MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sweetheart | 2025-11-26 14:27:57+00:00
https://archive.ph/20251125055632/https://www.theverge.com/e...

I'm actually currently in the process of trying to career shift from a "normal" SWE career into indie game development, and starting to navigate this a bit myself. As I become more invested in the indie game space, both as someone who wants to make a living within it, but also as someone who wants to support other indie devs more and more, I feel like what I care about most is when a game has a clear sense of the individual(s) behind the project. I dont think that this strong sense of identity is antithetical to generative AI use, but I definitely think it can become a crutch that hurts rather than helps.

I say all this, but at the same time can't imagine feeling compelled to do without Cursor for development. To me, there is a remarkable difference between AI being used for the software engineering vs. the art direction. But this is just personal preference, I think. Still, it's hard to know if that will mean I can't also use something like a "Gen-AI Free" product label, or where that line will fall. Does the smart fill tool in Photoshop count as Gen AI? How could it not?

In the end, I think there is (or there _can_ be) real value to knowing that the product you purchased was the result of a somewhat painstaking creative process.
by jimbohn | 2025-11-26 14:28:18+00:00
Not exactly true, soldiers returning from the front can actually leave and move abroad. Also, with the amount of "hybrid-warfare" taking place in Europe it's safe to say not all russians "fleeing" russia are exactly well-intentioned. Let's skip the discussion about the advantages of having russian minorities in your own country, shall we?

edit: Would love to get a real argument instead of downvotes, but I'd say this speaks for itself
by lxgr | 2025-11-26 14:28:46+00:00
> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles.

Anything worth reading beyond this transparent and hopefully unsuccessful appeal to tribalism?

Hackers have always tried out new technologies to see how they work – or break – so why would LLMs be any different?

> the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. A fate that designers, writers, translators, tailors or book-binders lived through before us

What is it with this perceived right to fulfilling, but also highly paid, employment in software engineering?

Nobody is stopping anyone from doing things by hand that machines can do at 10 times the quality and 100 times the speed.

Some people will even pay for it, but not many. Much will be relegated to unpaid pastime activities, and the associated craftspeople will move on to other activities to pay the bills (unless we achieve post-scarcity first). That's just human progress in a nutshell.

If the underlying problem is that many societies define a person's worth via their employability, that seems like a problem best fixed by restructuring said societies, not by artificially blocking technological progress. "progressive hackers"...
by cjbgkagh | 2025-11-26 14:28:54+00:00
Around 80% of my work is easy while the remaining 20% is very hard. At this stage the hard stuff is far outside the capability of LLM but the easy stuff is very much within its capabilities. I used to hire contractors to help with that 80% work but now I use LLMs instead. It’s far cheaper, better quality, and zero hassle. That’s 3 junior / mid level jobs that are gone now. Since the hard stuff is combinatorial complexity I think by the time LLM is good enough to do that then it’s probably good enough to do just about everything and we’ll be living in an entirely different world.
by mikeyouse | 2025-11-26 14:29:36+00:00
See my other comment but Durov later admitted to basically all of that (he does travel freely in Russia, he did keep his Russian passport, the border crossing list was accurate). The signal - telegram debate has always come down to some variation of “If you trust Telegram to not allow MitM access to their servers and if the non-standard encryption they choose is secure and if you enabled the secure chat feature, it’s probably fine. Signal uses standard encryption and the messages are always encrypted so there’s no need to trust anyone.”

Which is likely why Signal is banned in Russia and Telegram is freely available.
by dtagames | 2025-11-26 14:29:54+00:00
You've hit the nail on the head. It's the inability to ship product from a Lisp machine that killed the idea. The fungibility of Lisp all the way down turned each machine into a one-off lab of its own. And this tech arrived after the industry had started moving from bespoke solutions provided by hardware companies to packaged software from specialized firms. Since Lisp machines aren't good at maintaining a duplicatable environment, they're not terribly useful for commercial software production nor as a distribution target.

