MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by john___matrix | 2026-01-15 14:43:00+00:00
I'm now several years out of a career as a web designer and running my own retail business on Shopify and so while I've always had a background in working with devs and having a vague idea of how to plan and spec something, my previous job was design and writing HTML and CSS and I always wanted to be able to make small tools or little fun projects for me but the other parts of the project - the js, caching, api integration etc were always beyond my skillset.

While I wouldn't say execution is necessarily "cheap" for everything, ChatGPT and Gemini helped me build out a little Spotify playlist generator [1] recently that scans my top 100 artists in the last 12 months then generate a playlist based on their bottom 50% of songs in terms of popularity with an option for 1 or 2 songs per artist.

Sadly the Spotify API limits will never allow me to offer it to more than 25 people at a time but I get so bored of their algorithm playing me the same top songs from artists it's a fun way for me to explore "lesser lights" and something I'd have absolutely never have been able to build before, let alone spin up in a couple of evenings.

It's quite liberating as a non-dev suddenly having these new tools available that's for sure.

[1] https://github.com/welcomebrand/Spotify-Lesser-Lights
by cafard | 2026-01-15 14:43:00+00:00
I found out that, as I thought, I'd probably rather have read Frederick Law Olmsted on his travels in the antebellum South than Tony Horwitz (Spying on the South) on Olmsted on etc.

I found out that falling out of bed is not just for children, and that bringing an adult's body mass is not an improvement. I don't suppose that I'd fallen out of bed since LBJ was president.

I found out that YouTube has some interesting notions about me: the opening ad on a rather bland video was anything but bland, astonishing even a jaded old man.
by grayhatter | 2026-01-15 14:43:13+00:00
> I’m not exaggerating. And neither is anyone else.

> Stack Overflow, the site that defined a generation of software development, received 3,710 questions last month. That’s barely above the 3,749 it got in its first month of existence. The entire knowledge-sharing infrastructure we built our careers on is collapsing because people don’t need to ask anymore.

"Because people don't need to ask anymore."?!

Yeah, I wouldn't call it exaggerating, I think I would call it a fundamental misunderstanding.

I wanted to comment on the code examples he shared. But they're they're all closed source. Which is a decision given the premise of the whole article, err I mean ad, that implementations are free these days.
by Workaccount2 | 2026-01-15 14:43:25+00:00
You can use DC fast chargers to fill gaps as needed.

Also if you are always driving 40mi/day, you likely float with a battery percentage around 80%, leaving plenty of capacity for those consecutive 100 mile days with your standard overnight slow charge.

Again, this cannot be said enough, EVs are not gas vehicles, they do not refill like gas vehicles, if you apply gas vehicle logic to them, they look awful. But they are not gas vehicles, they don't follow the same logic and rules of gas vehicles. So you don't apply gas vehicle logic to them.

It's like handing chopsticks to an 18th century westerner, they'll stab their food with it and laugh about how stupid and useless they are. You need to learn and use chopsticks before criticizing chopsticks.

This whole thread (as always) is full of people stabbing their food with chopsticks.
by taeric | 2026-01-15 14:43:36+00:00
Nice! I have a css based animation at the bottom of the page I was playing with. Considered trying to do it with 3d animations, but at that point I was assuming something like the main article here would be needed to keep the faces coherent to each other.

I also never kept going down this route to actually learn solutions. Which, I think should be easy enough to do.
by css_apologist | 2026-01-15 14:43:50+00:00
this article is about humility

its odd to me that it takes time for people to develop this, i had it very early. I understood the painpoints of business leaders, and technical debt early on.

However, i can no longer excuse the state of things, its pathetic that we just learn to accept that we will always consistently deliver trash, and it is _much harder_ to fix it than to just let it fail

i do not see a solution to this in the current fascist structures we work in
by tialaramex | 2026-01-15 14:43:51+00:00
Also, the platform SDKs invariably assume platform preferred semantics which might not be what you wanted if you write cross platform software.

