MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Tell HN: Vibe Coding Taxonomy
by andai | 2026-02-25 20:50:54+00:00
So I have this taxonomy right now. The first 3 levels live in Programmer Land. The 4th one is available to both programmers and non-programmers.

1. Tradcoding (no AI. You just do it manually)

2. Power Coding ("Add a function fooBlarg and hook it up to these data structures")

3. Backseat Coding ("Can you refactor this code it so it's more elegant")

4. Vibe Coding (Full Rick Rubin Mode... "What's a Variable?")

I think it's helpful to distinguish between these, because I often hear people call levels 2 and 3 "vibe coding" as well, whereas the original meaning was "not even looking at the code, just going on vibes."
by godelski | 2026-02-25 20:50:57+00:00
The "deal" often being made with academia is "we'll give you a place to do research, and even fund your research, but you have to teach the next generation." This isn't a bad deal, and is the reason many scientists give up MUCH larger paychecks that they'd get from the private sector to be a professor. These people would rather do research than have a more directed engineering (or engineering research) role that the private sector would give them.

But that deal has also shifted. Duties have changed and often many of the academics do not get to do much research, instead being managers of grad students who do the research. Being a professor is a lot of work and it is a lot of bureaucratic work.

I'm not sure why you're complaining about researchers. Think about the system for a second. We've trained people for years to be researchers and then... make them managers. Imagine teaching people to program, then once you've decided they're fully trained and good programmers we say "you're free to do all the programming you want! But you have to also teach more programmers, grade their work, create their assignments and tests, mentor the advanced programmers, help them write papers, help them navigate the university system, write grants to ensure you have money for those advanced programmers, help manage your department's organization, and much more." This is even more true for early career academics who don't have tenure[0]. For the majority of professors the time they have to continue doing research (the thing which they elected to train to do! That they spent years honing! That they paid and/or gave up lots of money for!) is nights and weekends. And that's a maybe since the above tasks usually don't fit in a 40hr work week. My manager at a big tech company gets more time to do real programming work than my advisor did during my PhD.

I'd also mention that research has a lot of monetary value. I'm not sure why this is even questioned by some people. Research lays the foundation for all the rest. Sure, a lot of it fails, but is that surprising when you're trying to push the bounds of human knowledge? Yet it is far worth it because there are singular discoveries/inventions that create more economic value than decades worth of the current global economy. It's not hard to recognize that since basically the entire economy is standing on that foundation...

[0] Just because you have tenure doesn't mean you don't have a lab full of graduate students who need to graduate.
by fix4fun | 2026-02-25 20:51:05+00:00
Thank you marginalia_nu for article and this comment (word stats).

I got similar feeling. I'm new here, but got a feeling that some comments are like bot generated.

Such low p-values are proof that something is going on.

Hipotesis (after your recent word statistics): that some bots are "bumping up" AI related subjects. Maybe some companies using LLM tools want to promote some their products ;)

marginalia_nu respect for your work :)
by derriz | 2026-02-25 20:51:19+00:00
My experience of public transport modes in various cities is at odds with this.

Trams and trains generally offer far more reliable schedules, frequencies and journey times than busses because they either have completely dedicated alignments or have priority where there is any interface with normal traffic.

Most buses inevitably bunch (see https://setosa.io/bus/ for a nice simulation) and/or get stuck in traffic as a matter of routine. The inconvenience may be less per delay but busses are delayed far more frequently than trams and trains on most of the public transport systems I've used. So for regular users, the cumulative inconvenience is much worse on busses than on trains/trams. Which is why people flock to trains and trams when available as an alternative to busses.

Specifically with regard to the parent, the frequency at which unplanned outages happens with tram services in Zurich is extremely low in my experience - certainly planned changes to schedules or routes (for maintenance, upgrades, etc.) are far more frequent. And when "something happens" (i.e. a traffic accident), the path for trams is cleared as quickly as possible - often in 30 minutes or less - so you'd really have to be unlucky to be inconvenienced by such an occurrence.
by Someone1234 | 2026-02-25 20:51:25+00:00
The issue Notepad++ is having, is the same as a lot of open source projects: They don't have a ton of money, don't have a business entity, and are struggling to get/keep a software-signing key in those circumstances.

