MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hypeatei | 2026-01-12 09:57:42+00:00
So instead of paying a human that "commands an engineer salary" then they'll be forced to pay whatever Anthropic or OpenAI commands to use their LLMs? I don't see how that's a better proposition: the LLM generates a huge volume of code that the product team (or whoever) cannot maintain themselves. Therefore, they're locked-in and need to hope the LLM can solve whatever issues they have, and if it can't, hope that whatever mess it generated can be fixed by an actual engineer without costing too much money.

I don't doubt that some businesses will try this, but on paper it sounds like a money pit and you'd be better off just hiring a person.
by JumpinJack_Cash | 2026-01-12 09:57:52+00:00
> > why do you dislike the Fed?

It prevents banks from doing their job, so does the existence of t-bills.

They hinder the economy by suppressing creativity and ingenuity . Every time a person becomes an investor instead of an inventor the economy and prosperity of a nation falthers.

You just don't see it in stats because stats can't measure against hypotheticals but that doesn't mean it isn't true
by shantara | 2026-01-12 09:57:53+00:00
That was my experience as well. macOS adopted the iOS UI pattern of list cells using a swipe gesture to show a delete button and other actions. This doesn’t work with mouse and you have to use the right click context menu. This is a constant annoyance when switching between the Mac with an external mouse and the one with a trackpad, as it breaks your muscle memory.
by halfcat | 2026-01-12 09:58:01+00:00
> Asking for evidence isnt a "belief system"

> If someone wants to hold something up as true, its correct to disbelieve it until evidence is provided.

So, a belief system.

> Seems like you quoted them having investigated it.

Asking for evidence isn’t investigating. It’s zero cost to ask for evidence.

Evidence alone doesn’t produce wisdom. It produces cleverness. Feelings and emotion are faster and vaster in terms of information processing, but provides a very low bandwidth output, basically a gut feeling of “good” or “bad”. Emotion isn’t irrational, it’s pre-verbal compression that contains real insight once it’s unpacked. Most people never unpack it, so an outside observer makes the (incorrect) leap from emotional -> irrational.

If you can marry evidence with that unpacked pre-verbal compression, that will be gold. But that requires a bunch of work and soft skills to have a good faith dialectic over time with someone you disagree with.
by jonplackett | 2026-01-12 09:58:20+00:00
I’ve noticed a gradual increase in my annoyance with technology over the last couple of years. A lot of things now just feel irritating and not-quite-right.

Eg on my iPhone filling in a password sometime is kinda blanks the screen while I’m trying to fill the password in.

My keyboard is absolutely terrible.

Lots of other little annoyances I can’t remember right now.

This window thing is another good example of just not enough thought being put into things.
by pjc50 | 2026-01-12 09:58:39+00:00
> You have exactly the same burden trying to sell CN-manufactured hardware in the EU.

Not if you're a Chinese OEM: you just mail it in, and thanks to the arcane operation of international postage it's cheaper to post to Germany from China than from Germany. CE is such a European type of regulation, there's almost no enforcement, while at the same time it's so vague that simply working out what directives you might need to comply with is time-consuming.

Mind you as others have pointed out, there is still EU electronics. It's just not massive production runs for consumer electronics, much more of it is for defence, aerospace, and medical. And a bit of automotive, although that is definitely going to fall to Chinese car OEMs.
by mihaaly | 2026-01-12 09:58:55+00:00
I believe the heavy sarcasm is completely justified, I second it.

Most of the software creeping towards complete unusability devolve through non-practical apparence tweeking bullshit, ruining usability, while the functionality is intact (apart from bugfixes).

The other reason for decay is the overcomplication - pilin new and new marginal things on the top of the functionality heap - combined with sloppines, rushing through things, but that's an other discussion.

Did we reach a peek in software quality recently? So things only go down from here? I have this growing itchy feeling. I feel obstructed, forced to jump hoops, also disgust touching an increasing amount of software, most of those used for many many years without trouble (i.e. did not really registered its usage, it was doing things silently and well, but now starting to jump into my face or kick my legs).
by Tenemo | 2026-01-12 09:59:19+00:00
I've been on-and-off working on a portable, sturdy electrical cloud chamber for a couple of months now. It's a device that lets you see ionising radiation with a naked eye, right on your desk.

