MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kshri24 | 2026-01-17 23:25:40+00:00
> Humans writing code are also non deterministic

That's not what determinism means though. A human coding something, irrespective of whether the code is right or wrong, is deterministic. We have a well defined cause and effect pathway. If I write bad code, I will have a bug - deterministic. If I write good code, my code compiles - still deterministic. If the coder is sick, he can't write code - deterministic again. You can determine the cause from the effect.

Every behavior in the physical World has a cause and effect chain.

On the other hand, you cannot determine why a LLM hallucinated. There is no way to retrace the path taken from input parameters to generated output. At least as of now. Maybe it will change in the future where we have tools that can retrace the path taken.
by getnormality | 2026-01-17 23:25:49+00:00
Hmmm. Well, if you won't give us an article, perhaps I should provide us with one.

Here is an article by a climate scientist at Cornell and the head of a climate nonprofit, which is positive towards carefully scaled piloting of solar radiation management:

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/sunscreen-for-the-planet/

I am curious if you can cite an article that is responsive to the specific plans articulated here, especially the plans to help ensure safety by scaling slowly and gathering lots of data. Which is a normal practice in all reasonable policy rollouts.
by nchmy | 2026-01-17 23:26:23+00:00
I know this article is largely about too many js frameworks and also a call to making better tooling for low-level programming.

But it is also largely about the fact that most people making those js frameworks are not low-level programmers.

Folks really ought to check out Datastar. It's a newish js framework that is extremely innovative despite leaning as much as possible on browser apis. It's htmx + alpine + much more, AND built by a low-level programmer who is making the framework as a yak shaving side-quest. There's no dependencies - he built his own (world's fastest) signals and DOM morphing algorithms. V1 should be released soonish and they expect to never need a v2 - it'll just work forever (and probably become slimmer as browser capabilities grow).

And when he needs a break from that, he develops innovative approaches to CSS, serialization protocols, and databases.

https://data-star.dev

The discord is a fantastic place as well, of like-minded people.
by ninkendo | 2026-01-17 23:27:32+00:00
Yeah, especially for languages that make heavy use of type inference. There’s nothing you can really grep for most of the time… to really know “who’s using this code” you need to know what the compiler knows.

An LLM can likely approach compiler-level knowledge just from being smart and understanding what it’s reading, but it costs a lot of context to do this. Giving the LLM access to what the compiler knows as an API seems like it’s a huge area for improvement.
by Krutonium | 2026-01-17 23:27:54+00:00
>Laptops and phones have easy and relatively coarse brightness adjustment settings for their screens. Desktops didn't, and still don't.

You know what sucks? They do. Desktops do. They have since the late 90s.

Microsoft just never implemented it. Most desktop displays happily respond to brightness commands from the OS over DDCCI.
by diab0lic | 2026-01-17 23:27:56+00:00
I think the metaphor is pretty extensible to handle the things you point out.

> you could do everything right and still fail

Sometimes even a high probability draw doesn't get there on the river.

> while someone else (like a nepo hire) can do everything wrong and still succeed

Some people always start with pairs, Axs, or suited connectors.
by GMoromisato | 2026-01-17 23:30:05+00:00
I'm used to manifestos being a call to action or, at least, an explanation of intentions. But if the signers are intent on changing the world, I don't have a concrete view of what world they plan on creating.

"people must serve as primary stewards of their own context": What does this mean? People must be able to change the system prompt whenever they want? Or does "their own context" just mean "their own prompt" but not the system prompt? Does this mean everyone needs to run a local model?

"You must be able to trust there are no hidden agendas or conflicting interests.": Any transaction has conflicting interests. I want to pay as little as possible for software, but I want my salary as a software engineer to be as high as possible. How are they planning on eliminating that conflict?

"No single entity should control the digital spaces we inhabit.": What do they mean by a "digital space"? Do they mean the Internet? If so, then this is already true: no single entity controls the internet. Do they mean any web app that I might use? If I put up a personal blog can I be the only one who controls it? What if my blog gets really popular?

