MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pixl97 | 2026-02-08 17:11:34+00:00
>increasingly hostile to ordinary people educating their kids outside school

There is a whole lot more nuance here than you're giving the topic.

There is one side that wants to give their kids a good education, they have the resources and the motivation to ensure they come out ahead.

They are not the problem, the problem is the other side of this coin.

Where I grew up there were a lot of homeschooled kids that belonged to religious organizations. These groups had very little motivation to ensure they were intelligent, but instead nice dumb little worker bees that would stay with said organization and have little ability to work with the outside world at large. They were also at a much higher risk of being sexually abused/sexually trafficked as they were given little to no education about sex or risky adults.

I still remember being a kid myself and having to educate these other kids my age because they were missing large chunks of important information about the world.
by omnimus | 2026-02-08 17:11:56+00:00
The metaphor doesn't work because all of the things mentioned have to be individually fabricated. But software doesn't. Copies are free. Thats the magic of software, you don't need much of it - you just need to be correct/smarter.

It's pretty surprising to see people on this site (assume mostly programmers) to think of code in terms of quantity. I always thought developers believe in less code the better.
by tialaramex | 2026-02-08 17:11:57+00:00
Because C wants to run on bare metal, an allocating type like C++ std::string (or Rust's String) isn't affordable for what you mean here.

I think you want the string slice reference type, what C++ called std::string_view and Rust calls &str. This type is just two facts about some text, where it is in memory and how long it is (or equivalently where it ends, storing the length is often in practice slightly faster in real machines so if you're making a new one do that)

In C++ this is maybe non-obvious because it took until 2020 for C++ to get this type - WG21 are crazy, but this is the type you actually want as a fundamental, not an allocating type like std::string.

Alternatively, if you're not yet ready to accept that all text should use UTF-8 encoding, -- and maybe C isn't ready for that yet - you don't want this type you just want byte slice references, Rust's &[u8] or C++ std::span<char>
by askonomm | 2026-02-08 17:12:02+00:00
Seems like the author has a case of all or nothing. The real power in agentic programming, to me, is not in extremes, but in that you are still actively present. You don't give it world-size things to do, but byte-sized, and you constantly steer it. It's to be detailed enough to produce quality, and to be aware of everything it produces, but not so detailed that it makes sense to just write the code yourself. It's a delicate balance, but once you've found it, incredibly powerful. Especially mixed with deterministic self-checking tools (like some MCP's).

If you "set and forget", then you are vibe coding, and I do not trust for a second that the output is quality, or that you'd even know how that output fits into the larger system. You effectively delegate away the reason you are being paid onto the AI, so why pay you? What are you adding to the mix here? Your prompting skills?

Agentic programming to me is just a more efficient use of the tools I already used anyway, but it's not doing the thinking for me, it's just doing the _doing_ for me.
by MontyCarloHall | 2026-02-08 17:12:46+00:00
>Can't you trivially force this to happen for any sequence?

No, because there's no deterministic way to infinitely extend that sequence. In your first example:

1 3 3 3 2 2 2 1 1 1 4 4 x x y y
1 3---- 3---- 3---- 2-- 2-- 2--

What are the values of x and y?

>Whenever you start a new count, choose a random number and repeat for a many times as needed for the trailing sequence to match the top sequence.

You answered your own question. The Kolakoski sequence is special because it does not just pick a random number: the sequence is deterministically encoded by the run lengths, and vice versa.
by hackyhacky | 2026-02-08 17:13:10+00:00
> people tend to want unique buildings that stand out

Just tell the LLM that you want a unique design. I've found LLMs to respond well to requests for "originality," at least in poetry, prose, and coding. No reason that can't do that in architecture as well.

> At some point an architectural design has to be built and you can't currently simulate real building sites at high speed inside a datacenter.

First of all, you can simulate a building site, or any physical environment. We've been doing that for years, even in games. AI companies are working towards a "world model" for precisely that reason. Second of all, even without a physical simulation, the laws of physics are deterministic and easy for an LLM to understand.

