MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How can I make PluriSnake, a daily puzzle game, easier to understand?
by amichail | 2026-01-26 15:41:09+00:00
PluriSnake is a daily snake color matching puzzle game.

Gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAjd5HgbOhU

Beta: https://testflight.apple.com/join/mJXdJavG [iPhone/iPad/Mac]

If you have trouble with the tutorial, check out this tutorial video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1dfTuoTluY

Color matching is used in two ways: (1) matching circles creates snakes, and (2) matching a snake’s color with the squares beneath it destroys them. Snakes, but not individual circles, can be moved by snaking to squares of matching color.

Goal: Score as highly as you can. Destroying all the squares is not required for your score to count.

Scoring: The more links that are currently in the grid, the more points you get when you destroy a square.

There is more to it than that, as you will see.

How can I make this puzzle game easier to understand?
by deadbabe | 2026-01-26 15:41:10+00:00
All the new “advances” in AI (LLMs) will mostly be from better context engineering. The core feature of an intelligent response for a given prompt will not improve much.

The stuff you mention is unproven in usefulness or is so far away that most software engineers have enough time to wrap up their careers and retire gainfully.

AI has already been integrated with robotics. We have entire factories running entirely with robots in the dark. For mass consumer markets, a floor vacuuming and mopping robot that can also climb stairs is probably peak robotics. They already build world models that map out your entire home and reason about materials and cleanliness.

There’s not much more juice left to squeeze here. The next frontier is genetic programming (biological).
by sofixa | 2026-01-26 15:41:15+00:00
> Or is it cheapo Android Phones picking up the tag and then sending GPS coords into cloud?

AirTags have no integration with Android devices. There's a shitty app from Apple you can install that allows you to scan for AirTags nearby, one shot. It's supposedly against stalkers, but it's practically useless. There a bunch of other community apps with varying features like finding and notifying you there's an AirTag nearby. But you can't even track your own AirTags from an Android device, because Apple have decided you must do it from an iDevice. No browser, no Android app. You can check your iPhone's location via the browser, but not the AirTag.

The Android ecosystem has an alternative thing, but depending on the phone manufacturer you have to opt in to your device being used to track trackers around you.

When I travel to places with low iPhone market share, I always have one tracker of each ecosystem, just in case.
by bobson381 | 2026-01-26 15:41:25+00:00
It's such a wonderful thing to be reminded of how silly it is to take language seriously. IMO it's prickles and goo[1] all the way down - and the prickles help us share meaning and exchange information, but there is no project of exactitude to be completed.

The hubris it takes to maintain the view that we can just keep figuring things out if we are rational enough is also sometimes overwhelming to me. It's not that we can't understand things better through analysis, just that it sometimes seems foolish to me to try to get all of it through system-2 type behavior. We will always miss something crucial[2].

[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4vHnM8WPvU

[2]:https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...
by cyanydeez | 2026-01-26 15:41:54+00:00
I am. Why arn't we doing more against "Russian" hacking, because:

1. They outsource it

2. It rarely has clear red flags, eg "Putin's IP showed up on our PC before the virus"

So, I'm generalizing the argument about why direct action rarely occurs: It's because even if theres a great deal of evidence, the fuzzy logic required to say "this is statistically true" is rarely used.
by darknavi | 2026-01-26 15:41:54+00:00
In middle school (I think) we spent a few days in math class hand-calculating trigonometry values (cosine, sin, etc.). Only after we did that did our teacher tell us that the mandated calculators that we all have used for the last few months have a magic button that will "solve" for the values for you. It definitely made me appreciate the calculator more!
by thesz | 2026-01-26 15:41:54+00:00
> AI assisted development isn't all or nothing.
> We as a group and as individuals need to figure out the right blend of AI and human.

This is what makes current LLM debate very much like the strong typing debate about 15-20 years ago.

"We as a group need to figure out the right blend of strong static and weak dynamic typing."

One can look around and see where that old discussion brought us. In my opinion, nowhere, things are same as they were.

