MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xantronix | 2026-02-28 16:29:13+00:00
How do we maintain best practices when the compiler outputs a different result for the spec at any given time? How do we obtain reproducible builds? Do we pin to a specific version of our compiler (ie, snapshot of the model; is this possible anywhere except local currently?), and vigorously test changes after any updates in our "toolchain"? How do we have control over our "toolchain" (again, apart from local), especially when said "toolchain" can, for all its users simultaneously, fold to political pressure from state regimes? And, if the code generated by LLMs is the build artifact, why is it now okay to check the build artifact into source control?

There may come a day when we, as an industry, decide that simply doing it by hand is more expedient when it comes to resolving urgent production issues. We may not know the pain we are causing ourselves until well into the future when it has become too much to bear without a visit to the proverbial doctor.
by finiking | 2026-02-28 16:29:23+00:00
Hi verdverm, thanks for the feedback.

Actually, there have been commits to the repo every day. The duplicate submissions today were a genuine accident on my part—I got a bit confused by the submission system as a first-timer and accidentally posted it again. My apologies for that.

I completely respect HN's guidelines on self-promotion. Going forward, I will only post updates here when there is a major version release or a significant architectural change. Thanks for understanding!
by rambojohnson | 2026-02-28 16:29:25+00:00
You’re mistaking the packaging for the product. Religion is the language leaders use. Power, territory, oil corridors, regional dominance, and domestic political survival are what they’re actually fighting over.

Tehran isn’t calculating missile ranges based on sutras. Washington doesn’t position carrier groups because of metaphysics. Israel’s security doctrine isn’t a meditation retreat.

Spiritual narratives make clean moral theater for the public. They mobilize bodies. They sanctify retaliation. But the machinery underneath runs on leverage and deterrence, not theology.

Wake up to the real world.

Calling it primarily religious violence feels tidy and tragic in a philosophical way. It’s harder, and more uncomfortable, to admit that it’s strategic violence dressed in symbols people recognize.

Shunyata is a beautiful lens for seeing through ego. It doesn’t dissolve geopolitics.
by brendanyounger | 2026-02-28 16:29:29+00:00
I'm in my mid-40's now. I taught myself C when I was 15. I have no desire to use LLMs to pump out code.

I take comfort in re-reading much of the 70's and 80's literature which focuses the possibilities of user experience. We still haven't fully explored all the dreams of half a century ago.

If AI forces the business case that "code is cheap", I can only hope we re-double our efforts at creating new interfaces and capabilities for computer systems. The Meta glasses, Apple Vision, and the like are small steps in this direction.
by jcastro | 2026-02-28 16:30:13+00:00
> customized via a Containerfile could work too? Except rebooting/reimagine for every change sounds tedious as hell.

You can do this today with Aurora, Bazzite, Bluefin, and other bootc systems. The system updates by default are weekly and require a reboot but when you move most of the stuff into the userspace most of that stuff updates independently anyway.
Anthropic vs. DoD: "Any lawful use" is a fight about control
by colek42 | 2026-02-28 16:30:32+00:00
I served 12 years infantry, then built targeting tools at JSOC vs ISIS. Now I lead a team building AI tools automating the compliance process. I’ve got opinions on Anthropic + DoD

When people argue about “AI in weapons” like it’s a sci-fi trigger bot… I can’t take it seriously.

A “kill chain” isn’t a vibe. It’s a process

Find, Fix, Track, Target, Engage, Assess (F2T2EA) and most of it is information work: sorting signal from noise, building confidence, tightening timelines, and getting decisions to the right humans fast enough to matter.

That’s why this Anthropic vs. DoD fight is getting attention. It’s not just “ethics.”

-> It’s about control.

Here’s what’s actually on the table:

Anthropic says they’ll support the military — but they want two carve-outs: no mass domestic surveillance and no fully autonomous weapons (their definition: systems that “take humans out of the loop entirely” and automate selecting/engaging targets).

Anthropic also says DoD demanded “any lawful use” and threatened offboarding / “supply chain risk” pressure if they didn’t comply.

A DoD memo posted on media.defense.gov explicitly calls for models “free from usage policy constraints” and directs adding standard “any lawful use” language into AI contracts.

The dispute escalated fast — including federal offboarding/blacklist actions and a “supply chain risk” designation as reported by major outlets.
Now my take, as someone who’s lived inside the targeting reality:

AI can absolutely help the kill chain without ever being the one “pulling the trigger.”

Speeding up Find/Fix/Track/Target changes outcomes — and it’s not hypothetical.

But if we’re going to talk about “any lawful use,” then stop outsourcing national policy to contract fights.

DoD already has policy that autonomous weapon systems should allow appropriate human judgment over the use of force.
So the real question isn’t whether humans matter.

