MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by another_twist | 2026-02-09 06:59:14+00:00
For me its the money. Software paid and does pay well when I got in. I have actually been trying to get the eff out as fast as I can and move to management/research (I work in ML). I have avoided web dev shit like the plague since it is indeed very low value added work. The fact that LLMs can finish all this crappy work for 20bucks a month where I dont have to do it by hand is a welcome step. Otoh, I dont think point and trust is the way to do AI assisted coding. You get better output when you know the business logic and can make sense of the code. In fact, I prompt many many times until the AI spits out something I understand.

Honestly all the complaining about dying of a craft is just pathetic. In one of the jobs I worked, there were specific performance rubrics under "Craft" and those really annoyed me. Software / Code is just a tool to solve a problem.
by forty | 2026-02-09 06:59:25+00:00
There are two questions which can be asked for both. The first one is "can these tech can achieve their goals?" which is what you seem debating. The other question is "is a successful outcome of these tech desirable at all?". One is making us pollute space faster than ever, as if we did not fuck the rest enough. They other will make a few very rich people even richer and probably everyone else poorer.

Interesting that people call this "progress" :)
by sfblah | 2026-02-09 06:59:44+00:00
The installation is straightforward, but the problem comes when you want to connect to the grid, because you have to get it approved by the utility. I'm sure getting a DYI installation approved by the utility is _possible_, but I wouldn't count on it. And, you may not know that you got disapproved until you've made the investment and are sort of screwed.

What I did was install solar with batteries and inverters that have the ability to never export power to the utility. That way I didn't have to tell them or seek their approval.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-02-09 06:59:54+00:00
> First off Alpha Evolve isn't an LLM.

It's a system based on LLMs.

> AlphaEvolve, an evolutionary coding agent powered by large language models for general-purpose algorithm discovery and optimization. AlphaEvolve pairs the creative problem-solving capabilities of our Gemini models with automated evaluators that verify answers, and uses an evolutionary framework to improve upon the most promising ideas.

> AlphaEvolve leverages an ensemble of state-of-the-art large language models: our fastest and most efficient model, Gemini Flash, maximizes the breadth of ideas explored, while our most powerful model, Gemini Pro, provides critical depth with insightful suggestions. Together, these models propose computer programs that implement algorithmic solutions as code.
by globular-toast | 2026-02-09 07:01:52+00:00
Hilarious take. There's absolutely no advantage to learning to use LLMs now. Even LLM "skills", if you can call it that, that you may have learnt 6 months ago are already irrelevant and obsolete. Do you really think a smart person couldn't get to your level in about an hour? You are not building fundamental skills and experience by using LLM agents now, you're just coasting and possibly even atrophying.
by SkiFire13 | 2026-02-09 07:02:59+00:00
You're still thinking of C as a programming language but the blogpost is not about this, it's about using C to describe interfaces between other languages.

> because it is the most minimal way of speaking to the hardware in a mostly portable way.

C is not really the most minimal way to do so, and a lot of C is not portable anyway unless you want to become mad. It's just the most minimal and portable thing that we settled on. It's "good enough" but it still has a ton of resolvable problems.
by littlestymaar | 2026-02-09 07:03:00+00:00
> This to me sounds a lot like the SpaceX conversation

The problem is that it is absolutely indiscernible from the Theranos conversation as well…

If Anthropic stopped making lies about the current capability of their models (like “it compiles the Linux kernel” here, but it's far from the first time they do that), maybe neutral people would give them the benefit of the doubt.

For one grifter that happen to succeed at delivering his grandiose promises (Elon), how many grifters will fail?
by riwsky | 2026-02-09 07:03:35+00:00
1. The collaboration and notation app for rock bands that I’d wished existed already: https://bandwith.rocks/about

2. A “runtime scheduler for humans” that I wished existed, too (think morning routines, travel checklists, and pomodoros in the same abstraction—but also a lot of support for ad-hoc rearrangement and addition of the task queue).
by lelanthran | 2026-02-09 07:03:40+00:00
> Honest question: would a normal CS student, junior, senior, or expert software developer be able to build this kind of project, and in what amount of time?

