MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sunaurus | 2026-03-10 09:26:56+00:00
Maybe I'm misreading it, but I don't see him saying it's just the cost of *inference* alone (which is the strawman that the article in the OP is arguing against). He says:

> this company is wilfully burning 200% to 3000% of each Pro or Max customer that interacts with Claude Code

There is of course this meme that "Anthropic would be profitable today if they stopped training new models and only focused on inference", but people on HN are smart enough to understand that this is not realistic due to model drift, and also due to comeptition from other models. So training is forever a part of the cost of doing business, until we have some fundamental changes in the underlying technology.

I can only interpret Ed Zitron as saying "the cost of doing busienss is 200% to 3000% of the price users are paying for their subscriptions", which sounds extremely plausible to me.
by lifis | 2026-03-10 09:27:14+00:00
Not sure how they can expect to make a viable full OS without massive use of LLMs, so this makes no sense.

What makes sense if that of course any LLM-generated code must be reviewed by a good programmer and must be correct and well written, and the AI usage must be precisely disclosed.

What they should ban is people posting AI-generated code without mentioning it or replying "I don't know, the AI did it like that" to questions.
by scheeseman486 | 2026-03-10 09:27:20+00:00
You might be thinking of fair use, but that's an affirmative defence. Every time someone has copied someone elses artwork and modified it into a meme, that's copyright infringement and remains so even if is eventually ruled as fair use. If you make a fair use claim, you don't deny infringement, you make the claim that you were allowed to infringe.
by baq | 2026-03-10 09:27:52+00:00
While I appreciate the morality and ethics of this choice, the current trend means projects going in this direction are making themselves irrelevant (don't bother quipping at how relevant redox is today, thanks). E.g. top security researches are now using LLMs to find new RCEs and local privilege escalations; no reason why the models couldn't fix these, too - and it's only the security surface.

IOW I think this stance is ethically good, but technically irresponsible.
by widdershins | 2026-03-10 09:28:01+00:00
> I imagine an LLM would be very good at writing Elisp to leverage EMacs’ strong core functionality

Yes, they are pretty good. I have set up GPTel (an excellent Emacs package for interacting with LLMs) with some tools allowing it to run Elisp, inspect files (Elisp functions know what file they were defined in, so it's easy to find stuff) and read Emacs documentation. LLMs use this to good effect, and iterate on my config very nicely.
by alex1sa | 2026-03-10 09:28:29+00:00
The "clean room" concept gets really blurry with LLMs in practice. I build a SaaS product that uses AI to process unstructured voice input and map it to
structured form fields. During development, we looked at how other tools solve similar problems — not their source code, but their public behavior and APIs.

Now imagine an LLM trained on every GitHub repo doing the same thing at scale. The model has "seen" the source, but the output is statistically generated, not
copied. Is that a clean room? The model never "read" the code the way a human would, but it clearly learned patterns from it.

I think the practical answer is that clean room as a legal concept was designed for a world where reimplementation was expensive and intentional. When an LLM
can do it in minutes from a spec, we need a different framework entirely.
by Strilanc | 2026-03-10 09:28:40+00:00
What do you mean? The original 2019 supremacy experiment was eventually simulated, as better classical methods were found, but the followups are still holding strong (for example [4] and [5]).
There was recently a series of blog posts by Dominik Hangleiter summarizing the situation: [1][2][3].

[1]: https://quantumfrontiers.com/2026/01/06/has-quantum-advantag...

[2]: https://quantumfrontiers.com/2026/01/25/has-quantum-advantag...

[3]: https://quantumfrontiers.com/2026/02/28/what-is-next-in-quan...

[4]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.04792

[5]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02501
by sshine | 2026-03-10 09:29:02+00:00
The ~foo as backup convention is not part of any standard.

Using hidden files is a stronger convention, e.g. .foo.swp or .foo~.

But nginx's sites-enabled also doesn't filter those.

It's a very simple mechanism that assumes what you put in that directory is a website configuration.

Adding backup files here and there is considered spam, no matter how old it is.

