MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sowbug | 2026-02-10 17:33:08+00:00
A lot of us resist the pressure to move to management or technical leadership for just these reasons. Programming people isn't the same as programming computers.

But the LLMs outnumber us. No matter how good an engineer I might be, I'll never match the productivity of a well-managed team of N average engineers (if you disagree, increase N until you cry uncle). Sure, there will be mythical man-month problems. But the optimal N is surely greater than 1, and I'll never be more than 1.

Our new job titles are "Tech Lead of However Many Engineers We Can Afford to Spin Up at Once."
by srean | 2026-02-10 17:33:13+00:00
Being an engineer by training, I never got exposed to much algebra in my courses (beyond the usual high school stuff in high school). In fact did not miss it much either. Tried to learn some algebraic geometry then... oh the horror. For whatever reason, my intuition is very geometric and analytic (in the calculus sense). Even things like counting and combinatorics, they feel weird, like dry flavorless pretzels made of dried husk. Combinatorics is good only when I can use Calculus. Calculus, oh that's different, it's rich savoury umami buttery briskets. Yum.

That's not the interesting part. The interesting part is that I thought everyone is the same, like me.

It was a big and surprising revelation that people love counting or algebra in just the same way I feel about geometry (not the finite kind) and feel awkward in the kind of mathematics that I like.

It's part of the reason I don't at all get the hate that school Calculus gets. It's so intuitive and beautifully geometric, what's not to like. .. that's usually my first reaction. Usually followed by disappointment and sadness -- oh no they are contemplating about throwing such a beautiful part away.
by notpachet | 2026-02-10 17:33:14+00:00
You're saying it's de facto selfish to not have kids? What if someone can't have kids?

In reality everyone who's thinking about having kids exists on a spectrum of what's possible: either it's going to be really easy for you (because you're Elon Musk and you don't give a fuck) or it's going to be borderline impossible (because you're infertile, or you're broke, or whatever).

Just because someone looked at the odds and said "you know what, maybe this isn't a great idea" doesn't make them selfish. Meanwhile you're the one imposing your worldview on them...
by SimianSci | 2026-02-10 17:33:15+00:00
Seems to be an extension of something we are dealing with across multiple parts of many societies.
Monetary pursuit has become a guiding principle for alot of people, and its been revealed that such thinking is leading to major societal consequences.

The current Technocratic idealization of efficiency by those in powerful positions is missing the second order consequences of financializing everything, and it appears to me that we are sacrificing societal necessities like trustworthiness and collective responsbility in favor of more efficient markets.
If no corrective action is taken, we can expect increasing issues.
Show HN: Track your input data and create colourful renders with it
by Xarovin | 2026-02-10 17:33:20+00:00
The first version of MouseTracks I made all the way back in 2017. It got a lot of interest, but I never had the skill to actually complete it. I finally made a start on 2.0 a bit over a year ago, and I've been chipping away at it for fun ever since.

Some key features:
- Track mouse movements, clicks, keyboard, and controller inputs (you can optionally disable any of these).
- Switch profiles depending on what game / application is loaded.
- Live render preview in the GUI.
-It's designed to flawlessly handle multiple monitors and different resolutions.
- Older mouse movements gradually fade to keep focus on the most recent activity.
- Data can be recorded for years and rendered at any time.

It's designed as a "run and forget" type application, where you tick an option to load in the background on startup, and it'll silently keep recording until you're ready to render (it doesn't do that by default though - it just acts as a normal portable application if you don't change any settings).

It's all open source and compatible with Windows/Linux/macOS. The executables are built automatically by GitHub Actions, and there's also instructions on how to build or run locally with Python.

Feel free to ask any questions. I've got a bunch of example renders on the GitHub page which should hopefully demonstrate it properly.
by coffeebeqn | 2026-02-10 17:33:28+00:00
We have MobilePay - looks like it’s made by Vipps. It’s my
preferred payment method these days and works great for things like farmer markets etc. zero fees and you can verify you got the right counterparty in seconds. I also pay e-commerce with it. The technology is not complicated to have an excellent payment system! People who think getting rid of Visa is impossible have not travelled anywhere - I even see people talk about PayPal as a good example smh
by Windchaser | 2026-02-10 17:33:30+00:00
> At some point, you could take 100% of the output of the productive people and it would still not be enough to support retirees et al.

