MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by harvenstar | 2026-03-10 22:11:46+00:00
I've been building a review UI layer for coding agents (Claude Code, Codex) that lets you actually inspect and edit what the agent is about to do before it executes: https://github.com/agentlayer-io/AgentClick

Turns out most of the "dumb" mistakes OP is talking about are catchable — you just need to actually see them before they ship.
by sidkshatriya | 2026-03-10 22:11:55+00:00
P.S. As -current is essentially running the latest master branch commit it should be evident that FreeBSD will be unstable, liable to break at any point and may have horrible bugs.

So -current is good for experimentation but probably not too much more than that (unless you're Netflix with team of FreeBSD experts who famously like to run -current -- see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47322830 ).
by fcatalan | 2026-03-10 22:12:24+00:00
This enables different satisfactions. You can still choose all your options but have a working repl or small compiler where you are trying them within minutes.

Also you decide how much in control you are. Want to provide a hand made grammar? go ahead, want the agent to come up with it just from chatting and pointing it to other languages, ok too. Want to program just the first arithmetic operator yourself and then save the tedium of typing all the others so you can go to the next step? fine...

So you can have a huge toy language in mere days and experiment with stuff you'd have to build for months by hand to be able to play with.
by pear01 | 2026-03-10 22:12:26+00:00
Someone thinking they need 40M to escape the "anxiety about the cost of living" is not just a personal decision. It is either extreme greed or delusional. He makes money doing Roblox he is the "laptop class". If you make 400k per month and can't afford to live something is wrong with you. Let's not conflate parents struggling to support their families with whatever this kid is doing.

For reference a worth of $40M puts you well within the top fraction of one percent of all Americans, nevermind the world. If anything given his age it is probably more likely his wealth will become a liability for him rather than an asset. The trope about people who come into that much wealth that young and it creates problems for them exists for a reason. Staying at his desk cranking out more Roblox products might be the best way to keep him away from becoming the victim of his own success.

Anyway good for him. You're right there is a lot of anxiety out there. On some level he should rightly get as much as he can. But let's not pretend you need millions and millions to be safe. We should be working to change that anyway, not merely celebrating massive outliers. I assume since you care about struggling families so much you support his taxation so some of that money can go to people or communities that are struggling? Or since you seem open the idea he needs 40M to survive perhaps you think the government should keep their hands off?
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-03-10 22:12:43+00:00
By definition, coding agents are right now the worse they will ever be and the industry as a whole by definition is the least experienced it will ever be at using then.

So many people on HN are so insulted that the people who put money in our bank accounts and in some cases stock in our brokerage accounts ever cared about their bespoke clean code, GOF patterns and they never did. LLM just made it more apparent.

It’s always been dumb for PR to be focused on for loops vs while loops instead of focusing on whether functional and non functional requirements are met
by sdwr | 2026-03-10 22:12:44+00:00
It's very rational to overshoot in that situation. If you build your lifestyle and then FIRE, you are derisking your budget while you still have income.

But wanting to change your lifestyle when you retire is incredibly risky, especially if you're young without life experience.

Any misstep costs you a fraction of lifetime earnings, and there's no way to recover it.
by Animats | 2026-03-10 22:13:01+00:00
"Before computers, a knowledge worker who had laboriously constructed essays in college quite likely wrote almost nothing for the rest of their working life. People talked face-to-face or on the phone, and dictated to secretaries."

Real men didn't type.

Even lawyers, whose job is producing written text, rarely typed; they wrote on yellow pads. Legal secretaries turned that into clean copy.
Engineers on the Apollo program were still dictating to secretaries.
by emirhan_demir | 2026-03-10 22:13:11+00:00
A short story: A developer let ClaudeCode manage his AWS infrastructure.
The agent ran a Terraform destroy command...
Gone: 2 websites, production database,
all backups and 2.5 years of data
The agent didn't make a mistake. It did exactly what it was allowed to do.
That's the problem dude
by nulltrace | 2026-03-10 22:13:12+00:00
Those three flags cover most of it. One gotcha: -fno-exceptions makes `new` return nullptr instead of throwing, so if any library code expects exceptions you get silent corruption. We added -fcheck-new to catch that.

