MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alexjplant | 2025-12-29 22:20:40+00:00
For every conspicuous vibecoding influencer there are a bunch of experienced software engineers using them to get things done. The newest generation of models are actually pretty decent at following instructions and using existing code as a template. Building line-of-business apps is much quicker with Claude Code because once you've nicely scaffolded everything you can just tell it to build stuff and it'll do so the same way you would have in a fraction of the time. You can also use it to research alternatives to architectural approaches and tooling that you come up with so that you don't paint yourself into a corner by having not heard about some semi-niche tool that fits your use case perfectly.

Of course I wouldn't use an LLM to #yolo some Next.js monstrosity with a flavor-of-the-week ORM and random Tailwind. I have, however, had it build numerous parts of my apps after telling it all about the mise targets and tests and architecture of the code that I came up with up front. In a way it vindicates my approach to software engineering because it's able to use the tools available to it to (reasonably) ensure correctness before it says it's done.
by MrJohz | 2025-12-29 22:20:46+00:00
I'm being snarky there, but I've genuinely never seen people make the arguments you're talking about in real life, and I run in some fairly lefty circles. Maybe online, but even then I rarely see people actually trying to argue that privilege has anything to do with the validity of people's opinions. More common is the idea that we need to better promote the voices of those with less privilege, which I don't see as being a particularly objectionable idea.

The only place I regularly see the points you mention are in the opinion pieces of certain types of pundits who like to peddle outrage and invent menaces that don't exist. They regularly tell me that people say those sorts of things, but rarely seem to be able to provide receipts.
by wahern | 2025-12-29 22:21:30+00:00
A little over 15 years ago you could index the web with a small cluster. I remember people doing doing it with Cassandra or Elasticsearch. I'm sure you'd need a much bigger cluster, but outside video and images I imagine it's still doable even for a small organization, especially if you're filtering out content farms. Plus, there are many organizations interested in having access to an index, and I'm pretty more than a few currently running their own index and selling to analytics firms.
by jjk166 | 2025-12-29 22:21:44+00:00
> For those who want a skeptical & cynical view: if remote viewing works, it would be part of the standard strategy of every hedge fund.

Please don't use the efficient capitalism argument. By that logic, if polio vaccines worked then why didn't 1940s pharma companies sell polio vaccines back when people were getting polio?

Remote viewing is bunk, but not because hedge funds in their omniscience have determined it to be unprofitable.
by roadside_picnic | 2025-12-29 22:21:51+00:00
> If an LLM is typing that code - and it can maintain a test suite that shows everything works correctly - maybe we don't need that abstraction after all.

I've had plenty of junior devs justify massive code bases of random scripts and 100+ line functions with the same logic. There's a reason senior devs almost always push back on this when it's encountered.

Everything hinges on that "if". But you're baking a tautology into your reasoning: "if LLMs can do everything we need them to, we can use LLMs for everything we need".

The reason we stop junior devs from going down this path is because experience teaches us that things will break and when they do, it will incur a world of pain.

So "LLM as abstraction" might be a possible future, but it assumes LLMs are significantly more capable than a junior dev at managing a growing mess of complex code.

This is clearly not the case with simplistic LLM usage today. "Ah! But you need agents and memory and context management, etc!" But all of these are abstractions. This is what I believe the parent comment is really pointing out.

If AI could do what we originally hoped it could: follow simple instructions to solve complex tasks. We'd be great, and I would agree with your argument. But we are very clearly not in that world. Especially since Karpathy can't even keep up with the sophisticated machinery necessary to properly orchestrate these tools. All of the people decrying "you're not doing it right!" are emphatically proving that LLMs cannot perform these tasks at the level we need them to.
by aspenmartin | 2025-12-29 22:22:06+00:00
No it doesn’t read like shilling and advertisement, it’s tiring hearing people continually dismiss coding agents as if they have not massively improved and are driving real value despite limitations and they are only just getting started. I’ve done things with Claude I never thought possible for myself to do, and I’ve done things where Claude made the whole effort take twice as long and 3x more of my time. It’s not like people are ignoring the limitations, it’s that people can see how powerful the already are and how much more headroom there is even with existing paradigms not to mention the compute scaling happening in 26-27 and the idea pipeline from the massive hoarding of talent.
by ponector | 2025-12-29 22:22:11+00:00
>> I'm very curious what happens when people who have just cheated their way through college, or these kinds of professional exams, meet the real world

