MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sarchertech | 2026-02-14 05:10:56+00:00
Someone asked why the backlog doesn’t get finished. You answered that it does but the backlog just refills. So I asked where is the backlog evidence that the original backlog was completed.

I’m still waiting for the evidence. I still haven’t seen externally verifiable evidence that AI is a net productivity boost for the ability to ship software.

That doesn’t mean that it isn’t. It does mean that it isn’t big enough to be obvious.

I’m very closet watching every external metric I can find. Nothing yet. Just saw the steam metrics for January. Fewer titles than January last year.
by Lerc | 2026-02-14 05:12:09+00:00
Interesting, I have been doing similar things recently with shaders and tiny MLPs,

It would be nice to see field maps to see what the raw inputs flattened out on a surface output. Sometimes it really helpful to get an impression of what it is doing.

Are there any especially clever ways to visualise fields greater than 2D beyond looking at slices? Perhaps contour lines(surfaces?) though UMap?
by dakolli | 2026-02-14 05:12:18+00:00
fracture all the services, idc.

3 hrs a day on your phone is equivalent to 15 years of your life (accounting for a 16 hour waking day). I know people that do a solid 6... That's 30 years of their life scrolling, getting their brains completely fried by social media, and soon the infinite jest machine that is generative AI.

Sorry, we don't let people fry their brains with drugs, well we at least try to introduce some societal friction in between users and the act of obtaining said drug.
by AmbroseBierce | 2026-02-14 05:12:36+00:00
Completely fair, but I was responding to someone who doesn't think that it curtails freedom but that is the total opposite, you cannot be free if you are dead (except for a few niche philosophical definitions of the word), so human centric regulations like the asbestos ban are orthogonal to freedom, even if I admit in the strictest definition of the word yes, a regulation can curtail your freedom to harm yourself and hypothetically could curtail yourself from positive benefits as well.

But the thing is that statistically the likelihood they were discussing in good faith about this is near none, instead their way of speaking are telltales of a libertarian, where they have a almost religious believe that regulation is their biggest enemy and will never admit that the lack of it could harm or even kill them, I have wasted many many hours talking with such kind of people and don't aim to waste more arguing in good faith giving nuanced responses.
by stingraycharles | 2026-02-14 05:13:45+00:00
Advertising = compensating someone to promote a product / company.

It’s about the compensation. That makes it advertising.

Regular booking.com is fine. Paying booking.com to allow your results to appear higher is not.

Regular Google Maps to register your restaurant is fine. Paying Google Maps to promote your restaurant is not.

It’s not that hard to implement. Advertising is pretty well defined.
by adithyareddy | 2026-02-14 05:13:52+00:00
Really fun / cool project!

I've always defaulted to using https://yarnpkg.com/ to search for packages cause the npmjs.com search is so slow, but while the yarnpkg.com search is super fast, actually clicking on a package and seeing the details page takes forever.

This is super fast for both search and the details page, and it's super keyboard friendly which makes it even faster to use in practice. Definitely going to become my go-to search now. Love it, thanks for building it!
by D-Machine | 2026-02-14 05:14:04+00:00
"It's interesting to me that whenever some new result in AI use comes up, there's always a flood of people who come in to gesticulate wildly that that the sky is falling and AGI is imminent. Like with the recent solutions GPT 5.2 has been able to find for Erdos problems, even though in almost all cases such solutions rely on poorly-known past publications, or significant expert user guidance and essential tools like Aristotle, which do non-AI formal verification - many users here (even in this very thread!) think they know more about this than Fields medalist Terence Tao, who maintains this list showing that, yes, though these are not interesting proofs to most modern mathematicians, LLMs are a major factor in a tiny minority of these mostly-not-very-interesting proofs: https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems/wiki/AI-contribution..."

The thing about spin and AI hype (besides being trivially easy to write) is that is isn't even trying to be objective. It would help if a lot of these articles would more carefully lay out what is actually surprising, and what is not, given current tech and knowledge.

