MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Stratoscope | 2026-01-15 14:14:15+00:00
Your philosophy reminds me of my friend Caroline Rose. One of Caroline's claims to fame was writing the original Inside Macintosh.

You may enjoy this story about her work:

https://www.folklore.org/Inside_Macintosh.html

As a counterpoint, the very worst "documentation" (scare quotes intended) I've ever seen was when I worked at IBM. We were all required to participate in a corporate training about IBM's Watson coding assistant. (We weren't allowed to use external AIs in our work.)

As an exercise, one of my colleagues asked the coding assistant to write documentation for a Python source file I'd written for the QA team. This code implemented a concept of a "test suite", which was a CSV file listing a collection of "test sets". Each test set was a CSV file listing any number of individual tests.

The code was straightforward, easy to read and well-commented. There was an outer loop to read each line of the test suite and get the filename of a test set, and an inner loop to read each line of the test set and run the test.

The coding assistant hallucinated away the nested loop and just described the outer loop as going through a test suite and running each test.

There were a number of small helper functions with docstrings and comments and type hints. (We type hinted everything and used mypy and other tools to enforce this.)

The assistant wrote its own "documentation" for each of these functions in this form:

"The 'foo' function takes a 'bar' parameter as input and returns a 'baz'"

Dude, anyone reading the code could have told you that!

All of this "documentation" was lumped together in a massive wall of text at the top of the source file. So:

When you're reading the docs, you're not reading the code.

When you're reading the code, you're not reading the docs.

Even worse, whenever someone updates the actual code and its internal documentation, they are unlikely to update the generated "documentation". So it started out bad and would get worse over time.

Note that this Python source file didn't implement an API where an external user might want a concise summary of each API function. It was an internal module where anyone working on it would go to the actual code to understand it.
by Telemakhos | 2026-01-15 14:14:20+00:00
When it became cheaper to publish text, for example with the invention of the printing press, the quality of what the average person had in his possession went up: you went from very few having hand-copied texts to Erasmus describing himself running into some border guard reading one of his books (in Latin). The absolute quality of texts published might have decreased a bit, but the quality per capita of what individuals owned went up.

When it became cheaper to mass produce sneakers, tshirts, and anything, the quality of the individual product probably did go down, but more people around the world were able to afford the product, which raised the standard of living for people in the aggregate. Now, if these products were absolute trash, life wouldn't make much sense, but there's a friction point in there between high quality and trash, where things are acceptable and affordable to the many. Making things cheaper isn't a net negative for human progress: hitting that friction point of acceptable affordability helps spread progress more democratically and raise the standard of living.

The question at hand is whether AI can more affordably produce acceptable technical writing, or if it's trash. My own experiences with AI make me think that it won't produce acceptable results, because you never know when AI is lying: catching those errors requires someone who might as well just write the documentation. But, if it could produce truthful technical writing affordably, that would not be a bad thing for humanity.
by Analemma_ | 2026-01-15 14:14:44+00:00
It’s a fire hazard in residential houses where people frequently do their own wiring, because it needs more expertise to wire correctly. Copper wiring is a lot more forgiving to being hooked up by amateurs.

The biggest reason is that aluminum oxidizes, and unlike copper, the oxide layer has high resistivity. In theory that shouldn’t be an issue in datacenters hiring expert technicians.
by keyringlight | 2026-01-15 14:15:01+00:00
It's interesting to see parallel development of certain features in the early 3D era and how they were used. The original Prey by 3D Realms was shown in demos in 1997/98 with portal tech including rotating it in a level prop, so it's interesting and ties into the game fiction instead of being only functional to stitch map areas together. There's likely more examples during that period when licensing an engine was less common.
by eszed | 2026-01-15 14:15:04+00:00
I take your point, but a good PM will have been inside the decision-making process and carry embedded assumptions about how things should work, so they'll miss things. An outside eye - whether it's QA, user-testing, (as here) the technical writer, or even asking someone from a different team to take an informal look - is an essential part of designing anything to be used by humans.
by nlip-project | 2026-01-15 14:15:33+00:00
Ecma International published on 10 December 2025 five new standards and one technical report defining the Natural Language Interaction Protocol (NLIP). These specifications establish an open, secure foundation for AI agents to communicate across organizational boundaries and technology platforms, replacing hard-coded application programming interfaces with a universal envelope protocol.

