MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dpark | 2026-01-11 16:28:11+00:00
I suspect that we are going to have a wave of gurus who show up soon to teach us how to code with LLMs. There’s so much doom and gloom in these sorts of threads about the death of quality code that someone is going to make money telling people how to avoid that problem.

The scenario you describe is a legitimate concern if you’re checking in AI generated code with minimal oversight. In fact I’d say it’s inevitable if you don’t maintain strict quality control. But that’s always the case, which is why code review is a thing. Likewise you can use LLMs without just checking in garbage.

The way I’ve used LLMs for coding so far is to give instructions and then iterate on the result (manually or with further instructions) until it meets my quality standards. It’s definitely slower than just checking in the first working thing the LLM churns out, but it’s sill been faster than doing it myself, I understand it exactly as well because I have to in order to give instructions (design) and iterate.

My favorite definition of “legacy code” is “code that is not tested” because no matter who writes code, it turns into a minefield quickly if it doesn’t have tests.
by lunaticlabs | 2026-01-11 16:28:19+00:00
As a non-German living in Germany, the German insistence on you buying your kitchen in a rental is really really stupid, and serves no purpose. Besides the schemes listed here, where the landlord tries to sell you the previous kitchen at full price, the old renter will do it too. If they're having you take over their contract, they have some choice in who the renter is, and will often condition their acceptance of your rental offer on taking their kitchen at full price or more. If you don't want it, someone else desperate will take it. There's also a robust marketplace of second hand kitchen appliances on FB marketplace, where the tenants tried to do the same thing or just generally got stuck with taking their kitchen, and now are trying to unload appliances that don't fit the new place. In Germany, its not just fridges. It's also the stove/oven combo sometimes, the dishwasher, and the lights and lightbulbs. It's a horrible inefficient system that just makes renting a nightmare, and keeps everyone in place because of the enormous hassle of moving (the standard 90 day notice period doesn't help either. Trying to line up a new lease and old one ending without significant overlap is also next to impossible. The German rental market is broken).
by akomtu | 2026-01-11 16:29:03+00:00
This is obviously a collision between our human culture and the machine culture, and on the surface its intent is evil, as many have guessed already. But what it also does is it separates the two sides cleanly, as they want to pursue different and wildly incompatible futures. Some want to herd sheep, others want to unite with tech, and the two can't live under one sky. The AI wedge is a necessity in this sense.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-01-11 16:29:19+00:00
The first single-board computer I had ever heard of. And I saw it in a book on making your own robot (1970's, TAB books, I think). No way I could afford a $400 computer with my measly allowance. Oh well—I've since been able to build a couple replicas.

The author of the robot book [1] had an unusual last name. When I came across the same last name during my time at Apple, a co-worker, I emailed him and he said that it was in fact his brother that had written the book. Small world, I guess.

[1] https://archive.org/details/howtobuildcomput0000loof
by zahlman | 2026-01-11 16:29:52+00:00
> I work out code in the abstract away from the keyboard before typing it out, and it's not the typing part that is the bottleneck.

Funny thing. I tend to agree, but I think it wouldn't look that way to an outside observer. When I'm typing in code, it's typically at a pretty low fraction of my general typing speed — because I'm constantly micro-interrupting myself to doubt the away-from-keyboard work, and refine it in context (when I was "working in the abstract", I didn't exactly envision all the variable names, for example).
by haasiy | 2026-01-11 16:29:59+00:00
I have to stand my ground here. Reducing a complex functionality into 15KB is not just about 'generating code'—it's about an architecture that AI cannot conceive on its own.

My role was to architect the bridge between UI/UX design and the underlying video data processing. Handling frame extraction via Canvas, managing memory, and ensuring a seamless seek experience without any backend support requires a deep understanding of how these layers interact.

Simply connecting a backend to a UI might be common, but eliminating the backend entirely while maintaining the utility is a high-level engineering choice. AI was my hammer, but I was the one who designed the bridge. To say this is worth no more than its token count ignores the most difficult part: the intent and the structural simplification that makes it usable for others in a single line of code.
by dangus | 2026-01-11 16:30:25+00:00
I know it’s not the same application but Quicken Simplifi definitely connects to investment accounts.

Hundreds of hours makes me wonder what distribution you chose…I think if you choose something that’s more designed to work out of the box as a ready to go solution you might have a better experience. For example, since I like occasionally playing games, I chose Bazzite which comes with all the gaming stuff installed already and is an immutable OS that “just works.”

And for sure, I think trying to shoehorn complicated non-Linux applications into your Linux workflow might waste your time. I tried this with Autodesk Fusion and I almost got it to work. But it didn’t work. So I just use that on Windows, but it’s also nice to not be bothering with Windows for the majority of what I do.