Only a fool would think we aren't potentially on the verge of something truly revolutionary here. But only a fool would also be certain that the revolution has already happened, or that e.g. AGI is necessarily imminent.

The reason HN has value is because you can actually see some specifics of the matter discussed, and, if you are lucky, an expert even might join in to qualify everything. But pointing out "how interesting that there are extremes to this" is just engagement bait.
by akagr | 2026-02-14 05:14:13+00:00
I believe (correct me if I’m wrong), their point is that with time, we’re writing less code ourselves and more through LLMs. This can make people disconnected from the “joy” of using certain programming languages over others. I’ve only used cl for toy projects and use elisp to configure my editor. As models get better (they’re already very good), the cost of trashing code spirals downwards. The nuances of one language being aesthetically better than other will matter less over time.

FWIW, I also think performant languages like rust will gain way more prominence. Their main downside is that they’re more “involved” to write. But they’re fast and have good type systems. If humans aren’t writing code directly anymore, would a language being simpler or cleverer to read and write ultimately matter? Why would you ask a model to write your project in python, for instance? If only a model will ever interact with code, choice of language will be purely functional. I know we’re not fully there yet but latest models like opus 4.6 are extremely good at reasoning and often one-shotting solutions.

Going back to lower level languages isn’t completely out of the picture, but models have to get way better and require way less intervention for that to happen.
by nofriend | 2026-02-14 05:14:16+00:00
Your explanation makes it sound like an incredibly stupid decision. I imagine what you're getting at is that 3 bytes were/are sufficient for the basic multilingual plane, which is incidentally also what can be represented in a single utf-16 byte pair. So they imposed the same limitation as utf-16 had on utf-8. This would have seemed logical in a world where utf-16 was the default and utf-8 was some annoying exception they had to get out of the way.
by olyjohn | 2026-02-14 05:14:29+00:00
Do these trucks actually drive themselves into a warehouse, and back into an empty spot? Can they actually navigate cities? Or only on the interstates? What kind of loads are they carrying? Can they navigate mountain passes? How much of the entire trip is actually automated? They never answer any of these questions, and make it sound like they can drive anywhere, any time. But it seems to me more like they are on predefined routes, limited to certain destinations. Maybe even someone picks up the truck at an off ramp and drives it into the city. That's not a bad thing, but they are so sketchy the way they don't give any details. It makes it hard for me to believe half this stuff.
by selylindi | 2026-02-14 05:14:38+00:00
Even manual labor is uncertain. Nothing in principle prevents a robot from being a mass produceable, relatively cheap, 24/7 manual worker.

We've presumably all seen the progress of humanoid robotics; they're currently far from emulating human manual dexterity, but in the last few years they've gotten pretty skilled at rapid locomotion. And robots will likely end up with a different skill profile at manual tasks than humans, simply due to being made of different materials via a more modular process. It could be a similar story to the rise of the practical skills of chatbots.

In theory we could produce a utopia for humans, automating all the bad labor. But I have little optimism left in my bones.
by vincent_s | 2026-02-14 05:16:03+00:00
Ha, this triggered me. I'm building exactly this.

It's a coding agent that takes a ticket from your tracker, does the work asynchronously, and replies with a pull request. It does progressively understand the codebase. There's a pre-warming step so it's already useful on the first ticket, but it gets better with each one it completes.

The agent itself is done and working well. Right now I'm building out the infrastructure to offer it as a SaaS.

If anyone wants to try it, hit me up. Email is in my profile. Website isn't live yet, but I'm putting together a waitlist.
by ottah | 2026-02-14 05:16:40+00:00
Well, if wasm process is limited on the syscalls it can make, the blast radius is limited. For example you can block network access, and disk access for tools that don't need those capabilities.

That being said, this doesn't sound like they're really thinking through the risks.

