MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by apawloski | 2026-02-16 20:41:35+00:00
Agree. It is harder to manufacture in America when the party leader breaks critical parts of your supply chain with rapid and unpredictable tariff changes. It is impossible to lower consumer prices on a good by raising taxes on it.

This is not even mentioning the astounding corruption of a president and his family personally and directly benefiting from these tariffs threats.

Does the party not understand the realities of this? Do they understand and are just lying about it because they're afraid of the leader? Afraid of admitting that they're wrong? I believe people are usually rational but I do not understand a rationalization where choosing to harm American manufacturers and consumers on the whims of a visibly corrupt leader is good, actually.
by buschleague | 2026-02-16 20:41:46+00:00
This is exactly right. The mental model gap is the real risk for AI-first builders. The code works until it doesn't, and when it breaks you have no framework for understanding why.

One thing that helped us: externalize the structure that experienced developers carry in their heads. Things like test driven development or wheel-and-spoke based file size limitations etc. are the distilled judgment of decades of software engineering. But if you've never written code traditionally, you don't know they exist.

We formalized these into enforced workflows. What I found pretty exciting about it, from an educational tool standpoint, is that the side effect was that new team members and vibe coders working within those constraints started absorbing the patterns themselves. They learn why tests matter because the system won't let them skip them and learn why file size matters because the system blocks them and forces decomposition etc.
by guywithahat | 2026-02-16 20:41:52+00:00
I’m not sure this article really applies to my experience. There are lots of companies who have extremely rigid pay ranges, and if you ask for wiggle room on a low salary they just move on to the next applicant. You should apply to jobs because you’d rather work there, and should come in with minimum salaries you’d accept. Thinking you’re going to negotiate 50k more after holding an offer in your hand is a good way to have the offer taken back
by dsign | 2026-02-16 20:42:30+00:00
One in four people dies of cancer[^1]. Those are terrible odds as they are, but it gets worse because most people will go through their lives terrified of when it will be their time to enter that Russian roulette of agony, and because everybody will have to see or care for a friend or relative dying that way.

Our therapies and treatments are so pitifully inadequate and yet so damn trying and expensive... We need a true revolution there, a qualitative jump of the kind between calling linear correlation a form of "AI" and calling an LLM a form of "AI".

[^1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
by jorvi | 2026-02-16 20:42:48+00:00
> I believe shopping malls often use such signals (wifi, bluetooth) to track what your travel pattern through the mall is. They know what section of the store you spend most of your time in and what storefronts you stall at

In the EU this is forbidden unless they explicitly ask your permission. They can still gather aggregate stats but they cannot build a profile on you.
by ryandrake | 2026-02-16 20:42:51+00:00
I think we can at least agree that children recruited by organized crime to steal cars, break into homes, assault people, and so on, should be treated differently than a kid who stole a pack of gum from a store. Whatever the solution is, it has to take into account the seriousness of the crime, and it has to discourage this binary criminal / not criminal thinking.
by dakolli | 2026-02-16 20:44:36+00:00
Everyone in the comments is like, "take a look at this AI tool for Ghirda"

This is indicative of two things.

1. While I can't stand the guy, ya'll need to watch Peter Thiel's talk from 10-15 years ago at Stanford about not building the same thing everyone else is, a la, the obvious thing.

2. People are really attracted to using LLMs on deep thinking tasks, off shoring their thinking, to a "Think for me SaaS". This won't end well for you, there's no shortcuts in life that don't come with a (huge) cost.

The person who showed their work and scored A's on math tests instead of just learning how to use a calculator, is better off in their career/endevours than the 80% of others who did the latter. If Laurie Wired makes an MCP for Ghirda and uses it that's one thing, you using it without ever reverse engineering extensively is completely different. I'd bet my bottom dollar that Laurie Wired doesn't prefer the MCP over her own mental processes 8/10 times.
by munksbeer | 2026-02-16 20:45:05+00:00
> It's comments like these that make me not really want to interact with this topic anymore.

It's a religious war at this point. People who hate AI are not going to admit anything until they have no choice.

And given the progress in the last few months, I think we're a few years away from nearly every developer using coding agents, kicking and screaming in some cases, or just leaving the industry in others.
by kgeist | 2026-02-16 20:45:16+00:00
Here where I live a similar thing exists for like 10 years already, and if the recepient has 2 bank accounts from different banks, then the banking app lets you choose which bank you want to send the money to. They also show the recipient's first and middle names (only the first letter of the last name is shown) to make sure you're sending money to the right person.

And I've always wondered, isn't it kind of unsafe, if someone gets my number, they can learn where I store my money and what my name is.

