MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by freeopinion | 2026-02-08 15:47:34+00:00
I think it is pretty indisputable that there is a valuable place for AI. I recently had to interact with a very horrible db schema. The best approach I came up with to solve my challenge involved modelling a table with 300 columns. Converting some sql ddl to a Rust struct was simple but tedious work. A prompt with less than 15 words guided an AI to produce the 900+ loc for me. It took a couple seconds to scan it to see that each field had both annotations I needed and the datatypes were sane.

That is exactly the type of help that makes me happy to have AI assistance. I have no idea how much electricity it consumed. Somebody more clever than me might have prompted the AI to generate the other 100 loc that used the struct to solve the whole problem. But it would have taken me longer to build the prompt than it took me to write the code.

Perhaps an AI might have come up with a more clever solution. Perhaps memorializing a prompt in a comment would be super insightful documentation. But I don't really need or want AI to do everything for me. I use it or not in a way that makes me happy. Right now that means I don't use it very much. Mostly because I haven't spent the time to learn how to use it. But I'm happy.
by siva7 | 2026-02-08 15:47:52+00:00
That's not what i am seeing being played out at a big corp. In reality everyone gets thrown under the bus, no matter if c-level or pleb if they don't appear to know how to drive the ai metrics up. Just being a PM won't save your job any more than that of the dev who doesn't know how to acquire and use new skills. On the contrary, jobs of the more competent devs are safer than those of some managers here who don't know the tech.
by thrownaway561 | 2026-02-08 15:48:30+00:00
Personally I'm loving AI for TECHNICAL problems. Case in point... I just had a server crash last night and obviously I need to do a summary on what could have possibly caused the issue. This use to take hours and painfully hours at that. If you ever had to scroll through a Windows event log you know what I'm talking about. But today I just got an idea of just exporting the log and uploading it to Gemini and asking it:

Looking at this Windows event log, the server rebooted unexpected this morning at 4:21am EST, please analyze the log and let me know what could have been the cause of the reboot.

It took Gemini 5 minutes to come back with an analyst and not only that, it asked me for the memory dump that the machine took. I uploaded that as well and it told me that it looks like SentinelOne might have caused the problem and to update the client if possible.

Checking the logs myself, that's exactly what it looks like.

That used to take me HOURS to do and now it took me 30 seconds, took Gemini 10 minutes, but me 30 seconds. That is a game changer if you ask me.

I love my job, but I love doing other things rather than combing over a log trying to figure out why a server rebooted. I just want to know what to do to fix it if it can be fixed.

I get that AI might be giving other people a sour taste, but to me it really has made my job, and the medial tasks that come with it. easier.
by Isamu | 2026-02-08 15:49:19+00:00
For me writing code is clarifying ideas, it’s an important part of the process.
Sometimes you start to see a radical way of simplifying what you want, that only happens if you are willing to transform what your requirements are if they turn out to be overly prescriptive.

I think though it is probably better for your career to churn out lines, it takes longer to radically simplify, people don’t always appreciate the effort. Plus instead if you go the other way, increase scope and time and complexity that more likely will result in rewards to you for the greater effort.
by utopiah | 2026-02-08 15:49:25+00:00
So funny because "you’re still riding around on a fixie bike." that's literally what I do. I also take a plane to fly.

In that analogy that would be picking the right library/framework/service vs. vibe coding it. I do NOT need to write all the code to provide value.

Knowing which tool to use for the task is precisely what requires honing a skill and requires judgement. It's not about how many kilometers you manage to cover.
by graphpilled | 2026-02-08 15:49:36+00:00
That's a cool setup. An API that returns the branching structure as JSON would fit your use case well—you'd feed in a prompt, get back the graph, and integrate it into your knowledge tree however you want.

I'll keep this in mind as I plan the API. If you want to stay in touch, I just created an X account—it's on my HN profile.
by batshit_beaver | 2026-02-08 15:49:43+00:00
> This is no different then carpentry. Yes, all furniture can now be built by machines. Some people still choose to build it by hand. Does that make them less productive? Yes.

