MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by _pdp_ | 2026-01-26 17:21:36+00:00
AI may replace the need for coding but not the need for understanding how it works. It is as simple as that.

We still need / want to study physics to understand the universe despite the fact that it is a process that we have no control over.

AI is the same. Even when code is written by AGI you still need to be able to understand what it is and how it works.

The alternative is complete abdication and resembles a lot more like religion or even a cult.

Trust but verify.
by Verdex | 2026-01-26 17:21:45+00:00
The quote that I heard (I think on HN) was, "If we had AIs to write XML for us then we never would have invented json."

My biggest LLM success resulted in something operationally correct but was something that I would never want to try to modify. The LLM also had an increasingly difficult time adding features.

Meanwhile my biggest 'manual' successes have resulted in something that was operationally correct, quick to modify, and refuses to compile if you mess anything up.
by alex43578 | 2026-01-26 17:21:48+00:00
That’s like saying you could train a state of the art model by hand, and it’ll only cost you a lot of man-hours.

Realistically, to train a frontier model you’d need quite a lot of compute. GPT4, which is old news, was supposedly trained on 25,000 A100s.

There’s just no reasonable way of catching modern hardware with old hardware+time/electricity.
by jbombadil | 2026-01-26 17:21:57+00:00
I hope so too, but don't believe that's the ultimate intent here.

The problem is that the tech independence is being pushed by government who want more control - not less. (Not speaking specifically of France and this instance, but looking at the anti-encryption rules that the UK and Ireland are pushing)

From that standpoint, I imagine the "solution" here won't be to push an open source alternative, but a closed one that they to control.
by mindslight | 2026-01-26 17:21:57+00:00
Here come the usual disruptors, with their hecklers' veto...

Sorry, I'm not looking to get sucked into going around in circles with your gaslit cinematic universe, again. If you want some written material to rail against, go get yourself copies of the US Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. Some Canadian bookstore must still have copies of those, right? You can even take a black marker and scribble out everything you don't like.
by devinprater | 2026-01-26 17:22:14+00:00
I'm completely blind. I like Linux. I've started to love Android since getting a Samsung and getting rid of OnePlus, cause accessibility. Termux is cool, but it's accessibility wasn't. So, I had Gemini rangle it up a bit into my fork of Termux [1]

Now it reads (usually) only newly incoming text, I can feel around the screen to read a line at a time, and cursor tracking works well enough. Then I got Emacs and Emacspeak working, having Gemini build DecTalk (TTS engine) for Termux and get the Emacspeak DecTalk speech server working with that. I'm still amazed that, with a Bluetooth keyboard, I have Linux, and Emacs, in my pocket. I can write Org and Markdown, read EPUB books in Emacs with Nov.el, look at an actual calendar not just a list of events, and even use Gemini CLI and Claude Code, all on my phone! This is proof that phones, with enough freedom, can be workstations. If I can get Orca working on a desktop environment in Termux-GUI. But even with just Emacs and the shell, I can do quite a bit.

Then I decided to go wild and make an MUD client for Emacs/Emacspeak, since accessible ones for Android are limited, and I didn't trust my hacks to Termux to handle Tintin++ very well. So, Emacs with Emacspeak it was, and Elmud [2] was born.

Elmud has a few cool features. First of all, since Emacspeak has voice-lock, like font-lock but for TTS, Ansi colors can be "heard", like red being a deeper voice. Also a few MUD clients have sound packs on Windows, which make them sound more like a modern video game, while still being text-based. I got a few of those working with Elmud. You just load one of the supported MUD's, and the sound pack is downloaded and installed for you. It's easy and simple. And honestly, that's what I want my tools to provide, something I, or anyone else who chooses to use them, that is easy to get the most out of.

None of this would have been possible without AI. None of it would have been done. It would have remained a dream. And yes, it was all vibe-coded, mostly with Codex 5.2 on high thinking. And yes, the code may look awful. But honestly, how many closed-source programs look just as bad or even worse under the covers of compilation?

