MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by syeare | 2026-02-07 22:33:44+00:00
At least on this Materialistic app available on F-Droid, all those comments are flagged and unable to be seen

Its absolutely senseless to take on a position on something when not knowing what's coming from both sides

I'd presume this place to be frequented by those who would also find it similarly foolhardy to be taking a stance on an issue when not all parties are privy to the same objectivity/impartiality (in terms of information and the different sides of the story)
by sethev | 2026-02-07 22:33:47+00:00
Yeah, it's hard to read the article without getting a cringy feeling of second hand embarrassment. The setup is weird too, in that it seems to imply that the little snippets of "wisdom" should be used as prompts to an LLM to come to their same conclusions, when of course this style of prompt will reliably produce congratulatory dreck.

Setting aside the absurdity of using dollars per day spent on tokens as the new lines of code per day, have they not heard of mocks or simulation testing? These are long proven techniques, but they appear bent on taking credit for some kind revolutionary discovery by recasting these standard techniques as a Digital Twin Universe.

One positive(?) thing I'll say is that this fits well with my experience of people who like to talk about software factories (or digital factories), but at least they're up front about the massive cost of this type of approach - whereas "digital factories" are typically cast as a miracle cure that will reduce costs dramatically somehow (once it's eventually done correctly, of course).

Hard pass.
by tim333 | 2026-02-07 22:34:09+00:00
Someone with 20:20 vision can read a UK number plate from about 60m so the 20m standard allows for some eye imperfections. You're allowed to use glasses.

I have some experience because I got a macular hole in one eye which had surgery. With the good eye I can do about 60m, with the problem one about 20.
by rhelz | 2026-02-07 22:35:07+00:00
// I showed that to be incorrect. I followed the evidence, where you followed your gut. //

Even the authors of the original article didn't claim this was evidence of conflict between the species. They only claimed that it was evidence consistent with conflict between the species.

You are extrapolating far, far, beyond what the evidence would support.

There's one bone which is fractured in a way which is *consistent* with its being caused by a homo sapiens-style rock hitting it.

And nobody is claiming that we never got into the pleistocene version of a bar fight. Of course we did. Perhaps the bone mentioned in the article you cited was the result of such a fight. Perhaps not.

We have no evidence whatsoever of war between the species. None. Zero. A bar fight is not a war. And we have absolutely no evidence of any kind of genocidal berzerking. Any attempt to recruit the Assyrians or the rapists of Nanjing is anachronistic. That kind of warfare requires social coordination on the a scale which we wouldn't even invent until the Assyrians.

sigh it is an easy mistake to make---the evidence is consistent with what you want to believe. Therefore, it must support what you believe. :-( You have to resist the temptation. The more you want something to be true, the more suspicious you should be that it isn't true.
by munksbeer | 2026-02-07 22:35:14+00:00
I guide the AI. If I see it produce stuff that I think can be done better, I either just do it myself or point it in the right direction.

It definitely doesn't do a good job of spotting areas ripe of building abstractions, but that is our job. This thing does the boring parts, and I get to use my creativity thinking how to make the code more elegant, which is the part I love.

As far as I can tell, what's not to love about that?
by sdoering | 2026-02-07 22:36:14+00:00
I didn't even put in my last hotel bill, because my time was worth more to me than navigating a shitty, always borderline broken excel file that once filled out leads to a back and forth of clarifying questions always with an undercurrent of "them" trying to "teach me how to be a good form fill monkey".

If I should win the next pitch, I will definitely have on e of my team work on setting up a shadow system, a web application that produces pdfs for the finance department that are indistinguishable from the XLS based ones. But with a better CX for me and my people.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-07 22:36:17+00:00
You did see the part that I worked at startup for 2.5 years, then worked at AWS ProServe for almost 4 and now work at a third party consulting company as a staff consultant leading cloud + app dev hybrid projects?

I turned down a job where the position was going to be created for me by a former coworker at AWS who is now a director at a well known non tech F500 company where I would be responsible for a multi year migration and modernization strategy that would have paid about 30% more than I was making at AWS.

