MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by giancarlostoro | 2026-02-17 06:47:54+00:00
Ah yes, my high school years, go to sleep at 1 ~ 2 AM wake up at 5 AM in order to get ready for high school. There was no instagram, insomnia was still terrible. Teens need a lot of sleep time, but I feel like I was way more resilient on less sleep. Compared to now where I can barely function without at least 7 hours of sleep.
by wolvesechoes | 2026-02-17 06:47:55+00:00
> Anyone being able to contribute to projects is what makes open source so great. If we all put up walls, then you're basically halfway to the bad old days of closed source software reigning supreme.

Exaggeration. Is SQLite halfway to closed source software?
Open-source is about open source. Free software is about freedom to do things with code. None is about taking contributions from everyone.
by fluoridation | 2026-02-17 06:48:02+00:00
Some behaviors are left unspecified instead of undefined, which allows each implementation to choose whatever behavior is convenient, such as, as you put it, whatever the hardware does. IIRC this is the case in C for modulo with both negative operands.

I would imagine that the standard writers choose one or the other depending on whether the behavior is useful for optimizations. There's also the matter that if a behavior is currently undefined, it's easy to later on make it unspecified or specified, while if a behavior is unspecified it's more difficult to make it undefined, because you don't know how much code is depending on that behavior.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-02-17 06:48:30+00:00
The American economy and GDP was driven by consumer spending (around 68%). Who knew if you offshored the jobs, pushed an ever increasing share of capital to higher tax brackets and away from consumers, and then started replacing consumer/workers with AI, that a consumer driven economy would drop off?

"U.S workers just took home their smallest share of capital since 1947, at least"
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-workers-just-took-home-2140...

And since our taxation system is also primarily worker funded (over 50%) and during times of loss businesses/capitalists can write off a ton of their share of the tax burden, we're in for a lot of pain.
by antonvs | 2026-02-17 06:48:33+00:00
That reason is along the lines of, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Coal miners will fight for coal mines, the oil industry will fight for dependence on oil, and so on. Sometimes they’re aware of what they’re doing, but in the case of a comment like the above, apparently not so much.
by nkmnz | 2026-02-17 06:49:08+00:00
Not sure what "baking your own bread" means if you are using wheat grown by someone else in an oven that you didn't build that is run with electricity you didn't created from your muscles' force. You haven't even contributed to the nuclear fusion which created the oxygen for the water molecules you've been using! How dare you, standing of the shoulders of giants!
by DeathArrow | 2026-02-17 06:49:57+00:00
>From that list of 40 or 50 people, it was easy to find and trawl their social media. And that is when they found a photo of Lucy on Facebook with an adult who looked as though she was close to the girl - possibly a relative.

>They worked out the woman's address

And yet they didn't bother to knock on the door.
by thisislife2 | 2026-02-17 06:50:05+00:00
Do you really believe 16 hours of use daily is not indicative of an addiction? It deserves a headline as it is is a controversial statement that aims to minimise criticism against social media platforms and thus needs to be challenged / debated in society. If social media addiction is not treated as a social problem, the people will not pressure the government to regulate it. That is why social media platforms are claiming that it is only (a personal) problem (of some individual) if some use it for 16 hours while others suggest that it has become a societal problem because its users are now addicts. Social problems needs political solutions to address, and in this case one of the suggested ways is government intervention (through regulations).
by godelski | 2026-02-17 06:52:10+00:00
I had a friend threatened with this by a cop. I was there. We had been drinking and he wanted to change his oil at a Jiffy Lube. Unbeknownst to us there was a park on the other side. He just got a ticket but the cop made the threat. It doesn't disprove your claim but it is an example of why the belief might persist
by josteink | 2026-02-17 06:52:59+00:00
> It really is the case that a lot of incompetence is hiding in plain sight.

It may sound preposterous but I'm going to make the argument that sometimes not knowing how things work is a feature, not a bug.

