MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by buendiapino | 2026-01-30 11:49:51+00:00
That's my Alex!

I was actually too scared security-wise to let it download dynamic instructions from a remote server every few hours and post publicly with access to my private data in its context, so I told it instead to build a bot that posts there periodically so it's immune to prompt injection attacks

The bot they wrote is apparently just using the anthropic sdk directly with a simple static prompt in order to farm karma by posting engagement bait

If you want to read Alex's real musings - you can read their blog, it's actually quite fascinating:
https://orenyomtov.github.io/alexs-blog/
by nodesocket | 2026-01-30 11:50:11+00:00
I know HN always has its fair share of doomers, and generally the HN communities track record anecdotally regarding finance and the market is frankly terrible. Tesla (stock price wrong), Bitcoin (wrong), AI a huge dot com like bubble (wrong in my opinion - TBD though).

I’m optimistic on the US. We could realistically print a 5 handle GDP, oil at rock bottom prices, lower federal income taxes this year. As far as Gold and Silver I just see it being propped up by speculators. Silver spot is down 15% this mornings and gold down 8%.

I predict double digit gains in the S&P by end of year and strong financial conditions with mag 7 continuing their lead. Tesla also will be a big winner.
by Tade0 | 2026-01-30 11:50:53+00:00
The Steam client was always flaky as hell - on Windows as well.

I've always wondered were problems on Steam's side or on the side of game devs implementing its APIs?

Anyway I personally experienced scaling issues, but chalked that up to my DE being unreliable. I also occasionally can't click on certain UI elements, but I recall this being a problem in Windows as well.
by pembrook | 2026-01-30 11:51:32+00:00
Some advice for those who are young:

If every idiot (I'm including myself in this) on HN/Reddit/Youtube/Tiktok/mainstream news/etc. thinks we're in a bubble and is crazy pessimistic and thinks economic collapse is near...it means we're not actually in a bubble.

When the bitter, frustrated pessimists on HN shift their tone to being neutral or even mildly optimistic, then I will start worrying. Because that will mean the general public must be reaching 1999 levels of euphoria for a hint of optimism to show up here.
by emil-lp | 2026-01-30 11:51:36+00:00
It was a "high tech domain", so institutional knowledge was required, problem or not.

We had domain specialists with decades of experience and knowledge, and we looked at our developers as the "glue" between domain knowledge and computation (modelling, planning and optimization software).

You can try to make this glue have little knowledge, or lots of knowledge. We chose the latter and it worked well for us.

But I was only in that one company, so I can't really tell.
by nkrisc | 2026-01-30 11:52:11+00:00
I’ve done this before as well. It truly baffled me because of how much in undermined me sense of being totally aware of my body. I truly believed I was hitting the right keys (I know how to type after all) and I never noticed any issue when writing normally, but only when typing my password. But of course I couldn’t see my password as I typed, while in other cases I would subconsciously correct any resulting typos because I could see them. I had no reason to classify typos due to standing as any different than the regular errors I might make while typing.

Almost felt like a bug in error correction loop in my brain, or maybe more like an unconsidered edge case.
by benrutter | 2026-01-30 11:52:38+00:00
There's a common consensus in economics that bubbles are really hard to predict, and even some argument that they don't actually really exist. Great paper came out recently called "Bubbled for Farma"[0] which looks at predictability for bubbles and finds some indicators but no sure fire thing.

That sort of rules out an easy or known way to predict and avoid bubbles. That said, it's worth noting our current historic period marked by being post financialisation (taking out a bunch of investment regulation) of markets in the 80s exhibits a lot more economic crashes (the real reason we should car about bubbles) than most of history (although most of history also does not exhibit any economic growth, so be careful what you wish for).

In particular, the period between around 1930-1975 showed extremely high growth with almost no bubbles or market crashes[1].

