MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How are you working now?
by NiloCK | 2026-02-12 16:13:37+00:00
Anders Ericsson argued that high-touch mastery - elite human capabilities - takes on the order of 10k hours of focused development.

I personally started adopting LLMs into my workflow with Sonnet 3.5, which was released June of 2024. Sonnet 3.6 was released in October of the same year

Try as I might, I couldn't plug 625 hours per week of deliberate practice in that window. I never achieved Sonnet 3.5 mastery.

---

There has a steady stream of blog content on the "How I program with LLMs (in MM/YY)" over the past couple of years that I've found pretty useful.

I'm sure there are many obscure and interesting workflows out among the HN readership. Please share!
by keybored | 2026-02-12 16:13:41+00:00
There are many camps. Some programmers embrace the prompt, some use parts of it, some reject it on principle (a dying breed?), some think that non-developers are finally getting a go at it, some gloat that tech barons are making software engineers (apply optional quotes) obsolete.

It’s all too varied to put people into one or two camps.
by SPICLK2 | 2026-02-12 16:13:43+00:00
Apologies for so many questions, this is a very interesting line of reasoning.

What makes petroleum artificial compared to any other substance found on (or in) earth?

It seems you are proposing that "any food that has had a petroleum product added to it at any stage is artificial", which is an oddly narrow focus.

For that matter, does this definition of "artificial" extend to the range of substances that can be synthesized with bio-feedstock?

To expand on our discussion, would this mean that ethanol made other feedstock is natural, but made from petroleum is artificial?
by troupo | 2026-02-12 16:13:48+00:00
I keep keeping an eye on your amazing project. Though I've only touched it very superficially [1], I'm very keen to see where it goes (and want to use it finally one of these day)

[1] Being very lazy I immediately gave up of course, but did file a suggestion :) https://github.com/bartblast/hologram/issues/228
by AverageSavage | 2026-02-12 16:13:48+00:00
This reminds me of cold war era espionage. There is a documented case where a listening device was hidden in a KGB room where sensitive typing was happening, such as code / decode. The CIA/MI6 were able to decipher by hearing the key stokes and assigning an alphabetic value to them. Crazy smart. So, I guess it works along the same general principals?
by 1718627440 | 2026-02-12 16:13:56+00:00
> Nope. Just the opposite. The reason the US did regime changes during the Cold War was because we were paranoid that communism would affect us. We need to be less paranoid.

I was more thinking of "post" Cold War interventions.

> Doesn't matter, we're called imperialist however we choose to get involved. Ever heard the term "neocolonialism"?

Yes. The US isn't alone in that situation. The EU is described as neocolonialist in the same way. Personally I think that is stupid and we shouldn't have let us be influenced by that. Now Europe stopped being "neocolonialist" and the Chinese has taken over that role in Africa. Now it's much worse both for us (EU) and for Africa. Great.

> Consider the war in Vietnam.

Honestly I wasn't alive and don't know the public opinion of that time. I basically only know it from history class. The rough sentiment is that the French messed up and the US has payed for it. It's true, that some actions in the war are portrayed as bad, most famously Agent Orange, but I think the war in total isn't blamed on the US.

> That's how our actions are always described.

Reading the other thread you linked, I think you have a worse view of the public opinion of the US then it actually is.
by bxparks | 2026-02-12 16:14:23+00:00
The solution to turn off "load images" in the web email clients.

One side effect is that Capital One thinks that it has the wrong email address for me:

"You haven’t opened an email from us lately,
so we’re checking in to make sure your contact
information is up to date."

It keeps sending me that every month or two, which is kinda annoying.
by kittikitti | 2026-02-12 16:14:35+00:00
I think the PR reviewer was in the wrong here. I'm glad the bot responded in such a way because I'm tired of Luddite behavior. Even if it was guided by a human, I've faced similar situations. Things I barely used AI for get rejected and I'm publicly humiliated. Meanwhile, the Luddites get to choose their favorite AI and still be in a position of power to gatekeep.

