MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lelanthran | 2026-01-24 08:42:06+00:00
> Might be, then again C23 isn't K&R C that many still learn from.

I agree with this, but then again, not many people are learning C now anyway. It will die away from natural attrition anyway, is my point.

The K&R C does have a few advantages, because the compilers at the time were not so aggressive in optimisation, and will consistently emit code that (for example) performed a NULL dereference (or other UB), ensuring things like consistently crashing instead of silently losing data/doing the wrong thing.
by reify | 2026-01-24 08:42:07+00:00
The Game of flue season 12.

Episode 1: It is not a vaccine. The definition/meaning of the word vaccine was changed by W.H.O. thats why we have symptom reduction medication called vaccines for every known common illness.

Episode 2: Some people who get vaccinated may still get sick with flu. It only works sometimes!

Episode 3: It's possible to get sick with flu even if you have been vaccinated (although you won't know for sure unless you get a flu test). yes! you people are so STUPID, you wont be able to recognise you have the flu.

Episode 4: You may be exposed to an influenza virus shortly before getting vaccinated or during the period that it takes the body to gain protection after getting vaccinated. Very convenient!

Episode 5: Some people who get vaccinated may still get sick with flu. However, flu vaccination has been shown in studies to reduce severity of illness in people who get vaccinated but still get sick

Episode 6: Finale! Take at your own risk. do your own research, dont believe what a person in a white coat tells you its OK.

What to look out for in Season 13: Its a symptom reduction medication

the flu-related death and hospitalizations

Vaccination has been shown to have many benefits including reducing the risk of flu illnesses, hospitalizations and even the risk of flu-related death. While some people who get a flu vaccine may still get sick with influenza, flu vaccination has been shown in several studies to reduce severity of illness
by hashstring | 2026-01-24 08:42:28+00:00
There are some errors in what you write, and despite that, it is not clear to me what the supposed ‘realization’ would be.

1. The famous 2016 San Bernardino case predates Advanced Data Protection technology of iCloud backups. It was never about encryption keys, it was about signing a ‘bad’ iOS update.

2. Details are limited, but it involved a third-party exploit to gain access to the device, not to break the encryption (directly). These are different things and should both be addressed for security, but separately.

Evidently, after this case ended, Apple continued its efforts. It rolled out protecting backups from Apple, and the requirement of successful user authentication before installing iOS updates (which is also protecting against Apple or stolen signing keys).

There is a market here.
by hintop_io | 2026-01-24 08:43:15+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve built Hintop, a trivia game where instead of multiple-choice answers you get progressive hints.
The goal is to guess as early as possible, fewer hints = more points.

I’m especially interested in feedback on:
• whether the core mechanic feels engaging long-term
• onboarding / first-time experience
• ideas to improve retention without adding complexity

App Store link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hintop/id6757975518
Web version: http://hintop.io

Happy to answer any questions.
by botacode | 2026-01-24 08:43:21+00:00
The _actual_ threat to the programmer as a career has little to do with AI and a lot to do with the looming decline in global growth which will continue to destroy opportunities for devs to thrive.

To frame this in terms of falsifiable-ish predictions as the article requests (won't add numbers cause I don't have time to research). FWIW none of these are novel, just combined.

- Dev productivity will improve with AI, but there will be fewer programming jobs because there will just be lower growth overall with the coming debt-overhang slowdown.

- The fraction of un/under-employed programmers as a percentage of total devs will continue to increase. We're at an all time high for number of devs worldwide and this will continue until the economy structurally re-adjusts.

- Employment in the sector will see even more "insider" vs "outsider" dynamics with a resurgence in the relative value of connections and seniority.

