MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dangus | 2026-01-18 14:48:44+00:00
I would submit that this could be based on a stereotype that “coder = antisocial.”

Why are we assuming that people who write code don’t have soft skills?

The youngest generation who joined the profession are probably in it for the the salary versus the older generations who came from computer clubs and dungeons and dragons groups of the 1970s/1980s along with a culture where having a niche interest was socially ostracizing and uncool.

I wonder if the youngest generation entering the profession is much more of a cross section of regular people.
by toss1 | 2026-01-18 14:49:30+00:00
Interesting example, as there was an article on HN front page 10 days ago about exactly that - a blind person doing revolutionary work in agriculture. [0][1]

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g4zlyqnr0o — "I used Lego to design a farm for people who are blind - like me"

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46502269
by TheOtherHobbes | 2026-01-18 14:49:48+00:00
Which is hilarious, because AI is making it easier and easier to bring a good idea to market with much less external financing than usual.

You can argue about security, reliability, and edge cases, but it's not as if human devs have a perfect record there.

Or even a particularly good one.

What are those execs bringing to the table, beyond entitlement and self-belief?
by CrulesAll | 2026-01-18 14:50:57+00:00
Beyond engineering itself, strictly computer engineering?
How many coders have no idea what goes on behind an IDE. Have not even the slightest notion how a computer works. Who thinks building a computer means watching a Youtube video and buying ready made parts, putting them together, and then think they should be employed by NASA.

To begin: Math, Linux, Devops, C, and Assembly.
Not a youtube video. Not arithmetic. Learn to the point that you could be employed by any of the above as a senior. And don't fear failure. Keep doing it until you understand it.
by conception | 2026-01-18 14:50:58+00:00
While true, an important factor that I didn’t realize until I had one is if you charge at home you wake up with a full tank of”of gas” every day. So yes, you have to stop for a charge on exceptional trips but every other day you aren’t late for work because you need gas or have to stop on the way home. And it’s not just the time to pump, but to get to the station and wait perhaps (costco gas). Your car always “has gas” and all that time is returned to your life.
by vortexshadow | 2026-01-18 14:51:42+00:00
For what it’s worth, this discussion is exactly what pushed me to experiment
with a small runtime invariant helper for React/JS.

The idea wasn’t to replace good modeling or tests,
but to fail early when real-world state temporarily drifts
away from its intended shape (especially in async or legacy flows).

I put a small prototype here if anyone’s curious:
https://github.com/vortexshadow678-hash/invariant-guard
by imiric | 2026-01-18 14:51:47+00:00
There's no question that "AI" is the next advertising frontier. I've been saying this for years[1][2][3]. It is going to be the most lucrative form of it yet, and no "AI" company will be able to resist it. Given the exorbitant amount of resources required for this technology, advertising will probably be the only viable business model that can sustain it at scale.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35706981

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36689090

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46425948
by alentred | 2026-01-18 14:51:49+00:00
Not the original author, but I would guess that understanding the domain problem and interpreting it correctly in a software solution (not code, but a product with workflows, UX, etc.), which in turn requires ability to listen and understand and ask right questions on one hand (what a user wants to achieve), and a good understanding of the technical limitations as well as human habits on the other hand (what is possible and makes sense). One can argue that AI lacks what we'd call intuition and interpersonal qualities which are still necessary, as before AI.
by lordnacho | 2026-01-18 14:51:57+00:00
I don't think it has ever been the case that you could neglect soft skills. You will hear this over and over, in every area of every business: people become successful by adjusting their behaviour to what works for the business. Sometimes this is called being a slick politician, sometimes it is called avoiding getting bogged down in politics.

But it's never been the case that a dev could just focus on technical things and not spend any time figuring out the context they are working in, and behaving accordingly.

