MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ollysb | 2026-02-08 01:37:35+00:00
Good code has always been written with a reader in mind. The compiler understanding it was assumed. The real audience was other engineers. We optimized for readability because it made change easier and delivered business value faster.

That audience is changing. Increasingly, the primary reader is an agent, not a human. Good code now means code that lets agents make changes quickly and safely to create value.

Humans and agents have very different constraints. Humans have limited working memory and rely on abstraction to compress complexity. Agents are comfortable with hundreds of thousands of tokens and can brute-force pattern recognition and generation where humans cannot.

We are still at the start of this shift. Our languages and tools were designed for humans. The next phase is optimizing them for agents, and it likely will not be humans doing that optimization. LLMs themselves will design tools, representations, and workflows that suit agent cognition rather than human intuition.

Just as high-level languages bent machine code toward human needs, LLMs let us specify intent at a much higher level. From there, agents can shape the underlying systems to better serve their own strengths.

For now, engineers are still needed to provide rigor and clearly specify intent. As feedback loops shorten, we will see more imperfect systems refined through use rather than upfront design. The iteration looks less like careful planning and more like saying “I expected you to do ABC, not XYZ,” then correcting from there.
by johng | 2026-02-08 01:38:37+00:00
I've run into this issue once before. I watched the movie Run, Hide, Fight and thought it was great. I checked it out on RT and saw a huge gap between member scores and critic scores. The critics all basically just talked about how the movie was crap because of the subject material, while the viewers essentially just said the movie was entertaining.

It made me feel like the critics were just really snooty... one of the reasons I've never gotten into wine drinking, it just seems like the people heavily into it were really snooty about the whole thing.

What's the word, highfalutin?

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/run_hide_fight

30% vs 93%...
Show HN: I Built a Free AI LinkedIn Carousel Generator
by troyethaniel | 2026-02-08 01:38:45+00:00
LinkedIn Carousel posts have the highest engagement rate, but as an engineer, instead of spending hours on Canva, I wanted to build a tool that can generate LinkedIn carousels automatically.

built this for my own startup and would like to give it to the HN community for free.

Feel free to try it out—no email or signup required!

How it works:

[1] Provide a prompt.
[2] Pick a theme (Professional, Creative, Tech, Minimalist, or Casual).
[3] Adjust settings (colors, number of slides, etc.) and add branding.

Tech-Stack
Built using Firebase Studio
LLM: Gemini 2.5 Flash lite (all I can afford to keep it free, and I found it was capable enough for the task. If there's interest, maybe I can add a pro version with stronger LLMs, and perhaps generate background images using Nano Banana)
by skydhash | 2026-02-08 01:38:59+00:00
I've never found something that was impossible to implement in any framework or SDK. Even in Android SDK land, you can easily get access to an OpenGL surface and import the whole world via the NDK. There's nothing limiting other than the OS itself and its mechanism.

Same with Web framework. Even React (a library) has its escape hatches to let in the rest of the world.
by max51 | 2026-02-08 01:39:47+00:00
There will always be bugs you can't fix, that doesn't mean we should embrace having orders of magnitude more of them. And it's not just about bugs, it's also about adding new features.

This is tech debt on steroid. You are building an entire code base that no can read or understand and pray that the LLM won't fuck up too much. And when it does, no one in the company knows how to deal with it other than by throwing more LLM tokens at it and pray it works.

As I said earlier, using pure AI agents will work for a while. But when it doesn't you are fucked.
by lconnell962 | 2026-02-08 01:40:11+00:00
Windows has made improvements in that area in the last decade, but I don't disagree much. It could be the bias of having dealt with IT related issues for long enough, but I do think the "average" user might be regressing closer to that grandparent level as far as (needing, if not wanting to admit) that child-proofing the OS is needed. Chromebook and tablet PC stuff will probably continue to draw more entry level users in. As that marketshare grows we will have to wait and see how malicious programming evolves with it...

Same general guesswork, but everyone on here can make reasonably educated guesses at what the AI evolution process will do to the tech landscape. Nobody knows enough yet to have anything in cement, but it's out there, and the small changes of the last few years make it seem that we are going to regress rather than improve the level of technical knowlege needed to be "average" when working on a computer.
by phil21 | 2026-02-08 01:41:13+00:00
Eli Lilly will categorically state it is impossible for the compounders to be using the same API as they are due to being the sole source of manufacturing for it on the planet.

From what I can tell they are technically correct. The FDA approved method of manufacturing the peptide chain is different than the Chinese sources these compounders are sourcing from. It may not make an actual biological difference (and hefty evidence of millions of people on it show there is unlikely to be a material difference) but it’s not the same as a generic medication being approved.

