MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tacone | 2026-01-20 15:35:10+00:00
The way I see it, is that for non-trivial things you have to build your method piece by piece. Then things start to improve. It's a process of... developing a process.

Write a good AGENTS.md (or CLAUDE.md) and you'll see that code is more idiomatic. Ask it to keep a changelog. Have the LLM write a plan before starting code. Ask it to ask you questions. Write abstraction layers it (along with the fellow humans of course) can use without messing with the low-level detail every time.

In a way you have to develop a framework to guide the LLM behavior. It takes time.
Show HN: A CLI tool that stores Claude Code chats in your Git repo
by jannesblobel | 2026-01-20 15:35:14+00:00
The idea is simple: when working with AI coding assistants, the reasoning behind
decisions often disappears once the session ends. Prompts, iterative refinements,
and the AI’s explanations, in other words, the context behind why code changes were made is lost.

This CLI tool preserves that context in Git, making Claude code conversations transparent,
continuable later, stored alongside code, and shareable with your team via a Git host.

You can test it here: https://github.com/Legit-Control/monorepo/tree/main/examples...

Curious how you handle shareability and persistence of AI conversations, or any ideas for making conversation history more useful and easily shareable.
by modeless | 2026-01-20 15:35:24+00:00
The only relevant technical discussion in the whole thread got downvoted to the bottom, and the top comment is poorly reasoned and arguably factually incorrect but on the "correct" political side. This is typical on politically charged topics. Is there anything HN can do to reduce the impact of politically motivated voting? The discouragement of posting politics in the guidelines doesn't seem to be enough anymore.
by vitlyoshin | 2026-01-20 15:35:49+00:00
AI adoption is accelerating across companies, but productivity gains often don’t follow.

I recently recorded a conversation that challenged a common assumption: when AI initiatives fail, it’s rarely because the models or tools are weak. More often, AI exposes existing issues: unclear processes, poorly defined workflows, and teams that haven’t aligned on how work actually gets done.

We discussed research showing that a large majority of organizations see little to no ROI from AI, not due to technical limitations, but because learning, integration, and change management are treated as secondary concerns. In practice, AI tends to amplify whatever system it’s placed into, good or bad.

Full conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3KgONTL_s4

Curious how others here are seeing this play out:

Has AI improved real workflows in your org, or mostly highlighted structural problems that were already there?
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-20 15:36:21+00:00
A quick rule of thumb is that one or two bytes per peak clock cycle per core or so (a bit like an old 8 bit or 16 bit machine!) is the worst case for memory bandwidth when running highly multithreaded workloads that heavily access main RAM outside cache. So there's a lot of gain to be had before memory bandwidth is truly saturated, and even then one can plausibly move to GPU-based compute and speed things up further. (Unified memory+HBM may potentially add a 2x or 3x multiplier to this basic figure, but either way it's in the ballpark.)
by bluGill | 2026-01-20 15:36:47+00:00
Almost nobody is driving 200 miles to get to work. Almost everybody will move if their commute is more than half an hour - this is through out history and includes hunter gathers deciding to move the tribe, peasants walking to their field... There are a few people driving that far in the US, but either they are planning to move soon, or they don't expect the job to last long.

There are a lot of people driving more than 200 miles a day for work though. Many of them are in cars because their unique skills are why they need to be there (as opposed to delivery drivers who are bringing cargo).

There are also people who drive a long distance once a week. I know of a rural hospital that pays a lot of doctors to drive in on Thursday so locals don't have to go to the city. (they keep an ER, but the rest of the hospital is empty other than a few nurses the rest of the week)
by quacked | 2026-01-20 15:37:31+00:00
I agree with both of your assertions. Most jobs are indeed bullshit jobs in the age of abundance, and while the "point" of knowledge and wisdom is, in a grander sense, to continue in the same vein and contribute to the sum total of all human knowledge (I prefer the slightly less abstract phrase "build and inhabit a greater civilization"), there's very little about the current education system or the economic modality of the modern West that incentivizes that goal.
by iLemming | 2026-01-20 15:37:41+00:00
> Why not just use VSCode?

