MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by epolanski | 2026-01-26 14:43:12+00:00
One major part of successful LLM-assisted coding is to not focus on code vomiting but scaffolding.

Document, document, document: your architecture, best practices, preferences (both about code and how you want to work with the LLM and how do you expect it to behave it).

It is time consuming, but it's the only way you can get it to assist you semi-successfully.

Also try to understand that LLM's biggest power for a developer is not in authoring code as much as assistance into understanding it, connecting dots across features, etc.

If your expectation is to launch it in a project and tell it "do X, do Y" without the very much needed scaffolding you'll very quickly start losing the plot and increasing the mess. Sure, it may complete tasks here and there, but at the price of increasing complexity from which it is difficult for both you and it to dig out.

Most AI naysayers can't be bothered with the huge amount of work required to setup a project to be llm-friendly, they fail, and blame the tool.

Even after the scaffolding, the best thing to do, at least for the projects you care (essentially anything that's not a prototype for quickly validating an idea) you should keep reading and following it line by line, and keep updating your scaffolding and documentation as you see it commit the same mistakes over and over. And part of scaffolding requires also to put the source code of your main dependencies. I have a _vendor directory with git subtrees for major dependencies. LLMs can check the code of the dependencies, the tests, and figure out what they are doing wrong much quicker.

Last but not least, LLMs work better with certain patterns, such as TDD. So instead of "implement X", it's better to "I need to implement X, but before we do so, let's setup a way for testing and tracking our progress against". You can build an inspector for a virtual machine, you can setup e2es or other tests, or just dump line by line logs in some file. There's many approaches depending on the use case.

In any case, getting real help for LLMs for authoring code (editing, patching, writing new features) is highly dependent on having good context, good setup (tests, making it write a plan for business requirements and one for implementation) and following and improving all these aspects as you progress.
by rayiner | 2026-01-26 14:43:35+00:00
I'm curious. You complain about "profits," but do you know how much money private investors put into the water companies to begin with? Because the alternative to privatization was the government issuing bonds to get that money. Are these profits more or less than the interest to bondholders you'd otherwise be paying?

Here in the U.S., almost all water utilities are operated by the government. We have a more than trillion dollar investment shortfall that taxpayers will have to cover: https://nawc.org/water-industry/infrastructure-investment/.

It's not a problem with our government either. Both countries just have a lot of infrastructure built in the post-war era that is nearing end-of-life. And it just costs a lot more to replace that infrastructure than people think it should cost.
by kibwen | 2026-01-26 14:43:45+00:00
> Roger Ebert once claimed that video games cannot be art.

This quote gets trotted out all the time, and yes, he did say it at one point, but he recanted this position only a few years later:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100703023952/http://blogs.sunt...

"What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art. That was a foolish position to take, particularly as it seemed to apply to the entire unseen future of games. This was pointed out to me maybe hundreds of times. How could I disagree? It is quite possible a game could someday be great Art. [...] I thought about those works of Art that had moved me most deeply. I found most of them had one thing in common: Through them I was able to learn more about the experiences, thoughts and feelings of other people. My empathy was engaged. I could use such lessons to apply to myself and my relationships with others. They could instruct me about life, love, disease and death, principles and morality, humor and tragedy. They might make my life more deep, full and rewarding. Not a bad definition, I thought. But I was unable to say how music or abstract art could perform those functions, and yet they were Art. Even narrative art didn't qualify, because I hardly look at paintings for their messages. It's not what it's about, but how it's about it. As Archibald MacLeish wrote: A poem should not mean, but be. I concluded without a definition that satisfied me. I had to be prepared to agree that gamers can have an experience that, for them, is Art. I don't know what they can learn about another human being that way, no matter how much they learn about Human Nature. I don't know if they can be inspired to transcend themselves. Perhaps they can. How can I say?"
by K0balt | 2026-01-26 14:44:04+00:00
A month or two of isolated outages should not be a crisis in a developed nation with resources and infrastructure.

