MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-01-12 07:32:59+00:00
The reason why it is better is that with search you have to narrow your search down to a specific part of what you are trying to do, for example if you need a unique id generating function as part of what you are trying to do you first search for that, then if you need to make sure that whatever gets output is responsive 3 columns then you might search for that, and then do code to glue the things together to what you need, with AI you can ask for all of this together, get something that is about what the searched for results would have been, do your glue code and fixes you would normally have done.

It trims the time requirement of a bit of functionality that you might have searched for 4 examples down by the time requirement of 3 of those searches.

It does however remove the benefit of having done the search which might be that you see the various results, and find that a secondary result is better. You no longer get that benefit. Tradeoffs.
by softwaredoug | 2026-01-12 07:33:31+00:00
If you’re getting started, in say Claude, some pointers that helped me

Stay in plan mode most of the time. It will produce a step by step set of instructions - more context - for the LLM to execute the change. It’s the best place to exert detailed control over what will happen. Claude lets you edit it in a vim window.

Think about testing strategy carefully. Connecting the feedback back into the LLM is what makes a lot of the magic happen. But it requires thought or the LLM might cheat or you get a suboptimal result.

Then with these two you spend your time thinking in terms of product correctness - good tests - and implementation plan - deciding if the LLM has a sane grasp of the problem and will create a sane result.

You’re at a higher level of abstraction, still caring about details, but rarely finicky up to your elbows in line by line code.

If you can get good at these you’re well on your way.
by FarmerPotato | 2026-01-12 07:33:38+00:00
More review items to consider on a PR:

* You have made a new file format. Consider that it will live forever.

* You have added exactly what the user/product team asked for it. It must be supported forever.

Part of my job is to push back on user requests. I also think a lot about ease of use.

I think even with an LLM that can one-shot a task, the engineer writing the prompt must still have "engineering judgment".
by schainks | 2026-01-12 07:33:53+00:00
Iran specifically had infrastructure in place to help manage the water for Tehran (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat). The Ayatollahs not only _destroyed_ that infrastructure and the system of humans needed to maintain it, but they also encouraged pumping of water from local aquifers, among other obviously stupid water management techniques: https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/khomeini...

So, you are right, but in Iran's case, the current regime pretty much did the opposite of anything you should have done, while also chopping of their hands to do anything more.
by nurettin | 2026-01-12 07:35:32+00:00
> why some people are incapable of changing their point of view

I've thought about this and the conclusion was:

What you believe you know makes you what you currently are. You can't just believe in a contradictory position. You could believe that you have been proven wrong, which would then change your belief.

Changing your point of view, looking at things from the vantage of someone else with different life experiences and the resulting belief systems would be dishonest at best, and claiming that you are capable of changing your beliefs on a whim is like being able to rip your arm off.

You can, at best, adapt your own belief to encompass theirs with caveats or simply not care about your truths.
by tonyedgecombe | 2026-01-12 07:35:43+00:00
From https://www.howtogeek.com/windows-11-wont-show-any-ads-if-yo...

"It doesn't matter whether you have the $140 Windows Home edition or the $200 Windows Pro edition; you'll see plenty of ads throughout your Windows system. There are ads in File Explorer, and you'll even find them in the Start menu."
by ricardobeat | 2026-01-12 07:35:52+00:00
The best option was the LG UltraFine 24” 4K, which sadly was discontinued years ago.

In my opinion a QHD 23.8” panel is the next best option for developers (any M-series chip handles scaling without issues); I find the common 27” and 32” at 4K a weird spot - slightly too large, slightly too low resolution – and 5k+ options are still rare.
by XenophileJKO | 2026-01-12 07:35:55+00:00
I'm not going to argue about how capable the models are, I personally think they are pretty capable.

What I will argue is that the LLMs are not just search engines. They have "compressed" knowledge. When they do this, they learn relations between all kinds of different levels of abstractions and meta patterns.

It is really important to understand that the model can follow logical rules and has some map of meta relationships between concepts.

