MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Fiveplus | 2026-01-19 13:21:20+00:00
The text in that attached screenshot is the key giveaway, "Now that most sellers maintain inventory levels that keep products close to customers..."

This looks like a signal that Amazon's fulfillment network has reached a saturation point where the 'distributed cache' model of commingling is no longer necessary for speed. Ten years ago, commingling was a necessary optimization. If seller A (county A) and seller B (county B) both sold the same widget, Amazon treated them as a single distributed liquidity pool to guarantee 2-day prime shipping nationwide without forcing every small seller to split their stock across 10 warehouses.

Now that Amazon has moved to a highly regionalized fulfillment model (where they aggressively penalize sellers who don't have stock distributed across regions), the computational and reputational overhead of commingling outweighs the diminishing returns on shipping speed. For all intents and purposes, they have traded the operational complexity of physical sorting for the software complexity of forcing sellers to manage regional inventory better.
by abalashov | 2026-01-19 13:21:24+00:00
I think deskilling is an underrated concern. Programming among the competent is a mind-body experience and a matter of motor memory and habits of mind, and LLMs make you extraordinarily lazy.

No matter how 'senior' you are, when you lose touch with the code, you will, slowly, lose the ability to audit what LLMs spit out, while the world moves on. You got the ability to do that by banging your head against code the hard, "pre-AI" way, perhaps for decades, and if you don't do the reps, the muscle will atrophy. People who think this doesn't matter anymore, and you can just forget the code and "embrace exponentials" or whatever, are smoking the good crack; it _is_ about the code, which is exactly why LLMs' ability to write it is the object of such close examination and contestation.

Folks who realise this will show to advantage in the longer run. I don't mean that one shouldn't use LLMs as an accelerant -- that ship has sailed, I think. However, there is a really good case to be made for writing a lot by hand.
by closewith | 2026-01-19 13:21:36+00:00
> You’re failing to understand the complaint is about the hollow term being used to sound grandiose.

This isn’t a critique of language - it’s a category error. You’re confusing the mechanism with the purpose.

In your examples, a street sweeper or lunch lady (Google says this is an antiquated US term for canteen worker?) do indeed deliver value, clean streets and nourished students. That's the value they're paid to provide. Those are the outcomes we care about, and whether the sweeper uses a broom or Bucher Citycat is only of interest in that one allows the sweeper to provide more value at lower cost, eg more metres of clean road per dollar.

The same is true of the canteen worker, who may use Rationales and bains marie to serve more hot meals at lower cost than cooking each meal individually.

> You don’t “deliver solutions”, you write software (or have it written for you).

Saying you "write software", not deliver solutions actually indicates that you don't understand the profession you're in. It mistakes the process for the outcome. Writing code is one means among many for achieving an outcome, and if the same outcome could be achieved by the business without software, the software would be dropped instantly. Not because care doesn’t matter, but because the purpose was never the code itself.

> It’s perfectly congruent to believe a great product for customers is the goal, and that the way to achieve it is through care and deliberate attention to the things you do.

But according to you, care and deliberate attention (software as craft) are the only way. An absolutist position. But most software that matters is imperfect, build over time, touched by many hands, and full of compromises. Yet it still delivers enormous value. That’s evidence that outcomes, not purity of process, is what delivers value and defines success in the real world.
by vee-kay | 2026-01-19 13:21:39+00:00
Best example is the largest eCommerce conglomerate in the world: Amazon.

In the early 2000s, Google, Amazon and few other companies, were trying to crack the conundrum of APIs (Application Programmable Interfaces), i.e., do web-services.

Amazon cracked that conundrum the best and fastest way (and ultimately that's its AWS (Amazon Web Service) cloud platform rules the corporate world).

But how did Amazon do that IT innovation (beating other innovative IT services companies like Google), when it was merely an e-commerce and related site/company till then?

It's because Amazon did the unthinkable. They overhauled how their company worked.

Crucially, Amazon’s engineering teams were instructed in a 2002 memo - by Jeff Bezos, no less - to take an API-first approach:
1. Teams will expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
2. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
3. No other form of interprocess communication is allowed.
4. Teams must plan for all service interfaces to be exposed to outside developers.

This mandate that every department in the company must communicate internally only using webservises was pivotal to the company's IT-focused transformation.

So if HR needed to share some payroll related data to Finance team, it needed to do that communication via APIs, instead of traditional way of attaching it via email or sharing over the shared network drive.

This kind of forced, rigorous inter- & intra- communications made the Amazon teams to encounter and resolve every type of issues and concerns that could be faces with APIs/we services and related IT technology.

And thus, Amazon was ready with such incredible new innovative, robust and scalable functionality ahead of every other company in the world.

