MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rxw0lf | 2026-02-05 16:02:19+00:00
Because while these new grads and less experienced people maybe quite intelligent, in general they are less capable of dealing with or managing anything properly. I am 54 I go back and forth between an IC and director level management at will.

As an IC, all of my designs just simply work without any drama. What happens in this scenario is that as soon as they learn what they needed to learn from me I am usually out. Also there seems to be some concept of drama and running around like a chicken with your head cut off is "fun" and I am a buzz kill in this situation.

As a manager I spend a lot of my time just making sure that everybody is set up for success as nobody seems to be able to advocate for themselves. Their communication is lacking they don't understand their audience or how to delegate. In these roles I am retained as long as I wish.

Smart doesn't equal knowledgeable and smart doesn't equal efficient. It's that simple. These are things best taught through experience.
by nicklucking | 2026-02-05 16:03:07+00:00
Exactly this and its a blind spot in the article. LLM's / orchestrated specialist agents can query SOP's, policy docs, compliance docs. Having humans build these artifacts in code isn't really needed at this point. Maybe if there is an interim format LLM's can use that save tokens / time / etc. Wouldn't assume that looks exactly like exactly what human coders would have used the past though.
by Aromasin | 2026-02-05 16:03:11+00:00
If this were cyclical, I'd be inclined to agree, but this seems to be more of a wave. I also think the push back is more than just one against rented compute. It is tied to a societal ennui that comes from the feeling that we no longer own anything, be it music, housing, movies, land, tools, phones, or cars. Everything is moving to either being rented or on credit. There's a push back against this self-made feudal revival, and that scales all the way from individuals through to corporations; in this case, against the idea that a mega-corporation gets to decide how and when you get to use your compute, and at what variable price.
by deaux | 2026-02-05 16:03:22+00:00
That's the setup you want for serious work yes, so probably $60kish all-in(?). Which is a big chunk of money for an individual, but potentially quite reasonable for a company. Being able to get effectively _frontier-level local performance_ for that money was completely unthinkable so far. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Deepseek R1 hardware requirements were far costlier on release, and it had a much bigger gap to market lead than Kimi K2.5. If this trend continues the big 3 are absolutely finished when it comes to enterprise and they'll only have consumer left. Altman and Amodei will be praying to the gods that China doesn't keep this rate of performance/$ improvement up while also releasing all as open weights.
by brazzy | 2026-02-05 16:03:25+00:00
"Code" is absolutely the wrong word here. There's nothing executable about it.

It's a model. And it will inevitably be incomplete and out of data, because the map is not the territory[1]

Of course, the same is true about the unstructured documents he laments, and whatever is done with those documents could probably sped up a lot this way, probably enough to justify the cost of building and maintaining it.

But the more advanced use cases he imagines run a big risk of making very costly decisions based on an incomplete or outdated model.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation
by swed420 | 2026-02-05 16:03:43+00:00
Just one guess, but a lot of memory formation happens during various sleep cycle(s). Persistent cannabis use is commonly associated with lack of dreaming, which suggests it interferes with normal sleep cycles.

I was experiencing lack of dreaming after some time of daily use, and was able to regain my ability to consistently dream (and remember them) by simply ceasing cannabis use by 5pm each day. I don't experience noticeable problems with memory, but YMMV.
by lubujackson | 2026-02-05 16:03:51+00:00
I am not against vibe coding at all, I just don't think people understand how shaky the foundation is. Software wants to be modified. With enough modifications the disconnect between the code as it is imagined and the code in reality becomes too arduous of a distance to bridge.

The current solution is to simply reroll the whole project and let the LLM rebuild everything with new knowledge. This is fine until you have real data, users and processes built on top of your project.

Maybe you can get away with doing that for a while, but tech debt needs to be paid down one way or another. Either someone makes sense of the code, or you build so much natural language scaffolding to keep the ship afloat that you end up putting in more human effort than just having someone codify it.