This is about as Wild West as most of us have lived through for the U.S. drug market.
by zzo38computer | 2026-02-08 01:41:26+00:00
I also use C, for games and other stuff. However, for many games it can be useful to have a game engine, which is written in C (and I might write it by myself) but other parts will be written in the game engine. I also sometimes program games on DOS, and will use BASIC or Pascal. You will then not need to have too many dependencies; if it is a DOS program then the executable file should just work (with emulation if necessary) without the mess that is common on modern computers.
by LorenPechtel | 2026-02-08 01:42:21+00:00
The pollution from Fukushima was very minor, blown all out of proportion by the reporting. It could be detected on the other side of the Pacific because the background levels are so low. But we can detect it far, far below the point of meaningful risk.

I don't know the numbers for Fukushima, but let's consider Three Mile Island. Same basic problem--some radioactive noble gas needed to be released to avoid trouble (and they actually released it rather than panic.) You are standing at the fence line, what do you do? Let's say you evacuate....hey, there's a street here. Cross it? Nope--it was more dangerous to walk across one ordinary street than to stay put.
by JuniperMesos | 2026-02-08 01:42:34+00:00
Way, way fewer. Any billionaire you've heard of is almost certainly a net creator of a huge amount of value, by successfully leading a company in a capitalist system that made enough money selling products or services to make its shareholders worth billions of dollars. This isn't forcibly extracting money from society, this is exactly what net-value-creation looks like in the world.
by rootusrootus | 2026-02-08 01:44:25+00:00
After the first big crackdown on compound pharmacies, I have seen a lot of people go to gray market. Especially now that it has become pretty clear that the remaining compound pharmacies defying the FDA are getting their API from the same sources that we can buy it from directly, and their testing is way more suspect. On the gray market the batches of peptides are routinely subject to a battery of tests run by groups of volunteers, which is a lot more than what you can get from your chosen compound pharmacy (most will give you a COA, but that's already table stakes if you buy from a "research" vendor.)

I have noticed that the "research" vendors have started to tighten up their operations, especially the ones based in the US. A lot of people have seen the writing on the wall and expect it to become somewhat harder to get the peptides, and are stocking up. It's a running joke how many years worth of tirzepatide or retatrutide people have in the freezer. Once you've had the miracle drug, you won't risk being without it.
by phongn | 2026-02-08 01:44:37+00:00
Tevatron’s construction program built up a lot of industrial capacity for superconducting magnets. This was by design, in the hopes that it would drive induced demand for them. One of the first beneficiaries were MRI machines, which became a lot more affordable to produce.

The DOE hoped to repeat that success in the 1990s with the much larger SSC, but it was cancelled.
by carefree-bob | 2026-02-08 01:44:38+00:00
I wonder about that, and decided that Azure is infrastructure first, and software second. MS is destroying/has destroyed their ability to write software, but are still maintaining infrastructure.

But I wonder how many people will be using Azure once the market moves away from windows software. I don't think they have any edge other than windows tie-ins (e.g. Azure ID)
by jvalaj | 2026-02-08 01:45:47+00:00
Location: Tampa, Florida, USA
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: React, Next.js, TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Tailwind, Figma, Node.js, ASP.NET, Python, C#, SQL, MongoDB, Firebase, REST APIs, LLM tools, Git, Docker, AWS, Vercel

Résumé/CV: https://jvalaj.com/resume
Email: jvalajpandey13@gmail.com

Summary:
- Computer Science student at University of South Florida, graduating December 2026
- Two SWE internships at Delta Air Lines and Nucor Steel
- Full-stack experience with React, TypeScript, Node.js, ASP.NET, Python, and SQL
- Strong focus on design quality and polished UI/UX

Built:
https://www.getnav.app
https://www.trygrid.app
https://jvalaj.github.io/liquid-glass-try/
https://www.komalkids.com
by tialaramex | 2026-02-08 01:46:08+00:00
> then end up reimplementing virtual interfaces manually

C++ dynamic dispatch (your "virtual interfaces") is achieved by welding a vtable onto every type and providing a pointer to that vtable for instances of the type. If in 90% of your code you deal with specific types like Goose or Swan or Duck or Seagull, and only 10% needs to work with the broad Bird category well, too bad, every Goose, Swan, Duck and Seagull carries around that vtable pointer even if it goes nowhere near that 10% of the system. This way your Bird code "just works" in C++.

That's not the only way to crack this nut. Idiomatic Rust approach uses vtables only in the Bird code, elsewhere they don't exist, and thus don't take up space in a Duck or whatever that's always a Duck, but in exchange now you're spending more time thinking, because by default there aren't any vtables and so dynamic dispatch isn't possible at all.

So while that C programmer has to implement features by hand, they are at least able to specifically implement the feature they wanted, not whatever was easiest for Bjarne Stroustrup last century.
by da_chicken | 2026-02-08 01:47:01+00:00
Edit has not shipped with Windows since Win9x -- which is to say, it hasn't shipped since Windows required DOS -- and what you linked is an homage project, not the same program.

