MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrgriffin | 2026-01-12 10:37:15+00:00
I'm sure Bill understands what I'm about to say, but as a person on team "require explicit initializations" I think the mitigations I would be looking at are:

1. Only require that the programmer prove the variable is initialized before it's read. Riffing on Bill's example:

Object *x; // Fine
if (is_foo) {
x = &foo;
} else {
x = &bar;
}
x->a // Fine, was initialized by the time it was used.

Of course this is still a trade-off, your compiler has to work harder to prove that all paths that flow to each use are definitely-initialized. When you have initialization functions you now need to have type specifiers like 'in', 'out', and 'in/out' so that 'out' can take a pointer to uninitialized data, or something like MaybeUninit. This handles this example from Bill:

Foo f;
Bar b;
grab_data(&f, &b); // Fine if 'grab_data(out Foo *, out Bar *)'.

2. Something like Rust's MaybeUninit to explicitly opt-in to wanting to deal with possibly-uninitialized data. Obviously also a trade-off, especially if you want to force all the maybe uninitialized stuff to be in an 'unsafe' block.
by tumetab1 | 2026-01-12 10:37:17+00:00
Since you're getting into a senior role, learn the mantra, it depends :D

The usual trade-off of a well paid software development job is lack of job security and always learning - the skill set is always changing in contrast with other jobs.

My suggestion, stop chase trends and start to hear from mature software developers to get better perspective on what's best to invest on.

And why the mantra is always true?

You can find stable job (slow moving company) doing basic software development and just learn something new every 4 years and then change companies.

Or never change company and be the default expert, because everyone else is changing jobs, get job security, work less hours and have time within your job to uplift your skills.

Keep chasing latest high paid jobs/trends by sacrificing off time.

What's the best option for you? Only you know, it's depends on your own goals.
by elAhmo | 2026-01-12 10:37:21+00:00
The changes in Tahoe do not fall under the bucket of "no matter how small". We have grown to accept many small, but very annoying changes, starting from disappearing scrollbars to not showing full URL in Safari, to name a few, which were all driven by smaller touchscreens on iPhone/iPad, but with Tahoe things became quite extreme.
by Fnoord | 2026-01-12 10:38:00+00:00
If I use fish, I want to make use of it, and that means I will want to convert scripts, or simply learn to write scripts compatible with fish.

Shell scripts from third parties stick with whatever shell they were written for (ie. /bin/sh or /usr/bin/env bash), and commands copy/pasted from the internet are either quickly executed with bash (one-off) or ported over. Because I like to have such in my history (fish is configured to use atuin), I want to keep using the same shell, so I try to stick with fish. If I cannot convert a command (usually a bunch of commands) to fish, it is PEBCAK and a learning curve/experience.

As for tmux, that is solid advice, because it also allows to stick with a shell which is known to work. I've come to like zellij with alacritty, with zellij the option is default_shell. But now that I use ghostty, I don't use a terminal multiplexer locally any more; only remotely. And there I still use tmux.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-01-12 10:38:11+00:00
I loved the book (usually, Lovecraft’s work drives me nuts, because adjectives), but I assumed that The Great Old Ones were Cretaceous-era native lifeforms that had basically gone extinct.

He wrote his books at a time, when significant parts of the Earth were still a mystery. I sort of feel envy for that.
by nl | 2026-01-12 10:38:13+00:00
I'm vibe coding a fantasy console with the feel of early 90s computing.

100% vibe coded WASM based. It runs Doom so far.

I'm building that because I'm building a free-to-use vibe coding platform (ala Lovable) but the entire world off all apps is too hard to one shot with the current set of free LLM models... So now I have something it can target.

I've spent a lot of time with free models because I use them heavily in my VibeProlog project (https://github.com/nlothian/Vibe-Prolog/), which is actually in pretty good shape now. Next step is to rebuild the parser so it can load libraries in a somewhat reasonable way.
by tpm | 2026-01-12 10:38:53+00:00
> why is TS wildly successful

>From my perspective, it stops me from making stupid mistakes, improves autocomplete, and adds more explicitness to the code, which is incredibly beneficial for large teams and big projects. But I don't think that answers my original question, because if you strip away the types, it's JS.

