MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ziml77 | 2025-12-19 13:27:16+00:00
How is podman managed in larger environments? It's designed around running rootless, but it seemed like the nature of that is there wasn't a proper way to centrally manage the containers even on just a single machine. Like even seeing the logs required using machinectl to get a shell as the user who owns the service (sudo/su do not retain the necessary environment variables for journalctl to work). Trying to get the logs as root seems to let you filter down to the user (rather than service) level at best.

Meanwhile, with Docker (or the not recommended rootful podman), you can have centralized management of multiple machines with a tool like Portainer.

I like the idea of podman, but this has been a head-scratcher for me.
by thisissomething | 2025-12-19 13:27:31+00:00
> how can I utilize AI without degenerating my own abilities?

Couldn't the same statement, to some extent, be applied to using a sorting lib instead of writing your own sorting algorithm? Or how about using a language like python instead of manually handling memory allocation and garbage collection in C?

> What I want above all is AI that helps me become better at my job and continue to build skills and knowledge

So far, on my experience, the quality of what AI outputs is directly related to the quality of the input. I've seen some AI projects made by junior devs that a incredibly messy and confusing architecture, despite they using the same language and LLM model that I use? The main difference? The AI work was based on the patterns and architecture that I designed thanks to my knowledge, which also happens to ensure that the AI will produce less buggy software.
by skillcreator | 2025-12-19 13:27:37+00:00
Alot of the major coding assistants now support "skills" (instruction files that customize behavior), but they're scattered everywhere and each agent uses different directories.This implements the open Agent Skills standard(agentskills.io).

We built a universal installer with the most popular claude skills that you can now install into any agent directly

via

npx ai-agent-skills install frontend-design --agent --Codex (cursor, amp etc)

Looking for feedback on this, anything we can do to improve it
by gaigalas | 2025-12-19 13:27:50+00:00
Author doesn't consider the possibility that engineers dismiss AI after they constantly tried it. Not once, not twice, but consistently.

I am one of those dismissers. I am constantly trash talking AI. Also, I have tried more tools and more stress scenarios than a lot of enthusiasts. The high bars are not in my head, they are on my repositories.

Talk is cheap. Show me your AI generated code. Talk tech, not drama.
by g947o | 2025-12-19 13:27:51+00:00
I think you lost the context

> modern browsers warn about self-signed certificates the same as HTTP

So if I can read and understand those browser warning and am not a complete idiot, I will close the browser tab instead of proceed despite the warning. Which is the correct choice.

So now I cannot read the website at all.

Otherwise, if I do make the bad decision and accept the certificate, I don't know what will happen. But with HTTP, at least the browser says clearly that the site is unsafe.

So the fact that the website does have a certificate and serves HTTPS, as suggested in the GP, is completely irrelevant and useless.

> trust on first use has shown to be perfectly fine for SSH

If that is MY server or a server I trust/can verify. I don't know about you, but I never SSH into someone else's server and just blindly accept the keys. GitHub, for example, provides their SSH keys: https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/keeping-your-accou...
by jcpst | 2025-12-19 13:27:53+00:00
My reasons for initially dismissing it is because to me it felt like it was taking the fun part of the job. We have all these tasks, and writing the code is this creative act, designed to be read by other humans. Just like how I don’t want AI to write music for me.

But I see where things are going. I tried some of the newer tooling over the past few weeks. They’re too useful to ignore now. It feels like we’re entering into an industrial age for software.
by nottorp | 2025-12-19 13:28:01+00:00
> gave Claude some of the code to connect and it diagnosed a CREDENTIALS issue without seeing the credentials file nor seeing the error itself

10 years ago google would have had a forum post describing your exact problem with solutions within the first 5 results.

Today google delivers 3 pages of content farm spam with basic tutorials, 30% of them vaguely related to your problem, 70% just containing "aws" somewhere, then stops delivering results.

The LLM is just fixing search for you.

