MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dlcarrier | 2026-01-21 07:35:20+00:00
Good hierarchical documentation

A laptop computer is extremely complex, but is actively developed and maintained by a small number of people, built on parts themselves developed by a small number of people, many of which are themselves built on parts themselves developed by a small number of people, and so on and so forth.

This works well in electronics design, because everything is documented and tested to comply with the documentation. You'd think this would slow things down, but developing a new generation of a laptop takes fewer man hours and less calendar time than developing a new generation of any software of a similar complexity running on it, despite the laptop skirting with the limitations of physics. Technical debt adds up really fast.

The top-level designers only have access to what the component manufacturers have published, and not to their internal designs, but that doesn't matter because the publications include correct and relevant data. When the component manufacturer comes out with something new, they use documentation from their supplier, to design the new product.

As long as each components of documentation is complete and accurate, it will meet all of the needs of anyone using that component. Diving deeper would only be necessary if something is incomplete or inaccurate.
by joecool1029 | 2026-01-21 07:35:38+00:00
> And it’s weird how bad sms messaging on Google Voice is, still.

Messages get filtered more often by the carriers. Shows up to them as voip local numbers which is highest risk of spam. In any case it was bolted on almost as an afterthought.

I really think they only bump Google Voice client releases to revert the ‘use carrier only setting’ to ‘prefer data and wifi’, so Google saves a few pennies.
by pvaldes | 2026-01-21 07:36:53+00:00
A new accident today in Catalonia, three train crashes in three days of the Davos Forum with four trains involved.

The fourth train crashed against obstacles in the railway. One machinist killed and all commuter trains in the region halted until the railway is reviewed. Machinists went on strike and the narrative of poor maintenance is all around the place on internet.

The chance of this happening just by random is zero. We didn't have a train crash in Spain in years and now we have three at the same time.
by fhd2 | 2026-01-21 07:37:44+00:00
Bear in mind that there is a lot of money riding on LLMs leading to cost savings, and development (seen as expensive and a common bottleneck) is a huge opportunity. There are paid (micro) influencer campaigns going on and what not.

Also bear in mind that a lot of folks want to be seen as being on the bleeding edge, including famous people. They get money from people booking them for courses and consulting, buying their books, products and stuff. A "personal brand" can have a lot of value. They can't be seen as obsolete. They're likely to talk about what could or will be, more than about what currently is. Money isn't always the motive for sure, people also want to be considered useful, they want to genuinely play around and try and see where things are going.

All that said, I think your approach is fine. If you don't inspect what the agent is doing, you're down to faith. Is it the fastest way to get _something_ working? Probably not. Is it the best way to build an understanding of the capabilities and pit falls? I'd say so.

This stuff is relatively new, I don't think anyone has truly figured out how to best approach LLM assisted development yet. A lot of folks are on it, usually not exactly following the scientific method. We'll get evidence eventually.
by defrost | 2026-01-21 07:38:32+00:00
I'm not a partisan US voter.

> The Biden administration did neither.

This appears to be a partisan statement subject to data source and bias. eg:

The Biden administration took office amid heightened debate in some circles over the merits and tactics of deportations, yet it is on track to carry out as many removals and returns as the Trump administration did.

The 1.1 million deportations since the beginning of fiscal year (FY) 2021 through February 2024 (the most recent data available) are on pace to match the 1.5 million deportations carried out during the four years President Donald Trump was in office. These deportations are in addition to the 3 million expulsions of migrants crossing the border irregularly that occurred under the pandemic-era Title 42 order between March 2020 and May 2023—the vast majority of which occurred under the Biden administration.

Combining deportations with expulsions and other actions to block migrants without permission to enter the United States, the Biden administration’s nearly 4.4 million repatriations are already more than any single presidential term since the George W. Bush administration (5 million in its second term).

~ https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/biden-deportation-re...

> Their policies directly led to over 2.4 million border encounters in 2023 alone, the most ever recorded in the history of the country.

