MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by d12frosted | 2026-01-14 11:03:50+00:00
Thanks for sharing! The JSON schema → widget mapping is a solid use case, and your two-tier validation (keystroke + submit-time) is a nice touch.

On the unbalanced parentheses from LLMs - I've found Claude Code with Opus 4.5 is generally quite good at keeping them balanced, fwiw.

Curious about this though:

> after understanding the tradeoffs, I pushed the widget code creation to an LLM

What tradeoffs made you go with raw widget.el over vui.el? Genuine question - that's exactly the kind of feedback that helps me understand if vui.el is solving the right problems or missing something.

Your gist essentially reimplements some things vui.el provides generically (state tracking, inline form lifecycle, cleanup). Would be interesting to see if vui.el could simplify the widget/state parts while you focus on the schema translation - or learn what's missing if it can't.

If having conversation here is not convenient, we can continue under your gist or via email. Let me know if you are interested :) If not - that's also fine :)
by grumbel | 2026-01-14 11:05:11+00:00
> GPT-3 was supposedly so powerful OpenAI refused to release the trained model because of “concerns about malicious applications of the technology”. [...] This has, of course, not happened.

What parallel world are they living in? Every single online platform has been flooded with AI generated content and had to enact counter measures, or went the other way, embraced it and replaced humans with AI. AI use in scams has also become common place.

Everything they warned about with the release of GPT‑2 did in fact happen.
by Ntrails | 2026-01-14 11:05:20+00:00
Any one of those goals is probably accomplishable merely via delegation, assuming you can pick the right people (good luck!). To achieve all of them likely isn't. It may well be we cannot have all of them at once. Note that I just grabbed a subset of things that seem relevant, certainly not all of the things the government should care about.

I'm not saying nobody could run this country more effectively. I do strongly suspect the market for that kind of skillset is out of our current price range
by Cyykratahk | 2026-01-14 11:05:26+00:00
An alternative to the paste commands is vipe (vi + pipe?) from moreutils which opens an $EDITOR that returns the contents once saved and closed.

It helps with pasting special chars, newlines, and remote sessions without access to the local clipboard.

secret=$(vipe)
echo "$secret"

https://manpages.debian.org/jessie/moreutils/vipe.1
by dogman1050 | 2026-01-14 11:05:37+00:00
As a manager, my job was to make sure they were working on the right thing. If they didn't carry their weight, I either reduced the impact by assigning them necessary-but-boring tasks to offload the high performers, or PIP'd them. I "rehabilitated" several engineers over the years and even gave them references when we parted. Staff that lied to me more than once were terminated.
by solumunus | 2026-01-14 11:05:47+00:00
OK dude. You’re bothering to respond so you could just properly respond. It’s entirely possible that I have gaps in my knowledge and can hear a new argument and find it reasonable, since I’ve spent almost no time debating Brexit. Obviously I’m now just going to assume you don’t have a decent argument, which you will point at and say “see!”. It’s an easy cop out for you. What’s the point in expressing opinions if you’re going to refuse to put any weight behind them whatsoever?
Tell HN: I Downgraded from macOS Tahoe to Sequoia
by inatreecrown2 | 2026-01-14 11:05:50+00:00
And I am loving it.
After a couple of months on Liquid Glass it is very refreshing to be back with somehow sane window shapes and icons in Sequoia.
Still hard to believe Apple shipped Tahoe in its current state.
If things don't improve with macOS 27 this will be my last Mac.
The downgrade was a hassle but nothing too bad.

I followed this guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ4RZHehp0k
by r0x0r007 | 2026-01-14 11:06:01+00:00
'If I had to guess, I'd say that is the main "skill" being lost'(to endure frustration).

I think this might be true for you, but for less experienced and new developers, well, they actually won't get to that stage because their 'learning' is basically prompting and they have nothing to forget nor remember. And that might be bigger issue.
by defrost | 2026-01-14 11:06:54+00:00
Blackballing, in Victorian English society, strictly meant to vote against a proposed member joining a club (above the working classes club memberships carried great weight wrt social standing).

