MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tstrimple | 2026-02-01 06:07:17+00:00
I've used Claude Code a lot over the last year and I've generally been very happy with it. I have a lot of experience writing code both professionally and for personal projects. I've found that for things like basic APIs and websites and database operations, I don't have to pay attention to the code being produced much at all anymore. It Just Works for the most part as long as you adequately describe what you're trying to build. There are only so many ways you can write a CRUD app after all, and generally the implementation isn't "special" just necessary.

But my experience on 3d game dev in particular has been quite different. I've been able to get good results for basic 2d games and basic features in 3d worlds, but have been struggling to build more complicated scenarios with Claude Code without laying out every specific detail. I have to tell it to use quaternions for a particular rotation because I know about issues with gimble lock. I have to suggest a ray traced solution in another area because relative mouse position isn't good enough when accounting for resolution and aspect ratio. If I didn't know about ray tracing or quaternions and how they are used and fit into game development I wouldn't have been able to interrupt Claude Code and guide it down a better path. I think claude code is particularly weak in spatial reasoning and I suspect the context required for some GPU operations are pushing other parts of instructions out of context. It's forgetting "the basics" far more than I've experienced in any other project. Building a 3d world simulation featuring a bastardization of plate tectonics and weather systems is the first thing I've tried to do with Claude Code that I could have probably written myself faster. If it wasn't for the crippling adhd.
by nharada | 2026-02-01 06:11:16+00:00
I'm obviously biased, and I probably have more gripes than most about Waymo as a corporate entity, but the premise this article seems to be based on is "Waymo is a zombie company who will never release a real product" or something similar?

They seem to be scaling just fine. Here in SF they're ubiquitous and most people I know use them regularly (and usually prefer them to rideshare). Sure, it's not the type of growth possible with pure software, but they're doing 500k rides/week and are looking to be doing 1MM/week by the end of the year. What scale does this business need to be for the author to consider them a real company?
by pfannkuchen | 2026-02-01 06:12:23+00:00
Mind reading intent, of course.

People do foolish things when they panic. And the question is panicked mistake vs intentional murder.

My mind does anchor on things that feel too low probability to be a coincidence. The very odd “gun gun gun” shout immediately before the shooting, which very clearly could induce panic, is just a coincidence and had nothing to do with the shooting? And instead they just maniacally decided to kill him, coincidentally immediately after hearing “gun gun gun”.

Like it seems like this structure does not cause your brain to prioritize “gun gun gun” as a likely explanation. Do we just have different mental heuristics? Like I wouldn’t say that this is proof, just that it is my default explanation and that I need reasonably strong evidence to end up with a different default. I wonder what causes you to end up with the other default?
by lrvick | 2026-02-01 06:12:38+00:00
I turned off all cell carrier tracking 5 years ago. 100% of it.

By canceling my cell phone subscription.

I know I know, I must be amish, I have heard it all. But I run two tech companies, travel, have a family, and do most of the things most around here probably do other than doom scrolling.

So much more time in my own head to think.
by trimethylpurine | 2026-02-01 06:13:36+00:00
There are so many rulings, just in the last 25 years even, where SCOTUS has reaffirmed that warrantless search is not okay. This one is very much in line with the topic, in fact.

Carpenter v. United States (2018)

This country has never been what you're saying. We have some over policing happening. That seems to come and go in every country and doesn't say anything by itself about what a county is about, especially where it's trending over a 25 year timeline in the opposite direction from what you're describing.

Let it go to court, at least, before you flip your lid and turn on your countrymen.

Please.
by blueprint | 2026-02-01 06:16:27+00:00
> Hyperbole is rarely useful.

So you'll use some other kind of fallacious argument?
anyway, it wasn't hyperbole.
it's reduction to absurdity. Your struggle is that you don't realize that I'm right because you are in the situation that I describe.
if you want to be helpful to yourself, then you can ask me for proof of what I'm talking about instead of merely causing doubt in the minds of any other readers. If you have any real counterexample or proof then you are free to present it.
Meanwhile, I've got tons of evidence for what I said and it would be lucky for the world if that were true, would it not? and if hyperbole is not so helpful, then why don't you help by giving some other examples to substantiate my argument? That's collaboration in good faith. so are you actually disagreeing with what I'm saying or are you just attempting to plant doubt in people's minds and not being forthcoming about why even with yourself?

