MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Quothling | 2026-02-09 02:25:22+00:00
Maybe I don't understand it correctly but to me this reads like the author isn't actually using AI agents. I don't talk or write prompts anymore. I write tasks and I let a couple of AI agent complete those tasks. Exactly how I'd distribute tasks to a human. The AI code is of variating quality and they certainly aren't great at computer science (at least not yet), but it's not like they write worse code than some actual humans would.

I like to say that you don't need computer science to write software, until you do. The thing is that a lot of software in the organisations I've worked in, doesn't actually need computer science. I've seen horrible javascript code on the back-end live a full lifecycle of 5+ years without needing much maintainence, if any, and be fine. It could've probably have been more efficient, but compute is so cheap that it never really mattered. Of course I've also seen inefficient software or errors cost us a lot of money when our solar plants didn't output what they were supposed to. I'd let AI's write one of those things any day.

Hell I did recently. We had an old javascript service which was doing something with the hubspot API. I say something because I didn't ever really find out what it was. Basically hubspot sunset the v1 of their API, and before the issue arrived at my table my colleagues had figured out that was the issue. I didn't really have the time to fix this, so when I saw how much of a mess the javascript code was and realized it would take me a few hours to figure out what it even did... well... I told my AI agent running on our company framework to fix it. It did so in 5-10 minutes with a single correction needed. It improved the javascript quite a bit while doing it, typing everything. I barely even got out of my flow to make it happen. So far it's run without any issues for a month. I was frankly completely unnecessary in this process. The only reason it was me who fired up the AI is because the people who sent me the task haven't yet adopted AI agents.

That being said... AI's are a major security risk that needs to be handled accordingly.
by neya | 2026-02-09 02:26:26+00:00
Modern day tech journalism is just lazy, you browse a bunch of HN and reddit threads, if you're feeling it, ask ChatGPT for some stats to support your propaganda piece and hit publish. Fact check, spell check and everything else is done by AI. It's not like you have to run around the streets with camera crew, interviewing real people, so...yeah. I doubt if even they write the articles themselves, I've seen models on Huggingface for "creative, human-like writing". So maybe it was just a prompt "write me some ragebait on AI companies as I'm having a slow news day and my job is hanging by a thread"
by RupertSalt | 2026-02-09 02:26:34+00:00
"Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins."

Every time I see someone campaigning to exercise their civil liberties via hardware or software, I wonder if their devices are connected to any network.

Because once you connect to a network, especially a WAN, your liberties are tempered by the rights of all other users.

If your device hosts malware, botnets, scammers, spammers, or other malicious activity, no you do not have a right to the liberty of your hardware. The network and the service providers have a fiduciary responsibility of harm reduction and threat mitigation.

Sure, some hackers are very very good at preventing malware and keeping the botnets at bay. You may be better at it than cloud providers or your ISP. In fact, it is the inexperienced users that we can't really trust. They'll get pwned and their browser will have a million toolbars with spyware. Their PC will join botnets and host CSAM. It is their ignorance and ineptitude that gets them into trouble.

And so because WANs, particularly the public Internet, are common property, and not your private domain or sandbox, this is why things like device trust and attestation are being added. Because you could do all you wanted with your Commodore 64 and your Apple ][. The blast radius was limited to your family and every friend who traded cracked software.

But once you're hooked up on a network, you need to stop swinging your fists at my nose.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-09 02:28:09+00:00
> It's raining outside and you're looking out the window asking for an expert to give you the context for how damp it is

No, the mountains are misty and I’m asking if it’s snow or a storm. The number of armchair experts on DoJ process on the internet right now may only have been recently matched by the banking experts during the SVB collapses.
by apical_dendrite | 2026-02-09 02:28:24+00:00
I'll second this. An external recruiter was under the (incorrect) impression that we are a 996 company. We found out because she said that no senior people she talked to were willing to work those hours.

