MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sibeliuss | 2026-02-08 00:48:22+00:00
> This same colleague then invested time into understanding the kernel subsystem, the exact reasons why the original C program was written how it was, and rewrote the Rust translation himself. The difference was night and day; the code flowed naturally, explained itself and the underlying subsystems, and may genuinely be some of the nicest parts of the entire codebase.

This is the point that everybody needs to calm down and understand. LLMs are fantastic for POCs _which then get rewritten_. Meaning: the point is to rewrite it, by hand. Even if this is not as fast as shipping the POC and pretending everything is ok (don't do this!) it still drastically speeds up the software engineering pipeline and has the potential to increase Good Code overall.

A perfectly reasonable rule in software organizations is: For greenfield code, LLMs are strictly required for 1st-pass prototyping (also required!). And then: Hand writes (within reason) for production code. Your company will not lose their competitive edge following this guideline, and this includes your hard-earned skills.
by jwpapi | 2026-02-08 00:48:49+00:00
I’ve written about that a bit here https://jw.hn/dark-software-fabric

AI gets a lot of big projects right if you give at all the tools to verify its own implementation if you can build a proper system to verify the solution it works astonishly good. Even Opus 4.6 judgement seems to be wrong most of the time on projects of my scale pre the validation layers.
by jopsen | 2026-02-08 00:49:30+00:00
Lol, a military showdown where a few hundred people are killed might be horrible.

Leave the US with an island it doesn't recognize as its own (because Congress wouldn't) and that isn't recognized as US by most of the rest of the world.

Would economic ties between the US and Europe be broken as a result? Probably, but maybe everybody else decides that this will be resolved peacefully in the UN. And the can is kicked down the road, until Trump kicks the can.

Because ending economic ties between Europe and the US would mean a massive depression on both sides. Massive assets lost and written off. Goodbye pension.

Economic meltdown might be worse than a military showdown in the Arctic. Casualties from an economic conflict would be worse.
by theK | 2026-02-08 00:49:32+00:00
> Good Cirquits

Afaic, people designing circuits still do care about that.

> Good Assembly

The thing with the current state of coding is that we are not replacing "Coding Java" with something else. We are replacing it with "Coding Java via discussion". And that can be fine at times but it still is a game of diminishing returns.
LLMs still make surprising mistakes, they too often forget specifics, make naive assumptions and happily follow along local minima.
All of the above lead to inflated codebases in the long run which leads to bogged down projects and detached devs.
by alexitorg | 2026-02-08 00:49:50+00:00
Here are a few ideas trends that are affecting this:
-Publishing is getting less profitable so there are less books being published by the big companies.
-Publishing companies are grow 70-80% woman and are choosing female preferred books
-Most published fiction readers are female (I'm not sure what came first women reading more books or publishes publishing less male friendly books)
-Romance is the biggest genre fiction and that has heaps of dragons, werewolves and vampires (hence why those terms haven't dropped off)
-Self published books aren't included in isfdb, lots of male authors self publish
-Amazon best selling sci/fi, cyberpunk lists now have heaps of self-published books (maybe most)
-Most of this stuff is pretty pulpy, but it is really common to have starships and space travel in these books.
by sizzzzlerz | 2026-02-08 00:50:00+00:00
The year was 1978. A young engineer, just out of school with a still-warm BSEE degree, is working at his new job where programming was performed using punch cards or over the phone line with a acoustically coupled modem. After 3 or so months, the company has purchased these 3270 displays with keyboards and installed them in offices. Our junior engineer is assigned one of these. After just a few moments of use, it becomes exceedingly apparent that these are of a new class of technology, indeed, making life at work ever so much more pleasant and productive. Now retired, our engineer still remembers these quite fondly. Even more so, he remembers the keyboard. How solid it felt and the wonderful tactile feedback when pressing the keys. He might even say that it was the best keyboard that he ever used.
by coldtea | 2026-02-08 00:50:04+00:00
That's begging the question. We don't need to look "at every kind of mythological creature that gets classified as such nowadays" from "cultures that wouldn't have recognized the concept".

