MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by asa400 | 2026-02-07 23:25:52+00:00
If all you (not you specifically, more of a royal “you” or “we”) are is a collection of skills centered around putting code into an editor and opening pull requests as fast as possible, then sure, you might be cooked.

But if your job depends on taste, design, intuition, sociability, judgement, coaching, inspiring, explaining, or empathy in the context of using technology to solve human problems, you’ll be fine. The premium for these skills is going _way_ up.
by bluesnowmonkey | 2026-02-07 23:26:00+00:00
But, is that different from how we already work with humans? Typically we don't let people commit whatever code they want just because they're human. It's more than just code reviews. We have design reviews, sometimes people pair program, there are unit tests and end-to-end tests and all kinds of tests, then code review, continuous integration, Q&A. We have systems to watch prod for errors or user complaints or cost/performance problems. We have this whole toolkit of process and techniques to try to get reliable programs out of what you must admit are unreliable programmers.

The question isn't whether agentic coders are perfect. Actually it isn't even whether they're better than humans. It's whether they're a net positive contribution. If you turn them loose in that kind of system, surrounded by checks and balances, does the system tend to accumulate bugs or remove them? Does it converge on high or low quality?

I think the answer as of Opus 4.5 or so is that they're a slight net positive and it converges on quality. You can set up the system and kind of supervise from a distance and they keep things under control. They tend to do the right thing. I think that's what they're saying in this article.
by Revanche1367 | 2026-02-07 23:26:04+00:00
The difference is that the person who was a woodworker is no longer needed. Why can’t the customer just walk up to a kiosk and ask the machine to start building? The machine or another one specialized for QA can then assess if it fits all the technical requirements which the customer doesn’t necessarily understand. This is what most people here are worried about, eventually the professional human being will no longer be needed by businesses which can produce everything with neither customer nor business owner being in need of specialized knowledge which they previously needed to acquire by hiring professionals.
by heliumtera | 2026-02-07 23:26:49+00:00
Everybody offers a generous free tier.

Verification? LoL, lmao even. Your vibes are low.

If you're a professional code producer, you shit out code as fast as possible. Don't give anyone time to analyze the disgusting pile of shit you generated, just shit out code as fast as you can and call it a win! Who would prove you wrong?

Would someone waste their biological precious resources reviewing machine generated slop, when your cadence is super human?
Would someone use the same machine you used to evaluate itself? Lol
by whattheheckheck | 2026-02-07 23:27:05+00:00
Is like the transition from monarchies to nation states.

By the 19th century, the rise of nation-states accelerated due to the spread of nationalism, the decline of feudal structures, and the unification of countries like Germany (1871) and Italy (1861). Centralized governments, uniform laws, national education systems, and a sense of collective identity became defining features. The French Revolution (1789) played a pivotal role by promoting citizenship, legal equality, and national sovereignty over dynastic rule

Maybe in 2300 they'll say something similar about nationalism
by bitwize | 2026-02-07 23:27:09+00:00
Joann comes from a different era of work, when full service—with a smile—was the baseline expectation. Our banker is in her mid-60s and kind of the same way: we come to her with a request and she just takes care of everything.

In our current corporate hellscape, companies want to cut costs by cutting down service to the bare minimum necessary to function in compliance with all regulations. The line workers, being given menial, unrewarding tasks with an increasing amount of paperwork they are now responsible for, naturally respond by putting forth the barest amount of effort necessary and clocking out as early as they can get away with.
by Closi | 2026-02-07 23:27:11+00:00
> It's not a programming language if you can't read someone else's code, figure out what it does, figure out what they meant, and debug the difference between those things.

Well I think the article would say that you can diff the documentation, and it's the documentation that is feeding the AI in this new paradigm (which isn't direct prompting).

