MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by henryhale | 2026-01-18 16:10:06+00:00
> I think it can sometimes be caused by me just being haphazard about re-exporting them, but other times I'm not sure.

I think so too. I guess that's how your project is structured and duplicates maybe inevitable.

The graph shows exactly how the project is organized. Right - "duplicates confuse things" - this would suggest eliminating "files that re-export functions/classes" or passing an option (-i) for ignoring specific paths would help. Otherwise, this issue is noted for further analysis.

Thanks for trying depgraph.
by Brajeshwar | 2026-01-18 16:10:33+00:00
This is going to be very personal opinion but I’ve bought many digital products when I’m either not thinking too much about the price or find that it has a much cheaper Indian version. Many times, have I done it just so I could help out another founder.

The most recent one I remember was some tool (Show HN) that searches the Mac with a local AI. I’m yet to start using it. I like the idea, and I might use it someday. It was beta-discounted

I’m from India.
by Sharlin | 2026-01-18 16:10:44+00:00
I think you’ll find the essay much more nuanced than that. It only incidentally discusses what you’re thinking about.

> Think of AI software generation: there are plenty of coders who love using AI. Using AI for simple tasks can genuinely make them more efficient and give them more time to do the fun part of coding, namely, solving really gnarly, abstract puzzles. But when you listen to business leaders talk about their AI plans for coders, it’s clear they are not hoping to make some centaurs.
by bee_rider | 2026-01-18 16:11:04+00:00
A very nice story, and an interesting reflection on the education system.

Also, and this is just an aside, but “the protagonist who is too special for the sorting hat” is a bit of a trope in young adult literature at this point. Is this the first real instance of it? 1957. That’s a while ago! I don’t even know if the “sorting hat” trope was established enough to subvert at the time.
by spwa4 | 2026-01-18 16:11:06+00:00
Opendev is better, and it's just so much easier convincing your boss to let you use it when all company data doesn't get sent to some American company.

While you notice the difference, it was very surprising to me that for almost all tasks, worse models just means things take longer. Plus, both claude and openai lie when they don't know something. I actually have the impression Qwen coder 30B-A3B is a lot more forthcoming about not knowing something.

But the intelligence of the model doesn't actually make the difference between succeed or fail, and when it's exploring an actual problem, the tokens/second makes more difference than the intelligence. And, well, if it's hard enough, just take a break.

Randall, we'll need an update: https://xkcd.com/303/
by commiepatrol | 2026-01-18 16:11:07+00:00
Because most European countries are US vassals. They have US bases on their soil. What kind of a sovereign nation will allow another country's military on their ground??

That means at the end of the day they will bitch and moan but eventually they will do what US tells them to do. Otherwise they'll get the same medicine that Libya, Iraq, etc etc has received for disobedience.
by caskell | 2026-01-18 16:11:16+00:00
It does happen, yes.

For example, look up Tremaine Carroll and Karen White. Both of them men who claimed to be women, were transferred to women's prisons based on policy that allows "gender identity" to override sex, then raped and sexually assaulted female prisoners who were locked up with them.

The whole reason we have sex-segregated prisons is to prevent imprisoned women from being subjected to male predation and violence. Letting men into women's prisons because these men claim to be women completely undermines this.
by xhkkffbf | 2026-01-18 16:11:30+00:00
There's a thing called "copyright" and it's kind of like a union, but for people who write or create art. It gives them the right to decide who gets to make a copy. Many of the best sources of news put up a paywall because it's what allows them to pay their reporters. When you make an illicit copy without their permission, you undermine their ability to make a living. In other words, eat.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2026-01-18 16:11:40+00:00
It's an allegory about trusting "best practices", standardized bodies of knowledge¹, and "that's the way it's always been done". Not that those things necessarily don't work, they do in the story as well as in real life, but they need to adapt to change and the story illustrates what happens when they harden from best practice into unquestioned dogma.

