MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PrimalOrigins | 2026-01-11 16:36:34+00:00
I spent months on this because I got frustrated with "code is law" being a lie.

Every blockchain claims immutability until something goes wrong. Then they fork.
- Ethereum forked after the DAO hack
- Bitcoin forks constantly over ideology
- Smart contracts get "upgraded"

So I asked: what if you literally couldn't change the rules?

Not "we promise not to" — actually physically impossible.

I designed a chip where the transaction split (6.18%) is computed by arithmetic circuits etched into silicon at fabrication. No software layer. No API. No attack surface.

The split:
- 1.00% → Founder
- 3.00% → Liquidity
- 2.18% → Maintenance
- 93.82% → User

To change it, you'd need new photomasks ($millions), new fabrication (months), and replace every chip. That's the point.

Also included:
- SRAM-PUF identity (each chip is physically unique)
- Proof of Innovation (rewards diversity, not mining/wealth)
- Logarithmic governance (anti-whale: 1000× activity = 10× votes)
- 30-day mortality clause (dead wallets revert, unlike Bitcoin's 4M lost coins)

Real performance: ~500M transactions/sec @ 500MHz. No BS trillion-TPS claims.

It's 31 SystemVerilog modules, fully synthesizable. Not fabricated yet (RTL only). No formal verification yet. Performance is estimated.

I'm not selling anything. I want people to review the architecture. Find the flaws. Tell me why it won't work. That's how it gets better.

The project is open source and community-driven.

GitHub: https://github.com/YggdrasilDao/Primal-Origins-SoC-IP-Core

Happy to answer questions about the architecture.
by bicepjai | 2026-01-11 16:36:48+00:00
Already it’s getting hard to avoid noticing satellite trains when stargazing with the naked eye. If mega-constellations really scale into the hundreds of thousands, it feels like we’re on track to permanently degrade the night sky, even in places without much light pollution.

With mega-constellation launches accelerating, the sci‑fi premise of imprisoning ourselves behind a debris field feels less fictional. This is essentially the collision-cascade risk described by Kessler Syndrome

Kurzgesagt has a good explainer. Hopefully we never trigger it.

https://youtu.be/yS1ibDImAYU?si=vbs-PY5VEA9xv_gS
by cogman10 | 2026-01-11 16:36:58+00:00
Certainly. These are institutions that have mostly been created during the progressive era of the US. The EPA (I believe) is the latest of these organizations.

Since roughly Reagan, the US has been either fully dismantling, defunding, or privatizing these institutions.

We've seen the FAA start to rely too heavily on the likes of Boeing to set regulation standards. The FDA has relied heavily on fees from private institutions to function and it's weakening due to that improper mixing has resulted in the likes of the Vioxx scandal.

Medicare is a good example of this. Under Clinton, rather than expanding or reforming medicare he introduced a plan to allow private insurance companies to get government dollars (medicare part c).
by wpm | 2026-01-11 16:37:02+00:00
I'm the same way. LLMs are still somewhat useful as a way to start a greenfield project, or as a very hyper-custom google search to have it explain something to me exactly how I'd like it explained, or generate examples hyper-tuned for the problem at hand, but that's hardly as transformative or revolutionary as everyone is making Claude Code out to be. I loathe the tone these things take with me and hate how much extra bullshit I didn't ask for they always add to the output.

When I do have it one-shot a complete problem, I never copy paste from it. I type it all out myself. I didn't pay hundreds of dollars for a mechanical keyboard, tuned to make every keypress a joy, to push code around with a fucking mouse.
by sigbottle | 2026-01-11 16:37:23+00:00
There's two things to separate here.

One is the practical and societal consequences, iteratively, over the next few decades. Fine, this is important discussion. If this is what you're discussing, I have no worries - automation taking a significant portion of jobs, including software engineering, is a huge worry.

