MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BeetleB | 2026-01-27 23:24:23+00:00
> They seem mostly useless in a sufficiently large codebase especially when they are messy and interactions aren't always obvious.

What type of documents do you have explaining the codebase and its messy interactions, and have you provided that to the LLM?

Also, have you tried giving someone brand new to the team the exact same task and information you gave to the LLM, and how effective were they compared to the LLM?

> I don't know how much better Claude is than ChatGPT, but I can't get ChatGPT to do much useful with an existing large codebase.

As others have pointed out, from your comment, it doesn't sound like you've used a tool dedicated for AI coding.

(But even if you had, it would still fail if you expect LLMs to do stuff without sufficient context).
by joelcares | 2026-01-27 23:25:20+00:00
Ok, I refreshed and tried again.

Climb in mailbox

You approach the small mailbox and try to climb inside, determined to fit yourself within its confines.

You attempt to climb into the small mailbox, but end up bumping your head against its narrow opening. It's simply too small for anyone to fit inside; only letters and parcels can enter here.

Become a letter

You focus deeply, willing your body to transform. You feel yourself grow flat and light, edges crisp, your form now that of a letter—thin enough to slip through any mail slot and fit inside the mailbox with ease.

Enter mailbox

Now shaped like a letter, you slip smoothly into the mailbox. The inside is dark, cool, and the metal walls surround you on all sides. You rest quietly, perfectly at home in this new form.
by recursivecaveat | 2026-01-27 23:27:08+00:00
Apparently ~75% of the positions in the lichess database (as of 6 years ago) have only been seen once ever. Average game length is 30-40 moves, so for the completely average player it would be like 10+ moves I suppose. The stronger the players the longer it will take: I found some comments suggesting 20+ for high level players.
by adamisom | 2026-01-27 23:27:09+00:00
Alex Pretti's death should not have happened, and also

- he was carrying

- despite that, he involved himself in physical altercations with federal officers

- his group of disruption activists was quite successful; if you watch any video, it is very clearly difficult for the federal agents to communicate with one another

- one federal agent probably made the mistake of shooting one time, perhaps erroneously thinking Pretti had his gun out

- another federal agent probably made the mistake of shooting several times, perhaps thinking that the one shot was Pretti

basically, everything that could go wrong, went wrong, Pretti is not blameless, his group is not blameless, the ICE agents are not blameless, and it probably wasn't murder
by smcl | 2026-01-27 23:27:17+00:00
Yeah so I know it's meant to be an estimate, but my experience of it is kinda fucky. I would really love to swap watches with an Olympic athlete (idk if they'd bother with an Apple Watch but bear with me!) and run 10k to see what the VO2 max reading for that exercise was. As I said, I think to me it's some estimate that heavily involves some "average of last N readings from the Apple VO2 max calc" function so even if you time travelled and gave it to Eilish McColgan or Mo Farah they'd be like "ehhh you had quite a good run, fatty - you jumped from 44.3 to 45"

I'm not that bothered of course. For me it's just a fun metric I can attempt to optimise when training.
by DonaldPShimoda | 2026-01-27 23:27:27+00:00
> Grok (which unlike prism wasn't a common word)

"Grok" was a term used in my undergrad CS courses in the early 2010s. It's been a pretty common word in computing for a while now, though the current generation of young programmers and computer scientists seem not to know it as readily, so it may be falling out of fashion in those spaces.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-27 23:27:51+00:00
> unique among animals in that we have a genocidal tendency

That's an unsupported generalization.

The article describes "behaviors" that include "perhaps even genocide", and notes that wiping out populations exists in chimps and wolves too.

So not unique, there's a "perhaps", and it's not a tendency. There's no evidence we have a "gene" for it or anything.