It's already working, but it requires so many tweaks and adjustments that make the project hard to finish-finish.

It's controllable by an ESP32, can run automated cooling benchmarks (to find the power vs temp sweet spot) and is pretty much all made out of metal, not 3D-printed – I've learned a ton about working with metal, especially around drilling, cutting, and tapping/threading. Who knew precise drilling a solid copper block could be so tricky at times (saying this as a person who has never drilled anything except wood/concrete before)!
by bhaak | 2026-01-12 09:59:23+00:00
> Based on the folk & religious beliefs of a great many cultures, it's easy to argue that human societies have a very strong bias toward believing in anthropomorphic supernatural beings - be they angels, demons, ghosts, spirits, or whatever. Are von Däniken's ancient aliens anything more than "random" meme, which turned out to be an excellent fit for the social environment it found itself in?

The supernatural beings are a way of explaining a world that is not completely understood. Even today we don't completely understand it but we have dismissed the idea that something intelligent is behind the inner workings of the world around us.

Now if you have supernatural beings it is not quite a big leap from going from supernatural to just technical advanced. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. For us modern readers this removes the supernatural part while it keeps them for our ancestors.

I wouldn't call it a random meme. But it was an excellent fit at a time where we started to explore space and could even imagine becoming ancient aliens to other civilizations in the future.
by tete | 2026-01-12 09:59:35+00:00
At the current time this is essentially science fiction though. This something that the best funded companies on the planet (as well as many many others) work on and seem to be completely unable to achieve despite trying their best for years now, despite an incredible hype.

It feels like if those resources were poured in nuclear fusion for example we'd have it production ready by now.

The field is also not a couple of years old, this has been tried for decades. Sure only now companies decided to put essentially "unlimited" resources into it, but while it showed that certain things are possible and work extremely well, it also strongly hinted that at least the current approach will not get us there, especially not without significant trade-off (that whole over training vs "creativity" and hallucination topic).

Doesn't mean it won't come, but that it doesn't appear a "we just need a bit more development" topic. The state hasn't changed much. Models became bigger and bigger and people added that "thinking" hack and agents and agents for agents, but it also didn't change much about the initial approach and its limitations, given that they haven't cracked these problems after years of hyped funding.

Would be amazing if we would have AIs that automate research and maybe help us fix all the huge problems the world is facing. I'd absolutely love that. I'd also love it if people could easily create tools, games, art. However that's not the reality we live in. Sadly.
by oblio | 2026-01-12 09:59:35+00:00
OP mentioned a local LLM rig plus a rather complex setup from what I understood (I could be wrong).

Also, most of the lower end models aren't that good. At this point you can take an experienced dev and start implementing an app using any mature stack (I'm talking even about stuff like Ada, so not just C/C++, JS, etc) on any mainstream platform (big 3 desktop + big 2 mobile + web) and you can get quite far with Claude Code. By far I mean you'll at least do the 80% really quickly, at which point the "experienced dev" needs to take over. I think you can even get 95% of the way there. And that's with a stack that the dev is unfamiliar with at the start.
by oliwarner | 2026-01-12 09:59:38+00:00
39% of the country still approves of him and his fractal waterfall of disaster. So many people, and so many now gifted power and immunity to swing it at dissenting voices. That's a lot of inertia.

In the "First They Came" poem, we're already at white Christian mothers, and it's not moving the needle. I'm not sure why there isn't more talk of succession on the coasts but at this pace, it feels inevitable.
by johnisgood | 2026-01-12 10:00:03+00:00
Fair point. There is a distinction between syntactic efficiency (C is terse) and task-completion efficiency (what the benchmark likely measured). If the tasks involved string manipulation, hash maps, JSON, etc. then C pays a massive token tax because you are implementing what other languages provide in stdlib. Python has dict and json.loads(), C has malloc and strcmp.

