MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fsloth | 2026-01-31 11:35:41+00:00
Sorry for the flood below. It's relevant but not very compact.

The compact answer is software complexity, intrinsically complex algorithms and geometric robustness. Data model may be difficult depending what you want to do. Robust import. Robust export domain to domain.

The last two are especially nasty if you are solo since there are no good specs here. There are _specs_ but what happens in practice is that each party has their own implementation that almost works, except in n. corner cases. Then you need to figure out is your software wrong, or is the input data wrong, and not rush to hasty conclusions. This will be time consuming.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-31 11:35:53+00:00
> I don't think it's possible to separate any open source contribution from the ones that came before it, as we're all standing on the shoulders of giants. Every developer learns from their predecessors and adapts patterns and code from existing projects.

Yes but you can also ask the developer (wheter in libera.irc, or say if its a foss project on any foss talk, about which books and blogs they followed for code patterns & inspirations & just talk to them)

I do feel like some aspects of this are gonna get eaten away by the black box if we do spec-development imo.
by antirez | 2026-01-31 11:35:57+00:00
Exactly that. And all the books about, for instance, operating systems, totally based on the work of others: their ideas where collected and documented, the exact algorithms, and so forth. All the human culture worked this way. Moreover there is a strong pattern of the most prolific / known open source developers being NOT against the fact that their code was used for training: they can't talk for everybody but it is a signal that for many this use is within the scope of making source code available.
by AdamN | 2026-01-31 11:36:06+00:00
Waterfall can work great when: 1/ the focus is long-term both in terms of knowing that she company can take a few years to get the thing live but also that it will be around for many more years, 2/ the people writing the spec and the code are largely the same people.

Agile was really pushing to make sure companies could get software live before they died (number 1) and to remedy the anti-pattern that appeared with number 2 where non-technical business people would write the (half-assed) spec and then technical people would be expected do the monkey work of implementing it.
by inglor_cz | 2026-01-31 11:36:21+00:00
"What's wrong with that?"

Political context. Rationalism was associated with atheism, which, for the first time in European history, started making visible inroads into the intellectual class. If you can solve all your problems using your reason, do you really need a God? And plenty of French philosophers hinted that the answer could be "no".

It wasn't just a religious question. Atheism or suspicion of thereof was seen as politically subversive, in the age when most ruling feudal dynasties still relied on God's grace as the ultimate fount of their power - at least in their eyes of the subjects. (But it wasn't always that cynical, plenty of the rulers themselves were quite pious.)
by torginus | 2026-01-31 11:36:41+00:00
I feel one upshot of AI coding is that people finally recognize 5 layer enterprise architectures for what they are - useless slop whose purpose is to make solutions more 'professional' and complicated to make the people who write them feel smart, inflate costs and personnel needs and sell consulting on how to solve problems with 5x more code than necessary.

The extra code doesn't encode any requirement.

On the other hand, these couple-hundred line, crappy spitballed together solutions that actually still do what is needed (and are usually are hand-written, LLMs aren't known for brevity) are vindicated.
by rtpg | 2026-01-31 11:38:58+00:00
> The author smears the boundary between what people believe and what is logically entailed, and between mathematical techniques and the way they are applied in modelling the real world.

I think the clue here is the section mentioning Cauchy and rigor.

Without a certain flavor of rigor, "proofs" given by people, _especially in analysis_, can feel unsatisfying and can outright be incorrect, even if the thing they are trying to prove is true!

Imagine a proof of the intermediate value theorem like: well if you try to go from point A to point B you _have_ to pass through C in between eventually or else you'll never get to B.

This might be a sketch of a proof, vaguely. And it's not like the IVT is _wrong_, right? But a non-rigorous proof is not convincing. A non-rigorous proof might leave out details that would otherwise guarantee that a proof isn't left up to interpretation.

If your proof hand waves away some cases that feel trivial to you, to others that might look like a hole in your proof! Or you might think it's trivial, and actually it's not trivial.. but you haven't done it.

Anyways this is, I think, the core here. A new style of mathematics with new foundations... that haven't quite been smoothed out yet. The conclusions being reached are all kinda mostly right, but the reasons the conclusions are correct have not been actually properly set up. So skeptics can drive a truck through that contradiction.

Knowledge is about knowing the right thing for the right reasons... and in its infancy I could see a universe where a lot of mathematicians are running around using its tooling without having the right foundations for it.

We are lucky to live downstream of all this hard work. In the moment things were messier (see also calculus' initial growing pains)
by bioknot | 2026-01-31 11:39:22+00:00
It feels like we are ignoring the historical reality that alliances always shift.
Today AI is our best friend; tomorrow is not guaranteed.

The gap in capability is getting too wide to fight back if the "regime" changes.

Me and my friends are going to work on BioKnot, which is basically an open-source "fire escape" for humanity.

