MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by matwood | 2026-01-12 08:39:38+00:00
Good points. I'm a 'solve the problem' person, so rarely get into language wars, editor wars, etc... I just don't care as long as the problem is solved in a way that meets the needs of the user.

I've worked with all the types, and no type is wrong. For example, I can certainly appreciate the PL researcher type who wants to make everything functional, etc... I won't fight against it as long as it doesn't get in the way of solving the problem. I've also found that my style works well with the other styles because I have way of always asking "so does this solve the problem??" which is sometimes forgotten by the code is beautiful people, etc...
by antirez | 2026-01-12 08:40:00+00:00
I care a lot about programming, but I want to do programming in a way that makes me special compared to machines. When the LLM hits a limit, and I write a function in a way it can't compete, that is good. If I write a very small program that is like a small piece of poetry, this is good human expression. But if I need to develop a feature, and I have a clear design idea, and I can do it in 2 hours instead of 2 weeks, how to justify with myself that just for what I love I use a lot more time? That would be too much of ego, I believe. So even if for me too this is painful, as a transition, I need to adapt. Fortunately I also enjoyed a lot the desing / ideas process, so I can focus on that. And write code myself when needed.
by xvector | 2026-01-12 08:40:04+00:00
Because my life does not run on envy. It does not bother me that Elon is $100B richer when global outcomes have improved dramatically as well. Comparison is the thief of joy.

As long as conditions are materially improving, we are doing well. It is up to people to maintain a psychological outlook commensurate with their incredible quality of life gains. If they don't manage to do that, that is a personal failure caused by envy, not an inherent structural problem with wealth inequality.
by johnisgood | 2026-01-12 08:40:53+00:00
There is a difference between "I choose not to" and "I cannot". The thread is full of people saying Tailscale "unlocked" self-hosting, implying capability, not time savings or time preference.

Choosing convenience is fine. But if basic port forwarding or WireGuard is beyond someone's skill set, "software engineer" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

I am not saying they are, but if it really is the case, then yeah.

As for file sharing... I remember when non-SWEs knew how to torrent movies, used DC++ and so on. These days even SWEs have no idea how to do it. It is mind-boggling.
by cpgxiii | 2026-01-12 08:41:37+00:00
> Let's assume vision is 100% correct

This is not going to be true for a very long time, at least so long as one's definition of "vision" is something like "low-cost passive planar high-resolution imaging sensors sensitive to the visual and IR spectrum" (I include "low-cost" on the basis that while SWIR, MWIR, and LWIR sensors do provide useful capabilities for self-driving applications, they are often equally expensive, if not much more so, than LIDARs). Camera sensors have gotten quite good, but they are still fundamentally much less capable than the human eyes plus visual cortex in terms of useful dynamic range, motion sensitivity, and depth cues - and human eyes regularly encounter driving conditions which interfere or prohibit safe driving (e.g. mist/ fog, heavy rain/snow, blowing sand/dust, low-angle sunlight at sunrise/sunset/winter). One of the best features of LIDAR is that it is either immune or much less sensitive to these phenomena at the ranges we care about for driving.

Of course, LIDAR is not without its own failings, and the ideal system really is one that combines cameras, LIDARs, and RADARs. The problem there is that building automotive RADAR with sufficient spatial resolution to reliably discriminate between stationary obstacles (e.g. a car stalled ahead) and nearby clutter (e.g. a bridge above the road) is something of an unsolved problem.
by gmueckl | 2026-01-12 08:41:45+00:00
I was looking at the roles of elected politicians in this, not the general public or the police force. I think I wasn't clear about this.

A constitution should have peace and prosperity for the country as one of its goals. This means that force against the people should be the monopoly of an institution that is governed by laws in order to uphold at least a minimum amount of order in pursuit of the other goals. That legitimizes police.

Now we get to the matter of how a certain constitutional order is allowed to defend itself against domestic threats within its own legal framework. The US constitution relies a lot on balance of power and does not regulate much else in case that this fails. I do not know of any constitutional right for a congressman to lead violent actions against other parts of the government. And that leads to the situation where the most effective actions to restore order are more detrimental to that order in the short term.