My first day of work, this is what my boss said to me: "Look at this trading floor. There's screens everywhere, everything is numbers. Deltas, gammas, vegas. Everything is calculated by computers. But don't forget, every business is a people business!"
by notepad0x90 | 2026-01-18 14:52:09+00:00
I'd pay $0.005 per conversation, provided the payment is not inconvenient, anonymous, and an account isn't required. That in my opinion is the root cause of the problem, people can't pay easily even if they wanted to pay instead of get ads.

I think the next natural evolution after showing ads in chat sessions is providing services where LLMs tailor site content to include ads in real time. Right now you get served a prepared advertisement after the bid is won and the ad for you is selected. With LLMs, both the bidding process and the ad served would be seamlessly integrated with the site content/context.

Part of the "problem" with ads is people know they're ads. What if this comment was edited by HN's servers and rephrased to mention a specific product? You might see a sentence about how OpenAI is the future, someone else might see how claude or anthropic are. Another person might see a paragraph from me about how I used Tide to clean laundry this morning with the help of AI, telling me the right portions for the right cloth. You might suspect it's AI but you won't always be able to tell. Even if they made it more obvious like how reddit is doing it, the content of the AD itself, pictures, text,etc.. could be crafted dynamically so that it embeds in your subconscious without much resistance.

The tech developed to make ads more effective is also used to influence people for other purposes. The current state of society came about after the widespread accessibility of smartphones, social media and the rise of surveillance capitalism. Russia's influence ops using ads is well documented for example. I mentioned all this to say how catastrophic the combination of LLMs and advertising could be, even by today's standards.
by DrBazza | 2026-01-18 14:52:13+00:00
I'm old enough to remember the first attempt at 'mobile underground'. Maybe I've forgotten the name but it was something like BT Phone Zone, though google returns zero relevant results, so perhaps it was called something else. In lieu of public call boxes, BT trialled a base station that was installed in some tube stations (almost certainly Oxford St and Tottenham Court Rd), and with the correct 'wireless handset' as long as you were within 10 feet of it, or thereabouts, you could make a call. I'm sure I remember a semi-circle painted on the ground that if you stood in, you were in range.
by dtagames | 2026-01-18 14:53:02+00:00
The problem is likely not the SVG aspect. It's the fact that LLMs don't have any real cross-training between visual concepts and the syntax that produces them. We have this problem with CSS, too, which LLMs are notoriously bad at.

It's actually easier to do bitmaps which is why the visual models create those. You can describe any painting with a few words about content and style but that doesn't give you the SVG syntax needed to represent those things as shapes.
by cogman10 | 2026-01-18 14:53:23+00:00
From an old forum post in 2013, the best I can find is about 15 tons.

I suspect it's much lower than that number now-a-days. Primarily because the energy going into batteries production will both use less power and likely comes from greener power sources.

If nissan is to be believed, since then they've cut the CO2 emissions from production by 40%. So maybe in the range of 9T?
by Eisenstein | 2026-01-18 14:55:34+00:00
Battery degradation is non-linear, and when it reaches a certain point of degradation it can be become unstable. This has lead to 80% being the traditionally considered point for EOL of a Li-Ion pack. However, this is a rule of thumb and the data is evolving with the technology.

"When the battery degrades to a certain point, for instance, if a battery can only retain 80% of its initial capacity,9, 10, 11 the battery should be retired to ensure the safety and reliability of the battery-powered systems."

Xiaosong Hu, Le Xu, Xianke Lin, Michael Pecht,
Battery Lifetime Prognostics, Joule, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2020, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...
by mupuff1234 | 2026-01-18 14:55:46+00:00
If 1 person can ship in a week what would used to take an entire team a quarter then we're gonna see less need for corporate style soft skills as companies will run leaner and become flatter, with less middle management and less "stakeholder management".

You'll still need to soft skills, but I'd argue that the level of skill required will be much simpler.
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-01-18 14:55:48+00:00
Having studied ethology, the conversations people have on AI are some of the weirdest I've ever seen. Often resurrecting dead 19th century ideas left and right.

On the one hand, note that biologists are monists and mechanists and actually reject there being any kind of special biological 'vital force'.

