MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lifetimerubyist | 2026-01-07 01:51:59+00:00
The end goal is to have these things be general purpose do all sorts of jobs everywhere. Civilization is designed around human anatomy, so if you want to replace humans with a drop-in robot replacement in as many places as fast as possible then a humanoid robot is how you’re going to do it. It’s also probably more cost effective to design 1 robot that does everything, than design 1 robot specialized for 1 task. Specialized robots will fill in gaps, but humanoids will be the vast majority of the AI-based robot workforce.
by llm_nerd | 2026-01-07 01:52:07+00:00
"its building it the right way, in an easily understood way, in a way that's easily extensible"

I am in a unique situation where I work with a variety of codebases over the week. I have had no problem at all utilizing Claude Code w/ Opus 4.5 and Gemini CLI w/ Gemini 3.0 Pro to make excellent code that is indisputably "the right way", in an extremely clear and understandable way, and that is maximally extensible. None of them are greenfield projects.

I feel like this is a bit of je ne sais quoi where people appeal to some indemonstrable essence that these tools just can't accomplish, and only the "non-technical" people are foolish enough to not realize it. I'm a pretty technical person (about 30 years of software development, up to staff engineer and then VP). I think they have reached a pretty high level of competence. I still audit the code and monitor their creations, but I don't think they're the oft claimed "junior developer" replacement, but instead do the work I would have gotten from a very experienced, expert-level developer, but instead of being an expert at a niche, they're experts at almost every niche.

Are they perfect? Far from it. It still requires a practitioner who knows what they're doing. But frequently on here I see people giving takes that sound like they last used some early variant of Copilot or something and think that remains state of the art. The rest of us are just accelerating our lives with these tools, knowing that pretending they suck online won't slow their ascent an iota.
by majormajor | 2026-01-07 01:52:07+00:00
I think `andrekandre is right in this hypothetical.

Who'd pay for brand new Photoshop with a couple new features and improvements if LLM-cloned Photoshop-from-three-months-ago is free?

The first few iterations of this cloud be massively consumer friendly for anything without serious cloud infra costs. Cheap clones all around. Like generic drugs but without the cartel-like control of manufacturing.

Business after that would be dramatically different, though. Differentiating yourself from the willing-to-do-it-for-near-zero-margin competitors to produce something new to bring in money starts to get very hard. Can you provide better customer support? That could be hard, everyone's gonna have a pretty high baseline LLM-support-agent already... and hiring real people instead could dramatically increase the price difference you're trying to justify... Similarly for marketing or outreach etc; how are you going to cut through the AI-agent-generated copycat spam that's gonna be pounding everyone when everyone and their dog has a clone of popular software and services?

Photoshop type things are probably a really good candidate for disruption like that because to a large extent every feature is independent. The noise reduction tool doesn't need API or SDK deps on the layer-opacity tool, for instance. If all your features are LLM balls of shit that doesn't necessarily reduce your ability to add new ones next to them, unlike in a more relational-database-based web app with cross-table/model dependencies, etc.

And in this "try out any new idea cheaply and throw crap against the wall and see what sticks" world "product managers" and "idea people" etc are all pretty fucked. Some of the infinite monkeys are going to periodically hit to gain temporary advantage, but good luck finding someone to pay you to be a "product visionary" in a world where any feature can be rolled out and tested in the market by a random dev in hours or days.
by sargstuff | 2026-01-07 01:52:47+00:00
Practice on nonsensical/wimsy topics aka. typed, 50 page report on the contents of the inside of a ping pong ball. reiterate/refine till doesn't sound like bs/cut and paste.

Ask several people around you for a book/article. Find common way to associate aforementioned topic with article(s)/books provided. Extra credit if can present in a specific style/area. aka Socratic method, humanities architectural style, etc. Does a corinthian ping pong ball contents vary more than a the contents of a doric ping pong ball? Iconic ping pong ball might be easier to build an ascii/utf pictorial representation of contents. How many sprinkles have to covered the exterior of a ping pong ball before the interior contents change? (how long does that take?)

