MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by leptons | 2026-02-08 00:57:32+00:00
You're kind of jumping around in scope here, and I think you got it a little wrong.

>Biological systems are vastly more complex, and less brittle, in the sense that killing a single cell doesn't cause system failure like for example removing an object file from a program often would.

Removing a single node from a massively parallel system doesn't kill the system either, it only removes one node, another node will spin up and replace it, just like a failing cell would in a biological system. One liver cell doesn't do anything for the host on its own, it's part of a massively parallel system.

> Just look at the complexity of a single sell, and try to imagine what an analog of similar complexity would be in software.

Removing some parts from a cell certainly could kill it, or a million other things that lead to apoptosis, or turn it cancerous. The same goes for a single node in a system - remove part of the code and you're going to have big problems - for that node. But probably won't kill the other nodes in the system (though a virus could).

There are 3 Billion base pairs in Human DNA. I could imagine that there's more than 3 billion lines of code running important things throughout the world right now. Maybe even in one system, or likely soon there will be. With "AI" doing the coding that number is going to explode, without anyone able to understand all of it. And so I could imagine that "AI" will probably lead to some kind of "digital cancer", the same way there are viruses and other analogues to biological systems.
by HappMacDonald | 2026-02-08 00:57:36+00:00
I'm curious about your thoughts on voluntarily donating the excess wages that you perceive earning.. and perhaps not directly to the US government (which is — to put it simply — not in a healthy state of mind at the moment), but instead to charity organizations that you can vet and trust?

Obviously actually vetting these organizations to make sure that your dollar accomplishes what you wish of it remains a Very Hard Problem, but at least while making baby steps from where we are right now (with our dystopian government) increases in taxation would not constitute a small step in the right direction.

EG: a better environment might look like a healthy government being supported by higher taxes than we see today, but without that first "healthy government" component the latter cannot be a net positive.
by ChicagoDave | 2026-02-08 00:57:37+00:00
I love the sentiment, but 40 years in the business realm of software development has taught me “good code” is never a priority for management. It’s difficult to explain good unit testing, tech debt, or just going through proper solution selection with management.

So having used Claude Code since it came out I’ve decided the resulting code is overall just as good as what I’d see in regular programming scenarios.
by logicprog | 2026-02-08 00:57:37+00:00
This feels very odd to me because I'm actually able to refactor and DRY and generally improve my code and tests and documentation much more with agents to help speed up the process than I ever would have before. I also make sure to describe and break down problems when I ask an agent to implement them in such a way that they produce code that I think is elegant. It seems to me like people think there's only two settings. Either sleeping away carefully on the craft of your code manually writing it, or shitting out first pass vide-coded stuff without really taking care to specify the problem or iterate on the code afterwards. But you can apply just as much care to what the agent produces, and in my experience, still see significant speedups since refactoring and documentation and pulling out common abstractions and so on are something that agents can do extremely reliably and quickly but require a lot of manual text editing and compile/test passes to do yourself. As long as you don't get hung up on making the agent produce exactly character for character, the code you would have produced, but instead just have good standards for functionality and cleanliness and elegance of design.
by icedchai | 2026-02-08 00:58:03+00:00
Most humans aren't making new scientific discoveries either, are they? Does that mean they don't have AGI?

Intelligence is mostly about pattern recognition. All those model weights represent patterns, compressed and encoded. If you can find a similar pattern in a new place, perhaps you can make a new discovery.

One problem is the patterns are static. Sooner or later, someone is going to figure out a way to give LLMs "real" memory. I'm not talking about keeping a long term context, extending it with markdown files, RAG, etc. like we do today for an individual user, but updating the underlying model weights incrementally, basically resulting in a learning, collective memory.
by IhateAI_3 | 2026-02-08 00:58:12+00:00
Why would you adopt agent first coding? Are you that bad at it? Is there anything you really have to get done regardless of quality right this second? Just right the code yourself, and stop training your replacement.

