MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ericmay | 2026-02-10 16:25:49+00:00
Yes, guns, clubs, fire, and steel weapons. And afterward they had the Reign of Terror, and the rise of the French Emperor Napoleon. It seems like it mostly worked out in the long run, though subsequent World Wars left the French Empire as a weakened shell of itself. In the short term, up until Napoleon was finally taken down by the combined British and Prussian forces at Waterloo, it seemed to have led to all sorts of calamities. How many died? How many did Robespierre manage to get sentenced to death before he met the same fate? Would Napoleon have risen and caused the death of so many?

One thing would-be revolutionaries don't appreciate is that, well, similar to Mr. Putin's experience today, revolutions (and wars) are much easier to start than to control. One day you're chopping off the leader's head, the next day you are pressed into military service and your Constitution is gone. I personally would rather be patient and work on reforming institutions, even if it takes a much longer time. Often times when we get rid of them, it's not that something better fills the void, as anarchists (communists or libertarians alike) like to claim, but instead it's nothing and that capability is gone until some calamity restores the need.
by wongarsu | 2026-02-10 16:25:55+00:00
My rent is less than that. But if you add up salary, payroll taxes, benefits, social security etc my employer still spends around four times that amount on employing me. More if you include misc overheads associated with having one more employee. Personally I could never afford 1500-2000€/month for dev tooling, but my employer should rationally be willing to spend that for anything that makes me more than 25% more effective.

I'm not sure today's Claude Code could ask for that. But I don't think it would be a crazy goal for them to work towards
by jppope | 2026-02-10 16:26:00+00:00
Fantastic Article, well written, thoughtful. Here are a couple of my favorite quotes:

* "Then it professionalised. Plug and Play arrived. Windows abstracted everything. The Wild West closed. Computers stopped being fascinating, cantankerous machines that demanded respect and understanding, and became appliances. The craft became invisible."

* "The machines I fell in love with became instruments of surveillance and extraction. The platforms that promised to connect us were really built to monetise us. The tinkerer spirit didn’t die of natural causes — it was bought out and put to work optimising ad clicks."

* "Previous technology shifts were “learn the new thing, apply existing skills.” AI isn’t that. It’s not a new platform or a new language or a new paradigm. It’s a shift in what it means to be good at this."

* "They’re writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs in a V8 engine written in C++ that’s making system calls to an OS kernel that’s scheduling threads across cores they’ve never thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with caching layers they couldn’t diagram, all while npm pulls in 400 packages they’ve never read a line of... But sure. AI is the moment they lost track of what’s happening."

* "Typing was never the hard part."

* "I don’t have a neat conclusion. I’m not going to tell you that experienced developers just need to “push themselves up the stack” or “embrace the tools” or “focus on what AI can’t do.” All of that is probably right, and none of it addresses the feeling."

To relate to the author, I think with a lot of whats going on I feel the same about, but other parts I feel differently than they do. There appears to be a shallowness with this... yes we can build faster than ever, but so much of what we are building we should really be asking ourselves why do we have to build this at all? Its like sitting through the meeting that could have been an email, or using hand tools for 3 hours because the power tool purchase/rental is just obscenely expensive for the ~20min you need it.
by iamtheworstdev | 2026-02-10 16:26:01+00:00
It's been a decade and it's hard to keep up with all of the drama and ego. It was the EyeQ3 vision system. It used cameras, radar, and ultrasonic sensors and Tesla was accessing them directly. MobileEye cut them off and Elon put his foot down and said "fine we'll just use crappy webcams and be fine."
by rraghur | 2026-02-10 16:26:36+00:00
Are you me?

I'm 49.... Started at 12... In the same boat

First 286 machine had a CMOS battery that was loose so I had to figure that out to make it boot into ms-dos

This time it does feel different and while I'm using them ai more than ever, it feels soulless and empty even when I 'ship' something
by mountainb | 2026-02-10 16:26:41+00:00
Population declines have happened many times in many places in history, and it sometimes heralds collapse and at other times it is just a temporary phenomenon. Part of the issue is with how you define the metrics and what you consider success. Population increase can correlate with good things and also with bad things. Perhaps much of the problem here is with the idea that gross population numbers should be a governance KPI, rather than more specific measures and goals.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-10 16:26:46+00:00
> There's not much sense of community, particularly in the white middle class. People are very individualistic and distrusting of others.

My experience couldn’t possibly be more different.

Once we had kids it was like our world opened up to a whole new set of communities and other parents. Most of the other parents we’ve met have been very friendly and helpful, and we’ve tried to do the same for others.
Show HN: I built a visual node system for CI/CD that supports GitHub Actions
by sebastian_io | 2026-02-10 16:27:03+00:00
Hey HN,

About a year ago I shared a first MVP of a visual node-based system for CI/CD pipelines that I've been very passionate about. I've been building on it since, and it's now live.

