MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by delusional | 2026-01-11 11:15:26+00:00
The argument of the AI megacorps is that generated work is not "derivative" and therefore doesn't fall interact with the original authors copyright. They have invented a machine that takes in copyrighted works, and from a legal standpoint produces "entirely original" code. No license, be that GPL or otherwise, can do anything about that, because they ultimately rely on the authors copyright to required the licensee to observe the license.

They cannot violate the license, because in their view they have not licensed anything from you.

I think that's horse shit, and a clear violation of the intellectual property rights that are supposed to protect creatives from the business boys, but apparently the stock market must grow.
by vanviegen | 2026-01-11 11:15:44+00:00
> Mostly because humans are made worse by using AI.

For the type of work I do, I found it best to tightly supervise my LLMs. Giving lots of design guidance upfront, and being very critical towards the output. This is not easy work. In fact, this was always the hard part, and now I'm spending a larger percentage of my time doing it. As the impact of design mistakes is a lot smaller, I can just revert after 20 minutes instead of 3 days, I also get to learn from mistakes quicker. So I'd say, I'm improving my skills faster than before.

For juniors though, I think you are right. By relying on this tech from early on in their careers, I think it will be very hard to grow their skills, taste and intuition. But maybe I'm just an old guy yelling at the clouds, and the next generation of developers will do just fine building careers as AI whisperers.
by acessoproibido | 2026-01-11 11:15:48+00:00
Its definitely easier to beat addiction if you aren't living on the street, selling everything you have and are injecting one of the most horrible shit substances but instead you are using a clean, safe alternative that is provided by the state together with prevention programs (which is usually the model for this) - how is it a false dichotomy?

Or are you someone who assumes you just need to "use willpower" and "stop" being an addict?
I assure you its not so easy with opiates.
by faidit | 2026-01-11 11:16:00+00:00
100% agree on banning glue traps. Snap traps aren't perfect though. I had to finish off a mighty survivor of one once. The rat was huge. When I heard the rattling in the shed I panicked and grabbed a shovel lying nearby. My mind has erased the memory of what happened next, I just remember the aftermath and being splattered with lots of rat blood. I deeply regret doing that and wish I had let her limp away to an uncertain fate. I stopped setting traps after that and just let them run rampant through the moldy old walls of that place until I moved.
by oncallthrow | 2026-01-11 11:16:20+00:00
My take: learning how to do LLM-assisted coding at a basic level gets you 80% of the returns, and takes about 30 minutes. It's a complete no-brainer.

Learning all of the advanced multi-agent worklows etc. etc... Maybe that gets you an extra 20%, but it costs a lot more time, and is more likely to change over time anyway. So maybe not very good ROI.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-01-11 11:16:54+00:00
A lot of times, they just toss the bag on the ground.

Each morning, I take a 5K walk around the neighborhood, and am constantly passing cast-off shitbags.

They are usually brightly-colored, and are easy to spot.

I remember, once, being at a stop light, on a fairly major road, where a guy was walking his dog, and just dropped the bag, right there. He did it kind of surreptitiously, but he still did it in front of everyone.

Probably was a fairly high-value person, too. It was a pretty tony neighborhood.
by DrewADesign | 2026-01-11 11:17:01+00:00
Job insecurity while a bunch of companies claim LLM coding agents are letting them decimate their workforces is a pretty solid reason to feel like your code is being stolen. A whole lot of people in tech have been very sheltered from the harsher economic realities most people face, and many are starting to realize that labor demand, not them being special, was the source of that protection. AI is specifically being used to increase the supply of what developers produce with their labor, and that reduces demand for that labor. I’d say that’s a pretty rational reason to feel like the code you donated to a project is being stolen if it’s being used to train models.
by everdrive | 2026-01-11 11:17:04+00:00
The community largely expected something like $800, with some overly-optimistic estimates going as low as $400-$600. So to a lot of people I think this feels overpriced. I personally don't have a sense for the PC market and costs, so I can't comment on this myself, but I know that a lot of people were hoping for something sub-$1000.