It’s this:

Do we want safety and governance implemented at the model layer (vendor guardrails), the contract layer (“any lawful use”), or the law/policy layer (Congress + DoD doctrine + auditing)?

Because “Terms of Service vs. warfighting” is a stupid place to settle a question this big.

If you’ve worked in intel, targeting, acquisition, or governance:

Where should the boundary live? model, contract, or law, and who owns accountability when it breaks?
by softwaredoug | 2026-02-28 16:30:32+00:00
If I’m learning for the first time, I think it matters to hand code something. The struggle internalizes critical thinking. How else am I supposed to have “taste”? :)

I don’t know if this becomes prod code, but I often feel the need to create like a Jupyter notebook to create a solution step by step to ensure I understand.

Of course I don’t need to understand most silly things in my codebase. But some things I need to reason about carefully.
by somenameforme | 2026-02-28 16:30:43+00:00
Many, I suspect the overwhelming majority, of the markets are impossible to engage in insider trading in. So it's genuinely just an interesting way to monetize expertise. Chess is a great example. A lot of the money in that market is people turning on the latest chess engines and betting in accordance to position evals, but skilled players can see much more - like how a position that the computer gives as a dead drawn is, in reality, extremely difficult for one side to hold. So the market might give near 50% when it's perhaps more like 65/35. That's quite a large edge. There's also quite a lot of opportunities for arbitrage betting, which is by definition risk free.
by Bender | 2026-02-28 16:30:50+00:00
Maybe this comment is also AI.

My nickname on here would at least suggest so. I think Grok is the closest option since they were working on making a snarky insulting version of their bot. Tame that down a bit and one could get the personality of Bender. [1]

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPNGFC7-t68 [video][16s]
by gck1 | 2026-02-28 16:31:04+00:00
Which is why I find "LLMs will replace x in 12 months" so amusing. I've used LLMs to write decently sized backend projects and they turned out okay.

I also used it for several FE projects and all of them turned out absolutely terrible.

The only difference is that I have 15 years of BE experience and 0 years of FE experience. Had I allowed it to make the same average decisions when working on BE, they would share the same fate.
by samrus | 2026-02-28 16:31:15+00:00
Management will demand that free time goes to more features. Thats the problem. Time spent understand the feature (either while writing it or documenting it) is not valued, only time spent making it. So when making and understanding are decoupled, management will demand you spend all your time making, rather than understanding. They'll just tell you to have the llm make the docs
by toddmorey | 2026-02-28 16:31:23+00:00
I’m worried that opportunities like this to build fun/interesting software over models are evaporating.

A service just like this maybe 3 years ago would have been the coolest and most helpful thing I discovered.

But when the same 2 foundation models do the heavy lifting, I struggle to figure out what value the rest of us in the wider ecosystem can add.

I’m doing exactly this by feeding the papers to the LLMs directly. And you’re right the results are amazing.

But more and more what I see on HN feels like “let me google that for you”. I’m sorry to be so negative!

I actually expected a world where a lot of specialized and fine-tuned models would bloom. Where someone with a passion for a certain domain could make a living in AI development, but it seems like the logical endd game in tech is just absurd concentration.
by card_zero | 2026-02-28 16:31:34+00:00
I dunno, I've been reading for hours, I might play some games.

So the Mughals defeated and assimilated the Sultanate of Delhi ruled by the Afghan Lodi dynasty. Then they defeated and assimilated the Rajput Kingdom of Mewar ... who were Hindu ... ah, I've got it, you must mean Hindus. So excluding Shah Jahan and the Taj Mahal from being Indian I guess. I'll figure this out eventually.
by EMIRELADERO | 2026-02-28 16:31:48+00:00
Yeah, that attitude is not new.

> "The point is that as soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged. And, as I have pointed out already, the sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged also. There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case, even if one admits in an intellectual sense that it is unjustified – still one cannot feel that it is wrong. Loyalty is involved, and so pity ceases to function."
by nz | 2026-02-28 16:31:51+00:00
Most of these "class traitors" live in high cost of living areas, and for them, the choice is "become unemployed within two weeks for not complying", or "become unemployed within a few years for complying". They are being betrayed by the shareholder class, and they in turn are betraying their customers and their species.

The only thing that we can do is to not make it worth their time in the long run. Don't let greed and fear slide. Don't hate someone for choosing their family and comfort over your own, hate the system that forces them to make that choice. Hold them accountable, but attack the system, instead of its hostages and victims.
by reliabilityguy | 2026-02-28 16:31:56+00:00
> if you slaughter civilians and label all males as combatants you conveniently get a near 50% militant death rate

Say the ratio is 1:4, then what?

