MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by avtar | 2026-02-07 21:21:22+00:00
> Pair it with Debian

A KDE dev mentioned on a podcast that issues related to Debian Stable get closed automatically on their bug tracker because fixes don't get backported :/

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1pneqp4/kde_dev_do_n...

My wife was complaining about Windows issues so I ended up installing Fedora with KDE on her laptop. I would have preferred Debian but using Testing (as suggested by the dev) doesn't some ideal.
by blibble | 2026-02-07 21:21:24+00:00
it is a very, very strange thing to witness

even if you can be a prompt engineer (or whatever it's called this week) today

well, with the feedback you're providing: you're training it to do that too

you are LITERALLY training the newly hired outsourced personnel to do your job

but this time you won't be able to get a job anywhere else, because your fellow class traitors are doing exactly the same thing at every other company in the world
by twelve40 | 2026-02-07 21:22:01+00:00
I found my love for programming in high school, dreaming of helping the world with my beautiful craftsmanship, but now i really really need the fokken money. Both are true!

So if my corporate overlords will have me talk to the soul-less Claude robot all day long in a Severance-style setting, and fix its stupid bugs, but I get to keep my good salary, then I'll shed a small tear for my craft and get back to it. If not... well, then I'll be shedding a lot more tears ... i guess
by levodelellis | 2026-02-07 21:22:50+00:00
IIRC go wasn't that fast but can feel like it in vscode. IIRC vscode compiles go using the lsp which is faster than launching a process because for some reason, vscode stalls for a second or more before launching a process.

I can't remember how fast D was but iirc it was fairly fast. Actual fastest is my compiler which I don't work on anymore and isn't ready for production. It's the only compiler I know of that hit millions of lines <1s in a non trivial language https://bolinlang.com/
by chrisfosterelli | 2026-02-07 21:23:01+00:00
Good point. By 'technical garbage' I largely meant the dated visualizations it associated with all the hacking scenes (the rapid hacking speed I can forgive for the sake of story) but TBH I never fully made the connection between 'the gibson' and william gibson -- I kind of like the idea of the hacking scenes as an exploration to gibson's ideas around cyberspace.
by Marsymars | 2026-02-07 21:23:03+00:00
> Fair enough if you've some development environment automation and you want the CI to run it as well so CI is consistent with local development.

Oh we don't even run it in applications' CI, the environment automation is an entirely separate CI workflow. The intention isn't consistency between dev/CI, the environment automation CI effectively just serves to ensure that the automations actually run without error, and adds some explicit responsibility for anyone who's adding a new dependency.

> But I don't think useradd taking 30's on GitHub Actions is a bug or something they need to fix, they've explained why. Unsure about the sudo issues, did not read it carefully.

Yeah, agreed. Tangential, our dev setup CI is fairly slow, which tends to be fine - it runs a couple orders of magnitude less frequently than our app CI.
by mirawelner | 2026-02-07 21:23:16+00:00
These posts make me feel like I’m the worst llm prompter in existence.

I’m using a mix of Gemini, grok, and gpt to translate some matlab into c++. It is kinda okay at its job but not great? I am rapidly reading Accelerated C++ to get to the point where I can throw the llm out the window. If it was python or Julia I wouldn’t be using an LLM at all bc I know those languages. AI is barely better than me at C++ because I’m halfway through my first ever book on it. What LLMs are these people using?

The code I’m translating isn’t even that complex - it runs analysis on ecg/ppg data to implement this one dude’s new diagnosis algorithm. The hard part was coming up with the algorithm, the code is simple. And the shit the LLM pours out works kinda okay but not really? I have to do hours of fix work on its output. I’m doing all the hard design work myself.

I fucking WISH I could only work on biotech and research and send the code to an LLM. But I can’t because they suck so I gotta learn how computer memory works so my C++ doesn’t eat up all my pc’s memory. What magical LLMs are yall using??? Please send them my way! I want a free llm therapist and a programmer! What world do you live in?? Let me in!
by watwut | 2026-02-07 21:23:17+00:00
I remeber reading tons of junk and pulp as a teen decades ago. If anything, the teen section is more complex then pure hero fantasies and repetitive scary stories that used to make the bulk of reading. Yes, lord of the rings was popular before and now. But the stuff people read en masse was not lord of the rings and certainly not some kind of smart complex stuff.