NLIP enables multi-turn conversational exchanges between humans and AI agents, as well as agent-to-agent interaction, regardless of their organizational domains or internal technologies. This approach eliminates many challenges associated with API management in current software systems and enables the development of universal client applications that can communicate with any NLIP-enabled agent.

Works with MCP, Google A2A...
by d12frosted | 2026-01-15 14:15:34+00:00
Thanks for the detailed response! This is really helpful feedback.

Looking at your gist, I think the code actually illustrates why I built vui.el in the first place. The schema→widget mapping logic is genuinely interesting work, but a significant chunk of the code (~400 lines) is dedicated to the inline form lifecycle: jsf--inline-forms registry, marker tracking, resync passes, advice on widget-before-change, overlay cleanup, etc. That's exactly the plumbing vui.el handles automatically.

With vui.el, your json-schema-form could potentially be just the schema translation + a component wrapper:

(vui-defcomponent json-schema-form (schema on-submit)
:state ((values (schema-defaults schema))
(errors nil))
:render
(vui-vstack
(render-schema-fields schema values
:on-change (lambda (path val)
(vui-set-state :values (set-at-path values path val))))
(vui-button "Submit"
:on-click (lambda ()
(let ((errs (validate-schema schema values)))
(if errs
(vui-set-state :errors errs)
(funcall on-submit values)))))))

State tracking, cleanup on close, multiple forms per buffer - all handled by the framework. Your validation logic and schema mapping would be the same, just without the infrastructure code.

On the emacs -q -nw workflow: it works, but you might find eldev + buttercup tests even better for AI-assisted iteration. The agent can run eldev test after changes and self-correct on failures. Byte-compilation catches issues too. Claude Code handles eldev well out of the box.

Anyway, not trying to hard-sell vui.el - your approach clearly works and the schema-form idea is cool. But if you do hit more state/cleanup headaches, might be worth a look. Happy to help if you want to try porting the schema logic over.
by Majromax | 2026-01-15 14:15:39+00:00
I did some math for this particular case by asking Google’s Gemini Pro 3 (via AI studio) to evaluate the press release. Nvidia has since edited the release to remove the “tons of copper” claim, but it evaluated the other numbers at a reported API cost of about 3.8 cents. If the stated pricing just recovers energy cost, that implies 1500kJ of energy as a maximum (less if other costs are recovered in the pricing). A human thinking for 10 minutes would use sbout 6kJ of direct energy.

I agree with your point about induced demand. The “win” wouldn’t be looking at a single press release with already-suspect numbers, but rather looking at essentially all press releases of note, a task not generally valuable enough to devote people towards.

That being said, we normally consider it progress when we can use mechanical or electrical energy to replace or augment human work.
by lenerdenator | 2026-01-15 14:15:42+00:00
Gotta get that investor cash.

In regard to their niche, their niche is a ridiculously well-documented ecosystem for SBCs. Want to do something with your RPi? You can find it on Google, and the LLM of your choice is probably trained to give you the answer on how to do it. If you're just tinkering or getting a POC ready, that's a big help.

Of course, if you're in the business of hardware prototyping, and have a set of libraries and programs you know you're going to work with, you don't need to care as much.
by tetromino_ | 2026-01-15 14:15:51+00:00
Before buying something like this for my home, I'd need to know:

* Is it safe for babies and small children (whose thin skin and developing eyes might well be much more vulnerable to UVC)

* Is it actually safe for all adults regardless of skin type, colors, dermatologic conditions, or was it only tested on a few healthy college students of one particular ethnicity;

* Does it accelerate degradation of household items, plastics, fabrics, books, and paint; and if so, by how much
by miniupuchaty | 2026-01-15 14:16:08+00:00
I'm writing this on my old 2014 acer aspire.