Ultimately you can make a lot of short-term progress with 23-year-olds who are willing to live 5 minutes away from the office, have no life outside of work, and work 72 hour weeks. But you also end up with a product that was built by people who have no idea what they're doing.
by SirensOfTitan | 2026-02-09 02:28:25+00:00
A lot of tech's current trends have a lot to do with its inability to see beyond the first order, like:

- How layoff culture backfires: companies that lean into this culture tend to underperform compared to those that do not.

- The deleterious effects of overwork on employees: work carries diminishing returns after a certain number of hours per week, and eventually the mistake rate from exhaustion outweighs the productivity from more hours. Not to mention, this causes burnout which leads to valuable people leaving.

- How AI removes flow: this is something I've seen in myself, but using agents means I do not achieve the cognitive engagement necessary for flow, which is one of the most pleasant states I can get into while working (and it often makes work feel worthwhile).

I'd also note: if you get hired at Rilla for their senior engineer position, and you're able to command the top of their stated band (300K), that is defacto ~165K for 40 hours worked / week.

Many people fought very hard for a long time to secure a 40 hour work week, and it's pretty silly how easily a lot of tech people will throw it away. Time is your most important asset, don't waste your life behind a screen not seeing your family or friends.
by 7thpower | 2026-02-09 02:28:52+00:00
I remember one of my brother’s friends bringing over gta 3 and, after having played gta 2 and the 1960s London version, having my early teenage mind absolutely blown. One of my older brothers had a job and had copped a ps2, and let me play it when he was at work or with friends.

I must’ve crashed the dodo hundreds of times, trying to figure it out in a pre YouTube world, where the best I could do is exchange tips with my friends at school.
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-02-09 02:30:52+00:00
What's the gap between sleep-deprived humans and LLMs?

Extreme programming (XP) was all about going as fast as you could go. One of their rules was "never work more than 40 hours for more than one week in a row". Why? Because when you get tired, you slow down. The net effect is negative after the first week.
by ifyoubuildit | 2026-02-09 02:30:59+00:00
OK, thanks for spelling them out.

I don't see how either of those principles suggest I should go steal the steaks, because I could easily end up being the person who is stolen from.

Its not surprising when starving people steal, and you can't really blame them for it. And people shouldn't waste frivolously when there are people in their community that are lacking.

But adding these unwritten caveats to private property rights based on whether someone is satisfied with their lot or not... I can't wrap my head around it.
by Isamu | 2026-02-09 02:31:40+00:00
>brute force search of the solution space

“Brute force” is mostly what makes it all work, and what is most disappointing to me currently. Including the brute force necessary to train an LLM, the vast quantity of text necessary to approach almost human quality, the massive scale of data centers necessary to deploy these models, etc.

I am hoping this is a transitional period, where LLMs could be used to create better models that are more finesse and less brute force.
by agentultra | 2026-02-09 02:31:54+00:00
First, creating power tools didn’t cause mass layoffs of carpenters and construction workers. There continued to be a demand for skilled workers.

Second, power tools work with the user’s intent. The user does the planning, the measuring, the cutting and all the activities of building. They might choose to use a dovetail saw instead of fasteners to make a joint.

Third, programming languages are specifications given to a compiler to generate more code. A single programmer can scale to many more customers than a labourer using tools.

The classification of centaur vs reverse-centaur tools came to me by way of Corey Doctorow.

There might be ways to use the technology that doesn’t make us into reverse centaurs but we haven’t discovered that yet. What we have in its current form isn’t a tool.
by jasonlotito | 2026-02-09 02:32:27+00:00
#dungeon26
https://adungeon.com

It's a creative project in which I add a new room to a mega-dungeon over the course of a year, resulting in 12 levels and approximately 30 rooms per level at the end. All the tiles are created by me using my own tools. It's a lot of fun and something I can do every day that I feel like I can enjoy for a year.

It's focused on OSR/Shadowrun. It's also taught me a lot about dungeon design and creation.
by alexgarden | 2026-02-09 02:34:03+00:00
This will remain an issue as long as we rely on the agent substrate's good judgment to power OpenClaw (or whatever comes next).

To make these frontier-based agents performant, they're weighed heavily on "bias to action" - useful, but as you pointed out, dangerous when the action is "share my bank details".

