MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alephnerd | 2026-02-08 01:08:02+00:00
You're welcome!

If you don't value IP and knowhow that's on you. Every piece of knowledge is valuable no matter what.

China did something similar 15 years ago when it was where India is today.

We also know how little it costs to lobby the US. Maybe the Chinese were a bit right - it's a bit like the late Qing period.
by amitprasad | 2026-02-08 01:08:08+00:00
To be clear, I am also having the most fun I've had when it comes to side-projects and even more exploratory things at work. I don't derive all my joy from "Good Code" -- that's silly! I would much rather ship tangible products and features and/or tackle things at home that I wouldn't otherwise.

On the other hand, the other responsibilities of being an engineer have become quite a bit less appealing.
by Avamander | 2026-02-08 01:08:45+00:00
That was a long time ago and it was specific to one implementation. In comparison GnuPG has had so many critical vulnerabilities even recently. That's why Apt switched to Sequoia.

Modern TLS stacks are far from fragile, especially in comparison to PGP implementations. It's a significant reduction in attack surface when it's a MITM we're talking about.

Malicious mirrors remain a problem, but having TLS in the mix doesn't make it more dangerous. Potential issues with PGP, HTTP and Apt's own logic are just so much more likely.
by love2read | 2026-02-08 01:09:15+00:00
> Either sleeping away carefully on the craft of your code manually writing it, or shitting out first pass vide-coded stuff without really taking care to specify the problem or iterate on the code afterwards.

I think the thing you are missing is that people are

> shitting out first pass vide-coded stuff without really taking care to specify the problem or iterate on the code afterwards

to assume that people will take a path other than the path of least resistance now when they never did before, such as copy-pasting directly from stackoverflow without understanding the implications of the code.
by Ucalegon | 2026-02-08 01:09:19+00:00
They just are not going to provide insurance to companies who use AI because the liability costs are not worth it to them since they cannot actual calculate risks, it is already happening [0]. Its the one thing that a lot of the evangelists of using AI for entire products have come to realize or they aren't actually dealing with B2B scenarios where indemnity comes into play. That or they are lying to insurance companies and their customers, which is a... choice.

[0] https://futurism.com/future-society/insurance-cyber-risk-ai
by kens | 2026-02-08 01:09:46+00:00
The 80×24 display of the IBM 3270 is the reason that terminal windows nowadays are typically 80×24 (or 25 lines because the IBM PC added an extra line). IBM dominated the CRT terminal market in the mid-1970s, so other manufacturers were mostly forced to 80×24 in order to be compatible. (And of course the IBM 3270 had 80 columns for compatibility with punch cards.)
by ElatedOwl | 2026-02-08 01:10:23+00:00
The author effectively argues deep thinking is dead, that people are no longer going to take the time to understand the problem and solution space before they solve it.

I think that’s untrue, I think it’s /more/ important than before. I think you’re going to have significantly more leverage with these tools if you’re capable of thinking.

If you’re not, you’re just going to produce garbage extremely fast.

The use of these tools does not preclude you from being the potter at the clay wheel.
by majormajor | 2026-02-08 01:10:53+00:00
Hm? The article is pretty clear about two claims, IMO: (1) good code has been rare for a long time because the job is a pragmatic one and not a philosophical one but that sometimes "good code" pays off down the line, and (2) possibly the "pays off down the line" will be less important in the future with AI coding tools.

And the comment by 'ElatedOwl is pretty directly responding to that second idea.
by coldtea | 2026-02-08 01:10:59+00:00
Most systems are not needed anyway. They are built to be built, by companies not caring for how good, secure, or fast they are, or even how usable they are, as long as users are lured or forced to use them.

Nothing speciail will happen when things are built "this way". People will just be used to lower quality, like they've been used to enshittified software for the past two decades.

