MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by matheus-rr | 2026-02-07 14:42:09+00:00
The pendulum swing described here is real but I think the underlying issue is subtler than "AI vs. no AI."

The actual problem most teams have isn't writing code — it's understanding what the code they already depend on is doing. You can vibe-code a whole app in a weekend, but when one of your 200 transitive dependencies ships a breaking change in a patch release, no amount of AI is going to help you debug why your auth flow suddenly broke.

The skill that's actually becoming more valuable isn't "writing code from scratch" — it's maintaining awareness of the ecosystem you're building on. Knowing when Node ships a security fix that affects your HTTP handling, or when a React minor changes the reconciliation behavior, or when Postgres deprecates a function you use in 50 queries.

That's the boring, unsexy part of engineering that AI doesn't solve and most developers skip until something catches fire.
by ksec | 2026-02-07 14:42:45+00:00
One of the them is a one shot project and one of them is an infrastructure project being used by billions. It makes a nice headline but not a decent comparison.

On another note I wish there is some break down of where all the spendings goes to. GPU, CPU, RAM, Network, Switch, Cables, Power, Datacenter. The AI ecosystem and business is larger than Smartphone revolution kick started by Apple, but unlike Smartphone or consumer products these Hyperscaler and AI spending right now it is very opaque.
by matheus-rr | 2026-02-07 14:42:58+00:00
Interesting trade-off: build a minimal interpreter that's "good enough" for AI-generated code rather than trying to match CPython feature-for-feature.

The security angle is probably the most compelling part. Running arbitrary AI-generated Python in a full CPython runtime is asking for trouble — the attack surface is enormous. Stripping it down to a minimal subset at least constrains what the generated code can do.

The bet here seems to be that AI-generated code can be nudged to use a restricted subset through error feedback loops, which honestly seems reasonable for most tool-use scenarios. You don't need metaclasses and dynamic imports to parse JSON or make API calls.
Show HN: Verifiable server roundtrip demo for a decision interruption system
by veeduzyl | 2026-02-07 14:43:15+00:00
This is a read-only demonstration repo showing a full server-side decision interruption roundtrip:

REQUIRE_CONFIRM → EXECUTE → REJECT

The demo is intentionally minimal and static. It exists only to make one thing verifiable:

how a high-risk decision is interrupted,

how a receipt + plan_hash are issued,

and how execution is either explicitly confirmed or rejected.

The repository includes:

a runnable CLI-style roundtrip (demo_server_roundtrip.ts)

frozen evidence artifacts (_evidence/*.json)

a CI check that validates the outputs deterministically

There is no UI, no SaaS, and no agent behavior here.
This is not a product — it’s an evidence artifact meant for engineers who want to inspect the mechanics.

Feedback from people who’ve built guardrails, code review tools, or AI-assisted workflows is especially welcome.
by gom_jabbar | 2026-02-07 14:43:31+00:00
Land himself has suggested a very anti-human solution to the problem of "IQ shredders":

"The most hard-core capitalist response to this [IQ shredders] is to double-down on the antihumanist accelerationism. This genetic burn-rate is obviously unsustainable, so we need to convert the human species into auto-intelligenic robotized capital [a]s fast as possible, before the whole process goes down in flames." [0]

[0] Nick Land (2014). IQ Shredders in Xenosystems Blog. Retrieved from github.com/cyborg-nomade/reignition
by matheus-rr | 2026-02-07 14:43:44+00:00
This is one of those "obvious in hindsight" tricks. The comma prefix gives you a namespace that's guaranteed to never collide with system binaries, shell builtins, or anything from a package manager.

I do something similar with my personal scripts — prefix them with a short namespace. The real win isn't just avoiding collisions though, it's tab completion. Type the prefix and tab, and you immediately see all your custom stuff without wading through hundreds of system commands.

The 2009 date on this is wild. Some of these simple unix conventions age better than most frameworks.
by unsupp0rted | 2026-02-07 14:43:45+00:00
Every doctor and researcher in the world is trained on things we already know how to do already.

