MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-01-26 14:10:50+00:00
> (And the automated test suite will help them confirm that the refactoring worked properly, because naturally you had them construct an automated test suite when they built those original features, right?)

I dunno, maybe I have high standards but I generally find that the test suites generated by LLMs are both over and under determined. Over-determined in the sense that some of the tests are focused on implementation details, and under-determined in the sense that they don't test the conceptual things that a human might.

That being said, I've come across loads of human written tests that are very similar, so I can see where the agents are coming from.

You often mention that this is why you are getting good results from LLMs so it would be great if you could expand on how you do this at some point in the future.
by FeloniousHam | 2026-01-26 14:11:05+00:00
Back when I listened to NPR, I shook my fist at the radio every time Shankar Vidantim came on to explain the latest scientific paper. Whatever was being celebrated, it was surely brand new. It's presentation on Morning Edition gave it the imprimature of "Proofed Science", and I imagined it getting repeated at every office lunch and cocktail party. I never heard a retraction.
by Scubabear68 | 2026-01-26 14:11:26+00:00
> They protect the team from unnecessary stress and pressure, but don’t hide reality from them.

I was going to highlight this as well, but it is also one of the trickiest parts of the equation, because by definition this inevitably involves a lot of politics and social implications.

What I have learned over the years: let the overall direction, and also the overall competitive pressures, filter down through your umbrella. But shield them from the details and your specific efforts here, unless it is relevant.

Maybe even more important, though - recognize inflection points in your company and your group. How you manage during routine times and during stressful times may well be very different. If they're not, then you have a serious problem.
by timcobb | 2026-01-26 14:11:33+00:00
At the earliest, "vibecoding" was only possible with Claude 3.5, released July 2024 ... maaaybe Claude 3, released in March of that year...

It's worth mentioning that even today, Copilot is an underwhelming-to-the-point-obstructing kind of product. Microsoft sent salespeople and instructors to my job, all for naught. Copilot is a great example of how product > everything, and if you don't have a good product... well...
by homebrewer | 2026-01-26 14:11:55+00:00
We've been self-hosting protomaps (aka pmtiles) for several years. The only thing you need server-side is a web server that can serve static files and supports range requests (so anything works; I've tried caddy and nginx). The map is one large file, it's easy to share it between however many servers you need.

https://docs.protomaps.com/guide/getting-started

Downsides? Nothing major that I can think of. You have to add another client-side dependency (support for their custom protocol); the library is pretty small and easy to audit.

Editing map styles is slightly more difficult because generic maplibre styles won't work with it: they add a bit of custom sauce on top. IIRC this editor worked fine, you can import one of protomaps styles and base your work off it:

https://maputnik.github.io/editor

That's probably it.
by koakuma-chan | 2026-01-26 14:12:03+00:00
I'm not saying that you shouldn't use AI.

There was a submission to a blog post discussing applications of AI but it got killed for some reason.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750927

I remain convinced that if you use AI to write code then your product will sooner or later turn into a buggy mess. I think this will remain the case until they figure out how to make a proper memory system. Until then, we still have to use our brains as the memory system.

One strategy I've seen that I like is using AI to prototype, but then write actual code yourself. This is what the Ghostty guy does I believe.

I agree that AI can write decent Rust code, but Rust is not a panacea. From what I heard, Cursor has a lot of vibe-coded Rust code, but it didn't save it from being, as I said, a buggy mess.
by echelon | 2026-01-26 14:12:19+00:00
The maintainers can now do all the work themselves.

With the time they save using AI, they can get much more work done. So much that having other engineers learn the codebase is probably not worth it anymore.

Large scale software systems can be maintained by one or two folks now.

Edit: I'm not going to get rate limited replying to everyone, so I'll just link another comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46765785
by anarticle | 2026-01-26 14:12:52+00:00
My dad is a retired Marine and I learned several things from the NCO system and Marines in general: good leaders (EM/Sergeant) will generally never ask you something they cannot also do (implies they are your peer, even if they are not), and Marine Corps manuals are able to take anyone who can read and make them operate technical things. Their manuals are written in a very direct stepwise way to get people up to speed in doing whatever task they are assigned which I learned early on is just plain good documentation.

Servant leadership works really well when you have high agency individuals, and can grow high agency individuals. I have definitely been on the other side of that with control freak machiavellian / nearly adversarial leaders as well.
by neko-kai | 2026-01-26 14:13:02+00:00
On the contrary, I hope vibe coding revives Linux desktop into a truly usable platform.

e.g. Vibe coding defeats GNOME developers' main argument for endlessly deleting features and degrading user experience - that features are ostensibly "hard to maintain".

Well, LLMs are rapidly reducing development costs to 0.

