MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by selridge | 2026-02-26 19:48:28+00:00
I think we need to invent that distinction, which is notable since the article has MANY opportunities to say it clearly. Instead we are given a picture where the improvement of the agent and the software (here docs are included) is a LOOP, and to make the loop plausible we need to imagine learning in agents that doesn't exist.

That doesn't mean your agent won't improve with a better onboarding regime, but that's a unidirectional process. You can insinuate things into context, but that's not automatically 'learned' and it can be lost at compaction and will be discarded when the session ends. An agent who is onboarded might write better onboarding docs, that's true! But "agents are onboarded mindfully with project docs, then write project docs, which are used to onboard." That's a real lift, but it's best expressed as "we should have been writing good docs and tests all along, but that shit was exhausting; now robots do it."

Don't get me wrong, a fractal onboarding regime is the way. It's just...not a self-improving loop without allowing contextual latch to stand in for learning.
by avmich | 2026-02-26 19:48:50+00:00
Two comments here.

First, "AI is thereby incapable" is a hypothesis, not a fact - how would you prove that you have to "live" to produce art? You might feel this way, you may suggest some correlations here - but can you really prove that?

Second, I don't see impossibility for AI to be - to various degrees - an agent to the world. I think that's already happening actually - they are interacting with world even today, in some limited sense, through our computers and networks, and - today - not many of them actually "learn" from those interactions. But we're in the early days of this - I suspect.
by mrguyorama | 2026-02-26 19:49:33+00:00
Municipal water usage in California is only 20% of all water usage. The rest is almost entirely agriculture, and all that agriculture uses a strange system of water rights where you do not have to reduce consumption during a drought, and the last person in line instead absorbs all the drought problems.

This creates an insane political environment where the rich as fuck agribusiness which owns that final water right is incentivized to get that tiny municipal water usage reduced as much as possible to squeeze out a tiny bit more water for their own business, rather than reform the dumb water rights system which would ensure that they only shoulder a tiny tiny portion of drought scarcity but probably force them to pay a little bit for irrigation improvements or stop growing almonds as cheaply.

The only reason the rest of the country even knows about the California water situation is because those bottom rung agribusinesses are still wealthy as all fuck and have actively paid for national political campaigns
by lurkshark | 2026-02-26 19:49:56+00:00
I don't think it's that elaborate. I didn't mean to suggest they intentionally goaded the government into this confrontation. I figure it's a simpler "Oh look, we now have a good opportunity to make that announcement that we were worried about." Considering it's probably the same high-level decision makers on both choices it doesn't need a board meeting. And yes they're absolutely free to do what they want, but they're also not blind to how the public will view their decisions.
by CqtGLRGcukpy | 2026-02-26 19:50:05+00:00
The reason for this is that the creator wanted to "hack" Google's AI and ChatGPT, see his article at https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt....

See all the people who submitted that article at https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Ffuture....
by stego-tech | 2026-02-26 19:51:09+00:00
Honestly, the remixes this generation suck compared to priors.

"This time will be different," they said about the Metaverse, ignoring the vast tranches of MUCKs, MUDs, MMOs, LSGs, and repeated digital real estate gold rushes of the past half-century. Billions burned on something anyone who played Second Life, Entropia, FFXIV, EQ2, VRChat, or fucking Furcadia could've told you wasn't going to succeed, because it wasn't different, it just had more money behind it this time.

"NFTs are different", as collectors of trading cards, art prints, coins, postage stamps, and an infinite glut of collectibles looked at each other with that knowing, "oh lord, here we go" glance.

"Crypto is different", as those who paid attention to history remembered corporate scrip, gift cards, hedge funds, the S&L crisis, Enron, the MBS crisis, and the multitude of prior currency-related crises and grifts bristled at the impending glut of fraud and abuse by those too risky to engage in traditional commerce.

And thus, here we are again. "This time is different", as those of us who remembered the code generators of yore pollute our floppy drives and salesgrifts convinced our bosses that their program could replace those expensive programmers roll our eyes at the obvious bullshit on naked display, then vomited from stress as over a trillion dollars was diverted from anything of value into their modern equivalent - with all the same problems as before.

I truly hate how stupidly people with money actually behave.
by thomassmith65 | 2026-02-26 19:51:16+00:00
We're in an era that presents some novel problems.

I've read a few people this week discuss the consideration that Anthropic's behavior itself will likely impact Claude's training.

The concern there is that if Claude ingests news articles that show Anthropic behaving in a manner that clashes significantly with the values they want to instill in Claude, it could make training less effective.

It's all very weird.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-02-26 19:51:58+00:00
measured and flavorless. As expected of a company trying to IPO.

