MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Eisenstein | 2026-02-15 08:30:28+00:00
> You know it’s literally in the constitution - the idea of a free press. If the money to keep the press in business, who keeps the government accountable?

The constitution doesn't say anything about whether the government can fund media.

> And to pretend like the US is a democracy where the popular vote matters completely ignores reality.

No one made that claim. In fact, no one claimed that popular vote was even a good standard for a democracy. Is your assertion that the solution to an imperfect system is not to try and reform it, but to rely on a worse one?

> So if you want to push for a more (small d) democratic government, you’re going to first have to overall the entire constitution so the largest states population’s aren’t diluted.

I don't know if that's the answer to the nation's problems, but it is worthy of consideration.

> And I posted a link earlier that the government has literally been trying to defund PBS since the 1960a and Mr. Rogers himself had to beg Congress not to defund it.

The government is not a unified monolith. The whole point of democracy is that everything is being debated all the time and sometimes people don't agree and try to stop or changes things that others did. That's a good thing.

> Right now today the federal government is erasing any signs of anything in museums and national parks that doesn’t make the US look good or admit that gay people exist. This is the government you want controlling the press?

I think that's bad, and hopefully enough other people do so that we can vote out the people who are doing that and restore things to how they were.
by flutas | 2026-02-15 08:30:44+00:00
One of my earlier experiences with codex was actually reverse engineering, far before it was good at actual coding.

It was able to decompile a react native app (Tesla Android app), and fully trace from a "How does X UI display?" down to a network call with a payload for me to intercept.

Granted it did it by splitting the binary into a billion txt files with each one being a single function and then rging through it, but it worked.
by sgt | 2026-02-15 08:30:49+00:00
It's funny how people complain about Slack pricing but I've been using it for our company (nearly 100 people) for nearly a decade without paying a dime. The only thing we're not getting is history (and you really shouldn't save valuable info on chat anyway, we have other data repositories for that such as Wiki and git).

So for me, we're getting tremendous value out of Slack and not once have they bothered to ask us to pay.
by shevy-java | 2026-02-15 08:30:53+00:00
I haven't gone through the games they have, but it makes sense to preserve ALL games for future generations. I'd even go so far as to offer games in an original variant; but also in modified variants, aka one being mostly focused on fixing bugs and doing modest upgrades (simplifying playability and SLIGHT improvements to the user interface), as well as slightly more aggressive upgrades, including UI, making them visually beautiful but retaining the spirit of the game. For instance, of all the simcities, the first one was IMO the best. The graphics lateron were much better of course, but playability wise I found the first one the most addictive; similar with colonization, first one was quite good. The last 3 releases had better graphics, but playability wise it felt like 100 steps back.

What I would love to see is that we retain old flash games too. HTML5 was promoted as "making flash obsolete", but they never fulfilled that promise. Many flash-games simply died and there was no replacement in HTML; similar with some java applet games. Or at the least I could not find a replacement (that's also a problem - with google search having become nearly useless, finding things is super-hard; and of course old websites tend to die, that is also a problem).
by localhoster | 2026-02-15 08:31:56+00:00
Agent assisted coding is just vibe-coding in disguise.
You still only glance over the code "just so it won't be considered vibe-coding", but at the end of the day, if you invest a proper amount of time reading and reasoning with the generated code - than it would take the exact same time, as if you would have wrote it by hand.

By not going through this process, you loose intent, familiarity, and opinions.

It's the exact same as vibe-coding.
by numpad0 | 2026-02-15 08:32:06+00:00
This took me a while(I'm slow), but I think GP is saying: "I've seen enough of (expressions) thinking ideas is the key when engineering was; with everyone snorting LLMs, we'll see that replicating in software world" but nicely.

THAT makes sense. Engineering was never cheap nor non-differentiating if normalized by man-hours, only when it was USD normalized. If a large enough number of people were to get the same FALSE impression that software and firmware parts are now basically free and non-differentiating commodities, then there will be tons of spectacular failures in software world in coming years. There has already been early previews of those here.
by dmurray | 2026-02-15 08:32:42+00:00
Perhaps playing 1. e4 2. Bc4 3. Qh5 4. Qf7 (and resigning or offering a draw if some move isn't legal) would minmax this further

The problem isn't really well defined. Elo rating is assumed to be determinable independent of what opponents you face, so scoring 50% against opponents rated 1800 gives you the same information as scoring 26% against opponents rated 2000. In practice that's obviously not completely true, and for degenerate examples like the ones we are discussing it completely falls apart.
by ivanbalepin | 2026-02-15 08:32:58+00:00
by "maintainability" and "rarely remembered by the engineer" i'm assuming the bigger concern (beyond commenting and sane code) is once everyone starts producing tons of code without looking - and reading(reviewing) code is, to me at least, much harder than writing - then all of this goes unchecked:

* subtle footguns

* hallucinations

* things that were poorly or incompletely expressed in the prompt and ended up implemented incorrectly

* poor performance or security bugs

other things (probably correctable by fine-tuning the prompt and the context):

* lots of redundancy

* comments that are insulting to the intelligence (e.g., "here we instantiate a class")

* ...

not to mention reduced human understanding of the system and where it might break or how this implementation is likely to behave. All of this will come back to bite during maintenance.
by svens_ | 2026-02-15 08:34:10+00:00
This assumption has unfortunately led to countless security issues, at least in the past. The nosniff header (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...), was created because of this and should be added.

