MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by frm88 | 2026-01-05 07:26:46+00:00
In fact, for each 1 percentage point increase in MT usage, translator employment growth dropped by approximately 0.7 percentage points. Cumulatively, this effect translates into an estimated loss of about 28,000 new translator positions that might otherwise have been created over the 2010–2023 period.

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/lost-translation-ais-impact-t...
by kmoser | 2026-01-05 07:26:56+00:00
> I don't necessarily disagree with providing context, but my concern is that comments eventually lie. If the business rule evolves (say the window moves to 5 days) the comment becomes a liability the moment someone updates the code but forgets the prose.

Yes, comments can drift out of sync with the code. That doesn't mean the comments were a bad idea; it just means the programmer didn't update the comments when they should have.

Similarly, even with zero comments, variable names can drift out of sync with their intended purpose, e.g. when they are repurposed to hold values that are different from what their name implies. Again, the solution is to rename the variable so it reflects its purpose (or possibly create another variable).

> This way, the 3 day rule is a hard requirement that fails the build if broken rather than a suggestion in a comment block.

What happens when a dev changes the test code, but fails to update the string "should_match_debit_with_credit_only_if_within_three_day_settlement_window"? That's effectively no different than comments being out of sync with the code.
by anigbrowl | 2026-01-05 07:28:05+00:00
No projection going on here, the modern conservative movement is a paragon of unselfish sincerity, as exemplified by the national administration. It may look like they're up to their absolute eyeballs in corruption and double dealing, but just ask them and they'll tell you they're the most honest folk to ever walk the earth, or indeed any other planet.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-05 07:28:14+00:00
I wouldn't be so sure of that consensus, given that C# and Python exist and are generally well-regarded by their users. Clearly there are varying degrees to it, and taking the idea to its logical extreme is not by necessity going to produce the best result, but there's certainly merit to the idea of code that can be read more naturally.

And I think that is really the point of syntax sugar: reading code, not writing code. It seems like a misconception about syntax sugar is that its primary purpose is to make code easier for beginners to learn to write. But I would contend that the real purpose is to make code easier for even experienced programmers to read at a glance, because reading code is actually far more important than writing it.

...granted a certain subsection of the population has determined that reading code is for chumps and boast about how quickly they can use a tool to write lines of code they haven't even read, and that this is the future of software development. Despite their boasts I have yet to see any software I would actually want to use that was written in this manner, though.
by kazinator | 2026-01-05 07:28:31+00:00
> ] Before running inside to her irritated mother, the girl threw the ball.

> ] The girl threw the ball. Then she went inside. Her mother sounded irritated.

> Is the second so much easier to read?

The second one is semantically different. In the first sentence, it is pervasive information, from an omnipresent narrator who can peer into the minds of characters, that the mother is irritated.

In the second sequence, the mother sounds irritated: the narrative voice doesn't look inside the mind, but only reports on the external evidence.

In the first sentence, the girl doesn't just go inside; we know that she runs. She also runs to her mother. In the second sequence, she goes inside, not necessarily to her mother.

There is a sense in the first sentence that the girl might know that her mother is irritated before running inside.

There is a sense in the second sequence that the girl learns, together with the reader, that her mother is irritated, only after going inside.
by marc_g | 2026-01-05 07:28:37+00:00
These are beautiful. As someone who has 3 small dots on my back from stick and poke, this must’ve been a seriously enduring endeavour. And for them to be so intricate and somehow so modern, it really boggles the mind.

Interesting that the gryphon is present here, wasn’t aware it was part of the mythology of Siberia 2000 years ago.
by rcarmo | 2026-01-05 07:28:42+00:00
Ha. Well, https://taoofmac.com was ported to Hy (https://github.com/rcarmo/sushy) in a week, then I eventually rewrote that in plain Python to do the current static site generator —- so I completely get it.

