MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wtallis | 2026-02-08 16:51:55+00:00
Windows laptops have been pretty much exclusively NVMe for years. The 2.5" SATA form factor was a waste of space that laptop OEMs were very happy to be rid of, first with mSATA then with M.2 using SATA or NVMe. NVMe finished displacing SATA years ago, when the widespread availability of hardware supporting the NVMe Host Memory Buffer feature meant that entry-level NVMe SSDs could be both faster and cheaper than the good SATA SSDs. Most of the major SSD vendors discontinued their M.2 SATA SSDs long ago, indicating that demand for that product segment had collapsed.
by ramon156 | 2026-02-08 16:52:01+00:00
One of the best programmers I know personally is constantly under the influence of marijuana. As "immature" as it may sound, she's still extremely aware of what she's doing and is able to work in an environment I would give up in after 2 weeks. The kind of environment that denies 1 day PTO for your birthday because of a deadline (hint, every week is a deadline).

I do not smoke myself, but it made me realize how little I know regarding THC and CBD
by zamadatix | 2026-02-08 16:52:06+00:00
I'd really recommend not. It's 75% one guy running AI agents talking like it's his project, 24% shitposting about AI, and 1% anything else.

You'll get a much better view about what it does and doesn't do by spending same amount of time looking at it yourself and maybe trying to take that back to the comments here where there is a decent chance at least a massively larger portion of the comments aren't bots or memes.
by energyscholar | 2026-02-08 16:52:12+00:00
Exactly right. The phase transition analogy is powerful precisely because it's not just analogy — the same mathematical operators that describe water at criticality also describe markets approaching crashes, ecosystems approaching collapse, and cardiac rhythms approaching fibrillation.

What surprised us was how many fields derived this independently. The superheated water intuition you describe maps directly to what ecologists call "critical slowing down" and what financial engineers call "increased autocorrelation near instability." Same math, three different names, minimal cross-citation.
by spicyusername | 2026-02-08 16:52:27+00:00
while I have more time to do what?

For work, I regularly have 2-4 agents going simultaneously, churning on 1-3 features, bug fixes, doc updates.

I pop between them in the "down time", or am reviewing their output, or am preparing the requirements for the next thing, or am reviewing my coworkers MRs.

Plenty to do that isn't doom scrolling.
by Aperocky | 2026-02-08 16:52:51+00:00
Code IS spec.

Your code in $INSERT_LANGUAGE is no less of a spec to machine code than english is to $INSERT_LANGUAGE.

Spec is still needed, spec is the core problem of engineering. Too much specialization have made job titles like $INSERT_LANGUAGE engineer, which deviated too far from the core problem, and it is being rectified now.
by sebderhy | 2026-02-08 16:53:09+00:00
Yeah, I have to say that finding the right balance between what to write and not to write in the AGENTS.md is quite hard.

Regarding the protocols being unstable, that's quite a fair point. Maybe it is possible to automate this? That is, detecting changes in the official docs automatically, and adapt the docs and tests automatically based on it via a Coding Agent.
by Razengan | 2026-02-08 16:53:09+00:00
If you see magazines, articles, ads and TV shows from the 1980s (there are lots on YouTube and a fun rabbit hole, like the BBC Archive), the general promise was "Computers can do anything, if you program them."

Well, nobody could figure out how to program them. Except the few outcasts like us who went on to suffer for the rest of our lives for it :')

With phones & LLMs this is the closest we have come to that original promise of a computer in every home and everyone being able to do anything with it, that isn't pre-dictated by corporations and their apps:

Ideally ChatGPT etc should be able to create interactive apps on the fly on iPhone etc. Imagine having a specific need and just being able to say it and get an app right away just for you on your device.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-08 16:53:12+00:00
Unfortunately, people do care that the AI agents don’t code just like they do.

Once I got to the point where I was delegating complete implementations to seniors with just “this is a high level idea of what Becky’s department wants. You now know as much I do. If you have any business related questions go ask Becky and come back to me with a design and these are our only technical constraints”. Then two weeks later there are things I might have done differently. But it meets all of the functional and non functional requirements. I bite my toungue and move on.

His team is going to be responsable for it.

Now I don’t treat AI as a senior developer. I treat it as a mid level ticket taker. If their is going to be a feature change, I ain’t doing it any more. The coding agent is. I am just going to keep good documentation in various MD files for context.
by arjie | 2026-02-08 16:53:49+00:00
It reminds me of “Tai’s method” of integration - an approximation discovered in 1994.

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/rediscover...

I think I found it in that other world that is the past on Slashdot - which was a Hacker News from another era https://m.slashdot.org/story/144664
by podgorniy | 2026-02-08 16:53:51+00:00
I want to see an example of the application with well written documentation which produces well working application based on those docs.

