MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 5o1ecist | 2026-02-07 19:30:16+00:00
> maybe nothing is priced right

What does "priced right" even mean? For whom? When a public company makes billions in profits by selling insanely overpriced hardware, then that's "priced right" for the shareholders.

When a supermarket gives out 25% discount stickers to use, then the price of the good is closer to being priced right for the consumer, as long as you apply the sticker. There is, of course, no reason to assume that the supermarket would operate at a loss or close to cost. These 25% are already priced in and anyone not using the stickers is paying extra.

Nothing has been priced right ever since they've (the collective of anyone willing to sell something) figured out that they can ask for however-much people are willing to pay, which is quite more than what MY FELLOW HUMANS would need to pay.

For everyone else, who aren't willing to pay deliberately inflated prices, there's usually always some form of discount for some product, somewhere to be found.
by xigoi | 2026-02-07 19:30:16+00:00
> C hit a perfect balance of being a small enough language to grok, being indepedent of the system manufacturers, reflecting the computer architecture of 80s, actually small in syntax

C is a complex language with complex syntax. The C specification is, like, 800 pages. And good luck implementing a C parser as easily as you could a Scheme parser.
by aavci | 2026-02-07 19:30:21+00:00
LLMs have made a lot of coding challenges less painful: Navigating terrible documentation, copilot detecting typos, setting up boilerplate frontend components, high effort but technically unchallenging code completions. Whenever I attempted LLMs for tools I’m not familiar with I found it to be useful with setting things up but felt like I had to do good old learning the tool and applying developer knowledge to it. I wonder if senior developers could use LLMs in ways that work with them and not against them. I.e create useful code that has guardrails to avoid slop
by icedchai | 2026-02-07 19:30:54+00:00
Building a microkernel based OS feels feasible because it’s actually quite open ended. An “OS” could be anything from single user DOS to a full blown Unix implementation, with plenty in between.

Amiga OS is basically a microkernel and that was built 40 years ago. There are also many other examples, like Minix. Do I think most people could build a full microkernel based mini Unix? No. But they could get “something” working that would qualify as an OS.

On the other hand, there are not many C compilers that build Linux. There are many implementations of C compilers, however. The goal of “build Linux” is much more specific.
by thor-rodrigues | 2026-02-07 19:31:16+00:00
I absolutely disagree with this. All the things the author said will still exist and keep on existing.

Nothing will prevent you from typing “JavaScript with your hands”, from “holding code in our hands and molding it like clay…”, and all the other metaphors. You can still do all of it.

What certainly will change is the way professional code will be produced, and together with that, the avenue of having a very well-paid remuneration, to write software line-by-line.

I’ll not pretend that I don’t get the point, but it feels like the lamentation of a baker, tailor, shoemaker, or smith, missing the days of old.

And yet, most people prefer a world with affordable bread, clothes, footware, and consumer goods.

Will the world benefit the most from “affordable” software? Maybe yes, maybe not, there are many arguments on both sides. I am more concerned the impact on the winners and losers, the rich will get more rich and powerful, while the losers will become even more destitute.

Yet, my final point would be: it is better or worse to live in a world in which software is more affordable and accessible?
by Levitating | 2026-02-07 19:31:42+00:00
> golden age of computing

I feel like we've reached the worst age of computing. Where our platforms are controlled by power hungry megacorporations and our software is over-engineered garbage.

The same company that develops our browsers and our web standards is also actively destroying the internet with AI scrapers. Hobbyists lost the internet to companies and all software got worse for it.

Our most popular desktop operating system doesn't even have an easy way to package and update software for it.
by faccacta | 2026-02-07 19:31:45+00:00
I often venerate antiques and ancient things by thinking about how they were made. You can look at a 1000-year-old castle and think: This incredible thing was built with mules and craftsmen. Or look at a gorgeous, still-ticking 100-year-old watch and think: This was hand-assembled by an artist. Soon I'll look at something like the pre-2023 Linux kernel or Firefox and think: This was written entirely by people.
by hakunin | 2026-02-07 19:32:01+00:00
I'm not using a narrow sense. There is no elasticity here. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterministic_system

> significant extra effort is required to make them reproducible.

