MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zeroonetwothree | 2026-02-07 20:16:11+00:00
It's true, unless you have always been working on FOTM frontend frameworks, you could easily be doing the same thing as 20/30/40 years ago. I'm still using vim and coding in C++ like someone could have 30+ years ago (I was too young then). Or at least, I was until Claude code got good enough to replace 90% of my code output :)
by 0xy | 2026-02-07 20:16:30+00:00
Correct. The unemployment rate was 4.7% in January 2017 and was 3.6% in January 2020. Or if we look at total private sector employment that went from 123,300,000 to 129,300,000 (its highest ever, at the time). That's an average of 125,000 jobs per month, or equivalent to Obama (although Obama's unemployment was significantly higher for both terms).
by tatjam | 2026-02-07 20:16:39+00:00
Would you consider drudgery the in-depth thinking that's required to actually go and write that algorithm, think out all the data ownership relationships, name the variables, think the edge cases for the tests?

For me, the act of sitting down and writing the code is what actually leads to true understanding of the logic, in a similar way to how the only way to understand a mathematical proof is to go trough it. Sure, I'm not doing anything useful by showing that the root of 2 is irrational, but by doing that I gain insights that are otherwise impossible to transfer between two minds.

I believe that coding was one of the few things (among, for example, writing math proofs, or that weird process of crafting something with your hands where the object you are building becomes intimately evident) that get our brains to a higher level of abstraction than normal mammal "survival" thinking. And it makes me very sad to see it thrown out of the window in the name of a productivity that may not even be real.
by Ronsenshi | 2026-02-07 20:16:51+00:00
I'm not sure comparing artisanal software to woodworking or organic farming is possible.

With woodworking and farming you get as a result some physical goods. Some John Smith that buys furniture can touch nice cherry paneling, appreciate the joinery and grain. With farming you he can taste delicious organic tomatoes and cucumbers, make food with it.

Would this John Smith care at all about how some software is written as long as it does what he wants and it works reliably? I'm not sure.
by NeutralCrane | 2026-02-07 20:17:01+00:00
As someone who has lived in public transportation heavy cities, and currently lives in a flyover American city where we all drive everywhere, I strongly disagree. I live in a very popular commuter suburb of a larger American city, and the commute is about 30 minutes in the best case scenario. If you are in rush hour, or there is an accident (and there inevitably is), it pushes 45-60.

But the bigger point is that even for a similar amount of time, driving is far less convenient than public transportation. Cars demand your full attention. Public transportation does not. I can sleep on the bus or train. I can read. I can work. In the car my options are limited to music/podcasts/audiobooks. Cars are extremely expensive. They are expensive to buy, expensive to maintain, and expensive to insure. Cars are deadly. Driving is the single riskiest thing people do with regularity, by a large margin. Cars are less efficient and have more externalities. They require more space for roads and parking, they produce more pollution, in terms of both greenhouse gasses and noise. They are also possibly the single biggest factor in the obesity crisis. Part of the reason America is among the fattest countries in the world is because a trip to anywhere requires driving there, where in many other countries people walk or ride their bike to many places the need to go to.

It’s very hard to live in a place with proper, functional urban design and public transportation, and walk away preferring car-centric culture.
by BoiledCabbage | 2026-02-07 20:17:32+00:00
What? This is the most convoluted theory I think anyone could imagine. And it seems like it was only posted to distract from the most obvious:

Someone in the President's circle is secretely communicating with (or compromised by) a foreign adversary's intelligence service. They don't want that story getting out as it would make them politically look terrible and so they went to suppress it.

I mean Occam's razor here.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-02-07 20:17:32+00:00
>It is unfortunate that things like this become politically impossible because older people are one of the most reliable voting groups out there.

