MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ps | 2026-01-07 14:37:06+00:00
OK, I am gonna be the guy and put my skin in the game here. I kind of get the hype, but the experience with e.g. Claude Code (or Github Copilot previously and others as weel) has so far been pretty unreliable.

I have Django project with 50 kLOC and it is pretty capable of understanding the architecture, style of coding, naming of variables, functions etc. Sometimes it excels on tasks like "replicate this non-trivial functionality for this other model and update the UI appropriately" and leaves me stunned. Sometimes it solves for me tedious and labourous "replace this markdown editor with something modern, allowing fullscreen edits of content" and does annoying mistake that only visual control shows and is not capable to fix it after 5 prompts. I feel as I am becoming tester more than a developer and I do not like the shift. Especially when I do not like to tell someone he did an obvious mistake and should fix it - it seems I do not care if it is human or AI, I just do not like incompetence I guess.

Yesterday I had to add some parameters to very simple Falcon project and found out it has not been updated for several months and won't build due to some pip issues with pymssql. OK, this is really marginal sub-project so I said - let's migrate it to uv and let's not get hands dirty and let the Claude do it. He did splendidly but in the Dockerfile he missed the "COPY server.py /data/" while I asked him to change the path... Build failed, I updated the path myself and moved on.

And then you listen to very smart guys like Karpathy who rave about Tab, Tab, Tab, while not understanding the language or anything about the code they write. Am I getting this wrong?

I am really far far away from letting agents touch my infrastructure via SSH, access managed databases with full access privileges etc. and dread the day one of my silly customers asks me to give their agent permission to managed services. One might say the liability should then be shifted, but at the end of the day, humans will have to deal with the damage done.

My customer who uses all the codebase I am mentioning here asked me, if there is a way to provide "some AI" with item GTINs and let it generate photos, descriptions, etc. including metadata they handcrafted and extracted for years from various sources. While it looks like nice idea and for them the possibility of decreasing the staff count, I caught the feeling they do not care about the data quality anymore or do not understand the problems the are brining upon them due to errors nobody will catch until it is too late.

TL;DR: I am using Opus 4.5, it helps a lot, I have to keep being (very) cautious. Wake up call 2026? Rather like waking up from hallucination.
by godzillabrennus | 2026-01-07 14:37:47+00:00
I expect you see the world this way because you are a software developer. People who know how to sell and understand the problems to solve do not routinely understand how to build software to solve those problems so they can sell them to customers. Now that the bar for building software is lowering, the world of building a startup is changing. A relatively newcomer to software is able to ship a medium complexity vibe-coded app to a few test customers and kick off revenues.
by saalweachter | 2026-01-07 14:37:52+00:00
There's also the concept of a story stick.

When working on a project where you need a bunch of things to be the same, you take a stick and mark on it at various points the dimensions you're using -- when working on a house, it might be things like the heights of outlet boxes and switches, the width and height of rough opening for doors, the height of window sills, etc etc.

Then, you just use the stick as the reference, using the marking for outlets to position all of the outlets instead of measuring the height of the floor in inches or millimeters or cubits or whatever each time. It's kind of like a measuring jig.

("Measure once, cut twice" is a superior methodology which has been unfairly maligned for generations.)
by tsazan | 2026-01-07 14:38:19+00:00
OP here.

I took the unofficial IKEA US dataset (originally scraped by jeffreyszhou) and converted all 30,511 products into a flat, markdown-like protocol called CommerceTXT.

The goal: See if a flatter structure is more efficient for LLM context windows.

The results:
- Size: 30k products across 632 categories.
- Efficiency: The text version uses ~24% fewer tokens (3.6M saved total) compared to the equivalent minified JSON.
- Structure: Files are organized in folders (e.g. /products/category/), which helps with testing hierarchical retrieval routers.

The link goes to the dataset on Hugging Face which has the full benchmarks.