I am now slowly rebuilding it in TypeScript/Bun and still finding a lot of LISP-isms, so it’s been a fun exercise and a reminder that we still don’t have a nice, fast, batteries-included LISP able to do HTML/XML transforms neatly (I tried Fennel, Julia, etc., and even added Markdown support to Joker over the years, but none of them felt quite right, and Babashka carries too much baggage).

If anyone knows about a good lightweight LISP/Scheme dialect that has baked in SQLite and HTML parsing support, can compile to native code and isn’t on https://taoofmac.com/space/dev/lisp, I’d love to know.
by kleiba | 2026-01-05 07:29:19+00:00
Unfortunately, I've been to many coffee shops where the coffee tasted much worse than what a modern fully automated machine can produce.

And perhaps you have to be more nuanced - when TV's first hit the market, a wide-spread concern among film-makers was that it would kill movie theaters. The fear was that people would now only watch movies in the comfort of their homes. That didn't happen back then, but it pretty much did with the combination of big, flat-screen TVs and streaming services.
by wesammikhail | 2026-01-05 07:29:20+00:00
> I have to assume you have never written a large scale project for the web?

Can I ask, what classifies as large scale project for the web?

I previously created and exited a trading platform that did billions in transactions via our servers with thousands of users streaming real time data. It's certainly more complicated and "larger" than 99.9% of things you'll ever do. So does that qualify?

If so, I can tell you that I did it with PHP and no JS frameworks. Hosted on a couple of VPS servers from digital ocean. From idea to execution to exit in ~9 months.

You know what the weird part is? I see your take repeated over and over by "shovel peddlers" and grifters. And every single time it comes with 0 substance or merit.
by willtemperley | 2026-01-05 07:29:28+00:00
> You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more.

Yes. That used to require difficult decision making: “Can I do this and how long will it take?” was a significant cognitive load and source of stress. This was especially true when it became clear something was going to take days not hours, having expended a lot of effort already.

Even more frustrating was having to implement hacks due to time constraints when I knew a couple more hours would obviate that need.

Now I know within a couple of minutes if something is feasible or not and decision fatigue is much lower.
by j16sdiz | 2026-01-05 07:29:39+00:00
> The frustration, for Hamkins, goes beyond mere incorrectness—it’s the nature of the interaction itself that proves problematic.

I would assume pairing LLMs with a formal proof system would help a lot. At the very least, the system can know what is incorrect, without lengthy debates, which frustrate him most.

This won't help the system discover or solve new math, but it make the experience far more endurable.
by heddycrow | 2026-01-05 07:30:44+00:00
I like where you are going with this and love that you dropped Zen here. Permit me to riff/add color, please.

Zen tries to draw a distinction between mental models with an object/subject separation and alternatives.

There are sane and insane reasons why we might adopt one or the other model.

An object/subject thinker might obsess over status symbols, but also the frame itself can lead to discomfort over using the "wrong" part.

Witness something like this in buy/build discussions where cargo-cult thinking plays a bigger part than rational thought. This probably goes well beyond object/subject thinking.

The status symbol thing can be more than posturing for prosperity. Some people get their identity tangled up in brand separate from social concerns.

I talk with LLM's about this sort of thing quite a bit more than I talk with humans. I get irritated when LLM refuses to allow for shorthand language. I hope I don't come across like that.

I agree with what I read as the sentiment from your last line, there's something that can be unsettling about objects carrying more than their intrinsic value.
by tristenharr | 2026-01-05 07:31:09+00:00
Oh, I'm glad this got picked up! I posted it on New Years day and wasn't sure if it was going to be!

As a bit of background on myself and my goals/targets with this.

I started my career as an embedded software developer writing uCos-III for an RTOS working on medical devices for Cardinal Health where I primarily worked on enteral feeding pumps. From there, I spent a couple years in fintech, before trying my hand at my first startup where I co-founded a company in the quick commerce space. (Think similar to Doordash Dashmarts). When that fell apart I took a job at Hasura where I wrote GraphQL to SQL transpilers and other neat things for about 18 months. I've worked across a few different domains and the motivation behind writing this language is that I am preparing to teach my 13 year old brother how to code and wanted something I could get low level with him on, without losing him altogether.

