MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nilslice | 2026-01-13 23:43:19+00:00
I worked at one of the quantum computing co's on their compiler stack (so pretty much pure classical compute stuff), but in order to have even a baseline understanding of the computations and programming using qubits, I had to first get a better intuition for the underlying quantum mechanics at play. This was a great introduction to the physics underpinning the computations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ3bPUKo5zc&list=PLUl4u3cNGP...

It's long, and the subject matter is intimidating at times, but watch, re-watch, then go deep by finding papers on subjects like superposition and entanglement, which are the key quantum phenomena that unlock quantum computing.

It also helps to understand a bit about how various qubit modalities are physically operated and affected by the control systems (e.g. how does a program turn into qubit rotations, readouts, and other instruction executions). Some are superconducting chips using electromagnetic wave impulses, some are suspending an ion/atom and using lasers to mutate states, or photonic chips moving light through gates - among a handful of other modalities in the industry and academia.

IBM's Qiskit platform may still have tooling, simulators, and visualizers that help you write a program and step through the operations on the qubit(s) managed by the program:

https://www.ibm.com/quantum/qiskit
by smithkl42 | 2026-01-13 23:43:40+00:00
I think it USED to be true that you couldn't really use an LLM on a large, existing codebase. Our codebase is about 2 million LOC, and a year ago you couldn't use an LLM on it for anything but occasional small tasks. Now, probably 90% of the code I commit each week was written by Claude (and reviewed by me and other humans - and also by Copilot and ZeroPath).
by minimaltom | 2026-01-13 23:43:48+00:00
I like OP's representation, but I feel like a lot of people arent saying 'LLMs are the bomb dot com _right now_' (though some are), but rather the trend is evident: these things will keep getting better, and the writing is on the wall.

Personally I think the rate of improvement will plateau: in my experience software inevitably becomes less about tech and more about the interpersonal human soup of negotiating requirements, needs, contradiction, and feedback loops, at lot of which is not signal accessible to a text-in-text-out engine.
by rendang | 2026-01-13 23:43:58+00:00
One could probably think of dozens of reasonable arguments for avoiding LLM use, but this one is awful. If LLMs actually are able to get more work done with fewer people aka "firing people" that would be wonderful for humankind. If you disagree and like getting less work done with more people, you are welcome to forego tractors, dishwashers, the steam engine, and all the rest.
by wrs | 2026-01-13 23:43:58+00:00
Yes, it's really easy to argue against AI music and find that you're making exactly the same argument that was used against DJs and sampling in the 90s. "Real musicians" thought they were being ripped off by "non-musicians" who didn't know how to play an instrument, just a turntable or an AKAI. But it turns out that turntables and samplers are instruments if you allow people to get creative with them, and now we have entire genres of music that exist because sampling is legitimate (though the copyright wars did make it more expensive than the original guerrilla days). I mean, do we seriously think DJ Shadow isn't a musician?

You could regard AI as being literally just a very advanced form of sampling. I've seen and heard some very creative uses of AI tools, and it would be a terrible shame if that baby got thrown out with the bathwater.
by bob001 | 2026-01-13 23:44:01+00:00
To me you're describing a team with mediocre communication and social skills. That's common but its not all teams.

It has everything to do with maturity, motivation and competence. The best teams I've been on didn't care about these rituals because each person bridged the gap with other people. The TLs kept an eye on everything the TL and EM kept an eye on all the people side and concerns. In a startup it'd be the founders. There was mutual trust built by those in leadership roles and issues were communicated and everyone kept an eye out for them.

> They're made of diverse human beings, every one of us, who come from different backgrounds with different expectations about when and what to communicate and when and what not to and around what is who's responsibility when.

Have a meeting, align on some norms for these things and then hold people accountable to them. It's not hard. We're all adults. You don't need constant meetings to hand hold people like little kids.
by duendefm | 2026-01-13 23:44:06+00:00
Until some days / weeks ago, LLM's for coding was more hype than actually real code producing. That is gone now. They clearly leveled up, things will not be the same anymore. And of course this is not just for coding, this is just the beginning. A month ago it really seemed that the models were hitting a complexity wall and that the architecture would need to be improved. Not anymore.
by q3k | 2026-01-13 23:44:09+00:00
Agreed. They've also been extremely finnicky from my experience - had cases where large EVPN deployments just blackholed some arbitrary destination MAC until GARPs were sent out of them.