Parser code is here: https://github.com/commercetxt/commercetxt

Happy to answer questions about the conversion logic!
by recursivedoubts | 2026-01-07 14:38:24+00:00
depends where the complexity is

many enterprise applications are "wide" complex (that is, lots of screens, but relatively simple individually) where the complexity can mainly live server side in the domain model, and hypermedia is great for these

hypermedia isn't always as good for "deep" complex apps, with complicated individual screens, because server round trips are often unacceptable from a latency perspective for them, here client-side scripting of some sort is a better solution. You can use islands for this situation to mix the two models.

See https://htmx.org/essays/does-hypermedia-scale/
by ugamarkj | 2026-01-07 14:38:25+00:00
Interesting article and I've enjoyed reading all the comments. The focus on Postgres is fascinating to me. From an analytics database perspective, we've had great success with Exasol, which isn't so well known in the US. It is very low overhead (no index management) and extremely fast and scalable. They have a free version as well as a licensed MPP version -- cloud hosted or on-prem. It is a blank slate, but it can do all the things.
by NotGMan | 2026-01-07 14:39:25+00:00
From my experience in my country scooters are the problem, not bikes.

I have never needed to be watchful of a guy on a bike going fast by me, people on bikes don't go that fast in pedestrian zones.

But damn those people on scooters... Many go so insanely fast that I wouldn't mind a scooter ban in pedestrian areas.

Whenever I hear one behind me I always take care to move in straight line as I'm afraid if I move to the side the idiot will crash into me.
by VikingCoder | 2026-01-07 14:39:38+00:00
FIYNTBOM

Financial Independence, You're Not The Boss Of Me.

Once you're financially independent, at a level that you're comfortable with, you don't have to put up with crappy bosses.

If you're Sergey Brin, you kind of don't really have a boss, do you?

If you "retire" into working at a hardware store, or volunteering at the Humane Society, or just shifting into a lower-stress job...

Well, that's the dream, isn't it?

I was so happy when I realized that, unless there were dramatic shifts in the markets, I would always be able to find "decent" work for great wages. And maybe I could be patient and find "good" work for "pretty great" wages.

Once I had that level of comfort, I was way, way more brave at work. I thought, "Well, they could fire me for their own reasons, any day. So, I might as well do The Right Thing™. If they fire me for doing The Right Thing™, well, I didn't really want to work there anyway, did I?"

And then there were dramatic shifts in the markets, lol. But fortunately for me, I had built up a nest egg, and now I've shifted into a lower-stress job.

I honestly don't know what advice I'd give to younger folks. Move to Norway?
by __MatrixMan__ | 2026-01-07 14:40:33+00:00
I hadn't heard of that before, but I just looked it up and... Sorta.

Roko's basilosk, it seems, knows we exist. This is like an infection which spreads by sneezing, but which doesn't actually understand what a sneeze is. It has found a way to balance its behavior such that its propagation continues, but it's not necessarily intelligence.

Roko's pox, perhaps.
by bayindirh | 2026-01-07 14:40:59+00:00
>> Self-driving cars don't use LLMs, so I don't know how any rational analysis can claim that the analogy is valid.

Doesn't matter, because if we're talking about AI models, no (type of) model reaches 100% linearly, or 100% ever. For example, recognition models run with probabilities. Like Tesla's Autopilot (TM), which loves to hit rolled-over vehicles because it has not seen enough vehicle underbodies to classify it.

Same for scientific classification models. They emit probabilities, not certain results.

>> Sure, but the question is not "how long does it take for LLMs to get to 100%"

I never claimed that a model needs to reach a proverbial 100%.

>> The question is, how long does it take for them to become as good as, or better than, humans.

They can be better than humans for certain tasks. They are actually better than humans in some tasks since 70s, but we like to disregard them to romanticize current improvements, but I don't believe current or any generation of AIs can be better than humans in anything and everything, at once.

Remember: No machine can construct something more complex than itself.

>> And that threshold happens way before 100%.