This is a dual-purpose language and has a dual-AST, and the things I'm currently working on... having switched gears towards spending a couple days on the Logical side of things are adding an actual prover to the Logical AST. I'm getting ready to add a derivation tree struct and incorporate the ability to use a solver to do things like Modus Ponens, Universal Instantiation, etc. I also want to upgrade the engine to be able to reason about numbers and recursion similar to Lean with inductive types.

This is an early access product, it is free for students, educators, non-profits, orgs with < 25 people, and individuals.

It would make my day if I could get some rigorous HN style discussions, and even the critiques!! The feedback and discussions are invaluable and will help shape the direction of this effort.

What a lovely surprise doing my daily HN check before bed and seeing this post. :)

EDIT: I will read and respond to comments when I get up in the morning, feel free to ask questions! Or make suggestions.
by crote | 2026-01-05 07:31:48+00:00
So why did the Blue Team lose the Millennium Challenge? Where were its destroyer-equivalents? Were they deliberately excluded from a massive $250M free-play wargame for operational reasons? If so, why wasn't Ripper explicitly told that this type of attack was out of scope?

Ripper's tactics probably did have a perfect destroyer-equivalent counter. The entire question is: why didn't the Blue Team bring it? You can't declare yourself victorious because a counter to their counter theoretically exists - you have to actually preemptively include it in your forces!
by mlindner | 2026-01-05 07:31:50+00:00
> All the best to you and your family and friends. For what it’s worth (not much I’m sure) many of us didn’t vote for this and are aghast.

This white knighting is getting rather tiresome. Why does the _why_ of why it happened matter besides virtue signalling? What matters is the end effect of the action. And the end effect here is better for EVERYONE (or at the worst neutral) involved other than Maduro and his cronies.
Show HN: llmnop – Rust CLI for benchmarking LLM endpoints
by jpreagan | 2026-01-05 07:32:13+00:00
I built this because I needed to benchmark LLM inference endpoints and the existing tools required Python environments. I wanted a single binary I could grab quickly on any server.

I've also become interested in performance metrics like time to first token, inter-token latency, throughput, and wanted a tool focused on just that.

llmnop is written in Rust and was initially modeled after LLMPerf, which was archived last month. LLMPerf predates reasoning models and doesn't handle them correctly.

This release adds support for reasoning models like DeepSeek-R1, Qwen3, and gpt-oss. It now separates reasoning tokens from output tokens so your metrics actually mean something.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44565477
by rincebrain | 2026-01-05 07:32:36+00:00
A lot of places in the US are not, in my experience, that intelligent about hiring people.

Or, say rather, the externalities of the cost of hiring are not imposed on the people choosing to fire, directly, so they can say they "improved efficiency" by firing someone, and then the people trying to find reliable labor do not experience any improvement that might have been available by migrating the person.
by BeetleB | 2026-01-05 07:32:37+00:00
You're not wrong. You're just missing the thing people are complaining about: The existence of people who succeed in pushing for inferior solutions, and managing to leave before it becomes clear (which can take years in a large company).

My previous company is in a bad position and many such folks are finally being outed. But it takes lots and lots of screwing up before the fat is trimmed.
by inkyoto | 2026-01-05 07:33:09+00:00
I do not share the view that the unification of RAM and disk requires or entails linear regions of memory. In fact, the unification reduces the question of «do I have a contiguous block of size N to do X» to a mere «do I have enough memory to do X?», commits and rollbacks inclusive.

The issue of durability, however, remains a valid concern in either scenario, but the responsibility to ensure durability is delegated to the hardware.

