MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mixdup | 2026-02-08 00:34:12+00:00
The worst part of vibe coding, and developers as managers of "agents"

AI is at best a good intern or a new junior developer. We're locking in mediocrity and continuing enshittification. "Good enough" is codified as good enough, and nothing will be good or excellent. Non-determinism, and some amount of inaccuracy on the margins continually, no matter the industry or task at hand including finance, just so we can avoid paying a person to do the job
by panny | 2026-02-08 00:34:35+00:00
That doesn't change the fact that the submission is basically repeating the LISP curse. Best case scenario: you end up with a one-off framework and only you know how it works. The post you're replying to points out why this is a bad idea.

It doesn't matter if you don't use 90% of a framework as the submission bemoans. When everyone uses an identical API, but in different situations, you find lots of different problems that way. Your framework, and its users become a sort of BORG. When one of the framework users discovers a problem, it's fixed and propagated out before it can even be a problem for the rest of the BORG.

That's not true in your LISP curse, one off custom bespoke framework. You will repeat all the problems that all the other custom bespoke frameworks encountered. When they fixed their problem, they didn't fix it for you. You will find those problems over and over again. This is why free software dominates over proprietary software. The biggest problem in software is not writing the software, it's maintaining it. Free software shares the maintenance burden, so everyone can benefit. You bear the whole maintenance burden with your custom, one off vibe coded solutions.
by ossa-ma | 2026-02-08 00:34:42+00:00
Why don't you take a more proactive role in AI safety and alignment? I think that community would suit you better than some of the AI-maximalists/accelerationists here.

I do agree with some of your points, AI may result in a techno-feudalist world and yes as a direct result of "taking humans out of the equation." The solution isn't to be a luddite as you may suggest, it's to take a more proactive role in steering these models.
by hackyhacky | 2026-02-08 00:34:51+00:00
> How's the non-programmer going to tell the LLM to use Docker? They don't know what Docker is.

At this point, I think you are intentionally missing the point.

The non-programmer doesn't need to know about Docker, or race conditions, or memory leaks, or virtual functions. The programmer says "make me a web site" and the LLM figures it out. It will use an appropriate language and appropriate libraries. If appropriate, it will use Docker, and if not, it won't. If the non-programmer wants to change hosting, he can say so, and the LLM will change the hosting.

The level of abstraction goes up. The details that we've spent our lives thinking about are no longer relevant.

It's really not that complicated.
by Nextgrid | 2026-02-08 00:36:03+00:00
Only if you can’t fly to a neutral low-tax country and enjoy low tax and not being sent to war. But you do you, I do me.

(And of course, if they don’t have a problem with stealing over half of the fruits of your labor, do you really think they won’t send you to fight for them when the chips are down anyway?)
by WalterBright | 2026-02-08 00:36:11+00:00
I think we can agree that Musk is strongly motivated. He works insanely hard and takes huge personal risks with his fortune.

He says why he does it - over and over - to save humanity by spreading it out into space.

> desperate for approval and accolades. From anyone.

If true, it is rather common behavior, not deeply unwell. Politicians 100% fall into that category. So do movie stars. So does every Olympic athlete. So what.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-08 00:38:08+00:00
> Also, on a personal level it rubs me the wrong way to have my insurance premiums go towards something that people could just do themselves, from something they did to themselves. I know many will disagree, of course, and there are other examples (say, lung cancer treatments) that are similar.

Our Obsession With Personal Responsibility Is Making Us Sick - https://jacobin.com/2026/02/health-inequality-individual-res... - February 6th, 2026
by tialaramex | 2026-02-08 00:38:31+00:00
IIRC Banks insisted in interviews that the culture's citizens aren't pets. The exact relationship is, like the FTL travel and indeed teleportation, very vague and only sketched in where needed to advance the plot.

We have no experience with the extremely asymmetrical relationships which would result. Lem tries to imagine this in Golem XIV - what happens when humans who are used to thinking of themselves as smart are talking with a categorically more intelligent machine - and it doesn't work very well even though it's only a sketch.

