MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cracki | 2026-01-04 13:06:44+00:00
LLMs caused this decline. Stop denying that. You don't have to defend LLMs from any perceived blame. This is not a bad thing.

The steep decline in the early months of 2023 actually started with the release of ChatGPT, which is 2022-11-30, and its gradually widening availability to (and awareness of) the public from that date. The plot clearly shows that cliff.

The gentle decline since 2016 does not invalidate this. Were it not for LLMs, the site's post rate would now probably be at around 5000 posts/day, not 300.

LLMs are to "blame" for eating all the trivial questions that would have gotten some nearly copy-pasted answer by some eager reputation points collector, or closed as a duplicate, which nets nobody any rep.

Stack Overflow is not a site for socializing. Do not mistake it for reddit. The "karma" does not mean "I hate you", it means "you haven't put the absolute minimum conceivable amount of effort into your question". This includes at least googling the question before you ask. If you haven't done that, you can't expect to impose on the free time of others.

SO has a learning curve. The site expects more from you than just to show up and start yapping. That is its nature. It is "different" because it must be. All other places don't have this expectation of quality. That is its value proposition.
by bjt12345 | 2026-01-04 13:06:52+00:00
It's interesting that the Roland DSP does eloquently map to solutions in the z-domain, and allow easy implementation of FIR/IIR filters.

It's not surprising they doubled the clock rate to 88.2kHz to simplify anti-aliasing, but it is curious the choice of the CD audio frequency of 44.1kHz and not the DAT tape frequency of 48kHz.

It's hard not to get nostalgic about the 90s when watching this video.
by Saline9515 | 2026-01-04 13:07:04+00:00
Lybia is a tribal country that has always been divided between its eastern and western part. Gaddafi married a bride from the opposing tribe to seal an alliance and bring stability to the country.

The "revolution" was done by the Tripoli (western) tribe, against the Cyrenaica (eastern) one - it was more a civil war starting than a popular uprising.

Gaddafi could have indeed crushed them, bring back order to the country, avoiding the current long lasting chaos, civil war, open slavery, migrant waves and so on.

It's hard to evaluate situations with a westerner mind, in countries that are structured around very different cultural norms, and with deep ethnic divisions. "Democracy" is not the silver bullet it those cases, and maybe we should acknowledge that.
by jonathanstrange | 2026-01-04 13:07:56+00:00
I don't believe it is possible (or even makes sense) to completely avoid illegal/invalid objects and structures, and a cheap way to mark these are nil pointers. From that perspective, it doesn't matter to me whether a language allows nil pointers or doesn't have them. What matters are the details, though. It is generally desirable to keep invalid objects properly typed and languages with nil sometimes have quirks with "nil typing" (I'm not sure if that's the right term).
by binary132 | 2026-01-04 13:07:56+00:00
The shadow image of this story should be explored just as thoroughly and “seductively”: the incremental descent of humanity into abominable serfdom, witless hypnosis, and hedonic escapism from an increasingly hopeless tomorrow.

Just because someone paints a nice (or frightening) picture of something doesn’t mean it must be accepted. It can merely be contemplated.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-04 13:08:22+00:00
This is far too simplistic. Yes there are some critical minerals and Russian and Chinese influence. But that's true in many countries. The Chinese are investing in infrastructure and mining all over the globe.

I think it's much simpler. Maduro became a fixation for Trump and the republicans mostly for ideological reasons. It's the same reason he rolled back normalization of relationships with Cuba under Obama. Venezuelan oil is critical to the Cuban economy. Cuban votes in Florida are important for republicans in Florida. Removing Maduro has many beneficial side effects at a very low cost. They might end up with fresh oil supplies, critical minerals, a more friendly regime, and it send a strong signal to countries like Panama, Cuba, and others that all are under a lot of pressure from Trump already. And they get to send back a lot of Venezuelan refugees.

