MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tosh | 2026-01-26 14:19:45+00:00
I'm just speculating (please chime in if you know more!).

Afaiu protocol buffers are very popular for over the wire communication and in that use case cap'n proto does not win you much @ performance (?).

And if you don't go over the wire the performance difference might not matter for many use cases (e.g there is plenty of json sent around as well) and when it does matter: cap'n proto or something custom w/ desired performance characteristics other than protocol buffers is chosen but here cap'n proto covers a slim middleground (?).

+ usual adoption dynamics: protocol buffers have more mindshare and if another solution is not clearly way better for the use case: switching/trialing is not happening as much. (?)
by zahlman | 2026-01-26 14:19:48+00:00
I'm comparing to the same language implemented without the supposed internal optimization, according to my understanding of what you're doing.

But I think at this point I'd have to read and analyze the code to have a proper understanding.

... Although granting that you already have paid the cost of reference-counting GC (and, I assume, per-object allocation), it probably is indeed insignificant. And special-casing where the reference count == 1 is also kinda neat. (E.g. CPython doesn't "move references" per se if I'm thinking clearly; but it does detect cases where it can safely mutate the underlying implementation of a type that's "immutable" from the perspective of language syntax.)
by ValdikSS | 2026-01-26 14:20:00+00:00
>I wonder though, if I package say a .so file from nVidia, is that allowed by the license?

It won't work: drivers usually require exact (or more-or-less the same) kernel module version. That's why you need to explicitly exclude graphics libraries from being packaged into AppImage. This make it non-runnable on musl if you're trying to run it on glibc.

https://github.com/Zaraka/pkg2appimage/blob/master/excludeli...
by simonw | 2026-01-26 14:20:30+00:00
I work in Python which helps a lot because there are a TON of good examples of pytest tests floating around in the training data, including things like usage of fixture libraries for mocking external HTTP APIs and snapshot testing and other neat patterns.

Or I can say "use pytest-httpx to mock the endpoints" and Claude knows what I mean.

Keeping an eye on the tests is important. The most common anti-pattern I see is large amounts of duplicated test setup code - which isn't a huge deal, I'm much more more tolerant of duplicated logic in tests than I am in implementation, but it's still worth pushing back on.

"Refactor those tests to use pytest.mark.parametrize" and "extract the common setup into a pytest fixture" work really well there.

Generally though the best way to get good tests out of a coding agent is to make sure it's working in a project with an existing test suite that uses good patterns. Coding agents pick the existing patterns up without needing any extra prompting at all.

I find that once a project has clean basic tests the new tests added by the agents tend to match them in quality. It's similar to how working on large projects with a team of other developers work - keeping the code clean means when people look for examples of how to write a test they'll be pointed in the right direction.

One last tip I use a lot is this:

Clone datasette/datasette-enrichments
from GitHub to /tmp and imitate the
testing patterns it uses

I do this all the time with different existing projects I've written - the quickest way to show an agent how you like something to be done is to have it look at an example.
by d--b | 2026-01-26 14:20:59+00:00
Yeah but that definition is a deformation of what bankrupcy means for a business, and the use of the word bankrupcy is more alarmist than its "proposed definition".

"irreversible damage to nature" is vague. Is a dam causing irreversible damage to nature? It sure is. Can it solve a lack of water in the dry season, of course it can.

People are more ready to build dams and damage nature than to starve.

The whole notion of bankrupcy is unclear, and making headlines with alarmist claims that are not really felt on the ground is just going to make people cringe.
by dv_dt | 2026-01-26 14:21:23+00:00
I think there is going to be an AI eternal summer. Both from developer to AI spec - where the AI implements to the spec to some level of quality, but then closing the gap after that is an endless chase of smaller items that don't all resolve at the same time. And from people getting frustrated with some AI implemented app, and so go off and AI implement another one, with a different set of features and failings.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-26 14:21:31+00:00
Honestly I don't ask for anonymized stats but rather public stats.

If you flag a post, you are inadvertedly trying to push a hn post away.

That's fine if the current moderation finds it okay and I respect HN moderation but once again another post gets flagged & dead.

If someone flags a post, they should have a reasoning why. So have it public, so that its easier to call people out if they are being unfair and it would make people more aware of who they are flagging and actually why.
by InMice | 2026-01-26 14:21:33+00:00
I like this take. "How things are today + LLM" is in some ways the best we can approximate because one is all we know and other side is the future unfolding before our eyes.
One of the coolest things about vibe coding I find is starting with a base like django then using vibe coding to build models and templates exactly how one wants for a UIUX. Basically maybe we still need humans for the guts and low level stuff but that provides a base for fast, easy personalized customization.

