MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cmp0 | 2026-02-07 15:11:29+00:00
You make a good point I think the blog post still works.

"The real estate team should not be a risk center." - Why not? Sure, I agree with you it doesn't make a ton of sense _to me_ to fire 90% of the janitors.

Satya said he wants his team to be "Intellectually honest".

I'd argue that a plan to fire 90% of the janitors today is not that realistic, but if some real estate exec thinks they honestly have a plan that could be successful, are tracking data, and change their plan if they're wrong - what's the problem?

Maybe they're crazy enough to have figured something out we don't know....or not in which case Satya says you'll be gone if you make it a habit.
by hakunin | 2026-02-07 15:14:00+00:00
Of all the points the other side makes, this one seems the most incoherent. Code is deterministic, AI isn’t. We don’t have to look at assembly, because a compiler produces the same result every time.

If you only understand the code by talking to AI, you would’ve been able to ask AI “how do we do a business feature” and ai would spit out a detailed answer, for a codebase that just says “pretend there is a codebase here”. This is of course an extreme example, and you would probably notice that, but this applies at all levels.

Any detail, anywhere cannot be fully trusted. I believe everyone’s goal should be to prompt ai such that code is the source of truth, and keep the code super readable.

If ai is so capable, it’s also capable of producing clean readable code. And we should be reading all of it.
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-07 15:14:13+00:00
Better yet, look at the power output of a femtosecond laser (e.g. some unremarkable tabletop experiment in a lab in Clark Hall is many GW at peak!)

But I think it's not silly, it's at the heart of what a rocket is and how it compares to other technologies like, say, an airplane powered by a jet engine.
by cafard | 2026-02-07 15:14:40+00:00
Elite distance runners are likely to be running farther than a half marathon every day. There used to be a notion that your weekly mileage ought to be triple the distance you are training for, which for a marathon is about 79 miles per week, eleven-plus miles per day. My body would not tolerate much more than 60 miles per week, and honestly I don't know what most other recreational runners did.
by Lalabadie | 2026-02-07 15:14:54+00:00
AI has a lot of "leaders" currently working through a somewhat ignorant discovery of existing domain knowledge (ask me how being a designer has felt in the last 15 years of UX Leadership™ slowly realizing there's depth to the craft).

In recent months, we have MCPs, helping lots of people realize that huh, when services have usable APIs, you can connect them together!

In the current case: AI can do the tedious things for me -> Huh, discarding vast dependency trees (because I previously wanted the tedious stuff done for me too) lessens my risk surface!

They really are discovered truths, but no one's forcing them to come with an understanding of the tradeoffs happening.
by tempest_ | 2026-02-07 15:15:31+00:00
> the supporting ecosystem, ... the common parlance and patterns

Which are often the top reason to use a framework at all.

I could re-implement a web frame work in python if I needed to but then I would lose all the testing, documentation, middle-ware and worst of all the next person would have to show up and re learn everything I did and understand my choices.
by peteforde | 2026-02-07 15:16:16+00:00
I have been using Cursor w/ Opus 4.x to do extensive embedded development work over the past six months in particular. My own take on this topic is that for all of the chatter about LLMs in software engineering, I think a lot of folks are missing the opportunity to pull back and talk about LLMs in the context of engineering writ large. [I'm not capitalizing engineering because I'm using the HN lens of product development, not building bridges or nuclear reactors.]

LLMs have been a critical tool not just in my application but in my circuit design, enclosure design (CAD, CNC) and I am the conductor where these three worlds meet. The degree to which LLMs can help with EE is extraordinary.

A few weeks ago I brought up a new IPS display panel that I've had custom made for my next product. It's a variant of the ST7789. I gave Opus 4.5 the registers and it produced wrapper functions that I could pass to LVGL in a few minutes, requiring three prompts.

