MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-21 08:04:48+00:00
All of this is subjective. What does it mean for code to be high quality?

If you can express that in a form that can be easily tested, you can just instruct an agentic coding tool to do something about it. Most of my experience is with codex. Everytime I catch it doing something I don't like, I try to codify it in a skill or in my Agents.md or some test. I've been using codex specifically to work on addressing technical debt in my own code bases. There's a lot of stuff I never got around to fixing that I'm now actually addressing. Because it stopped being a monster project that would take weeks. You can actually nudge a code base in the right direction with agentic coding tools.

The same things that make it hard for people to iterate on code bases (complexity, technical debt, poor architectural decisions, etc.) also make it hard for LLMs to work on code bases. So, as soon as you start working on making those things better, you might get better results.

If you have a lot of regressions when iterating with an LLM, you don't have good enough regression tests. If code produces runtime type errors, maybe use something with a better type checker that can remove those bugs before they happen. If you see a lot of duplication, tell it to do something about it and/or use code quality tools that flag such issues and tell it to address those issues. This stuff requires a bit of discipline and skill. But they are fixable things. And the usual excuse that you can't be bothered doesn't apply here; just make the coding tools fix this for you.

As for evidence, the amount of dollars being spent by well respected people in the industry on these tools is increasing. That might not be the evidence you like but it's a clear indication that people are getting some value out of these tools.

I'm definitely getting more predictable results. I find myself merging most proposed changes after a few iterations. The percentage is trending up in the last months. I can only speak for myself. But essentially everybody I know and respect is using this stuff at this point. With very mixed results. But people are getting shit done. I think there are lots of things to improve with these tools. I'd like them to be faster and require less micro management. I'd like them to work across multiple repositories and issue trackers instead of suffering from perpetual tunnel vision. Mostly when I get bad results, it's a context problem. Some of these things are frustrating to fix. But in the end this is about good feedback loops, not about models magically getting what you want.
by xomiachuna | 2026-01-21 08:05:38+00:00
Have yet to read the whole thing, but skimming the outline and dipping my toes here and there made me believe this is indeed a valuable piece of knowledge - not some absurd "how to survive zombie apocalypse" but more like "how to be reasonably prepared for mundane disasters and try to avoid most of them in the first place". Guess I found my next read! Thanks
by borzi | 2026-01-21 08:05:40+00:00
I am working on a game side project where I started to force myself not to look at the code (the foundation was written by hand). I just recently launched a big update, all written with agentic code. I really enjoy it and do believe it's the future...plug for reference: https://thefakeborzi.itch.io/tower-chess/devlog/1321604/the-...
by marcus_holmes | 2026-01-21 08:05:49+00:00
This. I use it for coding in a Rails app when I'm not a Ruby expert. I can read the code, but writing it is painful, and so having the LLM write the code is beneficial. It's definitely faster than if I was writing the code, and probably produces better code than I would write.

I've been a professional software developer for >30 years, and this is the biggest revolution I've seen in the industry. It is going to change everything we do. There will be winners and losers, and we will make a lot of mistakes, as usual, but I'm optimistic about the outcome.
by Athas | 2026-01-21 08:06:25+00:00
That depends on the language. I have used (and implemented) languages where arrays are modeled as a function from an index space to some expression. During compilation, this is used to drive various optimisations. For those arrays that need a run-time representation, they may be stored in the classic way (a dense region of memory accessed with offsets computed from indexes), but also in more complicated ways, such as some kind of tree structure. These are still, semantically, arrays at the language level.
by anticodon | 2026-01-21 08:06:54+00:00
Very unlikely. Men of ages 18-60 are forbidden to leave Ukraine since February 27 or 28 of 2022. Women cannot cross the border since 2023.

Of course, there should be some exceptions. For example, some people need to go abroad to bring Western supplied munitions, officials can leave to visit other countries, etc.

But almost 100% of the population cannot leave Ukraine under any circumstances.
by fhd2 | 2026-01-21 08:07:32+00:00
Their Readme.md is weirdly obsessed with "2 hours":

"before Claude Opus 4.5 started doing better than humans given only 2 hours"

"Claude Opus 4.5 in a casual Claude Code session, approximately matching the best human performance in 2 hours"

"Claude Opus 4.5 after 2 hours in our test-time compute harness"

"Claude Sonnet 4.5 after many more than 2 hours of test-time compute"

So that does make one wonder where this comes from. Could just be LLM generated with a talking point of "2 hours", models can fall in love with that kind of stuff. "after many more than 2 hours" is a bit of a tell.

Would be quite curious to know though. How I usually design take home assignments is:

1. Candidate has several _days_ to complete (usually around a week).

2. I design the task to only _take_ 2-4 hours, informing the candidate about that, but that doesn't mean they can't take longer. The subsequent interview usually reveals if they went overboard or struggled more than expected.

