MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jonahrd | 2026-02-17 14:22:21+00:00
I might be able to shine a little light on this.

I came from embedded, where I wasn't able to use agents very effectively for anything other than quick round trip iterative stuff. They were still really useful, but I definitely could never envision just letting an agent run unattended.

But I recently switched domains into vaguely "fullstack web" using very popular frameworks. If I spend a good portion of my day going back and forth with an agent, working on a detailed implementation plan that spawns multiple agents, there is seemingly no limit* to the scope of the work they are able to accurately produce. This is because I'm reading through the whole plan and checking for silly gotchyas and larger implementation mistakes before I let them run. It's also great because I can see how the work can be parallelized at certain parts, but blocked at others, and see how much work can be parallelized at once.

Once I'm ready, I can usually let it start with not even the latest models, because the actual implementation is so straightforwardly prompted that it gets it close to perfectly right. I usually sit next to it and validate it while it's working, but I could easily imagine someone letting it run overnight to wake up to a fresh PR in the morning.

Don't get me wrong, it's still more work that just "vibing" the whole thing, but it's _so_ much more efficient than actually implementing it, especially when it's a lot of repetitive patterns and boilerplate.

* I think the limit is how much I can actually keep in my brain and spec out in a well thought out manner that doesn't let any corner cases through, which is still a limit, but not necessarily one coming from the agents. Once I have one document implemented, I can move on to the next with my own fresh mental context which makes it a lot easier to work.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-17 14:22:22+00:00
> highly ramped up requirements

Yes

> without additional compensation

No. Most SWEs and employees in the tech industry are paid significantly higher in 2024 [0] (1 years after layoffs kicked off( versus 2014 [1].

This isn't true of other white collar professions.

> also people aren't disposable enough

The issue is SUI premiums leading to states incentivizing their labor boards to challenge for-cause dismissals (explained in another comment).

[0] - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

[1] - https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2014/occupations/home.htm
by iberator | 2026-02-17 14:22:45+00:00
All I need is a classic bad VI. Only thing lacking is syntax colours and multiple undo.
I hate when people using ViM claim that they are vi users or experts...

I miss elVis also. ViM should be banned from all distros because it is literally nag-ware and charity ware (Uganda 's children thing). 30 years later we still can't edit files bigger than RAM size unless you want to use swap file ...

Even commodore 64 had editors which could edit files bigger than RAM and WITHOUT ANY kind of swapping to the disk.

/rant
by zbentley | 2026-02-17 14:23:03+00:00
Some of those already exist, e.g. https://bellard.org/tcc/

However, they're not in widespread use. I would be curious to learn if there's any data/non-anecdotal information as to why. Is it momentum/inertia of GCC/LLVM/MSVC? Are alternative compilers incomplete and can't actually compile a lot of practical programs (belying the "relatively simple program") claim? Or is the performance differential due to optimizations really so significant that ordinary programs like e.g. vim or libjpeg or VLC or whatnot have significant degradations when built on an alternative compiler?
by takko_the_boss | 2026-02-17 14:23:31+00:00
Felix proposes a simple constraint: never update state directly.
Instead, append canonicalized temporal facts and derive current state from the latest observation.
Includes canonicalization rules, identity hashing, snapshot semantics, and ingestion behavior.
Designed for telemetry, configuration tracking, audit logging, and out-of-order ingestion scenarios.
by softwaredoug | 2026-02-17 14:23:47+00:00
> Which is to say that the pleasure I get from programming is mostly about learning the underlying truths about computation and applying what I’ve learned. Always improving the craft. This, to me, is the practice of programming.

I guess when you get to a certain age (I'm 45) I stop caring whether something like this has social value. I enjoy it anyways.

Wanting to know how things work always brings me back. I don't care if an AI coded small or big parts of it, I still want to know how it works, how to make it better - what's holding the AI itself back from being a more effective programmer.

I feel like I got into programming when it was seen as low-status profession in the late 80s. And it went through levels of hype and collapse. Maybe this is the ultimate collapse. But I still want to take apart the watch to see how it ticks.

