MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by whalesalad | 2026-02-10 17:21:15+00:00
The author's point here is great, but the post does (imho) a poor job illustrating it.

The tl;dr on this is: stop sprinkling guards and if statements all over your codebase. Convert (parse) the data into truthful objects/structs/containers at the perimieter. The goal is to do that work at the boundaries of your system, so that inside of your system you can stop worrying about it and trust the value objects you have.

I think my hangup here is on the use of terms parse vs validate. They are not the right terms to describe this.
by arethuza | 2026-02-10 17:21:21+00:00
"people who have no idea how hard life is already for a kid who is disabled"

I have two disabled siblings out of the four kids my parents had - I didn't really appreciate what that meant for my parents until I had kids - I can only guess at the stress they must have gone through.

So yes, having kids sucks sometimes, but its also the most important thing that most of us do. And yes, as a dog-owning empty nester, I can confirm its not the same, not even close.
by chriswarbo | 2026-02-10 17:21:34+00:00
> 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

It's tricky because `class` conflates a lot of semantically-distinct ideas.

Some people might be making `Date` objects to avoid writing defensive code everywhere (since classes are types), but...

Other people might be making `Date` objects so they can keep all their date-related code in one place (since classes are modules/namespaces, and in Java classes even correspond to files).

Other people might be making `Date` objects so they can override the implementation (since classes are jump tables).

Other people might be making `Date` objects so they can overload a method for different sorts of inputs (since classes are tags).

I think the pragmatics of where code lives, and how the execution branches, probably have a larger impact on such decisions than safety concerns. After all, the most popular way to "avoid writing defensive code everywhere" is to.... write unsafe, brittle code :-(
by BugsJustFindMe | 2026-02-10 17:21:37+00:00
> I pay about 6,000 a month in daycare.

My sister did this too until it got to be nearly as much as her entire salary so then she stopped working again and became the daycare. And that is super hard when your children have special needs. I think the worst may be that in-between area, where working and paying for daycare still seems to make sense financially because you take home more than you spend on not being at home but the net practical result is working for a very low effective salary to also spend less time with the children, which is its own kind of utterly draining.
by thewebguyd | 2026-02-10 17:21:52+00:00
AFAIK all US states have some form of "keep right" or "slow poke" laws in various forms that distill down to keep right, except to pass.

So the laws do exist, they just are never enforced. Even when said left lane campers cruise by state patrol, I never see them stopped. Hell, I rarely see them stop people going 15+ over the limit either so not actually sure what they're doing.
by rorylaitila | 2026-02-10 17:22:02+00:00
I make great use of value objects in my applications but there are things I needed to do to make it ergonomic/performant. A "small" application of mine has over 100 value objects implemented as classes. Large apps easily get into the 1000s of classes just for value objects. That is a lot of boilerplate. It's a lot of boxing/unboxing. It'd be a lot of extra typing than "stringly typed" programs.

To make it viable, all value objects are code-generated from model schemas, and then customized as needed (only like 5% need customization beyond basic data types). I have auto-upcasting on setters so you can code stringly when wanted, but everything is validated (very useful for writing unit tests more quickly). I only parse into types at boundaries or on writes/sets, not on reads/gets (limit's the amount of boxing, particularly on reading large amounts of data). Heavy use of reflection, and auto-wiring/dependency injection.

But with these conventions in place, I quite enjoy it. Easy to customize/narrow a type. One convention for all validation. External inputs are by default secure with nice error messages. Once place where all values validation happens (./values classes folder).
by GahLak | 2026-02-10 17:22:28+00:00
This is a clever use case for LLMs, but I'd be curious about the quality of signal you're extracting from Discord noise. How are you handling the challenge of distinguishing genuine feature requests from off-topic conversation or jokes? Are you doing any filtering/validation before feeding to the model, or relying on the LLM to handle that context-switching itself?
by cubefox | 2026-02-10 17:22:31+00:00
While I don't doubt this was one influence, there was also an infamous problem with Dall-E 2, which was perfectly able to generate an astronaut riding a horse but completely unable to generate a horse riding an astronaut.

