MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Draiken | 2026-02-04 11:49:00+00:00
Even disregarding what he has done, this is utterly absurd. I almost spit my coffee reading that.

You are going to tell me that the vibe coders care and read the code they merge with the same attention to detail and care that Linus has? Come on...

That's the key for me. People are churning out "full features" or even apps claiming they are dealing with a new abstraction level, but they don't give a fuck about the quality of that shit. They don't care if it breaks in 3 weeks/months/years or if that code's even needed or not.

Someone will surely come say "I read all the code I generate" and then I'll say either you're not getting these BS productivity boost people claim or you're lying.

I've seen people pushing out 40k lines of code in a single PR and have the audacity to tell me they've reviewed the code. It's preposterous. People skim over it and YOLO merge.

Or if you do review everything, then it's not gonna be much faster than writing it yourself unless it's extremely simple CRUD stuff that's been done a billion times over. If you're only using AI for these tasks maybe you're a bit more efficient, but nothing close to the claims I keep reading.

I wish people cared about what code they wrote/merged like Linus does, because we'd have a hell of a lot less issues.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-02-04 11:49:09+00:00
> In space, only radiation works

it's worse, incoming radiation also works to heat up objects that are in sunlight and in space. And you want to be in sunlight for the solar panels.

This is why surface of the moon is -100C when it's night and +100C when it's day there.

And the sun's radiation also flips bits.

Yes, it's technically possible to work around all of these. There are existing designs for radiators in the shade of the solar panels. Radiation shielding and/or resistant hardware. It's just not even close to economic at datacentre scale.
by surgical_fire | 2026-02-04 11:50:01+00:00
> Nobody cares about the whole region. People living and paying taxes in Spain care about what's happening in Spain, not all the way in Romania or Bulgaria. So Spaniard elect politicians that will do what's best for Spain not what's best for other EU countries. Same for every other EU member. Politicians get elected on how they can improve the lives of the people in that specific country.

This is an extremely nearsighted view of the bloc.

Things that benefit the EU will benefit my country too. Things that make Romania or Bulgaria worse will also impact the other countries in the bloc. I thought we learned this lesson when countries like Greece had fiscal issues back in the day.

Politicians at the EU level should be concerned by their country, but also should be concerned about the bloc as a whole.

And this is true to national politics too. A member of a national parliament typically is concerned with the province/county/constituency he represents, but also with national issues as a whole.
by xinayder | 2026-02-04 11:50:23+00:00
This is ridiculous. As WIRED has shown [0], the only 3D printed part of most "3D printed" guns is the frame. You can do only so much with the frame alone. All the other parts are sourced online and much easier to get, other than getting a 3D printer and finding the frame of the gun you want to print it for.

Maybe these advocating for gun control laws for 3D printers should first advocate for stricter control on selling spare repair parts for guns and the websites selling them with no sort of background check.

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/luigi-mangione-ghost-gun-built-t...
by tialaramex | 2026-02-04 11:50:30+00:00
One of the fun things about the World Wide Web is that without specifically intending to do so we provided all of the Worst Case Scenario cryptographic properties, things a good cryptographic solution can cope with, but which were often treated as difficulties that aren't really worth worrying about because why would you need that?

For example, what kind of moron would put a secret you mustn't learn right next to data you can choose? A good solution wouldn't care, but surely a bad solution where that would cause a problem would never encounter real world scenarios where.... oh right HTTP Cookies

Good solutions won't lose security from repeating transactions, but while accidents might cause one or two repetitions surely no real world systems would need to withstand millions of... oh yeah, Javascript loops exist
by _pdp_ | 2026-02-04 11:51:02+00:00
You know there is no such thing as the world police or something of that sort.

If the perpetrator is in another country / jurisdiction it is virtually impossible to prosecute let alone sentence.

It is 100% regulatory problem in this case. You just cannot allow this content to be generated and distributed in the public domain by anonymous users. It has nothing to do with free speech but with civility and common understanding of what is morally wrong / right.

