

Just go to CodeWeavers store and enter the code then update and you will see your discount. This promo code is now valid until December 31st 2026 so feel free to share it with family and friends so they can also save 15% off CrossOver for Linux, Mac, ChromeOS.

This coupon code currently isn't valid for a discount off CrossOver Lifetime. But if you should decide to purchase CrossOver LifeTime you will receive 65 Swag Bucks that can be used in CodeWeavers Swag store.
by ekinertac | 2026-01-01 01:51:24+00:00
the real question isn't "should AI write readable code" but "where in the stack does human comprehension become necessary?" we already have layers where machine-optimized formats dominate (bytecode, machine code, optimized IR). the source layer stays readable because it's the interface where human judgment enters.

maybe AI should write better readable code than humans. more consistent naming, clearer structure, better comments. precisely because humans only "skim". optimize for skimmability and debuggability, not keystroke efficiency.
by skydhash | 2026-01-01 01:51:53+00:00
Please tell me which one of the headings is not about increased usage o LLMs and derived tools and is about some improvement in the axes of reliability or or any kind of usefulness.

Here is the changelog for OpenBSD 7.8:

https://www.openbsd.org/78.html

There's nothing here that says: We make it easier to use it more of it. It's about using it better and fixing underlying problems.
by kenferry | 2026-01-01 01:52:31+00:00
Seems like engagement bait or a thought exercise more than a realistic project.

> "But I need to debug!"

> Do you debug JVM bytecode? V8's internals? No. You debug at your abstraction layer. If that layer is natural language, debugging becomes: "Hey Claude, the login is failing for users with + in their email."

Folks can get away without reading assembly only when the compiler is reliable. English -> code compilation by llms is not reliable. It will become more reliable, but (a) isn’t now so I guess this is a project to “provoke thought” (b) you’re going to need several nines of reliability, which I would bet against in any sane timeframe (b) English isn’t well specified enough to have “correct” compilation, so unclear if “several nines of reliability” is even theoretically possible.
by simplynd | 2026-01-01 01:53:29+00:00
I built this over the holidays to automate my yearly family expense audit. I wanted to see if I could get 100% mathematical accuracy using local LLMs without my data ever leaving my machine.

The Tech Stack:

Models: Granite 3.3 (8b for reasoning, 2b for vendor normalization). I found these to be a great balance of speed and consistency on local hardware compared to other small models I tried.

Interface: FastMCP. I realized early on that LLMs shouldn't do the math—they should write the tools for the math. By using MCP, the LLM generates SQL queries for SQLite instead of "hallucinating" totals.

Backend: FastAPI/Python.

Lessons Learned: The project taught me that "AI-assisted development" requires a lot of "Developer-led oversight." I had moments where the AI forgot its own API types or suggested overly complex fixes for simple CORS issues. It's a great co-pilot, but you still need to know how the plumbing works.

Repo: [Your GitHub Link] I also wrote a deeper dive on the "Writer vs. Editor" shift here: [Link to Medium Article V2]

Happy to answer any questions about the setup or the Granite performance!
by jodrellblank | 2026-01-01 01:54:05+00:00
Berkshire Hathaway holds over 9% of Coca Cola's shares, worth $28 billion and returning over $800 million a year in dividend payments. Isn't that worth being seen visibly supporting Coca Cola products?

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xXwAtQqkN6c/XM3Brj-ZkuI/AAAAAAAAv...
by dlenski | 2026-01-01 01:54:34+00:00
This is a 21st-century equivalent of leaving short words ("of", "the", "in") out of telegrams because telegraph operators charged by the word. That caused plenty of problems in comprehension… this is probably much worse because it's being applied to extremely complex and highly structured messages.

It seems like a short-sighted solution to a problem that is either transient or negligible in the long run. "Make code nearly unreadable to deal with inefficient tokenization and/or a weird cost model for LLMs."

