MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Waterluvian | 2026-01-30 15:41:28+00:00
The other day I said something along the lines of, "be interested in the class, not the instance" and I meant to try to articulate a sense of metaprogramming and metaanalysis of a problem.

Y is causing Z and we should fix that. But if we stop and study the problem, we might discover that X causes the class of Y problem so we can fix the entire class, not just the instance. And perhaps W causes the class of X issue. I find my job more and more being about how far up this causality tree can I reason, how confident am I about my findings, and how far up does it make business sense to address right now, later, or ever?
by bluGill | 2026-01-30 15:41:45+00:00
Facebook as a monopoly of a sort and so is hard to get away from. If I don't like Tesla there are many other options. Even if you only buy EVs, there are a lot of options that you can buy today. The only people who have to buy Tesla are the type who are buying 10 year old EVs (the limited range on 10 year old Nissan rules them out).
by leoedin | 2026-01-30 15:41:52+00:00
I've been playing around with "vibe coding" recently. Generally react front end and Rust back end. Rust has the nice benefit that you only really get logic bugs if it compiles.

In the few apps I've built, progress is initially amazing. And then you get to a certain point and things slow down. I've built a list of things that are "not quite right" and then, as I work through each one all the strange architectural decisions the AI initially made start to become obvious.

Much like any software development, you have to stop adding features and start refactoring. That's the point at which not being a good software developer will really start to bite you, because it's only experience that will point you in the right direction.

It's completely incredible what the models can do. Both in speed of building (especially credible front ends), and as sounding boards for architecture. It's definitely a productivity boost. But I think we're still a long way off non-technical people being able to develop applications.

A while ago I worked on a non-trivial no-code application. I realised then that even though there's "no code", you still needed to apply careful thought about data structures and UI and all the other things that make an application great. Otherwise it turned into a huge mess. This feels similar.
by JBAnderson5 | 2026-01-30 15:41:57+00:00
I think part of the issue here is that software engineering is a very broad field. If you’re building another crud app, your job might only require reading a ticket and copy/pasting from stack overflow. If you are working in a regulated industry, you are spending most of your time complying with regulations. If you are building new programming languages or compilers, you are building the abstractions from the ground up. I’m sure there’s dozens if not hundreds of other sub fields that build software in other ways with different requirements and constraints.

LLMs will trivialize some subfields, be nearly useless in others, but will probably help to some degree in most of them. The range of opinions online about how useful LLMs are in their work probably correlates to what subfields they work in
by drnick1 | 2026-01-30 15:42:11+00:00
It's not hate, but we are now at a point where the vast majority of games just run, mostly thanks to Valve and the Wine/DVXK community's efforts. What Linux gamers fear now (with good reason) is that increased interest in the platform from companies more interested in money than freedom will undermine these efforts with anti-consumer and anti-FOSS initiatives, such as closed source clients, DRM, signed kernels, hardware attestations.
by CubityFirst | 2026-01-30 15:42:21+00:00
I'm vaguely involved w/ ShareX, so take this however you want.

It doesn't as of a recent update (due to continued stability issues at Imgur). The default behavior is to not upload anymore.

Additionally ShareX pops up a big red warning telling you that you're about to upload. There are some forks (see: ShareNot) that explicitly remove any uploading, but by default there is a registry key, a setting, and a big warning that you can enable that disables uploading.
by ryandrake | 2026-01-30 15:42:27+00:00
There used to be [EDIT: still is] a website[1] that listed all of Musk's promises and predictions about his businesses and showed you how long it's been since he said the promise would materialize. It's full of mostly old statements, probably because it's impossible to keep up with the amount of content being generated monthly.

1: https://elonmusk.today
by Uehreka | 2026-01-30 15:42:34+00:00
So I called out Acid3 in the original comment (and mentioned why it’s not the holy grail) so people wouldn’t get the idea that I was building full-on modern browsers. I’m not sure what I need to say to make y’all happy. I’m just excited that these tools are capable of doing non-trivial work and I’m having fun throwing tasks at it to see what comes out. I’m not going around telling people to download or use these things.
by noirscape | 2026-01-30 15:43:06+00:00
Still feels very relevant, since I don't think much has been systematically changed.

