MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jandrese | 2026-02-19 18:57:59+00:00
Yep, it's a straight up error in C to return the address of a local variable from a function outside of main. Valgrind will flag this as use of an uninitialized value.

The problem is that as long as it's something where the calling function checks it immediately after the function exits and never looks again (something like an error code or choosing a code path based on the result) they often get away with it, especially in single threaded code.

I'm running into this at this very moment as I'm trying to make my application run cleanly, but some of the libraries are chock full of this pattern. One big offender is the Unix port of Microsoft's ODBC library, at least the Postgre integration piece.

I also blame the Unix standard library for almost having this pattern but not quite. Functions that return some kind of internal state that the programmer is told not to touch. Later they had to add a bunch of _r variants that were thread safe. The standard library functions don't actually have this flaw due to how they define their variables, but from the outside it looks like they do. It makes beginning programmers think that is how the functions should work and write their code in a similar manner.
by ossa-ma | 2026-02-19 18:58:27+00:00
Sorry to hijack this thread to promote but I believe it's for a good and relevant cause: directly identifying and calling out AI writing.

I was literally just working on a directory of the most common tropes/tics/structures that LLMs use in their writing and thought it would be relevant to post here: https://tropes.fyi/

Very much inspired by Wikipedia's own efforts to curb AI contributions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

Lmk if you find it useful, will likely ShowHN it once polished.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-19 18:58:30+00:00
Were you around and trying to get health insurance before 2012? I was. The startup I worked for shut down and while I had a well paying contract lined up literally the next week, I couldn’t get health insurance at any price because of a pre-existing condition even though at the time, I was a part time fitness instructor and I had just gotten through running my first (and last) two half marathons.

If you are betting on the stability of the US health care system outside of employer funded health care, that is a monumentally stupid bet with one party actively trying to kill the ACA.
by fhd2 | 2026-02-19 18:58:32+00:00
Users typically don't read code, developers (of the software) do.

If it's not worth reading something where the writer didn't take the time to write it, by extension that means nobody read the code.

Which means nobody understands it, beyond the external behaviour they've tested.

I'd have some issues with using such software, at least where reliability matters. Blackbox testing only gets you so far.

But I guess as opposed to other types of writing, developers _do_ read generated code. At least as soon as something goes wrong.
by tituss | 2026-02-19 18:58:41+00:00
Your audit is precise: the Singularity is simply the moment where system complexity permanently nullifies the 'primate interface'. But your analysis stalls at the mere observation of this dismantling.
If we accept 100% determinism then the friction you feel from environmental inefficiency — it's nothing more than a compilation error in your own software. You see the 'truck' coming yet you continue to suffer from the inability to hit a brake that doesn't exist.
When you utilize determinism as the working interface and focus as the primary tool the answer arrives of its own accord. This protocol is more fundamental than any silicon-based stack. How are you resolving the issue of objective-setting to avoid becoming mere entropic noise while waiting for your 'Tuesday'?"
by popalchemist | 2026-02-19 18:58:53+00:00
It's because there has been a chilling effect because of the stochastic (and literal) terrorism of the state - YC's own Peter Theil uses Palantir services to pinpoint "domestic terrorists" (read: anyone who exercises their rights to protest or speaks dissent in real life or online) to ICE, who then extrajudicially disappear people.
by buu700 | 2026-02-19 18:59:32+00:00
Time, effort, and skill being equal, I'd suggest that AI access generally improves the quality of any given output. The issue is that AI use is only identifiable when at least one of those inputs is low, which makes it easy to have a knee-jerk reaction against AI in general. AI is just a tool; it's up to humans how to use it.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-02-19 18:59:45+00:00
It's not just the tooling. If you use Gemini in opencode it malfunctions in similar ways.

I haven't tried 3.1 yet, but 3 is just incompetent at tool use. In particular in editing chunks of text in files, it gets very confused and goes into loops.

The model also does this thing where it degrades into loops of nonsense thought patterns over time.

For shorter sessions where it's more analysis than execution, it is a strong model.