I strongly question the idea that code can be effectively audited by humans if it can't be read by humans.
by norir | 2026-01-01 01:54:50+00:00
I suspect this is wrong. If you are correct, that implies to me that LLMs are not intelligent and just are exceptionally well tuned to echo back their training data. It makes no sense to me that a superior intelligence would be unable to trivially learn a new language syntax and apply its semantic knowledge to the new syntax. So I believe that either LLMs will improve to the point that they will easily pick up a new language or we will realize that LLMs themselves are the dead end.
by shakna | 2026-01-01 01:55:26+00:00
Sidenote:

Whilst Morrowind is fine under Wine, there's a fantastic engine rebuild called OpenMW [0]. It runs on both Windows and Linux natively.

Some of the memory limits are also lifted, which meant I have a few mods that weren't possible without hacks in the past [1].

[0] https://openmw.org/

[1] https://morromod.netlify.app/
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-01 01:55:47+00:00
> it provides protection and accountability for those who don't have the prior presence of mind to demand deletion

Perhaps. I just see another compliance-industrial tax on consumers backed up by a nonsense checklist.

> act which mandated deletion in all cases for data once business needs are addressed (often 30--90 days for much data), might address your question

Or opt out by default.

Perhaps California should give counties the power to do that. Then we can watch the experiment for unintended consequences.
by throwaway150 | 2026-01-01 01:56:54+00:00
I'm not sure how you can be so sure about that sentence being written by LLM. I can imagine it is perfectly possible that a human could've written that. I mean, on some day I might write a sentence just like that.

I think HN should really ban complaints about LLM written text. It is annoying at best and a discouraging insinuation at worst. The insinuation is really offensive when the insinuation is false and the author in fact wrote the sentence with their own brain.

I don't know if this sentence was written by LLM or not but people will definitely use LLMs to revise and refine posts. No amount of complaining will stop this. It is the new reality. It's a trend that will only continue to grow. These incessant complaints about LLM-written text don't help and they make the comment threads really boring. HN should really introduce a rule to ban such complaints just like it bans complaints about tangential annoyances like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage
by jasonwatkinspdx | 2026-01-01 01:57:03+00:00
You're attributing views to me I do not hold.

And frankly, you characterization of those views makes clear you're not interested in actual answers.

The primary issue with gentrification in historically black neighborhoods is that owners face the dilemma of having to leave their community to capture the increased property values.

For example, I live near the oldest black church in the PNW. Many of the older congregation members live in the area, and have low mobility. If we don't build a mix of housing that addresses their needs in downsizing, they end up having to effectively exile themselves from the community they've lived within for decades. They can't simply "move somewhere lower cost" without dramatic changes to their entire social world, just at an age where keeping those social ties takes a lot of effort.
by borroka | 2026-01-01 01:57:16+00:00
This comparison is hardly apt in the way it is formulated, but it is fitting when considering tailors and seamstresses. A few decades ago, numerous tailors made custom-made clothes and skilled seamstresses repaired them.
Today, since clothes are made by machines and the cost of production has fallen significantly, making bespoke clothes has become a niche job, almost extinct, and instead of repairing clothes, people prefer to buy new ones.

These jobs have not disappeared, but they have become much less common and attractive.
by dlenski | 2026-01-01 01:58:11+00:00
> Not really. You can have 100,000 IPs from proxies or use VPNs and have only 5 egress IPs.

Why…?

If I can run a proxy exit node on 100k residential IPs, why can't I run a VPN server on 100k residential IPs?

There is no additional technical complexity or resource consumption from the VPN server compared to the proxy server.
by coolewurst | 2026-01-01 01:58:18+00:00
In his youth he was heavily inspired heavily by the book "1000 ways to make 1000 dollars", quite literally a get rich quick book.

Also his bets on GEICO were probably a little impatient, reckless, and unscrupulous, but that's fine.

He is one of the finest businessmen to study and certainly one of the more moral billionaires.
by Animats | 2026-01-01 01:58:26+00:00
The question is whether this language can be well understood by LLMs. Lack of declarations seems a mistake. The LLM will have to infer types, which is not something LLMs are good at. Most of the documentation is missing, so there's no way to tell how this handles data structures.

