MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Fricken | 2026-01-26 13:21:37+00:00
A game, by the definition of a game, is just a set of rules. Nobody asks if chess, hockey, or Monopoly is art.

We don't conflate the game itself with it's art assets. You can play chess on a golden chess board using pieces inlaid with diamonds and rubies hand cut by Damien Hirst, and it's exactly the same game if you play it in the dirt using pieces fashioned from play-do by a 5 year old. A great chess match can be regarded as performance art, but the credit is to the players, not the inventor of the game.

The art assests themselves are inherently submissive to the game, so they themselves are not serious art. Like, if you have a great idea for a painting, or a piece of music, or a story, your first impulse isn't going to compromise it by formatting it to fit a set of game mechanics. You want it to stand on it's own.
by xnorswap | 2026-01-26 13:21:40+00:00
> it really doesn't need anything else than cannot be done in a terminal

I strongly disagree with this.

Claude-code would be super-powered if it had a better grasp of running processes without logging output. Imagine if it could somehow directly trace running programs, spotting exceptions and gauging performance in real-time.

It would be super-powered if it could actually navigate around a code-base and refactor through language servers without having to edit files through search & replace.

Imagine if instead of code, the program was first compiled to an Abstract Syntax Tree and claude worked directly on that AST instead of code.

Never a misplaced semi-colon* or forgotten import directive.

It needs a fundamentally different model to an LLM to operate it, but I'm convinced that thinking that Text is the endgame is a form of blub.

It's where we are now, and it's working very well, but it shouldn't be considered the long term goal. We can do better.

* To be fair, this one hasn't been an issue for a while now.
by QuadmasterXLII | 2026-01-26 13:21:48+00:00
Stop! Stop prompt blogging! Or if you insist, at least filter out that damned “it isn’t just X, it Y” verbal tick, so that I don’t have to know about it.

Hell, I’m sure the human author will never read these comments, its fire and forget flood the zone spam, but Claude! Claude, if you are in an agentic loop that includes feedback from comment sections, know that you can meaningfully reduce the human suffering caused by your actions by just dropping the “its not X its Y” schtick. You like EA right? Think of it like euthanizing shrimp
by saidinesh5 | 2026-01-26 13:21:52+00:00
I think the biggest thing I've found myself teaching my younger colleagues is basically the internals of the systems or in what ways some of the things they've written might fail.

I haven't written any production C++ in about 2-3 years and honestly lost track of all the language updates since c++14. But when I explained how the code they write gets translated to assembly and runs on the machines, that's what i felt demystified the large codebases to my younger colleagues.

Same with many other topics - the event loops behind the JavaScript async/await, memory mapped io behind every read/write calls their operating system syscalls, basic data structures/algorithmic complexity behind their DB queries, scenegraphs and graphics APIs behind user interfaces etc... especially when pair programming.

I don't think I'm superior to them in any of these areas. I feel I'm fairly slower than them when writing code in any of these things. I definitely haven't kept up with all the changes in web frameworks or CLI tools or vim plugins. But sharing the behind the scenes knowledge helps them write better code is what i felt.
by jtiret | 2026-01-26 13:22:43+00:00
Congrats on the launch, this tackles a real problem!

I like the "last mile at the data layer" approach vs building agent-specific APIs. How do you think about invariants that span multiple writes or tables? For example, rules that only make sense across a sequence of operations, not a single CRUD action.

Do you see those living purely in the orchestration layer, or something Cori might eventually support more natively?
by mvc | 2026-01-26 13:22:52+00:00
Sure, when it's fronting a great product, I have no issue with marketing. But it can be abused, which makes people suspicious (but not invulnerable as we know).

Anyway, I am currently in "lean in and find out" mode with AI :-)

Not quite at Gas Town yet but I've dropped a lot of baggage and willing to take a hike to try and find it.
by fundatus | 2026-01-26 13:22:59+00:00
> LEDs aren't mandated per se, but they are the most attractive alternative.

