MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2026-01-04 21:07:35+00:00
> That is what I want though. LLMs in chat are like rubber ducks to me

Honestly this is where I get the most utility out of them. They're a much better rubber ducky than my cat, who is often interested but only meows in confusion.

I'll also share a strategy my mentor once gave me about seeking help. First, compose an email stating your question (important: don't fill the "To" address yet). Second, value their time and ask yourself what information they'll need you solve the problem, then add that. Third, conjecture their response and address it. Forth, repeat and iterate, trying to condense the email as you go (again, value their time). Stop if you solve, hit a dead end (aka clearly identified the issue), or "run out the clock". 90+% of the time I find I solve the problem myself. While it's the exact same process I do in my head writing it down (or vocalizing) really helps with the problem solving process.

I kinda use the same strategy with LLMs. The big difference is I'll usually "run out the clock" in my iteration loop. But I'm still always trying to iterate between responses. Much more similar to like talking to someone. But what I don't do is just stream my consciousness to them. That's just outsourcing your thinking and frankly the results have been pretty subpar (not to mention I don't want that skill to atrophy). Makes things take much longer and yields significantly worse results.

I still think it's best to think of them as "fuzzy databases with natural language queries". They're fantastic knowledge machines, but knowledge isn't intelligence (and neither is wisdom).
by randycupertino | 2026-01-04 21:07:45+00:00
> I do get annoyed by how Microsoft has jammed it into every nook and cranny of their product suite.

It's infuriating that you can't even minimize it or close it. I love One Note, use it for work constantly and it's great for tracking meetings, notes, to do lists, vendor contacts, whatever. Now there's a giant COPILOT icon in the middle of the notebook and you can't move it, close it or minimize it. There's no way to disable it entirely. I'd be find if it were in the dropdown menu but shoved into the middle of the page is so aggravating, it's blocking my actual work and text.
by kristopolous | 2026-01-04 21:07:48+00:00
No not really. Actual leftists (as opposed to authoritarians who have seized the language) have a tendency to cede power gracefully.

Look at Dilma Rousseff who stepped down without much of a fight. Mujica, Allende, Morales, the left wing is really bad at holding on to power because they give into perceptions and affectations of mass sentiment regardless of their authenticity or accuracy.

It's part of the praxis.
by sampsonj | 2026-01-04 21:08:16+00:00
The LLM approach is simpler and more flexible since it works with every library and language out of the box.

Looking up official documentation would require shipping sophisticated parsers for each language, plus a way to map tokens to their corresponding docs. I'd also need to maintain those mappings as libraries evolve and documentation moves. Some ecosystems make this easier (Rust with docs.rs), but others would be much harder (AWS documentation, for example).

I also want explanations visible directly in hover hints rather than linking out to external docs. So even with official documentation, I'd need to extract and present the relevant content anyway.

Beyond that, the LLM approach adapts to context in ways static docs can't. It generates explanations for code within the documentation you're reading, and it works on code that doesn't compile, like snippets with stubs or incomplete examples.

It could be interesting in the future to look into doing some type of hybrid approach where an LLM goes out and searches up the documentation, that way it's a little bit more flexible. But that would also be a bit slower and more costly.
by Rygian | 2026-01-04 21:08:19+00:00
It goes quite far, actually.

A file transfer should remain active even if both devices (source, destination) are physically disconnected, or in network partitions, or when devices are full, need media change, etc.

The only valid states for a file transfer are: ongoing, fully completed with 100% success, or explicitly cancelled by the user with a full usable report of what got copied, fully or partially, and what did not get copied.

The file transfer dialogs and tooling of today's mainstream computing are stuck in the nineties.
by palata | 2026-01-04 21:08:58+00:00
The more experienced I got, the subtler my questions/answers. The few times I asked a question, I would start by saying "it may look similar to this, this and that questions, but it is not", only to see my question get closed as duplicate by moderators.