Investors and markets have regularly rewarded layoffs and will continue to do so as growth stories become fewer and further between. AI (incredible though it is as a tool) is just the fig-leaf/cover for this transition to be framed as a growth and efficiency story that ennobles insiders even further. The implication will be that some devs are just more skilled at using these new tools/being insightful about business and therefore their continued employment is justified while the outsiders are just unskilled. While this will be true for a small percentage (as it is now!), it will be really mostly be access/restrictive guild dynamics at play driving the shift.
by andrekandre | 2026-01-24 08:46:42+00:00
> I am surprised Google hasn't yet bought JetBrains.

same, but i just guess google doesn't know what they would do with them outside of supporting android

> Compared to Apple and Microsoft, Android development is mostly outsourced.

its true, but i wish apple worked harder on their ide because its so barebones compared to jetbrains its not even funny
by snasan | 2026-01-24 08:47:55+00:00
All these mental models are simplified maps of an infinitely complex reality. When we rely on them too heavily, do we risk falling into the trap of mistaking the map for the actual territory? The very tools we use to understand the world can end up shaping and even limiting our perspective. That's why being aware of the limitations of the models themselves is just as important as using them.
by Alex2310 | 2026-01-24 08:48:28+00:00
I built a tool that tracks leadership communications from S&P 500 companies and links them to verified market reactions.

The motivation came from noticing how often markets move on tone and wording rather than on reported numbers alone. Earnings calls, filings, and press releases often contain signals that aren’t obvious until after the stock moves.

The site aggregates these statements, generates short summaries, and shows how the stock reacted over short time windows (1D, 5D). The goal is to make it easier to see which communications actually mattered.

I’m mainly looking for feedback: Is this kind of financial information presentation useful?
by samejewagain | 2026-01-24 08:48:47+00:00
Do you realize how much hatred your country draws to itself by what it says its attempts to fix the world (Iran, Ukraine, Syria, Venezuela, and so many others)?

Many of you are genuinly deceived by such claims, though I can only imagine the depth of ignorance required fo that.

Others repeat them knowing they are lying, thinking to themselves that the important thing is that they themselves are not living in the midst of civil wars caused by foreign interventions, and that eventually what is robbed from the miserable prople who are living in such hell, will trickle also to ther own pockets.

But the residents of the countries you bomb, either by yourselves or using the hands of others, and even these "others", they do know what is happening..
by reify | 2026-01-24 08:50:41+00:00
I tend to disagree with the assumption that a glorified autocomplete machine has, or is, aware, of its own constitution.

constitution wiki;

A constitution, or supreme law, is the aggregate of fundamental principles or established precedents that constitute the legal basis of a polity, organization or other type of entity, and commonly determines how that entity is to be governed.

so, no it doesnt, and cannot agree or disagree
by rhubarbtree | 2026-01-24 08:50:49+00:00
I’m not arguing for a lack of regulation or a jungle. Far from it. But I’m pointing out that many people behave within the law but not in the spirit of it, for example.

Google exists, Facebook exists, both require intrusive advertising technology that has undermined democracy, led to large scale violence, etc. and it’s legal, and thousands of nerds make it happen.
by rhubarbtree | 2026-01-24 08:53:03+00:00
I didn’t say don’t legislate, I said it is not enough. The responsibility ultimately lies with the individual.

If I’m an academic and I want to pursue being a professor over helping a student, that’s my choice and no system will stop me. That’s why so many PhD students are endlessly screwed over by their supervisors so they can fuel their career.

Individual morality is what maintains institutions and the west has replaced that culture with selfish neoliberalism and now it is screwed.
A possible future architecture for decoupled GUIs
by powerwordtree | 2026-01-24 08:53:13+00:00
# My English is bad, this is translated by AI.

A distributed setup where business logic and rendering are completely separated.

1. Core idea: stop sending “drawing commands”, start sending “intent”

Right now, GUI development (native or web) is still very tightly coupled. I’ve always felt the business layer and the GUI layer should be fully separated, and this actually fits the direction of cloud computing pretty well.

What I’m imagining is an intent‑driven architecture. Instead of sending layout, styles, JS code, etc., the backend only sends intent, semantics, and descriptive data through some protocol.

