MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jrjeksjd8d | 2026-01-17 13:20:27+00:00
The Gervais Principle is much more accurate in my experience. One of the important reasons middle management has to be "clueless" to drink the kool-aid and take on more responsibility for minimal extra compensation. The checked out employees of the world know their work is meaningless, but the clueless ascribe to it some greater meaning which makes them trustworthy.
by ajsnigrutin | 2026-01-17 13:20:52+00:00
Pretty much every married woman (who changed/added to her last name) has her birth name written there, even if she was never notable/known as Knavs or Skłodowska.

More info is usually better than less info, if you personally don't need to know something, that does not mean that that info should be removed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melania_Trump
by WJW | 2026-01-17 13:21:17+00:00
TBH it sounds like it would be extremely against the whole "simplicity, even at high costs" philosophy the Golang people strive for. Deploying new handlers into a running web service seems much more like something the Erlang people would be interested in.

(and lo, the BEAM does indeed allow hot code reloads. I don't think this is commonly used in BEAM-based Erlang/Elixir web services though. Certainly the Gleam people don't seem to like hot reloads very much...)
by nephihaha | 2026-01-17 13:21:43+00:00
1215? Try Cromwell, or numerous dubious monarchs. The Tudors murdered 10% of the English population, I believe. Other monarchs have usurped the throne and most people never had the vote until Victorian times and after. Then you have the beginnings of an attempted coup against Harold Wilson and Blair using the so called Criminal Justice Bills to force things through. Lockdown demonstrated their powers well. Even Private Eye which poses as a dissident voice towed that line.

The UK is certainly not the paradise it thinks it is. Northern Ireland was pretty oppressive throughout much of my lifetime, and the state authorities were part of that along with the paramilitaries. The British state has engaged in all kinds of shenanigans to undermine Scottish and Welsh nationalism, including people dying under mysterious circumstances, manufactured political scandals and agents provocateurs. Some declassified information details the effort put into derailing the Scottish independence movement in the sixties and seventies (and even the devolution movement).

If you are in England, then agents provocateurs have been common in the environmentalist movement, the far left & far right etc. The Socialist Workers Party has to be one of the most obviously infiltrated groups out there or it certainly looks like it. The state has also tried to make the campaign against Digital ID look ridiculous by linking it to Flat Earth and chemtrail agents provocateurs, even though hostility to it is much more widespread and serious.
by wonger_ | 2026-01-17 13:21:51+00:00
Great breakdown and visuals. Most ASCII filters do not account for glyph shape.

It reminds me of how chafa uses an 8x8 bitmap for each glyph: https://github.com/hpjansson/chafa/blob/master/chafa/interna...

There's a lot of nitty gritty concerns I haven't dug into: how to make it fast, how to handle colorspaces, or like the author mentions, how to exaggerate contrast for certain scenes. But I think 99% of the time, it will be hard to beat chafa. Such a good library.

EDIT - a gallery of (Unicode-heavy) examples, in case you haven't seen chafa yet: https://hpjansson.org/chafa/gallery/
by latexr | 2026-01-17 13:22:11+00:00
> All startups are created to solve a problem

And most of the time that problem is “the founders don’t have as much money as they want”.

> Apps are simply tools to solve human problems. Because humans will always have challenges to address, software will remain a vital tool.

You make it sound like it’s something noble, but let’s not pretend most software companies these days don’t have “make me rich” as the top goal. Effectively everything VC backed (yes, including by Y Combinator) falls in that category. That’s why pivots are a thing. Most founders these days don’t give a shit about what they’re building or customers, they only care about the payoff.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2026-01-17 13:23:04+00:00
^^;

Part of me knew a comment like this would show up. The trend itself is greater than Dilbert and not new, but it has certainly become more pronounced. What is interesting that while 'Dilbert empire' fell in the process for not accepting white inferiority, full blown resistance marketing market is taking ( or maybe has taken already ) shape fueled largely by highly polarized populace.

I am not looking forward to it, because it requires keeping abreast of currents I do not care for or even understand.
by Spooky23 | 2026-01-17 13:23:13+00:00
That's a good point. There's alot of weird stuff out there about this, especially with regard to weapons. There's a balance between being aggressive and not a victim. If you tip too much on the "aggressive" side, you become a threat.

If you work with dogs it's very obvious with them as they are so empathic and attuned to humans. If you are afraid, they will try to take over. If you present as in control, they accept your control. If you are a threat, they respond as they see it. It happens between other animals too -- we're all seen reels of family pets chasing off bears or tiny chihuahuas chasing off German Shepards. People aren't dogs, but I think the comparison has some merit.
by martinpw | 2026-01-17 13:24:02+00:00
> This was the world of Dilbert’s rise. You’d put a Dilbert comic on your cubicle wall, and feel like you’d gotten away with something

My former manager used to have Dilbert comic strips on his wall. It always puzzled me - was it self deprecating humor? At a certain point though it became clear that in his mind the PHB was one layer ABOVE him in the management chain and not anyone at his level. I suspect it may be a recursive pattern.
by mpalmer | 2026-01-17 13:25:07+00:00
Synthesizing 500 words at a time into digestible topics is significantly less prone to error. You're giving it a lot of info and asking for an organized subset. It's good at following such direction.

