MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nosianu | 2026-02-07 17:10:10+00:00
> Which it can’t.

The welfare state for corporate interests is alive and well though, and costs much more.

(2025) "Corporate Welfare in the Federal Budget" -- https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/corporate-welfare-feder...

(2024) https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2024/07/16/100-years-of-risi...

> There is nothing to disagree about. With current demographics projection no amount of taxes can cover welfare states

Okay? Let's get rid of that much more expensive type of welfare then!

As if we have "real capitalism" - not even on a scale of local bakeries any more. Even the small businesses often are just a shop owned by a corporation. Not that I'm against some level of concentration, a lot of economic activity requires it. A lot of products are too expensive and require a certain scale to be viable at all.

What is the goal of economic activity anyway? For the few to live well, while the majority struggles? By "struggle" I don't mean that the majority already lives in the streets, to me it is enough that they have to be afraid. Of getting sick, of losing the job, of anything bad happening. I saw myself how a single unfortunate event could spiral out of control, and a guy making a lot of money in enterprise sales ended up alone, broken, and sick in the streets. I count all those having to fear such a development as part of the "losers", even if they are still making money and living in their house now. That fear, suppressed or not, should not be necessary, and it influences stress levels and decisions, consciously or not.

I mean, you are also right with your message, and I actually agree.

The flow of money around and away from too many people should not be happening. Being part of the economy should be easy for the majority, and real "welfare" should only be necessary for the sick and otherwise temporarily or fully disabled.

If a lot of normal people need welfare, something is not right.

But then you need an economy that provides those easy options to participate and get enough of a share.

You also need a system where an unfortunate event (or some) does not put you into an unescapable downward spiral, and provide a way back into the economy.
by alsetmusic | 2026-02-07 17:10:13+00:00
One only needs to look at the Grok-generating-nudes fiasco to see that potential financial liabilities are a pittance to huge companies. We need to jail CEOs whose companies break the law.

You can just get away with fraud:

Former CEO of Volkswagen AG Charged with Conspiracy and Wire Fraud in Diesel Emissions Scandal

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-ceo-volkswage...

> He remains a fugitive in the United States and is wanted by the Environmental Protection Agency on charges including conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to violate the Clean Air Act, and multiple counts of wire fraud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Winterkorn
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-02-07 17:10:19+00:00
This is my actual complain with Electron. And with modern programming languages like Go and Rust. Static compilation is such a grevious waste of memory & caches.

There's Tauri, which does use a dynamic loading approach. But the various browsers it uses are nowhere near as capable and featureful as chrome, which is so sad. I don't know when it got started but there is https://github.com/tauri-apps/cef-rs now, using Chromium Embedded Framework, which is pleasantly modern & can share a binary too; rad.
by vlovich123 | 2026-02-07 17:10:28+00:00
Sounds like someone who’s been fed a line and has believed it.

A) why do you think car companies started to need to develop more modern emission systems to begin with? That’s right - California, a huge car market, started creating and enforcing standards through the introduction of CARB. Prior to this car companies had no incentives and weren’t doing this

B) there’s more to smog than just cars. CARB tackled emissions across multiple industries.

C) average cars last too long. The reason cars modernized was because CARB made owning and operating older vehicles impractical/impossible.

D) population and vehicle miles driven kept growing so per unit emissions need to shrink faster than that growth and it did. Thanks to CARB.

Is ethanol the primary reason we don’t have smog now? No, but the problem was so bad that CARB took a comprehensive approach at tackling the problem on many angles. And importantly they succeeded. It’s quite a silly position to take that “this problem would have solved itself”. It’s the twin to the fatalism position of “this problem is too big and complicated to solve”
by exe34 | 2026-02-07 17:10:30+00:00
I'm so glad software engineering isn't my job. I love solving problems, and I'm somewhat better at using code to do it than my peers (fellow scientists), but I would hate to have a boss/client that says "it needs to do X" and the framework writer (or SDK, ala Android/Xcode) say "no, that hurts my profits/privacy busting".
by ahepp | 2026-02-07 17:10:50+00:00
One could set an env var to their local bin dir which is otherwise not in the path, like L=/home/ahepp/.local/bin, and then do $L/mycommand. Doesn't meet the OP's requirement of no shift key.