The other thing is this almost schadenfreude of intelligence. The argument goes something like, if AGI is a superset of all our intellectual, physical, and mental capabilities, what point is there of humans? Not from an economic perspective, but literally, a "why do humans exist" perspective? It would be "rational" to defer all of your thinking to a hyperintelligent AGI. Obviously.

The latter sentiment I see a decent bit on hackernews. You see it encoded in psychoanalytic comments like, "Humans have had the special privilege of being intelligent for so long, that they can't fathom that something else is more intelligent than them."

For me, the only actionable conclusion I can see from a philosophy like this is to Lie Down and Rot. You are not allowed to use your thinking, because a rational superagent has simply thought about it more objectively and harder than you.

I don't know. That kind of thinking, be it from intuitively when I was in my teens, to learning about government and ethics (Rational Utopianism, etc.) has always ticked me off. Incidentally, every single person who's thought that way unequivocally, I've disliked.

Of course, if you phrase it like this, you'll get called irrational and quickly get compared to not so nice things. I don't care. Compare me all you want to unsavory figures, this kind of psychoanalytic gaslighting statement is never conducive to "good human living".

Don't care if the rebuttal analogy is "well, you're a toddler throwing a tantrum, while the AGI simply moves on". You can't let ideologies like the second get to you.
by lefty2 | 2026-01-11 16:37:56+00:00
c++ 03 was a lot easier.

For instance, if you want to avoid unnecessary copy operations when returning a string, just return it in variable that you pass by reference (eg. void doSomething(string& str);)
likewise avoid the vector class making unnecessary copies, simply by creating the objects on the heap and use a vector of pointers instead of values.
It's a bit more ugly, but it works, and you don't need to read a 24 page blog to understand all the corner cases where it can go wrong.
modern c++ is all about syntactic suger.
by satisfice | 2026-01-11 16:37:56+00:00
“perceptibility of judgement” is not rigorously defined in these papers, as far as I can tell.

The proposed JTP principle is suspended in midair, too. I can’t identify its ethical basis. Whatever perceptible judgement is supposed to mean, why should it always be transparent? Mechanical systems, such as a physical slot that mounts a sliding door, automatically cause alignment of the force that you use to open that sliding door. Is that “judgement” of the slot perceptible as it corrects my slightly misaligned push? Do I care? No.

I would say that any tool we use responsibly requires that we have a reliable and rich model of the tool in our minds. If we do not have that then we cannot plan and predict what the tool will do. It has nothing to do with “judgements” that the tool makes. Tools don’t make judgements. Tools exhibit behavior.
by antirez | 2026-01-11 16:38:43+00:00
Please note that the majority of OSS efforts where already non monetized and deeply exploited. At least, what it is happening has the potential to change the model towards a more correct one. What you see with Tailwind and similar cases, it is not really an open source business model issue, it is a "low barrier to entry" business model issue, since with AI a lot of things can be done without efforts and without purchasing PRO products. And also documentation is less useful, but this is a general thing, not just related to OSS software. In general people that write OSS are, for the most part, not helped enough by the companies using their code to make money, by users, buy everybody else, basically.
by jraph | 2026-01-11 16:39:07+00:00
Contrary to <img /> or <br />, <div /> is necessarily a mistake or intentionally misleading. The unfamiliar reader should not stumble upon <div /> too often. <div /> is a bug. It's a bit like using misleading indentation in C-like programming languages. Yeah, it can happen, and is a source of bugs, but if the page is well written, the regularity of having everything closed, even if it's decorative for the spec, can help the unfamiliar reader who doesn't have all the parsing rules in mind.

Now, we can discuss whether we should optimize for the unfamiliar reader, and whether the illusion of actual meaning the trailing slash in HTML5 can be harmful.

I would note that exactly like trailing slashes, indentation doesn't mean anything for the parser in C-like languages and can be written misleadingly, yet we do systematically use it, even when no unfamiliar reader is expected.

