MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by em-bee | 2026-01-17 09:35:25+00:00
kind of, except that when i review a code submission to my project i can eventually learn to trust the submitter, once i realize they write good code. a code review is to develop that trust. AI code should never earn that trust, and any code review should always be treated like it it is from a first time submitter that i have never met before. the risk is that does not happen, and that we believe AI code submissions will develop like those of a real human. they won't. we'll develop a false sense of security, a false sense of trust. instead we should always be on guard.

and as i wrote in my other comment, reviewing the code of a junior developer includes the satisfaction of helping that developer grow through my feedback. AI will never grow. there is no satisfaction in reviewing its code. instead it feels like a sisyphusian task, because the AI will make the same mistakes over and over again, and make mistakes a human would be very unlikely to make. unlike human code with AI code you have to expect the unexpected.
by discreteevent | 2026-01-17 09:36:01+00:00
> But we need to ack the positives, otherwise it's not an honest debate but only a mix of ranting and populist propaganda.

It's not ranting to not ack every positive if the negative clearly outweighs it. I would much rather live 20 years ago than live now without a job. Wouldn't you?

Alternatively suppose you get to keep your job. What percentage of the population being unemployed do you think would make it worse for you personally than going back 20 years. Because there is going to be more unemployment and it will affect your environment unless you have got a private island (some people do - some ai owners do)
by cocoto | 2026-01-17 09:36:16+00:00
I have yet to find a cross-platform UI framework that really feels native on Gnome. The reality is that there is no shortcut for native UI on all platforms, you have to use the “official” framework (e.g. GTK for Gnome). In my opinion the only softwares that should use a custom framework are professional grade apps where custom workflows can’t fit the native UI (e.g. Blender). Despite all the noise about native cross-platform frameworks, it’s absolutely not fooling anyone, we can spot this immediately on any platform.
by lurk2 | 2026-01-17 09:36:52+00:00
> It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises.

We’re nowhere near it, but there is a point at which the marginal utility of laborers is worth less than the security risk the laborers represent by continuing to exist. This is already happening with a lot of manufacturing and resource extraction.

> This is the lump of labor fallacy- the belief that there’s a fixed amount of economically valuable work that technology and capital can eliminate through automation or capital accumulation instead of transforming it.

What if I consider the labor conditions that exist after this transformation to be undignified?
by chme | 2026-01-17 09:36:56+00:00
Even bringing down the "theory" to paper in prosa will be lossy.

And natural languages are open to interpretation and a lot of context will remain unmentioned. While programming languages, together with their tested environment, contain the whole context.

Instrumenting LLMs will also mean, doing a lot of prompt engineering, which on one hand might make the instructions clearer (for the human reader as well), but on the other will likely not transfer as much theory behind why each decision was made. Instead, it will likely focus on copy&pasta guides, that don't require much understanding on why something is done.
by tetha | 2026-01-17 09:37:00+00:00
I'm a broken record about this by now, but stories like these keep reminding me how broken the law is for ethical hackers in Germany. If an ethical hacker found something like this in Germany, it would from my knowledge not be clear if entering an empty password counts as "circumventing or breaking a security barrier". "No password barrier" has recently been clarified in courts, but "Static Password" hasn't.

And once you break a security barrier, you're breaking the law. Even GDPR doesn't help you there - that just ensures more people are breaking different laws. And this can get all your devices seized, land you in jail, end your career, cause thousands of Euros of equipment loss, because the new laptop naturally got lost in the return process after 6 - 12 months.

And thus, many people with the skill to find such problems and report them silently to get them closed do ... nothing. Until bad people find these holes and what the article describes happens. And Europe has hacker groups who could turn our cybersecurity upside down in a good way. Very frustrating topic.
by imiric | 2026-01-17 09:37:16+00:00
> All of them are enabled by big tech

That's not true. All of the examples you mentioned are possible without Big Tech. There are F/LOSS and community supported alternatives for all of them. Big Tech might've contributed to parts of the technology that make these alternatives possible, but that could've been done by anyone else, and they are certainly not required to keep the technology functional today.

