MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by llmslave2 | 2026-01-07 08:10:00+00:00
It's true that some people will just continually move the goalposts because they are invested in their beliefs. But that doesn't mean that the skepticism around certain claims aren't relevant.

Nobody serious is disputing that LLM's can generate working code. They dispute claims like "Agentic workflows will replace software developers in the short to medium term", or "Agentic workflows lead to 2-100x improvements in productivity across the board". This is what people are looking for in terms of evidence and there just isn't any.

Thus far, we do have evidence that AI (at least in OSS) produces a 19% decrease in productivity [0]. We also have evidence that it harms our cognitive abilities [1]. Anecdotally, I have found myself lazily reaching for LLM assistance when encountering a difficult problem instead of thinking deeply about the problem. Anecdotally I also struggle to be more productive using AI-centric agents workflows in areas of expertise.

We want evidence that "vibe engineering" is actually more productive across the entire lifespan of a software project. We want evidence that it produces better outcomes. Nobody has yet shown that. It's just people claiming that because they vibe coded some trivial project, all of software development can benefit from this approach. Recently a principle engineer at Google claimed that Claude Code wrote their team's entire year's worth of work in a single afternoon. They later walked that claim back, but most do not.

I'm more than happy to be convinced but it's becoming extremely tiring to hear the same claims being parroted without evidence and then you get called a luddite when you question it. It's also tiring when you push them on it and they blame it on the model you use, and then the agent, and then the way you handle context, and then the prompts, and then "skill issue". Meanwhile all they have to show is some slop that could be hand coded in a couple hours by someone familiar with the domain. I use AI, I was pretty bullish on it for the last two years, and the combination of it simply not living up to expectations + the constant barrage of what feels like a stealth marketing campaign parroting the same thing over and over (the new model is way better, unlike the other times we said that) + the amount of absolute slop code that seems to continue to increase + companies like Microsoft producing worse and worse software as they shoehorn AI into every single product (Office was renamed to Copilot 365). I've become very sensitive to it, much in the same way I was very sensitive to the claims being made by certain VC backed webdev companies regarding their product + framework in the last few years.

I'm not even going to bring up the economic, social, and environmental issues because I don't think they're relevant, but they do contribute to my annoyance with this stuff.

[0] https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
[1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/11/is-ai-dulling...
by to_ziegler | 2026-01-07 08:10:04+00:00
Great point. It is indeed the case that most io_uring libraries are lagging behind liburing. There are two main reasons for this: (1) io_uring development is moving very quickly (see the linked figure in another comment), and (2) liburing is maintained by Axboe himself and is therefore tightly coupled to io_uring’s ongoing development. One pragmatic "solution" is to wrap liburing with FFI bindings and maintain those yourself.
by luz666 | 2026-01-07 08:12:39+00:00
The machine smells correctly, when the same numbers (or similar when using some norm, e.g. the L2) appear for the same smell (reproducibility) and therefore a mapping (numbers -> smell) can be created. When this starts to exist (practically usable), there can be a database to store the mappings, allowing classification. E.g., the machine says "this tastes like banana". The machines/algorithms/products could itself be rated for precision.

I dont say such machines don't exist, but for my taste (pun intended) the solutions all lack something, either long term stability or having a second source supplier or being able to classify a reasonable amount of tastes or being able to distinguish between two tastes (or lacking all those things together).
by the_shivers | 2026-01-07 08:12:52+00:00
All the daily levels are built by hand. I struggled to come up with a good random level generator. You can see my feeble attempts in the Edit page (via the hamburger menu) by giving the dice button a few sad clicks.

I did originally try to measure the difficulty computationally by running the solver and timing it, but it didn't really line up with what humans would find difficult. Now I'm just eyeballing it.
by energy123 | 2026-01-07 08:13:16+00:00
It's for planning system architecture when I want to get something good (along the criteria that I give it) rather than the first thing that runs.

I use Thinking and Pro. I don't use the default ChatGPT so can't comment on that. The difference between Thinking and Pro is modest but detectable. The 20 minute thinking times are with Pro, not with Thinking. But Pro only allows 60k tokens per prompt so I sometimes can't use it.

In the $200/month subscription they give you access to a "heavy thinking" tier for Thinking which increases test time compute by maybe 30% compared to what you get in Plus.
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-07 08:13:51+00:00
It's worth noting that you can replicate implementation inheritance pretty much as-is in Rust by using the generic typestate pattern. This is effectively what OP calls "policies" except that the policies can also bundle data of their own, just like our derived classes of old; they aren't just limited to picking some statically-known behavior at compile time.