If the definition of programming is "a process to create sets of instructions that tell a computer how to perform specific tasks" there is nothing in there that requires it to be deterministic at the definition level.
by msarnoff | 2026-02-07 23:27:14+00:00
Retro Game Mechanics Explained has a video about how the Asteroids vector generator worked and was coded for:

https://youtu.be/smStEPSRKBs?si=k_0u3NKCxCqZBc6w

Battlezone and later 3D games used different circuitry that generated vectors with analog circuitry and used a “math box” coprocessor based on Am2901 bit slice ALUs to help with the 3D math.
by kgeist | 2026-02-07 23:27:17+00:00
Years ago I built a scripting language that transpiled to TCC and then compiled to machine code in memory. It produced human-readable C code so it was very easy to get going: when debugging the compiler I could just look at the generated C code without having to learn any special infrastructure/ecosystem/syntax etc. Plus basically zero-overhead interop with C out of the box => immediate access to a lot of existing libraries (although a few differences in calling conventions between TCC and GCC did bite me once). Another feature I had was "inline C" if you wanted to go low level, it was super trivial to add, too. It was pretty fast, maybe two times slower than GCC, IIRC, but more than enough for a scripting language.
by shevy-java | 2026-02-07 23:27:27+00:00
Strangely enough I still think Civilization I is best.

Later versions added better graphics, some interesting gameplay choice and elements. But all of them felt much slower gameplay wise compared to Civilization I.

I feel in a similar way with SimCity. I liked the follow-ups and they were a bit better in terms of gameplay compared to later Civilizations, but the first version is still by far the best, even if young people today will find the graphics crap.

There is something about purity, to get the most basic parts out. Games today are more like movies. They may be fun but they feel more like playing a movie than a game. Little Nightmares was interesting, pretty to look at and fun from a game play perspective too, but ultimately I feel that the modern games lost something fundamental that they may never get back (at the least non-indie games; indie games are a bit more varied).
by stoneforger | 2026-02-07 23:27:40+00:00
Noone will clean it up, it's a societal problem. The koolaid is produce more, like we need another app for X . We are celebrating owning nothing, as a liberating act. People hate mental load yes, this is the perfect drug. You don't need to think or challenge anything. If the model says it's okay, it's okay. Local models will never be able to democratise this. People will do as they are told, and another generation of consumers will follow. The matrix won't be a prison, it will be a prompt from birth to death. And y'all clapping cause you can have X number of agents running around burning tokens like kids looking at the fire cracker on their hand about to blow up, giggling. The world was always mad, and this is proof it will always be mad while people are still around.
by Calavar | 2026-02-07 23:28:18+00:00
I'm not sure I'd call agents an
army of juniors. More like a high school summer intern who has infinite time to do deep dives into StackOverflow but doesn't have nearly enough programming experience yet to have developed a "taste" for good code

In my experience, agentic LLMs tend to write code that is very branchy with cyclomatic complexity. They don't follow DRY principles unless you push them very hard in that direction (and even then not always), and sometimes they do things that just fly in the face of common sense. Example of that last part: I was writing some Ruby tests with Opus 4.6 yesterday, and I got dozens of tests that amounted to this:

x = X.new
assert x.kind_of?(X)

This is of course an entirely meaningless check. But if you aren't reading the tests and you just run the test job and see hundreds of green check marks and dozens of classes covered, it could give you a false sense of security
by krapp | 2026-02-07 23:28:18+00:00
Jesus was very political. The archetype of the Messiah was understood to be explicitly political in the context of liberation from Roman occupation. Overturning the tables of the moneychangers was political. "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and Render unto God what is God's" is political. "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God", "If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also.", "If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.", "Let the dead bury their own dead." All political.

"Supply side Jesus" obviously has nothing to do with Jesus' actual teachings but the faith's founding principles are inextricable from politics because those principles are inextricable from the followers' relationship with the world and its power structures.
by Nextgrid | 2026-02-07 23:29:10+00:00
Anyone can fly a quadcopter though? You can buy one right now for a couple hundred bucks off Amazon (and strap explosives to it if you wanted to).