¹ There's even a BoK for software developers, the SWEBOK, but I've never met anybody who's read it.
by Eridrus | 2026-01-18 16:12:14+00:00
SaaS software is not generally zero marginal cost since you run the infra, have support, etc, but maybe in your situation is close to zero since its very simple.

If you have no sales, but your costs are very low, you should try it.

The main reason not to would be costs or cannibalizing your higher value customers (which you don't have).
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-18 16:12:48+00:00
> Those developers WILL get replaced - by ones who know how to use the tool.

Now _that_ I would believe. But note how different "those who fail to adapt to this new tool will be replaced" is from "the vast majority will be replaced by this tool itself".

If someone had said that six (give or take) months ago I would have dismissed it as hype. But there have been at least a few decently well documented AI assisted projects done by veteran developers that have made the front page recently. Importantly they've shown clear and undeniable results as opposed to handwaving and empty aspirations. They've also been up front about the shortcomings of the new tool.
by jrm4 | 2026-01-18 16:13:42+00:00
So, for better or worse, it's an "IT for Professionals" class, and I'm not "teaching coding" per se.

It's more a big picture view of everything tech related that I see as important to be aware of, as well as filling in some blanks. Most of my students get "straight up programming" in other classes. So I actually have always done "here is Bash scripting and what it's good for." And I definitely teach "the controversy," e.g. This AINT what you want for big and professional, but also, knowledge of bash (and similar) is a very useful "swiss army knife."
by ninkendo | 2026-01-18 16:13:53+00:00
> It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work.

Agreed.

> Unfortunately I think that many people’s jobs are essentially in the “Coyote running off a cliff but not realizing it yet” phase or soon to be.

Eh… some people maybe. But history shows nearly every time a tool makes people more efficient, we get more jobs, not less. Jevon’s paradox and all that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
by class3shock | 2026-01-18 16:14:40+00:00
They quite literally hoard the profit produced by the people that work for them. If they didn't, they wouldn't be billionaires. Pretending that because the wealth isn't in the form of a pool filled with gold coins that somehow makes it different is just misunderstanding wealth.

As far as feeding people, he could single handidly fund SNAP for a year and still have 100 billion plus.
by Frotag | 2026-01-18 16:14:45+00:00
They deprecated their audio features endpoint which provided metrics like "danceability". Their ToS also forbids building recommendation engines with that data. So I imagine they're a little protective of at least that section of the metadata dump.

But yeah I agree that the audio file itself probably isn't super important to keep secret. After all, it's not that hard to find cd rips or at worst, a youtube version to download.
by EGreg | 2026-01-18 16:15:04+00:00
Look, if we zoom in, then "learning to code" is also quite a broad range of skills that someone needs to master before they can meaningfully carve out a career in a competitive marketplace.

The point is that if you zoom out, it's just a thin slice that can be automated by machines. People keep saying "I'll tell you in my experience, no UAV will ever trump a pilot's instinct, his insight, the ability to look into a situation beyond the obvious and discern the outcome, or a pilot's judgment"... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZygApeuBZdk

But as you can see, they're all wrong. By narrow here I meant a thin layer that thinks it's indispensable as they remove all the other layers. Until the system comes for this layer too.
by whimsicalism | 2026-01-18 16:15:07+00:00
I disagree. The article leads with the sentiment that I mention and has it woven throughout. The theme is AI is obviously not capable of doing your job, the problem is that the stupid managerial class will get convinced it is and make things shitty.

> This is another key to understanding – and thus deflating – the AI bubble. The AI can’t do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can’t do your job.

> Now, AI is a statistical inference engine. All it can do is predict what word will come next based on all the words that have been typed in the past. That means that it will “hallucinate” a library called lib.pdf.text.parsing,

I think it is a convenient, palatable, and obviously comforting lie that lots of people right now are telling themselves.