The way I do it is that my laptop is Linux and my desktop is on Windows and I can just RDP into it over WireGuard to use Windows apps. So I guess this is cheating: ideally my desktop also leaves Windows but I haven’t made that leap.
by k1t | 2026-01-11 16:31:17+00:00
March 10 (Reuters) - Nvidia (NVDA.O), whose chips power artificial intelligence, has been sued by three authors who said it used their copyrighted books without permission to train its Nemo AI platform.

Brian Keene, Abdi Nazemian and Stewart O'Nan said their works were part of a dataset of about 196,640 books that helped train NeMo to simulate ordinary written language, before being taken down in October "due to reported copyright infringement."

They are seeking unspecified damages for people in the United States whose copyrighted works helped train NeMo's so-called large language models in the last three years.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-is-sued-by-authors...
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-11 16:31:29+00:00
<p> indicates a new paragraph. <li> indicates a new list item. Unless otherwise specified, the existing paragraph/list item continues. There's nothing magic about any of this, it's part of the HTML spec.

Laziness doesn't play a role. This isn't XML where you need to repeat yourself over and over again or abusing a bug in the rendering logic; it's following the definitions markdown language you're writing content in.

If you're not too familiar with the HTML language then it's always a safe bet to close your tags, of course.
by ordu | 2026-01-11 16:31:31+00:00
> The Linux installations started to degrade — subtle at first, then undeniable. Random slowdowns. Browser links that wouldn't register for 10 or 15 seconds.

Very interesting. It is something I've never hit. Or, rather, I know the symptoms, but in my case they are caused not by the age of the installation, but by the memory use and swapping. When I compile something big, it can eat a lot of memory, and even 32Gb or RAM is not enough sometimes, there are lags and sometimes very painful.

It is really interesting because the behavior was persistent for all Linux distributions you tried, so probably there was some program that ate all the memory. Pity you didn't try running top and watching CPU and memory usage. Now I'll think of possible causes to the end of my days without any hope to find a real cause.
by keybits | 2026-01-11 16:31:39+00:00
I enjoyed about your blog post, but I was curious about the claim in point 2 above. I asked Claude and it seems the claim is false:

# Fact-Checking This Climate Impact Claim

Let me break down this claim with actual data:

## The Numbers

*US Air Conditioning:*
- US A/C uses approximately *220-240 TWh/year* (2020 EIA data)
- This represents about 6% of total US electricity consumption

*Global Data Centers:*
- Estimated *240-340 TWh/year globally* (IEA 2022 reports)
- Some estimates go to 460 TWh including cryptocurrency

*AI's Share:*
- AI represents roughly *10-15%* of data center energy (IEA estimates this is growing rapidly)

## Verdict: *The claim is FALSE*

The math doesn't support a 4:1 ratio. US A/C and global data centers use *roughly comparable* amounts of energy—somewhere between 1:1 and 1:1.5, not 4:1.

The "40 times AI" conclusion would only work if the 4x premise were true.

## Important Caveats

1. *Measurement uncertainty*: Data center energy use is notoriously difficult to measure accurately
2. *Rapid growth*: AI energy use is growing much faster than A/C
3. *Geographic variation*: This compares one country's A/C to global data centers (apples to oranges)

## Reliable Sources
- US EIA (Energy Information Administration) for A/C data
- IEA (International Energy Agency) for data center estimates
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory studies

The quote significantly overstates the disparity, though both are indeed major energy consumers.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-01-11 16:31:47+00:00
It works so far. That means nothing. Different memory areas, different patterns of bus access, hardware usage and CPU activity. And don't forget different hardware drivers, for that matter.

However much Windows 11 sucks, BsoDs are vanishingly unlikely to be caused by Windows itself. They haven't managed to degrade it to that extent. At least not yet.
by carlosjobim | 2026-01-11 16:32:05+00:00
How does your comment have any relevance? The commenter with back pain took a commendable, scientific approach. You are talking like everybody in the world is an idiot, and you alone have any intelligence.

If this is how you experience everyday life, then I suggest you seek out challenges in real life, where you actually encounter people who are on the same level of intelligence as you or higher, and you will learn some humility instead of dismissing everybody as crazy.
by mrkurt | 2026-01-11 16:32:41+00:00
Believe it or not, that's the only example that's not autogenerated from tests (yet).

https://github.com/superfly/sprites-js/tree/main/examples
https://github.com/superfly/sprites-go/tree/main/examples
https://github.com/superfly/sprites-py/tree/main/examples
https://github.com/superfly/sprites-ex/tree/main/examples
by antirez | 2026-01-11 16:32:48+00:00
Yep, they work especially if you instruct them to add into your program ways for them to "see" what it is happening. And the more embedding models are getting better, the better results we will get too, from their ability to "see". For now Gemini 3 is the best at this, but is not the best at coding as an agent, so we will have to wait a bit.
by john-h-k | 2026-01-11 16:32:55+00:00
> They come from laboratories at the end of a long chain of custody complicated by legal machinations, dealing with contraband having no provenance beyond its date of seizure. That it takes only "months" to wend its way though the byzantine and corrupt legal system, and the bankers hours academic process of laboratory professionals, is actually admirable.

