MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alloyed | 2025-12-28 10:15:34+00:00
So, in my professional work environment, which is a complex C++ app with long build times and lots of proprietary domain-specific knowledge, LLMs were worse than useless. Not totally surprising, but I originally had hopes for something like Cursor being useful in terms of simplifying the process of large mechanical refactors, which it decidedly wasn't. It could suggest interesting and complex uses of C++ templates, but its application were very slop-adjacent, and even for less complex refactors it would attempt and fall apart in the "check" part of the "guess and check" loop, probably because of the whole "long build times" thing. So we're still paying for visual assist and just wishing it had more (and more specific!) kinds of mechanical refactors available.

for personal projects (more polyglot but rust, js, python, and random shell scripts are bigger and more important here) it's been more mixed to positive; and this is (i think?) in part because i have the luxury of writing off things I'm _not actually_ interested in doing. maintaining cmake files sucks, and the free tier of Cursor does a good enough job of it. I have a few small plugins/extensions for things like blender, and again, I don't know enough to do a good job there, and the benefit of making something extremely specific to what i need without actually knowing what's going on under the hood works fine: I can just verify the results, and that's good enough. but then, conversely, it's made it _wayyyy_ harder to pick and verify third party libraries for the things i do care about? I'll look something up and it'll either be 100% AI vibe coded and not good enough to sneeze at, or it'll be fine, but the documentation is 100% AI generated and likewise, I would rather just have the version of this library before AI ever existed.

more and more I'm convinced LLM agents are only fit for purpose for things that don't need to be good or consistent, but that there is actually a viable niche of things that don't need to be good that it can nicely slot into. That's still not worth $20/month to me, though. and it's absolutely ruining the online commons in a way that makes it hard to feel good about.

(my understanding of claude code is that it's a non-interactive agent, which is worse for what i have in mind. iteration and _changing my mind_ are a big part of my process, so even if I let the computer do its own thing for an hour and work on something else, that's less productive than spending even 10 minutes of focused time on the same thing.)
by PaulRobinson | 2025-12-28 10:15:39+00:00
There are proven advantages to hand-writing out notes and planning on paper over digital tools - the physical, tactile experience engages your brain in different ways, and this has been proven by multiple studies.

Digital tools are great. They're why they're here. But a lot of people want paper for good reasons, and it's a very different experience to wanting a wooden holder for your phone.
by brainless | 2025-12-28 10:15:43+00:00
I co-mentor with a large online school for an AI accelerator course. We get about 600 participants each month, paying about $500-600 for a 14 day course. I only co-mentor for 2 days - the days we teach fundamentals of software development and then show how to code with Replit, Bolt, Lovable, Emergent, etc.

One of the most common questions is "can I build on xyz and shift to abc because I do not want to pay?" And another is "can I host the code myself?"

Customers know they do not need to stay with any of these code builders. The platforms know it too. They spend tons of $ to get customers, who use the credits and then leave.

Manus is running $5000 credit for 2000 people. A simple search shows so many offers: https://x.com/search?q=ManusAI%20credits&src=typed_query

Each of the players are just eating each others customers and showing growth. Perplexity has acquired who knows how many customers in India through their 12 month free Pro offer via Airtel (a telecom provider): https://www.perplexity.ai/help-center/en/articles/11842322-p...
by i_k | 2025-12-28 10:15:57+00:00
Negative percentage.

I was very very keen on using this tech when it just emerged and was almost addicted to it.

The feeling I was gaining was akin to scrolling one of them feed-generating apps with cat videos, or eating fast food - quick and empty joy and excitement without lasting fulfilling effect.

After months, or maybe a year of using LLMs - I realized that neither I am faster in delivering the final desired quality of the product, nor am I satisfied with where I am professionally. I lose my human skills and I forget how to get joy out of my work (and I enjoy making them computers work). I noticed how I grew negligent to the results of my work, felt disconnected from and disconcerted by it, and it was alarming sign.

Anybody who worked anywhere for long enough knows that unhappy, robbed of joy people - produce worse results.

