MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by drivers99 | 2026-02-07 23:13:30+00:00
Then it's a little bit of a stretch but they could put a script with the name of a common typo similar to commonly run commands there. Maybe "ls-l" without the space in case they miss the space. Yeah, that's a stretch. I went looking for better sources.

> The current directory ( . ) is not in PATH by default, for security reasons. This prevents accidentally running unintended programs in your current directory.

-- POSIX Shell scripting from scratch, By Sultan Zavrak (states it in general terms. They also use ls as an example though, which shouldn't be affected if you have "." at the end.)

Practical UNIX and Internet Security has an example of "." (or having a null entry in the PATH, which also indicates the current directory; I didn't know that![0]) at the beginning, which is obviously a bad idea, but he (Simson Garfinkel) makes a good point:

> More generally, you should never have a path that is writable by other users.

Ah yes, finally, he covers a situation where you have a directory at the end of your path, that is writable by others ("." would count) and having a trojan named "mroe" (for "more") waiting patiently for the superuser to mess up.

He even goes so far to say that root should run commands with full paths, such as /sbin/chown and not just chown. I've never gone that far, except I can see the benefit of doing that in scripts.

So anyway, besides the typo example, there's also a kind of shadowing: let's say you expect a command to fail because the program is not installed. Or maybe you try to run a command you think is installed but it's not. You might even have a command or way of working that tries various commands until one works. If you have a path that someone can write to (including ".") then instead of failing, it will run something unintended, if they have shadowed that command in that directory.

[0] to quote the bash man page: A zero-length (null) directory name in the value of PATH indicates the current directory. A null directory name may appear as two adjacent colons, or as an initial or trailing colon.
by GregDavidson | 2026-02-07 23:13:43+00:00
Realistic Hard SF has to deal with Accelerating Change making technology vastly powerful yet still limited. The hardest thing to write about is cognitively enhanced humans or any other entities (AI, aliens, etc.) exceeding human cognitive limits. JW Campbell famously said it couldn't be done, but without that depictions of the future or wider universe fall flat. Vernor Vinge became the master of such SF and showed several ways to do it. I recommend everything he wrote! Good Hard SF requires an author who has a good grasp of science without that stifling their imagination. It's easy if you cheat but Science Fantasy is unreadable by the science literate folks who frequent HN. Good Hard SF is out there, with and without spaceships, but you'll have to hunt for it - and thanks for all the recommendations here!
by johannes1234321 | 2026-02-07 23:13:45+00:00
The interesting aspect is: that allows people who couldn't do it before to build tools for their department needs. Where in the past they would have needed a budget for going to the IT department and then do complex processes to transfer the requirements from business needs into a form the developers understand.

Now they can quickly build simple tools. Yes, they are bad from software quality pov, but they solve problems.
by pier25 | 2026-02-07 23:13:53+00:00
Maybe I'm missing something but pressing enter with the group selected doesn't really isolate the group. It's the same as double clicking a group.

Objects in front of the group are not removed/hidden and you can still select objects outside the group. Even worse, accidentally selecting an object outside the group exits the group.

Illustrator has a tool to select objects inside a group too although never use it.
by timpera | 2026-02-07 23:13:56+00:00
https://archive.is/eQJnd

The Verge's Terrence O'Brien on his experience switching his laptop to Linux as a non-developer.

To be compared with his coworker Nathan Edwards who had a much better experience a few weeks ago: https://www.theverge.com/tech/858910/linux-diary-gaming-desk...
by olivia-banks | 2026-02-07 23:14:43+00:00
libtcc doesn't give you much control AST wise, you basically just feed it strings. I'm using it for the purpose you mentioned though--scripting language backend--since for my current "scripting-language" project I can emit C89, and it's plenty fast enough for a REPL!

/* add a file (either a C file, dll, an object, a library or an ld script). Return -1 if error. */
int tcc_add_file(TCCState *s, const char *filename);

/* compile a string containing a C source. Return non zero if error. */
int tcc_compile_string(TCCState *s, const char *buf);
by joe_the_user | 2026-02-07 23:15:26+00:00
I've seen adversarial approaches in small companies or even an individual boss and I've seen cooperative approaches in moderately large organizations.

