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SpaceX no longer needs NASA, and that's a problem for America's space agency

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/spacex-no-longer-needs-nasa-and-thats-a-problem-for-america...
1•civilchaos•2m ago•0 comments

Highway thieves are spoofing GPS to steal millions in data center-bound cargo

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/10/highway-thieves-are-spoofing-gps-to-steal-millions-in...
1•cdrnsf•2m ago•0 comments

The Economic Organisation of a POW Camp [pdf]

https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/econ4260/out/radford_pow.pdf
1•sebg•2m ago•0 comments

Why big tech stopped building useful stuff

https://www.rubenerd.au/why-big-tech-stopped-building-useful-stuff/
1•cdrnsf•4m ago•0 comments

The Hottest New Side Hustle Is Stripping Copper Wire and Posting About It

https://www.wired.com/story/the-hottest-new-side-hustle-is-stripping-copper-wire-and-posting-abou...
2•cdrnsf•6m ago•1 comments

Building fine-grained version control for agents with Rust and Durable Objects

https://delta.dev/blog/fine-grained-version-control-for-agents
1•nsm•6m ago•0 comments

Martian meteorite found in the Sahara is 4.1B years old

https://www.reuters.com/science/martian-meteorite-found-sahara-is-41-billion-years-old-2026-10-29/
1•noideawhatididt•6m ago•0 comments

Local Decisions in DuckDB

https://altertable.ai/blog/2026-10-29-local-decisions-in-duckdb
1•altertable•6m ago•0 comments

The Battle of the Green Dot

https://malja.dev/the-battle-of-the-green-dot
1•maljacz•7m ago•0 comments

DualChem Benchmark

https://scale.com/blog/dualchem-evaluating-ai-models-dual-use-chemistry-risks
1•satirr•9m ago•1 comments

Thoughts while watching myself be automated (2024)

https://dynomight.net/automated/
1•gone35•15m ago•0 comments

A (lukewarm) defense of Minsky and Papert

https://federicomilanesio.substack.com/p/a-lukewarm-defense-of-minsky-and
1•sebg•15m ago•0 comments

LLMs bring new nature of abstraction (2025)

https://martinfowler.com/articles/2025-nature-abstraction.html
1•p2detar•16m ago•0 comments

LeadPilot

https://getleadpilot.tech/
1•ktoznet•16m ago•0 comments

Dartmouth provost resigns following accusations he used AI for writing

https://apnews.com/article/dartmouth-provost-ai-a9f71dc5e9e10461c7c2390febcd1b5a
4•nradov•17m ago•1 comments

Achim Leistner

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achim_Leistner
1•jumpocelot•18m ago•0 comments

DIY AI Lockpicking Robot: ESP32 and Claude AI Opens Any Lock [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4AUKGdScNI
1•AareyBaba•18m ago•0 comments

Diana Pfeil on Evals [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8A9jDsnq6U
1•mooreds•20m ago•0 comments

Open-weight AI models can exploit the patch gap

https://epoch.ai/publications/open-weight-models-patch-gap
3•merksittich•20m ago•0 comments

The Physics of Getting Fired

https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-use-physics-to-make-sense-of-the-messiness-of-life
2•ersinesen•21m ago•0 comments

'I fear for my family': Berlin mayoral candidate's messages expose Hamas ties

https://www.ynetnews.com/article/skmcttlpzl
2•extraextra•23m ago•0 comments

A Pig, the State, and War: Porco Rosso (Kurenai No Buta) (2014)

https://journal.animationstudies.org/article/id/66/
4•simonebrunozzi•26m ago•0 comments

Buildings full of machines are tied to modest local job growth

https://theconversation.com/we-studied-1-584-data-centers-and-found-the-buildings-full-of-machine...
6•andrewstetsenko•26m ago•1 comments

Much Ado About None: Sentinel Values in Python

https://florianwilhelm.info/2026/10/sentinel_values/
2•sebg•28m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Charter, field-level control over agents' calls into customer accounts

https://github.com/r28ai/charter
2•nathanqueme•29m ago•1 comments

Google value plunges by $500B as AI fears rattle Wall Street

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm9qzdqpxy48o
7•dabinat•31m ago•2 comments

Intel stock plunges after posting disappointing Q4 outlook

https://finance.yahoo.com/video/intel-stock-plunges-after-posting-disappointing-q4-outlook-200731...
3•baal80spam•31m ago•1 comments

Chinese Universities in Jiangsu Begin Paying Staff in Digital Yuan

https://chinascope.org/archives/41502
3•gscott•33m ago•0 comments

Biltong.ai

https://biltong.ai/
2•almogo•35m ago•0 comments

The Great American Rascal: Tom Sawyer at 150

https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-great-american-rascal/
13•beatstop•38m 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 ...