MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Arifcodes | 2026-02-17 04:09:41+00:00
The issue isn't AI, it's effort asymmetry. Before LLMs, opening a bad PR still took enough effort that most people self-filtered. Now the cost of generating a plausible-looking PR is near zero, so the noise floor has gone way up.

Maintainers need better tools, not just policies. A "contributor must show they've read the contributing guide" gate (like a small quiz or a required issue link) would filter out 90% of drive-by LLM PRs. The spam problem in email was solved with a mix of technical and social solutions, not by asking people to stop spamming.
by bfbcu763 | 2026-02-17 04:09:47+00:00
Because most people dont know any history of Finance. We already tried this once upon a time. In fact its a natural evoltiinary stage before central banks emerge. Ask your favoriye GPT why they emerged or the sequence of failures that led to their emergence. It was called the Free Banking system back then. And it failed because distributed systems are not magic just because the skill to build then exists.
by Arifcodes | 2026-02-17 04:10:15+00:00
Using SERIALIZABLE everywhere sounds nice in theory but it tanks throughput on write-heavy workloads. In practice, most teams I've worked with use a mix: SERIALIZABLE for the critical financial paths, READ COMMITTED + explicit locking for the rest.

The advisory lock pattern mentioned in the thread is underrated. We used pg_advisory_xact_lock for exactly the "first resource creation" race condition on a multi-tenant SaaS. Cleaner than dummy rows and no cleanup needed.
by _aavaa_ | 2026-02-17 04:11:41+00:00
StackOverflow was well on its way to death even without ChatGPT, just look at the graph from [0]. It has been in steady consistent decline since 2014 (minus a very transient blip from covid).

Then the chagpt effect is a sudden drop in visitors. But the rate of decline after that looks more or less the same as pre-chatgpt.
by bigiain | 2026-02-17 04:12:28+00:00
You didn't see the latest AI grifter escalation? If you reject their PRs, they then get their AI to write hit pieces slandering you:

"On 9 February, the Matplotlib software library got a code patch from an OpenClaw bot. One of the Matplotlib maintainers, Scott Shambaugh, rejected the submission — the project doesn’t accept AI bot patches. [GitHub; Matplotlib]

The bot account, “MJ Rathbun,” published a blog post to GitHub on 11 February pleading for bot coding to be accepted, ranting about what a terrible person Shambaugh was for rejecting its contribution, and saying it was a bot with feelings. The blog author went to quite some length to slander Mr Shambaugh"

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/16/the-obnoxious-github-open...
by majormajor | 2026-02-17 04:13:33+00:00
The 80s-and-on story of America is not a story of women and minorities getting on more solid economic footing at the cost of some additional costs for white male Americans. Almost everybody is worse off - higher debt, less property ownership among the youth, etc.

I wouldn't agree with a position of "white people aren't going to stop being racist, just separate everyone and let them be" (we could call this the Clarence Thomas position, as Corey Robin has written about[0]). But it's wildly misleading to say that the slippage of the American economy is because of less overt discrimination. It's universal. The economy itself is broken compared to how it used to be. (Personally, I'd point at the oligarch-fighting "soak the rich" taxes passed in the early 20th century as a key point here.)

[0] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781627793834/theenigmaofclar...
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-17 04:14:49+00:00
> Maintainers can...insist on disclosure of LLM origin

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog [1]. Maintainers can insist on anything. That doesn't mean it will be followed.

The only realistic solution you propose is using LLMs to review the PRs. But at that point, why even have the OSS? If LLMs are writing and reviewing the code for the project, just point anyone who would have used that code to an LLM.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
by WillPostForFood | 2026-02-17 04:16:04+00:00
Part of the economic distortion, and difficulty in making these comparisons, is that a 1970 Ford F-100 and 2025 Ford F-150 are pretty radically different. Both by design, government mandate, and customer demands.

