MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-02-07 20:03:26+00:00
I plugged "admitting a large number of uses" into OneLook Thesaurus (https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/?s=admitting%20a%20large%2...), and it returned:

> Best match is versatile which usually means: Capable of many different uses

with "multi-purpose", "adaptable", "flexible" and "multi-use" as the runner-up candidates.

---

Like you, I had no idea that tools like OneLook Thesaurus existed (despite how easy it would be to make one), so here's my attempt to look this up manually.

"Admitting a large number of uses" -> manually abbreviated to "very useful" -> https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/useful -> dead end. Give up, use a thesaurus.

https://www.wordhippo.com/what-is/another-word-for/very_usef..., sense 2 "Usable in multiple ways", lists:

> useful multipurpose versatile flexible multifunction adaptable all-around all-purpose all-round multiuse multifaceted extremely useful one-size-fits-all universal protean general general-purpose […]

Taking advantage of the fact my passive vocabulary is greater than my active vocabulary: no, no, yes. (I've spuriously rejected "multipurpose" – a decent synonym of "versatile [tool]" – but that doesn't matter.) I'm pretty sure WordHippo is machine-generated from some corpus, and a lot of these words don't mean "very useful", but they're good at playing the SEO game, and I'm lazy. Once we have versatile, we can put that into an actual thesaurus: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/thesaurus/versatile. But none of those really have the same sense as "versatile" in the context I'm thinking of (except perhaps "adaptable"), so if I were writing something, I'd go with "versatile".

Total time taken: 15 seconds. And I'm confident that the answer is correct.

By the way, I'm not finding "multifarious" anywhere. It's not a word I'm familiar with, but that doesn't actually seem to be a proper synonym (according to Wiktionary, at least: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Thesaurus:heterogeneous). There are certainly contexts where you could use this word in place of "versatile" (e.g. "versatile skill-set" → "multifarious skill-set"), but I criticise WordHippo for far less dubious synonym suggestions.
by readthenotes1 | 2026-02-07 20:04:01+00:00
Iirc, there is a quote from Barry Boehm, author of Software Engineering Economics, who said something in the effect of "I wish you hadn't persuaded me that requirements didn't change much in big military contracts"

They do change, especially if projects take years.

Not only do people tend not to read, or read well, there is a lot on inherent ambiguity in english--so even if not written stupidly there may be surprises.

"Requirements" changed on just about every project I was on. I remember once asking the business owner if he could simplify some requirements cuz they were really complicated to develop well, and he replied Certainly--he was trying to put out something he thought would be easy for us to build.
by zeroonetwothree | 2026-02-07 20:04:06+00:00
Fully AI generated code has similar artifacts. You can spot them pretty easily after a bit. Of course it doesn't really matter for the business goals, as long as it works correctly. Just like 99% of people don't care if their clothing was machine made vs. handmade. It's going to be a tiny minority that care about handmade software.
by pstuart | 2026-02-07 20:04:15+00:00
It's clear that lidar is superior to the Tesla cameras only approach, but I wonder if being able to take all that data and be able to better correlate what is being seen visually with what the lidar is showing.

That said, for autonomous driving I'd like to see as many sensor options as possible: lidar, radar, cameras, sonar. Belt and suspenders. I imagine as pricing continues to drop all will be embraced.
by TheGRS | 2026-02-07 20:04:27+00:00
It's crazy! I don't think anyone in my sphere is some hardcore fan of a niche game. But then I stumble on them in the marketplace or watching some GDC talk and it's like, wow this solo dev has been making this obscure series of games for 20 years and they live comfortably (but not extravagantly) with their family. Good on them!

I'm really just describing the long tail at this point. Gives me hope that maybe I can find that product before getting to retirement age.
by crazygringo | 2026-02-07 20:04:38+00:00
I'm all for AI programming.

But I've seen this conversation on HN already 100 times.

The answer they always give is that compilers are deterministic and therefore trustworthy in ways that LLMs are not.

