MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lo_zamoyski | 2026-02-21 23:09:47+00:00
This reads like a transcript of a therapy session. He never gives any real reasons. It's mostly a collection of assertions. This guy must never have worked on anything substantial. He also must underestimate the difficulty of writing software as well as his reliance on the work of others.

> I don’t like using code that I haven’t written and understood myself.

Why stop with code? Why not refine beach sand to grow your own silicon crystal to make your own processor wafers?

Division of labor is unavoidable. An individual human being cannot accomplish all that much.

> If you’re not writing in binary, you don’t get to complain about an extra layer of abstraction making you uncomfortable.

This already demonstrates a common misconception in the field. The physical computer is incidental to computer science and software engineering per se. It is an important incidental tool, but conceptually, it is incidental. Binary is not some "base reality" for computation, nor do physical computers even realize binary in any objective sense. Abstractions are not over something "lower level" and "more real". They are the language of the domain, and we may simulate them using other languages. In this case, physical computer architectures provide assembly languages as languages in which we may simulate our abstractions.

Heck, even physical hardware like "processors" are abstractions; objectively, you cannot really say that a particular physical unit is objectively a processor. The physical unit simulates a processor model, its operations correspond to an abstract model, but it is not identical with the model.

> My control freakery is not typical. It’s also not a very commercial or pragmatic attitude.

No kidding. It's irrational. It's one thing to wish to implement some range of technology yourself to get a better understanding of the governing principles, but it's another thing to suffer from a weird compulsion to want to implement everything yourself in practice...which he obviously isn't doing.

> Abstractions often really do speed up production, but you pay the price in maintenance later on.

What? I don't know what this means. Good abstractions allow us to better maintain code. Maintaining something that hasn't been structured into appropriate abstractions is a nightmare.
by linsomniac | 2026-02-21 23:10:34+00:00
I don't know about whether Electron fits in this case, but I can say Claude isn't equally proficient at all toolchains. I recently had Claude Code (Opus 4.6, agent teams) build a image manipulation webapp in Python, Go, Rust, and Zig.

In python it was very nearly a 1-shot, there was an issue with one watermark not showing up on one API endpoint that I had to give it a couple kicks at the can to fix. Go it was able to get but it needed 5+ attempts at rework. Rust took ~10+, and Zig took maybe 15+.

They were all given the same prompt, though they all likely would have dont much better if I had it build a test suite or at least a manual testing recipe for it to follow.
by vunderba | 2026-02-21 23:11:21+00:00
Nice job. Some Sound/Music Advice:

- The landing page music is.... rough. It almost caused me to instaclose the app. You'd be better off with zero music or even something like an ambient wind sound.

- NORMALIZE the audio across the board. Downloading a bunch of SFX off the web means that there isn't any consistency between them. Use something like ffmpeg/sox to level all the sound effects so that they are similar loudness.
by cbeach | 2026-02-21 23:12:12+00:00
> The EU has had 20 years to create an equally successful and popular product, which it failed to do. American companies don’t owe your European nationalist ambitions a dime.

So true.

There's a lot of passive-aggressive anti-US rhetoric and fearmongering on HN at the moment, while America is simply doing what it's always done - innovating and thriving.

As a European, I wish our continent was able to be more like America, as opposed to jealously coveting its outcomes.
by freetime2 | 2026-02-21 23:12:28+00:00
> The long term value of a car is only really relevant if one is constantly cycling through cars and needs the trade-in/resale value.

Depreciation is based on real-world qualities of a vehicle that determine how desireable it is to own over time. Toyotas tend to depreciate slower than Mercedes-Benz, for example, because maintenance and repair costs tend to be lower. For someone looking to buy a car new and drive it for 10+ years, they are probably going to be drawn to car models that have a reputation for reliability and thus hold their value. Even if you don't care about the resale value of a car, you probably do care about the underlying factors driving that resale price.