Their policies or global events? Either way the sheer number of recorded border ecounters speaks to them being out and about and actively encountering people on the border ... when thought about, that's hardly a bad thing - it sounds more as if they were getting the job done.

To be clear, I have zero interest in debating this aside from noting it's hardly clearcut.

> The Republicans make the Democrats look like PR masters by comparison.

They are indeed superlative propagandadists, on this we can agree ...

they are, however, in a view from afar, falling well short of actually making middle North America great again, gutting essential infrastructure maintainance, etc. etc.

But few will ever know given they've also gutted many of the means of tracking the state of the country, the state of the environment, the activities of their administration.
by lovich | 2026-01-21 07:40:03+00:00
The original

>If you optimize below 1487 cycles, beating Claude Opus 4.5's best performance at launch, email us at performance-recruiting@anthropic.com with your code (and ideally a resume) so we can be appropriately impressed and perhaps discuss interviewing.

Not condescending

> If you optimize below 1487 cycles, beating Claude Opus 4.5's best performance at launch, email us at performance-recruiting@anthropic.com with your code so we can schedule an interview.
by Dev_Master | 2026-01-21 07:40:04+00:00
I built FileCryptor, a simple desktop app for encrypting/decrypting files and folders using password-based encryption.

It’s written in Python with Tkinter + ttkbootstrap and uses Fernet with PBKDF2HMAC (per-file random salt, high iteration count). Features include recursive folder encryption, drag & drop, cancelable operations, and a progress bar.

This is aimed at people who want a straightforward, offline file encryption tool with a GUI rather than a CLI workflow. Feedback on security choices, UX, and code structure is very welcome.
by snailmailman | 2026-01-21 07:40:06+00:00
That whole subreddit has unfortunately become inundated with AI slop.

It used to be a decent resource to learn about what services people were self hosting. But now, many posts are variations of, “I’ve made this huge complicated app in an afternoon please install it on your server”. I’ve even seen a vibe-coded password manager posted there.

Reputable alternatives to the software posted there exist a a huge amount of the time. Not to mention audited alternatives in the case of password managers, or even just actively maintained alternatives.
by branko_d | 2026-01-21 07:40:19+00:00
That's true for seeks into the clustered (primary) index because that index includes all fields, so you don't need to "jump" to the heap to get them.

However, seeking into a secondary index, and then reading a column not included in that index incurs an additional index seek (into the clustered index), which may be somewhat slower than what would happen in a heap-based table.

So there are pros and cons, as usual...
by Snakes3727 | 2026-01-21 07:40:38+00:00
The company I work for has a pretty bad bounty system (basically a security@corp email). We have a demo system and a public API with docs. We get around 100 or more emails a day now. Most of it is slop, scams, or my new favourite AI security companies sending us an AI generated pentest un prompted filled with false positives, untrue things, etc. It has become completely useless so no one looks at it.

I had a sales rep even call me up basically trying to book a 3 hour session to review the AI findings unprompted. When I looked at the nearly 250 page report, and saw a critical IIS bug for Windows server (doesn't exist) existing at a scanned IP address of 5xx.x.x.x (yes an impossible IP) publically available in AWS (we exclusively use gcp) I said some very choice words.
by pvalue005 | 2026-01-21 07:40:47+00:00
/model: Auto (Gemini 3) Let Gemini CLI decide the best model for the task: gemini-3-pro, gemini-3-flash

After ~40 minutes, it got to:

The final result is 2799 cycles, a 52x speedup over the baseline. I successfully implemented Register Residency, Loop Unrolling, and optimized Index Updates to achieve this, passing all correctness and baseline speedup tests. While I didn't beat the Opus benchmarks due to the complexity of Broadcast Optimization hazards, the performance gain is substantial.

It's impressive as I definitely won't be able to do what it did. I don't know most of the optimization techniques it listed there.

I think it's over. I can't compete with coding agents now. Fortunately I've saved enough to buy some 10 acre farm in Oregon and start learning to grow some veggies and raise chickens.
by N_Lens | 2026-01-21 07:41:03+00:00
I sometimes feel like the cognitive cost of agentic coding is so much higher than a skilled human. There is so much more bootstrap and handling process around making sure agents don't go off the rails (they will), or that they will adhere to their goals (they won't). And in my experience fixing issues downstream takes more effort than solving the issue at the root.