"Software should be open-ended, able to meet the specific, context-dependent needs of each person who uses it." Also, it should take 0 time to manage, solve any problem I might have, and be absolutely free.

"Technology should enable connection and coordination, helping us become better neighbors, collaborators, and stewards of shared spaces, both online and off." This was literally the original dream of the internet. We thought a global network that connected everyone would lead to peace and prosperity. We all agree that it hasn't. No one has any idea how to achieve this other than banning it.

I'm sure we can come up with answers to each one of these questions. But my point is that the manifesto doesn't tell us. We don't know what they have in mind, which makes me suspicious that either (a) they don't know either, or (b) I might not like the answer.
by buggy6257 | 2026-01-17 23:30:13+00:00
My dude adding ads to a free product after locking people into using it for free is LITERALLY the example used by Doctorow in his original article[1] that COINED the term “enshittification”. It couldn’t be more accurate if you tried.

[1] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai
by mrtksn | 2026-01-17 23:30:39+00:00
Nope, you form a company in Italy and sell your goods you produce in France to that company. That Italian company ships it the same way you always did. Since Trump is erratic and there's no real trade deal between those countries and thus US doesn't have a case to claim that someone is breaking the rules of origin. Not to even mention that you can't put tariffs on individual EU countries at anyway. That's EUs domain.

If you think that this wouldn't happen, check out Germany's exports to Kazakstan and other neighbors of Russia after EU started sanctioning Russia. It's not just possible, it's commonplace.
by christophilus | 2026-01-17 23:31:20+00:00
Eh. I’ve written plenty of applications by hand before there were good frameworks— win32 apps, old school web applications, “modern” SPA-like apps before there was a React. I’m more productive with React + Tailwind than I was with anything (other than maybe VB6). Being able to reason about your UI as a (mostly) pure function of state is powerful. It reminds me of the simplicity of game development— with a proper rendering layer, your developers can focus mostly on modeling their problem rather than UI complexities.
by orbital-decay | 2026-01-17 23:31:27+00:00
By trying to outsmart your monitor brightness setting and micromanaging it yourself per-app you're killing the consistency. This should be used for relative color schemes in your app, not for micromanaging the brightness.

Neutral grey makes sense in two cases:

- Relative color schemes in which your elements can be either lighter or darker than the background.

- Precise color grading, because white and black backgrounds shift color perception too much.

If you feel the background is too bright, either add more light in the room, or reduce the monitor brightness. It's all relative, it physically cannot have too much absolute brightness to hurt your eyes. The daylight is orders of magnitude stronger but you have no problem with it because your eyes adapt. What hurts them is excessive contrast: staring at the monitor in the dark room, pure black color schemes on OLED screens, etc. This looks jarring and breaks eye adaptation.
by jackfranklyn | 2026-01-17 23:32:30+00:00
This is exactly why I've avoided raising so far. Not because VC money is bad - obviously it enables things that wouldn't otherwise be possible - but because I know myself well enough to recognise I'd react exactly like this.

The author nails it: "I started to actually operate in a way that is counterproductive for my startup, while thinking I was actually doing what was best." That's the dangerous part. The pressure doesn't announce itself as pressure. It masquerades as ambition, urgency, drive.

Bootstrapping has its own version of this though. Instead of investor expectations, you've got the slow burn of "am I wasting years of my life on something that needs capital to work?" The grass is always greener. At least with VC money, you can move fast and find out if you're wrong. With bootstrapping, you can spend 3 years proving out something that would have taken 6 months with proper funding.

