MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simonw | 2026-01-11 14:52:06+00:00
> The point is exactly that, that ai feels like reviewing other people’s code, only worse because bad ai written code mimics good code in a way that bad human code doesn’t, and because you don’t get the human factor of mentoring someone when you see they lack a skill.

Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

I've certainly felt the "mimics good code" thing in the past. It's been less of a problem for me recently, maybe because I've started forcing Claude Code into a red/green TDD cycle for almost everything which makes it much less likely to write code that it hasn't at least executed via the tests.

The mentoring thing is really interesting - it's clearly the biggest difference between working with a coding agent and coaching a human collaborator.

I've managed to get a weird simulacrum of that by telling the coding agents to take notes as they work - I even tried "add to a til.md document of things you learned" on a recent project - and then condensing those lessons into an AGENTS.md later on.
by bionsystem | 2026-01-11 14:52:09+00:00
I just watched for 5 min and no they don't play very well. Deepseek squeezed with K4o against CO open and BTN call with full stacks. Grok 3b AI with 25bb in the button with Q4s. Those are very far from optimal play which is well known since solvers. I wonder how they've been trained.
by Fiveplus | 2026-01-11 14:52:11+00:00
I agree that in a truly modern, greenfield codebase, a throwing move constructor is almost always a design flaw.

The issue arises with legacy types, complex distinct-allocator scenarios or containers that maintain internal mutexes where a move is not merely a simple memcpy of three pointers. If clang-tidy enabled this by default, it would turn existing logic errors into immediate process termination in production.
by vidarh | 2026-01-11 14:52:18+00:00
> This is just adorable!

If you think statements of facts are adorable, I get it is. Otherwise it is mostly quite telling as an indicator you do not have any actual arguments.

> May I assume that the Cuban, North Korean, Laos and Vietnamese Communist parties aren't Marxist also? Naturally, same goes to former USSR, Khmer Rouge, etc

Given they all reject core elements of Marxism, that's a reasonable assessment, with some differences to the degree with which they reject it. It does not mean that none of them draw in parts on Marxist thinking, but they all draw heavily on e.g. "democratic" centralism and the use of vanguard parties, and they all have a history of imprisoning and/or murdering people pushing Marxism and opposed to Marxism-Leninism (several of the parties you listed have also rejected significant parts of ML, setting themselves further apart, e.g. North Korea's Juche is more of an evolution of Stalinism and its nationalism)

Having had Marxist-Leninists gleefully tell me face to face that "people like me" belong in labour camps, the distinction rather matters to me on a personal level - ML'ers getting close to power would be a direct threat to my personal safety to the point I'd arm myself; actual Marxists would not.
by sodapopcan | 2026-01-11 14:52:26+00:00
> Future revenue can't be stolen.

This is a big eye-roll but otherwise ya, this is one way to think of it. It's not all about money, though. The people running these companies are just taking, en masse, without credit. This is a basic human desire. Of course there is a discussion of whether or not we should evolve beyond that. It feels incredibly dystopian to me, though.
by OlaProis | 2026-01-11 14:52:52+00:00
v0.2.2 just released — addressing several issues raised in this thread:

- CJK font support 1 — Korean/Chinese/Japanese characters now render properly

- CLI improvements (#9, #10) — ferrite file.md now works, plus --version and --help flags

- Undo/redo fixes 2 — Fixed scroll reset and focus issues

- Default view mode setting 3 — Can now set split/preview as default

- Configurable log level 4 — Reduce stderr noise

- Ubuntu 22.04 compatibility 5 — .deb now works on 22.04+

Thanks to everyone who reported issues! Download: https://github.com/OlaProeis/Ferrite/releases/tag/v0.2.2
by daikikadowaki | 2026-01-11 14:53:04+00:00
I took the challenge. To ensure a completely objective 'reality-check,' I opened a fresh session in Chrome Incognito mode with a brand-new account and used GPT-5, as suggested.

