MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: GitGuessr – test your code reading skills in a GeoGuessr-like game
by nikhaldi | 2026-02-04 13:17:26+00:00
I built this game as a playful way to train code reading skills. You're dropped into a random location in a real GitHub repo where some lines code are hidden. The goal is to pick up clues from the surrounding code and fill in the missing lines as quickly as possible. It currently has curated game content for Python, TypeScript, JavaScript (by most metrics the top 3 languages on GitHub).

I had the idea when it dawned on me that reviewing and understanding code spat out by an LLM is a key skill for the AI era. (I sincerely hope you're critically reviewing what your favorite LLM is serving you.) Plus I like GeoGuessr and it was fun to put those two concepts together.

Playing a game requires authenticating with GitHub at the moment. Apologies for the hurdle, but it's a small one if you already have a GitHub account.

Any feedback welcome! Especially on how to improve game mechanics, either the fun or the educational aspect of it.
by acdha | 2026-02-04 13:17:31+00:00
> developers and users increasingly trust code they haven't personally reviewed.

This has been true since we left the era where you typed the program in each time you ran it. Ken Thompson rather famously wrote about this four decades ago: https://www.cs.umass.edu/~emery/classes/cmpsci691st/readings...

Sandboxing certainly helps but it’s not a panacea: for example, Notepad++ is exactly the kind of utility people would grant access to edit system files and they would have trusted the updater, too.
by Sol- | 2026-02-04 13:17:32+00:00
I really like that they establish it as their niche, and given their corporate focus it's also easy for them to take that stance. They have less to lose from forgoing advertising than ChatGPT with its relatively larger consumer focus.

I don't think ad supported business models are as bad as everyone says, though. Ultimately they trade attention for access, and access to this new kind of intelligence is already very important and will become even more so in the future. Claude already has pretty low limits in the free tier, so that's the price - perhaps a good one - for being ad free I guess.
by jacobbudin | 2026-02-04 13:17:45+00:00
Location: Waterbury, VT, US
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: Engineering manager and individual contributor across many web stacks but primarily JavaScript (TypeScript), Python, and PHP
Résumé/CV: https://www.jacobbudin.com/resume.pdf
Email: self@jacobbudin.com

For the past fifteen years, I’ve been building, overseeing, and leading technology projects for companies including American Express, Apple, Discover, MasterClass, Peloton, SoFi, and Zocdoc.

I’ve launched many web and mobile digital products for Fortune 500 companies and start-ups alike, including Webby Award-winning work.

- Modern client-side applications (SPAs) using JavaScript and TypeScript, using frameworks including React and Vue and related technologies (e.g., Next.js, Redux)

- Traditional server-side and microservice architectures using Node.js, Python, PHP, Java, and Go, and their more popular frameworks

- Native and non-native mobile development for iOS and Android platforms

- Cloud infrastructure and services, including self-service (AWS, Google Cloud) and full-service (Netlify, Vercel), as well as platforms for content delivery, monitoring, logging, analytics

- Fundamentals of DevOps, CI/CD, bundling, testing, i18n, security, compliance, and performance optimization

Open to independent contractor (freelance) positions.

Website: https://www.jacobbudin.com
GitHub: https://github.com/jacobbudin
Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/users/865601/jacob-budin
by orbital-decay | 2026-02-04 13:17:52+00:00
Utilitarian device to type on became an object of obsessive consumption, collection, customization, showing off, fashion (RGB lighting, forced mechanical over scissor distinction even though many people prefer the latter, etc). Yeah of course it's a craze, without scare quotes.

The same gear obsession happened to the gaming mice world, but it was much tamer by comparison.
by jermaustin1 | 2026-02-04 13:18:05+00:00
I am in agreement with you, but as a kid, we DID carry guns, regularly. Gun racks in our cars/trucks, and strapped to our backs as we walked down the street.

The problem stems from parents lack of parenting, a huge lack of real after-school programs, and the tiktokification of modern society.

30 years ago, we had a lot of the same "slap on the wrist" punishments because it was assumed when you got home your parent was going to beat your ass. That isn't a thing anymore (rightfully), because parenting through threat of violence just leads to those kids becoming violent parents.