> Dynamic Tool Building - Describe what you need, and IronClaw builds it as a WASM tool

If the agent can write it's own insecure plugins, and the wasm processes isn't properly isolated, you've really gained nothing.
by deaux | 2026-02-14 05:18:02+00:00
> I have friends who are otherwise extremely progressive people, who I think are genuinely good people, who worked for Palantir for many years. The cognitive dissonance they must've dealt with...

There's really nothing different about it than people working for Meta, AWS or Microsoft, and there are likely a dozen of those among us in this thread alone (hi!). Especially pre-Trump. Without the latter two companies gladly committing to juicy enterprise contracts with Palantir (continuing to this day), they would barely exist. Zuckerberg has caused magnitudes more death and destruction in the world than Karp could even dream of. Not for the latter's lack of trying, of course. And with similar amounts of empathy. Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel's combined empathy amounts to zero. None of them have more than any of the others.

To be fair, I think at least at Microsoft, Google and indeed Palantir a lot of people have had large degrees of separation to the despicable stuff the companies are responsible for. Working on say, Xbox (Microsoft), or Gmail (Google), or optimizing Airbus manufacturing (Palantir), one can see how it's quite easy to defend at a surface level.

In that sense I consider Meta the worst because Facebook/Instagram are effectively the entire business, with a little side of WhatsApp. Almost everyone is working directly on those two products, or is maybe one degree separated.

I'm sure this won't be a popular opinion on here, but it may help you give a different point of view about your friends in a way. You should talk with them about it. Pre-MAGA, you'll likely find that ironically the place they worked at was internally more progressive than Meta or Microsoft. Did your friends quit voluntarily or were they booted?

This is an interesting article [0].

This comment probably won't be very popular here, but I do invite those who instinctively reach for the downvote button to have a calm think and maybe reply before they do so.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/30/palantir-trump-karp-politics...
by sponaugle | 2026-02-14 05:18:07+00:00
The study looks at a wide range of different tests spanning many different areas of expertise and output types. Some of the tests, like the web vis tasks used Sonnet not Opus (which was not out at the time). It is similar to testing a car to do many different things, but only one of the tests is the actual driving somehwhere and many of the others are based of the fabric used in the interior. This gives a very broad "96% failure" while missing the observation of the successes. Of course AI can't do everything, and nor can I.

One of the most interesting observations about AI is the timescale at which the favorite model and favorite task changes. Before November I found Sonnet to be interesting, but not moving that much of the needle. Once Opus came out it was clear the needle was not only moving, but moving fast.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-14 05:19:00+00:00
The proposal was to "outlaw compensation for advertising". That would presumably include paying people to create ads and not just to publish them, hence the first example. What you're arguing is that the first example is different from the second one, but they were intended to be, because they map to two different parts of the process.

> The customer is (presumably) purchasing a product and is reading the documentation to understand how to operate it.

Product documentation is also available to prospective customers so they can review it to decide whether they want to purchase the product.

And then the question is, how do they get it? There are many ways to distribute. They could pay to print it out on paper and put it in the lobby in their corporate offices, but then customers would have to come to their corporate headquarters to get it, which most won't do, so obviously some methods of distribution have a higher likelihood of being seen. Then companies will prefer the ones that allow them to be seen more.

But they're paying someone for any of them, so "is paying for it" isn't a useful way to distinguish them.

And then we're back to, suppose you pay Facebook to host your documents on your company's Facebook page. Furthermore suppose that they, like most hosting companies, charge you more money if you get more traffic. Meanwhile their "hosting customers" on the "free tier" (i.e. ordinary Facebook users) have a very small quota which is really only enough for their posts to be seen by their own friends. So paying them for distribution -- like paying for any other form of distribution -- causes your documents to have better visibility. Now you can show up in the feed of more people before you run out of quota, just like paying more for hosting means more people could visit your website before you exceed your transfer allowance.

