MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by heavyset_go | 2026-03-07 04:24:09+00:00
> Even as late as the mid-aughts the internet was mostly nerdy technical information, real people sincerely discussing various topics, and the very worst thing was a little bit of (mostly still-image) porn if you were looking for it.

This is the naive take. In the early to late 2000's, you could buy drugs on the clearnet. You could discuss taking those drugs on forums and sites like Erowid.

This was the age of shock sites, gore, extreme porn, 4chan, etc.

At one point a pornstar actress crushing kittens to death was a meme. 2 girls 1 cup was a meme. Tubgirl was a meme. Goatse was a meme. Ogrish, LiveLeak, etc were all open access. I once watched someone get burned to death for being a witch*.

These are all things that were one click away, your friends would send them to you for the lulz.

* I am actually glad I saw that. It showed me that those types of things were not in the distant past, civilized people can still be driven by moral panics to do horrific things. Discriminatory ideology still exists, and gone unchecked, leads to wanton violence and reprehensible things, some things that I've experienced myself, but not to that extent. It served as a potent reminder of human nature, and I've watched its template play out over and over again. The delight I saw in the faces of those who perpetrated it is the same delight you see in the faces of those engaging in today's secular witch hunts, moral panics, hate crimes, etc.
by Covenant0028 | 2026-03-07 04:26:19+00:00
Adding new features doesn't necessarily grow the market. Your bread with nuts and berries competes with the regular bread for the customer's money. Other things also compete for the same money, such as medical, daycare, schooling etc. So increasing features won't necessarily grow the market because the market. Even in an optimistic scenario, those features only have a probability of increasing revenue, it's not certain.

OTOH, if you fire those workers, it is a certainty that your bakery gets more cash. You can then use that cash to reward your shareholders (a category that conveniently includes you) via buybacks or dividends.
by m4x | 2026-03-07 04:27:49+00:00
This is rather disingenuous. It can be hard to overcome momentum in research, but most researchers would be giddy with excitement if they could show our (extremely disturbing) forecasts regarding climate change are wrong and that things are much rosier than expected.

I also suspect you would find easy funding from existing climate change deniers. There is no shortage of well-heeled folk in that space.

Do you have a chip on your shoulder regarding research? You're begging the question by stating it is conducted in a "practically religious" way. Ask whether that's true before you question the effect it would have on somebody's behaviour.
by zahlman | 2026-03-07 04:27:59+00:00
> The bitter irony the author lands on: the only way to seem human is to pass your writing through an LLM.

(FWIW, some people consider this style of colon use an LLM-ism.)

I appreciate where you're coming from, though. As bland as LLM output can be, it seems to read more human to people because it's more average. (Although I can't really fathom seeing the neurodivergent as not human; neurodiversity is about the most human trait I can imagine. cf. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/11/05/think-alike/ .)

Long before the rise of ChatGPT, it seems a lot of people were immersed in a culture where "improving" your writing with tools like Grammarly was considered more or less mandatory. And it seems like people read less nowadays, certainly when it comes to attempts at good writing for writing's sake. Overall I fear the art of natural language communication is in decline.
by D-Machine | 2026-03-07 04:28:28+00:00
This article is great. And the blog-article headline is interesting, but wrong. LLM's don't in general write plausible code (as a rule) either.

They just write code that is (semantically) similar to code (clusters) seen in its training data, and which haven't been fenced off by RLHF / RLVR.

