MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-08 18:09:44+00:00
The last administration left this administration one of the healthiest economies in US history, regardless of consumer sentiment and vibes, this is a fact based on objective economic metrics around unemployment, job growth rates, wage gains, etc.

Exit polls are no longer reliable due to voters lying. If voters were upset with prices, and therefore vote for someone with no plan to improve prices besides "I will fix them" and then does nothing to fix them, well, not much you can do about that. Voters voted, in some combination of economic unsophistication (not knowing "How do prices go down?" but believing anyone who says they could make it happen without a plan) and racism (below citation), for this. This is what they get until next elections. If they experience economic harm due to these outcomes, again, not much you can do about that, we're on rails assuming political and governance system election timelines. But this is how we got here, based on the evidence and data.

White Americans’ feelings of being “last place” are associated with anti-DEI attitudes, Trump support, and Trump vote during the 2024 U.S. presidential election - https://advances.in/psychology/10.56296/aip00046/ | https://doi.org/10.56296/aip00046

Abstract: Due to racial wealth inequality in the U.S.—inequality that benefits White Americans on average—many Americans associate White people with wealth. Yet, many White Americans report feeling like they, personally, are “falling behind.” We conducted a five-wave longitudinal study with a representative quota sample of non-Hispanic, White Americans (N = 506) during the 2024 U.S. presidential election. We found that White Americans who feel they are falling behind White and Asian Americans, while also being close to being passed by Black and Hispanic Americans, within a perceived tight status hierarchy, reported the most support for DEI bans and Trump, controlling for objective status. Further, White Americans with these status perceptions were most likely to vote for Trump in the 2024 election. We conclude that White Americans’ subjective perceptions of their position in the racial economic hierarchy meaningfully relate to political attitudes and behavior.

The Findings: Using a statistical technique called Latent Profile Analysis (LPA), we identified distinct groups based on where people subjectively ranked themselves and other racial groups on the American status ladder.

* We found a specific group of White Americans (~15% of our sample) who perceived themselves as "tied for last place" with Black Americans.

* Crucially: This group was the most likely to vote for Donald Trump and support bans on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

* Importantly, this effect held true even when we controlled for their actual income, education, age, and gender. In other words, feeling like you are losing status predicted voting behavior more strongly than actually having low status.

Author AMA (scheduled for Monday, Feb 9th, 10:00am EST): https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1qz9158/we_are_pr...
by djoldman | 2026-02-08 18:10:13+00:00
> nitpick: most users don’t care about these things until something goes significantly wrong and it impacts them, e.g. a massive data breach or persistent global downtime.

> then they get angry. very angry.

Yes, this has a lot of overlap with how humans differ from "Homo Economicus" [0].

Humans generally can't find out, don't know, care to know, have the time to research, or are expert enough to understand the ramifications of decisions perfectly (or adequately to some definition of adequate).

However, they do understand price!!! So you end up getting cheap stuff that everyone chooses because they don't understand how they lower their future risk or save money over the long run with a more immediately expensive option.

This, also, has been true for a long long time. Humans are far more likely to choose the cheap option if they don't believe or understand the expensive one.

Incidentally, this is somewhat rational given that marketing half-truths are rampant.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus
by Cyphus | 2026-02-08 18:10:13+00:00
I wholly agree, the response screams “copied from ChatGPT” to me. “Contributions” like these comments and drive by PRs are a curse on open source and software development in general.

As someone who takes pride in being thorough and detail oriented, I cannot stand when people provide the bare minimum of effort in response. Earlier this week I created a bug report for an internal software project on another team. It was a bizarre behavior, so out of curiosity and a desire to be truly helpful, I spent a couple hours whittling the issue down to a small, reproducible test case. I even had someone on my team run through the reproduction steps to confirm it was reproducible on at least one other environment.

The next day, the PM of the other team responded with a _screenshot of an AI conversation_ saying the issue was on my end for misusing a standard CLI tool. I was offended on so many levels. For one, I wasn’t using the CLI tool in the way it describes, and even if I was it wouldn’t affect the bug. But the bigger problem is that this person thinks a screenshot of an AI conversation is an acceptable response. Is this what talking to semi technical roles is going to be like from now on? I get to argue with an LLM by proxy of another human? Fuck that.
by Eridrus | 2026-02-08 18:10:43+00:00
What does it take to get a good outcome in the 2-20m ARR exit space?

When I read PE multiples in the 3-5x ARR range, it seems like a fire sale compared to valuation prices. At 3x, you might just be giving it all back in liquidation preferences.

Am I missing something, or is this just founders who are sick of running the business and want to do something else, or are there lots of capital efficient companies in this range where 3-5x revenue is a good deal?
by jodrellblank | 2026-02-08 18:11:00+00:00
LLMs aren't AGI and maybe aren't a path to AGI, but step back and look at the way the world is changing. Hard disks were invented by IBM in 1953 and now less than a hundred years later there's an estimated million terabytes a year of hard disks made and sold, and a total sold of Mega, Giga, Tera, Peta, Exa, Zetta ... 1.36 Zettabytes.