Or prefix files in the local bin dir with a couple letters from your username, like /home/ahepp/.local/bin/ah-mycommand
by leoedin | 2026-02-07 17:11:41+00:00
I almost never use word for exactly that reason. I don’t want to spend half an hour normalising my headings and fonts and margins. I want to focus on content and logical structure.

I much prefer Google Docs over word for this reason too.

I was writing a datasheet really and it’s really surprising how there isn’t ia straightforward solution. Confluence wasn’t expressive enough, while getting Word to apply consistent styles across tables, margins, headings etc is such a pain.
by andyjohnson0 | 2026-02-07 17:12:51+00:00
From memory, and from the one time I did it about three years ago: they get a letter saying that the DVLA has reason to believe that they are unfit to drive and that they must pass a medical examination in order to keep their licence. I don't believe the letter says that they've been reported.

And to be clear: when I said "anonymously" I meant from the pov of the person being reported. The DVLA requires some basic details of the person making the report, but they're definitely not disclosed to the subject.
by allears | 2026-02-07 17:12:55+00:00
I think this is a great summary and resource. No, it's not all you need to learn to sing, but it wasn't intended to be.
Regarding singing on pitch and in tune, that too is a learned skill. A good coach or singing class will work on ear training. Sometimes the (wrong) mechanics of your vocal technique can make it difficult to hit a pitch accurately, but you can definitely improve your ability to hear a pitch and sing it. These are things that even pro singers train and receive coaching on.
by hyperman1 | 2026-02-07 17:13:09+00:00
In my experience, the 70+ are bad at driving in ways that do lighter accidents. Typically: Drive 50 km/h everywhere, even if the road is 30 or 70. General weird behaviour. Swerving slowly left right left forever.

They do cause a lot of cursing, but they are signalling hard enough they're bad at driving and other drivers leave huge margins, overly grant right of way, don't cross the road, etc...
by goobert | 2026-02-07 17:13:13+00:00
I use conductor with git worktrees and will literally have 10 or 20 running at a time getting pinged as they finish stuff for me to review, mostly getting rid of small ticket and doing random POCs while I focus on bigger stuff, the bottleneck has literally become the company doesn't have enough stuff to give me. It only really works however because I have a lot of context and understanding of the codebase. It's already here.
Show HN: Built an space travel calculator with vanilla JavaScript v2
by captainnemo729 | 2026-02-07 17:13:22+00:00
built this fun web to visualise how fast or how far are we since birth using 4 velocity vectors Rotation,orbit, solar system speed and galactic drift relative to cosmic microwave background. I’m currently using ~600 km/s for the galactic velocity, but I know this is a debated figure depending on the reference frame
Built with Vanilla JS (no frameworks).
added a feature to generate a "Cosmic Receipt" of your journey.
added cosmic connection section to compare with ur friend and partner
added seassion travel log
by japhyr | 2026-02-07 17:13:38+00:00
> That idea of treating scenarios as holdout sets—used to evaluate the software but not stored where the coding agents can see them—is fascinating. It imitates aggressive testing by an external QA team—an expensive but highly effective way of ensuring quality in traditional software.

This is one of the clearest takes I've seen that starts to get me to the point of possibly being able to trust code that I haven't reviewed.

The whole idea of letting an AI write tests was problematic because they're so focused on "success" that `assert True` becomes appealing. But orchestrating teams of agents that are incentivized to build, and teams of agents that are incentivized to find bugs and problematic tests, is fascinating.

I'm quite curious to see where this goes, and more motivated (and curious) than ever to start setting up my own agents.

Question for people who are already doing this: How much are you spending on tokens?

That line about spending $1,000 on tokens is pretty off-putting. For commercial teams it's an easy calculation. It's also depressing to think about what this means for open source. I sure can't afford to spend $1,000 supporting teams of agents to continue my open source work.
by enderforth | 2026-02-07 17:14:13+00:00
This right here is where I feel most concerned

> If you haven’t spent at least $1,000 on tokens today per human engineer, your software factory has room for improvement

Seems to me like if this is true I'm screwed no matter if I want to "embrace" the "AI revolution" or not. No way my manager's going to approve me to blow $1000 a day on tokens, they budgeted $40,000 for our team to explore AI for the entire year.

