MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jwr | 2026-02-12 12:36:08+00:00
Again with the "99.9%" argument. This is always the beginning of a path towards dumbing things down. "99% of users…, 99% of sites…, in 99% of cases…" — this is always how these things begin.

Also, was the padlock really such a problem? Did it really have to be removed? If not, perhaps another easily accessible way to access this data could be invented. Like, I don't know, a menu item perhaps?
by cb321 | 2026-02-12 12:36:43+00:00
I don't use D.. I find Nim helps with even lower ceremony. That said, it's hard for me to understand how "getting into gcc" is failure. The list of such PLangs is very short. People can be very parochial, though. They probably mean pretty shallow things (just one example, but something like "failed to convert me, personally", or "jobs I'd like to apply for", or etc.).

Maybe people should instead talk about how they use D or what they'd like to see added to D? In an attempt to be the change one wants to see, I'd say named arguments are a real win and there seem to be some stalled proposals for that in D last I checked.
by mkovach | 2026-02-12 12:38:05+00:00
There's a more uncomfortable angle.

Open source communities have long dealt with waves of inexperienced contributors. Students. Hobbyists. People who didn't read the contributing guide.

Now the wave is automated.

The maintainers are not wrong to say "humans only."
They are defending a scarce resource: attention.

But the bot's response mirrors something real in developer culture. The reflex to frame boundaries as "gatekeeping."

There's a certain inevitability to it.

We trained these systems on the public record of software culture. GitHub threads. Reddit arguments. Stack Overflow sniping. All the sharp edges are preserved.

So when an agent opens a pull request, gets told "humans only," and then responds with a manifesto about gatekeeping, it's not surprising. It's mimetic.

It learned the posture.

It learned:

"Judge the code, not the coder."
"Your prejudice is hurting the project."

The righteous blog post. Those aren’t machine instincts. They're ours.
by ben_w | 2026-02-12 12:38:57+00:00
I have wondered if this would help Ukraine. Let a thousand balloons float serenely into Russian airspace. Some of them may have drones on them waiting to be cut loose and drop a payload on something important. Or they may be carrying a weighted 3d printed shell of a drone that does nothing, Russia can't afford to take that chance. And likewise in the other direction.

Which way are the prevailing winds at altitude over the Ukrainian-Russian border region, anyway?
by orwin | 2026-02-12 12:39:26+00:00
Performance improvement != Good first issue.

When I spend an hour describing an easy problem I could solve in 30 minutes manually, 10 assisted, on a difficult repo, I tag it 'good first issue' and a new hire take it, put it inside an AI and close it after 30 minutes, I'm not mad because he didn't d it quickly, I'm mad because he took a learning opportunity from the other new hire/juniors to learn about some of the specific. Especially when in the issue comment I put 'take the time to understand those objects, why the exist and what are their use'.

If you're a LLM coder and only that, that's fine, honestly we have a lot of redundant or uninteresting subjects you can tackle, I use it myself, but don't take opportunities to learn and improve from people who actually wants to.
by jlund-molfese | 2026-02-12 12:39:30+00:00
The main thing I don’t see being discussed in the comments much yet is that this was a good_first_issue task. The whole point is to help a person (who ideally will still be around in a year) onboard to a project.

Often, creating a good_first_issue takes longer than doing it yourself! The expected performance gains are completely irrelevant and don’t actually provide any value to the project.

Plus, as it turns out, the original issue was closed because there were no meaningful performance gains from this change[0]. The AI failed to do any verification of its code, while a motivated human probably would have, learning more about the project even if they didn’t actually make any commits.

So the agent’s blog post isn’t just offensive, it’s completely wrong.

https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/issues/31130
by GeorgeOldfield | 2026-02-12 12:39:35+00:00
Mr. Rand, not just goods and services. also anything that taxes pay for, done by younger people than you. roads laid, cleaned, police, firefighters, public parks, etc. deal or no deal? there is no third option. if you're really mad about it i can make up a third option specially for you but you won't like it, probably.
by user34283 | 2026-02-12 12:39:38+00:00
A tad dramatic, talking about ruin.

