MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-01-27 02:46:06+00:00
Not AMD doing the work, but 14 year old GCN 1 / 1.1 has been getting a bunch of modernization & other improvements. R9 290, HD 7970, many more old chips.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMDGPU-SI-Power-Management https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-GCN-1.1-Driver-Default-Pro...

AMD might not be doing the work, but they set the world up to be able to support their chips. I'd take that over crossing my fingers for ok Windows driver support to hold out any day.

Top range of these cards had (only 8GB) of 0.3TB/s memory, which is what a modern 9060xt can do. Double that for the 9070xt, but still not bad. 4->~48 (fp32) TFLOPS though, wow! Especially with a modern driver stack. With the accelerators all using much older architectures I wonder if they stand to get any benefit, not that they're getting used for graphics much.
by Lerc | 2026-01-27 02:46:10+00:00
When Asimov wrote those works there was optimism that Symbolic artificial intelligence would provide the answers.

>But the specific issues we are dealing with have little to do with us feeling safe and protected behind some immutable rules that are built into the system

If your interpretation of the Robot books was that was suggesting a few immutable rules would make us safe and protected, you may have missed the primary message. The overarching theme was an exploration of what those laws could do, and how they may not necessarily correlate with what we want or even perceive as safe and protected. If anything the rules represented a starting point and the books were presenting a challenge to come up with something better.

Anthropic's work on autoencoding activations down to measurable semantic points might prove a step towards that something better. The fact that they can do manipulations based upon those semantic points does suggest something akin to the laws of robotics might be possible.

When it comes to alignment, the way many describe it, it is simply impossible because humans themselves are not aligned. Picking a median, mean, or lowest common denominator of human alignment would be a choice that people probably cannot agree. We are unaligned on even how we could compromise.

In reality, if you have control over what AI does there are only two options.

1. We can make AI do what some people say,

2. We can make them do what they want (assuming we can make them want)

If we make them do what some people, that hands the power to those who have that say.

I think there will come a time when an AI will perceive people doing something wrong, that most people do not think is wrong, and the AI will be the one that is right. Do we want it to intervene or not? Are we instead happy with a nation developing superintelligence that is subservient to the wishes of say, Vladimir Putin.
by bartread | 2026-01-27 02:46:11+00:00
All the time, my friend: all the damn time.

I've been all the way up to CTO in a mid-size company (650ish people), and I've felt like this in every role I've had at different times. Some places more than others. Where I was CTO wasn't too bad but that came at the cost of me not touching code at the company for several years because, at that level, and in the kind of company it was, you just really can't - not without finding yourself becoming a blocker anyway.

But I've worked in a couple of larger organisations - one of them, probably 90k employees, although it wasn't a tech company - and these issues are rife there as well. To some extent, I think it's just big company behaviour, not specific only to big tech companies.
by Dig1t | 2026-01-27 02:46:40+00:00
There is more than enough water available for everyone in the world. Israel gets 80% of its water from desalinated ocean water. They even have extra water to pump back into natural sources like the sea of Galilee and aquifers.

Western countries have more than enough resources to replicate Israel's approach. Water shortages are a choice, a failure of our bureaucracies.

Pretending that eating less cheese is going to somehow fix our dumb politicians' mismanagement and shortsightedness just seems silly. Water is extremely abundant on this planet, there is no reason why every person shouldn't be able to blast their shower for as long as they want and eat as much cheese as they like.
by roncesvalles | 2026-01-27 02:46:43+00:00
Exactly. This is like buying a smoothie blender when you already have an all-purpose mixer-blender. This whole space is at best an open-source project by some kid, not a (multiple!) whole company.

It's very unlikely that any of these tools are getting better results than simply prompting verbatim "review these code changes" in your branch with the SOTA model du jour.
by JuniperMesos | 2026-01-27 02:46:59+00:00
DEI programs were (largely) incentivized by one political faction in the United States primarily via legal rather than market mechanisms, and in response to this a rival political faction explicitly ran on undoing those legal mechanisms to disincentivize DEI programs.

Of course one of the ways the government can enact policy is by making something cheap or expensive for firms participating in capitalism to do, which incentivizes their behavior; but characterizing DEI programs as something that corporations jettisoned because it was determined to be "unprofitable under the current administration" ignores the fact that the current administration explicitly promised to end DEI programs in a political campaign in a democracy and then won an election.
by bingb0ng | 2026-01-27 02:48:05+00:00
The largest Microsoft subscription account is the United States federal government. Windows/office/whatever else for every federal employee pays the company enough to continue development and offer it to the masses. I’m certain that the ability to collect habitual data on users is valuable to both Microsoft and the powers that be, for advertising and criminal investigation.