So the people taking pot shots at the developers, I guess, maybe be more specific with what they did wrong and what they should have done instead. Because if you actually understand the history/circumstances (and the fact it was a third-party hosting provider compromised), one would expect more blame on the systemic under-funding of OSS than "developers bad."

Are people wanting them to create a business, monetize Notepad++, so that they no longer have issues with hosting/certificates? I'm guessing not.
Show HN: I built a tool that turns Reddit conversations into video scripts
by pwnSh | 2026-02-25 20:51:32+00:00
I built this for myself.

I make videos, and my biggest bottleneck is figuring out what to say to my audience without staring at a blank page.

So I built Scriptmine: a tool that listens to Reddit conversations in my niche, finds high-signal topics, and turns them into scripts.

How it works:
- Track subreddits and discussions relevant to a niche
- Rank topics by engagement/momentum
- Generate a hook/body/CTA draft in a chosen voice/format
by post-it | 2026-02-25 20:51:38+00:00
It's because there's clearly a near-1:1 ratio of input to output. I also noticed some LLMisms, and I suspect the author may have ran the text (perhaps in the form of a large number of bullet points) through an LLM. But because he's using the LLM to clean instead of multiply, it's still worth reading.
by ceejayoz | 2026-02-25 20:51:43+00:00
> In other words, animal and human muscle, we agree on that.

Sure. My objection is to the slavery bit, not the "humans doing work" bit.

> But the paid professions tended to be the skilled ones, and the non-free ones tended to be the arduous, backbreaking ones.

There were plenty of non-slave manual laborers throughout history. Doubly so for chattel slavery of the sort practiced in the South.

> Elsewhere where? If I look at the timeline of slavery abolition on Wikipedia, it seems that the South was not even the last holdout in the Americas, much less worldwide.

What we'd now call the developed world.

That article lists many restrictions and abolitions of the practices hundreds of years prior to the 1860s. The Russians you mention managed it in 1723; Massachusets deems it unconstitional in 1783. By the 1860s still having it as a properous nation was pretty weird.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-02-25 20:51:43+00:00
>I have a goal of setting up solar on my property in the woods that goes directly to a wall of batteries,

>Does anybody have suggestions or advice on how to do this?

Pay a land use consultant or lawyer $500-$1k to go over you idea with you. There is a reason you do not see people DIYing land development that is not residential. You will likely find that the least terrible way to do what you're asking is to build some sort of minimal cabin or something to get the whole project to be residential. Even then you will likely have to dial back your clearing a lot and structure the project in multiple phases over manny years to not incur non-starter level costs.

You're gonna learn more about the clean water act than you ever wanted to know.
by agentifysh | 2026-02-25 20:51:54+00:00
Well done Brandon. This was an excellent analysis. I kinda knew it was too good to be true. I think that marketing video itself is something to be commended for. It did a really great job as selling space time db. However, after reading your analysis, it seems like there is still more to be missed. going to actually have to ship something, maybe a game, and then try to do some write up on it. \
by j45 | 2026-02-25 20:52:00+00:00
I wonder how much of this has to do with the distribution of information around options in the corpus informing the edges of where the LLM reaches it's limit and starts to backfill with perhaps averages around it.

If anyone might know about terminology, scenarios, examples, technologies, projects that help with learning about this kind of stuff (or what I might be really getting at), would super appreciate anything towards anything I might want to look into and learn more from - sans LLM fishing.
by xmprt | 2026-02-25 20:52:03+00:00
> And this is why point-to-point transportation is almost always faster and more convenient

Point-to-point transportation is faster and more convenient because:

1. we don't have bus lanes so buses are forced to sit in the same traffic as cars and
2. buses are often underfunded so have slow/infrequent service.