Structurally, SSL verification is in the same category as stuff like SELinux: most people that interact with it understand why it exists, why it's needed... but the actual process of using anything related to SSL is an exercise in frustration. So the default response is to degrade it or turn it off entirely because shit isn't working for them. (The second search suggestion for SELinux is to change it to permissive, which effectively turns it off without having your distro tools yell at you for disabling it.)

Even today, OpenSSLs interfaces are horrendously designed (if you've ever chose to mess with a proper self-signed cert setup with a custom CA and everything, you'd be aware of how bad their CLI tools are). I wouldn't be surprised if this is a case of it propagating upwards from them; OpenSSLs bad interfaces lead to bad CURL flags, which in turn leads to bad checks by more high level implementations... which goes all the way until you get the HTTP library that just does away with all the fanfare and has a function that accepts all you need for a URL and under the hood handles all those other implementations. (ie. requests for urllib3.)

It also really doesn't help that SSL errors tend to be... unhelpful at the best of times in most cases. You're usually fishing out random error codes that don't seem to have any clear relationship to what you're doing; it creates an aversion to having to engage with the process at all.

And that's for the programming side of things; the dev UX may be bad, but on the user side it tends to be way worse. This isn't about browsers, but it makes no sense that a regular HTTP connection just works, but the moment an SSL certificate is expired for a single second, you have to click through big red scare screens. It'd make more sense if both the certificate and HTTP connection threw up scare screens, but they don't. Instead you just get the strike-through lock of disappointment in your address bar. Makes zero sense.
by s-macke | 2026-01-30 15:43:17+00:00
> ... emitting a NYC worth of CO2 in a year is dizzying

Simplified comparisons like these rarely show the full picture [0]. They focus on electricity use only, not on heating, transport, or meat production, and certainly not on the CO2 emissions associated with New York’s airports. As a rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate, a flight from Los Angeles to New York with one seat is on the order of 1,000,000 small chat queries CO2e.

Of course we should care about AI’s electricity consumption, especially when we run 100 agents in parallel simply because we can. But it’s important to keep it in perspective.

[0] https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversa...
by tsimionescu | 2026-01-30 15:43:55+00:00
I don't know, since they unfortunately don't cite a source for that number, but I can imagine some sources of data - insurers, vehicle repair and paint shops. Since average miles driven without incident seems plausible to be an important factor for insurance companies to know (even minor incidents will typically incur some repair costs), it seems likely that people have studied this and care about the accuracy of the numbers.

Of course, I fully admit that for all I know it's possible the article entirely made up these numbers, I haven't tried to look for an alternative source or anything.
by hedora | 2026-01-30 15:44:01+00:00
> TFA does a comparison with average (estimated), low-speed contact events that are not police-reported by humans, of one incident every 200,000 miles.

Where does it say that? I see "However, that figure doesn’t include non-police-reported incidents. When adding those, or rather an estimate of those, humans are closer to 200,000 miles between crashes, which is still a lot better than Tesla’s robotaxi in Austin."

All but one of the Tesla crashes obviously involved significant property damage or injuries (the remaining one is ambiguous).

So, based on the text of the article, they're assuming only 2/5ths of property damage / injury accidents are reported to the police. That's lower than I would have guessed (don't people use their car insurance, which requires the police report?), but presumably backed by data.
by bambax | 2026-01-30 15:44:17+00:00
> Code was always a means to an end. Unlike poetry or prose, end users don’t read or care about code.

Yes and no. Code is not art, but software is art.

What is art, then? Not something that's "beautiful", as beauty is of course mostly subjective. Not even something that works well.

I think art is a thing that was made with great care.

It doesn't matter if some piece of software was vibe-coded in part or in full, if it was edited, tested, retried enough times for its maker to consider it "perfect". Trash is something that's done in a careless way.