Dunno about the desktop, but if you're on a phone, there's often a button "open in the bank app". I actually like that you need to approve it in the banking app, it's like a single source of truth no one else but me has access to. Dunno why it would be "way slower", it's just an additional click?
by crystal_revenge | 2026-02-16 20:45:25+00:00
Very similar to web3! On paper the web3 craze sounded very exciting: yes, I absolutely would love an alternate web of truly decentralized services.

I've been pretty consistently skeptical of the crypto world, but with web3 I was really hoping to be wrong. What's wild is there was not a single, truly distributed, interesting/useful service at all to come out of all that hype. I spent a fair bit of time diving into the details of Ethereum and very quickly realized the "world computer" there (again, wonderful idea) wasn't really feasible for anything practical (I mean other than creating clever ways to scam people).

Right now in the LLM space I see a lot of people focused on building old things in new ways. I've realized that not only do very few people work with local models (where they can hack around and customize more), a surprisingly small number of people write code that even calls an LLM through an API for some specific task that previously wasn't possible (regular ol'software build using calls to an LLM has loads of potential). It's still largely "can some variation on a chat bot do this thing I used to do for me".

As a contrast, in the early web, plenty of people were hosting their own website, and messing around with all the basic tools available to see what novel thing they could create. I mean "Hamster Dance" was it's own sort of slop, but the first time you say it you engaged with it. Snarg.net still stands out as novel in it's experiments with "what is an interface".
by roblh | 2026-02-16 20:45:34+00:00
It's a not a binary thing, it's a spectrum. There are many elements of uncertainty in every action imaginable. I'm inclined to agree with the other commenter though, the LLM slot machine is absolutely closer on that spectrum to gambling than your example is.

Anthropic's optimization target is getting you to spend tokens, not produce the right answer. It's to produce an answer plausible enough but incomplete enough that you'll continue to spend as many tokens as possible for as long as possible. That's about as close to a slot machine as I can imagine. Slot rewards are designed to keep you interested as long as possible, on the premise that you _might_ get what you want, the jackpot, if you play long enough.

Anthropic's game isn't limited to a single spin either. The small wins (small prompts with well defined answers) are support for the big losses (trying to one shot a whole production grade program).
by coldtea | 2026-02-16 20:45:57+00:00
>Yeah, if you consider a military-grade AI/LLM with access to all military info sources, able to analyze them all much quicker than a human… there’s no way this isn’t already either in progress or in use today.

Still wouldn't mean much. Wars are won on capacity, logistics (the practical side, not ability to calculate them), land/etc advantages, and when it comes to boots on the ground, courage, knowledge of the place, local population support, etc. Not "analyzing info sources" at scale which is mostly a racket that pretends to be important.
by suralind | 2026-02-16 20:46:06+00:00
I can’t see how it would possibly work in Polish market. Polish job IT market (at least for Go developers) is very specific. There’s very few companies actually building their own products and plenty of software houses/hiring agencies looking to hire cheaply. I’ve been doing Go for long enough that what I ask for is on the higher end, so much so that I probably refuse ~95% offers because they are significantly below my expectations. Importantly, I’m no public figure nor I’m 10x developer, I’m just a regular guy who chose Go very early in my career, just before it really took off.

Now, imagine that I don’t ask for a number nor share my expectations. With 3-4 rounds of interviews, even if we assume 1/10 is in my range, I’d have to SUCCESSFULLY do maybe 30-40 interviews on average to find a job that matches my expectations. Another thing is that benefits in Poland are pretty standard almost nearly everywhere: private medical care, gym card, 20 vacation days, 10 sick days… unless you’re willing to work in the big few companies that just have unlimited money.

(If someone in Poland has different experience, please share - would love to hear more.)
by saulpw | 2026-02-16 20:46:07+00:00
Yeah I'm finding that there's "clock time" (hours) and "calendar time" (days/weeks/months) and pushing people to work 'more' is based on the fallacy that our productivity is based on clock time (like it is in a factory pumping out widgets) rather than calendar time (like it is in art and other creative endeavors). I'm finding that even if the LLM can crank out my requested code in an hour, I'll still need a few days to process how it feels to use. The temptation is to pull the lever 10 times in a row because it was so easy, but now I'll need a few weeks to process the changes as a human. This is just for my own personal projects, and it makes sense that the business incentives would be even more intense. But you can't get around the fact that, no matter how brilliant your software or interface, customers are not going to start paying in a few hours.
by ljm | 2026-02-16 20:46:44+00:00
The author thinks they made the wrong move a few times during their career, and now they're replaying it in hindsight as if their present experience has a measure on previous performance. They are only able to write this post because they did some things badly in the past, but after a load of other steps they got to a point where they could write a post or a book and basically skip all of the hard bits they don't want to talk about.