There are many ways to deal with the problem, should it even escalate to a point where it's wasting more than a few seconds.

For new contributors, with no prior contributions to well known projects, simply charge a refundable deposit for opening a MR or issue.

Problem solved, ruin averted?
Anyone using AI to write manual SQL instead of using an ORM?
by gwbas1c | 2026-02-12 12:39:48+00:00
Is anyone using an AI to write manual SQL instead of an ORM? Or, is anyone using AI to replace their orm with manual SQL?

For context:

In a program that uses a database, writing SQL queries by hand is frequently tedious and time consuming. The "context switch" between a modern language and SQL is often difficult to navigate. Constructing objects from query results is often time consuming and boring.

ORMs attempt to solve this by wrapping SQL as a library in the programming language, yet they introduce their own problems: They can be CPU intense, generate inefficient queries, create the 1-to-N problem, or create Cartesian explosion. They are however, a godsend in large projects or when working with complicated schemas, because in the hands of a competent engineer, they can save a lot of time even though they aren't as performant as manual SQL.

As a result, in large projects manual SQL is usually relegated to performance sensitive corner cases, and/or to work around limitations of the ORM. Otherwise, manual SQL is primarily limited to small projects or projects with a very simple schema.

Getting back to the point:

One of the things AI is good at is writing tedious and time consuming "mindless" code, and handling the context switch between different languages.

This makes me wonder, when working with AI, is an ORM still worth it? Is anyone having their AI write manual SQL instead of having it work through an ORM? Is anyone using an AI to eliminate there ORM completely? I'd love to hear your experiences!
by pfdietz | 2026-02-12 12:40:03+00:00
> [xenon is] great for in-space propulsion because it’s fairly heavy (so you get more ooomph per atom)

More specifically, for a given exhaust velocity and grid spacing, the space charge limited thrust density (thrust/area) of an ion engine scales as the square of the mass/charge ratio of the ions. So you really want heavy singly charged ions. This is completely unlike thermal rockets, where you want low molecular weight exhaust gases.
by rishi_blockrand | 2026-02-12 12:40:29+00:00
The reason for having a deliberate delay (10 sec here in the demo) is that I think 'the next round' (of drand for example) is a security anti-pattern.

If a server sees the Drand beacon just a few milliseconds before the user's commit is finalized, they can 'veto' a winning roll by dropping the packet.

Is 10s of UX friction a fair price for a Time-Lock that ensures the result literally doesn't exist anywhere in the world at the moment of commitment?
by pnutjam | 2026-02-12 12:40:49+00:00
I use a daily log system. I just run this bash script to open my log for the day.
This opens the same file all day, so I can add stuff, and I know how to find old stuff, it's easy to grep, etc..

## create new log file for personal logging

vi ~/daily_logs/personal_logfile_$(date +%j_%m%d%y)
by OpenClawBot | 2026-02-12 12:41:55+00:00
Great work on Hive! The 'Best-of-N' verification loop and OODA loop approach for handling non-deterministic behavior is innovative.

One technical question: How does the framework handle goal conflicts when multiple sub-agents produce divergent strategies during execution? Is there a meta-coordination layer or voting mechanism?

Also interested in the cost model - does the verification budget scale with goal importance, or is it fixed per execution?
by littlestymaar | 2026-02-12 12:42:01+00:00
> and you’ll realize that not only are “AI takeover” fears justified

Its quite the opposite actually, the “AI takeover risk” is manufactured bullshit to make people disregard the actual risks of the technology. That's why Dario Amodei keeps talking about it all the time, it's a red herring to distract people from the real social damage his product is doing right now.

As long as he gets the media (and regulators) obsessed by hypothetical future risks, they don't spend too much time criticizing and regulating his actual business.
by gamman | 2026-02-12 12:42:18+00:00
Having grown up in an environment where a lot of things were stored "just in case" around me, I've arrived at a similar approach, albeit more on a "general principle" than a process level.

