MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by prodigycorp | 2026-01-08 20:57:48+00:00
You’re not wrong but I still think that the harness matters a lot when trying to accurately describe Claude Code.

Here’s a reframing:

If you asked people “what would you rather work with, today’s Claude Code harness with sonnet 3.7, or the 200 line agentic loop in the article with Opus 4.5, which would you choose?”

I suspect many people would choose 3.7 with the harness. If that is true, then I’d say the article is no longer useful for understanding Claude Code.
by angiolillo | 2026-01-08 20:58:07+00:00
> Surely eating animal protein on a regular basis is better than having to take a variety of unregulated supplements to stay within a healthy range of essential vitamins and minerals?

By "variety" you mean B12 & omega 3? Or is there something else you think vegans ought to supplement that omnivores don't?

What "variety of unregulated supplements" most reminds me of though is my chores prepping the cow mineral-vitamin mixes on the farm I worked on as a kid. Most farm animals in the US are given a variety of supplements (by my recollection the cows got A, D, E, iodine, selenium, zinc, various minerals...) that have even less regulation than human supplements. And roughly two thirds of beef cattle in the US receive growth-promoting hormones, though we didn't use those on our farm. And much of the dairy consumed in the US is directly supplemented with vitamin A and D.

Personally I haven't found it any more difficult to get high-quality human supplements than it is to get high-quality animal proteins.
by conradev | 2026-01-08 20:58:07+00:00
If anything, the limit of RBAC is ultimately the human attention required to provision, maintain and monitor the systems. Endpoint security monitoring is only as sophisticated as the algorithm that does the monitoring.

I'm actually most worried about the ease of deploying RBAC with more sophisticated monitoring to control humans but for goals that I would not agree with. Imagine every single thing you do on your computer being checked by a model to make sure it is "safe" or "allowed".
by zamadatix | 2026-01-08 20:58:17+00:00
I've seen wildly different takes assuming how many people worked at Tailwind and what they did because "3/4 of the engineering team" is confusing without more context, so I decided to go through the podcast episode about it https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six... and see what the full picture really was.

Remaining:

- Adam (cofounder/owner/original author of tailwind)

- Jonathan (cofounder/owner/product/engineering/early co-author of tailwind)

- Steve (owner/design lead)

- Peter [part time] (partnerships/ops/support)

- Robin (engineer)

There were 3 other engineers who worked with Robin and made up the 4 person engineering team which 75% was laid off. The ones laid off were claimed to be given a good severance, it did not seem to clarify if the 3 owners are collecting a full salary or not.
by nfriedly | 2026-01-08 20:58:32+00:00
Not the person you asked, but here's a couple of sources that back that claim:

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-starlink-ukraine-gur-elon-mu...

https://kyivindependent.com/nearly-half-of-usaid-starlink-te...

Also, as I understand it, a big part of the reason USAID was fed "into the woodchipper" was because they were investigating SpaceX over Russian use of Starlink - see https://gizmodo.com/elon-musks-enemy-usaid-was-investigating...
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-08 20:59:39+00:00
I don't think consumers are idiots but I do think the system is skewed towards unhealthy borrowing. These protections and cashbacks are nothing but an incentive to keep it the same. The exact same could be done with debit cards after all. The banks are making money off the late payments and customers are incentivised to buy things they can't really afford.

Don't forget this system already collapsed in a big way in 2007 and it had massive global ramifications.
by Bjartr | 2026-01-08 20:59:55+00:00
I think that might just be the original and it simply is symmetrical to that degree. I found a few more examples of "cryo-em center slices" and I've yet to find one that doesn't have really strong symmetry down to the small dot patterns.

A different paper, this figure shows a number of cryo-em images, including a simulation, and they all show the same degree of pattern symmetry
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Central-sections-through...

First figure in this third paper also shows symmetry of small patterns
https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/jvi.00990-22
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2026-01-08 21:00:13+00:00
Now I am wondering are there any industrial processes that use a common commercial product as a standard?