I've always liked building pipelines and workflows, but I've never liked writing YAML for anything more than simple linear tasks. Branching, conditions, loops, or trying to just run certain things in parallel always gets messy. So I built Actionforge, a visual node system to tackle some of these pain points.

Instead of writing YAML yourself, you build workflows as graphs. While Actionforge still uses YAML under the hood, the visual editor makes them much easier to maintain. These graphs also run natively on GitHub runners with no middleman. What used to take me hours of fiddling with indentation and string syntax, now only takes me minutes to create a full build pipeline.

The editor comes with a visual debugger so you can run and troubleshoot workflows locally before deploying them.

I dogfood it heavily, so Actionforge builds itself. Here's one of its graphs for GitHub Actions.
https://www.actionforge.dev/example

The runner is written in Go, and is open source on GitHub (including GH Attestation and SBOM for full transparency).

Would love to hear what you think. Happy building!
by lsy | 2026-02-10 16:27:04+00:00
LLM coding isn't a new level of abstraction. Abstractions are (semi-)reliable ways to manage complexity by creating building blocks that represent complex behavior, that are useful for reasoning about outcomes.

Because model output can vary widely from invocation to invocation, let alone model to model, prompts aren't reliable abstractions. You can't send someone all of the prompts for a vibecoded program and know they will get a binary with generally the same behavior. An effective programmer in the LLM age won't be saving mental energy by reasoning about the prompts, they will be fiddling with the prompts, crossing their fingers that it produces workable code, then going back to reasoning about the code to ensure it meets their specification.

What I think the discipline is going to find after the dust settles is that traditional computer code is the "easiest" way to reason about computer behavior. It requires some learning curve, yes, but it remains the highest level of real "abstraction", with LLMs being more of a slot machine for saving the typing or some boilerplate.
by dcanelhas | 2026-02-10 16:27:10+00:00
> I wrote my first line of code in 1983. I was seven years old, typing BASIC into a machine that had less processing power than the chip in your washing machine

I think there may be a counterpoint hiding in plain sight here: back in 1983 the washing machine didn't have a chip in it. Now there are more low-level embedded CPUs and microcontrollers to develop for than before, but maybe it's all the same now. Unfathomable levels of abstraction, uniformly applied by language models?
by lotsofpulp | 2026-02-10 16:27:12+00:00
> The primary cause of low birth rates is that society does not value children.

I have seen what women go through to bring about a baby, and I would never do it more than 2 times, and that is only to give the 1 kid a sibling.

I also would not partner with the bottom 20% of the population (as a man or a woman), for myriad reasons.

If enough people think like me, then this results in a sub replacement total fertility rate, as the number of people with 3 or more kids will not be significant enough to outweigh the zero and ones.

The only “solution” that seems like it could increase TFR to replacement rate, without violating people’s rights, is getting rid of all old age benefits.
by its_magic | 2026-02-10 16:27:22+00:00
Sorry, you're thoroughly confused. It is not theft to steal from a thief. It's called "justice."

I realize this is a radical concept for your society, which at this moment is thoroughly unjust. Familiarize yourself with this concept now, as it will come up later on the test.

No wonder you keep getting robbed and fucked over all the time. You think it's somehow morally wrong to strike back! It's like you were born and bred to be a victim.

This also explains why so many others get victimized while you stand by and watch idly. Because you think there's nothing wrong with your fellow man getting fucked over!

I could explain more, but it would be useless, as your confusion is at this time far too thick and heavy to be dispelled by just one guy like me. What you're gonna need is somebody like me in your local area to help educate you.

My recommendation is to just double park your big ass honkin truck or Maserati somewhere, then just watch and see what happens. Eventually, you will reach enlightenment.
by sho_hn | 2026-02-10 16:27:22+00:00
I resonate with that. I also find writing code super pleasurable. It's immediate stress relief for me, I love the focus and the flow. I end long hands-on coding sessions with a giddy high.

What I'm finding is that it's possible to integrate AI tools into your workflow in a big way without giving up on doing that, and I think there's a lot to say for a hybrid approach. The result of a fully-engaged brain (which still requires being right in there with the problem) using AI tools is better than the fully-hands-off way touted by some. Stay confident in your abilities and find your mix/work loop.

It's also possible to get a certain version of the rewards of coding from instrumenting AI tools. E.g. slicing up and sizing tasks to give to background agents that you can intuit from experience they'll be able to actually hand in a decent result on is similar to structuring/modularization exercises (e.g. with the goal to be readable or maintainable) in writing code, feelings-wise.
by Balgair | 2026-02-10 16:27:23+00:00
I like to hang out on fertility twitter.

It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources.

They're all looking for the recipe to get people to have kids again, and mostly finding nothing.

"Oh it's apartments!"

