MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tjchear | 2026-02-09 08:00:58+00:00
I take a fairly optimistic view to the adoption of AI assistants in our line of work. We begin to work and reason at a higher level and let the agents worry about the lower level details. Know where else this happens? Any human organization that existed, exists, and will exist. Hierarchies form because no one person can do everything and hold all the details in their mind, especially as the complexity of what they intend to accomplish goes up.

One can continue to perfect and exercise their craft the old school way, and that’s totally fine, but don’t count on that to put food on the table. Some genius probably can, but I certainly am not one.
by Ef996 | 2026-02-09 08:01:10+00:00
Hello, I am the creator of this road system. The thing is that I myself don't even know what I want to do with it. lol. Maybe an asset or a game (a bit scared to jump in a full fledge game to be honest).

I am a fun of Junxions my self which follow closely. But the approach in our systems if very different. Junxions creator uses the same kind of node base/bezier shapes paradigm where intersections happen as node graphs and not automatically as collisions between road segments. It's hard to explain but I am planning to dive into more details on why those two approaches are different in my next blog deep dive.
by plausibility | 2026-02-09 08:01:21+00:00
At the lower or easier end, there’s your standard containerisation tools like Docker Compose or the Podman equivalents. Just move your compose files and zip the mount folders and you can move stuff easily enough.

Middle ground you’ve got stuff like Ansible for if you want to install things without containers, but still want it to be scripted. I don’t use these much since they feel like the worst of both worlds.

Higher end in terms of effort is using something like NixOS, where you get basically Terraform for everything in your distro.
by ChaosOp | 2026-02-09 08:01:22+00:00
Still working on Gaming Couch, a web-based local multiplayer party game platform. It's like a lovechild of Jackbox Games and Mario Party: https://gamingcouch.com. Back in December Gaming Couch hit the front page of Hacker News, you can check it out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46344573

At the moment working on the 3rd party development tools so in the future anyone can make their game dev dreams a reality and make a simple and fun multiplayer party game for the Gaming Couch platform, ideally in only one weekend!

If you're an interested game dev that would like to beta test the dev tools, hit me up either here, via Discord (link available from https://gamingcouch.com) or by emailing me at gc[dot]community[at]gamingcouch[dot]com!

The TL;DR of Gaming Couch:

- Currently in free Early Access with 18 competitive mini-games.

- Players use their mobile phones as controllers (you can use game pads as well!)

- Everything is completely web-based, no downloads or installs are necessary to play

- All games support up to 8 players at a time and are action based, with quick ~one minute rounds to keep a good pace. This means there are no language based trivia or asynchronous games!
by casey2 | 2026-02-09 08:01:24+00:00
People from the US are totally unaware that their leaders are unpopular abroad!
If only traditional media didn't have such a stranglehold on the US population The people would know they would...

I fail to see the point of pushing this narrative. Has braindrain taken all of Europe good writers? Meanwhile China and America still take all the medals. All France can do is pick the games so Marchand gets the most golds, so much for collectivism.

Oh and Marchand swims for UT Austin BTW. An American school, training under an American coach with American infrastructure.
by jazzyjackson | 2026-02-09 08:01:57+00:00
> Ask someone to explain how riding a bicycle works, or an uneducated native speaker to explain the grammar of their language. They have no clue.

This works against your argument. Someone who can ride a bike clearly knows how to ride a bike, that they cannot express it in tokenized form speaks to the limited scope ofof written word in representing embodiment.
by tomasz-tomczyk | 2026-02-09 08:02:08+00:00
I'm juggling two projects:

https://www.fastpause.app/

Offline first, no tracking PWA for intermittent fasting and mindful eating. It helped me lose another 3 kg in January. Spiked a native iOS version, but I really like the simplicity of just the PWA. Not sure what's next!

--

https://reposit.bot/

Having done a lot of back and forth with LLMs and at the end throwing away learnings from a conversation felt so wasteful - reposit allows you to /share a summary of the valuable learning from your LLM chat for others to discover.

At the beginning of researching a problem, your agent can search reposit just like Context7 for docs. This way, even if you opt out of sharing your data with your LLM provider (as it's all or nothing), you can choose to publicise a solution to your problem with very little effort.

