MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by inder1 | 2026-02-19 18:51:10+00:00
My son had questions about his career and couldn't answer them. So I built Parallax — a tool that helps you explore career options and arrive at your own answers.

Upload your resume, get an AI exposure score (0-100), then run simulations to see what happens if you: stay and upskill, pivot to adjacent work, or reset entirely. Year-by-year timelines. Trade-offs made visceral.

* The problem
People know AI is disrupting careers. What they don't know is:

How exposed they specifically are, given their actual career history
What their realistic options are — not generic advice, but paths modeled on their timeline
What each option costs them in money, stress, and life satisfaction

* What Parallax does
It's a flight simulator for your career. Not advice — consequence exploration.
The flow (takes ~5 minutes):

* Upload resume → AI calculates your AI exposure score
* Five-question interview (finances, learning appetite, stability preference)
* LLM generates up to 9 futures: 3 strategies × 3 timing scenarios
* Pick which paths to compare
* Compare dashboard shows net worth, stress, fulfillment, AI exposure, drift

* Three recovery strategies:

1) Augment (blue): Stay, upskill with AI tools
2) Pivot (amber): Lateral move, lower AI exposure
3) Reset (purple): Start something fundamentally different

* Tech

Next.js 14 + TypeScript, LLM-powered
No database — fully client-side (localStorage)
Zero tracking. Your career data never leaves your browser.
Privacy-first by design

* Pricing

Free: AI exposure score + interview + briefing
Pro ($10/mo): Full compare dashboard + timeline exploration
This app is compute intensive, so I added a paywall to pay for my compute costs.

Built solo over 2 months. Would love your feedback.
by shortercode | 2026-02-19 18:51:11+00:00
A languages syntax and its error messages are its user interface. Yes you can have a good tool that you don’t enjoy looking at. You can also have a good tool that’s frustrating to learn because its user interface isn’t clear and doesn’t do what you expect. Can I not hope for something that does what I need, is easy to use, and looks good?

I dislike the “you can change the syntax” argument because that just doesn’t happen. Closest thing is a new languages that compiles to another.
by ggregoire | 2026-02-19 18:51:11+00:00
I use it for free in Google Search. For example yesterday I typed in Google "postgres generate series 24 hour". Previously I would have clicked on the first StackOverflow result, now I just take it from the Gemini summary (I'd say 95% of the time it's correct for basic programming language questions. I remember some hallucinations about psycopg3 and date-fns tho. As usual with AI, you need to already know the answer, at least partially, to detect the bs).
by znnajdla | 2026-02-19 18:51:19+00:00
If you are just “gluing together API calls” that’s exactly where Elixir state machines and supervisors make your agentic code so much easier to write. API calls are constantly failing, timing out, retrying, and being pre/post processed, and you need to keep track of the state of your agent across multiple failure modes, recover gracefully, and coordinate between processes. In most other languages like Python or TypeScript that’s a hell of a lot of process orchestration code (Bull/Celery), try/catches, health checks, retry logic, and global state management in a a database of some sort. Compare that to Elixir processes where you get most of that for free because the language was designed exactly for that. It’s just a state machine that can crash and recover gracefully in the right order with all related processes. The BEAM is not just about running millions of processes at scale. It’s also about simplifying how you reason about a single process lifecycle, and long running agent lifecycles can get really complex.

When you are just “gluing together API calls” surrounding tooling doesn’t matter as much. I don’t care that Elixir doesn’t have such a large community as Python, I’m just gluing together API calls, not doing trying to reinvent the wheel.
by justin66 | 2026-02-19 18:51:58+00:00
I appreciate the thoughtful reply - thanks! There are some things here to follow up on eventually.

I'm very skeptical that the aforementioned "consultants" made money off of the phonics controversy in a way that was comparable to those selling home lessons, but that's my main quibble at this stage.

> for many years colleges were all teaching utter nonsense.

