MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sgarland | 2026-02-08 15:59:45+00:00
> So you read every line. And reading code you didn't write, that was generated by a system that doesn't understand your codebase's history or your team's conventions, is exhausting work.

I’ve noticed this strongly on the database side of things. Your average dev’s understanding of SQL is unfortunately shaky at best (which I find baffling; you can learn 95% of what you need in an afternoon, and probably get by from referencing documentation for the rest), and AI usage has made this 10x worse.

It honestly feels unreasonable and unfair to me. By requesting my validation of your planned schema or query that an AI generated, you’re tacitly admitting that a. You know it’s likely that it has problems b. You don’t understand what it’s written, but you’re requesting a review anyway. This is outsourcing the cognitive load that you should be bearing as a normal part of designing software.

What makes it even worse is MySQL, because LLMs seem to consistently think that it can do things that it can’t (or is at least highly unlikely to choose to), like using multiple indices for a single table access. Also, when pushed on issues like this, I’ve seen them make even more serious errors, like suggesting a large composite index which it claimed could be used for both the left-most prefix and right-most prefix. That’s not how a B{-,+}tree works, my dude, and of all things, I would think AI would have rock-solid understanding of DS&A.
by ibaikov | 2026-02-08 15:59:48+00:00
Indeed. When I was just starting every blog and tweet screamed micro-management sucks. It does if the manager does this all the time. But sometimes it is extremely important and prevents disasters.

I guess best managers just develop the hunch and know when to do this and when to ask engineers for smallest details to potentially develop different solutions. You have to be technical enough to do this
Show HN: Open-Source "Junior AGI"
by Moriarty2026 | 2026-02-08 15:59:53+00:00
https://github.com/dakotalock/holygrailopensource

Readme is included.

What it does: This is my passion project. It is an end to end development pipeline that can run autonomously. It also has stateful memory, an in app IDE, live internet access, an in app internet browser, a pseudo self improvement loop, and more.

This is completely open source and free to use.

If you use this, please credit the original project. I’m open sourcing it to try to get attention and hopefully a job in the software development industry.

Target audience: Software developers

Comparison: It’s like replit if replit has stateful memory, an in app IDE, an in app internet browser, and improved the more you used it. It’s like replit but way better lol

Codex can pilot this autonomously for hours at a time (see readme), and has. The core LLM I used is Gemini because it’s free, but this can be changed to GPT very easily with very minimal alterations to the code (simply change the model used and the api call function).
by falcor84 | 2026-02-08 16:00:04+00:00
I'm not saying that it's a good idea, but the obvious way would be with evolution: Give each agent its own wallet, rewarding it for a job well done and penalizing it for a poor job. Then if it runs out of money, it's "out of the game", but if it earns enough to it can spawn off another agent with similar characteristics, and give it some of its money.
by cat_plus_plus | 2026-02-08 16:01:10+00:00
I am TL of an Android app with dozens of screens that expose hundreds of different distinct functions. My task is to expose all of these functions as appfunctions that can be called by an LLM in response to free form user requests. My current plan is to build a little LangGraph pipeline where first step is AI documenting all functions in each app's fragment, second step is extracting them into app functions, then refactoring fragment to call app functions etc. And by build I mean Gemini will build it for me and I will ask for some refinement and edit prompts.

I also like writing code by hand, I just don't want to maintain other people's code. LMK if you need a job referral to hand refactor 20K lines of code in 2 months. Do you also enjoy working on test coverage?
by linamagr | 2026-02-08 16:01:27+00:00
Alexander Berger, COO of Bolt.new, is one of the most humble founders I've talked to. Two things from our conversation really stuck with me.

They spent four years with under $1M ARR before the breakthrough. How many of us would keep going that long?

Their original 7 employees, including Alex, stayed together the entire time.

Having tried to build a product myself, I know how hard retention is. Some of these people were probably making minimum wage. Holding a team together through four years of near-zero traction, saying no to every temptation elsewhere, before any sign it would work, is by itself an unbelievable feat.

