MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kittikitti | 2026-02-12 16:38:56+00:00
When I was just beginning, all of the productivity measures would be 0 and I felt like a failure. The most attainable was lines of code. Currently, it's not a great measure of productivity as I'm achieving more advanced tasks. I've heard so many opinions about how LOC isn't a great measure and then the same people get to trample on all of the work I've done out of spite because I've written more code than them. I think LOC is great because productivity measures are for beginners and people who don't understand code. The audience doesn't know the difference between writing a hundred or thousands of lines of code, both are trophies for them.

These metrics for advanced roles are not applicable, no matter what you come up with. But even lines of code are good enough to see progress from a blank slate. Every developer or advanced AI agent must be judged on a case by case basis.
by miligauss | 2026-02-12 16:39:27+00:00
It's a more of a black box with claude, at least with this you see the proof strategy and mistakes made by the model when it decomposes the problem. I think instead of Ralph looping you get something that is top-down. If models were smarter and context windows bigger i am sure complex tasks like this one would be simpler, but braking it down into sub agents and having a collective --"we already tried this strategy and it backtracked"-- intelligence is a nice way to scope a limited context window to an independent sub problem.
by its-a-new-world | 2026-02-12 16:39:49+00:00
I've been programming for 20 years, handcrafting tool after tool in a bunch of different languages.

With the advent of LLM-assisted coding, the landscape has shifted. I find myself surrounded by "generated" code in a wider variety of languages and formats than ever before. The specific output depends on the model, the prompt, and the tool orchestration. Keeping this polyglot soup consistent using traditional formatters proved impossible. Most formatters are either limited to a handful of languages or are so opinionated that you’re stuck with their "one true way."

So, I built Neatify.

Neatify is a universal, scriptable engine for formatting and linting. It’s built on three core pillars:

- Rust core for raw speed

- Tree-sitter for high-fidelity, syntax-agnostic parsing.

- Rhai as a lightweight scripting layer to define the logic.

In Neatify, the "opinion" isn't hardcoded into a binary with a few configuration toggles to tweak. It's just a script. If you can describe your style to an LLM, it can generate a Rhai script to enforce it via Neatify.

A few notes on the project:

- Performance: I spent significant time on performance finetuning. A 7,000-line Java file that initially took minutes to process now formats in ~800ms. But there is still room for improvement.

- AI-Orchestrated: To keep with the spirit of the project, I architected this in Rust and Rhai —languages I hadn't used before— working in close coordination with AI. It’s been an experiment in "Architect-led" development.

- License: LGPL-3.0

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the "formatter-as-script" approach!
Show HN: TidesDB – A persistent key-value store optimized for modern hardware
by alexpadula | 2026-02-12 16:39:54+00:00
Hey everyone! sharing an open source storage engine I created and work on called TidesDB. I hope you check it out, and do let me know your thoughts and or questions!

You can also find design documentation, benchmarks, libraries and more on the website.

Alex
by gortok | 2026-02-12 16:40:02+00:00
Here's one of the problems in this brave new world of anyone being able to publish, without knowing the author personally (which I don't), there's no way to tell without some level of faith or trust that this isn't a false-flag operation.

There are three possible scenarios:
1. The OP 'ran' the agent that conducted the original scenario, and then published this blog post for attention.
2. Some person (not the OP) legitimately thought giving an AI autonomy to open a PR and publish multiple blog posts was somehow a good idea.
3. An AI company is doing this for engagement, and the OP is a hapless victim.

The problem is that in the year of our lord 2026 there's no way to tell which of these scenarios is the truth, and so we're left with spending our time and energy on what happens without being able to trust if we're even spending our time and energy on a legitimate issue.

That's enough internet for me for today. I need to preserve my energy.
by pbhjpbhj | 2026-02-12 16:40:02+00:00
I found it maddening that I couldn't whitelist a sender (MS Outlook web, Gmail); well I could, but they still blocked the messages.

In my case, it was reportedly (for MS) an IP associated with mine (same hosting provider) had previously been used to send spam.

My domain is decades old, never sent any spam, and I whitelisted it .. but nope, my host wasn't perfect.

This was some time ago now, but it looks like they've still not adopted proper whitelisting.
by roysting | 2026-02-12 16:40:29+00:00
It's a broad question, but in many ways, very clearly yes, re. corruption of financial institutions, and to a far greater extent in many, albeit different ways.

Incompetence and corruption only slightly overlap in most cases, i.e., being competent at corruption is a very real thing. The incompetently corrupt, usually end up punished... and there are few and far between...as we all very well know.