This problem is infamous because it persisted (unlike other early problems, like creating the wrong number of fingers) for much more capable models, and the Qwen Image people are certainly very aware of this difficult test. Even Imagen 4 Ultra, which might be the most advanced pure diffusion model without editing loop, fails at it.

And obviously an astronaut is similar to a man, which connects this benchmark to the Chinese meme.
Runtime validation is still fucked in AI coding agents
by sebringj | 2026-02-10 17:22:50+00:00
AI agents (Cursor, Claude computer-use, Copilot agent mode, etc.) have gotten stupidly good at spitting out code. Prompt → boom, clean code. The marketing says "it just works."

It fucking doesn't.

You run it in a real app and immediately hit the same bullshit wall every time:
- Hallucinated logic only reveals itself under real data or edge cases
- UI updates magically forget to sync across devices (mobile → web = sad trombone)
- API calls quietly return 401s or other crap that gets swallowed in some lazy try-catch
- Vision-based agents crawl like molasses (2–10s per action) and torch tokens like it's free
- Background pings and unrelated fetches make it impossible to tell what actually caused what

I tried pretty much everything out there and none of it quite scratched the itch I had: fast, structured, cross-platform runtime visibility without vision bloat or having to wire up a ton of hooks.

Quick rundown of the usual suspects:

- Pure vision/computer-use (Claude 3.5/4, ADEPT-style): zero setup, works on anything — but latency from hell and token burn is brutal for anything longer than a demo
- Playwright / browser MCP servers: fast and structured for web — but web-only, selectors shatter like glass, no native mobile
- Appium + vision hybrids: cross-platform on paper — but still vision-dependent and setup is a pain
- Sandboxed agents (OpenHands, SWE-agent): decent for repo tasks and shell stuff — not so much for live app UI/network state
- Explicit hooks/bridges: precise when you bother adding them — but requires code changes, which sucks

Couldn't find anything that gave me low-latency structured JSON state (UI elements, network, errors, logs) across platforms, local-first, without the usual trade-offs. So yeah, I got fed up and built a small local MCP server to solve it for myself.

Full disclosure: it's called Autonomo MCP https://github.com/sebringj/autonomo — very early, just launched.

I don't usually do this "I built a thing" thing — my open-source contributions are mostly small fixes and PRs — but I honestly couldn't see a better way in the current landscape.

It is my hope that Anthropic (or someone) will eventually ship a clean native solution for this. They already fixed BM25 tool calling to shrink context like crazy; I'd love to see them (or the industry) make runtime validation "just work" out of the box too.

Sometimes when you code in a vacuum you think your shit smells good. lmk if I'm off base here, I grew up with a mean grandpa so I'm cool with it.
by GahLak | 2026-02-10 17:23:02+00:00
This addresses a real pain point—runtime guarantees vs probabilistic hopes. A few questions from someone who's dealt with LLM guardrails in production:

1. How does CSL handle the gap between what an LLM intends to do (based on its reasoning) and what constraints allow? For example, if a policy forbids "database modifications" but an agent legitimately needs to write logs—does the DSL let you express intent-aware exceptions, or do you end up with overly broad rules?

2. Z3 constraint solving can be slow at scale. What's your performance profile when policies are deeply nested or involve many symbolic variables? Have you profiled latency on, say, 100+ concurrent agent requests?

The formal verification angle is solid, but I'd be curious whether you've stress-tested the actual bottleneck: not the policy logic itself, but the interaction between agent reasoning and constraint checking when policies need to be permissive enough to be useful.
by graemep | 2026-02-10 17:23:49+00:00
Its not just American tourists. Its everyone from everywhere.

If you do not accept Visa and Mastercard you are not going to accept payments from all sorts of travellers (tourists, business people, people from your own country living abroad) either.

> I guarantee there are a large number of people in rural Europe that would be very happy never to meet another American tourist, even if it costs them.