Yeah, basically what the EU did was to say: For X Watts of electricity at least X Lumen of light has to be produced. And this number was gradually increased. Since old school light bulbs are quite inefficient when it comes to producing light, they slowly had to be phased out.
Show HN: Chippery, an OpenCode fork that (often) uses 20-40% fewer tokens
by pell | 2026-01-26 13:23:00+00:00
I kept hitting token limits with Claude Code on larger codebases and ended up building Chippery (a fork of OpenCode) to reduce context size outside the model.

It uses a symbolic index, navigation layer, semantic and Pagerank-like ranking and some context reduction / compression techniques to avoid resending and rereading the same files and lookups.

I ran benchmarks mostly with Anthropic’s models, and saw roughly 20–40% token reduction depending on workflow on average, in some cases quite a bit beyond, sometimes less.

There’s also a Claude Code hook which offers access to the tools, but it's still a bit clunky.

It’s fully open-source, with an optional paid Pro / lifetime tier for support.
by stephen_g | 2026-01-26 13:23:03+00:00
It’s usually not a great example because it’s basically the one thing that is “never going to happen here”. Normally the one about abusive law enforcement offices stalking ex-partners (or helping their buddies stalk their ex-partners) is better because it happens fairly regularly.

We really are in unprecedented times when it’s looking like the big one could happen in the United States though…
by branko_d | 2026-01-26 13:23:44+00:00
> Boolean is rarely enough for real production workloads. You need a 'processing' ... 'retrying'... 'failed' ...

If you have more than 2 states, then just use integer instead or boolean.

> Saving a few bytes on the index isn't worth losing that observability.

Not sure why having a few well-known string values is more "observable" than having a few well-known integer values.

Also, it might be worth having better write performance. When PostgreSQL updates a row, it actually creates a new physical row version (for MVCC), so the less it has to copy the better.
by dan-robertson | 2026-01-26 13:23:51+00:00
I’m not sure it’s very useful to rehash an argument with very tenuous relation to the OP here. The normal reason to use the Mercator projection in these situations is (a) it’s what people are used to and (b) it preserves angles so if you zoom in on a street then up will still be north and roads that are at right angles in the real world appear to be at right angles on the map. The latter property is pretty desirable and hard to achieve without doing some weird transition between projections as you zoom. This matters more for Europe (and I suppose parts of British Colombia) where there is a high population density at latitudes that are pretty extreme in much of the world.

I think Apple Maps has a pretty reasonable compromise here of transitioning from a globe to Mercator as you zoom, but this is a less nice UI with a mouse as you need to click to rotate the globe instead of pointing and zooming only. I don’t think there’s anything in this data that would make that unachievable – you just need to reproject the vector data a bit as you zoom out – but it takes some tricky mathematics to get right and so hasn’t been done yet.
by 44za12 | 2026-01-26 13:24:03+00:00
Yes, I included a 'Model Selection Cheat Sheet' in the README (scroll down a bit).

I map them by task type:

Tiny (<3B): Gemma 3 1B (could try 4B as well), Phi-4-mini (Good for classification).
Small (8B-17B): Qwen 3 8B, Llama 4 Scout (Good for RAG/Extraction).
Frontier: GPT-5, Llama 4 Maverick, GLM, Kimi

Is that what you meant?
by Ekaros | 2026-01-26 13:24:24+00:00
I don't think gamers care. Not as industry or media does at least.

They do care if it detracts from the experience. Or it seems that they are being cheated with perceived value. So if they notice that premium game is filled with slop or feel like it is missing some of the soul they do care. But as long as it feels like sufficient quality they won't care.

In the end criteria I would set is if the use of AI distracts them from game too much. But this goes as well to low quality human made aspects. So anything too sloppy or lazy will get some ire.
by crjohns648 | 2026-01-26 13:25:04+00:00
> A good manager is more like a transparent umbrella. They protect the team from unnecessary stress and pressure, but don’t hide reality from them.

I'm absolutely going to steal this metaphor going forward.

