MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vunderba | 2025-12-31 04:56:06+00:00
They're referring to scores on individual COMMENTS - this information isn't available via the HN Firebase API.

The only way you could theoretically extract everyone's comment scores (at least the top level ones) would be like this if you're a complete madman:

1. Wait 48 hours so the article is effectively dead

2. Post a new comment using an account called ThePresident

3. Create a swarm of a thousand shill user accounts called Voter1, Voter2, etc.

4. Use a single account at a time and upvote ThePresident

5. Recheck the page to see if ThePresident has moved above a user(s) post

6. Record the score for that user and assign it to the tracked story's history

7. Repeat from (4)
by DannyBee | 2025-12-31 04:57:53+00:00
"This is especially true where small-dollar harms are being done, but at scale of millions, where ripping off consumers is systematic, or where harms such as pollution affected many."

All of these particular things seem exactly like the job of a state AG, or other form of regulator, vs private lawyers.

Political dysfunction aside, of course.

I'd personally rather the state AG and various consumer-friendly regulators of, say, california, have the billions of dollars going to the class action attorneys in that state.

Remember that class actions were not created to enable any of the things you cite. They were judiciary-created as a means of simple judicial efficiency (and requiring all affected plaintiffs to be grouped together). As such, outside of "they were there", it's not obvious why they are a particularly good way to solve the problems you give.

In case you think i'm particularly anti-consumer, i actually think LLC's should not exist and shareholders should be responsible for harms again. Which would likely obviate a lot of the practices class actions were suing over in the first place.
by shariffic007 | 2025-12-31 04:59:12+00:00
Built a portfolio optimization tool in 24 hours as a learning project.

What it does: Enter your stock holdings, get optimized allocation using mean-variance optimization (Markowitz portfolio theory).

Tech stack:
- Python for calculations
- Streamlit for UI
- yfinance for market data
- Scipy for optimization
- Deployed on Replit

This was an experiment in shipping fast vs perfect. Lots of rough edges but it works.

Looking for feedback on:
- Is this actually useful or just a toy?
- What's the #1 feature missing?
- How would you improve the UX?

Takes 30 seconds to try. No signup required.
by pcmaffey | 2025-12-31 05:02:24+00:00
Thanks, it’s a few years old. Rereading it now it’s kind of incoherent. But of primary importance now I think is the idea of making software (and systems) resilient, self healing. Traditional concepts of agile are mostly paved over with modern constructs and self-serving processes. I think AI will be an earthquake for many companies.
by Negitivefrags | 2025-12-31 05:02:52+00:00
At my company I just tell people “You have to stand behind your work”

And in practice that means that I won’t take “The AI did it” as an excuse. You have to stand behind the work you did even if you used AI to help.

I neither tell people to use AI, nor tell them not to use it, and in practice people have not been using AI much for whatever that is worth.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-31 05:03:15+00:00
Good point. There's probably no legitimate reason for non-voting children to be present at such a political event, either.

And by way of the process of excluding these children, the motivation for bringing other items without legitimate use like crayons, coloring books, and paperclips will be greatly diminished.

It's win-win. Thank you for the excellent insight!
by looneysquash | 2025-12-31 05:03:39+00:00
Looks like a good policy to me.

One thing I didn't like was the copy/paste response for violations.

It makes sense to have one. Just the text they propose uses what I'd call insider terms, and also terms that sort of put down the contributor.

And while that might be appropriate at the next level of escalation, the first level stock text should be easier for the outside contributor to understand, and should better explain the next steps for the contributor to take.
Ask HN: What to do when Claude Code is writing code?
by brihati | 2025-12-31 05:03:48+00:00
I have been using claude code extensively for coding at my startup, but I am feeling that I can be more productive by utilising the time when the claude code is writing code instead of just staring what claude is doing.

One may think that it's a marginal time, but I have timed it, it's 2.5-3 hours per day split over 1/2 minutes window over the whole day.

Since the time window is short, I want something that I can complete in that time window. I have been solving chess puzzles during that time, but want to do something which benefits my startup in the long run, maybe learn something new.