The fact that the Texas outages killed anyone is a testament to the fact that the USA is, apparently, a developing nation, possibly going through a rough patch.

It’s not like there wasn’t enough generators or fuel in the nation to ameliorate that crisis. It was that, like all developing nations, resources are not available at the point of need despite their widespread availability.
by hnthrow0287345 | 2026-01-26 14:44:24+00:00
>The most common reason companies fail is creating products that don’t deliver value to users, causing them not to pay.

>“Oh, but I have a PM for that,” you might say. But having a PM is not enough.

It should be, that's literally their job. Developers and EMs shouldn't be doing that part for them.

In the same way developers need to know how to ifs and loops, Product Managers need to find out which features to build and user pains to fix.

Maybe, just maybe, we need to stop raising the bar for interviewing developers and start raising the bar for the other people working with developers, instead of getting developers to compensate for shortfalls.
by homebrewer | 2026-01-26 14:44:28+00:00
No, the names are there in the file, streets included. Their default styles did not support the languages we needed out of the box (everything was shown in the local language or English IIRC), but it was easy to fix by patching the style. I don't remember the exact fix, but it was about as simple as replacing something like `["get", "name_en"]` with `["get", ["coalesce", "name_xx", "name_en"]]`.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-26 14:44:45+00:00
Crazy that I had to still defend him in one of the posts when I mentioned cf vs italy. but in no way or form I endorse cf

I do have my domain name in them but I have been lazy to migrate out with cf tunnels but I definitely hope that I can have courage to muster to migrate my domains and cf tunnels alternative and everything.

Edit: Looks like we were talking about the same thing, y'know what's crazy is that there are some points in which I can justify cloudflare but in no way or form should they try to speak the rheoteric or something.

Like just call spade a spade and we can understand it that in this case italy is wrong but the fact that he had to speak in the rheoteric or even spoke in first place is why I also don't really like cloudflare & think that the internet should move away from 12% traffic being in cloudflare

Hope that I am able to explain that italy vs cf, I feel like italy's in the wrong but overall cf with its CEO rheoteric is wrong too and as you mention, he isn't above kissing the ring and we probably need alternatives too.
by FrostViper8 | 2026-01-26 14:45:02+00:00
I was actually directly addressing your comment about the your independent org for these identity tokens. There is no value because it cannot guarantee privacy. Therefore it has no value (at least not to me).

Secondly you seemed to not understand who set the interest rate but you are now confident in telling me about the perceived benefits of having a central bank set the interest rate. Which tells me that you just looked this all up about 10 minutes ago.

> It has value because governments cannot be trusted to directly control interest rates.

Neither can the central bank. As they are failing at their mandate of keeping inflation at 2%. The reported inflation rate is probably lower than the actual inflation rate due to CPI calculation wankery.

> The indirection has value, politicians are forced to spend political capital in order to wrest control.

To who does it have value? It doesn't benefit me (or most regular people) to have a 2% inflation rate and relatively low interest rates. It eats away the value of my savings. I now buy Gold (it hit a record high price today) and the value of my Gold and Silver has more than doubled in 3 years.

> Still better than black wednesday and Norman Lamont.

Saying it is better than a total crash isn't saying much.

Instead we have a gradual devaluing of the currency, many consumer goods are of far poorer quality (I repair my own vehicle and it is often better to get a reconditioned part than a new one), there is also "shrinkflation".

If we had a crash I actually think it would at least provide a wake up call and spur some real meaningful change.
by komali2 | 2026-01-26 14:45:19+00:00
Sometimes tagging is that, sure, or just some person indicating that they exist there. For some taggers, it's an addiction. I knew one that would tag at people's houses when invited to parties. I was outside smoking a cigarette with him after the owner had threw him out on his ass, asking why he did shit like that, and he said "I just feel like if I can tag someone's house, it's like I've won."

I can kinda empathize since I'll have an addiction to getting the perfect photograph during a protest or whatever and will go to extreme lengths and burn through SD cards to get it.

