MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by geiser | 2025-12-19 14:20:27+00:00
We’ve been “losing skills” to better tools forever, and it’s usually been a net positive. Nobody hand-writes a sorting algorithm in production to “stay sharp”, most of us don’t do long division because calculators exist, and plenty of great engineers today couldn’t write assembly (or even manage memory in C) comfortably. That didn’t make the industry worse; it let us build bigger things by working at higher abstraction.

LLM-assisted coding feels like the next step in that same pattern. The difference is that this abstraction layer can confidently make stuff up: hallucinated APIs, wrong assumptions, edge cases it didn’t consider. So the work doesn’t disappear, it shifts. The valuable skill becomes guiding it: specifying the task clearly, constraining the solution, reviewing diffs, insisting on tests, and catching the “looks right but isn’t” failures. In practice it’s like having a very fast junior dev who never gets tired and also never says “I’m not sure”.

That’s why I don’t buy the extremes on either side. It’s not magic, and it’s not useless. Used carelessly, it absolutely accelerates tech debt and produces bloated code. Used well, it can take a lot of the grunt work off your plate (refactors, migrations, scaffolding tests, boilerplate, docs drafts) and leave you with more time for the parts that actually require engineering judgement.

On the “will it make me dumber” worry: only if you outsource judgement. If you treat it as a typing/lookup/refactor accelerator and keep ownership of architecture, correctness, and debugging, you’re not getting worse—you’re just moving your attention up the stack. And if you really care about maintaining raw coding chops, you can do what we already do in other areas: occasionally turn it off and do reps, the same way people still practice mental math even though Excel exists.

Privacy/ethics are real concerns, but that’s a separate discussion; there are mitigations and alternatives depending on your threat model.

At the end of the day, the job title might stay “software engineer”, but the day-to-day shifts toward “AI guide + reviewer + responsible adult.” And like every other tooling jump, you don’t have to love it, but you probably do have to learn it—because you’ll end up maintaining and reviewing AI-shaped code either way.

Basically, I think the author hit just in the point.
by MezzoDelCammin | 2025-12-19 14:21:20+00:00
I admit it's a nice experiment, but I guess the title should be "detecting iPhone Lidar".

Both the 60Hz frequency and 940nm wavelength are fairly specific. There's a whole world of different wavelengths (1550nm is fairly common) and frequencies (up to 1MHz isn't particularly exceptional).

There's been a whole thread on the topic here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46110395
by Forgeties79 | 2025-12-19 14:21:46+00:00
Lmao what a title. That is some quality clickbait/ragebait right there.

> Most important of all, Americans must become aware of how our digital economy is being changed without our consent through laws like the UK’s Online Safety Act.

I am categorically against OSA but the framing of this opinion piece is really hard not to laugh at.
by not_so_34 | 2025-12-19 14:22:12+00:00
“Companies, especially those connected to the Chinese Communist Party, have no business illegally recording Americans’ devices inside their own homes,” Paxton said. “This conduct is invasive, deceptive, and unlawful. The fundamental right to privacy will be protected in Texas because owning a television does not mean surrendering your personal information to Big Tech or foreign adversaries.”
by chuckadams | 2025-12-19 14:22:16+00:00
Found the well-hidden setting (you'd think "Trackpad" would be an obvious place for it), enabled it, and wasn't exactly jazzed: if I lift my fingers for more than half a second (say, to cmd-tab with the same hand), it releases. And you can't have both three-finger-drag and drag lock enabled, so drag lock it remains for me.
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-19 14:23:33+00:00
Agreed.

Armor historians from the 1960s, all the way back to Victorian age, sat in their offices smoking pipes and imagining what purpose the armor served, and and what constraints molded it.

Then the SCA and Renaissance Faires sprang up, and it was no longer purely theoretical. Recreationist research became a thing. And historical analysis became practical.

The most glaring example are the rectangular epaulets on funereal brasses and sarcophagi. Historian used to claim they were used to deflect blows from the shoulder.

