MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cogman10 | 2026-02-07 21:05:28+00:00
For a solo dev, it's not difficult. C++ is nearly a superset of C. You don't have to adopt all of C++ to start using it and to get immediate benefits from it (for example, unique_ptr, shared_ptr, and vector would all be things that I think any C dev would really appreciate).

A reason I can think of to not move to C++ is that it is a vast language and, if you are working on a team, it can be easy for team members ultimately forcing the whole team to become an expert in C++ simply because they all will be familiar with a different set of C++ features.

But for a solo dev? No reason not to use it, IMO. It's got a much nicer standard library with a rich set of datastructures that just make it easier to write correct code even if you keep a C style for everything.
by noncentral | 2026-02-07 21:06:04+00:00
Most people explain LLM failures by saying we do not have enough data, not enough RL, not enough supervision, or not enough scale.
But these same problems continued through GPT3, GPT4, 4o, and now 5.
At some point it feels reasonable to ask whether we are even looking in the right direction.

I spent a few days thinking about this and kept coming back to a different way of framing the issue.

LLMs behave like observers that are stuck inside a space they cannot see.

If a system makes predictions without seeing its own internal state, without seeing the container it is operating in, and without any global reference for what is correct, then the same outcomes will always show up.
Hallucination.
Small inconsistencies.
Planning that falls apart after eight to twelve steps.
Long range drift.

The model is not making these mistakes because it is stupid.
It is doing this because the structure it lives inside forces these behaviors.

I call this idea Recursive Collapse Constraints, or RCC.
The point is not to replace architecture but to describe the limits of any architecture that is trapped inside a larger space.

If RCC is right, then a lot of current research is trying to patch the symptoms of a deeper mismatch that cannot be fixed by scaling alone.

I am interested in what people here think.
Are we spending too much time tuning artifacts of embedding instead of understanding the structure underneath it.
by catlifeonmars | 2026-02-07 21:06:22+00:00
Flying is a bad example because airlines are a thing and make flying relatively accessible.

I get your point, but I don’t think it really matters. If a cure for most (or all) cancers is known but it’s not accessible to most people then it is effectively nonexistent. E.g it will be like TB.

> We have treatments (cures) for TB

TB is still one of the top 10 causes of death globally.
by stego-tech | 2026-02-07 21:06:41+00:00
The free market is not some universal force of balance. It is a system of systems that is routinely influenced, disrupted, damaged, manipulated, and controlled overwhelmingly by a small cadre of wealth and asset-owners with disproportionate influence after a century of government policies against market intervention or regulation.

C'mon, be better than some "lol free market" quip.
by chasil | 2026-02-07 21:07:10+00:00
The Chinese built a much larger spherical telescope, so what was the point of rebuilding Arecibo?

I visited Arecibo a decade before it collapsed. It was impressive and of great historical value, but could repair be cost-effective?

Edit: It did have some unique features.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp...
by giancarlostoro | 2026-02-07 21:08:14+00:00
There's tooling out there 100% vibe coded, that is used by tens of thousands of devs daily, if that codebase found its way to training data, would it somehow ruin everything? I don't think this is really a problem, the problem will become people will need to identify good codebases from bad ones, if you point out which codes bad during training it makes a difference. There's a LOT of writings about how to write better code out there that I'm sure are already part of the training data.
by strange_quark | 2026-02-07 21:09:03+00:00
> Wait, you're completely skipping the emergence of reasoning models, though?

o1 was something like 16-18 months ago. o3 was kinda better, and GPT 5 was considered a flop because it was basically just o3 again.

I’ve used all the latest models in tools like Claude code and codex, and I guess I’m just not seeing the improvement? I’m not even working on anything particularly technically complex, but I still have to constantly babysit these things.

Where are the long-running tasks? Cursor’s browser that didn’t even compile? Claude’s C compiler that had gcc as an oracle and still performs worse than gcc without any optimizations? Yeah I’m completely unimpressed at this point given the promises these people have been making for years now. I’m not surprised that given enough constraints they can kinda sorta dump out some code that resembles something else in their training data.
by timonoko | 2026-02-07 21:09:07+00:00
Hey Gemini, can you describe the imperial bicycle tire sizes compared to ISO in concise and preferably comical way?

Trying to understand imperial bicycle tire sizing is like trying to learn a language where the grammar rules change based on how the speaker feels that morning. It’s a chaotic legacy of Victorian engineering and regional stubbornness.

Here is the breakdown of the "Imperial Nonsense" vs. the "ISO Sanity.... etc etc
by doublerabbit | 2026-02-07 21:09:23+00:00
I've been doing theory and really want to myself.

Time escapes me before I get a chance to type Hello World. Working in front of a screen eight hours a day leaves me exhausted that the least things I want to do is code more on my day off.

Although wanting to dive in to WASM has been a priority and checking Odin for wasm their 3D model example is super cool.

