MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dathinab | 2026-02-07 15:40:19+00:00
> The three problems frameworks solve (or claim to) [..] Simplification [..] Automation [..] Labour cost

and he misses _the most important problem frameworks solve_

which is correctness

when it comes to programming most things are far more complicated in subtle annoying ways then they seem to be

and worse while you often can "cut away" on this corner cases this also tends to lead to obscure very hard to find bugs including security issues which have a tendency to pop up way later when you haven't touched to code for a while and don't remember which corner you cut (and with AI you like did never know which corner you did cut)

like just very recently some very widely used python libraries had some pretty bad bugs wrt. "basic" HTTP/web topics like http/multipart request smuggling, DOS from "decompression bombs" and similar

and while this might look like it's a counter argument, it speaks for strict code reuse even for simple topics. Because now this bugs have been fixed! And that is a very common topic for frameworks/libraries, they start out with bugs, and sadly often the same repeated common bugs known from other frameworks, and then over time things get ironed out.

But with AI there is an issue, a lot of the data it's trained on is code _which does many of this "typical" issues wrong_.

And it's non-determenistic, and good at "hiding" bugs, especially the kind of bugs which anyway are prone to pass human reviews.

So you _really_ would want to maximize use of frameworks and libraries when using AI, as that large part of the AI reliability issues.

But what does change is that there is much less reason to give frameworks/libraries "neat compact APIs" (which is a common things people spend A LOT of time one and which is prone to be the source of issues as people insist on making things "look simpler" then they are and in turn accidentally make them not just simpler but outright wrong, or prevent use-cases you might need).

Now depending on you definition of framework you could argue that AI removes boiler-parts issues in ways which allow effectively replacing all frameworks with libraries.

But you still need to review code, especially AI generated code. To some degree the old saying that code is far more read then written is even more true with AI (as most isn't "written"(by human) anymore). Now you could just not review AI code, but that can easily count as gross negligence and in some jurisdictions it's not (fully) possible to opt out of damages from gross negligence no matter what you put in TOS or other contracts. I.e. I can't recommend such negligent actions.

So IMHO there is still use for some kind of frameworks, even if what you want from them will likely start to differ and many of them can be partially or fully "librarified".
by kkfx | 2026-02-07 15:40:51+00:00
Is there really for the ML boom, or is it just a way to make computers more and more expensive to push people towards mobile? Because looking around, that's the effect I'm seeing, regardless of the causes.

I see a future where most people will buy tablets to save money and the desktop will be for only a few, a very few, just when self-hosting is becoming trendy and people are saying "it's time for GNU/Linux to take Windows' place"...
by Nevermark | 2026-02-07 15:41:04+00:00
Tiered versions work well.

I don't know anyone that doesn't use a combination of at least one simple, one feature laden, text editor. Most of us via notes apps, etc., routinely move between a range of text complexity, suitable to a range of things we want to write.

Having the simplest to the most powerful apps be consistent between each other, wherever they have feature commonality, would be really nice.
by irishcoffee | 2026-02-07 15:42:31+00:00
If Tolkien had not lived an entire life, fought in a war, been buddies with other authors, and also been a decent writer, the story doesn’t exist. And an LLM won’t come up with it.

An LLM isn’t coming up with the eye of Sauron, or the entire backstory of the ring, or gollum, etc etc

The LLM can’t know Tolkien had a whole universe built in his head that he worked for decades to get on to paper.

I’m so tired of this whole “an LLM just does what humans already do!” And then conflating that with “fuck all this LLM slop!”
by crazygringo | 2026-02-07 15:42:56+00:00
Not at all.

The most basic way is to do a 30 min interview with 20 designers that cover a few each of freelance, small company, med company, large company. Find out which features they use and don't, and what their pain points are, and whether a tool with less features is something that would be majorly helpful or not very important.

Then do a round of validation with AdWords, can you get designers to click on the ad for something advertised as simpler and bloat-free, go to a landing page that explains what it has and doesn't have, and then put it their email to find out when it launches.

To me, that is the absolute bare minimum to make sure you're developing something that can be a business, rather than just a hobby for yourself.

