MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pardon_me | 2026-02-06 21:16:02+00:00
Manufactured consent, planned economies, controlled economies, imbalance of wealth or power, tariffs, subsidies, tax breaks, lobbying, ad networks, tracking, algorithmic content delivery, AI generation, asymmetric access to information, social effects, requirements to live despite inaccessible resources for basic needs, government control, private property but no free land available, and international trade laws, are a few things that come to mind which very much go against the idea that we are living in anything like the model of capitalism we learn about in school.

2026 is not based on wants and needs except in isolated situations. We are at the hypernormal point of manufacturing problems to sell solutions, because there's very little rent or work left to extract from assets. Lives of excess are maintained by depriving others of necessities. The intense control and misdirection required to keep this somewhat stable is starting to be felt.
Show HN: Measured World – Country Statistics and Rankings Site
by no_creativity | 2026-02-06 21:16:47+00:00
I built a free tool to explore demographic, economic, and education statistics for every country and territory in the world.

At the moment the site covers population, fertility, mortality, migration, GDP, education,and 100+ other metrics. Each country has interactive charts, rankings, and comparisons with neighbors and similar countries. There is also a map and card view. I plan to go more granular in the future, focus on counties or individual states.

Built with Next.js, SQLite, and D3. All pages are statically generated. Sources I used: UN World Population Prospects, IMF World Economic Outlook, and UNESCO Institute for Statistics.

Would love feedback on what data or features would make this more useful, what you find works or what I should change.
by hsuduebc2 | 2026-02-06 21:16:52+00:00
Absolutely. It’s not some grand replacement theory. It’s not an intellectual master plan. It’s mostly plain greed and cynicism from the powerful, plus ignorance or a resigned belief that people cannot be changed from everyone else.

I’m in the second group. When a majority of people miss the basics, when a large chunk treat internet content as daily reality rather than algorithmically served rage bait, it feels like there’s nothing you can do.

A friend once told me, “I wish I were more schizo like before, it was much more fun,” and in a bleak way, I get it. I’d almost prefer it if there really were a coherent plan, some deliberate attempt by the mighty to steer civilization. But right now it mostly looks like greed and cynicism. These days, a lot of it seems to be coming out of Silicon Valley but it will change as it always does like it did before.
by subscribed | 2026-02-06 21:17:24+00:00
Me. There are four I want. All very safe.

I always wanted to try specific two, but first cannot be had in the safest form because of the specific precursor ban, and all of them suffer from an insane (to me) risk of adulteration.

In twenty minutes I could probably find 10 "reputable" shops/markets, but still with 0 guarantee I won't get the specific thing laced with something for strength.

Even if I wanted pot (I don't, I found it repetitive and extremely boring, except for one experience), I would have to grow it myself (stench!) but then.... where I find sane seeds (healthy ratio CBD to THC)?

Similarly, I wouldn't buy the moonshine from someone risking prosecution to make and sell it. It's guaranteed this risk is offset.

So ... I can't get what I want because there's extremely high chance of getting hurt. An example being poisoning with pills sold as mdma - every music festival, multiple people hurt. Not by Molly, by additives.
by recursive | 2026-02-06 21:18:15+00:00
The death trap claims come from the internal affordance, which seems to be totally independent from the exterior one.

I have a car with a "novel" handle situation. (Ford Mustand Mach E) The door is operable from the inside with a dead battery. Maybe this particular one isn't as challenging as some of the other designs, but calling it a "puzzle" definitely overstates the case. I think it took me maybe 4 seconds to figure out the first time.
by red-iron-pine | 2026-02-06 21:18:23+00:00
> In many places it’s illegal to call yourself an engineer unless you match certain criteria, such as being a licensed engineer or working for a company in the industry that can oversee your work in a specified capacity.

that is the case in most countries. the US is an outlier in the First World in that sense.

only country where you could be called a Sandwich Engineer with a straight face and not get sued.
by dingaling | 2026-02-06 21:18:29+00:00
'User' has been a term in computing for decades before the current Cloud Services fad ( hence uid ).

One uses a hammer, one uses a microwave, one uses a computer, one uses a word processor. Nothing negative towards the user, they're being productive with the product.

If anything it's derogatory in the other direction, towards the manufacturer, reducing the fruits of their labour to that of a simple tool.
by mrandish | 2026-02-06 21:18:35+00:00
Some legislation which sounds good in concept and is well-intended ends up being having little to no positive impact in practice. But it still leaves businesses with ongoing compliance costs/risks, taxpayers footing the bill for an enforcement bureaucracy forever and consumers with either annoying warning interruptions or yet more 'warning message noise'.

It's odd that legislators seem largely incapable of learning from the rich history of past legislative mistakes. Regulation needs to be narrowly targeted, clearly defined and have someone smart actually think through how the real-world will implement complying as well as identifying likely unintended consequences and perverse incentives. Another net improvement would be for any new regs passed to have an automatic sunset provision where they need to be renewed a few years later under a process which makes it easy to revise or relax certain provisions.
by rapind | 2026-02-06 21:18:35+00:00
True, and that's usually what I'm doing now, but to be honest I'm also giving all of it's code at least a cursory glance.