The bottleneck for UI development is now testing, and here desktop Linux has advantage - Linux users have been trained like Pavlov's dogs to test and write detailed upstream bug reports, something Windows and macOS users just don't do.
by ValdikSS | 2026-01-26 14:13:44+00:00
`dlopen`'ing system libraries is an "easy" hack to try to maintain compatibility with wide variety of libraries/ABIs. It's barely used (I know only of SDL, Small HTTP Server, and now Godot).

Without dlopen (with regular dynamic linking), it's much harder to compile for older distros, and I doubt you can easily implement glibc/musl cross-compatibility at all in general.

Take a look what Valve does in a Steam Runtime:

- https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/blob/main/docs/pressure-vessel.md
- https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/blob/main/subprojects/libcapsule/doc/Capsules.txt
by ipaddr | 2026-01-26 14:14:18+00:00
For me spending time on my open source projects doesn't make sense anymore.

People (the community and employers) previously were impressed because of the amount of work required. Now that respect is gone as people can't automatically tell on the surface if this is a low effort vibe code or something else.

Community engagement has dropped. Stars aren't being given out as freely. People aren't actively reading your code like they use to.

For projects done before llms you can still link effort and signal but for anything started now.. everyone assumes it's llm created. No one want to read that code and not in the same way you would read other humans. Fewer will download the project.

Many of the reasons why I wrote open source is gone. And knowing the biggest/only engagement will come from llms copying your work giving you no credit.. what's the point?
Show HN: Bird – Turn any website into an isolated desktop app
by nsz32 | 2026-01-26 14:14:31+00:00
I built Bird to get my web apps out of my browser. I have multiple Google accounts, Slack workspaces, and various SaaS tools — managing them in browser tabs was a mess. The "you're signed into another account" error, and I got tired of it.

Bird wraps any website into a standalone desktop app with full session isolation. Each app has its own partition (cookies, localStorage, cache) — they never interfere with each other or with your main browser.

Beyond isolation:

- URL routing rules (control what opens internally, externally, or gets blocked)
- Smart downloads (auto-open by MIME type, executable and dangerous file detection)
- Kiosk mode with custom escape shortcuts
- User-agent spoofing (test mobile layouts, bypass Electron detection)
- Cache management per partition (max age, max size)
- Ad blocking via Ghostery

For SaaS vendors (WIP): package Bird with a locked config to ship your web app as a branded desktop installer — out of the browser, native feel, ready to deploy.

Coming next: per-app themes, preload script injection for deeper SaaS integration.

Linux + Windows supported, macOS coming. Arch users: yay -S bird-apps-bin
by ayewo | 2026-01-26 14:14:46+00:00
> ... and then it was all killed because Apple did not dare to open source it, or put serious efforts on their own into improving the technical base of the flash player (that had aquired lots of technical dept).

IIRC, they couldn't open source Flash due to its use of a number of 3rd party C/C++ libraries that were proprietary.

Adobe's license with these 3rd parties permitted binary-only distribution so it would have meant renegotiating a fresh license (and paying out $$$) for an EOL codebase that had enormous technical debt, as you also acknowledge in your last sentence.
by hayd | 2026-01-26 14:15:16+00:00
I think one of the things that will need to be embraced is carefully curating .md context files to give the prompts better/shared direction to contributors. Things like any new feature or fix should include a test case (in the right place), functions should re-use existing library code wherever possible, function signatures should never change in a backwards-incompatible way, any code changes should pass the linter, etc etc. And ideally ensure the agent writes code that's going to be to the maintainer's "taste".

I haven't worked out how to do this for my own projects.

Once you've set it up it's not too hard to imagine an AI giving an initial PR assessment... to discard the worst AI slop, offer some stylistic feedback, or suggest performance concerns.
by __patchbit__ | 2026-01-26 14:15:23+00:00
Breaking the Von Neumann architecture illusion with data flow architecture, Next Silicon, Efficient Computing, Houston Haines Fidelity Framework F# low energy systems programming are new directions from a fundamental shift away at how control flow is operationalized.

Happy Path Programming #119
FP reaches the masses with Paul Snively
https://youtu.be/M1MRCjzq--w

This developer doesn't use Windows or PC.
by acedTrex | 2026-01-26 14:15:23+00:00
The blog appears to imply that the author only opened the codebase after a significant period of time.

> It’s not until I opened up the full codebase and read its latest state cover to cover that I began to see what we theorized and hoped was only a diminishing artifact of earlier models: slop.

This is true vibe coding, they exclusively interacted with the project through the LLM, and only looked at its proposed diffs in a vacuum.

