MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pron | 2026-02-07 23:03:18+00:00
> Unless you are only ever a single engineer, your career is filled with "I need to debug code I didn't write".

True, but there's usually at least one person who knows that particular part of the system that you need to touch, and if there isn't, you'll spend a lot of time fixing that bug and become that person.

The bet you're describing is that the AI will be the expert, and if it can be that, why couldn't it also be the expert at understanding the users' needs so that no one is needed anywhere in the loop?

What I don't understand about a vision where AI is able to replace humans at some (complicated) part of the entire industrial stack is why does it stop at a particular point? What makes us think that it can replace programmers and architects - jobs that require a rather sophisticated combination of inductive and deductive reasoning - but not the PMs, managers, and even the users?

Steve Yegge recently wrote about an exponential growth in AI capabilities. But every exponential growth has to plateau at some point, and the problem with exponential growth is that if your prediction about when that plateau happens is off by a little, the value at that point could be different from your prediction by a lot (in either direction). That means that it's very hard to predict where we'll "end up" (i.e. where the plateau will be).
by antonvs | 2026-02-07 23:03:32+00:00
> Space Station that lasts 25 years

A small station, hosting a small number of people, orbiting very close to the surface of the Earth.

> 3,000 satellites providing Internet Service

…very close to the surface of the Earth.

> Mars rovers that run for 10+ years

On the closest planet to Earth that our equipment can survive on. Notably, we have nothing but melted slag on Venus.

> Flying helicopters on Mars

On the closest planet to Earth that our equipment can survive on.

I don’t mean to detract from the achievements of our space programs. But we have to be realistic: we’re exploring the easiest bits of our local neighborhood, that’s all.
by AIorNot | 2026-02-07 23:03:37+00:00
I don't know, its a bit of a hellscape in tech right now as thousands of people with deep domain knowledge and people knowledge and business knowledge (ie experienced engineers managers and product owners), were laid off by C Suites desperate to keep the AI funded mandates going

Do you know how hard it to make a successful company or even make money? Its like saying any actor can goto hollywood and be a star

VCs wont fund everyone

Nobody is sure of anything
by PostOnce | 2026-02-07 23:03:58+00:00
I personally believe (and so far, my evidence suggests) that AI doesn't anywhere near as well as claimed for almost any of its use cases.

However, let's suppose the alternate case:

If AI works as claimed, people in their tens of millions will be out of work.

New jobs won't be created quickly enough to keep them occupied (and fed).

Billionaires own the media and the social media and will use it to attempt to prevent change (i.e. apocalyptic taxation)

What, then, will those people do? Well, they say "the devil makes work for idle hands", and I'm curious what that's going to look like.
by pfisherman | 2026-02-07 23:04:12+00:00
FDA regulates the marketing of drugs and medical devices. This is a case of Hims and Hers (and other compounding pharmacies) marketing drugs without having been granted approval.

There is an abbreviated application for new drug approval (ANDA) pathway meant for generics, but it does not seem like H&H has gone this route. It does require you to open your supply chain up to inspections and to provide evidence that your generic version basically works the same as the brand name.

In my opinion there two things going on here that I strongly feel are true.

1. Something is systemically wrong in the US when we are cutting off people’s access to meds, like GLP-1s, which have profound health benefits.

2. Hims and Hers are also in the wrong. The rules and laws are there for a good reason. It is not just for us to arbitrarily pick and choose when to enforce them.
by anon22981 | 2026-02-07 23:04:15+00:00
I use LLM’s daily and agents occasionally. They are useful, but there is no need to move any goal posts; they easily do shit work still in 2026.

All my coworkers use agents extensively in the backend and the amount of shit code, bad tests and bugs has skyrocketed.

Couple that with a domain (medicine) where our customer in some cases needs to validate the application’s behaviour extensively and it’s a fucking disaster —- very expensive iteration instead of doing it well upfront.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2026-02-07 23:04:53+00:00
>> Current language models do not handle context this way. They rely primarily on parametric knowledge—information compressed into their weights during massive pre-training runs. At inference time, they function largely by recalling this static, internal memory, rather than actively learning from new information provided in the moment.

>> This creates a structural mismatch. We have optimized models to excel at reasoning over what they already know yet users need them to solve tasks that depend on messy, constantly evolving context. We built models that rely on what they know from the past, but we need context learners that rely on what they can absorb from the environment in the moment.

>> To bridge this gap, we must fundamentally change our optimization direction.