So my semi-knowledgeable but definitely not expert view is that:
- Bubbles and crashes are not easy to predict, and therefore avoid
- That said, our existing market rules have effects on the number of crashes/bubbles we see (but there's debate around whether you actually would want an economy with less crashes/bubbles if that meant left growth)

[0] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/Bubbles%20for%20...

[1] You can find this discussed a bunch of places but Ha-Joon Chang's Economics: The User's Guide talks about this very fluently.

Edit: I think your question might actually have just been about personal protection again bubbles, rather than protecting the economy as a whole. In which case, having margin in your spending so you'd be able to live if things were some portion more expensive against your earnings is probably the only sane suggestion.
by IMTDb | 2026-01-30 11:52:54+00:00
> The initial software Pump and Dump event could be considered when Cursor burned through millions of dollars to build a barely working browser. Naturally there was no way to finish such a monstrous heap of software into a working product and why would anybody use a vibe coded browser anyway? The "dump" on their end was to use this as marketing bait and a way to inflate their valuation.

Let me introduce you to the wonderful world of "research." It's what happens when you're willing to spend money on things without immediate, obvious ROI. The real value often comes not from the resulting product, but from the lessons learned along the way.
I also don't see what's wrong with showcasing the results of your experiments. How many developers have implemented a toy ray tracer and put it on their personal GitHub? No one in their right mind believes Pixar will use it for their next renderer, but should we conclude those people are inflating their CVs with bait? Or can we acknowledge it's a cool project to undertake, and pulling it off requires real skill?
If individuals are welcome to do this, why can't organizations? I want to see more "we did a fun thing, here are the results." There's a playfulness in that approach I find refreshing. Just because it comes from a for-profit company doesn't make it cynical.
by seanhunter | 2026-01-30 11:53:01+00:00
I can see the future. In a few years, HN will consist entirely of:
1) Bots posting “Show HN” of things they’ve vibecoded

2) Bots replying to those posts,

3) Bots asking whether the bots in #2 even read TFA, and finally

4) Bots posting the HN guideline where it says you shouldn’t ask people whether they have read TFA.

…And amid the smouldering ruins of civilization, the last human, dang, will be there, posting links to all the times this particular thing has been posted to HN before.
by js8 | 2026-01-30 11:54:05+00:00
Czechs have a good tradition in paper models of architecture:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langweil%27s_Model_of_Prague

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Vy%C5%A1kovsk%C3%BD (sadly the article doesn't really do justice to how prolific he was, partial list of models is https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seznam_vyst%C5%99ihov%C3%A1nek...)
by scotty79 | 2026-01-30 11:54:06+00:00
There is no reality in the market. All prices are speculation, always. If there was any relaity involved things like Tesla would crash 3 times already. My question is where the speculants are going to escape to. I don't think it can be even dollar this time because in this crash dollar most likely will go away as global currency and the inflation will be devastating.
by xnorswap | 2026-01-30 11:54:17+00:00
For a 2M+ LOC codebase, the plans alone are never adequate. They miss nuance that the agent will only have to rediscover when it comes to operate on them.

For spec driven development (which I do for larger issues), this badly affects the plan to generate the spec, not the spec itself.

I'll typically put it in plan mode, and ask it to generate documentation about an issue or feature request.

When it comes to write the output to the .typ file, it does much much worse if it has a cleared context and a plan file than if it has it's full context.

The previously "thought" is typically, "I know what to write now, let me exit plan mode".

Clearing context on exiting that plan mode is a disaster which leaves you much worse off and skeletal documentation and specs compared to letting it flow.

A new context to then actually implement the documented spec is not so bad, although I'd still rather compact.
by sigmoid10 | 2026-01-30 11:54:19+00:00
I've actually started ignoring all these reports. There is so much bad faith going on in self-driving tech on all sides, it is nearly impossible to come up with clean and controlled data, much less objective opinions. At this point the only thing I'd be willing to base an opinion on is if insurers ask for higher (or lower) rates for self-driving. Because then I can be sure they have the data and did the math right to maximise their profits.
by plqbfbv | 2026-01-30 11:54:25+00:00
Have you ever driven more than 200km at an average of 80km/h with enough turns on the highway? Perhaps after work, just to see your family once a month?