In your example, you're doing the inverse (give me a lot of text based on a little), and that's where LLMs have no problem hallucinating the new information.
by alecco | 2026-01-17 13:26:11+00:00
> There should be a law that lawmakers can only be scientific people

Nope. Merkel was a scientist but she caved to the green's pressure to keep her coalition. Also she spent a decade of surplus in millions of refugees from Middle East and neglected infrastructure.

"Merkel obtained a doctorate in quantum chemistry in 1986 and worked as a research scientist until 1989" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Merkel

"Policy Reversal: In May 2011, just months after extending reactor lives, Merkel's government announced a total phase-out of all nuclear plants by 2022."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46631586#46632118
by surgical_fire | 2026-01-17 13:26:14+00:00
The thing is that the EU is a complex structure. The interests of countries such as Poland, Italy, Germany and Ireland differ wildly, which is why things are so slow to maneuver, politically speaking.

I always considered that the over reliance on US a weakness. It was comfortable because it postpones some difficult discussions (for example, in terms of defense and military spending it is completely bonkers for the EU to not act as a federal entity). Since this subject is thorny, it was alright to rely on the US for defense and just kick this can down the road.

The US becoming hostile at least forces the countries in the EU to face reality a little, and perhaps speed some things up (see for example the recent EU-Mercosur trade agreement).
by tim-kt | 2026-01-17 13:26:15+00:00
While I agree that it's not important whether or not someone uses AI to improve a blog post or create code examples, this blog post seems like the output of the prompt "Write an interesting blog post about a goroutine leak". I don't have the expertise to verify if what is written is actually correct or makes sense, but based on the other comments there seems to be some confusion if what is written is actually content or also AI generated output.
by allantoledo | 2026-01-17 13:27:13+00:00
I think that Disposable System can combine very well with Malleable Software[1]. Imagine a program, photoshop as example, with a plugin system and builtin Code Agent, if by default the program doesn’t have the tool you want, you could ask the agent to create the tool in 5 minutes. Each user will have an unique set of tools, and a program molded for him.

[1] https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/malleable-software/
by sarchertech | 2026-01-17 13:27:23+00:00
> If you're asking why the landlord minds having a real tenant instead?

This

> 10+ year lease

I haven’t had a ton of experience with commercial property, but I have enough to know that at least where I live 10+ year leases aren’t common.

5 is much more common even for businesses spending significant money on buildout.

But also the kind of businesses the article is talking about wouldn’t require extensive buildout, so they would be much more amenable to shorter terms.

There are other reasons $4 lunch bowls are never going to happen in the us. Much higher labor costs (despite what the article said about similar minimum wage) is the biggest one.

> All you need is a low cost property manager to look in on the place once a week, make sure the "staff" are actually showing up, and keep the plumbing/heat/electrical working.

They could do that. Or they could actually make some income by renting it out instead of spending $50-100k on a fake business waiting for a payday that may never come.

There are many locations that are never going to attract a renter with deep pockets. And even in locations that will, it doesn’t take many years running a fake business to erase any eventual profits.
by jrjeksjd8d | 2026-01-17 13:28:04+00:00
> We are teaching the sand to think and working on 3d printing organs and peering at the beginning of time with super-telescopes and landing rockets.

There are a lot of smart and skilled people involved in making a cutting edge chip fab. It's not one ubermensch in a basement inventing a new TSMC process by thinking really hard. There's technicians, scientists, researchers in multiple disciplines. All of those people have to be organized.

I don't know where you think the "smart" people are, but maybe meditate on the fact that "smartness" is not a single variable that dictates a person's value or success. Someone who is an expert at researching extreme UV patterning isn't going to necessarily run a great chip manufacturer.
by spacecadet | 2026-01-17 13:28:37+00:00
Got to get more creative and less funding dependent. People still seem caught up in the old process of ideation, static creation, pitch decks. Ack! Garbage now! I only ever took funding to scale to 3-5 heads, well I have 20 heads for nearly nothing now... Ive created more "startup" ideas in the last 3 years then the last 20 of my career. I just keep cranking out anything remotely interesting, launch, and if it don't "work", move on. I just launched another one this week, feels most promising, but we'll see... I didn't go quitting my day job just yet.

