MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mulmboy | 2026-01-18 02:21:46+00:00
LLMs aren't like you or me. They can comprehend large quantities of code quickly and piece things together easily from scattered fragments. so go to reference etc become much less important. Of course though things change as the number of usages of a symbol becomes large but in most cases the LLM can just make perfect sense of things via grep.

To provide it access to refactoring as a tool also risks confusing it via too many tools.

It's the same reason that waffling for a few minutes via speech to text with tangents and corrections and chaos is just about as good as a carefully written prompt for coding agents.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-01-18 02:23:26+00:00
Thr talk is great. Good into to Xous, to using the MMU sort of to do a rust borrow-checked owned memory system.

Also Bunnie talks about making the Baochip: a 1+4 small-tiny risc-v design. That hitchhikes on another company's core! "Can I also put fuses on so we can use this as a risc-v design?" "Sure"! So awesome!!
by zabzonk | 2026-01-18 02:24:12+00:00
Off-topic, I guess, but on-screen icons are not the only things you have to puzzle about. On my quite new Asus laptop (which I really like) there is a key on the keyboard that launches Asus's My Asus application, which does hardware-specific configuration. I like the app, I like easy access to it - what I don't understand is why the label on the key is "//]".
by amluto | 2026-01-18 02:24:17+00:00
Au contraire.

If you live in a climate where the outdoor air is generally fairly dry and also sufficiently warm that it spends most of its time above the interior dewpoint, then fine. You can vent our attic and it stays dry. This covers rather little of the world.

If you do not insulate at all and you heat your house when it’s cold or wet and you do not experience hot and humid weather, then there will be enough heat flow to keep your attic dry. This is generally an awful idea, but old insulated houses did work in many climates.

If you live somewhere cold and put fluffy stuff on your ceiling and you vent your attic and you have air leaks in your ceiling (hint: this is basically unavoidable) and it’s very cold in your attic, you may get condensation in the ceiling insulation or the attic. Mold time.

If you live somewhere hot and humid and you vent your attic, then you are are filling your attic with hot, humid air. Your dehumidifier or A/C will not control your attic humidity. But your A/C may cool parts of your attic, leading to additional condensation.

If you have nasty severe blowing rain, it may blow into your attic, leading to damage. This is a problem in hurricanes.

Wildfire embers can ignite the inside of your attic. You can try to use fancy supposedly ember resistant vents to mitigate this, or you can omit vents entirely.

If you seal your attic and control moisture in the living spaces well enough to avoid moisture problems and you have adequate conditioning in your attic, your attic will be about the same temperature and humidity as your living spaces, and you’ll be fine.

You can geek out at buildingscience.com. The author appears to have become increasingly convinced that vented attics are basically never the answer.
by jackzhuo | 2026-01-18 02:24:54+00:00
OP here.

I built this project because I am fascinated by the Yarrow Stalk method—a process that is complex and full of ritual.

While most apps are just "click and get answer," my implementation requires the user to click over 100 times to complete the ritual. I originally hesitated to add AI because AI demands speed, whereas this ritual represents slowness.

After a month of observation, the results have been surprising:

1. I see users completing these 100+ clicks every day, far exceeding my expectations.

2. Users have left comments on the site specifically asking me NOT to add AI.

3. I also received strong validation for this "sacred friction" strategy from the Indie Hackers community.

This has been really encouraging. It seems people are craving the "process" more than just the result.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
by vortexshadow | 2026-01-18 02:24:54+00:00
Tests definitely help, and I agree they should cover as much logic as possible.

The gap I’ve seen is that tests usually validate expected scenarios,
while some invariants only break after specific sequences of events
or over time — especially with async flows and state that evolves across renders.

In practice, we found tests and runtime checks to be complementary:
tests verify intent,
invariants catch unexpected drift when reality doesn’t match assumptions.
by linguae | 2026-01-18 02:24:56+00:00
I agree. Six years ago during COVID I wrote a document describing my idea of a dream personal computing environment, where all functionality is accessible using an API, enabling scripting and customizable UIs. UIs are simply shells covering functionality provided by various objects.