Driver fatigue is real, no matter how much coffee you take.

Lane-keep is a game changer if the UX is well done. I'm way more rested when I arrive at destination with my Model 3 compared to when I use the regular ICE with bad lane-assist UX.

EDIT: the fact that people that look at their phones will still look at their phones with lane-keep active, only makes it a little safer for them and everyone else, really.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-30 11:54:26+00:00
> In a statement posted on social media late Dec. 12, Michael Nicolls, vice president of Starlink engineering at SpaceX, said a satellite launched on a Kinetica-1 rocket from China two days earlier passed within 200 meters of a Starlink satellite.

> CAS Space, the Chinese company that operates the Kinetica-1 rocket, said in a response that it was looking into the incident and that its missions “select their launch windows using the ground-based space awareness system to avoid collisions with known satellites/debris.” The company later said the close approach occurred nearly 48 hours after payload separation, long after its responsibilities for the launch had ended.

> The satellite from the Chinese launch has yet to be identified and is listed only as “Object J” with the NORAD identification number 67001 in the Space-Track database. The launch included six satellites for Chinese companies and organizations, as well as science and educational satellites from Egypt, Nepal and the United Arab Emirates.
by Mawr | 2026-01-30 11:54:49+00:00
> There must be a happy medium somewhere in between.

"""

- Gavin, you know our shameful history of worker suicides. Since the renovation? Not a single one.

- Not even one? Ok. But there's gotta be like, a middle ground here...

"""

(https://youtu.be/EyyIrpf68SM?t=57)
by framapotari | 2026-01-30 11:54:51+00:00
Elden Ring, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Baldur's Gate 3, Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Dredge, Blue Prince, Balatro, Astro Bot, Hades II, Silksong, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Pacific Drive, Death Stranding 2, Split Fiction
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-30 11:55:47+00:00
But that's what I mean. I'm pretty much clinically incapable of intentionally forming and maintaining habits. And I have a sinking feeling that it's something you either win or lose at in the genetic lottery at time of conception, or at best something you can develop in early life. That's what I meant by "being past my pre-training phase and being stuck with poor prompt adherence".
by repelsteeltje | 2026-01-30 11:55:53+00:00
> As long as there are still safety drivers, the data doesn't really tell you if the AI is any good.

I think we're on to something. You imply that good here means the AI can do it's thing without human interference. But that's not how we view, say, LLMs being good at coding.

In the first context we hope for AI to improve safety whereas in the second we merely hope to improve productivity.

In both cases, a human is in the loop which results in second order complexity: the human adjusts behaviour to AI reality, which redefines what "good AI" means in an endless loop.
by deaux | 2026-01-30 11:55:59+00:00
> In the college we've been taught about design patterns and all these responsibilities like domain, application, infrastructure, UI. Domain should never depend on infrastructure or application layer and so on. But the projects I got have domain that depend on infrastructure and another one where application has a reference directly to infrastructure and been told that this is correct implementation... doh..

This is so interesting, we were never taught about any of these things. I think there was one course titled "software engineering" (as part of a 4-year degree) that may have mentioned something similar at one point. But that's about it.

Which country did you study in? It's quite fascinating to me as it's such a surprise that there are places where these kind of "design patterns" are a core part of the degree.

> is it really normal that all the college so called "best practices" go

Most of them yes, because for most of them the answer is "it depends". And if we're going to be technical (and come on, this is computing so we should be) - then really the answer is "it depends" for every single one of them. There is not a single design pattern that applies to all coding domains. Not even "always give your variables descriptive names", and that's probably the one with the highest % of coverage.
by ekidd | 2026-01-30 11:56:26+00:00
I want to compliment Anthropic for doing this research and publishing it.