But productivity for productive people is increasing. Is there an assumption that retiree spending is also going to increase to match?

Realistic solutions look something like:
- we increase productivity of the working population
- we lock or decrease the per-year, per-person spending on retirees
- we decrease the % of their lives that people spend retired
by jimnotgym | 2026-02-10 17:33:34+00:00
Intersting you mention Japan. The accounting scandal I mentioned was in Japan! So again, no hard rules.

I suppose my biggest takeaway, is that all I know right now, is every time I was given a dysfunctional department to look after it got better very quickly, both according to staff, colleagues and my seniors. I don't know exactly why, and would love an outside observer, but I have my theories. I'm loath to put bits of it out there because you get a couple of categories of negative response.

1) 'That is just obvious'. All of my best work ever was obvious to everyone afterwards!

2) You are naive. It would never work in x company. You give people too much credit etc.

Yet here I am, unexpectedly at home feeling ill, with 100% confidence that everyone in my extended team is coping just fine, doing as much work as if I was there, and getting along with each other. The only message I got today was one asking how I am. Meanwhile my colleague mangers will be answering emails while on holiday, because their world would fall apart without them.

Again, this is why an outside observer would be so useful, they could testify to the results as well as the methodology.
by convivialdingo | 2026-02-10 17:33:37+00:00
Similar story for myself. It was long and tedious for my mental model to go from Basic, to Pascal, to C, and finally to ASM as a teen.

My recent experience is the opposite. With LLMs, I'm able to delve into the deepest parts of code and systems I never had time to learn. LLMs will get you to the 80% pretty quick - compiles and sometimes even runs.
by vincentjiang | 2026-02-10 17:33:48+00:00
Here's the full story behind this project:

I grew up helping my dad run his factory so I'm very familiar with ERP systems for manufacturing. A few years ago, when I decided to build a startup and I indentified the biggest problems with ERP is the fact they all just serve as data integration and system of records now - there're not enough processes automation. Therefore, I thought it'd be very meaningful to leverage AI to automate business processes such as PO, Price Requisition, and invoices, etc.

3 years in, I realized that every customer in our space (construction and contracting) want process automation, however, AI is simply not good enough - it's too slow, unpredictable, inconsistent, and overall hard to count on. For example, automating a quote by asking AI to insert dynamic variables from a relational database is hit or miss. Asking voice AI to provide training does not capture full breadth of the offline activities. Asking AI to fill out a work order creates a ton of errors.

Later, we decided that though LLM and the foundation models were progressing fast, the dev tools were lacking way behind, particular behind all the hypes and promises these AI applications claimed. The agents are not reliable, consistent, intelligent, evolving, and chances are the market would demand more apps to keep the party going.

Therefore, we went full open-source. The mission we have in mind is really to "generate reliable agents that can run business processes autonomously". We see all this hype about general computer use (GCUs) and can't help but making an opposing argument - that the AI agents need guardrails, more defined paths, and most importantly consistent results just like a human would need

- Proactive Reasoning (anticipating future needs or consequences)

- Memory & Experience (events affecting himself/herself)

- Judgment (based on experience)

- Tools & Skills (capabilities to execute)

- Reactive Adaptiveness (handling immediate roadblocks)

- Contextual Communication (articulating intent and collaborating with others)

- Character & Traits (consistent behavioral biases: Risk profile, Integrity, Persistence)

The project seems to have gained a bit of a traction so far and I hope that you can fork it and tell the community what's missing and what we should be working on. I deeply thank you because the it's truly painful to build and deploy these one-off agents that don't get utilized. (https://github.com/adenhq/hive).
by hyperman1 | 2026-02-10 17:33:50+00:00
No. I remember a phone app ( Whatsapp?) doggedly supporting every godforsaken phone, even the nokias with the zillion incompatible Java versions. A developer should go where the customers are.