If society collapses because 80% of white collar jobs disappear, I guess I'll just be in my basement wanting to know how a linux kernel driver works.
by concats | 2026-02-17 14:24:06+00:00
> Putting that kind of filter in the way of speech seems ripe for abuse.

On one hand I agree with you. Any automatic filter implemented can later be expanded to cover more and more things, such as messages from political adversaries for example. It's a slippery slope as we all know.

On the other hand I don't think it applies in this context very much. If we're talking about content published by a corporation or such (say a newspaper for example) they already filter all their gathered news themselves and have no obligation to publish things they don't feel like.

Similarly if we're talking about user uploaded content on social media I don't think they have any obligation to publish everything and anything that their users decide to upload either, and it's not the expectations of the users that anything can be hosted there for them. Users already know that youtube/facebook/tiktok/what-have-you have seemingly arbitrary rules regarding what content they're willing to host and not.

Now if for example DNS providers or ISPs decide to implement these sort of filters on the web at large that's a different matter I think. In which case I agree with you.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-02-17 14:24:25+00:00
They’re being made but I just don’t think there’s a whole lot of demand/spaces for them. People sure don’t want them in their homes and arcades barely exist in many countries now.

I’ve seen a couple of bars open up that try to have an arcade as well but they never take care of the machines/drunk people break them, so after a few months half the games don’t even work. There’s only so many times I can lose a quarter or a dollar before I decide it’s not worth it anymore and I just go drink somewhere else with friends.

The only real arcade left in my city is attached to a laser tag, it would be super weird for a bunch of grown men in their 30s and 40s to roll up during kids’ birthday parties they weren’t invited to lol
by ianpcook | 2026-02-17 14:24:38+00:00
Hey HN! I built Galatea because I was tired of every AI coding assistant sounding exactly the same.

Galatea generates personality config files for your coding agents. You describe a character (or pick a preset — pirate captain, noir detective, drill sergeant, etc.), and it researches the character using web search + LLM to find authentic speech patterns, mannerisms, and quotes. Then it outputs agent-specific config files you drop into your project.

Supported agents: Claude Code (CLAUDE.md), Cursor (.cursorrules), Gemini CLI (GEMINI.md), Codex, OpenClaw (SOUL.md — this is the agent framework created by the developer OpenAI recently hired), Windsurf, Cline, Roo Code, and Amp.

The research step is the interesting part. Rather than just prompting "talk like a pirate," it actually searches for how the character speaks, their vocabulary, catchphrases, worldview, and weaves that into system instructions that feel surprisingly authentic. A Shakespeare personality doesn't just add "thee" and "thou" — it picks up iambic patterns, specific references, and the right register for the character.

The web app is free to use at galatea.sh. There's also a Python CLI if you want to self-host or integrate it into your workflow. The frontend is open source.

Tech stack: Next.js frontend, FastAPI backend, Claude Haiku for generation (keeps costs low enough to offer free), Brave Search for character research.

I'd love feedback on the generated personalities — are they actually fun to work with? Any characters you'd want to see as presets? And if you try it with an agent I haven't tested much (Amp, Roo Code), I'd especially appreciate bug reports.
by aeonque | 2026-02-17 14:25:18+00:00
Seems to me we’re ignoring history:
1. Prescott Lecky destroyed the validity of Pavlov’s experiments with his paper on Self Consistency.
2. Macys conference in 1960s converged on the idea of systems theory and cybernetics; cause and effect is for elementary school - self organization is for the adults.
3. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (Autopoesis) are rolling in their graves.

It’s not a new discovery if something better has already been in use for 50+ years.

