MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stevenwoo | 2026-02-06 00:20:14+00:00
Funnily enough, the currently airing Starz program, Spartacus: House of Ashur does this, has Caesar as a character and all political sides use “pirates” as a bogeyman to justify all sorts of things and stage false flag attacks while pretending to be pirates. It’s meant for entertainment not historicity but it’s kind of reminding me of Battlestar Galactica reboot touching political themes in this one aspect except with swords and prosethetics flying everywhere.
by henry_bone | 2026-02-06 00:20:29+00:00
LLMs are not for me. My position is that the advantage we humans have over the
rest of the natural world, is our minds. Our ability to think, create and express ideas
is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Once we give that over to
"thinking" machines, we weaken ourselves, both individually and as a species.

That said, I've given it a go. I used zed, which I think is a pretty great tool. I
bought a pro subscription and used the built in agent with Claude Sonnet 4.x and Opus.
I'm a Rails developer in my day job, and, like MitchellH and many others, found out
fairly quickly that tasks for the LLM need to be quite specific and discrete. The agent
is great a renames and minor refactors, but my preferred use of the agent was to get it
to write RSpec tests once I'd written something like a controller or service object.

And generally, the LLM agent does a pretty great job of this.

But here's the rub: I found that I was losing the ability to write rspec.

I went to do it manually and found myself trying to remember API calls and approaches
required to write some specs. The feeling of skill leaving me was quite sobering and
marked my abandonment of LLMs and Zed, and my return to neovim, agent-free.

The thing is, this is a common experience generally. If you don't use it, you lose it.
It applies to all things: fitness, language (natural or otherwise), skills of all kinds.
Why should it not apply to thinking itself.

Now you may write me and my experience off as that of a lesser mind, and that you won't
have such a problem. You've been doing it so long that it's "hard-wired in" by now.
Perhaps.

It's in our nature to take the path of least resistance, to seek ease and convenience at
every turn. We've certainly given away our privacy and anonymity so that we can pay for
things with our phones and send email for "free".

LLMs are the ultimate convenience. A peer or slave mind that we can use to do our
thinking and our work for us. Some believe that the LLM represents a local maxima, that
the approach can't get much better. I dunno, but as AI improves, we will hand over more
and more thinking and work to it. To do otherwise would be to go against our very nature
and every other choice we've made so far.

But it's not for me. I'm no MitchellH, and I'm probably better off performing the
mundane activities of my work, as well as the creative ones, so as to preserve my
hard-won knowledge and skills.

YMMV

I'll leave off with the quote that resonates the most with me as I contemplate AI:-

"I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you,
it really became our civilization, which is, of course, what this is all about."
-- Agent Smith "The Matrix"
by habinero | 2026-02-06 00:20:42+00:00
1. No. The point of having engineers is to build product and make you money. They cannot make you money if you waste their time on building internal apps that do not make you money.

There's no point in saving $20K on an SaaS app if you use $100K in developer time and miss out on $1M of potential revenue. We get paid the big bucks because we can make companies a lot of money.

2. Haaaa no, that's 100% not how that works. If you buy a SaaS product, the company made that product. They have documentation. They have training. You can hire people who have worked on that system before. If it goes down, they get paged.

If you write the tool, all of that is on you to do. If it goes down, you have to fix it. If it screwed up data, you have to fix it. Any time anyone has any questions? Guess what, you're the one they'll ask. All of that costs the company money, because you don't work for free. When you quit, the app is now useless and can't be fixed unless you did a lot of work beforehand.

It's best to think of DIY apps like those really really sticky noxious tarpits. It might look safe or easy to get into, but good luck getting out of them. You might end up at the bottom with the bones of everyone else who thought that DIYing it was a good idea.
by mdelaney7 | 2026-02-06 00:20:52+00:00
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by jamesfinlayson | 2026-02-06 00:20:58+00:00
Same thing in Australia - some gang was busted recently for stealing mid-range four wheel drives, packing them in shipping containers with partially dismantled cars (I guess so that a cursory inspection would just show "car parts" rather than a single nice looking car) and then shipping them around the world (I guess an overseas buyer isn't checking if a car with this VIN has been stolen on the other side of the world).
by Noumenon72 | 2026-02-06 00:21:30+00:00
And that's not necessarily anti-intellectual or in opposition to truth. When "seeing like a state", a government doesn't have a view of most actual facts, like "was this person actually in danger" or "is this person repeating the exact same story as the ten people before them". It only knows facts legitimated by its own systems. When those facts force it to take actions that are harmful and dumb, the government is wise to stop defining those as facts.