Also IME EVPN is mostly deployed/pushed when clueless app developers expect to have arbitrary L2 reachability across any two points in a (cross DC!) fabric [1], or when they want IP addresses that can follow them around the DC or other dumb shit that they just assumed they can do.

[1] "What do you mean I can't just use UDP broadcast as a pub sub in my application? It works in the office, fix your network!" and the like.
by hexer292 | 2026-01-13 23:44:16+00:00
> You can save thousands of people, but murdering someone still should mean a life sentence.

I've struggled with this point of view since my early teens, and possibly even earlier. There is no amount of good one can do to compensate for even the slightest misdeed.

As much as I may agree, however, it's probably the most damaging and destructive moral framework you can possibly have, because it just consumes anything positive.
by jd172 | 2026-01-13 23:44:27+00:00
Personally I would rather use a 'bad' ai that's trained ethically and runs locally than a good ai trained on stolen data that requires me to surrender my thoughts to the cloud.

whether or not it's possible to compete I guess we'll see but I am hopeful and appreciative that Mozilla is trying, as I am getting tired of big tech trying to force everyone to hand over even more unhinged amounts of data than what they're already taking from us.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-13 23:45:11+00:00
Influencers are, by definition, advertisers - and a particularly insidious, ugly bunch at that.

If we go by the vibe of this thread, it's yet another reason to avoid social media. You wouldn't want to reward people like this.

As for the broader topic, this segues into the worryingly popular fallacy of excluded middle. Just because you're not against something, doesn't mean you're supporting it. Being neutral, ambivalent, or plain old just not giving a fuck about a whole class of issues, is a perfectly legitimate place to be in. In fact, that's everyone's default position for most things, because humans have limited mental capacity - we can't have calculated views on every single thing in the world all the time.
by ktallett | 2026-01-13 23:45:36+00:00
QC Researcher here!

1/ Digital and analog - where digital equals qubits and analog equals photonics, diamonds, or a range of other bit replacements.

2/ Qubits and gates are the building blocks and operations in digital. Photons, diamonds, electrons, and so on are the bits in analog, you can encode any of these with information in various ways.

3/Strawberry fields for analog qc, and IBM's qiskit for digital

I work on photonic integrated circuits and adapt them to remove the physical limitations on capacity, such as heat, and information loss.
by baranul | 2026-01-13 23:45:42+00:00
> Does anyone understand what the end objective of V is?

The Vlang site makes it clear what their objectives are[1]. "Simple, fast, safe, compiled. For developing maintainable software." They also have a roadmap[2], showing what their end objective (or production release) is.

> I've known about this language for I think 4-5 years and for some reason it's still v0.5...

They just came out with version 0.5 (2 weeks ago from this post), so obviously that statement is mistaken.

[1] vlang.io

[2] https://github.com/vlang/v/blob/master/ROADMAP.md (vlang's roadmap)
by zahlman | 2026-01-13 23:45:57+00:00
> You keep throwing "belligerently" out there to describe protest behavior. Yes, protesting is belligerent.

You keep throwing "escalation" out there to describe ordinary law enforcement procedure. No, "get out of the car" is not an escalation; it is a response to someone who has already demonstrated non-compliance with a previous request to stop the obstruction.

> I don't see which vehicles here you are saying were obstructed

The ones that cannot continue forward in a straight line because the SUV is in the way, perpendicular to the road.

(I don't know how you're deciding which vehicles are or are not ICE in this video.)

> but it looks like they decided to reverse without interacting with her, so that's not obstruction.