The shift toward an adversarial approach in just about any organization is noticeable, in fact, in the US in the last 10-15 years but the US hasn't grown in size that much, large scale organizations existed much earlier.
by XxCotHGxX | 2026-02-07 23:15:34+00:00
I’ve been tracking the "AI is taking all remote work" narrative, but it felt like the raw data was missing a major variable: Structural Complexity.

I audited 87 micro-tasks using the Scale AI RLI benchmarks and O*NET labor baselines. By decomposing 10 large projects into their atomic requirements, I found a sharp "Complexity Kink" at 10^3 instruction entropy. Below this line, agents are highly applicable; above it, their marginal productivity collapses, and the "Human Agency Moat" actually widens.

Technical details:

- Metric: Instruction Entropy (E) = Solution_Tokens / Requirement_Tokens
- Model: Heckman Two-Step (Correcting for benchmark selection bias, p=0.012)
- Robustness: Rosenbaum Sensitivity Analysis (Stable up to Gamma = 1.8)
- Standardization: Applied 5% Winsorization to normalize for "human slop" in self-reported freelance durations.

The full paper (PDF) and code are in the repo.

I'd love to hear from people building production agents—are you seeing this 10^3 threshold in your own error logs, or am I over-simplifying the "connective tissue" problem?
by electroly | 2026-02-07 23:15:35+00:00
I won't be paying extra to use this, but Claude Code's feature-dev plugin is so slow that even when running two concurrent Claudes on two different tasks, I'm twiddling my thumbs some of the time. I'm not fast and I don't have tight deadlines, but nonetheless feature-dev is really slow. It would be better if it were fast enough that I wouldn't have time to switch off to a second task and could stick with the one until completion. The mental cost of juggling two tasks is high; humans aren't designed for multitasking.
by ben_w | 2026-02-07 23:17:26+00:00
I smell skulduggery.

They say this was detected years ago, but they chose not to even say anything about it until "a day after the treaty limiting U.S. and Russian missile and warhead deployments expired"?

I don't buy it. I do buy that China has a lot more nukes than before, there doesn't seem be to be any disagreement about that, but "revealing" years-old tests now smells more like an excuse for US build-up than anything else.
by kgraves | 2026-02-07 23:18:36+00:00
When these vibe coded projects realise that maintenance, security updates, API changes are still needed. Get ready for a massive swing back to senior software developers being in demand.

Playing software maintainer while many vibe coded web apps aren't built with proper software architecture or practices only makes the swing back to senior engineers being in demand a possibility.

Good luck to those who are building 600K-LOC vibe coded web apps with 40+ APIs stitched together.
by jaytaylor | 2026-02-07 23:18:37+00:00
(StrongDM AI team member here)

This is great feedback, appreciate you taking the time to post it. I will set some agents loose on optimization / purification passes over CXDB and see which of these gaps they are able to discover and address.

We only chose to open source this over the past few days so it hasn't received the full potential of technical optimization and correction. Human expertise can currently beat the models in general, though the gap seems to be shrinking with each new provider release.
by happytoexplain | 2026-02-07 23:18:46+00:00
I'm not sure I will ever understand the presentation of "inevitable === un-criticizable" as some kind of patent truth. It's so obviously fallacious that I'm not sure what could even drive a human to write it, and yet there it is, over and over and over.

Lots of horrifying things are inevitable because they represent "progress" (where "progress" means "good for the market", even if it's bad for the idea of civilization), and we, as a society, come to adapt to them, not because they are good, but because they are.
by 13415 | 2026-02-07 23:19:02+00:00
I have to sign off on the code. When I use compilers and 3rd-party libraries, I choose them very carefully. When I use an AI assistant, I have to check that it produces a good enough quality that I can sign off on it and stand behind it as if it was my own. I cannot do that with large amounts of agentic code, only with small enough snippets that I can overlook and check.