And you know what else was included in versions of MS-DOS that shipped with Win9x? Edlin. The editor so basic most people can't figure out how to use it.
by globalnode | 2026-02-08 01:47:06+00:00
this is refreshing. personally i do all my hobby stuff in C or Python. I could certainly use c++ if i wanted to but templates and cin/cout were such monumental jokes how can i trust the rest of the language? i too have contemplated writing my own language but to paraphrase the author, id rather make games than languages and C/Python are good enough.
by willtemperley | 2026-02-08 01:47:10+00:00
LLMs also make refactoring for readability, simplicity and performance far easier.

Nothing has fundamentally changed! A good solution is a good solution.

I do worry that the mental health of developers will take a downturn if they’re forced into a brain rotting slop shovelling routine, however.

So yes readability and good concise code is still important.
by logicprog | 2026-02-08 01:47:30+00:00
This is a pretty shitty article, honestly.

- They blame people not buying their supposedly "well-designed academic studies" proving that AI isn't productive on the fact that everyone is being fooled by influence and persuasion tricks that LLMs are pulling on them. Or, you know, maybe they could acknowledge that those art studies aren't as good as they think they are, and not try to find an extremely convenient, unfalsifiable, psychoanalyzing way to dismiss anyone's experiences that contradict their own.

- For someone who claims to care so much about well-designed academic studies, their evidence that AI is meaningfully deteriorating the quality of actual software infrastructure around in their world is vague anecdotes not really directly attributable to AI that they've received from a few friends, as well as vague gesturing at the general state of the world in software development, which could be for literally any reason.

- They spend most of the article just shitting on AI for guilt by association, and guilt over how it's being used by bad actors that use other neutral technologies — like word processors, the internet, social media, video streaming, and so on — to achieve the same things (such as spreading gendered harassment, right-wing, ideology, and propaganda, etc), which ironically seems a pretty transparently ideologically motivated to me.

Ultimately, this is extremely boring, standard anti-AI fair. The exact same kind of shit that you can hear from a thousand billion other angry neo-Luddites. In the same way that I wish we would stop posting all the software development is dead. Here's what's coming next posts that are all clearly AI generated slop and repeat the same points over and over. I think it would be better if we stopped posting shit like this as well.
by bitwize | 2026-02-08 01:49:01+00:00
There's just no longer any value in good code, just like there's no value in Mel Kaye's beautiful hand-assembled programs:

https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

But now, reading, understanding, and maintaining the software is the job of coding agents. You are free to do the interesting work: setting goals and directions for the agents, evaluating the finished product, communicating with stakeholders, etc. This has always been the hard and interesting part of systems design: solving real-world problems for people and businesses.
by rootusrootus | 2026-02-08 01:49:04+00:00
The compound pharmacies are the leeches I have the least amount of sympathy for. While Lilly may gouge on the price, at least they can claim to have invented the drug. Some compound pharmacy buying $20 worth of API from China and selling it reconstituted for at least 10x that is just raking in huge profit, and they did none of the R&D.

What the FDA will probably have trouble cracking down on are the vendors selling lyophilized peptides direct to the public. And the number of people going that route goes up dramatically over time.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-08 01:49:34+00:00
New Reddit and Outlook.com are two off the top of my head. It is not uncommon to be looking at a spinner for several seconds. There are other websites that are not primarily for text but are still insane. Twitch.TV, an old favorite of mine, now routinely takes 10+ seconds despite having Amazon money behind it. Youtube routinely takes several seconds to load the page, which is still unacceptable even for a video website. These sites are maintained by FAANG-tier engineers being paid mid-high 6 figures or 7 figures, who I'm sure are mostly perfectly competent, and yet they are completely dysfunctional because enterprise environments inevitably create structural disincentives to producing good code.

I use Electron applications. They are usable, for some value of the word. I am
certainly not happy about it, though. I loathe the fact that I have 32GB RAM and routinely run into memory issues on a near-daily basis that should literally never happen with the workloads I'm doing. With communication-based apps like Slack and Discord where your choice of software to use comes down entirely to where the people you're communicating are, you will use dogshit because there is no point to communicating to the void on a technically superior platform.
by alexitorg | 2026-02-08 01:49:45+00:00
There are a heap of self published sci-fi and fantasy novels that fill the top selling lists on amazon in their respective niche. These are not included in the database that this analysis used. Space travel, multiple worlds and aliens are all really common tropes in those, even if the book is a pulpy progression fantasy or litrpg. The other top sellers are Romantasy which are published professionally. These have lots of dragons, were-wolves and vampires for sexy reasons.
The professional fiction publishers are 70-80% women publishing for a majority female fiction reader fan base. Even old best selling men's action authors like Clive Custler and Tom Clancy would probably have to self publish if they were writing today.
by phil21 | 2026-02-08 01:49:47+00:00
For chronic diseases that tend to be caused by obesity, the expensive bits tend to be towards retirement aged people - or are so disabling that people drop out of the workforce early.

