MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by locallost | 2026-01-04 12:37:46+00:00
People (and I'm one of them) usually say why instead of what because in general the what can be understood if you can read code. But obviously no hard rules, if I write something twisted because I had no idea how to do it better or had the time, then I'll write what it does. It's not perfect, but nothing is.

Same goes for comments vs commit messages. It's a fact comments get outdated and then you have an even bigger problem whereas a commit message is always correct at the time it was made. But obviously again, no hard rules. Sometimes I feel it's better to write a comment, e.g. if it's something that is really important and won't change a lot.
Show HN: An update-aware approach to incremental sorting (DeltaSort)
by shudv | 2026-01-04 12:38:48+00:00
Paper (PDF): https://github.com/shudv/deltasort/blob/main/paper/main.pdf

I’ve been exploring a variant of the sorting problem where the sort routine knows about which indices were updated since the previous sort.

This situation arises in many practical systems: large sorted lists that are read frequently, updated in small batches, and where the update pipeline already knows which positions changed (e.g., UI lists, leaderboards). Despite this most systems either re-sort the entire array or apply independent binary insertions or perform extract-sort-merge.

In the paper, I propose DeltaSort, an incremental repair algorithm for this update-aware model - which is able efficiently batch together multiple updates and avoid a full re-sort. Initial experiments with a Rust implementation show multi-fold speedups over repeated binary insertion and native sorting (sort_by) for update batch size up to 30%.

I’m mainly looking for technical feedback from people who’ve worked on sorting, data structures, or systems:
1. Am I missing prior work that already addresses this model or technique?
2. Are the baselines and comparisons reasonable? Is there a better (stricter) baseline that we can use to compare DeltaSort?
3. How useful does this seem in real systems, outside of the benchmarks I have used?

Thanks - and happy to discuss details!
by surgical_fire | 2026-01-04 12:38:53+00:00
Is Venezuela even a drug exporter country?

I mean, I understand that this is HN, and people here probably think that every country south of Texas is a drug exporting country full of Mexicans.

The main producers of drugs in South America are Colombia and Bolivia. Traditionally Colombia has the largest cartels.

I don't even think oil was the main goal of the US. There is no occupation of Venezuela, and not even a puppet dictator was put in place.

Maduro's vice president seems to be in power and there's no real indication that the Venezuelan government still in place will enact meaningful policy changes. Unless an actual occupation begins, the only thing I expect is that if the new government is too weakened the situation will spiral into a civil war of sorts.

I think that Trump just did something to take focus away from the whole Epstein deal for a bit.
by bborud | 2026-01-04 12:39:07+00:00
Really? You read the constitution and managed to not absorb how the system is structured?

Hint: Look at who has which powers. Congress has the power to check every other branch. Neither the President nor the courts have symmetrical power over Congress. This asymmetry reflects its position.

I must admit I am a bit flabbergasted. How can you not understand what you read? And if a portion of Hacker News users, who are likely to have above average cognitive ability, don’t understand this, how poorly does the rest of the population understand the core ideas of how their political system works?
by jqpabc123 | 2026-01-04 12:39:57+00:00
Removing network connectivity from basically any new car is trivial, often as simple as pulling an easily accessible fuse.

I'm guessing that you haven't actually done this on "basically any new car".

If you had tried, you would know that there is often no fuse dedicated to "network connectivity". It is typically tied in with other, often essential functions like the vehicle computer --- specifically in order to thwart a simple disconnect like you describe.

What I have seen done is to tear into the right roof pillar and cut the wires going to the antenna on the roof. But this is often not without consequences such as a perpetual error code display or the radio or navigation system stops working.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-04 12:40:01+00:00
That is because of what people claiming UWP is dead, haven't gotten the whole picture.

UWP as separate subsystem, yes it is deprecated, and no one should be using it, although Microsoft was forced to introduce .NET 9 support on UWP, because many refuse to move away from UWP into WinUI 3.0, given the lack of feature parity.