It was also synonymous with ostracism, to be excluded from society, to have little to no chance of regular financing or loans, to have debts called, to be fired and have little hope of being employed.

It was socially networked suppression, operating at the speed of club dinners and afternoon teas.

Such things go back in time in many societies, wherever there was a hierarchy, whispers, and others to advance or to tread down.
by jamestennant | 2026-01-14 11:06:58+00:00
I built a small macOS menubar app (ShiftHappens) that swaps return and shift+return for selected applications, mainly to avoid accidentally submitting chatbot prompts.

The app itself is trivial. What mattered to me was the time it took to build.

I don’t know Swift and had never written a macOS app before. Based on past experience, I’d estimate that learning enough Swift, figuring out the macOS APIs, implementing the logic, and testing would normally take me 3–4 days.

Using Gemini Pro (via Antigravity), almost all of the code was generated by AI, and the whole thing took about an hour.

This is obviously a tiny project, but yet another data point on how software engineering is changing.
by jijijijij | 2026-01-14 11:07:13+00:00
My prediction: AI is the deathblow to IPv6 adoption for the wider web, since blocklists only really work with IPv4. Increasing VPN usage making user tracking and heuristics difficult, AI scrapers stealing appropriated human content and AI spam poisoning its exploitation, not to mention tech monopolization and centralization, the limitations of IPv4 are suddenly becoming an asset and incentives for IPv6 support are zero.

On the plus side, we probably got all of IPv6 to build an alternative, non-commercial, better web or whatever network, if we act quickly before routing support is vanishing. IPv6-only housing is cheap, things don’t need to work out. There could be the IPv4-enforced corpo world within walls, and IPv6-enabled wild wide wonderlands.
by abricq | 2026-01-14 11:07:14+00:00
> My belief in this tech isn't based on marketing hype or someone telling me it's good – it's based on cold reality of what I'm shipping daily

Then why is half of the big tech companies using Microsoft Teams and sending mails with .docx embedded in ?

Of course marketing matters.

And of course the hard facts also matters, and I don't think anybody is saying that AI agents are purely marketing hype. But regardless, it is still interesting to take a step back and observe what marketing pressures we are subject to.
by n4r9 | 2026-01-14 11:07:27+00:00
Great managers absolutely can provide motivation. They can have a genuinely compelling vision for a product - "we're going to build the best damn FooGadget on the web". They can figure out what motivates their reports and work to make it transparent to them - for example some engineers like to see positive client feedback, whilst other engineers like having thorny problems to solve.
by anonnon | 2026-01-14 11:07:47+00:00
I don't see what any of this has to do with Greenland.

But his posts describing his fellow countrymen as if some "berserker" spirit lies dormant within, are so credulity-straining that I initially assumed they were ironic, but then I remembered what site I was on (orange reddit), and how irony unqualified by "/s" is swiftly met with downvotes or flags, so he must be serious.
by st_goliath | 2026-01-14 11:07:50+00:00
A lovely video from a Shenzhen factory, mass producing disposable vapes, in case someone's interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WohEiRvn2Dg+

Most likely a promotional from the looks of it. I myself stumbled over it a about a year ago, when someone posted it on an IRC channel.
by Traubenfuchs | 2026-01-14 11:08:39+00:00
0. Claude, have a look at frontend project A and backend project B.

1. create a skeleton clone of frontend A, named frontend B, which is meant to be the frontend for backend project B, including the oAuth configuration

2. create the kubernetes yaml and deployment.sh, it should be available under b.mydomain.com for frontend B and run it, make sure the deployment worked by checking the page on b.mydomain.com

3. in frontend B, implement the UI for controller B1 from backend B, create the necessary routing to this component and add a link to it to the main menu, there should be a page /b1 that lists the entries, /b1/xxx to display details, /b1/xxx/edit to edit an entry and /b1/new to create one

4. in frontend B, implement the UI for controller B2 from backend B, create the necessary routing to this component and add a link to it to the main menu, etc.

etc.

