MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-02-28 17:49:20+00:00
"Our Turnstile widget and Challenge Pages are served 7.67 billion times every single day. That's not a typo. Billions. This might just be the most-seen user interface on the Internet."

Or it might not

The majority of the traffic on the internet is from so-called "bots"

If a "bot" hits this "interface" does that count as being "seen"

The web's failing, its inability (unwillingness) to accept non-interactive use (no good for advertising), is Cloudflare's success

A strange thing to celebrate. MITM'ing the majority of the web for "security". Could there be a better way

Another source of amusement is the "You've been blocked" Cloudflare page showing the user's IP address and suggesting contacting the site operator might solve the problem

The truth is that sending an acceptable user-agent header value solves the problem

"You" are not being blocked (Cloudflare does not who "you" are), your IP address is not being blocked, the _request_ you sent was blocked because of crude heuristics

If a site operator wants a certain header value (why) then it should publish the list of acceptable values

Send another request with an acceptable header value and the requests succeeds. It appears "you" are not blocked, same IP address, same living, breathing, thinking person sending the request
by Veserv | 2026-02-28 17:49:30+00:00
As @vitus points out [1], these numbers are pure, unadulterated garbage. Instead of being data, they are wild extrapolations from this [2] actually useful and relatively correct past data.

2,000 bytes over commodity network in 5 us is 400 MB/s (3.2 Gbps). Far faster than commodity residential speeds.

1,000,000 bytes from memory in 741 ns (ridiculous amount of significant figures) is 1.3 TB/s.

1,000,000 bytes from SSD in 12.245 us (ridiculous amount of significant figures) is 81 GB/s.

Disk seek in 1.649384 ms (ridiculous amount of significant figures) means we now have 36,000 RPM HDDs.

Read 1,000,000 bytes from HDD in 358.968 us (ridiculous amount of significant figures) is 3 GB/s.

Every single one of these numbers is wildly incorrect. This page is unequivocal anti-knowledge.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47196505

[2] https://brenocon.com/dean_perf.html
by leoqa | 2026-02-28 17:49:37+00:00
The higher velocity ends up bottlenecking on actual product decisions, deployments, testing etc. Before AI was generally blocked on the design approval, PR cycles, flaking tests etc. AI just helps me endure the pain of legacy code easier.

In my own personal projects I’m flying with AI. I know what I’m doing, I know how I would implement the code. Now I can just save the labor of typing the boilerplate.
by richk449 | 2026-02-28 17:50:03+00:00
This authorizes an attack on Iran?

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This joint resolution may be cited as the ‘‘Authorization for Use of Military Force’’.
SEC. 2. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.
(a) IN GENERAL.—That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.
by ruszki | 2026-02-28 17:50:13+00:00
I don't understand how some people decide here, who the good programmers are. A lot of people reminded me a guy from West Palm Beach, who votes on elections solely on the principle of who has more "fame". Paul Graham is famous for sure (at least in HN circles), but I never considered him an exceptional or good programmer at all. So I always interpreted his words with a hefty amount of grain of salt. And sometimes some comments have a list of "good" coders, then half of them is like these famous, but not good ones.
by ffsm8 | 2026-02-28 17:50:56+00:00
The productivity boost entirely depends on the way the software was written.

Brownfield legacy projects with god classes and millions of lines of code which need to behave coherently across multiple channels- without actually having anything linking them from the written code? That shit is not even gonna get a 20% boost, you'll almost always be quicker on your own - what you do get is a fatigue bonus, by which I mean you'll invest yourself less for the same amount of output, while getting slightly slower because nobody I've ever interacted with is able to keep such code bases in their mind sufficiently to branch out to multiple agents.

On projects that have been architected to be owned by an LLM? Modular modilith with hints linking all channels together etc? Yeah, you're gonna get a massive productivity boost and you also will be using your brain a shitton actually reasoning things out how you'll get the LLM to be able to actually work on the project beyond silly weekends toy project scope (100k-MM LOC)

But let's be real here, most employees are working with codebases like the former.