So, where will LLM-assisted coding bring us? By rhyming it with the static types, I see no other variants than "nowhere."
by gumboshoes | 2026-01-26 15:41:57+00:00
I have permanent prompts in Gemini settings to tell it to never include videos in its answers. Never ever for any reason. Yet of course it always does. Even if I trusted any of the video authors or material - and I don't know them so how can I trust them? - I still don't watch a video that could be text I could read in one-tenth of the time. Text is superior to video 99% of the time in my experience.
by sidpatil | 2026-01-26 15:41:57+00:00
> It may be that like clothes, there's only so much need for software.

Clothing demand has increased greatly in the past decade due to fast fashion. Much of this clothing is designed to cost a few bucks, last a few wears, then get thrown out. It's an ecological disaster.

Maybe we'll see something similar happen with software — as production costs fall, trends will shift toward few-use throwaway software. I highly suspect this is already happening.
by fullstop | 2026-01-26 15:42:01+00:00
> Where I'm from, I am legally required to have proof of ID with me all the time. So basically used to never leaving home without it.

Yes, I too have proof of ID. It does not prove that I am a citizen. I can also tell you that children in the USA do not carry ID.

> No, going back to what you're saying: why is it wrong to deport somebody that came to the US illegally?

If they were brought here as young children, yes, it's wrong -- they're being punished for the actions of their parents.

> And speaking about TPS, you know what the T stands for, right?

Of course. Let's look at Somalia, who recently had their temporary protected status designation revoked. Their home country is currently involved in a civil war, and the US government simultaneously lists Somalia as "Level 4: Do Not Travel". There's a good chance that we're sending these people to their deaths. You are okay with this?
by gdubs | 2026-01-26 15:42:34+00:00
Long way from the "Think Different" era Apple. Been thinking about that campaign this week. Posters of people like MLK, which Jobs had to get permission for from each and every estate for the campaign. When Apple was solidly, unambiguously positioned as the computer for the rebels, the misfits, the crazy ones.

If nothing else, there was an opportunity to simply say that given the day's events, a movie screening didn't feel right. Or – "hey there's a gigantic winter storm covering half the country, and I have a lot of logistical stuff to take care of."
by squidbeak | 2026-01-26 15:43:09+00:00
> You might be able to get more trust by the government assigning a third party to audit the systems to make sure they are working as advertised, and not being abused, but you would still get people being paranoid that either the third party could be corrupted to pretend that things are okay, or that a future government would just fire them and have the system changed to track everyone anyway.

The scheme is one step ahead of you, Auditors are required [1]. Government's role in the scheme is limited to operating the API in front of its departments which are read only and scattered (eg no central database), funding the auditors and trust registry (a Digital Verification Service public key store), and legislating. The verification work will all be done by private sector digital verification services - whichever is associated with the wallet app you've chosen. There were 227 of them last year already working for various services - we all benefit from the sector being brought under a formal regulatory framework.

The tracking you fear doesn't seem to be possible beyond what is already tracked when you open a bank account etc, but this is entirely outside the scope of the wallet's operation. It's been designed specifically to make the kind of abuse you fear impossible, at least in its current format, where government is out of the loop except as a passive reference, and the DV services are legally prevented from retaining any data without your consent. Of course that could alter in future, but as it stands the framework doesn't allow for what everyone fears it does.

[1] https://enablingdigitalidentity.blog.gov.uk/2024/10/24/how-a...

(The Enabling Digital Identity Blog has a comprehensive information about every aspect of the framwework.)
by gowld | 2026-01-26 15:43:10+00:00
To the Guardian's credit, at the bottom they explicitly cited the researchers walking back their own research claims.

> However, the researchers cautioned that these videos represented fewer than 1% of all the YouTube links cited by AI Overviews on health.

> “Most of them (24 out of 25) come from medical-related channels like hospitals, clinics and health organisations,” the researchers wrote. “On top of that, 21 of the 25 videos clearly note that the content was created by a licensed or trusted source.