Certification questions, as well as interview questions usually quite far from the real world. The best strategy is to fake everything to pass through and then learn at work.

Basically fake it until you make it. The hardest part of swe job is to land it.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-12-29 22:22:37+00:00
I'm very confused, are you or are you not an LLM run account?

A couple weeks ago, under a freshly made account "llmslave", you said it's already replacing devs and the field is cooked, and anyone who doesn't see that lacks the skills to adopt AI [1]

I pointed out that given your name and low quality comments, you were likely an LLM run account. As SOON as I made that comment, you abandoned the account and have now made a duplicate llmslave2 account, with a different opinion

Are you doing an experiment or something?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46291504#46292968
by mancerayder | 2025-12-29 22:22:42+00:00
Maybe because you have the personalization disabled. My complaint isn't the SEO stuff; that hits me when I search on a tech item I want to learn (I get slammed with crappy vendor blogs), or food recipes (long story about a Sicilian Grandma before the recipe at the end). My complaint with Google is it fights me on keywords, and I have to constantly add quotes, add minuses, and it seems to silently override it.

It's easier to add Reddit at the end to get a more accurate question repeated, and skip the sponsored SEO crap.
by alexfoo | 2025-12-29 22:22:58+00:00
Anywhere with third rail (which is predominantly London and the South-East of England) tends to be fenced off along the sides of the tracks or other things in place to strongly discourage you from walking onto the tracks.

Given that a considerable amount of the UK rail routes date from the late 1800s there are a lot of places where tracks cross roads and therefore mix with other forms of transport (including pedestrians). It's surprising just how little there is in between a pedestrian and a live rail in these situations, here's an example 5 miles or so away from central London: https://maps.app.goo.gl/nPcJM1YxBexaDDKY6

One of those live third rails start less than 5 yards away from where pedestrians regularly walk, with just some angled planks of wood to stop you walking towards them.
by slowmovintarget | 2025-12-29 22:23:31+00:00
Or the more than 42K NGOs getting billions of dollars in Minnesota alone are not legitimate and this will just be the tip of the iceberg.

Ilhan Omar has a $174K salary, and she went from nearly broke to having a net worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 million in the space of six years... and her only "work" is the Senate? This is an amazing rags-to-riches story! Journalists should be knocking down her door to discuss it. But it's "not news," right?

There's a whole lot of something there.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-12-29 22:23:50+00:00
Indeed, while DeepSeek 3.2 or GLM 4.7 are not Opus 4.5 quality, they are close enough that I could _get by_ because they're not that far off, and are about where I was with Sonnet 3.5 or Sonnet 4 a few months ago.

I'm not convinced DeepSeek is making money hosting these, but it's not that far off from it I suspect. They could triple their prices and still be cheaper than Anthropic is now.
by reconnecting | 2025-12-29 22:24:07+00:00
Click fraud is malicious activity where someone runs bots that click on ads for specific category keywords. For example, if this is a villa rental website, someone like competitors or a large platform, might use ad agencies that perform click fraud against the villa rental website to exhaust their budget and therefore get more traffic themselves. In the case of an entertainment agency, it might be other competitors interested in your traffic.

The first step you might take is to check that you are not advertising with AdWords partner networks, as they might be the reason for the clicks on your ads.

Second, you can check your server logs and verify clicks from Google Ads, especially the geolocation of those clicks. If they are not from your region and the visitors perform no action after viewing the first page, this is most probably click fraud.

