MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ACow_Adonis | 2026-01-05 11:18:40+00:00
In practice, I find it depends on your work scale, topic and cadence.

I started on the $20 plans for a bit of an experiment, needing to see about this whole AI thing. And for the first month or two that was enough to get the flavor. It let me see how to work. I was still copy/pasting mostly, thinking about what to do.

As i got more confident i moved to the agents and the integrated editors. Then i realised i could open more than one editor or agent at a time while each AI instance was doing its work.

I discovered that when I'm getting the AI agents to summarise, write reports, investigate issues, make plans, implement changes, run builds, organise git, etc, now I can alt-tab and drive anywhere between 2-6 projects at once, and I don't have to do any of the boring boiler plate or administrivia, because the AI does that, it's what its great for.

What used to be unthinkable and annoying context switching now lets me focus in on different parts of the project that actually matter, firing off instructions, providing instructions to the next agent, ushering them out the door and then checking on the next intern in the queue. Give them feedback on their work, usher them on, next intern. The main task now is kind of managing the scope and context-window of each AI, and how to structure big projects to take advantage of that. Honestly though, i don't view it as too much more than functional decomposition. You've still got a big problem, now how do you break it down.

At this rate I can sustain the $100 claude plan, but honestly I don't need to go further than that, and that's basically me working full time in parallel streams, although i might be using it at relatively cheap times, so it or the $200 plan seems about right for full time work.

I can see how theoretically you could go even above that, going into full auto-pilot mode, but I feel i'm already at a place of diminishing marginal returns, i don't usually go over the $100 claude code plan, and the AIs can't do the complex work reliably enough to be left alone anyway. So at the moment if you're going full time i feel they're the sweet spot.

The $20 plans are fine for getting a flavor for the first month or two, but once you come up to speed you'll breeze past their limitations quickly.
by kravosecdonna | 2026-01-05 11:19:07+00:00
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by jacquesm | 2026-01-05 11:19:23+00:00
Yes, that is part of it. And part of it is 'useful idiots' doing what the propagandists would do as well.

On HN you will find people from a lot of different countries with a lot of different viewpoints. The main reason politics (and religion) are mostly taboo on here is because those subjects tend to polarize and turn the place into yet another shithole. So I can see why there is a strong push to keep those off the site.

But at the same time I'm realistic enough to know that everything has a political angle and that you can not solve a problem like this by denying its existence. That just makes it a bigger problem.

The mods here have an un-enviable job, they walk a very fine line with an extremely smart audience, and they are doing an absolutely amazing job of it given that most people would fail in that position in about 30 seconds flat. It is as even handed as you could possibly make it. But flagging is not a moderator action, it is the users and I've seen them be abused more than once, either because of personal dislikes or because of brigading.

Even so, you'd be hard pressed to find a place with better discourse on a large variety of subjects.
by rswail | 2026-01-05 11:19:37+00:00
They should have a general idea of what they are building and why, in exactly the same way as a construction worker.

That doesn't mean they spend all day asking stakeholders what they want. It means that when there is a choice and the stakeholder has to make a decision, the developer should be able to understand some of what the stakeholder is looking for so that they can recommend a direction.

Sure, a carpenter is just putting up a wall, but if they're experienced and they see that there's going to be a joist that is going to block some feature, they should be able to point that out to the architect or builder or client.
by thinkingemote | 2026-01-05 11:20:03+00:00
Dark mode - turning off the transponders and also coordinating their movements together to overwhelm any reaction. Some ships painted fake names on their hulls.

If one or two get caught but 10 make it through then ${game_theory}. This is very rare with modern blockades and global shipping.

According to Tanker Trackers on twitter. I dont think they have a blog or news area, their tracking of global shipping is very interesting to see patterns related to geopolitics https://x.com/TankerTrackers
by jamalm1417 | 2026-01-05 11:20:52+00:00
Hi HN

I started this after getting frustrated with the back-and-forth of sharing PowerPoint files and wanting something closer to “slides as code” that works well with version control.

