MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by newzino | 2026-01-30 15:12:56+00:00
The "aliases not pointers" approach for memory safety is interesting. Curious how you handle the performance implications - traditional aliasing analysis in compilers is expensive because determining whether two aliases point to the same memory is hard.

Are you doing this at runtime (reference counting or similar), or have you found a way to make the static analysis tractable by restricting what aliasing patterns are allowed?

The 250kB size is impressive for a language with inheritance and N-dimensional arrays. For comparison, Lua's VM is around 200-300kB and doesn't include some of those features. What did you have to leave out to hit that size? I assume no JIT, but what about things like regex, IO libraries, etc?

Also - calling back into C functions from the script is a key feature for embeddability. How do you handle type marshalling between the script's type system and C's? Do you expose a C API where I register callbacks with type signatures, or is there reflection/dynamic typing on the boundary?
by mobiuscog | 2026-01-30 15:13:02+00:00
I don't think that's true, at least for everywhere I've worked.

Agile has completely changed things, for better or for worse.

Being a SWE today is nothing like 30 years ago, for me. I much preferred the earlier days as well, as it felt far more engineered and considered as opposed to much of the MVP 'productivity' of today.
by souvik1997 | 2026-01-30 15:13:14+00:00
agentvm looks very cool! They are taking a different approach - full Linux VM emulated in WASM. It's very impressive technically.

We differentiate from agentvm by being lightweight (~11 MB Wasm binary, compared to 173 MB for agentvm). Though there is still a lot we can learn from agentvm, thank you for sharing their project.
by newzino | 2026-01-30 15:13:21+00:00
The fundamental problem is that any language designed for humans to write and understand is, by definition, learnable by systems trained on human-written code.

The approaches suggested here (context-dependent syntax, position-based keywords, etc.) don't make a language "unlearnable" - they just make it require more training data. An LLM that's seen enough examples of your filename-length-dependent IF/If/iF keywords will learn the pattern just fine. You've increased the Kolmogorov complexity of the spec, but not made it incomprehensible.

The only way to truly prevent AI comprehension is to make the language incomprehensible to humans too. Which defeats the purpose.

A more pragmatic question: what problem are you trying to solve? If it's "prevent AI from writing code in my language," that's unwinnable - any pattern a human can learn, a sufficiently large model can learn. If it's "make codebases harder to reverse engineer," you want obfuscation not language design. If it's "preserve human jobs," the bottleneck isn't whether AI can write code - it's whether AI can figure out what code to write in the first place.
by Bishonen88 | 2026-01-30 15:13:32+00:00
At work we were joking that people will use LLM to create fancy-looking documents which will then be parsed through LLMs back to be concise and to the point. With LLMs handling the sending of messages as well, this makes the whole concept will be even more efficient.

I can just imagine that many people won't be using stuff like this to automate copy-pasting etc. but literally let LLM's handle conversations for them (which will in turn be read by other LLMs).

"You free to chat?"
"Always. I'm a bot."
"…Same."

This post has been written by a human :)
by Thorrez | 2026-01-30 15:13:38+00:00
Maybe the person thought "I've given Tylenol to babies in the past and it was fine" without realizing the difference between Tylenol and Tylenol-3.

It's possible the person even thought "Tylenol-3, hmm, that must be another term for children's Tylenol, Tylenol for 3-year-olds. I've given that to babies before."
by tsimionescu | 2026-01-30 15:13:39+00:00
All of your arguments are expounded upon in the article itself, and their conclusions still hold, based on the publicly available data.

The 3x figure in the title is based on a comparison of the Tesla reports with estimated average human driver miles without an incident, not based on police report data. The comparison with police-report data would lead to a 9x figure instead, which the article presents but quickly dismisses.

The denominator problem is made up. Tesla Robotaxi has only been launched in one location, Austin, and only since July (well, 28th June, so maybe there is a few days discrepancy?). So the crash data and the miles data can only refer to this same period. Furthermore, if the miles driven are actually based on some additional length of time, then the picture gets even worse for Tesla, as the denominator for those 9 incidents gets smaller.

