MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by martin-t | 2026-01-18 05:31:59+00:00
> A happier future is one with humans in control over their own tools and their own livelihoods.

People should own the product of their work and owning companies should be illegal.

Every good product starts as somebody's weekend project or and experiment with a buddy in the garage. Then they start getting users and making money. And then they sell it and the new owner ruins is.

Molecules form cells, cells form humans, humans form organizations. Slavery is illegal, yet it's legal to own a group of humans, replace parts against the group's will and order the group to do something against their will. Owning companies is just an abstraction built to replace slavery with enough indirection that people don't object.
by oenton | 2026-01-18 05:33:59+00:00
> Everything was for sure simpler, but also the requirements and expectations were much, much lower.

This. In the early 2000s, almost every day after school (3PM ET) Facebook.com was basically unusable. The request would either hang for minutes before responding at 1/10th of the broadband speed at that time, or it would just timeout. And that was completely normal. Also...

- MySpace literally let you inject HTML, CSS, and (unofficially) JavaScript into your profile's freeform text fields

- Between 8-11 PM ("prime time" TV) you could pretty much expect to get randomly disconnected when using dial up Internet. And then you'd need to repeat the arduous sign in dance, waiting for that signature screech that tells you you're connected.

- Every day after school the Internet was basically unusable from any school computer. I remember just trying to hit Google using a computer in the library turning into a 2-5 minute ordeal.

But also and perhaps most importantly, let's not forget: MySpace had personality. Was it tacky? Yes. Was it safe? Well, I don't think a modern web browser would even attempt to render it. But you can't replace the anticipation of clicking on someone's profile and not knowing whether you'll be immediately deafened with loud (blaring) background music and no visible way to stop it.
by danpalmer | 2026-01-18 05:34:13+00:00
I think this spectrum shows the issues with that though. Take the last one, the pen pot. You truly have to _learn_ what that means. Pen pots aren't a thing that most people are familiar with (I've never used one, I don't think my parents generation did mostly either), and there's little explanation of what it is.

Move up just one previous, and you've got a good looking illustration still, the pen and paper, but now a) everyone knows what a pen and paper look like, b) it literally says the name of the app, and c) the yellow colour scheme distinguishes it well when scanning many icons. It's clearly more accessible to new users, existing users, young and old users, and in terms of illustration quality, seems pretty subjective as to whether it's better or worse than the last one.
by gregfjohnson | 2026-01-18 05:35:56+00:00
This all reminds me of one of the most foundational and profound papers ever written about software development: Peter Naur's "Programming as Theory Building". I have seen colleagues get excited about using Claude to write their software for them, and then end up spending at least as much time as if they had written it themselves trying to develop a theory the code that was produced, and an understanding sufficient to correct the problems and bugs in the created code.
Every professional software engineer confronts the situation of digging into and dealing with a big wad of legacy code. However, most of us prefer those occasions when we can write some code fresh, and develop a theory and deep understanding from the get-go. Reverse-engineering out a sufficient theory of legacy code to be able to responsibly modify it is hard and at times unsatisfying. I don't relish the prospect of having that be the sum total of all my effort as a software engineer, when the "legacy code" I need to struggle to understand is code generated by an AI tool.
by stego-tech | 2026-01-18 05:36:25+00:00
Plex does - if you give them money. A lot of app packages offer customizable icons provided you give them money for the privilege.

I disagree with this approach, and vendors that lock such changes down. If a user wants to replace every single app icon with a PNG or SVG of their choosing, that should be permissible at the OS-level. Users should always have the final say over their interface choices, and corporate or software-maker changes regarding aesthetics/interfaces should never override what the user has chosen for themselves.

Right now there's strong overlap in interfaces and experiences that make this difficult, if not impossible to execute on. Separating the two again is critical for computing to be accessible to all, as is maintaining a consistent experience throughout interface changes.
by businessmate | 2026-01-18 05:37:48+00:00
This protocol defines the procedures by which AIVO records and preserves evidence of AI-generated representations at the moment of observation.

