MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kace91 | 2026-02-04 23:13:27+00:00
Explain then how testing the functionality (not the new one; regressions included, this is not a school exercise) is faster than checking the code.

Are you writing black box testing by hand, or manually checking, everything that would normally be a unit test? We have unit tests precisely because of how unworkable the “every test is black box” approach is.
by snowwrestler | 2026-02-04 23:14:08+00:00
I totally agree about the management reluctance to just own everything in house.

But I think it’s plausible that SaaS companies will be easier to start with AI coding, and with lower costs (thanks to AI) they will be able to get into the black with a smaller addressable market. So each one can have a different mix of fewer features, for different segments of customers, at lower prices.

The result would be a loss of pricing power by the incumbent do-everything big guys: no more baked-in 10% annual increases. Which is still a pretty big change in their economics. And therefore valuations.
by FrojoS | 2026-02-04 23:14:52+00:00
That implies that the A/B testing will lead to a new version that is substantially more engaging. Maybe so, but it seems that the most successful social media platforms arrived at their optimal version more or less immediately.
For instance, I (naively?) doubt that much A/B testing went into designing HN. Yet, no other site holds as much of a grip on me.
by irishcoffee | 2026-02-04 23:14:58+00:00
> Libertarianism doesn't mesh well with reality; the government doing less is part of it, but it also requires a way for people to efficiently protect their property.
> So you get to a point where mass surveillance is justified by the anti-crime angle; there is no contradiction, libertarianism logic where you can live and let live requires no crime...

Whatever technical definition of Libertarianism you're using is very narrow. Nobody is under the delusion that Libertarianism requires no crime.
by quickthrowman | 2026-02-04 23:15:01+00:00
It depends entirely on where you live. My city has its own asphalt batch plant and they spend a few weeks every late winter/early spring repairing potholes.

Also, union labor is not mandatory for public work, but the prevailing wage scales that contractors are required to pay their workers do line up pretty closely to the actual union wages. It’s a good thing that people get paid a living wage, in my opinion. There are a lot of facilities that require union labor for certain trades due to the risk involved: mechanical, electrical, and plumbing for the most part.
by dluxem | 2026-02-04 23:15:08+00:00
As someone who works in the B2B SaaS space...

- If our customers vibe coded better integration points for us, it probably improves our overall value to our customers.

- The software industry, especially startups, is such an insignificant portion of the market, its not really worth worrying about. But, I can tell you from experience, that even large software companies don't want their own developers spending much time on accounting, ERP, or HRIS systems and they "outsource" this to SaaS companies.
by AlienRobot | 2026-02-04 23:15:09+00:00
Yep. It's a funny thing.

You build a Twitter. Profiles have posts, posts can have images, etc. It's very easy to model the database.

But then how do you make money with it? Now you need to build a separate system for advertising? Or do you want to sell subscriptions? Which means you need to build a separate system to handle payments. This is usually the big one, because when you handle money, what happens if there is a bug and you charge someone without delivering anything? How do you prevent fraud? How do you handle disputes?

Someone posted something illegal. What do you do in this situation? Do you call the police? The FBI? What kind of data do you give the authorities? How much data SHOULD you have been logging in the first place in case something like this happens?

One user doesn't like you so he bought a botnet to DDoS your website. How do you handle this? Are they mass posting? Mass creating accounts? Is it possible for them to exhaust all the usernames possible and then nobody can create an account anymore?

Your website is online but if the server blows up you'll lose all the data in the database. You need backups. You need a system to ensure the backups are actually working. But then some guy from the UK said he wants his posts all deleted. What are you going to do now, because his posts are also in the backups, and you don't want to touch those.

Trolls are posting things against the ToS. Who handles these things? Shadowban? So there needs to be a shadowban system? Moderators? So there needs to be a moderator-only section of the website? Should this be integrated with the main website or not?

Then you look at this horrendous mess of 6 paragraphs and you think back about the first paragraph that already did everything you wanted from Twitter. All these other systems, most of the work, and all you actually wanted was the first paragraph.
by shevy-java | 2026-02-04 23:15:15+00:00
So I have been wondering about this ...