I’m not claiming we haven’t made a dent. I’m claiming I’m in roughly as much danger from these things right now as any human ever has been: middling results.

If we can speed up the cures by even 1%, that’s cumulatively billions of hours of human life saved by the time we’re done.
by dgacmu | 2026-02-07 14:44:05+00:00
Some code is fun and some sucks?

There's a joke that's not entirely a joke that the job of a Google SWE is converting from one protobuf to another. That's generally not very fun code, IMO (which may differ from your opinion and that's why they're opinions!). Otoh, figuring out and writing some interesting logic catches my brain in a way that dealing with formats and interoperability stuff doesn't usually.

We're all did but we all probably have things we like more than others.
by GiraffeNecktie | 2026-02-07 14:44:11+00:00
For overcoming pitchiness, the "one weird trick" I learned from a singing teacher is to imagine you are moving in the opposite direction from the actual pitch. If you're going higher, imagine you're going lower and vice versa.

This helped me overcome the tendency to constrict the throat when reaching for a higher note or to go flat when heading lower.
by doublerabbit | 2026-02-07 14:44:58+00:00
> Merely watching videos, even of disturbing material, doesn't even come close to being as bad as those and some other professions.

Your comment angers me. Both are disturbing, both are disgusting and both have psychological consequences. Neither are mutually exclusive.

Have you done either? I have throughout my teenage career. I o'd on acid in the end and entered a psychosis because of. 36 now and I can put it all aside, I did my time for the devil.

Working IT for the meat industry where slaughter houses were a thing. Knowing you're working and fixing machinery that kills animals taints your soul.

Working in IT for a money laundering pornography shop, receiving images of barely-legal trafficked women with silhouettes of guns in the shadows pointed at their heads is gruesome, snuff as some would call it.

I have worked for both and both eff' you up. You can't compare one to the other.
by pech0rin | 2026-02-07 14:46:08+00:00
Strange how many people are comparing code to art. Software engineering has never been about the code written, it’s about solving problems with software. With AI we can solve more problems with software. I have been writing code for 25 years, I love using AI. It allows me to get to the point faster.

The author is right, eliminating all this framework cruft will be a boon for building great software. I was a skeptic but it seems obvious now its largely going to be an improvement.
by Winblows11 | 2026-02-07 14:46:29+00:00
Yes I remember when UK regulator blocked Microsoft from buying Activision there were posts on r/Microsoft regarding their ability to send update to brick all Windows installs in UK and delete all Azure data of UK companies, how UK was a small insignificant market compared to BRICs so it wouldn't hurt MSFT stock price.

Given JD Vance obviously hates UK/EU way more than Trump, and he may be next US president, he may in fact threaten Microsoft to do it against UK and EU.
by quickthrowman | 2026-02-07 14:46:44+00:00
Oh man, multi-tenant housing sounds like the worst case scenario for this sort of thing. I’m glad you were able to avoid any liability, trying to pin liability for rebuilding a unit on a tenant is insane.

And yeah, the volume of water a fire pump can move is astounding. Electrical code requires the fire pump to be wired so that it can run at its locked rotor amp rating without tripping overcurrent protection and it’s usually tapped directly off the utility transformer separately from the rest of the electrical service. There’s also a smaller jockey pump that maintains water pressure in the system so that when the main pump turns on, there’s no lag with water coming out. The pump motor will keep spinning even if there’s a dead short if it’s fused right above locked rotor amps, since replacing a motor is cheaper than replacing a fully burned out structure and keeping the water flowing allows as many people to escape as possible. The feeder has to be encased in concrete or it has to be fire-resistant cable.
by shermantanktop | 2026-02-07 14:47:31+00:00
The trend up until the 2010s was that global companies were so big and ubiquitous that they could dictate the economic actions of nations, not the other way around. International military conflicts were influenced by the likes of Halliburton. Corporations were the new nation-states, countries were mere speed bumps in the flow of global capital. That was seen by some as a great thing, aligning everyone’s interests together and encouraging peace.

