MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alexjplant | 2026-01-07 03:28:52+00:00
> Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture which says that any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken for a sincere expression of those views.

The things you mentioned are important but have been on their way out for years now regardless of LLMs. Have my ambivalent upvote regardless.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
by daxfohl | 2026-01-07 03:29:01+00:00
This resonates with my experience in codex 5.2, at least directionally. I'm pretty persnickety about code itself, so I'm not to the point where I'll just let it rip. But in the last month or two things have gone from "I'll ask on the web interface and maybe copy some code into the project", to trusting the agent and getting a reasonable starting point about half the time.

> because models like to write code WAY more than they like to delete it

Yeah, this is the big one. I haven't figured it out either. New or changing requirements are almost always implemented a flurry of if/else branches all over the place, rather than taking the time for a step back and a reimagining of a cohesive integration of old and new. I've had occasional luck asking for this explicitly, but far more frequently they'll respond with recommendations that are far more mechanical, e.g. "you could extract a function for these two lines of code that you repeat twice", not architectural, in nature. (I still find pasting a bunch of files into the chat interface and iterating on refinements conversationally to be faster and produce better results).

That said, I'm convinced now that it'll get there sooner or later. At that point, I really don't know what purpose SWEs will serve. For a while we might serve as go-betweens between the coding agent and PMs, but LLMs are already way better at translating from tech jargon to human, so I can't imagine it would be long before product starts bypassing us and talking directly to the agents, who (err, which) can respond with various design alternatives, pros and cons of each, identify all the dependencies, possible compatibility concerns, alignment with future direction, migration time, compute cost, user education and adoption tracking, etc, all in real time in fluent PM-ese. IDK what value I add to that equation.

For the last year or so I figured we'd probably hit a wall before AI got to that point, but over the last month or so, I'm convinced it's only a matter of time.
by Ericson2314 | 2026-01-07 03:29:53+00:00
We don't know what Opus 5.0 will be able to refactor.

If argument is "humans and Opus 4.5 cannot maintain this, but if requirements change we can vibe-code a new one from scratch", that's a coherent thesis, but people need to be explicit about this.

(Instead this feels like the mott that is retreated to, and the bailey is essentially "who cares, we'll figure out what to do with our fresh slop later".)

Ironically, I've been Claude to be really good at refactors, but these are refactors I choose very explicitly. (Such as I start the thing manually, then let it finish.) (For an example of it, see me force-pushing to https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/14863 implementing my own code review.)

But I suspect this is not what people want. To actually fire devs and not rely on from-scratch vibe-coding, we need to figure out which refactors to attempt in order to implement a given feature well.

That's a very creative open-ended question that I haven't even tried to let the LLMs take a crack at it, because why I would I? I'm plenty fast being the "ideas guy". If the LLM had better ideas than me, how would I even know? I'm either very arrogant or very good because I cannot recall regretting one of my refactors, at least not one I didn't back out of immediately.
by vivzkestrel | 2026-01-07 03:30:20+00:00
"2. Make sure your computer is ON and UNLOCKED
When disconnecting/reconnecting power, make sure you unlock the computer. I've ran into this issue one too many times."

- this is the biggest problem that needs to be solved

- i dont want to keep my computer running 24x7 wasting power for stuff like this

- why not make a robotic arm that you keep at the computer table which can use open cv to plug the computer on when required?
by efskap | 2026-01-07 03:30:46+00:00
Yeah thin clients [0] make a lot of sense with this kind of workflow. If you only really need text, living in the terminal and browser, it might make sense to use eink for eye comfiness and outdoor readability, something like this hack: https://maxogden.com/kindleberry-wireless. Or one of those eink android tablets.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_client
by BobbyJo | 2026-01-07 03:31:04+00:00
Up until now, no business has been built on tools and technology that no one understands. I expect that will continue.

Given that, I expect that, even if AI is writing all of the code, we will still need people around who understand it.