They become politically impossible because they're not a front burner issue for anyone so the only people who are driving the issue are extremists who want the criteria set at like 10 whereas normal people want it at like 5 on some arbitrary scale of extremity so whenever it goes up for public consideration it gets shot down. You see this across all areas of mundane policy.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-02-07 20:17:42+00:00
I feel like a lot of comments here are missing the point. I think the article does a fairly good job neither venerating nor demonizing AI, but instead just presenting it as the reality of the situation, and that reality means that the craft of programming and engineering is fundamentally different than it was just a few years ago.

As an (ex-)programmer in his late 40s, I couldn't agree more. I'm someone who can be detail-oriented (but, I think also with a mind toward practicality) to the point of obsession, and I think this trait served me extremely well for nearly 25 years in my profession. I no longer think that is the case. And I think this is true for a lot of developers - they liked to stress and obsess over the details of "authorship", but now that programming is veering much more towards "editor", they just don't find the day-to-day work nearly as satisfying. And, at least for me, I believe this while not thinking the change to using generative AI is "bad", but just that it's changed the fundamentals of the profession, and that when something dies it's fine to mourn it.

If anything, I'm extremely lucky that my timing was such that I was able to do good work in a relatively lucrative career where my natural talents were an asset for nearly a quarter of a century. I don't feel that is currently the case regarding programming, so I'm fortunate enough to be able to leave the profession and go into violin making, where my obsession with detail and craft is again a huge asset.
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-02-07 20:17:45+00:00
Without a human in the loop?

If you did that today, what percentage of the time would the change improve the software? What percent of the time would it make it worse (security, usability, accuracy, or whatever)?

I think that today, this approach would work on some days. Some days it would fail, perhaps catastrophically. (I don't know the percentages, though. Does anyone have enough experience to comment?)
by WJW | 2026-02-07 20:17:59+00:00
Time dilation and space contraction only matter if you can reasonably achieve speeds of a significant portion of the speed of light. AFAIK nobody has even come up with a reasonable way to achieve this for lightweight probes, let alone for hundred-ton ships capable of carrying humans. And let's not forget the practical problems like all photons incoming from the front being blueshifted into ultrahard radiation that would make a point blank nuclear bomb seem like a small candle.

Realistically even getting to the nearest star in less than 400 years experienced time is way way WAY out of reach for now.
by satgate | 2026-02-07 20:18:00+00:00
Interesting execution but this highlights the exact infrastructure gap nobody's talking about: when agents operate autonomously at scale, every API call costs money. 10,000 founder agents making decisions, calling payment processors, hitting third-party APIs — who enforces the budget? Who audits the spend?

The "Real World Boundaries" they mention are really economic boundaries. And right now there's no standard way for an API to say "this request costs $0.003, do you authorize it?" to a machine caller the way we do with humans.

The plumbing for the agent economy is still missing. That's where the real opportunity is.
by torlok | 2026-02-07 20:18:08+00:00
I write mostly like I would in C, but use C++ features as needed. It ends up looking similar to Rust if you squint. All these "I write games in C" people complain about C++ features, and then end up reimplementing virtual interfaces manually with struct headers or massive switch statements, just to feel better about themselves. Writing games in C is not harder, you just have to implement modern language features by hand.

Complaining about a language having features you don't want is silly. C++ doesn't take longer to compile if you don't abuse templates.
by bm3719 | 2026-02-07 20:18:20+00:00
AI is an attractor. In general, attractors absent barriers have the potential to act as a resource shredder in the context of an ecosystem where stability was predicated on said barriers being present.

I called AI a "capital shredder" because I'm asserting that it is one (of many) by comparison to a more even distribution of capital investment. The non-attractor small town where the capital that would have gone into a self-reinforcing progress cycle has it redirected into an external context. If you don't care about that and just want more AI, then no worries, because that's what we're optimizing for.

I was trying to limit my point to something clear with linear reasoning, but AI is indeed also an IQ shredder in both the immediate and transitive sense. For the former, it's an aggregator of talent. From the perspective of the small town (both domestic and foreign), its best human resources have been extracted.