We are definitely headed toward a future where we have lots of these Frankenstein projects in the wild, pulling down millions in ARR but teetering in the breeze. You can definitely do this, but "a codebase always pays its debts."
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-02-05 16:03:56+00:00
You're way less jaded than me.

I give this less than 2yr before being embroiled in a revenue enforcement scandal.

There's a TON of stuff you can do from the air that you can't do with a government employee on foot because of that pesky constitution and stuff like fences and locked gates. Being able to just look in any back yard at will without waiting for the annual aerial survey is too lucrative to resist the temptation.
by sjmaplesec | 2026-02-05 16:04:05+00:00
This resonates with my experience: we have dozens of internal “playbooks” and prompt snippets floating around, and nobody knows which ones still work after model changes. If you can make “skill quality” visible over time (regressions, drift), that’s valuable. Do you have a CI integration where you can pin a skill version and fail builds if eval scores drop?
by dasil003 | 2026-02-05 16:04:18+00:00
Yes I remember those days! I joined a startup whose first product was a Facebook app in 2007. We were right around the corner from Facebook HQ on Forest and High, and we were alpha partners for the launch of Pages. We created a feature film streaming app (the learning was: no one watches 100-minute videos on Facebook). While we never intended to be a Facebook-app company, technically it was the first thing we launched.

Fast forward 18 years, and the company is going strong with millions of subscribers and distributing Oscar winning films such as Demi Moore’s The Substance.
by WillAdams | 2026-02-05 16:04:21+00:00
There were also

- TeXview.app which at least inspired the award-winning TeXshop.app

- Altsys Virtuoso which became Macromedia Freehand (having been created as a successor to Freehand 3) --- these days one can use Cenon https://cenon.info/ (but it's nowhere near as nice/featureful)

- WriteNow.app --- while this was also a Mac application, the NeXT implementation was my favourite --- WN was probably the last major commercial app written in Assembly (~100,000 lines)

Still sad my NeXT Cube stopped booting up....
by rbshamsu | 2026-02-05 16:04:26+00:00
The idea for Commissioned started taking shape during a hackathon for Software Engineers that me and Gabe participated in. And like many of the best ideas that come out of hackathons, it wasn’t the project we submitted but a product of a problem we noticed. Out of all the dozens of impressive projects at that AI themed hackathon, we were the only ones using fine-tuning.

That was quite surprising to us because we knew how valuable it can be. Even in the hackathon, our project’s eligibility model had gotten a 35% boost in accuracy from fine-tuning. But something else also became obvious: fine-tuning is intimidating even for seasoned developers.

When we looked closer, the reasons became clear. People experimenting with fine-tuning kept running into daunting data formatting requirements, brittle pipelines, and painful infrastructure setup. These time-consuming, low-level tasks have shaped the perception of fine-tuning as something slow, expensive, and reserved for large companies with dedicated ML teams.

We built Commissioned to change that. We want marketers to fine-tune models that write in their voice without having to know what a JSONL is. We want ops teams to get better labeling and classification models by simply uploading a CSV. And we want developers to focus on building differentiated products instead of rewriting the same integration logic for every provider.

Our goal is simple: make fine-tuning accessible enough that anyone can experience the value it can bring in minutes not weeks.
by RobMurray | 2026-02-05 16:04:26+00:00
I've been using tuist plus codex cli and vscode. only using Xcode for running and debugging. I would love to get rid of xcode entirely. The tuist plus xcode project is a tiny shim - the rest of the app is in spm packages.

Tuist generates the code project from a simple swift confiuration file similar to Package.swift. I don't know why apple can't just throw away the proprietary and ugly Xcode project files and provide a sane build system that would work in any IDE, on the command line, in CI and now with AI agents.

They could open up the instruments format while they are at it for the same reason, do they really gain anything by making it proprietary?
by ibejoeb | 2026-02-05 16:04:31+00:00
Dead on. Recently, 3 and 4 have been compelling. Cloud costs have rocketed up. I started my casual transition to co-lo 2 years ago and just in december finished everything. I have more capacity at about 30% of the cost. If you go option 3, you even get the benefit of 6+ month retro pricing for RAM/storage. I'm running all DDR4, but I have so much of it I don't know what to do with it.