Relying on Big Tech is a personal choice. None of these companies are essential to humanity.

> none of them is based on surveillance, ads or social media.

That's not true either. All Alphabet and Meta products are tied to and supported in some way by advertising. All of these companies were/are part of government surveillance programs.

So you're highly overestimating the value of Big Tech, and highly underestimating the negative effects they've had, have, and will continue to have on humanity.
by wickedsight | 2026-01-17 09:38:08+00:00
> when push comes to shove the EU can force banks in the EU to uphold EU rules and regulations.

This made me realize that many people who are extremely critical of the power the EU has, have no idea how much that power is often protecting them.

This is not a dismissal of the fact that it's absolutely critical to stay vigilant about how that power is used. But it's quite clear that without that power, the US would've abused theirs way more within Europe.
by falconroar | 2026-01-17 09:38:26+00:00
Interesting, I wasn't aware; thanks for that. I will say, Polars' implementation is much more centered on out-of-core processing, and bypasses some of DuckDB's limitations ("DuckDB cannot yet offload some complex intermediate aggregate states to disk"). Both incredible pieces of software.

To expand on this, Polars' `LazyFrame` implementation allows for simple addition of new backends like GPU, streaming, and now distributed computing (though it's currently locked to a vendor). The DuckDB codebase just doesn't have this flexibility, though there are ways to get it to run on GPU using external software.
by roenxi | 2026-01-17 09:39:39+00:00
Sure, I don't know why anyone would want to hand-weave cloth in this era of miracles where a machine can do it for you faster and better. It looks like hard work and it is technically a waste of time. But, hypothetically, if there was a portion of society that for some mad reason can't get access to machine-made cloth they can still weave their own.

And the fact is, for those souls who are motivated to do so, they can make a living hand-weaving anyway and do not need to weave 3,000x faster. They weave at a similar pace to that people always have. They can still afford bread. Society will almost give bread away to people, it is absurdly cheap.
by pera | 2026-01-17 09:39:50+00:00
Just for context, this was the original claim by Cursor's CEO on Twitter:

> We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor. It ran uninterrupted for one week.

> It's 3M+ lines of code across thousands of files. The rendering engine is from-scratch in Rust with HTML parsing, CSS cascade, layout, text shaping, paint, and a custom JS VM.

> It kind of works! It still has issues and is of course very far from Webkit/Chromium parity, but we were astonished that simple websites render quickly and largely correctly.

https://xcancel.com/mntruell/status/2011562190286045552#m
by fullstackchris | 2026-01-17 09:39:52+00:00
The frameworks have NOT gotten slower! God I hate Hackernews sometimes... whats really going on is actually that not a single dev reads the release notes / improvements / learns how to actually use the framework. If anything, the latest React release was almost purely a performance improvement release (and has been for a while) ...most people need to fully understand a tool they use before complaining about it.

Everyone always wants a frontend framework that "just works" - sounds a lot like a free lunch to me! You have to manage the state and updates of your application at some point - the underlying software cant just "guess" what you want. But I'm always like a broken record when these react hate / <insert frontend framework here> hate threads show up - most of the confusion is derived from lack of basic concepts of what problems these frameworks solve in the first place.
by ammmir | 2026-01-17 09:40:06+00:00
https://amirmalik.net - I haven't blogged in a while, but have been experimenting with single-file build-step-free HTML tools (inspired by simonw's tool catalog) at https://amirmalik.net/tools -- I'm hoping to add more "bring your own API key" local-first mini tools that store their data in IndexedDB or OPFS and sync. I should probably write a post about it :)
by adangert | 2026-01-17 09:40:22+00:00
Awful awful awful, ads lead to anti consumer behavior, anti free market competition, turns capitalism into a pay to win game, are similar to a cancer, incentivize the creation of extremely harmful platforms, such as slop filled tik tok, destroys existing companies such as Facebook, generally harms society in every measure, the cons outweigh any and all pros. It transforms your product into a sticky candy box trap for unassuming visitors while your actual customers are now just the advertising industry, you become, as is so well spoken , the product. Adopting ads should be taken as a step towards harming your consumer base so you can vampiricaly extract attention from them indefinitely and forever, as your company slowly becomes a skeleton drain on all of humanity. There is no such thing as a "good" ad.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2026-01-17 09:40:52+00:00
Yes, and even in prehistoric eras people could attempt to compete with the wind at blowing air, but I've restricted my above description of "labor" to activities in which I was not already outcompeted to the point where I couldn't hope to make a living. So I've written off the once-profitable career of "calculator" from the get-go.