The $40M ARR story gets all the attention, but I think the real story is those four quiet years before it.
by wazHFsRy | 2026-02-08 16:01:31+00:00
For me, it feels good if I get it right. But unfortunately, there are many times, even with plan mode and everything specced, where after a few hours of chipping away and refactoring the problem by the agent, I realised that I can throw the whole thing away and do over. Then it feels horrible. It feels especially horrible because it feels like you have done nothing for that time and learned nothing.
by afavour | 2026-02-08 16:01:49+00:00
I think this comparison isn’t quite correct. The downside with carpentry is that you only ever produce one of the thing you’re making. Factory woodwork can churn out multiple copies of the same thing in a way hand carpentry never can. There is a hard limit on output and output has a direct relationship to how much you sell.

Code isn’t really like that. Hand written code scales just like AI written code does. While some projects are limited by how fast code can be written it’s much more often things like gathering requirements that limits progress. And software is rarely a repeated, one and done thing. You iterate on the existing product. That never happens with furniture.
by panarky | 2026-02-08 16:02:31+00:00
Some people like to spin their own wool, weave their own cloth, sew their own clothes.

A few even make a good living by selling their artisanal creations.

Good for them!

It's great when people can earn a living doing what they love.

But wool spinning and cloth weaving are automated and apparel is mass produced.

There will always be some skilled artisans who do it by hand, but the vast majority of decent jobs in textile production are in design, managing machines and factories, sales and distribution.
by hedora | 2026-02-08 16:02:43+00:00
It's probably easier to build a solar farm than prepare new land for hay production at this point.

Have you noticed the price of beef going up? It's because we're losing arable land to climate change. It takes a large number of high quality acres to raise a cow on grass.

That's been getting less and less feasible over time between extreme weather and erosion, so the cows get hay instead.

Hay production in places like Texas is disrupted by drought every few years, which means that ranchers have to sell their cattle at a loss or let the cows starve in the fields (assuming they don't die of heat stroke - the cows and the farmers).

After a few bad cycles like that, the ranchers start selling off land, so there aren't enough cows even in good years. Presumably this is bad for hay farmers, since demand attenuates down to what it would be in a drought year.

That brings us to 2026. It's pretty clear what's coming next.
by utopiah | 2026-02-08 16:02:48+00:00
I'm honestly not worried. My laptop battery is at ~70% health, same for phone. It's not great but it's enough to be useful.

Hopefully current companies failing, and yes closing down, might in fact be the opportunity for new companies focusing precisely on different dimension, namely repairability rather than top specs. I have in mind MNT, Pine64, Librem, FairPhone, or projects like LiFePO4wered/Pi+ or battery adapters.

There are new actors that are not computer manufacturers but precisely reconsider the value chain instead of solely focusing on higher specs.
by philistine | 2026-02-08 16:03:35+00:00
And what about the M3 Ultra, that sits at number 3 and came out ten months ago? Why was it not beaten five months ago? Might I add that the M3 Ultra is on an older node than the M5. And what about the A19 Pro, which is better at single core than every desktop chip in the world, and happens to be inside a phone!

Apple has the best silicon team in the world. They choose perf per watt over pure perf, which means they don't win on multi-core, but they're simply the best in the world in the most complicated, difficult, and impossible metric to game: single core perf.
by EasyMark | 2026-02-08 16:03:39+00:00
are you using a VPN? that happens often to me. might be a combo of that and ublock origin. I'm guessing archive gets a ton of attacks from VPN so they probably just have rules to captcha any VPN address. I have a local proxy on rpi setup and then a container in firefox that lets me use that to quickly swap to a proxy that uses my real IP. very handy for shit like this.
by jairuhme | 2026-02-08 16:03:45+00:00
> Things that can cleanly be expressed in 1-2 sentences are whole paragraphs