Currently gnome-shell is taking 135MB of ram, with other gdm/gnome related background services ranging in 700KB-3.2MB each to like 20MB together.

And it's as snappy as my sway config I log into depending on the needs.

I just spammed virtual desktop changes, opening Files, browsing, and it's as snappy as it is in sway.

I think gnome is getting a lot of unfair performance criticism online as it looks like something that would be slow.
Maybe it was slow back in the starting gnome3 days.
Maybe there are some heavy differences in how distros package it? (arch btw)

... though I will say that from my experience it's the KDE that's the slow one. I don't have it installed currently on this machine but had in the past and have it on my steam deck(which is stronger then this laptop).
It feels sluggish and I have this bouncing cursor wait animation in my head right now just thinking about it.
by nepger21 | 2026-01-15 14:16:11+00:00
Execution in the article is simply having faster tech operations. Execution in a startup context doesn't imply that - execution is how the business operates - strategy, operations, hiring, marketing, legal handling, product building - all of that.
Has AI made that easier, yes. But not how this article is soley focusing on an important but a very less significant part of a startup operation or the success it might have. Startup (even only a tech based) is not only tech product building, its a business. And, that execution incoporates all the functions of a business, not only tech product building.
by tiulpin | 2026-01-15 14:16:12+00:00
I have this website for years already https://tiulp.in/

Just a static page deployed on Cloudflare Pages.
Last year I added multiple funny features to it (you can open vim there!), but the UI is the same since 2021.

If you are interested in how it's built, here's the template I prepared https://github.com/tiulpin/kotlin-cv.js
by auxym | 2026-01-15 14:16:15+00:00
It's because aluminium has a higher coefficient of thermal expansion. It expands and shrinks more as it heats, and as those cycles add up it tends to loosen electrical connections. Loose connections have higher resistance, heat up and can cause fires.

That said, there is no reason we can't design better connectors that can withstand the expansion and shrinkage cycles, like spring loaded or spring cage connectors.
by loudmax | 2026-01-15 14:16:30+00:00
AI may never be able to replace the best tech writers, or even pretty good tech writers.

But today's AI might do better than the average tech writer. AI might be able to generate reasonably usable, if mediocre, technical documentation based on a halfheartedly updated wiki and the README files and comments scattered in the developers' code base. A lot of projects don't just have poor technical documentation, they have no technical documentation.
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-15 14:16:35+00:00
I will Github it soon.

The most interesting "don't know that they are dead" case is the culture industry in the US. Note a comment I made

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46604338

I am blown away by how in Japan somebody can write a "web novel", get a contract for a light novel, then there is a manga, and an anime, and video games and a billion dollar media franchise. Sure there are a lot of trash light novels that don't go very far, but there really is a pipeline by which quirky individuals can get make it big -- but the path just doesn't exist in the US, the door is closed, the market is completely uncompetitive.

Hollywood knows it is not doing well financially but it is incapable of facing up to this fact. It hopes that its problems are cyclical because to some extent they are but the very idea of giving up control to creators [1] and doubles down on remakes of big franchises and crappy indy films that follow in the footsteps of Woody Allen.

[1] it can't absorb the energy of Youtubers and other "creator economy" stars and the best it can do with the internet and new media is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Angry_Birds_Movie and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emoji_Movie
by incomingpain | 2026-01-15 14:16:43+00:00
The traditional historical PE ratio of ~17 was before it was so easy to invest in the stock market. PAssive or not.

The current SP500 pe ratio is ~31

It's not unreasonable to expect that this might even be below the new average whatever that might be. In fact, the antistock market like gold/silver/bitcoin is also probably low; not high.

