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Tiny C Compiler

https://bellard.org/tcc/
51•guerrilla•1h ago•20 comments

You Are Here

https://brooker.co.za/blog/2026/02/07/you-are-here.html
36•mltvc•1h ago•31 comments

SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes

https://xorvoid.com/sectorc.html
148•valyala•5h ago•25 comments

The F Word

http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/02/friction.html
76•zdw•3d ago•31 comments

Brookhaven Lab's RHIC concludes 25-year run with final collisions

https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/brookhaven-labs-rhic-concludes-25-year-run-with-final-collis...
36•gnufx•4h ago•39 comments

Speed up responses with fast mode

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/fast-mode
82•surprisetalk•5h ago•89 comments

LLMs as the new high level language

https://federicopereiro.com/llm-high/
19•swah•4d ago•12 comments

Software factories and the agentic moment

https://factory.strongdm.ai/
118•mellosouls•8h ago•231 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
156•AlexeyBrin•11h ago•28 comments

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
864•klaussilveira•1d ago•264 comments

GitBlack: Tracing America's Foundation

https://gitblack.vercel.app/
17•martialg•49m ago•3 comments

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

https://susam.net/twenty-five-years-of-computing.html
113•vinhnx•8h ago•14 comments

FDA intends to take action against non-FDA-approved GLP-1 drugs

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-intends-take-action-against-non-fda-appro...
28•randycupertino•57m ago•29 comments

Show HN: A luma dependent chroma compression algorithm (image compression)

https://www.bitsnbites.eu/a-spatial-domain-variable-block-size-luma-dependent-chroma-compression-...
21•mbitsnbites•3d ago•1 comments

Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and working with Disney

https://spillhistorie.no/2026/02/06/interview-with-sierra-veteran-al-lowe/
73•thelok•7h ago•13 comments

First Proof

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05192
74•samasblack•7h ago•57 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
253•jesperordrup•15h ago•82 comments

I write games in C (yes, C) (2016)

https://jonathanwhiting.com/writing/blog/games_in_c/
156•valyala•5h ago•135 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
532•theblazehen•3d ago•197 comments

Italy Railways Sabotaged

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czr4rx04xjpo
67•vedantnair•1h ago•53 comments

Show HN: I saw this cool navigation reveal, so I made a simple HTML+CSS version

https://github.com/Momciloo/fun-with-clip-path
38•momciloo•5h ago•5 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://rlhfbook.com/
98•onurkanbkrc•10h ago•5 comments

Selection rather than prediction

https://voratiq.com/blog/selection-rather-than-prediction/
19•languid-photic•3d ago•5 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
212•1vuio0pswjnm7•12h ago•320 comments

72M Points of Interest

https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-places-pois.html
42•marklit•5d ago•6 comments

A Fresh Look at IBM 3270 Information Display System

https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/a-fresh-look-at-ibm-3270-information-display-system
52•rbanffy•4d ago•14 comments

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
273•alainrk•10h ago•452 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
129•videotopia•4d ago•40 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
648•nar001•9h ago•284 comments

Show HN: Kappal – CLI to Run Docker Compose YML on Kubernetes for Local Dev

https://github.com/sandys/kappal
41•sandGorgon•2d ago•17 comments
Open in hackernews

Agents turn simple keyword search into compelling search experiences

https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/09/22/reasoning-agents-need-bad-search
67•softwaredoug•4mo ago

Comments

OhMeadhbh•4mo ago
These people really mis-understand how people like me use search. I don't want "an experience," I want a list of documents that match the search specifier.
softwaredoug•4mo ago
Author here, well specifically I'm using "experiences" to mean basically ranking / finding relevant results.
soco•4mo ago
Wouldn't the "dumb API search" be already enough for users? I'm not sure my decades experience as Google search user has improved once they leaned heavy on the ranking and adding "relevant" things...
janalsncm•4mo ago
> once they leaned heavy on the ranking

Not sure what you mean here. Google started with PageRank which is a decent, albeit gamable, ranking algorithm. They’ve never not been leaning heavy on ranking.

Mid 2010s, Google began supporting conversational (non keyword) searches. This is because a good number of queries are difficult to reduce to keywords. But it is an inherently harder problem. And at the same time, the open web enahittified itself, filling up with SEOed blogspam. And a lot of user generated content moved into walled gardens.

hulitu•4mo ago
> Wouldn't the "dumb API search" be already enough for users?

This has been deprecated a long time ago (10 years ?). It hurts (ad) sells.

nottorp•4mo ago
Well, at least you didn't use 'engagement'.

Edit: oops, you used it in another comment on here.

hulitu•4mo ago
You mean hiding relevant results. Not only that today's search engine gives you mostly crap, they also insert "results" which have no relation whatsoever with your search term.
awlejrlakwejr•4mo ago
Absolutely. We need separate interfaces for work and play.
OhMeadhbh•4mo ago
You might be onto something here. What we've lost I notice mostly when working. When I search for "Bizarre undocumented compile error B7102343. Rebooting Universe." I really want to see ONLY those pages that have these keywords. But when I'm trying to find a list of DMV offices near me, I want the "search" engine to interpret my question "where are DMV offices near me?"