Something supposedly hyperbolic should be even easier to disprove. That's why I posed it that way - to leave you less room for doubt as I start to show you positive evidence. If it turns out I was right, would you still be upset at me for saying that intelligent people fall for fallacies? That doesn't have to be your fate unless you somehow participate in it, and I would suggest to you it's because you've accepted something untrue and uncomfirmed without realizing it, leading you to assume that no one has a solution, simply because you've never experienced or encountered them. Lucky for us there are people who know things we don't and have not yet imagined and whose levels in some areas are much higher than our own. The humble or cultivated in virtue know this and are lucky for it as they see it as a benefit rather than an afront to their pride or reflection on themselves somehow.
by refulgentis | 2026-02-01 06:18:30+00:00
This is a really good point.

It made me realize there's something weird about TikTok, it's kind of like Twitter except with an audience much more compliant with/sanguine about The Algorithm. i.e. no one's fighting for a "people I follow only" feed (there is one, but it's not worth fighting for, in a cultural sense)

They will overpromote one thing and some story you're not part of will be hyperviral for 6 hours, so there's almost no time for someone else to digest it. (example that comes to mind is Solidcore Guy, https://people.com/man-finds-empty-6-a-m-solidcore-class-fil..., took People 10 days to catch up to something you'd need to know for small talk in a 48 hour window)
by enaaem | 2026-02-01 06:20:47+00:00
Content on social media nowadays isn’t organic. State level resources are being thrown to influence people. So you are being beamed some government propaganda anyway.

I grew up in the forum days and internet discussions were very different back then. Accounts like “Endwokeness” would never work. People will make fun of him for being so obsessed with trans. You can’t just post some low effort political openings and walk away. Your openings need to have substance and you are pressured to engage. Otherwise people will see through your schtick and you get banned.

I don’t have a solution for this, and I think it’s a different problem regarding social media for kids.
by fy20 | 2026-02-01 06:21:31+00:00
I watched a documentary a while ago on YT, I can't remember the name now, but it was talking about the negative affects of this.

It was discussing how crops are bred specifically for life span and storefront appeal, at the expense of other attributes like taste and nutrition. It focussed on tomatoes, but I'd assume it is true for all crops.

Also fun fact: a kg of tomato seeds can be worth more than a kg of gold.
by vunderba | 2026-02-01 06:22:31+00:00
It was more an experiment in psychology than a real AI.

It recorded every input/output pair from users over time and eventually reached the point where, instead of generating a random response, it would simply search for the most similar A→B pair and return that output to the user, creating the illusion of intelligence.

If you’re familiar with the magician Derren Brown, there’s a good comparison: when he appeared to play competitively against nine very strong English chess players simultaneously. It’s like that.

https://en.chessbase.com/post/derren-brown-s-che-trick-once-...
by slfreference | 2026-02-01 06:23:11+00:00
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42041926-the-scout-minds...

When it comes to what we believe, humans see what they want to see. In other words, we have what Julia Galef calls a soldier mindset. From tribalism and wishful thinking, to rationalizing in our personal lives and everything in between, we are driven to defend the ideas we most want to believe--and shoot down those we don't. But if we want to get things right more often, argues Galef, we should train ourselves to have a scout mindset. Unlike the soldier, a scout's goal isn't to defend one side over the other. It's to go out, survey the territory, and come back with as accurate a map as possible. Regardless of what they hope to be the case, above all, the scout wants to know what's actually true. In The Scout Mindset, Galef shows that what makes scouts better at getting things right isn't that they're smarter or more knowledgeable than everyone else. It's a handful of emotional skills, habits, and ways of looking at the world--which anyone can learn. With fascinating examples ranging from how to survive being stranded in the middle of the ocean, to how Jeff Bezos avoids overconfidence, to how superforecasters outperform CIA operatives, to Reddit threads and modern partisan politics, Galef explores why our brains deceive us and what we can do to change the way we think.
Show HN: Securing the Ralph Wiggum Loop – DevSecOps for Autonomous Coding Agents
by agairola | 2026-02-01 06:23:26+00:00
Hi HN,

Since AutoGPT in 2023, I’ve been uneasy about fully unsupervised AI agents. I see the productivity upside, but “kick it off and walk away” felt risky.

