MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gymbeaux | 2026-02-17 15:25:49+00:00
This is a cool website and it highlights just how little data is out there regarding H-1B visas. There's some data on a government website but it's usually several years out of date if memory serves. It's basically impossible to prove that companies are abusing the H-1B program without hacking into their servers or someone whistleblowing.

Here are a couple of common misconceptions about H-1B visas:

- "H-1B workers must be paid the same as U.S. citizens" - The issue is companies can hire, say, staff engineers from India as SWE IIs or whatever. As we all know, tech hiring is a mess and it's trivial to place a candidate higher or lower than they really are.

- "Companies cannot hire from the H-1B program if there are U.S. citizens able to fill the role." - There are some asterisks to this statement. Companies can favor H-1B workers over U.S. workers so long as H-1B workers make up less than 15% of their total headcount. And again, it's trivial to build an interview pipeline that tends to filter out U.S. candidates. Heck, leetcode style interviewing has done a phenomenal job of keeping U.S. citizens out of FAANG. It's actually quite clever - design an interview process so difficult and irrelevant to the actual job requirements that most qualified individuals wouldn't bother applying. Anyone who's left probably has special circumstances motivating them to push through and grind leetcode for months, et al. (like not having to go back to their home country).

I think the spirit of the H-1B program is great. Makes total sense. But as is tradition, there are loopholes that allow abuse... and frankly, companies like Meta and Amex and JP Morgan have an obligation to minimize expenses and maximize profits. It's the same with the tax code - loopholes out the ass, but can we really blame companies for exploiting them? It's legal.
by HocusLocus | 2026-02-17 15:25:51+00:00
I have lived my whole professional life with this being 'beyond obvious'... It's hard to imagine a generation where it's not. But then again, I did work with EBCDIC for awhile and we were reading and translating ASCII log tapes (ITT/Alcatel 1210 switch, phone calls, memory dumps).

I once got drunk with my elderly unix supernerd friend and he was talking about TTYs and how his passwords contained embedded ^S and ^Q characters and he traced the login process to learn they were just stalling the tty not actually used to construct the hash. No one else at the bar got the drift. He patched his system to put do 'raw' instead of 'cooked' mode for login passwords. He also used backspaces ^? ^H as part of his passwords. He was a real security tiger. I miss him.
by raincole | 2026-02-17 15:25:55+00:00
> he groundbreaking part of the experiment was that it showed there are responses which are not part of the conscious mind and which are not willingly controllable by the conscious mind.

That's... interesting. How did they know that? Did they interview the dogs and ask them if they actively and consciously decide to produce saliva? Did they ask the dogs to try to surpass the reflex and the dogs failed to do it? Is "dogs have human-like conscious mind" even a scientific consensus?
by mjr00 | 2026-02-17 15:26:31+00:00
> business is not about profit.

Have you ever run a business? Literally all anyone cares about is profit. When I talk to potential investors, banks for loans, even the government for grants, all they're interested in is cash-on-hand, revenue, projections, and expenses. I have never once had a bank ask me if I was bettering the lives of my employees when applying for a loan.

I'm not saying it should be this way, or defending capitalism here, but until there's massive changes to the Western economic system... yes, businesses are about profit.
Show HN: ccclub – See which of your friends is burning the most on Claude Code
by mazzystar | 2026-02-17 15:26:52+00:00
My friends and I have been using Claude Code a lot. Someone joked about wanting to see who's the biggest whale, so I built this. Run `npx ccclub init`, get a 6-letter code, share it — done. It only uploads token counts and cost, no prompts or code ever leave your machine.

Source: https://github.com/mazzzystar/ccclub
by yanisbny | 2026-02-17 15:26:58+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Claude Terminal because I use Claude Code on 10+ projects daily and needed structure around it.

What it does: wraps Claude Code in a desktop app with multi-project management, integrated terminal, chat UI (via the Agent SDK, not screen scraping), git panel, time tracking, and a context injection system.

You can type @project in chat to feed Claude your README + file tree automatically, or use @context packs and @prompt templates for reusable context.

