MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FloorEgg | 2026-01-12 03:16:39+00:00
I have been doing the same since GPT-3. I remember a time, probably around 4o when it started to get useful for some things like small React projects but was useless for other things like firestore rules. I think that surface is still jagged, it's just that it's less obviously useless in areas that it's weaker.

When things really broke open for me was when I adopted windsurf with Opus 4, and then again with Opus 4.5. I think the way the IDE manages the context and breaks down tasks helps extend llm usefulness a lot, but I haven't tried cursor and haven't really tried to get good at Claude code.

All that said, I have a lot of experience writing in business contexts and I think when I really try I am a pretty good communicator. I find when I am sloppy with prompts I leave a lot more to chance and more often I don't get what I want, but when I'm clear and precise I get what I want. E.g. if it's using sloppy patterns and making bad architectural choices, I've found that I can avoid that by explaining more about what I want and why I want it, or just being explicit about those decisions.

Also, I'm working on smaller projects with less legacy code.

So in summary, it might be a combination of 1, 2 and the age/complexity of the project you're working on.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-01-12 03:17:10+00:00
> You can commission a painting from an artist, but it is hubris to point at a painting you bought or commissioned and go "I made that". But somehow it is acceptable to do this for LLMs. That is a baffling mindset to me!

The majority of the work on a lot of famous masterpieces of art was done by apprentices. Under the instruction of a master, but still. No different than someone coming up with a composition, and having AI do a first pass, then going in with photoshop and manually painting over the inadequate parts. Yet people will knob gobble renaissance artists and talk about lynching AI artists.
by arbitrary_name | 2026-01-12 03:17:19+00:00
>I don't get any enjoyment from "building something without understanding" — what would I learn from such a thing? How could I trust it to be secure or to not fall over when i enter a weird character? How can I trust something I do not understand or have not read the foundations of? Furthermore, why would I consider myself to have built it?

All of these questions are irrelevant if the objective is 'get this thing working'.
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-01-12 03:17:26+00:00
This response is funny to me, because there’s been a massive drop in rightwing violence in the US since Trump was elected… but that’s because state-sponsored violence isn’t counted towards the statistics.

Pretty funny how there aren’t any more Proud Boy marches, yeah? Couldn’t be that they’re all getting paid six figure salaries to round up brown people at Kavanaugh stops…

But yes. Most left wing thought leaders count state-sponsored violence as political violence, and that often includes the death penalty.
by dd8601fn | 2026-01-12 03:18:10+00:00
I think that's the point. None could name a crime, and that didn't matter.

Meanwhile, 34 actual felony convictions, court finding misuse of millions in charity funds, an attempted coup, being found liable for sexual assault, SCOTUS having to formally place the president above the law to avoid prosecution... none of it even moved the needle for those same folks.

None of it is about law and order.
by rkomorn | 2026-01-12 03:18:18+00:00
Recipe calls for skirt steak or chuck. I used chuck. Skirt steak would probably taste nicer, though, but might also be harder to chop.

I ended up chopping it down to 2-3mm (~1/8in?) bits, and it helps to have the meat really cold (eg having hung out in the freezer for a bit).
by cal_dent | 2026-01-12 03:18:18+00:00
One thing I think is sometimes forgotten about shifting the overton window is that it sort of doesnt matter what political leaning has their hands on the lever. When it serves a purpose, which is not always a public first purpose, people in power will leverage any lever possible. Shifts in the overton window, just add more levers and it comes down to benevolence or luck that those levers aren't used incorrectly
by JeremyNT | 2026-01-12 03:18:38+00:00
> There is ample ability to change events, but people must believe they can act and act together, as they have for centuries of democracy and for all human history.

This is the political will of a plurality of American voters. They certainly can't claim they didn't know what they would get, and they seem unconcerned by any of these actions that many of us find terrifying.