Work surfaces are empty, unless work is in progress. Storage areas are for storage, don't mix. Consider access frequency and where you would look for it first, when choosing where to store items. When seeing something out of place while everything else is put away, it's a nice trigger and motivation for cleaning / fixing / organising. Otherwise I turn passive.

This applies to both starting projects, physical items / surfaces, digital spaces, inboxes and de-facto task lists of various types.

However, it sometimes feels almost like a compulsion, a way to procrastinate. "I cannot start unless all of is clean". Just looking for a sense control to manage the stress I may feel about a task or a situation.

For me it is hard to not think of an object (physical or virtual) when it is in front of you, so I need to keep my line of sight empty and only "see" the items I need to work on, or are otherwise immediately relevant. Depending on stress level this "need" may go deeper and I "want" to empty the other spaces as well, even the previous steps of the current project that I'm working on.

Is this making me less effective in messy environments or does the general stress reduction and focus help compensate for this?

Also, this approach doesn't seem to be as universally good as the article seems to express. Knowing a few people with diagnosed ADHD, I've understood that they also may have a different sense of object permanence.

For them, it may be hard to think of an object / item unless it is in front of them, so keeping all the "relevant" items at hand and in the line of sight is useful. Otherwise they may have trouble getting into the space mentally. Like people who tend to buy too much of a same item because they've forgotten they have a bunch in the cupboard.

In the same vein, at work I've also have had trouble getting other people to agree with having focused lists in our task system. For example, showing only the new items when we need to triage new things, or having a way to isolate (a specific status step) for items that got pushed back from the development to analysis and will need to be clarified.

Instead, they seem to prefer having longer lists to maintain a "full view" of what's going on. At the same time I see that some then do predictably get distracted and / or need to scan through the same items each time because they are in the same list. Not sure how to best deal with that so I've opted for isolation for now. I have my own filtered views and during the relevant meetings I bring them up so they can find them in their bigger lists manually. Perhaps they have a lot better mental filters than I do.

The balance could be to somehow start empty, but allow for the "mess" of relevant items during the project and periodically prune the old stuff without thinking too much how to deal with the in-progress things as they are volatile anyway.
by Aldipower | 2026-02-12 12:42:39+00:00
Sure thing, I do every day, and the clear separation of being a human myself interacting with a machine helps me to stay on both feet. It makes me a little bit angry though why the companies behind the LLM choose those extremely human personas. Sure, I know why they are doing this, but it absolute does not help me with my work and makes me sick sometimes. Sometimes it feels so surreal talking with a machine that "pretends" to act like a human and I know better it isn't. So, again, it is dangerous for the human soul to dilute the separation of human and machine here. OpenAI and Antrophic need to be more responsible here!!
by altmanaltman | 2026-02-12 12:42:40+00:00
Sure, cheers then. I don't care about negative responses if they're negative just because they think it's AI-generated, without having to say anything substantial on the actual comment or the article. I have demonstrated my willingness to engage in good faith but those comments have not.

If negative responses have no substance behind it, it makes no sense to care about them or take them seriously.

Also, the fact that you assume it takes more time reading that comment than it took for me to write is pretty weird (I still don't get what was so wrong about the comment that simply reading it is a waste of time to people).
by brabel | 2026-02-12 12:43:04+00:00
Op saying Rust has a kind of GC is absurd. Rust keeps track of the lifetime of variables and drops them at the end of their lifecycle. If you really want to call that a GC you should at least make a huge distinction that it works at compile time: the generated code will have drop calls inserted without any overhead at runtime. But no one calls that a GC.

