MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scarecrowbob | 2026-01-05 18:14:12+00:00
It's not like these discussions haven't have quite a lot of precedence. I bought a 4-track tape "portastudio" back in the 90s, but it didn't make me a good producer- years of playing music with dozens of groups did that. And I bought a canon xl1, but that didn't make the movies I was making more compelling than if I'd had budget to shoot on 16mm.

Creativity and good craft come from struggling to communicate an idea; anything that short circuits that will make you a worse artists.

AI is, to me, like claming that because you have access to a forklift going to the gym is no longer useful- you're missing both the aesthetic and material reasons why folks have been doing things.

What's worse- people claim a forklift is better than, say, working out and then say to the folks who were working out "this is what you're doing and it is dumb to spend all that effort doing it". That's nothing new either- I get why folks look at a lot of my early, cracked FruityLoop-based work from 2002 with some disdain-- it misses all of the nuances and trade-craft knowledge that I gained playing in bands over the following 20 years.

And I know how it sounds because I can hear it in the products of other young musicians: I play a lot of jazz with kids in their 20s who have way better chops than I ever will and who have a lot of the real book memorized. That real book allows them to pick up the tunes super fast, but they don't have a lot of the nuance that the 70 year olds I sometimes get to play with have in their playing.

I use AI for the dumbest stuff, like writing contracts for mechanical licensing. It's shit, because I'm just looking to copy some already-written document without paying a lawyer. I can't see see why folks would -want- to use it to make documents that no one else had previously thought would be worth writing and to me it very much seems like it can only produce, by definition, derivative works.

Musicians are terrible about that. I love being in a cover band, because I usually like the people and playing. But absent that, simply being able to "poof here's 'your' cover of Stariway" seems super boring, almost soul crushing.

And paying AI do the creative parts- that's like paying someone to have sex with my partner because I wanted to spend my nights playing video games instead of woodshedding on pedal steel guitar :D

All that is to say- I agree.
by Zak | 2026-01-05 18:14:18+00:00
> It's inconceivable that you can learn a programming language and be effective in it in a short time.

I didn't spend any time learning Python. I just started using it and was fairly effective immediately.

I already knew programming in general of course, and several languages with similar features. It takes years to get good at programming, but adding a language that doesn't contain any major new concepts shouldn't take a long time for a proficient programmer.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-05 18:14:34+00:00
You know how forums turned bad because people with good manners/communication skills can just go to a different discussion place so over time you consolidate with a toxic base of people with nowhere else to go?

Even if a company tries to get rid of the bad people, once you start doing random, the line must go up layoffs, the best people leave and then use their network within the company to poach the next down layers of good people. Current American 'layoff while spending the money on stock buybacks' is corporate suicide.
by tavavex | 2026-01-05 18:14:37+00:00
> Could you explain to your grandma what a 365 is?

Microsoft Office - Okay, this is a bundle of software relating to office work, released by Microsoft. Makes sense!

Microsoft Office 365 - This is also office software by Microsoft, but the 365 indicates it's a subscription service, because you're paying for it 365 days a year or something. This is contrasted to normal non-365 Office.

Microsoft 365 - So... This is something by Microsoft, that is also a subscription service? Okay...

Microsoft 365 Copilot - Oh! Copilot! Everyone knows Copilot, right? It's like, their one and only remaining important trademark, everyone has got to know what it means with no further explanation. So, it just makes sense, this is a Microsoft subscription service where you pay for this "Copilot", right?
by EGreg | 2026-01-05 18:14:47+00:00
I refuse to believe that people can do downvotes on a long-ish comment 4 seconds after something is posted.

Not even read. Posted. That means they had to refresh exactly at that moment, within a second of it being posted, scroll down the page to that comment, read it, and downvote it, in 4 seconds! Come on
by tialaramex | 2026-01-05 18:14:52+00:00
What's happened is that you've been poisoned so badly by languages like C that you no longer even understand what's actually going on.

Your world becomes a bewildering mess in which it seems as though nothing can ever be trusted, and so you stumble into either writing endless checks because you're never sure of anything, or you throw your hands in the air and pronounce doing nothing "good enough" then blame others when inevitably your software doesn't work.