Obviously you cannot prevent this in private forums unless it is made illegal which is a completely different problem that requires a very different solution.
by bluegatty | 2026-02-04 11:52:16+00:00
No, that's not at all how this works.

They have a court order obviously to collect evidence.

You have offered zero evidence to indicate there is 'political pressure' and that statement by prosecutors doesn't hint at that.

'No crime was prevented by harassing workers' is essentially non sequitor in this context.

It could be that that this is political nonsense, but there would have to be more details.

These issues are really hard but we have to confront them. X can alter electoral outcomes. That's where we are at.
by myrmidon | 2026-02-04 11:52:38+00:00
If there is a glut of legal, AI generated CSAM material then this provides a lot of deniability for criminal creators/spreaders that cause genuine harm, and reduces "vigilance" of prosecutors, too ("it's probably just AI generated anyway...").

You could make a multitude of arguments against that perspective, but at least there is a conclusive reason for legal restrictions.

> What is the criteria for this?

My criteria would be victims suffering personally from the generated material.

The "no harm" argument only really applies if victims and their social bubble never find out about the material (but that did happen, sometimes intentionally, in many cases).

You could make the same argument that a hidden camera in a locker room never causes any harm as long as it stays undetected; that is not very convincing to me.
by oblio | 2026-02-04 11:52:41+00:00
Q.e.d.

He who holds the purse strings, decides. The people who pay to have the apps made get to decide and they have decided that what geeks want doesn't matter.

And every time a geek tries to change that, he only wins for a short while and then we're back to the primordial soup.

Oh, and regular users obviously don't care enough.
by mohsen1 | 2026-02-04 11:53:07+00:00
I agree! It's a lot more pleasant than being stuck over figuring out how to use awk properly for hours. I knew what I needed to do then, and I know what I need to do now too. The difference is I get to results faster. Sometimes I even learn that awk was not even the right tool in my situation and learn about a new way of doing things while AI is "thinking" for me
by moorebob | 2026-02-04 11:53:13+00:00
My mindset last year: I am now a mentor to a junior developer

My mindset this year: I am an engineering manager to a team of developers

If the pace of AI improvement continues, my mindset next year will need to be: I am CEO and CTO.

I never enjoyed the IC -> EM transition in the workplace because of all the tedious political issues, people management issues and repetitive admin. I actually went back to being an IC because of this.

However, with a team of AI agents, there's less BS, and less holding me back. So I'm seeing the positives - I can achieve vastly more, and I can set the engineering standards, improve quality (by training and tuning the AI) and get plenty of satisfaction from "The Builder" role, as defined in the article.

Likewise I'm sure I would hate the CEO/CTO role in real life. However, I am adapting my mindset to the 2030s reality, and imagining being a CEO/CTO to an infinitely scalable team of Agentic EMs who can deliver the work of hundreds of real people, in any direction I choose.

How much space is there in the marketplace if all HN readers become CEOs and try to launch their own products and services? Who knows... but I do know that this is the option available to me, and it's probably wise to get ahead of it.
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-04 11:53:18+00:00
Why do you want to jerk off to a minor? Sounds like you should get a visit from the police for asking a tool to do that for you.

If I ask you to go kill someone and you do it, in the eyes of the law I am just as guilty as you even though I never actually touched the person.