Unfortunately I haven't had the time to implement this vision, but Smalltalk environments such as Squeak and Pharo appear to be great environments to play around with such ideas, since everything is a live object.
by rvz | 2026-01-18 02:25:12+00:00
There is an obvious pattern of very smart people such as the author and what they do.

They do not care about the place they have worked at or the college they went to. They just build startups.

In contrast, you can see what happens when (outside of research) market forces is now not in favour of knowledge workers and now ignores the college candidates go to and they end up on this site [0] or /r/cscareerquestions.

It in fact, favours those who build startups, Hence the answer to the above question to stop participating:

> I started two companies, comma.ai and tiny corp.

Both companies are in robotics, which is the next wave of the tech industry.

So if you want >500k+ income or at least a way to stand out, you might as well build a (profitable) startup as I said before [1] (probably in robotics) with no need to raise more money (unless you have a very good reason).

Instead of going through the interview loop scam with thousands of others, getting low-balled for <100k which half is taxed from you anyway and risk getting laid-off if you ask for a promotion (which comes with extra cons).

That should be clearly obvious by now.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46615137

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46615295
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-18 02:25:18+00:00
Sound like some political spin on your part, or just head in the sand.

It's how trade starts, small friction reductions. And now that trade is happening anyways, and there are newer better ports, it becomes easier to do more trade. And trade grows. With better new trade routes/infrastructure they aren't just selling the Europe, they are taking more and more market around the world.

For the USA that 'tiny' to you 3% is going to wreck a lot of red, agricultural states economies. And they then become drags on other parts of the American economy, and instead of chasing opportunities we're propping things up. Less trade impacts all trade, because suddenly things get tighter for Mississippi shipping. Train lines. There's less synergy, more expense carried by the remaining industry. Less money for maintenance/reinvestment in bulk transportation. Less money going into John Deere and all those agg adjacent companies. Less money for our petrochemical companies (fertilizer) means less reinvestment for them/worse health, higher risk from foreign competition.

For example 60% of farm exports travel over rivers, and 20% of coal. So coal shipping prices might get impacted. Maybe coal shipping efficiency as river shipping lanes lose 60% of their business there is less put back into maintaining them. Coal isn't in a position to absorb much shock, it's doing really bad already.

Chemicals are 9% of US exports. More ag trade makes it profitable for companies in these other countries to start setting up their own petrochemical factories/industries that will then compete with us as well.
by DivingForGold | 2026-01-18 02:25:25+00:00
From the article . . . The hammer came down over the weekend for assorted religion, film, ethnic studies, sociology, communications, and literature classes.

As an alumni I say Great. Glad to see it. All the BS courses whose students majoring in this stuff will likely never be able to pay back their student loans waiting tables for the rest of their life. Get a GRIP. NOBODY is hiring these majors. My son and my family endowed scholarship is limited to engineering and science majors, business majors a second possibility. No liberal arts majors whatsoever.
by hintymad | 2026-01-18 02:25:50+00:00
This wave of AI innovation reveals that a lot of activity in coding turns out to be of accidental complexity instead of essential. Or put it another way, a lot of tasks in coding is conceptual to human, but procedural to AI. Conceptual tasks require intuitive understanding, rigorous reasoning, and long-term planning. AI is not there yet. On the other hand, procedural tasks are low entropy with high priors: once a prompt is given, what follows is almost certain. For instance, one had to learn many concepts to write "public static void main(String[] args)" when writing Java code in the old days. But for AI, the conditional probability Pr(write "public static void main(String[] args)" | prompt = "write the entry method for a given class") is practically 1. Or if I'd like to use Python to implement linear regression, there will be pretty much one way to implement it right, and AI knows about it - nothing magical, but only because we human have been doing so for years and the optimal solution for most of the cases have converged, so it turns into procedural to AI.