The oil is probably not that critical. Over supply would actually be bad for US producers that are currently extracting at a relatively high cost. Investing in Venezuela sounds like a high risk type thing. The country has a history of revolutions. There's no guarantee that any investments today are worth anything in ten years. I doubt much will happen there.

This is about opportunism. Maduro was weak. Taking him out creates opportunities. Trump can score some points, send back some refugees, please oil companies, and put pressure on other countries in the region. I wouldn't credit him with any kind of long term strategy or vision. I don't think he actually cares what happens in ten years. And I don't think he cares about the significant international/diplomatic cost either. Some bridges were burned yesterday on that side. That might actually create problems elsewhere.
by metalman | 2026-01-04 13:09:00+00:00
There is no concievable end game that put's the US ahead in any way, and right at this moment the constucted narative is unravelling faster then it can be spun.
Did they realy bomb the tomb of chavez?, blow up empty shipping cans and the homes of
some of the most oppresed people there?
but somehow leave the entire Venezuelan governing aparatus intact.
Nothing bieng proposed for how Venezuela will be carved up has a legal mechanism to be enacted with, the newly sworn in leader of Venezuela is defiant, "elections" are impossible, and just inserting another leader is essentialy impossible, so this theatrical production is very likely going to solidify resistance to American interests worldwide, and worse!, encourage every oportunistic "helper" that the US will need to put in front of the cameras.
China has folded it's arms, India can't belive how unhinged the whole thing has gotten, Russia is happily playing every angle, and the fucking euros are actualy standing up saying that "this is a good , but totaly illegal and unjustifyable action"
and wringing there hands while trump ridicules there selection for the peace prize.
wild
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-04 13:09:01+00:00
> If you travel and go to some random beach town and buy random item from random street merchant, they won’t give you a refund. Main issue to bridge is ensuring the item is expected as you can’t physically inspect prior to purchase.

Depends on how large the beach town is, and what country. Whenever I've needed to return/change things in those type of places (in South America, South Europe and around East Asia), it's never been a problem even if I don't have a receipt, as usually the vendor recognize you, or the person who sold it to you is around somewhere.

I can remember one clear time (probably out of 10s) where someone refused to take back an item that clearly didn't work the way it was sold to us.
by wild_egg | 2026-01-04 13:09:08+00:00
I've been running long duration coding agents with Claude Code for about 6 months now. Steve Yegge released Beads back in October and I found that giving Claude tools for proper task tracking was a massive unlock. But Beads grew massively in a short time and every release made it slower and more frustrating to use. I started battling it several times a week as its background daemon took to syncing the wrong things at the wrong times.

Over the holidays I finally ripped it out and wrote ticket as a replacement. It keeps the core concept I actually cared about (graph-based task dependencies) but drops everything else.

ticket a single file bash script built on coreutils managing flat files. You don't need to index everything with SQLite when you have awk. It's just a small plumbing utility that gets out of your way so you can get to work.

Would love feedback on gaps. I built this for my own agent workflows so there are probably use cases I haven't thought about.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2026-01-04 13:11:08+00:00
> Surely there exist communities today for LaTeX that have been around since before SO began its life.

Yup, TeXhax has been around since 1986 [0], and comp.text.tex has been around since 1983/1990 [1], and both are still somewhat active.

[0]: https://www.ctan.org/pkg/texhax

[1]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb45-3/tb141lucas-usenet.pdf
by axdithya | 2026-01-04 13:11:21+00:00
"Making execution paths inspectable reduced failures far more than swapping models."

100% this. We found the same thing. The issue isn't that the model is dumb; it's that the state is opaque. Once we stopped treating agents like "chatbots" and started treating them like "state machines" (where you can see the exact input/output of every step), our debugging time dropped by 90% even with cheaper models.

That's actually the core thesis of Lár [0] — forcing every step to produce a structured diff so you have a complete "Flight Recorder" of the crash.

[0] https://github.com/snath-ai/lar
by krapp | 2026-01-04 13:11:50+00:00
It doesn't help that they've been trained to refer to themselves in ways that imply a sense of self-awareness ("as a large language model, I") or that they employ emotional language, which is far more effective at influencing people than rationality.