Also, GTFO! My ideas are not just slop from sitting around day dreaming. Every one is from observations made from talking or watching people struggle... cant replace that with AI yet.
by pankajdoharey | 2026-01-17 13:28:43+00:00
WoW, i stand corrected. Though my actual point was that now we have Plutonium and it cant be wished away it cant be put in silos, even if we lock it up in silos sooner or later say in a few centuries when people will forget about it those silos will leak and threaten humanity. There is no better way to get rid of it than spent it away in fast breeder reactors. It will threaten humanity sooner or later.
by lloydatkinson | 2026-01-17 13:28:44+00:00
> Unicode commit graph with per-branch colors

I think every popular Git client can do this, no?

I'm waiting for a Git client which can colour commits by category/areas/files. It would be helpful to see which areas of the codebase have the most commits. Especially useful if using conventional commits (eg. fix: correct usage of foo) alongside it.

Areas or files with a lot of commits tend to be sources of bugs or indicate other things.

You can write a script to find this sort of thing, but that requires you to remember to do it. If it was built in passively to a Git client, I think a lot more would be revealed.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-17 13:29:41+00:00
I think there's a misunderstanding here. I'm not arguing in favor of a state run economy or a dictatorship or whatever else it is you seem to have concluded. Flawed though our system may be I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

But all the same it's important to be able to recognize where we could do better. Optimizing for investor return is frequently not synonymous with optimizing for societal well being. I don't think engagement algorithms that result in negative emotions are really a benefit to anyone other than the company that deploys them.

So too for the online advertising industry. We - ie capitalists - have dedicated some of our best minds to building out something that vaguely resembles a panopticon. When you consider the intangible social and political externalities it seems to me that the place we've arrived at isn't a good one.

Don't forget that in addition to any negative impacts of the things that were built, every day spent in that way was a day not spent pursuing scientific or mathematical breakthroughs.
by jascha_eng | 2026-01-17 13:29:57+00:00
It was not a fire sale I'm pretty sure. Langfuse has been consistently growing, they publish some stats about sdk usage etc so you can look that up.

They also say in the announcement that they had a term sheet for a good series a.

I think the team just took the chance to exit early before the llm hype crashes down. There is also a question of how big this market really is they mostly do observability for chatbots but there are only so many of those and with other players like openais tracing, pydantic logfire, posthog etc they become more a feature than a product of its own. Without a great distribution system they would eventually fall behind I think.

2 years to a decent exit (probably 100m cash out or so with a good chunk being Clickhouse shares) seems like a good idea rather than betting on that story to continue forever.
by ratmice | 2026-01-17 13:30:18+00:00
Definitions are built up layer upon layer like an onion too, with each step adding it's own invariants reducing the problem space.

I just feel like the street light example is an extremely small free standing example. Most things that I feel are worth the effort of proving end up huge. Forever formal verification languages were denigrated for being overly rigid and too verbose. I feel like translations into natural language can only increase that if they are accurate.

One thing I wish is this whole discussion was less intertwined with AI.
The semantic gap has existed before AI, and will be run into again without AI.
People have been accidentally proving the wrong thing true or false forever and will never stop with our without AI help.

At the very least we can agree that the problem exists, and while i'm skeptical of natural language as being anything but the problem we ran away from. At least you're trying something and exploring the problem space and that can only be cheered.
by Daub | 2026-01-17 13:30:32+00:00
One advantage of using hello as a greeting is that it is agnostic of social rank. This made it the perfect choice for greeting people of unknown social rank on the phone.

Having traveled the world quite a bit I can attest to the ubiquity of the word hello… almost everywhere I go it is understood. ‘OK’ has a similar ubiquity, and it is interesting that both words are relatively new additions to the English (universal?) language.
by sunnyam | 2026-01-17 13:31:40+00:00
Thanks! I agree with you to some extent. I _do_ need to get better with these tools but I remain suspicious for reasons like skill atrophy and the fact that I'm perhaps experienced enough to know how much I don't know. Using AI to plug gaps in my own skillset feels like setting a dangerous precedent on the one hand, but on the other hand, if it works then what's the problem? People just want things that work at the end of the day.

Just to check that I've got it right by the way, are you referring to the Ralph Wiggum loops? And are these Taches? https://github.com/glittercowboy/taches-cc-resources

I'm definitely keen to dive into these tools.

A message that I maybe didn't land in my post is that it is a little bit ridiculous to demand or only deliver "Artisanal Code". It's more labour intensive and the end product is virtually the same at the end of the day.
by yen223 | 2026-01-17 13:32:22+00:00
Australia is lucky, we get hot summers and mild winters, which means our electricity demand is highest precisely when we get the most solar.

That's why something like 30% of Australian houses have solar.

That said, grid prices spiked recently. Both a combination of subsidies expiring, and fewer people buying grid power (because of solar) causing fixed costs to be shouldered by fewer people.

