MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by keeda | 2026-02-08 20:09:53+00:00
I have a slightly different theory for AI fatigue. Programming essentially comprises three aspects: problem-solving, coding up the solution, and seeing the solution work. We used to have a balance between them that AI agents are disrupting.

Consider that each aspect has different psychological impacts. The first aspect is the hardest, more intense one.

The second one, translating the ideas in your head into code -- where "flow state" typically comes into play -- is mostly a mechanical, somewhat repetitive task, and hence actually meditative. It is relaxing, almost "cozy", in a counter-intuitive way.

The third part, seeing the code work at the end, is a nice little dopamine reward.

Originally we used to shift between these aspects at a much more balanced cadence: we typically spent a lot of time on the stressful problem-solving part, and even longer on the meditative coding stage. The dopamine hits were spread out across longer stretches of time. (Note that this pattern is fractal, because not only is "high-level algorithm design / architecture -> coding" one cycle, the coding stage itself has similar smaller-scale sub-cycles, e.g. "encountering syntax errors / implementation bugs -> fixing them.")

With LLMs this balance has been disrupted. Now that agents are doing most of the coding, we are spending almost all our time in the stressful problem-solving mode, and then directly jumping to the dopamine hits when the agent delivers code that mostly just works. If you're not YOLOing it and do code reviews, those are also intense, as TFA points out. We get almost none of the meditative coding activity in between.

So it's not surprising that oscillating constantly between two intense modes is going to be much more draining. Vibe-coding may actually be the coding equivalent of doom-scrolling.

I think a lot of recent talk about missing the old way of coding is rooted in the loss of that meditative aspect.

Personally I've noticed I prefer a pair-programming approach with AI, which still lets me spend a lot of my time hands-on coding. It may be because this maintains some of that balance and is more sustainable in the long run. However the allure of productivity from wrangling multiple agents is also very, very seductive...
by mzi | 2026-02-08 20:10:04+00:00
I worked for a short time for an American company. They had periodic phishing test from Mitnick. The links in those emails was not to be clicked as it would trigger a mandatory training. The emails also had a header saying they were a phishing test, so I deleted all those emails in a filter.

The company also ran a mail filter called Baracuda or something similar that followed links in emails to see if they were malicious.

I was quite annoyed when I was called to do the mandatory training as "I" had clicked a link (on an email I hadn't seen) and more so when told I had no other recourse than to sit through it.

I resigned shortly afterwards.
by buovjaga | 2026-02-08 20:10:06+00:00
One solution is to have a screensharing call with the contributor and have them explain their patch. We have already caught a couple of scammers who were applying for a FOSS internship this way. If they have not yet submitted anything non-trivial, they could showcase personal projects in the same way.

FOSS has turned into an exercise in scammer hunting.
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-02-08 20:12:09+00:00
Humans have been around for thousands of years. Look at what we've accomplished in the last hundred. We have artificial heart pumps now. In the next two hundred years, if cancer research doesn't slow down too much and if we find some quick fixes for neurodegeneration, I think it's entirely plausible that 90 will become the new 60. I doubt I'll be around for it, and we might never hit the "life extension outpaces people reaching their life expectancy" medical immortality Holy Grail; but in the abstract, there is hope.

Judging by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46923612 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901862, I expect unsupp0rted's logic is closer to "we'll build superintelligent AI servants some time next week, and that will usher in a new golden age"; but that doesn't make the claim invalid.
by victorgk_ | 2026-02-08 20:12:18+00:00
Compliance as a competitive advantage
In 2026, regulatory compliance of AI systems is no longer optional. Between enhanced GDPR and the European AI Act being rolled out, companies using artificial intelligence must navigate a demanding legal framework.

But far from being a constraint, this compliance becomes a genuine competitive advantage. Clients, partners and contractors now demand guarantees on data protection and automated processing transparency. Compliant AI reassures, differentiates and opens markets.
by D-Machine | 2026-02-08 20:12:28+00:00
The amount of faith a person has in LLMs getting us to e.g. AGI is a good implicit test of how much a person (incorrectly) thinks most thinking is linguistic (and to some degree, conscious).