If you ask for CP, you're still just as guilty even if you're not the one making it.
by dv_dt | 2026-02-04 11:54:26+00:00
I think some the prevalence of AI is actually turning the bias on this. It would actually be a return to the roots of the start of early business computing - and sort of picking up where excel et al left off. I don't think it's AI the tech itself, it's the confidence for companies to build a customized software stack and maintain it is what AI mostly contributes.
by Pilottwave | 2026-02-04 11:54:40+00:00
Wow, this whole thread has been a blast from the past. But this tribes mapper is beaming me back to my childhood. Seeing the actual siege base layouts, wow. I can still see myself as a little kid, not fully understanding or being good at the shooting part of tribes. I just stayed in base, repairing the generators. Sometimes enemies would run in, i would hide, and shoot from a distance and call for help. Them some heavyweight, powerarmoered up, armed to the teeth teammate would come down from the skies with his jetpack, carrying crazy armaments like heavy spinfusors, plasma cannons, artillery. The queiet generator complex would soon erupt in a burst of violence, this iron hulk would clear out the intruders, thank me for the heads up and leave. Then i would get back to the repairs! Now my friends, that kind of emergent gameplay, is hard to come by!
by anthk | 2026-02-04 11:54:53+00:00
Yes, it was. I'm from Spain. The Macs where for media people, not for the common worker on a boring office, where MS dominated. At home, Macs where a thing maybe for some rounding percent from kids living in a loaded neighbour.

No one got Macs at school either. First DOS, then Windows 95/98. Maybe in some Universities they used Macbooks well into the OSX era, as a reliable Unix machine to compile legacy scientific stuff; and even in those environments GNU/Linux began to work perfectly well recompiling everything from Sparcs and the like with a much cheaper price.

Forget about pre-OSX machines in Spain outside of a newspaper/publishing/AV producing office. Also, by the time XP and 2000 were realiable enough against OSX (w9x was hell) that OS was replaced for much cheaper PC alternatives.

I mean, if w2k/wxp could handle big loads without BSODing every few hours, that was a success. And as the Pentium 4's with SSE2 and Core Duo's happened, suddenly G4's and G'5 weren't that powerful any more.
by WillAdams | 2026-02-04 11:55:19+00:00
That exists, it's a functioning education system and electorate aware of current events, past history and able to reason logically and impartially, and a viable fourth estate.

The problem is, as Rousseau warned us, elections only function for so long as the voters are able to see and identify efforts to bribe them with their own money (paraphrased).
by nitin_flanker | 2026-02-04 11:55:27+00:00
Great app. It's at the perfect level of advanced and simplicity for the usecase you have mentioned.

I tried my hands on a few things and would like to ask / share feedback:

- Not sure if you're already on it or planning to, but target design/marketing agencies for it first. I know a few and they always have a chaos in their designing apps because they have to tell their team which brand they are designing a particular graphic for, and then find those specific templates, etc. Design process with your app starts from the brand which solves that problem.

- I currently work in a technology consulting firm and we regularly need to make multi-page reports, social media posts in carousal formats, or a series of graphics on the same topic. I noticed that currently your app doesn't support multi-page reports. I tested an A4 size, and did not see an option for social media post to generate more pages. That will be super helpful if you end up targeting individual brands for it later. Not having this could be a deal breaker.

- The design editor is really buggy at the moment. Totally understandable noting that you're at very early stages. But providing and option to "edit" AI designs and then a user really struggling to edit is counter productive. It did what MS word does to design when you try to resize and image and the element actually goes missing. I wasn't able to freely move elements on the page, or when I tried to resize an overlay element, it teleported to another dimension.

Overall, really great initiative and refreshing app. For generic usage like a single page social media post, a poster, or a featured image, this works amazingly well.
by skydhash | 2026-02-04 11:55:29+00:00
Yep. Any statement in python or others can be mapped to something that the machine will do. And it will be the same thing every single time (concurrency and race issue aside). There’s no english sentence that can be as clear.

We’ve created formal notation to shorten writing. And computation is formal notation that is actually useful. Why write pages of specs when I could write a few lines of code?
by OJFord | 2026-02-04 11:55:40+00:00
The convertible is still the car, not a convertible kilt(?!), GP is saying with Scottish as opposed to Californian weather there would be less changing. Say, a single open-top-weather period (two changes) per year. Or none.

(I imagine the Californian poster is changing twice per year too, just using 5-6 ties. With that reading the joke is Hey in Scotland you just keep it closed, never need any more ties.)
by koliber | 2026-02-04 11:55:46+00:00
Sometimes you want an artistic vase that captures some essential element of beauty, culture, or emotion.