Its purpose is to establish a defensible, replayable record of what an AI system presented to a user under defined conditions, without influencing, optimizing, or altering the system’s behavior.

This protocol applies to operational AI reliance contexts, including but not limited to AI-mediated discovery, explanation, comparison, and summarization interfaces.
by inferiorhuman | 2026-01-18 05:39:40+00:00
Conflict of interest is a thing. The researchers could be AI hallucinations. The quotes could be too. Or the researches could be real and intentionally saying things that are untrue. Who knows.

What is interesting is that HN seems to have reached a crescendo of AI fanboi posts. Yet if you step outside the bubble the Microsoft and Nvidia CEOs are begging people to actually like AI, Dell's come out and said that people don't want AI, and forums are littered with people complaining about negative consequences of AI. Go figure.
by ericdykstra | 2026-01-18 05:41:45+00:00
I studied poker a lot in high school, and it still influences how I think today.

Probabilistic thinking about the EV of your decisions is a good framework, but "Just keep making good decisions" is the hard part. Same as in poker, though, the hard part about making a decision in life isn't the middle-school level probability math, but about making the right estimates about payoff potential and success rate based on incomplete information.

Analyzing things as they are rather than how you wish they were, being able to separate useful information from noise, and taking a step back to look at second-order effects are all useful skills that will help you make better decisions the more you develop them.
by jy-tan | 2026-01-18 05:44:19+00:00
Currently Tusk Drift focuses on functional/regression testing - we mock outbound dependencies (DBs, external APIs) for determinism, so we're not measuring real-world performance characteristics today.

That said, we're also exploring extending it for capacity modeling and resource estimation, which would be a differentiated approach from traditional load testing. Synthetic benchmarks fail to capture how traffic patterns (not just volume) affect resource usage. Since we already record real production traffic, we're uniquely positioned to:

1. Replay specific time periods (e.g., last year's Black Friday sale)

2. Preserve the natural distribution of request types

3. Control downstream latency via our mock system

4. Build models beyond linear regression for QPS -> CPU/mem prediction

What performance testing use case did you have in mind? We're actively exploring this space.
by WD-42 | 2026-01-18 05:44:35+00:00
There is only one quote in the entire article, though:

> Cheeseman finds Claude consistently catches things he missed. “Every time I go through I’m like, I didn’t notice that one! And in each case, these are discoveries that we can understand and verify,” he says.

Pretty vague and not really quantifiable. You would think an article making a bold claim would contain more than a single, hand-wavy quote from an actual scientist.
by rendaw | 2026-01-18 05:45:42+00:00
I'm not sure the legislation is good, but I'm not sure I follow some arguments. FWIW the ideas you're referring to are these I think: https://www.forbrukerradet.no/report-on-virtual-currencies-i...

> Bigger purchases give more, because the percentage lost to fees are lower.

Encouraging bulk purchases seems like an orthogonal problem to allowing users to choose the amount. You could always allow users to choose the amount and just include the transaction fee.

> after the purchase is made, it's not real money, and if it were, I'd be a financial institution and break the rules of all major card networks

If card networks are operating in the country, they'd have to abide by the country's rules too.

But also, I don't think that's how it works. It says "Developers must be obligated to provide an equivalence in real currency clearly and transparently next to the premium virtual currency before each transaction." (translated to English, but) - IIUC this means that if you sell a skin for "10 coins" you have to show the cost in real world money at the same time, e.g. maybe $1.9 one day, maybe $2.2 another day, based on the cost to purchase said coins. Or you could change the skin price from 10 to 11 or whatever if you want to keep the real money cost the same. It's not forcing any financial changes on you, just making you display a number.
by StellarScience | 2026-01-18 05:45:56+00:00
And similarly:

slow growth is terrible

Slow growth is awesome! Slow growth gives you time to address the challenges of growth, and think through sensible solutions.