We're going to focus on solutions, protocols and action plans in case of an AI invasion.

Any human or AI agents are welcome!
by phtrivier | 2026-01-31 11:39:26+00:00
Food distribution is still a problem in vast part of the world.

Handling food waste is another issue.

Climate related shortage are coming soon for us (at the moment they only manifest as punctual price hikes - mustard a few years ago, coffee and chocolate more recently, etc...

https://www.euronews.com/green/2025/02/13/goodbye-gouda-and-...

https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/adverse-climatic-conditi...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/noelfletcher/2024/11/03/how-cli...

I don't know if the electricity going into compute centers could be put to better use, to help alleviate climate change impacts, or to create more resilient and distributed supply chains, etc...

But I would not say that this is "not a problem", or that it's completely obvious that allocating those resources instead to improving chatbots is smart.

I understand why we allocate resource to improving chatbots - first world consumers are using them, and the stock markets assume this usage is soon going to be monetized. So it's not that different from "using electricity to build radios / movie theater / TVs / 3D gaming cards, etc... instead of desalinating water / pulling CO2 out of the air / transporting beans, etc...

But at least Nvidia did not have the "toupet" to claim that using electricity to play Quake in higher res would solve world hunger, as some people claim:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwerner/2024/05/03/sam-altma...
by yetihehe | 2026-01-31 11:39:36+00:00
> financial destitution by definition cannot affect producers of vital goods,

Say that to farmers struggling to make meets end. We managed to make production of vital goods so efficient, that we don't need as many producers, so they are becoming not-producers-of-vital-goods en masse. So, now that they don't produce vital goods, they can safely go into destitution?

> only an individual level failure (which isn’t to say that the individual is “to blame”, I am not talking moralistically

Individual level failure means individual is to blame. But UBI is meant to give them safety net, so that when they fail, they don't go into destitution.

> So at least what you mentioned cannot result in systemic failure from a mechanistic point of view, only an individual level failure (which isn’t to say that the individual is “to blame”, I am not talking moralistically, just that it affects individuals and not the entire structure

Nice, but when you get rid of 20% of people and move them into "not usable, you won't eat now" category, each single one for personal reasons, then another 20% for other personal reason, you have to train them somehow. You could of course say that they should retrain on their own, but that's currently done typically after several years of giving them too low prices, so they used up their safety reserve.

> On first paragraph, okay how does that scale though. Who does the actual work of producing things people need to live

The people who feel they have the skills for this. Just like right now.

> and how do we make sure that enough people keep doing that specifically,

We have enough people to make food. We have to make artifical limits on how much food they produce or they would flood the market with food. We pay them to keep their fields unused for some time, kept in reserve. UBI would just be a guarantee that they won't go into destitution when they can't sell the food at good price.

> “birth rate increases because people have more free time which means now you need more farming”

I think birth rate might decrease even more. As people become more and more comfortable and stopped having to work as much as previously, they don't need children to secure their future.

> We need to characterize these dynamics, wouldn’t you say? Have you thought about it, or are you satisfied by hand waving?

I agree we should. Who would do it? Who would pay for such characterisation? Maybe you should try to do it? A lot of people think about it already.
by griffzhowl | 2026-01-31 11:39:56+00:00
That's cool isn't it? Even to the Akkadians, Sumerian was an ancient language (prehistoric!), that became sacred.

Aren't there also bilingual texts that are used for learning it? Or maybe I'm thinking of different versions of stories, in Sumerian and later Akkadian or Babylonian.

I'm curious how the modern pronunciation is arrived at. Is that a lot of convention and guess work or is it reasonably secure through knowing (approximately) Akkadian pronunciation via other Semitic languages?
by maccard | 2026-01-31 11:40:46+00:00
Indeed. I am a frequent critic of the c++ committee’s direction and decisions. There’s no direction other than “new stuff” and that new stuff pretty much has to be in the library otherwise it will require changes that may break existing code. That’s fine.

But on the flip side, there’s a theme of ignoring the actual state of the world to achieve the theoretical goals of the proposal when it suits. Modules are a perfect example of this - when I started programming professionally modules were the solution to compile times and to symbol visibility. Now that they’re here they are neither. But we got modules on part. The version that was standardised refused to accept the existence of the toolchain and build tools that exist, and as such refused to place any constraints that may make implementation viable or easier.

St the same time we can’t standardise Pragma once because some compiler may treat network shares or symlinks differently.

There’s a clear indication that the committee don’t want to address this, epochs are a solution that has been rejected. It’s clear the only real plan is shove awkward functional features into libraries using operator overloads - just like we all gave out to QT for doing 30 years ago. But at least it’s standardised this time?
by phtrivier | 2026-01-31 11:42:50+00:00
I'm curious about Handmeier's opinion on location of data centers.

