MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by trinsic2 | 2026-01-18 03:31:25+00:00
I like the idea, but as others have said, I don't see any meat behind it. Is just words on a page, a concept at best and no vision or direction on how to get there. I signed because Im interested in supporting people and places to be more humanistic, but yeah I need to know who you are and what your history is before I sign on to anything. The world is full of two faced well-meaning / hostile to free societies right now. And if you really want to make difference in this department, in this climate, transparency is your friend.
by squirrellous | 2026-01-18 03:32:35+00:00
It depends on the language and codebase. For something very dynamic like Python it may be the case that grepping finds real references to a symbol that won’t be found by a language server. Also language servers may not work with cross-language interfaces or codegen situations as well as grep.

OTOH for a giant monorepo, grep probably won’t work very well.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-18 03:32:49+00:00
> It kind of looks like this is happening to the author. He became a founder, and started doing things that seem like what a founder would do, then got hit hard when he was unable to fulfill the "founder" role (i.e. didn't grow fast enough).

This happens a lot in the startup world: It’s really common for someone to be among the top in their classes from a young age, be praised by all their family members and friends, and be called the next Bill Gated / Jeff Bezos / Elon Musk (adjust for age) for the first quarter of their life.

So they enter the startup world believing that they were destined for this. They may think success is inevitable, they just need to get that first investment round to hire a couple engineers and then start telling everyone what to do.

I don’t think this author is an extreme example of this because they’re actually talented and successful at many things. However I could see this mindset leading them down a path that seemed like the right thing to do but wasn’t actually a good fit for their personal style. The article talks about how they’re doing better now, but it’s filled with so many admissions that they think a full-time job would have been a better path in general that it’s hard to unsee it. I wish them the best and I appreciate the honesty, but I feel like I’ve seen this movie many times before in the local startup world.
by VerifiedReports | 2026-01-18 03:33:12+00:00
It was not a screen-saver. Less ghosting? Most likely. But the fact remains that reading text off of a light bulb blasting in your face all day sucks, and once upon a time people knew that... but "forgot" it when vendors shoved inverse color schemes on them by default.

"80's and 90's had a general concept of a desktop with windows as paper documents"

Yes, I noted that; but the analogy to a piece of paper fails because paper does not EMIT light.

Everyone with sufficient computing experience calls "light" schemes inverted. This was even documented in instruction manuals from the early PC era: https://imgur.com/a/aLV8tn0
by nebula8804 | 2026-01-18 03:34:06+00:00
I've heard that SASS never really took off in China because the oversupply of STEM people have caused developer salaries to be suppressed so low that companies just hire a team of devs to build out all their needs in house. Why pay for a SASS when devs are so cheap. These are just anecdotes. Its hard for me to figure out whats really going on in China.

What if AI brings the China situation to the entire world? Would the mentality shift? You seem to be basing it on the cost benefit calculations of companies today. Yes, SASS makes sense when you have developers (many of which could be mediocre) who are so expensive that it makes more sense to just pay a company who has already gone through the work of finding good developers and spend the capital to build a decent version of what you are looking for vs a scenario where the cost of a good developer has fallen dramatically and so now you can produce the same results with far less money (a cheap developer(does not matter if they are good or mediocre) guiding an AI). That cheap developer does not even have to be in the US.
by chanux | 2026-01-18 03:34:08+00:00
> DevOps was (and is) merely an excuse for companies to replace Developers with cheaper Ops resources [..].

Like everything, the original intentions must have been noble. But as we can see, looking back, it got popular and popular enough to get to the enterprise types.

Nothing really survives that.

PS: I have witnessed a sysadmin team being renamed DevOps and then SRE with not much other meaningful changes. I couldn't believe it at the time.
by 152334H | 2026-01-18 03:34:17+00:00
> I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.

Wow. This is the most insightful statement I've read today.

It's finally clicked [U+2014] why I prefer e-ink to hardback, in spite of the alluring texture of plup across fingers.

It's because it should've been white-on-black, not black-on-white. It makes so much intuitive sense.
by jackzhuo | 2026-01-18 03:36:56+00:00
Love the coin approach for field readings!

regarding a 'second pocket' version: You absolutely have to check out Bradford Hatcher (https://hermetica.info/).

He is actually the biggest inspiration behind my development process. His work is incredibly deep, pragmatic, and distinct from the 'Christianized' tone you sometimes get with Wilhelm. He offers his massive 2-volume translation for free on his site.

I am actually considering digitizing his text as an alternative option on my site because his word-by-word matrix is just mind-blowing. Let me know if you find his style fits your 'field reading' vibe.
by jajuuka | 2026-01-18 03:38:34+00:00
I'm talking about the above comments argument that this kind of overreach is a healthy government regulatory framework. I am not talking about the argument from the person above them.