Now, when WinRT was made to also work on Win32 side, it also brought with it the concept of package identity, which forms a part of the whole app isolation from UWP similar to Android, now on Win32 as well, hence the MSIX.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/secauthz/app...

On the specific case of the context menu, it depends on what is being done,

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/07/19/extend...

You can work around app identity when using the suggested alternative of unpackaged Win32 apps with sparse manifests.
by libertine | 2026-01-04 12:40:40+00:00
If you believe the US that colonized part of North America is the same as post-ww2 US, then I can understand.

I don't think they're the same, so many institutions were established that over the years that I don't see them as the former colony of the British crown.

But hey, if you want to discuss semantics, go for it.
by hosh | 2026-01-04 12:41:07+00:00
I ended up skimming a lot of it, though I closely read the beginning and the end. This is not a vision of humanity I agree with.

Technology is not the only path towards expansion of consciousness, even though in this day and age, it appears so. The wonders, marvels, and growth described in this story can be experienced through other means. To act and build as if it is the only path is, in my opinion, deeply misguided.

Probably not the most popular stance in this crowd.
by krapp | 2026-01-04 12:41:38+00:00
Yes? And so should the US, multiple times.

Both are violent, hegemonic, imperialist dinosaurs holding the world back, and the world would be infinitely and objectively better off with the extinction of both. Barring that, yes, the UN should at the very least expel both. The fact that can't happen is evidence that the UN is a farce.
by corimaith | 2026-01-04 12:41:42+00:00
From the perspective of an otaku, that's an ironic conclusion. The confusion regarding the neglected interiority was a conscious decision by the mainstream in the beginning was it not?

That's perhaps not to say that the otaku lifestyle as is today is preferable, but it always more about the transcendent experiences they were reaching for, an activity labelled childish by their peers. Meaning was never an issue, just actualization.
Show HN: CodeAnswr – AI-powered developer hub with no geo-restrictions
by saradev2025 | 2026-01-04 12:42:23+00:00
Hi HN! Solo dev here. I built this using SvelteKit and Cloudflare D1. It combines AI answers with community Q&A. The goal is to provide a toxic-free, globally accessible platform. It even has E2E encryption for private questions. Curious to hear your thoughts on the edge-database performance!
by BoorishBears | 2026-01-04 12:42:27+00:00
It's not FUD when you make something terrible* and that reputation doesn't immediately slough off.

And I just checked the Dart release notes from all of 2025: https://dart.dev/resources/whats-new

Great progress! But smells a lot like the language I had it pegged for when "underscore as a wildcard" lands in February 2025, 2 years after pattern matching lands.

How did they ship pattern matching in 2023, with a million examples of how to do it right already hashed out and in the wild... and then not figure out a wildcard symbol for 2 years?

-

* Dart was awful, lost to Javascript because no one rated it highly enough to justify moving off Javascript, and was practically dead until Flutter dusted off the corpse and pivoted away from their browser goals... so super weird revisionism to act like we're talking about some beloved evergreen language.
by sph | 2026-01-04 12:44:46+00:00
Yeah I think I get your problem. I am prototyping a message-passing actor platform running in a flat address space, and virtual memory is the only way I can do cleanup after a process ends (by keeping track of which pages were allocated to a process and freeing them when it terminates)

Without virtual memory, I would either need to force the use of a garbage collector (which is an interesting challenge in itself to design a GC for a flat address space full of stackless coroutines), or require languages with much stricter memory semantics such as Rust so I can be safe everything is released at the end (though all languages are designed for isolated virtual memory and not even Rust might help without serious re-engineering)

Do you keep notes of these types of platforms you’re working on? Sounds fun.
by jacknews | 2026-01-04 12:45:02+00:00
This has been planned since Trump's first stint, where he declared fentanyl to be a 'weapon of mass destruction', and Maduro to be a 'narco-terrorist' (never mind that the fentanyl comes from China via Mexico).

This was a new term at the time, shifting drugs from a police issue to a military one, and obviously trying to manufacture consent for military intervention.