One could stick on those classified as such in western culture - which is where the fantasy novel about dragons and knights and spells and the rest are based on.

And in there, dragons have quite specific characteristic and vibes, as evidenced from medieval iconography of St George to countless fantasy book covers and illustrations.
by zapzupnz | 2026-02-08 00:50:09+00:00
Rather than making people run commands in Terminal, it would be more ideal to just tell people to try to run the app, then go to System Settings -> Privacy & Security -> scroll down until they see the Open Anyway button.

It'll be a skill they can use for any unsigned app and you can have cute screenshots. The Terminal command, on the other hand, is a huge barrier to entry.
by runarberg | 2026-02-08 00:50:13+00:00
Your logic sounds like willful ignorance. You are relying on some odd definitions of "definitions", "equivalence", and "procedures". These are all rigorously defined in the underlying theory of computer science (using formal logic, lambda calculus, etc.)

Claude and Gemini do not "do the same thing" in the same way in which Clang and GCC does the same thing with the same code (as long as certain axioms of the code holds).

The C Standard has been rigorously written to uphold certain principles such that the same code (following its axioms) will always produce the same results (under specified conditions) for any standard compliant compiler. There exists no such standard (and no axioms nor conditions to speak of) where the same is true of Claude and Gemini.

If you are interested, you can read the standard here (after purchasing access): https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso-iec:9899:ed-5:v1:en
by WalterBright | 2026-02-08 00:50:24+00:00
More nuance:

"Mr. Musk made these statements based on reports he received from a private investigator he hired to investigate Mr. Unsworth in preparation for the litigation that Mr. Unsworth had already threatened. Unbeknownst to Mr. Musk, the investigator’s reports were fabricated, and the investigator himself turned out to be a convicted felon who had gone to prison for fraud."

"Mr. Musk’s tweet was the culmination of an argument between two people that was punctuated by insults—not a factual accusation of the crime of pedophilia. The firm also demonstrated that Mr. Unsworth had not suffered any injury."

There's more: https://www.quinnemanuel.com/the-firm/our-notable-victories/...

Childish behavior - sure (on both sides). Anybody hurt - no.
by HappMacDonald | 2026-02-08 00:50:36+00:00
> Maybe you can expand a bit on how you are defining free market.

Not OP, but just look at a company town as an example in a bottle.

When the rich and powerful control the means of production so completely that they are the only people one can buy what one needs from, then in what way can the exchanges still be called "voluntary" and in what way is "mutual benefit" achieved vs the lesser of two evils: "perpetual debtorship that one must endlessly toil to slow the progress of" vs "abject starvation"?

At the end of the day consent and free will are actually really complicated topics, and they can be surprisingly easy to pervert by unequal power dynamics. The market cannot be free whenever feudalism forms to take its place.
by cthalupa | 2026-02-08 00:50:43+00:00
Compounding pharmacies are getting the raw API from China. Some of them are getting it from FDA registered facilities in China. Some are not.

It should be more or less the same thing as the legit stuff, but it is made with a different process, with different excipients, etc. For those going the more legit route, FDA registered still does not mean FDA inspected or that the FDA has signed off on them as being a reputable manufacturer.

There has also been cases of compounding pharmacies offering reta and other unapproved peptides, resulting in the FDA sending lots of angry letters to state pharmacy certification boards.
by HamoodBahzar | 2026-02-08 00:50:45+00:00
E-commerce changed how we buy.
Social commerce is changing who benefits.

Traditional e-commerce is simple:
A platform lists products, users buy them, and the platform keeps most of the value.
Customers are just customers.
Their data is monetized.
Their influence is ignored.

Social commerce flips that model.

Instead of treating people like traffic, it treats them like participants.

In social commerce, users don’t just buy —
they share, recommend, and bring others into the platform.
And when that happens, they earn.

Value no longer flows in one direction.

A purchase doesn’t just benefit the platform and the seller —
it rewards the people who helped the platform grow.