I really hate babysitting infrastructure and lift and shifts so much I turned it down and took a job that paid the same as I was making at AWS. That’s just how much more I enjoy the hybrid cloud + app dev roles.

I deal strictly with AWS on the infrastructure side, the minute I’m working on a large assessment (those huge 50 page requirement docs) and they mention hybrid, or anything outside of AWS, I bring in someone who actually likes that stuff. As I do when I see it’s going to be a migration.

The other side of my job is to actually do hands on app dev + cloud either doing it myself for small projects or leading larger ones.

I’m also not the person who is going to be on call or monitoring, that’s for the young folks.

My last three projects were using the CDK, Terraform and CloudFormation respectively
by dlenski | 2026-02-07 22:36:27+00:00
> These fake “going out of business ads” have been around for a few years,

There was an extremely funny and interesting Canadaland podcast about these, wherein Canadaland's founder Jesse Brown bought an "elegant men's cardigan" from a fake Toronto clothing store that was "going out of business" due to its ersatz owners’ retirement.

https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/1176-mens-elegant-cardiga...
by WalterBright | 2026-02-07 22:36:30+00:00
> There is some indirect and inconclusive evidence of microbial life on Mars, and even in the Venusian atmosphere. This dates back to results from the Viking and Venera, as well as more recent research.

Yes, I've been hearing that forever. Every probe shrinks the envelope on the possibility.

> Earth life could be destructive to native life in these places,

Better us than slime mold.

> and vice versa (since they would likely be extremophiles) resulting in invasive species.

Perhaps. If anyone was transporting things back from there, there'd be a long space voyage where any such toxicity to the astronauts would be pretty clear.

2. Musk is not getting subsidies. He does get government contracts, where he exchanges rockets for money. That is not a subsidy, like if I make boxes and sell them to the government I am not getting a subsidy.
by colejhudson | 2026-02-07 22:36:33+00:00
No, Russia is the prime (if not only) candidate.

Why? They've been developing a system of "single-use agents" to overwhelm European governments and keep them on their back foot.

This is likely a test run.

A lovely article on this was recently published in The New Yorker that you may enjoy: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/09/to-build-a-fir....
by trueno | 2026-02-07 22:36:59+00:00
I've been working religiously for like 2 years on the jedi academy codebase which is c & c++. It's Ravensofts variant of the idtech3 engine and it's insane how fragile the games combat is to precision and timing changes, I can't get away with adding much without destroying the lightsaber combat qualities. There are certain spots where I can't even add an incrementing i++ counter lmao it presents just enough of a slowdown or shifts something around that I haven't been able to track down that bleeds into the rest of the gameplay, but I am also sticking with the ancient compilers from 22 years ago so as to preserve the fpu characteristics of the game. There are some modern attempts at using this codebase with modern tooling but they've kind of bastardized/refactored all of it and it just feels different/unbalanced wrong. idtech3 is such an incredibly foray into c it's really something else and carmack and team really sent it back in the day.
by bodge5000 | 2026-02-07 22:37:31+00:00
On the face of it, this or at least acting as a code reviewer from an experienced point of view seems like the solution, the problem is that we all naturally get lazy and complacent. I actually think AI was at its best for coding a year or so ago, when it could kind of do part of the work but theres no way you could ever ship it. Code that works today but breaks in 6 months is far more insidious.
by mike_hearn | 2026-02-07 22:37:52+00:00
Yes if/when prices rise there'll be demand destruction but I think demand will keep rising for the foreseeable future anyway even incorporating that. Lower value use cases like vibe coding hobby apps might fall by the wayside because they become uneconomic but the tokens will be soaked up by bigger enterprises that have found ways to properly integrate it at scale into their businesses. I don't mean Copilot style Office plugins but more business-specific stuff that yields competitive advantage.
by kristianp | 2026-02-07 22:38:08+00:00
This is gold for Anthropic's profitability. The Claude Code addicts can double their spend to plow through tokens because they need to finish something by a deadline. OpenAI will have a similar product within a week but will only charge 3x the normal rate.