Take Rust's Allocator::allocate, defined as:

fn allocate(&self, layout: Layout) -> Result<NonNull<[u8]>, AllocError>;

Yes, our allocation might fail, and in this case our result is Err(AllocError). That's a perfectly good result, and a perfectly good allocation error. It's not the memory you wanted, because your allocation failed, but it's not "invalid" in any useful sense.
by liaomaos | 2026-01-05 18:15:01+00:00
Clarity is seniority. Cleverness is overhead. - On a consulting project where the client was building a 5000 user plus application. They had an amazing architect, know all the best frameworks and had implemented that on the project. Issue is, only he understood the framework (even though it's documented on github) and it costed the developers more time to understand the framework than if the code was a little "dumber". Then he left for a better role for his career as he should. Because of that, the devs and new architects abandoned the framework and built new things around it and now the old framework is "tech debt".
by ecb_penguin | 2026-01-05 18:15:11+00:00
> 4 seconds after I posted it, it got downvoted. Then 10 seconds later, -2. Because it has the word cryptocurrency. No one can load, read and react that fast. This is getting ridiculous. Turn off the bots based on a word, and engage with the substance.

Because as soon as you said Cryptocurrency, you lost the plot.

Everything you said is literally how freelancing already works. You pay a certain amount upfront, and then pay more based on deliverables.

> Cryptocurrency is the right fit here because you want it to be tied to something the client can’t just mint unlimited amounts of

Can you tell me how to mint unlimited amounts of US Dollars? I would love this hack.

> just another use of cryptocurrency that properly aligns everyone’s incentives and prevents legal disputes through continuity instead of abruptness

How does a blockchain determine whether I built the site the owner wanted?
by Scubabear68 | 2026-01-05 18:15:13+00:00
My record is about 9 weeks to get onboarded enough to do work, where "onboarded" was getting my Laptop to work and login and access to a few critical systems.

These kinds of costs are baked into every level of the company. This is a place where they calculate it costs about $30,000 to add a period to the end of a sentence in a static website.
by collingreen | 2026-01-05 18:15:41+00:00
I don't downvote things I disagree with though (only bad faith and anti-hn-rules behavior) and I didn't downvote this.

The substance seems very silly to me. Even if businesses were well versed in using crypto and it didn't have such a scam reputation it's still silly to me. Using a cryptocurrency blockchain for any of this, let alone all of this, lands squarely in the realm of what the haters brand as "a solution looking for a problem".
by okokwhatever | 2026-01-05 18:15:53+00:00
Reading your messages, I've come to the personal conclusion that we live in an age of misunderstanding. We're incapable of reaching any useful, consensual agreements.

This holds us back, halting progress that could be truly positive for humanity, because having a society that's moving in opposite directions keeps us stagnant.

This has been going on for far too many years.

Let AI users use it. And let's train those who are defenseless against this advancement so they can decide for themselves.
by krschacht | 2026-01-05 18:16:15+00:00
My assumption is a bit different: the UIs in science fiction are intended to communicate information, now typically that's to advance the storyline but there's a lot of overlap with real apps. Maybe more importantly, UIs in movies are elicit a feeling. Maybe it's a shallow feeling of "this is cool!" but to me that's where it seems like production apps mostly give up. "It works, let's move on..." seems to be the bar in most cases rather than "let's wow users!"

This might be a clearer articulation of what I'm trying to get at with my question...
by asveikau | 2026-01-05 18:16:37+00:00
> I think there will be always people in bad mental state who will unfortunately commit suicide after some interaction. I don't think there is a way to avoid that completely,

I have been close to multiple people who suffer psychosis. It is tricky to talk to them. You need to walk a tightrope between not declaring yourself in open conflict with the delusion (they will get angry, possibly violent for some people, and/or they will cut you off) but also not feed and re-enforce the delusion, or give it some kind of endorsement. With my brother, my chief strategy for challenging the delusion was to use humor to indirectly point at absurdity. It can be done well but it's hard. For people, it takes practice.

All this to say, an LLM can probably be made to use such strategies. At the very least it can be made to not say "yes, you are right."
by neogodless | 2026-01-05 18:16:47+00:00
I had a client like this. It was easy work, easy money, even if a bit delayed.

After one such "non-payment" incident, the next time they needed something they basically offered xx hours of payment for 15 minutes of work to get back on my good side. In general they'd end up "overpaying" for each project to make up for their tardiness in paying.
by dujuku | 2026-01-05 18:18:10+00:00
Also somewhat surprised. DuckDB traction is impressive and on par with vector databases in their early phases. I think there's a good chance it will earn an honorable mention next year if adoption holds and becomes more mainstream. But my impression is that it's still early in its adoption curve where only those "in the know" are using it as a niche tool. It also still has some quirks and foot-guns that need moderately knowledgeable systems people to operate (e.g. it will happily OOM your DB)
by sennawcf1 | 2026-01-05 18:18:10+00:00
The decline of Nike for the stated reasons make 100% sense. When ATMs came out, the bank I worked for in Canada, started losing market share as they replace physical banking locations with self-service ATMs. After 15 years of slow decline, they started to aggressively rebuild physical locations. They now believe you have to have BOTH - a clearly identifiable brick and mortar presence and ATMs.
by larkost | 2026-01-05 18:18:11+00:00
It is actually more complicated than this implies. For example hospitals are often held afloat by Medicare/Medicaid spending (25%/19%). Private health insurance is about 37%, so larger than either, but smaller than both. But then you have to remember that some of the private health insurance is being subsidized by taxpayer dollars (e.g.: the ACA subsidies), and that private health insurance is largely coming from tax exempt dollars (a form of subsidies). So where the costs are actually being paid is more difficult.

https://www.kff.org/health-costs/key-facts-about-hospitals/?...