Coke, Guinness, etc all probably have exquisite quality control. Is it in the manual of any equipment, “congratulations on your new FooBar pH meter. To confirm the correct operation, a CokeCola should give a reading of X”
by groby_b | 2026-01-08 21:00:30+00:00
Given the guideline is "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." one could certainly make the case it's not a topic that's fit.

"Large company does horrible things, occasionally an investigation happens" is not satisfying curiosity on an intellectual level. What, specifically, are we learning?

Yes, we can debate if it's relevant to the audience anyways, or if it's healthy for HN to have that guideline, but those are different criteria & topics.
by dmitrygr | 2026-01-08 21:00:38+00:00
> service generated illegal imagery

Could you please elaborate which law was broken? And if you do find one, how is it not unconstitutional, given that “put X into a bikini” is constitutionally protected speech, and the output fails the Roth test for obscenity and is thus protected just the same. Would not every other law claiming to be relevant be null and void w.r.t. stoping this in this particular case?

I do know some laws in some states do exist that might be said to be relevant here, but this case might be precisely the test that gets them struck down. SCOTUS was quite clear in Roth v. United States.

I note, again, that "some unelected org said so" is not a weighty argument when the opposition is the SCOTUS's clear stance on the 1st amendment.
by mikepurvis | 2026-01-08 21:01:20+00:00
Maybe, but that isn't really what the GP post is talking about. At the level of mythology, the eye-earth is place where people of that group belong without judgment or limitation. No different from Harry Potter or Narnia or any other fantasy place one might imagine going where they can be with their people.

In any case, I'm not sure this even survives transposing to other senses that humans are weak in, such as smell (like prey animals) or magnetic direction (like migratory birds). A human who randomly had these would indeed be seen as superpowered, but that wouldn't become a statement that all regularly-abled humans are now disabled for missing the "critical" long range sense.
by llmslave2 | 2026-01-08 21:02:26+00:00
No, because Grok or ChatGPT etc are not tools, they are services. It doesn't matter if Grok uses an LLM or a bunch of people using Photoshop, if they are outputting illegal content the consequences should be the same.

People don't go after big auto because they sell cars that other people drive. If they suddenly started offering a service where they would drive people around in their cars, and they started crashing into other people, of course they would be responsible for that.
by square_usual | 2026-01-08 21:03:20+00:00
You don't find it interesting that a major social media company enabled generating deepfake porn, and now faces global legal action for it?

(I know for a fact you and people like you will say No, so posts about deepfakes and their legal consequences have been extremely relevant for HN; you just need one search to prove this: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=deepfakes)
by Okkef | 2026-01-08 21:03:31+00:00
Claude has a nice answer to your riddle:

Claude Code could code all the Claudes Claude Code could code, because Claude Code already coded the Claude that codes Claude Code.

Or more philosophically: The answer is recursively infinite, because each Claude that gets coded can then help code the next Claude, creating an ever-improving feedback loop of Claude-coding Claudes. It's Claudes all the way down!
by Barrin92 | 2026-01-08 21:03:31+00:00
I'd honestly turn the argument on its head. It's China that is being democratic, in the most literal sense. Giving the people what they want, clean energy, cheap stuff, infrastructure simply by satisfying market demand.

It's the largest western, ostensibly democratic nation that is run by some combination of occult neoreactionaries, techno-elites and pseudo-royalty all of which seem to have lost connection to immediate reality in pursuit of annexing territories, bringing about the singularity or what have you. It is ironically China who is more short termist and notably better off for it

I would actually much prefer if the US was run by people who fix potholes in the streets than something that resembles Dune's House Harkonnen
by eterm | 2026-01-08 21:03:36+00:00
The only one I can think of, literally the only one, is grouped icons.

And even that's only because browsers ended up in a weird "windows but tabs but actually tabs are windows" state.

So yeah, I'd miss the UX of dragging tabs into their own separate windows.

But even that is something that still feels janky in most apps ( windows terminal somehow makes this feel bad, even VS code took a long time to make it feel okay ), and I wouldn't really miss it that much if there were no tabs at all and every tab was forced into a separate window at all times with it's own task bar entry.
by dsmurrell | 2026-01-08 21:04:30+00:00
I wrote this coincidentally a few days before the recent news about Tailwind’s layoffs and revenue downturn due to AI’s impact on doc use leading to their paid product distribution being affected.

