MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by boringg | 2026-01-11 19:45:05+00:00
Again they aren't the same product. Everyone always thinks power is only about $/kwh especially in hackernews. That is a strong proponent of the product but most definitely not all of it. Solar just does not work for large scale industrial uses cases (99.99% uptime). Even with massive energy storage to try and cover the edges. Its a great combo but not comparable.
by vpasupuleti10 | 2026-01-11 19:45:24+00:00
– :

Delving a bit into the fascinating world of Large Language Models (LLMs).

At their core, LLMs take text, break it into tokens, convert those tokens into vectors, pass them through layers of mathematical transformations, and predict the next token in a sequence.

In this first post, I focus on the very first step in that pipeline:
how raw text becomes vectors the model can reason about — covering tokenization, subword units (BPE), and embedding vectors.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-11 19:45:26+00:00
This has nothing to do with whether programming is enjoyable, elegant, creative, or personally meaningful.

It is about economic value.

Programming exists at scale because it reliably produces money. It creates leverage for businesses, reduces costs, and accelerates execution. For a long time that value could only be produced by human labor. That assumption is now breaking.

When a skill consistently converts into income, it stops being just a skill. It becomes a foundation for people’s lives. Mortgages, families, social standing, and long term security get built on top of it. At that point the work is no longer something you do. It becomes something you are.

That is why people do not say “I write code sometimes.” They say “I am a software engineer,” in the same way someone says “I am a pilot” or “I am a doctor.” The label carries status. Programming has been culturally framed as difficult, intelligence signaling, and exclusive. Historically it has rewarded that framing with high compensation and prestige. Identity attachment is the expected outcome.

Once identity is involved, objectivity becomes extremely difficult.

Most resistance to AI is framed as technical concern. Accuracy, edge cases, hallucinations, safety. Those arguments exist, but they are secondary. They are not the cause. The real issue is identity threat.

These systems are not just automating tasks. They are encroaching on the thing many people have used to define their value. A machine that can generate code, reason about systems, and produce usable solutions challenges the belief that “this is what makes me special and irreplaceable.” That registers as an existential problem, not a technical one.

When people experience an existential threat, they do not calmly update their beliefs. They defend. They minimize progress. They fixate on flaws. They shift standards. They demand perfection from machines that was never required from humans. This is not unique to programmers. It is a universal response to displacement.

The loudest critics are rarely the weakest programmers. They are often the most invested ones. The people whose self concept, status, and personal narrative are tightly bound to the idea that what they do cannot be replicated by a machine.

That is why the discourse feels evasive and dishonest. It is not really about whether AI is good at programming today. It is about resisting a trajectory that points toward a future where the economic value of programming is no longer tightly coupled to human identity.

This is not a moral failure. It is a psychological reaction. But pretending it is something else only delays adaptation.

AI is not attacking programming. It is attacking the assumption that a lucrative skill guarantees permanence. What people are defending is not the craft itself, but a story about who they are and why they matter.

That is the real conflict. And places like HN are full of people running straight into it.
by irvingprime | 2026-01-11 19:46:11+00:00
Developing a graph-based programming language called Graphoid. The original concept was to target AI-related programming. Probably not ready for that yet!

Repo: https://github.com/xvandervort/graphoid

Claude Code is doing the majority of the coding, with close supervision from me. I write notes while I'm working on it. Notes are here: https://www.patreon.com/cw/aiconfessions
by bochoh | 2026-01-11 19:46:17+00:00
Gymlocity (https://gymlocity.com) - All-in-one gym management platform for small gym owners.

Building this for personal trainers with home gyms and small 1-2 location owner-operated facilities. The big players (Mindbody, etc.) are overkill and expensive for this market.

Core features: class scheduling, member booking, Stripe payments, and workout programming (the part most gym software ignores - trainers still use spreadsheets or generic apps).

Stack: React 19 + Vite frontend, ASP.NET Core 10 API, PostgreSQL, multi-tenant architecture so each gym gets their own branded experience.