It's the second thing I fix in either Vim or Emacs: Put backup files in a central location. (The first is proper indentation/spacing rules.)
by jharsman | 2026-03-10 09:29:43+00:00
Emacs solo actually contains functionality for just that, the below snippet which allows exporting xref buffers to grep format by pressing 'E'. You can then use wgrep etc.

;; Makes any xref buffer "exportable" to a grep buffer with "E" so you can edit it with "e".
(defun emacs-solo/xref-to-grep-compilation ()
"Export the current Xref results to a grep-like buffer (Emacs 30+)."
(interactive)
(unless (derived-mode-p 'xref--xref-buffer-mode)
(user-error "Not in an Xref buffer"))

(let* ((items (and (boundp 'xref--fetcher)
(funcall xref--fetcher)))
(buf-name "*xref→grep*")
(grep-buf (get-buffer-create buf-name)))
(unless items
(user-error "No xref items found"))

(with-current-buffer grep-buf
(let ((inhibit-read-only t))
(erase-buffer)
(insert (format "-*- mode: grep; default-directory: %S -*-\n\n"
default-directory))
(dolist (item items)
(let* ((loc (xref-item-location item))
(file (xref-file-location-file loc))
(line (xref-file-location-line loc))
(summary (xref-item-summary item)))
(insert (format "%s:%d:%s\n" file line summary)))))
(grep-mode))
(pop-to-buffer grep-buf)))
(with-eval-after-load 'xref
(define-key xref--xref-buffer-mode-map (kbd "E")
#'emacs-solo/xref-to-grep-compilation))
by antonvs | 2026-03-10 09:29:57+00:00
> People get taken by the theoretical coolness and ultimate utility of the idea, and assume it's just a matter of clever ideas and engineering to make it a reality. At some point, it becomes mandatory to work on it because the win would be so big it would make them famous and win all sorts of prizes and adulation.

Good description. Commercial fusion power seems to be in the same category currently.

The next step once you have enough thinkers working on the problem is to start pretending that commercial success is merely a few years away, with 5 or 10 years being the ideal number.
by jasim | 2026-03-10 09:30:41+00:00
Everytime someone mentions Clipper (or dBase or FoxPro, or even FoxBase, but Clipper the most), I feel a sene of productive nostalgia, and a constructive anger at the state of technology today. xBase was a beautiful thing - I haven't had as much fun at building software that I've had from the first plink86 till CA-Clipper 5.3's blinker and exospace. Even prolific use of Opus 4.6 doesn't bring the sense of quality and satisfaction that those systems produced.

I'm building a new database tool for the web, a frankenstein of Lotus 1-2-3, dBase, MS-Access, and Claude Code. It is where that anger goes these days.
by krick | 2026-03-10 09:31:10+00:00
Huh, that's an interesting point. Not sure I agree though. I always was irritated by the complaint that leap seconds are complicated and must be eliminated, and I am convinced that eliminating them in UTC is the most idiotic decision ever made, and I sincerely hate the idiots who made it, but, indeed, the idea that UTC time is just a time-zone representation of linear TAI time on Earth does make a lot of sense. On the other hand, we still can convert between UTC and TAI, so treating TAI as primary only makes sense if it clearly would make things simpler. And it's very unclear if it would. It really seems like the "correct" abstraction, but the problem is that currently my main hack for avoiding time complexity is always using datetimes in UTC+0 internally, thus ignoring time zones until I need to display something for user. This way I know that 14:00 today + one month is still 14:00 in my "internal" time format, even if in the user TZ one is DST and the other one is not. And a hundred of other ugly things I am willing to ignore in practice. And in 99.999% of cases I don't even care how many days are in that month, let alone seconds.

Now, if I cannot really add a month anymore (and I cannot in TAI, because months don't even really exist in TAI, since TAI isn't a solar year) in my internal time format, all that convenience goes away. I now must always worry about leap seconds and timezones and all the stuff I don't really need to think about in the vast majority of cases.