Sometimes you want a utilitarian teapot to reliably pour a cup of tea.

The materials and rough process for each can be very similar. One takes a master craftsman and a lot of time to make and costs a lot of money. The other can be made on a production line and the cost is tiny.

Both have are desirable, for different people, for different purposes.

With software, it's similar. A true master knows when to get it done quick and dirty and when to take the time to ponder and think.
by ffsm8 | 2026-02-04 11:56:03+00:00
Subsidize?

What? How are you subsidizing anything when it's just recognized as volunteering?

You can at most put that on your Einkommensteuererklärung for a deduction on taxes...

Calling that's subsidizing, idk man, feels massively overblown?

And the Steueramt would have to agree with your statement, which I doubt it would for 99.9% of software.

The exploit-ability of this seems severely overstated here, but I'm not a lawyer so maybe y'all know something I dont
by vee-kay | 2026-02-04 11:56:36+00:00
I am using Tiny10 for a debloated Win10 on my old PC last few years, and I faced no issues. Microsoft Office, Windows Updates, etc., all worked well. Of course, it is a sandboxed PC with VPN and good antimalware (Bit defender and MBAM) to protect it, as Microsoft has almost stopped giving Win10 updates (there's a workaround for an extension, but it may not be continued, as M$ wants everyone to migrate to crappy adware Win11).

I had to reinstall Win11 on a newer PC, so I used Tiny11 for a debloated Windows installation, and it is working fine with the licensed Microsoft apps I use (Microsoft Office, MS Project, etc.) and other programs (game stores (Steam, GoG, Epic, etc.), video editing tools, programming tools, etc.

But I don't really like Win11 as I had to do hosts blocking to block ads on it, and everything Win11 does feels a bit more clunky compared to Win10. I even had to use a Start Menu replacer app, as M$ enshittified/nerfed the Start Menu for Win11.

As you rightly pointed out, these debloaters can be unsafe (if they are not open-source, so they are not validated for security issues and bugs; thankfully Winslop is open-source) and can cause Windows to misbehave. But I think such a debloater would be good for a dual OS setup (Linux and Windows).

In 2026, I think I'll have to throw out Windows out the proverbial virtual window, and switch over to Linux on all my home PCs. I am running out of my patience with M$'s enshittification and nasty ads.
by sdoering | 2026-02-04 11:56:53+00:00
To me that seems like a spurious (maybe even false) dichotomy. You can have crappy results without AI. And you can have great results with AI.

Your contrast is an either or, that - in the real world - does not exist.

Take content written by AI, prompted by a human. A lot of it is slop and crap. And there will be more slop and crap with AI than before. But that was the case, when the medium changed from hand writen to printed books. And when paper and printing became cheap, we had slop like those 10 Cent Western or Romance novellas.

We also still had Goethe, still had Kleist, still had Grass (sorry, very German centric here).

We also have Inception vs. the latest sequel of any Marvel franchise.

I have seen AI writen, but human prompted short stories, that made people well up and find ideas presented in a light not seen before. And I have seen AI generated stories that one wants to purge from my brain.

It isn't the tool - it is the one yielding it.

Question: Did photoshop kill photography? Because honestly, this AI discussion to me sounds very much like the discussion back then.
by cbolton | 2026-02-04 11:58:16+00:00
> Anyone skilled at photoshop

So let's say there are two ways to do something illegal. The first requires skills from the perpetrator, is tricky to regulate, and is generally speaking not a widespread issue in practice. The second way is a no brainer even for young children to use, is easy to regulate, and is becoming a huge issue in practice. Then it makes sense to regulate only the second.

> People can now 3D print guns at home, or at least parts that when assembled can make a functioning firearm. Are now 3D printer makers to blame if someone gets killed with a 3D printed gun?

Tricky question, but a more accurate comparison would be with a company that runs a service to 3D print guns (= generating the image) and shoot with them in the street (= publishing on X) automatically for you and keeps accepting illegal requests while the competitors have no issue blocking them.

