MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sublimefire | 2025-12-14 14:47:13+00:00
Good discussion of the paper and the observations and ironies. A thing to note is that we do have software factories already, with a bunch of automation in place and folks being trained to deal with incidents. The pools of agents just elevate what we currently have but the tools are still lacking severely. IMO the tools need to improve for us to move forward as it is difficult to observe the decisions of agents when they fall apart.

Also, by and large the current AI tools are not in the critical path yet, well except those drones that lock on targets to eliminate them in case of interference, and even then it is ML. Agents can not be in that path due to predictability challenges yet.
by nayroclade | 2025-12-14 14:47:18+00:00
I'd be wary about interpreting a simple trend of App Store / Google Play apps without other context. Both are walled gardens, with developer fees and review processes managed by gatekeepers with an incentive and an ability to artificially control the rate of new apps. I would ask: What is the trend of app store review waiting times? What is the trend of rejections? What is the trend of delistings?
by lurk2 | 2025-12-14 14:47:53+00:00
> It's not all a resort town

Tourism comprises 45% of the economy, which is what I was characterizing as a resort town. If you look at cities that have anything else going on for them, you’re looking at figures of less than 2% of housing stock. London is around 2.5%, New York City was around 2% before the ban, Los Angeles is around 2.1%.
by dp2447 | 2025-12-14 14:48:29+00:00
Location: California, USA

Remote: Preferred but open to hybrid or on-site

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Product Management, complex data management, strategic thinking, stakeholder management and negotiations, tradeoff decisions.

Email: dp2447@proton.me

Senior product manager with experience in complex healthcare and social media data, with serious startup experience. I can also make highly usable products in highly regulated environments. I thrive when the stakes are high. Have launched 0->1 products for millions of users. Looking for a role where I can help solve user needs and lead a team to build meaningful change.
by notnullorvoid | 2025-12-14 14:48:49+00:00
Transpilers: SWC, Oxc Linters/Formatters: DPrint, deno lint, Biome, Oxlint, Oxfmt Bundlers: Rolldown (replacing esbuild in Vite), Rspack, Turbopack, and certain components of Parcel

All built with Rust
by jraph | 2025-12-14 14:49:17+00:00
> But then comes somebody and decides to just flush your well curated history down the toilet (=delete it and start somewhere else from scratch) and then all the valuable metadata stored in the history is lost.

How does this happen? I haven't run into this.

> Maybe consider putting your energy into a good documentation inside the repository

I'd say both are valuable.

I use git log and git blame to try to understand how a piece of code came to be. This has saved me a few times.

Recently, I was about to replace something strange to something way more obvious to fix a rendering issue (like, in some HTML, an SVG file was displayed by pasting its content into the HTML directly, and I was about to use an img tag to display it instead), but the git log told me that previously, the SVG was indeed displayed using an img tag and the change was made to fix the issue that the links in the SVG were not working. I would have inadvertently reverted a fix and caused a regression.

I would have missed the reason a code was like this with a big "work" end of the day commit.

It would have been better if the person had commented their change with something like "I know, looks weird, but we need this for the SVG to be interactive" (and I told them btw), but it's easy to not notice a situation where a comment is warranted. When you've spent a couple of hours in some code, your change can end up feeling obvious to you.

The code history is one of the strategies to understand the code, and meaningful commits help with this.
by lkjdsklf | 2025-12-14 14:49:30+00:00
> nondeterministic programming language that would allow your mom to achieve SOTA results

I actually think it's great for giving non-programmers the ability to program to solve basic problems. That's really cool and it's pretty darn good at it.

I would refute that you get SOTA results.

That has never been my personal experience. Given that we don't see a large increase in innovative companies spinning up now that this technology is a few years old, I doubt it's the experience of most users.

> The whole "it's a bad language" refrain feels half-baked when most of us use relatively high level languages on non-realtime OSes that obfuscate so much that they might as well be well worded prompts compared to how deterministic the underlying primitives they were built on are... at least until you zoom in too far.

Obfuscation and abstraction are not the same thing. The other core difference is the precision and the determinism both of which are lacking with LLMs.
by hermanzegerman | 2025-12-14 14:49:47+00:00
Right now, you can and should do it.

See https://www.bundesgesundheitsministerium.de/themen/digitalis...

> We should instead elect officials that can deal with the “Neuland” of the digital age and have some technical chops and don’t immediately cave in when there is some money to be made

Yes, but I don't think this will happen during our lifetimes. Especially since the Gematik has shown again and again that they can't be trusted with it
by II2II | 2025-12-14 14:50:08+00:00
Killer apps aren't always survivors. Consider how Visicalc fell to Lotus 1-2-3, and how Lotus 1-2-3 fell to Excel. Arguably, the killer app for NeXT was WorldWideWeb. While it's successors weren't developed in Objective-C, the prototype for the world wide web was.

