MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by VladVladikoff | 2026-02-07 14:08:48+00:00
I don’t get it? Wouldn’t figuring out a simple FFMPEG command to watermark an image (or video) take less time than integrating with an API to do it? Plus if you had to do a lot of images it would be much faster to work locally than having to ship the images remotely somewhere.
-someone who does this a lot, specifically for videos.
by chongli | 2026-02-07 14:08:50+00:00
I don’t know anything about “hard/brittle” analogies for operating systems. What I do know is that Linux distributions don’t seem to have a coherent strategy for building an operating system with sensible defaults and a consistent design that makes it easy to use for non-technical users.

Linux developers seem to almost-universally believe that if the user doesn’t like it or it doesn’t make sense then the user will fix it themselves either via configuration files or patching the source code. That model works fine for users with a lot of knowledge and time on their hands. In other words, it’s an operating system for hobbyists.

MacOS, for all its faults, is still pretty easy to use (though not even close to the ease of use of Classic Mac OS 9 and earlier).
by sam256 | 2026-02-07 14:08:58+00:00
BTW, unrelated to the MCP App part of this, it is interesting to see how the LLM (Claude Opus, is what I've been using mostly) plays backgammon. I'm surprised about how often it forgets the board state. At first, I didn't think I'd need a tool for it to remind itself of the board state, but it seems to need that surprisingly often.
by Avamander | 2026-02-07 14:09:11+00:00
The attacker can meddle with every step taken before the signature verification. The way you handle the HTTP responses, the way you handle the signature format, all that. Captive portals have already caused corruption issues for Apt, signed packages be damned.

Saying it's "fair" is like saying engine maintenance does not matter because the tires are inflated. There are more components to it.

Ensuring the correctness of your entire stack against an active MITM is significantly more difficult than ensuring the correctness of just a TLS stack against an active MITM.
by carlosjobim | 2026-02-07 14:09:32+00:00
> What are your favorite old people deceits?

The favourite has to be "I'm leaving all this inheritance to you when I die, so you'd better obey me!".

You're only leaving an inheritance because you can't bring anything with you when you die. If you could, you wouldn't leave a dime.

But in a business / hiring setting, old people are more shrewd and have learnt to put their own interests first at every point. Ie, colleagues cannot count on camaraderie and employers cannot count on loyalty. Young employees usually haven't been screwed over or betrayed in life yet, so they don't carry that burden of having to find a way to "get even" by screwing other people over.
by quibono | 2026-02-07 14:10:38+00:00
I've been using Omarchy because it made Hyprland usable out of the box. By default you get sane hotkeys and neat config management. All the custom scripts are easily editable (since they're all bash scripts). So it's a very tweakable setup.
In fact that's how I run it. I changed most of the defaults (Chrome->Firefox; Vim->Emacs; Walker->Vicinae; Alacritty->Wezterm) and removed all the app cruft and I'm loving it.
Also, I enjoy the way themes are handled.
by gostsamo | 2026-02-07 14:11:40+00:00
Scifi as a space based genre failed due to the end of the space race. The generation that grew in the post WWII era aged and died. The lack of big scientific breakthroughs for the last fifty years added to the lack of new dreams. The future is here, just it's not exciting.

For the last few decades the culturally significant fiction has been in anime and manga. Lots of it is trash, but lots of it captures the ya themes of friendship and adventure. Some of it captured better the ideas of the cyber age, I suppose. If one explores those genres with a bit of background, you can see how they have been inspired by the traditional sf works, but repackaged them for new audiences without the introspection and conventions of yesterday.

I'm not sure if it is all bad. Definitely, science is not an aspiration any more and those works lack the grounding hard scifi taught us. On the other hand, there is still romanticism in those stories and they teach kids to dream for the impossible. I choose to believe that this is still something to base some optimism on.
by mcdeltat | 2026-02-07 14:11:41+00:00
Well said. I wonder about this too in my city (Australia). Apparently many people think "living the dream" is having an excessively large copy-pasted house in a copy-pasted suburb in the middle of nowhere, with no amenities, no green/community space, and you have to drive for an hour to get anywhere. It sounds like a dystopian lifestyle to me.