Learning modal editor - vim, nvim, emacs is like skiing or snowboarding. For anyone uninitiated this whole endeavor may seem dumb - you have to spend so much money, time and effort, so you can just descent from a mountain peak to its base on a piece of wood? Absurdly bananas.

Some may even try hitting the greenest, flattest, most beginner-friendly slopes with great confidence, only to find themselves face down in the snow minutes after getting on the lift. They try again. Sometimes, falling for the fourth or fifth time reinforces their belief that it's really is dumb and they just quit at that point.

Some newbie skiers, after a few successful runs, get overly excited and head to the lift for the steeper slope, only to regret their decision. If falling all the way down doesn't make them quit, they may eventually start enjoying it.

At some point, they'd gain so much experience - their movements become smooth and graceful, their speed intimidating. Suddenly, they'd discover an enormous, indescribable feeling of joy. There's so much tacit - emotional, mental and physical enlightenment that is almost impossible to convey to another soul who's never experienced it or rose to that level.

Then there's a spectrum of differences - some still fall all the time yet enjoy it nonetheless, and they enthusiastically discuss with other beginner skiers how awesome they feel. Some, after mastering the most difficult carving techniques, somehow forget their own beginner's journey and become apathetic toward rookies.

So, then why ski [vim] at all? Well, it is truly one of the most efficient, fastest, healthy ways of getting back to the base [dealing with text]. But most importantly it's tremendously fun. Often, in quite indescribable ways. I'm afraid you would never understand the appeal until you do try it. But even then, it's never guaranteed you'd find that thrill; then maybe skiing [vimming] isn't for you. Even though these activities literally for everyone (unless they have physical/mental barriers).

I honestly can't take seriously any programmer who doesn't know the basics of vim - doesn't that suggest they've never used sed, less, or read through man pages? Have they never had to ssh to a remote machine in the terminal? I do though get it, when people say "I tried it and ain't for me". I suppose, it just means they've never hit the spot that inspired them to keep going.
by devalexwells | 2026-01-20 15:37:55+00:00
I have had similar questions, and am still evaluating here. However, I've been increasingly frustrated with the sheer volume of anecdotal evidence from yay and naysayers of LLM-assisted coding. I have personally felt increased productivity at times with it, and frustrations at others.

In order to better research, I built (ironically, mostly vibe coded) a tool to run structured "self-experiments" on my own usage of AI. The idea is I've init a bunch of hypotheses I have around my own productivity/fulfillment/results with AI-assisted coding. The tool lets me establish those then run "blocks" where I test a particular strategy for a time period (default 2 weeks). So for example, I might have a "no AI" block followed by a "some AI" block followed by a "full agent all-in AI block".

The tool is there to make doing check-ins easier, basically a tiny CLI wrapper around journaling that stays out of my way. It also does some static analysis on commit frequency, code produced, etc. but I haven't fleshed out that part of it much and have been doing manual analysis at the end of blocks.

For me this kind of self-tracking has been more helpful than hearsay, since I can directly point to periods where it was working well and try to figure out why or what I was working on. It's not fool-proof, obviously, but for me the intentionality has helped me get clearer answers.

Whether those results translate beyond a single engineer isn't a question I'm interested in answering and feels like a variant of developer metrics-black-hole, but maybe we'll get more rigorous experiments in time.

The tool open source here (may be bugs, only been using it a few weeks): https://github.com/wellwright-labs/devex
by neilwilson | 2026-01-20 15:38:00+00:00
We finally realise there is no such thing as a “reserve currency” in the floating exchange rate era and that the concept is a long dead hangover from fixed exchange rates.

And that’s definitely going to upset the gold bugs.

