MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by robot-wrangler | 2026-01-11 11:23:27+00:00
Let's maybe avoid all the hype, whether it is for or against, and just have thoughtful and measured stances on things? Fairly high points for that on this piece, despite the title. It has the obligatory remark that manually writing code is pointless now!!1 but also the obligatory caveat that it depends on the kind of code you're writing.
by CraigJPerry | 2026-01-11 11:23:29+00:00
Revealed preferences suggest otherwise and that matters because he says a lot of things, often contradictory.

Is it just another Epstein diversion maybe?

Oil story doesn't stack up though:

- it's heavy sour oil, the tar like substance isn't economically extractable without an almost doubling in barrel price
- cheaper (existing infra) sour supply chain with Canada already meets US shale light sweet oil blending needs for a long time
- decided on maintaining stability of existing Venezuelan regime over supporting regime change

One thing that lines up so far is it does seem to be disproportionately effective at displacing column inches spent on the pending bringing to justice of Epstein entangled elites. Disproportionately because that pursuit of justice seems quite resilient in resisting partisanship breakdown.
by edg5000 | 2026-01-11 11:24:20+00:00
Nonsense indeed. The model knowledge is the current state of the art. Any computation it does, advances it. It re-ingests work of prior agents every time you run it on your codebase, so even though the model initializes the same way (until they update the model), upon repeated calls it ingests more and more novel information, inching the state of the art ever forwards.
by dist-epoch | 2026-01-11 11:24:21+00:00
People said the exact same thing about (numbers from memory, might be off):

- when Google paid $1 bil for YouTube

- when Facebook paid $1 bil for Instagram

- when Facebook paid $1 bil for WhatsApp

The same thing - these 3 companies make no money, and have no path to making money, and that the price paid was crazy and decoupled from any economics.

Yet now, in hindsight, they look like brilliant business decisions.
by sokoloff | 2026-01-11 11:24:39+00:00
> children dying from diseases whose vaccinations cost 1$

If there’s a government anywhere that isn’t providing this for its citizens, perhaps looking into why that government is such a failure would yield more durable change than a point patch of just a few vaccines.

> If the top 1% would spend 1% of their wealth

Why should we expect/demand more generosity from only 1% of the population? Maybe everyone should spend 1% of their wealth on these efforts? It’s easy to be magnanimous with someone else’s wallet.
by rzzzwilson | 2026-01-11 11:24:48+00:00
What do you hope to achieve by doing that?

I am retired now but during my professional career as a software engineer I never used an IDE to write software, I used vi/vim and the command-line toolchains for the language(s) I was using, even python, at the end. GUI programs like web browsers, spreadsheets, PDF viewers were also used, of course. So it is possible to develop software mostly on the command-line.

But I started when there weren't any GUI programs for developers, so it was easy for me. I do think that an experienced developer should be comfortable using the command-line but these days using one or more GUI programs in the developer toolchain is normal.

So, again, why?
by vouwfietsman | 2026-01-11 11:25:01+00:00
I think it would make sense to have these issues bubble up into the public consciousness of hackernews.

I've never used AI to code, I'm a software architect and currently assume I get little value out of an LLM. It would be useful for me if this debate had a vaguely engineering-smelling quality to it, because its currently just two groups shouting at eachother and handwaving criticism away.

If you actually deal with AI generated problems, I love it, please make a post about it so we have something concrete to point to.
Show HN: Authentic AI CV optimizer – real keywords only, 90%+ ATS scores
by jaumapv | 2026-01-11 11:25:50+00:00
Hey HN,After applying to 300+ jobs over the last year and getting ghosted by ATS bots despite having solid experience (and seeing friends waste hours keyword-stuffing or using shady white-text prompts that recruiters now auto-reject), I got fed up.