No "artisans" will be employed to fix any mess. The mess will be our software baseline going forward.
by misir | 2026-02-08 01:11:13+00:00
> Which probably means we are all going to start to be more like airline pilots:

Airline pilots are still employed because of regulations. The industry is heavily regulated and the regulations move very slowly because of its international cooperative nature. The regulations dictate how many crew members should be on board for each plane type and other various variables. All the airlines have to abide by the rules of the airspace they're flying over to keep flying.

The airlines on the other hand along with the technology producers (airbus for example) are pursuing to reduce number of heads in the cockpit. While their recent attempt to get rid of co-pilots in EASA land has failed [1], you can see the amount of pursuit and investment. The industry will continue to force through cost optimization as long as there's no barrier to prevent. The cases where automation has failed will be just a cost of the business, since the life of the deceased is no concern to the company's balance sheet.

Given the lack of regulation in the software, I suspect the industry will continue the cost optimization and eliminate humans in the loop, except in the regulated domains.

[1] - https://www.easa.europa.eu/en/research-projects/emco-sipo-ex... ; while this was not a direct push to get rid of all pilots, it's a stepping stone in that direction.
by problynought | 2026-02-08 01:11:15+00:00
Starships are a boring transport layer, implementation detail.

Being a part of a Q continuum, a disembodied consciousness that can appear wherever whenever, while still retaining a memory/sense of "self" is a far more interesting a dream.

Starships titillate people who tinker with machines. Not very optimistic if we are dragging along service jobs to explore the cosmos.
by Guestmodinfo | 2026-02-08 01:11:52+00:00
There is trust issue about Maths. Since math people are mostly elitists going on about their love for math with their intuition and not translating their knowledge for other non math people lacking the intuition so other fields when they need to develop math as a need to understand their field better then they do so from the ground up because anyone can do math if they do the hard work. Its just math elitists who think their intuitions are above everyone else. So people dont go to math people and say hey please build a math model for this problem i am having because they know they may be shot down and so they develop math on their own. i wish there was a math bridge which could explain most of math things even to the non intuitive people like us
by somesortofthing | 2026-02-08 01:12:08+00:00
I've found that Good Code is actually actively detrimental to agent performance. I suspect agent-written code is very comprehensible to agents(for example, agents love to define single-use variables because it lets them document the code without adding comments, having to read whole files, or understand novel code patterns(complex pipeline statements, for example) but is a nightmare to read. You have to keep the meanings of all the small variables in your head, so your short term memory gets overloaded with small pieces of info. I tried making the agent refactor to reduce these, but noticed a substantial increase in how often it misunderstands what the code does.
by jdub | 2026-02-08 01:12:19+00:00
History suggests otherwise, and there's nothing particularly special about this moment.

Microsoft survived (and even, for a little while, dominated) after missing the web. Netscape didn't eat its lunch.

Then Google broke out on a completely different front.

Now there's billions of dollars of investment in "AI", hoping to break out like the next Google... while competing directly with Google.

(This is why we should be more ambitious about constraining large companies and billionaires.)
by tolerance | 2026-02-08 01:12:38+00:00
My theory about what made Epstein attractive to these guys is along the lines of what makes apparently educated people speak to Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman for hours: They forge low-risk environments to sound smart at.

Not a novel observation. But when you throw in the draw of private islands and illicit sex romps Epstein was a one-stop shop of gratification for the depraved and sophistic.
by charcircuit | 2026-02-08 01:13:18+00:00
>Why would you adopt agent first coding?

Since most work on software projects is going to be done via coding, debugging, QA, etc AI agents you should prioritize finding ways to increase the velocity of these AI agents to maximize the velocity of the project.

>Are you that bad at it?

That is irrelevant.

>Is there anything you really have to get done regardless of quality right this second?

You are implying that AI agents have low quality work, but that is not the case. Being able to save time for an equivalent result is a good thing.

>Just write the code yourself, and stop training your replacement.