And I'm still learning how to do the second. While I've significantly improved since I've started one year ago, I wouldn't consider myself a master at it yet. I continue to try things out and frequently try things that I ultimately decide to revert or (best case) discard before merge to main simply because I ... Notice significant impediments modifying/adding features with a given architecture.

Seriously, this is currently bleeding Edge. Things have not even begun to settle yet.

We're way too early for the industry to normalize around llms yet
by NathanFlurry | 2026-02-28 17:51:13+00:00
We built everything with this architecture internally already at Rivet. It's less common than you might expect to have to query cross-DB in practice.

However, we are planning on building a query engine that can operate over multiple databases. One option we're considering is exposing Rivet SQLite as a DuckDB datasource: https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/data/data_sources
by DaylitMagic | 2026-02-28 17:51:21+00:00
I see what you're saying. Modularity and interfaces are really important between the different aspects of what's being developed. And it is worth putting time into the question "if another will use this, what would they potentially use it for, and why?". It doesn't mean that it needs to be built now - but considering that and ensuring that the planned code executes against that is a good strategy.
by scoofy | 2026-02-28 17:51:30+00:00
It is difficult to instigate regime change for democratically elected governments.

Iran has an unelected supreme leader.

Israel has a large portion of its population completely disenfranchised.

The US has a generally democratically elected government.

If one of these governments is going to fall during military instabilities, it would most likely be Iran. The US will have significant regime change in November if polling holds.
by thewebguyd | 2026-02-28 17:51:32+00:00
Anthropic isn’t the inventor here, they are a service provider. The government can easily go find a different service provider, or if none of them will allow their service to be used for war, then the government should develop their own tech.

Saying the government can just nationalize any company purely because they want to use the tech to kill people has pretty big implications and his historically against what this country stands for.
by mikepurvis | 2026-02-28 17:51:55+00:00
Of course they're correlated but it's obvious to anyone who has had a long term relationship unravel that the causes are always complicated and multi-layered.

I (man) was the one who pulled the trigger on my divorce but that followed years of conflict and withdrawing from both sides and ultimately you can point to specific milestones (who killed the bedroom, who opened a separate bank account first, who stepped out first, who wouldn't come back to counselling) but it's actually better for healing not to be preoccupied with the blame game and instead focus on where one's own growth opportunities are.
by SteveNuts | 2026-02-28 17:52:00+00:00
> Makes me a bit less terrified that untested vibe coded slop will sink the economy.

The difference is those spreadsheets were buried on a company internal fileshare and the blast radius would be contained to that organization.

Today vibe coders can type a prompt, click a button, and their thing is exposed directly to the internet and ready to suck up any data someone uploads.
by tlogan | 2026-02-28 17:52:23+00:00
What do you mean by “toothless”?

I was thinking more along the lines of Japan or South Korea. Militarily restrained, but prosperous and strong.

I understand that recent military actions have often made things worse, not better. I am just trying to stay optimistic. From what I know, many Iranians are not enthusiastic about religion controlling law and politics.
by _pdp_ | 2026-02-28 17:52:27+00:00
Everything in this post stems from the assumption that you already know what you're doing, which is probably true for things you've built before. But I hope we can agree that you can't spec out something you have no clue how to build, let alone write the tests before you've even explored the boundaries of the problem space. That's completely unreasonable.

My second point is that this approach is fundamentally wrong for AI-first development. If the cost of writing code is approaching zero, there's no point investing resources to perfect a system in one shot. What matters more is how fast you can explore the edges. You can now spin up five agents to implement five different versions of the thing you're building and simply pick the best one.

In our shop, we have hundreds of agents working on various problems at any given time. Most of the code gets discarded. What we accept to merge are the good parts.
by samhclark | 2026-02-28 17:52:34+00:00
Personally, I've really enjoyed using bootc for both my personal laptop and my NAS.