[1] https://github.com/devinprater/Talking-termux-app

[2] https://github.com/devinprater/elmud
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2026-01-26 17:22:18+00:00
>> "Probability" does not mean "maybe yes, maybe not, let me assign some gut feeling value measuring how much I believe something to be the case."

That's exactly what Baeysian probabilities are: gut feelings. Speaking of values attached to random variables, a good Bayesian basically pulls their probabilities out their ass. Probabilities, in that context, are nothing but arbitrary degrees of belief based on other probabilities. That's the difference with the frequentist paradigm which attempts to set the values of probabilities by observing the frequency of events. Frequentists ... believe that observing frequencies is somehow more accurate than pulling degrees of belief out one's ass, but that's just a belief itself.

You can put a theoretical sheen on things by speaking of sets or probability spaces etc, but all that follows from the basic fact that either you choose to believe, or you choose to believe because data. In either case, reasoning under uncertainty is all about accepting the fact that there is always uncertainty and there is never complete certainty under any probabilistic paradigm.
by akurilin | 2026-01-26 17:22:29+00:00
Great point, definitely a possibility. I think I've gotten lucky in the past here where either the process caught that kind of abnormality early in the funnel, or these folks just happened to actually be super early in their careers and just hadn't had anybody take a chance on them.

Do you find that in the tarpit scenario they will typically have a work history hinting at these quirks?
by fsloth | 2026-01-26 17:23:38+00:00
If you doubt it’s real just run it, man.

I shared the app because it’s not confidential and it’s concrete - I can’t really discuss work stuff without stressing out what I can share and what not.

At least in my workplace everyone I know is using Claude Code or Cursor.

Now, I don’t know why some people are productive with tools and some aren’t.

But the code generation capabilities are for real.
by citizenfishy | 2026-01-26 17:23:44+00:00
I built my first company on engineers I hired from the local college by simply asking them to send me students who had clear talent but weren't engaging well in the academic side. We became a local clearing house where we quickly found out whether they could thrive outside of the academic environment. Two of them became "The Best" you talk about. One in DevOps (earns way more than me now) another found his talent in DevEx.
by colechristensen | 2026-01-26 17:24:10+00:00
>I can't believe that after 4 fucking years, a hostile nation is still permitted to wage war against a sovereign country.

Then you're not paying attention. They have nukes, europe needs their gas, and the other major powers don't care about what they're doing to Ukraine.

America doesn't have hegemony any longer and its leaders and people have been subjugated by foreign powers intelligence actions.
Show HN: A simple way to send secrets between teammates
by dannytatom | 2026-01-26 17:24:12+00:00
hey there.

at every job i’ve had, people paste secrets into Slack and delete them really fast. i wanted a quick, secure way to hand off a credential that wasn’t that, so I built 30s.

it’s a CLI that generates a local keypair and uses envelope encryption so the server never sees plaintext. you send to a recipient’s email, they decrypt locally, and secrets expire automatically (default 30s, maximum 24h).

free to use, 50 secrets/month.
by thrw2029 | 2026-01-26 17:24:12+00:00
Yes, exactly this. One of the main reasons for ChatGPT being so successful is censorship. Remember that Microsoft launched an AI on Twitter like 10 years ago and within 24 hours they shut it down for outputting PR-unfriendly messages.

They are protecting a business just as our AIs do. I can probably bring up a hundred topics that our AIs in EU in US refuse to approach for the very same reason. It's pure hypocrisy.
by technofiend | 2026-01-26 17:24:13+00:00
>... and you don't have to worry about it.

Not to be argumentative, but I have a concern that whomever I buy my solution from will have vibe coded it instead. I guess that means my support contract entitles me to hassling them about it, but I'm starting to worry it's just LLMs and vibe coded apps all the way down.
by aspenmartin | 2026-01-26 17:24:13+00:00
> Because software developers typically understand how to implement a solution to problem better than the client. If they don't have enough details to implement a solution, they will ask the client for details. If the developer decides to use an LLM to implement a solution, they have the ability to assess the end product.

Why do you think agents can’t do that? They can’t do this really well today but if the distance we went in 2025 stays similar it’ll be like a year before this starts getting decent and then like another 1 year before it’s excellent.

