MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dexwiz | 2026-02-07 21:32:51+00:00
Growth will be proportional to spend. You can cut waste later and celebrate efficiency. So when growing there isn't much incentive to do it efficiently. You are just robbing yourself of a potential future victory. Also it's legitimately difficult to maximize growth while prioritizing efficiency. It's like how a body builder cycles between bulking and cutting. For mid to long term outlooks it's probably the best strategy.
by tmtvl | 2026-02-07 21:33:02+00:00
Not every compiled language has a de facto standard compiler, but with SBCL Common Lisp compiles pretty quickly. The Pascals (and Delphi) also tend to have rather fast compile times. I believe Jai is supposed to compile quickly but I'm not in the beta so I don't know. C can be quite good if you know what you're doing and use a decent compiler.
by NeutralCrane | 2026-02-07 21:33:25+00:00
> The original roll out of Healthcare.gov is a counterpoint.

Healthcare.gov was primarily developed by private contractor firms, not government employees.

> And even if you did work in pub sec, if you were good, why would you want to work for the government when you can get paid a lot more working in the private sector and consulting for the government?

Some people are motivated by factors other than pay, a concept that seems to be foreign to many FAANG corporate mercenaries.
by kingstnap | 2026-02-07 21:33:32+00:00
I don't need a study to prove anything about a dude abusing the medical system. You don't just come in for an extension conveniently as things are winding down multiple times because whoops, turns out got rear ended again.

>> Anecdotal stuff / vibes are actually really useful.

> You can just say you've already made up your mind despite not having personal experience, your anecdotes being biased, and having no statistically relevant evidence - and nothing will change your mind.

I absolutely can and do change my mind, lots of times. I'm not an old fart set in his ways. What I'm saying is that there is an overcorrection towards this "intellectual well" way of thinking. It's not that statistics is useless, it's that someone telling you of an issue based on vibes / personal experience, or from a single sample is useful even if editors would desk reject it.

It's as though people behave as the numbers in papers come from God instead of a study done with limitations by people who have agendas and make mistakes. It can be right, I love good papers, and despite what you might have concluded actually I love rigor, mathematics in particular is amazing, but when you also take the approach of rejecting any story or opinion because a stat said so (often ignoring how that stat may have been collected or data analysed), this is where problems happen.
by throwaway89201 | 2026-02-07 21:33:40+00:00
> OpenCloud is the "open-source" fork but they are already in legal trouble with OwnCloud due to industrial espionage claims.

Can you expand on this or source this? I'm quite interested in OpenCloud, and haven't heard anything about this. I searched for a few keywords (espionage, legal, lawsuit), which only lands your comment on top.
by notnullorvoid | 2026-02-07 21:33:58+00:00
Agreed. Programming languages are not ambiguous. Human language is very ambiguous, so if I'm writing something with a moderate level of complexity, it's going to take longer to describe what I want to the AI vs writing it myself. Reviewing what an AI writes also takes much longer than reviewing my own code.

AI is getting better at picking up some important context from other code or documentation in a project, but it's still miles away from what it needs to be, and the needed context isn't always present.
by samuelklam | 2026-02-07 21:34:27+00:00
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Permitting is a challenging yet interesting problem; thousands of municipalities across the United States have their own processes and requirements - many which are continually updating. Software, AI, and LLMs provide an exciting opportunity for us to reason at scale and distill a nuanced and localized permitting process into a standard and streamlined experience for our customers.

We're looking for customer-obsessed, ambitious, and hard-working teammates who are excited about solving a real-world problem with technology at its helm.

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1. Staff Software Engineer - $200K-275K + equity

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https://permitflow.com/hiring
by guerrilla | 2026-02-07 21:34:44+00:00
> I agree on C++ being the worst of both worlds for many people. You get abstraction, but also an enormous semantic surface area and footguns everywhere.

Not only that, but who even knows C++? It keeps changing. Every few years "standard practice" is completely different. Such a waste of energy.

> Java is interesting because the core language is indeed small and boring in a good way, much closer to C than people admit.

I know. I used to be a Java hater, but then I learned it and it's alright... except the whole no-unsigned-integers thing. That still bothers me but it's just aesthetic really.
Ask HN: Why doesn't Netflix add a “Theater Mode” that recreates the worst parts?
by amichail | 2026-02-07 21:34:53+00:00
The idea is to recreate the entire movie theater experience, including the worst parts.

This mode would add audience reactions like laughter, gasps, and clapping at key moments, so movies feel like an event again.

But it would also faithfully recreate the true theater experience:

* People shouting comments at the screen like they are part of the movie

* Someone standing up at the exact worst moment and blocking your view

* A person behind you explaining the plot to their friend in a whisper that is somehow louder than normal talking

* Random coughing fits that last way too long

* Someone’s phone lighting up like a small sun during a dark scene

* Constant seat shuffling and aggressive snack rustling

This feature would remind people why watching movies at home is better. Conveniently, on Netflix.