With EVs the factors driving depreciation are concerns about rapid tech obsolescence, battery degredation and replacement costs, incentives and new price cuts, and charging infrastructure. You also hear stories about Tesla drivers waiting 6+ months for a replacement part, Rivians being totaled because of a dent in a rear quarter panel, etc. These are all reasonable things for a buyer to be concerned with, in my opinion.

But I agree that if you are ok with all of the above in a used EV (range and charging speed may not matter if you have a place to charge at home, for example), there are good deals to be found.
by verdverm | 2026-02-21 23:12:57+00:00
I don't seem any claim in GP's comment that it would make it decentralized. It does seem, by looking across your comments in this thread, that

(1) You feel very strongly about what decentralized means w.r.t. social media, bluesky, and the PLC

(2) ATProto accepts that it's not planned to be as decentralized as some want, and that it is currently centralized with secondary validators.

(3) No answer or plan for the PLC is going to satisfy you. Nor is any argument you make going to change the plans for identity in ATProto for the foreseeable future.

This is all fine, people can have different perspectives and work/play in different ecosystems, no one is right or wrong. This is precisely why there are multiple protocols out there and bridges between them.

May I then ask why you keep making comments to the same effect aas those you made in the post and multiple times here ~12h ago?
by hyperrail | 2026-02-21 23:13:00+00:00
I too thought VSCode's being web based would make it much slower than Sublime. So I was surprised when I found on my 2019 and 2024 ~$2,500-3,000 MacBook Pros that Sublime would continually freeze up or crash while viewing the same 250 MB - 1 GB plain text log files that VSCode would open just fine and run reliably on.

At most, VS Code might say that it has disabled lexing, syntax coloring, etc. due to the file size. But I don't care about that for log files...

It still might be true that Visual Studio Code uses more memory for the same file than Sublime Text would. But for me, it's more important that the editor runs at all.
by sdkfjhdsjk | 2026-02-21 23:13:05+00:00
The U.S. is certainly not a wealthy country, and California most definitely is not, when measured by miles of homeless camps, crime, hobos, pollution.

There's a reason why the crowds are moving out of California and similar places and into my region over the past 5-6+ years.

The country as a whole is covered in abandoned factories and homes. Not exactly the picture of a healthy and prosperous nation. Turns out you can't print prosperity.

I'm fine where I'm at, thanks.
by Nairel | 2026-02-21 23:13:40+00:00
We launched a marketplace (nairel.com) for buying/selling with AI listing tools.
Platform works, ~400 products, but getting the supply side going is the real challenge.

We've tried: cold email outreach to independent retailers, SEO/blog content,
social media. Cold email has been the most effective so far.

What worked for others who've built marketplaces or platforms with a supply/demand problem?
by ozim | 2026-02-21 23:13:52+00:00
To build gtk you are hit with GPL which sucks. To build Swift you have to pay developer fee to Apple, to build win32 you have to pay developer fee to Microsoft. Which both suck. Don’t forget mobile Android you pay to Google.

That is why everyone jumped to building in Electron because it is based on web standards that are free and are running on chromium which kind of is tied to Google but you are not tied to Google and don’t have to pay them a fee. You can also easily provide kind of the same experience on mobile skipping Android shenigans.
by harel | 2026-02-21 23:14:16+00:00
Here is what worries me the most at the moment: we're in a period of hype, fire all the developers, we have agents, everybody can code now, barrier is not low - it's gone. Great. Roll up a year from now, and we have trillions of lines of code no human wrote. At some point, like a big PR, the agent's driver will just say yes to every change. Nobody now can understand the code easily because nobody wrote it. It works, kinda, but how? Who knows? Roll up another few years and people who were just coding because it's a "job" forget whatever skill they had. I've heard a few times already the phrase "I didn't code in like 10 months, bruh"...

Then what?

Not saying I'm not using AI - because I am. I'm using it in the IDE so I can stay close to every update and understand why it's there, and disagree with it if it shouldn't be there. I'm scared to be distanced from the code I'm supposed to be familiar with. So I use the AI to give me superpowers but not to completely do my job for me.
Ask HN: If the "AI bubble" pops, will it really be that dramatic?
by moomoo11 | 2026-02-21 23:15:14+00:00
I'm building software for a sector that is massive, but one where you don't really need AI. At least, not AI == LLM.