I personally don't agree at all, in the sense I don't think that matters. I've run into compiler bugs, and more library bugs than I can count. The real world is just as messy as LLMs are, and you still need the same testing strategies to guard against errors. Development is always a slightly stochastic process of writing stuff that you eventually get to work on your machine, and then fixing all the bugs that get revealed once it starts running on other people's machines in the wild. LLMs don't write perfect code, and neither do you. Both require iteration and testing.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-02-07 20:04:42+00:00
It is a different kind of code. Just a lot of programmers can’t grock it as such.

I guess I started out as a programmer, then went to grad school and learned how to write and communicate my ideas, it has a lot in common with programming, but at a deeper level. Now I’m doing both with AI and it’s a lot of fun. It is just programming at a higher level.
by sandworm101 | 2026-02-07 20:05:28+00:00
There is a scene in Pirates of the Carribean where captain jack is stuck in a void surrounded by duplicates of himself. It is his hell. As we have biult better and better telescopes we realize that as we expand into space we will be stuck talking only to ourselves, at least for a few thousand generations.

When they turned LIGO on i wanted to see warp drives whipping around. But all we saw was distant black hole mergers; interesting but not exactly a star trek moment. When areicebo fell and was not immediately rebiult, i realized that most people just dont care about ever meeting another civilization. Even if we did find one it wouldnt change much here on earth. Most people dont care about climate change. They dont care about anything beyond their own lifetime. What matter will aliens be if they are a thousand lightyears away? So people dream now about other things, about grimy politics and alternative history.
by light_hue_1 | 2026-02-07 20:05:39+00:00
That's just gatekeeping.

It was and is my craft. I've been doing it since grade 5. Like 30 years now.

Writing tight assembly for robot controllers all the way to AI on MRI machines to security for the DoD and now the biggest AI on the planet.

But my craft was not typing. It's coding.

If you're typist you're going to mourn the printer. But if you're a writer you're going to see how the improves your life.
by 9rx | 2026-02-07 20:05:45+00:00
~13% of the UK population, and growing, lives in London. Why would an unaffordable place be home to such a large portion of the population? It wouldn't. These cities become large — and continue to grow — because they are most affordable in the typical case.

Small towns often have a lower sticker price, but the low sticker price is low for reason: Because it is much less affordable. Everyone would be moving there if it were more affordable. Humans love to chase a good deal. After all, even London itself was just a small town, even rural, at one time, but people moved there because it was a better deal and thus the city you know today was born.

Of course, there are always outliers. Perhaps you are one of them. The earlier comment was clear about 'generally'.
by majormajor | 2026-02-07 20:05:51+00:00
Reagan supported those interest rate changes. Reagan than continued to push deficit spending well after the recovery from those first couple years, a huge lasting trend in Republican administrations ever since.

It's also very hard to assume that Reagan being elected in 76 would've avoided the oil-driven inflation at the end of that decade.

But of course, we've decided as a country/media to generally blame Biden for non-policy factors that put the economy on a wild bullwhip ride from 2020-to-2023ish, soooooo... maybe Reagan can deal with getting the blame for the inflation too!
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-02-07 20:06:03+00:00
If "anonymously" is your make or break criteria then that should be a red flag to reconsider your actions because it almost certainly means those around you (edit: a group distinct from the target of such actions) would not agree with you. And if you think everyone around would agree with you, then you'll probably do better leveraging them instead of the government. Generally, not just on this issue.

Now, I get that some social issues can be touchy in this regard but we're not talking about gay dating in Saudi Arabia here, we're talking about something pretty non-controversial. Everyone's body declines as they get old. Among seniors stopping driving at some point is just a part of the aging process.
by IhateAI | 2026-02-07 20:06:13+00:00
Anybody who says this kind of thing, I assume you weren't very good at programming, you ultimately didn't like doing it and so you probably climbed the business ladder. I can't say for sure but I'd bet you're upper management and therefor this is magic to you, its a threat to all of us. You probably despised writing code because you weren't good at it so you welcome these tools to patch that insecurity of yours.
by prmoustache | 2026-02-07 20:06:28+00:00
> Google Docs is a document editor (opening/saving Microsoft office compatible documents, with layout, etc), not a wiki/markdown editor. The La Suite Docs seems a product more similar to Atlassian Confluence.

