MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by px43 | 2026-01-26 14:25:07+00:00
> it struggles

It does not struggle, you struggle. It is a tool you are using, and it is doing exactly what you're telling it to do. Tools take time to learn, and that's fine. Blaming the tools is counterproductive.

If the code is well documented, at a high level and with inline comments, and if your instructions are clear, it'll figure it out. If it makes a mistake, it's up to you to figure out where the communication broke down and figure out how to communicate more clearly and consistently.
by AhmedAli9991 | 2026-01-26 14:25:12+00:00
Hi christian I am a FullStack developer with over four years of experience building high-impact, real-world applications in both enterprise environments and fast-paced startups and also have a strong understanding of the entire product lifecycle.

feel free to reach out

linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahmed-ali-a8b415215
website: https://ahmedthedev.vercel.app
email: ahmedalibalti2000@gmail.com
github: https://github.com/AhmedAli9991
by wongarsu | 2026-01-26 14:25:33+00:00
The same reason why they exist now. Why spend millions of tokens on designing, implementing and debugging something, followed by years of discovering edge cases in the real world, if I can just use a library that already did all of that

Sure, leftpad and python-openai aren't hugely valuable in the age of LLMs, but redis and ffmpeg are still as useful as ever. Probably even more useful now that LLMs can actually know and use all their obscure features
by jimnotgym | 2026-01-26 14:25:43+00:00
> Chronic overuse of groundwater, forest destruction, land degradation, and pollution have caused irreversible freshwater loss in many parts of the world

I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories.

In the UK after a prolonged drought in Southern England the news announced something like, 'The aquifer is so depleted that it will take years to recover'. Then came 3 months of the wettest summer on record. I remember a local fishing tackle shop going out of business because noone could fish due to flooding! The acqifer filled in 3 months.

Then I saw a village in Southern Spain where the acquifer dried up. Someone realised that the Moors had built an ancient water harvesting system in the hills, at least hundreds of years before, and because of rural depopulation the knowledge and labour to maintain them had been lost. The abundance of water was not natural, it was human created, and then human lost.

I think the final problem I wanted to speak about is the 'it's the end users fault' problem. I pay for my water, through water rates (a tax on the property I live in). Others have water meters. The company that gets that money has to supply me water, and take away my sewage. The company used to be a public utility, but was privatised when I was young. When there is a drought they tell me I should shower rather than bath, they ban the use of hosepipes! They tell me to buy low flush toilets and more efficient washing machines. But they never share that pain, they still make massive profits for their shareholders. The private water companies in the UK have not built a single reservoir since privatisation in 1989. To be fair most of the water infrastructure is Victorian. The infrastructure that filed reservoirs was left unmaintained. A staggering amount of water leaks from pipes in the road. Their solution is for me to use less water, so they can continue to get rich. And they know that they can fail to invest forever, and the government will have to bail them out. I suspect this is the problem in other places too.
by otikik | 2026-01-26 14:25:45+00:00
> when LLMs can build you an custom(!) hammer or saw in a few minutes, why go to the shed?

Because I thought I needed a hammer for nails (employee payroll) but then I realized I also need it to screw (sales), soldering (inventory management) and cleanup (taxes).

Oh and don't forget that next month the density of iron can lower up to 50%.
by orev | 2026-01-26 14:26:07+00:00
It’s like weightlifting: sure you can use a forklift to do it, but if the goal is to build up your own strength, using the forklift isn’t going to get you there.

This is the ultimate problem with AI in academia. We all inherently know that “no pain no gain” is true for physical tasks, but the same is true for learning.

Of course this becomes a different thing outside of learning, where delivering results is more important in a workplace context. But even then you still need someone who does the high level thinking.
by red-iron-pine | 2026-01-26 14:26:07+00:00
i don't know why this is downvoted, it's a legit complaint.

wyoming has ~800k people. ohio has 11 million. the greater NYC area (parts of NJ, CT, etc.) has ~22 million. california has 40 million.

and as a parent poster mentioned, just slightly 1/3 of eligible voters chose trump; if "no candidate" was a choice it may have one most states, beating out kamala and trump.
by altern8 | 2026-01-26 14:26:31+00:00
I think that something in between works.