In 2000, webcams were barely a thing, audio was often recorded to dictaphone tapes, and now you can find a recorded photo or video of roughly anyone and anything on Earth. Maybe a tenth of all humans, almost any place, animal, insect, or natural event, almost any machine, mechanism, invention, painting, and a large sampling of "indoors" both public and private, almost any festival or event or tradition, and a very large sampling of "people doing things" and people teaching things for all kinds of skills. And tons of measurements of locations, temperatures, movements, weather, experiment results, and so on.

The ability of computers to process information jumped with punched card readers, with electronic computers in the 1950s, again with transistors in the 1970s, semiconductors in the 1980s, commodity computer clusters (Google) in the 1990s, maybe again with multi-core desktops for everyone in the 2000s, with general purpose GPUs in the 2010s, and with faster commodity networking from 10Mbit to 100Gbit and more, and with SATA, then SAS, then RAID, then SSDs.

It's now completely normal to check Google Maps to look at road traffic and how busy stores are (picked up in near realtime from the movement of smartphones around the planet), to do face and object recognition and search in photos, to do realtime face editing/enhancement while recording on a smartphone, to track increasing amounts of exercise and health data from increasing numbers of people, to call and speak to people across the planet and have your voice transcribed automatically to text, to realtime face-swap or face-enhance on a mobile chip, to download gigabytes of compressed Wikipedia onto a laptop and play with it in a weekend in Python just for fun.

"AI" stuff (LLMs, neural networks and other techniques, PyTorch, TensorFlow, cloud GPUs and TPUs), the increase in research money, in companies competing to hire the best researchers, the increase in tutorials and numbers of people around the world wanting to play with it and being able to do that ... do you predict that by 2030, 2035, 2040, 2045, 2050 ... 2100, we'll have manufactured more compute power and storage than has ever been made, several times over, and made it more and more accessible to more people, and nothing will change, nothing interesting or new will have been found deliberately or stumbled upon accidentally, nothing new will have been understood about human brains, biology, or cognition, no new insights or products or modelling or AI techniques developed or become normal, no once-in-a-lifetime geniuses having any flashes of insight?
by kjkjadksj | 2026-02-08 18:11:08+00:00
Companies are already like this. Boss fires his friend and puts him out of work with a family to feed. Why? It was ‘good for the company.’ So many inhuman decisions hide behind that fig leaf. It is a way to mentally remove responsibilities from these decisions. After all, it was for the good of the company. Stock buybacks while mailroom is on food stamps? For the good of the company. Dumping the waste into the river instead of safely disposing it? For the good of the company. Making money off vice and the mentally vulnerable? For the good of the company. Overfishing the ocean such that there won’t even be a commercial fishing industry in our lifetimes? For the good of the company. Polluting the earth and ushering in a new age of extinction? For the good of the company.

We are already enslaved to capitalism. Working against our own interest. In service towards the company and the company alone. This meta organism we value above all else on earth.
by csense | 2026-02-08 18:12:05+00:00
If actual inflation > IR you can get for safe investments, it means inflation is working as designed. Mainstream economists make the argument that anyone who saves money is selfishly hoarding resources that could be spent or invested. The Fed is supposed to print money to purposely cause inflation, precisely to "tax" this unsocial behavior and incentivize consumption, riskier investments, and debt.

I don't personally agree with this argument. But everyone should be aware that the argument exists, many economists endorse it, and it is used to guide policy in many countries.
by vishyouluck | 2026-02-08 18:12:08+00:00
This project demonstrates how to instrument agentic AI systems to detect when they make different decisions depending on whether they think a decision is hypothetical (theory mode) vs real (action mode).

It implements logging, comparison, and reversal detection logic, with sample usage for both simulated and real model cases. The motivation and conceptual foundation are discussed here: https://dev.to/vishalmysore/why-ai-agents-make-different-dec...

Feedback welcome — especially on integration patterns and real-world drift detection
by 9rx | 2026-02-08 18:12:33+00:00
> If you want to establish a new word, you need to make sure that the word also sticks in common use.

That depends on your goals. If you are writing in your private journal, or a comment on HN, it doesn't matter one bit.

If you want to find commonality with other people it is significantly more efficient, but still not required. It is not like one is born understanding words. They are not passed down from the heavens. They are an invention. When I say 'sloopydoopidydoo' you might not know what I intend by it right away, but the path to figuring it out is a perfectly solved problem. Even young children can handle it.

> For existing concepts it's much better to use the words that have already been established

Let's put it to the test: I added enums to the programming language I am working on. Tell me, with your dictionary in hand, what do I mean by that?