You seem to be forgetting a crucial part of this. The parent. If a parent is buying their child a gambling game then that's on them. Not on the government to force everyone to submit their IDs and face scans to play a game for adults.

Parental controls are not a phony feature at all. That's like saying accessibility options are phony features. It's an option for people who need it. Just because it isn't default in every scenario doesn't mean it's disingenuous.
by da_chicken | 2026-01-18 03:39:58+00:00
It's not the dream of replacing developers.

It's the dream of replacing labor.

They've already convinced their customers what the value of the product is! Cutting labor costs is profit! Never mind the cost to society! Socialize those costs and privatize those profits!

Then they keep the money for themselves, because capitalism lets a few people own the means of production.

So everything that looks cheaper than paying someone educated and skilled to do a thing is extremely attractive. All labor-saving devices ultimate do that.
by b112 | 2026-01-18 03:40:33+00:00
Windows last hundreds of years because glass lasts hundreds of years.

Modern windows don't last very long, because the seals leak, and the argon gas or whatever leaks out. The glass is still good, but the insulative quality is gone.

The parent poster didn't realize that if you don't have double pane windows, you have single pane windows, which have no gas to leak.
by Brajeshwar | 2026-01-18 03:41:05+00:00
My personal choice is kinda split between both modes. I like Light as a default, but prefer Dark for others. For instance, the IDE where I write code is always in the darker mode, but writing normal notes/prose, such as in Obsidian, Apple Notes, is always light. I also prefer the non-primary focus area to be of a darker shade; hence, the sidebar in my Obsidian is usually darker with light text while the main writing area is light (themes/settings does this).

However, I prefer Dark Mode on my phone as the default, except for a few specific apps, such as Maps, even at night. I like minimal setup with less text and content during daytime but after sunset, the phone is set to be more pronounced (with labels, etc). I’m 40+ and I like sharper text and higher contrast especially when it is darker (night). Hence, the more pronounced Phone Setup; I should be able to read/know quick enough if I get a Whitelisted call at Night.

I like apps that do not force but give me an option to have a choice between Light/Dark.

In macOS, to use Dark Theme for Menubar and Dock (the periphery) but overall Light Theme for the main content, here is how to do it;

1. Go to System Preferences, then set the theme to LIGHT.

2. In Terminal, run `defaults write -g NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool Yes`

3. Logout, then System Preferences, then set the theme to DARK

If you wish to reset back to the default, in Terminal, run `defaults write -g NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool No`
by JSR_FDED | 2026-01-18 03:41:18+00:00
I worked for Olivetti (outside Italy) on their Point of Sale systems. That division also made ATMs and amazing printers for printing in passport and savings booklets. That printer could lift the print head to skip over the staple in the middle of the booklet and then merrily continue printing.

As a developer it was great, they handed out these gorgeous M380 XP9 machines to everyone “, check out the boot sequence: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQCF9GsiJrd/

It was while working there that I started to appreciate that design of things you use every day is important.
by jackzhuo | 2026-01-18 03:41:47+00:00
Funny you mention that—visual automation was actually in my original roadmap!

I held off on building it because I personally really cherish the manual process. The physical effort (even the clicking) helps me settle into the reading.

But I hear you. 100 clicks is a heavy lift for every session. I will likely add that 'visual auto-play' feature in a future update as a middle ground. Thanks for the feedback!
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-18 03:42:14+00:00
> I've heard that SASS never really took off in China because the oversupply of STEM people have caused developer salaries to be suppressed so low that companies just hire a team of devs to build out all their needs in house. Why pay for a SASS when devs are so cheap. These are just anecdotes. Its hard for me to figure out whats really going on in China.

At the high end, china pays SWEs better than South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, India, and much Europe, so they attract developers from those locations. At the low end, they have a ton of low to mid-tier developers from 3rd tier+ institutions that can hack well enough. It is sort of like India: skilled people with credentials to back it up can do well, but there are tons of lower skilled people with some ability that are relatively cheap and useful.

China is going big into local LLMs, not sure what that means long term, but Alibaba's Qwen is definitely competitive, and its the main story these days if you want to run a coding model locally.
Ask HN: What are some LLM shibboleths?
by EGreg | 2026-01-18 03:42:19+00:00
The most reliable one I see and hear all the time, is:

"It's not X. It's Y."

or

"This is not X. It's Y."

Also when something is misspelled by a human such as "IOUS" and "read" incorrectly by a synthetic digital twin as "I O U S" instead of "IOUs." And sometimes a word is accented incorrectly.

