MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Kiboneu | 2026-02-07 16:13:49+00:00
A trip down the recursion hole. Also, scripts will inherit the relative path so they will have different absolute paths from each other. Seems easier to just type ./ so it's kinda funny in a "UNIX haters handbook" kind of way, but it's not even a fault in linux's command interface in that case. We've all been there.

Oh, that's without even going into the security risks and loss of portability.
by toddmorrow | 2026-02-07 16:14:39+00:00
[using an lmm as stack overflow]

even if you check and redo after paste, you need to check for gotchas. I wish I had a nickel for every time the llm gave me a solution with a hidden limitation. assume that it violates all your unspoken assumptions, and adheres only to what you nailed down in your prompt
by AndrewKemendo | 2026-02-07 16:14:42+00:00
I have an employee that’s been setting up ops dashboards manually for 30 years

He set all ours up from scratch in a week with assistants and he’s never been happier cause he knows exactly what to do and what the outputs should be

He can still teach juniors the important parts and walk through how to use Prometheus and Grafana etc…
by noodlesUK | 2026-02-07 16:15:10+00:00
Older people in the UK already have free bus passes and various other substantial concessions regarding public transport. Cars are dangerous, and if you can't see clearly, you're obviously not fit to drive. It's true that there will be negative impacts on people who will fail the eye tests, and we should be compassionate, but ultimately those people aren't safe behind the wheel, and put other peoples lives at risk, not just their own.

The practical details of implementing this are important - is the eye test done at an ordinary optician/optometrist's shop? How are the results going to be submitted to DVLA, etc.? What protections will be in place to prevent people from shopping around for a dodgy optician (as people often do with cars and MOTs)?

I think this is a reasonable and practical step in the right direction. I accept that given the shortage of driving examiners it would be impossible to require re-testing of existing drivers in the foreseeable future, but as the article says, people already get eye tests frequently and often for free, so this is something that can be done without too much additional infrastructure.

A personal anecdote: my grandfather is in his 90s and is not at all fit to drive due to cataracts and various other issues, but he still does "short journeys" because it's convenient and he feels that it's necessary. The UK has plenty of public transport options and places where people can live with amenities close by (though this is not at all universal). Most British towns and cities are very different from their US counterparts in this respect. My grandfather moved house relatively recently --in full knowledge that the house he chose would benefit from car ownership, and in full knowledge about his age. The only thing that will stop him and others like him from putting people in danger is taking away his licence. He has been told by doctors, opticians and family members that he's not safe to drive, but in the absence of any enforcement he persists. I hope that this policy comes in before he or someone else gets hurt.
by jraph | 2026-02-07 16:15:41+00:00
There's a huge difference between the origin of some open source software, where a service is hosted and where the company providing it is from.

You can take some open source software made in some other country and use it or fork it no strings attached to its country of origin. No leader from that country can decide to abruptly cut you off your usage of the software because they feel like it.
by qqrot | 2026-02-07 16:15:46+00:00
Unfortunately you (and of course the wikipedia page) misunderstood the OECD document [1], which says:

"In France, income tax and employer social security contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax
wedge, compared with 77% of the total OECD average tax wedge."

Note how it says "of the total tax wedge" not "of their salary.

The tax wedge itself is 47.2% in 2024 in France. This is indeed high by international standards but nowhere as high as you claimed.

[1] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
by mancerayder | 2026-02-07 16:15:48+00:00
How would one go from devops or sre management to a customer facing pre sales role like you described?

I thought sales was a separate career path.

I relate 100 percent to your realization about competing with 25 year olds on Leetcode. I'm comfortable, but I realize finding a new job is harder than ever, even though I am as valuable as ever - they want me not only to have proven I can 10x a company managing infra and people (I did and have), but they expect me to spend my weekends coding, and not just coding but coding esoteric algorithms than no one uses outside of academia.

And meanwhile there's an enormous amount of messages here on HN about how managers are useless and mean.

It's a weird spot to be in, so I'm opting for trying to prepay mortgages as quickly as humanly possible before I'm unemployed forever and have to call it retirement (and which might have to take place in a cheaper foreign country).
by barkerja | 2026-02-07 16:16:11+00:00
For us, the reason is we're primarily a Salesforce company and rely on the Heroku Connect product to facilitate bidirectional syncing between Salesforce and PostgreSQL (which also requires Heroku PG).

