MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rendall | 2026-03-07 07:09:22+00:00
I know that your post has lots of comments, but I'd like to weigh in kindly too.

> I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued.

Listen to the comments that say that experience is more valuable than ever.

> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.

No they cannot. You and an LLM can build something together far more powerful and sophisticated than you every could have dreamt, and you can do it because of your decades of experience. A newbie cannot recognize the patterns of a project gone bad without that experience.

> I feel depressed and very unmotivated and expect to retire soon.

Welcome to the industry. :) It happens. Why not take a break? Work on a side project, something you love to do.

> My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM.

Once upon a time painters and illustrators were not "artists", but archivists and documenters. They were hired to archive what something looked like, and they were largely evaluated on that metric alone. When photography took that role, painters and illustrators had to re-evaluate their social role, and they became artists and interpreters. Impressionism, surrealism, conceptualism are examples of art movements that, in my interpretation, were still attempting to grapple with that shift decades, nearly a century later.

Today, we SWE are grappling with a very similar shift. People using LLMs to create software are not poor coders any more (or less) than photographers were poor painters. Painters and illustrators became very valuable after the invention of photography, arguably more valuable socially than before.
by satvikpendem | 2026-03-07 07:10:42+00:00
Maybe it used to but with companies like Disney lengthening copyright times way beyond the original intention, or corporations patenting absurd things, it seems to be more of a way to entrench power than any sort of democratization. I'm glad generative AI seem to be bypassing all this and actually democratizing returns on the creative process, by flagrantly violating the concept of IP.
by abustamam | 2026-03-07 07:11:36+00:00
I think this is one of the moments where the adage "it's the thought that counts" makes sense! If you're just throwing a prompt at a generator and send it to your friend as a birthday gift then that's a bit tacky. I once got a hand drawn picture in a card from one of my best friends. It was terrible! But I knew how much effort he put into it.

If I found out that he just used AI to make the picture, then I'd probably ask him what his workflow was.

I'm not against using AI to generate images and stuff! I actually have been playing with image generation (Nano banana and also comfy ui). I like making silly pictures for friends and family as e-cards (or whatever they're called now). If it's not a close friend, then I'll exchange prompts with nano banana and generate a few dozen images and then pipe it into veo to make an animated e-card. Maybe takes 10-20 mins including image generation time.

For closer friends I'd spin up comfy ui, spend some time looking for workflows or loras, probably generate a few dozen images as well, and pipe the one I like into Wan video.

This process can take me about an hour, which includes generation time. But I tell my friends they're ai generated, not that I need to because they all I know I can't draw. They don't mind, even if they don't necessarily know how much effort I put into their picture. To their eyes, maybe I just used nano banana. But no ones ever accused me of being lazy with them. It's all in good fun anyways.
by lovelearning | 2026-03-07 07:12:15+00:00
The change is indeed painful to many of us, including me. I, too, am a software engineer. LLMs and vibe coding create some insecurity in my mind as well.

However, our personal emotions need not turn into disparaging others' use of the same skills for their satisfaction / welfare / security.

Additionally, our personal emotions need not color the objective analysis of a social phenomenon.

Those two principles are the rationales behind my reply.
by qsera | 2026-03-07 07:12:45+00:00
>100 is my answer

We both know that it is not true. Because by this logic, you wouldn't fire a weapon at someone who is about to stab your wife or child. Because there is a small chance that they will die of a heart attack before they can do it. So it is some value that is < 100%, but apparently that is not good enough for you.
Show HN: ImmutableBase – Strict immutable data objects for PHP
by bill402099 | 2026-03-07 07:13:40+00:00
Hi HN, I built this because PHP's `readonly` keyword isn't enough. It prevents reassignment but doesn't enforce type-safe construction, nested object validation, or consistent null handling across your data layer.

ImmutableBase takes a different approach: you extend one of three base classes (DTO, VO, or SVO — each with different strictness guarantees) and all validation happens at construction time. Your objects are either valid or they don't exist.