Futhermore, commits and rollbacks are not sensitive to the memory linearity anyway; they are sensitive to durability of the operation, and they may be sensitive to the latency, although it is not a frequently occurring constraint. In the absence of a physical disk, commits/rollbacks can be implemented using the software transactional memory (STM) entirely in RAM and today – see the relevant Haskell library and the white paper on STM.

Lastly, when everything is an object in the system, the way the objects communicate with each other also changes from the traditional model to message passing, transactional outboxes, and similar, where the objects encapsulate the internal state without allowing other objects to access it – courtesy of the object-oriented address space protection, which is what the conversation initially started from.
by lenkite | 2026-01-05 07:33:57+00:00
You have to fix your problems yourself. I say this as a citizen of a nation in South-East Asia. Do not depend or cheer external actors like the U.S. to solve internal issues - they will only use and throw you away. The U.S. is also a nation whose political culture respects only strength - they hold absolute contempt for soft, weak/poor and divided nations. A home-grown dictator is better than a foreign one promising "democracy". It is one of the reasons that the U.S. regularly takes leadership out - they would like nations in their sphere to remain weak, poor and/or fully economically dependent.

You can look forward to U.S. oil companies doing free looting now. Sure, the "trickle down" effect will make some Venezuelan's prosperous but you have effectively given up the resources of your nation and chosen to become subservient slaves. And U.S. billionaires will become even richer.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-05 07:34:32+00:00
Those source do not say what you have been writing all along. Those sources make it plain that this is a controversial and complicated subject that you wish to flatten into a much simpler worldview. But that worldview is at odds with the facts, both the facts on the ground and the view of the parties involved.

You can continue to stick to your worldview, or you can admit that maybe the matter is more complex than you thought it was. The point is that there are multiple viewpoints on this and yours is not necessarily the only one and given that you claim not to have a horse in the race it is strange that you would end up carrying water for one of the parties.

Agreeing to disagree is a thing too, you're perfectly entitled to your own take on this no matter how wrong I think it is. But you are not entitled to your own facts and if you really believe this to be an uncontroversial thing then I don't think I can help you with that.
by defrost | 2026-01-05 07:34:35+00:00
Watch what people do rather than listen to what they say.

Marcus Aurelius likely quipped about pompous resorts during one of his many four day public holiday visits to Alsium (a pompous seaside resort town), although he was known to write at length about the work he did on holidays rather than the time he spent on the beach.

As for retirement .. not a thing for Marcus. He died* age 58 in his military quarters while on active tour of Roman provinces (in either Austria or Serbia apparently).

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxDHv9Ktb78
by inferiorhuman | 2026-01-05 07:34:46+00:00
To my continual personal frustration.

That's not the fault of Opus 4.5 because like all AI nonsense it's still not worth the cost. The privacy given up by having to authenticate with services like Github that used to be publicly available before getting constantly DDoSed by AI bots. The reliability and freedom that evaporated into the ether as folks run to the shelter of Cloudflare to mitigate the endless DDoS attacks at the hands of AI data scrapers. The emotional and social development stunted by having AI chatbots pretend to be a significant other and only say what folks want to hear. Whether Opus "can" code is immaterial.
by sielakis | 2026-01-05 07:35:49+00:00
The thing is, it still feels like a mixed bag for me.

It's good enough for things I can define well and write okay code for.

But it is far from perfect.

It does too much, like any LLM. For example, I had some test cases for deleted methods, and I was being lazy and didn't want to read a huge test file, so I asked it to fix it.

It did. Tests were green because it mocked non-existing methods, while it should have just deleted the test cases as they were no longer needed.

Luckily, I read the code it produced.

The same thing happened with a bit of decorators I asked it to write in Python. It produced working code, tests were fine, but I reworked the code manually to 1/10 of the size proposed by Opus.

It seems magical, even thinking, but like all LLMs, it is not. It is just a trap.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-05 07:35:53+00:00
> “I’ve played around with it and I’ve tried experimenting, but I haven’t found it helpful at all. Basically zero. It’s not helpful to me. And I’ve used various systems and so on, the paid models and so on.”