I use our own open-source security platform (I'm a co-founder) for this purpose (1), as it's server-side and works even if bots aren't running JS. However, your website analytics might also be useful if they can collect events without JS.

1. https://github.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirreno
by polalavik | 2025-12-29 22:24:10+00:00
I think a deeper dive on this is The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri [1] which argues, in short, that people have been enabled by the internet (which he calls the infosphere) and that mobilization via the internet has created extreme turbulence for systems of authority (which are still needed despite their existing issues). The people enabled by the internet have no way to rule, and in many examples do not wish to rule, but only want to dismantle the status quo without any meaningful replacement or solution leaving everyone in a vacuum of nihilism which is highly corrosive to liberal democracy.

[1] https://press.stripe.com/the-revolt-of-the-public
by nostrademons | 2025-12-29 22:24:53+00:00
Would it show up in the numbers on web usage, platform usage, etc? People who do this drop out of the sample - they don't show up in the numbers. As far as your stat gathering is concerned, they don't exist.

If you're actually doing a census of people and asking about their web usage and social habits, it'd show up. So maybe Google or Facebook has the data if they were to do say cohort analysis on Google Analytics or Chrome History or Facebook beacon logs, counting specifically the number of total unique Internet users that used to visit social media but no longer do. But such an analysis would require SVP-level privacy approval (because it joins together personal, non-anonymized data across multiple products), and why would an executive commission a study that potentially tells them that their job is in danger and their employer is making a mistake by employing them? And if they did, why would they ever publicize the results?

AFAIK, most of the major public-facing analytics platforms work by sampling their users. If their users are voluntarily choosing not to engage with the platform that their sampling runs on, they by definition cannot measure that change. They just become a biased sample that excludes specifically the population they're trying to measure.
by vel0city | 2025-12-29 22:25:10+00:00
In my non-Telsa, I get decent suggestions with live data built in to the car. I also get suggestions through multiple different apps of my choice through Android Auto.

In a Tesla, you get what Tesla gives you.

I haven't bothered with any accounts in years for third-party chargers. Most just plug in and negotiate payment automatically. Others have credit card readers on them. I haven't personally encountered out of service chargers on my road trips in a few years.

I can charge at most of the major Tesla charging locations as well these days. Ironically, those require I hop on a proprietary app with another account to manage, so I often avoid them.
by rainonmoon | 2025-12-29 22:25:11+00:00
Start with your threat model. Who is the “someone” you’re imagining attacking you? What are the most likely risks to occur? What are the most damaging? Where do those two lists overlap? Prioritise addressing those first. There’s no point worrying about someone stealing your laptop if it rarely leaves the house, but something like not having reliable 2FA on your accounts is probably more likely to get exploited and potentially as damaging. There’s no point worrying about nation state actors exploiting a side-channel to leak data via an LED on your earphones if you’re currently embroiled in a messy divorce.
by neomantra | 2025-12-29 22:25:13+00:00
I know very little about online marketing, but my Googler marketing friend told me that just 6 months ago everybody would Google search three word terms: “best Chinatown dumpling”

But now people Google search: “my boyfriend is coming to town for the holidays and we are going to Chinatown and I want to have delicious dumplings with him because it was what we had on our first date, where should we go?”

So he now works to sell AdWords properly in that environment. I am wondering how or if OP took that into account with their new spend. What are other people doing?

I’ve also heard (probably via post+comments here on HN) that the new SEO is making tons of AI slop info pages on the site, not for humans but for AI crawlers to slurp, and then refer from prompts.
Show HN: Revertly – version control for Shopify products
by SaveYourChanges | 2025-12-29 22:25:24+00:00
Hi HN — I built Revertly (https://revertly.io/
) after getting burned one too many times by Shopify product edits.

A title tweak, price change, or variant update would go live, something would break (ads, conversions, reporting), and there was no clear way to answer: what actually changed? or how do I undo this safely?

