MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zen928 | 2026-01-05 07:38:50+00:00
I lean toward agreeing to this notion as well, I see this as the battle of practicality on use of my time and the payoff of the skills im gaining. I actually learned this a bit earlier in the heyday of stable diffusion where colossal efforts were being spent on designing techniques for prompting and inpainting img2img and understanding the effects of qualifiers and keywords. Large swathes of the community found ways to subtly manipulate the input to obtain specific characteristics in visuals, and common tricks were passed around to produce mostly consistent results.

Then LORAs were conceptualized, designed, and implemented by scientific researchers completely unrelated to the community (brought to fine tune LLMs, adapted to work with diffusion), which almost instantly displaced most of those techniques. If you ever wasted any amount of time learning those methods, your knowledge is actively tainted by outdated tidbits that need to be unlearned. Foundational changes of this nature happened frequently.

Many similar stories will go untold, im sure.
by pram | 2026-01-05 07:39:22+00:00
I wouldn't encourage anyone to enlist myself, but the benefits are still pretty good even if the salary is crap. The GI Bill doesn't expire anymore and you can get a lot of credits easily while you're in. Subsidized housing, food, free healthcare, free college, etc. It's a pretty comfy life for someone out of high school with zero plans.

I enlisted during what turned out to be the absolute nadir of the Iraq war (2005-2010) so the risk today is also a lot less ominous IMO (for now lol...)
by KempyKolibri | 2026-01-05 07:39:54+00:00
I wasn’t aware of that critique, thanks for sharing. Before I read the response my first thought was “why such consistency across different SNPs, then?”, so I would certainly agree with that aspect of the defence.

In general, Ference’s explanation just seems more parsimonious than Schooling’s. It’s possible that they’re right, but I think they would need to show that the specific genes in Ference’s study are affected by age in this way.

I wouldn’t claim to be a great expert in MR, though. I can just about keep up with surface level understanding of them but once you get into the nitty gritty stats, pleitropy testing etc it’s a bit over my head tbh.
by zkmon | 2026-01-05 07:40:24+00:00
The only problem is, when you are alone and not looking at your phone, you tend to observe people around. But unfortunately, looking at others is seen as being a weirdo, while looking at phone is considered super normal.

Also, the reason people feel comfortable with dogs is because, you don't need to act or talk in way to impress the dog, while technically not being alone. You don't get this freedom while being with people, unless you are the boss of the gang. The lack of freedom is usually offset of by the benefit of sharing, laughs and a feeling that you have achieved your goal of impressing others.
by inferiorhuman | 2026-01-05 07:42:06+00:00
Ah, I see you have a JD from OpenAI.

I don't run personal sites worth millions of dollars. I do, however, use sites like Sourcehut, DigiKey, Github, Mouser, Farnell, etc, etc, etc. that have opted to put everything behind bullshit captchas because of the DDoS (nee AI) bots.
by marc_g | 2026-01-05 07:42:35+00:00
Your “technical guy” sounds a lot like me.

When debugging stuff with the devs at our work, I tend to overexplain as much as I can, because often there’s some deep link between systems that I don’t understand, but they do.

I’m a pretty firm believer in “no stupid questions (or comments)”, because often going in a strange direction that the devs assure me isn’t the problem, actually turns out to be the problem (maybe thing A actually has some connection to thing B in a very abstract way!).

I think just serving a different perspective or theory can help us all solve the problem faster, so sometimes it’s worth to pull that thread, even if it seems worthless in the moment.

Maybe I’m just lucky that my engineering colleagues are very patient with me (and maybe less lucky that some of our systems are so deeply intertwined), but I do hope they have more than zero expectations from me, as we mean well and just want to support where we can, knowing full well that ya’ll are leagues ahead in the smarts department.
by codebolt | 2026-01-05 07:44:12+00:00
Another anecdote: I built my first Android app in less than a dozen hours over the holiday, tailored for a specific need I have. I do have many years of experience with Java, C# and JS (Angular), but have never coded anything for mobile. Gemini helped me figure out how to set up a Kotlin app with a reasonable architecture (Hilt for dependency injection, etc). It also helped me find Material3 components and set up the UI in a way that looks not too bad, especially considering my lack of design skills. The whole project was a real joy to do, and I have a couple of more ideas that I'm going to implement over the coming months.