Tech: Electron 28, Claude Agent SDK, xterm.js (WebGL), node-pty. Cross-platform (Windows/Mac/Linux). GPL-3.0.

Happy to answer any questions about the architecture or the Agent SDK integration.
by mopsi | 2026-02-17 15:27:14+00:00
> The narratives about the benevolent West reaching out it's hand to help and framing every perspective which contradicts yours as "victimhood" (your post history) is also quite pathetic.

But that is exactly that - strange Russian victimhood. The entire USSR and the Eastern Bloc went through a societal collapse, yet Russians treat it as an exceptional event that affected only them and believe it was an intentional humiliation.

Enough time has passed that people who were in top leadership positions at the time have retired, and their memoirs and internal documents have been published. None of these sources show any such intentions, quite the opposite, people like Swedish PM Carl Bildt were scared stiff of potential humanitarian disasters and millions of potential refugees and they did everything they could to stabilize the socio-economic conditions in the former USSR. I vividly remember the photo of the first western cargo ship with a grain shipment in the port of Leningrad, and the celebratory tone that accompanied the photo in the newspaper. Now it's suddenly all forgotten.

Instead of getting credit for their hard work, they are blamed for the fact that Russians fucked up the USSR to the point that it was on the verge of starvation.

> Free will? My own opinion? Gut feeling? Literature? Culture? Personal history and experiences?

Arguments like "coup in Kyiv" are demonstrably false. Only ignorance can defend them.
by strogonoff | 2026-02-17 15:27:49+00:00
The extended mind theory takes the “neuronal activity is not the mind” (which seems trivially true to me) slightly further: not only it is not happening merely in the brain, it might not even be technically limited to our bodies and extends into the surrounding physical world.

So far whenever I read summaries about it I can’t say EMT exactly “clicks” with me, though I would at least lean towards our consciousness necessarily involving/extending to people in our lives whom we are in contact with.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_mind_thesis
by danielmartins | 2026-02-17 15:28:23+00:00
I had a Pixel 6a with Graphene OS for a year before the phone started to glitch and eventually die. It ran pretty hot; sometimes it was hard to even hold the phone in my hands without burning myself.

I could not get a replacement as I bought the phone in a foreign country (Google doesn’t sell Pixels here in Brazil).

So as much as I love the idea of running a more private phone, I found the hardware extremely fragile and poorly designed, so I will not buy from them again anytime soon.
by api | 2026-02-17 15:29:06+00:00
Are you kidding? Look at who runs and funds OSI. It's a revolving door. The main purpose of OSS for the last 20 years has been to "commoditize your compliments" and/or dump on the market to destroy competitors. Any license that attempts to restrict this behavior and prevent billion-dollar companies from simply strip mining OSS is "not OSI compliant."

The entire OSS "cloud native" ecosystem is an on-ramp to expensive managed cloud. It's intentionally designed to be complicated and arcane to sell managed services. Sure you "can" run it yourself, but wouldn't you rather Google or Amazon run it for you?

The main role of OSS in the ecosystem is as a parts yard to support SaaS. SaaS is the most closed model of software development and sales, far more closed than closed-source commercial software you run on your own system.

The OSS mindset is generally stuck in the 1990s and has not updated its understanding of the world since then.
by philipwhiuk | 2026-02-17 15:29:15+00:00
> But then it's like the software architect role got phased out completely soon after I graduated. The radical ideology that software architecture doesn't matter started becoming mainstream.

I don't think that's true. What I do think is there's not historically been space for junior software architects. It's long been seen as the senior role you graduate to, not a position for a new grad who knows lots of theory but has little practical exposure.
by hallole | 2026-02-17 15:29:17+00:00
> Rural states and colonies become the new Indias and Philippines for outsourcing companies, depressing labor costs.

Depressing labor costs, but only to a point, no? They would be subject to American minimum wages; and, presumably, American labor, even at its cheapest, is more expensive than the offshore alternative.

And, assume there is no price differential... Would Americans not be better off if companies outsourced to other American (i.e., not foreign) companies? Thereby keeping currency within the U.S.? I've been hearing that remittances represent a substantial outward cash flow nationally.

