MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by program_whiz | 2026-02-06 15:21:26+00:00
This argument is somewhat true in the small case (e.g. if you are starving and the only job for you is shoveling bodies into a furnace, may as well).

But I think the reason people have a problem is that giant multi-national corps have created a system where shoveling bodies into the furnace is the most profitable option for these desperate people.

The wealth available in the world right now is completely unfathomable, and its mostly going to ads, privacy invasion, burning massive amounts of energy to make fake videos and articles and more adware, etc. Its not wrong to think "is something wrong with having droves of poor people wading through our shit so they don't starve?"

Similar to how the coal mining companies were happy to watch miners die in the mines from blacklung, and their services were indeed useful, and they were quite proud of it. Its a complex issue because it was critical work at the time. However, only a little while later, we realize the system we had was broken and poisoning the planet, ourselves, and the workers. I'm sure many coal miners are remiss that they no longer can work the mines, and many companies would be happy to employ them if it was profitable enough, but ultimately its not a good system for anyone. And if I hear that "coal miners in high demand in China" I'm not going to say "oh I'm so glad they have employment" I'm going to ask "why aren't they using a clearly better alternative for those people?"
by ToValueFunfetti | 2026-02-06 15:21:27+00:00
Okay, well you can look at the wikipedia page referenced above: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_(United_States)

You can read Freddie deBoer's (notable communist writer) article: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/antifa-is-a-fatherless-...

Or this article on PBS: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/black-clad-anarchists-sw...

Or google it or ask an LLM to google it for you and put 10 minutes into actually participating in this conversation?
by vlovich123 | 2026-02-06 15:21:59+00:00
No, modulo bugs generally the same set of inputs to a compiler are guaranteed to produce the same output bit for bit which is the definition of determinism.

There’s even efforts to guarantee this for many packages on Linux - it’s a core property of security because it lets you validate that the compilation process or environment wasn’t tampered with illicitly by being able to verify by building from scratch.

Now actually managing to fix all inputs and getting deterministic output can be challenging, but that’s less to do with the compiler and more to do with the challenge of completely taking the entire environment (the profile you are using for PGO, isolating paths on the build machine being injected into the binary, programs that have things in their source or build system that’s non deterministic (e.g. incorporating the build time into the binary)
by dangus | 2026-02-06 15:22:16+00:00
Traditional SaaS products literally “write code” for you (they implement business logic). See: Zapier, Excel.

The enshittification is that the costs are going up faster than inflation and companies like OpenAI are talking about adding advertisements.

https://www.fintechweekly.com/magazine/articles/cursor-prici...

https://hostbor.com/claude-ai-max-plan-explained/

We can see especially in the case of Claude AI Max that while it sounds like you’re getting better value than the cheaper plans, the company is now encouraging less efficient use of the tool (having multiple agents talking to each other, rather than improving models so that one agent is doing work correctly).
by derektank | 2026-02-06 15:22:32+00:00
My preferred solution would be to subsidize tools that allow people to better identify and resist compulsive behaviors. Apps like Opal and Freedom that allow you to monitor your free time and block apps or websites you have a troubled relationship with would probably see more use if everybody was given a voucher to buy a subscription. Funding more basic research into behavioral addictions like gambling, etc (ideally research that couldn’t be used by casinos and sports gambling apps on the other side). Helping fund the clinical trials for next Zepbound and Ozempic.
by pchristensen | 2026-02-06 15:22:48+00:00
Back when the Internet was America online and some CGI bin perl scripts, there were a lot of very lofty things said about the potential of the Internet in the future. I don’t remember any of them predicting the power of the tech would have over business, politics, media, and hours of every single day for billions of people. Even without AGI, it’s quite possible that were still underestimating. The effects of predictive, probabilistic computing 20 or 50 years from now.
by crazygringo | 2026-02-06 15:22:58+00:00
> But yes, it's an architecture question; my point being, most people pick many bulldozers while they need a 1 shovel.

Again, huh?

Client-server vs locally embedded does not map to "many bulldozers vs 1 shovel".

SQLite and Postgres aren't even really competitors. They serve extremely different use cases. I'm not aware that "most" people are picking Postgres when they "need" SQLite. What are you even basing this on? SQLite is already an extremely popular choice.
by dd8601fn | 2026-02-06 15:23:13+00:00
I’ve heard the same about Nvidia, quite a few times, but have never really understood it.