I hope these shibboleths stay, because they at least alert me to sloppily edited AI.
by nebula8804 | 2026-01-18 03:42:37+00:00
Where have you worked? I have seen this mentality among the smartest most accomplished people I've come across who do things like debug kernel issues at Google Cloud. Yes, those people need to really know fundamentals.

90% of people building whatever junk their company needs does not. I learned this lesson the hard way after working at both large and tiny companies. Its the people that remain in the bubble of places like AWS, GCP or people doing hard core research or engineering that have this mentality. Everyone else eventually learns.

>Excel proves the rule. It's objectively terrible: 30% of genomics papers contain gene name errors from autocorrect, JP Morgan lost $6bn from formula errors, Public Health England lost 16,000 COVID cases hitting row limits. Yet it succeeded at democratisation by accepting catastrophic failures no proper system would tolerate.

Excel is the largest development language in the world. Nothing (not Python, VB, Java etc.) can even come close. Why? Because it literally glues the world together. Everything from the Mega Company, to every government agency to even mom & pop Bed & Breakfast operations run on Excel. The least technically competent people can fiddle around with Excel and get real stuff done that end up being critical pathways that a business relies on.

Its hard to quantify but I am putting my stake in the ground: Excel + AI will probably help fix many (but not all) of those issues you talk about.
by jajuuka | 2026-01-18 03:43:22+00:00
This is riddled with fearmongering. You don't need to be a cybersecurity expert to take interest in your own child. It doesn't take a PhD to enable parental controls or tell your child "no" if they want something that is inappropriate for them.

You might as well have said that you need to be a police officer to make sure your child isn't hit by a drunk driver, kidnapped by creeps or attacked by someone on the street. Children are under the care of parents or guardians for a reason. It's not to fist fight criminals or design their own security system.
by WWLink | 2026-01-18 03:43:31+00:00
The current icons really aren't that good. Looking at apple specifically: The facetime and messages icons are almost completely indistinguishable. Get angry and say I'm blind, but so is a lot of the userbase - like legitimately, legally blind people.

The camera icon on iOS is just a fucking camera lens with a grey background. No context.

The calculator one is actually pretty good.

The photos one is also bullshit lol.
by tjr | 2026-01-18 03:44:25+00:00
Fair point! And I wasn't clear: my anecdote was me, personally, needing an instance of some software. Rather than me personally either write it by hand, or even write it using AI, and then host it, I just found an off-the-shelf solution that worked well enough for me. One less thing I have to think about.

I would agree that if the scenario is a business, to either buy an off-the-shelf software solution or pay a small team to develop it, and if the off-the-shelf solution was priced high enough, then having it custom built with AI (maybe still with a tiny number of developers involved) could end up being the better choice. Really all depends on the details.
Claude Coding on Manager's Schedule
by michaelhoney | 2026-01-18 03:44:36+00:00
Many of you will be familiar with pg's "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule": https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

It strikes me that one of the main changes to my day using Claude Code is that my work doesn't have to be solid blocks of focus, in Maker's schedule.

I can task the agent, go off and work on something else, and come back to it when I want, and the thing is done. Test it, task with the next thing, go and grab a snack. Repeat.

Is something lost? Sure, you don't get that deep engagement with the code. But not all code needs that. There are some things you can delegate.
by nbardy | 2026-01-18 03:44:44+00:00
> Claude Code officially added native support for the Language Server Protocol (LSP) in version 2.0.74, released in December 2025.

I think from training it's still biased towards simple tooling.

But also, there is real power to simple tools, a small set of general purpose tools beats a bunch of narrow specific use case tools. It's easier for humans to use high level tools, but for LLM's they can instantly compose the low level tools for their use case and learn to generalize, it's like writing insane perl one liners is second nature for them compared to us.

If you watch the tool calls you'll see they write a ton of one off small python programs to test, validate explore, etc...

If you think about it any time you use a tool there is probably a 20 line python program that is more fit to your use case, it's just that it would take you too long to write it, but for an LLM that's 0.5 seconds
by f30e3dfed1c9 | 2026-01-18 03:45:03+00:00
"It's cowardly to go to a restaurant, smile, eat your meal, say nothing, and then decide not to leave a tip because you thought the service sucked - without ever speaking up or allowing the restaurant to fix the problem."

You seem to frame many more things in terms of "coward[ice]" than I would. I'd describe the scenario above as rude but not "cowardly" and it wouldn't occur to me to frame it that way or think of it in those terms.

In the real world, in that scenario, I would leave a tip because I know how servers get paid. If this is a restaurant I've never been to before, I'm not going to speak up about it because I just don't really care very much. Not my problem.

It's also sort of hard for me to imagine hypothetically a restaurant where the "service sucked": it's not an experience I've ever had and I don't have much in the way of expectations about restaurant service. Just get me seated reasonably quickly (or tell me that you won't be able to), give me a menu, take my order, bring the food, bring the check. It's not a high bar.

