MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rvz | 2026-02-15 10:45:26+00:00
First, this is the problem:

> ...now his advice it only get Claude Code and learn how to make it automate toil, and multiple claude agents to perform tasks instead of manually writing code.

Advice from creator of Claude Code is for you to continue to use Claude Code to spend more money on tokens instead of knowing what you are doing or what the code does.

I don't think that will help in the long run. In fact this over-reliance will help accelerate the decline in being able to find hard to reach bugs and will create a new class of bugs from AI agents.

> Do you also see this pattern emerging?

This helps experienced engineers and those who know what they are doing. For those who have no idea or have no experience then they tend to spend even more on tokens which is exactly what Anthropic needs you to keep doing.

> Do you think software engineering and managarial roles are slowly merging and the value traditional software engineering is decreasing?

They were already merging before LLMs, (managers that can code and SWEs that become managers) but that doesn't mean the value of traditional software engineering decreases. Software Engineering accounts for maintainance, security and time and usually producing more code to solve a problem just increases all of that and also the maintainance debt and the cognitive debt on the prompter.

The moment one needs to monetize that software, then software engineering becomes even more relevant (one feature can open another security issue) with or without LLMs.

> Are above advices overindexed on Claude Code, because Boris created it?

Possibly. But that does not mean it is good advice, especially from someone that is selling a product telling you to use it even more and you not looking at what it is doing.

It was said that Claude Code was Boris's side project that was built on a bad architecture and was difficult to maintain until the Bun developers were hired to fix those issues. Since they understood how the JS runtime works they knew how to fix those bugs when Claude got stuck, whilst also maintaining the Bun runtime.

The point is, it is still worth knowing what you are doing and learning about how it all works and not soley relying on a coding agent to do it all for you.
by dist-epoch | 2026-02-15 10:46:52+00:00
For example there is no easy way to create a "localized" branch - this branch is only allowed to change files in "/backend", such that the agent doesn't randomly modify files elsewhere. This way you could let an agent loose on some subpart of the monorepo and not worry that it will break something unrelated.

You can do all kinds of workarounds and sandboxes, but it would be nice for git to support more modularity.
by michaelt | 2026-02-15 10:46:59+00:00
> As a non-American, I think the breakup of AT&T/Bell Labs was a mistake.

With the benefit of hindsight, the break up was performed in the most ineffective way you could possibly imagine.

Take a national monopoly, and convert it into seven regional monopolies, which don't compete on price or service? Then let those monopolies merge back into three companies?

Countries that addressed national telecoms monopolies with local loop unbundling and similar policies seem to have ended up with much more competitive markets.
by quadrifoliate | 2026-02-15 10:47:06+00:00
I don't know if you're demonstrating reductio ad absurdum, but maybe that's because they are genuine? As people in the thread have pointed out, the author as well as their company is pretty well-known in software circles. They have had multiple projects discussed on HN in the past[1]. 2000 stars is not a lot given that [2].

I fail to understand why a ton of breathless blog posts about the process of AI-assisted coding are more interesting to HNers than some of the actual code (potentially, not claiming anything about it) written.

Maybe you or the GP could actually say what you think are "weird comments" and why you think this is being "boted"?

---------------

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] Why are people obsessed with star counts? I at least only star things to bookmark them, not vouch for them in any way. It does not seem unreasonable to me that 5 times as many people bookmarked the repo in the early days than are using it on npm. Also, npm is not necessary, the author shows at least 2 other ways to use it (direct download, link to GitHub pages) which will not show up in npm stats.
by conartist6 | 2026-02-15 10:47:46+00:00
Come the BABLR side. We have cookies!

In all seriousness this is being done. By me.

I would say structural editing is not a dead end, because as you mention projects like Unison and Smalltalk show us that storing structures is compatible with having syntax.

The real problem is that we need a common way of storing parse tree structures so that we can build a semantic editor that works on the syntax of many programming languages
Show HN: I built a map where anyone can rename anything
by kafked | 2026-02-15 10:48:00+00:00
The idea is simple: click any place on the map, propose a name, others vote, or it will be auto-accepted in ~5min. No account needed for fresh locations or name duel - only to challenge already-renamed places or vote to prevent abuse.
40k renames so far, and surprisingly people mostly behave. Some names are genuinely creative and I keep learning random geography facts just by watching the map (did you know someone mapped every single animal in a Taiwan Kaohsiung zoo on OpenStreetMap?)

Non-commercial, just a side project. Stack is SvelteKit, MapLibre, 40GB vector map self-hosted on Cloudflare R2.

Please don't use this for navigation.
by yellowapple | 2026-02-15 10:48:27+00:00
I like it. Seems like a nice combination of features. It's pitched at AI/ML usecases, which is understandable given the current hypetrain, but on first glance I think it can stand up well in a more general-purpose context.