If people on HN can believe LLMs are sentient, sapient and intelligent beings (even more so than other humans I suspect) then there isn't much chance for average people getting caught in the intersection of LLM marketing, a hundred years of pop sci-fi cultural conditioning and a million years of primate evolution.
by maccard | 2026-01-04 13:12:40+00:00
I’m far more in the camp of not AI than pro LLM but I gave Claude the HTML of our jira ticket and told it we had a Jenkins pipeline that we wanted to update specific fields on the ticket of using python. Claude correctly figured out how we were calling python scripts from Jenkins, grabbed a library and one shorted the solution in about 45 seconds. I then asked it to add a post pipeline to do something else which it did, and managed to get it perfectly right.

It was probably 2-3 hours work of screwing around figuring out issue fields, python libraries, etc that was low priority for my team but causing issues on another team who were struggling with some missing information. We never would have actually tasked this out, written a ticket for it, and prioritised it in normal development, but this way it just got done.

I’ve had this experience about 20 times this year for various “little” things that are attention sinks but not hard work - that’s actually quite valuable to us
by carlmr | 2026-01-04 13:12:43+00:00
>It is generally desirable to keep invalid objects properly typed

I think that's the bigger issue in Java. `int` can't be used in generics, so now you use the boxed type `Integer` which needs to be checked on each use, which depending on the usage is a lot of work.

If Java had proper generics without this workaround, we wouldn't have nearly as many issues.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-04 13:13:00+00:00
> that could turn the EU into an enemy of the US

The EU is already an enemy in the eyes of the US, even though it isn't reciprocated.

Not sure what would happen if the US attacked Greenland, attacking a close ally you have literal agreements about protecting each other kind of forces NATO into new territory. My hunch is that the NATO would be dissolved, and everyone would have to team up against the aggressor.
by LatencyKills | 2026-01-04 13:13:10+00:00
This is fantastic. I’m currently building a combustion engine simulator doing exactly what you did. In fact, I found a number of research papers, had Claude implement the included algorithms, and then incorporated them into the project.

What I have now is similar to https://youtu.be/nXrEX6j-Mws?si=XdPA48jymWcapQ-8 but I haven’t implemented a cohesive UI yet.
by Lio | 2026-01-04 13:13:34+00:00
You're assuming that VW is following the GDPR.

In 2024 when they got hacked it turned out they were gathering (and "lost") a great deal of user data that they weren't supposed to.

https://cybersecuritynews.com/volkswagen-data-breach/

I don't think that VW were punished for that breach; the GDPR has no teeth.

I drive a VW but I won't buy another.
by michalc | 2026-01-04 13:13:51+00:00
> without regard for the maintenance burden 1, 2, 5, 10 years down the road.

To me software craftsmanship isn't just about the code, it's about engineering use of time.

In general shouldn't knowingly make choices that would result in pain in the future, but if you're increasing the chance of the project not making it to the future, then is that really the better option? Finding out enough information to make the judgement call between long term/far future pain and short term benefits is all part of the craftsmanship.

> I don't blame agile. But I do kind of blame Agile™

(Loving the phrasing here! I think I'm right on board, especially if we're talking Scrum/Scum-ish)
by Trasmatta | 2026-01-04 13:13:57+00:00
> The industry that's receiving an Apollo project's worth of money every few months appears on track to produce not a machine to cure cancer, but to produce fake slop as indistinguishable from human speech or real images as possible.

Over the past ~12 months I've become increasingly convinced that LLMs are a net negative for society. It's so intensely disheartening to see them eating the entire industry.
by K0nserv | 2026-01-04 13:14:08+00:00
> If you want to make pointers not have a nil state by default, this requires one of two possibilities: requiring the programmer to test every pointer on use, or assume pointers cannot be nil. The former is really annoying, and the latter requires something which I did not want to do (which you will most likely not agree with just because it doesn’t seem like a bad thing from the start): explicit initialization of every value everywhere.