You have to be careful to not be led into this, as if you can follow OP's self-help advice and skip the failures. You will, in fact, fail in a different way.

Is this cynical? Yes. But it's how self-help advice works.
by orwin | 2026-02-16 20:46:47+00:00
Despite having a very good life, i always had trouble with self-esteem and always felt the impostor syndrome and not having really earned what i have (both professionally and personally.

AI users and especially AI boosters are the best thing that happened to me. I no longer felt as an impostor, maybe the opposite. The confidence they gave me got me a promotion and a raise.

I still get mad at AI sometime, when someone use it to resolve an easy issue tagged "good first issue" i especially took time to describe for a new hire to enter a very complex codebase, or when i review a fully vibe-coded PR before the person who vibe-coded it, but overall the coming of AI (especially since Sonnet/Opus4.5 and GPT 5.1) is great.
by cowboylowrez | 2026-02-16 20:46:48+00:00
this is what I've been using freebie gemini chat for mostly, example code, like reminding me of c stdlib stuff, javascript, a bit of web server stuff here and there. I think it would be fun to give googles agent or cli stuff a spin but when I read up here and there about antigravity, I'm reading that people are getting their accounts shutdown for stuff I would have thought was ok, even if they paid for it (well actually as usual the actual reasons for accounts getting zapped remain unknown as is today's trend for cloud accounts).

I'm too poor for local llms, I think there might be a 2 or 4gb graphics card in one of my junk pcs but thats about it lol
by zahlman | 2026-02-16 20:46:48+00:00
> I suppose I should finally clear this up: The autocorrect functionality I originally described here was a feature of the first Linux systems I ever used, so I assumed it was how every Linux system worked by default. Since then I've come to understand that it's a completely optional extra doodad.

What systems did this? I've never encountered one that I can recall.
by panstromek | 2026-02-16 20:46:59+00:00
> what if the parsing step was performed immediately on stop symbols rather than later and merged with the program graph immediately rather than during a separate build step?

I think this is the way to go, kinda like on Github, where you write markdown in the comments, but that is only used for input, after that it's merged into the system, all code-like constructs (links, references, images) are resolveed and from then you interact with the higher level concept (rendered comment with links and images).

For programinng langauge, Unison does this - you write one function at a time in something like a REPL and functions are saved in content addressed database.

> Or what if it was like "staging" step?

Yes, and I guess it'd have to go even deeper. The system should be able to represent broken program (in edited state), so conceptually it has to be something like a structured database for code which separates the user input from stored semantic representation and the final program.

IDE's like IntelliJ already build a program model like this and incrementally update it as you edit, they just have to work very hard to do it and that model is imperfect.

There's million issues to solve with this, though. It's a hard problem.
by dnw | 2026-02-16 20:47:28+00:00
Honestly it is unclear to me still. Last month wrote a whole coding principles AGENTS/CLAUDE MD file but not clear if the produced code has changed _because of_ that or other reasons. Couple of things give me confidence that the models actually do read them and follow them.

1) I have a sentence that says: "I am your pairing buddy Bob. Occasionally address me by my name." And you will see them address you by the name, occasionally.
2) I do have per project "Project Tenets." Each tenets is a catchy couple of words, like Design for Agent First, Tolerant Interfaces over Robust Interfaces. If you notice the coding assistant referring to this you know they are aware, and they do sometimes refer to it. I also have a common list of principles but I think they are less useful because those are generic for software engineering.
3) Occasionally, I will do the following prompt:
i) Who am I?
ii) What is our design philosophy and tenets?
iii) Go through the repo and ensure the architecture and codebase adheres to our design philosophy and tenets.

Kind of works.
by robocat | 2026-02-16 20:48:03+00:00
Trick questions test the skill of recognizing that you're being asked a trick question. You can also usually find a trick answer.

A good answer is "underground" - because that is the implication of the word bury.

The story implies the survivors have been buried (it isn't clear whether they lived a short time or a lifetime after the crash). And lifetime is tautological.

Trick questions are all about the questioner trying to pretend they are smarter than you. That's often easy to detect and respond to - isn't it?
by MilaM | 2026-02-16 20:48:33+00:00
A phone number (or email) is not strictly necessary [1]. Some banks do indeed require it for the Wero account setup, which in my opinion is a mistake. You only need the additional identifiers if you want to look up other Wero users with your phone's address book to send money directly to them.