Roughly three parts:

1. Business layer
Business code stays the same. Developers don’t need to think about UI details. A small “semantic interface” converts business actions into abstract intents.
2. Intent protocol
The protocol only describes intent, semantics, and data.
Example: send “pick a date”, not “open a calendar widget with style X”.
It can run over memory, IPC, or network.
3. Rendering engine
A self‑contained engine that interprets intents and renders UI locally.
All pure UI logic (components, constraints, animations, etc.) stays inside the engine, without calling back to the business side.

2. Possible use cases

- Native GUI apps
Bundle business + protocol + engine into one program. No networking needed. Just link the engine like a library and load components/plugins as needed.

- Modern web apps
Backend runs the business logic and sends intents over HTTP.
The browser basically becomes a custom rendering engine with very high reusability.

- Cloud + thin clients
Similar to the web model: business runs in the cloud, rendering engine runs locally as a lightweight client.
One engine can serve multiple cloud apps, and can hot‑update components to gain new rendering abilities.

3. Why this might be interesting

- No interaction latency
UI logic runs locally, so even in distributed setups it feels smooth.

- Extreme reuse
Business and rendering are fully decoupled. Either side can be swapped out easily.

- Clear separation of concerns
Frontend decides layout and style; backend focuses on business logic.

- Potential beyond normal apps
With a strong enough protocol, this could even drive complex 3D apps or games.

4. Hard parts

- Automatic layout
Very hard to do well, especially if it needs to look good. Early versions may need simple or fixed layouts.

- Component/plugin system
Handling constraints, interactions, animations, etc. inside the engine is not easy to design.

- Protocol design
Too detailed → backend ends up micromanaging the frontend.
Too vague → frontend lacks necessary info.
And describing UI logic without sending code is a big challenge.
by miduil | 2026-01-24 08:53:19+00:00
Yes, plenty - sometimes data centers are built together with apartment or office complexes for this particular purpose. Unfortunately that already pinpoints the core limitation, due to the low-temperature of the data centers. The higher the temperature difference is, the more affective heating becomes - with air cooled systems it requires preparation to ensure that can be used for heating.

Also data centers need physical space, and often - you need heating where there is not a lot of space (cities), and for "district heating" you need higher temperatures usually.
by rubyn00bie | 2026-01-24 08:53:20+00:00
I’ve been using PopOS for the last five years and while I generally agree… the latest release using Cosmic by default has a lot to be desired. Cosmic will eventually be good but right now it’s far from it and I had to install Gnome as a stop gap just to have a functional desktop environment. I’ll probably ditch PopOS for Arch + KDE but I haven’t had the time to do so yet for my workstation.

Truly, and to really drive it home, I’ve loved PopOS but this latest release is just too half baked. I think anyone considering it should either wait a year or use something else, and Kubuntu seems like a reasonable alternative for people coming from Windows or MacOS.
by dr_dshiv | 2026-01-24 08:54:48+00:00
> Li correctly points out that the Archive's budget, in the range of $25-30M/year, is vastly lower than any comparable website:
By owning its hardware, using the PetaBox high-density architecture, avoiding air conditioning costs, and using open-source software, the Archive achieves a storage cost efficiency that is orders of magnitude better than commercial cloud rates.

That’s impressive. Wikipedia spends $185m per year and the Seattle public library spends $102m. Maybe not comparable exactly, but $30m per year seems inexpensive for the memory of the world…
by ahf8Aithaex7Nai | 2026-01-24 08:55:22+00:00
I think I understand your point. I only brought parsing into play to illustrate that XML is complicated, not because it's my general focus. I wouldn't classify namespaces, etc. as additional languages and tools, but that's beside the point.

> in your application nothing prevents you from using a dumbed-down version of XML

That's right. And if XML were exactly that, then there wouldn't be so many people frustrated with it. Unfortunately, in a professional work context, you don't always have control over whether it stays within this manageable subset. Sometimes the less pleasant aspects simply come into play, and then you have to deal with the whole complicated mess.
by apaprocki | 2026-01-24 08:56:41+00:00
I got the impression the author was implying because CHAR_BIT is enforced to be 8 that uint8_t and char are therefore equivalent, but they are different types with very different rules.