I'm working on extracting valuable learnings from open-source community projects as a starting point now (with attribution), as it probably needs a larger database to be valuable for users to install and use.

You can also self-host it and share privately within the company.
by inemesitaffia | 2026-02-09 08:02:11+00:00
Ukraine's co-operation was required.

See

Starlink Blocks Russian Troops' Internet Access, at Ukraine's Request

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46906875

Right now there are complaints about non working Ukrainian equipment.

If SpaceX had acted on their own, the blame would fall on them.

The blame is on the Ukrainian government now.
Discussion: Seedance-style AI video generation workflows
by littlepp | 2026-02-09 08:02:40+00:00
I recently came across a site called Seedance 2:
https://seedance2.tech/

It seems to be exploring a different angle of AI video generation, focusing more on rhythm, motion, and visual continuity rather than long-form cinematic storytelling.

I’m curious what people here think about this direction in general:
- Does a rhythm- or motion-focused approach to AI video feel genuinely useful?
- How does this compare to current AI video tools in terms of control and expectations?
- If you were to use an AI video generator, what kind of control would actually matter to you?

Not affiliated, just interested in discussing where AI video generation workflows might be heading.
by pducks32 | 2026-02-09 08:02:43+00:00
Coding is a tool to solve a problem, but, to many it is also a culture. It has a history, it has connections, it has lore, it had some loosely commonly held values, and yes it absolutely was a craft. It’s okay for people to mourn that. It’s not the same as someone who may have taken it up for money. That itself, is seeing coding as a tool for income—which is valid.

Calling it pathetic I think lacks empathy and perhaps an appreciation for what it might mean to other people outside the letters we type. Those letters, the languages we type, compilers that process them, and libraries that enable them were, at the end of the day, made by people.
by fragmede | 2026-02-09 08:03:10+00:00
> I wonder if Nicholas Carlini (the author of the Anthropic post) would have had more success using Claude Code alongside his own abilities for significantly cheaper.

You're thinking like an individual, not a corporation. $20,000 is a lot of money for me to go and pay the bill for as an individual. That's a car for most of America! However, if I'm earning $20,000/year at my job, that's peanuts. Thus Mr. Carlini (whom surely makes vastly more than $20,000/year) being able to do, what previously would have taken a team of people to do, is nothing short of astounding. I don't know how well the compiler stacks up against, say clang or gcc, the real question is how much did it cost Intel to make v0.1 of icc.

> For example, someone might feel like they're more productive, but their output is roughly the same as what it was pre-LLM tooling.

There is just no comparison. It's not about how much faster it is, it's about could I have attempted this project before? Yes. Would I have attempted it? Probably not! The start up cost for a project was just so high that I've a list of things that I'd love to attempt but never made the time for. With AI, I'm slowly knocking things off that list (most of them don't actually go anywhere, but there's an itch to scratch, as a hobby).

> not nearly as good as some would have you believe.

Hallucinations from LLMs are interesting as a concept, but they can hardly be blamed for it as they learned to ability from humans. (Some) humans love to blow smoke up your ass in pursuit of the all mighty dollar. LLMs have their limitations. There's some prognostication about the future, but I'm interested in what they can do today.

Thank you for the thoughtful response!
by penteract | 2026-02-09 08:05:36+00:00
Not quite - you need 12 pentagons in a mostly hexagonal tiling of the sphere (and if you're keeping them similar sizes, Gosper-islands force hexagon-like adjacency). I don't think it's possible to tile the sphere using more than 20 exactly identical pieces.

You could get a Gosper-island like tiling starting from H3 by saying that each "Hex" is defined recursively to be the union of its 6/7 parts (stopping at some small enough hexagons/pentagons if you really want). Away from the pentagons, these tiles would be very close to Gosper islands.
by mikeayles | 2026-02-09 08:05:36+00:00
I built a Pokédex for zoo trips for my girlfriend:

https://www.zookeeperapp.com

https://www.mikeayles.com/#zookeeper-wip

It lets you take photos of all the animals you see to collect them, when you 'capture' a new animal, it gives you fun facts about them.

