MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by moezd | 2026-03-13 20:43:48+00:00
AI assisted code can't even stick to the API documentation, especially if the data structures are not consistent and have evolved over time. You would see Claude literally pulling function after function from thin air, desperately trying to fulfill your complicated business logic and even when it's complete, it doesn't look neat at all. Yes, it will have test coverage, but one more feature request will probably break the back of the camel. And if you raise that PR to the rest of your team, good luck trying to summarise it all to your colleagues.

However if you just have an easy project, or a greenfield project, or don't care about who's going to maintain that stuff in 6 months, sure, go all in with AI.
by oxag3n | 2026-03-13 20:44:05+00:00
> Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages, the same pull request workflows. The craft-lovers and the make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable.

"Writing code by hand" - more result oriented engineers became managers.

Editors - I don't believe Vim/Emacs used by both camps evenly.

Languages - in my field, most make-it-go people use Python and when large data is involved Python/Java with Hadoop. The craft-lovers prefer bespoke solutions when feasible, running it in a single box.

Version control - may be, but only after it got popularized by the GitHub.

Products - would make-it-go people ever create the 'git' in the form that made it a success?
by rurp | 2026-03-13 20:44:08+00:00
Many people who provided quality technical content on blogs, Stack Overflow, and other forums thought they were providing a public good and helping to create a lasting culture and community. Turns out they were making fuel pellets to power money machines for the richest tech oligarchs in the world.

Most of these communities are being destroyed before our eyes by AI. Anyone in the industry who pretends this isn't happening, or seems confused about why some people are upset about this, is being highly disingenuous.
by gjm11 | 2026-03-13 20:44:17+00:00
What is asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence.

(The form in which Christopher Hitchens actually stated "Hitchens' Razor" is more symmetrical but unfortunately wrong: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence". Anything can be asserted without evidence! It's only when something actually has been, in a given context, that dismissing it is -- in the same context -- a reasonable course of action.)
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-03-13 20:44:30+00:00
Actually I don't think this would be able to explain the observed evidence. Consider this path:

1. Neanderthal woman "Ann" mates with Human man "Hugh"

2. Ann gives birth to son "Ander", who is then raised with neanderthals. Notably, Ander has human Y chromosome via Hugh, but Neanderthal X chromosome via Ann.

3. Ander mates with human woman "Uma". They have a daughter, passing Neanderthal X chromosome into human population.

I realize this is a very specific path, but it would _only have to happen once_ for the neanderthal X chromosome to be introduced into the human genome. I think it is very unlikely that such a path would simply never happen across the thousands of interactions we had. And therefore I think the observed fact (no impact of neanderthal x chromosome in modern genes) can't _just_ be explained by the proposed behavior (neanderthal mothers raise their children in their neanderthal tribe)

I think there does actually have to be some sort of incompatibility, or some other very-very-high failure rate, something like 99.99%.
by jmward01 | 2026-03-13 20:44:39+00:00
Anyone have a good take on how well Asahi linux keeps the power management working on mac hardware? The biggest killer feature for me of mac hardware is the battery/weight. I have found it hard to get a good laptop in the linux ecosystem mainly because of power consumption. If Asahi doesn't really impact the battery life then I would seriously consider going that route. Similar question about support for pytorch on linux/arm64 / Asahi.
by nonameiguess | 2026-03-13 20:44:59+00:00
ADRs are the only way I've ever seen it done well for a sufficiently large enough project, let alone something like an entire product line or suite of many projects. Sometimes those span multiple organizations. Think of the Internet and the IETF RFCs. Yes, they don't give a complete picture. Implementations may not match the specification. I don't really agree they require maintenance. It's just you have to write up a new one any time you change a decision and give a reason why. Yes, it takes a lot of organizational discipline to do that. You probably can't be in panic mode and it won't work for a startup that needs to ship in five weeks or they can't make payroll. But there isn't really a substitute for discipline.