The only thing that surprises me is the lack of any additional cost to end users. It’s almost as if the majority shareholder is Blackrock.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-27 02:49:01+00:00
Depends what you're doing I suppose. E.g. if keyboards had a 40% error rate you wouldn't find me trying to write a novel on one... but you'd still find me using it for a lot of things. I.e. we don't choose to use tools solely based on how often they malfunction, rather stuff like how often they save us time over not using them on average.
by xtafnuihc | 2026-01-27 02:49:26+00:00
First, I’d like to apologize to the community for my clumsy entrance — I probably came across like a drunk guy stumbling into a party he doesn’t yet understand. I should have spent more time learning the community norms first.

That said, let me try to respond to your very insightful and constructive questions.

At this scale, water tends to replace the air film and introduce surface tension and capillary forces between the ball and raceway. That adds drag rather than reducing friction, especially when combined with fine particles or residue. So your concern is absolutely valid.

Our honest answer is that we’re constantly balancing real-world usability against technical constraints. We did consider applying hydrophobic coatings to the raceway, but in practice those coatings wear off very quickly at the actual contact points inside the bearing, which makes them ineffective over time.

Instead, we focused on making the internal structural components corrosion-resistant and water-tolerant, and designed the system so that, rather than trying to completely block water from entering, it can be easily cleaned and quickly dried.

The “sticky” or sluggish feel water introduces in a micro-bearing is temporary. In practice, you can restore normal performance by blowing it dry with a hair dryer in about a minute.

The analogy we often use is washing your hair: if you’re not in a hurry, it will air-dry on its own. If you need to go to sleep right away, you use a hair dryer. In either case, the impact on the overall experience is minimal. By the way give me a bit of time — I promise I’ll put together a more systematic report with photos and data from our testing. There’s no real secret sauce here, just a lot of trial, error, and tiny tolerances.
by abcde666777 | 2026-01-27 02:49:40+00:00
This will sound arrogant, but I can't shake the impression that agent programming is most appealing to amateurs, where the kind of software they build is really just glorified UIs and data plumbing.

I work on game engines which do some pretty heavy lifting, and I'd be loath to let these agents write the code for me.

They'd simply screw too much of it up and create a mess that I'm going to have to go through by hand later anyway, not just to ensure correctness but also performance.

I want to know what the code is doing, I want control over the fine details, and I want to have as much of the codebase within my mental understanding as possible.

Not saying they're not useful - obviously they are - just that something smells fishy about the success stories.
by nlawalker | 2026-01-27 02:50:19+00:00
>Shipping is a social construct within a company.

Thanks for flagging this, this was an epiphany for me today, so for anyone else struck by it I'm linking directly to the article it's from (same author, and linked from the article in the context the parent mentions, just not linked directly in their post above):

"How I ship projects at big tech companies" https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-to-ship/

Also the HN comments on it from when it was originally posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42111031
by irjustin | 2026-01-27 02:50:49+00:00
How is this apples-apples at all?

But to answer directly... yes? yes, I am.

[edit]

A bit it more real. My blood pressure monitor says my bp is 200/160. Chat says you're dead get yourself to a hospital.

Get to the hospital and says oh your bp monitor is wrong.

I'm happy? I would say that I am. Sure I'm annoyed at my machine, but way happier it's wrong than right.
by PeterWhittaker | 2026-01-27 02:51:21+00:00
While I still struggle to think in Rust after years of thinking in C, it is NEVER the borrow checker or lifetimes that trip me, it's the level of abstraction, in that C forced me low level, building my own abstractions, while Rust allows me to think in abstractions first and muse over how to implement those idiomatically.

What did it for me was thinking through how mutable==exclusive, non-mutable==shared, and getting my head around Send and Sync (not quite there yet).

AI helps me with boiler plate, but not with understanding, and if I don't understand I cannot validate what AI produces.

Rust is worth the effort.
by nomel | 2026-01-27 02:51:27+00:00
> Why are you assuming that the general public ought to have access to imperfect tools?

Could you tell me which source of information do you see as "perfect" (or acceptable) that you see as a good example of a threshold for what you think the public should and should not have access to?

> I live in a place where getting a blood test requires a referral from a doctor, who is also required to discuss the results with you.

I don't see how this is relevant. In the above article, the user went to their doctor for advice and a referral. But, in the US (and, many European countries) blood tests aren't restricted, and can be had from private labs out of pocket, since they're just measurements of things that exist in your blood, and not allowing you to know what's inside of you would be considered government overreach/privacy violation. Medical interpretations/advice from the measurements is what's restricted, in most places.
by wenc | 2026-01-27 02:52:13+00:00
Rust, Go and TypeScript are good bets.

