MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by badsectoracula | 2026-01-26 20:58:01+00:00
I actually had someone like "Mike" in my most recent job (though he wasn't uncooperative, just didn't seem to care about writing proper code). He made some tool using AI and i took it over to clean it up and improve it, but he still worked on it too. He got occasionally annoyed when i suggested changes and sometimes i felt i was talking to ChatGPT (or whatever AI he used, i don't know) via a middleman. He didn't put any 1600 line PR (that i remember anyway) but he did add extra stuff to his PRs which were often related to other tasks and the code submitted was often much larger in "volume" than needed.

As an example there was a case where some buttons needed a special highlight based on some flag, something that could be done in 4-5 lines of code or so (this was in Unreal Engine, the UI is drawn each frame), but the PR was adding a value indicating if the button would need to be highlighted when the button was created and this value was passed around all over the place in the up to the point where the data that was used to create the UI with the buttons would be. And since the UI could change that flag, the code also recreated the UI whenever the flag changed. And because the UI had state such as scrolling, selected items, etc, whenever the UI was recreated, it saved the current state and restored it after it was recreated (together with adding storage for the state). Ultimately, it worked, but it was too much code for what it needed to do.

The kicker was that the modifications to pass around the value for the flag's state wasn't even necessary (even ignoring the fact that the flag could have been checked directly during drawing) because a struct with configuration settings was already passed through the same paths and the value could have been added to said struct. Not that it would have saved the need to save/restore the UI state though.
by bsimpson | 2026-01-26 20:58:30+00:00
I remember being a teenager and intentionally dialing down my ambitions, because it was socially uncomfortable to have people's perceptions of me be tied to the things I excelled in.

Figured I had my whole life to have a job, so didn't really wanna do a startup or anything like that. Watched all the Macworld et. al. keynotes and knew all the specs of all the devices, until I got tired of being pigeonholed as "the computer kid."
by qingcharles | 2026-01-26 20:58:44+00:00
I was on my first set of a Hollywood movie. Like, right in the middle of the set during filming (I had something to do with the IP). I was looking at the horribly janky set design, and the lighting looked awful. I guess the director saw me scowling. He called me over, "Come see what I'm seeing!" This was when RED cameras had just come out. I went over and looked at his monitor. I didn't say another word. It looked like a $10m movie. Amazing what a good crew can do.

If you want to see how really crap a lot of production materials are, go take a tour of say the Universal prop warehouse and see real movie props up close. Especially before the days of 3D printing. Props from the 70s, 80s are all just drainpipes and duct tape and lots of spray paint.
by behnamoh | 2026-01-26 20:58:52+00:00
I wonder if the era of dynamic programming languages is over. Python/JS/Ruby/etc. were good tradeoffs when developer time mattered. But now that most code is written by LLMs, it's as "hard" for the LLM to write Python as it is to write Rust/Go (assuming enough training data on the language ofc; LLMs still can't write Gleam/Janet/CommonLisp/etc.).

Esp. with Go's quick compile time, I can see myself using it more and more even in my one-off scripts that would have used Python/Bash otherwise. Plus, I get a binary that I can port to other systems w/o problem.

Compiled is back?
by jefftk | 2026-01-26 20:59:08+00:00
I agree we're talking past each other somewhat, but it really feels to me like you're missing the point. Here's the convo:

mg: This is a great example of how useful the File System Access API is ...

auggierose: the API is not supported (yet?) either by Safari or Firefox

you: describes the current situation with cross-browser file input support, says it's a "developer education problem"

me: this specific use case really does need the full API

It read to me, and still does read to me, like you were saying that Kinlan's use of FSA was hubris.
by tgtweak | 2026-01-26 20:59:21+00:00
I think it's impressive for what it is: this level of complexity being reached by an ai-only workflow. Previously, anything of modest complexity required a lot of human guidance - and even with that had some serious shortcomings and crutches. If you extrapolate that the models themselves, the frameworks for inter-model workflows, the tooling available to the models and the hardware running them are all accelerating - it's not hard to envision where this will get to, and that this is a notable achievement particlarly when comparing with the amount of effort and resources put into what we currently see in a browser engine: many decades and countless millions of man-hours.