At minimum if you must use these tools, please please press thumbs down if its a good response or thumbs up if a bad one (you'll be doing this a lot) if your tool of choice has that.
by Braxton1980 | 2026-02-08 00:58:42+00:00
Biden was hated so much that large groups of people chanted "Let's go Brandon" (fuck Joe Biden) in public. There is video evidence of this.

No Democrat politician has ever stated that Republicans have a mental illness for hating Joe Biden. Nor have they come up with a phrase similar to Trump Derangement Syndrome to describe it.

This is why I don't like "both sides" people. Overall Republican voters and their representatives are worse people.
by mattgreenrocks | 2026-02-08 00:59:18+00:00
IMO, you need to have the capacity to write Good Code to know what Good Enough Code is. It's highly contextual to a particular problem and season in a codebase's life. One example: ugly code that upholds an architecture that confers conceptual leverage on a problem. Most of the code can operate as if some gnarly problem is solved without having to grapple with it themselves. Think about the virtual memory subsystem of an OS.

The problem with this argument is many do not believe this sort of leverage is possible outside of a select few domains, so we're sort of condemned to stay at a low level of abstraction. We comfort ourselves by saying it is pragmatic.

LLMs target this because the vast, vast majority of code is not written like this, for better or for worse. (It's not a value judgment, it just is.) This is a continuation (couldn't resist) of the trend away from things like SICP. Even the SICP authors admitted programming had become more about experimentation and gluing together ready-made parts than building beautifully layered abstractions which enable programs to just fall out of easily.

I don't agree with the author, BTW. Good code is needed in certain things. It's just a lot of the industry really tries to beat it out of you. That's been the case for awhile. What's different now is that devs themselves are seemingly joining in (or at least, are being perceived to be).
by ryan_n | 2026-02-08 00:59:18+00:00
I wish it was silent, we've been hearing about it non-stop for the past 4 years.

I agree it is sad though. I changed careers from one I was unhappy with into software development. Part of what drew me to software was that (at least sometimes) it feels like there is a beauty in writing what the author describes as great code. It makes you really feel like a craftsman, even if that sounds a bit dramatic. That part of the profession seems to fading away the more agentic coding catches on. I still try to minimize use of any LLM's when doing personal projects so I can maintain that feeling.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-02-08 00:59:31+00:00
> But if your setting or plot relies on something we know to be scientifically untrue, and you don't put some effort into explaining why it somehow works in your setting, it's fantasy and not speculative.

Agreed but only because "some effort" could be as little as a single paragraph.

> But detective stories don't work if your world isn't grounded in something real. Otherwise the reader can't reasonably build their own theory or deduce the answer because it's based on what the author thought was cool and not what logically connects.

If you only change a tiny bit, this isn't a major issue.

> The appeal of something like The Expanse just falls apart if you introduce a FTL engine just because it makes for a more dramatic story moment somewhere in the plot unless there is some serious justification as to why the author didn't just break all the rules of their world (which is supposed to be our world, but in the future).

That specific story falls apart but you could have lots of thematically similar stories with FTL. No need for "serious justification" unless you're trying to pull it out of nowhere halfway through the plot. If it's there from the start, there's no problem.
by coldtea | 2026-02-08 01:00:00+00:00
>but if it's just about you, the speed of light is no limitation at all

It's a huge limitation, even just getting propelled to "big enough speed", say 1/10 the speed of light.

We barely do 1/1500 the speed of light, in unmanned probes, and only because we sling shot on Solar gravity, not as propulsion or anything, and at 1400 o Celcius, plus deadly radiation, not to mention any micro-meteor as big as a particle of dust could kill someone there).
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-08 01:00:14+00:00
If you were wrongfully arrested at a DUI checkpoint one night, but hey, 1 in 20 people arrested there are drunk drivers! Would you be okay with that? I certainly wouldn't.

If SWAT started driving around gunning people down in the street but every last "victim" turned out to be guilty of murder would that be okay? I certainly don't think so. There's a legal process that needs to be followed.
by CTDOCodebases | 2026-02-08 01:00:25+00:00
The margins on software are incredibly high and perhaps this is just the cost of having maintainable output.