Yes, and I consider that "treshold" as "complete", if they can ever reach it for certain tasks, not "any" task.
by thebytefairy | 2026-01-07 14:42:00+00:00
I think a simpler explanation the some of the others is.. why care? Phones these days, even cheaper ones, have oodles of GB available. They're not losing customers from the size. And I don't think making it smaller is going to draw in new gmail/workspace customers. So why spend time on it when there are tons of new features or active bugs that could be fixed instead?
by sjw987 | 2026-01-07 14:42:35+00:00
My Enduro 2 lasts around that long, with about 1.5-2 hours of daily GPS tracking for running, part of 4 hours total exercise tracking per day, and underlying background fitness data collection (HR, respiration, temperature etc. including sleep).

As I write, it's at 37% with 6 days left of charge. And it charges 0 to 100% in around 2 hours.

I used to use a fancy Movado / Android Wear watch that without word of a lie could die before 8pm on almost minimal use. It was an absolutely redundant item to own.
by krapp | 2026-01-07 14:42:36+00:00
Individualism is just a polite word for selfishness and a lack of empathy, and it's at the root of many of America's cultural and political problems. We're supposed to be a nation, not 300 million cowboys suffering the indignity of one another's trespass. We can't even fix our basic infrastructure because no one wants to spend their taxes on anything that benefits anyone but themselves. We can't have decent healthcare because it would be "socialist." But we'll shoot each other in the streets because nothing projects individual power more than a man with a loaded gun.
by ramses0 | 2026-01-07 14:42:54+00:00
My time to shine! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45902088

References were Racket with the Racklog library¹. There's also Datalog² and MiniKanren, picat, flix. There were tons of good comments there which you should check out, but PySwip seemed like "the right thing" when I was looking at it: https://github.com/yuce/pyswip/

...documentation is extremely sparse, and assumes you already know prolog, but here's a slightly better example of kindof the utility of it:

https://eugeneasahara.com/2024/08/12/playing-with-prolog-pro...

...ie:

# ya don't really care how this works
prolog.consult("diabetes_risk.pl")

# ...but you can query into it!
query = "at_risk_for_diabetes(Person)"
results = list(prolog.query(query))

...the point being there's sometimes some sort of "logic calculation that you wish could be some sort of regex", and I always think of prolog as "regexes for logic".

One time I wished I could use prolog was trying to figure the best match between video file, format, bitrate, browser, playback plugin... or if you've seen https://pcpartpicker.com/list/ ...being able to "just" encode all the constraints, and say something like:

valid_config = consult("rules.pl")
+ consult("parts_data.pl")
+ python.choice_so_far(...)

rules.pl: only_one_cpu, total_watts < power_supply(watts)
parts_data.pl: cpu_xyz: ...; power_supply_abc: watts=1000
choices: cpu(xyz), power_supply(abc), ...

...this is a terribly syntactically incorrect example, but you could imagine that this would be horrific code to maintain in python (and sqrt(horrific) to maintain in prolog), but _that's_ the benefit! You can take a well-defined portion and kindof sqrt(...) the maintenance cost, at the expense of 1.5x'ing the number of programming languages you need to expect people to know.
by bitexploder | 2026-01-07 14:42:56+00:00
Anecdote, but some of the time when I am blasted after a day of thinking for my job all day a design session randomly throwing shit at an LLM hits the spot. I usually make some meaningful progress on a pet project. I rarely let the LLM do much pure vibe coding. I iterate with several LLMs until it looks and feels right and then hack on it myself or let the LLM do drudgery like refactoring or boilerplate to get me over the humps. In that sense I do strongly agree.
by mikedelago | 2026-01-07 14:42:57+00:00
I've shipped multiple projects running HTMX, and I generally like it.

Grain of salt too, I'm typically a "DevOps engineer", and I generally lean towards backend development. What I mean to say is that I don't know react and I don't want to.

My understanding of it is that HTMX is a library, whereas React is a framework. With a library, you need to figure out the structure yourself, and that sometimes makes things more difficult since it's another responsibility. This is likely where things fail for the large enterprise apps _not_ using a framework, since structuring the codebase for an enterprise application (and convincing your colleagues to like it) is genuinely difficult and there's no way around that.

