MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SupremumLimit | 2026-02-08 06:46:58+00:00
The ignorance of this comment is breathtaking. How are the crops going to grow if the temperature drops by 15 degrees Celsius? What marine and terrestrial ecosystems can survive a sudden catastrophic change like that? What’s going to happen to the weather patterns after this planet-scale shift? How do you “adjust” to the collapse of your food supply and entire ecosystems?
by sph | 2026-02-08 06:47:02+00:00
Another take away from that documentary is not that politicians do not care, but that the world has become so increasingly complex, fast-moving and interconnected there is no simple or real solution to any of the problems people have. They just do not have the answers.

Whenever a politician gets elected on the wish to fix housing, jobs, the pension system, the larger and larger divide between the ultra rich and the masses, either they are lying to you or are hopelessly naive they can achieve anything in their 4 years. At that point all they can do is just fill their pockets like everybody else is doing.
by man8alexd | 2026-02-08 06:47:12+00:00
> Thrashing is the penality for using too much swap. I was saying there is no penality for having a lot of swap available, but unused.

Unless you overprovision memory on a machine or have carefully set cgroup limits for all workloads, you are going to have a memory leak and your large unused swap is going to be used, leading to swap thrashing.

> the OMM killer laying waste to the system. Out of those two choices I prefer the system running slowly.

In a swap thrashing event, the system isn't just running slowly but totally unresponsive, with an unknown chance of recovery. The majority of people prefer OOM killer to an unresponsive system. That's why we got OOM killer in the first place.

> If load ramps up gradually you get a gradual slowdown until the working set is badly exceeded, then it falls off a cliff.

Random access latency difference between RAM and SSD is 10^3. When the active working set spills out into swap, liner increase of swap utilization leads to exponential performance degradation. Assuming random access, simple math gives that 0.1% excess causes a 2x degradation, 1% - 10x degradation, 10% - 100x degradation.

> A seminal paper on the subject: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/362342.362356

This paper discusses measuring stable working sets and says nothing about performance degradation when your working set increases.

> https://yeet.cx/r/ayNHrp5oL0.

WTF is this graph supposed to demonstrate? Some workload went from 0% to 100% of swap utilization in 30 seconds and got OOM-killed. This is not going to happen with a large swap.

> Once swapping starts latency increases gradually as more and more workers are swapped in and out while they wait for clients and the database

In practice, you never see constant or gradually increasing swap I/O in such systems. You either see zero swap I/O with occasional spikes due to incoming traffic or total I/O saturation from swap thrashing.

> Your options are get your desktop app randomly killed by the OOM killer and perhaps lose your work, or the system slows to a crawl and you take corrective action like closing the offending app.

You seem to be unaware that swap thrashing events are frequently unrecoverable, especially with a large swap. It is better to have a typical culprit like Chrome OOM-killed than to press the reset button and risk filesystem corruption.
by roenxi | 2026-02-08 06:47:46+00:00
How big a problem is that over a multi-decade time horizon?

There is a pretty big variation in average temperatures by country [0]. Somehow People everywhere from Thailand to Greenland manage to find food. All else failing it is a possibility to trade for calories. Let alone technology improvements that might save the day by accident.

I mean, it might make places uninhabitable over the course of a few generations, but things that change so slowly are't actually much of a threat on an individual level. Worst of the worst cases people can move or not have children - the statistics suggest that is an acceptable option to a lot of people.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_y...
by swolios | 2026-02-08 06:47:58+00:00
Many of the resources consumed to make electricity at the scale we are talking replacing the production of those resources create the other resources used to for various other things

e.g. diesel(heating oil), jet fuel, gasoline, plastics, asphalt, etc

There is a balance of these.

This also doesn't take into account the extra electricity needed to replace the alternative heating methods in the home that utilize these other materials we're abandoning
by andai | 2026-02-08 06:48:36+00:00
It can already exfiltrate stuff in a VM though right? Like people will run this thing in a sandboxed environment in docker in a VM but then hook it up to GMail and also feed it random web content (web search tool, Twitter integration etc.).