And these are not my ideas or anything. They're pretty standard stuff, and there's a lot more you can and should do as well.
by acdha | 2026-02-07 15:43:49+00:00
> It's not a small problem in Canada. Funny was this patient who got rear ended like 8 times in a few years and needed time off and massage treatment every time.

This seems … reasonable? Car crashes are the leading cause of life-altering injuries in North America and back pain is notoriously hard to prove to the point that a hostile audience can’t say they’re overstated. If you look at case studies from the American opioid crisis, a disturbing number of them start with someone getting in a road or workplace accident and not having a full pain management regimen.
by ctoth | 2026-02-07 15:44:27+00:00
> other side???

> We don’t have to look at assembly, because a compiler produces the same result every time.

This is technically true in the narrowest possible sense and practically misleading in almost every way that matters. Anyone who's had a bug that only manifests at -O2, or fought undefined behavior in C that two compilers handle differently, or watched MSVC and GCC produce meaningfully different codegen from identical source, or hit a Heisenbug that disappears when you add a printf ... the "deterministic compiler" is doing a LOT of work in that sentence that actual compilers don't deliver on.

Also what's with the "sides" and "camps?" ... why would you not keep your identity small here? Why define yourself as a {pro, anti} AI person so early? So weird!
by ecshafer | 2026-02-07 15:44:28+00:00
The welfare state can not exist in world where the government is against population growth. You cant have a robust welfare state and make through policy and propaganda 4+ child families rare. We need an exponential curve of population to maintain it, especialy when its at european levels. Mass immigration of uneducated people from low income countries doesnt cover the gap, especially when the government extends welfare to them.

This is all a fact.
by mathfailure | 2026-02-07 15:46:02+00:00
Kinda makes no sense to me: so you don't use '--' as a prefix, you use it in the middle of an alias, so you first have to autocomplete, say, 'gi' not to 'git' but to 'git--progress'. What does that alias do? Doesn't it call git with some args? If so - why not just alias it to git?
by savant2 | 2026-02-07 15:46:11+00:00
Genuine question: why do you consider it to be nowhere near an "Office suite"? It seems to me it fits the definition given by Wikipedia [1]. I guess it is less advanced than Google Workspace or Microsoft Office but it would cover all of my needs at work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_software#Office_s...
Show HN: Almostnode – Run Node.js, Next.js, and Express in the Browser
by PetrBrzyBrzek | 2026-02-07 15:46:16+00:00
Hey HN, I built almostnode. It's a library that gives you a Node.js-like environment inside the browser.

It includes:
- A virtual filesystem with POSIX-compatible API
- 40+ shimmed Node.js modules (fs, path, http, crypto, stream, etc.)
- A package manager that installs real npm packages client-side
- Built-in Next.js (App Router) and Vite dev servers with HMR
- Service worker bridge that makes virtual servers accessible via real URLs

The main use cases are interactive code playgrounds, live documentation, and AI coding agents that need to execute code client-side without provisioning a sandbox server.

It's not a WebContainers replacement, no real TCP/IP or native modules. Think of it as the lightweight alternative when you just need a demo or playground running from a static HTML page.

It's experimental and definitely has bugs. Would love feedback, especially on the module shims and framework support.

GitHub: https://github.com/macaly/almostnode
Show HN: Env-shelf – Open-source desktop app to manage .env files
by ivanglpz | 2026-02-07 15:46:24+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m sharing a small open-source desktop tool I built to simplify managing .env files across multiple projects.

Env-shelf scans a selected folder, lists all .env files it finds, and lets you view and edit environment variables from a single UI. The goal is to reduce friction when working on multiple repositories and avoid mistakes caused by manual editing of scattered config files.

It is free and open source.

Demo / landing page: https://env-shelf.vercel.app/

Repository: https://github.com/ivanglpz/env-shelf-local

Feedback and suggestions are welcome.
by razingeden | 2026-02-07 15:47:33+00:00
non watermarked content can reside on an s3 bucket or http path, referenced by squid as the origin server, which is Icap Aware , and you can run any command on the content;

Antivirus, ffmpeg to watermark a doc … or indeed a third party API..

it’s most commonly used to do antivirus on a transparent proxy and block infected file downloads but you can run any command you want.

