MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by csmoak | 2026-02-28 15:24:03+00:00
this reminds me of Polyworld by Larry Yaeger, an artifical life sim where each creature has a vision system. i played around with this back in the early 2000s though the hardware i had access to was basically insufficient to run it in any real way. it's nice to see its development has continued.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyworld
Ask HN: Do fast-moving DevTools need localized documentation?
by skytin1004 | 2026-02-28 15:24:56+00:00
I’ve been reviewing documentation strategies across several globally adopted DevTools and OSS projects.

One pattern stood out.

Even products with large user bases across Asia, Europe, and Latin America often keep their official documentation English-only.

Some projects experimented with community translations in the past. But as release velocity increased, translations gradually fell out of sync. Eventually, many reverted to English-only.

This raises two different possibilities:

1. Localization is valuable, but maintaining it does not scale in high-velocity projects.

Frequent releases mean documentation changes constantly.
Keeping multiple languages synchronized introduces review overhead, validation work, and operational complexity.

For fast-moving teams, English-only may simply be the rational trade-off.

2. Localization may not be strategically critical for DevTools.

Developers are generally comfortable reading English documentation.
Core ecosystems (Stack Overflow, GitHub issues, RFCs) operate primarily in English.

If multilingual documentation does not materially affect activation or revenue, prioritizing speed might make sense.

For teams that ship frequently:

Is documentation localization strategically important?

Have you seen multilingual docs meaningfully impact product metrics?

If localization could stay aligned with each release without slowing the team down, would it change your decision?

Curious how others think about this trade-off.
by MindSpunk | 2026-02-28 15:25:15+00:00
Being so absolutist is silly but their counter argument is very weak. Can I invalidate any memory safe language by dredging up old bug reports? Java had a bug once I guess it's over, everyone back to C. The argument is so thin it's hard to tell what they're trying to say.

It's just as reductive as the person they're replying to.
by ExoticPearTree | 2026-02-28 15:25:28+00:00
Unfortunately, every country has a law somewhere saying it can take private property at will if it is in the national interest.

It's not only the US being special in this case.

The problem is pretty simple: there is money to be made and someone will do what the Pentagon wants. Will it be worse in capabilities than Anthropic? Probably, but as long as it can be used to wage autonomous war wherever the US military decides, it will be good enough.

Anthropic can stick to their beliefs as much as they want, but it will not change the outcome, maybe just postpone it a bit.

On an unrelated note, I think the Pentagon erred when it labeled them a supply chain vulnerability, they should have used the DPA to make them do what they need. Less drama and much cheaper compared to replacing them with a whole different company.
by xg15 | 2026-02-28 15:25:33+00:00
Then have a look who is supporting whom with weapons, which militaries are running maneuvers together, who is cooperating - or not cooperating - economically, who is visiting each others' summits, etc.

It's true that many countries are trying to have relationship with both sides or are trying to keep all options open - which is the most reasonable strategy, I think - but there are still two power centers emerging between which those countries are aligning themselves.
by hnlmorg | 2026-02-28 15:25:37+00:00
I remember being in my early 20s, learning C and Pascal, and having this one kid telling me I was learning dead languages and he’d earn 3 times more than me leaning 4GL as well as himself being 3 times smarter than everyone else too.

The only reason I remember this encounter so clearly was because he got rather annoyed, to the point of being aggressive, when I pointed out that most of the computing landscape was built on C and this wasn’t going to change any time soon.

Multiple decades later, and C-derived languages still rule the world. I do sometimes wonder if his opinion mellowed with time.
by skydhash | 2026-02-28 15:26:48+00:00
> The code is not replaced by English prompts. The code still exists

If you can guarantee that it does what you say it does, then all is ok. The core issue since the advent of ChatGPT was always this reliability issue, whether the end result, the code, addresses the change request issued.

It turned out that you need to be an expert programmer to vet the code as well as supervise its evolution, whatever the tool used to write it.
by adampunk | 2026-02-28 15:26:52+00:00
It’s worth pointing out that as of February 2026 the costs here are still pretty speculative. We’ve got some small sample studies on developers, and we have some anecdotal transmission of certain skills falling away. But frankly, if these anecdotes and limited data were attached to some statement about Rust, for example, no one would give them any credence whatsoever.

What we’re working with
-—unfortunately—-are vibes. It really seems as though AI coding will have this effect on people. Morally, it seems like it ought to have this effect on people. We should not be allowed to be at ease without some sort of cost. And if we can luridly suggest that you don’t pay with money all the better.

This allows for the piece to perform its function, even when it doesn’t fully commit to it. A work in the genre can say all sorts of nuanced things about agentic coding, while still keeping the core premise that those who resist or position themselves strategically will be the winners.

