MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bunderbunder | 2026-01-22 13:45:50+00:00
I wouldn’t say “never mastered Scala,” but it is a strong sign that Scala was never the right tool for the job on the first place. Go is a non-JVM systems programming language that is proudly procedural and generally eschews most of the key features of both object-oriented and functional programming. Scala is pretty much the opposite of that, so much so that it’s strange to me to think of them as competitors. They are both good languages, but the only overlapping use cases I can think of offhand are implementing command-line tools and Web APIs, which are a use case for almost every language because realistically you should just do both of those in whatever language you were already using for everything else.
by bhouston | 2026-01-22 13:45:52+00:00
Are they using a custom dictionary with Brotli designed for PDFs? I am not sure if it would help or not, but it seems like one of those cases it may help?

Something like this:

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/shared-dictionary-compress...

In my applications, in the area of 3D, I've been moving away from Brotli because it is just so slow for large files. I prefer zstd, because it is like 10x faster for both compression and decompression.
by ang_cire | 2026-01-22 13:45:58+00:00
I'm not interested in wading into the wider discussion, but I do want to bring up one particular point, which is where you said

> do you believe that we design our moral systems based on our laws of punishment? That is... quite a claim.

This is absolutely something we do: our purely technical, legal terms often feed back into our moral frameworks. Laws are even created to specifically be used to change peoples' perceptions of morality.

An example of this is "felon". There is no actual legal definition of what a felony is or isn't in the US. A misdemeanor in one state can be a felony in another. It can be anything from mass murder to traffic infractions. Yet we attach a LOT of moral weight to 'felon'.

The word itself is even treated as a form of punishment; a label attached to someone permanently, that colors how (almost) every person who interacts with them (who's aware of it) will perceive them, morally.

Another example is rhetoric along the lines of "If they had complied, they wouldn't have been hurt", which is explicitly the use of a punishment (being hurt) to create an judgement/perception of immorality on the part of the person injured (i.e. that they must have been non-compliant (immoral), otherwise they would not have been being punished (hurt)). The fact they were being punished, means they were immoral.

Immigration is an example where there's been a seismic shift in the moral frameworks of certain groups, based on the repeated emphasis of legal statutes. A law being broken is used to influence people to shift their moral framework to consider something immoral that they didn't care about before.

Point being, our laws and punishments absolutely create feedback loops into our moral frameworks, precisely because we assume laws and punishments to be just.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2026-01-22 13:46:06+00:00
For me the real capability unlock from The Design of Everyday Things was that it made me start noticing and thinking deliberately about design decisions, which pushed me to begin evaluating everything through that lens. In general it comes down to looking at something and asking "what is good / effective and what is bad / annoying about this". If you keep doing that enough you develop your own taste and a greater appreciation of the world. Donald Norman isn't handing you a map, he's teaching you how to build your own.
by an0malous | 2026-01-22 13:46:07+00:00
Likewise I keep seeing all these comments on HN about how AI is revolutionary and all these AI skeptics are just haters. I really want to understand what this gap is between the believers and skeptics.

I have access to all the popular AI tools from work for free, I use them for the same cases you mentioned like search, consultation, a better StackOverflow, and autocomplete. It’s definitely useful but I would describe that as incrementally useful, not revolutionary.

Satya is saying that AI needs to start doing more than vibe coding and autocomplete, there’s probably half a trillion invested into the technology worldwide now and it’s not enough for AI to be a good coding assistant. It needs to replace customer support, radiologists, and many other professions to justify the unprecedented level of investment its garnered.
by jcims | 2026-01-22 13:46:23+00:00
As a gent with some years under his belt, I have to humbly admit that it was quite late in my career before I realized how much culture influences how people operate. Two separate incidents with two different cultural contexts brought it to the fore about ten years ago. I sought some advice from a senior exec that I was close with and he just laid it out in very unflinching way. It was just one conversation but it has helped me tremendously in the years since.
by legacynl | 2026-01-22 13:46:42+00:00
> but the fact that chlorination is needed.

