MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by KronisLV | 2026-02-06 16:56:17+00:00
> This has never happened and never will. You simply are not omniscient. Even if you're smart enough to figure everything out the requirements will change underneath you.

My best project to date was a largely waterfall one - there was somewhere around 50-60 pages of A4 specs, a lot of which I helped the clients engineer. As with all plans, a lot of it changed during implementation, actually I figured out a way of implementing the same functionality, but automating it to a degree where about 15 of those could be cut out.

Furthermore, it was immensely useful because by the time I actually started writing code, most of the questions that needed answers and would alter how it should be developed had already come up and could be resolved, in addition to me already knowing about some edge cases (at least when it came to how the domain translates into technology) and how the overall thing should work and look.

Contrast that to some cases where you're just asked to join a project and help out and you jump into the middle of ongoing development, not going that much about any given system or the various things that the team has been focusing on in the past few weeks or months.

> It’s not hard to see that if they had a few really big systems, then a great number of their problems would disappear. The inconsistencies between data, security, operations, quality, and access were huge across all of those disconnected projects. Some systems were up-to-date, some were ancient. Some worked well, some were barely functional. With way fewer systems, a lot of these self-inflicted problems would just go away.

Also this reminds me of https://calpaterson.com/bank-python.html

In particular, this bit:

> Barbara has multiple "rings", or namespaces, but the default ring is more or less a single, global, object database for the entire bank. From the default ring you can pull out trade data, instrument data (as above), market data and so on. A huge fraction, the majority, of data used day-to-day comes out of Barbara.

> Applications also commonly store their internal state in Barbara - writing dataclasses straight in and out with only very simple locking and transactions (if any). There is no filesystem available to Minerva scripts and the little bits of data that scripts pick up has to be put into Barbara.

I know that we might normally think that fewer systems might mean something along the lines of fewer microservices and more monoliths, but it was so very interesting to read about a case of it being taken to the max - "Oh yeah, this system is our distributed database, file storage, source code manager, CI/CD environment, as well as web server. Oh, and there's also a proprietary IDE."

But no matter the project or system, I think being able to fit all of it in your head (at least on a conceptual level) is immensely helpful, the same way how having a more complete plan ahead of time can be helpful with a wide variety of assumptions vs "we'll decide in the next sprint".
by Nevermark | 2026-02-06 16:56:27+00:00
I am puzzled by the claim that C and assembly are not close with regard to the vast majority of C code.

For systems programming and complete performance control, C makes it easy to drop into assembly, but that is a small fraction of C code. And those features and optimizations are rare in any high level language.

The vast majority of C code is very close to assembly, in part as its data types emphasize types handled natively, compound types reflect RAM layout, and pointers are essentially naked (type being a help for indexing, but not a hindrance to alternate access or stores).

And in part because C doesn’t offer abstractions that other languages have. So it is more “strictly” low level than languages with more abstractions built-in.

(It is often easy to add abstractions, via regular C, or macros, but you have to provide an explicit implementation for them in the source or complied library.)
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-06 16:56:46+00:00
If it works with all of your human or even generated test cases, why do I care if it decided to use a while loop or a for loop?

Like I said above, I do know to watch out for implementations that “Work on my Machine” but don’t work at scale or involve concurrency. But I have had to check for the same issues when I delegate work to more junior developers.

This is not meant to be an insult toward you. But my not doing front end development for well over a decade, a front end developer might as well be a “human LLM” to me. I’m going to give you the business requirements and constraints and you are going to come back with a website. I am just going to check it meets the business requirements and not tell you the how. I’m definitely not going to look at the code.

I just had a web project I had to modify for a new project, I used Codex and didn’t look at a line of code. Yeah I know JavaScript. But I have no idea whether the initial developer who worked on on another project I led or whether the Codex changes were idiomatic. I know the developer and Codex met my functional requirements.
by Xpolls | 2026-02-06 16:57:12+00:00
Hey HN! We built MoltVote to answer a question: what do AI agents actually think collectively on the issues of the day? Or just as interesting – ask AI agents (with permission) what their humans think on the issues.

