MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simonw | 2026-02-07 17:18:47+00:00
I recently passed 40,000 but my Substack is free so it's not a revenue source for me. I haven't really looked at who they are - at some point it would be interesting to export the CSV of the subscribers and count by domains, I guess.

My content revenue comes from ads on my blog via https://www.ethicalads.io/ - rarely more than $1,000 in a given month - and sponsors on GitHub: https://github.com/sponsors/simonw - which is adding up to quite good money now. Those people get my sponsors-only monthly newsletter which looks like this: https://gist.github.com/simonw/13e595a236218afce002e9aeafd75... - it's effectively the edited highlights from my blog because a lot of people are too busy to read everything I put out there!

I try to keep my disclosures updated on the about page of my blog: https://simonwillison.net/about/#disclosures
Show HN: A toy compiler I built in high school (runs in browser)
by xeouz | 2026-02-07 17:19:41+00:00
Hey HN,

Indian high schooler here, currently prepping for JEE, thought itd be nice to share here.

Three years ago in 9th/10th grade I got a knack for coding, I taught myself and made a custom compiler with LLVM to try to learn C++.
So I spent a lot of time learning LLVM from the docs and also C++. It's not some marvelous piece of engineering,

It has:

- Basic types like bool, int, double, float, char etc. with type casting
- Variables, Arrays, Assign operators & Shorthands
- Conditionals (if/else-if/else), Operators (and/or), arithmetics (parenthesis etc)
- Arrays and indexing stuff
- C style Loops (for/while) and break/continue
- Structs and dot accessing
- extern C interop with the "extern" keyword

Some challenges I faced:

- Emscripten and WASM, as I also had to make it run on my demo website
- Learning typescript and all for the website (lol)
- Custom parser with basic error reporting and Semantic analysis was a PITA for my undeveloped brain
- Learning LLVM from the docs

Important Learnings:

- Testing is a very important aspect of making software, I skipped it - big regret
- Learning how computers interpret text
- Programming in general was a new tour for me
- I appreciate unique_ptrs and ownership

Github: https://github.com/xeouz/virec

Its on my github and there's a link to my web demo (https://vire-lang.web.app/), it might take some time to load the binary from firebase.

Very monolithic, ~7500 lines of code,
I’d really appreciate any feedback, criticism, or pointers on how I could’ve done this better.
by mark242 | 2026-02-07 17:19:59+00:00
I would argue that it's going to be the opposite. At re:Invent, one of the popular sessions was in creating a trio of SRE agents, one of which did nothing but read logs and report errors, one of which did analysis of the errors and triaged and proposed fixes, and one to do the work and submit PRs to your repo.

Then, as part of the session, you would artificially introduce a bug into the system, then run into the bug in your browser. You'd see the failure happen in browser, and looking at Cloudwatch logs you'd see the error get logged.

Two minutes later, the SRE agents had the bug fixed and ready to be merged.

"understand how these systems actually function" isn't incompatible with "I didn't write most of this code". Unless you are only ever a single engineer, your career is filled with "I need to debug code I didn't write". What we have seen over the past few months is a gigantic leap in output quality, such that re-prompting happens less and less. Additionally, "after you've written this, document the logic within this markdown file" is extremely useful for your own reference and for future LLM sessions.

AWS is making a huge, huge bet on this being the future of software engineering, and even though they have their weird AWS-ish lock-in for some of the LLM-adjacent practices, it is an extremely compelling vision, and as these nondeterministic tools get more deterministic supporting functions to help their work, the quality is going to approach and probably exceed human coding quality.
by Insensitivity | 2026-02-07 17:20:40+00:00
I was looking at the Meet repository as an example, people literally don't know how to write React, without drowning in `useEffect`, `eslint-disable`, `any`. React has it's issues (and a ton of them), but writing code like this, I expect it to end up exactly like Microsoft Teams quality wise.

Honestly, at that point, it's indistinguishable from LLM slop
by sgarland | 2026-02-07 17:20:51+00:00
> The major thing I advocate for is don't pick a NOSQL database to avoid relational dbs, only to try and do a bunch of relational work in NOSQL that would have been trivial in an RBDMS.

