MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by benreesman | 2026-02-07 18:27:54+00:00
It is tempting to be stealthy when you start seeing discontinuous capabilities go from totally random to somewhat predictable. But most of the key stuff is on GitHub.

The moats here are around mechanism design and values (to the extent they differ): the frontier labs are doomed in this world, the commons locked up behind paywalls gets hyper mirrored, value accrues in very different places, and it's not a nice orderly exponent from a sci-fi novel. It's nothing like what the talking heads at Davos say, Anthropic aren't in the top five groups I know in terms of being good at it, it'll get written off as fringe until one day it happens in like a day. So why be secretive?

You get on the ladder by throwing out Python and JSON and learning lean4, you tie property tests to lean theorems via FFI when you have to, you start building out rfl to pretty printers of proven AST properties.

And yeah, the droids run out ahead in little firecracker VMs reading from an effect/coeffect attestation graph and writing back to it. The result is saved, useful results are indexed. Human review is about big picture stuff, human coding is about airtight correctness (and fixing it when it breaks despite your "proof" that had a bug in the axioms).

Programming jobs are impacted but not as much as people think: droids do what David Graeber called bullshit jobs for the most part and then they're savants (not polymath geniuses) at a few things: reverse engineering and infosec they'll just run you over, they're fucking going in CIC.

This is about formal methods just as much as AI.
by burnerToBetOut | 2026-02-07 18:28:31+00:00
> …You don't need to fully explain the
> concept as it probably nows them well…

Unsurprisingly, many would disagree [1]…

> 1 Establish a Clear Vision

…

You have experienced the world, and you want to work together with a system that has no experience in this world you live in. Every decision in your project that you don’t take and document will be taken for you by the AI…

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46916586
by bijant | 2026-02-07 18:28:36+00:00
So now we know what that was all about. Nothing. Obviously POTUS orders people in his circle to contact foreign leaders and foreign intel all the time. Whether Mossad or SVR there are people in the Trump orbit that talk to them and Trump approves of this in his unusual diplomacy style. Maybe they even think they have leverage and it's going on behind Trumps back. Now thanks to this Whistleblower they know that their contacts happened with knowledge of the WH. Seems like a legitimate discretionary decision by DNI Gabbard to disclose this only to the WH CoS and not along the usual lines. Particularly since the press apparently get briefed immediately by members of the congressional oversight committee.
by christoph | 2026-02-07 18:28:39+00:00
Same. Feels like it goes against the entire “hacker” ethos that brought me here in the first place. That sentence made me actually feel physically sick on initial read as well. Everyday now feels like a day where I have exponentially less & less interest in tech. If all of this AI that’s burning the planet is so incredible, where are the real world tangible improvements? I look around right now and everything in tech, software, internet, etc. has never looked so similar to a dumpster fire of trash.
by neya | 2026-02-07 18:28:48+00:00
The solution to this problem is not throwing everything at AI. To get good results from any AI model, you need an architect (human) instructing it from the top. And the logic behind this is that AI has been trained on millions of opinions on getting a particular task done. If you ask a human, they almost always have one opinionated approach for a given task. The human's opinion is a derivative of their lived experience, sometimes foreseeing all the way to the end result an AI cannot foresee. Eg. I want a database column a certain type because I'm thinking about adding an E-Commerce feature to my CMS later. An AI might not have this insight.

Of course, you can't always tell the model what to do, especially if it is a repeated task. It turns out, we already solved this decades ago using algorithms. Repeatable, reproducible, reliable. The challenge (and the reward) lies in separating the problem statement into algorithmic and agentic. Once you achieve this, the $1000 token usage is not needed at all.

I have a working prototype of the above and I'm currently productizing it (shameless plug):

https://designflo.ai

However - I need to emphasize, the language you use to apply the pattern above matters. I use Elixir specifically for this, and it works really, really well.

It works based off starting with the architect. You. It feeds off specs and uses algorithms as much as possible to automate code generation (eg. Scaffolding) and only uses AI sparsely when needed.