Perhaps the author just likes to write? I've only just recently started blogging more, but I unexpectedly started to really enjoy writing and am hoping to have my posts be more of a "story". Different people have different writing styles. It's not a problem, it's just that you prefer reading posts that are straight to the point.
by eddythompson80 | 2026-02-08 16:04:33+00:00
You can also configure a policy for it [0] and there are many oss tools for auto converting your workflow into a pinned hash ones. I guess OP is upset it’s not in gh CLI? Maybe a valid feature to have there even if it’s just a nicety

[0] https://github.blog/changelog/2025-08-15-github-actions-poli...
by DivingForGold | 2026-02-08 16:04:34+00:00
I doubt Elon cares much since his huge win (as reported) was getting the Pentagon and US Gov't to adopt his platform as the preferred one, regardless of the alleged porn problem with X. Not withstanding that Elon's satellite network rules the skies over planet earth for the foreseeable future, and the US military regards that and Space X's highly successful ability to move serious payloads to orbit and around the world as rather valuable assets to be involved with. Seems much of the world has polarized into the left representing Europe and Canada, and the conservative right currently in power in the US, Hungary, Italy and Argentina. However, significant right wing coalitions are now gaining strength (arguably through anti-immigration backlash) in the Netherlands, Finland, Slovakia, Croatia, Poland, Germany, Austria, France and Sweden.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-02-08 16:06:02+00:00
You're just repeating your assumptions - "taxpayer-funded state-developed is bad", but "marketplace competitively" good. I'm not convinced.

You're not engaging with the sovereignty aspect - "compete globally" isn't the main goal at all as I said above, you're just restating you misconception. And so this part comes across as pure projection:

> You seem to be arguing for the sake of argument while avoiding the substance of my point
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-08 16:06:04+00:00
> I don’t feel like the boss is hot to replace me with power tools. Or to lay off half my team because we have power tools now.

That has more to do with how much demand there is for what you're doing. With software eating the world and hardware constraints becoming even more visible due to the chips situation, we can expect that there will be plenty of work for SWE's who are able to drive their coding agents effectively. Being the "top" (reasoning) or the "bottom" half is a matter of choice - if you slack off and are not highly committed to delivering quality product, you end up doing the "bottom" part and leaving the robot in the driver's seat.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2026-02-08 16:06:40+00:00
Never heard the follow-up, so good to hear that it was potentially less hazardous than the initial reporting.

However, I am still mixed on the interpretation. I do not think the FDA is as good as say the NTSB, but I do think they will take lessons learned from a bad outcome. New medical products are likely to undergo additional scrutiny on any kinds of foams/solvents/whatever that are directly in the airway path. It is only because it is such a heavily regulated product that the entire product chain had to be stamped, certified, and traced so that such an investigation was possible. In a theoretical fly-by-night product offering, SKUs might be changing daily as the vendor can shave pennies off of the development price.
by dancemethis | 2026-02-08 16:06:45+00:00
Hype-based ones like what's described in the original blog post are a nightmare. And I don't even need to pull the privacy card; the UX is already daunting enough.

A good benchmark I have is my wife, who didn't grow messing around with computers and a tinkerer's mindset: if she's taking more than a couple of tries or days to tinker and start living with something new, I need either to prep a better backup plan, or to cut it off. Very specialized stuff (like light bulb colors) are still too expensive to have more manual-like controls, but almost everything toggleable should have something one can press.
by nayuki | 2026-02-08 16:06:54+00:00
> no-unsigned-integers [...] still bothers me

I like the lack of unsigned integers in Java. It simplifies the language while only removing a tiny bit of functionality. You can emulate almost all unsigned math using signed operations, whether you use a wider bit width or even the same bit width. The only really tricky operations are unsigned division and unsigned parseInt()/toString(), which Java 8 added to smooth things over.

https://www.nayuki.io/page/unsigned-int-considered-harmful-f...
by jredwards7 | 2026-02-08 16:08:16+00:00
This is the right instinct. LLMs are great at proposing actions, but they're fundamentally unreliable at enforcing deterministic invariants.