Am I missing something here?
by thelastgallon | 2026-02-17 14:25:28+00:00
> comparative advantage tells you that some human labor will remain valuable in some configuration, but nothing about the wages, number of jobs, or the distribution of gains. You can have comparative advantage and still have massive displacement, wage collapse, and concentration of returns to capital. A world where humans retain “comparative advantage” in a handful of residual tasks at a fraction of the current wages is technically consistent with Oks’ framework, but obviously is worth worrying about and is certainly not fine.
by MITSardine | 2026-02-17 14:25:40+00:00
I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. Public speaking is itself a skill that the teacher presumably wanted to teach their students. These types of assignments are also quicker to grade (and on class time, no less) and harder to cheat at than written exams:
- students copying on their neighbor
- students using their smartphone in class or in the restroom
- old-school cheats (cheat sheets hidden on their person)

Even disregarding cheating, why should ability at written exams be the only measure of a student? Some crumble under the pressure of the moment and perform poorly as their mind blanks. They don't trust their abilities and find themselves terrified in front of an exam sheet. Having time to research a subject and carefully rehearse it can be reassuring. Others (as was my case) have the opposite problem; they trust themselves fully to improvise their way to a good grade in front of a sheet of paper but freeze up if they have to speak in front of a crowd. But these students already get their way in the 99% of evaluations that are not in this format.
by edbaskerville | 2026-02-17 14:25:43+00:00
Switched to this from Apple a year and a half ago. Works for most things. Unexpectedly, replacement apps lack polish. Also, RCS works very inconsistently (been without it for months), seems to be Google's fault. There may be workarounds, but I haven't had the energy to try the more complicated suggestions.

I am probably going to switch back to a used old iPhone for "phone appliance" tasks, but keep around the Pixel for other things.

My main takeaway from the experience is that iMessage is an even bigger weapon than I thought.
by throwaw12 | 2026-02-17 14:26:23+00:00
as I am getting older, I wholeheartedly relate to what you are saying.

1. Some people give a damn, but decision makers won't give them money and resources to fix. Good enough is enough, lets work on next project.

2. Inviting "real people" is expensive, A/B testing is cheaper

3. Complicated 150 page, 120 tab ERP or B2B SaaS can be funded, simple things -> investors are worried that it can be replicated by 1 engineer with Claude Code/Codex at hand

4. Have a heart --- this makes me think, unfortunately we lost it to capitalism. We are even ready to ruin our kids life and their mental health, if it makes money to us

Sad sad sad
by RGamma | 2026-02-17 14:27:06+00:00
I mean it would make sense to see this as a hardware investment into a virtual employee, that you actually control (or rent from someone who makes this possible for you), not as private assistant. Ballparking your numbers, we would need at least an order of magnitude price-performance improvement for that I think.

Also, how much bang for the buck do those 3090s actually give you compared to enterprise-grade products?
by dxxmxnd | 2026-02-17 14:27:16+00:00
> is it really work if all you're doing is telling the computer what to do and then reviewing it to make sure it didn't do anything wrong and also babysitting it all hours of the day?

It’s funny because this is what we do already at many jobs but now its just telling a computer to tell a computer what to do. A higher level of abstraction.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-17 14:27:29+00:00
> found a 13% relative decline in employment for early-career workers (ages 22-25) in AI-exposed occupations since late 2022. For young software developers specifically, employment fell almost 20% from its 2022 peak

This is confounding AI-exposed white collar occupations with occupations that were overrepresented with extended remote work.

I am on multiple boards and that was a major factor that disincentivized new grad hiring in the US, because a new grad salary in a white collar profession in the US is a mid-career salary in the rest of the world.

AI is used as an excuse, but even most executives when polled agree that we do expect to see the amount of employees being hired at least in software adjacent roles to increase.

I cannot justify hiring a mediocre new grad in Seattle for $120k who will end up using Claude Code anyhow when I can hire an early-career employee doing something similar in Romania or India for around $20k.

The reality is a large portion of new grads and mid-career types who started their careers after 2020 are too mediocre for the TC paid.
by softwaredoug | 2026-02-17 14:27:41+00:00
In the last few decades, we went from a small handful of programming languages / libraries to a massive cambrian explosion from Github-fueled open source. Everyone's choice of Javascript framework became a dumb pissing contest and source of identity. A cudgel used at meetings to look down on some other way of doing things.

