MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ineedasername | 2026-02-08 02:58:38+00:00
coding agents are an order of magnitude better than they were less than a year ago: Claude code, arguable the best, didn't exist a year ago and nonetheless, is an order better than when it did in late February.

It's really not a great sense of things for someone working in tech to make such a strong statement as the above given these circumstances. There is no reason to expect improvement will not continue, that agents' ability to review code-- drastically improved even since May/June, won't improve and, to the extend your concerns are valid about current agents, be able to manage the review and surfacing of issues for review and remediation.

This also ignores the growing awareness within the community of professional developers that, yes, blind trust-- as naively but minimally understandable given lack of knowledge on capabilities-- that blind trust cannot be given, and reasonable review of generated code at the end of a session is good practice. Developers are quite often already changing their habits with agents, if they were even avoiding such review before.

As for companies that may fire developers, rely near completely on agentic coding? I agree with the sentiment, but I really have not seen that happen to any great degree.
Ask HN: Codex 5.3 broke toolcalls? Opus 4.6 ignores instructions?
by kachapopopow | 2026-02-08 02:58:50+00:00
When using codex 5.3 the model will often do this:

Result: core local tools are stable; LSP is unavailable (expected in this harness context).
Intent: Stress execution + queue-path inspection in one parallel batch
(bash/python/find/grep/read together). +#+#+#+#+#+assistant to=multi_tool_use.parallel
մեկնաբանություն 天天中彩票中了json

what is even more interesting is that: "մեկնաբանություն 天天中彩票中了json" will always be the same.

This issue does not occur in codex 5.2, both are ran with xhigh thinking. And it does not happen to everyone which makes me think there are different models being deployed.

As for opus 4.6:
You're supposed to use @(file).

And it responded with:
The diff shows the changes are already made. The working tree already has all the modifications you described <...>.

Refused to do anything else completely ignoring my input until I typed 2-3 sentances explaining exactly what to do, for some reason it kept looking at git diff insisting that "it is done".

Branching the conversation into opus 4.5 the issue was fixed as expected.

Vibe coded llms are here I guess!
by tern | 2026-02-08 03:01:00+00:00
I'm mostly vibe-coding a system of comparable complexity in Elixir/Ash right now and it's an insanely good ecosystem for the use-case.

The combination of credo, dialyzer, and tidewave means you have an iterative feedback loop at multiple levels of analysis.

If it needs, it can call right into the running process with the CLI. Everything is runtime inspectable and manipulable, and agents just automatically figure out what to do instantly. Debugging is very quick.

Ash AI gives you automatically generated MCP servers that let agents call functions in your software, so you can prototype the backend without building any UI.

On top of that, the library ecosystem is battle-tested and encodes knowledge from decades of enterprise learnings. With agents, there's no reason to "just use bash" or "just use a python script" because it's easier for a human. You can just build an extremely robust application with high-level architecture patterns, self-healing, rich access permissions, minimal runtime mutation, etc. for free, because why not?

(I have similar things to say about Rust with its algebraic typing, just, etc.)
by brador | 2026-02-08 03:01:42+00:00
AI trained on real time data will always and only get dumber over time. Reversion to mean of human IQ. just like every web forum ever. Eternal September.

That’s why gen 1-3 AI felt so smart. It was trained on the best curated human knowledge available. And now that’s done it’s just humanities brain dumps left to learn from.

2 ways out: self referential learning gen 1-3 AIs. Or, Pay experts to improve datasets and not training with general human data. Inputs and outputs.
by thot_experiment | 2026-02-08 03:02:19+00:00
Yeah, this is the chief issue with Windows, LTSC helps but I've gone further and only let this system update about 3 times in the last 5 years. That plus disabling all signature enforcement, zone.identifiers and other nonsense "security" stuff makes Windows pretty great. I have never lost time to a random windows update since the first time it happened to me, it's just an unacceptable UX, I would have swapped to linux long ago if I wasn't able to disable it.
by qaq | 2026-02-08 03:02:40+00:00
Again people confuse paper wealth and material assets. If you take half of money of 0.001% people imagine there will be material change in world of atoms but thats not true. You can't take 8 mil Richard Mille watch and build an apartment building. We are mostly resource constrained. There are no material assets to convert all the paper wealth into. Telsa's physical assets are like 5% of Tesla's market cap the rest is cultish belief in Elon. You can't convert that into a hospital. It's trivial to observe on AI side there is unlimited amount of $ available and yet companies are supplied constrained on the atoms side from gas turbines having 3-4 year lead times to ASML running 24/7 prod cycle and yet unable to meet demand.
by jaredklewis | 2026-02-08 03:03:06+00:00
I think you’re just confused.