But Trump wasn't re-elected in 2020 so the plan stalled for 5 years. Now it's back. The military didn't 'asses threats' or whatever other garbage this piece claims, this is long pre-meditated.

But, the oil story is not quite what it seems either. Sure Trump wants to get his hands on all that oil and other resources, that's probably the only part he understands (and 'bad hombres').

But far more important for the Pentagon and people with actual brains, is to thwart China's influence in America's 'sphere of influence'. Venezuela is literally America's backyard, and the last time that was severely violated by a peer power, it almost led to armageddon (Cuba).
by tolien | 2026-01-04 12:45:04+00:00
> Hosting a website behind a NAT isn’t as trivial as it used to be, and for many it’s now impossible without IPv6.

The example I keep coming back to is multiplayer games like Mario Kart, where Nintendo tell you to put the Switch in the DMZ or forward a huge range of ports (1024-65535!) to it [1].

If you’ve got more than one Switch in the household, though, then I guess it sucks to be you.

1: https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Support/Troubleshooting/How-t...
by DELTA-X | 2026-01-04 12:45:06+00:00
Most AI discussions focus on improving answers.
This misses a more basic problem: knowing when an AI-assisted interaction should produce no answer at all.

In many systems (including RAG), correctness is outsourced to retrieval. That reduces hallucination, but it doesn’t define a stopping rule. The failure mode isn’t missing data — it’s continuing when the system should stop.

In other domains (edge security, request filtering), value comes from moving the decision boundary as early as possible: deciding that nothing else should happen.

This corpus explores non-decision by design, explicit stop conditions, and human decision sovereignty as first-class constraints.
by nikoletai | 2026-01-04 12:45:45+00:00
I built CharaX to solve the dataset bottleneck for character LoRAs: getting images that are clearly the same identity across angles/poses (to avoid “average face” drift).
You pick features → it generates a few candidates → you choose one → it exports a consistent 10-image multi-angle/pose pack (front/left/right/back + poses) for training. You could also upload your own chosen model and generate a consistent dataset from it.
If you try it, I’d love feedback on:
• does identity stay consistent across the grid (what drifted)?
• are any angles/poses missing?
• what export details would help (naming/captions/resolution)?
by wartywhoa23 | 2026-01-04 12:46:10+00:00
StackOverflow was immediately dead for me the day they declared that AI sellout of theirs.

Pathetic thieves, they won't even allow deleting my own answers after that. Not that it would make the models unlearn my data, of course, but I wanted to do so out of principle.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399619/our-partners...
by vardump | 2026-01-04 12:46:17+00:00
I think most played Protracker, XM, S3M, IT, etc. modules, not MIDI. They typically used very short samples, a style which was called a 'chiptune', songs that were made sound like they came from some eighties microcomputer.

More recently the definition of 'chiptune' shifted to specifically mean music from 8-bit sound chips.
by forgotpwd16 | 2026-01-04 12:46:45+00:00
>I thought Wayland was the latest and greatest, but folks here report issues and even refuse to ever use it.

>Windows and Mac Os, for all their faults, are unquestionably ready to use in 2026.

Quite ironically there're people refusing to leave Windows 7, which has been EOS since 2020, because they find modern Windows UI unbearable. Windows 11 being considered that bad that people are actually switching OSes due to it. Have seen similar comments about OSX/macOS.

The big difference between those and Linux is that Linux users have a choice to reject forced "upgrades" and build very personalized environments. If had to live with Wayland could do it really, even if there're issues, but since my current environment is fine don't really need/care to. And it's having a personalized environment such a change is a chore. If was using a comprehensive desktop environment like GNOME (as many people do), maybe wouldn't even understand something changed underneath.
by lproven | 2026-01-04 12:46:45+00:00
> There were a few other similar projects a few years back

Notably the Hello System, by Simon Peter, AKA probonopd.

I looked at that, too.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/31/hellosystem_08/

Probonopd is now involved with Gershwin and was quite active in its Github when I looked.
by noduerme | 2026-01-04 12:47:00+00:00
LOL. As a top 10% contributor on Stack Overflow, and on FlashKit before that, I can assure you that any real world value attached to that status was always imaginary, or at least highly overrated.