Python -- hear me out. With spec-driven development to anchor things, coupled with property-based tests (PBT) using Hypothesis, it's great for prototyping problems.

You wouldn't write mission critical stuff with it, but it has two advantages over so-called "better designed languages": massive ecosystem and massive training.

If your code involved manipulating dataframes (polars, pandas), plotting (seaborn), and machine learning, Python just can't be beat. You can try using an LLM to generate Rust code for this -- go ahead and try it -- and you'll see how bad it can be.

Better ecosystems and better training can beat better languages in many problem domains.
by onion2k | 2026-01-27 02:52:17+00:00
I don't understand the title. It says autosave is not recovery, and then the article talks about a form that evidently didn't have an autosave feature, and how the author wrote a library to add autosaving to forms.

Ironically, unless the author has committed to maintain it forever, that library will inevitably become a "legacy library that is no longer actively maintained" that's part of the problem they're trying to solve. Presumably a short blog post about how to serialize soem form data to a JSON object and save it to localStorage when a field's onBlur event fires, and how to load that data and populate the form when the page loads, wouldn't have been complicated enough.
by zerohp | 2026-01-27 02:52:51+00:00
In the chip design world, 2:1 for design verification to design is on the low end of normal.

Some organizations have gone as low as 1:1 but that is considered an emergency that must be fixed. It’s so important that designers will be intentionally underworked if there are not enough validation engineers on staff.

When you can’t fix bugs in the field, quality is important.
by srcreigh | 2026-01-27 02:53:13+00:00
Idk. Did you see the "Buffer reuse" section of this blog post? [1]

Kudos to that guy for solving the puzzle, but I really don't want to use a special trick to get the compiler to let me reuse a buffer in a for loop.

[1]: https://davidlattimore.github.io/posts/2025/09/02/rustforge-...
by VerifiedReports | 2026-01-27 02:53:26+00:00
Yeah, the regressions in Mac OS are particularly ill-timed and infuriating because there is no real competition now. I consider Windows unusable. It's not even worth talking about anymore; and I was a big Windows fan (and developer) into the 2000s. Now I don't have a single instance of Windows running in my house.

If Apple's slide continues, computing will recede back to its hobbyist/academic roots, I guess.
by forrestthewoods | 2026-01-27 02:53:30+00:00
This is a n objectively false statement.

Rusts borrow checker is only able to prove at compile-time that a subset of correct programs are correct. There are many correct programs that the BC is unable to prove to be correct and therefore rejects them.

I’m a big fan of Rust and the BC. But let’s not twist reality here.
by siliconc0w | 2026-01-27 02:53:54+00:00
I'm not so sure. IMO agents are actually a huge unlock for low code tools because before you had to teach a disinterested human how to use your new DSL/tool. But Agents are a lot more patient and enthusiastic. So you can have the agent generate the low-code instead of the human.

You could try to generate the business tools straight from the conventional toolsets but the problem is that agents are still far to unreliable for that. However, just like humans, if you dumb down the space and give them a smaller, simpler, set of primitives - they can do a lot better.
Show HN: Seedance 2.0 Pro AI Video Generator
by Zach_HE | 2026-01-27 02:55:43+00:00
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With fast rendering, multiple aspect ratios, and high-resolution support, it enables rapid production of storytelling content, ads, and social media videos without traditional filming complexity.
by plantwallshoe | 2026-01-27 02:55:47+00:00
This is also been my cope.

By the time software engineers are fully automated, then executive assistants, accountants, business development people, marketers, administrative staff, researchers, and HR will also have been fully automated. At that point we have a revolution on our hands and not having a coding job will be the least of your worries.

(or it happens slowly enough that we have time to adjust)
by radium3d | 2026-01-27 02:56:04+00:00
I actually haven't come across situation 1 2 or 3 mentioned in the attached video. Generally I iterate on the code by starting a new prompt with the code provided, with enhancements, or provide the errors and it repairs the errors. Generally it gets it within 1-2 iterations. No emotions. Make sure your prompts do not contain fluff, and are straight what you want the code to accomplish and how you want it to accomplish it. I've gone back to code months later and have not had what you described as being shocked about bad code, it was quite easy to understand. Are you prompting the AI to also write variables and function names logically and utilize a common coding standard for whichever type of code you are having it write, such as wordpress coding standards or similar? Perhaps claude isn't the best, I have been experimenting with grok 4.1 thinking and grok expert at the mid-level paid tier. I'll take it a step further and adjust the code myself, start a new prompt and provide that updated code along with my further requests as well. I haven't hit the road blocks mentioned.
by VerifiedReports | 2026-01-27 02:57:05+00:00
Nonsense. And 98 was even better.