This is just one of countless examples where I've basically stopped using libraries for anything that isn't LVGL, TinyUSB, compression or cryptography. The purpose built wrappers Opus can make are much smaller, often a bit faster, and perhaps most significantly not encumbered with the mental model of another developer's assumptions about how people should use their library. Instead of a kitchen sink API, I/we/it created concise functions that map 1:1 to what I need them to do.

Where I agree with the author of this post is that I feel like perhaps it's time for a lot of libraries to sunset. I don't think replacing frameworks is the correct abstraction at all but I do think that it no longer makes sense to spend time integrating libraries when what you really need are purpose-built functions that do exactly what you want instead of what some library author thought you should want.
by b-karl | 2026-02-07 15:16:51+00:00
Not a catch all to fix issues agree with linting. Being very strict with linters has become very cheap with coding agents and it keeps you up to date with code standards and keeps code style homogenous which is very nice when you are reviewing professional code, regardless of who wrote it.

It’s also tricky otherwise if you have to occasionally review lazily written manual code mixed with syntactically formal/clean but functionally incorrect AI code.
by debugmeplease | 2026-02-07 15:16:59+00:00
I think like some of our community I suffer from ME/CFS. ME/CFS is a severe, currently incurable disease — often worse than late-stage cancer — and it causes nearly $1 trillion in annual economic damage in the US.

People are often housebound or bedbound because their bodies seem not to give them enough energy. Physical exercise worsens the disease by a lot. CFS affects the whole body - from brain fog to pain to sore muscles to severe loss of strength and air hunger even when doing nothing despite talking.

ME/CFS affects 1 in 200 people, yet research is virtually non-existent. Patients often live with a quality of life worse than late-stage cancer, while NIH funding is just $4 per patient compared to $2500 for HIV. This GitHub Page is an open letter to the visionaries of Silicon Valley to finally step up and fix this biological failure. We chose GitHub because this is where the tech elite realizes their projects and builds the future. Giving it a star would force the algorithm to notice our crisis: https://github.com/debugmeplease/debug-ME
by listeria | 2026-02-07 15:17:40+00:00
Global aliases are a zsh feature and not avaliable in bash. So if you want:

openssl ,v

to expand to...

openssl --version

readline seems like the way to go.

Then again most of the examples OP gave are usually available as short options, and aliasing ,s to sudo is certainly possible. So the only one which makes sense to me is ,,=$. But it's probably not worth the trouble to my muscle memory.
by NeutralForest | 2026-02-07 15:17:56+00:00
Aside from the debugging & testing I already mentioned, going only through guix is a tough sell considering the very tiny amount of people that use it. It's also incredibly slow and doesn't have many packages available. Even for Emacs, it has this weird way of going around Emacs-installed packages (GNU or MELPA channels). Just like Guile docs, it also doesn't tell you of a good way to do things, it only says "here is what exists" with too little guidance imo. It means people have to figure out how to setup things properly on top of all the rest. It makes for a terrible onboarding.
by mathfailure | 2026-02-07 15:18:08+00:00
One rarely actually needs to shadow binaries. Some cases could indeed be covered by introducing an alias that binds the binary's name to call a different copy of that binary.

You use shadowing to fix issues where you install some software that expects you to have a sane and ~recent version of some tool like git, but you don't as your system provides that binary and unfortunately it is either not sane (not GENERALLY sane [while it could be sane for system scripts]) or not recent enough. In that case the program's function would simply fail if it would call the system's binary and you shadow the binary with your version to fix that.

> adding your script directory in front of the PATH

That's a poor advice for the scripts you call relatively frequently. Instead, (as a general approach, we aren't discussing some particular script) don't use shadowing for scripts: just pick a non-conflicting script name and append the script's dir to $PATH.
by KellyCriterion | 2026-02-07 15:18:14+00:00
THIS!
Instrument-playing capability of a social environment:
By today, I know only of one person playing a piano regularly in his club, he is the only one I know.
When I was young, you had some basic instrument introduction in music classes at school - I do not know if these still exist today.