In the last 10 years I've been spending much more time at the office consulting and editing confluence and web pages (sharepoint / mkdocs / readme and other markdown based resources) than the cumulative time spent on
word, excel, powerpoint and pdf documents. I imagine it is the same for a significant portion of the population.

Also, libreoffice is already a thing and nobody edits office365 documents using the web versions except when their employer can't/don't want to pay the license for the full version or the client is not vailable on their OS (linux users). Libreoffice doesn't have that problem, you only really need storage with sharing facilities, not featurefull web clients for your docs.
by MusaGazi | 2026-02-07 20:06:40+00:00
Location: Burlington, MA
Remote: Optional
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: Python, React, JavaScript, SQL, REST APIs, Git, CI/CD, PySide6
Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1GkZceihbtVWolNuupmp5...

Email: sathmangazi1@gmail.com

Summary:
Software Engineer with ~2 years of experience building internal enterprise systems in a manufacturing environment. At Novanta, I built LiteMES, a Python/PySide6/MSSQL manufacturing execution system used by 100+ operators and engineers, replacing manual red-tag and Excel workflows and improving sprint delivery from ~90% to ~97%.

I work end-to-end: requirements → system design → implementation → deployment → user adoption. Strong bias toward pragmatic, business-driven engineering.

Outside of my core SWE role, I also run a small influencer marketing side project, where I handle creator outreach, deal negotiation, campaign tracking, and performance analysis for consumer brands. This has strengthened my skills in data-driven decision making, communication, and building systems that connect technical execution with revenue outcomes.

Orca Security Ambassador. Currently on H-1B grace period and seeking transfer sponsorship.
Open to backend, full-stack, or product-driven engineering roles.
by NewsaHackO | 2026-02-07 20:06:57+00:00
>Death of flash

>The library support for games[in Go] is quite poor, and though you can wrap C libs without much trouble, doing so adds a lot of busy work.

I can't see when this was written, but it has to be around 2015. So, about 10 years ago. I wonder what his opinion is today.
by steveBK123 | 2026-02-07 20:07:07+00:00
This is largely the crux of it.

GOP is the fun dad party and Dems are the mommy party.

Republicans run economy hot until it blows, then Dems get voted in to clean up. People get annoyed about taxes and regulation when economy is ok again, fun dad promises ice cream and pizza for dinner forever.. rinse & repeat.
by TJTorola | 2026-02-07 20:07:09+00:00
I'm not particularly against AI programming but I don't think these two things are equivilent. A compiler translates code to specifications in a deterministic way, the same compiler produces the same output from the same code, it is all completely controlled. AI is not at all deterministic, temperature is built into LLMs and furthermore the lack of specificity in prompts and our spoken languages. The difference in control is significant enough to me not to put compilers and AI coding agents into the same catagory even though they are both taking some text and producing some other text/machine code.
by sersi | 2026-02-07 20:07:27+00:00
It was a better linux for the desktop back during the snow leopard day but it's slowly gotten worse at the same time that linux became better.
Now the only advantages they have is the hardware. The os is buggy doesn't respect apple's own human interface guidelines and is increasingly locked down. Gone are the days of simbl extensions, customizability and a clean nice coherent stable os with few bugs.
by GeorgeTirebiter | 2026-02-07 20:07:36+00:00
One other helpful frame: I consider LLMs simply to be very flexible high-level 'language' Compilers. We've moved up the Abstraction Chain ever since we invented FORTRAN and COBOL (and LISP) instead of using assembly language.

We're 'simply' moving up the abstraction hierarchy again. Good!
by RivieraKid | 2026-02-07 20:07:39+00:00
> I do find it that the developers that focused on "build the right things" mourn less than those who focused on "build things right".