There is no place in the world that is zoned for homeless encampments. Zoning is stuff like residential, commercial, industrial, mixed use, and so on. If you are talking about homeless encampments, it’s not a zoning discussion.

I don’t support homeless encampments. Out here where I live in California they tend to be on public land like parks. But wherever they are, there should be laws, enforcement mechanisms, and social support to deal with them. But none of those things have anything to do with zoning.
by ZoomZoomZoom | 2026-02-08 03:03:07+00:00
Yep, always forget about '--forceBuild'.
You can see in the script above the nimcache directory was overriden to tmpfs for the measurement, though. Caching will be helpful in real usecases, of course.

Nimscript is cool but very limited, not being able to use parts of the stdlib taht depend on C. Hope this will change with Nimony/Nim 3.
by softwaredoug | 2026-02-08 03:03:09+00:00
A lot of examples of creating clones of existing products don't resonate with new products we build

For example, most development work involves discovering correctness, not writing to a fullproof spec (like cloning slack)

Usually work goes like:

* Team decides some vague requirement

* Developer must implement requirement into executable decisions

Now I use Claude Code to do step 2 now, and its great. But I'm looking over whether the implementation's little decisions actually do what the business would want. Or more accurately, I'm making decisions to the level of specificity that matters to the problem at hand.

I have to try, backtrack, and rebuild all the time when my assumptions get broken.

In some cases decisions have low specificity: I could one-shot a complex feature (or entire app if trying to test PMF or something). In other cases, the tradeoffs in 10 lines of code become crucially important.
by bhadass | 2026-02-08 03:03:17+00:00
but isn't this like a lot of other CS-related "gradient descent"?

when someone invents a new scheduling algorithm or a new concurrent data structure, it's usually based on hunches and empirical results (benchmarks) too. nobody sits down and mathematically proves their new linux scheduler is optimal before shipping it. they test it against representative workloads and see if there is uplift.

we understand transformer architectures at the same theoretical level we understand most complex systems. we know the principles, we have solid intuitions about why certain things work, but the emergent behavior of any sufficiently complex system isn't fully predictable from first principles.

that's true of operating systems, distributed databases, and most software above a certain complexity threshold.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-08 03:03:52+00:00
> No, what I mean is it takes pulling teeth to get someone who would die anyway, the ability to try experimental drugs even with a doctor’s prescription.

This topic came up in another online community (which I'm intentionally not mentioning) a lot a few years ago. I left a comment about why giving experimental drugs to terminally ill patients is not a simple or obvious idea like many would assume. I got some very long, very intense replies from someone who was dying of a type of cancer who believed he had a good shot at recovery if he could get his hands on an experimental drug. He had all of the links and papers to prove it.

I remember trying to take it all in and reconsider my position.

A few years later, there was a post from his wife that he had died. It was a very sad situation. I clicked some of her links and found that he had a blog where he had written a lot. He actually did go through with the process of requesting the experimental drug and his request was granted. However, the drug not only didn't work, it had caused some irreversible damage to his body that made his final months a lot more painful and difficult than they had to be.

Apparently the "compassionate use" exemptions are not as hard to get as the anti-FDA writers have led us to believe. The harder part is often getting the companies to provide the drugs, because they know the risk profiles and uncertainties better than anyone and aren't always interested in letting terminally ill patients experiment on themselves outside of the process.
by solarengineer | 2026-02-08 03:05:06+00:00
I apologise for the incorrect "make the world a better place" attribution to you.

It does appear that for many of us "saving the planet" has become akin to "making the world a better place".

