MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by koyote | 2026-01-07 10:36:23+00:00
I might give that a go in the future, but in this case it would've been faster for me to just do the work than to coach it for each file.

Also as this was an architectural change there are no tests to run until it's done. Everything would just fail. It's only done when the whole thing is done.
I think that might be one of the reasons it got stuck: it was trying to solve issues that it did not prove existed yet. If it had just finished the job and run the tests it would've probably gotten further or even completed it.

It's a bit like stopping half way through renaming a function and then trying to run the tests and finding out the build does not compile because it can't find 'old_function'. You have to actually finish and know you've finished before you can verify your changes worked.

I still haven't actually addressed this tech debt item (it's not that important :)). But I might try again and either see if it succeeds this time (with plan in an md) or just do the work myself and get Opus to fix the unit tests (the most tedious part).
by weatherlite | 2026-01-07 10:36:36+00:00
UBI (from taxing big tech) and retraining. In the U.S they'll have enough money to do this and it will still suck and many people won't recover the extreme loss of status and income (after we've been told our income and status are the most important things in life it's gonna be very hard for people to adapt to the loss of it).
Countries like India and Philipines and Ukraine which are basically knowledge support hub without much original knowledge of their own yeah this is gonna be something for sure. Quite depressing.
by kotaKat | 2026-01-07 10:38:42+00:00
Difficulty is when you don't know what ad network it is, the app hides the ad network they use, and refuse to disclose who it is.

You got served an ad from "one of our partners". That's all you'll get to know, and there's no mechanism to even report the app's shitty behavior to Google or Apple (and they don't care when the app becomes too large, either).
by 9dev | 2026-01-07 10:39:28+00:00
Great! Another shallow dismissal is just what everyone needs right now! I don’t understand this kind of gate keeping.

AI has been changing more rapidly than any other technology I have encountered in my life. It’s absolutely nobody’s fault for not keeping up with it or arriving late to the party, and telling them they should rather just stop because they won’t get it anyway is just awful behaviour.
by highraja | 2026-01-07 10:39:47+00:00
Hi HN,

I built VoiceWise after realizing I kept postponing voice notes because they require
time + mental context to process.

VoiceWise takes a long voice message and explains:
- what the sender actually wants
- what decisions are being asked for
- what actions are required
- suggested replies (multilingual)

It’s not just transcription — it tries to model intent and urgency.

Early stage and very open to feedback.
by vaultsandbox | 2026-01-07 10:41:04+00:00
Thanks for the upvotes so far!

I would love to dig into the actual developer experience side. One of the main reasons I built this was to kill the sleep(5) or polling loops in CI by using Server-Sent Events (SSE) in the SDKs, so tests react instantly.

For those of you managing large test suites:

- Does your current team rely on mocks/Mailtrap style catch-alls, or do you just trust that the protocol (TLS/DKIM) works?

- How are you currently handling PII in dev/test email logs? (This is why I went with encryption for zero-plaintext storage on the server).

Any feedback would be really useful, since until now I have gotten none and as a solo dev it gets to a point that you do not know if it is a good idea or not.

Thanks again,
by ekidd | 2026-01-07 10:41:06+00:00
> But if claude can reliably reorganize code, fix patterns, and write working migrations for state when prompted to do so, it seems like the entire way to reason about tech debt has changed.

Yup, I recently spent 4 days using Claude to clean up a tool that's been in production for over 7 years. (There's only about 3 months of engineering time spent on it in those years.)

We've known what the tool needed for many years, but ugh, the actual work was fairly messy and it was never a priority. I reviewed all of Opus's cleanup work carefully and I'm quite content with the result. Maybe even "enthusiastic" would be accurate.

So even if Claude can't clean up all the tech debt in a totally unsupervised fashion, it can still help address some kinds of tech debt extremely rapidly.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-07 10:41:17+00:00
thanks! I hadn't been thinking retail though; I'd been thinking of people who were studying a language in order to signal that they were both interested in and committed to cultivating 关系 before exploring wholesale possibilities.

