MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by keeda | 2026-02-28 23:12:14+00:00
> The organizational assumption that reviewed code is understood code no longer holds.

This never held.

As somebody who has inherited codebases thrown over the wall through acquisitions and re-orgs, there is absolutely nothing in this article related to "code generated by AI" that cannot be attributed to "code generated by humans who are no longer at the company." Heck, these have happened when revisiting code I myself wrote years ago.

In a previous life 10 years ago, there was one large Python codebase I inherited from an acquisition, where a bug occurred due a method argument sometimes being passed in as a string or a number. Despite spending hours reproducing it multiple times to debug it, I could never figure out the code path that caused the bug. I suspect it was due to some dynamic magic where a function name was generated via concatenating disparate strings each of which were propagated via multiple asynchronous message queues (making the debugger useless), and then "eval"d. After multiple hours of trial and error and grepping, I could never find the offending callsite and the original authors had long moved on. My fix was just to put in a "x = int(x)" in the function and move on.

I would bet this was due to a shortcut somebody took under time pressure, something you can totally avoid simply by having the AI refactor everything instead.

We know what the solutions for that are, and they're the same -- in fact, they should be the default mode -- for AI-generated code. They are basically everything that we consider "best practices": avoiding magic, better types, comprehensive tests, documentation, modularity, and so on.
by danielheath | 2026-02-28 23:13:00+00:00
I switched to my own domain ages ago; it only took 2-3 years to stop getting relevant mail to the old one (I put a forwarding rule in place and just used the new one for everything).

Imported all my past mail on day one, forwarding meant I had one inbox only, and I only sent mail from the new domain. A few gentle “please stop using my old address” conversations with family.
by teleforce | 2026-02-28 23:13:19+00:00
Genuine question, why is it very difficult even with our 21st century technology to accurately detect landmines for the purpose of destroying them after the war?

In order to be effective landmines need to be very close to the land surface thus should be easier enough to detect. Researcher in Japan has succesfully detect using low power radar sub-surface bamboo shoots since they are more expensive than bamboo shoots that are already grown over land surface.

For safe and fast detection mechanism close to the ground aerial UAV can be deploy to scan the the suspected land mine area.

Something is missing and don't add up here, perhaps someone can help explain the situations?
by lm28469 | 2026-02-28 23:14:21+00:00
> Wonder what am I doing wrong?

You're comparing 100b parameters open models running on a consumer laptop VS private models with at the very least 1t parameters running on racks of bleeding edge professional gpus

Local agentic coding is closer to "shit me the boiler plate for an android app" not "deep research questions", especially on your machine
by hnthrowaway0315 | 2026-02-28 23:14:49+00:00
I think Windows 95/2000 and the contemporary MacOS (including the then future MacOS X) have the best UI in everything I used in my 30+ years of tech life.

I sincerely hope that one day we could go back to that road. If you want that achieved, please support me to join Apple/Microsoft to become the UI boss, fire all flat-design people and hire a small team to implement the older UI, then give a few passionate talks on EDX and conferences so people who supported flat UI magically support the older UI. They always follow whoever the lead is like headless flies.

LOL.
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-02-28 23:14:50+00:00
I somewhat feel that using floating point arithmetic for what should be a symbol manipulation exercise is cheating. The deserialisation technique is interesting enough that I'm not really upset, though.

> The codex solution reversed the order which makes sense for making carry logic easy, but it is less clean.

That's the approach I'd have gone with. I've long been an advocate of little-endian numerical representations. That said, if there's a maximum number of digits, it's straightforward to implement the circuitry needed to do calculate the most-significant digit of the result in one go; and I somehow doubt the AI-generated solution really took advantage of the tricks that little-endian allows.

> At some point I set claude code on some debugging to my surprise I don’t recall it actually solving any of the bugs, it seemed much more concerned with “correcting” the funky things I was intentionally doing.

It baffles me that somebody capable of this kind of work would find this surprising. The process that allows LLMs to find bugs in code is the same process that entreats them to "correct" such creativity: their understanding of the world begins and ends at statistical plausibility, and they cannot truly comprehend things (though they can do a very good job of pretending, given sufficient training data).
by surgical_fire | 2026-02-28 23:15:06+00:00
Planning? I can't say.