I've always been strongly in the first category, but... the issue is that 10x more people will be able to build the right things. And if I build the right thing, it will be easy to copy. The market will get crowded, so distribution will become even harder than it is today. Success will be determined by personal brand, social media presence, social connections.
by hypertexthero | 2026-02-07 20:07:52+00:00
Potentially unrelated tangent thought:

The Man Who Listens to Horses (1997) is an excellent book by Monty Roberts about learning the language of horses and observing and listening to animals: https://www.biblio.com/search.php?stage=1&title=The+Man+Who+...

Video demonstration of the above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYtTz9GtAT4
by alainrk | 2026-02-07 20:08:17+00:00
Strawman argument.

Standards and patterns matter, but discernment matters more. The issue isn't reusability itself, it's the cargo-cult adoption of frameworks that solve problems you don't have, when you don't have them.

Your LLM agent works for undiscussed reasons because you made deliberate architectural choices for your specific context. That's engineering. Blindly importing a framework just because "everyone uses it" is the opposite. That's the point, nothing more nothing less.
by skybrian | 2026-02-07 20:08:18+00:00
The costs for code improvement projects have gone down dramatically now that we have power tools. So, perhaps it will be considered more worthwhile now? But how this actually plays out for professional programming is going to depend on company culture and management.

In my case, I'm an early-retired hobbyist programmer, so I control the budget. The same is true for any open source project.
by poulsbohemian | 2026-02-07 20:08:25+00:00
I think back on the ten+ years I spent doing SRE consulting and the thing is, finding the problems and identifying solutions — the technical part of the work — was such a small part of the actual work. So often I would go to work with a client and discover that they often already knew the problem, they just didn’t believe it - my job was often about the psychology of the organization more than the technical knowledge. So you might say “Great, so the agent will automatically fix the problem that the organization previous misidentified.” That sounds great right up until it starts dreaming… it’s not to say there aren’t places for these agents, but I suspect ultimately it will be like any other technology we use where it becomes part of the toolkit, not the whole.
Show HN: Tharos – CLI to find and autofix security bugs using local LLMs
by fluantix | 2026-02-07 20:08:29+00:00
OP here. We built Tharos because we were tired of "security theatre" tools that produce read-only reports.

Tharos is an open-source security engine written in Go. Key features:

Polyglot: Scans Go, Python, JS/TS (AST-based + Regex).
Interactive: tharos --interactive opens a TUI to fix issues one-by-one.
CI-Ready: Returns strict exit codes for blocking builds.
Visual: HTML reports and rich terminal UI.
Repo: https://github.com/chinonsochikelue/tharos Docs: https://tharos.vercel.app

Would love feedback on the rule engine and the TUI ux!
by throwaway0123_5 | 2026-02-07 20:08:35+00:00
Yeah, I notice a lot of the optimism is from people who have been in the field for decades. I'm newish to the field, half a decade out of undergrad. It definitely feels like almost all of what I learned has been (or will soon be) completely devalued. I'm sure this stuff feels a lot less threatening if you've had decades to earn a great salary and save a bunch of money. If money wasn't a concern I'd be thrilled about it too.
by dham | 2026-02-07 20:08:40+00:00
It's not so much the writing of the code (which I did like), it's the aesthetic of the code. It's solving a problem with the right code and the right amount of code (for now). That's still the case, even with AI writing most of the code. You have to steer it constantly because it has very bad instincts, because most people in the profession aren't good at it, so it has bad training data. Mainly because the "learn to code" movement and people getting into this profession just for the money and not the love. Those people are probably screwed.
by jarjoura | 2026-02-07 20:08:51+00:00
Your comment is spot on, but the nuance people who are still new to these LLMs don't yet see is the real reason "he'd be better off just writing the damned book instead."

1. That prompt is always a slot machine. It's never 100% deterministic and that's why we haven't seen an explosion of claude skills. When it works for you, and it's magical, everyone is wowed. However, there is a set of users who then bang their head, wondering why their identical attempt is garbage compared to their coworker. "It must be a skills issue." No, it's just the LLM being an LLM.