All of this is done in 10 minutes. Yeah I could do all of this myself, but it would take longer.
by adornKey | 2026-01-14 11:08:44+00:00
Seeing them and hearing about them in the media are different things. You have to look for data yourself - it won't come to you.

I met several people working in cancer medicine, and they tell me that they're seeing the spikes. And some statistics showed very early that something is wrong. But chances are low you'll read anything about that in the media.

Look around and see who is dying. It's an old saying about wars that people will not bother to check if something is going wrong before not at least 5-10% of the population have died.
Show HN: I built a lightweight banner tool because existing ones felt overkill
by yelston | 2026-01-14 11:09:02+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Pomo - a small, free tool for adding simple banners to websites (announcements, promos, alerts).

I kept running into this problem while building small projects: I just wanted a clean banner, but existing tools were either expensive, overly complex, or bundled with features I didn’t need.

So I built something intentionally minimal:

- quick setup

- clean UI

- no heavy scripts

- free to use

It’s designed for builders, indie founders, and small teams who want something that “just works.”

Would love feedback—especially on what feels unnecessary or what you’d expect from a tool like this.
by ben_w | 2026-01-14 11:09:24+00:00
He might.

But… Russia isn't the only place causing oligarchs to have quote marks around the word "accident", it's simply a state that's bad at the coverup.

I don't know at what point his private jet suffers a mysterious decompression, or his drugs are tainted with a lethal agent, or whatever, and it's possible his conversations with Russia have included such threats already. But eventually, playing with all this fire, worldwide, burns are inevitable.

There's a reason former US presidents get secret service protection for life, and they're term-limited.

This would all still be the case even if he was just making the kind of waves most of the west likes, rather than… not even just this, also encouraging a civil war in a nuclear armed state.
by wink | 2026-01-14 11:09:46+00:00
Same here, I've only been using it for a bit and have 100% been ignoring the JS part and the only time where I felt I needed to think about it for a moment was when I was writing a patch for someone else's code that did not ignore it, so basically when contributing to a library you might have to do extra work.

Of course I can't say if anyone ever made any decisions based on the other target that would have repercussions for me only using the BEAM.
by adrian_b | 2026-01-14 11:10:17+00:00
All the productivity enhancement provided by LLMs for programming is caused by circumventing the copyright restrictions of the programs on which they have been trained.

You and anyone else could have avoided spending millions for programmer salaries, had you been allowed to reuse freely any of the many existing proprietary or open-source programs that solved the same or very similar problems.

I would have no problem with everyone being able to reuse any program, without restrictions, but with these AI programming tools the rich are now permitted to ignore copyrights, while the poor remain constrained by them, as before.

The copyright for programs has caused a huge multiplication of the programming effort for many decades, with everyone rewriting again and again similar programs, in order for their employing company to own the "IP". Now LLMs are exposing what would have happened in an alternative timeline.

The LLMs have the additional advantage of fast and easy searching through a huge database of programs, but this advantage would not have been enough for a significant productivity increase over a competent programmer that would have searched the same database by traditional means, to find reusable code.
by falloutx | 2026-01-14 11:10:23+00:00
AI doomerism was sold by the AI companies as some sort of "learn it or you'll fall behind". But they didnt think it through, now that AI is widely seen as a bad thing by general public (except programmers who think they can deliver slop faster). Who would be buying $200/month sub when they get laid off, I am not sure the strategy of spreading fear was worth it. I also don't think this tech can ever be profitable. I hope it burns more money at this rate.
Show HN: Simple time zone converter and world clock for everyone
by yelston | 2026-01-14 11:10:26+00:00
Hi HN! I’m excited to share Tizo, a lightweight web tool that makes time zone conversions and global time tracking friction-free.

I built Tizo to help anyone who deals with multiple time zones — whether you’re scheduling meetings across continents, planning travel, or coordinating with teammates around the world. Too often time zone tools are clunky or overloaded with features; Tizo strips everything down to the essentials:

Instant time zone conversions between any two regions

Current time display for any selected zone

Multiple date & time formats supported

Responsive and easy to use on desktop or mobile

Whether you’re a remote worker, traveler, or just juggling international friends, Tizo helps eliminate confusion and saves you a bunch of mental math. It’s free and web-based — no install, no signup.