I really like the NAS use case because I can build the ZFS kmods for that specific version of Fedora CoreOS in CI/CD. If there's any compatibility failure, then my NAS doesn't get an update and I get the CI/CD failed email. No downtime because of some kernel incompatibility.

For the laptop though, I feel like there's a better way that I haven't found. Some way not to require CI/CD, to build the next image and switch to it all locally. I haven't gone down that path yet, but it looks kinda like that Option 2 the author described. Maybe it's really just that easy.

I've really been enjoying this space.
by lukan | 2026-02-28 17:52:56+00:00
Of course there was a military plan for this since months, but that does not mean that plan was surely to be executed. (A likely option I assume)

What I find worrying is the standard tactic seems to be to do negotiations, let the other side assume there is hope for a other solution - and then attack hard all of a sudden. Already the second time. It might be effective short term, but it erodes what is left of trust negotiating with the US.
by bogzz | 2026-02-28 17:53:23+00:00
The trade-off is worth it in my opinion when you are in a time crunch to deliver a demo, or are asked to test out an idea for a new feature (also in a time crunch).

The hope being that if the feature were to be kept or the demo fleshed out, developers would need to shape and refactor the project as per newly discovered requirements, or start from scratch having hopefully learnt from the agentic rush.

To me, it always boils down to LLMs being probabilistic models which can do more of the same that has been done thousands of times, but also exhibit emergent reasoning-like properties that allow them to combine patterns sometimes. It's not actual reasoning, it's a facsimile of reasoning. The bigger the models, the better the RLHF and fine-tuning, the more useful they become but my intuition is that they'll always (LLMs) asymptotically try to approach actual reasoning without being able to get there.

So the notion of no-human-brain-in-the-loop programming is to me, a fool's errand. I do obviously hope I am right here, but we'll see. Ultimately you need accountability and for accountability you need human understanding. Trying to move fast without waiting for comprehension to catch up (which would most likely result in alternate, better approaches to solving the problem at hand) increases entropy and pushes problems further down the road.
by xg15 | 2026-02-28 17:53:26+00:00
> For around 280,000 years, roughly 95 percent of our history as Homo sapiens, we lived as hunter-gatherers.

OT, but I find this fact mindboggling whenever I read it.

Our way of timekeeping and general education emphasizes the last 2 millennia. Popular (highschool level) history usually goes back maybe 5-8. The furthest is maybe the end of the ice age ~14 millennia ago.

But then you learn there are still 270 millennia of human history left that we know almost nothing of...
by sigmoid10 | 2026-02-28 17:53:30+00:00
Not sure what you mean by "official." They call themselves that way:
https://www.war.gov/

It doesn't matter that there exists another name on some paper, when all official, ceremonial and public communications use this name. The old name is about as worthless as the constitution or the senate at this point. The executive branch has successfully taken over the country.
by WarmWash | 2026-02-28 17:53:49+00:00
I think it's a bit more nuance than that. The government (however good or bad, just bear with me) already has oversight mechanisms and already has laws in place to prevent mass surveillance and policy about autonomous killing.

So the governments stance is "We already have laws and procedures in place, we don't want and can't have a CEO to also be part of those checks"

I don't think this outcome would have been any different under a normal blue government either. Definitely with less mud slinging though.
by Klaster_1 | 2026-02-28 17:54:19+00:00
The article very much resonates with my experience past several months.

The project I work on has been steadily growing for years, but the amount of engineers taking care of it stayed same or even declined a bit. Most of features are isolated and left untouched for months unless something comes up.

So far, I managed growing scope by relying on tests more and more. Then I switched to exclusively developing against a simulator. Checking changes with real system become rare and more involved - when you have to check, it's usually the gnarliest parts.

Last year's, I noticed I can no longer answer questions about several features because despite working on those for a couple of months and reviewing PRs, I barely hold the details in my head soon afterwards. And this all even before coding agents penetrated deep into our process.