Recently, the “Ralph Wiggum loop” pattern has gone viral. The idea is simple:
An autonomous coding agent runs repeatedly until all PRD items are complete, with fresh context each loop and state stored outside the model in git, JSON, etc.

What bothered me was this part: what protects the system while I’m AFK?

Traditional AI-assisted dev today looks like:
AI writes code → human reviews → CI scans → human fixes

What I wanted instead:
AI writes code → security scans immediately → AI fixes issues → repeats until secure → escalates if stuck

So I built a prototype that embeds security scanning directly inside the agent loop. The agent runs tools like Semgrep, Grype, Checkov, etc. inside its own session, sees the findings, and iteratively fixes them before anything is committed.

The loop looks like this:

PRD → Agent → Scan → Pass? → Commit
Fail → Fix → Retry (3x) → Escalate to human

A few design principles that mattered:

* Baseline delta: pre-existing issues are tracked separately. Only new findings block commits.
* Sandbox constraints: no network access, no sudo, no destructive commands.
* Human override: nothing is fully autonomous. You can step back in at any point.

Is this bulletproof? Definitely not.
Is it production-ready? No.
But it’s a starting point for applying DevSecOps thinking to autonomous agents instead of trusting “AI magic.”

Repo link: https://github.com/agairola/securing-ralph-loop

Would love feedback from folks experimenting with agent loops, secure automation, or AI-assisted development gone wrong.

Happy to iterate.
by chickensong | 2026-02-01 06:24:00+00:00
If you don't have building codes, you can totally yolo build a small house, no calculator needed. It may not be a great house, just like vibeware may not be great, but also, you have something.

I'm not saying this is ideal, but maybe there's another perspective to consider as well, which is lowering barriers to entry and increased ownership.

Many people can't/won't/don't do what it takes to build things, be it a house or an app, if they're starting from zero knowledge. But if you provide a simple guide they can follow, they might end actually building something. They'll learn a little along the way, make it theirs, and end up with ownership of their thing. As an owner, change comes from you, and so you learn a bit more about your thing.

Obviously whatever gets built by a noob isn't likely to be of the same caliber as a professional who spent half their life in school and job training, but that might be ok. DIY is a great teacher and motivator to continue learning.

Contrast to high barriers to entry, where nothing gets built and nothing gets learned, and the user is left dependent on the powers that be to get what he wants, probably overpriced, and with features he never wanted.

If you're a rocket surgeon and suddenly outsource all your thinking to a new and unpredictable machine, while you get fat and lazy watching tv, that's on you. But for a lot of people who were never going to put in years of preparation just to do a thing, vibing their idea may be a catalyst for positive change.
by AngryData | 2026-02-01 06:24:51+00:00
I think part of the problem too is there being so much slop content now that isn't worth paying 100% to which primes people to use their phone while watching for example netflix. And there is no differentiation between "higher quality pay attention to me content" that loses value by not paying attention and "quick and dirty low budget background movie" that loses value by paying attention to everything outside of a few key moments that covers the basic story line.
by avidiax | 2026-02-01 06:25:16+00:00
What is it about mobile phone chipsets that makes the unsuitable for a TV stick or STB?

Is it that there is special TV-specific hardware like tuners, HW accelerated audio and video decoders, and PQ/AQ accelerators?