2. Coding agents are hyper localized and refuse to consider the larger project when it solves something. So you end up with these "paper cuts" of duplicated functions or classes that do one thing different. Now the LLM in future runs has to decide which of these classes or functions to use and you end up with two competing implementations. Future you will bang your head trying to figure out how to combine them.

3. The "voice" of the code it outputs is trained on public repositories so if your internal codebase is doing something unique, the LLM will consistently pick the voice it's trained on, forcing you to rewrite behind it to match your internal code.

4. It has no chill. If I set any "important" rules in the prompt then it sometimes adheres to it at the expense of doing the "right" thing in its changes. Or it completely ignores it and does its own thing, when it would have been the perfect time to follow the rule. This is to your point that, if I had just written the code myself, it would have been less words than any "perfect" prompt it would have taken to get the same code change.
by mylifeandtimes | 2026-02-07 20:09:22+00:00
Why do we need people to consume when we have the government?

Serious question. As in, we built the last 100 years on "the american consumer", the idea that it would be the people buying everything. There is no reason that needs to or necessarily will continue-- don't get me wrong, I kind of hope it does, but my hopes don't always predict what actually happens.

What if the next 100 is the government buying everything, and the vast bulk of the people are effectively serfs. Who HAVE to stay in line otherwise they go to debt prison or tax prison where they become slaves (yes, the US has a fairly large population of prison laborers who are forced to work for 15-50 cents/hour. The lucky ones can earn as much as $1.50/hour.
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/04/10/wages/
by kelnos | 2026-02-07 20:09:27+00:00
I love building things too, but for me, the journey is a big part of what brings me joy. Herding an LLM doesn't give me joy like writing code does. And the finished project doesn't feel the same when my involvement is limited to prompting an LLM and reviewing its output.

If I had an LLM generate a piece of artwork for me, I wouldn't call myself an artist, no matter how many hours I spent conversing with the LLM in order to refine the image. So I wouldn't call myself a coder if my process was to get an LLM to write most/all the code for me. Not saying the output of either doesn't have value, but I am absolutely fine gatekeeping in this way: you are not an artist/coder if this is how you build your product. You're an artistic director, a technical product manager, something of that nature.

That said, I never derived joy from every single second of coding; there were and are plenty of parts to it that I find tedious or frustrating. I do appreciate being able to let an LLM loose on some of those parts.

But sparing use is starting to really only work for hobby projects. I'm not sure I could get away with taking the time to write most of it manually when LLMs might make coworkers more "productive". Even if I can convince myself my code is still "better" than theirs, that's not what companies value.
by mcmcmc | 2026-02-07 20:09:37+00:00
Having kids is also a bullshit excuse. Choosing comfort over conscience is your prerogative but you’re just teaching your kids the same values.

Yeah, tech monopolist that enables genocide to contemporary gestapo isn’t an equal comparison. But my point was that you can’t ignore the moral hazards of employment by handwaving “gotta eat somehow”. There are a million ways to feed your kids. Saying you have to work a high paid job to feed them non-GMO certified organic produce from Erewhon because that’s the only standard of living you can possibly survive with, that’s a choice.

I also want to reiterate that I’m not judging the people who choose to work there. I’m just saying that by signing the employment contract they accept the reasonable public perception that the products they work on are shit. And to some marginal degree, they are complicit in all their employer’s wrongdoings.
by throwaway132448 | 2026-02-07 20:09:40+00:00
I said I want to _see_ less ego. Calling out assholes is being that change, because not enough people do it. If you’re going to try and feel superior through technicality (which let’s
be honest, claiming a single interpretation of a common phrase is a dumb way of trying to achieve that), at least pay attention to the details.
by jryio | 2026-02-07 20:09:41+00:00
These comments are comical. How hard is it to understand that human beings are experiential creates. Our experiences matter, to survival, to culture, and identity.

I mourn the horse masters and stable boys of a century past because of their craft. Years of intuition and experience.

Why do you watch a chess master play, or a live concert, or any form of human creation?

Should we automate parts of our profession? Yes.

Should he mourn the loss of our craft. Also yes.