I take issue even with this part.

First of all, all furniture definitely can't be built by machines, and no major piece of furniture is produced by machines end to end. Even assembly still requires human effort, let alone designs (and let alone choosing, configuring, and running the machines responsible for the automable parts). So really a given piece of furniture may range from 1% machine built (just the screws) to 90%, but it's never 100 and rarely that close to the top of this range.

Secondly, there's the question of productivity. Even with furniture measuring by the number of chairs produced per minute is disingenuous. This ignores the amount of time spent on the design, ignores the quality of the final product, and even ignores its economic value. It is certainly possible to produce fewer units of furniture per unit of time than a competitor and still win on revenue, profitability, and customer sentiment.

Trying to apply the same flawed approach to productivity to software engineering is laughably silly. We automate physical good production to reduce the cost of replicating a product so we can serve more customers. Code has zero replication cost. The only valuable parts of software engineering are therefore design, quality, and other intangibles. This has always been the case, LLMs changed nothing.
by cf100clunk | 2026-02-08 15:49:55+00:00
''In 2018, at the age of 83, Dave moved to Japan to become Distinguished
Professor at Keio University and Co-Director of the Keio Cyber Civilization
Research Center (CCRC). He loved teaching, and taught his final class on
January 22, 2026.

At CCRC, one of his most enjoyable activities was co-hosting the IP-Asia
online gathering, which has met every Monday for more than five years and
has addressed many aspects of the impact of technology on civilization.''

https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/nanog@lists.nanog.org/...
ShellScope – open-source flight recorder for transient Windows processes
by shiks09 | 2026-02-08 15:50:00+00:00
I built this tool because I kept seeing random terminal windows flash on my screen for a split second. I could never open Task Manager fast enough to catch them or see what they were executing.

ShellScope is a local flight recorder for these transient processes. It monitors the creation of terminal instances (cmd, powershell, wt) and logs their activity to a local SQLite database.

The architecture consists of two parts:
1. A Python backend that uses WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) to hook into Win32_ProcessStartTrace events. This allows it to capture the process name, the parent process ID, and the full command line arguments before the process terminates.
2. A Flutter frontend that visualizes the logs in real time.

Current features in this MVP:
Captures processes that live for less than 100ms.
Logs full command line arguments to help identify hidden scripts.
Highlights suspicious keywords (like "-enc" or "hidden").
Stores all data locally with no cloud dependency.

I am currently using WMI for the monitoring layer. I am aware this has some latency compared to a kernel driver, but it was easier to implement for an MVP.

I would appreciate feedback on the architecture, specifically on moving from WMI to ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) for better performance.

Project Page: https://shiks2.github.io/shellscope
by twoodfin | 2026-02-08 15:50:23+00:00
Andy is by no means innocent, he’s just not guilty of any crime he should have been imprisoned in Shawshank for.

The guy who sits drunk in his car eyeing a revolver is not a Mary Sue. And his demeanor of resignation at Shawshank suggests he doesn’t consider himself just an unlucky victim of blind fate & a golf pro.
by zabzonk | 2026-02-08 15:50:49+00:00
But why does it "feel good", if in fact it does?

I tried writing a small utility library using Windows Copilot, just for some experience with the tach (OK, not the highest tech, but I am 73 this year) and found it mildly impressive, but quite slow compared to what I would have done myself to get some quality out of it. It didn't make me feel good, particularly.
by O1111OOO | 2026-02-08 15:52:29+00:00
If you target an individual using the vast resources of the government for exercising his\her rights under the Constitution... would it not be much worse than spying?

Would it surprise you - given the well-documented behavior of the Federally-supported ICE agents - that this "leak" was a strategic (insidious) move? We've seen this behavior before on numerous occasions across social media that it should not surprise any of us. Or am I reaching...?

[note: his account (/u/Budget-Chicken-2425) has been suspended. I don't know if it happened before or after the leak. This is important to know too.]

