MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dimitri-vs | 2025-12-14 17:10:08+00:00
As someone that's currently building accounting (and many many other) tools for myself: yes, it can.

But with a big fat asterisk that you: 1. Need to make it aware of all relevant business logic 2. Give it all necessary tools to iterate and debug and 3. Have significant experience with strengths and weaknesses of coding agents.

To be clear I'm talking about cli agents like Claude Code which IMO is apples and oranges vs ChatGPT (and even Cursor).
by verall | 2025-12-14 17:10:11+00:00
Lots of things - typical llm em-dash situations although using dash. Lists of 3s after a colon where the 3 items aren't great. Short sentences for "impact" that sounds kind of like a high school essay i.e. "God level engineer...Zero ego."

I cannot at all understand writing an essay and then having an llm "tighten up the sentences" which instead just makes it sound like slop generated from a list of bullets
by pcmaffey | 2025-12-14 17:10:27+00:00
A side project for my side project: I built my own static site generator with React islands architecture and MDX support, using Bun. (Build your site from .mdx files, output only html+css, progressively hydrate the client with React only as needed).

I wrote about it here: https://pcmaffey.com/custom-ssg/

Forkable template: https://github.com/pcmaffey/bun-ssg
by ricardo81 | 2025-12-14 17:10:45+00:00
You've said a lot so excuse myself if I don't address all your points or address them enough.

>proton

Yes, probably 'good enough' at the scale they have as an alternative.

>Obviously, this will never happen.

Hard sell for sure vs the status quo.

>Obviously, this will never happen. So either the government makes such services, and makes them well enough to seriously compete or implements a "great firewall of Europe" Chinese/Russian style and forces the change.

Consumer change of habits but obviously having alternatives count.

>Is there any place left in the EU

Is definitely a problem wrt dependency. Also outages from Cloudflare etc suggest further dependency and its all about convenience.

>The only solution is that all European governments force themselves to ONLY work through "sovereign" channels not dependent on American companies.

They don't. The US companies have gradually pushed the envelope and unfortunately EU reaction has resulted in time wasting cookie modals etc for front end users. There is surely a measure of lost EU business opportunity vs what is actually happening, a wholesale copyright and privacy override. Google was bad enough before AI but now it's just wholesale stealing of everyone's everything.
by RestartKernel | 2025-12-14 17:11:13+00:00
Am I naive to think we've reached the point where anyone would be able to get a revolutionary thought out there quite easily? If I were such a brilliant nutjob, I'd post it on some math or computer science forum if I just wanted to be recognised. Even if just a few people see it, such an audience would likely be entrenched with the right communities to signal boost it.
by CodingJeebus | 2025-12-14 17:11:29+00:00
Markets have essentially prevented this from being a reality. Government can't pay anything close to competitive with the private market, if they did it would be an easy target for "government waste", and even if they could, why take a job that could be axed during a budget cut? The people doing the firing could justify it by claiming an outside vendor would be cheaper anyway.
by Cyph0n | 2025-12-14 17:11:31+00:00
Yes, they didn’t normalize, so they’re irrelevant to the peace equation floated by the person I replied to.

So a genocidal campaign to level Gaza and cleanse it of its human anima- oops, I meant people, expand settlements in the WB, and occupy southern Lebanon and Syria in pursuit of a “Greater Israel” is self-defense. Makes total sense.
by dymk | 2025-12-14 17:11:42+00:00
Clearly those jobs have "inherent value", or The Market would not have sunk a few billion into automating away the people that do them. These are jobs that people have been doing for years, and been getting paid money to do.

Look at how things went for the "Learn to code" workforce. They were told that software would be a valuable skill to have, and sunk a lot of time and money into fronted coding bootcamps. The job market in 2025 looks very different with Sonnet 4.5, which is particularly good at frontend code. What skills would you tell all those copywriters to go re-train in? How confident are you that won't be useless in 10, 15 years? Maybe you can say that they should have trained in other fields of software, but hindsight is 20/20.