Let alone from a personal perspective I'm screwed because I don't have $1000 a month in the budget to blow on tokens because of pesky things that also demand financial resources like a mortgage and food.

At this point it seems like damned if I do, damned if I don't. Feels bad man.
by sanex | 2026-02-07 17:14:58+00:00
It seems to me that a lot of the discussion stems around different definitions of the word framework and I believe library is probably the more appropriate term to use here. I wouldn't replace .net framework with something I vibe coded but your example of a library of not so specific functions is ripe for replacement. If you're only using 5% of a library you've probably written as much adapter code as you would have if it was just specific code to solve your problem.
by insane_dreamer | 2026-02-07 17:15:38+00:00
> Their first new hardware release was the Apple Watch, which is a confused product,

I think you just shot your own argument with that.

I remember when no one thought the Apple Watch would amount to much, and it's literally on everyone's wrist in the US. "Almost one in five US consumers — 17% — say they’ve used an Apple Watch in the past week." -- that's an insane amount of market penetration, when you consider it's all consumers. It's almost rare to see an "analog" watch anymore (I'm one of those). You still have Garmin/Suunto/etc and the luxury analog watches, but they're in a different categories. And Samsung/etc. are far behind.

I've never owned an Apple Watch (I have iPhone/Mac). I prefer the elegance of classical analog watches over having notifications on my wrist (no thanks!). but it's an outstanding product that has driven the sale of iPhones/Macs, etc.
by aggregator-ios | 2026-02-07 17:15:44+00:00
I wanted to believe this article, but the writing is difficult to follow, and the thread even harder. My main issue is the contradiction about frameworks and using what the large tech companies have built vs real engineering.

The author seems to think that coding agents and frameworks are mutually exclusive. The draw of Vercel/next.js/iOS/React/Firebase is allowing engineers to ship. You create a repo, point to it, and boom! instant CICD, instant delivery to customers in seconds. This is what you're complaining about!? You're moaning that it took 1 click to get this for free!? Do you have any idea how long it would take to setup just the CI part on Jenkins just a few years ago? Where are you going to host that thing? On your Mac mini?

There's a distinction between frameworks and libraries. Frameworks exist to make the entire development lifecycle easier. Libraries are for getting certain things that are better than you (encryption, networking, storage, sound, etc.) A framework like Next.js or React or iOS/macOS exist because they did the heavy work of building things that need to already exist when building an application. Not making use of it because you want to perform "real engineering" is not engineering at all, that's just called tinkering and shipping nothing.

Mixing coding agents with whatever framework or platform to get you the fastest shipping speed should be your #1 priority. Get that application out. Get that first paid customer. And if you achieve a million customers and your stuff is having scaling difficulties, then you already have teams of engineers to work on bringing some of this stuff in house like moving away from Firebase/Vercel etc. Until then, do what lets you ship ASAP.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2026-02-07 17:16:02+00:00
I'm not saying this to be harsh. I think that the idea is good, and it's highly relevant to my interests. But I threw it a real softball, Zeus' famous "O popoi" paragraph from the Odyssey:

ὢ πόποι, οἷον δή νυ θεοὺς βροτοὶ αἰτιόωνται: /
ἐξ ἡμέων γάρ φασι κάκ᾽ ἔμμεναι, οἱ δὲ καὶ αὐτοὶ / σφῇσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὑπὲρ μόρον ἄλγε᾽ ἔχουσιν, / ὡς καὶ νῦν Αἴγισθος ὑπὲρ μόρον Ἀτρεΐδαο / γῆμ᾽ ἄλοχον μνηστήν, τὸν δ᾽ ἔκτανε νοστήσαντα, / εἰδὼς αἰπὺν ὄλεθρον, ἐπεὶ πρό οἱ εἴπομεν ἡμεῖς, / Ἑρμείαν πέμψαντες, ἐύσκοπον ἀργεϊφόντην, / μήτ᾽ αὐτὸν κτείνειν μήτε μνάασθαι ἄκοιτιν: / ἐκ γὰρ Ὀρέσταο τίσις ἔσσεται Ἀτρεΐδαο, / ὁππότ᾽ ἂν ἡβήσῃ τε καὶ ἧς ἱμείρεται αἴης. / ὣς ἔφαθ᾽ Ἑρμείας, ἀλλ᾽ οὐ φρένας Αἰγίσθοιο / πεῖθ᾽ ἀγαθὰ φρονέων: νῦν δ᾽ ἁθρόα πάντ᾽ ἀπέτισεν.