Edit: and by the way, it can fix search for you just because somewhere out there there are forum posts describing your exact problem.
by martinald | 2025-12-19 13:28:03+00:00
Yes I remember a while ago it fixing a pipeline problem because I had managed to copy and paste an IP with one of the digits missing at the end. Spent about an hour before that looking at everything else (all the other steps succeeded, but the last one 'timed out', because I copy and pasted it wrong at the end). Took it <30secs as you said to instantly diagnose the problem.
by kksweet | 2025-12-19 13:29:02+00:00
> If you’ve actually tried modern tools and they didn’t work for you, that’s a conversation worth having. But “I tried ChatGPT in 2022” isn’t that conversation.

How many people are actually saying this? Also how does one use modern coding tools in heavily regulated contexts, especially in Europe?

I can't disagree with the article and say that AI has gotten worse because it truly hasn't, but it still requires a lot of hand holding. This is especially true when you're 'not allowed' to send the full context of a specific task (like in health care). For now at least.
by croes | 2025-12-19 13:29:10+00:00
> The gap is widening between engineers who’ve integrated these tools and engineers who haven’t.

Let‘s wait with the evaluation until the honeymoon phase is over. At the moment there are plenty of companies that offer cheap AI tools. It will not stay that way. At the moment most of their training data is man made and not AI made which makes AIs worse if used for training. It will not stay that way.
by pwillia7 | 2025-12-19 13:29:13+00:00
Just normal Luddite things, which attracts those most threatened in their personal identity by the new technology.

You see it obviously with the artists and image/video generators too.

We did this with Dadaism and Impressionism and photography before this too with art.

Ultimately, it's just more abstraction that we have to get used to -- art is stuff people create with their human expression.

It is funny to see everyone argue so vehemently without any interest in the same arguments that happened in the past.

Exit through the giftshop is a good movie that explores that topic too, though with near-plagiarized mass production, not LLMs, but I guess that's pretty similar too!

https://daily.jstor.org/when-photography-was-not-art/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqVXThss1z4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada
by fluxusars | 2025-12-19 13:29:32+00:00
As someone whose stance is to be extremely skeptical of AI, I threw Claude at a complex feature request in a codebase I wasn't very familiar with, and it managed to come up with a solution that was 99% acceptable. I was very impressed, so I started using it more.

But it's really a mixed bag, because for the subsequent 3-4 tasks in a codebase that I was familiar with, Claude managed to produce over-commented, over-engineered slop that didn't do what I asked for and took shortcuts in implementing the requirements.

I definitely wouldn't dismiss AI at this point because it occasionally astounds me and does things I would never in my life have imagined possible. But at other times, it's still like an ignorant new junior developer. Check back again in 6 months I guess.
by dangus | 2025-12-19 13:29:44+00:00
I think the places where American inefficiency is most visible is in construction, urban planning, and healthcare.

America blows a significant amount of its money by having its citizens drive everywhere with no option to take a train, bus, bicycle, or low-speed e-scooter. Americans take a crazy percentage of their income and just dump it into the stagnant automotive industry. Americans blow between $5,000-10,000 a year on transportation. It’s so crazy that there is a pretty long list of American cities where moving from the suburbs to the most walkable part of the metro area of that city will net you more square footage in your dwelling after removing the $750/month expense of owning a personal vehicle.

Then you can’t even really fix this problem in America because construction costs are wildly inflated. China can build a high speed rail network for the entire country for the price of a handful of miles of subway in manhattan. Projects take an insanely long time, e.g., California high speed rail. Multiple US cities have a housing cost crisis because houses aren’t being built fast enough, and that’s more money in the economy being blown on rent and financial products rather than productive endeavors.

Hangzhou metro has 12 subway lines. In 2014 they only had one.

Finally, healthcare. America just blows double the amount of money on healthcare of the next most expensive country, with worse outcomes in part because they sit in their cars all day.

I don’t even think some of the problems you’ve brought up with America like the school system are as big of problems. America has really good public schools and universities, so good that Chinese people still come to the US to get educated en masse, even at pretty standard and average state schools.

