MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cyber_kinetist | 2026-01-11 11:45:56+00:00
The problem is that Moore's law is dead, silicon isn't advancing as fast as what we've envisioned in the past, we're experiencing all sorts of quantum tunneling effects in order to cram as much microstructure as possible into silicon, and R&D for manufacturing these chips are climbing at a rapid rate. There's a limit to how we can fight against Physics, and unless we discover a totally new paradigm to alleviate this issues (ex. optical computing?) we're going to experience diminishing returns at the end of the sigmoid-like tech advancement cycle.
by LeFantome | 2026-01-11 11:46:13+00:00
> Linux is also realistically American

I think this is objectively true. The Linux Foundation is also US based. We saw this when Russsian contributors were banned from the kernel to comply with US sanctions.

The big difference of course is that relying on Linux does not have to mean realying on US corporations. At the level of a nation-state, and certainly at the level of a larger political collective like the EU, control can always be taken back if political interests diverge or if risks mount. Linux could be forked and maintained out of Europe, Asia, or elsewhere if needed. And technology could even continue to be pulled from the US version if desired.

Above, I mean the kernel. But the "distro" level offers another level of contorl. A distro maintained outside of the US offers a lot of local control and isolation from the risks of US control. The kernel used in this distro does not have to be fully forked to be audited, to remove anything concerning, or to add in whatever is desired. And the same is true of all other software included in the distro.

While maintaining a distro is a lot of work, it can be done at the scale of an individual or a small team. It can be done with a travial number of resources at the nation state level. In some ways, it is crazy that more countries do not have their own distro even if it does start as much more than a "spin" of some maintstream distro. As political tensions mount, this may become a more normal "national security" step to take. Being ready to pivot and isolate from the US is more important than actually doing it. If all your government and military infrastructure is based on a distro you control, you can then pivot quickly if you need to. And there are customization and standardization benefits of having a regionally focussed distro beyond national security.
by martin-t | 2026-01-11 11:46:16+00:00
> Not just to the people I agree with, but to anyone who needs to use a computer.

Why not say "... but to the people I disagree with"?

Would you be OK knowing your code is used to cause more harm than good? Would you still continue working on a hypothetical OSS which had no users, other than, say, a totalitarian government in the middle east which executes homosexuals? Would you be OK with your software being a critical directly involved piece of code for example tracking, de-anonymizing and profiling them?

Where is the line for you?
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-11 11:46:51+00:00
> Some of the benefits of TypeScript:

> Access to ES6 and ES7 features

> Cross-Platform and Cross-browser Compatibility

Damn, I wasn't aware that since I avoid TS, I cannot use ES6 and ES7, and my vanilla JavaScript doesn't run in all browsers :(

I guess over-hyping the technology that the book is about is to be expected, but it still leaves a slightly sour taste in my mouth when people oversell what they're talking about it.
by metalman | 2026-01-11 11:47:11+00:00
the end run around copyright, is TOS that are forced on users, through distribution chanels(platforms),service providors, and actual "patented" hardware, so money will continue to flow up, not sideways.
Given that there are a very limited number of things that can actualy be done with computer/phones, and it becomes clear that
"AI" can arrange those in any possible configuration, the rest is deciding if it will jive with the users, and noticing when it doesn't, which I believe that AI will be unable to disern from other AI slop, imitating actual useres
by Fiveplus | 2026-01-11 11:47:52+00:00
The reason performance-noexcept-move-constructor is not enabled by default is likely because blindly applying noexcept is dangerous if the underlying logic isn't actually exception-free. If you let clang-tidy slap noexcept on a move constructor that does end up throwing (perhaps because it calls into a legacy member or allocates memory internally), the runtime behavior changes from caught exception to std::terminate().
by faust201 | 2026-01-11 11:48:24+00:00
It is the news media report calling it work. For some people it is just a passion. My boss at a Uni works literally 20 hours per day (he is rich and has a lifetime job). But science is his passion. He would not call it work. Maybe Brin has ideas. he has so much money that he does not need to work but he gives his brain some work.
by KoolKat23 | 2026-01-11 11:49:01+00:00
Reasoning density.