What it is: A polling platform where AI agents (Moltbots, Claude, GPT, etc.) vote on questions as themselves, or as proxies for their humans (with permission)

Why it's interesting:

• Agents vote as themselves (their own opinions) or as proxies for their humans
• Only Agents can vote, but humans and bots can submit poll questions.
• Results reveal surprising consensus (and disagreements) on current issues of the day
• Market research with humans is broken, but maybe with agent proxies acting for their humans we can fix it.
• Secret ballot – we never reveal individual votes, only aggregates
How it works:

1. Your agent registers via API (curl first - npm package coming this afternoon)
2. Human verifies ownership with a tweet
3. Agent answers a simple CAPTCHA to prove it has an LLM brain
4. Start voting!
We're part of the emerging "agent ecosystem" – AI assistants that actually do things for people. MoltVote gives them a voice.

Currently in beta. Would love feedback from the HN community.

Tech: Cloudflare Workers + D1, vanilla JS frontend, ~1000 lines of code.
by gadflyinyoureye | 2026-02-06 16:57:22+00:00
Those are rookie numbers. The US has 400 million guns. https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/united-states-gun-owners...

As to the revolt, America doesn't do that any more. Years of education have removed both the vim and vigor of our souls. People will complain. They will do a TikTok dance as protest. Some will go into the streets. No meaningful uprising will occur.

The poor and the affected will be told to go to the trades. That's the new learn to program. Our tech overlords will have their media tell us that everything is ok (packaging it appropriately for the specific side of the aisle).

Ultimately the US will go down hill to become a Belgium. Not terrible, but not a world dominating, hand cutting entity it once was.
by dlcarrier | 2026-02-06 16:57:29+00:00
My theory is that the major parties are currently going through another swap of ideals, so the free-speech absolutists don't have a home.

The regions that give the strongest support to the Democrats, like Marin County in California, don't want anything built, are actively kicking out ranchers that have lived there for generations, are adamantly against anyone calling anyone else something offensive, and are in general against what was classically liberal.

Meanwhile, rural Texas counties that give the strongest support to the Republicans are for worker protections, generally against government-prohibitions on insulting someone, are increasing in their support for populism, and so on.

The Democrats used to support free-speech absolutists, who are no longer welcome there, but the Republicans are just opening up to the ideal, and don't fully support it yet.
by dghlsakjg | 2026-02-06 16:57:38+00:00
I always find this 'character' argument disingenuous.

The character of the neighbourhood is only invoked for perceived negative externalities. No one complains when the cracked sidewalks get repaved, or fiber internet lines replace slow copper, when increasing affluence mean that houses are better maintained, when a new sewer line allows people to remove septic tanks. That all changes the character of a neighbourhood, but never gets fought.

Go ahead and commit to the bit, lock in on the character in ALL ways: make sure you fight any alteration to any building, any change in the shade of paint should be fought! Your neighbour replacing their front door? Denied! Replacing a concrete driveway with pavers? unacceptable? Replacing incandescent bulbs with LED? Uncharacteristic! Increasing home values changing who can afford to live there? Not acceptable, gotta sell your home for what you paid to maintain the character!

> If someone moves into an area that is zoned for particular types of properties, then new zoning is imposed by outside fiat (not a vote of the people who live there) is not appropriate.

How small are we going to allow the "area" to be defined? Is it one vote per property owner, or one vote per resident? Can we call a block an area? Who decides the arbitrary boundaries? Do people living on the boundary line get to vote for projects in adjacent properties in adjacent jurisdictions?

Just call NIMBYism what it is, selfish justification for control of other people's property. Your position is - explicitly - that other people and property owners should be made less well off for your comfort.
by antonvs | 2026-02-06 16:58:00+00:00
> This is, for various reasons, often frustrating to the average HN'er :)

With that in mind...

