MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chanip0114 | 2026-02-07 02:36:32+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m sharing an interactive project a friend is building called Zest. We felt that most system design resources are too theoretical (books and videos). He wanted to create a "flight simulator" where you can actually practice making architectural trade-offs in real-world scenarios.

The App: https://staff-engineering-simulator-880284904082.us-west1.ru...

Why we are here: We are in early Alpha and looking for the community's brutal feedback:

Scenario Realism: Do these challenges feel like the actual high-scale problems a Staff/Principal engineer faces?

AI Mentorship: The app uses an LLM-powered engine to provide feedback on your design choices. Does it feel insightful or too generic?

The "Hands-on" Approach: Is this interactive format helpful for learning architecture?

It’s a functional prototype running on Google Cloud Run. We would love to hear your thoughts, criticisms, or ideas for new scenarios!

Thanks for the feedback!
by o8vm | 2026-02-07 02:37:02+00:00
Hibana( https://github.com/hibanaworks/hibana ) is an Affine MPST runtime for Rust. The key claim is type-system guardrails. In Hibana software behavior is written as global choreography, projected into role-local sessions, and invalid transitions are rejected by the type/protocol model instead of being handled ad hoc at runtime.

As one concrete example, hibana-agent( https://github.com/hibanaworks/hibana-agent ) applies the same model to constrain AI-agent action flow with session-typed branching.
by wes-k | 2026-02-07 02:37:42+00:00
> software specs are often an order of magnitude simpler than the actual number of branches in the code

Love this! Be it design specs or a mock from the designer. So many unaccounted for decisions. Good devs will solve many on their own, uplevel when needed, and provide options.

And absolutely it means more design up front. And without human in the direct loop, maybe people won’t skimp on this!
by freeourdays | 2026-02-07 02:37:47+00:00
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Open source and ready to ship. Star it now!
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#AI #ClaudeCode #Tauri #OpenSource #DevTools #React19
by scoofy | 2026-02-07 02:37:58+00:00
Where does the extra money come from in a deficit period?

> BART, Muni, Caltrain, AC Transit — which an independent analysis confirmed face annual deficits of more than $800 million annually starting in fiscal year 2027-28

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/california/2026/01/06/ba...

Nearly a billion dollar shortfall per year going forward. That’s nontrivial, and the state has lost patience with the systems after providing two bailouts already.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-02-07 02:38:53+00:00
'Christians' in the US don't consider Catholics 'Christians' (using quotes to show it's a group identifier based not solely on following Christs teachings). They (Christians) are also the newer splinter group. So Catholics have taken to identifying themselves as Catholics to 'stay in their lane' or to self identify to the 'Christians' that they aren't part of the accepted/in group. Catholics were lower status historically, look at the talk around Kennedy. Also Christians might not want to be friendly with Catholics but they would with Christians, so you out yourself as Catholic from the start to avoid that bullshit (so back to 'stay in your lane').

The two have very different approaches to religion, with Catholics following the 'love they neighbor' 'care for the poor' live Jesus' teachings and Christians building mega churches and following prosperity gospel. Or most upsetting to my grandma, the Christian holy roller stuff. Or more upsetting to the Christians Mother Mary in the Catholic church.

When I was a kid there was also a huge racial element. WASPs versus Catholic congregations made up of Italians (not white), Irish (not the right white), Filipinos, Latin Americans, Middle Easterners and Germans.

But from my experience it's largely the 'stay in your lane' thing. I've had people be friendly with me because since I was christian they assumed I was Christian christian, and when they found out I was Catholic they stopped talking to me (past tense as I'm not really religious).
by jameshush | 2026-02-07 02:39:11+00:00
1000%. When the sale doesn't go through, it's the salesperson's fault. When the product doesn't work, it's the "real" engineer's fault. When everything works, the client gives you a high five.

If you don't know the answer, you can ask one of the "real" engineers.

As long as you show up with a smile on your face and the demo kinda works during the call, you're 10/10.

At FAANG companies, you generally get paid at a level above your technical role; for example, if you have a mid-level engineer's coding ability but can also talk to customers, you'll generally be paid a senior engineer's salary.

Some days, I don't understand why everyone doesn't want this job. But then I'll talk to the product engineers on my team, and they'll thank me for talking to the customers so they can focus on coding. I think it's really a personality/preference thing.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-02-07 02:39:31+00:00
At times like this I like to quote Chris Rock:

> Everyone wanna get down with a gang in America these days. "I'm liberal!" "I'm conservative!" Be a fucking person, ok? No good, decent person is all one thing. I got some shit I'm liberal about, and I got some shit I'm conservative about.