That’s possible! It’s entirely possible that we will see some skill atrophy that is broken down by AI usage AND materially impacts outcomes that matter. We for sure do not know whether or not that is the case. I suspect it is because we don’t ask what these predictions cost you, which is nothing.

If we look at the starting point for most people on this stuff, it’s basically last fall. The author points this out, but the necessary conclusion one was draw from this is that we don’t have enough information to tell what the cost will be. It may like moving to programming languages from assembly or moving to assembly from bespoke instructions—-fundamentally very little was lost in those transitions, despite there being a lot of carping about it. It could be like the introduction of the tablet in American schools, where what we lose is nearly everything. We really do not know. It might be prudent to be cautious in this situation, but we ought to respect the fact that this caution might be born out of an old paradigm.
by joshsegall | 2026-02-28 15:26:53+00:00
Great survey. One thing I'd push further on your principle 2.3: the reason .context() chains work better than stack traces isn't just ergonomics, it's that they preserve causal information rather than mechanical information. A stack trace tells you which functions were on the call stack. A context chain tells you what the program was trying to do. These are fundamentally different things, and the gap widens dramatically with async code, where the mechanical stack is often meaningless.
by levkk | 2026-02-28 15:27:21+00:00
Models don't learn. They retrain them periodically, but junior engineers learn much faster and constantly improve. If you stop learning, you will only be as good as the model.

I've been coding (software engineering, I guess) for close to 15 years. The models skill set is a comfortable L1 (intern), pushing L2 (junior). They are getting better, but at a snail pace compared to a human learning the same thing.
by VikRubenfeld | 2026-02-28 15:27:21+00:00
What I don't think people are talking enough about yet, is that AI doesn't invent new ways of doing things -- it just predicts the next word based on the materials it was trained on. That means that if a company lets all its coding be done by AI -- that company will be permanently stuck in, say, 2026 -- while other companies will be continuously improving.
by utopiah | 2026-02-28 15:28:23+00:00
> Biometric keys are still a niche techie thing that the average person probably doesn't even know exist.

Is it? Maybe I'm in a bubble but feels like most people I know unlock their phone with biometrics. Sure few do that on their laptop, even less on their desktop, but I imagine that explaining it's "like unlocking your phone" would help those very numerous people (if you have metrics on biometrics on phone, please do share, genuinely curious) see that it's basically doing what they already do on more devices.
by galangalalgol | 2026-02-28 15:28:31+00:00
The current Israeli government obviously has a great deal of influence in the US government. That much is not conspiracy theory. The evangelicals involved in project 2025 have a very real interest in middle eastern conflict from an ideological standpoint. If you want a cynical follow the money villain look no farther than Al Saud and friends. Also, this weakens Russia and further restricts oil reaching China from anywhere. Every oil feed reaching China over water is at this point being curtailed. Looking for a single reason is very hollywood, enough interests aligned.

The US president hasn't required a new war resolution since Afghanistan. They each keep stretching it farther and farther. It cannot be rescinded without a veto-proof majority. If there was a veto proof majority willing to stand up to the executive, a conviction and removal would have already occurred.

The assertion that the US is a democracy is nisguided. It will be downgraded by vdem this month to an electoral autocracy. It is also worth noting that it only takes senators receiving the votes of <7% of the total population to filibuster all legislation, prevent overriding any vetos, and halt all impeachment trials. The fact it has looked like a democracy for so long is astounding.
by Hamuko | 2026-02-28 15:29:00+00:00
Yeah, Polymarket is explicitly advertising this.

>Research shows prediction markets are often more accurate than experts, polls, and pundits. Traders aggregate news, polls, and expert opinions, making informed trades. Their economic incentives ensure market prices adjust to reflect true odds as more knowledgeable participants join.

>If you’re an expert on a certain topic, Polymarket is your opportunity to profit from trading based on your knowledge, while improving the market’s accuracy.

You know what's a great knowledgeable participant? An insider.
by msisk6 | 2026-02-28 15:29:04+00:00
Just use plain text files. Anything backed by a service is going to hurt over a long enough time frame. And it seems that time frame gets shorter every year.

I still use email drafts for a lot of notes. Looking at my email draft folder the oldest one I have is from 2002 and I can still access it just fine, even on mobile.
by danielfetz | 2026-02-28 15:29:20+00:00
Children behind bank counters, in city councils, as mayors, as newspaper and television editors, as employees in registration offices, as workers in a furniture workshop, in a stonemason’s workshop – naturally, none of that is possible. They lack all the prerequisites, we think. Not just in ability, but also in seriousness, in accountability, in responsibility. And besides, child labor is forbidden, in the interest of children, as we like to say. And so we let them grow up in the children’s ghetto, let them dream of what will happen “when I grow up someday.” They remain, as if it were only natural, locked out of the serious realities of life – immature, in need of supervision, not to be taken seriously.
by juleiie | 2026-02-28 15:29:47+00:00
Yeah but someone has to give the money to the insider traders.