Revertly does a simple thing:
it keeps a history of product changes, shows you clear diffs, and lets you restore an earlier version with one click.

It works automatically in the background - no manual snapshots, no remembering required.

Right now it supports:

Field-level tracking for product changes

Before/after diffs that are easy to scan

One-click rollback

An audit trail that’s useful for teams and agencies

What I’m building next: metafield tracking, deeper variant diffs, and better tooling for agencies managing multiple stores.

This is early, but already useful. I’d love feedback - especially from anyone who’s ever thought “I wish Shopify had undo.”

Thanks for reading! Any feedback is appreciated!
by davnicwil | 2025-12-29 22:25:57+00:00
I would say while LLMs do improve productivity sometimes, I have to say I flatly cannot believe a claim (at least without direct demonstration or evidence) that one person is doing the work of 20 with them in december 2025 at least.

I mean from the off, people were claiming 10x probably mostly because it's a nice round number, but those claims quickly fell out of the mainstream as people realised it's just not that big a multiplier in practice in the real world.

I don't think we're seeing this in the market, anywhere. Something like 1 engineer doing the job of 20, what you're talking about is basically whole departments at mid sized companies compressing to one person. Think about that, that has implications for all the additional management staff on top of the 20 engineers too.

It'd either be a complete restructure and rethink of the way software orgs work, or we'd be seeing just incredible, crazy deltas in output of software companies this year of the type that couldn't be ignored, they'd be impossible to not notice.

This is just plainly not happening. Look, if it happens, it happens, 26, 27, 28 or 38. It'll be a cool and interesting new world if it does. But it's just... not happened or happening in 25.
by sunshine-o | 2025-12-29 22:26:25+00:00
I believe the Achilles' heel of Web3 is really that is was built on Web1&2.

Whatever opinion you might have about this industry, the core work is done by the Bitcoin and Ethereum teams and it is pretty admirable. They have been progressing for 10 years in a system where any mistake can collapse the entire system.

But ultimately those wallets and Web3 apps are built with web technologies and run in a browser and this is just not made for this.

This hack was targeting seed phases or private key because the keys have to be stored in the browser extension. How insane is that? But there isn't really any other ways to do it within the framework of a web browser.

Ultimately if the extension or web app is compromised an hardware wallet cannot really ultimately protect you (at least you would only be compromised when interacting with it).

Ethereum also now built in the secp256r1 signature checker so passkey/yubikey can be used but, same problem the "web" is the weak link.

Bottom line if they want that thing to succeed they will have to create a way to interact with smart contracts outside of the web browser. Maybe it will take building a simpler "dapp browser". Their apps are pretty basic in the end, a TUI would be enough to swap a token and approve a transaction...
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-12-29 22:26:52+00:00
> which is another thing I like about Kagi: they allow me to choose when I want to see an LLM summary and to turn off summaries altogether.

firefox: keyword "g" configured as google search plus &udm=14

firefox: keyword "a" configured as google search without &udm=14

works for me!
by hinkley | 2025-12-29 22:26:54+00:00
Every voting cycle for at least the last 4 you have seen a certain class of citizen not understand why the early numbers come in from small, rural precincts who can finish early and then the densest areas come in later and vote for other people than their guy. I’m sure that this is being fed by people whose livelihood depends on misunderstanding the problem, but it’s something people should be taught in school and the civics curriculum went away sometime around No Child Left Behind. So this has been going on at least since GW Bush, and some of this bullshit tracks all the way back to Reagan.
by jenadine | 2025-12-29 22:26:57+00:00
I'm afraid that's still not defined behaviour in many case. For example, pointer and bool can be initialized with `=0`, but that doesn't mean the binary representation in memory has to be 0, and so initializing with memset would still be wrong. (Even if it works with all compilers I know of.)