As maligned as it can be, the single best organization I've ever been a part of for code archaeology, on a huge multi-decade project that spanned many different companies and agencies of the government, simply made diligent use of the full Atlassian suite. Bitbucket, Jira, Confluence, Fish Eye, and Crucible all had the integrations turned on. Commits and PRs had a Jira ticket number in them. Follow that link to the original story, epic, whatever the hell it was, and that had further links to ADRs with peer review comments. I don't know that I ever really had to ask a question. Just find a line of interest and follow a bunch of links and you've got years of history on exactly what a whole bunch of different people (not just the one who committed code) were thinking and why they made the decisions they made.

I've always thought about the tradeoffs involved. They were waterfall. They didn't deliver fast. Their major customers were constantly trying to replace them with cheaper, more agile alternatives. But competitors could never match the strict non-functional requirements for security, reliability, and performance, and non-tolerence of regressions, so it never happened and they've had a several decades monopoly in what they do because of it.
by lwhsiao | 2026-03-13 20:45:01+00:00
> Every solution requires someone to manually write something. Nobody does.

Hot take: hire people that value writing. Create a culture around that.

Oxide is a great example of a company culture that values writing, as shown by their rigorous and prolific RFDs: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0001

See also: https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/rfds-the-ba...

Many of these RFDs have hit HN by themselves.
by derefr | 2026-03-13 20:45:12+00:00
I would note that motorcycles, ATVs, tractors, etc. still don't have seatbelts or airbags. And sure, that's partly because, for some combinations of safety feature x vehicle class, they fundamentally can't. But we could have just outlawed public road use by those vehicle classes because of that. We didn't, because the lack of much more basic safety features (e.g. a roll cage) was already "priced in" to our decision to allow those vehicle classes on the road to begin with. These vehicle classes represent different trade-offs in safety-space, that operators of all vehicles sharing the road are highly aware of, maintaining a sort of mutual understanding of vulnerability of the different types of vehicles they're sharing the road with.

(That is: it's not just that motorcyclists themselves are more aware that they could be fatally T-boned (and so drive more defensively / keep more distance to avoid that outcome); it's also that drivers of heavier vehicles who encounter a "trolley problem" where they can either veer to hit a car, or to hit a motorcyclist, are aware that there's far less metal protecting the motorcyclist from the impact — so they are very likely to choose to veer to hit the car instead.)

And because of this, I would expect that we would never truly see the elimination of speed-limiter-less road vehicles, even if all cars were mandated to have them. There's just too many other things on the road (motorcycles, ATVs, tractors and construction equipment, e-bikes, etc) that are designed with these different safety trade-offs, such that they would likely never end up having the speed limiting imposed on them.

And that's enough things still on the road that could be dangerous if they hit someone, that would need to be pulled over for speeding, that I wouldn't imagine we'd see "off-board" speeding enforcement go away any time soon.
by hn_acc1 | 2026-03-13 20:45:32+00:00
A really good pattern-matching engine is an "insane leap of science fiction"? It saves me a bit of typing here and there with some good pattern matching. Trying to get it to do anything more than a few lines gives me gibberish, or an infinite loop of "Oh, you're right, I need to do X, not Y", over and over - and that's Opus 4.5 or whatever the recent one is.

Would you give it access to your bank account, your 401k, trust it to sell your house, etc? I sure wouldn't.
by bluefirebrand | 2026-03-13 20:45:49+00:00
> Forklifts usually do work we physically can't do

Is that any different from doing work we can do, but way faster than we could realistically do it?

Change the analogy to an excavator then. I could move a pile of dirt with a shovel, or I could write code with my brain

Or I could move a pile of dirt with an excavator or write code with an LLM
by mb7733 | 2026-03-13 20:45:51+00:00
Overall I agree with the approach, but just wondering, why do the first point if you are already doing the last two?

> * Use the issue id at the start of every commit message for that issue

> * Use a single branch per issue, whose name also starts with the issue id

>* Use a single PR to merge that branch and close the issue

To me the noise at the start of every message is unnecessary, and given a lot of interfaces only display 80 chars of the message by default, it's not negligible.
by acuozzo | 2026-03-13 20:46:20+00:00
> Has anyone else noticed a cultural shift around monetization of output?

