frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

When Software Engineers Don't Look at the Software

https://nicoritschel.com/writing/when-software-engineers-dont-look-at-the-software
1•nicoritschel•58s ago•0 comments

Physiology, Resting Potential

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30855922/
1•rolph•3m ago•0 comments

Greenspun's Tenth Rule

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule
1•pinkmuffinere•5m ago•0 comments

GNU Hurd Is "Almost There" with x86_64, SMP and ~75% of Debian Packages Building

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNU-Hurd-In-2026
1•sergiogdr•5m ago•0 comments

March for Billionaires

https://marchforbillionaires.org/
1•Frondo•6m ago•0 comments

The Gods Are Restless for the Original Fantasy Lit of Lord Dunsany

https://www.printmag.com/daily-heller/the-daily-heller-the-gods-are-restless-for-the-original-fan...
1•bryanrasmussen•7m ago•0 comments

The Gnome Village: Treads fight, gnomes cooperate (2025)

https://happihacking.com/blog/posts/2025/the-gnome-village/
1•rapnie•7m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I analyzed 6 years of Hacker News data and here's what I found

https://app.hex.tech/%22https://app.hex.tech/virtual-hackathon/app/Hacker-News-Demystified-032DXk...
1•Tusharmagar•8m ago•0 comments

Forget Technical Debt

https://www.ufried.com/blog/forget_technical_debt/
1•todsacerdoti•8m ago•0 comments

The Cassandra of 'The Machine'

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-cassandra-of-the-machine
1•andsoitis•14m ago•0 comments

Is X Falling Apart? Inside the Latest Outage and What It Means

https://comuniq.xyz/post?t=778
3•01-_-•15m ago•0 comments

Towards a science of scaling agent systems: When and why agent systems work

https://research.google/blog/towards-a-science-of-scaling-agent-systems-when-and-why-agent-system...
1•gmays•15m ago•0 comments

Talos – Universal UI testing agent (works on any stack via Vision)

https://github.com/Talos-Tester-AI/Talos
1•alexst07•15m ago•1 comments

Why Tech (&) Media is complicated – Om

https://om.co/2026/02/01/why-tech-media-is-complicated/
2•MaysonL•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: DeskTab – See the browser tabs like apps on a phone home screen

1•aiibe•16m ago•0 comments

How a BlackRock Loss Reignited Worries About What Is Hiding in Private Credit

https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/how-a-blackrock-loss-reignited-worries-about-what-is-hiding...
2•zerosizedweasle•19m ago•0 comments

Forcing and Diagnosing Failure Modes of Fourier Neural Operators

https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11428
1•TimorousBestie•20m ago•1 comments

A Crisis comes to Wordle: Reusing old words

https://forkingmad.blog/wordle-crisis/
1•cyanbane•20m ago•0 comments

NCR Tower 1632 – Computer Ads from the Past

https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/ncr-tower-1632
4•rbanffy•25m ago•0 comments

Chris Bathgate: Machinist Sculptor

https://www.chrisbathgate.com/process
1•ripe•25m ago•0 comments

Packetstorm Exploits

https://packetstorm.news/tos/aHR0cHM6Ly9wYWNrZXRzdG9ybS5uZXdzL2ZpbGVzL2xhdGVzdC8xIDE3Njk5NjgxMzgg...
2•Alifatisk•26m ago•0 comments

Lessons from 200k SWE-bench runs

https://www.ai21.com/blog/scaling-agentic-evaluation-swe-bench/
2•Areibman•29m ago•0 comments

Recreating My Email Server with Claude

http://jbrot.com/blog/recreating_my_email_server_with_claude.html
1•jbrot•31m ago•0 comments

Observations from Using Claude Code

http://ternarysearch.blogspot.com/2026/01/observations-from-using-claude-code.html
1•tosh•32m ago•0 comments

Comparing the Accuracy of Various IP Geolocation Providers

https://ipapi.is/blog/ip-geolocation-accuracy.html
2•incolumitas•32m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Harmony AI – Clawdbot for the rest of us

https://getharmony.ai/
1•Vishal19111999•32m ago•0 comments

Obsidian Audio Inbox

https://alexanderweichart.de/5_Archive/4_Projects/audio-inbox/Obsidian-Audio-Inbox
2•surrTurr•33m ago•0 comments

Zig Libc

https://ziglang.org/devlog/2026/#2026-01-31
2•g0xA52A2A•34m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Watch ChatGPT Codex agent add TailwindCSS to a site

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYd2_ujFdkk
1•logicallee•34m ago•0 comments

Boxer loses hairpiece in the ring and blames mother's shampoo

https://news.sky.com/story/boxer-loses-hairpiece-in-the-ring-and-blames-mothers-shampoo-13501837
1•austinallegro•35m ago•1 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•8mo ago

Comments

qwertox•8mo ago
Rule #1: Always put deletions behind a flag which is disabled for the first couple of test runs.
turtleyacht•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
Oh, I see. Having a flag to skip deletion during test runs is a good rule then.
rvz•8mo 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•8mo ago
Who runs such an AI generated script without checking the code first?
qwertox•8mo 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•8mo ago
Right so lets just always run the code as is ?
qwertox•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
In which Roko's Basilisk fires a warning shot.
jethronethro•8mo ago
This is why you test code or a script before running it for real. Live and learn, I guess ...