Zero extra effort is required. It is reproducible. The same input produces the same output. The "my machine" in "Works on my machine" is an example of input.

> Engineering in the broader sense often deals with managing the outputs of variable systems to get known good outcomes to acceptable tolerances.

You can have unreliable AIs building a thing, with some guidance and self-course-correction. What you can't have is outcomes also verified by unreliable AIs who may be prompt-injected to say "looks good". You can't do unreliable _everything_: planning, execution, verification.

If an AI decided to code an AI-bound implementation, then even tolerance verification could be completely out of whack. Your system could pass today and fail tomorrow. It's layers and layers of moving ground. You have to put the stake down somewhere. For software, I say it has to be code. Otherwise, AI shouldn't build software, it should replace it.

That said, you can build seemingly working things on moving ground, that bring value. It's a brave new world.
by lucb1e | 2026-02-07 19:32:05+00:00
> why not fork LibreOffice [...] But after some thought, I feel a cloud collaboration suite makes more sense

LibreOffice has a cloud version :). From what they presented at T-Dose like 10 years ago, it's basically an instance of the software running on the server, cut up into tiles and displayed on a webpage as zoomable image using Leafletjs, the same way that google maps worked before switching to vector graphics 15 years ago. Clicks and other input events are presumably emulated on the server and the resulting display update is sent back to the client, a bit like VNC but using a map library
by gombosg | 2026-02-07 19:32:08+00:00
I think there are four fundamental issues here for us...

1. There are actually less software jobs out there, with huge layoffs still going on, so software engineering as a profession doesn't seem to profit from AI.

2. The remaining engineers are expected by their employers to ship more. Even if they can manage that using AI, there will be higher pressure and higher stress on them, which makes their work less fulfilling, more prone to burnout etc.

3. Tied to the previous - this increases workism, measuring people, engineers by some output benchmark alone, treating them more like factory workers instead of expert, free-thinking individuals (often with higher education degrees). Which again degrades this profession as a whole.

3. Measuring developer productivity hasn't really been cracked before either, and still after AI, there is not a lot of real data proving that these tools actually make us more productive, whatever that may be. There is only anecdotal evidence: I did this in X time, when it would have taken me otherwise Y time - but at the same time it's well known that estimating software delivery timelines is next to impossible, meaning, the estimation of "Y" is probably flawed.

So a lot of things going on apart from "the world will surely need more software".
by Symbiote | 2026-02-07 19:32:21+00:00
Seems to be.

Facebook's investment is to be $135bn [1]. The Channel Tunnel was "in 1985 prices, £4.65 billion", which is £15.34bn in December 2025 [3], or $20.5bn at current exchange rate.

That is staggering.

(I didn't check the other figures.)

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn8jkyk78gno

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel

[3] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in...
by giancarlostoro | 2026-02-07 19:32:44+00:00
The HBO “Silicon Valley” series’ version of “making the world a better place by” nonsense. The blog article has fallen for the marketing of OpenAI. OpenAI is making the world a worse place by inflating the cost of RAM and even getting rid of RAM chip providers from the consumer space. Not to mention all the wasted power on compute for all sorts of meaningless tasks. At least with something like Claude I am saving months if not years of engineering effort and resources in a few hours.
by manuelabeledo | 2026-02-07 19:32:45+00:00
There are people out there who truly believe that they can outsource the building of highly complex systems by politely asking a machine, and ultimately will end up tasking the same machine to tell them how these systems should be built.

Now, if I were in business with any of these people, why would I be paying them hundreds of thousands, plus the hundreds of thousands in LLM subscriptions they need to barely function, when they cannot produce a single valuable thought?
by andai | 2026-02-07 19:32:54+00:00
I love programming, but most of that joy doesn't come from the type of programming I get paid to do. I now have more time and energy for the fun type, and I can go do things that were previously inconceivable!

