MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lapcat | 2026-01-30 14:11:29+00:00
Capitalism as we're taught from economics textbooks does not exist in our reality. The theory is that sellers are supposed to compete among themselves to attract consumers. Instead we have local, state, and even national governments competing among themselves to attract sellers. And of course political election campaigns are mostly privately funded, so even the kind of competition that does exist is rarely "meritocratic," and it's certainly not democratic (small d). The wheels are greased in various ways, with campaign contributions in office and cushy corporate jobs afterward. You might say, "the public should stop electing corrupt representatives," but again, our political system is based on private funding of election campaigns, so the system practically requires financial corruption. The political duopoly is an advertising duopoly: politicians can't spread their message without money, which is why alternative parties are trapped forever in obscurity. Advertising is the price of admission to the debate. The for-profit news media conspires in this system by refusing coverage, and media-sponsored debate invitations, to candidates without money, allegedly because they're not "viable," a Catch-22 situation.
by Orygin | 2026-01-30 14:11:57+00:00
Lol tell that to my city. They removed the cross walks and declared the zone a "shared zone" where pedestrians have right of way.

Result? No more safe places to cross, drivers are not stopping for pedestrians when no cross walk. They added parking zones right up to the old cross walks that pedestrians still use (since it were the safest places) where vans are regularly parked and obscure the entirety one side of the road. Even outside of these shared zones, there are lots lots lots of places where parking space is obscuring the crosswalk, where huge vans park right on it, even though legally you have to be 5+ meters away. Never seen a cop give a ticket for that in my life.

One day someone will get killed right there, I'm sure of it, and it'll be mainly the city's fault.
by sangkwun | 2026-01-30 14:12:01+00:00
The missing piece in most learning tools: they assume you manually feed them content.

But where does that content come from? You're already:
- Reading HN discussions
- Following newsletters
- Monitoring subreddits
- Scanning Discord servers

What if the same AI that filters this information also:
1. Identifies concepts worth remembering
2. Generates SRS cards automatically
3. Tracks what you've mastered vs what needs review

You'd go from "information overload" → "filtered insights" →
"retained knowledge" in one pipeline.

Passive consumption → Active retention, automatically.

This is the direction I'm exploring with Daigest (currently does steps 1-2,
considering adding 3). Anyone else see value in this workflow?
by dgb23 | 2026-01-30 14:12:20+00:00
Yes, that's very often the case with things that would very likely be shared if it looked good.

There are things that don't get shared out of principle. For example there are anonymous votes or behind the scenes negotiations without commitment or security critical data.

But given that Musk tends to parade around vague promises since a very long time, it seems sharing data that looks very good would certainly be something they would do.
by Uehreka | 2026-01-30 14:13:08+00:00
You found it! Yeah the 4th version of the browser is in Haskell and is only a couple hours in, so it’s nowhere near done. The Go version achieved Acid3 compliance in 7 hours, but I expect this one to take a lot longer since Haskell is a bit more difficult to work with and there’s probably less Haskell in the training dataset.
by rewilder12 | 2026-01-30 14:13:20+00:00
The original phrase "talk is cheap" is generally used to mean "it's easy to say a whole lot of shit and that talk often has no real value." So this cleaver headline is telling me the code has even less value than the talk. That alone betrays a level of ignorance I would expect from the author's work. I go to read the article and it confirmed my suspicion.
by yodsanklai | 2026-01-30 14:13:52+00:00
> I am, of course, in no position to question senior dev

Don't assume senior devs know necessarily better. There's a wide range of abilities in our profession!

That being said software engineering is made of trade offs and your colleagues may be aware of the issues you mention. Maybe this was decided on purpose based on constraints at the time, or maybe it was a bad design, but it's now costly to fix.

In any case, you should probably not question them and re-assess the case when you have more experience and seniority in the company.

It's still very important to know the best practices, but it doesn't mean they have to be followed blindly in all situations.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-30 14:13:57+00:00
Understanding the system and understanding the code is different. The “system” I just mentioned was “architected” by me just like I would have done in 2018 when I first started with AWS (but with 20 years of experience with coding).