"Tatja Grimm's World" has a neat trick where Vinge is able to sidestep this because [[SPOILER]] although Tatja is much smarter than everybody else from her world, that's not because she's smarter than we are, almost everyone born on her planet is an idiot for reasons the story justifies.
by martinald | 2026-02-08 00:38:47+00:00
Hmm not sure I agree with you there entirely. You're right there's queues to ensure that you max out the hardware with concurrent batches to _start_ inference, but I doubt you'd want to split up the same job into multiple bits and move them around servers if you could at all avoid it.

It requires a lot of bandwidth to do that and even at 400gbit/sec it would take a good second to move even a smaller KV cache between racks even in the same DC.
by aspenmartin | 2026-02-08 00:39:09+00:00
We’re not locking in anything, “at best a good intern or new junior developer” was maybe true at like sonnet 4 and earlier. Code is not codified it’s living. Models of tomorrow will correct the model outputs of today. At some point alarmingly soon, no one will read code just like nobody reads the assembly output of a C compiler.

Non determinism and inaccuracy are also very real features of human programmers.
by aqeisi | 2026-02-08 00:39:17+00:00
When I was learning web penetration testing / security, I found it really hard to put the bits and pieces together. There are a lot of labs, but the basics are not really explained in depth. The attack simply "works" and you are left thinking why it did. After 7 years in AppSec, I built AppSecMaster, with clear learning tracks for all skill levels. Each lab has its code attached, where you can spot the insecure code and also a live instance for you to test on. Solutions are explained in detail, starting from the core concepts. For expert level users, we also have big applications (mansions) that help prepare you for top level code review certifications.

Best of luck to all
by all2 | 2026-02-08 00:39:34+00:00
I'm assuming GP means 'run inference locally on GPU or RAM'. You can run really big LLMs on local infra, they just do a fraction of a token per second, so it might take all night to get a paragraph or two of text. Mix in things like thinking and tool calls, and it will take a long, long time to get anything useful out of it.
by mjr00 | 2026-02-08 00:39:49+00:00
How does the non-programmer know about hosting? They just want a burger site. What's hosting? Is that like Facebook?

To maybe get out of this loop: your entire thesis is that nonfunctional requirements don't matter, which is a silly assertion. Anyone who has done any kind of software development work knows that nonfunctional requirements are important, which is why they exist in the first place.
by feelamee | 2026-02-08 00:39:51+00:00
Of course people do" virtual functions" in C, but I think this is not an argument despite C.
I noticed that making virtual in C++ is sooo easy that people start abusing it. This making reading/understanding/debugging code much harder (especially if they mess this up with templates).
And here C is a way - it allow but complicates "virtual". So, you will think twice before using it
by thepuppet33r | 2026-02-08 00:40:00+00:00
Everyone complains about one little update breaking your PC, or random things not working, but my Windows 11 laptop for work has been a nightmare, too.

I'm always terrified to let them install the latest version update as it has done everything from break all my taskbar shortcuts to make my computer blue screen on boot.

My fingerprint reader didn't work on it until I manually installed the fingerprint driver.

My friend had Outlook start deleting all of his emails on loading Outlook after a minor update for reasons that even the helpdesk couldn't parse.

I understand that Linux is rougher around the edges in some ways, but I think we are just all used to the friction Windows has (like that bizarre right-click menu behind a button on the right-click menu thing).

I've spent time on a Mac, too, and while it has way less "huh, that just doesn't work today, okay" moments, it's not perfect either. No OS is.

My hope is not that everyone in the world will switch to Linux. I don't think "the year of Linux" will ever happen. But I wish we didn't only have two poles of articles when it comes to people coming to Linux: The "I switched to Linux and it was so easy and I'm never going back and Window sux" or the "I switched to Linux and it killed my dog and ate all my food and I had to quit my job just to play Stardew Valley on it."