A few things that might be interesting to this crowd:
- Behavioral attributes (`#[Strict]`, `#[Lax]`, `#[SkipOnNull]`, `#[KeepOnNull]`) let you control null/missing value handling per property rather than per class
- SVO (Single Value Object) supports type narrowing with automatic validation chaining — think of it as a value object that enforces its own invariants through the type hierarchy
- CLI tools: `ib-cacher` for pre-warming validation cache, `ib-writer` for auto-generating Markdown docs of your entire object hierarchy
- No magic methods, no naming conventions — everything is explicit and IDE-visible

Requires PHP 8.4+. I'm the sole author and maintainer. Used in production at enterprise scale in Taiwan. Happy to discuss any design decisions — there are some deliberately controversial ones in there.

Feedback welcome.
by maltelau | 2026-03-07 07:14:03+00:00
And every time the issue is side-stepped by chatbot proponents.

Accuracy and reliability are necessary to know real productivity. If you have produced code that doesn't work right, you haven't "produced" anything (except in the economic sense of managing to get someone to pay for it).

For example, if you produce 5x more code at 5% reliability, the net result is a -75% change in productivity (ignoring the overhead costs of detecting said reliability).
by heavyset_go | 2026-03-07 07:14:40+00:00
IMO the issue isn't discovery and research, it's development. Unless companies foresee a good return for buying/licensing/etc rights to treatments, discovered drugs with potential just sit there.

What sucks is when drugs are deliberately not brought to market, but kept in portfolios, because it might impact sales of other existing cashcows. For example, Gilead has a history of staggering the release of new drugs only once their patents expire for similar drugs they already have on the market.
by nprateem | 2026-03-07 07:14:54+00:00
In the last month I've done 4 months of work. My output is what a team of 4 would have produced pre-AI (5 with scrum master).

Just like you can't develop musical taste without writing and listening to a lot of music, you can't teach your gut how to architect good code without putting in the effort.

Want to learn how to 10x your coding? Read design patterns, read and write a lot of code by hand, review PRs, hit stumbling blocks and learn.

I noticed the other day how I review AI code in literally seconds. You just develop a knack for filtering out the noise and zooming in on the complex parts.

There are no shortcuts to developing skill and taste.
by dogemaster2025 | 2026-03-07 07:14:56+00:00
Actually Kansas is doing the opposite of East Germany.

East Germany introduced the Transsexuellengesetz in 1980, which allowed people to change their first name or gender, as long as they provided, among other things, two psychiatric evaluations to ensure the condition was permanent, and not some decision driven by some temporary influence or fashion, but a full diagnosis of transsexualismus.
by Implicated | 2026-03-07 07:15:03+00:00
> Typically the uncountable version is used with a measure of quantity, while the countable version denotes different kinds (flours - different types of flour; peoples - different groups of people).

This was very helpful, thank you! (I had just gotten off the phone with Claude learning about countable and uncountable nouns but those additional details you provided should prove quite valuable)
by ascorbic | 2026-03-07 07:15:24+00:00
As I mentioned, images are the hardest to do because beyond the core icons, the available graphics vary massively in size. Displaying them at "actual size" makes them far too small to be usable on a modern screen. I think you're also probably misremembering the scale of the cursor. It's not perfect, but it's not meant to be 16x16. Take a look at https://hcsimulator.com/

The approach I took is the best I could manage without hand-modifying every image. You're right that some of them are not as good as they should be. The ones that I did hand-make (the background, as you noticed, and the window chrome) are the ones that are pixel-perfect.

The fonts took a lot of work to control the anti-aliasing. You'll see they vary quite a bit between monitors, OSs and browsers. Generally they look best in Firefox on a Mac retina display, because that's what I created them in.
by dzhiurgis | 2026-03-07 07:15:26+00:00
That's why Salesforce is so well positioned here. Entire data, client interactions (crm) and admin team (slack) is already mostly there.

For developer like me - Slack bot already proven useful digging out info. Slack also supports kanban so probably can replace jira/asana/etc for documenting system. In Salesforce "vibes" already can tell a lot of stuff about your Salesforce implementation. Connect it all up and you got pretty useful package. Sadly Salesforce is moving too slow here.