Regarding singing - I do not know a single perso who can "somehow" sing at least a little bit.

The society is loosing these capacities.
by dkersten | 2026-02-07 15:18:53+00:00
People who really care about performance still do look at the assembly. Very few people write assembly anymore, a larger number do look at assembly every so often. It’s still a minority of people though.

I guess it would be similar here: a small few people will hand write key parts of code, a larger group will inspect the code that’s generated, and a far larger group won’t do either. At least if AI goes the way that the “other side” says.
by dextrous | 2026-02-07 15:18:55+00:00
After a multi-decade career that spanned what is rapidly seeming like the golden age of software development, I have two emotions: first gratefulness; second a mixture of resignation, maudlin reflection, and bitterness that I am fighting hard to resist.

As someone who’s always wanted to “get home and code something on my own”, I do have a glimmer of hope that I wonder if others share. I’ve worked extensively with Claude and there’s no question I am now a high velocity “builder” and my broad experience has some value here. I am sad that I won’t be able to deeply look at all the code I am producing, but I am making sure the LLM and I structure things so that I could eventually dig in to modules if needed (unlikely to happen I suppose).

Anyway, my hope/question: if I embrace my new role as fast system builder and I am creative in producing systems that solve real problems “first”, is there a path to making that a career (I.e. 4 friends and I cranking out real production software that’s filling a real niche)? There must be some way for this to succeed —- I am not yet buying the “everything will be instantly copyable and so any solution is instantly commodity” argument. If that’s true, then there is no hope. I am still in shape, though, so going pro in pickleball is always an option, ha ha.
by api | 2026-02-07 15:20:16+00:00
Wolfram is one of those somewhat unfortunate characters who is both an off the charts narcissist and actually smart. He has some actually interesting ideas, but they are drowned by his weird egomania.

I recall years ago a "Wolfram drinking game" where you take a shot when he talks about how he was a childhood prodigy, etc.

Another big gripe I have with him is that being a narcissist he implicitly takes a lot of credit for other peoples' ideas. I'm not even sure he knows he's doing it. He builds on and incorporates a ton of ideas from mathematics, theoretical CS, and theoretical biology, and kind of launders them by slapping his own peculiar terminology and personal brand on them.

But most extreme narcissists are purely derivative, often to the point of being outright grifters and con men. He at least has some ideas and contributions of his own and most of his wealth is the result of actually doing things not running grifts. I'll give him credit for that.
by fheinsen | 2026-02-07 15:20:26+00:00
The github repository's first toy example is with 8 Taylor terms, applied to a context with 1B tokens, each token with 1K heads:

https://github.com/glassroom/sata_attention

That toy example is not practical with the quadratic formulation, because it would require computing and storing 1K attention matrices, each with 1B×1B dot-product scores. For example, at Float32 precision, those attention matrices would consume approximately 1K x 1B x 1B x 4 bytes = 3,725,290,298.5 Terabytes of memory, which is not practical.

Like every other proposed method, this one must be tested too. If it performs well in practice, AI service providers who ignore it will find themselves at a disadvantage.

Otherwise, the mathematical techniques introduced by this work are likely useful for other applications besides Transformer attention.
by gruez | 2026-02-07 15:21:02+00:00
>So you had to add code to detect modifications which itself could be bypassed.

Right, which is why DRM schemes aren't typically implemented in a straightforward way. Instead license checks are added to critical program logic so you can't easily skip it, anti-tamper/debug is added to thwart runtime analysis, and on top of all of this the code is obfuscated to thwart analysis even further. You might be eventually be able to figure it out, but it's designed to make it enough of a slog that nobody bothers to work through it all.
by patrick451 | 2026-02-07 15:21:39+00:00
No human needs to have seen an elephant standing in the road before to know that you should not drive through an elephant standing in the road. These are not "long tail" events as the waymo says. It's a big object in the road. You have seen that hundreds of thousands of times. Calling that a long tail event is an admission that your model has zero ability to generalize.
by Aperocky | 2026-02-07 15:22:00+00:00
Tolkien's book is an art, programs are supposed to do something.

