MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sbuttgereit | 2026-02-07 20:39:48+00:00
> "I didn’t ask for a robot to consume every blog post and piece of code I ever wrote and parrot it back so that some hack could make money off of it."

I have to say this reads a bit hollow to me, and perhaps a little bit shallow.

If the content this guy created could be scraped and usefully regurgitated by an LLM, that same hack, before LLMs, could have simply searched, found the content and still profited off of it nonetheless. And probably could have done so without much more thought than that required to use the LLM. The only real difference introduced by the LLM is that the purpose of the scraping is different than that done by a search engine.

But let's get rid of the loaded term "hack" and be a little less emotional and the complaint. Really the author had published some works and presumably did so that people could consume that content: without first knowing who was going to consume it and for what purpose.

It seems to me what the author is really complaining about is that the reward from the consuming party has been displaced from himself to whoever owns the LLM. The outcome of consumption and use hasn't changed... only who got credit for the original work has.

Now I'm not suggesting that this is an invalid complaint, but trying to avoid saying, "I posted this for my benefit"... be that commercial (ads?) or even just for public recognition...is a bit disingenuous.

If you poured you knowledge, experience, and creativity into some content for others to consume and someone else took that content as their own... just be forthright about what you really lost and don't disparage the consumer. Just because they aren't your "hacks" anymore, but that middlemen are now reaping your rewards.
by pas | 2026-02-07 20:39:50+00:00
because constrained supply leads to shitty solutions, and people spend their money on land rent instead of spending it on actual service (like making sure there are no hidden fees and cameras)

that said those are not new problems, and are not caused (nor exacerbated) by airBnB (likely the only tangentially significant factor is the decentralization of the hospitality industry thanks to online market places, and barriers to building more hotels, and of course people's preferences for renting something more unique, or simply something remote or secluded)
by quotemstr | 2026-02-07 20:40:17+00:00
> I like Go a lot. In many ways it is C revisited, taking into account what has be learnt in the long years since it was released. I would like to use it, but there are big roadblocks that prevent me. The stop-the-world garbage collection is a big pain for games, stopping the world is something you can't really afford to do.

I'm no Go fan, to be clear, but GC isn't the problem with Go. It has a pretty decent GC with sub-millisecond pause times. People who complain about GC pauses while extolling the virtues of manual memory management are running on a set of prejudices from 1999 and are badly in need of a mental firmware update.
by zzrrt | 2026-02-07 20:40:23+00:00
They can and do pay taxes with ITIN instead of SSN, and some non-citizens are eligible for SSN anyway. Undocumented immigrants have paid billions in taxes annually. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/article/how-do-undocumented-imm...

The larger point that they may be omitted on reports like this may still stand, but it’s not because every single one is unable to be tabulated in the count by definition.
by mike_hearn | 2026-02-07 20:40:23+00:00
AI, obviously! A bubble doesn't mean demand vanishes overnight. There is - at current price points - much more demand than supply. That means the market can tolerate price hikes whilst keeping the accelerators busy. It seems likely that we're still just at the start of AI demand as most companies are still finding their feet with it, lots of devs still aren't using it at all, lots of business workflows that could be automated with it aren't and so on. So there is scope for raising prices a lot as the high value use cases float to the top, maybe even auctioning tokens.

Let's say tomorrow OpenAI and Anthropic have a huge down round, or whatever event people think would mark the end of the bubble. That doesn't mean suddenly nobody is using AI. It means they have to rapidly reduce burn e.g. not doing new model versions, laying off staff and reducing the comp of those that remain, hiking prices a lot, getting more serious about ads and other monetized features. They will still be selling plenty of inferencing.

In practice the action is mostly taking place out of public markets. We won't necessarily know what's happening at the most exposed companies until it's in the rear view mirror. Bubbles are a public markets phenomenon. See how "ride sharing"/taxi apps played out. Market dumping for long periods to buy market share, followed by a relatively easy transition to annual profitability without ever going public. Some investors probably got wiped along the way but we don't know who exactly or by how much.