Fortunate or unfortunate, many procedural tasks are extremely hard for humans to master, but easy to AI to generate. In the meantime, we structured our society to support such procedural work. As the wave of innovation spreads, many people will rise but many will also suffer.
by D-Machine | 2026-01-18 02:25:51+00:00
I'd need a citation for that statistic, and I'd also need to see which themes are actually used.

> IMO, the best themes do typically have minimal/functional highlights, which results in more text that is the base color

And IMO, those are the worst themes.

These things are just preferences, but it is an objective fact that a good highlighting scheme makes certain information immediately visible, without requiring the reader to parse the actual characters. Whether or not this information is something you find helpful or annoying depends on your processing styles and preferences.
by altmanaltman | 2026-01-18 02:25:51+00:00
I mean that's perfectly valid for a hobby project, but I think the argument is from the pov of a company seeing your time as a resource. In that context, it is obvious why it makes economic sense to spend your time on the actual, complex issues, assuming AI can handle the basic tasks. My job doesn't give a f about me finding joy, I can raw dog all the code I want in my free time/for hobby projects.
by ronjakoi | 2026-01-18 02:26:52+00:00
Finnish case markers vary a lot from word to word, because of not only vowel harmony but other features of the word stem, and consonant gradation which is a weird feature of Uralic languages.

For the subtraction example, some numbers would be 50:tä 5:llä and others 6:tta 3:lla. Of course you could encode for all those possibilities and successfully parse them, but it would feel weird for a compiler to reject an expression because it's ungrammatical Finnish.

Also it would feel weird if you first write (vähennä muuttujaa 256:lla) but then realise you made an off-by-1 and have to change it to (vähennä muuttujaa 255:lla) but that doesn't compile because it should be 255:llä, so you have to remember to change two things.

But on the other hand, that's just how it is to write in Finnish, so in prose we don't really think about it. In natural language, it's normal to have to change other stuff in a sentence for it to continue making sense when you change one thing.
by komali2 | 2026-01-18 02:26:57+00:00
Well, let's explore the topic then, because for example aforementioned cults will use protest or other uncomfortable situations to solidify indoctrination. See: Mormons and Jehovah's witnesses sending people door to door to proselytize knowing full well the majority of people will be annoyed by this, which will Other the proselytizers and make them feel like the church members are the only people who they're safe around. Or the "God Hates F*s" Church doing their protests. Taken to the extreme: the Cultural Revolution's struggle sessions, designed explicitly to make as many people as possible feel that they were culpable alongside the Party. So, maybe not great for the opponents or the observers, but very good at solidifying the base itself.

Personally I'm not interested in running a cult, but I'm very interested in anything that empowers people.

In the case of an anti ICE protest where we shout mean things at the gestapo, a couple side effects include the empowerment of participants and locals. See for example how the dynamic shifts for the woman sheltering a door dash driver from ICE once more neighbors start showing up: https://www.reddit.com/r/minnesota/comments/1q8vvwa/st_paul_...

In the case of the various anti Nazi protests I've been to (proud boy rallies) it's also been good for generating images of just how many people are in opposition to racists.

It's not necessarily always about persuading, sometimes it's more about, well I suppose "circling the wagons?" Solidifying community support, demonstrating capabilities, empowering people and communities, and disempowering, defanging, or scaring racists and fascists. Finally, it's great for recruitment: fed up liberals turn up to their first protest, get one hell of an adrenaline rush screaming at cops and running away from tear gas, and then may later ask the person pouring milk onto their face how they can help outside of protesting. In that sense the cop's escalations, while barbaric and inexcusable, are the unconvincing escalation you mentioned that in fact helps us.

But for you then, I'm not sure your opinions on ICE as gestapo but perhaps humor my position on their danger, how would you instruct anti-fascists to operate in the USA right now in the face of ICE raids? The original idea is, what, applying Christian values? Jesus threw out the merchants and moneychangers, did he not? For certain people, he decided he wasn't in the business of forgiveness.
by pembrook | 2026-01-18 02:27:03+00:00
Exactly.