I don’t suppose you know a good “for dummies” explanation of why CUDA is such an insurmountable moat for them?

Like, what is it about that software that AMD can’t produce for their own hardware, or for a most important subset, with these $1T market stakes?
by trcf23 | 2026-02-06 15:23:45+00:00
And it’s also mostly targeting children/teenagers.
As a parent you can add limitations on cinema, binging series. You can’t on TikTok.

I’m quite glad that there is a form of control preventing a company from a different part of the world that don’t really care about the mental health or wellbeing of my kids to creep into their life like that…

As a parent, it’s not a fair fight and I should not have to delegate that to another private company
by ArjunDevM | 2026-02-06 15:23:51+00:00
Location: India
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: C#, .NET Core, React, C++, Python
Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14Y2VJbwS0tVdKkBM8Mwx0yITZ6b...

Email: arjundevmishra6@gmail.com
Summary: Full-stack engineer building high-scale consumer platforms, shipping performance wins and engagement features used by millions of buyers.
I turn product ideas into fast, reliable systems — from microservices and APIs to polished user experiences.
by jFriedensreich | 2026-02-06 15:24:20+00:00
While i appreciate anthropic making a proof of concept like they did with claude code cli on which they can then do RL to optimise the patterns that work, I expect this to be as unusable as the cli itself. Its a big difference if a model provider internalises something like thinking mode which mainly depends on context and text or if they try to grab a part of the agent loop which has to run on the side of the systems we build and use.

We cannot allow model providers to own the browsers, CLIs, memory, IDEs, extensions and other tooling. Its not just a matter of power but also they just suck at it as i experience every time i have to use claude code instead of amp.

I truly hope we get the pattern of innovation that looks like:

- some dude vibecodes a really cool idea

- model providers build into their reference implementations

- model providers optimize models to work optimally

- startup and/or open source projects step in and build something that is actually usable and opens a new market segment

We saw this play out beautifully with amp, kilo, roo, cline, continue

Another aspect is that we do not want interfaces just made for agents to work in teams, we want software made for humans and agents, that are true platforms for these agent teams to collaborate in.
by mapt | 2026-02-06 15:24:24+00:00
They're not standing still now. They're eating our entrails. Right now.

We haven't passed a budget in almost 30 years, we've been routinely filibustering nearly all legislation for 15 (breaking the gameplay loop for electoral democracy), we're unilaterally withdrawing from trade and military alliances week by week. We have fascist armies on the streets pulling people from their cars and houses. Our leaders openly brag about their corruption and a good fraction of our people praise them for it simply because it pisses other people off.

We are allegedly about to "Federalize Elections" and also enter a war with Iran that a supermajority of voters do not want.

In terms of state capacity, in terms of our agency in the world, in terms of what we historically regarded as our legacy and our culture and our material security and our institutions, we are in freefall. And it is mostly down to having far too much wealth concentrated in far too few people.
by antves | 2026-02-06 15:24:24+00:00
Thanks for asking! There are a few core differences:
1. we expose a higher level interface which allows the agent to think about what to do as opposed to what to do
2. we developed a token-efficient representation of the webpages that combines both visual and textual elements, heavily optimized for what LLMs are good at.
3. because we control the agentic loop, it also means that we can do fancy things on contextual injections, compressions, asynchronous manipulations, etc which are impossible to achieve when exposing the navigation interface
4. we use a coding agent under the hood, meaning that it can express complex actions efficiently and effectively compared to the CLI interface that agent-browser exposes
5. because we control the agent, we can use small and efficient LLMs which make the system much faster, cheaper, and more reliable

Also, our service comes with batteries included: the agent can use browsers in our cloud with auto-captcha solvers, stealth mode, we can proxy your own ip, etc
by adrian_b | 2026-02-06 15:24:31+00:00
Your hypothesis does not match history, because the early printing was focused on things that had a potentially large market, which at that time meant books like The Bible, with a lot of pages.

The parent article mentions that binding the pages of the first bibles in the correct order, in the absence of page numbers, was an extremely tedious work.

That is why page numbers have invented many years later, exactly as you say, "to help printers not mix up pages".
by kgeist | 2026-02-06 15:24:33+00:00
>Unfortunately it’s as legacy as Jenkins today

Why do you consider TeamCity legacy? The latest release was just 2 months ago: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/teamcity/what-s-new-in-teamci...