What do you think of this idea?
by Jensson | 2026-02-07 21:35:04+00:00
> Models do not need to hold the whole code base in memory, and neither do you

Humans rewire their mind to optimize it for the codebase, that is why new programmers takes a while to get up to speed in the codebase. LLM doesn't do that and until they do they need the entire thing in context.

And the reason we can't do that today is that there isn't enough data in a single codebase to train an LLM to be smart about it, so first we need to solve the problem that LLM needs billions of examples to do a good job. That isn't on the horizon so we are probably safe for a while.
by flyinglizard | 2026-02-07 21:35:12+00:00
That's assuming no human would ever go near the code, and that over time it's not getting out of hand (inference time, token limits are all a thing), and that anti-patterns don't get to where the code is a logical mess which produces bugs through a webbing of specific behaviors instead of proper architecture.

However I guess that at least some of that can be mitigated by distilling out a system description and then running agents again to refactor the entire thing.
by em-bee | 2026-02-07 21:35:22+00:00
yes of course, language is by nature an abstraction, so by definition it will never describe the whole world perfectly, but it can describe it as well as we understand it. and the point that matters, once we have a shared experience we can name that experience, and between us it will then describe the full experience, whereas to bystanders it will be an abstraction.

language doesn't replace the actual experience. it isn't meant to. me living in china, and me telling you about my life in china are not the same thing, no matter how detailed my description. but that does not limit my experience. and if you lived in china too, then my description will refer your experience, and in that case the description will feel much more detailed.

the way i understand wittgensteins claim it not only suggests that language can't describe everything, which is only partly true, because it implies that language can not expand. it also means that i can not even experience what i can not describe, which makes even less sense. i can't feel cold because i have no word for it? huh?

(i feel like my argumentation jumps around or goes in circles, it doesn't feel well thought through. i hope it makes sense anyways. apologies for that.)
by HoldOnAMinute | 2026-02-07 21:35:45+00:00
Have you tried using GenAI to write documentation? You can literally point it to a folder and say, analyze everything in this folder and write a document about it. And it will do it. It's more thorough than anything a human could do, especially in the time frame we're talking about.

If GenAI could only write documentation it would still be a game changer.
by chasd00 | 2026-02-07 21:35:48+00:00
it's an exciting time, things are changing and changing beyond "here's my new javascript framework". It's definitely an industry shakeup kind of deal and no one knows what lies 6 months, 1 year, 5 years from now. It makes me anxious seeing as i have a wife+2 kids to care for and my income is tied to this industry but it's exciting too.
by Nextgrid | 2026-02-07 21:36:07+00:00
I’ll believe it when coding agents can actually make concise & reusable code instead of reimplementing 10 slightly-different versions of the same basic thing on every run (this is not a rant, I would love for agents to stop doing that, and I know how to make them - with proper AGENTS.md that serves as a table of contents for where stuff is - but my point is that as a human I don’t need this and yet they still do for now).
by tombert | 2026-02-07 21:37:04+00:00
I remember at a previous job I had to do a fair bit of business travel. The company had their own internal tool for filing expense reports.

I would do the typical thing of "take picture of receipt, upload receipt, specify how much it cost, etc.", and for the most part it was seemless and it would be sent to my bank account.

One time, I bought a box of Fiber One bars at a CVS Pharmacy and expensed that. I got a phone call from the billing department asking why I would expense something like that and I said something like "because I don't usually eat that healthy during business travel and I suspect you can guess the reason after that". They told me they would get back to me, and then I got an email telling me that they rejected the expense report and I would have to file it again to get the rest of my stuff reimbursed.

I can be a pretty petty dude, so I filed it again, completely unchanged, I get another phone call telling me to remove it, and this repeated two more times. Eventually I complained to my manager and he was able to get them to let me expense it and it all worked out.

I find it amusing, because the box of Fiber One bars was less than five bucks. I suspect all the time that they wasted of theirs and mine probably cost considerably more than the $5 would have saved from not covering it.
by trinix912 | 2026-02-07 21:37:16+00:00
It's much harder for non-dev jobs where the management won't let you BYOD for whatever reasons, which could range from IT being too stubborn to allow you to keep company data on your own laptop that's not centrally managed, to everything including licenses for random 3rd party software the company is using being tied to the ActiveDirectory fleet of computers with centralized storage.

This is the reality of IT equipment in big parts of the non-dev world, and you'll have a hard time convincing the IT dept to take on extra hassle just for you to use Linux out of all hundreds of employees who're just fine with Windows.
by teunispeters | 2026-02-07 21:39:19+00:00
Winnipeg is far south of where I usually am, and rather near the US border. It might be comparable to China what with the sea nearby and all those lakes.