All this is right and what critics of the deafening over-hyping of LLMs have long pointed out.

So what do the authors propose we do? Currently, they propose ... a benchmark. But, what's that going to achieve? We know very well that LLMs, neural nets in general, are masters at saturating benchmarks without actually mastering the abilities that the benchmarks are meant to be measuring.

What happens if in a year or so, as will definite happen, LLMs saturate this benchmark too? Will we all have to agree that LLMs can now do "context learning" and then move on to the next big thing? This year it's "world models", last year it was "reasoning" and next year it's going to be "context learning"? And then, what? Where is this all leading to, if after all the billions spent and all the benchmarks beaten conclusively, LLMs still can't do reasoning, can't do world-modelling, can't do context learning and so on, and so forth?
by einpoklum | 2026-02-07 23:04:55+00:00
It is also interesting to note that while the repository is quite active, there has not been any release for _8 years_, and the website is the same one at the top of this conversation, i.e. the one where the old maintainer says he quit and the benchmarks are from 20 years ago.

A small and minimalistic C compiler is actually a very important foundational project for the software world IMNSHO.

I'm definitely reminded of: https://xkcd.com/2347/
by koiueo | 2026-02-07 23:05:19+00:00
I'm not saying it can btw. I'm arguing for the opposite.

And for the record, I'm impressed at issues it can diagnose. Being able to query multiple data sources in parallel and detect anomalies, it sometimes can find the root cause for an incident in a distributed system in a matter of minutes. I have many examples when LLMs found bugs in existing code when tasked to write unit tests (usually around edge cases).

But complex issues that stem from ambiguous domain are often out of reach. By the time I'm able to convey to an LLM all the intricacies of the domain using plain English, I'm usually able to find the issue myself.

And that's my point: I'd be more eager to run the code under debugger till 2am, than to push an LLM to debug for me (can easily take till 2am, but I'd be less confident I can succeed at all)
by scoofy | 2026-02-07 23:05:22+00:00
So, we're just doing whatever it takes to blame the Democratic Party, huh?

Cutting interest rates during a period of time when people were literally locked in their homes waiting for a vaccine to be manufactured? I mean, yea, there were mistakes made, and the PPP and Biden stimulus were very obviously bad decisions, but pretending that tariffs and literally threatening allies has nothing to do with this economy is just lunacy. Just look at what's happening to the American tourism sector. It's falling apart.

I'm a liberal guy, but this take is ridiculous.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-02-07 23:05:29+00:00
> blantatly skirting patent laws

Can you please explain (TFA doesn't mention patent laws, just unregulated drugs)? For example, my understanding is that semaglutide is protected by patent in the US - I had assumed HIMS was including semaglutide in some of their formulations under an agreement with the patent holder, but I guess that's not correct?

Side note, I'm all for the true innovators being able to patent drugs (like semaglutide) that they put a lot of research dollars into, but seriously fuck all these additional "method of delivery" and "formulation" patents that are bullshit that just get added on later by the patent holder solely as a way to try to restrict the entry of generics into the market after the original patent expires.
by Schmerika | 2026-02-07 23:06:05+00:00
> I'm not sure the mods really censor.

They do. Not unflagging an important story is just as much censorship as flagging it yourself. And it happens here a hell of a lot.

Try and make a post questioning what stories get unflagged, or asking about moderation logs, or even asking for a debate on the flagging system. It will be rapidly removed; and if you ask for permission it will be denied.

That's censorship, and it has been getting more and more extreme. But you can't post about it - guess why.
by gnufx | 2026-02-07 23:06:42+00:00
Indeed. The first dedicated light -- for various values of "light" -- source[1] repurposed the tunnel and various bits and techniques from the particle physics accelerator it replaced, and on which parasitic "light" measurements were made previously. See also [2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron_Radiation_Source

2. https://www.ukri.org/publications/new-light-on-science-socio...
by twelvechairs | 2026-02-07 23:07:58+00:00
Its a well researched area. My understanding is for most use cases and data like this R trees outperform as bounding box comparisons are fast to run and the bounding boxes tend to be well organised to chunk data efficiently. For h3 is can be a looser area and you may find lots of your points are clustered in a few grids so you end up doing more expensive detailed intersection calculations. Of course it all depends a little on your data, use case and to some extent the parameters chosen for the spatial index. But I think safe to say now based on industry experience that r trees do a very good job 99.9% of the time.