Our problem is we never transitioned from violent parenting into any other kind. I watched my nieces and nephews get parented by YouTube and get social media accounts before they were 10. COVID created a society of chronically online children who don't know how to interact offline.

And yes, the tools to create bad shit are more accessible than ever, and I always come off as some angry gate keeper, but so much of the internet as it is today has become too easy to access by people incapable of the critical thinking required for safe use.

In the last 5 years, generative AI has taken over most of the "public facing" internet, and with internet literacy at the same level it was 20-30 years ago, we are back in the "walled garden" AOL era, but it is Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok that are the gardens.
by wildzzz | 2026-02-04 13:18:13+00:00
It's not too hard to slip a new wire into a laced bundle. In the places that still use lacing (aerospace), they use tefzel insulated wires that have the benefit of being super slippery against each other. This makes it easy to slip one in but it also helps reduce stiffness in the bundle because the insulation isn't sticking to itself as much as other things like vinyl.

Last cable I made: https://ibb.co/4gw3GQGL
by jdxcode | 2026-02-04 13:18:18+00:00
It's idiomatic in pre-commit to leverage the public plugins which all do their own tool installation. If you're not using them, and also not using it for tool installation, I'm not sure why you'd not be using the much simpler lefthook.

If you look at hk you will understand what I'm talking about in regards to parallelism. hk uses read/write locks and other techniques like processing --diff output to safely run multiple fixers in parallel without them stomping on each other. treefmt doesn't support this either, it won't let you run multiple fixers on the same file at the same time like hk will.

> If the linters you're running are open source, isn't this what you're ultimately doing anyway?

You have to trust the linters. You don't also need to trust the plugin authors. In hk we don't really use "plugins" but the equivalent is first-party so you're not extending trust to extra parties beyond me and the lint vendors.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-02-04 13:19:10+00:00
That one reminds me of the NATO straps popular in combination with Casio watches, I used to have that.

But for a belt, I also have (used to have?) a canvas belt with a buckle that would pinch the belt instead of go through it. Two actually, the one had two D-rings, the other had a more involved system with a bar going through a slotted box of sorts.
by HK-NC | 2026-02-04 13:19:28+00:00
Do you have anything to report in terms of mental or physical health after making this change, both short and long term? I quit sugar a long time ago I was just interested to read your experience compared to my own. I certainly had withdrawal and intense cravings to begin with and I wasn't particularly overeating or enjoying a poorly balanced diet at the time. I caught myself eating cookies and spitting them into the trash without swallowing so it "didnt count" before I decided I was going to ditch the stuff forever.
by xg15 | 2026-02-04 13:19:49+00:00
"Ultraprocessed" is at least a tangible definition though (even if it's a proxy) where you can empirically show that a certain product is ultraprocessed or not based on the way it is manufactured.

It also has enough overlap with addictive food to be a useful criterion.

In contrast "hyperpalatable" is more precisely describing the problem, but seems much more difficult to proof / easy for manufacturers to wiggle out of.

How would you prove that a given food item is "hyperpalatable"?
by bux93 | 2026-02-04 13:19:50+00:00
It's exhausting to read.

I can't quite put my finger on it; obviously the "it's not this. It's that." is part of it, but even without the obvious tells that writing was AI-generated/improved, it's just so tiring to read?

Maybe a linguist can chime in why all these texts are so samey, cloying and annoying to read? Is it (just) the pacing?
by jamesu | 2026-02-04 13:19:55+00:00
Bumped into your project a while back - pretty impressive. I was a little disappointed it seemed to just convert the resources rather than use the original runtime formats (since there are a features that don't directly translate to gltf), but for a viewer it's perfectly reasonable.
Are you planning on supporting tribes 1 maps at all?
Theres still quite a surprising interest in reverse engineering and extending the life of torque games. I'm hoping on publicly releasing a refresh of the original torque codebase this year which improves support for modern platforms including wasm.
It's amazingly easy these days to reverse engineer stuff and revive old codebases!
by ethbr1 | 2026-02-04 13:20:13+00:00
100 separate political units, each with their own version of an industry, are by their nature less economically efficient than one entity that's 100x as big.