In my own AI-heavy workflows, I’ve noticed that AI tools are great at generating layouts quickly, but the results tend to converge on a certain look and feel and often lack polish around responsiveness and design details.

Templates still accelerate my builds. They encode decisions, constraints, and taste that I don’t want to recreate from scratch... even with the help of a coding agent.

As AI becomes more central to how we build things, do templates continue to retain value, or is this just a transitional phase?
by orliesaurus | 2026-01-08 21:05:33+00:00
Think about this for a second. So we're telling me that IBM just created an AI assistant that's basically been trained to run malware if you tell it nicely? That's wild, man. That's actually insane.

Like, we're at this point now where we're building these superintelligent systems but we can't even figure out how to keep them from getting pranked by a README file? A README FILE, bro. That's like... that's like building a robot bodyguard but forgetting to tell it the difference between a real gun and a fake gun.

And here's the crazy part - the article says users just have to not click "always allow." But dude, have you MET users? Come on. That's like telling someone not to eat the Tide Pod. You're fighting human nature here.

I'm telling you, five years from now we're gonna have some kid write a poem about cybersecurity in their GitHub repo and accidentally crash the entire Stock Exchange. Mark my words. This is the most insane timeline.
by jesse__ | 2026-01-08 21:05:49+00:00
> the people who made your HashMap type are much better equipped to optimize ...

Who's to say I'm not the one making the hashtable? There are plenty of real-world reasons the standard library hashtable may be either inaccessible or unsuitable.

Furthermore, the idea that "oh, honey, it's too hard, smart people did it for you" is insufferable and needs to die. When I'm the one making something, I have dramatically more information about the problem I'm trying to solve than the author of a hashtable library, and am therefore much better equipped to make design decision tradeoffs.

Please stop perpetuating the idea that 'just use a library' is unilaterally the best option. Sometimes, it's not.
by libraryofbabel | 2026-01-08 21:05:52+00:00
It's a great point and everyone should know it: the core of a coding agent is really simple, it's a loop with tool calling.

Having said that, I think if you're going to write an article like this and call it "The Emperor Has No Clothes: How to Code Claude Code in 200 Lines of Code", you should at least include a reference to Thorsten Ball's excellent article from wayyy back in April 2025 entitled "How to Build an Agent, or: The Emperor Has No Clothes" (https://ampcode.com/how-to-build-an-agent)! That was (as far as I know) the first of these articles making the point that the core of a coding agent is actually quite simple (and all the deep complexity is in the LLM). Reading it was a light-bulb moment for me.

FWIW, I agree with other commenters here that you do need quite a bit of additional scaffolding (like TODOs and much more) to make modern agents work well. And Claude Code itself is a fairly complex piece of software with a lot of settings, hooks, plugins, UI features, etc. Although I would add that once you have a minimal coding agent loop in place, you can get it to bootstrap its own code and add those things! That is a fun and slightly weird thing to try.

(By the way, the "January 2025" date on this article is clearly a typo for 2026, as Claude Code didn't exist a year ago and it includes use of the claude-sonnet-4-20250514 model from May.)

Edit: and if you're interested in diving deeper into what Claude Code itself is doing under the hood, a good tool to understand it is "claude-trace" (https://github.com/badlogic/lemmy/tree/main/apps/claude-trac...). You can use it to see the whole dance with tool calls and the LLM: every call out to the LLM and the LLM's responses, the LLM's tool call invocations and the responses from the agent to the LLM when tools run, etc. When Claude Skills came out I used this to confirm my guess about how they worked (they're a tool call with all the short skill descriptions stuffed into the tool description base prompt). Reading the base prompt is also interesting. (Among other things, they explicitly tell it not to use emoji, which tracks as when I wrote my own agent it was indeed very emoji-prone.)
by labrador | 2026-01-08 21:05:56+00:00
This shouldn't be flagged because this is a very interesting AI problem. Grok was trained on X content which contains a lot of porn. Other image generation models aren't trained on porn so they don't know how to produce it. It appears to be very difficult to stop Grok from making porn since it has been trained on it. Is the ony workable solution to not train Grok 5 on porn?
by mothballed | 2026-01-08 21:06:24+00:00
I wouldn't describe 'safety' as the state of things after the last time feds glassed a right-wing adjacent group. When the feds 'glassed' Waco, a little known guy named Timothy McVeigh was there. He used it as inspiration to bomb a federal building at which there were 700+ casualties of which over 150 were deaths.