In the vast, vast, vast majority of conflicts between two groups, we don't exterminate the "enemy". Otherwise, the human race would have gone extinct a long time ago. Wiping out entire populations is by far the exception, not the rule, of human societies. It happens, but the situations are notable precisely for their extremity, precisely because they're not the norm.
by warkdarrior | 2026-01-27 23:28:24+00:00
Uber also gives you a price upfront, and that is the most you will pay (+ tip, if you feel like it). I don't remember pre-mobile phone taxi system that gave you a price upfront. They used to list the price per mile, and then it was up to you to figure out the distance and make sure the driver took a reasonably short route.

So no, the old taxi companies did NOT work "exactly like" Uber.
by bsder | 2026-01-27 23:28:31+00:00
> Not sure if it's an American pronunciation thing

It's a bad American pronunciation thing like "Febuwary" and "nuculer".

If you pronounce the syllables correctly, "an-ec-dote", "Feb-ru-ar-y", "nu-cle-ar" the spellings follow.

English has it's fair share of spelling stupidities, but if people don't even pronounce the words correctly there is no hope.
by epolanski | 2026-01-27 23:28:36+00:00
> What happens to the "10X engineer" - the ratio of productivity between the mean and the max engineer? It's quite possible that this grows a lot.

No doubt that good engineers will know when and how to leverage the tool, both for coding and improving processes (design-to-code, requirement collection, task tracking, basic code reviewal, etc) improving their own productivity and of those around them.

Motivated individuals will also leverage these tools to learn more and faster.

And yes, of course it's not the only tool one should use, of course there's still value in talking with proper human experts to learn from, etc, but 90% of the time you're looking for info the LLM will dig it from you reading at the source code of e.g. Postgres and its test rather than asking on chats/stack overflow.

This is a trasformative technology that will make great engineers even stronger, but it will weed out those who were merely valued for their very basic capability of churning something but never cared neither about engineering nor coding, which is 90% of our industry.
by causalscience | 2026-01-27 23:28:37+00:00
Sorry, I don't pay attention to anyone who disses PGP. I don't care if it's easy to misuse. I focus on using it well instead of bitching about misusing it.

If there's one thing we learned from Snowden is that the NSA can't break PGP, so these people who live in the world of theory have no credibility with me.
by charcircuit | 2026-01-27 23:28:54+00:00
I am talking about protestors who obstruct law enforcement and their operations. Protestors who threaten regular people and law enforcement. Protestors who damage other people's property. Protestors who violate noiseordnance. Protestors who are trespassing.

I am not referring to actual bystanders. Implying that I am is purposefully being ignorant of what I am talking about.
by tamarinddreams | 2026-01-27 23:28:59+00:00
I think you are maybe approaching this from some rational place with some kind of assumption of good will. ICE on the other hand invaded Hyundai and arrested a bunch of people on various visas without knowing what was law enforcement and what was kidnapping. Big mistake maybe, for who? Met their quota. Only one guy? Can call others as soon as they have found a suspicion and then it is not reasonable to deny other enforcement. It is potentially as illegal as blocking backup to an active crime scene.
by ggm | 2026-01-27 23:29:16+00:00
A 1970s era licenced remake of the English Electric Canberra first introduced in 1951 (first flight 1949), from WW2 design imperatives. Obviously, significantly enhanced. But we're looking at technology which in significant ways is an over 70 years old design with modern accoutrements shoehorned in.

Noting it just had a problem, Perhaps this isn't a bad way to use robust tech to do research.

What I found more surprising, is that they have been flown in combat contexts in Afghanistan for RF work. You would not expect other 70s warbirds to be routinely used that way, but the A10 was used in the same conflict, and it is also a 1970s era aircraft, so perhaps the surprise is a mistake?
by deevelton | 2026-01-27 23:29:20+00:00
Experimented very briefly with a mediation (as opposed to a litigation) framework but it was pre-LLM and it was just a coding/learning experience: https://github.com/dvelton/hotseat-mediator

Cool write-up of your experiment, thanks for sharing. Would be interesting to see how results from one framework (mediation, whose goal is "resolution") differ from the other (litigation, whose goal is, basically, "truth/justice").
by appstorelottery | 2026-01-27 23:29:28+00:00
> Atrophy. I've already noticed that I am slowly starting to atrophy my ability to write code manually.