…Yeah, well, I'm really not sure. I am not convinced, and am honestly kinda relieved by the fact I won't have to find out. But it's an interesting point nevertheless. And, no, UTC w/o leap seconds is not the same thing. In fact, UTC w/o leap seconds is kinda the polar opposite: it's clearly the wrong abstraction, because it ignores the (not even so hard) problem somebody doesn't want to deal with, which doesn't really go away, but is very practical.
by throwaway2037 | 2026-03-10 09:31:30+00:00
Another thing that I have raised multiple times on HN: I had a roommate a few years ago that was a non-native English speaker doing research as a post-doc. He would use ChatGPT to improve his writing in scientific papers. He was producing the first draft, then would discuss with ChatGPT about how to improve the grammar. At the time, I thought it was genius. He said it acted like an English tutor for him. When you see the reactionary anti-LLM comments on HN, never once do they mention LLM-assisted -- only all human or all LLM.
by rstuart4133 | 2026-03-10 09:32:31+00:00
I came here to say a similar thing.

There would be no GPL if anybody could have cheaply and trivially reproduced the software for printers and Lisp machines Stallman was denied access to. There is no reason to force someone to give you the source code if takes no effort to reproduce.

Mind you, that isn't what happened here. The effort involved in getting a LLM to write software comes from three things: writing a clear unambiguous spec that also gives you a clean exported API, more clean unambiguous specs for the APIs you use, and a test suite the LLM can use to verify it has implemented the exported API correctly. Dan got them all for free, from the previous implementation which I'm sure included good documentation. That means his contribution to this new code consisted of little more than pressing the button.

Sadly, if you wrote some GPL software with excellent documentation, a thorough test suite, clean API, and implemented using well understood library the cost of creating a cleanroom reproduction has indeed gone to near zero over the past 24 months. The GPL licence is irrelevant.

Welcome to the brave new world.

PS: Sqlite keeping their test suite proprietary is looking like a prescient masterstroke.

PPS: The recent ruling that an API isn't copyrightable just took on a whole new dimension.
by nachocoll | 2026-03-10 09:33:16+00:00
The bottleneck isn't ideas or the AI tools — it's judgment. Knowing which problem is worth solving, for whom, and whether what you've built actually solves it. That judgment can't be generated; it has to be earned.

Vibe coding lowered the barrier to shipping code, but it didn't lower the barrier to shipping value. The result is a lot of technically impressive things that nobody needed. The first comment here (lots of tiny personal tools that never get released) is actually the realistic picture: most of what gets built with AI tools is either too narrow to scale or not quite right for anyone but the builder.

The missing discipline is customer value validation — which is why it's the first principle of the Agile Vibe Coding Manifesto (https://agilevibecoding.org): "Acceleration in development must translate into validated customer value. Speed without value is waste." That sounds obvious but it gets skipped constantly when AI makes spinning up new projects so effortless.

The real unlock will be when people pair AI-generation speed with the harder work of understanding user problems before building.
by adrian_b | 2026-03-10 09:33:16+00:00
Unfortunately, the Gregorian calendar has not restored the time of Julius Caesar, but the time of the First Council of Nicaea (325 AD), when the rule about how to compute the date of the Easter was established.

For the time of Julius Caesar, about 3 more days would have been needed, which would have made the Christmas coincident with the Winter Solstice, and which would have made much more sense.
by epolanski | 2026-03-10 09:33:38+00:00
Not only that, but since the release of 5.4 and 5.3 codex I've been running them in parallel and I've been let down by Opus 4.6 with maximum thinking way more than I've been let down with OpenAI models.

In fact I'm more and more inclined to run my own benchmarks from now on, because I seriously distrust those I see online.

Even if the benchmarks are indeed valid, they just don't reflect my use cases, usages and ability to navigate my projects and my dependencies.
by godelski | 2026-03-10 09:33:50+00:00
> I think you're conflating "knowledge" with "intelligence"

A calculator is not doing calculations through knowledge. It actually performs computation. It is not doing a database lookup.

> And, "agency" seems to be a missing concept,

>> I think we really need to be explicit about the assumptions being made

Agency was never mentioned. Thanks for being more explicit ;)
by lifis | 2026-03-10 09:33:51+00:00
Because it takes a massive amount of developer work (perhaps more than anything else), and it's very unlikely they either have the ability to attract enough human developers to be able to do it without LLM assistance.