That idea evolved into visualise.ink: instead of writing the structure yourself, you describe what you want and AI generates clean, usable visuals for you. The goal isn’t to compete with PowerPoint, but to serve people who want good slides now without fiddling with layouts.

Under the hood, designs are defined using a simple YAML-based language (inspired by SwiftUI / Jetpack Compose) and rendered to HTML. In practice, the AI writes almost all of this for you; I rarely touch it myself anymore.

You can:
- generate slides, posters, cheatsheets, and menus from text
- input your own data
- recreate or match the style of an existing slide or image

I know Gamma and others exist already but I have found them to be clunky and not produce slides that I would actually want to use. I want max ROI with minimal effort.

It’s a closed-source SaaS with a free tier and a paid plan if you use it heavily.

I’d love feedback on:
- whether the outputs feel usable out of the box
- pricing clarity
- what formats or features would be most valuable next

Link: https://visualise.ink
Small showcase: https://visualise.ink/showcase
by thaumasiotes | 2026-01-05 11:21:25+00:00
> The team of scientists discovered that 69,000 Tegenaria domestica, known as the barn funnel weaver, were living with about 42,000 Prinerigone vagans, which inhabit wet places. Usually the barn funnel weavers prey on P. vagans, which are smaller.

> “But in the cave, because it’s dark in there, our hypothesis was that they do not see each other,” Blerina Vrenozi, a biologist, zoologist and ecologist at the University of Tirana in Albania said in an interview. “So they do not attack.”

I thought one of the major purposes of spiderwebs was that the spider can detect the presence of something else in the web without needing to be able to see it.
by rswail | 2026-01-05 11:21:58+00:00
The other argument about this is whether or not an SWE is a fungible resource.

When you're doing a construction schedule, you might have a pool of carpenters, pool of electricians etc. They can be assigned to the different jobs as a fungible resource, a different carpenter can take over a task just like one power drill can take over another.

We all know that no matter how much ceremony and process, SWEs are not equal, so you can't just move them around randomly.
by cogman10 | 2026-01-05 11:23:37+00:00
Ah California.

This is a very good example of the difference between a left policy and a liberal policy (actually neoliberal to be precise).

The left policy would have been to have some agency within the california government which ultimately does the verification... because why would you outsource that task to a 3rd party?

The neoliberal policy is "Well, we don't want to spend the time to set this up, so let's just pay 10 companies with some taxpayer money to do the job we really should do ourselves".
by potato3732842 | 2026-01-05 11:24:30+00:00
Your comment should offend far more on HN than it will.

Heck, drop into any comment section about transportation infrastructure or environmental policy (or a few years ago public health policy as well) and there's all sorts of evil mustache twirling going on about how to use basically the same sort of technologies to deploy state violence in pursuit of some goal and they are either unable or unwilling to think a few steps ahead see that what they're advocating for will over time if not quickly lead to dark places as policy and priorities change incrementally.

As I'm concerned the people who are happy to peddle this stuff when it suits them are just as complicit as the people who are cheering for it right now when it's being used for "obviously bad" things.

>As Benjamin Franklin put it: those who give up essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither. The tradeoff rarely feels extreme at the time. It feels reasonable. By the time it isn’t, there’s no way back.

This quote is like a lightening rod for exactly the kind of people I'm talking about.
by lelanthran | 2026-01-05 11:25:51+00:00
> Well, yes. Most people want to be given a fish, rather than learning how to fish.

Understood, but that is not what SO represented itself as. They called themselves a Q and A site, not a wiki of fact-checked information.

From what you are saying, they pretended to give fish when in reality only teaching fishing. Users went their because they were told that they could get fish, and only found out once there that there was no fish, only fishing lessons.

Blame lies squarely on SO, not on users. If SO clarified their marketing as "Not a Q and A site" then we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Right now, the only description of the SO site is on stack-exchange, and this is what it says on the landing page, front and center:

Stack Exchange Q&A communities are different.
by rswail | 2026-01-05 11:26:17+00:00
No, that's HR justifying its existence.