Last night "I" "made" 3D boids swarm with directional color and perlin noise turbulence. "I" "did" this without knowing how to do the math for any of those things. (My total involvement at the source level was fiddling with the neighbor distance.)

https://jsbin.com/ququzoxete/edit?html,output

Then I turned them into weird proteins

https://jsbin.com/hayominica/edit?html,output

(As a side note, the loss of meaning of "self" and "doing" overlaps weirdly with my meditation practice...)
by mothballed | 2026-02-07 19:32:57+00:00
As it turns out, no one wants to invest in infrastructure when all the inputs are going to be tariffed to oblivion. All else equal why invest in USA when you could invest somewhere where you can import the needed inputs much cheaper? Protectionism isn't enough to overcome losing access to world markets.

Eventually the protected industries will be totally disconnected from global markets causing them to lose global competitiveness, to the point they cannot even compete with the black market markups. And then you are maga, er mega, fucked.
by thatcat | 2026-02-07 19:32:57+00:00
I don't think that is scalable to infinite iphones since the input materials are finite. If your all your friends get 100,000 iphones and then you need an ev battery and that now costs 20,000 iphones now and you're down 5k iphones if the previous battery cost was 5k iphones. On the other hand if you already had a good battery, then you're up 20k iphones or so in equity. Also, since everyone has so many iphones the net utility drops and they become worth less than the materials so everyone would have to scrap their iphones to liquidate at the cost of the recycled metals.
by mindslight | 2026-02-07 19:32:58+00:00
There would have to be some substance to the original article for that to be true. Instead, it merely contains analysis-free whinging ostensibly meant to nurture frustration that can be directed to other ends - likely making the problem itself worse. So my comment is more appropriately described as examining the larger scope to put the article's gripe in perspective.

If you want to see my constructive thoughts on the subject at hand, in spite of the useless article as a starting point, you can check out my other follow up comments.
by epistasis | 2026-02-07 19:33:28+00:00
The "refutation" is the common view tha has been repeated for years and years, and is not complex at all. It in fact misses the dominant trends that have made US housing situation so unaffordable, and is only a tenable view if one has an overly simplistic and narrow view of the players in housing, specifically from the viewpoint of a home owner that does not struggle with the current high costs, and in fact implicitly benefits from those high costs that increase their wealth while locking the next generation out of the opportunity they had.

I don't think my views are absolutist at all, but please do point out wha you think is absolutist if you believe that is a fair criticism instead of a passing swipe.

> generalizing "rich people" as a group without considering strata of wealth at all

I did nothing of the sort, but I did point out that if the basis of opposing something is because rich people benefit, well, that is an argument to support more housing. If somebody is saying that only certain slices or classes should not benefit but that other rich people should benefit, then let that person make that argument, rather than the overly simplistic "rich person" argument. And let them add enough complexity to concretely state the profits: a homeowner is making 5% a year on their home due to scarcity by locking others out of opportunity, while the developer makes their investors 10%-15% over 2-3 years by adding productively to society and benefiting lots of new people with access to economic opportunity and housing.

Yes, different people are profiting, but one strata is doing it by making others wealthy at the same time, and their profits are to a REIT, and one times. Whereas the landlord and homeowner getting compounded annual returns at a high rate by increasing economic inequality and segregation, through rentierism and exclusion. When developers build an apartment building, investors profit but so does labor and the new residents and city coffers through new taxation.

The comment I was replying to did not present a single shred of complexity, and their petite bourgeois naïveté presents themselves as the only people in the world deserving of profit or consideration or agency or influence. They did not refute my world view at all, and my entire worldview on housing has come about from their same overly simplistic starting point and then learning that there's a vast world out there beyond it.
by AndrewKemendo | 2026-02-07 19:34:02+00:00
Same.