The problem is we have these incredible assistants, but they have no judgement that is personal to the way we work... A workplace full of coworkers who have no prefrontal cortex.
by heliumtera | 2026-02-09 02:34:10+00:00
Programmers for some reason love to be told what do to. First thing in the morning they look out for someone else to tell them how to do, how to test, how to validate.

Why don't yourself, like you want to do it, when you could just fallback to mediocrity and instead do like everybody else does?

Why think when you can be told what to do?

Why have intercourse with your wife when instead you can let someone else do? This is the typical llm user mentality
by tokioyoyo | 2026-02-09 02:34:28+00:00
Been bored a bit, so working on a Coop exploration app, already on AppStore - https://apps.apple.com/jp/app/ato-explore-together/id6757285....

Basically tracking where my friends and I have collectively been by dividing the global map into H3 hexagons. The using photo and workout metadata to get the locations, giving points and doing comparisons between everyone. It’s actually quite fun to see random people around the world sign up and see in the global map where everyone has been. Grounds me a bit haha.
by animeshjain | 2026-02-09 02:34:39+00:00
i am building https://alphacheck.ai on the side. it uses stock market data to track performance of recommendations made by youtubers.

What i have working as of now:
- submit a video and get a snapshot of which stocks were mentioned, sentiment (buy/sell), price delta and reasoning.
- analyze a channel and get a performance 'report card' of that channel
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-09 02:35:17+00:00
People in the US are giving up on our senescent culture industry. Go to Target and you find the new music is: Taylor Swift and K-Pop. My son and I are starting a anime theme song cover band and tell potential vocalists that it is easy to sing in Japanese even if you don't know what it means.

Hollywood is so busy getting high on it's own supply that it hasn't even noticed that you can't understand what people are saying even if you speak English so young people today turn on the subtitles habitually which means it it is all the easier to watch subprime/subtitled TV on Tubi.

So when it comes down to it, US-ians care less and less if it is in English.
Why is price comparison still so bad in 2026?
by YourPriceHub | 2026-02-09 02:36:04+00:00
I’ve been thinking a lot about how surprisingly difficult it still is to compare prices across major online stores. Even in 2026, Amazon, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Costco, and dozens of others all show different prices, different discounts, and different stock levels.

Google Shopping is incomplete, browser extensions feel heavy, and most comparison sites are full of ads or outdated data.

Why is this still such a hard problem? Is it technical, legal, business incentives, or something else?

I’ve been experimenting with my own approach to this problem here: https://yourpricehub.com — but I’m curious how others think about the broader challenge.

Would love to hear perspectives from people who’ve worked in e‑commerce, scraping, or pricing systems.
by VerifiedReports | 2026-02-09 02:36:32+00:00
But .Net goes back way farther than 15 years.

I attended one of the evangelist roadshows Microsoft put on when they announced .Net, back in the late '90s. We were developing Windows applications and using an SQL Server/ASP back-end.

We walked out of there saying WTF WAS all that? It was terribly communicated. The departing attendees were shaking their heads in bafflement.

I'm impressed that it has stood the test of time and seems to be well-done; I've never had occasion to use it.

But man... that stupid name.
by mmastrac | 2026-02-09 02:36:57+00:00
EDIT: Looks like these were almost all fixed, awesome.

I'd say there's a few QoL improvements you could make:

- The building choice for a colonist could probably just be a type of building, otherwise you're scrolling through 90+ buildings

- Add key repeat for scrolling long lists

- Draw a rectangle for the building footprint you're about to build to help position, allow mouse placement to shift it around if you need

- Maybe consider re-selecting the same building type because building an array of buildings requires a lot of keys (or a hotkey per building type?)