You can put it another way: If my customers lose data because of a nasty bug and it was because there was an error in the compiler, it wasn't my fault (unless I chose some unfinished hobby compiler with no reputation at all). If my AI assistant wrote the bug and I didn't spot it, the bug was definitely my fault and is fully my responsibility.

"It wasn't me, my AI assistant did it" is a lousy excuse.
by varispeed | 2026-02-07 23:19:29+00:00
How deep do you want to go? Because reasonable person wouldn't have expected to hand hold AI(ntelligence) to that level. Of course after pointing it out, it has corrected itself. But that involved looking at the code and knowing the code is poor. If you don't look at the code how would you know to state this requirement? Somehow you have to assess the level of intelligence you are dealing with.
by nullocator | 2026-02-07 23:19:37+00:00
Rephrased: Trump inherited a strong economy, did not know how to govern or appropriately wield the power of his office (zero experience), did not have a good relationship with congress so made no progress there unlike most presidents, and was constrained from his worst impulses by his own staff. Finally when Covid occurred and he was actually required to lead it all came crashing down because he was and is incapable. A geriatric democrat had to come and right the ship again immediately after.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-07 23:19:45+00:00
Looking through the AWS lens because that’s the one I know.

The goal of the centralized ops team is to put just enough guardrails on the Organization (a group of AWS accounts) to keep the company in compliance - no public access S3 buckets, no one has organization::* permissions, set budget limits per account or organizational units etc, establish budget thresholds (or in the case of Isengard - AWS’s account vending machine - you can do almost anything except spin up an Oracle DB) . Let each team be responsible for their own deployments, monitoring, etc. For the most part, the top level operations department should be responsible for the Organization, setting up service control policies, Security monitoring and then the embedded DevOps person should be an SME not the department of “no”.

If you make the dev team a long with the embedded ops person responsible for their account/monitoring and they get called once a twice, they will figure it out
by YZF | 2026-02-07 23:19:55+00:00
Predictions

- Small companies using AI are going to kick the sh*t out of large companies that are slow to adapt.

- LLMs will penetrate more areas of our lives. Closer to the STTNG computer. They will be agents in the real life sense and possibly in the physical world as well (robots).

- ASICs will eat nVidia's lunch.

- We will see an explosion of software and we will also see more jobs for people who are able to maintain all this software (using AI tools). There is going to be a lot more custom software for very specific purposes.
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-07 23:20:13+00:00
Yep in other countries CPAPs are over the counter. In America you need to go to a sleep lab for a wasteful overnight sleep study (sometimes two!) that costs thousands. And then have appointments with a “doctor” who provides no useful help but is necessary for the prescription. All for the machine to figure out its own optimal settings anyways. Total racket and regulatory capture.
by Veserv | 2026-02-07 23:20:26+00:00
Of course it is a personal benefit, you are literally benefitting by not spending your own post-tax dollars for something that goes into your stomach. However, there are legal rules that allow categorizing certain such expenses and amounts as a cost of doing business even though the manifest benefit is purely “personal”.

These rules have tightened up since the days of company cars and company houses “expensing” employee cars and houses as a tax advantaged form of compensation. If you try to do that now, that all shows up as “compensation” which is taxed. If you look at say Mark Zuckerberg’s yearly “salary” you will see that it is almost entirely non-monetary compensation for bodyguard services and “paying” for Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, using the plane of Mark Zuckerberg, the person, and paying personal income taxes on that “compensation” even though Mark Zuckerberg was not paid any dollars (for that compensation).

The allocations you are provided and the manner in which you are allowed to spend them are generally considered “safe” from a accounting perspective. There is usually wiggle room above them if you are willing to more thoroughly document or finagle them, but that is extra accounting department cost to do things beyond the safe, well-trod legal path even if it is actually okay at the end of the day.
Show HN: Glance – Fast CSV inspection for the terminal (SIMD-accelerated)
by AveryClapp | 2026-02-07 23:20:34+00:00
I built this because I got tired of waiting for pandas to load just to peek at a CSV file. Glance handles multi-million row files in under a second with lazy parsing and SIMD optimizations.

