MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Eong | 2026-01-12 01:46:29+00:00
Love the article, I had a struggle with my new identity and thus had to write https://edtw.in/high-agency-engineering/ for myself, but also came to the realisation that the industry is shifting too especially for junior engineers.

Curious about how the Specialist vs Generalist theme plays out, who is going to feel it more *first* when AI gets better over time?
by wooptoo | 2026-01-12 01:46:33+00:00
Programming is essentially automation. You tell the machine what to do character by character, and if you get it right, the machine will be able to correctly interpret your intention, transform it into a lower level code, and then execute it.

AI is also automation but the instructions are given in a higher level language.
You still have to know how to automate it. You need to instruct the machine in sufficient detail, and if done correctly the machine will once again be able to interpret your intention, transform it to a lower level code, and execute it for you.
by LinasKo | 2026-01-12 01:46:34+00:00
I want to automate the first half of software engineering work.

I'm building a system that reads Slack, listens to Google Meetings, user complaints, etc and gives me prompts I could feed into coding agents or planners.

Problem-to-prompt seems like a larger obstacle than coding these days, I wonder if it's solvable, and if solving it makes cheaper coding agents viable.
by trinsic2 | 2026-01-12 01:47:41+00:00
> Whatever you believe about what the Right Thing should be, you can't control it by refusing what is happening right now. Skipping AI is not going to help you or your career. Think about it. Test these new tools, with care, with weeks of work, not in a five minutes test where you can just reinforce your own beliefs.

You can refuse to support it on the grounds that its being used to harm people. That might not do anything but its still important to be on the right side of humanity.

I don't condemn the tech, but the tech depends on factors that are harming people and not supporting that part of it is an act of support for humanity.
by davidw | 2026-01-12 01:48:20+00:00
Who are your favorite non-doomer folks to read?

I thought this post was a good one on why doomerism is just a waste of time - featuring Ken Jennings of Jeopardy fame:

https://bsky.app/profile/goldengateblond.bsky.social/post/3m...

Some accounts at random that tend towards "this all sucks really bad - however!"

https://bsky.app/profile/olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social

https://bsky.app/profile/golikehellmachine.com

It's a particular and kind of peculiar attitude, because objectively "things ain't great" and it's really easy to dwell on that. But we also need some hope.
by akomtu | 2026-01-12 01:49:07+00:00
Great book. Its first part could become a sci-fi novel, and that's probably how many of the great novels were written. Its second part makes me think that you have a high spiritual foundation, despite your hardcore scientific attitude. Otherwise how did you spontaneously jump to the essence of meditation at that level?

This probably explains the disturbing breakthrough that you call psychosis. If you had a sudden insight into the weird life of microbes, you'd quickly put it into reasonable terms because those insights are below your level. However, if the contents of the insights exceed your level, you'll be overwhelmed and may even suffer serious neural damage.

> Who is it that identifies something as missing? Can it itself go missing?

Your true spirit, most likely. You might reject this idea at the moment, but that's okay.

I'd also firmly reject everything that comes from that Yoshua. The vision you've described isn't really novel, and it's not a heaven, but hell, deceptively decorated with technology. It's a possible future for humanity. Helping others to get unglued from such visions would be a noble deed.
by sparksandmagic | 2026-01-12 01:50:07+00:00
I'm working on a Linux live streaming media server. Supports Ingesting, Mixing with Mix Minus, MultiMux, Multistreaming, and Recording of RTMP, RTSP, SRT, and MP4 with LL-HLS, Low Latency WebTransport Viewing, and Low Latency WebSocket Viewing.

https://github.com/Sparks-And-Magic/AVShack
by zamadatix | 2026-01-12 01:50:10+00:00
The more obvious something seems the more valuable steelmanning becomes, precisely because if the only steelman arguments you get (if any) are propaganda at best (instead of reasons you just hadn't considered) then you can be that much more confident your outrage is based in reason rather than feelings. My guess is there won't be many coming up with steelman arguments for this one though anyways.