In my experience the majority of graffiti is artists just putting up art. Privileged folk pass down the propaganda that graffiti is dirty and gangster and so any street art is viewed as dirty, but in the end it's just a matter of taste.
by bloomingeek | 2026-01-26 14:45:28+00:00
<Servant leadership works really well when you have high agency individuals, and can grow high agency individuals. I have definitely been on the other side of that with control freak Machiavellian / nearly adversarial leaders as well.>

This. Every time I've lead people, IF they were already or were able to become high agency, we were efficient and capable. Control freak managers were usually guilty of what they obsessed over before they became managers. Good workers always leave bad managers in time, which always hurts the company.
by quietbritishjim | 2026-01-26 14:46:05+00:00
Your comment is a bit dismissive, like all this detail isn't needed. But really it's just because you have a different goal to the article.

You're just talking about determining whether someone is a good manager. Sure, a basic measure of their actions (which you describe as "context" but I don't think that's what you really mean) is enough. Do they care about the people they manage?

But this article is about how to be a good manager. Assuming you already do care about the people you manage there's a lot more detail to deal with. So yes, the lessons of this article really are in the words. I found it very interesting.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-01-26 14:46:51+00:00
> Early AR is starting to reach consumers.

Early AR was a thing 10, 15 years ago - along with the dawn of smartphones, accellerometers and cameras. Second generation was the google glass and the like, over ten years ago now. Third generation was Microsoft's HoloLens and Magic Leap. Fourth (current?) generation is Apple's Vision and I suppose the rayban things. There's probably generations I'm missing but I'm no expert.

Anyway, AR has had nearly two decades to "start to reach customers" and honestly, I don't think it's broken through. Not even the 3d environment scanning 'measure' apps see frequent use (in my limited experience). It's always remained a gimmick.

TL;DR I disagree with the author's assertion in multiple levels. It's not "early AR", and I don't think it's actually reaching customers, let alone at a volume that will recuperate its investments.
by peppernub | 2026-01-26 14:46:52+00:00
Ahead of an upcoming healthcare congress in Germany focused on digital health infrastructure, I’ve been thinking about what actually slows teams down in European digital health.

From what I see, MDR Class IIa compliance, HL7 FHIR interoperability, and secure medical data handling are still major bottlenecks-specially for teams building telemedicine and remote patient monitoring platforms.

Curious to hear from others:

What’s been the hardest part of MDR IIa in practice?

Do API-first/platform-based approaches really reduce time-to-market?

Is EU digital health regulation becoming more innovation-friendly?

Would love perspectives from people working in HealthTech Europe.
by rich_sasha | 2026-01-26 14:47:45+00:00
I came to "vibe coding" with an open mind, but I'm slowly edging in the same direction.

It is hands down good for code which is laborious or tedious to write, but once done, obviously correct or incorrect (with low effort inspection). Tests help but only if the code comes out nicely structured.

I made plenty of tools like this, a replacement REPL for MS-SQL, a caching tool in Python, a matplotlib helper. Things that I know 90% how to write anyway but don't have the time, but once in front of me, obviously correct or incorrect. NP code I suppose.

But business critical stuff is rarely like this, for me anyway. It is complex, has to deal with various subtle edge cases, be written defensively (so it fails predictably and gracefully), well structured etc. and try as I might, I can't get Claude to write stuff that's up to scratch in this department.

I'll give it instructions on how to write some specific function, it will write this code but not use it, and use something else instead. It will pepper the code with rookie mistakes like writing the same logic N times in different places instead of factoring it out. It will miss key parts of the spec and insist it did it, or tell me "Yea you are right! Let me rewrite it" and not actually fix the issue.

I also have a sense that it got a lot dumber over time. My expectations may have changed of course too, but still. I suspect even within a model, there is some variability of how much compute is used (eg how deep the beam search is) and supply/demand means this knob is continuously tuned down.