I discovered that it is not trivial to conceptualize app to that extent of clarity which is required for deterministic output of LLM. It's way easier to say than to actually implement by yourself (that's why examples are so interesting to see).

Backwards dynamics when you get spec/doc based on the source code does not work good enough.
by Waterluvian | 2026-02-08 16:53:55+00:00
I think oftentimes in the absence of context, people will substitute their own, usually worst-case context. They imagine someone vibe coding safety critical software that flies airplanes.

I think we much too often forget that the domain of software development has expanded its reach into literally everything and that we share a guild hall with all kinds: those who write deeply safety critical correct code, those who are hacking a blender, those who are just making their clerical task less repetitive, etc.
by haynajjar | 2026-02-08 16:54:10+00:00
I've built a crawler that's indexed 51.3M+ companies and their technology stacks. I'm open-sourcing sample datasets (500 companies per technology) for the community.
The repo covers 403 technologies across 30+ categories - CMS platforms, payment processors, frameworks, analytics tools, etc. Each CSV/JSON includes company name, domain, location, and detected tech stack.

These are free samples from my full database (which powers Leadita, my lead gen tool). The samples give you a solid starting point for:

- Market research and competitive analysis
- Understanding tech adoption trends
- Building prospect lists
- Training ML models

Full datasets with contact info available via the platform, but these samples should be useful for experimentation and smaller projects.

The data updates daily. Feedback and suggestions welcome!
by vscode-rest | 2026-02-08 16:54:20+00:00
I’m no mathematician (studied up to diff eq, linear algebra, discrete), but from glancing through the paper I do not really have an ability to apply this concept to a problem of my own, though it does seem useful.

Do you think this is something that should be taught generally? In which class would it fit? It feels generally diffeq-ish.
by tux1968 | 2026-02-08 16:54:24+00:00
You're not wrong. But your same objection was made against compilers. That they are opaque, have differences from one to another, and can introduce bugs, they're not actually deterministic if you upgrade the compiler, etc. They separate the programmer from the code the computer eventually executes.

In any case, clinging to the fact that this technology is different in some ways, continues to ignore the many ways it's exactly the same. People continue to cling to what they know, and find ways to argue against what's new. But the writing is plainly on the wall, regardless of how much we struggle to emotionally separate ourselves from it.
by k310 | 2026-02-08 16:54:30+00:00
> Apple removes apps at the request of repressive governments, busts unions, fights tooth and nail against consumer-protection laws, has to be strong-armed into allowing repairability, and so on.

The morally bankrupt seem to do very well financially.

People and society seem to put a heavy tax on integrity and quality.

Except for a few moments on Sunday morning.

Apple has sold its soul.

Think Different [0]1997

Here's to the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently.

They're not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can quote them, disagree with them,
glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can't do is ignore them.

Because they change things.

They push the human race forward.

While some may see them as the crazy ones,
we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think
they can change the world, are the ones who do.

[0]https://www.thecrazyones.it/spot-en.html
by basedrum | 2026-02-08 16:54:52+00:00
Why do you find it implausible that he got money to develop this challenge? I work in the non profit space and we get these kind of gifts all the time, with minimal strings attached or sometimes the deliverables don't see the light of day. 20k is actually small in my experience and they often come from random people who support our mission. Sure we do investigate and sometimes refuse based on findings, but we don't know or find everything. Taking money doesn't mean you know and support everything the person who have the money ever did, thought, said...
by doctorwho42 | 2026-02-08 16:55:50+00:00
What other jobs? I hate how people just throw that out as a viable path. In a world with ever increasing wealth inequality there is lower velocity of money (lower available cash flow) to enable the creation of jobs. And just pointing to the industrial revolution is not the panacea that you think it is. Past economic/tech revolutions creating new jobs, I have yet to see anyone point to a vast creation of jobs (or at least the starting trend of job creation)... Instead all the news, all the discussions, everything has been about (directly or indirectly) the decreased need for as many workers or the increased production of workers with the tools (which indirectly implies a decrease in workforce)
by TFSFVentures | 2026-02-08 16:57:00+00:00
We've seen this exact scenario before with companies scaling from early prototypes to small-batch production. The manual crimping bottleneck, especially at 60 seconds per crimp for JST connectors, is a very common pain point when moving from design-end engineering to in-house assembly of tens of units. This usually comes down to a combination of tooling, process optimization, and strategic design choices around pre-crimped wires or connector standardization. There's usually a path through this that significantly reduces the manual effort.
by lloydatkinson | 2026-02-08 16:57:16+00:00
This reminds me slightly of some copilot nonsense I get. I don’t use copilot. Every few days when I’m on the GitHub homepage the copilot chat input (which I don’t want on my homepage anyway) tells me it’s disabled because I’ve used up my monthly limit of copilot.