Not to mention that even finding good developers willing to develop without AI (a significant handicap, even more so for coding things like an OS that are well represented in LLM training) seems difficult nowadays, especially if they aren't paying them.
by anonnon | 2026-03-10 09:34:09+00:00
> The LLM ban is unenforceable

Just require that the CLA/Certificate of Origin statement be printed out, signed, and mailed with an envelope and stamp, where besides attesting that they appropriately license their contributions ((A)GPL, BSD, MIT, or whatever) and have the authority to do so, that they also attest that they haven't used any LLMs for their contributions. This will strongly deter direct LLM usage. Indirect usage, where people whip up LLM-generated PoCs that they then rewrite, will still probably go on, and go on without detection, but that's less objectionable morally (and legally) than trying to directly commit LLM code.

As an aside, I've noticed a huge drop off in license literacy amongst developers, as well as respect for the license choices of other developers/projects. I can't tell if LLMs caused this, but there's a noticeable difference from the way things were 10 years ago.
by usrbinbash | 2026-03-10 09:34:13+00:00
> Not sure how they can expect to make a viable full OS without massive use of LLMs, so this makes no sense.

Every single production OS, including the one you use right now, was made before LLMs even existed.

> What makes sense if that of course any LLM-generated code must be reviewed by a good programmer

The time of good programmers, especially ones working for free in their spare time on OSS projects, is a limited resource.

The ability to generate slop using LLMs, is effectively unlimited.

This discrepancy can only be resolved in one way: https://itsfoss.com/news/curl-ai-slop/
by pydry | 2026-03-10 09:34:22+00:00
>Decommissioning costs" are essentially bad math.

This is disingenuous. Bad math is focusing on the one part of nuclear power which is relatively cheap (fuel) and ignoring the rest where the majority of the cost is, which is what you did.

I wasnt comparing nuclear power to gas anyway I was comparing it to solar and wind which produce no CO2. FIVE times cheaper LCOE.

Nuclear power needs anyway to be paired with dispatchable energy source like batteries or gas just as solar and wind do.

It isnt a competitor with gas or batteries it is a complement to gas and batteries, just like solar and wind.
by bonesss | 2026-03-10 09:35:33+00:00
In hindsight, 90s through 2000s, I think we were coming up in an era of consistent UX refinement and improvement that we took for granted, and that improvement got nailed by mobile transitions (first to phone then to pad and now to AR). MS missed the web, then missed the phone. Apple surpassed them on the desktop but they also made the golden goose (iPhone), pulling focus and consistency away.

I assume it’ll rectify in the vast future, but it’s weird to see regressions in core areas because the new hotness has made it so that these gigantic-corps can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.
by internet_points | 2026-03-10 09:35:39+00:00
The Lem editor[0] and LispWorks IDE's[1] are implemented in Common Lisp.

Still, the reason for choosing a language for whatever are always more social and path-dependent than technical (reason 1: initial developer of whatever really likes the language, reason 2: language is seen as hip within some crowd, reason 3 (later in the game): management feels language is safe). Technical reasons for choosing a language typically tend to be post-hoc rationalizations. (I mean, no sane person would choose Javascript for an editor based on technical reasons alone, yet here we are.)

[0] https://lem-project.github.io/
[1] https://www.lispworks.com/products/lispworks.html
by ptak_dev | 2026-03-10 09:35:53+00:00
This is a great point and something we've been dealing with firsthand. The biggest shift is that AI agents need structured, predictable output — not pretty human-formatted tables. We found that adding a simple --json flag and making error messages machine-parseable made our tools 10x more useful to agents. The other thing worth considering is idempotency — when an agent retries a command because it wasn't sure if it succeeded, you want the second run to be safe. That changed how we think about every CLI we build now.
by imtringued | 2026-03-10 09:36:55+00:00
The Mütterrente is a good idea, because it rewards having children which end up paying the pensions. This leads to sustainable population replacement. If anything, this should be expanded to fathers as well (I don't mind mothers receiving more).