Consequently, industry in 1 of those 100 units is always going to be outcompeted, at scale, by industry in the 100x as big entity.

Given more or less global free trade, that leaves the smaller entities economically competitive at... what? Why wouldn't business inherently flow to larger entities?
by codyZ | 2026-02-04 13:20:16+00:00
I have no productive words to share other than positive feelings and kind empathy to you @sberens. I've gone through this manufacturing route in China before about 10 years ago and...it has largely been the same. Even with near native fluency in Mandarin and Cantonese did not spare me from this experience. Good luck and I looking forward to purchasing one on your next run - its been on my radar for a very long time!
by jatora | 2026-02-04 13:20:27+00:00
Yeah? And then you continue prompting and developing, and go through a very similar iterative process, except now it's faster and you get to tackle more abstract, higher level problems.

"Most developers don't know the assembly code of what they're creating. When you skip assembly you trade the very thing you could have learned to fully understand the application you were trying to make. The end result is a sad simulacrum of the memory efficiency you could have had."

This level of purity-testing is shallow and boring.
by abhisek | 2026-02-04 13:20:39+00:00
110 tools. That’s probably a reason why Anthropic is probably switching to sandboxed code execution over MCPs.

It’s just easier to write code and do something specific for a task than load so many tool metadata.

I did not go past IDA. But I remember idc and IDA python. I wonder if it’s a better approach to expose a single tool to execute scripts to query what the agent needs.
by goodpoint | 2026-02-04 13:20:39+00:00
> Thankfully the hosting provider I chose BuyVM happens to be borderline bulletproof, and has no qualms with hosting extremist content. I’ve been a happy customer for a while for hosting tiny networking projects and personal website at good prices, and I was pretty blissfully unaware of their darker side when I bought the service. Luckily their very pro-free speech pro-privacy policies comes in handy for this project

...
by mlok | 2026-02-04 13:20:51+00:00
First impression : interesting concept, but half baked result.

Some Feedback :

- A few times, while using the automatic translation of Firefox (I don't speak portuguese) I ran into critical bug while hovering the map, that "deletes" the whole page and leaves me with an error message : "Erreur d'application: une application client a une exception lors du chargement de saas-map.ssr.trapiche.cloud (voir la console du navigateur pour plus d'informations)." in the console I get : "Uncaught DOMException: Node.removeChild: The node to be removed is not a child of this node > NextJS"

- I use Firefox with zoom on by default, and its not dealt with properly : the floating window on the map is right above what I am pointing at and hiding it. Really annoying.

- Clicking on "commençar gratis" I get to "Error Loading Deployments - HTTP 401: Unauthorized"

Good luck with this project. I like the idea of a micro-SaaS map, but it needs some more work, at this stage.
by omnarayan | 2026-02-04 13:21:55+00:00
We built this because Maestro has 1,319 open issues, many open since 2022.
The most requested feature (real iOS device support) has been waiting 3+ years.

maestro-runner is a drop-in replacement:

- Same YAML flows, no changes needed
- Single 21MB binary, no JVM
- 2-3x faster execution, 13x less memory
- Real iOS device support out of the box
- Parallel execution with --parallel flag

Technical deep-dive: https://devicelab.dev/blog/maestro-runner-architecture
Benchmarks: https://devicelab.dev/blog/maestro-runner-benchmarks

Apache 2.0, no paid tier, no telemetry. Happy to answer questions.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-04 13:22:36+00:00
I’m a programmer (well half my job) because I was a short (still short) fat (I got better) kid with a computer in the 80s.

Now, the only reason I code and have been since the week I graduated from college was to support my insatiable addictions to food and shelter.

While I like seeing my ideas come to fruition, over the last decade my ideas were a lot larger than I could reasonably do over 40 hours without having other people working on projects I lead. Until the last year and a half where I could do it myself using LLMs.