I have AI build self-contained, smallish tasks and I check everything it does to keep the result consistent with global patterns and vision.

I stay in the loop and commit often.

Looks to me like the problem a lot of people are having is that they have AI do the whole thing.

If you ask it "refactor code to be more modern", it might guess what you mean and do it in a way you like it or not, but most likely it won't.

If you keep tasks small and clearly specced out it works just fine. A lot better than doing it by hand in many cases, specially for prototyping.
by palmotea | 2026-01-26 14:26:41+00:00
> The paradigm now for software is "build a tool shed/garage/barn/warehouse full of as much capability for as many uses possible" but when LLMs can build you an custom(!) hammer or saw in a few minutes, why go to the shed?

1) Your specific analogy is kinda missing something important: I don't want my tools working differently every time I use them, also it's work to use LLMs. A hammer is kind of a too-simple example, but going with it anyway: when I need a hammer, I don't want my "LLM" generating a plastic one, then having to iterate for 30 minutes to get it right. It takes me far less than 30 minutes to go to my shed. A better example is would be a UI, even if it was perfect, do you want all the buttons and menus to be different every time you use the tool? Because you generate a new one each time instead of "going to the shed"?

2) Then there's the question, can an LLM actually build, or does it just regurgitate? A hammer is an extremely we'll understood tool, that's been refined over centuries, so I think an LLM could do a pretty good job with one. There are lots of examples, but that also means the designs the LLM is referencing are probably better than the LLM's output. And then for things not like that, more unique, can the LLM even do it at all or with a reasonable amount of effort?

I think there's a modern phenomenon where making things "easier" actually results in worse outcomes, a degraded typical state vs. the previous status quo, because it turns what was once a necessity into a question of personal discipline. And it turns out when you remove necessity, a lot of people have a real hard time doing the best thing on discipline alone. LLMs might just enable more of those degenerate outcomes: everyone's using "custom" LLM generated tools all the time, but they all actually suck and are worse than if we just put that effort into designing the tools manually.
by sausagefeet | 2026-01-26 14:26:43+00:00
I work with @lawnchair, so we both have been complaining to each other about how slow GitHub PRs are for awhile. It's wild that THE feature of GH is so bad!

I have been using Argus in anger for a few days, it needs some updates, but being "run on your own desktop" software means it can be a lot simpler than a full product, which is nice. Next feature I am pushing to get implemented: I want Reviewboard-like intra-push diffs. I have a force-push heavy workflow and GH PR view doesn't let you see the diff of what was pushed vs what I last reviewed, and that is a feature that all the data is there and I want it.
by t-3 | 2026-01-26 14:27:00+00:00
Without any stated goals or definitions of a proportional response from Israel, how are outsiders supposed to know what their final goal is? If they give every indication of fighting a war of extermination (public statements calling for eradication of Gazans and emptying of the strip, support for illegal settler colonies, support for rape and torture) and don't give reasonable objectives for completion of the war, of course it will be labeled a genocide. Israel's refusal to communicate with the rest of the world is why they are being "misunderstood". They either don't want to be understood, or we have the correct interpretation of events and they don't care to hide it.
by dangus | 2026-01-26 14:27:16+00:00
There are efficiency standards and laws for large appliances.

This isn’t some kind of controversial subject. Ensuring home appliances don’t overconsume energy is beneficial for everyone in society.

You don’t want to have brownouts, blackouts, or run out of heating gas/oil in the winter.

You bring up the idea of regulating computer equipment power efficiency as if it’s crazy talk but it’s a real thing in concept. Governments do offer guidance and sometimes regulate computer efficiency. They have efficiency standards (e.g. Energy Star) as well as relying on industry standards (e.g. “80 Plus”).

Take a look at your computer monitor or TV box and it probably has an energy star logo somewhere if you live in the US.

