MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tetha | 2026-02-26 19:56:34+00:00
> The higher paid engineers i've worked with are always worth their salary/hourly rate because of the way they approach problems and the solutions they come up with.

I'm honestly just happy at the moment, because our two junior admins/platform engineers have made some really good points to me in preparation for their annual reviews.

One now completed his own bigger terraform project, with the great praise of "That looks super easy to maintain and use" from the other more experienced engineers. He figured: "It's weird, you actually end up thinking and poking at a problem for a week or two, and then it actually folds into a very small amount of code. And sure, Copilot helped a bit with some boilerplate, but that was only after figuring out how to structure and hold it".

The other is working on getting a grip on running the big temperamental beast called PostgreSQL. She was recently a bit frustrated. "How can it be so hard to configure a simple number! It's so easy to set it in ansible and roll it out, but to find the right value, you gotta search the entire universe from top to bottom and then the answer is <maybe>. AAaah I gotta yell at a team". She's on a good way to become a great DBA.

> Agents are great at building out features, i'm not so sure about complex software that grows over time. Unless you know the right questions to ask, the agent misses alot. 80/20 doesn't work for systems that need 100% reliability.

Or if it's very structured and testable. For example, we're seeing great value in rebuilding a Grafana instance from manually managed to scripted dashboards. After a bit of scaffolding, some style instructions and a few example systems, you can just chuck it a description and a few queries, it just goes to successful work and just needs a little tweaking afterwards.

Similar, we're now converting a few remnants of our old config management to the new one using AI agents. Setup a good test suite first, then throw old code and examples of how the new config management does it into the context and modern models do that well. At that point, just rebuilding the system once is better than year-long deprecation plans with undecided stakeholders as mobile as a pet ferret that doesn't want to.

It's really not the code holding the platform together, it's the team and the experiences and behaviors of people.
by vichoiglesias | 2026-02-26 19:57:15+00:00
When an autonomous agent fails at step 40, the bug was usually introduced at step 12. The hard part is finding it. Logs tell you what happened, but they don’t let you bisect a trajectory the way you’d bisect code.

I started thinking about what it would actually take to make that kind of debugging mechanical. It seems to require three things: immutable traces, pure reducers, and violation predicates that don’t flip back once they become true.

The interesting part: remove any one of those invariants, and there exists an execution where binary search over the trajectory cannot be guaranteed to return the correct onset tick. I tried to sketch a proof of that.

Once that substrate exists, though, you get something fun: fork, diff, and cherry-pick over agent reasoning. The same operations Git gave us over code but applied to trajectories.

Curious what breaks in the argument, especially the impossibility claim and whether the predicate regularity assumption is actually realistic.
by zorked | 2026-02-26 19:57:17+00:00
Artists who do not make it big (or who have not made it big _yet_) have some fallback jobs as illustrators, decorators, stage musicians, etc. These will increasingly disappear, raising (even more) the risks of an art career.

Therefore, art will increasingly be an occupation for the rich, as was historically the case. It will again represent the modes of life of the upper classes, and there will be a widening disconnect with popular culture.
by CompoundEyes | 2026-02-26 19:57:26+00:00
I’m doing enterprise coding tasks that used to take a month of whole team coordination from mockups to through development and testing in 3 days now. It’s all test driven development, codex 5.3 and a small team of two people who know how to hold it right orchestrating the agents. There’s no reason not to work this way. The sociotechnical engineering aspects of this change are fascinating and rewarding to solve.
by profsummergig | 2026-02-26 19:58:00+00:00
I decided to make rotis every day for a month (am male of Indian origin who hadn't ever cooked breads), AND eat them. The first one was completely inedible. The 30th day's rotis were edible, but nothing like what women in my family make. But still, edible.

Eventually had the confidence to experiment with making Naan.

This led to experimenting with Asian-style Pot-Stickers.

