MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by apparent | 2026-02-24 08:23:03+00:00
> men have no interest in spending time with children because that's what they learned from their own parents.

It sounds like this was the case for you, but it doesn't mean it is the case for other men. It isn't the case for the dads I know who didn't have an in being around their babies/toddlers. They simply did not have an interest.

> if you want to equalize this then you effectively need to force dads to stay at home for the same amount of time as moms, so that their careers are affected in the same way.

This is not possible in a country that values liberty. Even if you could somehow require parity between one parent and another (mom only gets as many weeks of leave as dad takes), you can't effect parity between one family and another. More families have SAHMs than SAHDs, which would disrupt any attempt at parity at a societal level.

Bottom line though, is that moms simply are more maternal than dads. We literally have a word for it, and it's related to being a mother. There is a reason, and it's not all/mostly cultural. It is one of the most genetically-imbued aspects of our beings as humans. Mothers are the predominant nurturers in humans, as in nearly all mammal/animal species.

You can fight against it, but biological reality will not easily be defeated.
by rebane2001 | 2026-02-24 08:23:14+00:00
I wasn't sure whether to address the disconnect in the FAQ - I wanted it to be short and readable.

The idea is that, since a long time ago, there has always been demos that prove turing completeness and other programmy qualities in CSS, but that which people dismiss as requiring user inputs. The ones around by the time the comment got made were definitely at the "keep on clicking on the same spot on the screen" level - essentially just providing a clock.

And seeing discussion from after Jane Ori's hack, many still claim that even as much as hovering your mouse on a specific part of the screen makes css not a programming language.
by hyperman1 | 2026-02-24 08:23:28+00:00
I know of 1 smaller Cobol company. They alone had 10 to 100 million lines, after a decennium of trying to move to Java. Source files containing 1 routine were easily a few KLoc. The number in the article is probably too low.

The main problem with these code bases are they predate modern coding practices, so the sheer size, incomprehensability and untestability will crush you. You can easily spend your whole carreer reading the source code and reach pension age before you finish. Also, the organisational difference between 2 code bases is much bigger than modern code bases, as every company invented their own practices, and people rarely switched companies so didn't know what others were doing.
by rudolftheone | 2026-02-24 08:24:10+00:00
That's super-interesting experiment, but I wouldn't start it in such a large country as USA.
Why won't humanity test it on a smaller scale?

In Belgium (Ostbelgien) the German-speaking community has a permanent sortition-based Citizens’ Council wired into the parliamentary process; In Ireland they've already run national, randomly selected Citizens’ Assemblies on high-stakes constitutional topics.

These are basically production prototypes - maybe we should ask ourselves why they don't push it further?
by submeta | 2026-02-24 08:24:24+00:00
I think the framing is still too code-centric.

The real bottleneck isn’t writing (or even reviewing) code anymore. It’s:

1. extracting knowledge from domain experts

2. building a coherent mental model of the domain

3. making product decisions under ambiguity / tradeoffs

4. turning that into clear, testable requirements and steering the loop as reality pushes back

The workflow is shifting to:

Understand domain => Draft PRD/spec (LLM helps) => Prompt agent to implement => Evaluate against intent + constraints => Refine (requirements + tests + code) => Repeat

The “typing” part used to dominate the cost structure, so we optimized around it (architecture upfront, DRY everywhere, extreme caution). Now the expensive part is clarity of intent and orchestrating the iteration: deciding what to build next, what to cut, what to validate, what to trust, and where to add guardrails (tests, invariants, observability).

If your requirements are fuzzy, the agent will happily generate 5k lines of very confident nonsense. If your domain model + constraints are crisp, results can be shockingly good.

So the scarce skill isn’t “can you write good code?”
It’s “can you interrogate reality well enough to produce a precise model—and then continuously steer the agent against that model?”
by martin82 | 2026-02-24 08:24:45+00:00
I basically have to hit the edit function in Signal and correct typos in Every. Single. Thread. Every. Single. Day. It is infuriating.