I know my country is a circus right now, but I haven't forgotten the steps a "civilized" corporation does to creep into your privacy. This is just the first step: "It won't affect most of you don't worry. We pinky promise your data won't leak too".

I'm tired of words. I want actions taken. The current actions is "we will wait until it's too late and disassociate with any 3rd party that gets hacked". Doesn't really help now that my data is out there.
by verdverm | 2026-02-26 19:52:06+00:00
That's pretty cool, rootless would be nice, but more effort than we see in ROI currently. I'm using the Dagger SDK directly, no CLI or modules.

Had to recently make it so multiple versions can run on the same host, such that as developers change branches, which may be on different IaC'd versions (we launch on demand), we don't break LTS release branches.
by quesera | 2026-02-26 19:52:10+00:00
I appreciate your response, and your candor.

I'll push back on one point: when I said "contradicts your story", I meant that the headline and the story (article content) are in conflict. So you do have a story/article, and yes your headline is squishy enough to argue misinterpretation, but it's clearly not honest.

So the tension is that the boring but honest headline of "Applying for a UK visa without a smartphone requires a few extra clicks that are easy to overlook" doesn't serve the (apparently higher) purpose of drawing people in.

I was expecting outrage in your article, but I only found inconvenience. That's manipulative in my opinion, and I would avoid reading future articles on your site based on that experience. Do as thou wilt, obviously, but that's my take!

Your topic (smartphone/appstore requirements) is a real issue! I'm glad to hear that the UK hasn't gone all-in, yet.
by just6979 | 2026-02-26 19:52:32+00:00
Not sure I need to give any example solutions, because you've already explained that your solution isn't great, "mine doesn't work 1:1 for you, which is basically a given for any non-trivial project", and that applies for most solutions. But I will:

* GitFlow isn't perfect, but works for many, especially projects with lots of contributors working concurrently, and double especially if there are release gates that keep a human (release engineers) in the CI/CD loop for accountability, which is not uncommon in real world commercial projects.
* GitHubFlow works for lots, but not all. Pretty good for moderate team sizes with some but not so much concurrent overlapping work, and perhaps a dedicated release engineer to handle those "potential adaptations".
* TBD works for some, but can be inappropriate for many, especially when there are long-lived stable branches with commitments to ongoing security and bugfixes and the team size is smaller such that dedicated release engineers are not a thing.

This list is obviously not comprehensive, and just pulls from some workflows commonly presented elsewhere in this post.

Basically, I was just saying that one _can't_ just "[fix] on master first and cherry-pick that fix then directly to the stable branch with potential adaptions", because in most projects (non-trivial, as you said, which probably means anything with more than a couple contributors and an actual concept of a "stable branch") there will always be adaptations that need to be considered to maintain the stableness of that stable branch. And that's stableness from the user/customer/client PoV of "it acts the same but with less undefined behavior [read: bugs]", not just the dev PoV of "tests pass and it doesn't crash".
by tengbretson | 2026-02-26 19:52:46+00:00
LLMs have not radically transformed the world yet because the number of people capable of solving problems by typing into a blinking cursor on a blank screen is actually quite small. Take that subset of the population and reduce it to those that can effectively write communicative prose, and its even smaller still.

It's just an interface problem. The VT100 didn't change the world overnight either.
by gnabgib | 2026-02-26 19:53:00+00:00
BBC coverage I hacked ChatGPT and Google's AI – and it only took 20 minutes (12+6+4+2+3+1+3 points, 8 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47059725 https://hn.algolia.com/?&query=hacked%20ChatGPT%20and%20Goog...
by themafia | 2026-02-26 19:53:01+00:00
That's absolutely what they are. That and other crimes. That's why they're mandatory, by law, in certain industries. That's _precisely_ why we started using them: to prevent the easily preventable.

I suppose this logic stands in the way of a corporation getting what it wants and so it's automatically offensive to the HN "job seeking" crowd; however, even a basic reading of the history shows it's completely true.
by bpt3 | 2026-02-26 19:53:12+00:00
That is their point, and mine is that it's baseless speculation that is almost certainly inaccurate, probably originating from a similarly uninformed and angry internal source to the one that produced the article in question.

I'm not saying it can't happen, or even that it's never happened, but I see no evidence from personal experience or news in academia that would indicate it's anything other than extraordinarily rare at most, and it certainly shouldn't be assumed to be the case for all donations unless proven otherwise.
by mint5 | 2026-02-26 19:53:21+00:00
“The question is whether the data is accurate, not whether it is complete”

Oh so Lies of omission don’t exist? Deception researchers will be very keen to hear how that works.