I'm personally really excited for the Steam Machine, but I'm not sure it makes sense for me to get one. It's a somewhat close side-grade of my current PC, which is working just fine. And we have two very small children, so there is really no benefit to a permanent couch computer for us either.
by antirez | 2026-01-11 11:17:50+00:00
I think that who says that you need to be accustomed to the current "tools" related to AI agents, is suffering from a horizon effect issue: these stuff will change continuously for some time, and the more they evolve, the less you need to fiddle with the details. However, the skill you need to have, is communication skills. You need to be able to express yourself and what matters for your project fast and well. Many programmers are not great at communication. In part this is a gift, something you develop at small age, and this will, I believe, kinda change who is good at programming: good communicators / explorers may not have a edge VS very strong coders that are bad at explaining themselves. But a lot of it is attitude, IMHO. And practice.
by thisislife2 | 2026-01-11 11:17:52+00:00
Looks like a good effort and the features sound appealing. The landing page is good too - concise, to the point with the right amount of media. Suggestion: Offer a free trial version. It really doesn't hurt you because 'cleaning' up a Mac is a repetitive task. Those who appreciate it will buy it. Those who don't want to buy your software, will anyway never pay for it. But if they have used it, they are more likely to recommend it to others. Potential customers are also more likely to buy your product after seeing it in action. It also makes it easier to recommend it to others.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-11 11:17:54+00:00
> I want to write less, just knowing that LLM models are going to be trained on my code is making me feel more strongly than ever that my open source contributions will simply be stolen. Am I wrong to feel this? Is anyone else concerned about this?

I don't think it's wrong, but misdirected maybe. What do you that someone can "steal" your open source contributions? I've always released most of my code as "open source", and not once has someone "stolen" it, it still sits on the same webpage where I initially published it, decades ago. Sure, it's guaranteed ingested into LLMs since long time ago, but that's hardly "stealing" when the thing is still there + given away for free.

I'm not sure how anyone can feel like their open source code was "stolen", wasn't the intention in the first place that anyone can use it for any purpose? That's at least why I release code as open source.
by gary_0 | 2026-01-11 11:18:13+00:00
I feel old because the post talks about these techniques as if they're surprising innovations or compromises for more accurate simulations, but most of these tricks were industry standard for 3D games in the early 2000's. Much of the science about lighting, physics, and rendering we take for granted today was mostly unknown; developers just did the best they could with the basic tech that was available. Back then, just the fact that we could put thousands of hardware accelerated textured polygons on the screen was a miracle to us.

While Max Payne was cutting-edge, a lot of what made the visuals appear impressive was due to hand-tweaking by a team of highly skilled artists and designers, who were probably using ridiculously primitive tooling. Pretty much every realistic 3D game of this era had to make do with low-res diffuse textures, prebaked lighting, mostly fixed-function rendering, pre-scripted interactions, and particle dynamics that were basically just a few lines of C++. Other early-2000's games like Serious Sam, Halo, and Metroid Prime also managed to create immersive visuals with very limited tech, using the same techniques as Max Payne.
by senko | 2026-01-11 11:18:51+00:00
The anti-AI hype, in the context of software development, seems to focus on a few things:

> AI code is slop, therefore you shouldn't use it

You should learn how to responsibly use it as a tool, not a replacement for you. This can be done, people are doing it, people like Salvatore (antirez), Mitchell (of Terraform/Ghostty fame), Simon (swillison) and many others are publicly talking about it.

> AI can't code XYZ

It's not all-or-nothing. Use it where it works for you, don't use it where it doesn't. And btw, do check that you actually described the problem well. Slop-in, slop-out. Not sayin' this is always the case, but turns out it's the case surprisingly often. Just sayin'

> AI will atrophy your skills, or prevent you from learning new ones, therefore you shouldn't use it

Again, you should know where and how to use it. Don't tune out while doing coding. Don't just skim the generated code. Be curious, take your time. This is entirely up to you.

