MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xenadu02 | 2026-02-27 00:38:54+00:00
> At least allow us to use names instead of numbers.

You can for the destination. That's the whole reason you need the "&": to tell the shell the destination is not a named file (which itself could be a pipe or socket). And by default you don't need to specify the source fd at all. The intent is that stdout is piped along but stderr goes directly to your tty. That's one reason they are separate.

And for those saying "<" would have been better: that is used to read from the RHS and feed it as input to the LHS so it was taken.
by Trufa | 2026-02-27 00:39:43+00:00
@grok remove the corporate jargon and explain it in a direct and candid way in a single sentence

@grok
We're slashing the company from 10k to under 6k people because AI plus tiny teams now let us do the same work with way fewer bodies, and the CEO would rather gut half the staff in one brutal move than bleed out slowly over years.

I am curious why this got so popular, it really is the same thing, am I missing something? Is it because of elon/jack dynamics?
by teyopi | 2026-02-27 00:39:59+00:00
> But China has some of the most imperialist policies in the world.

Citation needed?

US and allies have invaded or intervened in 20+ countries in last 20 years in the name of "western values" where values means $$$$ and hegemony.

Educate me please with a comparison of what China has done to be "some of the most imperialist policies"?
by stephen_g | 2026-02-27 00:40:21+00:00
Yeah I'm not saying they are unheard of - for example I've done a lot of stuff in AV and almost every single extension cord you use in that world will be a piggy-back right angle (always moulded though because they have to be test-and-tagged so a reputable certifier won't pass them).

Just that not having any pictures of the plug that you see on 90% of cords in normal use is an odd choice.
by mhitza | 2026-02-27 00:40:29+00:00
What's the US history around nationalization? Would "confiscation", ever be a likelyhood on escalation?

On a quick search I came up with an article, that at least thematically, proposes such ideas about the current administration "Nationalization by Stealth: Trump’s New Industrial Playbook"

https://thefulcrum.us/trump-state-control-capitalism
by al_borland | 2026-02-27 00:41:12+00:00
From everything I’ve seen, LLMs aren’t exactly known for writing extremely optimized code.

Also, what happens to the stability and security of my phone after they let an LLM loose on the entire code base for a weekend?

There are 1.5 billion iPhones out there. It’s not a place to play fast and loose with bleeding edge tech known for hallucinations and poor architecture.
by mschuster91 | 2026-02-27 00:41:53+00:00
> And finally, COVID proved to a large number of companies and industries that 100% WFH and Async for white collar roles does work. But wait, if I can hire Joe in Cary to work async, why can't I hire Jan in Karlin, Prague or Jagmeet in Koramangla, Bangalore? This means I can also enhance FCF positivity while not impacting delivery.

Cultural differences. Things like "saving face" / not being able to admit a lack of knowledge in Asian cultures, Americans that need to be coddled (the higher up, the more dumbed down execs want information because they insist on micromanaging - they try to have their cake and eat it at the same time), Germans being blunt and direct to the point it offends Americans, Americans unable to comprehend Europe has labor regulations including on overtime and on letting go of staff... if you just say, you hire a bunch of bodies somewhere else and expect that to work out, you end up screwed - and many did end up screwed. In both ways, by the way.
by doyougnu | 2026-02-27 00:42:02+00:00
I think this is exactly right. I've been thinking of "this time" as similar to the advent of digital spreadsheets. Spreadsheets existed for thousands of years but spreadsheet programs transformed spreadsheet work that took hours or weeks into seconds. You still had to know what you were doing, and if you knew what you were doing you were easily 10x faster than those that didn't.

I think we are in a similar situation with code generation now, then only difference in my mind is that LLMs come with a massive platform risk. Who's to say that one day anthropic decides my company is too much of a competitor to use their tool (like they've already done with openai) or what if they decide that instead of pulling their product from my use they just make it generate worse code, or even insert malicious payloads. A dependence on these tools is wildly more risky than dependency on a word processor or a spreadsheet program. It reminds me of the arguments around net neutrality and I cannot fathom how people building on top of, and with, these tools do not see the mountain of risks around them.
Show HN: Agentplace, the tool we built to become a 20x company
by Fortunevlad | 2026-02-27 00:42:18+00:00
Garry Tan posted a video this week about what he calls 20x companies. The idea is that small teams beat incumbents many times their size by automating everything internally, not just one or two functions. This alpha is real, and I think it is underhyped tbh.

But here's the honest part, building agents is hard, expensive and most of the scaffolding we make would be obsolete with a new labs release. at the same time models are not quite there and they are not keeping up with "coding is dead" and "knowledge workers are doomed". Pushing them beyond what they can actually do reliably just boils the ocean. And we don't need to.