Key features:
- Instant schema inference (detects int64, float64, currency, dates, enums)
- SQL-like filtering with numeric comparison support
- Interactive pager (like less, but CSV-aware) with search
- Auto-detects delimiters (comma, tab, pipe, semicolon)
- Multiple output formats (table, CSV, TSV, JSON)

Performance on 5M rows (307 MB):
- Display + schema: 0.09s (lazy parsing + SIMD line counting)
- Full filter + sort: 0.88s

Technical bits:
- mmap for zero-copy file access
- Flat row storage (single vector with stride, no per-row allocations)
- ARM NEON / x86 SSE2 for newline counting
- memchr fast-path for quote-free lines, state machine fallback for RFC 4180 edge cases

Built in C++20 with comprehensive tests. Works on macOS and Linux.

GitHub: https://github.com/AveryClapp/glance
by cm2187 | 2026-02-07 23:20:53+00:00
Well you either remove all the bureaucracy around drug testing and approval and make it cheap to develop a new drug, or you prevent drug makers from making money if they are successful at developing a new molecule. But if you do both, all you will get is zero research. Right now it takes 10s of billions in R&D budget to bring new molecules to the market, which is insane.
by nayroclade | 2026-02-07 23:21:26+00:00
NATO could certainly rollover the Russian army in a conventional war, but that was just as true before the Ukrainian war. The idea that Russia is/was a serious threat is a convenient fiction: It helps maintain Russia's image as a superpower, and it provides a justification for the existence of NATO and the associated military industrial complex that supports it.

What is true however, is that Russia does possess a huge arsenal of nuclear and other weapons:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_and_weapons_of_mass_des...

Despite Putin's posturing, Russia's never going to risk deploying them in a conflict with Ukraine. But in an actual war between NATO/Europe and Russia, with the regime facing an existential threat, then there's a very good chance they would. But even before it got to that point, the nature of the conflict itself would make nuclear escalation very likely. Both sides would be firing huge numbers of missiles, attempting to gain air superiority by wiping out the other's own missile launchers, radar bases, etc. With that many missiles flying, and stressed people and automated systems making split-second decisions, it's very likely that an error or miscalculation would result in an accidental nuclear strike, at which point it would be impossible to put the genie back in the bottle.
by ndriscoll | 2026-02-07 23:22:24+00:00
Assuming high bandwidth flash works out, RAM requirements should be drastically reduced as you'd keep the weights in much higher capacity flash.

> Sample HBF modules are expected in the second half of 2026, with the first AI inference hardware integrating the tech anticipated in early 2027.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/sandisk-and-sk-hy...
by mmooss | 2026-02-07 23:22:44+00:00
> I believe we already have the resources to colonise the Moon and maybe Mars right now.

That is or was essentially the mission of the US government's Artemis program, as I understand it. Some elements of the plan are (or were):

'Civilize' (my word) the Moon - build PNT, situational awareness, communication infrastructure, bases, permanent human presence etc. Bring it within a normalized region of operations, like Earth orbit (though obviously much more expensive and less utilized). A benefit is developing plans for infrastructure and operations on Mars, in a much more friendly and less expensive environment. What does it take to support humans efficiently and reliably on another body?

Also conduct experiments and develop technology for Mars in cislunar regions - again, much friendlier and less costly.
by dt3ft | 2026-02-07 23:22:51+00:00
I beg to differ. Let's say you're right. Code producers should turn to agriculture and let their managers and product owners prompt AI to produce code. How about code maintainers? Ever heard the mantra "You build it, you run it"? Lets say that AI can build it. Can it run it though? All alone, safely, securely and reliably? No. It can't. We can keep dreaming though, and when will AI code production services turn profitable? Is there a single one which turned profitable?
by toprerules | 2026-02-07 23:23:45+00:00
The answer is the AI. It's already handling complex issues and debugging solely by gathering its own context, doing major refactors successfully, and doing feature design work. The people that will be held responsible will be the product owners, but it won't be for bugs, it will be for business impact.