I hope AI liberates us from that dumb facade of pretend innovation. In some ways, us programmers got way too full of ourselves and filled our lives with pretend work porting apps from one thing to the next thing with no actual change in end-user value
Show HN: Timebound AWS IAM Permissions for Claude Code
by arrsingh | 2026-02-17 14:28:31+00:00
Hello HN,

I've been using Claude Code for managing my AWS infra and I have multiple accounts (probably should have just one but here we are), and everytime I needed to work with my Cloudfront or S3 or Dynamo or anything else I was constantly updating AWS IAM Policies and had to remember to remove the policy permissions after I was done so my account didn't just have access to everything for my user.

So I built a simple MCP server that talks to AWS STS and allows claude code to request temporary credentials with a standard AWS IAM policy scoped to the specific service and permissions for a limited amount of time.

Now claude asks me to approve the permissions and the MCP takes over and vends the credentials. The nice thing is that there is no backend to maintain or durations to manage since AWS STS handles all those including expiration of the credentials.

Check it out, give me your feedback and feature requests are welcome.

Free & Open Source: https://github.com/builder-magic/timebound-iam
by 0xy | 2026-02-17 14:28:45+00:00
It's simple, if you refuse to adapt you will be replaced by those who will.

Writing code by hand is not going to be the default mode going forward. You either do the majority of your work controlling autonomous agents and reviewing their work or you get surpassed by all of your colleagues.

Are you going to be the farmer who refuses to buy a plow?

I also do not have sympathy for those who refuse to adapt. These people hold back organizations by appealing to tradition and resisting any form of change.
by whiplash451 | 2026-02-17 14:29:20+00:00
I am not a blind AI fanboy but I am more bullish than some people here, for two reasons:

1. We might be drowning under the "top of the iceberg" at the moment (quickly generated AI slop) but there's a silent crowd of builders doing long-term work (still with the help of AI) that will only surface after months of work. I expect more of the bottom of the iceberg to show up over time.

2. A lot of the most interesting work in science was done out of sheer curiosity, not given a specific problem to solve. The current generation of AI is good -- and getting better -- at the latter, but genuinely incapable of doing the former in a remotely meaningful way.

In other words, I'm long on truly human-driven innovation.
by mark-r | 2026-02-17 14:29:56+00:00
There's something that tends to go unrecognized, a function of the way our monitors work. Any color that is made of multiple primaries, such as magenta, cyan, or yellow, will naturally be brighter because more photons are emitted from the display. Not twice as bright, since our eye response is non-linear, but noticeably brighter.
by lunias | 2026-02-17 14:32:06+00:00
This is why I always champion technical leadership. Many, many people seem to think this is unnecessary, but I think it's common sense. The layman might see building software like building a house. We know basically all the components of the house, we know we need to lay the foundation before raising walls and installing a roof. Software development is nothing like this. You can add a roof before the walls, you can dig an entire basement before providing any method of descending into it from the ground floor.
by onli | 2026-02-17 14:32:10+00:00
I still haven't seen what you describe, the behaviour of other projects. And I dont believe it without proof (since it was claimed so often by GOS without proof being shown, or in some cases with it obviously not existing).

For the security thing: It is wrong to claim that an unlocked bootloader completely breaks the android security model. If anything, it breaks one specific aspect, one that doesn't matter for many attacker models. Besides, on some phones the bootloader just can't be relocked, that's on the phone vendor though. Signing keys for bootloaders might just not matter if change detection was working or the bootloader was not relockable, but maybe I'm missing some specifics there.

