MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pajuhaan | 2026-01-01 09:16:03+00:00
Electron capture doesn’t contradict “electrons don’t fall into protons.” In an atom, the electron isn’t a tiny ball spiraling inward; it’s a stable quantum state.

But for inner orbitals there’s still some chance of finding the electron right at the nucleus. if the nucleus can lower its energy by turning a proton into a neutron, the weak interaction can use that overlap and the capture happens. so it’s not an electromagnetic “collapse”; it’s a weak nuclear transition that only becomes possible in certain nuclei.

My point is that a deeper microdynamics can still reproduce the familiar quantum phenomenology (including Dirac as the macroscopic limit); what would separate it from "repackaging or pseudo-theory" is if it actually predicts the physical constants and transition behavior that the standard model largely treats as input or has no idea about them, rather than explaining them.
by f1shy | 2026-01-01 09:18:06+00:00
The web experience, specially in the phone, reminds me of the 90, if not worst, because some of those cookies dialogs have “processing” time (just a 5 sec. Wait)

I have counted 20 clicks until I get a clean view of actual content with all possible distractions closed. And never EVER less than 5.

The thing is so awful, that I started trusting the sheitty Gemini extract, because at least pops up at once. If I open a site to check, I have to be prepared to about 10 annoying and slow, microscopic buttons to close all the sheit. Then you realize the site is LLM slope anyway… or just marketing BS… next site… rinse and repeat.

Specially EU and specially Germanay, the web is dead. (Was anytime alive?!)
by Lvl999Noob | 2026-01-01 09:18:12+00:00
You don't. Assertions are assumptions. You don't explicitly write recovery paths for individual assumptions being wrong. Even if you wanted to, you probably wouldn't have a sensible recovery in the general case (what will you do when the enum that had 3 options suddenly comes in with a value 1000?).

I don't think any C programmer (where assert() is just debug_assert!() and there is no assert!()) is writing code like:

assert(arr_len > 5);
if (arr_len <= 5) {
// do something
}

They just assume that the assertion holds and hope that some thing would crash later and provide info for debugging if it didn't.
by Hoasi | 2026-01-01 09:18:16+00:00
> I think this is a weird wording. I dont think you need to limit the ick factor to "Westerners" There are an awful lot of people out there who would feel the "ick" factor.

Of course, this has nothing to do with “Westerners.” No one in their right mind would want farm animals to be fed insect powder. The fact that the company was allowed to operate and to receive massive funding is the real issue here.
by flowerbreeze | 2026-01-01 09:19:13+00:00
Over a (rotary) phone with a classmate of mine, who had gotten really-really into programming, explaining how to do things in Turbo-C. Turbo-C had a great help system, so I mostly followed that and my classmate's instructions to make a tiny drawing program and a small RPG that rendered characters straight from FILE* to screen a pixel at a time.

I didn't know how arrays or linking/including worked (or that they existed), so it was one long file with each creature having its own function to determine their behaviour and their own health_creature_1, health_creature_2 and so on. I really started wondering if there was a better way after a while.
by nen-nomad | 2026-01-01 09:20:05+00:00
LLMs just can't come up with anything they haven't seen in their training data. Try any obscure language, and they will stumble. So for them to become fluent in a new language, you will need a massive corpus of data. Not only do you need to invent a new language, but you also need to create all the sample code for it.
by tenuka_o_22 | 2026-01-01 09:20:11+00:00
*gitz* is a Rust-based CLI that uses AI to automatically generate conventional commit messages and README content. It analyzes your diffs and suggests structured, high-quality messages so you can spend less time writing and more time building. Great for teams and solo devs who want clean, consistent Git histories.
• GitHub: [https://github.com/Tenuka22/gitz](https://github.com/Tenuka22/gitz)
• Crates.io: [https://crates.io/crates/gitz-cli](https://crates.io/crates/gitz-cli)
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-01 09:20:22+00:00
Link for those who don’t use X:

https://xcancel.com/mtgreenee/status/2006130536184422555

Funny how the entire right wing is melting down over the alleged daycare fraud by Somalian immigrants, when it is so small in size compared to the fraud that goes on everyday in America that is committed by white males. They didn’t care when Trump pardoned criminals who committed much larger scale fraud. They don’t care when Trump’s family trades on bizarre tariff announcements or scammy crypto coins. They don’t care that the Pentagon has not passed an audit.