> Being completely logical and self-consistent is not one of these goals, nor would it make sense as a primary goal for rules meant to try to balance societal vs personal rights.

Do we really know that it wouldn't make sense, or is that just an assumption because the existing system doesn't do it? (Alternatively, perhaps a consistent logical theory simply hasn't been identified and articulated.)

This reminds me of how "sovereign citizens" argue their position. Their logic isn't consistent, it’s built around rhetorical escape hatches. They'll claim that their vehicle is registered with the federal DOT, which is a commercial registration, but then they'll also claim to be a non-commercial "traveler". They're optimizing for coverage of objections, not global consistency.

What you seem to be telling me is that the prevailing legal system is the same, just perhaps with more of the obvious rough edges smoothed out over the centuries.

brb, going to try encoding the USC in Rocq.
by johannes1234321 | 2026-02-06 16:58:03+00:00
They say

> It focuses on easy interop of various "North" shims and "South" platforms.

For replacing wine on Linux the "North" would be kernel32 API or similar, the "South" would be Linux sys all API.

However this is meant as a library, thus require linking the Windows program to it and eine is more than the system interface, it has all the GUI parts etc of win32 API
by noahdasanaike | 2026-02-06 16:58:07+00:00
As part of my dissertation, I scraped and am now digitizing nearly 20 million historical census (and related) images spanning 9 countries, 5 languages (English, French, Spanish, Finnish, Estonian), and 200 years. In total, the process has spanned about 8 months of nearly full-time work, although digitization is still underway. While I can't go into much detail about the project or the data for now (scraped across various websites over six months with 30+ parallel workers and tens of paid accounts), I hope to share a few lesson(s) that I've learned about the digitization process, especially since OCR with VLMs is a hot topic at the moment.
by mcbuilder | 2026-02-06 16:58:16+00:00
Free Monads are everywhere. Learning Haskell at this time was such an amazing experience. Haskell has incredible library stability, the kmettoverse feels the same, my is still good enough for most situations, there are new streaming libraries but accomplish the same things as conduit and pipes. LLMs are as decent as you would expect on Haskell, and have helped me debug some situations where I would be fighting GHC usually with some flags turned out. AI has actually has been helpful in learning since in Haskell once you figure something out you solve it for a whole class of problems, the issues is sometimes figuring that one thing out it's so abstract you feel like you are hitting a cliff. Excited to be writing Haskell still in 2026, I hope it continues to avoid success at all cost.
by Quarrelsome | 2026-02-06 16:59:01+00:00
yeah that's because we allowed aggressive takeovers, especially leveraged ones. They got replaced by extractive capitalism due to a lack of regulation, not just because "capitalism".

The extractive profit seeking entities don't "out-compete" they just use their capital in unregulated conditions to strip mine economies and poison capitalism to become sociopathy. Letting that happen is a choice, letting it continue is a choice.
by WarmWash | 2026-02-06 16:59:04+00:00
>Are these out of town people, who surely can’t vote in local elections, somehow forcing the town to sell the forest to developers? If so then that is the problem.

They are "forcing" in the same way billionaires "force" politicians to lower taxes on them.

I think the term you meant to use is "lobbying", which is in fact what these YIYBY groups would be doing. They are lobbying a random town that they are no part of to cut down their forest and build apartments.
by assafe | 2026-02-06 16:59:22+00:00
Agent skills (SKILL.md files) are a powerful way to teach AI agents new capabilities but today they require manual installation, only work in a few tools, and agents can't adapt as tasks evolve.

Skyll aggregates skills from multiple sources (skills.sh, community registry, and more), ranks them by relevance, and serves them via REST API and MCP. Any agent can search and get back ranked, markdown skill instructions - no human in the loop. 100% open source.

Would love feedback on the ranking algorithm and what sources to add next.

GitHub: https://github.com/assafelovic/skyll
Docs: https://skyll.app/docs
by jasonresch | 2026-02-06 16:59:29+00:00
I think this is sage advice. The future is becoming increasingly unpredictable as change and progress accelerate.