The main benefit to me was confidence, and belief in pmarca's "you can just do things".
by hnuser123456 | 2026-02-26 19:58:05+00:00
Fair, I read the whole post but I guess that part didn't register, maybe because I never fullheartedly believe marketing fluff to begin with. Maybe this person has too much contact with "AI will fix everything" types, and not enough with actual scientists who are really developing novel methods better than anything before, piece by piece.

I also found the "it's almost always dudes" line a bit strange, because I've seen plenty of women doing marketing for startups running on hype.
by alwillis | 2026-02-26 19:58:12+00:00
>> The central promise—that distributed digital fabrication would bring manufacturing back to America, that every city would have micro-factories, that 3D printing would decentralize production—simply didn’t materialize.

> This version of the Maker Movement only ever existed in news articles and hype bubbles.

That version of the Maker Movement was heavily pushed by city and the state government in Massachusetts. They put money into it; foundations funded it.

It was seen as a way to give students another pathway for those who weren't interested in going to college. I've seen first hand how some kids who weren't interested school or academics really got into the Maker thing, which got them into STEM.

Some of them ended up going to college to study engineering and related fields. Some of them ended up working in related fields and started their own businesses.

As time went on, it became clear to me that the Maker Movement wasn’t going to go mainstream, although 3D printing has found another niche audience recently in the home lab space. Many home-labbers on YouTube 3D print their own cases and other parts.

There will be normies that take up vibe coding like some knit their own sweaters or grow their own food because they enjoy it.

And there will be Fortune 500 companies that will vibe code certain products.
by Davidzheng | 2026-02-26 19:58:21+00:00
Re: But they aren't alive, they don't live in the world and have experiences, and they can't create something truly new.

Is it possible for a character in a novel to have novel experiences? Or for you to experience a novel dream? I would argue yes. You can know the rules of the environment and the starting conditions, but with a bit of randomness (or not) you can generate from that novel experiences which were unexpected - so too from the data & distribution that AIs are already trained on they can experience new experiences.

Another source of novelty is from good verifiers/recognition of a class of object which is hard to construct but easy to verify - here the AI can search and from that obtain novel solutions which were unthought of before.

N.B novelty itself is basically trivial - just generate random strings. But both of the above are mechanisms to generate novel samples inside some constraint of "meaningfulness"
by program_whiz | 2026-02-26 19:58:36+00:00
The book daemon explored an interesting concept. It explored the idea that an AI could dominate and cause problems, not through super-intelligence, but through simple mechanisms that already exist.

Like the executive who deleted all her emails -- humans giving tons of control and access, and being extremely compliant to digital systems is all it takes. Give agent control of bank and your social media, and it already has all the movie scripts and mobster movie themes to exploit and blackmail you effectively with very rudimentary methods (threats, coercion, blackmail, etc.).

Just spoofing a simple email with the account it gained access too at the Meta exec's email (had it hit an email with an attack prompt), could have been enough to initiate some kind of thing like this. For example, by emailing everyone at the company and in contacts with commands that would be caught by other bots. No super-intelligence needed, just a good prompt and some human negligence.
by tstrimple | 2026-02-26 19:58:36+00:00
> Do you think today the average Japanese person knows more about water supply than the average American?

Probably yes. Our education systems and culture are so very different. Japan is far more structured and standardized. In the US, schools are a complete gamble unless you've got the means and motivation to explicitly move to an area with "good schools". Given the incredible number of adults who read below a sixth grade level, I'd fully expect the average US citizen to be less informed and less capable of informing themselves as the average Japanese citizen. This would translate into more Japanese citizens being familiar with things like water pressure.
by hedora | 2026-02-26 19:59:14+00:00
Pro tip: If you still have a local record store with a used section, you can probably buy blurays and dvds super cheap. They’re typically 25-50% the price of renting on Amazon/Apple, or buying used media on Amazon.

Also, it’s actually easier to bypass the DRM crap than not, so they’ll continue to play in full resolution moving forward.
by rockskon | 2026-02-26 19:59:17+00:00
No, it isn't. There is a gigantic chasm of difference between "80% of code they produce could be created by AI" and "80% of commits they produce could be created by AI".

