MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by leecommamichael | 2026-01-30 14:46:50+00:00
> Ignoring outright bad code, in a world where functional code is so abundant that “good” and “bad” are indistinguishable, ultimately, what makes functional AI code slop or non-slop?

I'm sorry, but this is an indicator for me that the author hasn't had a critical eye for quality in some time. There is massive overlap between "bad" and "functional." More than ever. The barrier-to-entry to programming got irresponsibly low for a time there, and it's going to get worse. The toolchains are not in a good way. Windows and macOS are degrading both in performance and usability, LLVM still takes 90% of a compiler's CPU time in unoptimized builds, Notepad has AI (and crashes,) simple social (mobile) apps are >300 MB download/installs when eight years ago they were hovering around a tenth of that, a site like Reddit only works on hardware which is only "cheap" in the top 3 GDP nations in the world... The list goes on. Whatever we're doing, it is not scaling.
by thesz | 2026-01-30 14:46:54+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kUQWuK1L4w

APL inventor says that he was developing not a programming language, but notation to express as much problems as one can. He found that expressing more and more problems with the notation first made notation grow, then notation size started to shrink.

To develop conceptual knowledge (when one's "notation" starts to shrink) one has to have some good memory (re-expressing more and more problems).
by CognitiveBytez | 2026-01-30 14:47:13+00:00
I am in the process of dreaming up a project that will maybe resolve this one day. Highly doubt this will be figured out in my lifetime since it feels like this is a money thing and companies don't want to invest in defensibility for themselves. I do privacy compliance btw but this hit my feed on LinkedIn and I liked the viewpoint. And of course the humor.

I do agree that the use of screenshots, PDFs, and manual attestations are fundamentally flawed as evidence. They're trivially forgeable, lack chain of custody, and create "trust-based" proof that regulators increasingly reject.

Im wanting to change careers and maybe look at audit so I have been researching certs to take. Getting deep into RFC 3161 timestamps and ISO/IEC 18014 standards as alternatives—turning compliance evidence into cryptographically verifiable proof that holds up in enforcement actions.

Curious what others think about the shift from "trust me" to "verify this" in GRC.

Thanks so much for reading. Love this site and glad I stumble upon it last week.
by vlunkr | 2026-01-30 14:47:14+00:00
Maybe I wasn’t clear enough because I agree with everything you said lol. What I take issue with is the parent comment trying to assert that the SNES (or any console) is the greatest of all time. There’s too much subjectivity in art to make a statement like that. I’m trying to say that it’s nostalgia informing their opinion, even if they’re disguising it with technical arguments.
by agscala | 2026-01-30 14:47:54+00:00
My understanding is that they use up a lot of water and electricity, driving costs up for local residents.

Datacenters are asking for tax breaks because they "contribute back to the local economy". In most cases however, the added jobs are mostly temporary (construction)

In short, they're asking residents to pay for some short-term jobs and long-term
utility price increases. A bad deal if you ask me
by simonw | 2026-01-30 14:48:34+00:00
I'm not sure you're actually in disagreement with the author of this piece at all.

They didn't say that software engineering is over - they said:

> Software development, as it has been done for decades, is over.

You argue that writing code is 10-20% of the craft. That's the point they are making too! They're framing the rest of it as the "talking", which is now even more important than it was before thanks to the writing-the-code bit being so much cheaper.
by westurner | 2026-01-30 14:48:57+00:00
From the README:

> Security model

> The sandbox runs inside WebAssembly with WASI for a minimal syscall interface. WASM provides memory isolation by design—linear memory is bounds-checked, and there's no way to escape to the host address space. The wasmtime runtime we use is built with defense-in-depth and has been formally verified for memory safety.

> On top of WASM isolation, every tool call goes through capability validation: [...]

