MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vidarh | 2026-01-22 15:04:57+00:00
I saw that part and I disagreed with the very notion, hence why I wrote what I did.

> Because they didn't understand the architecture or the domain models otherwise.

My point is that requiring or expecting an in-depth understanding of all the algorithms you rely on is not a productive use of developer time, because outside narrow niches it is not what we're being paid for.

It is also not something the vast majority of us do now, or have done for several decades. I started with assembler, but most developers have never-ever worked less than a couple of abstractions up, often more, and leaned heavily on heaps of code they do not understand because it is not necessary.

Sometimes it is. But for the vast majority of us pretending it is necessary all the time or even much of the time is a folly.

> I do wonder, however, how much of your actual job also entails ensuring that whoever is doing the implementation is also growing in their understanding of the domain models. Are you developing the people under you? Is that part of your job?

Growing the people under me involves teaching them to solve problems, and already long before AI that typically involved teaching developers to stop obsessing over details with low ROI for the work they were actually doing in favour of understanding and solving the problems of the business. Often that meant making them draw a line between what actually served the needs they were paid to solve rather than the ones that were personally fun to them (I've been guilty of diving into complex low-level problems I find fun rather than what solves the highest ROI problems too - ask me about my compilers, my editor, my terminal - I'm excellent at yak shaving, but I work hard to keep that away from my work)

> If it is an AI that is reporting to you, how are you doing this? Are you writing "skills" files? How are you verifying that it is following them? How are you verifying that it understands them the same way that you intended it to?

For AI use: Tests. Tests. More tests. And, yes, skills and agents. Not primarily even to verify that it understands the specs, but to create harnesses to run them in agent loops without having to babysit them every step of the way. If you use AI and spend your time babysitting them, you've become a glorified assistant to the machine.
by freedomben | 2026-01-22 15:05:33+00:00
Indeed, also a great example of a failing bumbling lovable loser who is frequently considered a hero to many Americans is Homer Simpson. Homer Simpson is a hero to many people in America, especially among the working class. It's not a pure example, because Homer does inadvertently succeed often, but it's almost always because of some crazy luck, not because of some skill or even perseverance.

I largely agree with Douglas Adams assessment of the cultural differences. I think it's pretty clear that he is on to something in a general sense. But there are definitely exceptions in my opinion. It's just way too diverse and way too complex a formula to ratchet down in such a narrow way.
by xoa | 2026-01-22 15:05:37+00:00
>Is this going to be like that submarine that guy built to bring people to the Titanic?

Doubtful. Might seem counter intuitive but in some ways space is an easier problem then under water, at least once you get up there. The pressure differential between ~vacuum and 1 atmosphere obviously is just one atmosphere, and outward instead of inward, whereas you get to 1 atm of pressure (14.6 psi) in water at almost exactly the 10m mark (in salt water). The Titanic wreck (which is what the sub you're referring to was designed to reach) is at 3800m, at which point the pressure is around 380 atm (~5600 psi). Any failures are going to be absolutely catastrophic with no time to react. Whereas a space station can handle small leaks just fine for quite awhile (as ISS has had to [0]) if it has some buffer, it's "just" a supply loss and if it became too much would mean people having to get into a safe area or suits and eventually abandon it in the worst case, but it doesn't go pop like a soap bubble. And such things can definitely be patched. Assuming normal proven safety procedures are followed (most importantly having some margin and constant backup life boats or rooms sufficient for all humans on board until all can get to Earth) an impact or mistake or the like might put the station out of business but should be very survivable.

At any rate nothing like the titan, where IIRC the implosion went supersonic and thus they literally didn't even know what did them in because the collapse front was faster then the speed of human nerve signal propagation (120 m/s at best, usually lower).

----

0: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-international...
Surviving AI
by dpforesi | 2026-01-22 15:05:58+00:00
What follows was written by ChatGPT 5.2 Instant and it reflects my conversation with it about the two articles linked below. Enjoy.

Ego plays a complicated role in periods of technological change. It sharpens skill during stable eras, but it often hinders adaptation during inflection points.

Two recent essays on AI and software engineering illustrate this tension clearly.

