So, either the entire project was already written and being uploaded one file at the time (first modification since lowest commit mentioned is README update: https://github.com/whispem/minikv/commit/6fa48be1187f596dde8..., clearly AI generated and clearly AI used has codebase/architecture knowledge), and this claim is false, or they're implementing a new component every 30s.
I had the opportunity to request a review of my first post (which was flagged) following my email to the moderators of HN.
I didn’t use AI for the codebase, only for .md files & there's no problem with that.
My project was reviewed by moderators, don't worry.
If the codebase or architecture was AI generated this post would not have been authorized and therefore it would not have been published.
No, I was helped (.md files only) by AI to rewrite but the majority of the doc is written by myself, I just asked for help from the AI for formatting for example.
I am not going to pretend to know what this person did, but I've definitely modified many things at once and made distinct commits after the fact (within 30s). I do not find it that abnormal.
Thanks a lot!
I make distinct commits "every 30s" because I'm focused and I test my project.
If the CI is green, I don't touch of anything.
If not, I work on the project until the CI is fully green.
Yes, in minikv, I set up GitHub Actions for automated CI.
Every push or PR triggers tests, lint, and various integration checks — with a typical runtime of 20–60 seconds for the core suite (thanks to Rust’s speed and caching).
This means that after a commit, I get feedback almost instantly: if a job fails, I see the logs and errors within half a minute, and if there’s a fix needed, I can push a change right away.
Rapid CI is essential for catching bugs early, allowing fast iteration and a healthy contribution workflow.
I sometimes use small, continuous commits (“commit, push, fix, repeat”) during intense development or when onboarding new features, and the fast CI loop helps maintain momentum and confidence in code quality.
If you’re curious about the setup, it’s all described in LEARNING.md and visible in the repo’s .github/workflows/ scripts!
Yes, I do split my working tree into separate commits whenever possible!
I use interactive staging (git add -p) to split logical chunks: features, fixes, cleanups, and documentation are committed separately for clarity.
Early in the project (lots of exploratory commits), some changes were more monolithic, but as minikv matured, I've prioritized clean commit history to make code review and future changes easier.
Always happy to get workflow tips — I want the repo to be easy to follow for contributors!
I don’t want to discredit the authors but just want to offer couple of hypothetical points in these paranoid times.
From a marketing angle, for a startup whose product is an AI security tool, buying zero-days from black market and claiming the AI tool found them might be good ROI. After all this is making waves.
Or, could it be possible the training set contains zero-day vulnerabilities known to three-letter agencies and other threat actors but not to public?
These two are not mutually exclusive either. You could buy exploits and put them in the training set.
Theres huge uncertainty and layered assumptions in all of microbiology and biochemistry about how exactly things work on small scale. Because it is really hard to study live reactions in little things you can just barely see on an electron microscope.
But yet humanity has managed to assert statistical truths about for example genetics and explain countless diseases, even cure and alleviate some. So even if you don’t have a theory on how exactly something works from the ground up, if you have statistical evidence, plenty of useful and practical advances can be built top-bottom and we have outcomes that validate this.
Not giving any opinion on this piece specifically but just saying there can be scientific value even if the details are hand-wavy.
> The point is that people are drawing all sorts of unwarranted conclusions from this lay report on early stage research.
That is partly because no one seems willing to summarize this work, in concise form, for nonspecialists. Such a summary might be, "This is an important finding, but it doesn't mean Lysenko was right, and the term 'inheritance' doesn't have just one meaning."
I think the term "inheritance" for both DNA and epigenetic information transfers (as in the linked article) is innately confusing.
Epigenetics can arguably be an example of what the comment means by narrowing the search space. You can have heritable changes to gene expression that are not part of your genome, but are a result of feedback from the environment (and not random mutations, viability of which natural selection will judge over future generations)
Are there areas in the developed world where this is common? I’ve never heard of anyone regularly taking anti parasitic medication because their kids kept bringing home parasites from daycare. I had a friend whose son was prescribed medicine for pinworms once when he was fairly young (mostly as a precaution).
Pinworms are particularly common in children, with prevalence rates in this age group having been reported as high as 61% in India, 50% in England, 39% in Thailand, 37% in Sweden, and 29% in Denmark. [1]
Remember that
prevalence is the proportion of a particular population found to be affected by a medical condition (typically a disease or a risk factor such as smoking or seatbelt use) at a specific time.
So it is not just that percentage has had it at any point in their life, it is that percentage that has it at any time.
And yes, kids. Pinworm is literally called 'children worm' here.
That’s interesting, thanks. Looks like it’s 11%-ish in the US which is lower than the other cited countries but still more common than I would have guessed.
If you’re a suburban kid, GenX or later you may have missed the peaks. In the 60s, it was more like 35-45% of kids.
Things like rules for handwashing and standards for things like residential plumbing improved hygiene and reduced ringworms. Many urban and rural households didn’t have things we take for granted like hot water!
Millennial. But I was thinking less about my own childhood and more about never treating my kids or (with the one exception) hearing of friends treat theirs.
It is actually extremely common in Europe (as I linked to in a sibling chat), with 30-40% of kids having it at any time.
With those rates, my guess is that you probably had it several times, but just thought your bum was itching for no reason (or you were one of the asymptomatic cases). I think the awareness of it has gone up, now it's common to let the kindergarten know if you suspect it in your child, and they send a message to the other parents.
To be blunt you do not get it from eating cookies in sand. You get it from ingesting pinworm eggs, you ingest them by someone touching their bum (where the worms lay eggs) and then touching something that you then touch and touch your face/mouth, or scratching your own bum in your sleep then scratching your face / mouth.
