MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by myrmidon | 2026-02-10 16:05:51+00:00
I'd argue that those higher standards/costs for raising children are the effect and not the cause.

We (need to) invest more into their education because uneducated children/adults have little or even negative value as workers (especially to their parents), this was not the case two centuries ago.

Children appear to be a "luxury" nowadays because there is no longer any expectation that they "net contribute" to their family economically (might be a positive change ethics-wise, but this is a huge shift in incentives for parents).
by aveao | 2026-02-10 16:05:54+00:00
The payment processing rates offered vary by country. It rarely goes above 1% in Germany unless you're really not shopping around or are really low volume.

A % of that also goes to the issuing bank*, not to MC/Visa, so I suspect the mentioned 0.2% is talking about what MC/Visa has as their cut.

*: That's also how banks can profitably offer things like cashback.
by ktrnka | 2026-02-10 16:06:03+00:00
I'm a few years behind you. I got started on my uncle's handed down vic 20 in the late 80s.

The culture change in tech has been the toughest part for me. I miss the combination of curiosity, optimism, creativity, and even the chaos that came with it. Nowadays it's much harder to find organizations like that.
by ossa-ma | 2026-02-10 16:06:10+00:00
This is not either of those. This is the equivalent of a eulogy to a passion and a craft. Using an LLM to write it: entire sections, headers, sentences - is an insult to the craft.

The post in the same vain, "We mourn our craft", did a much better job at this communicating the point without the AI influence.
by seanwilson | 2026-02-10 16:06:10+00:00
Maybe I'm missing something and I'm glad this idea resonates, but it feels like sometime after Java got popular and dynamic languages got a lot of mindshare, a large chunk of the collective programming community forgot why strong static type checking was invented and are now having to rediscover this.

In most strong statically typed languages, you wouldn't often pass strings and generic dictionaries around. You'd naturally gravitate towards parsing/transforming raw data into typed data structures that have guaranteed properties instead to avoid writing defensive code everywhere e.g. a Date object that would throw an exception in the constructor if the string given didn't validate as a date (Edit: Changed this from email because email validation is a can of worms as an example). So there, "parse, don't validate" is the norm and not a tip/idea that would need to gain traction.
by parsimo2010 | 2026-02-10 16:06:47+00:00
I am generally displeased with the way social media has evolved, but I'm not in favor of this lawsuit. It seems like a way to blame tech companies for Congress' failure to regulate businesses properly. None of the engineers involved thought of their work as a way to rot the minds of future generations. Their thought process was straightforward-

1. We sell ads to make money
2. If we keep eyeballs on our apps more than competing apps, we can increase the price for our ads and make more money
3. Should we implement limits to kick kids off the app after they've been doomscrolling for an hour? Absolutely not, that would violate our duty to our shareholder. If parents complain, we'll say they should implement the parental controls present on their phones and routers. We can't make choices to limit our income if parents don't use the tools they already have.

I'm sorry that social media has ruined so many kids' lives, but I don't think the responsibility lies with the tech companies in this case. It lies with the society that has stood by idly while kids endured cyber-bullying and committed suicide. This isn't something that happened recently- the USA has had plenty of time to respond as a society and chosen not to. Want to sue someone? Sue Congress.

Google and Meta are rational actors in a broken system. If you want to change something you should change the rules that they operate under and hold them accountable for those rules going forward. Australia (and Spain) is doing something about it- now that social media is banned for kids under 16 in those countries, if social media companies try to do anything sneaky to get around that you actually have a much stronger case.

Now if there were evidence that they were intentionally trying to get kids bullied and have them commit suicide then by all means, fine them into oblivion. But I doubt there is such evidence.
by 52-6F-62 | 2026-02-10 16:06:56+00:00
No. By this logic, if they wanted to stay with the times they should have sought capital investment for their own industrial forges, joined their local lodges, climbed the ranks, lobbied their governments for loose safety regulations, and plied their workers with propaganda about how "we're in a recession and have to tighten our belts".

