MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andy99 | 2026-02-07 23:42:44+00:00
> The premium for these skills is going _way_ up.

Not so sure. I think it’s a “pendulum will swing back” thing but for now I see people sort of suspending expectations so they’re aligned with whatever AI does. There’s so much obvious criticism and ironically if a person did this stuff four years ago they’d probably be out on their ass, but the AI shine (and possibly associated cognitive decline of people using it) makes everyone think it’s great and that people who point out flaws are the AI equivalent of “no-coiners” that haven’t accepted the inevitable.

I looked at this months “who is hiring” and was amazed by the number of ads telling candidates that AI tool use is required. (Search for cursor e.g.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46857488

It really feels like some sort of mass psychosis at this point, like performance expectations are one thing but discarding those in favor of dictating tools as if you know better than the developer is pretty weird. Compare the number of ads like that with the number looking for experience, judgement, and good taste.
by jandrewrogers | 2026-02-07 23:43:07+00:00
The US started upgrading and modernizing its nuclear production capacity in earnest during the Biden administration, targeting a capacity of 80 weapons per year. It pre-dates the current administration by years.

This disclosure was pretty obviously intended to put international pressure on China to conform to norms on nuclear testing, while also letting them know that the US can detect their top secret nuclear tests despite their best efforts to hide them.

I'm sure the timing of the disclosure wasn't accidental but I don't see much nefarious about it. The US doesn't disclose their knowledge of this type of thing unless there is some geopolitical leverage in doing so, since it makes it easier for other countries to calibrate US intelligence capabilities.
by hackyhacky | 2026-02-07 23:43:13+00:00
> In my experience, agentic LLMs tend to write code that is very branchy with cyclomatic complexity

You are missing the forest for the trees. Sure, we can find flaws in the current generation of LLMs. But they'll be fixed. We have a tool that can learn to do anything as well as a human, given sufficient input.
Dev with 5 of experience switched to Rails, what should I be careful about?
by vampiregrey | 2026-02-07 23:43:34+00:00
Coming to Rails with ~5 years of professional experience, but new to the Rails way of doing things.

It feels productive and opinionated in a good way.

So far I’m enjoying the conventions and speed, but I’m aware every framework has sharp edges you only discover later.

What are the mistakes that experienced developers still fall into when adopting Rails?
by A_D_E_P_T | 2026-02-07 23:45:12+00:00
If you're a scientist -- and in many cases if you're an engineer, or a philosopher, or even perhaps a theologian -- your job is quite literally to add to humanity's training data.

I'd add that fiction is much more complicated. LLMs can clearly write original fiction, even if they are, as yet, not very good at it. There's an idea (often attributed to John Gardner or Leo Tolstoy) that all stories boil down to one of two scenarios:

> "A stranger comes to town."

> "A person goes on a journey."

Christopher Booker wrote that there are seven: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots

So I'd tentatively expect tomorrow's LLMs to write good fiction along those well-trodden paths. I'm less sanguine about their applications in scientific invention and in producing original music.
by hackyhacky | 2026-02-07 23:45:33+00:00
It just depends what level of abstraction you're willing to pretend doesn't matter.

gcc and clang produce different assembly code, but it "does the same thing," for certain definitions of "same" and "thing."

Claude and Gemini produce different Rust code, but it "does the same thing," for certain definitions of "same" and "thing."

The issue is that the ultimate beneficiary of AI is the business owner. He's not a programmer, and he has a much looser definition of "same."
by kentm | 2026-02-07 23:46:03+00:00
Notwithstanding the other myriad of reasons to not like Elon Musk (of which there are many), equivocating a childish insult with insisting that a person is a pedophile and hiring a private investigator to prove so and then writing scathing emails to reporters because they refuse to repeat your claims uncritically are nowhere near the same level of “bad”. Implying they are is, frankly, an appalling failing of morality.
by its-summertime | 2026-02-07 23:47:22+00:00
Outside of VM usage, the answer seems to be (on top of containerization and selinux) writing a tight seccomp filter.