For group chats chatgpt has that, but not the same. I think the closest is Airtable where you can collab on data.
by abustamam | 2026-03-07 07:16:53+00:00
I read that comment as the commenter trying to decipher the meaning of the post, and saying what meaning would be interesting.

I think it's interesting that there's a few camps of commenter in this discussion who think this post is Ai generated and refuse to engage with the content. And there's others who are enjoying it for what it is. A silly blog post.
by nh2 | 2026-03-07 07:17:05+00:00
Haskell is the king of cancellation. Using asynchronous exceptions, you can cancel anything, anytime, with user
-defined exception types so you know what the cancellation reason is.

Example:

maybeVal <— timeout 1000000 myFunction

Some people think that async exceptions are a pain because you nerd to be prepared that your code can be interrupted any time, but I think it's absolutely worth it because in all the other languages I encounter progress bars that keep running when I click the cancel button, or CLI programs that don't react to CTRL+C.

In Haskell, cancellability is the default and carries no syntax overhead.

This is one of the reasons why I think Haskell is currently the best language for writing IO programs.
by ggm | 2026-03-07 07:19:54+00:00
In times past, Oz dislike of Kiwi property acquisition along the Gold Coast was possibly more pointed than the expected anti Japanese and anti Chinese racism. It doesn't do us any credit how quickly we fall back on these petty differences.

I do feel very sorry for people struggling in the NZ economy and I can see why making the jump works for them, but it's got strong qualities of "you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone" -yes, Australia is a bigger more resilient economy overall by comparison but things can go pear shaped here fast too.

I like NZ. I have family there. Some have made the jump back over here, some remain. I can believe I'd be happy there, and in that totally perverse outcome the Kiwi misfortune might mean more Australians my age moved over there, if inflation/deflation works out the right (wrong?) way. It's not likely right now, cost of living in NZ is a lot higher.
by tonyedgecombe | 2026-03-07 07:19:59+00:00
He's probably getting a buzz from the novelty of it, just like that buzz you get when you buy a new car. It wears off though and it isn't long before you are back in the showroom again, looking at new models.

I'm also in my sixties and retired and decided not to use these tools. I'm a year into my current project and I am enjoying the struggle. I've learnt a lot about the domain and the language I'm using. There is satisfaction coming from the fact that I do all of the work.

It's not that these tools aren't very good. They have come a long way in the last year and are impressive. It's just that I don't have any of the problems that they solve. I don't need to be more productive. I don't need to get features or fixes out quicker. I can spend the time to learn new things.
by belZaah | 2026-03-07 07:20:50+00:00
That’s a broken analogy. An intern and a llm have completely different failure modes. An intern has some understanding of their limits and the llm just doesn’t. The thing, that looks remarkably human, will make mistakes in ways no human would. That’s where the danger lies: we see the human-like thing be better at things difficult for humans and assume them to be better across the board. That is not the case.
by lovelearning | 2026-03-07 07:20:52+00:00
It's _relatively_ democratic when compared to these counterfactual gatekeeping scenarios:

- What if these centralized providers had restricted their LLMs to a small set of corporations / nations / qualified individuals?

- What if Google that invented the core transformer architecture had kept the research paper to themselves instead of openly publishing it?

- What if the universities / corporations, who had worked on concepts like the attention mechanism so essential for Google's paper, had instead gatekept it to themselves?

- What if the base models, recipes, datasets, and frameworks for training our own LLMs had never been open-sourced and published by Meta/Alibaba/DeepSeek/Mistral/many more?
by jrflowers | 2026-03-07 07:20:56+00:00
I like that the author does not mince words about how this union of 2 million people must be destroyed and is ontologically evil and has never targeted California’s tech industry and has only ever lost ballot measures and they did so on purpose because the SEIU is largely responsible for a ballot measure, in California, that passed, that allowed Uber and Lyft etc. drivers to unionize, who are employees of tech companies.