But... this relies on the idea that the purity numbers are based on "time of test" not "date of seizure". This seems like a pretty obvious thing they would have accounted for. Do you have any evidence that the published data for purity levels is delayed by several months?
by nicce | 2026-01-11 16:32:56+00:00
> What I don't understand about this whole "get on board the AI train or get left behind" narrative, what advantage does an early adopter have for AI tools?

Replace that with anything and you will notice that people who are building startups in this area will want to bring the narrative like that as it usually highly increases the value of their companies. When narrative gets big enough, then big companies must follow - or they look like "lagging behind". Whether the current thing brings value or not. It is a fire that keeps feeding itself. In the end, when it gets big enough - we call it as bubble. Bubble that may explode. Or not.

Whether the end user gets actual value or not, is just side effect. But everyone wants to believe that that it brings value - otherwise they were foolish to jump in the train.
by delichon | 2026-01-11 16:33:02+00:00
If you are aware of what you are and find that it needs improvement, a good technique is to fabricate the responses as those of the person you want to become. Fake-it-until-you-become-it is imperfect but an improvement on I'm-an-asshole-so-they-should-adapt-to-it. After all, if you want to change, that's who you are too.
by ryandrake | 2026-01-11 16:33:09+00:00
Yikes. It's 2026. "Don't break the bootloader" should be table stakes for any OS distribution's update process by now. I am not a fan of Windows or macOS, but I don't even recall the last time an operating system software broke my ability to boot--maybe during the Windows 2000 days?

Yet, when you go online to refresh your memory on how to update your Linux installation, too many of the guides still say STEP 1: Back everything up because you may not be able to boot after you do this!
by pentagrama | 2026-01-11 16:33:16+00:00
I looked into this a bit and I am also skeptical about the leak narrative.

I just checked, and Instagram’s password reset flow allows requesting a reset using an email address, a phone number, or even the username [1]. The username is public information, so triggering password reset emails is relatively easy. At scale you would need IP rotation and some basic automation, but it is not particularly hard to generate a large volume of reset emails and create confusion.

From an attacker’s perspective, this does not grant access to accounts or sensitive data. It mainly causes users to receive unexpected reset emails and possibly panic or change their passwords. That aligns more with nuisance or malice than with a meaningful breach.

I do not have definitive proof, but based on this behavior it seems plausible that the reported wave of reset emails could be explained without any large scale data leak.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/accounts/password/reset/ (screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/4x5HPLx)
by nrp | 2026-01-11 16:33:23+00:00
That is incorrect. All of our laptops have modular, upgradable memory. Our Framework Desktop is a mini PC that does not because AMD’s Ryzen AI Max platform doesn’t support it. Regardless, we maximized modularity and reuseability on that product too by following PC standards. It uses a MiniITX form factor, standard 120mm fan, and FlexATX power supply.
by voxleone | 2026-01-11 16:33:26+00:00
It’s worth acknowledging the real challenges raised in this thread: desktop Linux still has rough edges for some use cases, hardware support isn’t always perfect, and niche professional software may lack native support or require workarounds. But these obstacles are not intrinsic technical limitations so much as ecosystem and investment gaps, areas where community projects, standards efforts, and wider adoption could drive improvement without sacrificing freedom.

Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather: Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?
by kbolino | 2026-01-11 16:34:14+00:00
This interpretation of the p element implies that it contains a paragraph. But HTML is first and foremost a document format, and one could just as logically conclude that the p element simply starts a new paragraph. Under the latter interpretation, </p> would never exist any more than </hr> or </img>.

In practice, modern HTML splits the difference with rigorous and well defined but not necessarily intuitive semantics.
by knollimar | 2026-01-11 16:34:28+00:00
Probably the "should I force X on my team" instead of managing them like professionals with insight (or even just treating them like adults).

Managers deciding minutiae like this is the type of micromanagement you make blog posts about, imo.

You would have likely received less combative feedback without your first sentence. I would have framed it as "recommend to team"
by sovietmudkipz | 2026-01-11 16:34:34+00:00
I’m so close to the switch myself for silly reasons. I don’t like windows due to their creepy business practices and negative design patterns in their OS so I’m very bias against it. Forcing copilot is just the latest in their creepy practices…

For more details on why I came close to switching: I use my win desktop as a host for ai services such as Comfy UI for stable diffusion generation since it is a beefy platform; for example, I generate reference stuff for Krita (digital painting software) illustrations on my drawing tablet. I remember the process to configure windows as being strange, GUI bound (NOT windows strong suit), and just annoying due to my aforementioned bias. Valve has done great work with running games on linux which is the only reason I keep that OS and I’d rather set up services on linux.