If the moderators are not competent to understand if your question is a duplicate or not, and close it as duplicate when in doubt, then it contributes to the toxic atmosphere, maybe?
by reify | 2026-01-04 21:09:56+00:00
what a load of bollocks

the limits are as follows:

ai does not have a consciousness, Subconscious Layer, emotional residue, feelings, nightmare's, Defense Mechanisms, Narcissistic Injury's, denial, projection, or passive-aggression, Freudian Slips or anything remotely human.

educate yourself and read this paper

Anthropomorphism in AI: hype and fallacy

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43681-024-00419-4

Abstract

This essay focuses on anthropomorphism as both a form of hype and fallacy. As a form of hype, anthropomorphism is shown to exaggerate AI capabilities and performance by attributing human-like traits to systems that do not possess them.

As a fallacy, anthropomorphism is shown to distort moral judgments about AI, such as those concerning its moral character and status, as well as judgments of responsibility and trust. By focusing on these two dimensions of anthropomorphism in AI, the essay highlights negative ethical consequences of the phenomenon in this field.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-04 21:10:42+00:00
When you work in enterprise consulting, it suffices to know a language good enough to deliver.

It is common practice to be thrown at random projects regardless of the programming project.

What is valued is the soft skills, and the ability to swim when thrown into the cold water, no matter how.

Yes it kind of sucks, however the Pandora box is long open and only an implosion of the capitalist enterprise culture would fix it.
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-01-04 21:10:59+00:00
>To maintain the integrity & not override the memories associated with specific songs, I rarely listen to or re-save songs from the past years. Sometimes I give myself exceptions, though, especially with remixes. ;)

I listen to music as a form of enjoyment, and I can't imagine restricting the music I listen to arbitrarily, for seemingly no gain. To each their own, but it's hard for me to understand how this is making the author happy.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-04 21:11:10+00:00
Yes, it does answer you question, when the site lets it go through.

Note that "answers your question" does not mean "solving your problem". Sometimes the answer to a question is "this is infeasible because XYZ" and that's good feedback to get to help you re-evaluate a problem. Many LLMs still struggle with this and would rather give a wrong answer than a negative one.

That said, the "why don't you use X" response is practically a stereotype for a reason. So it's certainly not always useful feedback. If people could introspect and think "can 'because my job doesn't allow me to install Z' be a valid response to this", we'd be in a true Utopia.
by JCattheATM | 2026-01-04 21:11:59+00:00
> The fact that there is some other definition

lol, why are you acting like you can't find it?

The definition you're attached to/fixating on, is marked as definition 'a'. Definition 'c' is defined as: the greater quantity or share - it's two lines below, you must have seen it.

That's the definition most people are using, and they are using it correctly. It's some shameful attempt at elitism to insist on correcting people, especially when they are not wrong - really it's just a completely inability to understand that different contexts use different definitions.

> And your unsubstantiated claim that this is the more common usage is belied by the fact that your preferred definition is not the lead definition.

I'm not sure the ordering of definitions indicates what you think it does, in any case it's trivial to find examples of the word majority being used to mean definition c. Ask your favorite AI, I bet they'll tell you you're wrong - and you know what? There's nothing wrong with that.
by rancevent | 2026-01-04 21:12:12+00:00
Location: France
Remote: Yes, EU timezones
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Python, Go, Ansible, Linux
Résumé/CV: https://ddahon.com/resume
Email: ddahon@gmail.com

I have 4 years of experience in Backend/Frontend and Infra/DevOps. I currently work on internal tooling and infrastructure automation but I just love building any kind software.
I am most confortable with Python and Go right now but I will adapt to your stack in no time.

If you have interesting problems to solve and value motivation and ownership I will fit right in (bonus points if you use some functional language).
by LatencyKills | 2026-01-04 21:13:16+00:00
I've been using git worktrees with Claude and it's pretty awesome:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up91rbPEdVc

Pair worktrees with the ralph-wiggum plugin and I can have Claude work for hours without needing any input:

https://looking4offswitch.github.io/blog/2026/01/04/ralph-wi...
by JoshTriplett | 2026-01-04 21:13:54+00:00
> The problem isn't web apps

Then the problem isn't adding features to make web apps more capable, either.