Now, maybe someone writing almost-XHTML (closing all tags, putting trailing slashes, quoting all the attributes) should go all the way and write actual XHTML with the actual XHTML content type and benefit from the strict parser catching potential errors that can backfire and that nobody would have noticed with the HTML 5 parser.
by kertoip_1 | 2026-01-11 16:39:39+00:00
What I miss in this book is the reasoning.

https://gibbok.github.io/typescript-book/book/differences-be...

So we now there are types and interfaces. One support declaration merging, one does not. Both can extend others, but in different ways. But why? Why there are two of them? When should I use them? Is one better than the other?
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-01-11 16:40:12+00:00
I always thought of the term "hype" as associated with _promotion_, usually communications of a commercial nature, e.g., marketing

I never considered it could be used to describe non-promotion, e.g., examination/criticism of "AI" hype

If "hype" is promotion, then the prefix "anti-" seems to imply the communications would not be "hype" because they are not promoting anything

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hype

NB. I'm not disagreeing with the blog post. I like reading the author's code. I'm interested in the word "hype" because IMHO that is the issue that many people have with with "AI": the hype. In other words, they are reacting to _AI hype_ not "AI"
by free652 | 2026-01-11 16:40:18+00:00
>Drivers are part of the kernel in Linux

While the drivers at the runtime are part of the kernel, they are not distributed as part of the kernel.

My drivers are *latest* -> 6.16.6.30200100-2255209.24.04

https://instinct.docs.amd.com/projects/amdgpu-docs/en/latest...

Debian is *stable*, but you are so far only proving my point in my original post.

If you are going to download ubuntu, the version proposed is 24.04 that has older kernel version than my debian 13.

https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop -> Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS -> Kernel 6.8
by otterley | 2026-01-11 16:40:36+00:00
The MIT license doesn’t require attribution for “using...code.” It reads as follows:

> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

> THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

The operating language here is “all copies or substantial portions of the Software.” LLMs, with rare exceptions, don’t retain copies or substantial portions of the software it was trained on. They’re not libraries or archives. So it’s unclear to me how training an AI model with an MIT-licensed project could violate the license.

(IAAL and this is my personal analysis, not legal advice.)
by comprev | 2026-01-11 16:41:01+00:00
When my dad (83) was looking to replace his ancient Win7 Dell PC I convinced him to buy a MacMini since he's had an iPad for a long time, and more recently an iPhone.

Initially he was concerned about the "new" interface after using Windows since 3.11 days, but within an hour he was happy doing his usual "basic tasks" (email, basic Excel, Word for letters, printing, etc). He was amazed both his printers (colour/scanner, b&w) worked with zero hassle after simply plugging them in.

Now he loves the ability to FaceTime anyone in the family (kids, grandkids, etc.) at the click of a button using the webcam plugged into the Mini, and really enjoys the sync of photos, emails, notes, etc.

I think he would have really struggled with Windows 11 so I was tempted by an older-person friendly Linux distro if macOS wasn't an option.
by Y_Y | 2026-01-11 16:41:12+00:00
https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributo...

It looks like they're second to Intel, at least by LF's metric. That said driver code tends to be take up a lot of space compared to other areas. Just look at the mass of AMD template garbage here: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/gpu/dr...
by quesera | 2026-01-11 16:41:17+00:00
I love you guys, and I wish you were right, but I don't think you are.

Any of the above moves (military bases, Visa/MC, ASML, etc) would make the US suffer, but it would collapse the EU. Europe has a decade or two of hard work and crippling costs to significantly disengage from the US, and no one has the vision or fortitude to make that happen.

You also wouldn't have any security. If you disengage from the US militarily (whatever's left of "NATO"), we'll all see how far Russia can project power. Not as far as they'd like, but enough to make life miserable in a half-dozen or more current-NATO countries. Which puts pressure on their neighbors of course. This would be a shooting war in the east, which would require central and western European countries to decide whether they want to spend blood and treasure to respond. "No" kicks the can down the road a few years, "Yes" is economically devastating.