Some of the gathered data is shown here, right? Probably not all.

Now ... that's static information though. That's not really an analysis,
most definitely not an independent (open ended) analysis. And it will only
show a very incomplete part of the full picture.

This is why I think the "release the files" movement, as good as they are,
seems incomplete. I'd rather know a lot more about how they operate their
networks, getting away involving underage women. How about secret services
of other countries? Should that not also be highly important? So why is there
not really a larger investigation as well as independent analysis? Those .pdf
files alone can not tell the whole picture. That can just be the tip of the
iceberg; and it evidently involves other countries too, with Prince Andrew
being the most famous here (aka, the UK, but we already saw that other countries
also have similar issues where people suddenly had to step away from politics
when it was found out they visited the party-locations of Mr. Epstein).
by ralnivar | 2026-02-04 23:15:21+00:00
We have replaced many SaaS with inhouse solutions, but most of these where lacking in quality and where part of our existing core business model which we where not "owning" prior. We can flip the argument where we have lost customers and revenue due to SaaS not delivering

The gains is generally more seen outside of monetary as these SaaS solutions where holding us back for achieving our goals and improving our services to our customers. As in the end of the day our customers do not care if "insert SaaS" is having issues, it will always be our problem to own.
by signatoremo | 2026-02-04 23:16:16+00:00
> I can ask Gemini five times at what temperature I should take a waterfowl out of the oven, and get five different answers, 10°C apart.

Are you sure? Both Gemini and ChatGPT gave me consistent answers 3 times in a row, even if the two versions are slightly different.

Their answers are inline with this version:

https://blog.thermoworks.com/duck_roast/
by eikenberry | 2026-02-04 23:17:51+00:00
I think many people are missing the overall meaning of these sorts of posts.. that is they are describing a new type of programmer that will only use agents and never read the underlying code. These vibe/agent coders will use natural(-ish) language to communicate with the agents and wouldn't look at the code anymore than, say, a PHP developer would look at the underlying assembly. It is not the level of abstraction they are working on. There are many use cases where this type of coding will work fine and it will let many people who previously couldn't really take advantage of computers to do so. This is great but in no way will do anything to replace the need for code that requires humans to understand (which, in turn, requires participation in the writing).
by TZubiri | 2026-02-04 23:18:09+00:00
It seems like 'the market' is making this bet. I'm not deep into financial reports or whatever. But what I'm seeing from the tech side, this is not at all true.

If anything B2B SaaS is growing with AI, and it hasn't even begun, the biggest AI markets right now are personal. The B2B market is up for grabs for sure, 0%-1% of niches have an LLM product right now. But traditional SaaS has a huge advantage, they have reams of industry specific data, and they have the customers, sure they will have competition, but they are the incumbents.

If I had any money I'd buy the dip
by shevy-java | 2026-02-04 23:18:13+00:00
It is rather interesting how dead-focused Microsoft is on AI. Even if you look at their recent statements "We now admit there are AI problems with Microsoft-related products." (e. g. Win11 in particular), it seems to me that they really have no way back now. It's turtles down all the way; once the train is moving, it is hard to stop.

It's definitely not what many users wanted or expected from Win11; nonetheless, and this also surprised me, more than one billion devices run on Win11. That's also strange - AI is not a big reason for most of these folks then, right? Probably neither positive or negative (or they may not even know about it).
by webdevver | 2026-02-04 23:18:26+00:00
i did a similar excercise - something i found very funny, was that my half-baked emulator was getting stuck in various places in the tetris ROM. i copy-pasted the program counter hex address into the google search bar, and immediately got a reddit thread of someone doing exactly the same thing i was, whose emulator was getting stuck in exactly the same place in exactly the same tetris ROM!

not only that, i think this scenario played out a few more times before i finally got tetris to play. i suppose game boy emulators are sort of the defacto 'hello world' of this type of work.
by rbanffy | 2026-02-04 23:19:12+00:00
> As one technology S-curves, another technology replaces it

Even if for no other reason than us abandoning a diminishing returns approach looking for other alternatives.