(In reality lots of things are held in reserve)

USD is a routing currency that is used because it is cheaper than the mesh alternative. When it stops being cheaper whoever is then cheapest will get the routing transactions.
by criddell | 2026-01-20 15:38:48+00:00
Do you think children should still be expected to be able to do arithmetic by hand?

I think the answer maybe comes down to figuring out exactly what the goal of school is. Are you trying to educate people or train them? There is for sure a lot of overlap, but I think there's a pretty clear distinction and I definitely favor the education side. On the job, a person with a solid education should be able to use whatever language or framework they need with very little training required.
by jadbox | 2026-01-20 15:38:49+00:00
I'm skeptical of this perspective as most social housing in the UK and the USA have stiff REQUIREMENTS that housing residents be either either employed OR be showing proof of interviewing OR enroll in a job placement program (which requires active training participation). If you fail these, you are generally kicked out of these social housing programs.

Maybe there are some exceptions here and there, but it's generally unusual to have social housing without strict policies and monitored policies on job placements. This policy exists as social housing is highly limited and the administrators wants people to get jobs so that they move out (and into a better shelter they can now afford).
by mike_hearn | 2026-01-20 15:38:56+00:00
Riffing off the identity thing, one service I wanted for a while is something that issues X.509 certificates based on verified phone numbers. Phone numbers are a pretty great identity, perhaps the most successful private sector identity system ever, but they're expensive and annoying to verify, and the verification isn't portable across systems. A CA that did SMS verification and then gave you a certificate you could use with S/MIME or bind to passkeys or just use to sign software/documents in general, would democratize stable cryptographic identity. People generally can't handle key management directly, it's too easy to lose keys, but issuing transient keys tied to a phone number is much more palatable.

And PNs have got good features you want in general:

• Can have >1 of them if you want.

• Anonymous if you want.

• Not tied to any specific provider due to number portability laws.

• Hard to lose; phone companies will accept govt issued ID to get your account back if you lose your SIM and it's tied to a contract.

• Verifiable over the internet.

The only problem with them is they don't yield asymmetric keypairs.

The difficulty is business model. The people who want to consume such certificates are people who don't want to pay to verify numbers directly, but users don't want to pay either. So who pays.
by throwway120385 | 2026-01-20 15:39:07+00:00
There will never be a boost to domestic manufacturing without some kind of investment. The booms of the 1950's and 1960's were a result of massive government spending in the 1930's and 1940's building a bunch of capacity and researching novel manufacturing techniques and building new tools. If we don't have the morale for that we will simply stop having as many things.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2026-01-20 15:39:07+00:00
Sometimes, when there is conflict, it helps to ask questions to better understand people. In furtherance of that shared understanding, here are some questions you were asked:

> Are Epstein and his associates pedophiles? [0]

> Are minorities allowed to exercise the second amendment rights the right champions for themselves? [1]

> Is it unfair to call someone cosplaying for a social media account that regularly posts repurposed Nazi slogans a Nazi? [2]

0: Only 6% of americans are satisfied with the administration's handling of the epstein affair - https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/18/politics/epstein-files-cnn-po...

1: Only 20% of americans believe there should or should not be a law that would ban the possession of handguns, except by the police and other authorized persons - https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx

2: Only 23% of americans believe Hitler was a "good person or an equally good and bad person" or "a bad person who did some good things" - https://www.newsweek.com/hitler-had-some-good-ideas-american...
by vee-kay | 2026-01-20 15:39:33+00:00
I hate wars and warmongers.

The most powerful man in the world, must have a responsibility to help heal the world, not hurt it willy nilly.

The name, gender, skin color, race, religion - all these factors can pale to insignificance under the scrunity and expectations of the world.

Why do you think he got the Nobel Peace Prize in the first place? That's right: the expectations from the world, from what they thought is a pivotal positive change in history, due to unexpected (and hitherto considered impossible) ascension of a person of color to the highest position of authority in the world. They expected great things from him, because they knew he had the authority to do great things, and possibly, help heal a broken world.