It's also not possible to register the same phone number at two banks simultaneously. The last registration wins and the associated bank account will switch on the backend when you try this.

Also, EU bureaucrats have little to do with it. Wero is the third attempt by a subset of private European banks to establish a new pan-European payment network.

[1] https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599201237...
by biophysboy | 2026-02-16 20:49:23+00:00
This is what I think:

- Alex Karp genuinely believes China is a threat

- I think China is an economic threat, especially for tech

- An AI arms race is itself threatening; it is not like the nuclear deterrent

- Geopolitical tensions are very convenient for Alex Karp

- America has a history of exaggerating geopolitical threats

- Tech is very credulous with politics
by prmph | 2026-02-16 20:49:35+00:00
> There's no reason for something like that in Go for example, because it's less expensive [sic] [1] and the signatures are trivial.

Whoah, Are you saying, for example, that generics are not useful? That's quite the claim. In that case, to make things even simpler, let's remove recursion, functions as data, even type systems altogether, because they lead to "complex" code. See where your reasoning leads?

Any language feature can be abused. In the same vein, you also say:

> Perl suffers from this. You can build your own OOP, so many people did and now there are hundreds of mostly-compatible-but-not-fully versions of OOP with different syntax and semantics all over the place.

One can create OOP in any most modern Turing-Complete languages, so this is not a strong argument.

[1] I believe you meant "expressive" here
by SauntSolaire | 2026-02-16 20:49:40+00:00
Along with the orders for kids school uniform skirts a bit later.. tough viewing in context.

Makes it unsettling when it then shows orders for books I've also read. Hard to swallow having anything in common with such a person.

As a side note -- I would have assumed he got his clothes from much fancier places than Amazon, considering his wealth.

Altogether his Amazon orders are disturbing, but also somewhat humanizing, which is not what I expected.
by hearsathought | 2026-02-16 20:49:50+00:00
Using your logic, then chemistry should be shortened to "chemy"? Biology should be shortened to "bioy"? I'm going to my bioy class?

We shorten chemistry to chem, just like we shortened mathematics to math because we are just taking the first few letters of the word.

"Mathematics is a field of study..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics

Is A field of study. Mathematics isn't a "plural" even though it has an s at the end.
by palmotea | 2026-02-16 20:50:33+00:00
> The only value from asking this question is to be entertained, and “fixing” this question makes the answer less entertaining.

You're thinking like a user. The people doing the patching are thinking like a founder trying to maintain the impression that this is a magical technology that CEOs can use to replace all their workers.

You don't have as much money to spend as the CEOs, so they don't care about your entertainment.
by Steve6 | 2026-02-16 20:51:18+00:00
I recently read the book for the first time. Fantastic story! The best western I've ever read. Then I watched the miniseries with my wife (also for the first time). Westerns aren't her favorite, but she loved it too. Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones were incredible, the whole cast did a great job, and the costumes and scenery were beautiful. We still make jokes about "We don't rent pigs." :)

We only watched season 1 because that's the one based on the original Lonesome Dove book. They make some changes, but generally only one that makes the show easier to follow. I'd highly recommend anyone to watch it. If you stick with only season 1 it tells a complete story and it's not too long of a commitment. It has everything.

RIP Duvall. You've had many roles, but this is the one I'll remember you for.
by anonymars | 2026-02-16 20:51:43+00:00
Related ("what is your current salary"), you should know about "the work number"

"Talent Report™ Income and Employment
Provides verification of employment plus verification of a candidate’s income."
https://theworknumber.com/solutions/industries/pre-employmen...

Opt out: https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze
by renehsz | 2026-02-16 20:52:05+00:00
This is big news. Defer can simplify control flow a lot, especially in early-return cases like handling errors. No longer do we have to write deeply nested ifs or the madness that is goto. Resource acquisition and cleanup can now be right next to each other.

Now we just have to hope that standardization goes well. The C standard moves very slowly, and that's probably a good thing. But defer is such a simple yet powerful feature that the cost/benefit ratio should easily justify its inclusion.
by svilen_dobrev | 2026-02-16 20:52:07+00:00
reading comments so far.. seems from people who have not tried how the current situation is. Yes most of these "cant say" worked 3+ years go. But it is harsh employer-driven market now. 100 candidates for 1 position.

The question is baked and mandatory in most forms, and there's no "cant say" - only about 20% do not ask it, all else.. have it. And it is the easiest filter for the above 100 candidates, so.

Negotiation phase? hah. You are lucky if you get a rejection e-mail. Most don't bother with even that, regardless the importance of the role. And you never know if the number was too high, or completely irrelevant.