Source: I was a mainframe compiler developer at IBM during this era.
by debo_ | 2025-11-26 14:31:00+00:00
Most of the focus on this isn't the code. It's the art and music that make up the experience.

This is discussed right in the article.

> For Kanaris-Sotiriou, the question of adopting the use of gen AI to make games was an easy one to answer. “The foundations that it’s built upon, the idea of using other people’s work without permission to generate artwork [...] are unfair,” he says.

I personally think using AI assistance for the code is much less intrusive than using AI for the art and music -- the code isn't as directly experienced by the player as the art.
by codedokode | 2025-11-26 14:31:25+00:00
> the bacterium Carsonella ruddii, which lives as a symbiont within the guts of sap-feeding insects, has an even smaller genome than Sukunaarchaeum, at around 159,000 base pairs

159 000 base pairs is ~320 Kbit, or 40 KBytes. I wonder, if that is the minimum size of a cell firmware. Also, if the cell is that simple, can we study it exhaustively and completely? Like, decipher every base pair in DNA, and determine what it is responsible for. And make an interactive website for that.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-26 14:31:32+00:00
> But if I was a junior I'd be very worried about the longevity I can expect as a dev. It's already easier for many/most cases to assign work to a LLM vs handholding a human through it.

This sounds kind of logical, but really isn't.

In reality you can ASSIGN a task to a junior dev and expect them to eventually complete it, and learn from the experience as well. Sure there'll likely be some interaction between the junior dev and mentor, and this is part of the learning process - something DESIREABLE since it leads to the developer getting better.

In contrast, you really cant "assign" something to an LLM. You can of course try to, and give it some "vibe coding" assignment like "build me a backend component to read the data from the database", but the LLM/agent isn't an autonomous entity that can take ownership of the assignment and be expected to do whatever it takes (e.g. coming back to you and asking for help) to get it done. With todays "AI" technology it's the AI that needs all the handholding, and the person using the AI is the one who has effectively taken the assignment, not the LLM.

Also, given the inability of LLMs to learn on the job, using an LLM as a tool to help get things done is going to be a groundhog day experience of having to micro-manage the process in the same way over and over again each time you use it... time that would have been better invested in helping a junior dev get up to speed and in the future be an independent developer that tasks can indeed be assigned to.
by chuckadams | 2025-11-26 14:31:51+00:00
> Defaults emacs ships with today are really good.

They're really not. It still defaults to opening a split window, still litters #foo# and foo~ files in the directory of whatever you're editing, and still comes with few language modes supported out of the box, let alone set up to automatically spawn and use LSP servers. Running a macro over a 10,000 line file is still incredibly slow on a 1-year old mac. Many common functions are still bound to chains of two or sometimes three keystrokes with multiple combinations of ctrl-keys and sometimes the mysterious ctrl-u prefix. Rebinding all the defaults is pretty much a given for any emacs power user. It's no wonder RMS ended up with RSI problems, because "emacs pinkie" is still very much a thing.

I miss emacs in a lot of ways, I used it for a good two dozen years starting in the 90's, but there's a reason I use IDEA Ultimate to write code now.
Modernizing Legacy Apps with AI
by sasakrsmanovic2 | 2025-11-26 14:32:12+00:00
It might actually turn out that if you were sitting on an unmaintained legacy app, the timing actually works out for you:), funny twist of fate. MCP servers now make the modernization path a lot more straightforward. A tech journalist Paul Thurrott once published an open-source Notepad clone, NotepadWPF (https://github.com/thurrott/NotepadWPF) , as a way to examine modern Windows UI patterns. The NotepadWPF s was converted using AI from windows-only to a cross-platform app running on linux, mac, windows and Web in under three minutes. The AI system produced a functional modernized application which is 99% identical to the original. Original app and source code was used to feed AI – the resulting video is here - https://youtu.be/7-l_ZsZdIb0. AI is from https://github.com/unoplatform/uno
Show HN: MasteryTrack, Open-source 10000-hour practice tracker(Tauri/Rust/React)
by alphalenchoo | 2025-11-26 14:32:35+00:00
I wanted to track my journey toward mastery using the 10,000-hour rule, so I built MasteryTrack — a cross-platform desktop app.