Also -nostdlib means no global constructors run, so static objects with nontrivial ctors need you to call __libc_init_array yourself.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-03-10 22:13:24+00:00
Homeowners have, in some cases, gotten a free ride when insurers did not have access to this data. They’re closing the gap with cheap, accessible property data.

> “We're seeing an overreaction by insurance companies to data that they're now getting through new technology," Bach said. "We're seeing them drop homes that they've been insuring for decades - and nothing's changed on the homeowner's part."

> For Bennett, time is ticking. She said she has contacted other companies but has not found one willing to insure her home. She is also consulting with roofers as she weighs her options ahead of a May 1 deadline.

Observing that a roof is at the end of its service life using drones or satellite imagery is entirely reasonable, as would be consuming public permit data to determine the same. The homeowner does not need to take action for the risk assessment to change; the insurer is simply accurately pricing the risk in this scenario.

(State Farm customer)
by abandonliberty | 2026-03-10 22:13:38+00:00
Democracy had enemies before the founding of the Republic. Our founders warned us that it would require constant maintenance: "a republic, if you can keep it," warned Franklin.

Washington cautioned us that political parties would allow unprincipled men to subvert the power of the people.

Jefferson highlighted the criticality of public education: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

For Adams, it was the willingness of citizens to sacrifice their private interests for the sake of the community. He cautioned against purely self-interested rugged individualism, now a fake American ideal.

All of these have eroded from a combination of assault and neglect. This problem is asymmetric: those who assault democracy have more to gain than those who defend it (e.g. by looting it, or getting compensated by a foreign power, etc.)

In 1971, 2 months after Lewis Powell argued businesses use their political power to aggressively influence the law, Regan brought him on as a Supreme Court Justice. It was much more efficient to buy a justice for life. He helped set the stage for First Amendment protection of corporate speech, and Citizens United; ultimately legalizing the ability to secretly give a political candidate money.

The rot is really, really deep.
by array_key_first | 2026-03-10 22:13:44+00:00
Because it would be unpopular, not because it can't be done.

Rest assured, when the time is right and the average consumer complacent enough, they will require a subscription. Yes, I can see the future. Call me an Oracle. No, not that Oracle.

Over the past many decades, we're seeing standards slip and slip as our standards for goods are constantly challenged. What was unthinkable just 10 years ago is now business as usual.

If you told someone in 2005 they would have to upload their ID and scan their face to use a chat application, they would call you crazy. If you told someone in 2015 that Google Glass was gonna come back and this time people would like being recorded and would willingly give up their camera feed, they would think you're insane.
by js2 | 2026-03-10 22:13:53+00:00
> Apple introduced control keys (separate left and right ones) because companies writing terminal emulators needed it.

I'm not sure that's the correct reason.

The Apple II/III had the control key from the start. The Mac keyboard originally did not have control (nor escape.) When Apple introduced the external Apple Desktop Bus keyboard designed to be used with both the Apple IIgs and the Mac, it needed the full complement of keys to be used with both systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_keyboards#Discontinued_k...
by fmajid | 2026-03-10 22:15:46+00:00
If they do not also increase the senior devs’ allotted time for code reviews to make up for the increased volume of changes due to increased productivity of the junior to mid level devs, or hire more seniors, this will just lead to burnout (on top of Amazon’s already high levels) and scapegoating seniors for having waved through a change because they materially can’t review them fast enough.
by scottlamb | 2026-03-10 22:15:47+00:00
If I'm understanding correctly moonlighter's proxy speaks Ubiquiti's protocol on both ends, "just" altering the video stream along the way. Which is pretty cool but not what you're looking for.