Most likely outcome: AI bubble will deflate steadily rather than suddenly burst. Resources are diverted from training to inferencing, new features slow down, new models are weaker and more expensive than new models and the old models are turned off anyway. That sort of thing. People will call it enshittification but it'll really just be the end of aggressive dumping.
by joe_the_user | 2026-02-07 20:40:37+00:00
I dislike it when rhetorical flourishes start with "honest question...".

Maybe using AI assistant instead of directly writing code is equivalent to using a high level language instead of assembly and maybe it isn't. So at least begin your discussion as "I think programmers who don't use AI are like programmers who insist on assembly rather than a high level language" (and they existed back in the day). I mean, an "honest question" is one where you are honestly unsure whether you will get an answer or what the answer will be. That's completely different from honestly feeling your opponents have no good arguments. Just about the opposite, really.

By the way, the reason I view AI assistants and high level language compilers as fundamentally different is that high level languages compilers are mostly deterministic, mostly you can determine both the code generated and the behavior of code in terms of the high level language. AI created/assisted code is fundamentally undermined relative to the source (a prompt) on a much wider basis than the assembly created by a high level language compiler (whose source is source code).

Edit: formatting
by pyrolistical | 2026-02-07 20:40:39+00:00
I always liked C. I enjoyed how brutal it is, except the preprocessor.

This is why zig is a godsend. It is actually simpler than C while being more precise than C!

For example zig can distinguish between a pointer to a single element vs a pointer to an array of unknown length. Where as in c abi, it is all T*

When importing a c lib, you can make it more ergonomic to use than c itself.

Being able to easily import c lib is especially important to game dev, as practically all so called c++ libs also export a c header as they know how important it is.

https://github.com/zig-gamedev has a lot of repos of ziggified c libs used in games.

As for the preprocessor, zig comptime is so much better. It’s just more zig that runs at compile time.
by asenchi | 2026-02-07 20:40:45+00:00
Well many of them you may know in that they made their way into so many systems (though arguably without the refined UX of Heroku) but the two that come up the most and I am teaching others:

* The simpler the interface for the user, the more decisions you can make behind the scenes. A good example here is "git push heroku". Not only is that something every user (bot or human) can run, it is also easy to script, protect, and scale. It keeps the surface area small and the abstraction makes the most sense. The code that was behind that push lasted for quite some time, and it was effectively 1-2 Python classes as a service. But once we got the code into our systems, we could do anything with it... and we did. One of the things that blows my mind is that our "slug" (this is what we called the tarballs of code that we put on the runtimes) maker was itself a heroku app. It lived along side everyone else. We were able to reduce our platform down to a few simple pieces (what we called the kernel) and everything else was deployed on top. We benefited from the very things our customers were using.

* NOTE: This one is going to be hard to explain because it is so simple, but when you start thinking about system design in this way the possibilities start to open up right in front of you.
The idea is that everything we do is effectively explained as "input -> filter -> output". Even down to the CPU. But especially when it comes to a platform. With this design mentality we had a logging pipeline that I am still jealous of. We had metrics flowing into dashboards that were everywhere and informed us of our work. We had things like "integration testing" that ran continuously against the platform, all from the users perspective, that allowed us to test features long before they reached the public. All of these things were "input" that we "filtered" in some way to produce "output". When you start using that "output" as "input" and chaining these things together you get to a place where you can design a "kernel" (effectively an API service and a runtime) and start interacting with it to produce a platform.

I remember when we were pairing down services to get to our "kernel" one of the Operations engineers developed our Chef so that an internal engineer needed maybe 5-7 lines of Ruby to deploy their app and get everything they needed. Simple input, that produced a reliable application setup, that could now get us into production faster.

Anyways, those are just a couple.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-02-07 20:41:10+00:00
My ability to ask questions & hone in on good answers is far better than it ever was. My ability to change course & iterate is far faster than it ever has been. I'm making far more informed decisions, far more able to make forays and see how things turn out, with low cost.