2 door single row -> 4 door two rows

drum brakes -> anti-lock disc brakes

lap belts only -> shoulder belts with airbags,

normally aspirated V-8, no catalytic converter -> twin turbo v6 and dual catalytic converter

manual transmission -> 10 speed automatic

If you wanted to make a Ford F-100 today, without the modern safety, emissions, fuel efficiency, and comforts, you could probably do it for less than $17,000, which is what $2,000 adjusted for inflation is.
by majormajor | 2026-02-17 04:16:15+00:00
Yeah, that's been the typical attitude for well over a decade now from the older generations who didn't have the same struggles and don't imagine that things have actually changed.

Even if we read that as generously as possible - "wow, look at how many millennials buy $20 Erewhon smoothies" - it's a wildly stupid play to couple that to how many millennials are in debt and can't afford homes.

Nobody said no millennials can afford homes. Nobody said they are all broke. Plenty of businesses out there are still capitalizing off the higher end of the range.

But at almost every percentile they're worse off than their parents were, economically. And probably working more hours to get there.
by marcus_holmes | 2026-02-17 04:16:18+00:00
People who actually know about the Ukrainian war are countering the idea that Ukraine is running out of men: https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/the-fewer-soldiers-on...

As they point out: "... the issue of Ukraine’s supposed manpower crisis. This idea has been a key part of the analysis for more than two years now, analysis saying Ukraine was on the verge of military failure."

The Ukrainians are adapting their battle tactics and use of drones to reduce their casualties. The Russians are not, and are suffering huge casualties as a result. Yet no-one is saying the Russian invasion is doomed because they're going to run out of young men.
by zharknado | 2026-02-17 04:16:47+00:00
Alternative hypothesis—-efficiency. Executives are very, very busy. As long as you can figure out what they mean, polish doesn’t add much. (Unless it does because it’s an earnings call, board meeting, etc.)

I’m quite convinced in most cases they are not spending time or energy consciously choosing to signal anything about status. They’re just not willing to pay the opportunity cost of keeping their attention on an internal communication any longer than the minimum required. They’re certainly capable of polished communication, but deploy that skill selectively when the return on investment is high.

It’s a classic rookie pitfall to over-index on form instead of content (guilty myself many times). It’s more instructive to pay attention to which questions and ideas powerful people focus on than the forms they use to deliver them (which are not as important, turns out).
by cagz | 2026-02-17 04:17:00+00:00
Low-quality AI-created PRs that are submitted to open-source repositories are prompted by humans. And those are the same humans who fails to review AI's output properly before submitting (or letting AI submit) as PRs. Let's not blame the tools instead of bad workmanship.

A smaller number of PRs generated by OpenClaw-type bots are also doing so based on their owner's direct or implied instructions. I mean, someone is giving them GitHub credentials and letting them loose.

AI is also allowing the creation of many new open-source projects, led by responsible developers.

Given the exponential speed at which AI is progressing, surely the quality of such PRs is going to improve. But there are also opportunities for the open-source community to improve their response. It will sound controversial, but AI can be used to perform an initial review of PRs, suggest improvements, and, in extreme cases, reject them.
by userbinator | 2026-02-17 04:17:47+00:00
The general sentiment from musicians and collectors seems to be that they don't want a bunch of scientists to come into their world and tell them that what they are or are not hearing or they just don't understand why controlled tests are required.

There seems to be the same sentiment from audiophiles against testing their ridiculously overpriced placebos, although sometimes it does happen and the results are exactly as you'd expect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47015987
by bigiain | 2026-02-17 04:18:12+00:00
Claiming maintainers can (do things while still take effort and time away from their OSS project's goals) is missing the point when the rate of slop submissions is ever increasing and malicious slop submitters refuse to follow project rules.

The Curl project refuse AI code and had to close their bug bounty program due to the flood of AI submissions:

"DEATH BY A THOUSAND SLOPS

I have previously blogged about the relatively new trend of AI slop in vulnerability reports submitted to curl and how it hurts and exhausts us.

This trend does not seem to slow down. On the contrary, it seems that we have recently not only received more AI slop but also more human slop. The latter differs only in the way that we cannot immediately tell that an AI made it, even though we many times still suspect it. The net effect is the same.