Think of the wonderful world we could have if everyone just got their shit together and became paper trillionaire technocrats.
by macintux | 2026-02-10 16:07:03+00:00
A frequent visitor to HN. Tip: if you click on the "past" link under the title (but not the "past" link at the top of the page), you'll trigger a search for previous posts.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Parse%2C%20Don%27t%20Validate&...

However, it's more effective to throw quotes into the mix, reduces false positives.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
by rldjbpin | 2026-02-10 16:07:06+00:00
> Windows 10 (LTSC) has been the best operating system experience of my life

Unless you've stumbled upon it by chance, the LTSC version of Windows is by far the recommended approach by forums online, particularly for those who do not want to run random scripts to remove unwanted elements.

Windows 11 happen to have its own variant [1], I wonder how it compares to the gold standard of the previous version.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-...
by JPLeRouzic | 2026-02-10 16:07:10+00:00
Please finish your novel, it looks very interesting!

> "What if 9/11 was done with a flying Chernobyl?"

I guess it's a PR problem, particularly with the perspective to have dozen of Starship rockets launched every year.

What do people prefer? A rocket that works within reasonable technological limits (a nuclear rocket with chemical first stage) or a monster rocket that works at the edge of what is physically possible (Starship)?
by compounding_it | 2026-02-10 16:07:21+00:00
My darwinian theory:

About 11 years ago I went on a bus in Rochester, NY. It was bizarre to me that every person in the bus (about 12-15 people aged between 18-25 maybe) were buried in their phones. No one was talking to each other, not looking outside, nothing. I had the latest iPhone but since America was new for me I mostly spent time looking at the world around me and talking to people. I felt sad that the social world had come to this.

Fast forward to now and this is what I see in India too. Talking to random people in their prime years (maybe 18-30) is now 'weird'. But it's perfectly fine if it's via 'insta' or 'snap'. I can't imagine how much worse it's now in America in that age group. I know my pre teen nephews have withdrawals if I take away their devices here in India.

The moral here is that procreation requires better social skills and strong presence in the world and good parenting will probably create that. In order to raise an offspring, people need to have good mental health and that generally leads to good physical health which in turn improves the mental health and so on which can lead to procreation etc. The scrolling and virtual world is a distraction from reality. Something that keeps away humans from each other. We will only see this getting worse. In India the social world is still good enough to see higher birth rates. But that is also now slowing down. Mental health of people is not great. People complain about being single but there is virtually no way to hold a conversation as getting their attention is impossible. Phones are glued to their eyes and hands even when sitting with you.

I am hoping though things will be different in the future.
by dh2022 | 2026-02-10 16:07:28+00:00
Well, they can do whatever they want in their red-states. Blue states are already moving healthcare away from federal non-sense standards [0] and [1]

[0] https://governor.wa.gov/news/2025/washington-california-and-...

[1]https://www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/inside-mdhhs/newsroom/2026/01...
by ericmay | 2026-02-10 16:07:29+00:00
> No, these companies keep themselves in power not because they've solved such a difficult problem that nobody else can, but because they have a moat which they protect.

I don't know that the problem is sophisticated, but it's certainly complex [1]. It's a bit of both in terms of complexity and defending a moat, which all businesses do, including, and especially European ones.

And companies like Visa, Mastercard, American Express, &c. arose initially from solving a real need. Before these companies came into existence when you traveled you'd have to take cash, or traveler's checks or some other nonsense. Today you can, at least as an American, just walk in to the subway in just about any country and tap to pay. Need a coffee at Mt. Fuji? Easy. Buying a bottle of Calvados in some remote area? Yea just tap to pay with your Mastercard.

> Time to do away with these foreign entities.

You'll never do that. Why? Because at a minimum you want American tourist dollars and Europe isn't going to start issuing European credit cards to Americans or other citizens around the world.