That must be an exaggeration. It made me realize I actually have no idea how many different streams of methodology there are in education, outside of what we define as the mainstream. Certainly phonics is a part of Montessori education. Ah well, another thing to read about someday.
by Sol- | 2026-02-19 18:52:07+00:00
I think I can observe the world and my relative state therein, no? I know I am unfortunately less ambitious, driven and outgoing than others, which are commonly associated with being interesting. And I don't complain about it, the word has a meaning after all and I'll not delude myself into changing its definition.

Definitely at a certain threshold it is for others to decide what is boring and not, I agree with that.

In any case, my simple point is that AI can definitely raise the floor, as the other comment more succinctly expressed. Irrelevant for people at the top, but good for the rest of us.
by jleyank | 2026-02-19 18:52:11+00:00
While they weren't a startup, they were a small pharmaceutical company (Novo Nordisk). Yet Ozempic in its various forms totally upended the diet and "comfort food" marketplace. They even distorted the economy of Denmark... They face competition, and need a follow-on, but that's the nature of the pharma biz. Huge, big-loss, big-win field, and if anybody has a drug in any form that addresses Alzheimer's (for example), the profit will be damn near infinite.

Europe has all sorts of biotech/pharma. Heard of mRNA drugs? Germany, amongst other sites.
by taurusnoises | 2026-02-19 18:52:13+00:00
We've thrown some parties on the prop, and have often thought, "Maybe it'd be cool to let people try some of this stuff out," at which point we remember how incredibly dangerous something like an excavator is, even when closely monitored and in a safe environment, and then have nightmares about worst case scenarios. So, it's been a no-go thus far. What we have actually considered, though, is seeing about renting it out to a known-to-be safe / mature user to use on projects when we aren't. But, haven't pulled the trigger on that yet.
by devmor | 2026-02-19 18:52:14+00:00
I don’t really find this surprising! If we can expect social networking to allow groups of like minded individuals to find eachother and collaborate on hobbies, businesses and other benign shared interests - it stands to reason that the same would apply to violent and other anti-state interests as well.

The question that then follows is if suppressing that content worked so well, how much (and what kind of) other content was suppressed for being counter to the interests of the investors and administrators of these social networks?
by epistasis | 2026-02-19 18:52:29+00:00
Depends on what you mean by justice. In the US, the law is now merely a tool used to give privileges to the in-group at the cost of the out-group. For the in-group it protects them from harm but never constrains their actions. For the out-group the law never protects them from harm, but constrains them.

In the US, federal prosecutions are ordered by the in-group via public social media posts, rather than by professionals dedicated to the law deciding if there's enough evidence to support a case. Currently, federal prosecutions will never be pursued against the in-group, no matter the evidence.

I'd like the US to return to it's prior stance on what the law means and how it can be used.
by imiric | 2026-02-19 18:52:59+00:00
You don't fit the profile OP is complaining about. You might not even be "vibe" coding in the strictest sense of that word.

For every person like you who puts in actual thought into the project, and uses these tools as coding assistants, there are ~100 people who offload all of their thinking to the tool.

It's frightening how little collective thought is put into the ramifications of this trend not only on our industry, but on the world at large.
by nice_byte | 2026-02-19 18:53:14+00:00
I have really just one wish when it comes to syntax: no syntactically significant whitespace. Space, newline, tab, etc. should ALL map to the same exact token. In practice this also means semicolons or something like them are needed as well, to separate expressions/statements. I dislike langs that try to insert semicolons for you, but at least it's better than the alternative.

the way python treats whitespace is a huge design mistake that has probably wasted like a century (if not more) worth of time across all users, on something really trivial.
by BiraIgnacio | 2026-02-19 18:53:20+00:00
One of the down sides of Vibe-Coded-Everything, that I am seeing, is reinforcing the "just make it look good" culture.
Just create the feature that the user wants and move on. It doesn't matter if next time you need to fix a typo on that feature it will cost 10x as much as it should.

That has always been a problem in software shops. Now it might be even more frequent because of LLMs' ubiquity.