With agents, I noticed exactly what article talks about. Reviewing PR feels even more implicit, I have to exert deliberate effort because tacit knowledge of context didn't form yet and you have to review more than before - the stuff goes into one ear and out of another. My team mates report similar experience.

Currently, we are trying various approaches to deal with that, it it's still too early to tell. We now commit agent plans alongside code to maybe not lose insights gained during development. Tasks with vague requirements we'd implicitly understand most of previously are now a bottleneck because when you type requirements to an agent for planning immediately surface various issues you'd think of during backlog grooming. Skill MDs are often tacit knowledge dumps we previously kept distributed in less formal ways. Agents are forcing us to up our process game and discipline, real people benefit from that too. As article mentioned, I am looking forward to tools picking some of that slack.

One other thing that surprised me was that my eng manager was seemingly oblivious to my ongoing complains about growing cognitive load and confusion rate. It's as if the concept was alien to them or they could comprehend that other people handle that at different capacity than them.
by Brian_K_White | 2026-02-28 17:54:23+00:00
Man it would rule so much if programmers could manage not to be assholes by default so much of the time.

It's ironic that the more ignorant one is the one calling another ignorant.

Alright I've had my fun with the name-calling. I will now explain the stunningly obvious. Not a thing anyone should have to for someone so sharp as yourself but there we are...

For someone to produce that text after growing up in an English speaking environment, they would indeed be comically inept communicators. Which is why the more reasonable assumption is that English is not in fact their native language.

Not merely the more generous assumption. Being generous by default would be a better character trait than not, but still arguably a luxury. But also simply the more reasonable assumption by plain numbers and reasoning. So, not only were you a douche, you had to go out of your way to select a less likely possibility to make the douche you wanted to be fit the situation.

Literate programmers indeed.
by georgemcbay | 2026-02-28 17:54:51+00:00
> Although I'm starting to sound like Star Treks view of the future, which may not achievable

Also worth noting that even in Star Trek, which is viewed as a utopian vision of the future, the sort of societal changes you are talking about only came after humanity almost wiped itself out in a third world war (which coincidentally happened to start in 2026)
by surgical_fire | 2026-02-28 17:54:53+00:00
Are we going to pretend Israel has no genocidaire ambitions against basically every neighboring country? What do you think ideas of "greater Israel" are?

Hell, the US ambassator to Israel basically admitted to it in anç recent interview with Tucker Carlson.

Also, lest we forget, the US has a huge laundry list of supporting insurgencies and actively sponsoring coups everywhere. Especially in Latin America.

To be frank, Iran sounds pretty tame in comparison. If your argument is that they are evil, I would counter they are definitely the lesser of two evils.

So.... Go Persia?
by DaylitMagic | 2026-02-28 17:55:03+00:00
Some random (hopefully additive and helpful) thoughts:

Many companies have older code bases / databases that can be somewhat well defined (and somewhat not). If things have been slowly iterating over 35 years, there's a lot of undocumented edge behavior that may occur; it may be beneficial to have a step before Edge Case Catalog where there's some kind of prompting to catalogue how the inputs and outputs work, and then find the different inputs and outputs - and then confirm that with Input A and Output A that it works as expected. (Legacy systems often have weird orchestration that nobody remembers.)

(Sub-note: This is somewhat part of the provable properties catalog; while this step could be placed there, it would require a re-run of edge case catalog build potentially, which isn't a bad thing.)

A small note that I personally think is a good idea is better code commenting than has been outlined here - the spec itself should be woven into the code with potentially slightly over-commenting for each aspect, code spec gets lost. The code itself should serve as context, especially in the TDD stage.

I think it's implicit but may be worth overtly stating that for the Code Quality check in Phase 3 that it also checks on a zero-trust basis, and doesn't include things like hardcoded keys.

I'm not sure what Chainlink is (sorry!) but I like the ideas outlined around the decomposition - but it misses stringing everything together end-to-end in the way outlined here (it asks to create each part, but never actually weaves the whole together).