To me, all the ‘nuance’ in this article is just because the coyote in Doctorow has begun looking down but still cannot quite believe it. He is still leaning on the same tropes of statistical autocomplete that have been a mainstay of the fingers-in-ears gang for the last 3 years.
by AstroBen | 2026-01-18 16:15:28+00:00
I don't think there truly is a way to bulletproof yourself

Anything that AI can't do today could be convincingly argued that it will be able to do in 3 years. There's no-one that can tell you what the world will look like then

If you're seriously worried and can't take that risk then maybe look into switching careers

Learn to sell yourself. Learn to adapt quickly. Learn to learn

The days of having one skillset you learn deeply and monetize for 40 years are over
by jrm4 | 2026-01-18 16:16:04+00:00
I'm optimistic, actually.

One sort of "big-picture" idea that I've seen that I think is generally useful is kind of like this: For a VERY long time, Linux was kind of a joke for most.

But I realized that, it being 1% of desktops was still VITALLY IMPORTANT, even when it was never huge -- it provided enough "background pressure" for mainstream things to not screw up overly badly.

I see e.g. "homelabs" and "self-hosting" as doing that right now. And, again, given that Linux won :) -- we will see.
by rawgabbit | 2026-01-18 16:16:15+00:00
Well. I try for a middle ground. I am currently ditching both airflow and dbt. In Snowflake, I use scheduled tasks that call stored procedures. The stored procedures do everything I need to do. I even call external APIs like Datadog’s and Okta’s and pull down the logs directly into snowflake. I do try to name my stored procedures with meaningful names. I also add generous comments including urls back to the original story.
by closewith | 2026-01-18 16:16:27+00:00
> The payoff period for an EV is anywhere from 15,000 to 25,000mi. The moment any EV crosses that threshold, it becomes better for the environment than the ICE vehicle that you'd otherwise buy.

That's the payoff period for the carbon differential between a new EV and a new ICE, not a new EV and your existing ICE, where the carbon cost of production is already sunk. Hence why the GP commented that keeping your ICE is environmentally better than buying a new EV.

Also note that 15-25k miles is 24-40k km, or 2.4-4 years of the average annual mileage in the EU. That's to break even with a new ICE. To break even with a second hand ICE, it's on the order or 15-20 years, or effectively longer than the useful life of the EV.

> If your used ICE vehicle has 15 to 25,000mi in it, then yeah, replacing it with an EV today is the better choice. It's more a matter of when it will be the better choice.

This claim is simply false. There is no point in the lifetime of a used ICE where replacing it with a new EV will result in reduce overall emissions.
by ndriscoll | 2026-01-18 16:16:33+00:00
A lot of studying math is just learning jargon and applications for what are actually pretty straightforward concepts, which lets you better communicate with the computer. You get higher bandwidth communication and better ability to know all of the nuances in things it might propose. You can propose things and understand when it replies with nuances you missed.

Like intro differential geometry is basically a deep dive into what one actually does when reading a paper map. Something everyone (over 30?) is familiar with. But it turns out there's plenty to fill a graduate level tome on that topic.

Linear algebra is basically studying easy problems: y=ax. Plenty to write about how to make your problem (or at least parts of it) fit that mould.

I suspect and think I've seen others say that you get better outputs from LLMs when using jargon. Essentialy, its pattern matching tells it to say what an expert would say when using the terminology experts use.
by whimsicalism | 2026-01-18 16:16:41+00:00
My work involves reading papers, doing high level math, coding it, reasoning about the business environment, etc. etc. My work is important and I find the classic HN impulse to stigmatize people for saying this to be silly.

It is you who is the fool if you haven’t managed to use these things to massively accelerate what you can do and if you cannot see the clear trend. Again, it has been three years since chatgpt came out.
by binary132 | 2026-01-18 16:16:44+00:00
Once upon a time a clever software engineer realized that engineering talent is the fuel which the business relies on to support its revenue growth, and management is for facilitating this process, while the CEO’s purpose is to be blamed when it doesn’t work out. He wrote a small bash script which replaced corporate leadership with a “quote of the day” generator and everyone lived happily ever after.
by kuerbel | 2026-01-18 16:17:57+00:00
I don’t think the article is blaming AI as a technology. It’s criticizing how the current socio-economic system uses AI.