Including watermarking everything with a company logo , “confidential “ , or a unique ID of the requestor.

or making subtle alterations to md5sums , metadata etc in confidential documents or for each requestor to track down leaks and sharing.

Nakivo does something kind of like that with product downloads (executables) to manipulate them and require a specific file name to install that goes back to the info you furnished for a demo.

All sorts of use cases for these alterations, I wouldn’t necessarily abandon an idea that’s interesting or challenging to you and id encourage you to spend a little more time on whether youve considered them all and whether they’re marketable

Then if it’s not interesting as a standalone product it might be something you can bake into a paid CMS plugin (Wordpress, Xenforo, etc) for people who are savvy enough to deploy those kinds of products but maybe not go this far with it.

My bread and butter , I guess.. isn’t something mass marketable , but it’s something i enjoy, am wired for, and never really get burned out or bored of.
by jmull | 2026-02-07 15:50:07+00:00
> Since [a few months ago], things have dramatically changed...

It's not like we haven't heard that one before. Things have changed, but it's been a steady march. The sudden magic shift, at a different point for everyone, is in the individual mind.

Regarding the epiphany... since people have been heavily overusing frameworks -- making their projects more complex, more brittle, more disorganized, more difficult to maintain -- for non-technical reasons, people aren't going to stop just because LLMs make them less necessary; The overuse wasn't necessary in the first place.

Perhaps unnecessary framework usage will drop, though, as the new hype replaces the old hype. But projects won't be better designed, better organized, better through-through.
by almostdeadguy | 2026-02-07 15:50:10+00:00
If you trust what the executives of OpenAI and Anthropic say about their respective projects, its a die roll as to whether or not they will totally destroy the world. A theme of the last 5-10 years has been tech dropping the whitewashing of their reputation and embracing the idea that they what they are doing is incredibly sociopathic and still somehow cool (to them, I guess). Guess not everyone got the memo.
by ipsento606 | 2026-02-07 15:50:35+00:00
> Software engineers are scared of designing things themselves.

When I use a framework, it's because I believe that the designers of that framework are i) probably better at software engineering than I am, and ii) have encountered all sorts of problems and scaling issues (both in terms of usage and actual codebase size) that I haven't encountered yet, and have designed the framework to ameliorate those problems.

Those beliefs aren't always true, but they're often true.

Starting projects is easy. You often don't get to the really thorny problems until you're already operating at scale and under considerable pressure. Trying to rearchitect things at that point sucks.
by tchoa91 | 2026-02-07 15:51:04+00:00
I built COGext to fill the gap left by the original System Monitor Chrome Web App (by François Beaufort), which is no longer functional now that Chrome Apps have been deprecated. I wanted a modern, extension-based replacement that remains lightweight and transparent.

Technical approach:

Clean Vanilla JS: a lightweight and robust VMC architecture.

Privacy: Zero tracking, zero record.

Lightweight: The whole package is under 550KB.

Open Source: Fully auditable.

It provides real-time monitoring for CPU (usage/temp), RAM, Storage, Battery level and more. I’ve focused on accessibility and a clean, internationalized (i18n) UI.

I'm a veteran developer (started in the late 80s) and I still believe the web is at its best when it's minimalist and user-centric. I’d love to get your feedback on the implementation or any features you'd find useful for a dev workflow.

Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/bkgdbdaidbamkkbhkop... GitHub: https://github.com/tchoa91/cog-ext
by acdha | 2026-02-07 15:51:13+00:00
> he’s the first guy in a long long time to actually do things and not just talk about doing things

The problem is that the things he’s doing are using his office to become an actual billionaire and tearing down protections against abuse and fraud. You don’t fight “institutional rot” by enshrining the principle that loyalty trumps following the law or that policy outcomes can be purchased on the blockchain. Lying about the law and actions by his predecessors similar is building, not lowering, institutional rot by encouraging the idea that cheating is okay as long as you win (c.f. continued lying about election integrity or awarding government funds and jobs based on political affiliation).
by handelaar | 2026-02-07 15:51:23+00:00
> "The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 82% of their salary"

This might be the most insane comment I've ever seen on this forum.