Or, you could live in a somewhat smaller residence where you actually have access to the things that make life good. But god forbid there's a train nearby that increases the sound by 10dB every 10 minutes and brings in all those dodgy (i.e. working class) people! Grrr functional society makes me angry!!
by kayo_20211030 | 2026-02-07 14:11:59+00:00
It was such a great product.

Yes, I know they had one truly horrible year. But, they righted the ship.

I worked for a company that ran 10bn in revenue, with thousands of users, and Heroku just hummed along. It ran our business.

The benefit to us was the lack of problems that occurred at deploy time. Heroku's orchestration of removing old dynos, adding new dynos, and their network control was spectacular. DB's were updated, or patched, without downtime. It truly was impressive.

We moved to a combination of AWS and on-prem, and the overhead of providing what Heroku previously provided is quite large.

I'll remember it fondly, and miss it a bit too.
by bm3719 | 2026-02-07 14:12:00+00:00
We can blame the individual for the cost we've outsourced into him. When he collapses under that load, we can attribute it to personal shortcomings. Some people survive, even thrive, in the current environment, after all. We've coalesced a plurality of games into a single one, and in a sense, it works great. We have our smartphones, AI, online shopping, and targeted advertising.

Notepad now has Copilot built right into it, after all. That wasn't going to happen by now if we took the human psyche as a given and built around that.
by unsupp0rted | 2026-02-07 14:12:08+00:00
If we knew that we probably wouldn’t need AI to tell us.

But realistically: perhaps by noticing patterns we’ve failed to notice and by generating likely molecules or pathways to treatment that we hadn’t explored.

We don’t really know what causes most diseases anyway. Why does the Shingles vaccine seem to defend against dementia? Why does picking your nose a lot seem to increase risk of Alzheimer’s?

That’s the point of building something smarter than us: it can get to places we can’t get on our own, at least much faster than we could without it.
by 9dev | 2026-02-07 14:12:19+00:00
I think this started a lot earlier actually. A few generations back, many people played an instrument, or at least could sing. It didn't matter that none of them was a Mozart, because they didn't had to be. For making music or singing together in a family or a friend group, it was wholly sufficient to be just good, not necessarily great.

But when everyone has access to recordings of the world's best musicians at all times, why listen to uncle Harry's shoddy guitar play? Why sing Christmas songs together when you can put on the Sinatra Christmas jazz playlist on Spotify?
by throwaw12 | 2026-02-07 14:12:30+00:00
Its funny though, if we unpack it more and add little more exaggeration to see where future might be going:

* we don't need to know how to write the code, because AI can write code.

* we don't need dashboards, because AI can connect to db directly and generate dashboards on-demand

* we don't need utility SaaS, like managing your Google Ads, Meta Ads. Because AI can connect to them directly and manage your ads

* we don't need many other services, because AI can do them

Only moat seems to be in the platforms with large user base and inertia or things run on top of them: Gmail, Google Ads, Reddit, Instagram, MS Office, AWS/Azure/GCP and etc,.
by dangus | 2026-02-07 14:13:02+00:00
I dunno, I added a major feature to a project I had never interacted with before because I needed the functionality at work. I even used AI to help me (and spent a lot of time cleaning it up, as I didn't want to submit something shameful, but I needed the AI to implement a particular section that was on the edge of my understanding).

The code got accepted and is now released.

I imagine if the project maintainers were curmudgeons like OP, the rest of the community would never benefit from the work I did, and I'd have to keep it as an internal fork.

Am I really that exceptional, where these contributors can count on 1 hand the number of times people like me contributed something useful? I guess it probably depends on the project.
by ppoooNN | 2026-02-07 14:13:03+00:00
A cohesive culture that has strong bonds that transcend class. Rich people choosing to allocate capital in a manner that benefits them at the expense of others isn’t a new phenomenon by any means. We need rulers who value noblesse oblige. The current ones see us as cattle (the term popping up the Epstein emails so frequently is kinda funny).

