MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Shabamed | 2026-01-12 12:51:26+00:00
I’ll say it straight

Most people arent failing with AI because it’s weak.. They’re failing because they treat it like magic instead of engineering

Ive built production apps this way
Real users. Real traffic. Real consequences.
Mostly with Cursor. Very little manual intervention

But first… this is likely your current flow:

You open your editor
You type “build me X”
AI starts strong… then drifts
One fix breaks another thing
You restart. Again
That’s not building
That’s rolling dice!!

Here’s the system I use
It’s boring. It’s structured
And it works every single time

Step 1 : architecture first (before a single line of code)

Before touching Cursor, open ChatGPT and ask for structure, not code

Describe the product in painful detail
What it does. Who its for. What matters. What doesnt.
Then ask for:

the full architecture
folder and file structure
what each part is responsible for
where state lives
how things talk to each other

Nothing fancy. Markdown only

Save this as http://architecture.md and drop it into an empty project folder

This document is the spine of the app
If this is vague, everything downstream will be vague too

Step 2 : turn the architecture into small boring tasks

Next ask AI to convert that architecture into a task list

Not “build auth”
But “create auth schema”, “wire session state”, “protect route X”..
Each task must:

be small enough to test
have a clear start and end
touch one concern only

The key detail: tell the AI these tasks will be executed one by one with testing in between

This becomes http://tasks.md
At this point, you still havent written code
But the chaos is already gone

Step 3 : now I let Cursor work (with rules)

Only now open Cursor

tell it:
You’re an engineer joining this project
You’ve been given http://architecture.md and http://tasks.md
Read them carefully. No guessing
Then add strict rules:

minimal code only
no refactors unless asked
no unrelated changes
don’t break existing behavior
stop after each task so I can test

One task
Run it
Test it
Commit it
Repeat

This sounds slower
It’s not

Why this works (and vibe coding usually doesnt)

Most vibe coding fails for one reason: intent isn’t frozen

When intent is fuzzy AI fills gaps with guesses
Those guesses compound
Thats how you get “it worked yesterday” bugs

This workflow fixes that
You’re not dumping everything into the IDE and hoping
You’re giving AI a map
You’re keeping it on rails
You stay the one making decisions
AI becomes a fast, obedient engineer
Not a creative wildcard.

This is how you ship clean, testable, AI assisted code
without the spiral.. without rewrites and without fear of touching things later

Id normally say “follow me for the playbook” but f it.. just use it
by Draiken | 2026-01-12 12:52:27+00:00
Write scripts for everything.

If you need to run the command once, you can now run it again in the future.

It's very tempting to just paste some commands (or ask AI to do it) but writing simple scripts like this is an amazing solution to these kinds of problems.

Even if the scripts get outdated and no longer work (maybe it's a new version of X) it'll give you a snapshot of what was done before.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-12 12:52:38+00:00
> Mercurial was a better DVCS launched around the same time as git but it lost out, not because "worse is better" but the network effects spreading out from the of the linux kernel itself.

Yeah. I was using Mercurial and, reluctanctly, had to switch to Git. Now don't get me wrong: I was forced to use both CVS and SVN in a thankfully very distant past so I love Git. But I do miss Mercurial. We switched exactly for the reason you mentioned: Git simply won the market.

Git won, Magit is awesome. Then all the Github and whatnots. It's Git, Git and Git.

And never bet against Linus, either: the world runs on Linux (and that's a good thing) and every tech company in the world uses Git. That's just how it is.

Mercurial was a tiny bit better but not that much better that it'd compensate for the entire ecosystem and people gravitating towards Git.
Show HN: PEC – A proposal for compliance metadata in the Model Context Protocol
by lloydjones | 2026-01-12 12:52:43+00:00
What it is:

PEC (Protocol-Embedded Compliance) is an academic proposal to extend Model Context Protocol (MCP) with compliance metadata, so AI agents can make compliance-aware tool selections.

The problem:

When an AI agent discovers tools via MCP, it has no standard way to know where that tool processes data, what certifications it holds, or what use restrictions apply. Each deployer has to figure this out manually.