Currently polishing the member dashboard and workout tracking UI. The goal is something a solo trainer can set up in an afternoon without needing to call sales or sit through demos.
by LexiMax | 2026-01-11 19:48:02+00:00
I have seen very little evidence that bad-faith flagging is actually punished at any appreciable scale on this site.

Either the flagging tools are too easy to get hold of for new users, or the culture of flagging on this site is positively rotten due to the lack of enforcement or a too-specific definition of what "bad faith" is.

Gamified moderation tools require oversight.
by davedx | 2026-01-11 19:48:03+00:00
I'm working on Tech Posts (https://techposts.eu), a Hacker News for Europe!

Since the last time I posted on HN it's gained a decent amount of traffic and users. I'm particularly happy with the jobs section, which is growing into a high signal-noise source for European tech jobs: https://techposts.eu/jobs

The reason I started this website is because so much incredible innovation and growth in Europe flies under the radar. If you ask Americans many will say it's just "banks and museums", stagnant, or worse. But the reality is there is a huge spectrum of exciting companies starting and growing here. We have space launch companies, battery companies, AI companies, and a whole bunch of other interesting stuff. It's an exciting time to be a European in tech!
by schmuckonwheels | 2026-01-11 19:48:14+00:00
Absolutely. This reeks.

My iPads on 18.7.3 just yesterday started pushing notifications to upgrade to 26.2 again.

Guess Apple wants to pump up those numbers. If they really cared, if they had an ethical bone in their body, they would release 18.7.3 to the public WHICH THEY ALREADY HAVE STAGED.

This is more like blackmail where they are dangling these security issues over everyone's head as some scare tactic to upgrade, instead of giving everyone access to the iOS 18 security patch which already exists.
by HeavyStorm | 2026-01-11 19:48:19+00:00
You overestimate the level of investment the average person can and will make for these freedoms. People buy Kindles because they work (and are heavily marketed), they buy Apple because they simply work, and will keep preferring windows to Linux until Linux offer a easier barrier to entry.

Microsoft will (almost already has) loose its advantage to Apple before it loses to Linux.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-01-11 19:48:34+00:00
I did this sometime in 2022. First I was using POP OS but I wanted to have something more up to date so I gave an Arch based distro a shot, EndeavourOS has been my go to for a full year without any feel of missing out on another distro or features. Yay is the best thing to happen to Arch Linux and its derivatives.

I feel like Pacman is the real reason for instability with people who dont understand how Pacman works messing up upgrade commands and not getting all their dependencies properly updated. When I tried Manjaro like ten years ago it was a mess.
by ctoth | 2026-01-11 19:48:53+00:00
I was all set to be pissed off, "you can't tell me what I can make with your product once you've sold it to me!" but no... This outrage bait hinges on the definition of "use"

You can use Claude Code to write code to make a competitor for Claude Code. What you cannot do is reverse engineer the way the Claude Code harness uses the API to build your own version that taps into stuff like the max plan. Which? makes sense?

From the thread:

> A good rule of thumb is, are you launching a Claude code oauth screen and capturing the token. That is against terms of service.
by nephihaha | 2026-01-11 19:49:14+00:00
They certainly were not. The full force of British institutions was ranged against Scottish independence, including the civil service, BBC and even certain businesses like Baxters or Tesco.

Scotland forgets its past. Most people don't know that most of Scotland including non-Jacobite areas was garrisoned in the late 1740s. Or that there was an uprising in 1820. Or famines and rioting around the Moray Firth in the 1840s so bad that the army was brought in. Most of that is forgotten.

"Indigenous" is code for tribal. Scotland was partly tribal into the Middle Ages but is never classed as such. Why the difference?
by mcintyre1994 | 2026-01-11 19:49:14+00:00
https://xcancel.com/SIGKITTEN/status/2009697031422652461

This tweet reads as nonsense to me

It's quoting:

> This is why the supported way to use Claude in your own tools is via the API. We genuinely want people building on Claude, including other coding agents and harnesses, and we know developers have broad preferences for different tool ergonomics.
If you're a maintainer of a third-party tool and want to chat about integration paths, my DMs are open.

