MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sosodev | 2026-01-07 16:35:38+00:00
The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such thing.

While I understand that this has been difficult for him and his company... hasn't it been obvious that this would be a major issue for years?

I do worry about what this means for the future of open source software. We've long relied on value adds in the form of managed hosting, high-quality collections, and educational content. I think the unfortunate truth is that LLMs are making all of that far less valuable. I think the even more unfortunate truth is that value adds were never a good solution to begin with. The reality is that we need everyone to agree that open source software is valuable and worth supporting monetarily without any value beyond the continued maintenance of the code.
by postexitus | 2026-01-07 16:35:42+00:00
Tangentially related, but I enjoyed reading "The Most Human Human" by Brian Christian - granted it's written in a pre-LLM world, it's still very much relevant.

The book is following the annual Turing Test competition, in which, humans are chatting with AIs or real humans without knowing which is which and give them a score out of 10 for being most human and the AI that is "the most human" wins the competition. The twist is, not all humans get 10/10 for being human either - so the human that's the most human also wins a prize.
by mrguyorama | 2026-01-07 16:36:07+00:00
>This was always the inevitable result of shareholder capitalism.

Just capitalism. There's no actual or necessary distinction about what shape that capitalism takes.

A system where getting more money means you have more opportunity to generate more money by itself has all the feedback loop you need to consolidate over time, generate monopolies, and end up here.

Competition just doesn't happen in a free market. Actually competing, and trying to win marketshare or mindshare that way is too expensive, as there are much simpler and cheaper ways to impact a market.

Competition requires a fair market. This was fully understood by both Roosevelt trust busters, and both Teddy and FDR made big talk about "I'm not trying to kill business, I just want them to compete because that's such a force multiplier".

It doesn't take a socialist revolution. All it takes is like a gentle sprinkling of welfare and a fair and competitive market.

Granted, we have a lot of work to make the current market competitive. We've allowed so much consolidation that we would probably have to actively break up companies, we would have to nullify lots of contracts and IP rights and reduce the power a EULA can hold over you. Interoperability is necessary for competitive markets so we would have to roll back the DMCA anti-circumvention language. Improved customer rights would also help.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2026-01-07 16:36:20+00:00
Radicale - https://github.com/Kozea/Radicale

I picked it because it's in a language I know (Python) and free and copyleft. These days I don't contribute to anything unless it's copyleft.

No idea if it supports family calendar, I need to look into that as well at some point.
by krapp | 2026-01-07 16:36:21+00:00
In any sane world Donald Trump's political career would have ended as soon as the words "grab them by the pussy" became public.

But we don't live in a sane world. We live in a world where having a weird scream or creepy looking smile or being a bit awkward will end your political career but bragging about being able to get away with sexual assault because of your wealth on tape just makes you more endearing.
by weitendorf | 2026-01-07 16:36:27+00:00
Anecdotally I think you're right that the more skilled you are at something, the less utility there is for something that quickly but incompletely takes you from 0 to 90%

But I would generally be skeptical of anybody who claims that all their work is better off starting from 0, the same way I'd be skeptical of someone who claims to not use or need to make google searches about docs/terms/issues as they work.

I'll give you an example of something I understand decently well but get a lot of use out of AI for: bash scripts and unit testing. These are not my core work but they are a large chunk of my work. Without LLMs I would just not write a lot of bash scripts because I found myself constantly looking things up and spending more time than expected getting the script to work across environments / ironing out bugs - I would only write absolutely essential scripts, and generally they'd not be polished enough to check in and share with the team, and just live on my computer in some random location. Now with LLMs I can essentially script in english and get very good bash scripts, so I write a lot more of them and it's easier for me to get them into an acceptable state worth sharing with my team.

Similarly, I really like Golang table tests but hate writing all the cases out and dealing with all the symbols/formatting. Now I can just describe all the different permutations I want and get something that I can lightly edit into being good enough.

I've also found that with domains I am knowledgable enough about, that can translate into being better at going from ~70% to 95% with AI too. In those cases I am not necessarily using AI the same way as someone trying to go from 0->90%: usually they're describing the outcome/goals/features they want relatively informally without knowledge of the known-unknowns and gotchas involved in implementing that. With more knowledge you can prompt LLMs with more implementation/design details and requirements, and course correct away from bad approaches much faster than someone who doesn't know the shape of what they're trying to do. That still comes in handy a lot of the time.

Think about how much time you can save by feeding an API spec/docs into an LLM, telling it create a Go struct for JSON (de)serialization of some monstrous interface like https://docs.cloud.google.com/compute/docs/reference/rest/v1...? Or how much easier it is to upgrade across breaking versions of a language/library when you can just bump the version, note all the places where the old code broke, and have an LLM with an upgrade guide/changelog do all the drudgery of fixing each of the 200 callsites you need to migrate to the next version.
by bachmeier | 2026-01-07 16:36:27+00:00
This topic has been beaten to death, but the defenders of the toxic environment (including the SO founders) have never understood why the environment they promoted killed SO.