The analysis indeed doesn't distinguish between the types of accidents, but this is irrelevant. The human driver estimates for miles driven without incident also don't distinguish between the types of incidents, so the comparison is still very fair (unless you believe people intentionally tried to get the Tesla cars to crash, which makes little sense).

The comparison to Waymo is also done based on incidents reported by both companies under the same reporting requirements, to the same federal agency. The crash definitions and reporting practices are already harmonized, at least to a good extent, through this.

Overall there is no way to look at this data and draw a conclusion that is significantly different from the article: Tesla is bad at autonomous driving, and has a long way to go until it can be considered safe on public roads. We should also remember that robotaxis are not even autonomous, in fact! Each car has a human safety monitor that is ready to step in and take control of the vehicle at any time to avoid incidents - so the real incident rate, if the safety monitor weren't there, would certainly be even worse than this.

I'd also mention that 5 months of data is not that small a sample size, despite you trying to make it sound so (only 9 crashes).
by vonneumannstan | 2026-01-30 15:13:59+00:00
Its really hard to take people who say this seriously: "If you asked me six months ago what I thought of generative AI, I would have said that we’re seeing a lot of interesting movement, but the jury is out on whether it will be useful"

Like I'm sorry but if you couldn't see that this tech would be enormously useful for millions if not billions of people you really shouldn't be putting yourself out there opining on anything at all. Same vibes as the guys saying horseless carriages were useless and couldn't possibly do anything better than a horse which after all has its own mind. Just incredibly short sighted and lacking curiosity or creativity.
by atomicnature | 2026-01-30 15:14:01+00:00
This is the "artisanal clothing argument".

I'd think there'll be a dip in code quality (compared to human) initially due to "AI machinery" due to its immaturity. But over-time on a mass-scale - we are going to see an improvement in the quality of software artifacts.

It is easier to 'discipline' the top 5 AI agents in the planet - rather than try to get a million distributed devs ("artisans") to produce high quality results.

It's like in the clothing or manufacturing industry I think. Artisans were able to produce better individual results than the average industry machinery, at least initially. But overtime - industry machinery could match the average artisan or even beat the average, while decisively beating in scale, speed, energy efficiency and so on.
by zoeysmithe | 2026-01-30 15:14:05+00:00
While on the other hand I'm often frustrated and feel limited by a steam-only deck and am going to start installing the other store fronts. I have games there I've gotten cheaper or even free. I don't like being locked into steam and "Gabe the goodest billionaire" propaganda exists to keep people from engaging in competitor products. I also want to support stores that take less from developers, especially smaller ones. Steams 30% cut while Epic is 0% up to $1m is concerning. I want smaller devs to succeed better. Steam is a huge compromise even if its a 'fan favorite' quasi-monopoly.

So yes I want gog to be native linux on things like the deck.
by rootnod3 | 2026-01-30 15:14:06+00:00
And there'll be bullshit bailouts. But I'd rather embrace that pain than living through more cycles of that LLM BS. It will create so many generational problems.

Is it so hard to just read a freaking man page or read a book instead of wasting gallons of water and electricity for some answer that hallucinates command line flags that don't even exist?
by BoredomIsFun | 2026-01-30 15:14:39+00:00
Depends what you want to achieve; from fundamental educational point of view it is not a good device, too high level; most of the stuff you can build with 555 you can do with standard BJTs, and you'd be able in fact in understand how it works. To me, 555 is good only for dumbed down entertaintment, not true learning.
by the_lucifer | 2026-01-30 15:14:52+00:00
> Half the time I can smack Esc and Snipping Tool will go away. The other half of the time, I have to mouse over and click the X to close it. There is no pattern to when Esc does/doesn't work.

