MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kaydub | 2026-01-23 22:18:11+00:00
In my projects there's generally a "developer" way to do things and an "llm agent" way to do things.

For the llm a lot of linting and build/test tools go into simple scripts that the llm can run and get shorthand info out of. Some tools, if you have the llm run them, they're going to ingest a lot from the output (like a big stacktrace or something). I want to keep context clean so I have the llm create the tool to use for build/test/linting and I tell it to create it so the outputs will keep its context clean, then I have it document it in the .md file.

When working with the LLM I have to start out pretty explicit about using the tooling. As we work through things it will start to automatically run the tooling. Sometimes it will want to do something else, I just nudge it back to use the tooling (or I'll ask it why or if there are benefits to the other way and if there are we'll rebuild the tooling to use the other way).

Finally, if the LLM is really having trouble, I kill the session and start a new one. It used to feel bad to do that. I'd feel like I'm losing a lot of info that's in context. But now, I feel like it's not so bad... but I'm not sure if that's because the llms are better or if my workflow has adapted.

Now, let me backup a little bit. I mentioned that I don't have the llm use git. That's the control I maintain. And with that my workflow is: llm builds feature->llm runs linters/tests->I e2e test whatever I'm building by deploying to a dev/staging/local env->once verified I commit. Now I will continue that context window/session until I feel like the llm starts fucking up. Then I kill the session and start a new one. I rarely compact, but it does happen and I generally don't fret about it too much.

I try to keep my units of work small and I feel like it does the best when I do. But then I often find myself surprised at how much it can do from a single prompt, so idk. I do understand some of the skepticism because a lot of this stuff sounds "hand-wavy". I'm hoping we all start to hone in on some general more concrete patterns but with it being so non-deterministic I'm not sure if we will. It feels like everyone is using it differently and people are having successes and failures across different things. People where I work LOVE MCPs but I can't stand them. When I use them it always feels like I have to remind the llm that it has an MCP, then it feels like the MCP takes too much context window and sometimes the llm still trips over how to use it.
by tecoholic | 2026-01-23 22:19:01+00:00
I use 2 cli - Codex and Amp. Almost every time I need a quick change, Amp finishes the task in the time it takes Codex to build context. I think it’s got a lot to do with the system prompt and a the “read loop” as well, amp would read multiple files in one go and get to the task, but codex would crawl the files almost one by one. Anyone noticed this?
by BeetleB | 2026-01-23 22:19:22+00:00
> Our advice against using exceptions is not predicated on philosophical or moral grounds, but practical ones. ... Things would probably be different if we had to do it all over again from scratch.

They are clearly not against them per se. It simply wasn't practical for them to include it into their codebase.

And I think a lot of the cons of exceptions are handled in languages like F#, etc. If f calls g which calls h, and h throws an exception, the compiler will require you to deal with it somehow in g (either handle or explicitly propagate).
by Ferret7446 | 2026-01-23 22:19:49+00:00
They have a monopoly on their own search results. There's nothing stopping anyone from making their own (hell, a poster did so in the comments above). God forbid we aren't entitled access to the fruits of their labor; the reason you want it isn't because you can't make it (again, see above). It's because making it good is hard, and you want the good results without yourself putting in the effort to make it
by technothrasher | 2026-01-23 22:20:03+00:00
Basic fluency in English is widespread enough that I've had to be way out in the boonies in pretty much any country I've visited for me not to find somebody who can speak English. It makes me feel like a bit of a fool not being able to speak anything but English myself. I've got a learning disability that affects my ability to learn languages, so as much as I've tried, I'm not able to get much further than being able to get fed and find the bathroom in any other language.