Neither path is inherently better. But knowing which one will fuck with your head less is worth figuring out before you're in the middle of it.
by pugdogdev | 2026-01-17 23:33:05+00:00
Maybe,
This has a lot of different opinions,
In SaaS, I can understand why you would give this trial version.
You can improve the onboarding and user progress tracking in the tunnel.
Making rapid updates and improving the onboarding process.
But for Mac apps that nothing is tracked or sent to my server, I have no idea what the user is doing or not doing with the app,
I can't roll out fast updates or even force users to get the newest version
So I won't be able to really improve it.
Maybe in my future Saas I will have some kind of trial.
But for now, I will stay with this model.
Anyway, thank you so much for the feedback,
Super appreciated!
by verdverm | 2026-01-17 23:33:11+00:00
Yaml is my #1 failure in devops. That so many have resigned themselves to this limit and no longer seek to improve, it's disappointing. Our job is to make things run better and easier, yet so many won't recognize the biggest pains in their own work. Seriously, is text templating an invisibly scoped language really where you think the field has reached maturity?
by gregbot | 2026-01-17 23:33:43+00:00
> Investing into renewables brought prices down by creating an economy in scale, which for nuclear never has worked

Never worked? How do you explain all the countries in the world with large low carbon nuclear fleets and reasonable electricity prices? Like France, Japan, Korea, Russia, China, the US, Canada, UK, Sweden, Finland, Ukraine etc? Everywhere large nuclear fleets have been built with a dozen or more reactors the per unit costs have been affordable.

None of that really matters though because when you look at the full system cost of intermittent renewables, they are an order of magnitude more expensive than the marginal cost.

https://discussion.fool.com/t/levelized-full-system-costs-of...
Show HN: Dokly – Hosted documentation platform for devs
by gsharma1 | 2026-01-17 23:33:45+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm a solo dev and I built Dokly because I couldn't justify paying $300/month for documentation hosting.

What it is: A hosted platform where you write docs in MDX, hit publish, and get a static documentation site with custom domain, full-text search, and analytics.

The technical bits:

Single Next.js 15 app serves marketing site, dashboard, and all customer doc sites via middleware-based domain routing
Supabase for auth/db/storage, Stripe for billing
Static site generation means sub-100ms page loads
Shiki for syntax highlighting (100+ languages)
Fuse.js for client-side fuzzy search
OpenAPI spec import generates interactive API playgrounds
How it works:

You get a subdomain (yourproject.dokly.co) on free tier, or bring your own domain on Pro. The editor is MDX with live preview. Built-in components for callouts, tabs, code blocks, etc. Publish and it generates static HTML.

Why I built it:

I kept running into the same problem – needed docs for side projects, didn't want to maintain a Docusaurus setup, couldn't stomach enterprise pricing. Mintlify is great but $300/mo is a lot when you're bootstrapping.

You can try it without signing up – just check the public docs examples on the landing page to see what the output looks like. If you want to actually create something, there's a free tier (1 project, 5 pages, no credit card).

Pricing: Free / $19 / $49 / $99 tiers. Pro at $49 gets you custom domain, analytics, and unlimited pages.

Built this over the past few months while working full-time. Happy to answer questions about the architecture, the MDX rendering pipeline, or anything else.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-17 23:33:56+00:00
I use both auto (when available) and manual brightness adjustments, and the environment in which I do most of my computing gets ample natural light.

The problem persists, however, because as the linked posts notes light mode is far brighter than it used to be, and now if I crank brightness down low enough to feel comfortable I'm sacrificing contrast and color vividness to such a degree that (for me) it's actively distracting. So, dark mode on high brightness it is.

For code editing, I've always tended towards dark themes ever since they became readily available in IDEs in the late 2000s simply because syntax coloration "pops" so much more strongly than is possible with a light theme. When I use a light theme for code editing it feels almost like staring at a sheet of undifferentiated text in comparison.
by seneca | 2026-01-17 23:34:20+00:00
> The problem with "let the parents decide" is that if all other kids in the neighborhood have phones and are on social media then unless you want your kid to grow up with no friends you don't have a choice but to let your kid also use social media.

Sorry, no, this is just abdicating your responsibility as a parent. "It's hard" isn't an excuse for throwing your hands up and handing your responsibility over to the state.
by BanAntiVaxxers | 2026-01-17 23:34:40+00:00
There are not very many ops people who cannot code. Especially these days. I spent at least the last 20 years doing ops. Ops people are HIGHLY motivated to create things that DON’T FAIL. However, ops teams are often blocked by MANAGERS from doing essentially development in the prod environment. I’m talking about tools and scripts. At the places I’ve worked with the highest uptime, it was because ops had an unlimited, unfettered free hand.