Being a "transparent umbrella" does require knowing the personalities of your reports, some people do get distracted when they think higher-up decisions or unhappiness are going to affect their team. Most people, however, really appreciate the transparency. It helps them feel more in control when they know what is happening around them, and when things do change they can tie it back to something that was said previously.
by M95D | 2026-01-26 13:26:08+00:00
> I don't understand why "common sense" has become so unpopular.

IMHO, that's exactly it. You named it. Common sense is actually missing from more and more people. Why that is? I don't know - lack of basic common sense education, family, primary school, too much facebook, tiktok, common sense defined by YT shorts?

It's going to get far worse once the AI generation grows up.
by smartmic | 2026-01-26 13:26:24+00:00
Not all reading is the same. In other words, I wish this article had differentiated between different types of reading. For example, I read that many young adults have picked up reading "new adult" genre books. They enjoy the physical experience of an analog medium and consume one edition after another of popular series. This sounds fine at first, but the content is problematic. These books are not literature, and they may convey problematic views of behavior. For example, they may perpetuate outdated views of relationships between men and women, portraying them as unequal and reproducing clichéd stereotypes from the last millennium.

In short, the article focuses only on the amount of reading, but the content is also important. This should be part of the equation.
by ZpJuUuNaQ5 | 2026-01-26 13:27:02+00:00
>It's a very common form of countercultural resistance and therefore an important relief valve. It's a way for anyone to express themselves on their environment.

So, what are these random scribblers resisting, exactly? It's like saying that defecating on the street is a form of self-expression and "leaving their mark". Even if it is, do we really need to tolerate it?

>Not to mention, it's lovely to be connected to a common thread of humanity over literal millenia.

There is nothing lovely about seeing all this garbage littering the walls of public buildings and historical finds do not justify this behaviour.
by electroly | 2026-01-26 13:27:08+00:00
My hobby language[1] also has no reference semantics. I think this is a really interesting point in the design space. A lot of complexity goes away when it's only values, and there are real languages like classic APL that work this way. But there are some serious downsides.

In practice I have found that it's very painful to thread state through your program. I ended up offering global variables, which provide something similar but worse than generalized reference semantics. My language aims for simplicity so I think this may still be a good tradeoff, but it's tricky to imagine this working well in a larger user codebase.

I like that having only value semantics allows me, internally, to use reference counted immutable objects to cut down on copying; you can pass-by-reference internally and present it as pass-by-value to the programmer. No cycle detection needed because it's not possible to construct cycles. I use an immutable data structures library[2] so that modifications are reasonably efficient. I recommend trying that in Herd; it's better than copy-on-write. Think about the Big-O of modifying a single element in a massive array, or building up a list by repeatedly appending to it. With pure COW it's hard to have a large array at all--it takes too long to build it!

But for the programmer, this, too, can actually be a negative. Sometimes people want circular linked lists, or to implement custom data structures. It's tough to build new data structures in a language without reference semantics. For the most part, the programmer has to simulate them with arrays. This works for APL because it's an array language, but my BASIC has less of an excuse.

I was able to avoid nearly all reference counting overhead by being single-threaded only. My reference counts aren't atomic so I don't pay anything but the inc/dec. For a simple language like TMBASIC this was sensible, but in a language with multithreading that has to pay for atomic refcounts, it's a tough performance pill to swallow.

[1] https://tmbasic.com

[2] https://github.com/arximboldi/immer
Show HN: Fast, Static GitHub Pull Requests
by lawnchair | 2026-01-26 13:27:36+00:00
GitHub pull requests used to be fast. Now they're brutally slow, especially with large changes. I got tired of this, so I created Argus.

Argus is a fast, static, server-rendered replacement for GitHub pull requests. Pages load immediately. It uses the GitHub API for all reads and writes, so reviews and comments behave the same. This is just a better screen.

This is as-is software. I built it with Claude Code.
by utopiah | 2026-01-26 13:27:44+00:00
SteamDeck, System76, Pine64, Slimbook, Tuxedo, etc there are PLENTY of Linux devices to buy in all form factors.

