MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chasd00 | 2026-01-30 22:24:55+00:00
where these tools really shine is in the hand of someone who knows what they want soup-to-nuts, knows what is correct and what is not, but just doesn't want type it all out and set it all up. For those people, these tools are a breath of fresh air.

I remember reading a comment a few days ago where someone said coding with an agent (claude code) made them excited to code again. After spending some time with these things i see their point. You can bypass the hours and hours of typing and fixing syntax and just go directly to what you want to do.
by pron | 2026-01-30 22:24:59+00:00
Here's what I don't get about the "AI can build all software" scenario. It extrapolates AI capabilities up to a certain, very advanced point, and then, inexplicably, it stops.

If AI is capable enough to "build pretty much anything", why is it not capable enough to also use what it builds (instead of people using it) or, for that matter, to decide what to build?

If AI can, say, build air traffic control software as well as humans, why can't it also be the controller as well as humans? If it can build medical diagnosis software and healtchare management software, why can't it offer the diagnosis and prescribe treatment? Is the argument that there's something special about writing software that AI can do as well as people, but not other things? Why is that?

I don't know how soon AI will be able to "build pretty much anything", but when it does, Yegge's point that "all software sectors are threatened" seems to be unimaginative. Why not all sectors full stop?
by niyikiza | 2026-01-30 22:25:04+00:00
Exactly ... and that's why I'm skeptical of "AI verifies AI" as the primary safety mechanism. The verifier for moving money should be deterministic: constraints, allowlists, spend limits, invoice/PO matching, etc. The LLM can propose actions, but the execution should be gated by a human/polic-issued scope that's mechanically enforced. That's the whole point: constrain the non-deterministic layer with a deterministic one. [0]
[0] https://tenuo.dev/constraints
by gary_0 | 2026-01-30 22:26:29+00:00
> quite explicit furry art, is very common on bluesky

Now there's an understatement. It's bloody impossible to get rid of. People here are sneering at all the political content but they're ignoring the curvaceous elephant in the room. I think maybe bsky has improved things now, but a while back their adult content filters were not up to the task. When I first made an account I almost gave up on it because until I got all the right filter words set up it was nothing but weird porn whac-a-mole (actually that's probably a poor choice of words...)
by crote | 2026-01-30 22:27:46+00:00
> the former isn't interested in the help or has a very specific vision for the project and doesn't allow any input that isn't in line with that

I've come to call this "fenceware": technically open source due to its licensing, but community-wise it is as if the developers just throw a ball of code over the fence every few months. Sure, they let you play with it for a bit, but it is not yours to co-own.
by pibaker | 2026-01-30 22:27:59+00:00
The chatbot was released under the Eric Adams administration. The same Eric Adams, as soon as his term finished, went to Dubai and launched a cryptocurrency.

https://apnews.com/article/eric-adams-crypto-meme-coin-942ba...

I think he is simply not very bright, and got mesmerized by all the shiny promises AI and crypto makes without the slightest understanding of how it actually works. I do not understand how he got into office in the first place.
by SLWW | 2026-01-30 22:28:32+00:00
I would like articles like this to have a quick "who" and "what experience" is talking. I can usually tell the conclusions based on experience/skill level regardless, but it would be nice.

Also, that projects page on his website is atrocious; hate to be "that guy" but I don't trust the author's insight since "personal projects" seems to include a lot more than just his work; the first several PRs I looked at where all vibed.

I'm not interested in re-implementations of the same wheel over and over again telling me and people who know how to write real software (have been doing it since I was 12) that we are becoming unnecessary bc you can bully an extremely complex machine built on a base theory of heuristics abstracted out endlessly (perceptually) to re-invent the same specs in slightly different flavors.

> 100% human written, including emdashes. Sigh.
If you can't write without emdashes, maybe you spend too much time with LLMs and not enough time reading and learning on your own. Also people can lie on the Internet, they do it all the time, and if not then I'm doing it right now.

