MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by raphman | 2026-02-06 21:00:50+00:00
Hi i5heu. Given that you seem to use AI tools for generating images and audio versions of your posts, I hope it is not too rude to ask: how much of the post was drafted, written or edited with AI?

The suggestions you make are all sensible but maybe a little bit generic and obvious. Asking ChatGPT to generate advice on effectively writing quality code with AI generates a lot of similar suggestions (albeit less well written).

If this was written with help of AI, I'd personally appreciate a small notice above the blog post. If not, I'd suggest to augment the post with practical examples or anecdotal experience. At the moment, the target group seems to be novice programmers rather than the typical HN reader.
by throwaway-11-1 | 2026-02-06 21:01:05+00:00
I think it depends on the org, I did Product Design at a FAANG and 90% of the design was held back by engineering "appetite" and even then they would implement at best 60% of the UI to spec. This was building semi-niche professional products, not consumer so that was used as an excuse for not wasting time on polish.

That being said, I've recently made a few light weight apps for myself with Claude and I've easily spent 4x the time hand tuning the UI compared to implementing business logic / core features. Super fun tbh
by mitchjj | 2026-02-06 21:01:11+00:00
Understandable; let me ask a a question. You don't want to play these sort of games (read a paragraph, enter a word). For you, browsing to find a compelling devtool, what makes you say, this is legit? Can you share examples of a couple of sites that do exactly what you are after?

I say that not because we wanted the CLI homepage to be 'legit', the light context there is we needed a way to quickly change direction from a previous failed initiative that added stark category marketing across the classic site... so took the opportunity to do purposefully do something very different from conventions, rightly or wrongly.
by Schmerika | 2026-02-06 21:01:58+00:00
There's no shortage of evidence of a strong relationship there [0], [1].

What's missing is definitive proof, so far at least. I think you're conflating the two. Evidence and proof are different things - see [2] for a good example of this conflation used the other way.

Anyway, yeah, you can very seriously consider this based on the evidence already out there. Considering the stakes, it would be kinda silly not to imo.

0 - https://www.commondreams.org/news/epstein-israeli-intelligen...

1 - https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA000903...

2 - @NormalIsandNws on X:

“Here is the proof Epstein was a Russian asset:

- his girlfriend was the daughter of a Mossad agent

- one of his best friends was Israel's lawyer

- another of his best friends was a former Israeli prime minister

- he met with the current Israeli prime minister

- a senior Israeli spy would stay at his house for weeks at a time

- a friend invited him to bring his girls to Israel

- he fled to Israel when he was charged with sex crimes against a minor

- he was pictured wearing an IDF shirt

- he was funded by pro-Israel fanatics

- he worked for the Rothschilds

- he donated to pro-Israel student groups

- he was responsible for the Wexner group's "pro-Israel philanthropy"

- he supported Israeli settlement projects

- his friends were all Zionists

- he scathingly referred to non -Jews as "goyim"

- he was involved in Israeli diplomacy efforts

- he brokered security deals for Israel

- he aimed to profit from regime changes in the Middle East

- a former Israeli intelligence officer said he ran a honeypot for Israel

- his business partner confirmed he ran a honeypot for Israel

- one of his victims confirmed he ran a honeypot for Israel

As you can see, all of this was done for the benefit of Russia. There is no other explanation.”
by krapp | 2026-02-06 21:02:00+00:00
Tiktok hasn't been around long enough for the claim that it "destroys childrens attention spans for life" to make any sense.

And children get propagandized by hostile foreign governments everywhere online. And by their own government. The premise that TikTok was somehow more dangerous in this regard than Facebook or Twitter or even Discord is based entirely on sinophobia.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-06 21:02:32+00:00
To a first approximation, no one gets paid to write bespoke hand crafted software. We get paid to make the company more money or save the company more money than the fully allocated cost to employ us to make computers do things. I take “pride” in the fact that software and implementations I designed meets the requirements of the people that paid me to write it - whether that be by a combination of my work and my delegated work to humans or LLMs

Over the past decade, part of my job has been to design systems, talk to “stakeholders” and delegate some work and do some myself. I’m neither a web developer nor a mobile developer.

I don’t look at a line of code for those types of implementations. I do make sure they work. From my perspective, those that I delegated to might as well be “human LLMs”.
by doug_durham | 2026-02-06 21:02:33+00:00
I'll push it back against this a little bit. I find any type of deliberative thinking to be a forcing function. I've recently been experimenting with writing very detailed specifications and prompts for an LLM to process. I find that as I go through the details, thoughts will occur to me. Things I hadn't thought about in the design will come to me. This is very much the same phenomenon when I was writing the code by hand. I don't think this is a binary either or. There are many ways to have a forcing function.
by ezekg | 2026-02-06 21:02:49+00:00
Sorry, but telling people to take a logical backup of their database, and then download it onto their local work station is insane for a production application. First, a logical backup at any decent scale will fail, and second, I don't even have enough local storage to do that -- even ignoring the compliance issues with downloading a full copy of production data onto a work station.