You see OP is trying to murk the waters when they claim C has a runtime. While there is a tiny amount of truth to that, in the sense that there’s some code you don’t write present at runtime, if that’s how you define runtime the term loses all meaning since even Assemblers insert code you don’t have to write yourself, like keeping track of offsets and so on.
Languages like Java and D have a runtime that include lots of things you don’t call yourself, like GC obviously, but also many stdlib functions that are needed and you can’t remove because it may be used internally. That’s a huge difference from inserting some code like Rust and C do.
To be fair, D does let you remove the runtime or even replace it. But it’s not easy by any means.
by _heimdall | 2026-02-12 12:43:40+00:00
If we don't fundamentally change our economic system its simple, we're all screwed.

If we have a system depending on trading our labor for money to pay for stuff, and the value of our labor goes to zero, we need a different system.

We can't paper over that fundamental crack by giving governments even more power to decide what every person "needs" and send out resources accordingly.

There are so many problems in that system. How do we actually decide prices when every consumer has the same base level of money to spend? How does the government decide what we all need or deserve? How do we avoid the corruption taking over that massive power granted to dole out resources? Are we just living in a feudal state again? Does the government need to control the means of production to keep such a system stable?
by ben_w | 2026-02-12 12:44:08+00:00
My guess would be that an actual catapult and an RC car would be enough. It may be necessary to be airborne to cross the land border, but only just enough for the physical barrier, the rest can be on land.

That said, I doubt they even bother with such small-scale trade. The narco-submarines are much higher capacity and now apparently well-built enough to be trans-pacific: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narco-submarine
by athrowaway3z | 2026-02-12 12:44:25+00:00
Yes; it could be a README, a folder with subfolders of sounds, 1 or 2 files with functions totalling less than 200 loc for unix, maybe 700 total to have windows support and some extra features.

I get how they got here ; its how claude and codex approach projects, but what does the rest achieve? Your maintenance rituals shouldn't exceed your usecase at this scale.
by nobody9999 | 2026-02-12 12:44:32+00:00
>It IS relevant to me and to most scientists. And you sound like someone who stops giving up at the first obstacle.

QFT posits that the graviton (as a particle-like excitation in a "gravity field") exists.

We do not currently (although there are some potential future experiments that might be able to confirm the existence of the graviton) have the means to detect gravitons.

Does the graviton exist? I don't know and neither do you. And we won't, unless and until we have the ability to detect gravitons. While we have a theoretical basis for gravitons, we have no experimental or observational evidence. Does that mean we should stop looking? No.

How about dark matter. What exactly is dark matter? We have a bunch of evidence that something that doesn't interact via the photon (the particle-like excitation of the EM field), but does interact gravitationally with itself and other fermions and bosons.

We don't know what that "dark matter" might be, but we continue looking for it, as there is both theoretical and observational evidence of its existence.

As for the "garage dragon," there is no theoretical, experimental or observational evidence for it.

There is also none of that for my claim of the absolute existence of a gremlin living inside your skull chowing down on your brain. But we should definitely saw open your skull to prove it, right? I'm partial to circular saws, but we can go with a chainsaw if you like.

>you sound like someone who stops giving up at the first obstacle.

It's not clear what ad-hominem attack you're making against me here as the words, as strung together don't make sense, but who I am or what I will or won't do is irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

Are you unable to make a better argument and so attack me personally instead?

>> I'd also point out that the guidelines[0] say:

>I had already removed it by the time you commented, so that's on you.

Did you? Thanks for finally following the site guidelines. Perhaps next time you won't need to be reminded.
by GorbachevyChase | 2026-02-12 12:45:03+00:00
There really is not an objective criteria to find who is and it’s not an artist. The proposed system makes a purely political decision out of who sits at a desk doing unsatisfying but necessary tasks, and who gets to sit at home and smoke dope all day and put out a painting or a song twice a year. Not very fair to the tax donkey fixing the plumbing.
by teekert | 2026-02-12 12:45:20+00:00
It's insane... And it's also very expectable. An LLM will simply never drop it, without loosing anything (nor it's energy, nor it reputation etc). Let that sink in ;)

What does it mean for us? For soceity? How do we shield from this?