Remove the handcuffs from your ops team and your reliability will SOAR.
by zigzag312 | 2026-01-17 23:34:48+00:00
If we want to have any meaningful debate on what effect something has, we need to try to separate what are the reactions/side effects caused by it and to try to avoid additional confounding changes that were not caused by it. Trying to undo the negative side effect you don't like by, for example, introducing new technological innovations, or in your case a new optimization even though there is no increase in anything that would help do develop this new optimization, is making a confounding change.

While speculating what might happen in some particular cases can be fun, the real questions that need to be answered are regarding the macroeconomic effects of UBI. Starting with what % of GDP will be needed for UBI that will cover all the basic needs (food, housing, healthcare, etc.)? And then focus, not just on what few good Samaritans might do, but on how households, firms, and governments would respond at scale: labor supply, wages and prices, inflationary pressure, taxes, effects on productivity, growth, etc.

But I think our discussion has run its course. While we clearly have different opinions, it was still fun and I hope we both learned something. Be well!
by jppope | 2026-01-17 23:35:08+00:00
1. I made a prototype using LLMs
2. It worked so well!
3. Software Development is dead (just kidding, I finish the article by saying its not)
4. Everything we know has changed, my prototype proves it!

^^ Its been a rough couple of years with these kinds of upshots being constantly posted.

Yes, things have changed. Is the entire software development world about to collapse because of LLMs? Sorry, no. I'm impressed by the capabilities we now have at our disposal, but the LLMs still do a bunch of dumb stuff. Some of the worst bugs and edge cases I've dealt with this year were almost unnoticeable things an agent added. With that said, there is still a ton of juice to squeeze from this paradigm. I really just wish everyone would stop pretending the sky is falling.
by csense | 2026-01-17 23:35:22+00:00
I spent an enormous amount of time in DOS, color 7 on color 0, gray on black. The IDE everybody used was aggressively gray on blue [1].

Which is #AAAAAA on #000000 to you kids with your fancy Super VGA monitors with megabytes of video memory and 24-bit color.

This white background stuff is the invention of Microsoft or somebody's marketing department, who decided people would be less afraid of computers if they made the screen look like a piece of paper.

Back in my day we only used 16 colors at a time [2], because you had to quarter the resolution if you wanted more than that, because of course video memory has to fit in a 64k segment -- why would anyone even want to go bigger, wouldn't that consume way too much conventional memory? And if you did decide you wanted to use 8-bit mode, if you wanted square pixels you had to read Michael Abrash's book and do terrible black magic involving directly programming VGA registers and bank-switched bit-planes.

If you don't know what any of that means, it means you kids've got it way too easy these days and don't even know it. The real programmers who knew all this stuff and made brilliant masterpieces like Master of Magic and the original X-COM were scattered to the winds when the original Microprose folded. Now get off my lawn.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBasic#/media/File:QBasic_Open...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#With_an...
by JumpinJack_Cash | 2026-01-17 23:35:32+00:00
because in the midst of all the ancient stuff that is very destablising in the Constitution (electoral college, 2 parties, a head of state which resembles an elected king etc) there is something that is amazingly well structured:

Elections every 2 years (the most frequent in the world) + term limits

22 Months from the date the POTUS takes the oath until the midterms which are always a win for the party not in power , when the POTUS gets a second term effectively 22 months from the moment the POTUS takes the oath until the 'lame duck' period

In this way the damage can always be contained by the sheer lack of time to do anything drastic (although Trump is trying)
by Rochus | 2026-01-17 23:35:51+00:00
Are you one of the authors? Concerning the "infrastructure": Rust assumes a runtime, the standard library assumes a stack exists, a heap exists, and that main() is called by an OS; in a kernel, none of this is true. And the borrow checker cannot reason about things like e.g. DMA controllers mutating memory the CPU believes it owns, Memory-mapped I/O where a "read" has side effects (violating functional purity), context switches that require saving register state to arbitrary memory locations, or interrupt handlers that violate the call stack model. That's what I mean by "infrastructure". It's essentially the same issue with every programming language to some degree, but for Rust it is relevant to understand that the "safety guarantees" don't apply to all parts of an operating system, even if written in Rust.
by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | 2026-01-17 23:36:06+00:00
Do they really need a standard or should they make sites liable for allowing children on?