The current government doing stupid shit like discouraging research and immigration is certainly not helping though.
by furqs | 2025-12-19 13:30:29+00:00
What's a "Code Refactor Specialist"? Are you implying that in the future we'll have programmers who will just write code using AI and a specialist role whose job it would be to clean up that code? That isn't going to work, you'll need a superhuman for that role. People who write the code using AI have to be the ones who review it and they have to be responsible for the quality of that code.
by kshacker | 2025-12-19 13:30:37+00:00
I wonder just like retailers are required to account for local sales taxes (I know it is not that clear cut), there should be some enforcement mechanism to settle disputes locally. Setup an agency which "legally" provides support for google, Amazon, and all those unreachable entities. Provides local jobs as well as quick grievance redressal. Maybe something like consumer protection agency but not federal, maybe at least one per county maybe more depending on the population.

Edit - I don't mind paying for the service. Maybe charge everyone $99 to file a case to avoid everyone piling on, but it helps resolve most egregious ones, and fee could be refunded at the agency's discretion.
by gum_wobble | 2025-12-19 13:30:37+00:00
> I don’t know why this is so controversial it’s just a tool

Do you really "don't know why"? Are you sure?

I believe that ignoring the consequences that commercial LLMs are having on the general public today is just as radical as being totally opposed to them. I can at least understand the ethical concerns, but being completely unaware of the debate on artificial intelligence at this stage is really something that leaves me speechless, let me tell you.
by icqFDR | 2025-12-19 13:30:41+00:00
That’s possible, but I can’t know for sure because Amazon never provided any concrete details. I didn’t receive any warning emails, only a cryptic message after the ban:

> "Amazon.co.uk found that the rate at which refunds were occurring on your account was extraordinary and could not continue."

After looking through my order history, the only refund I could find on this account was the one related to the book I mentioned above. If there was any other activity or misuse, Amazon hasn’t disclosed it to me, which makes it impossible to verify or dispute their conclusion.
by carlosjobim | 2025-12-19 13:30:42+00:00
How do you know anything? You can never know for sure if you can trust another person, and this is why people can get schizophrenia.

Asking people to verify that they are honest will never help you. Dishonest people will of course lie to you and say they are honest. While honest people will be insulted by your question and not want to engage with you.

What you can do is verify. Try a Kobo, try a Kindle. Make up your own mind.
by nadinengland | 2025-12-19 13:30:45+00:00
I love that this is part of the syntax.