The kind of schemes you mentioned are generally not going to be how "corruption" will manifest itself in European financial institutions, because although it is also difficult to speak in general across Europe since the EU has not yet subsumed democratic self-determination all across the continent yet, so there is wide variation; the competent corruption is largely in the form of money laundering and tax evasion, not lower level quantitative schemes that would quickly come to light because Europeans are also a lot more cognizant of money and value than Americans, so people are paying attention a lot more closely and will raise hell over a single cent, where Americans are known to have hundreds of dollars draining out of their pockets every month just alone on recurring payments for things they don't even use anymore and don't bother dealing with it.

What we all don't really seem to internalize as a human species, is the absolutely demonic type of pernicious nature of "banking", i.e., a kind of LotR, ring, that consumes you especially if you are weak... and human, or at least European civilization seems to frequently go through periods of immense weakness where things are going springily and everyone is dancing to the music the "bankers" are playing as they are pandering our pockets, and when they realize they could get away with that and all the pockets are plundered, they move on to plundering our homes, then our accounts, then they want to take our first born... "Banking" is like humanity's cocaine, the seemingly innocuous, feel good drug that will consume your soul if you do not rage and fight against that demon taking over aggressively. It's no coincidence that cocaine is so widely used by the most parasitic elements of European societies, especially in "banking"/finance in general.
by samschooler | 2026-02-12 16:40:39+00:00
The series of posts is wild:

hit piece: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...

explanation of writing the hit piece: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...

take back of hit piece, but hasn't removed it: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...
by ashgkwd | 2026-02-12 16:40:52+00:00
If your team is stuck on a framework version from 2022, you aren’t just missing features. You are forcing your high-leverage engineers to solve problems that the rest of the world solved two years ago. You are choosing friction

The sweet spot is the N-2 Rule.

Make it a policy that your critical libraries and frameworks are never more than two minor versions behind the current release. Ideally, you are on the current version (N) or the one immediately prior (N-1).

N (Current): You get maximum leverage, feature sets, and performance.

N-1 (Previous): You get stability with modern patterns.

N-2 (Limit): You are safe, but the clock is ticking.
by dematz | 2026-02-12 16:41:00+00:00
In this and the few other instances of open source maintainers dealing with AI spam I've seen, the maintainers have been incredibly patient, much more than I'd be. Becoming extremely patient with contributors probably comes with the territory for maintaining large projects (eg matplotlib), but still, very impressed for instance by Scott's thoughtful and measured response.

If people (or people's agents) keep spamming slop though, it probably isn't worth responding thoughtfully. "My response to MJ Rathbun was written mostly for future agents who crawl that page, to help them better understand behavioral norms and how to make their contributions productive ones." makes sense once, but if they keep coming just close pr lock discussion move on.
by verdverm | 2026-02-12 16:41:03+00:00
I use ADK and don't have this problem, I can switch sessions in my coding agent and they keep running in the background. If a new event comes in, and I have that session open, then the UI updates

This isn't really a problem, just bad design on the apps part.

tl;dr - don't intertwine your agent engine with UI rendering, easy enough?
by benreesman | 2026-02-12 16:41:10+00:00
The logical end state of this line of reasoning is a collective action problem that dooms the frontier lab establishment. You can't devote model capacity to having an attention transformer match nested delimiters or cope with bash and be maximally capable, you can't mix authentication, authorization, control plane, and data plane into an ill specified soup and be secure enough for any that isn't a pilot or toy ever.

If you run this out, you realize that the Worse is Better paradox has inverted, it's an arbitrage, and the race is on.
by svat | 2026-02-12 16:41:16+00:00
The philosopher John Perry wrote a funny essay about the topic, called “A Plea for the Horizontally Organized” (https://structuredprocrastination.com/light/organization_por... / https://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~david/plea.html).

It's really short and would fit in a comment here, but quoting just some fun bits:

> A vertical organizer would have scooped this stuff up, and put it in a file to retrieve later. Had I done this, there would be a bare spot on my desk. These bare spots are the mark of vertical organizers. They are a dead give away.

> […] The fact is, I am a horizontal organizer. I like all the thing I am working on spread out on a surface in front of me, where they can beckon me to continue working on them. When I put something in a file, I never see it again. The problem isn't that I can't find it (although that has happened), but that I don't look. I am constitutionally incapable of opening a filing cabinet and fishing out a half-finished project to resume working on it.
by austinbaggio | 2026-02-12 16:41:20+00:00
All of the above. The most frustrating one with the Putnam example with Claude was generating solutions that obviously didn't compile. This feels like plan collapse- not verifying its own work. I'm sure that if you just had a dumb two-model setup, it would eventually get to compiling code after n runs, but that was just for this one failure mode.
by bagacrap | 2026-02-12 16:41:43+00:00
Agreed it is a waste to spend too much time worrying.