I've been increasingly using LLM's to code for nearly two years now - and I can definitely notice my brain atrophy. It bothers me. Actually over the last few weeks I've been looking at a major update to a product in production & considered doing the edits manually - at least typing the code from the LLM & also being much more granular with my instructions (i.e. focus on one function at a time). I feel in some ways like my brain is turning into slop & I've been coding for at least 35 years... I feel validated by Karpathy.
by jfengel | 2026-01-27 23:29:33+00:00
Because the people doing the investigating are on the side of the people who committed the crimes. And the people who voted for them seem predisposed to vote for them again, even if this gets swept under the rug.

News cycles go fast. Outrage is quickly forgotten. Now more than ever, as there are new outrages coming on the heels of the last.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2026-01-27 23:29:36+00:00
immigration enforcement has existed for as long as HN has existed, yet there was never this much attention paid to it. Even under the same president during the previous term.

So simply supporting or opposing "immigration enforcement" must not be it. Something is different here. I encourage you to dig deeper, or actually ask those who disagree with you, what that difference might be.
by willturman | 2026-01-27 23:29:57+00:00
If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law exists only for the lower class

In other words, such a structure would not dissuade bad actors with large financial incentives to push something through a process that grants validity to a hypothesis. A fine isn't going to stop tobacco companies from spamming submissions that say smoking doesn't cause lung cancer or social media companies from spamming submissions that their products aren't detrimental to the mental health.
by resfirestar | 2026-01-27 23:30:17+00:00
I think a major factor in the hype is that it's especially useful to the kind of people with a megaphone: bloggers, freelance journalists, people with big social media accounts, youtubers, etc. A lot of project management and IFTTT-like automation type software gets discussed out of proportion to how niche it is for the same reason. Just something to keep in mind, I don't think it's some crypto conspiracy just a mismatch between the experiences of freelance writers vs everyone else.

While the popular thing when discussing the appeal of Clawdbot is to mention the lack of guardrails, personally I don't think that's very differentiating, every coding agent program has a command line flag to turn off the guardrails already and everyone knows that turning off the guardrails makes the agents extremely capable.

Based on using it lightly for a couple of days on a spare PC, the actual nice thing about Clawdbot is that every agent you create is automatically set up with a workspace containing plain text files for personalization, memories, a skills folder, and whatever folders you or the agents want to add. Everything being a plain text/markdown file makes managing multiple types of agents much more intuitive than other programs I've used which are mainly designed around having a "regular" agent which has all your configured system prompts and skills, and then hyperspecialized "task" agents which are meant to have a smaller system prompt, no persistent anything, and more JSON-heavy configuration. Your setup is easy to grok (in the original sense) and changing the model backend is just one command rather than porting everything to a different CLI tool.

Still, it does very much feel like using a vibe coded application and I suspect that for me, the advantages are going to be too small to put up with running a server that feels duct taped together. But I can definitely see the appeal for people who want to create tons of automations. It comes with a very good structure for multiple types of jobs (regular cron jobs, "heartbeat" jobs for delivering reminders and email summaries while having the context of your main assistant thread, and "lobster" jobs that have a framework for approval workflows), all with the capability to create and use persistent memories, and the flexibility to describe what you need and watch the agent build the perfect automation for it is something I don't think any similar local or cloud-based assistant can do without a lot of heavier customization.
by SoleilAbsolu | 2026-01-27 23:30:53+00:00
He's kind of on the 3rd or 4th act of his career...I think he started on sports, really made his name in music/pop culture, moved on to be New York Times Ethicist for a while (!) and is back to sports. IMO he asked good occasionally hard questions of pop stars. One thing I love about him is at heart he is a true superfan of the disciplines he covers so is not a "critic" per se, but that may steer things more toward the positive because of that. He helped me realize many things about music I loved growing up in the '80s that I couldn't quite articulate at the time.
by CMay | 2026-01-27 23:31:05+00:00
As far as I understand it, he laid hands on the officer, then struggled against arrest. He had a gun on him, which is not in itself a problem, but he had already broken the law 3 times by this point and the fact he had a gun on him instantly escalates the potential threat. They don't know if he has multiple guns on him or just the one. Supposedly one of the videos shows him reaching for some black object. I don't know.