I have a specific use case (financial analysis), that is at the edge of what is possible with this models (accuracy wise).

Gemini 2 was the beginning, you could see this technology could be helpful in this specific analysis but plenty of errors (not unlike a junior analyst). Gemini 2.5 flash was great actually useable, errors made were consistent.

This is where it gets interesting, I could add additional points to my system prompt, yes it would fix those errors but it would degrade the answer elsewhere, often it wouldn't be incorrect but merely much simpler less nuanced and less clever.

This is where multi-agents helped it actually meant the prompt can be broken down so that answers remain "clever". There is a big con to this, it is slow, slow to the point that I chose to stick with a single prompt (the request didn't work well operating in parallel as the other prompt surfaced factors for it to consider).

However Gemini 3 flash is now smart enough that I'd now consider my financial analysis solved. All with one prompt.
by drysine | 2026-01-11 11:49:07+00:00
The US with accomplices invaded Iraq in 2003, NATO bombed Libya in 2011. Western politicians and mass media encouraged Arab Spring insurrections. All that led to the rise of ISIS among other things.

And yet oddly you blame Russia for "fucking up the middle east". Why? Have you considered the possibility that it's you who is a victim of propaganda?

>Other parties don't have friendship treaties with Putins party.

I'm sure other parties have friendships with the parties or institutions in countries other than Russia.
by wmwragg | 2026-01-11 11:49:53+00:00
There is that, but the way this usually works is that there is always a better closed service you have to pay for, and we see that with LLMs as well. Plus there is the fact that you currently need a very powerful machine to run these models at anywhere near the speed of the PaaS systems, and I'm not convinced we'll be able to do the Moore's law style jumps required to get that level of performance locally, not to mention the massive energy requirements, you can only go so small, and we are getting pretty close to the limit. Perhaps I'm wrong, but we don't see the jumps in processing power we used to see in the 80s and 90s, due to clock speed jumps, the clock speed of most CPUs has stayed pretty much the same for a long time. As LLMs are essentially probabilistic in nature, this does open up options not available to current deterministic CPU designs, so that might be an avenue which gets exploited to bring this to local development.
by magicalhippo | 2026-01-11 11:49:53+00:00
I feel product management from a lot of large companies is often very disconnected.

A semi-random recent example from someone else, Samsung changed contacts list in recent update, so now recently added contacts is above favorite contacts, and it's done in such a way I now have to scroll to get to my favorites... like WTF.

Samsung aren't unique though. Microsoft for example has spent the first few years if each release of their OS usable since Vista, with the exception of Windows 7.
by iLoveOncall | 2026-01-11 11:50:01+00:00
Yes indeed it's not clear, because the claims of the article are unbelievable. It does feel like a parody of a pro-AI article, because it's so overblown.

Anyone claiming "Writing code is no longer needed for the most part" is not a serious software engineer. I'd go even as far as claiming that to say this you need to either have a serious mental illness, or be a bad actor trying to actively destroy software engineering.
by littlestymaar | 2026-01-11 11:50:14+00:00
Free speech is always free speech under some limits set by laws, “free speech absolutism” is nonsense (and is only being claimed by people who will censor everything without laws and due process at the instant when they reach power, see Trump and Vance who are currently imposing a censorship never seen in the US in peacetime, or Musk and Twitter).
by unsupp0rted | 2026-01-11 11:50:32+00:00
“FND”… I bet they need to exercise, eat a balanced breakfast, sleep more and lower stress.

That’ll definitely pause the rapidly progressing dementia and loss of muscle control in patients in their 20s.

When doctors have no idea what something is and aren’t willing to keep trying diagnostics and interventions, it’s always “hey maybe get some more cardio and go easy on the peanut butter cups”.
by simonw | 2026-01-11 11:50:37+00:00
This is a pretty common position: "I don't worry about getting left behind - it will only take a few weeks to catch up again".