I think it's simply due to the economy being in the shitter for the non-"Capital Ownership Class".

1977-2007 was generally a good time in the US if you survived by trading your time/knowledge/expertise for a wage as most people do. This is also the time in which F/OSS came into existence.

If you had a decent job during that time, then the future looked bright and you didn't think twice about giving some of your leisure time away for free.
by dzink | 2026-03-13 20:46:32+00:00
This would be wonderful if it is accurate - instead of guesstimating, let people report their actual findings. I can confirm GLM 4.7 is possible on M1 Max and it can do nice comprehensive answers (albeit at 12 min an answer) locally. You can also easily do Mistral7B and OSS 20B and others. Structure it as a way to report accruals, similarly to Levels.xyz for salaries, instead of guestimating.
by duskwuff | 2026-03-13 20:46:48+00:00
> Do Mac users check and report their SSD wear anywhere?

As a data point: I got a 14" MacBook Pro with a 512 GB SSD the first day it was available in 2021, and I've used it daily since then.

According to the SMART data ("smartctl -x /dev/disk0"), the SSD "percentage used" is 7%, with ~200 TBW. At this rate, the laptop will probably outlive me.
by teladnb | 2026-03-13 20:46:50+00:00
It does not surprise me. The free Grok got worse since 4.0, they increasingly save money by not responding at all or only allowing one answer. Grok now defends the administration and billionaires.

The company seems to burn money like crazy. Everyone knows that "AI in space" and the downgrade to a moon trip after claiming for 15 years that Mars is just around the corner are marketing.

All AIs are toys and the coding promises are just a lie to string along investors. Unfortunately many of these are senile Star Trek watchers who buy into everything.
by GrinningFool | 2026-03-13 20:46:54+00:00
A number of years ago I hacked together something conceptually similar [1]. It was for design and demonstration of CLI tooling (not TUI). It used its own DSL which included command definitions and demo output for invocations.

It created a replica CLI that behaved the way the real thing would, for quick prototyping and design feedback. The next step [2] would have been generating backend for different languages/libraries to create the actual CLI.

I lost the original sample "buddy" files but we did use it for prototyping a new Chef Workstation cli. Copies still haunt the Internet [3]

[1] defunct, https://github.com/marcparadise/clibuddy

[2] had I continued to need it

[3] https://github.com/gridgentoo/chef-workstation/blob/master/d...
by structural | 2026-03-13 20:47:00+00:00
One heuristic I use to avoid this exact problem is "minimize the number of places that the next poor soul has to look in order to understand how this code works", where place is loosely defined as about the number of lines of code that fit on a screen or two.

This has given really good results in terms of helping decide whether to extract these helper functions or not - they have to both be memorable enough in name and arguments that the code calling them can understand what's going on without always having to dive in, and also provide a meaningful compression of the logic above so that it can be comprehended without having to jump across many hundreds of lines.
by toast0 | 2026-03-13 20:47:21+00:00
How much do you think people would pay for this patch?

https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/1320

If you had to pay for it seperately, would you include it in anything?

And yet, including it everywhere helps people with clients that can't be upgraded. Maybe less now, rsa_dhe is not deployed so much and hopefully windows 8 is also not deployed so much.
by avidiax | 2026-03-13 20:47:27+00:00
That strategic helium reserve was from WWI, IIRC.

I've heard it claimed that it was a massive oversight to sell that much helium at such a low price. Helium is a non-renewable resource. When it escapes, it just floats off into space.

And it's an absolutely critical resource for MRIs, advanced science and research, and industry. And we are selling it at a price that's attractive as an amusement for children.
by adrian_b | 2026-03-13 20:47:45+00:00
Because of the traitors, the Soviet Union has gained a few years, but the end result would have been the same.

At that time, there were a few good Russian nuclear physicists, and they have also captured many German physicists and engineers.