I’d love to hear how you use it and what else would make it even more useful.

— Elston (Maker of Tizo)
by JacoboJacobi | 2026-01-14 11:10:38+00:00
The claims being made that are cited are not really in that camp though..

It may be extremely dangerous to release. True. Even search engines had the potential to be deemed too dangerous in the nuclear pandoras box arguments of modern times. Then there are high-speed phishing opportunities, etc.

It may be an essential failure to miss the boat. True. If calculators were upgraded/produced and disseminated at modern Internet speeds someone who did accounting by hand would have been fired if they refused to learn for a few years.

Its communication builds an unhealthy relationship that is parasitic. True. But the Internet and the way content is critiqued is a source of this even if it is not intentionally added.

I don't like many people involved and I don't think they will be financially successful on merit alone given that anyone can create a LLM. But LLM technology is being sold by organic "con" that is how all technology such as calculators end up spreading for individuals to evaluate and adopt. A technology everyone is primarily brutally honest about is a technology that has died because no one bothers to check if the brutal honesty has anything to do with their own possible uses.
by bondarchuk | 2026-01-14 11:10:43+00:00
I really disagree with the level of glee you display in predicting that artists will be replaced - that said, this:

>Soon you will have to grapple with the reality of what really drives your enjoyment of media, and part of that will be realizing that the human-ness never mattered at all.

is a good point that many media consumers will at some point have to come to grips with. There is a sense, almost accelerationist, in which the machine-generation of vast amounts of enjoyable media (let's not pretend none of it will be enjoyable) forces people to reconsider what drives their engagement with art/entertainment, what value there really is in sitting still for 2 hours to watch a movie or listen to music no matter how good. (As you can see all over this comment section most people have staggeringly naive ideas about art)
by ozim | 2026-01-14 11:10:44+00:00
Downside is a lot of those that argue, try out some stuff in ChatGPT or other chat interface without digging a bit further. Expecting "general AI" and asking general questions where LLMs are most prone for hallucinations. Other part is cheap out setups using same subscription for multiple people who get history polluted.

They don't have time to check more stuff as they are busy with their life.

People who did check the stuff don't have time in life to prove to the ones that argue "in exactly whatever the person arguing would find useful way".

Personally like a year ago I was the person who tried out some ChatGPT and didn't have time to dabble, because all the hype was off putting and of course I was finding more important and interesting things to do in my life besides chatting with some silly bot that I can trick easily with trick questions or consider it not useful because it hallucinated something I wanted in a script.

I did take a plunge for really a deep dive into AI around April last year and I saw for my own eyes ... and only that convinced me. Using API where I built my own agent loop, getting details from images, pdf files, iterating on the code, getting unstructured "human" input into structured output I can handle in my programs.

*Data classification is easy for LLM. Data transformation is a bit harder but still great. Creating new data is hard so like answering questions where it has to generate stuff from thin air it will hallucinate like a mad man.*

Data classification like "is it a cat, answer with yes or no" it will be hard for latest models to start hallucinating.
by ACCount37 | 2026-01-14 11:11:12+00:00
Yeah. Obviously. Duh. That's why we keep doing it.

Opus 4.5 saved me about 10 hours of debugging stupid issues in an old build system recently - by slicing through the files like a grep ninja and eventually narrowing down onto a thing I surely would have missed myself.

If I were to pay for the tokens I used at API pricing, I'd pay about $3 for that feat. Now, come up with your best estimate: what's the hourly wage of a developer capable of debugging an old build system?

For the reference: by now, the lifetime compute use of frontier models is inference-dominated, at a rate of 1:10 or more. And API costs at all major providers represent selling the model with a good profit margin.
by danielbln | 2026-01-14 11:11:54+00:00
I think the 'novelty' goalpost is being moved here. This notion that agentic LLMs can't handle novel or non-trivial problems needs to die. They don't merely derive solutions from the training data, but synthesize a solution path based on the context that is being built up in the agentic loop. You could make up some obscure DSL whole cloth, that has therefore never been in the training data, feed it the docs and it will happily use it to create output in said DSL.