Maybe it is two different products: index search and fuzzy search?

gus_massa•4mo ago
I agree, I agree, I search in Google, but Gemini is quite good and most of the times the answer is correct or close enough to save a lot of my time.
inetknght•4mo ago
> I search in Google

What I understand you to mean is: you ask Google to give you the most-advertised product and hope that it's what's best for you.

gus_massa•4mo ago
I skip the "sponsored" links at the top. For programming questions it used to link to the most relevant Stack Overflow question and the exact doc of that language (that many times are difficult to navigate). It autocorrected typos and used synonyms like "pause" -> "sleep".
krageon•4mo ago
It isn't like the sponsored links are the only paid-for high listing in your results, SEO is a thing that exists and has nothing to do with quality. Just money and time.
hulitu•4mo ago
Most of those people substituted their intelligence with AI.
dsr_•4mo ago
"Agents, however, come with the ability to reason."

Citations needed. Calling recursive bullshit reason does not make it so.

softwaredoug•4mo ago
Well call it what you want, I'm referring to the reasoning functionality of GPT-5, Claude, etc. It seems to work pretty well at this task. These tools prefer grep to some fancy search thingy.
esafak•4mo ago
> These tools prefer grep to some fancy search thingy.

Passing on the cost to you. The fancy search thingy could navigate the AST and catch typos.

softwaredoug•4mo ago
It's more accurate to say the agents like simple, interpretable tools. Clear input / obvious output. That might be more an AST thing, keyword search, search with very straightforward filters, etc.

I don't thing they do well with search that is built for human engagement, which is a more complex tool to reason about.

esafak•4mo ago
It makes no different to the agent. The response from grep is a list of matches, and so it is from something more intelligent. A list is a list.

> I don't thing they do well with search that is built for human engagement, which is a more complex tool to reason about

I agree! Structured outputs are best.

shadowgovt•4mo ago
Under the hood, LLMs are vector analysis engines. They benefit from spaces where the result of change is smooth.

Adding levels of indirection and secondary reasoning to the search interface makes the results less smooth. This is one of the things humans complain about often when using e.g. Google: "I'm interesting in searching for X, but all these results are Y." Yes, because X and Y are synonyms or close topics and Google is mixing in a popularity signal to deduce that, for example, your search for `tailored swift database` is probably about a corpus of Taylor Swift song lyrics and not about companies that build bespoke Swift APIs on top of data stored in Postgres.

If you're driving the process with an LLM, it's more of a problem for the LLM if it's searching the space and the search engine under it keeps tripping over the difference between "swift means a programming language" and "swift means a successful musician" as it explores the result space. A dumber API that doesn't try to guess and just returns both datasets blended together fits the space-search problem better.

the_snooze•4mo ago
If agents are making value judgments ostensibly on my behalf, why should I trust them to continue to be aligned with my values if in practice they're almost always running on someone else's hardware and being maintained on someone else's budget?

We'd be stupid to ignore the last 15+ years of big tech "democratization"-to-enshittification bait-and-switch.

softwaredoug•4mo ago
Search engines currently do this for better or worse. But they still want you to buy products.

The bigger issue is I’m not sure agents are trained to understand what users find engaging. What makes users click.

janalsncm•4mo ago
That was never not the case. There are always value judgements. Even for keyword searches, there are often hundreds of exact matches, and one you want might not even be an exact match.

This article is about how Target can use LLMs to help you find patio furniture. I guess you could imagine the LLM upselling you on a more expensive set?

evilduck•4mo ago
Unless you're running your own search engine for yourself, search indexes and vector databases already manage what data they want to ingest, they contain rank weights, keyword aliases, and prefiltering for controlling the search result in favor of the service provider's desired outcome. And these all run on someone else's hardware maintained on someone else's budget.

Adding an LLM or agentic data flow and a tuned prompt to the mix does nothing to change who is in charge, it was never you.

jillesvangurp•4mo ago
Interesting approach. It might be helpful to give the agent more tools though. Some simple aggregations might give it a notion of what's there to query for in the catalog. And a combination of overly broad queries and aggregations (terms, significant terms, etc.) might help it zoom in on interesting results. And of course, relatively large responses are not necessarily as much of a problem for LLMs as they would be for humans.
softwaredoug•4mo ago
I agree, my post only scratches the surface. I want to give more knobs to the agent. But not so many that it can't really experiment / reason about them.
intalentive•4mo ago
The doc string becoming part of the prompt is a nice touch.

It seems plausible and intuitive that simple tools dynamically called by agents would yield better results than complex search pipelines. But do you have any hard data backing this up?

softwaredoug•4mo ago
I don't have any hard data, no. That will be the other-other side project I may or may not have time for :)
mips_avatar•4mo ago
One interesting thing about the lack of click stream feedback is that you can generate it synthetically. If you've got your model evaluating the quality of search responses and adjusting its queries when there's a miss, you get to capture that adjustment and tune your search engine. In user click search you need scale to tune search, now you can generate it. The only problem is you need to trust your agent is doing the right thing as it keeps searching harder.
daft_pink•4mo ago
I think Comet's search is really nice and worth the $20 a month, but not $200 a month that it currently costs although it is a little slow. My experience is similar to this article.
westurner•4mo ago
Prompts for this:

Turn this into a paragraph-sized prompt

Turn this into a n document length formal proposal,

And then split that into paragraph sized token optimized prompts

westurner•4mo ago
Aren't "Attention is all you need" Transformers good at suggesting suggested search terms?
pimlottc•4mo ago
“thick-daddy search API”…
hakfoo•4mo ago
Keyword search is the compelling experience.

I want my machine to be determinstic and non-magical. I am so tired of search tools that won't let me actually search for what I want because it clearly thinks I meant something else.

rgavuliak•4mo ago
Why do you expect an LLM to provide an accurate distance metrics?