Now, some program may be considered art (e.g. codegolf) or considered art by their creator. I consider my programs and code are only the means to get the computer to do what it wants, and there are also easy way to ensure that they do what we want.

> Frodo and Sam having an argument over the trustworthiness of Gollum. Frodo should be defending Gollum and Sam should be on his side.'

Is exactly what programs are. Not the minutiae of the language within.
by pandaman | 2026-02-07 15:22:32+00:00
>I don't see why this is to be expected, but a business shouldn't expect to pay a fine

Understandable, you don't seem to know what zoning does so it might not be evident to you that commercial zoning is different from residential and available property uses are also different. Residential zoning restricts the occupancy and structures you can have on your property more so than commercial. That's why if you run a store in your house you will be fined unless you keep your customers and vendors under a very low limit and running a store from a commercial lot does not get you fined, for example.
by Nevermark | 2026-02-07 15:22:51+00:00
Don't punish/restrict responsible people for a problem caused by an irresponsible person.

Fix the irresponsible behavior directly.

Most residential codes define minimum living standards, and as a result people camping/crashing on a property whose structure they don't live in, is prohibited.

Apparently your zone code needs to be corrected. Small businesses in residential areas need to be held to relevant/responsible residential zone code.

(You are proposing a zoning code fix too, but for reasons I don't understand, seem fixated on eliminating non-offending businesses, instead of directly addressing the problem.)
by mimasama | 2026-02-07 15:23:05+00:00
Sure, "all" operating systems. "All" that is OSes that have a web browser built for it that at least supports [TransformStream](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/TransformSt...)... And the browser and spec written and maintained mostly by people outside of France. Kinda compromises the point of being "sovereign" doesn't it?
by SCdF | 2026-02-07 15:24:11+00:00
> In my mind, besides the self declared objectives, frameworks solve three problems .. “Simplification” .. Automation .. Labour cost.

I think you are missing Consistency, unless you don't count frameworks that you write as frameworks? There are 100 different ways of solving the same problem, and using a framework--- off the shelf or home made--- creates consistency in the way problems are solved.

This seems even more important with AI, since you lose context on each task, so you need it to live within guardrails and best practices or it will make spaghetti.
by YousefED | 2026-02-07 15:24:16+00:00
Great to see this on HN. fyi, La Suite is an umbrella project built by DINUM in France that started several years ago, mainly to enable people in the public administration to use more independent tools. It's built in-house, often on top of other open source technologies. E.g.: Matrix powers chat and LiveKit powers Visio (which was recently featured on HN as well when they announced it's rolled out to replace Zoom / Teams, etc [1])

I'm fortunate to be collaborating with them as their Docs product is built on top of our open source BlockNote text editor (https://www.blocknotejs.org).

Docs specifically started as an international collaboration with Germany [2] to explore how different EU countries can collaborate in building sovereign workplace solutions (several other countries including NL have shown interest as well).

They're actively supporting us, and related projects like Yjs (https://yjs.dev) by sponsoring feature development.

I'm sure many of the team members will follow along here as well! Happy to answer any questions.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294
[2] https://www.zendis.de/en
by shimman | 2026-02-07 15:24:18+00:00
That's a different complaint.

It's quite easy to make things without react, it's not our fault that business leaders don't let devs choose how to solve problems but hey who am I to complain? React projects allow me to pay my bills! I've never seen a good "react" project yet and I've been working professionally with react since before class components were a thing.