You're wrong. The whole point is this: in EU, you cannot chlorinate your chickens. This means that to sell chicken, you need to make sure that your chicken is good to eat without chlorination (by making sure your whole production chain is sanitized up to sufficient level).

In the US you don't need to make sure your production chain is super high sanitation quality because you can chlorinate the chicken afterwards. This means that you don't have to spend money/effort cleaning up your chains, because you can dip them in chlorine after.

From a health perspective there is honestly not that big of a difference. The resulting product in both cases is chicken that's safe to eat.

The real reason for the difference in policy is the incentives that it creates for the meat-producers. In the US there is no incentive to keep sanitation up in the production chains because the chicken will be chlorinated anyway. This actually incentivizes sloppy (cheaper) production methods over ones that are more sanitized but more costly.

On the other hand, in the EU you cannot wash chicken meat, so it needs to be kept clean and sanitized throughout the production process.
by __jonas | 2026-01-22 13:46:56+00:00
Here are some examples:

- ESLint, the most commonly used linter in the JavaScript ecosystem uses a JavaScript file for configuration (eslint.config.mjs), so if you open a JS project and want your editor to show you warnings from the linter, an extension needs to run that JS

- In Elixir, project configuration is written in code (mix.exs), so if you open an Elixir project and want the language server to provide you with hints (errors, warnings and such), the language server needs to execute that code to get the project configuration. More generally it will probably want to expand macros in the project, which is also code execution.

- For many languages in general, in order to analyze code, editor extensions need to build the project, and this often results in code execution (like through macros or build scripts like build.rs, which I believe rust-analyzer executes)
by pedrofsteim | 2026-01-22 13:46:58+00:00
Your insight is right on point.

We're all hooked on the dopamine these notifications trigger. Smartphones have become a constant distraction. From ourselves. From reality. We can't stay still for 15 seconds anymore. Healthy boredom barely exists.

There's an interesting phenomenon you may have noticed: you're hanging out with friends. Talking. Laughing. The moment one person checks their phone, everyone else follows.

I hope that, 100 years from now, society looks back at social media the same way we now look at how cigars were consumed 50 years ago.
by n4r9 | 2026-01-22 13:46:58+00:00
I hope that I wouldn't be dismissive or angry. My worry is that my son will feel dejected because he (correctly) thinks he understands something but is told he's wrong. I also worry about him getting external validation from following a method, and will value that over genuine understanding and flexible thinking. But I see your point that it's my responsibility to help him work through that and engage with the syllabus.
Show HN: Freebird – Authorization without identity using VOPRF cryptography
by flammafex | 2026-01-22 13:47:08+00:00
I built Freebird as a resistance to the surveillance state that has been established in the United States. Every useful system requires identity by default. Want rate limiting? Track users. Want access control? Create accounts. Want to prevent spam? Surveil everyone.

Freebird uses VOPRF (Verifiable Oblivious Pseudorandom Function) to separate "can you do this?" from "who are you?" Users get unforgeable tokens that prove authorization while revealing nothing about identity. The issuer can't link issuance to usage. The verifier can't identify the token holder. Correlation is mathematically impossible.

Real-world use cases:
- Marginalized community identity verification without keeping a list of said marginalized people.
- Municipal feedback systems (residents report issues without fear of retaliation)
- Anonymous voting (one person, one vote, enforced cryptographically)
- Library computer time limits (without logging what people read)
- STI clinic eligibility (without creating subpoenable records)

It's built in Rust, implements the IETF VOPRF draft, and is fully self-hostable. Try it:

git clone https://github.com/flammafex/freebird
cd freebird
docker compose up

Apache 2.0 so if you don't like that this is being released by a Gnostic Christian church and not some capitalist enterprise, fork it.

I'd love feedback on the implementation and where else this could be useful.
by Jenny249 | 2026-01-22 13:47:13+00:00
Z Image Turbo is an online AI image generation platform built for creators and small teams.

