MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwup238 | 2026-01-31 13:38:37+00:00
It depends on the scale of complexity you’re working at and who your users are going to be. I’ve found that it’s trivial to have Claude Code spit out so much functionality that even just proper manually verifying it becomes a gargantuan task. I end up just manually testing the pieces I’m familiar with which is fine if there’s a QA department who can do a full run through of the feature and are prepared to deal with vibe coding pitfalls, but not so much on open source projects where slop gets shipped and unfamiliar users get stuck with bugs they can’t possibly troubleshoot. Writing the code from scratch The Old Way™ leaves a lot less room for shipping convincing but non functional slop because the dev has to work through it before shipping.

The most immediate example I can think of is the beans LLM workflow tracker. It’s insane that its measured in the 100s of thousands of LoC and getting that thing setup in a repo is a mess. I had to use Github copilot to investigate the repo to get the latest method. This wouldn’t fly at my employer but a lot of projects are going to be a lot less scrupulous.

You can see the effects in popular consumer facing apps too: Anthropic has drunk way too much of its own koolaid and now I get 10-50% failure rates on messages in their iOS app depending on the day. Some of their devs have publicly said that Claude writes 100% of their code and its starting to show. Intermittent network failures and retries have been a solved problem for decades, ffs!
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-31 13:38:37+00:00
> Complete aside, but it's beyond infuriating I need to enable a VPN here in the UK to view this link.

Here, I uploaded the image to catbox.moe if anyone's interested.

https://files.catbox.moe/c4smhd.png

I don't think that catbox is blocked within the UK.
by nixpulvis | 2026-01-31 13:38:39+00:00
First of all I just want to say, I completely agree with the main point of this post, and argue for more full-lifecycle discussions on a regular basis at every job I've had.

With that said, I partially disagree this block:

> When I’m heads-down-coding, I’m not seeing, I’m not asking, and I’m not learning about the problem. To do that, I have to get up from my desk, go to where the problem is and/or the people I need to ask are, and have a conversation.

There are two types of problems when developing software. The problem of figuring out what you want to do, and the problem of figuring out how to do it.

These often impact each other, either because a limitation on what you can do changes what you end up trying to do, or because you learn something new about the use case, like this post describes. But keeping these two problems separated in your mind, at least for a time, is what lets us focus and find solutions.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-31 13:39:43+00:00
> Does anyone have a mirror? I’m in authoritarian UK so the link is blocked

Here you go. I had it uploaded after hearing from the magospietato's comment but then saw you talk about the same so I am pasting the same image link here as well

https://files.catbox.moe/c4smhd.png
by close04 | 2026-01-31 13:40:03+00:00
> When centralized systems attempt to institutionalize "fairness" as a primary directive, the resulting information-calculation problems and rent-seeking often lead to catastrophic externalities.

Sounds like you’re focusing on Eastern society examples and some are a stretch. If you believe “institutionalized fairness” is unequivocally wrong, what do you think of the more Western “DEI”? It’s a standout example of “equity”.

Is your opinion that DEI results in the same kind of bad outcome? Do you think that Western societies can pull off “institutionalized fairness” better than Eastern ones? Are you drawing a biased picture by highlighting the failures without putting them in the larger context along with any possible successes?
by bgnn | 2026-01-31 13:40:40+00:00
Except none of that data center grade chips can work in the space. No GPUs, no memory, no SSD. They are not radiation-hardened (rad-hard). Rad-hard chips generally cost an oder of magnitude or more compared to normal commercial chips, and they are in general an order of magnitude less complex, plus they operate much lower frequencies. Data centers in space is straight up stupid.
by deaux | 2026-01-31 13:41:09+00:00
You're completely right, I mistakenly left out the US so I'm going to edit it in. If you include the US, it's five. The first two are of course trivially correct. I'm leaving them unnamed in the hope that those who write all-knowingly about this topic yet can't instantly name them might realize they don't know much about software sovereignty in the first place.

