MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DrewADesign | 2026-01-01 02:07:40+00:00
You’re absolutely right! You astutely observed that 2025 was a year with many LLMs and this was a selection of waypoints, summarized in a helpful timeline.

That’s what most non-tech-person’s year in LLMs looked like.

Hopefully 2026 will be the year where companies realize that implementing intrusive chatbots can’t make better ::waving hands:: ya know… UX or whatever.

For some reason, they think its helpful to distractingly pop up chat windows on their site because their customers need textual kindergarten handholding to … I don’t know… find the ideal pocket comb for their unique pocket/hair situation, or had an unlikely question about that aerosol pan release spray that a chatbot could actually answer. Well, my dog also thinks she’s helping me by attacking the vacuum when I’m trying to clean. Both ideas are equally valid.

And spending a bazillion dollars implementing it doesn’t mean your customers won’t hate it. And forcing your customers into pathways they hate because of your sunk costs mindset means it will never stop costing you more money than it makes.

I just hope companies start being honest with themselves about whether or not these things are good, bad, or absolutely abysmal for the customer experience and cut their losses when it makes sense.
by phil21 | 2026-01-01 02:08:04+00:00
We are all talking about exceptions to the exception at this point. It's typically uninteresting to discuss...

But at the risk of being uninteresting, I know of incredibly niche software projects that were done for a single rich benefactor as one-offs simply for their personal use-case and no one else. Years in the making and quite well paid. In one case effectively lifetime employment for the sole developer.

They are obviously incredibly rare, but they do exist.

However, they are totally irrelevant to discuss in this context since it's a rounding error of 1% of 1% of current developers who would get such roles either via luck or skill.
by philsnow | 2026-01-01 02:10:44+00:00
> There was also a feature that allowed method lookup by putting in the inputs and expected outputs (I still haven't seen anything like this).

Do you mean like hoogle [0]? Or does what you're talking about operate on values rather than type signatures?

[0] https://hoogle.haskell.org/?hoogle=a%20-%3E%20a
by diath | 2026-01-01 02:11:16+00:00
The entire point of LLM-assisted development is to audit the code generated by AI and to further instruct it to either improve it or instruct it to fix the shortcomings - kind of being a senior dev doing a code review on your colleague's merge request. In fact, as developers, we usually read code more than we write it, which is also why you should prefer simple and verbose code over clever code in large codebases. This seems like it would be instead aimed at pure vibecoded slop.

> Do you debug JVM bytecode? V8's internals?

People do debug assembly generated by compilers to look for miscompilations, missed optimization opportunities, and comparison between different approaches.
by skydhash | 2026-01-01 02:11:20+00:00
> The coding agent heading. Claude Code and tools like it represent a huge improvement in what you can usefully get done with LLMs.

Does it? It's all prompt manipulation. Shell script are powerful yes, but not really huge improvement over having a shell (REPL interface) to the system. And even then a lot of programs just use syscalls or wrapper libraries.

> can try the code, see that it doesn't work and fix the problem.

Can you really say that does happens reliably?
by rorytbyrne | 2026-01-01 02:11:48+00:00
Relatively speaking, no. Strength training (as opposed to hypertrophy) calls for fewer reps, around 5 per set.

Many people advise spending about a year doing more sets of fewer (~5) reps to build strength, and then switch to fewer sets of more reps (8-12) when you want to build muscle mass.

Point being, the idea of doing lighter weights until failure is already kind of there in body building wisdom.
by kakapo5672 | 2026-01-01 02:11:51+00:00
Whenever someone tells me that AI is worthless, does nothing, scam/slop etc, I ask them about their own AI usage, and their general knowledge about what's going on.

Invariably they've never used AI, or at most very rarely. (If they used AI beyond that, this would be admission that it was useful at some level).

Therefore it's reasonable to assume that you are in that boat. Now that might not be true in your case, who knows, but it's definitely true on average.
by noodletheworld | 2026-01-01 02:12:41+00:00
I know it seems like forever ago, but claude code only came out in 2025.

Its very difficult to argue the point that claude code:

1) was a paradigm shift in terms of functionality, despite, to be fair, at best, incremental improvements in the underlying models.