Emir Ribic’s “From Craftsmen to Operators”
https://dev.ribic.ba/the-rapid-evolution-of-software-engineer-s-role

Ribic frames the rise of AI-assisted development as a loss of craft. He mourns the disappearance of deep, line-by-line problem solving and the sense of authorship that came with it. Engineers, in his telling, are becoming operators—prompting, reviewing, and assembling—rather than builders. The piece captures something real: pride in difficulty, satisfaction in mastery, and the joy of personally solving hard problems.

But that pride is also where ego enters. What’s being lost isn’t just a way of working—it’s a form of status. Manual coding was scarce, hard-won, and socially rewarded. When AI erodes that scarcity, it threatens identity as much as technique. The article largely dwells on that loss, while giving little attention to the exhilaration many engineers feel when modern tools collapse days of work into minutes.

P.C. Maffey’s “AInxiety”
https://pcmaffey.com/ainxiety-1/

Maffey takes a more balanced view. He openly acknowledges discomfort, ethical concerns, and the risk of over-reliance on AI, but he also accepts the productivity gains and uses AI extensively in his work. Rather than framing the shift as a fall from craft, he reframes the role: less time spent on syntax, more on design, planning, judgment, and responsibility. Where Ribic sees loss, Maffey sees trade-offs.

Taken together, the contrast suggests a broader pattern we’ve seen before.

During the Industrial Revolution, skilled artisans resisted mechanization not only because of economic threat, but because identity and status were tied to difficulty and exclusivity. The same thing happened when typewriters gave way to personal computers in offices—typing lost its prestige once everyone could do it. In each case, ego slowed adaptation, but also reflected a real commitment to excellence that had previously raised standards.

That leads to a fair synthesis:

Ego hones skill in stable environments. It motivates mastery, pride, and depth. But during technological inflection points, the same ego can become friction—blinding people to leverage, speed, and new forms of craftsmanship.

Progress doesn’t eliminate craft; it relocates it. The challenge isn’t to abandon pride in skill, but to recognize when clinging to old expressions of that skill prevents adaptation to more powerful tools.

The winners in these transitions aren’t ego-free. They’re ego-aware.
by MrDrDr | 2026-01-22 15:06:14+00:00
This does not surprise me - and America is a big place, and I'm sure there are areas where Arthur would be seen in a similar light but I've worked in the US and the UK and this type of things reminds me of the phrase 'separated by a common language'. Slightly off topic perhaps but another area where I see a strong divide in sensibilities are the NewYorker cartoons - my wife (born in north America) thinks the are hilarious. I usually don't understand what's funny about them.
by __hugues | 2026-01-22 15:07:27+00:00
45s? how long do your apps take to start? what dependencies exist between your apps?

sway-layout does not enforce any dependencies between apps. everything is started concurrently, so unless your apps manage their own interdependencies, it's not going to work

on the other hand, that means the initial wait should be much shorter

one potential avenue you could explore might be to configure a headless output, and try to have your slow starting apps/workspaces anchored there until they are ready. I haven't trie it though...
by FireBeyond | 2026-01-22 15:07:28+00:00
What? On HFCS:

While glucose is used by nearly every cell in the body and has tight regulation by insulin, fructose is largely processed by the liver, where it more easily is converted into fat, triglycerides and uric acid.

Intrinsically this messes with our bodies insulin resistance, for a start, contributing to diabetic issues, as well as increased fatty liver disease, and elevated triglycerides.

It bypasses our body's normal appetite regulation, as fructose also (in addition to insulin) does not stimulate leptin, providing the body with no/less feeling of satiation, and is also less effective at stimulating ghrelin (hunger hormone).

You feel less full, you keep eating, calories and obesity go up.

This is at its worst in liquids, as liquid fructose is absorbed rapidly, and leads to effective weight gain even at small amounts of consumption.

Carrying on from that, contrary to your statement, HFCS has absolutely been linked in multiple studies to increased obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease.