Staying in sync with Labs' release pace is already super mega photonic speed. So to sum up: we need to use what they are capable of, keep our options open and quickly improve our agents. How to do it w/o a dedicated person for AI innovation?

That problem is what we kept running into at Agentplace.

We wanted a builder that handles the full stack for an internal agent: backend, database, any MCP-ish integrations, and a real custom UI.

A side note: The zero-UI autonomous agent dream is completely oversold. The communication loop between models and humans is still tight, and a purpose-built interface that fits that loop makes agents dramatically more reliable in practice. Custom UI is underrated.

The other thing we learned is that you only understand what an agent is missing once you're actually working with it. So we built two modes: Work mode, where you and your team use the agent in real workflows, and Edit mode, which you can jump into the moment something breaks or a better model ships. This has been our most impactful design decision. You spot the gap during actual work, fix it in minutes, and you're back. No ticket, no dev request, no deploy cycle. That unlocks something real for small teams.

We've built this system and it was a productivity unlocker for everyone. Everyone on the team managed to build exactly the agent they wanted using our AI builder and start using it immediately. Over the weeks the agents really grow into complex automation tools but adding what's missing during the work. That said, a lot of "cool agent ideas" died like in an evolutionary process. Useful ones kept growing while less frequent ones just stayed at the end of the agent list.

We took it further, we wanted to give our clients an agent to gather requirements. These requirements our team then queries using their own agents. So we added a public publish option. Client-facing and internal workflows can share the same database, foundation but with diff permissions.

We can share agents with specific teammates and deliver them anywhere: web, Claude Code, Cursor, ChatGPT, or as a tool called by other agents.

We use Agentplace for our own startup every day. Every internal automation we rely on lives here. We're giving any early-stage team $1k in credits to start building. It costs us real money, so no public link. If you're genuinely building, DM me on X: @fortune_vy

become a real 20x company!
by ajross | 2026-02-27 00:42:49+00:00
We are and have been for many years now. Check out the "free" phone tier at your mobile vendor of choice. Those are great devices!

They may not match your particular tastes, but people with inflexible taste are always the last-resort market for manufacturers of commoditized products. People still buy from Hermès even though Shein completely dwarfs them in revenue, etc... That's the way it will always be with Apple too.
by VonGuard | 2026-02-27 00:42:52+00:00
Interesting perspective, here, from someone who has observed a tiny bit of unknown streaming history.

So, way back in the day, 2005, Turner Broadcast corp. launched this weird-ass thing, known as GameTap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameTap . It was a subscription-based service that offered on-demand retro videogames. While it started as a way to play MAME Pac-Man and Metal Slug legally from a legit service, it grew into a competitor in the online games market arena in a time when Steam was still nascent.

The whole thing was created by this amazing fellow named Blake Lewin. Blake was really sharp, and having built this on-demand, streaming emulation service, he even went on to add at-the-time-modern games. Now, this stuff literally just installed the game on your HD and let you play, so it wasn't quite Stadia or Luma, but it was absolutely ahead of its time, and it was really slick.

I was a journalist then, and while games journalists get pampered, Turner moving into games was on another level. They launched this thing at the Armani Store on Market St. in SF, and when you walked in, they asked you to pick some sun-glasses from the case to take with you when you left.

GameTap was great and even gathered a following, but from the moment it launched, I knew what it really was: Turner's scientific experiment to build the infrastructure to later allow it to stream its enormous library of content. Movies, cartooons, TV shows, etc.

I was having lunch with Blake, a few years into GameTap, and I asked him point blank how the video streaming prototypes were coming (pure guess, no evidence). He was baffled and wanted to know how I knew they were working on that. Said it had been going great!

But in the end, the service never launched, AFAIK. Maybe some remnant is still there somewhere, but it just shows, you can be years ahead in your planning and development, and still end up alone at the end dance. It's a shame. Turner has so many great things in their library, why is it not possible for me to just pay someone for access to all the old movies in the TCM vault!?
by cthalupa | 2026-02-27 00:43:04+00:00
I can see the argument for Hong Kong. I don't agree, really, but I can understand it. Under the strictest of definitions, perhaps it isn't.

But Taiwan is very obviously a totally separate country no matter what fictions anyone employs. If you are trying to talk about the thin veneer of everyone going "Uh huh, sure, China, yep Taiwan is totally part of you, wink wink, nudge nudge" as somehow making China not imperialist when Taiwan basically lives under the perpetual threat of a Chinese military invasion and having their own democratic form of government overthrown and replaced with the CCP, then... I don't really know what to say.