2) The results are an order of magnitude, I estimate, better in terms of output.

I think its very fair to distill “AI progress 2025” to: you can get better results (up to a point; better than raw output anyway; scaling to multiple agents has not worked) without better models with clever tools and loops. (…and video/image slop infests everything :p).
by cultofmetatron | 2026-01-01 02:12:46+00:00
>This new Iron Beam technology is more precise and cheaper, and will likely save even more (israeli) lives.

There fixed it for you. last I checked, Israelis are using drones to summarily execute Palestinian kids with impunity. the idea of these people having even more weapons at their disposal paid for by MY tax dollars leaves me a bit disgusted.
by senordevnyc | 2026-01-01 02:13:22+00:00
This comment is legitimately hilarious to me. I thought it was satire at first. The list of what has happened in this field in the last twelve months is staggering to me, while you write it off as essentially nothing.

Different strokes, but I’m getting so much more done and mostly enjoying it. Can’t wait to see what 2026 holds!
by simonw | 2026-01-01 02:13:31+00:00
Depends on what you mean by "reliably".

If you mean 100% correct all of the time then no.

If you mean correct often enough that you can expect it to be a productive assistant that helps solve all sorts of problems faster than you could solve them without it, and which makes mistakes infrequently enough that you waste less time fixing them than you would doing everything by yourself then yes, it's plenty reliable enough now.
by Theaetetus | 2026-01-01 02:14:34+00:00
Are you the poker Matt Maroon? If so, I've been enjoying your writing for a very long time.

I definitely don't sit around doing nothing when I'm waiting for water to boil, but very often the water is still on the critical path (e.g., because I want the pasta to be done ASAP even if other things aren't done yet, or because it's on the critical path even if I can use all that time efficiently).
by n2d4 | 2026-01-01 02:15:26+00:00
This is extremely dismissive. Claude Code helps me make a majority of changes to our codebase now, particularly small ones, and is an insane efficiency boost. You may not have the same experience for one reason or another, but plenty of devs do, so "nothing happened" is absolutely wrong.

2024 was a lot of talk, a lot of "AI could hypothetically do this and that". 2025 was the year where it genuinely started to enter people's workflows. Not everything we've been told would happen has happened (I still make my own presentations and write my own emails) but coding agents certainly have!
by bob1029 | 2026-01-01 02:15:34+00:00
There's no way this works in practice. A lot of heavy lifting (maximums) is about neurology and mind-body training. You cannot develop the ability to deadlift 405lbs by spending 2 hours using a cable crossover machine every day. Picking up something that weighs 2x more than you do requires your brain to send an extremely strong, synchronized signal. This is something that takes a lot of practice to develop. You have to consistently push your maximum voluntary effort in order to expand this capacity.
by beardedwizard | 2026-01-01 02:15:46+00:00
"Given the state of robotics" reminds me a lot of what was said about llms and image/video models over the past 3 years. Considering how much llms improved, how long can robotics be in this state?

I have to think 3 years from now we will be having the same conversation about robots doing real physical labor.

"This is the worst they will ever be" feels more apt.
by jjj123 | 2026-01-01 02:16:27+00:00
The funny thing is I’ve never seen an author of a post chime in and say “hey! I wrote this entirely myself” on an AI accusation. I either see sheepish admission with a “sorry, I’ll do better next time” or no response at all.

Not saying the commenters never get it wrong, but I’ve seen them get it provably right a bunch of times.
by antonvs | 2026-01-01 02:17:47+00:00
I agree, it's fascinating. I've lived in four countries, including England and the US, but I haven't seen anything quite like the UK names elsewhere. You do see a lot of indigenous names in the US, but they haven't evolved in the same way, probably largely because it's all so much more recent, but also because there was only one really one actual invasion, not waves of them coming from all different directions - Beakers, Celts, Roman, Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Norman.