I could not be having a better time.

I liked coding! It was fun! But I mourned because I felt like I would never get out 1% of the ideas in my head. I was too slow, and working on shit in my free time just takes so much, is so hard, when there's so little fruitful reward at the end of a weekend.

But I can make incredible systems so fast. This is the craft I wanted to be doing. I feel incredibly relieved, feel such enormous weigh lifted, that maybe perhaps some of my little Inland Empire that lives purely in my head might perhaps make it's way to the rest of the world, possibly.

Huge respect for all the sadness and mourning. Yes too to that. But I cannot begin to state how burdened and sad I felt, so unable to get the work done, and it's a total flip, with incredible raw excitement and possibility before me.

That said, software used to reward such obsessive deep following pursuit, such leaning into problems. And I am very worried, long term, what happens to the incredible culture of incredible people working really hard together to build amazing systems.
by lunar_mycroft | 2026-02-07 20:41:41+00:00
To pick a few (from the server crate, because that's where I looked):

- The StoreError type is stringly typed and generally badly thought out. Depending on what they actually want to do, they should either add more variants to StoreError for the difference failure cases, replaces the strings with a sub-types (probably enums) to do the same, or write an type erased error similar to (or wrapping) the ones provided by anyhow, eyre, etc, but with a status code attached. They definitely shouldn't be checking for substrings in their own error type for control flow.

- So many calls to String::clone [0]. Several of the ones I saw were actually only necessary because the function took a parameter by reference even though it could have (and I would argue should have) taken it by value (If I had to guess, I'd say the agent first tried to do it without the clone, got an error, and implemented a local fix without considering the broader context).

- A lot of errors are just ignored with Result::unwrap_or_default or the like. Sometimes that's the right choice, but from what I can see they're allowing legitimate errors to pass silently. They also treat the values they get in the error case differently, rather than e.g. storing a Result or Option.

- Their HTTP handler has an 800 line long closure which they immediately call, apparently as a substitute for the the still unstable try_blocks feature. I would strongly recommend moving that into it's own full function instead.

- Several if which should have been match.

- Calls to Result::unwrap and Option::unwrap. IMO in production code you should always at minimum use expect instead, forcing you to explain what went wrong/why the Err/None case is impossible.

It wouldn't catch all/most of these (and from what I've seen might even induce some if agents continue to pursue the most local fix rather than removing the underlying cause), but I would strongly recommend turning on most of clippy's lints if you want to learn rust.

[0] https://rust-unofficial.github.io/patterns/anti_patterns/bor...
by teeray | 2026-02-07 20:41:50+00:00
> because they’re wearing bazooka-powered jetpacks and you’re still riding around on a fixie bike

Sure, maybe it takes me a little while to ride across town on my bike, but I can reliably get there and I understand every aspect of the road to my destination. The bazooka-powered jetpack might get me there in seconds, but it also might fly me across state lines, or to Antarctica, or the moon first, belching out clouds of toxic gas along the way.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-02-07 20:42:04+00:00
Alternative to archive.ph, no Javascript, no CAPTCHAs:

x=www.washingtonpost.com
{
printf 'GET /technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/ HTTP/1.1\r\n'
printf 'Host: '$x'\r\n'
printf 'User-Agent: Chrome/115.0.5790.171 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible ; Googlebot/2.1 ; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)\r\n'
printf 'X-Forwarded-For: 66.249.66.1\r\n\r\n'
}|busybox ssl_client -n $x $x > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htm
by p0w3n3d | 2026-02-07 20:42:17+00:00
C has very low entry level, providing that you have some knowledge about memory management. When, as a Java developer, I had to quickly deliver some exchange connector using given .h and .so, I chose C, because C++ had too high entry level. If C is a sharp knife, C++ is a rotating pell post full of sharp knives. You can cut yourself even if you think you're safe.

