MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anigbrowl | 2026-02-02 20:09:27+00:00
I've said it before, open source works poorly in this area. It's great if everyone's getting paid fat money in a day job and can maintain their pet project a few days a month, but that's just not true for a lot of people.

It's disgusting that maintainers of critical projects have to go through the humiliation of begging for money, and absurd to suggest they all hang out Kofi or PAtreon banners. Realistically nobody is going to go through their bash history working out what utilities they use in order of frequency and allocating funds to the maintainers proportionally. I'm baffled that some entity like the Linux Software Foundation isn't administering this already.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-02-02 20:09:36+00:00
"The second reason for dropping System V is that packages like GNOME and soon KDE's Plasma are building in requirements that require capabilities in systemd that are not in System V."

I remember LFS from way back in the day.

What do we all think the overlap between LFS users and Gnome or KDE users is? I think it's pretty small.
by antisthenes | 2026-02-02 20:09:54+00:00
That giant 5-level parking lot monstrocity could be a transport hub instead that has a warm metro stop, much better lighting and safety and perhaps even some light convenience retail.

> Imagining sitting in a cosy, warm pod, driving in a tunnel autonomously, point to point, and you have my vote.

They already have this. It's called a metro.
by strongpigeon | 2026-02-02 20:10:10+00:00
The trick to reach the usage limit is to run many agents in parallel. Not that it’s an explicit goal of mine but I keep thinking of this blog post [0] and then try to get Codex to do as much for me as possible in parallel

[0]: http://theoryofconstraints.blogspot.com/2007/06/toc-stories-...
by shevy-java | 2026-02-02 20:10:20+00:00
One of the few living oldschool UNIX legends still alive.

Here is when he was young:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0

Kind of explains in an epic manner why pipes were useful back then.

They are still useful, but computers are so much more powerful that
many techniques back then came primarily because their computers were
not as powerful. I still, oddly enough, prefer the hardware of the
1970s, 1980s, almost early 1990s too. Today's hardware is much better,
but I am nowhere as interested in it; it is now just like a common
tool.
by mindslight | 2026-02-02 20:10:47+00:00
For sure. I often think about this when using my tractor to clean up trees I've taken down, for which there is a lot of grab, lift, hop off, chainsaw, repeat. Or really any kind of hoisting/positioning where the engine is just sitting idle to occasionally move hydraulics.

Via HN a little while back, I came across a guy importing electric versions of things like front loaders, forklifts, excavators, etc. Intriguing, but less compelling if you have to buy 2-4 pieces of equipment rather than one jack-of-all-trades. Although if I were going to have to maintain multiple pieces of equipment, I'd definitely prefer them to be electric!

I can end up putting in more than 2 hours a day, but I think the math still works out for most homeowner use. I think the main thing it doesn't work out great for is long dirt-engaging operations like for actually farming a large field. But it's not like the subcompacts are really made for that either, and they're quite popular.

It would be really interesting to see what could be done with linear actuators instead of hydraulics, too. Although I suspect heat dissipation would be a problem, and working on hydraulics is pretty cool in and of itself.
by mpweiher | 2026-02-02 20:10:50+00:00
Nope, the only one making it a zero-sum us-vs.them game is you.

The article noted that there is a large gap, and that it is widening.

This obviously calls for measures to help boys close that gap, measures that haven't been taken for decades.

Any measures to correct an overall decline in reading are unaffected by this. Nobody called for general reductions or reductions for girls.

Only you came and denied that boys should receive help when they are facing a disadvantage.

Why?

Why is the idea of boys getting help so completely und unacceptably horrible for you?

Interesting story about your grandma in the olden days, but has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
by spwa4 | 2026-02-02 20:10:54+00:00
I don't understand, unless I'm misreading this OS has no memory protection. In other words: it can't run applications! And this is not fixable! You can never risk executing untrusted or semi-untrusted code with permissions on something like this.