Mixing the two up is how we get a massive company like Microsoft to continually produce such atrocious software updates that destroy hardware or cause BSODs for their flagship Operating System.

That's not replacing software development. That's dysfunction masquerading as capability.

And none of what I said is goalpost moving. They are the goalposts constantly made by the AI industry and their hype-men. The very premise of replacing a significant amount of human labor underlies the exorbitant valuation AI has been given in the market.
by jazzpush2 | 2026-02-26 19:59:21+00:00
That's nothing. Former/current YC founders are also abusing BookFace.

I did YC and now work at a frontier lab.

I've received multiple spam-style emails from (mostly young) current founders tagging me and all other YC-alum at my place-of-work with the profiles of their friends for internship roles, referrals, etc.. Same girl has done it for like 5 different people.
by kbelder | 2026-02-26 19:59:47+00:00
Names-wise, I think 'Grok' is pretty good, there's just lots of other baggage that comes along with it.

I still hate how Microsoft ruined the value in the name 'Cortana'. If they had a modern LLM named Cortana with the right voice, I'd be very tempted to use it just because. What other LLM has a face associated with it?
by verdverm | 2026-02-26 19:59:56+00:00
> I have been spoiled (?) by monorepos so that's why designed for this.

I too find monorepos superior at this point in time. There are essentially the same complexities both ways (polyrepo), two sides of the same coin. I have broken slightly, having "megarepos", where most code is in one place, but a few are broken out, possibly another "megarepo". The most natural split is public vs private.
by ronaldluc | 2026-02-26 20:00:13+00:00
Okey, went through temporal.io and prompted how could it be implemented into our workflow It actually can replace the semaphores, checkpointing, cancellation and even add crash recovery (since it's for free, why not).

But I don't understand what makes it a state machine. Temporal sounds like durable execution enabler. It is better fit to sit on top of our state machine.
by kodomomo | 2026-02-26 20:01:26+00:00
Octo [0] for nvim lets you submit reviews, add comments on ranges, reply to threads, etc.

This in conjunction with gh-dash [1] to launch a review can get you a pretty nice TUI review workflow.

[0] https://github.com/pwntester/octo.nvim

[1] https://github.com/dlvhdr/gh-dash
by linkjuice4all | 2026-02-26 20:01:28+00:00
3D printing does bear some similarity to vibe coding/LLM-generated code. I do occasionally see "product" 3D printed items but the bigger value-add for 3D printing has been rapid prototyping and then running that design through actual production testing.

An example 3D workflow:
Prototype design -> 3D print -> test/break -> production design -> real manufacturing process

The equivalent vibe code
Vibecobe -> slop -> test/break -> real developers -> real development process

--

The real test for vibe coded stuff (much like 3D printed crap at craft fairs) will be if someone actually buys it. But much like those 'makers', vibe coders will have to go through the "real development process" if they want to make money at scale.
by meatmanek | 2026-02-26 20:01:35+00:00
Maybe I'm only noticing the times when it messes things up, but it kinda seems like these auto-edits cause a lot of confusion that could be avoided if they were shown up-front to submitters, who would then have the option to undo them.

Or maybe judicious use of an LLM here could be helpful. Replace the auto-edits with a prompt? Ask an LLM to judge whether the auto-edited title still retains its original meaning? Run the old and new titles through an embedding model and make sure they still point in roughly the same direction?
by m3047 | 2026-02-26 20:01:37+00:00
An analysis based on linear distance fails the essential geometric test:

> Humans walk at roughly 2.1-3.0mph. "European cities" are listed as having bus stops 984-1476 ft apart, which would imply you'd typically walk half that to reach the nearest one (492-738 ft), which for a fit 3.0mph person is 2-3 minutes, and for a frail old 2.1mph person is 3-4 minutes.

> Of course, people can be further away than that (they live orthagonally to the bus route), but you get the point. If you doubled bus stop distances to 1476ft apart, it would not add many walking minutes for the users.