But the millions in fraud from some Somalian daycare centers? Time for a tax strike! How is this not purely a racist movement?
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-01 09:20:30+00:00
I use a qemu vm for running codex cli in yolo mode and use simple ssh based git operations for getting code in and out of there. Works great. And you can also do fun things like let it loose on multiple git projects in one prompt. The vm can run docker as well which helps with containerized tests and other more complicated things. One thing I've started to observe is that you spend more time waiting for tool execution than for model inference. So having a fast local vm is better than a slower remote one.
by viraptor | 2026-01-01 09:21:22+00:00
Sure, I get an occasional bad result from Opus - then I revert and try again, or ask it for a fix. Even with a couple of restarts, it's going to be faster than me on average. (And that's ignoring the situations where I have to restart myself)

Basically, you're saying it's not perfect. I don't think anyone is claiming otherwise.
by BrenBarn | 2026-01-01 09:21:40+00:00
I played computer games as a kid and got interested in computers. I looked at books from the library on how to make games. This was in the 90s and many of the library books were from the 70s or early 80s. Many of them focused on computers like the TRS-80 that I had never heard of. Eventually at the library I found the David Ahl books ("BASIC Computer Games" and "More BASIC Computer Games"), and discovered that I had QBasic available in DOS. I started typing in the listings and playing the games. Pursuing this interest led me to get a fat book called "Using BASIC" that focused on QBasic.

I started learning to modify the games I was inputting, and then to write my own simple games. Somewhere in there I also was learning to write DOS batch files to do simple tasks. I wrote a DOS menu system that let you choose which program you wanted to run, to make it easy for me or my siblings to run any of various games, plus "serious" programs like WordPerfect. My dad got me a subscription to Dr. Dobb's Journal and a magazine called DOS World. They had program listings in assembly that I also typed in and tried to modify, just doing super simple stuff like playing the Twilight Zone theme song on the PC Speaker. A bit later I got into text adventures and wrote a few of those using special-purpose languages. I also wrote some games in ZZT. (And oh yeah, another comment on here reminded me I wrote some silly "games" in the variant of basic on my TI calculator, stuff like a Mad Libs generator.)

At some point in high school I started using Python. I think it was Python 2.1. By that point the internet had gotten to the point where I could learn a lot by searching for stuff, and so then I kind of shifted into using web tutorials and newsgroups and forums and stuff, which continued until today. Along the way I played around with a few other languages, like Haskell, and got reasonably conversant with JavaScript, but Python remains "the" language for me.

So I was self-taught, at first relying on books and later on whatever I could scrounge from the internet. I've never taken an actual class in programming or computer science.

Games were a major factor in my early programming development, the other main line being small DOS utilities. The David Ahl books were foundational for me, and I really hope people starting out today can find something like that, something that makes them go "Wow, look at all the things that I can actually do just by taking this code that I don't understand and learning how to mess with it." The "Using BASIC" book was similarly key in that it got me to understand how a programming language had a syntax, data types, and so on. Even when I moved away from BASIC, I pretty easily understood how when I was reading a tutorial on Haskell or Python, it was in some sense telling me the same stuff that that book was telling me, although the languages were quite different.

Since then I've taught programming a few times and I'm very informed by that early experience, basically the idea that learning to program involves just jumping in and wrestling with stuff, exploring and experimenting.
by tkgally | 2026-01-01 09:22:09+00:00
The Internet Archive has scans of Sears catalogs from when it was a major mail-order retailer. For example:

1911: https://archive.org/details/sears-roebuck-catalog-122-spring...

1922: https://archive.org/details/SearsRoebuckAndCoCatalog1922_201...

When I was young, they were especially known for their tools:

1974/1975: https://archive.org/details/SearsCraftsmanPowerAndHandTools1...