To me this is the crux of the problem with null. It's not that null itself is a problem, it's that nothing communicates when it can be expected. This leads to to anti-patterns like null-checking every single pointer dereference. What's need is a way to signal when and when not `null` is valid under your domain model. This is precisely what stuff like `Option` does. Without a signal like this, programming feels like a minefield, where every dereference is liable to blow up, personally I'm done with that kind of programming.

The latter part of the post about individual-element vs grouped-element mindset is interesting, but I'm not sure it refutes the need for null or reasoning about it.

EDIT: It's also worth noting that Rust can still zero initialise entire structs despite element-wise initialisation when the valid bit pattern for the struct is 0.
by mcny | 2026-01-04 13:14:14+00:00
From a web developer's perspective, I think the problem is that the people who built these systems were too nice.

Let me explain.

Web browsers have the option to reject syntax errors in HTML and immediately fail, but they don't. Similarly, I think compilers could be a bit slower, check a few more things, and refuse to produce an output if a pointer could be null.

I'm just a code monkey, so I don't have all the answers, but is it possible to have a rule like "when in doubt, throw an error"? The code might be legal, but we aren't here to play code golf. Why not deny such "clever" code with a vengeance and let us mortals live our lives? Can compilers do that by default?
by miyamotomusashi | 2026-01-04 13:14:17+00:00
This is a great point. I've benchmarked io.net and vast.ai extensively.
You are right that they solve the setup tax (persistent instances) and the cost (cheaper hourly). But they hit a different hard limit: The VRAM Wall.

The Problem: To run a 70B model, you need around 140GB of VRAM.

On io.net/Vast: You can't find a single cheap consumer card with that memory (RTX 4090s cap at 24GB ). You are forced to rent expensive enterprise chips (A100s) or manually orchestrate a multi-node cluster yourself, which brings the DevOps headache.

On the Swarm: We handle that multi-node orchestration automatically. We stitch together 6x cheap 4090s to create one "Virtual GPU" with enough VRAM.

So if your model fits on one card, io.net wins. If it doesn't (like 70B+ models), that's where the swarm architecture becomes necessary.
by impossiblefork | 2026-01-04 13:14:35+00:00
Supposing that it's done, one of the things I wander about is whether the EU and the Danes would understand that it's war and act accordingly-- i.e. would the ships stop, would the transatlantic flights stop, would US firms in Europe get told that they're now independent EU subsidiaries unconnected with their parent companies, would Americans in the EU be interned, etc.-- i.e would people react in the normal way that one does when one is at war.

Obviously they'd have to, but I'm curious about whether they'd do it on the first day, or whether they'd sort of wonder around half-understanding "is this war?"

I've gotten an impression from the Danes through this whole affair that they're not getting it and I wonder how little people understand in general, whether war is so foreign to them that they can't react appropriately.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2026-01-04 13:15:09+00:00
Because the party groups negotiated with the heads of states comprising the European Council to find a suitable candidate?

You know, like how all parliamentary systems works? No parliamentary system directly has the populace vote for their prime minister.

After the election someone has the task of proposing an executive government to the parliament. In many countries that is the speaker of the house. In the EU it is the heads of states.

The European Parliament has also rejected commissioners from being appointed. How is that literally being a rubber stamp?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/26/meps-reject-tw...

Yes, the EU is a bit more complex. What most people miss is that the EU functionally has both an upper and lower house, with the upper house being selected from the national elections and lower house from EU wide elections.