I seeded it with UK zoos, but there's no reason it can't work elsewhere.

It was built because the signage at a zoo we went to was terrible and we had no idea what some animals were, so it matches your photo with the list of animals to the best of its ability.
by resfirestar | 2026-02-09 08:07:30+00:00
What does this imagined conversation have to do with the linked article? The “pro” and “anti” character both sound like the kind of insufferable idiots I’d expect to encounter on social media, the OP is a very nice blog post about performance testing and finding out what compilers do, doesn’t attempt any unwarranted speculation about what agents “struggle with” or will do “next generation”, how is it an example of that sort of shitposting?
by swyx | 2026-02-09 08:07:44+00:00
saved you a claude:

Polarr's Mission: For over a decade, Polarr has provided photographers with intelligent, intuitive AI-powered tools for photo and video editing, culling, and workflow automation. The company pioneered web and mobile photo editing apps and powered photo enhancements on hundreds of millions of devices through edge AI SDKs. Pixieset is a Vancouver-based all-in-one SaaS platform serving over 600,000 photographers with client galleries, websites, and online stores. Polarr is a San Jose-based startup that has built a community of creators with AI-powered editing tools and a catalog of over 1 million filters generated monthly. 1

Founding & Early Years

Polarr was founded in 2014 by Stanford graduate Borui Wang and Derek Yan. The company launched its online photo editor in February 2015. The app achieved remarkable early traction, receiving 250,000 downloads in its first 48 hours.

Product Evolution

• June 2015: First mobile version of Polarr Photo Editor released

• Fall 2015: Launched Polarr Photo Editors for Windows 10 and macOS

Polarr was named Apple's Best of the App Store for 2015 and 2016.

• December 2017: Released Album+, an app using on-device AI to organize photos

• March 2019: Announced $11.5M Series A funding round led by Threshold Ventures. Other Investors: Threshold Ventures, Cota Capital, Pear VC, StartX, and ZhenFund

• April 2022: Launched Polarr 24FPS app for video editing with Polarr filters

• January 2023: Launched Polarr Next, an AI web app that learns user style for automatic photo updates

• 2023: Introduced Polarr AI Copilots (beta) for transforming text into photos, videos, and designs

Public revenue figures for Polarr are not disclosed. However, the company demonstrated strong early traction:
• 4 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs) as of 2019, with only 30% based in the US
• Enterprise partnerships with major OEMs including Samsung, LG, Oppo, and Lenovo, whose native camera apps integrated Polarr's technology
• Enterprise value estimated at $46–69M as of recent valuation data

The company operates a freemium model with premium subscription tiers ($2.39/month for filter storage and premium filters, $4.79/month for all features), but specific ARR or annual revenue figures have not been publicly released.
by berdario | 2026-02-09 08:08:48+00:00
I don't think he's arguing for rural, just expressing concern about the *biggest* cities.

> entertainment, variety, walkability, and many other benefits that rural places don't provide

I appreciate all of this as well, but at the end of the day, I moved to a city with 80x the population of my hometown because of a (specific) job. Rent is also significantly higher, and if I had to consume my savings to survive here, I'd surely move out. Entertainment and walkability have secondary importance compared to putting food on the table and saving for retirement.
by Sir68k | 2026-02-09 08:09:23+00:00
A lot of reverse engineering and guesswork actually!

One of the parts when writing a extensions for a device from which you've only extract a firmware blob from memory space is to understand as much as possible from the memory layout, and possible memory mappings. With HiMD MiniDisc recorders, they don't just have to bring up the MCU on boot, but also the VME (Virtual Mobile Engine / DSP).

As such, during my investigation I found a bit of code mapped to an unknown memory area 0x0081_0000. It contained what seemed to be a vector table, code for bootstrapping the system, and then some USB code with a small protocol to do some debug operations. The code was written as it was supposed to live at address 0x00 (which is where the Flash is mapped to in normal conditions).

As such, to me this seemed to clearly be a bootrom that could be activated in some condition. The question was, how?