It'll give one some practice on techniques to approach things in different ways.
by jaggederest | 2026-01-07 01:53:01+00:00
I don't know if you've tried Chatgpt-5.2 but I find codex much better for Rust mostly due to the underlying model. You have to do planning and provide context, but 80%+ of the time it's a oneshot for small-to-medium size features in an existing codebase that's fairly complex. I honestly have to say that it's a better programmer than I am, it's just not anywhere near as good a software developer for all of the higher and lower level concerns that are the other 50% of the job.

If you have any opensource examples of your codebase, prompt, and/or output, I would happily learn from it / give advice. I think we're all still figuring it out.

Also this SIMD translation wasn't just a single function - it was multiple functions across a whole region of the codebase dealing with video and frame capture, so pretty substantial.
by bigbuppo | 2026-01-07 01:54:24+00:00
Back where I used to live there was a place called The Donut Shoppe and Bakery, and quickly expanded to ...and Full Breakfast, and a couple decades later ...Now Serving Hot Lunches, and then ...WE HAVE KOLACHES!. At some point, though, they dropped the ...Still Steve and Cindy's After All These Years because Steve and Cindy died.
by biammer | 2026-01-07 01:54:25+00:00
> Why are you afraid of using your real account

Careful with being blindly led by your own assumptions.

I actually disagree with your thesis here. I think if every comment was posted under a new account this site would improve its average veracity.

As it stands certain 'celebrity', or high karma, accounts are artificially bolstered by the network effect indifferent to the defensibility of their claims.
by gerdesj | 2026-01-07 01:55:23+00:00
You are fixating on one tiny point which isn't really that important within OP's ... errm "opus".

Why not critique the entire work?

Anyway:

I borrow 100 from someone. I am now in debt and they are in credit - to balance, both are 100.

However, they require a return on investment - usury: 10 for 100 (or a 10% margin - call it what you like).

When I take out my loan, I am in debt for 110 and they are in credit for 100 with a promise of 10 later. So we have some accounts - my one account is 110 in debit (I borrowed 100 and promised to pay 10 on top) and they have two accounts - one for the principal (100) and another for the 10 interest. To me, in this case, the principal and interest are part of the same account but to the lender they are separated out because the interest is probably taxable as income.

However, it might be the case that I can set off my debt or the interest on my debt against some tax. In that case I will maintain two accounts - the principal and the interest.

All those interests will also end up in additional accounts related to probably banking.

I've probably pissed off a few accountants with my choice of terms but in the end I do understand how fiat money works.

What gets on my tits is assertions such as "People who don't understand ..." with no working.
by SeanAppleby | 2026-01-07 01:56:27+00:00
One thing I've been tossing around in my head is:

- How quickly is cost of refactor to a new pattern with functional parity going down?

- How does that change the calculus around tech debt?

If engineering uses 3 different abstractions in inconsistent ways that leak implementation details across components and duplicate functionality in ways that are very hard to reason about, that is, in conventional terms, an existential problem that might kill the entire business, as all dev time will end up consumed by bug fixes and dealing with pointless complexity, velocity will fall to nothing, and the company will stop being able to iterate.

But if claude can reliably reorganize code, fix patterns, and write working migrations for state when prompted to do so, it seems like the entire way to reason about tech debt has changed. And it has changed more if you are willing to bet that models within a year will be much better at such tasks.

And in my experience, claude is imperfect at refactors and still requires review and a lot of steering, but it's one of the things it's better at, because it has clear requirements and testing workflows already built to work with around the existing behavior. Refactoring is definitely a hell of a lot faster than it used to be, at least on the few I've dealt with recently.

In my mind it might be kind of like thinking about financial debt in a world with high inflation, in that the debt seems like it might get cheaper over time rather than more expensive.
by yourapostasy | 2026-01-07 01:56:56+00:00
> ...multiple engineers argued about the "right" way to build something. I remember thinking that they had biases based on past experiences and assumptions about what mattered.

