MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dpark | 2026-01-01 18:46:08+00:00
> ever since they thought they won over communist/socialist ideas, i.e. with the breakup of the USSR

You seem to have redefined the timeframe significantly. Previously you indicated that the decline was happening even before the end of the Cold War.

I don’t believe that this is a true statement even since the fall of the USSR, though. I’d be interested in what data or metrics this claim of decline is based on.

> Nice try, this won't provoke me.

You’re so unprovoked that you didn’t even address the concern. You could have pointed at what you believed was problematic suppression of free speech (of which there are certainly some examples in western nations) without actually divulging your apparently controversial beliefs.

Bluntly, I believe your criticism here is dishonest. Pearl clutching about apparent suppression of free speech in the west while pointing to a nation that sends ethnic Muslim minorities to reeducation camps as a better system is deeply disingenuous.

> It's a mistake to think that Xi is in power for wealth.

> I often draw a parallel with being a father. You have some power, but mostly you have responsibilities.

This is a man who refused the traditional transfer of power within the CCP and had the Chinese constitution revised so that he could remain in power. This is absolutely a man who wants power and wealth.

You’re plainly biased.
by Brian_K_White | 2026-01-01 18:46:10+00:00
I've had many problems with many python scripts over the many years. Problems that I did not have with other scripts from other ecosystems. And that's just sticking to scripts and not languages in general.

A random sh script from 40 years ago usually works or works with only the tiniest adjustment on any current system of any unix-like.

A random py script from 6 months ago has a good chance of not working even on the same system let alone another system of the same platform, let alone another system of a different platform.

Now please next by all means assume that I probably am only complaining about the 2->3 trasition and nothing that actually applies since 15 years ago.
by pornel | 2026-01-01 18:46:17+00:00
That's not the spirit Rust wants to have. You can already disable borrow checker selectively by using "raw" pointers in places where you think you know better, and this is used very commonly. Every String in Rust has such raw pointer inside.

It doesn't make much sense to globally relax restrictions of Rust's references to be like C/C++ pointers, because the reference types imply a set of guarantees: must be non-null (affects struct layout), always initialized, and have strict shared/immutable vs exclusive access distinction. If you relax these guarantees, you'll break existing code that relies on having them, and make the `--yolo` flag code incompatible with the rest. OTOH if you don't remove them, then you still have almost all of borrow checker's restrictions with none of the help of upholding them. It'd be like a flag that disables the sign bit of signed integers. It just makes an existing type mean something else.
by jaapz | 2026-01-01 18:46:21+00:00
I think the comprehension part is very important.

When I write my own code without an LLM, it is an extension of my own thinking, my own mental model.

But when I use an LLM, that LLM produces code that I need to comprehend, understand. It's like I'm continually reading some other developers' code, and having to understand their mental model and way of thinking to truly understand the code.

For me, this is very tiring. It just costs more energy for me to review and read other people's code than when I write it myself.
by kalkin | 2026-01-01 18:46:49+00:00
I have nonspecific positive associations with Dan Wang's name, so I rolled my eyes a bit but kept going when "If the Bay Area once had an impish side, it has gone the way of most hardware tinkerers and hippie communes" was followed up by "People aren’t reminiscing over some lost golden age..."

But I stopped at this:

> “AI will be either the best or the worst thing ever.” It’s a Pascal’s Wager

That's not what Pascal's wager is! Apocalyptic religion dates back more than two thousand years and Blaise Pascal lived in the 17th century! When Rosa Luxemburg said to expect "socialism or barbarism", she was not doing a Pascal's Wager! Pascal's Wager doesn't just involve infinite stakes, but also infinitesimal probabilities!

The phrase has become a thought-terminating cliche for the sort of person who wants to dismiss any claim that stakes around AI are very high, but has too many intellectual aspirations to just stop with "nothing ever happens." It's no wonder that the author finds it "hard to know what to make of" AI 2027 and says that "why they put that year in their title remains beyond me."