> The design draws from capability-based security as implemented in systems like seL4—access is explicitly granted, not implicitly available. Agents don't get ambient authority just because they're running in your process.
by wing-_-nuts | 2026-01-30 14:49:03+00:00
>I find funny the remarks of "PC gaming" is growing

If anything, with current prices, it's dying. I don't say this as a 'pc v console' flame. I'm saying that if you want your hobby to be widespread, sustainable and growing it needs to be accessible to a broke highschooler. PC gaming might be affordable to us tech workers, but it isn't to them, and that's a problem. Hell even console gaming has become very expensive in the last couple years. A ps5 is $500, which is reasonable for what you get, but the $70 games and $80 / yr PSN sub adds up.
by Smaug123 | 2026-01-30 14:49:29+00:00
They're not definitionally the same. Normally a (stock market) crash is just "everyone's assessment of expected future cash flows goes down, meaning that what everyone owns is less valuable". One thing that can cause people's assessments to drop is "everyone else is withdrawing from it, which I assume means they're assessing it as being much less valuable, so they have information I don't, so I should revise downwards", which can make a self-sustaining feedback loop, but that's certainly not the only possible cause of a crash; I wouldn't even say it was the most likely cause of an AI-bubble crash.

My guesses would be "everyone's assessments go down together because OpenAI et al's predictions of their future revenue are observed to be consistently vastly overinflated vs actual performance, but everyone was previously assuming they were roughly correct" or "some political thing happens which makes OpenAI et al's services obviously much less valuable or makes them much less able to provide services".
by briancr | 2026-01-30 14:50:44+00:00
Thanks for the references! Writing a language was almost an accident — I worked on a neural networks tool with a scripted interface back around 2000, before I’d ever heard of some of these other languages.. and I’ve been using/updating it ever since.

Beyond NNs, my use case to embed fast C calculations into the language to make scientific programming easier. But the inspiration was less about the use case and more about certain programming innovations which I’m sure are elsewhere but I’m not sure where — like aliases, callable function arguments, generalized inheritance, etc.

That’s a great list — most of those languages I’ve honestly never heard of..
by skrebbel | 2026-01-30 14:51:34+00:00
My 13yo son recently discovered Godot and I'm very impressed by how accessible and powerful it all is. He had started gamedev a few years ago with Scratch. Figured out Roblox Studio a fair amount, but it's super quirky, plus he wanted to do 2D games. Tried some other stuff (eg pygame) but that's just super low level, inaccessible, plus you can't properly distribute pygame games for shit. Godot is on a whole nother level.

I had never bothered pointing him to it, because I remembered Godot as "a bunch of C++ libraries for gamedev". I'm not even sure whether that's ever been the case or just an incorrect memory, but today's Godot is incomparable to that. The editor UI is very full featured, and you can easily make simple 2D games with relatively small amounts of programming. It includes a level editor, animation stuff, and so on. It's just very feature complete, and I think it's very impressive for a FOSS project to be so accessible to newcomers stumbling into it by chance. Points also to the people making videos.

Also sidenote I think GDScript is great. My son had tried Unity first, but the C# compile cycle was so slow that he kept getting out of the flow. As a developer dad, Godot's GDScript struck me as a super weird "not invented here" thing at first, but realizing what tradeoffs they're going for (familiarity, fast edit-compile-run cycle, concurrency, lightweight binding to C++ internals, etc), I now see the point completely. I'm sure it has plenty quirks but for a beginner like my son it's a perfect fit.

Bottom line, he was able to make a Flappy Bird clone and put it on his Android phone, totally solo (except the Android export, and with lots of YouTube support), in like two afternoons. Drew the art, coded the dynamics, everything. Hats off to the Godot team!
by SilverBirch | 2026-01-30 14:51:57+00:00
No, my argument is you shouldn't draw a statistical conclusion with this data. That's all. I'm kind of pushing in the direction you were pointing in the second part - it's not enough data to make statistical inferences. We should examine each incident, identify the root cause and come to a conclusion as to whether that means the system is not fit for purpose. I just don't think the statistics are useful.
by wiseowise | 2026-01-30 14:52:48+00:00
>> Remember the old adage, “programming is 90% thinking and 10% typing”? It is now, for real.

> Proceeds to write literal books of markdown to get something meaningful

>> It requires no special training, no new language or framework to learn, and has practically no entry barriers—just good old critical thinking and foundational human skills, and competence to run the machinery.