Desire? Absolutely. That's what they have been doing with the Palestinians after all.

As I said before, I have no dog in this race. I personally prefer the countries I care about to not get involved in this conflict, and hope the US-Israel axis lose somehow.

I stole that silly axis jargon from you. It is very fitting there now.
by matthewdgreen | 2026-02-28 23:15:06+00:00
I don’t think either of these things requires more than a vote of Congress and the President’s signature. DC might, because of its unique Constitutional status and the current partisan Court, but there’s no argument for PR. You would have to abolish the filibuster, but Congress can do that once per session by majority vote — it’s just a legislative rule and not a Constitutional mechanism.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-28 23:15:20+00:00
> Well Opus and Gemini are probably running on multiple H200 equivalents, maybe multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars of inference equipment.

But if you've got that kind of equipment, you aren't using it to support a single user. It gets the best utilization by running very large batches with massive parallelism across GPUs, so you're going to do that. There is such a thing as a useful middle ground. that may not give you the absolute best in performance but will be found broadly acceptable and still be quite viable for a home lab.
by tombert | 2026-02-28 23:15:37+00:00
I don't think the world needs another geeky guy making a podcast about his unearned political opinions.

I have all the equipment necessary for a podcast (a decent Shure microphone and Zoom sound interface), but my political opinions don't usually stray too far from typical American progressive stuff and there's already a million podcasts for those kinds of viewpoints from people more educated on these subjects than I am.

When I have a perspective that I do think is unique I'll write something on my blog but generally I've stayed away from any kind of partisan politics on there because I don't see the point in regurgitating the same stuff everyone else is.
by getnormality | 2026-02-28 23:15:45+00:00
So much AI moaning and groaning these days seems based on the idea that people have to be forced to do anything of value, even for themselves.

It seems to imply a great deal of pessimism about human self-determination. Like, I can't be anything good unless there is an external mold pressing me into the good shape. And it can't be my choice because I would never choose anything good. I'll only do good things for myself if forced.

Since AI is supposedly taking everybody's jobs and making it so we can choose never to better ourselves, maybe future governments will need to institute taskmasters to force us into regimens of physical and mental health and vigor. A whole new adult school system will have to be instituted.
by lateforwork | 2026-02-28 23:16:05+00:00
Designers tend to be less open to feedback than developers. That, I think, helps explain why flat UI persists even though it has shown usability drawbacks. It also helps explain why overall usability feels like it's declining ever year — for instance, macOS Tahoe seems noticeably worse in usability compared to macOS Sequoia. Does anyone think Apple is going to rush out a release that fixes the excessive rounding of window corners? Don't hold your breath.
by reliabilityguy | 2026-02-28 23:16:12+00:00
Libya is not a real country in a historical sense. It’s a bunch of tribes, Kadaffi was from one of the tribes that subjugated others. In Iraq it was a Sunni minority that rules over Shiite majority, and other minorities like the Kurds. In Syria one minority (alawiites) rules over others by force.

Also, these countries were not formed by themselves, but rather through deals with France and/or Britain.

Iran, while also diverse, has a thousands of years long history. Persians still see themselves as continuation of Persian peoples from the empire times, etc.

So, it is not very correct to compare it one to one.
by muzani | 2026-02-28 23:16:21+00:00
I got the wrong answer with Haiku and Sonnet 4.5

Correct answer with Sonnet 4.6, but this might as well be a coin flip. I've found Sonnet 4.6 to be substantially dumber than 4.5. I'd rate Sonnet 4.5 a 10/10 at creative writing and 4.6 a 3/10.

My ChatGPT just expired and I was about to get Claude instead, but I'm starting to rethink this.
by casey2 | 2026-02-28 23:16:36+00:00
Usability is the wrong metric, paint by numbers is more "usable" (sic accessible) than a canvas but you'd be depressed watching your son graduate art school and that's all he can do.