And the Democratic party is refusing to go there. Think of that what you will, but that's why their actions amd responses are so tame.
by sweetrabh | 2026-01-12 08:41:55+00:00
Working on https://thepassword.app

It's a macOS desktop application that uses browser agents to update your old and compromised passwords.

It started off a side project for myself after running into a compromised password email. Since then, I've expanded it into a macOS app + chrome extension for navigation. It's been so much fun building this application, learning about AI agent management while enforcing security/privacy best practices. I've re-written this app 4 times from scratch before launching it a couple weeks ago. Please check it out and let me know what you think!
by Y-bar | 2026-01-12 08:42:02+00:00
Thanks for this interesting read.

I’m asking you to judge people’s state of mind here, which is near impossible, but please bear with me…

> Several team members paid dearly in emotional abuse under Steve and decided to leave rather than deal with the environment post Steve's death.

Normally during an event like this there is a change in culture as well which I think we have seen under Cook. So why did they assume that the abusive situation would continue? Jobs was generally known to be harsh to the point of abusive, but if the situation did not change on his death maybe the abuse was equal parts cultural rather than just from the CEO, so why not leave earlier?
by crote | 2026-01-12 08:42:03+00:00
The regulations argument is a red herring: those mostly apply to electronics products sold in the EU, not manufactured in the EU. You have exactly the same burden trying to sell CN-manufactured hardware in the EU.

Worker's shortage is a real problem in China as well. Their approach? Automate everything. Focus on manufacturing 1000s of designs using a handful of standard formulas, instead of treating every design as bespoke. There's no reason this couldn't be done in the EU.

It's going to require a serious cultural shift, but given the right incentive I see no reason why it would be impossible.
by hmontazeri | 2026-01-12 08:42:13+00:00
Love this. I run also all my stuff by myself and I’m not an infra expert by all means just know enough to self host my app and services. I also built an remote monitoring agent using Go and rails I call it https://bareagent.io which monitors servers, docker containers and sends notifications when in any of those containers an error occurres as it is attached to the container logs
by padjo | 2026-01-12 08:42:21+00:00
That is exactly the problem. The first past the post single representative systems all have this feature. It seems almost inevitable that they will just because of that. Some sort of representative system will reduce this disconnect between what voters want and what they get because it allows more parties to flourish. The downside is that you end up with coalition governments. These are seen as “weak” although I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.
by grumbelbart2 | 2026-01-12 08:42:28+00:00
Climate change was likely a factor in 2015.

https://www.dw.com/en/how-climate-change-paved-the-way-to-wa...

> even the repeated blatant lies

It is difficult to have a reasonable discourse when starting with such overkill positions. The topic is way too nuanced. The civil war in Syria had many reasons, political, economic, religious, but also environmental.

Climate change massively increases the risk on water supply and harvesting yields, and if that risk manifests in a situation where people are already unhappy due to other reasons, it can be the trigger for large-scale reactions.

With all that having many factors, you'll rarely be able to point to one thing as "the" cause. That does not make it less relevant, though.
by 8bitsrule | 2026-01-12 08:42:28+00:00
Could be distro-dependent. Yep I can use a key to move a window ... depending on where I 'grab' ('alt' works anywhere, 'super' only outside the browser window). But horizontal, vertical resizing requires a THIN edge, and diagonal re-sizing requires grabbing a tiny corner (character-sized), keys have no effect.
by galaxyLogic | 2026-01-12 08:42:30+00:00
The job of AI is to do what we tell it to do. It can't "create a spec" on its own. If it did and then implemented that spec, it wouldn't accomplish what we want it to accomplish. Therefore we the humans must come up with the spec. And when you talk about a software application, the totality of its spec written out, can be very complex, very complicated. To write and understand, and evolve and fix such a spec takes engineers.

To repeat: To specify what a "system" we want to create does is a highly complicated task, which can only be dones by human engineers who understand the requirements for the system, and how parts of those requirements/specs interact with other parts of the spec, what are the consequences of one (part of the) spec to other parts of it. We must not writ e"impossible specs" like draw me a round square. Maybe the AI can check whether the spec is impossible or not, but I'm not so sure of that.

