MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by znq | 2026-02-05 16:32:04+00:00
Here are some real examples from our projects in 2025 at SIROC (for context: we are a 18 people venture studio; 140+ projects completed):

* A task estimated at 4 hours → solved with one well specified prompt

* A 20 hour engineering effort → executed in about 3 hours

* A 3 month project → delivered in 1 month

These are clearly best case scenarios. They are not the norm, yet. But they demonstrate what is possible.

We have also seen what happens when things go wrong. Companies, including startups, come to us with broken systems and spaghetti code and architecture caused by weak prompts, unclear requirements, and no verification.

It is important to understand that the efficiency gains we are seeing do not come from the tools alone. They come from a specific combination:

1) Engineers who have spent 20 years building everything from robotics to enterprise-scale technology. You cannot give a perfect instruction to an AI if you do not know what perfect looks like in a production environment.

2) A technical prompt should not be treated as a quick input or question. It is a detailed specification that requires experience and deliberate thinking.

3) Knowing the right combination of tools, workflows, and validation processes.

That said, some (many?) members of our team are dinosaurs in the software engineering world. They bring a ton of experience but are used to tools from 15 years ago and don't like change. We really had to push AI adoption (mostly Cursor and Claude Code) on them. It’s still an ongoing process, and probably will be for a while.
by dmschulman | 2026-02-05 16:32:14+00:00
It's part of a multi-pronged approach to intentional cede US soft power.

To what ends I'm still fuzzy on, but this discontinuation follows a pattern we've seen with this administration knee-capping or outright dismantling many of the ways this country spreads soft power such as through humanitarian services via USAID, broadcasts from Voice of America, ending international research opportunities and divesting us from the WHO, and doing everything possible to turn the US into a pariah in the eyes of NATO, just to name a few big changes.
by robhawkes | 2026-02-05 16:32:36+00:00
Definitely wind roses planned, I posted about them on my LinkedIn page if anyone is curious (linked on the main map).

That's a great point about the controls. Originally the map only showed wind farms and as I've expanded the features the control system (and really the entire UX) hasn't kept up. I need to sit down and have a proper think about how best to design the controls and documentation.
by Symbiote | 2026-02-05 16:33:35+00:00
Managing the PostgreSQL databases is a medium to low complexity task as I see it.

Take two equivalent machines, set up with streaming replication exactly as described in the documentation, add Bacula for backups to an off-site location for point-in-time recovery.

We haven't felt the need to set up auto fail-over to the hot spare; that would take some extra effort (and is included with AWS equivalents?) but nothing I'd be scared of.

Add monitoring that the DB servers are working, replication is up-to-date and the backups are working.
by Isamu | 2026-02-05 16:33:54+00:00
>who checks the sources

I do, when I’m reading something and accuracy matters. Anybody who cares about accuracy will investigate the sources. I know people will complain that “nobody” does this, but it is essential, without checking sources you are just casually reading. That goes for books and all media consumption. If a book or any media (ahem Tucker) doesn’t give you enough information to be able to look something up, that is rather a red flag of obfuscation.
by siliconc0w | 2026-02-05 16:34:10+00:00
You can also buy the hardware and hire an IT vendor to rack and help manage it as smart hands so you never need to visit the datacenter. With modern beefy hardware, even large web services only need a few racks so most orgs don't even to manage a large footprint.

Sure you have to schedule your own hardware repairs or updates but it also means you don't need to wrangle with the ridiculous cost-engineering, reserved instances, cloud product support issues or API deprecations, proprietary configuration languages, etc.

Bare metal is better for a lot of non-cost reasons too, as the article notes it's just easier/better to reason about the lower level primitives and you get more reliable and repeatable performance.
by danans | 2026-02-05 16:34:18+00:00
> Oh yes, I'm absolutely sure the Democrats were just sitting on a treasure trove of - only - Republican Party members' pedophile crimes for 5 years, and they did nothing because they are useless

No, they did it to protect wealthy and influential people, regardless of party.

It happens that such people are disproportionately Republican aligned, there are fewer places to hide this behavior in the Democratic tent - just at the top - and the current POTUS seems to be very close to the center of it all.

Independently, we are learning that extremely wealthy and influential men commit sex crimes through fixers like Epstein.

This is about huge wealth and power imbalances, no accountability for the wealthy and powerful, and the behavior they get away with as a result.

If there are any "good guys" here, it's Massie and Khanna for shaming Congress into forcing DOJ to release something, even while DOJ does everything it can to avoid/minimize it.
by SaberTail | 2026-02-05 16:34:19+00:00
I was on a greenfield project late last year with a team that was very enthusiastic about coding agents. I would personally call it a failure, and the project is quietly being wound down after only a few months. It went in a few stages:

At first, it proceeded very quickly. Using agents, the team were able to generate a lot of code very fast, and so they were checking off requirements at an amazing pace. PRs were rubber stamped, and I found myself arguing with copy/pasted answers from an agent most of the time I tried to offer feedback.