So I built Cvora (https://www.cvora.net): an AI that takes your existing CV + a job description and:
-Extracts only real keywords from the posting (zero hallucinations or invented skills)
-Rewrites your bullets naturally and professionally to highlight what you've actually done
-Generates a clean, ATS-proof PDF in seconds (tested against major systems like Greenhouse, Lever, Workday consistently 90-98% match)
-Includes a simple dashboard to track all your applications (no more spreadsheet hell)

No fabricating experience. No prompt injection tricks. Just making your real background match the job better and faster.
It's free to try with the first few generations, no card needed.
Would love brutal feedback – does this solve a real pain? What sucks? Any ATS horror stories to improve against?

Thanks!
Jaime
by borlox | 2026-01-11 11:26:01+00:00
Regarding the last few sentences about the speedtest, Fibre doesn’t degrade in a way that you get 30 to 40% line speed. DSL did that, fibre doesn’t.

Speedtests for 10G are complicated and will show low numbers because of all the different TCP parameters and schedulers. Sometimes because peering links of your ISP or the speedtest providers are saturated.
by forgotpwd16 | 2026-01-11 11:26:32+00:00
Considering Arch is one of the big upstream distros and, alongside Debian and NixOS, one of the big community-run ones, standardizing and improving its foundations is certainly not a waste. Moreover some results are usable beyond Arch, e.g. VOA (for storage and retrieval of signature verifiers). Choosing Rust though does impose some portability limitations. (Even if makes sense to not want to use C in 2020s.)
by martin-t | 2026-01-11 11:26:39+00:00
No, you're absolutely right.

LLMs are labor theft on an industrial scale.

I spent 10 years writing open source, I haven't touched it in the last 2. I wrote for multiple reasons none of which any longer apply:

- I believe every software project should have an open source alternative. But writing open source now means useful patterns can be extracted and incorporated into closed source versions _mechanically_ and with plausible deniability. It's ironically worse if you write useful comments.

- I enjoyed the community aspect of building something bigger than one person can accomplish. But LLMs are trained on the whole history and potentially forum posts / chat logs / emails which went into designing the SW too. With sufficiently advanced models, they effectively use my work to create a simulation of myself and other devs.

- I believe people (not just devs) should own the product they build (an even stronger protection of workers against exploitation than copyright). Now our past work is being used to replace us in the future without any compensation.

- I did it to get credit. Even though it was a small motivation compared to the rest, I enjoyed everyone knowing what I accomplished and I used it during job interviews. If somebody used my work, my name was attached to it. With LLMs, anyone can launder it and nobody knows how useful my work was.

- (not solely LLM related) I believed better technology improves the world and quality of life around me. Now I see it as a tool - neutral - to be used by anyone for both good and bad purposes.

Here's[0] a comment where I described why it's theft based on how LLMs work. I call it higher order plagiarism. I haven't seen this argument made by other people, it might be useful for arguing about those who want to legalize this.

In fact, I wonder if this argument has been made in court and whether the lawyers understand LLMs enough to make it.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46187330
by nebula8804 | 2026-01-11 11:26:42+00:00
The hardware needs to catch up I think. I asked ChatGPT (lol) how much it would cost to build a Deepseek server that runs at a reasonable speed and it quoted ~400k-800k(8-16 H100 + the rest of the server).

Guess we are still in the 1970s era of AI computing. We need to hope for a few more step changes or some breakthrough on model size.
by prodigycorp | 2026-01-11 11:26:58+00:00
Yup. I'd take a gander than most complaints by people who have even used LLMs for long time can be resolved by "describe your thing in detail". LLM's are such a relief on my wrists that I often get tempted to write short prompts and pray that the LLM divines my thoughts. I always get much better results in a lot faster time when i just turn on the mic and have whisper transcribe a couple minutes of my speaking though.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-11 11:27:32+00:00
> But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building.

I feel like this is not the same for everyone. For some people, the "fire" is literally about "I control a computer", for others "I'm solving a problem for others", and yet for others "I made something that made others smile/cry/feel emotions" and so on.

I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer, and for them, I understand LLMs remove the fun part. For me, I initially got into programming because I wanted to ruin other people's websites, then I figured out I needed to know how to build websites first, then I found it more fun to create and share what I've done with others, and they tell me what they think of it. That's my "fire". But I've met so many people who doesn't care an iota about sharing what they built with others, it matters nothing to them.