If anything, the fact we’re not seeing random drones carrying explosives and diving into groups of people on a daily basis shows the vast, vast (99.999%) majority of people is actually well-meaning and has no desire to kill or hurt anyone.

If you’re legitimately baffled by a random guy being able to fly a quadcopter around without any kind of government approval or oversight, I encourage you to buy one and play around (without explosives please!), just make sure to not fly it over places where people could be standing - terminal velocity is real and even a light one could cause serious injury if it were to lose control and fall on someone’s head.
by problynought | 2026-02-07 23:29:12+00:00
All programming achieves the same outcome; requests the OS/machine set aside some memory to hold salient values and mutate those values in-line with mathematical recipe.

Functions like:

updatesUsername(string) returns result

...can be turned into generic functional euphemism

takeStringRtnBool(string) returns bool

.. same thing. context can be established by the data passed in, external system interactions (updates user values, inventory of widgets)

as workers SWEs are just obfuscating how repetitive their effort is to people who don't know better

the era of pure data driven systems is arrived. in-line with the push to dump OOP we're dumping irrelevant context in the code altogether: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data-driven_programming
by vlovich123 | 2026-02-07 23:29:31+00:00
> If you batch harder, increase parallelism, you can get higher tokens/s. But you get less throughput. Simultaneously there is also this dial that you can speculatively decode harder with fewer users.

I think you skipped the word “total throughout” there right? Cause tok/s is a measure of throughput, so it’s clearer to say you increase throughput/user at the expense of throughput/gpu.

I’m not sure about the comment about speculative decode though. I haven’t served a frontier model but generally speculative decode I believe doesn’t help beyond a few tokens, so I’m not sure you can “speculatively decode harder” with fewer users.
Show HN: AI agent forgets user preferences every session. This fixes it
by fliellerjulian | 2026-02-07 23:29:31+00:00
I build AI agents for work and kept hitting the same issue: a user corrects the agent, the session ends, and the correction is gone. Next session, same correction. I tracked it across our users and the average preference gets re-corrected 4+ times before people just give up.
Existing solutions don't really solve this. Memory layers store raw conversation logs. RAG retrieves documents. Neither extracts what the user actually wants as a structured, persistent preference.
So I built pref0. It does one thing: extracts structured preferences from user corrections and compounds confidence across sessions.
How it works in practice. Say you're building a customer support agent:

Session 1: User says "always escalate billing issues to a human, don't try to resolve them."
pref0 extracts billing_issues: escalate_to_human, confidence 0.55.

Session 4: User flags a billing ticket the agent tried to auto-resolve. pref0 reinforces the preference. Confidence hits 0.85.

Session 7: A billing issue comes in. The agent routes it to a human without being told. No correction needed.

Now multiply that across hundreds of users. Each one teaching your agent slightly different things. pref0 maintains a structured profile per user (or team, or org) that your agent reads before every response.

The API is intentionally minimal. Two endpoints:
POST /track: send conversation history after a session. pref0 extracts preferences automatically.
GET /profiles/{user_id}: fetch learned preferences before the agent responds.

A few design decisions:
> Explicit corrections ("don't do X") score higher than implied preferences. Stronger signal.
> Preferences are hierarchical: user > team > org. New team members inherit org conventions on day one.
> Confidence decays over time so stale preferences don't stick forever.

This isn't a replacement for memory. Memory stores what happened. pref0 learns what the user wants. You can run both side by side.

Works with LangChain, CrewAI, Vercel AI SDK, or raw API calls. Free tier available -> https://pref0.com/docs

Would love feedback on the approach, especially from anyone building agents with repeat users.
by trimethylpurine | 2026-02-07 23:30:14+00:00
I see. And which company do you work for? Better yet, do you sleep in a bed? Do you have any idea what went into that bed that you knowingly sleep on?