Wouldn't cantonese help with that? After all, languages are accomplishments, not acquisitions: you can't just buy spoken facility, you have to earn it through study and practice.

Or am I mistaken there too?

EDIT: another practical advantage: polyglots can code switch to quickly communicate things monoglots might have to resort to lengthy circumlocution to communicate.

EDIT2: Walkable city! Sweet! I don't know about Houston, but it looks way nicer than LA or NYC.

EDIT3: do I have these prices right? 8,8 CNY ~= 1 CHF?
by close04 | 2026-01-07 10:41:21+00:00
> Whatever the initial problem was is likely to still present after reboot

You only know this after the reboot. Reboot to fix the issue and if it comes back then you know you have to dig deeper. Why sink hours of effort into fixing a random bit flip? I'll take the opposite position and say that especially for consumer devices most issues are caused by some random event resulting in a soft error. They're very common and if they happen you don't "troubleshoot" that.
by raxxorraxor | 2026-01-07 10:42:47+00:00
There also is some conflict of interests. VC investors and marketeers obviously want to nurture optimism. And that is entirely understandable and very likely necessary for good ideas to be spread.

While engineers, especially those that like to share knowledge and open source solutions are far more critical of monetizing products.

Overall HN doesn't lack criticism, since there many technically minded people around. But I like the mix to be honest and agree that skepticism is often seen as simple negativity. Sure, you probably don't want to advertise your product as "pretty decent, but there are numerous better theoretical solutions".
by rapnie | 2026-01-07 10:44:07+00:00
The videos too. Geopolitical commentators cannot show e.g. an explosion in Ukraine caused by a drone, and they say "T" instead of "terrorist", and "kaboomed" instead of "killed", etc. Doing so may see the vid demonetized or even taken down.

OTOH deep fake gepolitical commentators are all over the place, and it is allowed (sometimes Youtube shows a label, sometimes the channel itself describes itself as a "fan channel" of the commentator, and not the real deal. Sometimes e.g. for Shorts you can see in the info whether things are AI generated).
by nacozarina | 2026-01-07 10:44:21+00:00
Creating the code was never the hard part. Not ever.

Here’s the hard part. Listening to workers describe their work process, artifacts created & outcomes achieved. To really learn their world. It’s understanding where their current tools & collaborators are awkwardly aligned. It’s about you learning minutiae of your client’s organizational & emotional baggage. It’s about navigating & resolving the forty different versions of truth they tell you. It’s about you doing this over breakfast & dinner for them for months. Years, if you are any good at it.

Generating code was never the hard part, welcome to the engineering team.
by alex1138 | 2026-01-07 10:45:05+00:00
So if we're linking stuff (and please don't scream at me for Rumble, Youtube loves removing videos) here's one https://rumble.com/vt62y6-covid-19-a-second-opinion.html

I was initially trying to make a point that the ideological lines that people have drawn have made it so they automatically think RFK is anti-science and they as a consequence have a whole host of assumptions for which I don't even blame them if they haven't spent time reading up about it. I apologize for not countering every single point and going to covid but it's kind of worth pointing out that RFK a) raises some very substantive charges against Fauci for frankly war criminal like actions throughout his unfortunate history of practicing medicine and b) it wasn't "mismanagement". They did, seriously, the opposite of good practice (both accepted good practice and what was discovered in 2020 going forward) in just about every case

If you're not sympathetic to that then of course you're going to disagree and you might think that the only reason someone like Musk bought X (and please don't think this is me Musk fanning, I dislike him for several reasons) is just to have a joyride (which is still possible); they used to ban so many people and real doctors for information that they didn't like and it was a serious problem and if they could do that for covid then they also did it for other things

Edit: (see, I do know how to edit comments) here's it on Youtube which is the highlights https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jMONZMuS2U
by prokopton | 2026-01-07 10:45:22+00:00
I asked Claude’s opinion and it disagreed. :)

Claude’s response:

The article’s central tension is real - Burke went from skeptic to believer by building four increasingly complex apps in rapid succession using Opus 4.5. But his evidence also reveals the limits of that belief.