> Sure, you will see a few people using LLMs to develop personalized software for themselves. Yet these will be people who understand how to specify the problem they are trying to solve clearly, will have the patience to handle the quirks and bugs in the software they create

Only humans can do this?
by dimitri-vs | 2026-01-26 17:24:18+00:00
This assumes an educated, passionate and patient user that 99% of people are not. They wont ask for a hammer - they will ask for a rock tied to a stick and get pissed off when it doesn't work like a hammer. They will ask for paint that doesn't drip. They will ask for electrical sockets they can install in their bathtub.
by nerdponx | 2026-01-26 17:24:35+00:00
Audio is also great for busy people. Doing chores, driving, shopping, at the gym, even at work depending on your job. A lot of video content is mostly just audio anyway with either a person's face or filler images anyway. Audio and audio-heavy video is a way to get information or entertainment if you don't feel like you have the time to sit down and read.
by ZpJuUuNaQ5 | 2026-01-26 17:24:51+00:00
>Are you American? Freedom means the ability to do what you want. It doesn't mean owning guns.

No, I am not, and I haven't mentioned guns or even hinted at the topic. Do whatever you want, but trying to purposefully destroy and smear the environment around you and claim it's an expression of freedom is ridiculous. It's just malicious, disgusting behavior that helps no one, serves no cause and has nothing to do with freedom.
by bob1029 | 2026-01-26 17:25:17+00:00
Delivery of nuclear weapon via shipping container might seem like a deterrent but it's kind of the opposite thing.

For something to be a deterrent it must have a few properties. Delivery taking a non-zero amount of time and producing a gigantic visible ordeal from outer space is a feature here. A container bomb going off somewhere in a civilian logistics chain is a surprise. Surprises cannot be deterrent by their very definition. The inability to ~instantly attribute the attack to some party would only invite additional instability.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-26 17:25:29+00:00
Accountability is perhaps irrelevant is my point. You can turn off a computer, you can turn off a human. Is that accountability? Accountability only exists if there are consequences, and those consequences matter. What does it mean for them to "matter"?

If accountability is taking ownership for mistakes and correcting for improved future outcomes, certainly, I trust the computer more than the human. We are never running out of humans incurring harm within suboptimal systems that continue to allow it.
by rurp | 2026-01-26 17:25:37+00:00
I don't think there's any question at this point that it's in Nordic self interest to develop a nuclear deterrent. This has also become true for other regions in the world.

This is all a horrible development for the overall future of humanity, but it's the world we live in now. At a minimum hundreds of billions of dollars will be siphoned off from more beneficial uses over the coming decades, and the risk of major accidents will increase. The worst change is of course the fact that the odds of a complete societal collapse have increased dramatically.

Almost all of the world's nukes are controlled by aging old dictators or aspiring dictators who are surrounded by sycophants and treat competence as much less important than personal loyalty. Geopolitical risks are only going to increase as these rulers become more erratic and demented.
by zahlman | 2026-01-26 17:26:08+00:00
The repeating pattern has 2 digits, and is a multiple of 9. 9 times 11 is 99, so that multiplication gives a "repeating pattern of a multiple of 99" — equivalently, a multiple of a repeating pattern of 99. And I assume you're familiar with the concept of .99999... equaling 1.
by leoedin | 2026-01-26 17:26:15+00:00
Yeah, I’ve been able to use desktop Linux without many issues in a corporate environment. The main issue was the web version of office being incomplete. If corporate IT teams embraced it, I bet most companies could be free of Windows without too much issue.

The bigger problem seems to be the cloud services - teams, OneDrive, sharepoint and all the account management stuff.
by antonvs | 2026-01-26 17:26:25+00:00
Skill comes from experience. It takes a good amount of working with these models to learn how to use them effectively, when to use them, and what to use them for. Otherwise, you end up hitting their limitations over and over and they just seem useless.