Maybe that's how it should be, maybe not. I don't really know.
I was once told by people in the video game industry that games were usually buggy because they were short lived.
Not sure if I truly buy that but if anything vibe coded becomes throw away, I wouldn't be surprised.
by dylan604 | 2026-02-19 18:53:55+00:00
That's the worst lawnmower I've ever seen. It didn't even cut the grass as much as it just bothered the blades of grass. 0 out of 5 stars. What's that? It's not a mower. Oh, well then, that thing is cool as hell, but not as cool as the pilot that looks like he's just casually standing there.
by cpcloud | 2026-02-19 18:54:25+00:00
I often find myself wanting answers to questions that require linking data, and I also want to codify those links somehow, so a single-file, row-oriented database seemed like the appropriate way to get that.

You might actually be able to get away with less structure and just dumps thoughts and ideas, statuses, and documents into $AI and have it generate ad-hoc reports.

In which case, a text file might be the right interface.

Kind of a non-answer, I realize.

I suppose the answer is: because I had a relatively specific idea of what I wanted to build and I didn't consider not building it.
by ryandrake | 2026-02-19 18:54:42+00:00
> The number of people who I see having E-mail conversations where person A uses an LLM to turn two sentences into ten paragraphs, and person B uses an LLM to summarize the ten paragraphs into two sentences, is becoming genuinely alarming to me.

I remember in the early days of LLMs this was the joke meme. But, now seeing it happen in real life is more than just alarming. It's ridiculous. It's like the opposite of compressing a payload over the wire: We're taking our output, expanding it, transmitting it over the wire, and then compressing it again for input. Why do we do this?
by dekhn | 2026-02-19 18:54:46+00:00
I agree, but I don't have a subscription.

The remaining technical challenge I have is related to stage positioning- in my system, it's important that all the image frames we collect are tagged with the correct positions. Due to some technical challenges, right now the stage positions are slightly out of sync with the frames, which will be a fairly tricky problem to solve. It's certainly worth trying all the major systems to see what they propose.
by steve_adams_86 | 2026-02-19 18:55:02+00:00
I asked myself the same thing as I typed that comment, and I'm not sure what the answer is. I don't think models are specifically trained on this (though of course they're trained on how to generate SVGs in general), but I'm prepared to be wrong.

I have a feeling the most 'emergent' aspect was that LLMs have generally been able to produce coherent SVG for quite a while, likely without specific training at first. Since then I suspect there has been more tailored training because improvements have been so dramatic. Of course it makes sense that text-based images using very distinct structure and properties could be manipulated reasonably well by a text-based language model, but it's still fascinating to me just how well it can work.

Perhaps what's most incredible about it is how versatile human language is, even when it lacks so many dimensions as bits on a machine. Yet it's still cool that we can resurrect those bits at rest and transmogrify them back into coherent projections of photons from a screen.

I don't think LLMs are AGI or about to completely flip the world upside down or whatever, but it seems undeniably magical when you break it down.
by wduquette | 2026-02-19 18:55:17+00:00
Semantics are where the rubber meets the road, certainly; but syntax determines how readable the code is for someone meeting it the first time.

Contrast an Algol-descendant like C, Pascal, Java, or even Python with a pure functional language like Haskell. In the former, control structure names are reserved words and control structures have a distinct syntax. In the latter, if you see `foo` in the body of a function definition you have no idea if it's a simple computation or some sophisticated and complex control structure just from what it looks like. The former provides more clues, which makes it easier to decipher at a glance. (Not knocking Haskell, here; it's an interesting language. But it's absolutely more challenging to read.)

To put it another way, syntax is the notation you use to think. Consider standard math notation. I could define my own idiosyncratic notation for standard algebra and calculus, and there might even be a worthwhile reason for me to do that. But newcomers are going to find it much harder to engage with my work.
by doublerabbit | 2026-02-19 18:55:33+00:00
The boring parts where you learn. "Oh, I did that, this is now not that and it does this! But it was so boring building a template parser" - You've learnt.

Boring is suppose to be boring for the sake of learning. If you're bored then you're not learning. Take a look back at your code in a weeks time and see if you still understand what's going on. Top level maybe, but the deep down cog of the engine of the application, doubt so. Not to preach but that's what I've discovered.