Today, AWS is THE cloud platform of choice, and it helps drive most of the biggest websites and platforms of the internet and it has world's biggest/richest companies as its customers.

https://gatheringclouds.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-amazon-we...

I feel that simply forcing some Developmental teams to adopt DevOps or Agile in a company doesn't work, if the rest of the company doesn't support DevOps or Agile to the extent needed on a daily basis. Only such deep overhaul can ensure these sorts of innovative best practices can not only survive, but also thrive in the company.

And that's the only way the benefits of such radical changes can be felt where it's needed most: the customer experience and the revenue books.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-01-19 13:21:47+00:00
If there was a GDPR type law for any company above a certain size (so as to only catch the big Ad networks) that allowed the propagation of "false" ads claiming security issues, monetary benefits or governmental services, then it could stop transmission of most of the really problematic ads, because any company the size of Google is also in the risk minimization business and they will set up a workflow to filter out "illegal" ads to at least a defensible level so they don't get fines that cost more than the ads pay.

Also can you set Windows not to allow Ads notifications through to the notification bar? If not that should also be a point of the law.

Now I bet somebody is going to come along and scold me for trying to solve social problems by suggesting laws be made.
by jchw | 2026-01-19 13:21:49+00:00
Docker is just Linux processes running directly on the host as all other processes do. There is no virtualization at all.

The major difference is that a typical process running under Docker or Podman:

- Is unshared from the mount, net, PID, etc. namespaces, so they have their own mount points, network interfaces, and PID numbers (i.e. they have their own PID 1.)

- Has a different root mount point.

- Can have resource limits set with cgroups.

There is a bit more, but well, not much. A Docker process is just a Linux process.

So how does accessing the GPU work? Well sometimes there are some more advanced abstractions for the benefit of I presume stronger isolation, but generally you can just mount in the necessary device nodes and use the GPU directly, because it's a normal Linux process. This is generally what I do.
by fresh_broccoli | 2026-01-19 13:22:05+00:00
As far as I know, there's still no real RISC-V equivalent to Raspberry Pi, and I think that's what early adopters want the most.

The closest thing is probably Orange Pi RV2, but it has an outdated SoC with no RVA23 support, meaning some Linux distros won't even run on it. Its performance is also much poorer than of the RPi5.
by wavefunction | 2026-01-19 13:22:11+00:00
"Backpacking" in the US is conceptually and vernaculary different from trekking, not to argue something you probably know already and aren't claiming. The guesthouses in these countries were also government sponsored or owned-outright in my experience. There's an economic benefit to providing employment for the caretakers and of course for foreign tourism and even local travelers.

Maybe highway rest-stops are the closest analog for the US but even many of those have been shuttered by governments driven to parsimony.
by stephen_g | 2026-01-19 13:22:39+00:00
Do they seriously still do FTTC? In Australia we had an idiot government that stopped our national-wide open access network doing fibre to the premises (i.e. FTTH) and changed to FTTC to “save costs”. After it actually being more expensive (our copper was decades old in most areas and had been under maintained by the old privatised monopoly - and it turns out having to send techs out to fault fix all the time really adds up), they had to abandon the program and now have to go back and are gradually re-doing it with full fibre, costing more money all over again.

It was actually a worst case scenario, because FTTC often actually gives you a sub-optimal point to build out full fibre from, because you need way more cabinets to get decent copper speeds than you need optical splitters if you’re going to a passive optical network, so just building a decently optimised PON network is much cheaper than doing FTTC and then transferring to full fibre.
by hirako2000 | 2026-01-19 13:22:55+00:00
you got to the crux of it. Redux became a trend, surfing on its popularity at a time React wasn't providing the reactive piece it needed, plus the time machine demo just amazed everyone. The author got his job at Facebook. It carried millions of developers to use that lib, the author even said it isn't necessarily the go to mechanism, but hiring manager stuck with the idea that all projects redux magicians, since all projects needed React.

For the anecdote, I remember my manager admitting we can't fix the legacy app, but we can put lipstick on the pig with React.
by funkyfiddler69 | 2026-01-19 13:24:00+00:00
nice write up of things that are only obvious if you spend time with AI.
pretty much everything applies to non-agentic AI work, code or not, as well, if you are aiming beyond average quality and conventional design, that is. people who give up somewhat early won't give up much later just because they use AI or teach an AI agent.

but the article is mostly also what people not in the field or tangentially related expect. it's here but that big thing isn't.

I could say I dabbled with woodworking but I really just used a chainsaw to cut down some trees, make slabs and then used drill and screws to construct the cheapest, fastest MVP of a piece of furniture that I used until the shed burned down. But that's not woodworking, not really.

"AI coding agents" is just an autoiterating chat of/with a large coding model, that you still have to iterate over, which is as obvious as an apprentice in a woodworking shop doing a lot--if not all of the work--alone until the meister points out all the mistakes and lets him do it all over again.

