MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jeppester | 2025-12-19 13:58:31+00:00
Meanwhile I'm getting a 5000 lines PR with code that's all clearly AI generated.

It's full of bloat; Unused http endpoints, lots of small utility functions that could have been inlined (but now come with unit tests!), missing translations, only somewhat correct design...

The quality wasn't perfect before, now it has taken a noticeable dip. And new code is being added faster than ever. There is no way to keep up.

I feel that I can either just give in and stop caring about quality, or I'll be fixing everyone else's AI code all of my time.

I'm sure that all my particular colleagues are just "holding it wrong", but this IS a real experience that I'm having, and it's been getting worse for a couple of years now.

I am also using AI myself, just in a much more controlled way, and I'm sure there's a sweet spot somewhere between "hand-coding" and vibing.

I just feel that as you inch in on that sweet spot, the advertised gains slowly wash away, and you are left with a tangible, but not as mindblowing improvement.
by duskdozer | 2025-12-19 13:59:19+00:00
>As an abstract idea I think there is a reasonable argument to be made that the size of any contribution to a problem should be measured as a relative proportion of total influence.

Right, I think you have responsibility for your 1/<global population>th (arguably considerably more though, for first-worlders) of the problem. What I see is something like refusal to consider swapping out a two-stroke-engine-powered tungsten lightbulb with an LED of equivalent brightness, CRI, and color temperature, because it won't unilaterally solve the problem.
by throw0101a | 2025-12-19 13:59:20+00:00
> It would be nice to have a new Council, an ecumenical one, coming to agreement to unite Catholic, Orthodox, and as many mainline protestant churches as possible. It may require the Catholic church to make some sort of concession, which is probably the biggest obstacle.

It was the Protestantism that splintered from the Catholic Church (and then splintered with-in itself), and changed doctrine(s) to what had been accepted for over a thousand years.

For example: the Real Presence. It's been accepted since the earliest times, and both Eastern (Orthodox) and Western (Catholic) Christianity profess it. Are Protestants going to accept it.
by DonHopkins | 2025-12-19 13:59:25+00:00
At least AI can write grammatically correct sentences and use punctuation and proper capitalization.

As a 0.1x low effort Hacker News user who can't lift a pinky to press a shift or punctuation key, you should consider using AI to improve the quality of your repetitive off-topic hostile vibe postings and performative opinions.

Or put down the phone and step away from the toilet.
by vivzkestrel | 2025-12-19 13:59:34+00:00
tbh i did not encrypt decrypt for the ai scrapers at all, a lot of people were previously trying to download data directly from my API that my frontend uses and this kinda pissed me off a bit. So I added encryption/decryption to the mix and will release the newer version. As I mentioned earlier as well, can someone sit through and decrypt it? yes. Will 99% of them do it? no! Thats where I win
by latexr | 2025-12-19 14:00:32+00:00
> For 99% of tasks I'm totally certain there's people out there that are orders of magnitude better at them than me.

And LLMs slurped some of those together with the output of thousands of people who’d do the task worse, and you have no way of forcing it to be the good one every time.

> If the AI can regurgitate their thinking, my output is better.

But it can’t. Not definitively and consistently, so that hypothetical is about as meaningful as “if I had a magic wand to end world hunger, I’d use it”.

> Humans may not need to think to just... do stuff.

If you don’t think to do regular things, you won’t be able to think to do advanced things. It’s akin to any muscle; you don’t use it, it atrophies.
by ben_w | 2025-12-19 14:00:44+00:00
> Between long COVID and ai, nobody will be able to make fizzbuzz in Java, let alone code a frontend by hand.

I've been doing front-end stuff since getting free trials/demos of Dreamweaver and of the mac equivalent of Visual Basic* on a magazine cover CD with pocket money while in high school in the 90s.

IMO, the stuff you need on your CV as a front-end developer, is much less productive than the stuff we had back in the late 90s. Well, except for localisation (while Unicode technically existed back then, support for it seemed to be minimal) and version control. Everything else feels like a regression that has only been partially compensated for by hardware and network speed improvements.

