MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-03-07 03:25:40+00:00
>It's incredibly frustrating arguing these same points, over and over,

quite frankly there seems to be something incredibly frustrating in your life going on, but I'm not sure that the underlying cause of whatever is weighing on your mind at the moment is that I asked "how do you know that what you are feeling is actually true, in comparison to what studies show should be true?" (rephrased, as not reasonable to quote whole post)

>From our perspective, the gains are so obvious that it really does feel like you must just be doing something fundamentally wrong not to see the same wins.

From my perspective, when I think i am experiencing something that data from multiple sources tell me is not what is actually happening I try to figure out how I can prove what I am experiencing, I reflect upon myself, have I somehow deluded myself? No? Then how do I prove it when analysis of many similar situations to my own show a different result?

You seem to think what I mean is people saying "Claude didn't help me, it wasn't worth it", no, just to clarify although I thought it was really clear, I am talking about numerous studies always being posted on HN so I'm sure you must have seen them where productivity gains from coding agents do not seem to actually show up in the work of those who use it. Studies conducted by third parties observing the work, not claims made by people performing the work.

I'm not going to go through the rest of your post, I get the urge to be insulting, especially as a stress release if you have a particularly bad time recently. But frankly, statistically speaking, my life is almost certainly significantly worse than yours, and for that reason, but not that reason alone, I will also quite confidently state without hardly any knowledge of you specifically but just my knowledge of my life and comparison of having met people throughout it, that my list dwarfs yours.
by 8cvor6j844qw_d6 | 2026-03-07 03:26:41+00:00
True. archive.org complies with removal requests from site owners [1]. The problem is that the content most worth preserving is exactly the content people try hardest to get taken down. If archive.is goes down, and between the FBI subpoena and the Wikipedia ban the pressure is real, archive.org becomes the de facto monopoly in web archival. A monopoly that honors takedown requests is not a reliable record of history.

[1]: https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-request-to-remove-som...
by hackyhacky | 2026-03-07 03:27:00+00:00
> Like we have prehistoric skeletons with obvious signs of traumatic injury inflicted by tools.

No one is arguing that modern technology is the sole or even principal cause of military deaths. The argument is simply that technology has greatly facilitated the ease and scale.

Imagine a world without nuclear weapons, automatic weapons, rockets, and explosives (other than gunpowder). There would still be wars, certainly, but they would be a lot less destructive.
by IBCNU | 2026-03-07 03:27:57+00:00
It's cool to rediscover Applescript for me (I'm late 40's) but it's a funny thing where I can like smell the NeXT in it almost nostalgically but it's quite handy in this new era of hijacking mac mini's (OpenClaw obviously is one way to do it, but why not just straight to the core).

I personally think coders get better with age, like lounge singers.
by sidewndr46 | 2026-03-07 03:28:47+00:00
We're in this really weird world where have this obviously useless to the public agency. It does in fact serve a purpose to the government. But it's useless to the public, at least in the form of officers deployed to airports.

Yet we still wind up with these stories where some TSA employee says something and for some reason people just roll with it. I am just left in awe that this is possible. Especially in the case of an individual with a medical implant. Almost certainly a medical professional told them to never do this.

Why would someone take a such an action based off a TSA employee's statement? I will not even use the word "risk" because the outcome here is known in advance. Just for perspective, I had a TSA officer proudly explain to me without any conversation (I did not want to speak to him) on my part that his qualifications for working there were "could not get into any other federal job, so they sent me here!"
by eventmapx | 2026-03-07 03:28:49+00:00
I’m a 13 year lurker, first time commenter (Not sure why this post compelled me). I don’t think this is a genuine take. I don’t see how a 60 year old has any kind of joy for actual software creation suddenly from llms. It might be a joy in seeing software automatically be created but it’s definitely not doing the work. (I may be biased, I left the field 5 years ago) I doubt he’s spending any time fixing the software to make it near usable for anyone besides himself and the semi-working state the llm gave him. Meaning he’s going to have 10 or more half-finished projects again.
by dragonwriter | 2026-03-07 03:29:29+00:00
> Your first 3-4 arguments I just read as trying to weasel out from under the GPL.

I haven't talked about any license, or given any though to any particular license in any of this; I don't know where you are reading anything about the GPL specifically into it.

None of this has anything to do with the GPL, except that the GPL only is even necessary where there is something to license because of a prohibition on copyright law.

> nd btw: that a "compilation copyright" would apply to training data. Great. That only means, of course, that if they are publish their training data (like they agreed to when using GPL code to base their models on), people can't republish the exact same collection under different conditions (BUT they can under the same conditions).