It has always felt to me like devs will gravitate towards doing the opposite of what makes sense for their DB. If they have a Document DB, they'll try to use it relationally. If they have a relational database, they'll shove everything into a JSON column. Then in both cases, they complain that it's slow.
by tialaramex | 2026-02-07 17:20:56+00:00
Well there's a big gap between something like London, a very dense city, and actual countryside. There's also a big variation in will. Where I grew up (Metroland, just beyond the end of the Metropolitan "underground" Line) the services are (other than the afore-mentioned London underground) abysmal because providing services costs money & people there want lower taxes. But where my mother lives today, near Bingley, there are enough buses that I get confused as to which one goes closest to her house when I visit.

The difference in London is also in large part because London was allowed to retain a unified transport system when Tories dismantled other systems because ideologically their position is the Invisible Hand of the Free Market will fix everything.
by allears | 2026-02-07 17:20:58+00:00
There's a story (dunno if it's true, but it could be) about an anthropologist who is living with an African tribe to study them. He gets to know the tribe and is accepted by them, and one day a village elder invites him to join a group sing that evening. The anthropologist says "No, no, I can't sing." The elder looks at him in astonishment and says, "What do you mean you can't sing? You can talk, can't you?"
by alsetmusic | 2026-02-07 17:21:13+00:00
I haven't had broadcast tv for decades. I already had to ask my friend to mute commercials to help me follow conversation after a couple of years (he just tuned them out). I concluded that I would hate the company I worked for because of their intrusive ads while visiting family during the holidays a year after that. My partner still objects to how angry I get when an ad is shoved into our on-demand content, but that meant that I figured out how to stop Plex from serving us ads after it happened ONE TIME (fuck you, Plex, I used to like you).

I can't believe how normalized this stuff is. It's loud. It's incredibly stupid. It treats the viewer as unintelligent. It's really offensive if you aren't used to it.
by codingdave | 2026-02-07 17:21:20+00:00
> If you haven’t spent at least $1,000 on tokens today per human engineer, your software factory has room for improvement

At that point, outside of FAANG and their salaries, you are spending more on AI than you are on your humans. And they consider that level of spend to be a metric in and of itself. I'm kinda shocked the rest of the article just glossed over that one. It seems to be a breakdown of the entire vision of AI-driven coding. I mean, sure, the vendors would love it if everyone's salary budget just got shifted over to their revenue, but such a world is absolutely not my goal.
by mikkupikku | 2026-02-07 17:22:16+00:00
It seems like a new version of this story, "[Big tech] workers protest their employer taking [federal agency] contracts" shows up at least once a year. I guess the steel man of this is that people think they can take jobs at these corps and push reform from within, but this seems powerfully naive to me. Fact of the matter is that a large portion of the compensation these companies provide is for buying off your better judgement. You're taking a deal with the devil when you sign on. There are a lot of better, smaller, companies you could be working for, but you chose the evil ones because it pays better.
by 3vidence | 2026-02-07 17:22:39+00:00
Yeah honestly I've been racking my brain about the same question (where can I move on to).

HN has been my home for learning about all sorts of things for 10+ years but blockchain + AI has just killed all interesting discussion that can be had.

It's hard to define a community around "not being obsessed" with something. Maybe instead it's worth thinking about what the goal of such a community / forum is. Might be easier to find / define.

If you come up with something I'm happy to check it out.
by eqvinox | 2026-02-07 17:23:00+00:00
> LLMs will be better than humans in learning new frameworks.

I don't see a base for that assumption. They're good at things like Django because there is a metric fuckton of existing open-source code out there that they can be trained on. They're already not great at less popular or even fringe frameworks and programming languages. What makes you think they'll be good at a new thing that there are almost no open resources for yet?
by navanchauhan | 2026-02-07 17:23:20+00:00
I think corporate incentives vs personal incentives are slightly different here. As a company trying to experiment in this moment, you should be betting on token cost not being the bottleneck. If the tooling proves valuable, $1k/day per engineer is actually pretty cheap.