If AI can create and operate your entire business, your moat is nil. So, you not hiring software engineers does not matter, because you do not have a business.
by Blissfulbody39 | 2026-01-07 03:32:20+00:00
I’m not the author of this paper, but I recently came across this preprint and I’m trying to understand how people here would evaluate it.

It argues that the long-standing split between relativity and quantum mechanics comes from incompatible models of the observer:
relativity treats the observer as passive, while quantum theory assigns an active role in measurement.

The paper proposes a unifying framework by starting from an underlying observer/observational structure (rather than from spacetime or particles).

The authors also report experimental correlations involving EEG and quantum processors, but I’m mainly interested in the theoretical claim:

Does framing both relativity and quantum mechanics as different phases of a single observer model make sense from a physics or information-theoretic perspective?

What would you see as the strongest objections, and what would need to be clarified for this approach to be taken seriously?
by leshokunin | 2026-01-07 03:33:07+00:00
It’s been the right’s spin for a few years. Eg: it was peaceful, until an ex fbi guy told them to go in the capitol. The idea being the Biden fbi did this. While Trump was in office.

Also somehow antifa did this. And the violence was made up and exaggerated.

I’m just echoing talking points I’ve heard from friends who listen to the right wing channels.

People are unaware of this degree of spin.
by rl3 | 2026-01-07 03:33:14+00:00
>Why are they behaving like this since last year (trying very hard to burn themselves to the ground)

Since last year? Burning themselves into the ground has been their M.O. for the last decade and a half, at least.

I'd argue enshitification started in earnest with Windows 8.

AI just enables them to speed up the process dramatically.
by postalcoder | 2026-01-07 03:35:01+00:00
> Tmux is helpful, too.

Yes. tmux is essential, IMO. It's great to be able to monitor a session from desktop, or to pick up an existing conversation i'm having on the computer on my phone. In my shell, I have gemini flash wrapper that I use to manage my sessions so I can quickly connect to an existing one, or create a new one with natural language.

> He doesn't seem to be credited on this page, but I believe Pieter Levels (@levelsio) actually popularized this scheme. The author documents a nearly identical scheme.

I've been doing this (tailscale + termius + tmux + ssh) for at least a year and a half. First with Aider in this exact setup, and now with Claude Code and Codex.
by rectang | 2026-01-07 03:35:06+00:00
Time will tell. I’d bet on Spolsky, because of Hyrum’s Law.

https://www.hyrumslaw.com/

> With a sufficient number of users of an API,
it does not matter what you promise in the contract:
all observable behaviors of your system
will be depended on by somebody.

An LLM rewriting a codebase from scratch is only as good as the spec. If “all observable behaviors” are fair game, the LLM is not going to know which of those behaviors are important.

Furthermore, Spolsky talks about how to do incremental rewrites of legacy code in his post. I’ve done many of these and I expect LLMs will make the next one much easier.
by Manuel_D | 2026-01-07 03:35:23+00:00
The difference between a supersonic jet and and a subsonic jet is about 2x. Between NY and London that's a 3.5 hour flight vs a 7 hour flight (plus the overhead of security, traveling to and from the airport, boarding, taxiing, etc. which brings down the proportional cost).

By comparison, a boat would take 7-8 days. The disparity in time saved between supersonic and subsonic flight is pretty trivial in comparison to the time saved between a boat and a subsonic plane.
by bigyabai | 2026-01-07 03:35:24+00:00
It's easy to get caught up in the high-fantasy sci-fi politicking, here. For the past 50 years, there have been private American space ventures promising everything from round-trip tourism to asteroid mining, and it just hasn't happened. There's no shortage of imaginative ways to leverage space, but the realistically rewarding applications are quite limited.

Orbital inference isn't intended to break even, or present a significant risk. It has every hallmark of a marketing stunt.
by leshokunin | 2026-01-07 03:36:26+00:00
It’s been the right’s spin for a few years. Eg: it was peaceful, until an ex fbi guy told them to go in the capitol. The idea being the Biden fbi did this. While Trump was in office.

Also somehow antifa did this. And the violence was made up and exaggerated.

I’m just echoing talking points I’ve heard from friends who listen to the right wing channels.