The proposal:

A JSON schema extension where MCP servers declare processing locations (e.g., "EU-only", specific countries), certifications (HIPAA, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, etc.), and use restrictions.
This lets compliance-aware orchestrators filter tools before invocation.

Current status:

Draft paper targeting Q1 2026 publication. Draft schema available at https://usepec.eu. No adoption yet — seeking feedback from the MCP ecosystem.

What it's not:

This doesn't guarantee compliance or replace legal review. It standardises how tools declare compliance characteristics. The bet is that protocol-level standardisation is worth the coordination cost.

Happy to discuss the technical approach, alternative designs, or why this might be a terrible idea.
by jugoetz | 2026-01-12 12:52:49+00:00
The author completely misses what travel is for.
Compare it to a museum. You can see almost all of the artworks on the museum's website, in high-definition, accompanied by backstories and references. It's much more suitable to learn about art. But it's not _impressive_.
You need to experience the artwork to understand and internalize what you studied about it. Same with travel.
by gregw2 | 2026-01-12 12:52:59+00:00
I find Tolkein's depictions on his original jacket covers of the Rings of Power and the one ring and the "all seeing eye" that accompanies them quite evocative:

https://imgur.com/CZSNpiS

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8e/The_Fellowshi...
by brobdingnagians | 2026-01-12 12:53:07+00:00
Git is only better in the same sense that Windows is better than Linux. I really need the tools I use that only run on Windows. I prefer Linux for a lot of things, including daily web development, but the experience of developing Unreal Engine on Linux is lacking. I love fossil and the many features it provides in itself and would use it for everything, except that it doesn't have (working) Intellij plugin for integration, a good GitHub alternative, etc.
by xp84 | 2026-01-12 12:53:07+00:00
Wholeheartedly agree. The few times in my life that I’ve bothered to post there with a problem, it’s been all the more upsetting that the patronizing generic advice and scolding of the frustrated users, is coming from random volunteer fanbois on the Internet, not even paid Apple staff who contractually have to be positive about Apple. A company with such rabidly loyal supporters shouldn’t deploy them like this. And if it was wise back in 2010 when Apple software was for the most part quite good… it sure isn’t wise now when they’re reaching what I hope is a temporary nadir in quality.
by Gracana | 2026-01-12 12:53:43+00:00
Yep, I've been running a Windows laptop plugged into a pair of monitors for the past ten years at work, and across multiple laptops and from Windows 10 to 11, this has always been a problem. If I undock to do some work elsewhere and come back, I either have to live with a bunch of stuff now being blurry, or I need to re-launch all the affected programs.

I also have programs that bleed from one monitor onto another when maximized. AutoCAD is one offender that reliably does this -- if it's maximized, several pixels of its window will overlap the edge of the window on the adjacent screen. The bar I set for windows is pretty low, so I'm generally accepting of the jank I encounter in it vs Linux where I know any problem is likely something I can fix. Still, that one feels especially egregious.
by vntok | 2026-01-12 12:54:22+00:00
This is a really weird website, I glanced over a bunch of different articles and all read like AI slop to me.

Indeed, a detecting tool like GPT Zero is "highly confident" that 97% of this article is AI generated, while AI Detector returns "We are 100% confident that the text scanned is AI-generated".

Curious if this is an uncanny valley situation, because there aren't that many tells (dashes, etc.) in the text itself. Does it feel the same to you?
by shalmanese | 2026-01-12 12:54:25+00:00
It's very easy to construct strawman examples where the worst ways to travel are compared to some abstract "best" way of learning as if that proves anything.

Reading up on something is a great way to discover the "high order bits" but it's very hard, apart from being in person, to ever pick up the "low order bits". I recently had a friend visit Australia and notice that attitudes towards mild speeding were very different from the US, not something you ever could have found from hours of trawling on the internet. One of the hundreds of different observations he made on the trip.

