MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pixl97 | 2026-02-08 17:20:47+00:00
The important thing to note here is people have been propagandized into thinking that capitalist = democratic. In fact the US would gladly punish you with 'un-American activities' investigation if you said anything to the contrary.

The thing is a capitalistic country will gladly turn itself into an authoritarian one if both wealth becomes concentrated and wealth buys votes. With the massive rise in authoritarian activities all over the world, especially in the US our democratic system is at very high risk of collapsing.
by bikenaga | 2026-02-08 17:20:49+00:00
Abstract: "For over 600 years, debates over noncompete clauses have centered on whether they function as efficient contracting tools or anticompetitive restraints on workers. This article reassesses that debate in light of recent policy attention and new empirical and theoretical research. Proponents argue that noncompetes are necessary to protect investments in training and trade secrets, increasing productivity and wages. However, recent studies indicate that the widespread use of noncompetes—frequently extending beyond roles involving sensitive information—and their enforceability lower mobility, wages, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Moreover, in many cases, less restrictive contractual terms appear to safeguard firm interests. Evidence of spillovers to other workers and across state boundaries, as well as behavioral effects even when noncompetes are unenforceable, raises questions about whether existing state-level enforcement regimes adequately address their observed impacts."
by pdimitar | 2026-02-08 17:20:52+00:00
I am with you and fully agree with your "it does not have to be an all or nothing" stance. A remark on one part of your comment:

> What are you adding to the mix here? Your prompting skills?

The answer to that is an unironic and dead-serious "yes!".

My colleagues use Claude Opus and it does an okay job but misses important things occasionally. I've had one 18-hour session with it and fixed 3 serious but subtle and difficult to reproduce bugs. And fixed 6-7 flaky tests and our CI has been 100% green ever since.

Being a skilled operator is an actual billable skill IMO. And that will continue to be the case for a while unless the LLM companies manage to make another big leap.

I've personally witnessed Opus do world-class detective work. I even left it unattended and it churned away on a problem for almost 5h. But I spent an entire hour before that carefully telling it its success criteria, never to delete tests, never to relax requirements X & Y & Z, always to use this exact feedback loop when testing after it iterated on a fix, and a bunch of others.

In that ~5h session Opus fixed another extremely annoying bug and found mistakes in tests and corrected them after correcting the production code first and making new tests.

Opus can be scary good but you must not handwave anything away.

I found love for being an architect ever since I started using the newest generation [of scarily smart-looking] LLMs.
by tuhgdetzhh | 2026-02-08 17:21:18+00:00
Historically, every major general-purpose technology followed the same trajectory. Printing reduced the quality of manuscripts while massively increasing access. Industrialization replaced craftsmanship with standardization. Early automobiles were unreliable and dangerous compared to horse-drawn transport, yet they won because they were sufficient and scalable. The internet degraded editorial standards while enabling unprecedented distribution. None of these shifts reversed. They stabilized at a new equilibrium where high quality persisted only in niches where it was economically justified.
by stanac | 2026-02-08 17:21:28+00:00
They don't care, they would rather let you use pirated MS software than move to Linux. There is a repo on GH with powershell scripts for activating windows/office and they let it sit there. Just checked, repo has 165K stars.

This could be the same, they know devs mostly prefer to use cursor and/or claude than copilot.
by markstos | 2026-02-08 17:22:48+00:00
Last night I was debugging a website where some users, some times were getting a message that they were attempting to sign up too many times, even when they only had tried to sign-up once.

I tried using LLMs to help debug at different points, but they went in circles on bad ideas, even when I gave them what turned out to be a correct clue.

Root cause turned out to be that IPv6 wasn't enabled for Docker networking, but was enabled for the websites DNS. So people who connected over IPv6 were getting their IPs all converted to the same internal Docker IP before being handed to the per-IP throttling algorithm.

I spotted that there were no IPv6 IPs in the logs, but the LLMs missed that the key pattern was the absence of something expected, instead drawing wrong conclusions.

So no, I'm not about to turn OpenClaw loose on building anything at all complex.
by energyscholar | 2026-02-08 17:22:51+00:00
No, the goal is documenting the convergence pattern itself. We did use LLMs as research tools — acknowledged in the paper — but the cross-domain analysis and citation mapping are human work.

