MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tialaramex | 2026-01-19 13:48:58+00:00
Rice's Theorem says we can advance arbitrarily close but can't reach the goal of compiling exactly the set of correct programs (all correct, none incorrect). Some years ago Rust landed "Non-lexical lifetimes" borrow checking which is an example of such an advance, you don't need to overturn mathematics to make such advances, only to reach the goal. Work to further improve lifetime checking is ongoing though I doubt anything as big as NLL is on the foreseeable horizon.

The problem isn't directly with C++ choosing "All correct programs compile" but instead with the resulting incentive structure. Programmers want their program to compile.

In Rust the incentive is to improve the compiler, allowing more programs (all of them correct) to compile as with the NLL changes.

But in C++ the incentive is to loosen the requirements, allowing more programs (some of them incorrect) to compile, as with Concepts Lite in 2020.
by zipy124 | 2026-01-19 13:49:33+00:00
In the end of the day everything is subjective. A choice of what objective measuremetns to make is already a choice.

I think the reason for their list not having that 9.0 monitor is that it is 50% more expensive, and doesn't really add that much more. One might say it is superfluous. They should probably add their justification to the article though. Personally I am in agreement, I wouldn't buy a 5k display for my office staff because I really don't think it adds anything over the 4k display to their productivity, but I could definetly justify a 4k display over a 1080p display.
by ryan-c | 2026-01-19 13:49:42+00:00
Two things that I simultaneously believe:

* Gun ownership should be much more tightly regulated in the US.

* Requiring 3D printers to block production of firearms is worse than useless.

How would that even work from a technological perspective? If it did work, why would 3d printer jailbreaks not be the immediate result? I would use jailbroken firmware on principal.
by aenis | 2026-01-19 13:49:49+00:00
It helped me finish my webRTC client for a esp32 microcontroller. Thats fairly low level. It did it without breaking a sweat - 2hrs, and we had a model which works with my pipecat-based based server.

I loaded the lowest level piece of software I wrote in the last 15 years - a memory spoofing aimbot poc exploiting architectural issues in x86 (things like memory breakpoints set on logical memory - not hw addresses - allowing to read memory without tripping kernel-level detection tools, ability to trigger PFs on pages where the POC was hiding to escape detection, low level gnarly stuff like this). I asked it to clean up the code base and propose why it would not work under current version of windows. It did that pretty well.

Lower level stuff does of course exist, but not a whole lot IMHO. I would not assume claude will struggle with kernel level stuff at all. If anything, this is better documented than the over-abstraced mainstream stuff.
by yabones | 2026-01-19 13:49:54+00:00
I don't think anybody would earnestly argue that anything is "completely safe" because that's not how risk management works.

The exhaust of 250 years of fossil fuel energy production is stored in your lungs and bloodstream. It kills five million people every year. As bad as some of the nuclear accidents have been, it's minuscule compared to what happens on a daily basis in the oil/gas/coal industry.
by heliumtera | 2026-01-19 13:50:14+00:00
We should probably stop using adjectives to describe programs/systems.

"Run" X,Y,Z...where, where does it run?
"Isolated environment". How isolation was achieved? Is it a VM, if yes then what is the virtualization stack and what it contains? Is it firecracker, just a docker image?
What are the defaults and network rules in this isolated environments?
by aserafini | 2026-01-19 13:51:02+00:00
My recollection (admittedly worked for Amazon >19 years ago) is that there was never any computational overhead to commingling. In fact, the opposite was true: there was a computational overhead to tracking which vendor a specific piece of inventory of a given product came from instead of assuming that all inventory of that product was fungible.

This was reflected in other ways: for example inventory that we returned to a supplier for a given product with multiple suppliers could never be guaranteed to be same the inventory they actually shipped to us originally (in the case of reverse logistics for overstocks or damaged stock). The only guarantee we could make was that it was the same product. Vendors complained about this a lot.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-19 13:51:07+00:00
Exactly. Micro grids keep on functioning unless they are hit directly. Batteries can charge up when there's power from solar, the grid, rooftop wind, generators, EVs that can provide power back, and so on. There are many options here; batteries don't care where the power comes from. That kind of resilience is very hard to take out with drones once you have it. Centralized grids are much less resilient.