Every travel opportunity for me has used these low order bits to propel huge amounts of reading to fill in the missing high order bits that mesh with it. On a recent trip to South Korea, I became obessessed with the South Korean presentation (or rather, the lacuna) of the country's history 1955-1987. I went to countless history museums around Seoul just so I could see what they wanted attendees to know about Korea between the day-by-day recap of the Korean War and the miracle of K-Pop and industrialization. It was interesting the degree of frankness each museum had but all of them made me delve much more into the scholarly writing to see what was pointedly omitted.
by reactordev | 2026-01-12 12:54:28+00:00
If you can do those things in production, so can Lee Hong Quag in North Korea. I’d rather not have that capability in production and rely on proper CI/CD to deploy resources into the cloud. The way you like to work is like giving hackers a complete jump box into your organization. You are bound to get hacked, it’s only a matter of time.
by pron | 2026-01-12 12:54:33+00:00
> Rust has kind of become the default answer for "safe browser components"

I don't think that a language that was meant to compete with C++ and in 10+ years hasn't captured even 10% of C++'s (already diminished) market share could be said to have become "the default" for anything. Certainly we shouldn't generalise from n=1 (or even n=2).
by zzzeek | 2026-01-12 12:55:40+00:00
Mercurial was not better. Features like rebase /squash are not native to mercurial (even though they since added extensions for this) and the tool had a very rigid view of the commit history. I had all my projects on Mercurial for several years after using SVN, because it felt more similar to SVN and I had no mental concept of why you'd ever want something so crazy as "rebase" - commit histories looked the way I always remembered them looking with SVN, with tons of tiny commits like "fix comma", "fix syntax", and no steady concept of a commit hash linked to a complete, working change, because that was something I had never seen before. Basically I just didn't get it.

Today my workflow is based on git + gerrit code review (which is heavily based around git), or in other areas github pull requests, and there is no such thing as a series of little commits that all hodge-podge together to form a particular change to the code, we tailor changes to be perfect, we push -f to keep each commit in the series to be a full and CI-tested story of a change, then we squash-merge them. My use with git is 100% all day things that were impossible with Mercurial back when I used it, if there are extensions for these things now, they are afterthoughts, git understood these concepts from the beginning.
by troupo | 2026-01-12 12:55:44+00:00
> Yes kind of, but only different results (maybe) for the things you didn't specify.

No. They will produce a different result for everything, including the things you specify.

It's so easy to verify that I'm surprised you're even making this claim.

> Once you've nailed your "spec" enough so there isn't any ambiguity, the LLM won't have to make any choices for you, and then you'll get exactly what you expected

1. There's always ambiguity, or else you'll end up an eternity writing specs

2. LLMs will always produce different results even if the spec is 100% unambiguous for a huge variety of reasons, the main one being: their output is non-deterministic. Except in the most trivial of cases. And even then the simple fact of "your context window is 80% full" can lead to things like "I've rewritten half of your code even though the spec only said that the button color should be green"
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-12 12:55:49+00:00
> most "travel" is staying a week or so

Most reading is probably crap, too.

> what is learned from this kind of travel is generally trivial and superficial (and thus often wrong)

Someone can learn the wrong history of a dish while still being educated by it. Broadly speaking, I’m sceptical of new experiences not yielding education outside the irredeemably incurious.
by RHSman2 | 2026-01-12 12:55:53+00:00
You should study a bit of physical geography and glacialology.

Not all ‘ice ages’ are the same.

A true ice age as you discuss is due to the distance we are from the sun. Unfortunately, we are in the opposite and the compounding effects of human induced greenhouse effect will doom us. It’s a bit like nature/nuture.

There is stuff we can control. How we handle our species and our home, the earth.
by fsiefken | 2026-01-12 12:56:38+00:00
hi loloquwowndueo, i was thinking the same thing, but then I thought why you would prefer reading a book while sitting instead of listening - is it about efficiency and that if you CAN read one should (you use the imperative) read?
I also have this view, but when I was young and an avid reader I also enjoyed radio stories immensely as my imagination was also activated. As in the past we were an species with a predominantly oral cultural transmission, arguably more 'embodied', there could be something to say for attending a theatre version in preference of a book. On the other hand, reading often is faster, but it's indirect, you translate the symbols into your imagination yourself, on the upside you perhaps train your mind more. So both have their advantages, one is not necessarily better. I notice I am often looking through a lense of efficiency and then make choices where I loose a certain experience - sitting in the dark listening to someone telling a story instead of reading can be equally wonderful.
by aljt | 2026-01-12 12:56:44+00:00
I've been building a reader app designed for language learning. It's a place where you can read and listen to plenty of content in your target language (currently English, Spanish, French, German and Italian) and also comes with plenty of smart bits for helping to teach you and test your progress.