So if someone Mormon bubbles a photo of you that also has a kid in it, you’re fine being arrested for indecency and registering as a sex offender? After all, that’s just omitting a few pixels, not a lie or deception in your book.
by HerbManic | 2026-02-26 19:53:58+00:00
I suspect Jobs would have held off for a few years just to see where the road is going before making a move. In that sense, Apples current lack of real dedicated to move into the LLM space has become a happy accident. They have avoided the hype cycle and the potential blow back once the more exuberant part of the AI craze fade away.

They have pulled an accidental Jobs move.
by exceptione | 2026-02-26 19:54:17+00:00
> because the real problem with buses is that there aren't enough routes and they don't run frequently enough:

That's a bit of a chicken-egg problem. People value the current offering as 'not worth it'. By making it free, you make it more valuable, driving utilization, lowering traffic and emissions, etc.

> The bus service has been close to perfect for the last two months but we've had plenty of times when 30 minutes late in the morning or evening has been absolutely routine.

In NL you have got some special bus lanes to make sure they don't get stuck in traffic. You can scale frequency and things like bus lanes when public transit gets more dominant viz-a cars.
by casey2 | 2026-02-26 19:54:18+00:00
There is this pervasive cynical belief that anything adults like kids will dislike and vice versa it's important to remember that for the vast majority of history that hasn't been true. In the recent past people had to work very hard to create these define these social groups and sell products to/for them.

These social classes will collapse quicker than you think, you're seeing the final death throes with age-verification laws
by dclowd9901 | 2026-02-26 19:54:32+00:00
> I’m a sensible moderate on the killbot issue (we’ll probably get them eventually, and I doubt they’ll make things much worse compared to AI “only” having unfettered access to every Internet-enabled computer in the world)

Crikey, this isn't sensible, this is completely misanthropic and nihilistic. How can anyone be ok with a machine unilaterally deciding (outside of the courts or any other check mechanism) to murder someone?

I also take issue with the author's postulation that the Defense Production act could be used here. It's one thing to make sheet metal companies build plane parts, but requiring companies to be put themselves "in the loop" so to speak with regards to actual military strategy or defense puts those companies and their employees at unwilling and extraordinary risk. It's basically enlistment. Plus, it can only be used in extraordinary circumstances.

There's actually another possibility here: Anthropic really doesn't care about being in the loop, and are protesting as theater, but behind the scenes, hammering out a deal with the Pentagon, and they'll help under classified status, and none of us will be the wiser.
by lich_king | 2026-02-26 19:54:39+00:00
> I never heard that

I did, a lot, maybe fifteen years ago. There was a lot of talk about a "3D printing revolution" and being years away from being able to make whatever you want at home. For a while, the "maker" moniker was strongly associated with home manufacturing maximalists.

I still don't get the point the article is making, though. That 3D printer thinking was obviously naive because it underestimated the difficulty of mechanical design and the importance of the economies of scale. Using AI to "write" or "code" is a lot easier than turning a vague idea for a household good into a durable and aesthetic 3D print, so it's apples to oranges.

There are other things that the vibecoding movement is underestimating - when you pay a SaaS vendor, you're usually not paying for code as much as for having a turnkey solution where functionality, security, infrastructure, and user support are someone else's problem. But I think that's pretty much where the parallels end.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-02-26 19:54:44+00:00
Funny I was just commenting about something like this regarding Docker[0]. I feel like major corporations could and should adopt OSS projects in this manner especially critical software they all rely on, so that these projects don't have to worry about doing the most ridiculous of things to attain funding to keep themselves going. It's why I imagine Anthropic went ahead and just bought out Bun immediately, Bun was trying to monetize shortly before Anthropic bought them out, now they don't have to worry about that.

In a different world we would incentivize tech giants to sponsor critical open source projects by turning their donations into more serious tax write offs, up to a certain amount, and reviewed by experts within the industry, affiliated and unaffiliated with the companies doing the funding.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47154059
by jerf | 2026-02-26 19:55:02+00:00
I think our little corner of the world has a distorted view of AI in that it is actually proving useful for us. Once they passed a certain level of usefulness... I remember when they were still struggling just to output syntactically correct code, you know, like, 18 months ago or so... they became a useful tool that we can incorporate.

But there's a lot of things playing out to our advantage. Vast swathes of useful and publicly available training data. The rigorous precision of said data. Vast swathes of data we can feed it as input to our queries from our own codebases. While we never attained the perfect ideal we dreamed of, we have vast quantities of documentation at differing levels of abstraction that the training can compare to the code bases. We've already been arguing in our community about how design patterns were just level of abstraction our coding couldn't capture and AI has access now to all sorts of design patterns we wouldn't have even called design patterns because they still take lots of code to produce, but now for example, if I have a process that I need to parallelize it can pretty much just do it in any of several ways depending on what I need at that point.