No, that's not what it means, and I don't know where you got the "other terms" or the dependency on publication from; neither is from copyright law.

> But the models were created by violating ToS of webservers!

And, so what?

To the extent those terms are binding (more likely the case for sites where there is affirmative assent to the conditions, like ones that are gated on accounts with a signup process that requires agreeing to the ToS, e.g., “clickwrap”), there are remedies. For those where the conditions are not legally binding (more like the case where the terms are linked but there is no access gating, clear notice, or affirmative assent), well, they aren't binding.

> Btw: what model training is doing, obviously, is distilling from the work, from the brain, of humans, against the will of those humans, and without paying for it. So in any reasonable inteUhrpretation, that's also a ToS violation.

Uh, what? We are just creating imaginary new categories of intellectual property and imaginary terms of service and imaginary bases for those terms to be enforceable now?
by skeledrew | 2026-03-07 03:31:00+00:00
I'm squarely into #1, but it usually requires #2 (at a high level) and has #3 as a side effect. But there's also #0 which kicks it all off: the triggering problem/question.

Like just yesterday I started to notice the increasing pressure of an increasingly hard-to-navigate number of Claude chats. So I went searching for something to organize them. I did find an extension, but it's for Chrome, and I'm a Firefox person, so I had Claude look at it with the initial idea of porting to Firefox. Then in the analysis, Claude mentioned creating an extension from scratch, and that's what I went for.

I've never really used JavaScript, let alone created a Firefox extension before, but in a few minutes I was iterating on one, figuring out how I wanted it to work with Claude, and now I have a very nice and featureful chats organizer. And I haven't even peeked at the code. I also now have a firm idea of this general spec of how I want arbitrary list-organizing UI to look+behave going forward.
by rramadass | 2026-03-07 03:31:22+00:00
“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”

― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
by HackerNewt-doms | 2026-03-07 03:31:40+00:00
In Germany, there was a trend of setting up public bookcases in town squares where passers-by could drop off or take books. But as things go, after a while, they slowly started to go out of fashion. Since then, kebab shops and barbershops have become a more common sight in the cityscape (Stadtbild).
by olieidel | 2026-03-07 03:31:51+00:00
A lot of slightly misleading information here.

- What you're talking about is working as a freelancer (Freiberufler), which is a subset of a sole proprietor (Einzelunternehmen); these are different business types than a GmbH, and the article is about setting up a GmbH.

- Only setting up a GmbH if you want to "invest money" is overly simplistic. People might choose a GmbH due to limited liability, a more solid shareholder structure, etc. Slightly more generalized, you do have a point that of course a sole proprietorship might be a much better and simpler choice for one-person "companies" who mainly offer software freelancing services.

- Not setting up a separate bank account for your business, GmbH or otherwise, is strongly advised against. Not only by literally 100% of tax advisors, but also by the tax office themselves.
by johncolanduoni | 2026-03-07 03:32:42+00:00
The law can be bad and a specific legal argument against it can be wrong at the same time. Would you logically accept (as opposed to mere political convenience) every potential argument whose conclusion is that this law is invalid? If not, does that mean there is something “wrong with you”?

On the object level: giving medical advice is a form of (literal) speech. If you want to practice medicine and give medical advice as part of that practice, there are tons of constraints on what you can say to patients. The argument you’re laying out here is clearly too general.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-03-07 03:33:35+00:00
You're paid by a company to create software, so they can use it to drive business value and make a profit. You did so effortlessly. But it didn't make you feel personally fulfilled. So you're going to go back and re-do it, so you feel better?

How do you think your company's CEO is going to feel when you tell them you could be finishing the software much faster, but you'd rather not, because it feels better to do it by hand?
by toomanyrichies | 2026-03-07 03:34:01+00:00
The surface area of the Earth is roughly 510 million square kilometers. Of which you occupy a, let's say, small portion. You also seem to be ignoring every data point in between 100 years ago and today.

So out of 365 days per year * 100 years * 510 million square kilometers, you're basing your beliefs on... 2 data points? 100 years ago, and today? Really?
by himata4113 | 2026-03-07 03:34:05+00:00
There's not, but it's also a very very old technology - definitely not 'modern' linux.

It has a lot of problems especially with protocol standartization and permissions. You can tell something and you might get something back or you might listen for something and get garbage instead.

The maker of hyprland has shipped an alternative though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46278857
by avazhi | 2026-03-07 03:35:42+00:00
Why is this dude acting like emojis were and are some kind of indispensable communicative tool?