I know what every module does (well Lambda in my case but I’m trying to be more generic), I know the abstractions, I know the business case, etc.

As a team lead/architect, even with other people writing code, I don’t know every line of code does. Claude code/Codex is just a junior/mid level developer to me
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-01-30 14:14:17+00:00
> Benjamin Netanyahu literally made Hamas rise to power, on purpose

I think that's probably a pretty uncharitable take. Like certainly it benefits extremists on one side if the other side are also extremists, but certainly he didn't force them to start blowing up buses in Israel.

Did he benefit? Yes. Did he facilitate them? Yes, but mostly to damage the less extreme Palestinian side. Is it all his fault? Definitely not.
by gipp | 2026-01-30 14:14:33+00:00
I see a lot of the same (well thought out) pushback on here whenever these kinds of blind hype articles pop up.

But my biggest objection to this "engineering is over" take is one that I don't see much. Maybe this is just my Big Tech glasses, but I feel like for a large, mature product, if you break down the time and effort required to bring a change to production, the actual writing of code is like... ten, maybe twenty percent of it?

Sure, you can bring "agents" to bear on other parts of the process to some degree or another. But their value to the design and specification process, or to live experiment, analysis, and iteration, is just dramatically less than in the coding process (which is already overstated). And that's without even getting into communication and coordination across the company, which is typically the real limiting factor, and in which heavy LLM usage almost exclusively makes things worse.

Takes like this seem to just have a completely different understanding of what "software development" even means than I do, and I'm not sure how to reconcile it.

To be clear, I think these tools absolutely have a place, and I use them where appropriate and often get value out of them. They're part of the field for good, no question. But this take that it's a replacement for engineering, rather than an engineering power tool, consistently feels like it's coming from a perspective that has never worked on supporting a real product with real users.
by Novosell | 2026-01-30 14:15:03+00:00
I just listed a few games off the top of my head, and in contrast to the person who I responded to having listed a bunch of 90s/early 2000s games. In comparison, mine are certainly modern.

If you want "modern", 5 years old maximum, then we have, for example:

Backpack Battles.
Elden Ring(Nightreign).
Tainted Grail.
Monster Train 2.
Escape from Duckov.
Nine Sols.
Hollow Knight Silksong.
Black Myth Wukong.
WH 40k Rogue Trader.
WH 40k Space Marine 2.
Spirit of the North 2.
Patrick's Parabox.
Stacklands.
Balatro.
Ender Lilies/Magnolia.
Tunic.
ANIMAL WELL.
Dome Keeper.
Inscryption.
Reus 2.
Astral Ascent.

I just had a scroll through my steam library and picked some games I really like/love that felt like they should be less than 5 years old. I've not double checked. This is what I meant by "etc. I could go on, and on, and...". I wasn't saying that cause I ran out of games to list.
by Kiboneu | 2026-01-30 14:15:09+00:00
How I think it could play out:

- OpenAI botches the job. Article pieces are written about the fact that kids are still able to use it.

- Sam “responds” by making it an option to use worldcoin orbs to authenticate. You buy it at the “register me” page, but you will get an equivalent amount of worldcoin at current rate. Afterwards the orb is like a badge that you can put on your shelf to show to your guests.

“We heard you loud and clear. That’s why we worked hard to provide worldcoin integration, so that users won’t have to verify their age through annoying, insecure and fallible means.” (an example marketing blurb would say, implicitly referring to their current identity servicer Persona which people find annoying).

- After enough orb hardware is out in the public, and after the api gains traction for 3rd parties to use it, send a notice that x months for now, login without the orb will not be possible. “Here is a link to the shop page to get your orb, available in colors silver and black.”
by AlexandrB | 2026-01-30 14:15:33+00:00
> Tesla's approach has been more risk averse and conservative than others.