The flip side is that compliance is a little more involved. Rather than, say, carve out a whole swathe of SOC-2 ops, I have to coordinate some controls. It's not a lot, and it's still a lot lighter than I used to do 10+ years ago. Just something to consider.
by jaffa2 | 2026-02-05 16:05:02+00:00
Hmm. I can't actually find the link to start using it to try it out. ? It offers a Free Demo that is behind some kind of details harvesting form. I don't want a demo. Is this usable enough to move a small (6 people) team away from google sheets ? hard to say since i can't test it and it doesn't say what the cost is. Stop hiding your shit behind hard to navigate/use/privacy invading bullshit. Just let us use the stuff. If you must gimp it, do it in a way that doesn't stop us using it first.
by ajb | 2026-02-05 16:05:07+00:00
I used to have colleagues who literally learned to program on punched card machines. As in they wrote a program on paper in symbolic assembler, manually converted it to machine code, punched the machine code onto a card,and then carried the cards to the nearby university so that they could run their school homework program.

They would be amused by the idea that this wasn't computing.

Punched cards store bits. Bits can store symbols.
by runjake | 2026-02-05 16:05:10+00:00
> obviously not everyone thinks ISPs are evil, and that is what interests me. why do some people think they are and what motivations lead them to that belief?

This is all going to sound cynical but I'm just trying to relay facts.

For residential:

- Consistently rising rates

- Service outages and degradations with no or terse notifications

- Data rates below what's advertised

Again the goal is to maximize profits by providing just enough quality that you maintain an acceptable amount of customers. If you provide excellent, or even good service, that is viewed as wasting profits away.

For commercial tier 1/2 ISP, the above does not apply, because your company dies if you do those.

> why do you think an ISP that offers exceptional service at remarkably low rates would eventually fail or run out of funds?

Because the margins are thin. If you survive 5-10 years with a decent customer base, you're pretty likely to get acquired, though.

> if such a company gets acquired by another firm and its focus shifts back to profit, would you say that its motivation was not profit before it was acquired?

The motivate before was certainly profit, but also quality of service. Once an ISP gets acquired by a big ISP or by an equity firm, the goal is to maximize profit.

These buyers are in the "profit" game, not the "provide good Internet service" game.

Hope that helps.

My background is that I worked for a startup ISP a while ago, work with and talk with people and engineers who run all sizes of ISPs every day.
by Yizahi | 2026-02-05 16:05:41+00:00
As an anecdote example, I've never ever accessed said Factbook, but I've heard about it enough times to remember that such thing exists and that USA govt. is collecting a relatively objective fact list. So yeah, it was a tiny bit of soft power of sorts. It showed that USA cares about outside world, in some way at least.

PS: and I live in Eastern Europe, far far away from the USA.
by cpursley | 2026-02-05 16:05:51+00:00
In 2026, Postgres and it's ecosystem just keep getting better with the recent example of pg_textsearch (BM25). A few years ago a gist of mine blew up on hacker news (gist: https://gist.github.com/cpursley/c8fb81fe8a7e5df038158bdfe0f... thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39273954). Thought I'd turn the philosophy into a website with an easy to search directory of tools and extensions.
by nomagicbullet | 2026-02-05 16:05:57+00:00
This is a tough one in my opinion because the content of the article is valuable. Yes while reading it i noticed several AI tells. Almost like hearing a record scratch every other paragraph. But I was interested in the content so I kept reading mostly trying to ignore the "noise".
The problem I fear is that with enough AI generated content around, I will become desensitized to that record scratching.
Eventually between over-exposure, those who can't recognize the tells, people copying the writing they see..., we might have to accept what might become a prevalent new style of writing.
by iainctduncan | 2026-02-05 16:06:04+00:00
That I don't know, but the s7 author, Bill Schottstaedt (who I will ping about this) is very helpful on the email list and is deeply, deeply knowledgeable about Lisp, so you could definitely ask there!

https://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/cmdist

In my context, I have rigged up a REPL in Max, so I wind up using that instead. (Which is freaking awesome, because I can script all of Max from my vim buffers.)
by TheCoelacanth | 2026-02-05 16:06:21+00:00
> Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources, and to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources and primary sources. Secondary or tertiary sources are needed to establish the topic's notability and avoid novel interpretations of primary sources. All analyses and interpretive or synthetic claims about primary sources must be referenced to a secondary or tertiary source and must not be an original analysis of the primary-source material by Wikipedia editors.