>To make TeamCity more approachable for everyone, we’ve launched the pipelines initiative, and are investing heavily in reimagining the familiar UX. Complementing these efforts, we are excited to introduce the TeamCity AI Assistant.

Looks like it's under active development.
by alexjplant | 2026-02-06 15:24:40+00:00
I, too, have such a work playlist entitled "Hack the Mainframe." It's got this type of stuff along with 90s/early 2000s breakbeat songs that ended up shoehorned into car and techno thriller movies at the time. I know a lot of this music was reviled as sellout trash at the time but I was too young to know any better when I heard it and think it still holds up phenomenally well.
by breuleux | 2026-02-06 15:24:56+00:00
If the government doesn't have enough power, the wealthy won't need to bribe politicians to do their bidding. They will do their own bidding directly, and there will be nobody to stop them.

It's like, if you want to sell your cyanide penis pills under big government, you need to bribe someone. If you want to sell them under small government, you just... you just sell them, that's what.

There may be ways to design a government where power is better distributed, e.g. using sortition, but ultimately it needs to be richer and more powerful than its wealthiest citizens, otherwise these wealthy citizens will assess, correctly, that when push comes to shove, the laws won't apply to them, and they do not need the government's permission to do what they want.
by Nayjest | 2026-02-06 15:25:02+00:00
I kept running into the same problem: every time I wanted to try a different LLM provider, I had to rewrite large parts of my code. Different SDKs, different APIs, different response formats. It slowed down experiments and made simple comparisons painful.

So I ended up building a small abstraction layer that lets me switch between providers without touching the rest of the app. One interface, multiple backends.

In this post, I explain:

the exact problem I kept hitting

what design choices worked and what didn’t

how I structured the abstraction

and the trade-offs of this approach

If you’ve ever wanted to compare models or avoid vendor lock-in, this might be useful:

https://dev.to/chief_yaml_officer/how-i-stopped-rewriting-my...

Source: https://github.com/Nayjest/lm-proxy
by jjk166 | 2026-02-06 15:25:07+00:00
> You are entirely right, because 98%+ trips in a car are commutes or errands that average 6 miles in distance.

My figure was based on miles travelled, not trips. Further, your assumption that local travel would severely skew the data seems at best unsupported. Think about all those trips taking the kids to school/soccer practice/etc. Having a lot of people in the car is going to radically skew the average number of occupants up.

> Just like how the average person has around 1 testicle, this data is also multimodal

Then why are you essentially arguing that people with two testicles are a niche case?

The overwhelming majority of car trips that happen are going to be car trips that make sense to be car trips. That's not evidence of driving's economic sensibility, it is selection bias. The question is of all trips where a person needs to go a certain distance, how often is flying the cheaper option, and for long trips it is a lot.
by macNchz | 2026-02-06 15:25:19+00:00
There are a variety of ways that democratic governments are structure that make this an inaccurate characterization of how things work.

The US, for example, apportions representatives and votes for President in a way that overweights less populated states, and there are various aspects of parliamentary systems that help avoid landing in a two-party system where a simple majority gets the say in everything—they force compromise and coalition building among disparate groups. Additionally, Constitutional systems will enumerate the rights of its citizens such that they cannot simply be taken away by a simple majority of any body.

Democratic countries are also basically never "pure" democracies where everyone votes on every decision as in your Plato's ship analogy—we elect people who audition for the role of running the ship, ostensibly those among the people who are best suited to the task.
by tgtweak | 2026-02-06 15:25:45+00:00
Tiktok ads, Youtube Ads, Instagram/Meta ads - there's just a huge influx of scams and obviously fake sites on them. AI generated copy, AI generated landing pages...

My honest take on it is that it's the payment companies that are complacent here - they're just allowing payment processing for anyone now up to a certain amount before doing proper diligence. The fact these chinese vendors can spin up a website, get payment processing, verify an ads account and buy advertising shows that many compliance functions are being skipped (or are complicit) in this.