I am not sure where your question about a percentage of your salary is valid on the face of it. Do you count the employer portion of your medical coverage as part of your salary? Do you count the tax exemption? How do you figure the taxes taken out to support Medicare/Medicaid/Veterans Health (all of which are required to support the system as it exists)? And how do you figure that for single payer systems?

So a much more direct way of comparing is to look at total costs per person, and then figure out how outcomes compare. When you do that the U.S. comes to about double the cost, and generally worse outcomes. Conservative politicians will scream about how long it takes to get procedures, but the research shows that elective procedures take about the same time (and no-one waits for emergency procedures in comparable systems).

https://www.pgpf.org/article/how-does-the-us-healthcare-syst...
by burdfili | 2026-01-05 18:18:33+00:00
I like the instinct, but I think the framing is off.

Most people already know what to do. They know eating out less saves money. They know carrying a balance is bad. The problem isn’t knowledge, it’s that the consequences don’t feel real in the moment.

Money decisions are made by present-you and judged by future-you. Most tools talk to neither. If your real advantage is memory, then the product isn’t advice. It’s continuity. It’s reminding me that past-me cared about something and current-me is quietly changing the deal.

“Three months ago you said this mattered” is more powerful than any chart or benchmark. If you lean into that, this could be super interesting but pls don't blend into optimizations for consumer ai.

And I agree on your point that this isn’t about income but about impulse and right steps
by cryptonector | 2026-01-05 18:19:00+00:00
> You need an integrated root-of-trust in your CPU in order to solve these.

Yes, quite. The BIOS/UEFI absolutely needs to store a public key of a primary key on the TPM, probably the EKpub itself for simplicity. Without that you will be vulnerable to an MITM attack, at least early in boot, and since the MITM could fool you about the root of trust for later, as long as the MITM can commit to always being there you cannot detect the attack.
by bityard | 2026-01-05 18:19:01+00:00
Less-than-fully-reputable shared hosting providers have been doing a variation on this for decades. Although normally in the form of a pop-up or banner at the top of the page.

When I worked for a hosting provider, an overdue account would get daily emails for up to a month. After a month, the site would be disabled (404) or the VPS would be turned off. After three months, the site/VPS would be archived. After one year, the archive was deleted.

Astonishingly, there was always a fairly steady stream of customers who would come back over a year later and ask for their site to be restored, or to get a copy of it. I never enjoyed being the person who had to give them the bad news of the consequences of their choices.
by kennywinker | 2026-01-05 18:19:01+00:00
This doesn’t pass a basic plausibility test. It’s a war zone where food is super scarce and aid workers are there voluntarily. Between people wanting to feed their communities, and humanitarian aid workers who’ve already shown they are willing to risk life and limb, and gazan truckers with basically no other work, someone is going to be able to move goods for free or very cheap.
by benterix | 2026-01-05 18:19:02+00:00
I chose the hard way and disabled them anyway. If I want to know if a train is delayed, I check. If I wait for a driver, I check. Actually the latter is better as I'm not surprised by the guy arriving but can synchronize well. And frankly, I don't complain.

And every evening or so I sit down on my computer and check WhatsApp notifications on web.whatsapp.com to catch up with what's going on in groups people added me to. I find this quite good for my well-being.
by miladyincontrol | 2026-01-05 18:19:10+00:00
True but even mainstream western brands often have various qualities of product that appear at different markets. Their brand name is no guarantee of quality.

Outlets sell specifically made lower cost versions of products that are made to look similar. Costco? Same deal with many versions of clothes and shoes they sell.

Chinese brands at least still segment this fairly decently where if you know what you're looking for, you can get the quality you're hoping for. They're more likely to just spin off another brand at a different quality rather than dilute the image of one that has reputation.
by krschacht | 2026-01-05 18:19:15+00:00
(1) and (2) are good points. Particularly 2 because movies may intentionally add steps / slow things down so that a viewer can follow along but this would be at odds to daily use.

However, I still think there's something to be said for movies attempting to build UIs that have a strong aesthetic and elicit an emotional response, whereas production apps feel so flat and boring, in comparison.