It's not because people disliked the rudeness, though that didn't help and was never necessary. It's because the toxicity became the only goal. And the toxicity replaced both accuracy and usefulness.

I wanted to learn web development during the lockdown of 2020. First thing I learned was that SO was completely useless. Everything on there was wrong. Everything was wrong due to incompetent moderation that prevented bad information from being corrected. Everything new marked as a dupe even when the other post was wrong or irrelevant.

That killed SO. It was a decision of the founders and the mods. They took great pride in doing it, too.
by BugsJustFindMe | 2026-01-07 16:36:53+00:00
If it were satire, what do you think it would be satirizing?

> I don't really know what it's saying

It's saying that complaints about deficiencies in LLMs, about a fundamental lack of LLM intelligence, about how LLMs are just statistical machines and not really thinking, about how LLMs are incapable of learning from past experiences, about how LLMs lack any coherent epistemology ignore how very deficient humans are in many same exact ways.

> Does this somehow make LLMs better in our perspective somehow?

Better is a relative measure not an absolute one, so possibly, because views of LLMs are inherently formed in relation to views of the human brains they're modeling.
by ZeroConcerns | 2026-01-07 16:37:38+00:00
I just had a more-detailed look, and I'm not sure where I'd find the pure-HTML stuff? From https://tailwindcss.com/plus/templates/pocket#pricing:

"Our website templates are built using Next.js, so all of the markup is written using React"

And the individual components that make up these templates don't seem to have pricing attached, nor non-React usage examples?
by forgotaccount3 | 2026-01-07 16:37:39+00:00
> In my opinion most of the people who refuse to believe AI can help them while work with software are just incurious/archetypical late adopters.

The biggest blocker I see to having AI help us be more productive is that it transforms how the day to day operations work.

Right now there is some balance in the pipeline of receiving change requests/enhancements, documenting them, estimating implementation time, analyzing cost and benefits, breaking out the feature into discrete stories, having the teams review the stories and 'vote' on a point sizing, planning on when each feature should be completed given the teams current capacity and committing to the releases (PI Planning), and then actually implementing the changes being requested.

However if I can take a code base and enter in a high level feature request from the stakeholders and then hold hands with Kiro to produce a functioning implementation in a day, then the majority of those steps above are just wasting time. Spending a few hundred man-hours to prepare for work that takes a few hundred man-hours might be reasonable, but doing that same prep work for a task that takes 8 man-hours isn't.

And we can't shift to that faster workflow without significant changes to entire software pipeline. The entire PMO team dedicated to reporting when things will be done shifts if that 'thing' is done before the report to the PMO lead is finished being created. Or we need significantly more resources dedicated to planning enhancements so that we could have an actual backlog of work for the developers. But my company appears to neither be interested in shrinking the PMO team nor in expanding the intake staff.
by metalman | 2026-01-07 16:37:44+00:00
there is an intersection in the north end, that is sometimes refered to as Red Square, but it's Halifax, so we like our communism with weekends off, and perhaps more beer than is strictly nessesary.
I know the crew who owns JavaBlend, and there workers unionised a few years ago, just as the pandemic got going, and it almost took them out, the place is coffee heaven, anf has been operating for 100yrs now, but they are bouncing back.
As to a mega company like Ubisoft, well they can afford the cost of a dinky union
cant they, but I think they could get in trouble head hunting the choice staff, sorry, programers, sorry, workers, thats it, and relocating them.
Unions are tedious, but thats what you get when you hire extra capable people, with promises of oportunity, and then underutilise and pay them fuck all.
by farhanhubble | 2026-01-07 16:37:58+00:00
I use Tailwind for connecting dev machines across two continents and as a free user I think it's an amazing product. It breaks my heart to see people losing their jobs because there isn't enough revenue.

I can empathize with the founder too because I was kind of in their shoes last year. Had been laid off and nearly exhausted my savings but I was more worried about having to let go of folks I employed.
by pavel_lishin | 2026-01-07 16:38:22+00:00
I remember a guy in high school basically taking orders for things to steal off the Walmart truck; expensive electronics (for back in the day) like XBoxes, Playstations, etc.

And of course, while working at Kohl's, you had people occasionally put items away in the back, tucked behind shelves, so that when they went on ultra-clearance they could pull them out and buy them.
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-01-07 16:38:38+00:00
I genuinely expected that you worked for some niche company I'd never heard of. I wasn't looking specifically to raise issues: this is how I engage with this topic in earnest (example: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/370343/308065). My persnickety behaviour has been appreciated by at least one Stack Exchange employee; and I assumed from https://www.datagrail.io/solutions/datagrail-vs-onetrust/ that your company would appreciate such criticism as well.