Eh... I don't know. It's hard for me to believe such absolutist takes. Especially since other proeminent mathematicians (i.e. Tao) have spoken highly of the help and value they get from these systems.

I also see this kind of takes in my field. Especially from "senior" people, 20+ years of experience. The problem is that, when pressed, their "trying it out" is often the most basic, naive, technically atrocious type of testing. "I tried coding with it but it's useless" -> they tried once, 3 years ago, in a chatgpt web interface, and never touched it since.

I think there's a lot of disconnect between the overhypers and deniers. Both are wrong, IMO, and unfortunately both are extremely vocal while also being stubborn and unwilling to try different things. But my gut feeling is that if in 2025/26 someone says "basically zero" they are wrong. Or naive. Or make strawman arguments. And ignorable.
by Lio | 2026-01-05 07:36:07+00:00
Thinking back to my time as a contractor, this makes me wary.

In the UK at least, you would need to be careful that by allowing people to waste your time (and them paying for it) you would be breaking the dreaded IR35 tax rules by appearing as a “disguised employee”.

HMRC won’t tell you the exact rules but one of big tests is do you retain control of your time or not.

You need to be upfront with clients about what they are paying for or you could both be in for a nasty surprise.
by anhner | 2026-01-05 07:36:22+00:00
I appreciate your reply. A lot of people just say how wonderful and revolutionary LLMs are, but when asked for more concrete stuff they give vague answers or even worse, berate you for being skeptical/accuse you of being a luddite.

Your list gives me a starting point and I'm sure it can even be expanded. I do use LLMs the way you suggested and find them pretty useful most of the time - in chat mode. However, when using them in "agent mode" I find them far less useful.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-05 07:37:03+00:00
Varies a lot on your job or family situation. As expected, minimum wages jobs can have the most abusive behaviors in terms of respecting your time.

And of course,culture.30 years ago, if your kid got hurt you wouldn't be considered an ignorant parent if the school took an hour to get a hold of you on a phone. They may even call your work and have that relayed over to you. Now, good luck even having the chance to speak to a human that can receive the message, let alone relay the message to the right branch and team to you.
by tordrt | 2026-01-05 07:37:45+00:00
What? The whole Promoting European Greatness section is obviously an attack on the EU. They want to break it up.

It states the goal is to help Europe operate as a "group of aligned sovereign nations" rather than a unified political or economic entity.

It explicitly calls for "cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations."

It claims that the EU and other "transnational bodies" are responsible for a "stark prospect of civilizational erasure."

It attacks the EU’s regulatory framework, calling it "economic suicide" and "stifling regulation". Suggesting that the U.S. will prioritize trade and technology sharing with "aligned countries" that reject these EU standards, creating economic incentives for member states to break away from EU-wide rules.

It emphasizes building up "the healthy nations of central, eastern, and southern Europe"—specifically those that "want to restore their former greatness"
by SkiFire13 | 2026-01-05 07:37:56+00:00
> Then I thought: how hard is it to write this C++ static analyzer? Conceptually, I think it’s not hard. It requires going through the AST. And since the static analysis is mostly statically scoped, it doesn’t require heavy cross-file analysis.

How do you handle function lifetimes then? Those are generally non-local to infer, and Rust requires annotating functions with informations for that. I tried taking a look at the mako db's refactor but I didn't see any lifetime annotation being added there.
by raikouwithboobs | 2026-01-05 07:37:59+00:00
Plus, one thing that the article misses, or rather, casually omits, is that some people want a customized base fig. They'll still put the time, the effort, the whole shebang. But they want to do it on something that is different on a foundational level from what's for sale on official channels.

Such as, I dunno. A proxy that looks like a...

Either way, no, I don't take Resin Printers as a market disruption either. But I have a rather more positive take on them: They probably grow the market itself. Because there are more people getting into the hobby. Well, that and stuff like 10th edition probably helps a bunch.