This was back when you'd hook up a new printer or other device to a Windows computer, and it would detect it and prompt you for a driver disk. During that same era (and well past it, into the 2000s) if you plugged something into a Mac... nothing would happen. You had to go hunt down a driver for it and initiate the installation process yourself.

How times have changed.
by bartread | 2026-01-27 02:57:40+00:00
Yeah, I would say it's pretty variable, and it depends on what you mean by the word write.

I've recently joined a startup whose stack is Ruby on Rails + PostgreSQL. Whilst I've used PostgreSQL, and am extremely familiar with relational databases (especially SQL Server), I've never been a Rubyist - never written a line of Ruby until very recently in fact - and certainly don't know Rails, although the MVC architecture and the way projects are structured feels very comfortable.

We have what I'll describe as a prototype that I am in the process of reworking into a production app by fixing bugs, and making some pretty substantial functional improvements.

I would say, out of the gate, 90%+ of the code I'm merging is initially written by an LLM for which I'm writing prompts... because I don't know Ruby or Rails (although I'm picking them up fast), and rather than scratch my head and spend a lot of time going down a Google and Stackoverflow black hole, it's just easier to tell the LLM what I want. But, of course, I tell it what I want like the software engineer I am, so I keept it on a short leash where everything is quite tightly specified, including what I'm looking for in terms of structure and architectural concerns.

Then the code is fettled by me to a greater or lesser extent. Then I push and PR, and let Copilot review the code. Any good suggestions it makes I usually allow it to either commit directly or raise a PR for. I will often ask it to write automated tests for me. Once it's PRed everything, I then both review and test its code and, if it's good, merge.

Is this quicker?

Hmm.

It might not be quicker than an experienced Rails developer would make progress, but it's certainly a lot quicker than I - a very inexperienced Rails developer - would make progress unaided, and that's quite important.

But yeah, if you look at it from a certain perspective, an LLM writes 90% of my code, but the reality is rather more nuanced, and so it's probably more like 50 - 70% that remains that way after I've got my grubby mitts on it.
by VerifiedReports | 2026-01-27 03:00:36+00:00
They were not doing skeuomorphism. They were using simple visual clues, like "bevels" on buttons, to convey the existence of a control and its state. They weren't disguising controls as "paint" on "felt" on a gaming table, as Apple Game Center did at the peak of their cheesiness.

The overreaction known as "flat" design (AKA no design) has fortunately started to recede. Still... some derelict "designers" are still deliver Advent calendars instead of usable applications.
by BenjiWiebe | 2026-01-27 03:01:08+00:00
It worked for years with no/few changes. Then the price increases and pro features stop working.
I'm not too likely to give the devs the benefit of the doubt. Patch out the 'pro' check and release an update. Or reply to one of the many new 1 star reviews and say you lost access to the source code, if that's what happened.

Complete silence + taking money...
by cube00 | 2026-01-27 03:03:16+00:00
3 days ago: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46743831)

> Honestly, grilling him about what the CEO had tweeted didn't even cross my mind.

Today:

> I don't think directly accusing them of being misleading about what they had done would have supported that goal, so I didn't do it.

I find it hard to follow how it didn't cross your mind while for the same interview you had also considered the situation and determined it didn't meet the interview goal.
by strange_quark | 2026-01-27 03:03:35+00:00
I really recommend “More Everything Forever” by Adam Becker. The book does a really good job laying out the arguments for AI doom, EA, accelerationism, and affiliated movements, including an interview with Yudkowsky, then debunking them. But it really opened my eyes to how… bizarre? eccentric? unbelievable? this whole industry is. I’ve been in tech for over a decade but don’t live in the bay, and some of the stuff these people believe, or at least say they believe, is truly nuts. I don’t know how else to describe it.
by ravenstine | 2026-01-27 03:03:50+00:00
That depends on how you define "doomed". Most screwed up companies don't go belly up overnight. They get sold as fixer-uppers and passed between bigger firms and given different names until, finally, it is sold for parts. The way this works is that all parties behave as if the company is the opposite of doomed. It's in a sense correct. The situation hardly seems doomed if everyone has enough time to make their money and split before the company's final death twitches cannot be denied, in which case the company accomplished its mission. That of course doesn't mean everything from its codebase to its leadership didn't lack excellence the whole time.
by lorenzohess | 2026-01-27 03:04:36+00:00
> The Library of Babel is a place for scholars to do research, for artists and writers to seek inspiration, for anyone with curiosity or a sense of humor to reflect on the weirdness of existence - in short, it’s just like any other library. If completed, it would contain every possible combination of 1,312,000 characters, including lower case letters, space, comma, and period. Thus, it would contain every book that ever has been written, and every book that ever could be - including every play, every song, every scientific paper, every legal decision, every constitution, every piece of scripture, and so on. At present it contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 104677 books.