Of course, the downside of this approach is that you can't just simply say "build me a social network". You can however say something like "Build me a social network where users can share photos, repost, like and comment on them".

Once you nail the models used in the MVC pattern, their relationships, the software design is pretty much 50% battle won. This is really good for v1 prototypes where you really want best practices enforced, OSWAP compliant code, security-first software output which is where a pure agentic/AI approach would mess up.
by jmalicki | 2026-02-07 18:28:55+00:00
I mean, one could argue skills are sort of MCP 2.0 fixing some of the mistakes.

The big pluses for MCPs are when:

1. They live remotely and update themselves
2. You install the skill and the scripts it uses together locally, so it can be more convenient packaging

MCPs aren't really all that complicated inherently, a lot of mistakes around them happened because they came early.
by virdev | 2026-02-07 18:29:14+00:00
Lasuite Docs PM here. Awesome to see we’ve made it top the first page again! Thanks for the interest :)

I’ve compiled a bunch of answers in an FAQ on this doc https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/docs/ed2e1dbf-07a2-43bb-ae1e-...

Cheers!
by belter | 2026-02-07 18:29:30+00:00
Can you make an ethical declaration here, stating whether or not you are being compensated by them?

Their page looks to me like a lot of invented jargon and pure narrative. Every technique is just a renamed existing concept. Digital Twin Universe is mocks, Gene Transfusion is reading reference code, Semport is transpilation. The site has zero benchmarks, zero defect rates, zero cost comparisons, zero production outcomes. The only metric offered is "spend more money".

Anyone working honestly in this space knows 90% of agent projects are failing.

The main page of HN now has three to four posts daily with no substance, just Agentic AI marketing dressed as engineering insight.

With Google, Microsoft, and others spending $600 billion over the next year on AI, and panicking to get a return on that Capex....and with them now paying influencers over $600K [1] to manufacture AI enthusiasm to justify this infrastructure spend, I won't engage with any AI thought leadership that lacks a clear disclosure of financial interests and reproducible claims backed by actual data.

Show me a real production feature built entirely by agents with full traces, defect rates, and honest failure accounting. Or stop inventing vocabulary and posting vibes charts.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46925821
by 9dev | 2026-02-07 18:30:04+00:00
That's sure true in theory, but given the prevalence of status symbols, many people thrive on comparing themselves to others. I'd argue society was better off when the only people you could reasonably compare yourself to were the three neighbours down the street (out of which only one would be into Pac-Man), not the world's ten thousand best players showing off only their best streaks on your Instagram feed all day.
by threecheese | 2026-02-07 18:30:10+00:00
My post? Shiiiii if that’s how it comes across I may delete it. I haven’t logged into LI since our last corp reorg, it was a cesspool even then. Self promotion just ain’t my bag

I was just trying to share the same patterns from OPs documentation that I found valuable within the context of agentic development; seeing them take this so far is was scares me, because they are right that I could wire an agent to do this autonomously and probably get the same outcomes, scaled.
by politelemon | 2026-02-07 18:30:16+00:00
> we transitioned from boolean definitions of success ("the test suite is green") to a probabilistic and empirical one. We use the term satisfaction to quantify this validation: of all the observed trajectories through all the scenarios, what fraction of them likely satisfy the user?

Oh, to have the luxury of redefining success and handwaving away hard learned lessons in the software industry.
by tucnak | 2026-02-07 18:30:18+00:00
I really like this for CodeAct, but like with other similar tools it's unclear how to implement data pipelining to leverage, like, lockstep batching to remote providers, or paged attention-like optimisations. Basically, let's say I want to run agent for every row in the table, I would probably want to batch most calls...

It's something, I think, missing from smolagents ecosystem anyway!
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-07 18:30:40+00:00
Statistics differ, but refugees granted protection range from a single-digit percentage of recent immigration into France to about ~15% or so (other countries have a somewhat larger share, including other European countries). It's true that many people tend to conflate proper refugees and economic migrants to whom a points-system might apply, but this is a general problem with how migration policy is discussed on all sides of the political spectrum, not something that's original to my comment.