Slaves at least still need to be fed and housed, but I'm sure they were tough competition indeed for independent laborers.
by CTDOCodebases | 2026-01-17 09:41:42+00:00
That's extremely annoying. I have a Bluetooth speaker that I was intending to repurpose into a device to combat inconsiderate smart phone usage. I connected it to my laptop and started playing multiple streams of Punjabi MC - Beware of the Boys. It was torturous.

My other idea was to get the line from dumb and dumber "Do you want to hear the most annoying sound in the world..." And just loop the sound continuously.

I might just try this project though and see how it goes.
by neuralkoi | 2026-01-17 09:41:49+00:00
"The people who are leading the AI revolution, 'the tech titans', many of them are thinking in a way which is really alien to most of the people on the planet. People sometimes think 'Oh, these tech titans, they want money. They want power.' They want something far more ambitious than money or power. They want to change the course of the evolution of life and even of the evolution of the cosmos. In the minds of some of them, sometime in the future, millions, billions of years in the future, when they write the history of the universe, it will be like: 'Okay, the Big Bang - 14 billions years ago, 10 billion years later - the emergence of life on earth, the only life we know about so far in the universe, 4 billion years later - Elon Musk and the beginning of AI'. This is the timeline they have.”

- Yuval Noah Harari, Ideas for the Future
by hnlmorg | 2026-01-17 09:42:07+00:00
Most of the texts that matter are. Yeah you’re not going to find some random flat earth blog in the library, but equally, that’s a good thing.

However, I wasn’t talking specifically about libraries. The web did still exist 20 years ago. Wikipedia is more than 20 years old. And newsgroups have been around much longer too.

The web was also mobile accessible for more than 20 years (WAP, for example, was introduced in 1999).

There were also phone numbers you could ring who could provide quick searches for information look up. People are most familiar with them in terms of telephone directory services (eg ring an operator to ask for the phone number of someone else) but there were other general knowledge services too. In fact I used one once when my bike chain broke, I walked to a local pay phone, and enquired how to put a chain back on.

Even know, there’s a plethora of information at local government information and audit offices, which isn’t available online. most of which is store on microfilm. A friend needed to visit one office recently to look at historic maps to trace the origins of a public right of way (which is a legal public footpath though farmland in the UK)

Like I said before, we weren’t living in the dark ages before smartphones came along.
by a_humean | 2026-01-17 09:42:36+00:00
If your business has everything on GCP/AWS/Azure (which is very common) and the Americans choose to weaponinse US tech against your country or business, then unless you have non-US backups you are probably dead and all of your employees unemployed. If you are a state, all of your services and functions are probably dead and you have to rebuild from nothing. That is certainly true of my company and there are some mutterings starting where I am internally about worst case disaster recovery if suddenly one of these suppliers just disapeared.

In this new world you cannot trust that this will not happen. As a European relying on the Americans is honestly probably little better than relying on the Russians and probably on par with relying on the Chinese in terms of risk profile. Note we are actually for all intents and purposes at war with Russia.