I've always thought that it would be quite simple to pull "an android" but based on wasm (even perhaps using wasm-in-kernel execution). Quite simple, that is, compared to what Android achieved with Java. But this, this just can't work.
Ask HN: Anyone else unemotional about AI coding?
by softwaredoug | 2026-02-02 20:11:31+00:00
I’m neither outraged nor panicking

I’m fine if 100% of my code is actually from Claude

Most of the time, I like to use Claude Code to make targeted changes along with the tests. I try the feature, notice issues with the change, and clarify with better tests along the way.

Occasionally I give it a more ambitious task, but the variance increases, and much depends on whether I’ve given the right guardrails. Like recently I upgraded a pandas plugin to Pandas 3.0, but it had heeaaavy amounts of testing.

In both cases my software brain is still fully on and I care about the same things I used to care about. I’m just not wasting time on dumb human mistakes. Why would I? I have a predictive model of language next to me

I do still write a bit of code (like in a Jupyter notebook). Sure it’s a tad rusty, but it’s perfectly fine. I don’t yet feel completely decayed in my ability to appreciate code.

In the end we have always had to go up/down levels of abstraction and not get too attached to one tool. I see using an LLM the same, you can use it in tight, low variance changes. Or go big with bigger swings. Sometimes you vibe code a whole app to test PMF and create a demo. Sometimes you’re really fine tuning 10 lines of code for performance and correctness.
by atmavatar | 2026-02-02 20:11:35+00:00
> Older folks have to deal with the double whammy of being familiar with what they already know, plus there is a good bit of research that learning and absorbing new things just gets harder past mid-40s or so.

Unfortunately, since the tech industry still largely skews young, reticence to chase every new hype cycle also feeds into the perception of an inability to learn new things, even after many prove to be fads (e.g., blockchain).
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-02-02 20:11:40+00:00
> If AI can program, why does it matter if it can play Chess using CoT when it can program a Chess Engine instead?

Heh, we really did come full circle on this! When chatgpt launched in dec22 one of the first things that people noticed is that it sucked at math. Like basic math 12 + 35 would trip it up. Then people "discovered" tool use, and added a calculator. And everyone was like "well, that's cheating, of course it can use a calculator, but look it can't do the simple addition logic"... And now here we are :)
by zdw | 2026-02-02 20:11:48+00:00
Excel spreadsheets have little to no validation logic that you're actually getting a good result, unless you have a secondary check (most spreadsheets are structured as "single entry" accounting, so lack the checks)

A prime example of this was the Reinhart/Rogoff paper advocating austerity that was widely quoted, and then it was discovered that the spreadsheet used had errors that invalidated the conclusions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt#Metho...

Just because technology is in use and "works" doesn't mean it's always correct.
by gushogg-blake | 2026-02-02 20:12:15+00:00
Project: Jaw Health (https://jawhealth.org)

Purpose: raise awareness of the jaw epidemic.

Background: changes related to agriculture and industrialisation are causing our jaws to grow smaller and more backwards and downwards. This is behind much of the prevalence of malocclusion (crooked teeth), sleep-disordered breathing (inc. sleep apnea), and jaw joint problems we see. It's being ignored because a) historical separation of dentistry and medicine -- neither GPs nor dentists are trained to recognise it, and b) it challenges the business model of orthodontics (common procedures such as extractions and retraction can cause or make issues worse; if orthodontics accepts the jaw epidemic idea as stated then almost all practitioners will have to retrain significantly).

Funding needed: Living expenses for one person + server costs, ~£700 per month.

Possibilities for further funding: improving website, running ad campaigns for awareness.
by ycombinatrix | 2026-02-02 20:12:18+00:00
they charge a minimum fee per transaction. from Accursed Farms' donation page (https://www.accursedfarms.com/donations/)

"Paypal keeps $0.30 + 2.9% of every donation, so please keep anything less than $0.32 as they have enough money already."

i think Cash App has the lowest fees i've seen at like $0.01 which would still be too much.

not saying it is impossible - but likely not viable directly with the current payment providers.
by SimianSci | 2026-02-02 20:12:22+00:00
The Value of software is going down, this much is clear to most people.
It will continue to demand proper engineering for its creation and operation.
But AI will lead to an increase of unique one-of-a-kind systems created by very small teams. And the world will increasingly rely on these unique systems.