Seeing my carefully designed spec that includes all of the cloud architecture get done in a couple of days - with my hands on the wheel - that would have taken at least a week with me doing some work while juggling dealing with a couple of other people - is life changing
by Jagerbizzle | 2026-02-04 13:23:52+00:00
Also, with an LLM you can tell it to throw away everything and start over whenever you want.

When you do this with an outsourced team, it can happen at most once per sprint, and with significant pushback, because there's a desire for them to get paid for their deliverable even if it's not what you wanted or suffers some other fundamental flaw.
by Someone | 2026-02-04 13:24:11+00:00
For the sake of an argument, let’s assume "The Outer Space Treaty (1967) has a loophole. If you launch from international waters (planned by SpaceX) and the equipment is not owned by a US-company or other legal entity there is significant legal ambiguity” is 100% true.

To use that loophole, the rockets launched by SpaceX would have to be “not owned by a US-company”. Do you think the US government would allow that to happen?
by prng2021 | 2026-02-04 13:24:22+00:00
The author gives this example of the problem and incorrect way to leverage AI:

"Sarah was relieved. She thought she could focus on high-value synthesis work. She’d take the agent’s output and refine it, add strategic insights, make it client-ready."

Then they propose a long winded solution which is essentially the same exact thing but uses the magical term "orchestrate" a few times to make it sound different.
by abcde666777 | 2026-02-04 13:24:28+00:00
Well, for programming work which is essentially repetition (e.g. making another website not unlike thousands of others), it's no surprise that AI programming can work wonders - you're essentially using a sophisticated form of copy paste.

But there's still a lot of programming out there which requires originality.

Speaking personally, I never was nor ever will be too interested in the former variety.
by anymouse123456 | 2026-02-04 13:25:06+00:00
Having a background in fine art (and also knew Aral many years ago!), this prose resonates heavily with me.

Most of the OP article also resonated with me as I bounce back and forth between learning (consuming, thinking, pulling, integrating new information) to building (creating, planning, doing) every few weeks or months. I find that when I'm feeling distressed or unhappy, I've lingered in one mode or the other a little too long. Unlike the OP, I haven't found these modes to be disrupted by AI at all, in fact it feels like AI is supporting both in ways that I find exhilarating.

I'm not sure OP is missing anything because of AI per se, it might just be that they are ready to move their focus to broader or different problem domains that are separate from typing code into an IDE?

For me, AI has allowed me to probe into areas that I would have shied away from in the past. I feel like I'm being pulled upward into domains that were previously inaccessible.

I use Claude on a daily basis, but still find myself frequently hand-writing code as Claude just doesn't deliver the same results when creating out of whole cloth.

Claude does tend to make my coarse implementations tighter and more robust.

I admittedly did make the transition from software only to robotics ~6 years ago, so the breadth of my ignorance is still quite thrilling.
by crote | 2026-02-04 13:25:09+00:00
That could be used to justify banning drones in general, or banning all drones which aren't radio controlled (not that those are being used domestically). And "it can be used for war" is a bit silly in a country where you can buy guns at the grocery store. Not to mention that cars can be very effective weapons as well, and those haven't been banned yet.

The far more likely explanation is that they just don't want people filming them. They can't legally stop someone with a cellphone from filming them, but that hasn't stopped them from using up-to-lethal force against observers. On the other hand, you can't exactly beat a flying drone into submission, so the obvious move is to observe using drones instead.

Luckily for ICE the FAA already has the mechanics in place to criminalize flying drones in certain places, so with their magic "no drones anywhere we operate" NOTAM they can now punish observers with a year of jail time.
by trashb | 2026-02-04 13:26:08+00:00
It is entirely plausible that your colleague did have a significant speedup from using AI. But that may also be a one off overstated story (probably not as you respect his judgement as "senior dev").

I'm not saying they didn't get a speedup or you can't get a speedup. I'm just wondering how they determined that speedup and how reliable they are as a source for the statement "using AI will improve your performance".

As the other thread was discussing, it is a difficult thing to prove but some (debatable) measurement proves more then anecdotal stories. And I am trying to probe for some sources where these kind of statements are proven as I am a programmer continually judging the tools available to me.