I can't imagine where you're hearing that there's "no evidence that HFCS is bad" other than those in the production pipeline or their lobbying.
by pdyc | 2026-01-22 15:07:38+00:00
I dont want to hand edit i want the output of better ai model with edit instructions like //update here <code> // new code <code> insert here etc. and local model read the files and apply the updates.
I tried generating patch format but both bigger models fail to generate it accurately and smaller models have hard time in using them.
Is there some way to do this with this kind of model? or its for completions while editing only?
by adrian_b | 2026-01-22 15:07:56+00:00
I chose "ioctl" precisely because it has maximum simplicity, in order to show that in "nolibc" it needs externally provided syscall numbers.

Some other syscall wrappers from "nolibc" may be somewhat more complex, by doing some processing on the arguments, before invoking a generic syscall wrapper like "my_syscall3", "my_syscall5" etc. (where the number from the name of the generic syscall wrapper refers to the number of syscall arguments).
by catlifeonmars | 2026-01-22 15:07:56+00:00
TUIs are experiencing something of a renaissance, I think. My hypothesis is that the popularity attracts newcomers who inevitably bring their own preconceptions from other domains. Many are unaware of the state of the art and reinvent the wheel. I don’t think this categorically a bad thing, but it can be a mixed bag of slop and genuinely useful cross-pollination.
by BearOso | 2026-01-22 15:08:00+00:00
My understanding was that the meat-packing process in the US involves a butchering method that results in more fecal matter contamination, posing the risk of salmonella, which necessitates the wash. Those bacteria occur naturally, so you can't avoid that without being careful with butchering, which is probably what the EU standards require. But I doubt the big meat conglomerates like Tyson will want any hit to productivity, and they would fight a change every step of the way.
by amiban | 2026-01-22 15:08:05+00:00
The premise that AI is dulling our thinking is interesting, but I’m skeptical that a 'daily prompt' is the right fix. The reason I outsource emails or basic text is usually speed and convenience, not a lack of ability to think laterally. I don't see how answering a random creative riddle once a day changes the friction of daily tasks that drives us to use AI in the first place.

Nice landing page though!
by conductr | 2026-01-22 15:08:16+00:00
It’s similar to oil. Our people are very price sensitive to food and gas. It’s required in America at all economic classes fairly heavily in our society. So, politicians have decided to try to force prices low and keep hidden costs at the federal level. It allows for reallocation of wealth (a richer person’s taxes helps pay for a poorer person’s lunch and gas to the grocery store). Also, if taxes aren’t enough to cover it well we run our country at a huge deficit so it’s all a big illusion of sustainability that pretty much is destined to fail eventually anyway. I don’t think people or politicians really care about the future or what world their children will inherit as much as they act like they do here; or I’ve not been witness to that thought process in most of our systems.
Show HN: I made a Mac app for rate limiting and monitoring LLM requests
by winchester6788 | 2026-01-22 15:08:30+00:00
https://github.com/quilrai/LLMWatcher/releases/latest/downlo... - Signed and Notarized app

I use coding agents (claude code, codex, cursor etc) a lot and wanted a lightweight app which

1 - have searchable logs of all conversations
2 - rate limit or get notified if using too much context length (-especially useful for reminding myself to use a new session)

3 - block api keys etc from going to LLM providers

4 - get overview of tokens, tools used, and other interesting information

So, I made LLMWatcher

Using base url feature supported by most of the coding agents, LLMWatcher sits in the middle of coding sessions and can do all the above + some extra goodies

Also has a LLM Gateway feature, which can be used to get monitored/ proxied URLs with controls for any LLMs

Would love some feedback on this and to know if anyone finds it useful

Note: Always wanted to make desktop apps, and Tauri made it very easy to do so. Attempted with python first but got dragged into signing and packaging hell
by RcouF1uZ4gsC | 2026-01-22 15:08:49+00:00
I think this supposed English "heroes" is more post-WWI and post-WWII trauma and coping than the actual historic English culture.

Basically it is cope for losing history's greatest empire in a generation.

You don't see this in the pre-WWI authors. Look at Rudyard Kipling (see Mowgli who although Indian is very English). Look at Burroughs and Tarzan. Or even Fleming and James Bond.

See also Dickens and some of his heroes such as Nicholas Nickleby.