It is difficult to see how we can democracy our way out of this situation.
by MattRix | 2026-01-12 03:18:45+00:00
I mean you can download a free sample project for Unity or Unreal and have a 3D FPS Shooter even without AI. If you want to make one from scratch using AI, you’ll still need to provide some kind of art…

With that said, yeah Claude Code CAN build one, but for action games a big part of them comes down to “game feel”, something that can’t be captured in a screenshot. You really need to have taste and the ability to describe what isn’t working and why.
by SilentM68 | 2026-01-12 03:19:58+00:00
Toying/Vive Coding with the idea or algorithm to classify the tendencies, ideological biases, and sentiment from contents of posts on message forums, including HN, by using LLMs to measure the temperatures and intensities of posters and replies to posts. Also thinking of incorporating ability to identify potential duplicate accounts, (e.g. same user multiple accounts) based on similar language and grammatical usage in posts. Don't see much of that type of detection in forums or message boards. Perhaps it can be useful in law enforcement circles. It's a work in progress, though, no repos yet.
by czmilo | 2026-01-12 03:20:52+00:00
UCP solves the N-to-N integration problem in commerce by providing a single open standard that enables AI platforms, businesses, and payment providers to interoperate without custom integrations. Built on REST, JSON-RPC, MCP, and A2A protocols, UCP standardizes checkout, order management, and payment processing APIs.

The protocol uses a capability-based architecture where businesses publish their supported features at `/.well-known/ucp`, and platforms negotiate capabilities automatically during request/response flows. Core capabilities include checkout sessions (`dev.ucp.shopping.checkout`), order lifecycle management (`dev.ucp.shopping.order`), and OAuth 2.0-based identity linking.

Co-developed by Google, Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart, with support from 60+ organizations including Stripe, PayPal, and Visa. Transport-agnostic design supports REST APIs, MCP for LLM integration, and A2A for agent-to-agent communication.

The article covers architecture, core capabilities, extensions, payment architecture, and integration patterns. Includes code examples and implementation details.
by teleforce | 2026-01-12 03:20:57+00:00
You can check the video on the early generation cars reviewed by the famous Top Gear team members [1].

Austin 7 and its derivatives (notably Dixi that kickstarted the highly successful BMW car business), dictated and popularized the modern car architecture, interfaces and controls stereotype as we know today. In order to drive old cars prior to Austin 7, we probably need a manual before we can drive them except the Cadillac Type 53 car, the original car that heavily inspired the Austin 7.

Austin 7 is the lightest car and cheapest proper car of its generation, and even by today's standard and inflation. As crazy as it sounds you can even drive it now in the UK road without any modification [2].

It become the template of modern cars, made popular in the UK, Germany and Japan, and then the rest of the world since these three countries are major manufacturers of modern cars.

The lighweight and low cost price of the baby Seagull (smallest BYD), is very similar to Baby Austin (popular name for Austin 7 in the UK) innovation criteria.

[1] Jeremy Clarkson and James May Find the First Car [video]:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46409075

[2] Everyone should try this! 1924 Austin Seven - no synchromesh, uncoupled brakes, in the rain! [video]:

https://youtu.be/HpwSKVJptKw
by mvkel | 2026-01-12 03:21:16+00:00
> Other people are just less picky than I am

I think this is part of it.

When coding style has been established among a team, or within an app, there are a lot of extra hoops to jump through, just to get it to look The Right Way, with no detectable benefit to the user.

If you put those choices aside and simply say: does it accomplish the goal per the spec (and is safe and scalable[0]), then you can get away with a lot more without the end user ever having a clue.

Sure, there's the argument for maintainability, and vibe coded monoliths tend to collapse in on themselves at ~30,000 LOC. But it used to be 2,000 LOC just a couple of years ago. Temporary problem.

[0]insisting that something be scalable isn't even necessary imo
by maxkfranz | 2026-01-12 03:21:37+00:00
This is a great article, and it's very much aligned with my experiences.