If they had been monitoring the code in aggregate the entire time they likely would have seen this duplicative property immediately.
by throwawayffffas | 2026-01-26 14:16:16+00:00
Saying you are laying people off because AI, makes the company look like it's innovating and embracing new technology. Saying you are laying people off because costs are up and earnings are struggling reflects bad on the image of the company and the performance of the leadership. Everyone has incentives to lie.

What we would be seeing if the AI uptake was productive would be faster GDP growth, and an uptick in the job market as they would be looking for people to leverage the AI into even more productive gains.
by zimpenfish | 2026-01-26 14:16:24+00:00
> the recent childcare center fraud

"As of December 2025, subsequent investigations by state officials have not found evidence of fraud at the sites Shirley visited."

There is no fraud there which means the only -actual- fraud people can be complaining about re: Somalis in Minnesota must be the Feeding Our Future one.

Unless they're not complaining about that and are just making stuff up, obvs.
by geremiiah | 2026-01-26 14:16:26+00:00
So if I'm understanding correctly, you decompose kernels into their per_sm_workload, then you figure out per_sm_data_dependency and then you can schedule sm_workloads from the next kernel to start running as soon as the data dependency is satisfied, not needing to wait for the other sms from the previous kernel to finish.

In this case are you're strickly fusing pre defined kernels or are you also optimizing them? Is this complimentary to your earlier work on search-based compilers?
by brk | 2026-01-26 14:16:37+00:00
Not an expert, but a more-than-casual-observer as someone who has lived on the water (literally and figuratively).

A core part of the problem is things like the farming in California that uses excessive amounts of water, which is already brought in from very distant regions.

I don't think there is a way to distribute the fresh water supply equitably if you have various regions and industries that insist on being highly inefficient and wasteful. California is certainly not the only example, there are lots of places trying to grow crops in illogical places, water supplies being polluted by industries, etc.
by marginalia_nu | 2026-01-26 14:16:38+00:00
> When OSS is monetized only through direct user engagement, greater adoption of vibe coding lowers entry and sharing, reduces the availability and quality of OSS, and reduces welfare despite higher productivity. Sustaining OSS at its current scale under widespread vibe coding requires major changes in how maintainers are paid.

I can't think of even a single example of OSS being monetized through direct user engagement. The bulk of it just isn't monetized at all, and what is monetized (beyond like a tip jar situation where you get some coffee money every once in a while) is primarily sponsored by enterprise users, support license sales, or through grants, or something like that. A few projects like Krita sell binaries on the steam store.
by techblueberry | 2026-01-26 14:16:51+00:00
Something that's been bugging me about the AI rollout, with everyone talking about like non-deterministic adversarial multi-agent workflows. Like how do you teach normies about this? Especially, how do you teach normies about this without a traditional path to understanding the underlying mental models?

And like particularly - one thing I talk to a lot of engineers about is what I call "merge days". Merge days are when you like take on the mental overhead of actually getting code merged and deployed, because maybe you have to confirm that tests are run, and you have all the right tests, and like. That mental load on like 50k lines of code is just bananas.

Part of the point is, as has been spoken about forever - actual value is not measured in lines of code. While I think there will be some who can really super charge things with these new powers, I'm not sure how we'll actually scale this.

Like, most of the superpowers in my life has come from single-threading and deep thought. I don't think AI fundamentally changes this, I suspect for most people, it makes delivering real value harder.
by jorvi | 2026-01-26 14:17:22+00:00
It really isn't. Chromium (since 67) does USB interface class filtering to prevent access to sensitive devices. Then there is the blacklist you mentioned.

On top of that, straight from Yubico's site:

".. The user must approve access on a per website, per device basis .."

This isn't any more a security hole than people clicking "yes" on UAC prompts that try to install malware.
by Eliza113 | 2026-01-26 14:17:25+00:00
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by pjmlp | 2026-01-26 14:17:35+00:00
Not at all, the WinRT APIs that exist, which is indeed one additional interface (IInspectable), .NET metadata instead of type libraries, application identity, is a minority constrained to WinAppSDK and WinUI 3.0, that barely anyone uses other than Microsoft employees on the Windows team.

If not using WinUI 3.0, or Windows ML with CoPilot+, there is no reason to submit oneself to the pain of using CsWinRT or C++/WinRT bindings with lesser tooling than their UWP counterparts.

The large majority of new APIs, since Vista are based on traditional COM, with the biggest exception being UMDF that in version 2.0 rolled back its COM API from version 1.0, back to a C based one.
by dxdm | 2026-01-26 14:17:45+00:00
> According to whom? It's their personal website, they're allowed to place value on whatever they want.

It's a well-known design principle to not impede the intended function of things by giving them a form that distracts from it. Of course you can deviate from that, especially if you want to make a point of some sort.

However, I presume they publish their writings so they will be read by others. Making this hard will reduce their audience.