[1] Why is it complex? Well you have to deal with American and European financial regulations, KYC, &c. - you have to vet merchants, you have to run the infrastructure to process transactions, refunds, direct payments from bank accounts to pay for cards, and all of those things. Those are real, genuine business activities that are non-negotiable and while they may seem simple, in practice they are not at all simple.
by jimnotgym | 2026-02-10 16:07:32+00:00
Whereas accountants, lawyers, civil engineers and surveyors have to do postgraduate training with their institute to become chartered.

Interestingly many accountants in the UK never did a degree (very many more did a degree in something unrelated), but came through the technician route of evening, weekend or day release study. Many do their chartered training at weekends.
by mamonster | 2026-02-10 16:07:44+00:00
Horrible fiscal ticking time bomb that ignores the fact that regularization means naturalization over the next 10-15 years and so access to EU healthcare system.

The biggest drag on government budgets in EU are socialized healthcare and retirement costs. At this point we know healthcare costs are severely backloaded, with most spending coming out of the last 10 years of someone's life. Regularizing now allows them to show a fiscal boost now and for next 4-5 years(edit: maybe even like 10-15 years) and accumulate a massive liability as they age.

Think about it this way: If you regularize a 30 year old illegal migrant right now with a path to citizenship over next 10-15 years, the government NPV is positive over a 15 year horizon(whilst he works) and then will go flat to negative as he starts using the healthcare system whilst retired.
by bombcar | 2026-02-10 16:07:47+00:00
I'd say (and this is painful for many) that it really depends on who you are and how you act - if you're outgoing, or force yourself to pretend to be, and you talk, and you listen, and you don't immediately judge people (by whatever metric you come up with) - you can build community anywhere

Is it easier if you're in a group of tightly-knit people all nearly identical to you? Sure! But it's possible with work anywhere that has any population at all.

Social media and the Internet have let us self-select for "friends" who are as close to us as possible, there's ease because of the lack of friction, but that same lack of friction prevents our rough edges from being sanded off.

The number of people who could list what they want in a community, and when presented with a community that matches their list, cry that it votes wrong is way too high, just as an example.
by jmull | 2026-02-10 16:07:53+00:00
Regarding the shift away from time spent on agriculture over the last century or so..

> That was a net benefit to the world, that we all don't have to work to eat.

I’m pretty sure most all of us are still working to have food to eat and shelter for ourselves and our families.

Also, while the on-going industrial and technological revolution has certainly brought benefits, it’s an open question as to whether it will turn out to be a net benefit. There’s a large-scale tragedy of the commons experiment playing out and it’s hard to say what the result will be.
by cs02rm0 | 2026-02-10 16:08:23+00:00
I'm 43. Took a year or so off from contracting after being flat out for years without taking any breaks, just poked around with some personal projects, did some stuff for my wife's company, petitioned the NHS to fix some stuff. Used Claude Code for much of it. Travelled a bit too.

I feel like I turned around and there seem to be no jobs now (500+ applications deep is a lot when you've always been given the first role you'd applied to) unless you have 2+ years commercial AI experience, which I don't, or perhaps want to sit in a SOC, which I don't. It's like a whole industry just disappeared while I had my back turned.

I looked at Java in Google Trends the other day, it doesn't feel like it was that long ago that people were bemoaning how abstracted that was, but it was everywhere. It doesn't seem to be anymore. I've tried telling myself that maybe it's because people are using LLMs to code, so it's not being searched for, but I think the game's probably up, we're in a different era now.

Not sure what I'm going to do for the next 20 years. I'm looking at getting a motorbike licence just to keep busy, but that won't pay the bills.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-10 16:08:28+00:00
haha, Sorry but I didn't intend to flatter you (atleast this time although your work in oaoh is commendable) but I literally just wrote it as a (blog?) because I was already writing a comment and I didn't want a massive wall of text & also you can see from my other project that I wanted to write more as blog posts rather than HN comments when they get too big.