And on the flip side there is at least some evidence that programmers often overstate/overestimate their speedup when using AI.
by nickkell | 2026-02-04 13:26:22+00:00
For the most part I agree with you: there is less functionality and hence less to police. There are also fewer people in chats/channels, as for the most part they are private or undiscoverable.

There are definitely still breaches of etiquette though, e.g. people frequently tagging a whole channel when they have a support question, even though it contains hundreds of people.
by Ray20 | 2026-02-04 13:26:23+00:00
Yes, and most of this measures result in decisions being made by the most irresponsible people.

Prisoners voting is madness. They are in too dependent a position to believe that their vote will reflect their votes.

On the contrary, voting should be banned not only for prisoners but also for people working for the government in any capacity. People who live off taxpayers should not be able to decide how to spend their taxes.

Registration procedures should be more complex and strict, not simpler. If someone is irresponsible, disorganized, or illiterate enough to fail to fill the form on time, then why should we consider their vote meaningful? If someone believes they have more important things to do than vote, why force them to vote?
by signatoremo | 2026-02-04 13:26:35+00:00
> They obey a specification developers know

Which spec? Is there a spec that says if you use a particular set of libraries you’d get less than 10 millisecond response? You can’t even know that for sure if you roll your own code, with no 3rd party libraries.

Bugs are by definition issues arise when developers expect they code to do one thing, but it does another thing, because of unforeseen combination of factors. Yet we all are ok with that. That’s why we accept AI code. They work well enough.
by itay-maman | 2026-02-04 13:26:42+00:00
Interesting writeup. The tiered retrieval approach and privacy model for group chats are well thought out.

One thing I'd love to see: what does "actually works" mean in measurable terms? The engineering is sophisticated, but I'm curious about user-facing impact - did memory injection improve task completion or satisfaction? How often do users invoke /memory forget? What's the false positive rate on extraction?

These systems are hard to evaluate because failure modes are subtle - the AI "knows" something but uses it awkwardly, or surfaces context that feels intrusive. Would be great to hear what metrics you're tracking to validate the complexity is paying off.
by shafiqurehman | 2026-02-04 13:26:48+00:00
Location: Pakistan
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes, depending on role and visa sponsorship

Technologies:
JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js, Express, React, Next.js
Docker, AWS (EC2, S3, IAM), CI/CD, Linux
MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Supabase
REST APIs, JWT auth, OAuth
C++ (DSA), basic Kubernetes concepts

Résumé/CV:
https://github.com/im-shafiqurrehman

Email:
shafiqurrehmanbscs2022@gmail.com

I’m a Bachelor of Computer Science student and backend-focused software engineer with strong hands-on experience building and deploying full-stack systems. I’ve worked on production-grade MERN and Next.js applications including an LMS, e-commerce platform, real-time messaging with Socket.IO, and authentication systems with JWT and OAuth.

I have a growing focus on infrastructure and distributed systems. I use Docker for all deployments and have been actively learning Kubernetes, cloud-native architecture, and how systems like etcd and kube-apiserver work internally. I enjoy backend internals, reliability, and security-oriented engineering.

Previously worked as a Software Engineering Fellow at Headstart AI. I’m looking for junior or early-career backend, platform, DevOps, or full-stack roles where I can grow with a strong engineering team.
by gen220 | 2026-02-04 13:27:16+00:00
Oaxaca and its surroundings are still identifiably Zapotec! The idea of an urban landscape that’s still culturally and aesthetically indigenous to such an extent is super mindbending to this gringo.

Mexico’s historical relationship to indigenous groups is incredibly complicated and problematic in its own ways, but it’s completely and frankly unimaginably different from the analogous relationships in the U.S. or Canada.
by mario_lopez | 2026-02-04 13:27:19+00:00
I’m working on a platform like this - a Pocket (RIP) alternative with some added features.

The kicker is multi-platform support, since I also want the ability to browse from mobile and web, with the extension to easily add while browsing and native Share To to save links on mobile.

I’m working on reminders and daily emails for myself. I’ll prioritize this.

Site is up as well as Chrome Extension. Apps are built and ready to be published, just need some time to get them submitted to their respective stores.

https://backpocket.my/