Perhaps this is another calculated move to intimidate American citizens from exercising their Constitutional rights under the First Amendment?

Speech, Press, Assembly, Petition (and religion).

And if so... the very Constitution is under attack when these protected rights are reframed as homeland threats. Would you consider this a valid position?
by raincole | 2026-02-08 15:52:49+00:00
> HN homepage is still quite sane.

Those Show HN posts aren't the insane part. Insane part is like:

> Thank you, OpenClaw. Thank you, AGI—for me, it’s already here.

> If you haven't spent at least $1,000 on tokens today per human engineer, your software factory has room for improvement

> Code must not be reviewed by humans

> Following this hypothesis, what C did to assembler, what Java did to C, what Javascript/Python/Perl did to Java, now LLM agents are doing to all programming languages.

(All quoted from actual homepage posts today. Fun game: guess which quote is from which article)
by foldr | 2026-02-08 15:53:06+00:00
>In order to clarify the check: Epstein asked Noam to develop a linguistic challenge that Epstein wished to establish as a regular prize. Noam worked on it, and Epstein sent a check for US$20,000 as payment. Epstein’s office contacted me to arrange for the check to be sent to our home address.

This part honestly makes no sense. There is no 'Chomsky linguistic challenge'. I guess the claim is that Chomsky was paid as a consultant to develop the supposed challenge which was then to be administered by Epstein (who – guess what – did nothing of the sort). But it sounds an awful lot like an entirely spurious reason for sending someone $20k.
by grayhatter | 2026-02-08 15:53:07+00:00
> Does that make them less productive?

I could use AI to churn out hundreds of thousands of lines of code that doesn't compile. Or doesn't do anything useful, or is slower than what already exists. Does that mean I'm less productive?

Yes, obviously. If I'd written it by hand, it would work ( probably :D ).

I'm good with the machine milled lumber for the framing in my walls, and the IKEA side chair in my office. But I want a carpenter or woodworker to make my desk because I want to enjoy the things I interact with the most. And don't want to have to wonder if the particle board desk will break under the weight of my many monitors while I'm out of the house.

I'm hopeful that it won't take my industry too long to become inoculated to the FUD you're spreading about how soon all engineers will lose their job to vibe coders. But perhaps I'm wrong, and everyone will choose the LACK over the table that last more than most of the year.

I haven't seen AI do anything impressive yet, but surely it's just another 6mo and 2B in capex+training right?
by stuartjohnson12 | 2026-02-08 15:53:32+00:00
...and I usually come to doubt my own intuitions that this is the case when people say things like this, but my experience is usually that the LLM is doing more heavy lifting than you realise.

> Distill - deterministic context deduplication for LLMs. No LLM calls, no embeddings, no probabilistic heuristics. Pure algorithms that clean your context in ~12ms.

I simply do not believe that this is human-generated framing. Maybe you think it said something similar before. But I don't believe that is the case. I am left trying to work out what you meant through the words of something that is trying to interpret your meaning for you.
by layer8 | 2026-02-08 15:54:17+00:00
You can’t reason about inference (or training) of LLMs on the semantic level. You can’t predict the output of an LLM for a specific input other than by running it. If you want the output to be different in a specific way, you can’t reason with precision that a particular modification of the input, or of the weights, will achieve the desired change in the output. Instead, it’s like a slot machine that you just have to try running again.

The fact that LLMs are based on a network of simple matrix multiplications doesn’t change that. That’s like saying that the human brain is based on simple physical field equations, and therefore its behavior is easy to understand.
by skydhash | 2026-02-08 15:54:46+00:00
> I think there will be a bifurcation between people who are finicky about 10 lines of code. And those finicky about high level product experiences.

No ones care about a random 10 lines of code. And the focus of AI hypers on LoC is disturbing. Either the code is correct and good (allows for change later down the line) or it isn't.