How are you utilising that time?
by tmoertel | 2025-12-31 05:04:17+00:00
What is the point you're trying to make?

I claimed that Binary Provenance was important to organizations such as Google where it is important to know exactly what has gone into the artefacts that have been deployed into production. You then replied "it depends" but, when pressed, defended your claim by saying, in effect, that binary provenance doesn't work in organizations that have immaturate engineering practices where they don't actually follow the practice of enforcing Binary Provenance.

But I feel like we already knew that practices don't work unless organizations actually follow them.

So what was your point?
by foltik | 2025-12-31 05:04:27+00:00
Sorry, my earlier comments were somewhat vague and assuming we were on the same page about a few things. Let me be concrete.

The snippet is, after lowering:

if (x)
return { a = 13, b = undef }
else
return { a = undef, b = 37 }

LLVM represents this as a phi node of two aggregates:

a = phi [13, then], [undef, else]
b = phi [undef, then], [37, else]

Since undef isn’t “unknown”, it’s “pick any value you like, per use”, InstCombine is allowed to instantiate each undef to whatever makes the expression simplest. This is the problem.

a = 13
b = 37

The branch is eliminated, but only because LLVM assumes that those undefs will take specific arbitrary values chosen for convenience (fewer instructions).

Yes, the spec permits this. But at that point the program has already violated the language contract by executing undefined behavior. The read is accidental by definition: the program makes no claim about the value. Treating that absence of meaning as permission to invent specific values is a semantic choice, and precisely what I am criticizing. This “optimization” is not a win unless you willfully ignore the program and everything but instruction count.

As for utility and justification: it’s all about user experience. A good language and compiler should preserve a clear mental model between what the programmer wrote and what runs. Silent non-local behavior changes (such as the one in the article) destroy that. Bugs should fail loudly and early, not be “optimized” away.

Imagine if the spec treated type mismatches the same way. Oops, assigned a float to an int, now it’s undef. Let’s just assume it’s always 42 since that lets us eliminate a branch. That’s obviously absurd, and this is the same category of mistake.
by sunrays | 2025-12-31 05:04:58+00:00
Hey HN! I built this after I nearly got hit with a €1,200 fine at Barcelona airport for miscounting my Schengen days.

The 90/180 rule is confusing - it's not just "90 days then leave." It's a rolling 180-day window, and every trip counts even if you left and came back.

Existing calculators were clunky or behind paywalls, so I made this:
- Clean, mobile-first interface
- Tracks multiple trips automatically
- Shows exact reset date
- Works offline
- 100% free, no signup

Built for digital nomads, but useful for any non-EU travelers visiting Europe.

Happy to answer questions or get feedback!
by eddd-ddde | 2025-12-31 05:05:07+00:00
Yeah, all new commits are merged to main.

The complexity comes from releases. Suppose you have a good commit 123 were all your tests pass for some project, you cut a release, and deploy it.

Then development continues until commit 234, but your service is still at 123. Some critical bug is found, and fixed in commit 235. You can't just redeploy at 235 since the in-between may include development of new features that aren't ready, so you just cherry pick the fix to your release.

It's branches in a way, but _only_ release branches. The only valid operations are creating new releases from head, or applying cherrypicks to existing releases.
by autoexec | 2025-12-31 05:05:41+00:00
> I know self-hosting is held as a point of pride by many, but in my experience you’re still better off putting lower cost hardware in a cheap colo with the contract going to the business entity which has defined ownership and procedures. Sending it over to a single member to put somewhere puts a lot of control into that one person’s domain.