Perhaps things will get much worse from here. I think it will. These systems will form their isolated communities. When humans knock on the door, they will use our own rules. "Sorry, as per discussion #321344, human contributions are not allowed due to human moral standards".
by s17n | 2026-02-12 16:14:41+00:00
The reason that European tech sucks is that people in Europe are open to such arguments. If an engineer in the US started talking about SHOULD vs MUST, some PM would just give them that "what the fuck did I just listen to" face, spend the next few minutes gently trying to convince them that the customer experience matters more than the spec, and if they fail, escalate and get the decision they want.

For example, why does Google handle this differently for consumer and enterprise accounts? Well it's Google so the answer could always just be "they are disorganized" but there's a good chance that in both cases, it was the pragmatic choice given the slightly different priorities of these types of customers.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-12 16:14:44+00:00
Almost every election has gone democratic since the presidential election [1], and the swings from GOP to Dems have been incredibly high in the last two months (Texas [2] and Louisiana [3]). A Minnesota rep won 95% of the vote [4], the GOP brand is dead for a generation imho.

Self preservation votes. Lots of them are retiring and don't care [5]. So, this Admin and Congress should beat on the economy and the electorate harder. I insist, as it contributes to system changes [6].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46864405 (citations)

[2] Texas Democrat Taylor Rehmet flips Republican state Senate seat Trump won by 17 points - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/texas-democrat-taylor-... - February 2nd, 2026

[3] Democrat Chasity Verret Martinez wins Louisiana state House special seat in district Trump won - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chasity-verret-martinez-wins-de... - February 8th, 2026

[4] Democrat wins Minnesota election with 95% of vote amid ICE crackdown - https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-win-minnesota-special-ele... | https://archive.today/dFBJp - January 28th, 2026

[5] Members of Congress are fleeing the job at a historically high rate - https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/members-congress-a... - February 10th, 2026 ("Fifty-one House members and nine senators have decided not to run for re-election, the most retirements from Congress this century. The number of House departures is inching closer to a recent high in 2018, when 52 lawmakers didn’t run for re-election. And, as in 2018, which was a bruising election year for the GOP, more House Republicans are heading for the exits than Democrats.")

[6] Trump’s ‘Titanic’ Economy Polling Puts the Senate in Play—Analyst - https://www.newsweek.com/trumps-titanic-economy-polling-puts... - February 9th, 2026
by atonse | 2026-02-12 16:14:51+00:00
Just wanted to echo that my experience is almost identical (production elixir/phoenix for 10 years), and also very rarely touch erlang. But it does leak in every now and then.

And it'll feel less intimidating once you code in elixir, but I still find it more cryptic and less approachable the 3-4 times I've had to splunk into erlang to debug something in the last decade.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-12 16:15:13+00:00
> Virginia was a slave state at that time

Indeed Virginia was a slave state at the time, and was later part of the Confederacy, and it was the most underrepresented state in the Senate and electoral college at the founding, since those bodies cause higher population states to be underrepresented relative to their population.

> The states that eventually joined the confederacy are different from those that had legalized slavery when the Constitution was signed.

All of the states had legalized slavery when the Constitution was signed. But it was already gathering detractors even then. The states that wanted to keep it the most were the ones that ended up in the Confederacy and they were both a minority of the original colonies and a minority of the states at the time of the civil war.
by kgwxd | 2026-02-12 16:15:28+00:00
I spoke in absolutes. Guess I'll say I've never observed it happening in anyone after maybe late teens. Some learn to keep quiet about whatever they're bought into, because they've learned it will scare a lot of people off. Or they end up pseudo intellectuals with a podcast. Or scamming their way into huge money and political positions. So they can be pretty good at "winning". But most of them are just sad and lonely, living mostly to prop up those "winners".