It's one thing to notice the commonalities between some AI doom discourse and apocalyptic religion. It's another to make this into such a thoughtless reflex that you also completely muddle your understanding of the Christian apologetics you're referencing. There's a sort of determined refusal to even grasp the arguments that an AI doomer might make, even while writing an extended meditation on AI, for which I've grown increasingly intolerant. It's 2026. Let's advance the discourse.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-01 18:47:10+00:00
> people will figure that out and adapt for themselves

No they won't. People on HN will. Not the average person.

> Security-wise, the sandbox should limit damage to within the browser

The problem is, arbitrary code execution vastly expands the risks. Your "should" is doing all the work there.

> Standardization, eh? Forcing Safari on iOS and not making it available on the mass market platforms

Huh? Apple follows web standards. Why the heck should it make Safari available on Android and Windows? Safari isn't a standard, web standards are.
by rhco | 2026-01-01 18:47:11+00:00
It's always fun seeing other Kiwis on HN, but this is the first time I've seen my hometown mentioned!

I do agree with your point too: perhaps emotional stimulation is also important? That can be a lot less sharp, less well-defined, but just as enriching.

It sounds like GP has very high standards for their friends, which is not the point IMO. I think we should have friends to broaden our horizons and expose us to new things. Intelligence is only one part of that.
by Glubker | 2026-01-01 18:48:08+00:00
Radial is a modern pie menu for macOS that lets you automate repetitive tasks through custom macros. Create workflows that combine multiple actions, like opening apps, running scripts, triggering shortcuts, or managing files, then execute them with a single gesture. The menu adapts to your active application, displaying relevant macros based on your current context. Whether you're working in Word, Safari, Photoshop, or any other app, Radial provides the actions you need exactly when you need them.

The app also provides instant access to your favorite applications, emojis, and frequently used files through its modern pie menu. Everything is accessible via a simple keyboard shortcut.

Furthermore, users can share their macro configurations with the community through the preset library at appverge.net/presets, making it easy to discover new workflows and find inspiration from other users.
by ryandrake | 2026-01-01 18:48:45+00:00
Yea, unfortunately with software, using enough granular feature flags, they can make their software "maximally bad" for each given region. They lose a battle in the EU and are forced to make the software better? They will make it better only in the EU. Lose another one in Japan over a different issue? Just make a "japan" flag and only make it narrowly better for that use case in that region. Lose further battles in other regions, just add more flags.

They will never deploy the "better" feature worldwide if they have the opportunity to limit the better code to a particular region.

1: And of course, by "better" I am always referring to "better for the user" not "better for Apple."
by toast0 | 2026-01-01 18:49:12+00:00
Yeah, that shouldn't happen (although I think I've seen reports of eFuses blowing spontaneously as well as eFuses self-repairing)

If your console blows a fuse before Nintendo intends to, you won't be able to install firmware until a firmware is released that will run with that number of fuses blown. And, depending on how things are implemented, you might not be able to run the firmware that you have either.
by graemep | 2026-01-01 18:49:30+00:00
There is always a social acceptability component to psychiatric diagnoses. It was not that long ago that homosexuality was classified as a disease.

Being less accepting of neurodiverse people being different is directly linked to greater need to diagnosing them as society does not accept their differences.

In some cases there is expert acknowledgement that some differences are not necessarily a bad thing. For example:

> It can be helpful to think of ADHD not just as a deficit or disorder but as a ‘difference’. Some people view some aspects of their ADHD as strengths in certain situations or environments:

https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/mental-health/mental-illnesses-and...
by michelangelodev | 2026-01-01 18:49:40+00:00
Background: I did YC back in 2006 and currently work as a data scientist, and I've been working on this website as a hobby since 2022.

I published the first version of this article in mid-2024, and since then I've significantly expanded it with new content, including:

- materials from recent talks by Harvard astronomy professor Karin Öberg
- findings from archaeology and modern academic biblical scholarship (for the section on the Resurrection)
- an entirely new section on Lourdes
- inline photographs & lab reports on Eucharistic miracles
- links to faith testimonies including my interview with Evan O'Dorney, a 2x IMO gold medalist and 3x Putnam fellow

Regardless of your religious views, I hope you find it interesting. Happy New Year everyone.
by LorenPechtel | 2026-01-01 18:49:41+00:00
Leftist fantasy.