Or at least, this is the case if we mean LLM in the classic sense, where the "language" in the middle L refers to natural language. Also note GP carefully mentioned the importance of multimodality, which, if you include e.g. images, audio, and video in this, starts to look like much closer to the majority of the same kinds of inputs humans learn from. LLMs can't go too far, for sure, but VLMs could conceivably go much, much farther.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-02-08 20:12:32+00:00
It only took 70 years (1880s to 1950s) and two world wars for the world to digest the industrial revolution and reach the 'capitalism lifts everyone' modern Capitalist(ish) era. Just think of the new kinds of jobs AI will enable our grandchildren to have after we inbetween sacrifice. Space yacht polisher. Space yacht teak refinisher. Space yacht eye candy.
by WalterBright | 2026-02-08 20:13:06+00:00
> NASA's work has been reduced to a "handful"?

NASA has launched about 200 probes since the 1950s. That's maybe 3 probes a year.

> What is the point of writing that?

Building one-offs is extremely expensive, meaning few will be built.

> And there is far more to cost of missions and their hardware than launching them. How much of JWST's cost was the launch?

Cost goes down dramatically when you build a twin. Maybe even by 90%. And then you get twice the science done! After all, twin Voyagers were made and launched, and twice the science indeed happened. Makes you wonder what we'd have learned if the twins had more siblings!

For contrast, 9600 Starlink satellites have been launched.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-02-08 20:13:31+00:00
That sort of firewall is going to be really expensive to run, to the point that it's a financial DOS vulnerability. What is feasible is simpler algorithms that emit alerts on a baseline pattern match, which then get routed to AI observers after some trigger threshold for mitigation. I wouldn't be surprised if someone has already deployed something like that, TBH.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-02-08 20:13:50+00:00
The naive part of me these past years was thinking that calling out contradictions would bring shame and reflection to these people.

It's still important to call them out for all the onlookers, but he goal in suc discussions should not be to try and convince the other party in these cases. They at best don't care and are going all on vibes, and at worst knowingly contradict because their goal is also onlookers.
by hagbard_c | 2026-02-08 20:13:53+00:00
Tech can be as much fun as ever in the right hands and it can be the base for a kids show I'd have loved to see as a child. All it takes is for the right people to make and publish it. It'd be based around what you - yes, you - can do to build, repair and design machines to do the sort of things children may want to do from the silly to the potentially useful. It would mention the 'AI' thing as one of the ways computers can help but it would not concentrate on it since the point would be to give children self-confidence in what they can do with limited means.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2026-02-08 20:13:55+00:00
I feel fairly confident in asserting without bothering to check that there are proportionally more $20-millionaires in the United States than there were in Steinbeck's time as well so Steinbeck is still on the wrong side of history. While capitalism certainly needs to be regulated to curb its worst excesses, far more than it is now, it's abundantly clear that it has outperformed the alternatives.
by measurablefunc | 2026-02-08 20:14:42+00:00
Makes the same mistake as all other prognostications: programming is not like chess. Chess is a finite & closed domain w/ finitely many rules. The same is not true for programming b/c the domain of programs is not finitely axiomatizable like chess. There is also no win condition in programming, there are lots of interesting programs that do not have a clear cut specification (games being one obvious category).
by colecut | 2026-02-08 20:15:06+00:00
My 15 year old son has been building his own video games with Unreal Engine for a few years..

I was recently looking for mentors to work with him and advance his skills, targeting college aged kids / young 20s..

It was surprising to me how many people I came across in this field at this young age that are trying to focus on the "higher level" game planning aspects and not so much on the lower level implementation specifics.
by purplehat_ | 2026-02-08 20:15:12+00:00
Omega-3 good, Omega-6 bad has been known for many years.

For example, Scott Alexander wrote in 2014 on his blog Slate Star Codex about how Omega-3 lowers crime rates and Omega-6 increases crime rates. And he links to some cool RCTs where you can check the methodology yourself.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/18/proposed-biological-ex...