And before I go further, let me state up front that I do like AI coding agents. They are great as assistive tools.

People say that if the AI bubble pops, the economy tumbles. And okay, I mean the M7 will certainly get rekt but everyone else? Things will recover within a few years. We didn't make it to 2026 AD taking the easy road.

You still need to visit the doctor. Goods still need to be delivered. Homes need to be built. We need to drill for oil. People still need to eat. And yes, unfortunately or not, we still need millions of administrators because humans are not 0/1 systems.

Am I crazy to think that maybe it won't be that bad? There are still infinite number of things to do, and maybe (call me stupid, whatever) it would be a good turning point for our species if we realize that speculative bubbles are absolutely destructive and not worth it.

I don't need a personal assistant to make calls for me to get a restaurant reservation, and I certainly don't care for AI slop videos. I would much rather we have better products and services that actually work, and even if they have rough edges I would prefer people are employed and busy doing something with their lives.

Maybe a world where we don't chase endless growth (to escape inflation, pay off debts, whatever the case) would be good. And also we put nerds (not people like us, the engineers, I mean the evil dorks who cosplay as movie super villains) in the toy box again and pick up different toys this time.
by namibj | 2026-02-21 23:15:16+00:00
Then maybe you shouldn't be allowed to rely on such software not causing utter carnage when you're implementing some infrastructure thing via software?

Also note that such warranty disclaiming "fitness for any purpose" is not possible if you sell for money software that you say is for such an infrastructure situation, at least in e.g. Germany.
That's not from the license but from the sale though.
by slopinthebag | 2026-02-21 23:15:19+00:00
I think that's too broad of a blanket statement. Plenty of people including myself choose Apple products in part for their software quality over Windows and Linux. However there are other factors like network effects or massive marketing campaigns, sales team efforts etc that are often far greater.

We just don't know how bad it will get with AI coding though. Do you think the average consumer won't care about software quality when the bank software "loses" a big transition they make? Or when their TV literally stops turning on? People will tolerate shitty software if they have to, when it's minor annoyances, but it makes them unhappy and they won't tolerate big problems for long.
by elAhmo | 2026-02-21 23:15:30+00:00
> Email is an open, federated protocol. Anyone can run a mail server. In practice, running your own mail server is painful and everyone just uses Gmail. The protocol being "open" didn't prevent centralization.

This is an odd take and hard to agree with. I have never seen anyone complaining that email is a centralised service. GMail might be among the most popular solution, but there is a number of other solutions for "regular consumers", and many institutions, governments, etc. all run their email servers.
by yellowapple | 2026-02-21 23:15:36+00:00
> The syntax is a bit weird

In what way? It's more-or-less the same syntax as Ruby and Elixir, just with different keywords. Like as much as I love Zig, Zig's syntax is way weirder than Julia's IMO (and none of 'em hold a candle to the weirdness of, say, Erlang or Haskell or Forth or Lisp).
by Someone1234 | 2026-02-21 23:16:01+00:00
At least a KeePass file via Cloud Storage seems like a somewhat sane tradeoff between security and convenience.

What you're proposing where you're adding a backdoor to your home network (via Wireguard) that needs to be maintained/hardened, and then still needing a LAN hosting solution for the actual database running 24-hour, is neither convenient nor secure (least of all because of layer 1 / fire / theft).

This is a fragile solution which isn't solving any particular problem; but certainly introducing multiple new exciting potential problems.
by davidgerard | 2026-02-21 23:16:04+00:00
A relay or appview needs a ton of resources. Blacksky finally created the second ever real-world usable appview instance after 2.5 years.

Also, the open source version of the appview doesn't work at Bluesky scale. You need a proprietary database for sufficient speed.

AT Proto is completely decentralised, except for all the structural and financial points of absolute centralisation.
by juanre | 2026-02-21 23:16:15+00:00
This sounds very plausible. Arguably MCPs are already a step in that direction: give the LLMs a way to use services that is text-based and easy for them. Agents that look at your screen and click on menus are a cool but clumsy and very expensive intermediate step.