I'll explain how we got to this point. I had previously mentored my friend, Robin Macomber, in math & physics for several years. Robin Macomber independently discovered a variation of criticality math and asked me to evaluate. After due consideration I recognized a pattern: his work echoed that of Kenneth Wilson's renormalization group theory, which I'd previously studied. I then conducted a detailed survey of all academic fields that touched on criticality (using an LLM!) and found, to my great surprise, that this same math had been independently discovered many times in many domains. So I wrote a paper about it.
by deeth_starr_v | 2026-02-08 17:23:03+00:00
> Compared to participants at Q1 of DHA, those at Q5 of non-DHA showed a significant lower risk of EOD. A statistically significant lower risk was observed in Q3, Q4 and Q5 of non-DHA omega-3

If I'm reading this right, if you can't get many fish sources in your diet, it's better to increase the quantity of non-DHA sources (certain seeds, oils and vegetables). But my understanding is non-DHA is not helpful so I may not be understanding correctly
by pjmlp | 2026-02-08 17:23:07+00:00
No, but will certainly result in a complete different sequence of machine code instructions, or not, depending on what that line actually does, what dynamic types it uses, how often it actually gets executed, the existence of vector units, and so forth.

Likewise, as long as the agent delivers the same outcome, e.g. an email is sent with a specific subject and body, the observed behaviour remains.
by DSMan195276 | 2026-02-08 17:23:11+00:00
It's phishy because it's breaks the rules people are generally told for avoiding phishing links, mainly that they should pay attention to the domain rather than subdomains. Browser even highlight that part specifically so that you pay attention to it, because you can't fake the real domain. The problem with what GitHub does here is that while `github.github.io` might be the real GitHub, `foobar-github.github.io` is not because anybody can get a github.io via their username, that was part of why they made github.io separate. Additionally they could easily host this via GitHub Pages but still use a custom domain back to github.com, they just don't.

I would say that GitHub is particularly bad about this as they also use `github.blog` for announcements. I'm not sure if they have any others, but then that's the problem, you can't expect people to magically know which of your different domains are and aren't real if you use more than one. They even announced the github.com SSH key change on github.blog.
by snozolli | 2026-02-08 17:23:13+00:00
Before we used to have to buy really expensive tools that were designed to last forever and perform a ton of jobs. Now we can just go to harbor freight and get a tool that is good enough for most people.

This just isn't true. First, cheap tools have always been around. I have a few that I've inherited from my grandfather and great-grandfather. They're junk and I keep them specifically to remind myself that consumer-oriented trash versions of better quality tools have always existed.

Second, Harbor Freight is the only consumer-oriented tool retailer that seems to be consistently improving their product lines. Craftsman, which was the benchmark for quality, consumer-oriented hand tools, dropped off a cliff in terms of quality around the mid- to late-2000s.

If you can afford professional-grade tools (Snap-On, Mac, Wera, Knipex, etc.) great. For the rest of us, Harbor Freight is the only retailer looking out for us. Their American- and Taiwanese-made tools are excellent. Their Chinese-made tools are good. Their Indian-made tools will get the job done, but it won't be pleasant. At least they give the consumer a range of options, unlike Snap-On, which gives you a payment plan.
by abustamam | 2026-02-08 17:23:32+00:00
Yeah there's a reason there is a stereotype/trope about programmers not liking people. I like a lot of people. But I would hate to work with many of them even if I like hanging out with them.

That said, I do like having an LLM that I can treat like the crappy bosses on TV treat their employees. When it gets something totally wrong I can yell at it and it'll magically figure out the right solution, but still keep a chipper personality. That doesn't work with humans.
Show HN: Intervu – Free, BYOK Interview Prep (Groq/Gemini/OpenAI)
by viveknar | 2026-02-08 17:23:34+00:00
Hey HN,

I’ve been interviewing recently and got frustrated with two things:

Copy-pasting context (resume, job description) into LLMs repeatedly.
"AI Interview" tools that charge monthly subs just to wrap an API call.
So I built Intervu, a free dashboard to organize your prep.

The main difference: It’s Bring Your Own Key (BYOK). You use your own OpenAI, Gemini, or Groq keys and pay the provider directly. I don't charge anything.

Features:

Panic Mode: High-yield prep for when you're short on time.
System Design Bank: Dedicated section for architecture questions.
Company Recon: Auto-fetches company news and stats.
Resume Tailoring: Detailed feedback based on specific job URLs.
It’s open source and keys are stored locally in your browser.

GitHub: https://github.com/vvknyn/interview-os Demo: https://www.intervu.cc
by throwaw12 | 2026-02-08 17:23:44+00:00
> only for the first ~10kloc. After that the AI, no matter how well you try to prompt it, will start to destroy existing features accidentally

I am using them in projects with >100kloc, this is not my experience.

at the moment, I am babysitting for any kloc, but I am sure they will get better and better.
by coldtea | 2026-02-08 17:23:47+00:00
>After re-reading the post once again, because I honestly thought I was missing something obvious that would make the whole thing make sense, I started to wonder if the author actually understands the scope of a computer language.

The problem is you restrict the scope of a computer language to the familiar mechanisms and artifacts (parsers, compilers, formalized syntax, etc), instead of taking to be "something we instruct the computer with, so that it does what we want".