The hubris on display is fascinating.
by Neywiny | 2026-01-30 22:28:43+00:00
Maybe I'm not understanding the problem. I just saw mention of obsidian being the only paid app a user had on their laptop. I'd never heard of it. For me, I keep a notes.txt either local to the project (not repo) folder, or named similarly. To find something I grep through them all. It's not perfect but it's very easy. If it becomes collaborative, I push it as a readme or a wiki page. I don't feel a need for anything more. Maybe a slightly better search but that's it.
by swed420 | 2026-01-30 22:29:14+00:00
Or would it show group A complains about some political posts, while that same group doesn't complain about other political posts?

There's already a predictable trend in political posts that do and do not get flagged, clear even without this feature addition.

Such a feature would either make the trend even more obvious, and/or perhaps encourage self reflection so as to not commit the sin of making contradictions in public.
by tim-tday | 2026-01-30 22:29:51+00:00
I beg to differ. We are not resilient. We consistently refuse to acknowledge and take action on items of critical importance:
Leaded gasoline
Forever chemicals
Climate change

It’s not that we don’t know, it’s that we choose to suppress our knowledge of uncomfortable or unprofitable truths.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see the end of humanity in my lifetime. I’d be utterly shocked to learn we’d survived the next 100 years.
by theLiminator | 2026-01-30 22:30:22+00:00
I think that's a very extreme take in the software industry. Sure you don't need to pick up every new trend, but a ridiculous amount has changed in the past 10 years. If you only consider stuff from 2016, you're missing some incredible advancements.

You'd be missing stuff like:
- Containers
- Major advancement in mainstream programming languages
- IaC

There's countless more things that enable shipping of software of a completely different nature than was available back then.

Maybe these things don't apply to what you work on, but the software industry has completely changed over time and has enabled developers to build software on a different scale than ever previously possible.

I agree there's too much snake-oil and hype being sold, but that's a crazy take.
by smeej | 2026-01-30 22:30:32+00:00
I just use Logseq and put double brackets around my key terms. Whenever I need to revisit a topic, I can quickly review what I've a already learned about it, when, and what else it was connected to.

My understanding is that Obsidian is pretty similar? The point of my PKM isn't to turn my notes into shipped things. The point of my PKM is that when I do want to work on something, I don't have to repeat all my old mistakes to get back to where I was before, or reinvent all my own wheels.
by mstump | 2026-01-30 22:31:05+00:00
I attempted to handle some of what you're suggesting via the plugin ecosystem utilizing a vector database for RAG, and LLMs to auto-suggest tags or related docs. None of the plugins seem to get this quite right. The extensions were pretty brittle, and limited in terms of what they could do with the open doc. I now do most of my new note creation/editing and organization through cursor and custom built agent flows. The obsidian app is now just for mobile access and sync.
by AlotOfReading | 2026-01-30 22:31:06+00:00
The way you've written it sounds like taxing unmonetized bullion is insane overreach, but is it? They're just treating them the same as any other commodities. I can understand if you're opposed to sales taxes generally, but the only reason to single out bullion for an exception I can see is historic norms.

They're also applying a tax to monetized bullion. That's more more like taxing currency exchanges and it's a bit weird since currency exchanges are normally taxed on appreciation.
by asjo | 2026-01-30 22:31:26+00:00
In case you feel like visiting usenet as it looked 40+ years ago, I run https://olduse.net/ - which Joey Hess originally did as an art project - where you can connect a news reader (Thunderbird, Gnus, slrn, nn, tin, Pan, or even Lynx or ELinks, for instance) and read usenet delayed 40-46 years.
by palmotea | 2026-01-30 22:31:30+00:00
>> If the technocrats say "99% of the time immigration is great for the economy" and the people say "we don't want it, less immigration, please," what do you do?

> Do less immigration where people feel it, invest into economic education of the general populace.

There can be a lot of legitimate disagreement about what the economy should look like or what's "great" for it. It's not just "GDP number go up."

