MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nottorp | 2026-01-15 14:21:30+00:00
> Doesn't help that no one talks about exactly what they are doing and exactly how they are doing it

Let me try a translation:

> I am using $model for writing software and its great.

I have generated an extremely simple javascript application that could have been mostly done by copy/paste from StackOverflow or even Geeks4Geeks and it runs.

This is true. I have a PWA that I generated with a LLM on my phone right now. It works. Pretty sure even w3schools would be ashamed to post that code.

> I am using $model for writing software and it sucks and will never do it.

This is also true. At work I have a 15 year old codebase where everything is custom.

You can't get a LLM to use it all as a context because you simply don't have ram for it so you can't even test the quality of advice given on it.

You can't train a LLM on it because you don't have the budget for it.

You maybe could get a LLM to generate code by prompting it "this is the custom object allocation function, these are the basic GUI classes, now generate me the boilerplate for this new dialog I'm supposed to do". Unfortunately it takes as long or longer than doing it yourself, and you can't trust the output to boot.
by Macha | 2026-01-15 14:21:58+00:00
Pre all the recent OpenSSL forks the only other options were:

- use the platform sdks which have completely distinct APIs (and so probably aren't supported by everything between you and the TLS connection)

- Use GnuTLS which is GPL and so wasn't suitable for a lot of commercial uses (less important in the age of SaaS to be fair)
by GuB-42 | 2026-01-15 14:22:01+00:00
AI works well for one kind of documentation.

The kind of documentation no one reads, that is just here to please some manager, or meet some compliance requirement. These are, unfortunately, the most common kind I see, by volume. Usually, they are named something like QQF-FFT-44388-IssueD.doc and they are completely outdated with regard to the thing they document despite having seen several revisions, as evidenced by the inconsistent style.

Common features are:

- A glossary that describe terms that don't need describing, such as CPU or RAM, but not ambiguous and domain-specific terms, of which there are many

- References to documents you don't have access to

- UML diagrams, not matching the code of course

- Signatures by people who left the project long ago and are nowhere to be seen

- A bunch of screenshots, all with different UIs taken at different stages of development, would be of great value to archeologists

- Wildly inconsistent formatting, some people realize that Word has styles and can generate a table of contents, others don't, and few care

Of course, no one reads them, besides maybe a depressive QA manager.
by order-matters | 2026-01-15 14:22:53+00:00
your ability to articulate yourself cleanly comes across in this post in a way that I feel AI is trying to be and never quite reaches as well.

I completely agree that the ambitions of AI proponents to replace workers is insulting. You hit the nail on the head with pointing out that we simply dont write everything down. And the more common sense / well known something is the less likely it is to be written down, yet the more likely it might be needed by an AI to align itself properly.
by 91706863 | 2026-01-15 14:23:13+00:00
उड़ती हुई मछली
एक हरे-भरे गाँव के पास एक साफ़ और चमकती हुई नदी बहती थी। उसी नदी में रहती थी एक छोटी सी मछली, जिसका नाम था मीना। मीना बाकी मछलियों से थोड़ी अलग थी। उसे पानी में तैरना तो अच्छा लगता ही था, लेकिन उसे आसमान भी बहुत आकर्षित करता था। वह अक्सर नदी के ऊपर उड़ते पक्षियों को देखती और सोचती, “काश! मैं भी उड़ पाती।”
नदी की बाकी मछलियाँ मीना की बात सुनकर हँसती थीं। वे कहतीं, “मछली कभी उड़ नहीं सकती, मीना! हमारा घर पानी है।” लेकिन मीना हार मानने वालों में से नहीं थी। वह हर दिन पानी से ऊपर छलांग लगाने की कोशिश करती।
एक दिन तेज़ हवा चल रही थी और नदी की लहरें ऊँची उठ रही थीं। मीना ने हिम्मत जुटाई और ज़ोर से छलांग लगाई। अचानक हवा ने उसे सहारा दिया और वह कुछ पल के लिए पानी के ऊपर उड़ने लगी। नीचे नदी, किनारे पेड़ और ऊपर नीला आसमान—सब कुछ कितना सुंदर लग रहा था!
मीना खुशी से झूम उठी। वह सच में उड़ रही थी! थोड़ी देर बाद वह धीरे से फिर पानी में लौट आई। बाकी मछलियाँ हैरान रह गईं। उन्होंने अपनी आँखों से मीना को उड़ते हुए देखा था।
अब कोई मीना पर हँसता नहीं था। सब उसे बहादुर मछली कहने लगे। मीना समझ गई कि सपने देखने और कोशिश करने से ही कुछ नया संभव होता है।
उस दिन के बाद मीना रोज़ छोटी-छोटी उड़ानें भरती और बच्चों को यह सिखाती कि अगर सच्चे मन से कोशिश की जाए, तो असंभव भी संभव बन सकता है।
by wongarsu | 2026-01-15 14:23:18+00:00
Obviously we don't have AGI so we can't compare many tasks. But on tasks where AI does perform at comparable levels (certain subsets of writing, greenfield coding and art) it performs fairly well. They use more power but are also much faster, and that about cancels out. There are plenty of studies that try to put numbers on the exact tradeoff, usually focused more on CO2. Plenty that find AI better by some absurd degree (800 times more efficient at 3d modelling, 130 to 1500 times more efficient at writing, or 300 to 3000 times more efficient at illustrating [1]). The one I'd trust the most is [2] where GPT4 was 5-19 times less CO2 efficient than humans at solving coding challenges