I guess the conclusion is, not all programmers program for the same reason, for some of us, LLMs helps a lot, and makes things even more fun. For others, LLMs remove the core part of what makes programming fun for them. Hence we get this constant back and forth of "Can't believe others can work like this!" vs "I can't believe others aren't working like this!", but both sides seems to completely miss the other side.
by zahlman | 2026-01-11 11:27:32+00:00
> But, in general, it is now clear that for most projects, writing the code yourself is no longer sensible, if not to have fun.

I want to write code to defy this logic and express my humanity. "To have fun", yes. But also to showcase what it means when a human engages in the act of programming. Writing code may increasingly not be "needed", but it increasingly is art.
by edg5000 | 2026-01-11 11:28:00+00:00
> state of the art LLMs are able to complete large subtasks or medium size projects alone, almost unassisted, given a good set of hints about what the end result should be

No. I agree with the author, but it's hyperbolic of him to phrase it like this. If you have solid domain knowledge, you'll steer the model with detailed specs. It will carry those out competently and multiply your productivity. However, the quality of the output still reflects your state of knowledge. It just provides leverage. Given the best tractors, a good farmer will have much better yields than a shit one. Without good direction, even Opus 4.5 tends to create massive code repetion. Easy to avoid if you know what you are doing, albeit in a refactor pass.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-01-11 11:28:20+00:00
Time for a NATO-wide Standards Committee on Responsible (and Excellent) Cosplay?

(Possibly under the aegis of NATO CPD?)

(inspired by the last 3 items on this list

https://www.angryflower.com/1587.html)

Ps: is that Kira (We The Living), Roark (Fountainhead) and Ayn herself? Who's the blonde prepster

https://www.angryflower.com/348.html)
by zarzavat | 2026-01-11 11:29:13+00:00
Laws can be changed. This is right now a trillion dollar industry, perhaps later it could even become a billion dollar industry. Either way, it's very important.

Strict copyright enforcement is a competitive disadvantage. Western countries lobbied for copyright enforcement in the 20th century because it was beneficial. Now the tables have turned, don't hold your breath for copyright enforcement against the wishes of the markets. We are all China now.
by drysine | 2026-01-11 11:29:20+00:00
>After moving a value, it needs to remain in a "valid but unspecified state".

No, it doesn't.

The standard library requires that for its classes, but not the language.

"Unless otherwise specified, such moved-from objects shall be placed in a valid but unspecified state."[0]

[0] https://timsong-cpp.github.io/cppwp/n4950/lib.types.movedfro...
by tw04 | 2026-01-11 11:29:23+00:00
> The entire point is to make it public, for anyone to use however is useful to him or her

The entire point isn’t to allow a large corporation to make private projects out of your open source project for many open source licenses. It’s to ensure the works that leverage your code are open source as well. Something AI is completely ignoring using various excuses as to why their specific type of theft is ok.
by menaerus | 2026-01-11 11:29:27+00:00
I don't doubt that at all and I'm glad for anyone who is managing to make some money from their open-source contributions, even more so in today's age where market is so volatile. I am being empathetic for that cause. But the point I am rather trying to convey is that this is not the strategy that will converge to something substantial that will make EU more competitive on global landscape.
by Juliate | 2026-01-11 11:29:29+00:00
> What is the social solution, then? Innovation can't be taken back after all.

It definitely can.

The innovation that was the open, social web of 20 years ago? still an option, but drowned between closed ad-fueled toxic gardens and drained by AI illegal copy bots.

The innovation that was democracy? Purposely under attack in every single place it still exists today.

Insulin at almost no cost (because it costs next to nothing to produce)? Out of the question for people that live under the regime of pharmaceutical corporations that are not reigned by government, by collective rules.