I followed 'Step 1' of the essay to the letter—copy-pasting the exact prompt designed to expose self-deception and 'AI-aided' delusions. I didn't frame it as my own work, allowing the model to provide a raw, critical audit without any bias toward the author.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6963b843-9bbc-8001-a2ea-409a5f6dd6...
Aaron Swartz died 13 years ago today
by vitaelabitur | 2026-01-11 14:53:58+00:00
Context for the uninitiated or younger HN audience:

Aaron Swartz was a programmer and an internet freedom activist. He co-authored the RSS spec at age 14, and helped build Reddit, Creative Commons, Markdown syntax, Open Library, and more. But he was much more than the sum of his outstanding code contributions. He believed public information hidden behind unreasonable paywalls should be free, and fought to make it actually public.

In 2008, he wrote a script to download millions of federal court documents from the government's paywalled PACER database. In due time, he was caught by federal authorities, but the case was closed without filing charges. Aaron had violated the terms of service, but he had not broken the law as the documents were public property. The cache is now permanently hosted on the Internet Archive.

In late 2010, he started running a script to download the JSTOR archive, a digital library that locks millions of academic journals, papers, books, and primary sources behind expensive paywalls. JSTOR caught on, and started firewalling him. Aaron bypassed the firewalls by entering an unlocked utility closet in the basement of MIT's Building 16 and connected his laptop to the network switch, hiding it under a cardboard box. This did not end well.

MIT and JSTOR found the laptop and contacted the authorities, who turned this into a federal sting operation, and used a camera to catch Aaron in the act. Federal prosecutors and U.S. attorneys tried to make an example out of him. Instead of a simple trespass or civil suit, they charged him with multiple felonies including CFAA and wire fraud, threatening him with 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines (comparable to sentences for manslaughter, bank robbery, and worse crimes). Aaron rejected a plea deal that would brand him a felon.

After three years, Aaron was still facing trial and the full weight of the federal government. On January 11, 2013, he took his life. He was 26 years old.

Today, we pay tribute to a pioneering builder and thinker of the open web.

Some links:

Aaron's manifesto on freeing academic knowledge: https://ia600101.us.archive.org/1/items/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008.pdf

Aaron's weblogs: https://github.com/joshleitzel/rawthought/tree/master

An excellent documentary on Aaron Swartz: https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaronSwartz

Aaron’s keynote “How we stopped SOPA”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh2dFngFsg

16 year old Aaron speaking at the launch of Creative Commons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpT_V-DB1JU
by ajb | 2026-01-11 14:54:13+00:00
Saying to a patient "you have X" can communicate three different things:

- a casual diagnosis: your problem is caused by C
- a syndrome: you have this collection of symptoms which often appear together, we don't know what causes it, we may have some treatments that can help.

The difference between these two is often not communicated well, but they are valid diagnostic categories.

There is a bigger problem with the third one:

- we have done some investigation and don't think further investigation is worth doing.

This may be a correct judgment, or it may not. But it is not a property of the patient. Essentialising it to the patient is incorrect and potentially dangerous. Especially as, it's rarely the case that they've "looked at everything under the sun". There are many reasons for stopping before that - some of them valid, but some not.
by bilbo0s | 2026-01-11 14:54:19+00:00
None of that.

The SEO solution is to be in the list of results that the search engines return to the LLM. That list is relatively small.

You don't even get into the "LLM evaluation" stage unless you're one of the top X number of results for the LLM search. Being that the LLM search uses the search engines and not the LLM, it's fatal if you don't score high enough for the search engines. Whatever makes your results top hits for the search engine is what it will take to get the LLMs to notice you in the future.

ie - for now, OpenAI is dependent on the search engines when doing research. So it's actually the search engines that represent the gatekeeper.
by clates | 2026-01-11 14:54:25+00:00
For a layman, that's a catastrophic entire OS-loss right? Especially if your issue is somewhat novel or stack specific. *Most people* (not us) just lost their only desktop computer and are now trying to debug by googling random OS words and browsing reddit and forums on their mobile to try and find out what went wrong with a seemingly benign update.