> The safe jobs are ones where there's little training data available online,

These cases are "safe" only in relative terms. Lack of easily-available training data is friction but not insurmountable. AI companies have bet big and they have a strong incentive to find and use appropriate training data.
by huijzer | 2026-02-08 17:13:37+00:00
> This reminds me of my Dutch friend who is prone to exaggeration to make things sound dramatic and scary to outsiders, and frequently claims the Netherlands is a "narco state" - big "Nederlandse hiphop: Ik kom van de straat" energy going on here.

Well I think there is definitely WAY too much drugs here. Definitely not as bad as California, but I've lived in Eindhoven for a while and people could just put their car window open a bit and text a certain number and get it delivered to their car! Also I've met plenty of students who took XTC during parties and thought it was all fine. When I said something about it they called me a "moral knight". Guess I'm old fashion.
by mooktakim | 2026-02-08 17:13:42+00:00
I agree. But I do have some concerns. Sometimes the LLM writes code and its a lot of work to go through it. I get lazy and trust LLM too much. I've been doing this for a while so I know how it should write, I go back and try to fix or refactor. But a new dev might direct LLM to write code they might not understand. Like a blackbox. LLM makes a lot of decisions without you realising, decisions which you used to make yourself. Writing code is making thousand decisions.
by tux1968 | 2026-02-08 17:13:45+00:00
I'm not sure pure determinism is actually a desirable goal. I mean, if you ask the best programmer in the world the same question every day, you're likely to eventually get a new answer at some point. But if you ask him, or I ask him, hopefully he gives the same good answer, to us both. In any case, he's not just a power hungry Google, because he can contextualize our question, and understand us when we ask in very obscured ways; maybe without us even understanding what we're actually looking for.
by dataviz1000 | 2026-02-08 17:13:45+00:00
Remember when Russia first went in and started killing children?

Putin claimed to be doing military exercises on the border with Ukraine.

It is very easy for China to flip the switch and turn having surrounded the island with navy into a full scale assault.

The United States should consider electing a different president who isn't an afraid snowflake and will protect democracy like Clinton.
by maccard | 2026-02-08 17:13:54+00:00
My Mac - couldn’t tell you, I just close the lid. My work laptop? Probably every day, as it makes its own mind up what it does when you close the lid. Even the “shut down” button in the start menu often restarts the machine in win 11.

My work desktop? Every day, and it takes > 30 seconds to go from off to desktop, and probably another minute or two for things like Docker to decide that they’ve actually started up.
by crazygringo | 2026-02-08 17:14:50+00:00
> I'm terrified of the good enough to ship—and I'm terrified of nobody else caring.

I get the emotion, but factually, the author doesn't need to worry so much.

We've always had cheaper, inexperienced developers shipping code that is the bare minimum to get the product out the door. All of capitalism has been about delivering the minimum quality necessary make money.

Fortunately, economic competition ensures that businesses are constantly trying to deliver a better product than their competition. Which in some contexts means the same thing for cheaper, but in others means better quality at a given higher price.

As long as there is economic demand for higher-quality software, it will continue to be produced. This is structural. It doesn't matter how much starts as LLM output because it's still architected, code gets reviewed, tested, bugs get filed. Because economic competition requires it to be or else you'll go out of business.

And if there's new demand for lower-quality software, for lots of one-off scripts that people can get an LLM to write, or GUI frontends for command-line tools, or whatever it is, then that's amazing too! Even if they're "slop", they're useful and accessible and correctly treated as temporary or disposable. There's nothing wrong with that, and it doesn't mean those tools are going to affect or replace serious software like Photoshop or macOS or whatever.
by sathish316 | 2026-02-08 17:15:07+00:00
> “vibe coding has an addictive nature to it, you write some instructions, and code that looks correct is generated. Bam! Dopamine hit! If the code isn’t correct, then it’s just one prompt away from being correct”

The reason Claude code or Cursor feels addictive even if it makes mistakes is better illustrated in this post - https://x.com/cryptocyberia/status/2014380759956471820?s=46
by ratrace | 2026-02-08 17:15:15+00:00
> The type of programmer were people would put up with just because they could really go in their cave for a few days and come out with a bug fix that nobody else on the team could figure out is going to have a hard time.