Fully agree that the original authors made some unsubstantiated and unqualified claims about what was done - which is sad, because it was still a huge accomplishment as i see it.
by candiddevmike | 2026-01-26 20:59:26+00:00
Seems like everyone is trying to get ahead of tool calling moving people "off platform" and creating differentiators around what tools are available "locally" to the models etc. This also takes the wind out of the sandboxing folks, as it probably won't be long before the "local" tool calling can effectively do anything you'd need to do on your local machine.

I wonder when they'll start offering virtual, persistent dev environments...
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-01-26 20:59:35+00:00
My experience is that Claude or others are good at pointing out things I will want to look at and then I can go review more thoroughly. So it's helped to some degree.

But like everything else with it, it tries to do too much.

What I want is a review "wizard" agent -- something that identifies the pieces I should look at, and takes me through them diff by diff asking me to read them, while offering its commentary ("this appears to be XX....") and letting me make my own.
by rjh29 | 2026-01-26 21:00:00+00:00
I read your post, it's confusing. You talk about needing a machine that Linux is guaranteed to work with - no driver config. That means you need custom hardware. But now you're talking about software? Then you throw in random stuff that only you specifically want (keychain, clipboard, no AI) and say that your specific needs represent a "gaping wide space" in the market.

As other posters have said if you want "just works" / MacOS model then you can already buy a thinkpad or system76. I mean this is literally Ubuntu's business model for the last 20 years, "just works" with minimal configuration.
by kube-system | 2026-01-26 21:00:25+00:00
I'm sure idiots do this but it's a pretty high risk way to try to track someone. IME the tracking notifications are timely enough that you're going to have a good idea where they came from. Actual GPS trackers are cheap on Amazon, have better accuracy, and don't notify people they exist -- they just don't have the public's mindshare nearly as much.
by sublinear | 2026-01-26 21:00:30+00:00
I'm confused by what you mean.

I don't think I'm unique for putting miscellaneous stuff like this on a credit card, and not even necessarily the one my bank offers. Not to hide the transaction, but because charging to debit/checking would make tracking my monthly expenses less straightforward. Payments online are also safer on credit in case a chargeback is required.
by waffleiron | 2026-01-26 21:00:40+00:00
Why is it not that interesting? Especially when you see big tech align themselves with whomever is in power at the time?

To me as a non American, it’s an absolute cope to argue that its okay when its not due to law when the effect is the same.

It’s like someone in China arguing the censorship isn’t interesting because you and download the non-guardrailed weights.

Both absolutely post-hoc justifications why one type of censorship is better than the other.
by trymas | 2026-01-26 21:00:49+00:00
> Before: US: "please increase military spending" EU: "no"

What this meant between the lines for 60+ years is “please increase military spending on US overpriced weapons that we gonna sell you, weapons will be degraded versions of native counterparts and don’t think about making your own independent military industry. Oh by the way bring those weapons when we will do 20 years of failed occupation in Middle East, because we are the only country in NATO that triggered article 5 and bunch of Euros died for nothing. Because that’s the deal, we protect you, for the economic price of helping our imperial hegemony since 1940s stay at the top, but suddenly we decided this is a bad deal after all.”
by dimatura | 2026-01-26 21:00:55+00:00
This is neat! It's a bit amusing in that I worked on a somewhat similar project for my phd thesis almost 10 years ago, although in that case we got it working on a real drone (heavily customized, based on DJI matrice) in the field, with only onboard compute. Back then it was just a fairly lightweight CNN for the perception, not that we could've gotten much more out of the jetson TX2.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-26 21:01:08+00:00
Let my try another angle.

If someone else in the "exact same circumstances and starting conditions" implies they're identical down to every single molecule, how is that someone else?

If they're not identical at that level, they wouldn't make the same decisions. Put two almost-perfect clones into two exact copies of the world and a week later they'll be on diverging paths.