Something not covered - is sequencing work and decomposition of work. A spec can create multiple dependencies within itself, requiring things to be worked on in a specific order.
by vlovich123 | 2026-02-28 17:55:13+00:00
MoE is not suited for passing because it’s essentially a random expert per token. It only improves throughput because you reduce the memory bandwidth requirements for generating a token since 1/n of the weights are accessed per token (but a different 1/n on each loop).

Now shrinking them sure, but I’ve seen nothing that indicates you can just page weights in and out without cratering your performance like you would with a non MoE model
by wat10000 | 2026-02-28 17:55:31+00:00
Nuclear weapons have a very brief transition from “everything is fine and nothing bad has happened” to “we’re completely fucked.” The fact that nothing has happened yet isn’t very reassuring to me with all the ways things can go wrong. The threat of retaliation certainly puts a damper on a first strike, but there’s always the possibility of a mistake, someone feeling backed into a corner, or not believing the consequences, or just going a little crazy. The more countries that have them, the more likely this becomes.
by kyboren | 2026-02-28 17:55:40+00:00
60% is actually very close to 93%. To go from natural uranium (<1% U235) to 60% represents the vast majority of the effort. From 60% to 93% is actually quite quick; most of the material is already U235. And they already have enough to build maybe a dozen bombs.

They also have (had?) a very active ballistic missile program, and have conducted implosion experiments.

The constellation of evidence is quite clear: Iran is a threshold nuclear state with all the pieces necessary to credibly threaten the region (and soon the US homeland) with nuclear weapons.
by trinsic2 | 2026-02-28 17:55:51+00:00
> it's no longer a matter of choice, you have to do it too

You know, there are plenty of examples where people in positions of power choose different paths of escalation. I doesn't always need to be liner tit for tat. Some times you need to step back and look at the larger picture and decide of the escalation is worth the risk for all of humanity.

There is a video about game theory [0] that describes this problem very clearly. You have better outcomes when you make decisions outside the direct course of escalation.

Please don't talk in absolutes about these things, you have an opinion. I accept that, but its not as black and white as you think

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM
by QuantumAtom | 2026-02-28 17:55:55+00:00
I don't understand. I was under the impression that this a tech site. Why is there so much politics on here? What is all the rage bait. Are these bots or people who have inject politics and rage bait into every single place. Seriously, why did Mein Kampf have 40 articles on Hacker News last year? Whatever you think of the Israel/Palestine conflict, maybe there can be places or website where some of us just want tech articles and interests.
Show HN: Voice-coded a Doom-scroll Hacker News (Twitter-style feed)
by imprisonedmind | 2026-02-28 17:55:58+00:00
Built a mobile-friendly Hacker News clone where stories and comments flow in an infinite, Doom-scrollable timeline (think Twitter/X feed meets HN).

Voice-coded the entire website from scratch using my yapboard voice keyboard + OpenAI Codex via a Discord bridge bot. Screen-mirrored with scrcpy for real-time testing. Forgot to turn on mic during the live build, so added narration afterward.

Demo (try on mobile): https://hackernews.lukestephens.co.za
Full build video (voice coding timelapse): https://youtu.be/RRF-F5jDS50

Tools: scrcpy, yapboard.app, Codex Discord bridge (https://github.com/imprisonedmind/codex-discord-bridge)

Curious to hear thoughts, especially on the voice-coding workflow or the endless-scroll UX for HN content!
by RyanOD | 2026-02-28 17:56:03+00:00
"so that they can extricate as much personal wealth and influence as possible"

I've always thought this. If you're running something like OpenAI, it really doesn't matter to you if the company fails because you're already comfortably wealthy. But, it sure would be nice to be worth another 10x billion - though I'm not totally sure why.

So these individuals perceive a large upside and no downside. It's more of a hobby than a job. Like learning to play piano. It would be amazing to be a badass pianist...but not a big deal if that never happens.