Also, how does CBase knows the size of its allocated memory?
by doug_durham | 2025-12-29 22:27:11+00:00
I found the article interesting until they brought up the Apple headquarters. It’s just an office building. Steve Jobs was obsessed with people walking around and bumping to each other. That’s why it’s a circle. The landscaping mimics the area around the Stanford dish where he liked to go on walks with people a talk through things. That’s it. Jony Ive brought the minimalist architecture. No greater meaning. These types of articles tend to lose their way when that try to attribute meaning to things that have no specific meaning.
by silisili | 2025-12-29 22:27:48+00:00
> Why would something picked up from you box not be considered within the postal system's control? Does your box not get picked up from daily?

It does. I live on a rural route and as far as I can tell it doesn't get postmarked until it actually processes through the closest city's PO. They get backed up sometimes, I guess?

> Also as a slight bit of victim blaming, why would you not drop something of this importance and time sensitive directly into a more controlled drop off?

It wasn't anything that important - I think it was either a holiday or birthday card. The only reason I knew at all is because the recipient didn't get it until about 7 days later and told me when it was postmarked.
by darkwater | 2025-12-29 22:27:51+00:00
I have recently vibe-coded an Android app, written in Kotlin, to scratch an itch and also as an experiment as an LLM skeptical [1]. It's a greenfield app that basically displays read-only data that's retrieved from a REST JSON API, so it's where Claude Code should shine the most and... yes, I'm actually positively impressed! I would have never been able to write that app myself, and at least surely not over a weekend (while cooking and doing other things with my family).

I wanted to try a Show HN as well but I feared that the HN crowd would tear it and me down so... I didn't.

[1] check my comments history
by gs17 | 2025-12-29 22:28:06+00:00
> On a different note, I sometimes use Instagram and recently I have seen a ton of ads for a local tech event... but the event already passed a good while ago, so every time I see the ad it's completely pointless.

I get a lot of these for elections which already took place... in places I don't even live. It seems like these are mistakes on the part of the people placing the ads, it's hard to imagine they're seeing the view metrics from after the event and deciding to keep spending.
by netsharc | 2025-12-29 22:28:06+00:00
Only simpletons can't see the end game of beautiful profits!

https://americanliterature.com/author/hans-christian-anderse...

I always thought the story ended with the emperor and his entourage being embarassed after the child said he's naked... but no, it ends even more close to real human behavior. (Sorry for writing a clickbait sentence).
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-12-29 22:28:27+00:00
> “Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America,..”

^^^^^ In the context of Armada, implying sea-blockade?

Edit: That aside, there isn't much infrastructure like roads, rails, rivers, channels through rough terrain, which would allow to circumvent that meaningfully. Or uncontested borders with neighbors...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuela#/media/File:Venezuel... vs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Venezuela
by ajxs | 2025-12-29 22:29:02+00:00
I live in Australia, which is culturally the polar opposite of Germany[1], and you'd get a similar response here. If the police saw it, you'd be fined at least $500, and risk losing your licence.

1: Australia is very egalitarian, rather than hierarchical. Pragmatic, rather than bureaucratic. Australians are direct and emotive communicators. Spontaneous planners, etc. etc.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-29 22:29:38+00:00
The same number of 55+ voters in the US that was the margin of victor for this election die in a year (~2M, ~5k/day). I admit, I'm unsure if those who voted for this have felt sufficient pain yet to vote better, and the votes of those who don't age out by election deadlines are hard to predict, but election results since the presidential election have been very favorable. NYC and Seattle have both elected democratic socialist mayors recently. Certainly, I have no doubt deep red parts of the country will continue to vote for this until death, but those parts of the country also have lower life expectency.

https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1puwkpj/democrats...

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/behind-trump... ("Most adults who were eligible to vote in 2020 – but declined to do so – stayed home again in 2024. But among those who did turn out, Trump had the edge. Among all 2020 nonvoters (including those who were too young and ineligible to vote in 2020), 14% supported Trump in 2024 while 12% supported Harris.")