Inviting propaganda is good, let the obviously weak arguments come front and center to be logically considered and ridiculed rather than put in small private group chats where they seem to grow and grow. This only works, in any way, if people stop saying things aren't worth having consideration about because it's obvious to them.
by lamontcg | 2026-01-12 01:50:35+00:00
I have bad things to say about him. But they're firmly on pause. What Trump wants for the Federal Reserve is far worse.

And anyone who is a hard-currency quantity-theory-of-money conservative, should also be appalled by it.

Trump is way worse than what the harshest critics of the Federal Reserve think about it. Nobody right or left should support it. Only the billionaires will profit off the monetary disorder.
by pentagrama | 2026-01-12 01:50:59+00:00
This feels like a surprisingly good moment for Linux desktops to position themselves as real alternatives and actually gain ground.

MacOS Tahoe has been heavily criticized for its UI decisions, especially Liquid Glass, which many people feel actively hurts usability rather than improving it. On the other side, Windows keeps piling on user-hostile features, dark patterns, and friction that increasingly frustrate power users and regular users alike.

Distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, and others have mature desktops, solid performance, and fewer design decisions that get in the user’s way.

I honestly cannot remember another moment where both major desktop platforms were being questioned this openly at the same time. If Linux is ever going to take advantage of dissatisfaction at scale, this feels like it.
by jvans | 2026-01-12 01:51:33+00:00
i notice a huge difference between working on large systems with lots of microservices and building small apps or tools for myself. The large system work is what you describe, but small apps or tools I resonate with the automate coding crowd.

I've built a few things end to end where I can verify the tool or app does what I want and I haven't seen a single line of the code the LLM wrote. It was a creepy feeling the first time it happened but it's not a workflow I can really use in a lot of my day to day work.
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-12 01:52:18+00:00
Lately I've been interesting in biosignals, biofeedback and biosynchronization.

I've been really frustrated with the state of Heart Rate Variability (HRV) research and HRV apps, particularly those that claim to be "biofeedback" but are really just guided breathing exercises by people who seem to have the lights on and nobody home. [1]

I could have spent a lot of time reading the docs to understand the Web Bluetooth API and facing up to the stress that getting anything with Bluetooth working with a PC is super hit and miss so estimating the time I'd expect a high risk of spending hours rebooting my computer and otherwise futzing around to debug connection problems.

Although it's supposedly really easy to do this with the Web Bluetooth API I amazingly couldn't find any examples which made all the more apprehensive that there was some reason it doesn't work. [2]

As it was Junie coded me a simple webapp that pulled R-R intervals from my Polar H10 heart rate monitor in 20 minutes and it worked the first time. And in a few days, I've already got an HRV demo app that is superior to the commercial ones in numerous ways... And I understand how it works 100%.

I wouldn't call it vibe coding because I had my feet on the ground the whole time.

[1] for instance I am used to doing meditation practices with my eyes closed and not holding a 'freakin phone in my hand. why they expect me to look at a phone to pace my breathing when it could talk to be or beep at me is beyond me. for that matter why they try to estimate respiration by looking at my face when they could get if off the accelerometer if i put in on my chest when i am lying down is also beyond me.

[2] let's see, people don't think anything is meaningful if it doesn't involve an app, nobody's gotten a grant to do biofeedback research since 1979 so the last grad student to take a class on the subject is retiring right about now...
by 8bitsrule | 2026-01-12 01:52:22+00:00
>90-100% of their work was in generic outlets like the web browser, terminal, e-mail, and Slack. To be fair, that could cover a lot of people.

It does ... for them Linux is a very good substitute for their needs. OTOH, for certain specialties, software available for Linux is NOT the best. 2012 was the Linux year for me ... but while FOSS is OK, sometimes a $200 app is a far superior choice for non-technical people. (Musicians for example.)
by tptacek | 2026-01-12 01:52:27+00:00
Nothing? Trump is playing freeway chicken with Powell, he's driving a Pontiac Fiero and Powell is driving a bulldozer. The Supreme Court has already signaled that they're not on board fucking with the Fed. This will potentially cost Trump his next Fed nomination for awhile, because GOP Senators are putting a hold on his nominations until the legal stuff resolves.
by nephihaha | 2026-01-12 01:52:27+00:00
Love how Brit archaeologists can barely stomach using the C word (Celtic), for political reasons, and have to use the phrase "Iron Age" instead. Imagine if they treated the Romans like this, then they would have to refer to Roman Britain continually as "the Classical Period" or "Classical Britain". (Never mind that the Romans themselves were an Iron Age people.)