I think it sort of does answer that - if js was not an awful language, there would be no need for TS, even if TS just a band-aid. Even better, if browsers provided a compile target, bytecode/vm spec or whatever instead of a very bad language everyone has to use, we would be spared of close to three decades of evolving tooling that is trying to remedy that bad decision.
by alextousss | 2026-01-12 10:39:02+00:00
Reminds me that comma.ai has its own line. While their setup is quite expensive they do run production for a smartphone-level of difficulty in-house. They detail it incredibly well at commacon [0].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iiBSN224w4

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE-QlIWMHxM
by ViewTrick1002 | 2026-01-12 10:39:07+00:00
Solar has only really been viable since ~2020.

Storage has only really been viable since mid 2024.

With timelines in the energy business being decades there's what currently exists and where we are headed are two completely different questions.

Looking at what gets built Q1 through Q3 in 2025 solar and wind met all electricity grid demand growth.

https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/solar-and-wind-growt...

Storage is also scaling massively.

https://www.ess-news.com/2025/11/12/german-network-operators...

If we just keep doing like we are then within 10-15 years renewables will be dominating every single grid globally.
by systemtest | 2026-01-12 10:39:12+00:00
I have been using OS X since 10.4 Tiger. I still remember standing in line at midnight trying to get a copy on DVD. Getting to test all the new features back home in the middle of the night was so exciting! Well worth the €129/€29 they charged for it. Nowadays the yearly releases are more of a "meh". I hit install, they added a new grouping feature to Reminders and that is about all I use from what they added.

Still bitter that my 2006 Core Duo MacBook only had support up to 10.6 Snow Leopard but back then that was over 4 years of being able to use the latest OS, so comparable to four releases with the current cycles.
by nebula8804 | 2026-01-12 10:39:29+00:00
>Who wants to be manufacturing technician when you can be lifestyle influencer!?

Before influencers people wanted to be actors. It predates the time before Electronics was 'lost' in Europe so thats not a convincing argument.

What you are saying really is that the world enjoys what we have on the backs of inadequately paid production engineers in China. As their demographic crisis does not produce a similar sized replacement generation, that benefit will go away as experts retire and no one replaces them. So one way or another wages will go up meaning inflation will go up and some of those 'lifestyle influencers' will now consider the field because it is a viable career path in terms of pay.
by bmitc | 2026-01-12 10:39:39+00:00
Have you seen literally any chart covering just the past one to two hundred years, or even just the past 50-70 years that covers emissions, population, industrial scale, environmental destruction, weather patterns, etc.? They would answer your question.

There is no end to the concrete evidence of the negative effect of humans towards the climate.

Here's something simple. Deforestation is directly caused by humans. (Note that wildfires "deforest" but without human intervention, they grow back and thus reforest.). So then ask yourself, what is the role of forests and jungles within the environment and climate?

Look at this article: https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation. What began 10,000 years ago, 200 years ago, and 100 years ago? This couldn't possibly be major changes in human activity could it?
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-01-12 10:39:40+00:00
I'm not sure I get why everything above France would be rendered uninhabitable? The coldest place inhabited by humans year round is Oymyakon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oymyakon

Temperatures are generally above 0°C in summer, -50 approximately in winter.

Will an Ice Age actually be worse than that?

I would expect somewhat better, although maybe not much. I might expect Denmark and Southern Parts of Sweden and England to reach 10 degrees in Summer, and -20 in Winter. But that is of course just a guess on my part so I am certainly willing to hear that I have guessed wrong.
by magicalhippo | 2026-01-12 10:39:45+00:00
> maybe only 20% higher depending on what service you take

For higher-end board that seems likely. For cheap hobby-grade boards just the job fee[1] is more than 10 boards delivered is from JLCPCB.

That said, thanks for reminding me. Will definitely compare next time I need boards.

[1]: https://community.aisler.net/t/our-simple-pricing/102#p-124-...
by thw_9a83c | 2026-01-12 10:39:55+00:00
There is one class of languages missing in the comparison: Programming golf languages: E.g. Japt [1], Pyth [2] or Jelly [3].