Should they be close to the solar arrays (that is, in the desert, with data networks connecting them to were the tokens are used)

Or close to their customers (which mean far from the solar arrays, with electricity networks)

He's talking a lot about removing movable parts, but aren't the wires going to be an limiting factor ?
by pllbnk | 2026-01-31 11:42:59+00:00
A human, not a statistical model. I can insert any random words out of my own volition if I wanted to, not because I have been pre-programmed (pre-trained) to output tokens based on a limited 200k (tiny) context for one particular conversation and forget about it by the time a new session starts.

That’s why AI models, as they currently are, won’t ever be able to come up with anything even remotely novel.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-31 11:44:29+00:00
(Yes?) but the editor isn't claiming to take your job in 5 years.

Also I do feel like this is a very substantial leap.

This is sort of like the difference between some and many.

Your editor has some effect on the final result so crediting it/mentioning it doesn't really impact it (but people still do mention their editor choices and I know some git repo's with .vscode which can show that the creator used vscode, I am unfamiliar if the same might be true for other editors too)

But especially in AI, the difference is that I personally feel like its doing many/most work. It's literally writing the code which turns into the binary which runs on machine while being a black box.

I don't really know because its something that I am contradicted about too but I just want to speak my mind even if it may be a little contradicted on the whole AI distinction thing which is why I wish to discuss it with ya.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-31 11:45:04+00:00
> unfortunate that government control / intervention in the free market to this degree can be spun into something positive

I don't think most Europeans want a laissez faire-style "anything goes" market, we want corporations and people to have responsibility for what they do and the effect they have. With a little bit of nuance, some government control and intervention is needed in a healthy society, because we don't want to end up in the same situation the US currently finds itself in.
by tgv | 2026-01-31 11:45:16+00:00
I do. It just works, and it feels better than the on-screen versions. The Windows calculator is atrocious. Some of the emulators for iOS are good, but still feel clumsy in comparison to the real thing, especially for more than adding two short numbers.

The truth is: I like calculators, and I think almost everyone answering in the positive does too. Most people don't care about them, and see their phone as a god-given miracle, I guess, which makes calculators an expensive-ish burden.
by pfdietz | 2026-01-31 11:45:29+00:00
The critique of calculus as lacking in rigor goes much further back than that. Bishop Berkeley famously argued calculus was no more dependable than theology. It was only with Cauchy and the formalization of analysis in the 19th century that this issue would be put to bed.

I wonder if the issues that this essay claims came up in Italy persisted in any way. I ask that, because there was later (1885-1935) an infamous breakdown in Italian mathematics (the "Italian School of Algebraic Geometry") due to foundational issues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_school_of_algebraic_ge...

History doesn't repeat but it sometimes rhymes.
by user3939382 | 2026-01-31 11:46:27+00:00
I spent my career building software for executives that wanted to know exactly what they were going to get and when because they have budgets and deadlines i.e. the real world.

Mostly I’ve seen agile as, let’s do the same thing 3x we could have done once if we spent time on specs. The key phrase here is “requirements analysis” and if you’re not good at it either your software sucks or you’re going to iterate needlessly and waste massive time including on bad architecture. You don’t iterate the foundation of a house.

I see scenarios where Agile makes sense (scoped, in house software, skunk works) but just like cloud, jwts, and several other things making it default is often a huge waste of $ for problems you/most don’t have.

Talk to the stakeholders. Write the specs. Analyze. Then build. “Waterfall” became like a dirty word. Just because megacorps flubbed it doesn’t mean you switch to flying blind.
by aaplok | 2026-01-31 11:46:32+00:00
Neat collection!

Do you have advice on how to use those calculators with modern tooling? For example I remember there were cross-compilers for the hp48 [0], do you use any of that (and how do you transfer data to/from the calculators)?

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250124204959/https://sourcefor...
by shalmanese | 2026-01-31 11:47:28+00:00
At the end of the week, if you suffered a hard drive crash and all of your recent code got erased, how quickly could you recreate it? That's how much of your week was spent coding. The rest of the week was spent transforming you into the person who could code the thing you coded.

Contrast this with a chair maker. If at the end of the week, their chair got thrown in a woodchipper, some significant fraction of the next week would be in unavoidable labor making the exact same chair.

This is the fundamental difference between these two activities that gets abstracted away when we both think of them as "labor".
by adrianN | 2026-01-31 11:48:18+00:00
„Cloud“ ist a lot more than blob storage where encryption can help. As soon as you use a service that sees plain text (eg a database saas) encryption doesn’t save you from the service provider (and by extension foreign government). But as the article points out, data exfiltration is one problem, the other, imo bigger, problem is dependence on a foreign nation for critical infrastructure. The US government can decide to shut down almost all European IT and there is nothing Europe can do about it right now.
by jraph | 2026-01-31 11:48:38+00:00
> Also it’s not like it’s impossible to encrypt things when you store them?