E.g. `char p = (char )&astruct` may violate strict aliasing but `uint8_t p = (uint8_t )&astruct` is guaranteed legal. Then modulo, traps, padding, overflow, promotion, etc.
by pepinator | 2026-01-24 08:56:43+00:00
I agree that a lot of people speak two languages. But man, I've lived in several countries in Europe for many years, and even the average university student doesn't really speak English (and I work at the university so I interact with many of them). Even in countries like Belgium where there're three official languages!

However, I'd agree with that the average educated person can somewhat communicate ideas in a second language. This is what polls usually show, around 30% to 50% of people.
by edg5000 | 2026-01-24 08:59:04+00:00
First time I'm seeing this on HN. Maybe it was posted earlier.

Have been doing manual orchestration where I write a big spec which contains phases (each done by an agent) and instructions for the top level agent on how to interact with the sub agent. Works well but it's hard utilize effectively. No doubt this is the future. This approach is bottlenecked by limitations of the CC client; mainly that I cannot see inter-agent interactions fully, only the tool calls. Using a hacked client or compatible reimplementation of CC may be the answer. Unless the API was priced attractively, or other models could do the work. Gemini 3 may be able to handle it better than Opus 4.5. The Gemini 3 pricing model is complex to say the least though (really).
by reify | 2026-01-24 08:59:56+00:00
THESE FUCKING MORONS.

Gen Z gamblers are experiencing the full range of addictive entertainment.

which will eventually lead them to suicide, mental ill health, isolation, depression and a loss of all things that are valuable to them.

gambling advertising needs to be banned.

we need serious gambling regulation worldwide

A gambler never tells you of his wins, He only tells you of the near misses, the if only's and the could have beens, because that is where the excitement of the addiction resides.
by BrenBarn | 2026-01-24 09:00:53+00:00
I agree. I see a lot of comments here and articles out on the web where it seems like people don't realize you can turn notifications off. A large portion of the distraction problem of tech is really a notification problem. Push notifications are the scourge of our era. The only things that I get notifications for on my phone are messaging things that I use for personal messaging (text messages, calls, etc.). If I want to check my email I open up an email program and check it. It's mindblowing to me when I look at someone else's phone and see the constant stream of notifications that are nothing more than ads from various apps.
by sam_lowry_ | 2026-01-24 09:02:56+00:00
Old Dutch banks and their Belgian suckers, mostly. You can see a list on their website.

I am not deep into this, but I heard multiple times that the choice of the pan-european payment system was largely political and technnically suboptimal. Old Europe pushed for the aging iDEAL against a much more advanced Blink, so Eastern European banks led by Poland left the consortium.

In the end, iDEAL rebranded as Wero was dead on arrival because a successful system needs to be supported by everyone.
by pseudohadamard | 2026-01-24 09:03:03+00:00
It's exactly the right question, "what (demonstrable) value are you getting from this?". Having been through several FIPS certifications I can say that it added nothing to the security of the product, in fact if anything it reduced the security because of all the silly-walk stuff that had to be added. In particular the algorithm certs are essentially worthless because if you get (say) AES wrong you'll find that out the very first time you use it, with or without a NIST algorithm cert, and beyond that for level 1 which is what 99% of products go for it's mostly a paperwork-production exercise and the aforementioned silly-walk code changes.

About 30+ years ago it was somewhat useful for keeping out the homebrew snake-oil crypto that was common at the time, but since you can find (again as an example) AES code in the implementation language of your choice and license of your choice within seconds that's not been an issue for some time.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-24 09:04:04+00:00
The 1% effort seems very close to what I've arrived at as a strategy for doing something both novel and good (where, if the status quo is decent, most attempts will be either novel xor good). But then again, I've slept rough in my life, so maybe I'm the wrong person to ask?

Who? Who are the other candidates, to be compared with Nishimura-san?