I had a job where in short we had a lot of pain points with software that we had no resources permitted to fix them. With a mix past experience, googling I started writing some internal web based tools to fix these gaps. Everyone was happy. This is where I see vibe coding being really helpful in the higher level stuff like higher level scripting and web based tools. Just my opinion based on my experience.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-01-26 14:21:44+00:00
Is the maintenance due to code or due to people / politics / etc? LLMs won't change that.

Also it's a formal system and process, "vibe" coding is anything but. Call me curmudgeony (?) but I don't think "vibe coding" should be a phrase used to describe LLM assisted software engineering in large / critical systems.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-01-26 14:22:04+00:00
There are almost endless reasons why. It's like asking why would you want a self-driving car. Having a drone to transport things would be amazing, or to patrol an area. LLMs can be helpful with object identification, reacting to different events, and taking commands from users.

The first thought I had was those security guard robots that are popping up all over the place. if they were drones instead, and LLM talked to people asking them to do/not-do things, that would be an improvement.

Or an waiter drone, that takes your order in a restaurant, flies to the kitchen, picks up a sealed and secured food container, flies it back to the table, opens it, and leaves. It will monitor for gestures and voice commands to respond to diners and get their feedback, abuse, take the food back if it isn't satisfactory,etc...

This is the type of stuff we used to see in futuristic movies. It's almost possible now. glad to see this kind of tinkering.
by voidUpdate | 2026-01-26 14:22:21+00:00
The thing that really gets me about graffiti is that you don't own the canvas. It's just vandalism. If you're commissioned to do it one someone else's wall, I'd call that a mural instead, and I see quite a few aesthetically pleasing ones around. Why can't you paint on stuff you actually own, instead of making it someone else's problem? You might as well just shit on someone else's lawn and say it's fine because it's art
by zylepe | 2026-01-26 14:22:25+00:00
Planetiler currently supports generating MLT by adding —-tile-format=mlt cli argument. It’s only on latest main right now but I should be able to get a release out in the next few days. In my testing I’ve seen ~10% reduction in overall OpenMapTiles archive size with default settings but there are some more optimizations the team is working on that should bring it down even further.
by mr_spothawk | 2026-01-26 14:22:34+00:00
I upvoted your comment.

Also, it's a scarcity mindset.

I don't agree that sibling to my comment: "make money by getting papers cited". it is not a long-term solution, much as Ad revenue is broken model for free software, also.

I'm hopeful that we see some vibe-coders get some products out that make money, and then pay to support the system they rely on for creating/maintaining their code.

Not sure what else to hope for, in terms of maintaining the public goods.
by Quarrelsome | 2026-01-26 14:22:46+00:00
the UK already forces ISPs to hold a database of the hosts you have visited in the last three years. By implementing the laws in the way they currently are doing undermines their own legislation by pushing UK users into having a tangible reason to hide their their browsing patterns from UK networks by funneling their traffic through VPNs or other proxies to avoid age gates.

Tin foil aside, my issue is that they're not even good at what they're trying to do. Their policy is inconsistent with their aims and lacks technical strategy. You think they're worried about dissenters when in practice they're more worried about elections in 2029 and whatever pearl clutching users post on mumsnet.
by Gareth321 | 2026-01-26 14:22:54+00:00
I think it's both. Local populations adapt to whatever the local reservoirs can sustain but as soon as an unexpected climate event occurs (such as unusually low rainfall in a given season), the water reserves can no longer sustain the population. See Cape Town (2015-2018), Chennai (2019), São Paulo (2014-2015), California (2012–2016 & 2020–2022), etc.

If the local reservoirs were not already at capacity, or had much more redundancy, these events would have been much easier to manage. Fewer people in high risk areas would in fact reduce the risks of water scarcity.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-26 14:23:00+00:00
> Manuals are fairly easy to find, but in my experience they are dumbed-down.

I just linked to the full CAD library for the modern version of these parts, though. It’s not dumbed down.

Use the search phrase “service manual” and you can find documentation for every appliance in your house. I frequently fix appliances for friends and even neighbors and have yet to be unable to find the service manual.

Same for cars.

I’m so confused by this comment section. Why is everyone convinced that the situation is so much worse today?
by bluejay2387 | 2026-01-26 14:23:03+00:00
Does it seem to anyone else that author's have created a definition for 'vibe coding' that is specifically designed to justify their paper? Also that their premise is based on the assumption that developers will be irresponsible about the use of these tools ("often without users directly reading documentation, reporting bugs, or otherwise engaging with maintainers") so that it would actually be people killing open source not 'Vibe Coding'? Just a guess on my part, but once developers learn to use these tools and we get over the newness I think this will be great for open source. With these tools open source projects can compete with an army of corporate developers while alleviating some of the pressure on overworked under-rewarded maintainers.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-01-26 14:23:16+00:00
But effort / amount of work shouldn't be a deciding factor - I think anyone can churn out code if they choose to. But it's the type and quality of it.