So imho what you describe as catastrophic scenario likely wasn't one.
by simon666 | 2026-02-17 14:32:11+00:00
To my ear "rise up" and anything with "oppression" also have the negative connotations that aren't particularly useful. Both expressions are old, associated with a generic and unsuccessful leftist movement in the US. Additionally, "oppression" has the same problems as "resist" in that it makes one sound like a victim and a complainer. That's not to say the meaning of "oppression" is bad; roughly: undue or unjust restriction on freedom. In the US it's better to use the language of liberty. So instead of talking about "oppression" one should just articulate threats to liberty and freedom, particular from the government writ large or the Federal government in particular.
by ghywertelling | 2026-02-17 14:32:14+00:00
We need to appoint people who really CARE. When CEOs hop from company to company, the culture of CARING takes a backseat. Everything becomes transient with no one with deep technical or cultural knowledge at the driving seat. This is the reason people who have been at the company for long time should get a chance to transform it from within like Satya Nadella.
by ModernMech | 2026-02-17 14:32:45+00:00
> And the teacher grew very quiet.

I'm sorry, but this is a yarn. The story is either about a very inexperienced teacher (of which there are many), so not representative of the profession as a whole; or it's invented by the author to make a rhetorical point, but not a real thing that happened.

What you say the speaker pointed out to the teacher is basic teaching praxis. The idea that this teacher was somehow stunned to silence by the hypotheticals says more about her personal abilities as a teacher than the teaching profession (you framed this as how "most" education is delivered).

The number one thing we do when designing classes is first we talk about outcomes: what do we want the student to know after the class? Then we talk about prereqs: what should they know coming in? From there, we design assessments to actually measure whether the outcomes were achieved. During the class we implement the assessments, and then after the class we analyze the results to determine if we were successful in attaining outcomes. Then we reassess the course and iterate. But at all stages, student outcomes are driving the design, so I must disagree with the idea most education is uninterested in whether the students learn anything.
by patchorang | 2026-02-17 14:33:25+00:00
This has been exactly my experience too. I switched from Spotify to Plex, but discovered there really isn't a music focused desktop player. So I vibe coded one, exactly how I want my music player to work (albums not playlists/tracks as the central item). I was so happy with my desktop app, I built a mobile version to use instead of PlexAmp. There are some bugs I'm ironing out, but they are both I've stopped using PlexAmp and Spotify entirely.
by meta_1995 | 2026-02-17 14:33:28+00:00
Not a dev but doing some side projects.

As i build with agents, i frequently run into new issues that arent in scope for the task im on and would cause context drift. I have the agent create a github issue with a short problem description and keep going on the current task. In another terminal i spin up a new agent and just tell it “investigate GH issue 123” and it starts diving in, finds the root cause, and proposes a fix. Depending on what parts of the code the issue fix touches and what other agents ive got going, i can have 3-4 agents more or less independently closing out issues/creating PRs for review at a time. The agents log their work in a work log- what they did, what worked what didnt, problems they encountered using tools - and about once a day i have an agent review the worklog and update the AGENTS.md with lessons learned.
by sireat | 2026-02-17 14:33:53+00:00
After, RAM, SSD, GPUs, now HDDs what else is there left to sell out? Power supplies, fans?

In a way this feels a bit absurd for these AI centers to hog HDDs.

As pointed by others neither training nor inference require HDDs and storing raw data should not require that much.

So my hypothesis is that it is a double whammy of overall declining consumer sided HDD demand, leaving data centers as main source of demand and additional demand from the new AI centers.

I feel like the AI centers are just buying HDDs because why not throw a HDD in each server blade even if there is no need? The money is there to be spent and it must be spent.

As someone who has been building computers since 1989 it feels like end of personal hobby casual building.

I will end with an imperfect analogy with multiplayer gaming. It is quite common in multiplayer games for higher level players to wish to acquire some tradeskill they neglected to acquire earlier. maybe a new quest appears, or new "must have" item that requires such skill.

They (past me included) have too much game money and no wish to acquire tradeskill items slowly. So the "rich" will overpay by 2x or 10x or even 100x the usual price.

That is free market at work right?

In the process whole low level economy is destroyed due to 2nd order effects.
Meaning a new player starting out can only be a farmer.

So if a student comes to me wishing to start building computers what advice do I give them? Farm something?