If anything, AI will let us go back to actually performant systems, because the AI doesn't need to show off how many years of experience it has with Gorebyss-on-Arvados (or whatever other buzzword bingo you want to insert here).

* Now this, thanks to a rebrand: https://www.xojo.com
by Romateslax | 2025-12-19 14:00:46+00:00
I talked to Andy from Not Boring Software about the story behind his apps you probably know and use, !Weather, !Camera, !Calculator, etc.

The fun part is that all of the apps are built using a 3D rendering engine SceneKit with 3D assets made in Blender, basically designing and building apps like games. I was super impressed by that.

Hope you learn something fun from it too!
by necovek | 2025-12-19 14:02:14+00:00
2 decades ago, so well before any LLMs, our CEO did that with a couple of huge code changes: he hacked together a few things, and threw it over the wall to us (10K lines). I was happy I did not get assigned to deal with that mess, but getting that into production quality code took more than a month!

"But I did it in a few days, how can it take so long for you guys?" was not received well by the team.

Sure, every case is its own, and maybe here it made sense if the fix was small and testing for it was simple. Personally (also in a director-level role today), I'd rather lead by example and do the full story, including testing, and especially writing automated tests (with LLM's help or not), especially if it is small (I actually did that to fix misuse of mutexes ~12 months ago in one of our platform libraries, when everybody else was stuck when our multi-threaded code behaved as single-threaded code).

Even so, I prefer to sit with them and loudly ask questions that I'd be asking myself on the path to a fix: let them learn how I get to a solution is even more valuable, IMO.
by unconed | 2025-12-19 14:03:06+00:00
cough

The Strange Case of "Engineers" Who Use AI

I rely on AI coding tools. I don’t need to think about it to know they’re great. I have instincts which tell me convenience = dopamine = joy.

I tested ChatGPT in 2022, and asked it to write something. It (obviously) got some things wrong; I don’t remember what exactly, but it was definitely wrong. That was three years ago and I've forgotten that lesson. Why wouldn't I? I've been offloading all sorts of meaningful cognitive processes to AI tools since then.

I use Claude Code now. I finished a project last week that would’ve taken me a month. My senior coworker took one look at it and found 3 major flaws. QA gave it a try and discovered bugs, missing features, and one case of catastrophic data loss. I call that “nitpicking.” They say I don’t understand the engineering mindset or the sense of responsibility over what we build. (I told them it produces identical results and they said I'm just admitting I can't tell the difference between skill and scam).

“The code people write is always unfinished,” I always say. Unlike AI code, which is full of boilerplate, adjusted to satisfy the next whim even faster, and generated by the pound.

I never look at Stack Overflow anymore, it's dead. Instead I want the info to be remixed and scrubbed of all its salient details, and have an AI hallucinate the blanks. Thay way I can say that "I built this" without feeling like a fraud or a faker. The distinction is clear (well, at least in my head).

Will I ever be good enough to code by myself again? No. When a machine showed up that told me flattering lies while sounding like a silicon valley board room after a pile of cocaine, I jumped in without a parachute [rocket emoji].

I also personally started to look down on anyone who didn't do the same, for threatening my sense of competence.
by squeefers | 2025-12-19 14:03:16+00:00
im similarly dubious about this.... only works by blue light hitting your retina, which meant your eye was open, which meant you were awake ie not even trying to sleep. also, circadian rhythms were proven to be unaffected even when living in a cave with no natural sunlight - so theres more to sleepiness than just light hitting your eyebaws
by gorbachev | 2025-12-19 14:03:32+00:00
Something similar happened to me. The delivery company returned two packages, two separate orders, as damaged back to Amazon. They were marked as "delivered". They automatically refunded just one item in one of the returned orders.

I had to call them to get a refund for all the items on all the orders, and even then they had a lot of difficulty figuring out what was happening. Isn't Amazon supposed to be a world leader (maybe after Walmart) in this stuff?
by queejjd | 2025-12-19 14:03:34+00:00
> There can be soundness bug inside your abstraction, but it will be a massively smaller surface for auditing and expert required to write such abstraction.

If all of the Vec has to be "audited", or checked and reviewed, including all the code that is not inside unsafe blocks, how would the surface be any smaller?