Plus that's for higher stature service based roles, not warehouse logistics.

It's also mostly bullshit.

Teams work because they have the right combination of skills, both personal and technical, high EQ and IQ, leadership and ownership.

Whether or not you fall backwards into a team's arms or have to participate in childish games is not relevant.
by igleria | 2026-01-05 11:27:04+00:00
> It's utterly unreal to me to hear so little discussion about labor organization

Never lived in the US, where I assume you are from. It's the same country that contrary to most countries, does not have May 1st as a Holiday. Same country that has states with at will employment, etc etc.

unreal? nope, totally coherent and expected.
by aragilar | 2026-01-05 11:27:08+00:00
Most linux distros require that software they distribute is open source, and link to the home pages of applications, so effectively donations are the only way to pay for those. There are paid distros (which are almost always about support, there was a paid GNUStep distro though many years ago).

On the other hand, Steam et al are app stores where developers can get paid.
by ethbr1 | 2026-01-05 11:27:31+00:00
Wasn't this the observation / tension at the heart of Mountainhead?

The solution to this was representative democracy electing independently-minded technical experts, but electoral / parliamentary systems in many countries would need to change to make this viable.

E.g. in the US, what percentage of Congress do you think could give even an accurate 100-level description of AI?
Show HN: RepoReaper – AST-aware, JIT-loading code audit agent (Python/AsyncIO)
by realdexter | 2026-01-05 11:27:43+00:00
Hi everyone,

I was tired of "Chat with Code" tools that blindly chunk text and hallucinate context. So I built RepoReaper – an autonomous agent designed to mimic the cognitive process of a Senior Tech Lead.

Instead of dumping the whole repo into context, it works step-by-step:

Thinking Like a Pro: It starts by reading the file tree, selects the top 20 critical files based on architecture, and "thinks" about what to read next to understand the project structure.

AST-Aware Chunking: It uses Python's ast module to split code by Class/Method boundaries, preserving logic instead of breaking it mid-function.

ReAct Loop & JIT Loading: If it encounters a function call defined in a missing file, it pauses, triggers a tool to fetch that specific file from GitHub (Just-In-Time), and resumes analysis.

Visual Output: It generates Mermaid diagrams (Architecture/Sequence) and markdown tables to explain complex logic visually.

Hybrid Search: Combines Vector Search (BGE-M3) for semantics and BM25 for exact keyword/function name matching.

High Performance: Built with AsyncIO for high concurrency and uses Persistent Storage (ChromaDB on disk) to save state across sessions.

The Live Demo (Global & China optimized) is available directly in the README.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-05 11:27:53+00:00
You can optimize things. I have a github action that starts stops a fast google cloud vm for our builds. It only gets used about 3 minutes per build. We maybe have a few dozen builds per month. So that's a few hours of run time. The rest of the time the vm is stopped and not billed (except for storage, which is cents per month at most). It's a simple debian vm so it boots in about 20 seconds.

VMs are expensive if you leave them running 24/7 but the logic to start/stop them is pretty easy. There's no need.

Anyway, you need to balance this against the payoff. Agentic coding is useful enough that it beats spending your own time. And that includes waiting time for the relatively slow/underpowered containerized environments that some tools would use by default. I use codex web and codex cli (with a qemu vm so I can use the --yolo flag). Codex web is a bit limited with memory and CPU. Some of my slower builds are taking forever there. To the point where most of the time it consumes is just waiting for these builds to happen.

With a bit of plumbing, you can do things like the author describes pretty easily. IMHO this needs to be better integrated into tools. With Github you have the option to run your own runners. I don't think codex/claude web have similar options currently. But with the cli versions, you can get more creative if you know your tools. And if you don't, use LLMs to drive them for you. It's mostly just about expressing what you want and how you want it.
by lm28469 | 2026-01-05 11:30:13+00:00
The same but less rigged would be a good start. I feel like people ask your question as a gotcha because they can't wrap their head around a system more nuanced than "cancerous capitalism" or "potato famine communism"

Something like we had in advanced western europe and the US between ww2 and the late 70s seemed much more balanced while not requiring a complete system change. Most people would be fine if we sprinkled a bit of socialism on top of the gigantic pile of capitalism.