As the components started to get more integrated, things started breaking. At first these were obvious things with easy fixes, like some code calling other code with wrong arguments, and the coding agents could handle those. But a lot of the code was written in the overly-defensive style agents were fond of, so there were a lot more subtle errors. Things like the agent adding code to substitute an invalid default value in instead of erroring out, far away from where that value was causing other errors.

At this point, the agents started making things strictly worse because they couldn't fit that much code in their context. Instead of actually fixing bugs, they'd catch any exceptions and substitute in more defaults. There was some manual work by some engineers to remove a lot of the defensive code, but they could not keep up with the agents. This is also about when the team discovered that most of the tests were effectively "assert true" because they mocked out so much.

We did ship the project, but it shipped in an incredibly buggy state, and also the performance was terrible. And, as I said, it's now being wound down. That's probably the right thing to do because it would be easier to restart from scratch than try to make sense of the mess we ended up with. Agents were used to write the documentation, and very little of it is comprehensible.

We did screw some things up. People were so enthusiastic about agents, and they produced so much code so fast, that code reviews were essentially non-existent. Instead of taking action on feedback in the reviews, a lot of the time there was some LLM-generated "won't do" response that sounded plausible enough that it could convince managers that the reviewers were slowing things down. We also didn't explicitly figure out things like how error-handling or logging should work ahead of time, and so what the agents did was all over the place depending on what was in their context.

Maybe the whole mess was a necessary learning as we figure out these new ways of working. Personally I'm still using the coding agents, but very selectively to "fill-in-the-blanks" on code where I know what it should look like, but don't need to write it all by hand myself.
by noncentral | 2026-02-05 16:35:13+00:00
OP here a few folks asked about whether RCC has an actual mathematical backbone, so here’s the compact version of the formal axioms. It’s not meant to be a full derivation, just the minimal structure the argument depends on.

RCC can be written as a set of geometric / partial-information constraints:

A1. Internal State Inaccessibility
Let Ω denote the full internal state.
The observer only ever sees a projection π(Ω), with
π: Ω → Ω′ and |Ω′| < |Ω|.
All inference happens over Ω′, not Ω.

A2. Container Opacity
Let M be the manifold containing the system.
Visibility(M) = 0.
Global properties like ∂M or curvature(M) are, by definition, not accessible from inside.

A3. No Global Reference Frame
There is no Γ such that
Γ: Ω′ → globally consistent coordinates.
Inference runs in local frames φᵢ, and the transition φᵢ → φⱼ is not invertible over long distances.

A4. Forced Local Optimization
At each step t, the system must produce
x₍ₜ₊₁₎ = argmin L_local(φₜ, π(Ω)),
even when ∂information/∂M = 0.

From these, the boundary condition is pretty direct:

No embedded inference system can maintain stable, non-drifting long-horizon reasoning when ∂Ω > 0, ∂M > 0, and no Γ exists.

This is the sense in which RCC treats hallucination, drift, and multi-step collapse as structural outcomes rather than training failures.

If anyone wants the longer derivation or the empirical predictions (e.g., collapse curves tied to effective curvature), I’m happy to share.
by bunderbunder | 2026-02-05 16:35:22+00:00
I don’t necessarily feel the need to ban loops and variables, but I do kind of wish schools didn’t start with object-oriented languages. My undergraduate program started with Scheme but I actually think a proper procedural language would be a fine choice too.

(Or even - and I know this is a spicy take - assembly language. An intro-level course that takes students through games like TIS-100 and Human Resource Machine might have a lot of pedagogical value.)

What I’ve observed is that people who have had to spend some time working in a language that maintains a clean separation between functions and data tend to be better at domain modeling, which ultimately enables the to produce designs that are simpler and easier to maintain. OOP can be a powerful mechanism, but it seems like, perhaps ironically, people who only know OOP tend to have a harder time reasoning about information flow, control flow and state. Perhaps because object-oriented language features are mostly meant as a way to abstract over those concerns. Which does have some value, but maybe also discourages learners from thinking about them too deeply.
by yesbabyyes | 2026-02-05 16:35:34+00:00
Not saying you're wrong in all cases, but there are enough examples of hugely expensive megaprojects which totslly tanked, which would have definitely been much more successful with OPs approach if executed correctly. Not saying they would be done and done within a weekend, that's silly. But the alternative, poorly defined integration interfaces, multiple contractors, multiple stakeholders with conflicting requirements and zero (real) regard for the user is unfortunately fairly common, both in public (city/regional/government) and private bureaucracies.

The examples are legion, and they always seem to have NIH and baroque requirements, and be rather over- than underspecified. I would go so far as to say that these projects are almost never successful (and definitely never on time and budget).
by dragonwriter | 2026-02-05 16:36:04+00:00
> orders of magnitude work by rounding from .5.