For a company like Northflank, I'd expect actual production-grade documentation for migrating, not instructions that are only applicable to a toy app.
by mothballed | 2026-02-06 21:02:56+00:00
No, it just is the most direct obvious example I can find of high level assistance in violating the 15th amendment since the year 2000. I have no doubt all of your examples have also been used to effectuate the same thing, they just have a little more plausible deniability to the point it's harder to point out in black and white.

I was not asked to contemplate every example of racism.

The ID bit is particularly amusing to look at. In my state you need an ID to vote but not to conceal carry a gun. In Illinois it's the exact opposite, with a lot of handwaving why you need an ID to prove you are a 'person' but not a 'citizen'. Obviously the states and government are totally inconsistent on the issue of ID to exercise rights.

Mail voting might be more prejudicial to the poor with irregular addresses, since their only option is to vote in person whereas those better off with regular mail access can vote via mail or in person.

Overall I would take a stab that both mail voting and ID requirements yield a net slight prejudice against some minorities. Gerrymandering is just dog-shit all around.
by trevwilson | 2026-02-06 21:02:58+00:00
If you're referring to the Himba experiment (or one of the news or blog posts tracing back to it), the outcome was far less decisive than you're implying. Language showed an impact on perception time of color differences, not a complete inability to distinguish.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18237
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00100...
by krapp | 2026-02-06 21:03:11+00:00
Advertising is speech by corporations, so there's a public interest in regulating it. What's the public interest in regulating your speech, or mine, just because we're on a platform that has an arbitrarily high userbase or uses algorithmic sorting?

Why should it be illegal for me to like fishing videos, and want to be shown more fishing videos if I watch fishing videos?

Or to post at all online without a license and account tied to my real identity?

If I run a car forum, why should it be illegal for me to ban Nazis just because Nazi speech is legal in the US?

Or if my forum gets some arbitrarily large userbase, why should I be forced to give control of my forum to the government to be regulated as a utility?

All of these are rational, likely results of policies that people on HN have advocated, along with banning social media entirely (which would destroy one of the few truly free hypermedia and communication models out there.)

I don't trust the intentions of people who want to regulate social media and I absolutely don't trust the intentions of governments.
by mylastattempt | 2026-02-06 21:03:51+00:00
Me, on the other hand, love ffmpeg, because I notice my ytdlp using it and my vlc player sometimes using it and I have two homemade powrshell scripts using it to convert flac to mp3 and whatever. I don't want to open a program and figure out it's UI for those things. It has a job, it does it well, you can sort of pipe things to it and I'm very happy.
by rawgabbit | 2026-02-06 21:03:56+00:00
For my personal passwords, I use Apple's password manager. It lets me share passwords with my family. I also created a folder on Apple's iCloud that I share.

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/share-passwords-iphe6...

https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/share-files-and-folde...
by BrouteMinou | 2026-02-06 21:04:48+00:00
I am with you on that. HN is becoming a "14 years old edgy mini-tech" Facebook.

"Microsoft bad, Linux good" kind of comments are all over the place. There is no more in depth discussions about projects anymore. Add the people linking their blogs only to sell you thier services for an imaginary problem, and you get HN 2026.

It's maybe the time to find another tech media. If you know one, I would be glad to know.
by codezero | 2026-02-06 21:04:51+00:00
I really loathe that sales engineers stole the term Solutions Engineer which was previously used to basically mean support/services engineer (technical generalist), a mostly post-sales role. It's pedantic, but I watched it happen in real time, my company's HR even asked if we could change our team titles to help out the sales team since they wanted the more appealing title to use.

The reason it annoys me so much is that it makes it harder to find post-sales technical generalists as the top of the funnel ends up filled with pre-sales people.
by econ | 2026-02-06 21:04:53+00:00
Ive quite often thought job descriptions should describe absolutely everything they do, should do and have done.

I've had the joy of being the company glue quite a few times. I simply ask myself if everything needed by everyone is actually there.

Then one day I learn how invisible this work is. I had a funny conversation aimed to get paid for my official job description that in stead resulted in demotion. I told them fine, from now on i'll do precisely what I'm hired for and nothing else.

Then I watched everything descend into a chaos much worse than I could have imagined. Everyone blamed everyone else and no one got along. People even got fired.

One dumb example out of many. If you look which new employees, clients and contractors will visit today after noticing no one is at the gate you can let them in. Then they want coffee and then they want the things needed to do their job. If those things are repeatedly not there they do crappy work (if any) and have a terrible mood. Its just one example, already takes way to many words to explain while the actual instances are far more hilarious than described.