Objective-C itself didn't have much of a chance for many reasons. One is that most APIs were based upon C or C++ at the time. The availability of Objective-C on other platforms will do little to improve productivity if the resulting program is essentially C with some Objective-C code that you developed from scratch yourself. Microsoft was, for various reasons, crushing almost everyone at the time. Even titans like DEC and Sun ended up falling. Having a 10x more productive API was not going to help if it reached less than 1/100th of the market. (Objective-C, in my opinion, was an interesting but not terribly unique language so it was the NeXT API that offered the productivity boost.) Also keep in mind that it took a huge marketing push for Java to survive, and being platform agnostic certainly helpted it. Seeming as Java was based upon similar principles, and a more conventional syntax, Objective-C was also less appealing.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-12-14 14:50:19+00:00
Exactly, and the further tweaking has been getting so bad it might as well be Linux :\

Another way of looking at it is that Windows XP is the enterprise version for many well-built pieces of expensive equipment which normally outlast PC electronics 5 to 1.

Or asking "What distro of Linux has an enterprise version where you can install the high-dollar setup.exe in administrator mode?" WINE won't help you now when most versions and configurations of Windows were never even supported. This is no game.

Now only some of the relatively newer instruments are validated using enterprise versions, this only started with Windows 10, plus it sometimes took years while only Pro was supported before Enterprise is now an option too. Only some vendors too.

Must also work totally air-gapped start-to-finish (no downloading packages) and draw from the largely Windows-familiar ranks of chemists who need to be the most efficient mouse operators, so they have more time to accomplish their natural scientific duties which can be confusing enough.
by maccard | 2025-12-14 14:50:33+00:00
If this is your view of modern gaming, I think it’s you that has changed. This year alone my play list has been - blue prince, hollow knight: silksong, Ball X pit, split fiction, clair obscur, monster hunter wilds, arc raiders, helldivers 2 (came to Xbox, so this one is a stretch), nightrein, Indiana jones, dispatch… That’s on top of the “big” hitter that are still very fun experiences.
by callc | 2025-12-14 14:50:49+00:00
> Then there's library and framework churn. AI models aren't good with this (as evidenced by the hours I wanted trying to get any model to help me through a webpack4 to webpack5 upgrade. There was no retained context and no understanding, so it kept telling me to ado webpack4 things that don't work in 5).

I experienced this too asking LLM to help with a problem with a particular Arduino board. Even with being a very popular microcontroller, it is probably giving blended answers from the 15 other types of Arduino boards, not the one I have.
by exasperaited | 2025-12-14 14:51:16+00:00
It is an aside, but: I am not sure I encountered any professional photographers saying that in 2005, FWIW; only non-serious photographers were still prattling on about e.g. the mystical and conveniently malleable "theoretical" resolution of film being something that would prevent them ever switching.

There were still valid practical and technical objections for many (indeed, there still is at least one technical objection against digital), the philosophical objections are still as valid as they were (and if you ask me digital has not come close to delivering on its promise to be less environmentally harmful).

But every working press photographer knew they would switch when there were full-frame sensors that were in range of budget planning that shot without quality compromise at the ISO speed they needed or when the organisations they worked for completed their own digital transition. Every working fashion photographer knew that viable cameras already existed.

ETA: Did it disrupt the wider industry? Obviously. Devastatingly. For photographers? It lowered the barrier to entry and the amount they could charge. But any working photographer had encountered that at least once (autofocus SLRs did the same thing, minilabs did the same thing, E6 did it, etc. etc.) and in many ways it was a simple enabling technology because their workflows were also shifting towards digital so it was just the arrival of a DDD workflow at some level.

—

Putting aside that aside, I am really not convinced your comparison isn't a category error, but it is definitely an interesting one for a couple of reasons I need to think about for a lot longer.

Not least that digital photography triggered a wave of early retirements and career switches, that I think the same thing is coming in the IT industry, and that I think those retirements will be much more damaging. AI has so radically toxified the industry that it is beginning to drive people with experience and a decade or more of working life away. I consider my own tech retirement to have already happened (I am a freelancer and I am still working, but I have psychologically retired, and very early; I plan to live out my working life somewhere else, and help people resisting AI to continue to resist it)
by famouswaffles | 2025-12-14 14:52:14+00:00
We've been through this. The context of a LLM is not fixed. Context windows =/ n gram orders.

They don't because n gram orders are too small and rigid to include the history in the general case.

