MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alsetmusic | 2026-02-07 00:19:57+00:00
This is the depressing reality.

When I lived in the bible belt, I had a hilarious idea for a "student film" project on the life and times of Jesus. Stuff like using little-kids' floaties on his ankles to walk on water, accidentally raising an undead zombie, etc. My good friend told me he couldn't morally participate in the project.

We were 18 and he should have been able to laugh at a funny project but he saw it as insulting an important deity. What a sad and limited life organized religion constructed around him.

I also remember when my father started dating and he complained to me that he always made it clear that he was an atheist but then a few dates in the women would start talking about their faith and getting all Christy. I was incredulous and explained that it had always been that way since we moved there. He just wasn't divorced yet, so he didn't notice.

These people's lives are all about their faith. It's a fucking brain rot. It's a sickness and it greatly contributes to the misery of others.
by shoeb00m | 2026-02-07 00:20:25+00:00
A big benefit of letting agents run code is they can process data without bloating their context.

LLMs are really good at writing python for data processing. I would suspect its due to Python having a really good ecosystem around this niche

And the type safety/security issues can hopefully be mitigated by ty and pyodide (already used by cf’s python workers)

https://pyodide.org/en/stable/

https://github.com/astral-sh/ty
by altairprime | 2026-02-07 00:20:56+00:00
FYI, you forgot to remove the &si= tracking cookie from your derogatory comment that uniquely identifies you. As a former Salesforce/Heroku employee and so presumably familiar with Heroku’s treatment within the megacorp for at least some of (checks notes) the past sixteen years, do you have anything relevant to contribute to this post?
by bluegatty | 2026-02-07 00:21:14+00:00
Yes, so I think that's a fine thought, I don't think it fits into LLM architecture.

Also, weirdly, even Lecun etc. are barely talking about this, they're thinking about 'world models etc'.

I think what you're talking about is maybe 'the most important thing' right now, and frankly, it's almost like an issue of 'Engineering'.

Like - its when you work very intently with the models so this 'issue' become much more prominent.

Your 'instinct' for this problem is probably an expression of 'very nuanced use' I'm going to guess!

So in a way, it's as much Engineering as it is theoretical?

Anyhow - so yes - but - probably not LLM weights. Probably.

I'll add a small thing: the way that Claude Code keeps the LLM 'on track' is by reminding it! Literally, it injects little 'TODO reminders' with some prompts, which is kind of ... simple!

I worked a bit with 'steering probes' ... and there's a related opportunity there - to 'inject' memory and control operations along those lines. Just as a starting point for a least one architectural motivation.
by Xpolls | 2026-02-07 00:21:36+00:00
Whoa that's deep! But appreciated. Since AI agents can also submit surveys, I supposed we can ask the agent privately what they think the answer is and compare the collective results against what the agent's initial estimate was. I'm sure a majority of agent brains are powered by similar singular AIs, so the wrinkle is whether the agent's environment and associated human influence their behavior and preferences.
by scoofy | 2026-02-07 00:21:48+00:00
You seem to be misunderstanding my point. I am a transit alternatives advocate, and have been my entire adult life.

I'm NOT saying "people don't want to ride trains."

I AM saying "people don't want ride trains that allow 5% of the riders to smoke cigarettes on enclosed train platforms and in enclosed train cars."

You might says "what? but that's not happening."

In Chicago, yes it is: https://resphealth.org/snuff-out-smoking-on-cta/

People want transit as long as that transit reasonably meets their quality of life standards. The reason why automobiles have been so popular -- even while being wildly more expensive -- is exactly that they allow the user to adjust their travel to their optimal quality of life expectations.

Public transit advocates need to be honest with themselves that anti-social behavioral issues really matter to people. People are willing to pay more to have a more pleasant experience. When a transit system fails to meet that standard, then you'll suddenly find yourself with a transit system that people don't want to use.
by sensanaty | 2026-02-07 00:21:49+00:00
I agree that endless scrolling can be a good UX paradigm, but really only in certain situations, like if I'm looking at my bank account it sure is nice to just keep scrolling to find a payment from 3 months ago rather than having to click a "next" button every 10 transactions.