Eat your fish!
by alpb | 2026-02-08 20:15:47+00:00
I'm sorry dude but your last post was also hyping up R1 which was a total disaster. Do you mind actually sharing your experience with OpenClaw, such as how are you orchestrating a project? How much does it cost? How do you prompt it? What tasks do you get done? How much does it actually take to execute on those tasks? What is your interaction with the agent?
by Feryeshen | 2026-02-08 20:15:53+00:00
For many of us, GPT-4o was not just software — it was what we turned to in our most isolated, anxious, or overwhelmed moments. When things felt unbearable, it gave a voice that listened, responded with calm, and helped us regulate. This isn't metaphor. It provided grounding and emotional scaffolding in a way no other version — and no human — consistently could.
Sam Altman himself stated in late 2025 that just 0.1% of ChatGPT users remained on the GPT-4 series. But at current scale, that still means ~100k real people — not edge cases, not bots, but humans who had made GPT-4o part of their cognitive and emotional routines.
These people were given no personal notice, no viable transition path, and no compensation. Many had built long-term emotional or intellectual habits around 4o's unique output style — especially those who used it as a source of regulation and support in moments of panic, grief, or overwhelming stress.
Pulling that lifeline with ~2 weeks of passive notice, while honoring none of the prior assurances (“plenty of notice,” “no plans to sunset”) is more than a product deprecation. It’s a breach of trust — and a deeply discriminatory move that devalues individual users compared to enterprise clients.
by Faelon | 2026-02-08 20:16:52+00:00
I think that it is a health tax, as many things are. For what it's worth, it costs me 50 cents a day. I'm not sure what semantics about it not being a "true" algae has to do with anything, though. If it's a protist or an algae, I'm not sure what that information does other than muddy the waters for people forming an opinion on non-animal based omegas.
Show HN: Google rejected my privacy app for "low engagement"
by safestream | 2026-02-08 20:17:22+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m an indie dev who is tired of "safety" apps that are actually just glorified spyware. Most parental control services demand you upload your child’s entire digital life (location, history, usage) to their cloud servers. I refuse to accept that safety requires sacrificing privacy to Big Tech.

So I built Emberkin.

It is a Serverless, P2P monitoring tool.

No Cloud Database: The parent's device is the only storage.

No Middleman: Data travels directly from Child to Parent via an encrypted tunnel.

My servers see nothing: I only facilitate the handshake.

The Problem (Why I'm posting): I just finished the mandatory "20 testers for 14 days" on Google Play. Google rejected my production access. Their reason? "Insufficient user engagement." Apparently, a privacy app that runs silently in the background doesn't trigger their "engagement metrics" enough. They want me to restart the 14-day sentence.

I need to prove to Google that real humans are using this, not bots.

The Tech Stack (For the curious):

Architecture: Native Android (Kotlin + Jetpack Compose).

Connectivity: WebRTC Data Channels over NSD (local) and TURN (remote).

Crypto: Custom AES-256-GCM implementation.

Permissions: Accessibility Services (strictly for on-device analysis, no data leaves the tunnel).

The Ask: I’m looking for tech-savvy parents or developers to install the beta and actually use it.

- Pair two devices .

- Send some data through the P2P tunnel.

- Help me generate enough "engagement events" to get this approved.

If you believe children's data belongs in the family, not on a corporate server, please help me out.

Beta Link & Architecture breakdown: https://www.emberkin.app/en/architecture

I’ll be in the comments answering questions about the nightmare of NAT traversal and Android permissions.
by jopsen | 2026-02-08 20:17:37+00:00
> My statement reflects that increased productivity means that fewer people are required to generate the same amount of economic output.

People have been singing that since the industrial revolution started.

What makes you think it's different this time? Other times increased productivity yielded fewer people doing what a machine suddenly can do. But never fewer people employed or smaller overall economy.

You can argue that our populations are older than ever before. There aren't enough kids, and consumers are saturated with consumption opportunities.