Friends invite friends.
Communities replace ads.
Trust replaces targeting algorithms.

Shops don’t need massive ad budgets.
They reach the right users through real connections.
Users don’t just spend money — they earn from activity.

This is the evolution:

E-commerce = transactions

Social commerce = relationships

E-commerce optimized checkout.
Social commerce optimizes people.

And that’s where the future is headed.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-08 00:50:48+00:00
Good code was approximately never valued in enterprise. How many companies worth billions or even trillions have webpages that take 5+ seconds to load text, and use Electron for their desktop applications? In that regard, nothing has changed.

There is still a market for good code in the world, however. The uses of software are nearly infinite, and while certain big-name software gets a free pass on being shitty due to monopoly and network effects, other types of software will still find people who will pay for them if they are responsive, secure, not wildly buggy, and can add new features without a 6 month turnaround time because the codebase isn't a crime against humanity.

On another note, there have been at least four articles on the front page today about the death of coding. As there are every other day. I know I'm tired of reading them, but don't people get bored of writing them?
by IhateAI_2 | 2026-02-08 00:51:23+00:00
I agree its not a flat out replacement, but this doesn't stop the marketing from infecting C -suite and leading to them cutting engineering payroll. 400k layoffs in the USA in the last 16 months, and most of those were before this ramp up in "agentic marketing". The tools will 100% be leveraged as a weapon to devalue the expected salaries of tech workers.

Then when they do need to rehire everyone, they will have improved these tools and people will be desperate. They'll say SWE is vastly easier now, and they'll either hire less qualified or push down the value of SWE salaries, I expect the latter.

I think the lawyer money for SWE is gone, so glad I spent 100k in school, years of study and practice. Instead of getting to do the thing I love, I'm going to be expected to basically play project manager with a half literate bot.
by benjiro | 2026-02-08 00:52:28+00:00
Your forgetting a little detail ... While you do not need a lot of new stuff, companies need buyers. A lot of companies work on rather thing margins and losing potentially 10 a 20% sales can result in people getting fired, or companies shutting down.

Remember, its not just about "O, X big brands sells less, they can deal with it". But a lot of brands have suppliers who feed that system. Or PC component makers like ... heatsinks, Fans, Cases ... seeing a 20% less sales because people buy less new PCs.

People do not realize how much is linked in the industry. Smaller GPU card makers are literally saying that they may be forced to leave the industry because of drops in sales and the memory prices making the products too expensive.

We can live a long time on old hardware but hardware also limits. Hey, the wife's laptop is from 2019, just before Covid (2020 when a lot of people bought new laptops). The battery is barely holding on. Replacement? None (reputable) ... So in a year that laptop is dead.

How about phones? Same issue ... battery is the build in obsolete maker.

You see the issue. It goes beyond what what most people realize.

Wait when a recession hits when the whole AI bubble bursts and cascades down the already weakened industry. Unlike previous bubbles, the hardware being build is so specialized, that little will hit the normal consumer market. So there will not be a flood of cheap GPUs or memory being dumped on the market.
by chetanahuja | 2026-02-08 00:52:34+00:00
Oh good lord. Spare us the beatings of the chest and rending of the garments. "crafting code by hand" like some leftover hipsters from 2010s crafting their own fabric using a handloom. It's fucking code. Were there similar gnashing of the teeth and wails of despair when compilers were first introduced?
by noosphr | 2026-02-08 00:52:48+00:00
OK, but who is saying that to the llm? Another llm?

We got feedback in this thread from someone who supposedly knows rust about common anti patterns and someone from the company came back with 'yeah that's a problem, we'll have agents fix it.'[0].

Agents are obviously still too stupid to have the meta cognition needed for deciding when to refactor, even at $1,000 per day per person. So we still need the buts in seats. So we're back at the idea of centaurs. Then you have to make the case that paying an AI more than a programmer is worth it.[1]

[0] which has been my exact experience with multi-agent code bases I've burned money on.