Gleaned from https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap/blob/0c408e156b12dd... and https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap/tree/0c408e156b12dd...
by wolvoleo | 2026-02-07 23:48:28+00:00
Wing commander III and IV were just really boring IMO. No wonder that IV didn't sell well after III.

It didn't need more live action. It just needed a decent story and some animated cutscenes and more fun in the gameplay. Which WC 1 and 2 did very well. Their stories were exciting even though they were full of pretty stupid B movie tropes. But it worked. The sequels felt hollow.

Additionally they were so heavy they ran really badly on everything but the most expensive computers of the day. Not exactly a good way to sell a lot of copies.

Ps one thing I don't understand is why Chris Roberts doesn't just buy the rights of the wing commander name for Star citizen. He's collected billions by now.
by bananapub | 2026-02-07 23:48:36+00:00
it's simpler than that - making it faster means it becomes less of an asynchronous task.

current speeds are "ask it to do a thing and then you the human need find something else to do for minutes (or more!) while it works". at a certain point at it being faster you just sit there and tell it to do a thing and it does and you just constantly work on the one thing.

cerebras is just about fast enough for that already, with the downside of being more expensive and worse at coding than claude code.

it feels like absolute magic to use though.

so, depends how you price your own context switches, really.
by pvtmert | 2026-02-07 23:49:10+00:00
Honestly, "vibe-code-cleaners" are already out there and in demand!

I even expect "vibe-code-scalers" will come soon, to be able to fix and scale up the spaghetti AI agents plopped in the first place.

The author seems to be an Amazonian, it also seems that they are good at "Invent", but not at "Simplify" bit.

Big-Tech has invented LLMs, that is great. Big-Tech hasn't been great when it comes to "Simplify"-ing things. Actually, notoriously bad at it.

That is the opportunity here; "Simplifying" these workflows, making AaaS (Agent as a Service or AI as a Service)
Does anyone else feel like their inbox has become their job?
by cfata | 2026-02-07 23:49:20+00:00
Lately I’ve realized I’m not spending most of my day doing the work I get paid for. I’m managing email, follow-ups, scheduling, and loose ends around that work.
It’s not even the time. It’s the constant background stress of “did I miss something important?”
Curious how other freelancers and solo operators deal with this.
I ended up building a personal assistant for myself to own inbox-derived work so nothing important slips, but I’m more interested in how others approach the problem.
Here's the link if you're curious: get-alfred.ai
by rc-1140 | 2026-02-07 23:49:28+00:00
Saying it again, I think we're in need of a moratorium on "AI Has Changed The World Forever" posts. All of them read the same and offer nothing past "I asked a LLM to make a midsize feature, I haven't looked at the code but it compiles on my machine and that should terrify you" - buddy, we've had people pushing code that compiles on their machine and occasionally goes quickly read or unread in PRs, that terrifies me now.
by rvz | 2026-02-07 23:49:56+00:00
This is what happens when a long term, non-developer tries to use Linux by themselves (no technical friend telling him what to do); and the honest reality is that, the experience always ends in fustration.

Before using anecdotes or suggesting that he didn't use X / Y / Z, first, just read this to understand why he believes it was a mistake and why he felt he was wasting his time, even though he used Linux for more than a decade:

> I can make music in Bitwig or Reaper on Ubuntu, but Ableton on macOS is easier to use and supports all my VSTs. GIMP and Darktable offer solid image editing, but let’s be honest, they’re nowhere near as powerful as Lightroom and Photoshop. Linux can do all the things now — sometimes better than Windows. But for all it does, it always feels like there’s a better option.

Instead, he ended up switching to macOS.

This shows that it still means the Linux desktop experience is not good enough for just regular work, compared with macOS it seems. There is still a lot of room for improvement.

Maybe the true reason for the Verge author for switching to macOS was simply just taste.
by JeremyNT | 2026-02-07 23:50:39+00:00
I see what these can do and I'm already thinking, why would I ever hire a junior developer? I can fire up opencode and tell it to work multiple issues at once myself.