China could step in! It's a long way from China to the Mediterranean and North Atlantic, and their naval power is ... thin, currently. But you don't want China to step in. They could send money, but then they'd own you worse than the US even fever dreams about owning you.

The US seizing Greenland would be a terrible thing for the world, but I think the most likely outcome is that there would be complaints from the EU countries at highest level and volume, and a handful of countries would get legislation through to make the US suffer, but it would fail at the EU level, maybe even split the EU into two factions of American-bully-reluctantly-aligned countries vs American-bully-righteously-andor-selfservingly-opposed countries. The instability would last a few years, maybe a decade, and then we'd be back to where we are now, with "Greenland (US)" replacing "Greenland (DK)" on maps, but otherwise no one would spend much time thinking about it.

And the stomach-turning irony is that all of this is completely unnecessary. The US has a compact of free operation in Greenland already, including military operations. This is just an exercise in establishing dominance (i.e. The End of Politeness). There are some administrative details like mineral rights and redrawing international exclusivity zones (watch out Canada), but those are not very important when the global economic machine is working properly.

The rhetoric here in the US is that RU and CN are waiting to pounce on Greenland already, and that if we don't, they will. I honestly don't know if there's even a shred of truth to that -- it sounds like absolute manufactured BS to me (RU isn't strong enough to hold it, and CN can't project at that distance), but I have a strong anti-trusting bias against liars who lie, and those are the people dominating the conversation on this side.

The next ten months in the US will decide the next fifty years of the world. On a personal level, that's the rest of my life, and I'm worried about it.

I wish wisdom, resilience, and peace, for all of us.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2026-01-11 16:41:18+00:00
Agreed. Naturally, we don't always know which event is a one off ( it used to be easier prior to proliferation of internet and then cell phones ). This likely explains some of the overcorrection I see in this area as a result. I am constantly on guard in public and if someone pulls a cell to record me, I am immediately defensive.

I guess what I am saying is that it is harder to assume it is not the type of event where we don't have to 'condition' people.
Show HN: Slim – 50% fewer tokens than JSON for LLM applications
by matteuccimarco | 2026-01-11 16:41:19+00:00
I built SLIM because JSON wastes tokens on repeated keys. Every object in an array repeats "id", "name", "email"...

SLIM defines the schema once, then just data rows:

JSON: {"id":1,"name":"Alice"},{"id":2,"name":"Bob"}
SLIM: |id#,name$|1,Alice|2,Bob

Results: 50%+ token savings, still human-readable, LLMs understand it without parsing.

MIT licensed, zero dependencies, TypeScript.

Would love feedback from the HN community.
by chrsw | 2026-01-11 16:42:27+00:00
This is the key point for me in all this.

I've never worked in web development, where it seems to me the majority of LLM coding assistants are deployed.

I work on safety critical and life sustaining software and hardware. That's the perspective I have on the world. One question that comes up is "why does it take so long to design and build these systems?" For me, the answer is: that's how long it takes humans to reach a sufficient level of understanding of what they're doing. That's when we ship: when we can provide objective evidence that the systems we've built are safe and effective. These systems we build, which are complex, have to interact with the real world, which is messy and far more complicated.

Writing more code means that's more complexity for humans (note the plurality) to understand. Hiring more people means that's more people who need to understand how the systems work. Want to pull in the schedule? That means humans have to understand in less time. Want to use Agile or this coding tool or that editor or this framework? Fine, these tools might make certain tasks a little easier, but none of that is going to remove the requirement that humans need to understand complex systems before they will work in the real world.

So then we come to LLMs. It's another episode of "finally, we can get these pesky engineers and their time wasting out of the loop". Maybe one day. But we are far from that today. What matters today is still how well do human engineers understand what they're doing. Are you using LLMs to help engineers better understand what they are building? Good. If that's the case you'll probably build more robust systems, and you _might_ even ship faster.