SaaS companies need to start reading the writting on the wall, their massive valuations enjoyed when software was harder to create will need to be justified.
Show HN: Feistly – Cryptographically secure ID obfuscation with Feistel cipher
by jundev76 | 2026-02-02 20:12:31+00:00
I built Feistly to hide auto-increment IDs in URLs with tamper detection.

Most ID obfuscation libraries (Hashids, Sqids, Optimus) are reversible encodings. If you know the algorithm, you can decode tokens or manipulate them without the server detecting it. Feistly uses a Feistel cipher with HMAC-SHA256 to provide:

- Tamper detection: Modified tokens fail validation
- Domain separation: User ID 100 and Order ID 100 generate different tokens with the same key
- Format-preserving encryption: 64-bit input to 64-bit ciphertext, deterministic

The tradeoff is speed. Feistly does ~60K ops/sec vs millions for Hashids, but for most web apps database queries are the bottleneck anyway.

Example:

const feistly = new Feistly({ masterKey: process.env.KEY });
const token = feistly.encrypt("user", 12345); // "7nX4kP2mQ"
feistly.decrypt("user", token); // "12345"

GitHub: https://github.com/jundev76/feistly
npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/feistly

Zero dependencies (Node.js crypto only), TypeScript native, includes benchmarks.

Feedback welcome – is this solving a real problem or is it overengineering?
by ipdashc | 2026-02-02 20:12:32+00:00
> Is there a way to simply have these not present at all, for people who don't want any of them?

This is quite literally what the article you're replying to is about.

> None of this is useful. Just stop.

Translations and tab grouping both seem pretty useful to me. Image alt text is probably very useful for those who need it. The remaining two, meh, but I'll just turn them off.
by shevy-java | 2026-02-02 20:12:34+00:00
I disagree on "the most critical" part. You can be superuser at all times. I understand the arguments why not; I am pointing out that this is possible. Despite people claiming aliens will arrive and nothing will work, everything works fine when the superuser account is used too.

Also, I disagree that every company needs to pay the man. Funding is important, yes, but a *nix system is not crippled without sudo. You can change the permission systems. The superuser can do so too. It is not black magic. The permission system is trivial. sudo is simply a feature of convenience, not a "if sudo does not exist, nothing works" - that just makes no sense.
by larodi | 2026-02-02 20:12:39+00:00
No, they dont distrust AI, they now may start to distrust all the big service providers that are likelty to eventually be eradicated by AI now that everyone can prompt a browser. This perhaps will also finally kill Microsoft Access, which is the closest to AI doing the work instead of you for so long. Then all the do-it-yourself enterprise-grade systems became SAAS, so its right for SalesForce and friends to go fck themselves once in a lifetime for standing in the way of actual software ownership.

I know, you are saying - they will adopt. Perhaps, while also cutting 40% (if not more) personnel during the pivot, and perhaps also by facing more challenges by faster moving competition.

Like, look for a second - why didn't Google create what the perplexity newsfeed is, given they actually like did 10 years ago and then close to nobody was using it. The equilibrium seems super unstable. What happens if a smart kid devices way to compress this information 10x times faster. This immediately means neural chips stall.

This volatility is something, not a joke. The second order effects may be unforseeable in an unparalleled way. Besides, the Luddites organize much better in 2026 given reddit etc.
by lcrisci | 2026-02-02 20:12:49+00:00
Location: London, UK

Remote: Preferred but open to hybrid for the right offer

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Kubernetes, Istio, GitOps, Go, AWS, GCP, Terraform, CICD, Supply Chain Security ( in-toto Attestations ) and a lot more

Email: laurent [at] crisci-solutions [dot] co [dot] uk

I'm an infrastructure development specialist with 18+ years of experience delivering value from Day 1. I help teams design, build, stabilise and scale modern platforms across AWS, GCP, and Kubernetes with hands-on expertise in DevOps, SRE and Platform Engineering. I also have an extensive knowledge of supply chain security best practices and frameworks such as SLSA and in-toto Attestations.