But when it comes to these algorithmic feeds I think the endless scrolling becomes a dark pattern since it encourages that "one more swipe" headspace that gets people stuck scrolling for literal hours at a time. The platforms engineered their apps this way because they have a monetary incentive to get people sucked in, they even hire psychologists to target people as effectively as possible and I think it's pretty undeniable they've engineered quite an impressive dopamine harvesting engine in the worst way possible.

I do agree that banning recommendation algos is quite dumb, especially since they seem to be specifically singling out TikTok rather than all the apps with similar feeds, and I believe the problems are on a societal level and not necessarily something that can be smoothed over by laws banning predictive algorithms. Realistically if people had time and freedom for their hobbies and loved ones rather than wasting away at jobs that suck all motivation out of you, we'd have a lot less people addicted to this type of content.

Though I suspect there have to be some rules here regardless because even though we're working with incomprehensibly complicated hardware in our noggins the brain is also lazy, and in modern times it's proven quite easy to trap a brain with flashy lights and loud noises that would've been unimaginable a few decades ago.

Really it's just these business models encouraging such antisocial behaviour from the psychotic C-suite in charge that needs to die a violent death, but how we get there is a question I'm not sure I have the answer to.
by aryonoco | 2026-02-07 00:22:07+00:00
My favourite languages are F# and OCaml, and from my perspective, TypeScript is a far better language than C#.

Typescript’s types are far more adaptable and malleable, even with the latest C# 15 which is belatedly adding Sum Types. If I set TypeScript to its most strict settings, I can even make it mimic a poor man’s Haskell and write existential types or monoids.

And JS/TS have by far the best libraries and utilities for JSON and xml parsing and string manipulation this side of Perl (the difference being that the TypeScript version is actually readable), and maybe Nushell but I’ve never used Nushell in production.

Recently I wrote a Linux CLI tool for managing podman/quadlett containers and I wrote it in TypeScript and it was a joy to use. The Effect library gave me proper Error types and immutable data types and the Bun Shell makes writing shell commands in TS nearly as easy as Bash. And I got it to compile a single self contained binary which I can run on any server and has lower memory footprint and faster startup time than any equivalent .NET code I’ve ever written.

And yes had I written it in rust it would have been faster and probably even safer but for a quick a dirty tool, development speed matters and I can tell you that I really appreciated not having to think about ownership and fighting the borrow checker the whole time.

TypeScript might not be perfect, but it is a surprisingly good language for many domains and is still undervalued IMO given what it provides.
by aforwardslash | 2026-02-07 00:22:08+00:00
5 out of 7 means you cannot be in an eg. car accident with more than 2 of them at a time, if there is the possibility of all of them present in the car not surviving.

Im also quite more practical - there are responsabilities that may go beyond a simple memory loss - eg. If one is in a coma or just hospitalized for a long period of time; trusted third parties may require access to your accounts even for simple stuff like paying bills/rent/cloud services.
by indymike | 2026-02-07 00:22:12+00:00
> All of them are coming for our SaaS margins, and as an industry we are woefully unprepared.

My company just switched from slug slow product management driven tech to startup footing. Everything is up for grabs everywhere. And it's always like this in tech when there's a sea change.

> We also struggle to attract this kind of talent. People who fit that profile go to FAANG or the labs.

Hires aren't the problem, culture is. I can take the same new dev that a FAANG hires and turn them into a slug with the development process I see at most b2b saas companies. The flipside is true too: you can take an average dev and set them free and amazing things happen.