Are you trying to use LLMs to fool yourself into thinking this still isn't the game of humans needing to understand what's going on? "Let's offload some of the understanding of how these systems work onto the AI so we can save time and money". Then I think we're in trouble.
by tombert | 2026-01-11 16:42:39+00:00
I didn’t dispute attitude problems. If you had finished reading the comment you’re responding to you would have seen that. I also stand by what I said.

I wasn’t trying to rework everything and I am not 100% sure how you reached that conclusion. There were just plenty of times that for certain things there were clear simpler ways of doing things but those weren’t sexy and you were only incentivized to constantly do things to make yourself seem important instead of actually doing work.

I’m not an idiot, I know that you cannot rewrite everything in a 20+ year old codebase, and I wasn’t suggesting as much. At BigCo, instead of actually doing work, you instead were expected to hold several meetings about every minor change you were going to make, come up with a million classes and abstractions that serve no purpose other than to increase your LOC count, and then have a bunch of things to point to at your end of year self-review.

I am pretty sure most of my teammates liked me just fine, because I was generally not critical of any individuals code, because I felt like most of these issues were top down. Management created a situation that if you wanted to get a reasonable yearly pay raise you had to be able to point to a bunch of “big successes” (their words) in your yearly “self review”. Great if you have big projects to point to, but if you’re working on a “keep the lights on” team like I was, you start running out of new proper nouns to list. Instead have to constantly rebrand any small small thing you do as an “initiative”, and you point to the dozen meetings you called for it, and maybe even literally mention the LOC written for it.

Companies that have been around for awhile will always have cruft, and I agree, a lot of seemingly “stupid” code actually has a good reason for being that way, and I knew that even at the time. The code quality itself wasn’t really what I was complaining about, it was the politics around me it.

But please go on about how you think that I shouldn’t be able to express my frustration at a corporation’s idiotic policies at an exit interview.
by NegativeK | 2026-01-11 16:42:41+00:00
> I have been using Linux exclusively for twenty years now.

Ditto. I can't stand other OSs; they are constantly in my way for just the basic tasks.

> I don't understand people who use anything else, to be honest.

Anti-ditto. I would never give Linux to my parents. They're capable enough to maintain their own Windows computers, and switching them to Linux would mean that I'd have to take over all of those tasks -- because they've got other, more important things to do than to learn a new OS.

I'd agree with you if you could buy rando PC with Linux installed and working with no stupid hardware issues. People who can live in Google Docs/Office 365 web and don't have industry specific use cases will almost always be fine. But once you break out of that subset of people, tossing them a Linux machine can be kind of mean.
by atrettel | 2026-01-11 16:42:55+00:00
I recently wrote a command-line full-text search engine [1]. I needed to implement an inverted index. I choose what seems like the "dumb" solution at first glance: a trie (prefix tree).

There are "smarter" solutions like radix tries, hash tables, or even skip lists, but for any design choice, you also have to examine the tradeoffs. A goal of my project is to make the code simpler to understand and less of a black box, so a simpler data structure made sense, especially since other design choices would not have been all that much faster or use that much less memory for this application.

I guess the moral of the story is to just examine all your options during the design stage. Machine learning solutions are just that, another tool in the toolbox. If another simpler and often cheaper solution gets the job done without all of that fuss, you should consider using it, especially if it ends up being more reliable.

[1] https://github.com/atrettel/wosp
by diego_moita | 2026-01-11 16:42:56+00:00
Ok, I get it. You consider yourself to be part of the noble lineage of "true" Marxists. This is a common belief in all zealots, from the religious ones to the political ones.

But the truth is: that matters only to you. Like it or not, those regimes are what Marxism becomes in practice. Take the "scientific" approach that Marxism claims to follow and see the "objective conditions", see things as they are and what they became, not what you want them to be.

Whenever it tries to abolish capitalism, 140 years of history say that Marxism degenerates into tyranny. This is objective history.