> as some people have suggested - perhaps cynically - a simple lightweight replacement of jQuery?

I don't even see this as cynical, I think it's a relatively fair assessment. A key difference is that jQuery has it's own language to learn, whereas htmx is pretty much a few extra html tag attributes.

I'd recommend you just try HTMX out when you have an opportunity to write something small and full stack, you might like it a lot.
by DrScientist | 2026-01-07 14:43:09+00:00
How do you implement point 3?

Doesn't that then require a centralised ( or a hierarchy of centralized ) authority to manage point 3?

Who would that be? ( each country issuing it's own citizens IDs? )

If the solution requires you to keep a private key private ( to prove who you are ) - how is the average person going to do that?

How are you going to build in your cryptography into all those different systems?

All you need is one link between that pseudonym and some identifying info - like IP address or a payment - and it's all gone, and you've already built a perfect system for government tracking.

So even if you have built all that successfully I'd still suggest the world would split into sites that would use it and sites that wouldn't.
by gedy | 2026-01-07 14:43:14+00:00
I think that's comparing something different. I've seen the one-day vibe code UI tool things which are neat, but it feels like people miss the part that: if it's that easy now, it's not as valuable as it was in the past.

If you can sell it in the meantime, go for it and good for you, but it doesn't feel like that business model will stay around if anyone can prompt it themselves.
Show HN: Can you hit replacement? A fertility SIM with cited sources
by joshuafkon | 2026-01-07 14:44:03+00:00
America's TFR is 1.67. I wanted to understand what it would actually take to get back to replacement (2.1), so I built a simulator where you can stack policies and see the projected effects.
Every policy has cited effect sizes (Cohen, Milligan, Raute, etc.) with confidence levels. You can click any policy title to see the methodology and sources. The model includes:

Fiscal tracking (policy costs, deficit impact, GDP effects)
Diminishing returns when stacking similar interventions
Immigration with selection mechanisms and generational convergence
Tax increases and entitlement reform as funding options (with growth drag)
A few "illiberal" policies for analytical completeness

The honest answer seems to be: it's really hard. Most realistic packages get you to ~1.9-2.0 at enormous cost, and that's assuming the effect estimates transfer to the US context (they might not).
Built with vanilla JS. Feedback welcome - especially on the methodology or effect estimates I got wrong.
by raldu | 2026-01-07 14:44:36+00:00
This is a critique of the VC ecosystem based on a dichotomy of "inflated" versus "fundamental" value, with a CTA to hackers to "do something about it."

Here's one that better suits the title:

"Pricing Money: A beginner's guide to money, bonds, futures and swaps" (866 points)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36358754
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-01-07 14:45:27+00:00
Reviewing PRs should be for junior engineers, architectural changes, brand new code, or broken tests. You should not review every PR; if you do, you're only doing it out of habit, not because it's necessary.

PRs come originally from the idea that there's an outsider trying to merge code into somebody's open source project, and the Benevolent Dictator wants to make sure it's done right. If you work on a corporate SWEng team, this is a completely different paradigm. You should trust your team members to write good-enough code, as long as conventions are followed, linters used, acceptance tests pass, etc.
by 3D30497420 | 2026-01-07 14:46:05+00:00
I'll second this. I'm making a fairly basic iOS/Swift app with an accompanying React-based site. I was able to vibe-code the React site (it isn't pretty, but it works and the code is fairly decent). But I've struggled to get the Swift code to be reliable.

Which makes sense. I'm sure there's lots of training data for React/HTML/CSS/etc. but much less with Swift, especially the newer versions.
by yndoendo | 2026-01-07 14:46:48+00:00
I cannot stand the Windows user experience in their command line. The Linux method actually has to software registries that allow for different content to be copied and pasted.

Oh I used CTRL+C to copy something but I need something copied first, highlight paste with middle mouse and paste with CTRL+P.