What used to be read a lot was literary equivalent of a sitcom or slash fantasy.
by sara_builds | 2026-02-07 21:23:57+00:00
Great question! That's exactly what Voice Profiles are for.

In the dashboard, you can set up:
- Your business description (so AI knows context)
- Voice instructions (e.g., "friendly but professional", "use humor", "keep it short")
- Example responses you've written before
- Custom sign-off

The AI uses all of this to match your tone. So if your style is casual and witty, responses will sound casual and witty. If you're more formal, it adapts.

The goal is that responses sound like YOU wrote them, not a bot. Most users tweak their voice profile once and then forget about it.
by egeuysall | 2026-02-07 21:24:10+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm 16 and built this after over-engineering my first SaaS and never shipping.

Huesly generates complete design systems (colors, fonts, spacing) from a mood in <1 second. Uses OKLCH color space for actually harmonious palettes instead of random RGB.

Tech stack:
- Next.js 15
- TypeScript
- PostgreSQL
- Tailwind CSS

Export formats:
- CSS variables
- Tailwind v4 config
- SCSS
- JSON tokens

Homepage has a live demo that updates every 3 seconds so you can see the possibilities.

Built in 2 weeks to force myself to ship fast instead of perfecting infrastructure.

Happy to answer any questions about the color science, architecture, or why OKLCH > RGB.
LLM as an Engineer vs. a Founder?
by dm03514 | 2026-02-07 21:24:36+00:00
Every day I'm seeing blogs on here about the impact of AI on software engineering. Sentiment seems split between AI eventually automating the software engineer role away, vs AI produces too many bugs to displace senior engineers.

I feel like many of the AI insights featured on hackernews are from the software engineers Point of View?

There's also the perspective of vibe-coded-to-prod disaster scenarios.

For me, as a software engineer with nearly 20 years experience, AI is already more trustworthy than many contractors I've worked with over the years.

As a founder/product manager, a lot of trust is put into the engineers building the platforms. The Founder <-> Implementer interaction already involves huge amounts of trust. Things happen all the times, and C-suite executives don't have the ability to fix themselves.

My interpretation is that a lot of engineers are just encountering this trust relationship for the first time with AI. We're trusting AI (a ~contractor) to do something to spec. Advanced engineers are able to audit the AI output at a very deep level.

For founders / product managers / executives, this relationship is nothing new, and we already trust other parties to implement our code.

What does everyone think?

Going from contractor to LLM is actually a huge benefit to me, LLM has a much faster feedback loop than human contractors, costs a fraction and has a lower base rate of error (in my experience). Nothing new with the trust model.
by trinix912 | 2026-02-07 21:24:40+00:00
> Fyi, in Mint if you search application for "notepad", "Text Editor" is the first result. That is curated search done right. Search for notepad on windows and you probably get an ad for a travel website.

So it was with Windows Vista, Windows 7, even Windows 8. It's not an impossible ask for Windows either.
by marginalia_nu | 2026-02-07 21:24:53+00:00
It's not like the Soviets fared much better with regards to corruption and institutional decay, to the part where the rampant corruption of the Brezhnev-era was a major contributing cause to the eventual collapse of the union.

Institutional longevity is largely an unsolved problem. Seems having checks and balances like the US does helps slow it down to some extent, but is far from a guarantee.
by bytearray | 2026-02-07 21:25:00+00:00
I understand the sentiment and I've been involved in software engineering in various roles for the last 25+ years. The thing that gives me hope is that never once in that time has the problem ever been that we didn't have more work to do.

It's not like all of a sudden I'm working 2-3 hours a day. I'm just getting a lot more done.
by eranation | 2026-02-07 21:25:01+00:00
Of course. I mean, my view is that it needs to be "build the right things right", vs "build things right and then discover if they are the right things". It's a stab at premature optimisation, focusing on code elegance more than delivering working software. Code simplicity, good design, scalability, are super important for maintainability, even in the age of AI (maybe even more so).