I usually resolve this by putting on the table the consequences and their impacts upon my team that I’m concerned about, and my proposed mitigation for those impacts. The mitigation always involves the other proposer’s team picking up the impact remediation. In writing. In the SOP’s. Calling out the design decision by day of the decision to jog memories and names of those present that wanted the design as the SME’s. Registered with the operations center. With automated monitoring and notification code we’re happy to offer.

Once people are asked to put accountable skin in the sustaining operations, we find out real fast who is taking into consideration the full spectrum end to end consequences of their decisions. And we find out the real tradeoffs people are making, and the externalities they’re hoping to unload or maybe don’t even perceive.
by dyigitpolat | 2026-01-07 01:57:06+00:00
just vibe-coded an optimizer for this game that takes in the screenshot of the grid and the number of walls as input, and spits out the optimal wall configuration (supports cherries too!)

algorithm:

1. infer grid dimensions

2. color histogram analysis to designate grasses, water, cherries and horse

3. apply mixed-integer linear programming to determine optimized wall placements

4. profit!

try: https://dyigitpolat.github.io/enclose-horse-solver

source: https://github.com/dyigitpolat/enclose-horse-solver
by verdverm | 2026-01-07 01:57:53+00:00
Instructions, in the system prompt for not doing that

Once more people realize how easy it is to customize and personalized your agent, I hope they will move beyond what cookie cutter Big AI like Anthropic and Google give you.

I suspect most won't though because (1) it means you have to write human language, communication, and this weird form of persuasion, (2) ai is gonna make a bunch of them lazy and big AI sold them on magic solutions that require no effort on your part (not true, there is a lot of customizing and it has huge dividends)
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-07 01:58:35+00:00
> would it be enough to let people express themselves while cutting out the impact of negative externalities of advertising?

I think it's doable. But I haven't seen the scalpel yet.

In the meantime, we have clean lines we can run up towards. Banning ads (basically, commercial speech) in public space. Banning commercial bulk mail. And banning targeted commercial advertising (beyond the content it sits).
by csuwldcat | 2026-01-07 01:58:55+00:00
The interesting thing about Passkeys is that they are only ever output in the client create() call, and the platform does not retain them for disclosure after that, so if you don't send them out of the origin boundary, they are treated like a virtually secret value by the platform. It's ironic, because the WebAuthn/Passkey authors (who I know some of) explicitly treat the public key as a sensitive value, and built system assumptions around that, which is what makes this possible. It's a rather gross hack, can't deny it that, but there are a group of use cases for which it is a better fit than any of the far more ugly flows many non-P-256 self-custodied key use cases are accomplished with today.
by robocat | 2026-01-07 01:59:36+00:00
> Doctors don’t really care to look at these kinds of issues

Perhaps for good reasons?

The science is messy, there are few proven interventions and every woowoo person will be worried about it and asking their doctor.

With doctors in New Zealand, my one trick is to find good specialists and pay them.

I believe that a GP only helps point you in the right direction, and that the public health system is mostly too overloaded to help (unless you have a critical problem and your GP helps you get in a queue).

Not sure what helps in other countries.
by arthurofbabylon | 2026-01-07 01:59:45+00:00
My question "what systemic solutions are available on a scale like Apple's to maintain high-quality and strong consistency?" was sincere.

I'm neither complacent (as you seemed to imply) nor magically hand-waiving a "just do it" notion (as you seem to exemplify). I'm seriously interested in what it takes to effectively manage complexity as this scale.
by 0928374082 | 2026-01-07 02:01:02+00:00
Here is a recent picture, taken during discussions about Greenland: https://bilder.deutschlandfunk.de/72/d7/aa/c5/72d7aac5-be14-...

You probably recognise the woman on the left, the PM of Denmark.

You may not recognise the dude on the right, but he comes from a country that gave us the motto which vocally expresses the solidarity he is physically expressing in the pic: "all for one, and one for all"

If we may talk brass tacks, he also has several boomers that could lob a bus or a few at the new White House ballroom. Half an hour flight time if they didn't bother to leave their home base; shorter than that if they fired from somewhere in the Atlantic: https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/17070508372...
by 0xdde | 2026-01-07 02:02:06+00:00
They don't describe the graphic very well in the article, but they do link to the source data [1]. The "Expected" line seems to refer to a historical average. Since the starting point of the graph coincides with the beginning of congestion pricing, we would expect a difference between the two values at that point.