I did hit a funny situation in rural France once where I was talking to a French restaurateur through one person who spoke French and Spanish, and then a second person who spoke Spanish and English. It was convoluted, but it worked enough to get me a meal. Alternatively, when I was in rural Spain, near the French border, a French speaking lady desperately tried to get me to help translate for her since she didn't speak Spanish and the merchant she wanted to talk to didn't speak French. Unfortunately, neither of them spoke English. The best I could do was communicate to the merchant in my broken Spanish that I couldn't help.
by nine_k | 2026-01-23 22:20:15+00:00
Wisdom and authentic progress are hard to measure. They are also not the goals enterprises pursue. Enterprises go for the money, but the money is normally paid by satisfied customers; this side effect is what makes enterprises viable and useful. (In case of VC money, customers even don't have to pay for sustainably for some time.)

An IPO or a large acquisition is like a graduation event for school students. A diploma or a SAT certificate also do not certify wisdom, or even progress. They certify a certain degree of success, and a transition into "adult life". Or think about this as of an orbital insertion event for a spacecraft. Not an end goal, but a precondition for a serious progress.

If you seek wisdom, a VC firm like YCombinator is likely not the most appropriate tool for your quest. (An attempt to found a business may bring some wisdom, as usual, at a cost.)
by ofalkaed | 2026-01-23 22:20:23+00:00
The old cheap way works quite well for the sorts of things this complicated and expensive solution would work for; liner gloves in mittens, when you need dexterity just pull of the mitten but leave on the liner, do what you need and then put the mitten back on. I like the merino wool liners, thin but dense and give great dexterity.
by AlotOfReading | 2026-01-23 22:20:32+00:00
We should probably differentiate between trying to run a profitable farm, and producing any amount of yield. They're not really the same thing at all.

I would submit that pretty much any joe blow is capable of growing some amount of crops, given enough money. Running a profitable farm is quite difficult though. There's an entire ecosystem connecting prospective farmers with money and limited skills/interest to people with the skills to properly operate it, either independently (tenant farmers) or as farm managers so the hobby owner can participate. Institutional investors prefer the former, and Jeremy Clarkson's farm show is a good example of the latter.
by mxuribe | 2026-01-23 22:20:48+00:00
Hi @ifh-hn , would you mind sharing what features you feel might make zotero better than text files on a disk? I'm genuinely interested to learn.

I've heard of zotero maybe a year or so ago, and was curious about it, but never took the plunge. I manage the bulk of my info/knowledge base across mostly locally-saved text files, with a few other tidbits leveraging PDFs and word process files (.odt, .docx)...and really i only use the latter for pasting in screenshots. And, then of course simply synching them across devices using syncthing.

While my approach works great for the majority of the time, i can imagine there might be some functions that some other tools might bring me which i might be missing...I suppose one thing that i lack is a graph of linkages for content that might live in different, separate files but might be related, etc. So, would you be willing to share your opinion, experience for what makes zotero better than text files on a disk? :-) Thanks!
by xp84 | 2026-01-23 22:21:01+00:00
We are moving towards it... if every site accepted both Apple Pay and Google Pay we'd be there. If we got there, you could make the case that we ought to all be able to file all the numbers off of our cards and never need to give them to anyone. But the problem is that even with 99% adoption, those secrets still have to be printed on the cards and used some percentage of the time to support the laggards -- and it only takes one hack or phish to defraud you.
by dloranc | 2026-01-23 22:21:09+00:00
I was also banned several months ago, but I don’t think it happened because I created a CLAUDE.md file or anything like that. I have no idea why I was banned, since I only used Claude Code for typical CRUD projects - where AI really excels.
Here’s my timeline:

1. Claude Code stopped working.
2. I received an email about the ban.
3. Fine, time to contact support. I've wrote to them.
4. I got an automated message saying they were reviewing my case.
5. I received a refund (I had a Pro plan) in the meantime.
6. After a few days I got this funny email:

Hi there,

We're reaching out to people who recently canceled their Claude Code subscription in order to understand why you decided to cancel.

We'd like to invite you to participate in an AI-moderated interview about your experience with Claude Code—including what improvements you'd like to see us make.

This approach uses an AI interviewer to ask you questions and respond to your answers, creating a conversational experience you can complete at your convenience.