I am not saying automation is bad, or that the jobs we have today should be set in stone and nothing change. But, there will be society level ramifications if we take some significant fraction of the workforce and tell them they're out of a job. Society can absorb the impact of a small fraction of the workforce going out of a job, but not a big one.
by yunyu | 2025-12-14 17:11:49+00:00
What are legitimate sources in your definition? Should physicians be expected to spend all their free time reading every single study in every medical journal or conference, even for niche areas that they don't usually encounter? Should the average diabetic/arthritic patient need to obsessively pore over academic reports to stay informed about their condition? Should advertisers be banned from sponsoring journals or conferences? This is an extremely ill informed line of reasoning.
by hermitcrab | 2025-12-14 17:12:03+00:00
There is an interesting video by Sarah Paine on Youtube discussing the geopolitics of this. (Paraphrasing from memory) she says that the US tried to be friends with both but, because the scars of partition were so painful, this wasn't possible and they just ended up pissing off both. Apparently Pakistan was very strategic due to the presence of US listening posts and U2 bases.
by Lerc | 2025-12-14 17:12:21+00:00
The world changes and jobs cease to exist. Historically there hasn't been a great deal of support for those who lose their jobs to change.

While there are issues that are AI specific, I don't feel as if this is one of them. This happens for many reasons, of which AI is just one. In turn, I think this means that the way to address the problem of job loss should not be AI soecific.

If it turns out that AI does not create more jobs than are lost; that will be a new thing. I think that can happen, but on a longer timeframe.

When most jobs can be done by AI, we will need a societal change to deal with that. That will be where people need a livelihood, not necessarily a job. I have read pieces nearly a hundred years old saying this, there are almost certainly much earlier writings that identify this needs to be addressed.

There will undoubtedly be a few individuals that will seek to accumulate wealth and power who aim to just not employ humans. I don't think that can happen on a systemic scale because it would be too unstable.

Two of the things that supports wealth inequality is 1) people do not want to risk what they currently have, and 2) they are too busy surviving to do anything about it.

A world where people lose their jobs and have no support results in a populace with nothing to lose and time to act. That state would not last long.
by snickerbockers | 2025-12-14 17:12:26+00:00
>Running npm install is not negligence. Installing dependencies is not a security failure. The security failure is in an ecosystem that allows packages to run arbitrary code silently.

No, your security failure is that you use a package manager that allows third-parties push arbitrary code into your product with no oversight. You only have "secutity" to the extent that you can trust the people who control those packages to act both competently and in good faith ad infinitum.

Also the OP seemingly implies credentials are stored on-filesystem in plaintext but I might be extrapolating too much there.
by the_other | 2025-12-14 17:12:58+00:00
The pre 26.2 less-glassy options were bearable because they were mostly like pre-Tahoe. The post 26.2 less-glassy options are now so shit that I’m using glassy mode, despite it being also ugly, distracting and harder to read than ever before. Apple have absolutely trashed their OS and their “Apple make good UIs” pedigree. It’s such a disappoibtment. I hope they come to their senses in the next major release round.
by kmeisthax | 2025-12-14 17:13:17+00:00
College is optional. Actually, if you're just looking for "a skilled job" trade school is a better bet than college now. But the only people actually saying that are conservative nut-jobs trying to fight a culture war against a balanced education. People send their kids to colleges for the same reason why they demand more car lanes instead of better buses and trains: it's a status symbol.

The thing about status symbols is that you are buying them to feel better than someone else. So they almost have to be scarce - and therefore expensive. That's the basic idea behind cost disease; scarce things in an economy of abundance become more expensive, not less.
by lfittl | 2025-12-14 17:13:36+00:00
The article has a section where it estimates index bloat based on comparing the number of index reltuples * 40 bytes (?), compared to the size of the file on disk.

This is problematic, first of all because I don't think the math is right (see [0] for a more comprehensive query that takes into account column sizes), and second because it ignores the effects of B-Tree index deduplication in Postgres 13+: [1]

In my experience, fast bloat estimation queries can work okay for table bloat, but for index bloat I'd recommend instead looking at the change in page density over time (i.e. track relpages divided by reltuples), or just go direct to running pgstatindex outside business hours.