The US federal government and other state and local agencies will not buy computer products that aren’t energy star compliant, and encourages businesses and individual to follow similar standards. Other countries might regulate further than these (dis)incentives.

https://www.energy.gov/femp/purchasing-energy-efficient-comp...

And if you bring up data centers, those are considered productive industry that has its own regulations different than home regulations. Plenty of things legal in industrial series aren’t legal in your house.
by ephaeton | 2026-01-26 14:27:25+00:00
time to try guix again!
Let's see ... hey, let's install inside an arch nspawn on arch.
Oh no, builds won't complete. Can't mount a proc directory.
Doesn't matter if root or not, with or without systemd-nsresourced, etc, spawn ran as root or not, or ..

Fine, let's give it a shot in a qemu: doesn't work. After eons it just .. fails. Some HTTP timeout.

Ok, ok, let's install the thing on my box. I didn't want to but let's give this a try .. install, try and install the first package ... whoa, that computing my solution is taking forever, my oh my ... oh it does something!

```
In ice-9/boot-9.scm:
1685:16 1 (raise-exception _ #:continuable? _)
1685:16 0 (raise-exception _ #:continuable? _)

ice-9/boot-9.scm:1685:16: In procedure raise-exception:
In procedure struct-vtable: Wrong type argument in position 1 (expecting struct): #f
```

Wow, same experience as the last three times. Sink time into making sure I'm up to date with concepts, ideas, implementation details, read the docco, try the simplest things and ... fail.

Obviously this is not the default experience of you all. But it doesn't seem to be for me :'(
by djoldman | 2026-01-26 14:27:57+00:00
> biomedical progress, especially in therapeutics, has become less productive despite staggering advances in basic science.

> the inflation-adjusted cost to bring a new drug to market roughly doubles every nine years: a trend that has held since the 1950s.

Presumably they're getting at numbers of new drugs brought to market.

I'm interested in a different metric: Quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) saved due primarily to new drugs brought to market.

Who cares if 1 million drugs come to market and they do little to improve lives? We'd prefer 10 that had more QALYs.
by bccdee | 2026-01-26 14:28:53+00:00
ATProto may be the closest we'll get to that. PDSes are granular enough to serve individual users, and you can (theoretically) pull from a relay and index only posts from users you're interested in for your appview, if you're hardware-limited. Relays are fungible and pretty lightweight themselves, so you're not depending too much on any central server.

But people don't want to run an always-online server to send their stuff to peers, so they host it on the main bsky servers. The problem with p2p is UX; people don't want to DIY their server.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-26 14:29:02+00:00
No, it’s an internet thing. I’ve also installed bathroom fixtures recently (in the US) and my experience is the same as yours.

My other comment pointing out that these materials are still available and easily found online is getting downvoted.

I suspect a lot of the comments and arguments are coming from the perspective of people who haven’t done any of this type of work, so under a thread about a historical document they assume that the content of the document was only available in the past?

This is on of the stranger comment sections I’ve seen on HN lately. The comments about how only our grandparents learned how to do things like read manuals or change oil in their career is really revealing.
by delegate | 2026-01-26 14:29:06+00:00
There's some irony in the fact that LLMs are in large part possible because of open source software.

From the tools which were used to design and develop the models (programming languages, libraries) to the operating systems running them to the databases used for storing training data .. plus of course they were trained mostly on open source code.

If OSS didn't exist, it's highly unlikely that LLMs would have been built.
by seec | 2026-01-26 14:29:21+00:00
Hilariously, you got downvoted. Of course, HN is a popularity contest just like any other social media or social group for that matter.

Truth doesn't matter that much for most people, they just want to belong with a tribe even if they need to come up or agree with a lot of bullshit along the way.
Thankfully there are people who don't care too much and they push the envelope.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-26 14:29:32+00:00
> go into decision paralysis or prematurely optimize

Setting out to implement a feature only to immediately get bogged down in details that I could probably get away with glossing over. LLMs short circuit that by just spitting something out immediately. Of course it's of questionable quality, but once you get something working you can always come back and improve it.
by lapcat | 2026-01-26 14:30:19+00:00
> Going back to typing all of the code yourself (my interpretation of "writing by hand") because you don't have the agent-managerial skills to tell the coding agents how to clean up the mess they made feels short-sighted to me.