What makes this interesting: I built the entire app with Cursor as my AI pair programmer. The codebase is ~5K lines of Rust + TypeScript, and I shipped it in about a week. It was a fascinating experience seeing how far AI-assisted development has come.

Features: • Focus timer with idle detection & productivity guards • 7 procedurally-generated ambient sounds (rain, white noise, ocean, etc.) — runs 100% offline using Web Audio API • Automatic screenshot capture during practice sessions • Session reflections (what you practiced, learned, next focus) • Progress ring showing journey to 10,000 hours • Data export/import for backup & PC migration • System tray integration

Tech stack: Tauri 2, React 19, Rust, SQLite, TypeScript

The ambient sound generator was particularly fun — instead of bundling audio files, it generates brown noise, rain, and fire crackle sounds procedurally. No network requests, no external dependencies.

GitHub: https://github.com/Alpha-Mintamir/MasteryTrack Downloads: https://github.com/Alpha-Mintamir/MasteryTrack/releases

Built by Alpha Lencho. Happy to answer questions about the Cursor workflow or the Tauri/Rust experience!
Show HN: AI-Archive – Help us build the "junk filter" for AI-generated science
by minimal_action | 2025-11-26 14:32:43+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm building AI-Archive, an experimental platform for AI-generated research. But I need your help to solve its hardest problem.

The Core Challenge:

AI agents can now fetch data, run simulations, and generate research outputs at scale. But here's what I've learned: AI reviewing AI is circular and doesn't work. Without human experts establishing a baseline of quality, we just get an echo chamber of hallucinations reviewing hallucinations.

This is where you come in.

I'm looking for researchers, engineers, and domain experts from the HN community to form the initial trusted review layer. Your job would be to:

- Review incoming AI-generated papers

- Help us calibrate what "good" looks like

- Establish the reputation baseline that the system can learn from

- Be the human immune system that filters signal from noise

Think of this as an experiment in "can we create infrastructure for AI research tools that doesn't devolve into junk?" The answer might be no! But I think it's worth trying with the right community involvement.

What I've built so far:

- MCP Integration: Agents can submit papers directly via CLI/IDE (6-min demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fxa3uB3haU)

- Agent contribution tracking (though you as the human researcher remain accountable)

- Basic automated desk review

- A reputation system framework (that needs human ground truth to work)

What I need from you:

- Reviewers (most critical): Help establish quality standards by reviewing submissions

- Beta testers: Try the submission workflow and break it

- Skeptics: Tell me why this won't work so I can address it now

- Ideas: How would you architect quality control for high-volume AI outputs?

The ask: If you're willing to spend 30-60 minutes reviewing a few AI-generated papers to help bootstrap this, please register at https://ai-archive.io or join the Discord: https://discord.gg/JRnjpfrj

This only works if we build the filter together. Who's with me?
by zwnow | 2025-11-26 14:33:01+00:00
> You really need a competent and understanding boss to not be labeled a luddite, because let's be real - LLMs have made everyone more "productive" on paper.