- Lists should probably wrap around too
by samplatt | 2026-02-09 02:37:04+00:00
In case anyone else has ever wondered:

IDDQD stands for Id Delta Quit Delta, a fraternity created by DOOM programmer Dave Taylor who released that if you drop out or quit a course you get a statistically-better final grade than you would by failing the course. Of course, you still end up not achieving a degree, hence when used in-game it shows "Degreelessness Mode" activated.
by pixodaros | 2026-02-09 02:37:09+00:00
No chance of tenure and you don't get grad students and adjuncts busting their butts as underpaid workers for a decade, so universities have to pay them better with the money they saved by laying off a few underperformers (in the USA, think roughly doubling pay for those workers and adding health insurance). I thought GMU economists liked gambling-based mechanisms?
by marcus_holmes | 2026-02-09 02:38:44+00:00
I think the author answers their own question at the end.

The first 3/4 of the article is "we must be responsible for every line of code in the application, so having the LLM write it is not helping".

The last 1/4 is "we had an urgent problem so we got the LLM to look at the code base and find the solution".

The situation we're moving to is that the LLM owns the code. We don't look at the code. We tell the LLM what is needed, and it writes the code. If there's a bug, we tell the LLM what the bug is, and the LLM fixes it. We're not responsible for every line of code in the application.

It's exactly the same as with a compiler. We don't look at the machine code that the compiler produces. We tell the compiler what we want, using a higher-level abstraction, and the compiler turns that into machine code. We trust compilers to do this error-free, because 50+ years of practice has proven to us that they do this error-free.

We're maybe ~1 year into coding agents. It's not surprising that we don't trust LLMs yet. But we will.

And it's going to be fascinating how this changes the Computer Science. We have interpreted languages because compilers got so good. Presumably we'll get to non-human-readable languages that only LLMs can use. And methods of defining systems to an LLM that are better than plain English.
by bri3d | 2026-02-09 02:38:58+00:00
> Baseless FUD.

This is a fascinating thing to post on an article about… bypassing UEFI Secure Boot?

PKFail, BlackLotus/BatonDrop, LogoFail, BootHole, the saga continues. If you’ve ever audited a UEFI firmware and decided it’s going to protect you, I’m not sure what to tell you.

To be clear, it’s extremely useful and everyone should be using it. It’s also a train wreck. Both things can be true at the same time. Using Secure Boot + FDE keys sealed to PCRs keeps any rando from drive bying your machine. It also probably doesn’t stop a dedicated attacker from compromising your machine.

> No one said anything about a nag screen.

The parent post suggested that Secure Boot arrive in Setup Mode. Either the system can automatically enroll the first key it sees from disk (supply chain issue, like I posted) or nag screen a key hash / enrollment process. Or do what it does today.

> For the record google pixels work largely this way. Flash image, test boot, re-lock bootloader

So do UEFI systems. Install OS, test boot, enroll PK. What the OP is proposing is basically if your Android phone arrived and said “Hi! Would you like to trust software from Google?!?!” on first boot.
by phpnode | 2026-02-09 02:39:18+00:00
The other day I had an agent write a parser for a niche query language which I will not name. There are a few open source implementations of this language on github, but none of them are in my target language and none of them are PEGs. The agent wrote a near perfect implementation of this query language in a PEG. I know that it looked at the implementations that were on github, because I told it to, yet the result is nothing like them. It just used them as a reference. Would and should this be a licensing issue (if they weren't MIT)?
by dedup | 2026-02-09 02:40:29+00:00
Hi!

We are the founders of The Dedup Company, or dedup.com for short. We’re building software to help people deduplicate their personal files across multiple computers, home servers, external drives, and (eventually) cloud storage accounts and mobile devices. Being chronically unable to conquer the chaos of 2.5M+ files accumulated over thirty years and stored across a dozen computers, we decided to quit our jobs and create the best deduplication software in the world. We are based near Seattle, WA and are currently participating in the local Startup425 accelerator program. Our planned launch date is sometime in April-May this year.

We’re conducting pre-launch customer research and would be very grateful if you could spend a few minutes to answer some questions about your personal challenges of organizing large numbers of files across multiple storage devices. We’re not attempting to sell you anything (we don’t even have a finished product yet); the objective is to identify which high-priority use cases we should focus our attention on for the first release.

Survey link: https://dedup.com/survey1

Thank you!