So, a technology that has a dubious ROI over the energy and water and land consumed, incites illegal activities and suicides, and that is in the process of killing the consumer public IT market for the next 5 years if not more, because one unprofitable company without solid verifiable prospects managed to pass dubious orders with unproven money that lock memory components for unproven data centers... yes, it definitely can be taken back.
by imiric | 2026-01-11 11:30:08+00:00
This is the first time I hear sentiments against "AI" hype be referred to as hype itself. Yes, there are people ignoring this technology altogether, possibly to their own detriment, but at the stage where we are now it is perfectly reasonable to want to avoid the actual hype.

What I would really urge people to avoid doing is listening to what any tech influencer has to say, including antirez. I really don't care what famous developers think about this technology, and it doesn't influence my own experience of it. People should try out whatever they're comfortable with, and make up their own opinions, instead of listening what anyone else has to say about it. This applies to anything, of course, but it's particularly important for the technology bubble we're currently in.

It's unfortunate that some voices are louder than others in this parasocial web we've built. Those with larger loudspeakers should be conscious of this fact, and moderate their output responsibly. It starts by not telling people what to do.
by eddyg | 2026-01-11 11:30:34+00:00
You left out the rest of the spec:

> On void elements, it does not mark the start tag as self-closing but instead is unnecessary and has no effect of any kind. For such void elements, it should be used only with caution — especially since, if directly preceded by an unquoted attribute value, it becomes part of the attribute value rather than being discarded by the parser.

(The void elements are listed here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Void_eleme... )
by roncesvalles | 2026-01-11 11:30:56+00:00
Exactly. AI is minimally useful for coding something that you couldn't have been able to code yourself, given enough time, without explicitly investing time in generic learning not specific to that codebase or particular task.

Although calling AI "just autocomplete" is almost a slur now, it really is just that in the sense that you need to A) have a decent mental picture of what you want, and, B) recognize a correct output when you see it.

On a tangent, the inability to identify correct output is also why I don't recommend using LLMs to teach you anything serious. When we use a search engine to learn something, we know when we've stumbled upon a really good piece of pedagogy through various signals like information density, logical consistency, structuredness/clarity of thought, consensus, reviews, author's credentials etc. But with LLMs we lose these critical analysis signals.
by ozlikethewizard | 2026-01-11 11:30:58+00:00
I'm unfortunately inclined to not look at their actions so favourably. They operate solely in jurisdictions where the US state supports open destabilization, and dont where the political ramifications would be too high for the US. Makes them little more than an extension of the US imperialist structure.

And this makes sense for an organization thats so highly reliant on federal support, vs Apple and Google who only have to just stay somewhat in the states good graces.
by hnlmorg | 2026-01-11 11:31:18+00:00
I get your point, but again, that’s not relevant to the point I was making.

You posted a terse comment with some HTML. I responded specifically about that comment and HTML. And you’re now elaborating on things as a rebuttal to my comment despite the fact that wasn’t the original scope of my comment.

Another example of that is how you’ve quoted my reply to the 2 vs 3 elements, and then answered a completely different question (one I didn’t even ask).

I don’t think you’re being intentionally obtuse but it’s still a very disingenuous way to handle a discussion.
by businessmate | 2026-01-11 11:31:26+00:00
The recent Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act case against Fireflies.AI Corp has largely been framed as a biometric privacy dispute. That framing is legally correct but analytically incomplete. The more consequential issue is not voice recognition accuracy or transcription quality. It is evidence failure in systems that now routinely record, summarize, and store human speech.

AI meeting assistants have crossed a quiet threshold. Their outputs are no longer disposable productivity aids. In legal, compliance, HR, and audit contexts, transcripts and summaries are increasingly relied upon as records. Once that reliance exists, scrutiny shifts. Regulators and plaintiffs stop asking whether the AI was accurate and start asking whether the organization can reconstruct what actually happened.

Most cannot.
by martin-t | 2026-01-11 11:31:28+00:00
> programmer who actually do like the actual typing

It's not about the typing, it's about the understanding.

LLM coding is like reading a math textbook without trying to solve any of the problems. You get an overview, you get a sense of what it's about and most importantly you get a false sense of understanding.