Rapid growth feels like you're constantly plugging holes in the dike or putting out fires.

Like you I've had brief moments of jealously seeing a company that started after mine and grew faster. But when I think rationally, I just wish them well, and realize I'm happy with any pace of growth that's not negative.
by paravaib | 2026-01-18 05:47:36+00:00
I agree, and that’s exactly the failure mode I’ve seen too.

What seems to work better is when the “website” isn’t treated as a sales or marketing engine at all, but as a low-friction publishing surface for information that already exists and already has an audience.

That’s actually what I’ve been experimenting with www.sheet2notice.com: instead of building sites, letting people expose a public, read-only page directly from something they already maintain (like a spreadsheet). No funnels, no SEO promises — just a clean, auto-updating view over an existing workflow.

In that setup, the page supports whatever goal already exists (updates, coordination, trust), rather than pretending to create demand on its own.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-18 05:49:16+00:00
This is a relief, honestly. A prior solution exists now, which means the model didn’t solve anything at all. It just regurgitated it from the internet, which we can retroactively assume contained the solution in spirit, if not in any searchable or known form. Mystery resolved.

This aligns nicely with the rest of the canon. LLMs are just stochastic parrots. Fancy autocomplete. A glorified Google search with worse footnotes. Any time they appear to do something novel, the correct explanation is that someone, somewhere, already did it, and the model merely vibes in that general direction. The fact that no human knew about it at the time is a coincidence best ignored.

The same logic applies to code. “Vibe coding” isn’t real programming. Real programming involves intuition, battle scars, and a sixth sense for bugs that can’t be articulated but somehow always validates whatever I already believe. When an LLM produces correct code, that’s not engineering, it’s cosplay. It didn’t understand the problem, because understanding is defined as something only humans possess, especially after the fact.

Naturally, only senior developers truly code. Juniors shuffle syntax. Seniors channel wisdom. Architecture decisions emerge from lived experience, not from reading millions of examples and compressing patterns into a model. If an LLM produces the same decisions, it’s obviously cargo-culting seniority without having earned the right to say “this feels wrong” in a code review.

Any success is easy to dismiss. Data leakage. Prompt hacking. Cherry-picking. Hidden humans in the loop. And if none of those apply, then it “won’t work on a real codebase,” where “real” is defined as the one place the model hasn’t touched yet. This definition will be updated as needed.

Hallucinations still settle everything. One wrong answer means the whole system is fundamentally broken. Human mistakes, meanwhile, are just learning moments, context switches, or coffee shortages. This is not a double standard. It’s experience.

Jobs are obviously safe too. Software engineering is mostly communication, domain expertise, and navigating ambiguity. If the model starts doing those things, that still doesn’t count, because it doesn’t sit in meetings, complain about product managers, or feel existential dread during sprint planning.

So yes, the Erdos situation is resolved. Nothing new happened. No reasoning occurred. Progress remains hype. The trendline is imaginary. And any discomfort you feel is probably just social media, not the ground shifting under your feet.
by rendaw | 2026-01-18 05:52:45+00:00
How do you know which command to copy and paste? Unless you're suggesting to just try them randomly until you get one that seems to do what you want.

There are plenty of commands where the documentation is nearly impenetrable (e.g. ffmpeg, or if it exists at all), but I think GP's point was that for docker it's fairly simple.