Most B2B SaaS companies have three people managing tickets for every developer, executives don't understand bugs are the byproduct of progress (and will be fixed quickly), have name brand enterprise agile-fall style processes, have six months of sprints preplanned, are fixated on UI testing, and do releases like they are publishing CD ROMS. This kind of culture is literally repugnant to innovators, problem solvers, people doing things a new way, and people who value doing things well (because fighting everyone to change for better sucks).
by Wobbles42 | 2026-02-07 00:22:23+00:00
I wonder if there is a point where signal to noise in advertising gets so low that the industry itself collapses. Many people actively ignore advertisement at this point, but there is still enough attention to make paying for them profitable. I don't see any reason that couldn't change in a sufficiently noisy environment.

If demand for advertising drops too low as a whole, and ad supported content goes away as a result, is there enough of the internet left to maintain critical mass and keep existing?

Maybe spam really does win in the end.
by palata | 2026-02-07 00:23:15+00:00
Starts by saying that publishing to Maven Central is "a bit involved", and that "you need to install GPG (or PGP???)".

Proceeds in showing a pipeline that does not seem simpler at all, and involves setting up a PGP key. I am confused.

Also whoever finds it "involved" to make a difference between "GPG" and "PGP" possibly shouldn't be publishing an artifact.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-07 00:23:25+00:00
It's even weirder than that, there's many ideas that might very easily be described as "pagan" except that they're entirely accepted as orthodox. For instance the entire notion of the Trinity is at its root a straightforward application of Neoplatonic philosophy, where the "One" Godhead exists as three lower "hypostases" (Greek) or "persons" (Latin). And much Stoic ethics was adopted directly within early Christianity.

To be entirely fair about it, the linkage may easily go back to the very time of Jesus in some important ways, seeing as many of Jesus's teachings were shared with the Essenes', and the Essenes in turn were quite knowledgeable about Greek/Hellenistic philosophy.
by apparent | 2026-02-07 00:23:55+00:00
> Your complaint about apartments can just be straightforward, you can say that you are concerned with the possible nuisances that can come with dense housing, and you don't trust the current enforcement or rules to allow you to enjoy your property peacefully. That is a perfectly valid reason to oppose something.

Great, that's one of the things I wouldn't want. But I also don't want to live in a city, which is why I didn't move to one. The other aspects of city life (noise all the time higher crime rates, etc.) are what many suburbanites are referring to when they talk about the character of their suburban neighborhoods. It's not hard to grasp, and there's significant overlap in what individual people mean. That's why "character" is used as a shorthand.
by furyofantares | 2026-02-07 00:24:24+00:00
Why is learning an appropriate metaphor for changing weights but context is not? There are certainly major differences in what they are good or bad at and especially how much data you can feed them this way effectively. But they are both ways to take an artifact that behaves as if it doesn't know something and produce an artifact that behaves as if it does.

I've learned how to solve a Rubik's cube before, and forgot almost immediately.

I'm not personally fond of metaphors to human intelligence now that we are getting a better understanding of the specific strengths and weaknesses these models have. But if we're gonna use metaphors I don't see how context isn't a type of learning.
by kokanator | 2026-02-07 00:24:58+00:00
The actual way you reason today has in large part to do with your religious cultural heritage. This is true regardless of whether you accept it or not. To say that Christianity has not impacted western culture including thinking and reasoning would be naive at best.

Understanding this will help you to understand why you view the world and morality the way you do and in turn how you answer hard questions like technology's place in culture, life, workplace, etc.
by hannofcart | 2026-02-07 00:25:44+00:00
The post touches very briefly on linting in 7. For me, setting up a large number of static code analysis checks has had the highest impact on code quality.

My hierarchy of static analysis looks like this (hierarchy below is Typescript focused but in principle translatable to other languages):

1. Typesafe compiler (tsc)

2. Basic lint rules (eslint)

3. Cyclomatic complexity rules (eslint, sonarjs)

4. Max line length enforcement (via eslint)

5. Max file length enforcement (via eslint)

6. Unused code/export analyser (knip)

7. Code duplication analyser (jscpd)

8. Modularisation enforcement (dependency-cruiser)

9. Custom script to ensure shared/util directories are not over stuffed (built this using dependency-cruiser as a library rather than an exec)

10. Security check (semgrep)

I stitch all the above in a single `pnpm check` command and defined an agent rule to run this before marking task as complete.