I wrote the 6 minute mark to think of how long it took me to write the comment which was around ~50 minutes ish. And I mentioned you many times in the comment-ish because I had written something first and then wrote something on top of it & thus many initial mentions.

Anyways I have now removed the mentions and honestly a lot of this is just transparency efforts.

I literally just write whatever I am thinking :)
by havaloc | 2026-02-10 16:08:29+00:00
I think it's probably a little bit harder than you think with all the rules and regulations out there. I would highly encourage anybody who's remotely interested, listen to the Acquired podcast episode regarding Visa. It's actually quite fascinating how it was started. You may balk at the length, but the whole thing had me interested.

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/visa
by toddmorrow | 2026-02-10 16:08:34+00:00
there are many many examples where paying a nominal fee seems like it would get rid of the clowns. and it would. almost any place where the public can "post". but the challenge is to not inadvertently throw out the good ones.

once notable policy SQL Server enterprise support used to have was you must be available 24/7 if you submit a critical issue. Microsoft was demanding as much of their time as our time.

not sure how that could be rolled out to repos but it worked
by mentalgear | 2026-02-10 16:09:06+00:00
Actually interesting, but how's that different from just putting your learning / decision context into the normal commit text (body) ? An LLM can search that too, and doesn't require a new cli tool.

EDIT: Or just keep a proper (technical) changelog.txt file in the repo. A lot of the "agentic/LLM engineering frameworks" boil down to best approaches and proper standards the industry should have been following decades ago.
by saubeidl | 2026-02-10 16:09:25+00:00
> If there's one thing the EU really does have, it's the capacity to revise regulations.

This is the central power lever of the EU and one that is frequently underestimated.

European power projection doesn't work through tanks and aircraft carriers. It works with regulations, trade deals and economic incentives. Remember how a few years ago was scrambling to get GDPR-compliant? That wasn't some random event. That was the EU projecting power.

Why do iPhones have USB-C now? European soft power.

Why are things like Champagne and Prosciutto di Parma protected brands that can only be sold if they're from the actual region? And I mean not just in Europe itself, but everywhere it has deals? Canada, Japan, India, China, Mercosur, etc etc? European soft power.

The EU is playing a different game from the other major players. Not one of brute force, but one of shifting the foundational rules of commerce in their favor. And they're very good at it.
by throw554345 | 2026-02-10 16:09:32+00:00
> Anyone who's lived in a typical Chinese family should wonder why the hell there's the stereotype that Americans are more individualistic?

For me, it was finding a lot of my American friend’s grandparents lived in nursing homes. That really shocked me, since just about everyone I knew in Taiwan lived with their grandparents.

The other one was learning quite a few of my American classmates had to pay their own college tuition. Not because their parents couldn’t afford it, but simply because they were seen as “adults” so were on their own.
by bee_rider | 2026-02-10 16:09:37+00:00
This LLM stuff is a little weird. Previously we had Python which was pretty close to pseudocode but you could run it directly. Now, these LLMs are one step more abstract, but their outputs aren’t runnable directly, they produce possibly incorrect code-like-text. Actually this seems like good news for programmers since you have to read the code in the lower-level language that gets produced.
by aveao | 2026-02-10 16:09:37+00:00
We do actually. The German Girocards were, until Maestro ceased to exist, often co-issued as Maestro + Girocard, and global acceptance was pretty good under the Mastercard network.

There are examples of other co-branded national payment systems out there (troy + Discover comes to mind).

If a European payment system (with cards, at a store) is to exist, then visa/mc will still want a piece of the pie by at least playing along to remain as a co-brand and taking their cuts from international payments.
by lswhiteh | 2026-02-10 16:09:44+00:00
Nice! Definitely have encountered issues with metered pricing through stripe, especially when sales wants to do custom pricing for larger contracts.