IMO except for the concrete examples for docker run/exec, this website looks more or less exactly like the CLI help output for docker.
by D-Machine | 2026-01-18 05:53:49+00:00
"Pattern matching" is not sufficiently specified here for us to say if LLMs do pattern matching or not. E.g. we can say that an LLM predicts the next token because that token (or rather, its embedding) is the best "match" to the previous tokens, which form a path ("pattern") in embedding space. In this sense LLMs are most definitely pattern matching. Under other formulations of the term, they may not be (e.g. when pattern matching refers to abstraction or abstracting to actual logical patterns, rather than strictly semantic patterns).
by nchmy | 2026-01-18 05:54:11+00:00
I'd say it's not in between so much as subsumes both, and then does even more. While being smaller, faster and simpler. Htmx v4 (in beta) will close the gap by becoming a heavier datastar-lite with idiomorph and sse built in, but no signals, SDKs, and just all-round polish and back-to-front integration.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-18 05:55:08+00:00
> Pen pots aren't a thing that most people are familiar with

Personally, no. Cognitively? We've been seeing quills and ink in children's stories for centuries. One doesn't have to have used a bubble level to get the analogy in the iOS Level app.

> pen and paper, but now a) everyone knows what a pen and paper look like

A quill and ink are conventionally portrayed in relation to writing. A pen and paper could refer to e.g. sketching.

I'm obviously nitpicking. But I reject the notion that we have to oversimplify to the degree you're suggesting.

> it literally says the name of the app

The OS does this almost everywhere apps exist. Putting the name in the logo is superfluous.
Show HN: Figma-use – CLI to control Figma for AI agents
by dannote | 2026-01-18 05:55:48+00:00
I'm Dan, and I built a CLI that lets AI agents design in Figma.

What it does: 100 commands to create shapes, text, frames, components, modify styles, export assets. JSX importing that's ~100x faster than any plugin API import. Works with any LLM coding assistant.

Why I built it: The official Figma MCP server can only read files. I wanted AI to actually design — create buttons, build layouts, generate entire component systems. Existing solutions were either read-only or required verbose JSON schemas that burn through tokens.

Demo (45 sec): https://youtu.be/9eSYVZRle7o

Tech stack: Bun + Citty for CLI, Elysia WebSocket proxy, Figma plugin. The render command connects to Figma's internal multiplayer protocol via Chrome DevTools for extra performance when dealing with large groups of objects.

Try it: bun install -g @dannote/figma-use

Looking for feedback on CLI ergonomics, missing commands, and whether the JSX syntax feels natural.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-18 05:55:50+00:00
> Every single one of these icons should be available to choose by the user.

They are. You can replace the icon of any app straight in Finder, in the Get Info window. Copy the icon from somewhere else, click the icon in Get Into to select it, and Cmd+V to paste.

I mean, you'll need to get the original icon, but that's not too much work.
by 827a | 2026-01-18 05:56:02+00:00
You shouldn't wait for the bright future, because its unlikely one is coming for anyone, unless we (the west) thread the needle through one of very few green paths.

The endgame we're in now is the sunset of the anthropocene. We're less-than one generation away from wholesale human labor automation. Good will and trade relationships with other countries are inconsequential. All that matters, literally from the perspective of "the good of your people", is having the foundations in place to participate in the automation explosion that is already happening; or being a forever-serf to the countries that do (at best).

Sadly, there is no "opt-out" button in this game.
by ofriw | 2026-01-18 05:56:03+00:00
ChunkHound does it a bit differently, since at true enterprise scale it's very slow and costly to pass all code chunks through an LLM during indexing time. Instead, ChunkHound implements a customized "deep research" algorithm that's been optimized for code exploration so it can answer, on demand, any deep technical question about the indexed codebase. This research agent can be powered by a lower tier LLM (think Haiku, Codex low, etc) that's already included in your subscription.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-18 06:00:14+00:00
> holding out with the vague 'I tried it and it came up with crap'

Isn't that a perfectly reasonable metric? The topic has been dominated by hype for at least the past 5 if not 10 years. So when you encounter the latest in a long line of "the future is here the sky is falling" claims, where every past claim to date has been wrong, it's natural to try for yourself, observe a poor result, and report back "nope, just more BS as usual".
by K0balt | 2026-01-18 06:01:16+00:00
Well, not with that attitude, they aren't. But I've been on some charters where I'm pretty sure that they were, in fact, larping Chuck Yeager. I've seen a solid 2.5-2.8G turns in a 737, as well as some cornea-peeling rotations to max climb. It's kinda funny how things sometimes change when the plane isn't full of paying passengers.