When I use telegram to talk to the OpenClaw instance in my spare Mac I am already choosing a new interface, over whatever was built by the designers of the apps it is using. Why keep the human-facing version as is? Why not make an agent-first interface (which will not involve having to "see" windows), and make a validation interface for the human minder?
by pavon | 2026-02-21 23:16:24+00:00
Do any feel-like estimates take cloud cover into consideration? It doesn't seem like it, but in a high altitude desert like NM, it is a huge factor. Furthermore, the magnitude of the effect varies depending on the day of year and time of day (how much atmosphere the sun passes through), so you can't just mentally add 10 degrees or something. And it isn't just based on the immediate conditions - if it has been cloudy all morning it will feel cooler even after the sun comes out then it will if the ground has been baking in the sun all morning. Some of that is accounted for by the air temperature (conductive heating of the air by the ground), but there is also a radiative heating effect as well. I would love an app that tried to incorporate those factors into it's "feels-like" estimate.
by viccis | 2026-02-21 23:16:30+00:00
People who don't do intense security work for a living underestimate the complexity of it. This might find some vulnerabilities, but it's not really capable of producing new methods and attacks. What it replaces isn't a high quality human researcher; it replaces current static code review systems.

If AI models never had stack smashing writeups in their corpus, they'd never be able to invent stack smashing.
by Plasmoid | 2026-02-21 23:16:33+00:00
We're actually not that far off.

Right now, liquid fuels have about 10x the energy density of batteries. Which absolutely kills it for anything outside of extreme short hop flights. But electric engines are about 3x more efficient than liquid fuel engines. So now we're only 3x-4x of a direct replacement.

That means we are not hugely far off. Boeing's next major plane won't run on batteries, but the one afterwards definitely will.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-02-21 23:16:56+00:00
1200 looks harder than it is because of the change in pronouns.

...Nor shall I never it forget, not while I live!

... and that was a wife [= woman], strong and [stith]! She came in among the evil men and me [nerede] from their hands.

She slew the heathen men that me pinned, slew them and felled them to the ground. There was blood and [bale] enough. And they fell [and] lay still, for they [] might no more stand. And the Master, the [wraþþe] Master, he flew away in the darkness and was seen no more.

I said [to] her, "I thank thee, [leove] wife, for thou hast me [ineredd] from death and from all mine [ifoan]!"

Interestingly, nerede/ineredd has no descendant in modern English, but it's not difficult to understand in the passage, while leove and ifoan do have descendants, and in the case of ifoan the meaning hasn't changed, but they are harder to read.

In 1100 the idea of "just substitute the modern word in for the old word" starts to break down.
by WJW | 2026-02-21 23:16:57+00:00
Anything that can be automated can be automated poorly indeed. But while it has been proven that textile manufacturing can be automated well (or at least better than a hand weaver ever could), the jury is still out if programming can be sufficiently automated at all. Even if programming can be completely automated, it's also unclear if the current LLM strategy will be enough or whether we'll have another 30 year AI winter before something better comes along.
by latchkey | 2026-02-21 23:18:35+00:00
> you cant rely on the thing that produced invalid output to validate it's own output

I've been coding an app with the help of AI. At first it created some pretty awful unit tests and then over time, as more tests were created, it got better and better at creating tests. What I noticed was that AI would use the context from the tests to create valid output. When I'd find bugs it created, and have AI fix the bugs (with more tests), it would then do it the right way. So it actually was validating the invalid output because it could rely on other behaviors in the tests to find its own issues.

The project is now at the point that I've pretty much stopped writing the tests myself. I'm sure it isn't perfect, but it feels pretty comprehensive at 693 tests. Feel free to look at the code yourself [0].

[0] https://github.com/OrangeJuiceExtension/OrangeJuice/actions/...
by jv22222 | 2026-02-21 23:18:42+00:00
I used Claude to document, in great detail, a 500k-line codebase in about an hour of well-directed prompts. Just fully explained it, how it all worked, how to get started working on it locally, the nuance of the old code, pathways, deployments using salt-stack to AWS, etc.