1: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54271-x?fromPaywa...

2: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-24658-5
by crote | 2026-01-15 14:23:34+00:00
That's why my calculation example used a 1.5mm2 copper wire but a 2.4mm2 aluminum one.

Aluminum has a higher resistance, which means the same diameter will get hotter than copper. Make the cable thicker and its resistance drops, which means it gets less hot.

Want more amps at the same temperature? Ohm's law still applies: just use a thicker cable.
Show HN: I vibecoded a language server for web assembly
by emnudge | 2026-01-15 14:23:44+00:00
Hey!

First was just a test to see if I could. Then became a pretty fun test on iteration loops. How little I could be involved and what kind of instruction works best.

It's a language server for WAT, the webassembly text format. There are not many of these that exist in general, so it's very easy for this to claim the #1 spot.

It's a problem that has some clear correctness criteria so putting it in a loop with Claude Code on Opus 4.5 kept producing really nice results.

The repo includes a playground so you can see how it feels without needing to download anything. Check it out at https://wat-lsp.emnudge.dev/
by dorfsmay | 2026-01-15 14:23:47+00:00
mDNS

In the past few weeks I have been exploring mDNS and IPv6. Your router doesn't provide local DNS? Not an issue, add .local to the hostnames and boom, everything works.

For example, run `python3 -m http.server` on your laptop, then open the browser on your phone and browse yourlaptopname.local:8000 ! There's more, services are advertised on mDNS, that's how your printer magically appears on your computers and phones.
by psychoslave | 2026-01-15 14:23:56+00:00
>you are likely overestimating your own contributions at work

That’s the logical fallacy anyone is going to be pushed to as soon as judging their individual worth in an intrinsically collective endeavor will happen.

People in lowest incomes which would not be able to integrate in society without direct social funds will be seen as parasites by some which are wealthier, just like ultra rich will be considered parasites by less wealthy people.
by api | 2026-01-15 14:24:26+00:00
If they're cheaper than nuclear, why is the AI crowd looking to nuclear for data centers?

I can think of two possible reasons: (1) it's America, and it's very hard to build anything, and nuclear is smaller and fits on site, and (2) we have an administration openly hostile to solar and wind energy for political "vibes" reasons.

Vibes are dumb. I think looking back this is going to be seen as an age of people deciding based more on vibes, which ultimately comes down to tribal dog whistles, than reason.
by ben_w | 2026-01-15 14:25:25+00:00
> If you idea is easily replicable probably it was not a good idea after all.

Yes.

> LLMs don't change the equation.

No. They make more things easily replicable.

"We made this and all it took was 500 juniors working for a year" used to be a reasonable business moat of effort. Now it's not.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-15 14:25:35+00:00
Fossil fuel could be heading for a big cliff where most countries that currently import a lot of oil/gas will be year on year reducing their imports. China is ahead of the curve here and is already importing less oil year on year. That's likely going to spread. If you extrapolate growth curves trending up for EVs a few years you can draw similar curves for oil demand trending down.