No, orders of magnitude are exponential, not linear, so conventionally “on the order of 1 billion” would be between 100 million × sqrt(10) and 1 billion × sqrt(10), but “billionaire” isn't “net worth on the order of 1 billion” but “net worth of 1 billion or more”, or, when used heirarchically alongside trillionaire ans millionaire “net worth of at least one billion and less than one trillion”.
by egypturnash | 2026-02-05 16:36:08+00:00
Oh certainly, I do this myself.

But out of the box all this shit is constantly begging you for your attention, they come with so many attention sinks installed that you have to find time and energy to sit down and curate, there's entire huge industries based on getting you to stare at your phone forever that you have to consciously spend time and effort to get rid of, versus "this ipod just plays music and cannot do anything else".
by tracker1 | 2026-02-05 16:37:19+00:00
Of course... I'm just talking about raising the bar enough so that it would take a bit more than some casual observations to crack. Per my final statement in GP comment.

> In the end, it was probably as much about satisfying the content rights holders as anything else. If it looks like a lock, it doesn't matter if you can cut it off with scissors.

Most locks get broken eventually... the locks on houses, for example, rarely actually secure the home from intrusion... you have windows that are easy to break and enter/exit. It's about adding a modest effort in order to deter such action... nothing will ever stop it altogether. There's a difference between minimal effort, best appropriate effort, creating Fort Knox around your content and doing nothing at all.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-02-05 16:37:20+00:00
Like I said I agree with your larger point. But it’s actually not a great example, because lowering the barrier to entry, particularly the hardware side, led to a massive increase in the number of filmmakers and films in the world. People telling full stories from start to finish included. The reason it doesn’t graft well onto the AI discussion is that the process and output are controlled and measurable. There’s no real black box element. What you see is what you get and the output of the camera is fully controlled by the user.
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-02-05 16:37:25+00:00
∴ If a certain quintile of population is gathering more resources, necessarily other sections of the population are losing compensatory access to these same resources.

----

We can argue zero-sum (or not) all day long, but wealth inequality is increasing (globally, as well as US) and it shows most (anecdotally; statistically) along borders of haves & have nots.

I happen to live along such a border, as do both of my wealthier brothers (I'm the one on the other side of the tracks, but I live respectfully, with simple grace). The majority of americans are broker than broke, whether they live in a big financed house or a cardboard box — the latter's net-worth may actually be higher (if @ $0.00).

----

However you want to define metrics / sources, when the majority of your citizens are living paycheck-to-paycheck, or not able to come up with $1000 for an emergency expense without going into debt — you live in a fiscally unhealthy society.

----

When the majority of US stocks transacted in 2025 were done in darkpool (i.e. not public) marketplaces your financial markets are no longer participating in daily public price discovery.

----

I am the black sheep [blue collar electrician] of my family (they're all "professionals" [lawyers, politicians, engineers]); we still maintain respectful conversational tones (mostly) but none of my many family members lives outside of Top 5% income brackets, so they absolutely do not live in the same world as a median income earner experiences (like me; perhaps not you?).

Perhaps there is a Top20%/80% line that it takes living beyond to actually experience the reality of wealth inequality. I've seen both sides — that's about where I'd place it.

----

Let's continue this discussion, but I only log on a few times a week. I appreciate attempting to understand different perspectives (share yours?).
by lasgawe | 2026-02-05 16:37:47+00:00
I agree with your points. I can clearly see the difference in myself between how I used to program before and how I do now.

At one point, I was using Copilot very heavily. One day I lost my internet connection and tried to write code manually, but I did not even know what to write. All I had been doing was reading the code and pressing the Tab key.

When I tried to write code myself, my fingers automatically moved to the Tab key with perfect millisecond timing. That was the day I disabled AI auto-completion and decided to use only Ask mode in Copilot.

Now I only use code generation when I 100% (atleast 90%) understand what is happening in the code, or when I am working on something that will not help my future growth, like routine code at my job.
Ask HN: How Did You Validate?
by haute_cuisine | 2026-02-05 16:37:47+00:00
Dear founders,

I'm trying to understand common startup wisdom and it doesn't make sense to me.

For example, if you give me the source code of Dropbox, I don't think I'll cross the 100K ARR in the first year. Maybe, even 1K goal would be a stretch.

What would you do to get an abstract Dropbox to 1M ARR? Start with cold emails? Define ICP and spam them through Linkedin Sales Navigator, aka B2B sales playbook?

I find common advice on validation super generic, which means it doesn't work as it lacks specifics and nuance. For example, competition is good because it proves demand, but "scrappy MVP" doesn't sell in competitive markets.

I'm arriving at the point that the only way to succeed is to get your product embedded into some kind of value delivery pipeline through offline sales: meetups, trade shows, etc. Go to a place where your customers hang out offline.