> I've just bought a house in Alderwasley in Derbyshire

Congratulations! A quick check of the map shows you're right near Whatstandwell, Nether Heague, Shottle, Hognaston, and of course Knockerdown. It all makes Tolkien and Pratchett seem a bit unimaginative!
by AdieuToLogic | 2026-01-01 02:17:56+00:00
> I don't know if this sentence was written by LLM or not but people will definitely use LLMs to revise and refine posts. No amount of complaining will stop this. It is the new reality. It's a trend that will only continue to grow.

Using an LLM to generate a post with the implication it is the author's own thoughts is the quintessential definition of intellectual laziness.

One might as well argue that plagiarism is perfectly fine when writing a paper in school.
by 8bitsrule | 2026-01-01 02:18:45+00:00
'Very small'?? Depends on your perspective.

"The amount of CO2 removed from the atmosphere via photosynthesis from land plants is known as Terrestrial Gross Primary Production, or GPP. It represents the largest carbon exchange between land and atmosphere on the planet. GPP is typically cited in petagrams of carbon per year. One petagram equals 1 billion metric tons, which is roughly the amount of CO2 emitted each year from 238 million gas-powered passenger vehicles."

The article: https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/pla...

The paper: doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-08050-3
by DrewADesign | 2026-01-01 02:19:20+00:00
I work in a specialty in an industry that requires a fairly stringent annual ISO certification. Even preparing for the audit it is a completely worthwhile exercise in seeing things that maybe got swept under the rug or left by the wayside. Customers having clearly defined criteria to prove in court or even business negotiations, that our lapse was negligent or in bad faith keeps us from straying too far to begin with. Our having clear criteria to show that we followed industry guidelines shuts down customers trying to accuse us of something in bad faith, or even trying to make a mountain out of a molehill to get leverage in a contract negotiation or something.

I’ll bet most of it depends on how good the certification is. My bosses think it’s annoying, and sure not 100% of the requirements make a difference for us, but most do, and from my vantage point, I can see how much of a difference it makes.
by rhubarbtree | 2026-01-01 02:20:06+00:00
It’s possible this is correct.

It’s also possible that people more experienced, knowledgable and skilled than you can see fundamental flaws in using LLMs for software engineering that you cannot. I am not including myself in that category.

I’m personally honestly undecided. I’ve been coding for over 30 years and know something like 25 languages. I’ve taught programming to postgrad level, and built prototype AI systems that foreshadowed LLMs, I’ve written everything from embedded systems to enterprise, web, mainframes, real time, physics simulation and research software. I would consider myself an 7/10 or 8/10 coder.

A lot of folks I know are better coders. To put my experience into context: one guy in my year at uni wrote one of the world’s most famous crypto systems; another wrote large portions of some of the most successful games of the last few decades. So I’ve grown up surrounded by geniuses, basically, and whilst I’ve been lectured by true greats I’m humble enough to recognise I don’t bleed code like they do. I’m just a dabbler. But it irks me that a lot of folks using AI profess it’s the future but don’t really know anything about coding compared to these folks. Not to be a Luddite - they are the first people to adopt new languages and techniques, but they also are super sceptical about anything that smells remotely like bullshit.

One of the most wise insights in coding is the aphorism“beware the enthusiasm of the recently converted.” And I see that so much with AI. I’ve seen it with compilers, with IDEs, paradigms, and languages.

I’ve been experimenting a lot with AI, and I’ve found it fantastic for comprehending poor code written by others. I’ve also found it great for bouncing ideas. And the code it writes, beyond boiler plate, is hot garbage. It doesn’t properly reason, it can’t design architecture, it can’t write code that is comprehensible to other programmers, and treating it as a “black box to be manipulated by AI” just leads to dead ends that can’t be escaped, terrible decisions that will take huge amounts of expert coding time to undo, subtle bugs that AI can’t fix and are super hard to spot, and often you can’t understand their code enough to fix them, and security nightmares.

Testing is insufficient for good code. Humans write code in a way that is designed for general correctness. AI does not, at least not yet.

I do think these problems can be solved. I think we probably need automated reasoning systems, or else vastly improved LLMs that border on automated reasoning much like humans do. Could be a year. Could be a decade. But right now these tools don’t work well. Great for vibe coding, prototyping, analysis, review, bouncing ideas.
by agnishom | 2026-01-01 02:20:11+00:00
> LLMs tokenize English words efficiently. Symbols like {, }, === fragment into multiple tokens. Words like "plus", "minus", "if" are single tokens.

