MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gen220 | 2026-01-24 18:25:47+00:00
In my (admittedly conflict-of-interest, I work for graphite/cursor) opinion, asking CC to stack changes, and then having an automated reviewer agent help a lot with digesting and building conviction in otherwise-large changesets.

My "first pass" of review is usually me reading the PR stack in graphite. I might iterate on the stack a few times with CC before publishing it for review. I have agents generate much of my code, but this workflow has allowed me to retain ownership/understanding of the systems I'm shipping.
by jstummbillig | 2026-01-24 18:25:58+00:00
The first two paragraphs of that article are a wild incoherent ride, mixing all kinds of things, that have very little to do with each other (feel slighted [...] even the slightest mistreatment [...] failed to deliver birthday greetings on time)

Regardless of the analysis and without having read the study, I agree with the sentiment in the headline and it's sad agreement that matches my experience: Making employees feel not slighted works really well – for both the company and the employee. It does not require that you respect anyone, and actually often runs counter it.

Once you figure that out as an employer, I can see why you would chose to just get better at fooling and distracting people.
by ksec | 2026-01-24 18:26:19+00:00
I dont think that is true, consider Fuzzy, Hey, Basecamp, Shopify all seems to be doing fine. Shopify actually got impressively fast in the recent two years I have no idea why. Github used to be fast as well.

So while Go by default will always be faster then Ruby Rails, there are plenty of examples of decently fast Ruby Rails Apps. Having 10 years saying they will improve performance and not getting any of it suggest problems with Gitlab itself more than RoR.
by lance_ewing | 2026-01-24 18:26:26+00:00
Yeah, libGDX is my go to now for web-based emulators and interpreters. JVIC is the third one I've written now. The other two are JOric and AGILE:

https://oric.games/

https://agi.sierra.games/

They all use the GWT html target. I realise that there is now also a TeaVM target. I might try converting JVIC to use TeaVM at some point.
by ferguess_k | 2026-01-24 18:26:44+00:00
I had the same experience when doing an exercise implementing `mmap` for `xv6` -- that was the last lab. There was no specification except for a test file. Passing that test file is relatively easy and I could game it. I consulted the manpage of `mmap` but it is pretty far from a specification, so eventually I had to write a lot of tests in Linux to figure out what it can do and what it can't do (what happens when I over-mmap? what happens when I write back pass EOF? etc.), and write the same tests for `xv6` so that I could test my implementation. Not sure about hardware, but it is really hard to get a clear specification for software.
by state_less | 2026-01-24 18:26:57+00:00
In another life, I would do things like measure the cost in developer time of bugs making it into developer repos vs. the cost in time of running tests in CI to catch such bugs, so evidence based decision making. It was mostly ignored, and at first I was surprised. A multi million dollar organization of people making negative EV plays, which I chalked up to the political pressures being more important than the wastage. More on that later.

As far as estimates go, I've also struggled with the industries cult(ural) rituals. I tried to put forward a Gaussian based approach that took into account not only the estimate of time, but the expected uncertainty, which is still probably off the mark, but at least attempts to measure some of the variance. But again, the politics and the rigidity of the clergy that has built around software development blocked it.

On the bright side, all this has helped me in my own development and when I think about software development and estimating projects. I know that outcomes become more chaotic as the number of pieces and steps compound in a project (i.e. the projects normal curve widens). You may not even get the project at all as defined at the outset, so my normals approach is still not quite the right tool.

I think this kind of thinking can be helpful when working solo or in a small group who are exposed to market forces. But for solo and small groups, the challenge isn't so much about the estimates, it's about how you're going to fight a battalion of mercenaries hired by big VC money and Big Tech. They can often afford to be inefficient, dump in the market, because their strategy is built around market control. These aren't practices small players can afford, so you need to get creative, and try to avoid these market participant kill boxes. And this is why, coming back to my earlier point, that often times, inefficient practices and politics plays a big role. Their trying to marshal a large number of troops into position and can afford to lose a few battles in order to win the war. The big money plays by a different set of rules, so don't worry if their doing it wrong. Just recognize your in the army soldier!
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-01-24 18:27:04+00:00
I've tried it a few times. It took generally ten times as long to come up with code that I could have written more clearly by myself.

Can you give me an example of the kind of things you ask it to do, and the results you get?

I genuinely don't understand why people think it's good. I don't want to waste time trying to work out how to ask a computer to write code for me, when I could just be writing code.
by fragmede | 2026-01-24 18:27:16+00:00
> Just for fun, once I had played a bit with it like that, I just told it to finish the application with some vague Jira-epic level instructions on what I wanted in it and then fed it the errors it got.

Would you finish the application with "some vague Jira-epic level instructions"? Or, even if you don't formally make tickets in Jira for them, do you go from vague Jira-epic-sized notions to ticket-sized items? If I had a mind-control helmet that forced you to just write code and not let you break down that jira-epic in your thoughts, do you think the code would be any good? I don't think mine would be.