Sony has always been protective of their hardware, and as such they have been careful in the service manual documentation of their NetMD/HiMD devices and renamed any pin/pad that could be potentially dangerous (as in, giving more control to users than they should have). Of course, if you look for nonsensical names, that brings you directly to the interesting pins :) That's how I isolated JTAG (though figuring out how to get it working and the right pinout was another story). The HSALF pin stood out as well, somehow I sort-of recognised the name, but I did not know how until I realised it stood for FLASH in reverse. Basically, it was pulled up, activating the flash. Pulling it down activated the bootrom.

The other pin that has to be bridged is related to the power IC. If not asserted by the MCU it will shut off. In bootrom mode or JTAG the MCU will not do this, so you need to force the power IC to stay alive.
by bgirard | 2026-02-09 08:09:36+00:00
That's true and I fully agree. I don't think LLMs' progress in writing a toy C compiler diminishes the achievements that the GCC project did.

But also we've just witnessed LLMs go from being a glorified line auto-complete tool to it writing a C compiler in ~3 years. And I think that's something. And noting how we keep moving the goal post.
by bux93 | 2026-02-09 08:10:16+00:00
That's also my take, vibe coding as a non-deterministic 4GL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_...

4GLs are productive yes, but also limited, and still require someone to come up with specs that are both informed by (business) realities and engineering considerations.

But this is also an arena where bosses expect magic to happen when people are involved; just pronounce a new strategy, and your business magically transforms - without any of that pesky 'figuring out what to do' or 'aligning stakeholders' or 'wondering what drugs the c-suite is doing'. Let LLMs write the specs!
by PetitPrince | 2026-02-09 08:10:53+00:00
I agree with the general vibe of your post but let me make a tangeant:

> I always think of my Roomba in this kind of situation, namely when one tries to imagine a future where tech works outside of the computer. Basically my little vacuum robot mostly sits idling in the corner because... a basic broom or a normal vacuum cleaner is radically more efficient, even if it means I have to do so myself.

For me the whole value of a robot vacuum is that... I don't vacuum, the robot does, and when it does so it when I'm not at home. Reduce the dust periodically by 75% so that it's neater; I'll do a deep clean every few month or so.

(maybe what you're saying is that the cost of vacuuming for you is low enough that it's similar to launching the robot vacuum, in that case I understand you !)
by knorker | 2026-02-09 08:10:56+00:00
> "Shipping" wouldn't be a problem, they could just run it from a network drive.

This is exactly the shipping I'm talking about. The gains would be so miniscule (because, again, and incremental compile was never actually slow even on the PC) and the network overhead adds up. Especially back then.

> just run it from a network drive.

It still needs to be transferred to run.

> I know which system I would choose for compiles.

All else equal, perhaps. But were you actually a developer in the 90s?
by jbjbjbjb | 2026-02-09 08:11:04+00:00
> a simple English prompt

And that’s where my suspicion stems from.

An equivalent original human piece of work from an expert level programmer wouldn’t be able to do this without all the context. By that I mean all the all the shared insights, discussion and design that happened when making the compiler.

So to do this without any of that context is likely just very elaborate copy pasta.
by chickensong | 2026-02-09 08:12:15+00:00
I know, the expectation of phones and "just install our app" sucks, but it's easier than the alternatives for most people.

I don't think we should be ok with the status quo, and I think complaining about issues can be a catalyst for change, but rather than just complain about the state of affairs, I'm pointing out that alternatives exist, so it's on us to enact change.

TBH, I'm pessimistic about my words making a difference, but I want to promote independent/DIY mindset anyway. It's ironic that the frontier LLMs are proprietary platforms, yet they're enabling more independence to their users. Regardless, if everything goes to shit, we can still opt out and go back to the previous generation's lifestyle. No mobile phones and moving at the speed of snail mail doesn't sound all that bad, though I'd sure miss Google Maps.
by abbyprog | 2026-02-09 08:12:31+00:00
I'm firmly in the anti/unimpressed camp so far - but of course open to see where it goes.