In that world, France betting on Microsoft is not only benign, it’s a positive. That’s also the world of Davos and Jeffrey Epstein.

We’re experiencing a global shift toward nationalism which has pushed back hard on that trend. There’s things to like about that and things to dislike, but those things differ wildly depending on your politics.
by jazzyb | 2026-02-07 14:47:44+00:00
My biggest concern with AI is that I'm not sure how a software engineer can build up this sort of high-level intuition:

> I still have to deeply think about every important aspect of what I want to build. The architecture, the trade offs, the product decisions, the edge cases that will bite you at 3am.

Without a significant development period of this:

> What’s gone is the tearing, exhausting manual labour of typing every single line of code.

A professional mathematician should use every computer aid at their disposal if it's appropriate. But a freshman math major who isn't spending most of their time with just a notebook or chalk board is probably getting in the way of their own progress.

Granted, this was already an issue, to a lesser extent, with the frameworks that the author scorns. It's orders of magnitude worse with generative AI.
by FeteCommuniste | 2026-02-07 14:47:57+00:00
Another thing I've noticed is that using AI, I'm less likely to give existing code another look to see if there's already something in it that does what I need. It's so simple to get the AI to spin up a new class / method that gets close to what I want, so sometimes I end up "giving orders first, asking questions later" and only later realizing that I've duplicated functionality.
by jstummbillig | 2026-02-07 14:48:56+00:00
That took the strangest turn. It started with empowerment to do much more (and that I reallY agree with) — to then use it to... build everything from scratch? What? Why?

What a framework gives me is mostly other people having done precisely the architectural work, that is a prequisite to my actual work. It's fantastic, for the same reason that automatic coding is. I want to solve unsolved problems asap.

I am so confused by the disconnect that I feel like I must be missing something.
by titzer | 2026-02-07 14:50:12+00:00
It just sucks to put in a ton of work into something and then show it off to people but the first reaction is someone comes out of the woodwork to loudly crow that it "misses the mark" and is somehow crap.

It's a completely avoidable experience when the community has a more generally positive attitude. All it takes is a little different phrasing of exactly the same feedback, but with a positive emotional and encouraging tone.

For example, instead of writing:

> Nice visuals, but misses the mark. Neural networks transform vector spaces, and collect points into bins. This visualization shows the structure of the computation. This is akin to displaying a Matrix vector multiplication in Wx + b notation, except W,x,and b have more exciting displays.

> It completely misses the mark on what it means to 'weight' (linearly transform), bias (affine transform) and then non-linearly transform (i.e, 'collect') points into bins

Here's more or less the same comment but with a completely different attitude:

> Oh wow, that's cool! That must have been a ton of work to put together. That got me thinking as to how it's akin to Matrix vector multiplication in Wx + b notation, except W,x,and b have more exciting displays.

> An idea I am wondering about but don't know how to solve is what it means to 'weight' (linearly transform), bias (affine transform) and then non-linearly transform (i.e, 'collect') points into bins.

> Here's some other links that are related and cool: ...

> Cheers, nice work!

Let's not crap on people's work so readily. After all, we have no idea about who the author is. Maybe it's a teenager or a university student and this was their first project. It's really a jarring and demoralizing experience to have your first visualization immediately crapped on.
by ontouchstart | 2026-02-07 14:50:55+00:00
I think there are two use cases of open source, one is for people who need a solution to grab and use. In this case, I think LLM Agents will pick up quickly and replace grab and use type of engineering.

The second use case is for HUMAN to learn from human. Your open source projects are excellent examples, same with Django and Python open source ecosystem.

I just hope humans will not stop learning. As long as you share your passion of learning, people will learn from you. It has nothing to do automation.
by verdverm | 2026-02-07 14:51:01+00:00
Don't extrapolate

There is a ton of wheel reinvention going on right now cause everyone wants to be cool in the age of ai

Use boring tech, you'll thank me and yourself later

Which in this case means, just use regular python. Your devops team is unlikely to allow knock off python in production. TS is fine too, I mainly write Go
by milowata | 2026-02-07 14:51:39+00:00
> no amount of AI is going to help you debug why your auth flow suddenly broke.