“Blood and soil” is such a taboo in today’s society because it’s the solution to the problems we have. I don’t say this to be edgy. Scaling trust is the most important thing in human societies, and race, cultural history, shared religion etc are the absolute best ways to do this. Think about it this way:

Every morning men like Sam Altman wake up and decide to keep pursuing billions of dollars with no thought of how to ensure the rest of his people (because they aren’t you and me) are going to get by. He could very easily make this a core tenet of OpenAI (in a way inline with its original incarnation) and be _loved_ by the people. We don’t have a single elite that behaves this way: Musk, Trump, Altman, etc are all parasites that do not care if we live or die.

Land and co. are more or less transhumanist Thiel cronies so you’re not gonna get great analysis from them.
Show HN: AboutMyProject – A public log for developer proof-of-work
by Raiplus | 2026-02-07 14:14:30+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m a student developer and I built AboutMyProject because I noticed a gap in how we showcase our skills. Resumes feel static, and GitHub commit graphs don't always tell the story of "how" a project was built.

What it is: It’s a platform where developers document their build journey in real-time. Instead of just a final link, it shows the progress, the hurdles, and the actual proof-of-work.

Tech Stack:

Node.js & Express (Backend)

React (Frontend)

MongoDB for data persistence

Deployed on AWS EC2 with Nginx and PM2

Why I’m showing this today: I’m currently in beta and would love to get some technical feedback. Specifically:

Is the "Proof-of-Work" concept clear enough for a recruiter?

How can I make the onboarding smoother for developers?

I'm here to answer any questions. Roast the code or the logic—I’m here to learn!
by lazide | 2026-02-07 14:14:43+00:00
That not only doesn’t answer my question, but might as well be ‘have you stopped beating your wife yet’.

And how have you done re: ongoing jobs? The thing that was the actual topic here?

The reality is that if there were better jobs available for folks relative to number of available employees, the employer wouldn’t be able to find the people to do the crap jobs we’re talking about, and would have to make them better to get anyone to do them.

Or result to actual (or just de-facto) slavery anyway, which does happen in some places.

It’s a continuum.

Actual living conditions in India, in particular, are pretty brutal for most people. But certainly not just there!
by conciliatory | 2026-02-07 14:15:21+00:00
I am especially annoyed by the dark pattern whereby if I do a fast swipe up in an article, the page will scroll to a stop with the ad landing right under my finger, so the accidental click rate is higher. Very disappointed in Apple - as if the money from accidental clicks on spam ads is truly a meaningful revenue stream vs the cost of customer goodwill. Certainly optimizing in the wrong direction.
by dangus | 2026-02-07 14:15:44+00:00
So, the answer is yes, a single agent makes too many mistakes and you have to run four of them (4x usage cost) to improve the quality.

I understand that it works better, but I am rightfully pointing out that it's less efficient.

An analogy would be putting a V8 engine into a pickup truck to make it go as fast as a Mazda Miata.
by arghwhat | 2026-02-07 14:15:50+00:00
You seem to have forgotten all the critical TLS bugs we had. Heartbleed ring a bell?

> An attacker doesn't get to attack client's HTTP stack without first piercing protection offered by TLS.

You misunderstand: this means more attack surface.

The attacker can mess with the far more complex and fragile TLS stack, and any attacker controlling a server or server payload can also attack the HTTP stack.

Have you recently inspected who owns and operates every single mirror in the mirror list? None of these are trusted by you or by the distro, they're just random third parties - the trust is solely in the package and index signatures of the content they're mirroring.

I'm not suggesting not using HTTPS, but it just objectively wrong to consider it to have reduced your attack surface. At the same time most of its security guarantees are insufficient and useless for this particular task, so in this case the trade-off is solely privacy for complexity.
by voidhorse | 2026-02-07 14:16:01+00:00
Nah. Nothing has changed. To offload the work to an agent and make it a productivity gain it is exactly the same as using a framework, it's a black box portion of your system, written by someone else, that you don't understand.