Here's what you need to know:

The interview takes 15-20 minutes to complete This interview will be available until Monday October 13 at 9pm PT For completing the interview, you'll receive a $40 USD (or local equivalent) Amazon gift card within 3-5 business days Please complete only one interview per person As much as possible, help us know you're not a bot by showing your beautiful human face!

Your survey may terminate early if you record illegible video content (ex: overly loud environments, aren't well lighted, etc) Participate Now

This interview is administered by a third party, Listen Labs. By participating in the interview, you agree to Listen Labs' Privacy Policy. Anthropic may use your responses to improve our services and follow up.

Your honest feedback—whether your experience was positive, challenging, or mixed—is invaluable in helping us understand how to make Claude Code work better for developers like you.

Thank you for your time and insights!

–The Anthropic Team

7. Wait, you banned me and now you’re sending me this email? Seriously? Okay, I decided to participate in the survey. Unfortunately, when I selected the option that it was due to a bug or some issue, they ended the survey. No gift card.

8. A few days later, I received an email saying they couldn’t reinstate my account because I had violated their usage policy. How? No idea.

9. After a few more days, I got an email saying they had reinstated my account. They also mentioned they believed it was a bug.

It was crazy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by hungryhobbit | 2026-01-23 22:21:22+00:00
Redo the co-founder match sub-site next!

That thing hasn't been updated in years, and could really use some love. If they don't want to do it themselves, just open source the sub-site and I'm sure a bunch of tech founders will happily do it for them (if only to be able to say they contributed to YC itself).
by input_sh | 2026-01-23 22:21:30+00:00
In the reality called the European Union, where phones already have to ask you to pick the default browser during device setup, and Android specifically has to also ask you to pick a default search engine (Apple doesn't have to because they don't own one). AirDrop and iMessage (and WhatsApp) have already been legally ruled against and forced to open up, but that's not the reality as of yet. It will be in a few years from now.

> What I think the author is referring to are the minor concessions Apple has made in some territories, mainly the EU. And even there, they're using every dirty trick at their disposal to do the absolute bare minimum.

It's not Apple specifically, not even a little bit. All of this is a consequence of one piece of legislation called the Digital Markets Act and it applies to everyone that is defined as the "digital gatekeeper" according to that piece of legislation, but the exact steps they need to take are not written in the law and are decided on a case-by-case basis. Such malicious compliance tricks are normal on a short timescale, but on a large-enough timescale they get ironed out and we all get to live in a less monopolistic world as a consequence.

You can join that reality too! One properly thought out piece of legislation can turn the whole thing around.

> Anti-competitive moats are still alive and well, and growing larger. It's curious that the author is positive about "AI", when that is the ultimate moat builder right now. Nobody can basically touch the largest players, since they have the most resources and access to mind-bogglingly large datacenters.

If they become large enough to matter, they will also be designated as "digital gatekeepers", and then the steps they need to do to open up will be decided. They are not that large (within the European Union) as of yet.
by kenhwang | 2026-01-23 22:21:32+00:00
Not sure why you want to have purpose-build OS as the hill to die on since many of those Android-based mp3 players absolutely outclass the old iPod classics in snappiness and compatibility and output quality.

Plenty of choices that meet your other criteria once you're OK with it being Android powered.

Like a SnowSky is very obviously stripped down Android that can only run the music app it's shipped with, but it's otherwise everything you want.
by kaydub | 2026-01-23 22:21:39+00:00
What do your rules files look like?

I wonder if some people are putting in too much into their markdown files of what NOT to do.

