MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CamperBob2 | 2026-02-07 20:47:07+00:00
If I were in it, and somebody pulled out a camera, I'd make damned sure I wasn't in the photo. At a minimum I'd make my disapproval crystal-clear.

That's one of the things I don't get about this whole business. Epstein and Maxwell were constantly taking pictures with famous people, in many/most cases willingly, even after his first conviction. What did those people think was going on?
by djoldman | 2026-02-07 20:48:03+00:00
I am not "against" AI programming, although I confess I don't really know what that means... coders and business folk are gonna do whatever gets the job done and opinions by and large matter not a whit.

However:

> ..it can probably be used for AI programmers using temperature 0.0 as well, just one abstraction level higher.

Right, but... approximately zero users of AI for coding are setting temperature to 0 not to mention changing temperature at all. So this is a comparison to a world that doesn't really exist.

Additionally, C code compiles much much closer to the same assembly and microcode regardless of compiler as compared to temperature zero prompts across different AIs.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2026-02-07 20:48:09+00:00
It'll probably look like the code version of this, an image run through a LLM 101 times with the directive not to change anything: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kbj71z/i_tried_th... Despite being provided with explicit instructions, well...

People are still wrongly attributing a mind to something that is essentially mindless.
by pornel | 2026-02-07 20:48:38+00:00
A chef can cook a steak better than a robo-jet-toaster, even though neither of them has raised the cow.

It's not about having abstraction levels above or below (BTW, in 21st century CPUs, the machine code itself is an abstraction over much more complex CPU internals).

It's about writing a more correct, efficient, elegant, and maintainable code at whichever abstraction layer you choose.

AI still writes messier, sloppier, buggier, more redundant code than a good programmer can when they care about the craft of writing code.

The end result is worse to those who care about the quality of code.

We mourn, because the quality we paid so much attention to is becoming unimportant compared to the sheer quantity of throwaway code that can be AI-generated.

We're fine dining chefs losing to factory-produced junk food.
by pron | 2026-02-07 20:48:41+00:00
> Complaining about a language having features you don't want is silly.

It might be silly if you're working on your own. Software that delivers a lot of value is usually developed and evolved not only by team, but by a team with changing members and changing leadership over the project's lifetime. The features used will be the union of all features used over the years, and while it's easy for team leads to allow the use of more features than their predecessors, it's quite hard to reduce them.

Also, you may be forced to use language features you don't want if they're used by libraries whose functionality you do want.
by dasil003 | 2026-02-07 20:49:08+00:00
I don't feel threatened because no matter how tools, platforms and languages improved, no matter how much faster I could produce and distribute working applications, there has never been a shortage of higher level problems to solve.

Now if the only thing I was doing was writing code to a specification written by someone else, then I would be scared, but in my quarter century career that has never been the case. Even at my first job as a junior web developer before graduating college, there was always a conversation with stakeholders and I always had input on what was being built. I get that not every programmer had that experience, but to me that's always been the majority of the value that software developers bring, the code itself is just an implementation detail.

I can't say that I won't miss hand-crafting all the code, there certainly was something meditative about it, but I'm sure some of the original ENIAC programmers felt the same way about plugging in cables to make circuits. The world of tech moves fast, and nostalgia doesn't pay the bills.
by strange_quark | 2026-02-07 20:49:09+00:00
ChatGPT 3.5 was almost 40 months ago, not 24. GPT 4.5 was supposed to be 5 but was not noticeably better than 4o. GPT 5 was a flop. Remember the hype around Gemini 3? What happened to that? Go back and read the blog posts from November when Opus 4.5 came out; even the biggest boosters weren't hyping it up as much as they are now.

It's pretty obvious the change of pace is slowing down and there isn't a lot of evidence that shipping a better harness and post-training on using said harness is going to get us to the magical place where all SWE is automated that all these CEOs have promised.
by pzo | 2026-02-07 20:49:12+00:00
I didn't come in IT for money - back in the days it wasn't as well paid as today - nevertheless if this craft was very poorly paid I probably wouldn't choose this profession either. And I assume many people here wouldn't as well unless you are already semi-retired or debt free.