As a father of three with a busy life, this would've simply been impossible a couple of years ago.
by michaelsalim | 2026-01-05 07:44:54+00:00
For most of my AI uses, I already have an implementation in mind. The prompt is small enough that most of the time, the agent would get it 90% there. In a way, it's basically an advanced autocomplete.

I think this is quite nice cause it doesn't feel like code review. It's more of a: did it do it? Yes? Great. Somewhat? Good enough, i can work from there. And when it doesn't work, I just scrap that and re-prompt or implement it manually.

But I do agree with what you say. When someone uses AI without making the code their own, it's a nightmare. I've had to review some PRs where I feel like I'm prompting AI rather than an engineer. I did wonder if they simply put my reviews directly to some agent...
by Hobadee | 2026-01-05 07:44:58+00:00
> It’s contradictory to sit alone in a café. It’s against the reason cafés exist.

Not at all. I've never been a huge cafe person, so I don't have much firsthand experience with this, but I do recall a time before laptops and cell phones when people would go to cafes to just read the newspaper or a magazine. Heck, some cafes even had the daily paper there for you to borrow if you wanted.
by otterley | 2026-01-05 07:45:15+00:00
Then I don’t understand. My point was that it doesn’t matter whether the machine or the human actually wrote the code; liability for any injury ultimately remains with the human that put the agent to work. Similarly, if a developer at a company wrote code that injured you, and she wrote that code at the direction of the company, you don’t sue the developer, you sue the company.
by ColinEberhardt | 2026-01-05 07:45:52+00:00
Looking at the commit log, almost every commit references an AI model:

https://github.com/nibzard/awesome-agentic-patterns/commits/...

Unfortunately it isn’t possible to detect whether AI was being used in an assistive fashion, or whether it was the primary author.

Regardless, a skim read of the content reveals it to be quite sloppy!
by benchloftbrunch | 2026-01-05 07:46:21+00:00
Question: why did they decide to make /usr/bin the "primary" and /bin the symlink? Methinks it should have been the other way around as was the original Unix design before the split.

Also the first URL is serving me scam popup ads that do a crap job at pretending to be android system alerts. Next time please try to choose a more reputable source.
by panny | 2026-01-05 07:46:28+00:00
A Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14, with an MT8196 processor, with fully free blobless ARM Trusted Firmware on github

https://github.com/ARM-software/arm-trusted-firmware

With user replacable WiFi hardware, with full panfrost GPU support... oh, wait, not that one, Alyssa left us.
by FpUser | 2026-01-05 07:47:48+00:00
>"When China did this, this was seen as a terrible violation of rights....
Now that we do this hundreds of times a day, it has become routine."

Normally questions like this would be labeled as whataboutism, false equivalence etc. One rule for thee, another one for me.

Personally I think we (The West) are heading to disaster. I really missed older times before 9/11
by inkyoto | 2026-01-05 07:48:09+00:00
I can see your point now, and we are in agreement that nested clauses are uncommon and at the very least sound unnatural in Sinitic languages, but it is distinct from «The sentences simply can't be very long and often don't have any connecting words between sentences».

Strictly speaking, complex nested clauses are slowly on the way out of English as well due to the analytical nature of its present form, which is what the cited article partially laments, and remain a distinctive feature of highly inflected languages (German, Scandinavian, Slavic, etc.).
by anhner | 2026-01-05 07:48:18+00:00
It's wild to me that a lot of people consider that SWE need to be knowledgeable in business requirements and interact with clients all day.