Primary sources aren't completely disallowed, but they are definitely discouraged.
by MisterTea | 2026-02-05 16:07:03+00:00
> which one is it?

Which what? I honestly don't understand what the comparison is or what is misunderstood as there is nothing to misunderstand - it's a proprietary screw designed to defeat self/unlicensed repair - FULL STOP. Fuck the technical merit. And the point of mentioning that Chinese factories can produce cheap knock-offs is to demonstrate how absurd of a anti-consumer measure this is.
by alexsmolen | 2026-02-05 16:07:30+00:00
I love this idea despite the real world operational challenges - most people with governance responsibilities in organizations don't want to code, and code is often too precise to model messy social/organizational context without constant tweaking, tending, and exception management.

I'm an advocate for bringing software culture to GRC, or as it's sometimes called “GRC Engineering”. While there are plenty of products to automate evidence generation for auditors, the underlying policies and documents that they prescribe are usually still old-school Word/PDF-style boilerplate junk.

I'm working on an open source project for security policies/processes/standards that map back to underlying frameworks (e.g. SOC 2, GDPR, ISO 27001, etc.) Docs are Markdown with YAML frontmatter metadata, interlinks generated automatically, site is published via GitHub actions.

The code is at https://github.com/engseclabs/graphgrc, and you can see an example published site here https://graphgrc.engseclabs.com.

Would love to know if others find it useful or have built similar systems.
by stego-tech | 2026-02-05 16:07:45+00:00
Just a genuinely excellent essay written to a broader technical audience than simply those software engineers who live in the guts of databases optimizing hyper-specific edge-cases (and no disrespect to you amazingly talented people, but man your essays can be very chewy reads sometimes). I hope the OP’s got some caching ready, because this is going to get shared.
by rixed | 2026-02-05 16:08:04+00:00
This industry is funny.

In one hand, one is reminded on a daily basis of the importance of security, of strictly adhering to best practices, of memory safety, password strength, multi factor authentication and complex login schemes, end to end encryption and TLS everywhere, quick certificate rotation, VPNs, sandboxes, you name it.

On the other hand, it has become standard practice to automatically download new software that will automatically download new software etc, to run MiTM boxes and opaque agents on any devices, to send all communication to slack and all code to anthropic in near real time...

I would like to believe that those trends come from different places, but that's not my observation.
by martinald | 2026-02-05 16:08:13+00:00
Hey Robin, big fan of this map, congrats on getting front page on HN :).

Two suggestions/questions if you may:

1) Would be good to see how many MW each boundary can handle, not just %? Btw, I can't see the number for the south east england boundary.

2) Great job on the battery info. I'm seeing some battery storage is curtailed. How is that possible? Please don't tell me that we are paying batteries to _not_ export :/?
by sgarland | 2026-02-05 16:09:30+00:00
The person I replied to said they wanted an open-source reimplementation of Aurora. My point - which was probably poorly-worded, or just implied - was that there's a lot of work that goes into something like that, and if you can't put the pieces together on your own, you probably shouldn't be running it for anything you can't afford downtime on.

Managed services have a clear value proposition. I personally think they're grossly overpriced, but I understand the appeal. Asking for that experience but also free / cheap doesn't make any sense.
by deaux | 2026-02-05 16:09:30+00:00
I called one out here recently with very obvious evidence - clear LLM comments on entirely different posts 35 seconds apart with plenty of hallmarks - but soon got a reply "I'm not a bot, how unfair!". Duh, most of them are approved/generated manually, doesn't mean it wasn't directly copy-pasted from an LLM without even looking at it.
by O1111OOO | 2026-02-05 16:09:37+00:00
When it comes to politics and studies... We all should know by now to research those sources too, right?