I hope AI leads to a Cambrian explosion of software people running their own businesses, given the force multiplier it affords. On the other hand, the jaded part of me feels that AI may lead to a consolidation into a very small set of monopolies. We'll see.
by lopatin | 2026-01-12 03:21:46+00:00
At work, I have the same difficulty using AI as you. When working on deep Jiras that require a lot of domain knowledge, bespoke testing tools, but maybe just a few lines of actual code changes across a vast codebase, I have not been able to use it effectively.

For personal projects on the other hand, it has expedited me what? 10x, 30x? It's not measurable. My output has been so much more than what would have been possible earlier, that there is no benchmark because these level of projects would not have been getting completed in the first place.

Back to using at work: I think it's a skill issue. Both on my end and yours. We haven't found a way to encode our domain knowledge into AI and transcend into orchestrators of that AI.
by atomicnumber3 | 2026-01-12 03:22:11+00:00
This is how I feel too. Let me try to itemize it:

how AI speeds me up:

- no longer have to remember how to set up unit test boilerplate in each of the 6ish programming languages i commonly use

- can often vaguely gesture at an existing pattern and have AI "copy-paste" it into new code. "do that read-through cache pattern like you see there and there but do it for this table and this proto msg type."

- can quickly answer questions like "does anyone in the code seem to build this string manually instead of using the library/helper method for it"

- can quickly generate code like "all I want is a gosh dang PKCS-formatted key, why is that so hard for this library" which the docs did not provide

which is really cool. it absolutely speeds things up by 10-100x in some scenarios. a lot of the sucky parts of programming are being mired down in these kinds of messes.

how AI slows me down:

- have to explain to jr dev why, even though it has unit tests, the AI-generated bespoke mutex async cache is not going into our production codebase

- have to explain to PM why I cannot let them vibe code new features into the hot path of our prod services when they are not on-call to be forced to clean it up when it explodes at 3am

- have to explain to senior dev who should REALLY know better why you cannot _just_ ask someone to review a 2000 LOC PR

- have to explain to CEO in tremendous itemized, evidenced detail why [big project in eye of sauron] did not go noticeably faster than it did 2 years ago even though the team was hand-picked to be full of people he knew would use AI as much as he wanted them to.

- have to explain to CEO why I really wish he would stop playing with AI and bothering the crap out of the engineers and go back to actually doing whatever it is the CEO gets paid 10-100x what a software engineer salary to do. [actually still trying to figure this one out without getting fired.]

I'm as interested in AI use as anyone can be, when I have to put up with sycophantic "believers" who really wish they could replace me entirely with the chatbot.

Also, this shit is expensive and still being sold at a loss. I signed up for Amp and blew through my $10 of signup credit getting very little done. I'm certainly not paying my own money for that.
by pxc | 2026-01-12 03:22:31+00:00
> I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer.

I don't think this is really it for many people (maybe any); after all, you can do all of that when writing a text message rather than a piece of code.

But it inches closer to what I think is the "right answer" for this type of software developer. There are aspects of software development that are very much like other forms of writing (e.g., prose or poetry).

Like other writing, writing code can constitute self-expression in an inherently satisfying way, and it can also offer the satisfaction of finding "the perfect phrase". LLMs more or less eliminate both sources of pleasure, either by eliminating the act of writing itself (that is, choosing and refining the words) or through their bland, generic, tasteless style.

There are other ways that LLMs can disconnect the people using them from what is joyful about writing code, not least of all because LLMs can be used in a lot of different ways. (Using them as search tools or otherwise consulting them rather than having them commit code to simply be either accepted/rejected "solves" the specific problems I just mentioned, for instance.)

There is something magical about speaking motion into existence, which is part of what has made programming feel special to me, ever since I was a kid. In a way, prompting an LLM to generate working code preserves that and I can imagine how, for some, it even seems to magnify the magic. But there is also a sense of essential mastery involved in the wonderful way code brings ideas to life. That mastery involves not just "understanding" things in the cursory way involved in visually scanning someone else's code and thinking "looks good to me", but intimately knowing how the words and abstractions and effects all "line up" and relate to each other (and hopefully also with the project's requirements). That feeling of mastery is itself one of the joys of writing code.