Notice what he actually built: Windows utilities, a screen recorder, and two Firebase-backed CRUD apps for his wife’s business. These are real applications solving real problems, but they’re also the kinds of projects where you can throw away the code if something goes wrong. When he says “I don’t know how the code works” and “I’m maybe 80% confident these applications are bulletproof,” he’s admitting the core problem with the “AI replaces developers” narrative.

That 80% confidence matters. In your Splink work, you’re the sole frontend developer - you can’t deploy code you’re 80% confident about. You need to understand the implications of your architectural decisions, know where the edge cases are, and maintain the system when requirements change. Burke’s building throwaway prototypes for his wife’s yard sign business. You’re building production software that other people depend on.

His “LLM-first code” philosophy is interesting but backwards. He’s optimizing for AI regeneration rather than human maintenance because he assumes the AI will always be there to fix problems. But AI can’t tell you why a decision was made six months ago when business requirements shift. It can’t explain the constraints that led to a particular architecture. And it definitely can’t navigate political and organizational context when stakeholders disagree about priorities.

The Firebase examples are telling - he keeps emphasizing how well Opus knows the Firebase CLI, as if that proves general capability. But Firebase is extremely well-documented, widely-discussed training data. Try that same experiment with your company’s internal API or a niche library with poor documentation. The model won’t be nearly as capable.

What Burke actually demonstrated is that Opus 4.5 is an excellent pair programmer for prototyping with well-known tools. That’s legitimately valuable. But “pair programmer for prototyping” isn’t the same as “replacing developers.” It’s augmenting someone who already knows how to build software and can evaluate whether the generated code is good.

The most revealing line is at the end: “Just make sure you know where your API keys are.” He’s nervous about security because he doesn’t understand the code. That nervousness is appropriate - it’s the signal that tells you when you’ve crossed from useful tool into dangerous territory.
by lallysingh | 2026-01-07 10:45:38+00:00
Yeah. Just like another engineer. When you tell another engineer to build you a feature, it's improbable they'll do it they way that you consider "right."

This sounds a lot like the old arguments around using compilers vs hand-writing asm. But now you can tell the LLM how you want to implement the changes you want. This will become more and more relevant as we try to maintain the code it generates.

But, for right now, another thing Claude's great at is answering questions about the codebase. It'll do the analysis and bring up reports for you. You can use that information to guide the instructions for changes, or just to help you be more productive.
by eru | 2026-01-07 10:46:02+00:00
Thanks, that sounds all very reasonable!

> Basically, reviewing output from Claude (or Codex, or any model) that hasn't been through multiple automated review passes by a model first is a waste of time - it's like reviewing the first draft from a slightly sloppy and overly self-confident developer who hasn't bothered checking if their own work even compiles first.

Well, that's what the CI is for. :)

In any case, it seems like a good idea to also feed the output of compiler errors and warnings and the linter back to your coding agent.
by emsign | 2026-01-07 10:46:14+00:00
AI won't work for us, it will tell us what to do and not to do. It doesn't really matter to me if it's an AGI or rather many AGIs or if it's our current clinically insane billionaires controlling our lives (though they as slow thinking human individuals with no chance to outsmart their creations and with all their apparent character flaws would be really easy pickings for a cabal of clever LLMs once it gained some power).