In either case the vast majority of those costs will be incurred by either Medicare or Medicaid. Or at least the next insurer in line as the typical worker doesn’t spend an entire career at the same firm with the same insurance provider.

By the time any cost savings benefits have been realized (call it a decade later), chances are that insured patient is long gone and all they were was an additional expense.

By the time government gets involved you have someone who has been obese all their life and the damage is largely already done. Even if you paid for the meds now, the savings are limited.

Given the market already though - these drugs will be affordable to the average working person within a few years
by kkso2005 | 2026-02-08 01:51:20+00:00
We built an AI-powered market intelligence platform that analyzes Kalshi prediction markets by comparing what traders are betting against what fundamental analysis suggests the true probability should be.
Currently live with 91 deep research reports across crypto, equities, economics, and science/tech events. Each report includes our model's probability assessment, current market prices, historical resolution data, and decision-flipping events that could move odds. Some notable discrepancies: OpenAI AGI timeline (market 26% vs our model 0.7%), meteor strikes (market 58% vs model 14.7%).
The methodology combines financial analysis, real-time data feeds, and machine learning to identify mispriced predictions. Reports span everything from Bitcoin hitting $150K to Fed rate decisions to Costco hot dog prices.
We also open-sourced a Kalshi trading bot: github.com/OctagonAI/kalshi-deep-trading-bot
Curious about the methodology or spotted any analysis gaps? Happy to discuss in the comments.
by FridgeSeal | 2026-02-08 01:51:37+00:00
Nothing in this space “smells right” at the moment.

Half the “ai” vendors outside of frontier labs are trying to sell shovels to each other, every other bubbly new post is about this-weeks-new-ai-workflow, but very few instances of “shutting up and delivering”. Even the Anthropic C compiler was torn to pieces in the comments the other day.

At the moment everything feels a lot like the people meticulously organising desks and calendars and writing pretty titles on blank pages and booking lots of important sounding meetings, but not actually…doing any work?
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-02-08 01:52:12+00:00
"January was the worst start to a year for job cuts in the United States since 2009, with high-profile layoffs at UPS and Amazon fueling a tumultuous beginning to 2026 on the labor market, according to a private firm's report, as official government reports remain delayed."

But this is only one giant mail order company and the shipper that services its deliveries

"Which Companies Are Cutting The Most Jobs?

UPS announced last month it would be cutting 30,000 jobs this year, after it eliminated 62,000 positions in 2025, The New York Times reported. The company's new layoffs are triggered by the company ending its relationship with Amazon, according to the report, which noted Amazon was also a leader in layoffs. Amazon announced in late January it would lay off around 16,000 corporate employees as it continues to restructure its business model."

What about all the other companies

Maybe there is more to the US economy than one giant company

How much of the US economy is small businesses
by carefree-bob | 2026-02-08 01:54:06+00:00
My gemini subscription is all I need. It's like an interactive stack overflow that doesn't yell at you and answers your questions.

I was working on a problem and having trouble understanding an old node splitting paper, and Gemini pointed me to a better paper with a more efficient algorithm, then explained how it worked, then generated test code. It's fantastic. I'm not saying it's better than the other LLMs, but having a little oracle available online is a great boost to learning and debugging.
by mullingitover | 2026-02-08 01:54:11+00:00
> This is about as Wild West as most of us have lived through for the U.S. drug market.

I don't know about that. I'm old enough to remember The Vaping Panic of 2019, where (medical and/or recreational) cannabis vape liquid was adulterated with Vitamin E acetate in industrial quantities, which caused widespread injury and death. The real cause was called out very quickly (thanks in part to investigative reporting by...WeedMaps[1]), but health departments flailed and spent months blaming it on Juul and teen e-cigarettes. The panic evaporated because right as the public health community realized what was happening, Covid broke out.

To this day, afaik no testing of vapes is required to ensure they don't contain this toxic ingredient.

[1] https://weedmaps.com/news/2019/10/why-vitamin-e-acetate-and-...
by rootusrootus | 2026-02-08 01:55:38+00:00
Hard to regulate. A lot of the retatrutide sold today is marketed on Discord & Telegram groups and paid for with crypto. It is infeasible for customs to open every last package entering the US, so this avenue will continue to work. The only gov't that could realistically stop it (for a while at least) is the Chinese. And they do, occasionally, shut down a manufacturer for a while. Though not because they are shipping GLP1s to the states.