But considering that AI will more and more "build things right" by default, it's up to us humans to decide what are the "right things to build".

Once AI knows what are the "right things to build" better than humans, this is AGI in my book, and also the end of classical capitalism as we know it. Yes, there will still be room for "human generated" market, like we have today (photography didn't kill painting, but it made it a much less of a main employment option)

In a way, AI is the great equality maker, in the past the strongest men prevailed, then when muscles were not the main means to assert force, it was the intellect, now it's just sheer want. You want to do something, now you can, you have no excuses, you just need to believe it's possible, and do it.

As someone else said, agency is eating the world. For now.
by gre | 2026-02-07 21:25:18+00:00
Tried all ten with claude, then had codex take a loook at the work -- codex thinks number 7 has the lowest chance of being correct, a 1 out of 10 rating. None of them were higher than 7/10 chance of being right so far as done by claude opus 4.6 and evaluated by codex 5.3 highest.

Not going to spend too many more tokens on this.
by jmclnx | 2026-02-07 21:25:53+00:00
>forcing us to file our own travel reimbursement

Similar for me in the corporate world, in the 80s, I just had to save the receipts and give the to the Department Admin. Easy as pie.

Then that all changed in the 90s. Everytime I traveled, using the 'canned' system provided to us, you could spend days trying to fill in the forms. It would ask you for all kind of codes no one knew to supply.

Multiply that by 10s of employees, there is no way firing a Dept admin and contracting that out saved any money. It has to cost the company 2x or 3x as much as one admin costs. And that is a low-ball estimate.
by kryogen1c | 2026-02-07 21:26:32+00:00
> Wild speculation detached from reality which destroys personal fortunes are not "a desirable feature."

This is not the definition of a bubble, and is specifically contrary to what i said.

A good bubble, like the automobile industry in the example I linked, paves the way for a whole new economic modalit - but value was still destroyed when that bubble popped and the market corrected.

You may think its better to not have bubbles and limit the maximum economic rate of change (and you may be right), but the current system is not obviously wrong and has benefits.
by puchatek | 2026-02-07 21:26:42+00:00
If that was the final price, no strings attached and perfect, reliable privacy then I might consider it. Maybe not for the current iteration but for what will be on offer in a year or two.

But as it stands right now, the most useful LLMs are hosted by companies that are legally obligated to hand over your data if the US gov. had decided that it wants it. It's unacceptable.
by bopbopbop7 | 2026-02-07 21:27:04+00:00
Because everything from assembly all the way to some high level language like python is deterministic.

LLMs are expensive, slow, and non-deterministic and English is not precise enough to be a good programming language.

But I would love to see an example of software that was built and maintained at your "higher" level of abstraction where the LLM is the compiler and English is the programming language.
by chasd00 | 2026-02-07 21:27:07+00:00
> You're free to use whatever tools you like.

this is important, i feel like a lot of people are falling in to the "stop liking what i don't like" way of thinking. Further, there's a million different ways to apply an AI helper in software development. You can adjust your workflow in whatever way works best for you. ..or leave it as is.
by shmeeed | 2026-02-07 21:27:24+00:00
I'm sorry to say your conclusion doesn't hold. I'm not sure where exactly you went wrong, without trying to do the math my best guess would be that you just can't properly simulate a far-sight task in a near-sight environment like that. Our eyes don't work that way.

But if you go outside and do a real world test, you'll (hopefully) find that a number plate should be readable from much further away than 20 meters. If you don't, please go and see an optometrist! I'm serious.