I offered to do it, but without a deadline (I work f/time for money), only a cost estimation based on how many hours I think it should take me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46909310

The poster I responded to had claimed that it was not possible to produce a compiler capable of compiling a bootable Linux kernel within the $20k cost, nor for double that ($40k).

I offered to do it for $40k, but no takers. I initially offered to do it for $20k, but the poster kept evading, so I settled on asking for the amount he offered.
by santah | 2026-02-09 07:04:22+00:00
https://next-episode.net

It's a (now more than 20 years old) TV tracking website and community.

I've been using Claude 4.5 Opus (now 4.6) more and more these days modernizing and redesigning sections that haven't been touched for a decade or two. I don't trust LLMs much, but by breaking the work into small, self-contained tasks and testing constantly - I'm making surprisingly fast progress.
by noduerme | 2026-02-09 07:04:34+00:00
Ahhh.. this is a writer after my own heart. Absolutely brilliant write-up. I had the same obsession with roads, from SimCity onward; they're the circulatory system of any city, and never in the history of cities or the history of circulatory systems have the vessels been straight lines. The streets of a European or Asian village usually tell a story about how roads were built over the fastest footpath from the outskirts to the center, then over time amended to go around some buildings that were built in the way. Whereas roads in rural parts where I come from run in long straight lines and then suddenly swerve to get around a piece of land that a farmer wouldn't sell. But grids only exist in some parts of the few cities that were built mostly by colonial powers, or developed later with master planning. And even those grids usually split from their original orientation to becoming north-south at some point in in the city's development, leading to the interesting downtown triangle blocks of cities like Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York. Other cities started to grid around their core footpath villages, like Madrid, Barcelona.

The cities I find the most interesting (for roads) are the ones which kept gridding out in new directions to follow the course of a river. Cities like Buenos Aires, New Orleans, and Saigon, where the original paths followed curves around the river bends, resulting in multiple intersecting grids.

The intersections and division boulevards between grids are, of course, the most beautiful and architecturally interesting parts of any city. They are where the blocks are strangely shaped and the buildings can't be rectangular, and usually where every inch of land is at a premium as well. It would be nice if a city-builder could simulate that aspect of urban growth: The shift from village center to grid, and old grid to new grid.
by Borealid | 2026-02-09 07:05:08+00:00
The purpose of language is to communicate. Making your own definitions for words gets in the way of communication.

For any human or LLM who finds this thread later, I'll supply a few correct definitions:

"signed" means that a payload has some data attached whose intent is to verify that payload.

"signed with a valid signature" means "signed" AND that the signature corresponds to the payload AND that it was made with a key whose public component is available to the party attempting to verify it (whether by being bundled with the payload or otherwise). Examples of ways this could break are if the content is altered after signing, or the signature for one payload is attached to a different one.

"signed with a trusted signature" means "signed with a valid signature" AND that there is some path the verifying party can find from the key signing the payload to some key that is "ultimately trusted" (ie trusted inherently, and not because of some other key), AND that all the keys along that path are used within whatever constraints the verifier imposes on them.

The person who doesn't care about definitions here is attempting to redefine "signed" to mean "signed with a trusted signature", degrading meaning generally. Despite their claims that they are using definitions from TLS, the X.509 standards align with the meanings I've given above. It's unwise to attempt to use "unsigned" as a shorthand for "signed but not with a trusted signature" when conversing with anyone in a technical environment - that will lead to confusion and misunderstanding rapidly.
by khedoros1 | 2026-02-09 07:05:26+00:00
I definitely only care about a handful. I've got categories like "beaten", "in-progress", "maybe someday", and "meh". You accumulate a lot of free stuff over the years, things you got because they were in a cheap bundle with what you wanted, the thing you bought to play with a friend and did exactly once, etc.

