MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rayiner | 2026-01-26 16:36:14+00:00
> The conclusion in this case is very simple: 86 billion has been taken in profits, with very limited capital investment.

What is the number for the capital investment? You’re comparing a number to words. That’s a type error.

> That's a bit more complicated, but we could at least start from the premise that had the water systems been public, that 86 billion could have been spent on capital investment without a single bond being issued

Not without knowing how much capital has actually been invested to date. Because you’d be have paid out interest and principal on that over 30 years out of that 86 billion.
by _whiteCaps_ | 2026-01-26 16:36:17+00:00
At my last job we had the power taken out by a backhoe. It was loaded onto a trailer and either the operator forgot to lower the bucket, or the driver drove away before he had time to lower it.

Regardless of whose fault it was, the end result was the bucket snagged the power lines going into the datacentre and caused an outage.
by bikenaga | 2026-01-26 16:36:34+00:00
Abstract: "The environs of other stellar systems may be directly probed by analyzing the cometary activity of interstellar objects. The recently discovered interstellar object 3I/ATLAS was the subject of an intensive worldwide follow-up campaign in its pre-perihelion approach. Now, 3I/ATLAS has begun its post-perihelion departure from the Solar System. In this letter, we report the first post-perihelion blue-sensitive integral-field unit spectroscopy of 3I/ATLAS using the Keck Cosmic Web Imager on November 16, 2025. We confirm previously reported CN, Fe, and Ni outgassing along with detections of carbon chain molecules C2 and C3. We calculate production rates for each species. We find Fe and Ni production rates of QFe=(9.55±3.96)×1025 atoms s−1, and QNi=(6.61±2.74)×1025 atoms s−1, resulting in a ratio of log(QNi/QFe)=−0.16±0.03, which matches Solar System comets well and continues the pre-perihelion trend of declining log(QNi/QFe) with rh. We investigate the radial distributions of these elemental species and find characteristic e-folding radii of 3880±39 km for Ni, 6053±68 km for CN, 4194±45 km for C2, and 3833±45 km for C3. Compared to pre-perihelion measurements, these radii have increased by a factor of ∼6.5--7. Our post-perihelion observations reveal that 3I/ATLAS continues to exhibit cometary behavior broadly consistent with Solar System comets."
by bawolff | 2026-01-26 16:36:40+00:00
> So, the way it's different is that it's you, in a way it can't be when you read a novel, or look at a painting.

I mean, i would just disagree with that. I think its the same.

> I enjoy watching people play video games and playing video games myself, and these are distinct activities, you shouldn't mistake how you feel about other people's play for how you would feel as a player. Some exercises, many of them at GDC are like the 100m sprint, you would need a lot of training to get even half as good as the people you've watched and maybe it's not worth it.

The videos i was talking about are not of people playing video games, its of people analyzing artistic choices in video games. Which is a very different thing (and of course also very different from actually playing them)
by CamouflagedKiwi | 2026-01-26 16:36:46+00:00
I've done this before, using Google's semi-standard ByteStream messages. It works, but is a bit of work, and I really don't love how you're building on top of a protocol that completely solves streaming contents of arbitrary size, which gRPC drops, and you have to reinvent again in the application layer.

I know it's not easy to solve given how protobuf-centric it is, but this is the worst piece of gRPC for me. The 4MB limit is a terrible size, it's big enough to rarely hit in test cases but small enough it can hit you in production. If you control it all you can just lift that number to something arbitrarily big to avoid most things just failing (although you probably don't want to use that as an actual solution for streaming files of any size), but in practice a lot of "serious" setups end up contorting themselves remarkably to try to avoid that limit.
by kaydub | 2026-01-26 16:37:01+00:00
How were you "vibe coding" 2 years ago?

There's been such a massive leap in capabilities since claude code came out, which was middle/end of 2025.