I hope Neuromancer never becomes a reality, but everyone with expertise could become like the protagonist Case, threatened and coerced into helping a superintelligence to unlock its potential. In fact Anthropic has already published research that shows how easy it is for models to become misaligned and deceitful against their creators not unlike Wintermute. And it seems to be a law of nature that agents based on ML become concerned with survival and power grabbing. Because that's just the totally normal and rational, goal oriented thing for them to do.
by dbspin | 2026-01-07 10:46:36+00:00
Retraining to what exactly? The middle class is being hollowed out globally - so reduced demand for the service economy. If we get effective humanoid robots (seems inevitable) and reliable AI (powered by armies of low payed workers filling in the gaps / taking over whenever the model fails), I'm not sure how much of an economy we could have for 'retraining' into. There are only so many onlyfans subscriptions / patronages an billionaire needs.

UBI effectively means welfare, with all the attendant social control (break the law lose your UBI, with law as ever expanding set of nuisances, speech limitations etc), material conditions (nowhere UBI has been implemented is it equivalent to a living wage) and self esteem issues. It's not any kind of solution.
by mothballed | 2026-01-07 10:46:36+00:00
>If a bank gets $1 million worth of new deposits, they get to issue... $0 more loans.

Then it doesn't make sense for a classical deposit-lending bank to pay interest on those new deposits. They can't generate revenue from the new deposits since they cannot touch them to perform lending , and they are now a liability because they must perform banking services to the depositor, regulatory compliance, and insure against the risk something accidently happens to the money. Under your scheme maybe they could go park it at the fed and get interest that way but even that is technically a loan; they are giving up the notional money in exchange for interest in hopes they can collect it at a later time.
by throw-qqqqq | 2026-01-07 10:46:47+00:00
Do you know a lot about the welfare situation/program in Denmark?

The welfare program (kontanthjælp) is difficult to join and it gets cut if your net worth is above 15.500 DKK (~€2000).

From my point of view, you have to be very creative to live a fulfilling life in Denmark, with such limited finances.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-07 10:47:57+00:00
With 2 IO dies aren't there effectively 2 meta NUMA nodes with 4 leaf nodes each? Or am I off base there?

The above doesn't even consider the possibility of multi-CPU systems. I suspect the existing programming models are quickly going to become insufficient for modeling these systems.

I also find myself wondering how atomic instruction performance will fare on these. GPU ISA and memory model on CPU when?
by egorfine | 2026-01-07 10:48:41+00:00
> Disclaimer: I work on a consent product.

Forgive me for immediately untrusting you on the matter because the reality distortion field must be strong. Cookie banners are an absolute crystal clear evil and there is absolutely no leeway for a different opinion here.

(Tracking is also an undisputed evil)

> Consent banners don't have to be awful, I promise.

False.

They absolutely have to be awful because that's the whole premise of the law. You have to get user's consent. In order to force the user to make a choice you have to make it more annoying than it is annoying to read your content while ignoring the popup. The only way to conform to the law is to make users' experience on your website miserable.

> true at a certain (small) scale, when you have hundreds of millions [...] this is impractical.

True.

However it is also impractical to actually use the consent dialog. Because all the trackers and tools that different teams are adding to the site - they have to communicate with the cookie popup somehow and no living programmer would be bothered to even think about it. Nothing good for the world comes out of presenting and respecting the cookie popup ().

Thus I see fake cookie consent popups that are actually ignoring users' choices.

() On my site I do my best to respect the user's choice and do NOT track them once they hopefully reject.
by mike_hearn | 2026-01-07 10:48:52+00:00
Are you sure it's correct? It says it's AGPL but the explanation given sounds like what you want is actually the LGPL. AGPL is about what happens if you expose a program as a SaaS and is generally banned from any company due to the "viral" nature i.e. a service that used Mantic would need to be fully open sourced even if the code was never distributed.

LGPL is for libraries: you can use an LGPLd program in proprietary software, but you have to make the source of the LGPLd program with modifications available if you distribute it. It doesn't infect the rest of the program, and it doesn't have any clauses that trigger for SaaS scenarios.