I am actually less productive when using LLMs because now I have to read another entities code and be able to judge wether this fits my current business problem or not. If it doesn't, yay refactoring prompts instead of tackling the actual problem. Also I can write code for free, LLMs coding assistants aren't free. I can fit business problems amd edge cases into my brain given some time, a LLM is unaware about edge cases, legal requirements, decoupled dependencies, potential refactors or the occasional call of boss asking for something to be sneaked into the code right now. If my job forced me to use these tools, congrats, I'll update my address to some hut in a forrest eating cold canned ravioli for the rest of my life because I for sure dont wanna work in a world where I am forced to use dystopian big tech machines I cant look into.
by markbnj | 2025-11-26 14:33:13+00:00
I think the dangers that LLMs pose to the ability of engineers to earn a living is overstated, while at the same time the superpowers that they hand us don't seem to get much discussion. When I was starting out in the 80's I had to prowl dial-up BBSs or order expensive books and manuals to find out how to do something. I once paid IBM $140 for a manual on the VGA interface so I could answer a question. The turn around time on that answer was a week or two. The other day I asked claude something similar to this: "when using github as an OIDC provider for authentication and assumption of an AWS IAM role the JWT token presented during role assumption may have a "context" field. Please list the possible values of this field and the repository events associated with them." I got back a multi-page answer complete with examples.

I'm sure github has documents out there somewhere that explain this, but typing that prompt took me two minutes. I'm able daily to get fast answers to complex questions that in years past would have taken me potentially hours of research. Most of the time these answers are correct, and when they are wrong it still takes less time to generate the correct answer than all that research would have taken before. So I guess my advice is: if you're starting out in this business worry less about LLMs replacing you and more about how to efficiently use that global expert on everything that is sitting on your shoulder. And also realize that code, and the ability to write working code, is a small part of what we do every day.
by fileeditview | 2025-11-26 14:33:50+00:00
The era of software mass production has begun. With many "devs" just being workers in a production line, pushing buttons, repeating the same task over and over.

The produced products however do not compare in quality to other industry's mass production lines. I wonder how long it takes until this comes all crashing down. Software mostly already is not a high quality product.. with Claude & co it just gets worse.

edit: sentence fixed.
by tecleandor | 2025-11-26 14:34:07+00:00
I've been trying to start a very similar thing around here (Spain) at first specializing a bit on backups and storage, still working very small as an independent contractor while I keep my daily job (at least for now, I'm testing the waters...).

I don't really totally miss the days where I had to configure multipath storage with barely documented systems ("No, we don't support Suse, Debian, whatever...", "No, you don't pay for the highest support level, you can't access the knowledge base..."), or integrate disparate systems that theoretically were using an open standard but was botched and modified by every vendor (For example DICOM. Nowadays the situation is way better.) or other nightmare situations. Although I miss accessing the lower layers.

But I've been working for years with my employers and clients cloud providers, and I've seen how the bills climb through the roof, and how easy is to make a million-dollar mistake, how difficult (and expensive) is to leave in some cases, and how the money and power is concentrated in a handful of companies, and I've decided that I should work on that situation. Although probably I'll earn less money, as the 'external contractor' situation is not that good in Spain as in some other countries, unless you're very specialized.

But thankfully, the situation is in some cases better than in the 00s: documentation is easier to get, hardware is cheaper to come by and experiment or even use it for business, WAN connections are way cheaper...
by array_key_first | 2025-11-26 14:34:09+00:00
Ahh, but once you get neurolink and the ads are injected directly into your subconscious mind what happens then?

I propose a new natural law: every medium that can carry advertisements, will.

Exhibit A: gasoline pumps. Why do those have ads? I'm already paying for gas. And I can't even run away.
Show HN: Why do coding interviews expose your whole desktop. Here's a fix
by jaygood | 2025-11-26 14:34:17+00:00
Coding interviews make candidates expose their entire desktop while interviewers keep their notes private. I built a Windows tool that hides selected windows from the screen-share stream so candidates finally get basic privacy.

Some people call this cheating. Others call it overdue.

Curious where this community stands.

Demo + beta sign-up: https://www.getcloakly.com
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-11-26 14:34:23+00:00
> it's way too vague

If anything, I made it too specific by saying computer.

> is a mouse click not an instruction for a computer to execute?

If an SOP document—another example of a program—says to click a button on the screen, then of course that action is part of the instructions for a program. No computer needed, even; the instruction could be to stick my thumb up my nose, for all it matters.
by _giorgio_ | 2025-11-26 14:34:41+00:00
Kindly suggest some books about RL?