[0]: https://github.com/pgexperts/pgx_scripts/blob/master/bloat/i... [1]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/btree.html#BTREE-DED...
by anorwell | 2025-12-14 17:13:56+00:00
https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...

From my perspective, it's not the worst analogy. In both cases, some people were forecasting an exponential trend into the future and sounding an alarm, while most people seemed to be discounting the exponential effect. Covid's doubling time was ~3 days, whereas the AI capabilities doubling time seems to be about 7 months.

I think disagreement in threads like this often can trace back to a miscommunication about the state today / historically versus. Skeptics are usually saying: capabilities are not good _today_ (or worse: capabilities were not good six months ago when I last tested it. See: this OP which is pre-Opus 4.5). Capabilities forecasters are saying: given the trend, what will things be like in 2026-2027?
Show HN: Open-source AI agent for spreadsheets
by raj_khare | 2025-12-14 17:14:26+00:00
Hi HN — working with spreadsheets still requires a lot of manual glue work.

Common pain points we kept running into:

- Copy-pasting data from PDFs and reports into sheets

- Cleaning and formatting inconsistent exports before any real work can start

- Building multi-sheet financial models that are fragile and hard to change

- Manually wiring spreadsheets to external data sources

Most AI spreadsheet tools try to help by generating text or formulas, but they don’t remove the underlying manual glue work.

We’re building an open-source AI agent for spreadsheets that operates directly on tables and sheet structure.

What it can do today:

- Extract structured data from PDFs into spreadsheets

- Clean and format messy data while keeping it editable

- Build multi-sheet financial models (DCF, LBO)

- Connect and refresh data from external sources

Available on Google Sheets, Excel and as a standalone web interface.

Would love feedback from people who work in spreadsheets daily.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-14 17:14:29+00:00
I feel the same way about Junie.

I have an "image sorter" that sucks in images from image galleries into tagging system with semantic web capabilities "Character:Mona -> Copyright:Genshin_Impact" and ML capabilities (it learns to tag the same way you do)

Gen 1 of it was cued by a bookmarklet to have a webcrawler pull the gallery HTML and the images. I started having Cloudflare problems so Gen 2 worked by saving complete pages and importing the directories, that had problems so I was looking at a Gen 3 using a bookmarklet to fetch and POST the images out of the browser into the server so I tell Junie my plan and it tells me I'll have CORS trouble and "Would you consider making a browser extension?"

Well I had considered that but was intimidated at the prospect, figured I'd probably have to carve out an uninterrupted weekend to study browser extensions, kick my son out of the house to go busk with his guitar instead of playing upstairs (the emotional/social bit is important) and even then have a high chance of not really getting it done and then end up taking another month to get an uninterrupted weekend. I told Junie "I've got no idea how you do that, don't you need a build system, don't you need to sign it?" and it said "No, you can just make the manifest file and a JS file and do a temporary install" so I say "make it so" and in 20 minutes I have the browser extension.

It still isn't working end-to-end, but I'm now debugging it and ought to be able to get it working in a weekend with interruptions even if I didn't get any more AI help.
by mupuff1234 | 2025-12-14 17:14:52+00:00
Ah yes, because every secret foreign intelligence asset goes straight to the press to brag.

Its complete normal behavior that people hire people they know, just look at hiring practices across all tech companies. As it is a completely normal behavior for a CEO to brag about their company.

Is Google an Indian intelligence asset because it's run by an Indian CEO and has quite a few Indian execs? How about Microsoft?
by lukan | 2025-12-14 17:14:54+00:00
"Pointing out ethnic affiliation is a crime "

Most lawyer arguments that I heard so far, do not follow the pattern of "do a quick google search yourself".

They usually do have a law at hand and some verdicts. Especially if there supposedly are "hundreds of examples" I never heard of.