So if the argument is not to judge anyone as a person because everyone would act the same if they had the exact same life circumstances and environment, and everything that affects their decisions fits into life circumstances and environment, what else is left that it would be unfair to judge?
by Avalaxy | 2026-01-26 21:02:01+00:00
Does anyone here still have television? Ever since I moved out of my parents house (15 years ago), I never had a TV subscription. I did own a TV screen, but only to run apps like Netflix and Youtube. I'd rather have a simple monitor without the TV options to do so, but strangely that never existed or was too expensive.

Edit: to make it clear, I absolutely did not miss having TV for even a second in all of those years.
by nabbed | 2026-01-26 21:02:11+00:00
"I just enjoy not trying to always be well curated, or careful with every detail of my life."

I agree with the author. I like to keep my tastes somewhat "peasant" so that I never have to fuss to enjoy my coffee (or food, etc.). I love watching James Hoffmann videos, but the number of steps he needs to take to make a simple cup of coffee would probably negate any extra joy from the improved flavor.
I built a tool to help recruiters decide who is good enough to send to clients
by marstay | 2026-01-26 21:02:21+00:00
I’m a software engineer who spent the last months talking to recruiters and agencies.

What surprised me:
The hard part isn’t parsing CVs or extracting skills.
It’s deciding who is “good enough” to put in front of a client when you have 30–50 CVs.

Most ATSs stop at keyword matching.
Recruiters still end up manually reading and justifying shortlists.

So I built a small tool that:
- Takes a job description
- Scores candidates against it
- Produces a client-ready shortlist with reasoning

This is a real demo (no signup, no paywall):
https://shortlisthq.online/demo

I’m not sure yet if this becomes a real business or just a useful experiment.
I’d love honest feedback from people who’ve built tools for hiring, recruiting, or decision support.
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-26 21:02:24+00:00
Other places can only afford universal healthcare to begin with because their healthcare sector is not nearly as corrupt or shackled by a huge amount of government regulation that was only put in place here for self-serving reasons. It's not about the model of provision, it's about whether the sector itself is sustainable. U.S. healthcare is doomed by its vast spiraling costs even after controlling for its supposedly higher quality.
by varispeed | 2026-01-26 21:03:03+00:00
This is a good start. I write prompts as if I was instructing junior developer to do stuff I need. I make it as detailed and clear as I can.

I actually don't like _writing_ code, but enjoy reading it. So sessions with LLM are very entertaining, especially when I want to push boundaries (I am not liking this, the code seems a little bit bloated. I am sure you could simplify X and Y. Also think of any alternative way that you reckon will be more performant that maybe I don't know about). Etc.

This doesn't save me time, but makes work so much more enjoyable.
by guywithahat | 2026-01-26 21:03:09+00:00
Did he argue SF likes graffiti? I don't think he does, and the people living in the city certainly don't. These are criminals tagging buildings, and city officials who either don't care or are too busy with other things. I'm not aware of anyone who actually lives there who likes graffiti, and logically there's no reason anyone should. If someone wanted a mural they would have hired a real artist to do it.
by 0PingWithJesus | 2026-01-26 21:04:05+00:00
Reminds me of Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" (1985), in which he argues that TV as a medium is fundamentally incapable of producing anything other than entertainment. So things like news, political discussion, or any other type of educational programming can only exist on TV as a nutrition-less pantomime of the real thing.
by 0o_MrPatrick_o0 | 2026-01-26 21:04:05+00:00
Hey man- sorry for the lack of recognition. Timing is a bit of luck. Good writeup!

w/r/t .git being mounted read write- yeah, there's risk here. It's a tradeoff. I want my agents to be able to commit code- which means they need to be able to write to the dir.

Thanks for the --new-session parameter suggestion. Great add!
by xracy | 2026-01-26 21:04:26+00:00
Medical advice from videos is frequently of the "unhelpful" variety where people recommend home cures that work for some things for absolutely everything.

Also people are really partial to "one quick trick" type solutions without any evidence (or with low barrier to entry) in order to avoid a more difficult procedure that is more proven, but nasty or risky in some way.