If you simply ignore public well-documented contrary evidence he has a good point. I’m trying to picture the research/writing/editing process here
by readitalready | 2026-03-07 07:21:37+00:00
Indeed. We all know, just based on his proclamation of support for terrorizing the Iranian people the other day, that the US is perfectly willing to target and kill entire schools full of children.

Killing 150+ elementary school girls was no accident. Do not let them get away with claiming it was an "error". They purposely targeted an elementary school filled with little girls to kill them.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2026-03-07 07:22:11+00:00
> If you wrote a new Python program today that needed to make HTTP requests, would you rely on the stdlib, or would you pull in a dep?

For a short script, the standard "urllib.request" module [0] works pretty well, and is usually my first choice since it's always installed. For a larger program, I'll usually use a third-party module with more features/async support though, but I'll only do this if I'm using other third-party dependencies anyways.

> JS, Python, and Ruby, I have, quite a bit, and I have the sprawling requirements.txts and Gemfiles to prove it.

I checked the top 10 Go repositories on GitHub [1], and all but 1 of them have 30+ direct dependencies listed in their "go.mod" files (and many more indirect ones). Also, both C and JavaScript are well-known for their terrible standard libraries, yet out of all languages, JavaScript programs tend to use the most dependencies, while C programs tend to use the least. So I don't think that the number of dependencies that an average program in a given language uses says anything about the quality of that language's standard library.

[0]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/urllib.request.html

[1]: https://github.com/trending/go?since=monthly
by jaredklewis | 2026-03-07 07:23:18+00:00
A paper being peer reviewed is a good sign, but I feel like the signal is usually over interpreted.

Peer reviewed does not mean the findings of the paper are established fact or scientific consensus. It does not mean that the findings have been replicated by other scientists. It does not mean that the paper relied on a robust methodology, is free of basic statistical errors, or even free of logical fallacies.

Some of these limitations are due to the limitations of peer review itself. Others are just side effects of the way science works (for example, some ideas start as small, unimpressive experiments that are reported on in papers, and the strength of the findings is gradually developed over time). Obviously sometimes the prestige (or lack thereof) of the journal the paper is in decreases (or increases) some of these issues.

Anyway, peer review is a very noisy channel (IMHO).
Way to Use AI for Coding
by deep1283 | 2026-03-07 07:23:30+00:00
A mistake I see many beginner developers make with AI coding tools is this:

They ask the AI to build the entire project.

Something like:

“Build me a full SaaS app that does this”

The result?

A messy codebase.

AI tries to generate everything at once, and the architecture usually falls apart.

After experimenting with AI coding tools, I’ve found a workflow that works much better.

Think Like an Architect, Not a Prompt Engineer

The key idea is simple:

You design the system.
AI helps implement pieces of it.

Instead of asking AI to generate the whole project, break it down.

You decide:

architecture

folder structure

data models

API design

Then AI helps implement one piece at a time.

A Better Workflow

Here’s the process that works well for me.

Design the architecture first
Before asking AI for code, define:

project structure

database schema

API routes

major components

Example:

/api
auth.ts
users.ts

/services
userService.ts

/components
Dashboard.tsx

This prevents AI from inventing random structures.

Ask AI to build one file at a time
Instead of:

“Build the backend”

Ask:

“Create an Express API route for user registration with email and password validation.”

Or:

“Create a React component for a dashboard that displays a list of projects.”

Small tasks = much better results.

Review and refine
Never paste AI code blindly.

Check for:

unnecessary complexity

security issues

inconsistent patterns

AI is great at generating code, but developers are still better at judging it.

Use AI for boring work
Where AI really shines:

boilerplate

tests

simple CRUD endpoints

documentation

refactoring suggestions

Let AI do the repetitive work.

Focus your time on system design and product decisions.

The Real Shift

AI doesn’t replace developers.

It changes the role of developers.