And isn't it undemocratic for a government to be "investing" into educating people to think about and prioritize issues in a certain way (e.g. according to certain economic ideologies, like a technocrat)? A democratic government is supposed to represent its people, not control them to make them "better" according to some official's opinion.
by esperent | 2026-01-30 22:32:08+00:00
I finally bit the bullet and got a $200 Claude subscription last month. It's been a busy month and I've used it a lot. More than is healthy, more than I sustainably could for more than a few weeks. I've managed to hit a 5 hour limit exactly once (20 minutes before it refreshed) and I've never hit more than 80% of a weekly limit.

But if I did - and I could imagine having some specific highly parallelizable work like writing a bazillion unit tests where I send out 40 subagents at a time - then the solution would be to buy two subscriptions. Not switch to API billing.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-01-30 22:32:23+00:00
Aha do you have an RSS set up for the memes too? I never get these in my feeds..

Yeah the plight of nurses/docs in the US gets me all emo.. (is premed the "hidden fortress"?)

Sorry, it's weird that we seem to be getting into dangerous (exciting ) territory while my cycles are being directed elsewhere!

Placeholder for meditating on the PH/Kohut/Platonic conception of narcissism/anti-love/AI..

(Lefty anime.. a great question to ask PH!!)

This is one(?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Snake_Enchantress_(f...

(Yes. There's longstanding PRC/RoC issues in the mix)
by inetknght | 2026-01-30 22:32:27+00:00
> What I’m asking from you:

> 1.Where does your “second brain” break down the most?

First and foremost, remembering to write notes or to review them. What do I want? Is there a timeline that requires things to be done before it becomes invalid or increases liability?

Secondly, remembering to do actions instead of sitting down and doing something that gives some dopamine. I decide I want to work on a project on my computer. So I go sit down in front of the computer and... I've already forgotten the project, now it's time to play a game or read Hacker News instead.

Lastly -- it's the things that I "don't know". Let's say I want to build a robotic lawnmower. There are plenty of robotic lawnmowers already but I want to build my own. I know where to find the source code (or I can make my own). I don't know where to find the tools, where to source components, or who to ask for help assembling heavy things; I don't know how to assess risks (what happens if this thing catches fire on my lawn while I'm in the kitchen? what happens if it drives into the street and hits a car? or worse, what happens if it drives into the neighbor's kids?).

> 2.What best represents “active project context” for you today?

In my head, mostly. Documents in random places like ~/Documents/<project-name>, or a todo.md in the project root. Hard to remember what <project-name> is for or when I last did anything of value for it though.

> 3.What’s your hard “no” for an AI that

If the AI does not run 100% on my machine, then it's not getting anything important. That means no notes, no personal projects that have business value. Business value includes comments or ideas to improve other peoples' products! I've seen too many times my comments end up turning into someone else's pay-me project and I see none of the rewards. Speaking of which, here I am giving you valuable information for free.

After that, it's pricing. If I spend $20 on a weekend project, that's fine. If I have to spend $20 for every task, then it'll be yet another project that is only ever half-finished.
Show HN: FuturLang – Natural language formal verification
by wapiou | 2026-01-30 22:32:55+00:00
I built FuturLang, a formal verification system that preserves natural language structure while enabling machine verification. The goal is to make formal proofs more accessible without requiring specialized notation like Coq/Lean/Agda.
Example proof structure:

(1) It is assumed that: (√2 is rational)
(2) This implies that: (∃ integers a, b)...
(3) Therefore: (√2 is irrational)

I’ve built the language spec, verification engine, and a database of 250+ proofs. But adoption has been minimal, which makes me question if this addresses a real need.
Questions for HN:
∙ Is “natural language + formal verification” solving a real problem?
∙ What would need to be true for you to use this instead of Lean/Coq?
∙ Am I building a solution in search of a problem?
Honest feedback welcome - trying to decide whether to keep building or move on.
GitHub: https://github.com/wenitte/mathematical-intelligence
by flohofwoe | 2026-01-30 22:33:05+00:00
> neither receiving not sharing the source code with others, treating third-party libraries as blackboxes.