The bottleneck becomes how fast you can write the spec or figure out what the product should actually be, not how quickly you can implement it.

So the future of our profession looks grim indeed. There will be far fewer of us employed.

I also miss writing code. It was fun. Wrangling the robots is interesting in its own way, but it's not the same. Something has been lost.
by syntaxing | 2026-02-07 23:50:47+00:00
Not OP but I doubt it. I’m in my mid 30s and when I grew up there in the 90s, Suffolk county was bumble. Some people had horses on their land. After 9/11, a ton of people moved in from the city and the population absolutely ballooned. Over two decades, the population grew so much that just Nassau county and Suffolk county combined has more people than a handful of states. People come and go too (including myself) so unless some organization is tracking us, it’ll be hard to pinpoint.
by mahirsaid | 2026-02-07 23:51:13+00:00
If you analyze what's happening right now in the tech industry, you can't help but to think of something deeper than what's being talked about in plain sight. There is a clear panic amongst the large tech firms. the root cause of the panic is still unclear, simply saying these companies want to be the first in this new revolution isn't enough to draw conclusion. Amongst the top tech firms there still sits the original founders whom as we all know changed the way we live life today. Saying they are misunderstanding what's happening right now and they're are foolish, is to simple of an understatement. They of all people in the world would know it's a bad idea to go all in, in this manner. The underlying competing nature of this whether it has to do with China or other competing markets are not being talked about, and not just that " what exactly is the strategy here?"
by II2II | 2026-02-07 23:51:42+00:00
> The professor just really liked tcc for some reason.

Perhaps, or maybe they just got tired of students coming in and claiming that their program worked perfectly on such-and-such compiler.[1] It looks like tcc would run on most systems from the time of its introduction, and perhaps some that are a great deal older. When I took a few computer science courses, they were much more restrictive. All code had to be compiled with a particular compiler on their computers, and tested on their computers. They said it was to prevent cheating but, given how trivial it would have been to cheat with their setup, I suspect it had more to do with shutting down arguments with students who came in to argue over grades.

[1] I was a TA in the physical sciences for a few years. Some students would try to argue anything for a grade, and would persist if you let them.
by jimnotgym | 2026-02-07 23:51:58+00:00
I work at an organization that uses concur. My team work at the other end of the process. They take Concur outputs and pay the claimants back. We find that somehow makes us the support department, adding users, training them, and worse still teaching them how to get around rejections. It is a bit less work for us than the paper forms I started my career with. It does rather push the overhead of claiming the expense onto the claimers though, many of which tend to be those whose time is most expensive. I'm not sure it works out.
by stoneforger | 2026-02-07 23:52:19+00:00
Because then you won't be important, the model will be important. And then everyone will have to use their model, that's their dream. Why isn't that your nightmare too? Why will you be special if it can just code whatever it needs to code? Then anthropic can just employ all the programmers that will ever be needed, to just review new skills and modules of code. It was predicted early on there would be a need for about six big computers worldwide. Well now we'll just need six AI shepherds. And then literally everyone else will forget how anything works because it will be a solved problem. People already treat computers like magic, it will literally become a dark art. And I guess it's fine, what can we do, right? Go with the flow I guess. "If I don't , someone else will. Maybe I can be one of those six real people at Anthropic".
by steve_adams_86 | 2026-02-07 23:52:32+00:00
It's passivity about things you can't control. I'm all for engaging with things within my control. I just spent the morning under my car replacing CV axles because I wanted it done faster, for less, on my own schedule. Why sit around waiting? I suppose what I'm advocating here isn't passivity at all, but engaging in loving his partner in ways that would matter to her while he still can. That can be a very active and engaged way of handling this.

After watching several family members die from cancer though, the notion of fighting that rather than being with my family as they pass sounds terrible. At some point you have to accept that death is on the way. Love people while they're here. Curing cancer is a generational goal accomplished by huge numbers of people, hopefully, not a single person in short order.