The key difference compared to OOP inheritance is simply that generic typestate is explicitly anti-modular: your "base" and "derived" slices are expressly contained within a single program module. You still have extensibility - you can create new "derived" slices to go with some existing "base" - but now there is no attempt to use implementation inheritance as a "programming in the large" strategy or pattern; that is done by using more robust modularity mechanisms.
by socalgal2 | 2026-01-07 08:14:09+00:00
I don’t find hobbies to be a replacement for work. Maybe it depends on the hobby but many hobbies are solo. work, or work that I enjoy, is not. Accomplishing things with others and for others has its on motivation for me at least

Of course maybe your hobbies or your dad’s hobbies are social. when someone says “hobbies” to me I generally think of things done mostly alone and I know for me, that’s not enough
by themaninthedark | 2026-01-07 08:14:18+00:00
I thought that the rural conservatives just needed to learn new skills in order to transition into a new job market.

At least, that was the messaging around 2019 when we were telling coal miners to 'learn to code.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/changing-america/en...

Now we are saying it takes a specific mindset...

It's also looking like those coal miners who pushed back had more foresight as the market is saturated and with the AI sea change.

https://futurism.com/computer-science-majors-high-unemployme...

I do agree with you in part however, it takes ambition to succeed. This is true no matter if you are an immigrant or native born.

Maybe the real question should be, why is our population losing their ambition?
by InMice | 2026-01-07 08:15:47+00:00
I scrolled this whole thread curious if someone would make this simple observation. We did not survive and evolve for millions of years to be born and then do nothing, to not meet needs and have needs met. Historical precedent, tamper with carefully.

I am partial fire and I feel that line of demarcation personally. I've also watched it play out in others like clockwork. As wealth grows, new responsibilities emerge.
by baq | 2026-01-07 08:16:29+00:00
dark mode is easier on battery for OLEDs but not on LCDs where black needs the pixel to be fully active (white is off, black is on).

black on white is easier to read than white on black full stop, no astigmatism necessary.

https://esa.org/communication-engagement/2018/08/03/resource...

ambient lightning is highly recommended to not strain your vision.
by Macuyiko | 2026-01-07 08:16:32+00:00
Oh I see what you mean now, indeed:

Score: 7
~~~~~~
~····~
~·~~·~
.#..#.
......
..#...
.#H#..
..#...

However, I think that you do not need 'time' based variables in the form of

reachable(x,y,t) = reachable(nx,ny,t-1)

Enforcing connectivity through single-commodity flows is IMO better to enforce flood fill (also introduces additional variables but is typically easier to solve with CP heuristics):

Score: 2
~~~~~~
~....~
~.~~.~
......
......
..##..
.#H·#.
..##..

Cool puzzle!
by weatherlite | 2026-01-07 08:16:40+00:00
> Time will tell what happens, but if programming becomes "prompt engineering", I'm planning on quitting my job and pivoting to something else. It's nice to get stuff working fast, but AI just sucks the joy out of building for me.

I hear you but I think many companies will change the role ; you'll get the technical ownership + big chunks of the data/product/devops responsibility. I'm speculating but I think one person can take that on himself with the new tools and deliver tremendous value. I don't know how they'll call this new role though, we'll see.
by qnleigh | 2026-01-07 08:16:56+00:00
So much of the conversation is around these models replacing software engineers. But the use cases described in the article sound like pretty compelling business opportunities; if the custom apps he built for his wife's business have been useful, probably there are lots of businesses that would pay for the service he just provided his wife. Small, custom apps can be made way more cheaply now, so Jeven's paradox says that demand should go up. I think it will.

I would love to hear from some freelance programmers how LLMs have changed their work in the last two years.
by armchairhacker | 2026-01-07 08:17:43+00:00
I’ve noticed that my short comments that express cliche HN views get upvoted more than the long unique ones that I feel are more interesting. And in general, many top posts and comments are cliche.

If I respond to an article about open-source with “open-source is good”, article about privacy with “privacy is good” etc. with a basic justification and slightly fancier words, I’ll almost surely get upvotes. But I see those opinions on this site practically every day.

I wish people would instead upvote posts and comments with uncommon knowledge and opinions. I do see the former: cool projects and “fun facts” (e.g. an article about the cultural history of an isolated small region) are constantly on the front page and in top comments. But the latter are only in /new and further down comments.
by qingcharles | 2026-01-07 08:17:47+00:00
Thank you. I've been saying the same thing since forever. In Europe if you say you want to start your own company you get a lot of "why would you do that? why not take a nice government job with a pension?"

For all of the USA's myriad flaws, if you say the same thing people will cheer you on.

It infuriates the fuck out of me that practically all the success of the Internet era has come out of one single country that can't even come up with a way to provide healthcare or vacations for their population.
My Logitech mouse became unusable, Logi Options+ can't validate certificate
by enescakir | 2026-01-07 08:17:52+00:00
Logi Options+ stopped working on macOS.