Math is the obvious example, but schema validation falls into the same bucket. If an agent outputs structured JSON, the question "does this conform to the declared schema?" should have exactly one answer. Same schema + same payload → same result, every time, regardless of runtime, language, or retry.

Once you treat that layer as deterministic infrastructure instead of model behavior, a few things get easier:

• retries stop producing inconsistent side effects
• downstream systems can trust that validation actually ran
• you can audit what passed structural checks independently of the model

Semantic correctness is still a separate problem (models or domain rules are needed there) but offloading the structural layer removes a lot of accidental complexity.

One example of what that deterministic validation layer looks like as a standalone API: https://docs.rapidtools.dev/openapi.yaml
by alephnerd | 2026-02-08 16:08:18+00:00
Turns out using wolf warrior diplomacy [0][1][2][3][4] to influence domestic politics severely backfires, just like we are slowly learning.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-unleashes-wolf-war...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/russian-b...

[2] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-russia-discuss-ukr...

[3] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinese-airlines-...

[4] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/china-curbs-rare-...
by pixl97 | 2026-02-08 16:08:34+00:00
The motivations of the people running the capitalistic system is making more money. Remember the entire mantra of greed is good? Group interest can be a super-human entity that you can get caught in a loop of serving even though serving said entity is not in your best interest. Humans have only been 'mostly' in control of this because there was no other entities capable of said control themselves.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
by Saris | 2026-02-08 16:08:51+00:00
Yes in my opinion the benefit of smart home stuff is not controlling things from my phone or tablet or some touchscreen on the wall. But instead having the same physical switches and controls as one normally would, with the ability to automate things in the background.

Smart home setups where a failure stops you from turning on a light or opening the garage is the worst possible combination.

The trend of smart devices that require internet access to function even when on the same local network as my phone or smart home system are a good example of very poorly designed products.
by r-johnv | 2026-02-08 16:09:39+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laser_types

Wavelengths of commercially available lasers. Laser types with distinct laser lines are shown above the wavelength bar, while below are shown lasers that can emit in a wavelength range. The height of the lines and bars gives an indication of the maximal power/pulse energy commercially available, while the color codifies the type of laser material
by echelon | 2026-02-08 16:10:21+00:00
It's not dogshit if you're steering.

That's what so many of you are not getting.

Look at the pretty pictures AI generates. That's where we are with code now. Except you have ComfyUI instead of ChatGPT. You can work with precision.

I'm a 500k TC senior SWE. I write six nines, active-active, billion dollar a day systems. I'm no stranger to writing thirty page design documents. These systems can work in my domain just fine.
by efilife | 2026-02-08 16:10:24+00:00
I found a contradicting statement where she said that she doesn't mind her picture being used in tech. Maybe even in the wikipedia article you got this quote from. I don't have the time to find it right now but here for example she says she's proud of the picture: https://archive.is/fIRoG

"Lena doesn’t harbor any resentment toward Sawchuk and his imitators for how they appropriated her image; the only note of regret she expressed was that she wasn’t better compensated. In her view, the photograph is an immense accomplishment that just happened to take on a life of its own. “I’m really proud of that picture,” she said."
by cat_plus_plus | 2026-02-08 16:10:41+00:00
Good for artists I guess, I wouldn't know because I am not one. The best I can manage is drawing a stick figure of a cat. Years back I was working on a Mac app and I needed an icon. So I talked to an artist and she asked for $5K to make one for me. I couldn't justify spending so much on a hobby that I didn't know if it would go anywhere so I wrote a little app that procedurally generated me some basic sucky icon. I am sure Gordon Ramsay is also not impressed with cooking skills of my microwave, I just don't know how his objections practically relate to getting me fed daily.
by ticulatedspline | 2026-02-08 16:10:48+00:00
Taking the narrative as presented in this article seems plausible Epstein just crumpled it up and threw it out. He just wanted a way to further endear himself to Noam in order to have someone credible vouching for him. Work like this is a good way to do that, like that old Ben Franklin trick of having someone do something for you.
by pixl97 | 2026-02-08 16:11:16+00:00
Misconception is not really the right word here along with the word 'need'.

