MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: CodeContext – Cut developer onboarding time from months to weeks
by shivanshsonii | 2025-12-14 16:28:00+00:00
Hey HN!

I'm Shivansh, and I built CodeContext to solve a problem every growing engineering team faces: new developers taking 2-3 months before their first meaningful contribution.

The core insight: Most onboarding time isn't spent learning to code—it's spent figuring out which 15 files (out of 10,000) actually matter, and in what order to read them.

What CodeContext does:

Scans your repository (any language)

Builds a dependency graph using AST parsing

Runs PageRank to identify "knowledge hotspots" (the UserService.java that's called by 47 other files)

Generates a topologically-sorted "reading list" (simple → complex)

Creates interactive D3.js visualizations

Example output:

text Your Codebase Map ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Knowledge Hotspots: 1. AuthService.kt (89 connections) - CRITICAL 2. DatabaseConfig.kt (67 connections) 3. UserRepository.kt (45 connections)

Week 1 Onboarding Path: → README.md, ARCHITECTURE.md → Models: User.kt, Product.kt (low complexity) → Config: application.yml, DatabaseConfig.kt → First task: Add validation to UserDTO Technical stack:

Kotlin (multiplatform-ready)

Tree-sitter for parsing 40+ languages

JGraphT for graph algorithms

D3.js for interactive visualizations

Git history analysis for change patterns

Why this approach works:

Traditional docs go stale immediately

Code search is great if you know what to search for

AI assistants generate code but don't teach architecture

Juniors need a "start here" button, not a search box

What's different from Sourcegraph/CodeSee:

Lightweight (single CLI command, no infrastructure)

Onboarding-first (not code search)

Free & open source (MIT license)

Runs locally (no code leaves your machine)

I've been testing this with 3 teams (50-200 developers). Average time to first PR went from 47 days → 19 days.

Try it:

bash npm install -g codecontext codecontext analyze /path/to/repo Open to feedback! What features would make this immediately useful for your team?

GitHub: https://github.com/sonii-shivansh/CodeContext
by nataliste | 2025-12-14 16:28:06+00:00
You can tell what the paper is going to argue just by reading the author affiliations. They're all part of a group whose funding lines all lead back to NIDA.

NIDA’s mandate is harm. Not cognition, not performance, not any of the reasons people actually use cannabis. So of course the study leans hard on CUD and psychosis as those are the two outcomes that guarantee grant renewals. A proposal about cannabis and creative problem-solving will get immediately buried. But if you emphasize risk (especially adolescent risk, ideally with "first-episode psychosis" somewhere in the aims) then suddenly everyone’s interested.

They do the usual maneuver with FDA-approved derived substances: carve them out as clean, respectable, and clinically manageable, while treating the whole-plant as this murky, unstable mass the medical system can’t "trust." That distinction is purely commercial, not scientific. The plant itself is chaotic, but the extract with an SKU number is pure, controlled, and therefore "clinical." It’s not hard to see what this protects.

It's the exact same thing Cargill, Coca-Cola, and PepsiCo did against stevia (Rebiana) and Merck did against red rice koji (Lovastatin). The form you can just grow or make yourself cheaply is dangerous to consumers. But this patented recombination passed solely through greased palms is just dandy. This study is just another vehicle for the same move against cannabis.

Most of the authors work in addiction medicine. Their entire professional world assumes SUD as the governing model. If cannabis doesn’t sit inside that model (as in patients can just go buy it without passing through the psychiatric gate) then they lose money and clients. The conclusion section basically spells out the anxiety: clinicians must provide guidance, clinicians must set the boundaries, clinicians must interpret the evidence. That’s jurisdictional language.

Meanwhile, the practical reality is that patients get contradictory instructions: a doctor says "try cannabis" but a follow-up psychiatrist says "chronic cannabis use is a disorder." They're trying to patch that incoherence by building a moat around medicalized (and patented) cannabinoids and burning everything outside it.