And the linked tweet says that such integration is against their terms.

The highlighted term says that you can't use their services to develop a competing product/service. I don't read that as the same as integrating their API into a competing product/service. It does seem to suggest you can't develop a competitor to Claude Code using Claude Code, as the title says, which is a bit silly, but doesn't contradict the linked tweet.

I suspect they have this rule to stop people using Claude to train other models, or competitors testing outputs etc, but it is silly in the context of Claude Code.
by alexford1987 | 2026-01-11 19:49:18+00:00
They have some leverage over his party politically or him as a candidate, but as a sitting president (especially one as unhinged as he is), his power is absurd.

Apple and Googles revenue combine to around 3% of US GDP (substantial!), but it’s not like they would threaten to take that elsewhere or stop selling in the US or something. The ways they can “hurt” Trump hurt them and the rest of the country also. But Trump can do targeted damage to them across many avenues with a stroke of the pen (or even a Tweet)
by Zetaphor | 2026-01-11 19:49:41+00:00
You are learning an entirely different operating system. You're going to have to make some choices and do some research/learn new things. There will be challenges because it's something completely different from what you know.

The entire point of Linux is there isn't just one Linux, having centralized control of an OS is how Mac and Windows ended up so godawful.

As time goes on the UX will continue to improve (through targeted distros) for less sophisticated users, but we're realistically only now at the point where everything in the ecosystem is "good enough" for a large number of people.
by geooff_ | 2026-01-11 19:49:54+00:00
I’m a remote dev building an iOS app called Springus. You add a few pics / your closet basics, and it suggests outfits based on what you already own. It’s less “fashion app” and more “tiny morning momentum hack.”

Would love feedback from other WFH folks — a weird amount of my productivity comes down to how I start the day.
by martin-t | 2026-01-11 19:50:18+00:00
I don't think copyright should be binary or should work the way it does not. It's just the only tool we have now.

There should be a system which protects all work (intellectual and physical) and makes sure the people doing it get rewarded according to the amount of work and skill level. This is a radical idea and not fully compatible with capitalism as implemented today. I have a lot on my to-read list and I don't think I am the first to come up with this but I haven't found anyone else describing it, yet.

And maybe it's broken by some degenerate case and goes tits up like communism always did. But AFAICT, it's a third option somewhere in between, taking the good parts of each.

For now, I just wanna find ways to stop people already much richer than me from profiting from my work without any kind of compensation for me. I want inequality to stop worsening but OTOH, in the past, large social change usually happened when things got so bad people rejected the status quo and went to the streets, whether with empty hands or not. And that feels like where we're headed and I don't know whether I should be exited or worried.
by saltcured | 2026-01-11 19:50:21+00:00
I feel like some of these proponents act like a poet has the goal to produce an anthology of poems and should be happy to act as publisher and editor, sifting through the outputs of some LLM stanza generator.

The entire idea using natural language for composite or atomic command units is deeply unsettling to me. I see language as an unreliable abstraction even with human partners that I know well. It takes a lot of work to communicate anything nuanced, even with vast amounts of shared context. That's the last thing I want to add between me and the machine.

What you wrote futher up resonates a lot for me, right down to the aphantasia bit. I also lack an internal monologue. Perhaps because of these, I never want to "talk" to a device as a command input. Regardless of whether it is my compiler, smartphone, navigation system, alarm clock, toaster, or light switch, issuing such commands is never going to be what I want. It means engaging an extra cognitive task to convert my cognition back into words. I'd much rather have a more machine-oriented control interface where I can be aware of a design's abstraction and directly influence its parameters and operations. I crave the determinism that lets me anticipate the composition of things and nearly "feel" transitive properties of a system. Natural language doesn't work that way.