It comes down to if the people in power think they are playing a zero sum game and are driven by greed. We see plenty of dictatorships that are very resource wealthy and yet their society suffers in abject poverty. Said leaders have zero care about making their peoples life better and will gladly kill them wholesale if they become problematic.
by chasd00 | 2026-02-08 16:11:22+00:00
Claude code makes react + tailwindcss + whatever component library actually bearable for me. I can just “make a navbar on the left hand side of the screen like vscode has” and it mostly does it, a few tweaks and I have what I want. I waste so much time on that stuff doing it by hand it drives me crazy.

Also “pull records from table X and display them in a data grid. Include a “New” button and associated functionality respecting column constraints in the database. Also add an edit and delete button for each row in the table”. God, it’s really nice to have an LLM get that 85% of the way done in maybe 2 min.
by cstdr | 2026-02-08 16:11:43+00:00
Did you even read what I wrote? It did not work. Apple even has an FAQ page for that error (without any useful solution). The suggestion to create an account via Apple Music app is useless since all it does is create an account which must be migrated via browser first (with the same problem). You can also find large threads on Reddit about the problem. Of course the availability of such a sign-up flow suggests it should be possibly, but having it broken for months is not a good look.
by veganmosfet | 2026-02-08 16:12:07+00:00
Agree for a general AI assistant, which has the same permissions and access as the assisted human => Disaster. I experimented with OpenClaw and it has a lot of issues. The best: prompt injection attacks are "out of scope" from the security policy == user's problem.
However, I found the latest models to have much better safety and instruction following capabilities. Combined with other security best practices, this lowers the risk.
by jmull | 2026-02-08 16:12:30+00:00
> The process of writing code helps internalize the context and is easier for my brain to think deeply about it.

True, and you really do need to internalize the context to be a good software developer.

However, just because coding is how you're used to internalizing context doesn't mean it's the only good way to do it.

(I've always had a problem with people jumping into coding when they don't really understand what they are doing. I don't expect LLMs to change that, but the pernicious part of the old way is that the code -- much of it developed in ignorance -- became too entrenched/expensive to change in significant ways. Perhaps that part will change? Hopefully, anyway.)
by NBJack | 2026-02-08 16:12:31+00:00
Ugh, yes. Normally, you can theoretically pair someone up with a stronger engineer and watch as they learn and grow through their mistakes, while the stronger engineer keeps them on the proverbial straight and narrow with what they produce, through code reviews, documents, etc.

But now, I can't trust any of the models to be that reliable. I can't delegate that responsibility. And since context and prompting is such a fickle thing, I can't really trust any of them to learn from their mistakes, either.
by woodruffw | 2026-02-08 16:12:32+00:00
I find this confusing: I can see the value in having an LLM assist you in developing a CI/CD workflow, but why would you want one involved in any continuous degree with your CI/CD? Perhaps it’s not as bad as that given that there’s a “compilation” phase, but the value add there isn’t super clear either (why would I check in both the markdown and the generated workflow; should I always regenerate from the markdown when I need changes, etc.).

Given GitHub’s already lackluster reputation around security in GHA, I think I’d like to see them address some of GHA’s fundamental weaknesses before layering additional abstractions atop it.
by beAbU | 2026-02-08 16:12:36+00:00
I think you can still do it at the 'DMV', this was possible last time I renewed my license about 3 years ago (I don't live in SA anymore tho).

But the eye test machines often broken, so the advice was always to get the test done at an optometrist and they fill out a special form that you take with you when renewing your license.