It's an OS. No OS is perfect. Linux is more customizable but more breakable. MacOS is less customizable, but more stable. Windows is an ad-laden AI hellscape that still works better with most software because most software is written for it.
by jopsen | 2026-02-08 00:40:14+00:00
Two can play at the game, and the EU was probably closer to starting it.

The EU trade bazooka measure (Anti-Coercion Instrument) allows the EU to legally suspend patents, copyright, etc. if a member state is threatened, for example using tarifs. Which the US was a actively doing.

At the end of day, it doesn't matter the Danish government cannot surrender. Following WW2 it was made illegal for the government to do so. And voters would never support, not would Trump have the patience for Danish constitutional changes.

I'm quite convinced that:

(A) An invasion would have been a shooting matter. Even if the shooting would eventually come to an end.

(B) Denmark and most of EU and large parts of the world would never recognize an annexation.

(C) Congress in the US wouldn't recognize the annexation.

(D) EU and US would be both have entirely unnecessary and massive depression as massive assets would be seized or written off.

(E) Russia and China would be thrilled.

It was an allround shit show.

Trying to go further would have upended economic ties across the Atlantic. Causing massive economic depression on both sides.

But at the specific measures of parents: HUGE parts of US economy is Intellectual Property -- how dumb would the US have to be to declare IP laws invalid?
by cogman10 | 2026-02-08 00:40:31+00:00
> lung cancer treatments

A fairly large portion of lung cancer patients didn't "do it to themselves" (about 20% and rising).

It remains to be seen how vaping impacts lung cancer,

I don't like the idea of finding reasons to penalize people for predicable life decisions that lead to treatment needs. Insurance companies have a lot of resources to make those predictions and if unshackled they aren't afraid of using them. Making construction workers, miners, or truck drivers pay more (or be denied outright) for insurance because their job has negative health effects would be bad for society.
by stoneforger | 2026-02-08 00:40:33+00:00
It's not just tech it's everything. This is an existential crisis because we have rolled back almost two centuries. We are just handing the keys to the kingdom to these sociopaths, and we are thanking them for it. They are not even having the decency to admit they really just want to use us as numbers, this was always the case since the industrial revolution. Dozens of generations worldwide have toiled and suffered collectively to start creating life changing technology and these bloodsucking vampires that can't quench their thirst just live in their own reality and it doesn't include the rest of us. It's really been the same problem for ages but now they really seem to have won for the last time.
by sarchertech | 2026-02-08 00:40:52+00:00
It’s not about optimizing for performance, it’s about non-deterministic performance between “compiler” runs.

The ideal that spec driven developers are pushing towards is that you’d check in the spec not the code. Anytime you need the code you’d just regenerate it. The problem is different models, different runs of the same model, and slightly different specs will produce radically different code.

It’s one thing when your program is slow, it’s something completely different when your program performance varies wildly between deployments.

This problem isn’t limited to performance, it’s every implicit implementation detail not captured in the spec. And it’s impossible to capture every implementation detail in the spec without the spec being as complex as the code.
by diob | 2026-02-08 00:41:16+00:00
Not really, in my experience you still have to be good at solving problems to use it effectively. Claude (and other AI) can help folks find a "fix", but a lot of times it's a band-aid if the user doesn't understand how to debug / solve things themselves.

So the type of programmers you're talking about, who could solve complex problems, are actually just enhanced by it.
by moregrist | 2026-02-08 00:42:52+00:00
> There are plenty of papers out there that look at LLM productivity and every one of them seems to have glaring methodology limitations and/or reports on models that are 12+ months out of date.

This is a general problem with papers measuring productivity in any sense. It's often a hard thing to define what "productivity" means and to figure out how to measure it. But also in that any study with worthwhile results will:

1. Probably take some time (perhaps months or longer) to design, get funded, and get through an IRB.

2. Take months to conduct. You generally need to get enough people to say anything, and you may want to survey them over a few weeks or months.