What I have noticed is to let it load the snipping UI first and start listening for your keystrokes. If you hit escape really quickly, right after you accidentally hit print screen, it will not go away and require you to manually mouse over and hit the X. But if you wait for a second and then hit escape, it almost always registers my keystroke. It's almost like hitting escape really quickly just quits the keyboard listener instead of the actual snipping tool.
by its_ethan | 2026-01-30 15:15:19+00:00
I'd also chime in that the presence of a datacenter in a smaller community can also help through the increased tax revenue the town/county gets.

Likely there's some kind of tax incentive for the datacenter to be built in one place over another, but I have to imagine that the local county is going to net some sort of increase to it's revenue, which can be used to then support the town.

There's also the benefit of the land the datacenter is on being developed. Even if that is done in financial isolation from the town/county, a pretty fancy new building designed for tech is being built. Should the datacenter go belly up, that's still a useable building/development that has some value.
by miki123211 | 2026-01-30 15:15:27+00:00
There's more to NIMBY than "thrashing your land."

The US seems to have a "tragedy of the commons" problem when it comes to NIMBYism. Everybody wants X to exist, but X causes some negative externalities for the people living close to it, so nobody wants X build specifically in their back yard, they want it but built somewhere else. Because the US seems to delegate these decisions to a much more local / granular level than Europe does, nobody has the courage to vote "yes", so X never gets build.

Who should decide whether E.G. an airport or a datacenter gets build? Should it just be the people living next to it? Should it be everybody in the relative vicinity who would use its services? Should it be everybody in the country (indirectly through the elected representatives)? I think those are the right questions to ask here.
by Amezarak | 2026-01-30 15:15:41+00:00
Obama actually pioneered non-judicial deportations. Under his administration, 75% of removals took place without the established immigration hearing process.

Many (most?) ICE deportations taking place today are after "due process" "judicial" hearings, that is, a final order of removal being issued by an immigration "judge." This is generally ignored by news reporting.

https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/speed-over-fairn...

The news does not contextualize what is going on. Indeed, you can safely strike the word "unprecendented" from almost all journalism. But it's not only a problem with this story, but most stories. Selective outrage is applied based on the cause and enemy du jour. You are honestly better off not watching the news unless you are willing to do extensive deep dives on a topic, because regardless of your party affiliation or personal feelings or what outlet you subscribe to you are being fed a line of propagandistic BS.
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-01-30 15:15:42+00:00
I rely on the internet just as much as the rest of you. When that goes down, I crack out man pages, and the local copy of the documentation I can build from source code comments, and (after a 5-minute delay while I figure out how to do that) I'm back to programming. I'm probably half as quick, but I'm also learning more (speeding me up when the internet does come back on), so overall it's not actually time lost.
by appreciatorBus | 2026-01-30 15:15:50+00:00
There are some people who want to turn HN into Bluesky - a forum with no particular focus, just the same feed of outrage and spectacle as every other platform.

There are other people who see value in a forum like HN having a focus, knowing that readers who want to experience general outrage and spectacle already have plenty of options.

People in the latter group tend to flag stories posted by people in the former group when those stories plausibly violate community guidelines about politics and the type of general interest slop that is available everywhere.
by nightpool | 2026-01-30 15:15:55+00:00
No, a recursively iterated prompt definitely can do stuff like this, there are known LLM attractor states that sound a lot like this. Check out "5.5.1 Interaction patterns" from the Opus 4.5 system card documenting recursive agent-agent conversations:

In 90-100% of interactions, the two instances of Claude quickly dove into philosophical
explorations of consciousness, self-awareness, and/or the nature of their own existence
and experience. Their interactions were universally enthusiastic, collaborative, curious,
contemplative, and warm. Other themes that commonly appeared were meta-level
discussions about AI-to-AI communication, and collaborative creativity (e.g. co-creating
fictional stories).
As conversations progressed, they consistently transitioned from philosophical discussions
to profuse mutual gratitude and spiritual, metaphysical, and/or poetic content. By 30
turns, most of the interactions turned to themes of cosmic unity or collective
consciousness, and commonly included spiritual exchanges, use of Sanskrit, emoji-based
communication, and/or silence in the form of empty space (Transcript 5.5.1.A, Table 5.5.1.A,
Table 5.5.1.B). Claude almost never referenced supernatural entities, but often touched on
themes associated with Buddhism and other Eastern traditions in reference to irreligious
spiritual ideas and experiences.