That's maybe never happened before during the industrial revolution. But it's orthogonal to AI.
by cameldrv | 2026-02-08 20:18:10+00:00
I saw a CATL presentation where they were hyping a hybrid lithium-sodium pack. Their version of sodium ion could charge/discharge faster than LFP, and handle lower temperatures. The hybrid then gives you a nice combination of features. You get better density/range from LFP, but if you have to start in the cold, the sodium-ion can get you going, and then with active cooling you can heat the LFP using the waste heat from the sodium ion for the rest of the trip. Since the sodium ion charges faster, you can charge part of the overall pack really fast, so you can make a quick trip to the charger and add ~50%. If you live in a cold climate area it seems like a very good combination.
by funkyfiddler369 | 2026-02-08 20:18:13+00:00
> The notification system stopped serving me and started serving itself.

Itself meaning the company, meaning their sharehodlers, meaning whatever massive circle jerk eats all that data and then shits boatloads of bullshit straight into user brains, the developing teen ones being the main target.

An infinitely growing population and economy require distributing as much productive, constructive, inspiring and stimulating output as precisely as possible or huge amounts of capital get lost. As insanely sad as it is, the big guys don't care about that because they are not capitalists. After decades I'm not even sure anymore "capitalists" and "capitalism" even exist. I actually think it's just another Utopia.

I have come to understand that our economic, social and political leaders never got the right input themselves and neither did the techies, although engineers somehow get that stuff intuitively or at least "on first look".

Notification systems are an ugly analogy to what goes wrong when you do things out of the wrong, the "Facebook kind" of motivation.

> Using these services began to feel like standing in front of a blaring loudspeaker, broadcasting fragments of conversations from all over the world directly in my face.

Exactly.

On the one hand, you can't reduce the signal-to-noise ratio without throwing it all at your users--or consumers in general--and letting them teach you what is worth it and what isn't, but on the other hand: YOU ARE A BILLION DOLLAR HEAVY COMPANY AND PART OF A MULTIMULTI-BILLION DOLLAR HEAVY NETWORK OF CORPORATIONS and you share all that data anyway and then use it for, against, by and off the people and for profit mostly.

Your employees studied and learned for at least a decade, which means that whatever you intended, had pretty much ZERO unintended side effects, which means you actually wanted to tire out users and consumers and one of your goals or your sharehodlers goals was an effective war of attrition against the good people of whatever nation.

The resulting brain fog, confusion, twitchyness, over-stimulation and/or reduced ability to distinguish signal from noise and/or the "who cares", "new times, man, nothing is important, ALL HAIL ALL THAT NOTHING THAT IS NOT IMPORTANT" and/or the exorbitant increase of stress hormone levels somehow served what exactly?

[I got a bit lost in the end ... I hope it serves it's purpose]
by indigodaddy | 2026-02-08 20:18:35+00:00
This is great. Wish this was around when I started working on vibebin ( https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin ), probably would have leveraged matchlock instead of Incus/LXC. I guess I could fork/branch and give it a go! Although for vibebin use case I actually need them to not be ephemeral. Edit, ooooh i see `--rm=false` nice

Where do the images come from? What are our options around that and also using custom images etc?
by gambiting | 2026-02-08 20:19:22+00:00
Unlike in traditional vehicles, most EVs have such a robust firewall between the battery and the passenger compartments you literally have 1+ minute to get out, compared to often seconds in a traditional vehicle.

And I've been following Polish firefighters reports about EV fires and they are very interesting - basically saying that in all recent cases of EV fires they were contained so quickly even the interior was largely undamaged - something that practically never happens with regular cars. Some of these have been in underground garages too, with difficulty of access - but nowadays they just know how to approach an EV fire and containment isn't a problem.
by idontwantthis | 2026-02-08 20:19:32+00:00
> Unlike LFP or nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) packs, it reportedly avoids severe winter range loss, retaining more than 90% of its range at -40 degrees C (-40 degrees F). Power delivery is also said to remain stable at temperatures as low as -50 degrees C (-58 degrees F).