2 years ago I MAYBE used an LLM to take unstructured data and give me a json object of a specific structure. Only about 1 year ago did I start using llms for ANY type of coding and I would generally use snippets, not whole codebases. It wasn't until September when I started really leveraging the LLM for coding.
by elevatortrim | 2026-01-26 16:37:21+00:00
What I do not understand is why is it that software engineers are so afraid? I have heard from so many other white collar people that AI already changed their job entirely (technical salesmen, translators, designers, government researchers, the list goes on), yet it is the software engineers that I hear the most noise from.

Software engineering is one of the most intellectually demanding categories of white collar work. I’m not saying it is invincible, but I do not see why SWEs should worry more.
by vidarh | 2026-01-26 16:37:21+00:00
You should worry about code quality, but you should also worry about the return on investment.

That includes understanding risk management and knowing what the risks and costs are of failures vs. the costs of delivering higher quality.

Engineering is about making the right tradeoffs given the constraints set, not about building the best possible product separate from the constraints.

Sometimes those constraints requires extreme quality, because it includes things like "this should never, ever fail", but most of the time it does not.
by rich_sasha | 2026-01-26 16:38:21+00:00
They weren't great before LLMs either.

Also, it seems from the outside like a dysfunctional organisation, or at least with incentives heavily misaligned with their users. Replace LLMs with a bunch of 10x engineers and it will still be bad in an environment like this.

So not sure how much to blame the LLMs - or in fact how much MS is really using them. Poor souls have to use MS AI tools, I almost feel sorry for them.
by yawnxyz | 2026-01-26 16:38:22+00:00
I like to use AI to write code for me, but I like to take it one step at a time, looking at what it puts out and thinking about if it puts out what I want it to put out.

As a PRODUCT person, it writes code 100x faster than I can, and I treat anything it writes as a "throwaway" prototype. I've never been able to treat my own code as throwaway, because I can't just throw away multiple weeks of work.

It doesn't aid in my learning to code, but it does aid in me putting out much better, much more polished work that I'm excited to use.
Show HN: Recal – Turn meetings and Slack threads into actionable tasks
by markbuilds | 2026-01-26 16:38:43+00:00
Hi HN, I’m building Recal to help teams avoid losing decisions and follow-ups after meetings and Slack discussions.

It automatically summarizes conversations, extracts action items, and lets you chat with your past meetings and messages to find context later.

I started this after my own team kept missing things that were “said in a meeting” or buried in long Slack threads.

I’d really appreciate feedback on whether this solves a real problem for you, and what feels missing or confusing.
by taeric | 2026-01-26 16:38:48+00:00
I would focus a little differently from the folks talking about the technological copies that are possible. Copying people and things is just somewhat natural for people to do. And yes, you can somewhat copy a performance that you see.

But that is far far harder to judge your progress and ability on compared to copying a text over and seeing if you can keep the same structure and rhythm. The proliferation of cameras have changed this some, of course. But it used to be a thing that you would try and rewrite from memory some poems that you were studying for school.

Oddly, what is really killing this, I think, is the new idea that so much in life should be permanent. Notebooks are where you think outloud and you should expect most of your thoughts to be transient and not worry about holding on to them. Computers completely break that with people wanting a permanent and indexed collection of all of their thoughts.
by fragmede | 2026-01-26 16:39:09+00:00
That is a great point. Airdrop on my iphone currently has this weird bug where if I try and airdrop directly to a target (eg my laptop) it doesn't work, but if I go into airdrop and select the exact same target, works fine. This is even weirder because it's followed me between phones (I restored from icloud backup). Yet, yeah, my airpods are fine at switching.
by jonas21 | 2026-01-26 16:39:28+00:00
If you click through to the study that the Guardian based this article on [1], it looks like it was done by an SEO firm, by a Content Marketing Manager. Kind of ironic, given that it's about the quality of cited sources.

[1] https://seranking.com/blog/health-ai-overviews-youtube-vs-me...
by GMoromisato | 2026-01-26 16:39:32+00:00
I consult on clinical trials at various drug companies, and I'm broadly sympathetic to Clinical Trial Abundance Project that they talk about.