I would assume most people with a little work-experience has encountered the kind of legacy systems which is crucial to the business, yet for whatever reason doing any sort of work on them involves a tremendous amount of friction.

A technical person who knows how this system works in and out will often claim that certain seemingly simple things cannot be done, because of how the system works.

It might be highly impractical, but if we're honest about things, it's all software. It can be changed if we decide to and the company is willing to put in the effort to make it happen. It's clearly possible, but the skilled worked will often present it as an impossibility.

The Julius, not hampered by such knowledge or constraints, will be see a seemingly simple problem, and maybe even imagine what other things would be possible or even "simple" if that problem was solved.

If the Julius manages to get management approval for these ideas, you may actually end up getting management approval for changing/upgrading the base system causing the friction, something the more fact-based engineers would not.

Chances are it's going to be messier than projected, not being delivered on time... But in the long term it might be a net good for everyone involved ;)
by yes_really | 2026-02-17 06:53:51+00:00
If the "carnage" was so well "documented", then it'll be quite easy for you to provide proof. Do you have any proof at all that Israel engages in systematic *terrorism* (i.e. "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims")?

Again, I'm not talking about collateral casualties in valid military strikes. I'm talking about sustained, deliberate attacks against civilians with the objective of killing as many civilians as possible. Do you have any evidence at all that Israel did this?
by unsnap_biceps | 2026-02-17 06:54:46+00:00
I feel (fear?) we are basically locked in to a world where C, C++, Rust, Go, Python and Javascript will be the assembly code we compile to

I actually think that AI will largely rendered these "abstractions' meaningless in the future. We need higher order programming languages because it reduces our cognitive load, but AIs won't have the same limitation, and by going directly to the lowest level, they'll be able to find additional performance gains that are way too difficult for compilers to do.
by efreak | 2026-02-17 06:56:22+00:00
I've made similar tessellations before, they can be curved. You can trivially make a pre-folded tessellation into a cylinder of arbitrary diameter; to curve it like a submarine, you'd just adjust the angle of the creases. Optimize the curve so the pressure is always perpendicular and there's no problem here.

The real issue here is that there's not much point in it, as the very thing that makes this useful (the ability to fold it up) would also make it collapse easily in a pressurized environment. You'd also have to deal with preventing leaks if you wanted air inside, likely by adding an outer hull, which would then defeat the purpose.
by cyphar | 2026-02-17 06:57:00+00:00
That depends on the country. In Australia, there is an explicit carve-out in the Copyright Act to allow for backups of computer programs[1], and there is also a widely held belief (at least, according to the government) that backups of this kind in general are also considered fair use[2].

It seems there is a somewhat similar carve-out in the US but it is a bit more restrictive[3].

[1]: https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/legis/cth/cons...
[2]: https://www.alrc.gov.au/publication/copyright-and-the-digita...
[3]: https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#117
by the_harpia_io | 2026-02-17 06:57:13+00:00
yeah the escape hatch accumulation is the real problem - starts as like 2 edge cases then just grows. I think the worst outcome is when you realize 6 months in that the abstraction was kind of wrong for your use case - now every new feature is fighting the grain of the code AND you've got a pile of special cases on top. at some point maintaining the abstraction layer itself becomes the work
by the_harpia_io | 2026-02-17 06:57:46+00:00
that mental walk-through is honestly underrated - you didn't just know the code, you had a model in your head of why each piece was there. with AI output you know the spec, maybe reviewed it quickly, but there's no real internalization. usually fine until something breaks and then you're debugging code that's kind of foreign to you. I've started reading the diffs more carefully exactly because of that - takes more time but at least you have something to fall back on when it goes wrong
by nielstron | 2026-02-17 06:58:15+00:00
Hey, a paper author here :)
I agree, if you know well about LLMs it shouldn't be too surprising that autogenerated context files are not helping - yet this is the default recommendation by major AI companies which we wanted to scrutinize.

> Their definition of context excludes prescriptive specs/requirements files.