I typically use closures to do this in other languages, but the syntax is always so cumbersome. You get the "dog balls" that Douglas Crockford always called them:

``` const config = (() => { const raw_data = ...

... return compiled;

})()'

const result = config.whatever;

// carry on

return result; ```

Really wish block were expressions in more languages.
by godelski | 2025-12-19 13:32:00+00:00
> I don't think it fairly characterizes the backlash at all.

People are saying LLMs are being forced on them. That's just not true. So yeah, I'm sticking with what I said.

Again, FF added shortcuts to the 5th most popular site in the world. So what. They also have shortcuts to Google, Bing, Wikipedia, and a bunch of other sites with their bangs. The split window for the chatbot sites? That's barely any bloat and you're not forced to use that. Nor is it even close to shipping you an LLM.

And the translate is completely opt-in. You have to fucking download the translations! They also aren't LLMs. They're like 50MB lol. But they're opt-in!

> foisting 'experiments' off on us

The Mr Robot thing? Hell yeah I was pissed about that. And that's a legitimate reason to be pissed. But have they tried that again? If they learned they learned and let's move on (even with extra caution).

But if we're grabbing pitchforks for fiction then why should they care when we grab pitchforks for reality? Literally boy who cries wolf situation here and that's why I'm calling it laughable. Just as it is laughable when the OP doubled down and called the accepting of crypto donations like wearing a swastika. It is just ridiculously disingenuous and delegitimizes any serious complaints. So it is entirely counterproductive.

I'll save my pitchfork when the bullshit becomes real, not when the bullshit is based on flimsy rumors and egregious mischaracterizations. That's a witch hunt, and I don't want any part of that.
by Multicomp | 2025-12-19 13:32:00+00:00
> 502. That’s an error.

> The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.

> Please try again in 30 seconds. That’s all we know.

Even YouTube goes down. Good reminder for us mere cyber mortals with our total customer base of 100ks and not millions. Nobodys perfect!

I was just about to research 1:60 scale mapmaking for my rpg campaign since I was going to adapt a modern day map hidden as a fantasy map, and boom, shes dead Jim.
by omnicognate | 2025-12-19 13:32:04+00:00
If that's the case (and I'm not convinced it is), shouldn't retaining that skill be the priority for anyone who has already acquired it? I've yet to see any evidence AI can turn someone who can't code into a substitute for someone who can. If the supply of that skill is going to dry up, surely it will only become more valuable. If using AI erodes it, the logical thing would be not to use AI.
by zzzeek | 2025-12-19 13:32:24+00:00
from some of the engineers I've debated this over, I think some of them have just dug their heels in at this point and have decided they're never going to use LLM tools period, and are just clinging to the original arguments without really examining the reality of the situation. In particular this "The LLM is going to hallucinate subtle bugs I can't catch" one. The idea that LLMs make subtle mistakes that are somehow more subtle, insidious and uncatchable compared to any random 25 pull requests you get from humans is simply ridiculous. The LLM makes mistakes that stick out to you like a sore thumb, because they're not your mistakes. The hardest mistakes to catch are your own, because your thinking patterns are what made them in the first place.

The biggest problem with LLMs for code that is ongoing is that they have no ability to express low confidence in solutions where they don't really have an answer, instead they just hallucinate things. Claude will write ten great bash lines for you but then on the eleventh it will completely hallucinate an option on some linux utility you hardly have time to care about, where the correct answer is "these tools don't actually do that and I dont have an easy answer for how you could do that". At this point I am very keen to notice when Claude gets itself into an endless ongoing loop of thought that I'm going about something the wrong way. Someone less experienced would have a very hard time recognizing the difference.
by duskdozer | 2025-12-19 13:33:13+00:00
>For me, however, there is one issue: how can I utilize AI without degenerating my own abilities?

My cynical view is you can't, and that's the point. How many times before have we seen the pattern of "company operates at staggering losses while eliminating competition or becoming entrenched in enough people's lives, and then clamps down to make massive profits"?
by everdrive | 2025-12-19 13:33:23+00:00
Amazon deserves a lot of criticism in the general sense, but this can only be seen as a positive move. Most importantly, if they set an industry standard, others might follow.

Fundamentally, I prefer a physical book to a digital one. But, the primary reason I'd never even entertain a digital book is the lack of ownership. Ownership is incredibly important, and we need to celebrate victories when they happen.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-12-19 13:33:43+00:00
From your NBC piece

> About half of the Gen Z adults who identify as LGBTQ identify as bisexual,

So that means ~15% of those surveyed are not attracted to the opposite sex (there’s more nuance to this statement but I imagine this needs to stay boilerplate), more or less, which is a big distinction. That’s hardly alarming and definitely not a major shift. We have also seen many cultures throughout history ebb and flow in their expression of bisexuality in particular.