Update: I noticed that the author mentions that "APL's famous terseness isn't a plus for LLMs." Isn't that just a design limitation of the LLM tokenizers?

[1]: https://github.com/ETHproductions/japt

[2]: https://github.com/isaacg1/pyth

[3]: https://github.com/DennisMitchell/jellylanguage
by mawadev | 2026-01-12 10:41:04+00:00
Exactly. Some jobs moved from database, backend, frontend and devops to "fullstack", which means 4 jobs with the pay of one. People do that job, but with only 8h-10h in a day the quality is as expected. I think overall people will try to move out of the field, no matter how much of a force multiplier AI might be. Its simply a worse trade to carry so much responsibility and burden when you can work in IT or outside of IT in a less cognitively demanding field with set hours and expectations for the same pay (in EU, very hyperbolic statement tbh). Especially when the profit you bring dwarfs the compensation with all the frustrations that come with knowing that and being kept down in the corporate ladder.
by river_otter | 2026-01-12 10:41:06+00:00
Next level up is self hosting your LLM! I put LM Studio on a mac mini at home and have been extremely happy with it. Then you can use a tool like opencode to connect to that LLM and boom, Claude Code dependency is removed and you just got even more self-hosted. For what you're using Claude Code for, a smaller open-weight model would probably work fine
by ViewTrick1002 | 2026-01-12 10:41:13+00:00
Which storage can solve. The problem is that "base load" as we know it is dead. It was only ever an economic construct, never a physical one.

Distributed renewables are unraveling the grid monopoly, meaning you can't just foist enormous nuclear subsidies on the tax payers anymore. They will vote with their wallets.

Some reads for you:

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Quiet-Unravel...

https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/Wha...
by thinkingemote | 2026-01-12 10:41:44+00:00
Often we think someone is 100% sure but they only appear that way to us. Trying to change someone's thoughts by arguing with them never works.

Nasty quarrels might indicate an amount of uncertainty, or an amount of inability to articulate a thought. We often have ideas we don't really know why we have them, so we can help others to try to explain things to us in a way that helps them understand why too.

A "nasty quarrel" requires more than one side, and this other side is also responsible for the quarrel.
I think its wise when trying to talk about difficult things to first identify and agree upon the small things you can both agree upon.
If a conversation becomes heated it's no longer a conversation and you should get out before it gets worse. If you feel it's leading into fire and can still be salvaged you can then go back to these shared things and start again.

However a real conversation about ideas will also challenge and change your own view of the world. You might find your own ideas changing. People generally find this a psychologically painful process and will subconsciously resist such a movement. Generally we prefer to label the other as different, alien, us vs them. Having a quarrel is therefore even more likely as it means that your own psyche is protected from encounter with the dangerous other. Understanding that this also applies to the person you are talking with can also help reduce tensions and increase empathy. Again, starting from common shared baseline will help.
by TuxSH | 2026-01-12 10:41:44+00:00
Not OP, but there are plenty of minor annoyances (I had the "pleasure" of upgrading my work laptop to Tahoe) :

- Apple Music requires one more click to pop the multiplayer, UI is worse and the click hitbox for the progress seek bar is too small

- Volume +/- now acts like a notification (top-right corner of screen and clickable). Horrible design decision (gets in the way of browser tabs)

- The "A > B > C" folder thingy at the bottom of Finder windows is gone, and the tabs' styling looks unsettling

- Weather (and Stocks, to a lesser degree) looks worse, lots of space wasted
by Altern4tiveAcc | 2026-01-12 10:43:01+00:00
> You missed the point entirely.

I didn't miss it, I just don't buy it. Lots of people create and write in their free time, without any financial incentives whatsoever.

I'm okay with writing books for profit, though. But if your business case depends on artificially limiting what users can do with their copies, then your business is fundamentally unethical, whether it's a one-man company or OpenAI. It's not a bad thing for such a business to go under.
by lelanthran | 2026-01-12 10:43:12+00:00
> But that's not how most products work.

That's exactly how most products work :-/

> If you buy a table saw and can't figure out how to cut a straight line in a piece of wood with it - or keep cutting your fingers off - but didn't take any time at all to learn how to use it, that's on you.

