MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-20 01:32:10+00:00
It's not you.

From the viewpoint of the applicant, the probability of anybody even reading your resume declines as the number of applicants skyrockets.

This has been going on for a while and nobody can deny that the chance of any one person getting hired keeps decreasing because of that. This is what anybody can notice right away.

Both employers and applicants have had to face the dramatic loss in ability to select a suitable candidate, not nearly as well as the established hiring process used to be capable of.

Lots of candidates have already accepted that there were almost no chances left for them to select the most appropriate employer from a variety of outstanding opportunities. And so many times the ideal employer is one to which specific qualifications match the candidate best. That ship sailed a long time ago.

The candidates who can compromise and go outside their established background have the best chance since that might be the only openings on the market. After a while employers get accustomed to it, and it sinks in that qualifications are not as important as they thought they were, even if it's not true.

They're not going to find the perfect employee no matter what they do, as long as it's too crowded.

Now it looks like that attitude has crept down the applicant funnel all the way to those who achieve the most promising interview milestone.

In the best case scenario you're still talking to somebody who can be almost 100% sure that you are not the ideal candidate before you even walk in the door. No matter what your qualifications are. The system has already screened that rare bird right out of the dataset, and they know it. It's just too crowded and it's been that way for a while.

If things don't turn around, more of these employer ships will be leaving the dock too, destination unknown :\

You don't game the system, you need a workaround. If you know someone working at a decent company these networking contacts are better than ever, get you in the door and talk to somebody who doesn't expect a perfect qualification match as much as they would before either.

Depending on where you go and how lucky you get playing the odds of course :\
by givemeethekeys | 2026-02-20 01:32:13+00:00
Where I live - in a large American city, the biggest barriers to allowing new development are the lack of provisioning for increased density.

Sure, let that new apartment building come up. Screw everyone's commute time, ability to park, availability of services - no, we won't issue enough permits, require the construction come with a massive underground parking facility, ensure there's sufficient expansion of roads, or drastically improve transit.

Improvements have a history of being so slow to appear and in a deficient state, that the prospect of having more people around makes people unhappy.

"The middle class always pays".
by SpecialistK | 2026-02-20 01:32:43+00:00
Even if there were no other smartwatches in existence and it was iPhone + Apple Watch or Android + a Casio F91w, I would still take the Casio.

The iPhone experience is simply too inferior [for me / my uses] that even if I did encounter the flaws in Samsung watches (it tells me I have a notification and tracks my exercise), it's an accessory compared to a whole platform I don't care for.
by NoLinkToMe | 2026-02-20 01:32:48+00:00
That's partially true. 37% contribution of pay, earmarked for personal welfare expenses (housing/healthcare/retirement), basically covers 60% of a typical state budget.

But these funds aren't pooled like taxes. Typically the top 25% pay something like 80% of the income taxes. And the recipient of that tax revenue is typically the bottom 50% who get means-tested welfare benefits. In the Singaporean model it seems that the CPF funds of 37% are not pooled but allocated to personal accounts.

In other words it's a redistribution in-time (from early to late) and in-type (general income to housing/healthcare/retirement expenses), but to the same person.

Whereas a tax is typically a redistribution in the same time period, but to different persons, and can be earmarked to whatever.

I'd certainly prefer a 37% tax earmarked to me only (with modest ROI) + 10% income taxes + 0% cap gains, than the 40% tax I pay (west-europe) on my income which is wholly redistributed to others + 36% cap gains if I invest the remainder.
by harrall | 2026-02-20 01:33:56+00:00
Humans are also shaped by the training material… maybe all intelligence is.

Talk to people with extreme views and you realize they are actually rational, but the world they live in is not normal or typical. When you apply perfectly sound logic to a deformed foundation, the output is deformed. Even schizophrenic people are rational… Logic is never the problem, it’s always the training material.

Anyway that’s why we had to build a mathematical field of statistics and create tools like sample sizes and distributions to generalize.
by salawat | 2026-02-20 01:33:58+00:00
As mentioned above, it's not a micropayment. It's just a payment. You can transact in whatever amounts you want, and backend systems will bump the numbers around just fine, even for fractions of a cent. Hell, that's how interest and currency exchange settle out. The LLM provider runs a meter. The meter tallies your activity, wraps it in a transaction, hands it to the backend, backend talks to other banks/payment gateways, an ACH happens, done. That isn't a "micropayment". That's just a payment. In fact, if you pay attention, some of the biggest winners in tech, namely cloud providers or AI providers, are as darling as they are because they figured out how to turn everyday compute tasks into billable transactions. We're exceptionally good at tracking the build up of value, even if your atomic unit of transaction is a thousandth of a cent, but x however many million customers you have, it quickly adds up.