I saw at least some interest in a better security model where for example instead of giving it the API keys, there's a broker that rewrites the curl requests and injects keys so the agent doesn't see them.

I'm not sure what that looks like for your emails or web content though, since using placeholders there would defeat the purpose.
by YZF | 2026-02-08 06:48:58+00:00
100%- which is what I'm telling everyone. I am in big tech and it doesn't matter that I can write what I used to in 1 week in 5 minutes. Meetings, reviews, design docs, politics, etc. etc. mean how much code is written is irrelevant. Productivity in big tech is pretty low because of organizational overhead. You just can't get anything done. Being able to get more work done with less people is the real game changer because less people don't suffer from those "coordination headwinds".
by empressplay | 2026-02-08 06:50:25+00:00
Right, but that's the point -- prompting an LLM still requires 'thinking about thinking' in the Papert sense. While you can talk to it in 'natural language' that natural language still needs to be _precise_ in order to get the exact result that you want. When it fails, you need to refine your language until it doesn't. So prompts = high-level programming.
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-02-08 06:50:53+00:00
> Good code was approximately never valued in enterprise.

Nope, the value the code creates was always what was valued.

Now we can refactor more easily than ever. And quite a lot of code was throwaway to begin with.. so there’s no need to deliver good code. Not in the first iteration. But if it is going to be improved upon, part of the improvement will be to prepare it for that improvement.
by skydhash | 2026-02-08 06:51:18+00:00
> If the definition of programming is "a process to create sets of instructions that tell a computer how to perform specific tasks" there is nothing in there that requires it to be deterministic at the definition level.

The whole goal of getting a computer to do a task is that it’s capable to do it many times and reliably. Especially in business, infrastructure, and manufacturing,…

Once you turn specifications and requirements in code, it’s formalized and the behavior is fixed. That’s only when it’s possible to evaluate it. Not with the specifications, but with another set of code that is known to be good (or easier to verify)

The specification is just a description of an idea. It is a map. But the code is the territory. And I’ve never seen anyone farm or mine from a map.
by andai | 2026-02-08 06:54:24+00:00
I wonder if the problem of idle time / waiting / breaking flow is a function of the slowness. That would be simple to test, because there are super fast 1000 tok/s providers now.

(Waiting for Cerebras coding plan to stop being sold out ;)

I've used them for smaller tasks (making small edits), and the "realtime" aspect of it does provide a qualitative difference. It stops being async and becomes interactive.

A sufficient shift in quantity produces a phase shift in quality.

--

That said, the main issue I find with agentic is my mental model getting desynchronized. No matter how fast the models get, it takes a fixed amount of time for me to catch up and understand what they've done.

The most enjoyable way I've found of staying synced is to stay in the driver's seat, and to command many small rapid edits manually. (i.e. I have my own homebrew "agent" that's just a loop of, I prompt it, it proposes edits, I accept or edit, repeat.)

So then the "synchronization" of the mental state is happening continuously, because there is no opportunity for desynchronization. Because you are the one driving. I call that approach semi-auto, or Power Coding (akin to Power Armor, which is wielded manually but greatly enhances speed and strength).
by refurb | 2026-02-08 06:54:41+00:00
Yes, plans have pretty wide latitude on what they cover. ACA limited quite a lot by not only in plan design, but also what therapeutics must be covered. And you are correct, obesity is not one of them.

Medicare Part D (outpatient drugs) has wide latitude on what medicines they cover - it's actually smart for patients to shop their Part D plans if they are taking an expensive, chronic medication.

The only classes of drugs that Part D plans must included are:

Part D sponsor formularies must include all or substantially all drugs in the immunosuppressant (for prophylaxis of organ transplant rejection), antidepressant, antipsychotic, anticonvulsant, antiretroviral, and antineoplastic classes. (Page 28)

https://www.cms.gov/medicare/prescription-drug-coverage/pres...
by hliyan | 2026-02-08 06:55:25+00:00
I think you have misunderstood the term "tragedy of the commons", which is a phenomenon distinct from a market failure. Also, "markets allocate resources based on supply and demand" is, I believe an oversimplification one should not carry beyond Economics 101. If that were sufficient to explain the totality of market behavior, especially at large scale, then the remainder of the discipline of economics need not exist.
by nerdix | 2026-02-08 06:56:20+00:00
Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, etc have been able to collect large amounts of revenue from a global customer base so I don't think the assumption was that unreasonable.