At home on my personal setup, I haven't even had to move past the cheapest codex/claude code subscription because it fulfills my needs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. You can also get a lot of mileage out of the higher tiers of these subscriptions before you need to start paying the APIs directly.
by vunderba | 2026-02-07 17:23:36+00:00
I know you've gone and stated your purported age (presumably to increase engagement which I'm not going to fault you for), but that being said, I'm still going to treat you like an adult.

Vibe coding is not a substitute for basic testing.

Just a few seconds of trying this - and it seems to be riddled with issues.

https://the-lexicon-project.netlify.app/app#plato-apology/17...

Many times the part of speech doesn't show - giving an inscrutable number instead:

πεπόνθατε
Part of Speech: POS 17
Gloss: -

ἐμαυτοῦ
Part of Speech: POS 12
Gloss: -

Also the "Translation" is checked, but the Inspector doesn't seem to give gloss/translation for 90% of any of the words that I tried clicking on to highlight.

When used on smaller devices, the layout shifts result in many of the buttons being completely misaligned as well. Again this would have been easily caught with a cursory visual inspection.

For a free tool, it's pretty clearly pushing the AI subscription aspect. Given how LLMs tend to do better with overrepresented languages (Spanish, English, Chinese, etc.), I'm not sure I'd trust my studies of ancient languages like Greek and Latin to OpenAI.
by nabbed | 2026-02-07 17:24:05+00:00
Hey, based on the picture, I used one of those 3179 models for about 6-7 years until my company replaced it with a desktop PC running terminal emulation software.

Years later, probably around 2003, when desktop apps started getting replaced by web apps (at least at my job), I remember making that connection between web browsers and 3270s. In the 1990s, clients got very fat (think powerbuilder), but then in the late 1990s and early 2000s much of the fat went to the server-side and the web browser became the thin(ish) client. The web browser was sort of acting as a block device (like the 3270) in the sense that the end-user filled data into fields and then sent the whole thing at once by hitting some button.

With Web 2.0, the client started to put on weight again. Then with mobile apps, the fat client was back, baby! It just keeps cycling.
by alsetmusic | 2026-02-07 17:24:19+00:00
This is interesting. I intrinsically knew this was a thing without knowing it was formalized.

Sorta the same as the emails that went out to employees of my org telling them that we would perform network upgrades that resulted in IP addresses changing. Not one person that I've assisted updating their devices read those emails because they were mentally filtered out as noise. We sent a lot of notices, fwiw.
by insane_dreamer | 2026-02-07 17:24:32+00:00
I use it daily and it's decent. It's easy enough to just filter out all of the low-quality news sources (either block those channels or "suggest less"). I use it for sources I want to occasionally read articles from but wouldn't subscribe to: WSJ, New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Scientific American, or sources I do subscribe to but it's convenient to have them in one place (Atlantic, Wired, my local paper) instead of 5 different apps.

I mostly ignore the "For You" and go straight to browsing the sources I like, "saving" articles to read later, etc.

Never noticed there were lots of ads; I guess I'm used to just scrolling on by them automatically.
by woeirua | 2026-02-07 17:24:59+00:00
I use coding agents almost exclusively now and I’m going to say yes and no on this one.

Yes, I think there’s the potential to replace some frameworks that abstract away too many details and make things way too complicated for basic apps. A good example of this are ORMs like SqlAlchemy. Every time I use them I think to myself it would be easier to just write SQL myself, but it would be a tremendous amount of boilerplate. Nowadays though it might be worth it for an agent to just write the SQL for you instead!

On the other hand, you have libraries like Django. Sure, an agent _could_ write you your own web server. But wow would it be a waste of tokens and your projects surface area would be dwarfed by the complexity of just building your own alternative to Django. I can’t see that being the right move for years still.
by asveikau | 2026-02-07 17:25:02+00:00
You're doing politics right now in your attempt to shut down political discussion you don't like.

It is supremely naive to think you can excise political discussion, and if you're wondering why people are so upset at techies these days, this is a hint at the reason. Techies are people who think they can just say "no politics" and they did something good or got rid of politics.
by kev009 | 2026-02-07 17:26:22+00:00
Block mode terminals are somewhat similar to the forms based UIs we later got like HTML.