Mainly, it was good at making you feel useful and at honing your own craft - because providing answers forced you to think about other people's questions and problems as if they were little puzzles you could solve in a few minutes. Kept you sharp. It was like a game to play in your spare time. That was the reason to contribute, not the points.
by Helmut10001 | 2026-01-04 12:47:11+00:00
Yes, I meant China, Russia and the US with the "3 big world" powers and yes, I was referring to the war Ukraine. I am aware that the situation in Taiwan, Ukraine and Venezuela cannot be compared one-to-one. My categorization was not intended to suggest that these 'moves' are the same, nor to make any evaluation regarding good or bad. From the respective perspectives of the 3 world powers, they have been motivated by different interests.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-04 12:47:56+00:00
Yeah, when you draw arbitrary limits (30 years for you it seems), it's easy to paint one side as the better one. Once you start to think a bit bigger, you start to realize most big nations act as the others, and it's just different flavors of "bad", yet they're all as bad as the others.

What about segregation then, is that recent enough for you? Or that wasn't about culture/language, so that too isn't applicable? I'm afraid that with rose-tinted glasses, everything has an explanation why your favorite is different than their favorite.
by KaiserPro | 2026-01-04 12:48:01+00:00
I have changed my commenting style now, since the rise of LLMs.

I used to comment in a similar way to claude/chatgpt, as in both the what and why. (although the why in LLMs is often lost. ) I used to comment as if it was for someone who didn't know the libraries very well. (ie me in two years time. Documentation at the previous place was utterly shite, so it was effectively a journal of discovery)

However, my commenting style is both what and why. My variable names can be longer than my FANG peers, mainly because I know that English not being a first language means that half arsed abbreviations are difficult to parse.

But effort is placed on not using fancy features, python mostly, so avoiding lambdas and other "syntactic sugar", unless they absolutely make sense. If I do use them, i have a comment saying _why_ I'm doing it.

Some of my colleagues were dead against any kind of commenting. "my code should be readable enough without it". They had the luxury of working on one bit for a few months, then throwing it away.
by rayiner | 2026-01-04 12:48:11+00:00
What do you guys in Europe think “democracy” means? The current president ran on a platform of 20 all-CAPS sentences where the first point was “SEAL THE BORDER AND STOP THE MIGRANT INVASION.” https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform. He then won the Presidential popular vote and his party won the Congressional popular vote by 4 million points.

If you have ever been to Florida, this is completely unsurprising. I’m currently at a Disney World resort which has a 3 acre heated pool: https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/recreation/yacht-club-reso.... We probably needed to topple Venezuela just to keep it heated in January.

What do you think is not legitimately democratic about any of this?
by crote | 2026-01-04 12:48:42+00:00
VW was also bound by emission standards, yet Dieselgate still happened.

I would be very surprised if it didn't have some kind of "heavily-restricted debugging interface, only available to select VW engineers, which provides a limited set of fully anonymous vehicle diagnostic metrics" - which in practice is of course used to sell trivially deanonymizable data to anyone with a few bucks to spare.
by jchw | 2026-01-04 12:48:48+00:00
X11 as a protocol will probably continue to work ~forever.

X11 as a display server will continue to work ~forever as long as someone maintains a display server that targets Linux.

KDE and GNOME will not support X11 forever because it's too much work. Wayland promises to improve on many important desktop use cases where X.org continues to struggle and where the design of X11 has proven generally difficult to improve. The desktop systems targeting Linux want these improvements.

> "Because it's modern" and "Because it's outdated" just aren't compelling reasons for anyone besides software developers.

I can do you one better: that's also not really compelling to software developers either most of the time. I beg you to prove that the KDE developers pushed Wayland hard because they badly wanted to have to greatly refactor the aging and technical debt heavy KWin codebase, just for the hell of it. Absolutely not.