Said that, I realized loud and clear that writing code, developing systems, is something that I want to experience joy of personally, I want my brain struggle, sweat and click through most of the parts of it, and that parts of the work that I don't enjoy doing and can be shamelessly offloaded to LLM, are, in fact, quite minimal.

On top of it, while using the LLMs (and boy was I using all of it! Sub-agents, skills, tasks! Hour-long planning-prompting exercises!), I was still noticing that when it comes to "write code" tasks - LLMs were only better and faster than me in delivering quality work when the task at hand was not my primary skill, something that I'd be below average (in my case, web-development or app development, any front-end work). And, given, that I was employed to exercise my main skill rather than secondary skills, it's almost never the case that LLMs were boosting my productivity, they required long time of baby-sitting before I'd almost certainly give up and do all of the work myself.

Admittedly, LLMs are outstanding study partners that can give pointers to where to start and what structure to stick to when learning about new project, technology, problem domain, or generating flash cards based on materials one wants to study, and that's a use of LLM that I'd probably not give up. My speed of learning new things with some LLM assist is boosted greatly, so from this perspective, one can say that LLM makes me better developer after all.
by 000ooo000 | 2025-12-28 10:16:53+00:00
But to describe my latest (latest, not only) experience with an LLM: I was with my toddler last night and I wanted to create a quick and dirty timer displayed as a pizza (slices disappear as timer depletes) to see if that can help motivate him during dinner. HTML, JS, SVG.. thought this would be cake for OpenAI's best free model. I'm a skeptic for sure, but I follow along enough to know there's voodoo to the prompt, so I tried a few different approaches, made sure to keep it minimal beyond the basic reqs. It couldn't do it: first attempt was just the countdown number inside an orange circle; after instruction, the second attempt added segments to the orange circle (no texture/additional SVG elements like pepperoni); after more instruction, it added pepperoni, but now there was a thick border around the entire circle even where slices had vanished. It couldn't figure this one out, with its last attempt just being a pizza that gradually loses toppings. I restarted the session and prompted with some clarifications based on the previous session but it was just a different kind of shit.

Despite being a skeptic I'm somewhat intrigued by the idea of agents chipping away at problems and improving code, but I just can't imagine anyone using this for anything serious given how hard it fails at trivial stuff like this. Given that MS guy is talking big game about planning to rewrite significant parts of Windows in Rust using AI, and is not talking about having rewritten significant parts of Windows in Rust using AI, I remain skeptical of anyone saying AI is doing heavy lifting for them.
by BuckRogers | 2025-12-28 10:17:14+00:00
With AI, I am a 10X developer now. At minimum. I use it for my C# and JavaScript day job. Copilot in VS.

I work on a code base that is easily over 1 million lines. It has had dozens of developers work on it over the last 15 to 20 years. Trying to follow the convention for the portion of the code base that I work on alone is a pain. I’ve been working on it for about seven years and I still had to ask questions.

So I would say that I work on a could base with a high level of drudgery. Having an all knowing AI companion has taken an awful lot of the stress out of every aspect.

Even the very best developer I’ve ever worked with can’t match me when I’m using AI to augment my work. For most development tasks, being the best of the best no longer matters. But in a strange way, you still need the exact same analytical mindset because now it’s all about prompts. And it definitely does not negate the need for a developer.

Writing your own code is essentially just an exercise in nostalgia at this point. Or someone who prefers to pick seeds out of cotton themselves, instead of using a cotton gin.

Or perhaps instead of using voice dictation to write this post, I would write a letter and mail it to Hacker News so that they can publish my comment to the site. That’s how backwards writing code is quickly becoming.
by dleeftink | 2025-12-28 10:18:30+00:00
For those in the JS/CSS/HTML ecosystem, paged.js[0] provides a comprehensive plugin or custom 'hooks' system to enhance CSS to print functionality. The maintainers have recently gone through a new round of FOSS funding and have also been more actively updating their journal in regards to the CSS @media print spec and their upcoming '2.0' polyfill[1].