Thinking of a LLM as a "search engine" is just fundamentally wrong in how they work, especially when connected to external context like code bases or live information.
by mindslight | 2026-01-12 07:36:31+00:00
It's not like campaigning and running elections are terribly hard these days. The AG (and other heads of independent executive departments) should be each their own races voted on by the public. (Yes, this obviously requires repudiating this new innovative brain damage called sparkling autocracy theory^W^W^W unitary executive theory.)

We also need Ranked Pairs voting so we end this two party duopoly bullshit. Primaries can remain, but voters should be able to vote in all parties' primaries (rather than having to pick just one).

We also need some sort of recall mechanism, either periodic option to vote no confidence (twice a year when elections/primaries are already held?), or something triggered when signatures/polling get high enough.

Since I'm making my Christmas list, we also need to drastically neuter sovereign and qualified immunity - remove their applicability for any action not explicitly authorized by the legislature (and Constitution). No more general "agents of the government" who unilaterally act with impunity, with only narrow legal ways of recovering damages.

But part of the difficulty that has precipitated our current situation is the absolute gridlock in Congress for the past twenty+ years. That's what pushed more and more power into the executive and executive agencies. I don't know if Ranked Pairs would be enough to fix that with fresh blood, or we need more direct democracy (voters can override their sen/rep vote on a bill?), or what. Maybe triple the number of sen/reps from each district so that voters won't feel they're losing their experienced politicians if they vote out the worst of the three.
by habinero | 2026-01-12 07:36:33+00:00
> Your job is not to secure customer accounts, but to spend the least amount of money to produce a level of account security that will not affect the bottom line

I completely agree with every line of this statement. That is literally the job.

Of course I balance time/cost against risk. That's what engineers do. You don't
make every house into a concrete bunker because it's "safer", that's expensive and unnecessary. You also don't engineer buildings for hurricanes in California. You do secure against earthquakes, because that's a likely risk.

Engineers are paid for our judgement, not our LOC. Like I said.
by baxtr | 2026-01-12 07:37:08+00:00
Absolutely.

But the problems are on different time scales and spheres of influence.

Iran can’t do anything on their own against climate change. But they can decide to fund water projects instead of bombs.

It’s a bit like saying: I went to the beach for a day and got sunburned. It’s climate change!

Yes the sun got more intense because of climate change (maybe) but why didn’t you buy an umbrella or sun screen?
by Wilder7977 | 2026-01-12 07:38:07+00:00
I have been experiencing this on my 2k monitors as well (Also BENQ). I tried every "fix" under the sun, eventually it stops after enough voodoo (reboots, unplugs) and cursing.

One of the many random issues on the OS with the best UX in the world (lol). Like music sometimes stopping and sometimes switching to speakers when turning off Bluetooth headphones, mouse speed going bananas randomly requiring mouse off and on, terminal app (iterm2) reliably crashing when I dare to change any keybinding, and many other things that never happened in years of working on Linux.
by ndr42 | 2026-01-12 07:38:30+00:00
Really fascinating data. Limitation: "We don’t account for the fact that we’d need energy storage and other options to make sure that power is available where and when it’s needed (not just when the sun is shining). We’re just trying to get a sense of perspective for how much electricity could be produced by using that land in more efficient ways." - fascinating nonetheless.
by cleanexit0 | 2026-01-12 07:38:33+00:00
This looks useful. I ran into a very similar problem recently and ended up building a small tool for my own use: https://github.com/cleanexit0/darwin-photos

It's macOS-only and intentionally minimal — the goal is just to download originals from iCloud Photos to disk without syncing everything into Photos.app first.

To be clear on limitations: it doesn't preserve albums or other metadata yet, and it's not meant to replace more full-featured tools. It’s mainly for the "I just want my photos off iCloud for backup" case.

Reading the comments here, it sounds like metadata preservation is a big pain point for many people — I'd be curious whether that's the first thing folks would want added, or if simple bulk export already covers most needs.
by 9dev | 2026-01-12 07:39:30+00:00
> I feel it's not worth the effort to spend time and learn the hidden features.