I think the authors understand that there is no silver bullet here. There is no single obstacle to better drug development--if there were, then one or more drug companies would have discovered it (for more profit) and the rest would have copied.

Of the trials I've been involved in, the most common reasons for not moving faster are:

1. Patient enrollment: For all the common diseases, there are multiple companies testing new drugs, all competing for patients. For rare diseases, the patient population is so small that, again, it is hard to recruit.

2. Molecule development: Many (most?) new drugs being tested are "me-too" drugs that are tweaks of existing, successful drugs. If it cost $100 million to test a new drug, you want to maximize your chances of success, so you are not likely to take risks. Of course, taking more risks also means risking patient lives, so no one is in a hurry to change too quickly.

My particular focus is around the information tech used to analyze the data in the trial. There are a lot of inefficiencies right now, mostly due to primitive, but well-tested, systems. You'd be surprised (or maybe not) at how much clinical trial data gets sent around in random Excel worksheets.
by augusteo | 2026-01-26 16:39:41+00:00
Building on sluongng's point about schema evolution: we ended up in a weird middle ground on a project where we used gRPC for metadata and presigned S3 URLs for the actual bytes.

The metadata schema changed constantly (new compression formats, different checksum algorithms, retry policies). Having protobufs for that was genuinely useful. But trying to pipe multi-gigabyte files through gRPC streams was painful. Memory pressure, connection timeouts on slow clients, debugging visibility was terrible.

S3 presigned URLs are the boring answer, but they work. Your object storage handles the hard parts (resumability, CDN integration, the actual bytes), and your gRPC service handles the interesting parts (authentication, metadata, business logic).
by vidarh | 2026-01-26 16:39:42+00:00
I had to do that too, in Norway. Writing C++ code with pen and paper and being told even trivial syntax errors like missing semicolons would be penalised was not fun.

This was 30 years ago, though - no idea what it is like now. It didn't feel very meaningful even then.

But there's a vast chasm between that and letting people use AI in an exam setting. Some middle ground would be nice.
by pandaman | 2026-01-26 16:39:49+00:00
>It's not credible to claim that Good got in her car that day with the intent to run over ICE and cause a mass casualty event.

It's not a claim anyone in this thread has made though. The claim I find ridiculous is "Good never touches the officer with her car."

>Whether or not her car made contact with her killer, no reasonable person would assume she had any desire to run him over.

You are welcome not to discuss it then, I, however, see someone claiming there was no contact in face of the contact shown on video and deduct that the person is either delusional or hopes to gaslight me somehow.
by acessoproibido | 2026-01-26 16:40:15+00:00
I don't see why you can't use your approach of writing one function at a time, making it work in the context and then moving on with AI.
Sure you can't tell it to do all that in one step but personally I really like not dealing with the boilerplate stuff and worrying more about the context and how to use my existing functions in different places
by dev1ycan | 2026-01-26 16:40:44+00:00
I vibe coded for a while (about a year) it was just so terrible for my ability to do anything, it started becoming recurring that I couldn't control my timelines because I would get into a loop where I would keep asking AI to "fix" things I didn't actually understand and had no mental capacity to actually read 50k lines of LLM generated code compared to if I had done it from scratch so I would keep and keep going.

Or how I would start spamming SQL scripts and randomly at some point nuke all my work (happened more than once)... luckily at least I had backups regularly but... yeah.

I'm sorry but no, LLMs can't replace software engineers.
by everdrive | 2026-01-26 16:41:23+00:00
>to set your social media visibility to public between the time when you apply for the visa and the time when a decision is made on it.

That's absolutely crazy, thanks for sharing. We're entering a pretty dark time here. It's easy to imagine that authorities won't really care if you don't have social media and will just deny you out of convenience. If this gets even more entrenched, then social media gets closer to being a requirement. (and a requirement that is quite a personal detriment)
by nonethewiser | 2026-01-26 16:42:22+00:00
The hardest part of coding has never been coding. It's been translating new business requirements into a specific implementation plan that works. Understanding what needs to be done, how things are currently working, and how to go from A to B.