Diplomacy only works if both sides desire peace.

The reality:

Israel desires to avoid a continuation of the Holocaust.

Iran desires stirring up trouble as a means of taking over countries, and uses the conflict with Israel as a justification. It's working fine for Iran, why would they agree to peace? They never have, just some stuff playing us for fools. I don't support The Felon but tearing up the Iran agreement was a stopped clock thing.

The left thinks everything can be solved with enough jaw, jaw. The right thinks everything can be solved with enough war, war. Both are wrong.
by oldandboring | 2026-01-01 18:50:30+00:00
I'm in your camp but I go for the cheap VPS. Lightsail and DigitalOcean are amazing -- for $10/mo or less you get a cheap little box that's essentially everything you describe, but with all the peace of mind that comes from not worrying about physical security, physical backups, dynamic IPs/DDNS, and running out of storage space. You're right that almost nobody needs most of the stuff that AWS/GCP/Azure can do, but some things in the cloud are worth paying for.
by aoeusnth1 | 2026-01-01 18:50:33+00:00
There is already evidence provided of it! METR time horizons is going up on an exponential trend. This is literally the most famous AI benchmark and already mentioned in this thread.

https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-14-how-does-time-horizon-vary-...
by giancarlostoro | 2026-01-01 18:50:40+00:00
I've bought shirts I've seen through Facebook ads before. Ads can work, but Facebook is propped up with so many scams these days you have to wonder at what point do they get investigated over it? Amazon has had a similar problem, I've seen loads of threads here over it. I have been fortunate enough that most things I've bought off amazon have been legit.
by dang | 2026-01-01 18:51:00+00:00
You've posted over 40 replies hounding this one user that you seem to be fixated on. We've already asked you to stop (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44726957) but you've continued:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46409736

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46395646

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46209386

This is obviously an abuse of HN, regardless of who you're being aggressive towards. We ban accounts that keep doing this. If you keep doing it, we will ban you. No more of this, please.
by leptons | 2026-01-01 18:52:04+00:00
It absolutely is reality. Safari is the worst browser by far, it's been compared to Microsoft's old Internet Explorer browser. But don't take my word for it, lots of people have written about it...

https://www.google.com/search?q=safari+is+the+new+ie

And Apple purposely will never implement lots of APIs that only their native apps allow (which other browsers implement), specifically to force many developers to create a native app to use these APIs, so that Apple can force the developer to give them a percentage of any purchases made through the app. They can't force a developer to give them a cut of purchases made through a web browser, which is why they purposely hobble the Safari browser engine and then force all other browsers to use this engine. If you can't see how bad this is, then you've been taken over by the reality distortion field.

It's spelled out in the DOJ lawsuit against apple, among many other anti-competitive practices.

Microsoft got sued and lost in an antitrust suit for bundling IE with Windows. Apple bundles Safari with iOS but forbids any other browser engine but their Safari engine. Can you imagine if Microsoft forbade any other browser from being installed on Windows? It's time Apple was brought to justice over their abusive anti-competitive practices.

Here's the whole DOJ suit against Apple:

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline
by normie3000 | 2026-01-01 18:52:04+00:00
> Most people prefer Bluetooth because you don't need to deal with annoying wires getting tangled, ripping your earbuds out, etc.

Thanks for this summary. I feel sad to be in a minority who prefer wired headphones. For me it's because all their failures you listed are issues I can understand and mitigate. But when bluetooth goes wrong, what do I do? Usually:

1. turn off both devices and then turn them back on again
2. try to reconnect
3. if step 2 failed, give up and try again another day

I don't learn anything. I feel infantilised and helpless.
by mswtk | 2026-01-01 18:52:27+00:00
Technically, the actual statement in Galois theory is even more general. Roughly, it says that, for a given polynomial over a field, if there exists an algorithm that computes the roots of this polynomial, using only addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and radicals, then a particular algebraic structure associated with this polynomial, called its Galois group, has to have a very regular structure.