> “So at first glance it looks pretty reassuring. But it’s important to remember that these 25 videos are just a tiny slice (less than 1% of all YouTube links AI Overviews actually cite). With the rest of the videos, the situation could be very different.”
by jqpabc123 | 2026-01-26 15:43:30+00:00
We now have a serial bankruptcy artist personally running the world's largest economy --- largely by way of threats and intimidation and force because he understands next to nothing about economics and business and how the world is interconnected.

The only safe play is not to play --- buy gold instead and wait for reality to persist --- which it almost always does.

It would be funny if it wasn't so deadly serious.
by ozten | 2026-01-26 15:43:40+00:00
Generative AI is a major setback to OSS licensing. I've been on projects where we needed to do a "cleanroom" implementation and vet the team has never viewed the source code of competing products. Now in the gen AI era, coding agents are IP laundering machines. They are trained on OSS code, but the nuances of the original licenses are lost.

On the whole, I think it is a net gain for civilization, but if we zoom into OSS licensing... not good.
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-26 15:43:57+00:00
Additionally to point 2, the older format was created by a company (Mapbox) that used to be open source-friendly but has recently made a larger pushback against open source and open standards, changing the licenses of much of their formerly open source work. (The Maplibre JS library itself is a fork of that company's previous open source work from its last open source drop to keep the work open source.)
by ryandrake | 2026-01-26 15:44:27+00:00
The more I experiment with quickly coding up little projects with LLMs the more I am convinced of this. There is that saying: 90% of your customers use 10% of your software's features, but they each use a different 10%. Well, the ability to quickly vibe up a small bespoke app that does that 10% AND NOTHING ELSE is here now, and it kind of solves that problem. We don't need to put up with DoEverythingBloatWare (even open source DoEverything) when you can just have the bits and pieces you actually want/need.

Also, you don't have to fear breaking updates--you know for sure that the software's UI will not just change out from under you because some designer had to pad their portfolio. Or that you're not going to lose a critical feature because the developer decided to refactor and leave it out.

I'm currently going through and looking at some of the bigger, bloated, crashing slow-moving software I use and working on replacements.
by caminante | 2026-01-26 15:44:33+00:00
I don't understand how you're aware of terms like COINTELPRO, yet are dismissive that black box slush funds like USAID weren't facilitating US soft power.

Heard of ZunZuneo, National Endowment for Democracy, Reporters Without Borders? The DOGE campaign put a spotlight on the ulterior motives of these "independent" USAID funded initiatives.
by replooda | 2026-01-26 15:44:50+00:00
I'm truly thankful to Cal Newport for his "Deep Work," a book I would recommend to anyone here, but this article read like one of those videos which, despite interesting, are ultimately a thin wrapper around "a message from our sponsors."

In short: "[Self-help influencing] succeeds because what it sells looks hard enough to be worth doing but easy enough we feel we could. I fear we, specially the young, will settle for that and stop seeking truly hard, truly rewarding goals. Speaking of, I recommend Brad Stulberg's new book 'The Way of Excellence.'"
by andai | 2026-01-26 15:45:07+00:00
It probably depends on what you're doing, but my use case is simple straightforward code with minimal abstraction.

I have to go out of my way to get this out of llms. But with enough persuasion, they produce roughly what I would have written myself.

Otherwise they default to adding as much bloat and abstraction as possible. This appears to be the default mode of operation in the training set.

I also prefer to use it interactively. I divide the problem to chunks. I get it to write each chunk. The whole makes sense. Work with its strengths and weaknesses rather than against them.

For interactive use I have found smaller models to be better than bigger models. First of all because they are much faster. And second because, my philosophy now is to use the smallest model that does the job. Everything else by definition is unnecessarily slow and expensive!

But there is a qualitative difference at a certain level of speed, where something goes from not interactive to interactive. Then you can actually stay in flow, and then you can actually stay consciously engaged.
by rahimnathwani | 2026-01-26 15:45:21+00:00
Have you ever read a 200 page vibewritten novel and found it satisfying?