I think he's absolutely right, and that labeling things as "left" or "right" is a thought-terminating cliche that one should strive to avoid. What matters is the idea, not which faction people might stereotype it with.
by recursive | 2026-02-07 02:39:59+00:00
Metric implies there is some way to objectively measure it. I'm not sure if that's true.

But almost everyone thinks the same as you do, and yet ads are huge business. How are you affected? I don't know, but my first guess is brand perception, regardless of your self-diagnosis. If a company is advertising a certain time-limited sale, some of their value will come from conversions taking that offer. But some, maybe most, is the brand impression that people get over time. Think "I never heard of that" vs "Oh yeah, I've seen that somewhere".
by rvz | 2026-02-07 02:40:01+00:00
Nope. You have not shown how a large scale collection of neural networks irrespective of their architecture is more deterministic when compared to a 'compiler' and only repeating a known misconception of tweaking the temperature to 0 which does not bring the determinism you claim it brings with LLMs [0] [1] [2], otherwise you would not have this problem in the first place.

By even doing that, the result of the outputs are useless anyway. So this really does not help your point at all. So therefore:

> You're just using words incorrectly. Deterministic means repeatable. That's it. Predictable, verifiable, etc are tangential to deterministic.

There is nothing deteministic or predictable about an LLM even when you compare it to a compiler, unless you can guarrantee that the individual neurons through inference give a predictable output which would be useful enough for being a drop-in compiler replacement.

[0] https://152334h.github.io/blog/non-determinism-in-gpt-4/

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09501

[2] https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeating-nondeterminism-in...
by majormajor | 2026-02-07 02:40:06+00:00
I wonder about who "anybody can now output something acceptable" will hit most - engineers or software entrepreneurs.

Any implementation moat around rapid prototyping, and any fundraising moat around hiring a team of 10 to knock out your first few versions, seems gone now. Trying to sell MVP-tier software is real hard when a bunch of your potential customers will just think "thanks for the idea, I'll just make my own."

The crunch for engineers, on the other hand, seems like that even if engineers are needed to "orchestrate the agents" and manage everything, there could be a feature-velocity barrier for the software that you can still sell (either internally or externally). Changing stuff more rapidly can quickly hit a point of limited ROI if users can't adjust, or are slowed by constant tooling/workflow churn. So at some point (for the first time in many engineers' career, probably) you'll probably see product say "ok even though we built everything we want to test, we can't roll it all out at once!". But maybe what is learned from starting to roll those things out will necessitate more changes continually that will need some level of staffing still. Or maybe cheaper code just means ever-more-specialized workflows instead of pushing users to one-size-fits-all tooling.

In both of those cases the biggest challenge seems to be "how do you keep it from toppling down over time" which has been the biggest unsolved problem in consumer software development for decades. There's a prominent crowd right now saying "the agents will just manage it by continuing to hack on everything new until all the old stuff is stable too" but I'm not sure that's entirely realistic. Maybe the valuable engineering skills will be putting in the right guardrails to make sure that behavioral verification of the code is a tractable problem. Or maybe the agents will do that too. But right now, like you say, I haven't found particularly good results in conceptualizing better solutions from the current tools.
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-07 02:41:48+00:00
> He said the program has created income inequality because the annual median income for Indian-American families was more than $150,000 in 2023, higher than the median income for other racial groups. Median household income for all Americans was $82,690 in 2023, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

I love that the racists who attack the H1B program simultaneously complain that some racial groups earn more than their own white group, and also that the same racial groups are somehow just low cost labor meant to replace Americans. Their brains cannot acknowledge the most basic contradictions in their worldview.

Also the anti immigration “activist” this article casually mentions is absolutely deranged:

> Palasciano said he found it suspicious that there was a growing number of small businesses in Frisco owned by people of Indian origin employing Indian H-1B workers, especially in light of Paxton’s investigation.

> “There’s potential visa fraud here,” Palasciano said.

He literally sees a business employing nonwhites and thinks there is fraud. Textbook racist. His Twitter posts are even more unhinged and conspiratorial:

https://xcancel.com/marc_palasciano
by trimethylpurine | 2026-02-07 02:41:58+00:00
I don't think people typically have so much choice about it. Everyone is just trying to feed their families and enjoy their life. The job market is a little tough right now, I think, for software engineers. No?

I know a few personally that left their stable job to be hired and fired in the same month and remain unemployed six months later. Very sad.
by rmunn | 2026-02-07 02:43:20+00:00
Says who? What's the proof?