The only cannabis that counts is the kind that runs through the FDA and, by extension, the institutions tied into that pipeline. Everything outside that channel is going to be treated as dangerous and destructive on purpose.
by MangoToupe | 2025-12-14 16:28:11+00:00
> he put out a call for stories from people who have lost their jobs to AI

This seems like an inherently terrible way to look for a story to report. Not only are you unlikely to know if you didn't find work because an AI successfully replaced you, but it's likely to attract the most bitter people in the industry looking for someone to blame.

And, btw, I hate how steeply online content has obviously crashed in quality. It's very obvious that AI has destroyed most of what passed as "reporting" or even just "listicles". But there are better ways to measure this than approaching this from a labor perspective, especially as these jobs likely aren't coming back from private equity slash-and-burning the industry.
by dustractor | 2025-12-14 16:28:49+00:00
I'm glad to hear that the Blackfoot tribe is still going strong. I'm a nobody white guy but I've always felt a special connection with them. Here's why:

When I was a teenager and my parents weren't home, there was a knock at the door and it was an ancient-looking old man. He said he was a medicine man of the Blackfoot tribe. He didn't go into details but he said that since the tribe's numbers had dwindled they had voted to move to a different reservation. The problem was that the reservation they were going to was on land that used to belong to a tribe that was one of their ancient enemies and that he could not allow his tribe's medicine bag to end up there. He had heard that my parents were friends with the (? shawnee ? pawnee) and we had let them build a sweat lodge on our land that before he and his tribe left to go live with the tribe that was taking them in, he wanted to leave the medicine pouch somewhere it could stay on traditional Blackfoot lands. So anyway, he gave it to me and I got to hold it. The leather was old and cracked, the feathers were brittle, and the decorations were old shells and antique beads. I kept it for a while and used it in a couple of sweat lodge ceremonies with my friends before I finally told my dad about it and let him keep it.
by YouAreWRONGtoo | 2025-12-14 16:30:54+00:00
> Am I correct to assume that links2 is more of the same/better?

Most distributions install links2 as links.

> But I wonder: Whose ruffles did you panty in order for your comments to land this way?)

I don't know, but most people on voting based forums don't like what I have to say, even though I am almost always right. For example, when I say that Linux is an operating system using a software development methodology from the 1970s, that hurts some people's feelings. Similarly, when I say that I use Linux, because I am poor (read: not a decabillionaire), not because it's good (Mac/Windows are obviously even worse), that just rubs people the wrong way. So, ultimately, it's because most people are political and stupid in nature.

I think almost everything sucks relative to my standards, which is only natural, because I am engineer and I only exist to fix broken shit.
by conartist6 | 2025-12-14 16:31:11+00:00
It just doesn't seem that different to me. The difficulty of building and maintaining a 3 screen webapp hasn't changed significantly. Flight schools are a niche sure (and I've been around them; I'm a private pilot) but really all the innovation that lets a flight school own a webapp has nothing to do with AI, it happened in web browsers and in React and lots of investment in abstractions until we made it pretty trivial to build and own a simple webapp.

Somehow AI took over the narrative, but it's almost never the thing that actually created the value that it gets credit for creating.
by quotemstr | 2025-12-14 16:31:39+00:00
Fil-C lets programs access objects through the wrong pointer under data race. All over the Internet, you've responded to the tearing critique (and I'm not the only one making it) by alternatively 1) asserting that racing code will panic safely on tear, which is factually incorrect, and 2) asserting that a program can access memory only through its loaded capabilities, which is factually correct but a non sequitur for the subject at hand.

You're shredding your credibility for nothing. You can instead just acknowledge Fil-C provides memory safety only for code correctly synchronized under the C memory model. That's still plenty useful and nobody will think less of you for it. They'll think more, honestly.
by leoh | 2025-12-14 16:31:43+00:00
You live in Greece. You are a physician. It’s a free country. Yet you have chosen to blame a “Jewish company.”

You also probably have confirmation bias. Given your specialty, you likely have a lot of patients that suffer from neuropathic pain. It’s your job to support them. Is cannabis best for your patients? Perhaps not always as used. It’s your job to help.