So I am not a lawyer, but I do know the german constitution pretty well, and there is nothing remotely in it, like you claim. So I can only imagine by "negative" tweets, you rather mean incitement of violence. But I really doubt, you can provide one case of a verdict where the crime was saying the person in a crime was from nation X which is what you claimed above.
by alain94040 | 2025-12-14 17:15:05+00:00
This is interesting if quite incomplete (as noted in the end conclusion). CPU re-order buffers turn what you think as mostly sequential execution into a massively parallel engine. Data memory access, perfecting, speculative execution, etc. But if you are running a micro-bencmark with a tight loop of millions of iterations, then understanding the pipeline dependencies and dispatching can provide good insights.
by pico303 | 2025-12-14 17:15:30+00:00
One of my coworkers (not a developer, but familiar enough with technology) asked about a new “low code” app and wondered if our engineering team used that. My response, I think, provides something of an answer to this paradox: it’s not writing the code that’s time consuming; it’s the requirements gathering. It’s not enough to generate code or even have the LLM build or deploy the software. It’s all the knowledge and experience around crafting an app that’s likely preventing the shovelware. Turns out code is only a part of our job.

Also, why is this the “Gorman” Paradox? He literally links to the article that I remember as first proposing this paradox (though I don’t think the original author called it a paradox). This author just summarizes that article. It should be the Judge Paradox, after the original author.
by IgorPartola | 2025-12-14 17:15:37+00:00
Agreed. With Claude Code I will often specify the feature I want to develop, then tell it to summarize the plan for me, give me its opinion on the plan, and ask questions before it does anything. This works very well. Often times it actually catches some piece I didn’t consider and this almost always results in usable code or code that is close enough that Claude can fix after I review what it did and point out problems.
by threethirtytwo | 2025-12-14 17:15:38+00:00
It doesn’t happen anymore because of phones and the internet. Most people in the past read because they had nothing to do and they were willing to invest the time into a good book. You sacrifice a lot of energy in order to get enjoyment from a book.

Now with the internet there’s an unlimited stream of zero investment snippets of entertainment. People naturally dive into that because it’s more rational in the short term to do that.

Schools stopped reading but it’s as a result of the way students behave. The causal driver is student behavior.
by westurner | 2025-12-14 17:15:46+00:00
NewsArticle: "High-energy photons drive conversion of greenhouse gases into high-value chemicals, no catalyst needed" (2025) https://phys.org/news/2025-12-high-energy-photons-conversion... :

> A team of researchers from China discovered that high-energy photons with a wavelength of 185 nm generated by a specialized 28-W ultraviolet light source could directly break the strong chemical bonds in methane and carbon dioxide. This allowed them to transform the gases into chemicals such as water-gas (CO/H2) and ethane (C2H6) under ambient conditions and even in oxygen-free outer-space-like conditions.
by dangus | 2025-12-14 17:16:02+00:00
Big companies will always use their leverage to create less desirable working conditions than smaller companies who can't compensate as well and don't enhance resumes in the same way.

That's the whole tradeoff for working for big corp and essentially always has been in some way.

The generally smaller companies that pioneered benefits like 4-day work weeks, full remote companies, and "unlimited" time off realized they could offer things that didn't directly cost the company much/any money or even saved money but managed to attract top talent away from larger, more stuffy companies.

None of these mega-corps can say that their in-office teams are engaging in purely in-person collaboration without lying through their teeth since they are the ones who have dozens of global offices.

Instead, RTO is there to enhance their ability to monitor employees, make sure they aren't overemployed, make sure they don't take soft days off, etc. To these bigcorps, it doesn't really matter if it hurts productivity by 5-10% or cost a lot of money for the office space. The control is, supposedly, worth it.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-12-14 17:16:05+00:00
True. However, my fantastically modern machine from this marvelous version of the future we're living in doesn't offer any programs that soak for a noticable length of time. My bedding gets set to a cycle that constantly agitates the drum for the better part of 2 hours which my shirts definitely won't benefit from being subjected to.
by nick4 | 2025-12-14 17:16:22+00:00
I've really enjoyed writing blog posts recently. Not only is it a great way to flex your writing muscles, but writing about a topic, unsurprisingly, helps you understand that topic better too. I've had great conversations with friends about the posts I've written as well.