Even if 17 is still the correct number, 31 isnt even a bubble by definition.
by cubefox | 2026-01-15 14:17:07+00:00
One reason is that not all these websites manage to make equally "creepy" links, even though the basic idea is the same. I remember one version which was a lot more alarming than the current example, with links containing a mix of suspicious content hinting at viruses, phishing, piracy/warez sites, pornography (XXX cams), and Bitcoin scams. I don't remember that website, but the current case seems rather weak by comparison.
by lotsofpulp | 2026-01-15 14:17:22+00:00
> the working class is the easiest: do vat tax, force income tax. Tere is no way taxing rich or executives is comparably easy

Marginal land value tax rates. Use beneficial ownership data, and land ownership records, which should all be digitized by now, and apply a tax
rate according to total ownership and “urban-ness” of the land. Since businesses have to pay also, it flows through to shareholders, and may serve as a counterbalance to businesses getting excessively large.
by fithisux | 2026-01-15 14:17:27+00:00
They should design from the beginning to be as open source as possible. I work for a known customer and for their analytics stack they used in one of their departments they use some non-free libraries. From the first month I asked them to research open source libraries to have as a fallback and make the source code as friendly as possible to other contributors as if tomorrow we would open source it. The idea is that if we disappear people should take over easily. If the non-free vendor disappear or we do not have the money to spend we need a fallback.

They listened to the second part, but not the first.

During summer I had to build around this non-free libraries but their subscription ended when people responsible were in vacations and the project was paused because of design bugs for two months, so they did not plan to renew the license for two months. Still my part had to carry on in the mean time.

I added an open source library as a fallback, even if it was 4x slower. Because of delays the license was renewed 3 months later when design issues were addressed. If they had designed around open source from the start I would have a better time. It was a real pain to replicate the functionality around the open source library. It was not a drop-in, not very far but far enough to cause hard to find bugs, in nasty calculational code. That had a number of bugs already and bad code quality.

My experience.
by samiv | 2026-01-15 14:17:55+00:00
I'd say that those high quality things that still exist do so despite of the higher volume of junk and they mostly exist because of other reasons/unique circumstances. (Individual pride, craftsmanship, people doing things as a hobby/without financial constraints etc)

In a landscape where the market is mostly filled with junk by spending anything on "quality" any commercial product is essentially losing money.
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-01-15 14:19:13+00:00
Lets just say that Russia or China does some surprise attack and lands a bunch of troops in Greenland.

OK, great, they've got troops in Greenland. Now they have to keep them supplied. How are they going to do that? Well, either through the air or by sea.

Does either have a navy that can do that? No. Does either have an air force that can do that against US opposition? No.

So it's really unlikely. Even if China or Russia were stupid enough to do that, they could never hold it.

Now, perhaps the more interesting question: How likely does Trump think it is? Does he think it's real, despite the absurd impossibility of it? Or is he just saying fact-free stuff that he hopes some people will believe?
by jcims | 2026-01-15 14:19:48+00:00
Reminds me of my rather memorable introduction to special characters invoking functions, seeing this dastardly little quip in the email signature of someone in a mailing list (circa '95 or so).

:(){:|:&};:

My curiosity piqued, I pasted it into the shell on my terminal in a pure example of FAFO. The poor little Sparc 5 I was using ground to a halt over the course of about ten seconds. The reboot was as hard as the lesson. xD
by aggeeinn | 2026-01-15 14:20:22+00:00
The 418 status is a nice touch. We actually noticed that whack-a-mole issue across the entire dataset—keeping a static Nginx config synced with the explosion of new user-agents is proving difficult for most admins right now.

If you're curious to stress-test the regex, feel free to drop the URL (or check my profile for email). I can run a quick pass with our crawler to see if it triggers the teapot response or if the headers manage to slip through.
by Draiken | 2026-01-15 14:20:23+00:00
> but it also increases the quality of the higher-tier

I truly don't see this happening anymore. Maybe it did before?

If there's real competition, maybe this does happen. We don't have it and it'll never last in capitalism since one or a few companies will always win at some point.