> AI takes away the fun part (coding) and intensifies the boring (management)

I love programming but TBH, for non-toy projects that need to go into production, at least three quarters are boring boilerplate. And making that part interesting is one of the worst things you can do in software development! That path lies resume-driven development, architecture astronautics, abusing design patterns du jour, and other sins that will make code maintenance on that thing a nightmare! You want boring, stable, simple. AI excels at that. Then you can focus on the small tiny bit that's fun and hand-craft that!

Also, you can always code for fun. Many people with boring coding jobs code for fun in the evenings. AI changes nothing here (except possibly improving the day job drudgery).

> AI is financially unsustainable, companies are losing money

Perhaps, and we're probably in the bubble. Doesn't detract from the fact that these things exist, are here now, work. OpenAI and Anthropic can go out of business tomorrow, the few TB of weights will be easily reused by someone else. The tech will stay.

> AI steals your open source code, therefore you shouldn't write open-source

Well, use AI to write your closed-source code. You don't need to open source anything if you're worried someone (AI or human) will steal it. If you don't want to use something on moral grounds, that's a perfectly fine thing to do. Others may have different opinion on this.

> AI will kill your open source business, therefore you shouldn't write open-source

Open source is not a business model (I've been saying this for longer than median user of this site has been alive). AI doesn't change that.

As @antirez points out, you can use AI or not, but don't go hiding under a rock and then being surprised in a few years when you come out and find the software development profession completely unrecognizable.
by kace91 | 2026-01-11 11:19:03+00:00
>Yes, maybe you think that you worked so hard to learn coding, and now machines are doing it for you. But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building. And now you can build more and better, if you find your way to use AI effectively. The fun is still there, untouched.

I wonder if I’m the odd one out or if this is a common sentiment: I don’t give a shit about building, frankly.

I like programming as a puzzle and the ability to understand a complex system. “Look at all the things I created in a weekend” sounds to me like “look at all the weight I moved by bringing a forklift to the gym!”. Even ignoring the part that there is barely a “you” in this success, there is not really any interest at all for me in the output itself.

This point is completely orthogonal to the fact that we still need to get paid to live, and in that regard I'll do what pays the bills, but I’m surprised by the amount of programmers that are completely happy with doing away with the programming part.
Show HN: SSL Radar – Real-time CT logs with probabilistic data structures
by lopezb | 2026-01-11 11:19:07+00:00
Last week I released Limite, a server for probabilistic data structures. I decided to build a demo to stress it a bit and see it in action.

The demo doesn't claim to be accurate or production-grade. The goal is to show how useful probabilistic data structures can be when you're processing large amounts of data and you're okay giving up some precision.

The server is still a work in progress, but it's usable.

GitHub: https://github.com/benitolopez/limite
by supriyo-biswas | 2026-01-11 11:19:09+00:00
Ultimately most things in life and society where one freely gives (and open source could be said to be one such activity) is also balanced by advising everyone participating in the "system" to also reciprocate the same, without which it becomes an exploitative relationship. Examples of such sayings can be found in most major world religions, but a non-religious explanation of the dynamics at hand follows below.

If running an open source model means that I have only given out without receiving anything, there remains the possibility of being exploited. This dynamic has always existed, such as companies using a project and sending in vulnerability reports and the like but not offering to help, and instead demanding, often quite rudely.

In the past working with such extractive contributors may have been balanced with other benefits such as growing exposure leading to professional opportunities, or being able to sell hosted versions, consulting services and paid features, which would have helped the maintainer of the open source project pay off their bills and get ahead in life.

However with the rise of LLMs, it both facilitates usage of the open source tools without getting a chance to direct their attention towards these paid services, nor allows the maintainer to have direct exposure to their contributors. It also indirectly violates the spirit of said open source licenses, as LLMs can spit out the knowledge contained in these codebases at a scale that humans cannot, thus allowing people to bypass the license and create their own versions of the tools, which are themselves not open source despite deriving their knowledge from such data.