While this probably works, you should also add a restrictive CSP (using the sandbox directive).

Forcing the download (via Content-Disposition header) would likely be even better, but it is annoying for users.
by imiric | 2026-02-15 08:35:04+00:00
I will never stop being dumbfounded by the contrast of people going through this kind of hardship being surrounded by some of the wealthiest people in the world. This exists in other parts of the world as well, of course, but it's particularly troubling that it exists in the tech epicenter.

There's something deeply disturbing about a society that allows this to happen, and yet it's something we've learned to accept and largely ignore for centuries. The promise of technology bringing forth universal prosperity is a lie promoted by those who have something to gain from that narrative. Yet we keep believing these people to this day.
by pierrekin | 2026-02-15 08:38:04+00:00
I get an incredible “narcism ick” from this writing. I wonder if other people feel the same way.

It’s so gross contrasted with the theme. The very first paragraphs start with a poor attempt to humble brag his”credentials” as not just a “normal” homeless person.

The self mythologising, the framing of negative things more like the weather than consequences of his choices.

The fact that despite privileged upbringing and working in tech in the valley he has no one willing to offer him a couch.

The most striking for me is the framing of his own grandmothers death as exceptional, proving his lineage is special.

Calling others NPCs, framing of stealing from stores as being the heroic action, even with approval from grandmother.

I feel this is getting redundant. I’d love to hear if anyone disagrees and what their thoughts are.
by VorpalWay | 2026-02-15 08:38:07+00:00
Could be. I don't remember Arch being on my radar at that point though. But it wasn't long after I switched from Gentoo to Arch (and then Debian for a decade due to lack of stability before going back to Arch 7 years ago or so).

A few years before the Xorg thing there was also the 2.4 to 2.6 kernel switchover. I think I maybe was using Slackware at that point, and I remember building my own kernel to try out the new shiny thing. You also had to update some userspace packages if I remember correctly: things like modprobe/insmod at the very least.
by imiric | 2026-02-15 08:38:09+00:00
Sure, we don't know the entire backstory, but can we agree that no person should live in these conditions? Especially in one of the richest places in the world. Everyone deserves dignity, food, and shelter.

Also, can we stop stigmatizing "drug" use? Most of humanity uses "drugs" regularly for various reasons. Just because a specific "drug" which someone enjoys using recreationally is on a government list doesn't mean that they can't be a productive member of society. Live and let live.
by nkko | 2026-02-15 08:38:19+00:00
For no special reason, beside I could, I’ve slop coded this AI agents ephemeral VM orchestrator which I use inside any agent to manipulate and maintain my coding VMs on Proxmox. Probably it could make sense to simplify it further and move from Proxmox to something like this. Link: https://github.com/nibzard/agentlab
by K0balt | 2026-02-15 08:39:42+00:00
Vibe coding doesn’t work for the imbedded system code that I am working on, which includes layered state machines, hardware drivers, and wire level protocol stacks. But supervised AI code generation definitely does work.

You need a highly refined sense of “smell” and intuition about architecture and data design, but if you give good specifications and clear design goals and architectural guidance, it’s like managing a small team but 12x faster iteration.

I sometimes am surprised with feature scope or minor execution details but usually whenever I drill down I’m seeing what I expected to see, even more so than with humans.

If I didn’t have the 4 decades of engineering and management experience I wouldn’t be able to get anything near the quality or productivity.

It’s an ideal tool for seasoned devs with experience shipping with a team. I can do the work of a team of 5 in this type of highly technical greenfield engineering, and I’m shipping better code with stellar documentation… and it’s also a lot less stressful because of the lack of interpersonal dynamics.

But… there’s no way I would give this to a person without technical management experience and expect the same results, because the specification and architectural work is critical, and the ability to see the code you know someone else is writing and understand the mistakes they will probably make if you don’t warn them away from it is the most important skillset here.

In a lot of ways I do fear that we could be pulling up the ladder, but if we completely rethink what it means to be a developer we could teach with an emphasis on architecture, data structures, and code/architecture intuition we might be able to prepare people to step into the role.

Otherwise we will end up with a lot of garbage code that mostly works most of the time and breaks in diabolically sinister ways.