So it's a bit stronger than the term "closed formula" implies. You can then show explicit examples of degree 5 polynomials which don't fulfill this condition, prove a quantitative statement that "almost all" degree 5 polynomials are like this, explain the difference between degree 4 and 5 in terms of group theory, etc.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-01 18:53:41+00:00
> My father in law clearly has severe undiagnosed Autism. But he was a successful engineer

It's interesting how much the definition of "severe" Autism has changed in common language. Typically, someone with "severe Autism" would not be capable of holding down a complex job like engineering, let alone having a successful career and a family.

The families I know with severely autistic children (now young adults) are still working on basic self-sufficiency without a job or in one case basic verbalizations. So it's strange for me to see someone casually described as having "severe" autism but also having a successful engineering career and a family.
by chuckadams | 2026-01-01 18:53:53+00:00
That had a lot to do with De Beers blacklisting any buyers of used diamonds, so used stones would end up their only supply. Meanwhile running "Diamonds are Forever" campaigns that would paint any such recycling as the actions of sleazy dishonest pawn brokers. You wouldn't sell Grandma's precious heirloom to one of those people now, would you? Nowadays I'm not sure the cartels have the power they used to, but whatever's left does still seem pretty disproportionate.
Show HN: Gene – a Lisp-like language built around a generic "Gene" data type
by gcao | 2026-01-01 18:53:56+00:00
Hi HN — I’ve been working on Gene, a general-purpose, homoiconic language with a Lisp-like surface syntax, but with a core data model that’s intentionally not just “lists all the way down”.

What’s unique: the Gene data type

Gene’s central idea is a single unified structure that always carries (1) a type, (2) key/value properties, and (3) positional children:

(type ^prop1 value1 ^prop2 value2 child1 child2 ...)

The key point is that the type, each property name, each property value, and each child can themselves be any Gene data. Everything composes uniformly. In practice this is powerful and liberating: you can build rich, self-describing structures without escaping to a different “meta” representation, and the AST and runtime values share the same shape.

This isn’t JSON, and it isn’t plain S-expressions: type + properties + children are first-class in one representation, so you can attach structured metadata without wrapper nodes, and build DSLs / transforms without inventing a separate annotation system.

Dynamic + general-purpose (FP and OOP)

Gene aims to be usable for “regular programming,” not only DSLs:

* FP-style basics: fn, expression-oriented code, and an AST-friendly representation
* OOP support: class, new, nested classes, namespaces (still expanding coverage)
* Runtime/tooling: bytecode compiler + stack VM in Nim, plus CLI tooling (run, eval, repl, parse, compile)

Macro-like capability: unevaluated args + caller-context evaluation

Gene supports unevaluated arguments and caller-context evaluation (macro-like behavior). You can pass expressions through without evaluating them, and then explicitly evaluate them later in the caller’s context when needed (e.g., via primitives such as caller_eval / fn! for macro-style forms). This is intended to make it easier to write DSL-ish control forms without hardcoding evaluation rules into the core language.

Optional local LLM backend via llama.cpp

I also added an optional local LLM backend: Gene has a genex/llm namespace that can call local GGUF models through llama.cpp via FFI (primarily because I wanted local inference without external services).

Repo: https://github.com/gene-lang/gene

I’d love feedback on:

* whether the “type/props/children” core structure feels compelling vs plain s-exprs,
* the macro/unevaluated-args ergonomics (does it feel coherent?),
* and what would make the project most useful next (stdlib, interop, docs, performance, etc.).
by dpark | 2026-01-01 18:53:56+00:00
I think most people in general have no taste. But taste is also so subjective that it’s hard to meaningfully discuss. Everyone probably thinks they have great taste.

Part of the Silicon Valley ethos (and techie ethos in general) is the rejection of fashion. Comfort over style. Casual over classy.

Even the “stealth wealth” thing that trended for a while seemed to be an expression of this. Casual wear, but really expensive.
by nospice | 2026-01-01 18:53:56+00:00
> ... go into the official statistics.