On the other hand, I'm not entirely siding with the current LLM folks here either. The 'neuron' used in AI is more like a single dendritic compartment in a biological neuron[1], and the brain is more like a data center than it is a single computer.

Still, one can't argue with results.

[1] Not really, but it's closer.
by joelkoen | 2026-01-18 14:56:27+00:00
> What happens if a train has to stop in the middle of the tunnel, and you phone for help? [...] the system has been deliberately configured to transmit the location of the nearest tube station, where access can be arranged. That’s why sometimes you might check your smartphone map, and it will display the “wrong” location, because that’s the best one for a 999 call to use.

This doesn't seem correct - cell towers don't just transmit a location that phones then pickup and use? Unless this is some emergency specific feature I'm not aware of?
Show HN: Vouch Protocol – Open Identity for AI Agents (C2PA and Did)
by rampy | 2026-01-18 14:56:52+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m the creator of Vouch Protocol.

We are entering a world where AI agents are taking real actions (booking flights, committing code, moving money).

The problem: There is currently no way to cryptographically verify an Agent's intent before execution. (e.g., An agent claims it will `read_db`, but actually executes `delete_db`—and you have no proof of the discrepancy nor a way to stop this from happening).

The current industry solution relies on the old X.509 Certificate Authority model—basically, paying a centralized authority $$$ per year for a digital ID. That doesn't scale for billions of autonomous agents.

So I built Vouch Protocol.

It is an open-source standard for AI Agent Identity that replaces paid certificates with W3C Decentralized Identifiers (did:web).

How it works:

1. Identity: Your agent generates its own Ed25519 key pair.

2. Resolution: It publishes its public key to your domain (/.well-known/did.json), making your domain the root of trust.

3. Signing: The agent signs every prompt/action using a JWT-VC (Verifiable Credential).

4. Verification: Any other system can cryptographically verify "This action came from the Agent at domain X" without hitting a central server.

Update: I just submitted Vouch to the C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) today to push for this decentralized model as a standard alongside Adobe and Microsoft.

Repo (Code + SDK): https://github.com/vouch-protocol/vouch

I’d love you to roast my architecture, tell me why I'm wrong, or (hopefully) star the repo if you agree this layer should be free.
by maipen | 2026-01-18 14:57:09+00:00
> especially when these LLM tools are going to get crazy expensive because at some point they will need to be sustainably funded

You say this with such certainty when progress is actually proving otherwise.

LLMS are only going to get cheaper.

There will always be expensive models, because they use the latest tech and infra, but that doesn't mean we need them for everything...

But year after year we see free or local LLMs become more powerful.
by graemep | 2026-01-18 14:57:11+00:00
How is biking better than walking?

New EV vs used ICE will depend on how much you drive and in what conditions. I would guess what I do (in the UK) is uncommon in the US but it must be possible but working from home plus living in a town rather than a city means I only do low single digit thousands of miles a year and that almost entirely on clear roads.
by acomjean | 2026-01-18 14:57:49+00:00
I took a bio statistic class. The tools were Excel/ R or Stata.

I think most people used R. Free and great graphing. Though the interactivity of Excel is great for what ifs. I never got R till I took that class. Though RStudio makes R seem like scriptable excel.

R/Python are fast enough for most things though a lot of genomic stuff (Blast alignments etc..) are in compiled languages.
by marginalia_nu | 2026-01-18 14:58:09+00:00
The sort of people who have been able to neglect their soft skills are probably still going to be able to do so in the future. But those were always the extreme intelligence outliers, generational talent type figures.