This isn't that hard to remember, and is a correct enough simplification of what generative LLMs actually do, without resorting to simplistic or incorrect metaphors.
by 00N8 | 2026-03-07 04:28:33+00:00
I didn't propose any of those things you mentioned & am strongly opposed to them. If I were proposing anything, it would be more along the lines of ending theocracies, increasing equality, access to education, birth control & abortion services, & creating a social safety net so people don't have to rely on having as many kids as possible to assist in subsistence farming. But like I said, none of this is a popular goal - especially not among billionaires or the global south - so my comment was more of an idle musing than anything resembling a proposal.
by lhl | 2026-03-07 04:31:04+00:00
Yes, I read it and specifically pointed it out (that's why there are 3 hours of interactive logs). There are 4 other runs pushed now so you can see what actual clean room runs for 5.2 xhigh, 5.3-Codex xhigh, 5.4 xhigh, and Opus 4.6 ultrathink look like: https://github.com/lhl/claudecycles-revisited/blob/main/COMP... as well as the baseline.
by grigri907 | 2026-03-07 04:32:32+00:00
The promise/potential of ever-refining skills and agents drives this compulsion for me. "NEXT time it will be even better. And NOW it's set up to avoid the pitfalls I faced last time." You can feel the exponential engine-building.

I'm not a SWE. I'm a mechanical engineer who spends his life in excel. So when I first made my own node editor app and then asked Claude to read that for my workflow in my second project.... I felt like God herself.
by creamyhorror | 2026-03-07 04:34:54+00:00
It sounds doable. An AI can be made to keep modifying a game's codebase. I imagine it'd be easiest to separate out a scripting layer for game mechanics & behavior that AI can iterate quickly on, although of course it could more riskily modify the engine itself.

Then you could open voting up to a community for a weekly mechanics-change vote (similar to that recent repo where public voting decided what the AI would do next), and AI will implement it with whatever changes it sees fit.

Honestly, without some dedicated human guidance and taste, it would probably be more of a novelty that eventually lost its shine.
by maldev | 2026-03-07 04:35:23+00:00
Seeing a lot of the same. Never studied leetcode and didn't work at leetcode companies. I could do them, I passed AWS and Microsoft cloud at L5 levels with no prep, but never was my strong suit. But I ship, and I can play politics very well. Especially in crusty organizations. Lots of callbacks, very hot market.

My friends who are "book smart" and leetcode geniuses are struggling. They're my friends, but they come off a bit "off" at first glance, the stereotypical nerd vibe. They're all really struggling since they can't sell themselves properly and lack the interpersonal skills.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-03-07 04:36:12+00:00
I've always dabbled in electronics, as a hobbyist. I've never had any formal courseware or training in it.

But I have been haranguing Claude/Gemini to help me on an analog computer project for some months now that has sent me on a deep dive into op-amps and other electronics esoterica that I had previously only dabbled a bit in.

Along the way I've learned about relaxation oscillators, using PWM to multiply two voltages, integrating, voltage-following…

I could lean on electronics.stackexchange (where my Google searches often lead) but 1) I first have to know what I am even searching for and 2) even the EEs disagree on how to solve a problem (as you might expect) so I am still with no clear answer. Might as well trust a sometimes hallucinating LLM?

I guess I like the first point above the best—when the LLM just out of the blue (seemingly) suggests a PWM multiplier when I was thinking log/anti-log was the only way to multiply voltages. So I get to learn a new topology.

Or I'm focused on user-adjustable pots for setting machine voltages and the LLM suggests a chip with its own internal 2.45V reference that you can use to get specific voltages without burdening the user to dial it in, own a multimeter. So I get to learn about a chip I was unfamiliar with.

It just goes on an on.

(And, Mr. Eater, I only let the magic smoke out once so far, ha ha.)
by Implicated | 2026-03-07 04:36:52+00:00
You're holding it wrong.

Set the boundaries and guidelines before it starts working. Don't leave it space to do things you don't understand.

ie: enforce conventions, set specific and measurable/verifiable goals, define skeletons of the resulting solutions if you want/can.

To give an example. I do a lot of image similarity stuff and I wanted to test the Redis VectorSet stuff when it was still in beta and the PHP extension for redis (the fastest one, which is written in C and is a proper language extension not a runtime lib) didn't support the new commands. I cloned the repo, fired up claude code and pointed it to a local copy of the Redis VectorSet documentation I put in the directory root telling it I wanted it to update the extension to provide support for the new commands I would want/need to handle VectorSets. This was, idk, maybe a year ago. So not even Opus. It nailed it. But I chickened out about pushing that into a production environment, so I then told it to just write me a PHP run time client that mirrors the functionality of Predis (pure-php implementation of redis client) but does so via shell commands executed by php (lmao, I know).