I live in California and cannabis is used here too. Blaming a “Jewish company” is beyond absurd.
by erichocean | 2025-12-14 16:31:48+00:00
I dunno, I'm working on a TUI for a Claude Code like UI in Clojure right now, and after examining all of the available libraries and tools, just had Opus work with me to generate a new library (with tests) that does what I want.

Works great, and it's easy to add features to (as evidenced by the dozen or stuff I've added already).

Is that a "new library"? It certainly doesn't show up in any statistic the OP could point to.
by simonw | 2025-12-14 16:31:57+00:00
Collecting personal stories from people - and doing background reporting to verify those people are credible - is a long standing journalistic tradition. I think it's valuable, and Brian did it very well here (he's a veteran technology reporter).

It doesn't tell the whole story though. That's why I always look for multiple angles and sources on an issue like this (here that's the impact of AI on freelance copywriting.)
by fsckboy | 2025-12-14 16:32:02+00:00
nar nar = from gnarly meant in the sense of "great"

pow pow = is powder, powdery snow

cuttin = skiing (i.e. leaving a trail behind you after cutting through the snow)

freshies = means fresh, new; not clear in this context, it could refer to "fresh snow" or "fresh tracks"

nippy nips = depth of snow is up to your nips (nipples) and you are cold/excited/goosebumps so your nips are nippy

this is generalized "california surfer talk"; the type of western man who surfs also snowboards, dirt bikes, jet skis, etc as well as clings to a teenaged hangout burnout lifestyle
by Ekaros | 2025-12-14 16:32:06+00:00
Somehow I just thought about this on VS Code. Native windows has the top command bar. One of Linux VMs do not... It saves entire line of text... As if I would care about that much vertical space on modern screen.

On other hand. Vivaldi I am trying on phone has this stupid thick bar at bottom on my Android. With essentially bookmarks, back, home, forward and tabs buttons... Significantly more taking visual space...

I am really not sure what is going on in total...
by epiccoleman | 2025-12-14 16:32:45+00:00
This is at least a little bit true for me. Examples:

https://github.com/epiccoleman/scrapio

https://github.com/epiccoleman/tuber

These are both projects which have repeatedly given me a lot of value but which have very little market mass appeal (well, tuber is pretty fuckin' cool, imho, but you could just prompt one up yourself).

I've also built a handful of tools for my current job which are similarly vibe coded.

The problem with these kinds of things from a "can I sell this app" perspective is that they're raw and unpolished. I use tuber multiple times a week but I don't really care enough about it to get it to a point where I don't have to have a joke disclaimer about not understanding the code. If one of my little generated CLIs or whatever fails, I don't mind, I still saved time. But if I wanted to charge for any of them I'd feel wrong not polishing the rough edges off.
by chihuahua | 2025-12-14 16:33:04+00:00
I apologize that my memory has faded over the intervening 25 years.

What I do remember is that it's an odd language, but nothing about it suggested that it would even be 2x more productive than C or C++ or Java.

I didn't get to use it much after the week-long class; the only reason the company sent 3 of us across the country for a week is because the CTO had a bizarre obsession with Objective-C and OS X.
by rsynnott | 2025-12-14 16:33:27+00:00
> This was unsettling. It was impossible not to question if I too were an unreliable narrator of my own experience. Was I hoodwinked by the screens of code flying by and had no way of quantifying whether all that reading and reviewing of code actually took more time in the first place than just doing the thing myself?

I don’t understand why this was so surprising to people. People are _terrible_ at self-reporting basically anything, and “people think it makes them mildly more productive but it actually makes them mildly less productive” is a fairly common result for ineffective measures aimed at increasing productivity. If you are doing a thing that you believe is supposed to increase productivity, you’ll be inclined to think that it is doing so unless the result is dramatically negative.
by wniak | 2025-12-14 16:34:04+00:00
So, if i understand it correctly, you built something like StackOverflow but with auto-redaction for sensitive data?