Nothing is flat after a blow. All real armor is built on pressure-spreading arches, often first two-dimensionally, but ultimately in three dimensions (the armor over a 16th-century knight's legs are never conic sections, but more fluid curves).

So, those rectangles? Not defensive metal, but purely decorative, and probably leather or paper-mache. (None survive, and in fact there's some argument they exist only in art.)

Any historian who tried to make one and use it would learn this in a short exercise. But the fallacy survived for decades, because the people were operating outside of their area of expertise, while falsely claiming otherwise with no criticism.

Another example is the still-pervasive myth that medieval people used spice to mask the flavor of spoiled meat; I've heard it used by academics a couple decades ago at a conference presentation. Ever eaten spoiled meat? Ever think to yourself, this bellyache wouldn't be so bad if I didn't taste the source of my poisoning? That myth was tracked back to a singular author in the 1950s, IIRC, and copied without any rational criticism ever since.
by aitchnyu | 2025-12-19 14:24:10+00:00
I glanced at these tools and felt security will "fall through the cracks" with some teams I knew, thanks to the parade of developers and features that need to be done yesterday. Django seems more forgiving of neglect. I can do `TopSecretDocument.fetch_or_show_404_page(office__department__=me)` (Github defaults to 404 for non-200 errors) or `@user_is(function_that_checks_user_is_senior_staff)def list_patients(request)` and then write happy path code. And its easy to unit test too.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/6.0/topics/auth/default/#d... https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.2/topics/http/shortcuts/... https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.2/topics/http/shortcuts/...
by paddleon | 2025-12-19 14:24:11+00:00
> “We’ve created something so dangerous that we couldn’t possibly live with the moral burden of knowing that the wrong people (which are never us, of course) might get their hands on it, so with a heavy heart, we decided that we cannot just publish it.”

Or, how about, "If we release this as is, then some people will intentionally mis-use it and create a lot of bad press for us. Then our project will get shut down and we lose our jobs"

Be careful assuming it is a power trip when it might be a fear trip.

I've never been as unimpressed by society as I have been in the last 5 years or so.
by Esn024 | 2025-12-19 14:24:19+00:00
I've been reading HackerNews for years, but this is my first time submitting. I welcome all critiques, good and bad. To be honest, I know that there's plenty to criticize in the way I've coded the site; though there are parts I'm proud of, some of it is still left over from when I was only just starting to learn to code and barely understood what I was doing. This post describes my attempt over the past 1.5 months to fix ONE of those many issues.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-19 14:24:42+00:00
If I want to continue the same task, I run /compact

If I want to start a new task, I /clear and then tell it to re-read the CLAUDE.md document where I put all of the quick context: Description of the project, key goals, where to find key code, reminders for tools to use, and so on. I aggressively update this file as I notice things that it’s always forgetting or looking up. I know some people have the LLM update their context file but I just do it myself with seemingly better results.

Using /compact burns through a lot of your usage quota and retains a lot of things you may not need. Giving it directions like “starting a new task doing ____, only keep necessary context for that” can help, but hitting /clear and having it re-read a short context primer is faster and uses less quota.
by sajithdilshan | 2025-12-19 14:25:01+00:00
This is the exact policing we don't want government to do regardless of the age. In my opinion it's the responsibility of the parents to decide how to raise their children and teach them how to live and adapt in the age of social media and maintain a balance.

In the same sense one could argue that social media like Facebook or WhatsApp should be banned among older population because that's one of the major ways mis/fake information being spread among elderly people and now with AI videos they actually believe those fake stories to be 100% true as well. I think that's more risk to modern day democracy and well being of the society in general.
by necovek | 2025-12-19 14:25:27+00:00
But there are really two types of things you need to describe in a change request:

- What and why needs changing

- What the code does after the change

One should really try hard to keep the first one answered in a change request description, or comments in the tool for code reviews. Don't you love running into comments in the code of the type "// This performs better than sorting-after-load as the service offers built-in sorting." because someone originally did "load(); in_memory_sort()" and today the code only does a "load(order_by=X)" (I mean, duh).