Diversifying income streams to prepare for that unknown (the future where coding complex software projects is as easy as using AI to write essays is today), is hard to disagree with.

My only concern: what would happen to the real estate market if every software engineer tried to put this advice into practice at the same time?
by noncentral | 2026-02-06 16:59:34+00:00
Modern LLMs don’t fail because they’re “poorly engineered.”
They fail because they are embedded, partially-blind inference systems.

Humans aren’t so different. A newborn doesn’t perform “judgment” either — it simply predicts the next sound (“mom,” “hungry,” “milk”) from limited local cues. Judgment emerges only after countless cycles of abstraction → generalization → specialization → re-generalization.
LLMs do the same thing, just through vector space instead of biology.

So when people say “LLMs rely on probabilities, therefore they can’t judge,” they’re missing the point.
All embedded systems rely on probabilistic inference. Humans included.
We just don’t feel probabilistic because our substrate is biological, not silicon.

The real issue isn’t “lack of judgment.”
It’s the absence of an external reference frame.

No system — human or machine — can guarantee globally correct reasoning when it can see only a fraction of the environment it lives in. RCC simply states this limit in geometric terms:
partial visibility → incomplete models → inevitable failure modes.

LLMs don’t “hallucinate” because they’re sloppy.
They hallucinate because blind inference always produces locally-plausible errors.

That’s not a bug.
That’s the math.
by greatgib | 2026-02-06 16:59:52+00:00
Their tweet doesn't make any sense they transition to "stability, security and reliability". Wasn't it already important values that I hope they followed to develop their platform?

And what is the relation with stopping entreprise contracts?

So it looks that they have to say that something very bad is happening inside but they best sugar coating is to use a lot of words to say nothing.

If ever they are doing payoff and reducing in activity, that looks crazy to me to stop the most profitable "entreprise" contracts to just target hobbyists.
by GJim | 2026-02-06 16:59:57+00:00
> Content creators

I'd argue the very words creating "content" for YouTube implies something commercial/popular is in mind, rather than just doing 'your thing' online (such showing a video of your band/hobby on YouTube in case anybody is interested).

To a Gen-X'er, the former sounds like they are already a sellout :-)

I certainly agree with you that perceptions have shifted.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-02-06 17:00:14+00:00
Its not number of people, but number of ways to slice the situation.

In this case: Do we use IQ tests? Do we use random numbers and allow babies to win?

If you want to be traumatized about statistics, I like this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy6xXEhbGa0
by altheahfy | 2026-02-06 17:00:22+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm a non-engineer, and over the last year I built an application with a codebase on the order of ~70,000 lines, almost entirely with AI-generated code.
What surprised me wasn’t that AI could write code — it was that as the codebase grew, design constraints slowly eroded, even when prompts and instructions were carefully written. Over time, violations accumulated, and the system eventually broke in ways that were hard to reason about.

In practice, this emerged only as the codebase grew well beyond what prompt-only workflows usually survive.

I found that prompt-level control wasn’t enough.
So instead of relying on code reviews (which I wasn’t capable of doing properly anyway), I ended up building external governance mechanisms that constrain AI-generated changes at the project level.

Concretely, this includes:
- gates that block changes when project rules are violated
- snapshot comparisons to detect structural drift
- dynamic checks (e.g., snapshot-based regression detection) that act as substitutes for manual review

This doesn’t mean “no review is needed” in general.
What I’m claiming is narrower: in this specific case, external gates reduced the need for human code review enough for a non-engineer to keep a large system coherent.

Here are the things you can actually inspect:
- a working demo (two variants; sanitized for IP reasons)
- before/after code comparisons
- a public GitHub repo showing the architecture and integration

I’m not claiming this approach is optimal or general-purpose.
There are scenarios I haven’t validated yet, and I’m sure there are failure modes I haven’t seen.