One of the biggest benefits to this product -- aside from the syncing mechanism -- is a bypass of Salesforce's extremely limiting (and expensive) API limits.
by sallycarmen | 2026-02-07 16:16:29+00:00
Yes I agree. His conversations online were completely inane. With women he’d quickly resort to insults or asking for nude pictures. I don’t see a shred of intelligence in any email. Additionally no mention of any current affair or political story, which most intelligent people have an interest in. Steven pinker the Harvard professor thought him an idiot and because he called him out he was banished from the island. I think he worked for Russia. Taking girls, photographing them with numerous men and sending the info to Russia. That’s another thing, there’s no talk of doing deals in his correspondence so I believe he had one major source of income, Russia.
by awakeasleep | 2026-02-07 16:16:35+00:00
In the threads I see people focusing on the origin of the contaminated material. I think that misses the point that you have to deal with this by testing at the point where the ingredients are assembled into a final product, because it can’t be removed from whatever feed stock creates the individual ingredients.

Of course, ideally the manufacturer of the component ingredient also does the testing but in manufacturing you never trust your suppliers- you need your own testing engineers if you are putting your brand on the product and taking responsibility for it.
by 9rx | 2026-02-07 16:16:55+00:00
> That's not non-determinism, is it?

In the context of discussion, yes, as the only input is considered to be the source code. It is both non-deterministic in the compiler output and in program function (two different builds will produce programs that do different things). Side channel inputs like time are not considered here. If you are trying to start a new thread again and you want to include time as an input in that discussion, then no. However, the same is true of LLMs. They are 100% always deterministic when all inputs are accounted for.

Obviously. Working computers fundamentally cannot operate non-deterministically, although in the real world can appear to when some or all inputs are not accounted for. The discussion is premised on non-determinism meaning "some inputs are ignored".
by somenameforme | 2026-02-07 16:16:59+00:00
This is a far bigger small world than some might expect. The number of devs and games he's referring to numbers well into the thousands. A quick search [1] shows more than 4 games are released per day on Steam which will go on to earn more than $50k in revenue, so about 1500 per year.

It's wild - I'm a big gamer but I strongly doubt I could even list 1500 games across all systems and time. And that many games make $50k+ each year.

[1] - https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/10/06/steam-stats-41k-gam...
by bilbo0s | 2026-02-07 16:17:53+00:00
So true.

You can only complain about creativity if you were actually being creative. 99.99999% of the industry was not.

But sure, for the 0.000001% of the industry coming up with new deep learning algorithms instead of just TF/PyTorch monkey-ing, maybe the LLMs won’t help as much as a good foundation in some pretty esoteric mathematics.
by zdc1 | 2026-02-07 16:17:59+00:00
My initial thought was: why not fork LibreOffice and spend the extra dev time closing the gap between what it is and what they need?

But after some thought, I feel a cloud collaboration suite makes more sense as big orgs often run on online-first solutions like Sharepoint. So they can tick the essential boxes by being an online collaboration suite, and fill in formatting features later.

Though your points on speed and architecture do make me wonder if Python was their best choice...
by rglover | 2026-02-07 16:18:02+00:00
A significant number of developers and businesses are going to have an absolutely brutal rude awakening in the not too distant future.

You can build things this way, and they may work for a time, but you don't know what you don't know (and experience teaches you that you only find most stuff by building/struggling; not sipping a soda while the AI blurts out potentially secure/stable code).

The hubris around AI is going to be hard to watch unwind. What the moment is I can't predict (nor do I care to), but there will be a shift when all of these vibe code only folks get cooked in a way that's closer to existential than benign.

Good time to be in business if you can see through the bs and understand how these systems actually function (hint: you won't have much competition soon as most people won't care until it's too late and will "price themselves out of the market").
by hattmall | 2026-02-07 16:18:20+00:00
This isn't true at all though. There's a small amount of areas that are able to be super expensive and you can walk to stuff. Then there's far more cheap areas where you can walk to stuff that aren't generally desirable. The slightly more expensive unwalkable areas are intentional because the only way to keep the area safe is to make it inhospitable for people who can't afford cars.

Allowing business also does the opposite to property values, it creates demand to sell because fewer people want to live adjacent to heavily trafficked areas.

There has to be a careful mix to have business and residential in the US and it not devolve into Vape Shops, lottery stores and other highly profitable but exploitative businesses.

It really only works if there's some other sort of barrier like general unaffordability.
by RyanMu | 2026-02-07 16:18:31+00:00
’ve been experimenting with AI video tools for a while, but most of them generate isolated clips that fall apart when you try to build an actual narrative. We built Seedance2 to focus on something slightly different: multi-shot video generation that keeps characters, motion, and visual style consistent across scenes.

Seedance2 is an AI video generator that supports text-to-video and image-to-video workflows. Instead of producing a single short clip, it can generate cohesive multi-shot sequences with consistent identity and cinematic transitions.