Unless you already have the knowledge, then fine. "here's my code make it better" but if it's the 14th time you've written the ring buffer, why are you not using one of the previous thirteen versions? Are you saying that the vibed code is more superior then your own coding?
by pbmango | 2026-02-19 18:55:42+00:00
Along these same lines, I have been trying to become better at knowing when my work could benefit from reversion to the "boring" and general mean and when outsourcing thought or planning would cause a reversion to the mean (downwards).

This echos the comments here about enjoying not writing boilerplate. The there is that our minds are programmed to offload work when we can and redirecting all the saved boilerplate to going even deeper on parts of the problem that benefit from original hard thinking is rare. It is much easier to get sucked into creating more boilerplate, and all the gamification of Claude code and incentives of service providers increase this.
by h14h | 2026-02-19 18:56:00+00:00
Would be really interesting to see an "Eager McBeaver" bench around this concept. When doing real work, a model's ability to stay within the bounds of a given task has almost become more important than its raw capabilities now that every frontier model is so dang good.

Every one of these models is so great at propelling the ship forward, that I increasingly care more and more about which models are the easiest to steer in the direction I actually want to go.
by stavros | 2026-02-19 18:56:06+00:00
Sure, I haven't written it up, but the code is here:

https://github.com/skorokithakis/middle

I'll take some photos, it's larger now than it will be, because I don't have a MEMS mic (and a small battery). It looks like this now:

https://imgz.org/iACAKWj2/
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-19 18:56:26+00:00
Additional citation:

Graphs About Religion: When Are Half Your Members Going to be Dead? - https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/when-are-half-your-mem... - January 29th, 2026

https://gist.github.com/ryanburge/2034b9dea297f6b4db4ebad7e8...
by rbanffy | 2026-02-19 18:56:29+00:00
> Tesla, used in this example, was built by someone who lucked out from a capital perspective (Paypal)

I have the impression Tesla existed before and Musk only took over it later.

> Europe doesn't need a Tesla, they need a BYD. Learn from China,

I completely agree with that. The Chinese model of state-supported industry seems a lot more efficient than the US model where companies compete with each other duplicating effort uncontrollably.

Their election system is also interesting - IIRC a candidate for position N needs to first go into position N-1 and demonstrate some competence. This would make a Donald Trump impossible.
by stopachka | 2026-02-19 18:56:51+00:00
> Original ideas are the result of the very work you’re offloading on LLMs.

I largely agree that if someone put less work in making a thing, than it takes you to use it, it's probably not going to be useful. But I disagree with the premise that using LLMs will make you boring.

Consider the absurd version of the argument. Say you want to learn something you don't know: would using Google Search make you more boring? At some level, LLMs are like a curated Google Search. In fact if you use Deep Research et al, you can consume information that's more out of distribution than what you _would_ have consumed had you done only Google Searches.
by hackyhacky | 2026-02-19 18:56:56+00:00
An article about diversity of language syntax that somehow only deals with C-adjacent curly-brace languages (and,tbf, Odin).

This is a blinkered viewpoint. If you want to talk about syntax, at least mention the Haskell family (Elm, Idris, F*, etc), Smalltalk, and the king of syntax (less) languages, LISP (and Scheme), which teach us that syntax is a data structure.
by kbolino | 2026-02-19 18:57:00+00:00
This isn't really true, and it wouldn't be a big deal even if it was.

Die areas for consumer card chips are smaller than die areas for datacenter card chips, and this has held for a few generations now. They can't possibly be the same chips, because they are physically different sizes. The lowest-end consumer dies are less than 1/4 the area of datacenter dies, and even the highest-end consumer dies are only like 80% the area of datacenter dies. This implies there must be some nontrivial differentiation going on at the silicon level.