[1] https://metrics.mta.info/?cbdtp/vehiclereductions
by hannofcart | 2026-01-07 02:03:40+00:00
To the sceptics still saying that LLMs still can't solve "slime mold pathing algorithm and creating completely new shoe-lacing patterns" (literally a quote from a different comment here), please consider something we've learnt over and over again in history: good enough and cheap will destroy perfect but expensive.

And then cheap and good enough option will eventually get better because that's the one that is more used.

It's how Japanese manufacturing beat Western manufacturing. And how Chinese manufacturing then beat Japanese again.

It's why it's much more likely you are using the Linux kernel and not GNU hurd.

It's how digital cameras left traditional film based cameras in the dust.

Bet on the cheaper and good enough outcome.

Bet against it at your peril.
by Analemma_ | 2026-01-07 02:04:05+00:00
You're getting a bunch of joking shitpost replies, but a useful answer is that it's very common for people to become furries first and then later realize they are trans, presumably because the feelings of body dysmorphia convince you that something is mismatched between your felt sense and outward appearance, but you only nail it down as gender dysphoria later.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-07 02:04:15+00:00
> I am curious where your confidence that this is true, is coming from?

My confidence comes from working in big startups and big companies with legal teams. There's no way the entire company is going to gather all of the engineers and everyone around, have them code up a secret system to consume customer data into a secret part of the training set, and then have everyone involved keep quiet about it forever.

The whistleblowing and leaking would happen immediately. We've already seen LLM teams leak and and have people try to whistleblow over things that aren't even real, like the Google engineer who thought they had invented AGI a few years ago (lol). OpenAI had a public meltdown when the employees disagreed with Sam Altman's management style.

So my question to you is: What makes you think they would do this? How do you think they'd coordinate the teams to keep it all a secret and only hire people who would take this secret to their grave?
by flexagoon | 2026-01-07 02:05:05+00:00
Check their gitlab for bounties. They have a lot of money in reserves to be spent on that. There are a few open bounties for hundreds of thousands of dollars. I've also worked on a bounty for them once and can confirm they have plenty more money in their budget. So I believe that they don't pocket donations, or at least not a very large portion of them.
by stevenhuang | 2026-01-07 02:05:09+00:00
This is you. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-alwa...

Unironic comparisons to Humane AI shows quite how uncalibrated you are. Not to mention you'd also likely be wrong about that on a 100 year time scale. Undoubtedly you'd have the same opinions for the Internet. Try to reason better, you can do it.
by majormajor | 2026-01-07 02:05:45+00:00
All of these things work very well IMO in a professional context.

Especially if you're in a place where a lot of time was spent previously revising PRs for best practices, etc, even for human-submitted code, then having the LLM do that for you that saves a bunch of time. Most humans are bad at following those super-well.

There's a lot of stuff where I'm pretty sure I'm up to at least 2x speed now. And for things like making CLI tools or bash scripts, 10x-20x. But in terms of "the overall output of my day job in total", probably more like 1.5x.

But I think we will need a couple major leaps in tooling - probably deterministic tooling, not LLM tooling - before anyone could responsibly ship code nobody has ever read in situations with millions of dollars on the line (which is different from vibe-coding something that ends up making millions - that's a low-risk-high-reward situation, where big bets on doing things fast make sense. if you're already making millions, dramatic changes like that can become high-risk-low-reward very quickly. In those companies, "I know that only touching these files is 99.99% likely to be completely safe for security-critical functionality" and similar "obvious" intuition makes up for the lack of ability to exhaustively test software in a practical way (even with fuzzers and things), and "i didn't even look at the code" is conceding responsibility to a dangerous degree there.)
by yourapostasy | 2026-01-07 02:06:18+00:00
Reminds me of a post I read a few days ago of someone crowing about an LLM writing for them an email format validator. They did not have the LLM code up an accompanying send-an-email-validation loop, and were blithely kept uninformed by the LLM of the scar tissue built up by experience in the industry on how curiously a deep rabbit hole email validation becomes.