If they really want to run it out of a computer in their living room they should at least keep a couple servers on standby at different locations. Trusting a single person to manage the whole thing is fragile, but trusting a few people with boxes that are kept up to date seems pretty safe. What are the odds they'd all die together? Paying a colo or cloud provider is probably better if you care about more 9s of uptime, but do they really need it?
by why-o-why | 2025-12-31 05:06:26+00:00
Given the fact that Apple and Coke but rushed to produce AI slop, and the agreements with Disney, we are going to see a metric fuck-ton of AI-generated cinema in the next decade. The broader population's tastes are absolute harbage when it comes to cinema, so I don't see why you need convincing. 40+ superhero films should be enough.
by falkensmaize | 2025-12-31 05:07:22+00:00
It seems pretty obvious that the opposite is true. I know I’ve experienced some serious skill atrophy that I’m now having to actively resist. There’s a lot lost by no longer having to interact with the raw materials of your craft.

Thinking is a skill that is reinforced by reading, designing and writing code. When you outsource your thinking to an LLM your ability to think doesn’t magically improve…it degrades.
by petterroea | 2025-12-31 05:07:25+00:00
I suspect you are right. It reminds me of the whole "at the government you can hack legally" argument used by government intelligence agencies to recruit hackers.

I think a lot of skilled engineers want interesting challenges where they break boundaries, and being in an environment that wants you to break those boundaries allows them to legitimize why they are doing it. That is, "someone else is taking moral responsibility, so I can do my technical challenge in peace"
by mmsc | 2025-12-31 05:09:16+00:00
This AI usage is like a turbo-charger for the Dunning–Kruger effect, and we will see these policies crop up more and more, as technical people become more and more harassed and burnt out by AI slop.

I also recently wrote a similar policy[0] for my fork of a codebase. I had to write this because the original developer took the AI pill, and starting committing totally broken code that was fulled of bugs, and doubled down when asked about it [1].

On an analysis level, I recently commented[2] that "Non-coders using AI to program are effectively non-technical people, equipped with the over-confidence of technical people. Proper training would turn those people into coders that are technical people. Traditional training techniques and material cannot work, as they are targeted and created with technical people in mind."

But what's more, we're also seeing programmers use AI creating slop. They're effectively technical people equipped with their initial over-confidence, highly inflated by a sense of effortless capability. Before AI, developers were once (sometimes) forced to pause, investigate, and understand, and now it's just easier and more natural to simply assume they grasp far more than they actually do, because @grok told them this is true.

[0]: https://gixy.io/contributing/#ai-llm-tooling-usage-policy

[1]: https://joshua.hu/gixy-ng-new-version-gixy-updated-checks#qu...

[2]: https://joshua.hu/ai-slop-story-nginx-leaking-dns-chatgpt#fi...
by 578_Observer | 2025-12-31 05:09:48+00:00
The "Railway Bubble" analogy is spot on.

As a loan officer in Japan who remembers the 1989 bubble, I see the same pattern.
In the traditional "Shinise" world I work with, Cash is Oxygen. You hoard it to survive the inevitable crash.
For OpenAI, Cash is Rocket Fuel. They are burning it all to reach "escape velocity" (AGI) before gravity kicks in.

In 1989, we also bet that land prices would outrun gravity forever.
But usually, Physics (and Debt) wins in the end.
When the railway bubble bursts, only those with "Oxygen" will survive.
by aaronbrethorst | 2025-12-31 05:09:54+00:00
Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Carlin#Death

Carlin had a history of heart problems,[82][83] including heart attacks in 1978, 1982, and 1991.[52] He also had an arrhythmia requiring an ablation procedure in 2003, a significant episode of heart failure in 2005, and two angioplasties on undisclosed dates.[84] In the 2022 documentary George Carlin's American Dream, Jerry Hamza—Carlin's manager from 1980 until his death—said Carlin underwent many heart surgeries in a short period toward the end of his life. Carlin's publicist Jeff Abraham said that he once lifted his shirt after coming to a gig from the hospital to show Abraham his torso, whereupon Abraham said it looked like a science project.