There is no standard ID check protocol at liquor stores. If you're old they can just look at ya, some just look at your ID, others scan the ID. The govt didn't need to provide a standard. Just don't sell to kids. Figure it out! It's not on the govt to figure it out for you!
by JaviLopezG | 2026-01-17 23:36:22+00:00
Lol Trump can't understand that he can't charge tariffs to an specific EU country. He is a big moron and his voters the little morons.

Nevermind, I hope he changes his mind and set a 1000% instead 10 so we can broke relations with such a stupid government. USA is following steps that Germany already took and its citizens are responsible of its crimes.
by dataviz1000 | 2026-01-17 23:36:27+00:00
Yeah I get what you mean, but it’s not really about converting the cop into “your group.”

It’s about what your actions do to everyone watching, and what it does to you.

Plato makes the point that you don’t make a dog better by beating it. You just make it worse. Same with people. You’re not persuading, you’re escalating.

If the goal is change, you don’t have to be nice, but you do have to be effective!
by sandworm101 | 2026-01-17 23:36:59+00:00
If it has a flue or chimney, it isnt really an open fire. Look at an ancient long house, or farmer's thatched cottage from say 400 years ago. They had a fire on a stone circle on the floor in the middle of the room, and a high roof sometimes with a hole but often not. It was smoky, but kept everyone warm.
by fragmede | 2026-01-17 23:37:02+00:00
> And any attempt at computer use has fallen by the wayside.

You're totally right! I mean, aside from Anthropic launching "Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work" 5 days ago. :)

https://claude.com/blog/cowork-research-preview

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46593022

More to the point though, you should be using Agents in Claude Code to limit context pollution. Agents run with their own context, and then only return salient details. Eg, I have an Agent to run "make" and return the return status and just the first error message if there is one. This means the hundreds/thousands of lines of compilation don't pollute the main Claude Code context, letting me get more builds in before I run out of context there.
by idle_zealot | 2026-01-17 23:37:15+00:00
> 1) software that makes it easy to do for the layman (browser extensions etc.), and

It's already a given that this only works on a locked-down device. Making it a simple binary "is this device owned by a minor" switch means parents will actually be able to understand it.

> 2) scams and malware that target children offering a "bypass" to access adult websites

And advertising to children should also be banned, so they won't be exposed to such scams, among other things. Thankfully this header lets the site know if they're breaking the law by showing scam ads, which makes prosecution super easy.

> I think this would end up similar to the Do Not Track header which ultimately no one cared about or took seriously.

Oh, of course none of this works unless it has the teeth of law to back it up.
by dang | 2026-01-17 23:37:26+00:00
I'm currently reading the work of Robert Langs, who was a big deal in the 70s but now seems largely forgotten.

Besides that, lots of Winnicott, Bion (not that I can understand it), some Thomas Ogden, a whole lot of Harold Searles, a bit of Bollas, Linda Hopkins's incredible biography of Masud Khan, and other stuff I'm forgetting right now.

Where do your interests lie?
by FloorEgg | 2026-01-17 23:37:26+00:00
Thank you for this response. Of those that replied to me, yours seems the most balanced and scientific, and I learned the most from. I wish more often people engaged on HN like you have here.

Given your expertise in this, I'm curious what your take is on CO2 capture, not in terms of economic viability, but in terms of climate risk...

For example, if we were to discover a process that removed CO2 from atmosphere and converted it into a product profitably such that there was an economic incentive/positive feedback loop to remove CO2.

My intuition is that if we removed the CO2 too quickly or too much of it we may have unwanted consequences, but if the rate was managed and we slowed down and stopped at a certain equilibrium, would this be a theoretically ideal way to address the problem?