What in the hell are you talking about? Did you actually read that first link, completely fail to understand a single word of it, and then the number 82 just magically fell out of the sky?
by stmw | 2026-02-07 15:51:28+00:00
"The talk Whirlwind Software Restoration provides an overview of the Whirlwind real-time digital computer designed at MIT. When brought on line in 1950, Whirlwind was one of the largest computers in existence. We then focus on restoration of one application of Whirlwind, development and demonstration of an interactive real-time air defense application, using radar data to compute headings to guide piloted interceptor aircraft towards intruders. The 1951 demonstration ultimately evolved into the SAGE continental air defense system."
by blenderob | 2026-02-07 15:52:42+00:00
Can someone explain how this would work?

> the answers are known to the authors of the questions but will remain encrypted for a short time.

Ok. But humans may be able to solve the problems too. What prevents Anthropic or OpenAI from hiring mathematicians, have them write the proof and pass it off as LLM written? I'm not saying that's what they'll do. But shouldn't the paper say something about how they're going to validate that this doesn't happen?
by simonw | 2026-02-07 15:53:34+00:00
Have you really never found writing code painful?

CI is failing. It passed yesterday. Is there a flaky API being called somewhere? Did a recent commit introduce a breaking change? Maybe one of my third-party dependencies shipped a breaking change?

I was going to work on new code, but now I have to spend between 5 minutes and an hour+ - impossible to predict - solving this new frustration that just cropped up.

I love building things and solving new problems. I'd rather not have that time stolen from me by tedious issues like this... especially now I can outsource the CI debugging to an agent.

These days if something flakes out in CI I point Claude Code at it and 90% of the time I have the solution a couple of minutes later.
by throwaw12 | 2026-02-07 15:54:39+00:00
skill issue.

sorry for being blunt, but if you have tried once, twice and came to this conclusion, it is definitely a skill issue, I never got comfortable by writing 3 lines of Java, Python or Go or any other language, it took me hundreds of hours spent doing non-sense, failing miserably and finding out that I was building things which already exists in std lib.
by brysonreece | 2026-02-07 15:55:20+00:00
The golden age is over. It’s a saddening experience watching something you care about, and your opportunities to build a career and life around it, fade away. The reasons for this are numerous, (like you mentioned; ZIRP, COVID, etc) but the ultimate irony IMO was the layoffs/AI push being an industry-driven nail in the industry’s own coffin.

There’s also something to be said about the industry’s faltering after the social era, a period which largely began the degradation of Big Tech’s public image, which was worsened even more by the overcorrection into Crypto/Web3, and finally through AI - which feels just as forced as the previous era was.
by Krasnol | 2026-02-07 15:56:03+00:00
No, more competition does obviously NOT solve oligarchies. It is what we see RIGHT NOW. It is OUT THERE NOW. Oligarchs buy up competition and either incorporate their ideas or make them disappear if they threaten their established business models.

Why are you keep repeating this myth?

The only relevant player who might break up oligarchies before they become to powerful is the state they operate in.
by trehalose | 2026-02-07 15:56:14+00:00
It's strange to me have different people have different eyes for spotting AI. Sometimes I see somebody say, "That's obviously AI, look at how wrong it looks!" and I can barely see it even after they point it out. Sometimes I see somebody say, "Hm, it looks almost indistinguishable from a real photo, I might not have realized if I didn't already know," but I found it immediately jarring. This article shows three photos of ads and says the first two are clearly AI-generated and the third one possibly so; to me, the third one was the only one where I thought, "That thing looks really fucked up in one of those ways only AI can do."
by cruffle_duffle | 2026-02-07 15:56:17+00:00
> If you've ever enjoyed the sci-fi genre, do you think the people in those stories are writing C and JavaScript?