People are unaware of this degree of spin.
by majormajor | 2026-01-07 03:37:32+00:00
> Doctors don’t really care to look at these kinds of issues. It took years of suffering and autoimmune issues (particularly muscle spasms and joint pain) alongside gut problems before I demanded a gastroenterologist test me for H pylori and SIBO: I was positive for both.

I went through a similar post-antibiotics gut nightmare. There are good doctors and there are bad doctors and like everything, there are fewer good ones than bad+average ones.

Seems like you got testing and treatment eventually, I'm sorry it didn't work better; I'm replying less for you and more for anyone who encounters similar. Shop around for your docs!

I got tested very quickly for both H Pylori and SIBO in 2019 on doctor suggestions, I'd never heard of either. Sounds like this was probably around the same time as you went through this based no the antibiotic course that messed up your gut being in 2017).

I went to three doctors in six months, the one that did the testing was the second one. The one who was confident in their knowledge but didn't do anything, including the testing -> immediate no-return-visit from me. The one who said "we don't really know how this works" but also didn't do anything -> no return visit, but appreciate the candor. The one I went back to is the one who said "we don't really know how this works, but let's test for these other things we've learned more about recently, and let's also try some experimental/off-label things." I was actually negative for both of those things, so there was even more random stuff beyond that, but the only one the doctor I liked was really resistant to was a poop transplant, though personally... seems like the only known way to repopulate some of the shit, pun intended.
by presentation | 2026-01-07 03:39:31+00:00
Hard disagree, without any ads the only way to find out about new things is via word of mouth, which would make many valuable products never get off the ground. Ads done badly are poison but ads done well educate people about new things they can benefit from and drive the entire economy. I have had many experiences where I’ve seen an ad that I genuinely think is interesting and was enlightening to find.
by nailer | 2026-01-07 03:39:34+00:00
Fascinating. As an adult I don’t speak about politics, health or sex with strangers. My old flatmate was a member of the CCP, NYU students near my old apartment are openly communist and when I worked in London an Emily ACAB colleague would occasionally meet an Polish or Czech person with direct experience of communism and loudly put them in their place. What does that have to do with theft murder and starvation being wrong though?
by eli | 2026-01-07 03:39:36+00:00
An upgrade process involves heavy CPU use, disk read/writes, and at least a few power cycles in short time period. Depending what OP was doing on it otherwise, it could've been the highest temperature the device had ever seen. It's not so crazy.

My guess would've been SSD failure, which would make sense to seem to appear after lots of writes. In the olden days I used to cross my fingers when rebooting spinning disk servers with very long uptimes because it was known there was a chance they wouldn't come back up.
by conductr | 2026-01-07 03:39:46+00:00
Started much earlier than 9/11. Probably the drug “war” that had things going towards the police state thing. Police departments buying military grade weapons and equipment to arm their swat teams. Then compounded by the fact US citizens are extremely armed themselves and use automatic rifles in their crime. So the police were outgunned. I think the North Hollywood shootout was pivotal in that regard, in the mid-late 90s.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-07 03:40:06+00:00
It's a shame this is downvoted. It doesn't make it right, but it is true.

Until the regulation actually gets enforced so that everyone is on a level playing field and does not do such things, you will be at a disadvantage if you're the only one to comply, so the winning strategy is to not comply and engage in such practices just like your competitors do.
by buzer | 2026-01-07 03:40:09+00:00
This is what European Commission has determined to be acceptable for them. One very important distinction here is, as far as I understand, that EC is not bound by ePrivacy Directive as directives bound member states and require them to include them on their national law.

The text on that website does state that some DPAs have found some first-party analytics acceptable, but that's not something that is confirmed by CJEU. And ePD does not have single-stop shop so you need to follow every DPAs directions if you are offering services to that DPA's country.
by quotemstr | 2026-01-07 03:40:22+00:00
It's hilarious that browsers will use loosy goosy parsing on the HTML of a web page but strictly interpret a JPEG to which its img tag refers.