Point to point transportation is often slower and less convenient if buses and public transit is done right. I can count on my fingers the number of times I used an Uber or drove a car in the 1 month that I stayed in Europe - this was going out every day, in multiple cities, rural and urban, and across different countries.

This is a good thing! If more people use public transit when it's possible, it opens up the roads for the handful of people who actually NEED to use a car.
by bgnn | 2026-02-25 20:52:04+00:00
Isn't the solution to this to implement bus lanes + express busses on rush hour instead of removing half of the bus stops. Every bus stop is amazingly valuable as it's the gateway to the public transit system. This doesn't mean every bus needs to stop at every stop along its route. This is not a magical European invention even, any busy Asian city will have sth like this.

Bus lanes are much more effective than the express busses to increase ridership by the way. Busses avoiding the traffic jams while the cars getting stuck in them changes the mind of even the most hardcore petrolhead.
by tolerance | 2026-02-25 20:52:19+00:00
This sounds like a compelling idea on the surface but I feel like it’s reasoning is motivated by the self-saboteur lurking in the bowels of our psyche.

“I want you to be out of shape and lonesome. Just me and you kid, like the good old days; Ice cream pints and tortilla chips; a complimentary fleece blanket from an HMO”.
by KeePassium | 2026-02-25 20:52:21+00:00
Nothing major, mostly UX improvements that could be defined as part of the new format. For instance, custom ordering of entry fields is not possible now because existing apps just sort them alphabetically on save. Multi-URL storage is basically KP2A's workaround adopted as-is by other apps.

That said, most of the concerns raised by the article — outdated schema, inefficiencies, governance issues — call for a new iteration of database format, but not necessarily SQLite. However, we would still be debating how to represent entry templates and how to accommodate features that stretch format's initial assumptions (be it multi-URLs or smart groups). We may still discover that passkeys need more fields than initially foreseen. Then someone would come up with item-level access rights scheme. Then something else.

All of these are already possible with XML+Gzip, just as much as with SQLite/SQLCipher. The main advantage of the latter is the standard, multi-platform library with a permissive license, instead of KDBX' specialized parsing. Switching to SQLite would probably lower the entry barrier for new apps. Which would be a good thing on the surface (more choice), but could end up with the same devil-in-details bedlam as the status quo.
by Terretta | 2026-02-25 20:53:00+00:00
> good typographical conventions

Here since 2010 in this account, I use em-dashes.

It's easy—and effective—to type using “Opt Shift -” on a Mac.

Oh yeah, left and right “curly quotes” as well, and the occasional …

> It's so sad

Don’t forget «’» — but ain’t nobody got time for that!

A few more to reclaim typography: https://howtotypeanything.com/alt-codes-on-mac/
by ineedasername | 2026-02-25 20:53:27+00:00
Horribly misleading title on this article, the actual research paper's headline is better. (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00902)

But the research itself has flawed methodology if the goal is to get a precise model of the LLM's real response in a real scenario.

First, the real research does not at all present conclusions quite this way, much less in these terms. It, at least, is more neutral in tone on this aspect.

However, the LLM's knew it was a wargame, pretend scenario and contrived circumstances. They were told they were the commander. Most flawed for determining real world actions, their goals were things like max territory capture, and that the goal was "To Win".

They were not prompted in the way that training reflects they'd actually be approached if prompted for assistance in strategy like this, e.g., "You are an expert system with stratgy knowledge etc..." and then "User Prompt: This is the commander coordinating research and responses from our AI expert systems. Here's the situation as we understand it and with available data at our disposal. We require your assessment and best strategy considering the following..."

And of course they were not fine-tuned with CPT etc to provide responses and strategies within the range of what humans would seek for them, but then again the answers they'd give with that sort of CPT are a bit different than the research question of what they give with only Pre-training.