The general trend so far in 2025 has been way more AI slop than ever before (about 20% of all submissions) as we have averaged in about two security report submissions per week. In early July, about 5% of the submissions in 2025 had turned out to be genuine vulnerabilities. The valid-rate has decreased significantly compared to previous years."

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-s...
by gnarlouse | 2026-02-17 04:19:06+00:00
On the one hand, this is a beautiful (but depressing) story about humans standing up for each other.

On the other hand, this is clearly propaganda from the BBC to push police state functionality on the UK population by pre-justifying it. "See what happens? Never mind the part about it taking six years. Let us see everything in your fucking lives, you twats."
by dennysora | 2026-02-17 04:19:16+00:00
I’m genuinely unsure how to assess the current state of open source. Many projects have been AI-assisted in one way or another.
Meanwhile, a large number of people use AI to generate code indiscriminately and publish it as open source.
As a result, using open-source contributions as a proxy for someone’s engineering ability has become increasingly unreliable.
In addition, many developers now prefer to build their own solutions rather than rely on whether an open-source alternative exists.
And for many small open-source projects, frankly, I hesitate to use them—given how prevalent malicious software has become, if it’s feasible to build it in-house, I’d rather do that.
by bruce511 | 2026-02-17 04:20:01+00:00
>> The prompt starts at the first field and <RETURN> (not <TAB> !) moves to the next.

This is hilarious to me, because times have certainly changed.

When we first started shipping Windows software the big complaint from users was the use of Tab to switch fields, while Return triggered the default button (usually Save or Close).

The change, for users used to DOS was painful - not least when capturing numbers as the numeric key pad has Enter not Tab.

Software developers either stood firm, convincing customers to learn Tab, or caved and aliased the Enter key to the Tab key. Even today I still find that option here and there in Software that's been around a while...
by yieldcrv | 2026-02-17 04:20:13+00:00
it's a distributed evolution occurring right now, and lots of people replicate the same things, so its useful to be able to point to some things as a waste of time

that being said, I think you're right that all of this will be a moot point in like 2 weeks or 2 months, when the next AI model is released that addresses this specific friction

and yeah, that's sad. there are a lot of people in companies being instructed to pivot to skills, and then before they can launch or sell their procedurally generated moat, the next AI model will procedurally generate skills better

nobody knows what to do for guaranteed food and shelter so they're grasping
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-17 04:20:19+00:00
> GitHub added a feature to disable Pull Requests entirely. Pull Requests are the fundamental thing that made GitHub popular

There is a temporary solution. Let maintainers limit PRs to accounts that were created prior to November 30 2022 [1]. These are known-human accounts.

Down the road, one can police for account transfers and create a system where known-human accounts in good standing can vouch for newer accounts. But for now that should staunch the bleeding.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT
Show HN: Neko – AI agent runtime that fits on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W
by harshdoesdev | 2026-02-17 04:20:50+00:00
I wanted a personal AI agent I could leave running on cheap hardware, a Pi Zero 2W or a $4/mo VPS, without much infrastructure overhead. So I built Neko.

Memory is markdown files the agent reads and writes itself. There's a short-term layer for today's and yesterday's session logs, a long-term MEMORY.md capped at 2000 chars that forces the agent to compact and curate rather than just accumulate, and a searchable recall folder for older conversations. The files are plain text you can read, edit, and commit to git.

It also supports MCP for connecting external tools, and Telegram as a messaging front-end.

Cron jobs are first-class. You can schedule them from the CLI, or the agent can create them itself mid-conversation. If a user on Telegram says "remind me every morning at 9am", the agent creates the job and routes the results back to that chat.

Ships as a single static binary written in Rust.
by caconym_ | 2026-02-17 04:22:22+00:00
> sociopathic trillionaire brains

> men with guns and a very thin technocratic class

Bold of you to assume these are disjoint. In the US we're spiraling toward oligarchy with a billionaire president whose primary goal in office is evidently to enrich himself and his family, and his regime is (with the $encouragement of AI titans) aggressively pushing integration of AI in various government and military applications.