Last time I asked someone that (over a decade ago), the answer I got was that ad companies wouldn't spend millions of dollars on their ad campaigns if they didn't have proof of effectiveness. Sure, okay, that's good evidence that the ad campaigns are effective at getting some people to buy the product. But what's the evidence that I, personally, am influenced by ads? Rather than "many people are influenced by ads, don't think you're immune"?

Especially because I, personally, actively avoid advertising. I block it on the Internet, I avoid watching live TV and instead buy (or check out from the library) DVDs of shows I'm interested in... And the billboards on the highway are mostly for services I don't need (like injury lawyers) so I have almost never bought something because I saw it advertised on a billboard. The only exceptions are the ones where the billboard said "(name of restaurant) 10 miles ahead" and I thought "Oh good, I had been hoping to find exactly that restaurant, I'll pull over in 10 miles". But I was already looking for that product, the billboard ad just helped me find it.

Not to mention that if all ads were like that — "Hey, our restaurant is at exit 183, we do really good fajitas" — I would be far, FAR less annoyed by advertising. If that was the only kind of ads you saw on the Internet, I might not have sought out adblockers in the first place.
by DaedalusII | 2026-02-07 02:44:41+00:00
i mean its cheaper from an enterprise customer perspective. if a company is training an LLM, writing their training programs to use AMDs hardware instead of just using CUDA is so expensive and time consuming that it is cheaper to pay four times the price and use nvidia hardware. in this space its important to move fast, although that economic will shift over time

which is why nvidia hardware trades at a 4x premium to AMD

its not necessarily cheaper to make chips at cost either. nobody is making them, only designing them. so first you have to design your new chip, then you have to get a minimum order in with the chip fab so big it competes on unit economics, and then finally you have to get your dev team to write a CUDA equivalent software that is a problem so hard its only really been solved by apple, google, intel, and nvidia

only companies with big fab orders can get priority too.. if a company did all of the above and was ready to go, they probably wouldn't get fab capacity until 2030
by schiffern | 2026-02-07 02:45:29+00:00
>Waymo is doing the thing.

This worldview is overly simplistic, almost child-like.

Waymo has (very shrewdly, for prospective investors at least) executed a strategy that most quickly scales to 0.1% of the population. Unfortunately it doesn't scale further. The cars are too costly and the mapping is too costly. There is no workable plan for significant scale from Waymo.

Tesla is executing the strategy that most quickly scales to 100% of the population.

If you don't comprehend the difference, I really don't know what to tell you.
by untrust | 2026-02-07 02:45:41+00:00
Imagine everyone who is in less technical or skilled domains.

I can't help but resist this line of thinking as a result. If the end is nigh for us, it's nigh for everyone else too. Imagine the droves of less technical workers in the workforce who will be unseated before software engineers. I don't think it is tenable for every worker in the first world to become replaced by a computer. If an attempt at this were to occur, those smart unemployed people would be a real pain in the ass for the oligarchs.
by Brajeshwar | 2026-02-07 02:45:51+00:00
Start treating the Future-You like a Stranger. Write for that stranger, your Future-You will thank you. We think we will remember, but we won’t. So, don’t be too harsh on yourself and make it easier for your future-you. If that stranger finds it easier, it will also be for others; your relatives, kids, etc.

Unless your work and life need to be very secretive, or involve matters of national or international importance, I personally think a simpler printed/written format that works without electronics/Internet would be a better option. Of course, the printed details can have simple encryption, which your family/friends can break using day-to-day quirks you shared, such as the family secret codes, the name of that pet in the town you grew up in, or the middle name from the story of your great-grandfather, etc.

Some time ago, my mother-in-law (erstwhile teacher) and my godmother-aunty (businesswoman) began to forget many things. Their kids have tried quite a few phone apps and whatnot with electronics. Finally, I have suggested enforcing just two things: a lot of Valet bowls around the house (at common places in all the rooms) and pocket notebooks with pens attached. They just write anything and everything, from money to kitchen items to anything they want. If they forgot something, refer to the notebooks. If a key is lost, try the Valet Bowl. Now, my plan is to train their muscle memory to drop/pick from the bowl (don’t try to remember) and write things down.

The idea of Valet Bowls comes from something someone mentioned on Hacker News.
by richardhapb | 2026-02-07 02:46:05+00:00
I was working in a tool to detect N+1 queries in Django apps and now I think is in a good state to be used regularly. The tool has two modes of usage, run directly in CLI to analyze a whole Django project, or as an LSP, this can be configured in your editor, and I just made a Visual Studio Code extension to be installed easily. I expect that can be useful for you, specially if you are learning. I'll continuing improving and manage more edge cases, then feedback will be very appreciated.