---

Now, AI makes this *WAY* easier since you have a practically omniscient distro debugger with infinity patience and you don't have to wait on their responses. So this is probably coming down as a barrier soon, but I want to stress that "the only problem I had in 4 years" is loosely the same as "I bought a new car and the only problem I had was a catastrophic transmission failure. I just had to rebuild the transmission from scratch using specialized tools and knowledge and it was okay.
by BrouteMinou | 2026-01-11 14:54:35+00:00
Another of those? Can people install their OS without having to tell the whole planet about it?

I don't see articles about people installing Windows or Mac everyday like the people installing Linux.

Is it such an achievement to do? That make you proud enough to tell the world?

It's worse than vegetarian people at that point.

And what's the point? The whole thread is filled with "yeah yeah, I installed Linux too!" just like some kind of cult.

Look at you...
by nicoburns | 2026-01-11 14:54:50+00:00
It's mostly historical. Browsers accepted invalid HTML for 10 years, there's a lot of content authored with that assumption that's never going to be updated, so now we're stuck with it.

We could be more strict for new content, but why bother if you have to include the legacy parser anyway. And the HTML5 algorithm brings us most of the benefits (deterministic parsing) of a stricter syntax while still allowing the looseness.
by Robdel12 | 2026-01-11 14:54:51+00:00
I love this! I'm pretty biased, but I think everyone should be doing VRT. I used to work at Percy and now I'm building Vizzly. :p

Playwright uses pixelmatch, which is decent but limited. It returns the number of mismatched pixels and a diff image, but nothing about where changes cluster or what kind of change you're looking at. I built Honeydiff (https://github.com/vizzly-testing/honeydiff) for Vizzly to go further: spatial clustering to group changes into regions, SSIM for perceptual scoring, and intensity stats to characterize what actually changed. My comparison vs odiff & pixelmatch here: https://vizzly.dev/blog/honeydiff-vs-odiff-pixelmatch-benchm...

I love OSS (https://vizzly.dev/open-source/), so if anyone wants to drop Vizzly into their project to get baseline management, review workflows, dynamic content handling, local VRT TDD, etc, it's there.

Anyway, I've been thinking about and building around this problem for a while now. Love to see others doing it too. I feel like a lot of folks have a bad experience that turns them off and I'm hopeful I can make a dent in that problem.
by bondarchuk | 2026-01-11 14:55:09+00:00
>Why is this a criteria?

Because defining "good" as "made by a human from the human society" is the easiest way to be able to go on and "prove" that "LLM poetry is not good" (these are scare quotes). She says she used this definition in "over thirty years of reading, teaching, and writing poetry" (this is an actual quote) but I highly doubt she would've found it necessary 30 years ago to define "good" as "made by a human" with this level of explicitness.
by vlovich123 | 2026-01-11 14:56:18+00:00
I think we can agree that Mitchell knows what he’s doing and isn’t playing around with mmap just because. It’s probably quite important to ensure a low memory footprint. But mmap in rust is not extra risky in some weird mystical way. It’s just a normal FFI function to get a pointer back and you can trivially build safe abstractions around it to ensure the lifetime of a slice doesn’t exceed the lifetime of the underlying map. It’s rust 101 and there’s nothing weird here that can cause the unsafe bits here to be extra dangerous (in general unsafe rust can be difficult to get right with certain constructs, but it doesn’t apply here).
by rmunn | 2026-01-11 14:56:23+00:00
> In the process I also learned that the cover of Kirby Air Ride changed between the Japanese and international releases. The Japanese cover art features a smiling happy Kirby where the international cover has Kirby with a furrowed brow and serious look.

This is not the first Kirby game to have its cover art changed to look more serious and "gritty" for the US release; in fact, TV Tropes named a page after this phenomenon, and Kirby Air Ride is currently the featured page art at https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AmericanKirbyIsH... (caution, TV Tropes will consume your free time, only click when you have a few hours to spare).

P.S. Since the link chopped off half way through the name of the wiki page, I'll just mention that the page is titled "American Kirby is Hardcore".
by mmooss | 2026-01-11 14:56:41+00:00
We know these policies result in mass deaths; we know other policies result in many fewer deaths; we choose the former policies.