What does help is an industry accepted benchmark, easily ran by everyone. I remember browser css being all over the place, until that whatsitsname benchmark (with the smiley face) demonstrated which emperors had no clothes. Everyone could surf to the test and check how well their favorite browser did. Scores went up quickly, and today, css is in a lot better shape.
by WhompingWindows | 2026-02-10 17:34:01+00:00
It's actually not a good trade at all, you need a balanced population pyramid if you want a functional economy in the future. The housing stock is behind due to financial crisis in 2007, as well as lots of other factors, and population decrease won't solve most of those.

In fact, declining population could make the housing problem worse, if there's far fewer workers to make the new housing.
by SahAssar | 2026-02-10 17:34:03+00:00
But saying that 200 million and 30 are in the same ballpark is not true in 99.99% of contexts.

Even 50k and 30 I would not say are in the same ballpark. I've worked for major corps and of course a cost saving of 50k/month would not register for the overall company but it probably would for my team. A saving of 30/month is probably not worth spending any considerable amount of time on in most non-personal contexts.
by pimterry | 2026-02-10 17:34:10+00:00
> “Breakup” seems a bit exaggerated considering the % of payment volume which might switch to the new system.

Brazil introduced Pix in 2019, it's now the most used payment method for all transactions nationwide, ahead of both cards & cash.

India introduced UPI in 2016, it now handles >80% of digital payments there, and handles more transactions a day than Visa does worldwide.

It's totally plausible to me that a similar replacement could overtake cards completely within a decade. The lack of cross-border support means "Pay with Bizum" is a niche feature that's only useful in Spain, but if "Pay with Wero" becomes an instant & ~free payment method that works for hundreds of millions of users then it's a very different ballgame.
by louiereederson | 2026-02-10 17:34:18+00:00
At some point AI may deliver the level of net economic benefit you reference, but it's not entirely clear that we're there yet.

Right now much of the direct monetization occurs via OpenAI and Anthropic, who together have around $30B in annualized revenue. They are burning cash like crazy, though admittedly have potentially sustainable unit economics (gross margins around 40-60% before revenue share).

However, they need to spend a huge chunk of revenue on training. OpenAI spent something like $9b on training against around $13-14b in rev in 2025 (different from annualized rev) according to The Information. Anthropic's mix is supposed to be similar. Also implies a lot (maybe majority) of their compute spend is training.

If scaling laws falter, what happens to training spending? What happens to competitive degree of differentiation given Chinese open source models are a few months behind frontier? Then what happens to margins? It is very fragile.
by AlienRobot | 2026-02-10 17:34:40+00:00
You are conflating different things. Anonymous or not, people can post hate on the Internet. That's a question of moderation.

Personally I think it would be easier to just ban anything that is political altogether. Bluesky for example is 90% politics. Just because something can be allowed in some spaces on the Internet that doesn't mean it should be allowed on every single space. No reason for the "funny short video" platform to become a news/opinion essay platform.
by bluegatty | 2026-02-10 17:35:01+00:00
This is a fine thought, I'm reluctant about it. It could work, I don't think it's obvious. It's very, very hard to know what to train for and not, and this still leaves the 'fact v. skill' problem - even LORA won't enable a model to remember your favourite lunch place.

This is kind of an existential problem with context I think. Maybe we need new architectures.
by tomtom1337 | 2026-02-10 17:35:08+00:00
Definitely do not parse each row into eg pydantic models. You lose the entire performance benefit of pandas / polars by doing this.

If you need it, use a dataframe validation library to ensure that values are within certain ranges.

There are not yet good, fast implementations of proper types in Python dataframes (or databases for that matter) that I am aware of.
by tyushk | 2026-02-10 17:35:30+00:00
I don't think local as it stands with browsers will take off simply from the lead time (of downloading the model), but a new web API for LLMs could change that. Some standard API to communicate with the user's preferred model, abstracting over local inference (like what Chrome does with Gemini Nano (?)) and remote inference (LM Studio or calling out to a provider). This way, every site that wants a language model just has to ask the browser for it, and they'd share weights on-disk across sites.
by kubanczyk | 2026-02-10 17:35:32+00:00
Yes. But crackpots are still vital.