But I find string management in C awful and would like to borrow it from C++. Only string management
by mike_hearn | 2026-02-07 20:42:19+00:00
FWIW the models aren't thrown away. The weights are used to preinit the next foundation model training run. It helps to reuse weights rather than randomize them even if the model has a somewhat different architecture.

As for the rest, constraint on hospital capacity (at least in some countries, not sure about the USA) isn't money for capex, it's doctors unions that restrict training slots.
by shubham-coder | 2026-02-07 20:42:31+00:00
I honestly didn't expect this to get much attention, but we hit ~330+ clones in the last 24 hours.

That unexpected load actually helped me find a few bugs in the setup script (specifically with the pgvector config on Windows), which I've just patched. If anyone else hits memory issues on 4GB cards, let me know—I'm actively optimizing the quantization now
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-02-07 20:42:35+00:00
>Being reported may be seen as betrayal by the parent,

It kind of is no matter how you slice it. You're prioritizing other interests above theirs specifically to their detriment and then saying "it's justified because X". No value for X no matter how legitimate is gonna change the fundametal reality.

>even if it is objectively justified. That could also be the reason why „everyone around“ failed to act,

If everyone around thinks it's justified then they'll have no problem supporting the guy who does want to act. Buuuut, and this is a big bug. "Will support someone narcing on someone to cause the state to take action" is a way higher bar "will support a DIY solution". Showing up to or organizing your friend's intervention is a way lower bar than throwing them under the bus to the cops. What we're discussing here is basically the "lite" version of the latter.
by dataviz1000 | 2026-02-07 20:42:44+00:00
> Ultimately, the new homeowners were also borrowers and paid portions of their yearly income as interest on long-term mortgages

The United States does similar and we also have a nice twist on the concept. We have $38,000,000,000,000 in national debt which increased $2,500,000,000,000 in 2025. Which is like $111,764 per citizen with ~$3,000 in interest payments a year each, all going to a handful of families (and Japan) who hold most the debt as an investment.

The US government borrowed the money, gave the money back to people the government borrowed it from in form of kickback contracts, subsidies to oil companies and farmers who vote for the politicians who increased the debt by $2,500,000,000,000 in 2025, and every citizen is responsible for paying the interest on it.

As an American, all of this is insane to me.
by navanchauhan | 2026-02-07 20:43:08+00:00
I think this comment is slightly unfair :(

We’ve been working on this since July, and we shared the techniques and principles that have been working for us because we thought others might find them useful. We’ve also open-sourced the nlspec so people can build their own versions of the software factory.

We’re not selling a product or service here. This also isn’t about positioning for an acquisition: we’ve already been in a definitive agreement to be acquired since last month.

It’s completely fair to have opinions and to not like what we’re putting out, but your comment reads as snarky without adding anything to the conversation.
by zahlman | 2026-02-07 20:44:32+00:00
> A 2025 simulation-based study published in the journal Frontiers in Sports and Active Living suggested that every 2 cm of extra fabric in a ski jumpsuit could increase drag by about 4 percent and increase lift by about 5 percent. On a jump, that extra 2 cm of fabric amounts to an extra 5.8 meters, the simulations found.

This sounds... highly implausible.
by svara | 2026-02-07 20:44:38+00:00
I hear you, and that's where my mind goes first on this issue too.

But with social media, many of the people most into it, when asked, will say they wish it didn't exist.

A lot of kids feel they have to be on it, but wish it didn't exist.

People sound and behave more like actual drug addicts than just mere fans of a medium around social media.
by matthewaveryusa | 2026-02-07 20:46:15+00:00
I think it’s not about compensation or passion, but something a bit more abstract.

I’ll give it a shot; I think you’re successful in what you do and very altruistic and open, not only in your discoveries but also your opinions. You also have a higher sense of duty. as oscar wilde once said, we’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. compensation is boring gutter talk. It’s hard for people to reconcile your benevolence with your success, and just as the trope of joining a company to change the world is a veil for making money, so is the trope of criticizing the agent of change entering an industry because the industry is bad.