Do you use a phone? Do you buy groceries?

You have a philosophical problem with your reasoning. You've made it so general in order to be right in the discussion, that you can't escape your own criticism now.
by MSFT_Edging | 2026-02-07 23:30:18+00:00
It's not an entitlement if you're paying into the tax base.

I'm somehow entitled to others receiving corporate bailouts, entitled to massive military waste spending, and entitled to seeing the "victims" of Havana Syndrome receiving free healthcare for life.

Yet I am not entitled to this money going towards research for the greater good of humanity?
by dataviz1000 | 2026-02-07 23:30:30+00:00
The only thing that can stop China from taking Taiwan is a US president willing to put two aircraft carrier strike groups between the island the mainland. That is the same today as it was 30 years ago. However, today, unlike in the 90s the mainland can take the island in 3 days without firing a shot.

> this has a lot more to do with China's growth

That is my point. Because of China's growth they don't need to take the island by force or commit terrorist attacks against other countries especially in Europe. Today, countries like the Bahamas, Peru, Afghanistan, and Nigeria are welcoming China and their infrastructure money (not destroying infrastructure like Russia does) with open arms.
by jdjdndbdhsjsb | 2026-02-07 23:30:39+00:00
Yes it is. But I am an optimist for human nature. I personally believe smaller companies doing different things is the future... Scaling as they need. It is a hellscape but people can and will adapt.

> Do you know how hard it to make a successful company or even make money?

Yes I have failed to do it before. I get this.

> VCs wont fund everyone

And? Do you need VCs? Economics mean that scale matters but what if we don't need it. What if we can make efficient startups with our own funding??
by notesinthefield | 2026-02-07 23:30:41+00:00
It was infuriating trying to get Wegovy via insurance. My doctor made three appeals, all denied. Out of pocket it wouldve been $1600/mo. Ive been getting semaglutide from compounding pharmacies for the last year and half for $149-$200. I have lost 97lbs, come back to running 30 miles a week after several major knee injuries made even a mile jog a multiday recovery effort. I absolutely get the regulatory stance but the name brands are absolutely unaffordable.
by itissid | 2026-02-07 23:31:07+00:00
So I am on a web cast where people working about this. They are from https://docs.boundaryml.com/guide/introduction/what-is-baml and humanlayer.dev Mostly are talking about spec driven development. Smart people. Here is what I understood from them about spec driven development, which is not far from this AFAIU.

Lets start with the `/research -> /plan -> /implement(RPI)`. When you are building a complex system for teams you _need_ humans in the loop and you want to focus on design decisions. And having structured workflows around agents provides a better UX to those humans make those design decisions. This is necessary for controlling drift, pollution of context and general mayhem in the code base. _This_ is the starting thesis around spec drive development.

How many times have you working as a newbie copied a slash command pressed /research then /plan then /implement only to find it after several iterations is inconsistent and go back and fix it? Many people still go back and forth with chatgpt copying back and forth copying their jira docs and answering people's question on PRD documents. This is _not_ a defence it is the user experience when working with AI for many.

One very understandable path to solve this is to _surface_ to humans structured information extracted from your plan docs for example:

https://gist.github.com/itissid/cb0a68b3df72f2d46746f3ba2ee7...

In this very toy spec driven development the idea is that each step in the RPI loop is broken down and made very deterministic with humans in the loop. This is a system designed by humans(Chief AI Officer, no kidding) for teams that follow a fairly _customized_ processes on how to work fast with AI, without it turning into a giant pile of slop. And the whole point of reading code or QA is this: You stop the clock on development and take a beat to see the high signal information: Testers want to read tests and QAers want to test behavior, because well written they can tell a lot about weather a software works. If you have ever written an integration test on a brownfield code with poor test coverage, and made it dependable after several days in the dark, you know what it feels like... Taking that step out is what all VCs say is the last game in town.. the final game in town.