The Wayland switchover that is currently ongoing is entirely focused on end users, but it's focused on things they were never able to do well in X11, and it shows. This is the very reason why Wayland compositors did new things better before they handled old use cases at parity. The focus was on shortcomings of X11 based desktops.

> And "because we're going to drop support so you have to switch eventually" is an attitude I'd expect out of Apple, not Linux distributions.

Yeah. Except Apple is one of the five largest companies in the United States and GNOME and KDE are software lemonade stands. I bet if they could they would love to handle this switchover in a way that puts no stress on anyone, but as it is today it's literally not feasible to even find the problems that need to be solved without real users actually jumping on the system.

This isn't a thing where people are forcing you to switch to something you don't want under threat of violence. This is a thing where the desktop developers desperately want to move forward on issues, they collectively picked a way forward, and there is simply no bandwidth (or really, outside of people complaining online, actual interest) for indefinitely maintaining their now-legacy X11-based desktop sessions.

It actually would have been totally possible, with sufficient engineering, to go and improve things to make it maintainable longer term and to try to backport some more improvements from the Wayland world into X11; it in fact seems like some interested people are experimenting with these ideas now. On the other hand though, at this point it's mostly wishful thinking, and the only surefire thing is that Wayland is shipping across all form factors. This is no longer speculative, at this point.

If you really want to run X.org specifically, that will probably continue to work for a decently long time, but you can't force the entire ecosystem to all also choose to continue to support X.org anymore than anyone can force you to switch to Wayland.
by genuser | 2026-01-04 12:49:25+00:00
In a strategic move that disrupts the specialized gaming phone market. OnePlus has officially announced its new Turbo series, headlined by the OnePlus Turbo 6 and Turbo 6V. This isn’t a subtle entry, it’s a declaration of war, built around a single, staggering specification: a colossal 9,000 mAh battery. This power cell, nearly double the capacity of mainstream flagships like the anticipated Galaxy S25 Ultra or iPhone 16 Pro Max. Represents the most ambitious battery ever placed in a OnePlus device and serves as the core identity for a series designed to dominate endurance benchmarks. With a confirmed launch in China this January, the Turbo series signals OnePlus’s intent to capture. The hardcore mobile gamer and power user by trading sleek minimalism for unabashed, marathon-running stamina.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-04 12:50:25+00:00
Reunite is propaganda because it gives credibility to the lie that these two countries are and/or were one like for instance Germany after world war II.

Taiwanese do not see themselves as Chinese, just like Ukrainians do not see themselves as Russian even if they speak the language. By playing along you are effectively carrying water for the Chinese. That may be your goal, but then you should be clear about that. If that is not your goal you should refrain from adopting the language of the party that is clearly the aggressor here. The 'ROC' moniker stems from a bunch of Chinese that fled there in 1949 after they lost their struggle with the communists inside China. They ruled Taiwan and they named it 'Republic of China', a name that has caused a lot of confusion with those unfamiliar with where it came from.

This is the reason the Chinese now lay claim to Taiwan, and it is about as misguided as it gets. They got Hong Kong by being patient, they may take Taiwan by force.

If you are playing into their hands by parroting their terminology you are fractionally helping to normalize their behavior towards Taiwan. If it should come to pass that China will take Taiwan by force that will have grave consequences, for the Taiwanese, the Chinese and the rest of the world as well due to the central spot that Taiwan occupies in the global supply chain.
by bmacho | 2026-01-04 12:50:38+00:00
> Like, ok, its 2030 and X11 is dead, no one works on it anymore and 90% of Linux users use Wayland, what did they gain?

The more influence the better. And the less influence the worse. For example Canonical, too, tried to replace Linux Desktop stack with their own in house software and protocol Mir. That would've been just bad for RH. They also tried to replace pid1 with Upstart. (Not just in Ubuntu, but they have tried to push it into Debian. 3/6 of Debian tech committee members were Canonical employees when they voted (and they still failed lol).) They have failed, and both are RH technologies now. It is not just what they have gained, but what they haven't lost too.