Apple has adapter their A15 chipsets for use in the Apple TV, so it seems possible. But obviously the Apple TV products don't have tuners, aren't driving a display natively, and probably don't have enough I/O interfaces to add all the extra hardware you'd need to embed it in a panel or STB.
by userbinator | 2026-02-01 06:25:46+00:00
I briefly taught a beginner CS course over a decade ago, and at the time it was already surprising and disappointing how many of my students would reach for a calculator to do single-digit arithmetic; something that was a requirement to be committed to memory when I was still in school. Not surprisingly, teaching them binary and hex was extremely frustrating.

I tell people when I tip I "round off to the nearest dollar, move the decimal place (10%), and multiply by 2" (generating a tip that will be in the ballpark of 18%), and am always told "that's too complicated".

I would tell others to "shift right once, then divide by 2 and add" for 15%, and get the same response.

However, I'm not so sure what you mean by a problem with thinking that abstraction is bad. Yes, abstraction is bad --- because it is a way to hide and obscure the actual details, and one could argue that such dependence on opaque things, just like a calculator or AI, is the actual problem.
by keepamovin | 2026-02-01 06:26:00+00:00
Yeah, I agree with the reading that these kind of large information pipelines are essentially some kind of institutions almost like public railways or water and electricity because they’ve become essential. I mean there’s a little bit more nuance because not everybody wants nor needs a Facebook or whatever but if you make the bucket big enough, it seems almost everybody uses something inside of it.

I see your point now about monopoly. It’s more sort of monopoly in the digital age and it’s pretty coherent what you’re saying, From the narrow point of view that you’re meaning here, and it is a significant point. I think the only solution in that case is you have to treat them as institutions and they have to be run for the public benefit - but saying that sounds ridiculous and I don’t think it could ever work so I guess our societies have to come up with some other solutions. But the problem, your point is referencing, is very real.
by throwdbaaway | 2026-02-01 06:27:05+00:00
> Many times I will erase what the LLM has written and redo it, by myself depending on the situation.

The contention here is that antirez doesn't think this is necessary anymore. 100% code gen, with the occassional "stepping in and tell the AI how to write a certain function"

Your position is more balanced and quite similar to https://mitchellh.com/writing/non-trivial-vibing
by steve1977 | 2026-02-01 06:29:31+00:00
They also allow for much better subscriber retention.

But the same applies. If attention span was not an issue, the episodes could be longer and allow for even more interesting development. ;)

Also see what Netflix is doing for example, with explaining the plot multiple times and often very literally. You could even argue that multiple episodes are necessary today so that the plot can be explained explicitly and repeated enough often so it sticks.
by armadyl | 2026-02-01 06:30:13+00:00
The things that Lockdown Mode disables actually massively reduce attack surface at the expense of user experience.

For example, Graphite, the spyware used by Paragon gets stopped in its tracks by Lockdown Mode as it disables link previews in iMessage (probably one of the more vulnerable apps due to it’s system privileges alongside Safari I believe) which can prevent zero-click attacks: https://citizenlab.ca/research/first-forensic-confirmation-o....

The NSO Group’s Pegasus and BlastPass spywares are also stopped with Lockdown Mode (in Pegasus’ case, zero-click exploits at minimum are thwarted).

Lockdown Mode’s USB protection is also effective at stopping Cellebrite, although it’s means of protection isn’t as comprehensive as GrapheneOS’s usb-blocking feature.

It also disables (among other things) Safari’s JIT compiler/V8 and WebAssembly which are some of the biggest attack vectors for web-based malware.

I noted it in the Apple Platform Security thread but I would like to also see Lockdown Mode have full synchronous across the board MTE which would be a big feature but I understand that this can introduce a severe performance regression.
by Jordan-117 | 2026-02-01 06:30:25+00:00
205! The running commentary was fun. And I love how permissive it is -- it was fun stumbling into a new category that you wouldn't necessarily expect to qualify. I do wish that there was an option to see a list of the most popular ones you missed (based on traffic to the article or similar).

For a similar brain exercise, try to Name Every City:

https://cityquiz.io/
by leptons | 2026-02-01 06:32:56+00:00
>Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them. The content must either be addictive/engaging or paid advertisements. Quality of the content doesn't matter at all.