Did you validate your idea before shipping the product? Did you know in advance that it'll succeed? Did you have to do cold emails to find first customers? Did you feel you had to push your product at first?
by JoshTriplett | 2026-02-05 16:37:54+00:00
Seconding this. Your voice has value. Every time, every time, I've seen someone say "I use an LLM to make my writing better" and they post what it looked like before or other samples of their non-LLM writing, the non-LLM writing is always what I'd prefer. Without fail.

People talk about using it because they don't think their English is good enough, and then it turns out their English is fine and they just weren't confident in it. People talk about using it to make their writing "better", and their original made their point better and more concisely. And their original tends to be more memorable, as well, perhaps because it isn't homogenized.
by rekabis | 2026-02-05 16:38:04+00:00
> Is it possible to patch the biological code, or is the obsolescence inevitable?

Patching? Conservatively yes. The problem is threefold:

1. The technological advancements needed to untangle the rat’s nest of dependencies that exist in the average, idealized brain, much less those developmental dependencies in any one individual brain. We have decades - if not centuries - of work ahead of us just with genetic diseases, and those are exceedingly simple in comparison. Reworking genetic expressions in neurological development is a whole different ballgame.

2. The best foundational/genetic-rewiring option moving forward is not to backport, but to work on new versions only. However, without a strictly regulated and socialist-like system that benefits everyone equally, the risk is virtually 100% that the wealthy clients will try to leverage this into establishing speciation between the haves (fantastic cognitive abilities) and the have-nots (legacy functionality only) in order to engineer a permanent economic and social stratification. And in no part of human history has this ever been a Good Thing in any fashion whatsoever.

3. Will we still be recognizably “human” after this is done, or will our ways of thinking make us completely alien to pre-mod humanity? What will we lose with these efficiencies? What “benefits” are really downsides in disguise? Will humanity look back at these modifications with regret, especially if we haven’t ensured a series of restore points to roll back to?
by RobMurray | 2026-02-05 16:38:08+00:00
Xcode isn't necessarily the problem. Some people like it. That's fine. But apple forces it's use for iOS development. There are workarounds like Tuist, but you are still locked into Xcode for debugging, instruments, and even console output from an iOS device!

Nobody is saying not to use Xcode if you like it, but there should be a choice like there is for almost every other modern platform.
by graybeardhacker | 2026-02-05 16:38:15+00:00
Two major factors I see a impediment to this:
1. Most management doesn't understand it and therefore won't champion it.
2. Those few that do understand it will resist it because it reduces the need for management and process.

This is similar to the Bible being in a dead language only understood by priests.

But how amazing would it be if everything from company policy to product specifications was in a format that could be programmatically accessed and tracked? When/if you needed a document you would access it from an artifactory where it had been generated and versioned automatically?

It may very well be that LLMs will push this idea to the forefront. PDFs and Word Docs suck for AI interaction. As we incorporate LLMs into our businesses it might be a natural progression to move toward databases, LaTex, code and source control for documentation and policy.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-05 16:38:25+00:00
> once your memory size grows above a few hundred lines of text (which you can just dump into the context for most current models)

A few hundred lines of text is nothing for current LLMs.

You can dump the entire contents of The Great Gatsby into any of the frontier LLMs and it’s only around 70K tokens. This is less than 1/3 of common context window sizes. That’s even true for models I run locally on modest hardware now.

The days of chunking everything into paragraphs or pages and building complex workflows to store embeddings, search, and rerank in a big complex pipeline are going away for many common use cases. Having LLMs use simpler tools like grep based on an array of similar search terms and then evaluating what comes up is faster in many cases and doesn’t require elaborate pipelines built around specific context lengths.
Ask HN: Built an interactive textbook for math. Non profit or startup route?
by nutanc | 2026-02-05 16:38:29+00:00
We have created a product which is an interactive textbook for math. It covers the CBSE curriculum in India. The idea being that in this day and age why should students read from static textbooks and digital textbooks should mean much more than PDF links. Now that we have all the content we have to make a choice. Should we go the Khan Academy route and become a non profit(Highest impact). Or go the startup route and charge a subscription fee etc. We are leaning towards a non profit as most students and parents want exam tech(tech which will help them in their exams) and actually are not too interested in actually learning. Getting them to pay might be a big effort. We dont want to become yet another byjys etc.
by rob | 2026-02-05 16:38:44+00:00
I'm the one that posted about it multiple times, including noticing the 45 second pattern the second time.

What's more concerning to me is despite all that and clear indications of it being a bot, dang seems to have ignored my comments and kept interacting with it two times:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46889769

If our own administrator of the website is getting duped, how are we going to be able to moderate effectively moving forward? Pointing it out multiple times ( y me and others) doesn't seem to have worked in this case.