If you truly love and use what you made, it's likely someone else will. If not, well... why would anyone?
by jsight | 2026-01-30 15:44:25+00:00
I've always assumed that the answer to this would be no. However, I also always assumed that a huge space-based internet system would be both expensive and impractical for bandwidth and latency.

Starlink has largely defied those expectations thanks to their approach to optimize launch costs.

It is possible that I'm overlooking some similar fundamental advancement that would make this less impractical than it sounds. I'm still really skeptical.
by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | 2026-01-30 15:45:01+00:00
Not op but for breakfast I do 1/4 cup steel cut oats, 1 cup water, 1 tbsp olive oil, 1 tbsp maple syrup, 1/4 tsp cinnamon, pinch of salt. Add a spoon of flax meal at the end. I sometimes add walnuts.

I wish I didn't need the maple syrup. Adjust to taste I guess. Doc says my cholesterol levels are immaculate.
by captain5123 | 2026-01-30 15:45:04+00:00
> The real concern is for generations of learners who are being robbed of the opportunity to acquire the expertise to objectively discern what is slop and what is not.
How do new developers build the skills that seniors generated through time? I see my seniors having higher success in vibe-coding than me. How can I short-circuit the time they put through for myself?
by everdrive | 2026-01-30 15:45:07+00:00
>Meanwhile, alkaline batteries can go to hell. You might as well plan on one leaking in the battery compartment.

On the other hand, alkaline batteries never burn your house down.

I also feel like they serve different purposes. Needed for long-term storage and only used in an emergency? (eg, a flashlight for power outages) You're probably better off going with old-fashioned alkaline batteries. Duracell claims they're good for 10 years. Needed for day-to-day usage? Lithium might be better: you can monitor for swelling, the battery recharge-ability is probably more important than any of the downsides that come with lithium ion batteries.
by drakythe | 2026-01-30 15:45:08+00:00
Glad I'm not the only one who had this thought. We shit on new apps that ask us to install via curling a bash script and now these guys are making a social experiment that is the same idea only _worse_, and this after the recent high profile file exfiltration malicious skills being written about.

Though in the end I suppose this could be a new species of malware for the XKCD Network: https://xkcd.com/350/
by _rousbound | 2026-01-30 15:45:08+00:00
I wonder the same thing, but with an emphasis on app mobile development.

Godot from project setup to running on my Android is way more effortless/lightweight experience than doing the way of AndroidStudio and/or Flutter stuff.

What I dream of is making a Lua binding for essential godot GUI control nodes using GDExtension and using this LibGodot to own the engine loop, so I can do all the app code in Lua.

So, I may have drifted away from your question, but the point is that I love Godot for gaming, and I can handle GDScript plus the engine editor, but for writing a complete application I would want to develop in my language/editor/ecosystem of choice.

In that sense, LibGodot(plus GDExtension) may help indirectly developing GUI applications by letting people own Godot in their ecossystem of choice.
by rayiner | 2026-01-30 15:45:17+00:00
They were both ideologically on the libertarian end of neoliberal, which is highly unusual. There’s no major political party anywhere in the world currently that’s as far right on free markets as Reagan and Thatcher were, except maybe Milei’s Argentina.

Reform’s nationalism by contrast is incredibly milquetoast. It wouldn’t even be considered right wing in much of the world. For example, if the shoe were on the other foot, and British and Irish immigration had reduced Bangladeshis to a minority in Dhaka, then the immigrants would be removed en masse (as the center-left government did with the Rohingya in response to that migration).

What do you think would happen in China if Indians and Bangladeshis mass migrated to Beijing until Chinese people were a minority? It would be a lot less talk and a lot more action than what you’re seeing from Reform.
by westurner | 2026-01-30 15:45:28+00:00
"Rethinking Code Refinement: Learning to Judge Code Efficiency"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42097656

eWASM has costed opcodes. The EVM virtual machine has not implemented eWASM.