Define the boundaries, give it guard rails, use design patterns and examples (where possible) that can be used as reference.
by atonse | 2026-03-07 04:38:51+00:00
I agree with you about using our brains. I honestly have no idea.

But I can tell you that, just like with most things in life, this is yet another area where we are increasingly getting to do just the things we WANT to do (like think about code or features and have it appear, pixel pushing, smoothing out the actual UX, porting to faster languages) and not have to do things most people don't want to do, like drudgery (writing tests, formatting code, refactoring manually, updating documentation, manually moving tickets around like a caveman). Or to use a non tech example, having to spend hours fixing word document formatting.

So we're getting more spoiled. For example, kids have never waited for a table at a restaurant for more than 20 mins (which most people used to do all the time before abundant food delivery or reservation systems). Not that we ever enjoyed it, but learning to be bored, learning to not just get instant gratification is something that's happening all over in life.

Now it's happening even with work. So I honestly don't know how it'll affect society.
Show HN: CC Pocket – Control Claude Code/Codex from Your Phone
by k9i | 2026-03-07 04:40:19+00:00
CC Pocket is a mobile app (iOS/Android) for remotely controlling Claude Code and Codex CLI sessions on your Mac.

Architecture: a bridge server on the Mac (`npx @ccpocket/bridge@latest`) wraps the Claude Code SDK and Codex CLI via stdio, exposing a WebSocket API. The phone connects over Tailscale or local Wi-Fi.

The main use case is approving tool calls without being at the keyboard. Approvals are surfaced directly on the session list so you can handle multiple agents quickly. You can also start new sessions (with git worktree creation), write prompts with file mention and slash command completion, and review diffs including image comparisons.

Flutter (Dart) on the client, TypeScript on the bridge. MIT licensed.
by vlovich123 | 2026-03-07 04:42:50+00:00
That’s a weird tldr and not my takeaway. More like “scientists convinced their new ultra destructive weapon is sure to bring about peace this time around”. Spoiler: it does not. Arguably maybe nuclear weapons but even then I’d say the use of nuclear weapons in armed conflict hasn’t really been tested yet and people are generally hesitant to do so, preferring instead illegal chemical and biological warfare.
by atonse | 2026-03-07 04:44:31+00:00
I don't have an answer for this, and won't pretend to.

But my take on this is that accountability will still be a purely human factor. It still is. I recently let go of a contractor who was hired to run our projects as a Scrum/PM, and his tickets were so bad (there were tickets with 3 words in them, one ticket was in the current sprint, that was blocked by a ticket deep in the backlog, basic stuff). When I confronted him about them, he said the AI generated them.

So I told him that:

1. That's not an excuse, his job is to verify what it generated and ensure it's still good.

2. That actually makes it look WORSE, that not only did he do nearly 0 work, that he didn't even check the most basic outputs. And I'm not anti-AI, I expressly said that we should absolutely use AI tools to accelerate our work. But that's not what happened here.

So you won't get to say (at least I think for another few years) "my AI was at fault" – you are ultimately responsible, not your tools. So people will still want to delegate those things down the chain. But ultimately they'll have to delegate to fewer people.
by 64738 | 2026-03-07 04:44:53+00:00
Just for reference, Codex using GPT-5.4 and that exact prompt was a 4-shot that took ten minutes. The first result was a horrific caricature. After a slight rebuke ("That looks terrible. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleur-de-lis for a better understanding of what it should look like."), it produced a very good result but it then took two more prompts about the right side of the image being clipped off before it got it right.
by virgildotcodes | 2026-03-07 04:45:30+00:00
You must understand the net content and impact of your messaging, which is far from "Hey I'm just pointing out that humanity is fallible, apropos of nothing."