But I can easily picture some places sending a candidate the assignment and asking them to hand in their work within two hours. Similar to good old coding competitions.
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-21 08:07:36+00:00
> They likely won't be able to connect to their mobile network's RCS

And why is that? Assuming your carrier bothers to run RCS, the protocol works just like MMS and SMS do. If your operator doesn't peer with other operators then you'll have the same issues getting any kind of multimedia delivered from phone to phone.

> It is. The Google's RCS endpoint requires attestation that is available through Play API only.

Annoying, though hardly unexpected at this point. Still, that only poses a problem for Google's RCS servers, not for RCS itself.
by AngryData | 2026-01-21 08:10:33+00:00
There is perhaps some extra opportunity in a 10-14 day solid observation window, but I don't see why a satellite version couldn't still work in smaller windows.

Another reason could be testing for building a much large radio antenna on the moon's surface in the future which is mentioned to farther down in the article. The moon itself and it's dust has electromagnetic effects that might effect measurements and learning about them now could help future planning.
by xurukefi | 2026-01-21 08:12:03+00:00
I hate NAT with a passion. It's a terrible technology, whose disruptive nature has probably prevented any novelty on the transport layer. But this article is oversimplifying things.

It is well known that NAT is not meant for security and that NAT is not a firewall. But one cannot deny that it implicitly brings some "default" security to the table. With NAT it's basically impossible to screw you over because there is no meaningful practical way to allow inbound connections without the client explicitly defining them (port forwarding). With IPv6, you could have a lazy vendor that does not do any firewalling or a has a default allow policy or maybe buggy firewall. With NAT that is not possible. There is no lazy/buggy NAT implementation that allows inbound connections for your entire network, because it is technically not possible. When a NATting device receives a packet with a destination port that has not previously been opened by a client, it does not decide to drop this packet because of a decision by the vendor. It drops the packet because there is simply no other option due to the nature of NAT. That is what people mean when they talk about the inherent "security" of NAT.

Again, NAT is terrible. We need to finally get rid globally of IPv4 and all the NATting that comes with it. But let's keep it to the facts.
by dmurray | 2026-01-21 08:13:07+00:00
cURL would operate such a program in good faith, and quickly earn the trust of the people who submit the kind of bug reports cURL values.

Your bank would not. Nor would mine, or most retail banks.

If the upfront cost would genuinely put off potential submitters, a cottage industry would spring up of hackers who would front you the money in return for a cut if your bug looked good. If that seems gross, it's really not - they end up doing bug triage for the project, which is something any software company would be happy to pay people for.
by shubhamjain | 2026-01-21 08:13:51+00:00
I feel AI will have the same effect degrading Internet as social media did. This flood of dumb PRs, issues is one symptom of it. Other is AI accelerating the trend which TikTok started—short, shallow, low-effort content.

It's a shame since this technology is brilliant. But every tech company has drank the “AI is the future” Kool-aid, which means no one has incentive to seriously push back against the flood of low-effort, AI-generated slop. So, it's going to be race to the bottom for a while.
by 4gotunameagain | 2026-01-21 08:14:07+00:00
This is not true. First of all, this is the SECOND time this clown is elected.

Secondly, 77,302,580 americans voted for trump. That is one in three.

I am sorry you get blamed for this, I know you are not to blame. But you have to see how it looks from the outside, given the incredible effects it has had (most importantly, making millions lose faith in the world. And who knows what more to come.)
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-21 08:14:34+00:00
> They can make a "standards compliant" RCS which will be able to connect to literally zero carriers or servers on the planet.

I call bullshit. If iPhones can connect to RCS, so can other phones.

Their app does use a weird protobuf spec of their own design, but that's for synchronising messages across devices/their web UI. RCS doesn't really do multi-device the same way iMessage does so they had to add another layer. That's not part of RCS.
by reallymental | 2026-01-21 08:15:58+00:00
All this hullabaloo about trade, tariffs and international relations has really got me thinking about the role of career "diplomats". I know of (peripherally) a few european people who have studied for this as a career, they've spent a lot of time on it (education wise). From far away it seems like a professional-level thing like being a doctor or a lawyer. They spend a lot of time studying, then working at the gov level as a lackey for a few years, then they gain some "contacts" and then... what? They join a "think-tank"? They help draft "policy"?

What's the point of all this? Aren't they all supposed to be just elected officials, and with the help of admin, supposed to just do their jobs?

I know I sound naive, I know it's more than this. I know interpersonal relationships matter and that's what these "contacts" are. But if all this can be thrown away by the actions of the few, what's the point of all this effort? Just simplify the entire structure, slash all this admin to the bare bones and let the people at the top show their competency, instead of the admin covering for them.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-21 08:16:20+00:00
> 154–155 million people voted in the 2024 presidential election; that's 63-65% of eligible voters, the second highest percentage in the past 100 years.