This has been going on for years, so I guess when this guy claims this started at iOS 17, it seems to make sense.

The iOS keyboard really really is utterly broken. I'm glad it's not just me. I was already wondering if I should schedule an appointment with a doctor and check if I have early onset dementia or something.
by AlexCoventry | 2026-02-24 08:24:47+00:00
OpenAI is implying that code may no longer be human readable in some circumstances.

> The resulting code does not always match human stylistic preferences, and that’s okay. As long as the output is correct, maintainable, and legible *to future agent runs*, it meets the bar.

https://openai.com/index/harness-engineering/
by adebayoj | 2026-02-24 08:24:52+00:00
Great questions. We have several posts in the works that will drill down more into these things. The model was actually designed to answer these questions for any sentence (or group of tokens it generates).

It can tell you which specific text (chunk) in the training data that led to the output the model generated. We plan to show more concrete demos of this capability over the coming weeks.

It can tell you where in the model's representation it learned about science, art, religion etc. And you can trace all of these to either to input context, training data, or model's representations.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-24 08:24:54+00:00
There is plenty of evidence.

As another poster has said, most unicellular eukaryotes are either attracted or repelled by light and this is very simple to observe.

For some of them the mechanism of photoreception is partially understood, because they use photosensitive molecules related to those used in the eyes of animals.

Moreover, there are many bacteria that can sense light, so they are also attracted or repelled by light. Again, many of them use rhodopsins for sensing light, the same as our eyes.

Some light-sensitive molecules, like rhodopsins, are known to have existed in living beings for at least a few billion years, so the ability to sense light is that old.

Where the animals have innovated is in developing optical systems that can capture 2-dimensional images, instead of just sensing whether light is present or absent, like the other living beings can do.
by voidUpdate | 2026-02-24 08:25:49+00:00
The instruction matrix they provide only includes 8086 instructions, not 186, 286 etc, which are all x86, hence the x at the start. From that wikipedia article, "The term "x86" came into being because the names of several successors to Intel's 8086 processor end in "86", including the 80186, 80286, 80386 and 80486. Colloquially, their names were "186", "286", "386" and "486"."
by krisoft | 2026-02-24 08:26:34+00:00
What does “get it wrong” mean for you with this question? Or what is “getting it right” here? If i hear that Pat is a rooster and i understand and retain that information I will look at you like you are dumb for saying such an impossible story. If i don’t i will look at you like you are dumb because how is anyone supposed to know which way will an egg laid on a ridge roll. How are you supposed to even score this?
by shiroiuma | 2026-02-24 08:26:37+00:00
C, Python, and frameworks don't generate all-new code for every task: you're taking advantage of stuff that's thoroughly tested. That simple debugging UI server is probably using some well-tested libraries, which you can reasonably trust to be bug-free (and which can be updated later to fix any bugs, without breaking your code that relies on them). With AI-generated code, this isn't the case.
by steerpike | 2026-02-24 08:26:48+00:00
Flickr deserves a lot of praise for a number of technical advances that I wish had seen wider adoption.
Their API was one of the first and honestly still one of the most enjoyable to actually use as a developer. It's still full of incredibly interesting API calls that you wouldn't expect from it unless you read carefully. Did you know, for example, that flickr API will provide you with the bounding box co-ordinates of different types of places? From a neighbourhood all the way up to a continent?

They implemented the Where On Earth ID (WOEID) which was a super useful way of disambiguating different places that shared latitude and longitude (for example, being able to disambiguate the Sydney Opera House, Circular Quay and Sydney Harbour which all can potentially share the same lat/long co-ords).

They implemented machine tags which are tags in the form of -

namespace:predicate=value

Which, when it was implemented by other sites with machine tags allowed you to get and group all kinds of interesting combinations of content.