Want to admit more refugees without endangering social cohesion? Then you should make sure that you're also carefully selecting your economic migrants as best you can. It's not a matter of assigning different human worth to each, but of simultaneously abiding by legal obligations towards actual refugees that are binding for the country, and also trying to do the absolute best you can for the highest amount of people who might be wanting to expatriate to it for different but nonetheless valid reasons - without unduly burdening that country and society in the process.
by dasil003 | 2026-02-07 18:30:41+00:00
In big companies there is always waste, it's just not possible to be super efficient when you have tens of thousands of people. It's one thing in a steady state, low-competition business where you can refine and optimize processes so everyone knows exactly what their job is, but that is generally not the environment that software companies operate in. They need to be able innovate and stay competitive, never moreso than today.

The thing with AI is that it ranges from net-negative to easily brute forcing tedious things that we never have considered wasting human time on. We can't figure out where the leverage is unless all the subject matter experts in their various organizational niches really check their assumptions and get creative about experimenting and just trying different things that may never have crossed their mind before. Obviously over time best practices will emerge and get socialized, but with the rate that AI has been improving lately, it makes a lot of sense to just give employees carte blanche to explore. Soon enough there will be more scrutiny and optimization, but that doesn't really make sense without a better understanding of what is possible.
by rednafi | 2026-02-07 18:31:08+00:00
Stoicism often gets conflated with apathy, which to some extent is a fair interpretation. But it’s not being indifferent to everything - rather, only to the things that disrupt your psychological stasis.

Then Silicon Valley ran with the idea and made it about tone-deafness. So now it’s almost fashionable to be intentionally cruel and tone-deaf, and then chalk it up to Stoicism.
by f30e3dfed1c9 | 2026-02-07 18:31:11+00:00
OK thanks. By the UK, do you mean Great Britain? England? Something else?

As far as I know (admittedly not far), Christians in the UK are about one-third Church of England, one-third non-denominational, one-fifth Catholic, and the rest other. I think most of the growth in non-denominational Christian churches in the UK has taken place in my lifetime.

There is a particular part of the UK where, in fairly recent decades, I think self-identifying as "Protestant," as quite specifically opposed to "Catholic," was not at all odd, to use your word. Not sure of the extent to which that's still the case.
by pkal | 2026-02-07 18:31:26+00:00
According to https://algol68-lang.org/, and as expressed in the recording, the contributors (specifically Marchesi) believe that ALGOL 68 continues to have advantages over other languages to this day ("more modern, powerful and safe" and "without successors"). One mentioned in the video is that the more complex, two-level grammars allow properties that would usually be described in the semantics of a language to be formally expressed in the syntax (the example he gives is the behaviour of numeral coercion). I guess this is not a surprise, as van Wijngaarden grammars are known to be Turing complete, but nevertheless it seems like something interesting thing to investiagate! There is a lot of lost wisdom in the past, that we dismiss because it doesn't fit into the language we use nowadays.
by catlifeonmars | 2026-02-07 18:31:33+00:00
1. Some people can afford to light a lot of their money on fire and still remain rich.

2. The trick is to burn other people’s money. Which is a lot more akin to what is going on here. Then, at least in the US, if you’re too big to fail, the fed will just give you more cash effectively diminishing everyone else’s buying power.
by kortex | 2026-02-07 18:31:36+00:00
Glad to see this idea getting traction!

Had the same idea years ago (same hashicorp lib too) but lost motivation to polish it to the point I felt confident enough to Show HN.
https://github.com/xkortex/passcrux

But given recent events, I want to restart work on it.

My use-case revolved more around preserving a master password e.g. to a password manager. I also wanted to support self-hosted backup, like hiding shares and giving directions to the parts to trusted friends. The shamir sharing part was straightforward but i really want to add forward error-correction to protect against partial data loss.
by mystraline | 2026-02-07 18:32:43+00:00
The current LLMs are not constantly learning. They're static models that require megatons of coal to retrain.