So: C tokenizes efficiently for equivalent logic, but stdlib poverty makes it expensive for typical benchmark tasks. Same applies to Factor/Forth, arguably worse.
by athrowaway3z | 2026-01-12 10:00:15+00:00
I've been saying for a decade that one of the fundamental issues with SWE in the average company, is that management does not seem to understand that SWE is a management level job. Its not an assembly line worker. It requires reorganizing, streamlining, stake-holders, etc - in code and data - which directly affect people much the same that any other management role has. There are just fewer issues with HR and more with CDNs or CVEs.

> A CEO of a low-code platform articulated this vision: in an “agentic” development environment, engineers become “composers,”

I see we'll be twisting words around to keep avoiding the comparison.
by ckastner | 2026-01-12 10:00:39+00:00
> Some 30 years ago, someone challenged me to tell the difference between Pepsi and Coke in a blind taste test.

I did something similar with co-workers recently, who didn't believe there is a meaningful difference between brands. I blind-tasted 6 different glasses and got each one right. I got my favorite (Coke) right just by the first smell, I just had to taste to see whether it was diet or not.

Not that this is a skill or anything. Its just that each of the brands I tasted has a strong characteristic flavor to me, and the difference between real sugar and artificially sweetened is also stark. I've been drinking diet versions for ages precisely because the sugary ones are just too sweet for me.
by shayief | 2026-01-12 10:01:59+00:00
I'm building a new Git hosting service focused on performance and great UX. It's another take on source code hosting and patch sharing, with some nice features like stacked diffs, automatically protected branches.

Currently just the cloud hosted version (https://gitncoffee.com), but plan to open-source most of it when it's more complete.

If you want to see a repo example, https://gitncoffee.com/gitncoffee/git-demo
by pjjpo | 2026-01-12 10:02:03+00:00
As a kid 25+ years ago, it was fun tweaking use flags, compiling with Intel cc, diving into every menu in that blue kernel configuration screen. System recompiles I think took 4 hours back then. Learned so much back then and it can even be useful to this day, I don't think I'd even know what a glibc is without tweaking out it's use flags just for kicks.

Now I am happily gaming on arch Linux and while generally developing on a Mac, need to jump into debian in docker and such. But I do hope kids these days end up trying Gentoo, the hacker skillset it builds is priceless. No offense to adults still using it! I just hope there aren't as many "my system doesn't build anymore" situations as I remember.
by falloutx | 2026-01-12 10:02:08+00:00
It seems alright, but I wonder if it crashes the economy for vast majority of internet businesses. I personally run some tool websites like ones to convert images, cut videos but the traffic for now seems stable, but my tools don't target devs. Most likely you didnt actually need it, but who am i to judge, I just find myself doing random projects because it "takes less time".
by PartiallyTyped | 2026-01-12 10:02:23+00:00
> To be honest, I still don’t fully understand how ideology can cloud the mind so thoroughly that only a single way of thinking remains possible.

From what I know, and please correct me if I am wrong; it relates to fear and cognitive dissonance. First, by creating FUD the perpetrator can cause physical narrow-mindedness within the brain, the amygdala — centre of emotions if you will — takes control which reduces reasoning capabilities. Second, by introducing multiple conflicting viewpoints in that state, you induce what we call cognitive dissonance. The brain is unable to reconcile the two opposing (or even just differing) views. This is a conflict at the circuit level of the brain, and the brain needs to reach a conclusion, and conveniently the conclusion is produced by the perpetrators of fud, those who seek to control/exploit others.
by v3xro | 2026-01-12 10:03:03+00:00
What hype? I have and will continue to be anti-BigAI from the very beginning. Until the mechanism is no longer that of a probabilistic model, the data gathering that of massive copyright infringment and the runtime that of a "let us burn more fossil fuels to power as many transistors as we can" I will continue to avoid it without any regrets about missed "productivity" or whatever.
by adornKey | 2026-01-12 10:03:33+00:00
Nowadays the popular mainstream cults openly go against hard data - and nobody bothers...