I'd like to make a production-quality version of what you're looking for: acts as an RTSP server, adopts Ubiquiti cameras. As a single-binary thing that you could run anywhere, maybe even on the camera itself. (self-adoption? emancipation, as in "emancipated minor"?) But it'll take me a bit. My RTSP library right now is client-only, so it needs a bit of expansion to do this. Server support is in my TODO list along with several other changes. https://github.com/scottlamb/retina/issues/89
by teleforce | 2026-03-10 22:16:14+00:00
It's really inevitable isn't it, we are going from RAG to PAG, or physical augmented generation.

We already have PINN or physics-informed neural networks [1]. Soon we are going to have physical field computing by complex-valued network quantization or CVNN that has been recently proposed for more efficient physical AI [2].

[1] Physics-informed neural networks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics-informed_neural_networ...

[2] Ultra-efficient physical field computing by complex-valued network quantization:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-70319-0
by harrall | 2026-03-10 22:17:20+00:00
If you’re planning to not work at all, $1 million is approx. $35,000 per year in salary.

At $5 million, we’re talking more $200k per year. I’d likely still work.

At $10 million, we’re seeing more like $400k.

At $40 million, you can can early at least $1 million/year. This kind of puts you in a new bracket for things you can blow money on.

If you quit working entirely, you will become not very employable so you need to consider that.
by troupo | 2026-03-10 22:19:42+00:00
> I can stage and unstage individual hunks, do complex interactive rebases, squash commits, break apart commits, etc. much faster in Magit than I can in other Git GUIs.

I can do all that pretty fast in GitUp, too. Since most of the commands there have quick keyboard shortcuts.

My most common workflow besides staging anything is (to make sure history is clean):

- split up a commit (add/remove files or hunks if the commit contains stuff that should go into another commit)
- move new commit up/down the branch (doesn't require interactive rebase in GitUp)
- squash up/down

(undo/redo from time to time)

As far as I understand, Magit doesn't offer anything in that regard except the good old interactive rebase [1]. In GitUp moving commits is (u)p/(d)own and (s)quash with parent

> Maybe you're hung up on the "G" part; perhaps I should have just said "UI" rather than "GUI".

The distinction doesn't matter. The keyword in both GUI and UI is User. As a user I found GitUp to be a much better tool than Magit. Though Magit does probably allow for more very advanced usage most people don't do. [2]

However, actual useful usage like I described above? Ooh boy, no one does it except GitUp for some reason.

[1] I only have this blog post to confirm https://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/magit-squashing.ht...

[2] There's another downside to GitUp: it's very slow on repos with huge histories. Probably due to the git library it's using.
by adrian_b | 2026-03-10 22:20:07+00:00
"Reference" was the original term used in the languages derived from ALGOL for what is now called "pointer".

The distinction that exists in C++ between "reference" and "pointer" is something very recent. In the past the 2 terms were synonymous.

The term "pointer" was introduced by IBM PL/I in July 1966, where it replaced "reference".

PL/I has introduced many terms that have replaced previously used terms. For example:

reference => pointer

record => structure

process => task

and a few others that I do not remember right now.

"Pointer" and "structure" have become dominant after they have been taken by the C language from PL/I and then C has become extremely popular. Previously "reference" and "record" were more frequently used.
by daxfohl | 2026-03-10 22:20:17+00:00
You could create an agent template for each incident you've ever had, with context pre-cached with the postmortem report, full code change, and any other information about the incident. Then for every new PR you could clone agents from all those templates and ask whether the PR could cause something similar to the pre-loaded incident. If any of them say yes, reject the PR unless there's a manual override. You'd never have a repeat incident.