I can provide various services like audit, discovery, management of new and existing infrastructures, troubleshooting existing issues, helping to establish a European presence for a US team, etc. I can lead teams and projects when required and have done so in the past. I have worked and delivered on all sorts of projects, from being the first member in a startup's platform team and helping it to grow to collaborating with top tier bank, media, gaming, crypto businesses.

Send me an email or book a call to discuss your needs via https://www.crisci-solutions.co.uk/contact/

I'm available for short term engagements before end of February and potentially long ones from March onwards.

I'm mainly looking for contracts in the UK/EU/US.
by Spivak | 2026-02-02 20:12:56+00:00
I mean that's "Park and Ride" which already exists but the problem is that people, kinda rightfully, hate it. All the downsides of a car with all the downsides of a bus.

The solution, which has done in my city to genuinely smashing success is to nationalize the parking garages meaning government builds them, maintains them, and they're free forever. Dot them around a dense mixed use area and quite literally watch the money pour in. Everything is within grandpa walking distance of at least one garage, they're specced to over capacity so each one is never full, and it provides parking to the workers and apartments.
by miso01 | 2026-02-02 20:13:04+00:00
Location: Slovakia (EU, UTC+1)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Kotlin, Java, Go, Docker, Kubernetes, gRPC, SQL

Résumé/CV: https://linkly.link/2Wb4u

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michal-svec/

I'm a motivated final year CS student who will be ready for full time employment in 07/2026 so I'm seeking junior/graduate level roles that revolve around backend stuff and where I can learn a lot.

I started programming on my own at the age of 15. Since then, I have explored multiple areas, including mobile app development (native and Flutter), web development (React, Next.js, Vue), QA, MLOps, and AI/ML. During this exploration phase, I realized that I want to focus my career on backend development.

My experience includes several internships and side projects. In my most recent internship at JetBrains, I worked on the backend for remote Kotlin code compilation. Prior to that, I worked at Dell on the MLOps team, where I gained exposure to DevOps and some cloud technologies.

You can check out my resume and GitHub (link included in the resume) for a complete overview of my experience and side projects.

Most of my coding experience is in Java and Python. I also really enjoy Kotlin and I am currently learning Go (Golang) by building a simple VPN as a side project. I prefer working with strongly typed languages. For example, I don’t have much experience with Rust or C++ but I’m eager to learn.

Feel free to reach out to me via email or connect with me on LinkedIn. My personal details are included in my resume.
by mort96 | 2026-02-02 20:13:04+00:00
From my perspective, the main structural difference between the EU and the US is that it's legal for a member country to leave the EU but illegal for a member state to leave the US.

This is a very significant difference and means that the EU is a consensual partnership between countries while the US is not. Still, if the US instituted a legal way for a member state to secede, I do not think it would be fair to call the US "only contracts between states"; I think it would be warranted to view the federal government as its own political entity which is more than just the sum of its member states.

Do you agree with my view of this hypothetical alternative US? If yes: what is the essential difference between that and the EU which makes one a political entity of its own right while the other is "just contracts between countries"? If no: why?
by codingdave | 2026-02-02 20:13:43+00:00
I find that most of the people I talk to feel about the same as this. There are vocal minorities at the extremes, and there are people producing and falling for hype, but if you get away from online discussions and just talk to people working in the industry, AI is just part of the modern toolbox. Everyone is finding their own groove with it, which may or may not match what anyone else says or does.
by shevy-java | 2026-02-02 20:15:02+00:00
No.