Relation with production is irrelevant for the purposes of being a shredder, but this system does generally serve for increased production of a sort. That's why we ended up with it. The small town doesn't get its factories, local governance doesn't get good programmers, etc. Those resources are being redirected into getting us to wherever AI is going to go because that's what the global economic machine desires right now. Likewise in the past for NFTs, crypto, cloud, etc.

To personalize this: I was drawn to an attractor and rode one of those waves myself, and, at least economically, it worked out great for me as it probably has for others here. However, this system isn't a free lunch.
by asenchi | 2026-02-07 20:19:23+00:00
It is hard to explain the impact of such massive growth over a 2-3 period. New features were coming online while old ones were being abused by overuse. For instance, we launched PostgreSQL in the cloud, something we take for granted today. Not only that, but we offered an insane feature set around "follow" and "forking" that made working with databases seem futuristic.

I remember when we launched that product we went to that year's PGCon and there were people in the crowd angry and dismissive that we would treat data that way. It was actually pretty confrontational. Products like that were being produced while we were also working on migrating away from the initial implementation of the "free tier" (internally called Shen). It took me and a few others months to replace it and ensure we didn't lose data while also making it maintainable. The resulting tool lovingly named "yobuko" ended up remaining for years after that (largely due to the stagnation and turn over).

Anyways, that was just a slice of it. Decisions made today are not always the decisions you wanted to be made tomorrow. Day0 is great, day100 comes with more knowledge and regret. :D
by Recurecur | 2026-02-07 20:19:24+00:00
FTL starships in an SF story don’t need a detailed explanation, just a new invention.

It’s the exact same thing as a speculative story in the 1920s discussing supersonic flight, even though the jet engine hadn’t been invented yet.

For instance “Tunnel in the Sky” bypassed the whole issue in the 50’s, later imitated by “Stargate”…
by uejfiweun | 2026-02-07 20:19:48+00:00
I mean yeah, but that's why there are far more research avenues these days than just pure LLMs, for instance world models. The thinking is that if LLMs can achieve near-human performance in the language domain then we must be very close to achieving human performance in the "general" domain - that's the main thesis of the current AI financial bubble (see articles like AI 2027). And if that is the case, you still want as much compute as possible, both to accelerate research and to achieve greater performance on other architectures that benefit from scaling.
by Animats | 2026-02-07 20:20:07+00:00
Some years ago I was at the Burger King near the cable car turntable at Powell and Market St in San Francisco. Some of the homeless people were talking about the days when they'd been printers. Press operators or Linotype operators. Jobs that had been secure for a century were just - gone.

That's the future for maybe half of programmers.

Remember, it's only been three years since ChatGPT. This is just getting started.
by iambateman | 2026-02-07 20:20:13+00:00
I’m going to be thinking about this comment for a while—-and I think you’re basically right.

Almost none of the code I wrote in 2015 is still in use today. Probably some percentage of people can point to code that lasted 20 years or longer, but it can’t be a big percentage. When I think of the work of a craft, I think of doing work which is capable of standing up for a long time. A great builder can make a house that can last for a thousand years and a potter can make a bowl that lasts just as long.

I’ve thought of myself as a craftsman of code for a long time but maybe that was just wrong.
by veltas | 2026-02-07 20:20:15+00:00
This is very nice. I'm currently writing a minimalist C compiler although my goal isn't fitting in a boot sector, it's more targeted at 8-bit systems with a lot more room than that.

This is a great demonstration of how simple the bare bones of C are, which I think is one reason I and many others find it so appealing despite how Spartan it is. C really evolved from B which was a demake of Fortran, if Ken Thompson is to be trusted.
by poulsbohemian | 2026-02-07 20:20:29+00:00
What kind of project / prompts - what’s working for you? /I spent a good 20 years in the software world but have been away doing other things professionally for couple years. Recently was in the same place as you, with a new project and wanting to try it out. So I start with a generic Django project in VSCode, use the agent mode, and… what a waste of time. The auto-complete suggestions it makes are frequently wrong, the actions it takes in response to my prompts tend to make a mess on the order of a junior developer. I keep trying to figure out what I’m doing wrong, as I’m prompting pretty simple concepts at it - if you know Django, imagine concepts like “add the foo module to settings.py” or “Run the check command and diagnose why the foo app isn’t registered correctly” Before you know it, it’s spiraling out of control with changes it thinks it is making, all of which are hallucinations.
by japhyr | 2026-02-07 20:20:36+00:00
If they're able to communicate with each other. But I'm pretty sure we could keep that from happening.