In particular this means you get another source of platform difference, no only does your Windows App work with different peripherals from the Mac App (because of OS drivers), but now some certificates which work with the Mac App don't work in Windows or vice versa. OpenSSL lets you bundle your CA policies with the app and thus avoid that issue (though now it's your choice what is or isn't accepted and you're probably not ready for that labour)
by everdrive | 2026-01-15 14:43:57+00:00
Wireless headphones were never a good idea. You need a buggy, annoying pairing protocol. You need a source of batteries. Lithium, in most cases, a deeply rare and valuable material is wasted so some idiots don't need to spend half a second managing a cable. Of course, the batteries wear out over time, and the tech eventually stops being supported. It's tons of waste just to make people slightly more comfortable.
by phil21 | 2026-01-15 14:44:12+00:00
There are exceptions, like to everything in life. They just aren't really that interesting to discuss when talking about trends and averages.

The average contractor servicing suburban and exurban properties in a work van is going to be able to trivially navigate 95% of all snowfalls with FWD with a modicum of winter driving skills. It's just not that hard, and very few places get the type of snow that requires a fully off road capable vehicle.

If I lived in the mountains of Colorado and servicing ranches or something of course I'd be buying for those conditions. But a standard city in the northern US or Canada? Meh. Total waste of money for a fleet vehicle. These sorts of locations are where something like 99% of all vehicle miles are put on.

For personal use now that I can afford it? AWD is on all my vehicles. It's a magical technology since it allows turning your brain off, and making some situations comically easy to navigate. But I'm not optimizing for cost efficiency or practicality there - I'm optimizing for luxury and convenience.
by cameldrv | 2026-01-15 14:44:17+00:00
Most people don't need to tow 4000 lbs period. If I had a Maverick and needed to tow 4000 lbs I would absolutely do it though. I've towed more than that in an older Tacoma that's not that different from the Maverick. Would I do it at 75mph? Probably not. Would I be towing 4000 lbs going 65 up an 8% grade in the heat at high altitude in Arizona? Again probably not, but the idea that a small truck needs to be able to do everything is just against the concept of a small truck. If you must have the ability to do that, get something bigger.

I agree that the Maverick's bed is small and the back seat is small. IMO they would have been better off making a regular cab or an "access cab" thing with two doors and fold-down seats, and used the extra length to add to the bed. Those are great if you're single or don't have kids, and you just need to carry passengers very occasionally. If you're regularly hauling kids around you definitely want the next step up. A lot of tradesmen essentially never even use the passenger seat though, and the back seat is just lost bed space unless you're using it for locked storage.
by DangitBobby | 2026-01-15 14:44:49+00:00
Not really a contradiction, since the entire point of jobs and the economy at all is to serve the specific needs of humanity and not to maximize paper clip production. If we should be learning anything from the modern era it's something that should have always been obvious: the Luddites were not the bad guys. The truth is you've fallen for centuries old propaganda. Hopefully someday you'll evolve into someone who doesn't carry water for paperclip maximizers.
by alibarber | 2026-01-15 14:45:00+00:00
I've also learned the hard way that breakout boards from Chinese retailers that look like the real thing but cost less than the price of the component from DigiKey in bulk are a pile of crap.

Whilst it is great that the hardware is open, I have come to the point of not caring that much as it just seems to mean that the market gets flooded with things that look very similar but are terrible. And in the case of that Si chip, it's really just the reference circuit from the manufacturer from what I see.
by notpushkin | 2026-01-15 14:45:04+00:00
Hmm, I guess I did Keybase a disservice. They do use a chain per user, and also store each leaf in a global Merkle tree, and then also store new Merkle tree root hash in a blockchain (previously Bitcoin, currently Stellar).

Although I think there are ways to make Merkle trees append-only (see e.g. the Certificate Transparency protocol [1]). This should be a suitable audit log implementation, even if a bit more tricky. That said, it is probably an overkill for most scenarios!