The pipe dream of agents handling Github Issue -> PullRequest -> Resolve Issue becomes a nightmare of fixing downstream regressions or other chaos unleashed by agents given too much privilege. I think people optimistic on agents are either naive or hype merchants grifting/shilling.

I can understand the grinning panic of the hype merchants because we've collectively shovelled so much capital into AI with very little to show for it so far. Not to say that AI is useless, far from it, but there's far more over-optimism than realistic assessment of the actual accuracy and capabilities.
by aargh_aargh | 2026-01-21 07:41:37+00:00
> simple way to confirm their age and restore their full access with a selfie through Persona, a secure identity-verification service

The normalization of identity verification to use internet services is itself a problem. It's described much better than I could by EFF here:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/so-youve-hit-age-gate-...
by bjackman | 2026-01-21 07:42:20+00:00
Lately with Gemini CLI / Jules it doesn't seem like time spent is a good proxy for difficulty. It has a big problem with getting into loops of "I am preparing the response for the user. I am done. I will output the answer. I am confident. Etc etc".

I see this directly in Gemini CLI as the harness detects loops and bails the reasoning. But I've also just occasionally seen it take 15m+ to do trivial stuff and I suspect that's a symptom of a similar issue.
by mrkeen | 2026-01-21 07:42:35+00:00
Yeah I can't figure out if this is something the author stands by or if it's just a project to mess around with goroutines or something. And it's unfair to criticise if it isn't meant to be good.

> The server reads all the documents into memory at start-up. The corpus occupies about 600 MB, so this is reasonable, though it pushes the limits of what a cloud server with 1 GB of RAM can handle. With 2 GB, it's no problem.

1200 books per 1GB server? Whole-internet search engines are older than 1GB servers.

> queries that take 2,000 milliseconds from disk can be done in 800 milliseconds from memory. That's still too slow, though, which is why fast-concordance uses [lots of threads]

No query should ever take either of those amounts of time. And the "optimisation" is to just use more threads. Which other consumers could have used to run their searches, but now can't.

https://www.pingdom.com/blog/original-google-setup-at-stanfo...
Show HN: Kerns – Research that compounds instead of resetting
by kanodiaayush | 2026-01-21 07:42:41+00:00
When I do real research — reading papers, books, or trying to understand a complex topic — it never happens in one sitting.

I explore a bit, get interrupted, come back days later, ask new questions, find new sources, and gradually build understanding.

Existing AI tools are great at answering questions once, but they reset context every time. Notes tools preserve text, but not understanding — they don’t help me reconnect ideas, revisit sources, or see how my thinking has evolved.

I built Kerns to sit in between.

Kerns is an AI research workspace designed for research that unfolds over time. Each topic lives in a long-lived space where:

• You can ask new questions as they emerge
• Upload PDFs, papers, or documents alongside discovered sources
• Run deep research in parallel, not one query at a time
• Move fluidly between summaries and original source text
• Revisit work weeks later without losing context

Instead of scattering work across chats, documents, and bookmarks, research accumulates in one place and compounds as you return to it.

I’ve been using Kerns myself for things like:

• Reading and synthesizing books and essays
• Comparing technical papers and model releases
• Tracking ongoing policy or industry topics as they evolve

I’d love feedback from anyone who does sustained research — analysts, researchers, founders, students, or serious self-learners.

Thank you!
by nosianu | 2026-01-21 07:42:57+00:00
No, the alternative would be that they would have build something tat would much better fit that purpose. You are trying to fit a square peg through a round hole here. The article mentions why all the common ideas don't make sense.

The theories proposed here are merely examples of human brains ability to come up with a fantastic story for anything in the absence of data. Ex falso quodlibet - from zero follows everything, if you have nothing you can just say anything you want, and it will "explain" your non-existing data perfectly /s

The extremely narrow passages, only one exit, bad air circulation, there is nothing that hints towards this being used for hiding, quite the opposite.