What? Coding agents are very capable at helping fix bugs in specific domains. Your examples are like, the exact place where AI can add value.

You do an update, things randomly break: tell Claude to figure it out and it can go look up the breaking changes in the new versions, read your code and tell you what happened and fix it for you.
by admissionsguy | 2026-02-07 14:52:10+00:00
> solutions written in dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python are always woefully slow

True as it may be that they are slow, I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages.

> The money should be secured immediately that cannot be touched by the upcoming governments. It should increase taxes. Independence has a price. We as Europeans should be ready to pay it.

You do you, but increasing taxes to build products to replace products built by private enterprise sounds like a 180 degree opposite of what Europe needs to prosper.
by swat535 | 2026-02-07 14:53:24+00:00
You can apply your own logic here as well.

“While there are differences between Figma’s implementation and Sketch, it's close enough that things are very clearly Sketch-inspired.”

Figma doesn’t have patent on side panels. I don’t think worrying about lawsuits is applicable here.

I’m sure Figma will attempt to abuse its power to kill competition regardless. It’s no different than other corporations.

Likely EU has better regulations.
by Forge36 | 2026-02-07 14:54:27+00:00
I'm still writing code. I'm doing it to solve a problem, there's more to writing code than than typing. Recently AI massively simplified "getting started", and all of the tips here are applicable to working well on a team.

My recent experience: I'm porting an app to Mac. It's been in my backlog for ~2 years. With Claude I had a functional prototype in under a day getting the major behavior implemented. I spent the next two weeks refactoring the original app to share as much logic as possible. The first two days was lots of fun. The refactoring was also something I wanted to flush out unit tests, still enjoyable.

The worst part was debugging really bugs introduced to my code from 5 years ago. My functions had naming issues describing the behavior wrong, confusing Claude, that I needed to re-understand to add new features.

Parts of coding are frustrating. Using AI is frustrating for different reasons.

The most frustrating part was rebasing with git to create a sensible history (which I've had to do without AI in the past), reviewing the sheer volume of changes (14k lines) and then deciding "do I want my name on this" which involved cleaning up all the linter warnings I'd self imposed on myself.
by SkipperCat | 2026-02-07 14:55:05+00:00
Agreed. I used to subscribe to the WSJ and WashPo and I cancelled both because I get both in Apple News. Plus I get the Atlantic, New Yorker, Wired and so many other magazines.

The user interface sucks. Sometimes I go to the actual websites to find articles and then search for them on Apple News. But for $13 USD a month, its a huge bargain and worth the crappy interface.

Another thing that kinda helped me was that Apple News doesn't give you access to the comments sections in these publications. Reading comments in the WSJ was just a huge rage-bait time suck and my life is probably better off not seeing that stuff.
by pixelat3d | 2026-02-07 14:55:44+00:00
I fail to see the obvious wisdom in having AI re-implement chunks of existing frameworks without the real-world battle testing, without the supporting ecosystem, and without the common parlance and patterns -- all of which are huge wins if you ever expand development beyond a single person.

It's worth repeating too, that not everything needs to be a react project. I understand the author enjoys the "vibe", but that doesn't make it a ground truth. AI can be a great accelerator, but we should be very cognizant of what we abdicate to it.

In fact I would argue that the post reads as though the developer is used to mostly working alone, and often choosing the wrong tool for the job. It certainly doesn't support the claim of the title
by Muromec | 2026-02-07 14:56:04+00:00
I posted about Amsterdam municipality digital strategy for next 10 years (tldr dont use azure clown for important stuff) yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46917768

That one explivitly cites the ICC judge incident as one of the reasons, even zo the motion to reduce dependence on American big tech was voted before that happened
by falkensmaize | 2026-02-07 14:57:36+00:00
What I never understand is that people seem to think the conception of the idea and the syntactical nitty gritty of the code are completely independent domains. When I think about “how software works” I am at some level thinking about how the code works too, not just high level architecture. So if I no longer concern myself with the code, I really lose a lot of understanding about how the software works too.
by mcdeltat | 2026-02-07 14:57:51+00:00
The suburbs I'm talking about do not really have nature or space to play. They are by no means rural, but endless seas of identical streets and houses. They are basically the worst of both worlds (no nature and no accessibility), with the advantage of a little extra space. And often they don't have shops either because again, they're so far from anything. Just sad places in my opinion.