We can speculate about how quick/slow all this will progress. But it's worth pointing out that e.g. IEA, EIA and similar institutes have been repeatedly wrong and overly pessimistic with their predictions for things like adoption and cost of renewables. People are still basing policy and important decisions on their reports. So this matters. The "What if they are wrong, again?" question might have some uncomfortable answers if you are betting on them not being wrong.

A lot of developing markets are skipping oil/gas/coal completely and are going straight to renewables. They are not first building a grid using coal/gas plants but working around what little they have in terms of unreliable grid by going straight for solar/batteries and microgrids. That's a pattern you see all over parts of Africa with historically very little/flaky power infrastructure and countries like Pakistan. These are growth economies showing much quicker economical growth than the world average. That's going to spread.

Lots of countries are going to be decimating their oil/gas imports over the next 20 years. That includes transport and power generation. They'll be installing wind/solar/batteries and buying lots of EVs. Fossil fuel usage won't go all the way to zero. But it won't stay at current levels or anywhere close to that. Some countries will be faster some will be slower. Being slower isn't necessarily good for economies.

Good advice here is to take an economic point of view and be aware of things like growth trends, cost curves, learning effects, technological changes, etc. You don't have to be an early adopter or believer. But there's a lot of data out there that supports an optimistic view. And a lot of pessimistic wishful thinkers that are not really looking at data or just cherry picking reports that support their believes. The fossil fuel industry sponsors a lot of reports research. And they are about as trust worthy as the Tobacco industry is when it comes to the pros/cons of smoking. That's why the IEA and EIA keeps getting it wrong. It helps to understand who pays for their reports (hint: fossil fuel companies and countries that depend on those).

A healthy personal perspective is maybe considering what happens if your pension fund bets on fossil fuel and that cliff I mentioned turns out to be very real in about 10-20 years. Because if you bet wrong, that affects the value of that. Before you knee jerk to an answer, take a close look at what institutional investors have actually been doing for a while. Hint: coal plants were written off as good investments ages ago and gas plants aren't looking much better at this point. I think you'll see them move on oil funds next.
by mixedbit | 2026-01-15 14:25:36+00:00
I like to think of coding as gathering knowledge about some problem domain. All that a team learns about the problem becomes encoded in the changes to the program source. Program is only manifestation of the humans minds. Now, if programmers are largely replaced with LLMs, the team is no longer gathering the knowledge, there is no intelligent entity whose understanding of the problem increases with time, who can help drive future changes, make good business decisions.
by 3D30497420 | 2026-01-15 14:25:49+00:00
I haven't seen Landman, but I have heard of it. My understanding is that all the characters are pretty miserable, but that it nonetheless weirdly glorifies their lifestyles.

I guess it is a bit like François Truffaut's statement that there are no "anti-war films". I imagine if some population segment has chosen to identify with a particular lifestyle (oilman, soldier, gangster, etc.) then it doesn't really matter quite how that lifestyle is portrayed so long as the viewer can make a connection with it.
by burroisolator | 2026-01-15 14:25:51+00:00
"Productivity gains are real when you understand that augmentation is better than replacing humans..." Isn't this where the job losses happen? For example, previously you needed 5 tech writers but now you only need 4 to do the same work. Hopefully it just means that the 5th person finds more work to do, but it isn't clear to me that Jevons paradox kicks in for all cases.
by incomingpain | 2026-01-15 14:25:55+00:00
Restricting speech based on a protected demographic of ageism is wrong and shouldnt happen.

But at the same time, I wonder how much of online political speech is actually poisoned by angsty immature low-info teens.

But I do expect it's less than dishonesty. People who are parodies pushing negative stereotypes or dishonest positions of their political opponents.

What would online political speech look like if everyone genuinely represented their own views as well as they could; including admitting when they simply dont know. Might be an enlightenment event on its own.
by dividuum | 2026-01-15 14:26:31+00:00
bubblewrap is a lot more flexible: You can freely piece together the sandboxed filesystem environment from existing directories, tmpfs, files or data provided via a file descriptor. landrun, from what I understand only restricts what already exists. What is neat with landrun is the TCP port restrictions. This isn't possible with bubblewrap at the moment, although nothing really prevents bubblewrap from adding landlock support for those cases.
by 9JollyOtter | 2026-01-15 14:27:33+00:00
> Can't you drink non-alcoholic beverage? If the point is socialising, alcohol is not a requirement.