[1]: 2.1.2. Merkle Consistency Proofs: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6962#section-2.1.2

As for the DSL, I think I’m more interested in the specific usecases for changing the rules in the runtime, considering that you have to change the code to e.g. add a new endpoint. Is it perhaps a common thing to tweak for each tenant or something?

Personally, I’m considering pgfga [2] for my next project, though the rules will probably live in the codebase for now :-)

[2]: https://github.com/isaacharrisholt/pgfga
by agentultra | 2026-01-15 14:45:15+00:00
Traditional engineering involves more than talking to people, teams, and trade offs.

Where I live the engineering society here does license software engineers now and enforces the term, "Software Engineer," as a protected term. You can't just call yourself a software engineer. You have to have educational credentials, pass exams, and be licensed. You have to keep up with your educational requirements. You have to be insured.

It boils down to the same thing, people and teams, but the difference is liability.

Personally I think we're better off pair programming with actual people than GenAI chat bots. We get to teach each other and learn together which improves our skills. We actually need to socialize and be around people to remain healthy. You miss out on all of these benefits with chat bots.

And there's growing evidence that you don't learn as much when using them [0].

Consider when using them is appropriate and maybe don't rely on them for everything.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
by jacobgadek | 2026-01-15 14:45:52+00:00
OP here. I built Romek because I kept getting blocked by Cloudflare/2FA when trying to run personal agents on a VPS.

I realized it was easier to port my local authenticated session (cookies) than to write a complex login bot that constantly breaks.

It currently supports Chrome on macOS/Windows/Linux. It's open source (MIT). Happy to answer any questions about the decryption logic!
by pxc | 2026-01-15 14:46:13+00:00
As someone who ended up getting two bachelor's degrees so that I could somewhat deeply explore diverse subjects, I think schools would do well to have strong, distinct programs in:

- computer science
- computer engineering
- software engineering
- mathematics
- some kind(s) of interdisciplinary programs that interweave computing with fine arts, liberal arts, or business, e.g.,
- digital humanities
- information science
- idk what other disciplines

and provide generously list courses taught in one department but highly relevant in another under multiple headings, for use as electives in adjacent minors and majors.

IIRC, when I was in school, my university only had programs in "computer science", "electrical and computer engineering", "management information systems", "mathematics", and an experimental interdisciplinary thing they called "information science, technology, and the arts". Since then, they've created a "software engineering" major, which I imagine may have alleviated some of the misalignment I saw in my computer science classes.

I loved the great range of theory classes available to me, and they were my favorite electives. If there had been more (e.g., in programming language design, type theory, or functional programming), I definitely would have taken them. But if we'd had a software engineering program, I likely would have tried to minor in that as well!

To me, it's an old-school liberal art (like geometry and arithmetic) that specialists typically pursue as a formal science (that is, a science of logical structure rather than experimentation, like mathematics or Chomskyan grammar). The engineering elements that I see as vital to computer science per se are not really software engineering in the broadest sense, but mostly about fundamentals of computing that are taught in most computer science programs already (compilers, operating systems, binary operations, basic organization of CPUs, mainframes, etc.).

My computer science program technically had only one course on software engineering per se, and I think schools should really offer more than that. In fact, I think that's not enough even within a "computer science" program. But I think the most beneficial way to provide courses of broader interest is with "clear but porous" boundaries between the various members of this cluster of related disciplines, rather than revising core computer science curricula to court students who aren't really interested in computer science per se.
by burkaman | 2026-01-15 14:46:21+00:00
Possibly apocryphal quote from a Yosemite park ranger talking about the difficulty of designing a trash can that a bear can't open but a human can: "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists." - https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=191810&cid=15757347 (earliest instance of it I can find)

I don't really follow the analogy here to be honest.
by torginus | 2026-01-15 14:46:34+00:00
I was just thinking about how harmful that idea is in general. I think true achievement and productivity comes from deep focus and immersion in the problem.

Ironically a lot of monotonous work that you were forced to do helped you immerse yourself in the problem domain and equipped you for the hard parts. Not just talking about AI btw, in general when people automate away the easy parts, the hard parts will suddenly seem more difficult, because there's no ramp-up.