Just try to imagine construction workers doing the same thing when building a skyscraper. Instead of laying bricks, mortar and beams, now every worker loses 1-2 hours each day asking each stakeholder separately what they want, if they like how it's going so far etc. And then make changes to the layout when the clients ask! What kind of monstruous building will emerge at the end?
by DannyBee | 2026-01-05 07:48:36+00:00
I was never a fan of 3d printers, but now own 2 fdm printers that I'm quite happy with. One is an industrial nylon printer, one a prosumer printer (h2c) for everything else (the nylon printer is much faster than the h2c, printing cf nylon at 30 mm^3 easy).

I've probably owned 6 or 7 over the past 10 years, mainly to check out new technology and such.

I also own a very nice wood cnc and a very nice metal cnc, and use both a lot. Since they are 6 figure machines, they get modified instead of replaced ;).

So I have never been afraid to spend money to try things. I also have no issue modifying things (I have rebuilt entire cnc cabinets and mechanicals from scratch, rewritten the plc programs, etc). I donate the things I'm done with to friends or schools.

I say all this because I have also tried 4 resin printers over the past 10 years, and cathartically thrown every single one in a dumpster to avoid anyone else experiencing them.

Selling any of them as a beginner level printer for someone new to 3d printing should be a crime. I can't think of a faster way to turn someone off from 3d printing.

Ironically, the one parson I know happy with their resin printer uses it exclusively to print Warhammer 40k minis (he uses one of my old fdm printers for other stuff).
by mytailorisrich | 2026-01-05 07:48:38+00:00
None of what I wrote is a worldview and I avoided any controversies by sticking to facts: China has split and this is explained in the first link in your previous comment, and "reunification" can therefore be an accurate term.

How is that at odds with "facts"? What "facts"? What do you think I claimed? How is it controversial? I am not sure you know at this point as you are being evasive and shifting to ad hominems.

Claiming that the Earth is round is "controversial" to flat-Earthers. Does this make it a controversial topic?
by satvikpendem | 2026-01-05 07:49:06+00:00
Talking about jobs that "might have been" created is disingenuous, the same as saying pirates "steal" copies they "might have" otherwise paid for. Even setting that aside, are there any confounding factors in that report? That would be my primary question because for many other industries, companies are using AI as the excuse, not the actual reason, to lay people off.
by rapidfl | 2026-01-05 07:49:20+00:00
> The existence of people who succeed in pushing for inferior solutions, and managing to leave before it becomes clear

Guess this is just random evolution at play. Some companies will pay a bigger price than others. And not everyone even recognizes it and pinpoint it like you did.

But overall influencing people is on net good skill for the individual. And what is good for the geese is good for the gander??
by Scarblac | 2026-01-05 07:49:22+00:00
It just looked way more complex (and it's easy to miss the () at the end of the whole expression that makes it II). And the point of the rule was to make code more readable.

Basically it's a shame that Typescript doesn't have a switch-style construct that is an expression.

And that nowadays you can't make nested ternaries look obvious with formatting because automated formatters (that are great) undo it.
by lotfijbe | 2026-01-05 07:49:44+00:00
I built this because I got tired of the 1,000-row limit on existing tools like Mockaroo, and I didn't want to upload my database schemas to the cloud just to generate seed data.

MockBlast is a local-first generator that runs on a $5 VPS using Dockerized Postgres and Next.js.

It supports: PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, MongoDB (native ObjectId/ISODate), JSON, and CSV.

The Technical Details:

Parsing: It uses a regex engine to parse raw CREATE TABLE statements to auto-detect types like UUID, JSONB, and BOOLEAN.

Streaming: To handle 1M+ rows without crashing the browser or server RAM, it uses Web Streams API to pipe generated data row-by-row directly to the response.

Integrity: It performs a topological sort on your schema to generate parent tables first, caching IDs to ensure Foreign Key integrity in child tables.

It generates 10,000 rows for free (no signup required for basic generation).

I'm giving a Lifetime Pro status to the users who want to help me stress-test the streaming architecture and who sign up before 31st January. So grab it fast.