For example, if you had cancer would you rather take:

"Ivermectin" which many people say anecdotally cured their cancer, and is generally proven to be harmless to most people (side-effects are minimal)

OR

"Chemotherapy" Which everyone who has taken agrees is nasty, is medically proven to fix Cancer in most cases, but also causes lots of bad side-effects because it's trying to kill your cancer faster than the rest of you.

One of these things actually cures cancer, but who wouldn't be interested in an alternative "miracle cure" that medical journals will tell you does "nothing to solve your problem", but plenty of snake oil salesman on the internet will tell you is a "miracle cure".

[Source] Hank green has a video about why these kinds of medicines are particularly enticing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC9glJa1-c0
by sethammons | 2026-01-26 21:04:26+00:00
> Well at least be honest that these things are organized professionally and funded with tens of millions of dollars

source? best I see from the linked fox news article is less than $8M. Note, we have customers sending marketing email and sms spending more than this and they are not getting the same attention No Kings did.

> though Soros' foundations have awarded grants to Indivisible every year since the organization's conception in 2017. In total, the Open Society Foundations have awarded $7.61 million in grants to the group behind the "No Kings" protest [1]

1: this is the direct source that the abc article was referencing: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/soros-foundation-helping-fu...
by torginus | 2026-01-26 21:04:35+00:00
What counts and what not? I'm sure the US has killed a lot more who could be reasonably considered civilians, deliberately in the same time frame, even if they were not US citizens. Sure it was not the current admin, but one of the 2 major parties were in charge. If we only count the same people, pretty likely all the bigwigs who were responsible in China back then are no longer in power.
by BryantD | 2026-01-26 21:04:38+00:00
If you're a cinema person, I strongly recommend Agnes Varda's documentary on LA street art at the end of the 1970s, Mur Murs. (That's a pun: murals as an expression of the murmurs of the community.) It takes graffiti as an expression of ownership as the central thesis and I found it really lovely. Thanks for this comment.
by SapporoChris | 2026-01-26 21:04:38+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaura...
"Liebeck's attorneys argued that, at 180–190 °F (82–88 °C), McDonald's coffee was defective, and more likely to cause serious injury than coffee served at any other establishment"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee#Preparing_the_beverage
"Optimal coffee extraction occurs between 91 and 96 °C (196 and 205 °F).Ideal holding temperatures range from 85 to 88 °C (185 to 190 °F) to as high as 93 °C (199 °F), and the ideal serving temperature is 68 to 79 °C (154 to 174 °F).

I'm aware of the injuries she incurred. I think it is frivolous because hot temperatures are simply part of the nature of coffee. McDonalds did not select the vehicle with out cup holders for Stella. McDonalds did not select the sweatpants that Stella chose to wear. McDonalds didn't spill the coffee in her lap. Lastly, even non-coffee drinkers are aware that coffee is hot.
by lotsofpulp | 2026-01-26 21:04:53+00:00
> Or you could have universal healthcare.

No, they could not have, based on the voting records of the previous 30 years of the federal US Congress. Even what they have passed only by the skin on their teeth.

The only federal wealth redistribution policy in the US in my lifetime of almost 4 decades only had a 6 month window of passing in 2009. And half the population still hates it, and has worked and succeeded at gutting major parts of it.
by 2001zhaozhao | 2026-01-26 21:05:29+00:00
I think the solution in harder-to-verify cases is to provide AI (sub-)agents a really good set of instructions on a detailed set of guidelines of what it should do and in what ways it should think and explore and break down problems. Potentially tens of thousands of words of instructions to get the LLM to act as a competent employee in the field. Then the models need to be good enough at instruction-following to actually explore the problem in the right way and apply basic intelligence to solve it. Basically treating the LLM as a competent general knowledge worker that is unfamiliar with the specific field, and giving it detailed instructions on how to succeed in this field.