I think srean's comment up the thread is spot on. This current situation where the state can be anything you want it to be just does not make a productive conversation.
by michaelbuckbee | 2025-12-14 14:53:06+00:00
A lot of the comments here feel like they're disappointed that this is a "Docker with unnecessary LLM crap thrown in" when I think what they're really going for is more "LLM workflows with a higher degree of observability and sanity".

I think a more interesting point of comparison is the Claude Code Github Action, Co-Pilot code reviews, etc.
by ViVr | 2025-12-14 14:54:14+00:00
When working on a feature branch it can be useful to break up your changes into logical commits. This gives you the flexibility to roll back to an earlier iteration when still working on the feature if needed.

One of my git habits is to git reset the entire feature branch just before opening a PR, then rebuild it with carefully crafted commits, where i try to make each commit one "step" towards building the feature. This forces me to review every change one last time and then the person doing code review can also follow this progression.

These benefits hold even if the branch ultimately gets squashed when merging into main/master. I also found that even if you squash when merging you can still browse back to the PR in your git repository web UI and still see the full commit history there.
Show HN: claude-docs – dependencies –> reliable documentation references for CC
by OldOtter | 2025-12-14 14:54:22+00:00
built a CLI tool that scans your project dependencies and automatically creates specialized documentation agents for Claude.

How it works: 1. Run npx claude-docs in your project root. It generates a /sync-docs command for Claude Code. 2. Run claude /sync-docs 3. You get a personalized /research slash command configured specifically for your project's stack and @ specialized subagents for the different dependencies

This is my first open-source project.

Looking for feedback.

Repo: https://github.com/ii-vo/claude-docs

Demo: https://www.claudedocs.com/
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-12-14 14:55:04+00:00
Not necessarily. It depends if the process is deterministic and repeatable.

If an AI generates a process more quickly than a human, and the process can be run deterministically, and the outputs are testable, then the process can run without direct human supervision after initial testing - which is how most automated processes work.

The testing should happen anyway, so any speed increase in process generation is a productivity gain.

Human monitoring only matters if the AI is continually improvising new solutions to dynamic problems and the solutions are significantly wrong/unreliable.

Which is a management/analysis problem, and no different in principle to managing a team.

The key difference in practice is that you can hire and fire people on a team, you can intervene to change goals and culture, and you can rearrange roles.

With an agentic workflow you can change the prompts, use different models, and redesign the flow. But your choices are more constrained.
by chihuahua | 2025-12-14 14:55:29+00:00
I think there's a good answer to that: to a first approximation, no one bought NeXT machines; therefore, there was no demand for NeXT apps and therefore no one produced any.

But it's unlikely that Steve Jobs of all people would want to provide that explanation.

Around 2001 my company sent me to a training class for Objective-C and as far as I can remember, it's like a small tweak of C++ with primitive smart pointers, so I doubt that it's 10x more productive than any other language. Maybe 1.01x more productive.
by IgorPartola | 2025-12-14 14:55:46+00:00
Full instruction following looks like monkey’s paw/malicious compliance. A good way to eliminate a bug from a codebase is to delete the codebase, that type of thing. You want the model to have enough creative freedom to solve the problem otherwise you are just coding using an imprecise language spec.

I know what you mean: a lot of my prompts include “never use em-dashes” but all models forget this sooner or later. But in other circumstances I do want it to push back on something I am asking. “I can implement what you are asking but I just want to confirm that you are ok with this feature introducing an SQL injection attack into this API endpoint”
by stevenjgarner | 2025-12-14 14:55:47+00:00
For the first time, researchers have observed live and in high resolution how influenza viruses infect living cells. This was possible thanks to a new microscopy technique, which could now help to develop antiviral therapies in a more targeted manner. [1]

[1] Enhanced visualization of influenza A virus entry into living cells using virus-view atomic force microscopy : https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2500660122
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-12-14 14:56:41+00:00
Maybe not anymore, as it's pretty simple to take a "vibe-coded" repo and have a modern agent change it according to your specs. Re-vibe it from time to time, and there goes your technical debt. If the app could be vibed at a random date, chances are it will keep be inside the capabilities of future models / agents /etc.
by hibikir | 2025-12-14 14:56:46+00:00
That's not how it works: Most things that people call non-discretionary still have opportunities for market effects. Take food: You might have spikes for, say, beef, but what is necessary is just enough calories, not necessarily having them come from beef. Therefore, you can switch preferences, eat something else, and not be affected by the price increases. Poeple rarely do though, because the amount of money spent on food is significantly lower than historical, precisely due to agricultural productivity improvements. In the US, we also have to consider the effects of recent tariffs: When supply gets far more expensive, prices go up in a market, regardless of whether people must eat or not.