I was born in 84 and have been doing software since 97

it’s never been easier, better or more accessible time to make literally anything - by far.

Also if you prefer to code by hand literally nobody is stopping you AND even that is easier.

Cause if you wanted to code for console games you literally couldn’t in the 90s without 100k specialized dev machine.

It’s not even close.

This “I’m a victim because my software engineering hobby isn’t profitable anymore” take is honestly baffling.
by light_hue_1 | 2026-02-07 19:34:38+00:00
I'm that 40 year old now. Been writing code since grade 5. Loved it so much I got a PhD, was an academic, then moved into industry.

I don't mourn or miss anything. No more then the previous generation mourned going from assembly to high level languages.

The reason why programming is so amazing is getting things done. Seeing my ideas have impact.

What's happening is that I'm getting much much faster and better at writing code. And my hands feel better because I don't type the code in anymore.

Things that were a huge pain before are nothing now.

I didn't need to stay up at night writing code. I can think. Plan. Execute at a scale that was impossible before. Alone I'm already delivering things that were on the roadmap for engineering months worth of effort.

I can think about abstractions, architecture, math, organizational constraints, product. Not about what some lame compiler thinks about my code.

And if someone that's far junior to me can do my job. Good. Then we've empowered them and I've fallen behind. But that's not at all the case. The principals and faculty who are on the ball are astronomically more productive than juniors.
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-02-07 19:34:56+00:00
The "reverse dictionary" is called a "thesaurus". Wikipedia quotes Peter Mark Roget (1852):

> ...to find the word, or words, by which [an] idea may be most fitly and aptly expressed

I briefly investigated LLMs for this purpose, back when I didn't know how to use a thesaurus; but I find thesauruses a lot more useful. (Actually, I'm usually too lazy to crack out a proper thesaurus, so I spend 5 seconds poking around Wiktionary first: that's usually Good Enough™ to find me an answer, when I find an answer I can trust it, and I get the answer faster than waiting for an LLM to finish generating a response.)

There's definitely room to improve upon the traditional "big book of synonyms with double-indirect pointers" thesaurus, but LLMs are an extremely crude solution that I don't think actually is an improvement.
by linkjuice4all | 2026-02-07 19:35:03+00:00
Much like Factorio - bringing too much tech/automation into your hobbies (such as model trains) just turns a fun weekend hobby into "work". It's really cool to see the progress with digital controls in model trains (read up about Neil Young and Lionel [0]) but I don't want to have to ask AI to rewrite my train handling config files just to get some little motor to spin.

[0] https://thrasherswheat.org/tfa/trains-neil-young-1993.htm
by pandaman | 2026-02-07 19:35:08+00:00
I am glad that going directly after illegal behavior is an option for you but I live in a blue city, where DA practices "restorative justice" and the mayor allowed homeless to camp everywhere by a decree (it took a referendum and numerous lawsuits to remove giant camps he created out of downtown, they are still free to camp in residential areas despite the referendum explicitly forbidding that on top of the city and state laws to the safe effect). Nobody gets ticketed for noise, the "defund police" campaign from 2020 ended with the police not even enforcing traffic anymore so nobody is holding small business responsible.
by localghost3000 | 2026-02-07 19:35:16+00:00
This perspective was mine 6 months ago. And god damn, I do miss the feeling of crafting something truly beautiful in code sometimes. But then, as I've been pushed into this new world we're living in, I've come to realize a couple things:

Nothing I've ever built has lasted more than a few years. Either the company went under, or I left and someone else showed up and rewrote it to suit their ideals. Most of us are doing sand art. The tide comes in and its gone.

Code in and of itself should never have been the goal. I realized that I was thinking of the things I build and the problems I selected to work on from the angle of code quality nearly always. Code quality is important! But so is solving actual problems with it. I personally realized that I was motivated more by the shape of the code I was writing than the actual problems it was written to solve.