I mean this compiler is the equivalent of handing someone a calculator when it was first invented and seeing that it took 2 hours to multiply two numbers together, I would go "cool that you have a machine that can do math, but I can multiply faster by hand, so it's a useless device to me".
by Ef996 | 2026-02-09 08:13:26+00:00
Very happy reading this because I was always thinking exactly the same about historical games. One of my turn offs for any historical city building is when they are grid based. I always found that to be highly unrealistic, but I yeah, was aware that it was just some unneeded complexity and just my nerdy nitpicks. The point you make would’ve actually been a strong argument in my article. Too bad I didn’t have the inspiration to include it. The way historical cities developed in an ordered yet intricate way without any central planning (same as ant colonies) is actually very fascinating and I might write about this at some point.
by coldtea | 2026-02-09 08:14:03+00:00
A high trust society reduces the incidence of scams/becoming victims to scams by reducing the number of scammers and increasing the number of honest people and honest behavior. That's what a high trust society is and does by definition.

If you want "mechanics", that would be an increased focus on community, with positive community best-behavior incentives (reputation, pride in work, solidarity, rewarding good behavior) and negative ones (shame, ostracism, punishing bad actors), social cohesion, and an emphasis on duty and morality, while reducing cynicism, and selfish individualism. This includes the appropriate role models and media/entertainment landscape.
by mrkeen | 2026-02-09 08:15:08+00:00
Adam Jacob
It’s not slop. It’s not forgetting first principles. It’s a shift in how the craft work, and it’s already happened.

This post just doubled down without presenting any kind of argument.

Bruce Perens
Do not underestimate the degree to which mostly-competent programmers are unaware of what goes on inside the compiler and the hardware.

Now take the median dev, compress his lack of knowledge into a lossy model, and rent that out as everyone's new source of truth.
by collingreen | 2026-02-09 08:15:08+00:00
The "whatever that means" isn't a judgement jab at your point, merely acknowledging the hand waving of my own with "good enough".

I hope this comment thread helps with your cheeky jab that I might have a problem understanding or using casual language.

I'm not sure if it's moving the goalpost or not to back away from a strong claim that LLMs are at the "good enough" (whatever that means!) level now and instead fall back to "some devs will just ship it and therefore that's good enough, by definition".

Regardless, I think we agree that, if LLMs are "good enough" in this way then we can think a lot less about code and logic and instead focus on prompts and feature requests.

I just don't think we agree on what "good enough" is, if current LLMs produce it with less effort than alternatives, and if most devs already believe the LLM generated code is good enough for that.

I use LLMs for a lot of dev work but I haven't personally seen these things one- or even many- shot things to the level I'd feel comfortable being on call for.
by psychoslave | 2026-02-09 08:15:10+00:00
To be fair, I don't know how a living human individual work, let alone how they actually work in society. I suspect I'm not alone in this case.

So nothing new under the sun, often the practices come first, then only can some theory emerge, from which point it can be leverage on to go further than present practice and so on. Sometime practice and theory are more entengled in how they are created on the go, obviously.
by coldtea | 2026-02-09 08:16:03+00:00
>Not really. You can be a Principal Engineer/Architect/Maintainer and do very little coding, but lots of code review and testing.

Those are usually software astronauts and dead weight. But of course they think highly of themselves.

I'd take someone who does that and codes a hell of a lot, like Linus or Lattner anyday of the week.
by lejalv | 2026-02-09 08:16:13+00:00
In fact, we can use an automated schedule: first PR - if rejected, 5€ are drawn from the contributor’s account, then 4€, 3€, etc (plug in your favourite decreasing function, round to 0€ when sufficiently close).

But, crucially, if accepted, the contributor gets to draw 5€ from the repository’s fund of failed PRs (if it is there), so that first bona fide contributors are incentiviced to contribute. Nobody gets to profit from failed PRs except successful new contributors. Virtuous cycle, does not appeal to the individual self-interest of repo maintainers.

One thing I am unsure of is whether fly-by AI contributions are typically made with for-free AI or there's already a hidden cost to them. This expected cost of machine-driven contribution is a factor to take into account when coming up with the upside/downside of first PR.

PS. this is a Gedankenexperiment, I am not sure what introducing monetary rewards / penalties would do to the social dynamics, but trying with small amounts may teach us something.