It focuses on prompt + reference image control, stable style consistency across iterations, and
clear bilingual (English/Chinese) text rendering. Users can generate photorealistic or creative
images, preview results quickly, and export in multiple sizes and formats.

We built this to solve common issues with style drift and text accuracy in image generation.
Feedback from designers, marketers, and content teams is welcome.
by nephihaha | 2026-01-22 13:47:28+00:00
"But a whole lot of that loss of the human element isn't about AI one way or another. It's about doctors being ridiculously overworked."

My suspicion just now is that while there is a long term pattern of neglect and overwork, we are being nudged towards AI medicine in order to avoid paying out wages. (I think a similar thing will happen in law enforcement, where facial recognition networks and machines will be used in future in place of human police in many cases.)
by microflash | 2026-01-22 13:47:33+00:00
My apologies if this came off as too condescending and harsh. I’m coming from the receiving end of an app which uses Tailwind and many developers run wild with class-soup in their changes, causing all sorts of inconsistency.

Still, does not justify the caustic comment. And I’ll be spending this entire weekend obsessing on how to do better.
by lateforwork | 2026-01-22 13:47:33+00:00
You should read "What's the Matter with Kansas?" by Thomas Frank [1] that discusses this topic at length. Yes, I do think it works: It is possible to persuade people to vote against their material or economic self-interest by inflaming passions around simple, emotionally charged "hot-button" topics that are easy for most voters to understand and react to instinctively.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Matter-Kansas-Conservatives-Ame...
by palmotea | 2026-01-22 13:47:59+00:00
> 1. Unlike most developed countries, in India (and many other develping countries), people in authority are expected to be respected unconditinally(almost). Questioning a manager, teacher, or senior is often seen as disrespect or incompetence. So, instead of asking for clarification, many people just "do something" and hope it is acceptable. You can think of this as a lighter version of Japanese office culture, but not limited to office... it's kind of everywhere in society.

Way back, when I first started working with Indian offshore teams, the contracting company at the time had a kind of intercultural training that addressed that issue.

> Advice: If you want better results from Indian engineers(or designers or anyone else really), especially juniors (speaking as of now, things might change in near future), try to reduce the "authority" gap early on. Make it clear you are approachable and that asking questions is expected. For the first few weeks, work closely with them in the style you want them to follow.. they usually adapt very fast once they feel safe to do so.

That's exactly the advice they gave. They advised was to try to make your relationships and interactions as peer-like as possible. The more "authority" is present in the relationship, the more communication breaks down in the way you describe.
by retsibsi | 2026-01-22 13:48:03+00:00
Are you:

- agreeing there must be some threshold such that if the price is $X then you will buy(/bid on) the item, but if the price is $X + $0.01 then you won't;

- but maintaining that in a case where you have already decided to buy/bid and the price then rises by $0.01, you will always go ahead and pay the extra cent (provided this hasn't already happened a bunch of times)?

If so, then I don't see the original problem. Do your best to estimate X (or, more specifically, the value of X you actually endorse as your 'true' valuation), and put that in as your maximum bid. If you get the item at $X you'll be marginally pleased; if you get it for less then you'll be more pleased; and if you miss out on it then you shouldn't mind, as you knew it was only going to be just barely worth it at $X.

If you're actually disagreeing with the first point, then you still need to explain how that can make sense. It's coherent to say that in practice, after making the decision to buy at a given price, you would always accept a 1c price rise but at some point between the first 1c rise and the billionth you'd tell the guy to piss off. But that's not the same as saying the actual value of the item, separate from the emotions involved in the purchase process, is somehow indeterminate. If it's not worth it at $1, and it's worth it at $100, but 1c can never take it from "worth it" to "not worth it", then ?
Show HN: Festiveo – Find and Track Music Festivals Around the World
by kirillstyopkin | 2026-01-22 13:48:46+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m Kirill, a developer, and I’ve been building Festiveo, an app for music festival lovers. It helps you discover festivals worldwide, track lineups, get updates, and plan your festival calendar.