I expect Ukrainians don't actually need to be told this and are already getting creative with ensuring they have power. There's plenty of incentive there to make sure they are not overly dependent on centralized power and heating infrastructure. Of course it takes time to fix and upgrade all buildings; that's why the Russians can still have huge impact with their nightly strikes against civilian infrastructure.

I think Russia and Puting will get credited for inadvertently speeding up the energy transition across Europe by a few decades. Everybody is going cold turkey on Russian gas and the replacement isn't LNG. That's more of a stop gap solution until something more economical can be put in place. We're having pretty harsh winter here in Germany (and elsewhere in the EU). There's not a lot of talk about gas prices in the news so far. That's because we've had a few years to diversify our energy sources. LNG is now a big part of the mix, obviously. But the high price of that is also an incentive for people to consider alternatives like heat pumps.
by barishnamazov | 2026-01-19 13:51:35+00:00
> You clearly underestimate the quality of people I have seen and worked with.

I'm not sure what you're referring to. I didn't say anything about capabilities of people. If anything, I defend people :-)

> And yes guard rails can be added easily.

Do you mean models can be prevented to do dumb things? I'm not too sure about that, unless a strict software architecture is engineered by humans where LLMs simply write code and implement features. Not everything is web development where we can simply lock filesystems and prod database changes. Software is very complex across the industry.
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-19 13:52:00+00:00
You speak about India?

Yeah, EU is super fucked since it outsourced its energy dependence to Russia, consumer manufacturing to China, defence and tech services to US, and only just woke up in the last 3 or so years that it was all a huge mistake that's now costing us dearly.

Trying to undo just one dependency is a slow and painful process, but fighting all 3 at the same time is a suicide mission.

The US outsourced its manufacturing too, but unlike EU, it has a strong enough economy and military that they can just snap their fingers and the likes of Taiwan and Korea will immediately onshore some manufacturing of their high end chips and ships to the US, but EU doesn't have this kind leverage.
by philistine | 2026-01-19 13:52:04+00:00
Unfortunately the other crap is probably what’s going to get ported. They’ll maintain for a long while a backwards compatible version of Windows that they’ll sell for an arm and a leg, but they’ll try to move their uncaring customers to a Windows userland running on Linux.

That’s my belief, and I’m always looking for clues that it’s what develops into their long-term plan. Right now the only thing we could glean is reduced investments in Windows.
by llm_nerd | 2026-01-19 13:52:12+00:00
Solar is about 50% as productive during the depths of winter than the summer at 50 degrees North (65% or so of the peak power, but obviously the duration of sunlight is reduced). "Barely any"/"Useless" is not accurate. Solar arrays remain productive during the winter, even at Northern latitudes.

Heat pumps obviously offer more heat output per kW than electric alternatives. It makes limited supply much more tenable and valuable.
by cykros | 2026-01-19 13:52:25+00:00
Bitchat does work with Meshtastic as of the most recent release. It also lets you self host a relay, because it uses Nostr relays. I'm not so sure about white/black listing so yours DOES get used, but you can absolutely host one. Routing through the Internet is something both Bitchat and Briar support, Briar through tor, Bitchat through Nostr (optionally also through tor). Disabling Internet routing at this time may require turning off Internet for Bitchat -- haven't dug on that one.

I do like the store and forward idea, though a thought on that is that while it makes sense for DM's, it makes less sense for group chats, which, being real time, make the shelf life of messages a bit short. It makes good sense for forum like content though. I think so far Bitchat has treated this as a bit out of scope, at least at this stage of development, and it is a reason that indeed, Briar is still quite relevant.