Being the BBC, they also have to note all the CBEs that certain individuals have. Got to honour that Royal Charter.
by crystal_revenge | 2026-01-12 01:52:34+00:00
> would further upset voters

I continue to be surprised by people who have seen things unfold as they have over less than a year of this administration and still somehow believe we'll continue to have "free and fair" elections anytime in the near future.

We have over, and over again seeing virtually all of the "checks and balances" we learned about as kids being overridden without consequence.

This community of all other should be aware of how easy it is to exert total control of information (I'm still surprised this article is on the home page). Everyone consumes almost all of their information through digital, corporate controlled means. Even people getting together a organically socializing in bars, something that was common 30 years ago, has been replaced with online interactions. Trump does not need mandate from the people to continue to rule the country.
by trinsic2 | 2026-01-12 01:52:42+00:00
By not using the tech within the context of the deployments by OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft (and Anthropic?), where it places the most harm on people, and letting people know why, it will wake people up to the harm corporations and government are causing. AI tech, in the hands of criminals is exactly the place where the dissent should start and voicing support against it is the place we can gain an edge of how the tech is being used as a vehicle to drive the harms. Its as good of a place as any to start.
by mandeepj | 2026-01-12 01:52:48+00:00
> No one has the power to save America from itself.

Wrong!! Please don’t say that! We all have power inside the US. Congress has the opportunity in 2021 to correct the wrong, but Republicans kowtowed and they are still doing so. That was the easy way. Now for the hard way, American people will have to do something about it.
by ch4s3 | 2026-01-12 01:52:48+00:00
> junior developer employment drops by about 9-10% within six quarters, while senior employment barely budges. Big tech hired 50% fewer fresh graduates over the past three years.

This study showing 9-10% drop is odd[1] and I'm not sure about their identification critria.

> We identify GenAI adoption by detecting job postings that explicitly seek workers to implement or integrate GenAI technologies into firm workflows.

Based on that MIT study it seems like 90+% of these projects fail. So we could easily be seeing an effect where firms posting these GenAI roles are burning money on the projects in a way that displaces investment in headcount.

The point about "BigTech" hiring 50% fewer grads is almost orthogonal. All of these companies are shifting hiring towards things where new grads are unlikely to add value, building data centers and frontier work.

Moreover the TCJA of 2017 caused software developers to not count for R&D tax write offs (I'm oversimplifying). This surely has more of an effect than whatever "GenAI integrator roles" postings correlates to.

[1] https://download.ssrn.com/2025/11/6/5425555.pdf
by LBWasserman | 2026-01-12 01:52:54+00:00
Hi HN! I’m Lourens — a farmer from South Africa who built Neurop Forge.

AI often generates unpredictable code that’s hard to audit in regulated industries.

Neurop Forge solves this with 2,700+ pre-verified, immutable function blocks. AI can execute them but cannot modify them, and every run is hash-verified and logged.

Built for banking, healthcare, and government, where “the AI wrote it” isn’t good enough.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, questions, or suggestions.
(I might be a bit slow to reply because of farm work, but I’ll try to respond to every comment!)
by CamperBob2 | 2026-01-12 01:55:15+00:00
I haven't seen a system that does anti-interference across multiple pulses...

My naive assumption would be that they would do exactly that. In fact, offhand, I don't know how else I'd go about it. When emitting pulses every X ns, I might envision using a long LFSR whose low-order bit specifies whether to skip the next X-ns time slot or not. Every car gets its own lidar seed, just like it gets its own key fob seed now.