It should be pointed out that while electricity prices went up on paper, a lot of people aren't paying those higher prices because they are on solar!
by mexicocitinluez | 2026-01-17 13:32:34+00:00
I've been building an EMR as a solo dev for a few years now while working at a healthcare agency. The main stakeholders are the CEO (super tech friendly, business type), the owner (nurse for longer than I've been alive) and the other clincians I work with.

What I learned very early on after having direct access to the users was how difficult it was to describe a future state of the application (or fish for pain points) without having something tangible to show/compare. A lot of them have a hard time thinking abstractly about software (and I don't blame them).

A few weeks back, I showed Bolt.new to the CEO and ever since then, our workflow has sped up tremendously. He has the technical know-how and desire to sketch out ideas he thinks will be useful (in lieu of me spending a week to build something up, getting it knocked down, and repeating over and over again). I told him to instruct it to use mock data and it's already using the exact same stack I use (React/Tailwind/React Aria). He knows enough about the process that it's not as simple as building it in Bolt, but also knows how valuable it's been to me.

I'm constitutionally incapable of building a decent UI. So bad that I can take a well designed system and completely screw it up. I just can't extrapolate on designs well (and even got into an argument during an interview with a designer because I mentioned that as one of my weaknesses). Having the ability to go back and forth with a "designer" and not get angry that I'm asking for EXACT examples has been insanely refreshing.

Our goal is to get enough of the app together (while also being mindful of stuff like accessibility) and then bring in the professionals at the end. We've burnt so much money bringing in designers too early, and now we can get to a baseline before asking for help.

I truly believe that we are witnessing another renaissance in software dev. Instead of development being relegated to the big dev companies and FAANG's, the economics of a small company bringing on a software developer are changing enough that it could turn the tide. Instead of one-size-fits-all behemoths, we can now tailor software to the client.
by ZeroGravitas | 2026-01-17 13:32:38+00:00
Trump couldn't even persuade his own fans that Operation Warpspeed was a good thing.

So the hypothesis that he was just riding the crazy train seems to fit the facts better.

Mostly he's just paraphrasing stuff he heard on Fox. People who don't watch Fox say "that's some of the craziest shit I've ever heard" and the people who have been marinated in the crazy for a decade or more say "he's the only one telling it straight (about all these made up things I believe)"
by microflash | 2026-01-17 13:32:43+00:00
I've been using DuckDB to process massive Excel files. Despite weird quirks [1], it has been great experience so far. I now use it to process CSV, JSON, Parquet files. It is very fast, and extremely approachable, thanks to SQL being the language for interaction.

[1]: https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb-excel/issues/76
by K0balt | 2026-01-17 13:32:55+00:00
This is a great example, an object lesson in something that is deeply misunderstood.

Running a company and running a government are fundamentally disparate things to the point of one set of skills being antithetical to the other, even though there is overlap in orthogonal skillsets

A company operates to extract value from employees (labor,automation,process, knowledge ) and concentrate and deliver that value to a minority set of individuals. Debts are costs to be paid. Cash surplus is power to act.

A government operates to -deliver- value to its constituents through redistribution of resources towards goals that are inherently cost centres. Debts are confidence in future economic growth and are not really ever paid in any real sense of the term, the monopoly game set doesn’t get richer or poorer when you move money around or print more bills. It only gets richer or poorer when you add or take away players, burn or draw in more properties or utilities, or melt or 3d print more houses and hotels. Cash surplus is useless and counterproductive.

The idea that business leaders will be effective political leaders is catastrophic. There is no more hopeless place to live than a country operated as an efficient and well planned business. At least in the chaos of Mogadishu or Haiti you can find the fetid seeds of opportunity to make something worthwhile, chaos creates pockets of opportunity and ad-hoc fiefdoms. Chaos is a ladder. A well oiled machine is a stifling factory farm, but for people.

Obviously you don’t want Mogadishu or Bechtel as your governance model, but the sweet spot is closer to Mogadishu, at least insofar as mandatory structures determining your life trajectory goes. Mogadishu is closer to a democracy than Bechtel. At least in Mogadishu it’s not a centralised power that threatens your life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, just your neighbours. It’s at least conceptually transcendable.
by c7b | 2026-01-17 13:32:58+00:00
What about the explanation presented in the next paragraph?

> Consider how an exponent affects values between 0 and 1. Numbers close to experience a strong pull towards while larger numbers experience less pull. For example 0.1^2=0.01, a 90% reduction, while 0.9^2=0.81, only a reduction of 10%.

That's exactly the reason why it works, it's even nicely visualized below. If you've dealt with similar problems before you might know this in the back of your head. Eg you may have had a problem where you wanted to measure distance from 0 but wanted to remove the sign. You may have tried absolute value and squaring, and noticed that the latter has the additional effect described above.

It's a bit like a math undergrad wondering about a proof 'I understand the argument, but how on earth do you come up with this?'. The answer is to keep doing similar problems and at some point you've developed an arsenal of tricks.