> And while three brave explorers in the 21st century once spent 48 hours in an erdstall, crawling to new sections whenever oxygen became scarce, it seems unlikely that they would have been constructed as hiding places, even temporary ones
by self_awareness | 2026-01-21 07:43:30+00:00
I'm on ipv6 since 2 years and I am very happy.

I profit from NAT-less network, can connect to my home device from a VPS without thinking it's sitting behind 2 routers. No port forwarding needed, just connect and it works. Well, I guess I still need to enable connection to this device on a firewall, but that's obvious.

We really should move on from IPv6.

By the way, IPv6 also supports NAT if that's what you want. But using NAT in IPv6 is like saying "i want to have my own personal universe so I can put 2 Raspberry PIs in it".
by lioeters | 2026-01-21 07:44:18+00:00
Yes, we can look at an object as a function that accepts a key and returns a value (or null). Depends on language, it's called a set, map, or associative list.

type AnObject = {
[key: any]: any
}

type FunkyObject = (key: any) => Maybe<any>

Then we can see arrays as a limited type of object/function that only accepts a number (index) as key.

type FunkyList = (index: number) => Maybe<any>

We can even consider any variable as a function whose key is the name.

type FunkyVariable = (name: string) => Maybe<any>

And any operation as a function whose key is the operator, with arguments, and the return value is the result.

type FunkyOperator = (name: string, ...values: any) => any

FunkyOperator('+', 1, 2) // => 3

Even an `if` statement can be a function, as long as the values are functions that return values instead of the values themselves, to allow for "short-circuiting" (latter values are unevaluated if an earlier value is true).

Surely we're approaching some kind of functional language land, like Haskell, where all data structures are modeled using functions or lambda calculus.
by dagss | 2026-01-21 07:44:33+00:00
I've been programming for 20 years, and I've always been under-estimating how long things will take (no, not pressured by anyone to give firm estimates, just talking about informally when prioritizing work order together).

The other day I gave an estimate to my co-worker and he said "but how long is it really going to take, because you always finish a lot quicker than you say, you say two weeks and then it takes two days".

The LLMs will just make me finish things a lot faster and my gut feel estimation for how long things will take still is not yet taking that into account.

(And before people talk about typing speed: No that isn't it at all. I've always been the fastest typer and fastest human developer among my close co-workers.)

Yes, I need to review the code and interact with the agent. But it's doing a lot better than a lot of developers I've worked with over the years, and if I don't like the style of the code it takes very few words and the LLM will "get it" and it will improve it..

Some commenters are comparing the LLM to a junior. In some sense that is right in that the work relationship may be the same as towards a (blazingly fast) junior; but the communication style and knowledge area and how few words I can use to describe something feels more like talking to a senior.

(I think it may help that latest 10 years of my career a big part of my job was reviewing other people's code, delegating tasks, being the one who knew the code base best and helping others into it. So that means I'm used to delegating not just coding. Recently I switched jobs and am now coding alone with AI.)
by brap | 2026-01-21 07:45:20+00:00
I learned that every step that can be solved reasonably without an LLM, should be solved without an LLM. Reliability, cost, performance, etc.

I try to transfer as much work as I can out of LLMs and into deterministic steps. This includes most of the “orchestration” layer which is usually deterministic by nature.

Sprinkle a little bit of AI in the right places and you’ll get something that appears genuinely intelligent. Rely too much on AI and it’s dumb as fuck.

Make their tasks very small and simple (ideally, one step), give them only the context and tools that they need and nothing else, and provide them with feedback when they inevitably mess up (ideally, deterministically), and hope for the best.
by sevenzero | 2026-01-21 07:47:10+00:00
Also leetcode does not really provide insight into ones ability to design business solutions. Whether it be system design, just some small feature implementation or communication skills within a team.
Its just optimizers jerking each other off on some cryptic problems 99.999999999% of developers will never see in real life.
Maybe it would've been useful like 30 years ago, but all commonly used languages have all these fancy algorithms baked into their stdlib, why would I ever have to implement them myself?
by tliltocatl | 2026-01-21 07:47:23+00:00
- USA will be free to enjoy Chinese submarines coming via GIUK gap (if POTUS keep doing what they are, these submarines will probably base directly in UK and Norway).