Of course - that's deterministic, so if you make a mistake and it comes out wrong, you can fix the mistake you made.

> Why should LLMs be any different?

Because they are not deterministic; you can't use experience with LLMs in any meaningful way. They may give you a different result when you run the same spec through the LLM a second time.
by dghf | 2026-01-12 10:43:16+00:00
Eh, when you think about it, it makes sense.

Original rules (host knows where car is and always opens a door with a goat):

- 1/3 of the time your original choice is the car, and you should stick

- 2/3 of the time your original choice is a goat, and you should switch

Alternative rules (host doesn't know where car is, and may open either the door with the car or a door with a goat)

- 1/3 of the time your original choice is the car, the host opens a door with a goat, and you should stick

- 1/3 of the time your original choice is a goat, the host opens a door with a goat, and you should switch

- 1/3 of the time your original choice is a goat, the host opens the door with the car, and you're going to lose whether you stick or switch

So even under the new rules, you still only win 1/3 of the time by consistently sticking. You're just no longer guaranteed that you can win in any given game.
by haunter | 2026-01-12 10:43:18+00:00
My favorite recent LotR media:

There is a Lord of the Rings MMO (like World of Warcraft) and a guy made a video recording a walk from the Shire to Mordor. Like you can just walk from the Shire to Mordor in the game. And it's almost 10 hours long in real world time to do that! But on top of that the whole journey is narrated by the Lord of the Rings audio book, with the relevant parts of the journey.

https://youtu.be/LYipECdYpXc

Incredibly relaxing
by cmpxchg8b | 2026-01-12 10:43:32+00:00
This is such a stupid argument. A very significant amount of code never makes it into the public sphere. None of the code I've written professionally in the last 26 years is publicly accessible, and if someone uses a product I've written they likely don't care if it was written with the aid of an LLM or not.

Not to mention agent capabilities at the end of last year were vastly different to those at the start of the year.
by retrocog | 2026-01-12 10:43:33+00:00
I've been working for the past few years building robust, locally owned digital community infrastructure for rural areas.

The pilot is being released this month in partnership with the newspaper of record and local radio stations that cover four rural counties in the New York Catskills.

It's a modular platform that wraps current workflows, rather than replace them. If the pilot shows promise, we'll move forward with offering it to other regions using the same type of partnership model.
by latexr | 2026-01-12 10:43:45+00:00
Neither of those would be a strawman, though. One would be a faulty generalization and the other is airing a grievance (could maybe be a bad faith argument?).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization

Though I get that these days people tend to use “strawman” for anything they disagree with, so you could be right in your assessment. Would be nice to have clarification on what they mean.
by DonHopkins | 2026-01-12 10:44:10+00:00
You are right about mode-collapse -- and that observation is exactly what makes this interesting.

In my other comment here, I described The Sims' zodiac from 1997: Will Wright computed signs from personality via Euclidean distance to archetypal vectors, displayed them cosmetically, and wrote zero behavioral code. The zodiac affected nothing. Yet testers reported bugs: "The zodiac influence is too strong! Tune it down!"

Your "mode-collapse with stochastic noise" is the same phenomenon measured from the other direction. In The Sims: zero computed difference, perceived personality. In this LLM experiment: minimal computed difference, perceived personality. Same gap.

Will called it the Simulator Effect: players imagine more than you simulate. I would argue mode-collapse IS the Simulator Effect measured from the output side.

But here is where it becomes actionable: one voice is the wrong number of voices.

ChatGPT gives you the statistical center -- mode-collapse to the bland mean. The single answer that offends no one and inspires no one. You can not fix this with better prompting because it is the inevitable result of single-agent inference.

Timothy Leary built MIND MIRROR in 1985 -- psychology software visualizing personality as a circumplex, based on his 1950 PhD dissertation on the Interpersonal Circumplex. The Sims inherited this (neat, outgoing, active, playful, nice). But a personality profile is not an answer. It is a lens.

The wild part: in 1970, Leary took his own test during prison intake, gamed it to get minimum security classification (outdoor work detail), and escaped by climbing a telephone wire over the fence. The system's own tools became instruments of liberation.