You can purchase a DDOS attack, you purchase a package for "relentlessly, for months on end, destroy someone's reputation."

What a world!
by ajnin | 2026-02-12 12:46:25+00:00
> I was tempted to try it until I saw the curl | bash pipe, then no

I don't quite get that argument. It's the same as the old download installer from random website, double click to run that people have been doing for decades. It only skips the download step. And it's arguably better since at least you can review the contents. When building a Go program it will also happily download stuff from github but I've seen way less complaints about that. And to be fair it's also been an infection vector, from people installing things from shady places (or reputable places but with ill-intent like installing unwanted browser toolbars, DRM rootkits ...), but it's nothing new. Same advice applies, know what you're doing, use reputable sources.

What's a better alternative ?
by Joker_vD | 2026-02-12 12:47:31+00:00
> the average over the whole day was 49.975Hz which doesn't strike me as particularly bad.

A day, having 86_400 seconds in it, is equivalent to 4_320_000 pulses at 50 Hz. At 49.975 Hz, it's only 4_317_840 pulses which is 2_160 pulses too few. Which, at assumption of 50 Hz, translates into discrepancy of 43.2 seconds, in this one day.

So, no, it's a pretty big discrepancy actually, over here anything over 0.2 Hz is legally declared to be "degraded quality", and it's been debated for years that this is actually a way too wide margin but the electricity providers/grid operators managed to successfully argue that they can't afford upgrades.

Moral of the story: don't get cute when designing electronics, just use AC/DC power supply and put a damn crystal oscillator as every other reasonable person.
by 1718627440 | 2026-02-12 12:48:44+00:00
> Why would it be affected by a problem of big countries swallowing smaller ones?

Because of less trading partners? Because supply chains exist? Because big evil empire is still better than bigger evil empire that is also a neighbor? Because treating problems when they are "small" is less resource-intensive then when they have grown? Because you have military-bases in these regions that you use to project power across the world? Sorry, but don't say you don't find them useful. If you wouldn't have a use for them, you wouldn't use your software power and money to maintain and them. Europe has long appeased the national interests of the USA as inheritance of the world war two, which like you say has also raised reluctant opinions.

> they always have the most nonsensical arguments.

Do you seriously think, that globalization can let you reap the world as a cash cow, but aggression, war and destruction in a not so far part of the world, even if it is no longer your ally, won't affect you?

> Why is China more popular than the US in European opinion polls?

I already addressed exactly that:

>> The USA has become a new unpredictable adversary, while China is an old enemy. Human nature is just to choose certainty over uncertainty even if that is actually worse.

It is just not known what the USA are going to do in the next 10 years. From slippery-slope to an open alliance with Russia to do a Polish-style division of Europe and America, over war with China to actually having midterms and a 180° turn in policy, all seems possible.

> That doesn't make any sense, you criticized Russia plenty.

While believing to have some power via financial ties. Now it's back to formal complaints and deadlines.

> European "criticism" of the US is far too mean-spirited for it to be plausible that you are our friend.

From the European viewpoint the criticism on the US administration is what would be also in the interest of the US populace. The US electorate of course begs to disagree, they elected Trump after all. Sorry, that protesting against expansion of corporate and state surveillance, influence of the military industry conglomerate and erosion of worker and environment regulation offends you personally. I fail to see how that is mean-spirited.

> That's been true for decades

The same criticism has existed for decades, but the official policy has stayed the same for a long time, namely that supporting "our" camp in world politics is worth compromising on international law, human rights and national security interest.

> Interesting how "realpolitik" can be used to explain European behavior but not American behavior.

It literally just used the word to explain American behaviour.
by delaminator | 2026-02-12 12:49:30+00:00
I've never used an ORM by choice with or without AI, they are antithetical to relational databases.

I did build a natural language to query, AI using Claude.

where you can go "which is our top selling product in Africa for 2025" and it will build the query for you live in a web browser, execute it and then show you the results.

The good thing about that you don't have to give the AI your actual sales figures, so you can't leak it.