While I know in some ways AI coding is helpful, the mode of work where you keep getting distracted while the agent works is much less productive when you just grind the problem.

I mean AI also helps you stay in the zone, but this 'casual' approach to work ultimately results in things not getting done, in my personal experience.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-15 14:47:03+00:00
These anecdotes say the people still using Firefox don't like Chrome/Edge and that few cared when Edge switched from Spartan to Chromium. I don't think anyone disagrees with any of that. It's the anecdotes about the different reasons people actually stopped using Firefox for under debate, not the reasons a few have still stayed anyways.

I.e. IE (couldn't resist :)) can be said to have used the exact same shenanigans, as mentioned above, but there were other reasons droves of people still decided to install and use Firefox back then anyways. People no longer make the same decision to install and use Firefox, so if the shenanigans haven't changed... then what did? This is where the common refrains that Chrome managed to be a better browser (particular on mobile) for that decade or that Firefox managed to regress in certain ways come from. Sure, Chrome absolutely got its growth blasted forward by marketing and bundling, but people decided to stick with it and stop using Firefox for reasons unrelated to that. Sometimes niche reasons, sometimes general reasons, but the story was never something like "Chrome invented marketing and bundling, which resulted in Firefox losing its easily gained massive market share of the time".
by bflesch | 2026-01-15 14:47:03+00:00
I think that we should discern between nonfunctional and functional requirements. Right now, implementation of functional requirements can be done very fast, with the effects that you mention.

But nonfunctional requirements such as reliability, performance and security are still extremely hard to get right, because they not only need code but many correct organizational decisions to be achieved.

As customers connect these nonfunctional requirements with a brand, I don't see how big SaaS players will have a problem.

For new brands, it's as hard as ever to establish trust. Maybe coding is a bit faster due to AI, but I'm not yet convinced that vibe coders are the people on top of which you can build a resilient organization that achieves excellence in nonfunction requirements.
by lsiq | 2026-01-15 14:47:10+00:00
The Teensy is so 2020 anyways. You want to skate where the puck is going.

You will want boards of the Kendryte K230 or SpacemitK3 (best value RISC-V chips) or Puya PY32 (best cheapest MCU, takes 5V!), and a STM32P1 linux board for good measure.
by mmastrac | 2026-01-15 14:47:12+00:00
Ideas are cheap for a very narrow vision of "ideas". Sure, you can build your recipe site, TODO list or whatever it is cheaply and quickly without a single thought, but LLMs are still just assembling lots of open-source libraries _mostly_ written by humans into giant piles of spaghetti.

There's a hilarious thread on Twitter where someone "built a browser" using an LLM feedback loop and it just pasted together a bunch of Servo components, some random other libraries and tens of thousands of spaghetti glue to make something that can render a webpage in a few seconds to a minute.

This will eventually get better once they learn how to _actually_ think and reason like us - and I don't believe by any means that they do - but I still think that's a few years out. We're still at what is clearly a strongly-directed random search stage.

The industry is going through a mass psychosis event right now thinking that things are ready for AI loops to just write everything, when the only real way for them to accomplish anything is by just burning tokens over and over until they finally stumble across something that works.

I'm not arguing that it won't ever happen. I think the true endgame of this work is that we'll have personal agents that just do stuff for us, and the vast majority of the value of the entire software industry will collapse as we all return to writing code as a fun little hobby, like those folks who spend hours making bespoke furniture. I, for one, look forward to this.
by anthk | 2026-01-15 14:47:14+00:00
I lived with 2.7KBPS

- News, phlogs, Wikipedia, translation services -> Gopher or Gemini, gopher://magical.fish and gemini://gemi.dev plus gopher://sdf.org and Bongusta Phlogs. It's magical.