[0]: https://pagedjs.org/en/documentation/10-handlers-hooks-and-c...

[1]: https://pagedjs.org/en/journal/
by defanor | 2025-12-28 10:19:19+00:00
Neat, but it takes two pages on printing in the landscape orientation in Firefox on either A4 or US letter paper sizes here, with minimal font size set to 16. Generally matching of text dimensions to container dimensions is unreliable if you take into account browser settings (not just minimal font size, but also things like differing fonts and disabled custom fonts), and perhaps an SVG image with pre-rendered texts would be more appropriate for such a task. Or even a more pages-oriented format, and for different paper sizes.
by citrin_ru | 2025-12-28 10:20:04+00:00
IMHO at least some spending on AI are FOMO driven. Companies think how they can adopt AI faster than competitors in a fear being left behind and loose the race. They don’t yet know if ROI of AI adoption is above zero. Even if adopting AI is the only right decision some of AI users may go out of business having overspend on AI and either way AI customer base will decrease.
by bArray | 2025-12-28 10:21:39+00:00
> NHS England is rolling out software to run our health records from Palantir – a US spy-tech firm that has supported mass deportation in the US and enabled genocide in Gaza.

Forget politics, not everything has to be framed this way. This is simply something that should be done in-house. What if the UK's relations with the US break down, or there is a cyber attack on the infrastructure?

> One of Palantir’s founders is also openly against the NHS. Peter Thiel claimed it “makes people sick” and said that the British people love the NHS because we’re suffering from Stockholm syndrome.

Is the insinuation that Thiel will sabotage the NHS servers because he wants to see it fail, at the cost of billions if he were to be caught? Do we have to be politically aligned with absolutely everybody at all times in every part of life in order to be able to function?

> With the government putting NHS trusts under pressure to adopt the software, we need to act right now. If you want to keep Palantir out of our NHS, send an email to your local trust and Wes Streeting, secretary of state for health.

This Wes Streeting guy has a high chance of being the next UK Prime Minister in early 2026.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-12-28 10:22:14+00:00
Not really.

They have a track record of failed IT projects, because they have a very high bar for handling data properly.

Palantir have a track record of successful IT projects, because they do what they want and hope there's limited blowback - they've modelled their biggest customer very well, there.

As somebody born in an NHS hospital whose life has been saved by the NHS on at least 3 occasions, I'm more than happy to defend their record.

Palantir, given what we know that has leaked about what they do and how they do it, considerably less so.
Show HN: SPF – Self-hosting from home(port forwarder with UPnP/DDNS)
by DsChauhan08 | 2025-12-28 10:22:28+00:00
I built SPF for my home server setup because I was frustrated with the complexity of existing solutions like rinetd, socat, and nginx streams for simple port forwarding.

What it does:
- TCP/UDP port forwarding with load balancing
- Auto-configures your router via UPnP/NAT-PMP (no manual port forwarding)
- Built-in DDNS client (DuckDNS, Cloudflare, No-IP, etc.)
- TLS termination, rate limiting, security hardening
- Single 63KB binary, no dependencies

Example: `spf host 3000` - exposes your local app to the internet in one command.

I used AI (Claude) to audit and optimize the codebase - fixed security bugs, applied Linux kernel coding standards, reduced binary from 83KB to 63KB. The code is cleaner than I could have done alone, honestly.

Looking for maintainers if anyone finds this useful. It's C/C++ but straightforward - most features are self-contained modules. I'm a hobbyist developer and would appreciate help from anyone more experienced.
by tailspin2019 | 2025-12-28 10:23:13+00:00
I just installed Foqos[0] (iOS, free) for this exact purpose. Excellent app. You can require scanning an NFC tag or QR code to disable app/web blocking.

I plan to put an NFC tag in my car, so that (while I’m home or working at my desk) I have to physically go outside if I really want to unlock my blocked apps before the end of the preset schedule. Meaning…. in reality…. I’m not likely to.

[0] https://www.foqos.app
by gus_massa | 2025-12-28 10:23:35+00:00
Facebook sometimes decides to block your account when the name is not 100% identical to your official ID.