Bitchat only just recently even added ad hoc wifi support, so it's still very early days.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-01-19 13:52:33+00:00
Brexit didn’t do anything to correct the UK’s current trajectory. I guarantee you even destroying the relationship with NATO would not shift the course the US is on. Every time something extreme happens, people gasp for a second then accept it and move on. I don’t think the situation in the US is hopeless by any means, but Greenland is not going to suddenly be some magical moment that wakes everybody up. We’ve done this song and dance for a decade with Trump. After the attack on the capitol it be became very clear that it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than we thought.
by zipy124 | 2026-01-19 13:53:44+00:00
That's not quite how that works though. It can for example be possible that fine-tuning a model to avoid the styles described in the article cause the LLM to stop functionaing as well as it can. It might just be an artefact of the architecture itself that to be effective it has to follow these rules. If it was as easy as just providing data and the LLM would then 'encode' that as a rule, we would advance much quicker than we currently are.
by pc86 | 2026-01-19 13:53:44+00:00
It is the imposition onto other people that makes it antisocial. The "I don't care or won't consider how this impacts other people, I am going to do whatever I want or whatever is easiest for me. If it bothers, upsets, or imposes on others, I don't care."

To keep with the example below, walking in the woods alone is "not social" but it's not at all "anti-social." Listening to music with headphones while walking through the woods is not anti-social. Blasting music on a portable speaker, not caring whether or not you're disturbing other people on that trail, is a pretty great example of anti-social behavior. As is having a speaker phone conversation on mass transit, or being visibly under the influence of drugs in public, or choosing to park illegally and block someone in because you'll "just be a minute" or any number of other things people do because it makes their lives 5% easier at the risk of making someone else's 10% harder.
by brazzy | 2026-01-19 13:53:47+00:00
> Why are these articles finding their way here? In europe , this is not news, never.

A provably untrue statement. Examples:

https://www.politico.eu/article/big-tech-lobbying-brussels-d...

https://www.brusselstimes.com/1916422/us-tech-giants-allying...

https://taz.de/Digitale-Rechte-in-Europa/!6130097/

https://fr.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/18/champ-de-batail...
by ninkendo | 2026-01-19 13:53:57+00:00
Yeah we’re not supposed to talk about how “HN is turning into Reddit”, but it already has. For years now. A typical comment here has been indistinguishable from a typical Reddit comment for many years, with the exception that humor is a lot less common here (although even that has changed a ton.)

The argument is that “HN is turning into Reddit” has been said since the beginning of HN… but that doesn’t make it wrong. To me the transformation is already complete. Regression to the mean is unavoidable.
by praptak | 2026-01-19 13:54:16+00:00
> Not if the data is small and in cache.

Isn't it another way of saying what the author says in the previous paragraph, namely that "ideal SIMD speedup can only come from problems that are compute bound"?

If the cost of getting the input data into the cache is already large compared to processing it with the non-vectorized code, then SIMD cannot achieve meaningful speedup. The opposite of this condition (processing is expensive compared to the cost of data into the cache) is basically the definition "compute bound".
by accidentallfact | 2026-01-19 13:54:17+00:00
It's the same kind of schizm that has lead to a lot of hate and mass murder over the last century or so:
Abstraction/dimensionality reduction vs. concrete logic and statistics

Concrete statistician: I can learn the problem in its full complexity, unlike the dumdum below me.

Abstract thinker: I understand it, because I can reduce its dimensity to a small number of parameters.

CS: I can predict this because I have statistics about its past behavior.

AT: I told you so.

CS: You couldn't possibly know this, because it has never happened before. You suffer from the hindsight bias.

AT: But I told you.

CS: It has never happened, you couldn't possibly have statistics of when such things occur. You were just lucky.

CS: I'm smart, I can be taught anything

AT: You are stupid because you need to be taught everything.

War (or another sort of mass death or other kind of suffering) emerges.
by stephenr | 2026-01-19 13:54:28+00:00
Look, do what works for you obviously but this just reinforces my view that the people who see "AI Code agents" as a useful thing, are the people who don't know how to write code themselves.

For the same reason things like Image Playground/etc seem magical/appealing to non-artists (myself included): we don't know how to do it ourselves, so it feels empowering.