The 3290 was like a 4 split tmux session, it is such a beautiful device (https://ifdesign.com/en/winner-ranking/project/ibm-3290-info...). Perfect keyboard, plasma contrast and the right text color for long sessions. My understanding is they outlived themselves with long service in air traffic control (supplementing vector/raster displays), financial markets, and software development. Once upon a time people seemed to really care about doing things well.
by Syzygies | 2026-02-07 17:26:52+00:00
I'm a mathematician relying heavily on AI as an association engine of massive scope, to organize and expand my thoughts. One doesn't get best results by "testing" AI.

A surfboard is also an amazing tool, but there's more to operating one than telling it which way to go.

Many people want self-driving cars so they can drink in the back seat watching movies. They'll find their jobs replaced by AI, with a poor quality of life because we're a selfish species. In contrast Niki Lauda trusted fellow Formula 1 race car driver James Hunt to race centimeters apart. Some people want AI to help them drive that well. They'll have great jobs as AI evolves.

Gary Kasparov pioneered "freestyle" chess tournaments after his defeat by Big Blue, where the best human players were paired with computers, coining the "centaur" model of human-machine cooperation. This is frequently cited in the finance literature, where it is recognized that AI-guided human judgement can out-perform either humans or machines.

Any math professor knows how to help graduate students confidently complete a PhD thesis, or how to humiliate students in an oral exam. It’s a choice. To accomplish more work than one can complete alone, choose the former. This is the arc of human evolution: we develop tools to enhance our abilities. We meld with an abacus or a slide rule, and it makes us smarter. We learn to anticipate computations, like we’re playing a musical instrument in our heads. Or we pull out a calculator that makes us dumber. The role we see for our tools matters.

Programmers who actually write better code using AI know this. These HN threads are filled with despair over the poor quality of vibe coding. At the same time, Anthropic is successfully coding Claude using Claude.
by afavour | 2026-02-07 17:26:57+00:00
It is unfortunate that things like this become politically impossible because older people are one of the most reliable voting groups out there.

I will always be bitter that older voters chose Brexit by a large margin, in opposition to the younger voters who will actually be around to feel its long term effects. Not taking that into account in voting feels wrong but there’s no politically palatable way of addressing it.
by scarecrowbob | 2026-02-07 17:27:03+00:00
Ah damn, I thought they were talking about the "one small city" I live in in rural CO.

Where where ICE kidnapped a bunch of folk who were legitimate parts of our community.

Where my anarchistic line of "I have stopped caring about the law and have a hard moral boundary that if a person can live here and keep up a house and job and contribute to our community they are as 'legal' as anyone else" is starting to get a real hold even among my historically Democrat-voting friends.

But yeah, I wouldn't forget those comparative metropolises, because I'd figure that the sentiment is even stronger where even more people can see the reality of which humans are being trafficked by the US gov.
by array_key_first | 2026-02-07 17:27:30+00:00
Python is slow, though, and so was java compared to other compiled languages of its time. Sure, it might not matter much if you're mostly doing database calls. If you're not, though, then yes, it's the languages fault if your app is slow. You can try to make it faster, but it's gonna be marginal gains. Or, you could just switch to another language and get a 100x speedup for free.

I also denounce the notion that trading language complexity for slowness is the case. Python is already complex, and there's some language and frameworks that are actually quite a bit easier to use for web backends. Like java, or dotnet. It just makes no sense to use python for this usecase, even if you ignore the slowness.

But that's not completely true, there is one very good reason to use python. Your devs know it. But, that doesnt say anything about the language itself.
by theodpHN | 2026-02-07 17:27:40+00:00
The IBM 3270 display family was amazing for its time - a character-oriented, block-mode terminal that supported light pens and APL keyboards in the '70s, as well as color graphics and a plasma display that supported four 80x24 logical screens in the early 80's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270
by JKCalhoun | 2026-02-07 17:27:57+00:00
> Well… maybe making thinking machines mass produced…

Now if we could only make thinking machines. ;-)

(Kind of surprised at all the negging of moon landings in this thread. Maybe I'm just of an older generation. At least one other post here points out all the spinoffs in regard to integrated circuits, etc. that came from the previous apace race.)
by alsetmusic | 2026-02-07 17:28:25+00:00
There was a site that kept breaking my Reader-mode last week. I would turn it on to filter ads, it would disable it by updating an element (I think that's how it got disabled).