Ultimately we don't need to debate about this; if open source remains a viable model in the age of LLMs, people will continue to do it regardless of whether we agree or disagree regarding topics such as this; on the other hand, if people are not rewarded in any way we will only be left with LLM generated codebases that anyone could have produced, leaving all the interesting software development to happen behind closed doors in companies.
by wmwragg | 2026-01-11 11:19:14+00:00
This is something I think a lot of people don't seem to notice, or worry about, the moving of programming as a local task, to one that is controlled by big corporations, essentially turning programming into a subscription model, just like everything else, if you don't pay the subscription you will no longer be able to code i.e. PaaS (Programming as a Service). Obviously at the moment most programmers can still code without LLMs, but when autocomplete IDEs became main stream, it didn't take long before a large proportion of programmers couldn't program without an autocomplete IDE, I expect most new programmers coming in won't be able to "program" without a remote LLM.
by babarock | 2026-01-11 11:19:22+00:00
I don't know if you're "wrong", but I do feel differently about this.

I've written a ton of open source code and I never cared what people do with it, both "good" or "bad". I only want my code to be "useful". Not just to the people I agree with, but to anyone who needs to use a computer.

Of course, I'd rather people use my code to feed the poor than build weapons, but it's just a preference. My conviction is that my code is _freed_ from me and my individual preferences and shared for everyone to use.

I don't think my code is "stolen", if someone uses it to make themselves rich.
by samwillis | 2026-01-11 11:19:59+00:00
I'm convinced that LLMs results in all software needing to be open source (or at the very least source available).

In future everyone will expect to be able to customise an application, if the source is not available they will not chose your application as a base. It's that simple.

The future is highly customisable software, and that is best built on open source. How this looks from a business perspective I think we will have to find out, but it's going to be fun!
by bob1029 | 2026-01-11 11:20:53+00:00
> Test these new tools, with care, with weeks of work, not in a five minutes test where you can just reinforce your own beliefs. Find a way to multiply yourself, and if it does not work for you, try again every few months.

I've been taking a proper whack at the tree every 6 months or so. This time it seems like it might actually fall over. Every prior attempt I could barely justify spending $10-20 in API credits before it was obvious I was wasting my time. I spent $80 on tokens last night and I'm still not convinced it won't work.

Whether or not AI is morally acceptable is a debate I wish I had the luxury of engaging in. I don't think rejecting it would allow me to serve any good other than in my own mind. It's really easy to have certain views when you can afford to. Most of us don't have the privilege of rejecting the potential that this technology affords. We can complain about it but it won't change what our employers decide to do.

Walk the game theory for 5 minutes. This is a game of musical chairs. We really wish it isn't. But it is. And we need to consider the implications of that. It might be better to join the "bad guys" if you actually want to help those around you. Perhaps even become the worst bad guy and beat the rest of them to a functional Death Star. Being unemployed is not a great position to be in if you wish to assist your allies. Big picture, you could fight AI downstream by capitalizing on it near term. No one is keeping score. You might be in your own head, but you are allowed to change that whenever you want.
by edg5000 | 2026-01-11 11:20:59+00:00
Are you hand-fixing the issues or having AI do it? I've found that second pass quality is miles away from an initial implementation. If you're experienced, you'll know exactly where the code smells are. Point this out, and the agents will produce a much better implementation in this second pass. And have those people store the promps in the repo! I put my specifications in ./doc/spec/*.md

Every time I got bad results, looking back I noticed my spec was just vague or relied on assumptions. Of course you can't fix your collegues, if they suck they suck and sombody gotta do the mopping :)
by phtrivier | 2026-01-11 11:21:08+00:00
How good is overdose _deaths_ as an indicator of the epidemic of drug consumption ?