Then, when listening for returned pulses, the receiver would correlate against the same sequence. Echoes from fixed objects would be represented by a constant lag, while those from moving ones would be "Doppler-shifted" in time and show up at varying lags.

So yes, you'd lose some energy due to dead time that you'd otherwise fill with a constant pulse train, but the processing gain from the correlator would presumably make up for that and then some. Why wouldn't existing systems do something like this?

I've never designed a lidar, but I can't believe there's anything to the multiple-access problem that wasn't already well-known in the 1970s. What else needs to be invented, other than implementation and integration details?
by mapontosevenths | 2026-01-12 01:55:45+00:00
> I wonder where you guys are headed.

You need to know only two facts about America to guess that:

* Fifty three percent of Americans now read below the sixth grade level.

* As (ostensibly) a representative Democracy America's fate is dictated by the majority of it's citizens.

Our future is to become a broken nation governed by middle-school student level thinking. The only way to build a better America is to build a better populace, and that would be contrary to the interests of the angry, spoiled, children who seem to hold all the power now.
by eukara | 2026-01-12 01:56:19+00:00
If you were wondering how The Economist felt about driver-less cars, they seem way more optimistic than trains.

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/11/27/s...
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/09/28/t...

Hint. Hint.
by c0nsumer | 2026-01-12 01:56:33+00:00
...yet at 4K native on macOS (OS X) I could see fringing. And it was worse than using a slightly lower resolution, scaled up by the OS.

And it's particularly bad on solid color lines and high contrast borders (not fonts). So... that doesn't work for me. Which was the point of the post; I don't like how this particular subpixel pattern OLED monitor looks and it's not for me.
by LorenPechtel | 2026-01-12 01:56:57+00:00
Fundamentally, people don't like situations with no good answer. I see it again and again, present a problem with no good answer and most people will resort to the answer that aligns with their political leanings even when faced with clear evidence they are wrong.

Look how quickly big business rolled over for The Felon--because they saw what mot people have been denying since the election.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-12 01:57:14+00:00
I recently had a question about what AI sandboxes use and I think Modal uses gvisor under the hood and I think others use firecracker/generally favour it as well

Firecracker kind of ends up being in the VM categories and I would place gvisor in a similar category too under the VM

So in my opinion, VM's are sandboxes.

Of course there is also libriscv https://github.com/libriscv/libriscv which is a sandbox (The fastest RISC-V sandbox)

There is also https://github.com/Zouuup/landrun Run any Linux process in a secure, unprivileged sandbox using Landlock. Think firejail, but lightweight, user-friendly, and baked into the kernel.

Your mileage may vary but I consider firecracker to be the AI sandbox usually. Othertimes it can be that they abstract on a cloud provider and open up servers in that or similar (I feel E2B does this on top of gcp)
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-12 01:57:53+00:00
I can say I feel that flow state sometimes when it all works but I certainly don't when it doesn't work.

The other day I was making changes to some CSS that I partially understood.

Without an LLM I would looked at the 50+ CSS spec documents and the 97% wrong answers on Stack Overflow and all the splogs and would have bumbled around and tried a lot of things and gotten it to work in the end and not really understood why and experienced a lot of stress.

As it was I had a conversation with Junie about "I observe ... why does it work this way?", "Should I do A or do B?", "What if I did C?" and came to understand the situation 100% and wrote a few lines of code by hand that did the right thing. After that I could have switched it to Code mode and said "Make it so!" but it was easy when I understood it. And the experience was not stressful at all.
by jiggawatts | 2026-01-12 01:58:03+00:00
He was the owner and CEO of a private company — essentially a dictator without even a board or the SEC keeping him in check.

For decades he hasn’t had to tolerate “checks and balances”! Nobody could say “no” and retain their jobs under him.

The American public decided to put this type of person in charge.

The consequences were predicted.
by OrthoBottle | 2026-01-12 01:58:08+00:00
Air Up GmbH markets its scent-based hydration system using the scientific term “retronasal olfaction” as the core mechanism for flavor perception. This paper examines the neurophysiological requirements for retronasal olfaction as established in peer-reviewed literature and compares them against Air Up’s actual delivery mechanism. We find that the product’s mechanism—inhaling scented air through a straw during water consumption—constitutes orthonasal rather than retronasal olfaction, contradicting the company’s primary marketing claim.