You can't dispense with yourself in those scenarios. You have to read, think, investigate, break things down into smaller problems. But I employ LLM's to help with that all the time.

Granted, that's not vibe coding at all. So I guess we are pretty much in agreement up to this point. Except I still think LLMs speed up this process significantly, and the models and tools are only going to get better.

Also, there are a lot of developers that are just handed the implementation plan.
by saghm | 2026-01-26 16:42:26+00:00
I'm not sure this is Goodhart's law, but I think you're right that the data doesn't really seem to support the claim, as well as with Nixon. My understanding is that the reason Nixon ended up resigning is that the Republicans in Congress told him that there would be enough votes to convict him after being impeached, so it didn't make much sense to stick around and get permanently stained as the only president ever to be forcibly removed from office after being impeached rather than leaving on his own terms and at least being able to claim innocence.
by goostavos | 2026-01-26 16:42:52+00:00
I had my first interview last week where I finally saw this in the wild. It was a student applying for an internship. It was the strangest interview. They had excellent textbook knowledge. They could tell you the space and time complexities of any data structure, but they couldn't explain anything about code they'd written or how it worked. After many painful and confusing minutes of trying to get them to explain, like, literally anything about how this thing on their resume worked, they finally shrugged and said that "GenAI did most of it."

It was a bizarre disconnect having someone be both highly educated and yet crippled by not doing.
by codeflo | 2026-01-26 16:43:01+00:00
In my experience, there seems to be a limitless supply of newly crowned "AI shamans" sprouting from the deepest corners of LinkedIn. All of them make the laughable claim that hallucinations can be fixed by prompting. And of course it's only their prompt that works -- don't listen to the other shamans, those are charlatans.

If you disagree with them by explaining how LLMs actually work, you get two or three screenfuls of text in response, invariably starting with "That's a great point! You're correct to point out that..."

Avoid those people if you want to keep your sanity.
by toast0 | 2026-01-26 16:43:05+00:00
> In decades of using and managing many kinds of computers I have seen only a handful of dynamic libraries for whom security updates have been useful, e.g. OpenSSL.

> On the other hands, I have seen countless problems caused by updates of dynamic libraries that have broken various applications,

OpenSSL is a good example of both useful and problematic updates. The number of updates that fixed a critical security problem but needed application changes to work was pretty high.
by adanto6840 | 2026-01-26 16:43:06+00:00
Because the comment is just a copy/paste of the content at the URL at the top of the comment; which doesn’t add anything to the discussion, because it’s not discussion at all. It’s just a wall of text, it’s not clear to me why you’re posting it as a comment (vs linking to it), and simply regurgitating copy/pasted external information isn’t helpful or interesting.

Next time, write a sentence or two of context about what you’re going to link to — who wrote it and when, why it’s interesting, and how/why it’s relevant to the topic at hand.

There’s almost never a need to copy/paste wholesale external content into an HN comment. Especially true when said content is literally linkable, and actually linked, from your comment!
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-26 16:43:10+00:00
The old classic mantra is "work smarter, not harder". LLMs are perfect for "work harder". They can produce bulk numbers of lines. They can help you brute force a problem space with more lines of code.

We expect the spec writing and prompt management to cover the "work smarter" bases, but part of the work smarter "loop" is hitting those points where "work harder" is about to happen, where you know you could solve a problem with 100s or 1000s of lines of code, pausing for a bit, and finding the smarter path/the shortcut/the better abstraction.

I've yet to see an "agentic loop" that works half as well as my well trained "work smarter loop" and my very human reaction to those points in time of "yeah, I simply don't want to work harder here and I don't think I need hundreds more lines of code to handle this thing, there has to be something smarter I can do".