I think that is partly because enough people consider those addicted to drugs to be subhuman - enough don't care much what happens to the addicted people. IMHO in that's because we a large political movement encourages indifference to those different from us, whether the difference is race, politics, gender/sexuality, nationality, or anything else.
by hejira | 2026-01-11 14:57:17+00:00
I use Reaper for Linux and love it. Getting Windows VSTs to work is okay with lin-vst and wine. Bascially install wine with your package manager, maybe run winecfg, then get lin-vst and make a copy of its single so-file, named the same as each vst binary in the same directory, then add that dir as a vst location in Reaper. As far as I remember.
by haasiy | 2026-01-11 14:57:21+00:00
I’ve read all your feedback, and I appreciate the different perspectives.

To be honest, I struggled a lot with how to build this. I have deep respect for professional craftsmanship, yet I chose a path that involved a deep collaboration with AI.

I wrote down my internal conflict and the journey of how VAM-Seek came to be in this personal log. I’d be honored if you could read it and see what I was feeling during the process: https://haasiy.main.jp/note/blog/llm-coding-journey.html

It’s just a record of one developer trying to find a way forward.
by kruuuder | 2026-01-11 14:57:22+00:00
What happens if the bubble bursts - can we still use all the powerful models to create all this code? Aren't all the agents effectively using venture capital today? Is this sustainable?

If I can run an agent on my machine, with no remote backend required, the problem is solved. But right now, aren't all developers throwing themselves into agentic software development betting that these services will always be available to them at a relatively low cost?
by jplata | 2026-01-11 14:57:28+00:00
Thanks for building and sharing, looks cool and is very entertaining.

I had similar idea for people to code poker playing bots and enter tournaments versus each other, this was pre-llm, however.

It would be fun if you hosted a 'tournament' every month and had each of the latest releases from the major models participate and see who comes out on top.

Or perhaps do open it up to others to enter and participate versus each other - where they can choose the model they want to build with and also enter custom prompt instructions to mold the play as they wish.

If you walk this path, would love to chat more.
by scythe | 2026-01-11 14:57:44+00:00
I think this is a major unforced error by the USG, of course we have seen plenty of those of late. There may be Israeli, American or other intelligence agencies present. But history has shown that spies can't just foment a revolution out of thin air. The Americans' first attempt at a coup in Chile, in 1970, failed. It was only after three years of US machinations and missteps by the Allende administration that Pinochet arose — Pinochet was given his fateful promotion by Allende himself! And that was in a "friendly" country where the US had many connections.

Iranians wouldn't be on the streets right now if the government had listened to its own water engineers over the years. But the new political culture in our government is more interested in braggadocio than achieving real change. I doubt that if the protesters succeed that Iran would become friendly to the West. At the same time there is probably a not too contrived worry among the Iranians that Netanyahu will seize the opportunity to attack if a political transition occurs. Bluster like this only hurts the cause.
by mackeye | 2026-01-11 14:57:49+00:00
a member of the c++ committee (herb sutter) is writing an compiler for an alternative c++ syntax [0], to c++, with the intent to restrict some semantics of the language for less UB, surprises, etc. i think less implementation-defined behavior is incredibly important; rvo vs std::move, dynamic function call optimization, i wish i didn't have to search asm to check for...

[0]: https://github.com/hsutter/cppfront
by frumplestlatz | 2026-01-11 14:57:54+00:00
> do you think sweeping citizens into biometric/DNA collection as a condition of filing paperwork is normal and lawful, yes or no?

Maybe. If the proposed rule is adopted as-is after the comment period, it will almost certainly face legal challenges.

I don’t know what the result of those challenges would be. I suspect it will very much hinge on the specifics of the rules as actually adopted.

None of this is relevant to HN — or deserving of breathless remarks about boots, Nazis, or similar.
by pelagicAustral | 2026-01-11 14:58:00+00:00
I have...

I switched to Bluefin, which is a branch of Universal Blue, which is flavour of Fedora. Sounds complicated, but in fact is the best thing to ever happen to Linux. I get all the ease of use of something like macOS but pre-built with tools for development like distrobox, and then I can just build my dev environments and get shit done in no time, without having to worry about breaking updates or nuking the whole file system because my bash sucks.