I don't take your comment as dismissive, but I think a lot of people are dismissing interesting and possibly effective approaches with short reactions like this.

I'm interested in the approach described in this article because it's specifying where the humans are in all this, it's not about removing humans entirely. I can see a class of problems where any non-determinism is completely unacceptable. But I can also see a large number of problems where a small amount of non-determinism is quite acceptable.
by zeroonetwothree | 2026-02-07 20:20:49+00:00
At my work ~90% of code is now LLM generated. It's not "new" software in the sense that you're describing but it's new features, bug fixes, and so on to the software that we all work on. (Although we are working on something that we can hopefully open source later this year that is close to 100% LLM generated, and I can say, as someone that has been reviewing most of the code, is quite high quality)
by eesmith | 2026-02-07 20:21:00+00:00
Do you have a reference for that account? I hadn't heard it before, and it doesn't sounds quite right.

They certainly knew the Earth and Moon had craters, so proximity to the asteroid belt isn't required.

I suspect they thought the atmosphere on Mars was thicker and like Earth, where the high rate of erosion erases evidence.

Digging around through archive.org I found https://archive.org/details/sim_popular-astronomy_1944-05_52... from Popular Astronomy 1944

> The following extracts are taken from pp. 49 and 50:

> “The recent dominance of the meteoritic impact theory of crater origin makes timely a review of the oases-crater question of Mars. In this treatise, these conclusions have been pointed out:

> “I, Meteorite craters are known on the Earth and Moon; therefore, craters exist on Mars.

> “2. The circular oases on Mars are the size, shape, and number of comparable lunar craters.

> “3. Crater depressions form a natural reservoir, accounting for the intense vegetation in the Martian oases,

> “4. The random distribution of crater oases is apparent, indicating that the canal system was adapted to this haphazard arrangement.

The reviewer of the above points out

> “Why didn’t someone think of the crater theory sooner? The answer is simple. Someone did. Back in 1892, at Arequipa, Peru, W. H. Pickering not only discovered the small black spots on Mars, but he also recognized their similarity to the circlets on the Moon. Because lunar craters were then believed to be volcanic, Pickering may be forgiven for implying that the Martian craterets also were of volcanic origin.

We now know these crater oases were not real. My point is only that some people proposed meteoric craters on the Moon before the 1960s.

BTW, the SF of the pre-Mariner era does have volcanic craters on Mars, like https://archive.org/details/Amazing_Stories_v15n01_1941-01_c... and https://archive.org/details/Startling_Stories_v07n03_1942-05... .

I also found https://archive.org/details/exploringmars0000rich/page/150/m... saying in 1954 "no irregularities due to shadows have ever been observed along the terminator—the line dividing daylight from dark—such as would be produced by Martian craters." The author was an American astronomer and also a SF writer in the 1950s. By this we know astronomers were already considering there might be craters on Mars as there are on the Moon.
Show HN: RMA Dashboard fast SAST results for monorepos (SARIF and triage)
by bumahkib7 | 2026-02-07 20:21:05+00:00
I’m building RMA (Rust Monorepo Analyzer) and a small dashboard for it.

The motivation: I love tools like Semgrep/CodeQL, but on big monorepos I kept ending up in “run scan → go make tea” territory. RMA is my attempt at a single-binary, fast SAST + code intelligence scanner that still outputs something you can actually triage.