More here:

https://archive.org/search?query=title%3A%28sears+catalog%29...
by dismalaf | 2026-01-01 09:22:11+00:00
Of all the real commercial apps written in Odin, few are games. JangaFX tools for example definitely involve graphics (like games), but they aren't games.

And what exactly is a "video game" language? A language that's low level and can do fast maths? Almost all commercial games are written in C++, but no one calls that a "game" language...
by globular-toast | 2026-01-01 09:22:39+00:00
It's a bit more subtle than that. The sugar is there to make it palatable and addictive. The real problem is it's hyper-processed and ridiculously easy to digest. It'll spike your blood sugar levels then have you wanting more an hour later. There's no point looking at a single food in isolation, you have to look at the entire lifestyle and the kind of lifestyle that includes McDonald's is not a generally a healthy one.

Then again Buffett apparently did it for 6 decades. But he also only had to drive a few minutes to work and probably had a mostly stress free life. You can eat all the healthy veg you want but if your day is punctuated by a dreadful commute and generally filled with stress, that's what will get you.
by elcritch | 2026-01-01 09:24:40+00:00
Israel invests in defending their civilians with technology like Iron Beam.

In contrast the Gazan government strategically uses humans shields [2, 3] and despite this the majority of Palestinians still support starting this war by attacking civilians on Oct 7th [1]. Defense technology doesn’t help if you don’t want it unfortunately.

Hamas also has hundreds of miles of tunnels which civilians aren’t allowed to use.

1: https://www.pcpsr.org/en/node/1000#:~:text=The%20Trump%20Pla...
2: https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/hamas_human_shields....
3: https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2023/11/01/hamas-officials-admi...
by huhkerrf | 2026-01-01 09:25:06+00:00
I'm almost certain I know the publisher he's talking about in the blog post, and I can see why it didn't work out. You have to be willing to be open to feedback while also being able to push back on that feedback. You also have to accept that you are committed to certain outcomes.

The publisher he worked with will push you but also make a better book in the end. You have to be willing to do your part.

(Not naming the publisher because I don't want to out myself.)
by tsimionescu | 2026-01-01 09:25:13+00:00
> LLMs also beat IMO and the ICPC

Very spurious claims, given that there was no effort made to check whether the IMO or ICPC problems were in the training set or not, or to quantify how far problems in the training set were from the contest problems. IMO problems are supposed to be unique, but since it's not at the frontier of math research, there is no guarantee that the same problem, or something very similar, was not solved in some obscure manual.
by 578_Observer | 2026-01-01 09:26:22+00:00
I’m glad it helped. For years you’ve focused on the "Knowledge" (知). Now you are finally stepping into the "Action" (行).

In Japan, we call this unity "Chiko-Goitsu." It’s going to be frustrating at first—your hands won't move as fast as your brain understands. But trust me, that friction is where the real skill is born. Good luck with your study guide.
by cyprianaa263 | 2026-01-01 09:26:24+00:00
Starting the year can be difficult and challenging, especially if you're unemployed or looking for a new place to call home as an employee. I know this firsthand—the last two years have been tough for me. I've been unemployed, navigating the uncertainty, the rejection emails, the waiting, and yes, sometimes just holding onto hope that something will break through.
by silisili | 2026-01-01 09:26:51+00:00
Literally almost everything, up to and including entire houses. I've lived in two Sears houses, great quality stuff if not a bit small by modern tastes.

When I was a kid it was normal for parents to let their kids read the huge yearly Sears catalog to get ideas or pick gifts. By then they'd stopped selling items like firearms and houses but had pretty much everything else.

If they had the foresight, they should have become a better version of what Amazon is now.
by grayhatter | 2026-01-01 09:27:12+00:00
Has the world moved on from copyright? Or expecting other people to behave ethically and fairly?

No, and god I hope not.

But it's a real dick move to set up your CI the way you have. Zig explicitly requests using one of the many mirrors for CI instead of hammering the main ziglang.org site itself. Perhaps you've moved on from trying to be ethical?
by Closi | 2026-01-01 09:27:19+00:00
I think the challenge is that you are potentially storing some of the most secret things for users here - passwords copied from password managers, bank details copied and pasted into forms, private photos, corporate secrets and designs, medical records... And even your revised model shows a completely careless approach to security and is entirely insufficient considering the data stored.