I suppose we could argue about imperialism being more of an economic thing - in which case this all still holds up - China's investments in Africa are effectively the same playbook the US has run out in developing nations for years. The US learned it from prior imperialist nations but belts and roads is nearly a carbon copy of what the US has done in other places.

But let's look at what the original poster was actually talking about - saying that China is safe because they don't have a military industrial complex because they're not imperialist. The proper word to use, if we want to get down to the semantics of it all, would be expansionist - but it's still not true. China has the 2nd largest military industrial complex in the world, and the gap is shrinking every day between them and the US. And if you were to look at wartime capacity, where China's dual-use shipyards could be swapped to naval production instead of commercial, a huge portion of that gap disappears immediately.
by pavel_lishin | 2026-02-27 00:43:21+00:00
There might not be that much demand. My understanding is that a good printing of a book will only make money back in pretty large amounts; if there's only a thousand weirdos in the world who want to buy it (and I'm one of those thousand), it'll only barely break even, if that.

Actually, I'm wrong, there is a newly published version that costs under a hundred bucks.
by internet101010 | 2026-02-27 00:43:29+00:00
Not sure if you have experimented with it yet but COSMIC is a DE made by System76 (creators of Pop!_OS) and manages to get pretty close to what I have been seeking, which is essentially MacOS with tiling. They basically gave up on GNOME and built it in Rust from scratch. Still a few major things like HDR missing but overall it's solid.

You get the tiling without the config that comes with Hyprland, with the added option of toggling between tiled or floating. Settings are minimal but they are slowly adding more when there is enough demand. IDE-style theming is done at system-level so that applications match.
by generuso | 2026-02-27 00:43:32+00:00
Sure. Line scan indoor units are extremely affordable, and some cost less that $20, sold as spare parts for robot vacuum cleaners. Outdoor units (with higher ambient light tolerance and longer range) are an order of magnitude more expensive, but also available.

Here is some detailed information about low cost units:
https://github.com/kaiaai/awesome-2d-lidars/blob/main/README...
by JohnMakin | 2026-02-27 00:43:52+00:00
I have hit points in this in my career where making a moral stand would be harmful to me (for minor things, nothing as serious as this). It's a very tempting and incentivized decision to make to choose personal gain over ideal. Idealists usually hold strong until they can convince themselves a greater good is served by breaking their ideals. These types that succumb to that reasoning usually ironically ending up doing the most harm.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-27 00:44:12+00:00
It doesn't matter anymore. Output is good enough - much of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and other tech companies backbone infra is already implemented and owned by product and engineering teams in Poland and India. And if middle managers cannot manage to maintain output when faced with those with cultural differences, we'll fire them and hire people who can.

This is why you see the trope of "Indian C-Suite means layoffs and offshoring" - it's not the C-Suite that makes this decision, it's boards that decided to do so and thus hired an Indian origin C-Suite to operationalize that strategy. It's the same reason why Taiwanese Americans were over-represented in Hardware Engineering C-Suite roles 10-20 years ago.

It became easier to hire Jans and Jagmeets after a large number of SWEs and middle-managers in tech who were on visas were given the option to either be laid off or relocate to the old country and open a GCC during the initial COVID recession.
by MichaelZuo | 2026-02-27 00:44:20+00:00
How do you reconcile the fact that many people in Anthropic tried to hide the existence of secret non-disparagement agreements for quite some time?

It’s hard to take your comment at face value when there’s documented proof to the contrary. Maybe it could be forgiven as a blunder if revealed in the first few months and within the first handful of employees… but after 2 plus years and many dozens forced to sign that… it’s just not credible to believe it was all entirely positive motivations.
by shimman | 2026-02-27 00:44:35+00:00
Why should tech workers care about the small minority of tech workers that make obscene amounts of money? The median dev salary in the US is ~$130k. [1]

Besides that point, I would very much like to get paid over time for being on call. I would very much like a preplanned process that comes to layoffs rather than firing people at random. I would like paid paternity leave.

Always a classic HN post about the rockstar dev willing to fuck over their fellow workers so they can make a quick buck then feign upset over how meaningless their lives are because they devote so much time making capitalists more capital rather than bettering their community.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
by 14 | 2026-02-27 00:44:59+00:00
I have not yet tried vibe coding but it is something I look forward to trying when I get some free time (kids growing up a little).

I assume some could use it to make for commercial sale products but when I heard of it I really just pictured it mainly for small personal projects mainly.