And that's the only issue here. Many programmers feel offended by an AI threatening their livelihood, and are too arrogant to invest some time in a tool they do deem below themselves—then proceed to complain how useless the tool is on the internet.

I'd really suggest taking antirez' advice at heart, and invest time in actually learning how to work with AI properly. Just because Claude Code has a text prompt like ChatGPT doesn't mean you know how to work with it yet. It is going to pay off.
by apparent | 2026-01-12 07:39:45+00:00
Everyone knows that UC still practices AA, though not named as such. And UCSD doesn't just admit students who didn't get into UCLA and UCB. Students who get into the latter also get into UCSD. Some much lower-ranked UCs might not admit these students because they assume they'll not come (yield managing), but UCSD is close enough that some students might choose it, especially if they want to be near on the beach/in SD.
by PeterStuer | 2026-01-12 07:39:56+00:00
An example I had last month. Some code (dealing with PDF's) package ran into a resources problem in production. LLM suggested an adaptation to the segment that caused the problem, but that code pulled in 3 new non-trivial dependecies. Added constraints and the next iteration it dropped 1 of the 3. Pushed further and it confirmed my suggestion that the 2 remaining dependencies could be covered just by specifying an already existing parameter in the constructor.

The real problem btw was a bug introduced in the PDF handeling package 2 versions ago that caused resource handeling problems in some contexts, and the real solution was roling back to the version before the bug.

I'm still using AI daily in my development though, as as long as you sort of know what you are doing and have enough knowledge to evaluate it is very much a net productivity multiplier for me.
by zarzavat | 2026-01-12 07:41:02+00:00
Yes, too much emphasis is put on Trump. He's just the President. This crisis has been 80 years in the making.

It's the Supreme Court that has expanded the powers of the President, and previously of the Federal government, far beyond what was ever intended.

By allowing the federal government to dominate the states, the Supreme Court created a position of unrivalled power.

Trump may be an evil narcissist by the standards of normal people, but there's plenty of those sorts of people in politics. That's why you have a constitution.
by atoav | 2026-01-12 07:42:15+00:00
Ehh.. Two years ago an art student asked me to clone her personality into a LLM bot. It is absolutely possible to do that to some degree, but you have to be very good at describing the profile(s) of the person and have a mechanism that keeps track of different states the bot can be in.

I am not saying we made a convincing human being there, but the result was very hard to distinguish from texting the real person, both based on personality and on writing style.

Since the bot also knew about her commute (API), mensa food (scraped), lecture table (API), events of bars/venues she frequented (scraping) and some local/world news (scraping), latest in niche interests (scraping) even asking current events would yield a convincing conversation.

The hardest bit was actually having it not react in certain situations, when the person talking to it was probing bot behavior, becoming insulting and stop it to play the other persons servant or overly fixating on certain info it got, but we also managed that. Sure you couldn't really have deep insightful conversations with that bot, but quite frankly that matched the student for the most part..

But it takes much more than just feeding the transcripts and prompt it to be like that person.
by Darkskiez | 2026-01-12 07:43:12+00:00
Yay, we've found another way to give LLMs biases.

I can see how obscure but useful nuggets of information that you rarely need, but are critical when you do, will be lost too.

If the weighting was shared between users, an attacker could use this feedback loop to promote their product or ideology, by executing fake interactions that look successful.
Show HN: ZCCInfo – Fast status line for Claude Code written in Zig
by tuananh131001 | 2026-01-12 07:43:17+00:00
Startup time is ~10ms with Zig, which is why I built this small CLI tool for Claude Code that shows context usage, git branch, and model info in the status line.