I literally do not use it, and no my account isn’t compromised. Trying to trick people into paying? Seems cartoonishly stupid but…
by sokols | 2026-02-08 16:57:26+00:00
> but if cancer were easy for the immune system to deal with nobody would die of it.

This made me think, whether it would somehow make sense that cancer cells on another host would be detected by the immune system of that host. Theoretically, these immune cells have different “initialization parameters” so to say and maybe they could show affinity to the foreign cancer cells.

But then again I am not an expert and this is just a pure speculation.
by TFSFVentures | 2026-02-08 16:57:27+00:00
We've seen this exact scenario before, where critical operational aspects like SEO silently degrade, leading to significant impact before anyone notices. Treating SEO like code quality and integrating validation into CI/CD, as you're proposing with Indxel, is a pattern that often emerges when teams mature their development practices. This usually comes down to the cost of manual detection versus automated prevention.
by arjie | 2026-02-08 16:57:32+00:00
That’s a good point. I suppose one must imagine the complaints from other Internet commenters in bygone times over using libraries vs writing one’s own code. They probably found themselves similarly estranged from a community of library assemblers. And now even those assemblers find themselves estranged from us machine whisperers. But we all were following the way to build software for our time.

I wonder who follows. Perhaps it has already happened. I look at the code but there are people who build their businesses as English text in git. I don’t yet have the courage.
by bc569a80a344f9c | 2026-02-08 16:57:37+00:00
Kind of but not really.

The whole point of BGP is to influence your routing tables. This fundamentally makes very little sense to do when you have a bunch of routers whose routing policy you don't control between you and whoever you're speaking BGP to. eBGP is just TCP and supports knobs to run over multiple hops (so up to 255), but at that point you can't really do anything with the routing information you exchange because the moment you hand the traffic off, the other party can do with it how it pleases. Also, very few people have enough public IP addresses for this, and on the Internet you obviously can't route RFC1918 space. Therefore, you need tunnels, so that you can be one hop away even if the tunneled traffic is traversing the Internet, and so that you can reach peers that let you announce whatever IP space you want.

The other thing you can do, of course, is to just do the same thing internal to your lab. You can absolutely stand up multiple ASN at home. I'd even argue that if you really want to learn BGP, this is a great way to do it, especially if you use two different platforms (say, FRR on FreeBSD peering with a cheap Mikrotik running RouterOS). That way you learn the underlying protocol and not a specific implementation, which is something that is very hard to undo in junior network engineers that have only ever been exposed to one way of doing things.

That's different from some of the goals outlined in the article, but if your goal is to learn this stuff rather than have provider-independent IP space (which even for home labs isn't very valuable to most people), doing it all yourself works fine.
by bananapub | 2026-02-08 16:57:42+00:00
incorrect.

- you can get an AS with RIPE by being sponsored for ~100eur/year, which does require you to be multihomed since an AS is no use without that

- you can lease IPv6 space for < 10eur/year from someone and then get someone else to announce it for you

- you can get PI space from RIPE for ~100eur/year but that's not very useful without an AS and not anymore useful than the leasing above for 1/10th the price
by TFSFVentures | 2026-02-08 16:57:43+00:00
We've seen this exact scenario before with teams trying to get a handle on the true cost of AI development. This usually comes down to accurately factoring in the less obvious costs like data pipelines, model training, and ongoing infrastructure, which can easily dwarf initial engineering estimates. There's usually a path through this by breaking down the project into distinct phases with clear cost drivers for each.
by epistasis | 2026-02-08 16:57:47+00:00
Two ways that batteries reduce costs:

1. Time arbitrage of energy. Store energy from times when it is abundant, and put it back when it's more scarce. This is profitable on most grids with at least high single digits of percentage of renewable generation. And to say it's profitable for battery operators is the same thing as saying it's reducing costs, if the grid/utility is operated in a fair way.

2. Location arbitrage of electricity by making use of times with less grid congestion. The grid itself is the only location arbitrage we have had up until grid-sized batteries. But it's expensive, and the costs are not even. Some locations are far cheaper to service than others. Battery storage has long been a "non-wired alternative" that in many cases is cheaper than stringing wires to expand capacity.

There's probably more that I dont understand. Battery storage on the grid is a disruptive technology, because up until now the grid was pretty much the only major system I could think of that doesn't have any storage. (Computer networking is kind of similar, but buffers have always existed. It just turns out that buffering is not tremendously useful in the network itself when the endpoints have tons of storage...)