I also made a VSCode extension if you want to use it inside the editor: https://github.com/richardhapb/django-check-vscode
by majormajor | 2026-02-07 02:46:09+00:00
> Not entirely unlike other code generation mechanisms, such as tools for generating HTML based on a graphical design. A human could edit that, but it may not have been the intent. The intent was that, if you want a change, go back to the GUI editor and regenerate the HTML.

We largely moved back away from "work in a graphic tool then spit out HTML from it" because it wasn't robust for the level of change/iteration pace, this wasn't exactly my domain but IIRC there were especially a lot of problems around "small-looking changes are now surprisingly big changes in the generated output that have a large blast radius in terms of the other things (like interactivity) we've added in."

Any time you do a refactor that changes contract boundaries between functions/objects/models/whatever, and you have to update the tests to reflect this, you have a big risk of your new tests not covering exactly the same set of component interactions that your old tests did. LLM's don't change this. They can iterate until the tests are green, but certain changes will require changing the tests, and now "iterating until the tests are green" could be resolved by changing the tests in a way that subtly breaks surprising user-facing things.

The value of good design in software is having boundaries aligned with future desires (obviously this is never perfect foresight) to minimize that risk. And that's the scary thing to myself about not even reading the code.
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-07 02:46:37+00:00
> I've yet to find a better way to instantly time-travel forward 12 hours

I find it very hard to use a computer in the cramped tables of the plane. And the person in front always ends up aggressively reclining only when I have a laptop out. Plus I feel bad that maybe my bright light is disturbing the people sleeping next to me.
by eseidel | 2026-02-07 02:47:45+00:00
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by esperent | 2026-02-07 02:47:51+00:00
> everybody only uses 20% of a given program's features, but the problem is that everyone is using a different 20%

This is a phrase that gets repeated and it sounds clever. But it's completely at odds with statistics, specifically the normal distribution.

We should say, people use 80-90% the same features, and then there's a tail of less common features that only some people use but are very important to them.

This is why plugin systems for apps are so important. You can build an app that supports the 80% with a tightly designed set of core features, and if someone needs to go outside of those they can use/build a plugin.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-07 02:48:20+00:00
I too wish the world hadn’t moved on from when I started programming on a 1Mhz Apple //e in 1986 or from my first job as a Fortran and C programmer on DEC Vax and stratus VOS mainframes…

I also loved programming on these in 2007 using Windows Compact Framework.

https://weareconker.com/blog/is-windows-ce-still-supported-i...

But after being in this game for 30 years professionally and after half century of living on this earth, I still haven’t overcome my addictions to food and shelter and while I’m in pretty good shape, I don’t think I could start a successful career by opening an OnlyFans account so instead, I keep up to date on where the industry is…
by solarkraft | 2026-02-07 02:49:00+00:00
This is my introduction to Breezybox and THAT I am really excited about. I hate that for some reason I have to care about Wifi configuration and updates, I just want to write my application. I never understood why we don’t have simple microcontroller OSes that care about that stuff for us.

This looks like a great basis (or maybe even all that’s needed) for one.

Does it have a good setup flow for headless deployment (e.g. supply Wifi config while flashing, remote shell access/web UI for deploying apps)?
by D-Machine | 2026-02-07 02:49:05+00:00
I don't think it is in fact such a threat at all, but at least that claim is not completely impossible, and I agree there needs to be caution around these kinds of apps.

However, that caution and legislation needs to be properly specific. If companies are in fact paying behavioural psychologists to maximize addictiveness, this is indeed the kind of thing a ban should be based on, not incredibly generic app features.
by knuit | 2026-02-07 02:50:12+00:00
I'll certainly keep an eye on this to see if a community forms around it.

Internally we host ~17 million artifacts (~200TB) in Artifactory with X-Ray that we self-host in AWS and backed by S3.

We've experienced pain in the management of the solution and while we're not getting killed on price, they keep trying to upsell on their security add-ons.

I've only glanced at the docs, but I'm curious how the security aspects scale with artifact count? Is autoscaling (via EC2 or ECS/EKS) a possibility with the various components?
by 8note | 2026-02-07 02:50:13+00:00
i dont think theres anything that makes it essentiall that llms are non-deterministic though

if you rewrote the math to be all fixed point precision on big ints, i think you would still get the useful LLM results?

if somebody really wanted to make a compiler in an LLM, i dont think that nondetermism is problem

id really imagine an llm compiler being a set of specs, dependency versions, and test definitions to use though, and you'd introduce essential nondetermism by changing a version number, even if the only change was the version name from "experimental" to "lts"