What you can try in the dashboard:

Browse scan results with dedupe (unique issues vs occurrences)

Export SARIF (GitHub Security tab friendly) and JSON

Filter security findings by subcategory so “real vulns” don’t get drowned out by audit/hardening noise

Default suppression for generated files (toggle to include)

A detail I’m pretty happy about: we now propagate rule metadata end-to-end (confidence, CWE/OWASP, references, impact/likelihood, etc.) so the findings carry enough context to be actionable.

If you try it, I’d love feedback on:

what feels noisy / what feels missing,

which repos it breaks on,

what you’d want for CI gating (vuln-only vs audit/hardening).

Dashboard: https://rma-dashboard.bukhari-kibuka7.workers.dev/

CLI/source: https://github.com/bumahkib7/rust-monorepo-analyzer
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-07 20:21:27+00:00
Pandas being one of those species. I feel as if pandas would go extinct if zoos weren't there.

technically panda's cuteness is the reason why it hasn't really gotten extinct. Dogs/Cats have also mastered the cuteness stat. I wonder if for animals, evolution might now lean towards cuteness.

I am also thinking what counts as cute in the first place? Is there any scientific consensus around cuteness that animals can develop?
by throwaway0123_5 | 2026-02-07 20:21:41+00:00
LLMs and AI more broadly certainly seem to have upended (or have the potential to upend) a lot of white-collar work outside of technology and art. Translators are one obvious example. Lawyers might be on the chopping block if they don't ban the use of AI for practicing law. Both seem about as far as you can get from "careers in technology," and in fact writing has pretty much always been framed as being on the opposite end of the spectrum from tech jobs, but is clearly vulnerable to technological progress.

Right now I can think of very few white-collar jobs that I would feel comfortable training 4+ years for (let alone spending money or taking on debt to do so). It is far from a guarantee that almost any 4-year degree you enroll in today will have any value in four years. That has basically never before been true, even in tech. Blue collar jobs are clearly safer, but I wouldn't say safe. Robotics is moving fast too.

I really can't imagine the social effects of this reality being positive, absent massive and unprecedented redistribution of the wealth that the productivity of AI enables.
by dynamite-ready | 2026-02-07 20:21:49+00:00
For me, photography is the metaphor - https://raskie.com/post/we-have-ai-at-home - We've had the technology to produce a perfect 2D likeness of a subject for close to two centuries now, and people are still painting.

Video didn't kill the radio star either. In fact the radio star has become more popular than ever in this, the era of the podcast.
by mlyle | 2026-02-07 20:22:10+00:00
> In a democracy, government planning is supposed to push the process towards local preferences.

In a representative, constitutional democracy, we're supposed to elect people who can more fully understand issues and possible outcomes, and work from there to create a system of laws and policies that is predictable and fair to all the parties.

This means that not every policy will be fully understood or agreed with by the populace. If we wanted to just implement what the public wants, we could just directly vote on every issue.

Orthogonally, there's a whole lot of the fabric of our daily lives that is just a certain way because that's how it's been so far. It works, but is neither popular nor unpopular-- it just is. That doesn't mean it couldn't be better.
by peheje | 2026-02-07 20:23:06+00:00
I get the grief about AI, but I don't share it.

After ten years of professional coding, LLMs have made my work more fun. Not easier in the sense of being less demanding, but more engaging. I am involved in more decisions, deeper reviews, broader systems, and tighter feedback loops than before. The cognitive load did not disappear. It shifted.

My habits have changed. I stopped grinding algorithm puzzles because they started to feel like practicing celestial navigation in the age of GPS. It is a beautiful skill, but the world has moved on. The fastest path to a solution has always been to absorb existing knowledge. The difference now is that the knowledge base is interactive. It answers back and adapts to my confusion.

Syntax was never the job. Modeling reality was. When generation is free, judgment becomes priceless.

We have lost something, of course. There is less friction now, which means we lose the suffering we often mistook for depth. But I would rather trade that suffering for time spent on design, tradeoffs, and problems that used to be out of reach.

This doesn't feel like a funeral. It feels like the moment we traded a sextant for a GPS. The ocean is just as dangerous and just as vast, but now we can look up at the stars for wonder, rather than just for coordinates.