I still try to use Claude for tasks like this, but increasingly find my hit rate so low that the whole "don't write any code yet, let's build a spec" exercise is a waste of time.

I still find Claude good as a rubber duck or to discuss design or errors - a better Stack Exchange.

But you can't split your software spec into a set of SE questions then paste the code from top answers.
by ncruces | 2026-01-26 14:48:05+00:00
> The AI had simply told me a good story. Like vibewriting a novel, the agent showed me a good couple paragraphs that sure enough made sense and were structurally and syntactically correct. Hell, it even picked up on the idiosyncrasies of the various characters. But for whatever reason, when you read the whole chapter, it’s a mess. It makes no sense in the overall context of the book and the preceding and proceeding chapters.

This is the bit I think enthusiasts need to argue doesn't apply.

Have you ever read a 200 page vibewritten novel and found it satisfying?

So why do you think a 10 kLoC vibecoded codebase will be any good engineering-wise?
by tonyedgecombe | 2026-01-26 14:48:21+00:00
>It can't be that GDP growth has stalled to 0.1 per quarter.

Growth was 1.1% in 2025, not great but saying it was 0.1% per quarter is deceptive.

>We are definitely not heading for a recession guys.

The consensus for 2026 is 1.4%, definitely not a recession.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-26 14:48:31+00:00
What you as a teacher teach might have to adapt a bit. Teaching how code works is more important than teaching how to code. Most academic computer scientists aren't necessarily very skilled as programmers in any case. At least, I learned most of that after I stopped being an academic myself (Ph. D. and all). This is OK. Learning to program is more of a side effect of studying computer science than it is a core goal (this is not always clearly understood).

A good analogy here is programming in assembler. Manually crafting programs at the machine code level was very common when I got my first computer in the 1980s. Especially for games. By the late 90s that had mostly disappeared. Games like Roller Coaster Tycoon were one of the last ones with huge commercial success that were coded like that. C/C++ took over and these days most game studios license an engine and then do a lot of work with languages like C# or LUA.

I never did any meaningful amount of assembler programming. It was mostly no longer a relevant skill by the time I studied computer science (94-99). I built an interpreter for an imaginary CPU at some point using a functional programming language in my second year. Our compiler course was taught by people like Eric Meyer (later worked on things like F# at MS) who just saw that as a great excuse to teach people functional programming instead. In hindsight, that was actually a good skill to have as functional programming interest heated up a lot about 10 years later.

The point of this analogy: compilers are important tools. It's more important to understand how they work than it is to be able to build one in assembler. You'll probably never do that. Most people never work on compilers. Nor do they build their own operating systems, databases, etc. But it helps to understand how they work. The point of teaching how compilers work is understanding how programming languages are created and what their limitations are.
by everdrive | 2026-01-26 14:48:37+00:00
People don't know how to be efficient at scale. Large complex problems could in principle be understood by a few experts, but they always become political problems. (ie, people must be socially, politically, or religiously attached to the right ideas rather than strictly convinced by detailed facts) Worse, people don't know how to maintain excess. People are a gas, and expand to fill the space they're in. If we had an abundance of water, all people would do is expand their water usage until that abundance is gone.
by joks | 2026-01-26 14:48:40+00:00
> "The same thing that happened to illustration and art is happening here"

What are you talking about? Illustrators and artists are not being replaced by AI or required to use AI to "keep up" in the vast majority of environments.

> "I don't get the sour opinions."

The reasoning for folks' "sour opinions" has been very well-documented, especially here on HN. This comment reads like people don't like AI because they think it's slow or something, which is not the case.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-26 14:48:42+00:00
Art is the Unnecessary done on Purpose. It is clearly unnecessary to make video games, and yet people purposefully do it anyway. That's art.

Whether any particular game is good art is a different question. And that's part of why review is an interesting activity, there is a tremendous amount of this art, much more than there is say, stained glass windows or towering bronze sculptures - should we try this or that - the reviewer might help us to sift.
by mariusor | 2026-01-26 14:48:50+00:00
I think supporters of P2P as "the one true way" perhaps don't realize that federation is just as peer to peer if your user count is 1.