So then, why does it seem reasonable that Claude would be any good, given such a mental straight jacket? Use planning mode, the keyword "ultrathink" and the phrase "do not write code", and have it break down the vage Jira epic into ticket-sized items, and then have it break it into sub tickets that are byte-sized tasks, and then have it get to work.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-01-24 18:27:35+00:00
> The headline is misleading. It says that Microsoft will provide the key if asked, but the linked statement to Forbes says Microsoft will provide the key if it receives a valid legal order.

This is an odd thing to split hairs over IMO. Warrants or subpoenas or just asking nicely, whatever bar you want to set, is a secondary concern. The main issue is they can and will hand the keys to LEO’s at all.
by MaskRay | 2026-01-24 18:27:52+00:00
Amazing! I read you article in 2012 when the link was https://homepages.cwi.nl/~tromp/maze.html
I was learning Haskell and Ocaml and wrote my own article in Chinese then https://maskray.me/blog/2012-11-02-perfect-maze-generation

Now I should fix the link.
by jraph | 2026-01-24 18:28:01+00:00
> Back when it was fashionable to complain about how every Electron application has 30 MB of bloat

What, this is not anymore??

And yes, I do end up writing web applications every time too (I haven't bundled them though). I don't want to tie myself to a specific platform, and being able to point users to an URL and bam, they can run the thing, is convenient. I hate that this makes me dependent on tech maintained with Big Tech money though.
by hypeatei | 2026-01-24 18:28:34+00:00
> things are kinda complicated. Technically, charges can be brought against specific agents breaking the laws of the State

Yes, and the complicated part is federal supremacy[0]. The federal government can "convert" the case against the agent into a federal one and essentially just turn a blind eye which means no justice. No doubt that this administration would protect agents executing citizens by saying it was "part of their duty" to be there and doing that.

Relevant: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB11213

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_Clause
by alt227 | 2026-01-24 18:28:52+00:00
Dude thats from 9 years ago.

A lot has changed since then and it is common knowledge that Apple regularly give government agencies access to their systems and hides it from the public until a whistleblower leaks it.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/governments...

In a statement, Apple said that Wyden's letter gave them the opening they needed to share more details with the public about how governments monitored push notifications.
"In this case, the federal government prohibited us from sharing any information," the company said in a statement. "Now that this method has become public we are updating our transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests."
by lubujackson | 2026-01-24 18:31:11+00:00
Having done a similar "rendition" to a book of poetry, I agree it is not the same as translating directly. It does open up a question about the fuzziness of "what is even translation?"

Especially when we talk about translating historic writing. Yes, not knowing the source language is a huge barrier. But so is not knowing specific cultural touchstones or references in the text. In-depth translations usually transliterate as a part of the process. Many words and language patterns are untranslatable, which is why perfect translations are impossible.

When translating poetry, issues of meter and rhythm are even more important. It comes down to what the purpose of a translation is meant to achieve. Yes, there are ideas and themes but there is no hiding the fact that translators always imprint their own perspective on a work - it's unavoidable and personally shouldn't even be the goal.

Most translators of popular texts look closely at other translations to "triangulate" on meaning and authorial intent. Older translations may use archaic writing but have historical understanding, well-researched translations may be more precise about tricky words or concepts. More "writerly" translations tend to rebuild the work from the building blocks and produce a more cohesive whole. None of these are wrong approaches.

I like the term "rendition" because it throws away the concept of the "authoritative translation". I like to think of translations the same way as cover songs. The best covers may be wildly different from the original but they share the same roots.

As a reader, if you can't ever "hear" the original because you don't know thr language you can still appreciate someone's "cover version", or triangulate the original by reading multiple translations.
by theptip | 2026-01-24 18:32:03+00:00
> easy projects with a very short time horizons (less than an a couple of days, I'd say).

The example I quoted said hours, not days. But even taking your claim of days as estimable, I have seen much better.

An example of weeks-long projects I regularly estimate accurately would be things like “in our Django monolith, add this new field/model, and update the state machine with these new transitions, and update the API, and surface the feature in the UI, including standard e2es and UT coverage”. With a team of 10-15 we regularly hit days-to-weeks estimates with in the ballpark of 90% accuracy. (Ie 1-in-10 slips)

An example of year-long projects I have seen waterfall’d successfully are IP protocol implementations where the RFC is clear, base frameworks exist, and the org has engineers with decades of individual experience implementing protocols in the same framework. IOW you have senior-staff or principal engineers on the project.

> the point of the article seems to be in a different direction: it _doesn't really matter_ that you have a good time estimate

I think the idea that you always start with time and define the work is also myopic. In some dysfunctional orgs I’m sure this is true, but it’s not the whole picture.