I haven't, but my son has. For two separate novels authored by GPT 4.5.

(The model was asked to generate a chapter at a time. At each step, it was given the full outline of the novel, the characters, and a summary of each chapter so far.)
by stackedinserter | 2026-01-26 15:45:28+00:00
I kinda get the point, but why is that? The goal of school is to teach something that's applicable in industry or academia.

Forklift operators don't lift things in their training. Even CS students start with pretty high level of abstraction, very few start from x86 asm instructions.

We need to make them implement ALU's on logical gates and wires if we want them to lift heavy things.
by smw1218 | 2026-01-26 15:45:33+00:00
It's a great feature to tell my drone to do a task in English. Like "a child is lost in the woods around here. Fly a search pattern to find her" or "film a cool panorama of this property. Be sure to get shots of the water feature by the pool."
While LLMs are bad at flying, better navigation models likely can't be prompted in natural language yet.
by CWuestefeld | 2026-01-26 15:46:01+00:00
I'm wondering why the guy at Microsoft in charge of Windows is still employed.

Over the prior weekend my installation of Playnite (a catalog/launcher for my games) was broken by the update, until I moved its data off of OneDrive[1]. And the other day I figured out that a couple of icons on my desktop had become completely inert and unresponsive due to the same bug - again due to an interaction between the Windows Shell and OneDrive. And this one I can't fix, I can't shift my desktop out of OneDrive.

MS's strategy at this point is that Windows is a loss leader to get people onto the subscriptions for Office and OneDrive. So when the Windows team releases bugs that break usage of those services, forcing people off them onto alternative solutions, the guy in charge of those updates really needs to be answering some tough questions.

[1] I've now got SyncThing handling this.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-01-26 15:46:01+00:00
True, but it's a lot harder to sneak those things than text. I've seen convincing Yanis Varifakis and Neil DeGrasse Tyson fakes, but even those don't survive any scrutiny. I'm sure that will change, and people will find new ways to signal authenticity in videos (leaving in fuckups is already in style).
by JohnFen | 2026-01-26 15:46:43+00:00
If it's taking more than a few minutes to explain something, write an explainer paper about it rather than writing the explanation in the message itself. Then publish that paper (or at least keep it handy) and point people to it when they need deeper explanations. In this way, you only have to write up an explanation once.

I've found that, generally, casual inquiries don't usually need a deep explanation. They usually just need a fast, actionable answer. Provide that, then attach or link to another document that provides the full, deep explanation.
by ethin | 2026-01-26 15:47:00+00:00
This only works up to a certain point. Given that the author openly admits they don't know/understand Rust, there is a really high likelihood that the LLM made all kinds of mistakes that would be avoided, and the dev is going to be left flailing about trying to understand why they happen/what's causing them/etc. A hand-rewrite would've actually taught the author a lot of very useful things I'm guessing.
by game_the0ry | 2026-01-26 15:47:36+00:00
"Will AI replace software engineers?" is not the right question and stems from a misunderstanding of how tech affects humans and how they work.

Tech is a tool. It will take away some jobs, and then create new ones. Think of a combine tractor -- it took away crop picking jobs, but created a new job of combine tractor driver. It bumps productivity.

The correct frame is "how can software engineers (or anyone, for that matter) use AI to increase my productivity?" With that frame, AI does not replace engineers; rather, engineers are in the best position to understand how it deliver products faster and implement that understanding.
by jeffbee | 2026-01-26 15:47:42+00:00
That's interesting ... why would you want to wall off and ignore what is undoubtedly one of the largest repositories of knowledge (and trivia and ignorance, but also knowledge) ever assembled? The idea that a person can read and understand an article faster than they can watch a video with the same level of comprehension does not, to me, seem obviously true. If it were true there would be no role for things like university lecturers. Everyone would just read the text.
by solatic | 2026-01-26 15:47:53+00:00
> real-time usage -> billing

This is one of the things that excites me about TigerBeetle; the reason why so much billing by cloud providers is reported only on an hourly granularity at best is because the underlying systems are running batch jobs to calculate final billed sums. Having a billing database that is efficient enough to keep up with real-time is a game-changer and we've barely scratched the surface of what it makes possible.
by deadbabe | 2026-01-26 15:47:56+00:00
Bootcamp devs were always going to be doomed in the job market. They were a symptom of not having enough true classically trained computer science degree holding engineers to hire, so you compromised by looking for anyone that knew how to code well enough. But this problem eventually corrects.