Re: pipe tracing, half a decade or so ago I made a little language called OTPCL, which has user-definable pipeline operators; combined with the ability to redefine any command in a given interpreter state, it'd be straightforward for a user to shove something like (pardon the possibly-incorrect syntax; haven't touched Erlang in awhile)

'CMD_|'(Args, State) ->
io:print("something something log something something"),
otpcl_core:'CMD_|'(Args, State).

into an Erlang module, and then by adding that to a custom interpreter state with otpcl:cmd/3 you end up with automatic logging every time a script uses a pipe.

Downside is that you'd have to do this for every command defining a pipe operator (i.e. every command with a name starting with "|"); alternate user-facing approach would be to get the AST from otpcl:parse/1, inject log/trace commands before or after every command, and pass the modified tree to otpcl:interpret/2 (alongside an interpreter state with those log/trace commands defined). Or do the logging outside of the interpreter between manual calls to otpcl:interpret/2 for each command; something like

trace_and_interpret([], State) ->
{ok, State};
trace_and_interpret([Cmd|Tree], State) ->
io:print("something something log something something"),
{_, NewState} = otpcl:interpret([Cmd], State),
trace_and_interpret(Tree, NewState).

should do the trick, covering all pipes and ordinary commands alike.
by ali_chherawalla | 2026-02-15 10:49:54+00:00
hey! thank you for the feedback. appreciate it. I pushed something recently that actually prevents showing up models in the download screen that don't fit on your phone. Please give it a whirl.

Yeah it wasn't straight forward figuring out the speed + getting it to work for both Android and iOS. Fair bit if complexity. But I'm so happy I got it done.
Show HN: Pangolin: Open-source identity-based VPN (Twingate/Zscaler alternative)
by miloschwartz | 2026-02-15 10:50:18+00:00
Pangolin (https://github.com/fosrl/pangolin) is an open-source tool for identity-based remote access to internal resources - an alternative to Cloudflare ZTNA, Zscaler, and Twingate.

It’s different than existing approaches: mesh VPNs (Tailscale, ZeroTier, etc.) create flat overlay networks where ACL and IP space management becomes complex at scale and every device can talk to every other device, while corporate ZTNA solutions (Zscaler, Cato, Netskope etc.) are closed-source and add latency by forcing traffic through a central server.

Pangolin takes a resource-centric approach. You deploy lightweight connectors that bridge to specific resources (private web apps, SSH, databases, CIDR ranges). Admins delegate resource-access to specific users and roles. It uses WireGuard with NAT hole-punching for peer-to-peer connections and traffic goes directly between the user and connector instead of through a central server. It supports native clients (Mac/Windows/Linux/iOS/Android) plus identity-aware, browser-based access when a client isn’t required.

Pangolin has a cloud and is optionally self-hosted. The Community Edition is AGPLv3. The Enterprise Edition is also open-source under the commercial license which enables free personal/small business use.
by austin-cheney | 2026-02-15 10:51:20+00:00
Follow the money.

When software was first a thing: 50s-70s it was only about micro automation on giant mainframes. This was very inefficient, from a computing perspective, because computers were very expensive and not very powerful. They still paid for themselves many times over.

Then came the personal computer. In the 80s-90s desktop applications were the focus.

Then came the internet and now owning data at large data centers is the primary money maker since the later 90s. Data is king.

The data economy is on its way out. The LLMs are its last big attempt at inventing money, but it’s the tail end of an dying step in a larger cycle.

The thing that will replace the data economy is already here, but it’s not big business yet. It’s fragmented and still almost exclusively in the hands of hobbyists. But it’s rapidly growing in popularity and already denting the giant data economy without substantial revenue streams of its own.

What’s important to understand is that each of these big cycles aren’t just changes in technology. They are changes in consumption, which has consequences to adjacent economies. Media has, over the last 10 years, drifted into the data economy. So when the data economy is replaced by this next thing the media economy will also risk being replaced.
by noodletheworld | 2026-02-15 10:51:23+00:00
> Qwen3 8B, or even 4B quantized is actually quite good.

No, it’s not.

Trust me, I don't write this from a position of vague hand waving.

Ive tried a lot of self hosted models at a lot of sizes; those small models are not good enough, and do not have a context long enough to be useful for most everyday operations.
by cromka | 2026-02-15 10:51:49+00:00
Also not OP, I gave up Arch around 2011 as well after I wasn't able to mount a USB pendrive at the uni, as I was rushing somewhere. This was embarrassing and actually a serious issue, took some time to fix upstream and finding workaround was also annoying. This is when I gave up on it and never looked back, but I did, indeed, learn all about Linux internals from dailying Arch for 3 or so years.
by znpy | 2026-02-15 10:52:43+00:00
> Poor life choices can be consequences of poor upbringing, mental health, or simply bad luck.