Why? Why do car rentals typically not require cash up front, but hotel rentals universally do? The economics are similar. Sometimes it's simple path dependency. Something is a certain way because it's always been that way and it'd be too expensive to change it now.

At least browsers all use the same loosy goosy HTML parsing now. It was hell on earth when each browser had its own error recovery strategy. In a sense, there is no longer any such thing as an invalid HTML document: every code point sequence has a canonical interpretation now.
by nhumrich | 2026-01-07 03:40:34+00:00
Holy survivor bias batman!
A bakery that makes sandwiches is good because well... It's still around and making sandwiches.
That's like saying "companies that become profitable are less likely to fail". Bakeries only start to make sandwiches _after_ succeeding at being a good bakery.
On average a sandwich shop is bad for the same reason most startups fail: there are a lot of them.
by Lmyuai | 2026-01-07 03:41:38+00:00
I built Shex because I kept forgetting command syntax. Need to find files by content? Extract an archive? Check disk usage? I know what I want, but googling the exact flags gets old.
What it does:

shex find all python files larger than 1MB
shex show disk usage sorted by size
shex compress the logs folder to tar.gz
shex what processes are using port 3000

It sends your natural language request to an LLM, which generates and executes the appropriate shell command. The output streams in real-time.
Key design decisions:
Auto-retry on failure - If a command fails, Shex automatically tries alternative approaches (up to 3 retries by default). The LLM sees the error and adapts.
Safety first - Dangerous commands (rm -rf, format, etc.) require explicit confirmation. The LLM flags these automatically.
Multi-provider support - Works with DeepSeek, OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, Groq, Qwen, and any OpenAI-compatible API. Bring your own key.
PTY support on Unix - Proper pseudo-terminal handling means progress bars and interactive prompts work correctly.
Install:

pip install shex

First run walks you through LLM configuration.
Technical notes:
1. Uses OpenAI function calling / tool use pattern
2. Streams both LLM thinking and command output
3. Cross-platform (Windows, macOS, Linux)
4. ~400 lines of core code

Happy to answer questions. Source: https://github.com/YUHAI0/shex
by Gigachad | 2026-01-07 03:42:22+00:00
I’ve been a furry for forever now. Way back when I was a teenager I used to hang out in a lot of tech spaces online and there just happened to be lots of furries in them. I just ended up becoming one too. Then shortly after I realised I was gay and furry spaces also happened to be an incredible place to meet other gay people my age with similar interests.
by tomhow | 2026-01-07 03:42:45+00:00
Other community members are flagging many of your posts and emailing us to complain because you're repeatedly breaking the guidelines. Whether or not I recognize a decade-old meme is irrelevant. The guidelines have been in place for most of HN's history and apply equally to everyone.

Low-quality comments and projects are unwanted on HN whether they're generated by LLMs or humans. If your reaction to seeing bad stuff is to post more bad stuff, you're just making the problem worse. Anyone who is earnest about wanting to reduce low-quality content on HN can do so by flagging bad posts and emailing us (hn@ycombinator.com) so we can investigate further. Several users do that routinely.

HN is only a place where people want to participate because others make an effort to raise the standards rather than dragging them down. Please do your part to make HN better not worse.
by testing22321 | 2026-01-07 03:43:46+00:00
And, ah, during a time of gas shortages, exactly which cars have gas in them just sitting around not being used, and who is going to let you do that to their car?

I can tell you’ve never actually lived this reality, you’re just making stuff up.

I had gas pumps not work due to lack of electricity (and lack of gas in the tanks) on half a dozens occasions in different countries.
by geerlingguy | 2026-01-07 03:44:33+00:00
From the article:

> I opened the system and reseated everything, including the SSD. No change. I even tested the SSD in another machine to rule it out, and it’s fine too.

But that doesn't mean it's not bad RAM, a bad SSD controller, who knows what... there are only a few of these boxes in the wild regardless, so it's unlikely it can be debugged :(
by tom_ | 2026-01-07 03:44:34+00:00
Not coding on a laptop is actually good advice?! My argument would be that you shouldn't be doing any work without plugging your laptop into a full size keyboard and mouse at least. And, ideally, at least one external display of some form (I recommend 2 or 3, but it depends on exact setup/total resolution/etc.). But it's your body, not mine.

