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Rewriting a production compiler's IR with AI agents in five weeks

https://github.com/CommanderTvis/writing/tree/main/rr-truffle-rewrite
1•CommanderTvis•3m ago•0 comments

A $21B 'Kids in Chips' Startup Is Scooping Up Nvidia Talent

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/a-21-billion-kids-in-chips-startup-is-scooping-up-nvidia-talent-4d099f12
1•_tk_•4m ago•0 comments

Prompt Injection in VirusTotal's Code Insights API

https://exploiting.systems/posts/2026-08-08-prompt-injection-in-virustotals-code-insights-api
1•ropbear•9m ago•0 comments

Conlang

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language
1•svenfaw•9m ago•0 comments

As Wisconsin cities flee Flock, its shared camera network loses value

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/as-wisconsin-cities-flee-flock-its-shared-camera-netw...
7•xoa•11m ago•1 comments

KDE's bookmark search ignores Brave because of one unmatched string

https://balint.blog/krunner-brave/
1•balintkorosi•11m ago•0 comments

Constantine's Bridge Has Surfaced from Beneath the Danube

https://thedebrief.org/a-mile-long-ancient-roman-engineering-marvel-has-suddenly-surfaced-from-be...
1•bookofjoe•14m ago•1 comments

Democracy vs. the machine: birth of digital age,the warnings that were ignored

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/aug/18/the-long-read-democracy-v-the-machine-digital-age-wa...
3•pseudolus•14m ago•0 comments

Searching for Answers from the Man Accused of Sabotaging Alaska's Senate Race

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/us/politics/dan-sullivan-alaska-senate-primary.html
1•dataflow•18m ago•0 comments

Wound/wait deadlock-proof mutex design

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/locking/ww-mutex-design.html
1•teleforce•18m ago•0 comments

Suicide hotlines don't seem to help

https://www.nber.org/papers/w35601
2•root-parent•23m ago•2 comments

US LLCs for founders whose country Stripe/Shopify don't support

https://open-entity.com
1•Doccc•25m ago•0 comments

Who bears the risk in Nvidia's $500B financing platform?

https://www.sascha-steffen.de/updates/nvidia-500bn-ai-financing-credit-risk
2•root-parent•26m ago•0 comments

AI Used to Verify Toughest Mathematics Proof Yet

https://spectrum.ieee.org/axiom-math-246-theorem-formalization
1•pseudolus•27m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Kitsunagu – A platform to find English-speaking professionals in Japan

https://kitsunagu.com/
2•byra•29m ago•1 comments

The most complex time in 20 years to build an enterprise software startup

https://eportnoy.substack.com/p/the-chaotic-enterprise-startup-period
1•eliportnoy•32m ago•0 comments

The hyperscalers' exploding 'purchase commitments' reach $1.5T

https://www.ft.com/content/1fbe47a6-bbf1-4de1-973b-8ce5baea591d
2•root-parent•32m ago•2 comments

Fredkin's Paradox

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin%27s_paradox
1•throw0101a•34m ago•0 comments

Handover of In-Context Learning State Across Session Boundaries

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14528
1•ninadwrites•35m ago•0 comments

We still don't know how people are using AI

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/08/18/1142226/how-people-use-ai/
4•joozio•36m ago•0 comments

Daron Acemoğlu: We Are "At the Cusp of Losing" Liberal Democracy [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvOfGzNn3-0
4•mertbio•37m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AirStats – Mac menu bar system monitor, 0.046% CPU idle, MIT

https://github.com/byrencheema/airstats
2•byrencodes•38m ago•0 comments

The Case for Deep Conversation in a World of Small Talk

https://thewalrus.ca/small-talk/
1•pseudolus•40m ago•0 comments

Data driven essay: Misogyny kills; misandry kills at scale

https://socialsommentary.substack.com/p/misogyny-kills-misandry-hurts-feelings
1•dandare•40m ago•0 comments

ARM64 BBML3 Feature Ready with Linux 7.3, Nvidia Olympus Workarounds

https://www.phoronix.com/news/ARM64-Linux-7.3
2•rbanffy•41m ago•0 comments

Show HN: ImageSage – Find the screenshot you want from 10k messy screenshots

https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9mt89hd9s6sm?hl=en-US&gl=US
1•ringlochid•47m ago•0 comments

Bootstrappable Builds: How and Why

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1088279/ada6cd53d01cdafa/
1•6581•51m ago•0 comments

Security Through Obscurity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity
2•thuva4•53m ago•0 comments

Meta faces pivotal kids' safety trial

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/18/meta-faces-pivotal-kids-safety-trial-01039903
2•0in•55m ago•0 comments

Each degree of warming could add a month of intolerable heat for 1B people

https://phys.org/news/2026-08-degree-month-intolerable-billion-people.html
5•geox•56m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

I asked Gemini for a script to move files to Cloudflare R2. It deleted them

https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1921974501257912563
6•bundie•1y ago

Comments

qwertox•1y ago
Rule #1: Always put deletions behind a flag which is disabled for the first couple of test runs.
turtleyacht•1y ago
It was truncating filenames, so /pics/1003-46.png overwrote /pics/1003-45.png because both were renamed /pics/1003-.png, or something like that.
qwertox•1y ago
Truncating file names for the target. Then it proceeded to delete the source file. "Successfully deleted local file: ..."

I mean, look at the printout. It shows that it created the remote file with the truncated filename, then deletes the local file with the correct filename.

turtleyacht•1y ago
Oh, I see. Having a flag to skip deletion during test runs is a good rule then.
rvz•1y ago
Recently there was a story about an updater causing a $8,000 bill because there was a lack of basic automated tests to catch the issue. [0]

The big lesson here is that you should actually test the code you write and also write automated tests to check any code generated by an LLM that the code is correct in what it does.

It is also useless to ask another AI to check for mistakes created by another LLM. As you can see in the post, both of them failed to catch the issue.

This why I don't take this hype around 'vibe-coding' seriously since not only it isn't software engineering, it promotes low quality and carelessness over basic testing and dismisses in checking that the software / script works as expected.

Turning $70 problems found in development into $700,000+ costs in production.

There are no more excuses in not adding tests.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43829006

victorbjorklund•1y ago
Who runs such an AI generated script without checking the code first?
qwertox•1y ago
To be fair, the code Gemini outputs in AI Studio is so extremely verbose that it is almost impossible to read through it.

It turns 10 lines of code which is perfectly fine to reason about into 100 lines of unreadable code full of comments and exception handling.

weatherlite•1y ago
Right so lets just always run the code as is ?
qwertox•1y ago
No. Not at all. I've settled to discussing my code with Gemini. That way it works very well. I explicitly say "Comment on my code and discuss it" or "Let's discuss code for a script doing this and that. Generate me an outline and let's see where this leads. Don't put comments in the code, nor exception handling, we're just discussing it".

Or you create elaborate System Instructions, since it adheres to them pretty well.

But out-of-the-box, Gemini's coding abilities are unusable due to the verbosity.

I've even gone so far to tell it that it must understand that I am just a human and have limited bandwidth in my brain, so it should write code which is easy to reason about, that this is more important than having it handle every possible exception or adding multiline comments.

rsynnott•1y ago
> To be fair, the code Gemini outputs in AI Studio is so extremely verbose that it is almost impossible to read through it.

In which case, it should simply be considered unusable. Like, the sensible response to "tool is so inadequate that there is no reasonable way to make sure its output is safe" is to _not use that tool_.

rsynnott•1y ago
In which Roko's Basilisk fires a warning shot.
jethronethro•1y ago
This is why you test code or a script before running it for real. Live and learn, I guess ...