What's not such a great idea is paying the Mütterrente retroactively. Pensioners can't have children retroactively to stock up the tax base, so all this does is increase the tax burden for the current generation, which discourages them even more from having children.
by godelski | 2026-03-10 09:37:01+00:00
> To me, a general intelligence is one that is not just specific

Which is why a calculator is a great example.

> A calculator is a very specific, very inflexible, type of intelligence, so it's not, by definition, general

Depends what kind of calculator and what you mean. I think they are far more flexible than you give them credit for.

> I'm in hardware engineering, so maybe I have a different perspective, but goals based on outcome are the only ones that actually matter, especially if nobody has done it before.

Well if we're going to talk about theoretical things, why dismiss the people who do theory? There's a lot of misunderstandings when it comes to the people that create the foundations everyone is standing on.
by scheeseman486 | 2026-03-10 09:37:21+00:00
They actually wouldn't, since they'd be sampling the new arrangement. They could reconstruct a new, similar sounding arrangement based on the original samples, but it'd be have to be different enough to that new arrangement so as not to be considered derivative of it.

That also applies to generative AI, pure output may not be copyrightable but as soon as you do something beyond type some words and press a button, like doing area-specific infills and paintovers, which involve direct and deliberate choices by a human, the copyrighted human-driven arrangement becomes so deeply intertwined with the generative work that it's effectively inseperable.
by AlexeyBelov | 2026-03-10 09:37:49+00:00
Cool, but late. There are tens of similar accounts active right now, and they are only banned after repeatedly and continously stepping over the line. Most of those accounts don't participate in good faith from day 1, but it takes 60-90 days for them to get banned. I don't know what to do about it, but it's a problem on HN for quite some time.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-03-10 09:37:52+00:00
> to the point that to get the equinoxes/solstices back to where they 'should' be 10 days had to be removed with the Gregorian calendar

Note that the equinoxes and solstices are officially supposed to be on the 25th. By the time of Julius Caesar, that had diverged, but the divergence in reality made no impact on the date of the official solstice. The Gregorian calendar could easily have put the solstices back on the 25th, but chose not to.
by usrbinbash | 2026-03-10 09:38:42+00:00
> Because it takes a massive amount of developer work

You know what else takes "a massive amount of developer work"?

"any LLM-generated code must be reviewed by a good programmer"

And this is the crux of the matter with using LLMs to generate code for everything but really simple greenfield projects: They don't really speed things up, because everything they produce HAS TO be verified by someone, and that someone HAS TO have the necessary skill to write such code themselves.

LLMs save time on the typing part of programming. Incidentially that part is the least time consuming.
by repelsteeltje | 2026-03-10 09:38:48+00:00
I think the bigger point about enforcement is not whether you're able to detect "content submitted that is clearly labelled as LLM-generated", but that banning presumes you can identify the origin. Ie.: any individual contributor must be known to have (at most) one identity.

Once identity is guaranteed, privileges basically come down to reputation — which in this case is a binary "you're okay until we detect content that is clearly labelled as LLM-generated".

[Added]

Note that identity (especially avoiding duplicate identity) is not easily solved.
Show HN: SoloDB 1.1 – embedded .NET document DB with real referential integrity
by falsename | 2026-03-10 09:38:49+00:00
I released SoloDB 1.1, an embedded .NET document database that adds true engine-level references, enforced delete behavior, cross-collection LINQ queries, and nested rollback with SQLite savepoints. It is aimed at people who like document databases until relations start leaking into service code.
by ptnpzwqd | 2026-03-10 09:39:17+00:00
The problem is the increasing review burden - with LLMs it is possible to create superficially valid looking (but potentially incorrect) code without much effort, which will still take a lot of effort to review. So outright rejecting code that can identified as LLM-generated at a glance, is a rough filter to remove the lowest effort PRs.

Over time this might not be enough, though, so I suspect we will see default deny policies popping up soon enough.
by tentacleuno | 2026-03-10 09:40:22+00:00
> As an aside, I've noticed a huge drop off in license literacy amongst developers

What do you mean by this? I always assumed this was the case anyway; MIT is, if I'm not mistaken, one of the mostly used licenses. I typically had a "fuck it" attitude when it came to the license, and I assume quite a lot of other people shared that sentiment. The code is the fun bit.