For example, if the army keeps launching raids that kill civilians because the government can only track progress through body counts, it is not "facts are the enemy" to stop counting the bodies. (Obviously it would be wiser to stop using the counts as the deciding factor, but if the generals have different values than the government, as immigration courts do, then stopping the count is the only way to stop the bleeding.)
by kevin_thibedeau | 2026-02-06 00:22:07+00:00
The perpetual war is just a framework for Orwell's autocrats needing to direct the anger of the populace away from themselves. We have this today with government propaganda stirring up renewed hatred of brown people to deflect from their ineptitude. Conveniently blowing up in their faces when it turns out to be much easier to hate pedophile protectors.
by jMyles | 2026-02-06 00:22:20+00:00
I've read your comment twice, and I can't make heads or tails of what you're trying to say.

> If some CEO spoke unflatteringly of The Red Cross or Habitat For Humanity,

Those are organizations. "Antifa" is a descriptive term that many people and organizations use, whether they have connections to one another or not. What is the comparison you are trying to draw here?

> If Antifa’s record speaks for itself, then you don’t need to play these kinds of word games.

You are using the possessive here, "Antifa's", in a way that seems grammatically incorrect to me.

"Antifa" is usually an adjective, but sometimes a known, like "vegan" or "blonde". If I "blonde's record speaks for itself", it seems like obviously broken English.

Usually you'd use this phraseology to describe a person or organization, "Joe's record", "Nabisco's record", etc.

What is the entity or entities whose record(s) you are trying to describe?
by tabbott | 2026-02-06 00:22:31+00:00
I'm sure you could do some of Zulip's features on top of Matrix.

But for what it's worth, as Zulip's lead developer, every time I'm looked at whether we could have built Zulip on top of Matrix, it just feels impossible to me. And a big part of it is the architectural decisions Matrix made to support a decentralized E2EE social network, which are not required for a self-contained chat system like Zulip or Slack (which can still be bridged with other chat systems). Permissions enforcement, performance, and lots of other details really benefit from the more focused goal, where we've explicitly decided we're not building a generic distributed network architecture and are not competing with WhatsApp.

That said, I think it's great that we have multiple OSS chat systems with different strategies that are targeting different collections of niches!

I will never understand why so many organizations entrusted the communications fabric of their organization to Microsoft and SalesForce Cloud services over the last decade. If an organization can succeed in escaping Teams or Slack to Element/Matrix, that's great, even if it's a use case where Zulip would be a better end-user experience for their requirements.
by planckscnst | 2026-02-06 00:23:03+00:00
That's so strange. I found GPT to be abysmal at following instructions to the point of unusability for any direction-heavy role. I have a common workflow that involves an orchestrator that pretty much does nothing but follow some simple directions [1]. GPT flat-out cannot do this most basic task.

[1]: https://github.com/Vibecodelicious/llm-conductor/blob/main/O...
by amazingman | 2026-02-06 00:23:34+00:00
I definitely have worries about far-left capture if/when a power vacuum occurs after the current fascist executive and semi-fascist legislative experience the whiplash of Americans finally pushing back. But you know what? I'll start focusing on that when we get closer to that reality. It's the fascists currently in power that deserve our focus. And you seem to be willing to carry water for them. I assume you don't see it that way, but that's hard to square with some of your other comments.
by vagab0nd | 2026-02-06 00:24:10+00:00
I recently started digging into databases for the first time since college, and from a novice's perspective, postgres is absolutely magical. You can throw in 10M+ rows across twenty columns, spread over five tables, add some indices, and get sub-100ms queries for virtually anything you want. If something doesn't work, you just ask it for an analysis and immediately know what index to add or how to fix your query. It blows my mind. Modern databases are miracles.
by imiric | 2026-02-06 00:24:14+00:00
I find it amusing that the innovation in this space for the past year+ has been mostly centered around engineering: MCP, "agents", "skills", etc. Now "agent" orchestration is the new hotness.

Meanwhile, the same issues that have plagued these tools since their inception are largely ignored: hallucination, innacuracy, context collapse, etc. These won't be solved by engineering, but by new research and foundational improvements.

On one hand, solid engineering was sorely needed, and can extract a lot of value from the current tech. But on the other, all these announcements and improvements feel like companies grasping at straws to keep the hype cycle going by any means necessary. Charts must go up and to the right, or investors get antsy.

It's all adding to the mountain of signs that suggest that this isn't the path to artificial intelligence. It's interesting tech, with possibly many valuable applications, but the "AI" narrative is frankly tiring. I wish I could fast forward on this speculative phase, go past the inevitable crash, and arrive at a timeframe where we've figured out what this tech is actually good for, and where we hopefully use it more for good than evil.
by jamesfinlayson | 2026-02-06 00:25:01+00:00
> start the car by connecting the right wires

I might be misinformed but I've been told that for a while now (maybe 20 years or so), new cars have been built to be exceptionally difficult to hot-wire.