This StrongDM stuff is a step beyond what I can understand: "no humans should write code", "no humans should read code", really..? But here is the thing that puzzles me even more is that spec driven development as I understand it, to use borrowed words, is like parents raising a kid — once you are a parent you want to raise your own kid not someone else's. Because it's just such a human in the loop process. Every company, tech or not, wants to make their own process that their engineers like to work with. So I am not sure they even have a product here...
by zamadatix | 2026-02-07 23:32:06+00:00
I think we just have different understandings of accountability but, perhaps, the same end desires. I absolutely agree if it's meant to be about also measuring the impact of the parents.

To me, accountability requires an added component of being held answerable for said impact. E.g. "John was held accountable for the damage to the car" would mean John had to answer for the damage, not just "the damage John had was measured" or "John's actions were found to cause the damage". This answerability to the impact is the only part of accountability which I think we can't realistically do with parents as we are able to for students or educators.
by olyjohn | 2026-02-07 23:32:25+00:00
I have been off work for over 6 months now. I have been doing so many projects, and exploring so many places, working out, eating healthy, learning, and spending very little money doing so. I actually even quit smoking pot after doing it daily for 10 years. It's been amazing, and I'd rather never go back to work. I don't get how people can get so bored. There's so much to do and see.
by toprerules | 2026-02-07 23:33:16+00:00
The question isn't whether businesses will have 0 human element to them, the question is does AI offer a big enough gap that technical skills are still required such that technical roles are still hired for. Someone in product can have all of those skills without a computer science degree, with no design experience, and AI will do the technical work at the level of design, implementation, and maintenance. What I am seeing with the new models isn't just writing code, it's taking fundamental problems as input and design wholistic software solutions as output - and the quality is there.
Show HN: Django-rclone: Database and media backups for Django, powered by rclone
by cui | 2026-02-07 23:33:30+00:00
django-rclone bridges Django's database layer with rclone's file transfer layer. You get native database dumps piped directly to any of rclone's 70+ supported cloud storage backends -- no temp files, no intermediate archives, no Python reimplementations of what rclone already does.
by phendrenad2 | 2026-02-07 23:33:32+00:00
This is interesting, because I've been going the other way: Using coding agents to write MORE abstraction layers. This is because I realized that, just like humans, in fact even more so, language models struggle to keep the whole stack in mind at once. See for yourself: Try having your agent write a CRUD app in Ruby or Python (no Rails, no Django), and then try it again with Rails or Django. It'll be a lot more productive and error-free the second time.

However, I think I understand where the author's coming from based on this line:

> I’ve been building a product from the ground up. Not the “I spun up a Next.js template” kind of ground up

Next.JS is the pinnacle of JavaScript-on-the-backend frameworks, and it's kind of pathetic compared to what Rails or Django give you. You still have a lot of thinking to do, so I posit (as I have for some time) that using Next.JS vs using NodeJS directly gives humans very little productivity boost. I think people just know that frameworks are a good thing in general, and never realized that the JavaScript offerings weren't that powerful.
by marcyb5st | 2026-02-07 23:33:53+00:00
I am more afraid if AI will actually deliver what CEOs are touting. People that are now working will be unemployable and will have to pivot to something else, overcrowding these other sectors and driving wages down.

If that comes to pass you will work the same or more for less money than now.

Basically jump back to a true plutocracy since only a few people will syphon the wealth generated by AI and that wealth will give them substantial temporal power.
by Mordisquitos | 2026-02-07 23:34:31+00:00
> Linux will only have a good desktop environment when it's users will be willing to leave it.

Putting aside the debate as to the quality of desktop environments, I honestly hope you're being intentionally nonsensical as a joke. What you describe can only make sense under the grossly misinformed belief that "Linux" is a monolithic entity incentivised to stop its users from "leaving it", and that this mythical "Linux" would have the agency to decide it needed "a good desktop environment" in order to avoid that from happening.