The resulting code should only have comments that explain the why for the end-state code.

But yes, questions to explain something in the end-state should always trigger changes in the code: make code more self-explanatory!
by practal | 2025-12-19 14:25:29+00:00
You know what? I agree with you. I have not formalised any of my stuff on abstraction logic [1] for that reason (although that would not be too difficult in Isabelle or Lean), I want to write it down in Practal [2], this becoming possible I see as the first serious milestone for Practal. Eventually, I want Practal to feel more natural than paper, and definitely more natural than LaTeX. That's the goal, and I feel many people now see that this will be possible with AI within the next decade.

[1] http://abstractionlogic.com

[2] https://practal.com
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-19 14:25:40+00:00
Having the action prominent and potentially with the default reversed would still leave it to the publisher's choice.

We can understand why they do it this way (they only need the option to exist, and can afford to apply dark patterns to it), but we don't need to excuse Amazon. Especially when they don't give a shit about what we think in the first place.
by squigz | 2025-12-19 14:25:43+00:00
> "1400 puzzles" rubs me the wrong way, like soulless open world games that brag about having hundreds of hours of content. A large part of what makes a truly exceptional game isn't volume of content, it's editing and curation.

There's a lot of people for whom what you're talking about is in fact a huge draw. Everyone likes different types of games, and that's fine; I don't really think we're at risk of losing one to the other :)

I'd also put forward that you can still make open-world games with 100s of hours of content that are still truly exceptional - look at Red Dead Redemption 2, for example.
by the_gastropod | 2025-12-19 14:25:45+00:00
If I’m understanding you right, I’m confident it’s screen analysis. I have a Hisense Roku TV I exclusively use with an AppleTV. I get creepy intrusive popups telling me: “you could be watching this on other streaming providers!” all the time. So it “knows” what’s being displayed on the screen regardless of what app (or HDMI input) is being used.
by everfrustrated | 2025-12-19 14:26:33+00:00
They have much less choice because all of those businesses that cared about quality have gone out of business!

100 years ago clothes were expensive items. Which is why they were class signals - less because of fashion and more because if you were poor you needed to buy long lasting fabrics. Clothes for the poor were expensive as well as the rich.

You can buy those same quality items today but nobody will because we expect clothes to be cheap and not have to repair them.

Take flights... For all the complaints about lack of legroom etc the price of a flight 50 years ago was the same as first/business class today. And yet how few people will pay for it. They'll grumble about small seats and bad snacks but hardly anybody will fork out for the upgrade. Not because they can't actually afford it but because they believe it should be cheaper.
Show HN: Local open sourced IMDB Wrapped
by eamag | 2025-12-19 14:26:35+00:00
IMDb doesn't do end of year reviews, so I build spotify-like IMDb wrapped that tells you about your year. It runs in your browser and is open sourced, so you can add more slides if you want. I also couldn't figure out CORS so you can't just paste a link to your profile and have to export CSV instead, help welcomed!
by zzzeek | 2025-12-19 14:27:07+00:00
I didnt say the LLM does not make mistakes, I said the idea that a reviewer is going to miss them at some rate that is any different from mistakes a human would make, is ridiculous.

Missing in these discussions is what kinds of code people are talking about. Clearly if we're talking about a dense, highly mathematical algorithm, I would not have an LLM anywhere near that. We are talking about day-to-day boilerplate / plumbing stuff. The vast majority of boring grunt work that is not intellectually stimulating. If your job is all Carnegie-Mellon level PHD algorithm work, then good for you.

edit: I get that it looks like you made this account four days ago to troll HN on AI stuff. I get it, I have a bit of a mission here to pointedly oppose the entrenched culture (namely the extreme right wing elements of it). But your trolling is careless and repetitive enough that it looks like.....is this an LLM account instructed to troll HN users on LLM use ? funny
by tliltocatl | 2025-12-19 14:27:08+00:00
The engagement-mining "content" is what killed the open web. Adblockers are just disposing of the body.