Obviously it's probably cost-prohibitive to do an all to all analysis for every PR, but I imagine with some intelligent optimizations around likelihood and similarity analysis something along those lines would be possible and practical.
by bloppe | 2026-03-10 22:20:24+00:00
I think of code review more about ensuring understandability. When you spend hours gathering context, designing, iterating, debugging, and finally polishing a commit, your ability to judge the readability of your own change has been tainted by your intimate familiarity with it. Getting a fresh pair of eyes to read it and leave comments like "why did you do it this way" or "please refactor to use XYZ for maintainability", you end up with something more that will be easier to navigate and maintain by the junior interns who will end up fixing your latent bugs 5 years later.
by dang | 2026-03-10 22:20:55+00:00
Nationalistic flamewar is not allowed on Hacker News, regardless of nation. Personal attacks aren't allowed either. We ban accounts that post like this, so please don't.

I'm sure you have good reason to feel the way you do, but please, no more of this here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines in other places as well, and we've already warned you once. If you'd please review the guidelines and stick to them when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
by blinkbat | 2026-03-10 22:21:00+00:00
i mean, you still guide a power tool. that requires a bit of expertise. for now, getting good products out of AI also requires expertise, but the future is unknown for that holding.

it's more about the transition from woodworking to some kind of lumber factory. a lot of people here didn't sign up to be factory managers, they wanted to work with their hands.
by adampunk | 2026-03-10 22:21:52+00:00
No.

The whole point of the article is that the lesson from North Korea is get yourself a nuclear weapon. If you choose to give up that ambition, you can expect to be punished. If you realize that ambition, you may survive.

It has nothing to do with the particular behavior of the country outside of their ability to achieve a nuclear deterrent. The plain lesson is deterrence works if the country you’re trying to deter is the United States.
by decidu0us9034 | 2026-03-10 22:22:23+00:00
Well it's an operating system. Ideally safety and reliability are prioritized. I think the scope and complexity of an operating system are large enough both to make a lot of changes non-trivial and to trip up LLMs. I think it's fine if you have an unstable release stream or you have bleeding edge forks that move faster than upstream. This is already the case...
by troupo | 2026-03-10 22:22:46+00:00
> Isn’t this just something that any IDE has built-in these days?

In most IDEs I feel that Git integration is an awkward badly integrated afterthought. They are also very much tied to the whatever IDE offers them in terms of available shortcuts, layouts, controls etc. (this applies to Magit, too).

Some of my idiosyncratic usage I developed with GitUp doesn't even exist in most (all?) Git tools: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47329489 (see my most common workflow)
by hyperpape | 2026-03-10 22:22:55+00:00
Right, but if you say something essential in a meeting with 10 people and it has to percolate through five levels of management to reach the front-lines and gets watered down, that could be much more lost, even millions.

Scale cuts both ways.

What matters isn't how big the meeting is, it's how important the material is, and how well presented it is.
by wolvoleo | 2026-03-10 22:23:07+00:00
Wow at 19 the last thing I was thinking about was children. In fact i didn't even finish college until 23. Didn't stop backpacking the world till 28. And never had kids at all in the end anyway, never missed them.

But at 19 it would have been the last thing on my mind. Too busy studying and getting drunk (ok probably not in that order :) )
by itissid | 2026-03-10 22:23:57+00:00
Many times there is really no way of getting around some of the expert-human judgement complexity of the larger question of "How to get agents to build reliably".

One example I have been experimenting is using Learning Tests[1]. The idea is that when something new is introduced in the system the Agent must execute a high value test to teach itself how to use this piece of code. Because these should be high leverage i.e. they can really help any one understand the code base better, they should be exceptionally well chosen for AIs to use to iterate. But again this is just the expert-human judgement complexity shifted to identifying these for AI to learn from. In code bases that code Millions of LoC in new features in days, this would require careful work by the human.

[1] https://anthonysciamanna.com/2019/08/22/the-continuous-value...
by martin-t | 2026-03-10 22:24:18+00:00
It's great that LLMs helped you but do you recognize that they are trained on thousands, perhaps millions of lifetimes of human work without the consent of the original authors and often quite explicitly against their will and their chosen license?