- IRC or IRC+Bitlbee -> IM, Jabber, IRC, most protocols

- Email -> Mbsync+msmtp + mutt. Caching helps there

- Usenet -> Slrn+Slrnpull, it has tech groups, caching and there's a web news discuss group too

- SSH -> Mosh
by hackeraccount | 2026-01-15 14:47:45+00:00
Really? I don't think I have a dog in this hunt but my judgement of comments is that it's maybe 70/30 (with the 30 being critical in one way or the other) and anyone critical is getting down voted to oblivion.

That said "you're just repeating what you're told" is a comforting argument but doesn't go all that far.
by rocqua | 2026-01-15 14:48:05+00:00
I find that the LLMs are good at the 'glue code'. The "here's a rather simple CRUD like program, please tie all of the important things together in the right way". That was always a rather important and challenging bit of work, so having LLMs take it of our hands is valuable.

But for the code where the hard part isn't making things designed separately work together, but getting the actual algorithm right. That's where I find LLMs still really fail. Finding that trick to take your approach from quadratic to N log N, or even just understanding what you mean after you found the trick yourself. I've had little luck there with LLMs.

I think this is mostly great, because its the hard stuff that I have always found fun. Properly architecting these CRUD apps, and learning which out of the infinite set of ways to do this are better, was fun as a matter of craftsmanship. But that hits at a different level from implementing a cool new algorithm.
by 0928374082 | 2026-01-15 14:48:29+00:00
pics (for anyone who prefers a bit more subtlety in their international relations):

https://bilder.deutschlandfunk.de/72/d7/aa/c5/72d7aac5-be14-...

https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/17070508372...
by jlarocco | 2026-01-15 14:48:45+00:00
But a lot of the people who buy trucks for image want the image of somebody who's going out towing, carrying a bunch of stuff, and doing "truck things".

They don't fit the image if they drive an e-truck because e-trucks aren't great at those "truck things. At least that's my theory why the e-trucks aren't doing well, even if they should be.

No doubt a used Lightning is a great deal if you only need to carry stuff once in a while.
by wongarsu | 2026-01-15 14:49:41+00:00
Wikipedia quoted global primary energy production at 19.6 TW, or about 2400W/person. Which is obviously not even close to equally distributed. Per-country it gets complicated quickly, but naively taking the total from [1] brings the US to 9kW per person.

And that's ignoring sources like food from agriculture, including the food we feed our food.

To be fair, AI servers also use a lot more energy than their raw power demand if we use the same metrics. But after accounting for everything, an American and an 8xH100 server might end up in about the same ballpark

Which is not meant as an argument for replacing Americans with AI servers, but it puts AI power demand into context

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/
by shredprez | 2026-01-15 14:49:55+00:00
Canva destroyed graphic design well before LLMs caught up, but UX is still (somewhat surprisingly) on the ropes.

My bet: front end devs who need mocks to build something that looks nice get crowded out by UX designers with taste as code generation moves further into "good enough" territory.

Then those designers get crowded out as taste generation moves into "good enough" territory.
by awkward | 2026-01-15 14:50:58+00:00
Deeply hate this. Just add a small fee. It's just a couple bucks.

Open Source Software underwrites everything. It makes the largest human endeavors work. It makes silly ephemeral games and little notes apps run. Turning maintainers into a kind of digital landlord that charges a fee is both insultingly low bore and enough to squeeze the life out of computing as a hobby.
by jandrewrogers | 2026-01-15 14:51:13+00:00
These kinds of errors are not rare in the media.

Even among engineering fields routine handling of diverse and messy unit systems (e.g. chemical engineering) are relatively uncommon. If you work in one of these domains, there is a practiced discipline to detect unit conversion mistakes. You can do it in your head well enough to notice when something seems off but it requires encyclopedic knowledge that the average person is unlikely to have.

A common form of this is a press release that suggests a prototype process can scale up to solve some planetary problem. In many cases you can quickly estimate that planetary scale would require some part of the upstream inputs to be orders of magnitude larger than exists or is feasible. The media doesn't notice this part and runs with the "save the planet" story.

This is the industrial chemistry version of the "in mice" press releases in medicine. It is an analogue to the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.