MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tasuki | 2026-02-13 23:26:49+00:00
> I have to basically get the mental model of the codebase in my head no matter what.

Ah yes, I feel this too! And that's much harder with someone else's code than with my own.

I unleashed Google's Jules on my toy project recently. I try to review the changes, amend the commits to get rid of the worst, and generally try to supervise the process. But still, it feels like the project is no longer mine.

Yes, Jules implemented in 10 minutes what would've taken me a week (trigonometry to determine the right focal point and length given my scene). And I guess it is the right trigonometry, because it works. But I fear going near it.
by Paracompact | 2026-02-13 23:27:09+00:00
To be clear, I don't think coming up with relativity was "in distribution" based on the results of the time. I would be exceedingly surprised if an LLM trained on all of the physics up until that point and nothing that would come up with the framework that Einstein did, from such elegant first principles at that. Without handholding from a prompter, I expect an LLM (or non-critical human thinker) would only parrot the general consensus of confusion and non-uniformity that predominated in that era.

I only believe that (1) if it hadn't been Einstein, it would very soon have been someone else using very similar concepts and evidence, (2) "completely novel idea" is a stricter criterion than "not in distribution," and (3) better examples of completely novel ideas from history exist as a benchmark for this sort of things.

> Without a formal study of physics it is really hard to differentiate these kinds of propositions. It can be very hard even with that education. So be careful to not overly abstract and simplify concepts. It'll only deprive you of a lot of beauty and innovation.

I agree, but with the caveat that I think ancestor worship is also an impediment to understanding our intellectual and cultural heritage. Either all of human creativity deserves to be treated sacredly, or none of it does.
by avaer | 2026-02-13 23:27:16+00:00
Unfortunately enforcing "human behind the push" would break so many automations I don't think it's tenable.

But it would be nice if Github had a feature that would let a human attest to a commit/PR, in a way that couldn't be automated. Like signed commits combined with a captcha or biometric or something (which I realize has its own problems but I can't think of a better way to do this attestation).

Then an Open Source maintainer could just automatically block unattested PRs if they want. And if someone's AI is running rampant at least you could block the person.
by viraptor | 2026-02-13 23:27:17+00:00
> Why can't we put GitHub behind one of those CloudFlare bot detection WAFs

At small scale of individual cases it's useless. It can block a large network with known characteristics. It's not going to block openclaw driving your personal browser with your login info.

> Would publishing a "human only" contribution license/code of conduct

It would get super muddy with edge cases. What about dependabot? What about someone sending you an automated warning about something important? There's nothing here that is bot specific either - a basic rule for "posting rants rather than useful content will get you banned" would be appropriate for both humans and bots.

We don't really need special statement here.
by slopinthebag | 2026-02-13 23:28:00+00:00
Why do you think it's not a physical sciences problem? It could be the case that current technologies simply cannot scale due to fundamental physical issues. It could even be a fundamental rule of intelligent life, that one cannot create intelligence that surpasses its own.

Plenty of things get substantial resources and investment and go nowhere.

Of course I could be totally wrong and it's solved in the next couple years, it's almost impossible to make these predictions either way. But I get the feeling people are underestimating what it takes to be truly intelligent, especially when efficiency is important.
by anthk | 2026-02-13 23:29:13+00:00
Spain still uses the Roman Law and save for the Basques (which are the cousins of Iberians) the 95% of the culture it's Western. The 5% it's just pre-Roman folklore (Basque, Celtic, Celtic-Iberian and so on) which survived Romanization and Christianization. But, even when being fully assimilated, I can always find some older Iberian substrate surviving in the North of Spain and the French Basque Country, some social behaviour predating Rome and the Catholic Kingdoms, such as the concept of the communal assemblies in towns and villages found all over in Spain.