Stuff like housing, energy, transportation, shouldn't make you live paycheck to paycheck forever. Just the fact that people are slowly starting to talk about 50 years mortgage should be a wake up call.

Most people would be happy knowing there is something a tiny bit better coming, rather than knowing they will never make it out and will kept getting fucked a tiny bit more year after year. My grandparents had objectively a harder life than mine, but their life was improving every year, mine is stagnating at best, and usually I'm losing purchasing power year after year, while being relatively well paid for my country
by nchmy | 2026-01-05 11:30:40+00:00
Oh my god. I have never seen an about/bio page even half as gross and cringey as this. It's so obscene that it reads like a parody

> Colleagues often remark on Osmani’s humility

LOL! Who writes these things about themselves with a straight face?!

It also shows that taking credit for others' work is 100% his MO.

> Osmani’s team created Workbox, a set of libraries for generating service worker scripts that handle caching and offline functionality with minimal fuss. Workbox simplified what used to be a complex task of writing low-level code to intercept network requests.

No, Jeff Posnick (who I suppose technically was on addy's team) created workbox and it has been basically abandonned since he left Google.

I have to assume the rest of the bio, and his career, has been built off of usurping credit. He always rubbed me the wrong way, and this vindicates that sense.

What a psychopath!
by davydm | 2026-01-05 11:30:53+00:00
That's a pretty positive way to say that the AI grifters have effectively enshittified the net. Every page is behind a bot detection interstitial, wasting users' time to get to what they're looking for. And when that bot detection is broken (and it has been, recently, a few times), then most of the internet is just plain broken.

I honestly wish the whole AI lot would go up in flames. Sooner rather than later.
by dako9999 | 2026-01-05 11:31:04+00:00
We're a duo maker and just shipped Healio v.2.0, an iOS self-help affirmations app.

we noticed most affirmation apps feel either too generic or too “woo”. we focused on short, emotionally grounded affirmations and a fast daily flow.

What’s different

Very short sessions (1–2 minutes)

Themes by emotional state (stress, guilt/shame, loneliness, resentment, etc.)

Save favorites + quick replay

Clean UI, minimal friction

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/healio-self-help-affirmations/...

If you try it, I’d love feedback!
by _qua | 2026-01-05 11:31:49+00:00
I've never really understood the "spiders protect you from pests" argument. Yeah, sure they eat flies. But I'd much rather have a fly buzz past me and get stuck to some fly paper than have a spider drop from the door frame on an invisible silk thread and slam into my face, or run across my pillow. Maybe I have arachnophobia, but they're freaky little creatures that I don't want in my living space.
by ben_w | 2026-01-05 11:31:59+00:00
Yes and no.

Yes, I recon coding is dead.

No, that doesn't mean there's nothing to learn.

People like to make comparisons to calculators rendering mental arithmetic obsolete, so here's an anecdote: First year of university, I went to a local store and picked up three items each costing less than £1, the cashier rang up a total of more than £3 (I'd calculated the exact total and pre-prepared the change before reaching the head of the queue, but the exact price of 3 items isn't important enough to remember 20+ years later). The till itself was undoubtedly perfectly executing whatever maths it had been given, I assume the cashier mistyped or double-scanned. As I said, I had the exact total, the fact that I had to explain "three items costing less than £1 each cannot add up to more than £3" to the cashier shows that even this trivial level of mental arithmetic is not universal.