It's not -

"hey, we can argue about the best way to address climate change and the details of how it's going to play out"

it's -

"this entire field is biased" (you said "it's absolutely the case that entire fields can be biased"), the "independent verification of empirical data is actually untrustworthy and primarily motivated by personal dislike", "they make their scientific conclusions with cursory examinations", and "they're as reliable as the social sciences".

I'm sorry, but it beggars belief that you are not aware of what you're doing.

It's not the communication style of an engineer just trying to be technically correct, it's filled with subtle and not-so-subtle accusations and implications all driving in a single direction which is the discreditation of the entire scientific field.
by jv22222 | 2026-03-07 04:46:04+00:00
> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.

It may look the same, but it isn't the same.

In fact if you took the time to truly learn how to do pure agentic coding (not vibe coding) you would realize as a principal engineer you have an advantage over engineers with less experience.

The more war stories, the more generalist experience, the more you can help shape the llm to make really good code and while retaining control of every line.

This is an unprecedented opportunity for experienced devs to use their hard won experience to level themselves up to the equivalence of a full team of google devs.
by scuff3d | 2026-03-07 04:47:50+00:00
I tried to use Codex to write a simple TCP to QUIC proxy. I intentionally kept the request fairly simple, take one TCP connection and map it to a QUIC connection. Gave a detailed spec, went through plan mode, clarified all the misunderstandings, let it write it in Python, had it research the API, had it write a detailed step by step roadmap... The result was a fucking mess.

Beyond the fact that it was "correct" in the same way the author of the article talked about, there was absolutely bizarre shit in there. As an example, multiple times it tried to import modules that didn't exist. It noticed this when tests failed, and instead of figuring out the import problem it add a fucking try/except around the import and did some goofy Python shenanigans to make it "work".
by vlovich123 | 2026-03-07 04:48:45+00:00
You’re comparing a 4 year bloodbath to 10 minutes and being underimpressed? Also those weapons are several orders of magnitude less powerful than what they’re capable of today…

Battle of Carthage was also 3 years and was a siege of a city, so you know… not a lot of places for the people inside to escape. Also took about 20-50k expertly trained Roman soldiers vs a few trained guys in a plane pressing a button.

And sibling comment is right. The application of industrialization to the death process in WW2 and similar application of the idea (eg Pol Pot and Stalin) also led to death on an unprecedented scale.
by humbleharbinger | 2026-03-07 04:49:54+00:00
One can imagine a manager given an outcome to achieve or a director and then a team of agents carrying out the task. Perhaps the agents are adversarial to some extent so they get reasonable pushback on their decisions (ex one agent always sides on taking a long term approach, another agent wants to be scrappy, another agent is on a PIP and approves everything etc).
by renewiltord | 2026-03-07 04:50:38+00:00
I frequently tell people this. We can solve so many illnesses cheaply. Instead we should charge a lot of money and spend that money on things like haemophilia that affect a few people. Imagine a world where the flu vaccine and COVID-19 vaccine cost $1000 each shot. We could mandate it and then the enormous profits we make we could dedicate to things like this family's illness. All we need is for the government to take control and jack up the prices and then to make it illegal to not get the flu shot.
Should AI web agents skip sponsored/ad results by default?
by ilyasJosef | 2026-03-07 04:51:18+00:00
AI agents are increasingly performing automated web research — browsing pages, following links, and sometimes clicking results as part of information gathering.

There's a small but potentially significant side effect: these systems can end up clicking paid advertisements.

Most online advertising runs on a pay-per-click (PPC) model. When a human clicks an ad, there's at least some level of commercial intent. When an AI agent clicks an ad during automated research, there's zero purchase intent — but the advertiser may still be charged.

At the individual level this is negligible. But AI agents are beginning to operate at scale — millions of automated queries. The cumulative effect on advertisers, particularly small businesses with tight budgets, could become meaningful.

This raises a few questions:

1. Should AI agents avoid clicking sponsored/promoted results by default?
2. Should browsers and agent frameworks detect labels like "Sponsored," "Promoted," or "Ad" and skip those results unless explicitly opted in?