Micropayments have always, as long as I've been in the industry, implied a level of disintermediation on the behalf of sender/receiver. The chance to have that kind of utility died September 11th, 2001, when the U.S. and western world suddenly got the bright idea that the only way to protect themselves from terrorists was to modify the system to be able to surveil everybody l, all at once. Bringing us to a codger explaining why P2P micropayments are pretty much a pipedream in the finance world as she is legally practiced.
by Brian_K_White | 2026-02-20 01:34:46+00:00
"A vibe-coded tool can sometimes do the job"

How do you know it ever does the job?

I don't know either for most code that I use, but I do have reason to trust that the author does know. I don't really trust any code itself, only the people and processes (organizational, not computer) that generated it.

I have no reason to trust that ai generated code is doing the correct thing. I know enough about the way code works to know that merely observing it seem to work in a test case means absolutely nothing at all. Multiply that zero by a million more test cases and it's the same zero.

The only thing I trust is that someone actually understood a problem they were trying to solve, and cares about avoiding edge cases, and tries to develop logic to make unintended outcomes impossible etc...

It's not possible for an ai to do any of that regardless what the prompts are. But what they can do is emit stuff that some person once wrote which did exhibit these qualities, and so looks ok, and causes idiots to think they found the cheat code to life, and worse, foist that shit off on everyone else.

My mom does not have my awareness that any of this is going on. She's just out there in the world running into this crap blindly as an unwitting end-user who has no idea how badly she's being served these days when she uses basically any app or service. Thanks for that vibe coders of the world.
by mathgladiator | 2026-02-20 01:36:35+00:00
This is one of the most insane things that I have realized... I have terrible insurance (in case), but I generally don't present it as it is much cheaper and faster to pay cash...

I think we can all agree that the current system is just... ridiculous

I used to be fearful of health concerns, but now I'm a carnivore and just feel great.
by codethief | 2026-02-20 01:36:37+00:00
> Germany is currently actively campaigning to force everyone to use their real names on all social media and force ID checks to do so, a clear chilling effect for free speech.

Source? (Other than one derailed politician, which unfortunately we get to call our chancellor, having a moment? He's still not "Germany", though, not even "the German government".)

> Macron has been railing against free speech specifically in recent months, calling it "bullshit".

I think you're misrepresenting what he said:

https://www.politico.eu/article/emmanuelmacron-calls-social-...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-18/macron-bl...
by salawat | 2026-02-20 01:36:42+00:00
Using a public ledger, that is just surveilled and treated as prosecution futures, or targeting for kidnappers. Yes, we know. It's also got major usability issues, and tends to end up in practice defaulting to a centralized custodial model anyways for the vast majority of users. Where it can't, the onramps to convert to the currency of the land are outlawed.
by Gigachad | 2026-02-20 01:36:49+00:00
For utilities its tolerated because there is a massive difference in cost between servicing different users of different usage patterns. There is no way to have a fixed monthly bill for utilities in a way that is fair. If usage didn't incur such huge costs it would be a fixed bill like internet and phone plans.

While providing extra TV channels costs nothing. Even if you are a power user who watches 10x the TV as a normal person, it doesn't cost the company anything extra.
by skydhash | 2026-02-20 01:37:23+00:00
Is there that much to explore in a given problem space. I believe a lot of people will take the good enough, but stable API over the unstable one that is striving for an unknown state of perfection. The customer of a library are programmers, they can patch over stuff for their own use case. A v2 can be released once enough pain points have been identified, but there should be a commitment to support v1 for a while.
by alphazard | 2026-02-20 01:37:33+00:00
> This assumes every individual is capable of succinctly communicating to the AI what they want. And the AI is capable of maintaining it as underlying platforms and libraries shift.

I think there are people who want to use software to accomplish a goal, and there are people who are forced to use software. The people who only use software because the world around them has forced it on them, either through work or friends, are probably cognitively excluded from building software.

The people who seek out software to solve a problem (I think this is most people) and compare alternatives to see which one matches their mental model will be able to skip all that and just build the software they have in mind using AI.

> And that there is little value in reusing software initiated by others.

I think engineers greatly over-estimate the value of code reuse. Trying to fit a round peg in a square hole produces more problems than it solves.
A sign of an elite engineer is knowing when to just copy something and change it as needed rather than call into it.
Or to re-implement something because the library that does it is a bad fit.