We have been kind of at the end of the rope for silicon for quite some time now and we found increasingly heroic ways to protect our investment in silicon based semiconductors, but silicon is not the only option - it’s just the one we have a lot of supply chains already set up.
by straydusk | 2026-02-04 23:19:14+00:00
When I talk with people in the space, go to meetups, present my work & toolset, I am usually one of the more advanced, but usually not THE most, people in the conversation / group. I'm not saying I'm some sort of genius, I'm just saying I'm relatively near the leading edge of how to use these tools. I feel like it's true.
by Xx_crazy420_xX | 2026-02-04 23:19:40+00:00
Why create IDE without IDE features? Whats the benefit of this over using IDE with Codex plugin? I don't believe that you can review the code without code traversal by references, so looks like its directed towards toy projects/ noobs. And the agents are not yet near the autonomy that will omit the code review in complex systems.
by trhway | 2026-02-04 23:19:58+00:00
in the 90-ies anyone could easily prototype with tools like Access (and all the other "4GL" tools which were similarly all the rage back then). That still didn't preclude companies from buying their major software from software vendors instead of doing it themselves.

In some sense having customer able to prototype what they want is a good thing. I did it myself as i was at the time on that side, and having a quick-whip-it tool was a good thing to quickly get some feature that was missing in the major software before that major software would add it (if at all).
(And if one remembers for example Crystal Reports - while for "reports", it and the likes were in many senses such quick-whip-it tools for a lot of such customization that was doable by the customer.)

So, after initial aftershock - "Ahhhh, we don't need software companies anymore!" - we'll get to the state with software companies still doing their thing just with a lot of AI as "specialization" is one of the main thing in modern economy.

(Of course some companies wouldn't survive the transition just like some companies didn't survive the transitions to client/server, cloud, etc.)
by dingaling | 2026-02-04 23:20:17+00:00
I've bookshelves full of obscure nonfiction but only dip into specific chapters when curiosity demands, which is most days. But every day it's a different book. I can't remember when I last read an entire book, it just seems inefficient. Get the info, appreciate the learning, move on.

"Sustained reading for entertainment" sounds like an ordeal rather than delight.
by spondyl | 2026-02-04 23:20:18+00:00
I haven't seen any mention or acknowledgement that the model provider is part of this loop too. Technically speaking, none of this is E2EE so you're trusting that a random employee doesn't just read your chats? There will be policies sure, but ultimately someone will try to violate them as has happened many times in the past like at social media companies for example.
by shevy-java | 2026-02-04 23:20:34+00:00
Yeah - Google really tried to get people to use Google+ but it always sucked.

YouTube, while Google nerfed and downgraded it, still works to some extent, though AI generated "content" is such a waste of time.

> Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.

https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/

Well for tech users it is at around 12% or so, give or take. More curiously Google chrome share dropped a little. I have no data about this, e. g. one website is too little info anyway but I suspect that Google killing ublock origin was a reason; right now I am using firefox and though it has tons of issues too, being able to lock away pointless "content" is so vital for how I browser and access information online.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-02-04 23:20:38+00:00
I stopped collecting specific examples because it does no good (people asking your question previously weren't really asking in good faith) but jumping back to the last time I was:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46611046

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46605598

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46596836

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46611065

SyrianGirl and others in the same space on X (way way more that's just the first off the top of my head). Lots in comments on BlueSky labeling it all a zionist plot. Lots in comments Reddit labeling it all a zionist plot.

Discussion in major media about the phenomenom
https://www.abc.net.au/religion/milad-haghani-iran-palestine...

Example from a recent pro-Palestinian event:
https://kagi.com/search?q=Pro-Khamenei+banners++London+Jan+3...
by CorrectHorseBat | 2026-02-04 23:21:06+00:00
Yes you can, that is exactly what heat pumps do. As long as the total entropy increases it is not in violation of the laws of thermodynamics.