3. Take months to analyze, write up, and get through peer review. That's kind of a best case; peer review can take years.

So I would view the studies as necessarily time-boxed snapshots due to the practical constraints of doing the work. And if LLM tools change every year, like they have, good studies will always lag and may always feel out of date.

It's totally valid to not find a lot of value in them. On the other hand, people all-in on AI have been touting dramatic productivity gains since ChatGPT first arrived. So it's reasonable to have some historical measurements to go with the historical hype.

At the very least, it gives our future agentic overlords something to talk about on their future AI-only social media.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2026-02-08 00:43:43+00:00
...violates no patents and can't materially harm a person in any way can be restricted on grounds of paternalistic "safety", then one would be right to remain skeptical of the claim that the FDA is restricting action against unauthorized semaglutide knockoffs to...

Well actually, there are lawsuits in the works because the Philips CPAP machine had toxic foam which would break down and increase the risk of cancer.
by martinald | 2026-02-08 00:44:01+00:00
I think it's just routing to faster hardware:

H100 SXM: 3.35 TB/s HBM3

GB200: 8 TB/s HBM3e

2.4x faster memory - which is exactly what they are saying the speedup is. I suspect they are just routing to GB200 (or TPU etc equivalents).

FWIW I did notice _sometimes_ recently Opus was very fast. I put it down to a bug in Claude Code's token counting, but perhaps it was actually just occasionally getting routed to GB200s.
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-08 00:44:53+00:00
Taxing on net specifically reduces integration. Imagine if every business was taxed on 30% if their revenue. You would buy an iPhone for $1000 including $300 tax, and $700 to Apple. Apple pays $700 to Foxconn, who pays $210 tax and gets to use $490 to make the phone. But now imagine Apple buys Foxconn and makes it one company, now they keep $700 to make the phone with. Taxing on net fixes this.

It's not required for personal income because you can't conjoin yourself with your butcher to become one person.
by loeg | 2026-02-08 00:44:56+00:00
> I would've had to pay close to $1k a month to take it otherwise.

If your frame of reference for GLP-1 prices is in like, 2024 or earlier, check prices again. They've come down a lot. You can get tirzepatide from Lilly without insurance coverage for under $500/mo (a little less for the smaller doses): https://investor.lilly.com/news-releases/news-release-detail...
by aegismind_app | 2026-02-08 00:45:18+00:00
I built an AI orchestration system where each component maps to a brain region. Not as a metaphor — each region is a separate module that influences how queries are actually processed.

The architecture has 12 regions:

- Hippocampal Memory — tracks which strategies worked for which query types
- Prefrontal Monitor — assesses confidence before committing to a response
- Amygdala — detects emotional tone (frustrated, curious, confused) and calibrates response style
- Dorsal Attention Network — allocates token budget and model count based on query complexity
- Cerebellum — plans parallel vs sequential model execution, implements circuit breakers
- Insula — monitors error rate, latency, token burn, and disk pressure; auto-throttles when stressed
- Corpus Callosum — HTTP API bridge between two hemispheres (user-facing service + autonomous worker)
- Temporal Pole — builds user profiles over time (expertise, domain interests, communication style)
- Plus 4 more (Association Cortex, Synaptic Plasticity, Basal Selection, Cingulate Detector)

Every query passes through a 21-step pipeline. Multiple models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, Grok) are queried in parallel, validated for novelty and coherence, then synthesized.

Key design decisions:

1. All brain modules are rule-based heuristics, not LLM calls. Zero additional API cost. The Amygdala is pattern matching on keywords and sentence structure, not calling GPT to detect emotion.

2. Every module is wrapped in try/except. If any brain region fails, the query still completes normally. They add intelligence but never block.

3. Two hemispheres run as separate services. The "Left Brain" handles user requests. The "Right Brain" runs 24/7 autonomously researching global problems. They share discoveries through the Corpus Callosum (an internal API bridge).