A programming language for LLMs isn't a bad idea, but this doesn't look like a good one.
by parineum | 2026-01-01 01:59:06+00:00
You can say amazon doesn't pay VAT but it's just as honest as saying Americans don't pay for tariffs

The consumer pays a certain price for a product and a portion of that money goes to taxes and costs to Amazon (including things that are taxed, like driver salaries and fuel). Those taxes are collected on the way from Amazon to the end user in every country they pass through, more or less.

Amazon is creating commerce that is taxed. They aren't skating by for free.
by quesera | 2026-01-01 01:59:07+00:00
My method for that is:

- I need 200g
- Bars are 160g
- So I need 1 bar + 40g
- 40g is 25% of 160g (this one's easy, but precision is rarely critical -- and if you think it is, ask Siri)
- So I need 1 bar + 1/4 bar
by slwvx | 2026-01-01 01:59:23+00:00
I'm all for higher estate taxes.

If one ignores FICA (social security) taxes, the US has a negative income tax for the lowest income brackets. I think this is a wonderful thing in that it encourages low income people to get into and stay in the workforce, and encourages high income people to focus on investment, due to lower taxes on long-term capital gains.

On the other hand, I'm in favor of higher taxes than income on short-term capital gains, to encourage investors to focus on long-term gains rather than short-term extractive exploitation of assets. I favor lower rates than income tax on long term gains, say assets held for five years.
by nntwozz | 2026-01-01 01:59:39+00:00
I didn't know that, talk about being late to the party.

On a tangent I also found this recently about Le Corbusier:

---

Research from the last decade, primarily from a series of books published in 2015 and released correspondence, has confirmed that the influential modernist architect Le Corbusier was a fascist and antisemite with ties to the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime in France.

--

He wanted to build this in Stockholm in 1933:

https://ptpimg.me/om1779.png
by bsder | 2026-01-01 02:00:38+00:00
> Poor people should properly budget and cook at home to avoid staying poor

You can't budget your way out of being poor. Most genuinely poor people I know have a very good grasp of their budget as they are constantly shifting money around figuring out which bills they have to pay and which bills they can put off.

You get out of being poor by getting more money. Period. Nothing else works.

Yes, more money doesn't guarantee you get out of being poor and we all know people who got a windfall and then were worse off than before.

However, insufficient money absolutely does guarantee that you will be poor indefinitely.
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-01-01 02:01:11+00:00
>I ditched MSFT stock a few years ago in favor of AMD

I bought equal amounts of MSFT and AMD, about four years ago. Haven't touched any of the AMD, yet... and was thinking maybe I should sell it all (also don't like AI-integrated things, fellow Old Man)... but now that GPUs are so expensive I haven't pulled the trigger, yet. Until a few months ago, AMD had been break-even for my then-three-years of holding.

>I am ditching is a 2006 Xeon dual core

Mine is a 2009, and honestly was held together with patches/glue (not literally). Also very stable after boot-up, but boots were becoming 50/50. I migrated off of Xeons (as my main machine) Jan 2023, when Apple released their M2Pro "Silicon" models. I also got a 15" M3 Macbook Air. Both machines make great internet browsers.

I hate modern macOS, but it is usable when you block apple/icloud (entirely), at the host level. No update nags, no cloud storage BS, no problems.

All my serious writing/paperwork happens offline, on quite antiquated equipment (oldest being my Smith Corona c~1946).

Very happily awaiting the return of in-person meetups, as generative AI video begins requiring such social connection.
by bastawhiz | 2026-01-01 02:02:42+00:00
Pypi has fewer than one million projects. The searchable content for each package is what? 300 bytes? That's a 200mb index. You don't even need fancy full text search, you could literally split the query by word and do a grep over a text file. No need for elasticsearch or anything fancy.

And anyway, hit rates are going to be pretty good. You're not taking arbitrary queries, the domain is pretty narrow. Half the queries are going to be for requests, pytorch, numpy, httpx, and the other usual suspects.
by Tuna-Fish | 2026-01-01 02:02:50+00:00
They definitely didn't. Apple was starting from scratch in the market, and the original iPhone did a whole bunch of things it shouldn't have, making it needlessly expensive to build for the hardware it included. This is partly why Nokia initially dismissed it, as soon as it was on the market, teardowns showed that it was basically an amateurish prototype that was pushed to production, internally much worse than you'd expect from a mature company that was used to building consumer electronics. The N95 could be sold for less because it was legitimately a lot cheaper phone to build.