These people (myself included) made their work available free of charge under some very friendly conditions such as being credited or sharing work built upon theirs under the same license. Now we are being shit on because obscenely rich people think we are no longer relevant and that they can get away with it.

What happens to you if, say 2 years down the line, "AI" or AI has absorbed all your knowledge and can do all of your work instead of you better and faster? Do you imagine you'll keep paying for AI and having it work for you or can you also imagine a future where AI companies decide to cut out the middle-man (you) and take over your customers directly?
by eesmith | 2026-03-10 22:24:44+00:00
Analogies are fun!

AI is to software like particle board/chipboard is to old growth wood.

Particle board didn't replace all other uses of wood. They made wood products accessible to more people. They make furniture less expensive. We don't have fewer lumberjack jobs because of particle board. And with particle board came a proliferation of styles that empowered people to toss out the old furniture every few years as their tastes changed. [0]

I don't get the "agents are like factories" analogy. It sounds identical to the argument used for software development in general. That it, it takes a lot of work to produce software, but once done, essentially perfect digital copies of that one thing are effectively free.

Also, "motivated by fear" includes the fear of missing out, so the flip side of the same coin is that manipulators and influencers of the latest hype peddle it for all they are worth.

[0] leading to more waste, plus the slow release of formaldehyde.
by ytoawwhra92 | 2026-03-10 22:24:46+00:00
The comment I replied to said:

> If lazy parents don't want to monitor their children while they spend all day on their ipads, that's their problem--it shouldn't be made mine.

This comes up all the time when age verification laws (of any kind) are discussed. Notice that this comment is not concerned with the implementation details of age verification laws, it simply rejects them in principle because the poster believes it is solely the parent's responsibility to monitor their children's Internet usage.

Offline age/ID verification is not a false equivalence comparison. Parents have a responsibility to supervise and protect their children from harm, it's true. But as children get older (esp. in their teens) it's critical for their development to have unsupervised time to interact with the world on their own terms. And for this reason most countries have some form of codified social responsibility to supervise and protect children from harm when they are in public spaces. Liquor stores checking ID is one example of that, but there are many others.

Every thread on HN about this topic has people saying it's solely the parents' responsibility to control their children's access to harmful media. I replied to one with what I believe is a good counter-example of this. As of writing this, 3 of the 5 replies to my comment are shifting the goal posts (criticising implementation details, rather than the concept of age verification). 1 is saying ban all kids from the Internet (requires age verification) and 1 is saying allow kids to buy liquor.

Online public spaces are still public spaces, so they share the social responsibility that offline public spaces have to refuse children access and/or protect them from harm.
by Affric | 2026-03-10 22:25:29+00:00
Yeah, being awoken by an alarm in pure darkness is grim which, longitude 15 solar noon minutes west of where our timezone is set and at our latitude is very possible in winter.

With pure standard time we would never have sunset before 5 pm but daylight savings puts half the year's 7 am before the sun has risen, and if you are an early riser as I have become, before the dawn breaks.

It also gives us four months where it's very hard to get children to sleep after 8 pm and for me it's even hard to start winding down.

I think summer time is really non-optimal for most purposes, changing the clocks sucks, and most individuals that work do so for too many hours a day. It's a local maximum in terms of how we socially manage time and people mistake optimising our society towards it to be optimising towards a global maximum.

Imagine if there was no DST and someone said "let's change every clock...", I would think it's a classic XY problem.
by repstosb | 2026-03-10 22:26:27+00:00
But Docker is free (unless you're a fairly large business, in which case containerd is still free, and you can either pay for the front-end license or figure out how to set up one of the free alternatives), and from what perspective are the isolations available for the containerd process inferior to those available for your browser process? The former was at least designed from the ground up with security, auditing, quotas etc. in mind, and offers better per-container granular control than your browser offers per-tab.