> The point coming back to abstraction and responsibility, in Rust, you can build abstraction that is sound and guarantee memory safety from there.

Isn't it normal for programming languages to support building abstractions that can help with not only memory safety, but general correctness? C is a bit barebones, but lots of other programming languages, like C#, C++, Haskell and Scala support building abstractions that are harder to misuse.
by hcfman | 2025-12-19 14:05:13+00:00
Sorry :) I couldn't resist. I think I'm the oldest person in the department and I think also that I am probably one of the ones that have been using AI in software development the most.

Don't be so quick to point at old people and make assumptions. Sometimes all those years actually translate into useful experience :)

Possibly. The focus of a lot of young people should be to try and effect political change that allows billionares wealth grow unended. AI is all going to accelerate this very rapidly now. Just look at what kind of world some of those with the most wealth are wanting to impose on the others now. It's frightening.
by Aachen | 2025-12-19 14:05:37+00:00
That's how language shifts. Supply chain attacks are broadly seen as a scary new thing, so like with any such term, people try to shoehorn things they find into its meaning. Those who fall for and repeat it shift the language. The same happened to the word 0day: it used to mean "a vulnerability that you specifically haven't had a chance to patch because it has been known to the world for 0 days". A scary thing. Now it's commonly used as synonym for the word vulnerability

I wonder if every vulnerability is soon called a supply chain attack:

- Microsoft releases a Windows security update -> Discord uses Windows -> supply chain attack on Discord

- User didn't install security updates for a while -> brought their phone to work -> phone with microphone sits in pocket in meeting room -> supply chain attack

Everything has dependencies that can be vulnerable, that doesn't mean "the supply chain" was attacked in a targeted effort by some attacker
by throw0101a | 2025-12-19 14:05:38+00:00
> Many Catholics believe that Mary was born without sin (immaculate conception), never died (assumption into heaven), can advocate to Jesus for believers (intercession) and has been crowned the Queen of Heaven.

So do the Orthodox churches. And both have roots going back way longer that 'just' two hundred years:

> Mary as Queen of Heaven is praised in the Salve Regina ("Hail Queen"), which is sung in the time from Trinity Sunday until the Saturday before the first Sunday of Advent. It is attributed to a German Benedictine monk, Hermann of Reichenau (1013–1054). Traditionally it has been sung in Latin, though many translations exist. In the Middle Ages, Salve Regina offices were held every Saturday.[21]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_of_Heaven#Salve_Regina

> "Majestic and Heavenly Maid, Lady, Queen, protect and keep me under your wing lest Satan the sower of destruction glory over me, lest my wicked foe be victorious against me." St. Ephrem the Syrian (4th Century)

* http://theorthodoxfaith.com/article/mary-as-the-queen-of-hea...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephrem_the_Syrian

And if we're going to with potentially troublesome dogmas, I would think the Real Presence would be much higher on the list:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_presence_of_Christ_in_the...
by lotsofpulp | 2025-12-19 14:05:46+00:00
Taxing land is taxing unrealized gains, hence it would tax billionaires. In addition, land value tax rates don’t have to be flat, so the poor have no reason to pay them.

If anything, taxing transactions hits the poor, as they don’t have the ability to borrow against assets they don’t have, and all their work (which is a transaction) is taxed.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-12-19 14:06:24+00:00
> Many have the attitude of finding one edge case that it doesn’t work well and dismiss AI as useful tool

Many programmers work on problems (nearly) *all day* where AI does not work well.

> AI gives you an approximated answer, it depends on you how to steer it to a good enough answer

Many programmers work on problem where correctness is of essential importance, i.e. if a code block is "semi-right" it is of no use - and even having to deal with code blocks where you cannot trust that the respective programmer did think deeply about such questions is a huge time sink.