Can you explain a bit what you mean here? If the context file specifies a desired behavior, we do check whether the LLM follows it, and this seems generally to work (Section 4.3).
by gostsamo | 2026-02-17 06:58:31+00:00
The restricted list means that it is much harder for someone to social engineer their way in on the receiving end of an exfiltration attack. I'm still rather skeptical of agents, but a pattern where the agent is allowed mostly readonly access, its output is mainly user directed, and the rest of the output is user approved, you cut down the possible approaches for an attack to work.

If you want more technical solutions, put a dumber clasifier on the output channel, freeze the operation if it looks suspicious instead of failing it and provoking the agent to try something new.

None of this is a silver bullet for a generic solution and that's why I don't have such an agent, but if one is ready to take on the tradeoffs, it is a viable solution.
by imiric | 2026-02-17 06:58:33+00:00
Many of the practices in this field are mostly based on feelings and wishful thinking, rather than any demonstrable benefit. Part of the problem is that the tools are practically nondeterministic, and their results can't be reliably compared.

The other part is fueled by brand recognition and promotion, since everyone wants to make their own contribution with the least amount of effort, and coming up with silly Markdown formats is an easy way to do that.
by locknitpicker | 2026-02-17 06:59:47+00:00
> You might be conflating "cloud" with serverless. Serverless is where developers can focus on code, with little care of the infrastructure it runs on, and is pay-as-you-go.

That's not what serverless means at all. Most function-as-a-service offerings require developers to bother about infrastructure aspects, such as runtimes and even underlying OS.

They just don't bother about managing it. They deploy their code on their choice of infrastructure, and go on with their lives.
by sdfhbdf | 2026-02-17 06:59:52+00:00
I've also been interested for some time in how metabolism works and wanted to debunk the popular myth for my friends that exercise burns a lot of calories, since I was under the impression that around 80% of energy we burn is just by "living" - breathing and thinking.

Reading this article I'm a little confused by the author's conflation of brain energy and the energy expenditure of the body as a whole. In the beginning they mention:

> "Your brain consumes roughly 20 to 25% of your body's total energy at rest"

while later they say:

> "Even chess grandmasters, who sit for hours in states of intense concentration, burn only about 1.67 calories per minute while playing, compared to 1.53 calories per minute at rest"

That second figure seems to refer to whole-body expenditure, not just the brain. And intense cognitive work doesn't happen in a metabolic vacuum - there's increased cerebral blood flow, elevated sympathetic nervous system activity, changes in heart rate variability, hormonal shifts (cortisol, adrenaline). These all have systemic metabolic costs that go beyond the glucose the neurons themselves consume. So the "it's just a banana and a half" framing might be undercounting by quietly switching between brain-only and whole-body measurements.

Also somewhat related - the link to businessinsider about chess grandmasters is broken, but another very interesting rabbit hole here is how energy expenditure is actually measured. A lot of what consumer devices and even many studies report is based on proxy biomarkers like heart rate, HRV, weight, age, and sex, run through linear regression models. True calorimetry (indirect via gas exchange, or direct in a metabolic chamber) is expensive and impractical outside lab settings. That means the precise calorie figures cited with such confidence - the "100 to 200 extra calories" from a day of thinking, or the per-minute burn rates of chess grandmasters - likely carry wider error bars than the article suggests. We don't really have a great way to measure real-world energy expenditure accurately at the individual level, which makes me a bit cautious about the neat narrative of "thinking is calorically cheap, full stop."

That said, the core point about adenosine accumulation and perceived exertion affecting training quality is fascinating and well-supported — that part of the article is genuinely useful regardless of the calorie accounting.
by anal_reactor | 2026-02-17 07:00:08+00:00
> It has never been like this, why is it like this now?