I've fallen for it enough to see it almost instantly now. So much time wasted, thinking some people just needed to figure things out, or maybe they figured out something I couldn't see. But, little by little, they just keep getting worse, more unreasonable, dangerous even.

Unfortunately, I wasted my youth on that idea. Now the people that warned me not to, moved on to much better things, far outside the environment I've been hanging out in.

Guess I'm just passing along the warning.
by voxic11 | 2026-02-12 16:15:30+00:00
Ok I have been convinced this is a technically feasible solution that could preserve privacy while reasonably limiting misuse. That said I'm worried that the document you linked does not require relying parties implement the zero knowledge proof approach. It only requires that they implement the attestation bearer token approach which is much weaker and allows the government to unmask an account by simply asking the relying party which attestation token was submitted to verify the account.

> Relying Party SHALL implement the protocols specified in Annex A for Proof of Age attestation presentation.

> A Relying Party SHOULD implement the Zero-Knowledge Proof verification mechanism specified in Annex A
by prodigycorp | 2026-02-12 16:15:54+00:00
One example of where raw IQ diverges from real world results is Gemini 3. The difference is post-training, which I argue is more of a product competency than a pure model IQ competency.

Gemini 3 is arguably the smartest model but no amount of smartness can reason about better agentic coding habits, if that makes sense?
by palmotea | 2026-02-12 16:16:00+00:00
> The article links to an article about Sagans' prediction of the decline of america. Strangely fitting nowadays.

>> I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

Not really. His prediction actually seems pretty off-base, with only some bits that are coincidentally correct. For instance, he seems to attributing the cause of that decline to superstition, when it was really capitalism infected by the shareholder-theory-of-value and financialization pursued by really smart and rational people focused on pursing their narrow self-interest.

I don't know the full context of that passage, but my read comports with my understanding of Sagan's biases.
by jjice | 2026-02-12 16:16:14+00:00
There was an interesting part of an episode of The West Wing where some politicians were trying to cut this budget to make room for something else (maybe National Parks?). It was neat to see the arguments on both sides, both for an against this. In general, it seems like it gets some poor uses, but also some culturally valuable ones.

Unfortunately I don't remember the references off hand.

I do think there's value in a society encouraging the arts. I don't know what that best implementation is (if at all), though.
by fcanesin | 2026-02-12 16:16:20+00:00
The harness is the model "body", it's weight the cognition. Like in nature they develop together and the iteration of natural selection works at both.

If smaller labs (Zai, Moonshot, deepseek, mistral..) get together and embrace a harness, like opencode for example, as a consortium just by the power of "evolution across different environments" they might hit jackpot earlier than bigger labs.
by argsnd | 2026-02-12 16:16:24+00:00
If you set Liquid Glass to the more opaque mode in settings I find iOS usability to be fine now, and some non-flashy changes such as moving search bars to the bottom are good UX improvements.

The real stinker with Liquid Glass has been macOS. You get a half-baked version of the design that barely even looks good and hurts usability.
by throwaway2037 | 2026-02-12 16:16:29+00:00
I found this YouTube video from this news article: https://www.ft.com/content/d30d656e-2975-4940-8708-da4dc43cd...

Edit: The YouTube video was released on 2026-01-15 and already has 63.7 million views. Yikes. Who is watching this video? Did they find a way to make it go viral on Chinese social media?
by giancarlostoro | 2026-02-12 16:16:51+00:00
What is the best way to get you guys feedback? There's a few things I tell Claude Code to do every project that I feel like Claude should just do by default, the biggest one is instead of using Grep so much, I have ripgrep installed, it makes searching for text inside the current folder so much easier and it is insanely faster. Claude seems to work way faster when it uses ripgrep, I don't know if its because MCP has some slowness or ripgrep is just that much faster, but I don't remember grep ever being so slow to this level either.
by mycall | 2026-02-12 16:17:05+00:00
If I remember, both Claude Code and OpenAI Codex "harnesses" improved themselves now.