The third one is definitely a notch lower than the others, as I noted. But still IMO noticeably higher than the other 196. The point still stands if you don't count them.
by larusso | 2026-01-31 13:42:30+00:00
The Statue of Liberty would be red without her patina and would look weird ;). I’m not talking about the beauty of weathering. I think a dirty glass roof which no longer lets any light through a planned weathering tactic. The point was that the plans architects make are always showing the building in prestine condition. And they never reflect how this building will look like in a few years. One example I see every day is a Train-station entrance. It has a very dramatic metal ark that stretches up. Looked great in the past. Now you see dirty water running down the surface. The brushed metal is stained with grime that pilled up. Every time it rains the grime runs a bit deeper. They tried to clean it a few month back. They have to come with a special crane and water jets to remove the grime. But nobody takes the time to polish the surface back up. Is this bad? No of course not. But don’t plan and sell something that will only last for half a year. That’s why I also think this post is brilliant.
by flexagoon | 2026-01-31 13:42:32+00:00
Given that your comment is AI generated I don't know if you're actually interested or just want to plug your product, though I'll assume good faith and answer the question

I don't manually tag any entries - the automatic AI tags just add extra keywords I can search for that are not included in the original article text. So I mostly search by keywords, yes. Not sure what the difference is between "keywords" and "topic you're working on".

See also https://mymind.com, which takes the AI tagging even further. Potentially similar to what you're building (although, again, your landing page contains a lot of AI generated metaphors and nothing that explains what your product actually does)
by clejack | 2026-01-31 13:42:36+00:00
"Absent corruption" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your statement. The idea that the system can't fail raises the question what do you consider failure, and what do you consider corruption"

If prices increase and wages don't keep up with them, an increasing number of people become squeezed by their environment. This is a slow event, sure, but enough drops can fill a bucket. The fallout from this pressure on the general populace will be the failure that you're saying can't happen. This seems inevitable without an intervening event to reset things.

With that said, I don't think your concerns are unreasonable, and I'm not sure UBI by itself could solve anything. At a minimum price controls or government administering of food and housing would be necessary to keep prices from rising in response to the influx of cash everyone would receive, but the problem of people not working does seem like a big potential issue.

I believe there have been studies to the contrary, but those studies necessarily miss the universal part of ubi, so they don't have the negative feedback loops that could spring up in a real implementation.
by blauditore | 2026-01-31 13:42:40+00:00
What hotkey-driven and fast-paced workflows are you referring to? I used to be an Office user, now G Docs, and I hardly miss anything. Hotkeys do exist, and more complex stuff can be automated quite well with AppsScript.

Maybe I'm not enough of a power user, but these things often sound to me like the 0.1% productivity boosts that are nice to have, but often hardly relevant in the grand scheme of things.
by Juliate | 2026-01-31 13:42:40+00:00
> I like it how everyone says that, but there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer.

But there is also no requirement for... most of their specific offering to start an online business.

Some people seem to miss this in the picture: you _can_ build without them, outside of them, and fund equivalent technology development while staying outside of them.

It's a matter of strategy and of choice.
by throwway1922 | 2026-01-31 13:42:52+00:00
Wrong point. Nothing wrong with browser based clients. Even if they build some desktop client, by the time google (or anyone) does that compatibility Microsoft will change their formats. MS even removed their apps from ChromeOS to make it so. The issue is you can't fix MS. regulators are just too rich to care.

It is even the same as Office for Mac is not 100% compatible with office for windows (or so called CoPilot AI whatever)
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2026-01-31 13:42:54+00:00
> Federal charges are appropriate where federal law is violated, and the Supremacy Clause ensures that federal government has the right to bring them.

And the first amendment ensures (er, well, it should) that charges which violate it are dismissed.

> "Protest" actions like this violate the first amendment rights of the church attendees.

They don't; the first amendment strictly protects against government persecution.