Without that mastery, you also lose one of the second-order joys of writing code that many here have already mentioned in these comments: flow. Delegation means fumbling in a way that working in your own context just doesn't. :-\
by lovich | 2026-01-12 03:22:41+00:00
You asked about which piece "of the dual mandate", but the OP said "operates as" which I am going to reply to.

Does the Fed can any data from labor sources or unions? I am asking in honest because the few reports from them that I have looked into(mostly around unemployment) all seem to be polls solely sourced from investor class assets like companies.

If they are only sourcing from one biased source for their data, they wouldn't have to have a bad mandate or manipulate it, to operate like it was for the benefit of the data source, right?
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-01-12 03:23:21+00:00
I dislike the Fed because it has (since 1913) held an unnecessarily powerful control of our nation's (and world's) money supply.

JFK was likely assassinated for attempting to retain the species backing of silver; less than a decade later Nixon would take us off the gold-backed dollar "temporarily" (i.e. 1971 - present) — the dollar's plummet since 1913 (and 1971 specifically) has been monumental.

The Fed simply has too much power to destroy the dollar savings of Americans (which is why cash and low interest bonds are so detrimental for long-term wealth preservation).

----

But I am glad the the Fed Chairman's brass-gilded balls are so big, in this struggle against our absolutely out-of-control unified executive theory President.

Personally, bitcoin and gold/silver make up the majority of my savings. Have been slowly DCA-ing out of stocks and primarily into those, these past few years... accelerated since learning the majority of stock trades in 2025 occurred in dark pools (i.e. no price discovery via public markets).
by callc | 2026-01-12 03:23:28+00:00
It goes back before Donald was in charge of the Trump real estate business. It started with a really really shitty father who desired a “killer” business instinct in his children (read: cruelty) above all else.

Reading some of Mary Trump’s books will give some insight on the family that Donald grew up in. No love, all cruelty.

Donald is just a rich kid who inherited a big business and learned nothing but cruelty from his daddy.
by FloorEgg | 2026-01-12 03:23:42+00:00
There is some truth to your point but you might want to consider that often seniors concerned with code quality aren't being pedantic about artisanal craft they are worried about the consequences of bad code...

- it becomes brittle and rigid (can't change it, can't add to it)

- it becomes buggy and impossible to fix one bug without creating another

- it becomes harder to tell what it's doing

- plus it can be inefficient / slow / insecure, etc.

The problem with your analogy is that toasters are quite simple. The better example would be your computer, and if you want your computer to just run your programs and not break, then these things matter.
by enos_feedler | 2026-01-12 03:23:48+00:00
you are learning what it takes to keep a machine up and running. You still witness the breakage. You can still watch the fix. You can review what happened. What you are implying from your question is that compared to doing things without AI, you are learning less (or perhaps you believe nothing). You definitely are learning less about mucking around in linux. But, if the alternative was not ever running a linux machine at all because you didn't want to deal with running it, you are learning infinitely more.
by sublinear | 2026-01-12 03:24:25+00:00
> People are increasingly building tools to solve a single, specific problem exactly once—and then discarding them. It is software as a disposable utility, designed for the immediate "now" rather than the distant "later."

Yes! This is 100% it.

This is a net good for everyone because it brings basic programming literacy to the masses and culls a lot of junk projects that are littering github or SaaS scams.

It means people can focus on the problems that actually matter.

AI doesn't have any impact on the need for accountable humans to write code.

The scratchpad analogy is so good. Most mature business software is almost literally like a tome of legal documents that have to be edited carefully, but that doesn't have anything to do with the napkin in your pocket.
by ehnto | 2026-01-12 03:24:56+00:00
A big challenge of game dev is the asynchronous nature of all the requirements, and that the game will develop its direction continuously throughout dev. That is to say you don't know what assets etc you need until you've developed the part of the game that generates that requirement. I find it hard to imagine even a 2000 page pre-planning could capture that process.