Also I think you have to consider development time.

If someone creates a SaaS product then it can be trivially cloned in a small timeframe. So the moat that normally exists becomes non existent. Therefore to stay ahead or to catch up it’s going to cost money.

In a way it’s similar to the way FAANG was buying up all the good engineers. It starves potential and lower capitalised but more nimble competitors of resources that it needs to compete with them.
by rizzeek | 2026-02-08 01:00:49+00:00
Location: Philadelphia, PA, USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Python, C++, C, CUDA, Computer Vision, Post training, Reasoning, Robotics, Multimodal sensing, Deep Learning, Event cameras

Résumé/CV: https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~richeek/assets/pdf/RicheekCV.pdf

Email: richeek@seas.upenn.edu

I am looking for internships -- summer/fall 2026.

My PhD work is on robotics, computer vision, neuromorphic and multimodal sensing, and representation learning.

I am excited about opportunities to work on robotic perception and planning (with multiple sensors, representation learning, world models, etc) -- and -- reasoning (post-training, etc).
by mjr00 | 2026-02-08 01:00:56+00:00
I'm not saying that AI can't figure out how to handle bugs (it absolutely can; in fact even a decade ago at AWS there was primitive "AI" that essentially mapped failure codes to a known issues list, and it would not take much to allow an agent to perform some automation). I'm saying there will be situations the AI can't handle, and it's really absurd that you think a product owner will be able to solve deeply technical issues.

You can't product manage away something like "there's an undocumented bug in MariaDB which causes database corruption with spatial indexes" or "there's a regression in jemalloc which is causing Tomcat to memory leak when we upgrade to java 8". Both of which are real things I had to dive deep and discover in my career.
by mhb | 2026-02-08 01:01:06+00:00
Well that's the choice. Allow drug companies to price discriminate so that poorer people can also buy the drugs or don't allow it and get more new drugs. It's not clear that drug companies are even going to retain low prices in other countries if it means that the US consumers will pay less.

Which drugs that haven't been invented yet do you think we should forego?
by dhx | 2026-02-08 01:01:14+00:00
I'm a contributor for ATP and can confirm that the contributor of the wildberries spider was deliberately trying to collect https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:shop%3Doutpost (online order pickup locations). This is not a common occurrence within the current set of ATP spiders to capture such features.

ATP has a much more inclusive set of features it can extract than what Overture Maps, TomTom et al care about. As Overture Maps is more opinionated on what they aggregate they will filter out ATP extracted features such as shop=outpost and infrastructure that ATP collects such as individual power poles, park bench seats, local government managed street and park trees, stormwater drain manholes, cemetery plots, weather stations, tsunami buoys, etc. I think there might be some exceptions if it helps TomTom et al with their products such as speed camera locations, national postal provider drop-off/pick-up locations within other branded retail shops, etc.
by ElatedOwl | 2026-02-08 01:02:01+00:00
I think good code is even more important now.

People talk about writing the code itself and being intimate with it and knowing how every nook and cranny works. This is gone. It’s more akin to on call where you’re trudging over code and understanding it as you go.

Good code is easy to understand in this scenario; you get a clear view of intent, and the right details are hidden from you to keep from overwhelming you with detail.

We’re going to spend a lot more time reading code than before, better make it a very good experience.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2026-02-08 01:02:04+00:00
As always it’s insurance nonsense. If incentives were aligned insurance companies would be lining up out the door to give this to obese people because they (the insurance companies) would eventually be on the hook for paying for the care of the conditions you just mentioned. It is very well demonstrated in literature that obese people have a much higher occurrence of these conditions than non obese people.

But the system is not set up with aligned incentives
by amitprasad | 2026-02-08 01:02:28+00:00
I would be extremely happy to be proven wrong! I love using agents for exploratory prototypes as well as "rote" work, but have yet to see them really pay off when dealing with existing tech debt.