Would love feedback on the SQL parsing logic—it's the hardest part to get right for edge cases.
by misiek08 | 2026-01-05 07:50:25+00:00
Maybe it is „very” professional, so he is part of one of hundreds of teams and he is creating micro parts of big system and with such setup he is easily hiding in ocean of very low performing people.
In many big setups there are so-called microservices that in reality are picoservices doing function of 1-2 method and 1-2 tables in db.

Either way - the setup looks nice and is one of very few that really shows how to make things work. A lot of people say about 5-10x improvements not showing even the prompts, because probably they made some 2 model CRUD that probably can be already made with 20 lines of code in Django.
by tordrt | 2026-01-05 07:51:48+00:00
It can happen in multiple ways, doesn't need to be an invasion.

I also think there is no way this is actually going to happen, but its obviously big news in itself that Trump and people in his circles are not willing to rule it out and are actively hinting at it.

Its kind of ridiculous that we’re all just supposed to make our own interpretations when the president is just talking shit again or being serious.
by lelanthran | 2026-01-05 07:52:04+00:00
> That might be true, but it doesn't have to be immediately true. It's an arbitrage problem: seeing a gap, knowing you can apply this new tool to make a new entrant, making an offering at a price that works for you, and hoping others haven't found a cheaper way or won the market first. In other words, that's all business as usual.

I'm hearing what you are saying, but the "business as usual" way almost always requires some money or some time (which is the same thing). The ones that don't (performance arts, for example) average a below-minimum-wage pay!

IOW, when the cost of production is almost zero, the market adjusts very quickly to reflect that. What happens then is that a few lottery ticket winners make bank, and everyone else does it for free (or close to it).

You're essentially hoping to be one of those lottery ticket winners.

> How does Glad sell plastic bags when there are thousands of other companies producing plastic bags, often for far, far less?

The cost of production of plastic bags is not near zero, and the requirements for producing plastic bags (i.e. cloning the existing products) include substantial capital.

You're playing in a different market, where the cost of cloning your product is zero.

There's quite a large difference between operating in a market where there is a barrier (capital, time and skill) and operating in a market where there are no capital, time or skill barriers.

The market you are in is not the same as the ones you are comparing your product to. The better comparison is artists, where even though there is a skill and time barrier, the clear majority of the producers do it as a hobby, because it doesn't pay enough for them to do it as a job.
Show HN: Formfactor – A MIDI Modulation Workbench
by oceanwaves | 2026-01-05 07:53:55+00:00
I'm releasing Formfactor, a utility plugin that observes timing, activity, and intensity from incoming MIDI. In addition to passing the original MIDI pattern through unchanged, it allows you to multiplex up to eight additional lanes of shaped, independently sequenced MIDI CC output to modulate external hardware or software instruments.

I built it for myself and enjoy it as a fun place to shape and route Eurorack modulation musically.

Formfactor is free. CLAP/VST3/AUv2
by altacc | 2026-01-05 07:54:39+00:00
The inefficiency of large companies is widespread. In many there are layers of managers whose jobs are little more than to attend meetings with each other and tickle down the bare minimum of requirements to delivery teams. So it's no surprise that they can be willingly blind to the inefficiency of the process that guarantees their job.

My story of being paid to do nothing involves spending a month waiting for my own PC and login details at a large corp, being billed at $1200+ a day. It was mind-numbing and demotivating and I soon left.

Hopefully these experiences made me a better manager when I started hiring contractors. I always had a computer & user account ready, scripted any local environments needed and work lined up, plus never asking them to start first thing in the morning due to my experience of waiting around in a new office whilst waiting for everybody I needed to arrive and have their first coffee. Just because somebody is a temporary contractor doesn't mean you can't show them some respect for their time & profession.
by galkk | 2026-01-05 07:55:30+00:00
Idk, to me that constant

Result<User, Error>

looks extremely ugly and unergonomic, even just to type.