The only time reuse really matters is in network protocols. Communication requires that both sides have a shared understanding.
by userbinator | 2026-02-20 01:37:57+00:00
ARM64 looked like an exercise in "what can we squeeze into a 32-bit instruction" the first time I examined it in detail; the various "load/store register pair" instructions are a great example of this. I would consider it even more difficult to decode than x86, and yet it's still nowhere near as dense as Thumb2 nor x86.
by wainguo | 2026-02-20 01:38:05+00:00
I created https://arcraiders.website, to help you manage your stash. And with the Loadout Crafter, you can now prepare your raids, by knowing exactly what to loot topside (materials and items that recycles into the materials you need). Give it a try, and please share your feedback if you have any.
Good Luck Top Side!
by setupminimal | 2026-02-20 01:38:50+00:00
It's actually not bad form to share guest links on aggregators, for that reason — we're entirely subscriber-funded, and we get a lot of new subscribers coming in via subscriber links, which is why we keep offering them. It's always nice when one of my articles end up being shared widely.

Although we do tend to notice trends in what kinds of articles make it onto aggregators like HN and which ones don't; if you've enjoyed LWN's technical reporting, but you've been getting it all filtered through HN or lobste.rs, you might like to come look at the website directly and see some of the wider content mix that we work on.
by ant6n | 2026-02-20 01:39:16+00:00
Google is is also consistently the most frustrating chat system on top of the model. I use Gemini for non coding tasks. So I need to feed it a bunch of context (documents) to do my tasks - which can be pretty cumbersome. Gemini

* randomly fails reading PDFs, but lies about it and just makes shit up if it can't read a file, so you're constantly second guessing whether the context is bullshit

* will forget all context, especially when you stop a reply (never stop a reply, it will destroy your context).

* will forgot previous context randomly, meaning you have to start everything over again

* turning deep research on and off doesn't really work. Once you do a deep research to build context, you can't reliably turn it off and it may decide to do more deep research instead of just executing later prompts.

* has a broken chat UI: slow, buggy, unreliable

* there's no branching of the conversation from an earlier state - once it screws up or loses/forgets/deletes context, it's difficult to get it back on track

* when the AI gets stuck in loops of stupidity and requires a lot of prompting to get back on the solution path, you will lose your 'pro' credits

It's an odd product: yes the model is smart, but wow the system on top is broken.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2026-02-20 01:39:27+00:00
I really like this idea for a lot of reasons, but especially the last one. It seems like it creates an incentive model that's much closer to rewarding quality investigative journalism rather than the viral junk that ad-driven business models incentivize.

But there is room for it to go wrong, so it would have to be designed carefully. For example it's still vulnerable to the same rage-bait incentive that ad-driven services are, where people decide that articles that make them angry or afraid, or which make their ideological opponents look evil, are more worth spreading (and therefore more worthy of paying to unlock for the crowds).

There's probably no perfect defence against this, but there's at least one option where the kickstarter contract can be structured so that the payments get returned if the article is later found to be factually incorrect in some major aspect. Then at least there's a pull towards truth, even if it's still rage-inducing.

Of course, this model also incentivizes the writing of articles that groups with more buying power are more likely to want to spread, so the wealthier blocs will shape the narrative... but when has the world ever been otherwise.
by zahlman | 2026-02-20 01:39:57+00:00
> examples of things I always thought were generally considered small enough differences...

The thing is that they add up. Writing C or C++ is unpleasant enough for me that I've seriously thought about learning Rust just to have an alternative in that niche that actually has traction this time. (I wasn't under the impression that Swift — or Go, similarly — is intended to be quite as low-level. But maybe they are?)
by tehjoker | 2026-02-20 01:40:35+00:00
Organizing is often less about convincing people that are in hard opposition and more about moving ppl that are pro, soft or uninformed. Then moving those people to take actions that advance the ball in their own interests or the interest of allies. You can really only move people that are hard against when the stakes are low and they have no ideological commitment against what you are suggesting. Getting someone to change ideologically is a slow or impossible process that comes from changes in social position and inner changes.
by overgard | 2026-02-20 01:40:46+00:00
The funny thing is I think these things would work much better if they WEREN'T so insistent on the agentic thing. Like, I find in-IDE AI tools a lot more precise and I usually move just as fast as a TUI with a lot less rework. But Claude is CONSTANTLY pushing me to try to "one shot" a big feature while asking me for as little context as possible. I'd much rather it work with me as opposed to just wandering off and writing a thousand lines. It's obviously designed for anthropic's best interests rather than mine.
by gerdesj | 2026-02-20 01:41:13+00:00
I'm pretty close to your approach too. I rather like lights, water features etc just switching themselves on and off as required. I use the UI to go off piste for me only and not for the wife (at home) or employees (at work)

HA's automations are getting rather good these days but Nodered is handy for when things get complicated. HA has a very neat Nodered integration maintained by Frenck, who is a HA dev.

My general directive is that any automation that is important should be able to work via manual means. Sadly my (Reolink) doorbell does not currently have a hard wired chime. The previous one (Doorbird) did.