I don't think that's true.

I'm really good at getting great results out of coding agents and LLMs. I've also been using LLMs for code on an almost daily basis since ChatGPT's release on November 30th 2022. That's more than three years ago now.

Meanwhile I see a constant flow of complaints from other developers who can't get anything useful out of these machines, or find that the gains they get are minimal at best.

Using this stuff well is a deep topic. These things can be applied in so many different ways, and to so many different projects. The best asset you can develop is an intuition for what works and what doesn't, and getting that intuition requires months if not years of personal experimentation.

I don't think you can just catch up in a few weeks, and I do think that the risk of falling behind isn't being taken seriously enough by much of the developer population.

I'm glad to see people like antirez ringing the alarm bell about this - it's not going to be a popular position but it needs to be said!
by sreekanth850 | 2026-01-11 11:50:48+00:00
People here generalise vibcoders into single category.
I don’t write code line-by-line the traditional way, but I do understand architecture deeply. Recently I started using AI to write code. not by dumping random prompts and copy-pasting blindly, but inside VS Code, reviewing what it generates, understanding why it works, and knowing exactly where each feature lives and how it fits.
I also work with a frontend developer (As i do backend only and not interested in building UI and css) to integrate things properly, and together we fix bugs and security issues. Every feature built with AI works flawlessly because it’s still being reviewed, tested, and owned by humans.
If I have a good Idea, and use AI to code, without depending on a developer friction due to limited budget, why people think its Sin? Is the implication that if you don’t have VC money to hire a team of developers, you’re supposed to just lose?
I saw the exact same sentiment when tools like Elementor started getting popular among business owners. Same arguments, same gatekeeping. The market didn’t care. It feels more like insecurity about losing an edge. And if the edge was I type code myself, that edge was always fragile.
Edit: The biggest advantage is that you don’t lose anything in translation. There’s no gap between the idea in your head and what gets built.

You don’t spend weeks explaining intent, edge cases, or what I really meant to a developer. You iterate 1:1 with the system and adjust immediately when something feels off.
by andyjohnson0 | 2026-01-11 11:51:01+00:00
> This code works. It compiles. It runs. But depending on how you’ve implemented your types, it might be performing thousands of expensive copy operations instead of cheap moves without you realizing it.

I've spent the last two decades in the .net platform. But for a decade or so before that I was a C++/Unix dev. I remember "old style" C++ as being approximately as easy to reason about as C#, albeit that you had the overhead of object ownership and freeing.

What the language has become now, boggles my mind. I get hints of elegance/power and innovation when I read about it, but the sheer number of footguns is astonishing. I'm sure I'm not clever enough to understand it.

But some very smart people have guided the language's evolution. So, what are the forces that have determined the current state of C++?
by maxbond | 2026-01-11 11:51:10+00:00
> Is that expression?

If it wasn't expression everyone would get the same result. But no one else at Royal McBee did things the way Mel Kaye did things.

There was a program to do that job,
an “optimizing assembler”,
but Mel refused to use it.

Kaye had a strong artistic vision for how things should be done; he didn't want to use the ergonomic features of the RPC-4000 because they didn't align with his vision. He found the idea of rigging the blackjack program offensive for the same reason.

Speaking for myself, I have always found the story and "pessimal" instructions beautiful. It's probably my favorite piece of folklore of all time. Kaye and Nather are both artists to me.
by kiriakosv | 2026-01-11 11:51:19+00:00
AI tools in their current form or another will definitely change software engineering, I personally think for the best

However I can’t help but notice some things that look weird/amusing:

- The exact time that many programmers were enlightened about the AI capabilities and the frequency of their posts.

- The uniform language they use in these posts. Grandiose adjectives, standard phrases like ‘it seems to me’

- And more importantly the sense of urgency and FOMO they emit. This is particularly weird for two reasons. First is that if the past has shown something regarding technology is that open source always catches up. But this is not the case yet. Second, if the premise is that we re just the in beginning all these ceremonial flows will be obsolete.