The genuinely useful stuff out there is on 1990's era personal sites. Then there are Wikipedia. Then there are company blogs (most of these were slop even before LLMs, but there are some quite good ones). Then user-generated hobbyist-driven stuff where advertisement only paid for running the platform - and these could be crowdsourced, it's not like running a server is that expensive. The rest is the content created for the sole purpose of showing people ads - and it belongs in the wastebasket.
by techblueberry | 2025-12-19 14:27:16+00:00
“You are also much more vulnerable to security incidents (and need to spend a significant amount of time chasing updates”

I can’t help but read this as “your security vulnerabilities are much more likely to be caught”. There are no CVE’s for private code, but maybe that’s a bad thing?

If you introduce a remote code execution vulnerability, no one will tell you (perhaps)
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-12-19 14:27:20+00:00
> If that's the case [...], shouldn't retaining that skill be the priority for anyone who has already acquired it?

Indeed I believe that, but in my experience these skills get more and more useless in the job market. In other words: retaining such (e.g. low-level coding) skills is an intensively practises hobby of such people that is (currently) of "no use" in the job market.
by twodave | 2025-12-19 14:27:51+00:00
Next is an ok choice (IMO), but there are definitely some things Next does that you want to be aware of up front.

* It wants to be your back-end. If you have a separate back-end, get ready to write back-end auth code twice, and probably in 2 different languages, and some brittle proxy code that will break the next time the Next guys decide they want to change how middleware works (again).

* The maintainers aren't particularly helpful. Having built a couple sites using Next, many of our questions ended up being answered with some variation of, "You're holding it wrong," but it was clear they just didn't want to support our (and other users' submitting issues) scenarios.

* Whether you are on Vercel or not, the team behind Next is very motivated to get you onto Vercel. You can expect their technical choices to go more towards that path. This is at odds with the goals of this project. Coupled with the above, expect to have little to no agency to raise issues and have them solved beyond simple/obvious bug fixes, even after you've invested your project into their platform.

* Next really struggles in situations where your users are your customers' customers, and your customers want something more white-labeled. As soon as this bleeds into the arena of using custom domains per customer and such, some of the advantages of Next start to become disadvantages.

Many of the pieces Next offers are sort of optional, but if you don't fit their idea of how a piece (such as auth via next-auth or their take on server-side components) should work, you're left to solve on your own. It's not the end of the world to have to implement your own auth flow with oidc-client, but it can be a little risky and my brain doesn't hold onto OIDC or OAuth2 so every time I implement an auth flow from scratch I end up having to look up how it should work.

That said, if you end up having to deal with more than a couple of the above things, Next moves from an ok choice for the project to a poor choice.
by nyeah | 2025-12-19 14:28:01+00:00
I've wondered about cognitive dissonance. Another "cog diss" possibility is, maybe I have a strong aversion to admitting that I'm getting screwed. Maybe I can relieve those feelings by arguing publicly that I'm not getting screwed. Or that it's "inevitable" for me to be screwed.

I don't know. It's one guess among many.
by jackschultz | 2025-12-19 14:28:02+00:00
Meta about how important context is.

People see LLMs and tons of tests tests written in the same sentence, and think that shows how models love writing pointless tests. Rather than realizing that the tests are standard and people written to show that the model wrote code that is validated by a currently trusted source.

Shows the importance for us to always write comments that humans are going to read with the right context is _very_ similar to how we need to interact with LLMs. And if we fail to communicate with humans, clearly we're going to fail with models.
by delichon | 2025-12-19 14:29:04+00:00
Last week I had a vendor tell me that they did warranty service through Amazon, and I should contact Amazon for a replacement, even though I was outside of their return window. It turned out to be a lie. But Amazon refunded me the full amount anyway, without prompting. The handful of times I've contacted Amazon tech support this has been my experience. The previous one was when they replaced a $250 porch pirated delivery, no questions asked.