For the fully-generalized principle at play here, I’m a big believer in the “cost / time / scope” tradeoff triangle. In other words, pick two as your free parameters, and the third is then determined. Sometimes time is the output of a calculation, and resource/scope are the input. Sometimes time can be the input and scope the output. It depends.

But the article opens by claiming it’s impossible to estimate time, given a fixed scope and cost(resource) input, which is simply false/over-generalizing.
by roromainmain | 2026-01-24 18:32:14+00:00
Interesting. Your comparison reminds me of something from Lacanian psychoanalysis: the idea that people often mistake themselves for the symbolic labels they occupy, their title for instance. Like a doctor who would praise himself for being a doctor, a president a president.
From that perspective, both versions of the Tao Te Ching line point to the same thing: what can be named, praised, or socially recognized isn’t the true underlying reality.
Different phrasing, but the same structural idea.
by krapp | 2026-01-24 18:32:49+00:00
You're correct that it would be wrong to just blame white people for this, but I don't think anyone is doing that. No one is claiming that all white people support ICE, or that all ICE agents are white, or that all white people are anti-immigrant.

However, it is the case that American culture is and historically has been built upon white supremacist principles and that the default identity in the US politically and culturally is white, and that therefore white people generally enjoy a status of privilege and political power that other groups do not, and thus a responsibility that others do not. And the links between the Trump administration, alt-right movements and white supremacist groups in the US are well known and documented, even though minority groups voted for him as well.

So it would be just as wrong to dismiss the premise that "white people" are to blame due to pedantry as it would be to blame all white people. "White people" do carry the lion's share of the blame as a community and culture even if not literally every white person does. That's the nature of systemic racism.
by otterley | 2026-01-24 18:32:57+00:00
> That's due to authorized humans at the company setting up the LLMs to publish statements which are materially relied upon. Not because company officers have delegated legal authority to the LLM process to form binding contracts.

It's not that straightforward. A contract, at heart, is an agreement between two parties, both of whom must have (among other things) reasonable material reliance in each other that they were either the principals themselves or were operating under the authority of their principal.

I am sure that Air Canada did not intend to give the autonomous customer service agent the authority to make the false promises that it did. But it did so anyway by not constraining its behavior.

> It's basically the same with longstanding customer service "agents". They are authorized to do only what they are authorized to semantically express in the company's computer system. Even if you get one to verbally agree "We will do X for $Y', if they don't put that into their computer system it's not like you can take the company to court to enforce that.

I don't think that's necessarily correct. I believe the law (again, not legal advice) would bind the seller to the agent's price mistake unless 1/the customer knew it was a mistake and tried to take advantage of it anyway or 2/the price was so outlandish that no reasonable person would believe it. That said, there's often a wide gap between what the law requires and what actually happens. Nobody's going to sue over a $10 price mistake.
by culi | 2026-01-24 18:33:00+00:00
In one of those threads a user, thadk, posted their really cool tool that shows a side by side comparison of English translations for each verse

https://thadk.net/sbs/#/display:Code:gff,sm,jhmd,uklg,jc,rh/...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40887305
by drweevil | 2026-01-24 18:33:46+00:00
The subject may sound silly, but we evolved this way. For the greatest part of human existence we were part of small social groups. We each took part in every activity. Our 'work' was for the group, and for ourselves. Those we worked with, we lived with, so in order to maintain group cohesion (and to not get stabbed in our sleep) we learned to get along. Current work practices violate a lot of those deeply set social mores. I'd love to see a study that looks into this hypothesis. Could explain a lot of the misery and depression in our modern life.
by aprentic | 2026-01-24 18:34:13+00:00
That's exactly what I mean.

If you tell people, "I'll take care of safeguarding your key for you," it sounds like you're just doing them a favor.

It would be more honest to say, "I can hold on to a copy of your key and automatically unlock your data when we think you need it opened," but that would make it too obvious that they might do so without your permission.
by sowbug | 2026-01-24 18:34:32+00:00
You are conflating work and work product. There's a difference between being acknowledged and compensated for doing hard work, and receiving property rights over the work product.

If you are an employee, you get paid for building something (work), and the employer owns the thing that was built (work product). If you are self-employed, it's the other way around. You don't get paid for the work, but you own the work product. Employees generally don't work for free, and the self-employed generally don't give away their capital for free.

If you opt to "release it to the [world] in the spirit of openness and sharing," then you built capital for free and gave it away for free. If you didn't want others to capitalize on the capital, then why did you give it away?

If you want attribution, then either get paid for the work and add it to your resume, or exchange your work product for attribution (e.g., let people visit the Jryio Museum, build a Jryio brand, become known in your community as a creative leader, etc.). If you give it away for free, then your expectations should include the possibility that people will take it for free.
by jobops_io | 2026-01-24 18:34:34+00:00
Automated job application tracker that connects to your inbox and uses AI to track applications, interviews, and offers without manual entry.