> Wrote a paragraph about how it is important to have serious experience to understand the generated code prior to that

>> For the first time ever, good talk is exponentially more valuable than good code. The ramifications of this are significant and disruptive. This time, it is different.

> This time is different bro I swear, just one more model, just one more scale-up, just one more trillion parameters, bro we’re basically at AGI
by js2 | 2026-01-30 14:52:57+00:00
I only know one kind of steel cut whole oat:

https://mccanns.com/product/mccanns-traditional-steel-cut-ir...

I'm using an instant pot. Maybe it develops more pressure? But 3 minutes high, rest for 10 minutes, vent, is just a bit on the al dente side. Cooked through, but slightly chewy.

Sometimes I sauté the dry oats in a pat of butter for a few minutes before adding the water and cooking. It gives them a nice nutty flavor.
by devmor | 2026-01-30 14:53:02+00:00
> It cuts both ways. The app store payment disincents consuming content from iPhones (indirectly, as the iPhone-heavy creators raise their prices).

That is not remotely a balanced comparison. An iPhone has more than the purpose of consuming content from Patreon and is unlikely to affect Apple. They are still gaining in this situation.

There is no magical fairy tale being called "the market" balancing the situation here. Just a large corporation exerting control over people through rent-seeking. The only disruption happening is Apple disrupting people being fairly paid for their work so they can take a large of chunk of it instead of being happy making a profit by skimming off the top already.
by SamiBuilds | 2026-01-30 14:53:22+00:00
This is a really neat approach! In API security tooling, we've been experimenting with analyzing OpenAPI specs semantically to detect risky endpoints before deployment. It’s interesting to see a system that auto-generates endpoints and docs while keeping sensitive connection info server-side.
Curious how you handle complex query logic or multi-step operations in production? Could similar intent-aware checks help catch risky edge cases?
by ctrlmeta | 2026-01-30 14:53:24+00:00
This "Code is cheap. Show me the talk." punchline gets overused as a bait these days. It is an alright article but that's a lot of words to tell us something we already know.

Also credit where credit is due. Origin of this punchline:

https://nitter.net/jason_young1231/status/193518070341689789...

https://programmerhumor.io/ai-memes/code-is-cheap-show-me-th...
by Marsymars | 2026-01-30 14:53:42+00:00
> I'd also ask exactly what you want to do with your "fast feedback loop to catch people driving without a license".

Unless the vehicle is stolen, seize and impound the vehicle. If the driver is the owner, auction it off and give them back the proceeds, minus costs.

I feel like I'm living in some different world where drunk driving is a-okay when I face these types of objections to actually enforcing the rules around it.
by conception | 2026-01-30 14:53:44+00:00
The Xbox 360 was the most gamer friendly console (play your open music during games?!?) but one feature i loved was the battery packs. Your controller died? Just swap a pack - two seconds. And the packs could be rechargeable or AA so you could have a bunch of rechargeable AA for a fair price and never get bogged down waiting for anything to charge.
by i_love_retros | 2026-01-30 14:53:46+00:00
Doesn't need to be a choice.

And how much better than palantir given that musk is a bigot, attempts to buy elections for fascists, meddles in foreign democracies to push far right extremist narratives, used his wealth to steal very sensitive data from government agencies, does Nazi salutes, trains his LLM to be racist...
by naasking | 2026-01-30 14:54:05+00:00
That's really interesting. I ran this scenario through GPT-5.1 and the reasoning it gave made sense, which essentially boils down to: in tools like Claude Code, Gemini Codex, and other “agentic coding” modes, the model isn’t just generating text, it’s running a planner, and the first-person form conforms to the expectation of a step in a plan, where the other modes are more ambiguous.
by seec | 2026-01-30 14:54:18+00:00
Food supply is something I though about but the problem is that we put a lot of it in storage and it's never clear how much because sellers may want to wait until markets are more favorable.

With modern technology/knowledge, we have a lot of high-density calories lying around, in the form of grains, potatoes, oils, etc.