Instead of spending most of our time writing code, we spend more time:

designing systems

reviewing generated code

thinking about architecture

Which, honestly, is where the interesting problems are anyway.
by menaerus | 2026-03-07 07:23:36+00:00
If you look into the results, you will see that they are able to execute 5x TPC-H queries in ~200ms (total). The dataset is not large it is rather small (10GB) but nonetheless, you wouldn't be able to run 5 queries in such a small amount of time if you had to analyze the workload, generate the code, build indices, start the agents/engine and retrieve the results. I didn't read the whole paper but this is why I think your understanding is wrong.
by faulander | 2026-03-07 07:24:07+00:00
53 here, coded in Assembler in late 80s, then C, Turbo Pascal - you know the route.
30 years later i am finishing all the products i started and never could finish because i for the love of god can not wrap my head around Frontend Design.

My first finished product: ZIB, a RSS Reader inspired by Innoreader, just free ;)
by pjmlp | 2026-03-07 07:24:15+00:00
I would rather have seen C# Native AOT for the Typescript 7, alongside Blazor for the playground, but it is what is.

Now when .NET team complains about adoption I get to point out Typescript 7's contribution repo.

And yes I know the reasons, my nick is on the discussions, please also watch the BUILD session where they acknowledge having to rewrite the whole datastructures due to Go's weaker type system.
by Implicated | 2026-03-07 07:24:34+00:00
So, you observed some telemetry - which would have been some sort of specific metric, right? Wouldn't you communicate that to them as well, not just "it's slow"?

"Hey, I saw that metric A was reporting 40% slower, are you aware already or have any ideas as to what might be causing that?"

Those two approaches are going to produce rather distinctly different results whether you're speaking to a human or typing to a GPU.
by damnitbuilds | 2026-03-07 07:24:38+00:00
Sadly predictable how Jacinda Ardern, the moronic do-gooder architect of this, is also leaving NZ for Australia.

She's yet another trendy lefty who has now discovered that fucking up your country's economy to "do good" does nobody any good.

From 2019:
"
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern criticized the tendency among countries to measure success by economic growth and gross domestic product at the 2019 Goalkeepers event on Wednesday, hosted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Ardern said that governments should instead focus on the general welfare of citizens and make investments in areas that unlock human potential. She pointed to New Zealand's new well-being budget that seeks to expand mental health services, reduce child poverty and homelessness, promote Indigenous rights, fight climate change, and expand opportunities.

"Economic growth accompanied by worsening social outcomes is not success," Ardern said. "It is failure."
"

https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/jacinda-ardern-goal...
by dataflow | 2026-03-07 07:25:07+00:00
What do you consider "modern"? Is a year old not modern? Am I supposed to be seeing something else?

$ pacman -Ss context | grep TeX -B1
extra/haskell-skylighting-format-context 0.1.0.2-163
ConTeXt formatter for skylighting syntax highlighting library
--
extra/texlive-context 2025.2-1 (texlive)
TeX Live - ConTeXt and packages
extra/texlive-latexextra 2025.2-1 (texlive)
TeX Live - LaTeX additional packages
$ sudo pacman -S --needed texlive-context
...
$ pacman -Qi texlive-context
Name : texlive-context
Version : 2025.2-1
...
Build Date : Sat 22 Mar 2025 07:15:15 PM EDT
by weinzierl | 2026-03-07 07:26:56+00:00
Nah, before the Internet if you asked a random German on the street, who'd they think invented the airplane I'm pretty sure you'd had gotten Otto Lilienthal as an answer. I guess the reality is that before the world got hyper connected every country had its own set of inventors for almost everything. There are numerous examples but they are hard to find now.

In the early days of Wikipedia I thought about writing a crawler that makes a table with inventor per country. It would have been an interesting experiment. Maybe it could be done with an archive even now.
by dataflow | 2026-03-07 07:28:28+00:00
I get that it can't handle LaTeX, that's literally my entire point. It's no wonder it goes unmentioned in TeX threads. The statement that it "can accomplish much of what LaTeX and its packages can do" pushes a lot under the rug. If that was a sufficient painting of reality, you could've just dropped the mic with "Ubuntu can accomplish much of what Windows and its packages can do" back in 2010, or with "Windows RT can do can accomplish much of what Windows can do" back in 2012, etc.