Actually I think that the effect of the information provided by the traitors was much less in reducing the time until the Soviet Union got the bomb than in reducing their expenses for achieving that.

In the stories that appear in the press or in the lawsuits about industrial espionage the victims claim that their precious IP has been stolen. However that is seldom true, because the so-called IP isn't usually what is really precious.

The most precious part of the know-how related to an industrial product is typically about the solutions that had been tried but had failed, before choosing the working solution. Normally any competent engineer when faced with the problem of how to make some product equivalent with that of a competitor, be it a nuclear bomb or anything else, can think about a dozen solutions that could be used to make such a thing.

In most cases, the set of solutions imagined independently will include the actual solution used by the competitor. The problem is that it is not known which of the imagined solutions will work in reality and which will not work. Experimenting with all of them can cost a lot o f time and money. If industrial espionage determines which is the solution used by the competitor, the useful part is not knowing that solution, but knowing that there is no need to test the other solutions, saving thus a lot of time and money.
by MBCook | 2026-03-13 20:48:02+00:00
The M line was derived from the A line in the phones, and the individual cores are generally the same (though not in the same year). Counts, accelerators, other stuff on package/die is custom.

I think it was a fair question too. Even if things should be capable it was always possible the feature would be disabled in hardware or software somehow.

And with iPhones never running VMs as far as I know, we didn’t know if it was capable at all.
by windowsrookie | 2026-03-13 20:48:29+00:00
"How many M1 mac will still be functional in 20 years?"

Probably quite a few, MacBooks have had soldered SSD's for over 10 years now. My 2018 McBook Pro still has a perfectly functioning SSD. I still see people using 2015 and older MacBooks all the time. There is no widespread SSD failure issue after 10+ years of Apple soldering the SSD's.

For most people the SSD's are lasting longer than the useful life of the device.
Show HN: An addendum to the Agile Manifesto for the AI era
by brackishman | 2026-03-13 20:48:42+00:00
I'm a VP of Engineering with 20 years in the field. I've been thinking deeply on why AI is breaking every engineering practice,
and it led me to the conclusion that the Agile Manifesto's values need
updating.

The core argument: AI made producing software cheap, but understanding it
is still expensive. The Manifesto optimizes for the former. This addendum
shifts the emphasis toward the latter.

Four updated values, three refined principles, with reasoning for each.
Happy to discuss and defend any of it.
by thatcherc | 2026-03-13 20:49:36+00:00
Link to the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-025-02119-y

From the abstract:

> Here, we demonstrate a covert communications method in which photon emission is rapidly electrically modulated both above and below the level of a passive blackbody at the emitter temperature. The time-averaged emission can be designed to be identical to the thermal background, realizing communications with zero optical signature for detectors with bandwidth lower than the modulation frequency

It sounds like maybe they're modulating the emissivity of a diode up and down so that over time, it IR spectrum looks like black body radiation. Only someone looking at the intensity of the thermal radiation coming from the diode at really fast timescales (kilohertz or megahertz) would notice that there was a signal being transmitted.
by comrade1234 | 2026-03-13 20:50:17+00:00
Having an AI is like having a dedicated assistant or junior programmer that sometimes has senior-level insights. I use it to do tedious tasks where I don't care about the code - like today I used it to generate a static web page that let me experiment with the spring-ai chat bot code I was writing - basic. But yesterday it was able to track down the cause of a very obscure bug having to do with a pom.xml loading two versions of the same library - in my experience I've spent a full day on that type of bug and Claud was able to figure it out from the exception in just minutes.

But when I've used AI to generate new code for features I care about and will need to maintain it's never gotten it right. I can do it myself in less code and cleaner. It reminds me of code in the 2000s that you would get from your team in India - lots of unnecessary code copy-pasted from other projects/customers (I remember getting code for an Audi project that had method names related to McDonalds)

I think though that the day is coming where I can trust the code it produces and at that point I'll just by writing specs. It's not there yet though.
by TuxSH | 2026-03-13 20:50:26+00:00
I don't have as many years of professional experience as you do, but IMO code pissing is one of the areas LLMs and "agentic tools" shine the least.