From these arrangements between the people and Kingdoms the concept of Fueros (some kind of agreement/constution between the villages' ruling and the King) was born and if some king was about to rule a Kingdom, he/she was prompty required to respect them 'by the grace of God' AKA 'respect these scrolls or you will be kicked from the throne faster than a drunk knight falling off from a horse'.
by paranoidrobot | 2026-02-13 23:29:15+00:00
A few years ago I was checking out of a reasonably up-scale hotel in Barcelona early in the morning.

They punch numbers into one of those wireless hand terminals. I tap my card, enter the pin and then before I can react to what the screen is now saying they've punched the 'Accept Conversion' button and submit it. By the time I realise what has happened, it's too late and has started printing the reciept.

I insisted they reverse it and redo the transaction without that - the staff didn't understand and didn't care they'd cost me another 10-15%. It really adds up for a week long stay.
by guluarte | 2026-02-13 23:29:45+00:00
Where I work, we're now building things that were completely out of reach before. The 90% job loss prediction would only hold true if we were near the ceiling of what software can do, but we're probably very, very far from it.

A website that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2000 could be replaced by a wordpress blog built in an afternoon by a teenager in 2015. Did that kill web development? No, it just expanded what was worth building
by mercutio2 | 2026-02-13 23:30:07+00:00
I used to feel this way, then a week or two ago, after an automatic update, it started hanging. All. The. Time for me. Launching the app now frequently takes 30 seconds before it shows me the “load a git repo” screen.

Speed was its main advantage, before. It has become nearly unusable.

The price of extraordinarily rapid iteration, I suppose.
by small_model | 2026-02-13 23:30:17+00:00
There is a very high barrier to entry (capital) and its only going to increase, so doubtful there will be any more player then the ones we have. Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI and Google seem like they will be the big four. Only reason a late comer like xAI can compete is Elon had the resources to build a massive data centre and hire talent. They will share the spoils between them, maybe one will drop the ball though
by eek2121 | 2026-02-13 23:30:51+00:00
The keyboard actually does this all the time, and many assume they are the problem (making typos, etc.). A few have recorded videos to show what is actually happening and it's wild. If I had a link handy I'd share it. The user directly taps on a letter, and the system picks what it thinks the user actually meant, even when the key hit was dead on.

Turning off slide to type in settings improves the situation, however it still happens.
by nemo1618 | 2026-02-13 23:31:37+00:00
"The steamroller is still many inches away. I'll make a plan once it actually starts crushing my toes."

You are in danger. Unless you estimate the odds of a breakthrough at <5%, or you already have enough money to retire, or you expect that AI will usher in enough prosperity that your job will be irrelevant, it is straight-up irresponsible to forgo making a contingency plan.
by sincerely | 2026-02-13 23:32:15+00:00
>The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes"

This is not such an unusual thing in law, as much as us stem-brained people want legal systems to work like code. The most famous example is determining art vs pornography - "I know it when I see it" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it)
by verdverm | 2026-02-13 23:32:25+00:00
AT has people generally working on the next generation of shared infra for social and much more. Come join us!

https://discord.atprotocol.dev (should work, best entrypoint to the dev community)

I like sharing this one for new devs:
https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers
by QuercusMax | 2026-02-13 23:33:33+00:00
Yes, this is where I just cannot imagine completely AI-driven software development of anything novel and complicated without extensive human input. I'm currently working in a space where none of our data models are particularly complex, but the trick is all in defining the rules for how things should work.