>How does this even work? There is no universe I can imagine where a natural language can be universal, self descriptive, non ambiguous, and have a smaller footprint than any purpose specific language that came before it.

Doesnt matter. Who said it needs to be "universal, self descriptive, non ambiguous, and have a smaller footprint than any purpose specific language that came before it"?

It's enough that is can be used to instruct computers more succintly and at a higher level of abstraction, and that a program will come out at the end, which is more or less (doesn't have to be exact), what we wanted.
by clarity_hacker | 2026-02-08 17:24:00+00:00
The review ordering problem is less about AI generation and more about graph traversal. Every diff already encodes a dependency graph (imports, function calls, type references), and optimal review order is just a topological sort weighted by cognitive load. GitHub's alphabetical ordering is zero-information when we have the full call graph. The hard part isn't producing the ordering — it's efficiently extracting and maintaining the dependency graph as code changes.
by bwfan123 | 2026-02-08 17:24:27+00:00
> Science should be about reproducibility, and almost nothing here is reproducible.

I can see your frustration. You are looking for reproducible "benchmarks". But you have to realize several things.

1) research level problems are those that bring the "unknown" into the "known" and as such are not reproducible. That is why "creativity" has no formula. There are no prescribed processes or rules for "reproducing" creative work. If there were, then they would not be considered "research".

2) things learnt and trained are already in the realm of the "known", ie, boiler-plate, templated and reproducible.

The problems in 2) above are where LLMs excel, but they have been hyped into excelling at 1) as well. And this experiment is trying to test that hypothesis.
by oytis | 2026-02-08 17:24:42+00:00
I don't think it's about power. I feel more empowered as an engineer than I would as an engineering manager. As an engineer I have the power over all the intricate details of how systems work. As an engineering manager if I am lucky I would get to decide whom to fire if my team's budget gets a cut.

I think it's that there is only that much demand for solving really complex problems, and doing the same thing over and over is boring, so management is the only way forward for many people
by clarity_hacker | 2026-02-08 17:24:46+00:00
The convergence isn't surprising once you notice that these domains all study systems near criticality — the point where small changes cascade into large effects. Phase transitions, market crashes, and extinction events are all hitting the same mathematical boundary condition: nonlinearity plus feedback. The structure is universal because the constraint is. Similar to how Zipf's law appears everywhere that optimization under resource scarcity matters.
by energyscholar | 2026-02-08 17:25:43+00:00
Dude, I'm sorry to offend you. And sharp of you to notice. I failed to get substantive engagement the first two times (1 point and 4 points) so I tried again. This time I got some engagement.

Re. the title, I started with a boring conservative title and got precisely zero engagement, so I changed the title to be a bit more clickbaitish. Just like most of the other titles in New. Did I do wrong?

As I said, this is my first serious attempt at social media engagement and I'm just learning how it works.
by pixl97 | 2026-02-08 17:25:51+00:00
And yet in the US I can currently survive and illness by the means of technology where I would have died in the 70s. It can be really hard to see the forest from the trees when everything around us is rapidly changing technology.

Increased debt is mostly on the good that technology cannot at least yet reproduce. For example they aren't making new land. Taste, NIMBYism and currently laws stop us from increased housing density in a lot of places too. Healthcare is still quite limited by laws in the US and made expensive because of it.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-08 17:26:00+00:00
> because why would you cite phase transitions or criticality? You learn about them in class as a physicist

I'm not sure if you're being entirely serious with that remark, but clearly citing the earlier work would have bolstered their credibility: interdisciplinary research is a plus and hardly something to hide. If it's something that's taught in physics class, you can cite a common textbook.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-08 17:26:23+00:00
Not when those LLMs are tied to agents, replacing what would be classical programming.

Using low code platforms with AI based automations, like most iPaaS are now doing.

If the agent is able to retrieve the required data from a JSON file, fill an email with the proper subject and body, sending it to another SaaS application, it is one less integration middleware that was required to be written.

For all practical business point of view it is an application.
by user____name | 2026-02-08 17:26:34+00:00
I feel like there's a false dichotomy here where there's an inverse relationship between quality and cost. I know seen plenty of cheap goods that do what they're supposed to and last forever, and I know plenty of expensive projects, both in purchasing price and development cost that are just steaming piles. So you get all this sloppy jank and say "well but at least it's fast and cheap". I'm not sure that's the argument you should be making, why can't we have high quality cheap things in the first place?
Show HN: Hivewire – A news feed where you control your algorithm weights
by bchaps | 2026-02-08 17:26:38+00:00
Hivewire is a news app that lets you define what you want to read about, rather than inferring it from your behavior. We process thousands of articles daily from hundreds of sources and rank them based on explicit preferences you set.