Personally I can’t wait to read about the inefficiencies you find and have a little glimpse into openai tech from your opinionated point of view.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-07 20:46:28+00:00
> I wouldn't be surprised if many of those GPUs are just e-waste, never to turn on due to lack of power.

That's my fear.

The problem is these GPUs are specifically made for datacenters, So it's not like your average consumer is going to grab one to put into their gaming PCs.

I also worry about what the pop ends up doing to consumer electronics. We'll have a bunch of manufacturers that have a bunch of capacity that they can no longer use to create products which people want to buy and a huge backstop of second hand goods that these liquidated AI companies will want to unload. That will put chip manufactures in a place where they'll need to get their money primarily from consumers if they want to stay in business. That's not the business model that they've operated on up until this point.

We are looking at a situation where we have a bunch of oil derricks ready to pump, but shut off because it's too expensive to run the equipment making it not worth the energy.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-02-07 20:46:42+00:00
I really am very thankful for @simonw posting a TikTok from Chris Ashworth, a Baltimore theater software developer, who recently picked up LLM's for building a voxel display software controller. And who was just blown away.
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/30/a-programming-tool-for...

Simon doesn't touch on my favorite part of Chris's video though, which is Chris citing his friend Jesse Kriss. This stuck out at me so hard, and is so close to what you are talking about:

> The interesting thing about this is that it's not taking away something that was human and making it a robot. We've been forced to talk to computers in computer language. And this is turning that around.

I don't see (as you say) a personality. But I do see the ability to talk. The esoteria is still here underneath, but computer programmers having this lock on the thing that has eaten the world, being the only machine whisperers around, is over. That depth of knowledge is still there and not going away! But notably too, the LLM will help you wade in, help those not of the esoteric personhood of programmers to dive in & explore.
by Evenjos | 2026-02-07 20:46:52+00:00
Yeah. As a sci-fi author, I have strong opinions about this. Made an authortube video on the topic: https://youtu.be/THVpdcgTYrQ

But tl;dr: Gatekeepers in big/mainstream publishing have outsourced their slush-piles to underpaid interns, most of whom are young and ambitious women. They tend to like certain things. Also, big/mainstream publishing is chasing data trends, like all other big businesses, which leads to a staleness cycle where they only publish what worked in the last two years. They're afraid to take financial gambles on unproven ideas or new IP.

The good sci-fi these days is mostly indie and mostly underground, IMO. You really have to dig for it. Personally, I find good stuff via Reddit r/powerprogression, but even there, you may have to dig to find gems that speak to you.

I joke that I'm a male author and reader, even though I'm female. The first book of my epic series (which is fully published) is Majority: Torth Book 1.
by randomtoast | 2026-02-07 20:46:56+00:00
I’ve seen this play out a lot. People say they “write games in C” and then quietly rebuild half of C++ anyway with vtables in structs or giant switch statements, just without the compiler helping. That’s fine if it makes you happier, but it’s not obviously simpler or safer. Also, C++ compile times are mostly a self-inflicted wound via templates and metaprogramming, not some inherent tax you pay for having virtual functions.
by dehrmann | 2026-02-07 20:47:00+00:00
> PC gamers

There's a pretty deep back catalog of PC games that will run on integrated GPUs.

> The swaths of folks who made freelance or commission artistry...

Those are people turning their hobby into a side hustle. If it's a hustle they depend on, this sucks. If it's actually a hobby, meh. You're drawing for you. Who cares if AI can also do it.
by einpoklum | 2026-02-07 20:47:01+00:00
An interesting use case - for the compiler as-is or for the essentiall idea of barely-C - might be in bootstrapping chains, i.e. starting from tiny platform-specific binaries one could verify the disassembly of, and gradually building more complex tools, interpreters, and compiler, so that eventually you get to something like a version of GCC and can then build an entire OS distribution.

Examples:

https://github.com/cosinusoidally/mishmashvm/

and
https://github.com/cosinusoidally/tcc_bootstrap_alt/