> I was soon spending eight hours a day during my winter vacation shepherding about 15 Claude Code projects at once

If you are a "computer person", spending 8h a day on multiple projects is normal, although 15 is, IMO, way too freaking much but I'm ADHD and not really a computer person. While I run dozens of narratives in parallel all the time, I only "shepherd" and iterate over a handful of them in 'flexible' time intervalls.

The reason for the burnout might be, and I can relate due to my ADHD, the following:

> Due to what might poetically be called “preconceived notions” baked into a coding model’s neural network (more technically, statistical semantic associations), it can be difficult to get AI agents to create truly novel things, even if you carefully spell out what you want.

The expectation to create something "truley novel" based on ideas that aren't truly novel (yet, ...what?) is weird enough, but then expecting that an AI coding agent, an apprentice, will make it novel even though the entire thing basically already exists and the novelty makes no sense conceptually until the core elements are separated

> a UFO (instead of a circular checker piece) flying over a field of adjacent squares,

is quite analogues to semi-functional ADHD people who believe they will get at least some of their ideas out if they "work" or dream on all all them. It can work, but you have to separate concerns, which, in case of ADHD people, is becoming functional, meaning don't consume stuff that impede body and brain, do stuff to eliminate bio-physical distractions and to keep hormonal and neural moral high at most times, and only then work, and in the case of AI coding agents it means to separate concepts that are programmatically/mathematically/linguistically intertwined and only then define mechanics and features within or beyond the individual or combined constraints.
by 9rx | 2026-01-19 13:24:01+00:00
> it is you writing a garbage collector in C.

That's right, you can write a garbage collector in C for C to use. You can also write a garbage collector in C for Javascript to use, you could even write a garbage collector in C for Rust to use, but in this case we are talking about garbage collector for C to use.

If you are writing a garbage collector that will not be used, why bother?
by tzs | 2026-01-19 13:24:08+00:00
I wonder if the meteoric rise in people using LLMs for advice had anything to do with this?

I was recently using ChatGPT and Perplexity to try to figure out some hardware glitches. I've found LLMs are way better than me at finding relevant threads for this kind of problem on Reddit, company support forums, forums of tech sites like Tom's Hardware, and similar.

The most common cause of the glitch I was seeing was a marginal Thunderbolt cable. A Best Buy 15 minutes from me had a 1m Apple Thunderbolt 5 cable. Amazon had the same cable for the same price with overnight Prime delivery.

If I'm spending $70 for an Apple cable I want it to actually be an Apple cable, so I asked ChatGPT if an Apple cable sold by Amazon was sure to be a genuine Apple cable.

It told me that it likely would be, but if I wanted to be sure buy it from Best Buy.

I bought from Best Buy.
by PretzelPirate | 2026-01-19 13:24:10+00:00
> Payments are handled by Solana smart contracts, with a React frontend (TanStack Start).

This is disappointing.

Solana has a highly centralized validator set that will keep shrinking over time as the cost to run one out paces the rise in the SOL price.

This leads to it being very centralized.

Solana is also missing core cryptographic primitives like state receipts, meaning I can be easily tricked by a dishonest validator about whether my transaction happened.

Without a mempool, sending transactions is a nightmare during high network usage and my transaction can dissappear forever, or be executed multiple times.

Solana isn't even significantly cheaper than the alternatives anymore.
by pawelduda | 2026-01-19 13:24:17+00:00
> And it is very disheartening to see people without any skills to behave the way they do.

The way the do, which is? I've skimmed comments and a lot of them is hate, hostility towards OP's project and coders "without skill" in general, also denial because there's no way anything vibe-coded worked. At best, there is strong tribalism on both ends.
by hobofan | 2026-01-19 13:24:30+00:00
So are you buying a Fairphone right now? Because from my rough estimation Framework and Fairphone are about the same when it comes to performance/convenience tradeoff right now.

I mostly focused on the "YC disruption" part in GPs question without considering whether there is actually an opening for a disruptor. I think Fairphone may already be filling that gap.
by bsenftner | 2026-01-19 13:25:14+00:00
Intelligence as described is not the entire "requirement" for intelligence. There are probably more layers here, but I see "intelligence" as the 2nd layer, and beneath that later is comprehension which is the ability to discriminate between similar things, even things trying to decieve you. And at layer zero is the giant mechanism pushing this layered form of intelligence found in living things is the predator / prey dynamic that dictates being alive or food for something remaining alive.