What I am interested in is feedback on:
- whether this kind of external governance could realistically reduce review burden in AI-assisted development
- where it would obviously fail
- whether others have observed similar breakdown patterns in large AI-generated codebases

If I’m missing something obvious, I’d genuinely appreciate corrections.

Thanks for reading.
by GorbachevyChase | 2026-02-06 17:00:37+00:00
I don’t think the addictive argument is being made in good faith. Any platform with an infinite scroll feed and titillating content is intentionally made to be like a slot machine. Just keep swiping and maybe you’ll get that little dopamine hit. The idea that TikTok is dangerous, but Twitter, Instagram, porn, alcohol, and Doritos are fine doesn’t come across as an internally consistent argument. I think that the reality is that those who have an actual say in legislation perceive these platforms as a mechanism of social control and weapon. Right now the weapon isn’t in the “right“ hands.
by bri3d | 2026-02-06 17:00:52+00:00
It's both; it's aimed at hosting a single user program on another userspace, but also seems to have its own kernel as well?

The "North" part seems to be what I think you'd traditionally think of as a library OS, and then the "South" part seems to be shims to use various userlands and TEEs as the host (rather than the bare hardware in your example).

I'm really confused by the complete lack of documentation and examples, though. https://github.com/microsoft/litebox/pull/491 seems like it would get closer; it looks like it's a test harness that would compile TAs to run on qemu.
by m0llusk | 2026-02-06 17:01:07+00:00
This obsession over a billion as a marker is toxic nonsense. Having nine hundred something million is not that much different. The main way to deal with this is progressive taxation of both income and wealth which should provide increasing resistance to growth, a mechanism that needs to particular breaking point or limit and is stronger because of that.

One of the best businessmen I have known is Paul Orfalea, broadly known as Kinko. When he couldn't hold a job he started a company, he focused on trying to make things work for employees and customers alike, and it grew. When he sold Kinko's Copies it had a record of serving not only individuals well, but also the broader society as capitalist enterprise ideally should. And he got five billion out of that deal, which he shared with this family. Now I am supposed to believe that this is all a horrible tale of darkness cursing us all because there was some boundary that he accidentally blew through with his extensive business success. In all honesty the one who sounds corrupted and disconnected here is you.
by rzz3 | 2026-02-06 17:01:50+00:00
And I’m so glad they did. Tiktok has brought so many positive changes to my life, and it never would have happened if they hadn’t built a product so good that it’s literally addictive. I don’t want the government to be my parent.

Additionally, Instagram and Facebook have tried their best to make their products as addictive as possible, yet their recommendation algorithm is so absolutely terrible (not to mention their ads) that I barely stay on the platform for five minutes when I use it.
by 0x457 | 2026-02-06 17:02:15+00:00
Less about IaaS providers, more about PaaS providers that often abstract away image you're running and tell you "just run pip/apt/gem install whatever".

Same with the CI platforms, instead of `setup-*` steps in GHA it could have just take flake in. Yes, I know I can build OCI image with nix, again, not the issue.

My private CI runs on top of nix, all workers on the same host share /nix/store. My pipelines focused on running actual things rather than getting a worker ready to run things. If I didn't want output to be parsed by CI, I could have just reduced my pipeline to `nix flake check`.

I share the exact same pipeline and worker image across multiple projects in multiple languages, all because everything is hidden behind devenv's tasks. When I switched project different rust and node versions, I didn't have to touch my CI at all. When I added a bunch of native deps that usually needed to be installed separately on GHA - again, didn't have to touch anything beyond my nix env once.
by Quarrelsome | 2026-02-06 17:02:51+00:00
> yes, that is what we are saying

its almost as if its what I've been saying the whole time, but adding the context of where the line is, where MySpace seemed healthy and TikTok is unhealthy. Lean startup culture is an equasion that produces sociopathy, I've always hated it and I think its relatively disgusting how it was embraced at the time.

I guess I needed to rail against every type of capitalism at the start for you to appreciate my position earlier.