> We may weirdly be in a case where it's possible to single-shot a slack clone, but taking time to change the 2 small features we care about is time consuming and requires thoughtfulness.

You do remember how easy it is to do `git clone`?
by DarkFuture | 2026-02-08 15:54:52+00:00
I looked into buying my own IP space from that IP auction site, an IPv4 C-class costs around $10,000. What stopped me was finding out I also to register with RIPE and pay the LIR annual fee, costing hundred Euros per month or so, even if I wasn't yet ready to use the IP space (I wanted to setup a basic Anycast IP without Cloudflare with help of VPS host who said they can help and had multiple locations around world).
Show HN: mdnb, a 100% native macOS markdown editor
by nicoritschel | 2026-02-08 15:54:57+00:00
I historically have switched between Apple Notes and Obsidian.

I built mdnb as a hybrid of both— it's a fully native mac app that lets you edit markdown with the same interaction as Obsidian. I plan to keep it minimal & have no plans to add a plugin system like Obsidian. Instead will build a curated first class featureset into the editor, not unlike Zed editor.

It will always be free to use. Feedback is welcome!
by jordanscales | 2026-02-08 15:55:12+00:00
The inspired me to write down some scattered thoughts I have on this [0]. tl;dr I firmly believe we kicked the can down the road and now it's too late.

Things programmers forgot to do before AI started writing a bunch of software:

1. Learn how to review code

Some tools exist, some of them are even quite good! Large organizations have tried to build best practices to balance urgency with correctness, but programmers are still quite bad at this.

2. Compare program A vs program B

In a similar vein, we simply do not know how to measure one program vs another. Or a function against another. Or even one variableName vs another_variable_name.

"It depends" Depends on what? We never sorted this out.

3. Talk to other professions

We are not the first profession forced to coordinate with Automation as a coworker, and we certainly won't be the last. We're not even the first knowledge workers to do so.

How did other laborers deal with this? We don't know because we were busy making websites.

[0]: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:wh7bie3ld7bmg3cz76sbjkwj/po...
by dizhn | 2026-02-08 15:56:06+00:00
> they're finding building yet another feature with "just one more prompt" irresistible.

Totally my experience too. One last little thing to make it perfect or something that I decide would be "nice to have" ends up taking so much time in total. Luckily now I can access the same agent session on my phone mobile browser too so I can keep an eye on things even in bed. (Joke but not joke :D)
by angrydev | 2026-02-08 15:56:10+00:00
> “What’s the point of it all?” I thought, LLMs can generate decent-ish and correct-ish looking code while I have more time to do what? doomscroll?

You could look back throughout human history at the inventions that made labor more efficient and ask the same question. The time-savings could either result in more time to do even more work, or more time to keep projects on pace at a sane and sustainable rate. It's up to us to choose.
by hedora | 2026-02-08 15:57:01+00:00
What was his point? If he'd been more specific, his comment would be true:

"If you don't give a fuck about [extracting revenue from poor serfs], of course we can do net zero."

If we lived in a more just society, we'd mandate community net metering: This is the idea that (say) a city block can build a solar/wind farm anywhere within a few dozen miles of itself, and then have their bills proportionally reduced by the amount of power that farm produces.

It enables interesting economic models, like "the community takes out a 30 year mortgage to build + maintain the farm in exchange for an immediate halving of their electricity bills", or having trade schools offer free/cheap electrician programs that include apprenticeships building such farms. (See also: Habitat for Humanity.)
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-02-08 15:57:27+00:00
By the definition used by the current Netanyahu cabinet (to wit 'everyone who disagrees with this cabinet') , even the israeli left-ish news provider Haaretz practically counts as 'antisemitic'. Certainly Haaretz is much more critical than most people currently labelled as antisemitic.

I disagree with the political erosion of the term, and wish it could be reclaimed and reapplied only in its original ugly racistic meaning.
by jasode | 2026-02-08 15:58:11+00:00
>, and if a tool prevents you from thinking deeply, I don’t think it is a good tool. If you are a knowledge worker, your core competency is your ability to think,

I started "coding by hand" as kid with 8-bit computers (and spending hours manually typing thousands of lines of code listings from computer magazines) so this essay should resonate with me but it doesn't.