Xenophobic or anti-tourism?
by plorkyeran | 2026-02-10 17:24:00+00:00
I do suspect this would not run well on a 75 Mhz Pentium 1. It would be very surprising if Quake 1 was actually the pinnacle of what as possible on the hardware of the time, though. id made exactly one game targeting that generation of hardware, and then their next game had meaningfully higher system requirements despite coming out only a year later. The hardware capabilities were changing so fast that there simply wasn't time to iterate on a specific target.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-10 17:24:09+00:00
> He’d previously run a TikTok account that had amassed 24,000 followers. One night, he was astonished to find, he received his first payout from TikTok’s creator scheme.

> His head was turned by the substantial sum of money: “I told my wife, wow, it’s £1,000.”

I’m not familiar with TikTok’s payout rate. Is it really so high that an account with 24K followers can start getting checks that large?
by Decabytes | 2026-02-10 17:24:09+00:00
I too have felt these feelings (though I'm much younger than the author). I think as I've grown older I have to remind myself

1. I shouldn't be so tied to what other people think of me (craftsman, programmer, low level developer)

2. I shouldn't measure my satisfaction by comparing my work to others'. Quality still matters especially in shared systems, but my responsibility is to the standards I choose to hold, not to whether others meet them. Plus there are still community of people that still care about this (handmade network, openbsd devs, languages like Odin) that I can be part of it I want to

3. If my values are not being met either in my work or personal life I need to take ownership of that myself. The magic is still there, I just have to go looking for it
by acoard | 2026-02-10 17:24:09+00:00
I think this works unironically. My mother is an avid gardener and can spend 8 hours a day gardening. When her life circumstances allowed for it, she hired a once a week gardener to do the tasks she didn't like (or had difficulties doing as a small woman), and still gardens the same amount. I've teased her for hiring a gardener, but she swears it's a huge help and boost to her gardening quality of life.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2026-02-10 17:24:19+00:00
LMStudio is a low barrier to entry for LLMs, for sure. The lowest. Good software!

Other people gave you the right answer, ComfyUI. I’ll give you the more important why and how…

There is a huge effort of people to do everything but Comfy because of its intimidating barrier. It’s not that bad. Learn it once and be done. You won’t have to keep learning UI of the week endlessly.

The how, go to civitai. Find an image you like, drag and drop it into comfy. If it has a workflow attached, it will show you. Install any missing nodes they used. Click the loaders to point to your models instead of their models. Hit run and get the same or a similar image. You don’t need to know what any of the things do yet.

If for some reason that just does not work for you… Swarm UI, is a front end too comfy. You can change things and it will show you on the comfy side what they’re doing. It’s a gateway drug to learning comfy.

EDIT: most important thing no one will tell you out right… DO NOT FOR ANY REASON try and skip the VENV or miniconda virtual environment when using comfy! You must make a new and clean setup. You will never get the right python, torch, diffusers, driver, on your system install.
by Zaskoda | 2026-02-10 17:24:21+00:00
I found that feeling again while building a game on the EVM. All of the constraints were new and different. Solidity feels somewhere between and high and low level language, not as abstracted as most popular languages today but a solid step above writing assembly.

A lot of people started building projects like mine when the EVM was newer. Some managed to get a little bit of popularity, like Dark Forest. But most were never noticed. The crypto scene has distracted everyone from the work of tinkerers and artists who just wanted to play with a new paradigm. The whole thing became increasingly toxic.

It was like one last breath of fresh cool air before the pollution of AI tools arrived on the scene. It's a bitter sweet feeling.
by matthewmacleod | 2026-02-10 17:24:32+00:00
It's a genuinely surprising feeling to live in a place, but see an absolute torrent of malevolent misinformation about it.