Well, I don’t think there is any question about it. It can only be attributable to human error. This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.
by surajrmal | 2026-01-26 14:30:32+00:00
Binary comparability extends beyond the vide that runs in your process. These days a lot of functionality occurs by way of IPC which has a variety of wire protocols depending on the interface. For instance there is dbus, Wayland protocols, varlink, etc. Both the wire protocol, and the APIs built on top need to retain backwards comparability to ensure Binary compatibility. Otherwise you're not going to be able to run on various different Linux based platforms arbitrarily. And unlike the kernel, these userspace surfaces do not take backwards compatibility nearly as important. It's also much more difficult to target a subset of these APIs that are available on systems that are only 5 years old. I would argue API endpoints on the web have less risk here (although those break all the time as well)
by bediger4000 | 2026-01-26 14:30:32+00:00
Ethically dubious article. Treats using "residential proxies", which are probably installed by some kind of cybercriminal, as a legitimate thing to do. Similarly, treats circumventing anti-scraping measures as a legitimate thing to do. They aren't. Take the hint, ignore web sites with some kind of anti-bot, or anti-scraper system. Ignore web sites with a scraper junkyard. Those people don't want you to have their content.

When a website upgrades its anti-bot system, it doesn't just make scraping slightly harder. It can make it 5X, 10X, or even 50X more expensive overnight.

This, of course, is very good news. Keep up the good work, folks!
by tom1337 | 2026-01-26 14:30:39+00:00
I have no first-hand experience with the Max subscription (which the $200 plan is) but having read a few discussions here and on GitHub [1] it seems that Anthropic has tanked the usage limits in the last few weeks and thus I would argue that you would run into limits pretty quick if you using it (unsupervised) for 24h each day.

1) https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/16157
by jmye | 2026-01-26 14:31:10+00:00
I'm "just going to copy and paste" your actual statement: "and SFH zoning should not exist"

> It's easy to say 'live where you want' when your preferred housing isn't illegal in most of the US.

And yet, even if we take this obviously bogus statement on it's face, there are still many places you could live if you were more interested in living there and less interested in trying to force me to live there, too. You could even, if this were honest concern, join your local city's planning commission and talk to people who actually understand your local area about it's zoning, though I suppose that takes more effort than shit posting about SFH BAD on social media.
by alecco | 2026-01-26 14:31:35+00:00
This guy tested it: https://she-llac.com/claude-limits

"Suspiciously precise floats, or, how I got Claude's real limits" 19hs ago 25 points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46756742

OTOH, with ChatGPT/Codex limits are less of a problem, in general.
by betaby | 2026-01-26 14:32:22+00:00
Based on what metric you declare my statement as false?

For example for Algeria:
"available resources dropping from 1500 \(m^{3}\)/capita/year in 1962 to 500 \(m^{3}\)/capita/year by 2016, far below the 1000 \(m^{3}\) threshold set by the World Bank"

the main factor is a region overpopulation.
by sailfast | 2026-01-26 14:32:34+00:00
I felt everything in this post quite emphatically until the “but I’m actually faster than the AI.”

Might be my skills but I can tell you right now I will not be as fast as the AI especially in new codebases or other languages or different environments even with all the debugging and hell that is AI pull request review.

I think the answer here is fast AI for things it can do on its own, and slow, composed, human in the loop AI for the bigger things to make sure it gets it right. (At least until it gets most things right through innovative orchestration and model improvement moving forward.)
by bko | 2026-01-26 14:32:42+00:00
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't water for cooling a closed loop? The water is used to cool, presumably it becomes water vapor and is re-condensed when cooled and used again.