AI labs are the ones doing the training better AI.
by amitprasad | 2026-02-08 01:14:03+00:00
Just because you or I may invest effort into deep-thinking, it does not mean that others will.

I'm not worried about this at Modal, but I am worried about this in the greater OSS community. How can I reasonably trust that the tools I'm using are built in a sound manner, when the barrier to producing good-looking bad code is so low
by love2read | 2026-02-08 01:14:04+00:00
> IMO, you need to have the capacity to write Good Code to know what Good Enough Code is.
I completely agree, and its one of the biggest problem of trying to talk about "how you use agents". A lot of the people that may use the same agents with the same workflow may see wildly different results depending on their ability to evaluate the end result.

> The problem with this argument is many do not believe this sort of leverage is possible outside of a select few domains, so we're sort of condemned to stay at a low level of abstraction.

I think theres a similar tangential problem to consider here: people don't think that they are the person to create the serious abstraction that saves every future developer X amount of time because its so easy to write the glue code every time. A world where every library or API was as well thought out as the virtual memory subsystem would be an overspecified but at the same time enable creations far beyond the ones seen today (imo).

> Even the SICP authors admitted programming had become more about experimentation and gluing together ready-made parts than building beautifully layered abstractions which enable programs to just fall out of easily.
by Nextgrid | 2026-02-08 01:14:33+00:00
50% tax is absolutely not typical in the US as far as I know unless you can provide sources? I thought it was around 30% thanks to all the various schemes and deductions one can use?

I live in Bulgaria. My effective tax rate here is around 20%. Next destination is Dubai which is even lower, because again, if rich politican assholes’ kids are going there to live the good life, why not follow them in their grift?

(Would I recommend Bulgaria? Well the tech money you make is enough to live like a king and privately pay for all the services a government is supposed to provide… but then again it’s no different from the UK where I also had to pay for everything privately except I could barely afford it because I also had to burn 50% of my income on taxes with nothing in return, so from that perspective Bulgaria wins. Make of it what you will. Switzerland appears to be the only place with a functioning government and fair taxes, except the property Ponzi is reaching such breaking points that whatever you save on taxes is getting burnt immediately on rent, so you’re no better)
by Avamander | 2026-02-08 01:15:03+00:00
TLS may be complicated for some people. But unlike HTTP, it has even formally proven correct implementations. You can't say the same about HTTP, PGP and Apt.

> Having to harden two protocol implementations, vs. hardening just one of those.

We're speaking of a MITM here. In that case no, you don't have to harden both. (Even if you did have to, ain't nobody taking on OpenSSL before all the rest, it's not worth the effort.)

I find it kind-of weird that you can't understand that if all a MITM can tamper with is the TLS then it's irrefutably a significantly smaller surface than HTTP+PGP+Apt.
by tombert | 2026-02-08 01:16:11+00:00
Sure, but I don't see how this is significantly different than if I had gotten dinner at a restaurant. If I had bought food at a restaurant, and even if I got a dessert, that wouldn't have been questioned at all. For that matter, if I had gotten fixings at a grocery store to make sandwiches or something, that also wouldn't have been questioned. Every morning when I would drive to work on these trips I would buy a soda at a gas station, and that was never questioned, even after adding the receipt.

Fiber One bars have extra fiber, but ultimately they really are just glorified candy bars, not radically different than a dessert. I don't see how this was significantly than ordering a dessert at a restaurant.
by zzo38computer | 2026-02-08 01:16:15+00:00
> The golden age for me is any period where you have the fully documented systems. Hardware that ships with documentation about what instructions it supports. With example code. Like my 8-bit micros did. And software that’s open and can be modified.