The "London has fallen" trope that has been prevalent on social media recently stank of some kind of deliberate manipulation. But increasingly—in part due to stories like this—I wonder if it is actually just all "for the views".
by severino | 2026-02-10 17:25:03+00:00
I've been in Portugal sometimes, and to me MB was synonymous with "we accept credit cards", and in fact it is in the sense that you can pay using Visa or Mastercard in those shops. But, is it a standalone system that doesn't require anything outside Portugal in order to work? With their own non-Visa credit cards? And can you use them when abroad in the EU, for example?
by kcplate | 2026-02-10 17:25:07+00:00
If you are getting paid in cash you are only paying income tax if you actually set out to do so. Operating fully in cash is getting harder and harder as we progress to a more cashless society, but right now, still do-able.

The government always cares when it is not getting its share, but enforcement is probably more by accident rather than intention. If you are living modestly and are not calling out any sort of government paper trail to yourself (avoiding government services, police interactions), you are probably not going to attract any investigation.

These sweeps that we are seeing change that a bit. Easier to get ensnared.
by WhompingWindows | 2026-02-10 17:25:12+00:00
You're not alone, Kraig911. It's very hard to be a parent in modern society. My wife and I's friends have basically vanished from our lives, they have zero initiative or interest in coming over to see the kids or help in any way. They say they do, but they rely on us to take the initiative and make social things happen. After dozens of rejections or silence from dozens of them, it's rejection fatigue with the friends...unless they also have kids, in which case we play DnD together when the kids go to bed.

Going out to eat? Going on vacations? Sleeping? Your own health? Your finances? Say goodbye to all of that for 5+ years if you have kids, even more if you have a special needs child.

And despite all that, we love them and we want to have them, and probably the vast majority would do so again. And we will have our children to keep us young-at-heart, learning, active, and to help us in old age. Many of our child-free friends are going to go through a lot of loneliness when they're old, while we'll have the vibrancy of a family life.
by qwertypk | 2026-02-10 17:25:14+00:00
I’m working on a portfolio & wealth data platform: https://github.com/finmars-platform/finmars-core

It helps to consolidate data from multiple sources, "slice & dice" data instantly from big picture overviews to smaller details like having a split screen. Basically extremely customisable tool.

On top of that, there's a marketplace where developers can build and monetise add-ons.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-10 17:25:35+00:00
> Didn't companies historically own their own compute?

Historically, companies got their compute needs supplied by mainframe vendors like IBM and others. The gear might have sat on premises in a computer room/data center, but they didn't really own it in any real sense.

> Basically I don't understand what they're selling if it's not what people already call clusters.

Is it really a cluster when the whole machine is an integrated rack and workloads are automatically migrated within the rack so that any impending failure doesn't disrupt operation? That's a lot closer to a single node.
by rurp | 2026-02-10 17:25:46+00:00
I think this is exactly right. It's not just environmental disasters either. There are more existential risks looming than ever before. The relative peace of the post-WW2 order kept things relatively calm and quite prosperous for decades, but everyone can see that coming to an end right now.

Maybe things will work out fine or even great in the medium term, but I think a lot of childbearing age people are looking around and thinking the next 30 years might be a lot worse than the previous 30.
by pja | 2026-02-10 17:26:03+00:00
“I want this thing, but in a different language” seems to be something that the current generation of cutting edge LLMs are pretty good at.

Translating a vibe is something the Ur-LLMS (GPT3 etc) were very good at so it’s not entirely surprising that the current state of the art is to be found in things of a “translate thing X that already exists into context Y” nature.
by thewebguyd | 2026-02-10 17:26:04+00:00
To be fair, some (automatic) vehicles have such tall gearing that coasting will not slow you down if on a flat, let alone downhill. I've driven a few, and I can't stand them. You have no choice but to tap brakes.