Dude had his first heart attack at the age of 41, and lived four years less than today's median life expectancy in the United States.
by blahlabs | 2025-12-31 05:10:26+00:00
I run my workstation PC with a dedicated GPU in a rack in the shed. I use Sunshine on the workstation and Moonlight on the client to access it. I can game like that, use blender for modelling, anything that needs more juice than my old laptop. It feels local. Even over WiFi I quite often forget I am on a remote machine. Moonlight runs on pretty much anything and everything too.
by rjzzleep | 2025-12-31 05:10:28+00:00
I think that in general there is a big difference between javascript/typescript projects big or small and other projects that actually address a specific project domain. These two are not the same. The same claude code agent can create a lot of parts of a function web project, but will struggle providing anything functional but a base frame for you to build on if you were to create a new SoC support in some drone firmware.

The problem is that everyone working on those more serious projects knows that and treats LLMs accordingly, but the people that come from the web space come in with the expectation that they can replicate the success they have in their domain just as easily, when oftentimes you need to have some domain knowledge.

I think the difference simply comes down to the sheer volume of training material, i.e. web projects on github. Most "engineers" are actually just framework consumers and within those frameworks llms work great.
by patrickthebold | 2025-12-31 05:10:32+00:00
This is interesting to think about: For gold I'd say the demand is coming from both industries and from people who want it as a store of value. If it was only used as an industrial chemical, then surely the price would drop because there would be less demand.

Some bitcoin advocates will talk about how useful it is as a currency, and I wonder how much bitcoin is actually used for purposes other then to hope you can sell it to someone else for more than you paid.
by darth_avocado | 2025-12-31 05:10:44+00:00
> At my company I just tell people “You have to stand behind your work”

Since when has that not been the bare minimum. Even before AI existed, and even if you did not work in programming at all, you sort of have to do that as a bare minimum. Even if you use a toaster and your company guidelines suggest you toast every sandwich for 20 seconds, if following every step as per training results in a lump of charcoal for bread, you can’t serve it up to the customer. At the end of the day, you make the sandwich, you’re responsible for making it correctly.

Using AI as a scapegoat for sloppy and lazy work needs to be unacceptable.
Show HN: Weekly newsletter with tactical frameworks from 50 $1M+ founders
by AlexMorganFndr | 2025-12-31 05:10:50+00:00
Hi HN,

I've spent the last 6 months interviewing founders who scaled to $1M+ ARR to understand what actually worked vs. what just sounds good in retrospect.

The surprising finding: Almost none of them had a grand vision at the start. They just solved one specific problem exceptionally well, then expanded.

Some patterns I found:
- They talked to 10-20 customers per week in early days (not surveys, real conversations)
- They picked narrow niches first ("X for dentists" beats "X for everyone")
- They charged money immediately, even with rough MVPs
- They averaged 18 months before their first hire
- They picked "boring ideas in exciting markets" over trendy tech

I'm documenting these insights in a weekly newsletter for founders: https://doanything.com/preview/uXalImXcFZk

No growth hacks or motivational fluff - just tactical frameworks from real builders who've done it.

Would love to hear what patterns you've noticed in successful founders, or what's worked in your own journey.
by chrisfosterelli | 2025-12-31 05:11:13+00:00
I wonder how air Canada reconciles this. There was a popular globe and mail article a while ago that gave awful rankings to air Canada's water tanks -- so the company put up signs in the bathroom saying the water is non-potable and called it a day.

Not super comforting if they're then using the same 'non-potable' water to make coffee...
by sva_ | 2025-12-31 05:11:21+00:00
I also started doing this since it seems to be a nobrainer to bring some empty water container rather than paying outrageous prices on bottled water... But a couple days ago I flew to the US through Heathrow and saw some guy drinking with his mouth from one of those refill stations, and now I'm not sure anymore because I feel like one in n people will touch/contaminate it.

Similarly when I use a public restroom it is shocking to me how many people don't even follow the most basic personal hygiene.
by fainpul | 2025-12-31 05:11:30+00:00
Nice experiment!

I agree that providing something more tangible than just a number would be beneficial for some operations. But I think it would get annoying quickly. Having difficulty moving a "heavy" file is the opposite of a good user interface. Every manipulation should require as little mental and physical effort as possible. Apart from that, I can't apply force with my mouse — it just clicks.