The amount of leverage the Americans have over Europe is insane, and every captial should be trying to mitgate that risk asap.
by noelwelsh | 2026-01-17 09:42:41+00:00
A few thoughts:

* These articles always say that hardware is amazing but software sucks. Let's not forget that hardware has its problems. Intel's management engine is a pile of complexity: https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-op.... The x86_64 instruction set is hardly inspiring, and I imagine we lose a pile of performance because it fails to adequately represent the underlying hardware. (E.g. there are hundreds of registers on modern CPUs, but you can't access them directly and just have to hope the hardware does a good job of register allocation.)

* Languages unlock performance for the masses. Javascript will never be truly fast because it doesn't represent the machine. E.g. it doesn't have distinct integer and floating point types. Rust represents the machine and is fast, but is not as ergonomic as it could be. OxCaml is inspiring me lately as it's an ergonomic high-level language that also represents the machine. (Scala 3 is also getting there with capture checking, but that is still experimental.) If we want more performance we have to give a way to efficiently write code that can be turned into efficient code.
Show HN: ReFlow Studio – An offline tool to dub, translate, and censor videos
by linearAmend | 2026-01-17 09:44:04+00:00
Show HN: ReFlow Studio – Local AI video dubbing and censorship

Hi HN,

I am the creator of ReFlow Studio, an open-source (MIT) desktop "uni-tool" for video creators. I built this because I wanted a way to handle the tedious parts of video editing—transcribing, dubbing, and censoring—locally, without relying on expensive, privacy-invasive cloud APIs.

What it does:

* Local Dubbing: Uses OpenAI Whisper for ASR and Coqui XTTS v2 for voice cloning. It is optimized for "Hinglish" (Hindi + English) content.

* Auto-Censorship: Uses NudeNet (ONNX) to find and blur NSFW content in video frames and "bleeps" profanity in audio files.

* 100% Offline: Once installed, no data leaves your machine. This was a priority for creators working with sensitive content.

Technical Challenges:

Distribution: Packing 5GB+ of AI models into a downloadable installer was a nightmare. I ended up using a split-binary Inno Setup approach to keep the download stable for users with limited bandwidth.

UI Persistence: I just hit v0.3.1 which finally integrated a settings manager so the app remembers your theme (Light/Dark) and processing preferences between sessions.

Performance: Managing the handoff between transcription, translation, and rendering threads without locking the main UI thread in Python.

I am currently planning v0.4, which will include "Smart-Silence" removal to automatically tighten up dubbed audio.

I would love to get your feedback on the architecture, the offline distribution method, or the performance of the local inference!

GitHub: https://github.com/ananta-sj/ReFlow-Studio

Thanks for looking!
by Chance-Device | 2026-01-17 09:44:54+00:00
I get the feeling behind the anti-AI sentiment, I just disagree with the conclusions.

There’s a lot of fear around what will happen with AI, not so much of extinction but rather of two things: fear of losing income, and arguably more importantly, fear of losing identity.

People often are invested in what they do to the point that it’s who they are. That being replaced or eliminated might be a bigger psychological threat than lack of income, at least to those of us fortunate enough to be well off right now.

However, these threats are outweighed by the benefits that AI can eventually bring. Medical advances, power generation, manufacturing capability. Our systems for running society have a lot of problems, economically, politically, epistemologically. These can also be improved with AI assistance.

The real problem is the transition, it’s such a huge shift, and it will happen all at once to everyone, uprooting our idea of the world and our place in it.

What we need is to embrace AI and find a way to make sure that the transition and benefits of AI are distributed instead of concentrated.

For me this looks like the following: companies must commit to retaining some minimum number of employees in every currently existing function, to be determined proportional to their profit taking. This sets a floor on the job losses that can come later when AI really comes on stream.

The justification for this is three fold: firstly, it’s a safety mechanism, it ensures that regardless of the capabilities of an AI system, there are multiple humans working with it to verify its results. If they aren’t verifying diligently, then they’re not doing their jobs.