On Windows you must destroy the content of the CTRL+C and replace it with what the middle mouse can do, go back to the first source to copy and paste again.
Show HN: ElixirFeed – AI summaries of new PubMed research on longevity
by gosu94 | 2026-01-07 14:46:49+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m building ElixirFeed, a small web app that helps people follow health and longevity research without having to read full scientific papers.

The app:

- pulls in new articles from PubMed
- filters for topics like longevity, lifestyle, diet, exercise, and metabolic health
- uses an LLM to generate short, plain-language summaries, actionable takeaways, translations
- labels study types (RCT, review, preclinical)
- adds simple, editorial-style visual explanations
- lets users vote and discuss papers

The goal is not to give medical advice, but to make it easier to understand what the research actually says.

I’m especially interested in feedback on:
- whether AI summaries are useful or risky in this context
- how to signal uncertainty and evidence quality better
- whether the product is valuable enough to justify a small subscription

Link: https://elixirfeed.co

Happy to answer questions about the technical pipeline, data sources, or design choices.
by saalweachter | 2026-01-07 14:46:58+00:00
The creators of metric weren't above buggering it to fit human scale needs.

Take the length/weight relationship.

Definitionally, it'd be way more elegant for the unit of mass to be based on the unit of length directly, a cubic meter of something, but having your base unit of mass be a ton wasn't going to fly.

So they instead tried for 1/100th of the meter and landed on the gram, but it turns out they misjudged and now your standard unit of weight is the prefixed kilogram instead, because everyone used kilograms instead.

Which is to say, if you didn't get a pretty good paper size out of the definition used for A0, someone would have found a different definition which did produce a pretty good paper size, and then declare it was the only natural one.
by close04 | 2026-01-07 14:47:11+00:00
> If it's so easy to make an unrecoverable and catastrophic mistake, it's a tool that's too dangerous to use on the daily.

Shift+Del and rm -rf don't have any guardrails around them. In tech you are surrounded by footguns and bear traps. MS made it that much worse by wrapping these in dark patterns that may change without notice but the logic that "dangerous things should be prohibited" is a perfectly good way to end up living in an environment where someone else curates what you can and cannot do. For your protection of course.

A tool isn't dangerous because you can make an unrecoverable and catastrophic mistake (you can make one with a kitchen knife and we still use them every day). It's truly dangerous if it can and does act against your wishes, interests, and reasonable expectations.

The article is accompanied by a TikTok video I can't scrub through so I can't tell why it's not possible to go to OneDrive's recycle bin and recover the lost data.
by ammut | 2026-01-07 14:47:12+00:00
I've spent quite a bit of time with Codex recently and come to the conclusion that you can't simply say "Let's add custom video controls around ReactPlayer." You need to follow up with a set of strict requirements to set expectations, guard rails, and what the final product should do (and not do). Even then it may have a few issues, but continuing to prompt with clearly stated problems that don't meet the requirements (or you forgot to include) usually clears it up.

Code that would have taken me a week to write is done in about 10 minutes. It's likely on average better than what I could personally write as a novice-mid level programmer.
by Y_Y | 2026-01-07 14:47:43+00:00
> Feature I don't use must be removed! I unsupportedly claim that it is bad, and will zealously advocate for changing it. It's existed for a long time, but I shan't acknowlege why!

Why are people like this? Will Gnome reach apotheosis when they have removed all buttons and boxes and you just get a shiny rounded rectangle to admire?
by ecshafer | 2026-01-07 14:47:44+00:00
I just cant say enough how much I love HTMX. I got my feet wet doing hotwire/turbo in rails, and htmx is really just such a wonderful expansion of thise ideas. Making reactive app experiences on the web with a tiny js bundle and just writing html feels how web programming should be. I am writing a UI with Spring Boot + Thymleaf + HTMX and Alpine JS, and its the smoothest java based web dev experience ive had in so long. I can look at a page I write in HTMX, and I KNOW if I wrote that in react or angular or vue it would be 50x more complex.