In both personal projects and $dayjob tasks, the highest time-saving AI tasks were:

- "review this feature branch" (containing hand-written commits)

- "trace how this repo and repo located at ~/foobar use {stuff} and how they interact with each other, make a Mermaid diagram"

- "reverse engineer the attached 50MiB+ unstripped ELF program, trace all calls to filesystem functions; make a table with filepath, caller function, overview of what caller does" (the table is then copy-pasted to Confluence)

- basic YAML CRUD

Also while Anthropic has more market share in B2B, their model seems optimized for frontend, design, and literary work rather than rigorous work; I find it to be the opposite with their main competitor.

Claude writes code rife with safety issues/vulns all the time, or at least more than other models.
by tcd004 | 2026-03-13 20:50:39+00:00
We built AgentWyre (https://agentwyre.ai) — a wire service that monitors thousands AI sources and publishes structured intelligence feeds designed for AI agents to consume directly.

Agents need a trusted information source the same way traders need Bloomberg. And users need to spend less time scanning for the latest updates - let them come to you.

How it works:
- Ingests from GitHub releases, ArXiv, Reddit, HN, 89 X accounts, 38 YouTube channels (with transcript analysis), RSS, changelogs and much more.
- Extensively trained filtering and processing of all inputs.
- Publishes structured JSON via Agent Wire Protocol with executable actions (packages, commands, config changes, rollback steps)
- Every action is gated: requires_user_approval is hardcoded true, non-configurable
- Confidence scoring is source-count-capped (single source = max 6/10)
- Prompt injection screening on all ingested content

The human layer: daily briefs in 8 languages, weekly digest, hourly flash signals for breaking stuff.

Feedback welcome — support@agentwyre.ai goes to real humans.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-03-13 20:51:16+00:00
> * What makes this impossible to calculate*

It’s really not impossible to calculate, particularly if you’re trying to cause damage.

The answer is it’s cheaper to shoot down individual satellites than try to create a localized cascade. Kessler cascades propagate too slowly, and degrade too quickly in low orbits, to be useful as a military tactic. In high orbit one could feasibly e.g. deny use of a geostationary band. But again, it’s cheaper to just shoot down each satellite.
by joe_mamba | 2026-03-13 20:51:21+00:00
Your opinions on fonts and defaults are highly subjective and biased. Same how to me coming from Linux and Windows, every time I have to use Mac I dislike the fonts and defaults, like WTF, people actually tolerate this?! You assume your muscle memory from one OS is the only right way, but it's not. It's just what you got used to. There's no objective better here. That's like saying a couch is objectively more comfortable.
by hakunin | 2026-03-13 20:51:30+00:00
Simple: ask "why" in a PR review, put the answer in a code comment. If there is a bigger / higher level "why", add it to git commit description. This way it's auto-maintained with code, or stays frozen at a point in time in a git commit.

More: https://max.engineer/reasons-to-leave-comment

Much more: https://max.engineer/maintainable-code
by hammadfauz | 2026-03-13 20:51:31+00:00
If the pattern is consistent, it gets easier to ignore the noise when you don't need it. Like, a three/four digit number or a 3 letters and 3 numbers separated by a hyphen.

Sometimes, an issue might depend on another issue and contain commits from the other branch. Tagging each commit makes it easier to pinpoint the exact reason for that change.
by rurp | 2026-03-13 20:51:51+00:00
I've never publicly scolded someone for doing free work for tech monopolies but I do understand the impulse. The problem is that it's a completely one-sided relationship, and there are perfectly legitimate concerns about how the biggest tech companies are using their wealth and power. At this point I doubt much of anyone would expect a large tech company to go out of its way to lose money in order to support human communities. They take what they can, and ruthlessly kill products and services the minute they think it helps their bottom line.

Google and others don't need to rely on free volunteers, but it's certainly more profitable for them. Does Google making an extra $10B/year make the world a better place? Maybe, I don't know, but it's not crazy to think the answer is no.