The translation it sent back was terrible. Completely unfit for purpose:

> "How you, men of Athens, have been affected by my accusers, I do not know; but I, for my part, almost forgot my own identity, so persuasively did they talk; and yet there is hardly a word of truth in what they have said. But I was most amazed by one of the many lies that they told—when they said that you must be on your guard not to be deceived by me,"

And that's all it returned. If that's what you get from a very famous and thoroughly analyzed passage, which has already been translated dozens of times, how can you trust it to analyze anything more obscure or complex? Frankly, I think it needs a lot more work.

Also, separately, I think that you should rewrite all of the text on the website, as passages like "A focused workspace for classical texts: clean typography, trustworthy glosses, and AI tutoring that nudges—never floods" are too obviously AI-generated.

> The AI feature is completely secondary as obviously, they are likely to give you wrong answers

I didn't check, but isn't the entire translation mechanism handled by an LLM?
Ask HN: Will GPU and RAM prices ever go down?
by alentred | 2026-02-07 17:16:23+00:00
A good graphics card costs a lot ever since the cryptomining fever, and RAM is a more recent case. Assembling a gaming or a "local AI" PC is practically out of question today given the budget needed - prices just don't sound reasonable, regardless of whether affordable or not. What's your take - are living in this world from now on, or will it revert, and why?
by sgarland | 2026-02-07 17:16:37+00:00
NUL in the middle of a string is fine, types have no meaning, VARCHAR limits are just suggestions…

The flexible typing is the biggest WTF to me, especially because it necessitates insane affinity rules[0]. For example, you can declare that a column is of type “CHARINT” (or “VARCHARINT”, for that matter), and while that will match the rule for TEXT affinity (contains the string “CHAR”), it also matches the rule for INTEGER affinity (contains the string “INT”), and since that rule matches first, the column is given INTEGER affinity. "FLOATING POINT" maps to INTEGER since it ends in "INT", and "STRING" maps to NUMERIC since it doesn't match anything else.

Then there are the comparison rules (same link). NULL < NULL, INTEGER || REAL < TEXT < BLOB - but those may be altered at comparison time due to type conversion. Hex values as strings get coerced to 0 as INTEGER, but only if they're in the SQL text, not if they're stored in a table. Finally, no conversion takes place for ORDER BY operations.

This is particularly galling considering that most of sqlite3's display types (this is `markdown`) don't visually differentiate between string-types and numeric-types - I manually added the strings on rows (by PK) 2 and 4 to assist the explanation.

sqlite> CREATE TABLE foobar (id INTEGER NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY, b BLOB NOT NULL);
sqlite> INSERT INTO foobar (b) VALUES (10), ('10'), (0xA), ('0xA');
sqlite> SELECT id, b, 15 > b, '15' > b, 0xF > b, '0xF' > b FROM foobar ORDER BY b;
| id | b | 15 > b | '15' > b | 0xF > b | '0xF' > b |
|----|----- |--------|----------|---------|-----------|
| 1 | 10 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| 3 | 10 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| 4 | '0xA' | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2 | '10' | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |

SQLite is great, if and only if you use STRICT mode (and enable FK checks, if applicable). Otherwise, best of luck.

0: https://sqlite.org/datatype3.html
by woeirua | 2026-02-07 17:16:43+00:00
People said the same thing about the transition to higher levels of abstraction in the past. “How will they write good code if they don’t know assembly? How can they write efficient code if they don’t understand how a microprocessor works?”

These arguments basically just amount to the intellectual equivalent of hazing. 90% of engineers don’t need to know how these things work to be productive. 90% of engineers will never work on a global scale system. Doing very basic things will work for those engineers. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough.