I hate people saying the llms are just better auto-correct, but in some ways they're right. I think putting in too much "don't do this" is leading the llm down the path to do "this" because you mentioned it at all. The LLM is probabilistically generating it's response based on what you've said and what's in the markdown files, the fact you put some of that stuff in there at all probably increases the probability those things will show up.
by adolph | 2026-01-23 22:22:03+00:00
An interesting related recent podcast is The Answer Is Transaction Costs episode
Parts is (Not) Parts: The Life Cycle Problem for Heavy Equipment. Part of the discussion is orienting a biz to what is actually being sold. Is the equipment-time being sold or is the capability being sold? When the capability is sold the story becomes more of a total supply-chain rather than simply static capital good.

https://taitc.buzzsprout.com/2186249/episodes/18387317-parts...

Synopsis:

We trace how Alex Schuessler, the once and once-again President of
SmartEquip--also a scholar of expressive choice!--built a platform that makes
machines more profitable by erasing the friction between parts, service, and
uptime. The rental economy, Japan’s utilization model, and IoT diagnostics
reveal why transaction costs, not price tags, decide who should own and who
should rent.
by davkan | 2026-01-23 22:22:11+00:00
You’re asking for a hundred million people to personally overcome engineered manipulation rather than addressing the manipulators. What you say is true for the individual but it’s not a solution at scale for our societal issues.

It’s much akin to suggesting that poor people should not blame the system that keeps them poor and instead should focus on their education and getting themselves out of their current situation. Sure it’s accurate for the individual but, it’s not an actual solution to the problem at scale.

Heroin addicts quit aided by the intense and direct efforts and support of the people around them. Whether that’s hospital staff or family. And you often do tell heroin addicts it’s not their fault. You tell them addiction is a disease. That their addiction is not a moral failing.
by lrvick | 2026-01-23 22:22:14+00:00
Microsoft could have done key backups to secure enclaves that will only return them to a user able to produce valid signatures using a backup code or otherwise they hold. Hell they were the ones that normalized remote attestation.

But Microsoft chose to keep them plain text, and thus they are, and will continue to be abused.

We must not victim blame. This is absolutely corruption on microsofts part.
by rz2k | 2026-01-23 22:22:15+00:00
I use macOS most of the time, but switch to a Windows VM for Excel. Without the same keyboard shortcuts, the macOS version ends up having a fraction of the power available to experienced users of the Windows version. For people who use Excel extensively, LibreOffice or Google Sheets would have to offer some remarkable new killer features to make it worth the switch. I don’t think feature parity alone would make the benefits of Linux outweigh the significant transition costs.
by idibiks | 2026-01-23 22:22:16+00:00
Valve's the main force here, AFAIK. I do think it'll make a big difference for home users. Home PC gaming, outside a handful of much-smaller niche use cases that're full of Windows-only software, was the only notable reason for a home user to have Windows at all, after the rise of Chromebooks and iPads to serve the rest of the home market. Valve's made ditching Windows for PC gaming viable for a high proportion of those remaining must-have-Windows users, which means Windows is hanging on to the home market by its fingernails. Just about all it has now is momentum, and that's fading.

I also don't think any of that matters much, because it's done nothing at all to the enterprise market, which is still full of Windows and other Microsoft stuff and that shows no sign of shifting.
by dang | 2026-01-23 22:22:46+00:00
That's a fun question! 806601 was from Sept 2009. I found 3 earlier cases of 'pivot' in the startup sense:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=699611 (July 2009)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=676514 (June 2009)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=562739 (April 2009)

All 3 of those posts were by YC founders, so the term was obviously in circulation by then. The last of them includes a (broken) likn to this article: https://web.archive.org/web/20090703130211/https://redeye.fi....

Edit: that one was discussed here, but the comments didn't say the p-word:

Yogi Berra wisdom for startups - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=537331 - March 2009 (9 comments)
Show HN: NeuralVoid – Block AI Telemetry from Copilot, Grammarly, Adobe
by Prof_Sigmund | 2026-01-23 22:23:00+00:00
NeuralVoid is a free Windows tool that stops AI apps from sending your data home.One click adds blocks to your hosts file (with backup) for:

Grammarly
Adobe (Photoshop/Firefly)
Microsoft Copilot/Edge
More common endpoints

No extra software running. Fully reversible.Built because AI "helpers" shouldn't spy on everything you type.