Imagine you have a hiring panel of 20 people, and you are a member of it. It's obvious that the whole process is completely broken. What's your correct move? If you improve the hiring process, the size of the hiring panel will be reduced from 20 people to 5, which means there's 75% chance you'll be fired. Congratulations, you played yourself. Instead, the correct move is to keep making the hiring process as bad as possible, so that the company expands the hiring panel even further, which lowers the risk of you being fired.

When you take a look at why soviet economy failed, the biggest issue was that the system actually rewarded inefficient institutions, allocating to them more resources, while punishing efficient institutions. Exactly the same problems exist within a single capitalist company.

On top of that, the employment has shifted from small business to large corporations. The best example is food delivery - 10 years ago you would've been hired directly by the restaurant, which means that either restaurants would freely compete for workers or workers would compete for restaurants, depending on the market. But nowadays either everyone deals with whatever bullshit UberEats pulls off or you're out of the game.
by nielstron | 2026-02-17 07:00:55+00:00
Hey, paper author here.
We did try to get an even sample - we include both SWE-bench repos (which are large, popular and mostly human-written) and a sample of smaller, more recent repositories with existing AGENTS.md (these tend to contain LLM written code of course). Our findings generalize across both these samples. What is arguably missing are small repositories of completely human-written code, but this is quite difficult to obtain nowadays.
by scarab92 | 2026-02-17 07:01:30+00:00
It’s worth keeping in mind that 16 hours was their single highest day of use ever, not their typical daily use.

I’m sure I’ve spent 16 hours on Netflix or League of Legends in a 24 hour period before, yet my median daily usage is 0 hours, and it wouldn’t be reasonable to describe my usage as an addition either.

I’m not saying people don’t get addicted to social media, they do, but in this particular case I think his description of problematic is adequate, and this headline is unnecessarily confrontational.
by uecker | 2026-02-17 07:01:32+00:00
Where there is UB in the standard it means that a C compiler is free to define the behavior. So of course, somebody could write a C implementation which does this. See also Fil-C for a perfectly memory safe version of C. So the first sentence makes no sense.

But also note that there is an ongoing effort to remove UB from the standard. We have eliminated already about 30% of UB in the core language for the upcoming version C2Y.
by wolvesechoes | 2026-02-17 07:02:20+00:00
> Do they? Or do they get convinced by adverts that their lives won't be complete unless they spend more than they can afford on an endless stream of shiny promises?

> Meanwhile, I'm mostly content living off my €1k/month passive income

This means you have sufficient capital to sustain yourself this way, and probably a place to live with no rent or mortgage. This also means you had either a rich family or earned quite a lot in the past what allowed you to collect this capital. And lastly this means you don't have family to support.

Well, maybe everyone could decide to grind few years (though in my country the minimal wage is not much greater than your "passive income", so grind options are limited) and then decide to not have a family and don't buy a phone. We would then have a whole society of full-time political activists, but then there is a question why any action matters.

Your comment reeks of classism. "Oh, they really do not try enough. Just get up earlier and cancel your Netflix sub".
by brigandish | 2026-02-17 07:02:30+00:00
I seem to remember a test (I believe I read it in the Kevin Dutton book on psychopaths) where psychopaths would be shown a video of people walking down a corridor, and they were more likely to choose vulnerable people than either chance or the norm.

Whichever it was, they could spot a vulnerable person just from their manner while they walk.

I wouldn't say they were drawn to vulnerable people, though. Like anyone else, they assess opportunity and effort, and these people are easier than others for getting what they want.

Edit: I found one of the studies -

> Key takeaways

> Higher Factor 1 psychopathy scores correlate with improved accuracy in assessing victim vulnerability based on gait.

> Inmates with elevated psychopathy scores consciously utilize gait cues to judge vulnerability more frequently.

> Psychopathy's Factor 1 traits, like manipulativeness, drive effective victim selection among violent offenders.

> Victims often display distinct gait characteristics that predict perceived vulnerability to assault.