I was excited last night thinking about what you might uncover at OpenAPI. While we can all speculate (device drivers? File systems? Python itself? DB queries? Memory architecture? Inference algos? ) I recall “I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data” by Sherlock Holmes in "A Scandal in Bohemia".

All the best with your work at OpenAPI. We will all hopefully learn about writing more energy efficient code and about more efficient LLMs and more thanks to your work!
by ricksunny | 2026-02-08 03:05:06+00:00
Again, raw LIGO data is sheer noise. They have to interrogate the dataset with their hypothesized candidate signal signature, natural or otherwise, and see if it ‘responds’ with a hit. In the case of black hole mergers, they had an idea - a candidate model - of what to look for. In the case of a warp drive, could they even guess a signature to interrogate the dataset with?

And to the extent that the -1701 patrolling Mars-Venus might manage to ‘stick out like a sore thumb’, what about the relative blip of a Sh'Raan class embarking on some fresh surveying out of 40 Eridani A?
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-02-08 03:05:23+00:00
The problem is that if it's just about obesity, you have to prove that cheaper treatments such as diet and exercise didn't work. That's not impossible to do, but it's hard and annoying even for people who really were trying. My doctor told me that you basically have to keep a detailed journal of your weight loss efforts for months on end.

Are GLP-1s so much more effective that we should make an exception to the general principle, maximizing healthcare resources by providing the cheapest effective treatment? I kinda think so, but I have a conflict of interest, and I can understand why others might think that money is better spent elsewhere.
by loeg | 2026-02-08 03:08:39+00:00
> because the FDA makes it that way with their paranoid risk averse regulatory process

FDA is constrained by Congress here. Its function (safety and efficacy in advance of marketing) is required by legislation dating to the 60s. Feel free to advocate for Congress to change the law, but it isn't obvious it would be popular with Americans.

> insanely restrictive requirements on what requires a doctor prescription.

I don't think OTC vs Rx rules have much if any impact on drug development expenses.
by meandmycode | 2026-02-08 03:08:53+00:00
I will say, for anybody reading and finds it in any way uplifting, I have been a Windows user for 30 years, been a .net developer for 5 years at one point, groaned at how bad the 'Linux desktop' always was, but this year I finally switched to using Linux instead of Windows and I think it's because the inflexion point is starting to hit more of the masses.
by WarmWash | 2026-02-08 03:10:17+00:00
I don't know a single person in my (non-tech!) life that doesn't use AI, shy of toddlers and geriatric people.

The famous MIT study (95% of AI initiatives fail, remember that one?) actually found that pretty much every worker was using AI almost daily, but used their personal accounts (hence the corporate ones not being used).

If you are brand new to the tech world, and this is your first new product cycle, the way it works is that there is a free-cool-we're-awesomely-generous phase, and then when you are hooked and they are entrenched, the real price comes to fruition. See...pretty much every tech start-up burning runway cash.

Right now they are getting us hooked, and like the dumbasses consumers are, they will become totally dependent and think it will stay this cheap.
by dfex | 2026-02-08 03:10:39+00:00
What a time to be alive!

After nearly two decades of complaining loudly about deteriorating quality of Google search results and Ad injection, Google puts in AI summaries and provides 1-shot answers to >50% of queries, annihilating the advertising business in the process and TFA is complaining about that?

This is a win! I'm going to enjoy it while it lasts...

I guarantee that the minute enough people wake up and cut their advertising spend with Google, then they'll change tack again.

I wouldn't want to be hanging my career on "SEO marketing" right now..
by Aurornis | 2026-02-08 03:12:06+00:00
They didn't change their minds. The enforcement was consistent. It's the companies who scaled up their production to mass market levels who prompted the action.

There have been several examples in the past 5-6 years of the FDA loosening regulations to benefit patients and companies rushing in to abuse the opportunity at scale.

Another one that comes to mind is when the FDA loosened restrictions on telehealth prescribing of controlled substances during COVID. Several companies saw this as an opportunity to set up digital pill mills, advertising on TikTok and offering Adderall prescriptions as a service. Nurse practitioners were paid up to $60,000 per month to write prescriptions as fast as they could without interacting with patients.
by loeg | 2026-02-08 03:12:55+00:00
Yes, bootleggers can undercut legit competitors, providing a boon for consumers.