> I assure you that your Access or Deletion request will be processed when you submit it.

No no, I never assumed otherwise! And that part is entirely reasonable.

My complaint was that, as a visitor to the company's website, my personal information is shipped off to third-parties and used in ways that I am not informed about, and I have to specifically request to be informed via email (or the form) despite having no business relationship with the company, when I'm entitled to be informed before any such data collection takes place. "Contact us, and we'll tell you all about how all your personal information is used" is a wonderful service to provide, but it really really shouldn't be the only way to find that information out.

> Had you communicated your consent preferences through GPC or DNT, all those scripts that you call out would have been blocked.

I noticed, and that's appreciated! However, that's not relevant to GDPR, whose obligations apply regardless of whether GPC or DNT is sent. The use of these scripts must be opt-in (unless the rare exceptions apply where you can use a basis other than consent), otherwise you're not complying with GDPR.

Again, not saying the company's atypically bad. The issues I've raised are fairly common in the industry. If forced to pick one of these services, I might go with DataGrail, because the selection of services the company offers is (in my estimation) very good. (Most smaller providers do not offer anything like that, and most larger providers are much less trustworthy.) However, my programming ability is such that it'd be easier to roll my own than audit the services of a company that has given me reason not to trust them.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-07 16:39:07+00:00
I prefer the Dropbox solution, and tend to configure OneDrive, Google Drive, etc the same... I like to be explicit about it... I don't want all my general docs sync'd, for that matter, most of my projects are in a git repo anyway.

I know my Documents/Pictures directory isn't sync'd, I don't want it to be... to me my workspace is far different than what I want backed up to the cloud... I also have a local nas that is also setup for cloud sync for my service accounts. I emphatically do NOT want system default workspace directories sync'd.
by kstrauser | 2026-01-07 16:39:17+00:00
How on earth did wokeness even come up there? You’d have zero notion of my political leanings if you only read the words I’d written there. How badly do you have to phrase a question or answer to have it downvoted for being not-woke? “So I’m trying to write a GET route in FastAPI, which has a great ass, by the way, amirite?, and I’m getting the error that…”
by etruong42 | 2026-01-07 16:39:25+00:00
The Google of 2026 is a very different Google of 2006. In 2006, everyone who left Google had only praises to sing about the employer they were leaving! It is very telling when the Google of 2026 has had years of highly reputable engineers voluntarily leaving (even before the layoffs) who are so bold as to openly criticize Google in the social environment that we're in. Openly criticizing Google requires great personal fortitude, since being a critic only burns bridges and reduces your career opportunities. That is to say nothing about the criticisms that never get published outside of Google.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-07 16:39:35+00:00
You're correct, but for some reason heavily downed at the moment (Edit: no longer the case!). Relevant excerpt backing this up:

> the sugar industry paid the Harvard scientists the equivalent of $50,000 in 2016 dollars

I.e. it was something more like 6k-7k in terms of dollars at the time of payment.
by rldjbpin | 2026-01-07 16:39:35+00:00
> Just finished upgrading it to Hugo today! (After being on Drupal for 16 years)

what made you migrate from Drupal?

from past videos i could recall your vast experience with running websites using it, even using drupal deployment for some sysadmin tutorials.

much appreciate the insider baseball about your work!

EDIT: there is a post on this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46487498
by rtfeldman | 2026-01-07 16:39:46+00:00
> Do you think it can replace you basically one-shotting features/bugs in Zed?

Nobody is one-shotting anything nontrivial in Zed's code base, with Opus 4.5 or any other model.

What about a future model? Literally nobody knows. Forecasts about AI capabilities have had horrendously low accuracy in both directions - e.g. most people underestimated what LLMs would be capable of today, and almost everyone who thought AI would at least be where it is today...instead overestimated and predicted we'd have AGI or even superintelligence by now. I see zero signs of that forecasting accuracy improving. In aggregate, we are atrocious at it.

The only safe bet is that hardware will be faster and cheaper (because the most reliable trend in the history of computing has been that hardware gets faster and cheaper), which will naturally affect the software running on it.

> And also - doesn’t that make Zed (and other editors) pointless?

It means there's now demand for supporting use cases that didn't exist until recently, which comes with the territory of building a product for technologists! :)
by dole | 2026-01-07 16:39:49+00:00
In 2012, Target operated a "couple of forensics labs" and at least 23 "investigations centers" for surveillance. OP's article kinda sugarcoats it. Since it's been verified Home Depot does checkout facial recognition and builds profiles, silly to think most any other major retailer wouldn't.

https://privacysos.org/blog/target-is-really-really-into-sur...
by utopiah | 2026-01-07 16:39:55+00:00
> reverse engineering existing clients and servers by inspecting their requests and responses.