Yeah, honestly flickr had some incredible tech the was so much fun to explore and use. That their vision of what the web could be wasn't the one that won is one of the great losses of the web IMO.
by armchairhacker | 2026-02-24 08:27:18+00:00
The current systems are not ineffective because they’re optional, they could be more effective and stay optional.

I also don’t mean “mandatory” as in “the software manufacturer must implement parental controls” like the Colorado bill. There only needs to exist one decent operating system, one decent messaging service, etc. with good parental controls; parents can use those technologies and block the others. Although regulators could pressure specific popular platforms like YouTube, and maybe that would be fine, I think it would be better to incentivize and support add-ons or alternatives (e.g. kid-safe YouTube frontend).
by dirkc | 2026-02-24 08:27:25+00:00
I like using the analogy of 'living in a small apartment' when building systems with a small team. You need to choose carefully what furniture you can fit into your apartment, and that choice depends a lot on how you live your live. Do you want a large table to host friends, or a comfortable couch to fall asleep on in front of the TV? If you get both the space will probably be cluttered.

The same applies to a small software project - you need to choose what features you can fit. And while the cost of building is part of the consideration, I'd say most of it is about the cost of maintaining features, not only in code, but also in product coherence and other incidental 'costs' like documentation and user support.

Be careful of building too many features and ending up being overwhelmed by the maintenance, or worse, diluting the product's value to a point where you loose users.
by Markoff | 2026-02-24 08:27:30+00:00
Terence Chi-Shen Tao FAA FRS (born 17 July 1975) is an Australian and American mathematician. He is a Fields medalist and a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he holds the James and Carol Collins Chair in the College of Letters and Sciences. His research includes topics in harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, algebraic combinatorics, arithmetic combinatorics, geometric combinatorics, probability theory, compressed sensing, analytic number theory and the applications of artificial intelligence in mathematics.[4][5]

...

A child prodigy,[18] Terence Tao skipped five grades.[19][20] Tao exhibited extraordinary mathematical abilities from an early age, attending university-level mathematics courses at the age of 9. He is one of only three children in the history of the Johns Hopkins Study of Exceptional Talent program to have achieved a score of 700 or greater on the SAT math section while just eight years old; Tao scored a 760.[21] Julian Stanley, Director of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, stated that Tao had the greatest mathematical reasoning ability he had found in years of intensive searching.[7][22]

Saved you a click...
by Kbelicius | 2026-02-24 08:28:03+00:00
> Can you name me another time when humanity has run out of useful work to do?
>
> Was it when we tamed fire, invented the wheel, writing, or double entry bookkeeping? All of which appear more consequential than current AI.
>
> We’ll always have something to do. And humans like doing things.

History doesn't predict the future. I can't tell you about another time when humans ran out of usefull things to do. What I can tell you is that we humans are biological beings we limited cognitive and physical abiloties.

I can also tell you about another biological being whose cognitive and phyisical abilities were surpassed by technology. Horses. What happened to them then wasn't pretty. The hight of their population in US was in 1915.

And sure, humans like doing things and so do horses, but you can't live by doing things that aren't useful to others, at least not in the current system. If technology surpases our abilities, the only useful things left to do for vast majority of humans is the same thing that was left for horses to do. Entertainment in various forms and there won't be enough of those jobs for all of us.
by mort96 | 2026-02-24 08:28:04+00:00
I wonder what sort of user testing made them decide that what Firefox users really need is a chat bot in the site bar. Isn't a chat bot in a tab good enough?

And calling translation "AI" seems like deceitful retroactive rebranding. Why is machine translation suddenly "AI" now? It was never branded as such before. Is "AI" here just used to mean machine learning?
by godelski | 2026-02-24 08:28:33+00:00
I've read this three times now and still don't understand you. Do you think people don't update their software? Are you just counting every update as people happy about the kill switch?