At work, my office has 40 odd windows and I have slapped a zwave sensor on all of them and all doors. Its quite handy to have a blank list of open doors/windows on a panel (HA) next to the alarm panel as you set the alarm. The auto entities card is very useful.
Show HN: Free web search for AI agents via MCP (You.com)
by bsparker | 2026-02-20 01:41:56+00:00
Hey HN — I’m a PM at You.com.

We just made our web search API free to use via MCP, so AI agents can call real-time web search without managing API keys or billing.

If you’re building with Cursor, Claude Desktop, OpenAI, or your own MCP-compatible agent, you can plug in our MCP server and get:
• Real-time web results
• Structured answers (news, web, RAG-friendly output)
• No cost for search via MCP

Docs are here:
https://docs.you.com/developer-resources/mcp-server

Would love feedback from folks building agentic workflows:
• What’s missing?
• What would make this actually useful in production?
• Where does search break in your current stack?
by acheong08 | 2026-02-20 01:42:14+00:00
100% agree even as someone who grew up around people speaking mandarin. I still cannot write despite having taken the language in both GCSEs and IB, while also living in the country for 3+ years.

i can speak the language just enough to get by but once you get into technical terms, i'm once again completely lost. Unless they do a Singapore or Dubai and make business in English, i dont see any chance of them attracting talent
by abustamam | 2026-02-20 01:42:32+00:00
That's fair. I work remotely as well and to be honest I just cycle through the same two pants I got from Stitch Fix and a few collared shirts, and some concert merch for more casual outings.

I was speaking more to waistline — I have a 28 inch waist and the smallest I usually find is like 30 or more, so even a belt can't fix that.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-20 01:43:07+00:00
Yes, I agree. That was my entire point when I said: What matters is the contexts in which I reproduce it (if any).

The issue is not (or at least should not be) that LLMs are trained on material subject to copyright or can be very intentionally coaxed into regurgitating copyrighted material. The issue should be people building or using systems with the explicit intent of reproducing copyrighted material in an unauthorized manner.
by layer8 | 2026-02-20 01:43:17+00:00
I bought a stockpile of Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard for Business (LXM-00001) when they were still available, after Microsoft announced discontinuing their peripherals. I hope they’ll last me for a long time. I don’t know if the curved geometry still counts as a traditional layout for you, though. Incase, who acquired Microsoft’s peripherals IP, has re-released them, but apparently can’t keep up with the orders: https://www.incase.com/products/ergonomic-keyboard
by fudged71 | 2026-02-20 01:44:42+00:00
This is in line with my thinking, can you say more about how intent changes how you would use a system like this?

I had a really complex negotiation for car repairs (goodwill warranty, balancing a long list of repairs/recalls etc) which was pretty time sensitive. If I had already had my service record in a structured format along with the manufacturer's policies I feel like I could have responded with better preparation. Same for any other big maintenance items on the house, mortgage, insurance, etc.

And then there's the flip side--what do my policies and healthcare/loyalty plans cover that I'm not taking advantage of? What can be combined towards my goals etc.
by neelc | 2026-02-20 01:45:07+00:00
Mac Mini/Studio has an integrated power supply, but other Mini PCs do not have the same luxury. It doesn't matter if you're Minisforum or HP.

Minisforum probably reused the x86 power supply for ARM. The x86 MS-01 and MS-A2 supports GPUs after all.

I'm not a hardware engineer, I've failed miserably in software engineering and now run a VPS host.
by lesuorac | 2026-02-20 01:45:45+00:00
I mean somebody could make a singular rust dependency that re-packages all of the language team's packages.

But what's the threat model here. Does it matter that the Rust STD library doesn't expose say "Regex" functionality forcing you to depend on Regex [1] which is also written by the same people who write the STD library [2]? Like if they wanted to add a back-door in to Regex they could add a backdoor into Vec. Personally I like the idea of having a very small STD library so that it's focused (as well as if they need to do something then it has to be allowed by the language unlike say Go Generics or ELM).

Personally I think there's just some willful blindness going on here. You should never have been blindly trusting a giant binary blob from the std library. Instead you should have been vendoring your dependencies and at that point it doesn't matter if its 100 crates totaling 100k LOC or a singular STD library totaling 100k LOC; its the same amount to review (if not less because the crates can only interact along `pub` boundaries).
[1]: https://docs.rs/regex/latest/regex/

[2]: https://github.com/rust-lang/regex
by tsunamifury | 2026-02-20 01:46:04+00:00
I have worked in with the Chinese now for two years in technical fields. I have a strict requirement that they learn English as it is a more technical and specific language and less prone to the use of metaphorical weasel words that slow progress.

I have openly stated that it is a strictly less technical language and often draws teams in to vague specifications and much more verbose language to find specificity. I have billions of dollars in progress to back that up.

There is a lot about Chinese and American culture that will surprise you when the rubber meets the road.