I find that the flaws of agentic workflows tend to be in the vein of "repeating past mistakes", looking at previous debt-riddled files and making an equivalently debt-riddled refactor, despite it looking better on the surface. A tunnel-vision problem of sorts
by sarchertech | 2026-02-08 01:03:09+00:00
Even if you specify performance ranges for every individual operation, you can’t specify all possible interactions between operations.

If you don’t care about the code you’re not checking in the code, and every time you regenerate the code you’re going to get radically different system performance.

Say you have 2 operations that access some data and you specify that each can’t take more than 1ms. Independently they work fine, but when a user runs B then A immediately, there’s some cache thrashing that happens that causes them to both time out. But this only happens in some builds because sometimes your LLM uses a different algorithm.

This kind of thing can happen with normal human software development of course, but constantly shifting implementations that “no one cares about” are going to make stuff like this happen much more often.

There’s already plenty of non determinism and chaos in software, adding an extra layer of it is going to be a nightmare.

The same thing is true for every single implementation detail that isn’t in the spec. In a complex system even implementation details you don’t think you care about become important when they are constantly shifting.
by dzaima | 2026-02-08 01:03:16+00:00
It only does if & while, not for. A goto in a single-pass thing would need separate handling for forwards vs backwards jumps, which involves keeping track of data per name (in a form where you can tell when it's not yet set; whereas if/while data is freely held in recursion stack). And you'd still need to handle at least `if ( expr ) goto foo;` to do any conditionals at all.
by bfung | 2026-02-08 01:03:38+00:00
If it’s easy to read and understand but doesn’t work, or is slow to execute, or costs a lot to run, is it good code?

If the function is a black box, but you’re sure the inputs produces a certain output without side effects and is fast, do you NEED “good code” inside?

After about 10yrs of coding, the next 10 of coding is pretty brainless. Better to try and solve people/tech interaction problems than plumbing up yet-another-social/mobile/gaming/crypto thing.
by int_19h | 2026-02-08 01:03:39+00:00
The problem is that it doesn't actually include the referenced file in the context. The model will only see what's in it if it deigns to read it, but that's not a given in all circumstances where it might need to.

I use this feature often in Claude to bring specific files so that they are in context at all times. E.g. when working on a parser, I will often put the grammar to be always in context. Or if working on a web app, all the model types.
by FjordWarden | 2026-02-08 01:03:57+00:00
Man am I getting tired of these articles and we can do without this neurotic melancholic whining. Maybe it is the title of the article that triggered me, but it reminded me of hearing Douglas Murray read excerpts from "The Strange Death of Europe" in his self-aggrandising pompous tone.

The authors colleague needed a couple of tries to write a kernel extension and somehow this means something about programming. If it was not for LLMs I would not have gone back to low-level programming, this stuff is actually getting fun again. Lets check the assembly the compiler produced for the code the LLM produced.
by amitprasad | 2026-02-08 01:04:03+00:00
It's hard to say. Perhaps LLMs of tomorrow will become capable enough to fix the mistakes of LLMs today. If so, great -- I'm worried about nothing.

If not, we could see that LLMs of tomorrow struggle to keep up with the bloat of today. The "interest on tech debt" is a huge unknown metric w.r.t. agents.
by runarberg | 2026-02-08 01:04:40+00:00
Undefined behavior is a edge case in C. Other programing languages (like JavaScript) goes to great lengths in defining their standards such that it is almost impossible to write code with undefined behavior. By far majority of code written out there has no undefined behavior. I think it is safe to assume that everyone here (except you) are talking about C code without undefined behavior when we mean that the same code produces the same results regardless of the compiler (as long as the compiler is standards conforming).
by dymk | 2026-02-08 01:05:43+00:00
Going to Japan felt like living in the future. I could walk into any glasses store, and for $50 or less buy a pair of frames and lenses. If I didn't know my prescription, included in the price was an automated eye exam machine which'd figure it out in 2 or 3 minutes.