How does this handle transitions when a customer changes plans mid-billing cycle e.g.they downgrade from paid to free but their current usage already exceeds the free plan's limits? Is it immediately enforced or is there some sort of reconciliation mechanism?
by Scunion95 | 2026-02-10 16:09:46+00:00
I'm a former military officer who sells physical products for a living. No CS degree, no bootcamp. I taught myself to code because the tech industry wasn't going to let me in any other way.

GrandCru is a CLI that does real code review — complexity, naming, error handling, unused code, separation of concerns — delivered in the voice of a pretentious French wine sommelier. The character makes the feedback memorable and the output shareable. But take away the wine metaphors and you still get real issues with line numbers and fixes.

Why I built it: solo developers don't get code review. I don't have a team or a senior engineer. I needed something that would catch the stuff linters miss — and I wanted it to be fun enough that I'd actually run it.

Technical details:

- One API call per file using Anthropic's structured outputs (constrained decoding, not "please respond in JSON")
- Dual-channel Zod schema: strict technical data (line numbers, severity, fixes) and creative prose (tasting notes, remarks) in one response
- Extended thinking on by default — the model reasons about code architecture before committing to structured output
- BYOK: your Anthropic key, ~$0.02/file, no server
- TypeScript, Commander.js, npm

I pointed it at its own source code. It found real issues in its prompt builder — no input validation, raw string interpolation. Scored itself 79/100 — "Needs decanting before service."

This is a portfolio project from someone trying to prove they can build real tools. Happy to talk about the architecture, the self-teaching process, or structured output patterns.
by oftenwrong | 2026-02-10 16:09:46+00:00
This is one of the main problems I have banging my head on for the past decade, and many of the things mentioned, like Buf, Unison, and more, I only stumbled upon randomly on my own. It's refreshing to read an article on this subject simply because it's so under-discussed. I also wonder to what degree these problems have been solved within the high walls of the tech giants like Google and Amazon.
by andrewla | 2026-02-10 16:09:52+00:00
I don't think he blames the immigrants specifically, so much as illegal immigration as an institution. The only "punishment" that most people want for illegal immigrants who have committed no crimes other than the immigration violation itself is for them to be deported, which really does not seem like a punishment at all -- it's just undoing the criminal act. Like if you stole some money from a bank and then had to give it back, but otherwise did not have to face prosecution.

Because what can an illegal immigrant do? They could in theory just rely on social services and entitlements, but I don't think anyone (including the immigrants themselves, for the most part) really wants that. They want to work, and to make money, and the law makes it very hard to do so legally, so they work illegally.

All the barriers you mention are things that we put in place to "protect" workers, but at the same time create a black market that undercuts those very workers.

As for the employers, sure, they are culprits here, but would you rather have them let the immigrants starve? That also does not seem to serve any social good. As for not paying workman's comp, for example, there is already enough paperwork and bureaucracy involved in hiring a legal worker where there are systems that support and administer those programs. If you wanted to offer a workman's comp lookalike for illegal labor as a social service, then that would multiply the effort and cost by a huge factor.
by fl0ki | 2026-02-10 16:09:52+00:00
Once you have those real world integrations, no spec is ever complete enough. You can have a whole industry agree on decades-old RFCs and still need "but actually" details diffused through every implementation that actually gets used. There is always more detail in implementations than can be specified by any less than the code itself, and it's multiplied by the set of all possibly deployed versions, and again by possible configurations.

Fun fact: The most costly incident I ever "caused" was because I fixed a bug in an API to make it match the spec. The affected client escalated and forced me to restore the defect, even though it also affects many other clients.

Working in almost any mature space requires you to be extremely conservative in ways that have always proven difficult to specify.
by mhitza | 2026-02-10 16:09:57+00:00
As far as I know the "digital euro" should allow for offline payments. At least in principle I should be able to offload to an offline/on-device wallet and give money to anyone without the servers knowledge.

But I'm sure there are plenty of villains and idiots that will try (and succeed) in diluting those principles and will get some dystopian (trace everything) version of that.