Costed opcodes in WASM for agents could incentivize efficiency

re: wasm-bpf and eWASM and the BPF verifier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42092120

ewasm docs > Gas Costs >
"Gas costs of individual instructions"
https://ewasm.readthedocs.io/en/mkdocs/determining_wasm_gas_...

Browser tabs could show CPU, RAM, GPU utilization;

From "The Risks of WebAssembly" (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32765865 :

> Don't there need to be per- CPU/RAM/GPU quotas per WASM scope/tab? Or is preventing DOS with WASM out of scope for browsers?

> IIRC, it's possible to check resource utilization in e.g. a browser Task Manager, but there's no way to do `nice` or `docker --cpu-quota` or `systemd-nspawn --cpu-affinity` to prevent one or more WASM tabs from DOS'ing a workstation with non-costed operations.

Presumably workerd supports resource quotas somehow?

From 2024 re: Process isolation in browsers : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40861851 :

> From "WebGPU is now available on Android" [...] (2022) :

>> What are some ideas for UI Visual Affordances to solve for bad UX due to slow browser tabs and extensions?

>> UBY: Browsers: Strobe the tab or extension button when it's beyond (configurable) resource usage thresholds

>> UBY: Browsers: Vary the {color, size, fill} of the tabs according to their relative resource utilization
by kageiit | 2026-01-30 15:45:29+00:00
We built our own harness from the ground up to account for this

Secrets come from aws secret manager and never injected into env directly.

Each part of the agentic workflow only gets the secrets it needs injected. Agent can see env var names but not the values (our harness masks them) . We also mask any attempts to output to stdout/files.

This keeps the agent architecture simple with env vars that all agents can operate on as it locally. Prompt injection attempts will only yield masked values

Has been working well for us so far
by jonpurdy | 2026-01-30 15:46:22+00:00
I had an issue with the original Apple Magic Mouse that would not work correctly with NiMH batteries but work fine with disposable AA. The mouse would be fine for a few days then randomly stop working; using fresh NiMH would revive it again. I assumed it was due to 1.2v vs 1.5v but perhaps that particular mouse (or all Magic Mice) was just bad.
by brookst | 2026-01-30 15:46:34+00:00
I agree with most of your points and your conclusion, but to be fair OP was asserting that human drivers under-report incidents, which I believe. Super minor bumps where the drivers get out, determine there’s barely a scratch, and go on. Or solo low speed collisions with walls in garage or trees.

I don’t think it invalidates the conclusion, but it seems like one fair point in an otherwise off-target defense.
by rkagerer | 2026-01-30 15:47:17+00:00
Is anyone else concerned about the huge, centralized dependency AI introduces into your workflow?

This is one reason I've been resistant to using it. I don't want my work to go to the companies providing the models. I don't trust them. Not only with my data in the first place, but also that they'll keep providing the service over the long term without totally enshittifying the experience.

I'll be so much more excited by this when local models catch up to (or even exceed) frontier-level quality. How close are we to this?

(In my case, I don't even care if it costs a boatload in hardware capital to deploy.)
by bespokedevelopr | 2026-01-30 15:47:21+00:00
I don’t like that county officials are willing to sign NDAs in order to bring data centers to their counties. It should be public, there should be competition if it is so desirable or important to be located in that county. The leaders in these companies love to talk up free-market, but then do everything to Standard Oil their way in.

I also don’t understand the vehement push back against data centers in WI. It is a prime location for both residents and business. WI and all of the upper midwest was gutted of their manufacturing in my parents time. Now companies are bringing back long term commitments and the people there don’t want it?

I can understand not wanting a data center in AZ or NM. But WI has the resources, climate, and power generating capabilities to support this. There is talk of bringing back the Kewaunee nuclear plant even to support growth.

How does a former manufacturing power house state, not want to bring back jobs and the tax revenue a dc will pull in?

One of the boomer-issues I’ve heard, as I characterize it since it comes from my fam, is that data centers along with solar are taking away farm land and they’re pouty about it. However that farm land is soybeans grown for export to other countries, acting as a fresh water subsidy for those places. The farmers aren’t feeding the state anyways.