I’m getting ready for the official launch, but while I work on expanding the library beyond the current collection of Aesop’s Fables, I’m opening up a beta.

If you’re on iOS and wouldn't mind helping me test it out, I’d love it if you had a look: https://verva.ai/en/
by minhduong243 | 2026-01-12 12:57:03+00:00
Surprise surprise, a long-time Apple hater who got a lot of things wrong on the company and who has not worked on hardware thinks he understands the hardware more than the company. I get that everyone can be disappointed with a product, but thinking he knows more about a product as sophisticated as Vision Pro than Apple is something else. I stopped reading his stuff a long time ago and it seems nothing changed
by kypro | 2026-01-12 12:57:34+00:00
I often wonder what Aaron would think of the internet today.

For those here who are younger there was a very a different culture online in the mid-00s. It was very optimistic about how access to data and global communication could create a better world – The Arab Spring being one of the best examples.

This was even a view largely shared by Western governments and "The great firewall of China" was ridiculed by almost everyone at the time.

Today it feels like very few of us still believe in Aaron's vision of an open internet anymore. As someone who is around the same age as Aaron and shared his optimism, it's been hard to watch the internet become an increasingly closed, restricted and regulated place in recent years.

I understand that most people disagree with me on that which is fine, but it's also why I'd love to hear Aaron's take on it – did we just get it wrong? Is the internet today with all its bad actors, AI bots and big tech algorithms fundamentally a different place than it was back then? Would Aaron still view open access to data the same? How would he feel about tech companies scrapping the web to build AI models for their own financial gain?
by mapt | 2026-01-12 12:58:18+00:00
COVID and the supply chain crisis made apparent just how over-reliant we are on Shenzhen and Taiwan for the most basic components. There are several hundred ICs on dozens of circuitboards in every car now that are dumber, slower, and less efficient than a 1990s calculator, that we have lost the ability to produce domestically. These are now bottlenecks to manufacturing in any disruption to world trade.
Show HN: I built a tool to repurpose long form content into my short form funnel
by jxywilliams | 2026-01-12 12:58:20+00:00
Hey HN,

A while back I realized I was spending hours every week just repurposing content from platform to platform. I needed that time back.

So I built Nebly, a tool for you to repurpose Youtube videos, podcast transcripts or key insights into content for major platforms.

Personalized content, understands you and your industry, written content funnel sorted!

Jay
by Timwi | 2026-01-12 12:58:41+00:00
> That's a very wrong view of how Wikipedia works

I think it's spot on. I used to be excited to contribute to Wikipedia, now I feel unwelcome and actively alienated. Everyone else I know doesn't even attempt to make any edits because “it all gets deleted anyway”. It's an incredibly hostile, unproductive and unwelcoming environment for anyone trying to make goodwill contributions.
Show HN: LLM Agent That Makes Composable CLIs
by binalpatel | 2026-01-12 12:59:22+00:00
Fun agent I've been playing with - the idea is it only has access to a bash tool, and it's directed to create CLIs for use (with additional direction to make the CLIs composable, follow the Unix philosophy, etc).
It persists these CLIs and knowledge about them get injected into the system prompt dynamically, so each time it runs it gets access to a larger and larger toolset of composable CLIs.

One interesting dynamic that's emerged from this is I've started using these CLIs myself since they're the same interface for the agent or for me, and it's turned into kind of non-chat channel to interact with the agent.