Encrypting images is too slow too? Poor excuse - it probably takes milliseconds. If you are asking people to trust them with their nudes and photos of bank documents, you need to store them in a way that you can’t see them.

You having access to all user data stored with a tiny privacy policy that basically boils down to “we can use your data as long as it’s not illegal for us to use it” is not sufficient!

I wouldn’t be this harsh on the security of another startup or app just because most startups don’t start asking users to store their secrets with them - because you will be storing secrets, that puts you into a category of people who need to be careful and not careless - at the moment you are demonstrating the latter.

It’s entirely possible to do everything end to end by the way (imo this is the only way this should be done considering you will be storing passwords) - see how 1password does it and copy them if nothing else: https://1password.com/files/1password-white-paper.pdf
by DiskoHexyl | 2026-01-01 09:29:21+00:00
Age: 22+-3
AND with that weight to ffbm ratio not only untrained, but at least slightly (I’m being generous here) overweight.

With these pre-requisites it almost doesn’t matter what kind of physical activity one does- the muscles will grow anyway. It’s when you are older and/or accustomed to some kind of physical training, that you really noticeably benefit from resistance training.

And still, that ‘almost’ part does a lot of the heavy lifting here.
I don’t believe it’s really possible for a couch potato without any experience to correctly assess their 1RM. People with no experience with pain and effort typically can’t push themselves hard enough, so the entire exercise turns to a half-cardio anyway.

And gauging 1 rep max in a bicep curl is especially difficult (saying nothing of a risk of injury).

I understand the complexity and difficulty of researching the subject, but this entire article is no good and is hardly applicable to most of the population IMO
by empiricus | 2026-01-01 09:30:09+00:00
In a way, this actually touches on a real issue. Instead of trying to please random ppl and make heuristics that work in arbitrary conditions, maybe start from the objective reality? I mean, for the start, take a picture, and then immediately compare it with the subject. If it looks identical then that's a good start. I haven't seen any device capable of doing this. Of course you would need the entire sensor-processing-screen chain to be calibrated for this.
by eloisius | 2026-01-01 09:30:20+00:00
I was disappointed to learn that even after subscribing to the Atlantic (print and digital, aka the premium tier) that popups don’t stop. They now nag me on every visit to spend even more money to buy a subscription as a gift for someone else. Pretty sure when my subscription lapses next year I’ll just go back to reading their site via archive.is. These companies can’t help but make piracy a better experience than even the most expensive subscription they offer.
by bahmboo | 2026-01-01 09:30:33+00:00
I agree. I do like the general idea as an exploration.

Perhaps the idea is to use an LLM to emulate users such that some user-based problems can be detected early.

It is very frustrating to ship a product and have a product show stopper right out of the gate that was missed by everyone on the team. It is also sometimes difficult to get accurate feedback from an early user group.
by jraph | 2026-01-01 09:32:04+00:00
See also:

- set up [1] (notice that it's a verb)

- setup [2] (notice that it's a noun)

- Phrasal verbs [3]

Unfortunately, I'm afraid it's mostly stuff one needs to know by heart, but I think it's often that the noun is the one that is all in one word and the verb is the phrasal one (composed of "base" and the particle, in several words). Note: I'm not a native English speaker.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/set_up#English

[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/setup

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrasal_verb
by BrenBarn | 2026-01-01 09:33:04+00:00
I used to go into Staples or Circuit City and go to the demo computers. I'd hit the reset button to reset them, boot into DOS, open up QBasic, and write a classic program along the lines of 10 PRINT "BRENBARN RULEZ!" 20 GOTO 10. Add a little spacing offset so it would create a wave-like pattern of text. Set it running and skedaddle.
Show HN: Replacing $5K industrial signal towers with a webapp [video]
by edmundsparrow | 2026-01-01 09:33:15+00:00
I built SignalTower, a web app that recreates $5K industrial signal tower functionality using just a browser.