I understand that this is complicated topic and there were a lot of strong opinions even inside of Google about it, but god, I miss absl::StatusOr and ASSIGN_OR_RETURN. Yes, it won’t work without preprocessor magic (and that’s why this article goes through heavy functional stuff, otherwise it just cannot work in language like C#), but it’s so easy and natural to use in base case, it feels like cheating.
by A1aM0 | 2026-01-05 07:56:07+00:00
Pavlo is right to be skeptical about MCP security. The entire philosophy of MCP seems to be about maximizing context availability for the model, which stands in direct opposition to the principle of Least Privilege.

When you expose a database via a protocol designed for 'context', you aren't just exposing data; you're exposing the schema's complexity to an entity that handles ambiguity poorly. It feels like we're just reinventing SQL injection, but this time the injection comes from the system's own hallucinations rather than a malicious user.
by nightpool | 2026-01-05 07:57:23+00:00
No. The product manager has to understand the big picture, but when you're working on a team that big, it follows that you're going to be working on a product big enough that no one person is going to be able to keep every single small detail in their mind at once either.

You wouldn't expect the engineering manager to micromanage every single code decision—their job is to delegate effectively so that the right people are working on the right problems, and set up the right feedback loops so that engineers can feel the consequences of their decisions, good or bad. In the same way, you can't expect the product manager to be micromanaging every single aspect of the product experience—their job is to delegate effectively so that the right people are working on the most important problems, but there are going to be a million and one small product decisions that engineers are going to have to have the right tools to be able to make autonomously. Plus, you're never going to arrive at a good engineering design unless you understand the constraints for yourself intuitively—product development requires a collaborative back and forth with engineering, and if you silo product knowledge into a single role, then you lose the ability to push back constructively to make features simpler in places where it would be a win/win for both engineering and product. This is what OP means when they say that "The engineer who truly understands the problem often finds that the elegant solution is simpler than anyone expected".
by ChiNutri20 | 2026-01-05 07:57:26+00:00
The pragmatic design choice of using comment-based annotations (// @safe) is brilliant. It successfully bypasses the 'intrusive syntax' trap that killed many previous safety proposals. This tool doesn't just promise safety; it provides a realistic path for legacy C++ codebases to adopt Rust-style borrow checking without a full rewrite. It’s a great example of using modern LLMs to solve deep engineering bottlenecks that previously required a team of compiler experts.
by BeetleB | 2026-01-05 07:58:33+00:00
For personal projects, 10x is a lower bound. This year alone I got several projects done that had been on my mind for years.

The baseline isn't what it would have taken had I set aside time to do it.[1] The baseline is reality. I'm easily getting 10x more projects done than in the past.

For work, I totally agree with you.

[1] Although it's often true even in this case. My first such project was done in 15 minutes. Conceptually it was an easy project. Had I known all the libraries, etc out would have taken about an hour. But I didn't, and the research alone would have taken hours.

And most of the knowledge acquired from that research would likely be useless.
by tordrt | 2026-01-05 07:59:20+00:00
How is this click bait and rage bait? I think the article is quite reasonably telling the events leading up to and the response from Denmark.

The president says Greenland needs to be a part of the US, and he wont rule out using military force.

The wife of one of his cabinet members tweets a picture where Greenland belongs to the US and captions it "SOON".

How is Denmark supposed the respond when the president is actively threatening them?

You have been acclimated to having a president who says crazy things. This is not normal.

I think almost nobody sees it actually happening, but just the fact that he is saying these things is insane.
by anakaine | 2026-01-05 07:59:26+00:00
I feel like we are just covering whataboutism tropes now.

You can absolutely learn from an LLM. Sometimes.documentation sucks and the LLM has learned how to put stuff together feom examples found in unusual places, and it works, and shows what the documentation failed to demonstrate.

And with the people above, I agree - sometimes the fun is in the end process, and sometimes it is just filling in the complexity we do not have time or capacity to grab. I for one just cannot keep up with front end development. Its an insurmountable nightmare of epic proportions. Im pretty skilled at my back end deep dive data and connecting APIs, however. So - AI to help put together a coherent interface over my connectors, and off we go for my side project. It doesnt need to be SOC2 compliant and OWASP proof, nor does it need ISO27001 compliance testing, because after all this is just for fun, for me.