Betting and insider gambling wouldn’t work if people were educated and just didn’t gamble and so never used these platforms in the first place.

It’s an old question of whether government is responsible to protect people from themselves or should we give everyone freedom to go bankrupt in this specific way if they so desire.

I don’t know if there is a healthy way to gamble really. With drugs and substances at least there is some continuous spectrum but you either gamble your money or not.
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-02-28 15:30:42+00:00
The USSR had to carefully keep enough land forces in the Pacific region to deter a Japanese land invasion. (Remember that Japan controlled Manchukuo.) So, yes, the USSR had little involvement, and they had to be very careful to keep it from becoming an active front.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol (that was in 1939).
by googamooga | 2026-02-28 15:30:53+00:00
I started my coding apprenticeship back in early 80s with a senior programmer who taught me to code in LSI-11 processor codes. I memorized the whole table of octal processor opcodes and learned how to compose them with data to write programs on PDP-11. I was able to understand what each exact 16-bit word in my program is doing. It was a great skill. But then the same guy taught me FORTRAN 83, and I suddenly understood that writing in opcodes is not exciting anymore, because you can be 10x more productive and suffer less. Now, many years and programming languages later, with my coding skills in LSI-11 opcodes totaly athrophied, I do not regret about loosing that skill at all.

I see no reason to regret that our skills in coding C++/Java/* will decline or athrophy at some point in time. This will mean that we just don't need them anymore.
by sillyfluke | 2026-02-28 15:31:27+00:00
If Altman didn't go round cringe-inducingly saying he doesn't (relatively) have much of nor care about money and how he doesn't have a stake in OpenAI while plotting his power-hungry moves, and publish equally repulsive articles like "missionaries over mercenaries" while acting like the latter, then you might have hade a point. But given all that, sorry no.
by mellosouls | 2026-02-28 15:31:46+00:00
To an extent, probably. It was the first serious (post GPT3 for all its flaws) AI assistant, but even so I'm not sure it was ever the default choice because it wasn't until after ChatGPT got released that AI capabilities started getting mainstream awareness.

Then ofc Cursor took off, but even then normie coders were AI-sceptical or mostly aware through ChatGPT.

Devin was only ever hype.

I still use Copilot (I've been a subscriber since first available) but in concert with ChatGPT/Codex and Cursor & Warp, so it tends to take a backseat.

I would expect most usage of it to be via VSCode until recently.

So perhaps it was always a secondary choice (despite being the pilot) to the trailblazers like Cursor and Claude Code but it has an important place in history and as a monthly subscription it's one of the best value ones so still worth looking at.
by bell-cot | 2026-02-28 15:31:57+00:00
From divorces among family & friends - yes, those concerns exist. But they are also worst-case scenarios, and there are many "friendlier" divorces. Or divorces after the kids grow up - where none of the paternity, left-to-raise, and visitation issues really apply.

Vs. even if marriages were magically 100% secure - the costs of having kids in most modern societies have skyrocketed over the past half-ish century or so.
by bwestergard | 2026-02-28 15:32:04+00:00
This expresses so well the concerns I've had as I've increasingly leaned into using Copilot at work.

The mismatch in time horizons between employers and developers will be so vexing.

At any given time, the profit-maximizing strategy for each employer is to have engineers ship features as quickly as possible. For each employee, it is rational to retain and strengthen skills by avoiding some amount of cognitive offloading.

Most insidiously, the temptation of cognitive offloading for the employee aligns with the profit-maximizing strategy of the employer.
Show HN: Salacia – The First Runtime OS for Agentic Coding
by alfredhua | 2026-02-28 15:32:32+00:00
All major AI coding agents (Cursor, Claude Code, Cline, etc.) share the same fatal flaw: they forget context the second the conversation changes.
My goal was simple: make prompts reliable.
So I built Salacia — a lightweight Runtime OS that sits underneath any agent.
It does four things:
Compiles raw prompts into structured Intent IR + verifiable specs
Runs metamorphic testing to kill semantic drift
Only asks one smart question when truly high-risk (Risk-first gate)
Keeps full auditable journal (every change is traceable and replayable)
Tested on 500+ SWE-bench tasks:with 3 SOTA models, +9pp pass rate uplift and 93% fault localization accuracy.
Completely local, silent by default, works with Cursor, Claude Code, Cline, Antigravity, Gemini CLI and more.
Open source, one command to install.
GitHub: https://github.com/StartripAI/Salacia
Website: https://startripai.github.io/Salacia/
Would love feedback, especially from people who have been frustrated with prompt drift and context loss.
by xg15 | 2026-02-28 15:32:49+00:00
As a possible example of this, I was kind of baffled how quickly we're all now throwing the sophisticated AST/program analysis and refactoring methods over board we already had before AI. Just look at the refactoring methods of Eclipse or IntelliJ.