Obviously, China will protect its homegrown AI industry. Current geopolitics trending towards US decoupling in Europe might slow it. But under the old status quo, US AI would have been rapidly adopted in the EU (and it still might. It depends greatly on how much of the Trump Doctrine outlasts the current administration).

Developing countries eventually adopt new technologies. First they adopted personal computers and became customers of Microsoft, then they adopted the Internet and became customers of Google, they adopted smartphones and became customers of Apple. Eventually they will adopt AI and become customers of someone. The question is whether it will be US tech or Chinese tech.
by SupremumLimit | 2026-02-08 06:57:01+00:00
Do you even understand how many people live in Europe and would be affected? Maybe you should look that up on Wikipedia as well. Your suggestions are completely absurd.

Multi-decade time frame can only be thought of as catastrophic when it comes to change of this magnitude. Not to mention that ecosystems simply don't adapt on that timescale, it’s at least two orders of magnitude off.
by sph | 2026-02-08 06:57:49+00:00
You say that as if it’s a bad thing. The bad thing is that to get there we’ll have to go through the bloody revolution to topple the AI that have been put before the humans. That is, unless the machines prevail.

You might think this is science fiction, but the companies that brought you LLMs had the goal to pursue AGI and all its consequences. They failed today, but that has always been the end game.
by nurettin | 2026-02-08 06:58:09+00:00
This has been my experience in the early 2000 with sourceforge. You went to the related irc channel, introduced yourself, asked for access and they would add you to the project. You could work on a game that you liked, a jabber client, and even code::blocks at some point. Boost (c++ libraries ) was more serious, you'd have to create the implementation and documentation according to their format and post it to the forum, then they would ask you to defend certain parts or reject due to bloat/DRY/unnecessary.

Everything felt more like a community effort back then.
by DoctorOetker | 2026-02-08 06:58:42+00:00
I have the impression the implied conclusion is that under the situation described it would be better to consult different LLM models, than a specific one, but that is not what they demonstrate:

to demonstrate this you measure the compute / cost of running and human-verifying the output.

the statistics provided don't at all exclude the possibility that instead of giving the top 5 models each a single opportunity to propose a solution, it may be more efficient to give the 5 opportunities to solve the problem to the best scoring model:

at 24% win rate the null hypothesis (what a usual researcher ought to predict based on common sense) would be that the probability of a loss is 76%, and the probability that it loses N times is (0.76 ^ N), and so the probability of it winning in N attempts is ( 1 - (0.76 ^ N ) ).

So consulting the best scoring model twice (2 x top-1) I would expect: 42.24% better than the giving the 2 top scoring models each a single try ( 1 x top-2 ) as that resulted in 35%

Same for 3x top-1 vs 1x top-3: 56.10% vs 51%

Same for 4x top-1 vs 1x top-4: 66.63% vs 66%

Same for 5x top-1 vs 1x top-5: 74.64% vs 73%

Same for 6x top-1 vs 1x top-6: 80.73% vs 83%

Same for 7x top-1 vs 1x top-7: 85.35% vs 90%

Same for 8x top-1 vs 1x top-8: 88.87% vs 95%

I can't read the numerical error bars on the top-1 model win rate, we could calculate a likelihood from to see if the deviation is statistically significant.
by jiggawatts | 2026-02-08 06:59:06+00:00
Sure, but the end-state of this isn't just chat bots! Bipedal robots are the real target application for this technology, and at least three big players have invested many billions each into base model training. The "GPT 2 moment" for robotics will happen likely later this year, next year at the latest. Then, the company that scales up from there to the equivalent of GPT 3.5 -- the first properly useful model -- can start selling androids by the tens of millions.

It'll be the next automobile, every well-to-do household will want one eventually. Every hospital, to assist/replace nurses. Every retirement home for the same reason.