But if you try to actually solve the problems, you engage completely different parts of your brain. It's about the self-improvement.
by mcauldronism | 2026-01-11 11:31:33+00:00
I've written a two-part series applying Clark & Chalmers' extended mind thesis (1998) to AI tools.

Part 1 covers the setup: if notebooks meet the criteria for extended cognition (reliable, accessible, trusted, endorsed), AI exceeds them.

Part 2 makes what I think is a novel argument: maintained software actually decays on these criteria over time. Disposable software — regenerated fresh each use — scores higher on reliability and trust.

The implication: the most cognitively reliable tools might be the ones we throw away.

I'm not an academic philosopher (though I did study Wittgenstein 20 years ago). Would genuinely welcome critique on whether this argument holds.

https://open.substack.com/pub/mcauldronism/p/where-do-you-en...

https://open.substack.com/pub/mcauldronism/p/the-maintenance...
by gary_0 | 2026-01-11 11:31:50+00:00
> e.g. if they used a seperate rendering package or mostly painted by hand

IIRC Max Payne was one of the earlier games to rely heavily on photo-reference textures (instead of hand drawing or computer generating them). Keep in mind that in 2001 digital cameras were rare, expensive, and low-res, so people often just used film cameras and scanned in the physical photo with a flatbed scanner. Max Payne was far from the first, though; even 1998's Half-Life used some photo-ref textures.

The lighting in Max Payne's textures was probably mostly just the lighting from the original photo. Every texture had to be hand-manipulated to make it usable on 3D models, so changing the lighting would have added even more work and would have looked less realistic.
by richardjennings | 2026-01-11 11:32:32+00:00
SOTA LLMs are now quite good at typing out code that passes tests. If you are able to instruct the creation of sufficient tests and understand the code generated structurally, there is a significant multiplier in productivity. I have found LLMs to be hugely useful in understanding codebases more quickly. Granted it may be necessary to get 2nd opinions and fact check what is stated, but there is a big door now open to anyone to educate themselves.

I think there are some negative consequences to this; perhaps a new form of burn out. With the force multiplier and assisted learning utility comes a substantial increase in opportunity cost.
by antirez | 2026-01-11 11:33:07+00:00
If you can't see this by working with Claude Code for a few weeks, I don't want to go into bigger efforts than writing a blog post to convince you. It's not a mission, mine. I just want to communicate with the part of people that are open enough to challenge their ideas and are willing to touch with their hands what is happening. Also, if you tried and failed, it means that either for your domain AI is not good enough, or you are not able to extract the value. The fact is, this does not matter: a bigger percentage of programmers is using AI with success every day, and as it progresses this will happen more and in more diverse programming fields and tasks. If you disagree and are happy to avoid LLMs, well, it's ok as well.
by OlaProis | 2026-01-11 11:33:28+00:00
Valid skepticism! A few counterpoints:

Market exists: Obsidian has 1M+ users, Typora is popular, iA Writer has a loyal following. These aren't VS Code users who wandered off — they're writers, PKM enthusiasts, and note-takers who find IDE-style editors overwhelming for prose.

Different audience: Developers might prefer VS Code + Markdown Preview Enhanced. But Ferrite targets people who want a focused writing tool, not a general-purpose editor that happens to support Markdown. Think "writing app" vs "code editor with Markdown support."

Native advantage: Most Markdown tools are Electron (Obsidian, Typora, Mark Text). Ferrite offers instant startup, lower RAM, and native performance — appeals to the "I want my tools to feel fast" crowd.

You might be right that it won't achieve mass adoption. But there's a niche for "Obsidian but native and lighter" that I think is underserved.
by eeixlk | 2026-01-11 11:33:42+00:00
If you dont call it AI and see it as a natural language search engine result merger it's a bit easier to understand. Like a search engine, it's clunky so you have to know how to use it to get any useful results. Sometimes it appears magical or clever but it's just analyzing billions of text patterns. You can use this search merger to generate text in various forms quickly, and request new generated text. But it doesn't have taste, comprehension, problem solving, vision, or wisdom. However it can steal your data and your work and include it in it's search engine.