The argument isn’t “tech is the problem,” but that autonomy narratives are used to shift risk, degrade labor, and justify valuations without real system-level productivity gains. That’s a critique of incentives and power structures, not of technological progress itself.

In that sense, “don’t blame tech, blame the system” is very close to the article’s point, not opposed to it.
by Y_Y | 2026-01-18 16:18:07+00:00
There are lots of ways to find out about products. We don't need Google or Meta to do look at a review site or ask a friend or search a directory or to solicit offers.

Adverising isn't there to push ideas into people who didn't need to know about it. Many industries would be better off without advertising (see e.g. cigarettes) because it ends up in an arms race.
by xhkkffbf | 2026-01-18 16:19:09+00:00
Nothing gets rid of capitalism. In the socialist world, various forms of status just replace basic currency. When goods are limited, there has to be some way to ration them. In the former Soviet Union, it was just high party officials who were rich in limited goods. Maybe they didn't have "money" or US-style "capital", but they had other things that took that role.
Show HN: Mist – a lightweight, self-hosted PaaS
by notcalc | 2026-01-18 16:19:54+00:00
Hi HN,

We’re building Mist, a lightweight, self-hosted PaaS for running and managing applications on your own servers.

We started Mist because we wanted a middle ground between raw VPS management and heavy, all-in-one platforms. Existing PaaS solutions often felt too complex or resource-intensive for small servers, homelabs, and side projects. We wanted something that keeps the PaaS experience but stays simple and predictable.

Our goals with Mist are:
- A simple PaaS to deploy and manage apps on your own infrastructure
- HTTPS, routing, and app access handled automatically
- Low resource usage so it runs well on small VPSes
- Self-hosted and transparent, with minimal magic

Mist focuses on being an opinionated but lightweight layer on top of your server. It doesn’t try to hide everything behind abstractions, but it does aim to remove the repetitive operational work that comes with managing apps by hand.

Mist is still early, and this is where we really need help. We’re actively looking for:

- Users who want a simple self-hosted PaaS and can share real-world feedback

- Contributors who want to help shape the core features, architecture, and UX

Website: https://trymist.cloud

Repo: https://github.com/corecollectives/mist
by sigotirandolas | 2026-01-18 16:20:05+00:00
I hope this too but it's not a given, IMO. Previously people without technical chops failed quickly by being unable to deliver working code, now they can deliver mediocre code with the damage only becoming clear years later. It breaks the "can deliver code --> good technical ability" proxy and even after the initial damage wave, it's unclear if we will find a better proxy.
by netsharc | 2026-01-18 16:20:07+00:00
How to fix the human/society instead? Technology has enabled a lot of evil: the society that had guns came and colonized the society without, and made them slaves (here's the opening to argue that Genghis Khan managed to enslave many societies without guns). The rise of the Internet and online shopping ruined "main street shops". "Uber for ___" enabled the exploitative gig-economy with retirement meaning dropping dead...

Yeah, we're back to feudal lords having the power to control society, they can even easily buy governments... Seems like the problem is with neo-liberalist capitalism, without any controls coming from the society (i.e. democractically elected governments) it will maximize exploitation.
by jmyeet | 2026-01-18 16:21:08+00:00
The tech world as a whole thinks the American Dream dying is a good thing and they're actively making that happen. And the answer is quite simple: further wealth concentration and the resulting inequality.

China is investing in infrastructure and making sure its citizens have enough to eat and a roof over their heads. The US is starving school children, unleashing its own Gestapo on its citizens, letting its citizens die, doing untold damage to every other country on Earth and letting our infrastructure rot so Jeff Bezos can buy a 4th megayacht.

Automation and AI could be a good thing for society. We could all enjoy the benefits by having to work less and having to less menial and/or dangerous work. But it won't work that here. It'll be used to displace workers, increase the wealth of th etop 0.01% and suppress the wages of reamining workers.