Let me put it this way. Once upon a time people didn't know about solar eclipse. But then a day came when a certain somebody was instantly promoted to a Lead Staff Senior Astronomer, just because they predicted to the hour that the sun is going to disappear.

Well, but think about the field just one day before that:

- maybe 10 theories that said "it's just a reformulation/refactoring, nothing to see here, all business as usual, no new predictions, very safe for the author",

- maybe 100 crackpot theories. Undoubtedly, unashamedly crackpot, with wild predictions all over. Of which 99% were in fact pure trash, so, retrospectively, people were rightfully considering them trash. Yet 1 was the key to progress.
by fhdkweig | 2026-02-10 17:35:36+00:00
> Whatever they come up with, I hope it doesn't tie you to a Google or Apple smartphone.

I would also hope so, that is the entire point. The reason they are scrambling right now is because Starlink just shut off all of Russia. Because Starlink was so cheap and easy (and stable for the last 4 years of the war), a lot of people in Russia stopped using any other form of internet access. And while all of Europe is happy to see Russia go away, they are concerned that the same can be done to them at a whim by any number of American companies. So they are trying to quickly create alternatives to anything American including software providers like Microsoft 360.

As for credit cards, it is not as if there is something intrinsically American in credit card processing. They can just as easily create a new system that uses the same protocols as Visa and Mastercard.

Having your entire economy dependent on a company you don't control in a country you don't control was considered acceptable for as long as a concept of "allies" existed. That is not the world we are living in right now.
by sebringj | 2026-02-10 17:35:41+00:00
ya, for real, my boss was like let's do e2e testing with AI, look for solutions out there... then like 2 days later he's like wtf is this bill, and i was like you wanted that right? Was using vision calls in azure foundry and was like over 100 bucks or something just in 2 days of me setting it up and trying it out with all the test cases it had.
by aytuakarlar | 2026-02-10 17:35:42+00:00
Great questions! Thats exact trade-offs we're navigating.
Re: Intent-aware exceptions:
CSL uses hierarchical policy composition for this. Example from our banking case study:
CSL:

DOMAIN BankingGuard {

VARIABLES {
action: {"TRANSFER", "WITHDRAW", "DEPOSIT"}
amount: 0..100000
country: {"TR", "US", "EU", "NK"}
is_vip: {"TRUE", "FALSE"}
kyc_level: 0..5
risk_score: 0..1
device_trust: 0..1
}

// Hard boundary: never flexible
STATE_CONSTRAINT no_sanctioned_country {
WHEN country == country
THEN country MUST NOT BE "NK"
}

// Soft boundaries: context-dependent
STATE_CONSTRAINT transfer_limit_non_vip {
WHEN action == "TRANSFER" AND is_vip == "FALSE"
THEN amount <= 1000
}

STATE_CONSTRAINT transfer_limit_vip {
WHEN action == "TRANSFER" AND is_vip == "TRUE"
THEN amount <= 10000
}

// Multi-dimensional guards (amount + device trust)
STATE_CONSTRAINT device_trust_for_medium_transfer {
WHEN action == "TRANSFER" AND amount > 300
THEN device_trust >= 0.7
}

}

Variables like is_vip, risk_score, device_trust are injected at runtime by your application logic, not inferred by the LLM. The LangChain integration looks like:

safe_tools = guard_tools(
tools=[transfer_tool],
guard=guard,
inject={
"is_vip": current_user.tier == "VIP", # From auth
"risk_score": fraud_model.score(context), # From ML model
"device_trust": session.device_score, # From fingerprinting
"country": geoip.lookup(ip)
}
)

So the agent can't "decide" it's VIP or that the device is trusted. Those come from external systems. The policy just enforces the combinations. Your database/logging example: You'd add a purpose variable and carve out:

STATE_CONSTRAINT no_user_table_writes {
WHEN action == "WRITE" AND table == "users"
THEN purpose MUST BE "AUDIT_LOG"
}

If you don't inject enough context, rules become binary (allow/deny). If you inject too much, the policy becomes a replica of your business logic. We're finding the sweet spot is 6-10 context variables that encode the "security-critical dimensions" (user tier, risk, trust, geography).