May just have to take a poke. TCL for web frontend; Erlang for DB and potentially Odin for wasm? This could be a cool mix.
by belter | 2026-02-07 21:09:24+00:00
Thank you. Your disclosure page is better than all other AI commentators as
most disclose nothing at all. You do disclose an OpenAI payment, Microsoft travel,
and the existence of preview relationships.

However I would argue there are significant gaps:

- You do not name your consulting clients. You admit to do ad-hoc consulting and training
for unnamed companies while writing daily about AI products.
Those client names are material information.

- You have non payments that have monetary value. Free API credits, and weeks of early preview access,
flights, hotels, dinners, and event invitations are all compensation.
Do you keep those credits?

- The "I have not accepted payments from LLM vendors" could mean
receiving things worth thousands of dollars. Please note I am not saying you did.

- You have a structural conflict. Your favorable coverage will mean preview access, then exclusive content then traffic, then sponsors, then consulting clients.

- You appeared in an OpenAI promotional video for GPT-5 and were paid for it. This is influencer marketing by any definition.

- Your quotes are used as third-party validation in press coverage of AI product launches. This is a PR function with commercial value to these companies.

The FTC revised Endorsement Guides explicitly apply to bloggers, not just social media influencers.
The FTC defines material connection to include not only cash payments but also free products,
early access to a product, event invitations, and appearing in promotional media
all of which would seem to apply here.

They also say in the FTC own "Disclosures 101" guide that states [2]: "...Disclosures are likely to be missed
if they appear only on an ABOUT ME or profile page, at the end of posts or videos, or
anywhere that requires a person to click MORE."

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/disclosures-...

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/plain-language/10...

I would argue an ecosystem of free access, preview privileges, promotional video appearances, API credits,
and undisclosed consulting does constitute a financial relationship that should be more transparently
disclosed than "I have not accepted payments from LLM vendors."
by levodelellis | 2026-02-07 21:09:36+00:00
I measured once and to my surprise templates aren't (directly) the reason for long compile times. It's function bodies in headers, and obviously templates are in headers and they call other templated functions/classes which explodes code generation and time. But if it's only a few lines and doesn't call other templated functions it's likely fine. I wrote about it here https://bolinlang.com/wheres-my-compile-time

After writing that, I wrote my own standard library (it has data structs like vector, hashmap and sets; slices, strings, rng, print, some io functions, and more) which uses a lot of templates, and it compiles in <200ms on both clang and gcc. Many standard library headers take much longer to compile than that. It's not a terrible idea to have your own standard lib if you need quick compile times.
by paulhebert | 2026-02-07 21:09:47+00:00
Sure, it’s complicated.

I worry that humanity has a track record of diving head first into new technologies without worrying about externalities like the environment or job displacement.

I wish we were more thoughtful and focused more on minimizing the downsides of new technologies.

Instead it seems we’re headed full steam towards huge amounts of energy use and job displacement. And the main bonus is rich people get richer.

I’m not sure if having software be cheaper is beneficial. Is it good for malware to be easier to produce? I’d personally choose higher quality software over more software.

I’m not convinced cheaper mass produced clothing has been a net positive. Will AI be a positive? Time will tell. In the short term there are some obvious negatives.
by 9rx | 2026-02-07 21:09:56+00:00
Searching "site:news.ycombinator.com go" on Google didn't yield any results that weren't about the Go programming language even after going several pages deep. What kind of search problems are you having, exactly?

And why is it unique to Go? I am sure there are comments on HN about metal oxidization, making sharp changes in direction, Norse gods, and letters of the alphabet.
by mpaepper | 2026-02-07 21:10:26+00:00
Yes and no I'd say.
It's still the case that now only by iterating and testing things with the AI you get closer to an actually good solution.
So up front big spec will also not work so well.
The only exception maybe if you already have a very clear understanding and existing tests (like what they did with the Claude's building the rust c compiler to compile the Linux kernel)
LicGen – Offline License Generator (CLI and Web UI)
by tejavvo | 2026-02-07 21:10:39+00:00
Built LicGen, a small CLI tool to generate software licenses straight from the terminal.
Works offline, supports common licenses, and uses simple template files so adding new ones is trivial.

Also made a static web UI that previews licenses and the exact CLI command it’ll run.

CLI does txt / md / json, interactive or fully scriptable, and has permission/condition tables like choosealicense -- ALL offline and has a web UI :).

Do check it out and give me some advice!

Site: https://tejavvo.github.io/licgen/
Repo: https://github.com/tejavvo/licgen
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2026-02-07 21:11:03+00:00
I want to write general apps in C. Such as a raster image editor. I have some idea and C has exactly the right mix of simplicity and flexibility that I need. C is a constructor, and as a constructor it places few limits on what you can do. Other environments are way more rigid. E. g. I find Python way too rigid compared to C.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-07 21:11:05+00:00
I too am working on my out of the country back up plan. My wife and I are going to one of those countries for 5 weeks in a couple of weeks. We have already looked into residency requirements as a Plan B.