Google when you make a chargeback or your youtuba channel has the song of a bird

The other platform also have similar weird cases.

I don't want to be instabanned from ALl the internet just because one site decides I did something wrong for real or imaginary reasons.
by 0xbadc0de5 | 2025-12-28 10:24:14+00:00
At home, on my side projects it's made me 2x to 4x.

At work, also 2x to 4x.

The numbers would be even higher (4x to 8x) if I didn't spend half the time correcting slop and carefully steering the AI toward the desired solution when it gets sidetracked. But then again, I was also guilty of those things so maybe it's an even score?

Perhaps it's partly psychological in that using it forces me to think through the problems I'm trying to solve differently than before. Perhaps I'm just a mediocre dev and the AI is bringing me up to "slightly above average," but a win is a win and I'll take it.
by KellyCriterion | 2025-12-28 10:24:31+00:00
I have two children:

Prior to them, I didnt think that behaviour or traits are inheritable.

When one of them was aronud 3 or 3.5, I observed an interesting behaviour:
It was about the meal, which contained fries - and ketchup.
He saw that the ketchup was flowing slowly towards the fries and reached there finally - he became funnily hectict, trying to prevent even more ketchup touching the fries.

Today I think he behaved that way ... because ... on my plate which fries & ketchup ... if this happens ... then ... you know :-D :-D :-D :-D
It drives me nuts, really - if I am at a restaurant, I ask always for separte plates for things which are fried, because I love the crust and it gets destroyed if any type of gravy is scattered around the plate :-D

Or maybe my son just found out the same, and then there is no inheritance. Im fine with this as well. :-D

But what I can clearly see, is: In their body shape I can see that their mother and I were super-fit-in-shape when they were "created".
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-28 10:24:52+00:00
> Is the insinuation that Thiel will sabotage the NHS servers because he wants to see it fail, at the cost of billions if he were to be caught?

I think the insinuation is that if someone is explicitly outspoken against something, don't hire/contract the guy/organization for tasks that are meant to help that something get better, the incentives just aren't aligned. Which in my mind, ignoring all the politics, make a ton of sense, I wouldn't want an anti-environmentalist to be "Head of Environmental Impact" or someone anti-education to be "Head of Education" or even involved in anything education.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-12-28 10:25:12+00:00
OTOH, it's good enough that a webapp I vibe-coded in 5 minutes on the phone is better at typesetting and aligning label stickers than Microsoft Word. Or at least easier and gives correct results on the first try, vs. Word that gives me correct results approximately never; I've wasted close to person-day fighting with it over the year already.
by philipp-gayret | 2025-12-28 10:25:36+00:00
10x to 1x. Usually 1.5x, maybe.

Each situation has a different bottleneck, and it's almost never how fast you can write lines of code.

You would need: All engineers aligned on AI use. Invested in automating your: unit tests, integration tests, end to end tests / code quality controls / documentation quality controls / generated api docs / security scans / deployments / feature environments / well designed internal libraries / feature flags / reviews / everything infrastructure / have standards for all of these, so on and so forth. You need to lose your culture of meetings to fix miscommunication. You need to centralize product planning and communication. Stop having 100 different tools at the same time (Jira, Email, Confluence, Slack, Teams, GitHub, BitBucket, GitLab, Sharepoint, ...) where you keep snapshots of what you wanted to do, at some point in time. You need to have a high trust culture. You need to understand mistakes will happen more frequently. You probably don't have production incidents often, because you deploy once a month. You will go fast and the faster you go, even with a low failure rate mistakes happen more often, and you'll need to be prepared for that too. Unfortunately most organizations are missing 99% of the above, organizations like to have layers of communication scattered in all kinds of tools, because hey X tool fixes my problem, they need 2 hour meetings so everyone is aligned on where the button goes and whether the button has to be green or blue, and 10 engineers need to be present in the room too, so 20 engineering hours. Then they go to production once a month.