Re: Z3 performance: Z3 runs at compile-time, not runtime. The workflow is:
Policy compilation (once): Z3 proves logical consistency → generates pure Python functors
Runtime (per request): Functor evaluation only, no symbolic solver
Typical policy (<20 constraints): <1ms per evaluation.
We haven't stress-tested 100+ concurrent yet (Alpha), but since runtime is stateless Python, it should scale horizontally. The bottleneck would be the LangChain overhead, not CSL.
Your concern about permissiveness is spot-on. We're addressing this in Phase 2 (TLA+) by adding temporal logic: instead of "block all DB writes," you can express "allow writes if preceded by read within 5 actions." This gives you state-aware permissions without making rules combinatorially complex.
The current Z3 engine is intentionally conservative. TLA+ will add the flexibility production systems need.
Appreciate the pushback—this is exactly the feedback we need at Alpha stage. If you have a specific use case in mind, I'd love to test CSL against it.
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-10 17:35:42+00:00
It does but there aren't really any SEPA transfer point of sales. It's too asynchronous. You always use card or cash there. SEPA transfer can sometimes be used when paying for things asynchronously online, and they won't ship the item until they receive the money.

SEPA instant transfers aren't guaranteed instant as they might still be withheld for fraud checks.
by stingraycharles | 2026-02-10 17:35:50+00:00
That really doesn’t matter a lot. The reason why it’s important for AIs to follow these rules is that it’s important for them to operate within a constrained set of rules. You can’t guarantee that programmatically, so you try to prove that it can be done empirically as a proxy.

AIs can be used and abused in ways that are entirely different from humans, and that creates a liability.

I think it’s going to be very difficult to categorically prevent these types of issues, unless someone is able to integrate some truly binary logic into LLM systems. Which is nearly impossible, almost by definition of what LLMs are.
by ShaYn087 | 2026-02-10 17:35:58+00:00
I contributed by identifying and reproducing an onboarding blocker where Hive examples could not be executed from a clean clone.

Issue: Running example scripts failed due to unresolved internal imports, since the repository was not installable as a package and no supported execution path was documented (issue #3207).

What I did: I reproduced the failure on a clean environment, documented clear reproduction steps, and provided a minimal fix so examples could run out of the box.

Why it matters: First-time users should be able to clone a repo and run an example immediately. Fixing this reduces onboarding friction and makes Hive easier to evaluate and contribute to.
by nmeofthestate | 2026-02-10 17:36:20+00:00
My YT Shorts experience: absent-mindedly watch a few, eventually think "damn, these things suck", tap the "show fewer shorts" link to reduce the chance of absent-mindedly clicking on them again soon. The format, with all its annoying little stylistic cliches, is just too irritating to be addictive. (modern Facebook is even more absurdly un-addictive).
by glasss | 2026-02-10 17:36:21+00:00
Yes but in my fantasy world I'm the king because my morals and opinions are best for society. And of course I'll always be reasonable and never have a bad day or let my personal interests take priority over the good of my subjects.

Obviously this is just wishful thinking about governance that people have been saying for milennia. Socrates said philosophers should of course be kings / the ruling class.

There's no simple solution to creating a harmonious society, which of course leads people today and from thousands of years ago to say "Gee, wouldn't it just be nice if everyone listened to me about how to act and what to do when people get out line?". It's a fantasy, and a reminder that anyone wanting a benevolent dictator or to give up their responsibility of being a good citizen shouldn't be taken seriously.

But I do pinky promise I would be a good king if everyone wanted to give me a try.
by trashb | 2026-02-10 17:36:27+00:00
> We as a society need to do something about the unprecedented levels of porn addiction in today's youth. "Enter your date of birth" prompts are performative and do nothing.

I agree, however show your ID is just a "Enter your date of birth" prompt with obfuscation.

Buying alcohol is physical and therefore has some advantages, for example you can be sure that your ID is not copied/sold as you are there and get it back.

In another comment the idea was presented to make a "I am adult" card you can buy (physical like the alcohol). I think that would work a lot better than upload your government id and face to random app/website.

Maybe I'm old school but I was always told "don't make a copy of your ID" by the government, a photo was included in that definition.