In the US, transmitting and distributing electricity is more expensive than generating it. That imbalance is going to widen far further as solar and wind get cheaper, which they will for a minimum of a decade, based on the current pace. They could get cheaper for multiple decades. We don't really know what the floor is going to be, but we do know it will be electricity far cheaper than we had imagined from any other technology up until now.
by queenkjuul | 2026-02-08 16:58:07+00:00
Basically describes how i use Claude Code now. I'll let it do stuff i don't want to do, like setting up mocks for unit tests (boring) or editing GitHub actions yaml (torture). But otherwise, i like to let it show me how to do something I'm not sure how to do, and then I'll just go do it myself. (If i have a clear idea of how i want to go something already, i just do it myself I'm the first place)

I almost never agree with the names Claude chooses, i despise the comments it adds every other line despite me telling it over and over and over not to, oftentimes i catch the silly bugs that look fine at first glance when you just let Claude write its output direct to the file.

It feels like a good balance, to me. Nobody on my team is working drastically faster than me, with or without AI. It very obviously slows down my boss (who just doesn't pay attention and has to rework everything twice) or some of the juniors (who don't sufficiently understand the problem to begin with). I'll be more productive then them even if i am hand-writing most of the code. So i don't feel threatened by this idea that "hand written code will be something nobody does professionally here soon" -- like the article said, if I'm responsible for the code i submit, I'm still the bottleneck, AI or not. The time i spend writing my own code is time I'm not poring over AI output trying to verify that it's actually correct, and for now that's a good trade.
by margalabargala | 2026-02-08 16:58:35+00:00
Okay, let's give it a try.

asdjklfh asdjhgflkj bveahrvjkhgv hjagsdfhj hgertjhga ads fhdfjmjhkr

Nope, that's incorrect english.

Turns out that because we've defined "words" as a thing that means a thing, now there are rules around "language" and "words". So while you're welcome to invent whatever combination of sounds you prefer to mean what you like, those sounds can be "correct" or "incorrect" as soon as other people become involved, because now you've entered into a social construct that extends beyond yourself.

So again your conclusion is technically correct, in a navel-gazing "the universe is what I perceive" sort of way, but counterproductive to use as a building block for communication.
by nine_k | 2026-02-08 16:58:58+00:00
The invention of Mr Jacquard ushered in a sartorial golden age, when complex fabrics are easy to produce cheaply, at the expense of a few hours spent on punching a deck of cards. But the craft of making tapestries by hand definitely went into demise. This is the situation which the post is mourning.

Frankly, I have my doubts about the utter efficiency of LLMs writing code unattended; it will take quite some time before whatever comes after the current crop learns to do that efficiently and reliably. (Check out how many years went between first image generation demos and today's SOTA.) But the vector is obvious: humans would have to speak a higher-level language to computers, and hand-coding Typescript is going to be as niche in 10 years as today is hand-coding assembly.

This adds some kinds of fun, but also removes some other kinds of fun. There's a reason why people often pick something like PICO-8 to write games for fun, rather than something like Unreal Engine. So software development becomes harder because the developer has to work on more and more complex things, faster, and with fewer chances to study the moving parts to a comfortable depth.
by deaux | 2026-02-08 16:59:11+00:00
I'm not convinced the data center numbers, especially water, are meaningful compared to absurdly wasteful agriculture like the corn for ethanol mentioned here, almonds in California, and cattle.

Let alone the likes of Nestlé's water stealing and golf courses in hot, dry climates.

Happy to be proven wrong by someone who has the numbers. For now like what this comment section is about with "the space needed for solar is nothing compared to what we're already doing", it seems like the water needed for data centers is nothing compared to how much we're already throwing away.
by danaris | 2026-02-08 16:59:11+00:00
It was, several years ago.

That's so much not the case now that renewables + batteries were by far the largest source of new generation in the US (yes, the US, with Trump actively trying to destroy them) last year.

Look up some of the new information coming out about them recently. Here, I'll give you a relevant video I watched recently to start with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM (channel is Technology Connections)
by tux1968 | 2026-02-08 16:59:39+00:00
People keep trotting this argument out. But a band saw is not deterministic either, it can snap in the middle of a cut and destroy what you're working on. The point is, we only treat it like it's deterministic, because most of the time it's reliable enough that it just does what we want. AI technology will definitely get to the same level eventually. Clinging on to the fact that it isn't yet at that level today, is just cope, not a principled argument.
by mitkebes | 2026-02-08 17:00:25+00:00
It is if it's something they couldn't do on their own before.

It's a magical moment when someone is able to AI code a solution to a problem that they couldn't fix on their own before.

It doesn't matter whether there are other people who could have fixed this without AI tools, what matters is they were able to get it fixed, and they didn't have to just accept it was broken until someone else fixed it.
by trainfromkansas | 2026-02-08 17:00:31+00:00
Everything Everywhere All at Once was the last time I sat in a theater where, for the first half at least, I thought I was watching an instant classic.

But that movie just dragged on, and now I look back and see it as a bungled opportunity. It could've been so much tighter in the edit. They could've cut a third of the movie and made the whole thing so much better.