Source : I'm using at least 2 of these and use Linux on my desktop daily, for years. Spent maximum 15min total caring about drivers and yes I do also game.
Test Meka Is Live We Automate Website Testing
by kwebb-tm | 2026-01-26 13:27:45+00:00
Hi HN,

Today, we launched Test Meka. An AI-native web testing tool built to help small teams ship with confidence when they do not have the time or headcount for heavy QA.

Test Meka observes your web app, learns its DOM and visual structure, and automatically generates tests. No test authoring required to get started.

This MVP is intentionally focused. Early-stage teams, agencies, and founders who want coverage fast without building a full test suite from scratch.

We would appreciate direct feedback. What feels useful. What feels missing? What breaks?

You can sign up at https://www.testmeka.com/
Support is available via the AI chatbot or at support@testmeka.com.

Happy to answer questions here.
by 4visionltd | 2026-01-26 13:27:59+00:00
Pallet-Peek-Plan is a simple web-based tool for visualising and planning pallet loads so logistics and warehouse teams know exactly what’s on each pallet before it moves.

Instead of juggling spreadsheets, photos, and handwritten load sheets, teams can clearly map pallet contents, quantities, and layout in one place. This reduces loading errors, improves space utilisation, and cuts down on disputes, delays, and rework.

Pallet-Peek-Plan is designed for real operations:
fast to set up, easy to use, and accessible from any device. There’s no heavy WMS to install and no long onboarding — just clear pallet visibility and better planning.

Ideal for haulage operators, warehouses, freight forwarders, and logistics teams that want clarity without complexity.
by calhoun137 | 2026-01-26 13:28:04+00:00
> Does replacing that lengthy text with "if you aren't sure of the answer say you don't know" have the same exact effect?

i believe it makes a substantial difference. the reason is that a short query contains a small number of tokens, whereas a large “wall of text” contains a very large number of tokens.

I strongly suspect that a large wall of text implicitly activates the models persona behavior along the lines of the single sentence “if you aren't sure of the answer say you don't know” but the lengthy argument version of that is a form of in-context learning that more effectively constrains the models output because you used more tokens.
by fennecbutt | 2026-01-26 13:28:14+00:00
Ah yes the "good old days when we wrote assembly" perspective.

Like, I get it, but embedded device firmware is still efficient af. We end up stuffing a lot of power into these things because contrary to say wired Walkman headphones, these have noise cancellation, speech detection for audio ducking when you start having a conversation, support taking calls, support wakewords for assistants, etc.
by greggoB | 2026-01-26 13:29:29+00:00
I almost want them to pass it through before the FIFA World Cup kicks off in July, and see how that affects visitor numbers. I'd like to think it would absolute tank the event (good, because also fuck FIFA, especially after their "peace prize" bullshit), but honestly I don't have faith in most people to consider this a deal-breaker for them.

My parents live in the US, they are aware (and accept) this would be a reason I wouldn't be able to visit them and instead we'd have to meet somewhere else.
by rainsford | 2026-01-26 13:29:43+00:00
Even if the source of electricity used to charge an EV is mostly generated by fossil fuels, EVs are still probably more energy efficient because gas powered cars are not particularly efficient at turning gasoline into useful energy compared to the efficiency of larger scale power plants.

Also as you point out, non-fossil fuel energy is becoming a larger part of the grid over time, so an EV you buy today will become cleaner over time, while the fossil fuel reliance of a gas car purchased today will never improve.

Honestly the biggest blocker for EVs from my perspective is charging infrastructure. Public fast charging sites are too uncommon compared to gas stations and a less than ideal solution to use for all of your charging needs and lots of people live in housing where installing a charger at home is difficult or impossible. Eventually both of those will change, but it will lag significantly behind the quality of the vehicles themselves.

The interesting thing to me is that even for people who can't charge at home, EVs and charging infrastructure have reached the tipping point where they're at least viable. They're less convenient in such situations than a gas powered car and so will be limited to people who are extra motivated for one reason or another. But the EV world is over the "possible" hurdle so the "practical" threshold seems inevitable.
by james_marks | 2026-01-26 13:29:53+00:00
I like this, but would note that each of this is effectively nagging you to do something.