I mean, those are pretty standard maneuvers, up to 4gs or so, in small aircraft, and I used to fly aerobatic frequently... but it just hits different somehow on an aircraft that weighs 70 tons and flexes visibly.
by habinero | 2026-01-18 06:01:22+00:00
> What is happening now. What the trendlines look like. What follows if those trendlines continue. Output per developer is rising. Time from idea to implementation is collapsing. Junior and mid level work is disappearing first. Teams are shipping with fewer people. These are not hypotheticals.

My dude, I just want to point out that there is no evidence of any of this, and a lot of evidence of the opposite.

> If you want to engage honestly, you stop citing the past and start following the numbers. You accept where the trendlines lead, even

You first, lol.

> This is how self delusion works

Yeah, about that...
by paravaib | 2026-01-18 06:01:31+00:00
This is a really useful data point, thanks for sharing it.

The hesitations you listed line up closely with what I’ve been seeing too — especially “already have a workflow” and “prefer simple”. It feels like most resistance isn’t about capability, but about introducing anything that feels like a new tool, even if it’s thin.

That’s actually the tension I’ve been trying to solve as well: keeping the original workflow completely intact, and making the public layer feel more like a passive view than something you have to “adopt” or manage.
by 1659447091 | 2026-01-18 06:02:54+00:00
> Bush jr. dragged the British into Iraq ...

W. and Blair were in cahoots wrt Iraq.

Start with Jan. 28, 2003 State of the Union address, Bush's 16 words: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” and go from there.

Leaked British documents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Iraq_document_leak

Bush–Blair 2003 Iraq memo : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush–Blair_2003_Iraq_memo

September Dossier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_Dossier

Chilcot Report: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Inquiry

> That the next republican president [...] is a continuation of the theme.

Leaving out EU part, I agree with the continuation. W. commuted the prison sentence of Scooter Libby (convicted of obstruction for interfering with an investigation the bush admin outed a CIA operative in retribution for her husband being outspoken that the intelligence that lead to Iraq where "twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat"). Trump fully pardoned him in 2018. Also, we have Bushism's and Trumpism's. It's uncanny how George W. was like a beta version of the full featured Trump Gold release. Both are/were figureheads that had people running them, the hanging chads 2000 election kerfuffle-fraud in Florida (of all places) that lead to SCOTUS appointing W. as president etc; it's almost as if that deep state maga likes to talk about is real.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-18 06:03:09+00:00
I don't think they will ever have human intelligence. It will always be an alien intelligence.

But I think the trend line unmistakably points to a future where it can be MORE intelligent than a human in exactly the colloquial way we define "more intelligent"

The fact that one of the greatest mathematicians alive has a page and is seriously bench marking this shows how likely he believes this can happen.
by acheong08 | 2026-01-18 06:03:57+00:00
Yes and no.

For the intended purpose of learning? Not at all. If you're legitimately interested in the subject, you'll learn more on your own.

For improving your prospects? Definitely. Say you were unlucky enough to be born in the third world. University is the easiest route into the first. I've spent almost £80k between tuition fees, rent, and living expenses over the past 3 years, all my own money from bug bounties, freelancing, and jobs/internships. I could've probably lived a comfortable life back in Malaysia with that much savings while working an average job. But the cap on my potential has definitely been raised several times that just by having a UK visa and a pathway to residency.

Also, I learnt this lesson way too late: it's not about what you know, but who you know. I wasted my first two years here mostly doing individual projects. Even though the 3rd year is the most busy, I'm making active effort now to work with professors on their projects. Some are genuinely interesting and at the same time, they have the ability to link you up with people with similar interests. If you can't seem to find people at your level IB Uni, it's because you haven't tried going the indirect route via professors. They know everyone