Japan and China alone, with their ageing populations in dire need of nursing, will easily pay for the investment with that one use-case.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-08 07:01:28+00:00
> I can't help but think of all the historical societies that collapsed due to even mild pressure on the food supply.

They didn't have the logistical advantages we have today (storage and transport).

Okay, when prawns fished from the coast of Mozambique are no longer viable some other spot will, necessarily, become viable.

Historical societies did not have the technology to simply farm in another place when their current place become hostile to farming. We already do this.

The only danger we have is if the global area for farming decreases. I do not think this will happen - it will merely shift around.
by skydhash | 2026-02-08 07:02:51+00:00
Yeah, in most swe roles, you got some task from the PM that describe a new features. But you were not hired to just translate the ticket to code. More often, it’s your responsibility to figure out all those non-functional requirements, like don’t break anything that is currently working.

More often, the issue with legacy code is not that you don’t know how to make a change, it’s because you don’t know if and how it will blow up after making it.
by maxglute | 2026-02-08 07:04:08+00:00
Of course GDP is an arbitrary abstraction, it's literally derived from arbitrary systems of measurement, i.e. why soviet had mps system and west had sna, and each get to decide what to value and how much... arbitrarily... and even when they calculate, a lot of it is guestimate because no one has perfect or even good data, especially 80 years ago in developing countries.

> starvation or the lack thereof is a strong indication of GDP

No that's just an indicator that some cohort starved due to distribution failure. And to be blunt... that cohort was rural / peasants doing mostly subsistence agriculture tier production that do not count much towards GDP. An urban worker in industry can generate 10x GDP surplus than farmers in a commune.

Hence starvation (mostly in rural) has disproportionately less GDP weight vs urban worker productivity. An economy losing millions of peasants while still modernizing/industrializing can easily maintain higher total GDP than peaceful agrarian society. AKA CCP speed running first 5 year plan post WW2 raised the GDP floor so much that they can unalive 10s of millions of peasants and still have higher GDP vs pre/post war which, was incidentally also not peaceful agrarian society, but even messier interregnum shitshow with significantly shit state capacity than relatively unified postwar PRC under CCP. Republican Era KMT (during anarchy/civil war) simply couldn't organize fragmented China to be as productive as PRC under CCP, who can lose millions of peasants with marginal productivity of labour near zero and still do massively better in gdp/economic terms.
by pingananth | 2026-02-08 07:05:45+00:00
I’ve spent the last 14 years in PM and Engineering roles. One thing I've consistently seen is that the technical skill of fixing a P0 is often undermined by the 'soft skill' of reporting it to leadership.

Engineers often over-explain, while CEOs just want to calculate business risk. I’ve been using these two frameworks (SIR/SIEN) to decouple technical investigation from executive communication. I'm curious if other teams have formalized communication protocols, or if it's mostly handled by a 'shield' person (like a Director or Senior PM)?
by calmbonsai | 2026-02-08 07:06:06+00:00
It will be a non-issue with the inevitable additional (charging) infrastructure roll-outs along with mandates for on-board heat-pump battery management.

Just look at what Norway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_electric_vehicles_in_N... has done in just 20 years and let's just say it's not known for its warm climate.
by Nextgrid | 2026-02-08 07:06:22+00:00
80k is 6.6k/month. That’s pre-tax, but for the benefit of the doubt let’s go with this figure instead of the post-tax.

Have you seen the prices of stuff nowadays? Whether energy, cars, technology or rent? 6.6k doesn’t go far at all anymore. Of course the post-tax is even lower.

> which would indicate you are living near the edge of your means

Real-estate being an investment means its price will adjust to extract maximum value. There’s an entire industry there that makes sure you can’t just work around this problem by adjusting your living standard or eating less Starbucks & avocado. Move to a farther away place? Well now you’re spending that rent reduction on transport instead. Move to a lower quality place? Well now you’re spending it on higher energy bills trying to keep the house warm. Willing to sacrifice all your social life and move in the middle of nowhere with ultra-cheap rent? Most roles are “hybrid” to prevent this very scenario, so can’t do that either.
by tombert | 2026-02-08 07:08:00+00:00
I got a similar start actually.