I am just starting to get a peek under the cover for sales. If I understand it correctly.

- “Someone” is hustling to make first contact with the customer or if you are a partner of one of the cloud providers, they send customers your way. I have no clue how this part works.

- The SA talks to the potential client enough to get high level business requirements to shape the contract. I’m not an SA. But there is a certain AWS speciality where I’m usually pulled in at this phase. We are trying to build expertise around this specialty. My former mentee is an SA at AWS so I know how they operate.

- After the contract is designed, I work with sales to understand the opportunity and I am the first person that does a deep requirement analysis - the business case is known, the technical requirements are ambiguous. I am responsible for getting the requirements and doing the design, talking to the technical guys, finance, security and the business folks to make sure their needs are met.

- then I lead the project, before AI, I would have needed a couple of people on the project. Now I can do it myself most of the time. It was never lack of knowledge, there are only so much I can do myself.

To your second question, the last 2016-2024 when I set on this path is a lot different than it is now.

I guess the best way is to work backwards from where you want to be to where you are.

1. How often do you know the business requirements in advance compared to how often are they given to you?

2. The money and the opportunities are in leading migrations. There are very few decent paying hands on keyboard “doers” those are easy to outsource. I lucked up that I got my job in a division that does care about “developers who know cloud and can lead implementations”

3. How are your project management skills? The ugly truth is PMs are useless when it comes to tech projects, you are the one that has to have the proper context to know dependencies, how to break things down, critical paths, etc.

4. Have you led implementations larger than what you can do yourself? Hands on keyboard folks are a dime a dozen and companies can pay them a fifth of what they pay you.

5. How are your presentation and communication skills? Can you explain what you did to someone non technical but knows their business, sonríe who understands technology but not what you did and someone who knows the technology and wants to know why you made the decisions you made?

6. Do you have experience juggling conflicting stakeholder agreements

7. How is both your small talk and business speak - “adding on to what Becky said”, “finding alignment”, “a single pane of glass”, “taking things to the parking lot”, “we aren’t solutioning yet, let’s talk about your business opportunities and challenges “?
by AIorNot | 2026-02-07 21:11:13+00:00
I hate to be harsh but this mentality is part of the decline of this country

(that is so evident with loss of manufacturing, open and free science and tech robber barons oligarchs that have taken over our national discourse)

Brookhaven was instrumental to Nobel winning discoveries and Stony Brook was a great science minded university

I’m not opposed to investing in AI but its not a zero sum game and we are not a country of data centers alone
by neilv | 2026-02-07 21:11:21+00:00
I'm happy for Guile to be getting more attention, but wouldn't write off Racket. A few quick thoughts...

* The recent Guile work on WASM is promising. (Note also Jens Axel Soegaard's recent work on WASM with a Racket-related compiler.)

* Racket's rehosting atop Chez seems like a good idea, and I'd guess that the Racket internals are now easier to work with than Guile's.

* Racket has done a lot of great work, and is a nice platform for people who can choose their tools without worrying about employability keywords for their resume. It made some missteps for broader adoption when it had a chance, and several of the most prominent industry practitioner contributors left.

* Racket still has the best metaprogramming facilities, AFAIK. But even more important than `syntax-parse` and `#lang`, one thing I'd really like from Guile and other Schemes is to support Racket's module system.

(I really like the ability to define Racket submodules inline, in fragments, for things like embedded unit tests <https://docs.racket-lang.org/overeasy/> and embedded API docs <https://docs.racket-lang.org/mcfly/>.)

(I also wanted to play with Racket's module system for PL research compilers: having early compiler implementation for a new language first expand into Scheme code, and then later (with submodules) also do native/VM code generation, while keeping the option to still expand to Scheme code (for better development tools, or for when changing the language). For example, imagine targeting a microcontroller or a GPU.)

* Right now, any Scheme is for people who don't have to do techbro/brogrammer interviews. The field has been in a bad place for awhile, professionalism-wise, and the troubled economy (and post-ZIRP disruption of the familiar VC growth investment scams) and the push to "AI" robo-plagiarism (albeit with attendant new investment scams) are suddenly making the field worse for ICs.
by whizzter | 2026-02-07 21:11:53+00:00
You don't usually do C++ subsets if you want the full shebang.

I have a "mini-std" headerfile that's about 500 LoC implementing lightweight variants of std::vector, std::function, a stack-local std::function (unsafe as hell and useful as hell to avoid allocations), a shared-ptr, qsort and some other nifty stuff.