It kinda is though depending on who you go to the bar with.

I went to the bar to get fucked up, a lot of my career I've worked in toxic workplaces, so have stressful day and work and then hit the bar.

Most of my mates at the time were heavy drinkers. We are talking about people that would have 6 beers and the bar and have a bottle of Rioja when they get home. Some of these dudes have turned out to be scumbags.

Once I stopped drinking, I never spoke to them again. Not once. So these people weren't my real friends.

> I know a lot of bars in my area also are places to play board games nowadays.

TBH, when I see people playing board games other than like Chess or Draughts as adults (and there are not children present), I just find it embarrassing like it is like some child day care. I appreciate it is a "me" problem, but I can't stand it.
by 542354234235 | 2026-01-15 14:27:37+00:00
70s and 80s movies come to mind where girls would be getting ready and lie down on the bed and suck in to get the button buttoned. Dazed and Confused comes to mind where they literally use a pair of pliers to put up the zipper because its so tight. Until you break it in, you are just having to suffer. Once they put elastic into jeans, people jumped on it because its just easier. I love my old-style selvedge denim, but it is more work and care than throwaway stuff.
by sozal | 2026-01-15 14:27:47+00:00
AI can write code, but testing/debugging still needs humans. This MCP server gives AI a Playwright-powered browser with screenshots, console/network inspection, Web Vitals, ARIA/AX snapshots, Figma compare, stubbing, React component inspection, and OpenTelemetry tracing. Works locally and in production.

Repo: https://github.com/serkan-ozal/browser-devtools-mcp
by Antibabelic | 2026-01-15 14:27:49+00:00
"The ability to actually build something—to turn a napkin sketch into working software—was the thing that separated dreamers from builders. It’s what made you valuable."

There is also the matter of having ideas that are good and knowing how to make them into good software, not something that simply "technically works". LLMs are not enough to overcome this barrier, and the author's examples seem to prove the point. The "working products with test suites, documentation, and polish" that are just another batch of LLM front-ends are frankly unimpressive. Is this the best that AI can offer?
by jackfranklyn | 2026-01-15 14:28:08+00:00
The "capture everything immediately" approach never worked for me. I'd end up with thousands of notes I never looked at again.

What helped was accepting that most ideas aren't actually that good - they just feel urgent in the moment. Now I use a deliberate friction test: if I still remember the idea after an hour without writing it down, maybe it's worth capturing. The truly important stuff has a way of recurring.

For the stuff that IS worth keeping, voice memos work better than typing for me. Lower friction means I actually do it, and listening back forces me to process rather than just hoard.
by adrian_b | 2026-01-15 14:28:56+00:00
While I agree with the article, the reducing of the number of technical writers due to the belief that their absence can be compensated by AI is just the most recent step of a continuous process of degradation of the technical documentation that has characterized the last 3 decades.

During the nineties of the last century I was still naive enough to believe that the great improvements in technology, i.e. the widespread availability of powerful word processors and the availability of the Internet for extremely cheap distribution will lead to an improvement in the quality of technical documentation and to easy access to it for everybody.

The reverse has happened, the quality of the technical documentation has become worse and worse, with very rare exceptions, and the access to much of what has remained has become very restricted, either by requiring NDAs or by requiring very high prices (e.g. big annual fees for membership to some industry standards organization).

A likely explanation for the worse and worse technical documentation is a reduction in the number of professional technical writers.

It is very obvious that the current management of most big companies does not understand at all the value of competent technical writers and of good product documentation; not only for their customers and potential customers, but also for their internal R&D teams or customer support teams.