I have very positive thoughts about his love and concern, too. I just hope it's put to good use while it still can be.

Also, he reminds me of my dad who was similarly convinced if he cared for my mom just right she'd be okay. It has been almost 20 years and he still hates himself for it. There was no stopping it. There's no sense in having these expectations of yourself.
by jmalicki | 2026-02-07 23:53:00+00:00
> Where is this all leading to, if after all the billions spent and all the benchmarks beaten conclusively, LLMs still can't do reasoning, can't do world-modelling, can't do context learning and so on, and so forth?

Humans completely displaced from the workforce while they harp "but LLMs can't really think and don't really have creativity!"
by danelski | 2026-02-07 23:53:19+00:00
It has to stop somewhere. Business owner can also hire a different company to create the product and get a result different by as little as 5% performance difference or something with clearly inferior maintainability and UX. You'd hardly argue that it's 'the same' when they followed the same spec, which will never be fully precise at the business level.
I agree that talking to an LLM is akin to using the business oriented logic at the module or even function level.
by AYBABTME | 2026-02-07 23:53:41+00:00
I think it's a mistake to believe that this money would exist if it was to be spent on these things. The existence of money is largely derived from society scale intention, excitement or urgency. These hospitals, machine shops, etc, could not manifest the same amount of money unless packaged as an exciting society scale project by a charismatic and credible character. But AI, as an aggregate, has this pull and there are a few clear investment channels in which to pour this money. The money didn't need to exist yesterday, it can be created by pulling a loan from (ultimately) the Fed.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-07 23:54:54+00:00
> Europe should stop tolerating these sabotages and go to war with Russia

Unnecessary. Just (a) pursue and seize its shadow fleet and (b) give Ukraine long-range weapons. (And radars so you can profile Russia's air defences.)

Russia is operating so comically outside its circle of competence, material constraints and international law that you don't even have to go kinetic to hurt it.
by dyauspitr | 2026-02-07 23:55:15+00:00
As long as the company that did the research and the medical professional gets paid the same amount. I’m completely OK with cutting out the insurance and the bureaucracy and other non-value add middleman, but the value add partners need to get paid for this to be sustainable.

Patent laws exist for a reason. It’s so people that come up with paradigm changing ideas and inventions can get rich off of it. This is something we want to maintain.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-02-07 23:55:35+00:00
> Yeah, apparently the whole controlling the train by the voltage¹ and polarity of the electricity in the rails has been replaced with little digital chips in the locomotives that let you control each locomotive independently and not have to have them in separate zones on the layout.

Can I reuse the tracks (not the locomotives, just the track) from my Marklin HO and switch to digital trains? Sounds cool.
by renegade-otter | 2026-02-07 23:56:00+00:00
Nothing meaningful happened in almost 20 years. After the iPhone, what happened that truly changed our lives? The dumpster fire of social media? Background Netflix TV?

In fact, I remember when I could actually shop on Amazon or browse for restaurants on Yelp while trusting the reviews. None of that is possible today.

We have been going through a decade of enshitification.
by renewiltord | 2026-02-07 23:56:01+00:00
Right, that's one way to be half-smart about it. But you have to make sure that's the final thing you append to the path. An easy mistake to make is temporal. You add `.` to the path, and time passes, someone appends `/opt/bin` to the path, and time passes, someone writes `~/not-in-path/defaulted/busybox` that references `/opt/bin/busybox` as just `busybox` and tests it by running `~/not-in-path/defaulted/busybox` while being in `~` and it works so they leave it alone, then you go `cd ~/not-in-path/defaulted/` and run it and die.

"I don't understand. I very specifically appended `.` at the end!"

Of course you can stick a comment "#the following should always be at the end of the file" or whatever or say "we should always make sure to reference binaries by their full path, so always write out `/opt/bin/busybox` rather than just `busybox`" and stuff like that. With enough system you can make this unlikely.
by fatherwavelet | 2026-02-07 23:56:03+00:00
It is not really obvious to me that happiness should be part of the social contract.