Because core settings depend on the app, I can't even change mouse acceleration, not just macros or shortcuts. Without the software, the mouse is basically unusable.

If hardware requires software to function, that software failing because of a missed cert renewal is pretty unacceptable.
by aleph_minus_one | 2026-01-07 08:17:59+00:00
>
Well, that's about as valid as listening to sovereign citizens' interpretation of the US constitution. (At least from the Catholic point of view as far as I can tell.)

From an "axiomatic perspective" this means accepting much more encompassing axioms than the holy scripture; such a "proof" requires much more than "the Bible/Quran says" as huijzer implicitly used in his argument "That’s why the Bible and Quran are against usury.", but more like "the Bible says and we additionally accept the following axioms that imply that the Pope's interpretation of the Bible is the correct one".
by QGQBGdeZREunxLe | 2026-01-07 08:19:51+00:00
I work remote and was offered a chance to move to the US. Exactly the same job both sides of the border but US pay was +30% and joint-filing cut my taxes significantly. I was also able to get a few health issues sorted that had been denied by provincial insurance.

The thing that really pushed me to leave though was housing costs relative to income. In Canada it has reached absurd levels. It was well into the 50% of take home pay going to housing. Here's it's less than a third.
by u_sama | 2026-01-07 08:19:56+00:00
I think this will answer both comments, I said Americans and not America because *both* Democrats and Republicans would antagonize Europeans if they went to bat for their interests (using China as a counterpower to America, protecting industries and becoming as agressive as American administrations have been with protectionism, heavy brain drain, financial abuse and retorting to diminish EU power etc etc)

As a counter to what you say, that is true but in large most are ok with the current administration or the earlier ones. It was under Bush that there was a renaming of French fries to Freedom Fries as a backlash to Gerlany/France not joining the Iraq war.
Not every German was a nazi in WW2, yet if you fought a German you will not stop and give him a questionaire to understand his ideology. You lump them as heuristic and act on that.
by remarkEon | 2026-01-07 08:20:36+00:00
Yes.

The purpose of the United States government is to benefit the people already here. It is not reasonable to assume that Americans should have to compete with the labor pool of the entire planet.

>But it turns out that for many of you it's about the place you happened to be born.

This meme needs to die. It was not some sort of accident that I was born in this country, it was the consequence of generations of conscious decisions and actions. I had a 0% probability of being born literally anywhere else. And as such, it is perfectly reasonable to want my government to prioritize the needs of me and my compatriots over those of others who are not from here.
by xlii | 2026-01-07 08:20:38+00:00
After my adventures with different languages I'm on the hill that Rust traits, Haskells typeclasses, (sic!) Go's interfaces, etc. are state-of-art features in modern programming languages.

It's not like they're without the footguns - they have plenty. But even with those footguns typeclasses (as I'd rather call them) are complexity escape hatches.

E.g. at some point your type can have dozen of different implementations and you can decide to ignore that fact completely while proceeding to work on your (very narrow) piece of pie ignoring vastness of universe[^0] you found yourself in.

That being said multiple inheritance fits the same category and with minimal squinting same features can be found in languages such as Clojure or Elixir.

As other commenters mentione this is not a secret by any means, as composition over inheritance advice is decades old, but IMO still worth repeating because there might be someone who doesn't know it yet :)

[^0]: By universe I mean code implementional universe, not The Universe
by p0w3n3d | 2026-01-07 08:20:45+00:00
when something works flawlessly and starts to fail after an update (so no user actions there) this could mean that update made the hardware fail. For example overuse of flash in ssd (it's been already reported https://community.spiceworks.com/t/anyone-else-have-their-ss...) or reflashing a component too many times (simple error in scripts)
by bayesnet | 2026-01-07 08:21:10+00:00
I recently had a baby. My wife and I are not on socials but wanted to share pics with close friends and family, so we created an iCloud shared album. We only realized that these shared albums had likes and comments once someone asked us if we had seen that my grandmother had left a comment.

I think the shared album is almost the perfect form of social media. We invited about 20 people who we all know well. This “community” has a singular and shared purpose of being interested in our baby. Content is presented in chronological order. There are no ads, no other content, not even suggested posts or “you may also like…”. If you want to see more you just swipe to the next picture and perhaps read what other people you know have to say about the funny face our child is making.

The author observes that social media creates bubbles and that people are tired of socializing. In some ways the shared album
is the ultimate bubble and provides only a very limited way for our community to socialize. Nonetheless many of our friends, also twenty-somethings, have told us how lovely it is to interact with us and each other on such a limited platform.

