MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by robocat | 2026-02-19 19:12:58+00:00
You won't be able to in the future unless you are very wealthy.

Countries cannot afford the benefits and healthcare promised to retirees. So governments are getting more grabby. That pattern seems to be occurring in many countries.

New Zealand example: when you are in nursing or elderly care you must spend all your savings and sell your home. The retirement age also needs to increase - one fund suggested to 70+ https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/586737/retirement-age-wi...

Netherlands example: new capital tax 36% rate. A capital growth tax (vermogensaanwasbelasting) applies to stocks, bonds, savings, and cryptocurrencies. A separate capital gains tax applies to real estate and startup shares, taxing only upon sale.

US: see medical debts.

Articles usually talk about savings as though you can bank some funds while working, earn interest, and withdraw the savings later.

Don't deceive yourself thinking like that.

"Savings" cannot work in the future due to demographic issues (especially due to people living longer) even if you saw it work in the past.

Look at how many workers support one retiree. In New Zealand it used to be 7 workers to one retiree, and in the future it looks like 2 workers to 1 retiree.

This is a core issue for anyone below retirement age. Not only do we deceive ourselves about solutions, we are deceived by articles and history.
by coldtea | 2026-02-19 19:13:38+00:00
>One of the bedrocks of a startup economy is that the rule of law applies equally to the powerful and to the less powerful.

Yes, as the saying goes, the law equally forbids and punishes the poor and the rich if they sleep in the park or under a bridge.

>We wouldn't have Apple, Netflix, or so many other Bay Area giants without the equal application of law.

US has nowhere near "equal application of law", and yet it has these companies.

In fact, if it did have "equal application of law", those companies would have dead, as they get away with things that, if a smaller company or private business did, they'd have the book thrown at them.

We wouldn't have Apple, Netflix, or so many other Bay Area giants without the equal application of law.
by mindcrime | 2026-02-19 19:13:41+00:00
probably won’t want to use software you had an LLM write up when they could have just done it themselves to meet their exact need

Sure... to a point. But realistically, the "use an LLM to write it yourself" approach still entails costs, both up-front and on-going, even if the cost may be much less than in the past. There's still reason to use software that's provided "off the shelf", and to some extent there's reason to look at it from a "I don't care how you wrote it, as long as it works" mindset.

came from a bit of innovation that LLMs are incapable of.

I think you're making an overly binary distinction on something that is more of a continuum, vis-a-vis "written by human vs written by LLM". There's a middle ground of "written by human and LLM together". I mean, the people building stuff using something like SpecKit or OpenSpec still spend a lot of time up-front defining the tech stack, requirements, features, guardrails, etc. of their project, and iterating on the generated code. Some probably even still hand tune some of the generated code. So should we reject their projects just because they used an LLM at all, or ?? I don't know. At least for me, that might be a step further than I'd go.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-02-19 19:13:52+00:00
The truth is now that nobody will bother to read anything you write AI or not mostly, creating things is like buying a lottery ticket in terms of audience. Creating something lovingly by hand and pouring countless hours into it is like a golden lottery ticket that has 20x odds, but if it took 50x longer to produce, you're getting significantly outperformed by people who just spam B+ content.
by fdefitte | 2026-02-19 19:13:57+00:00
The benchmark jumps are impressive but the real question is whether Gemini can stop being so aggressively helpful. Every time I use it for coding it refactors stuff I didn't ask it to touch. Claude has the opposite problem where it sometimes does too little. Feels like nobody has nailed the "do exactly what I asked, nothing more" sweet spot yet.
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2026-02-19 19:14:00+00:00
I will say that I am slowly becoming a convert to 'talk to data' approach. Still, it is not without its flaws. At the end of the day, it still requires the user to update stuff and, from experience, this is where I fail and render all those project apps useless..for me specifically.

It sucks, because it sounds like what I really need is for someone to track it for me so that i can just review it if needed.
by tyre | 2026-02-19 19:14:02+00:00
Okay at the same time they had the daughter of one of those autocrats fairly recently as PM, who then resigned due to influence peddling by a religious advisor (and did crazy things like her daughter didn’t go to class yet got amazing grades because her teachers were made to do her work, which she posted about on social media.)