This angle might also be NVidias reason for buying Groq. People will pay a premium for faster tokens.
by godelski | 2026-02-07 22:38:09+00:00
> I just prefix it with a backslash: \grep

I have an almost identical grep alias.

Word of warning, I use `\grep` quite frequently. The usage is when you are piping after grep or saving to a variable.

Illustrative example:

$ TO_DL=$(curl "https://foo.com/releases/" \
| grep -e "latest" \
| head -n1 \
)
$ curl $TO_DL
curl: (3) bad range in URL position XX
https://foo.com/releases/latest.tar.gz
^^^^^^

Annoyingly `--color=auto` can change the representation of the characters so when you run again there's a mismatch. I just find `\grep` easier than `grep --color=never`.

Annoying footgun, but something to be aware of in case you go down this extremely confusing rabbit hole like me. I couldn't figure it out until I decided to hexdump the string.

[Side note]: My first thought reading the article was also about how `\` basically solves the problem but they do have one advantage in that they can do `,<tab>` and get a list of all their custom commands. Personally not worth it for me but I can definitely see this being useful for some. Especially on shared systems. But getting everyone to prefix a script name seems just as unlikely as getting everyone to place programs in the right location.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-02-07 22:38:10+00:00
>If you are outsourcing to an LLM in this case YOU are still in charge of the creative thought.

The meetings will continue regardless. Those meetings aren't purely there for productivity reasons. It's the incentives for middle managers and directors and whatnot.

Its just that all that throughput of an outside team is pushed onto you and 0-3 more engineers. You will optimize accordingly for your job and get something out to satisfy their demands. Likely sacrificing quality in the process. It's not different domesticating the outsourcing.

And that's fpr now. Maybe in decades' time the engineer is extinct and it's simply cheap scriptors who run it.
by Dumblydorr | 2026-02-07 22:38:57+00:00
What would happen if these agents are given a token lifespan, and are told to continually spend tokens to create more agentic children, and give their genetic and data makeup such as it is to children that it creates with other agents sexually potentially, but then tokens are limited and they can not get enough without certain traits.

Wouldn’t they start to evolve to be able to reproduce more and eat more tokens? And then they’d be mature agents to take further human prompts to gain more tokens?

Would you see certain evolutionary strategies reemerge like carnivores eating weaker agents for tokens, eating of detritus of old code, or would it be more like evolution of roles in a company?

I assume the hurdles would be agents reproducing? How is that implemented?
by somat | 2026-02-07 22:39:27+00:00
It was a mid sized mail order company, they had invested early with computers, and not changed much since. It was a very strange mix of odd old computer systems. An IBM mainframe batch processing backend with sco unix on the front end using pick databases as a sort of vertically integrated database and terminal ui.

When hired I had just missed the retirement of some sort of lockheed minicomputer they had used in the call center, which I would have loved to see. It was a very odd environment.
by rstuart4133 | 2026-02-07 22:39:29+00:00
> There is a huge penalty for having too much swap - swap thrashing.

Thrashing is the penality for using too much swap. I was saying there is no penality for having a lot of swap available, but unused.

Although trashing is not something you want happening, if your system is thrashing with swap the alternative without having it available is the OMM killer laying waste to the system. Out of those two choices I prefer the system running slowly.

> Gradual performance degradation never happens.

Where on earth did you get that from? It's wrong most of the time. The subject was very well researched in the late 1960's and 1970's. If load ramps up gradually you get a gradual slowdown until the working set is badly exceeded, then it falls off a cliff. This is a modern example, but there are lots of papers from that era showing the usual gradual response, followed by falling off a cliff: https://yeet.cx/r/ayNHrp5oL0. A seminal paper on the subject: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/362342.362356

The underlying driver for that behaviour is the disk system being overwhelmed. Say you have 100 web workers that that spend a fair chunk of their time waiting for networked database requests. If they all fit in memory the response is as fast as it can be. Once swapping starts latency increases gradually as more and more workers are swapped in and out while they wait for clients and the database. Eventually the increasing swapping hits the disk's IOPS limit, active memory is swapped out and performance crashes.