It works because everyone in the game has something to gain from it - Apple's contract likely puts verification on Taboola's plate, which is likely not being done per their own "controls" process, or is itself being automated (poorly). Taboola is getting paid because they're running these ads and charging for them, the vendors are being paid because they're drop shipping temu garbage that doesn't resemble their AI ads (since taboola isn't checking this at all) and getting away with it for a few months by long shipping times and delaying refunds/chargebacks long enough to get paid, and the payment processors (paypal, apple pay, google pay) are all making money on their obscene 1%+ processing markups, and have special "group" programs where a company can underwrite their own merchants provided they follow guidelines (compliance offloading). Visa/Mastercard are offloading their compliance duties to the payment processors until they get a formal complaint or chargeback/refund spike over a certain ratio (where they issue a fine and seize processing volume - which is also income for them).

btw if you want to be 100% sure something is a scam - check the iframe url on the credit card input form on the checkout page - on mustylevo.com its https://cashiers.myshopline.com/pci-sdk/v3/iframe.html?merch... which is hardly a name brand ecom platform - they have a "shopify-like" checkout but that isn't shopify (props to shopify/shop pay - they've been very quick to kill these kind of scams on their platform despite it losing them some fees).

So yeah - everyone involved in this is making money and is complicit through their lack of process.
by Oliviia_r | 2026-02-06 15:25:49+00:00
I really liked how snapshot testing is shown not as a “fashionable tool”, but as a way to make testing understandable and even enjoyable. The examples from CLI and language server are especially strong — they demonstrate well that the readability of tests is sometimes more important than the formal accuracy of individual asserts. The idea of turning complex structures into well-thought-out, visual snapshots looks very practical, because it greatly simplifies code review and reduces cognitive load. After such examples, you really start to look at tests not as a necessary evil, but as a tool for communication in the team.
by testbyhuman | 2026-02-06 15:25:56+00:00
Interesting approach. The core problem you're solving - "not enough real users yet but need behavioral feedback" - is very real for early-stage products.

One gap I'd watch for: AI personas will tend to be too rational. Real first-time users do things no persona model would predict. They misread buttons, get distracted halfway through a flow, form completely wrong mental models of what your product does. The "impatient user" persona is a good start, but actual impatient humans are more creatively confused than any simulation.

We're working on the other side of this at Test by Human (testbyhuman.com) - actual people screen-recording their first time through your product with voice narration. The combination could be strong: use Acceptify for fast iteration loops during development, then validate with a real human before shipping.

Curious how the agent decides when to "give up" on a confused flow vs. keep trying. That threshold seems like it would matter a lot for the quality of the feedback.
by maxkfranz | 2026-02-06 15:25:57+00:00
It worked for me after I configured mise. I needed the mise setup in both `.zprofile` and `.zshrc` for Codex to pick it up. I think mise sets up itself in one of those by default, but Codex uses the other. I expect the same problem would present itself with nvm.

I.e. `eval "$(/Users/max/.local/bin/mise activate zsh)"` in `.zprofile` and `.zshrc`

Then Codex will respect whatever node you've set as default, e.g.:

mise install node@24
mise use -g node@24

Codex might respect your project-local `.nvmrc` or `mise.toml` with this setup, but I'm not certain. I was just happy to get Codex to not use a version of node installed by brew (as a dependency of some other package).
by liukidar | 2026-02-06 15:26:03+00:00
Ahah, indeed that's true... That's why we've just released Smooth CLI (https://docs.smooth.sh/cli/overview) and the SKILL.md (smooth-sdk/skills/smooth-browser/SKILL.md) associated with it. That should contain everything your agent needs to know to use Smooth. We will definitely add a LLM-friendly reference to it in the landing page and the docs introduction.
by gg582 | 2026-02-06 15:26:35+00:00
That is a valid point. When you are developing an application for an STM32, allocating memory on the heap is a bad idea. But if a programmer wants to make a high-performance back-end server in C, they should allocate unpredictable amounts of memory depending on a user's input(in many cases). This is not for Embedded/Hardware control; it aims for 'C Revival for High-level Development'. For a good example, many modern Rust applications do not statically fix memory areas; that is why Rust had to develop such a complex memory ownership system. In my personal opinion, with a bag of potato chips, you can do it better in C. Honestly, this does not have a proper memory tracker, so- yes. This does not have any advantages for now. However, I am planning to develop a memory lifetime tracker that can catch issues even before we run Valgrind or GDB. You can try to develop your own memory manager. This helped me to make my C-based web development framework safer through refactoring.

:)
by matheusmoreira | 2026-02-06 15:26:40+00:00
I wouldn't say it's entirely hopeless. Just gotta know who's behind the posts. Checking for conflicts of interest is essential. HN is valuable due the fact many notable hackers post here. Makes it easier to know who we are interacting with, what they stand for and who they work for. Invite only communities like lobsters are even better in that regard. Less random accounts adding noise. Some degree of elitism is a good thing.