That does a lot of things, but even then I use other patterns that brings a lot of bang for the buck without having to go full C (hint: the stack-local function equivalent gets a lot of mileage).
by stopbulying | 2026-02-07 21:12:41+00:00
Where is our moral outrage at the infidelity lies of the current executive?

Mr Trump's relationship with Mr Epstein apparently extended far beyond when Mr Trump told the American people he cut it off with ~Ballstein~ (Zoolander) Epstein.

Do some public and civil servants still see this as more than a cucking humiliation s show?

IMHO that immature need specifically would be distracting and saboteurially counterproductive in an acting or actual.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-02-07 21:12:57+00:00
I used to use 3270-based stuff at IBM back in the mid-2000s, when I did tech support for their EPOS systems.

They had some hyper janky Windows XP Citrix client that ran 3270 terminals that kind of half-worked on some server somewhere, that then talked to the Big Iron. When it didn't work (it frequently didn't) it meant we got a lot of coffee breaks, so not the worst in the world.
by dang | 2026-02-07 21:12:57+00:00
Related ongoing thread (currently on the frontpage):

Software factories and the agentic moment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46924426.

Edit: I think it makes sense to merge the threads and link to simonw's commentary from the toptext. That way we can have one discussion that includes both inputs (the original post and the commentary).
by bunderbunder | 2026-02-07 21:13:07+00:00
Yes. I have seen the better product lose out to network effects far too many times to believe that a real mass market competitor can happen nowadays.

Look at how even the Posix ecosystem - once a vibrant cluster of a dozen different commercial and open source operating systems built around a shared open standard - has more or less collapsed into an ironclad monopoly because LXC became a killer app in every sense of the term. It’s even starting to encroach on the last standing non-POSIX operating system, Windows, which now needs the ability to run Linux in a tightly integrated virtual machine to be viable for many commercial uses.
by rayboy1995 | 2026-02-07 21:13:40+00:00
I am the dev of Pocket Squadron (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bombsight....) and a few years ago I tried to make a build for iOS due to many player requests. I did not have a mac so I setup a mac VM and a dev account to start making builds and see how big of a lift it would be. My account was banned unfortunately. Still no iOS build to this day, I'm probably missing out on a good bit of money.
by guerrilla | 2026-02-07 21:13:52+00:00
As a hardcore C programmer and zealot myself... How in the hell can you be productive like that? C is a systems programming language, not an application programming language, let alone relevant to the levels of abstraction you'd want in game development.

That said, "I am dead" is a very real video game indeed... and his arguments are very sound. I also can't stand C++. I disagree with him on Java though. The core language of Java is actually super simple, like C.
by clutter55561 | 2026-02-07 21:14:16+00:00
Many have mentioned woodworking as an analogy from a personal perspective, but for me the important perspective is that of consumers.

Sure, if you have the money, get a carpenter to build your kitchen from solid oak. Most people buy MDF, or even worse, chipboard. IKEA, etc. In fact, not too long ago, I had a carpenter install prefabricated cabinets in a new utility room. The cabinets were pre-assembled, and he installed them on the wall in the right order and did the detailed fittings. He didn’t do a great job, and I could have done better, albeit much slower. I use handsaws simply because I’m afraid of circular saws, but I digress.

A lot of us here are like carpenters before IKEA and prefabricated cabinets, and we are just now facing a new reality. We scream “it is not the same”. It indeed isn’t for us. But the consumers will get better value for money. Not quality, necessarily, but better value.

How about us? We will eventually be kitchen designers (aka engineers, architects), or kitchen installers (aka programmers). And yes, compared to the golden years, those jobs will suck.

But someone, somewhere, will be making bespoke, luxury furniture that only a few can afford. Or maybe we will keep doing it anyway because our daily jobs suck, until we decide to stop. And that is when the craft will die.

The world will just become less technical, as is the case with other industrial goods. Who here even knows how a combustion engine works? Who knows how fabric is made, or even how a sawing machine works? We are very much like the mechanics of yesteryear before cars became iPads on wheels.

As much as we hate it, we need to accept that coding has peaked. Juniors will be replaced by AI, experts will retire. Innovation will be replaced by processes. And we must accept our place in history.
by rishabhaiover | 2026-02-07 21:14:18+00:00
> "must collect an extra $650 billion in revenue every year"
paired with the idea that automating knowledge work can cause a short-term disruption in the economy doesn't seem logical to me.

I find it funny that Microsoft is scaling compute like crazy and their own products like Copilot are being dwarfed by the very models they wish to serve on that compute.
by Nevermark | 2026-02-07 21:14:40+00:00
I agree. I also think we have only hit the surface of model efficiencies.

Apple's M3 Ultra with RAM up to 512GB shared directly across CPU/GPU/NPUs is a great example of an architecture already optimized for local models. I expect Apple will start offering larger RAM sizes for other form factors too.

And prices for RAM will drop eventually, because of the extreme demand for RAM with higher densities.