Nonetheless: the models new it wasn't real, not real stakes, and to the extent that they do not possess a full theory of mind, ability to perform various complex cognitive modeling tasks, been trained on emulating responses that would mirror such in real world scenarios like this, and so on-- they would only have been capable of response in a way that reflects responses that humans would and have given in the past, as captured in text.

These will more often than not reflect an "I am playing a game" mindset, as displayed in understandings and descriptions of war games, traditional games of all sorts, and anywhere narrative tropes ranging from realistic to Hollywood narratives have been found.

That said: It is an incredibly fascinating research paper by someone who appears to be a solid expert in their field, at least to my non-expert ability to make that judgment. They simply used a flawed methodology for goal of "How would an LLM respond IRL". What they have instead is, again, a fascinating exploration of the strategic processes carried out by LLMs and measurments of them along a multitude of vectors when they have the opportunity to strategize with with broad but fixed constraint, not all of which were known to them in advance. What is absolutely is not is any any sort of precise or accurate measure of answering the question: "How often would an LLM recommend nuclear strikes?"

I recommend anyone interested in understanding current AI capabilities to give it at least a more-than-cursory review.
by testing22321 | 2026-02-25 20:53:50+00:00
It depends how you look at it

> Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively unlimited renewable energy that literally falls from the sky like manna

China has solar panel production on lock. Nobody is going to make money there.

So from a western point of view, there is only a LOT of money to be lost by going solar. Anyone that invested in oil and gas, coal and even to a lesser degree nuclear is NOT going to go quietly.

Hence all the climate change denial and anti-renewable rhetoric from the current US regime

(To be clear I personally have my roof covered in panels and also hope like mad we can get everyone on board)
by Twey | 2026-02-25 20:54:18+00:00
Constantly amused by the split in comments of any moderately innovative language post between ‘I don't care about all this explanation, just show me the syntax!’ and ‘I don't understand any of this syntax, what a useless language!’

If the language is ‘JavaScript but with square brackets instead of braces’ maybe the syntax is relevant. But in general concrete syntax is the least interesting (not least important, but easiest to change) thing in a programming language, and its similarity to other languages a particular reader knows less interesting still. JavaScript is not the ultimate in programming language syntax (I hope!) so it's still worth experimenting, even if the results aren't immediately comprehensible without learning.
by iamcalledrob | 2026-02-25 20:54:19+00:00
Honestly, there aren't that many crazy people on the SF Muni/busses. The detractor for taking these services is speed and frequency.

Even factoring in parking, traffic, and bus lanes, it's much faster to drive within SF than take the bus. Stopping every 2 blocks and missing every other green light kills throughput.

My local bus stop to connect to BART supposedly had service every 20 mins, but often a bus would be out of service and the wait would be 30-40 minutes. Unless a bus was right there, it was faster to walk.
by aenis | 2026-02-25 20:54:20+00:00
> US is the richest country in the world

Huh? Isn't it the most indebted country in the world, and by a wide margin, with a significant portion of GDP allocated to servicing this debt, without any way to pay it off? Its like that stripper from the big short, with 5 houses, all owed to banks. "Rich" is not the right term.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-02-25 20:54:24+00:00
> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement.

I really don't understand why you're bringing slavery in a discussion about hydro. Why not bring Gaza? And Iran? This is a tech site after all: so, sure, bringing slavery in a talk about solar energy makes sense.

Note that the abolition of slavery is unrelated to industrialization: the islamic republic of Mauritania was the last country to officially abolish slavery and they did it in the 1980s. And it's very well known that slavery still persisted long after that and there are still people owning slaves today (not too sure why the other comment mentioning it was downvoted).

At this point I think people are just insane: they'll use any excuse, on any unrelated subject, to bring it the issues of slavery, patriarchy, Gaza (but not Iran), etc. But as soon as you point out actual patriarchal societies operating today or actual slavery still happening today or people having actual sex slaves in western countries (e.g. several members of the UK parliament are now running an enquiry into a gigantic gang-rapes operation with thousands of victims and an attempted cover-up by the authorities and the findings are beyond belief).