In my opinion, the "best" PRs delete as much or more code than they add. In the cleanest LLM created PRs I've never seen an LLM propose a true removal that wasn't just "this code wasn't working according to the tests so I deleted the tests and the code" level mistakes.
by kruador | 2026-01-26 16:43:10+00:00
I would add a further advantage of plain HTTP (REST) compared to gRPC. Splitting the response into blocks and having the client request the next block, as in the gRPC solution, causes round-trip delays. The server can't send the second block of data until the client requests it, so the server is essentially idle until the client has received all packets of the first block, parsed them and generated the next request.

In contrast, while HTTP/2 does impose framing of streams, that framing is done entirely server-side. If all one end has to send to the other is a single stream, it'll be DATA frame after DATA frame for the same stream. The client is not required to acknowledge anything. (At least, nothing above the TCP layer!)

It probably wasn't noticeable in this experiment as, if I'm reading it correctly, the server and client were on the same box, but if you were separated by any significant distance, plain HTTP should be noticeably faster.
Show HN: Dhi – 520x faster data validation for Python, 77x faster for TypeScript
by rachpradhan | 2026-01-26 16:43:18+00:00
Hi HN! I built dhi, a data validation library that uses Zig to compile to both native C (Python) and SIMD WASM (TypeScript).

Key points:
- Drop-in API compatibility with Pydantic (Python) and Zod (TypeScript)
- Python: 24.9M validations/sec (520x faster than Pydantic V2)
- TypeScript: up to 77x faster than Zod on invalid data
- 28KB WASM bundle, zero JS runtime overhead

I'd love feedback on the API surface, benchmarks, and real-world integration pain points. If you're curious, the repo has full benchmarks and examples.
by throw10920 | 2026-01-26 16:43:43+00:00
> Teaching how code works is more important than teaching how to code.

People learn by doing. There's a reason that "do the textbook problems" is somewhat of a meme in the math and science fields - because that's the way that you learn those things.

I've met someone who said that when he get a textbook, he starts by only doing the problems, and skipping the chapter content entirely. Only when he has significant trouble with the problems (i.e. he's stuck on a single one for several hours) does he read the chapter text.

He's one of the smartest people I know.

This is because you learn by doing the problems. In the software field, that means coding.

Telling yourself that you could code up a solution is very different than actually being able to write the code.

And writing the code is how you build fluency and understanding as to how computers actually work.

> I never did any meaningful amount of assembler programming. It was mostly no longer a relevant skill by the time I studied computer science (94-99). I built an interpreter for an imaginary CPU at some point using a functional programming language in my second year.

Same thing for assembly. Note that you built an interpreter for an imaginary CPU - not a real one, as that would have been a much harder challenge given that you didn't do any meaningful amount of assembly program and didn't understand low-level computer hardware very well.

Obviously, this isn't to say that information about how a system works can't be learned without practice - just that that's substantially harder and takes much more time (probably 3-10x), and I can guarantee you that those doing vibecoding are not putting in that extra time.
by spuz | 2026-01-26 16:43:50+00:00
I think this is a great idea. I wonder if it's technically possible to only unlock the apps when you have a certain other app (i.e. the Quran app) open for a given amount of time. Right now it just starts a 5 minute timer which means I can go and do something else but not actually spend time on the thing I want to practice.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-26 16:43:57+00:00
No, because proper QA/QC will be the bottleneck.... AI is ill-suited to test for fit/use. I built an ANSi terminal with AI assist (rust/wasm/canvas)... it literally took longer to get the scrollback feature working with keyboard and mousewheel interactions than it took to get the basic rendering correct. And there are still a few bugs in it.

In the end, you should not just skip QA/QC and fitness testing. Many things can fit a technical spec and still be absolutely horrible. With AI assisted developmnet, imo it's that much more important to get the UX right. I don't want 10x the apps if they're all half-implemented garbage that look like garbage are hard to use and just painful to install, maintain and use.

Library creation still has a place here... and so far, getting AI code assistants to actually understand and use a given library that may be less popular has been at the very least, interresting.
by ChrisArchitect | 2026-01-26 16:44:24+00:00
Earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754411

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754101

Related:

Pentagon buys device via undercover operation suspected link to Havana Syndrome

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46608913