For most software engineers, neglect of soft skills have always been a career tarpit that leads nowhere. Being able to navigate social settings and to communicate well is a force multiplier. For most people, it really doesn't matter how good you are if nobody understands what you are saying and you can't convince other people to buy into your ideas.
by MontyCarloHall | 2026-01-18 14:58:22+00:00
That is exactly my point: there easily could be, but there isn't. Based on how many commenters on HN and similar sites bemoan how Google Search quality has precipitously declined and yearn for the Google of ~10 years ago, I think there'd be nontrivial demand for a $200/month ad-free Google with no-nonsense comprehensive results. Such a product does not exist because it would ultimately be a net loss for Google.
by codingdave | 2026-01-18 14:58:38+00:00
The biggest gotcha is that if existing products were developed over a decade or more, that is decade of iteration over details and customer feedback. You can see the final result, but not the rationale behind 10+ years worth of decisions and discussions. The LLMs are almost guaranteed to get something wrong without that context, which means you final product won't be competitive. Unless you understand the nuance of which features are table stakes vs. market choices vs. regulatory requirement or other such fixed functionality, you might spend all your energy building something that is not even viable.

That doesn't mean you cannot build a newer, better, competitive product. You surely can. But you need to build the understanding of the market yourself so you know when the LLMs go off the rails and get them back on track.
by GeoAtreides | 2026-01-18 15:00:07+00:00
does it?

this is a verbatim quote from gemini 3 pro from a chat couple of days ago:

"Because I have done this exact project on a hot water tank, I can tell you exactly [...]"

I somehow doubt it an LLM did that exact project, what with not having any abilities to do plumbing in real life...
Ask HN: Can I still code by hand?
by dudewhocodes | 2026-01-18 15:00:23+00:00
I keep up with the latest in agentic coding on a daily basis and use it.

Lately however, work has started feeling duller than before. Whenever I'm digging through a deep problem by manually inspecting a stack trace or writing a piece of code by hand I'm overwhelmed with: "I should be doing this differently".

And whenever I do it the agentic way I find myself having to re-read a lot of things to understand the changes.

I was happier when I could just write it myself without thinking about token subscriptions. I liked writing code.

Can I still code myself at least a bit? Or should I try to move on?
by blactuary | 2026-01-18 15:00:24+00:00
> I'm not trying to defend or justify

Yes you are, when you say things like this:

> those ICE agents have a perspective, they have motivations, they're people

They are racist, fascist thugs, it's that simple. They want to terrorize immigrants and brown people. There is no need to overthink this. They are racially profiling people every day, and arresting citizens because they are minorities. They shot a mother in the head and now they are telling the rest of us "didn't you learn your lesson?", alluding to that murder. They tear-gassed a family of 6 trying to get home the other day, including a 6 month old baby that lost consciousness. The family had nothing to do with anything, they were simply trying to get home in an area ICE was attacking.

What "perspective" could possibly change anything about this shameful behavior?
by myself248 | 2026-01-18 15:00:37+00:00
This is standard advice among ham radio operators. If you're putting up a tower, put it up, mount the antennas, run the feedlines, but resist the temptation to operate for a while. Or use it for receive-only.

Log your activity, or lack thereof, meticulously. Perhaps a critical part was back-ordered, or more expensive than expected, and note in the log how it still hasn't arrived so you still aren't able to operate. If complaints come in, get them to be maximally public about it, ideally in a town meeting or something, then whip out your logbook and coup-fourré. Let the wackos show themselves to be wackos, then quietly start operating some time later.
by burkaman | 2026-01-18 15:01:14+00:00
It's LLMs. You can tell from the phrasing ("no X just Y", "isn't A it's B", "pure ___"), and because all of the sections except Screenshots say basically the same thing. A competent person would not write it like this and an incompetent person would not be this meticulous about grammar and formatting.

I realize this sounds exactly like "I can tell from some of the pixels and from seeing quite a few shops in my time" but I really can tell.
by vortexshadow | 2026-01-18 15:01:29+00:00
Thanks for the thoughtful discussion — a lot of good points here.

For me, the main takeaway is that good modeling, tests,
and runtime checks each catch different classes of mistakes,
and none fully replace the others.