I still wonder why we aren't seeing people try to push the envelope stylistically to "wow" users.
by EGreg | 2026-01-05 18:19:16+00:00
I normally think pg has been very reasonable in his views, but his historic approval of downvoting things merely to signal disagreement, or worse, being triggered by a word, is a mistake, this norm makes HN much less useful.

It chills speech to the point of not being able to suggest correct solutions to things, or correctly diagnose problems. Well, I refuse to participate in that.

I only downvote if I think the quality of a comment is bad, it is completely off-topic or absurd for example, or in bad faith. Not if I disagree with it and certainly not because it contains — gasp - a word for a technology I would prefer not to see discussed!

And I also refuse to be bullied into silence by some downvotes. I am saying that downvotes within 4 seconds is not likely to be organic, because it requires someone to have refreshed the page at nearly the exact time I posted, magically scroll down to the exact comment, read it first and downvote it. And then 4 downvotes in quick succession after. There is more going on here, I suspect, than mere “losing the plot”.

I could attempt to test this by posting comments with the ahem blacklisted word as a reply to some comments even further down the page, where it would be absurd for someone to scroll to that exact comment within, say, 10 seconds. But I have noticed that a specific set of words seems to produce that effect on HN.
Show HN: Xprv (expressive) – tRPC like framework for express
by pasaley | 2026-01-05 18:19:24+00:00
I wanted a trpc like framework that sits on top of express, so I built one.

Features include:
1) tRPC like DX
2) openapi schema generation
3) The server only returns valid over the wire json so you know exactly what youre getting on the client. i.e the server will not let you respond with a Date object. You'll need to convert it into a string/number before you do
4) (Almost) everything is well defined. When you create an xprv app, you can tell it how to handle errors like Internal Server Error or 404 and it will infer the types of the response
5) If something does go wrong, you also get full access to the underlying express objects.

This is not to say that the project is perfect. There are a few downsides:
1) Only deals in json at the moment. Other file types like images, or even text is not really supported.
2) The errors can be a little confusing at times. Asserting valid over the wire json uses complicated utility types and it's errors are not clear.
by Alex2037 | 2026-01-05 18:19:32+00:00
>cryptography

cryptography enables spies, terrorists, criminals, and dissidents to communicate over any network with absolute impunity. if it was feasible, every government in the world would have banned or "regulated" it, as some had attempted to. but in the end, they had conceded defeat, and the world had not ended.

>make every human need to question the reality of any electronic audio or video they encounter, no matter how realistic?

you left out "images", which we learned to question decades ago. likewise, audio and video could also be manipulated with readily available, completely unregulated tools, to produce quite believable results.
by marcosdumay | 2026-01-05 18:19:35+00:00
If you upskill enough people, companies will need to start paying more for those services. And once they need it, they will find the money.

There is a reason unemployment numbers are always within the same small band. There's always money to employ around the same ratio of the population. And when people get richer, that ratio gets slightly smaller, not larger.
by camperegrine | 2026-01-05 18:19:53+00:00
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by Shywim | 2026-01-05 18:19:54+00:00
So, it's been one year since I use Zed daily, and I didn't encounter this issue, or any other issue for instance, everything is smooth and I never encountered a failure or a crash.

I work on large (everything is relative, though) monorepos, that would probably qualify for this limit, and I remember already did the kind of "workaround" discussed in this issue years ago on this device. I think it's hard to blame the software when the default file limit is so low depending on the languages you work with.

Anyway, if you would encounter this problem, you would have already encountered it with other tools, or else this is fine.
by cduzz | 2026-01-05 18:20:00+00:00
So, let's look at UnitedHealth Group; do they deliver health care?

If there were single payer, what would their role be in the healthcare delivery process?

Apparently they made 2.3 billion in profits on 113 billion in revenue in Q3 of 2025. How much of that friction would evaporate if they weren't in the healthcare delivery infrastructure.

Someone once said "the best part is no part" ?
by lmorchard | 2026-01-05 18:20:08+00:00
Yeah, this is a lot of what I'm doing with LLM code generation these days: I've been there, I've done that, I vaguely know what the right code would look like when I see it. Rather than spend 30-60 minutes refreshing myself to swap the context back into my head, I prompt Claude to generate a thing that I know can be done.

Much of the time, it generates basically what I would have written, but faster. Sometimes, better, because it has no concept of boredom or impatience while it produces exhaustive tests or fixes style problems. I review, test, demand refinements, and tweak a few things myself. By the end, I have a working thing and I've gotten a refresher on things anyway.
by rootusrootus | 2026-01-05 18:20:09+00:00
> That's not a virtuous cycle, that's inflation.

From purely a price perspective, sure. But there are other advantages to maintaining production capacity within our own country.

Plus, doesn't offshoring effectively push the whole world towards a common cost-of-living/income ratio? Great if you're labor in a struggling country, bad if you are labor in the richest country in the world.