"Oh it's incentives!"

"Oh it's childcare!"

And then bickering how none of it is real and affects popsquat.

Once some formula is found, then the whole place will fall apart and they'll go back to hating each other again. But for now, it's a nice weird little place.

My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.

I know that's almost tautological. But it's simplicity cuts through the crap. No amount of baby cash, or white picket fences, or coercion, or lack of birth control, or whatever other set of schemes you can make, none of that matters. Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.

That's a gigantic task, I know. And I don't have the policy recommendations to enact that. I'm just a dweb on the Internet. But that is my take.
by morshu9001 | 2026-02-10 16:27:29+00:00
I tried Linux desktop for the first time in like a decade. Didn't know Xorg was deprecated for real, as in most distros moved to Wayland. Was surprised that the one hold out was Mint. And learned the hard way that Mint didn't work on my fairly normal PC, due to an Xorg issue.

This is the thing so many people recommend?! No wonder Linux is unpopular.

Also there like 20 competing ways to install packages now. Used to just be apt.
by angiolillo | 2026-02-10 16:27:49+00:00
> vehicle changes lanes in front of you; you slow down to maintain a safe following distance, another car sees a gap and changes lanes in front of you. Repeat for your entire commute.

For the sake of argument, assume you follow the "three second rule" and the other driver is slightly aggressive and enters closer to the front of the gap. You are now down to a two second buffer so rebuilding back to a three second buffer costs an extra second of travel time.

In practice this happens to me about a dozen times a day. It is frustrating; I could have arrived home a dozen seconds earlier and spent that time playing with my kids! But personally the tradeoff is worth it to slightly increase the odds that I arrive home each day to play with them at all.
by optymizer | 2026-02-10 16:28:09+00:00
You were homeless and didn't have a choice, so now obviously you're qualified to give assurances that essentially, "it is unlikely that your family will starve", right? /s

And if you're wrong, and shit hits the fan for whatever reason, who's going to fix that? You? No, he's going to have to fix that, because nobody else is going to step in.

It's easy to tell others that it's going to be OK, but put your money where your mouth is. Put $1M in a fund that he can access should he no longer be able to find employment. Then he'll have absolute certainty that it's going to be OK.

Something tells me you're not going to do that. Something tells me that what you would do if shit hits the fan, is you're going to tell him that he should find solace in the fact that while he's working for 1/5th of his former total comp, putting in more hours at the same time, seeing his kids less, not putting his kids through private school to give them the best chance at the best education, that, at least, some kid out there isn't watching 6-7 videos on the tablet that their parents use to do less parenting.
by meerab | 2026-02-10 16:28:12+00:00
I'm working on VideoToBe — a audio and video Transcription service with an AI chat layer. Whisper for transcription, then you can chat with your recordings instead of rewatching.

Also building simple tools for simple task such as converting audio-to-video to post on youtube and more for business users who find Premiere/Final Cut overkill for basic tasks. videotobe.com
by rayiner | 2026-02-10 16:28:26+00:00
Or people getting divorced multiple times each, parents having extensive hobbies that don't involve family, grandparents who don't help raise kids, how much input grandparents have into how kids are raised, etc. My wife is Anglo-American and I'm south asian and the culture shock is real. In my family you have all these rules to allow people to save face, suppress open conflict, etc. In her family, you just say what you mean and if the other person doesn't like it, you just get divorced, or "go no contact," or otherwise just stop dealing with each other.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-10 16:28:30+00:00
> Meanwhile, the curb is full of extra large SUVs idling with kids just waiting inside the cars

Anecdotally, when my work schedule was wonky for a while I would do the same with my kids. Those few extra minutes hanging out with them in the morning were something I valued a lot. We got to talk and relax a little bit after the rush of getting ready in the morning. They had all day to spend with their classmates so a few extra minutes in the morning wasn’t going to change much.

A suggestion: If you want to make friends with other parents, morning drop off is the worst time to do it because everyone is going from the rush of morning routines and mentally preparing for their jobs. After school is better, but the best is at events and activities away from school hours completely. Our schools have done parent socials that have been great for meeting people. Sports and activities are also a great way to get introduced to other families.

It also helps to be the one leading the charge. We’ll do things like go to the museum or other activities and then send invites to 5+ other families. Tell them to invite other families.
by pixl97 | 2026-02-10 16:28:31+00:00
The software world pretty much demanded this outcome.

Go back 10 years and post "SWE's should form labor unions"

Then watch as your post drops to [dead] and people scream "How dare you rob me of theoretical millions of dollars I'll be making".

I wonder how many of these same downvoters are now worried about getting replaced with AI.
by bombcar | 2026-02-10 16:28:38+00:00
Even if you don't go to that extreme, you look back only a few generations and even today at immigrants, and you see that the old people never stop working until they're literally bed-ridden.