They are no less today than they were then something fit for kids and unserious conversations, which is why they only ever make the news when a head of state or CEO uses one when he shouldn’t have and, revealing a lack of seriousness or professionalism vis a vis whatever he’s referring to. Our lives would be no worse if they weren’t on the iPhone today.
by boppo1 | 2026-03-07 03:37:44+00:00
> think the folks burning thousands of dollars of credits are unable to describe what they want.

Basically, yes. I bought 'business tier' and I know about webdev but I'm somewhere between intern and junior, so I do a lot of discussing. One session is "I want [functionality and constraints], ask me relevant major design questions" then implementation, then me investigating and asking for fixes.
by lemoncucumber | 2026-03-07 03:38:49+00:00
It’s great that they identified this (incredibly common) pain point and introduced a way to solve it, but I can’t help being disappointed.

Reading the examples I found myself thinking, “that looks like a really useful pattern, I should bookmark this so I can adopt it whenever I write code like that.”

The fact that I’m considering bookmarking a blog post about complex boilerplate that I would want to use 100% of the times when it’s applicable is a huge red flag and is exactly why people complain about Go.

It feels like you’re constantly fighting the language: having to add error handling boilerplate everywhere and having to pass contexts everywhere (more boilerplate). This is the intersection of those two annoyances so it feels especially annoying (particularly given the nuances/footguns the author describes).

They say the point is that Go forces you to handle errors but 99% of the time that means just returning the error after possibly wrapping it. After a decade of writing Go I still don’t have a good rule of thumb for when I should wrap an error with more info or return it as-is.

I hope someday they make another attempt at a Go 2.0.
by sjtgraham | 2026-03-07 03:39:08+00:00
> The "exhaustion" isn't a technical crisis. It's a landlord problem.

> These aren't niche services. They are the backbone of how major VPN and proxy providers operate.

> This isn't datacenter IP space being labeled as residential — it's actual ISP networks being leveraged as proxy pipes

The "this isn't X, it's Y" construction is a bright red tell for AI slop. Posting AI slop is just bad manners.
by wmeredith | 2026-03-07 03:39:24+00:00
Right here: https://codemanship.wordpress.com/2025/10/30/the-ai-ready-so...

This series of articles is gold.

Unsurprisingly, writing good software with AI follows the same principles as writing it without AI. Keep scopes small. Ship, refactor, optimize, and write tests as you go.
by ssl-3 | 2026-03-07 03:39:54+00:00
As a follow-up:

Yeah, Best Buy is right out. So are most local camera shops (if you can even find one where you're going), since many won't stock a $3k lens.

But there are camera shops in the world that will deliver things very fast -- for a price.

Might there be insurance available that softens that kind of blow to an adequate level? Maybe not erasing your loss, but making it able to be absorbed and still get some work done in 16-24 hours or something?
by sneak | 2026-03-07 03:40:11+00:00
> Kula uses Argon2id for password hashing. If you enable authentication, it is highly recommended to tune the Argon2 parameters (time, memory, threads) in config.yaml based on your hardware capabilities to increase resistance against cracking.

There is no reason to do this. Set them to sane defaults and set a minimum password length of 12 or 14 chars and stop trying to solve the wrong problem.
by samiv | 2026-03-07 03:41:13+00:00
This is just completely inaccurate. There's the same amout of information available as before. It's not like LLMs provide you with information that isn't available anywhere else.

But I agree that it can serve as a tool for a person who it's interested in learning but I bet you that for every such person there's 10x as many who are happy to outsource all their thinking to the machine.

We already have reports from basically every school in the world struggling with this exact problem. Students are just copy pasting LLMs and not really learning.
by XorNot | 2026-03-07 03:41:15+00:00
The number of casualties from the American civil war was estimated at 700,000 soldiers from both sides.

The death toll from Hiroshima and Nagasaki is estimated at about 200,000.

Nuclear weapons have killed far fewer people then any other type in history, whereas the musket did some work.

And you know, a bunch of Romans with the pinnacle of technology - the sharp thing on a long stick - in the Battle of Carthage collectively had about 100,000 casualties and also demolished a city. And that was one of many battles in many wars.

The masses of man and ground into the masses of man in conflict, at scale, at every turn that we've had organized society. We live in a time where casualty scales are actually shockingly low in conflict.
by mech422 | 2026-03-07 03:42:08+00:00
If offshoring started before your time, that might be coloring your perception.

I had already been working in tech for decades when the offshoring craze started. It was remarkably similar to the current 'ai craze'. Loads of jobs lost, predictions it was the end of (on-shore) programming, long job searches (and even longer ones for recent grads, etc. All in the name of 'cost reduction'. Thing is, in a couple of years when the savings didn't materialize/live up to expectations, companies started hiring on-shore again (and even paid better!). Now, offshoring is just one more tool. It still exists, it's still used - but it didn't destroy domestic programming market.