> There are a bizarrely large number similar book as Gender Queer being published, which creates the numeric discrepancy.

This really needs a source. And what makes it “bizarrely large”? How does it stack against, say, the number heterosexual romance novels?

> We seem to have entered into an equal but opposite problem of the past when those of deviant sexuality pretended to be straight to fit into societal expectations.

I really tried to give your comment a fair shake but I stopped here. We are not going to have a productive conversation. “Deviant sexuality” come on man.

Anyway it doesn’t change the fact that the book banning movement is largely a Republican/conservative endeavor in the US. The numbers clearly bear it out.
Ask HN: Do you allow vibecoded submissions in your open-source projects?
by sneas | 2025-12-19 13:34:10+00:00
This happened to me, and it's about to happen again soon.

Someone has submitted a 4k-line PR to one of my projects.

The person is a long-time user and is very enthusiastic about the app. They wanted a feature they've been asking about for half a year.

Not sure what to do now. I really want to help my user, but I don't like this code in my codebase.

This morning, I received another message from another user who is about to submit one more feature.

Is there any polite way to prevent that?
by Multicomp | 2025-12-19 13:34:40+00:00
The twitter fail whale was a thing a decade ago now.

I don't think outages are more common as such, but we pay more attention to them since we live in mobile phones nowadays.

There has been a lot of contralization of web servers into 3rd party CDNs like Akamai and Cloudflare, probably more than is truly needed by smaller actors who instead just need to fix their crappy DB access patterns and rid themselves of all the tracking js, but that in and of itself doesnt mean more outages...just a larger blast radius when an outage does happen.
Ask HN: What do you look for when evaluating privacy-first ad platforms or MVPs?
by frndsprotocol | 2025-12-19 13:35:06+00:00
I’m currently building FRNDZ, a privacy-first ad protocol with a live MVP.

Users earn on-chain rewards for real engagement, and advertisers target intent, not identities — no cookies, no PII.

I’d love to learn what signals or demos make you personally take a project like this seriously.
by hcfman | 2025-12-19 13:35:52+00:00
That's just blatant ageism!

I don't have a beard, but if I did I'm sure it would be white, beyond grey.

It's okay. It's okay to feel annoyed, you have a tough battle ahead of you, you poor things.

I may be labelled a grey beard but at least I get to program computers. By the time you have a grey beard maybe you are only allowed to talk to them. If you are lucky and the billionares that own everything let you...
by netdevphoenix | 2025-12-19 13:35:57+00:00
AI <> Transformers

I keep seeing this over and over by so called "engineers".

You can dismiss the current crop of transformers without dismissing the wider AI category. To me this is like saying that users "dismiss Computers" because they dismiss Windows and instead prefer Linux. Rejecting modern practices for not getting on the microservice hype train or not using React.

Intellisense pre-GPT is a good example of AI that wasn't using transformers.

And of course, you can have both criticise some usages of transformers in IDEs and editors while appreciating and using others.

"My coworker uses Claude Code now. She finished a project last week that would’ve taken me a month". This is one of those generalisations. There is no nuance here. The range of usage from boilerplate to vibe code level is vast. Quickly churning out code is not a virtue. It is not impressive to ship something only to find critical bugs on the first day. Nor is it a virtue using it at the cost of losing understanding of the codebase.

This rigid thinking by devs needs to stop imo. For so called rational thinkers, the development world is rife with dogma and simplistic binary thinking.

If using transformers at any level is cost-effective for all, the data will speak for itself. Vague statements and broad generalisations are not going to sway anyone and will just make this kind of articles sound like validation seeking behaviour.
by dredmorbius | 2025-12-19 13:36:08+00:00
The relative-time labeling bit HN in the ass this week during its outage (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46301921>), when hours-old comments were displayed as "n minutes ago", with n ranging from 0 to low-single-digits.

This made identifying the duration of the outage somewhat more difficult.

(HN does display the precise time in a title text for the timestamp which typically appears on hover, though you'd need to know that that's in UTC.)
by elzbardico | 2025-12-19 13:36:23+00:00
The System's purpose is what it does.

As capitalism moved towards financialization, the societal incentives moved from "profit from doing things" in the long run towards "profit from trading ownership of entities that eventually do things" in the short term.

This requires a completely different kind of management. I don't need someone who deeply knows what it takes to create and manufacture planes as a CEO anymore, I need someone who can make the most out of the numbers to make the speculators happy during this quarter.
by thisissomething | 2025-12-19 13:36:34+00:00
It really depends on how you use it. I really like using AI for prototyping new ideas (it can run on the background while I work on the main project) and for getting the boring grunt work (such as creating CRUD endpoints on a RESTful API) out of the way. Leaving me more time to focus on the code that really is challenging and need a deeper understanding of the business or the system as a whole.