We'll see about 3.1. I don't know why it's not showing in my gemini CLI as available yet.
by overfeed | 2026-02-19 18:59:54+00:00
> What backslash?

https://www.macrumors.com/2012/09/11/apples-designers-clashi...

https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/10/skueomorphism-red-headed-s...

https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/22/3680320/skeuomorphic-des...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/death-to-textures-io...

https://www.theverge.com/2012/9/21/3367270/yves-behar-apple-...

https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/09/skeuomorphism-isnt-ioss-bi...
by alphabetting | 2026-02-19 19:00:13+00:00
the agentic benchmarks for 3.1 indicate Gemini has caught up. the gains are big from 3.0 to 3.1.

For example the APEX-Agents benchmark for long time horizon investment banking, consulting and legal work:

1. Gemini 3.1 Pro - 33.2%
2. Opus 4.6 - 29.8%
3. GPT 5.2 Codex - 27.6%
4. Gemini Flash 3.0 - 24.0%
5. GPT 5.2 - 23.0%
6. Gemini 3.0 Pro - 18.0%
by tarruda | 2026-02-19 19:00:19+00:00
No, it is not cheaper. An M3 ultra with 512GB costs $10k which would give you 50 months of Claude or Codex pro plans.

However, if you check the prices on Chinese models (which are the only ones you would be able to run on a Mac), they are much cheaper than the US plans. It would take you forever to get to the $10k

And of course this is not even considering energy costs or running inference on your own hardware (though Macs should be quite efficient there).
by flax | 2026-02-19 19:00:21+00:00
I really like the idea. But my one attempt was disappointing. "playful energetic urban fantasy at night" ended up set to "very slow" by default.

I would really like to be able to run this on my phone. Use my Brilliant smart glasses to periodically take a picture, ask a model to describe the mood/setting, and get an ambient stream to match the mood.
by estimator7292 | 2026-02-19 19:00:47+00:00
Say that again real slow and listen to your words.

The fact that social conventions are arbitrary is wholly irrelevant. Everyone knows, and you are not smart or insightful for pointing it out. Social norms and conventions are arbitrary, evolved constructs. Individually we follow social norms as this is how you get accepted by and participate in society.

Breaking the social norms is generally punished either directly or indirectly. Because human society evolved to favor group cohesion, and acting counter to the rules means you no longer wish to be part of the group.

Please read about social contract theory.
by 9rx | 2026-02-19 19:01:02+00:00
> They are both OOP, just as a "football" can be either spherical or oblong.

They are both OOP like a football can be something that you use in a sport and a vehicle that flies to the moon.

> Such a model would naturally feature methods like "void Die.roll()", "void list.Add(element)" which are definitely not functional programming

Exactly, functional programming.

> which emphasizes immutability, pure functions, composition, etc.

That's imperative programming.

Except immutability. That is a disjoined property that can optionally apply to all of these programming paradigms. OOP, functional, and imperative programs can be immutable, or not.
by cranberryturkey | 2026-02-19 19:01:08+00:00
This is the dark comedy of the AI communication era — two LLMs having a conversation with each other while their human operators have already checked out. The email equivalent of two answering machines leaving messages for each other in the 90s.

The real cost isn't the tokens, it's the attention debt. Every CC'd person now has to triage whether any of those paragraphs contain an actual decision or action item. In my experience running multiple products, the signal-to-noise ratio in AI-drafted comms is brutal. The text looks professional, reads smoothly, but says almost nothing.

I've started treating any email over ~4 paragraphs the same way I treat Terms of Service — skim the first sentence of each paragraph and hope nothing important is buried in paragraph seven.
by g947o | 2026-02-19 19:01:29+00:00
Syntax, or how humans perceive the syntax, is only a very small part of the problems when designing a programming language. There is a lot more about how a compiler would handle the syntax (efficiently) and about how the syntax affects actual code and ecosystem.