Does this explain why the product is mostly popular with younger consumers?
by galleywest200 | 2026-01-12 01:58:30+00:00
My job as a DevOps engineer is to ensure customer uptime. If rebooting is the fastest, we do that. Figuring out the why is the primary developers’ jobs.

This is also a good reason to log everything all the time in a human readable way. You can get services up and then triage at your own pace after.

My job may be different than other’s as I work at an ITSP and we serve business phone lines. When business phones do not work it is immediately clear to our customers. We have to get them back up not just for their business but for the ability for them to dial 911.
by toast0 | 2026-01-12 01:58:32+00:00
I would bet that supermarket brand cola would sell more than it does now if it were closer to Coke.

I think sooner or later, everyone who drinks a lot of soda will try the store brand as well as other colas that are non-belligerents in the cola wars. Some of them are ok, some are good for some mixed drinks, some are so bad I won't even finish the pack. Even though I prefer Pepsi, if I knew brand X was pretty close to Coke, I might choose it when it costs less and money is tight.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-12 01:58:49+00:00
Because the answers are simple for anyone educated. If you are uneducated or unsophisticated, it’s is entirely possible such a person would not understand, but that issue lies with that person.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fed-renovation-budget-balloon...

https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/building-project-faqs.ht...
by b1temy | 2026-01-12 01:59:25+00:00
> An exception is regedit.exe

This might have changed at some point. I was curious about the latter part of your question on how it made changes without the Windows API (I assumed it used an older DOS API), but my `regedit.exe` _does_ have the `This program cannot be run in DOS mode.` DOS stub in it.
by AnotherGoodName | 2026-01-12 01:59:38+00:00
For full self driving sure but the more regular assisted driving with basic ‘knows where other cars are in relation to you and can break/turn/alarm to avoid collisions’ as well as adaptive cruise control lidar can manage well enough.

I think fsd should be both at minimum though. No reason to skimp on a niw inexpensive sensor that sees things vision alone doesn’t.
by ilaksh | 2026-01-12 01:59:43+00:00
There are multiple self driving car companies that are fully autonomous and operating in several cities in the US and China. Waymo has been operating for many years.

There are full self driving systems that have been in operation with human driver oversight from multiple companies.

And the capabilities of the LLMs in regards to your specific examples were demonstrated below.

The inability of the public to perceive or accept the actual state of technology due to bias or cognitive issues is holding back society.
by abetusk | 2026-01-12 01:59:46+00:00
For the 3 case, since 2/3 is relatively close to 1/2, it's hard to build intuition from just a few examples.

The N=100 build intuition very quickly. I disagree that it doesn't explain anything. After playing, people quickly understand that the likelihood that they chose the correct door initially is very small and when all 98 other doors are revealed, the remaining door provides a red flag that their intuition is off.

Note that often I would explain the logic behind switching and still have them not believe me. Their intuition wouldn't be shaken by arguments or even small demonstration. Only when actually playing an the N=100 case would they start to understand.
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-12 02:00:13+00:00
Often those kind of performance things just don't matter.

Like right now I am working on algorithms for computing heart rate variability and only looking at a 2 minute window with maybe 300 data points at most so whether it is N or N log N or N^2 is beside the point.

When I know I computing the right thing for my application and know I've coded it up correctly and I am feeling some pain about performance that's another story.
by blackjack_ | 2026-01-12 02:00:24+00:00
The only reasonable conclusion at this point is that the fascists in the white house see their deep unpopularity, obvious loss of power in the near future (they have lost nearly every election in the past year by a landslide), and the Epstein files closing in. The obvious outcome will be at minimum jail and ridicule due to their continuous and obvious corruption, high crimes and misdemeanors like invading Venezuela, trying to invade Greenland, and sexual crimes against children. So they have to accelerate chaos to try and destroy law and order before it catches up with them and destroys them.

Its time to put up or get put down by masked goons.