Also, I’d argue that AI will advance enough to capture system design soon too.
by energyscholar | 2026-02-07 17:16:44+00:00
Author here. We documented how researchers in 6+ fields independently derived equivalent math for detecting tipping points — power grids, markets, cardiac rhythms, neural networks, traffic — mostly without knowing about each other's work.

The interesting question: which fields SHOULD be using this but aren't yet?

Supply chains. Cybersecurity. Software architecture. Chronic disease progression. Insurance. Urban infrastructure. All deal with cascade failures and tipping points. None have imported the formalism.

Plain-language version: Appendix B (page 17). Happy to answer questions.
by eqvinox | 2026-02-07 17:16:47+00:00
> What’s gone is the tearing, exhausting manual labour of typing every single line of code.

Do I live in a different engineering world? Because that's so much not the exhausting labour part of my work, it's not even the same universe. The exhausting manual labour for me is interacting with others in the project, aligning goals and distributing work, reviewing, testing, even coming up with test concepts, and… actually thinking through what the code conceptually will work like. The most exhausting thing I've done recently is thinking through lock-free/atomic data structures. Ouch, does that shit rack your brain.
by mothballed | 2026-02-07 17:17:24+00:00
"indigenous people" do not have the right to block other races from voting for a public office. The fact that they're polyneysians that slaughtered other polynesians isn't a magic trump card to shit on the ethnic filipinos, chinese, and others that were enslaved and subjected under the "Kingdom of Hawaii" which by the estimation of BryantD were part of the subjected people at that time the "treaty" was meant to protect (no matter that the case itself, ruled that these "treaty" protections carveouts were applicable to Indians and that Hawaiians are not that, thus the racist tried to angle on the word 'indegenous' instead.)

RBG was not balancing the rights of 'indegenous' but rather "balancing" and supporting the racism of ethnic Hawaiians against all the other exploited minorities on the island that were subject in the Kingdom that the US overthrew. Only in the simplified view that it was just Hawaiians and the colonizers does the 'balancing' nonsense even look remotely to be the case, and that is in the most charitable possible interpretation.
by MHIA09 | 2026-02-07 17:17:25+00:00
As I see it, the fact that you emphasized that this is going to be a distro that is built by learners for other learners, giving them a middle ground between vanilla arch and a configured enough system to support their daily work allowing for further customization, is really commendable. I hope this turns out well and hopefully get more contributors. Good luck :3
by geophile | 2026-02-07 17:17:30+00:00
Z-order based indexes avoid the resolution problem. Basically:

- Generate z-values for spatial objects. Points -> a single z-value at the highest resolution of the space. Non-points -> multiple z-values. Each z-value is represented by a single integer, (I use 64 bit z-values, which provide for space resolution of 56 bits.) Each integer represents a 1-d range. E.g. 0x123 would represent 0x123000 through 0x123fff

- Spatial join is basically a merge of these z-values. If you are joining one spatial object with a collection of N spatial objects, the time is logN. If you are joining two collections, then it's more of a linear-time merge.

For more information: PROBE Spatial Data Modeling and Query Processing in an Image Database Application. IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 14(5): 611-629 (1988)

An open source java implementation: https://github.com/geophile/geophile. (The documentation includes a number of corrections to the published algorithm.)
by chuckadams | 2026-02-07 17:18:05+00:00
Following up, I see that's not really what the author was trying to say: it's that for a growing number of purposes, like gluing together two languages that aren't C, that the C ABI is still dominating things where the C language shouldn't even be involved.

Write clickbait, get kneejerk. I guess some other things are at least as old as C.
by ajb | 2026-02-07 17:18:44+00:00
The "hide" button is on every article. Most articles don't have political discussion.

When the political environment becomes unstable, people need to reach out to communities that they trust. For some people, here is where they are comfortable, and where they meet people whose character is legible enough to them that they can place trust. By saying "no politics here" you're denying the people who find this their safe space the ability to share their fears about the situation.

IMO the main difference between the current US administration and those usually considered authoritarian, is that it does not yet use violence to discipline it's own side. But if it remains, that is an unavoidable step on the roadmap. It's supporters are acting like democracy and the rule of law can be denied to some people, while they retain them; that is not a sustainable state of affairs. "Business as usual" is short-sighted.