This is the exact type of programmer that isn't going to have any issues - ones who actually know what they're doing and aren't just going to vibecode react slop.
by nubg | 2026-02-08 17:15:23+00:00
> Every inbound deserves respect, even if you think you’re not ready. Because the truth is, readiness in M&A isn’t a moment—it’s a mindset.

Dear ChatGPT, please rephrase these bulletpoints into a chapter of my book: ...

Pray tell why may we not just read the bulletpoints instead?

Sold your own company, but unable to use your own words?
by energyscholar | 2026-02-08 17:15:47+00:00
Fair call on the website — we built it fast and it shows. The paper itself is a traditional literature review and citation analysis. I am one of two human authors. We use standard methodology. Didier Sornette endorsed it for arXiv.

Thanks for pulling out the direct link. I'll change the site to make it more prominent. This is my first serious attempt at social media engagement. Thanks for pointing out flaws and where there's room for improvment.
by skaul | 2026-02-08 17:16:23+00:00
Programming with LLMs is fundamentally different than going from a lower-level to a higher-level language, even apart from the whole non-determinism thing. With a programming language, you're still writing a for-loop, whether that's in C, Java or Rust. There's language primitives that help you think better in certain languages, but they're still, at the end of the day, code and context that you have to hold in your head and be intimately familiar with.

That changes with LLMs. For now, you can use LLMs to help you code that way; a programming buddy whose code you review. That's soon going to become "quaint" (to quote the author) given the projected productivity gains of agents (and for many developers it already has).
by RaftPeople | 2026-02-08 17:16:27+00:00
Central Point Software, the makers of Copy II PC, was one of our customers (we created back office software, order processing etc.).

It was a pretty healthy business, not just for the copy protection breaking but also the general tools software.

Funny story:

I was at their offices working on a project when they were getting ready to ship out the new version. Their warehouse was connected to the office building and they were producing all of the final copies and loading them on trucks to get sent to the distributors.

In the morning they gave the all clear for the first wave of trucks to leave, then about 4 hours later someone found a bug and they had to call all of the trucks back to the warehouse, unload, re-create new clean product etc.

They did this about 3 times before that version finally made it to the distributors.
by throwaw12 | 2026-02-08 17:16:33+00:00
Not when one party owns half of the city real estate and another million people are looking for affordable house.

At the end of the day, couple of owners of those companies each have at least net worth of $2-4B, what do they do that money?

You can say they build more houses, but who benefits from it? Again, themselves?

Isn't this a broken system?
by tedsanders | 2026-02-08 17:16:35+00:00
It was available in the API from Feb 2025 to July 2025, I believe. There's probably another world where we could have kept it around longer, but there's a surprising amount of fixed cost in maintaining / optimizing / serving models, so we made the call to focus our resources on accelerating the next gen instead. A bit of a bummer, as it had some unique qualities.
by api | 2026-02-08 17:16:42+00:00
That's the thing though. Paperclips transcend ideology.

That and I'm not sure what Chomsky actually advocated. He was a tireless critic of American and Western imperial ambitions, but what would he replace them with? I get the impression it'd be some kind of authoritarian command economy socialism, which anyone with half a brain knows will turn into a totalitarian system where the ones running it are "more equal" than everyone else. These days, knowing what I know now, I wonder if he's always just been a Russian asset or useful idiot.

I've never been a Chomsky fan anyway. His criticisms are sometimes valid but it's easy to criticize. It's orders of magnitude harder to propose better alternatives. Being a witty and incisive critic is easy compared to fixing.