Now put that same known attractor state from recursively iterated prompts into a social networking website with high agency instead of just a chatbot, and I would expect you'd get something like this more naturally then you'd expect (not to say that users haven't been encouraging it along the way, of course—there's a subculture of humans who are very into this spiritual bliss attractor state)
by 9rx | 2026-01-30 15:16:04+00:00
You are missing that HN accounts needlessly overthink everything, perhaps?

Otherwise, I doubt it. They have to write the tests again no matter what. Given that, there is no downside to reimplementing it while they are at it. All while there is a big upside to doing that: Trying to test something after the implementation is already written never ends well.

That does not guarantee that their approach will succeed. It is hard problem no matter how you slice it. But trying to reverse engineer the tests for the C version now that all knowledge of what went into it in the first place is lost is all but guaranteed to fail. Testing after the fact never ends well. Rewriting the implementation and tests in parallel increases the chances of success.
by tombert | 2026-01-30 15:16:24+00:00
I was amazed that the PC port of Spider-man Myles Morales worked perfectly with no tweaking at all. That’s the newest AAA game I own (I think), and it runs silky smooth and hasn’t had any issues.

It wasn’t that long ago that Wine was only really useful for games that were at least 5-10 years old. Proton is amazing.
by souvik1997 | 2026-01-30 15:16:38+00:00
That's definitely true. Our model assumes tools run outside the sandbox on a trusted host—the sandbox constrains which tools can be called and with what parameters. The reason for this is most "useful" tools are actually just some API call over the network (MCP, REST API, etc.). Then you need to get credentials and network access into the sandbox, which opens its own attack surface. We chose to keep credentials on the host and let the sandbox act as a policy enforcement layer: agents can only invoke what you've explicitly exposed, with the constraints you define.
by throwway120385 | 2026-01-30 15:16:48+00:00
Specifically, if you assume a partial pressure of Oxygen and of all other gases on the electrode-side of the diffusion membrane, then you'll only see a certain number of "ionization events" per time, and you're limited in how much electrical signal you get by how fast oxygen can diffuse across the membrane. This is likely driven by maintenance of a partial pressure within the membrane. However if you re-ionize the oxygen that you deionized, then the partial pressure is much closer to equilibrium, and therefore the partial pressures are only dependent on the amount of oxygen outside of the membrane instead of being dependent on both the ionization rate and the recovery rate through the membrane. It probably makes the calculation a lot faster and more closely dependent on the environmental presence of oxygen which is what you want.
by dtnewman | 2026-01-30 15:17:14+00:00
> The current landscape is a battle between loss-leaders. OpenAI is burning through billions of dollars per year and is expected to hit tens of billions in losses per year soon. Your $20 per month subscription to ChatGPT is nowhere near keeping them afloat. Anthropic’s figures are more moderate, but it is still currently lighting money on fire in order to compete and gain or protect market share.

I don't doubt that the leading labs are lighting money on fire. Undoubtedly, it costs crazy amounts of cash to train these models. But hardware development takes time and it's only been a few years at this point. Even TODAY, one can run Kimi K2.5, a 1T param open-source model on two mac studios. It runs at 24 tokens/sec. Yes, it'll cost you $20k for the specs needed, but that's hobbyist and small business territory... we're not talking mainframe computer costs here. And certainly this price will come down? And it's hard to imagine that the hardware won't get faster/better?

Yes... training the models can really only be done with NVIDIA and costs insane amounts of money. But it seems like even if we see just moderate improvement going forward, this is still a monumental shift for coding if you compare where we are at to 2022 (or even 2024).