Note, I'm not against textual interfaces. I actually prefer the shell prompt to the GUI for many recurring control tasks. But typing works for me and speaking would not. I need editing to construct and proof-read commands which may not come out of my mind and hands with the linearity it assumes in the command buffer. I prefer symbolic input languages where I can more directly map my intent into the unambiguous, structured semantics of the chosen tool. I also want conventional programming syntax, with unambiguous control flow and computed expressions for composing command flows. I do not want vagaries of natural language interfering here.
by Ifkaluva | 2026-01-11 19:50:54+00:00
The big labs spend a ton of effort on dataset curation, precisely to prevent them from ingesting poison as you put it.

It goes further than that—they do lots of testing on the dataset to find the incremental data that produces best improvements on model performance, and even train proxy models that predict whether data will improve performance or not.

“Data Quality” is usually a huge division with a big budget.
by osigurdson | 2026-01-11 19:50:58+00:00
I built a system to ingest data and "do AI stuff with it". I think it is kind of useful. Here is an example from this post: https://nthesis.ai/public/hn-working-on (updates live).
I think my UI is kind of bad as no one seems to realize you can chat with the data as well (try the chat button). I've done quite a bit with auto-curation so you can ask questions like "What are the general themes in the posts this month?" and then dig into those results in the chat.

If you just want a basic text based search (no fancy AI stuff), the basic search does that for you. It also will do vector search as well if you click on the little button in the search box.

It also computes a UMAP based on the embeddings which can be quite interesting once there are larger numbers of posts. You can see some clusters even now but more interesting with 300+.

This project uses Postgres, NATS, Go, Next.js / Typescript (and Python for ML stuff).
by TheCraiggers | 2026-01-11 19:51:10+00:00
> Electricity generation is getting cheaper all the time, transmission and generation are staying the same or getting more expensive

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, since you claim that generation is getting cheaper, staying flat, and getting more expensive all in a single sentence.

But I can tell you my energy bill hasn't gone down a single time in my entire life. In fact, it goes up every year. Getting more (clean!) supply online seems like a good idea, but then we all end up paying down that new plant's capital debt for decades anyway. Having a company such as Facebook take that hit is probably the best outcome for most.
by uecker | 2026-01-11 19:51:14+00:00
I am not saying that safety culture is irrelevant, not at all. I am saying that if the advantage of Rust is the culture that emphasizes safety (or rather memory safety, if the Rust community cared about safety in general cargo would not exist in this form) then that is a weak argument.

I don't think 10 years ago there was a lot of Rust used, so I am not sure how relevant it is that 1.0 was released at this time.
by YetAnotherNick | 2026-01-11 19:51:26+00:00
No, humans probably have tens of millions of token in memory of memory per PR. It includes not only what's in the code, but what all they searched, what all they tested and in which way, which order they worked on, the edge cases they faced etc. Claude just can't document all these, else it will run out of its working context pretty soon.
by AlienRobot | 2026-01-11 19:51:27+00:00
Imagine a very plausible situation. You have 1 HTML file at the top that wants to access hundreds of files in a subfolder. There is no way you can show Allow | Deny for every one of them. On the other hand, it's also possible for someone to take that file and put it in a folder like Documents or Downloads, so blanket allowing it access to siblings would allow access to all those files.

This could easily be solved by some simple contract like "webgame.html can only access files in a webpage/ subdirectory," but the powers that be deemed such thing not worth the trouble.
by ramoz | 2026-01-11 19:51:29+00:00
We're doing so much planning and reviewing with coding agents like Claude Code and OpenCode.

I spent a day over break building a better UX for reviewing coding agent plans.

Plannotator - Annotate and review coding agent plans visually, share with your team, send feedback to the agents with one click.

Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_AT7cEN_9I

https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator
by gpm | 2026-01-11 19:51:48+00:00
Where the TOS allows them to, I would assume they are (and they aren't trade secrets anymore since reasonable measures weren't taken to protect them). Where the TOS forbids them from doing so - I'd generally assume the reputational risk is not worth the marginal value that could be extracted from the IP and trade secrets. Especially for companies with huge other businesses like Google. I'd worry more about Anthropic and OpenAI just because there's not this other huge billion dollar business that relies on trust. If I had trade secrets worth billions where money could easily be extracted from them (I'm thinking something like a hedgefunds current trading strategy) the trust wouldn't extend that far even for Google.