You lost me here. Tesla's approach has absolutely not been risk averse or conservative. They've allowed random public "testers" to beta test their self driving stack while even they called it a "beta". They've irresponsibly called the feature "full self driving" when it wasn't able to do any such thing. They've made completely outlandish promises (like FSD driving you from coast to coast in 2016). Finally they've staged marketing videos of FSD "working"[1]. Just deplorable stuff and using the public as their guinea pigs (and piggie bank).

> Its ethics are sound.

You've got to be joking. Where's the "/s"?

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/17/tesla-engineer-testifies-t...

Edit: Forgot another Tesla chonker of a promise. Remember when Elon said a Tesla car would be an appreciating asset because it would make you money by acting as a robotaxi when you're not using it? That was in 2019[2]. Has your Model S appreciated? Are you able to sell it for more today than the purchase price?

[2] https://electrek.co/2025/03/18/elon-musk-biggest-lie-tesla-v...
by brightball | 2026-01-30 14:15:39+00:00
Yep. That was my first thought when I saw the SpaceX & xAI merger news.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/bezos-and-musk-race-to-bring-data-c...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/technology/space-data-cen...
by esperent | 2026-01-30 14:15:40+00:00
I've had a fairly long career as a web dev. When I started, I used to be finicky about configuring my dev environment so that if the internet went down I could still do some kind of work. But over time, partly as I worked on bigger projects and partly as the industry changed, that became infeasible.

So you know what do, what I've been doing for about a decade, if the internet goes down? I stop working. And over that time I've worked in many places around the world, developing countries, tropical islands, small huts on remote mountains. And I've lost maybe a day of work because of connectivity issues. I've been deep in a rainforest during a monsoon and still had 4g connection.

If Anthropic goes down I can switch to Gemini. If I run out of credits (people use credits? I only use a monthly subscription) then I can find enough free credits around to get some basic work done. Increasingly, I could run a local model that would be good enough for some things and that'll become even better in the future. So no, I don't think these are any kind of valid arguments. Everyone relies on online services for their work these days, for banking, messaging, office work, etc. If there's some kind of catastrophe that breaks this, we're all screwed, not just the coders who rely on LLMs.
by direwolf20 | 2026-01-30 14:15:49+00:00
The C standard isn't the only thing compilers have to comply with.

HTTP doesn't specify what happens if the request method is XYZZY. An HTTP server that confirms to the HTTP specification (but not the laws of physics) could make demons fly out of your nose when receiving a request with a method of XYZZY. But nobody complains about that.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-01-30 14:16:26+00:00
> Government could not afford to provide the services they provide if these taxes weren't paid, full stop.

Of course they could. Taxation is not necessary in the short term for a government to provide services (especially if we're talking about the US which both issues its own currency and benefits from massive foreign demand for its debt).

Over the long term, taxation needs to at least pay back the debt but that long-term appears to be much longer than I would have expected (when was the last time the US government ran a surplus?).
by Propelloni | 2026-01-30 14:16:30+00:00
> if there is a shortage of doctors, why are we trying to solve that by training AI models modelled on influencers that spits out (hopefully improving) advice at 10x the rate of a human doctor?

The crucial part is the training. AI may very well be the solution for underserved communities, but not if it is trained on internet rubbish. Train an AI on curated state-of-the-art, scientific data, imagine the expert systems of yore on overdrive, and you will see much better results, including knowing when to call in a human doctor.
Show HN: Screenize - Screen Studio Alternative
by syi0808 | 2026-01-30 14:16:36+00:00
I like to create trivial services. I also like open-source software.

I wanted to make a high-quality video for promotion or introduction. Meanwhile, I found a service called Screen Studio, and I was impressed with the results.

I searched for a free service, and there was no suitable replacement. I'm working on this service because I'm challenging the impossibility with Claude Code these days.

Of course, there are still parts that do not meet the quality of Screen Studio, but I would like to develop it into excellent quality software with your help.
by irishcoffee | 2026-01-30 14:18:03+00:00
They neither directly create many long-term jobs or use copious amounts of water.