> If it were Tucker Carlson instead of Don Lemon, and a mosque rather than a church, and an imam suspected by the right of being involved with a terrorist cell rather than a pastor suspected by the left of being involved with ICE, would you have the same response?

Is this any better than an ad hominem? What if they would have a different response? Do you mean that we should then conclude something about this event or the other commenter's messages?
by samus | 2026-01-31 13:43:00+00:00
> Also I see in the comment section people are worry about tones. I can guarantee tones are not particularly useful and you can communicate with native speakers with all the tones messed up and that’s perfectly fine.

That might be true between native speakers of similar enough dialects who otherwise speak "properly" with each other: proper grammar, idiomatic expressions, predictable accents (also regarding tones, which are not random, just different patterns from the standard). Language learners make errors in all these categories and there providing more motivation to neglect the tones is harmful. If tones were completely irrelevant regarding understandably then they would have disappeared long ago.
by acdha | 2026-01-31 13:43:06+00:00
> I've noticed a dramatic drop in hallucinations after it had to provide links to its sources. Still not 0, though.

I’ve noticed that Google does a fair job at linking to relevant sources but it’s still fairly common for it to confabulate something that source doesn’t say or even directly contradicts. It seems to hit the underlying inability to reason where if the source covers more than one thing it’s prone to taking an input “X does A while Y does B” and emitting “Y does A” or “X does A and B”. It’s a fascinating failure mode which seems to be insurmountable.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-31 13:43:36+00:00
> You will learn this fact in time.

> And bots are not "good" or "bad", but rather an imperfect mirror of statistically salient nonsense. =3

I think that you are a human and surprised to see you be calm when someone calls you bot because I usually flip out.

If you are a human, I think that one of the things that I am starting to think to do is reply with I am human only after all video.

I am only human after all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3wKzyIN1yk

Or in this case about fishes, we can have the video parody of I am just a fish!

I am just a fish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1goAp0XmhZQ

(this last video is a parody-ish but really great music unironically out of the original music being I am just a freak, both music are really great in my opinion unironically haha!)

I am just a fish!
by seanjaii | 2026-01-31 13:44:10+00:00
I have to agree, I cannot quite pinpoint the fixation on LLMs doing away with software engineers/developers. I know teachers who rely on ChatGPT and Claude to do so many parts of their jobs; marking work, providing feedback for a kid's homework, lesson planning and even answering subject matter questions they don't know how to. LLMs work so much better so many professions, right now, than it does for software development.

Clearly, even assuming they are wrong far less often and don't hallucinate in the very near future, there is a human element that LLMs certainly can't replace (unless semi-autonomous robots become a thing soon). Why isn't the same thought process applied to writing software? It's obvious if you've worked in this industry for any amount of time just how paramount that human element is to producing useful programs.

If current and/or near future AI will replace us, then it's surely replacing almost everyone else, no?
by keepamovin | 2026-01-31 13:44:20+00:00
Free doesn't emerge from the quantum vacuum of spacetime in the realm of digital products however. It's not a innate natural right, but a choice, of a provider at a given point in time. It might change. Cost might be levied. Cost should be expecdted in free exchange. Especially as a westerner!

Aside from that - what age old institutions are wrecked by monopolies, or which ones are you talking about it? Genuinely curious.
by dopidopHN2 | 2026-01-31 13:44:45+00:00
I've seen US citizen swich in mass to cryptpad and protondoc over ICE being in their town and then wanting to deliver grocery to their neighbors.

Proton seems to have stick. It's far less feature full than google doc but I started to receive link to proton doc outside of a immigration context.

Also, I do spreadsheet for a living and my last two job were not providing a office licence ( no need )
by lelanthran | 2026-01-31 13:45:03+00:00
> If you do use this approach, you will get code that is better than what most software devs put out. And that gives you a good base to work with if you need to add polish to it.

If you do use this approach, you'll find that it will descend into a recursive madness. Due to the way these models are trained, they are never going to look at the output of two other models and go "Yeah, this is fine as it is; don't change a thing".