I now code with LLMs. They are so much faster than doing it by hand. But if I didn't already have experience of code review, I'd be limited to vibe-coding (by the original definition, not even checking). I've experimented with that to see what the result is, and the result is technical debt building up. I know what to do about that because of my experience with it in the past, and I can guide the LLM through that process, but if I didn't have that experience, the LLM would pile up more and more technical debt and grind the metaphorical motorbike's metaphorical wheels into the metaphorical mud.
by miggol | 2026-01-05 11:32:29+00:00
Good point, considering the nature of floppies I suppose it technically mustn't have been immutable. But I feel like it would have been wise to mount your OS root read-only to prevent yourself from accidentally ruining your (possibly only) copy of your OS. At least before you had a reasonably sized hard drive.

> I'm surprised that, having something immutable, you'd choose to go the other direction.

I can somewhat imagine that having been limited by space and having to swap out disks all the time one would jump on the train of mutability without fully appreciating the benefits of immutability.
by KomoD | 2026-01-05 11:33:04+00:00
Are you saying I'm wrong?

1. your privacy policy

> Third Parties

> - Twilio: Calls, SMS, phone numbers

2. your pricing and twilio's pricing

Twilio: $0.0140 / min

You: $0.05 / min

(0.05 - 0.0140) / 0.0140 * 100 = 257%
by stavros | 2026-01-05 11:33:48+00:00
It doesn't, but since it uses a whole ESP8266 module, it's really easy to add one. I'm going to add a light sensor soon, as the time-based brightness is more annoying than I expected.

I haven't tried with ESPhome, but I think it would be easy to add some alarm code. There's no touch screen or other interface, though, so you'd have to set the alarm via Wifi.
by mikkupikku | 2026-01-05 11:33:51+00:00
Let's take a step back and unpack what we're actually trying to say here:

> The gnucash developers use github, therefore...

There's no therefore which changes this discussion. If you want to follow the lead of gnucash developers, none of us can stop you but you and they are still making a mistake. Microsoft is not to be trusted. It's only been what, a week or so since Microsoft shut down the ability to install Windows without a Microsoft account? Something Microsoft fanboys said they'd never do, even as all the evidence pointed towards Microsoft slow boiling that frog. If you still need to learn the hard way, have fun with that. Don't expect anybody else to cheer you on though, we've seen where this goes too many times.
by afro88 | 2026-01-05 11:34:02+00:00
But that is still better than nothing at all, which is the point.

The people you want (or want to be) are the engineers who are smart and experienced enough to get a first draft down that is pretty much right without a long drawn out process of figuring out the best way to do X, Y and Z with all the lengthy ADRs, discussions, debates, POCs, revisions etc. over and over again. That may be necessary if you don't have people in the room who know what they're doing and have the intuition through deep experience to choose good tools, patterns and abstractions at the start. Begin closer to the target, rather than far away and iterate to it.
by acomjean | 2026-01-05 11:34:05+00:00
I think you are right. If I remember there were 2 types of silk, and they could use their legs to “listen” to vibrations when something gets caught anywhere in the web. They seem to avoid getting stuck in their own webs.

But they do have 8 eyes, so I’m assuming they make visual confirmation. But these cave spiders are in the dark…
by VOIDMAKINA | 2026-01-05 11:35:13+00:00
Mockery is easy. Analysis is hard.

I just provided the full technical whitepaper and source code to an unconnected, blank-slate AI for an unbiased audit.
It didn't laugh. It didn't call me crazy.
It asked me a single question:

> "Technically, this IS the end of hacking.
> But is humanity ready to handle the silence that follows?
> Are you sure you are smarter than the Agent that built this?"

You think I am insane?
You will not be able to prove me crazy.
Instead, by trying to break this, you will only prove that the theory is perfect.

Stop laughing and start your debuggers.
If you can.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-05 11:35:19+00:00
And the original submission billed as "Compile English to Rust" uses a lot more ## and quotation marks than natural language. Perhaps we could establish an understanding that we are still talking about programming languages, not natural language, and that there is a scale of "further from natural language" and "closer to natural language", wherein decisions made about and within the programming language can move it along the scale while still being a programming language.