It is easy to get too overexcited about what it can do and I suspect we're going to see an absolute flood of "We let AI into our code base and it has absolutely shredded it and now even the most expensive AI can't do anything with it anymore" in, oh, 3 to 6 months. Not that everyone is going to have that experience, but I think we're going to see it. Right now we're still at the phase where people call you crazy for that and insist it must have been you using the tool wrong. But it is clearly an amazing tool for all sorts of uses.

Nevertheless, despite my own experiences, I persist in believing there is an AI bubble, because while AI may replace vast swathes of the work force in 5-20 years, for quite a lot of the workforce, it is not ready to do it right this very instant like the pricing on Wall Street is assuming. They don't have gigabytes of high-quality training data to pour in to their system. They don't have rigorous syntax rules to incorporate into the training data. They don't have any equivalent of being guided by tests to keep things on the rails. They don't have large piles of professionally developed documentation that can be cross-checked directly against the implementation. It's going to be a slower, longer process. As with the dot-com bubble, it isn't that it isn't going to change the world, it is simply that it isn't going to change the world quite that fast.
by w10-1 | 2026-02-26 19:55:09+00:00
I disagree with too much philosophizing around both Makers and vibe coding. The actual incentives are curiosity and a desire to build what one cannot buy (and using that for teaching initiative in kids) - not AGI or transforming society.

Physical making is hard: you run up against the limits of plastic or the difficulty of cnc planning for various materials, as well as the limited value for small projects: people rarely make entire projects, instead making parts. So there is an upper bound for the utility of making. (btw, anyone have a laser welder or steel-capable CNC's they're tired of?)

Software making is what you make it, subject to the laws of complexity, and as valuable as its integration (computers, robotics). These in theory are limiting, but in practice there are effectively an infinite supply of valuable projects when the cost of production reduces. Deployments will be limited by access to customers, which is not a problem when people make software for themselves.
by scrozier | 2026-02-26 19:55:11+00:00
> Taste continues to be the single most important thing. The vast, vast majority of AI art out there is...not very good. It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem.

This is precisely and importantly true. I just wonder if most of the world cares. I'd like to think so, but experience tells me that most of the world is satisfied with mediocre stuff. And I don't say this as a criticism; it's just a fact that artists have to come to grips with.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-02-26 19:55:36+00:00
This.

It's high time to stop accumulating debt while providing free picture of pelicycles, just charge the full cost for them - enough to generate profits and pay back debt.

What we see now is literally burning money and energy to generate hype. The only true measures of success are financial and macroeconomic. If the hype is real, there should be no problem for the mighty AI to generate debt-free profits for its providers while the overall price level in the US goes down.

What we see is the exact opposite which makes the AI hype act only as market manipulation for capital misallocation.
by goatlover | 2026-02-26 19:55:51+00:00
I understand your point which sounds reasonable for a lot of debate, but the counter argument would be that in some situations you are normalizing both sides, when one side is not acting in good faith and is on the wrong side of history. Examples being Southern slave holders, Putin's invasion of Ukraine, fossil fuel interests regarding climate change.

If one did live under Nazis German rule, would it have been wrong to scream, "The Nazis have control of our government and are executing innocent people in the streets!"? At that point you're trying to wake the public up to do something about it, not sit down and have a debate over Goebbels latest speech with some fence sitter who can't decide whether Hitler has gone too far.
by barrkel | 2026-02-26 19:56:00+00:00
Search engines are more costly than inference AIUI and are certainly slower. The models are very expensive to train of course and incremental learning without catastrophic forgetting hasn't been solved. I would think whoever cracks could be in a better position than someone who must search all the time.

Concrete example: I had a very frustrating time recently installing Gerrit and jujutsu (jj) using ChatGPT for advice. It persistently gave me outdated info and I had to tell it to search multiple times in a single conversation. Its trained in info was out of date, but it didn't realize it, hadn't internalized it, despite being reminded over and over in one conversation.
by incanus77 | 2026-02-26 19:56:07+00:00
Pie is such a gift. My wife died nearly ten years ago and soon afterwards, I took up pie baking, which is something that she loved to do (I just loved to eat it — since childhood I've had a birthday pie instead of cake). I had all the stuff, after all. I got good at it and love to share them with friends at gatherings, or even just give them away entirely. Right before COVID, I did a Friday Pie Day thing where I gifted a pie to someone in town based on social media discussions. One time, someone got it for her coworkers who had just shipped a tough release.