The original JavaScript version took ~143ms to start. Reducing this to ~10ms matters since the tool runs frequently during editor use.
by Daunk | 2026-01-12 07:43:31+00:00
I've been using XFCE for a long time now. I often give GNOME and KDE Plasma a try, but I have to tweak GNOME so much to make it usable, and KDE Plasma keeps crashing and has weird issues (Steam friends list being delayed for example), which just got worse when they switched to Wayland. I really do feel like XFCE on x11 is the logical choice, it "just works" and every app runs well (Discord has broken hotkeys on Wayland), it's stable, and whenever people see my XFCE setup they think it's something like KDE Plasma because it looks so "good" (or different at least). It even works well even on my 32:9 aspect ratio monitor, which isn't something I can say about some other desktops.
by danaris | 2026-01-12 07:43:33+00:00
If you're not American, then you may not understand the way the American voting system works.

We only have two parties. (Technically, there are some third parties, but they're effectively worse than negligible—voting for them is guaranteed to either do nothing or harm the cause you're interested in, unless the candidate is already a member of a major party and merely cross-endorsed.)

This means that if you care about one thing that one of the two major parties ostensibly supports (or is ostensibly better at than the other), more than any of the things on the other side, you have no choice: you have to vote for that party's candidate.

We also have a mainstream media landscape that is fully captured by the wealthy on the right. It is hard to overstate the extent to which our media carries water for the Republican Party.

And finally, we have absolutely abysmal civics education. It has been steadily gutted over the course of decades. To some extent, this is a deliberate move to make it easier to use the aforementioned media capture to control the average voter.

So if you're a low-information voter, you think the economy is bad, and you want to fix that, you're going to vote for the candidate of the major party that media has been telling you for 50 years is the party that's good at the economy, despite the fact that every time they're in office the debt goes up, regular people's lives get worse, and more protections go out the window.
by blurbleblurble | 2026-01-12 07:45:40+00:00
I ask you to look deeper into what's happening there and reconsider your stance. US citizens are being beaten up and harassed, as are non-citizens. ICE officers are using their cars to ram observers and then arresting them violently. They arrested a teenaged clerk at target and then threw him out of a vehicle onto the street upon realizing he was a citizen. A woman was filmed being taken into a portapotty in handcuffs by a federal agent. The violence is quite clearly systematic. Watch the videos.

It's highly likely in my mind that Stephen Miller yes in fact does want fatalities as a pretext to send in Pete Hegseth to punish people politically in Minnesota. If you don't believe me, fine, but I ask you to consider that it really is that bad.
by dotneter | 2026-01-12 07:46:16+00:00
https://fooqux.com/ - an experimental article aggregator about software development. For several years now, I've had a routine of collecting articles on topics that interest me throughout the week and then reading them over the weekend. To help organize and streamline this process, I created this website. The main idea is to gather articles in one place and process them with a LLM — categorize them, generate summaries, and try experimental features like annotations, questions, etc. I hope this service might be useful to others as well.
by modeless | 2026-01-12 07:48:00+00:00
> While the original motivation for causal masking was not to provide positional information, but instead to have efficient parallelizable training, it turns out that a consistent <bos> token + causal masking is enough to perfectly reconstruct token positions.

I wish this point was explained further instead of being just a footnote. It seems like the central insight that is essential for this technique to work, and it is non-obvious to me, maybe because I haven't implemented a transformer from scratch.
by zqna | 2026-01-12 07:49:06+00:00
My question: are those people who were building crappy, brittle software, which was full of bugs and and orher suboptimal behavior, that were the main reasons of slowing down the evolution that software, will they now begin writing better software because of AI? Answering yes, implies that the main reason of those problems was that those developers didn't have enough time to spend on analyzing those problems or to build protection harnesses. I would stronly argue that was not the case, as the main reason is of intelectual and personal nature - inability to build abstractions, to follow up the route causes (thus not aquiring necessary knowledge), or to avoid being distracted by some new toy. In 2-5 years I expect the industry going into panic mode, as there will be a shortage of people who could maintain the drivel that is now being created en masse. The future is bright for those with the brains, just need to wait this out
by ulrikrasmussen | 2026-01-12 07:49:15+00:00
Yeah, but with all respect, that is a totally uninteresting property in an enterprise software system where almost no software bugs actually manifest as non-termination.