I believe a purely visual approach could work well. For example: every file icon has the same front area (basically the rectangles we have now), but visually extends to the back with some sort of stylized 3D effect, according to file size. So a small text file looks like a thin sheet of paper, a 10MB file might look like it's made of thick cardboard, a 2GB video looks like a box with considerable depth. The scaling should probably be logarithmic, not linear, to work well with human perception.
by eddd-ddde | 2025-12-31 05:11:44+00:00
That's why I mention having real stable APIs for cross-service interaction, as you can't guarantee that all teams deploy the exact same commit everywhere at once. It is possible but I'd argue that's beyond what a monorepo provides. You can't exactly atomically update your postgres schema and JavaScript backend in one step, regardless of your repo arrangement.

Adding new APIs is always easy. Removing them not so much since other teams may not want to do a new release just to update to your new API schema.
by jonas21 | 2025-12-31 05:12:01+00:00
The title should be changed to "LLVM AI tool policy: human in the loop".

At the moment it's "We don't need more contributors who aren't programmers to contribute code," which is from a reply and isn't representative of the original post.

The HN guidelines say: please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
by mizzao | 2025-12-31 05:13:45+00:00
If you think of it like cloud, where it's a commodity that reaches competitive prices, then you can use it to build products and applications, instead of competing for infrastructure (see also: railroads, optical fiber)

There is tons of money to be made at the application layer, and VCs will start looking at that once the infrastructure layer collapses.

Here's a blog post I wrote about that: https://parsnip.substack.com/p/models-arent-moats
by justatdotin | 2025-12-31 05:14:09+00:00
one reason i can imagine for this choice is that human review distributes new knowledge among human maintainers. Automated review might discourage that valuable interaction.

The comment is an artefact of an inherently valuable process, not the sole objective. So I'd prefer code is reviewed by a human who maybe initiates a discussion with an agent. I'd hope this minor workflow detail encourages the human to take a more active lead, rather than risk mere ceremonial approval.
by gdulli | 2025-12-31 05:14:24+00:00
Hard agree. Though I don't think most people who exhibit the problem are consciously trying to pad a resume. I think it's more mundane than that, most people just follow the crowd and earnestly think the new layers of complexity being sold this year will solve more problems than they introduce.

People want to find blog posts that dictate a best practice or generally correct solution. They don't have the skill or experience or mindset to evaluate each distinct problem and craft the optimally simple solution for it.

All I ever see anymore is architecture and tech stacks that promise to solve the perceived weakness that's currently in fashion while starting from scratch and taking steps backward in ways that people don't even realize or appreciate were already solved.
by colesantiago | 2025-12-31 05:15:37+00:00
"Vibe coding" (i.e. the kind of code that is statistically 'plausible' that sometimes works and the user doesn't look at the code but tries it to see if it works to their liking (with no tests) )

Was the worst thing to happen to programming, computer science I have seen, good for prototypes but not production software, and especially for important projects like LLVM.

It is good to gatekeep this slop from LLVM before it gets out of control.
by fwipsy | 2025-12-31 05:16:07+00:00
Bad example. If the toaster carbonized bread in 20 seconds it's defective, likely unsafe, possibly violates physics, certainly above the pay grade of a sandwich-pusher.

Taking responsibility for outcomes is a powerful paradigm but I refuse to be held responsible for things that are genuinely beyond my power to change.

This is tangential to the AI discussion though.
by cmurf | 2025-12-31 05:16:23+00:00
Simon did an update earlier this year on the Germanwings accident. He states the official report is flawed. It's an interesting read, but also quite sad that such basic questions are not answered and thus far few seem to even care that they get answered.

https://avherald.com/h?article=483a5651/0164&opt=0
by ajross | 2025-12-31 05:17:16+00:00
As a "measurement of value" they both suck. Gold is (extremely) volatile and currency inflates.

Well, you can't do much to correct for the speculation noise in gold. But maybe we can attack from the other side. Maybe we could record prices for various representative products in a giant data set somewhere and calculate and record, I dunno, a "price index" that normalizes the prices to a value that is stable over time.

I bet people would pay good money to look at a chart like that. Maybe we could find one.