This is beyond absurd. No, if I see that you're in my path, and I elect to choose a different route to avoid you, you have still obstructed me. You have hindered my passage in the direction I want to go, and you have blocked that path.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/obstruct
by xp84 | 2026-01-13 23:46:00+00:00
It's funny how many people don't get that. It's like adding a pretty great senior or staff level engineer to sit on-call next to every developer and assist them, for basically free (I've never used any of the expensive stuff yet. Just things like Copilot, Grok Code in JetBrains, just asking Gemini to write bits of code for me).

If you hired a staff engineer to sit next to me, and I just had him/her write 100% of the code and never tried to understand it, that would be an unwise decision on my part and I'd have little room to complain about the times he made mistakes.
by kokanee | 2026-01-13 23:46:25+00:00
I think both sides of this debate are conflating the tech and the market. First of all, there were forms of "AI" before modern Gen AI (machine learning, NLP, computer vision, predictive algorithms, etc) that were and are very valuable for specific use cases. Not much has changed there AFAICT, so it's fair that the broader conversation about Gen AI is focused on general use cases deployed across general populations. After all, Microsoft thinks it's a copilot company, so it's fair to talk about how copilots are doing.

On the pro-AI side, people are conflating technology success with product success. Look at crypto -- the technology supports decentralization, anonymity, and use as a currency; but in the marketplace it is centralized, subject to KYC, and used for speculation instead of transactions. The potential of the tech does not always align with the way the world decides to use it.

On the other side of the aisle, people are conflating the problematic socio-economics of AI with the state of the technology. I think you're correct to call it a failure of PMF, and that's a problem worth writing articles about. It just shouldn't be so hard to talk about the success of the technology and its failure in the marketplace in the same breath.
by habinero | 2026-01-13 23:47:15+00:00
I'm dubbing this "podcast driven development" because so many of them aren't building things to build things, they just want to _have built something_ so they can go on podcasts and talk about how great it is.

For what it's worth, I think most of them are genuine when they say they're seeing 10X gains,they just went from, like, a 0.01X engineer (centi-swe) to to a 0.1X engineer (deci-swe).
by bigDinosaur | 2026-01-13 23:47:16+00:00
That's because they've been indoctrinated - Mao was a complete disaster in every way but admitting that is a step too far for the CCP. The cultural revolution was the worst thing to ever happen to Chinese cultural history and connection to the past (since destroying that was the entire aim of it). Sun Yat-Sen is a far better example of someone worth venerating as a moderniser who didn't want to destroy everything from the past.
by kcplate | 2026-01-13 23:47:27+00:00
Well, I can’t speak to that with enough confidence to say it was “not a thing”, but I never saw that sort of thing in the eighties. Although, it would not necessarily be unusual for a manager to be that blunt and open at that time without fear of lawsuits, so that part tracks as possibly true for me if there was some sort of effort within his company.

However, latter half of the 90s I was in a high enough position in a couple of organizations to experience conversation in management meetings that the hiring of diverse candidates as a preference if possible was often discussed. Although in hindsight you would probably consider it more tokenism than a concerted effort at diversity.
by meowface | 2026-01-13 23:47:32+00:00
I feel no strong need to convince others. I've been seeing major productivity boosts for myself and others since Sonnet 3.5. Maybe for certain kinds of projects and use cases it's less good, maybe they're not using it well; I dunno. I do think a lot of these people probably will be left behind if they don't adopt it within the next 3 years, but that's not really my problem.
by ymyms | 2026-01-13 23:47:33+00:00
I mean, isn't driving the business forward really what matters (outside of academia, open source, and other such endeavors). We live in a hyper competitive market. All else being equal, if company A can produce "millions of lines of slop", constantly living on the knife-edge of disaster but not falling over it, they will beat company B that artificially slows themselves down. Up until the point company A implodes, but that's not necessarily a given if pre-LLM companies are any indication.
by godzillabrennus | 2026-01-13 23:47:39+00:00
As someone who: 1.) Has a brain that is not wired to think like a computer and write code. 2.) Falls asleep at the keyboard while writing code for more than an hour or two. 3.) Has a lot of passion for sticking with an idea and making it happen, even if that means writing code and knowing the code is crap.