If we haven't collectively established at this point that LLMs, data centers, "AI", "the next industrial revolution" are created and controlled by the wealthiest people in the world, and said people don't give a fuck about anything but money and power, we're hopeless. The elite don't care about jobs, or water. At all.

If I were wrong, the whole charade would have been shut down after LLMs convinced people to kill themselves. We have regulations on top of regulations in all corners of the US because of the "Safety" boogieman.

I wish we had the same riots about LLMs that we do about other things. If this isn't the biggest evidence yet that social unrest is engineered I'm not sure what would be more convincing.
by insuranceguru | 2026-01-30 14:18:18+00:00
That's exactly the issue. The jobs are front-loaded in construction. Once operational, a massive data center might only employ 30-50 high-skill technicians.

Compared to a factory of the same square footage that might employ 500+ people, the 'jobs per megawatt' ratio is terrible. It's essentially renting out the local power grid to a remote entity, not creating a local economy.
by mekdoonggi | 2026-01-30 14:18:25+00:00
I understand that. It's my personal opinion that one of the causes of low birth rates is that we continually choose to have robots solve our problems instead of choosing a human.

I think we could increase birth rates by making a taxation scheme in which the most marginally effective way to solve a problem is with a human, paid a wage which allows for that occupation to be a lifelong career.
Show HN: Built firewall for LLMs after prompt injection bypass GPT-4s guardrails
by Dushmesh_DS | 2026-01-30 14:18:29+00:00
After watching prompt injection attacks bypass every major LLM's safety systems, I built TrustLayer.

It's a simple API that:
1. Scans prompts for injection attacks in real-time (heuristic + OpenAI moderation)
2. Detects when agents drift from their intended behavior
3. Has a kill switch for production incidents

Built for production use. Free tier available. Open source docs and examples.

The problem: Prompt injection is still breaking LLM apps in production. Most guardrails can be bypassed with simple tricks.

The solution: API-first security layer that sits between your app and the LLM.
by pigpop | 2026-01-30 14:18:35+00:00
The analogy is pretty apt but you should keep in mind that a human is still doing work when driving a motor vehicle. The motor completely replaces the muscular effort needed to move from point A to point B but it requires the person to become a pilot and an operator of that machine so they can direct it where to go. It also introduces an entirely new set of rules and constraints necessary to avoid much more consequential accidents i.e. you can get to your destination much faster and with little effort but you can also get into a serious accident much faster and with little effort.
Show HN: Enshrouded (Game) Crafting Recipes
by nicklewers | 2026-01-30 14:18:36+00:00
I built a small site for quickly looking up crafting recipes for Enshrouded! I was very surprised to find there wasn't something like this already.

Its very basic, I have a cronjob which once a day scrapes and parses https://enshrouded.wiki.gg/wiki/Data:Crafting_Recipes.json?a... . I then have a static site on Github pages which loads up the parsed data and presents it in a searchable, hopefully user-friendly, manner.

Hope this is useful to someone :)
by PaulRobinson | 2026-01-30 14:19:03+00:00
Which is why they are spreading the 300g out over an entire day, and it's the entire diet for 2 days.

The study is not suggesting this is a long-term diet. They're saying "eat oats for all your food for two days, and your cholesterol lowers by ~10% and then stays low for ~6 weeks due to changes in your gut biome".

They're not saying eat 300g for breakfast and then eat as normal. They're not saying do this every day.

They're saying 2 days, this is what you eat, spread out to replace all your meals across those 2 days, then go back to normal.
by matsemann | 2026-01-30 14:19:20+00:00
Before celebrating this too much, I urge people to read this article about how it has actually played out: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23939076/norway-electric-...

These subsidies have insentivised more car culture. It hasn't fixed most of the issues around cars, just shifted the type of cars. Even possibly increased the amount of cars in the cities. Cars are dangerous, noisy, needs lots of space, microplastics from the tires etc etc., and we should've spent this money on things that could've helped to remove this reliance on cars.