You can of course also use h3 in postgis directly as well as r trees. Its helps significantly for heatmap creation and sometimes for neighbourhood searches.
by IhateAI_3 | 2026-02-07 23:08:06+00:00
*THE word ''Luddite'' continues to be applied with contempt to anyone with doubts about technology, especially the nuclear kind. Luddites today are no longer faced with human factory owners and vulnerable machines. As well-known President and unintentional Luddite D. D. Eisenhower prophesied when he left office, there is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO's, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed, although Ike didn't put it quite that way. We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on, even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool any of the people any of the time. If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come - you heard it here first - when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long. Meantime, as Americans, we can take comfort, however minimal and cold, from Lord Byron's mischievously improvised song, in which he, like other observers of the time, saw clear identification between the first Luddites and our own revolutionary origins.

It begins :
As the Liberty lads o'er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd!*

Your homework:

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/r...
by einpoklum | 2026-02-07 23:08:33+00:00
The professor could have just insisted on `-std=c99` or a similar GCC flag which disallows GNU extensions.

When I taught programming (I started teaching 22 years ago), the course was still having students either use GCC with their university shell accounts, or if they were Windows people, they would use Borland C++ we could provide under some kind of fair use arrangement IIANM, and that worked within a command shell on Windows.
by ben_w | 2026-02-07 23:08:43+00:00
Unfortunately with stuff like this, nation states will use groups like that as proxies.

Lots of governments.

For example, there's some other news at the moment that the USA is financing pro-MAGA groups across Europe, which I mention more because of Jan 6 happened at all than due to any specific evidence that the US government has knowingly given state support for terrorists.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-02-07 23:09:31+00:00
>Are you saying I was incorrect for feeling that way?

I think they just wanted clarification. If a program is just "make lines of code do thing" then it wouldn't be different.

But if you are used to ummanged code and considering the hardware architecture and memory management when you make a high performance program, working on python can feel like a black box. Things will slow down because there's a lot of "magic" weighing down the program. But not everyone works in that space.

Unlike LLMs, at least thos box can be peered inside of you really want to.
by furyofantares | 2026-02-07 23:09:32+00:00
The article does demonstrate how bad it is in context.

Context has a lot of big advantages over training though, too, it's not one-sided. Upfront cost and time are the big obvious ones, but context also works better than training on small amounts of data, and it's easier to delete or modify.

Like even for a big product like Claude Code from someone that controls the model, although I'm sure they do a lot of training to make the product better, they're not gonna just rely entirely on training and go with a nearly blank system prompt.
by u1hcw9nx | 2026-02-07 23:09:36+00:00
profgalloway.com? Really?

Galloway often universities for being "luxury brands" that overcharge for prestige, yet his own branding ....

Galloway is certainly milking his NYU donation for all it’s worth. He is 100% non academic and teaches one class per year as 'Professor of Practice' (aka Clinical Professor). I suppose if you’re a marketing professional, this is just what you do: frame things in a way that is materially misleading, but correct in some other sense and build upon it.

Other Professors of Practice include Matthew McConaughey, Jamie Hyneman, yet none of them try to build their brand around it.
by Gibbon1 | 2026-02-07 23:09:43+00:00
I have a friend that worked for a big corp back 15 years ago managing Macs. At one point they told him they were going to can him and switch the Mac uses to Windows. Didn't go anywhere when he pointed out he was managing all their Mac users. And he was managing 5 times as many Macs as his coworkers were managing Window Boxes.
by metalman | 2026-02-07 23:10:02+00:00
the "base of workers who bend metal" are not very adaptable, I have interviewed dozens of them, perhaps close to 100 since the tarrifs
and not one has experience beyond the assembly line job they were trained to do, and the calls from trade school students and teachers are for people with zero experience, and as my phone keeps ringing from large companys trying to find metal work sub contractors(or employees), the base
then appears to be thin, to non existant at least for non assembly line work,and many of the assembly line workers, have the comunication skills of , of, of, well, words fail, ok, if they get any question ,request for detail, or friction at all, they hang up or ghost, all they want is how much, start now, zero ability to describe what they can do. To be clear,just realised that I know many animals that are better comported, personable, able to express themselves and understand instructions than many of these "benders", not kidding.
by johannes1234321 | 2026-02-07 23:10:44+00:00
I know that my city's administration has a quite active development department.