How do you tell if someone is paying for computing resources or eyeballs when the same company provides both? Notice that "don't let them do both" is a bit of a problem if you also don't let them sell advertising, because if they can't sell ads or charge for using the service then what are they doing for revenue?
by nprateem | 2026-02-14 05:19:00+00:00
Yes and look how far we've come in 4 years. If programming has another 4 that's all it has.

I'm just not sure who will end up employed. The near state is obviously jira driven development where agents just pick up tasks from jira, etc. But will that mean the PMs go and we have a technical PM, or will we be the ones binned? Probably for most SMEs it'll just be maybe 1 PM and 2 or so technical PMs churning out tickets.

But whatever. It's the trajectory you should be looking at.
by Animats | 2026-02-14 05:19:14+00:00
There's a classic book on this, "Chapters on Machinery and Labor" (1926). [1]

They show three cases of what happened when a process was mechanized.

The "good case" was the Linotype. Typesetting became cheaper and the number of works printed went up, so printers did better.

The "medium case" was glassblowing of bottles. Bottle making was a skilled trade, with about five people working as a practiced team to make bottles. Once bottle-making was mechanized, there was no longer a need for such teams. But bottles became cheaper, so there were still a lot of bottlemakers. But they were lower paid, because tending a bottle-making machine is not a high skill job.

The "bad case" was the stone planer. The big application for planed stone was door and window lintels for brick buildings. This had been done by lots of big guys with hammers and chisels. Steam powered stone planers replaced them. Because lintels are a minor part of buildings, this didn't cause more buildings to be built, so employment in stone planing went way down.

Those are still the three basic cases. If the market size is limited by a non-price factor, higher productivity makes wages go down.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/1885817?seq=1
by tl2do | 2026-02-14 05:19:23+00:00
The typeahead search speed is genuinely impressive. I was typing package names and the results were appearing before I'd finished the keystroke—that's the kind of responsiveness you usually only see with native applications.

As someone who spent a year obsessing over performance in a .NET MAUI app (IMAP processing, background execution, API latency), I know how hard it is to shave milliseconds off search. The npm registry is massive, and you're clearly doing something right on the indexing or caching side.

Are you using client-side filtering with a pre-built index? Server-side with some clever caching strategy? I'm genuinely curious about the architecture choices that got you to "uncannily fast" territory—especially compared to the official npmjs.com search.

Whatever you're doing under the hood, it shows. Performance is a feature.
by jandrewrogers | 2026-02-14 05:19:40+00:00
The materials used in US house construction are practically restricted by a requirement to survive extreme seismic and wind loading. In the US there are ghost towns where brick and masonry cities were completely obliterated by these hazards. As the US learned how to engineer buildings that mitigated these risks, these learnings were reflected in construction standards.

This led to the highly evolved wood-frame and steel-frame structures used in all construction in the US you see today. There are still a few old brick and masonry buildings from before these building codes, but most of the buildings from those eras collapsed in one disaster or another.
by KittenInABox | 2026-02-14 05:20:14+00:00
In my mind we will have a bimodal set of skills in software development, likely something like a product engineer (an engineer who is also a product manager-- this person conceptualizes features and systemically considers the software as a whole in terms of ergonomics, business sense, and the delight in building something used by others) and something like a deep-in-the-weeds engineer (an engineer who innovates on the margins of high performance, tuning, deep improvements to libraries and other things of that nature). The former is needing to skill in rapid context switching, keeping the full model of customer journey in their minds, while also executing on technical rigor enough to prevent inefficiencies. The latter will need to skill in being able to dive extremely deeply into nuanced subjects like fine-tuning the garbage collector, compiler, network performance, or internal parts of the DOM or OS or similar.

I would expect a lot of product engineering to specialize further into domains like healthtech, fintech, adtech, etc. While the in-the-weeds engineering will be platform, infra, and embedded systems type folks.
by utopiah | 2026-02-14 05:20:24+00:00
That's the thing that annoys me the most. Sure you may find Altman antipathetic, yes you might worry for the environment, etc BUT initially I cheered for OpenAI! I was telling everybody I know that AI is an interesting field, that it is also powerful, and thus must be done safely and in the open. Then, year after year, they stopped publishing what was the most interesting (or at least popular) part of their research, partnering with corporations with exclusivity deals, etc.