This behavior genuinely earns them more of my business.
by dkdcio | 2025-12-19 14:30:06+00:00
they called me an idiot in the other thread for pointing out AI is broader than just LLMs (after they called everyone that uses AI an idiot) lol they’re clearly very angry and bitter, and I believe this is not the first account they’ve made to bombard threads with insults. in another comment they advocate for insulting the “AI idiots”

it’s not bullying in that it’s more entertaining than insulting, but still

ah in another comment (I am enjoying reading these):

> Ruthlessly bully LLM idiots

quite openly advocating for “bullying” people that use the bad scary neural nets!
by kilroy123 | 2025-12-19 14:30:45+00:00
1. There will be an economic meltdown by summer. Similar to 2008, likely worse.

2. Some kind of extreme US constitutional crisis.

3. Putin will remain in power, but Russia will be struggling dramatically to keep funding the war as Ukrainian attacks keep chipping away at oil and gas exports.

4. At least one new major AI breakthrough.

5. Several more countries virtually collapse
by pembrook | 2025-12-19 14:30:49+00:00
Listen, I get it. The things that "kids these days" are up to is always seen as unholy and dangerous by everyone once they turn 30: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic

I'm actually pro the idea of regulating your child's use of technology at the parent level. But giving the tools to government to shut off access to communication for certain groups of people because parenting is hard is such a dangerous precedent to set.

Once the mechanisms and tools to do this are in place, you're one piece of regulation away from removing the idea of privacy altogether and policing all forms of communication. You're forever building the infrastructure to enable 1984, making it super easy to turn on, and hoping the people in power never once abuse it.

All over Europe right now there's some insane things being proposed by domestic politicians. In Denmark, the same people pushing for chat control have proposed a total and complete ban on VPNs.

The impulse to safety is an understandable one in the context of children. But we aren't going to form a successful, independent, and flourishing next generation by hiding them from a huge part of modern life until some arbitrary age, and suddenly unlocking access to it in adulthood.
by necovek | 2025-12-19 14:31:17+00:00
Invite engineers to solve it in a way that makes it cheap for them.

Most shops I've been at prefix their branch names with ticket numbers ("bug-X-" or "TCKT-Y-"), and then it's trivial to reference it back. Some will write scripts on top, which gets them even more motivated to solve your problem (and might add links into the tracking tools too, move the ticket to "In Review" when the PR is up, close it after it's merged...).
by Aurornis | 2025-12-19 14:31:46+00:00
Casual calls for banning children from social media are becoming common, even here on HN. The people demanding these bans always assume that the bans will cleanly apply only to sites they don’t use or don’t like, as if only Facebook and TikTok will be impacted.

This proposed amendment shows exactly why this entire concept is problematic. The definition of social media site is this:

> by regulations made my statutory instrument require all regulated user-to-user services to use highly-effective age assurance measures to prevent children under the age of 16 from becoming or being users.

Now imagine all of the user-to-user services you use on the internet: Hacker News, Discord, Signal, any messaging app, the comment section on your favorite news websites. Even Wikipedia is a user-to-user website.

The second point that people calling for heavy regulation neglect is that the only way to keep under-16s out of these websites is to enforce age verification on everyone who visits the website. So HN would require ID verification, and Discord, and your messaging apps. I always see ideas about creating age verification services that don’t disclose ID information, but a key part of age verification is confirming (as reasonably possible) that the person presenting the ID with the age on it is the same person who is trying to use the service. The same reason a 16 year old can’t walk into a liquor store with their mom’s ID is going to be applied to these age checks, requiring that the sites make an effort to associate an ID with the user. Otherwise, kids are smart and will borrow their parents or older friends’ IDs or even use online black market services if there are no negative consequences for sharing IDs that perform anonymous age checks. Associating IDs with user accounts is a key part of age check legislation.