Some things you can do with Festiveo:

Browse festivals by country, genre, or date.

See full lineups and artist info.

Save festivals to your personal list.

Get early alerts about lineup rumors and updates.

I built this app because I love going to festivals and wanted an easier way to keep everything organized in one place.

I’d love to hear your feedback on the app, what features you’d like, and what could make it more useful for festival-goers.

You can check it out here: [link to your app/website]

Thanks for taking a look!

— Kirill
by publicdebates | 2026-01-22 13:48:47+00:00
1. Keep a portfolio.

2. Make and maintain connections.

3. Be pleasant to interact with.

4. Know what value you provide.

5. Find out what value people need.

If you're someone like Steve Jobs then #3 is a bit optional because #4 is increased, both in truth and in arrogant overestimation.

The hardest part of this really is #4, because most people either get too cocky and overconfident in the value they provide in general, or they are so overcome with imposter syndrome that they believe they offer practically nothing, so they do almost entirely open source work and fail to start a consultancy.
by erichocean | 2026-01-22 13:48:54+00:00
I've had AI write ~100% of my code for the last 7 months, but I acted as the "agent" so the AI had very high levels of direction, and I approved all code changes at every step, including during debugging.

Mostly Gemini Pro 2.5 (and now Gemini Pro 3) and mostly Clojure and/or Java, with some JavaScript/Python. I require Gemini's long context size because my approach leans heavily on in context learning to produce correct code.

I've recently found Claude Code with Opus 4.5 can relieve me of some of the "agent" stuff I've done, allowing the AI to work for 10-20 minutes at a time on its own. But for anything difficult, I still do it the old way, intervening every 1-3 minutes.

Each interaction with the AI costs at least a $1, usually more (except Claude Code, where I use the $200/month plan), so my workflow is not cheap. But it 100% works and I developed more high-quality code in 2025 than in any previous year.
by bluGill | 2026-01-22 13:49:28+00:00
First I've heard of izzat...

I'm not sure how to write that better, but the way you worded that made me suspect it was NSFW and I hesitated, but eventually decided I'd risk it. At least everything I found was work safe, and I learned a lot. I encourage everyone else who hasn't heard the word to look it up.
by NegativeK | 2026-01-22 13:49:29+00:00
> has nothing to do with open source

I partially disagree. It does have to do with open source: Github (et al) are about creating a community around an open source project. It's hard to get adoption without a community; it gives you valid bug reports, use cases you didn't think of, and patches.

You can, if you want, turn off PRs, issues, and literally any feedback from the outside world. But most people don't want that.

> and is not sustainable

I 100% agree. People (including people at for profit companies) are taking advantage of the communities that open source maintainers are trying to build and manipulating guilt and a sense of duty to get their way.

The most insidious burnout I see is in disorganized volunteer communities. A volunteer is praised for jumping in with both feet, pushes themselves really hard, is rewarded vocally and often and with more authority, and is often the one applying the most pressure to themselves. There's no supervisor to tell them to pace themselves. And when their view switches from idealistic to realistic and then falls into pessimistic, they view the environment through a toxic lens.

Then they vanish.
by lazide | 2026-01-22 13:49:35+00:00
Except for a very, very small number of people, everyone I've ever known who can afford to not have room mates - doesn't have room mates. Young or old.

There is a reason for this, and it isn't because they hate their mental health.

The issue here is how hard it is to protect your own mental health when someone else refuses to respect yours, and how a co-living situation can make that hard - because you literally are all up in each others business.
by sjajshha | 2026-01-22 13:49:50+00:00
> Customer service (chat, phone)

Only because companies have been cutting costs for decades here. This is not a good argument for AI.

> writing software

If you mean typing characters quickly, yes. Otherwise, there’s still a lot of employed devs, with many AI companies hiring.

> writing docs about software

The most useful docs are there because they contain info you cannot determine from the code. AI is not able to do this.