• Connects via Gmail OAuth or IMAP (works with any provider)
• AI extracts company, role, etc. from confirmation emails
• Auto-updates status when you get responses
• Kanban board, calendar view, analytics dashboard
• Smart notifications for interviews/offers

Built with FastAPI + React. Free tier available.

Try it: jobops.io
by rolph | 2026-01-24 18:34:57+00:00
unless you alays have your email open on your device, its a tiny PITA to fire it up, login, remember your issue, and compose a proper message.

so when you [@user] tag a user rather than email its kinda like a rhetorical question, your not expecting a reply, but if someone just happens to pass by and notice your tag, they might answer.

also @user might mean wasted desire to some, but other users here might see a previously agreed upon heuristic is in play, and act in that context.

for example if someone from a very small subset of usernames that i recognize, were to @rolph me, i might SMS them at a previously agreed mobile number, if i see the signal in a reasonable time.
by gostroverhov | 2026-01-24 18:35:53+00:00
On ProductHunt, one user wrote that «boring» problems are the best for building a startup.

I came to exactly the same conclusion that real startup ideas often come from «simple and boring» problems. From my own experience: I spent three years on a startup that was supposed to «revolutionize» online education, but in the end it had 0 users. Now I’ve just started solving a simple problem for home appliance repair technicians and immediately got my first paying users on a very rough MVP.
by burnerToBetOut | 2026-01-24 18:36:02+00:00
Say my Gradle or Maven build fails. The error message in the console might produce a clickable link to the problem artifact at https://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2/org/example/…

Say I expected a class or interface to exist in org.example:foo:1.10.0, for example. I could copy the https://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2/org/example/1.10.0/foo.... URL and paste it into your tool and see at a glance if it has what I'm looking for or not.

Also, sometimes I might like to see if an artifact is a Multi-Release JAR. Or see if it contains a `module-info.class` or a `META-INF/service/…` entry, for example.

It would be convenient if I didn't have to download it and `jar -xvf` it or whatever.
by amarant | 2026-01-24 18:36:09+00:00
I read gps comment as the reverse: in their analogy, the manager is the dog.

On a related note, I wouldn't mind being treated like a dog by someone who is up to date with modern dog training practices: instant rewards for success, no negative feedback(unless I'm being aggressive, but I think I can manage that much), and tons of belly and/or back rubs! Where do I sign?
by d1sxeyes | 2026-01-24 18:37:16+00:00
I still don’t understand how someone who wants something different from what’s on offer is “a victim”.

I do agree that “just fork it” is a flippant and pretty unhelpful thing to say, but just because a piece of software is open source, that doesn’t necessarily automatically mean that its development should follow the designs of a committee of its users.

You are absolutely correct that often, open source projects are indeed run with the maintainers exercising absolute control. I think this is where the tension comes in, because sometimes, folks expect that to be different, and approach the project with a sense of entitlement that somehow the project should change to fit their needs.

“Just fork it” is a way of saying “if you need it to fit your needs, feel free to take what we’ve done so far and add what you need, but we aren’t going to”.

The author’s core argument seems to be summarised here: “In social terms, it’s the equivalent of saying: “If you don’t like society, go start your own civilisation.”

It’s not at all equivalent though. It’s more like “I invited everyone round for dinner, and I don’t want my house to smell of fish, so I’m not cooking fish. If you want to cook fish, you can borrow my pans, but invite everyone round to your house instead.”
by orleyhuxwell | 2026-01-24 18:37:17+00:00
Sorry, but I don't think so.

I think without AI the effort of producing slop code or art that sort of looks like a real thing on the first glance is let's say 5% of the effort needed for the real thing that actually works flawlessly.
LLMs and diffusion models bring it down to 0.5%.

They are also really good at faking comprehension and make recognizing real experise from phoney cosplayers harder for busy managers, officials, execs, politicians etc.

So while AI CAN be used for useful things, it very rarely is and it requires more discipline than most people are willing to invest.

Also, the way AI is trained on stolen and random low quality content is deeply disturbing.

So yeah, while I'd like anti-AI rants to be more precise and nuanced, in general AI in 2026 is mostly a missuse of a technology with great potential.
by 46493168 | 2026-01-24 18:37:18+00:00
I don’t think the right question is “should vaccines be optional?” I think it’s “to what extent should public and private institutions be expected to accommodate people who, for no other reason than ignorance, choose to opt out of the collective responsibility to public health?”

Am I allowed, as a business owner, to pass on an antivax candidate? Am I, as a school administrator, permitted to keep an unvaccinated child from my school system?

Vaccines were always optional in the sense nobody ties you down and makes you take them, and certainly all requirements have exceptions for people with, i.e, immune system issues.