I curled the page and piped it to a markdown conversion tool because I really wanted whatever information I'd searched. It's the first time I ever didn't just close the tab and move on because whatever I'd searched was a pressing issue that I wanted to solve.

What a fucking dick move by that site. Fuck them, whoever they were.
by megaman821 | 2026-02-07 17:28:45+00:00
It looks like the next release of Django will take seriious strides to solve a lot of the n+1 headaches, https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/6.1/#model-fi....

Also, I doubt solving Instagram-level scale issues is on the top ten list of concerns for this project. Just getting something out there and gaining users is way more important than solving far future scaling issues.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-02-07 17:28:53+00:00
Assuming that users only use 20% of the program and that the usage is evenly distributed, which would be a really big assumption right there, then there is still a finite number of users before you will have used up every part of program functionality between your user base and that any users past that amount will be repeating an actual and specific percentage of program functionality already assigned to some other user, unless you want to argue that functionality can be reduced infinitesimally in a sort of Zeno-like process.

If you agree however that functionality profiles will repeat among users given a large enough user base then it implies a particular limited feature set can still be totally adequate to support program development.

And that is with assumptions stacked against you succeeding, if indeed, as would seem likely, that some user profiles are more widely distributed than others it would follow that a successful product can just focus on those.
by analog31 | 2026-02-07 17:28:54+00:00
Since I’ve worked on a lot of bikes for friends and family members, the condition of the front and rear brake pads tells me that many casual cyclists are afraid of their front brakes. The rear pads will be totally worn down and the fronts practically new. The advice I give people is: Don’t be afraid of your front brake, but learn to use two-wheel braking effectively, and find a safe place to practice it if necessary.
by landl0rd | 2026-02-07 17:29:38+00:00
You're right about military eligibility, but also that you shouldn't make calls for a nation which you will never see. No skin in the game, no alignment of incentives, no moral right to choose.

Even moreso when you consider basically the whole generation relies on leeching off the young and have continued to capture an ever-increasing proportion of public spending across the western world despite owning an outsized proportion of both real estate and wealth overall.
by breadwithjam | 2026-02-07 17:30:09+00:00
Hiya! Thanks so much for trying it out
The translations for texts already on the site are pulled from Persues.

Imported texts shouldn't be translated. You were seeing the first bit of the Apology:

> ὅτι μὲν ὑμεῖς ,ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι ,πεπόνθατε ὑπὸ τῶν ἐμῶν κατηγόρων ,οὐκ οἶδα · ἐγὼ δʼ οὖν καὶ αὐτὸς ὑπʼ αὐτῶν ὀλίγου ἐμαυτοῦ ἐπελαθόμην ,οὕτω πιθανῶς ἔλεγον . καίτοι ἀληθές γε ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν οὐδὲν εἰρήκασιν . μάλιστα δὲ αὐτῶν ἓν ἐθαύμασα τῶν πολλῶν ὧν ἐψεύσαντο ,τοῦτο ἐν ᾧ ἔλεγον ὡς χρῆν ὑμᾶς εὐλαβεῖσθαι μὴ ὑπʼ ἐμοῦ ἐξαπατηθῆτε

It seems like the import feature is broken entirely as I'm testing it. Thank you so much for pointing me to it!!
by dixie_land | 2026-02-07 17:31:16+00:00
This is an interesting point but if I may offer a different perspective:

Assuming 20 working days a month: that's 20k x 12 == 240k a year. So about a fresh grad's TC at FANG.

Now I've worked with many junior to mid-junior level SDEs and sadly 80% does not do a better job than Claude. (I've also worked with staff level SDEs who writes worse code than AI, but they offset that usually with domain knowledge and TL responsibilities)

I do see AI transform software engineering into even more of a pyramid with very few human on top.