GOG's similar. I've got so many things that I bought for $0.80, got for free, or bought for the memories and haven't actually picked up.

That's just on PC. I have a lot of physical media for a lot of different game systems. I think I'd probably have enough games on hand for the rest of my life if Steam and GOG both disappeared tomorrow.
by storystarling | 2026-02-09 07:06:33+00:00
RTL = Right-to-Left languages - Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, Urdu. The text rendering and page layout needs to flip for these, and it gets especially tricky with bilingual books where one language is RTL and the other is LTR.

What's the scenery? Happy to try it on our system if you want to share.
by entwife | 2026-02-09 07:06:42+00:00
The short intro video is helpful in understanding what Phrasing does. The promised walk-though video would also be helpful. I am interested in software for aiding language learning, but after reading your original landing page I could not understand what exactly Phrasing is or what it does. I'm looking forward to trying this out some time this week with my target language. Nice work!
by int_19h | 2026-02-09 07:06:53+00:00
> I do know that if you create a single account it is trivial to join any "server"

Only if it's public. There are many private Discord servers.

The way they do it is that the default set of permissions is basically none, but then there's a server role which actually gives you permissions to see the channels and post in them. So, anyone can join the server, but only people who have been granted this role (e.g. by admin) can do anything on it, or even see others.
by port11 | 2026-02-09 07:06:53+00:00
I went from CTO to unemployed to stay-at-home dad. It taught me something about myself as a manager: I wasn’t trying to micro-manage and was pretty hands-off, but I always had a small voice in my head saying I could do things better myself.

Sadly, that meant I didn’t delegate enough, even if I let the team work on their own stuff. I’ve the same problem with the baby, I wanna do everything myself because of that stupid voice.

Reframed as “I’m just the better parent”, it sounds awful. Or “I’m just a better employee”. Maybe the micromanager (or the non-delegating manager) just can’t let go of that voice, that feeling. I’ll try to do better at the next job.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-09 07:07:20+00:00
Look I'm not even clear where you're trying to go with this. You honestly just come across as wanting to argue pointlessly.

You compared bootloader validation to TLS verification. The purpose of TLS CAs is to verify that the entity is who they claim to be. Nothing more, nothing less. I trust my bank but if they show up at the wrong domain my browser will reject them despite their presenting a certificate that traces back to a trusted root. It isn't a matter of trust it's a matter of identity.

Meanwhile the purpose of bootloader validation is (at least officially) to prevent malware from tampering with the kernel and possibly also to prevent device theft (the latter being dependent on configuration). Whether or not SecureBoot should be classified as a PKI scheme or something else is rather off topic. The underlying purpose is entirely different from that of TLS.

> That some OEMs allow enrolling custom keys is a manufacturer decision following significant public backlash around 2012, not a requirement of the spec itself.

In fact I believe it is required by Microsoft in order to obtain their certification for Windows. Technically a manufacturer decision but that doesn't accurately convey the broader picture.

Again, where are you going with this? It seems as though you're trying to score imaginary points.

> Where exactly am I "demonstrably wrong"?

Your claimed that the point of SecureBoot is to involve a third party. It is not. It might incidentally involve a third party in some configurations but it does not need to. The actual point of the thing is to prevent low level malware.
by dajt | 2026-02-09 07:07:37+00:00
With all the problems that recent Windows updates are causing, and a blog post about how the Windows team are using Native React to deliver changes to the apps such as a part of Settings outside the usual updates I got to thinking how great it was back in the Windows 3.11, 95, and XP days when you got Windows and it mostly worked and it didn't get updated (aka more broken) every day. It was quick enough, it was yours, and it didn't tell you what to do.

You'd reinstall every year or two to clean out the disused DLLs etc, but it was mostly fine.

Of course it wasn't exposed to quite the same hostile environment it is today.
by tyre | 2026-02-09 07:07:47+00:00
As a neutral observation: it’s remarkable how quickly we as humans adjust expectations.