Secondly, you are not paying for the die area anyway. Whether a chip is obtained from being specially made for that exact model of GPU, or it is obtained from being binned after possibly defective areas get fused off, you are paying for the end-result product. If that product meets the expected performance, it is doing its job. There is no subsidy going to anyone here, the die is just one small part of what makes a usable GPU card, and excess die area left dark isn't even pure waste, as it helps with heat dissipation.

The fact that nVidia excludes decent FP64 from all of its prosumer offerings (old-school "pro" workstation cards are now basically upbadged consumer cards) can still be called "artificial" insofar as it was indeed done on purpose for market segmentation purposes, but it's not some trivial trick. They really are just not putting it into the silicon. This has been the case for longer than it wasn't by now, even.
by WorldMaker | 2026-02-19 18:57:09+00:00
The syntax of a language is the poetry form, it defines things like meter, scansion, rhyming scheme. Of course people are going to have strong aesthetic opinions on it, just as there are centuries of arguments in poetry over what form is best. You can make great programs in any language, just like you make beautiful poetry in almost every form. (Leaving an almost there for people that dislike Limericks, I suppose.) Language choice is one of the (sometimes too few) creative choices we can make in any project.

> Another option is to do something like automatic semicolon insertion (ASI) based on a set of rules. Unfortunately, a lot of people’s first experience with this kind of approach is JavaScript and its really poor implementation of it, which means people usually just write semicolons regardless to remove the possible mistakes.

Though the joke is that the largest ASI-related mistakes in JavaScript aren't solved by adding more semicolons, it's the places that the language adds semicolons you didn't expect that trip you up the worst. The single biggest mistake is adding a newline after the `return` keyword and before the return value accidentally making a `return undefined` rather than the return value.

In general JS is actually a lot closer to the Lua example than a lot of people want to believe. There's really only one ASI-related rule that needs to be remembered when dropping semicolons in JS (and it is a lot like that Lua rule of thumb), the Winky Frown rule: if a line starts with a frown it must wink. ;( ;[ ;`

(It has a silly name because it keeps it easy to remember.)
by anonymars | 2026-02-19 18:57:21+00:00
They are both OOP, just as a "football" can be either spherical or oblong.

Functional programming is not "encapsulating data in 'objects'". Such a model would naturally feature methods like "void Die.roll()", "void list.Add(element)" which are definitely not functional programming (which emphasizes immutability, pure functions, composition, etc.)
by readams | 2026-02-19 18:57:37+00:00
The concept of addiction seems be quite diluted at this point. Does it really make sense to say that, because you're trying to make a product that people like, that this means you're addicting them (intentionally or otherwise) to your product?

Food should not taste good? Books should not be entertaining? Don't try to make your video game fun, or some people may become addicted.
by ajross | 2026-02-19 18:57:43+00:00
There's clearly a difference between "what about" as a distraction technique (introducing an unrelated argument to avoid having to defend the original) and pointing out the existence of a clearly related issue. This is "youforgotaboutism", if you must label it.

Basically: analysis of international relations and influence techniques can only be correct when it treats with the influence of all parties, and not just the US. You agree with that framing, right?
by lelanthran | 2026-02-19 18:57:44+00:00
> The wider industry data gathered indicates that for memory unsafe languages 80% of issues are due to memory vulnerabilities, including mature codebases like Linux kernel, curl, V8, Chrome, Mach kernel, qemu etc etc etc.

You are misremembering the various reports - the reports were not that 80%[1] of issues were due to memory errors, but more along the lines of 80% of exploits were due to memory errors.

You could have 1000 bugs, with 10 of them being vulnerabilities, and 8 of those 10 being due to memory errors, and that would still be in line with the reports.

> As for why your experience may be different, my hunch is that either your code was super simple OR you didn’t test it thoroughly enough against malicious/unexpected inputs OR you never connected the code to untrusted I/O.

Payments processing, telecoms and munitions control software.

Of those, your explanation only applies to Telecoms; payments processing (EMV) was basically a constant stream of daily attacks, while munitions are live, in the field, with real explosives. We would've noticed any bugs, not just memory error bugs with the munitions one.

--------------------

[1] The number wasn't 80% IIRC, more like 70%?