I am glad to not depend on AI. It would annoy me to no ends how it tries to assimilate everything. It's like systemd on roids in this aspect. It will swallow up more and more tasks. Granted, in a way this is saying "then it was not necessary to have this things anymore now that AI solves it all", but I am skeptical of "the praised land" here. Skynet was not trusted back in 1982 or so. I don't trust AI either.
by dyauspitr | 2026-02-02 20:15:04+00:00
I think there will still be delivery services where you need someone to go into the restaurant and then up to the customers door. That’s going to stick around unless we get to a point where the restaurant is responsible to load up the Waymo and the customer is responsible for getting it out which probably won’t happen anytime soon. The whole delivery market was also mostly created overnight from something that didn’t exist before.
by cmpalmer52 | 2026-02-02 20:15:36+00:00
As much as we’d like to say “Make me a website that does X, Y, and Z” and then taking a nap, I’ve found breaking it down is best, even if each step is done by AI.

I started with just ChatGPT for the preliminaries.

I wrote a description, loose set of requirements then had the AI review the requirements for completeness and consistency, then draft them into a requirements.md file.

Then I gave the requirements to the AI and had it generate an architecture and design doc.

Then I had the AI review the design against the requirements a few times, refining them.

I also did a couple of rough paper sketches of layout and photographed them (digital or scan would be fine/better of course).

Only then did I switch the agentic coding AI.

Again, I broke it down into steps.

First, mock up the UI/UX with dummy data.

Implement the backend needed to support the UI.

Hook it all up.

Refine and add features.

Have it do code reviews to remove dead code, consolidate redundancies, etc. Always make sure it meets its requirements and design (modify design if necessary so that it documents the real state). It can also maintain your Readme.md.

I did this in a long afternoon to create a utility site that tracked Azure DevOps PRs across multiple projects and repos, creating links to YouTrack tickets, and providing basic searching and sorting (so a lot of API calls and state persistence, but no local database). I only had a step “fail” once or twice, usually due to misunderstanding or vagueness. No real errors.

By the end of the afternoon, I gave the tool to my team and it’s been being used without error since. a few new features were requested and I did the last few steps for each new features - add feature, code review, requirements review, update design and Readme.md.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-02-02 20:17:02+00:00
The Unix command-line composition-via-pipes workflow has no particular connection to hardware capabilities whatsoever.

foo | bar | baz

is useful whether you have a 25Mhz uniprocessor or 1024 cores running at 8GHz.

It is true that the unix pipe model is explicitly designed around text as the data format, and it is true that there's lot of data on computers in 2026 that is not sensibly represented as text. But there's also lots that is, and so the pipe model continues to be valuable and powerful.
by mempko | 2026-02-02 20:17:05+00:00
This article crystallizes something I witnessed firsthand last week.

Overheard a guy at a restaurant explaining how he builds phone apps with AI and no coding experience. When asked how he verifies the code works, he said he pastes it into a different AI to explain it.

That's the "slopware" problem in action. The code compiles. It might even work. But there's no understanding of what it's actually doing, no ability to debug when it breaks in production, no awareness of the technical cruft accumulating with every prompt. That's a problem for people creating software for others and is a huge opportunity for software developers to take prototypes and build real stuff.

Does anyone remember the RAD days of the 90s?

On the flip side, for people making software to solve THEIR problems, they don't need to make anything production quality. Its for a single user, themselves! Maybe the LLMs are good enough now that people don't need to buy or subscribe to software that solves trivial problems as they can build their own solutions. Maybe the dream of smalltalk, hypercard, and even early web where anyone can use the computer of what it was meant for is finally here?
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-02-02 20:17:19+00:00
> packages like GNOME and soon KDE's Plasma are building in requirements that require capabilities in systemd

So drop them. There are other desktops that are faster, simpler, more stable, and aren't hard-coded to make Linux worse. Has everyone forgotten the design principles that made Linux good in the first place? Tightly coupling your software into other software is simply bad design. At some point you need to eat the cost of a looser abstraction to make your system less fragile, easier to reason about, and more compatible.
by codingdave | 2026-02-02 20:17:19+00:00
Yes, in my experience sprints almost always go according to plan. But that is because if the team cannot successfully run a Scrum process, then they don't. Trying to force sprints and scrum onto a team that cannot or will not do it is the true failure. After all, Scrum in general has warts. So if you aren't succeeding with it, switch to something else. Do Kanban. Do Waterfall. Invent your own thing. But if your process doesn't work, don't keep doing it.