So, in short, LLMs write better code than I do. I'm not alone.
by sanity | 2026-01-13 23:47:51+00:00
> Because you’re invested. You’re a Scott Adams fan.

Sure — but I wouldn’t be if I thought he was a bigot. Having listened to hundreds of hours of him explaining his views, I’m far better informed than people judging him from short, out-of-context clips.

> It’s tough to see your idols fall into being dumbasses

I don’t treat public figures as idols. I also don’t think disagreeing with prevailing opinion automatically makes someone a “dumbass.” Sometimes it means they’re willing to take reputational hits for what they believe is right.

> If you sincerely think Scott Adams had zero bias

Nobody has zero bias. That’s an impossible standard.

> As someone who likes the Harry Potter series

For what it’s worth, I think J.K. Rowling is an example of someone who did the right thing at substantial personal and professional cost, particularly in defending women and girls. That’s not idol worship — it’s acknowledging moral courage when it’s inconvenient.

> That he didn’t support ‘stop the steal'

This is where the argument seems to shift from racism to political conformity. Disagreeing with someone’s politics isn’t the same thing as establishing that they’re a bigot.
by ookblah | 2026-01-13 23:48:23+00:00
"LLM evangelists - are you willing to admit that you just might not be that good at programming computers? Maybe you once were. Maybe you never were."

lol. is this supposed to be like some sort of "gotcha"! yes? like maybe i am a really shitty programmer and always just wanted to hack things together. what it has allowed me to do is prevent burnout to some extent, outsource the "boring" parts and getting back to building things i like.

also getting tired of these extreme takes but whatever, it's #1 so mission accomplished. llms are neither this or that. just another tool in the toolbox, one that has been frustrating in some contexts and a godsend in others and part of that process is figuring out where it excels and doesn't.
by butterisgood | 2026-01-13 23:48:34+00:00
A racist died today... ok.

Quote
> “The best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people.”

Oh sexist too:

Quote
> In a 2011 blog post he wrote: “The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone.”

Source: https://www.britannica.com/question/Why-was-Scott-Adams-cont...

I'm not feeling particularly upset.
by j2kun | 2026-01-13 23:48:48+00:00
The author claims it's not just that one evangelizes it, but that they become hostile when someone claims to not have the same experience in response. I don't recall Either Willison or Antirez scaring people by saying they will be left behind or that they are just afraid of becoming irrelevant. Instead they just talk about their positive experiences using it. Willison and Antirez seem to be fine to live and let live (maybe Antirez a bit less, but they're still not mean about it).
by _carbyau_ | 2026-01-13 23:49:10+00:00
As a Battletech lover, the phrase "somewhat of a competitor" is a bit vague. I see Battletech as a 3%er - one of a few 3%ers - compared to the near-monopoly of WH40K (and fantasy WH).

As an aside, I am somewhat disappointed that Battletech's appeal to the mainstream is largely down to the Mechwarrior games which have minimal lore.

There is so much more that could be done. But the current owners seem to be pretty poor at translating all their paperwork stories for the modern crowd.
by brian-bk | 2026-01-13 23:49:14+00:00
I think it's time that AWS customers hesitate before using any abstract software that AWS has built, as we're about to see the enshittification/profitability squeeze of an incumbent player. I wouldn't trust anything more than the ec2, RDS, S3 layer which are more "completed" products and there's not much to enshitify, only squeeze costs. You can already see that AWS has essentially dropped support of any publicly available software, I can't imagine it's any different internally.

It seems like AWS is replicating GCP's level of customer support, instead of using that as a differentiator (not that AWS' support was ever great, but dang it sure was better than GCP's by comparison). Consider yourself on the own, only trust software built on VM's, not SaaS abandonware.
by iscoelho | 2026-01-13 23:49:23+00:00
If I can source an enterprise Cisco/Juniper/Arista ASIC switch that is 1) rock-solid 2) full featured 3) cheaper - which I can - there is unfortunately no rationale where Mikrotik would be applicable in any professional project of mine.