If you don’t think it’s super commen in Europe it’s generally a lack of diagnoses. Literally 1/5th
Of British kids have it at any given time (and I imagine that tracks across Europe and USA at least)
Yes, it’s fairly common infection in children. I mean they don’t wash carefully their hands, they put everything in their mouth - it would be a real surprise if they would not catch it.
I believe I know an immune-compromised adult who was taking anti-parasitics for more than two years due to workplace (care context) reinfections. I say “believe” because these are two things people talk about in coded, careful ways. It might be a little more common than polite conversation ever really reveals.
For example if you know anyone who raised early concerns about antivaxxers causing short supply of ivermectin formulations for human use during the pandemic. More or less anyone who knew what ivermectin was at that point in time was either a farmer, a vetinarian, a doctor… or a patient with a condition.
Someone taking the time and effort to write and send a letter and pay for postage might actually be appreciated by the receiver. It’s a bit different from LLM agents being ordered to burn resources to send summaries of someone’s work life and congratulating them. It feels like ”hey look what can be done, can we get some more funding now”. Just because it can be done doesn’t mean it adds any good value to this world
> I don’t know anyone who doesn’t immediately throw said enveloppe, postage, and letter in the trash
If you're being accurate, the people you know are terrible.
If someone sends me a personal letter [and I gather we're talking about a thank-you note here], I'm sure as hell going to open it. I'll probably even save it in a box for an extremely long time.
Of course. I took it to be referring the 98% of other paper mail that that goes straight to the trash. Often unopened. I don't know if I'm typical but the number of personal cards/letters I received in 2025 I could count on one hand.
> Of course. I took it to be referring the 98% of other paper mail that that goes straight to the trash. Often unopened. I don't know if I'm typical but the number of personal cards/letters I received in 2025 I could count on one hand.
Yes so this is why the reason why person card/letters really matter because most people sheldom get any and if you know a person in your life / in any (community/project) that you deeply admire, sending them a handwritten mail can be one of the highest gestures which shows that you took the time out of your day and you really cared about them so much in a way.
Also not a doctor or microbiologist, but just wanted to share my layman’s guess on why fixing enzymes will not completely solve the issue: there’s 2 strands of DNA and to fix the broken (mutated) strand you need to have one correct template strand intact so you know what it should be fixed into. It could be the nucleotides swapped places between strands or are deleted completely or otherwise both mutated, which would mean any repair will not revert the sequence to what it used to be.
The other comments so far are probably more informed.
Cancer sucks, I wish all the best towards a recovery.
You’d also have to ‘fix’ DNA: unless we can re-engineer a bunch of key enzymes and then re-encode the entire genome (or maybe key parts) with forward error correction without breaking everything else, it might work. You might also break evolution to some degree by making random point mutations less likely.
But what I learned so far is that as soon as you’d attempt something like this in bacteria, the fitness advantage from an evolutionary standpoint is negligible compared to the efficiency loss introduced by FEC, so your colony would get outcompeted by other bacteria unless there is a niche your resistant bacteria survive in (high radiation environments?). The efficiency loss induced ‘disadvantages’ would probably be less pronounced in mammals though - If (big if) you manage to not also break anything essential in the wonderful yet surprisingly efficient Rube Goldberg machine that is life.
What I meant was there are collection of genes responsible for error correction. If there is a failure in duplication then these genes have not done their job.
Thought experiment, again as a layman, was to see if these genes responsible for error correction at the base level can be fixed or bolstered and that will act like a cancer vaccine. But looks like from other comments that this is even more harder!
The cross border not about technical capacity but legal control. For example if you are a refugee you might not be able to pull your bank savings and liquid stock with you from your home country to another without it being seized or taxed, but your crypto is always yours as long as you are the only holder of the keys. This scenario is one of the rare real world utilities I see with crypto.
Specifically for a refugee, at least with crypto you have the possibility to declare your assets in your destination, since you actually still hold on to them. Which is unlikely if it is tied to banks or investment platforms of an authoritarian country trying to genocide you. I understand this sounds like a fringe example but there are over 100 million forcibly displaced people globally.
A lot of countries cracked down on merchants accepting bitcoin, and in a lot of places it's illegal to offer BTC->cash conversions without KYC.
I suspect authoritarian regimes would be the first to close this loophole. This is not theoretical - Russia did this in 2022 to stop people from offloading their rubles and/or fleeing the country with their money.
Crypto is qualified as property and regulated in a very similar way. There is a market for borrowing using tokens regulated by digital assets act (цифровые финансовые активы).
This, and another angle is that whatever market you are in, it is harder to run profitable margins if your competitors can eat the market while sustaining losses. And there was a lot of money around to sustain those losses.
Not to say it wasn’t possible to be profitable during zero interest rates, Linear being an example, but the competitive landscape is certainly healthier today for companies trying to be profitable.
Just putting aside the bold assumption that LLMs do make coders obsolete or coding unnecessary, it is possible to find similar joy in the end result as one does (or did, given the article) for programming itself. Focusing on what kind of tools or products are being created, and what problems are being solved, and together with LLMs achieving that goal better and faster than without them and finding joy in solving problems this world has. That’s typically why anyone would have paid you to code anyway even before LLMs.
Of course in reality there’s weird economical mechanics where making the most money and building something that benefits the world don’t necessarily collide, but theres always demand for and joy in solving complex problems, even if its on a higher abstraction level than coding with your favorite language.