> don't play dumb, there's a reason israel is not letting foreign media into gaza and slaughtering local journalists at a rate never seen in history of war

And, at the same time, they keep all the internet links alive so that Palestinians can show the whole world the "genocide"? Like, do you really think that Israelis are that dumb? Islamic Republic shut down the internet to hide the scope of butchery, but Israelis did not figure it out?
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-02-28 16:32:23+00:00
> especially with AI

Yeah, the middle path sounds promising.

"Code Mode", where the AI writes a little program or script to do the AST/symbol transformations sounds like the win. As you point out, less tokens, and gives the humans insight.

This isn't exactly the same application of a "code mode" as before, but in my view it's a broad philosophy. AI for building machines, instead of doing the work directly. It also allows for easier updates/retries too. https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45399204
https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode-mcp/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47089505
by NalNezumi | 2026-02-28 16:32:44+00:00
Makes you wonder if recent antagonistic approach towards Europe was just part of this?

The Iran invasion was on the todo list of the current administration for ever. In those situation, they'd probably call NATO to step up in the same fashion as Yugoslavia.

And in that effort at least some level of collaboration from Europe is required, by geological proximity to middle east. So, prop them up with rethoric, make them lenient or even pro-iran invasion. "If we focus on Iran we will drop all the rethoric around Europe and Greenland" would probably even make the anti US sentiment be passive or silent about the military collaboration.
by galangalalgol | 2026-02-28 16:33:01+00:00
You are right that unless the eiu or others follow suit it would be less meaningful. On the senate conviction, my point is that only 33 senators need to oppose a conviction to stop it. Or to let a veto stand. The smallest states get the same number of senators. If those votes were evenly split, and it was the typical 50-60% turnout. It would actually only be 2-3% of the populace needed.

I do want to know who the bad guy is though.
by jcastro | 2026-02-28 16:33:21+00:00
> is currently converging on a different proposal by systemd developers that's standardized by the UAPI Group

We're working in this space with Project Bluefin: https://github.com/projectbluefin/dakota

Both approaches are indeed competitive, but you can also leverage both to achieve the same thing. We're experimenting with a pure ddi Bluefin as well as a Bluefin that is just a systemd-sysext on top of GNOME OS.

There will be many ways to slice this problem -- my opinion is that in the end it will be how you design the infrastructure to make these and not the artifacts themselves.

We already have CentOS/Fedora builds alongside these, long term we'll see which ones end up being the most efficient. Buildstream is a tool which people should look at in this space too: https://buildstream.build/index.html
by avaer | 2026-02-28 16:33:35+00:00
> The engineer who pauses to deeply understand what they built falls behind in velocity metrics.

This is the most insidious part. It's not even that bad code gets deployed. That can be fixed and hopefully (by definition) the market weeds that out.

The problem is that the market doesn't seem to operate like that, and instead the engineer who cares loses their job because they're not hitting the metrics.
by gtowey | 2026-02-28 16:33:43+00:00
The thing is you're still thinking of these insiders as someone who just got a juicy stock tip from a relative.

The much more serious problem is when these insiders actually have their hands on the levers which decide the outcome. It's really no different than a mobster who bets a bunch on money on an unlikely outcome then threatens one side to throw the match.

What possible economic benefit is there to society to allow ordinary people to bet in markets like that?
by hearsathought | 2026-02-28 16:33:49+00:00
> The president of peace btw.

Doesn't matter who the president is - bush, obama, trump, biden. They all do what israel tells them to do. Just like the iraq war. Iraq, libya, syria, etc. You live long enough and you'll see.

> I'm baffled at the lack of calls to boycott the Fifa world cup in US.

That's cause much of europe is controlled by israel as well.
by lapcat | 2026-02-28 16:33:55+00:00
> Wow…so laser focused on the trees and on the one man aspect of this.

The subject of the HN submission is the California wealth tax, which affects only billionaires. There are only about 200 in California. Moreover, only a few of those billionaires have left California, or are threatening to leave. So, I'm "laser focused" on the subject of the HN submission and puzzled by your remark here. Note that Larry Page's name is literally included in the submission title. I don't know what else I should be talking about here.

> I doubt that implementing aggressive wealth taxes will do anything to reverse the population loss trends they are seeing

That isn't the purpose of the wealth tax. And again, there are only about 200 billionaires in California, so even if they all left, which isn't happening, that's practically nothing compared to the total population of almost 40 million.
by theragra | 2026-02-28 16:34:52+00:00
Ive found that app my student team created for load testing of hammer drills for local factory is still ticking!

We created it around 2004, for Windows XP. Used Borland C++ and Windows driver for LPT port. Driver was written in asm, just for fun.