Or more close to home: it's the same reason that developers are so in love with clicking some buttons in the <insert cloud mega provider> dashboard in spite of the costs, lock-in, more costs, yet more costs, and of course the extra costs.

As with those choosing "cloud" services they don't need, here too there will no doubt be a lucrative market to fix the shit once people realise that there's a reason experts charge the way they do.
by pahbloo | 2026-01-19 13:54:33+00:00
There is an interesting pattern emerging in this thread. There are a lot of 'same here' and 'opposite for me' comments, but both sides are converging on the same point: people developing software to solve a problem.

Many who are considering a career shift away from software due to 'AI disgust' devoted their lives to developing software because they loved the craft. But with AI churning out cheap, ugly, but passable code, it's clear that businesses never appreciated the craft. I hope these folks find an area outside of SWE that they love just as much.

But once these folks find this area, it would be naive to think they won't use software to scratch their itch. In the same way that people who didn't pursue a career in SWE (because they felt under-qualified) are using AI to solve their problems, these folks will now find their own problems to solve with software, even if at first that is not their intention. They probably won't use AI to write the code, but ultimately, AI is forcing everyone to become a product manager.
by Traumen | 2026-01-19 13:54:39+00:00
As systems scale, control increasingly shifts from users to opaque layers: policy engines, algorithms, and now LLM-based agents. This isn’t an anti-AI argument, but an engineering one: collapsing policy, logic, and execution creates systems that are harder to reason about, override, or trust. This post examines loss of agency as a recurring failure mode in modern software architectures.
by owlninja | 2026-01-19 13:55:02+00:00
A$AP Rocky has always put out interesting videos, here are a few others that are pretty cool:

Yamborghini high: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt7gP_IW-1w
L$D: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gx4JEBwVlXo
by enriquto | 2026-01-19 13:55:05+00:00
> because of the stochastic nature of LLMs.

But is this "stochastic nature" inherent to the LLM? Can't you make the outputs deterministic by specifying a version of the weights and a seed for the random number generator?

Your vibe coding log (i.e. your source code) may start like this:

fix weights as of 18-1-2026
set rng seed to 42

write a program that prints hello world

Notice that the first two lines may be added automatically by the system and you don't need to write or even see them.
by aenis | 2026-01-19 13:55:17+00:00
100% this, too. I am an IT professional - CTO for a large-ish enterprise (25-30bn yearly revenue). I am finding myself waking up at 4am every single day for the last 2 months to vibe code stuff i always wanted to build for myself, my family and friends, and never quite had the time for it. My sleep habits are definitely suffering but my happines is through the roof.
by myth_drannon | 2026-01-19 13:55:19+00:00
I didn't quit coding but I also vibe coded something similar despite having found thousands of similar utilities (retirement calculators) so I vibe coded (with base44) https://boringretirementcalculator.com

What can I say... If you used a calculator to get an answer for sqrt(2) are you back to doing mathematics? It's simpler and more fun instead of using Newton method. But it's debatable if you are actually working on mathematics problems.
by aeneas_ory | 2026-01-19 13:55:35+00:00
Catch or prevent - linting only covers a tiny (depending on programming language sometimes more sometimes less) subset of runtime problems. The whole back pressure discussion feels like AI coders found out about type systems and lint rules - but it doesn’t resolve the type problems we get in agentic coding. The only „agent“ responsible for code correctness (and thus adherence to feature specification) is the human instructing the agent, a better compiler or lint rule will not prevent massive logic bugs LLMs tend to create like tests testing functions that have been created by the LLM for the test to make it pass, broken logic flows, missing DI, recreating existing logic, creating useless code that’s not being used anywhere yet pollutes context windows - all the problems LLM based „vibe“ coding „shines“ with once you work on a sufficiently long running project.

Why do I care so much about this? Because the „I feel left behind“ crowd is being gaslighted by comments like the OPs.

Overall strict type systems and static code analysis have always been good for programming, and I‘m glad vibe coders are finding out about this as well - it just doesn’t fix the lack of intelligence LLMs have nor the responsibility of programmers to understand and improve the generated stochastic token output
by win311fwg | 2026-01-19 13:55:41+00:00
> And agile teams are supposed to be self-managed but there’s nothing saying there should be no engineering managers.