Before you know it you're going to have change amplification, where a tiny change by one model triggers other models (or even itself) to make other changes, which triggers further changes, etc ad nauseum.

The easy part is getting the models to spit out working code. The hard part is getting it to stop.
by swed420 | 2026-01-31 13:45:43+00:00
> You can take the stance that nobody knows what any of these terms mean I guess

It's not that they don't know. It's that they bend definitions to their advantage depending on what the context dictates. 538 is exactly the kind of outlet one would expect to do such a thing.

https://jacobin.com/2024/11/liberals-bernie-working-class-tr...

It seems the left-right spectrum serves better to confuse than to differentiate, and that the most productive discussions unfold when we talk issues instead.
by mark_l_watson | 2026-01-31 13:46:18+00:00
I have used Hetzner off and on for years, nice products and services.

I don’t care what provider you use, if your business or app use case needs any sort of reliability have a plan for reinstalling code and data on alternate providers quickly as possible.

There are horror stories of people and companies being cut off because of pressure from the US government, or having one of the Google/Microsoft/Amazon tech giants cancelling accounts.

Really, in today’s world, why totally rely on anyone?

EDIT: it seems prudent to maintain a cloud account in Europe, US, and Asia and have a plan for moving application code and data around if required. Outside the US I have mostly only used Hetzner, but Alibaba has impressive looking services.
by znnajdla | 2026-01-31 13:46:19+00:00
My theory is that 80% of workloads on AWS/GCP/Azure are pure waste. They sell complexity-as-a-service. 80% of startups and enterprises could run on a single beefy baremetal server. AWS/GCP/Azure are the result of hype bubbles and VC-funded waste culture, it's not necessary for Europe to recreate that to compete.
by aenis | 2026-01-31 13:47:49+00:00
I am in the middle of this - my audit committee just told me we need an exit plan "just in case".

I don't think this is practically possible. The governments are currently focusing on enabling sovereign clouds - there is real work in France and the Netherlands that I am familiar with.

However, almost any company uses a lot of SaaS stuff - also for very core capabilities such as IdP, employee productivity, not to mention the boring stuff - CRMs, ERPs, payment, etc.

Some (all, maybe?) have non-US variants, but as anyone who ever worked through an ERP upgrade or a CRM replacement - theoretically trivial exercises - this will be heal on earth.

And that does not begin to address the questions such as next gen productivity tools such as frontier models for coding. If Anthropic, Google and OpenAI decided to shut down the Europeans, we'd be screwed for a while.

On the positive side, the absolute toxic stuff that tech companies brought to the world - shorts, social media networks - would for a while be inaccessible too, so there is that.
by brandonb | 2026-01-31 13:47:54+00:00
This is the first new paper from Alec Radford since leaving OpenAI. Token-level data filtering is kind of a simple idea, but so are many effective ideas in LLMs.

One advantage is that this type of safety guardrail can't be undone by an adversary in post-training, so it's a good fit for open source models.

The experiments are all done in preventing models from acquiring medical
capabilities, while preserving related capabilities like e.g., biology.
by hju22_-3 | 2026-01-31 13:48:06+00:00
Yes, because it isn't. What version they pump out has nothing to do with viability. It still lacks much of the feature set and functionally of Photoshop, enough so that it's just not a valid comparison, let alone a valid alternative. Like, I've seen people comparing Krita as the better alternative to GIMP, which isn't even designed to fill the same need. But the fact that those comparisons have even occurred should tell you enough about the state of GIMP.
by mrweasel | 2026-01-31 13:48:11+00:00
First of: Google has not once crashed one of our sites with GoogleBot. They have never tried to by-pass our caching and they are open and honest about their IP ranges, allowing us to rate-limit if needed.