For the easy-to-verify fields like coding, you can train "domain intuitions" directly to the LLM (and some of this training should generalize to other knowledge work abilities), but for other fields you would need to supply them in the prompt as the abilities cannot be trained into the LLM directly. This will need better models but might become doable in a few generations.
by spankalee | 2026-01-26 21:05:58+00:00
I think this view is really short-sighted. Low-code tools date back to the '80s, and the more likely outcome here is that low-code and agentic tools simply merge.

There's a lot of value in having direct manipulation and visual introspection of UIs, data, and logic. Those things allow less technical people to understand what the agents are creating, and ask for help with more specific areas.

The difficulty in the past has been 1) the amount of work it takes to build good direct manipulation tools - the level of detail you need to get to is overwhelming for most teams attempting it - but LLMs themselves make this a lot easier to build, and 2) what to do when users hit the inevitable gaps in your visual system. Now LLMs fill these gaps pretty spectacularly.
by mikkupikku | 2026-01-26 21:06:23+00:00
> That's mostly accurate too, especially the "it kind of works" bit. You can take exception to "from-scratch" claim if you like. It's a tweet, the lack of nuance isn't particularly surprising.

> In the overall genre of CEO's over-hyping their company's achievements this is a pretty weak example

I kind of agree, but kind of not. The tweet isn't too bad when read from an experienced engineer perspective, but if we're being real then the target audience was probably meant to be technically clueless investors who don't and can't understand the nuance.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-26 21:06:42+00:00
> By "dishonest" I'm saying they become measurements of time, which is what we were trying to avoid.

On the one hand, they simply can't. They're a measurement of effort, and a junior dev will take more time to finish a story than a senior dev will. On the other hand, at the sprint velocity level, yes of course they're supposed to be equivalent to time, in the sense that they're what the team expects to be able to accomplish in the length of a sprint. That's not dishonest, that's the purpose.

> The practice I see work well is that a senior person comes up with a high level plan fror a project with confidence intervals on timeline and quality and has it sanity checked by peers... I just don't see what points do for me other than attempt to "measure velocity".

Right, so what happens with what you describe is that you're skipping the "wisdom of the crowds" part, estimation is done too quickly and not in enough depth, and you wind up significantly underestimating, and management keeps pushing the senior person to reduce they're estimates because there's no process behind them, and planning suffers because you're trying to order the backlog based on wishful thinking rather than good information.

What points estimation does is provide a process that aims to increase accuracy which can be used for better planning, in order to deliver the highest-priority features faster, and not waste time on longer features that go off track where nobody notices for weeks. Management can say, "can't they do it faster?", and you can explain, "we have a process for estimation and this is it." It's not any single employee's opinion, it's a process. This is huge.

> but the moment they treat it as a target engineers juice their numbers.

How? Management doesn't care about points delivered, they care about features delivered. There's nothing to "juice". Points are internal to a team, and used with stakeholders to measure the expected relative size of tasks, so tasks can be reprioritized. I've never seen sprint velocity turn into some kind of management target, it doesn't even make sense. I mean, I'm sure there's some dumb management out there that's tried it. But what you're describing isn't my experience even remotely.
by varispeed | 2026-01-26 21:07:33+00:00
"Here are login details to my hosting and billing provider. Create me a SaaS app where customers could rent virtual pets. Ensure it's AI and blockchain and looks inviting and employ addictive UX. I've attached company details for T&C and stuff. Ensure I start earning serious money by next week. I'll bump my subscription then if you deliver, and if not I will delete my account. Go!"
by dyauspitr | 2026-01-26 21:07:43+00:00
Okay then that’s the new normal. Build out more generation. Do what China is doing with literally 100% redundancy from the baseload. Data centers are also not decentralized like you’re saying, the vast majority of these are large facilities that take significant time and resources to build.

Around 50 were built last year and between 80-100 are under construction right now, not 700 overnight. With about 6 GW consumption or about 24 GW of solar if you consider 25% operation time. The US installs about 30 GW of solar per year currently so you can offset that pretty easily with just one year of just solar power buildout. We need to step up our game- China is building out 300 GW of solar every year.