Tbh, this is an intriguing idea. Determine the size of a library (or module in a bigger system) by what one programmer can manage to build and maintain. Let the public interface be the defining feature of a library, not its implementation.
by resters | 2026-01-30 22:33:28+00:00
Gold reverted to the price it was wait for it five days ago. What actually happened was that Trump was forced/pressured to pick Warsh because prices were spiking in anticipation of how Trump's preferred pick would impact global finance.

But anyone who thinks Trump won't get his way and control the Fed to create hyper-inflation is living in a fantasy world that I wish were our actual reality.

We live in a world where Trump launched a criminal investigation against Powell. This is not someone who somehow learned his lesson in the last five days.

The irony is that if Trump understood how markets perceive threats to Fed independence, he'd try to influence rates behind closed doors and not make a public spectacle of his attempt to undermine Fed independence!
by reissbaker | 2026-01-30 22:33:32+00:00
It's really unfortunate the term "free software" took off rather than e.g. "libre software", since it muddies discussions like this. The point of "free software" is not "you don't have to pay," it's that you have freedom in terms of what you do with the code running on your own machine. Selling free software is not incompatible with free software: it's free as in freedom, not as in free beer.
by quickthrowman | 2026-01-30 22:34:13+00:00
Thermostats (aka space temperature sensors) can have between two and eight wires. A boiler will usually have three: 24V power, call for heat, and common.

If your boiler has inputs on the terminal block for a thermostat, I would highly recommend buying a wired one, the 24V constant power removes the need for batteries.

If you can provide a link to your boiler’s installation and operations manual, I can tell you.
by jmye | 2026-01-30 22:35:07+00:00
I agree that we should be blaming the voters who decided that naked bribery and corruption is an American value (moreso than, say, their bleating about gun rights), but…

The people most capable of fighting back, and who ultimately have the most to lose in a kleptocratic, authoritarian state, apparently to be cowards and losers. Bezos and Jassy could tell the administration to pound sand, given how critical AWS is, and that Amazon is part of the like, 4 companies propping up the teetering stack of cards holding up the thing this administration (and its weaponized voters) think represents “the economy”. But they won’t, because they’re a bunch of feckless children, desperate for scraps.
by zahlman | 2026-01-30 22:35:17+00:00
> unless I’m building software for a disconnected desktop?

... Why wouldn't you build software that works there?

As I understand things, the purpose of computers is to run software.

But more importantly, let's suppose your software does require an Internet connection to function.

Why should that imply a requirement for your development environment to have one?

Why should that imply a requirement for a code generation tool to have one?
by JDye | 2026-01-30 22:35:32+00:00
I live in the UK and can't view a large portion of the internet without having to submit my ID to _every_ site serving anything deemed "not safe the for the children". I had a question about a new piercing and couldn't get info on it from Reddit because of that. I try using a VPN and they're blocked too. Luckily, I work at a copmany selling proxies so I've got free proxies whenever I want, but I shouldn't _need_ to use them.

I find it funny that companies like Reddit, who make their money entirely from content produced by users for free (which is also often sourced from other parts of the internet without permission), are so against their site being scraped that they have to objectively ruin the site for everyone using it. See the API changes and killing off of third party apps.

Obviously, it's mostly for advertising purposes, but they love to talk about the load scraping puts on their site, even suing AI companies and SerpApi for it. If it's truly that bad, just offer a free API for the scrapers to use - or even an API that works out just slightly cheaper than using proxies...

My ideal internet would look something like that, all content free and accessible to everyone.
by keeda | 2026-01-30 22:36:35+00:00
I mean, they're literally pointing out the negative effects of AI-assisted coding?

> We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery. On a quiz that covered concepts they’d used just a few minutes before, participants in the AI group scored 17% lower than those who coded by hand, or the equivalent of nearly two letter grades. Using AI sped up the task slightly, but this didn’t reach the threshold of statistical significance.

This also echoes other research from a few years ago that had similar findings: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46822158
by nerdsniper | 2026-01-30 22:37:29+00:00
We do not charge sales tax when you exchange Dollars for Euros. Bullion advocates argue that exchanging dollars for physical gold is a currency exchange rather than a consumption purchase.