The Agile Manifesto is pretty vague, I'll give you that, but the 12 Principles makes it quite clear that they were thinking about partnerships. Management, of any kind, is at odds with that. It does not explicitly say "no engineering managers", but having engineering managers would violate the spirit of it.

> not lack of leadership.

Leadership and management are not the same thing. The nature of the social dynamic does mean that leadership will emerge, but that does not imply some kind of defined role. The leader is not necessarily even the same person from one day to the next.
by RickJWagner | 2026-01-19 13:55:59+00:00
Heres her page on the Space Force “Space Pioneers” page.

https://www.spaceforce.mil/Portals/2/Documents/Space_Pioneer...

West was a person of great faith.

"I think everybody should have God in their life," Gladys says. "I can just about see the complete circle and I can go back and I can look and see what He did and where He put me and where all along. And I would think it's amazing that I didn't understand it at the time, exactly what was happening, but He was there and He was doing it."

https://cbn.com/news/us/everybody-should-have-god-their-life...

https://gideons.org/blog/dr-gladys-west
by deaux | 2026-01-19 13:56:10+00:00
You're providing income to someone whose almost definitely more constrained than you. Without you, no one may have bought it. And the other comment is right - it's a buyers market, we need more buyers, there's a surplus of sellers. Another thing - if sellers more quickly and more easily get to sell their stuff second hand thanks to you, they're more incentivized to sell more in the future as well instead of keeping it in a drawer or throwing it in the trash.

You're doing great for everyone involved!
by m3h_hax0r | 2026-01-19 13:56:13+00:00
I wonder if the OP's question is motivated by there being less public examples of COBOL code to train LLM's on compared to newer languages (so a different experience is expected), or something else. If the prior, it'd be interesting to see if having a language spec and a few examples leads to even better results from an LLM, since less examples could also mean less bad examples that deviate from the spec :)
if there are any dev's that use AI with COBOL and other more common languages, please share your comparative experience
Show HN: QBox – Schrödinger's async (values in superposition until observed)
by gtwohig | 2026-01-19 13:56:20+00:00
QBox wraps async operations in a lazy proxy. The value exists in "superposition" until you observe it—then the box disappears and you just have your data.

user = QBox(fetch_user()) # starts async, returns immediately
score = user.score * 2 + bonus # chains lazily, still no blocking
if score > 100: # observation happens HERE
print("High score!")

No async/await spreading through your codebase. Pure stdlib, Python 3.10+.
by tw1984 | 2026-01-19 13:56:44+00:00
Let's be honest - RISC-V doesn't make sense to 99% users at this stage. ARM is cheaper for 99% use cases, has far more choices on the market, much better performance, greater software ecosystem and tooling.

For 99% users, the only real "benefit" RISC-V can bring to the table is the _false_ feeling that "I am different". Before you start to be excited about those a few cents risc-v MCUs - there are much cheaper MCUs, consider those risc-v MCUs are dead expensive.

Thanks for reading my honest opinions, please feel free to downvote.
by NotGMan | 2026-01-19 13:57:48+00:00
This tax proposal is either malicious or done by the most stupid people imaginable.

The 5% thing is not even remotely the biggest problem.

Also, what prevents them from doing a 5% tax again in a few years, or lowering the limit to who must pay it?

https://x.com/JaredWalczak/status/2011506494282309720

https://x.com/JesseTinsley/status/2012269748982370698

https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/state/california-weal...
by aenis | 2026-01-19 13:58:02+00:00
Could be, but that stack happens to also solve for a lot of problems totally unexperienced people will struggle with (such as, to not look too far, CORS issues). Good reco for a non-tech person to build a frontend. And besides, who cares which stack is used as long as its used. Its not like this will ever be maintained. If anything, if a need for a new feature emerges 5 months down the road the whole thing can be re-done from scratch in one sitting without writing a single line of code.