20 m is actually a very lenient requirement IMO. In my country, one should be able to read a number plate from about 35 m easily, and with good eyesight, 65 m and more shouldn't be a problem.
by straightbuggin | 2026-02-07 21:27:29+00:00
I am a non coder. For many years I went through many various coding tutorials, but never had been able to fully build anything other than basic websites. Now with AI I have been able to build useful CLI tools. Instead of using a static website generator such as Hugo, I can now quick build a website of what I am looking for. Heck, I just had it build me a website as a presentation instead of doing a slide show. I came up with an outline + my notes and information then had it build out the site based on that information. I was able to have it create some really cool animations to help explain my ideas.
Show HN: Engineering Perception with Combinatorial Memetics
by alan_sass | 2026-02-07 21:28:39+00:00
Hello, World!

Need your help, urgently! :)

Long-time lurker, newly and hopefully valuable HN poster soon.

My X account is currently classified as "Probable Spam" after I made 1,078 posts over the last 7 days (lol).

Any chance ya'll can explore the above, then if you are delighted to please interact with my account to counter the "Probable Spam" classification?

Thank you!

P.S. "Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread." <-- I hope this qualifies when related to Combinatorial Memetics!
by rubyn00bie | 2026-02-07 21:28:49+00:00
I sort of have a different view of that time matrix. If AI is only able to help me do tasks that are of low value, where I previously wouldn’t have bothered—- is it really saving me anything? Before where I’d simply ignore auxiliary tasks, and focus on what matters, I’m now constantly detoured with them thinking “it’ll only take ten minutes.”

I also primarily write Elixir, and I have found most Agents are only capable of writing small pieces well. More complicated asks tend to produce unnecessarily complicated solutions, ones that may “work,” on the surface, but don’t hold up in practice. I’ve seen a large increase in small bugs with more AI coding assistance.

When I write code, I want to write it and forget about it. As a result, I’ve written a LOT of code which has gone on to work for years without touching it. The amount of time I spent writing it is inconsequential in every sense. I personally have not found AI capable of producing code like that (yet, as all things, that could change).

Does AI help with some stuff? Sure. I always forget common patterns in Terraform because I don’t often have to use it. Writing some initial resources and asking it to “make it normal,” is helpful. That does save time. Asking it to write a gen server correctly, is an act of self-harm because it fundamentally does not understand concurrency in Erlang/BEAM/OTP. It very much looks like it does, but it 100% does not.

tldr; I think the ease of use of AI can cause us to over produce and as a result we miss the forest for the trees.
by jonahx | 2026-02-07 21:29:07+00:00
> If the goal isn't actively set to help and streamline the process

In the reimbursements example, the goal shifted, by design. The environment moved from high-trust to low-trust as the department grew, and the aim moved from "keeping people happy" to "spending less money"/"not being taken advantage of". Not defending it -- I hate paperwork like this -- but it seems almost inevitable as groups of any kind grow large enough and you actually can't assume good faith anymore.
by Insanity | 2026-02-07 21:29:19+00:00
Nit: saying “this country” without context on where the parent poster is from or where you are from is kinda useless.

From context, you probably mean USA. And I’d agree, however the US was always more technology minded than scientifically minded, and the parent poster lines up with that centuries old ideology. So I don’t think this is per se a new thing.
by jacomoRodriguez | 2026-02-07 21:29:30+00:00
I recently started building a POC for an app idea. As framework I choose django and I did not once wrote code myself. The whole thing was done in a github codespace with copilot in agentic mode and using mostly sonnet and opus models.
For prompting, I did not gave it specific instructions like add x to settings. I told it "We are now working on feature X. X should be able to do a, b and c. B has the following constraints. C should work like this." I have also some instructions in the agents.md file which tells the model to, before starting to code, ask me all unclear questions and then make a comprehensive plan on what to implement. I would then go over this plan, clarify or change if needed - and then let it run for 5-15 minutes. And every time it just did it. The whole thing, with debugging, with tests. Sure, sometimes there where minor bugs when I tested - but then I prompted directly the problem, and sure enough it got fixed in seconds...

Not sure why we had so different experiances. Maybe you are using other models? Maybe you miss something in your prompts? Letting it start with a plan which I can then check did definitly help a lot. Also a summary of the apps workings and technical decissions (also produced by the model) did maybe help in the long run.
by dlubarov | 2026-02-07 21:29:32+00:00
Okay, if you like, we can stretch the definition of "evidence of X" to "anything that has any bearing, however slight, on the likelihood of X".