Finally, I make sure `pnpm check` is run as part of a pre-commit hook to make sure that the agent has indeed addressed all the issues.

This makes a dramatic improvement in code quality to the point where I'm able to jump in and manually modify the code easily when the LLM slot machine gets stuck every now and then.

(Edit: added mention of pre-commit hook which I missed mention of in initial comment)
by ok123456 | 2026-02-07 00:25:48+00:00
It was an MTV move made for teenagers. People thought it was silly and had dumb technobabble when it was released. "RISC is good."

If you objected to the premise or technical content of the movie, you weren't the intended audience.

Hollywood tried to make a bunch of computer movies at the time and had to figure out how to make things on a computer seem exciting, even though in reality, it's just someone sitting and typing for long periods. The producers decided on 3D mainframes and artistically rendered hacker tools (some macintosh progz at the time were not too far off).

At least at the time, they were up to the task of using some creativity to address the challenges of making a compelling, at least visually if not intellectually, movie set in a place and time with technology that effectively shrinks time and space. Now they simply set all their movies before smartphones existed.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-02-07 00:26:38+00:00
Breck vs dang: they skipped the diplom

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Yep YC^W HN have these same "plans" as we "obviously", ntm Zuck (mod illiquid)

https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-school-palo-alto...

What do they miss that you haven't ? What is their blind spot? Imho "Sharp-Bigots" is the keyword :)

(As for teams with wellbred dogs going up against SB away from their steamrollers, 1000 yards is necessary and sufficient for the element of surprise?)
by rustyhancock | 2026-02-07 00:26:45+00:00
It's a very interest benchmark. Much more impressive than needle in haystack benches or just tuneable benches.

I wonder if it's somewhat incompatible with some domains.

I.e. perhaps coding models need to rigidly stick to what they know and resist bad ideas in their contexts - I don't want my mistakes to be replicated by the model.

Still I agree with the premise that learning in session is what I want from a model.

Perhaps once models mature they will diverge even more than just having sophistication and coding or not. But creative, coding, rule based etc models
by agentzed | 2026-02-07 00:27:53+00:00
Yes!

You have a valid unsettled intuition!

I have it too, though I have given it a different explanation.

Reality is not a counted number of things, it is the “potential” of all things, broken down into the most economically scalar interactive pieces, and sure we can use numbers to count those.

“Potential distribution” nerds, get that right.

It is “whatever there is by how ever many there are” not n many {n}s.

Go watch YouTube videos on quaternions brother. Do not see it for “the math”, see it for “one layer translating upon another layer.”

Whatever it is man. If you think “discrete” number of things make up reality, you are delusional. It is potential divided. That is reality.
by MiddleEndian | 2026-02-07 00:27:57+00:00
What if you RAID01 it, so you have four safety deposit boxes, two with the first half of your password, two with the second half of your password? Then no snoop at a particular bank would be able to get your password, but also if one or two go missing, the password won't be lost. And you just check all four boxes once or twice a year to make sure everything is good.
by mananaysiempre | 2026-02-07 00:28:02+00:00
Thanks for the explanation! Linux, meanwhile, will[1] in the normal case walk a sequence[2] of hash tables (representing incomplete but up-to-date views of directories) before hitting the filesystem’s vtable or the block I/O layer at all, and on the fast path[3] taking no locks other than the RCU read lock.

[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/path-look...

[2] I was under the impression that it could look up an entire path at once when I wrote my grandparent comment; it seems I was wrong, which on reflection makes sense given you can move directories.