"AI" is really no different. These social media bans should include "AI" too, for people under a certain age. I even see adults that don't understand the limits of "AI" and that it shouldn't be trusted blindly.
by childintime | 2026-02-01 06:33:31+00:00
I like your thesis, but what about this: all this self driving debate is nonsense if you require Tesla to pay all damages plus additional damages, "because you were hit by a robot!". That should make sure Tesla improves the system, and that it operates above human safety levels. Then one can forget about legislation and Tesla can do its job.

So to circle back to your thesis: when the car is operating autonomously, the manufacturer is responsible. If it goes broke then what? Then the owner will need to insure the car privately. So Tesla insurance might have to continue to operate (and be profitable).

The question this raises is if Tesla should sell any self-driving cars at all, or instead it should just drive them itself.
by godelski | 2026-02-01 06:34:33+00:00
> In a vacuum, radiative heat loss per time hyper scales with temperature to the 4th power.

Correct, but you do know that the Stefan–Boltzmann Constant is 5.67e-8 W/(m^2K^4), right? And that emissivity <1 in all real world applications? It is only 1 when a blackbody is radiating in a vacuum.

This is how I know you don't understand the math. Because you didn't take the time to understand it. Plug in dummy numbers. I'll make it easy, 100^4=1e8.

You didn't think about how T works and the domain we're operating in. T's power isn't a huge factor when we're trying to dump lower levels of heat.

Let's say we're trying to discharge our power draw of 300W at 100C, that's still going to take a 0.5m^2 black body radiator sitting in perfect darkness PER CPU!!! A data center has hundreds of thousands!

You realize how much fucking surface area that is?

And this is before we consider all the other heat generated from the datacenter and the fact that you're dumping heat back to the moon's surface which will radiate it right back at your radiator making it much less efficient. Add the sun and you're fucked.

> You have no knowledge of how effectively I use my time.

Of course I do. You made a statement so preposterous I know you don't use it to do math or physics. Maybe you watch some math YouTube but that's not the same. I don't have to know everything you do do to know what you don't do.

You know how I know this stuff? It's because I've put things into space. Yet you were even too arrogant to check NASA's website
by leptons | 2026-02-01 06:36:11+00:00
Lol, I guess I'm glad I checked-out from reddit before the whole "AI" thing took off. My life is honestly way better without reddit. HN isn't far behind though, honestly. The less time I spend here, the better for everything else going on in my life. HN has at least been somewhat useful for my day-job and employment future.
by keepamovin | 2026-02-01 06:37:47+00:00
One perspective I’m circling right now about this topic is that maybe we’re coming to realize as a society that what we considered intelligence (or symbolic intelligence whatever you wanna call that thing that we measure with traditional IQ tests, verbal fluency, etc) is actually a far less essential cognitive aspect to us as humans then we had previously assumed and is in fact, far more mechanical in nature than we had formerly believed.

This ties with how I sometimes describe current generation AI as a form of mechanized intelligence: like Babbage’s calculating machine, but scaled up to be able to represent all kinds of classes of things.

And in this perspective that I’m circling these days where I’m currently coming down on it is maybe the effect of this realization will be something like the dichotomy outlined in the Dune series: namely, that between mechanized intelligence embodied by mentats and the more intuitive and prescient aspects of cognition embodied by the Benni Jessarit and Paul’s lineage.

A simple but direct way to describe this transition in perspective may be that we come to see what we formally thought of as intelligence in the West/reductive tradition as a form of mechanized calculation that it’s possible to outsource to automatic non-biological processes, and we start to lean in more deeply to the more intuitive and prescient aspects of cognition.

One thing I’m reminded of is how Indian yogic texts describe various aspects of mind.

I’m not sure if it’s a one-to-one mapping because I’m not across that material but merely the idea of distinguishing between different aspects of mind is something with precedent; and central to that is the idea of removing association between self identity and the aspects of mind.

And so maybe one of the effects for us as a society will be something akin to that.