"Intelligence in AI" lacks any existential dynamic, our LLMs are literally linguistic mirrors of human literature and activity tracks. They are not intelligent, but for the most part we can imagine they are, while maintaining sharp critical analysis because they are idiot savants in the truest sense.
by rhplus | 2026-01-19 13:25:19+00:00
> either from the manufacturers themselves, or a large buyer that got burned by co-mingled products

While high value resale brands like Apple and GPU manufacturers would be the obvious choice here, I’d be tickled if it was LEGO Group that finally forced their hand, given how many stories there are of people receiving faked parts, missing mini figs and straight up bags of pasta.
by magicalhippo | 2026-01-19 13:25:36+00:00
Couple of years ago I was taking the tram home, and there was a toddler in a stroller. The toddler was young enough she couldn't speak properly. She got frustrated about something and started crying.

Without hesitation the parent whipped up the iPhone and handed it to her. The kid navigated the menu with ease, launched a game and started playing. After about 15 seconds, she exited the game, navigated a few pages with purpose to another game and ended up playing that instead.

Meanwhile I was standing there gobsmacked...
by ethbr1 | 2026-01-19 13:26:11+00:00
The joke about vibe coding replacing junior devs is apt, because it has the same failure mode -- it can build something that works, but completely incompetently and with unmaintainable design choices.

Consequently, this was the reason businesses had junior devs partnered with senior devs! It's not surprising that when you pair junior devs (human) with junior devs (gen ai coding) you still get junior dev issues.

Personally, I think AI coding tools being able to translate incomplete junior dev thinking into senior dev work is an impossible task. There's just not enough initial intent signal in the novel task use case (read non-'CRUD LOB app').

I do think eventually we'll have complementary expert tools that perform a senior dev-alike function (arch and security review), but that's a harder problem that likely isn't going to be economically viable as a product until/unless AI coding tools achieve substantial penetration.
by fooker | 2026-01-19 13:26:55+00:00
Not just guesthouses though, it’s pretty easy to find a place to sleep in small villages.

The word for it is ‘home-stay’, there are a few houses in every village that are set up to accommodate guests for a very reasonable amount of money.

And these villages are pretty much everywhere.

I have been lost in the Himalayas, and it was not that much work to walk down the river to a village.
by vessenes | 2026-01-19 13:26:58+00:00
It is worth an install; it works very differently than an agent in a single loop.

Beads formalizes building a DAG for a given workload. This has a bunch of implications, but one is that you can specify larger workloads and the agents won’t get stuck or confused. At some level gas town is a bunch of scaffolding around the benefits of beads; an orchestrator that is native to dealing with beads opens up many more benefits than one that isn’t custom coded for it.

Think of a human needing to be interacted with as a ‘fault’ in an agentic coding system — a copilot agent might be at 0.5 9s or so - 50% of tasks can complete without intervention, given a certain set of tasks. All the gas town scaffolding is trying to increase the number of 9s, and the size of the task that can be given.

My take - Gas town (as an architecture) certainly has more nines in it than a single agent; the rest is just a lot of fun experimentation.
I gave up on publishing my CLI tool to a PPA
by saberd | 2026-01-19 13:27:02+00:00
I built a small CLI tool and thought it'd be nice to let Ubuntu users install it via apt. Seemed straightforward enough.

Turns out Launchpad builds run in a network-isolated environment, so you can't fetch dependencies at build time. The toolchain versions available vary by Ubuntu release, and each version needs its own build configuration. The debian packaging format has a steep learning curve, and debugging failed builds means digging through walls of logs for cryptic errors.

After a few hours of fixing one build error only to hit the next, I realized I was spending more time on packaging than I spent writing the actual tool.

What surprises me is that there doesn't seem to be a modern alternative. Homebrew solved this for macOS years ago with simple tap repositories. Flathub and Snapcraft exist but target GUI apps and come with their own baggage. For a simple CLI binary, there's no equivalent of "push to repo, users run one command to install." PPAs are the closest thing Ubuntu has, and they feel stuck in 2010.

Is anyone working on making this easier, or is this just how it is?
by latexr | 2026-01-19 13:27:18+00:00
Exact messaging is:

> We have concluded the hard way that a bug bounty gives people too strong
incentives to find and make up "problems" in bad faith that cause overload and
abuse.

Anyone who follows Daniel Stenberg on social media, or his talks, or his blog, or cURL’s HackerOne, know the struggle AI slop reports have been on the cURL project, and how they’ve tried to work with HackerOne to reduce those and have been talking for months about terminating it for that very reason.
by slfnflctd | 2026-01-19 13:27:18+00:00
For me, Children of Ruin had more of a horror focus to it and left me with much more icky feelings than the brilliant positivity I felt at the end of the first book. It was still well done, though.

I agree that Children of Memory is not very good, mostly because it repeats itself so much. That could've been handled differently while still advancing the plot. I LOVE the overall concept, and the author's skills describing Gothi and Gethli's unique kind of intelligence was great, so I was okay with it overall... but too much of it was just a slog. First book is by far the best in my opinion as well.