So I expect that software engineers will still be in high demand, but they will be much more productive with AI than without it. This means there will be much more software because it will be cheaper to produce. And the quality of the software will be higher in terms of doing what humans need it to do. Usability. Correctness. Evolvability. In a sense the natural language-spec we give the AI is really something written in a very high-level programming-language - the language of engineers.

BTW. As I write this I realize there is no spell-checker integrated into Hacker News. (Or is there?). Why? Because it takes developers to specify and implement such a checker. If AI can do that for HN, it could be done, because it would be cheap enough to do it, if HN can exactly spell out what kind of system it wants. So we do need more software, better software, cheaper software, and AI will helps us do that.

A 2nd factor is that we don't really know if a spec is "correct" until we test the implemented system with real users. At that point we typically find many problems with the spec. So somebody must fix the problems with the spec, evolve the spec and rinse and repeat the testing with real users -- the developers who understand the current spec and why it is is not good enough.

AI can write my personal scripts for me surely. But writing a spec for a system to be used by thousands of humans, still takes a lot of (human) work. The spec must work for ALL users. That makes it complicated and difficult to get right.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-01-12 08:42:42+00:00
sure, but if I make a fake picture of someone having sex with a horse and someone else confirms "my gosh, that's really them! I recognize that mole" then I suppose it is the same damage.

At any rate where some of this stuff is concerned, fake CSAM for example, it doesn't matter that it is "fake" as fakes of the material is also against the law in some places at least.

if the problem is just the use of the word "undressing" I suppose the usage of the word is completely analogical, as nobody expects that Grok is actually going out and undressing anyone as the robots are not ready for that task yet.
by antirez | 2026-01-12 08:44:08+00:00
Thanks for reading / commenting this post. Initially it seemed like I received a bunch of very negative comments, now I read most of the thread, and there are very good points, articulated with sensibility. Thank you.

I wanted to provide some more context that is not part of the blog post. Since somebody may believe I don't enjoy / love the act of writing code.

1. I care a lot about programming, I love creating something from scratch, line by line. But: at this point, I want to do programming in a way that makes me special, compared to machines. When the LLM hits a limit, and I write a function in a way it can't compete, that is good.

2. If I write a very small program that is like a small piece of poetry, this is good human expression. I'll keep doing this as well.

3. But, if I need to develop a feature, and I have a clear design idea, and I can do it in 2 hours instead of 2 weeks, how to justify to myself that, just for what I love, I will use a lot more time? That would be too much of ego-centric POV, I believe.

4. For me too this is painful, as a transition, but I need to adapt. Fortunately I also enjoyed a lot the design / ideas process, so I can focus on that. And write code myself when needed.

5. The reason why I wrote this piece is because I believe there are still a lot of people that are unprepared for the fact we are going to be kinda of obsolete in what defined us, as a profession: the ability to write code. A complicated ability requiring a number of skills at the same time, language skills, algorithms, problem decomposition. Since this is painful, and I believe we are headed in a certain direction, I want to tell the other folks in programming to accept reality. It will be easier, this way.
by cmxch | 2026-01-12 08:44:27+00:00
because narrative security apparently precedes truth here, because truth that counters narrative must be silenced.

https://x.com/AlphaNews/status/2009679932289626385?s=20

She accelerated against the officer, hit them, he defended himself, which stands counter to the bloodlust directed towards ICE.

—

Order of events based on video analysis:

- The agent approaches the vehicle, which is stopped or slow-moving.

- The woman speaks through the window (partial audio/transcript includes phrases like "Big boy, show your face," "I'm not mad at you," and references to not changing plates or being a U.S. citizen—tone appears defiant or sarcastic).

- The agent positions himself near or in front of the vehicle.

- The SUV then accelerates forward, with the hood/grille filling the camera view (suggesting very close proximity, potentially a bump or near-miss).