Regarding terminals, how often does this requirement occur in practice? Assuming it does, you can probably use your laptop for it, in which case, see above.
by arjvik | 2026-01-07 03:45:10+00:00
I don’t understand why you want to enforce only using the public key instead of private key - while I believe you that as of now browsers do not disclose the public key anywhere, I’d also suspect that this is far more likely to be violated and accidentally disclosed by a bug than the private key, which theoretically cannot ever leave the TPM.

Would KDF(deterministic_sign(“well-known message”)) not also provide valid entropy?

Is it just impossible to force a nonce for a deterministic signature?
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-01-07 03:45:20+00:00
> Simply saying "oh I'm only tracking local cookies" might not even be enough in GDPR because the act of writing any cookie is actually covered under the law

You're mixing GDPR up with the ePrivacy Directive (henceforth "ePrivacy", not to be confused with the proposed ePrivacy Regulation). GDPR Recital 30 describes how cookies should be understood in relation to the GDPR (to the extent that GDPR Article 4(1) didn't already make it clear), and GDPR Recital 15 affirms that "the act of writing any cookie" doesn't have any special treatment under GDPR. Whereas ePrivacy Article 5 ¶3 discusses "the storing of information, or the gaining of access to information already stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user", and is the real source of nearly all "cookie consent" obligations in the EU. I hope you don't work on the legal side of the consent product!

Less pithily: I've noticed a lot of "consent" providers getting this basic stuff wrong, both in their marketing copy and in their actual products. I (along with most internet users) have a vested interest in any improvements in this area. I'm available to discuss this further, if that would be helpful – keeping in mind that while I know a lot more about this than many working professionals apparently do, I'm still very much an amateur with no formal legal training.

ePrivacy Directive as amended in 2009: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

GDPR as amended in 2016 (without recitals): https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
by binary132 | 2026-01-07 03:45:35+00:00
$150k is about 2-3 manufacturing floor salaries for one year. I am quite certain many companies would prefer to buy a compliant robot slave that will never ask for a raise, take sick leave, or get demoralized than to pay 2-3 fulltime employees the value of their labor, only to have them leave for a better job 6 months later and have to train new ones all over again.
by ec109685 | 2026-01-07 03:46:10+00:00
I use Prompt, Ever Terminal, Whisper, EC2 and Claude Code.

I can build anything with it. Having Claude on top of a terraform repo lets me fully control my infra. Claude is so good at AWS and terraform, and it even found a $3k monthly accidental spend I had running (also sent a refund request to hopefully get some credit back).

Also have a Claude driven CI workflow in GitHub to help keep everything on track.

Having full access to the Claude Code TUI is so much better than the web or iOS interface, plus everything runs on your own setup.

And agree it has replaced doom scrolling / useless new reading.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-07 03:46:38+00:00
> proper consent banner

It is also quite complex to integrate a third-party consent management platform in a compliant way; the tool itself is a script, but it somehow needs to preempt loading of any other scripts until the right consent is given (there's also an argument whether the CMP being third-party is itself a breach of "data minimization" when such functionality can trivially be done in-house, or at least self-hosting the script).

The majority of sites fail at this, which already breaches the GDPR since merely loading a third-party script discloses your IP address and browser fingerprint to them.

It's not a big deal in their case because their CMP is itself configured to be non-compliant, but if you want to be compliant with a third-party CMP it's likely the effort to integrate it properly would be just as much as just doing it in-house.
by Graziano_M | 2026-01-07 03:47:41+00:00
I had a friend's dad's computer's HDD fail while I was installing Linux on it to show him it. That was terrifying. I still remember the error, and I just left with it (and Windows) unable to boot. Later my friend told me that the drive was toast.

Come to think of it, maybe it was me. I might have trashed the MBR? I remember the error, though, "Non system disk or disk error".