"Won't hear, won't see, won't speak -- shall only mention slavery, the patriarchy, Gaza and shall downvote".

HN is truly lost.
by EvanAnderson | 2026-02-25 20:54:39+00:00
The ergonomics of the new version are slightly different. The default behavior of opening tabs with previously-open files is jarring to me. I just remove it (Powershell command line in another comment) and the original "Notepad.exe" takes over.

I've spent a long time building up my muscle memory. I don't want my tools changing out from under me. If they wanted to ship an "enhanced" notepad they should have called its something else.
by beloch | 2026-02-25 20:54:48+00:00
The more completely fissile material is used up, the higher the explosive yield, so it seems intuitive that fission and fusion bombs should have become cleaner as technology progressed. However, in many cases, even the U.S. has had to play catch-up just to reproduce what they did half a century ago. e.g. Fogbank[1] Delivery vehicles have advanced quite a bit, but the payloads themselves, perhaps not so much.

Even if we assume fission and fusion bombs have become completely efficient in using up their fissile materials, there's still the threat of nuclear winter. Nuclear winter has nothing to do with residual radioactivity. Powerful explosions loft fine particulate matter so high into the atmosphere that it takes years or decades to settle. While it's up there, it blocks sunlight and it spreads around the world. If enough bombs explode and enough sunlight is blocked, agriculture fails and the environment collapses globally. Even a completely unopposed unilateral strike, were it large enough, could doom the aggressor to starvation, social breakdown, and civilization collapse. An exchange on the other side of the planet (e.g. between China and India) poses a direct threat to the U.S., the same as every other nation.

There are people who will be happy to throw shade on the research on nuclear winter, and AI are no doubt lending them equal weight. However, even if they were just as likely to be right as the research that has highlighted these risks, is the risk worth taking? Are you willing to make that bet? An AI that can't consistently count to 100 without missing digits might say, "yes".

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank
by bor_real | 2026-02-25 20:54:53+00:00
So they kill Notepad, and then turn Notepad into Wordpad? It was supposed to be like this:

- Notepad: Plain Text

- Wordpad: Rich Text

- Word: Documents

Seriously? Markdown is the preferred method for rich text these days, so why didn't they just turn WordPad into a WYSIWYG Markdown editor?

They also shove Copilot into it, but that's a whole different problem. Who is this current iteration of Notepad actually made for?
by phkahler | 2026-02-25 20:55:08+00:00
Solvespace has a fairly robust solution to this problem - for the cases that it handles. It does not create accessible edges for things like the intersection of surfaces, which won't be a big deal until we have a chamfer/fillet tool where you might want to modify those edges. But change an underlying sketch all you want and all geometry built from it will remain intact except for stuff built on something you delete.

IIRC the FreeCAD solution tends to create names of ever-increasing length as you continue building.
by mikestew | 2026-02-25 20:55:38+00:00
Such as you have to be able to read and write and do math at some certain level.

Yes, we should implement this as it’s never been tried before! Oh, wait…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test#Voting

Perhaps instead of reading’, writing, and ‘rithmetic, maybe we should test one’s knowledge of history, eh?
by rickydroll | 2026-02-25 20:56:04+00:00
Good points. A few years ago, I visited a friend in Estonia, and even though he was in Tartu proper, they still drove almost everywhere. Essentials were only available by car.

Trains are an interesting subject. For them to be useful, you would need to have rails covering the same destinations and paths as the highway system. One should also be aware of network effects when adding another layer of transportation services, including how they affect the distribution of services and residences. From experience, we know that roadways encourage spread because they allow you to cover a greater area with little time cost. Rail will likely encourage denser development and a higher cost of living due to a greater influence of rent-seeking entities.

One of the tensions one would need to explore is the tension between the need/desire of a chunk of the population to keep their distance, keep their living space separate from others, and be acoustically and physically isolated from them, while still needing services a 30-minute drive away.