"Its just as lame to leave a 1-star review because you perecived the food to be awful without mentioning it and giving the kitchen a chance to prepare the food in a manner you'd like."

Again, I can't really imagine this scenario. It's one thing, I guess, if there's something objectively wrong with the food. I remember, for example, once being served a steak marinated in whiskey that I had definitely not ordered, and I sent that back. To me, it was pretty much inedible, although I guess if someone didn't like it, it wouldn't be on the menu.

But if the food is just not very good? Ehh, I don't have time to fuss over that. I'm not gonna leave a one-star review because I don't leave reviews. I'm probably just not coming back.

All this strikes me as pretty normal, and definitely not something that can be usefully framed in terms of "cowardice." I mean, if it's "cowardly" to not complain about poor service right then and there, is it "brave" to do so? That characterization seems sort of absurd.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-18 03:45:31+00:00
> identification increasingly depends on colour and shape.

If only they would stop there. These design terrorists won't even let us have that much; Google's Android apps all use the same 4-color-rainbow scheme. Not only did they get rid of the ability to visually identify the icons by color, but you can't even really identify them by shape because applying four highly constrasting colors to a simple shape breaks up its silhouette into something that is not quickly recognisable at a glance. It's as though they're intentionally trying to make the icons have as little functional utility as they possibly can.
by WWLink | 2026-01-18 03:45:58+00:00
The office icons are rather subtle but do sorta illustrate what they do if you look carefully - the word icon is a list, the excel icon is a spreadsheet, and the powerpoint icon is a pie chart.

That you have to look closely is kinda crap lol. Whoever designed the icons was more obsessed with consistent branding instead of making icons that make sense.

Looking at the start menu, some MS icons are great. Paint, Notepad, Calculator are all fantastic.
by nebula8804 | 2026-01-18 03:47:36+00:00
Thank you for the insight. Those countries you listed are nowhere near US salaries. I wonder what the SASS market is like in Europe? I hear its utilized but that the problem is that there is too much reliance on American companies.

I hear those other Asian countries are just like China in terms of adoption.

>China is going big into local LLMs, not sure what that means long term, but Alibaba's Qwen is definitely competitive, and its the main story these days if you want to run a coding model locally.

It seems like the China's strategy of low cost LLM applied pragmatically to all layers of the country's "stack" is the better approach at least right now. Here in the US they are spending every last penny to try and build some sort of Skynet god. If it fails well I guess the Chinese were right after all. If it succeeds well, I don't know what will happen then.
by libraryofbabel | 2026-01-18 03:48:43+00:00
This rings true and reminds me of the classic blog post “Reality Has A Surprising Amount Of Detail”[0] that occasionally gets reposted here.

Going back and forth on the detail in requirements and mapping it to the details of technical implementation (and then dealing with the endless emergent details of actually running the thing in production on real hardware on the real internet with real messy users actually using it) is 90% of what’s hard about professional software engineering.

It’s also what separates professional engineering from things like the toy leetcode problems on a whiteboard that many of us love to hate. Those are hard in a different way, but LLMs can do them on its own better than humans now. Not so for the other stuff.

[0] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
by bluehex | 2026-01-18 03:50:24+00:00
> The US Tax Filing system (and its associated software) meets that goal.

I disagree with the argument that the US Tax Filing system meets the goal of:

> "allows everyone, at scale, reliably, to do what they need to do."

It may do so for easy / common cases of W2 salaried employees but step a little outside of the norm (foreign sourced income, tax treaties etc.) and software gives up and shows you a PDF of relevant forms and requires you to become an expert in tax code and to keep your own multi year running calculation of carryovers and things to proceed. I'm glossing over all of the detail about how complex this really is but wouldn't expect the average, even very intelligent person to succeed in filing a correct return without a professional's help.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-01-18 03:50:47+00:00
> every change needs a human to take responsibility for and ownership of it, even if the changes were written by an LLM

Actually it could be the opposite: they hold the LLM responsible. When the code change breaks production they'll just ask the LLM to fix it. If it can't? "Not my fault, the LLM wrote it not me! We just need to improve our prompting next time!" Never underestimate humans' capacity to avoid doing work.
by gitaarik | 2026-01-18 03:51:55+00:00
But still the hypothesis of the article holds stance. If you want a new feature, you still have to think it through and explain the AI how to implement it, and validate the result.

You might be able to do more with less, but that is with every technological advancement.

Regarding your experience, it sounds like your codebase is such good quality that it acts as a very clear prompt to the AI for it to understand the system and improve it.

But I imagine your codebase didn't get into this state all by itself.