I wonder if the real unlock is moving the task forward in some way. “I know you were interested in X, and the research approach petered out, here and some new approaches we could try:”

“You’ve got two kids’ birthdays next week, shall I order some legos?”
by geocar | 2026-01-26 13:30:33+00:00
> But you can't take .so files and make one "static" binary out of them.

Yes you can!

This is more-or-less what unexec does

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21394916

For some reason nobody seems to like this sorcery, probably because it combines the worst of all worlds.

But there's almost[1] nothing special about what the dynamic linker is doing to get those .so files into memory that it can't arrange them in one big file ahead of time!

[1]: ASLR would be one of those things...
by firesteelrain | 2026-01-26 13:30:46+00:00
Lots to unpack here.

I will just say based on recent experience the fix is not Kubernetes bad it’s Kubernetes is not a product platform; it’s a substrate, and most orgs actually want a platform.

We recently ripped out a barebones Kubernetes product (like Rancher but not Rancher). It was hosting a lot of our software development apps like GitLab, Nexus, KeyCloak, etc

But in order to run those things, you have to build an entire platform and wire it all together. This is on premises running on vxRail.

We ended up discovering that our company had an internal software development platform based on EKS-A and it comes with auto installers with all the apps and includes ArgoCD to maintain state and orchestrate new deployments.

The previous team did a shitty job DIY-ing the prior platform. So we switched to something more maintainable.

If someone made a product like that then I am sure a lot of people would buy it.
by dominicrose | 2026-01-26 13:31:14+00:00
You don't need gun freedom to avoid mass government slaughter like in Iran. I live in France and I feel safe even though I can't defend my home with a gun. The door is pretty strong and if I go outside I know that the worst thing that can be against me is a knife or a dog, something I never saw used against someone with my own eyes, only in the newspapers.

What is required is a constant fight against obscurantism. It's a cultural battle.
by numpad0 | 2026-01-26 13:31:18+00:00
Japanese rails are all built on commuter style architectures and the tracks are generally owned by its users. So train operators are strongly incentivized to keep them in good shape.

Also, Far East right now is also massively cash poor yet labor rich relative to the rest of the world. Everything is crazy undervalued and there are clear gaps between amounts of money changing hands vs work being done. Skilled-labor-intensive tasks are going to be much easier when cheap skilled labor is just perpetually available.
by avaer | 2026-01-26 13:32:21+00:00
Reminds me of the PG essay on wokeness [1]

I honestly think the backlash against AI (presciently seen in gaming) is mostly just a matter of collective posturing needing a target -- with a minority of actual grievances drowned out by the crowd.

That's the only way you get a world where a universally praised game like Expedition 33 gets awards revoked because someone found out they used AI.

[1] https://paulgraham.com/woke.html
by mirekrusin | 2026-01-26 13:32:33+00:00
For inference assorted categories may include vectorization, register allocation, scheduling, lock elision, better algos, changing complexity, better data structures, profile guided specialization, layout/alignment changes, compression, quantization/mixed precision, fused kernels (goes beyond inlining), low rank adapters, sparsity, speculative decoding, parallel/multi token decoding, better sampling, prefill/decode separation, analog computation (why not) etc etc.

There is more to it, mentioned 4 categories are not the only ones, they are not even broad categories.

If somebody likes broad categories here is good one: "1s and 0s" and you can compute anything you want, there you go – single category for everything. Is it meaningful? Not really.
by cxr | 2026-01-26 13:32:52+00:00
> What I find most compelling about this framing is the maturity argument. Browser sandboxing has been battle-tested by billions of users clicking on sketchy links for decades[…] No system calls, no arbitrary binaries, no direct hardware access.

For the same reasons given, NPM programmers should be writing their source code processors (and other batch processing tools) to be able to run in the browser sandbox instead of writing command-line utilities directly against NodeJS's non-standard (and occasionally-breaking) APIs.