I have worked for several decades at many companies, very big and very small, on several continents, but, unfortunately only at one of them the importance of technical documentation was well understood by the management, therefore the hardware and software developers had an adequate amount of time planned for writing documentation in their schedules for product development. Despite the fact that the project schedules at that company appeared to allocate much more time for "non-productive tasks" like documentation, than in other places, in reality it was there where the R&D projects were completed the fastest and with the least delays over the initially estimated completion time, one important factor being that every developer understood very well what must be done in the future and what has already been done and why.
by mondonno | 2026-01-15 14:28:58+00:00
You hit the exact tension I struggled with while writing this.
To give a bit of context: growing up in Poland, I found that without formalizing my goals, I was paralyzed. I literally couldn't "think" clearly about my future because the variables were too undefined. I wrote this book primarily as my own "antifragility toolbox"—using the language I speak best (math and systems) to debug my own life constraints.
Re: The AI Copilot — that is exactly the dream. A dashboard that monitors inputs/outputs and warns: "Variance Instability Detected" before the biological system actually crashes. I am actually prototyping a small Python script for this right now. If it works, I'll post it here.
by SomeHacker44 | 2026-01-15 14:29:42+00:00
This seems like it is speaking from privilege. I have not even paid the car off, 5.5 years later. I am not going to sell a perfectly working (if not very good IMO) car at a loss. And buy what instead? No, I will stick with my functional but terribly unergonomic car now built by a nazi.
by crote | 2026-01-15 14:29:46+00:00
That's the "a pain to work with" part.

Residential aluminum is a Really Bad Idea because DIY Dave will inevitably do something wrong - which then leads to a fire hazard. Copper is a lot more forgiving.

But a large scale datacenter, solar farm, or battery storage installation? Those will be installed and maintained by trained electricians, which means they actually know what a "torque wrench" is, and how to deal with scary words like "corrosion" and "oxidation".

Like I said: it's what's used for most of the power grid. With the right training it really isn't a big deal.
by dangtung | 2026-01-15 14:29:53+00:00
Author here.

I write markdown every day: docs, notes, everything. My workflow: write in VSCode, push to private Git repos, pull and read in browser when I need to reference something.

The problem: I spend 10x more time reading docs than editing them, but all existing markdown viewers are designed for rendering single files. No folder browsing, no bookmarks, no way to efficiently navigate between related documents. I kept opening VSCode just to read a README, which felt like overkill.

Built MarkView as a Chrome extension that treats markdown like a reading environment rather than just a renderer.

Key features:
- Folder browser: Navigate entire directories of .md files with tree view
- Persistent bookmarks for frequently accessed folders
- Recent documents tracking with search
- Live auto-refresh while editing (no manual reload needed)
- Reading progress bar, word count, estimated reading time
- Mermaid diagrams with zoom/pan, KaTeX math rendering
- Syntax highlighting for 180+ programming languages
- Export to DOCX/HTML/PDF
- 100% local processing - no external servers, no tracking

Technical approach:
- Manifest V3 Chrome extension
- markdown-it for parsing with GitHub Flavored Markdown
- File System Access API for folder navigation
- highlight.js for syntax, Mermaid for diagrams, KaTeX for math
- Everything runs client-side in the browser

Current limitations:
- Chrome/Edge/Brave only (Chromium-based browsers)

Built this primarily for myself, recently packaged it for others who might have similar workflows. Not perfect, but it solves my daily reading workflow.

Links:

- Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/cfopbpknalachedpcdd...

- Edge: https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/kpobglkjea...

- Website: https://getmarkview.com

Happy to answer questions about the extension.
by maxdo | 2026-01-15 14:30:20+00:00
I’m on engineering side . We are in the same boat.

Writers become more productive = less writers needed not 0 but less.

That’s current step. Now if the promise of cursor that capable of Multi week system to be automated completely. All the internal docs become ai driven .

So only exception are external docs . But … if all software is written by machine there are no readers .

This obviously a vector not a current state :( very dark and gloom
by alecco | 2026-01-15 14:31:27+00:00
> I am of the opinion that Nvidia's hit the wall with their current architecture

Google presented TPUs in 2015. NVIDIA introduced Tensor Cores in 2018. Both utilize systolic arrays.

And last month NVIDIA pseudo-acquired Groq including the founder and original TPU guy. Their LPUs are way more efficient for inference. Also of note Groq is fully made in USA and has a very diverse supply chain using older nodes.

NVIDIA architecture is more than fine. They have deep pockets and very technical leadership. Their weakness lies more with their customers, lack of energy, and their dependency on TSMC and the memory cartel.