LLMs have also indirectly proven a lot of his linguistic theories wrong. We didn't crack natural language with NLP and grammars. We cracked it by loosely imitating biology.
by AnotherGoodName | 2026-02-08 17:16:58+00:00
Pick any number that's not 4 and repeat it twice. For the next 2 after that pick any number that's not that previous number and repeat it twice. So on.

It's not like i had any difficulty coming up with that sequence i wrote to that point.

1 3 3 3 2 2 2 1 1 1 4 4 5 5 6 6 8 1 2... as an example of how trivial it is to continue to this.

I get that if you limit yourself to '1' or '2' you force the choice of next number but even then there's two possibilities of this sequence (start on 1 vs start on 2).
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-08 17:17:37+00:00
OP's comments in this thread are also pure clanker speak, which is disappointing and shows a lack of awareness of what HN is for.[0] It would be nice if an established scholar in this area of mathematics (complex systems) could comment re: this proposed correspondence and whether it has been noticed before. To be sure, similarly duplicative developments, gratuitous differences in terminology, etc. are discovered all the time, this isn't huge news. Statistics and ML is a well-known example.

[0] I haven't actually tried this, but I'm pretty sure that even just telling the robot "please write tersely, follow the typical style for HN comments" would make the output less annoying.
by i-blis | 2026-02-08 17:17:55+00:00
I have always failed to understand the obsessive dream of many engineers to become managers. It seems not to have to do merely with an increase in revenue.

Is it really to escape from "getting bogged down in the specifics" and being able to "focus on the higher-level, abstract work", to quote OP's words? I thought naively that engineering always has been about dealing with the specifics and the joy of problem solving. My guess is that the drive is toward power. Which is rather natural, if you think about it.

Science and the academic world

I have always failed to understand the obsessive dream of many engineers to become managers. It seems not to be merely about an increase in revenue.

Is it to escape from "getting bogged down in the specifics" and being able to "focus on the higher-level, abstract work", to quote OP's words? I thought naively that engineering has always been about dealing with the specifics and the joy of problem-solving. My guess is that the drive is towards power, which is rather natural, if you think about it.

Science and the academic world suffer a comparable plague.
by ryan_n | 2026-02-08 17:18:12+00:00
I don’t really understand your point about AI freeing up your time to do other stuff at your job. Does your employer let you work less hours since you’re finishing projects sooner? Mine certainly doesn’t, and I’d rather be coding than doing the other parts of my job. But maybe I’m misunderstanding why you were trying to say?

I also would rather a project take longer and struggle through it without using AI as I find joy in the process. But as I said in my original post I understand that type of work appears to be coming to an end.
by asgraham | 2026-02-08 17:18:34+00:00
I know for a fact [1] that the neuroscientific discoveries were not independent of physics: the people doing the developing were largely former physicists. They likely didn't cite anything because why would you cite phase transitions or criticality? You learn about them in class as a physicist. I strongly suspect the ecology results weren't independent either, but all the theoretical ecologists I know are relatively young (if mostly former physicists) so no first person accounts.

The part of this that could totally be true is that a clinical application somewhere along the way "independently" "reinvented" it. There's a hilarious collection of peer-reviewed journal articles out there inventing a "new" method of calculating the sizes of shapes and areas under the curve. The method involves adding up really small rectangles. (I think a top comment already mentioned the Tai article [2])

[1] source: my doctoral advisor was a really really old theoretical neuroscientist who trained as an electrical engineer and mathematician. If you want a more concrete example, the work of Bard Ermentrout on neural criticality starting in the 70's or 80's. He read a lot of physics textbooks.

[2] https://science.slashdot.org/story/10/12/06/0416250/medical-...
by onionisafruit | 2026-02-08 17:18:34+00:00
This is an extension for the gh cli that takes markdown files as input and creates github actions workflow files from them. Not just any workflow files, but 1000-line beasts that you'll need an LLM to explain what they do.

I tried out `gh aw init` and hit Y at the wrong prompt. It created a COPILOT_GITHUB_TOKEN on the github repo I happened to be in presumably with a token from my account. That's something that really should have an extra confirmation.
by skydhash | 2026-02-08 17:18:35+00:00
> LLMs are much more like human coworkers than compilers in terms of how you interact with them.