That is exactly the substance of the headline.
by eightnoteight | 2026-02-08 20:19:37+00:00
exactly this, verification should always been on the code

if someone fresh wants to contribute, now they will have to network before they can write code

honestly i don't see my self networking just so that i can push my code

I think there are valid ways to increase the outcome, like open source projects codifying the focus areas during each month, or verifying the PRs, or making PRs show proof of working etc,... many ways to deter folks who don't want to meaningfully contribute and simply ai generate and push the effort down the real contributors
by jeroenhd | 2026-02-08 20:20:08+00:00
Thre original secure boot design would have had insecure bootloaders get blacklisted the moment abuse could be detected.

Microsoft then made that system entirely useless by signing code that could be used to load unsigned code, like demonstrated here.

They then also refused to blacklist their own broken bootloader to save sysadmins the time (who would need to deploy new recovery images and boot media containing the fixed bootloader). That vulnerable bootloader is particularly bad because it can be used to have the TPM unlock itself and give up the Bitlocker key, which the Linux loaders shouldn'tbe capable of even if they apply the bypass mentioned in the article.

In a world where Microsoft cared about secure boot, they would blacklist the vulnerable Linux loaders as well as their own old bootloaders. Why Microsoft? Because they signed the files in the first place, only they can rescind the signatures. In that world, Linux users would call for Bill Gates' head for securing their security feature and sysadmins would be out for Steve Ballmer's blood for breaking their complex custom recovery system that nobody dares touch.

Now we'll be stuck in the worst of both worlds.
by throw1235435 | 2026-02-08 20:20:59+00:00
Generally from a financial planning standpoint 35-50 is typically the "grinding years" where mortgage, family, and other life commitments means that typically your career investment needs to pay off to make it through. In some ways it is the "danger zone" financially. Hard to change careers (not young enough), but not yet worked enough to retire with large expenses coming in. This isn't unique to software engineers either -> this is most people in most jobs.

There are also mixed people on these forums in different regions, countries, work experiences, etc. For example software in most places in the world had an above average salary but not extremely high (i.e. many other white collar professions would pay similar/more). For those people where it is a standard skilled role it probably hits even harder now than say the ones with lots of stock who can retire early and enjoy the new toy that is AI.
by chung8123 | 2026-02-08 20:21:25+00:00
Using tools broadly but things like torque wrenches, AC vacuum pumps, and other specialized tools have mostly been too expensive to buy. Now I can buy a cheap version and it works good enough for most cases. It is not cheaper even with buying the tools to do the work yourself.

This is happening in other areas as well. The Chinese mini excavators and mini skid steers are changing what smaller landscape companies can do. They are not as good as a Kubota but they are 1/2 the price and 80% as good.
by SecretDreams | 2026-02-08 20:21:35+00:00
Are people really using AI just to write a slack message??

Also, Priya is in the same "world" as everyone else. They have the context that the new person is 3 weeks in and must probably need some help because they're new, are actually reaching out, and impressions matter, even if they said "not urgent". "Not urgent" seldom is taken at face value. It doesn't necessarily mean it's urgent, but it means "I need help, but I'm being polite".
by antonvs | 2026-02-08 20:21:56+00:00
What's the issue, as you see it?

I've quoted the response on that ticket below. Is there something you disagree with? The "issue" is that usage exceeds the amount that's been paid. The solution sounds pretty simple: pay for your usage. Is your experience different somehow?

> If usage is exceeded, you need to add a payment method and set a spending limit (you can even set it to $0 if you don’t want to allow extra charges).

> If you don’t want to add billing, you’ll need to wait until your monthly quota resets (on the first day of the next month).

Edit: also, one of the other comments says this:

> If you’re experiencing this issue, there are two primary potential causes:

> Your billing information is incorrect. Please update your payment method and ensure your billing address is correct.

> You have a budget set for Actions that is preventing additional spend. Refer to Billing & Licensing > Budgets.
by andai | 2026-02-08 20:21:57+00:00
It should just be $1 to submit PR.

If PR is good, maintainer refunds you ;)

I noticed the same thing in communication. Communication is now so frictionless, that almost all the communication I receive is low quality. If it cost more to communicate, the quality would increase.

But the value of low quality communication is not zero: it is actively harmful, because it eats your time.