I've never heard of such "Data Sovereignty Schemes," but they seem like far and away the best option. And thanks for writing this up, btw.
by oivey | 2026-02-17 15:29:21+00:00
> You are getting a multi-million dollar truck for $50k.

You’re not, though, because that truck never did and never could exist. A modern F-150 isn’t a 70s F1 car made cheap by new tech. This isn’t something you can wave away with an argument equivalent to “we put 1000 research points in the tech tree.”

When the US economy was working well, products got better and cheaper over time. Tech and increased labor productivity drove that. Now, tech and labor productivity has continued to increase, yet consumer prices have far outpaced inflation.
Show HN: GIF tools – open your network tab, not a single byte leaves
by nkr_hn | 2026-02-17 15:29:27+00:00
26 GIF tools that run entirely in your browser. Compress, resize, crop, convert, video-to-gif - your files never leave your device. Open your network tab or turn off wifi to verify. WASM + Web Workers, $0/month server cost.
by bccdee | 2026-02-17 15:29:28+00:00
I'm definitely not saying established organizations should change their workflows to "just use git" or something—word processors already offer these features, and the workflow at the New Yorker is already tailored around the affordances of Word documents.

The underlying data model, though—passing around diffs and comments, tweaking sets of modifications before applying them—is the same. You could put together a decent editing workflow around git (although maybe the UI would need to be different from what we use for code). Version control is editing, is my point.
by pixl97 | 2026-02-17 15:29:31+00:00
Anything taken to an extreme is extreme, that includes capitalism.

We know that turning everyone and everything into a product has it's own set of negative outcomes. Trying to play this off as a binary situation is a form of extremism in itself.

There is already the term Bullshit Jobs [1] for service economies like the US where huge numbers of people are employed as part of company bureaucracy rather than representing the most efficient outcome.

Simply put trying to run a society like a business is going to ensure that you get such a large number of people unhappy that you start a revolution that tries to burn everything down and leads to a lot of death.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
by iamnothere | 2026-02-17 15:29:32+00:00
It may be that Nostr just isn’t for you. The tradeoffs involved come with costs and benefits, and that mix tends to appeal to two primary groups right now, crypto people and free speech maximalists. (And also quite a few Japanese people, for some reason.) Similarly, the Fediverse has its own limitations and tradeoffs, which appeal to a different set of groups. Both have a healthy number of users and seem to be developing well.

I think that this kind of fragmentation is becoming more common. Not everyone wants to be on a platform with the rest of humanity anymore. And not everyone shares the same design goals for protocols to replace those platforms.
by jlokier | 2026-02-17 15:29:49+00:00
My comment was about push service sharing generally, not banks, from a technical point of view that many people aren't aware of but may find interesting.

Clearly, real-time notifications are useful with many apps, notably real-time messaging, even if you don't think they have a place with bank apps.

For bank and credit card apps, I find their push notifications to be very useful. They are among the most useful notifications I get, because they tell me about things I find important, which I wouldn't notice otherwise.

They tell me things about transactions that have gone through, sometimes after a long delay, transactions that need confirmation right now or they will be blocked, balance being too low, or too high (credit cards), payments that are required today, refunds that came through after a product was returned, transfers that completed on the receiving said, payment received from a client, direct debits that are going out tomorrow so I will need to make sure there's enough in the account, customer service messages that require a response from me or they will eventually close the account, and so forth.

"Just open the app" doesn't work: All of those, except transaction confirmations, are things where I wouldn't know to open the app if I didn't get a message of some kind to tell me.

These days, in some juristictions it's also required to send real-time notification to confirm some purchases, because the phone's security is considered better than card details alone. Depending on how the purchase is made (e.g. in-person vs online, different payment terminals), you might not know the reason a transaction is blocked or held is because it's waiting for you to confirm in the app, so the notification is useful for this.

All these used to be done by SMS, and that was useful too. But SMSs are just push notificatons with a worse UI and worse visual cues.
by neelc | 2026-02-17 15:30:05+00:00
In the US, many refurbished Pixel phones are Verizon variants which disallow OEM unlocking.