There'll be so much noise in that signal it'll be almost useless. You can't differentiate it from anything else. For all anyone knows it happened because the word Firefox was in the top story on hacker news
by OneMorePerson | 2026-02-24 08:30:23+00:00
This just feels like one of those things that can be completely loopholed. There's plenty of reasons why a company might find a specific software not profitable but also not want to open source it, so under this rule they will just host it on the most basic server possible (only concurrently supports like 50 users) and never update it again. Effectively still dead.
by amadeuspagel | 2026-02-24 08:30:47+00:00
> (Alternatively, I would consider getting rid of numerical ids altogether and relying on name alone. Internet Archive does it at e.g. archive.org/details/leroy-lettering-sets, but that has some serious limitations that are not hard to imagine.)

I could try to imagine these limitations and how the Internet Archive overcomes them, but I'd prefer reading about it.
by theshrike79 | 2026-02-24 08:31:04+00:00
That's how a welfare state operates.

It's long term second-order thinking that people on the right side of the political spectrum tend to lack in my experience.

I pay taxes so other people can afford to have kids, they can stay home and give the kids a stable childhood. Then the kids will go to subsidised childcare (0-250€/month depending on income) and later to school where they have free school lunches and well-paid teachers.

Why? Because I'm getting old and when I retire we need people working and paying taxes so there's money to pay for MY healthcare and pension.
by henrikschroder | 2026-02-24 08:32:18+00:00
Because it encourages the weird cosplayers, who will then claim to be "more Italian than the Italians", which is complete nonsense.

Because it's weird fetishisation of European cultures that are both seen as superior to American culture, but also at the same time as inferior.

Because it's rooted in weird beliefs in blood magic; that DNA somehow confers culture.
by wiseowise | 2026-02-24 08:32:18+00:00
> As a specialization? Sure. But the ditch diggers moved since to machine operators, handymen and the like.

All of them? What if they liked digging ditches?

> In the past there were sysadmins. Do we have less software engineers since sysadmins ceased to be a thing?

Software Engineers were never sysadmins in the past, you’re thinking DevOps maybe?
by adebayoj | 2026-02-24 08:32:29+00:00
You got it exactly right. Guilty as charged. Over the coming weeks, we will be showcasing exactly how you can debug all of these examples.

I agree that attribution is most useful for debugging and auditing. This is a prime usecase for us. We have a post with exciting results lined up to do this. Should be out in a week, we wanted to even just get the initial model out :)
by aurareturn | 2026-02-24 08:32:34+00:00
1. When do you want to wash your car? Tomorrow? Next year? In 50 years?

2. Where is the car now? Is it already at the car wash waiting for you to arrive?

I can see why an LLM might miss this. I think any good software engineer would ask clarifying questions before giving an answer.

The next step for an LLM is to either ask questions before giving a definitive answer for uncertain things or to provide multiple answers addressing the uncertainty.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-02-24 08:33:32+00:00
> but you're acting like it's easy to get that information.

It is, relatively speaking.

> You act like people don't scream when Firefox prompts people with surveys.

Surveys without proper response and adjustments aren't passing feedback, it's political theatre. People groan about surveys because it takes time and rarely shows results reflectant of the responses.

We know the system is broken. Hard to shame us into thinking we're the ones who broke it.

> You act like there isn't bias in survey takers.

You act like statisticians don't spend half their field accounting around bias.

>we'll just end up reinventing the same evils we're trying to fight today.

Let's have the old evils dealt with before worrying about creating new evils who happen to do the exact same thing as the "old evils" (spoilers: they are the same picture).
by vaxman | 2026-02-24 08:33:34+00:00
IBM plunges? Anthropic? COBOL? Is Deirdra Bosa somehow involved in this?

Consider that back in the day, we once had a situation where the shared runtime library supporting a programming language on Megabank's PROD cluster was updated from something like 4.1.1 to 4.1.2 after months on its TEST cluster, plus lots of formal meetings, planning, pages of signatures, contingencies, extra ops people onsite, etc. --and Megabank still proceeded to loose more than ten grand per minute after pressing [Return] on that update. At least a dozen people lost their jobs at the following Friday morning meeting. It turned out that a subtle change in the vendor's implementation of a floating point function was not caught because testing didn't consider enough digits of precision. Mind you NO CODE WAS CHANGED, only a dynamically linked runtime library SUPPLIED BY THE COMPUTER MANUFACTURER --not a third party. Point being (no pun intended), when you go monkeying around with stable production systems that are doing On Line Transaction Processing (OLTP), "bad things" happen, treasure and careers are in jeopardy --and COBOL Life is all about what goes on inside of those systems.