4. The Insula implements genuine interoception — it monitors the system's own health metrics and throttles when stressed (reducing model count and iterations), similar to how biological interoception regulates behavior under physiological stress.

What it's NOT: This isn't AGI. The brain mapping is an architectural pattern for organizing multi-model orchestration, not a claim about consciousness or general intelligence. The neuroscience analogy helps structure a complex system in a way that's intuitive and extensible.

Stack: Python/FastAPI backend, Next.js frontend, SQLite for each brain region's state, deployed on Render.

Try it: https://www.aegismind.app

Happy to discuss the architecture decisions or answer questions about the design.
by jwpapi | 2026-02-08 00:46:05+00:00
yeah a lot of people are just coping. If someone wants to become better or more productive, invest in engineering guardrails and verifications validation layers.

There are thousand of examples where tech became obsolute and frankly it’s given. No coders opinion will change it, but everybody is free to do what ever hobby the want. Author does seem to accept it, but commentor above not.
by nemothekid | 2026-02-08 00:46:07+00:00
This is something I've been thinking about as I start to adopt more agent-first coding.

There is a real advantage to having good code especially when using agents. "Good Code" makes iteration faster, the agent is unlikely to make mistakes and will continue to produce extensible code that can easily be debugged (by both you and the agent).

A couple months ago I refactored a module that had gotten unweildly, and I tried to test if Claude could add new features on the old code. Opus 4.5 just could not add the feature in the legacy module (which was a monster function that just got feature-crept), but was able to completely one shot it after the refactor.

So there is clear value in having "clean code", but I'm not sure how valuable it is. If even AGI cannot handle tech debt, then there's value is at least building scaffolding (or atleast prompting the scaffolding first). On the other hand there may be a future where the human doesn't concern himself with "clean code" at all: if the value of "clean code" only saves 5 minutes to a sufficiently advanced agent, the scaffolding work is usefuless.

My reference is assembly - I'm in my early 30s and I have never once cared about "clean" assembly. I have cared about the ASM of specific hot functions I have had to optimize, but I've never learned what is proper architecture for assembly programs.
by bodge5000 | 2026-02-08 00:47:21+00:00
I mean as has already been pointed out the fact that its a clone is a big reason why, but then I also think I could probably churn out a simple clone of reddit in less than a week. We've been through this before with twitter, the value isnt the tech (which is relatively straightforward), its the userbase. Of course Reddit has some more advanced features which would be more difficult, but I think the public db probably tells you that wasn't much of a concern to Moltbook either, so yeh, I reckon I could do that.
by toprerules | 2026-02-08 00:48:07+00:00
I would have said the same thing a year or two ago, but AI is capable of doing deep dives. It can selectively clone and read dependencies outside of its data set. It can use tool calls to read documentation. It can log into machines and insert probes. It may not be better than everyone, but it's good enough and continuing to improve such that I believe subject matter expertise counts for much less.
by roenxi | 2026-02-08 00:48:09+00:00
That seems pretty reasonable, yes. That is like asking if putting a low-cost Ops Research specialist in every company could make a 5% difference in operations - yes it could. Making resource-efficient decisions is not something that comes naturally to humans and having a system that consistently makes high quality game-theoretic recommendations would be huge.

Bunch of tiny companies would love to hire a mathematician to optimise what they are doing to get a 5-10% improvement. Unfortunately a 5-10% improvement in a small business can't justify the cost of hiring another person, and good mathematicians with business sense and empathy are a rare commodity.
by thefounder | 2026-02-08 00:48:10+00:00
The good thing is that now instead to spend 6 months - 1 year working on your app and making sure the code is just perfect you spend just a 1 or two , generate some garbage code but at least publish your app before you burn out. Once it gains some traction like it or not you gonna have to "fix the code" as well. I feel that AI is really a blessing for good programmers/coders because they start to focus more on the business of what they build than on the code.