There are no "official" statistics. None of this matters. If we judged projects by the number of security holes they had, then no one would be using ffmpeg, which had hundreds of serious vulns.

Vulnerability research is useful insofar that the bad guys are using the same techniques (e.g., the same fuzzing tools), so any bugs you squash make it harder for others to attack you. If your enemy is a nation state, they might still pack your laptop / phone / pager with explosives, but the bar for that is higher than popping your phone with a 0-day.

Vulnerability research is demonstrably not useful for improving the security of the ecosystem in the long haul. That's where sandboxing, hardening, and good engineering hygiene come into play. If you're writing a browser or a video decoder in C/C++, you're going to have exploitable bugs.
by ben_w | 2026-01-01 18:54:21+00:00
Yes, though it is much reduced.

I might look at my feed* perhaps 2-3 times a week; despite this, there's a good chance only one of my friends has posted anything new. Unfortunately, that particular friend is also a fairly cliché left-of-the-Cuban-Communist-Party (no, seriously) activist and 95% of her posts are "signal boosting" things I, a Brit living in Germany, do not have any connection to, e.g. "Demexit memes" or Bernie Sander's opinions about anything.

Doesn't help that this trillion dollar corporation still can't handle rotation metadata*, so if I see something and I want to share it, even if it's a good fit for my feed, 50% chance the pic looks stupid the moment I've uploaded it, to which I respond "ugh, never mind then" and forget about trying to solve this and don't post it.

* though the messenger app's web view
by jjgreen | 2026-01-01 18:54:52+00:00
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you think that C++ programmers actually want to write "broken garbage", so when you say "millions of people want broken garbage" the implication is that a) they do write broken garbage, b) they're so stupid don't even know that is what they are doing. I can't really read else than in the same vein as an apartheid-era white South-African statement starting "all blacks ...", i.e., an insult to a large class of people simply for their membership in that class. Maybe that's not your intent, but that's how it reads to me, sorry.
by ryandrake | 2026-01-01 18:54:55+00:00
No, I think Chrome is the modern IE. It has huge market share, to the point where developers often just ignore the other browsers. Just like they did when IE was dominant.

I'm torn on this honestly. Safari (particularly mobile Safari) is literally the only thing keeping the web from becoming Chrome-only. While I would love to see Safari-alternative engines on the iPhone, I fear that the "open web" in terms of browser compatibility is cooked the day that happens: Commercial web developers are supremely lazy and their product managers are, too. They will consider the web Chrome-only from that day forward and simply refuse to lift a finger for other browsers.

I think when IE6 died, on one hand it was a relief for web developers, who (very quickly) deleted all the code needed to maintain compatibility, but on the other hand, it made the web worse by bringing us closer to browser monopoly.
by TheAlchemist | 2026-01-01 18:55:09+00:00
In SF ? That would be illegal, as Tesla don't even have the permit to do that:

https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...

They only can test with a driver for now. Can you take a ride in this Robotaxi and film it, so we can all see ?

I'm always very curious about why people argue some obvious lies like that about Tesla. Invested ? Paid shills ? Just Musk distortion field ?
by shermantanktop | 2026-01-01 18:55:12+00:00
You’re making a lot of assumptions, and without going into detail, you couldn’t be farther off about my personal experience.

The point of TFA is that the mild/borderline diagnosis rate has exploded. So apparently those professionally tasked with diagnosis now see autism where they used to not see it. But now we have self-styled autism spotters out there labeling people definitively based on tweets.

Even in your response you said my response was neurotypical, OR undiagnosed atypical. You don’t see the irony?
by fooker | 2026-01-01 18:55:38+00:00
> you need to know these numbers on Python to know when to actually build something in C

People usually approach this the other way, use something like pandas or numpy from the beginning if it solves your problem. Do not write matrix multiplications or joins in python at all.

If there is no library that solves your problem, it's a great indication that you should avoid python. Unless you are willing to spend 5 man-years writing a C or C++ library with good python interop.