What is being passed as English culture is just fairly recent retconning due to WWI and WWII and the crisis in English thought it produced.
by Tyriar | 2026-01-22 15:08:54+00:00
> I don't have a flash of insight over what my risk exposure might be for what I'm opening at this moment

Maybe I'm too close to it, but the first sentence gives a very clear outline of the risk to me; Trusting this folder means code within it may be executed automatically.

> I don't have a comprehensive picture of all the implications, all I'm thinking is "I need to open this file and twiddle some text in it".

I'm curious what would stop you from opening it in restricted mode? Is it because it says browse and not edit under the button?

> Your recommendation makes sense as a strategy to follow ahead of time, before you're in that flow state.

You get the warning up front when you open a folder though, isn't this before you're in a flow state hacking away on the code?
by eviks | 2026-01-22 15:09:04+00:00
Hey, they did all the work and more, trust them!!!

> Experts in the PDF Association’s PDF TWG undertook theoretical and experimental analysis of these schemes, reviewing decompression speed, compression speed, compression ratio achieved, memory usage, code size, standardisation, IP, interoperability, prototyping, sample file creation, and other due diligence tasks.
Show HN: Wraps – AWS SES made usable (templates, broadcasts, + automations)
by stewartjarod | 2026-01-22 15:09:08+00:00
Hey HN, I'm Jarod. Spent 2 years at SendGrid watching developers struggle with email infrastructure. Built Wraps to fix the SES setup problem.

One command or package (CDK & Pulumi) deploys production email infra to your AWS account:
`npx @wraps.dev/cli email init`

~30 seconds to configure SES, DKIM/SPF, event tracking, and sandbox exit. You own everything—we just provide the tooling.

Key decisions:
- BYOC: Deploys to your AWS, you pay AWS directly for sending
- Zero credentials stored: OIDC federation only
- Open source CLI/SDK: MIT licensed, free forever
- No lock-in: Send emails and SMS from YOUR AWS account.

Dashboard with templates/analytics/broadcasts/automations is $10-149/month, tiered around the number of custom events you send. CLI and SDK are free.

Tradeoffs: You need an AWS account. If you want zero AWS involvement, the managed services are solid.
Happy to discuss architecture decisions or answer questions.
by calny | 2026-01-22 15:09:22+00:00
I didn't catch that on first read, but I see why you'd say that. LLMs are ridiculous in the constant usage "it's not X it's Y" -- It's in almost every response from Opus 4.5. "It's not X it's Y" is ruined for regular writing.

I'm also skeptical of anything that claims to reliably detect AI writing. FWIW, I plugged the comment into Pangram Labs, which claims to be the most reliably and seems to have worked well before. It categorized the comment as 100% human written with medium confidence.
by JohnFen | 2026-01-22 15:09:42+00:00
> you're hanging out with friends. Talking. Laughing. The moment one person checks their phone, everyone else follows.

In my social circle, anyway, this doesn't happen. It's considered incredibly rude to check your phone while socializing in person unless there's an actual emergency going on, and people will tell you so.

If you want to check your phone, the acceptable way is to go off somewhere away from everyone to do so.
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-22 15:09:46+00:00
> And it took more than a decade to get MMSC interoperability. It's still not perfect even now.

That's an understatement, my carrier has disabled MMS years ago. Still, that's not an issue with the MMS protocol, just an issue with carriers.

> That's a distinction without difference in the US.

The American carriers including Jibe in their network still speak RCS to clients. Google's Jibe is the most prevalent remaining RCS server but carrier Jibe isn't using the proprietary protocol that Google Messages uses (otherwise it wouldn't work on iPhones).

Looking at https://support.apple.com/en-us/108048, https://support.apple.com/en-us/118609, and https://support.apple.com/en-us/109526, carrier-based RCS is available in quite a few places. Nowhere near as prevalent as SMS/MMS hubs once were, but that has to do with the fact that in many countries SMS and MMS have been replaced by third-party apps over a decade ago.
by daqhris | 2026-01-22 15:09:52+00:00
They seem to not conceive of their creation as a service (software-as-a-service). In their minds, the creation(s) resemble(s) an entity, destined to become the mother ship of services (adjacent analogies: a state with capital s, a body politic,..). Notice how they've refrained from equating them to tools, prototypes or toys. Hence, constitution.