I mourn a little bit that in 20 years possibly 50% of software jobs will get axed or unless you are elite/celebrity dev salary will stagnate. I mourn that in the future upward mobility and moving up into upper middle class will be harder without trying to be entrepreneur.
by Barrin92 | 2026-02-07 20:49:14+00:00
>I don't want people to switch away from Windows; I want Microsoft to treat its premier operating system like it used to.[...] and Windows 12 is ultimately an agentic AI OS, I wouldn't be surprised if more people stick with a debloated Windows 11, just as others did with Windows 10

Is there any justification for the first part other than that the authors job at windowscentral.com depends on it? Because I'm not seeing it in the article which amounts to the digital version of Stockholm syndrome. If even the author is predicting that this is what the next windows will look like, why aren't you running for the hills
by IhateAI | 2026-02-07 20:49:34+00:00
Yeah, but humans still had to work to create those websites, it increased jobs, didn't replace them (this is happening). This will devalue all labor that has anything to do with i/o on computers, if not outright replace a lot of it. Who cares if it can't write perfect code, the owners of the software companies never cared about good code, they care about making money. They make plenty of money off slop, and they'll make even more if they don't have to have humans create the slop.

The job market will get flooded with the unemployed (it already is) with fewer jobs to replace the ones that were automated, those remaining jobs will get reduced to minimum wages whenever and wherever possible. 25% of new college grads cannot find employment. Soon young people will be so poor that you'll beg to fight in a war. Give it 5-10 years.

This isn't a hard future to game theory out, its not pretty if we maintain this fast track of progress in ML that minimally requires humans. Notice how the ruling class has increased the salaries for certain types of ML engineers, they know what's at stake. These businessmen make decisions based on expected value calculated from complex models, they aren't giving billion dollar pay packages to engineers because its trendy. We should use our own mental models to predict where this is going, and prevent it from happening however possible.

THE word ''Luddite'' continues to be applied with contempt to anyone with doubts about technology, especially the nuclear kind. Luddites today are no longer faced with human factory owners and vulnerable machines. As well-known President and unintentional Luddite D. D. Eisenhower prophesied when he left office, there is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO's, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed, although Ike didn't put it quite that way. We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on, even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool any of the people any of the time. If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come - you heard it here first - when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long. Meantime, as Americans, we can take comfort, however minimal and cold, from Lord Byron's mischievously improvised song, in which he, like other observers of the time, saw clear identification between the first Luddites and our own revolutionary origins. It begins:[0]

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/r...
by tlogan | 2026-02-07 20:49:47+00:00
There has to be some lag, and it is more about who controls Congress.

For example, the housing crisis and bubble were largely driven by legislation passed years earlier, including the 1999 repeal of Glass Steagall under Clinton. That was passed by a Republican controlled Congress, and the crisis eventually exploded under Bush. So I do not think either Clinton or Bush can be directly blamed for the housing crash. It is the repeal of the glass steagall act.

And was the dot com bubble crash in early 2000s caused by Clinton or by Bush? Or some legalization passed a long time ago? Or it just a business cycle?

More broadly, I would argue that presidents, and even legislators, have limited control over the actual health of the economy. Are we going to say Trump is responsible for the AI boom? And if this AI boom collapses into a massive bubble burst under the next administration, will that president be blamed instead?
by Kon5ole | 2026-02-07 20:50:41+00:00
>Even if that were accepted as fact (it isn't), tech complicity in fascism and genocide shouldn't ever be among such issues.

As I understand it, this place is about technology and curiosity, not fascism and genocide,

There are plenty of other places talking about fascism and genocide, this is not one of those places.

>There is, and there are many. But this isn't your sanctuary.

Since the story has been flagged I still feel it's my sanctuary. And I think it's right to flag it.

>Imagine seeing 9 of your 10 children get blown up with the aid of Microsoft and Google.

I would feel no rage, as I don't believe anyone, ever in the history of Google or Microsoft, intended to blow up any children, anywhere. Not once.

I want to discuss dotnet, dart, gmail, visual studio, android, and whatever else from those companies, without having to deal with what horrible people do with their technology.

I want to emphasize that the topics you mention are important too, just not here.
by ahepp | 2026-02-07 20:50:49+00:00
It's true, they don't "make 'em like they used to". They make them in new, more efficient ways which have contributed to improving global trends in metrics such as literacy, child mortality, life expectancy, extreme poverty, and food supply.

If you are arguing that standard of living today is lower than in the past, I think that is a very steep uphill battle to argue

If your worries are about ecology and sustainability I agree that is a concern we need to address more effectively than we have in the past. Technology will almost certainly be part of that solution via things like fusion energy. Success is not assured and we cannot just sit back and say "we live in the best of all possible worlds with a glorious manifest destiny", but I don't think that the future is particularly bleak compared to the past
by nomel | 2026-02-07 20:50:55+00:00
I tell my colleagues we're in the instantaneous peak of the AI developer relationship, especially for code monkeys. We're still valued, still paid really well, and our jobs will get easier and easier probably for the next 5-10 years! After that, maybe not so great for many of us, with the developers that use software as a means of their actual profession continuing to do just fine (hard math/science/optimization/business planning/project planners/etc).