- The camera shakes/tumbles, ending with views of the street and the vehicle driving away.
by cedws | 2026-01-12 08:44:48+00:00
Not really seeing what's amazing about this. It looks like something very similar to what Fly already offers, just ad-hoc and snapshottable. Still Firecracker underneath.

I've been wanting to sandbox Copilot/Claude Code for a while, but I don't want to pay for a PaaS just to do that. I want to run the sandbox on my M4 chip instead of needing a constant internet connection to run code on an anaemic remote CPU.
by pixelbyindex | 2026-01-12 08:44:52+00:00
I also started started experimenting with self-hosting in the last few years. Started with a simple Plex server, then gradually evolved my little setup into a handful of open-source apps that now cover most of what I use during my day to day.

There are a few important things to consider, like unstable IPs, home internet limits, and the occasional power issue. Cloud providers felt overpriced for what I needed, especially once storage was factored in.

In the end, I put together a small business where people can run their own Mac mini with a static IP: https://www.minimahost.com/

I’m continuing to work on it while keeping my regular software job. So far, the demand is not very high, or perhaps I am not great at marketing XD
by maxkuan | 2026-01-12 08:44:57+00:00
You probably nailed it. I'm a backend Data Scientist, not a designer, so "un-intuitive UI" is unfortunately my signature style right now.

But you are 100% right about the payment friction. You shouldn't have to swipe a card just to see if the analysis is actually good.

I just pushed a fix: I opened up a 'Sandbox' mode so you can see the AI Boardroom in action without paying.

Thanks for the honest slap in the face. I needed that.
by gf000 | 2026-01-12 08:45:17+00:00
Well, it's "a search engine that applies some transformations on top of the results" doesn't sound to me as a terrible way to think about LLMs.

> can follow logical rules

This is not their strong suite, though. They can only follow through a few levels on their own. This can be improved by agent-style iterations or via invoking external tools.
by johnisgood | 2026-01-12 08:46:34+00:00
Concatenative languages like Factor and Forth are very token-efficient in theory. Theoretically optimal for raw lexical density. No parentheses, no commas, no argument delimiters, just whitespace-separated words, but stack shuffling can add overhead for complex data flow, unless you use "locals" in Factor, for example.

C is surprisingly efficient as well. Minimal keywords, terse syntax, single-character operators. Not much boilerplate, and the core logic is dense.

I think the worst languages are Java, C#, and Rust (lifetime annotations, verbose generics).

In my opinion, C or Go for imperative code, Factor / Forth if the model knows them well.
by watwut | 2026-01-12 08:47:22+00:00
I don't. The blogosphere, writings and blogs from various professionals basically disappeared from results. And especially the best ones - people who write once in a while when they have good content. Google would not return me articles I literally knew the name of and could quote portions of.

Moreover, beyond that, it used to be that I could find what I was looking for easily, the google search is now noticeably worst.
by tgv | 2026-01-12 08:47:38+00:00
Linux isn't there (on the desktop), and I doubt it'll ever be. It lacks so much: newbie support, drivers, easy configuration (user friendliness in general), and software. There's so much software that doesn't run on Linux. Linux also lacks mature frameworks that make development for macOS and .NET easy. The only thing desktop linux does well is browsing. That would be enough for most people, but they also have tablets and phones, and no need for a desktop.
by burgerquizz | 2026-01-12 08:48:46+00:00
CraftMyGame – no-code game engine with multiplayer baked in

I’ve always loved making games but had the pain of rebuilding the same systems every time. Wanted my own editor with reusable components I could iterate on quickly. Most no-code tools felt too limited, so I built my own.

This week I shipped something I’m really excited about: a visual event system (think Unreal Blueprints / Unity visual scripting). It encapsulates the full UI editor—which wasn’t easy to navigate—into something way more approachable. Physics, combat, inventory, dialogue, pathfinding, all wired up visually: https://youtu.be/8fRzC2czGJc

Every game is multiplayer by default (WebSocket with client-side prediction, zero server config).