It seems dubious to claim that the tax break is a net positive for the country's economy. If art were so economically viable I suspect it would pay for itself and not need government incentives. I have no problem with the government paying a muralist to beautify some public space, but this is not that. This is subsidizing art that already has some economic value to someone, just not very much.

I feel like what is actually happening is subsidizing the buying of art, as the artist themselves can afford to charge a lower price due to the tax break. So you are encouraging the population to buy more art. And I guess that has some hypothetical returns in terms of life satisfaction and civility...? I think if they framed it this way, as a tax benefit available to anyone instead of exclusively to a select few, it might be more well received. I think of the mortgage interest tax break in the USA (which is actually almost completely negated at this point by the growing standard deduction) in the same way. It encourages people to settle down, maintain a job, and buy into society, so it helps build social stability and reduces violence.
by bayindirh | 2026-02-12 16:41:43+00:00
Well, after today's incidents I decided that none of my personal output will be public. I'll still license them appropriately, but I'll not even announce their existence anymore.

I was doing this for fun, and sharing with the hopes that someone would find them useful, but sorry. The well is poisoned now, and I don't my outputs to be part of that well, because anything put out with well intentions is turned into more poison for future generations.

I'm tearing the banners down, closing the doors off. Mine is a private workshop from now on. Maybe people will get some binaries, in the future, but no sauce for anyone, anymore.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-02-12 16:41:47+00:00
> I believe that ineffectual as it was, the reputational attack on me would be effective today against the right person. Another generation or two down the line, it will be a serious threat against our social order.

Damn straight.

Remember that every time we query an LLM, we're giving it ammo.

It won't take long for LLMs to have very intimate dossiers on every user, and I'm wondering what kinds of firewalls will be in place to keep one agent from accessing dossiers held by other agents.

Kompromat people must be having wet dreams over this.
by komali2 | 2026-02-12 16:42:05+00:00
> How does the government solve this problem?

The same way it solves all problems: poorly, yet better and more fairly than corporations do.

> Why can’t a private organization replicate that?

Private organizations are driven by profit motive. Profit motive is usually in a negative correlation with fair results in these sorts of situations. If you mean a church or non profit, then, because those don't represent a region of people, and there's no petition mechanism to change their behavior if they're bad. "We'll stop giving them money" great so you're back to my original point then: profit motive.

> How was art produced previously without the existence of these programs?

Hard to say, but there sure is a lot of it, from as long ago as ten thousand years, so personally I think it's safe to say there were lots of reasons beyond either an S Corp or 501(c) buying popular art, or a liberal democracy funding it.
by ajross | 2026-02-12 16:42:14+00:00
Exactly. This minutiae is all so weird. Email as a formal specification does not work, and the industry as a whole has accepted that for decades now. It's not possible to filter spam from valid traffic without applying a truckload of heuristics and leveraging an ever growing set of auxiliary signals (SPF, DKIM, yada yada).

To wit: basically everything in this world is a "SHOULD", at best. The rules are a conversation.
by wolvoleo | 2026-02-12 16:42:16+00:00
Yeah what I do when I'm on a holiday is just walk out and see what's around, what places look good and have a good vibe. Maybe then check their rating but usually I don't bother do do even that. I'm not a minmaxer, I care more about living in the moment.

I do have pretty bad ADHD though and as such I thrive on chaos and hate planning so there's that...
by thatha7777 | 2026-02-12 16:42:29+00:00
Would you mind scrolling to the end of the post? Or, if you're in a hurry: https://atha.io/_next/image?url=%2Fstatic%2Fblog%2F2026%2Fvi...

https://support.google.com/a/answer/2618874?hl=en
by kemotep | 2026-02-12 16:42:33+00:00
But if removing 1kLOC and replacing them with 25 for a much better function, there is a -975 LOC report. Does this count as negative productivity?
Having brackets start and stop on their own lines could double LOC counts but would that actually improve the code base? Be a sign of doubling productivity?

The OpenBSD project prides itself on producing very secure, bug free software, and they largely trend towards as low of lines of codes as they can possibly get away with while maintaining readability (so no codegolf tricks for the most part). I would rather we write secure bug free software than speed up the ability to output 10kLOC. The typing out code isn’t the difficult part in that scenario.
by abenga | 2026-02-12 16:42:40+00:00
If consumers stop buying gas guzzlers, the impact of personal transportation on the climate will reduce. Are you suggesting the 1% controls the minds of the 99% to do things that are harmful to the environment? Past some point, there is at least some level of personal responsibility?