A South African friend told me that some brand of four wheel drive could be hot-wired but it involved getting behind one of the front head-lamp bulbs - doable, but a damaging process if you're in a rush.
by trescenzi | 2026-02-06 00:25:12+00:00
I literally hit a claude code bug today, tried to use claude desktop to debug it which didn't help and it offered to open a bug report for me. So yes 100%. Some of the titles also make it pretty clear they are auto submitted. This is my favorite which was around the top when I was creating my bug report 3 hours ago and is now 3 pages back lol.

> Unable to process - no bug report provided. Please share the issue details you'd like me to convert into a GitHub issue title

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/23459
by tomlis | 2026-02-06 00:25:32+00:00
The deterministic mixed with LLM approach has been great for me so far. I've been getting a lot of the gains the "do it all with AI" people have been preaching but with far fewer pitfalls. It's sometimes not as fluid as what you sometimes see with the full-LLM-agent setups but that's perfectly acceptable to me and I handle those issues on a case-by-case basis.
by trhway | 2026-02-06 00:25:50+00:00
thank you, i see.

>the worm sits winding through subcutaneous connective tissue. It doesn't create a neat tunnel — it's loosely embedded and adhered to surrounding tissue along its length.

that's bad. In my thinking i in particular missed that it may be winding instead of being more streamlined like say blood vessels/etc. Stuff of nightmares. Now i imagined a one winding in the grooves of the brain ...
by quotemstr | 2026-02-06 00:25:51+00:00
Yes. That's a good framing. PostgreSQL is a good default for online LOB-y things. There are all sorts of reasons to use something other than PostgreSQL, but raw performance at scale becomes such a reason later than you think.

Cloud providers will rent you enormous beasts of machines that, while expensive, will remain cheaper than rewriting for a migration for a long time.
by doublerabbit | 2026-02-06 00:26:04+00:00
An email is an email. I used to talk to contacts like that all the time and they did too. These are quick interchanges with folk.

The grammar police as well as PC became a thing and now everyone is expected to construct paragraphs of text without any grammatical errors otherwise you're mobbed and lynched.

Just because you're expecting full pronunciation doesn't mean others do. I'd rather write with laziness and short hand than having to punctuate a whole paragraph and bore the person to death like this paragraph.
by jongjong | 2026-02-06 00:26:33+00:00
I hate how developers are often very skeptical but all the skepticism goes out the window if the tech is sufficiently hyped up.

And TBH, developers are pretty dumb not to realize that the tech tools monoculture is a way for business folks to make us easily replaceable... If all companies use the same tech, it turns us into exchangeable commodities which can easily be replaced and sourced across different organizations.

Look at the typical React dev. They have zero leverage and can be replaced by vibe coding kiddies straight out of school or sourced from literally any company on earth. And there are some real negatives to using silver bullet tools. They're not even the best tools for a lot of cases! The React dev is a commodity and they let it happen to them. Outsmarted by dumb business folks who dropped out of college. They probably didn't even come up with the idea; the devs did. Be smarter people. They're going to be harvesting you like Cavendish.
by duped | 2026-02-06 00:26:41+00:00
I mean gp is clearly a joke but

A fundamental part of the job is being able to break down problems from large to small, reason about them, and talk about how you do it, usually with minimal context or without deep knowledge in all aspects of what we do. We're abstraction artists.

That question wouldn't be fundamentally different than any other architecture question. Start by drawing big, hone in on smaller parts, think about edge cases, use existing knowledge. Like bread and butter stuff.

I much more question your reaction to the joke than using it as a hypothetical interview question. I actually think it's good. And if it filters out people that have that kind of reaction then it's excellent. No one wants to work with the incurious.
by hex4def6 | 2026-02-06 00:27:28+00:00
No.

I'd argue that no one would really care given it's GCC.

But if you worked for GiantSodaCo on their secret recipe under NDA, then create a new soda company 15 years later that tastes suspiciously similar to GiantSodaCo, you'd probably have legal issues. It would be hard to argue that you weren't using proprietary knowledge in that case.
by wvenable | 2026-02-06 00:28:04+00:00
This is cool and actually demonstrates real utility. Using AI to take something that already exists and create it for a different library / framework / platform is cool. I'm sure there's a lot of training data in there for just this case.