Open source, MIT license.
Run the EXE or check the Python source.
by simianparrot | 2026-01-23 22:23:04+00:00
LLM’s seem to be making a large quantity of people seriously retarded. I don’t mean to insult people but the proliferation of these topics about these “magical” solutions to wrangle more out of these tools than they can actually produce; time spent defending them; as well as time spent taking them seriously, is mind boggling to the point of exhaustion.
by malauxyeux | 2026-01-23 22:23:05+00:00
Here's one case from August 2025:

----

Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the International Criminal Court, discusses in an interview with Le Monde the consequences of US sanctions imposed on him and eight other judges and prosecutors at the court. The sanctions were introduced after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The concrete consequences of the sanctions extend far beyond a travel ban to the US. "The sanctions affect all aspects of my daily life. They prohibit all US individuals or legal entities, all persons or companies, including their foreign subsidiaries, from providing me with services", Guillou explains.

All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, and others have been closed. "For example, I booked a hotel in France through Expedia, and a few hours later, the company sent an email canceling the reservation citing the sanctions. In practice, you can no longer shop online because you don't know if the packaging your product comes in is American. Being under sanctions is like being sent back to the 1990s", he says.

"Overnight, you find yourself without a bank card, and these companies have an almost complete monopoly, at least in Europe. US companies are actively involved in intimidating sanctioned individuals – in this case, the judges and prosecutors who administer justice in contemporary armed conflicts", he notes.

He emphasizes that sanctions can last for more than a decade or even longer.

https://nordictimes.com/world/how-french-icc-judge-faces-us-...
by nitwit005 | 2026-01-23 22:23:10+00:00
A big pricing problem in software is that people try to sell products as-if you'd use all the features, but people rarely have any interest in most of it.

There are whole products that succeed by simply being less capable, but cheaper, variations of some other product. This is most obvious in the art space, where you can visually see the reduction in tools and menu items.

This people often don't want support, maintenance, or future development. Their needs have been met.
by at1as | 2026-01-23 22:23:14+00:00
> "I'm tied of Apple converting everything to services so I'll eschew the Apple Watch in favor of an analog watch and an Oura ring that requires a subscription."

I wouldn't pay a subscription to Oura, especially with them moving towards a more obfuscated view of individual metrics. I'm grandfathered in to a lifetime subscription. And eagerly awaiting something comparable in the market, but reviews of competing products are not yet compelling.

> "I'm tired of distracting notifications so I'm getting Meta Ray-Ban AR glasses."

These are for travel videos (dense markets, or places where I can't logistically use a phone or camera). My family enjoys the videos. If the glasses are capable of notifications, I haven't enabled them. The glasses have utility without notifications, and without a heads up display, they'd be of limited value.

> Why is Linux growing in popularity?

This was my point "Integrated platforms seemingly made the Linux philosophy untenable, and yet it may now be growing as a direct result of this decoupling. This was a feature, not a bug."

Linux is not part of an ecosystem, and people are starting to realize they like that for a variety of reasons. We're making the same point

> People are sick of being spied on and being manipulated for profit. I don't think the OP wants to acknowledge that fact because it paints him as a technology hipster rather than someone taking back their autonomy from corporations. He's saying "Look at me, I'm an individual because I choose to have a different set of companies spy on me than you do."

The point is that there is growing optionality. It's becoming easier to participate across ecosystems. We can treat tech as an a la carte rather than an omakase menu. Your computer can be one thing, your phone another, and your wearables something else. It's hard to escape big tech entirely, but cracks are starting to form in terms of portability, and perhaps increasingly in terms of alternative options.

> The other striking thing to me is that the list is also completely devoid of any sense of morality.

I had assumed I could just buy a printer I like that's relatively affordable, on sale, and highly rated? It allows me to use 3rd party filaments and import my designs from TinkerCAD or Python generated. What should I have bought?