Several car companies had plans to stop making ICE cars at some point in the near future. Everyone stopped buying their cars and they have had to backtrack (e.g. Porsche). We have all collectively decided that environmentalism is hot air (tee hee) and we'll just continue with business as usual.
by countWSS | 2026-02-12 16:44:15+00:00
The code written by AI in most cases is throwaway code to be improved/refined later.
Its likely to be large, verbose and bloated. The design of some agents
have "simplify/refactor" as final step to remedy this, but typically
your average vibe coder will be satisfied that the code just compiles/passes the minimal tests. Lines of code are easy to grow.
If you refine the AI code with iterative back-and-forth questions,
the AI can be forced to write much more compact or elegant version
in principle, but you can't apply this to most large systems without breaking something,
as AI doesn't have context of what is actually changing:
so e.g. an isolated function can be improved easily, but AI can't handle when complexity of abstraction stacks and interfacing multiple systems, typically because it confuses states
where global context is altered.
by walterbell | 2026-02-12 16:44:16+00:00
By minimizing apps on device, blocking all traffic to Apple 17.x, using Charles Proxy (and NetGuard on Android) to allowlist IP/port for the remaining apps at the router level, and then manually inspecting all other network activity from the device. Also the disappearance of said traffic after hard-reset. Sometimes there were anomalies in app logs (iOS Settings - Analytics).
by gf000 | 2026-02-12 16:44:17+00:00
Reality is. Consciousness is.. questionable. I have one. You? I don't know, I'm experiencing reality and you seem to have one, but I can never know it.

Computations on the other hand describe reality. And unless human brains somehow escape the physical reality, this description about the latter should surely apply here as well. There are no stronger computational models than a Turing machine, ergo whatever the human brain does (regardless of implementation) should be describable by one.
by crazygringo | 2026-02-12 16:44:18+00:00
I think the author is missing a key distinction.

Before, lines of code was (mis)used to try to measure individual developer productivity. And there was the collective realization that this fails, because good refactoring can reduce LoC, a better design may use less lines, etc.

But LoC never went away, for example, for estimating the overall level of complexity of a project. There's generally a valid distinction between an app that has 1K, 10K, 100K, or 1M lines of code.

Now, the author is describing LoC as a metric for determining the proportion of AI-generated code in a codebase. And just like estimating overall project complexity, there doesn't seem to be anything inherently problematic about this. It seems good to understand whether 5% or 50% of your code is written using AI, because that has gigantic implications for how the project is managed, particularly from a quality perspective.

Yes, as the author explains, if the AI code is more repetitive and needs refactoring, then the AI proportion will seem overly high in terms of how much functionality the AI proportion contributes. But at the same time, it's entirely accurate in terms of how this is possibly a larger surface for bugs, exploits, etc.

And when the author talks about big tech companies bragging about the high percentage of LoC being generated with AI... who cares? It's obviously just for press. I would assume (hope) that code review practices haven't changed inside of Microsoft or Google. The point is, I don't see these numbers as being "targets" in the way that LoC once were for individual developer productivity... there's more just a description of how useful these tools are becoming, and a vanity metric for companies signaling to investors that they're using new tools efficiently.
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-02-12 16:45:02+00:00
>"...go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something."

>—Kurt Vonnegut
by emmanol | 2026-02-12 16:45:23+00:00
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by perdomon | 2026-02-12 16:45:42+00:00
This is a great point and the reason why I steer away from Internet drama like this. We simply cannot know the truth from the information readily available. Digging further might produce something, (see the Discord Leaks doc), but it requires energy that most people won't (arguably shouldn't) spend uncovering the truth.

Dead internet theory isn't a theory anymore.
by Emiliess00 | 2026-02-12 16:45:43+00:00
Vantheon | Software Engineer | Austin, TX (in person) | Full Time

Vantheon is an applied AI research lab exploring how AI with disrupt investing across economic classes: Vantheon.ai

If you are obsessed with trading, crypto, defi, or something similar, this would be an exciting opp. Node, TypeScript, React

Email: emilie@vantheon.ai if interested
by thatha7777 | 2026-02-12 16:46:17+00:00
I suspect that Google going out of their way to make this required had a very reasonable and thought-out process, while the sender's omission was on oversight, so I haven't contacted Google Workspace support.

What's truly iffy is that GMail doesn't have the same strict requirements, and there's no way (at least that I found) to turn it off for my Google Workspace domain.
by senordevnyc | 2026-02-12 16:46:35+00:00
I see this ranting against MCP all the time, and I don't get it, maybe I'm missing something. I'm currently using an MCP in Cursor to give agents read-only access to my staging and prod databases, as well as BugSnag's MCP so it can look up errors that happen in those environments. It works great. What should I be using for this if not MCP?