Happiness is very slippery even in your own life. It seems absurd to me that you should care about my happiness.

So much of happiness is the change from the previous state to the present. I am happy right now because 2026 has started off great for me while 2025 was a bad year.

I would imagine there was never a happier American society than the year's after WW2.

I imagine some of the most happy human societies were the ones during the years after the black plague. No one though today gains happiness because of the absence of black plague.

To believe a society can be built around happiness seems completely delusional to me.
by zb3 | 2026-02-07 23:56:11+00:00
> The cost of turning written business logic into code has dropped to zero

Then go and throw your $0 to fix some real bugs on GitHub.. really, if AI works so well, why are all those issues still open?

Look, almost 2K issues open here:
https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues

If AI really works like non-technical people think it does, why doesn't Google just throw their AI tool to fix them all?
by insuranceguru | 2026-02-07 23:56:14+00:00
that's the current legal default, but it starts breaking down when you look at product liability vs professional liability.

if a company sells an autonomous agent that is marketed as doing a task without human oversight, the courts will eventually move that burden back to the manufacturer. we saw the same dance with autonomous driving disclaimers the "human must stay in control" line works as a legal shield for a while, but eventually the market demands a shift in who holds the risk.

if we stick to 100% human responsibility for black-box errors that a human couldn't have even predicted, that "brake" won't just slow down the agentic shift, it'll effectively kill the enterprise market for it. no C-suite is going to authorize a fleet of agents if they're holding 100% of the bag for emergent failures they can't audit.
by stoneforger | 2026-02-07 23:57:19+00:00
Quality shmuality. Get good bro, my app already uses best patterns and you can do all the things and has enterprise SSO and runs on vercel and needs 39 services and costs a few million to run to show you AI generated excel sheets because you cant be bothered to think for a hot minute. We can't have you thinking you might get wrong ideas about ownership. I'm afraid open source was a mistake in the end because it enabled enterprises to iterate faster than they ever could on their own.
by monooso | 2026-02-07 23:57:24+00:00
I think you're missing the point.

If a friend stated that they will stay with their partner regardless of how deceptive or abusive said partner's behaviour becomes, you would rightly question the wisdom of that choice.

Stating that you will remain loyal to a company come what may is even worse. It's an entity with no interest in your wellbeing. It exists to extract as much money or information from you as possible.

Quite apart from everything else, such a statement eliminates the prospect of ever finding something better.
by oxag3n | 2026-02-07 23:58:05+00:00
It's the end goal that matters in this context.

Boss that counts LOC will be fired or will bankrupt the company/team.

One of my friend who never lost a touch with coding in hist 30+ years career recently left FAANG and told me it's the best time to realize his dream of building a start up. And it's not because AI can write code for him - it would take him about 12 month to build the system from the ground up manually, but it's the best time because nobody can replicate what he's doing by using AI only. His analogy was "it's like everyone is becoming really good cyclist with electric bikes, even enthusiast cyclists, but you secretly train for Tour de France".
by hintymad | 2026-02-07 23:58:13+00:00
One thing that I realized was that a lot of our so-called "craft" is converged "know-how". Take the recent news that Anthropic used Claude Code to write a C compiler for example, writing compiler is hard (and fun) for us humans because we indeed need to spend years understanding deeply the compiler theory and learning every minute detail of implementation. That kind of learning is not easily transferrable. Most students tried the compiler class and then never learned enough, only a handful few every year continued to grow into true compiler engineers. Yet to our AI models, it does not matter much. They already learned the well-established patterns of compiler writing from the excellent open-source implementations, and now they can churn out millions of code easily. If not perfect, they will get better in the future.

So, in a sense our "craft" no longer matters, but what really happens is that the repetitive know-how has become commoditized. We still need people to do creative work, but what is not clear is how many such people we will need. After all, at least in short term, most people build their career by perfecting procedural work because transferring the know-how and the underlying whys is very expensive to human. For the long term, though, I'm optimistic that engineers just get an amazing tool and will use it create more opportunities that demand more people.