The fundamental distinction between a communication network that is p2p and one that is federated is the storage mechanism.

For p2p the network itself is the storage, and as a participating node you connect and retrieve what is addressed to you while the amorphous data blob that contains said messages remains to float in the network. While for a federated network, the receiving node needs to be present on the network at all times to be able to access/receive the messages addressed to itself, after which the messages are absent from the network (to some degree or another).

Personally the overhead of having the network having to bear the weight of all its nodes data is too large to make it viable.
by code51 | 2026-01-26 14:48:57+00:00
Physical losses in undermaintained water grids are the biggest cause for the issue. Yet, economic downturn creates a vicious circle: governments avoid infra spend because of low funds, then agriculture and other economic output gets hit because of water shortage. Lower resource lower will for infra spend. Until you hit the very low: stopping the grid because day zero. At that point, both the grid and city hygiene becomes a mess anyway. Costs build up so much that most governments cannot cope up with it properly.

and this is why you need sane people at the top earliest
by dataflow | 2026-01-26 14:49:13+00:00
Thanks for explaining. I just don't understand how society is supposed to function if laws work like this.

For example suppose I ask someone to come demolish my fence next week when nobody is home. And then I sell the house in between. So is the company supposed to run a title check the moment they arrive, because the owner may no longer have the authority they once had prior to that moment?

Or say I click Accept on an agreement, sleep/hibernate the device right as installation is about to start, and then transfer the rights to the device. Now the vendor is responsible for not running a title check or asking for confirmation a second time before the first confirmation? And I'm in the clear because I never claimed there's no installation pending?

I can't imagine the law really works this way... these sound absurd. Surely there's gotta be much more to it than what you're describing?
by jtbaker | 2026-01-26 14:49:15+00:00
It's very cool! If you want to get higher cache hit rates from a CDN or redis etc. and lower the amount of S3 reads, you can get set up a proxy to convert `/{z}/{x}/{y}.mvt` requests into the byte-range requests: https://docs.protomaps.com/deploy/

Brandon has some example code you can lift to dump it into a Cloudflare Worker or other platforms on that page.
by logicalfails | 2026-01-26 14:49:40+00:00
> The new AirTag is designed with the environment in mind, with 85 percent recycled plastic in the enclosure, 100 percent recycled rare earth elements in all magnets, and 100 percent recycled gold plating in all Apple-designed printed circuit boards. The paper packaging is 100 percent fiber-based and can be easily recycled.

I'm no material scientist, but this seems pretty impressive to me that Apple's economy of scale can pull this off, and upgrade the device capabilities, for less than $30 USD.
by thunfischbrot | 2026-01-26 14:50:08+00:00
And here I was hoping OP was being sarcastic. Yet it‘s reasonable we‘re nearing an AI-fueled Homer drinking bird scenario.

Some concepts people try out using AI (for lack of a more specific word) are interesting. They will add to our collective understanding of when these tools, paired with meaningful methods can be used to effectively achieve what seemed out of reach before.

Unfortunately it comes with many rediscovering insights I thought we already had, badly. Others use tools without giving consideration to what they were looking to accomplish, and how they would know if they did.
by linsomniac | 2026-01-26 14:50:22+00:00
We use mod_tile+renderd: https://github.com/openstreetmap/mod_tile

In short: We have a script that builds a pbf of the area we are interested in (Colorado, USA) from OSM, then set up a openstreetmap-tile-server container with that data, bring in our styles, and then set up renderd.
by bell-cot | 2026-01-26 14:50:27+00:00
> aqueduct from the great lakes to california?

Talk to a civil engineer about the lead times, length, flow rate, and elevation changes you'd need - nope, zero chance of any project that expensive and long-duration ever becoming operational.

Talk to a political scientist about the voters and leaders at the water intake end - nope, "over our dead bodies".