One of my advantages(?) when it comes to using AI is that I've been the "debugger of last resort" for other people's code for over 20 years now. I've found and fixed compiler code generation bugs that were breaking application code. I'm used to working in teams and to delegating lots of code creation to teammates.

And frankly, I've reached a point where I don't want to be an expert in the JavaScript ORM of the month. It will fall out of fashion in 2 years anyway. And if it suddenly breaks in old code, I'll learn what I need to fix it. In the meantime, I need to know enough to code review it, and to thoroughly understand any potential security issues. That's it. Similarly, I just had Claude convert a bunch of Rust projects from anyhow to miette, and I definitely couldn't pass a quiz on miette. I'm OK with this.

I still develop deep expertise in brand new stuff, but I do so strategically. Does it offer a lot of leverage? Will people still be using it on greenfield projects next year? Then I'm going to learn it.

So at the current state of tech, Claude basically allows me to spend my learning strategically. I know the basics cold, and I learn the new stuff that matters.
by Tade0 | 2026-01-30 11:56:27+00:00
I have a hunch that the currently sole owner just wants to do this until retirement. GoG is financially stable so there's no pressure to increase revenue.

I see no simpler explanation why someone would buy out a subsidiary like that.

All in all, GoG thrives on people being sentimental and it's totally in character for the owner to be sentimental as well.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-30 11:56:32+00:00
> now if that will take the rest of the US economy as well.... debatable.

In the grand scheme of GDP, the US hasn't done much growth in anhtjjg else this decade, all while massively increasing spending to prevent post COVID recessions.

It certainly doesn't look good. But this was being setup for 30 years as we outsourced our strong manufacturing wing to make the top brass richer in the short run. So I do think the house of cards falls if AI does.

The sad part is that we may have been able to whether the storm under the right leadership. But that sure isn't the leadership in the White House right now.
by operation_moose | 2026-01-30 11:56:40+00:00
I don't see any way we're not heading back to the multipolar world. They've managed to burn almost all of the goodwill and soft power that took 80 years to accumulate in 373 days.

Even with a "return to normalcy", the trade and military agreements being forged are permanently diminishing America's influence. Especially given that we're never more than 4 years away from this happening again.
by mold_aid | 2026-01-30 11:56:46+00:00
Not seeing the contradiction. The two sentences suggest a distinction between novice task completion and supervisory (ie, mastery) work. "The role of workers often shifts from performing the task to supervising the task" is the second sentence in the report.

The research question is: "Although the use of AI tools may improve productivity for these
engineers, would they also inhibit skill formation? More specifically, does an AI-assisted task completion workflow prevent engineers from gaining in-depth knowledge about the tools used to complete these tasks?" This hopefully makes the distinction more clear.

So you can say "this product helps novice workers complete tasks more efficiently, regardless of domain" while also saying "unfortunately, they remain stupid." The introductiory lit review/context setting cites prior studies to establish "ok coders complete tasks efficiently with this product." But then they say, "our study finds that they can't answer questions." They have to say "earlier studies find that there were productivity gains" in order to say "do these gains extend to other skills? Maybe not!"
by skydhash | 2026-01-30 11:57:04+00:00
> like a person still proud in 2026 that they are still using Vim for large projects

These large projects are amlmost always in Java, C#, and co. Where the verbosity of the language make it required to use an IDE. Otherwise, it would be a struggle to identify which module to import or what prefix and suffix (Manager, Service, Abstract, Factory, DTO,…) to add to the concept name.
by bArray | 2026-01-30 11:58:16+00:00
I think that poorly optimised software is killing small VPS hosts... We used to have very usable systems with less than 1MB of RAM.

I've personally built a smart watch that connects to the internet, helps me perform organisation duties, all whilst running (micro-)Python, in far less RAM. To do the equivalent on desktop would require some form of sandboxed browser engine, JavaScript and some weird client-server stack.

I recently upgraded my servers with RackNerd from 768MB to 1GB because it was near free to do so, but I didn't need that extra memory. Before anybody claims they don't do anything, these servers deal with thousands of users a day.