I think—well, maybe I hope—that the future of social media is “hyperlocal” like this. It will not be as easy to meet people and find new perspectives, sure, but it will let the internet serve its purpose of connecting people who are physically far away but still very much in each others thoughts.
by raesene9 | 2026-01-07 08:21:34+00:00
One problem with the idea of making businesses out of this kind of application is actually mentioned in passing in the article

"I decided to make up for my dereliction of duties by building her another app for her sign business that would make her life just a bit more delightful - and eliminate two other apps she is currently paying for"

OP used Opus to re-write existing applications that his wife was paying for. So now any time you make a commercial app and try to sell it, you're up against everyone with access to Opus or similar tooling who can replicate your application, exactly to their own specifications.
by cmxch | 2026-01-07 08:23:32+00:00
That’s because the damage has gone on too long.

When three generations (late Boomer, Generation X, and Millennials) have seen it and the various alphabet soup of programs from the perspective of having to train their replacements from these programs, or hear their parents having to do same, the sympathy and empathy have long since run dry. The only valid thing to do is to have the various involved entities from the law firms that architect the citizens out under dubious if not outright fraudulent terms, the companies that implement it (from the body shops to their clients, large and small), and the various lobbying groups that have pushed the sorry excuse of a program series (along with their smears about the citizens’ dare to protect their own first), to simply start cutting painfully huge, salary replacement checks to the entire generations that dealt with that mess.

And then you might understand why this is even on the table, and hope that the 1965 Immigration Act (and its follow on provisions) doesn’t get repealed in full to get rid of the fraud and abuse that even Grigsby & Cohen advocated for in the early 2000s.

Either you can stop this now and make amends with two and a half generations (and more) while you have a voice in the matter, or that it will be resolved in far uglier terms where your words will not be heard.
by lunar_mycroft | 2026-01-07 08:24:14+00:00
> Thus far, we do have evidence that AI (at least in OSS) produces a 19% decrease in productivity

I generally agree with you, but I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that it's plausible that the slow down observed in the METR study was at least partially due to the subjects lack of experience with LLMs. Someone with more experience performed the same experiment on themselves, and couldn't find a significant difference between using LLMs and not [0]. I think the more important point here is that programmers subjective assessment of how much LLMs help them is not reliable, and biased towards the LLMs.

[0] https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
by atoav | 2026-01-07 08:25:07+00:00
Yes but compare it to trains or busses. If I want to take the train/bus I make sure I am at the station 10 minutes before the vehicle departs.

In my experience the good time to arrive before a flight (with luggage to check in) is roughly 1 hour before (and this nearly wasn't enough in some cases).

If we talk about a short flight that can add more than 50% to the flight duration on the ground for (1) putting the luggage somewhere, (2) going through the security funnel and (3) getting to the plane.

Sure I get why things are shaped the way they are, but if I wanted to cut travel time I would first have a long deep look at that.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-07 08:25:11+00:00
They should learn to code, but as long as they believe math is some sort of conspiracy, they can’t. And it’s worse as they push their kids into the trades and into mining jobs that should go away, there simply won’t be an improvement quality if life.

Why do you think Utah is the richest red state? Mormon religion doesn’t see math/ science to conflict with faith for some reason, you will see a lot of Mormon programmers especially out here in the west. But the same isn’t true for the rest of red state America. Better yet, compare with China: China is a conservative country, but they believe in education. We simply don’t have that advantage in general.
by stingraycharles | 2026-01-07 08:25:23+00:00
Reminds me of this discussion between Alan Kay and Rich Hickey on this site 9 years ago. Rich Hickey always asserted that code is data (which aligns with the LISP view of the world), Alan Kay thinks that’s a bad idea.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11941656
by wiz21c | 2026-01-07 08:26:05+00:00
Same anecdote for me (except I'm +/- 40 years experience). I consider my self a pretty good dev for non-web dev (GPU's, assembly, optimisation,...) and my conclusion is the same as you: impressive and scary. If the somehow the idea of what you want to do is on the web in text or in code, then Claude most likely has it. And its ability to understand my own codebases is just crazy (at my age, memory is declining and having Claude to help is just waow). Of course it fails some times, of course it need direction, but the thing it produces is really good.
by nephihaha | 2026-01-07 08:27:06+00:00
Facebook is next to useless. I'm on it for work. It continually boosts one person's posts on my feed — not someone I dislike but am not close friends with — and then tells me about people's birthdays and bereavements weeks after they happened.

Like YouTube, the promoted content seems to be designed to pull me in particular political directions I am not interested in.
by MattGaiser | 2026-01-07 08:27:16+00:00
People are doing this lots of different ways. Some run it in its own containers or in instances on the web. Some are using git worktrees. I use a worktree for anything large, but smaller stuff is just done in the local files.

Sloppy? Perhaps, but Claude has never made such a big mess that it has needed its work wiped.