> computer graphics (animation, images)

If you are producing slop, yes.

> driving cars

True, but only because of its improved physical awareness. ie it’s a mechanical gain (better eyes, ears, etc) not an intellectual one (interpreting that information). Self driving cars aren’t LLMs and not really applicable here. Entirely different field.

> AI is only going to become more ubiquitous, there's 0% chance it 'fails' and we return to 2020

Absolutely true. But not for the reasons you think.
by davidivadavid | 2026-01-22 13:50:07+00:00
"Bible of design" might be a bit excessive. It's a good design 101 book. Definitely longer than it should be, and kind of fumbles the explanation of "affordances", which the author had to clarify later. It's representative of "design thinking" as a historically well-situated concept in design, but that's not necessarily a good thing in itself.

It really depends what you're looking for. If you want something deeper, more abstract, I would recommend going straight to something like Notes on the Synthesis of Form by Christopher Alexander, which I think typically appeals to the more abstraction-oriented part of the mind of engineers. If you want to get more actionable, practical day to day recipes, Refactoring UI as suggested somewhere else in the thread is a decent suggestion.
by dizhn | 2026-01-22 13:50:10+00:00
I was contacted by a guy who said he found a vulnerability on my site. Something like phpinfo being available or something. I informed them that I was aware of it and it's not a vulnerability but did offer to give them a small Amazon gift code if they wanted.

This might be part of the motivation. What's pocket change in the west might be good money in the 3rd world.
by SloppyDrive | 2026-01-22 13:50:28+00:00
The eternal-september; or its international equivalent, kills things because the nature of the public you are interacting with has changed.

These issues with reports and junk contributions come about because there is a huge payoff for pretending to be part of the community, but the benefit from actually contributing is generally less direct.

I dont think you can solve this with "friction", because the people you want to dissuade are more tolerant to these kinds of barriers than the ones you want invite in.
by Applejinx | 2026-01-22 13:50:41+00:00
Subjective ethics ARE the de facto standard and you can make a case that subjective ethics are the de jure standard for AI.

How can you possibly run AI while at the same time thinking you can spell out its responses? If you could spell out the response in advance there's no point expensively having the AI at all. You're explicitly looking for the subjective answer that wasn't just looking up a rule in a table, and some AI makers are explicitly weighting for 'anti-woke' answering on ethics subjects.

Subjective ethics are either the de facto or the de jure standard for the ethics of a functioning AI… where people are not trying to remove the subjectivity to make the AI ethically worse (making it less subjective and more the opinionated AI they want it to be).

This could cut any sort of way, doesn't automatically make the subjectivity 'anti-woke' like that was inevitable. The subjective ethics might distress some of the AI makers. But that's probably not inevitable either…

I'm not sure I could guess to whom it would be incredibly dangerous, but I agree that it's incredibly dangerous. Such values can be guided and AI is just the tool to do it.
by IanCal | 2026-01-22 13:50:50+00:00
Because it’s way easier to completely fuck up a system with running arbitrary commands on it while in use than it is by changing your code. It’s a massive step up in power and a massive drop in how much you can scrutinise a change (to zero).

Maybe the llm can carefully craft an exploit that happens when nginx reads some HTML. Maybe it found a way of hiding file system access in an import I didn’t notice.

I can completely destroy a prod service by accidentally not escaping a space in an rm command.

I’m genuinely confused by this question unless you’ve never worked on production systems in a team before. In which case that’s fine and it’s good to learn but there’s going to be a lot of material out there about deploying and safety.
by shishcat | 2026-01-22 13:51:19+00:00
I agree with this dicussion, AI should be used for improving, researching, and as he says, do something useful that changes the outcomes of people and communities and countries and industries.
BUT IT'S SATYA NADELLA SAYING IT!
The person whose company owns Copilot, Copilot in Bing, Copilot for Word, Copilot for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain...

With all this useless slop, he’s literally arguing against his own point.