Nobody cares if you wrote 5000 LOC, what they care about is what it does, how it does it, how fast and how good it does it, and none of those qualifiers are about volume.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-26 14:23:18+00:00
Call it "AI programming" or "AI pairing" or "Pair programming with AI" or whatever else, "vibe coding" was "coined" with the explicit meaning of "I'm going by the vibes, I don't even look at the code". If "vibe coding" suddenly mean "LLM was involved somehow", then what is the "vibe" even for anymore?

I agree there is a spectrum, and all the way to the left you have "vibe coding" and all the way to the right you have "manual programming without AI", of course it's fine to be somewhere in the middle, but you're not doing "vibe coding" in the way Karpathy first meant it.
by 9dev | 2026-01-26 14:23:35+00:00
Eh, I don't believe that. Smartphones have amazing cameras, and we still have photographers. There are CNC saws and mills that will ship you your perfectly realised CAD prints, yet there are still carpenters and a vibrant community of people making their own furniture. These examples go on and on.

Without any kind of offence implied: As maintainer of a few open source projects, I'm happy if it stops being an employability optimisation vector. Many of the people who don't code for fun but to get hired by FAANG aren't really bringing joy to others anyway.

If we end up with a small web of enthusiasts who write software for solving challenges, connecting intellectually with likeminded people, and altruism—then I'm fine with that. Let companies pay for writing software! Reduce the giant dependency chains! Have less infrastructure dedicated to distributing all that open source code!

What will remain after that is the actual open source code true to the idea.
by Quarrel | 2026-01-26 14:23:45+00:00
> I am a huge proponent of using AI tools for software development. But until I see a vibe coded replacement for the Linux kernel, PostgreSQL, gcc, git or Chromium, I am just going to disagree with this premise.

Did you read it?

It isn't saying that LLMs will replace major open source software components. It said that the "reward" for providing, maintaining and helping curate these OSS pieces; which is the ecosystem they exist in, just disappears if there is no community around it, just an LLM ingesting open source code and spitting out a solution good or bad.

We've already seen curl buckle under the pressure, as their community minded, good conscious effort to give back to security reports, collapsed under the weight of slop.

This is largely about extending that thesis to the entire ecosystem. No GH issues, no PRs, no interaction. No kudos on HN, no stars on github, no "cheers mate" as you pass them at a conference after they give a great talk.

Where did you get that you needed to see a Linux kernel developed from AI tools, before you think the article's authors have a point?
by scythe | 2026-01-26 14:23:50+00:00
For professional applications there are sulfur plasma lamps which have a continuous spectrum at high efficiency. Unfortunately they aren't economical below about 1000 watts which is impractical for many applications.

The technology basically works by continuously microwaving (think oven) a small amount of sulfur gas. The development of solid-state microwave emitters — most microwave generation is still done with vacuum tubes — might help miniaturize the devices. However, it's hard to beat the simplicity of an LED.
by squigz | 2026-01-26 14:24:03+00:00
Because going to the shed to get a work-tested tool is still faster than waiting on an LLM and hoping it meets every use-case you're likely to run into with that tool.

Whatever it is, the future will also certainly not be what it was a couple decades ago - that is, every one inventing their own solution to solved problems, resulting in a mess of tools with no standardization. There is a reason libraries/frameworks/etc exist.
by Quothling | 2026-01-26 14:24:05+00:00
I'm an external examiner for CS students in Denmark and I disagree with you. What we need in the industry is software engineers who can think for themselves, can interact with the business and understand it's needs, and, they need to know how computers work. What we get are mass produced coders who have been taught some outdated way of designing and building software that we need to hammer out of them. I don't particularily care if people can write code like they work at the assembly line. I care that they can identify bottlenecks and solve them. That they can deliver business value quickly. That they will know when to do abstractions (which is almost never). Hell, I'd even like developers who will know when the code quality doesn't matter because shitty code will cost $2 a year but every hour they spend on it is $100-200.

Your curriculum may be different than it is around here, but here it's frankly the same stuff I was taught 30 years ago. Except most of the actual computer science parts are gone, replaced with even more OOP, design pattern bullshit.

That being said. I have no idea how you'd actually go about teaching students CS these days, considering a lot of them will probably use ChatGPT or Claude regardless of what you do. That is what I see in the statistic for grades around here. For the first 9 years I was a well calibrated grader, but these past 1,5ish years it's usually either top marks or bottom marks with nothing in between. Which puts me outside where I should be, but it matches the statistical calibration for everyone here. I obviously only see the product of CS educations, but even though I'm old, I can imagine how many corners I would have cut myself if I had LLM's available back then. Not to mention all the distractions the internet has brought.
by jerf | 2026-01-26 14:24:13+00:00
"why go to the shed"

A good question but there's a good answer: Debugged and tested code.