They're certainly not perfect, but many of the issues that people post about as though they're show-stoppers are easily resolved with the right tools and prompting.
by jdiff | 2026-01-26 17:26:58+00:00
Jujutsu has been the tool that actually got me into making full use of version control software. Before, through multiple attempts at grasping at the deeper fundamentals, I only learned the bare minimum git commands I needed to make commits and branches, and very careful merges. Jujutsu maps to a much clearer and simpler mental model. Blockchains are nifty and all, but awfully inconvenient to work with as meatbags.
by armadsen | 2026-01-26 17:27:17+00:00
For what it’s worth, Philo Farnsworth and John Logie Baird were friendly with each other. I was lucky to know Philo’s wife Pem very well in the last part of her life, and she spoke highly of Baird as a person.

David Sarnoff and RCA was an entirely different matter, of course…
by colechristensen | 2026-01-26 17:27:21+00:00
Have the CIA turn enough insiders that one of them succeeds in assassinating Putin after a propaganda campaign raising up an opposition party ready to take over in an election/coup (mixture of both really). Have a weak and friendly leader installed that exchanges nukes for population support and possibly brakes up Russia into several smaller states.

When the USSR broke up, Ukraine gave up its nukes in exchange for security guarantees (lot of good that has done them)
by Timpanzee | 2026-01-26 17:27:49+00:00
In light of renewed aggressions from powerful states, the only recourse smaller states have to defend themselves is to turn themselves into a fortress like Taiwan (which is prohibitively expensive for most larger states) or nuclear deterrence (which Ukraine gave up for false guarantees of protection from invasion). Guarantees aren't what they used to be, and I wouldn't be surprised if many waning US allies are covertly developing nuclear capabilities.

I hope my state is because the alternative is being at the whim of the powerful nuclear states around us in a political climate of rising authoritarianism.
by jddj | 2026-01-26 17:27:54+00:00
The inertia (or actively maintained status quo) in Europe towards the US platforms is massive.

Anecdotally, I recently found myself in the local government building of a small European town. They run several free digitalisation classes for small businesses.

The options? Introductory classes to:

- LinkedIn

- WhatsApp business

- Facebook and Instagram ads

- Gsuite
by citizenpaul | 2026-01-26 17:27:57+00:00
I think we hit peak AI improvement velocity sometime mid last year. The reality is all progress was made using a huge backlog of public data. There will never be 20+ years of authentic data dumped on the web again.

I've hoped against but suspected that as time goes on LLMs will become increasingly poisoned by the the well of the closed loop. I don't think most companies can resist the allure of more free data as bitter as it may taste.

Gemini has been co opted as a way to boost youtube views. It refuses to stop showing you videos no matter what you do.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-01-26 17:28:23+00:00
Not true, for one very simple reason. AI model capabilities are spiky. Chinese models can SFT off American frontier outputs and use them for LLM-as-judge RL as you note, but if they choose to RL on top of that with a different capability than western labs, they'll be better at that thing (while being worse at the things they don't RL on).
by bilbo0s | 2026-01-26 17:28:28+00:00
Yes it has changed.

But when I was in Scottsdale, I still considered it a long shot. The hot idea down there at that time was that giant Arizona desert PV farms would feed California electricity. They would send it back in the form of water.

Definitely works on paper. Only gets cheaper to operate the solar farms over time. But enormous capital costs.

Who's paying all that? I don't really think most of the people down in Arizona have the money it would take for that up front charge.

That's what I meant. California can float those kinds of costs. So for a place like California, it's definitely something they can do if the issue is pressed on them.

Places like Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, I don't think they can? Maybe? But I don't think so. That's why I believe if the issue is pressed in western states outside of California, you would see much higher taxes that would likely make some people have to move.
by gjadi | 2026-01-26 17:28:36+00:00
Imho it's because you worked before asking the LLM for input, thus you already have information and an opinion about what the code should look like. You can recognize good suggestions and quickly discard bad ones.

It's like reading, for better learning and understanding, it is advised that you think and question the text before reading it, and then again after just skimming it.

Whereas if you ask first for the answer, you are less prepared for the topic, is harder to form a different opinion.