And then trump got elected which is the reason of the crisis right now.

Perhaps American people wanted this?

Also, I think that America and Russia's probably the only biggest difference right now is protests and yea, I looked at some protests in America and how people are getting shot and even one veteran got detained who worked in iraq war for 3 days and was stripped naked and wasn't allowed to say anything and this happened a long time ago because of ICE

All because he looked brown. You could fight or die for the country & they would come to haunt you.

Veterans are calling ICE against the protestors even worse than how Veterans acted during the wars towards Iraqi citizens

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y91VgKlJfLI

I have consistently called it out but most Americans from what I can gather want to desperately fit in the two boxes and not have independent support and especially when one party's effectively doing something like this. Bi-partisanship had always ended & you can't vote for anyone more than these two parties (one of which is causing an active war in greenland but the other party's better in this context but its also complicated and they still have very much an influence caused by lobbying)
by defatigable | 2026-01-21 08:16:23+00:00
Agreed. In the domains where I'm an expert, it's a nice productivity boost. In the domains where I'm not, it's transformative.

As a complete aside from the question of productivity, these coding tools have reawakened a love of programming in me. I've been coding for long enough that the nitty gritty of everyday programming just feels like a slog - decrypting compiler errors, fixing type checking issues, factoring out helper functions, whatever. With these tools, I get to think about code at a much higher level. I create designs and high level ideas and the AI does all the annoying detail work.

I'm sure there are other people for whom those tasks feel like an interesting and satisfying puzzle, but for me it's been very liberating to escape from them.
by theshrike79 | 2026-01-21 08:16:28+00:00
On the other hand a "high powered repeater" for Meshtastic is just the same board with a bigger more optimised antenna.

You can get solar powered ones for under 100€ and slap them wherever you want pretty easily. (But please don't unless you know what you're doing, adding useless router nodes makes the network worse, not better)
by davedx | 2026-01-21 08:16:58+00:00
We're not dependent on their energy. One example: we get 10-12% of our LNG from Qatar.

No one power controls all tech or markets. There are American and Chinese tech companies who are dependent on European tech companies (ASML being one of the better known examples).

The whole point of globalization is that we're all interdependent on each other.

All that being said: Europe has a ton of work to do. The spirit of your comment isn't entirely off the mark.
by regularfry | 2026-01-21 08:17:34+00:00
So review the code. Our rule is that if your name is on the PR, you own the code; someone else will review it and expect you to be able to justify its contents. And we don't accept AI commits.

What this means in workflow terms is that the bottleneck has moved, from writing the code to reviewing it. That's forward progress! But the disparity can be jarring when you have multiple thousands of lines of code generated every day and people are used to a review cycle based on tens or hundreds.

Some people try to make the argument that we can accept standards of code from AI that we wouldn't accept from a human, because it's the AI that's going to have to maintain it and make changes. I don't accept that: whether you're human or not it's always possible to produce write-only code, and even if the position is "if we get into difficulty we'll just have the agent rewrite it" that doesn't stop you getting into a tarpit in the first place. While we still have a need to understand how the systems we produce work, we need humans to be able to make changes and vouch for their behaviour, and that means producing code that follows our standards.
by enaaem | 2026-01-21 08:18:03+00:00
Trump fundamentally misunderstands how power really works. Power doesn’t mean others kiss your boot and give you peace prizes. People hate being ruled over. They absolutely hate it. So you have to hide your power through, ideology, laws and institutions. Galeev explains it well [1].

This is how American imperialism works. The American led western liberal order was an unprecedented alliance and America was the house. The house doesn’t win all the time, but everything is rigged in its favour.

The issue is that there is no 4d chess at play here. Trump has a narcissistic personality disorder combined with dementia and has surrounded himself by yes-men.

[1] https://kamilkazani.substack.com/p/might-makes-right
by davedx | 2026-01-21 08:18:30+00:00
"Carney said this more isolationist approach, where there's a "world of fortresses," will make countries poorer, fragile and less sustainable. But it's coming nonetheless and Canada must work with like-minded allies where possible to push back against domination by larger, wealthier and well-armed countries."

New trade relationships are being forged surprisingly quickly in the midst of all this. Anyone have a list of what's been recently announced? I can think of Mercator, EU-India, Canada-??...
by sudahtigabulan | 2026-01-21 08:18:37+00:00
> I've since learned that anything heavily regulated like hospitals and banks will have security procedures catering to compliance, not actual security.

Sadly, yeah. And will do anything only if they believe they can actually be caught.

An EU-wide bank I used to be customer of until recently, supported login with Qualified Electronic Signatures, but only if your dongle supports... SHA-1. Mine didn't. It's been deprecated at least a decade ago.