Also, almost all problems are composite problems where each part is either prior art or in itself somewhat trivial. If you can onboard the LLM onto the problem domain and help it decompose then it can tackle a whole lot more than what it has seen during pre- and post-training.
by potato3732842 | 2026-01-14 11:12:51+00:00
No, it's not. Society needs to back the F off and let anyone and everyone who owns property build what they can where they can as they want.

> just need to build a house/apt but supporting infrastructure, such as water, power, waste, public transport, supermarkets, and figure out how to connect it to the city's infrastructure.

No, you don't. 40yr ago, before you people <broadly gestures at HN with a certain finger on each hand> ruined it, it was common for even small time developers to build entire streets of houses on well and septic with 100a panels and pay the utility for a transformer at the end of the street. Obviously they weren't doing this downtown and obviously this doesn't work in all climates but there's no reason it can't be done everywhere east of the Mississippi.
by stuartjohnson12 | 2026-01-14 11:13:17+00:00
I think what people miss about indexing on social signals is that convincing social performance is hard. My suspicion when people say things like "ah but if you index on a social signal then everyone will just perform the social signal" are themselves feeling as though they do not naturally signal that thing, and ironically are frustrated by the effort that it takes to appear as though they do.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-14 11:13:27+00:00
Hm, yeah, AMD GPUs was a long time ago I owned, only used it myself with either 5950X or 9970X, and either RTX 3090ti or RTX Pro 6000, works great for 4K footage with both of those :) Could be that it works worse with AMD GPUs indeed, that'd suck :/
by wink | 2026-01-14 11:13:56+00:00
I think the problem is that there is Erlang, the syntax, then Erlang, the features, and then there's OTP. It's a bit much all in one if you might have not done FP before, and then only with C-like syntax languages (e.g. Java).

When I joined an Erlang project I also had some aha moments with the syntax and how stuff is structured, and I found Elixir much nicer to work with (without any real Ruby experience). I don't want to say Erlang is not modern enough, but some things felt like they were around half the work (and more enjoyable) with some Elixir libraries (vastly bigger ecosystem than pure Erlang), for example handling XML.

It might be a bit simplistic, but I don't think you really lose anything meaningful when using Gleam or Elixir over pure Erlang. Just like you don't lose anything when using Clojure or Kotlin over pure Java.
by trimethylpurine | 2026-01-14 11:14:36+00:00
The marketing says it does more than that. This isn't just a problem unique to LLMs either. We have laws about false advertising for a reason. It's going on all the time. In this case the tech is new so the lines are blurry. But to the technically inclined, it's very obvious where they are. LLMs are artificial, but they are not literally intelligent. Calling them "AI" is a scam. I hope that it's only a matter of time until that definition is clarified and we can stop the bullshit. The longer it goes, the worse it will be when the bubble bursts. Not to be overly dramatic, but economic downturns have real physical consequences. People somewhere will literally starve to death. That number of deaths depends on how well the marketers lied. Better lies lead to bigger bubbles, which when burst lead to more deaths. These are facts. (Just ask ChatGPT, it will surely agree with me, if it's intelligent. ;p)
by latexr | 2026-01-14 11:15:44+00:00
> If that's the case, then, what's the wall?

I didn’t say that is the case, I said it could be. Do you understand the difference?

And if it is the case, it doesn’t immediately follow that we would know right now what exactly the wall would be. Often you have to hit it first. There are quite a few possible candidates.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-14 11:15:57+00:00
+ purchasing any BMD camera and you usually get a "free" license of DaVinci :) That's how I got my license many moons ago.

Now BMD have "prosumer" cameras available too that doesn't cost half a liver, which the second-hand market seems flush with too, so you can grab really good hardware for "cheap", and get excellent software with it too as the license is movable across hosts :)