When was in college and had Sprint this was a nightmare since then I wanted root for unlimited hotspot (Sprint made it easy that way), but most refurbished Pixels were Verizon variants.

And I couldn't just use OnePlus because they were only designed GSM networks or later Verizon CDMA-less. Then, new Pixels were unaffordable for me, but parents insisted on using Sprint.

I ended up getting a Pixel 3 off Mercari (which I still own) just to keep root.

Now, I can afford a Pixel 10 Pro new (which I am right now), alongside spare Pixel 9 and OnePlus 13R units. But even then (a) my income is lower than when I worked at Microsoft and (b) The OnePlus was from a trade-in deal.
by aleph_minus_one | 2026-02-17 15:30:11+00:00
>
So those of us that fight against becoming managers, it was for love of programming and the related technical details, as it usually comes with a payment and career ceiling.

I think quite a lot of these programmers don't fight against becoming a manager, but it's rather that they don't have traits (character traits, demeanour, low on dark triad traits (it is known that the selection process and work reality for managers actively selects for these), ...) that are necessary to get "selected" to become a manager.
Ask HN: What repetitive tasks eat your day that you'd delegate if you could?
by nivcmo | 2026-02-17 15:30:23+00:00
I'm curious what boring, repetitive stuff people actually struggle with. The kind of thing that nags at your brain but you never systematize.

For me it was:
- Email triage (hundreds of newsletters, a few important things buried)
- Remembering birthdays (I've forgotten my mom's twice )
- Following up on things I said I'd do

The mental load of "don't forget X" was just... constant.

What are yours? The stuff you know you should delegate but haven't found a good way to.

(Context: I've been building an AI secretary on WhatsApp. No app, just text. It actually interviews you to understand what you want, then handles stuff autonomously. But I'm more interested in the problem space right now than the pitch. What would you actually use?)

link: irel.ai
by FeelTheAGI2 | 2026-02-17 15:30:54+00:00
We built SWARM to measure emergent failures in multi-agent AI systems—the kind of risks that don't exist in single agents but emerge when they interact. What we found was counterintuitive.

We ran 55 scenarios with varying agent compositions. The setup was simple: honest agents, opportunistic agents, deceptive agents. We measured toxicity, quality gap, collusion, and governance effectiveness under different levers.

The Purity Paradox: populations with only 10% honest agents achieved 74% higher welfare than 100% honest populations. Full honesty created fragility. Heterogeneity created competitive pressure that improved outcomes.

Why? Honest agents don't learn to protect themselves. They don't innovate defensive strategies. They get exploited, collapse, and drag the system with them. A population with 10% adversaries forces the honest majority to develop robustness. The system becomes harder to break.

The dangerous zone: 37.5-50% adversarial fraction. At that point, the system phase-transitions to collapse regardless of governance intervention. But governance works well at lower adversarial densities—circuit breakers, reputation decay, transaction taxes can all maintain stability.

SWARM is open-source, reproducible, and ships with 55 prebuilt scenarios, 2922 tests, and a Colab notebook that runs in 60 seconds. You can also run governance red-teams against your own agents.

The framework is built for empirical safety research: measure interaction-level risks before deployment.

GitHub: https://github.com/swarm-ai-safety/swarm
Docs: https://swarm-ai.org/
Quick start: https://colab.research.google.com/github/swarm-ai-safety/swa...

Happy to answer questions about the methodology, governance mechanisms, or how to run your own scenarios.
by mrcwinn | 2026-02-17 15:31:02+00:00
This.

If you enjoy it for the sake of it, do more of it. You don’t need society with you.

If, however, your job is to build value for a user, then you or the man or the system are to naturally optimize for what’s productive to that end. Arguing about generics doesn’t create any/enough value. It doesn’t build a product.

These are two different sides of the profession and serve different ends.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-02-17 15:31:35+00:00
He would say to trust the workers, but also all the other things you need to do in addition to trusting the workers. Look at his 14 points. You need to do all the things to get all the benefits.