The relationship with LLM coding depends on what type of software you write and the novelty (difficulty) of the problems you're trying to solve with code. If you're working on interesting problems, the latest AI tools including the Claude Opus 4.6 etc will not stop you from thinking. Instead, it let's you think about writing other code that AI can't write.

The evolution of shifting the thinking looked like this:

- used gcc/clang to compile C/C++ ... which means it stops me from thinking about which exact machine registers to use in assembly language. Using gcc compiler also stops me from thinking about writing recursive parsers, etc to read .c files and turn them into syntax trees.

- used an existing db library like sqlite.c to stop me from thinking about hand-coding b-trees, syncing fwrites() to disk, etc

- even just using a pre-made operating system like Linux or Windows means it stops me from thinking on writing a boot strapper and process scheduling loop from scratch.

But having [o/s code]+[C compiler]+[db library] do all that work on my behalf still leaves undone work where I still must write thousands of lines of code by hand.

The world's appetite for new software to solve interesting problems is basically infinite and LLMs still don't change that. Yes, even with running 100+ agents and orchestrating them, or vibe-coding, etc, there will still be a gap of missing functionality that you will have to write by hand. The next versions of Opus 5/6/etc won't fix that. They'll get better, but there will always be gap of capabilities that humans have to still write code for.

If your idea of coding by hand is writing a simple TODO app, then it's possible that LLMs are a threat because it can easily regurgitate that. However, there's a lot of yet-to-be-written software that's a lot more complicated than keeping track of grocery items. If that's the future you envision, LLMs will be welcome part of your toolkit and raise the baseline of your capabilities just like Linux+gcc+sqlite. LLM's can then cause the opposite situation and inspire one to code by hand even more because it generated some tedious scaffolding which let you concentrate intensely on the difficult code that's unique to your problem.

The perspective above works best for developers who have agency and choose the types of software they want to write. On the other hand, if you're a corporate drone working through JIRA tickets where management is forcing AI tools on you, I can see how it can be a killjoy.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-02-08 15:58:29+00:00
I tend to feel this way (also 40-year coder).

It's because of the way that I use the tools, and I have the luxury of being a craftsman, as opposed to a "TSA agent."

But then, I don't get paid to do this stuff, anymore. In fact, I deliberately avoid putting myself into positions, where money changes hands for my craft. I know how fortunate I am, to be in this position, so I don't say it to aggravate folks that aren't.
by agentultra | 2026-02-08 15:58:55+00:00
I’ve heard this metaphor before and I don’t think it works well.

For one, a power tool like a bandsaw is a centaur technology. I, the human, am the top half of the centaur. The tool drives around doing what I tell it to do and helping me to do the task faster (or at all in some cases).

A GenAI tool is a reverse-centaur technology. The algorithm does almost all of the work. I’m the bottom half of the centaur helping the machine drive around and deliver the code to production faster.

So while I may choose to use hand tools in carpentry, I don’t feel bad using power tools. I don’t feel like the boss is hot to replace me with power tools. Or to lay off half my team because we have power tools now.

It’s a bit different.
by Recurecur | 2026-02-08 15:58:57+00:00
In my opinion, LLMs provide one piece of AGI. The only intelligence I’ve directly experienced is my own. I don’t consciously plan what I’m saying (or writing right now).

Instead, a subconscious process assembles the words to support my stream of consciousness. I think that LLMs are very similar, if not identical.

Stream of thought is accomplishing something superficially similar to consciousness, but without the ability to be innovative.

At any rate, until there’s an artificial human level stream of consciousness in the mix for each AI, I doubt we’ll see a group of AIs collaborating to produce a significantly improved new generation of AI hardware and software minus human involvement.

Once that does happen, the Singularity is at hand.