What a strange process... why not read the source code of an open source working library (easy to test, run a client made by someone else on its server, and vice versa) in a language close to the target?

Why not use then those tests as a way to verify your own work after?

FWIW I'm using WebDAV, both with clients and with my own self hosted servers, on a daily basis and... it works.
by CWuestefeld | 2026-01-07 16:40:01+00:00
I strongly disagree. Have you used Lightroom in the last, say, two years?

They've had a revolutionary upgrade in their masking tools. ML models power automated, smart mask creation. For example, on a landscape photo I can get, with just a couple of clicks, separate masks for sky, water, land, foliage, structures, and natural ground. The power that this gives me to edit my photos is amazing. To the best of my knowledge, Darktable and others have nothing approaching this.
by bregma | 2026-01-07 16:40:03+00:00
Ever spread lard on toast? Do you prefer croissants made with lard? Is everyone's favourite dish these days lard chicken (I mean the Indian dish, not the Soul Food dish, which is of course popular in some locales).

Nope. Butter is favoured because it tastes unctuous. Nothing to do with Big Cow or any special interest lobby local to certain valleys in the USA. Except maybe Big Bacon Drippings, because if there's one thing better for a grill cheese than butter it's bacon grease (thick-sliced sourdough bread, sharp Cheddar cheese, a shmear of chili crisp)

Now, suet has been demonized to the point that nobody makes suet pudding any more. A shame, really.
by empath75 | 2026-01-07 16:41:01+00:00
> ChatGPT tend to argue with me so heavily

I have found that quite often when ChatGPT digs in on something, that it is in fact right, and I was the one that was wrong. Not always, maybe not even most of the time, but enough that it does give me pause and make me double check.

Also, when you have an LLM that is too agreeable, that is how it gets into a folie a deux situation and starts participating in user's delusions, with disastrous outcomes.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-07 16:41:14+00:00
Cool, give me as much statute and regulation required to squeeze companies and encourage competition to drive down profits while protecting workers. This system and game is all arbitrary, we can change the rules (of course, with time and effort). If we have to kill some companies to do this, that's acceptable. As someone wise once said, "We may not always succeed. But never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try."
by notepad0x90 | 2026-01-07 16:41:26+00:00
They didn't outsource manufacturing, rely on foreign parties for critical tech, and rely on immigrants (legal or not) for both skilled and unskilled labor. They didn't have instant comms and globalized commerce either.

Only tangentially related, the Nazis started the holocaust, in part, as a way to boost their domestic economy while making invasion supply chains viable. Less people to fight over resources, they were removing demand because of supply shortages, in literally the worst way possible.
by apexalpha | 2026-01-07 16:41:33+00:00
Every time I need to add my file and send it out I manually download it first.

The shenanigans that happen when you 'link' to files, or not, from Teams to Outlook to Sharepoint is beyond me.

They also constantly sneak it into Word. If you don't pay close attention they suddenly save your local file to some Cloud Desktop folder.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-01-07 16:41:40+00:00
I'd have guessed that Google's rapid advance with Gemini was more due to the merger of Google Brain with DeepMind under Demis Hassabis than the return of Sergey Brin.

I remember seeing an interview (Dwarkesh?) with Sholto Douglas who had been working at Google at the time (now at Anthropic) who said he would work late there and the only other person was Sergey Brin, apparently wanting to be part of (or following) the development/training process.
by catapart | 2026-01-07 16:42:09+00:00
I think it might! Definitely checks enough boxes for me to try out, anyway.

The UI is a little cumbersome for me, personally, but it does seem at least straightforward enough for me to understand what the intentions are.

ETA: Welp, that didn't last long. A service running in the background that exposes an "insecure" url for a browser to then open as the only means for GUI interaction with the app is not a great recommendation for everyday users. It looks like it has all the features, but I'm looking for a user experience. CLIs provide the features. I'd like an app, not a service running a webserver. Shudder the thought of just shoving the front end in an electron app, but even that would be better than this for casual users.
by Eisenstein | 2026-01-07 16:42:23+00:00
Write "This sentence is green." in red sharpie and "This sentence is red" in green sharpie on a piece of paper. Show it to someone briefly and then hide it. Ask them what color the first sentence said it was and what color the second sentence was written in.

Another one: ask a person to say 'silk' 5 times, then ask them what cows drink.

Exploiting such quirks only tells you that you can trick people, not what their capabilities are.
by DeRock | 2026-01-07 16:42:33+00:00
Here’s a better tip to measure things without a proper measuring device: spread out your hand on a table and measure the distance between your pinky and thumb. Remember that. Now when you need to measure something just measure it in number of pinky-thumb-stretches. I can quickly get the dimensions to +/- an inch by doing a few quick walks with my hand.