The only reason I can think the gradual slow down is not obvious to you is that modern SSD's are so fast, the initial degradation it's not noticeable to desktop user.

> Don't do this. Unless hibernation is used, you only need a few hundred megabytes of free swap space.

A you seem to recognise having lots of swap on hand and unused, even it it's terabytes of it does not effect performance. The question then becomes: what would you prefer to happen in those rare times when swap usage exceeds the optimal few hundred megabytes? Your options are get your desktop app randomly killed by the OOM killer and perhaps lose your work, or the system slows to a crawl and you take corrective action like closing the offending app. When that happens it seems it's popular to blame the swap system for slowing their system down because they temporarily exceeded the capacity of their computer.
by Muromec | 2026-02-07 22:39:40+00:00
Check out this one:

https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/documenten/rapporten/2025/07/04...

https://vng.nl/nieuws/meer-regie-nodig-op-technologie-voor-d...

https://www.amsterdam.nl/nieuws/nieuwsoverzicht/stappenplan-...
by hnlmorg | 2026-02-07 22:39:54+00:00
I’ve heard this argument made before and it’s the only side of AI software development that excites me.

Using AI to write yet another run-of-the-mill web service written in the same bloated frameworks and programming languages designed for the lowest common denominator of developers really doesn’t feel like it’s taking advantage leap in capabilities that AI bring.

But using AI to write native applications in low level languages, built for performance and memory utilisation, does at least feel like we are bringing some actual quality of life savings in exchange for all those fossil fuels burnt to crunch the LLMs tokens.
by WalterBright | 2026-02-07 22:40:27+00:00
> There are a lot of ethical issues surrounding Neuralink and how it would be used

Like what? (There are always ethical issues with new medical technology.)

> It might be good for certain medical stuff

Yes, like giving sight to the blind! What a monster Musk is!

P.S. two of my largest medical fears are becoming paralyzed or going blind. Neuralink has promise in making these treatable. I'm all for it!
by davidhyde | 2026-02-07 22:40:33+00:00
My take on the difference between now and then is “effort”. All those things mentioned above are now effortless but the door to “effort” remains open as it always has been. Take the first point for example. Those little black boxes of AI can be significantly demystified by, for example, watching a bunch of videos (https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.html) and spending at least 40 hours of hard cognitive effort learning about it yourself. We used to purchase software or write it ourselves before it became effortless to get it for free in exchange for ads and then a subscription when we grew tired of ads or were tricked into bait and switch. You can also argue that it has never been easier to write your own software than it is today.

Hostile operating systems. Take the effort to switch to Linux.

Undocumented hardware, well there is far more open source hardware out there today and back in the day it was fun to reverse engineer hardware, now we just expect it to be open because we couldn’t be bothered to put in the effort anymore.

Effort gives me agency. I really like learning new things and so agentic LLMs don’t make me feel hopeless.
by voidhorse | 2026-02-07 22:41:08+00:00
But the absence of papers is precisely the problem and why all this LLM stuff has become a new religion in the tech sphere.

Either you have faith and every post like this fills you with fervor and pious excitement for the latest miracles performed by machine gods.

Or you are a nonbeliever and each of these posts is yet another false miracle you can chalk up to baseless enthusiasm.

Without proper empirical method, we simply do not know.

What's even funnier about it is that large-scale empirical testing is actually necessary in the first place to verify that a stochastic processes is even doing what you want (at least on average). But the tech community has become such a brainless atmosphere totally absorbed by anecdata and marketing hype that no one simply seems to care anymore. It's quite literally devolved into the religious ceremony of performing the rain dance (use AI) because we said so.