Also, there is such thing as medium density, in between "city block" and "endless houses". No one seems to want to acknowledge this exists and may be a good option. I'm fortunate to live in a medium density area and I think it's very pleasant. It is absolutely not a city block but there's a train station 1 minute away and a local shopping/community precinct 10 minutes away (by walking). A decent amount of green space, and it seems to be popular with couples and small families. But suburbs like this seem to be rare and that's my point.
by franze | 2026-02-07 14:58:10+00:00
Claude Opus 4.6:

“He’s a liar and a sneak, Mr. Frodo, and I’ll say it plain — he’d slit our throats in our sleep if he thought he could get away with it,” Sam spat, glaring at the hunched figure scrabbling over the stones ahead. “Every word out of that foul mouth is poison dressed up as helpfulness, and I’m sick of pretending otherwise.” Frodo stopped walking and turned sharply, his eyes flashing with an intensity that made Sam take half a step back. “Enough, Sam. I won’t hear it again. I have decided. Sméagol is our guide and he is under my protection — that is the end of it.” Sam’s face reddened. “Protection! You’re protecting the very thing that wants to destroy you! He doesn’t care about you, Mr. Frodo. You’re nothing to him but the hand that carries what he wants!” But Frodo’s expression had hardened into something almost unrecognizable, a cold certainty that brooked no argument. “You don’t understand what this Ring does to a soul, Sam. You can’t understand it. I feel it every moment of every day, and if I say there is still something worth saving in that creature, then you will trust my judgment or you will walk behind me in silence. Those are your choices.” Sam opened his mouth, then closed it, stung as if he’d been struck. He fell back a pace, blinking hard, and said nothing more — though the look he fixed on Gollum’s retreating back was one of pure, undisguised loathing.
Show HN: One-click AI employee with its own cloud desktop
by fainir | 2026-02-07 14:58:10+00:00
CloudBot gives you a fully configured AI employee with its own cloud computer in one click. Built on OpenClaw.

What you get:
- Full Ubuntu desktop environment in the cloud
- Pre-installed AI agent that sees the screen and controls the computer
- 24/7 availability - your AI keeps working while you sleep
- Uses your own API keys for AI models
- Starting at $69/month

The AI can use VS Code, browse the web, run terminal commands, manage files - anything you'd do on a real desktop. I wake up to completed code reviews, finished research reports, and updated documentation.

Built this because setting up an AI agent with a proper working environment was always the painful part. Now it's just one click.

Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSe4bvDMuKQ

Would love feedback from the HN community!
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-02-07 14:58:39+00:00
>Im always wondering why it takes them so long to find out and inform the public?

Consumers of baby formula are known for having a high baseline rate of spewing things out their holes and having a pretty high standard deviation on top of that rate.

And of course the babies are getting older all this time and changing their diets and responses to things. So many parents are just gonna write it off as "I guess now that my baby is X months old this brand of formula gives him the shits/upsets their stomach."

It's gonna take a while to ID that there's a problem and then actually correlate it to consumption of a specific problem product.

It's not like the kids are turning blue here. That'd be root caused within the week.
by Brajeshwar | 2026-02-07 14:59:18+00:00
Here in India, Paperbacks are still very popular. It is actually much harder to get Hardcover equivalents, which tend to be much more expensive and not generally available.

I’m not getting any younger, and my eyes are much more comfortable with the better quality prints on hardcovers. Of course, this makes me choose the books I buy and be wise with money.

Ever since I restarted collecting books, about 10 years ago, I have only bought hardcovers. It started as they are more beautiful and sturdy to store. A few years ago, I realized I could no longer read paperbacks because of the print quality. I have found some, but they are very rare.