And by that, I mean the FULL spectrum of debugging and testing. Not just unit tests, not even just integration tests, but, is there a user that found this useful? At all? How many users? How many use cases? How hard has it been subjected to the blows of the real world?

As AI makes some of the other issues less important, the ones that remain become more important. It is completely impossible to ask an LLM to produce a code base that has been used by millions of people for five years. Such things will still have value.

The idea that the near-future is an AI powered wonderland of everyone getting custom bespoke code that does exactly what they want and everything is peachy is overlooking this problem. Even a (weakly) superhuman AI can't necessarily anticipate what the real world may do to a code base. Even if I can get an AI to make a bespoke photo editor, someone else's AI photo editor that has seen millions of person-years of usage is going to have advantages over my custom one that was just born.

Of course not all code is like this. There is a lot of low-consequence, one-off code, with all the properties we're familiar with on that front, like, there are no security issues because only I will run this, bugs are of no consequence because it's only ever going to be run across this exact data set that never exposes them (e.g., the vast, vast array of bash scripts that will technically do something wrong with spaces in filenames but ran just fine because there weren't any). LLMs are great for that and unquestionably will get better.

However there will still be great value in software that has been tested from top to bottom, for suitability, for solving the problem, not just raw basic unit tests but for surviving contact with the real world for millions/billions/trillions of hours. In fact the value of this may even go up in a world suddenly oversupplied with the little stuff. You can get a custom hammer but you can't get a custom hammer that has been tested in the fire of extensive real-world use, by definition.
by Orygin | 2026-01-26 14:24:29+00:00
AFAIK, Microsoft and/or Intel pushed to remove the usual sleep S3 state and use a less sleepy state to be able to access network and display notifications. As if it was a tablet or a Macbook.

This is (of course) badly done, and tested as well the rest of Windows, so it results in laptops waking up in bags, choking thermally, and not going back to sleep.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-26 14:24:36+00:00
"Vibe coding" isn't a "skill", is a meme or a experiment, something you do for fun, not for writing serious code where you have a stake in the results.

Programming together with AI however, is a skill, mostly based on how well you can communicate (with machines or other humans) and how well your high-level software engineering skills are. You need to learn what it can and cannot do, before you can be effective with it.
by bawolff | 2026-01-26 14:24:38+00:00
> Sure, but you can understand why US citizens and European citizens don't feel the same urge to go out and protest something that their taxes don't directly contribute to.

The point i was responding to was whether such protests [for Iranians] are pointless, and i asserted there can certainly be a point to them.

Different people care about different things. I doubt the "tax dollar" explanation for Gaza protests because they seem just as popular in countries that dont provide aid to Israel, and people seemed to care a lot more about Gaza than say Iraq, despite much much more tax dollars going there and much more people dead. Nonetheless people are going to care about different issues to different extents for whatever reason and I'm not objecting to that.

> If you care about the wellbeing of Iranian people, you have to acknowledge that a "hardline stance" of sanctions also contributes to their suffering.

I do not have to. Or more specificly such sanctions have complex impacts and it can be unclear what the overall net result is, especially over the long run.

Sanctions against Iran of course do not solely have to do with the human rights situation and are also being applied for various geopolitical reasons.

> I'd say it's also tricky in such situations to protest and not have your protest co-opted to justify aggression. Chomsky made this point on Iran: "Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don’t agree with, like bombing."

That sounds like a long winded way to justify not caring about atrocities when doing so would be inconvinent. Quite frankly i find that morally rephresible.

If you only care about human rights when its politically expedient to do so, do you really care about human rights?
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-26 14:24:40+00:00
> How does this person talk about other people?

I find myself referring to my contractors as: Workers.

What does that mean about me?

I can't call them employees. I read the communist stuff a while ago and decided I didn't want to be exploited, so I thought this was just the proper terminology.

But people on the internet loath being called a worker and have called me out on this.

Meanwhile I yoyo between to nice and too hard... I think I'm naturally too nice to the point of failure. I seem to only be 'too hard' for a few months before I go back.

Thank god my industry is high demand, I think even with bad management we will survive. (I got a masters in Engineering Management + read 10 books, but management/supervision orthodoxy is diverse and contradictory.)
by Quarrelsome | 2026-01-26 14:24:40+00:00
> Therefore it has no value.

We've not had a black wednesday since this change. It has value because governments cannot be trusted to directly control interest rates. The indirection has value, politicians are forced to spend political capital in order to wrest control.

> So we can see how well that is going.

Still better than black wednesday and Norman Lamont.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-26 14:24:41+00:00
> I mean, a generation or two ago, people frequently learned to do things like replace spark plugs and alternators and mess with oil changes.

These are all things I learned to do myself and have done recently (even the alternator).

Like I said, it’s easier than ever.

I’m kind of baffled that I’m getting downvoted for saying it on HN. Anyone with a little resourcefulness and a willingness to get their hands dirty can do these trivial operations too.