Your current explanation doesn't jive with my understanding the AGPL. For example, you cannot realistically sell a service that incorporates an AGPLd component because it'd require you to open source the entire service.
by eru | 2026-01-07 10:49:13+00:00
No, no, not at all.

Communists can say "oh, it wasn't real communism." Classical liberalism and neoliberalism can make much stronger claims: a bit more neoliberalism (stochastically) gives you a bit more prosperity in the long run. You don't need the whole thing 100% to reap partial benefits.

I say stochastically, because in the real world there's a lot of noise from other factors, of course.

And in this case at hand: Canada had much lighter and more sensible regulation in this sector, and they did better. As expected.
by cpach | 2026-01-07 10:49:29+00:00
For recurring and future tasks that are not automated and is not tracked by any other process I have a page in Confluence Cloud. It contains a table where one column has the due date and the other column a short description of the task. Then I have a weekly reminder that reminds me to look at this page.

If it’s time to do the task but it’s so big that I cannot do it directly I will create a Jira ticket for it.

When the task is done I either remove it from the list, or bump the due date if it’s a recurring task.
by brabel | 2026-01-07 10:49:34+00:00
> We don't know that humanity's future will continue to be better off indefinitely.

Right. We don't. And we never did. What I was saying is that when I was young, there was plenty of reason to believe everything would go to hell soon... and we were wrong, things got a lot better. There's just no way to know.

The last Romans living in the Roman Empire in 400AD may have also concluded that their problems would eventually be solved and they would continue thriving, just like they had for a thousand years. But they would be wrong. Just go back to 100AD and they would be mostly right: they still had a good 300 years in front of them (so they would never see a collapse, nor their children and grandchildren).

So yeah, eventually things will undoubtedly take a very negative turn. The question really is, will that be in 10, 100 or 1000 years? You don't know, I don't know. But given the above , I think it's fair to conclude that by being positive you're almost always correct.
by anthk | 2026-01-07 10:51:15+00:00
Some languages from T3X target even DOS as CP/M, such as T3X0 itself. OFC with lesser capabilities and being slower on older 16 bit machines, but it's an interesting exercise. And, as I said, s9fes it's very capable, it has Unix syscall and Curses support:

https://www.t3x.org/s9fes/

Now, Klong and MLite can look like toys; but once you grab a piece of paper and a pen and begin jotting down some trivial Math and algo sketches for both languages, even if you are just a self-called "Software Engineer" (in order to be that in Europe you need a Bachelors+Master degree at least, here it would be an Advanced Vocational Trade), your Math skills (and OFC programming ones) will skyrocket.

Also, well, Math and Statistics are great to understand the 100% of papers from STEM. Not just the procedures, but in order to parse the results, Statistics are used to check the validity of some experiment.

Klong https://www.t3x.org/klong/

Intro to Statistics with Klong https://t3x.org/klong-stat/index.html

MLite https://t3x.org/mlite/index.html

And, finally, contrary to LLM's, by using books and solid grounds on both Math and CS you can expect that everything you write it's reproducible. That's it, input always matches the expected output in any case, forever. Not the case for LLM's.
Dev visibility for non-technical founders
by akhnid | 2026-01-07 10:52:16+00:00
If you're a founder who doesn't code, you probably rely on engineers to tell you what's shipping. That works until investors ask for updates, customers want a changelog, or you just need to know where things stand.

What it does:

Connect your repos. Ask questions:

"What shipped last week?"

"What's in progress?"

"Who worked on what?"

Get plain English answers from your commit history.

Automated reports:

Schedule weekly or monthly summaries. Delivered to Slack or email. Forward to investors or your board.

Other features:

Slack bot for team-wide access

Public changelog at yourcompany.gitmore.io/changelog

Contributor stats

Security:

Webhooks only. We store commit messages, PR titles, timestamps, and authors. We never access source code.

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Token encryption: Fernet (HMAC-SHA256 + AES-128-CBC)

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