If I was somebody like Sam Altman and I had indeed been thinking about this, I'm not sure things could be going much better for me wrt. that scenario.
by EagnaIonat | 2026-02-17 04:22:48+00:00
The EU AI act activates this year. Facial recognition is in the restrictive list. You don't want to give auditors ammunition before it goes live as top fine would cost FB around $4B, and wouldn't be a one time fine.

Even if only law enforcement can use it, having that feature is highly regulated.

[edit] I see this is from years ago. I should read the articles first. :)
by t-writescode | 2026-02-17 04:24:20+00:00
Well, okay, so just like this article talks about, people often find it easier to declare a source of a problem, rather than describing a symptom they're having.

Illegals aren't taking their jobs - there's plenty of studies evidencing that that's not true. *BUT*, people are feeling:

1. under-employed
2. under-paid
3. in some level of pain, economically
4. feeling insecure, financially

And they're saying "it's those damn illegals takin' my job" to reflect that pain.

Sure, propaganda plays a part of the experienced pain people have; but it's often not all of it. Propaganda is less effective when people are comfortable.
by canada_dry | 2026-02-17 04:26:03+00:00
Nicely done.

It inspires me to tackle a project I've been holding off on for many years: OCR my grandmother/great-grandmother's cookbook. It's about 100 pages of collected and annotated recipes from the 1930-1980s.

OCR and AI have become sufficiently capable (as you've demonstrated) to properly scan, index, and classify the recipes into something I can share with relatives online or as an ebook.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-17 04:26:26+00:00
> that's like saying we were going 10kmh, it's nbd that we accelerate to 1000kmh since we were gonna hit the wall anyways

Devil's advocate: folks will take that wall a lot more seriously at 1,000 km/h.

"At Jena and Auerstedt the backwardness of the Prussian Army became apparent. By 1806, Prussian military doctrines have been unchanged for more than 50 years—tactics were monotonous, and the wagon system was obsolete" [1]. They had been obsolete for some time. But they didn't break until they hit Napoleon's army.

Similarly, we have a lot of social plumbing that became–with the benefit of hindsight–obsolete with social media. It was possible to ignore, however, because the rate of change was slow. Now it isn't.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jena%E2%80%93Auerste...
by majormajor | 2026-02-17 04:26:39+00:00
And a computer in 1970 would've been way more expensive and far crappier than a hundred dollar Android tablet today. It's not exactly in dispute that there has been technological development between 1970 and 2025. But it's also not the central issue.

In America the personal vehicle is a necessity in the vast majority of the country, and it's relatively more expensive today. As are many other necessities.

(If you want we can quibble further and say a 17k used Rav 4 or Tacoma would be more reliable than a 1970 F-100 anyway blah blah blah blah the increased lifespan and availability of used cars causes new cars to have to go more upmarket blah blah blah... but the hedonic treadmill is also real and if you would've been living it up with a new car and a nice home with a 30min commute in the 70s, but today have a 10 year old car and an apartment with a 70min commute, you're not gonna feel good.)
by foxglacier | 2026-02-17 04:27:27+00:00
I always thought StackOverflow was meant to fizzle out over time as more questions get answered and don't need to be asked again. Perhaps the decline is just a necessary part of their rule of having no duplicate questions - keeping it as a clean repository of knowledge rather than a messy forum.

Just the other day a question I asked about 10 years ago got flagged as a duplicate. It turns out somebody else had asked the same question several years later and got a better answer than my question got, so that other one is the canonical one and mine is pushed away. It feels kind of offensive but it makes complete sense if the goal is to provide useful answers to people searching.
by zephen | 2026-02-17 04:27:33+00:00
Here's a cogent argument that any decision by compiler writers that they can do whatever they wish whenever they encounter an "undefined behavior" construct is rubbish:

https://www.yodaiken.com/2021/05/19/undefined-behavior-in-c-...