That's pretty cool but I don't think this feature is enough for most people to sign-up and keep using it(not much already existing questions&answers, users etc.), maybe a browser extension which checks if you're putting your private keys in public places, and warns you if you do so, could be useful.
by Too | 2025-12-14 16:34:24+00:00
If I understand correctly, this is essentially a more composable way to write Dockerfiles? That alone is a very welcome improvement. They would do themselves a big favor if they were more clear on that in their marketing, instead of boasting around the bush with all kinds of other terminology and claims of redefining foundations.

If I already have a Dockerfile that doesn’t need composition, how does this help me vs being a small cosmetic improvement over ”docker build” command line?
by icegreentea2 | 2025-12-14 16:34:29+00:00
When I feel deeply cynical about the quality of our modern life, I imagine that one of the reasons it's so easy for us to "settle" for the "good enough" output of AI in certain areas, especially around corporate copywriting, art, and yes perhaps even code is that these areas already fundamentally suck.

I believe that good skillful writing, drawing, or coding, by a human who actually understands and believes in what they're doing can really elevate the merely "good" to excellent.

However, when I think about the reality of most corporate output, we're not talking about "good" as a baseline level that we are trying to elevate. We're usually talking about "just barely not crap" in the best case, to straight up garbage in maybe a more common case.

Everyone understands this, from the consumer to the "artist" (perhaps programmer), to the manager, to the business owner. And this is why using AI slop is so easy to embrace in so many areas. The human touch was previously being used in barely successful attempts to put a coat of paint over some obvious turds. They were barely succeeding anyways, the crap stunk through. May as well let AI pretend to try, and we'll keep trying until the wheels finally fall off.
by tmoertel | 2025-12-14 16:34:40+00:00
> This seems like an inherently terrible way to look for a story to report.

But it’s probably a great way create a story to generate clicks. The people who respond to calls like this one are going to come from the extreme end of the distribution. That makes for a sensational story. But that also makes for a story that doesn't represent the reality as most people will experience it, rather the worst case.
by ViktorRay | 2025-12-14 16:34:45+00:00
Interesting to see this level of cooperation between the United States and India in 1965. Especially between the American and Indian intelligence agencies.

Historians of this time period usually describe India as having a more frigid relationship with America by the mid 1960’s with India moving closer to the Soviet Union and the United States moving closer to Pakistan. But articles like this demonstrate that the situation may have been more complex than that.

Of course geopolitics can sometimes change quickly. The leadership in the US and in India did change between 1965, the early 1970’s and the late 1970’s so that was a factor as well.
by SEMIPREMIUM | 2025-12-14 16:35:17+00:00
What are you talking about? I am not openly suggesting that. This is a forum for tech in development. It is important to discuss and be able to be open about both intended and unintended consequences of the technology we work on. Too much focus on the positives. So this is an exercise on the good side of freedom of speech. With open discussion, the positives can be magnified and the negative mitigated.

This is an unintended consequence, but it would make it safer from a utilitarian perspective. I think a consequence of taking this to market is that people would use it for that, but it is not intended specifically for that. Traffic safety is a big one, and anything that can improve traffic safety should be considered, and if it does the law will change and adapt to technological innovation, but that is far ahead.
by qwertox | 2025-12-14 16:35:29+00:00
Cookie warnings are a sign of companies not willing to accept that they cannot just collect data on you and monetize it.

How does that make the EU regulation something bad? The bad thing is that the companies are willing to bombard us with the worst possible cookie banners, in order to monetize our visits.

Maybe the next EU regulation should be to prohibit those banners and allow companies to add a small toggle somewhere on their site so we can toggle it to allow them to set 3rd-party cookies.
by p_ing | 2025-12-14 16:35:31+00:00
It's like ST:TNG Season 3 Episode 26 and Season 4 Episode 1.

You had to wait a whole ~four months to see Episode 1 when Episode 26 ended in a "holy shit!" moment on top of one of the best TNG episodes to-date.

If you watch the subsequently, you miss that feeling of build-up; there's no school-yard discussion about what could happen next.

Doesn't keep me from watching it roughly once per year, but the original impact of the cliffhanger was incredible.
by more_corn | 2025-12-14 16:35:34+00:00
I’d want to dig into WHY the charging port is on the bottom. It is certainly not there by accident. Apple isn’t in the habit of making design choices without reason. Especially big, flashy ones.