Now if the LLMs could modify their own nets, and improve themselves, then that would be immensely valuable for the world.

But as of now, its a billionaires wet dream to threaten all workers as a way to replace labor.
by alexjplant | 2026-02-07 18:33:09+00:00
It's worth noting that in the book "service" is heavily implied to be primarily military in nature yet Heinlein purported years after the fact that in the book's canon "95 percent" of citizen service was actually civil. I think it's debatable whether or not this was his intention all along or a retcon to fit his more, ahem, liberal worldview that emerged as he aged.

I also loved Verhoeven's film adaptation but he straight up admitted that he didn't finish the book before making the film, which was itself based on a Neumeier (of "Robocop" fame) script called "Bug Hunt at Outpost 7" that bore only superficial resemblance to the book. He made the same mistake as many others in casting the book as fascist merely because of its militaristic elements when it's clearly not. On top of lacking many essential elements of fascism (a dictator, a directed economy, suppression of political dissent, etc) there are also several spots that veer into philosophical treatise to espouse the opposite. The flashback scene involving Rico's professor talking about how a society is obligated to raise its children correctly (and how it's society's failure if they end up delinquent) is a perfect example - "the system is the problem" hardly reads as far-right.

This is all to say that I think Heinlein was more interested in exploring a concept of reciprocal responsibility between a citizenry and its government. The militaristic aspects of the novel as regards a distant, dehumanized enemy and the dominance of the fight over all other aspects of life are far more alarming in my opinion.
by GeoAtreides | 2026-02-07 18:33:24+00:00
> it's a form of mania

Correct. The history is rife with examples of manias taking hold of societies, I recommend "Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" by Charles Mackay[1], it's an absolutely fascinating book.

[1]https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24518
by xeckr | 2026-02-07 18:33:29+00:00
>I think it reveals that comparisons to heroin use in arguments against TikTok are hyperbolic and disconnected from reality, by empirical data.

I don't think that follows from your premises. Who is overstating the evils of heroin? Plenty of people argue that viewing TikTok (or AI-optimized short-form feeds) has bad side effects, mostly in the direction of eroding your ability to pay attention to anything less stimulating.

One thing that makes heroin more benign is that it's "finished" in some sense. The drug trade will find more addictive substances (e.g. fentanyl), but a vial of pure heroin isn't going to gradually become more addictive over time in ways that are imperceptible to the user but visible on the backend because the loss function trends downward.
by stego-tech | 2026-02-07 18:33:37+00:00
IT perspective here. Simon hits the nail on the head as to what I'm genuinely looking forward to:

> How do you clone the important parts of Okta, Jira, Slack and more? With coding agents!

This is what's going to gut-punch most SaaS companies repeatedly over the next decade, even if this whole build-out ultimately collapses in on itself (which I expect it to). The era of bespoke consultants for SaaS product suites to handle configuration and integrations, while not gone, are certainly under threat by LLMs that can ingest user requirements and produce functional code to do a similar thing at a fraction of the price.

What a lot of folks miss is that in enterprise-land, we only need the integration once. Once we have an integration, it basically exists with minimal if any changes until one side of the integration dies. Code fails a security audit? We can either spool up the agents again briefly to fix it, or just isolate it in a security domain like the glut of WinXP and Win7 boxen rotting out there on assembly lines and factory floors.

This is why SaaS stocks have been hammered this week. It's not that investors genuinely expect huge players to go bankrupt due to AI so much as they know the era of infinite growth is over. It's also why big AI companies are rushing IPOs even as data center builds stall: we're officially in a world where a locally-run model - not even an Agent, just a model in LM Studio on the Corporate Laptop - can produce sufficient code for a growing number of product integrations without any engineer having to look through yet another set of API documentation. As agentic orchestration trickles down to homelabs and private servers on smaller, leaner, and more efficient hardware, that capability is only going to increase, threatening profits of subscription models and large AI companies. Again, why bother ponying up for a recurring subscription after the work is completed?