But I don't really see how that is relevant to the question of using waste energy to heat homes. We don't have ideal Carnot machines so there's always energy wasted, which most of the time is still good enough for residential heating.
by evanelias | 2026-02-04 23:21:09+00:00
Hidden changes indeed... I'm glad Oracle did a blog post about this, because otherwise it's largely missing from the MySQL documentation. This is really disappointing considering that 9.6 was released over two weeks ago, yet as of this moment:

* The new innodb_native_foreign_keys server variable has only two vague sentences describing its effect: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/9.6/en/innodb-parameters.ht...

* The MySQL 9.6 release notes make no mention of foreign key changes whatsoever, nor of the innodb_native_foreign_keys variable: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/relnotes/mysql/9.6/en/news-9-6-0.h...

* The "What is New in MySQL 9.6" manual page is currently just a copy-and-paste of that page from MySQL 9.5, with all the "9.5"'s replaced with "9.6": https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/9.6/en/mysql-nutshell.html vs https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/9.5/en/mysql-nutshell.html

As an independent software vendor providing solutions focused on MySQL, honestly I find this situation to be deeply concerning.

I have heard that an Oracle exec made a lot of promises about renewed MySQL Community Edition attention at a pre-FOSDEM event a few days ago; can we take any of that seriously if even basic documentation updates are not occurring?
Show HN: Quibble – Adversarial AI document review using Codex and Claude
by threekindwords | 2026-02-04 23:21:19+00:00
I built Quibble to get better feedback on technical documents (specs, plans, RFCs) by having two AI models argue about them. I still don't know if it's any good, so I'm sharing it here hopeful for you to try it out and give me feedback!!!

It works like this:

1. Codex reviews your document and raises issues/opportunities

2. Claude responds to the feedback and revises the document

3. Codex checks if the revisions actually addressed the concerns

4. Repeat until consensus or max rounds

The adversarial setup catches things a single-pass review misses. Codex tends to be nitpicky about specifics, Claude tends to defend or over-explain, so the tension between them surfaces real problems.

You can focus reviews on specific aspects (--focus "security and error handling") and resume sessions if you want to iterate further. Try it out like this (no install needed):

npx @mfelix.org/quibble docs/plan.md

Requires the Codex and Claude CLIs on your PATH. Sessions are saved to disk so you can inspect the back-and-forth.

npm:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/@mfelix.org/quibble

gh:
https://github.com/mfelix/quibble

thanks for reading and checking it out!!!
by elihu | 2026-02-04 23:22:14+00:00
That could be one reason they want to do it. Maybe by using data from Palantir or harvested from Elon's work with DOGE, along with twitter user data and whatever else they can get, they want their AI to be the all-seeing eye of Sauron. (Which isn't too far from what the whole ad-tech industry is about in the first place.) Or they want to make sexually explicit deepfakes of everyone Elon doesn't like. Or they want to flood the internet with AI generated right-wing propaganda.
by anthonypasq | 2026-02-04 23:23:00+00:00
>it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion

this is an extremely unfounded opinion, and pointing me to other people on hackernews that agree with you is not evidence. Google search quite literally was and continues to be the most successful and profitable product in the history of humanity. None of your comment interfaces with reality at all.
by FeistySkink | 2026-02-04 23:23:38+00:00
Huh. I had a native Android app way back when on the Play Store, that presented the Factbook in the mobile-friendly manner. Was quite popular in Africa of all places. But ultimately had to first delist it and then close the account altogether, once Google started requiring more and more unnecessary SDK updates, and ultimately identity verification. What a trip down the memory lane.
by asah | 2026-02-04 23:23:47+00:00
Smells Like Teen Spirit survives another challenge!