[1] which in my experience isn't when you know how to edit text and send API requests from your text editor.
by dgxyz | 2026-02-08 00:53:18+00:00
My one remaining windows machine is on 2021 LTSC and has no route to the internet. I am slowly working my way off it. This was onto macOS but that has gone down the shitter too. So it’s Debian. Hopefully be end of Q1 this year.

I honestly can’t believe what these vendors are doing. I don’t know anyone who approves of any of this.
by amitprasad | 2026-02-08 00:53:29+00:00
There's an opportunity-cost here. I use agents to be more productive. As many have noted, "Good Code" doesn't rank highly compared to actually shipping a product.

The tragedy, for me, is that the bar has been lowered. What I consider to be "good enough" has gone down simply because I'm not the one writing the code itself, and feel less attachment to it, as it were.
by itissid | 2026-02-08 00:53:41+00:00
I am not sure why people are getting hung on the price, i.e. this: "They have the gaul to pitch/attention seek a 1$/day with possibly little/no product". The price can drop TBH and while there is some correlation on $/capita output.

The more nuanced "outrage" here, how taking humans out of the agent loop is, as I have commented elsewhere, quite flawed TBH and very bold to say the least. And while every VC is salivating, more attention should instead be given to all the AI Agent PMs, The Tech lead of AI, or whatever that title is on some of the following:

- What _workflow_ are you building?
- What is your success with your team/new hires in having them use this?
- What's your RoC for investment in the workflow?
- How varied is this workflow? Is every company just building their own workflows or are there patterns emerging on agent orchestration that are useful.
by mariusme | 2026-02-08 00:53:41+00:00
While searching for Brevo (ex-Sendinblue) discounts, I noticed that most coupon pages list expired or unverified codes. Before signing up, I tried several sources and only found one page where the codes were actually still valid at the time of testing.

The page lists a small number of working Brevo coupon codes, without aggressive marketing or fake urgency. I tested the codes during signup and pricing preview to make sure they applied correctly. The page also notes limitations (plan-specific or time-limited), which is usually missing on coupon sites.

This might be useful if you’re evaluating Brevo and want to reduce initial costs until you decide whether to commit to a paid plan. Nothing groundbreaking, but it saved me some time compared to digging through outdated promo pages.

If anyone notices that a code has stopped working, it’s probably worth double-checking before relying on it, since Brevo seems to rotate promotions fairly often.
by htx80nerd | 2026-02-08 00:54:03+00:00
I started on Win 3.1. Win95 and 98 were so cool. Then I thought Win2k Pro was the best thing that even happened. WinXP was probably the last time I cared a lot about Windows. Vista looked cool. Then things just got worse and worse.

I have a medium-range gaming laptop running Windows 11. Dedicated GPU, extra RAM, etc. It "boots to ready" worlds slower than any of my low end Linux laptops. Windows is just so ungodly slow.

Somewhere around 2020 I changed my work laptop to use Linux only, no dual boot. MS was pushing 20GB patches, which is unreal. At the time I had AT&T DSL.

I had been using Linux on and off since the early 2000s. But the 20GB patches and 'ransom-ware' pushed me to Linux full time.

There are no apps I use that are 'windows only' so Im free. Windows is made by a mega-corp and it's just gotten out of control. "Update and shutdown" always just reboots. You can spend ~1hr doing an OS update with multiple reboots. I can install Linux + LibreOffice in ~15mins or less. A full Linux updated is like ~5min to ~10min, or less.
by lbreakjai | 2026-02-08 00:54:10+00:00
> If all you were doing is taking requirements from someone else and poorly coding them up

So, in your entire career, you've always worked in companies where you were a subject matter expert on everything the company did? Always knew the business domain inside out? You were running the numbers, sitting with customers, and determining yourself what they really wanted?

> If you push back on requirements when they are not reasonable. Etc

I did, because the requirements had a cost, which I had to balance with limited resources.

If widget A would make 10 customers happy, but would cost two weeks of work, that could be better spent making widget B that'd make 20 customers happy, then it would not be reasonable.