Now, there are way too many computer science grads in a time when code is easy and cheap. Not much to gain from hiring a bootcamp dev over the real deal.

But I would say if you truly enjoy coding and you didn’t get to study CS in a university, a bootcamp is probably a fun experience to go through just for your own enjoyment, not for job seeking purposes. Just don’t pay too much.
by HDMI_Cable | 2026-01-26 15:48:22+00:00
That's definitely true, though probably only limited to CS (and maybe the top 5% of people going to investment banking). The vast majority of the most intelligent people at any Canadian university will stay in Canada, and given the current political situation, I think that's probably only going to become more true.

Also, anecdotally, I would wager that schools with significant numbers of Americans (e.g., McGill) probably have more US students staying in Canada than vice versa at this point (with perhaps the exception of CS).
by jerf | 2026-01-26 15:48:52+00:00
The Great Lakes have a management principle that is basically "You can use the water of the Great Lakes by permission as long as the water remains in the watershed." And permission is not automatic either.

The reason for that to a large degree is that the Great Lakes area looked over at the Southwest, which wasn't even as bad at the time as it is now, did some math, and worked out that if the Great Lakes tried to supply the Southwest that it would cause noticeable dropping of the water level. I'm sure it would be even more dropping now.

The problem is, the Great Lakes aren't just some big lakes with juicy fresh water that can be spent as desired. They are also international shipping lanes. They make it so that de facto Detroit, Chicago, and a whole bunch of other cities and places are ocean ports. Ocean ports are very, very valuable. There are also numerous other port facilities all along the great lakes, often relatively in the middle of nowhere but doing something economically significant. This is maintained by very, very large and continual dredging operations to keep these lanes open. Dropping the water levels would destroy these ports and make the dredging operations go from expensive to impossible.

So, getting large quantities of water out of the Great Lakes to go somewhere isn't just a matter of "the people who control it don't want to do that", which is still true, and a big obstacle on its own. The Southwest when asking for that water is also asking multiple major international ports to just stop being major international ports. That's not going to happen.
by jimnotgym | 2026-01-26 15:48:57+00:00
> Are these profits more or less than the interest to bondholders you'd otherwise be paying?

Apparently rather more

"Earlier this year, Corporate Watch calculated that £2 billion a year could be saved – or £80 per household – if the water supply was in public ownership. The government can borrow much cheaper than the companies and there would be no private shareholders demanding their dividends"

The research is cited in the document if you would like to critique

https://corporatewatch.org/the-severn-trent-takeover-corpora...
by gowld | 2026-01-26 15:49:01+00:00
That's because decent (but still flawed) GenAI is expensive. The AI Overview model is even cheaper than the AI Mode model, which is cheaper than the Gemini free model, which is cheaper than the Gemini Thinking model, which is cheaer than the Gemini Pro model, which is still very misleading when working on human language source content. (It's much better at math and code).
by siliconc0w | 2026-01-26 15:49:11+00:00
IMO SRE works mostly because they exist outside the product engineering organization. They want to help you succeed but if you want to YOLO your launch and move fast and break things they have the option to hand back the pager and find other work. That option is rarely used but the option alone seems to create better than usual incentives.

With Vibecoding I imagine the LLM will get a MCP that allows them to schedule the jobs on Kubernetes or whatever IaaS and a fleet of agents will do the basic troubleshooting or whackamole type activities, leaving only the hard problems for human SRE. Before and after AI, the corporate incentives will always be to ship slop unless there is a counterbalancing force keeping the shipping team accountable to higher standards.