I also find OpenAI's past business dealings suspect (with regards to effectively stealing value from the public non-profit and transferring it into a privately owned company) which makes me trust them less than Anthropic.

I'd assume the NSA has access to anything they are interested in that you send to a US company.
by losvedir | 2026-01-11 19:52:02+00:00
I'm kind of surprised there's so many nuclear power companies. I remember Google signed a deal a year or so ago [0] with a different one (Kairos). I wonder why they're not in this deal? Is it all connections and funny money? Or do any of these have real shots at making something useful?

I was thinking how the dotcom bust left a lot of dark fiber infrastructure which helped the internet take off after that. It would be great if the upcoming AI bust (if it happens) leaves a bunch of power generation and new nuclear tech behind.

[0] https://blog.google/company-news/outreach-and-initiatives/su...
by JTrehan | 2026-01-11 19:52:05+00:00
Things are going slow, but it is a passion project so it's ok :)
A few people have bought a licence and it seems most people who try the app are very happy with it so I'm happy too.

The app is entirely in Java, with javaFX for the UI and Lucene for the search engine. To read and render PDFs I use PDFium.
by wltr | 2026-01-11 19:52:29+00:00
It’s wrong because it takes too much of attention, which we don’t have a lot these days. Good for you if it works, and you really need that much at once. But it’s just wrong for a newcomer, people are getting lost among options. That’s not a rocket science, really. I won’t object there are interfaces where the most simple way of doing some work / task is to have everything on one screen, without constant switching. But for an average person using general purpose OS, it’s just not the case. My point of view that those folks who really need everything at once, they have no problems with creating an environment they need. Everyone else would benefit with the simple things being the default. I’m really happy about Gnome, I can recommend it to everyone, regardless of the previous experience, Windows or Mac. It’s simple enough to explain to a parent, by using a tablet metaphor. Here is the dock, here is the settings, upper right corner, here is all apps, etc. I even enjoy the no minimise button, you don’t really need it. I used Gnome for over a year on one of my computers, quite often and for prolonged periods of time, and even I’m a Sway user, I enjoyed it a lot. To the point I thought perhaps I should switch from sway. But I stayed with sway, for the simplicity’s sake. And the ability to design my personal environment as I see it.
by fgonzag | 2026-01-11 19:53:33+00:00
Yeah, honestly this is a bad move on anthropic's part. I don't think their moat is as big as they think it is. They are competing against opencode + ACP + every other model out there, and there are quite a few good ones (even open weight ones).

Opus might be currently the best model out there, and CC might be the best tool out of the commercial alternatives, but once someone switches to open code + multiple model providers depending on the task, they are going to have difficulty winning them back considering pricing and their locked down ecosystem.

I went from max 20x and chatgpt pro to Claude pro and chat gpt plus + open router providers, and I have now cancelled Claude pro and gpt plus, keeping only Gemini pro (super cheap) and using open router models + a local ai workstation I built using minimax m2.1 and glam 4.7. I use Gemini as the planner and my local models as the churners. Works great, the local models might not be as good as opus 4.5 or sonnet 4.7, but they are consistent which is something I had been missing with all commercial providers.
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-01-11 19:54:02+00:00
I’m working on ApprovIQ, a tool for construction certifiers. Someone who wants to get something built will work with one of customers to get their project approved before construction. They’ll typically go back and forth on dozens of documents each of which must be checked over for compliance - drainage, water quality, fire safety, the list goes on.

Despite being intensely technical and detail-oriented, certifying construction is still mostly done by hand over email!

Our niche is full of folks whose lives we can improve with a portal for document management & comms, plus a sprinkle of AI for document understanding.

If you know someone - anyone - wrangling too many documents via email. Please reach out.

https://approviq.com