The residential proxies are not needed, if you behave. My take is that you want to scrape stuff that site owners do not want to give you and you don't want to be told no or perhaps pay a license. That is the only case where I can see you needing a residential proxies.
by jraph | 2026-01-31 13:48:43+00:00
As a child, I think I would have been annoyed by such a presentation. There are science magazines for children that can explain pretty complex stuff just fine.

It's also critical not to leave out the ethical topics (resource consumption, e-waste production, concerns about how the source data is harvested - both how it DDoS websites and how authors are not necessarily happy with their work ending in the models)
by spyder | 2026-01-31 13:49:06+00:00
Yea, but most advertisers come only after something went viral, not when you are building something and you try to say to potential advertiser: "this will go viral trust me bro". And such small viral things are usually short lived, by the time the advertisers come it will probably starts to die down.
But yea, maybe he would have got a little more financial support than donations even if he puts up ads after it went viral.

Another way he could benefit from this is when people want his skills to build them similar things, so it's basically already an advertisement for his skills.
by eduction | 2026-01-31 13:49:27+00:00
> if the US continues down the political path it currently seems to be pursuing, 'this time it's different' actually will be

You’ve set no time bound so what you say here is essentially irrefutable. It boils down to “on this path we will eventually have a big bust.” You’re right if it happens in 1 year or 30.

You’ve also not defined the bounds of the path. Paths can weave. So essentially that part of it becomes meaningless because anyone can draw a line that starts with today.

Tech has a long history of boom bust cycles. Some busts are much more mild than others. Some upend the whole economy for protracted periods. In reality no one knows when AI will bust and how bad it will be. Those are the key questions, not whether there will eventually be a tech (or broad) bust. Of course there will be if you’re looking out to infinity days from today.

Most economic commentary is like this including the linked article: so poorly defined as to be low worth as even speculation.
by 0x38B | 2026-01-31 13:50:25+00:00
I love this part at 25 minutes:

"There was a formula in Becker's book for a four-wheel drive vehicle with a powered trailer. Well, Don said, "I played with a formula and quickly found that the most sensitive dimension is the length of the rear axle to trailer hitchball. As I reduced it, performance increased. I went to less [negative number] and the performance continued to increase. But how can you have a negative length for this connecting member?

Don realized that a negative connection length just meant moving the pivot beyond the traditional attachment point. Instead of connecting everything to the frame, he made the four-wheel set a bogie in and of itself and attached it to another member with the other set of wheels. Another way to think about it is that the whole thing is a bogie with a rocker at one end, which is how Donna Shirley christened it when she saw the new design. Hence, the rocker bogie was born. And Don Bickler became known as The "Bogie Man" around JPL."

----------

I also like the email reproduced at 1:37:06 for the picture it gives of Don as a mentor:

"Mark,

In response to Don Bickler’s efforts over the last 2 months or so, I can't help but tell you how much I want to hang out with this guy! He is my hero! Every time we talk, I feel I walk away with some extra piece of knowledge that I didn’t have before. I told Don, it is so unfortunate that engineers these days are nothing like they were when he came out of school. He has so much common sense and has such a great ability to simplify the situation and come up with a solution that will not only work, but be simple and easy to build, while at the same time wanting nothing more than to solve the problem at hand, he thrives [at] it and that is something I really enjoy observing!

I'm sure this does not come as a surprise to you as every one I talk to, when I tell them that Don Bickler is helping us resolve this spring issue, tells me the guy is a legend and to soak up everything you can from him! Simply put, Don has been an asset to this issue we have had, he has quickly come up with a resolution so we can move forward with the spring design we have.

The issue is not yet resolved because we still have to design and build the spacers that Don recommends, but based on some preliminary testing, it looks like Don's resolution will be the remedy we are looking for. If possible, I would like to be locked in a room with Don through any type of project. Please let me know when and where.

I am currently working in Madrid right now until the 28" but if you'd like more info, please feel free to contact me on my cell phone.

Thanks in advance,

Jason Carlton

Jet Propulsion Laboratory" [line breaks added to ease reading]