You could try planning ahead and restricting assets to an asset library, that could fix some of that problem. But having used coding agents for complex software work, and games being one of the most complex software tasks in the industry, I just don't see it happening quite that easily.

I also think the outcome would be shit, pure and simple. The development of a game is usually the stylistic input of dozens to thousands of humans over the course of years. They are not trivial pursuits. There's a lot of variance in there, but generally speaking I expect this to be one of the final frontiers for AI development. There's not heaps of training data since game code is usually proprietary, which doesn't help.
by acdha | 2026-01-12 03:25:04+00:00
Exactly: there was a brief moment when it looked like Republicans were willing to hold him accountable after the January 6th insurrection but that faltered and they circled ranks, especially when Roberts signaled that Trump had the support of the Supreme Court to the extent that they were willing to concoct a new constitutional doctrine to shield him.

A lot of people were hoping he’d just go away without them having to do anything difficult, but it’s clear that the next government has to reestablish the United States as a constitutional republic with the rule of law, even if it means hard things like trials for officials who abused their power. This kind of slide into authoritarianism isn’t an accident, and without consequences the people pushing it will keep trying.
by _blk | 2026-01-12 03:26:01+00:00
Made my day, thanks. I use this so much. Even before AI.
With AsciiFlow it has the feel of a whiteboard, but you can shift stuff around.

I'll draw simple UI prototypes then rearrange and/or document. I can also easily share it with a colleague to comment or modify.

Here's one:

https://asciiflow.com/#/share/eJztXE1v2zYY%2FivvNAxwsDRBlrTA...)
by consumer451 | 2026-01-12 03:26:50+00:00
Thank you for pointing this out. It is really interesting, the difference between Trump 45 and Trump 47.

I would like to add one quote to be logged on this website:

> "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler," he wrote privately to an associate on Facebook in 2016. [0]

- Trump's future Vice President, JD Vance

If we survive the fall of Pax Americana in the next few years, and journalists and historians are again allowed to exist in a free environment, I really hope that they get to the core of how we got from 45 to 47.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/jd-vance-once-compared-trum...
by Chris911 | 2026-01-12 03:27:14+00:00
Instead of rewriting yourself have you tried telling the agent what it did wrong and do the rewrite with it? Then at the end of the session ask it to extract a set of rules that would have helped to get it right the first time. Save that in AGENTS.md. If you and your team do this a few times it can lead to only having to rewrite 5% of the code instead of 70%.
by drpepper42 | 2026-01-12 03:27:47+00:00
I think your observation assumes that inflating the value of gold relative to the rest of economy is a problem - if you do not care about that I'm not sure it matters.

In any case gold served as a strong check on monetary policy even if it had problems. Certainly it is possible to have a "sound" monetary policy without gold. I'm just not convinced in societies ability to affect sound governance of monetary policy without some "stronger" guard rails. Especially not in today's climate.
by fzeroracer | 2026-01-12 03:27:50+00:00
People are taking to the streets. People are getting beaten, their property destroyed, their homes invaded and even murdered in Minneapolis as a result. The problem is that the US is massive; most people don't live in an active ICE zone where agents are going door to door kicking it in and pulling people out.

But even then, people are getting angrier. The injustices in Minneapolis triggered waves of protests here in Seattle. Eventually these things compound and more people become aware that we're living in the Great American Collapse.
by testing22321 | 2026-01-12 03:28:01+00:00
I agree, but if a developed country could get the price down to $15 billion a pop in the next two decades it would be a miracle.

Not to mention you wouldn’t generate a single kW for 20+ years from today.

In theory they’re fantastic.
In reality not so much
(which, incidentally, is the same story for the CA HSr)
by rootusrootus | 2026-01-12 03:28:17+00:00
Well, it's an EV with a big inverter, not a generator, but I get your point. And I do periodically fire it up and run the house on it for a little while, just to exercise the connection and maintain my familiarity with it in case I need to use it late at night in the dark with an ice storm breaking all the trees around us.