- the dedup.com team
by rhplus | 2026-02-09 02:40:31+00:00
Pedantic: the axioms of Boolean algebra don’t assign any natural numbers to the elements “top” and “bottom” of the set it operates on. The notation is usually “1” and “0” but it doesn’t have to be. It’s a convenience that many computer languages have named those elements “true” and “false”, and yes, it’s totally valid that in some representations, top = 0 = true and bottom = 1 = false.
by jameshush | 2026-02-09 02:40:32+00:00
It might be role-specific. I'm a solutions engineer. A large portion of my time is spent making demos for customers. LLMs have been a game-changer for me, because not only can I spit out _more_ demos, but I can handle more edge cases in demos that people run into. E.g. for example, someone wrote in asking how to use our REST API with Python.

I KNOW a common issue people run into is they forget to handle rate limits, but I also know more JavaScript than Python and have limited time, so before I'd
write:

```
# NOTE: Make sure to handle the rate limit! This is just an example. See example.com/docs/javascript/rate-limit-example for a js example doing this.
```

Unsurprisingly, more than half of customers would just ignore the comment, forget to handle the rate limit, and then write in a few months later. With Claude, I just write "Create a customer demo in Python that handles rate limits. Use example.com/docs/javascript/rate-limit-example as a reference," and it gets me 95% of the way there.

There are probably 100 other small examples like this where I had the "vibe" to know where the customer might trip over, but not the time to plug up all the little documentation example holes myself. Ideally, yes, hiring a full-time person to handle plugging up these holes would be great, but if you're resource constrained paying Anthropic for tokens is a much faster/cheaper solution in the short term.
by hedora | 2026-02-09 02:42:11+00:00
To play devil’s advocate: We’ve vendored a few open source projects by just asking an LLM to fix obvious bugs that have been open for 12+ months (some projects are abandoned, others active).

If upstream can’t be bothered to fix such stuff (we’re talking major functionality gaps that a $10-100/month LLM can one-shot), isn’t my extremely well tested fix (typically a few dozen or maybe hundred lines) something they should accept?

The alternative is getting hard forked by an LLM, and having the fork evolve faster / better than upstream.

Telling people like me to f—— off is just going to accelerate irrelevance in situations like this.
by neomantra | 2026-02-09 02:42:36+00:00
https://wethinkt.com

The second bubble there is a tool for 3D visualization and analytics of Claude Code sessions. The sample conversation is the one that made the tool itself!

That was a fun toy I learned a lot from. I’m not expanding that but am working intensely on the first bubble:

thinkt a CLI/TUI/Webapp for exploring your LLM conversations. Makes it easy to see all your local projects, view them, and export them. It has an embedded OpenAPI server and MCP server.

So you can open Kimi and say “use thinkt mcp to look at my last Claude session in this project, look at the thinking at the end and report on the issues we were facing”.

I added Claude Teams support by launching a Team and having that team look at its own traces and the changing ~/.Claude folder. Similar for Gemini CLI and Copilot (which still need work).

Doing it in the open. Only 2 weeks old - usable, but early. I’m only posting as it’s what I’m working on. Still working on polish and deeper review (it is vibe-crafted). There’s ergonomic issues with ports and DuckDB. Coming up next is VSCode extension and an exporter/collecter for remote agents.
by colechristensen | 2026-02-09 02:42:56+00:00
Tell it to analyze your codebase for best practices and suggest fixes.

Tell it to analyze your architecture, security, documentation, etc. etc. etc. Install claude to do review on github pull requests and prompt it to review each one with all of these things.

Just keep expanding your imagination about what you can ask it to do, think of it more like designing an organization and pinning down the important things and providing code review and guard rails where it needs it and letting it work where it doesn't.
by crazygringo | 2026-02-09 02:43:15+00:00
Fun fact: Chinese has separate "financial numerals" precisely to prevent one digit being changed to another, the way that could be easily done with regular numerals like turning 一 (1) into 三 (3) or 十 (10). A lot harder when they look like 壹, 叁, and 拾 instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_numerals#Financial_num...