I don't know the current salary ranges,but they offer other values like vacation days, Work-Life-Balance (proper time tracking to avoid extra hours etc), part-time.offera, child care options and some other benefits, which most corporations won't give in addition to being the state, which means they won't go bankrupt, won't do reductions in force in the way companies do it, ...
by kubb | 2026-02-07 23:11:06+00:00
The reason is resentment rooted in an inferiority complex. Russia's state ideology is that they're being oppressed by "the West", and they really believe it up to the highest levels of government. They're quite convinced that hurting their "enemy" this way amounts to securing their interest, because by damaging "the West", their own relative power is elevated and that makes them a serious player on the international stage.
by visualphoenix | 2026-02-07 23:11:18+00:00
Thanks again for listening to the feedback and making these improvements! Especially the 302 redirect bit.

Would love to know if you’ve tested the hybrid migration mode against artifactory yet. Would be very very cool to have a way to run both of these side by side while evaluating the cutover. Maybe with a way to re-sync the artifactory db changes over periodically.
by YRMishra1904 | 2026-02-07 23:11:32+00:00
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by falloutx | 2026-02-07 23:11:49+00:00
> Im sure no one in the office has the time or skills to vibe code.

the thing you are describing can be vibe coded by anyone. Its not that teachers or nurses are gonna start vibecoding tmrw, but the risk comes from other programmers outworking you to show off to the boss. Or companies pitting devs against each other, or them mistakenly assuming they require very few programmers, or PMs suddenly start vibe coding when threatened for their jobs.
by problynought | 2026-02-07 23:12:20+00:00
Have you worked in software long? I've been in eng for almost 30 years, started in EE. Can confidently say you can't trust the humans either. SWEs have been wrong over and over. No reason to listen now.

Just a few years ago code gen LLMs were impossible to SWEs. In the 00s SWEs were certain no business would trust their data to the cloud.

OS and browsers are bloated messes, insecure to the core. Web apps are similarly just giant string mangling disasters.

SWEs have memorized endless amount of nonsense about their role to keep their jobs. You all have tons to say about software but little idea what's salient and just memorized nonsense parroted on the job all the time.

Most SWEs are engaged in labor role-play, there to earn nation state scrip for food/shelter.

As an EE of 30 years, I look forward to the end of the most inane era of human "engineering" ever.

Everything software can be whittled down to geometry generation and presentation, even text. End users can label outputs mechanical turk style and apply whatever syntax they want, while the machine itself handles arithemtic and Boolean logic against memory, and syncs output to the display.

All the linguist gibberish in the typical software stack will be compressed[1] away, all the SWE middlemen unemployed.

Rotary phone assembly workers have a support group for you all.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668
by Spivak | 2026-02-07 23:12:25+00:00
As always, depends on the law. This is a bright line example of companies breaking the law to the direct tangible benefit of not only their customers but the population at large. Letting Novo Nordisk jack the price back up and deprive the vast majority of Americans access to the greatest good to public health in a century meanwhile is… maybe not the example you should be holding as the law working.
by mbadyl | 2026-02-07 23:12:36+00:00
Hi - I built Octrafic, an open-source CLI for AI-assisted API testing and exploration.

Instead of writing test scripts, you can describe what you want to verify in natural language and Octrafic generates requests and validations based on your API spec (OpenAPI/Swagger, Postman Collections, GraphQL, etc.).

It’s BYOK: you plug in your own AI provider key (Anthropic / OpenRouter / OpenAI), and the CLI runs locally.

Quick start:

Install: curl -fsSL https://octrafic.com/install.sh | bash

Run: octrafic

Repo: https://github.com/Octrafic/octrafic-cli
Docs: https://docs.octrafic.com
by mmooss | 2026-02-07 23:13:29+00:00
> The one person who is advancing our space faring abilities by leaps and bounds

The overwhelming amount of the work is done by NASA, ESA, CNSA (China, going to the Moon), and other space agencies. Musk has built orbital rockets.

> routinely vilified and excoriated on HackerNews.

That's disingenuous and you know it. Why make such claims?
by chasd00 | 2026-02-07 23:13:30+00:00
>> How do you clone the important parts of Okta, Jira, Slack and more? With coding agents!

> This is what's going to gut-punch most SaaS companies repeatedly over the next decade

but there's already clones of the important parts of those systems and yet the SaaS world survives. The code used isn't the secret sauce and people in SaaS know writing the code is 10% of the effort in keeping those businesses on their feet.

I don't think the SaaS industry is on the ropes until coding agents can do things like create a recommendation algorithm better than Spotify and YouTube. In those cases the code/algorithm is indeed the secret sauce and if a coding agent can do better than those companies will be left behind.