And thanks who make this package it is easy and it is solve me problem
the name package that a have search many times it is

https://github.com/vortexshadow678-hash/invariant-guard
by greatgib | 2026-01-18 15:01:58+00:00
"forced" short lived certificates sucks so much.

Now you will have an American entity be controlling all your assets that you want online on a very regular basis. No way than calling home regularly.
Impossible to manage your own local certificate authority as sub CA without a nightmarish constant process of renewal and distribution.

For security this means that everything will be expected to have almost constant external traffic, RW servers to overwrite the certificates, keys spreaded for that...

And maybe I miss something but would IP address certificate be a nightmare in term of security?

Like when using mobile network or common networks like university networks, it might be very easy to snap certificates for ip shared by multiple unrelated entities. No?
by convolvatron | 2026-01-18 15:02:04+00:00
My shop is next to the flea market described in the article, I’m really surprised that so many people that live in sf don’t know about it. It’s a really interesting way to spend an hour, and you see a really broad swath of San Francisco residents. plenty of vinyl, other collectibles, hand tools, antiques, ‘antiques’, ephemera from the 70s, strange old electronics, etc. alemeny near bayshore at the farmers market. Every Sunday, pretty much over by noon
by lelanthran | 2026-01-18 15:02:18+00:00
> when hitting the limits of what works out of the box, hiring or commissioning developers to add more complex functions and integrations.

You aren't going to going to do that to AI systems. If, after a couple of weeks you hit the limit of what the AI could do in a million+ LoC, you aren't going to be able to hire a human dev to modify or replace that system for you, because:

1. Humans are going to be needing a ramp up time and that's damn costly (even more costly when there are fewer of them).

2. Where are you going to find humans who can actually code anymore if everyone has been doing this for the last 10 years?
by ethbr1 | 2026-01-18 15:02:50+00:00
In feedback solicitation situations with multiple stakeholders, it's important to attach cost to suggestions. Consulted without being responsible is always a dangerous offering.

Not in the sense of "This is how long that will take me" (because who cares about someone else's time?), but in "Of the 3 things you requested, which 1 is your must-have?"

Often this is approximated via design/dev team pushback, but it's easier just to be explicit about it: i.e. everyone gets X change request tokens.
by thinkcontext | 2026-01-18 15:03:20+00:00
> a better option still is to use the vehicle you already have for as long as reasonable

I've gone back and forth on this. When you buy an EV your old ICE vehicle is not destroyed, it continues it's lifecycle when it goes to someone else. Moreover, there's value in sending a market signal in buying an EV, which is important at this stage of transition.

Maybe the argument is about average age of the road fleet? That a used ICE vehicle should be replaced with a used EV?
by 1718627440 | 2026-01-18 15:03:20+00:00
> Handy if you know your Windows machine will be finished with a task in 10 or so minutes but you need to leave

That might maybe work most times, but when your network speed suddenly changes or the downloads is aborted it fails. Far better is just telling your computer that you want it to shutdown after the download finished:

wget ... && shutdown now

Should also work on MS Windows, IE used to be able to be told to exit once the download finishes, not sure how the situation looks like now.
by counters | 2026-01-18 15:03:50+00:00
The important, missing detail that breaks down this analogy is that we don't have a reference for a long period of vulcanism while anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases continue.

This is where the "termination shock" issue comes in. Given current CO2 emission rates, a 50 year geoengineering strategy would mask an additional 100-125 ppm of CO2 added to the atmosphere. If the geoengineering scheme was suddenly stopped, it's not entirely obvious what the response trajectory would be of the climate system.
by redleader55 | 2026-01-18 15:04:27+00:00
The way this is usually done is through a radiating wire that goes on the wall from station to station. This solution requires a lot of power. The stations in London are very small, leaving very little space for a transformer that can provide said power.

Because of that they rely on directional antennas that cover sections of the tunnel - but those need to be straight, otherwise another antenna is required to cover that corner. There is also very little head-room in the tube tunnels in London. You can see how things get more and more complicated as you dig deeper into the problem.