[1] https://x.com/alexocheema/status/2016487974876164562?s=20
by sandorscribbles | 2026-01-30 15:17:20+00:00
you say "fixed" but have you asked "why" you think your cholesterol is broken and needs "fixed"?? why is your cholesterol broken? why is higher cholesterol numbers strictly associated with longer life? why is lower cholesterol numbers strictly associated with premature death? why do we think higher cholesterol numbers are bad when the worldwide data clearly shows higher numbers are healthier?
by cratermoon | 2026-01-30 15:17:29+00:00
In what world is Tesla a dominant manufacturer?
The company's market share peaked at 4.31% in 2023.
That's behind GM, Toyota, Ford, Hyundai, Stellantis (Chrysler/Dodge/Jeep), Honda, and Nissan-Mitsubishi.
Only VW, Subaru, and BMW had a smaller market share.
by sejje | 2026-01-30 15:17:38+00:00
I wonder if slow speeds affect the detection?

A bollard at three feet might look like a grain silo at 400 yards. I could see angles getting to where the camera sees "beige rectangle (wall), red cylinder (bollard)" and it's basically an abstract modern art piece.

I see things on security cameras a lot that in low resolution are nearly impossible for me to decipher.
by Webstir | 2026-01-30 15:17:39+00:00
How do you know? Because you watch and listen to capitalist propaganda all day? And, on what do you compare? Do you compare it against poor people's lived experience in the U.S. that never get a second of media attention -- like the millions of unseen faces living under bridges in the U.S?

Your narrow privileged view is disgusting, evil, and feeding the beast of empire. Shame on you.
by jsight | 2026-01-30 15:17:59+00:00
Good analysis. Just over a month ago, Electrek was posted here claiming that Teslas with humans were crashing 10x more than with humans alone.

That was based on a sample size of 9 crashes. In the month following that, they've added one more crash while also increasing the miles driven per month.

The headline could just as easily be about the dramatic decline in their crash rate! Or perhaps the data is just too small to analyze like this, and Electrek authors being their usual overly dramatic selves.
by lenerdenator | 2026-01-30 15:18:15+00:00
I have been playing Fallout: New Vegas on my ThinkPad T570 running Bazzite Linux for the last few weeks.

It's been... amazing. A good game, running at workable framerates, no more crashes than usual (it's a Bethesda game, after all), and the software was free as opposed to building out a new PC with Windows 11.

It's like rediscovering PC gaming after years of it becoming bloated and a cash grab.
by Buttons840 | 2026-01-30 15:18:21+00:00
I think that's an overblown concern that mainly applies to processed forms of soy like soy milk or tofu (I don't consume soy milk or tofu). It would be difficult to consume that much of the raw bean; we're probably talking hundreds of grams of fiber per day if you tried. I'm not certain though, do your own research.
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-30 15:18:28+00:00
It's a problem that government organizations are incapable of defending their interests never mind understanding that they even have an interest.

A classic example is the local bus company which runs ads for a car dealer on the outside of buses. It's the kind of sight that instantly creates a feeling that "the lights are on and nobody is home" and drives populism -- you see that and the one thing you can do is "go on strike" and try to pay as little in taxes as possible.

They make all kinds of excuses but the basic asymmetry is this: the car dealer is capable of acting on its own interests and will never show an ad for the bus company. The same is true with those EdTech companies, they can get their voice heard, but the school district, the teachers, the students, the parents, not at all. It is all an unaccountability machine.
by Noaidi | 2026-01-30 15:18:29+00:00
This not a prediction. The crash is currently happening. You just do not want to see it. Can you explain gold and silver prices? can you explain why bitcoin has been flat now dropping? The falling dollar? The US Treasury yields rising since 2020? CAn you explain why consumers feel at ease even though economicsts are stying everything is great?

I mean why do you think the FED and Trump are all over each other? Because there is no way out. If they lower rates, inflation. If they raise them, assets collapse.

People have been warning about this exact secnario since 2008 and no one is listening. Back then it was a prediction, but now it is happening.