I'm unconvinced the trillions invested in AI will ever see a return. But even if it produces value in some way, will it even matter if nobody has any money to buy anything?
by fzeroracer | 2026-01-18 16:21:14+00:00
> My work involves reading papers, doing high level math, coding it, reasoning about the business environment, etc. etc. My work is important and I find the classic HN impulse to stigmatize people for saying this to be silly.

This is what every person who's been laid off by AI says. Every single time. People really like to assume that the work they do is important, except companies don't care about important they care about pushing shit out the door, faster and cheaper. Your high level math and business reasoning do not matter when they can just let someone cheaper go wild and deliver faster with no guard rails.
Show HN: DailySpace – Daily astronomy photos with rocket launch tracking
by DailySpace | 2026-01-18 16:21:23+00:00
I built DailySpace because I wanted a better way to explore space imagery beyond endlessly scrolling through search results.

The app features a curated collection of thousands of cosmic images organized into categories like galaxies, nebulae, Mars, and black holes. Each photo comes with explanations that make the science accessible. I recently added rocket launch tracking with detailed mission data from space agencies worldwide.

The architecture focuses on discoverability-you get a featured photo daily, but you can also browse categories or search the full collection. The dark-themed UI is optimized for viewing space imagery without eye strain.Free tier covers daily photos and basic browsing. Premium unlocks unlimited search results, unlimited favorites, and cross-device sync.

What started as a personal project to learn more about astronomy turned into something I use every day. The two-minute daily habit of opening it and learning something new about the universe has been surprisingly impactful.

Would love feedback from HN, especially on features you'd find useful or additional data sources worth integrating.

Download: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.daily.spac...
by kalkin | 2026-01-18 16:21:50+00:00
The article does a pretty lazy* job of defending its assumption that "solving really gnarly, abstract puzzles" is going to remain beyond AI capabilities indefinitely, but that is a load-bearing part of the argument and Doctorow does try to substantiate it by dismissing LLMs as next-word predictors. This is a description which is roughly accurate at some level of reduction but has not helped anyone predict the last three years of advances and so seems pretty unlikely to be a helpful guide to the next three years.

The other argument Doctorow gives for the limits of LLMs is the example of typo-squatting. This isn't an attack that's new to LLMs and, while I don't know if anyone has done a study, I suspect it's already the case in January 2026 that a frontier model is no more susceptible to this than the median human, or perhaps less; certainly in general Claude is less likely to make a typo than I am. There are categories of mistakes it's still more likely to make than me, but the example here is already looking out of date, which isn't promising for the wider argument.

*to be fair, it's clearly not aimed at a technical audience.
by rambojohnson | 2026-01-18 16:22:17+00:00
AI-generated ads. Dead-internet dog food. I’ve had to block recommendations across multiple SNS feeds because they’re flooded with blatant AI slop: synthetic video, synthetic images, synthetic music, topped off with a fake voice narrating the whole thing. Nausea.

then I open LinkedIn and it’s C-suite know-nothings openly bragging, wrapped in self-aggrandizing, narcissistic nonsense that only garners likes from other C-suite know-nothings or PMs that have never written a line of code, shilling AI like evangelists and borderline celebrating the obsolescence of entire careers despite being unable to deploy their boring SaaS app live to production.

to keep that part of my brain flexed however, because I do enjoy the craft of software engineering, I still tinker as a hobby, working on passion projects on my own terms. But it’s not my bread-and-butter anymore. Pivoting away from all this dogshit has been the biggest weight off my shoulders this year as I budget my investments and the savings garnered from my extensive engineering career abroad in Japan. early retirement. I’m done.
by essenceX | 2026-01-18 16:22:59+00:00
Tried connecting the dots between continual learning, memory, and context limits in LLMs, and how this lines up with ideas from the Nested Learning paper. The core gap seems to be the same: models can process more tokens, but they still don’t accumulate knowledge over time. Long context and RAG look like scaffolding; nested or hierarchical learning feels closer to what persistent, evolving intelligence would actually require.