Either way, prices should determine what an effective use of resources should be. It signals the scarcity, allows it to flow to the most productive resources, encourages new production and sources, and provides revenue.
by DavidGraca | 2026-01-26 14:32:49+00:00
Hi, thanks for reaching out, yep a big issue... not only for skills but all dependencies. One of the options I see is governance... rely on a trusted listing where you with your experts curate/validate/assess and select the ones that match your quality standards. The current MCP already supports that, you just need to change the listing json file, right now i use this listing https://github.com/dmgrok/agent_skills_directory that goes get the skills to some "trusted" repos, anthropic, vercel, github.

how are you dealing with this topic at keypost.ai?
by shmoogy | 2026-01-26 14:32:50+00:00
I've started using Claude code to review my linear tasks, add / propose new tags/labels and flag if it's a programming task (and if so flesh out requirements so I can toss it to an agent). It really helps me to just toss everything into it and see what I've got.

I'm actually going to take it further and use clawd to check Jira, linear, slack, and Apple reminders and help me to unify and aggregate them - as I'll often remember and record a reminder on Siri - and kind of ping me about these and adjusting dates when they're overdue so nothing slips through too past due
Show HN: 1Setter – One-click access to macOS system settings from the menu bar
by yyqyes | 2026-01-26 14:33:01+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m an indie developer and I recently built 1Setter, a macOS menu bar app that lets you quickly access and apply common system settings with a single click. It supports individual actions as well as grouped actions, so you can trigger multiple settings in one step if needed.

The motivation came from the friction of scattered macOS settings: some are buried in System Settings, some require multiple steps, and existing menu bar tools often felt too limited or opinionated. I wanted something lightweight, predictable, and fast.

Under the hood, the app uses official system frameworks where possible, and carefully scoped system-level commands where necessary, with permission checks and state verification to avoid mismatches between the UI and the actual system state. I maintain compatibility across recent macOS versions.

The app is entirely from the menu bar, and follows a simple one-time purchase model. Feedback from macOS users — especially around edge cases, OS compatibility, or actions you wish existed but are painful to access today — would be much appreciated.

You can check it out here: https://www.1setter.app

Thanks!
by djinnrutger | 2026-01-26 14:33:03+00:00
I Manage IT for a small/medium company. We were paying quite a bit for helpdesk software. Last year they moved their modules around so the features we wanted (IT Inventory) cost extra per item. With the help of AI I was able to vibe code my own helpdesk with Python/Flask. It does everything we need to do (and then some lol) and works great for us. We keep it on the inside of our network. It has been a great and fun project for me in my spare time and it is all possible because of AI!

https://helpfuldjinn.com/
https://github.com/DjinnRutger/HelpDesk-Public
by johngunderman | 2026-01-26 14:33:04+00:00
I interpret this comment as talking about prioritization across a broader org. A senior engineer should be able to prioritize inside of their team and adjacent teams. But there is a reason why there are levels of engineer beyond senior - beyond just increased technical judgement, there is increased influence in orgs spanning hundreds or even thousands of engineers.

There is always opportunity for growth in this dimension. For example even the CEO has to build the right skills to convince the board of their priorities.
by exe34 | 2026-01-26 14:33:57+00:00
along that line of thinking, I've been wondering if there are better building blocks. right now we're asking llms to use the bricks designed for the human hand building a cathedral - what do the bricks look like when we want AI to build many sheds for specific use? functional programming? would the database ideas of data storage like the longhorn vapourware make a come back?
by jihadjihad | 2026-01-26 14:34:25+00:00
In my experience asking the model to construct an automated test suite, with no additional context, is asking for a bad time. You'll see tests for a custom exception class that you (or the LLM) wrote that check that the message argument can be overwritten by the caller, or that a class responds to a certain method, or some other pointless and/or tautological test.

If you start with an example file of tests that follow a pattern you like, along with the code the tests are for, it's pretty good at following along. Even adding a sentence to the prompt about avoiding tautological tests and focusing on the seams of functions/objects/whatever (integration tests) can get you pretty far to a solid test suite.