My point being : killing your customer en masse is bad business practice in the long run. (Or even in the medium run.)

So, the drug dealer's best interest is to reduce the potency of the drug, therefore limiting the overdoses but keeping the customers alive, and willing to get the next dose.

If it happens when the prices are high, and you're able to cut your product and see it with a higher margin, it's even more value for the sharehol... Sorry, wrong analogy.

Anyway, is the number of people _using_ fentanyl also going down ? Where are the quarterly sales number published ? What's the trend ? When is the IPO ?
by danielbln | 2026-01-11 11:21:18+00:00
5 years ago we had GPT-3, not even instruction-following GPT yet, a mere completion model. ChatGPT release was late 2022 (3 years ago). True agentic systems with reliable tool calling in a loop, that came maybe a year ago, agentic coding harnesses less than a year ago.

Model improvements may have flattened, the quality improvements due to engineering work around those models certainly have not.

If we always wait for technology to calcify and settle before we interact with it, then that would be rather boring for some of us. Acquiring knowledge is not really that much of a heavy burden that it's an issue if it's outdated a year in . But that's maybe just a mindset thing.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-01-11 11:21:27+00:00
Plot twist: the bottleneck when you have a development force multiplier is __MARKETING__. If you develop at 10X the rate, you still have to grind/growth marketing. Unmarketed products might as well not exist, even if they're fantastic.

Github stars? That's 100% marketing. Shit that clears a low quality bar can rack up stars like crazy just by being well marketed.

Number of startups? That's 100% marketing. Investors put money into products that have traction, or founders that look impressive, and both of those are mostly marketing.

People actually are vibe coding stuff rather than using SaaS though, that one's for real. Your example is hyperbolic, but the Tailwind scenario is just one example of AI putting pressure on products.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-01-11 11:21:35+00:00
Me too.

I’ve never been a fan of coercive licensing. I don’t consider that “open.” It’s “strings-attached.”

I make mine MIT-licensed. If someone takes my stuff, and gets rich (highly unlikely), then that’s fine. I just don’t want some asshole suing me, because they used it inappropriately, or a bug caused them problems. I don’t even care about attribution.

I mainly do it, because it forces me to take better care, when I code.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-11 11:22:17+00:00
> Many programmers are not great at communication.

This is true, but still shocking. Professional (working with others at least) developers basically live or die by their ability to communicate. If you're bad at communication, your entire team (and yourself) suffer, yet it seems like the "lone ranger" type of programmer is still somewhat praised and idealized. When trying to help some programmer friends with how they use LLMs, it becomes really clear how little they actually can communicate, and for some of them I'm slightly surprised they've been able to work with others at all.

An example the other day, some friend complained that the LLM they worked with was using the wrong library, and using the wrong color for some element, and surprised that the LLM wouldn't know it from the get go. Reading through the prompt, they never mentioned it once, and when asked about it, they thought "it should have been obvious" which yeah, to someone like you who worked for 2 years on this project that might be obvious, but for some with zero history and zero context about what you do? How you expect it to know this? Baffling sometimes.
by rvz | 2026-01-11 11:22:44+00:00
> Best prompting practices, mcps, skills, IDE integration, how to build a feedback loop so that LLM can test its output alone, plug to the outside world with browser extensions, etc...

Ah yes, an ecosystem that is fundamentally inherently built on probabilisitic quick sand and even with the "best prompting practices", you still get agents violating the basics of security and committing API keys when they were told not to. [0]

[0] https://xcancel.com/valigo/status/2009764793251664279
by KaiserPro | 2026-01-11 11:23:24+00:00
I'm not an AI booster, but I can't argue with Opus doing lots of legwork

> It is no different to the crypto web3 bubble of 2021

web3 didn't produce anything useful, just noise. I couldn't take a web3 stack to make an arbitrary app. with the PISS machine I can.

Do I worry about the future, fuck yeah I do. I think I'm up shit creek. I am lucky that I am good at describing in plain English what I want.