These are the first abstract sentences of a research paper co-authored in 2022 by some of the owners/inventors steering the lab business (to which we are subject to experimentation as end-users):

"As AI systems become more capable, we would like to enlist their help to supervise other AIs. We experiment with methods for training a harmless AI assistant through self-improvement, without any human labels identifying harmful outputs. The only human oversight is provided through a list of rules or principles, and so we refer to the method as ‘Constitutional AI’." https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.08073
by square_usual | 2026-01-22 15:09:53+00:00
> The rule designed to stop "lottery abuse" hits direct employers 3x harder.

To prove this, you need to compute the total numbers and not just proportion. If 22% of the direct employees are Level 1, but there's only 300 direct level 1 filings total, the absolute numbers are dwarfed by the drop in probability of the staffing firms.
by retsibsi | 2026-01-22 15:10:12+00:00
So what is the problem? You've done the research, and your best estimate for the value is $X. And if you had to put a dollar value on avoiding doing the research again, it would be $Y. You put in a maximum bid of $X+Y, walk away from the auction, and come back to see that you won at a lower price (great!), won at your max price (fine), or lost (also fine; $X+Y was right at the threshold of what you considered worth paying, even accounting for the extra research you'll now have to do. Maybe if you look at the final price and see that you lost by 1c, you'll feel annoyed... but if that's anything more than an irrational emotional response, then why didn't you bid 1c more in the first place? You were free to enter any number you wanted, and you knew in advance that this might happen. If it is just an irrational emotional response, you can avoid that next time by not looking at the final price unless you win.)
by ZeroGravitas | 2026-01-22 15:10:17+00:00
Carbonbrief put out a report with a similar theme last July.

They calculated that Chinese green tech exports in 2024 reduced the rest of the world's carbon by 1%.

It's mostly solar (though they calculated EVs and some other stuff too) so assuming 25 years life that would be equivalent to 25% of the world-minus-China's CO2 emissions or about 18%.

So Chinese exports in one year cancel out 2/3rds of their yearly CO2.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-clean-energy-exp...

In 2025 they exported about 25% more in dollar terms, though prices keep falling so that can be misleading in terms of impact.
by CWuestefeld | 2026-01-22 15:10:19+00:00
This demonstrates the actual real-world problem, though. You're saying "this is a complex problem so I'm going to punt and depend on the user to resolve it". But in real life, the user doesn't even know as much as you do about how Code and its plugins interact with their environment. Knowledgewise, most users are not in a good position to evaluate the dangers. And even those who could understand the implications are concentrating on their goal of the moment and won't be thinking deeply about it.

You're relying the wrong people, and at the wrong time, for this to be very effective.
by vidarh | 2026-01-22 15:10:53+00:00
> It takes longer to read code than to write code if you're trying to get the same level of understanding. You're gaining time by building up an understanding deficit. That works for a while, but at some point you have to go burn the time to understand it.

This is true whether an AI wrote the code or a co-worker, except the AI is always on hand to answer detailed questions about the code, do detailed analysis, and run extensive tests to validate assumptions.

It is very rarely productive any more to dig into low level code manually.
by cogman10 | 2026-01-22 15:10:55+00:00
There's a difference between peanuts and the eds. In peanuts, adults were definitely around but the words they said weren't understandable. As a result they basically were just background noise. It wasn't the case that the kids felt unsupervised. They still went to school, rode the bus, talked with their teachers and parents (even if you never saw them.) And they never expressed a feeling like the adults were missing.

In the eds, if you'd said "their parents have long been dead and the kids are clinging on to what was left", it'd fit right into the story. Eds had dark and serious moments around the lack of adults.
by d0liver | 2026-01-22 15:11:07+00:00
If the tool is saving you a large chunk of time, then why does it matter what's happening in another industry? We seem to be losing a really simple thread here: Pay for things because they present more value to you than you're giving away in payment.

Y'all seem to have some notion of what constitutes "fair" payment that you're so attached to that you're willing to shoot yourselves in the foot.