Some technical highlights:
• Native multi-shot narrative generation with consistent characters
• Dynamic motion synthesis for camera movement and complex actions
• Precise prompt following for multi-subject scenes
• Optional native audio & lip-sync generation
• 480p–1080p output with multiple aspect ratios
• Short-form generation (5–12 seconds) optimized for rapid iteration

We originally built this because existing tools worked fine for single shots but became messy when trying to prototype storyboards, ads, or short films. A big goal was making something that feels closer to “scene generation” rather than “clip generation”.

Use cases we’re seeing:
• Rapid film pre-visualization
• marketing/social media videos
• short narrative content
• product demos and creative experiments

This is still evolving, and we’re actively looking for feedback from developers, filmmakers, and people building AI content workflows.
by ericzundel | 2026-02-07 16:18:43+00:00
I just listened to a fantastic multi-hour Acquired (https://www.acquired.fm/) podcast episode on Google and AI that talks about the history of Google and AI and all the ways they have been using it since 2012. It's really fascinating. You can forgive them for not focusing on Reader or any of their other properties when you realize they were pulling in hundreds of billions of dollars of value by making big bets in AI and incorporating it into their core business.
by szczepan1 | 2026-02-07 16:19:50+00:00
Author here: when calculating this I _did_ assume a uniform (area) distribution on the unit disk.

Now it does say

> Three points are chosen independently and uniformly at random from the interior of a unit circle.

which sounded OK to me at the time but I understand there could have been some ambiguity. Especially around the "uniform on area" part.

Also, I think that with rejection sampling you could get the same with 1) [0], 2) would work (provided correct scaling) [1]. No idea about 3) or the normal distribution thing you mentioned - I figured the problem was hairy enough already!

[0] https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/monte-carlo/#sampling-uniform...
[1] https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/monte-carlo/
by carlmr | 2026-02-07 16:20:00+00:00
>They say that using LLMs as advisors is already outdated, we should be doing fully agentic coding and just nudge the LLM etc. since we're losing out on 'productivity'.

As long as "they" are people that either profit from FOMO or bad developers that still don't produce better software than before, I'm ok ignoring the noise.
by pyrale | 2026-02-07 16:20:32+00:00
> The French state spends 57% of all French

That figure is pretty tired. In France, the pension scheme is counted as public spending. In neighbouring countries, the very similar, mandatory, pension schemes count as private.

The comparison makes little sense if you don't compare equivalent spending scopes, and equivalent service provided. If health care was to privatized, for instance, I'm pretty sure we would be worse off, but that number would go down.

> The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 82% of their salary

This figure, on the other hand, is straight up made-up bullshit. I dare you to find a salary that reaches 82% on URSSAF's salary simulator [1]. The OECD report quote is:

> In France, income tax and employer social security contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax
wedge

82% of the State's tax base are from income tax and social security contributions. That doesn't mean peopole are taxed 82% of their income.

[1]: https://mon-entreprise.urssaf.fr/simulateurs/salaire-brut-ne...
by sallycarmen | 2026-02-07 16:21:23+00:00
Sociable if you’re dumb like prince Andrew. Steven pinker the Harvard professor thought him an idiot. Said he was inane and a fraud who could only respond with stupid adolescent comments. Maybe somd like that sort of person and think they are fun. No doubt lots do, the guy down the pub who’s a laugh. Appeals to similarly dumb folk.
by nephihaha | 2026-02-07 16:21:50+00:00
Of course it makes their lives worse. In a lot of parts of the UK, the public transport is barely fit for purpose, irregular, non-existent (in much of the countryside) or dangerous (in the city). I speak from personal experience. I've been harassed and assaulted on British buses and trains on more than one occasion. Once had to phone the police to get rid of someone who started to follow me home, after he had hit me getting out of a train in a small branch station. It's like the Wild West. In one village I visited, there was only one bus there a day, and a bus back on a different day. How are old people supposed to function with that?

As usual this is set up as a tax farming scheme for the government to make money. They will make tonnes of money off forcing people to reapply for an overpriced licence every three years.
by kube-system | 2026-02-07 16:22:33+00:00
Yeah, that’s the root of a lot of problems in the US.

But pedestrian infrastructure is a very simple problem to solve, even in the US. Just look at how the market responds to public transit projects in the US —- developers trip over themselves to build projects in response to the induced demand.

Likewise they also responded to the reduced demand as a result of ripping out public transit infrastructure in the 20th century. Which is why doughnut-shaped cities are common in the US.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-02-07 16:22:41+00:00
As the other posted noted, it says that because it was trained on people saying that, which is perhaps interesting in of itself, but no indication that the model would do better without a framework than with one.