(or do the vids answer that? will watch them soon)
by PeterStuer | 2026-01-24 09:05:32+00:00
It often takes me 3-4 iterations with a coding assistant once you get to a working solution, to get one that still works but is simplified down ditching >80% of needless complexity introduced in the first take.

Many stop at the first thing that works. This is totally fine for code that will run once to get a result and then be discarded. But if that code is going into a product or service that will be maintained, you have to have the knowledge and the will to push further until you have not just a working but a lean, clean and simple solution.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2026-01-24 09:06:01+00:00
Phase 8 is a high margin collectible and brand promotion device. Korg may not make their money back from direct sales - although I wouldn't be surprised if they did - but likely there would be enough of a halo effect to make it worthwhile.

I expect this will turn into a small range of variations with strings, tubes, and so on.

But it's also part of a cultural trend moving back from do-it-all software products to tactile collectibles with a simple, legible purpose. Vinyl started that, and I think this is a kind of musical take on the idea that something mechanical has more presence and authority than software.

Sonically I don't think that's true at all, but it's a comprehensible marketing pitch.
by lionkor | 2026-01-24 09:08:18+00:00
Am I missing something here? UTF8 has multibyte characters, they're just spread across multiple bytes.

When you strlen() a UTF8 string, you don't get the length of the string, but instead the size in bytes.

Same with indices. If you Index at [1] in a string with a flag emoji, you don't get a valid UTF8 code point, but instead some part of the flag emoji. This applies with any UTF8 code points larger than 1 byte, which there are a lot of.

UTF16 or UTF32 are just different encodings.

What am I missing?

That's why UTF8 libraries exist.
Show HN: Orbit – Track "zombie loops" and cost-per-feature in AI agents
by harshit19932703 | 2026-01-24 09:08:33+00:00
Hi HN, I built Orbit to solve a visibility gap in AI cost management.

Provider dashboards show aggregate API spend, but don't answer which product feature is driving it. When your bill spikes, you're left guessing whether it's the chatbot, document processor, or an agent workflow running inefficiently.

Orbit attributes every LLM call to a specific feature, task, or customer. You wrap your existing AI client with our SDK, tag calls with metadata, and get real-time dashboards showing cost, latency, and error rates broken down by feature.

Key capabilities:

Per-feature cost and performance attribution
Agentic workflow tracking (group multi-step LLM calls by task or customer)
Support for OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini
SDKs for Node.js and Python
One-line integration, no API key access required
Free tier available.

Why I'm showing this now: I’m looking for 5-10 "Design Partners" to break the SDK and tell me what’s missing. I'm especially interested in teams building complex agents who feel they've lost control of their token spend.
by pseudohadamard | 2026-01-24 09:09:17+00:00
Websockets is just another layer on top of TLS, so you've got the size explosion and complexity/latency of TLS and then another layer on top of that. The OP hasn't provided additional info on what the requirements are but if it's a realtime game then they'll probably be "as close to zero latency and size increase as possible (compared to unencrypted messaging)", which websockets over TLS isn't.
by jhbadger | 2026-01-24 09:12:34+00:00
Sure, you can find new MP3 players on Temu and Alibaba, but they are almost invariably nearly unusable instant e-waste (like most things on those sites) And iTunes was great back in the day -- it only got awful when Apple made it support iPhones, Apple Music, etc. When it just did what it was supposed to (rip CDs and put the contents, neatly labeled and organized on your iPod) it was unsurpassed to this day.
by bob1029 | 2026-01-24 09:13:29+00:00
I'm beginning to question the notion that multi agent patterns don't work. I think there is something extra you get with a proposer-verifier style loop, even if both sides are using the same base model.

I've had very good success with a recursive sub agent scheme where a separate prompt (agent) is used to gate the recursive call. It compares the callers prompt with the proposed callee's prompt to determine if we are making a reasonable effort to reduce the problem into workable base cases. If the two prompts are identical we deny the request with an explanation. In practice, this works so well I can allow for unlimited depth and have zero fear of blowing the stack. Even if the verifier gets it wrong a few times, it only has to get it right once to reverse an infinite descent.