Anyone who thinks an intricate illustration of a quill and ink communicates to the user "Hey this app is our Microsoft Word"...is not thinking about what function an icon is supposed to serve.

It's like comparing a road sign to an 18th century painting and saying "LOOK HOW FAR WE'VE FALLEN!"

These are not serious people.
by robocat | 2026-01-18 02:27:41+00:00
That icon is pretty terrible. Fountain pens were obsolete 50 years ago and ink in bottles is even more outdated. What's with the shiny spherical bottle? It feels like a hipster icon design to me.

Of course picking a meaningful icon is trés difficult.

If we are given the name and then we learn the icon, then perhaps it doesn't matter too much what the icon is?
by Leftium | 2026-01-18 02:28:33+00:00
https://veneer.leftium.com is a similar project: a thin layer over Google sheets/forms:

- Adds markdown support

- Makes it prettier, especially on mobile

- Adds open graph social sharing image/title

Based on actual convention used by (dance) groups in Korea to use Google forms for event sign ups. It doesn't require changing their workflow: the original forms still work (as a fallback), they just need to share a different URL based on the form ID.

I've shown Veneer to several dance group organizers who use these Google forms on a regular basis. While two people have embraced the concept and registered their custom domains for their forms most people are surprisingly hesitant to use Veneer. Objections I've heard:

- Already have a workflow; don't want to learn something new

- Know how to program themselves, can make themselves if needed

- Already registered an unused domain, but have other plans for the site

- Prefer simple (even though I simplified: https://red.leftium.com)

Each Veneer page has a link to the original Google form and sheet. (Also a link to the full MIT-licensed source.) Here is the only one that is "in production:" https://viviblues.com
by sippeangelo | 2026-01-18 02:29:26+00:00
Is it? I've seen us going from obvious skeuomorphism to more and more abstract shapes, until we hit peak Windows 8 hubris where everything is a coloured square with a monochrome symbol in it. Then back to icons where shades of colour and contrast finally start meaning things again, but getting stuck in an endless balancing on the edge where icons are abstract enough to confuse but not clear enough to describe their function. We've never gotten fully back to actual skeuomorphism.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-01-18 02:29:32+00:00
Even lesser agents are incredibly good and incredibly fast using tools to inspect the system & come up with ideas for things to check, and checking them. I absolutely agree: we will 100% give the agents far more power. A browser, a debugger for the server that works with that browser instance, a database tool, a opentelemtry tool.

The teams are going to figure out how to mitigate bad deploys by using even more AI & giving it even better information gathering.
by m463 | 2026-01-18 02:29:34+00:00
I had trouble with my heating system and got a good long talk with the HVAC pro.

I think variable output heating/cooling has one interesting capability - it can adjust to things you've adjusted. For example, a one or two-stage heating system has trouble if you close heating vents in some rooms. It might overheat if too many are closed for example. With a variable-output system, it can support this. further with variable dampers it can support zoned heating and cooling. You can give the places that need it less or more airflow and have a more comfortable house without waste.

after seeing things like heatermeter (pid controlled smoker controller based on the raspberry pi), I wonder why this kind of convenient and efficient control isn't more common.
by nyc1983 | 2026-01-18 02:29:35+00:00
I don’t understand how this provides anything above using GitHub status checks and branch protections to require conversations to be resolved before merging. Combined with the GitHub CLI, this gives agents everything they need to achieve the same result. More AI slop on top of AI slop. At this point when seeing these kinds of posts I feel like Edward Norton in front of the copy machine.
by inkyoto | 2026-01-18 02:30:00+00:00
> That isn't the English subjunctive.

No, it is not a proper English subjunctive (a correct example would have been «as if they were» – past subjunctive) or «[we suggested] that they go».