They’re very much not over those players.
by rickandmorty99 | 2026-02-19 19:14:03+00:00
I'm building an education platform. 95% is vibe coded. What isn't vibe coded though is the content. AI is really uninspiring with how to teach technical subjects. Also, the full UX? I do that. Marketing plan? 90% is me.

But AI does the code. Well... usually.

People call my project creative. Some are actually using it.

I feel many technical things aren't really technical things they are simply a problem where "have a web app" is part of the solution but the real part of the solution is in the content and the interaction design of it, not in how you solved the challenge technically.
by max8539 | 2026-02-19 19:14:19+00:00
Before vibe coding, I was always interested in trying different new things. I’d spend a few days researching and building some prototypes, but very few of them survived and were actually finished, at least in a beta state. Most of them I left non-working, just enough to satisfy my curiosity about the topic before moving on to the next interesting one.

Now, these days, it’s basically enough to use agent programming to handle all the boring parts and deliver a finished project to the public.

LLMs have essentially broken the natural selection of pet projects and allow even bad or not very interesting ideas to survive, ideas that would never have been shown to anyone under the pre-agent development cycle.

So it’s not that LLMs make programming boring, they’ve allowed boring projects to survive. They’ve also boosted the production of non-boring ones, but they’re just rarer in the overall amount of products
by Jach | 2026-02-19 19:14:55+00:00
So what did you do? Clearly you didn't die. Did you just have no insurance for the week before the new job started, or what?

This also happened to you while you were working and slightly between jobs. So it's not really a FIRE concern if the concern is the US messing up the health care system even more in that it would effect everyone whether working or not. Generally speaking, an answer to mitigating a lot of types of risk with a FIRE model is: you just go back to work for a while. This is easier the younger you are.

Edit: Also I thought COBRA would have been a more recent thing but it was Regan era. So did you not have employer-sponsored coverage with the startup?
by toraway | 2026-02-19 19:14:56+00:00
Jeff Dean literally featured it in a tweet announcing the model. Personally it feels absurd to believe they've put absolutely no thought into optimizing this type of SVG output given the disproportionate amount of attention devoted to a specific test for 1 yr+.

I wouldn't really even call it "cheating" since it has improved models' ability to generate artistic SVG imagery more broadly but the days of this being an effective way to evaluate a model's "interdisciplinary" visual reasoning abilities have long since passed, IMO.

It's become yet another example in the ever growing list of benchmaxxed targets whose original purpose was defeated by teaching to the test.

https://x.com/jeffdean/status/2024525132266688757?s=46&t=ZjF...
by mindslight | 2026-02-19 19:14:59+00:00
Yes, USAID was only one part of US soft power. Everything else you have listed though, the destructionists have done effective jobs of trashing those as well!

In a thread about USAID it makes sense to talk about the damage to USAID. If these other pillars of soft power matter more to you, then try writing productive comments lamenting their destruction rather than downplaying in this discussion.
by tedsanders | 2026-02-19 19:15:03+00:00
A few thoughts:

- One thing to be aware of is that LLMs can be much smarter than their ability to articulate that intelligence in words. For example, GPT-3.5 Turbo was beastly at chess (1800 elo?) when prompted to complete PGN transcripts, but if you asked it questions in chat, its knowledge was abysmal. LLMs don't generalize as well as humans, and sometimes they can have the ability to do tasks without the ability to articulate things that feel essential to the tasks (like answering whether the bicycle is facing left or right).

- Secondly, what has made AI labs so bullish on future progress over the past few years is that they see how little work it takes to get their results. Often, if an LLM sucks at something that's because no one worked on it (not always, of course). If you directly train a skill, you can see giant leaps in ability with fairly small effort. Big leaps in SVG creation could be coming from relatively small targeted efforts, where none existed before.
by ossa-ma | 2026-02-19 19:15:31+00:00
Absolutely vibe coded, I'm sure I disclosed it somewhere on the site. As much as I hate using AI for creative endeavours I have to agree that it excels as nextjs/vercel/quick projects like this. I was mostly focused on the curation of the tropes and examples.