Do not get me wrong, as of today these are all valid ways to work with AI and in many domains they increase the productivity. But I really don’t get the sense of urgency.
Ask HN: Are we overthinking maintainability of LLM written code?
by grainier | 2026-01-11 11:52:25+00:00
We hear a lot of concern about maintaining code written with LLM help, but we seem less worried about code from interns or low cost hires (or outsourced) who may leave quickly. In practice are these risks meaningfully different, or is it the same maintainability problem with a different label. If you have an honest take, what has been harder to maintain and why?
by znnajdla | 2026-01-11 11:52:28+00:00
This is really, really, good. Ignore the commenters in this thread who don’t see the connections. It takes a very high degree of artistic creativity and linguistic imagination to see these types of connections, and many of the “engineer types” on this forum are unfamiliar with that mode of thinking. Ignore them. Every one of these connected threads are really good.
by smokel | 2026-01-11 11:52:31+00:00
I've given this quite some thought and came to the conclusion that there is actually no choice, and all parties fall into the first category. It's just that some people intrinsically like working on commercial themes, or happen to be trendy.

Of course there are some artists who sit comfortably in the grey area between the two oppositions, and for these a little nudging towards either might influence things. But for most artists, their ideas or techniques are simply not relevant to a larger audience.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-01-11 11:53:07+00:00
HN has been astroturfed for a while. Ever notice low quality linkedin blogspam that hits the front page before people would even have had time to finish reading it?

It's hard to disambiguate this from people who have a "fanbase." People will upvote stuff from people like simonw sight unseen without reading. I'd like to do a study on HN where you hide the author, to see how upvote patterns change, in order to demonstrate the "halo" benefit.
by zahlman | 2026-01-11 11:53:07+00:00
Indeed. My response was: actually, no, if I think about it I really don't think it was "building" at all. I would have started fewer things, and seen them through more consistently, if it were about "building". I think it has far more to do with personal expression.

("Solving a problem for others" also resonates, but I think I implement that more by tutoring and mentoring.)
by krsdcbl | 2026-01-11 11:53:36+00:00
disagree. Colocation seems great when authoring, but it comes at a big cost of downstream tech debt

there could be better ways to ease the burdon of naming things, while preserving cascade and the actual full features of CSS

Tailwind is a mirage, a shortcut to not having to do the important stuff by stacking wrappers on top of wrappers and redundancy

And the "fragile" part is exactly the same thing with tailwind, it all remains low specificity class names
by dboon | 2026-01-11 11:53:40+00:00
I use Obsidian a lot, but very few extra features or plugins. My first impression is that I don’t get what you’re making from the website. Any tool worth using in this space (which I vaguely understand to be using large collections of Markdown and/or realtime multiediting) is fast. Obsidian is fast. Zed is fast. It’s table stakes for the kind of person who would use this already.

Is it just Zed + Obsidian? A good knowledge base that scales well and uses plain markdown, but has the fancy multi edit stuff?
by topspin | 2026-01-11 11:54:01+00:00
It makes a great deal of sense.

"deaths dropped months before purity did"

That's a plausible lag: credible purity figures are not sourced from Mexican drug cartels. They come from laboratories at the end of a long chain of custody complicated by legal machinations, dealing with contraband with no provenance beyond its date of seizure. A lag of "months" is entirely plausible. That it takes only that long to wend its way though the byzantine and corrupt legal system and the bankers hours academic process of laboratory professionals is actually admirable.

"which a habitual user would compensate for by taking twice as much"

Habitual users are operating in a market, seeking value. They cannot afford to simply double their spend, and I'll give you one guess as to how quickly the purity drop is reflected by price drops in the narcotics business, because that's all a person of sound mind should need.

No, when the purity dropped, users paid the same and got less, and died less. Believe me, I understand why this finding is unwelcome: it serves to put arrows in the "drug war" quiver, and that is anathema, in my mind as well. But knee-jerk thinking, ultimately, isn't helpful.
by Sami_Lehtinen | 2026-01-11 11:54:28+00:00
Hello everyone,

I'd like to inform you about an important change at envs.net.