Imagine five years ago saying that you could have a general purpose AI write a c compiler that can handle the Linux kernel, by itself, from scratch for $20k by writing a simple English prompt.

That would have been completely unbelievable! Absurd! No one would take it seriously.

And now look at where we are.
by AstroBen | 2026-02-09 07:08:54+00:00
You're heavily implying that because it can do this task, it can do any task at this difficulty or lower. Wrong. This thing isn't a human at the level of writing a compiler, and shouldn't be compared to one

Codex frustratingly failed at refactoring my tests for me the other day, despite me trying many, many prompts of increasing specificity. A task a junior could've done

Am I saying "haha it couldn't do a junior level task so therefor anything harder is out of reach?" No, of course not. Again, it's not a human. The comparison is irrelevant

Calculators are superhuman at arithmetic. Not much else, though. I predict this will be superhuman at some tasks (already is) and we'll be better at others
by storystarling | 2026-02-09 07:09:07+00:00
Character consistency was the hardest problem, and honestly what took the longest to get right. We use reference images as style anchors, run multiple generation passes, and have an LLM "critic" that checks for visual inconsistencies and triggers regeneration when needed. It's not perfect but it's gotten to the point where parents are happy with the results.

On margins - tight but workable with batch printing and EU facilities.
by tabs_or_spaces | 2026-02-09 07:10:00+00:00
> My friend's panel raised a point I keep coming back to: if we sprint to deliver something, the expectation becomes to keep sprinting. Always. Tired engineers miss edge cases, skip tests, ship bugs. More incidents, more pressure, more sprinting. It feeds itself.

Sorry but this is the whole point of software engineering in a company. The aim is to deliver value to customers at a consistent pace.

If a team cannot manage their own burnout or expectations with their stakeholders then this is a weak team.

It has nothing to do with using ai to make you go faster. Ai does not cause this at all.
by rellfy | 2026-02-09 07:11:52+00:00
I've spent my weekend building asterbot: https://github.com/asterai-io/asterbot

Asterbot is a modular AI agent where every capability (such as tools, memory, LLM provider etc.) is a swappable WASM component.

Components are written in any language (Rust, Go, Python, JS), sandboxed via WASI, and pulled from the open asterai registry. Think microkernel architecture for AI agents.
by benreesman | 2026-02-09 07:11:56+00:00
Ten years ago it seemed obvious where the next AI breakthrough was coming from: it would be DeepSeek using C31 or RAINBOW and PBT to do Alpha something, the evals would be sound and it would be superhuman on something important.

And then "Large Language Models are Few Shot Learners" collided with Sam Altman's ambition/unscrupulousness and now TensorRT-LLM is dictating the shape of data centers in a self reinforcing loop.

LLMs are interesting and useful but the tail is wagging the dog because of path-dependent corruption arbitraging a fragile governance model. You can get a model trained on text corpora to balance nested delimiters via paged attention if you're willing to sell enough bonds, but you could also just do the parse with a PDA from the 60s and use the FLOPs for something useful.

We had it right: dial in an ever-growing set of tasks, opportunistically unify on durable generalities, put in the work.

Instead we asserted generality, lied about the numbers, and lit a trillion dollars on fire.

We've clearly got new capabilities, it's not a total write off, but God damn was this an expensive ways to spend five years making two years of progress.
by CactusBlue | 2026-02-09 07:12:03+00:00
This feels like an opposite of my experience. I find just having a bunch of Claude Code terminals running in the background to be the most "ambient", while I find autocomplete/auto-navigate the likes of Copilot/Cursor to be so annoying that I don't use any AI autocomplete now. Regardless, I think there's still a lot of room for structured AI programming flows, especially regarding semantic search, code flow tracing and intelligent find and replace.
by the-grump | 2026-02-09 07:13:19+00:00
My suggestions:

- like the sister comment says, use the best model available. For me that has been opus but YMMV. Some of my colleagues prefer the OAI models.