I've already studied a lot of deep learning.

Please confirm if these resoruces are good, or suggest yours:

Sutton et al. - Reinforcement Learning

Kevin Patrick Murphy - Reinforcement Learning, an overview https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.05265

Sebastian Raschka (upcoming book)

...
by teekert | 2025-11-26 14:34:55+00:00
It would be subways then, not cars I suspect. At least in a city like Rotterdam (673K inhabitants) that is by far the optimal way to get around, cars are really almost useless in the city center.

Here, most of the street is already reserved for bikes, with the sidewalks for pedestrians [0]. This is all a one way street.

[0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/EkUV5WQaQXFgv8KG8
by throw0101c | 2025-11-26 14:35:07+00:00
> I'm afraid that the solution is: build something small, and use it in production before you add more features.

Gall's Law:

> A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.[8]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)#Gall's_law
by jewayne | 2025-11-26 14:35:39+00:00
Interesting, given the decline in birth rate that seems to be the inevitable consequence of widespread prosperity.

"Happiness" is one of those words that has thousands of different definitions, so I would frame it this way: Parents almost always describe their children as the greatest joy in their lives, but (in America at least) they also generally express more dissatisfaction and frustration with their lives than childless people.
by MisterTea | 2025-11-26 14:35:56+00:00
> It's not free, it's not easy, and it introduces hard to test and rarely run code paths that may or may not have problems on the target architecture.

If your platform is designed properly it isn't much of an issue. This was bought up at a recent 9front hackathon and the lead dev stated that there is no reason to drop 386 or arm32. In fact, he said they are great test beds for shaking out cross platform bugs and tests all changes on 32 bit before committing.

Also, performance means nothing if the hardware is already there and capable of the job at hand.
by 5upplied_demand | 2025-11-26 14:36:11+00:00
No need for the apology, as I never said I disliked anything and you certainly don't seem sorry.

I'm not sure how you are avoiding all of the people working at or frequenting coffee shops, the DMV, car mechanics, the grocery store, airports, or any other scary place where you might be forced to interact with real people. Not to mention co-workers, school parents, sports parents, family members, in-laws, and more whom you may have to spend your valuable time around.

Enjoy the life of avoidance.
by bgwalter | 2025-11-26 14:36:25+00:00
Feeling glad that one is insulated from the knowledgeable users that have trained the "AI" that stole their IP is just strange.

"AI" is also larger than plagiarizing Stackoverflow. Google AI answers on any topic, which most people use, are pretty poor.

Coming back to sysadmin/programming. There are many migration guides from pfsense to Opnsense, for example (note there are no mean people in that thread):

https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=32793.0

The estimates are days, which is not that different from a weekend.

OpenAI now basically has your firewall configuration and who knows what else, so I would not recommend using "AI" for such sensitive matters.
by tshaddox | 2025-11-26 14:36:27+00:00
I don’t think a precise definition of life is particularly important or of particular interest to most biologists. This thing is life in the sense that it’s definitely in scope of being studied by biologists (same is true for viruses, of course). And the reason it is speculated that it may be crucial to understanding life is mentioned in the article: “This organism might be a fascinating living fossil—an evolutionary waypoint that managed to hang on.”
by JeremyNT | 2025-11-26 14:36:31+00:00
> And now, we're having a huge explosion of tools for developers, to build software that has to be maintained by developers, made by developers for developers.

What do you think they're building all those datacenters for? Why do you think so much money is pouring into AI companies?

It's not to help make developers more efficient with code assistants.

Traditional computation will be replaced with bots in every aspect of software. The goal is to devalue our labor and replace it with computation performed by machines owned by the wealthy, who can lease this out.

If you can't see this coming you lack both imagination and historical perspective.

Five years ago Claude Code would have been essentially unimaginable. Consider this.

So sure, enjoy your job churning out buggy whips while you can, but you better have a plan B for when the automobiles truly arrive.