With that said, I love Mikrotik for what it is: it is very approachable and it fills a niche. I believe it has added a lot of value to the industry and I'm excited to see their products mature.
by fsflover | 2026-01-13 23:49:33+00:00
Yes, I daily drive Qubes. It's an amazing feeling to feel in full control over your computing and not being afraid to open any links or attachments. Here is my Qubes OS Elevator Pitch: https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/how-to-pitch-qubes-os/4499/15

It's slow for tasks requiring GPU, but allowing GPU for chosen, trusted VMs is planned: https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/8552
by iwontberude | 2026-01-13 23:49:47+00:00
The most prolific coders are also more competent than average. Their proliferations are what have trained these models. These models are trained on incredibly successful projects written by masters of their fields. This is usually where I find the most pushback is that the most competent SWEs see it as theft and also useless to them since they have already spend years honing skills to work relentlessly and efficiently towards solutions -- sometimes at great expense.
by wolfgames | 2026-01-13 23:49:48+00:00
Wolf Games — Director of Engineering, Creative Automation — Remote (US/Canada) — Contract

Wolf Games is building generative entertainment universes where AI and players collaborate in real time. We’re a Series A creative-tech studio scaling the systems that turn ideas into playable, live experiences.

We’re hiring a hands-on Director of Engineering to lead ~10 engineers building JavaScript-based web games, creative automation tooling, and a hybrid GCP + AWS platform. You’ll own architecture, reliability, CI/CD, and internal tools that connect AI-driven content pipelines to production games.

Stack: TypeScript, Node.js, React/Next.js, GCP/AWS, Kubernetes
Looking for: strong technical leadership, web/game systems, automation mindset, AI familiarity
Rate: $70–85/hr, contract-to-hire

Apply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46466074
by developerDan | 2026-01-13 23:49:54+00:00
It seems you find LoC as a measure of productivity. This would answer your question as to why the author does not find it makes them more productive. If total output increases, but quality decreases (which in terms of code means more bugs) then has productivity increased or has it stayed the same?

To answer my own question, if you can pump out features faster but turn around and spend more time on bugs than you do previously then your productivity is likely net neutral.

There is a reason LoC as a measure of productivity has been shunned from the industry for many, many years.
by barishnamazov | 2026-01-13 23:50:08+00:00
I struggle with the "good guys vs bad guys" framing here.

Is a small indie dev "dodgy" if they use AI to unblock a tricky C# problem so they can actually finish their game? Yarn Spinner seems to conflate "Enterprise Scale Replacement" (firing 500 support staff) with "assistive tooling" (a solo dev using GenAI for texture variants).

By drawing such a hard line, they might be signaling virtue to their base, but they are also ignoring the nuance that AI -- like the spellcheckers and compilers before it -- can be a force multiplier for the very creatives they want to protect.

Personally, I do agree that there are many problems with companies behind major LLMs today, as well as big tech companies C-levels who don't understand why AI can't replace engineers. But this post, as much as written in a nice tone, doesn't frame the problem correctly in my mind.
by manxiemanx | 2026-01-13 23:50:14+00:00
The mess of Tahoe didn't just happen on the watch of Tim Cook, Craig Federighi, Eddy Cue, Phil Schiller, it happened because of them.

Tim Cook has no taste and no sense of quality. He merely counts beans really well. Craig Federighi is responsible for the most precipitous drop in Apple's software quality since the late 80s and early 90s. Eddy Cue is responsible for some of Apple's worst software (music, iCloud, services), and Phil Schiller… what exactly does he do again?
by shermantanktop | 2026-01-13 23:50:19+00:00
> "get the ick"

> even though it may work?

The first of those is about taste, and it's real, and engineers with bad taste write unstable buggy systems.

The second of those is about priority. If all you want is functional code, any old thing will do. That's what I do for one-off scripts. But if you plan to support the code at 2am when exposed to production requests on the internet, you need to understand it, which is about legibility and coherence.

I hope you do have taste, and I hope you value more than simple "it works" tests. But it might be worth looking there for why some struggle with LLM output.

For what it's worth, I use coding agents all the time, but almost never accept their output verbatim outside of boilerplate code.