Personally, I think AI will follow the same trajectory. Its gonna be rough, but then it won't be the 'magic bullet' management wants, and they'll start hiring again. AI (just like offshoring) will still be there, still be used - it will just be a tool rather then a complete replacement.
by rramadass | 2026-03-07 03:42:10+00:00
"It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones.

"There are things in life that we need to always have plenty of supplies, even if we will only use a small portion.

"If, for example, we consider books as medicine, we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few: when you want to feel better, then you go to the 'medicine closet' and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment. That's why you should always have a nutrition choice!

"Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books, that is, they consider them a consumer product, a good. Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity."

-- Umberto Eco
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-03-07 03:42:11+00:00
The other week I used Copilot to write a program that scans all our Amazon accounts and regions, collects services and versions, and finds the ones going EOL within a year. The data on EOL dates is scraped from several sources and kept in JSON. There's about 16 different AWS API calls used. It generates reports in markdown, json, and csv, so humans can read the markdown (flags major things, explains stuff), and the csv can be used to triage, prioritize, track work over time. The result is deduplicated, sorted, consolidated (similar entries), and classified. I can automatically send reports to teams based on a regex of names or tags. This is more data than I get from AWS Health Dashboard, and can put it into any format I want, across any number of accounts/regions.

Afaik there are no open source projects that do this. AWS has a behemoth of a distributed system you can deploy in order to do something similar. But I made a Python script that does it in an afternoon with a couple of prompts.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-03-07 03:43:50+00:00
I mean obviously things will always be a little bit behind that one reads about, so this is one of the claims I see sometimes about these studies is they are out of date, and if working with the new models they would find that wasn't the case. but then that is one of the continuing claims one also sees about LLMS, that the newest model fixes whatever issue one is complaining about. And then the claim gets reiterated.

The thing is when I use an AI I sort of feel these gains, but not any greatness, it's like wow it would have taken me days to write all this reasonable albeit sort of mediocre code. I mean that is definitely a productivity gain. Because a lot of times you need to write just mediocre code. But there are parts where I would not have written it like that. So if I go through fixing all these parts, how much of a gain did I actually get?

As most posters on HN I am a conceited jerk, so I can claim that I have worked with lots of mediocre programmers (while ignoring the points where I was mediocre by thinking oh that didn't count I followed the documentation and how it was suggested to use the API and that was a stupid thing to do) and I certainly didn't fix everything that they did, because there just wasn't enough hours in the day.

And they did build stuff that worked, much of the time, so now I got an automated version of that. sweet. But how do I quantify the productivity? Since there are claims put forth with statistical backing that the productivity is illusory.

This is just one of those things that tend to affect me badly, I think X is happening, study shows X does not happen. Am I drinking too much Kool-Aid here or is X really happening!!? How to prove it!!? It is the kind of theoretical, logical problem seemingly designed to drive me out of my gourd.
by kccqzy | 2026-03-07 03:44:21+00:00
When it comes to writing code, I can almost tell before writing code that whether this particular piece of code will be intellectually stimulating to me. If so, I write it myself without thinking about whether Claude might have done it faster. If not, I let Claude write it. Currently I'd estimate maybe 70% of the code falls in the first category, and the remaining 30% is something I would've used a lot of my own willpower to get started anyways.

Also, when I write code myself, I still ask Claude to review it. It's faster than asking a human colleague to review it, so you can have Claude review often. Just today after a five-minute review Claude said a piece of code I wrote had four bugs, three of which were hallucinations and one was a real bug. I honestly do think it would have taken me a bit more than five minutes to find that one real bug.
by therealdrag0 | 2026-03-07 03:44:33+00:00
No offense but you sound more like a “principle coder”, not a principle engineer. At least in many domains and orgs, Most principal engineers are already spending most their time not coding. But -engineering- still take sip much or most of their time.

I felt what you describe feeling. But it lasted like a week in December. Otherwise there’s still tons of stuff to build and my teams need me to design the systems and review their designs. And their prompt machine is not replacing my good sense. There’s plenty of engineering to do, even if the coding writes itself.
by chihuahua | 2026-03-07 03:45:43+00:00
Interesting perspective. One could argue that nuclear weapons are among the less harmful things invented, since they killed fewer people than knives, clubs, spears, guns, cars, cigarettes, alcohol, asbestos, coal power plants, and probably a lot of other things. Plus they probably prevent a 3rd world war with killing on the same scale as WW1 and WW2, tens of millions each.