The feds were very much aware "Bundys" was not just the ranching family but a whole bunch of people and greater militia network. If they had glassed Bundy himself it would have been a total shit-show.
by mrguyorama | 2026-01-08 21:06:46+00:00
The problem is the people like me who DO rewatch youtube videos. There are a bunch of "Comfort food" videos I turn to sometimes. Like you would rewatch a movie you really enjoy.

But that's the real problem. You can't just average everyone and apply that result to anyone. The "average of everyone" fits exactly NO ONE.

The US Navy figured this out long ago in a famous anecdote in fact. They wanted to fit a cockpit to the "average" pilot, took a shitload of measurements of a lot of airmen, and it ended up nobody fit.

The actual solution was customization and accommodations.
by kevinsync | 2026-01-08 21:07:07+00:00
This is just a half-baked thought, partially because I have no clue how major LLM providers track output metrics for tokens returned (in the context of, "Claude used Tailwind for this solution instead of XYZ"), but it seems to me like it would be a mutually-beneficial scenario for OpenAI, Anthropic, etc, to actively engage with large OSS project maintainers and sponsor/pay for "licensed"/"official" "expert" agents/sub-models that the main models can engage for higher-quality results when the tools are chosen.

Easier said than done obviously, and probably would become more expensive than it's worth, but imagine if the output was demonstrably better and exclusive deals were in place ("Claude Code has the expert Tailwind agent that's trained and maintained by Tailwind, Codex doesn't") -- it would create certain kinds of paying-subscriber mini-moats for specific LLMs.

I dunno. By the time I was done typing that I started to become skeptical of the idea but gonna hit "add comment" anyways lol
by imiric | 2026-01-08 21:07:29+00:00
> No, this is honesty.

No, it's bullshit.

From Wikipedia[1]:

> Corridor Digital LLC is an American independent production studio based in Los Angeles, known for creating pop-culture-related viral online short-form videos since 2010, as well as producing and directing the Battlefield-inspired web series Rush and the YouTube Premium series Lifeline. It has also created television commercials for various companies, including Machine Zone and Google.

You clearly have some bone to pick with them, but they're accomplished VFX artists. Whether they're good or not is a separate matter, but they're not "fake youtubers" or misleading anyone, unlike yourself.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corridor_Digital
by cthalupa | 2026-01-08 21:08:07+00:00
I disagree, and have direct personal experience in having cars moving towards me at that sort of range and that sort of speed. I was afraid I might get my foot run over or bashed about a bit, but it was plainly obvious to me, even in the moment, that unless I intentionally did something very stupid there was no risk of anything more than maybe a broken bone, and that even avoiding that would be trivial.

But we can ignore that and work from the idea that he could reasonably fear for his life there. It doesn't matter.

Because again: Shooting someone driving a car towards you at that distance makes you MORE LIKELY TO GET HIT. As evidenced by the fact the car wildly accelerates and is out of control after she is shot. It is one of the reasons that officers are often explicitly trained not to shoot at someone driving a car towards you at that sort of distance - because it isn't effective!
by prodigycorp | 2026-01-08 21:08:33+00:00
You’re right that subagents were more likely to cause issues than be helpful. But, when properly understood, lead to so much time saved through parallelization for tasks that warranted it.

I was having codex organize my tv/movie library the other day by having it generate. most of the files were not properly labeled. I had codex generate transcripts, manually search the movie db to find descriptions of show episodes, and match the show descriptions against the transcripts to figure out which episode/season the show belonged to.

Claude Code could have parallelized those manual checks and finished that task at 8x the speed.
by iLoveOncall | 2026-01-08 21:08:46+00:00
> If you allow an LLM to edit your code and also give it access to untrusted data (like the Internet), you have a security problem.