Just put it in the job description. Clients don't spawn at your desk but you wait for them at the gate, you arrange a parking spot, you make sure the coffee (that should be there) is actually there.

Then when you install chargers update the text to give them a spot to charge and update their profile with their type of car and if they want milk and sugar.

It sounds preposterous but if you do it like that you can consider putting someone at the gate.

If it is in the job description and you measure great performance you can put the pair programmer on a different team that needs him.
by ianburrell | 2026-02-06 21:05:18+00:00
Automated taxis would still be stuck in traffic. Automation gets couple times in capacity, but the induced demand and extra cars looking for rides and parking will mean traffic.

Automation makes public transit better. There will be automated minibuses that are more flexible and frequent than today's buses. Automation also means that buses get a virtual bus lane. Taxis solve the last mile problem, by taking taxi to the station, riding train with thousands of people, and then taking more transit.

Also, we might discover the advantage of human powered transit. Ebikes are more efficient than cars and give health benefits. They will be much safer than automated cars. Could use the extra capacity for bike and bus lanes.
by bonsai_spool | 2026-02-06 21:05:27+00:00
Have you read the document? I often find these things that we believe to be true wind up being a game of telephone. We further have no prior (is the metric of this sort of like how everyone has committed a crime given sufficient prosecutorial attention)?

I've also never heard of this report before this year as someone quite attuned to what happens in Minnesota.

One document contributor contends, notably, that if "adult “employees” spend hours in hallways chatting with other adults [...] the entire amount paid to that provider in a given year is the fraud amount."

I'll leave the assessment of that definition to readers. https://www.auditor.leg.state.mn.us/sreview/ccap.pdf
by MillionOClock | 2026-02-06 21:05:48+00:00
While there most likely is going to be some bias in the training of those kinds of models, we can also hope that transfer learning from other non-driving videos will at least help generate something close enough to the very real but unusual situations you are mentioning. We could imagine an LLM serving as some kind of fuzzer to create a large variety of prompts for the world model, which as we can see in the article seems pretty capable at generating fictive scenarios when asked to.

As always tho the devil lies in the details: is an LLM based generation pipeline good enough? What even is the definition of "good enough"? Even with good prompts will the world model output something sufficiently close to reality so that it can be used as a good virtual driving environment for further training / testing of autonomous cars? Or do the kind of limitations you mentioned still mean subtle but dangerous imprecisions will slip through and cause too poor data distribution to be a truly viable approach?

My personal feeling is that this we will land somewhere in between: I think approaches like this one will be very useful, but I also don't think the current state of AI models mean we can have something 100% reliable with this.

The question is: is 100% reliability a realistic goal? Human drivers are definitely not 100% reliable. If we come up with a solution 10x more reliable than the best human drivers, that maybe has some also some hard proof that it cannot have certain classes of catastrophic failure modes (probably with verified code based approaches that for instance guarantees that even if the NN output is invalid the car doesn't try to make moves out of a verifiably safe envelope) then I feel like the public and regulators would be much more inclined to authorize full autonomy.
by yongjik | 2026-02-06 21:06:05+00:00
...and look at some comments here, every day I get confirmation that Trump supporters will defend everything, there's no coming back.

Thankfully they are <40% of US voters now. Yes, that's a depressingly large number but having a ~40% core group of MAGA and everyone else being thoroughly disgusted by Trump means the bottom is falling out for Republicans.

Recent Texas Senate election (SD-9) saw Democrats winning by 17 points (Republicans won the district in 2022 by 60-40). Abolishing ICE is now the more popular opinion (46 to 43 in some poll).

We'll see how much damage the beast will inflict before it's finally slain.
by quuxplusone | 2026-02-06 21:06:07+00:00
As TFA says, the hard part is that "1" and "l" look the same in the selected typeface. Whether your OCR is done by computers or humans, you still have to deal with that problem somehow. You still need to do the part sketched out e.g. by pyrolistical in [1] and implemented by dperfect in [2].

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46906897

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46916065
by kmeisthax | 2026-02-06 21:06:10+00:00
The average person does not think about such things at all. They live in Car World, where they sit in a giant metal box for 30-45m and then wind up at the place where they can actually buy their shit. Their brain shuts off during driving[1]. To them, it's just The Way Things Are. And then they go take a trip to Tokyo and wonder why it feels so much nicer[0].

The thing to note is that NIMBYs are loud and obnoxious, but they do not have broad democratic support. What the average person has is a deep aversion to change they were not consulted with. What gives NIMBYs power is the fact that the average zoning agency is not very good at explaining the rationale of their changes or collecting and incorporating public feedback. It's very easy for a NIMBY to take a few things out of context, bring out a parade of horribles, and scare the average guy into opposing something they otherwise might have liked.