So... yes what pissed me the most about that is that initially I did support OpenAI! It's like the process of growth itself removed its raison d'etre.
by evanelias | 2026-02-14 05:20:47+00:00
OK, but that makes perfect sense given utf-16 was actually quite widespread in 2003! For example, Windows APIs, MS SQL Server, JavaScript (off the top of my head)... these all still primarily use utf-16 today even. And MySQL also supports utf-16 among many other charsets.

There wasn't a clear winner in utf-8 at the time, especially given its 6-byte-max representation back then. Memory and storage were a lot more limited.

And yes while 6 bytes was the maximum, a bunch of critical paths (e.g. sorting logic) in old MySQL required allocating a worst-case buffer size, so this would have been prohibitively expensive.
by roenxi | 2026-02-14 05:22:35+00:00
> My initial reaction was that this was a terrible precedent, but after thinking on it more I asked myself, "well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?". Everything I thought of would have some way or workaround that could be found...

This doesn't solve the problem though - the enforcers still have to come up with a standard that they will enforce. A line has to be drawn, letting people move the line around based on how they feel today doesn't help. Making the standard uncertain just creates opportunities for corruption and unfairness. I haven't read the actual EU stance on the matter but what you are describing is a reliable way to end up in a soup of bad policy. There needs to be specific rulings on what people can and can't do.

If you can't identify the problem, then you aren't in a position to solve it. Applies to most things. Regulation by vibe-checks is a great way to kill off growth and change - which the EU might think is clever, but the experience over the last few centuries has been that growth and change generally make things better.

And what they actually seem to be doing here is demanding that sites spy on their users and understand their browsing habits which does seem like a terrible approach. I don't see how their demands in that statement align with the idea of the EU promoting digital privacy.
by scythe | 2026-02-14 05:22:54+00:00
Possibly the solution would be to have some kind of soundproofing backing material on the converse side of the drywall panels. Including this could be required by regulation which would be easier to enforce than some kind of abstract acoustic property. One of the interesting arguments that Brian Potter made is that you're usually better off trying to move the issue from construction to manufacturing.

This is basically similar to how leaded drywall is used to shield X-rays. Of course, there are additional costs associated with the hazards of lead.
by godelski | 2026-02-14 05:23:38+00:00
Fwiw I'm not trying to celebrate for OpenAI. The press piece definitely makes bolder claims than the paper.

I was just stating the facts and correcting a reaction that went too far in the other direction. By taking my comment as supporting or validating OpenAI's claim is just as bad. An error of the same magnitude.

I feel like I've been quoting Feynman a lot this week: The first principle is to not fool yourself, and you're the easiest person to fool. You're the easiest person for you to fool because you're as smart as yourself and deception is easier than proving. We all fall for these traps and the smartest people in the world (or history) are not immune to it. But it's interesting to see on a section of the internet that prides itself for its intelligence. I think we just love blinders, which is only human
by georgeburdell | 2026-02-14 05:24:06+00:00
Both YC and Stanford have had their admissions process cracked for some time by resume maximalists. Those institutions are largely free to design their admissions process, yet I haven’t really heard of any innovation going on in that space. For example, Stanford could use their admissions data, correlated with college grades and starting salary, to figure out what is the cut-off for “good enough” and allocate 20% of the slots to a random lottery of good-enoughs. It’s akin to temperature in tuning a model
by smcin | 2026-02-14 05:24:10+00:00
Yes, Christian Rudder's old OKTrends blog was excellent and showed real-world data on how people actually behave, and the frequent mismatch with what they claim/ believe/admit to. (Mind you, the OkCupid founders left over a decade ago and it went hugely downhill)

For some reason your post got downvoted and killed.