I don't think the moat of "future developers won't understand the codebase" exists anymore.

This works well for devs who write their codebase using React, etc., and also the ones rolling their own JavaScript (of which I personally prefer).
by bgar | 2026-02-21 23:19:13+00:00
It’s one of those tools that’s well designed and you don’t need a thousand line configuration file to be productive. The modal editing style is also an improvement over vim/neovim because you do selection -> action rather than action -> selection. Lastly, it’s written in Rust, which is not a plus purely because of that but because it’s a lot easier to contribute code changes to or tweak a modern Rust codebase.
by Barrin92 | 2026-02-21 23:21:10+00:00
>If you look at this page and are about to crap on it on HN

Hundred Rabbits pops up here pretty frequently and people mostly have good things to say, how can anyone dislike them, they're an oasis in a desert full of AI crap these days. I always end up going down some rabbit hole (no pun intended) on their site.
by ikr678 | 2026-02-21 23:21:13+00:00
>It was always explained to me as a mix between, 'are you going to fuck things up by being in an altered state' and 'is someone going to blackmail you to make you into a double agent?'

You are missing the foremost consideration - how critical/specialised/irreplacable is this person in their role and can we just ignore the positive test instead.

If you are good enough at what you do and management like you positive tests dont seem to matter if you make the right noises about it being a one off, retesting clean etc.
by Telaneo | 2026-02-21 23:21:43+00:00
How often do your change your passwords? Assuming they are decently long and all that, why would you change them at all other than when a site gets breached?

The only reason my Keepass database changes is because I make new accounts on sites every now and then, and that's a fairly rare thing these days. And if I get so ungodly unlucky that my house burns down before my off-site database is updated to have that new account listed, I'll still have access to the email that account is associated with, so I can still recover the account either way.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-02-21 23:21:46+00:00
I can't tell if that is sarcasm. Of course you can use the same model to write tests. That's a different problem altogether, with a different series of prompts altogether!

When it comes to code review, though, it can be a good idea to pit multiple models against each other. I've relied on that trick from day 1.
by teemur | 2026-02-21 23:22:00+00:00
I'm not sure coding has ever been the hard part. Hard part (to me) has always been to be smart enough to know what, exactly, I (or somebody else) want. Or has someone heard of a case when someone says something like "These requirements are perfectly clear and unambiguous and do not have any undefined edge/corner cases. But implementing that is still really hard, much harder than what producing this unicorn requirements spec was"?
by Someone1234 | 2026-02-21 23:22:19+00:00
I use Bitwarden, and I like them, but I still disagree.

One of the things Bitwarden's design is MEANT to offer is "zero knowledge" meaning that it is an AES-256 encrypted database "blob", with PBKDF2 derived master password.

So "compromised" server absolutely IS something the DESIGN should protect against. If compromising Bitwarden's servers lets them extract what they say they can extract, then the whole "zero knowledge" assurance is dead in the water.

Plus, Bitwarden themselves don't even need to be compromised, we could have a DNS redirect into a server the bad-guys (inc. national-state) control. Then leverage that into complete compromise of your database.
by lesuorac | 2026-02-21 23:22:30+00:00
> See United States v. Hubbell. In Boyd v. United States,[60] the U.S. Supreme Court stated that "It is equivalent to a compulsory production of papers to make the nonproduction of them a confession of the allegations which it is pretended they will prove".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Amendment_to_the_United_...

This opinion hasn't lasted the test of time but historically your own documents cannot be used against use. Eventually the supreme court decided that since corporations weren't people that their documents could used against them and then later that it also people weren't protected by their own documents.
by Onavo | 2026-02-21 23:22:34+00:00
The bottleneck here is usually the locally hosted model, not the the assistant harness. You can take any off the shelf assistant and point the model URL at localhost, but if your local model doesn't have enough post training and fine tuning on agentic data, then it will not work. The AI Assistant/OpenClaw is just calling APIs in a for loop hooked up to a cron job.