> Some people are just not good at constantly learning things

Rather: some people are just not good at constantly looking beyond their programming bubble where AI might have some use.
by TwitBar | 2025-12-19 14:07:00+00:00
Essentially Braid Anniversary edition. Huge effort for someone to just say “oh so just Braid Remastered?” In general from his streams you learn that so much goes wrong during the slog that is video game development. Hire failures. Contractors billing $$$ and writing 1-2 LOC. Devs rage quitting. Platform optimization. Even a suicide (not just an employee but someone close). They do all this work and dropped the ball on marketing despite betting the future of the company on its reception, but even failing that I think it was clear to a normal person (which can be hard to reach out to and interact with) that there was no appetite for this game.
by snapcaster | 2025-12-19 14:07:26+00:00
I don't disagree with you on the conclusion, but man I just wish people stopped believing in fairy tales about countries like this. America does it too. Why are people so allergic to materialism? I'm not saying culture is irrelevant but saying china's success is due to "Chinese way of thinking" or america was dominant because of the "american dream" is an adult believing santa-tier take.

Material conditions shape history
by MStaniaszek1998 | 2025-12-19 14:07:33+00:00
Hi! I have been tinkering a bit with a new idea - Video tutorial as a code. I have figured out at my current contract that the tests in playwright/cypress/whatever are basically a scenarios for the video tutorials for final users. Such tool can automatically update the videos without the human intervention. So if you change UI of your SaaS, the video tutorial will automatically reflect this change. In the readme I have attached a video that shows how it works. Please let me know what you think. I would really appreciate all sorts of feedback.
by zdragnar | 2025-12-19 14:08:31+00:00
A-fucking-I doesn't make the product better. Mozilla constantly runs in every direction other than what their core users want or need.

> You want Mozilla to stop doing that? Guarantee their moneis flow.

Sure, just as soon as they sell something a privacy focused user of a browser wants. Privacy focused password management built into Firefox with paid sync or enterprise integration. Privacy focused paid email hosting, works great with Thunderbird. Had they done any of this back in the day, I'd gladly have paid for it and trusted them over smaller names or Google.

I'm sure they're getting lots of money to throw around playing with the new shiny, but that's not going to keep their users, or keep them happy.

They lost a ton of market share when the browser was slow as an old dog and chrome came on the scene, but they didn't do nearly enough to make up for it.
by tliltocatl | 2025-12-19 14:08:47+00:00
And how exactly is the AI going to give Mozilla money? I mean not investor money, but actual profit? By alienating their moat userbase (privacy-minded technies)? Because if not for the AI haters, nobody would care about Firefox __at all__.

Funding end-user-facing FOSS is hard. An OS kernel or a DMBS can count on corporations that need new features providing funding. A browser can't. But then if small individual donations aren't enough for them (I think there's still no way to donate to Firefox directly?) they don't have a product.
by andyjohnson0 | 2025-12-19 14:08:59+00:00
> Your comment seems rooted in fear and anger.

It's rooted in neither. Care to explain why you came to that conclusion? Fyi I'm neither American nor Chinese.

I was replying to a commenter who used "how we approach everything" and "Chinese way of thinking" when explaining China's economic dominance. I was questioning whether there is any such "national thinking" in any society, still less in a society of ~1.4bn people.

Fwiw I think that China's achievement, since the mid 20th century, of lifting so many people out of extreme poverty in such a short time is extremely creditable. As is its recent action on deploying clean energy technology. I'm much less impressed with its authoritarian political system. And of course I worry about military conflict.
by puff_pastry | 2025-12-19 14:09:05+00:00
It's been somewhat disheartening to see many techie spaces (also HackerNews) become so skeptical and anti AI. It's as-if the luddites are at it again and they're just refuting progress because of a bad impression or because they fear the consequences.

AI is a tool and it shuold be treated as such.

Also, beware of snake oil salesmen. Is AI going to integrate widely into the world? Yes. Is it also going to destroy all the jobs in the world? Of course not, luddites don't understand the naïvety of this position.
by latexr | 2025-12-19 14:09:23+00:00
> The second type of vibe coding is what I am interested in. It is when you use a coding agent to build towers of complexity that go beyond what you have time to understand in any detail. I am interested in what it means to cede cognitive control to an AI.

What an absolutely abhorrent way of thinking. “I am interested in turning off my brain to create unstable Jenga towers of complexity that I’ll have no ability to fix when they inevitably fail”.