I much prefer cars with short gearing for better engine braking. I continue to choose to drive a manual party for better engine braking.
by estearum | 2026-02-10 17:26:07+00:00
Can't edit my prior comment, but anyway here are some thoughts from a Founding Father, 2nd President of the United States, and leader of the American Revolution, John Adams:

> We are to look upon it as more beneficial, that many guilty persons should escape unpunished, than one innocent person should suffer. The reason is, because it’s of more importance to community, that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished; for guilt and crimes are so frequent in the world, that all of them cannot be punished; and many times they happen in such a manner, that it is not of much consequence to the public, whether they are punished or not. But when innocence itself, is brought to the bar and condemned, especially to die, the subject will exclaim, it is immaterial to me, whether I behave well or ill; for virtue itself, is no security. And if such a sentiment as this, should take place in the mind of the subject, there would be an end to all security what so ever

Lots of wisdom in this
by davsti4 | 2026-02-10 17:26:08+00:00
Similarly, I'm using it to write apps in non-native languages, like rust. My first foray into it led to finding poor documentation examples. AI allows me to create without spending large swaths of time learning minutia.

I'm enjoying it to a point, but yes, it does eliminate that sense of accomplishment - when you've spent many late nights working on something complex, and finally finish it. That's pretty much gone.
by stvltvs | 2026-02-10 17:26:12+00:00
IANAL, but written materials about sexual abuse don't seem to be illegal in the US. For recent-ish publications, see My Dark Vanessa by Russell and Tampa by Nutting.

(I liked the former which took a thoughtful approach whereas I didn't finish the latter because it just felt like erotica for pedophiles which isn't what I was looking for.)
by hannofcart | 2026-02-10 17:26:24+00:00
Fully agree and I don't see why more people aren't talking about this.

World population in early 1800 was around a billion. As recent as 1928, it was only 2 billion. We added 3x that number in the last 100 years!

I see population decline as a good thing. Nations should focus on managing the decline gracefully. It's good for the environment. It's good for distributing our limited resources equitably.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-10 17:26:25+00:00
> I'm actually really eager to hear why you think Chad, Somalia, and DR Congo are the countries where people feel the most optimistic about the future, and what you think rich countries should be learning from them!

Why not ask Israelis?

Even ignoring Haredim (who's fertility rate has fallen dramatically) secular Israelis tend to have 2 kids on average [0]. Israelis also work crazier hours than Americans (South Korea is the only OECD country tied with Israel in hours spent working), live primarily in 2-3 bedrooms apartment blocks built in the 1960s-90s, earn less than Americans, and pay San Francisco level prices for everything.

But society as a whole is very children friendly. If you have a baby crying in the background of a zoom call, it's not a faux pas to care for them. If your kids are running around in a mall no one gives you stink eye. Setting up a playdate in the office while parents are working is viewed as completely normal.

Western Europeans and North Americans are much less friendly and more individualistic veering on greedy.

[0] - https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptiona...
by dataviz1000 | 2026-02-10 17:26:39+00:00
I'm traveling South America now. It is so nice! Brazil and Peru are both today unexpectedly awesome. From the point of view of someone born in those countries, I can understand having ~70% of a US salary but living there being very attractive.

Things are a lot more stable than when I first visited South America 21 years ago. In every city on every block there is new construction in Bogota, Lima, Curitiba.

Moreover, the economic impact of having skilled trained labor returning from years of training how to lay brick, roofing, construction, welding, farm management, cooking in 2 star Michelin restaurants, and other industries is going to continue to fuel the growth. (I could understand building a wall to keep the skilled labor form leaving.)
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-02-10 17:26:39+00:00
"Stanford is also the birthplace of The Marriage Pact, a matchmaking project created in 2017 and adopted at more than 100 universities. Creator Liam McGregor said it’s produced over 350,000 matches..."

That's a lot.

"... and dozens of marriages."

That's not very many for 350,000 matches. Let's say "dozens" means 100? 200? 350? Even that is 1 in 1000. Not very impressive for something calling itself "The Marriage Pact".
by memsom | 2026-02-10 17:26:42+00:00
I would have said "true", or at least - I would have said "I do, but never incurring a charge on next month's bill", but with services like Flex from Monzo, you can actually get credit over 3 months with 0% interest rates, which not only makes buying stuff more likely, but spreads out the costs. It doesn't solve over spending though.