My point is that SWEs are living on a prayer that AI will be perched on a knifes edge where there is still be some amount of technical work to make our profession sustainable and from what I'm seeing that's not going to be the case. It won't happen overnight, but I doubt my kids will ever even think about a computer science degree or doing what I did for work.
by jongjong | 2026-02-07 23:23:46+00:00
I predict it's going to be a bloodbath. People who worked for Big Tech have no idea what's coming. Some of us software engineers who have been outside have been experiencing issues for almost a decade. The industry is extremely anti-competitive.

Whatever you produce, nobody is going to use unless you produce it under the banner of Big Tech. There are no real opportunities for real founders.

The problem is spreading beyond software. The other day, I found out there is a billion dollar company whose main product is a sponge... Yes, a sponge, for cleaning. We're fast moving towards a communist-like centrally planned economy, but with a facade of meritocracy where there is only one product of each kind and no room for competition.

This feeling of doom that software engineers started to feel after LLMs is how I was feeling 5 years earlier. People are confused because they think the problem is that AI is automating them but reality is that our problems arise from a deeper systemic issue at the core of our economic system. AI is just a convenient cover story, it's not the reason why we are doomed. Once people accept that we can start to work towards a political solution like UBI or better...

We've reached the conclusion of Goodhart's Law "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" - Our economic system has been so heavily monitored and controlled in every aspect that is has begun to fail in every aspect. Somebody has managed to profit from every blindspot, every exploit exposed by the measurement and control apparatus. Everything is getting qualitatively worse in every way that is not explicitly measured and the measurement apparatus is becoming increasingly unreliable... Most problems we're experiencing are what people experienced during the fall of communism except filter bubbles are making us completely blind to the experience of other people.

I think if we don't address the root causes, things will get worse for everyone. People's problems will get bigger, become highly personalized, pervasive, inexplicable, unrelatable. Everyone will waste their energy trying to resolve their own experience of the symptoms but the root causes would remain.
by apical_dendrite | 2026-02-07 23:23:56+00:00
I'm trying to work with vibe-coded applications and it's a nightmare. I am trying to make one application multi-tenant by moving a bunch of code that's custom to a single customer into config. There are 200+ line methods, dead code everywhere, tons of unnecessary complexity (for instance, extra mapping layers that were introduced to resolve discrepancies between keys, instead of just using the same key everywhere). No unit tests, of course, so it's very difficult to tell if anything broke. When the system requirements change, the LLM isn't removing old code, it's just adding new branches and keeping the dead code around.

I ask the developer the simplest questions, like "which of the multiple entry-points do you use to test this code locally", or "you have a 'mode' parameter here that determines which branch of the code executes, which of these modes are actually used? and I get a bunch of babble, because he has no idea how any of it works.

Of course, since everyone is expected to use Cursor for everything and move at warp speed, I have no time to actually untangle this crap.

The LLM is amazing at some things - I can get it to one-shot adding a page to a react app for instance. But if you don't know what good code looks like, you're not going to get a maintainable result.
by latchkey | 2026-02-07 23:24:24+00:00
I hate the current token gym membership pricing models, they are too complicated and abstract and even worse, you have issues like what this post points out. They favor the providers, not the users. They create a lot of stress for users who have to decide if they can afford to point GasTown at their codebase.

The problem is that the companies serving LLMs can't delineate compute between users. You're using a cloud of compute, not a single individual unit of compute. If you could measure at the unit of compute, then you'd just pay by the minute for what you use instead of by the token, we would get out of this situation.
by zhyder | 2026-02-07 23:25:21+00:00
So 2.5x the speed at 6x the price [1].

Quite a premium for speed. Especially when Gemini 3 Pro is 1.8x the tokens/sec speed (of regular-speed Opus 4.6) at 0.45x the price [2]. Though it's worse at coding, and Gemini CLI doesn't have the agentic strength of Claude Code, yet.

[1] - https://x.com/claudeai/status/2020207322124132504
[2] - https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models