As if software in general isn’t a big enough pile of garbage already. One day, every single one of us will be seriously bitten by bugs created by this irresponsible approach.

Being able to understand what you build is a feature, not a bug.
by delecti | 2025-12-19 14:09:46+00:00
Yeah, Tor Books publishes without DRM, and they seem to be one of the bigger SFF publishers these days. John Scalzi, George R.R. Martin (though not the ASoIaF books), Robert Jordan, Annalee Newitz, Charlie Jane Anders, and a bunch of other SFF authors I recognize. I'm sure there are others, but all the once I've noticed have been from Tor.
by Mumps | 2025-12-19 14:10:11+00:00
This is an anthropomorphization. LLMs do not think they are anything, no concept of self, no thinking at all (despite the lovely marketing around thinking/reasoning models). I'm quite sad that more hasn't been done to dispel this.

When you ask gpt 4.1 et c to describe itself, it doesn't have singular concept of "itself". It has some training data around what LLMs are in general and can feed back a reasonable response given.
by nyeah | 2025-12-19 14:10:13+00:00
That may be a good point. But I don't think it's an answer to my question.

My question was, Why do people get so passionate about being screwed? Say consumers really are receiving a $300 discount in exchange for being forced to watch say 30 hours of ads. Is that really such a fantastic opportunity that I'm going to go cheer for it publicly, or claim it's consumers' fault, or it should be mandatory, or we must just accept it because (whatever)?
by necovek | 2025-12-19 14:10:34+00:00
It can be your problem if the company goes under and you lose your job: you might not be able to pay your mortgage or bills.

If you believe your manager is asking for unreasonable things in what you are an expert in despite you raising these concerns, and it's not clear their manager is in on it, please raise it to their manager!

"I am willing to continue working this way, but I just want to make sure the consequences it could have on the business are clear to everyone here."
by username223 | 2025-12-19 14:11:20+00:00
> Which technology did we successfully roll back?

Quite a few come to mind: chemical and biological weapons, beanie babies, NFTs, garbage pail kids... Some take real effort to eradicate, some die out when people get bored and move on.

Today's version of "AI," i.e. large language models for emitting code, is on the level of fast fashion. It's novel and surprising that you can get a shirt for $5, then you realize that it's made in a sweatshop, and it falls apart after a few washings. There will always be a market for low-quality clothes, but they aren't "disrupting non-nudity."
by coldtea | 2025-12-19 14:11:26+00:00
>Fair enough. I guess I am making a bit of a straw-man in that I feel I just don't buy the idea that doing the same thing 10 times over the course of 10 years is somehow worse than doing different things over the course of 10 years.

Different things doesn't need to mean "different domains" which is how you read it.

It can be "things revealing different aspect/failure cases of the same domain" too.

If someone has done the same narrow kind of CRUD app 10 times, they're not CRUD-app experts - they never seen lots of different aspects of CRUD apps.
by moh_quz | 2025-12-19 14:11:27+00:00
Honestly just because its the most popular so more people can pick it up easily.

But the frontend and backend arent tightly coupled at all.

You can swap Next for Vite, Nuxt, whatever you want and connect it to the same Go backend.

Only thing you'd need to copy over is some auth and billing related stuff on the frontend side
by duskdozer | 2025-12-19 14:11:33+00:00
>only works by blue light hitting your retina, which meant your eye was open, which meant you were awake ie not even trying to sleep.

not necessarily - your eyelids aren't perfectly opaque

>also, circadian rhythms were proven to be unaffected even when living in a cave with no natural sunlight - so theres more to sleepiness than just light hitting your eyebaws

yeah, not disputing this. Blue light doesn't have to be the sole determinant to have an effect though
by Blinky243 | 2025-12-19 14:12:39+00:00
Author here. This piece tries to separate two numbers people mix up: (1) the premium insurers charge, and (2) what households pay after premium tax credits.

It includes a simple table of cost metrics, “receipt-style” scenarios (CHCF examples), and the sleeper issues that change real annual spend: deductibles, CSRs, drug tiers, and tax credit reconciliation (1095-A / Form 8962).

Primary sources are linked throughout the article.