You forget stupidity and ignorance. Sometimes people make poor life choices because they're stupid or ignorant (or both).

Yeah sure poor life choices can be consequences of poor upbringing, mental health, or simply bad luck, but that's not always the case.

Regarding this specific piece of writing and as a tech person myself, i wonder: why does this person not have some safety net savings?

Having worked in the highest-paying city (San Francisco) in the highest paying state (California) in the richest nation (USA)... Why didn't this guy build his own safety net?
by smashah | 2026-02-15 10:53:12+00:00
"openly supports islamo-supremacists and facists"

You must misunderstand what Anti-christ behaviour looks like. Antichrist behaviour is having one of your agents organize a worldwide cabal of child rapists and baby-organ eaters just so one day they can all be blackmailed into enabling the mass industrial holocausting of tens of thousands of other children in an open air prison - dropping thermobaric bombs onto schools so as to gas the victims of your demonic holocaust upon them .... oh wait turn them into a fine mist... and then attempting to shapeshift into members of a historically oppressed abrahamic monotheistic (antichrist followers - zs - are literal false-idol worshippers) faith so innocent anti-zionist Jewish people get framed for your demonic babybloodletting.
by conartist6 | 2026-02-15 10:55:48+00:00
A syntax tree node does not fit into a git object. Too many children. This doesn't mean we shouldn't keep everything that's great about git in a next-gen solution, but it does mean that we'll have to build some new tools to experiment with features like semantic patching and merging.

Also I checked the author out and can confirm that they know how git works in detail.
by lemoing | 2026-02-15 10:56:36+00:00
I’ve taken the last year off from software engineering and have worked a mix of jobs that primarily exist outside the magic circle of the internet. I think one thing that surprised me was just how little computers were used; there was some basic scheduling and retail management software, but the meat of the job was in the real world. Not only that, but most of the community was similar: their jobs were based in the physical world and computers were kept at an arm’s length. Even bookings were made over the phone, not online. It was eye-opening coming from my service-based economy bubble just how little computers (and because of that, LLMs) affected life in certain pockets of the world, some of them very large. What the article says about sprinkling in a bit of the physical world into your work was one of my takeaways from my year off as well; even without worrying about AI and job security, it just feels more rewarding.
by malux85 | 2026-02-15 10:57:32+00:00
I know people like this, theres a form of procrastination where they are busy hyperoptimising their todo lists and workflows but getting only a tiny amount of actual work done. It's a form of the disconnected intellect - they can tell you the problem, they can even tell you the solution, but they can't turn that knowledge into action. Convincing themselves that utterly trivial inconveniences are so productivity and or psychologically harmful they can they can then rationalize all this "meta-work" while simultaneously claiming to be virtuous, when in reality it's usually insecurity in their abilities or cowardice to face the unknown, preventing them doing real work
by keiferski | 2026-02-15 10:57:55+00:00
This comment is so out of touch with actual lived reality, I don’t know what to say, other than: the article is good and worth reading. I think the author was going for a bit of a Kerouac / Burroughs style in his writing.

I have never been homeless or close to being homeless, but it seems incredibly likely that under the stress of losing my job, not knowing where my next meal is from, where to sleep tonight, etc. – I would slowly lose the ability to make the kind of rational ethical decisions you’re criticizing him for.

Heck, even going a day or two without sleep is enough to make the average functional person incapable of pragmatic, rational thought.
by Kiro | 2026-02-15 11:00:43+00:00
> I wonder how our comments will age in a few years.

Badly. While I wouldn't assign a task to an LLM that requires such a long running time right now (for many reasons: control, cost etc) I am fully aware that it might eventually be something I do. Especially considering how fast I went from tab completion to whole functions to having LLMs write most of the code.

My competition right now is probably the grifters and hustlers already doing this, and not the software engineers that "know better". Laughing at the inevitable security disasters and other vibe coded fiascos while back-patting each other is funny but missing the forest for the trees.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-15 11:01:48+00:00
I disagreed strongly with that at the time and still do. The money we're talking about here was a pittance compared to the money already contributed by Dutch society to the university where these people were working. Besides that some of these royalty streams went into private pockets.

A friend of mine was studying under Andy and I had a chat with him about this at his Amstelveen residence prior to the release. He was dead set on doing it that way. As a non-student and relatively poor programmer I pointed out to him that his chosen strategy would make Minix effectively unaffordable to me in spite of his stated goal of 'unlocking unix'. So I ended up in Torvald's camp when he released Linux as FOSS (I never contributed to either, but I figured as a user I should pick the one that would win the race, even if from a tech perspective I agreed more with Tanenbaum than with Torvalds).