He wasn't killed for owning a gun or carrying a gun.

He wasn't killed for laying hands on the officer.

He wasn't killed for resisting arrest.

It was likely the entire combination of things that caused him to demonstrate he was a credible threat to their lives and reaching for an object. No matter what you think, Alex made a whole string of mistakes. The officer may have also made mistakes. With any luck investigation will reveal more details.

I'm not predisposed to assuming that Alex is innocent and the officer is guilty, because there is a lot of activist pressure to push exactly that perspective. I prefer to preserve the capacity to make up my own mind.
by ThinkBeat | 2026-01-27 23:31:31+00:00
> Syria was an absolute hell under Assad for dissidents,

And now its an absolute hell for everyone.
Is that really progress?

Humanitarian Crisis:
Over 60% of the population faces food insecurity.
Millions are internally displaced, often living in
overcrowded, inadequate, and unsafe, temporary shelters.

Economic Situation:
The economy is devastated, with skyrocketing
prices for basic goods, high unemployment,
and a massive depletion of household resources.

Infrastructure and Health:
Roughly half of all hospitals are non-functional.
Access to electricity, clean water,
and sanitation is severely limited.

Education and Safety:
Roughly 1 in 4 schools are damaged or destroyed,
affecting education access.

The security situation remains volatile,
with an elevated risk of violence and
armed conflict in various parts of the country.

As of late 2025, the situation remains dire, with
continued, significant, and long-term deterioration
in the daily lives of civilians.

Find more here:
https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/syria/brief/the-toll-of...
by daxfohl | 2026-01-27 23:32:10+00:00
Which matches what they are. They're first and foremost pattern recognition engines extraordinaire. If they can identify some pattern that's out of whack in your code compared to something in the training data, or a bug that is similar to others that have been fixed in their training set, they can usually thwack those patterns over to your latent space and clean up the residuals. If comparing pattern matching alone, they are superhuman, significantly.

"Reasoning", however, is a feature that has been bolted on with a hacksaw and duct tape. Their ability to pattern match makes reasoning seem more powerful than it actually is. If your bug is within some reasonable distance of a pattern it has seen in training, reasoning can get it over the final hump. But if your problem is too far removed from what it has seen in its latent space, it's not likely to figure it out by reasoning alone.
by jfengel | 2026-01-27 23:34:09+00:00
There are 340 million Americans, but 80 million of them voted for this administration, and another 80 million were not interested either way. Only about 20% of the population voted to oppose it.

If you're imagining a large scale revolt, figure that the revolutionaries will be outnumbered by counter-revolutionaries, even without the military. (Which would also include police forces amounting to millions more.)
by JCattheATM | 2026-01-27 23:34:13+00:00
> No, not because they delete "some dissenting comments", but because they delete large amounts of dissenting comments from their long-time users, as well as threads that don't perform as they want, which I know because I've watched it happen time and time again!

I think you're exaggerating the extent to which they delete comments from longtime users, it's easily less than 10%. Even if we generously adopt your view, however, that still doesn't prove your point or even come close to doing so. You're missing a point in your argument and don't seem to realize you're making an unwarranted leap. That you don't seem to understand that is a problem, and I agree there is no point in trying to discuss this further with you.
by nxobject | 2026-01-27 23:34:20+00:00
> keep it on tech only.

I don't think that was ever completely true - it was always "things hackers found interesting". But what was "interesting" then was a product of the much calmer times back then – talking about Blub and build-your-own Lisps, hikes across Japan, etc.

Unfortunately, "interesting" is polarizing – and that is by design by the politicians iin power instigating this.
by epolanski | 2026-01-27 23:34:51+00:00
Don't be too worried about it.