Witch hunting was popular in Europe for more than 300 years. Last conviction in court in Europe was 1944... The mainstream is much more insane than people are aware of. Modern cargo cults have a lot more evidence going against them than witch hunting ever had (doing statistics about the number of lightning strikes reduced by burning witches wasn't that popular at all).
by rellem | 2026-01-12 10:03:40+00:00
I've recently launched https://certobserver.com, a service for getting alerts before certificates expire. The goal is to be very easy to use with simple (pay-as-you-go, so no need to choose a plan) and affordable pricing.

The next step is to improve the landing site. I like the current no-frills design, but unfortunately I think I'm in the minority.

Feature-wise I'm planning to add support for getting alerts via Slack. I'd also like to make use of certificate transparency logs, alerts to start with but maybe for other stuff as well.

The stack is C#, .NET 10 and PostgreSQL 18 running on Hetzner VMs. I also self-host Forgejo and OpenSearch on Hetzner VMs. I recently switched from VS Code to JetBrains Rider and I think the latter is much better for C#. (I'm using Linux so Visual Studio is not an option for me.)
by nvarsj | 2026-01-12 10:03:44+00:00
It is pretty simple imo. AI (just like humans!) does best on well written, self contained code bases. Which is a very small niche, but also over represented in open source and subsequently by tech celebrities who tend not to work on “ugly code”.

I work on a giant legacy
code base at big tech, which is one piece of many distributed systems. LLM is helpful for localised, well defined work, but nowhere close to what the TFA describes.
by exDM69 | 2026-01-12 10:04:42+00:00
Using printf and debuggers are complementary.

Finding which pixel to debug, or just dumping some info from the pixel under mouse cursor (for example) is better done with a simple printf. Then you can pick up the offending pixel/vertex/mesh/compute in the debugger if you still need it.

You get both, a debugger and printf related tooling in Renderdoc and it's better than either of those alone.

I've been writing a lot of GPU code over the past few years (and the few decades before it) and shader printf has been a huge productivity booster.
by mstngl | 2026-01-12 10:05:13+00:00
Often, several stores belonging to the same chain are located in close proximity to each other so that goods can be distributed more cheaply and frequently. This strategy is known as dominant policy (ドミナント政策, dominanto seisaku).[1]

[1] https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%89%E3%83%9F%E3%83%8A%E3...
by gambiting | 2026-01-12 10:05:16+00:00
>>But it'd be a steady process of increasingly cold winters

I was in Switzerland last summer, in Glarus Alps, and walking around I found a sign that basically said that the reason why all the mountains around it were "smooth" in appearance is because during last ice age all of it was covered in ice, and the rock got smooth as the ice started to shift and slide over the course of hundreds of years. It said that only the highest peaks would be free of ice, and even then just barely - and all of those were above 2000m above(current) sea level. It's crazy to think that an ice age doesn't just mean "it's very cold" - it means there is enough ice to bury europe under 2 kilometers of ice. That's not survivable in any way, we would just have to move south somewhere - but like you said, even if it happens again it will take thousands of years to get to that point.
by zvqcMMV6Zcr | 2026-01-12 10:06:35+00:00
Politicians look at best at next term, CEOs look at next quarter. Climate changes took decades to manifest effects. And those 2 groups produce most news "worthy" messages. Journalism is quite close to being dead (with local reporting already being buried), as rephrasing PR statements is cheapest and fastest way to produce "content". Who is supposed to nudge public discourse in that direction, "influencers"?
by imtringued | 2026-01-12 10:06:43+00:00
They canceled the Drive Pilot L3, which is fully autonomous with zero driver intervention (approved by the government), because the software isn't there yet due to the hand off problem. They are still working on making it work at 130km/h on the highways. The problem with a zero driver intervention system is that the driver isn't guaranteed to pay attention when the mode is no longer applicable and the mode switch is only obvious on the highway when exiting, but the L3 system doesn't support highway driving speeds yet.