Apart from Signal, do you know of an actual US service where things are E2E encrypted, including metadata, that also allows several people working on the same thing at the same time?

> not having the US have access to EU data

It is a great deal about not having US access EU data.

It is also about the US not having the power to cut the EU from essential services.

> This article is more political than logical or technical

Of course this is 100% a political matter (rather than technical). This is not a bad thing. Technical stuff doesn't live in a politic-free vacuum.

> it’s unfortunate that government control / intervention in the free market to this degree can be spun into something positive.

And this stance too.
by KaiserPro | 2026-01-31 11:48:46+00:00
Its past political.

I work in energy now, and we host stuff in AWS. So far so normal.

However, with the tubthumping about invading greenland, We see that america is willing to evaporate any system that gets in the way of the sun king's world view. Sure, he says now that "we were never going to invade" but given the way you've all just given up your 1st, 4th, 10th and now 2nd amendment, we're not really that sure.

This means that when the next recession happens and the EU is busy competing, he'll ask "hey we subsidies the EU by getting them to pay for AWS, why don't we turn it off?" I mean that sounds far fetched, but so did unrelated personally controlled federal militia roving around states disappearing US citizens without trial.

tldr: you're damn right its about politics. He threatened to invade an ally, we aint hanging around to find out whats next.
by azarai | 2026-01-31 11:49:19+00:00
Took a look and here my thoughts in random order.

Looks like a dev perfolio and not something real.

No clear target niche/audience. Looks like for everybody but that seldom works.

Lacking trust signals, for example why should I trust your finance app or the transcript thing from a random personal site.

Too tech focused. Devs might drool about that but the average user is scared away.

Lots of fluffy wording where I zoom out. In my experience caused by the lack of a clear niche. Pick one, have a single target user in mind and write for that person. Will evolve over time so just start with something.
by rizzo94 | 2026-01-31 11:49:36+00:00
I ran into the same concerns while experimenting with OpenClaw/Moltbot. Locking it down in Docker or on a VPS definitely helps with blast radius, but it doesn’t really solve prompt injection—especially once the agent is allowed to read and act on untrusted inputs like email or calendar content.

Gmail and Calendar were the hardest for me too. I considered the same workaround (a separate inbox with limited scope), but at some point the operational overhead starts to outweigh the benefit. You end up spending more time designing guardrails than actually getting value from the agent.

That experience is what pushed me to look at alternatives like PAIO, where the BYOK model and tighter permission boundaries reduced the need for so many ad-hoc defenses. I still think a community-maintained OpenClaw security playbook would be hugely valuable—especially with concrete examples of “this is safe enough” setups and real, production-like use cases.
by boxed | 2026-01-31 11:49:38+00:00
If you think this is what LLMs are, then you are a bit behind the times. Opus 4.5 is a huge step up. The previous generation was good for starting basic hobby projects, now we can do pretty big time-consuming changes with it.

I have been extremely skeptical and dismissive of LLMs for a long time, but after a certain level of improvement you have to realize that at least for programming the advantages are substantial.
by throwawayqqq11 | 2026-01-31 11:49:46+00:00
> I do question why diminishing profit rates are relevant though. Even if profits had generally been going up, wouldn't the desire for even more wealth lead to the same lobbying / looting pattern?

Yes, it would, because the expectations of growth/profit/ROI are baked into the system (eg. by interests rates ticking on everything). That is the root of the problem. Achieving these profits is the point of conflict.

In early capitalistic societies, economic growth is easier because of untapped resources but once the growth of the economic pie slows down, environmental exploitation becomes societal explotation. Previously the point of conflict was capitalists, externalizing cost onto nature (waste products, side effects), today, it is them externalizing operational cost onto the public, and all this in pursuit of that sweet profit margin. Marxs take is, as i understood it, that this profit margin is physically bound to shrink when the remaining space for cost externalization shrinks too, because free markets eventually propagate the lower product prices.
by usrusr | 2026-01-31 11:50:32+00:00
Pretty much what has long been my dream "make the world better" product (long as in from pre-genAI days), only that this one happens in image space: take an architectural model, look at the surface material specifications, analyze it for where rainwater would run down etc and generate weathering texture, how would this look when it's not new anymore.

Because as I see it, a lot of aesthetic decisions in architecture, pretty much anything that goes in the direction of minimalism, is just putting "newness" in the center of perception. And thus absence of "newness" when it stops being new. All these clear geometric shapes? They look awesome at the opening ceremony, but two years down the line they are like magnifying glasses for uneven changes in color and the like. Whereas for a more playful surface full of ornaments, those same years would be hardly more than a blink and they can age gracefully, on the aesthetic level (and on the technical level, required maintenance intervals are much longer anyways). Architects who claim to care for sustainability should demonstrate that they consider how the building will look like later in life.