So if you have solved all that then the bottleneck becomes lines of code per minute, and you could rebuild most products in a few days.

For me personally, it ranges from 10x to 1x. On my own projects, and on projects where the development experience is really really great, easily 10x. We would never have brought that much live in these short timespans without AI assisted software development. In large businesses where 20 people need to stare at a Jira board to decide on the most basic things and give feedback through Confluence comments and emails.... Yeah the bottleneck is not how fast you can write lines of code.
by deknos | 2025-12-28 10:26:19+00:00
We need a keyring at a company. Because there's no other media for communicating, where you reach management and technical people in companies as well.

And we have massive issues due to the fact that the ongoing-decrying of "shut everything off" and the following non-improvement-without-an-alternative because we have to talk with people of other organizations (and every organization runs their own mailserver) and the only really common way of communication is Mail.

And when everyone has a GPG Key, you get.. what? an keyring.

You could say, we do not need gpg, because we control the mailserver, but what if a mailserver is compromised and the mails are still in mailboxes?

the public keys are not that public, only known to the contenders, still, it's an issue and we have a keyring
by domysee | 2025-12-28 10:26:38+00:00
This may be because most feed readers don't have a proper way to triage items. Adding a feed doesn't mean you want to read everything from said feed. Usually only a subset of articles are interesting.

I built a feed reader with that concept in mind, having a separate triage stage where you only decide if it's worth reading or not. This will make it easier to handle large feed lists and find the best articles from them.

https://lighthouseapp.io/
by JoshuaDavid | 2025-12-28 10:28:05+00:00
1.3x when working on a large janky which codebase I am very familiar with, very unevenly distributed.

- Writing new code it's probably 3x or so[1].

- Writing automated tests for reproducible bugs, it's probably 2x or so.

- Fixing those bugs I try every so often but it still seems to be a net negative even for Opus 4.5, so call it 0.95x because I mostly just do it myself.

- Figuring out how to reproduce an undesired behavior that was observed in the wild in a controlled environment is still net negative - call it 0.8x because I keep being tempted by this siren song[2]

- Code review it's hard to say, I definitely am able to give _better_ reviews now than I was able to before, but I don't think I spend significantly less time on them. Call it 1.2x.

- Taking some high-level feature request and figuring which parts of the feature request already exist and are likely to work, which parts should be built, which parts we tried to build 5+ years ago and abandoned due to either issues with the implementation or issues with the idea that only became apparent after we observed actual users using it, and which parts are in tension with other parts of the system: net negative. 0.95x, just from trying again every so often.

- Writing new one-off utility tools for myself and my team: 10x-100x. LLMs are amazing. I can say "I want to see a Gantt chart style breakdown of when jobs in a gitlab pipeline start and finish each step of execution, here's the network log, here's a link to the gitlab api docs, write me a bookmarklet I can click on when I'm viewing a pipeline" and go get coffee and come back and have a bookmarklet[3].

Unfortunately for me, a significant fraction of my tasks are of the form "hey so this weird bug showed up in feature X, and the last employee to work on feature X left 6 years ago, can you figure out what's going on and fix it" or "we want to change Y functionality, what's the level of risk and effort".

-----

[1] This number would be higher, but pre-LLMs I invested quite a bit of effort into tooling to make repetitive boilerplate tasks faster, so that e.g. creating the skeleton of a unit or functional test for a module was 5 keystrokes. There's a large speedup in the tasks that are almost boilerplate, but not quite worth it for me to write my own tooling, counterbalanced by a significant slowdown if some but not all tasks had existing tooling that I have muscle memory for but the LLM agent doesn't.

[2] This feels like the sort of thing that the models should be good at. After all, if I fed in the observed behavior, the relevant logs, and the relevant files, even Sonnet 3.7 was capable of identifying the problem most of the time. The issue is that by the time I've figured out what happened at that level of detail, I usually already know what the issue was.

[3] Ok, it actually took a coffee break plus 3 rounds of debugging over about 30 minutes. Still, it's a very useful little tool and one I probably wouldn't have spent the time building in the before times.