He failed though, and proved to the world that he was just one more warmonger, in a long line of warmongers who have held that position of utmost power, to further break and wreak havoc on the struggling world.

Anyone in a supreme position of authority must be held to such idealistic yardsticks of expectations. Otherwise they will continue with such wrongdoings and continue to get away with it.

As the old saying goes:
A man is judged by his deeds. Or misdeeds.

To put it into perspective: the world is running out of time. Climate change, pandemics, etc., are going to bring misery to humanity. Now more than ever, we need the greatest most-idealistic leaders, who can work together to help the world and try to save humanity and this world before it is too late. That's what's at stake - the future of humanity and this beautiful bountiful world.
by oofbey | 2026-01-20 15:39:54+00:00
There are two spheres of influence you need to consider. The local machine/vm/container that the agent is running in. But also the effect the agent can have on the outside world - using auth tokens or ssh keys or apis that is has access to. This article largely deals with the first problem and ignores the second.

You can have the local environment completely isolated with vagrant. But if you’re not careful with auth tokens it can (and eventually will when it gets confused）go wipe the shared dev database or the GitHub repo. The author kinda acknowledges this, but it’s glossing over a big chunk of the problem. If it can pus to GitHub, unless you’ve set up your tokens carefully it can delete things too. Having a local isolated test database separate from the shared infrastructure is a matter of a mature dev environment, which is a completely separate thing from how you run Claude. Two of the three examples cited as “no, no, no” are not protected by vagrant or docker or even EC2. It’s what tokens the agent has and needs.
by naravara | 2026-01-20 15:39:54+00:00
At a glance I don’t really see how this is meaningfully worse at differentiating.

If you saw more than 2 apps on the screen at a time the blue background might serve to distinguish ads from organic results, but when it’s the only thing in your screen-view with a few rows of the next result peeking out from the bottom, then it just looks like they’re alternating colors from one row to the next.
by dpcan | 2026-01-20 15:40:16+00:00
Yes, constantly.

I don’t know what I do differently, but I can get Cursor to do exactly what I want all the time.

Maybe it’s because it takes more time and effort, and I don’t connect to GitHub or actual databases, nor do I allow it to run terminal commands 99% of the time.

I have instructions for it to write up readme files of everything I need to know about what it has done. I’ve provided instructions and created an allow list of commands so it creates local backups of files before it touches them, and I always proceed through a plan process for any task that is slightly more complicated, followed by plan cleanup, and execution. I’m super specific about my tech stack and coding expectations too. Tests can be hard to prompt, I’ll sometimes just write those up by hand.

Also, I’ve never had to pay over my $60 a month pro plan price tag. I can’t figure out how others are even doing this.

At any rate, I think the problem appears to be the blind commands of “make this thing, make it good, no bugs” and “this broke. Fix!” I kid you not, I see this all the time with devs. Not at all saying this is what you do, just saying it’s out there.

And “high quality code” doesn’t actually mean anything. You have to define what that means to you. Good code to me may be slop to you, but who knows unless it is defined.
by Jensson | 2026-01-20 15:40:34+00:00
> I'm not sure where you've gotten this information, because it's completely untrue. For example, he made a quite famous offer to the southern states on September 22, 1862

That offer was not to the confederacy, he refused to negotiate with the confederacy. Its very hostile if workers form a union and the employee gives a sweet deal to each of those workers to leave the union while refusing to talk to the union, its the same thing here refusing to negotiate with their representative is very hostile.

> If any of them agreed to rejoin the Union before January 1, they would be welcomed back and allowed to keep their slaves under the pre-war status quo. But no state took him up on the offer, presumably because their leaders found it intolerable to live in a country where slavery might some day be banned.