I think those should be very useful, especially with AI: Either as a tool for the agents themselves - why spend heaps of tokens completely rewriting a code file, if you could do most of it by calling some global refactoring operations on the IDE's AST/symbol database?

Or side-by-side with it, to give human users better insight what the AI did.

Instead it seems to be all VSCode (if at all) + grep + AI agents, and nothing else.
by e1ghtSpace | 2026-02-28 15:33:05+00:00
I like the idea of evolving agents from scratch with no "learning", they just evolve their ability to survive in the environment. Maybe one day it'll be advanced enough to see life evolve.

How does the narrative story generator work?

I played around a bit with NEAT networks, and tried to create a bitcoin trading bot, but the best I could do was a +10% gain over many months. I was hoping for at least 30% each month. Oh well, I guess it doesn't all just depend on past price history.
by delusional | 2026-02-28 15:33:17+00:00
> The US isn't ever going to leave anyone, let alone Iran, alone. The options are a) fight and cease to exist and b) don't fight and cease to exist.

Oh boy, I see we learned nothing from Afghanistan. The US will eventually leave you alone, There will be a power vacuum, and the local warlord will rise to that opportunity.

The "military operations" don't end in decisive vistory. They end with death and destruction for the young men sent into battle, and more enemies in the surrounding areas.
by DetroitThrow | 2026-02-28 15:33:24+00:00
>Production-ready — 17 versions shipped, 315+ installs

In no universe would this mean production ready. That's just the bot traffic any package would get.

Brutal feedback from someone building RAG systems: nobody wants to use slop, the commit history is 6 initial commits with thousands of LOC with mostly README updates after that.

Also I get junk from a very simple PDF. How did you verify the claims of the capabilities of this project?
by kaffekaka | 2026-02-28 15:33:29+00:00
I don't think it is that simple. Innovation can be found on several levels, from the lowest next-token level up to the higher level of new ways of combining things. Surely LLMs can produce code that on the whole does something completely new, even if on a syntactical level it has all been seen before?

We only have a couple dozen letters, still it is possible to write new poetry.
by krapp | 2026-02-28 15:33:42+00:00
It's the image America has always projected of itself - aggressive and defiant, a nation of cowboys with Bibles in one hand and six-shooters in the other, rebels against any authority but God. I live in the South and have all of my life. I've had countless arguments with gun owners and gun rights people, and I know the arguments they use, and how proud they are of the image.

You're making the mistake of assuming an attribute of a culture cannot be accurate unless it's 100% accurate about every member.

I think it's perfectly valid to call Americans to the carpet when they won't live up to their stated principles, if only because of how obnoxious they've been about their own sense of exceptionalism, and how their guns serve as an absolute vouchsafe against tyranny.

History is going to note that the only times Americans attempted a revolution against their government was first in defense of slavery and second in defense of fascism, and that isn't a good look. Replying with #notallamericans doesn't help.
by brookst | 2026-02-28 15:33:50+00:00
What does “regulate AI” even mean?

The applications it can be used for? That doesn’t work, it’s the governments that want abusive applications.

The size of models? That doesn’t work, it just discourages MoE.

Access by consumers? Great, now it’s just for megacorps and the military.

What, exactly, would successful regulation look like?
by vitus | 2026-02-28 15:33:53+00:00
Well, it shouldn't be faster than "Read 1,000,000 bytes sequentially from memory" (741ns) which in turn shouldn't be faster than "Read 1,000,000 bytes sequentially from disk" (359 us).

That said, all those numbers feel a bit off by 1.5-2 orders of magnitude -- that disk read speed translates to about 3 GB/s which is well outside the range of what HDDs can achieve.

https://brenocon.com/dean_perf.html indicates the original set of numbers were more like 10us, 250us, and 30ms.

And it links to https://github.com/colin-scott/interactive_latencies which seems like it extrapolates progress from 14 years ago:

// NIC bandwidth doubles every 2 years
// [source: http://ampcamp.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Ion-stoica-amp-camp-21012-warehouse-scale-computing-intro-final.pdf]
// TODO: should really be a step function
// 1Gb/s = 125MB/s = 125*10^6 B/s in 2003

which means that in 2026 we'll have seen 11 doublings since gigabit speeds in 2003, so we'll all have > terabit speeds available to us.
by MattRix | 2026-02-28 15:34:08+00:00
I’d encourage you to read this post: https://factory.strongdm.ai

It hit the front page here a few weeks ago, but I don’t think most people took it seriously and got hung up on the $1000/day in tokens part.

I am convinced that approach is the future of nearly all software development. It’s basically about how if you’re willing to spend enough tokens, these current models can already complete any software task. With the right framework in place, you don’t need to think about the code at all, only the results.

I really don’t like that the industry is heading this way, but the more I consider that approach, the more I’m convinced it is inevitable.