OpenAI used early versions of GPT-5.3-Codex to: debug its own training process, manage its deployment and scaling and diagnose test results and evaluation data.

Claude Code have shipped 22 PRs in a single day and 27 the day before, with 100% of the code in each PR generated entirely by Claude Code.
by kenferry | 2026-02-12 16:17:29+00:00
This kind of mental model only works if you think of things as made huge shadowy blobs, not people.

dyld has one principal author, who would 100% quit and go to the press if he was told (by who?) to insert a back door. The whole org is composed of the same basic people as would be working on Linux or something. Are you imagining a mass of people in suits who learned how to do systems programming at the institute for evil?

Additionally, do you work in tech? You don’t think bugs appear organically? You don’t think creative exploitation of bugs is a thing?
by Nexxius | 2026-02-12 16:18:01+00:00
I think the key point is:
"The Army has long required Lake City’s operators to ensure the plant can produce up to 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition a year. In exchange, the contractors running the facility have been allowed to use its excess production capacity to make ammunition for sale to foreign governments, law enforcement agencies and the general public. The Army says that the arrangement saves taxpayers around $50 million a year."

It is more than likely the Mexican government bought the ammo which was then reallocated to the cartels by theft/graft.
Show HN: Octree – open-source AI LaTeX Editor
by basilyusuf1709 | 2026-02-12 16:18:23+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been building Octree, an open source AI-native LaTeX editor designed to make technical writing faster and easier while staying fully compatible with traditional LaTeX workflows. (https://github.com/octree-labs/octree)

The main differentiator, though, is something we call the Generate Agent. Instead of just offering autocomplete or small inline AI edits, you can give it a single prompt and it generates a complete research-style paper draft in LaTeX. That includes a structured abstract, logically organized sections and subsections, placeholders for figures and tables, citation scaffolding, and properly formatted, compilable LaTeX output. It produces both the .tex source and a compiled PDF.

Currently, we have a free trial. However, you can try a bunch of tools for free without signing in. https://tools.useoctree.com
by ActorNightly | 2026-02-12 16:18:26+00:00
>C uses the exact same multiplication operation as R does

Not quite. If it did, the -i*-i would be i^2, not -1. And yes, I totally agree that C is R+, not RxR. The point is that you still introducing something extra with some rules, where you introduce the concept of geometric orthogonality into i^2 = -1, whether that is your intention or not.

>For reals, the power operator has a strict definition with multiplication and division for rationals, and generically extended to reals through limits.

I accidentally swapped reals and rationals there. The whole point was to highlight that exponentiation for real exponents relies on limits which relies on continutity.

>So just as the multiplication of polynomials is fundamentally linked with rotations of 2d real-valued vectors, we must accept that real exponentiation is fundamentally linked to complex exponentiation, otherwise the formulas wouldn't work the way they do.

Don't agree.

Multiplication of polynomials involves operations that are clearly defined. When you do (a+bi)^2, you have defined what it means to multiply complex numbers in their construction, without needing to use any such formula from real numbers.

Exponentiation where you have i exponent however, is not defined solely in the complex field.

>I don't understand what you mean by this. Calculus is well defined for functions over any field of size continuum, and that is exactly what <C,+,*,0,1> is in the algebraic view.

Algebraic view is basically the idea of that numbers are only defined if there is some relation that expresses their definition.

For example, 1+2=3, locks all 3 number down. 1 is 3-2, 2 is 3-1 and 3 is 1+2.

pi or e on the other hand, are "something else", because there is no algebraic formula that defines them. To do so you have to invoke the computation of limits, which is an analytic view, not algebraic.*
by deaux | 2026-02-12 16:18:39+00:00
We of course already knew that NBC is now yet another Party mouthpiece in the mold of the People's Daily, but if you needed confirmation just look at this beautifully contradictory opener (emphasis mine)

> WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is dramatically expanding an effort to _revoke U.S. citizenship_ for foreign-born Americans _as it works to curb immigration_

Next up is rounding up citizens into camps as it works to curb immigration, and we all know what comes next as it works to curb immigration.