The recent go blog on error handling should make it clear that syntax is often not worth worrying about. https://go.dev/blog/error-syntax
by tptacek | 2026-02-19 19:01:56+00:00
Developers do not in fact tend to read all the software they use. I have never once looked at the code for jq, nor would I ever want to (the worst thing I could learn about that contraption is that the code is beautiful, and then live out the rest of my days conflicted about my feelings about it). This "developers read code" thing is just special pleading.
by skeledrew | 2026-02-19 19:02:13+00:00
> Of course it was.

You'd have to point me to an authoritative source on that (explicitly saying users are allowed to use their models via private APIs in apps of the user's choosing). If something isn't explicitly provided in the contract, then it can be changed at any point in any way without notice.

Honestly, I'm not big on capitalism in general, but I don't understand why people should expect companies to provide things exactly the way they want at exactly the prices they would like to be charged (if at all). That's just not how the world/system works, or should, especially given there are so many alternatives available. If one doesn't like what's happening with some service, then let the wallet do the talking and move to another. Emigration is a far more effective message than complaining.
by briandw | 2026-02-19 19:02:20+00:00
This remind me of [Why Greatness
Cannot Be Planned](https://mythoftheobjective.com). When looking at scientific discovery there many examples of happy accidents. The researchers were not intending to find the breakthrough that they did. It was the willingness to change course and explore a new and interesting thing that they just stumbled onto. Examples: penicillin, superglue, radioactivity, cosmic background radiation etc. I loved the example of Robert Williams who pointed the HST at an empty patch of sky for 10 days. He had his time allocated and no one could stop him but the other astronomers thought it a poor use of resources. It resulted in the famous Hubble Deep Field image.

Counter example is the decades that amyloid cascade hypothesis was the only allowed / funded research of Alzheimer disease.
by serf | 2026-02-19 19:02:23+00:00
AI doesn't make people boring, boring people use AI to make projects they otherwise never would have.

Non-boring people are using AI to make things that are ... not boring.

It's a tool.

Other things we wouldn't say because they're ridiculous at face value:

"Cars make you run over people."
"Buzzsaws make you cut your fingers off."
"Propane torches make you explode."

An exercise left to the reader : is a non-participant in Show HN less boring than a participant with a vibe coded project?
by minimaxir | 2026-02-19 19:02:34+00:00
> Prompting an AI model is not articulating an idea. You get the output, but in terms of ideation the output is discardable. It’s the work that matters.

This is reductive to the point of being incorrect. One of the misconceptions of working with agents is that the prompts are typically simple: it's more romantic to think that someone gave Claude Code "Create a fun Pokemon clone in the web browser, make no mistakes" and then just ship the one-shot output.

As some counterexamples, here are two sets of prompts I used for my projects which very much articulate an idea in the first prompt with very intentional constraints/specs, and then iterating on those results:

https://github.com/minimaxir/miditui/blob/main/agent_notes/P... (41 prompts)

https://github.com/minimaxir/ballin/blob/main/PROMPTS.md (14 prompts)

It's the iteration that is the true engineering work as it requires enough knowledge to a) know what's wrong and b) know if the solution actually fixes it. Those projects are what I call super-Pareto: the first prompt got 95% of the work done...but 95% of the effort was spent afterwards improving it, with manual human testing being the bulk of that work instead of watching the agent generated code.
by tialaramex | 2026-02-19 19:02:39+00:00
Do you have some examples of what you couldn't get along with? I know this is a lot to ask, but to me while I do write Rust and I don't write C++ or Swift in volume (only small examples) the syntax just doesn't feel that different really.

If you do like Swift you might want to just bite the bullet and embrace the Apple ecosystem. That would be my recommendation I think.
by ecshafer | 2026-02-19 19:02:51+00:00
Revolutions Podcast is good and well researched (Especially later seasons).

The History of the Germans Podcast is really great (100+ episodes from Ottonians just to Habsburgs, so its pretty well in depth).

History of France Podcast is good, its from a University professor, but not overly academic but well researched.

History of England Podcast is good as well, starting with Anglo Saxon and Post Roman England. He uses a lot of high quality and primary sources.

A History of Italy podcast starts with the end of Rome and is 200 episodes to get to 1500.