Basically the entire way I think about things has changed now. I'm building systems to build systems. Thats really fun. Do I sometimes miss the feeling of looking at a piece of code and feeling a sense of satisfaction of how well made it is? Sure. That era of software is done now sadly. We've exited the craftsman era and entered into the Ikea era of software development.
by Applejinx | 2026-02-07 19:35:30+00:00
I mean go ahead and cry if you want. You are losing time best spent caring about stuff, and overlooking many alarming gotchas through blindly accepting SV hype. I'd have thought crypto would teach people something, but apparently not.

Do what isn't replaceable. You're being told literally everything is replaceable. Note who's telling you that and follow the money.

I feel bad for this essayist, but can't really spare more than a moment to care about his grief. I got stuff to do, and I am up and doing. If he was in any way competing with the stuff I do? One less adversary.

I would rather bring him into community and enjoy us all creating together… but he's acting against those interests and he's doomering and I have no more time for that.
by majormajor | 2026-02-07 19:35:33+00:00
A century ago people in the US started to tax the rich much more heavily than we do now. They didn't believe that increasing inequality was necessary - or even actually that helpful - for improving their real livelihood.

Don't be shocked if that comes back. (And that was the mild sort of reaction.)

If you have billions and all the power associated with it, why are you shooting for personal trillions instead of actually, directly improving the day to day for everyone else without even losing your status as an elite, just diminishing it by a little bit of marginal utility? Especially if you read history about when people make that same decision?
by pcloadlett3r | 2026-02-07 19:35:38+00:00
I feel like maybe you spend too much time watching hypefluencers. AI tools are great but if they are already super intelligent why haven't you gotten a swarm of agents to build yourself a billion dollar SaaS?

It's hard to separate the bullshit from reality when the hype is just turned to the max everywhere you turn. It feels like I'm in some elaborate psy-op where my experiences with these tools are just an order of magnitude lower than the hype and I can't even express those thoughts without having "luddite" patch attached to me. And if you read between the lines of what Karpathy wrote in his famous "anxiety" post, it kind of echoes my point. Its "an alien technology and we can't yield it right" yada yada. Which is an odd way to say "sometimes this thing works magically but a lot of the time its total shit so you aren't as productive as you would like".
by b00ty4breakfast | 2026-02-07 19:36:14+00:00
I'll see if I can dig it up, but I remember reading that on average, under democratic presidencies going back to FDR, the economy in general performs better than it does under a republican presidency. If I'm remembering right, it's not as simple as mere ideological differences because there has been changes within the parties in those intervening ~75 years but the trend still holds.
by esbranson | 2026-02-07 19:36:20+00:00
CES establishment payroll survey monthly change averages is quite the choice of stats lol.

JOLTS is where stress shows first. Openings fall,[1] hiring slows,[2] quits drop,[3] and layoffs rise later.[4] Biden in particular shows the weakness of your provided stats.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSJOL

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSHIL

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSQUL

[4] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSLDL
by navanchauhan | 2026-02-07 19:36:20+00:00
You're absolutely right ;)

Your intuition/thinking definitely lines up with how we're thinking about this problem. If you have a good definition of done and a good validation harness, these agents can hill climb their way to a solution.

But you still need human taste/judgment to decide what you want to build (unless your solution is to just brute force the entire problem space).

For maximal leverage, you should follow the mantra "Why am I doing this?" If you use this enough times, you'll come across the bottleneck that can only be solved by you for now. As a human, your job is to set the higher-level requirements for what you're trying to build. Coming up with these requirements and then using agents to shape them up is acceptable, but human judgment is definitely where we have to answer what needs to be built. At the same time, I never want to be doing something the models are better at. Until we crack the proactiveness part, we'll be required to figure out what to do next.

Also, it looks like you and Danvers are working in the same space, and we love trading notes with other teams working in this area. We'd love to connect. You can either find my personal email or shoot me an email at my work email: navan.chauhan [at] strongdm.com