It might be possible to get a rough picture tracking the perishables that are often animal products but poor countries don't use a lot of it because, well, they are poor. So it makes everything very complicated.
by danso | 2026-01-30 14:54:22+00:00
When the Miami Herald won 2 Pulitzers for its coverage of the incident, do you think it was because people were highly interested in the international custody issues? I’d argue that people were more piqued at why 100+ armed immigration agents needed to raid a family’s home

https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/staff-48

https://www.seattlepi.com/national/article/dramatic-photo-of...
by telenardo | 2026-01-30 14:54:23+00:00
It's not set up for that, no, though it's theoretically possible!

The issues I see are:
- Transcription models use beam search to choose the most likely words at each step, taking into account the surrounding words. The accuracy will drop a lot if you pick each top word individually as it’s spoken. The surrounding context matters a lot.
- To that point, transcription models do get things wrong (i.e. "best" instead of "test"). The LLM post-processing can help here, by taking in the top-N hypotheses from the transcription mode and determining which makes the most sense (i.e. "run the tests", not "run the bests"), adding another layer of semantic understanding. Again, the surrounding context really matters here.

Do you need each word to stream individually? Or would it be sufficient for short phrases to stream?

The MLX inference is so fast that you could accomplish something like the latter by releasing and re-pressing the shortcut every 5-10 words. It so fast it honestly feels like streaming. In practice, I tend to do something like this anyway, because I find it easier to review shorter transcripts!
by antonvs | 2026-01-30 14:54:34+00:00
The point is not about "stifling EV adoption", it's reducing problematic levels of over-dependence on cars in general. EVs don't solve all the issues that cars raise.

Noise is a relevant factor in that discussion, not compared to internal combustion engines[1], but compared to fewer cars in general.

[1] The acronym for this did not age well
by simiones | 2026-01-30 14:54:35+00:00
From the tone, it seems that the poster's sister is a particularly bad driver (or at least they believe her to be). While having an autonomous car that can drive as well as even a bad human driver is definitely a major accomplishment technologically, we all know that threshold was passed a long time ago. However, if Tesla's robotaxis (with human monitors on board, let's not forget - these are not fully autonomous cars like Waymo's!) are at best as good as some of the worse human drivers, then they have no business being allowed on public roads. Remember that human drivers can also lose their license if [caught] driving too poorly.
by tdb7893 | 2026-01-30 14:54:55+00:00
You talk about how solar is getting really cheap but electricity costs are actually rising significantly for most people I know (I've had to help friends pay electricity bills recently). I don't know how much of this is data centers but electricity prices are a major worry for a lot of normal people and you can't just handwave it away with "we know how to generate electricity" (there are also other worries like water usage in some areas). I don't hate data centers but the hate for them is based on them seeming to exacerbate what's already a serious worry to people already struggling to afford electricity.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2026-01-30 14:55:31+00:00
We need to bring back the concept of seppuku for situations like that. "We have to lie more because it would be too painful to admit our lies" should be a moment that makes any leader question where they have been, where they are, where they're going, and all of their motivations and reasoning. It should be the sort of "what have I done?" moment that sends a person to a monastery, an asylum, or the grave.
by yesturi | 2026-01-30 14:55:41+00:00
I guess it is some kind of problem with the home-made counter (e.g., picking up electrical noise), or perhaps the counter is placed in a building with a higher background level.

As far as I’m aware, buildings made of blocks containing coal power plant slag have a higher background, but I don’t know how pronounced the effect is.

The normal background should be like 15–25 counts per minute for majority of Geiger tubes.
by kkfx | 2026-01-30 14:55:44+00:00
Not at all, but I know most people can't even imagine a different desktop, just as they can't imagine a different society.

A silly example: in many countries, we're starting to have digital identity as a smart-card, digital signatures through them. Well, in these countries there are still many banks that waste enormous resources to open accounts for new clients with photographs of documents, that are smart-cards, and facial recognition, to replicate what used to be done in person by showing the document, normally inappropriately and unnecessarily photocopied, not realizing that a PDF contract signed PAdES by the bank, with the client's added PAdES signature, guarantees both the signed contract conditions, the signing date, and the customer identity, and remains with both parties hands with much greater simplicity and a far lower computational cost than doing video analysis of documents and faces.