I'm not talking about some Tesla style last second bullshit where you're supposed to compensate for the deficiencies of the system that supposedly can do the full journey. I mean a route like L2->L3->L2 where L2 is human supervised autonomous driving and L3 is autonomous driving with zero intervention. You can't tell people they're allowed to drink a coffee and then one minute later tell them to supervise the driving.
by ZebraOtoko | 2026-01-12 10:07:25+00:00
>That machine also does not go to sleep properly (a common, real, complaint from many linux users) and I have to hibernate it manually via command line as the option does not exist in my power menu due to corporate's rules and regulations.

Are you required to make it sleep (perhaps due to a security directive)? If so, then why are you doing this? You should simply refuse, and tell IT it doesn't work. Then let them fix the problem, since it's a security issue. It's not your job to come up with workarounds for the IT department's failures.
by gizmondo | 2026-01-12 10:08:05+00:00
How much tax breaks and subsidies did Brin and Page get? I'd think it's close to zero. And apparently they are asked to give half of their wealth (https://x.com/garrytan/status/2009776299666223265) in a "one time" tax (of course we both know people like you won't be satisfied with it being one time, because look, still homeless people). I'd also leave without blinking, this level of expropriation is absurd.
by johnisgood | 2026-01-12 10:08:21+00:00
WireGuard is ~10 lines of config and wg genkey. Calling that "network engineering" is a stretch.

The siloing of basic infrastructure knowledge into "not my discipline" is part of the problem. Software gets deployed somewhere: understanding ports, keys, and routing at a basic level is not specialized knowledge.

Honestly, if 10 lines of config is "network engineering", then the bar for software engineering has dropped considerably.
by nikita2206 | 2026-01-12 10:08:33+00:00
> deep Jiras that require a lot of domain knowledge, bespoke testing tools, but maybe just a few lines of actual code changes

How do new hires onboard? Do you spend days of your own time guiding them in person, do they just figure things out on their own after a few quarters of working on small tickets, or are things documented? Basically AI, when working on a codebase, has the same level of context that a new hire would have, so if you want them to get started faster then provide them with ample documentation.
by vincnetas | 2026-01-12 10:08:33+00:00
yeah, but somehow consistency was not a concern when picking icons for menu items. as pointed out by some previous discussions on this matter.

i also hate this "consistency" idea. was working on mobile app for android/ios. and a requirement was for apps to look identical on both platforms. whyyyyy. sure for designer it looks nice, but as a user who uses either ios OR android im used to conventions of particular platform. why throw that all away just to look identical an both platforms.
by marginalia_nu | 2026-01-12 10:08:40+00:00
Most HighDPI issues on X based DEs is from lack of fractional scaling, which means the scaling needs to happen in the applications instead (with separate configs for each UI toolkit), leading to lots of weird issues with inconsistently scaled UI elements on monitors sized such that integer scaling produces an inappropriate scale.

It doesn't affect all monitors, but some DPIs really don't play well with X. The fractional scaling you get on Wayland leads to some element of blur instead, but that's a far lesser evil, the jank is a bigger issue IMO.
by latexr | 2026-01-12 10:09:09+00:00
> It’s almost impossible to discuss LLMs on HN because everyone is busy attacking the vibecoding strawman all the time.

What’s “the vibecoding strawman”? There are plenty of people on HN (and elsewhere) repeatedly saying they use LLMs by asking them to “produce full apps in hours instead of weeks” and confirming they don’t read the code.

Just because everyone you personally know does it one way, it doesn’t mean everyone else does it like that.
by matsemann | 2026-01-12 10:09:42+00:00
I learned Django 15 years after its inception. After 5 years of experience I'm probably not too far behind someone doing the exact same work as me but for 15 years.

Or would you say people shouldn't learn Django now? As it's useless as they're already far behind? They shouldn't study computer science, as it will be too late?

Every profession have new people continuously entering the workforce, that quickly get up to speed on whatever is in vogue.

Honestly, what you've spent years learning and experimenting with, someone else will be able to learn in months. People will figure out the best ways of using these tools after lots of attempts, and that distilled knowledge will be transferred quickly to others. This is surely painful to hear for those having spent years in the trenches, and is perhaps why you refuse to acknowledge it, but I think it's true.