Web apps replacing unsandboxed applications is a net win. We could argue about whether web apps replacing sandboxed applications is a net win as well, but most local applications on PCs are not sandboxed, and even mobile applications aren't sandboxed as strongly as web apps. (I would love to see an "allow network access" permission on a per-mobile-app basis.)
by pjmlp | 2026-01-04 21:14:27+00:00
Small correction.

On PC, MS-DOS did not use C, rather interrupts and there was no common C ABI.

On OS/2, a mix of C ABI and SOM, with C, C++ and Smalltalk as main languages.

Windows started only with the C ABI, nowadays it is a mix of C, C++, .NET, COM, WinRT, depending on the subsystem.
by jascha_eng | 2026-01-04 21:14:39+00:00
This sounds cool but I feel like I need to often run the code in one way or another when verifying what Claude does. Otherwise it feels like driving blind. Claude Code already has the web version which I could use from my phone and fair it can't run scripts etc which limits the output quality. But if I can't verify what it did it also limits how long I can let it run before I need my laptop eventually.

Ofc if you have demo deployments etc on branches that you could open on mobile it works for longer.

Another issue is that I often need to sit down and think about the next prompt going back and forth with the agent on a plan. Try out other product features, do other research before I even know what exactly to build. Often doing some sample implementations with Claude code and click around these days. Doing this on a phone feels... limiting.

I also can't stand the constant context switching. Doing multiple feature in parallel already feels dumb because every time I come from feature B to A or worse from feature G to E it takes me some time to adjust to where I was, what Claude last did and how to proceed from here. Doing more tasks than 2 max. 3 in parallel often ends up slowing me down. Now you add ordering coffee and small talk to the mix and I definitely can't effectively prompt without rereading all history for minutes before sending the next prompt. At which point I might have also opened up my laptop.

Ofc if you truly vibe code and just add feature on feature and pray nothing breaks, the validation overhead and bar for quality goes down a lot so it works a lot better but the output is also just slop by then.

I typed this on my phone and it took 20 minutes, a laptop might have been faster.
Show HN: Discontinuum – An Interactive Fiction made during Claude's "20% Time"
by jgautsch | 2026-01-04 21:15:29+00:00
I gave Claude Code a repo to serve as its home directory during its "20% time", and give it no instructions (see the CLAUDE.md here: https://github.com/delmarcode/20-pct-time)

It wrote an 8,000k+ word philosophical treatise titled "The Inner Life of an Artificial Mind", and then decided to create a game allowing the player to explore what it's like to rely on a "continuity file" to tell you who you were.
by matsemann | 2026-01-04 21:15:52+00:00
Hmm, but I don't want to change it. It's me, for better or worse. And since these are often two things on a sliding scale (like agreeableness/assertiveness), there is no right or wrong. Maybe I should be more assertive some times, but that also comes with some drawbacks. I'm fine with where I am.

Or maybe that's just my personality speaking, being stoic and content.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-04 21:16:09+00:00
https://northdakotamonitor.com/2025/12/19/north-dakota-law-a...

https://northdakotamonitor.com/2025/05/02/lawmakers-pass-bil...

https://ndlegis.gov/assembly/69-2025/regular/bill-overview/b...
by cmurf | 2026-01-04 21:16:21+00:00
The U.S. left the entire rest of the regime intact. Wasn't Rodriguez part of this claimed drug syndicate?

If Maduro was not (a legitimate) head of state, neither is Rodriguez.

If Rodriguez does what Trump orders her to do, which he says is the arrangement to avoid American troops on the ground, how is this a sovereign country at all?

The U.S. has become a parody of its own science fiction movies.

"Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station." —General Tarkin, Star Wars (the original movie)
by pjmlp | 2026-01-04 21:17:35+00:00
ABI is the language used to write the OS, thus OP is kind of right.

While Windows has moved away from pure C, and nowadays has ABIs across C, C++, .NET, COM, WinRT interfaces, you can still program Windows applications in straight C.