Our actual software implementation is usually pretty simple; often writing up the design spec takes significantly longer than building the software, because the software isn't the hard part - the requirements are. I suspect the same folks who are terrible at describing their problems are going to need help from expert folks who are somewhere between SWE, product manager, and interaction designer.
by NotNerdz | 2026-02-13 23:33:37+00:00
Hey Everybody,
We are now offering GPT-4o-Latest after sunset on InfiniaxAI for extremely cheap - Just $5/Month for complete model access with up to thousands of queries a month and customized adaptive memory.
You can also access 100s of other models, build your own websites and do many other things as its an All-In-One AI tool.
by BobMontgomeryJr | 2026-02-13 23:34:40+00:00
relevation!! Someone who actually levels well-deserved anti-synchophany against the IT majors!!! Volumes can be written about the collective abuses which reduce hundreds of millions to squinting at tiny impossibly illegible displays and noncontrasting fonts, typing at 5WPM with two thumbs, further reduced (3WPM?) by battles against 'auto-correct' and 'assistive cursor control'.. I use full-size BT & AAPLS wireless keyboards with my iPh and DroidTab. I have a 19" diag HDMI display via WiFi widget that actually makes the iPh screen landscape and readable. I use 'Assistive' crippling which overlays an actually visible orange cursor in a textline losenge over the ultraviolet-invisible unchangeable default one. I have maybe 800 notes (more than Googl has sent me false positive security alerts) of every Gaffe and insult going back to the Xeros Dorado epoch. Keep it up. Start a revolution!! The word needs more posts of the realities of these afflictions. I use the Futo onscreen kb on Android, and the devs there say there's nothing they can do to control when of how it pops over and obscures something you're tying to type. Typical of AAPL and GOOG tyranny and 'our way or the highway'. There's more to fill hundreds of pages to get distracting ad-injected, poorly implented UX back to un-affectively efficient realizations which don't foment vsceral aggravation, but I've had it with this little textbox here, and I'm not going to shuffle this comments back and forth to a text-editor to improve it. But thanks HakerNews hopefully for letting me post without forcing me to go find mycredentials to login!! Othersie this entire post -pfft-
by mercutio2 | 2026-02-13 23:34:48+00:00
I wonder if the reason that most people don’t agree with me about Antigravity is because you were used to VS Code?

For me, Antigravity is possibly the worst GUI experience I’ve had since Clippy.

It’s completely filled with arcane buttons, prompts that are effectively modal appear in at least 3 different places, it’s constantly… doing stuff, without any reference to where I should focus my attention.

I appreciate Google giving away absurdly generous quantities of tokens for FREE just to get me to use the thing, but I can’t bring myself to, because when I get into the flow of a feature with an LLM, I’m suddenly stuck and can’t figure it out.

It’s like peak Google UI for me.
by someguydave | 2026-02-13 23:35:11+00:00
if you mean "ICE agents (as sworn federal agents) are not authorized by statue to arrest people for federal crimes, like entering the US illegally" you are simply wrong.

ICE agents, specifically those in Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) under U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), are federal law enforcement officers with statutory authority to arrest individuals for immigration violations, including criminal offenses such as illegal entry into the United States under 8 U.S.C. § 1325 and § 1327.

It is true that many immigration violations are administrative in nature but it doesn't follow that ICE are not police, nor are they not sworn to enforce all federal laws.
by Izkata | 2026-02-13 23:36:15+00:00
Ranked choice is very similar to what you just described, has the same downsides, and is much more difficult to understand. What you want is approval voting which has all of the upsides ranked choice claims to have, none of the downsides, doesn't have multiple rounds, and is trivial to understand. On top of that approval voting has an additional benefit where voting third-party/moderates doesn't feel like throwing any vote away so you can just include them and they're much more likely to win.
by mrob | 2026-02-13 23:36:16+00:00
I cannot be 100% certain that sleep is not fatal. If I had some safe and reliable means of preventing sleep I would take it without hesitation. But it seems plausible that a person could survive sleep because it's a gradual process and one that everybody has a lot of practice doing. However, there are no such mitigating factors with general anesthetics. I will refuse general anesthetics if I am ever in a situation to do so. I believe a combination of muscle relaxants and opioids can serve the same medical purpose, which I do not believe would kill the person.
by sensanaty | 2026-02-13 23:36:23+00:00
The whole point is that these companies are spending a lot of cash making sure that their products are as addicting as possible to as many people as possible, so "just" shutting the phone off isn't a viable strategy.