How it works:

• Instead of collaborative filtering or engagement-driven ranking, you assign weights across four levels (Focus, More, Less, Avoid) and the engine prioritizes the intersection of your high-weight topics while aggressively down-weighting what you don't care about.

• Articles are clustered by story so you get one entry per development, not 15 versions of the same headline.

• Every morning, it pulls your top clusters and uses an LLM to generate a narrative briefing that summarizes what matters to you, delivered to your email.

Currently web-only and English-language. We'd love feedback from the community on the relevance of feed results, the UI, and the quality of the clustering.
by SJC_Hacker | 2026-02-08 17:27:26+00:00
> ethereum has a similar ewaste problem

Is it any worse now than say, the NYSE ?

This reference says energy usage was 0.0026 TWh (2.6 GWh, or 2600 MWh) in a year

https://ethereum.org/energy-consumption

If the power was used over the whole year (and not just one hour)

(2600 MWh / year) / (24 * 365 h/year) = 0.29 MWh = 296 kWh. Thats like hair dryer levels of power consumption (if the hair dryver was left on all the time)
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-02-08 17:27:46+00:00
If you place 1mm thermal pads between the sinks and the case, the CPUs/GPUs won't throttle as readily. At least for my M3 MBA (check your actual clearance).

I replaced a MacPro5,1 with an M2Pro — which uses soooooo much less energy performing similarly mundane tasks (~15x+). Idle is ~25W v. 160W
by yoyohello13 | 2026-02-08 17:27:54+00:00
> But AI has enabled them to put pages and pages of text out into the world each week: posts and articles where there were previously none.

Are you for real? Quantity is not equal to Quality.

I'll be sure to dump a pile of trash in your living room. There wasn't much there before, but now there is lots of stuff. Better right?
by frank_nitti | 2026-02-08 17:28:38+00:00
Who is liable for the runtime behavior of the system, when handling users’ sensitive information?

If the person who is liable for the system behavior cannot read/write code (as “all coders have been replaced”), does Anthropic et al become responsible for damages to end users for systems its tools/models build? I assume not.

How do you reconcile this? We have tools that help engineers design and build bridges, but I still wouldn’t want to drive on an “autonomously-generated bridge may contain errors. Use at own risk” because all human structural engineering experts have been replaced.

After asking this question many times in similar threads, I’ve received no substantial response except that “something” will probably resolve this, maybe AI will figure it out
by KronisLV | 2026-02-08 17:28:51+00:00
I like writing code that I don't have time pressure around, as well as the kind where I can afford to fail and use that as a learning experience. Especially the code that I can structure myself.

I sometimes dread writing code that's in a state of bad disrepair or is overly complex, think a lot of the "enterprise" code out there - it got so bad that I more or less quit a job over it, though never really stated that publicly, alongside my mind going dark places when you have pressure to succeed but the circumstances are stacked against you.

For a while I had a few Markdown files that went into detail exactly why I hated it, in addition to also being able to point my finger at a few people responsible for it. I tried approaching it professionally, but it never changed and the suggestions and complaints largely fell on deaf ears. Obviously I've learnt that while you can try to provide suggestions, some people and circumstances will never change, often it's about culture fit.

But yeah, outsource all of that to AI, don't even look back. Your sanity is worth more than that.
by libraryofbabel | 2026-02-08 17:29:21+00:00
Slightly tangential, but I discovered recently that the famous literary critic Harold Bloom was a huge fan of Ursula Le Guin and rated her one of the great canonical writers of the 20th century, in all of literature not just sci-fi. Also, they never met but they struck up a polite friendship over email when they were both old and chatted back and forth.

Some might consider this raises the stature of Ursula Le Guin. I consider it rather as raising the stature of Harold Bloom. He recognized how she transcended genre and belongs alongside (or perhaps, above) writers of highbrow literary fiction.
by losalah | 2026-02-08 17:29:26+00:00
Claude Code is an interactive coding assistant. Viba is an automation runtime. You wouldn't use Claude Code to run a cron job at 3am or watch a directory for new files.

Viba compiles your intent into a persistent and versioned workflow that runs unattended with triggers, retries, and history... more like a local first, AI-configured n8n than a coding agent.
by darepublic | 2026-02-08 17:29:32+00:00
These days it feels like there is a ton of pro anthropic astroturfing on this site. Probably it is mostly genuine enthusiasm from sincere people. But nevertheless there are a ton of articles from or about anthropic and within the comments of these you are sure to find, often at the top, someone staunchly defending the superiority of engineering everything via agentic use of the in fashion Claude model. If they are truly right than I don't see the need for proselytizing like they do. The proof is in the pudding. That is, if your choices are truly the best and fastest way to produce software inevitably the market and industry will reflect this. But it feels like they don't want to let results speak for themselves they need to hype up their claims continually and forcibly shove this down people's throats