I personally would prefer a more transparent system with more involvmement of the people in the EU democracy. But the EU functionally is democratic where the votes in both EU and national elections leads to the current executive branch.
by dijksterhuis | 2026-01-04 13:15:50+00:00
i personally prefer this kind of version — if i want to do the maths to work out tweaks i can, but i’m not forced to do maths in my head to know/tweak the end value

// a total of
// - backup interval = 24
// - approx backup duration = 2
// - “wiggle room” = 2
ageAlertThresholdHours = 28

yes lazy devs are lazy and won’t want to or just won’t update the comments (be pedantic in review :shrug:). it’s all trading one thing off with another at the end of the day.

edit — also your version forces me to read horizontal rather than vertical, which takes longer ime.

sorry, i’ve basically done an unprompted code review. i feel like a bit of a dick now.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-04 13:15:59+00:00
Up until yesterday most of us felt the same about "Going into Venezuela and kidnap the president of a sovereign nation" but here we are. Sure, it was also not out of nowhere, but I don't think anyone thought Trump needed such an abrasive distraction from the internal conflicts in the nation.

> to a point where USA might find it's all alone in the world.

I think the US might be misleading itself if it doesn't realize that it already is. We still care for the people, but the government of the US has truly shown that it cannot be an ally today, and the rest of the world already realize this, seems the US is the last to understand it.
by dbobbitt | 2026-01-04 13:17:11+00:00
The other major benefit of SO being a public forum is that once a question was wrestled with and eventually answered, other engineers could stumble upon and benefit from it. With SO being replaced by LLMs, engineers are asking LLMs the same questions over and over, likely getting a wide range of different answers (some correct and others not) while also being an incredible waste of resources.
by SanjayMehta | 2026-01-04 13:17:18+00:00
Trump has nothing to lose. He's almost 80, doesn't care for Europe or NATO, and is clearly desperate to be remembered for something significant.

Kidnapping Maduro doesn't really ensure his name in the history books. But if he annexes Greenland and/or Canada, then he's the next Jefferson or Jackson.

He might even rename Greenland+Canada to Trumpland.
by andrepd | 2026-01-04 13:17:36+00:00
> Why hire a builder to build your home? Why hire a mechanic to fix your car? Why pay a neighborhood kid to mow your lawn? Why hire a photographer for your wedding? Why hire a cook to make a meal?

But precisely, "AI" is _NOT_ fixing my car or building my home or photographing my wedding!! It's writing a sludge of plausible-looking but empty slop that contaminates everything on the web, it's attempting to automate the visual arts, it's generating fake video that's getting harder and harder to distinguish from real one. It's automating things that SHOULD NOT be automated, and it's NOT automating things that should!
by preommr | 2026-01-04 13:17:54+00:00
I like giner bill, but:

- this is experienced/smart person forgetting about selection bias - yea null ptr errors are easy when you've had years to learn to avoid them.

- systems programmers are just as bad as web devs in forgetting that that their style of programming doesn't always generalize across multiple domains.

- I don't think the article puts enough emphasis on how big of a difference tooling makes; compilers are smart enough now to tip off about lots of errors that manifested as null pointer errors - like forgetting to initialize a variable, that's just a lint error now.

- I also don't understand the obsession with being so strongly tied to C. Like I understand carbon, because that's a direct replacement that google is working on and because c++ has the opposite problem of having too much such that there's a really great language somewhere in the mess, but people aren't seriously going to jump from c to odin. People that like c, use c, are going to stay with c. People that try new languages want something at least a little bit better. The outcome could be the same, but it should be because a feature is good and not as a compromise in the hopes that it'll lure people over.
by avereveard | 2026-01-04 13:18:04+00:00
every time I dig in this story is always stories of stories, and all walk backward to maybe one single merchant, which is just his word, with no police trail or court case trail or anything substantial, with news agency work over "examples and reconstruction of what might have happened" and no actual data that could be verified / falsified.

is this something anyone has actually seen happen, or is it part of the AI hype cycle?
by ronbenton | 2026-01-04 13:18:43+00:00
>Karpathy has a great intuitive style, but sometimes it's too dumbed down

As someone who has tried some teaching in the past, it's basically impossible to teach to an audience with a wide array of experience and knowledge. I think you need to define your intended audience as narrowly as possible, teach them, and just accept that more knowledgeable folk may be bored and less knowledgeable folk may be lost.