Secondly, jobs aren’t just a way of making income, they’re wrapped up in identity and meaning for at least some people, and this helps to maintain that existing identity structure across a meaningful cross section of society.

Third, it keeps the economy running, money circulating. You can’t have a market economy without consumers. UBI is one component of this too, but this is both more direct, more useful and more meaningful.
by tern | 2026-01-17 09:46:22+00:00
The reason is that the underlying technology evolves, and software itself goes through cycles of innovation. Software stays just flexible enough to adapt to the changes and absorb the innovations. It finds this balance "by itself" because software exists in a competitive market, and one where an equivalent of "economies of scale" dominate. Really, it's "economies of attention." All the tools that most people use today are in-use because they were able to (1) adapt to many use-cases while also (2) adapting to changes in their environment and (3) absorb new ideas.

The market learned a long time ago that "high level" text-based languages with libraries are the sweet spot, and many other things about how they are.

People are constantly trying to crystallize higher-level ideas—build some version IKEA or lego, or whatever. It may be that one day this will work. Certainly we see consolidation around strategies as time goes on. But so far, higher-level systems cannot adapt to enough use cases while also adopting to changes in technology and absorbing innovations.

The type of IKEA the author speaks about is Web2.0 software. I was around when we invented all that, and it wasn't that long ago.

Now we're already living through another radical change that software will adapt to—agentic software. If we all used IKEA software, much of it would be thrown out the window in the transition, and we'd lose the value accrued in those systems.

Instead, systems that have been adapting for decades are adapting like they always have. Python, the language of engineering just adds libraries. C/C++/Rust, the anti-IKEA, have new uses. GPU stuff is repurposed for ends never imagined. Nobody uses JQuery anymore.

It's a brutal state of affairs, really. Werner Herzog says it best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF5xBtaL3YI
by Capricorn2481 | 2026-01-17 09:47:28+00:00
> I’ve come to appreciate that there is a new totally valid (imo) kind of software development one can do now where you simply do not read the code at all

No. If nobody actually reads the code, nobody knows what the app does.

> If someone vibe coded something and didn’t read it and I’m worried it contains something dangerous, I can ask Claude to analyze it and then run it in a docker container

And asking an LLM to "analyze it" is worthless. It will miss things here and make up things there. Running it in Docker does not mean it can't mess you up.
by chme | 2026-01-17 09:48:52+00:00
TBH, I doubt that this will happen...

It is much easier to use LLMs to generate code, validate that code as a developer, fix it, if necessary, and check it into the repo, then if every user has to send prompts to LLMs in order to get the code they can actually execute.

While hoping it doesn't break their system and does what they wanted from it.

Also... that just doesn't scale. How much power would we need, if everyday computing starts with a BIOS sending prompts to LLMs in order to generate a operating system it can use.

Even if it is just about installing stuff... We have CI runners, that constantly install software often on every build. How would they scale if they need LLMs to generate install instructions every time?
by mitthrowaway2 | 2026-01-17 09:50:31+00:00
This is one of those cases where it's really important to remember the assumptions built into comparative advantage theory, such as "no mobility of labor". If the Green-country people are more productive at all tasks than the Blue-country people, they can still both profit from trade with each other. But that does not represent the optimum productivity. Productivity can be increased still further by the Green people replacing the population of the Blue-country with more Green people, in which scenario the optimal resource allocation to sustaining the Blue people is unfortunately zero.

This is why the population of labor animals plummeted in the 20th century. And to put it plainly, it means that there's no guarantee you can always sell labor for enough to keep your home from getting paved over for a data center.
by franga2000 | 2026-01-17 09:50:34+00:00
And since LLM tokens are expensive and generation is slow, how about we cache that generated code on the server side, so people can just download the pre-generated install.sh? And since not everyone can be bothered to audit LLM code, the publisher can audit and correct it before publishing, so we're effectively caching and deduplicating the auditing work too.