Unless you are quite literally spending almost the same amount of time you'd spend yourself to deeply understand each component, at which point, you could write it yourself anyway, nothing has changed when it comes to the dynamics of actually authoring systems.

There are exceptions, but generally speaking untempered enthusiasm for agents correlates pretty well with lack of understanding about what engineering software actually entails (it's about relational and conceptual comprehension, communication, developing shared knowledge, and modeling, not about writing code or using particular frameworks!)

EDIT: And to be clear, the danger of "agentizing" software engineering is precisely that it promotes a tendency to obscure information about the system, turn engineers into personal self-llm silos, and generally discard all the second-order concerns that make for good systems, resilience, modifiability, intelligibility, performance.
by benburleson | 2026-02-07 14:16:04+00:00
I think these types of projects are really great for developers to exercise their end-to-end skills -- developing all pieces of the product. Kudos for launching it!

As someone who's done this before, the value is all in that experience and finding those gaps that you didn't know existed.

One important gap I originally didn't know about was needing a market for my product idea. I thought just because I had a clever idea that it would sell! Turns out that's not the case most of the time.

And in this case, I don't think there's a market for no-code solutions that simultaneously require HTTP API integration (that's not no-code, that's low-code), when there is a really simple low-code solution that doesn't require a network round-trip.

Again, kudos on completing the exercise of releasing something! It's a step most developers don't take, and absolutely worth the experience no matter where it goes.
by arghwhat | 2026-02-07 14:16:46+00:00
This statement makes no sense, TLS is a complicated protocol with implementations having had massive fun and quite public security issues, while HTTPS means you have both and need to deal with a TLS server feeing you malicious HTTP responses.

Having to harden two protocol implementations, vs. hardening just one of those.

(Having set up letsencrypt to get a valid certificate does not mean that the server is not malicious.)
by iExploder | 2026-02-07 14:17:12+00:00
Some people seem like fully gave in to using AI for everything, and nothing better than receiving multiple review requests per day for 2k+ diff PRs.. where most of the stuff is just "wtf" type of refactoring and added noise

Also funny to hear reactions when I'm grepping code for a function in front of someone and I hear "wow you look for code I would just ask Gemini" topkek
by vulcan01 | 2026-02-07 14:17:53+00:00
I see this as roughly equivalent to amortized big O complexity. If I push to a vector repeatedly, sometimes I will incur a significant cost O(n) of reallocation, but most of the time it's still O(1).

Similarly, if Meta violates the law, and is infrequently fined a small fraction of their revenue by a small number of governments, in general it will not be a big deal for them.
by quaintdev | 2026-02-07 14:18:06+00:00
Few months ago I did exactly this. But over time I threw away all the generated js,css and html. It was unmaintenable mess. I finally chose Svelte and stuck with it. Now I have a codebase which makes sense to me.

I did asked AI to generate landing page. This gave me the initial headers, footers and styles that I used for my webapp but I threw away everything else.
by ghaff | 2026-02-07 14:18:17+00:00
The Heroku style of PaaS just isn't very interesting to most large businesses that actually pay for things. The world basically moved on to Kubernetes-based products (see Google and Red Hat)--or just shutdown like a lot of Cloud Foundry-based products. Yes, many individuals and smaller shops care more about simplicity but they're generally not willing/able to pay a lot (if anything).
by projektfu | 2026-02-07 14:18:20+00:00
Does Apple News still share Apple News links to articles instead of the canonical link? When I had an iPhone, I uninstalled/disabled Apple News because I don't like distractions but when people shared with me an Apple News link I couldn't open it, because it would go to the app store instead of a redirect for the article. Ironically, on Android, that wasn't a problem. I'd get the article.
by softwaredoug | 2026-02-07 14:18:30+00:00
Even with a perfect coding agent, we code to discover what correct even is.

Team decides on vague requirements, then you actually have to implement something. Well that 'implementing' means iterating until you discover the correct thing. Usually in lots of finicky decisions.