I'm out in the middle of the prairies, where -40C is a normal winter day, and 100km winds are also ... normal. Mind, -20C to -30C is far more common, and -50C almost never happens where I am now. (it was a lot more common in FSJ, or in the badlands near Drumheller).

Fort St John BC however has almost exactly the same temperatures and weather as Yakutsk. Mind, it wouldn't be considered a city on these scales.

People do NOT understand how cold Canada gets. And I'm way south of places like Nunavut, the Yukon (mind, Yukon is warmer than Saskatchewan, mostly), or any of the Northwest Territories. I guess y'all think of balmy Toronto or the like. (or - by comparison - tropical Vancouver BC. Vancouver is warmer than Seattle, for the most part. Wetter too, largely, but not as wet as Prince Rupert or Kitimat).

Anyway that's mostly not here or there for EVs. EVs on the whole work really well on the prairies - especially if they've got mitigation for -50C and +50C (both temperatures happen regularly, at appropriate times of year). For the most part, more reliable than diesel at those ranges too.

The local frustrating part is while Alberta has an ok electrical grid, Sask is an unstable grid dependent on coal and low maintenance. (I mean, we do have Uranium City too ... heh..). Saskatchewan is poor, by Canadian standards.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-07 21:39:46+00:00
Not true it was managed by the government

https://www.businessofgovernment.org/sites/default/files/Vie...

And you are going to tell me that some people would rather work for the government now where they are constantly insulted, had to desk with DOGE and every year there is a threat they might not get paid?
by killerstorm | 2026-02-07 21:40:35+00:00
Software engineers have been confidently wrong about a lot of things.

E.g. OOP and "patterns" in 90s. What was the last time you implemented a "visitor"?

P. Norvig mentioned most of the patterns are transparent in Common Lisp: e.g. you can just use a `lambda` instead of "visitor". But OOP people kept doing class diagrams for a simple map or fold-like operation.

AI producing a flawed code and "not understanding" are completely different issues. Yes, AI can make mistakes, we know. But are you certain your understanding is really superior?
by jacquesm | 2026-02-07 21:41:06+00:00
Well, I probably was born stupid then. This was a Gnuradio setup (super impressive piece of software by the way) for a not-very-well supported SDR running an even less well supported GRC file. I'd been putting it off because I know those tell tale little clouds on the horizon well enough by now. Anyway, it's working now. But what a nightmare.
by nine_k | 2026-02-07 21:41:08+00:00
$1k per day, 50 work weeks, 5 day a week → $250k a year. That is, to be worth it, the AI should work as well as an engineer that costs a company $250k. Between taxes, social security, and cost of office space, that engineer would be paid, say, $170-180k a year, like an average-level senior software engineer in the US.

This is not an outrageous amount of money, if the productivity is there. More likely the AI would work like two $90k junior engineers, but without a need to pay for a vacation, office space, social security, etc. If the productivity ends up higher than this, it's pure profit; I suppose this is their bet.

The human engineer would be like a tech lead guiding a tea of juniors, only designing plans and checking results above the level of code proper, but for exceptional cases, like when a human engineer would look at the assembly code a compiler has produced.

This does sound exaggeratedly optimistic now, but does not sound crazy.
by jawon | 2026-02-07 21:41:21+00:00
I was thinking about inhouse model inference speeds at frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI after reading the "Claude built a C compiler" article.

Having higher inference speed would be an advantage, especially if you're trying to eat all the software and services.

Anthropic offering 2.5x makes me assume they have 5x or 10x themselves.

In the predicted nightmare future where everything happens via agents negotiating with agents, the side with the most compute, and the fastest compute, is going to steamroll everyone.
by JetSetIlly | 2026-02-07 21:41:34+00:00
I had the opportunity to test out the latest version of Claude this afternoon. After a very good analysis of the existing code, I asked it to implement an optimisation that it had identified.

It introduced a race condition into the code which I could tell just by looking at the diff. More worrying, is that after telling it that there was now a race condition, it provided a solution that was no fix at all. That concerns me.

I'm certain you can work with Claude in such a way that it will avoid those errors but I can't help worry about those developers who don't even know what a race condition is, ploughing on and committing the change.

These tools are very good in many ways and I can see how they can be helpful, but they're being mismarketed in my opinion.
by kaydub | 2026-02-07 21:41:49+00:00
How long have you been coding? How many languages and frameworks have you worked with? Where has your professional focus been?