If you’ve been around the block and are judicious how you use them, LLM’s are a really amazing productivity boost. For those without that judgement and taste, I’m seeing footguns proliferate and the LLM’s are not warning them when someone steps on the pressure plate that’s about to blow off their foot. I’m hopeful we will this year create better context window-based or recursive guardrails for the coding agents to solve for this.
by ryandrake | 2026-01-07 02:08:17+00:00
We were enjoying cheap second hand rack mount servers, RAM, hard drives, printers, office chairs and so on for a decade after the original dot com crash. Every company that went out of business liquidated their good shit for pennies.

I'm hoping after AI comes back down to earth there will be a new glut of cheap second hand GPUs and RAM to get snapped up.
by anshublog | 2026-01-07 02:08:25+00:00
NVIDIA was a small cap in 2016. Netflix was a small cap in 2016.

Intel was the leader. Comcast was the leader.

Yes Google and Apple have done great but its because they have made some good strategic decisions. And some (not all) of their failures of last 10 years fall sqaurely in stack fallacy.
by ycwiesen | 2026-01-07 02:10:39+00:00
Gmail is the master key to almost every online account — password resets, identity verification, security alerts, everything.

And yet the Gmail app on Android opens instantly if the phone is unlocked. No PIN. No password. No biometric. Nothing.

If someone steals your unlocked phone, they can:

- read all your emails
- trigger password resets
- delete security warnings
- take over multiple accounts

Banking apps require extra authentication. Password managers require extra authentication. Even some messaging apps do.

But Gmail — the most sensitive app of all — does not.

This is a huge, global security problem, and Google should offer an optional app-level lock. The current design assumes the device lock is enough. In real-world theft scenarios, it isn’t.

Curious what others think.
by robocat | 2026-01-07 02:10:52+00:00
> CCD

Core Complex Die - an AMD term for a chiplet that contains the CPU cores and cache. It connects to an IOD (I/O die) that does memory, PCIe etc (≈southbridge?).

Aside: CCX is Core Complex - see Figure 1 of https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/products/ep...

For any other older fogeys that CCD means something different.
by projektfu | 2026-01-07 02:11:13+00:00
But biz will be half empty or more at full price, so it gets filled with upgrades of coach tickets to reward frequent fliers or full-fare users. The average has to be lower. The biz price may also be optimistic. United EWR-LHR is more like your $2.5k-$3k. Delta has an ATL-LHR option for first/business class with a bed that's more like $8k-$10k, and their Premium Select, which is more like United's business class, is $2.5k. Interestingly, they offer more beds than big seats.

I remember pricing out the Concorde years ago, before it was grounded. BA's first class subsonic was $8k, Concorde was $12k. (2001 dollars) If you're paying those rates anyway, it might be worth it to go faster, if you don't mind the relatively small seat and limited food service. Coach was $400-$600.
by MohskiBroskiAI | 2026-01-07 02:11:23+00:00
The "blank page" paralysis happens because AI removed the friction of execution. Historically, the "idea" evolved while you were struggling to do the work. The brushstroke informed the next brushstroke. AI gives you the finished result instantly, so you lose that iterative discovery loop.

I’ve found the fix is to shift from being the Artist (who describes the image) to being the Architect (who defines the constraints).

Instead of trying to brainstorm the subject (e.g., "a futuristic city"), brainstorm the conflicting constraints (e.g., "design a city, but the architect is a biologist who refuses to use straight lines").

My workflow for "creativity":

Cross-Domain Injection: Take a concept from a totally unrelated field (e.g., fluid dynamics, mycelium networks, brutalist architecture) and force-map it onto your target domain.

Constraint Stacking: Don't tell the AI what to make. Tell it what it cannot do. "Write this code without using loops" or "Design this UI without using blue."

Creativity isn't magic; it's just combinatorial collision. The AI is good at rendering, but you have to be the one causing the collision.