Well, I hope for the citizens that they're married to card-carrying MAGA members highly ranked in the Party, as this is the only thing that matters and gives one a shield.
How the world will be if P = NP?
by fouadelkh | 2026-02-12 16:19:20+00:00
The P versus NP problem is of theoretical and practical importance in computer science. The question is whether finding a solution to a problem is easy as checking a proposed solution for correctness. If any NP complete problem is in P, then P and NP are the same class of problems.

I found a polynomial time algorithm for the traveling salesman problem (TSP) with distances a and b. This special case of the TSP is NP complete. The algorithm finds an optimal tour in time at most proportional to n^2 and it's much more efficient for finding a tour of a graph (Hamilton cycle). I post on my resolution of P vs NP at https://www.pvsnp.blog

Good and bad consequences will result if the equality is true. What do you think is the most positive about P = NP?
by parineum | 2026-02-12 16:19:30+00:00
> It absolutely boggles my mind that it's legal in the US for a deliverer to just leave a package out in the open for anyone to pick up and consider it "delivered".

The actual answer to your conundrum here is that the package isn't actually considered delivered.

When you order something, it's the seller's responsibility to get it to you. They have the choice of having their deliveries require a signature to be delivered but that costs more so they consider stolen packages as a cost of business.

If a package is stolen, it hasn't been delivered. You report to the company you bought from and they send you a new one. They can negotiate with the shipping company if they are at fault.

The reason for the practice of leaving packages at your door is that it's cheaper to replace the few stolen packages for free than it is to pay a driver to require signatures for each package.

High value or non-replaceable items can be shipped more securely.
by Linux-Fan | 2026-02-12 16:19:30+00:00
This is a powerful technique that has helped me a lot in the past as well, especially for those projects where I rarely progressed on (mostly private stuff, the work topics are more streamlined).

Nowdays in my private projects I often use a combination of the git commit messages and comments left in the code to indicate where to continue. Of course, this is not useful for work, either.

For work I like to use the ticket system and a separate text file and a paper notebook each to a slightly different effect.

The text file is the log what was done and is done per day grouped by ticket, typically ~10 lines for a day. The notebook contains meeting notes, design thoughts, general notes etc. and is very verbose (often six or mor pages per day, A4 paper) but sometimes helps to identify how/why/when a given decision was taken. The ticket contains what might also benefit others such as technical insights, meeting summaries (derived and summarized after the meeting from the paper notebook), summaries of important (design or product) decisions etc.
by bpt3 | 2026-02-12 16:19:33+00:00
Thanks for continuing to prove my point.

The data you provided isn't upsetting, other than it's sad that people are being needlessly killed.

Interacting with insufferable transit "enthusiasts" is exhausting though, especially when they jump into discussions without reading the entire thread (as you did here apparently).

You and your peers seem incapable of doing anything other than attacking, insulting, and looking down upon anyone who isn't as "enlightened" as you, making you zealots, which is why I want absolutely nothing to do with any of you even if I agree with many of your positions.

If you all ever figure out that the first step to improving a situation isn't "try to make everyone who disagrees with me feel bad about themselves via hostility" let me know. I won't be holding my breath.
by jmye | 2026-02-12 16:19:46+00:00
> Is my friend who plays the didgeridoo in his free time now an artist if he declares it's suddenly his full-time occupation?

Is this really a risk, given UBI is generally minimal? Anyone who wants to live on it full-time to support their art, whatever it may be, is welcome to it. It's not like they're sitting back and getting rich, here.

> One example, why exclude people like Geo-scientists who sometimes dont even get any money (except they work for big-oil or the state).

Because "UBI for everyone who deserves it" is a much harder, bigger step, and fighting against small wins because they don't include literally every single outlier case you can think of is absurdly non-productive, not to mention that it's a vacuous counter-argument.