And sort of in that same vein, I've been developing my own static site generator that I eventually want to move my blog to. It's almost certainly going to be a worse SSG than every alternative, but it'll be mine and that's worth something in itself.

Plus it's just been fun to make! I wrote some gnarly code to generate infinitely nestable layouts that I'm kind of proud of. It's the kind of code that's really cool but you can only code on a project for yourself, because if someone else had to debug it, they might say some pretty unkind things about you.
by everdrive | 2025-12-14 17:16:22+00:00
>The problem is we have not built a society or economy where everyone can thrive regardless of their employment.

The way I'd read this sentiment is that the arrangement of society is ultimately arbitrary and if we could only choose a different system we could by truly free. I'm not sure if I'm reading you correctly or not. That said, my impression is that people will not really be able to get away from something like that looks like traditional jobs. The core traits seem to be group dynamics, hierarchical competition, status-attainment -- all where resources are not infinite nor are opportunities for status.

We've already had sufficient technological advances such that people would not need to do much labor, but functionally speaking I just don't think people can organize themselves into _any_ possible arrangement. I think the potential arrangements that could exist are limited by nature.
Show HN: Founder Market Fit Mapping Tool a.k.a. "Coco"
by theDGA | 2025-12-14 17:16:44+00:00
This is a mouthful, which is why I'm also just calling it "Coco".

What is it? Coco uses your LinkedIn connections.csv to give you a view of your network in a variety of ways, e.g. by company, seniority, function- but also by "influence". It then compiles that into recommendations for sectors to focus on & people to reach out to.

What's the backstory? While my dayjob is VC, I'm always thinking of new ideas on the side, fascinated by the 0-1 of it all - how founders meet, how they commit, how they actually start working & reaching out to customers. Accelerators like EF, Antler and YC talk a lot about founder market fit & finding your edge- At the same time, I'm meeting so many "wantrepreneurs" like myself who claim to have no ideas, not sure where they should start. Well, this is where Coco comes in.

I'm trying to build a tool that surfaces users' "network strength" and point them towards people to talk to. Currently, the tool does what I call "alpha" and "beta"- beta being your big chunks, industries & companies you have most of your connections in, alpha being your outlier connections, notable people in notable companies.

It's kinda like Happenstance, but with a specific direction.

To use it, you'll have to go through the painful process of requesting your Linkedin Data - much like with Happenstance - but then you can simply upload & have a look at your data through Coco's lens.

Obviously, I have many ideas as to potential next features, but I'd love to get the community's view first!

I'd be super curious to hear any general thoughts, what your expectations, disappointments, likes & wishes are :)

Thank you!
by schmuckonwheels | 2025-12-14 17:16:55+00:00
Pro tip for anyone wanting to avoid liquid [gl]ass and install iOS 18.7.3: Apple is actively hiding 18.7.3 on most iPhones, despite the update showing on iPads. Perhaps a mistake, perhaps an attempt to force 26 onto users.

Simply select "iOS 18 Developer Beta" under beta updates (might need a developer account) and it will allow you to install it. The update currently offered is the production release.
by gentios | 2025-12-14 17:17:07+00:00
Hi there, I am co-founder of Infinitcode.ai, from what you are describing I think Infinitcode AI can help especially the code reviewer and code explorer.

Basically our code explorer lets you visualize the repo into a tree for better understanding legacy code and then you can select branches and ask questions within the interactive chat so you can either refactor or understand it more in depth

Hope this helps

Its free for smaller teams up to 3 (but only the code reviewer)
by impossiblefork | 2025-12-14 17:17:15+00:00
>Also, I thought that Yudkowsky's HPMOR fanfic had more interesting ideas than the whole Rowling series, which I like a lot.

Then you do not understand writing. If Yudkowski really had more interesting ideas, then he would have been able to do HPMOR as original fiction.

Rowling is actually really good, inventing very charming things, very fun sentences, and there's nothing even close in HPMOR (I have read it myself, and enjoyed it to some degree), but you really underestimate how good Rowling is.