Demo: https://signaltower.netlify.app

The demo uses your phone's flashlight to prove the concept, but the same Web Serial/WebUSB APIs can control real PLCs and signal towers.

Traditional setup: ~$15K (HMI panel + signal tower + licenses)
This setup: $15 Raspberry Pi

You can test it standalone or install it in GnokeStation by typing "install [signaltower-url]" in the terminal.

Current state: Working proof of concept. Looking for feedback on the industrial control approach and potential production use cases.
by encom | 2026-01-01 09:36:15+00:00
One aspect of popups that survived, was the ability of a website to spawn a new tab on click. I DETEST this behaviour. Not only because it breaks the back button, but tabs/windows are something I control, not you. I will decide when to leave your website for good, instead of opening a new tab.

Whoever invented target=_blank should be guillotined.
by mndgs | 2026-01-01 09:36:47+00:00
Played video games on ZX Spectrum and some Soviet computer at home. Wanted to learn to code games as a teen, took a course in Basic, very shallow. Then in high school some exposure to Turbo Pascal (90s), learned a bit, but wasn't great.

Then really learned Python in 2010s trying to solve a real-life problem - had to scrape an ecom website, used Scrapy. Now it's Go, quite complex projects, about to launch our SaaS startup.. took a while..
by kace91 | 2026-01-01 09:37:04+00:00
>I don't know how you can be so sure about that sentence being written by LLM.

I envy you if you can’t tell, genuinely. It means you don’t have to put up with generated text as much as I do. It’s not really an ambiguous case.

>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.

As long as people keep placing me in a position to read things they didn’t bother to write, I will keep pointing it out. If this place became content with being fed slop, I’d go.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-01 09:37:53+00:00
2025 was the year of development tool using AI agents. I think we'll shift attention to non development tool using AI agents. Most business users are still stuck using chat gpt as some kind of grand oracle that will write their email or powerpoint slides. There are bits and pieces of mostly technology demo level solutions but nothing that is widely used like AI coding tools are so far. I don't think this is bottle necked on model quality.

I don't need an AGI. I do need a secretary type agent that deals with all the simple but yet laborious non technical tasks that keep infringing on my quality engineering time. I'm CTO for a small startup and the amount of non technical bullshit that I need to deal with is enormous. Some examples of random crap I deal with: figuring out contracts, their meaning/implication to situations, and deciding on a course of action; Customer offers, price calculations, scraping invoices from emails and online SAAS accounts, formulating detailed replies to customer requests, HR legal work, corporate bureaucracy, financial planning, etc.

A lot of this stuff can be AI assisted (and we get a lot of value out of ai tools for this) but context engineering is taking up a non trivial amount of my time. Also most tools are completely useless at modifying structured documents. Refactoring a big code base, no problem. Adding structured text to an existing structured document, hardest thing ever. The state of the art here is an ff-ing sidebar that will suggest you a markdown formatted text that you might copy/paste. Tool quality is very primitive. And then you find yourself just stripping all formatting and reformatting it manually. Because the tools really suck at this.
by brabel | 2026-01-01 09:37:55+00:00
So exactly 10 years ago a lot of people believed that the game Go would not be “conquered” by AI, but after just a few months it was. People will always be skeptical of new things, even people who are in tech, because many hyped things indeed go nowhere… while it may look obvious in hindsight, it’s really hard to predict what will and what won’t be successful. On the LLM front I personally think it’s extremely foolish to still consider LLMs as going nowhere. There’s a lot more evidence today of the usefulness of LLMs than there was of DeepMind being able to beat top human players in Go 10 years ago.
by kennywinker | 2026-01-01 09:39:10+00:00
To say that israel invests in defense is at least 1/4 untrue, since the US sends billions every year. The US gave them about 7b cash last year, which is around 1/4 of their defense budget, and doesn’t include things like stationing carriers nearby, or doing airstrikes on houthi blockades.

Us $ to israel: https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-foreign-aid-does-the-u...

Israel defense budget: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-raise-defen...