One example - I'll add tasks throughout the day myself using the `tasks` CLI it made, then when I interact with the agent it'll run `tasks list` and see everything I've added, or use it to prioritize/update things for me. Later on when I run `tasks list` myself I see all the updates/priorities it set.
by kappuchino | 2026-01-12 12:59:58+00:00
I love services that have not a single person as a contact/responsible for the site. /sarcasm

It's a red flag if you hide behind a contact form with no reachability beyond that whatsoever.

And as other said: 99.5% accuracy means you should have millions of working fingerprints, since mine and others are faulty as hell.
by daeken | 2026-01-12 13:00:06+00:00
Some people just prefer to listen. I read well and I read quite quickly -- I don't know how many books I've physically read, but it's gotta be in the high hundreds at least -- but over the past ~10 years I've switched primarily to audiobooks. Rather than being something that I enjoy while I'm doing something else, I typically do something mindless with my hands (weave chainmail, cross stitch, sew) in order to give my full attention to the book.
by vidarh | 2026-01-12 13:00:10+00:00
No, but it can produce the onboarding docs itself with some "bootstrap" prompting. E.g. give it a scratchpad to write its own notes in, and direct it to use it liberally. Give it a persistent todo list, and direct it to use it liberally. Tell it to keep a work log. Tell it to commit early and often - you can squash things later, and Claude is very good at navigating git logs.
by svilen_dobrev | 2026-01-12 13:00:22+00:00
"product is the knowledge in the code, not the code itself".. and other interesting observations. That might be relevant in current to-AI-or-not-AI questions

Published as book - The Laws of Software Process: A New Model for the Production and Management of Software , 2003, Phillip G. Armour

https://www.amazon.com/Laws-Software-Process-Production-Mana...
by mcny | 2026-01-12 13:01:09+00:00
I'll give you one example -- Bali, Indonesia.

If you visit Bali for a week or even a month, you likely won't notice that Bali is in a strange little island in a massive country. You'll likely fly in and out of Bali and never visit the rest of Indonesia. What is the relation between Bali and the rest of the country? No idea.

Even a question as simple as what do the locals eat is a difficult question as a tourist. Who do you ask? If you ask a few people, you might get the wrong impression, it at least one that doesn't represent the whole place.

Think about your own country. Your own neighborhood. If a tourist came up to you to ask about how things work in your area, can you give a comprehensive answer? I sure can't.

Life is far too short to learn from travel. I'm not saying don't travel but we should keep our expectations in check.
by boringg | 2026-01-12 13:01:42+00:00
The differences between soviet state and Us market based capitalism are completely different. Chernobyl didn't fail because of a simple case of human greed and short sightedness. You really haven't read the details of how Chernobyl came about - its truly wild.

While I don't disagree that there is always a risk (albeit very small) that the bean counters come in while the regulators are sleeping and risk the actual product (see: Boeing) - to try and put in a fear that the Chernobyl situation is just as possible you are reaching there.

Your underlying argument is that we shouldn't use high tech energy and enjoy its benefits because there's a chance somewhere that someone might abuse it but also, that might not happen. Its a blanket safety argument - don't do anything because theres risk.
by cjs_ac | 2026-01-12 13:02:16+00:00
The person reading Wikipedia and the person who visited the place are both beaten by the person who read Wikipedia and then visited the place. Reading about a place can point you to unique experiences that you would otherwise have missed.

A deeper point, I think, is about being the kind of person who would read about a place. I know a few people who get excited about going on holiday, and excitedly tell you about it when they get back, but they just end up talking about the places they went drinking and the people they met, possibly with some Instagram pictures that look exactly the same as everyone else's Instagram pictures of that place. There's a lot of people in the developed world who just go travelling because it's a thing that people with money do: they're not even interested in learning about a foreign culture.
by 1313ed01 | 2026-01-12 13:02:19+00:00
I would not want to use fossil at work and I do not know if it could handle projects of that size. Would require manyears of rewriting tools that would not be realistic.

For my hobby projects I have used fossil for several years. It works great and I do not miss anything from git. It's simpler and just nicer to use.

If nothing else I felt like using the same version control system for over 10 years was getting boring. Needed something new to play with. See things from a new perspective. Like playing with a new programming language now and then, even when it is something I do not expect to get much real use out of.