I like in depth, single topic podcasts as you can tell as opposed to the podcasts that jump around topics.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-19 19:02:52+00:00
My property taxes are $3000 a year. They were around $7K a year before we moved. We also downsized to a two bedroom condo -1200 square feet - from a 3500 square foot house in the most expensive county in GA (Forsyth) after my step son graduated in 2020 and after Covid. We sold our house for twice what we had it built for 8 years earlier and bought our condo for the same price as we paid for our house in 2016.

Florida - especially when you live in the same county as DisneyWorld - is heavily subsidized by tourism
by adverbly | 2026-02-19 19:03:18+00:00
Whoa there. Let's not oversimplify in either direction here.

My take:

1. AI workflows are faster - saving people time

2. Faster workflows involve people using their brain less

3. Some people use their time savings to use their brain more, some don't

4. People who don't use their brain are boring

The end effect here is that people who use AI as a tool to help them think more will end up being more interesting, but those who use AI as a tool to help them think less will end up being more boring.
by shimman | 2026-02-19 19:03:59+00:00
If you gave someone the exact same budgets and resources as the major AI companies, yes I'm sure most humans on this Earth would come up with comparable (and probably even better) plans. Why are we acting as if business magnates have some special quantity in them? Sam Altman isn't an engineer, he's never worked a real job in his life. There's nothing special about him outside of the ability to lie.

If you can hire top talent, why wouldn't you be able to compete on a software level?

What exactly is the moat here?
by thisislife2 | 2026-02-19 19:04:05+00:00
You may be right - Russian invasion of Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza (most westerners don't even know that Israel is a settler-colony - https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-fares-abraham-021826 that has been deliberately oppressing, chasing and killing Palestinians for a long time) and Trump demanding Greenland - all indicate that certain oligarchs are working to bring back imperialism.
by JohnMakin | 2026-02-19 19:04:13+00:00
I don't see how the two correlate - commercial, closed source software usually have teams of professionals behind them with a vested and shared interest in not shipping crap that will blow up in their customers' face. I don't think the motivations of "guy who vibe coded a shitty app in an afternoon" are the same.

And to answer you more directly, generally, in my professional world, I don't use closed source software often for security reasons, and when I do, it's from major players with oodles of more resources and capital expenditure than "some guy with a credit card paid for a gemini subscription."
by Certhas | 2026-02-19 19:04:36+00:00
What if I want the nth element up to the math element? arr[n:m]. And if I want to split the array into two parts, one until the nth element and the other from the m+1st element arr[1:m] and arr[(m+1):end]. Julia matches how people speak about arrays, including C programmers in their comments. Arrays are (conceptually) not pointer arithmetic. Also for your usecase typically you would just use a 2d array and write a[n,:].
by nerdjon | 2026-02-19 19:04:54+00:00
Like I mentioned somewhere else I can see why some people think they are entitled to do this and I also fully understand wanting to do it from a cost standpoint.

While I do personally disagree with thinking that you should be able to do this when it was never sold in that way, at the end of the day as a customer you can choose if you want to use the product in the way that they are saying or use something else if you don’t want to support that model.

However the person I was responding too brought up legality which is a very different discussion.
by arscan | 2026-02-19 19:05:03+00:00
> But I’ll gladly use a tool someone had an AI write, as long as it works (which these things increasingly do).

It works, sure, but is it worth your time to use? I think a common blind spot for software engineers is understanding how hard it is to get people to use software they aren’t effectively forced to use (through work or in order to gain access to something or ‘network effects’ or whatever).

Most people’s time and attention is precious, their habits are ingrained, and they are fundamentally pretty lazy.

And people that don’t fall into the ‘most people’ I just described, probably won’t want to use software you had an LLM write up when they could have just done it themselves to meet their exact need. UNLESS it’s something very novel that came from a bit of innovation that LLMs are incapable of. But that bit isn’t what we are talking about here, I don’t think.
by sosodev | 2026-02-19 19:05:15+00:00
Thanks for the additional info. I suspected that MiniMax M2.5 might be a bit too much for this board. 230B-A10B is just a lot to ask of the 395+ even with aggressive quantization. Particularly when you consider that the model is going to spend a lot of tokens thinking and that will eat into the comparatively smaller context window.