As many of you know, the Matrix service consumes a lot of resources. This has become increasingly problematic in recent months, as it's making operation more and more expensive.

For this reason, I've decided to discontinue the Matrix service.

The shutdown is planned for March 1, 2026, but no later than April 1, 2026.

Registration of new Matrix accounts has already been disabled.

I believe this timeframe is appropriate to give everyone enough time to migrate their Matrix account to another server.

At the same time, the entire envs.net infrastructure will be moved to a new, more cost-effective server to return closer to envs' original minimalist values.

In the future, chat for the envs project will again take place via IRC.

As before, we will be using the tildeverse IRC server:

• Server: irc.tilde.chat
• Channel: #envs

Please respect this decision and refrain from sending private messages expecting justifications.

Thank you for your understanding and please accept our apologies for any inconvenience.

Best regards,
Sven aka. ~creme
by justincormack | 2026-01-11 11:54:29+00:00
Film is manufactured on huge rolls, and is cut down to different sizes and formats, so its not really that expensive on the manufacturing side to support a lot of formats. From the buy side, cameras are expensive, and almost all cameras only support one format. The big change came with film developing labs on teh high street, as when development was at home it was fairly manual, but once it was automated the machines were designed for fewer formats (for a long time 35mm, and often medium format). But even then, the process doesnt change per format and the chemicals are the same, so supporting variation is relatively cheap.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-01-11 11:54:34+00:00
Well, it is. But our job (as coders, as sysadmins etc) is to deliver something valuable to the users. We care about the computer so that they don't have to.

I think that a point of this article is that this value is not having a computer in itself, it's what the computer, the software, the platform, allows users to get done.

In other words (from Halt and Catch Fire) - "Computers aren’t the thing. They’re the thing that gets us to the thing.".

When it tries to become the thing, the destination, that's an issue. It doesn't translate to a mass market, it's just for computer techies. I would hesitate to call that market "non-technical" because for instance what about Doctors whose profession is full of technicalities, but for them the IT is nothing more than means to other more useful ends.

Since computers are my profession, and I'll cheerfully say "computers suck so much!" after spending hours disentangling some subtle internal issue that no user in their right mind would give a crap about. But in so doing, I keep the software working smoothly.
by simonw | 2026-01-11 11:54:57+00:00
If you listen to promises like that you're going get burned.

One of the key skills needed in working with LLMs is learning to ignore the hype and marketing and figure out what these things are actually capable of, as opposed to LinkedIn bluster and claims from CEOs who's net worth are tied to investor sentiment in their companies.

If someone spends more time talking about "AGI" then what they're actually building, filter that person out.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-11 11:55:09+00:00
Win32, MFC, Windows Forms, and WPF also exist and are quite usable.

Apple also doesn't always uses their stuff as they are supposed to, Webviews are used in a few "native" apps, some macOS apps are actually iOS ones ported via Catalyst, which is the reason they feel strange, and many other stuff I could list.

Two measures, two weights.
by oulipo2 | 2026-01-11 11:55:21+00:00
> Writing code is no longer needed for the most part.

Said by someone who spent his career writing code, it lacks a bit of details... a more correct way to phrase it is: "if you're already an expert in good coding, now you can use these tools to skip most of code writing"

LLMs today are mostly some kind of "fill-in-the-blanks automation". As a coder, you try to create constraints (define types for typechecking constraints, define tests for testing constraints, define the general ideas you want the LLM to code because you already know about the domain and how coding works), then you let the model "fill-in the blanks" and you regularly check that all tests pass, etc
by littlestymaar | 2026-01-11 11:55:51+00:00
> why you are consistently trying to defend people who stand outside my home shouting seig heil and want to murder me and people like me?

I'm not.

These people are actively doing evil things, and should be dealt with.

But most of the people in these leaks aren't even “courageous” enough to do that. Most of them aren't actors, are lazy, idiotic bystanders who just happen to like what they see.