I agree, that it would be good. (It is one reason why I wanted to design a better computer, which would include full documentation about the hardware and the software (hopefully enough to make a compatible computer), as well as full source codes (which can help if some parts of the documentation are unclear, but also can be used to make your own modifications if needed).) (In some cases, we have some of this already, but not entirely. Not all hardware and software has the problems you list, although it is too common now. Making a better computer will not prevent such problematic things on other computers, and not entirely preventing such problems on the new computer design either, but it would help a bit, especially if it is actually designed good rather than badly.)
by max51 | 2026-02-08 01:17:15+00:00
>I would argue that it's going to be the opposite. At re:Invent, one of the popular sessions was in creating a trio of SRE agents, one of which did nothing but read logs and report errors, one of which did analysis of the errors and triaged and proposed fixes, and one to do the work and submit PRs to your repo.

If you manage a code base this way at your company, sooner or later you will face a wall. What happens when the AI can't fix an important bug or is unable to add a very important feature? now you are stuck with a big fat dirty pile of code that no human can figure out because it wasn't coded by human and was never designed to be understood by a human in the first place.
by nradov | 2026-02-08 01:17:23+00:00
If that seems reasonable to you then you don't know anything about residential construction. The problems that homebuilders face aren't amenable to mathematical solutions. They have to deal with permitting issues, corrupt / incompetent government officials, supplier delays, bad weather, flakey workers, etc. The notion of a 5% improvement from LLM is ludicrously naive.
by ChuckMcM | 2026-02-08 01:17:27+00:00
I really reasonate with this post, I too appreciate "Good Code"(tm). In a discussion on another forum I had a person tell me that "Reading the code that coding agents produce is like reading the intermediate code that compilers produce, you don't do that because what you need to know is in the 'source.'"

I could certainly see the point they were trying to make, but pointed out that compilers produced code from abstract syntax trees, and the created abstract syntax trees by processing tokens that were defined by a grammar. Further, the same tokens in the same sequence would always produce the same abstract syntax tree. That is not the case with coding 'agents'. What they produce is, by definition, an approximation of a solution to the prompt as presented. I pointed out you could design a lot of things successfully just assuming that the value of 'pi' was 3. But when things had to fit together, they wouldn't.

We are entering a period where a phenomenal amount of machine code will be created that approximates the function desired. I happen to think it will be a time of many malfunctioning systems in interesting and sometimes dangerous ways.
by dataviz1000 | 2026-02-08 01:17:27+00:00
Their defense system is as big a joke as the architecture design in Hualien. Nobody living on the island will openly criticize the mainland for the same reason nobody will point a weapon at anyone from the mainland. They know if the mainland wants the island, they surround the island on day 1, take over the island on day 2, and install their own government on day 3. They know they do not want a record of opposing the mainland in words or violence because of the consquences.

I'm not saying this to be mean. I'm being honest and because the current United States administration is a bunch of snowflakes, it puts the democracy in Taiwan in great danger you need to honest about that too.

The only country I think that is prepared to defend against China is Vietnam.
by mwwaters | 2026-02-08 01:17:45+00:00
In the expenditures for the economy making up GDP, not a lot of it screams “AI-able.” Page 9 here breaks down GDP on expenditure basis.

https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2026-01/gdp3q25-upda...

Given how much of the spending is hard goods and simply not AI-able (rent, most of housing new construction, most of other goods, most health care, much of other services), the replacement theory would require a massive displacement.
by jatora | 2026-02-08 01:17:54+00:00
Nay, I periodically go through phases in most of my large applications where I do nothing but test, refine, refactor, consolidate, and modularize (the multi-thousand line monoliths that LLM's love to make so much) for days before resuming my roadmaps.

This part is honestly one of the most satisfying, where you merge the already existing functionality with beautiful patterns.

I also make good use of precommit hook scripts to catch drift where possible
by love2read | 2026-02-08 01:18:38+00:00
So funny when people point at electron as if it singlehandedly makes every program unusable.

Also, I would assume there are not many significant pages on $B/Trillion companies that take 5 seconds to load text that are used frequently.

> I know I'm tired of reading them, but don't people get bored of writing them?