Sometimes you might not care about those decisions, so you one shot one big change. But in my experience, the day-to-day on a production app you can 100% write all the code with Claude, but you're still trying to translate high level requirements into "low"-level decisions.

But in the end its nice not to care about the code monkey work going all over a codebase, adding a lot of trivial changes by hand, etc.
by macintux | 2026-02-07 14:18:36+00:00
This has been a popular topic nearly every time the post makes the HN front page.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40769362 (2024, 169 comments)

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31846902 (2022, 123 comments)

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22778988 (2020, 90 comments)
by unsupp0rted | 2026-02-07 14:18:53+00:00
It gives me pause that most people drive cars or are willing to sit in one for more than 20 minutes a week.

But people accept the status quo and are afraid to take a moment’s look into the face of their own impending injury, senescence and death: that’s how our brains are wired to survive and it used to make sense evolutionarily until about 5 minutes ago.
by simianwords | 2026-02-07 14:20:06+00:00
I’ve been thinking about this but one moat can be trust itself.

If every product can be made easily, what’s left is relation with the customers. Some companies rely on not just the core code or physical product but rather on the overall ecosystem of customers, service and other things. Here, the alignment between all of them is what matters because for certain products to work, you need all parties to jointly trust in the system. For example what makes Uber work is not only the quality of product but that all parties - drivers, riders all jointly trust that the system works.

A company has moat if they can earn this trust.
by abcde666777 | 2026-02-07 14:20:11+00:00
It's strange to me when articles like this describe the 'pain of writing code'. I've always found that the easy part.

Anyway, this stuff makes me think of what it would be like if you had Tolkein around today using AI to assist him in his writing.

'Claude, generate me a paragraph describing Frodo and Sam having an argument over the trustworthiness of Gollum. Frodo should be defending Gollum and Sam should be on his side.'

'Revise that so that Sam is Harsher and Frodo more stubborn.'

Sooner or later I look at that and think he'd be better off just writing the damned book instead of wasting so much time writing prompts.
by hyperman1 | 2026-02-07 14:20:21+00:00
AFAIK this story started in France, and has been going on for a while already in multiple countries.

e.g. here is the recall in Flanders,Belgium,for 2026-01-05, so more than a month ago:

https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2026/01/05/nestle-nan-babyvoedi...

Here is one English source about the deaths in France:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-nestl...
by eudamoniac | 2026-02-07 14:20:43+00:00
Because when I buy a house in a quiet neighborhood I don't want a cafe or bar open right next to my bedroom window? Is this actually mystifying? Everyone wants the shops near, but not too near, but you can't zone for that; someone will be too near.

In Seattle I lived on the 20th floor above a bar and it still awoke me some nights.
by UncleMeat | 2026-02-07 14:21:05+00:00
This is a moral panic.

To be very clear, the only real evidence anybody has provided is that way more students at Stanford have registered disabilities than students at community colleges. And individual students have tweeted.

These stories want you to draw the conclusion that there are huge numbers of students who are faking disabilities and then getting access to accommodations that give them an unfair advantage in coursework, setting them up for an unfair advantage in the job market. But nobody has been able to provide evidence of these things. Are these students really faking disabilities? Or are students with means far more likely to have access to doctors who can identify these disabilities? Do the students with disabilities actually get accommodations that make courses easier for them in an unfair way? Do these improved grades give students a meaningful leg up in the job market? Nobody is pointing to evidence here. They just let you conclude that this is happening.

My spouse is a professor. There are oodles of students who have disabilities who don't receive any accommodations because their course is already set up to support these students well. This idea of structuring evaluations such that everybody is getting access to the things that a student with ADHD or whatever might get is increasingly common in universities.
by mentalgear | 2026-02-07 14:22:11+00:00
I share that notion, but I think the abstractions are the foundational tech stack we have had for decades, like the Web Standard or even bash. You need constraints, but not the unnecessary complexity that comes with many modern tech stacks (react/next) that were build around SV's hyper-scalability monopoly mentality. Reach for simple tools if the task is simple: KISS.