Most of the fervent opposition however comes from my generation who are mad about AI so therefore data centers can’t be built because they don’t like it. It isn’t a very compelling argument.
by Waterluvian | 2026-01-30 15:47:27+00:00
Discussing what we should do about the automation of labour is nothing new and is certainly a pretty big deal here. But I think you're reframing/redirecting the intended topic of conversation by suggesting that "X isn't the issue, Y is."

It wanders off the path like if I responded with, "that's also not the issue. The issue is that people need jobs to eat."
by lo_zamoyski | 2026-01-30 15:47:39+00:00
Yes, the original phrase has a specific meaning. But in another context, "talk" is more important than the code.

In software development, code is in a real sense less important than the understanding and models that developers carry around in their heads. The code is, to use an unflattering metaphor, a kind of excrement of the process. It means nothing without a human interpreter, even if it has operational value. The model is never part of the implementation, because software apart from human observers is a purely syntactic construct, at best (even there, I would argue it isn't even that, as syntax belongs to the mind/language).

This has consequences for LLM use.
by bwfan123 | 2026-01-30 15:47:40+00:00
There was also a mini bubble around social media aggregators and RSS feeds culminating in sites like gada.be

I see the dynamic as follows (be warned, cynical take)

1) there are the youth who are seeking approval from the community - look I have arrived - like the person building the steaming pile of browser code recently.

2) there are the veterans of a previous era who want to stay relevant in the new tech and show they still got mojo (gastown etc)

In both cases, the attitude is not one of careful deep engineering, craftsmanship or attention to the art, instead it reflects attention mongering.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2026-01-30 15:47:47+00:00
This is a great resource. Some others along the same lines:

TinyRenderer: https://haqr.eu/tinyrenderer/

ScratchAPixel: https://www.scratchapixel.com/index.html

3D Computer Graphics Programming by Pikuma (paid): https://pikuma.com/courses/learn-3d-computer-graphics-progra...

Ray-tracing:

Ray Tracing in One Weekend: https://raytracing.github.io/

Ray Tracing Gems: https://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracinggems/

Physically Based Rendering, 4th Edition: https://pbr-book.org/

I'll also link a comment[1] I made a while back about learning 3D graphics. There's no better teacher than manually implementing the rasterisation and ray-tracing pipelines.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46410210#46416135
by happytoexplain | 2026-01-30 15:47:50+00:00
Yes, it's being discussed a lot. No, it's not being discussed enough, nor by all the right people. It has the potential to cause untold suffering to the middle class of developed nations, since it's moving too fast for individual humans to adjust. On the Problem Scale that puts it on the "societal emergency" end, which basically can not be discussed enough.
by turnsout | 2026-01-30 15:48:02+00:00
Yeah, I looked at Clawdbot / OpenClaw at the beginning of the week (Monday), but the token use scared me off.

But I was inspired to use Claude Code to create my own personal assistant. It was shocking to see CC bang out an MVP in one Plan execution. I've been iterating it all week, but I've had it be careful with token usage. It defaults to Haiku (more than enough for things like email categorization), properly uses prompt caching, and has a focused set of tools to avoid bloating the context window. The cost is under $1 per check-in, which I'm okay with.

Now I get a morning and afternoon check-in about outstanding items, and my Inbox is clear. I can see this changing my relationship to email completely.
by aspenmartin | 2026-01-30 15:48:20+00:00
Well considering people that disagree with you “shills” is maybe a bad start and indicates you kind of just have an axe to grind. You’re right that there can be serious local issues for data centers but there are plenty of instances where it’s a clear net positive. There’s a lot of nuance that you’re just breezing over and then characterizing people that point this out as “shills”. Water and electricity demands do not have to be problematic, they are highly site specific. In some cases there are real concerns (drought-y areas like Arizona, impact on local grids and possibility of rate impacts for ordinary people etc) but in many cases they are not problematic (closed loop or reclaimed water, independent power sources, etc).