It's as idiotic a statement as saying "Just stop smoking" around the time when big tobacco was lobbying politicians and bribing scientists and doctors to straight up lie about the deleterious effects of tobacco. It's engineered in such a way as to make it basically impossible for a large swathe of the population to "just not use" the apps.
by psyklic | 2026-02-13 23:36:47+00:00
This happens with every new tech. When websites first appeared, many businesses trusted kids to build their website. The key in applied work is to build a portfolio that shows off your abilities.

The reality is that most people who need services don't know anyone who is traditionally qualified and available. So, a portfolio may convince them to take a chance on a newcomer over an overly expensive firm (that often also just hires newcomers).
by 8note | 2026-02-13 23:37:46+00:00
the annoying part is that with tool calls, a lot of those hours is time spent on netowrk round trips.

over long periods of time, checklists are the biggest thing, so the LLM can track whats already done and whats left. after a compact, it can pull the relevant stuff back up and make progress.

having some level or hierarchy is also useful - requirements, high level designs, low level designs, etc
by dakolli | 2026-02-13 23:37:48+00:00
I think it will be over automation that does them in, most normies I know are not down with this all this automation and will totally opt for the human focused product experienced, not the one devoid of it because it was built and ran by a souless NN powered autocomplete. We certainly aren't going to let a bunch of autocomplete models (sold to us as intelligent agents), replace our labor. We aren't stupid.

Much like there is a premium for handmade clothing, and from scratch food. Automation does nothing but lower the value of your product (unless its absolutely required like electronics perhaps), when there is an alternative, the one made with human input/intention is always worth more.

And the idea that small nimble teams are going to outpace larger corporations is such a psyop. You really mostly hear CEOs saying these things on podcast. This is to appease the working class, to give them hope that they too one day can be a billionaire...

Also, the vast majority of people who occupy computer i/o focused jobs, whos jobs will be replaced, need to work to eat and they don't all want to go form nimble automated SaaS companies lmao, this is such a farce.. Bad things to come all around.
by rootusrootus | 2026-02-13 23:38:19+00:00
Probably 99% of all drywall in the US is not painted directly, either. It is textured [0]. I'll go out on a limb and say that a substantial majority these days are orange peel texture on the walls and knockdown on the ceiling, made primarily with drywall mud (Artex seems to be essentially the same thing).

I'm not sure I would want a plaster skim in any case. I grew up in a house built in 1914 that had lath & plaster, and I've cursed the brittle plaster many times. We even had actual picture rails but my mom never liked to use them to actually hang pictures, amusingly enough.

[0] To be brutally honest, the texturing isn't for any particular reason aside from how well it hides minor imperfections. Having someone skim coat the walls and ceiling with a perfectly smooth finish is definitely a thing, but it's a good bit more labor intensive.
by thrownawaysz | 2026-02-13 23:38:21+00:00
Interestingly there are some not so good sources

>F

>[SE fail, also used as a mark for inadequate work, or fuck!]

>(juv.) response to someone else’s bad news.

F doesn't come from fail but from Call of Duty

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

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/press-f-to-pay-respects
by Funes- | 2026-02-13 23:39:19+00:00
>"well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?"

Hear me out: banning advertising on the Internet. It's the only way. It's the primordial domino tile. You knock that one over, every other tile follows suit. It's the mother of chain reactions. There would be no social media, no Internet as we know it. Imagine having TikTok, YouTube or X trying to survive on subscriptions alone in their current iterations. Impossible. They'd need to change their top priority from "maximizing engagement by fostering addictive behavior" to "offering a product with enough quality for someone to pay a fee in order to be able to use it".
by lksaar | 2026-02-13 23:39:27+00:00
This is pretty normal? I work for a company that develops lab machines and we have a bunch of designs we have to follow:

ISO 12100 (Safety of Machinery): Sets general, fundamental principles for design, risk assessment, and reduction (Type A standard).

ISO 13849-1 (Safety-Related Parts of Control Systems): Defines performance levels and categories for safety-related components (Type B standard).