> Where do we draw the line at tools in terms of effort required, between when the tool bares the responsibility and not just the human using the tool to do illegal things?

That's also a tricky question, but generally you don't really need to know precisely where to draw the line. It suffices to know that something is definitely on the wrong side of the line, like X here.
by DrScientist | 2026-02-04 11:58:19+00:00
I think the real question here isn't whether roll your own software will replace large complex 'configurable' systems, but whether companies that roll their own will replace the companies that don't.

ie are the efficiency gains of having something that's exactly tailored to you enough to create a competitive advantage.

It's back to the old idea - of software eating the world.

So for example in the UK - there is a relatively new 'energy' company called Octopus - it's grown and grown and finally overtaken the old established players.

In reality it's not an energy company - it's a software company - that used it's expertise in software to overtake it's energy supplier competitors.

I think it's telling that the founder originally left school at 16 to write computer games, before coming back to do a degree etc.

ie the question is - for any particular industry what's the benefit of custom software.
Does a bakery having it's own give it enough of an advantage?
by nl | 2026-02-04 11:59:12+00:00
> My understanding is that the paper talks about very general principles.

This isn't really true.

In this case it's specific to NVidia's tensor matrix multiply-add (MMA) instructions, which lets it use silicon that would otherwise be unusued at that point.

> Why does publishing papers require the latest and greatest GPUs?

You really do need to test these things on real hardware and across hardware. When you are doing unexpected things there are lots of unexpected interaction effects.
by pdpi | 2026-02-04 11:59:27+00:00
In a world where hosting services are responsible that way, their filtering would need to be even more sensitive than it is today, and plenty of places already produce unreasonable amounts of false positives.

As it stands, I have a bunch of photos on my phone that would almost certainly get flagged by over-eager/overly sensitive child porn detection — close friends and family sending me photos of their kids at the beach. I've helped bathe and dress some of those kids. There's nothing nefarious about any of it, but it's close enough that services wouldn't take the risk, and that would be a loss to us all.
by chamomeal | 2026-02-04 11:59:41+00:00
> And it's also somewhat egotistical it seems to me. I sense a pattern that many developers care more about doing what they want instead of providing value to others.

I use LLMs a lot. They're ridiculously cool and useful.

But I don't think it's fair to categorize anybody as "egotistical". I enjoy programming for the fun puzzley bits. The big puzzles, and even often the small tedious puzzles. I like wiring all the chunks up together. I like thinking about the best way to expose a component's API with the perfect generic types. That's the part I like.

I don't always like "delivering value" because usually that value is "achieve 1.5% higher SMM (silly marketing metric) by the end of the quarter, because the private equity firm that owns our company is selling it next year and they want to get a good return".
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-04 12:00:12+00:00
> But weapons' culture in the US it's obsolete. Militias can't do shit against tyranical govs because once they send drones it's game over.

Pretty sure those 50 thousand or so civilians killed in the recent Iranian protests/riots would have been a lot less if all those Iranians had access to guns, and not just the government.

So no, mobs with guns are not obsolete.
by spacecadet | 2026-02-04 12:00:19+00:00
This is cute, but this is true for ALL activities in life. I have to constantly remind my brother that his job is not unique and if he took a few moments, he might realize, flipping burgers is also molding lumps of clay.

I think the biggest beef I have with Engineers is that for decades they more or less reduced the value of other lumps of clay and now want to throw up arms when its theirs.
by bayindirh | 2026-02-04 12:00:22+00:00
> Sometimes you want a utilitarian teapot to reliably pour a cup of tea.

If you pardon the analogy, watch how Japanese make a utilitarian teapot which reliably pours a cup of tea.

It's more complicated and skill-intensive than it looks.

In both realms, making an artistic vase can be simpler than a simple utilitarian tool.

AI is good at making artistic vases, not highly refined, reliable tools. Tolerances on these are tighter.