When I was in third grade, there was a scholastic book fair that was selling the book "Make Your Own Web Page! A Guide for Kids"[1]. The internet for nine year old me was this mysterious, opaque thing; I had no idea that you could just "make" a web page. I'm not sure I know what I thought it was, but I guess I assumed it was reserved for businesses or something, and I didn't realize it was something that a kid could do if they wanted to. It wasn't terribly expensive so I asked my mom and she bought it for me.

I read through it and was immediately hooked. I know HTML isn't a "programming language", but in my nine year old mind I felt like some uber-hacker writing code and seeing it render on the screen made me feel so cool. It didn't hurt that the internet was still novel enough (~1999-2000) that my third grade teacher was extremely impressed that I did this by myself after I presented it to class for show and tell, and she actually called my parents to tell them how impressed she was.

Later I got into proper programming with a bootleg copy of "Sams Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours" [2], a book on ActionScript I had found at Goodwill to use with a pirated copy of Flash MX 2004, and a C++ book that I got for my birthday one year. I eventually became reasonably ok at software stuff and I've built a decent career out of it.

I actually tracked down a copy of that original "Make Your Own Web Page!" on eBay and read through it again about two years ago, and while the HTML in there is dated and it's not terribly useful anymore, reading through it I couldn't stop smiling.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Make-Your-Page-Guide-Kids/dp/04391340...

[2] I'm actually not sure if it was bootleg. I didn't just download a PDF, it was a website that seemed to just host the entirety of the content of the Sams book I think.
by socialcommenter | 2026-02-08 07:08:39+00:00
Do you have any successful examples of software build by this factory in a main that isn't AI-adjacent? I.e. not an SaaS clone, not another code linter/database/whatever? Can the factory build, e.g. a crypto trading algorithm, an e-commerce site, etc.?

To come up with a software spec for the agents to follow, first you need to understand what your business is and where the money is.
by whitemyrat | 2026-02-08 07:09:03+00:00
I built a macOS app where you can record, transcribe, and summarize any meeting platform: Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Slack, Discord, FaceTime, Telegram, WhatsApp. If you want another platform supported, let me know!

Plus, you can create custom prompts for your exact use case and use it completely offline with Scripta LLM Model, or bring your own keys and use popular LLM provider.
by dvershinin | 2026-02-08 07:09:06+00:00
I do something similar but with a project prefix. I maintain a lot of packaging scripts and settled on prefixing them by project - gps-build, gps-deploy, gps-sync etc. Tab completion does the rest.

The real issue isn't collisions though, it's discoverability. Six months later you forget half of what you wrote. The prefix at least lets you type gps-<tab> and see everything at a glance.
by palmotea | 2026-02-08 07:09:21+00:00
> What happens if nobody has jobs? Oh, that’s right! Nobody’s buying stuff.

> Then what happens? Oh yeah! Billionaires get poorer.

Or they pivot to businesses that don't depend on consumers buying stuff.

Or pivot away from business entirely, into a realm of pure power independent of the market and conventional economics.

> There’s a very rational, self-interested reason sama has been running UBI pilots and Elon is also talking about UBI - the only way they keep more money flowing into their pockets is if the largest number of people have disposable income.

There's another very rational, self-interested reason for those people to pursue UBI: as a temporary sop to the masses, to keep them passive until they lack the power to resist.
by Kerrick | 2026-02-08 07:09:34+00:00
> the person writing the prompts knows what a quality solution looks like at a technical level and is reviewing the output as they go

That is exactly what I recommend, and it works like a charm. The person also has to have realistic expectations for the LLM, and be willing to work with a simulacrum that never learns (as frustrating as it seems at first glance).
by nandomrumber | 2026-02-08 07:10:09+00:00
Indeed.

Still, what good is free energy to anyone if the retail price has only one trajectory.

If politics is a significant cost factor, no amount of technology is going to fix that.

Or, as Jimmy Carr put it: But you go, yeah, you can have net zero, as long as you don't give a fuck about poor people, right? If you don't give a fuck about poor people, of course we can do net zero. - https://youtu.be/H3FwqPkPSHE