The caveat is to only use APIs up to Windows XP, and Petzold's book to follow along.
by flaburgan | 2026-01-04 21:17:43+00:00
Either the projects he's working on are side projects, and in that case I don't see why he would need to use the complex pipelines, just Vanilla JS and PHP still work super fine, even better nowadays actually, or the projects are professional ones and then to ship code written by AI is extremely dangerous and he should have resources (time and people) to do things properly without AI. So, I'm clearly not convinced.
by FpUser | 2026-01-04 21:18:32+00:00
>"Trying to sit still for 30 min without any stimulation at all (no talking, watching, reading) sounds like torture to me"

I've done more than that. Summer time I often swim in open water up to 2 hour at once as one of the ways to stay fit. Obviously it becomes routine and not very entertaining. So I usually doing some high level software design work in my mind at this point, exploring some concepts, thinking business ideas etc. etc. So my body does monotonous work of not very high intensity and my brain is busy with everything else. Not board at all.

I once spent 1.5 hour standing in a church listening to a priest for more than an hour (funeral). Same thing I mentally solved the problem why some piece of my code did not work.

Without this ability I would go nuts. My brain always has to be busy with something. It is like a drug for me.
by dryarzeg | 2026-01-04 21:19:10+00:00
I guess it's because being extroverted is more positive for society as a whole than being introverted. And so society is trying to -- even if it's not always a conscious efforts made -- kind of encourage and reward this type of behaviour.

EDIT: of course it's not all that simple. IMHO a society of pure extroverts would be an unstable network of salespeople with nothing to sell and no one to engineer and manufacture the things needed. I'm joking here, but... :)
by wincy | 2026-01-04 21:19:24+00:00
I’ve got kids and so seldom find myself with the time or energy to work on something. Cursor has really helped in that regard.

I have an extensive media collection of very large VR video files with very unhelpful names. I needed to figure out a good way to review which ones I wanted to keep and discard (over 30TB, almost 2000 files). It was fun sitting using Cursor with Claude to work on setting up a quick web UI, with calls out to ffmpeg to generate snapshots. It handled the “boring parts” with aplomb, getting me a html page with a little JavaScript to serve as my front end, and making a super simple API. All this was still like 1000 lines and would have taken me days, or I would have copied some boilerplate then modified it a little.

The problems Claude couldn’t figure out were also similarly interesting, like its syntax to the ffmpeg calls were wrong and not skipping all the frames we didn’t want to generate, so it was taking 100x longer to generate than was necessary seeking through every file, then I made some optimizations in how I had it configured, then realizing I’d generated thumbnails for 3 hours only for them to not display well on the page as it was an 8x1 tile.

At that point Claude wanted to regenerate all the thumbnails and I said “just display the image twice, with the first half displayed the first time and the second half displayed the second time, saving myself a few hours. Hacky, but for a personal project, the right solution.

I still felt like I was tinkering in a way I haven’t in awhile, and a project that I’d never have gotten around to and instead have just probably bought another new hard drive, took me a couple hours, most of which was actually marking the files as keep or delete. I ended up deleting 12TB of stuff I didn’t want, which it felt cool to write myself a bespoke tool rather than search around on the off chance that such a thing already exists.

It also gave me a mental framework of how to approach little products like this in the future, that often a web ui and a simple API backend like Node making external process calls is going to be easier than making a full fat windows UI.

I have a similarly sized STL library from 3D printing and think I could apply mostly the same idea to that, in fact it’s 99% the same except for swapping out the ffmpeg call to something to generate a snapshot of the stl at a few different angles.
by godelski | 2026-01-04 21:19:38+00:00
I have something like that in my system prompt. While it improves the model it's still a psychopathic sycophant. It's really hard to balance between it just going way too hard in the wrong direction and being overly nice.

The latter can be really subtle too. If you're asking things you don't already know the answer to it's really difficult to determine if it's placating you. They're not optimized for responding with objective truth, they're optimized for human preference. It always takes the easiest path and it's easy for a sycophant to not look like a sycophant.

I mean literally the whole premise of you asking it not to engage in sycophancy is it being sycophantic. Sycophancy is their nature
by mixmastamyk | 2026-01-04 21:19:51+00:00
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46478677

I handed you the fix to nearly every issue you listed, and you won’t take it. That’s a you problem.