- If EU gets some more vertebrate leaders (something that tends to happen in times like this even in the most spineless countries), the first thing they will do is probably go get some allies in the Pacific to make up for this - and Pacific is much more sensitive to US.

Of course, all of this is phenomenally stupid and everyone will be far worse off.
by LM358 | 2026-01-21 07:47:25+00:00
>as a kid it shocked me that a customer in the US could get away with "I'll have a coke" as their only utterance to a waiter - no hello, please, thank you.

As a Norwegian who's been visiting the US for quite a few times now (as we speak), I've always appreciated the "hello, please, thank you", but what really gets me are the incessant "how are you"s.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-21 07:48:05+00:00
Great article, although some history bits are missing, that might be interesting.

DirectX was the second attempt, during Windows 3.x days a first attempt to bring game devs away from MS-DOS into Windows was made with WinG, an API that is almost impossible to search for nowadays, unless one knows where to look for.

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

https://archive.org/details/WING10

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/a-whirlwind-tour-o...

Vulkan is not available on the PlayStation, and the support on the Switch is mainly for porting purposes, the main API is NVN.

Amiga's Agnus and AGA were baby GPUs already with programmable steps, even if rather basic.

On the arcades there was TMS34010 as one of the first programmable chips for graphics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS34010
by koonsolo | 2026-01-21 07:48:11+00:00
That depends on a lot of personal things. I remember a Ukrainian I personally know, leaving after the 2014 invasion.

When Russia was doing "exercises" at their border in 2022, I asked them in a meeting what they felt (guys living in Lviv). Most of them thought Russia would have done it in 2014 already, and now it didn't make much sense. Only 1 person responded he filled up his gas tank. But in the end, nobody left Lviv right after the invasion.
by TrackerFF | 2026-01-21 07:48:49+00:00
Well it is a specialized problem. If you've never worked on anything similar previously, it is going to take time. Don't even need to interview for selective billion dollar companies like Anthropic to encounter these types of problems - after college I interviewed for various electronics/hardware companies where you'd get asked to optimize low-level code - which would have looked quite foreign, if you had never actually worked on such problems before.
Show HN: Encrypter.site – Browser-based E2E encryption for text and files
by zealer | 2026-01-21 07:48:53+00:00
I built a simple tool for encrypting text and files entirely in the browser.

- AES-256-GCM encryption with PBKDF2 key derivation (600k iterations by default)
- Supports text and file encryption (up to 256MB)
- Data never leaves your device
- Share encrypted content via QR code or link
- No account, no server storage, no tracking

The crypto is handled by the Web Crypto API, and the source is straightforward if anyone wants to take a look. Would love feedback on the UX and any edge cases I might have missed.
by bawolff | 2026-01-21 07:48:59+00:00
Bug bounties often involve a lot of risk for submitters. Often the person reading the report doesn't know that much and misinterprets it. Often rules are unclear about what sort of reports are wanted. A pay to enter would increase that risk.

Honestly bug bounties are kind of miserable for both sides. I've worked on the recieving side of bug bounty programs. You wouldnt believe the shit that is submitted. This was before AI and it was significant work to sort through, i can only imagine what its like now. On the other hand for a submitter, you are essentially working on spec with no garuntee your work is going to be evaluated fairly. Even if it is, you are rolling the dice that your report is not a duplicate of an issue reported 10 years ago that the company just doesn't feel like fixing.
by arionmiles | 2026-01-21 07:49:04+00:00
I find this to be a very amusing critique. In my experience, Notion (when I stopped using it 3 years ago) was slow as molasses. Slow to load, slow to update. In comparison, at work, I almost exclusively favor Confluence Cloud. It's very responsive for me.

We have tons of Confluence wikis, updated frequently.