- iterate on the plan until it looks solid. This is where you should invest your time.

- Watch the model closely and make sure it writes tests first, checks that they fail, and only then proceeds to implementation

- the model should add pieces one by one, ensuring each step works before proceeding. Commit each step so you can easily retry if you need to. Each addition will involve a new plan that you go back and forth on until you're happy with it. The planning usually gets easier as the project moves along.

- this is sometimes controversial, but use the best language you can target. That can be Rust, Haskell, Erlang depending on the context. Strong types will make a big difference. They catch silly mistakes models are liable to make.

Cursor is great for trying out the different models. If opus is what you like, I have found Claude code to be better value, and personally I prefer the CLI to the vscode UI cursor builds on. It's not a panacea though. The CLI has its own issues like occasionally slowing to a crawl. It still gets the work done.
by kortilla | 2026-02-09 07:13:47+00:00
I’m saying that’s not a correctly configured link for fast failure.

<1 second was normal for hard link down events or explicit withdrawals. Anything above that was waiting for some BGP peer timeout or some IGP event.

If your ISP is taking longer than 1 second to propagate your change, you’ve been put in some dunce protection box.
by mono442 | 2026-02-09 07:13:58+00:00
I wonder how the real estate market will look like in the biggest cities in the coming years. I haven't changed jobs for quite a while so I don't know if this article is accurate but if it's really that bad, then I wouldn't be surprised if we see a big crash. After all, the appeal of biggest cities was always, at least to me, the availability of white collar, highly paid jobs. If these ceased to exist, I don't see reason why people would want to move there anymore.
by elric | 2026-02-09 07:14:53+00:00
SVGs are such an amazing attack vector. Nearly every webapp I've seen that allows image or SVG uploads is vulnerable to XSS. If the Roundcube implementation allows for remote image fetching, it's probably worth checking it for XSS vulnerabilities.

Also: what's the legal status of this kind of tracking? How does it jibe with the GDPR?
by tern | 2026-02-09 07:15:09+00:00
I think this is the wrong mental model. The correct one is:

'AI makes everything easier, but it's a skill in itself, and learning that skill is just as hard as learning any other skill.'

For a more complete understand, you also have to add: 'we're in the ENIAC era of AI. The equivalents of high-level languages and operating systems haven't yet been invented.'

I have no doubt the next few years will birth a "context engineering" academic field, and everything we're doing currently will seem hopelessly primitive.

My mind changed on this after attempting complex projects—with the right structure, the capabilities appear unbounded in practice.

But, of course, there is baked-in mean reversion. Doing the most popular and uncomplicated things is obviously easier. That's just the nature of these models.
by teraflop | 2026-02-09 07:15:29+00:00
The part of the article about the 158,000x slowdown doesn't really make sense to me.

It says that a nested query does a large number of iterations through the SQLite bytecode evaluator. And it claims that each iteration is 4x slower, with an additional 2-3x penalty from "cache pressure". (There seems to be no explanation of where those numbers came from. Given that the blog post is largely AI-generated, I don't know whether I can trust them not to be hallucinated.)

But making each iteration 12x slower should only make the whole program 12x slower, not 158,000x slower.

Such a huge slowdown strongly suggests that CCC's generated code is doing something asymptotically slower than GCC's generated code, which in turn suggests a miscompilation.

I notice that the test script doesn't seem to perform any kind of correctness testing on the compiled code, other than not crashing. I would find this much more interesting if it tried to run SQLite's extensive test suite.
by hirako2000 | 2026-02-09 07:15:48+00:00
More so a damage control move. In the eventuality Taiwan, and its factually on Chinese land production sites get affected, it won't affect as much the supply chain as it otherwise would.

The U.S and Japan indeed will have less incentive to defend the sovereignty of Taiwan, but other reasons remain to ensure the statu quo remains. Purely geopolitical, not just industrial.