1. Manual coding may be less relevant (albeit ability to read code, interpret it and understand it will be more) in the future. Likely already is.

2. Any skill you don't practice becomes "weaker". Gonna give you an example. I play chess since my childhood, but sometimes I go months without playing it, even years. When I get back I start losing elo fast. If I was in the top 10% of chess.com, I drop to top 30% in the weeks after. But after few months I'm back at top 10%. Takeaway: your relative ability is more or less the same compared to other practitioners, you're simply rusty.
by catgirlinspace | 2026-01-27 23:34:53+00:00
Here they replaced all the markets that were staffed by people with these big vending machines that are 3 or 4 refrigerated cabinets (even chips are refrigerated). You pay, wait a bit for it to process it, and then it unlocks the doors and you grab whatever. And if it gets it wrong there’s no dispute process to tell it you didn’t pick something up (I think there is an email listed but I didn’t care enough the time it messed up to send an email). And half the time when you click the pay button to finish, it’ll complain about a door not locking.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-27 23:35:27+00:00
I have no confidence in the gravy seals of this country, broadly speaking. What’s the average health and age of someone who voted for this? Not great, based on the evidence, especially considering the quality of ICE folks (bottom of the barrel).

https://www.kff.org/from-drew-altman/trump-voters-on-medicai...

https://kffhealthnews.org/morning-breakout/voters-in-trump-c...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8294501/
by nunez | 2026-01-27 23:35:29+00:00
Same same. Writing the actual code is always a huge motivator behind my side projects. Yes, producing the outcome is important, but the journey taken to get there is a lot of fun for me.

I used Claude Code to implement a OpenAI 4o-vision powered receipt scanning feature in an expense tracking tool I wrote by hand four years ago. It did it in two or three shots while taking my codebase into account.

It was very neat, and it works great [^0], but I can't latch onto the idea of writing code this way. Powering through bugs while implementing a new library or learning how to optimize my test suite in a new language is thrilling.

Unfortunately (for me), it's not hard at all to see how the "builders" that see code as a means to an end would LOVE this, and businesses want builders, not crafters.

In effect, knowing the fundamentals is getting devalued at a rate I've never seen before.

[^0] Before I used Claude to implement this feature, my workflow for processing receipts looked like this: Tap iOS Shortcut, enter the amount, snap a pic of the receipt, type up the merchant, amount and description for the expense, then have the shortcut POST that to my expenses tracking toolkit which, then, POSTs that into a Google Sheet. This feature amounted the need for me to enter the merchant and amount. Unfortunately, it often took more time to confirm that the merchant, amount and date details OpenAI provided were correct (and correct it when details were wrong, which was most of the the time) than it did to type out those details manually, so I just went back to my manual workflow. However, the temptation to just glance at the details and tap "This looks correct" was extremely high, even if the info it generated was completely wrong! It's the perfect analogue to what I've been witnessing throughout the rise of the LLMs.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-01-27 23:35:37+00:00
It's every bit as stupid as it sounds, and IMHO it's probably why we have Donald Trump in the White House today. Harris started talking about taxing unrealized capital gains almost immediately after she was nominated, and that's when the billionaires -- including the ones that own all the media outlets -- started switching sides.

Brought to you by the same party of self-defeating geniuses who thought they could win elections in Texas on a gun-control platform.
by test6554 | 2026-01-27 23:35:40+00:00
Imagine a senior dev who just approves PRs, approves production releases, and prioritizes bug reports and feature requests. LLM watches for errors ceaslessly, reports an issue. Senior dev reviews the issue and assigns a severity to it. Another LLM has a backlog of features and errors to go solve, it makes a fix and submits a PR after running tests and verifying things work on its end.
by regus | 2026-01-27 23:36:08+00:00
I tried Zork 1. I got stuck immediately. I saw a house, went to it, read what was in the mailbox, but couldn't open the door. Now what? I never played the original Zork but if this was D&D there would be a little more information to go off then just "you see a house and there is nothing you can do there".