ISO 13850 Safety of machinery – Emergency stop function – Principles for design

And that's just some of them.
by BadBadJellyBean | 2026-02-13 23:40:09+00:00
As a German I always found North American houses and their drywall and wood constructions incredibly odd. It always felt flimsy to me. From my experience we just started using drywall for some interior walls on some newly built homes. But throughout my life I was used to very massive walls.

I recently saw some house building videos and it is somehow fascinating how different the building materials and methodologies are. North America obviously made it work, but still very odd to me.
by observationist | 2026-02-13 23:40:41+00:00
Some of us have, and some of us still use it. The functionality and the need for an archive not subject to the same constraints as the wayback machine and other institutions outweighs the blackhat hijinks and bickering between a blogger and the archive.is person/team.

My own ethical calculus is that they shouldn't be ddos attacking, but on the other hand, it's the internet equivalent of a house egging, and not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. It probably got gyrovague far more attention than they'd have gotten otherwise, so maybe they can cash in on that and thumb their nose at the archive.is people.

Regardless - maybe "we" shouldn't be telling people what sites to use or not use -if you want to talk morals and ethics, then you better stop using gmail, amazon, ebay, Apple, Microsoft, any frontier AI, and hell, your ISP has probably done more evil things since last tuesday than the average person gets up to in a lifetime, so no internet, either. And totally forget about cellular service. What about the state you live in, or the country? Are they appropriately pure and ethical, or are you going to start telling people they need to defect to some bastion of ethics and nobility?

Real life is messy. Purity tests are stupid. Use archive.is for what it is, and the value it provides which you can't get elsewhere, for as long as you can, because once they're unmasked, that sort of thing is gone from the internet, and that'd be a damn shame.
by Rochus | 2026-02-13 23:40:41+00:00
Semi-formal human language will replace programming languages for a large part. As we are able to write specifications and build huge and complex systems based on it (as e.g. the Apollo program already in the sixties), an LLM is able to understand the intent and constraints from such a specifcation and generate a formal representation of it (e.g. using Abrial's Event-B) and eventually generate "proved code".

We have to remember why high-level programming languages and type systems came into being: they were essentially a tool to help humans make less errors and manage the complexity by modularization and other means. We could still write everything in assembler in principle, as they did in the sixties and even though were able to implement large systems which worked. But whe chose to use high-level languages because they make us faster and less error-prone.

An LLM doesn't suffer from (the same) human weaknesses. You could in principle use an LLM as a "compiler" from human language to assembler. But LLMs also make errors, so it would be a risk to trust this assembler (or C code). Generating a "safe" language like Rust instead of C or assember is a rather naive work-around for the time being. Actually it would be more prudent to let the LLM generate Ada/SPARK because it can formalize and prove a wider scope than Rust; and the code would be more trustful because the LLM agent would not just write arbitrary code, but also run the SPARK prover.

And now expand this idea and you'll end up with the formal methods like B, Z or VDM which were there for decades but only a few experts were able to use them. We can now let the LLM generate the "code" in those formal languages, and let the agent run the prover and make corrections until the resulting code (whether C, Ada or assembler) is provably correct.
by harrall | 2026-02-13 23:41:29+00:00
Yes.

And press releases are the same way. There is a literal message but often times there is subtext. They can’t say the subtext literally because it is inherently hurtful and burns a bridge (just like me saying “this guy sucks let’s leave”) so you read between the lines.

Outright lying in press releases is different. That’s a company saying “AI caused our company to fail” but actually you invested in the wrong product and don’t want to admit it.
by mumbleflow | 2026-02-13 23:41:55+00:00
+1 on the post-processing point. Raw Whisper output is ~90% there but punctuation, grammar, and formatting are the missing piece.

I built MumbleFlow to address exactly this — whisper.cpp for STT plus llama.cpp for smart text cleanup, all running on-device. Metal/CUDA accelerated, sub-second latency on Apple Silicon. Global hotkey works in any app.

$5 one-time, no cloud, no subscription. https://mumble.helix-co.com