55+ systems under the hood, but the visual editor is now the main way in.
I use it for my own games and improve the editor as I go. Turns out it’s also useful for asset creators who have beautiful sprites but no way to ship playable games, and devs who want to prototype fast without setting up infrastructure.

Some examples:

∙ Survivor-style: https://craftmygame.com/game/e310c6fcd8f4448f9dc67aac

∙ Platformer: https://craftmygame.com/game/f977040308d84f41b615244b

Stack: Next.js, Three.js, sockets.

Challenges now: I believe people can build complete games with it, but now convincing people they can do games with it isnt easy. I also try to get people who want to have games without having to do them so I can continue the project.

If you are curious, and want to give it a spin, it is Totally free. Feedback welcome, especially on first-time experience

https://craftmygame.com
by crote | 2026-01-12 08:48:50+00:00
The problem is the gap between hobbyist project and hundred-thousand-unit production run.

You can't easily and cheaply get 10, 100, or 1000 units manufactured in the EU the way you can in China. This pretty much kills hardware startups and scaleups wanting to do local manufacturing.

If you're not a multinational or have an essentially-unlimited budget for your small-scale run, you have to outsource it to China.
by aasz | 2026-01-12 08:48:59+00:00
I've just pushed a big update to the Lua extension system in Marasi (an open source application security testing proxy). It includes two main updates:

1) Addition of modules that you would want to use directly during your testing (think encoding, encryption, request / response manipulation)

2) Ability to extend the GUI of the application. This was challenging as Marasi the proxy is meant to be used as a library and the GUI is a separate application. Extensions run on the proxy and not the GUI application. Right now I've settled on having the GUI inject its specific render and update methods to handle that bridge.

You can check it out at https://marasi.app or the repo directly (https://github.com/tfkr-ae/marasi-app) but I would recommend download the latest development release as it includes a fix for the UI locking up of there is a lot of traffic going through the proxy.
by wtcactus | 2026-01-12 08:49:41+00:00
My present car is 18 years (and, other than 2 non functioning buttons that I decided I didn’t want to pay to replace), working perfectly fine.

And, I should say, I’m a terrible owner. This car had (at most) 10 maintenance checks (and oil changes) in its life. Emphasis in “at most”.

I intend to buy a new one in about 3 years and there’s no chance in hell I’m going for something shiny that breaks after 5 years like this fully made in China stuff (even Teslas are cumbersome to maintain according to statistics).

I want a car to last at least 15 years with very little servicing, not some disposable tech gadget that I can’t be sure it will work next month without some shop time.

P.S. The car is a Mazda 2.
by duckmysick | 2026-01-12 08:50:12+00:00
Software engineering is a broad spectrum where we can move up and down its abstraction ladder. Using off-the-shelf tools and even third-party providers is fine. I don't have to do everything from scratch - after all, I didn't write my own text editor. I'm also happy to download prepacked and preconfigured software on my Linux distro instead of compiling and adding them to PATH manually.

I could, I just choose not to and direct my interests elsewhere. Those interests can change over time too. One day someone with Tailscale can decide to explore Wireguard. Similarly, someone who runs their own mail server might decide to move to a hosted solution and do something else. That's perfectly fine.

To me, this freedom of choice in software engineering is not disheartening. It's liberating and exciting.
by patrickdavey | 2026-01-12 08:50:29+00:00
I've been working on https://www.minichessgames.com which I built with my 6 year old (she was the product owner ;). It's a site with a bunch of small puzzles (e.g. imagine a chess board with rocks thrown onto it, then move a single piece to a goal square). Lots of fun building it out. And radioactive pooping knights [1] is _amazing_ if I do say so myself ;).

1. https://www.minichessgames.com/#/play/pooping-knights
by tuetuopay | 2026-01-12 08:51:50+00:00
I live in France and there definitely is this feeling. I may be biased, because I only drink coke zero, which has a distinct "dryness" to it wrt other sodas. However, it's the only non-zero soda where I notice this feeling.

Children have a much more sweet tooth than adults, so it may be the reason you did not notice it, as it would not necessarily register as bothersome. I liked to bite into direct sugar cubes as a kid, which I would definitely not stand today.