For housing, there's also significant location effects: One doesn't have to live in, say, Manhattan. People trade time for location, and then select the space they want. A whole lot of the space Americans use is completely optional. Go look at cities in Asia, or in Spain: You can have a city with an average density similar to NYC's Upper East side, but not even NYC comes close. That's not about a limitation of supply, but very specific policy choices.

It's similar in other mandatory things: In healthcare, the amount of things that are actually mandatory isn't that large, training to become a doctor is offered to far fewer people that would want the job, drugs can be handed long monopolies... It's not about non-discretionary, but mostly a regulatory problem. Same with American colleges, which waste an order of magnitude more money in what is shaped like an old luxury good. Anyone that has gone to a public university in continental Europe and to a US college can tell you it's a completely different good, and the American approach isn't all that focused on efficient education, as it's still shaped like a finishing school. And again, it's not necessary.

So I'd argue it's almost always regulation written to help certain incumbents, instead of inability of market forces to keep prices low even when it appears that a good is non-discretionary.
by ursAxZA | 2025-12-14 14:56:50+00:00
I think you’re operating with the right mindset.

Looking at the linked story, the trigger seems to have come from redeeming a gift card bought at a major retailer.

Even if the purchaser uses a legitimate store, the user can’t really know the full supply-chain history of a prepaid code, and that uncertainty alone creates room for unexpected flags.

For people who already have a credit card, gift cards are a fuzzy choice if the goal is simply to load balance onto an account.

Something somewhere in the chain probably tripped a rule — maybe fraud-related, maybe a processing anomaly — and from the outside it’s impossible for the user to see which.
by conartist6 | 2025-12-14 14:57:13+00:00
Right but now you're talking about 5 or 20 or 100 or 1000 companies building CRM software. They're basically doing the mostly the same work over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and (I would like you to know that I typed every single one of these "and over"s with my very own fingers) and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and I think only the AI companies really benefit from that.

I feel silly explaining this as if it's a new thing, but there's a concept in social organization called "specialization" in which societies advance because some people decide to focus on growing food while some people focus on defending against threats and other people focus on building better tools, etc. A society which has a rich social contract which facilitates a high degree of specialization is usually more virile than a subsistence economy in which every individual has all the responsibilities: food gathering, defense, toolmaking, and more.

I wonder if people are forgetting this when they herald the arrival of a new era in which everyone is the maker of their own tools...
by callc | 2025-12-14 14:57:31+00:00
Why so long?

If AI had such obvious gains, why not accelerate that timeline to 6 months?

Take the average time to make a simple app, divide by the supposed productivity speed up, and this should be the time we see a wave of AI coded apps.

As time goes on, the only conclusion we can reach (especially looking at the data) is that the productivity gains are not substantial.
by ceejayoz | 2025-12-14 14:57:40+00:00
Doesn't matter; they'll keep up with the same talking points.

They're still flogging the "vast areas of the earth" one nearly two years after someone debunked it and they said "very encouraging!" to that info.

Now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259179

Early 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39415988
Git history knows more than your standup. We built an AI to query it
by slmslm | 2025-12-14 14:57:53+00:00
I've been building Gitmore for a while now. The problem I was solving: every week I'd spend 1-2 hours scrolling through commits trying to piece together "what did we ship?" for stakeholders who don't want to read "feat: impl oauth2 w/ refresh".

The insight: all the information is already in Git. Commits, PRs, authors, timestamps. It's just unreadable for anyone who isn't a developer.

So I built an AI layer on top that:

1. Connects to GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket via OAuth (reads only metadata, never code) 2. Captures commits and PRs in real-time via webhooks 3. Uses Claude to transform raw Git activity into human-readable summaries 4. Delivers automatically via email or Slack on whatever schedule you want

Example transformation:

Before: "fix: rm deprecated api calls, refactor: extract auth middleware" After: "Fixed API timeouts by updating deprecated endpoints. Improved security by centralizing authentication logic."

Technical stack: Next.js 15, MongoDB, Bull queues for async report generation, Claude API for summarization. Webhooks for real-time data, not polling.

Some things I learned building this:

- Commit messages follow strict patterns (73% start with feat:/fix:/refactor:) but contain almost no "why" context - Teams spend ~78 hours/year/person writing status reports manually - The question "what did we ship this week?" accounts for 62% of queries about repositories

Other features that emerged from the same data layer: - AI agents you can chat with ("What did Sarah work on last week?") - Developer leaderboards with contribution scoring - Auto-generated public changelogs

Free tier: 1 repo, 1 automation. Pro ($15/mo): 5 repos. Enterprise ($49/mo): 20 repos + custom branded reports.

https://gitmore.io

Happy to answer technical questions about the architecture, AI prompting strategy, or webhook handling. Also curious - how do other teams handle the "what did we ship" problem?