HN user
Can we also flag AI generated projects posted on Show HN?
I used to love reading HN for the handwritten articles and handmade projects, but in the LLM era the quality has deteriorated significantly. I find myself flocking to other message boards where LLM content is flagged, discouraged, or banned.
what’s left to get to is relatively small
Not necessarily. In many (most?) areas of tech the rate of advancement follows a logarithmic curve. That is to say, the first 90% is achieved quickly but the last 10% takes significantly more time.
I blocked AI overview because it starves websites of their own traffic and revenue.
Websites accepted Google scraping their content because it gave them a prominent blue link plus excerpt to drive traffic. Now everyone’s content is blended together and maybe, if they’re lucky, their site is chosen amongst the blend to get a tiny citation link.
Not sure if you're aware, but defer is proposed for C2Y [1]. It's already available in Clang behind a compiler flag. It is interesting how the languages continue to diverge.
[1] https://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG14/www/docs/n3734.pdf
I think there is one major difference that separates the two eras: in ye olden days you bought software for a fixed price and while it's understood you might only receive updates for a limited time, you could continue using it so long as you had the ability to run it. For example, you didn't have to upgrade to Windows XP if you were satisfied with Windows 98. With subscriptions, it's a recurring fee to continue accessing the software at all.
Data is being licensed by AI companies, but negotiations are limited to those with the capital [1][2][3]. You write about "imbalance" but ignore that large firms can cut deals while small creators languish.
You seem to believe advancement only happens in the private sector while ignoring academic institutions and publicly funded research. You've dismissed the possibility of public models entirely.
You fail to consider that when you financially disincentivize individual creators from publicly distributing their work, you starve future models resulting in a world were data is licensed only to those who can afford it anyway.
[1] https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/
concrete steps
Start by legally compelling companies that trained on unlicensed data to either (1) license the data, (2) publish their model, or (3) destroy their model.
If models are trained on the collective whole, they must be owned by the collective whole. If you believe funding creators for the training of private models is too slow, inconvenient, or creates a global disadvantage, then embrace collective ownership.
How about forcing businesses to be owned by their employees [1]? Instead of taxing the owning class and being paid UBI peanuts, you become the owning class and reap the rewards directly.
How about requiring AI companies to pay creators for training rights? Alternatively, models trained on the commons must be owned by the commons. Right now these AI companies are trying to have it both ways: it’s The People’s Data for training on comrade but ownership is privatized.
In my opinion, for open-source projects, scoring the project's AI sloppiness based on the timeline of commits would be a good indicator.
You can’t necessarily judge by timeline. I’ve always developed my projects privately and then squashed to one initial public commit. I’ve got a private repo now with thousands of commits developed over years and I still intend to squash.
Great read. It would be neat to see a mini operating system under 1 kb of code.
We're on the precipice of something incredible.
Only if our socioeconomic model changes.
Why is slop assumed inevitable? These models are plagiarization and copyright laundering machines. We need a great AI model reset whereby all published works are assumed to opt-out of training and companies pay to train on your data. We've seen what AI can do, now fund the creators.
It's called Universal Basic Income.
I'd rather we democratize ownership [1]. Instead of taxing the owning class and being paid UBI peanuts, how about becoming the owning class and reaping the rewards directly?
As far as I know, there aren't any Rust based C compilers with the same capabilities.
If you trained on a neutral representation like an AST or IR, then the source language shouldn't matter. *
* I'm not familiar with how Anthropic builds their models, but training this way should nullify PL differences.
I miss the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs days. At least there were positive improvements to Windows and Mac in those days.
reflects the software engineering philosophies of the 1980s.
It has a microkernel architecture. That's already an improvement over the "modern" monolithic kernels we are stuck with today. Given Big Tech's interest in hardening security and sandboxing you'd think this would get more attention.
Apple being the largest sponsor of Objective-C would suggest that you get greater vendor lock-in out of it than Swift
Fun fact, you can use Objective-C on non-Apple platforms [1] and with Cocoa APIs courtesy of the GNUstep project [2].
Why is there no C benchmark? The C++ benchmark appears to be "modern C++" which isn't a substitute.
I'm being pedantic, but on modern hardware, the ISA is an abstraction over microarchitecture and microcode. It's no longer a 1-to-1 representation of hardware execution. But, as programmers, it's as low as we can go, so the distinction is academic.
it's been mostly static
In a well-functioning competitive market, no company should be able to rest on its laurels. The problem is industries have consolidated and trustbusters are nowhere to be found.
Notice when tech is new (the web, smart phones, AI) there's an initial burst of competitive companies? That's because the market hasn't consolidated yet. Ask yourself how many dot-com millionaires would realistically be able to duplicate their success in 2026, given the same product but launching today.
Aside from consolidation, discoverability is a huge problem, especially in the era of AI slop. Building a superior product is easy, getting it noticed and building traction is hard.
I'm flabbergasted why anyone would voluntarily vibe code anything. For me, software engineering is a craft. You're supposed to enjoy building it. You should want to do it yourself.
like nearly all other datetime APIs, has 0 support for querying leap-second information
That's probably because you only need leap second accuracy in niche use cases, like astronomy or GPS. In JavaScript specifically, that kind of accuracy isn't needed for 99% of client-side use cases. Most date-time libraries work with POSIX time which assumes 86,400 seconds each day.
Tangentially, if you're interested in Doom mapping, John Romero has some interesting tips [1]
It never occurred to me that this was a possibility
Yes, it's viable. I do it for my companies projects in addition to dual-licensing under the GPL. See "The unit tests and Unicode data generators are not public. Access to them is granted exclusively to commercial licensees." [1].
[1] https://github.com/railgunlabs/unicorn?tab=readme-ov-file#li...
The default script now is that every side project should either be open-sourced or turned into a SaaS
I think its worse then that. It seems the narrative is everything needs to be enterprise-scale by default. Those who value small languages and tools, experimentation, self-hosting, and the do-it-yourself mindset are the counterculture.
Congratulations to Let’s Encrypt. I do wish there was something akin to them for code signing. OV and EV certificates are out of reach for many indie devs.
I'm not a kernel developer myself, but I’m aware of the Tanenbaum/Torvalds debates in the early 90’s. My understanding is the primary reason Linus gave Tanenbaum for the monolithic design was performance, but I would think in 2025 this isn’t so relevant anymore.
And thanks for attempting to answer my question without snark or down voting. Usually HN is much better for discussion than this.
Rust in the kernel feels like a red herring. For fault tolerance and security, wouldn’t it be a superior solution to migrate Linux to a microkernel architecture? That way, drivers and various other components could be isolated in sandboxes.