Then only a year later the iPhone 3G came out, and it was a rough wake-up for Nokia. Because that one was actually a well-built sane design.
by elminson | 2026-01-01 02:04:27+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm Elminson, a senior software engineer living in Brooklyn (from the Dominican Republic). I built Evee after getting frustrated with how expensive RAG chatbot platforms are.

What Evee does: Ingest content from URLs, sitemaps, PDFs, and Markdown. Vector search finds relevant context, GPT-4 generates answers with real-time streaming. Embed via widget or REST API.

The pricing problem: Most platforms charge $150-250/mo for 4k-15k queries. Evee gives 20k queries at $79/mo with white-label included. Free tier has 1.5k queries/mo.

Tech: Laravel, vector embeddings, GPT-4, scheduled auto-sync.

Would love feedback on the onboarding experience and any rough edges you find.

eveeapp.com — no credit card required.
by westurner | 2026-01-01 02:04:50+00:00
Relay > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relay :

> [1809, 1835, 1837, 1840 (Samuel Morse; Morse telegraph) ]

Electric gate > Electric Gate History:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_gate :

> One of the first electric gates was invented by a Canadian Fred W. Watson in 1881. It was designed to be used for railway systems ... “A catch connected with an electro-magnet keeps a gate closed,” reported The National Tribune on October 9, 1884. [3]

Flip-flop (electronics) > History:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip-flop_(electronics)
by leguminous | 2026-01-01 02:05:53+00:00
> For example, 720 is tied to 13.5 Mhz because sampling the active picture area of an analog video scanline at 13.5 MHz generates 1440 samples (double per-Nyquist).

I don't think you need to be doubling here. Sampling at 13.5 MHz generates about 720 samples.

13.5e6 Hz * 53.33...e-6 seconds = 720 samples

The sampling theorem just means that with that 13.5 MHz sampling rate (and 720 samples) signals up to 6.75 MHz can be represented without aliasing.

There's some history on the standard here: https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/techreview/trev_304-rec601_wood.pdf
by al_borland | 2026-01-01 02:06:34+00:00
> Do you debug JVM bytecode? V8's internals? No. You debug at your abstraction layer. If that layer is natural language, debugging becomes: "Hey Claude, the login is failing for users with + in their email."

I’ve run into countless situations where this simply doesn’t work. I once had a simple off-by-one error and the AI could not fix it. I tried explaining the end result of what I was seeing, as implied by this example, with no luck. I then found why it was happening myself and explained the exact problem and where it was, and the AI still couldn’t do it. It was sloshing back and further between various solutions and compounding complexity that didn’t help the issue. I ended up manually fixing the problem in the code.

The AI needs to be nearly flawless before this is viable. I feel like we are still a long way away from that.
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-01 02:06:36+00:00
I actually agree that building smaller/denser housing would be great and address the needs of many existing residents, but those same faux-progressive activists will decry that in the strongest terms, and insist that any increases in density will only further even worse gentrification and change the historical "flavor" of the neighborhood in extremely detrimental ways. Again, progressive activists cannot have it both ways; they should pick one or the other.
by RaftPeople | 2026-01-01 02:07:25+00:00
The reason I said it would impact duration is the assumption that the previous version and new version of the system are all in the code at one time, managed via feature flags or something. I think I was picturing that due to other comments later in the thread, you may not be handling it that way.

Either way, I still don't understand how you can reasonably manage the complexity, or what value it brings.

Example:

main - current production - always matches exactly what is being executed in production, no differences allowed

production_qa - for testing production changes independent of the big project

production_dev_branches - for developing production changes during big project

big_project_qa_branch - tons of changes, currently being used to qa all of the interactions with this system as well as integrations to multiple other systems internal and external

big_project_dev_branches - as these get finalized and ready for qa they move to qa

Questions:

When production changes and project changes are in direct conflict, how can you possibly handle that if everyone is just committing to one branch?

How do you create a clean QA image for all of the different types of testing and ultimately business training that will need to happen for the project?