They might not have GDP-increasing jobs that show up on balance sheets, but grandma watches the kids (effectively working as daycare, off-books), grandpa fixes things, and so on.

By demanding everything be reduced to the nuclear family (or smaller) we've created an unnatural situation on never seen before on a global scale.
by visarga | 2026-02-10 16:28:41+00:00
I am going lower level - every individual work item is a "task.md" file, starts initially as a user ask, then add planning, and then the agent checks gates "[ ]" on each subtask as it works through it. In the end the task files remain part of the project, documenting work done. I also keep an up to date mind map for the whole project to speed up start time.

And I use git hooks on the tool event to print the current open gate (subtask) from task.md so the agent never deviates from the plan, this is important if you use yolo mode. It might be an original technique I never heard anyone using it. A stickie note in the tool response, printed by a hook, that highlights the current task and where is the current task.md located. I have seen stretches of 10 or 15 minutes of good work done this way with no user intervention. Like a "Markdown Turing Machine".
by andrewla | 2026-02-10 16:28:51+00:00
I'm sorry, is this serious? Yes, Kavanaugh stops do exist and are problematic. But the question is -- are they doing them? Almost all of their operations in Minnesota (just assuming Minnesota here, apologies if I have mischaracterized) have been targeted operations, where they are pursuing a specific individual.

The two situations where someone was fatally shot were both targeted; they were not just grabbing brown people off the street and throwing them in the paddy wagon.

And if you're going to pretend that they just happened to be "near" ICE operations, and not actively trying to interfere and obstruct their operations (while attempting to stay technically inside the bounds of the law) then I don't think we can have a good faith conversation here.

The vast majority of people in Minnesota are simply unaffected by these operations. Many people have convinced themselves that they are at risk but this is not reflective of reality. If you claim to be changing your life in any way in response to this then you're just putting a fig leaf on decisions that you've already made.
by conartist6 | 2026-02-10 16:29:28+00:00
I think you're quite right that the idea of "parse don't validate" is (or can be) quite closely tied to OO-style programming.

Essentially the article says that each data type should have a single location in code where it is constructed, which is a very class-based way of thinking. If your Java class only has a constructor and getters, then you're already home free.

Also for the method to be efficient you need to be able to know where an object was constructed. Fortunately class instances already track this information.
by webdoodle | 2026-02-10 16:29:32+00:00
Only because the U.S. and U.K. conspired against them. The French did everything they could to keep the fire burning, by hosting people from various countries to teach them about revolution. Organizing globally against the rich parasites was hard and expensive back then. Now the only hold back, is that the rich parasites own most of the internet.

But WE BUILT IT, and can take back the internet when we finally realize it's not dems vs reps, but rich vs poor. It's always been a class war, they just are much better at keeping us distracted.
by JetSetIlly | 2026-02-10 16:29:36+00:00
I'm the exact same demographic as the author, just turned 50, writing code since childhood in BASIC. I'm dealing with the AI in programming issue by ignoring it.

I still enjoy the physical act of programming so I'm unsure why I should do anything that changes that. To me it's akin to asking a painter to become a photographer. Both are artists but the craft is different.

Even if the AI thing is here to stay, I think there will be room for people who program by hand for the same reason there's still room for people who paint, despite the invention of the camera.

But then, I'm somebody who doesn't even use an IDE. If I find an IDE obtrusive then I'm certain I'll find an AI agent even more so.
by xtracto | 2026-02-10 16:29:39+00:00
Yes yes yes!!!

I'm 45 yo. And also started programming quite early around 1988. In my case it was GWBAsic games and then C ModeX and A
Later Allegro based games.

Things got so boring in the last 15 years, I got some joy in doing AI research (ML, agents, Genetic Algorithms, etc).

But now, it's so cool how I can again think about something and build it so easily. I'm really excited of what I can do now. And im ot talking about the next billion dollar startup and whatnot. But the small hacky projects that LLMs made capable.yo build in no time.
by summa_tech | 2026-02-10 16:29:50+00:00
I think the issue at the core of the analogy is that factories, traditional factories, excel at making a ton of one thing (or small variations thereof). The big productivity gains came from highly reliable, repeatable processes that do not accommodate substantial variation. This rigidity of factory production is what drives the existence of artisan work: it can always easily distinguish itself from the mass product.

This does not seem true for AI writing software. It's neither reliable nor rigid.
by hiccup_socks | 2026-02-10 16:29:50+00:00
>"Post Mortem" feels a bit like it's done in bad faith as it's usually applied to projects that are over.

is it? outside of autopsies, i think i have only ever seen it used as a synonym for "incident report". i dont think ive ever associated the term specifically with the end of a project.

e.g. cloudflare uses the tag for all of their incident reports (https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/post-mortem/), not as a signal that they are closing shop