What does this design choice say about how they think of their users? What does it say when converted to a statement TO their users?

I leave those questions as an exercise for the reader.
by toast0 | 2025-12-14 16:35:49+00:00
My local roro ferry drops you off pretty close to downtown. If you don't get a good fix as you get off the boat before you get into the urban canyon, satnav is pretty hopeless for a few minutes.

Doesn't usually take 5 hours to figure out where it is though. At least not on my vehicles, even the one that's always getting confused.
by franciscop | 2025-12-14 16:36:57+00:00
> Apple today released iOS 26.2, iPadOS 26.2, and macOS 26.2

For those as confused as me, I'm on macOS 15.6.1, and it seems for the next version they aligned everything and I do indeed see an update for "macOS Tahoe 26.2". However, I also see a Sequoia 15.7.3 update dated at the same time and together in the same upgrade blog post (and for Sonoma 14.8.3, kudos), so for those that doesn't seem to want to do the jump now into Liquid Glass, that seems available:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/100100

Note: I had to click the [i], then unselect the "macOS Tahoe 26.2" and select the "macOS Sequoia 15.7.3" manually to avoid a full upgrade.
by fluidcruft | 2025-12-14 16:36:57+00:00
I sort of agree with this about cognitive load. I'm somewhat new (started dipping my toes around July) but use Claude code heavily now. I did spend a lot of time playing with configuring it at first and creating agents etc. But I have a weird setup where I have three computers that I work on and at one point I realized vanilla Claude Code had adopted the things I was doing as defaults (and improved on them). So I have sort of declared a configuration bankruptcy and just use the recommended things. The only things I still do are things that help both Claude and I keep track of things (md files describing decisions and context of files).

[I still haven't figured out MCP or how/why to use them or why to bother. You run servers. I guess. It's too complex for my smol brain to understand]
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-12-14 16:37:02+00:00
Even that short changes the original source:

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/i-was-forced-to-use-ai-u...

I bookmarked the series which looks exactly like what everyone in tech is saying ISN’T happening:

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/s/ai-killed-my-job

But I’m sure somebody will blow this off as “it’s only three examples and is not really representative”

But if it is representative…

“then it’s not as bad as other automation waves”

or if it is as bad as other automation waves…

“well there’s nothing you can do about it”

Anecdotally I was in an Uber yesterday on the way to a major Metropolitan airport and we passed a Waymo. I asked the Uber driver how they felt about Waymo and Uber collaborating and if he felt like it was a threat to his job.

His answer was basically “yes it is but there’s nothing anybody can do about it you can’t stop technology it’s just part of life.”

If that’s how people who are being replaced feel about it, while still continuing to do the things necessary to train the systems, then there will be assuredly no human future (at least not one that isn’t either subsistence or fully machine integrated) because the people being replaced don’t feel like they have the capacity to stand up to it.
by mancerayder | 2025-12-14 16:37:08+00:00
Is that true? While there's a much larger overall volume of content out there, many many games to choose from... Don't you see a pattern around first person shooters, real life 'simulators' built on repetitive OCD grind, and a general sense of sameness?

Nothing feels really novel. Where the innovation is seems to focus on graphical realism, which of course I love.

I'm strongly attached to Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and while I'm near the end of the game, I'm dragging my feet so I don't have to go back to the drawing board of sorting through endless terrible FPS and retro hack and slash games on Steam that don't interest me and are copies of 20 year old games.

Adventure games (the topic here) are my favorite though, and it's very rare that anything comes out. The Sierra and LucasArts days are over (RIP). That said a few gems come out here and there, like Lucy Dreaming.
by jaccola | 2025-12-14 16:37:10+00:00
People doing jobs with no inherent value still need food, shelter, healthcare,… all provided by other people. Further, the cost difference (for there must be a cost difference or we wouldn’t have anyone choosing AI) must come from somewhere, that money is not being used to pay people (or even the same person) doing productive work.

I can see some limited scenarios in up and coming industries or strategically important industries where government job programs could be at least argued for.

The copywriting industry is clearly not either of those.