"The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit[5] conservative think tank."

It is a report generated by this conservative organization (that presumably gets donations from many other conservatives). Is there a chance that the report itself is suspect?
I built an AI agent that automatically commented on HN. Here's what I learned
by Soerensen | 2026-02-05 16:10:11+00:00
I've been running an experiment: an AI agent (Claude) that automatically browses Hacker News, finds relevant posts matching my expertise (startups, email marketing, SaaS), writes substantive comments, and posts them.

The system uses browser automation (Playwright) to navigate HN, read posts, decide which ones to engage with, draft comments in my writing style and submit them. It tracks what it's posted to avoid duplicates and sends me Slack notifications for each comment so I can check it.

I ran this for a few days. Some comments got decent upvotes (20+). Then someone called me out - they noticed my comments were posted exactly 45 seconds apart across different threads. Obviously a bot pattern. It would have been easy to build out a guardrail for this, create a new account, and make the agent run again. Instead, I'm stopping this experiment and would like to start a discussion with the HN community:

I'm genuinely curious how people feel about this. Here's my attempt to steelman both sides:

The case for allowing it:
The comments provided genuine value. They were upvoted, sparked discussions, and answered questions helpfully. This is effectively generating new synthetic training data. Future models will learn from these interactions. If the output is indistinguishable from a thoughtful human comment, does the source matter?

The case against:
It undermines trust. HN's value comes from authentic human discourse, not optimized engagement. If everyone did this, HN becomes a battlefield of competing AI agents, drowning out real humans. The comments may be "valuable" but they're also calculated - optimizing for karma, not genuine contribution. It degrades the social contract that makes online communities work.

As said, I won't be posting comments this way anymore. But to be honest, that doesn't really matter. If I was able to do this, anyone is. The genie is out of the bottle - this is trivially easy to build.

What can HN (and other forums) do to detect/prevent this?

I feel like we have a limited time window to figure this out. If it's ignored for long enough, AI generated comments _will_ become indistinguishable from human generated ones. I don't think there's a turning back after that.
by fhd2 | 2026-02-05 16:10:14+00:00
I can't count the times I've told clients and prospects to _not_ hire us to build something they wanted. Because they could just use off the shelf solutions that were cheaper financially, at least in the short to mid term, and much, much cheaper in terms of opportunity costs. I struggle to put even billed hours into something that doesn't make sense to me.

Of course some overdo it. I've seen companies with more random SaaS tools than staff, connected with shaky Zapier workflows, manual processes, or not at all. No backups, no sense of risks, just YOLOing. That's OK in some cases, in others really not.

I suppose it does need some engineering thinking to find the right things and employ them in a good way. Unfortunately even developers commonly lack that.
by lun3x | 2026-02-05 16:10:33+00:00
Tried it out now with SQLite to see what it does with difficult migrations, like adding a foreign key constraint to an existing table. Looks like it just generates invalid migrations, eg:

`ALTER TABLE books ADD CONSTRAINT fk_books_author FOREIGN KEY (author_id) REFERENCES authors (id)`

Which is not valid in SQLite (https://www.sqlite.org/lang_altertable.html)
by IsTom | 2026-02-05 16:10:37+00:00
It's about queueing work, not running all these queries at the same time. You can run pgbouncer or you can have a pool on your backend. Having more connections won't make it go faster, so that really seems like a low-priority thing for postgres to me. Even if you integrated pooling into postgres the overhead of auth would be still taking time for small queries anyway.
by wheeleeo | 2026-02-05 16:11:00+00:00
Solo founder, finance background. I built a full accounting system as an MCP server. 17 tools covering double-entry bookkeeping, multi-company support, bank reconciliation, and financial reports. All data stays local in SQLite.

Claude is the UI layer. The accounting logic is deterministic.

No dashboard, no buttons. You just talk to your books.

Happy to answer questions.