I've written professional code in production for the past 15+ years in VB, C# (MVC2/MVC3 + Razor), Php(Yii, Yii2, Symfony), Perl, Python(Flask, Cherrpy), Java(Spring MVC, Spring boot, JSF, J2EE), Golang, Rust, Ruby. I've worked on build/ci pipelines from Jenkins, CircleCI, Github, Gitlab, Teamcity, etc. I've had to deploy/manage infrastructure from bare metal to the cloud with Ansible, Puppet, Saltstack, Terraform, Cloudformation. I've had to run on MySQL, Postgres, Mariadb, SQL Server and use ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, Kafka, SQS, SNS, MSK, Kinesis (of all flavors). I could literally keep going and going and going.

I'm tired. It's way easier to prompt than keep track of all this shit at this point. I don't need to know how to implement $feature or $tool in each and every framework, I'll let the machines worry about that.
by IhateAI_2 | 2026-02-07 21:42:01+00:00
These takes are terrible.

1. It costs 100k in hardware to run Kimi 2.5 with a single session at decent tok p/s and its still not capable for anything serious.

2. I want whatever you're smoking if you think anyone is going to spend billions training models capable of outcompeting them are affordable to run and then open source them.
by Revanche1367 | 2026-02-07 21:42:27+00:00
I agree with this. At a higher level of abstraction, you’re still doing the fundamental problem solving. Low-level machine language or high-level Java, C++ or even Python, the fundamental algorithm design is still entirely done by the programmer. LLMs aren’t being used to just write the code unless the user is directing how each line or at least each function is being written, often times you can just describe the problem and it solves it most of the way if not entirely. Only for really long and complex tasks do the better models really require hand-holding and they are improving on that end rapidly.

That’s not a higher level of abstraction, it’s having someone do the work for you while doing less and less of the thinking as well. Someone might resist that urge and consistently guide the model closely but that’s probably not what the collective range of SWEs who use these models are doing and rapidly the ease of using these models and our natural reluctance to take on mental stress is likely to make sure that eventually everyone lets LLMs do most or all of the thinking for them. If things really go in that direction and spread, I foresee a collective dumbing down of the general population.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-07 21:42:35+00:00
> Many people are having skills they spent years building made worthless overnight, without an obvious or realistic pivot available.

I'd like to see real examples of this, beyond trivial ones like low-quality copywriting (i.e. the "slop" before there was slop) that just turns into copyediting. Current AI's are a huge force multiplier for most white-collar skills, including software development.
by bdangubic | 2026-02-07 21:42:45+00:00
> they're controlled by huge corporations and cost a significant amount of money to use.

is there anything you use that isn't? like laptop on which you work, software that you use to browse the internet, read the email... I've heard similar comment to your before and I am not sure I understand it given everything else - why does this matter for LLMs and not the phone you use etc etc?
by mattlondon | 2026-02-07 21:43:07+00:00
Even if I am only slightly more productive, it feels like I am flying. The mental toll is severely reduced and the feel good factor of getting stuff done easily (rather than as a slog) is immense. That's got to be worth something in terms of the mental wellbeing of our profession.

FWIW I generally treat the AI as a pair programmer. It does most of the typing and I ask it why it did this? Is that the most idiomatic way of doing it? That seems hacky. Did you consider edge case foo? Oh wait let's call it a BarWidget not a FooWidget - rename everything in all other code/tests/make/doc files Etc etc.

I save a lot of time typing boilerplate, and I find myself more willing (and a lot less grumpy!!!) to bin a load of things I've been working on but then realise is the wrong approach or if the requirements change (in the past I might try to modify something I'd been working on for a week rather than start from scratch again, with AI there is zero activation energy to start again the right way). Thats super valuable in my mind.
by NeutralCrane | 2026-02-07 21:43:29+00:00
Is it? I’ve seen AI hallucinations, but they seem to be increasingly rare these days.

Much of the AI antipathy reminds me of Wikipedia in the early-mid 2000s. I remember feeling amazed with it, but also remember a lot of ranting by skeptics about how anyone could put anything on there, and therefore it was unreliable, not to be used, and doomed to fail.

20 years later and everyone understands that Wikipedia may have its shortcomings, and yet it is still the most impressive, useful advancement in human knowledge transfer in a generation.
by alan_sass | 2026-02-07 21:44:21+00:00
Combinatorial Memetics:
The process of generating novel cultural value by systematically permuting and sequencing discrete units of meaning (memes/videos) to discover high-stickiness configurations. Unlike traditional "remixing," which is often random, combinatorial memetics implies a deliberate, algorithmic approach to maximizing viral fitness through structural arrangement.

The Atomic Unit:
1 video (10s) = 1 Meme.

The Combinatorial Act:
Sequencing 154 of them where the transition ($N \to N+1$) creates the meaning.

The Result:
A "Macro-Meme" (the thread) that is greater than the sum of its parts.