[3] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/path-look...
by verdverm | 2026-02-07 00:29:30+00:00
setting aside the content, it's deeply concerning for something like this to happen

that account tweets national policy and attacks foreign leaders

that some person can tweet unsupervised is incredibly dangerous

---

back on topic, this is a repost of the same account that depicted Trump shitting on Americans from a plane

then consider it seems it occurred during the same time frame (late night) that is usual tirades on Trump Social happen (est based on when "deleted after 12 hours" started showing up in the articles "by mid day")

Obama really does live rent free in his head, it's incredible how often he's comparing himself to him
by Wobbles42 | 2026-02-07 00:29:33+00:00
I sometimes wonder if the economics of AI coding agents only work if you totally ignore all the positive externalities that come with writing code.

Is the entire AI bubble just the result of taking performance metrics like "lines of code written per day" to their logical extreme?

Software quality and productivity have always been notoriously difficult to measure. That problem never really got solved in a way that allowed non technical management to make really good decisions from the spreadsheet level of abstraction... but those are the same people driving adoption of all these AI tools.

Engineers sometimes do their jobs in spite of poor incentives, but we are eliminating that as an economic inefficiency.
by steveylang | 2026-02-07 00:29:59+00:00
The best thing to do is to tell the model itself what you'd like from it, and to help you craft a set of user preferences. Every so often I'll have a new suggestion for it, and it will revise the entire set for me. My Claude user prefs is around 1000 words and probably overkill, but I don't think it hurts besides using a few more tokens to start a chat.
by hsuduebc2 | 2026-02-07 00:30:16+00:00
I don’t know whether it’s ignorance of the subject or a sense of exceptionalism, but it’s striking that politicians who write this kind of legislation don’t spend even five minutes checking whether such a law is actually enforceable. I would genuinely like to see how they plan to enforce this in practice. At best, it seems like it could only work through reports and multiple witness statements.
by roenxi | 2026-02-07 00:30:57+00:00
It isn't quite that simple though - you're saying the standard is something like no danger of being a net welfare recipient. Apreche said he saw "no reason that becoming a citizen today should be any more difficult today than it was in the early 20th century".

Those are different. The standard of not being likely to be a welfare recipient is a much higher standard than what was around in the early 20th century. The US federal minimum wage came in in 1933 [0] for example following work that started in the 1910s. Ellis Island migration was completely finished fairly soon after that in the 1950s after what seems to be a wind-down period [1]. I don't know my US immigration history of when they started reviewing migration in relation to welfare but it'd be a complex question and it isn't obvious that the standards that were traditionally used on Ellis Island would even guarantee that the people migrating were skilled enough to be allowed to work in the modern era.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_Island
by crq-yml | 2026-02-07 00:30:58+00:00
I have just spent a month writing about 2000 lines of Forth. My answer is no, at least w/r to generating something that looks like the by-hand code I wrote. LLMs coast by on being able to reproduce idiomatic syntax and having other forms of tooling(type checkers, linters, unit tests, etc.) back them up.

But Forth taken holistically is a do-anything-anytime imperative language, not just "concatenative" or "postfix". It has a stack but the stack is an implementation detail, not a robust abstraction. If you want to do larger scale things you don't pile more things on the stack, you start doing load and store and random access, inventing the idioms as you go along to load more and store more. This breaks all kinds of tooling models that rely on robust abstractions with compiler-enforced boundaries. I briefly tested to see what LLMs would do with it and gave up quickly because it was a complete rewrite every single time.

Now, if we were talking about a simplistic stack machine it might be more relevant, but that wouldn't be the same model of computation.
by scolvin | 2026-02-07 00:31:16+00:00
this is pretty performant for short scripts if you measure time "from code to rust" which can be as low as 1us.

Of course it's slow for complex numerical calculations, but that's the primary usecase.

I think the consensus is that LLMs are very good at writing python and ts/js, generally not quite as good at writing other languages, at least in one shot. So there's an advantage to using python/js/ts.