Minix was (is?) flogged to students of VU for much longer than was beneficial to those students, all that time and effort (many 100's of man years by now) could have gone into structurally improving Linux. But that would have required admitting a mistake.
by cultofmetatron | 2026-02-15 11:03:15+00:00
>
Well, she openly supports islamo-supremacists and facists as long as they have the right skin color.

yea... I'm gonna call bullshit on that.

> are not just busy hating jews,

ah there we go. the standard strawmen dogwhistle. we stopped bying it sometime after you all called doctors without boreders, amnesty international and the ICC antisemetic. let me guess, you support zionism and the genocide in palestine? I bet in backrooms you refer to them as human animals too right?

sorry mate, we ain't fallin for it.
by etamponi | 2026-02-15 11:03:24+00:00
It blows my mind how these posts seem like everyone is victim of a collective amnesia.

Literally every single point in the article was good engineering practice way before AI. So it's either amnesia or simple ignorance.

In particular, "No coding before 10am" is worded a bit awkward, as it simply means "think before you write code", which... Does it need an article for saying it?
by specproc | 2026-02-15 11:04:07+00:00
I know the author! Ben's a great guy. A real treat seeing this on HN. He does really gnarly Caucasus-inspired ambient electronica:

https://www.youtube.com/benwheelermusic/videos

https://mountainsoftongues.bandcamp.com/

https://invertedspectrumrecords.bandcamp.com/album/bneleti

https://crashsymbols.bandcamp.com/album/lurji-talgha

https://sayatnovaproject.bandcamp.com/album/kazbek-field-rec...
by zelphirkalt | 2026-02-15 11:05:40+00:00
Why would structural editing be a dead end? It has nothing to do with storage format. At least the meaning of the term I am familiar with, is about how you navigate and manipulate semantic units of code, instead of manipulating characters of the code, for example pressing some shortcut keys to invert nesting of AST nodes, or wrap an expression inside another, or change the order of expressions, all at the pressing of a button or key combo. I think you might be referring to something else or a different definition of the term.
by jeroenhd | 2026-02-15 11:06:24+00:00
I can think of one reason for letting agents run overnight: running large models locally is incredibly slow or incredibly expensive. Even more so with he recent RAM price spikes thanks to the AI bubble. Running AI overnight can be a decent solution to solve complex prompts without being dependent on the cloud.

This approach breaks the moment you need to provide any form of feedback, of course.
by jason_oster | 2026-02-15 11:06:31+00:00
Crass and futility irate. What an unusual way to engage. It wouldn’t hurt to moderate your tone.

The thing about sponsored segments is that they pay publishers much less than what they would make with microtransactions. A 1 cent tip per viewer would be 100 times more lucrative than any ad placement.

But it sounds like you want to do some more explaining.
by shevy-java | 2026-02-15 11:06:46+00:00
> The tests range from several hundred to several thousand dollars, depending on which sections of the body are scanned, and are not covered by insurance.

Even ignoring the overdiagnosing problem (I don't understand how they can determine from MRI when a cancer is a cancer; there are also benign growth and often when they are a certain size, people notice them, but how would MRI help here? Too small areas could be classified as malign; any further procedures can be dangerous - see that Dawson Creek actor recently, the cost of clinical intervention did not help), I think that medicine is increasingly becoming a "only affordable for those who have money". You can see this with regards to gene therapy too - if we ignore the success ratio, many of these therapies are impossible to acquire for Average Joe. Granted, the prices will go down for various reasons (we saw this with Moore's law and many other inventions too), but at the end of the day I feel we are stepping closer and closer to a very unfair society model - more and more superrich, but prices also go up immensely for average people. That model is not sustainable; people will be angry since this is not fair.
by yorwba | 2026-02-15 11:07:02+00:00
> The idea is to have a chip with SRAM large enough to fit the entire model, so inference can happen entirely in-memory. [...] So how much internal memory does the latest Cerebras chip have? 44GB. This puts OpenAI in kind of an awkward position. 44GB is enough to fit a small model (~20B params at fp16, ~40B params at int8 quantization), but clearly not enough to fit GPT-5.3-Codex.

You don't really need to fit the entire model on a single chip. Just as with GPUs, you can shard the model across multiple chips. Of course when you have a long pipeline of chips that each token needs to pass through, that decreases the end-to-end tokens per second correspondingly.

So the size of GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark isn't limited by the memory of a single Cerebras chip, but the number of such chips that you can chain together and still hit the 1000 tokens per second target. Given that Cerebras offers models much larger than 40B at faster speeds https://www.cerebras.ai/pricing#exploration GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark is likely closer to GLM 4.7 in size. (≈355B total parameters, 32B active)