The insight seems flawed. I think LLMs are just as capable of understanding these symbols as tokens as they are English words. I am not convinced that this is a better idea than writing code with a ton of comments
by throwaway150 | 2026-01-01 02:22:03+00:00
> The funny thing is I’ve never seen an author of a post chime in and say “hey! I wrote this entirely myself” on an AI accusation.

I've seen this happen many times here on HN where the one accused comes back and says that they did in fact write it themselves.

Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45824197
by techpression | 2026-01-01 02:22:11+00:00
Nothing about the severe impact on the environment, and the hand waviness about water usage hurt to read. The referenced post was missing every single point about the issue by making it global instead of local. And as if data center buildouts are properly planned and dimensioned for existing infrastructure…

Add to this that all the hardware is already old and the amount of waste we’re producing right now is mind boggling, and for what, fun tools for the use of one?

I don’t live in the US, but the amount of tax money being siphoned to a few tech bros should have heads rolling and I really don’t want to see it happening in Europe.

But I guess we got a new version number on a few models and some blown up benchmarks so that’s good, oh and of course the svg images we will never use for anything.
by shakna | 2026-01-01 02:22:30+00:00
The Mechanics Institute, where craftsman learned and offered their wares in my town, was founded in 1801.

Its still here, today.

I wouldn't dismiss an industry based on business failures. The restaurant industry still exists, despite it being almost a guarantee that you will fail.

There's also stores with hand-knitted clothes and bears, sculpters and painters.

Yes, all of these are niche - but they survive because they embrace a different business model.
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-01-01 02:23:38+00:00
>information about Texans' travel from license plate and traffic cameras, which businesses they visit

Texas is already doing this to track women seeking out-of-state healthcare. Whatever "side" you're on (for that argument): THIS. IS. WRONG.

In addition to ditching your cell phone, consider ditching Texas, too (as a Native™, I did so almost a decade ago). Still toying with the idea of expatriation, but honestly I feel too old for that, now =P

----

We seem to have a lot in common, fellow retired Xeon user. My PO Box is in my profile.
by guessmyname | 2026-01-01 02:24:09+00:00
hmm (thinking) infinite loop, eh?

$ curl -i -A - 'https://consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov/maintenance.html'
HTTP/2 307
content-type: text/html
location: https://consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov/coming-soon.html
date: Thu, 01 Jan 2026 02:22:37 GMT
[…]

$ curl -i -A - 'https://consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov/coming-soon.html'
HTTP/2 307
content-type: text/html
location: https://consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov/maintenance.html
date: Thu, 01 Jan 2026 02:22:46 GMT
[…]
by spoaceman7777 | 2026-01-01 02:24:13+00:00
Yeah, the body-wide mucous thinning properties of NAC are one of the reasons it has racked up papers showing its efficacy in a truly staggering number of illnesses and conditions. (Including neurodegenerative diseases.)

Highly recommend reading the actual literature on its effects in regard to cystic fibrosis, pancreatitis, COPD, neurodegenerative disorders, high blood pressure, ulcers, IBD, liver and kidney problems, OCD...

The list goes on at a pretty extreme length, and it sounds too good to be true, but the papers are out there.
by p-e-w | 2026-01-01 02:25:09+00:00
Indeed. The top-level comment is pretty much wishful thinking. At this point, if you tell a frontier LLM to explain things bottom up, with motivation and background, you usually get something that’s better than 95% of the openly available material written by human domain experts.

Of course, if you just look at top posts on forums like this one, you might get the impression that humans are still way ahead, but that’s only because you’re looking at the best of the best of the best stuff, made by the very best humans. As far as teaching goes, the vast majority of humans are already obsolete.
by muhaccount | 2026-01-01 02:27:44+00:00
I agree with you on principle, but agree with the OP in practice. "NERD is what source code becomes when humans stop pretending they need to write it" means nothing. Once I read that I realized there was very little to zero review of the outputs by a human, so it's all potential hyperbole. It flips an internal switch to be more skeptical...for me, at least.