A government-certified identity provider made software that supposedly allowed you to have multiple such electronic signatures plugged in, presenting them in a list, but if one of them happened to be a YubiKey... crash. YubiKey conforms to the same standard as the PIV modules they sold, but the developers made some assumptions beyond the standard. I just wanted their software not to crash while my YubiKey is plugged in. I reported it, and they replied that it's not their problem.
by p0w3n3d | 2026-01-21 08:19:46+00:00
sadly you are not wrong. Or at least partially not wrong.

I wouldn't say pissing off, but more like 'not in a position for negotiations'. As we speak, EU is constantly slowing down their own companies while being fully dependant on US technology software and AI, being fully dependant on China's sources, chemicals, car-parts and batteries and importing (AFAIK still) Russian gas (which does not prevent german green activists from protesting against Polish gas-port). So welcome mr Trump, mr Xinping and mr Putin, which parts of our 'sovereign' conglomerate do you want to take?
by defatigable | 2026-01-21 08:20:44+00:00
:-) I feel you. Perhaps I should have ended my post with "Would you like me to construct a good prompt for your planning agent?" to really drive us into the uncanny valley?

(My writing style is very dry and to the point, you may have noticed. I looked at my post and thought, "Huh, I should try and emotionally engage with this poster, we seem like we're having a shared experience." And so I figured, heck, I'll throw in an enthusiastic interjection. When I was in college, my friends told me I had "bonsai emotions" and I suppose that still comes through in my writing style...)
by colechristensen | 2026-01-21 08:21:33+00:00
I don't know, I prompted Opus 4.5 "Tell me the reasons why this report is stupid" on one of the example slop reports and it returned a list of pretty good answers.[1]

Give it a presumption of guilt and tell it to make a list, and an LLM can do a pretty good job of judging crap. You could very easily rig up a system to give this "why is it stupid" report and then grade the reports and only let humans see the ones that get better than a B+.

If you give them the right structure I've found LLMs to be much better at judging things than creating them.

Opus' judgement in the end:

"This is a textbook example of someone running a sanitizer, seeing output, and filing a report without understanding what they found."

1. https://claude.ai/share/8c96f19a-cf9b-4537-b663-b1cb771bfe3f
by TonyStr | 2026-01-21 08:21:38+00:00
A smart, and by no means technically incompetent friend of mine struggled to get a software product to run. He would reinstall it, try different configuration, uninstall plugins, yet every time he tried running it, the program gave the same error message. I asked him to read the error, and it very simply stated that it was failing to create symlinks because the the disk was formatted with ExFAT. Had he just piped this message into ChatGPT, he would have avoided hours of debugging.
by spaqin | 2026-01-21 08:21:41+00:00
Warfare yes, but that's all warfare that's terrifying. Similarly you can make a point that for $10 you can buy a knife that can be used in all different morbid crimes.

FPV drones as a fun hobby in the rest of the world has had, in the last 10 years since it became somewhat popular, a total of zero fatalities or serious injuries. Don't let the irrational fear guide you towards further unnecessary regulation that makes others' lives worse.
by MPSimmons | 2026-01-21 08:22:50+00:00
I agree with the majority of your point, but hopefully your printer hasn't been assigned IPv6 IPs that are global in nature and is instead limited to site-local.

For anyone who is reading this but hasn't use IPv6, IPv6 addresses are a large flat 128-bit contiguous address space, but they are not universally routable. The prefix of any specific address determines what group of other IPs can get to it.

We often think of a computer as having an IP address, but with IPv6, computers will have several addresses, all with different prefixes to handle different types of traffic.

This site does a decent job of explaining - https://networklessons.com/ipv6/ipv6-address-types
by perihelions | 2026-01-21 08:23:09+00:00
(Mercosur*, for "Mercado Común del Sur"[0]; Mercator was a geographer from the 16th century[1]).

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... ("Glossary:Mercosur")

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerardus_Mercator ("Gerardus Mercator")
by rapsey | 2026-01-21 08:23:32+00:00
Russia is still an energy provider to Europe. Do we provide any security guarantees to Qatar or can protect the shipping lanes? We can not. It is controlled by the US, which is also a major supplier.

For every political squeeze EU can do, the US can squeeze 10x as hard.

ASML also has quite a lot of US suppliers. We are all tech dependent on each other, but China is working hard to fix that and the US also.
by kinjba11 | 2026-01-21 08:23:35+00:00
This reminds me of the "three tribes of programming: mathematical poetry, machine hackery, and business value". I think each SWE gets similar but different feelings of satisfaction. I knew a coworker who cared about the result, and little about the code he wrote. This was foreign to me when I saw it, as I was and still am definitely in the love for "math poetry" camp when it's possible.

https://josephg.com/blog/3-tribes/