Since NIMBYs are inherently minoritarian, the real base of their power isn't even democratic outrage. Their favored tool to stop projects they don't like is paper terrorism: i.e. finding as many legal complaints as possible that they can sue over to block the project. Even if they're bullshit, it'll take a year or two to get the lawsuit thrown out. Which means that, congratulations, you just increased the cost of the project by about 10% or so, and you're probably gonna have to explain to the feds why the grants you applied for aren't enough and your project is late.

[0] And, in the process, piss off a bunch of locals as they bumble their way through the city using their translator app

[1] In fact, a lot of the hype surrounding self-driving cars is just to make it possible to completely shut off one's brain while driving. I would argue that trains and buses already do that, but...
by ianm218 | 2026-02-06 21:06:21+00:00
> They do not.
Do you have anything to back this up? This seems like a shallow dismissal. Claude Code is mostly used to ship Claude Code and Claude Cowork - which are at multi billion ARR. I use Claude Code to ship technically deep dev tools for myself for example here https://github.com/ianm199/bubble-analysis. I am a decent engineer and I wouldn't have the time or expertise to ship that.
by KronisLV | 2026-02-06 21:07:07+00:00
> constant churn of refactoring, reorganizing and spiking to fix self-inflicted defects

Sometimes there’s valid reasons for addressing technical debt and reworking things to be better in the future… and other times people are just rewriting working code because reasons™.

Encountering the latter can be quite demotivating, especially when it turns to nitpicking over small stuff or keeping releases back for no good reason. Personally, I try to lean away from that and more into the “if it works, it works” camp (as long as you don’t ignore referential integrity and don’t mess up foundational logic).
by computerex | 2026-02-06 21:07:12+00:00
It's insane! We are so far beyond gpt-3.5 and gpt-4. If you're not approaching Claude Code and other agentic coding agents with an open mind with the goal of deriving as much value from them as possible, you are missing out on super powers.

On the flip side, anyone who believes you can create quality products with these tools without actually working hard is also deluded. My productivity is insane, what I can create in a long coding session is incredible, but I am working hard the whole time, reviewing outputs, devising GOOD integration/e2e tests to actually test the system, manually testing the whole time, keeping my eyes open for stereotypically bad model behaviors like creating fallbacks, deleting code to fulfill some objective.

It's actually downright a pain in the ass and a very unpleasant experience working in this way. I remember the sheer flow state I used to get into when doing deep programming where you are so immersed in managing the states and modeling the system. The current way of programming for me doesn't seem to provide that with the models. So there are aspects of how I have programmed my whole life that I dearly miss. Hours used to fly past me without me being the wiser due to flow. Now that's no longer the case most of the times.
by dasil003 | 2026-02-06 21:07:26+00:00
This take is pretty uncharitable. I write high quality code, but also there's a bunch of code that could be useful, but that I don't write because it's not worth the effort. AI unlocks a lot of value in that way. And if there's one thing my 25 years as a software engineer has taught me is that while code quality and especially system architecture matter a lot, being super precious about every line of code really does not.

Don't get me wrong, I do think AI coding is pretty dangerous for those without the right expertise to harness it with the right guardrails, and I'm really worried about what it will mean for open source and SWE hiring, but I do think refusing to use AI at this point is a bit like the assembly programmer saying they'll never learn C.
by secretballot | 2026-02-06 21:07:35+00:00
> everyday business and physics is monadic in function.

So?

> And if-then statements are functorial.

So?

All the "this is hard" stuff around these ideas seems to focus on managing to explain what these things are but I found that to progress at the speed of reading (so, about as easy as anything can be) once it occurred to me to find explanations that used examples in languages I was familiar with, instead of Haskell or Haskell-inspired pseudocode.

What I came out the other side of this with was: OK, I see what these are (that's incredibly simple, it turns out) and I even see how these ideas would be useful in Haskell and some similar languages, because they solve problems with and help one communicate about problems particular to those languages. I do not see why it matters for... anything else, unless I were to go out of my way to find reasons to apply these ideas (and why would I do that? And no, I don't find "to make your code more purely-functional" a compelling reason, I'm entirely fine with code I touch only selectively, sometimes engaging with or in any of that sort of thing).

The "so?" is the part I found (and find) hard.
by hunterpayne | 2026-02-06 21:07:42+00:00
I've been writing open source code for 30 years. I can count on 1 hand the number of times a random 3rd party PR contributed value to the project. The main contributions of the community are usually debugging and feedback. While it does happen that a good contribution comes from the community, the main values from opening code are increased user trust and identifying bugs. Almost every single open source project has a small number of devs who write almost all the code. The reasons for this are always about code quality. The idea that "the community" writes any open source projects is just fantasy. So refusing AI slop is just continuing on with these same policies that have worked for decades.