I deliberately lumped subjunctive, conjunctive, and conditional together for brevity. Part of the problem is that many English speakers do not differentiate between subjunctive and conjunctive (conditional) and incorrectly label the latter as subjunctive, but that happens because English does not have a conjunctive (conditional) mood.

English subjunctive is translated into other Indo-European languages either as the conjunctive or indicative mood, as there is no 1:1 mapping in existence.
by MarsIronPI | 2026-01-18 02:31:06+00:00
Natural gas is good for when the power goes out. I've never seen natural gas go out in my life. If you have an electric stove and the power goes out, you simply can't cook stovetop meals until the power is restored. Oh, and if you're thinking of using a generator to power your house if the grid is out, know that most generators run on natural gas.
by Nition | 2026-01-18 02:31:10+00:00
It's hard being human. A lot of cognitive ability peaks before age 25[1], physical before 35[2], and to some extent it's an inexorable downward slope from there. Accumulated experience often makes up for it, but only to a point. You still won't be as good as the version of you that started earlier, or learned faster. People reach 40 and finally start exercising and eating properly and miraculously feel 25 again - there are always ways to fight it. But they'd have been even more effective with the same habits at 25.

Life is stressful. There is fear of failure, there is fear of disappointing others, and ultimately there is fear of death. And that final deadline doesn't even have the courtesy to let us know when it will come.

But many people get nothing much done without a deadline. Most get more done with some time pressure. I'm not sure how we would manage immortality. If we lived twice as long, would we work half as fast? One hopes that for a little while at least, we manage to be happy and content with what we have.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4441622/

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17717011/
by baubino | 2026-01-18 02:31:25+00:00
Sonic Youth had already been playing for 15 years when Nevermind came out. I saw them a bunch of times in the early 90s and yeah the crowds had no idea who they were because they were opening for Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins despite having laid the ground work for those (in my opinion) lesser bands. Sonic Youth were too punk for the crowds showing up for the more commercialized sound that Nirvana ironically offered them.
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-01-18 02:31:44+00:00
It's not a novel idea: I've also invented that, as have most people I know who've thought about this problem. (This is a good thing: it means it'll be fairly easy to bootstrap a collaborative project.) I never got as far as writing up a full document, though: only scattered notes for my own use. Would you mind sharing yours?
by kamaal | 2026-01-18 02:32:33+00:00
I mean there are nearly two full decades between the appearance of Prolog(1972) and PC revolution late 1980s and early 1990s.

>>The people who dealt with Prolog on punchcards were the academics who created and/or refined it in its early days. [0]

That's like a decade of work. Thats hardly early 'days'.

Also the programming culture in the PC days and before that is totally different. Heck even the editors from that era(eg vi), are designed for an entirely different workflow. That is, lots of planning, and correctness before you decided to input the code into the computer.
by m463 | 2026-01-18 02:32:52+00:00
oh I love the old shows that were written with two-level humor.

think foghorn leghorn with funny physical humor for the kids and subversive humor for the parents.

Sort of related -- I have friends who are immigrants to the US. They have a hard time with subtle types of humor, but some extra physical humor can sometimes let them have a good time anyway.
by davnicwil | 2026-01-18 02:33:10+00:00
In the end, I think the dream underneath this dream is about being able to manifest things into reality without having to get into the details.

The details are what stops it from working in every form it's
been tried.

You cannot escape the details. You must engage with them and solve them directly, meticulously. It's messy, it's extremely complicated and it's just plain hard.

There is no level of abstraction that saves you from this, because the last level is simply things happening in the world in the way you want them to, and it's really really complicated to engineer that to happen.

I think this is evident by looking at the extreme case. There are plenty of companies with software engineers who truly can turn instructions articulated in plain language into software. But you see lots of these not being successful for the simple reason that those providing the instructions are not sufficiently engaged with the detail, or have the detail wrong. Conversely, for the most successful companies the opposite is true.