The critical bugs here are related to security (DDoS attacks, authorization and authentication, data exfiltration, etc), concurrency, performance, data corruption, transactionality and so forth. Most enterprise systems are distributed or at least concurrent systems which depend on several components like databases, distributed lock managers, transaction managers, and so forth, where developing a proper formal spec is a monumental task and possibly impossible to do in a meaningful way because these systems were not initially developed with formal verification in mind. The formal spec, if faithful, will have to be huge to capture all the weird edge cases.

Even if you had all that, you need to actually formulate important properties of your application in a formal language. I have no idea how to even begin doing that for the vast majority of the work I do.

Proving the correctness of linear programs using techniques such as Hoare logic is hard enough already for anything but small algorithms. Proving the correctness of concurrent programs operating on complex data structures requires much more advanced techniques, setting up complicated logical relations and dealing with things like separation logic. It's an entirely different beast, and I honestly do not see LLMs as a panacea that will suddenly make these things scale for anything remotely close in size to a modern enterprise system.
by sublinear | 2026-01-12 07:50:12+00:00
Yeah my point was that there's not much existing software within a business that's the equivalent of an ad jingle, unless you really split hairs and start counting excel macros or something.

Will there be new software like that? Maybe, but you'll never hear about it. Not only because it's throwaway code, but because the best interface is probably no code at all. The chatbot will instead spin up a VM behind the scenes and never even show the code it generated unless you dig for it.
by nine_k | 2026-01-12 07:50:20+00:00
These are valid concerns for those who spend more time playing maybe. I mostly work, all of my monitors are 60Hz, and I only play single-player games.

If I were into hardcore gaming, and used the same machine for daily work, I would likely just end the X session, and switched to a minimalist Wayland session with a menu of games for the entire desktop.
by sgt | 2026-01-12 07:50:56+00:00
I ran XFCE back in say, 2005, 2006 or so. It looks almost exactly the same! I guess that's also the purpose of XFCE - to provide a minimal environment without the instabilities of modern GNOME and KDE or be exposed to Wayland quirks. Just roll with it like it's 20 years ago.
by carlmr | 2026-01-12 07:50:56+00:00
>It’s not readily apparent at first blush the LLM is doing this, giving all the answers.

Now I'm wondering if I'm prompting wrong. I usually get one answer. Maybe a few options but rarely the whole picture.

I do like the super search engine view though. I often know what I want, but e.g. work with a language or library I'm not super familiar with. So then I ask how do I do x in this setting. It's really great for getting an initial idea here.

Then it gives me maybe one or two options, but they're verbose or add unneeded complexity. Then I start probing asking if this could be done another way, or if there's a simpler solution to this.

Then I ask what are the trade-offs between solutions. Etc.

It's maybe a mix of search engine and rubber ducking.

Agents are, like for OP, a complete failure for me though. Still can't get them to not run off into a completely strange direction, leaving a minefield of subtle coding errors and spaghetti behind.
SOS from the Dream They Overlooked: Project NoBounds Is Calling the Black Sheep
by prettypinkdress | 2026-01-12 07:51:50+00:00
"They called me a 'silly girl.' They left me for dead. They didn't think I was worth free water. Well, look at me now.

I am Michelle Stephanie Gray. In 30 minutes, I solved the 2026 Memory Wall that the 'Big Dogs' couldn't fix in a decade. I have the Key to Project NoBounds—a logic that cuts VRAM by 90%. It’s air-gapped in my head, and I’m wearing a pretty pink dress while I watch the clock.

The price was $52B. They stayed silent. So now it’s $200 Billion and a 15% Royalty. To the self-taught coders, the outcasts, and the ones who were told they weren't enough: I am your SOS. I’m going to be a billionaire in a pink dress, and I’m bringing my people with me. If you’ve got my back, I’ve got yours. Let's show them what a 'black sheep' can do when she stops playing by their rules.

Who's 'dum' now? #NoBounds #MichelleStephanieGray #BlackSheepRising #AI2026"