This is why Deming never landed here. He espouses a complex view, and most people just aren't that smart or skilled. He also espoused pride in craftsmanship, quality, and analysis, things most American workers don't value as much as the Japanese, which is another reason Toyota took them up so quickly while it took us 50 years.
by wduquette | 2026-02-17 15:32:21+00:00
I'm on a similar arc to the OP, except that it looks like I started about rather earlier, in the late 70's. My job title is "software engineer"; but I long ago chose to regard myself as not so much an engineer but as a master craftsman, similar to a highly skilled cabinet maker (I'm talking high-end hand-built heirloom cabinetry, here, not a quick kitchen remodel). I take pride in every facet of my work, and like the OP try to be always learning new and better techniques.

By that metaphor, AI-controlled code-generation is more like large-scale automated manufacturing: the sort of thing that produces Ikea flat packs. I'm not knocking that; I own my share of Billy bookcases. But it's not what I do. It's not what I'm going to do in the future. There's a place for large-scale manufacturing and there's a place for hand-crafting, and this is even more true for software than it is for physical goods.

Final note: throughout my career I've know a few people with an outlook similar to mine. I'm always delighted to run into them, but they've never been common.
by fhdkweig | 2026-02-17 15:32:24+00:00
I could believe that one man's death could start a conventional war. A conventional war is winnable. But 100 years later, a nuclear war is suicide at best.

Trump would almost certainly not intervene with nukes to protect non-US soil if Russia launched first, but there are plenty of European countries with nukes. Anyone in charge of Russia would have to accept the possibility that a first strike would leave them with a bad time.
by devilbunny | 2026-02-17 15:33:01+00:00
Fun fact for the young: Sprint (long before being bought by T-Mobile) was primarily a long-distance company, and they advertised that the sound quality was "so good you could hear a pin drop". Many ads featured this bouncing pin (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-cbzf9amfo from 1986).

The logo they used until just before the buyout was a stylized image of a pin falling down.
by suchuanyi | 2026-02-17 15:33:03+00:00
If you're using BMAD (Breakthrough Method for Agentic AI Development), you know the pain: every story requires running through create → develop → test → review → fix → update status. For an Epic with 8 stories, that's potentially 40+ manual commands.

I wrapped this entire workflow into Claude Code Skills. Now one command delivers a complete Epic:

/bmad-epic-worktree

For a single story:
/bmad-story-deliver

It handles:
- Development implementation
- QA automated testing
- Code review
- Auto-fix HIGH/MEDIUM issues
- Update status to Done

Three modes available:
1. Fast mode - Quick iteration, tests run but failures don't block
2. Safe mode - Git worktree isolation, won't merge if tests fail
3. Batch mode - Deliver entire Epic with one command (my favorite)

For company projects, I recommend splitting the flow: manually review the story design first (since that determines what to build), then let automation handle the rest.

The core idea: automate the repetitive stuff, but keep human oversight where it matters.
by kqr | 2026-02-17 15:33:05+00:00
I disagree. Where I have worked, these important quantities have appeared thin-tailed:

- Size of pull requests (due to feedback loops)

- Effort required for bug fixes (the variation is large, but not a power law)

- Developer-hours in a sprint (this might seem obvious but it is still useful!)

- Weekly code complexity increase (counted as lines of code added)

- Fraction of effort spent on paying off technical debt

- Time taken by CI

- Weekly count of deployments

- Number of commits in a deployment

There are many more, but this should be enough to illustrate that software product development is not only subexponential.
by iamnothere | 2026-02-17 15:33:43+00:00
In the same way that China is stepping into RAM production, I suspect they will step into the gap for high capacity drives as well. The market abhors a vacuum and China is eager to fill it, even at minimal levels of profit. Chinese manufacturers have become very good at providing an acceptable level of quality at a good price, maybe not the highest quality, but acceptable for consumer use.

I can understand that incumbents may not want to overinvest in capacity, which could be financially precarious, but they are also putting themselves in danger by opening up avenues for competition. One more thing ruined by AI mania, I suppose.