It's my perception.
by goodluckchuck | 2026-01-26 17:29:13+00:00
The Greenland affair has illuminated the US-Europe relationship. For whatever inequities may lie in asking / threatening to take this essentially worthless piece of land... I would have thought the value was less than a powerful ally.

The fact that Europe unified against the US, threatening to shoot first, proved they'd rather have an empty piece of ice / dirt, than our friendship and protection. It made me re-evaluate the whole Russia / Ukraine affair.

While Western Europe claimed to be mortal enemies with Russia... the US was providing much of the weapons. While the US was seizing Russian oil tankers, Europe was buying their gas. There's no dispute that the US is against Russia... and yet Europe would turn to fight the US too?

However, Europe doesn't view the US as an ally. Greenland is not enough to change their position, but it's enough to reveal their true position.

Europe is far more aligned with Russia than they are against. Both sides have the same goal. Russia is killing swaths of European men, and that's about it. Ukraine is killing swaths of European men. The territorial control doesn't explain the war. The killing is the purpose.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-01-26 17:29:14+00:00
It reminds me of a discussion from, who was it, Quentin Tarantino? He said he was anxious going into making his first film. A seasoned Hollywood veteran told him to relax—all those pros: the costume designers, the camera operators, sound, set designers, makeup, etc.… they're going to make the movie look fantastic.
by ReptileMan | 2026-01-26 17:29:14+00:00
Tech workers urge CEOs to replace them even faster with AI.

The golden years of first Trump admin and pandemic to pressure your employers are gone. Right now the leverage is in the companies. So kudos for the bravery if they realize on exactly how thin ice they are (pun semi intended) and I will want to see if there will be retaliation for unsolicited activism.
by carlosjobim | 2026-01-26 17:29:29+00:00
Nordic countries have had nuclear power plants for half a century.

If they don't have a sufficient secret stock pile of nuclear weapons already, then they have been utter and total fools.

If they don't have secret nuclear weapons in orbit, they have been severely irresponsible.

Let's hope the plans of their leaders is not to send all young men as infantry to the meat grinder to die for a country which hates them, like they are doing in the Ukraine war. But who knows? Life is full of surprises.
by WarmWash | 2026-01-26 17:29:54+00:00
Your missing the forest for the trees here.

Users will not fumble with the complex web of nested settings that engineers wet dream about.

But they will tell the LLM "I'd really like it if the tool bar only had the hammer and saw tools", and it will be done.

I cannot see software going in any other direction than a blank front end that users prompt LLMs to run scripts on top of.

Picture MS Word where the GUI is just a page and a sidebar for telling an LLM what you want it to do. And if it's not possible, the LLM could even write extensions and plugins that make it possible.

Software is going to completely change.
by gpm | 2026-01-26 17:30:22+00:00
Using it as a reference is a high bar not a low bar.

The AI videos aren't trying to be accurate. They're put out by propaganda groups as part of a "firehose of falsehood". Not trusting an AI told to lie to you is different than not trusting an AI.

Even without that playing a game of broken telephone is a good way to get bad information though. Hence why even reasonably trustworthy AI is not a good reference.
by VadimPR | 2026-01-26 17:30:40+00:00
Inspired by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754944, I built a Linux clone of the app. Always had it in the back of my mind to create such a thing and this was the impetus needed.

Install using:

pip install postured

uv pip install postured

Disclaimer: built with Claude Code, tested by a human.
by Archer6621 | 2026-01-26 17:30:57+00:00
It's even more general than that: LLMs seem to be exceedingly good at translating bodies of text from one domain to another. The frontier models also have excellent natural language translation capabilities, far surpassing e.g. Google translate.

In that sense, going from pseudocode to a programming language is no different from that, or even translating a piece of code from one programming language to another.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-26 17:31:04+00:00
Why not both.

An absolutely massive numbers of farmers were replaced too. Farm management was rather grueling in the early 1900s. Farmers that embraced mechanization were able to buy up surrounding farms that didn't and grew in size. As the equipment got better the amount of work per acre farmed dropped so farms expanded with more acreage. Farmers and hands dropped in number.