If you do want to optimize for usability you have to make sure you aren't making the system more consumptive at the same time. The prime example from the article is trading a moment where the user must take initiative with a menu. More useable less useful. Lower the floor not the ceiling etc. Windows (and iOS) did make genuine improvements to OSs but because of decisions like these most users are locked out of enjoying them.
by Rapzid | 2026-02-28 23:16:48+00:00
IMHO you're still making it too complicated; knives out GOT, titans of industry..

Sure, but it's even simpler.. The Ayatollah Regime funds regional terrorism. It destabilizes the region, gets people killed, and holds back progress.

Also, they are always seemingly always almost done building a nuke.. Which frankly nobody wants(not even them because they know they'd be obliterated the instant the world thought they actually had one or were about to for-reals have one).

They are BAD FOR BUSINESS both private AND PUBLIC.

As long as the rest of the region was developing eventually their number would be up. The recent uprising and massacre was the signal their number is up. Time to go, honestly signed all their neighbors.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-02-28 23:16:52+00:00
Depends on what one is looking for. I'm considering upgrading to an M5 model because while the M6 redesign might come with some nicer specs, it's also going to be coming with some teething pains by virtue of having a new design. The M5 generation is probably going to be a speed bump with a chassis and screen that's a known quantity and has had the kinks smoothed out.
by jcstk | 2026-02-28 23:19:04+00:00
Religion is a subset of ideology, and both are a mechanism to recruit labor to fight and not the reason for conflict. Material isn't cheaper to buy, the "owner" of the material has all of the leverage - lock them in like a SaaS contract and them jump the price up, and the buyer can't do anything. Crops and slaves are no longer valuable as port worthy coast and natural resource deposits, but the fight is still over land and power.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-02-28 23:20:42+00:00
Data decays on floppies at rest but... If I manage to read say a 5"1/4 floppy from my Commodore 64 correctly and copy it to another, NIUB (New In Unopened Box) but 30 years old floppy, will that new copy last for decades again?

Or is the medium itself damaged by time passing?

I'm asking because during Covid I dug out my old Commodore 64 and managed to read a few disks and created a copy of some that were still working.
by robot-wrangler | 2026-02-28 23:21:25+00:00
> Try speccing out a flux capacitor. I'll wait.

One way to spec that is presumably something like "X% more efficient than current best-in-class", "made of Y,Z with no exotic materials", "takes no longer than T days to create" and so on.

Anyway, being "anti" spec isn't even wrong because it's just a completely incoherent position. There's always a spec.. including any informal prompt you kick off your agents with. Call it a "structured prompt" if that soothes you and your agents, then let's move on to the interesting part where we decide how much structure is optimal
by PunchyHamster | 2026-02-28 23:21:27+00:00
good to know, thanks. I just ran ollama with qwen3.5:27b. Currently it's stuck on picking format

Let's write.
Wait, I'll write the response.
Wait, I'll check if I should use a table.
No, text is fine.
Okay.
Let's write.
Wait, I'll write the response.
Wait, I'll check if I should use a bullet list.
No, just lines.
Okay.
Let's write.
Wait, I'll write the response.
Wait, I'll check if I should use a numbered list.
No, lines are fine.
Okay.
Let's write.
Wait, I'll write the response.
Wait, I'll check if I should use a code block.
Yes.
Okay.
Let's write.
Wait, I'll write the response.
Wait, I'll check if I should use a pre block.
Code block is better.

... (for next 100 lines)
by lloeki | 2026-02-28 23:21:51+00:00
I fail to see how the inane failures brought by a dysfunctional IVth Republic are in any way relevant to the post-WW2 world order where both nuclear weapons and the EU began to exist, and in which France has been extremely relevant multiple times over, both geopolitically and on operational theatres.

The importance of the land component of the triad is vastly overstated, simply do not make sense at the landmass size of France, and only matters when your doctrine is USA vs USSR cold-war era complete retaliatory annihilation anyway.
by VerifiedReports | 2026-02-28 23:22:07+00:00
Yep. I always cite XP as being Windows's peak, but I forgot that it shipped with their insulting Fisher-Price motif enabled by default. Step 1 was to switch the UI to "classic" (essentially Windows 95) mode, and all was well.