This is a small but good example of how many are mentally incapable of evolving and therefore think that anyone who is, or who has done things differently, is crazy rather than someone who simply does things more efficiently.

I have colleagues (IT, sysadmin) who don't understand what happens on my screen when I give a presentation in org-mode; it seems like magic to them. Even after seeing demos like this https://youtu.be/u44X_th6_oY they stay where they are, thinking it's too complicated to change. They see how efficient it is but can't bring themselves to move from where they are.

I suggest you think about it.
by plagiarist | 2026-01-30 14:55:52+00:00
Phone spam would be so so easy. If you get a contact you don't like, SMS some magic short code and legally receive $1 from the sender. If the sender is foreign and cannot be held accountable, the entry point domestic carrier is liable for the $1.

All it takes is a mild amount of accountability for the shitheads delivering these. It would be gone overnight.
by padjo | 2026-01-30 14:56:03+00:00
I live in a country that is struggling to meet electricity demand as it is and our grid requires substantial investment to exploit our renewables, which are spread out and intermittent.

A switch to 100% EV on the scale and pace of Norway would absolutely flatten our grid. The only way we could do it would be to build lots of additional fossil fuel capacity with the intent of rapidly making it redundant. Which seems like a wasteful way to proceed.

The reason EVs have such a small impact on the grid in Norway is that they had already electrified their economy far above average due to the abundant hydro resources they been diligently exploiting since the 19th century.
by QuadmasterXLII | 2026-01-30 14:56:14+00:00
Kagi has the world's most pleasant engagement retention email life-hack, which is that if you don't use it for a whole month, they'll email you telling you that they refunded that month's price. I don't have a specific dollar cutoff where this is acceptable, but applying the categorical imperative, if every customer retention spam or nag I received came with $14 I could retire.
by FitchApps | 2026-01-30 14:56:25+00:00
I'm seeing things that are seriously alarming though. Claude can now write better documentation and document things 95% there (we're building a set of MCP tools and API end-points for a large enterprise..) - Claude is already either writing code or fixing bugs or suggesting fixes. We have a PM, who has access to both React and API projects, on our team who saw one of the services return 500; they used Claude to pinpoint the bug to exact database call and suggest a fix. So now, it's quite common for PMs to not only post bugs but also "suggested fixes" from the agents. In a not so distant future, developers here will be simply redundant since PM can just use Claude to code and support the entire app. Right now, they still rely on us for support and deployments but that could go away too.
by vb-8448 | 2026-01-30 14:56:33+00:00
> Software development, as it has been done for decades, is over.

I'm pretty sure the way I was doing things in 2005 was completely different compared to 2015. Same for 2015 and 2025. I'm not old enough to know how they were doing things in 1995, but I'm pretty sure there very different compared to 2005.

For sure, we are going through some big changes, but there is no "as it has been done for decades".
by Uehreka | 2026-01-30 14:56:44+00:00
At the moment I’m kind of just excited that this way of orchestrating works at all, and in the process of refining it I’ll probably have it build a couple more “browsers”. But yeah, once I’ve got a setup I’m happy with, I totally plan to go all in on an approach, up the ante from Acid3 to the Web Platform Tests (which do support HTML5 and modern Web APIs), and start using it (if not as a daily driver, at least enough to get a sense of where it’s strong/weak).

I will of course be complaining vehemently on HN whenever someone’s website fails to render properly in my janky obscure browser, as is tradition.
by simianwords | 2026-01-30 14:56:54+00:00
why do you think this changes what i said? I know it has constraints but the fact is that Google is serious about it. Enough to publicly speak about it many times and invest enormous amounts of R&D.

You are saying they are "hardly betting on it". This is grossly false and I wonder why you would write that? Its clearly a serious bet, with lots of people working on it.

> Google CEO Sundar Pichai says we’re just a decade away from a new normal of extraterrestrial data centers

Its surely a high risk bet but that's how Google has been operating for a while. But why would you say they are hardly betting on it?

As a counter question: do you think Google is not serious about it?