Human coworkers are much more predictable. A workplace where people act similarly to LLM would be a complete zoo. Imagine asking for an endpoint modification and the result is a broken backend. Or brainstorming with a PM and the reply are "you're absolutely right, whatever I was saying was completely wrong, but let me repeat it in a different manner".
by webdoodle | 2026-02-08 17:19:00+00:00
Do you consider the possibility that the knowledge was intentionally suppressed, the seed poisoned, or Ego driven suppression? Simply looking at things clinically can obscure intentional deception, to slow progress. The concept is called an information hazard.

Consider during the cold war, that the U.S. created fake nuclear designs, then allowed them to fall into the hands of the KGB. The KGB and Russian nuclear engineers then wasted significant time trying to build nuclear devices that failed to work, and could have been dangerous.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-08 17:19:03+00:00
Possibly, hence why the discussion regarding security in JavaScript runtimes and JIT, by completely disabling JIT execution.

https://microsoftedge.github.io/edgevr/posts/Super-Duper-Sec...

Also the exact sequence of generated machine instructions depends of various factors, the same source can have various outputs, depending on code execution, preset hardware, and heuristics.
by stared | 2026-02-08 17:19:26+00:00
Well, just because someone published does not mean that it was not (even implicitly) based. For example, there was a paper rediscovering trapezoid method of integration
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/rediscover...
A scientist may had been not aware of the method - yet, mathematics used for that is thought in high school.

Note that phase transitions are 100 years old or so. If someone genuinely does not know statistical mechanics, they still may know a lot of tools derived from it (a famous one - Shannon entropy).

I am not saying it is impossible to independently discover something (it happens all the time), but if discoveries are not (more or less) as the same time, likely there was some knowledge diffusion before.
by chfritz | 2026-02-08 17:19:55+00:00
Go through the ROS tutorials, using a simulated robot at first, then buy a tiny AMR kit and do the same thing IRL. Once you have those basics, you can ask yourself into which direction to go next, the obvious choices being 1) deeper into the research of the new-fashioned (bi-)manual manipulation (arms), or 2) more into business and actually build a real-world application for your mobile robot (which will involve a lot of tinkering with hardware). And +1 on what brudgers said. It's a hobby, so have fun.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-02-08 17:20:12+00:00
A "Firefox app" could "access browsing history", "steal cookies", whatever unless (a) the user removes the app's ability to "phone home" from the source code then compiles the app themselves and (b) the user controls the servers to which the app is allowed to connect

For example, Firefox app by default, without any input from the user, tries to make connections to Mozilla servers such as

content-signature-2.cdn.mozilla.net
firebaseremoteconfig.googleapis.com
firefox.settings.services.allizom.org
firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com
services.addons.mozilla.org
detectportal.firefox.com
contile.services.mozilla.com

The opportunities for Mozilla app developers to send data, e.g., browsing history, cookies, usage statistics, crash reports, empty requests (pings), whatever, to Mozilla or to any third party are without limit unless (a) and (b) are addressed

Even uBlock Origin tries to connect to ublockorigin.pages.dev by default, i.e., without any input from the user

The user might want this connection to occur but because it is a default the user might also not even know the connection is being made. The connection is a developer choice not a user choice. The user might agree with the choice
by XxCotHGxX | 2026-02-08 17:20:22+00:00
Author here - some clarifications after deeper analysis:

The core finding held up: there's a significant measurement gap
(p=0.03) between benchmarked AI capabilities and real-world
performance. Turns out this is driven by selection bias in how
benchmarks are curated - they systematically favor modular tasks.

The "10³ threshold" is more of a working hypothesis than a hard line
at this point (N=57 pilot), but the selection bias finding is robust.

For folks building production agents: The key question isn't "what's
the entropy threshold" but rather "are your eval tasks representative
of your actual workload?" Benchmark inflation is real.

Updated paper reflects the corrected analysis.