Every react code base has their own unique failures due to npm ecosystem, this will never change. In fact, the best way to anticipate what kind patterns are in a given react project is to look at their package.json.
by GuB-42 | 2026-02-07 15:24:42+00:00
On this topic, I think it is worth mentioning Framasoft [1]

It is a French organization that offers plenty of alternatives to Google and other big tech products. A lot of them are just rebranded and hosted open source software, but they also develop their own, such as PeerTube and Framaprout (the last one is a joke, but PeerTube isn't).

[1] https://framasoft.org/
by jatora | 2026-02-07 15:24:53+00:00
I dont really understand how this is possible. I've built some very large applications, and even a full LLM data curation,tokenizer, pretrain, posttrain SFT/DPO pipeline with LLM's and it most certainly took far less time than if i had done it manually. Sure it isnt all optimal...but it most certainly isnt subpar, and it is fully functional
by mothballed | 2026-02-07 15:25:05+00:00
LMAO. I built the house for $60,000. Myself. And I have the construction heavy equipment to demolish it, so I can demolish it for next to nothing. It paid for itself in 3 years vs renting.

I couldn't give a shit if I have to sell it for land value (which has massively appreciated by my own development, since I did all the prospecting for water, electric, and septic -- the land was basically worthless when I bought it), on the off chance someone doesn't want a mega cheap house in cash for break even. I didn't build it as an investment, I built it to live in.

It's by escaping your mentality, which is what has poisoned the real estate problem writ large, is how I escaped the inflated property price conundrum.
by spwa4 | 2026-02-07 15:25:35+00:00
Something like this that's proven itself: https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...

TLDR: C++, WASM, and some form of GRPC with C++ on the server side as well. Because you need a language that's fast, can contain high complexity and large programs without collapsing (which is a short list of languages) and can work fast for the bits that need speed.
by nostrademons | 2026-02-07 15:25:53+00:00
That's my experience too. And my employer has generally internalized it into their process: instead of negotiating over what code to write, write it all the ways, A/B test them, and negotiate over which code to launch once you have more data about how different approaches might affect user behavior.

Interestingly though, the experimentation process itself seems very under-optimized, and so it is frequently the bottleneck.
by cmp0 | 2026-02-07 15:26:07+00:00
Surprised by the hate here, I thought this was great.

Microsoft (and anyone's) success is probably a function of strategy + execution + luck.

So I think it's hard to solely judge this philosophy by Microsoft's success or not.

He's basically saying: "You must take calculated, strategic risks. But don't be wrong too much."

What's a better strategy?
by saghm | 2026-02-07 15:27:15+00:00
I've only recently started trying out using LLMs to help me write code (as in, within the last two weeks), and the workflow that makes the most sense to me is to not let the LLM anywhere close to PRs/MRs/CRs, or even version control at all. I've found it useful to give it a fairly constrained task (something that might be a 100-200 line modification of my current code), literally watch the output of Claude Code's "thinking" as it goes to potentially interrupt it if it's going down the wrong path or if it gives me a better idea, wait for it to present the code, and then read through all of it to make sure it's what I want. After making whatever small changes I might want, I commit, and then move onto the next thing. So far, this has pretty much all been for personal side projects outside of work, so there is no code review, but approaching it from the standpoint that the goal is produce the same code and version control history I would want if I created it by hand and just using the LLM as way of automating the typing, I've been pretty surprised that it's already been a net gain in efficiency for a lot of things I've been working on. Ideally, the code I'm generating shouldn't be distinguishable from what I'm already writing, because I would change it if I saw that it was. At that point, either it's high-quality enough to be merged, or it's not and should be rejected, and that's already how things work in the first place. If someone makes an MR that their coworkers find sloppy and annoying to review, there needs to be pushback, and how it was generated should be irrelevant if everyone is on the same page about where the bar for quality is and is acting in good faith. (If you're working in an environment where there's no bandwidth to care about quality or people are acting in bad faith, LLM code will probably not be much of an improvement, but you're also probably going to have a bad time regardless, and unfortunately I don't think there's a magic bullet for fixing that).