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/mind-mi...

MOOLLM's response: simulate an adversarial committee within the same call. Multiple personas with opposing propensities -- a paranoid realist, an idealist, an evidence prosecutor -- debating via Robert's Rules. Stories that survive cross-examination are more robust than the statistical center.

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/adversa...

I wrote this up with links into the project:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/sims-a...

The bigger project is MOOLLM -- treating the LLM as eval() for a microworld OS. K-lines, prototype-based instantiation, many-voiced deliberation. The question I keep wrestling with: mode-collapse as limitation vs feature. The Sims exploited it. MOOLLM routes around it.

Would value your take on the information-theoretic framing -- particularly whether multi-agent simulation actually increases effective entropy or just redistributes it.

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm

The MOOLLM Eval Incarnate Framework:
Skills are programs. The LLM is eval(). Empathy is the interface. Code. Graphics. Data. One interpreter. Many languages. The Axis of Eval.

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/MOOLLM...
by anthk | 2026-01-12 10:44:25+00:00
I'd choose Zukitre better. No dark theme or a light one blinding your eyes. Pretty neutral, gray.

As for the icon theme, Elementary XFCE works perfectly well with Zukitre. If not, ePapirus or Papirus itself. Simple and flat but contrasted, the opposite to a good chunk of flat themes today, where you can't guess where the buttons start and end.

Once you get used to that theme the Night Mode it's useless as I you can just spawn

sct 5500 #or xsct

at daytime, or

sct 3500

at night time.

xsct/xsct will work with any window manager, too. And the Zukitre
themes blend really well with minimal window managers as CWM, i3,
DWM and the like, as it has neither curves nor gradients.
by crote | 2026-01-12 10:44:32+00:00
Aisler is decent for bare boards, but their PCBA is several orders of magnitude more expensive due to the setup & handling fees. JLCPCB has this down to a science, with their preloaded (and therefore dirt-cheap) "basic parts" and pre-approved "extended parts" pulled directly from LCSC for a small fee.

On top of that they also offer 3D printing, CNC machining, sheet metal bending, and even a McMaster-Carr-like parts store. It is literally a one-stop-shop for all your hardware prototype needs.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-01-12 10:44:36+00:00
Thanks for sharing that, Robert, and good luck!

I have close family with schizoaffective disorder, which is very close to schizophrenia, and have a couple of acquaintances with schizophrenia.

One of them is a chap that has chosen to take the “John Forbes Nash Jr” approach, and eschew medication. In his case, it has been effective. He’s a bit odd, to talk to, but otherwise, does fine. I do find it annoying that he pressures others to do the same. My family member desperately needs their meds, and can’t function, without. I think it has to do with how the condition manifests.

Another acquaintance also desperately needs their meds. A few years ago, they spent a few months, where they tried going off them, carefully, and assisted by doctors, discipline, diet, and exercise. It didn’t work. We watched them slowly disintegrate, until they damn near committed suicide, and were forced to go back.

Each case is different, but they hold in common, a total devastation of normal life.
by jijijijij | 2026-01-12 10:44:46+00:00
That's Arch for you.

I've been on Linux since Ubuntu 8.04 or longer and I literally never had OS install problems with any of it at all. Except for Arch, but what did you expect? Hands-on is the point of Arch Linux.

On the other hand, I remember installing a lot of drivers by hand on windows. Most people never (re-)installed Windows or macOS to begin with.

Probably depends on your hardware, but that's a matter of vendor support, not operating system. It's not like Microsoft or Apple are writing all those drivers. With a Thinkpad or Brother, you likely never had problems with Linux for the last 20 years. People don't complain they can't install macOS on a Chromebook, and Windows has been the absolute OS monopoly everyone had to support. However, with tinkering, you can install Linux on a washing machine.

What has drastically changed is the user space software side. First off some FOSS alternatives like Blender, OBS, Krita... are becoming equal or better than the competition, but Valve also basically solved gaming on Linux, now. Virtualization and software development is and always has been better.

To be fair, Linux also shines now due to enshitification of everything else.