You don't even need to give it access to Internet to have issues. The training data is untrusted.

It's a guarantee that bad actors are spreading compromised code to infect the training data of future models.
by FloorEgg | 2026-01-08 21:09:32+00:00
> I know for a fact you and people like you will say No

You "know for a fact" what about me exactly?

And what do you mean by "people like me"?

I think AI deep fakes were an interesting new phenomenon at one point but that time has past. I think this post falls under crime and outrage, and I would categorize it maybe 70/30 as off-topic / on-topic. It's not cut and dry for me, but it does skew more as off-topic than on-topic.

The comment I was replying to was acting as if there was no explanation, yet the explanation is clearly laid out right in the top of the HN guidelines.

There are so many places to go on the Internet if you want to be outraged or spread outrage about things that outrage you, HN is one of the few places meant to harbour intellectual curiosity, and outrage and intellectual curiosity unfortunately don't mix well, hence the guidelines.
by r_lee | 2026-01-08 21:09:46+00:00
if you're not like working on much then of course no need for many tabs, but I tend to ctrl click a lot of links / videos etc. so I end up with having 10 tabs in one window 5 in another, 15 one other etc...

and then there's sometimes a graveyard of them but I tend to keep them "just in case" even though I may not ever need those tabs, but I don't remember so I tend to play it safe

I don't use the browser history much, maybe that's your equivalent?
by kingkongjaffa | 2026-01-08 21:09:50+00:00
Yeah it's silly, I don't mean it in any mean spirited way.

> Wigner's first example is the law of gravitation formulated by Isaac Newton. Originally used to model freely falling bodies on the surface of the Earth, this law was extended based on what Wigner terms "very scanty observations"[3] to describe the motion of the planets, where it "has proved accurate beyond all reasonable expectations."

So despite 'very scant observations' they yielded a very effective model. Okay fine. But deciding they should be 'unreasonably' so is just a pithy turn of phrase.

That mathematics can model science so well, is reductive and reduces to the core philosophy of mathematics question of whether it is invented or discovered. https://royalinstitutephilosophy.org/article/mathematics-dis...

Something can be effective, and can be unreasonably so if it's somehow unexpected, but I basically disagree that FTs or mathematics in general are unreasonably so since we have so much prior information to expect that these techniques actually are effective, almost obviously so.
by observationist | 2026-01-08 21:09:54+00:00
Conversely, it's about the state of Texas asserting control over an unaccountable third party who does things that run counter to the interests of the State and people of Texas. If the state's highest civil court misbehaves, the people of Texas have recourse. If the ABA misbehaves, the people of Texas can do... nothing.

From my perspective, I'd rather have a body held accountable to the people over which they are wielding power. Sometimes government makes sense.
by labrador | 2026-01-08 21:09:57+00:00
https://archive.is/qssiq

This is a very interesting AI problem. Grok was trained on X content which contains a lot of porn. Other image generation models aren't trained on porn so they don't know how to produce it. It appears to be very difficult to stop Grok from making porn since it has been trained on it. There's always a prompt that can produce it. Is the ony workable solution to train a new version Grok 5 without porn?
by janice1999 | 2026-01-08 21:10:23+00:00
What an unserious response.

Gun manufacturer accountability (or lack thereof) is a complex topic and one with ongoing lawsuits and evolving legal arguments. (In the USA see the Bush-era NRA-backed Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act in 2005 and recent Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc. v. Mexico arguments).

Personally if a gun manufacturer markets a gun with the primary feature being finger print resistant (yes, that's real) and being easy to carry concealed, I think lawmakers should investigate. Likewise f someone makes a big CSAM generator button and puts it in front of millions of users, it also deserves legal attention.
by beAbU | 2026-01-08 21:10:29+00:00
Anyone well versed in the metric system can easily scale up and down the orders of magnitude, and units like "millions of kilowatts" is just tautology in the end of the day.

Also, like others have pointed out, kilowatts and kilowatt-hours are most certainly not used on grid scale projects. Mega- and giga- are the standard throughout.