Believe me I've had to adjust my writing a lot to avoid these tells, even academics I know are second guessing everything they've ever been taught. It's quite sad but I think it will result in a more personable internet as people try to distinguish themselves from the bots.
by erader | 2026-02-19 19:16:05+00:00
I've been working on something like this the last few months specifically around service quote analysis (repairs, construction, hvac, auto, etc.) and it's really cool. I think LLM analysis is the way to go because the amount of complexity is absolutely staggering - just to start the difference in quality and information available on a quote is drastically different between vendors within the SAME vertical. Then to do actual do analysis on local laws, the details of your property (not just photos/videos, but zoning and lot details), vendor analysis, etc.

On top of it all, the most important thing to consider is intent -> An emergency plumbing visit is often very different than a proactive upgrade.

edit: spelling
by kees99 | 2026-02-19 19:17:30+00:00
I ended up running codex with all the "danger" flags, but in a throw-away VM with copy-on-write access to code folders.

Built-in approval thing sounds like a good idea, but in practice it's unusable. Typical session for me was like:

About to run "sed -n '1,100p' example.cpp", approve?
About to run "sed -n '100,200p' example.cpp", approve?
About to run "sed -n '200,300p' example.cpp", approve?

Could very well be a skill issue, but that was mighty annoying, and with no obvious fix (options "don't ask again for ...." were not helping).
by dheera | 2026-02-19 19:17:46+00:00
Yeah it depends on what the system is.

Lots of systems can tolerate a lot more downtime than the armchair VPs want them to have.

If people don't access to Instagram for 6 hours, the world won't end. Gmail or AWS S3 is a different story. Therefore Instagram should give their engineers a break and permit a migration with downtime. It makes the job a lot easier, requires fewer engineers and cost, and is much less likely to have bugs.
by mijoharas | 2026-02-19 19:18:31+00:00
I think you're right, it was 2 I think I saw explicitly deprecated, then searched again and saw 2.5 having a shutdown date.

This article[0] talks about 2 being deprecated.

It's still frustrating that they don't have proper production endpoints for 3.0 yet.

[0] https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/changelog
Show HN: I built Pixie to help parents employee their kids and fund retirement
by popupeyecare | 2026-02-19 19:18:39+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m an anesthesiologist and YC alum. I built Pixie initially for my own kids.

There’s a little-known but completely legal tax rule in the US:

If a child has legitimate earned income, you can contribute to a custodial Roth IRA for them. And you can start as early as 5-6 years old.

But when I spoke with my friends, everyone was confused and concerned about compliance.

Most parents:

• Don’t know what qualifies as legitimate work

• Don’t know how to document it properly

• Are nervous about audit risk

• Or give up entirely

Pixie helps parents:

• Log real work performed by their child such as family business tasks, content creation, etc.

• Track hours and compensation

• Generate structured documentation

• Keep everything organized in one place

• Issues W2 and get EINs (I recommend getting an EIN by yourself - cheaper/faster and easy)

Why I built it:

I ran the math for my own kids. Even small early contributions compounded over decades become meaningful. But I realized most people either don’t know this exists or are too intimidated to execute it correctly.

Built during nights and weekends.

Would love any feedback!

Happy to answer questions or share details.

Amit

For a discount -
https://friends.trypixie.com/?q=hn
by logicprog | 2026-02-19 19:19:04+00:00
If learning about individual cogs is what's important, and once you've done that it's okay to move on and let AI do it, than you can build the specific thing you want to learn about in detail in isolation, as a learning project — like many programmers already do, and many CS courses already require — perhaps on your own, or perhaps following along with a substantial book on the matter; then once you've gained that understanding, you can move on to other things in projects that aren't focused on learning about that thing.
by wavemode | 2026-02-19 19:19:36+00:00
> Lua is an example of such a language, and when a semicolon is necessary is when you have something that could be misconstrued as being a call:

(function() print("Test1") end)(); -- That semicolon is required
(function() print("Test2") end)()

Tangential, but I sidestepped this ambiguity in a language I've been designing on the side, via the simple rule that the function being called and the opening parenthesis can't have whitespace between them (e.g. "f()" is fine but "f ()" or "f\n()" is not). Ditto for indexing ("x[y]"). If these characters are encountered after whitespace, the parser considers it the beginning of a new expression.