If you're a higher tier X, cheaper processes means you'll just enjoy bigger profit margins and eventually decide to start the enshittification phase since you're a monopoly/oligopoly, so why not?

As for FOSS, well, we'll have more crappy AI generated apps that are full of vulnerabilities and will become unmaintainable. We already have hordes of garbage "contributions" to FOSS generated by these AI systems worsening the lives of maintainers.

Is that really higher quality? I reckon it's only higher quantity with more potential to lower quality of even higher-tier software.
by tsumnia | 2026-01-15 14:20:29+00:00
We had a few trees fall in our backyard last year and one of the first things I did was throw a picture into Photoshop for its generative fill tool. I removed the fallen trees, then added some raised garden beds and a gazebo (for good measure).

I'll play around with the tool a bit later, as the above is an idea I have for a homework assignment. I'd be happy to chat off HN about some of the ways this type of tool would be super beneficial for landscapers/engineers.
by fzeroracer | 2026-01-15 14:20:33+00:00
This seems like an attempt to avoid the argument rather than engage with it, because creating an imaginary world which we currently don't live in has nothing to do with the reality we're currently dealing with.

The reality being that one informs the other. I know people that would agree in regular situations that we need some enforcement of immigration law. But this is not a regular situation, and when you have an agency tasked with 'enforcing' immigration law who is not enforcing the law at all and in fact violating the law, people question why said immigration laws and agency exists in the first place.
by joshstrange | 2026-01-15 14:20:36+00:00
In college I took a database class, it was pretty basic overall as I had been playing with MySQL for a few years at that point. On the final exam I got a 90/100. The test was 10 questions that just had you write SQL to answer the question. I got all the queries 100% correct... except... I didn't put a ";" after each query. On a written test. I'm still a little bitter about that.
by hecanjog | 2026-01-15 14:20:55+00:00
This is a pretty wild claim, so I think it is fair to be critical of the examples given:

- Driftless sounds like it might be better as a claude code skill or hook

- Deploycast is an LLM summarization service

- Triage also seems like it might be more effective inside CC as a skill or hook

In other words all these projects are tooling around LLM API calls.

> What was valuable was the commitment. The grit. The planning, the technical prowess, the unwavering ability to think night and day about a product, a problem space, incessantly obsessing, unsatisfied until you had some semblance of a working solution. It took hustle, brain power, studying, iteration, failures.

That isn't going to go away. Here's another idea: a discussion tool for audio workflows. Pre-LLMs the difficult part of something like this was never code generation.
by hnmullany | 2026-01-15 14:21:03+00:00
The cheapest solar auction to date was $13 per MWh (middle east) - so utility solar in the best regions is already very very cheap. When you add 4hr batteries, it's still competitive with CCG gas - in the $50 range.

The cost models for first generation fusion plants show ¬$400 per MWh - it will take a while for them to get to reasonable cost levels.

Recycling of mono-crystalline solar (the dominant tech today) and modern turbine blades are solved problems.
by whatisthiseven | 2026-01-15 14:21:16+00:00
Oil and gas have used, between drilling and refining, over 7 million acres of land in just the US. Yes, it provides more electricity, but at the cost of destroying the entire planet's biosphere, global warming, etc.

Current US estimates for solar land usage are 500,000 acres.

The land use arguments are bunk. Anyone who complains is repeating oil and gas propaganda.
by sanex | 2026-01-15 14:21:17+00:00
I was just thinking about building something like this, looks like you beat me to the punch, I will have to try it out.
I'm curious if you're able to give commands just as well as some wording you want cleaned up. I could see a model being confused between editting the command input into text to be inserted and responding to the command. Sorry if that's unclear, might be better if I just try it.
by AlotOfReading | 2026-01-15 14:21:30+00:00
Yes, it's studied. Rust and metal have different frictional properties, and the rotors produce different torques when the brakes are applied. This results in a sort of uneven shuddering when you use the brakes if they're heavily corroded.

It's not immediately deadly, but your brakes are one of the most important safety systems on the vehicle. They should be in good working order.