Since then, factory changed hands two times, and relocated from EU to China. 20 years, and Windows app still is working. I think they ran it on even on windows 98 at first.
by bob1029 | 2026-02-28 16:35:11+00:00
I think stronger determinism could dramatically improve the situation here. Right now, I don't know if the same model within the same hour will produce consistent output given identical prompts and low temperature.

I have no clue what my compiler is emitting every time I hit F5. I don't need to comprehend IL or ASM because I have a ~deterministic way to produce this output from a stable representation.

Writing a codebase as natural language is definitely feasible, but how we're going about it right now is not going to support this. A vast majority of LLM coding is coming out of ad-hoc human in the loop or stochastic agent swarms. If we want to avoid the comprehension gap we need something closer to a compiler & linker that operates over a bucket of version-controlled natural language documents.
by autoexec | 2026-02-28 16:35:16+00:00
What do you think fascism is? What we have is a populist, nationalist, racist, regime headed by a man that can't be held accountable for his actions and who acts like a dictator (as further evidenced in this case by going to war without congress) who uses to the power of the government to attack/threaten/suppress his "enemies" here in the US. If this isn't textbook fascism you must admit that it at least checks a lot of the same boxes
by dasil003 | 2026-02-28 16:35:29+00:00
I sort of agree that the surface area and incidental complexity of stacks give more space to plug more developers in than was true in the 70s and 80s. But I disagree strongly this invalidates Brooks Law. Certainly there are cases where adding people helps, especially if they are stronger engineers than the ones that are already there, but I’ve also seen way too many projects devolve into resourcing conversations when the real problem was over-complicated, poorly reasoned requirements, boil-the-ocean solutions promising a perfect end state without a clear plan to get there iteratively.
by stared | 2026-02-28 16:35:39+00:00
The notebooks were THE thing of Mathematica, at least to me.
12 years ago, as I was finishing my PhD in quantum optics, I wanted to migrate to the stack used in industry - and picked Python. Also, that way I was an early adopter of Jupyter Notebook, as it captured what was need + was open.

Now Mathematica notebooks (still remember, it is .nb) do not have the novelty factor. But they were the first to set a trend, which we now take for granted.

That said, I rarely use notebooks anymore. In the coding time, it is much easier to create scripts and ask to create a visualization in HTML.
by Vexs | 2026-02-28 16:35:42+00:00
I recently accepted-ish a position at a very ai-forward company. Manual programming was somewhat discouraged entirely.

I've used AI tools in the past for maths I didn't understand or errors I couldn't make sense of, and wrote the bulk myself, but now we have as mentioned, opus/sonnet 4.5- which work great.

As part of this, I had to integrate two new apis- nornally, when I write an API wrapper I end up learning a lot about how the API feels, what leads to what and how it smells, etc. This time? I just asked Claude to read it's docs, then gave suggestions about how I wanted it to be laid out. As a result? I have no idea how these apis feel, their models, etc. If I want to interact with them, I ask Claude how I do a thing with the library it made.

Mind you, the library is good. I looked over everything, it's fairly thin and it's exactly how I would write it, as I suggested it do. But I have no deep understanding, much less an understanding of how it got integrated in.

Like, normally when I integrate something in I learn a bit about the codebase I'm integrating it into. Do that enough times, and I understand the codebase at depth, how things plug in. This time? Nada.

It's.... Deeply uncomfortable, to know so little but still be able to do so much. It doesn't matter if I get it to explain it, that's just information that washes off when I move onto the next thing. The reflexive memory isn't built.

All of which is to say, I agree with the article.
by bluGill | 2026-02-28 16:35:51+00:00
Something else that really should be mentioned:

Every recession where there was mass lay-offs on programmers (not every recession hits programmers hard), there were many articles saying that whatever that latest thing [see article] was the cause of this and industry is getting rid of programmers they will never need again.

In every case of course "it is the economy stupid". The tools made little difference in the need for programmers. The tools that worked actually increased the need because things you wouldn't even attempt without the tools were now worth hiring extra people to do.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-28 16:36:06+00:00
You've been uncritically supportive of Israel in plenty of other threads on HN already so I'm not sure if your exaggeration of my comment should even be taken serious.

Israel has a massive lobbying effort in the United States and that's not exactly news, on top of that there have been many documented pieces of interaction between Trump and Nethanyahu that seem to be evidence that Trump is doing a lot of things to please Israel.
by subdavis | 2026-02-28 16:36:33+00:00
> Next week Anthropic will do something evil and everyone will be moving back to OpenAI.

Anthropic has been, relatively speaking, the most responsible of the frontier labs since its founding. There has never been a point at which OpenAI took a more measured and reasonable approach while Anthropic proceeded dangerously.

These are relative terms, but you'd have to not be paying attention to find this plausible.