By sacrificing this (mostly unused, in practice) syntactic flexibility, I ended up not needing any sort of "semicolon insertion" logic - we just parse expressions greedily until they're "done" (i.e. until the upcoming token is not an operator).
by tyre | 2026-02-19 19:20:04+00:00
One interesting firestorm that he started was over doctors.

Yoon Suk Yeol did the basic math of “if our population isn’t having babies and people are getting older, how much medical capacity will we need?”

The results—due to artificial caps on medical students (like the AMA does in the US)—mathed out to: “oh, shit.”

He decided to raise the caps by a lot. The medical establishment freaked out, since that would lower salaries, and went on strike. Doctors, residents, and medical students didn’t show up for months. He had to call in doctors from the army to fill in.

Was a hostile takeover and subversion the right response to frustration over political obstacles? No. But he ran into some very real and frustrating realities (or collective refusal to admit to them.)

Not sure he needed to table-flip into full autocrat, though.
by yellowsunhy | 2026-02-19 19:20:05+00:00
TikTok Shop has 45+ fee types (referral fees, transaction fees, affiliate commissions, FBT fulfillment, co-funded campaign deductions) that make it nearly impossible to know your real profit per order.

I built a Chrome extension that overlays profit calculations directly onto TikTok Shop Seller Center. It also monitors your Shop Performance Score (SPS) - a 0-5 rating that controls access to Flash Deals, ads, and affiliate marketing.

Tech stack: Manifest V3, content scripts, Chrome local storage (zero data leaves your device).

This is my 4th product attempt in 30 days. First 3 failed because I couldn't solve distribution. Chrome Web Store gives organic discovery that landing pages + Reddit never could.

Free, no tracking, open to feedback.
by dnautics | 2026-02-19 19:20:06+00:00
in the era of LLMs, syntax might matter more than you think.

The c form of `type name;` is ambiguous because it could actually be more than one thing depending on context. Even worse if you include macro sheananigans. The alternate (~rust/zig) is `var/const/mut name type` is unambiguous.

For humans, with rather long memory of what is going on in the codebase, this is ~"not a problem" for experts. But for an LLM, its knowledge is limited to the content that currently exists in your context, and conventions baked in with the training corpus, this matters. Of course it is ALSO a problem for humans if they are first looking at a codebase, and if the types are unusual.
by atonse | 2026-02-19 19:20:13+00:00
Yep that's exactly what I'm talking about. I don't think it's overkill. It feels very natural and filling out forms feels archaic to me (unless it's a "edit this quickly" where that's almost always faster than asking an agent.)

So I've been building a full piece of software to manage my small business. And it looks like traditional software (forms, tables, etc). But every single thing also has an MCP tool.

So then I find myself just talking to the agent especially as an input mechanism way more than clicking around and editing a form.

I'm just saying, as an input method, I think forms, TUIs, etc will be good as a backup. Over time, as you've outlined, we'd just say "here's a PDF, figure it out" and the agent just inputs the right values into the right fields.

That's how I've approached my run-my-business app. I have models/tables for clients, purchase orders, invoices, support tasks, everything. But my interaction is more like "Add me to all the active projects, set my cost rate to __" and it'll run 15 MCP calls and put the data where it belongs.

Or I'll ask "what invoices are way overdue?" and it'll run the MCP calls to get it, even though I have pretty dashboards.

Glad to see you're already thinking of it.
by n4r9 | 2026-02-19 19:20:21+00:00
According to Wikipedia

> Addiction is ... a persistent and intense urge to use a drug or engage in a behavior that produces an immediate psychological reward, despite substantial harm and other negative consequences

Immediate psychological reward = dopamine hits from likes and shares

Harm and other negative consequences = anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, FOMO, less connection with friends and family, etc...