Windows 95 is a great case study because with that release, Microsoft did more for GUIs than Apple did through the entire decade of the '90s... and beyond.

All of it is now out the window (pun invited). It's a race to the bottom between Microsoft and Apple, with Microsoft having a HUGE head-start. But Apple has really stepped up to the plate with Tahoe, crippling it with big enough UI blunders to keep them in the enshittification game.
by n8cpdx | 2026-02-28 23:22:14+00:00
As bad as it is, I don't think it is bad in ways that non technical users are likely to notice unfortunately. Mostly because I think years of horrible software have trained people to not have expectations.

Tahoe is still a breath of fresh air compared to Windows, and iOS 26 is still great compared to Android (as I've unfortunately learned from a failed switch attempt).
by jebarker | 2026-02-28 23:23:19+00:00
> It's always funny how many people think that the only font of altruism is taking care of children who have your DNA, like that's some kind of selfless act

This is a strawman position in my opinion. I don't think there's that many people who think they're carrying out some selfless act by having children. It's simply biologically true that the children you'll probably have the easiest time raising are your own and, assuming we want to continue as a species, we do need people to have children. It's fine to have them, fine to not, neither side has some moral high ground.
Show HN: Depth Check – Your AI tutor to learn about anything
by gcrowne13 | 2026-02-28 23:24:59+00:00
Hey HN! Been hacking around with AI tutors using socratic method, Feynman technique, spaced repetition, etc. Depth Check allows you to learn about anything and collect all your learning progress in a slick and accessible UI. Try it out! Would love to hear your feedback
by consumer451 | 2026-02-28 23:25:01+00:00
Why would you believe this statement any more than a statement from Putin, Likud, Trump... or anyone like that? The Iranian regime recently admitted to shooting thousands of their own people who were protesting.

Without some confirmation, everything is propaganda, isn't it? Jeez... there is no greater force that that to have one's bias confirmed, is there. That is going to destroy us.
by vigrant | 2026-02-28 23:25:38+00:00
The constraint is enforced at every move. Stockfish can never actually play against it. The only limitation is that its internal search tree imagines unconstrained future moves, which makes its evaluation slightly off and the engine effectively weaker. For the use case (handicapping for fun) that's an acceptable tradeoff

https://constrainedchess.vercel.app/?fen=2b1kb2%2F8%2F8%2F8%...
by TMWNN | 2026-02-28 23:26:03+00:00
Relevant: TIL that ATMs are robbed with explosives. Criminals fill machines with propane or acetylene then ignite the gas, or use external bombs. Germany (where 60% of attacks succeed) is Europe's #1 target; landlords don't like to lease to banks with ATMs, because blowing them up endangers other tenants. <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1im37e4/til_t...>
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-02-28 23:26:13+00:00
I really liked XP (and 7) because for me, having a capable theming engine built in that didn't take a ton of extra resources or cause instability (unlike Stardock's WindowBlinds) was a real value add. There were some absolutely gorgeous third party XP/Vista/7 themes on sites like DeviantArt that worked extremely well within the limits of the engine, had a unique look and feel, and were just as usable as the "classic" theme.

When MS gutted the theming engine with the release of Windows 8 (flat rectangles only) I was devastated.
by amelius | 2026-02-28 23:26:16+00:00
The problem is that the abstraction level moved up so far that we're now programming in the English language, and we're more like managers than programmers. This will only get worse. The next step will be that AIs run entire companies. And BigAI will not allow us to profit from that because they will just run the AI themselves, the current situation was just a stepping stone.
by throw-qqqqq | 2026-02-28 23:26:17+00:00
It sounds quite plausible.

Almost all equity ETFs do their balancing against dark pools or directly with market makers to avoid arbitrage and to ensure enough liquidity.

Since index ETFs have more AUM than the underlying instruments (the “ETF tail wagging the dog”), this sounds like a natural evolution.

There is nothing nefarious about this, it’s just how the markets work.
by apolloartemis | 2026-02-28 23:26:30+00:00
If anyone at OpenAI is reading this, it would be super valuable if the contract might be updated to specifically make reference to the recent law prohibiting AI-based nuclear launch. On 2/27/2026 the Trump Administration made a statement to the Washington Post stating their support for this restriction (which is already law and would take an Act of Congress to amend).