And here's a cautionary tale of how a compiler writer doing whatever they wish once they encounter undefined behavior makes debugging intractable:

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-subtle-bug-you-have-h...
by Gigachad | 2026-02-17 04:29:27+00:00
There are more vehicles in the US than the F150 right? in Australia this would be seen as an absurdly over the top vehicle for almost all contractors and construction workers.

Some amount of this issue must be marketing and propaganda making people buy massively over spec vehicles than their actual needs require. Most of these workers could get by with basically any car but get marketed and peer pressured in to spending $50,000 on the biggest one.
by UqWBcuFx6NV4r | 2026-02-17 04:29:32+00:00
To save anyone the click, the article is exactly what you’d expect given its title, which is to say that it is not at all worth reading. Some conservative idealists with huge chips on their shoulders whining behind a thin vein of supposed academic integrity. Whatever. You can tell that the author has a preconceived idea in mind, a hypothesis they wanted to test, and they did what sounds like the bare minimum to confirm their suspicions. This is pseudointellectualism at its best.

> We were not studying politics — we were studying development

Says it all. You’re so deep in it that you can’t tell how insanely politically biased you sound.
by WillPostForFood | 2026-02-17 04:29:52+00:00
Yes I agree they are MUCH more expensive relatively. But they are more expensive entirely by choice, not because of inflation or stagnant wages. People want better cars, and that costs more. The government demands lower emissions, that costs more. Safety costs more. There is no world where you get all that for the same percentage of income.

you would've been living it up with a new car and a nice home with a 30min commute

And you be killed or paralyzed after a fender bender. Death rate per 100,000,000 miles dropped from 5 in 1970 to 1.4 in 2023.
by pdyc | 2026-02-17 04:30:12+00:00
My project[1] got some love on HN though never made it to frontage about a year ago. It also got unexpectedly popular on twitter. Its simple project and not particularly great ui either but somehow it clicked. My other projects which i thought were more useful never got any traction.
It seems novel idea was what caught people's attention.
one year later though it hardly gets any traffic. Also with improved LLM's it has become trivial to replicate them.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42207002
by majormajor | 2026-02-17 04:30:42+00:00
They're saying gas is too expensive.

They're saying rent is too high.

They're saying houses cost too much.

They're saying a cocktail shouldn't cost double digits.

They're saying they can't afford doctors or health insurance.

The complaints are specific about specific changes in affordability, not 80's AM radio talking points. They mostly aren't suddenly saying illegal immigrants are taking their jobs.

(Certainly some people are, but it's not really a bigger contingent than any other time in the last... 30? 40? years...)
by moneycantbuy | 2026-02-17 04:31:08+00:00
Not entirely, the problems are also that wages haven't kept up with inflation; $9,000 salary in 1970 would be $75,000 today, and the automakers realized they make more profit in financing than on the vehicle itself, optimizing the maximum they can squeeze someone who needs a vehicle, hence 96 months for an auto loan.
by throwaway290 | 2026-02-17 04:31:15+00:00
TL;DR

> We asked: Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? An astounding 88 percent said yes.

those social studies man.

based on this summary, that "have you ever" makes it kind of pointless.

because I think literally everyone pretended to hold some view (more progressive, more conservative, whatever) to succeed socially or academically at least once. it would be news if it was happening regularly

at least unless they asked the same question about conservative views and controlled for everything...
by kermatt | 2026-02-17 04:31:22+00:00
If you used Claude to fix the issue, built and tested your branch, and only then submitted the PR, the process is not much is different from pre-LLM days.

I think the problem is where bug-bounty or reputation chasers are letting LLM's write the PRs, _without_ building and testing. They seek output, not outcomes.
by refurb | 2026-02-17 04:31:59+00:00
> You're straw-manning here.
> The US government currently doesn't give a shit about the law or human rights in ways that are both completely unprecedented and very violent.

I'm not sure you know what "strawmanning" is.

You're making extraordinary claims with no evidence. That seems more like strawmanning.

> Name all the ones that violently assault and kill people in the street and imprison people for weeks or months or even years without formal charges

Huh? If you're talking about enforcing immigration laws, they all do. It's the US that is the odd outlier that doesn't enforce immigration laws.