Secondary effects worth considering: unintended ad spend for advertisers, distortion of click-through analytics, and reduced research quality (ad placement reflects budget more than relevance).

The web's ad-funded model depends on clicks having some commercial signal. If AI agents start generating ad clicks at scale with no purchase intent, it could quietly distort that ecosystem.

Curious how engineers and AI developers here think about this — both from an agent design standpoint and from the web economics angle.
by herdymerzbow | 2026-03-07 04:51:23+00:00
As a self teaching beginner* this is where I find AI a bit limiting. When I ask ChatGPT questions about code it is always about to offer up a solution, but it often provides inappropriate responses that don't take into account the full context of a project/task. While it understands what good structure and architecture are, it's missing the awareness of good design and architecture and applying to the questions I have, and I don't have have the experience or skill set to ask those questions. It often suggests solutions (I tend to ask it for suggestions rather than full code, so I can work it out myself) that may have drawbacks that I only discover down the line.

Any suggestions to overcome this deficit in design experience? My best guess is to read some texts on code design or alternatively get a job at a place to learn design in practice. Mainly learning javascript and web app development at the moment.

*Who has had a career in a previous field, and doesn't necessarily think that learning programming with lead to another career (and is okay with that).
by SilentM68 | 2026-03-07 04:52:41+00:00
Love the article. In my teens, I loved the RadioShack COCO in the 80s & its Assembly Language EditASM+. A manual to the 6809 assembly language can be found here: https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Manuals/Prog.... That was my first intro to assembly.

In High School, I used the TRS80s for programming in BASIC as well as for electronics stuff. We had access to Apple IIs but used them mostly for VisiCalc, spreadsheet and word processing. Having a RadioShack next to the high school, probably influenced my choice to keep using those brands of machines as opposed to Atari/Commodore. In my original move to Florida, before I returned, the COCO was shipped via land transport, when it arrived, I was informed that the shipment was damaged including the COCO. Life is not kind :(
by tombert | 2026-03-07 04:54:39+00:00
I have had the opposite experience.

When it was just asking ChatGPT questions it was fine, I was having fun, I was able to unblock myself when I got non-trivial errors much quicker, and I still felt like I was learning stuff.

With Codex or Claude Code, it feels like I'm stuck LARPing as a middle manager instead of actually solving problems. Sometimes I literally just copy stuff from my assigned ticket into Claude and tell it to do that, I awkwardly wait for a bit, test it out to see if it's good enough, and make my pull request. It's honestly kind of demoralizing.

I suppose this is just the cost of progress; I'm sure there were people that loved raising and breeding horses but that's not an excuse to stop building cars.

I loved being able to figure out interesting solutions to software problems and hacking on them until something worked, and my willingness to do the math beforehand would occasionally give me an edge. Instead, now all I do is sit and wait while I'm cuckolded out of my work, and questioning why I bothered finishing my masters degree if the expectation now is to ship slop code lazily written by AI in a few minutes.

It was a good ride while it lasted; I got almost fifteen years of being paid to do my favorite thing. I should count my blessings that it lasted that long, though I'm a little jealous of people born fifteen years earlier who would be retiring now with their Silicon Valley shares. Instead, I get to sit here contemplating whether or not I can even salvage my career for the next five years (or if I need to make a radical pivot).
by awakeasleep | 2026-03-07 04:55:37+00:00
> Expressed as redaction poetry, combining the WaPo and NYT articles might go something like this:

Anthropic’s Claude
the most advanced AI.
quickly prioritizing targets.
issuing precise location coordinates
supporting massive military operations
killed at least 175 people, many of them students attending class.

Read the article to understand the context of this excerpt
by codebolt | 2026-03-07 04:55:42+00:00
Any given system will still need people around to steer the AI and ensure the thing gets built and maintained responsibly. I'm working on a small team of in-house devs at a financial company, and not worried about my future at all. As an IC I'm providing more value than ever, and the backlog of potential projects is still basically endless- why would anyone want to fire me?