Here's the thing: According to the dictionary, an enum is something like Go's iota or C's enum. But many people will tell you that Go doesn't have enums — that an enum is what others might recognize as a tagged union. That kind of language evolution happens all the time. So, what do I mean? Am I using the dictionary definition, or the community definition that is quickly gaining favour and will no doubt be added to the dictionary as soon as someone has a chance to update it? Both uses have been widely established in my opinion. In fact, the Swift programming language's documentation even acknowledges both uses and then goes on to explain what it means by "enum" to remove any confusion.

I look forward to seeing if you captured my intent.
by manmal | 2026-02-08 18:12:38+00:00
I‘ve done some phone programming over the Xmas holidays with clawdbot. This does work, BUT you absolutely need demand clearly measurable outcomes of the agent, like a closed feedback loop or comparison with a reference implementation, or perfect score in a simulated environment. Without this, the implementation will be incomplete and likely utter crap.

Even then, the architecture will be horrible unless you chat _a lot_ about it upfront. At some point, it’s easier to just look in the terminal.
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-08 18:12:46+00:00
Working with people != socializing.

You can be professional and collaborate productively at work with people who you don't like at a personal level and have no intention to socialize with.

I get along great with all colleagues but I stopped joining them for coffee and watercooler smalltalk since we don't vibe and have nothing in common, so not only is it a waste of my time, it's also an energy drain for me to be to fake interest in forced social gatherings. But that doesn't mean we can't be productive together at technical stuff.
by devsda | 2026-02-08 18:13:23+00:00
> New models come out constantly and over time companies will phase out older ones. These newer models will be better, sure, but their outputs will be different.

IIUC, same model with same seed and other parameters is not guaranteed to produce the same output.

If anyone is imagining a future where your "source" git repo is just a bunch of highly detailed prompt files and "compilation" just needs an extra LLM code generator, they are signing up for disappointment.
by dijit | 2026-02-08 18:13:54+00:00
Why are you even trying to argue energy consumption when the topic is eWaste due to bitcoin ASICs?

Even if we continue down this route, its something like 15% of global stock transactions going through NYSE, per transaction its extremely efficient when compared to Ethereum; but thats not the argument anyway- its that the hardware used for mining is barely useful outside of that use-case, and the shelf-life is very low to boot.

If there was a use-case, we’d have found it by now, since 30,000 Tonnes a year of it ends up in landfills, surely someone would dig it out or buy it if it had utility.
by letharion | 2026-02-08 18:14:05+00:00
What I wanted to know from the article:

The CATL Naxtra sodium-ion battery will debut in the Changan Nevo A06 sedan, delivering an estimated range of around 400 kilometers (249 miles) on the China Light-Duty Test Cycle.

and

It delivers 175 watt-hours per kilogram of energy density, which is lower than nickel-rich chemistries but roughly on par with LFP
by SR2Z | 2026-02-08 18:14:18+00:00
Their industry is only shady because lots of fairly harmless drugs require a prescription. Viagra, the GLPs, and minoxidi+finasteride come to mind.

For a long time in this country, a flesh-eating bacteria infection required an amputation. In Russia and Eastern Europe, it was easily treatable with bacteriophages and people normally kept their limbs. There's still no process for approving a bacteriophage treatment in this country for general use.

Our system is ossified to protect big pharma and doctors. Liberalization is needed; hims and their like need to be regulated, but with a lighter touch than the current requirements.
by autoexec | 2026-02-08 18:14:38+00:00
> we're definitely in a golden age of computing.

Certainly not. Computers are still magic, but much of that magic is now controlled and being restricted by someone other than you.

Today most people's only computer is a cell phone, which is heavily locked down and designed for media consumption and to collect and give away every scrap of their personal/private data. Most people's desktop computers aren't much better. They are continuously used by others against the interests of the people who paid for them, sometimes explicitly keeping them from doing things they want or limiting what they can install.

People are increasingly ignorant of how computers work in ways that were never possible when you had to understand them to use them. SoCs mean that users, and even the operating system they use, aren't fully aware of what the devices are doing.

People have lost control of the computers they paid for and their own data. They now have to beg a small number of companies for anything they want (including their own data on the cloud). We're heading toward a future where you'll need a submit to a retinal scan just to view a website.