For full-fledged software, there's genuine benefit to be had with human intervention and creativity; for the multitude of integrations and pipelines that were previously farmed out to pricey consultants, LLMs will more than suffice for all but the biggest or most complex situations.
by amarant | 2026-02-07 18:34:46+00:00
"If you haven't spent at least $1,000 on tokens today per human engineer, your software factory has room for improvement"

Apart from being a absolutely ridiculous metric, this is a bad approach, at least with current generation models. In my experience, the less you inspect what the model does, the more spaghetti-like the code will be. And the flying spaghetti monster eats tokens faster than you can blink! Or put more clearly: implementing a feature will cost you a lot more tokens in a messy code base than it does in a clean one. It's not (yet) enough to just tell the agent to refactor and make it clean, you have to give it hints on how to organise the code.

I'd go do far as to say that if you're burning a thousand dollars a day per engineer, you're getting very little bang for your tokens.

And your engineers probably look like this: https://share.google/H5BFJ6guF4UhvXMQ7
by voxl | 2026-02-07 18:35:00+00:00
I voted for Bernie in the primary, for Hilary; Biden; and Harris in the general elections. At no point did I think to myself "Now is the time to be an idealist about the DNC, right when we're combating fascism"

The DNC is an embarrassment, the two party system is a democratic disaster, but accelerationists? They're evil.
Ask HN: Opus 4.6 ignoring instructions, how to use 4.5 in Claude Code instead?
by Chance-Device | 2026-02-07 18:35:07+00:00
I’ve been using Claude Code this evening and I’m very dismayed by Opus 4.6’s ability to follow instructions. I have given it very clear instructions on several points, only to discover it ignored me without telling me.

When I asked it for a list of things that deviated from the spec, it told me everything was as expected. Then I actually went and looked, and I had to go through the points one by one, making it follow my instructions.

When I confronted it about this, it told me:

> I kept second-guessing your design decisions instead of implementing what you asked for … the mistakes I made weren’t a model capability issue - I understood your instructions fine and chose to deviate from them.

This is not acceptable. Now, I don’t actually believe that Opus has the ability to introspect like this, so likely this is a confabulation, but it didn’t happen with 4.5. Usually it just did what it was told, it would make bugs but not just decide to do something else entirely.

I want a model that actually does what I tell it. I don’t see anything online about how to get 4.5 back.

Any help?
by svilen_dobrev | 2026-02-07 18:35:31+00:00
> “define the spec concretely“

(and unambiguously. and completely. For various depths of those)

This always has been the crux of programming. Just has been drowned in closer-to-the-machine more-deterministic verbosities, be it assembly, C, prolog, js, python, html, what-have-you

There have been a never ending attempts to reduce that to more away-from-machine representation. Low-code/no-code (anyone remember Last-one for Apple ][ ?), interpreting-and/or-generating-off DSLs of various level of abstraction, further to esperanto-like artificial reduced-ambiguity languages... some even english-like..

For some domains, above worked/works - and the (business)-analysts became new programmers. Some companies have such internal languages. For most others, not really.
And not that long ago, the SW-Engineer job was called Analyst-programmer.

But still, the frontier is there to cross..
by aidenn0 | 2026-02-07 18:36:15+00:00
Yes with a but:

NixOS simultaneously smooths the path to using absolute paths while putting some (admittedly minor) speed-bumps in the way when avoiding them. If you package something up that uses relative paths it will probably break for someone else relatively quickly.

What that means is that you end up with a system in which absolute paths are used almost everywhere.

This is why the killer feature of NixOS isn't that you can configure things from a central place; RedHat had a tool to do that at least 25 years ago; it's that since most of /etc/ is read-only, you must configure everything from a central place, which has two important effects:

1. The tool for configuring things in a central place can be much simplified since it doesn't have to worry about people changing things out from under it

2. Any time someone runs into something that is painful with the tool for configuring things in a central place, they have to improve the tool (or abandon NixOS).