If its output isn't massaged by a team, then I appreciate the callouts until the stack is mature/proven. Doesn't make it better/worse...just a different level of scrutiny.
by ridgeguy | 2026-01-01 02:27:55+00:00
A bunch of devices (laser diodes, microprocessors, high power RF GaN amplifiers) that'll run lots cooler on diamond heat spreaders; diamond Raman lasers (high efficiency & power); large single crystal diamond wafers - nothing most of us would pick up off the sidewalk, but might be very important.

I do have 3 CVD gem brilliants (blue, pink, colorless, 2ct. each) that a local jeweler is putting into a 30th anniversary piece for my wife. That makes me grin in anticipation of the surprise gift - my kind of bling.
by themafia | 2026-01-01 02:28:44+00:00
Our city just had a compost program. Throwing away compostable material into the provided bin was free. They put it into the city managed compost yards and then every weekend you could go down there and pick up bags of the finished product to use at home in your garden.

It's also the case that many states already have a "garbage feeding" program that allows food waste to be diverted into feed for commercial animal lots. The food has to meet certain criteria and be fully cooked and ready for human consumption before being discarded.
by anon7000 | 2026-01-01 02:29:33+00:00
You’re hitting at the core problem. Experts have done the intensive research to create guides on the Internet which ChatGPT is trained on. For example, car repairs. ChatGPT can guide you through a lot of issues. But who is going to take the time to seriously investigate and research a brand new issue in a brand new model of car? An expert. Not an AI model. And as many delegate thinking to AI models, we end up with fewer experts.

ChatGPT is not an expert, it’s just statistically likely to regurgitate something very similar to what existing experts (or maybe amateurs or frauds!) have already said online. It’s not creating any information for itself.

So if we end up with fewer people willing to do the hard work of creating the underlying expert information these AI models are so generously trained on, we see stagnation in progress.

So encouraging people to write books and do real investigative research, digging for the truth, is even more important than ever. A chatbot’s value proposition is repackaging that truth in a way you can understand, surfacing it when you might not have found it. Without people researching the truth, that already fragile foundation crumbles.
by StanislavPetrov | 2026-01-01 02:29:47+00:00
A lot of that is tied into billing in general, even without the people who can't afford to pay for their care. When they send out an invoice for $50,000 for services rendered, even if the insurance company only ends up paying them a fraction of that, when it comes to accounting and taxes you can be sure they are using that $50,000 number for deductions and such when it benefits them.
by PostOnce | 2026-01-01 02:29:48+00:00
Yes he did start with a "small loan of a million dollars"!

Buffett started with 1.2 million dollars (105K in 1956) in investments from his family, i.e. his aunt, sister, and father in law.

It is very nearly impossible to get rich without starting with a huge chunk of money, Buffett is no exception.
by Dusseldorf | 2026-01-01 02:29:55+00:00
I'm curious, is most of your dishware plastic? We have a Bosch and it does a great job drying everything except for the plastic stuff. I'm assuming the plastics cool faster and condense water on to them, but not 100% sure. Glass and ceramic/pottery always come out dry unless something got flipped over and pooled a bunch of water.
by pornel | 2026-01-01 02:30:15+00:00
You're harshly judging the entire language based on ease of compiling a 3rd party C++ compiler and the C11 code it emits. These gnarly build commands don't even come from the Rust project, and aren't using the Rust language.

(I assume you use mrustc, and you're not going the masochist route of recreating all the development steps starting from a 15-year-old Ocaml-based prototype of a language that wasn't Rust yet).

It's fair to say that bootstrapping of Rust sucks. It really does. The non-Rust bootstrap compiler doesn't get even a fraction of the polish that rustc and Cargo get. But it's not representative of how Rust and Cargo work for basically everyone in the world except you (and a couple of other maintainers who chose to do an independent bootstrap from scratch). Bootstrapping is a one-off pain, and then building Rust with a Rust-based compiler is nice and easy.

It'd be nice to have a cleaner bootstrap story for Rust, but it will take a while (waiting for gccrs C++ reimplementation to advance enough to replace mrustc).