I think it's going to be an amazing shift from those that know intricate details of software to enabling those that have the best ideas that can be implemented with software (a shift from tool makers to tool users).

I think many developers misunderstand the quality of software that people outside of software are willing to live with, if it does exactly what they want when they need it.
by webdevver | 2026-02-07 20:51:01+00:00
as a layperson, it seems the whole collider stuff has not been a very fruitful scientific direction so far (has there been any discovery made with the help of a collider that found its way into an industrial product?)

maybe we are trying to 'jump' the tech tree too much - perhaps the first step was to create a much smarter entity than ourselves, and then letting it have a look at the collider data.
by bayarearefugee | 2026-02-07 20:51:25+00:00
> will there be a day that AI will know what are "the right things to build" and have the "agency" (or illusion of) to do it better than an AI+human (assuming AI will get faster to the "build things right" phase, which is not there yet)

Of course, and if LLMs keep improving at current rates it will happen much faster than people think.

Arguably you don't need junior software engineers anymore. When you also don't need senior software engineers anymore it isn't that much of a jump to not needing project managers, managers in general or even software companies at all anymore.

Most people, in order to protect their own ego, will assume *their* job is safe until the job one rung down from them disappears and then the justified worrying will begin.

People on the "right things to build" track love to point out how bad people are at describing requirements, so assume their job as a subject matter expert and/or customer-facing liaison will be safe, but does it matter how bad people are at describing requirements if iteration is lightning fast with the human element removed?

Yes, maybe someone who needs software and who isn't historically some sort of software designer is going to have to prompt the LLM 250 times to reach what they really want, but that'll eventually still be faster than involving any humans in a single meeting or phone call. And a lot of people just won't really need software as we currently think about it at all, they'll just be passing one-off tasks to the AI.

The real question is what happens when the labor market for non-physical work completely implodes as AI eats it all. Based on current trends I'm going to predict in terms of economics and politics we handle it as poorly as possible leading to violent revolution and possible societal collapse, but I'd love to be wrong.
by etrvic | 2026-02-07 20:51:59+00:00
I feel like, for me, it’s that I am more familiar with writing in C and switching to C++ seems rather difficult. So, sure I am reimplementing features that already exist in anoter language, it just so happens in this case is C++. Why not use python if you want to avoid reimplementing the wheel as much as possible. And sure python is not suited for game development but I just wanted to make a point with it. I think in the end ising a language you are most familiar with results in the most amount of enjoyable coding.
by crazygringo | 2026-02-07 20:52:07+00:00
> Would you consider drudgery the in-depth thinking that's required to actually go and write that algorithm, think out all the data ownership relationships, name the variables, think the edge cases for the tests?

For 99% of the functions I've written in my life? Absolutely drudgery. They're barely algorithms. Just bog-standard data transformation. This is what I love having AI replace.

For the other 1% that actually requires original thought, truly clever optimization, and smart naming to make it literate? Yes, I'll still be doing that by hand, although I'll probably be getting the LLM to help scaffold all the unit tests and check for any subtle bugs or edge cases I may have missed.

The point is, LLMs let me spend more time at the higher level of abstraction that is more productive. It's not taking it away!
by charcircuit | 2026-02-07 20:52:23+00:00
>It's utility was never "six months away,"

6 months ago is when my coding became 100% done by AI. The utility already has been there for a while.

>I didn't have to be compelled to use it—I was eager to use it of my own volition as often as possible.

The difference is that you were a kid then with an open mind and now your world view has fixed into a certain way the world works and how things should be done.
by tzs | 2026-02-07 20:52:41+00:00
> Drivers in the UK must be able to read a number plate from 20 metres away, according to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA).

Unless I've botched the math and/or what the internet tells me about the size of the characters on a UK number plate is wrong this seems to be a bit overboard.

The internet is telling me that the characters are 79mm tall and 50mm wide (except for '1' and 'I') with a 14mm stroke.

My eyes right now are about 250mm from my monitor. Something that is 79mm tall and 20m away would have the same angular size as something 250mm away that is 79mm / 20m x 250mm = 0.9875mm tall.

If I set the size to 75% in Chrome that is the size of the numbers on this page in the timestamps and the submission points and comment counts. It is about 1/2 the size of the numbers in the text box that I'm writing this comment in.

I've just taken a photo of that and will include a link to it to show how small that is [1]. In that I'm holding a ruler next to the left side of the text. The "180" up where it says "180 points" is what you have to be able to read to pass the test. (If you can't see the photo because Imgur blocks your country just grab a ruler, hold it vertically 25cm in front of you, and the apparent size of the space between the mm marks is the size character you need to read).