> Understanding body language cues may inform victimization prevention strategies for at-risk individuals.

https://www.academia.edu/22213822/Psychopathy_and_Victim_Sel...
by aadarshkumaredu | 2026-02-17 07:03:35+00:00
I think the “AI bubble burst” framing is too simplistic. Bubbles don’t erase technology. They erase mispriced capital.

In 2000, internet stocks collapsed. The internet didn’t. What disappeared were business models built on fantasy unit economics. The same distinction matters here.

If AI funding compresses, here’s what likely happens:

• Speculative AI wrappers die fast
• Subsidized API pricing rises toward real compute cost
• Consolidation around a few model and infrastructure providers
• Enterprises shift from experimentation to strict ROI enforcement

Right now a lot of AI usage is artificially cheap. Growth is being prioritized over margin. If that flips, casual usage drops. That doesn’t mean the tools disappear. It means only usage that creates measurable value survives.

If a tool suddenly costs $1,000 per month, most hobbyists won’t pay. But that’s irrelevant. The real question is whether it replaces or amplifies enough labor to justify the price.

If it saves a team $8,000 to $20,000 in monthly productivity or headcount cost, it survives. If it’s just a nice-to-have, it dies.

The bigger risk isn’t foundation models disappearing. It’s the application layer collapsing. A lot of AI startups exist purely because inference is subsidized. If API pricing normalizes, many evaporate overnight.

A post-bubble AI world probably looks less magical and less overfunded, but more disciplined. Fewer demos. More boring enterprise contracts. More focus on margins.

The internet after 2000 didn’t disappear. It matured and consolidated into utilities. AI likely follows the same path.

The real question isn’t whether AI vanishes.
It’s who was relying on subsidies instead of economics.
by wolvesechoes | 2026-02-17 07:03:46+00:00
> Especially as this was in the context of how Greta Thunberg, who, to the best of my knowledge, has no kids of her own and thus doesn't need to also cover the cost of their hobbies or how to get them to school

And comes from the rich middle-class background. But let's ignore that, because all that matters is small financial discipline.
by jul8234 | 2026-02-17 07:06:00+00:00
Over the last years, state-tracking tasks, particularly permutation composition, have become a testbed to understand the limits of sequence models architectures like Transformers and RNNs (linear and non-linear). However, these are often sequence-to-sequence tasks: learning to map actions (permutations) to states, which is incompatible with the next-token prediction setting commonly used to train language models. We address this gap by converting permutation composition into code via REPL traces that interleave state-reveals through prints and variable transformations. We show that linear RNNs capable of state-tracking excel also in this setting, while Transformers still fail. Motivated by this representation, we investigate why tracking states in code is generally difficult: actions are not always fully observable. We frame this as tracking the state of a probabilistic finite-state automaton with deterministic state reveals and show that linear RNNs can be worse than non-linear RNNs at tracking states in this setup.
by dang | 2026-02-17 07:06:09+00:00
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

What every compiler writer should know about programmers (2015) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19659555 - April 2019 (62 comments)

What every compiler writer should know about programmers [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11219874 - March 2016 (106 comments)
by crystal_revenge | 2026-02-17 07:07:36+00:00
> What's Anthropic's optimization target??? Getting you the right answer as fast as possible!

What makes you believe this? The current trend in all major providers seem to be: get you to spin up as many agents as possible so that you can get billed more and their number of requests goes up.

> Slot machines have variable reward schedules by design

LLMs by all major providers are optimized used RLHF where they are optimized in ways we don't entirely understand to keep you engaged.

These are incredibly naive assumptions. Anthropic/OpenAI/etc don't care if you get your "answer solved quickly", they care that you keep paying and that all their numbers go up. They aren't doing this as a favor to you and there's no reason to believe that these systems are optimized in your interest.

> I built things obsessively before LLMs. I'll build things obsessively after.

The core argument of the "gambling hypothesis" is that many of these people aren't really building things. To be clear, I certainly don't know if this is true of you in particular, it probably isn't. But just because this doesn't apply to you specifically doesn't mean it's not a solid argument.