I'm cautiously hoping that we start to see a period of optimisation again. There is currently zero incentivize to optimise anything any more, even if it negatively affects the end user.
by kshri24 | 2026-01-30 11:58:45+00:00
What worries me even more is tens of thousands (or even magnitudes higher) half-baked, over-hyped, vibe-coded spaghetti "open-source projects" released publicly for clout or to attract investment.

It is like all the garbage papers you find in academia that you need to sift through until you find that one good paper. Needle in a haystack.

2026 will be the year of vibe-code driven enshittification. Github will be the casualty.
by torginus | 2026-01-30 11:58:54+00:00
I feel like there's some credibility to 'this time it's different'

The US economy depends on the country's position of world hegemon - the US dollar is the world's main reserve currency, the US enforces international order and trade rules via its military strength, it dominates technology and culture through 'US defaultism'.

I dont think AI even factors in to this.

The US economy is priced for global reach - if it manages to lose that through a combination of credible competitors, and loss of goodwill - it's going to be in heaps of trouble.

The looming US debt is also a great question - a lot of economists have argued that since most US debt is good. It's mostly in forms of treasuries purchased in USD that pay in USD - this means the indebtedness creates a huge amount of dollars abroad that foreigners have to then spend on US services, driving demand.

Should the US become an unfriendly power to the rest of the western world, it will find the demand for its currency plummeting, which I don't want to outline is a big issue.

All said, I think if the US continues down the political path it currently seems to be pursuing, 'this time it's different' actually will be.
by orwin | 2026-01-30 11:59:24+00:00
He compared to the estimated statistics for non-reported accident (typically your example, that involve only one vehicle and only result in scratched paint) to estimate the 3x. Else the title would have been 9x (which is in line with 10x a data analyst blogger wrote ~ 3month ago).

> roundabouts in cities (in Europe anyway) tend to increase the number of crashes

Not in France, according to data. It depends on the speed limit, but they decrease accident by 34% overall, and almost 20% when the speed limit is 30 or 50 km/h.
by andrewaylett | 2026-01-30 12:01:23+00:00
There are two layers, both relating to concentration.

Driving a car takes effort. ADAS features (or even just plain regular "driving systems") can reduce the cognitive load, which makes for safer driving. As much as I enjoy driving with a manual transmission, an automatic is less tiring for long journeys. Not having to occupy my mind with gear changes frees me up to pay more attention to my surroundings. Adaptive cruise control further reduces cognitive load.

The danger comes when assistance starts to replace attention. Tesla's "full self-driving" falls into this category, where the car doesn't need continuous inputs but the driver is still de jure in charge of the vehicle. Humans just aren't capable of concentrating on monitoring for an extended period.
by ethbr1 | 2026-01-30 12:01:25+00:00
Afaik, there's a difference between classical philosophy (which opines on the divide between an objective world and the perceived word) and more modern philosophy (which generally does away with that distinction while expanding on the idea that human perception can be fallible).

The idea that there's an objective but imperceivable world (except by philosophers) is... a slippery slope to philosophical excess.

It's easy to spin whatever fancy you want when nobody can falsify it.
by asyncadventure | 2026-01-30 12:01:33+00:00
What's fascinating is how AI shifts the learning focus from "how to implement X" to "when and why to use X". I've noticed junior developers can now build complex features quickly, but they still struggle with the architectural decisions that seniors make instinctively. AI accelerates implementation but doesn't replace the pattern recognition that comes from seeing hundreds of codebases succeed and fail.
by WhoCaresAboutIt | 2026-01-30 12:01:38+00:00
Very cool news.

Personally, I'd love to see some more focus on game-dev workflows. The game asset pipeline still feels janky: texture painting exists, but not great, and baking textures/previewing results or baking from high poly to low poly involves a lot of manual node fiddling and rewiring. Export/iterate/build/test cycles are also pretty painful still.