In this case, Novo developed the drug. In your view, why does Hims get credit for "the greatest good to public health in a century" and not the company that sank over $10B into developing Ozempic?

Of course, Novo faces competition from Lilly and every other pharma company in the world and continues to lower prices in the face of this competition.
by telui | 2026-02-08 03:13:01+00:00
Hi Hacker News — I’m releasing *Essential CDN (E.CDN)* as a beta.

Most developer CDNs stop at JavaScript. E.CDN is meant to be a simple, versioned “app-store CDN” for *more than JS*, including:

* *JS libraries* (e.g., jQuery versions side-by-side)
* *Scripts that can run in the terminal from a site without downloads.*

Everything is served with predictable, versioned paths so you can pin exactly what you want.

I also built *Essential Jaws (ejaws)*: a tiny runner that lets you stream a script from the web and execute it immediately from one terminal session (no saving an installer script to disk first).

*Examples*

JS Libs:

```html
<script src="https://essentialcdn.fluidity.workers.dev/jquery/3.7.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://essentialcdn.fluidity.workers.dev/jquery/4.0.0/jquery.min.js"></script>
```

Essential Jaws 1:

```powershell
# Windows (recommended): stream and run ejaws
iwr -useb https://essentialcdn.fluidity.workers.dev/ejaws/1.0.0/ejaws.... | iex
```

Repo / docs:

```text
https://gitlab.com/kryptonitewing/essential.cdn
```

It’s beta, so I’d love feedback on: URL conventions, what packages/tools to add next, and what would make you trust a “stream-to-run” workflow more (checksums, signatures, pinned tags, etc.).
by frob | 2026-02-08 03:13:21+00:00
I spent days and days inside the STAR control room in grad school, often during the 12:30am-7:30am graveyard shift. We needed to run 24/7 for efficiency reasons during the experimental season. Getting superconductors down to temp is costly, so once you get it there, it is go time all the time.

You had to stay on top of all the detectors and triggers, since every minute of beam time cost around $1k. You often sat around doing little, probably working on other research, and then would need to drop everything to reboot a detector so we could get back to collecting data.

RHIC is dead. Long live eRHIC.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-08 03:14:44+00:00
The marketing isn't for the drugs.

They market the service that gives you the drugs with the smallest oversight possible. These services are becoming popular among people who shouldn't be taking GLP-1s (eating disorders, body dysmorphia, people who are too thin but want to lose more weight) because most of their providers are just trying to write prescriptions as fast as possible to collect their payments.
by atmanactive | 2026-02-08 03:17:14+00:00
It doesn't. It has to connect to SOME LLM provider, but that CAN also be local Ollama server (running instance). The choice ALWAYS need to be present since, depending on your use case, Ollama (local machine LLM) could be just right, or it could be completely unusable, in which case you can always switch to data center size LLMs.

The ReadMe gives only a Antropic version example, but, judging by the source code [1], you can use other providers, including Ollama, just by changing the syntax of that one config file line.

[1] https://github.com/localgpt-app/localgpt/blob/main/src%2Fage...
by jpollock | 2026-02-08 03:17:45+00:00
Have these people done the math on how many engineers they can hire in other countries for USD$200k/yr? If you choose the timezone properly, they will even work overnight (your time) and have things ready in the morning for you.

USD$200k is 3 engineers in New Zealand.

https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/new-zea...
by Aurornis | 2026-02-08 03:17:45+00:00
The individually compounded versions have a higher risk because there's a person involved who can make mistakes, as opposed to a carefully controlled and tested manufacturing line.

Compounded drugs have higher rates of bacterial problems, doses being too high or low, and other issues.

Someone I know worked for a company that took over a poorly run compounding pharmacy and cleaned up their process. Some of the stories I've heard have made me want to avoid compounded medications wherever possible.
by jiggawatts | 2026-02-08 03:17:49+00:00
Gamma rays will cheerfully go right through centimetres (an inch) or so of solid metal, there’s no need to directly expose the Caesium to the environment!