People never get tired of reading or commenting on commentary on their hobbies.
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-08 01:18:58+00:00
That's probably to do with exceptions — possibly the only thing that pervades C++ code even if you don't use it. The compiler has to write code so an exception at any point leaves the stack in a sensible way, etc. Try -fno-exceptions (and -fno-rtti might save some memory while you're at it)

Regrettably not every C++ feature is free if you don't use it. But there aren't many that aren't.
by logicprog | 2026-02-08 01:19:04+00:00
But that's kind of my point — there's still a choice whether to care about the quality of your code and spend time refining it or not with agentic coding as with any other technology; people who took the time to write good code before can absolutely continue to do that, and people who didn't care about good code before will not care about good code now either. It was a choice that was not the path of least resistance before, and it is still a choice that is not the path of least resistance now.

Now, there is the very valid point that those that don't care about code quality can now churn it out at vastly accelerated rates, but that didn't really feel like what the original article was talking about. It felt like it was specifically trying to make the claim that a Gentic tools don't really afford the ability to refine or improve your code or strongly discourage it, such that you kind of can't care about good code anymore. And it's that that I wanted to push back on.
by Yokohiii | 2026-02-08 01:19:42+00:00
> Also, you may be forced to use language features you don't

This is quite important and often overlooked. An annoying fallacy is that people think some features are optional, but once they get heavily used, they aren't anymore. Often they quickly become an requirement and if you don't follow suit, your code is legacy or you are an idiot. But well, I guess I create legacy code upfront and the cargo cultists create modern code that turns into legacy next day.
by logicprog | 2026-02-08 01:20:30+00:00
Yeah, I can see that. But that didn't really feel like what the original article was arguing. It felt more that it was arguing that even people who care about good code, if they use agentic tools at all, can't produce good code, and it was the advantage in the velocity of agentic tools as a whole over the production of good code as a strictly separate category that was the problem?
by rramadass | 2026-02-08 01:20:40+00:00
You keep making these sorts of comments on various threads which tells me that perhaps you are not clear on the idea of an "Abstract machine" which underpins all high-level languages.

See my comment here for some references - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46930253

The gap between the "C Abstract Machine" and the actual Hardware underneath is smaller than most other high-level languages. This comment by user haberman puts it very nicely - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46910015
by runarberg | 2026-02-08 01:21:12+00:00
It is indeed extremely relevant to the end user. For websites the end user is not the creator of the web site who pushes it to the server, it is the user who opens it on a browser. And for that user it matters a great deal if a button is green or blue, if it responds to keyboard events, if it says “submit” or “continue”, etc. It also matters to the user whether their information is sent to a third party, whether their password is leaked, etc.

Your argument here (if I understand you correctly) is the same argument that to build a bridge you do not need to know all the laws of physics that prevents it from collapsing. The project manager of the construction team doesn’t need to know it, and certainly not the bicyclists who cross it. But the engineer who draws the blueprints needs to know it, and it matters that every detail on those blueprints are rigorously defined, such that the project manager of the construction team follows them to the letter. If the engineer does not know the laws of physics, or the project manager does not follow the blueprints to the letter, the bridge will likely collapse, killing the end user, that poor bicyclist.
by majormajor | 2026-02-08 01:21:17+00:00
> When you commit to a single agent, you're predicting it will be best for whatever task you throw at it.

A quibbe with this: you're not predicting it will be the best for whatever task you're throwing at it, you're predicting it will be sufficient.

For well-understood problems you can get adequate results out of a lot of models these days. Having to review n different outputs sounds like a step backwards for most tasks.

I do this sort of thing at the planning stage, though. Especially because there's not necessarily an obvious single "right" answer for a lot of questions, like how to break down a domain, or approaches to coordinating multiple processes. So if three different models suggest three different approaches, it helps me refine what I'm actually looking for in the solution. And that increases my hit rate for my "most models will do something sufficient" above claim.