Food is not as easy to make addictive because the psychological reward diminishes as you get full. The exception to this is people with an eating disorder, who use eating as a way to cope with or avoid difficult feelings.
by block_hacks | 2026-02-19 19:20:23+00:00
I’ve been using Next.js for a long time. Long enough to have shipped real products with it, migrated between major versions, rewritten parts that were “best practice” just a year earlier, and defended it in arguments like it was part of my identity.

Years ago, I remember calling a former classmate back in Kazakhstan. I asked him what he was working on. He said it was some large corporate project built on Java Spring Boot.

I laughed.

I literally said something like: “Bro, that’s ancient. That’s boring. Why would you build anything new on that? Why not Next.js?”

At the time, it felt obvious. Spring Boot sounded slow, verbose, old-fashioned. Next.js felt modern, fast, elegant. Everyone online was building with it. The ecosystem was exploding. The DX was addictive.

But over the years, after building, breaking, migrating, and maintaining real systems, that memory started to bother me.

Not because Spring Boot suddenly became cool. But because I slowly understood why those companies chose it.

After enough back-and-forth, enough upgrades, enough rewrites that weren’t supposed to be rewrites, something clicked:

They weren’t optimizing for excitement. They were optimizing for survival.

That’s when I realized something uncomfortable: I wasn’t laughing because Spring Boot was bad. I was laughing because I didn’t yet understand what “long term” actually means in software.

This article isn’t written by someone who hates Next.js. It’s written by someone who used it, trusted it, and then zoomed out far enough to see the trade-offs clearly.

And once you see them, you can’t unsee them.
by max8539 | 2026-02-19 19:20:24+00:00
It could be a native mobile app, but in that case you’d need to think about platforms, the App Store, and so on.

A progressive web app could be a nice alternative: just add the website icon to your phone, and you can open it in seconds.

The app could be self-hosted on a home server, and solutions like Tailscale would let you easily access it outside the house as well. A big plus is that you can open it on all your devices and have a unified database across them.

With a web app, you could even keep the TUI aesthetic - just style it like a CLI interface.
by metaPushkin | 2026-02-19 19:20:41+00:00
THE ONLY REASON IS THAT Courtsdesk PROVIDED TOO EFFECTIVE A TOOL FOR INVESTIGATING STATE CRIMES AND UNCOVERING CORRUPTION AMONG HIGH-RANKING OFFICIALS, LIKE Keir Starmer. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit..., Courtsdesk WAS ACTIVELY USED TO ANALYZE COURT CASES AND DETECT STATE CRIMES COMMITTED BY THE POLICE.
by imiric | 2026-02-19 19:20:49+00:00
The article does not fit the description of blind AI denialism, though. The author even acknowledges that the tool can be useful. It makes a well articulated case that by not putting any thought into your work and words, and allowing the tool to do the thinking for you, the end product is boring. You may agree or disagree with this opinion, but I think the knee jerk rejection is coming from you.
by solomonb | 2026-02-19 19:21:05+00:00
A few friends and I have worked on this project off and on for a while now. The original idea was to create a bot for matrix but we ended up building a more general library for encoding bot behaviors as Mealy Machines that can be tensored together in a bunch of cute ways to build more complex bots. Those bots can then be run against a protocol encoded as a Moore machine.

I feel strongly that this is a the right model for a lot of potential applications, including an agentic harness for LLMs (which I have not tried yet).
by paulddraper | 2026-02-19 19:21:16+00:00
While I will not argue that in your case insurance was bad, there is no way that $600,000 is the cash price for cancer treatment (especially 20 years ago, but also today).

The average cost of cancer treatment is $150k [1], and lower with cash price + shopping.

[1] https://treatcancer.com/blog/cost-of-cancer/
by mothballed | 2026-02-19 19:21:18+00:00
It cost $30k for a loved one just to go to the hospital when their heart "felt weird" but absolutely nothing turned out to be wrong and all they did was run a couple quick scans and tests. I do agree with the overall idea of what you're saying that usually the premiums are way more than what you could get care for if you just saved the money, but the numbers on the website seem very wrong. I realize it's a total anecdote but from loved one's bills it is $20-30k just to get in the door and that is if actually nothing is wrong and there is no heart attack yet they're quoting $30k for an actual heart attack care.