40 billion NOK in subsidies each year. That's a new metro line every year. Or faster trains between cities. Things that could've improved our cities tremendously. You pay more in taxes for buying a new bike than people pay for a new electric car. It cost more for a ticket on public transport than all toll roads driving an electric car from far away into the city in rush hour. Of course people then drive instead of biking or taking the bus.

Yes, the incentives were great and needed in the beginning. But it has gone way, way too far.
by pcthrowaway | 2026-01-30 14:19:38+00:00
> and tokens are used not as trading , but transactional currency to do that building.

I think it's funny that you highlight this, because for many blockchains, their native token is the transactional currency also.

Which opens up the possibility for a marketplace around it, as well as an incentive to grift to recoup one's investment.

AFAIK there's no similar market for LLM tokens (the price may fluctuate, but the AI companies set it, and they can't be resold), but the grift works by instead selling the outputs from using the tokens.
by xnorswap | 2026-01-30 14:19:52+00:00
Crypto only looked like it solved friction in places with messed up banking.

To people in the EU/UK who had free faster payments before Bitcoin was a thing, it never looked like an improvement at all.

The solution expensive and slow banking was always political, not technical.

Crypto was purely speculative, because it was never solving real problems.

I'm not speculating about problems being solved, I'm out there solving real problems. No-one in "blockchain" ever got to say the same. It was always a promise of things being better. And for many people, things already were better than what was being promised.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-01-30 14:20:07+00:00
> This is all wonderful and all but what happens when these tools aren't available - you lose internet connection or the agent is misconfigured or you simply ran out of credits. How would someone support their business / software / livelihood?

This is why I suggest developers use the free time they gain back writing documentation for their software (preferably in your own words not just AI slop), reading official docs, sharpening your sword, learning design patterns more thoroughly. The more you know about the code / how to code, the more you can guide the model to pick a better route for a solution.
by klustregrif | 2026-01-30 14:20:08+00:00
> gigantic chunk of money to spend on something with dubious return on investment.

There is nothing dubious about it. It’s providing verifiable value. Tasks that we would have set for developers or UX’ers last year are solved by it. At 1/50 of the cost, and with great scaling because the tasks are solved faster than you would even be able to explain them to a human and we can initiate 5-10 parallel tracks without having to onboard new people.

And sure it might not make sense to give a 200$/m AI tool to a worker you are paying 800$ but when we have devs that are paid 8000$/m then it’s great return on value to have one person being 10 times as productive at 8200$ instead of spending 80000$/m on ten developers just to be able to say we are doing authentic AI free artisanal software development.
by dguest | 2026-01-30 14:20:14+00:00
I'd like to hear the argument for why this is needed.

I can imagine a number of reasons, but this is all I found in the article:

> If I’m a company considering making strategic investments... I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at... You want to make sure everything is buttoned up and bow tied before that type of information is put into the public realm.

I'm having trouble with this. Is the worry that Amazon will outbid or outmaneuver Meta? How does this work in practice?

Whereas everyone here seems to assume it's to avoid NIMBY. I can see how a Meta spokesperson won't say "if we told you we're trashing your land you'd object" but I'd hope they could come up with a better argument than "your community is a pawn in a 5d chess game, better that you don't know".
by rramadass | 2026-01-30 14:20:18+00:00
> If at least C solutions took advantage of abstract data types as advocated by modular design approaches

People have been writing C code with ADTs and "Modules" from the very beginning.

Two excellent examples which come to mind are; Andrew Tanenbaum's Minix book Operating Systems Design and Implementation and David Hanson's C Interfaces and Implementations: Techniques for Creating Reusable Software.

And of course the Linux Kernel is full of great modular C techniques which one can study.
by bayindirh | 2026-01-30 14:20:21+00:00
> use copious amounts of water.

If you're in Europe and/or using completely closed loop systems, then yes. Your only water use is humidifiers, and maybe the sprayers you use on drycoolers in the summer months.

On the other hand, if you use water spraying into air as heat absorption system or use open loop external circuits, you're using literally tons of water.

Source: Writing this comment from a direct liquid cooled data center.