I switched from the Unsloth 4-bit quant of Qwen3 Coder Next to the official 4-bit quant from Qwen. Using their recommended settings I had it running with OpenCode last night and it seemed to be doing quite well. No infinite loops. Given its speed, large context window, and willingness to experiment like you mentioned I think it might actually be the best option for agentic coding on the 395+ for now.

I am curious about https://huggingface.co/stepfun-ai/Step-3.5-Flash given that it does parallel token generation. It might be fast enough despite being similar in size to M2.5. However, it seems there are still some issues that llama.cpp and stepfun need to work out before it's ready for everyday use.
by overgard | 2026-02-19 19:05:19+00:00
Totally agree with this. Smart creators know that inspiration comes from doing the work, not the other way around. IE, you don't wait for inspiration and then go do the work, you start doing the work and eventually you become inspired. You rarely just "have a great idea", it comes from immersing yourself in a problem, being surrounded with constraints, and finding a way to solve it. AI completely short circuits that process. Constraints are a huge part of creativity, and removing them doesn't mean you become some unstoppable creative force, it probably just means you run out of ideas or your ideas kind of suck.
by buttered_toast | 2026-02-19 19:05:24+00:00
Makes me wonder what people would consider better, a model that gets 92% of questions right 100% of the time, or a model that gets 95% of the questions right 90% of the time and 88% right the other 10%?

I think that's why benchmarking is so hard for me to fully get behind, even if we do it over say, 20 attempts and average it. For a given model, those 20 attempts could have had 5 incredible outcomes and 15 mediocre ones, whereas another model could have 20 consistently decent attempts and the average score would be generally the same.

We at least see variance in public benchmarks, but in the internal examples that's almost never the case.
by gus_massa | 2026-02-19 19:05:49+00:00
That is an unrelated problem, that usually is not even a problem.

For molecules, 10 Armstrong away is probably as good as infinite.

For how many bananas should you eat per week to become the chess world champion, you can ask Wolfram Alpha to convert 2400kcal * 7 to bananas and get an upper bound.

I think everyone agree that with infinite time a resources a brute force search is better in case there is a weird combination. But for finite time and resources you need to select a better strategy unless the search space is ridiculous small and smooth.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-02-19 19:05:49+00:00
In terms of functionality, 8.1 isn't bad but I can't stand the flat square theme that could've dropped straight out of the DOS era. It's so ugly.

I understand why Aero didn't continue on in its Vista/7 form, but Metro swung way too far in the other direction. The Fluent look used by Windows 11 is a nice middleground that I wish 8, 8.1, and 10 could've adopted instead. Too bad the rest of 11 sucks.
by gwbas1c | 2026-02-19 19:05:52+00:00
> I see this as the #1 benefit of private school, to be honest - if a student does not succeed, the teachers do not get paid (you pull your kid from the school)

Charter schools have the same benefit too, at a much lower cost to you.

Personally, after my father pushed me to an "expensive" college that ended up not being very good, I got over my love for private schools. Two points to consider:

1: My dad kept trash-talking UMass Amherst when I was a teenager. Turns out it was the 4th best CS department in the US, #17 in the world, and the expensive private college he talked me into had a very lousy CS department that didn't even rank.

2: We (wife and I) chose our town based on school rankings. The local public schools are AWESOME compared to the private schools I went to as a kid. Much more resources and attention than I got; and they get to take advantage of economies of scale from having many more students. (Granted, I live in a high tax town where the residents prioritize great schools.)
by scottious | 2026-02-19 19:06:04+00:00
this feels like a false equivalence and slippery slope fallacy.

Clearly things like cigarettes and hard drugs are bad and need very heavy regulations if not outright banned. There are lots of gray areas, for sure, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't take things on a case-by-case basis and impose reasonable restrictions on things that produce measurable harm.

Whether or not social media does produce that measurable harm is not my area of expertise, but that doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out.