Given four "bus stops" spaced at the corners of a square of dimension d, and a linear relationship of distance and time such that d == t, the distance to a stop along the edges of the square is at most d/2 == 0.5d. As the crow flies (straight line) the distance from the center of the square to any of the corners is sqrt(2*(d^2)) / 2 or (approximately) 0.71d.

But people don't fly, rather geometric physical reality is something sometimes called "manhattan distance" which essentially means that they need to walk to the edge and then along the edge (or zig-zag block by block, which amounts to the same thing just repeated at smaller scale). In this case the distance walked to any of the corners from the center is exactly d. Unless you live in the middle of a park (with stops at the corners) d is the best outcome. In a physical environment other obstacles may present which require backtracking; indeed, the bus routes (and hence stops) are likely optimized to avoid backtracking, acknowledging this physical reality.
by eesmith | 2026-02-26 20:01:54+00:00
In the sense that described in the lawsuit. See https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/2022-... for details, starting with:

> The policy and spirit of the California antitrust laws are to promote the free play of
competitive market forces and the lower prices to consumers that result. Amazon, the dominant online retail store in the United States, has violated the policy, spirit, and letter of those laws by imposing agreements at the retail and wholesale level that have prevented effective price competition across a wide swath of online marketplaces and stores.

The linked-to article concerns a possible preliminary injunction related to that case.
by demetris | 2026-02-26 20:02:11+00:00
Websites do care about the UA. They don’t care, at least most don’t care, about the User-Agent string. That is different.

About an element that gets rendered into native menu controls, I am not sure. I haven’t been following closely for the last two or three years. But that seems like a good candidate for a native element. 9 out 10 websites need it.
by plastic-enjoyer | 2026-02-26 20:02:35+00:00
> It's laziness because they have little CS fundamentals to base such claims on

So, what CS fundamentals do you need to evaluate if AI is the real thing, or will disappoint in the future? Until a few months ago, coding agents were met with skepticism, until Anthropic introduced their new model and, with it, a hype train that cannot be rationally justified. Look, SOTA LLMs, and coding agents in particular, are impressive. However, current predictions about the future of software development (and the world in general) are speculative. There is little to no data showing whether AI can deliver on its promises. How could there be in this short time frame? No one knows what the future will hold, no one knows how coding agents will be integrated into our work life and everyday life in the long run, or what hard limitations they will reveal. No one can tell you how professions will change in the coming years; every prediction is purely speculative, and anyone making prophecies is either trying to cope with the uncertainty themselves or has some stakes in the AI bet. It would be nice if people were actually humble enough to admit that they have no idea what will happen in the future, instead of writing the hundredth doom and gloom post.
by unholiness | 2026-02-26 20:02:42+00:00
I like it!

One big annoyance with the power-ups is that the failure condition is checked before you can use them. It's particularly painful since they all replace the current piece, so they seem tailor-made to get rid of a nasty piece that would cause you to lose... but then they have to be used before you get to that piece that would cause you to lose!

Anyway, both times I played I got in the 40s without any power-ups used, then saw that the next piece would cause me to lose but none of the powers could save me. Probably the ideal fix is just to not trigger a loss while you still have powers?
by thomassmith65 | 2026-02-26 20:03:06+00:00
If angering Trump weren't such high stakes, Anthropic could end this by releasing a single 30 second commercial.

Informing the public of this dispute would highlight Anthropic's mission (ie: responsible AI), which is a market differentiator.

The Pentagon would crawl back, anyways, since Claude is the most effective model for programming tasks.
by dmix | 2026-02-26 20:03:09+00:00
It helps you can buy an electric car in China for 1/4th the price as California. They also massively invested in every sort of energy (not just solar) where it's cheap and affordable to develop industry. Everyone obsesses about labour costs but almost everything is easier and cheaper to build in China because they allow stuff to be built there. Including the workers far lower housing, utilities, fuel, and food prices which lower the cost of living.
by program_whiz | 2026-02-26 20:03:21+00:00
Wrote this elsewhere, but I think its worth thinking about a scenario like the book "daemon", rather than a "super-intelligence explosion" type scenario (which may be more like curing the cold or fusion than building a faster car).