If widget A and B are free, then it becomes unreasonable to say no.
by bdcravens | 2026-02-08 00:54:12+00:00
While I tend to agree, insurance companies don't see it that way. They need a doctor to indicate a necessity to treat a condition, as opposed to it being the easiest way to treat it.

For example, I have to take digestive enzymes to digest my food (pancreatic insufficiency). For someone with an unusually high metabolism, they would also give them a leg up on gaining weight, even though there are other approaches to gaining that weight. However in many cases, the insurance company wouldn't cover their prescription when they will mine.
by solarisos | 2026-02-08 00:54:15+00:00
This is a really helpful breakdown, thanks for sharing it.
The point about lists being resold multiple times and accumulating spam traps resonates a lot, especially combined with lack of consent. That seems to explain why even technically “valid” addresses still perform poorly.
Out of curiosity, in your experience, did any approaches work better than others (for example strict segmentation, very small batch sends, or avoiding purchased lists entirely)?
Show HN: Seedance 2.0 AI video generator for creators and ecommerce
by dallen97 | 2026-02-08 00:54:22+00:00
Came across this tool today and figured some folks here might want to kick the tires.

Link: https://seedance-2.net/

What it appears to offer
• Text to video generation via a simple web UI
• The site claims up to 4K output and watermark free downloads on paid plans
• Pricing mentions batch generation, private generations, and API access on higher tiers

Why it might be interesting
• Low friction to test since it says you can start without signing up
• Could be useful for quick marketing clips, product showcases, or social content

Questions for anyone who tries it
• How’s prompt adherence and temporal consistency
• How does it compare with other web based video generators you’ve used
• Any red flags in quality, pricing, or terms

If you test it, would love to hear results and comparable alternatives.
by Barbing | 2026-02-08 00:55:07+00:00
Sixteen Claude AI agents working together created a new C compiler - Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/sixteen-claude-ai-agents-...

> The $20,000 experiment compiled a Linux kernel but needed deep human management.

We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler | Hacker News

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46903616
by fcjr | 2026-02-08 00:55:57+00:00
Hey op here: the goal was not to just get something working, it was to build it ourselves and learn along the way. And what's a better way to learn about how VGA works than to build a graphics card!

But for a little more context, we did purchase a few old AMD cards originally, but we were mostly interested in using modern hardware and possibly windows + webgpu (for certain games). We didn't want to rely on no longer manufactured parts and potentially unmaintained kernel drivers (like CRT emudriver).
by amitprasad | 2026-02-08 00:56:10+00:00
Right: Having "Good Code" is an investment into future velocity.

IMO we shouldn't strive to make an entire codebase pristine, but building anything on shaky foundations is a recipe for disaster.

Perhaps the frontier models of 2026H2 may be good enough to start compacting and cleaning up entire codebases, but with the trajectory of how frontier labs suggest workflows for coding agents, combined with increasing context window capabilities, I don't see this being a priority or a design goal.
by SSchick | 2026-02-08 00:56:24+00:00
Good code is extremely subjective, most bad code is built on a good code foundation. And most foundational software (think linux, ffmpeg, curl, v8, etc.) maintainers are pushing back.

Once AI/Agents actually master all tools we currently use (profilers, disassembly, debuggers) this may change but this won't be for a few years.
by Gehinnn | 2026-02-08 00:56:35+00:00
Opus is quite good at refactoring. Also, we can finally have all the helper functions/beautiful libraries/tests that we always wanted to have. There is no excuse anymore to approximate a parser with regular expressions.
Or to not implement the adapter class which makes an ugly unchangeable interface beautiful.

I believe the right use of AI makes it possible to write more beautiful code than ever before.
by zeeed | 2026-02-08 00:56:49+00:00
This. There’s no limitation to your prompting. If you feed rules and patterns for clean code to a bunch of agents they’ll happily work on that level.

Just right now no one cares enough yet. Give it a year or two.

I could conceive something evolving on a different abstraction layer - say, clean requirements and tests, written to standard, enhanced with “common sense”