No, its because the states had formed a new union and they didn't want to betray that one. Lincoln refused to negotiate with them as a whole, he tried to negotiate with the parts. Its like telling enemy soldiers that they get a sweet deal if they betray their country and join yours instead, that will not get you many because most people refuse to betray their allies.

If Lincoln hadn't refused to negotiate with the confederacy as a whole likely the war would be much less bloody or maybe even fully avoided.
by Archelaos | 2026-01-20 15:41:00+00:00
The share of the USD as a reserve currency has already been slowly declining over the last decade, although it is all but dramatic. The reduction is not in favour of another particular currency. Instead, the proportion of minor currencies is increasing. Here is a diagram for the years 2016 to 2023: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/232562/umfrag...
by mghackerlady | 2026-01-20 15:41:13+00:00
1)I need things, unless you want a naked homeless woman without a laptop to apply to your startup

2)Great, still have no job experience or degree

3)I sell everything and show up to the valley naked. I'm suddenly homeless looking for a job in a place where I have no connections, no degree, and no laptop to actually apply for a job or do remote gigs

4)AI startups number 1-4 are doomed to fail, 5 and 6 expect me to work 12 hour days with little pay and no benefits, and 7-9 won't hire me without a degree or nepotism

5)In the extremely unlikely chance I get hired given the circumstances described, I'll be laid off when the company goes belly up or the shareholders demand a new yacht

GeE i WOnDer whY PeoPlE DoN'T dO tHis
by alexfoo | 2026-01-20 15:41:23+00:00
> This stat is also complete bullshit. If it were true, your scrubs of any 20+TB pool would get at least corrected errors quite frequently. But this is not the case.

I would expect the ZFS code is written with the expected BER in mind. If it reads something, computes the checksum and goes "uh oh" then it will probably first re-read the block/sector, see that the result is different, possibly re-read it a third time and if all OK continue on without even bothering to log an obvious BER related error. I would expect it only bothers to log or warn about something when it repeatedly reads the same data that breaks the checksum.

Caveat Reddit but https://www.reddit.com/r/zfs/comments/3gpkm9/statistics_on_r... has some useful info in it. The OP starts off with a similar premise that a BER of 10^-14 is rubbish but then people in charge of very large pools of drives wade in with real world experience to give more context.
by quacked | 2026-01-20 15:41:51+00:00
I completely agree with you. Do you have any ideas about what might stem this tide on a grander scale? I live in the country and will homeschool my kids--I think the risk of under-socialization is worth the reward of competency-based education and the higher likelihood of my own principles taking hold--but I would vastly prefer to send them to a normal school with other kids, albeit one in a superior society to that which we currently inhabit.
by snowmobile | 2026-01-20 15:41:55+00:00
Bit of a wider discussion, but how do you all feel about the fact that you're letting a program use your computer to do whatever it wants without you knowing? I know right now LLMs aren't overly capable, but if you'd apply this same mindset to an AGI, you'd probably very quickly have some paperclip-maximizing issues where it starts hacking into other systems or similar. It's sort of akin to running experiments on contagious bacteria in your backyard, not really something your neighbors would appreciate.
by cwoolfe | 2026-01-20 15:42:13+00:00
Hang in there. Yes it is possible; I do it every day.
I also do iOS and my current setup is: Cursor + Claude Opus 4.5.

You still need to think about how you would solve the problem as an engineer and break down the task into a right-sized chunk of work. i.e. If 4 things need to change, start with the most fundamental change which has no other dependencies.

Also it is important to manage the context window. For a new task, start a new "chat" (new agent). Stay on topic. You'll be limited to about five back-and-forths before performance starts to suffer. (cursor shows a visual indicator of this in the for of the circle/wheel icon)

For larger tasks, tap the Plan button first, and guide it to the correct architecture you are looking for. Then hit build. Review what it did. If a section of code isn't high-quality, tell Claude how to change it. If it fails, then reject the change.

It's a tool that can make you 2 - 10x more productive if you learn to use it well.