If they are making this trade-off willingly, good for them, I suppose. But maybe they're so smitten with the style that they do not realize how hard to read it is.

There's also a point at which the form gets so bad that it starts to disrespect the audience. Again, that can be on purpose, but it might be unintentional.

This being a personal blog, it's not unreasonable to expect that a main purpose of it is communication. I think it's warranted to draw attention to the fact that its design gets in the way of that goal, big time.
by rtp4me | 2026-01-26 14:18:02+00:00
I wonder how many OSS projects are using AI to actively squash bugs so their projects are more rock-solid than before.
Also, seems to me if your project underwent a full AI standardized code-quality check (using 2 or 3 AI models), it would be considered the "standard" from which other projects could use. For example, if you needed a particular piece of code for your own project, the AI tooling could suggest leveraging an existing gold-standard project.
by ValdikSS | 2026-01-26 14:18:34+00:00
AppImage is not what you need. It's just an executable wrapper for the archive. To make the software cross-distro, you need to compile it manually on an old distro with old glibc, make sure all the dependencies are there, and so on.

https://docs.appimage.org/reference/best-practices.html#bina...

There are several automation tools to make AppImages, but they won't magically allow you to compile on the latest Fedora and expect your executable to work on Debian Stable. It's still require quite a lot of manual labor.
by pgwhalen | 2026-01-26 14:18:38+00:00
> Going back to typing all of the code yourself (my interpretation of "writing by hand") because you don't have the agent-managerial skills to tell the coding agents how to clean up the mess they made feels short-sighted to me.

I increasingly feel a sort of "guilt" when going back and forth between agent-coding and writing it myself. When the agent didn't structure the code the way I wanted, or it just needs overall cleanup, my frustration will get the best of me and I will spend too much time writing code manually or refactoring using traditional tools (IntelliJ). It's clear to me that with current tooling some of this type of work is still necessary, but I'm trying to check myself about whether a certain task really requires my manual intervention, or whether the agent could manage it faster.

Knowing how to manage this back and forth reinforces a view I've seen you espouse: we have to practice and really understand agentic coding tools to get good at working with them, and it's a complete error to just complain and wait until they get "good enough" - they're already really good right now if you know how to manage them.
by anticorporate | 2026-01-26 14:19:02+00:00
I think you're missing the enormous value in apps being standardized and opinionated. Standardized means that in addition to documentation, the whole internet is available to help you. Opinionated means as a user of an app in a new domain, you don't have to make a million decisions about how something should work to just get started.

Sure, there will be more personalized apps for those who have a lot of expertise in a domain and gain value from building something that supports their specific workflow. For the vast majority of the population, and the vast majority of use cases, this will not happen. I'm not about to give up the decades of experience I've gained with my tools for something I vibe coded in a weekend.
by stosssik | 2026-01-26 14:19:09+00:00
Totally agree. Vibe coding will generate lots of internal AI apps, but turning them into reliable, secure, governed services still requires real engineering, which is exactly why we’re building https://manifest.build. It lets non-technical teams build Agentic apps fast through an AI powered workflow builder while giving engineering and IT a single platform to add governance, security, data access, and keep everything production-ready at scale.
by Terretta | 2026-01-26 14:19:12+00:00
Can't scroll 2nd page within iPad window. Can't slide window down to reveal more of it. Don't see any rank or vote affordances.

UPDATE: After trying more, found that if using the iPad with a trackpad, then a pointer "mouse over" a page zooms it, for the upper page showing a small vote button lower right of frame, but for lower page, can't see bottom of frame. Which page works to scroll seems random or neither.

OFC, iPad doesn't normally "mouse over", unless using the trackpad keyboard for it.
by bborud | 2026-01-26 14:19:20+00:00
Both Blender and Fusion have pretty steep learning curves, so you will have to dedicate a significant amount of time to get to the point where you can just sit down and go from an idea you have to something that is of use whatever you choose.

But.

The thing is that Blender and Fusion do not even exist in the same universe. If your goal is to make mechanical parts it doesn't help you to learn something that is only good at creating meshes. Just as there is little point to learning Fusion if you want to create 3D characters for, for instance, animation.

Everyone tends to start by making shapes, but if you are making 3d printed mechanical parts you soon realize you have to graduate to learning how to do CAD in general. If you are making mechanical parts you tend to deal with precise geometry and geometric relationships. It is usually 2D geometry that drives most of the design. CAD models are often also parametrized so that you can change dimensions, angles, multiples of features etc.
by rayiner | 2026-01-26 14:19:44+00:00
> Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california?

Why would the midwestern states consent to that? The southwest is structurally unsustainable. If we can’t develop sufficient renewable energy to power desalination, we’ll probably have to abandon much of California.

My prediction is that if we ever have another civil war, it will be states going to war over access to water.