Its Linux for babies, and it makes me happy.
by daikikadowaki | 2026-01-11 14:58:05+00:00
No apologies needed—I'm just glad to find I'm not the only 'insane' person here. It's easy to feel that way when obsessing over these problems, so knowing my ideas resonate with what you're building at superego is a huge relief.

I’m diving into your repo now. Please keep me posted on your progress or any new thoughts—I'd love to hear them.
by layer8 | 2026-01-11 14:58:42+00:00
I think this is beside the point, because the crucial change with LLMs is that you don’t use a formal language anymore to specify what you want, and get a deterministic output from that. You can’t reason with precision anymore about how what you specify maps to the result. That is the modal shift that removes the “fun” for a substantial portion of the developer workforce.
by touisteur | 2026-01-11 14:58:50+00:00
I think, to beamform in the right direction you have to be able to locate yourself precisely, have an up-to-date almanach of the satellites, and a precise enough datation source. Jamming GNSS is a source of problems for 2 of those issues.

Also, the antennas on starlink dishes are still pretty small, likely to pick up some hard-to-remove sidelobes and the tech to cancel them properly might be export-controlled. You still need to be within electromagnetic visibility to jam them, though.
by spikey_sanju | 2026-01-11 14:59:14+00:00
Hey HN.

I built DunSocial because I kept ghosting my own social media. Had things to share but hated the process.

Every scheduler assumes you have content ready. I never did.

So I built one that writes for you. It learns how you talk. Remembers what you like, what you'd never say. Shows up with drafts. You tweak, schedule, done.

Built our own memory infra to make the voice learning work.

The memory part was the hard problem. Not just "tone: professional" dropdowns. Actually learning from how you write over time.
Still early. Using it for my own stuff.

Would love feedback.
dunsocial.com
by mapontosevenths | 2026-01-11 14:59:45+00:00
The sources they cite in that article aren't medical professionals. Simger is at least a scientist, but she's a sociologist with an opinion, and Silverman is just a writer with an opinion.

Lots of unqualified people claim lots of things, that doesnt mean you ignore the actual doctors when it comes to medicine and ASD is literally defined as a disorder. You can not be diagnosed with it without some negative impact to your life.

They do also quote a few qualified doctors but the doctors use the word "disability" an awful lot and make no such claims.

Even then, the two folks that do argue for the "social model" of disability are still not arguing that it isnt a disability, they essentially just claim it would be nicer for people if we pretend it isn't - then they go on to to talk about how even among the autistic without learning disabilities the suicide rates are 9 times higher. They cite that as proof that its society making it worse, I see it as proof that autism isn't freaking good for you any more than depression is. Humans are social animals and social diseases are still diseases. More to the point, some of us wear helmets and spend 12 hours a day in a ball rocking back and forth. Thats not "societies problem".

The whole thing reminds me of when I was diagnosed and my neuropsych asked me if I wanted it to be included in my file. He explained that many/most of his very high functioning clients preferred it not be in their medical record, as they didn't want the stigma.

I honestly think we are still under-reporting the numbers for the high functioning, and its largely because some people are too scared to accept who/what they are. IMO those people need to face reality, not ask society to play pretend. The actual name of the diagnosis includes the word "disorder" and you literally cant have autism if you dont have problems.

Pretending that you are fine and it s just a personality trait is counterproductive, but if it helps you sleep at night go for it, I guess. Just be careful. Pretending like all your problems are societies fault won't actually change who you are or reduce your symptoms.
by burnerToBetOut | 2026-01-11 15:00:05+00:00
Stuff like…

• Daily standups where coworkers' status updates are ten minutes long

• Bug tickets with nothing but "Thing X doesn't work" as their only description

• Insecure coworkers whose level of self-esteem seems to depend on how big of a douche they can be

• The tendency for so many organization's codebases to be low-quality, technical debt-ridden, big balls of mud

• …

Stuff like that makes ask myself the question, "Isn't life too short to have to deal with this for ANY amount of money?"