This comment serves as a reminder to myself that I should just go ahead grab my windows license keys for archival purposes and flash a better OS on that system.
by speed_spread | 2026-01-11 16:35:12+00:00
General administration is similar to Arch or any other regular distro. Package updates necessarily take longer because of recompiling but that's just CPU time. There are precompiled versions of big popular binaries (open office, Firefox, etc) that allow you to save a lot of time if you want.

Where you lose time is in trying to optimize your system and packages using the multiple switches that Gentoo provides. If you're the OCD twiddler type, Gentoo can be both extremely satisfying and major time sink.
by pentagrama | 2026-01-11 16:35:48+00:00
I just checked, and Instagram’s password reset flow allows requesting a reset using an email address, a phone number, or even the username [1]. The username is public information, so triggering password reset emails is relatively easy.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/accounts/password/reset/ (screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/4x5HPLx)
by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-11 16:36:14+00:00
This article is not about whether programming is fun, elegant, creative, or personally fulfilling.

It is about business value.

Programming exists, at scale, because it produces economic value. That value translates into revenue, leverage, competitive advantage, and ultimately money. For decades, a large portion of that value could only be produced by human labor. Now, increasingly, it cannot be assumed that this will remain true.

Because programming is a direct generator of business value, it has also become the backbone of many people’s livelihoods. Mortgages, families, social status, and long term security are tied to it. When a skill reliably converts into income, it stops being just a skill. It becomes a profession. And professions tend to become identities.

People do not merely say “I write code.” They say “I am a software engineer,” in the same way someone says “I am a pilot” or “I am a police officer.” The identity is not accidental. Programming is culturally associated with intelligence, problem solving, and exclusivity. It has historically rewarded those who mastered it with both money and prestige. That combination makes identity attachment not just likely but inevitable.

Once identity is involved, objectivity collapses.

The core of the anti AI movement is not technical skepticism. It is not concern about correctness, safety, or limitations. Those arguments are surface rationalizations. The real driver is identity threat.

LLMs are not merely automating tasks. They are encroaching on the very thing many people have used to define their worth. A machine that can write code, reason about systems, and generate solutions challenges the implicit belief that “this thing makes me special, irreplaceable, and valuable.” That is an existential threat, not a technical one.

When identity is threatened, people do not reason. They defend. They minimize. They selectively focus on flaws. They move goalposts. They cling to outdated benchmarks and demand perfection where none was previously required. This is not unique to programmers. It is a universal human response to displacement.

The loudest opponents of AI are not the weakest programmers. They are often the ones most deeply invested in the idea of being a programmer. The ones whose self concept, status, and narrative of personal merit are tightly coupled to the belief that what they do cannot be replicated by a machine.

That is why the discourse feels so dishonest. It is not actually about whether LLMs are good at programming today. It is about resisting a trend line that points toward a future where the economic value of programming is increasingly detached from human identity.

This is not a moral failing. It is a psychological one. But pretending it is something else only delays adaptation.

AI is not attacking programming. It is attacking the assumption that a lucrative skill entitles its holder to permanence. The resistance is not to the technology itself, but to the loss of a story people tell themselves about who they are and why they matter.

That is the real conflict. HN is littered with people facing this conflict.
by dpark | 2026-01-11 16:36:15+00:00
The solution for low performers is very close oversight. If you imagine an LLM as a very junior engineer who needs an inordinate amount of hand holding (but who can also read and write about 1000x faster than you and who gets paid approximately nothing), you can get a lot of useful work out of it.

A lot of the criticisms of AI coding seem to come from people who think that the only way to use AI is to treat it as a peer. “Code this up and commit to main” is probably a workable model for throwaway projects. It’s not workable for long term projects, at least not currently.
by dathinab | 2026-01-11 16:36:31+00:00
> old style "C with classes" C++ as being fairly small and elegant

it (C++) never really was that

but it was possible to use it "as if it where that" (kinda, e.g. there is code which is valid in C but UB in C++)

I mean there where also times where books which told you that in C everything "is just bits in memory" where popular/believed/beloved, even through that never really was true outside of some very specific cases (all of CPU without caches, only in order execution, single core, a mostly non-optimizing compiler, and other requirements). It was just that the chance to run into issues was much less likely if you go ~20+ years back into the past so you could kinda use it like that (at some risk, especially wrt. forward compatibility).

Today you find ton of material even about obscure features, complications, hidden food guns, etc. so things do look/feel far more overwhelming IMHO.

That modern C++ is a bit like a different language glued on top of old C++ doesn't exactly help either.