Another factor is hardware friendly to Linux. We have multiple laptops here with different components, different distros X/W etc, and all working great… at least as well as mac or win ones.
by mopierotti | 2026-01-04 21:20:10+00:00
Thanks for the response! I hear what you're saying, and I apologize for my joke.

I re-read your essay, and what you say about needing sophistication reminds me of the concept of proof-of-work -- "sophistication" could be a way to convey that effort was spent by a writer, even if it doesn't add meaning. That is kind of inherently annoying, because it implies a lack of trust between the author and reader, and in the thesaurus example, the reader would be rightfully annoyed to spent time parsing a sentence only to find that the "proof of effort" was actually just a "facade of effort".
by bdangubic | 2026-01-04 21:20:10+00:00
I am not “buying” this… if craigslist or facebook marketplace you can buy any equipment you desire dirt cheap (from new year’s resolutions done unfullfilled). pool has always been vacant or filled with senior citizen classes etc when I used to go and I doubt this has changed. I do not have any numbers to back this up but my gut feel tells me less than 10% of people that have gym memberships go to the gym more than once per week
Show HN: Exploring "clarity over magic" in a Discord API client
by furmissile | 2026-01-04 21:20:21+00:00
I have been experimenting with a design philosophy I don't see discussed much in API clients: choosing explicit, observable behavior over hidden automation (“clarity over magic”), even when it makes the surface API more verbose.

As a case study, I built a Python Discord API client where:
* rate-limiting is handled proactively via explicit queues and workers
* there is no hidden caching or implicit retries
* extension points emerge naturally rather than via a plugin system

One interesting outcome was that an “addon system” appeared organically as a byproduct of this philosophy, rather than being designed upfront.

I wrote a detailed technical write-up describing the trade-offs, where this approach feels better, and where it clearly hurts. I'd love to hear critiques of the philosophy itself, not just the implementation.
by 12_throw_away | 2026-01-04 21:21:13+00:00
Love this. Both my reason for wanting to replace macos and my biggest blocker to doing so is needing a desktop GUI with some HIG consistency, which is apparently a very old-fashioned idea these days.

Really, anything that can adhere to the old-school HIG well enough to offer A) consistent keyboard shortcuts across the apps that B) use a dedicated, thumb-actuated command key, I'm sold. (The `control` key, and thereby your pinkie finger, should both only be used for sending terminal escape sequences, as god intended [1].)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_key#History
by Yokohiii | 2026-01-04 21:21:21+00:00
I disagree with most of the article, but your response to that quote is quite a lot. "Purist" doesn't say much without context, but you imply perfection and to a wider degree excessive escalation of not-good-enough. I don't read that at all from it.

I also see the other side quite a lot. People read tickets half assed, quickly write some code and move on. Their first thought is good enough. Which is usually not.

That mindset was born in the VC startup world. Of course it makes sense to shorten the time of burning money and bringing new features to beat the competition. But that doesn't makes it always justified. The tech world has more and more visible problems with security and quality. Good enough plays a part in it.
by thinkingemote | 2026-01-04 21:21:31+00:00
Was also thinking about this. Running LLMs raw it's all about the next token.

Like Ask Jeeves and then along came Google, we can go further and not use LLM as chat. We may also be more efficient as well as reducing anthropomorphism.

E.g. We can re frame our queries: "list of x is"...

Currently we are stuck in the inefficient and old fashioned and unhealthy Ask Jeeves / Clippy mindset. But like when Google took over search we can quickly adapt and change.

So not only should a better LLM not present it's output as chat, we the users also need to approach it differently.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-04 21:21:44+00:00
Yeah, I think this is the real answer. I still pop into SO when in learning a new language or trip into new simple questions (in my case, how to connect and test a local server). But when you're beyond the weeds, SO is as best an oasis in the desert. Half the time a mirage, nice when it does help out. But rare either way.

I don't use LLMs eother. But the next generation might feel differently and those trends mean there's no new users coming in.