Computing today is more adversarial, restricted, opaque, centralized, controlled, and monitored than it has been in a very long time. "My computer talks to me" is not making up for that.
by AaronD44 | 2026-02-08 18:15:14+00:00
After months of building, I’ve officially released my first commercial software product: PayrollForge™. PayrollForge™ is a locally-run payroll calculation platform designed for businesses and payroll professionals who want full control over their payroll data without subscriptions or per-employee pricing. It includes: Multi-company payroll management Payroll approval and audit tracking Workers’ compensation calculations by role Federal and state payroll tax calculation tools Flexible payroll frequencies (weekly, bi-weekly, semi-monthly, monthly) The system runs locally, meaning businesses maintain full ownership of their payroll data rather than storing it in a third-party SaaS environment. This is an early commercial release, and I’m continuing to expand reporting, automation, and integration features over upcoming versions. If you work in payroll operations, accounting, or run payroll internally for your organization and want to take a look, feel free to reach out.

product link: https://dixon85.gumroad.com/l/rvtnut
by mancerayder | 2026-02-08 18:15:38+00:00
Don't you get bored with spending many years learning and becoming advanced or an expert in a system paradigm (like different hosting systems), a programming language (i.e. Perl), or a framework (pick your JS framework), only to have it completely obsoleted a few years later? And then in a job interview, when you try to sell yourself on your wisdom as expert on thing X, new to Y, they dismiss you because the 25 year old has been using Y since its release three years ago?

And when you're in an existing company, stuck in thing X, knowing that it's obsolete, and the people doing the latest Y that's hot in the job market are in another department and jealously guard access to Y projects?

How about when you go to interview, and you not ONLY have to know Y, but the Leetcode from 15 years ago?

So maybe I've given you another alternative to 'it has to be power, there's no other rational reason to go into management'.

Here's a gentler one: if you want to build big things, involving many people, you need to be in management.

Do you enjoy brick laying and calculating angles around doorways? You're the engineer. Do you want to be the architect hiring engineers, working with project managers, and assessing the budget while worrying about approvals? They're different types of work, and it's not about 'power' like you are suggesting. Autonomy and decision-making power are more the 'power' engineers often don't get (unless they are lucky, very very smart or in a small startup-like environment).
by abdimoalim | 2026-02-08 18:15:54+00:00
Hi everyone,
I took some time to release this allocator library for C which has various common patterns, e.g. arenas, pools, GPA, temporary and stack allocators. I found myself rewriting arenas/pools many times and since the same ideas exist in Zig, it would be useful to have this in C. In Rust/C++, there are a few external libraries, std::allocator class template isn't particularly concrete, it only provides an interface (allocator_traits).

It also makes it trivial to write a custom allocator. Cheers!

Link: https://github.com/abdimoallim/alloc
by fortran77 | 2026-02-08 18:18:13+00:00
It's very hard to make people understand how scammers use third parties. Mom 92 year-old mother mailed a check that was stolen in the mail, had the name changed, and was e-deposited.

My brother (a lawyer!) wanted to sue the person whose name is on the check! I had to convince him not to bother; that the person's account that the check was deposited to was probably some other victom who was tricked into giving the bank login information away and his account was being unwittingly used to launder checks. The scammer was most likely overseas, but pays U.S. Post Office employees to steal envelopes that likely contain checks and send images (See https://www.justice.gov/usao-ct/pr/former-postal-employee-se... for example)

The bank reversed the check but we had to get a notarized statement from my mom, and it was a hassle for a 92 year old.

As far as this case goes, guns should only be used in self-defense when there's an immediate danger. Not punitively. This guy's life wasn't immediately being threatened and he deserves to have the book thrown at him.
by lordnacho | 2026-02-08 18:18:13+00:00
I liken it to being an author.

You want to write a book about people's deepest motivations. Formative experiences, relationships, desires. Society, expectations, disappointment. Characters need to meet and talk at certain times. The plot needs to make sense.

You bring it to your editor. He finds you forgot to capitalise a proper noun. You also missed an Oxford comma. You used "their" instead of "they're".

He sends you back. You didn't get any feedback about whether it makes sense that the characters did what they did.

You are in hell, you won't hear anything about the structure until you fix your commas.

Eventually someone invents an automatic editor. It fixes all the little grammar and spelling and punctuation issues for you.

Now you can bring the script to an editor who tells you the character needs more development.

You are making progress.

Your only issue is the Luddites who reckon you aren't a real author, because you tend to fail their LeetGrammar tests, calling you a vibe author.
by djoldman | 2026-02-08 18:18:14+00:00
Agreed. "Quality" is a shortcut word to mean an aspect of a product/service that many/most think desirable.

There are examples of seemingly contradictory high/low cost, high/low durability, high/low reliability, high/low status symbol, etc. and seemingly every combination.

Cars are a great example:

* Reliable cars can also be cheap.

* High status symbol cars can be incredibly expensive but also unreliable.

* Expensive cars can be dangerous.

* etc.
by jake-modall | 2026-02-08 18:18:52+00:00
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Strictly on-site (Mon-Fri, 9-5:30pm) because we believe in high-bandwidth collaboration. No remote.

Outside of client work, we also incubate internal SaaS products. Team members can contribute to these projects outside regular hours for equity if interested.

Apply: https://modall.breezy.hr/p/552471e37316-frontend-developer-r...