Voxtral Transcribe 2:

Light up our guns, bring your friends, it's fun to lose and to pretend. She's all the more selfish, sure to know how the dirty world. I wasn't what I'd be best before this gift I think best A little girl is always been Always will until again Well, the lights out, it's a stage And we are now entertainers. I'm just stupid and contagious. And we are now entertainers. I'm a lot of, I'm a final. I'm a skater, I'm a freak. Yeah! Hey! Yeah. And I forget just why I taste it Yeah, I guess it makes me smile I found it hard, it's hard to find the well Whatever, never mind Well, the lights out, it's a stage. You and I are now entertainers. I'm just stupid and contagious. You and I are now entertainers. I'm a lot of, I'm a minor. I'm a killer. I'm a beater. I'm a nerd. I'm a nerd. I'm a nerd. I'm a nerd. I'm a nerd. I'm a nerd. I'm a nerd. I'm a nerd. I'm a nerd. And I forget just why I taste it Yeah, I guess it makes me smile I found it hard, it's hard to find the well Whatever, never mind I know, I know, I know, I know, I know Well, the lights out, it's a stage. You and I are now entertainers. I'm just stupid and contagious. You and I are now entertainers. I'm a lot of, I'm a minor. I'm a killer. I'm a beater. I'm a nerd. I'm a nerd. I'm a nerd. I'm a nerd. I'm a nerd. I'm a nerd. I'm a nerd. I'm a nerd. I'm a nerd.

Google/Musixmatch:

Load up on guns, bring your friends
It's fun to lose and to pretend
She's over-bored, and self-assured
Oh no, I know a dirty word
Hello, hello, hello, how low?
Hello, hello, hello, how low?
Hello, hello, hello, how low?
Hello, hello, hello
With the lights out, it's less dangerous
Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us
A mulatto, an albino
A mosquito, my libido, yeah
Hey, yey
I'm worse at what I do best
And for this gift, I feel blessed
Our little group has always been
And always will until the end
Hello, hello, hello, how low?
Hello, hello, hello, how low?
Hello, hello, hello, how low?
Hello, hello, hello
With the lights out, it's less dangerous
Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us
A mulatto, an albino
A mosquito, my libido, yeah
Hey, yey
And I forget just why I taste
Oh yeah, I guess it makes me smile
I found it hard, it's hard to find
Oh well, whatever, never mind
Hello, hello, hello, how low?
Hello, hello, hello, how low?
Hello, hello, hello, how low?
Hello, hello, hello
With the lights out, it's less dangerous
Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us
A mulatto, an albino
A mosquito, my libido
A denial, a denial
A denial, a denial
A denial, a denial
A denial, a denial
A denial
by qingcharles | 2026-02-04 23:24:02+00:00
I don't practically see it happen, but you have to be careful once you are in a jail though, because there are often few limits on what the administration of the jail can do to you for any supposed violation of the jail rules (which they can legally make up on a whim, and due process is extremely limited). In Illinois, at least, a county Sheriff has unlimited power to punish a detainee in any extreme way they can imagine for even the very slightest infraction. There are no laws (statutes) which define what a "crime" is inside jail and what the punishment for it is. If it wasn't for SCOTUS limiting the death penalty to certain levels of behavior (e.g. murder) then a sheriff would be able to simply legally execute a detainee for pretty much anything.
by virtualhat | 2026-02-04 23:24:22+00:00
The author seems to have confused a few things.

* They assume 1 satalite = 1 GPU. This is quite funny, actually. A single H200 floating in space with a solar panel and an antenna. In reality, a satellite would pack as many chips as the heat/power allows. A Starlink-sized satellite should be able to hold 40 or so chips. There's no reason why a larger satellitte couldn't hold, say, 1024.
* They mention training, but sampling is what makes sense here. Training is a different beast, and requires high reliability, high bandwidth, low latency, and a lot of IO. Space would not be ideal for this. I'd expect training to remain terrestrial and just do sampling in space. (FWIW, sampling will be most of the compute allocation).
* Also, no one upgrades GPUs in datacenters, they just add new nodes and leave the old ones there. Google still has their P100 nodes running. Not being able to fix them, though, is a significant concern.
by andrewflnr | 2026-02-04 23:24:22+00:00
This is basically a version of the Fermi Paradox, which, well, has a lot of different answers. A lot. One of my favorites is that humanity actually is one of the early tech civilizations, due to insufficient phosphorus in earlier phases of the universe. But also, there are a lot of ways to have a technological singularity, and many of them have no particular reason to be visible at astronomical distances.