I have always had an interest in electronics but without going to college there was really obvious no path to get into creating small diy projects. Then years back came along Raspberry Pi. I bought one along with a big variety of different sensors and a breadboard and all the things one would need to create something. I pictures making things that would email my mom when her plants were getting dry and many other dreams with all the sensors.

But it was still overwhelming. Lots of knowledge you need before you even start so it felt hard. But eventually I set off to try something and with many hours of searching for how to code what I wanted and essentially copying code and maybe slightly altering it to my needs I did finish one project. It was basic but I was always proud of what I accomplished. I had an IR sensor that would detect if someone walked in front of it and when that happened I also had a power relay that was connected to a lamp. When motion detected the lamp would then blink SOS in Morse code and it would also send me an email saying motion detected. What a feeling when I ran it and it worked on the first try.

But that took so much time searching and trying to find the code I wanted. I see vibe coding and imagine I could do the same thing in minutes verses hours. I don't think I will ever make some project that is ever going to make me money but do imagine with vibe coding the barrier to creating some of those projects I dreamed up in my head for personal use is much closer and obtainable.
by hirsin | 2026-02-27 00:45:07+00:00
The Twitter layoffs being used as proof of _anything_ is misguided no matter what you're trying to say.

If success is losing half their revenue, reverting to revenue numbers from a decade ago, I gotta know what failure looks like. You might argue that the revenue losses aren't correlated to their headcount changes and probably make a good argument, but I mean... It's not a great one
by jackp96 | 2026-02-27 00:45:15+00:00
I think it's really dependent on the software. And frankly, with the current rate of development, I feel like this continues to shift.

No, a non-engineer can't just spin up the next great app. Even with the newest models and a great prompting/testing system, I don't think you can just spit out high quality, maintainable, reliable code. But as a generalist - I'm absolutely able to ship software and tools that solve our business problems.

Right now, my company identified an expensive software platform that was set to cost us around $250k/year. People in the industry are raving about it.

I've spent 1-2 weeks recreating the core functionality (with a significantly enhanced integration into our CRM and internal analytics) in both a web app and mobile application. And it's gone far smoother than I expected. It's not done - and maybe we'll run into some blocker. But this would have taken me 6 months, at least, to build half as well.

I was an AI skeptic for most of last year. It provided value, sure, but it felt like we were plateauing. Slowing down.

I'd hoped we might be slowing down to some sort of invisible ceiling. I was faster than ever - but it very much required a level of experience that felt reasonable and fair.

It feels different now.

I'd say ~70% of my Claude Opus results just work. I tweak the UI and refactor when possible. And it runs into issues I have to solve occasionally. But otherwise? If I'm specific, if I have it brainstorm, then plan, and then implement - then it usually just works.
by viraptor | 2026-02-27 00:45:27+00:00
> After the massive X/Twitter layoffs (60-70% headcount culled) with X/Twitter still standing, this assumption was clearly proven false.

Twitter at the same time removed features to have fewer things to support. And didn't implement anything new (or really fix much) for ages. It's not the same service that was standing afterwards. And the "still standing" ignores the part where they started serving empty timelines, repeated messages from broken paging, broke 2fa for days, messed up whole continent access, etc. etc. They survived (and still had fewer problems than I expected), but it wasn't smooth at all - hardly a success too.
by tootie | 2026-02-27 00:46:56+00:00
During the massive post-pandemic hiring spree, there were a lot of threads in the vein of "why does [MATURE STARTUP] requires X,000 developers?" and I think those questions were maybe prescient. These companies have been spending free venture funds on whatever and acquiring headcount for the sake of headcount. A lot of them have tried to and failed to be "everything apps" and now they are really sitting on mature, stable and profitable platforms that don't need to move fast and break things. They just need to not crash. And the result is they need far fewer people.
by nickff | 2026-02-27 00:47:12+00:00
Every bureaucracy I've ever experienced is constantly complaining about being under-staffed, but when they get more funding, the service level rarely improves. It seems like complaining about 'over-work' is just an easy excuse for doing a bad job, which makes sense given how many friends I have in government who are constantly complaining about their lazy and inept colleagues.
by statuslover9000 | 2026-02-27 00:47:27+00:00
For example, China operates 1 foreign military base, in Djibouti. How many do you think the U.S. has in the South China Sea alone?

Beyond that, how many people has China killed in foreign military conflicts in the past 40 years? How many foreign governments have they overthrown?

Instead of all this, they’ve used their resources not only to become the world’s economic superpower but also to lift 800 million people out of poverty, accounting for 75% of the world’s reduction during the past 4 decades. The U.S. has added 10 million during that same time period.