These radiation sources are usually very solid metal containers with their lids welded permanently shut.

Not to mention that these sources usually contain water-soluble salts of caesium. Hence, hermetically sealing the sources is essential, especially for outdoors use.
by problynought | 2026-02-08 03:17:54+00:00
EE with decades of experience here.

Started my career designing/prototyping expansion cards for telecom blade boards.

I have built homes from foundation up, rebuilt cars from frame up.

I have contributed artisanal code from hardware drivers to GUI.

I have experience with hard things. SWE is not hard, just time-consuming.

Always a laugh when some non-contributor office worker exploiting sweatshop labor calls others low-effort.

For years SWEs have been so many layers of abstraction above the machine, SWE has been basic bitch data entry.

You got used as a political prop/pawn during ZIRP/money printer go brrr era. Womp womp.

Will keep training/leveraging LLMs and look forward to future hardware that further reduces the need to subject myself to useless middle-man SWEs.

It's just electrons in a machine. None of the gibberish SaaS conjured up matters.
by clarity_hacker | 2026-02-08 03:18:52+00:00
The interesting systems-level question here is whether the FDA approval pipeline was designed for a world where a single drug class can generate this much demand this fast.

Traditional pharma economics assumes the patent holder can supply the market. GLP-1s broke that assumption — Novo Nordisk and Lilly literally could not manufacture enough to meet demand, which created the shortage that let compounders in legally.

Now the shortage is declared over, so compounders lose their legal basis. But "shortage over" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It means the brand manufacturers say they can supply, not that the drug is accessible to most people who would benefit from it at a price they can afford.

The deeper tension: FDA's framework is binary (approved or not) but the actual risk landscape is continuous. A compounded semaglutide from an inspected 503A pharmacy with proper testing is a very different risk profile than something mixed in someone's garage. Treating them identically under enforcement seems like it optimizes for regulatory clarity over public health outcomes.
by noperand | 2026-02-08 03:19:19+00:00
HACK THE PLANET! This is great!

You seem to have folks leveraging XSS against the leaderboard (classic!). Of course, the JSON is available via https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/api/leaderboard?limit=1000&o...). XSS in the top entry (purportedly completed in -1e+129ms) might be firing since I get redirected to the Hacker's Manifesto included in the 40th anniversary issue of Phrack ;-)

```
{
"scores": [
{
"alias": "\u003Cimg onerror='document.location = `https://phrack.org/issues/7/3#article`' src=a\u003ESHOUTSOUTTOPHRACK\u003C/img\u003E",
"time_ms": -1e+129
}
...OTHER ATTEMPTS FOLLOW...
```

Regardless, thanks for sharing! Very cool!
by singpolyma3 | 2026-02-08 03:20:23+00:00
> So, in your entire career, you've always worked in companies where you were a subject matter expert on everything the company did? Always knew the business domain inside out? You were running the numbers, sitting with customers, and determining yourself what they really wanted?

You don't have to be the only person involved in the requirements for you to be involved. So yes, I've been involved from my very first internship where I pitched a new product to the CEO in my second month on the job and got told to go make that happen.
by orbital-decay | 2026-02-08 03:20:32+00:00
Reproducibility across all existing build systems took a decade of work involving everything from compilers to sandboxing, and a hard reproducibility guarantee in completely arbitrary cases is either impossible or needs deterministic emulators which are terribly slow. (e.g. builds that depend on hardware probing or a simulation result)

Input-to-output reproducibility in LLMs (assuming the same model snapshot) is a matter of optimizing the inference for it and fixing the seed, which is vastly simpler. Google for example serves their models in an "almost" reproducible way, with the difference between runs most likely attributed to batching.
by charcircuit | 2026-02-08 03:20:58+00:00
>with some effectiveness doesnt mean someone with less skills will be able to match their ability

I never said they would.

>Of course you'll still be coping by claiming you're so productive using some budget kimi 2.5 endpoint

I would. I already run my persistent agent on Kimi 2.5 and use Kimi CLI.