To go off the deep end… I actually think this LLM assistant stuff is a precondition to space exploration. I can see the need for a offline compressed corpus of all human knowledge that can do tasks and augment the humans aboard the ship. You’ll need it because the latency back to earth is a killer even for a “simple” interplanetary trip to mars—that is 4 to 24 minutes round trip! Hell even the moon has enough latency to be annoying.

Granted right now the hardware requirements and rapid evolution make it infeasible to really “install it” on some beefcake system but I’m almost positive the general form of moores law will kick in and we’ll have SOTA models on our phones in no time. These things will be pervasive and we will rely on them heavily while out in space and on other planets for every conceivable random task.

They’ll have to function reliably offline (no web search) which means they probably need to be absolutely massive models. We’ll have to find ways to selectively compress knowledge. For example we might allocate more of the model weights to STEM topics and perhaps less to, I dunno, the fall of the Roman Empire, Greek gods or the career trajectory of Pauly Shore. the career trajectory of Pauly Shore. But perhaps not, because who knows—-maybe a deep familiarity with Bio-Dome is what saves the colony on Kepler-452b
Show HN: The Codeverse Hub Linux
by sinisterMage | 2026-02-07 15:56:20+00:00
Hi HN!, So, We are working on an open source Linux distribution called CodeVerse Linux. It is a community project built by developers from The CodeVerse Hub.
The idea is simple: A minimal, fast, Arch based OS that is Wayland first and actually enjoyable for developers and power users.
we are not trying to be the next omarchy or the next big thing, but we have a lot of passion for what we do, after all, we are all learners ourselves.
the distro has sane defaults while not being very bloated and its fully open source
we are doing this for the purpose of giving everyone a change to contribute what they can, becoming the opportunity for many to make their first meaningful contribution. This project will continue to evolve and we aim to make it something that is built by learners for learners. So expect misconducts and mistakes in the code-base
We are open to: Feedback, Contributors, Suggestions and Criticism (constructive)
thanks for reading this and have a good one
by nh2 | 2026-02-07 15:56:24+00:00
Worth pointing out that with Nix/NixOS this problem doesn't exist.

The problem in other distros is that if you prefix PATH so that it contains your executable "foo", and then run a program that invokes "foo" from PATH and expects it to do something else, the program breaks.

With Nix, this problem does not exist because all installed programs invoke all other programs not via PATH but via full absolute paths starting with /nix/store/HASH...
by slfnflctd | 2026-02-07 15:57:01+00:00
Interesting business model.

I have two questions:

1) Who do you see as primary competitors in this niche?

2) What is your model for managing liability in a situation where a naive, less technical (or plain lazy) customer lets one of these run a business without sufficiently verifying output? Your definition of due diligence may differ from theirs.
by m0llusk | 2026-02-07 15:57:15+00:00
This is about green field development which is relatively rare. Much of the time the starting point is a bunch of code using React or maybe just a lump of PHP. Business logic ends up plunked down all over the place and LLMs tend to make a huge mess with all this unless kept on a tight leash.

I'm glad this guy is doing well, but I'm dreading the amount of work being created for people who can reverse engineer the mountains of hallucinated bullshit that he and others are now actively producing.

And if the frameworks aren't useful then maybe work up the chain and ditch compilers next?
by acdha | 2026-02-07 15:57:19+00:00
First mover advantage still requires some reason to stick, especially when it costs more. Almost nobody _needs_ Bitcoin – most people don’t use it at all so they have no reason to pay more for it and there’s almost no situation where that would be the only option. The only reason to buy in is hoping that there will be more demand in the future, and that can evaporate quickly as we’ve seen because a fiat currency like Bitcoin is valued on the strength of its backers and it doesn’t have anything like a country or large industry driving demand.
by strange_quark | 2026-02-07 15:58:02+00:00
The absence of evidence is evidence in its own way. I don’t understand how there haven’t been more studies on this yet. The one from last year that showed AI made people think they were faster but were actually slower gets cited a lot, and I know that was a small study with older tools, but it’s amazing that that hasn’t been repeated. Or maybe it has and we don’t know because the results got buried.