If you were to turn that bullion into an actual product like jewelry, then it would be taxed.

When a firm with tank capacity takes delivery of an oil contract they secured via the CBRE, do they pay sales tax on that? No, because it’s intended for resale.

Unmonetized gold bullion is similarly generally intended for resale. Generally no one is “consuming” gold bullion.
by prmoustache | 2026-01-30 22:37:41+00:00
Back then, unless you were using a projector, the screens weren't that big so we seated clother to the screens.

Besides there isn't that much operation you need to do with a DVD. Appart from volume control (which was set on the TV/speaker system command), you would just need a pause when you wanted to go for a pee so no big deal to only have the corded controller.
by trhway | 2026-01-30 22:37:54+00:00
I see it differently - they needed to redesign everything except the power train. I.e. in addition to the interior, externally it should have been looking way upscale from 3/Y. Giving that their design language is already almost 2 decades old, they needed (and actually would still need it for 3/Y max 5 years down the road) to have a full redesign for S/X similar to how BMW did with 2002 7-series trickling down that design into 2004 5-series and 2006 3-series (or like Mercedes did with S-class in 1996 and trickling down that to E and C later)
by flohofwoe | 2026-01-30 22:37:57+00:00
It's not the "string library" that's important, but standardized interface types - so that different libraries can pass strings to each other while still being able to select the best string library that matches the project's requirements.

In C this standardized string interface type happens to be the zero-terminated bag of bytes, not exactly perfect in hindsight, but as long as everybody agrees to that standard, the actual code working on strings can be switched out.

E.g. a minimal stdlib should mostly be concerned about standardized interface types, not about the implementation behind those types.
by a456463 | 2026-01-30 22:38:05+00:00
This blog post from the company that used promise "don't be evil", one that steals water for data centers from vilages and towns via shady deals, whose whole premise it stealing other people's stuff and claiming it as their own and locking them out and selling their data.. Who made them the arbiter of the internet? No one!!!

They just stole this and get on their high horse to tell people how to use internet? You can eff right off Google.
by jychang | 2026-01-30 22:38:25+00:00
> someone who needs an ai to manage inbox, calendar and scheduling tasks

A secretary. The word you're looking for is "secretary". Having a secretary has always been the preferred way to handle these tasks for the wealthy and powerful. The president doesn't schedule his own meetings and manage his own Outlook calendar, a president/CEO/etc has better things to do.

People just created calendar/email/etc software (like Microsoft Outlook) to let us do it ourselves, because secretaries are $$$$. But let's be real, the ideal situation is having a perfect secretary to handle this crap. That's the point of using AI here: to have an AI secretary.

Managing your own calendar would become extremely 2010 coded, if AI secretaries become a thing. It'd be like how "rewinding your VCR tape" is 1990s coded.
by simgt | 2026-01-30 22:39:03+00:00
I may have misunderstood you, but transactions are already processed without human intervention.

> Updating and running the cryptocoin network can be done on the computational margin of the many devices that are in everyone's pockets.

Yes, sure, that's an advantage of it being decentralised, but I don't see a future where a mesh of idle iPhones process my payment at the bakery before I exit the shop.
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-01-30 22:39:10+00:00
I think that a real bubble requires margin. It's not just that people are buying because the price is going up, it's that people are buying with borrowed money because the price is going up.

That ends badly. It ends badly for the lenders. So when it starts to look like that's what's happening, a perfectly reasonable response is to change the margin requirements. When the circumstances are normal, use the normal margin requirements. But when the circumstances are abnormal, of course they should adjust.
by mothballed | 2026-01-30 22:39:38+00:00
You've pretty much nailed why almost all the highest immigration nations are monarchies. You basically need a ruler to tell the populace they are his bitch and they'll get the free market and open work visa immigration (UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain) whether they like it or not.

It does work and made those countries much richer but basically it won't easily happen under democracies with paths to citizenship for immigrants and strong welfare. For both rational and irrational reasons.