All it really takes to do some kind of crazy world-dominating thing is some simple mechanisms and base intelligence, which the machines already possess. Using basic tactics like coercion, spoofing, threats, financial leverage, an unsophisticated attacker could cause major damage.

For example, that Meta exec who had their email deleted. Imagine instead one email had a malicious prompt which the bot obeyed. That prompt simply emailed everyone in her contacts list telling them to do something urgently (and possibly prompting other bots who are reading those emails). You could pretty quickly do something like cause a market crash, a nationwide panic, or maybe even an international conflict with no "super intelligence" needed, just human negligence, short-sightedness, and laziness.

Examples would be things like saying there is a threat incoming, a CIA source said so. Another would be that everyone will be fired, Meta is going bankrupt, etc. Its very easy to craft a prompt like that and fire it off to all the execs you can find (or just fire off random emails with plausible sounding emails). Then you just need to hit one and might set off a cascade.
by SpaceNoodled | 2026-02-26 20:04:00+00:00
Photography was considered pretty uncool; it removed what at the time was perceived as all of the skill. We now can appreciate deeper aspects of captured images such as composition, and we now see painted portraits replaced by more abstract, surreal, or imagined imagery. Generative AI is similarly revolutionary in that it moves away from realism back into the realm of the imaginary; whether or not a user's prompts can be appreciated remains to be seen.
by bonesss | 2026-02-26 20:04:27+00:00
One thought experiment I keep having when I see LLM hype: imagine if our outsourcing companies could be as blasé about copyright as OpenAI, and how profitable they could be.

I mean, rename some dudes over there to ‘transformer’, and let them copy & paste from GitHub with abandon… I know we could get a whole browser for less than a few grand.

We wouldn’t, because it’d be copyright-insane. But if we just got it indirect enough, maybe fed the info to the copiers through a ‘transforming’ browser to mirror the copyright argument, I bet we could outperform OpenAI in key metrics.

Coding is formalizing for the compiler. The other 99% of the job is softly getting the PHB not to fuck the entire company and being unique in not doing dumb shit everyone thinks is popular now but will regret soon. It’s all like IT tribal tattoos. Barely cool for a couple of years, and then a lifelong source of shielded regret.
by pbowyer | 2026-02-26 20:04:47+00:00
I came across a coding harness using Lua as its control plane yesterday: https://github.com/hsaliak/std_slop/blob/main/docs/lua_integ...

> std::slop is a persistent, SQLite-driven C++ CLI agent. It remembers your work through per-session ledgers, providing long-term recall, structured state management. std::slop features built-in Git integration. It's goal is to be an agent for which the context and its use fully transparent and configurable.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-02-26 20:04:56+00:00
> Agents really do not care at all how "nice" a language is.

People do care.

> You only need to be picky with language if a human is going to be working with the code.

Sooner or later humans will have to work with the code - if only for their own self-preservation.

> I get the impression that is not the use case here though

If that's not the use case, there's no legitimate use case at all.
by quesera | 2026-02-26 20:05:03+00:00
You are very wrong about Steve Jobs.

It's easy to be wrong about Jobs, because he was iconoclastic and idiosyncratic. And very very public.

And he did some personally, individually, shameful things. Especially in his 20s when he hadn't learned how to be an adult, much less a billionaire. And the latter protected him from needing to be the former for a while!

But if you believe for a second that Jobs would have tolerated Trump's wholesale ignorance and cruelty, you are making a huge mistake of understanding. That was never in Steve Jobs' personality -- in fact he was very outspoken about the excesses of power over people.

He was an anti-establishment Californian by birth, not a xenophobic RealAmerican™. These streams do not cross. If you do not understand the difference, you cannot possibly understand Steve Jobs.