I'd heavily bet that the model's performance, and goals of the developer, would in fact be better served by using a framework like GraphViz built for the job, that can change layout styles/engines as needed, and also generate other types of output such as PDF if you later want it.

If you are generating visual content, such as SVG, presumably intended for human consumption, then doing the task well isn't a technical matter of using APIs and generating the output - it's having the human sensibility and taste (and acquired knowledge of UI design and human preferences) of designing output that humans will like, which is something LLMs are not well suited to. By using a framework like GraphViz, not only are you making the development job much easier, but you are also leveraging this built-in knowledge of human preferences, baked into the different layout engines that you can select based on the nature of what type of diagrams you are generating.

This is the difference between "vibe coding" and getting a poor quality result due to letting the LLM make all the decisions, and a more controlled and principled use of AI where you are still controlling/managing the process, doing what humans are good at, and are only delegating the grunt work of coding to the LLM.
by rekabis | 2026-02-07 16:23:52+00:00
As an IT tech of three decades now, I have looked into “smart” home tech for the last decade and have found almost everything to be worse than the classic tech it’s supposed to be replacing.

And this is before the horrifically bad security that is inherent in these connected devices… like, for many of them security was only an afterthought, and for some of them it wasn’t even on the list aside from some performative fluff. Many IoT devices come with blisteringly bad zero-day exploits, and manufacturers love to wash their hands of responsibility by “obsoleting” the devices (no more updates/patches) long before production actually ends.

I’m currently doing a multi-year gut of my house to bring it up from 1970s expected electrical loads to modern ones (each floor has 80+% of all wall sockets and wired-in devices on a single 15a circuit… which is not going to fly in 2026), and while I am adding many features and conveniences, most of them will be built using 50s to 90s tech. In particular: they will all be near-trivially repairable by someone with only a pedestrian knowledge of electronics, electricity, and networking. And I do mean repairable, and not just replaceable.
by wundersam | 2026-02-07 16:24:02+00:00
The author makes a valid observation wrapped in an overstatement. Yes, AI coding agents have changed the economics of building custom tooling. But the conclusion—that frameworks are now obsolete—misses the forest for the trees.

The problem with "framework culture" wasn't that frameworks exist, but that we lost the ability to critically evaluate when they're appropriate. We reached for React for static sites, Kubernetes for three-server deployments, and microservices for monolithic problems—not because these tools were wrong, but because we stopped thinking.

What AI agents actually restore isn't "pure software engineering"—it's optionality. The cost of writing a custom solution has dropped dramatically, which means the decision tree has changed. Now you can prototype both approaches in an afternoon and make an informed choice.

But here's what AI doesn't solve: understanding the problem domain deeply enough to architect a maintainable solution. You can generate 10,000 lines of bespoke code in minutes, but if you don't understand the invariants, edge cases, and failure modes, you've just created a different kind of technical debt—one that's harder to unwind because there's no community, no documentation, and no shared understanding.

Frameworks encode decades of collective battle scars. Dismissing them entirely is like dismissing the wheel because you can now 3D-print custom rollers. Sometimes you want the custom roller. Sometimes you want the battle-tested wheel. AI gives you both options faster—it doesn't make the decision for you.
by vagab0nd | 2026-02-07 16:24:06+00:00
Interesting article. What prevents me from dumping the memory of the shell process and reading the local variable?

My program requires a password on startup. To run it in a loop, I used a script that takes the password as input, stores it in a local variable, and echoes it to the program. At the time I thought the only weakness was the memory of the shell process. But it was the best I could come up with.
by voidmain | 2026-02-07 16:24:20+00:00
I think this is reasonably precise. "Uniformly" means that all points within the unit circle are equally likely. You can sample this distribution by picking independent rectangular coordinates and rejecting points outside the unit circle. I'm sure you can sample it in polar space by using an appropriate nonuniform distribution for radius (because a uniform radius would not result in a uniform distribution over points in the unit circle). If you want to sample directly in some really weird parameterization I guess markov chain monte carlo methods are available.
by AstroBen | 2026-02-07 16:24:35+00:00
That will never happen unless we figure out a far simpler way to prove the system does what it should. If you've ever had bugs crop up with a full test suite you should know this is incredibly hard to do

LLMs can't read your mind. In the end they're always taking the english prompt and making a bunch of fill in the blank assumptions around it. This is inevitable if we're to get any productivity improvements out of them.

Sometimes it's obvious and we can catch the assumptions we didn't want (the div isn't centered! fix it claude!) and sometimes you actually have to read and understand the code to see that it's not going to do what you want under important circumstances

If you want a 100% perfect communication of the system in your mind, you should use a terse language built for it: that's called code. We'd just write the code instead