But I wonder how it would fare given a language specification for a non-existent non-trivial language and build a compiler for that instead?
by acdha | 2026-02-06 00:28:52+00:00
That last part is really interesting to me: humans are notoriously bad at things like looking at a large block of code and recognizing that something is missing from the middle. Offensive LLMs guided by control flow analysis are probably going to do some really interesting things finding flaws in that bespoke code but I bet most companies jumping on the vibe-coding bandwagon aren’t going to invest nearly as much.
Show HN: Graph DB-backed game, like Dobble/Spot it to play with Projective Plane
by jpadamspdx | 2026-02-06 00:28:54+00:00
Fun game to play on your own against the clock or against gpt-4o mini.
Uses finite projective plane PG(2, 7).
You can back it with a graph database with PG(2, 7) representation and it's fun to explore the structure. More in blog post: https://medium.com/neo4j/the-math-and-the-graph-behind-a-pop...
by Grimblewald | 2026-02-06 00:29:27+00:00
might not work well, but by navigating to a very harry potter dominant part of latent space by preconditioning on the books you make it more likely to get good results. An example would be taking a base model and prompting "what follows is the book 'X'" it may or may not regurgitate the book correctly. Give it a chunk of the first chapter and let it regurgitate from there and you tend to get fairly faithful recovery, especially for things on gutenberg.

So it might be there, by predcondiditioning latent space to the area of harry potter world, you make it so much more probable that the full spell list is regurgitated from online resources that were also read, while asking naive might get it sometimes, and sometimes not.

the books act like a hypnotic trigger, and may not represent a generalized skill. Hence why replacing with random words would help clarify. if you still get the origional spells, regurgitation confirmed, if it finds the spells, it could be doing what we think. An even better test would be to replace all spell references AND jumble chapters around. This way it cant even "know" where to "look" for the spell names from training.
by bdangubic | 2026-02-06 00:29:37+00:00
> This is absolutely terrible advice mathematically for anyone.

I apologize if I sounded like I am
pitching people should stay un-employed, I re-read my comment and I don’t think that I did. I would probably take lower paying job temporarily (not at this point in my career but when I was younger). however though, the 1/12 or 1/6 or 3/12 might sound significant but taking below-your-worth will probably end up worse in the long run if you stay long enough

> … easily make $1 million gross in 4 years with one promotion?

I think you are talking outliers and not for majority, not everyone working in “big tech” will make a mill in 4 years. but to answer your question, I made more in my first 4 years (not even inflation-adjusted) and this is 1999-2003. you can do it in several ways, the two I would recommend:

1. government contracting for a year or two (work your ass off and make top govies happy) then going solo or start your own firm when the contract is up

2. find a company that has been in the business for say 20+ years and has been profitable and has no more than 150 employees. in the first 1-2 years work your ass off and specifically volunteer to work on the worst shit most shy away from, the hardest problems, the worst parts of the codebase, ones that say // do not touch this, no one knows how it works. after some time it’ll be you that everyone turns to when hard problems need to be solved and further you will reach a point where you are more valuable to the company than company is to you. there may be a handful of such people in “big tech” (if that). once you get there you can go 1099 and charge just about anything you want.

overall, treat your self as corporation and every employment not as “I am slaving away for ____” but partnership between two corporations and career gets a lot better than working at “big tech”
by mekoka | 2026-02-06 00:29:37+00:00
They don't compare exactly. Author is mistaken in thinking that UNLOGGED means "in memory". It means "no WAL", so there's considerable speed up there, but traded in with also more volatility. To be a viable alternative to Redis or Memcached though, the savings you get from the latter two must really be superfluous to your use case. Which could be true for many (most?).
by yellowapple | 2026-02-06 00:29:52+00:00
Ardour's great. I've been donating $4/month for enough months that I probably could've bought one of the fancier “professional” DAWs, but why bother when Ardour does it all?

A couple friends and I started a band a couple months ago and we've started to use Ardour + a Behringer UMC1820 for some basic recording work; it's wild how quick we've been able to get up and running with it (to the point where our only limitation right now is scrounging up enough cables to hook up all our instruments to the UMC1820). Create tracks, pick each track's input, arm tracks for recording, hit record, hit play, and make noises. Our lead guitarist is more familiar with Cubase, but I had him try out Ardour and he's already putting together recordings; just had to point him to a couple manual pages and he was off to the races with it.

Curious to see how quick 9.0 will hit Ubuntu Studio (which is what we're using in our practice room). Cool to see Ardour finally get a dedicated piano roll window (presumably ported over from MixBus?); even though it's neat to be able to do MIDI editing directly from the main editor window, having the option to focus on a specific snippet will be handy. And the continued improvements with the new cue-based flow will be cool to play around with (and maybe work into live performances once we've got enough material down solid for shows?).