I have no idea what road signs and markings are like in the UK, but in the US in ~50 years of driving I don't think I've ever needed to read anything anywhere near that small.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/NGuPdfF
by imiric | 2026-02-07 20:53:02+00:00
> But suddenly you're working in a completely newer level of abstraction where a lot of the manual work that used to be your main concern is suddenly automated away.

It's remarkable that people who think like this don't have the foresight to see that this technology is not a higher level of abstraction, but a replacement of human intellect. You may be working with it today, but whatever you're doing will eventually be done better by the same technology. This is just a transition period.

Assuming, of course, that the people producing these tools can actually deliver what they're selling, which is very much uncertain. It doesn't change their end goal, however. Nor the fact that working with this new "abstraction" is the most mind numbing activity a person can do.
by throwaway0123_5 | 2026-02-07 20:53:11+00:00
> you'll also end up with scores of people who "correctly" followed the signals right up until the signals went away.

I think this is where we're headed, very quickly, and I'm worried about it from a social stability perspective (as well as personal financial security of course). There's probably not a single white-collar job that I'd feel comfortable spending 4+ years training for right now (even assuming I don't have to pay or take out debt for the training). Many people are having skills they spent years building made worthless overnight, without an obvious or realistic pivot available.

Lots and lots of people who did or will do "all the right things," with no benefit earned from it. Even if hypothetically there is something new you can reskill into every five years, how is that sustainable? If you're young and without children, maybe it is possible. Certainly doesn't sound fun, and I say this as someone who joined tech in part because of how fast-paced it was.
by mystraline | 2026-02-07 20:53:33+00:00
Corporate LLMs also are going to be the absolute biggest rug-pull.

The billionaire companies responsible for this claim they can bed used for intellectual and artistic labor. Sure, they're the biggest piracy and plagariam engines.

Once people start losing the abilities of what LLMs were trained on, will be the next phase. And thats to ratchet up prices to replace what they would have paid to humans.

It will be the biggest wealth transfer we will have ever seen.

This whole socio-econic equasion would be different if we all did actually gain. Raising tides raise all ships, but sinking ships get gobbled faster and faster.
by notnullorvoid | 2026-02-07 20:53:41+00:00
> They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months.

You can use AI to write all your code, but if you want to be a programmer and can't see that the code is pretty mid then you should work on improving your own programming skills.

People have been saying the 6 month thing for years now, and while I do see it improving in breadth, quality/depth still appears to be plateauing.

It's okay if you don't want to be a programmer though, you can be a manager and let AI do an okay job at being your programmer. You better be driven to be a good at manager though. If you're not... then AI can do an okay job of replacing you there too.
by havaloc | 2026-02-07 20:53:45+00:00
I work in academia and I've gotten most of my people to switch to Macs and no, Linux is not an option here.

I have about eight Windows PCs against about sixty MacBook Airs and guess which platform causes me the most work? 1:20 issue ratio. Even simple things like SMB in Windows 11 are hopelessly broken.
by 9rx | 2026-02-07 20:53:53+00:00
> 1. avoids confusion, no matter how unlikely it is in a context like HN

Who would be confused by "Go", but not "Rust" and "Zig", which are also common English words not usually associated with programming languages?

> 2. search engine "findability".

What kind of search engine are you using in 2026 that isn't capable of understanding context?

And if you are still using some weird antique thing like a steampunk character, "C" is going to be the least findable anyway, yet it didn't receive the same treatment.
Show HN: PalettePoint – AI color palette generator from text or images
by latentio | 2026-02-07 20:54:21+00:00
Hey HN,
I built PalettePoint (https://palettepoint.com) because picking colors for projects was always the part I dreaded most. I'm not a designer, and every time I'd start a new project I'd spend way too long on color palette websites refreshing until something looked okay.
So I built a tool where you just describe what you want, "warm coffee shop vibes" or "clean SaaS dashboard", and it generates a proper palette with color theory behind it. You can also upload an image and it'll extract a palette from that or get inspired by it.
What it does:
Text-to-palette: describe a mood/theme and get 3-7 colors
Image-to-palette: upload a photo and extract its colors or get inspired by it.
10 style modes (analogous, triadic, complementary, pastel, etc.)
Pin base colors and generate around them
Gallery with 100K+ palettes
Free tools: contrast checker, color mixer, gradient generator, color converter
Export to CSS, SCSS, Tailwind, JSON, (more to come)
Palette visualiser on logos, layouts etc .. (more to come)

Would love feedback, especially on the palette quality and if the styles actually feel distinct from each other.