FY2025 NDAA, Section 1638: Sense of Congress with Respect to use of Artificial Intelligence to Support Strategic Deterrence

(a) Sense of Congress.--It is the sense of Congress that--

(1) the considered use of artificial intelligence and machine learning tools presents opportunities to strengthen the security of critical strategic communications and early warning networks, improve the efficiency of planning processes to reduce the risk of collateral damage, and enhance U.S. capabilities for modeling weapons functionality in support of stockpile stewardship; and

(2) even with such applications, particular care must be taken to ensure that the incorporation of artificial intelligence and machine learning tools does not increase the risk that our Nation's most critical strategic assets can be compromised.

(b) Statement of policy.--
It is the policy of the United States that the use of artificial intelligence efforts should not compromise the integrity of nuclear safeguards, whether through the functionality of weapons systems, the validation of communications from command authorities, or the principle of requiring positive human actions in execution of decisions by the President with respect to the employment of nuclear weapons.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/5009...
by vonunov | 2026-02-28 23:26:44+00:00
I finally got all the nits picked out, except it seems to erroneously point out supposed section reference errors:

----

Reference to 'Section 13.1.3' but there is no Section 13 in the document - this appears to be a copy-paste error from another lease form

Cross-reference to 'Section 2' is incorrect - the non-real property items are actually listed in paragraph 12, not in any 'Section 2'

----

It seems to have trouble with the technical-writing numbering (e.g., 3.1.23) and insists on referring to sequential paragraph numbers even though the paragraphs aren't labeled and referenced that way. This numbering is done using the usual numbered list object but I don't remember if I had to configure a variant of it to do this. If you need I'll anonymize the document and send it, as long as you promise not to make too much fun of it (I was a party to the contract so I can get away with having drafted or substantively edited it despite not being an attorney, according to some guy on the internet; govern yourself accordingly or whatever it is you people say these days)
by snarfy | 2026-02-28 23:26:46+00:00
Yes this is what made GnG and other difficult games like it great. While some games balanced the financial side on forced limited play time, e.g. timers or constant depleting health, others like GnG were just hugely difficult. You can play for 4 minutes or 40 depending on skill.

As a kid with no money, I learned to get good at these and avoid the obvious cash crabs
by meling | 2026-02-28 23:26:54+00:00
What’s my remedy when Google’s product (Gemini 3.1 pro high) makes a “grave” mistake? This is unrelated to the bans that’s been happening recently, but wanted to share …

This morning I asked Gemini to “save” its output to a local file. However it did more than that … it committed the file (along with several unrelated staged changes that was not ready to be committed) and even pushed the changes to GitHub. I’ve never asked any model to commit, let alone push… I’m not impressed; actually a bit disappointed that it would do this without any warning up front. This happened in Antigravity.
by throwawayheui57 | 2026-02-28 23:27:09+00:00
Iranian here! Lived most of my life inside Iran. I don't view US's actions as a favor to common Iranians. That's naive. No one wants war and bombing of civilians. Our misery is caused by a mix of religious extremism, theocracy and foreign intervention (in the past, Mossadegh, etc.) among other things. First and foremost I hold the regime responsible. For most of my life, I witnessed firsthand how they pushed us step by step closer to confrontation with the US, yet there's no single bomb shelter in Tehran or any major city for people to run to after 47 years of this shit. How would you feel in this situation?

Their opposition to Israel is not from a humanitarian and moral standpoint, it's purely religious. They have no shame admitting this. You just have to listen to one of the 5 state TV channels in Farsi. I even think Palestinians would fare better if not for these extremists on either side!

All that said, the supreme leader is the one who commands the murder of innocents in the streets, so he had it coming. Good riddance and he died like the rat that he was. But as to what happens next? No one knows. Also I personally don't think US is doing this because they want Iran's oil. I believe they want to put pressure on China to not get Iran's cheap (under sanctions) oil. That seems more plausible to me.

*typo edit