Anthropic is great at gorilla marketing with all their PuRe BS and AI hype. Bottom line for the young peeps here:

1. There is really NO WAY IN HELL that any CIO at a credible Financial Institution will ever authorize a hallucinating chatbot to convert their core logic from COBOL to Python and Go.

2. The only way such institutions "escape" COBOL is through M&A (data --not code-- exported to the new entity's system).

3. As far as COBOL devs tapping out, that happened a very long time ago. (How many of you knew that COBOL was codeveloped by the late mathematician US Navy Rear Admiral "Amazing" Grace Hopper who also invented the first compiler?) COBOL is a simple computer language from a simpler time that enabled non-tech professionals from adjacent fields (like Accounting) to become application programmers (or "implementors" in the parlance of that era). Making minor changes to COBOL code such as PIC layouts and COMPUTE statements is no big deal that requires waking up a 95 year old, the problem is strictly related to production change control (like what version of the compiler and runtimes are you using to rebuild the production binary, etc.) and that isn't even specific to COBOL, except that it is better understood with more modern languages like C (but still remains an alien concept to almost an entire generation that entered the trade after 1997 due to all of the senior level people outside of a handful of tech companies being forced to crack open their 401Ks and move on to other fields during the dot-com crash).

----

Ken Lay died an innocent man --he had a heart attack before his sentencing. He was brought down by whistleblowers. Hang tough peeps. Fight. Back. Against. AI. Bullshitters. https://youtu.be/qJiALpiqpk8
by freefaler | 2026-02-24 08:34:08+00:00
Really?

Where will these resources will came from if the capitalist system is the most productive of them all? You can't redistribute something out of nothing. You need a healthy tax base to redistribute.

Childcare is just too regulated and people don't want to do it and ask for a premium on childcare.

Retirement in socialist country? Or in China before the capitalism came there? Or in a feudal society where your children where your insurance in the old age?
by linkregister | 2026-02-24 08:34:27+00:00
Having only heard of Pi in passing, I derived value from this article. I plan to experiment with it as a replacement for claude-code and gemini-cli.

[meta]
I frequently see criticism about an article having been obviously written by an LLM. Often the author apologizes for it in the HN comments. I wonder what is wrong with me that I am totally unaware of this LLM stench.

I have gotten a lot of value from hearing people criticize candidates' LLM usage in technical interviews and conversations. I adjusted my style from talking about axioms and best practices. Instead I always relate a personal anecdote to explain a technical decision. This has been universally well-received.

So I am hoping that someone can respond with some helpful holistic answers beyond a checklist of "uses em-dashes" and "says 'not X, but Y'". I suspect my writing style could be easily declared as having been written by an LLM.
by mort96 | 2026-02-24 08:34:34+00:00
Why is there a chat bot sidebar???

And even if there aren't that many bad AI features now, they've signalled their intent for Firefox to become an "AI browser". I don't know what they mean by that, but I know I don't want it. The chat bot sidebar is surely just the beginning.

It's primarily in response to the backlash from people who don't want an "AI browser" that they're promising a kill switch. But I don't want to use an "AI browser with AI features disabled", I just wanna use a regular web browser...
by throwmeoutplzdo | 2026-02-24 08:34:50+00:00
”[…] the times I was so naive and idealistic.”

”[…] I envy the worldview it's possible someone can take money from another and still maintain independence.”

Do you believe relying on our legal system is naive and idealistic?

What would be the non-idealistic view other than no structures can be trusted and that we live in a dictatorship?