In the US I'm paying $200 just for the exam.
by logicprog | 2026-02-08 01:06:28+00:00
Quoting my sibling comment:

Except it was written in a completely different language (Rust), which likely would have necessitated a completely different architecture, and nobody has established any relationship either algorithmically or on any other level between that compiler and TCC. Additionally, and Anthropic's compiler supports x86_64 (partially), ARM, and RISC-V, whereas TCC supports x86, x86_64, and ARM. Additionally, TCC is only known to be able to boot a modified version of the Linux 2.4 kernel[1] instead of an unmodified version of Linux 6.9.

Additionally, it is extremely unlikely for a model to be able to regurgitate this many tokens of something, especially translated into another language, especially without being prompted with the starting set of tokens in order to specifically direct it to do that regurgitation.

So, whatever you want to say about the general idea that all model output is plagiarism of patterns it's already seen or something. It seems pretty clear to me that this does not fit the hyperbolic description put forward in the parent comments.

[1]: https://www.bellard.org/tcc/tccboot.html
by subscribed | 2026-02-08 01:06:28+00:00
I don't want a random weed. I can easily get it myself on the street (there are several places with the distinct smell), and I know at least 3-4 people who I know smoke.

But I want safe (not pcp/fentanyl sprinkled) and sane (not engineered for a 'kick').

I don't know anyone who's a cultivator themselves :)
by rramadass | 2026-02-08 01:07:16+00:00
> The C abstract machine is exactly the important part. ... My gripe is only with people acting like the C abstract machine doesn't exist and C is just syntax sugar for a bit of assembly. It's a bit more involved than that.

Most people have no understanding of an abstract machine though the very idea of a high-level programming language is based on it.

The C Language Standard itself specifies "Program Execution" only on a "Abstract Machine". Mapping that abstract machine to an ISA/Memory on real hardware is the task of the C compiler. It can do this in any manner as long as the observable behaviour of the program is "as-if" it ran on the abstract machine.

Relevant quote:

A conforming implementation executing a well-formed program shall produce the same observable behavior as one of the possible executions of the corresponding instance of the abstract machine with the same program and the same input.

Further Resources;

Wikipedia Abstract machine - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_machine

Abstract machines for programming language implementation (pdf) - https://www.rw.cdl.uni-saarland.de/people/diehl/private/pubs...

The Abstract Machine: A Pattern for Designing Abstract Machines (pdf) - https://www.plopcon.org/pastplops/plop99/proceedings/garcia/...
by gruez | 2026-02-08 01:07:29+00:00
>Anonymous middleman that could potentiallly collect browsing histories

So literally any site? What's the alternative, using something like bypass paywalls clean, and allow it to access your browsing history AND steal your cookies?

>serves CAPTCHAS

I don't like it, but it's understandable given the load from AI scrapers. Do you also get upset at kernel.org for putting up Anubis?

>requires Javascript

So most sites?

>The site used to include a tracking pixel containing the visitor's IP address

???

They couldn't get visitor IP through logs?
by MattGaiser | 2026-02-08 01:07:56+00:00
> Is there anything you really have to get done regardless of quality right this second?

A vast number of things. There are a vast number of things I will accept having done in even mediocre quality, as in the old pre-AI world, I would never get to them at all.

Every friend with a startup idea. Every repetitive form I have to fill out every month for compliance. Just tooling for my day to day life.
by hackyhacky | 2026-02-08 01:07:56+00:00
> Claude and Gemini do not "do the same thing" in the same way in which Clang and GCC does the same thing with the same code (as long as certain axioms of the code holds).

True, but none of that is relevant to the non-programmer end user.

> You are relying on some odd definitions of "definitions", "equivalence", and "procedures"

These terms have rigorous definitions for programmers. The person making software in the future is a non-programmer and doesn't care about any of that. They care only that the LLM can produce what they asked for.

> The C Standard has been rigorously written to uphold certain principles

I know what a standard is. The point is that the standard is irrelevant if you never look at the code.