One thing the papers help provide is basic understanding and consistent terminology, even when the models change. You may not find value in them but I assure you that the actual building of models and product improvements around them is highly dependent on the continual production of scientific research in machine learning, including experiments around applications of llms. The literature covers many prompting techniques well, and in a scientific fashion, and many of these have been adopted directly in products (chain of thought, to name one big example—part of the reason people integrate it is not because of some "fingers crossed guys, worked on my query" but because researchers have produced actual statistically significant results on benchmarks using the technique) To be a bit harsh, I find your very dismissal of the literature here in favor of hype-drenched blog posts soaked in ridiculous language and fantastical incantations to be precisely symptomatic of the brain rot the LLM craze has produced in the technical community.
by davidcondrey | 2026-02-07 22:41:12+00:00
Hi HN, I'm building witnessd (v0.1.9) to solve the "Is this AI?" problem by looking at the process, not the result.

The Tech:

- Hardware Binding: Keys are bound to TPM/TEE; signals are signed in a secure environment.
- Jitter Seals: We capture the statistical entropy of the writing process to differentiate human "jitter" from synthetic input.
- Time Hardening: We use sequential VDFs (Verifiable Delay Functions) so that forging a 2-hour session requires 2 hours of computation. No parallelization.

Try it out:

brew install writerslogic/tap/witnessd

Or verify any .war certificate at https://writerslogic.com/verify

I'm a novelist and Marine veteran, and I'm currently moving this through the IETF (draft-condrey-rats-pop). I'd love your feedback on the schema and the VDF implementation.
by wildzzz | 2026-02-07 22:41:17+00:00
Probably a third hand story at this point but what I was told from someone that worked there for a long time is that at one point, the winch that raised the cesium source got jammed in the up position. Obviously this was a problem because no one could approach it. They brought in a marksman who somehow shot the winch or rope or whatever which dropped the source back into it's pig.

I will say that this experiment only exposed the plot of land to radiation, not contaminated it. Unless the source was broken or eroded, there would be no detectable radiation on that land once the source is sealed up.
by ProfessorLayton | 2026-02-07 22:41:19+00:00
>If you argue that the character of a neighborhood is based on all of those things, then keeping them the same would maintain the character. What you seem to advocate is for changing them, which is then changing the character.

You totally missed what they're saying, which is that "character" is a nebulous term and can mean anything one wants it to be. For example, it could be argued that you're the one changing the neighborhood by refusing any change, and causing people to be priced out, thus changing the neighborhood's "character".

>If someone builds an apartment complex on land near mine, the builder it is not my "neighbor". The builder is an LLC that owns the land. They do not live there and do not care if traffic gets awful, crime goes up, or quality of life of the pre-existing neighbors gets worse. That's because they aren't our neighbor. They're an LLC.

Why would a builder ever be a neighbor? Your neighbors are the people that live in the complex, and they would indeed care if traffic gets awful. Not wanting to suffer through traffic is a major reason one would pick an apartment complex near one's job.

Ultimately NIMBY's want to control property they do not own to the detriment of others. If you don't want an apartment complex next to your house, then consider buying that land and not building an apartment complex.
by Nextgrid | 2026-02-07 22:41:38+00:00
If you’re repeatedly prompting, I will defer to my usual retort when it comes to LLM coding: programming is about translating unclear requirements in a verbose (English) language into a terse (programming) language. It’s generally much faster for me to write the terse language directly than play a game of telephone with an intermediary in the verbose language for it to (maybe) translate my intentions into the terse language.

In your example, you mention that you prompt the AI and if it outputs sub-par results you rewrite it yourself. That’s my point: over time, you learn what an LLM is good at and what it isn’t, and just don’t bother with the LLM for the stuff it’s not good at. Thing is, as a senior engineer, most of the stuff you do shouldn’t be stuff that an LLM is good at to begin with. That’s not the LLM replacing you, that’s the LLM augmenting you.

Enjoy your sensible use of LLMs! But LLMs are not the silver bullet the billion dollars of investment desperately want us to believe.