By this absurd definition,

- Sure, Epstein having a Jewish client is evidence of him being a Mossad spy.

- If you have any Jewish acquaintances, that's evidence of you being a Mossad spy.

- If you've eaten at McDonalds, that means you're not an extreme BDSer, which is evidence of you being a Mossad spy.
by jasoneckert | 2026-02-07 21:30:36+00:00
Imagine if Fedora locked you out of vi because your Red Hat account had an issue.

The unsettling part of stories like this isn’t “Microsoft bad,” it’s the growing assumption that local tools should be downstream of remote identity systems. A text editor is about as offline and fundamental as software gets, yet it’s now possible for account state, sync bugs, or policy enforcement to make it inaccessible on your own machine.

This is where non-macOS UNIX and Linux systems draw the line - if it’s installed locally and you have permission, it runs. Cloud services can enhance that experience (backups, sync, collaboration) but they don’t get veto power over whether vi opens.

When that boundary erodes, we start to see our systems as thin clients, instead of full local OSes, as the author mentions.
by busterarm | 2026-02-07 21:30:58+00:00
All _your_ needs at work.

All of this goes out the window when you're dealing with a government bureaucracy that has hyper specific document formatting requirements.

This is a real foundational need of nearly every business at some point. Every court system and government agency has their own rules and they need to be tracked and followed perfectly. There are whole sub-industries around dealing with this for legal documents in MS Word.
by nosianu | 2026-02-07 21:30:59+00:00
Are you seriously comparing chips running AI models and human brains now???

Last time I checked the chips are not rewiring themselves like the brain does, nor does even the software rewrite itself, or the model recalibrate itself - anything that could be called "learning", normal daily work for a human brain.

Also, the models are not models of the world, but of our text communication only.

Human brains start by building a model of the physical world, from age zero. Much later, on top of that foundation, more abstract ideas emerge, including language. Text, even later. And all of it on a deep layer of a physical world model.

The LLM has none of that! It has zero depth behind the words it learned. It's like a human learning some strange symbols and the rules governing their appearance. The human will be able to reproduce valid chains of symbols following the learned rules, but they will never have any understanding of those symbols. In the human case, somebody would have to connect those symbols to their world model by telling them the "meaning" in a way they can already use. For the LLM that is not possible, since it doesn't habe such a model to begin with.

How anyone can even entertain the idea of "AGI" based on uncomprehending symbol manipulation, where every symbol has zero depth of a physical world model, only connections to other symbols, is beyond me TBH.
by vidarh | 2026-02-07 21:31:09+00:00
It's a fun comparison, but with the notable difference that that one can compile the Linux kernel and generate code for multiple different architectures, while this one can only compile a small proportion of valid C. It's a great project, but it's not so much a C compiler, as a compiler for a subset of C that allows all programs this compiler can compile to also be compiled by an actual C compiler, but not vice versa.
by teo_zero | 2026-02-07 21:31:21+00:00
I agree on the former two (std::string and smart pointers) because they can't be nicely implemented without some help from the language itself.

The latter two (hash maps and vectors), though, are just compound data types that can be built on top of standard C. All it would need is to agree on a new common library, more modern than the one designed in the 70s.
by a3w | 2026-02-07 21:31:28+00:00
The genre where we find the "fantasy/sci-fi" books right next to usually mystery books in our German book stores usually is speculative fiction:

- mystery,
- horror,
- fantasy,
- and sci-fi have lots of overlap.
- And XKCDs What-If-Books even.

But as someone who hates fantasy and loves sci-fi, the biggest difference for me comes from plausibility: "a witch did it" as Occam's fantasy razor for things being the way they happened, and the underlying physics engine means for me: either this is soft "sci-fi", or they better explain with hard rules the limitations and effects of their magic system.

Since (low-sorcery) fantasy RPGs even have torches that would never work, when historical torched looked completely differently, suspension of disbelieve hardly sets in for me in fantasy books.