Some of the things it occasionally does:

- Ignores conventions (even when emphasized in the CLAUDE.md)

- Decides to just not implement tests if gets spins out on them too much (it tells you, but only as it happens and that scrolls by pretty quick)

- Writes badly performing code (N+1)

- Does more than you asked (in a bad way, changing UIs or adding cruft)

- Makes generally bad assumptions

I'm not trying to be overly negative, but in my experience to date, you still need to babysit it. I'm interested though in the idea of using multiple models to have them perform independent reviews to at least flag spots that could use human intervention / review.
by metalman | 2026-02-06 21:19:22+00:00
health benifits are ongoing, all of which falls under "anecdata", but given that I am pushing 60, and just put in a couple of very
physicaly active weeks building and installing heavy steel objects by hand,long hours, culminating in a 20 hr day, and am now sitting around eating and taking it easier, watching my body bulk, doing calls/emails and texts juggling half a dozen different files, then hey, nothing to complain about here:)
by invader | 2026-02-06 21:19:46+00:00
Awesome! Brings me back into my teenage years when I was rewatching the movie on VHS hundreds of times, especially the cyberspace surfing sequences - all covered by the epic soundtrack. Orbital still sounds fresh in my ears after all these years.

I was also so inspired by this Gibson supercomputer interface when I created my little game prototype for js13k games contest 10 years ago:

https://invadium.itch.io/cybergrid-13

Now I think I should've used flight mechanics like in flight simulators instead of walking, but the cyberspace and viruses are still there. Maybe I will refresh it one day to give a more Hacker-like ambient flight feeling.
by vee-kay | 2026-02-06 21:19:49+00:00
Maybe in current era of skyrocketing prices of memory & storage components (due to mindboggling demand by AI-driven tech industry), I would agree that budget gaming laptops are not worth the value.

But for decades, I have found that gaming laptops (decent brands and popular models) gave best bang for buck, especially with AMD hardware.
My 12+ years old Lenovo gaming laptop is still going strong, and my 15+ years old Sony Viao netbook is also doing well (with SATA SSD and RAM upgrades few years ago).

But yeah, read/check up on the reviews (from reputed reviewers) before splurging for an expensive laptop.

One nifty trick to identify VFM(value for money) laptops is to check Amazon site/app for "Smartchoice" laptops. It is a special keyword that Amazon adds to listings of popular laptops that are VFM (best deals) and having good reviews.
by i5heu | 2026-02-06 21:19:50+00:00
Hi raphman,

i have written this text by myself except like 2 or 3 sentences which i iterated with an LLM to nail down flow and readability. I would interpret that as completely written by me.

> The suggestions you make are all sensible but maybe a little bit generic and obvious. Asking ChatGPT to generate advice on effectively writing quality code with AI generates a lot of similar suggestions (albeit less well written).

Before i wrote this text, i also asked Gemini Deep Research but for me the results where too technical and not structural or high level as i describe them here. Hence the blogpost to share what i have found works best.

> If not, I'd suggest to augment the post with practical examples or anecdotal experience. At the moment, the target group seems to be novice programmers rather than the typical HN reader.

I have pondered the idea and also wrote a few anecdotal experiences but i deleted them again because i think it is hard to nail the right balance down and it is also highly depended on the project, what renders examples a bit useless.

And i also kind of like the short and lean nature of it the last few days when i worked on the blogpost.
I might will make a few more blogposts about that, that will expand a few points.

Thank you for your feedback!
by mmooss | 2026-02-06 21:20:09+00:00
> it wouldn't be surprising if page numbers were a solution to help printers not mix up pages.

It's an interesting idea. Remember they printed large sheets containing many 'pages', I think even in different orientations, which were then folded and the ends cut to produce a nice orderly codex for the reader. They were printing in a different order than the one you read in.

I do think they numbered the large sheets or similar, and you can find old books that retain that number, but I don't recall what it is called.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-02-06 21:20:53+00:00
Imagine launching $75 billion dollar war on drugs where you didn't arrest drug dealers, only users. Yet the party of law and order and their supporters somehow aren't demanding these large scale abusers of employment law, and encouragers of illegal immigration be included in enforcement action. Really makes it look about racism more than smart/intentional/traditional law enforcement.
by magicalist | 2026-02-06 21:20:58+00:00
> but monocular depth estimation was spectacularly good by 2021

It's still rather weak and true monocular depth estimation really wasn't spectacularly anything in 2021. It's fundamentally ill posed and any priors you use to get around that will come to bite you in the long tail of things some driver will encounter on the road.

The way it got good is by using camera overlap in space and over time while in motion to figure out metric depth over the entire image. Which is, humorously enough, sensor fusion.
by dghlsakjg | 2026-02-06 21:21:06+00:00
Thank you.

Reductio ad absurdium is a logically valid ment technique to expose a fallacious argument. Since you aren't attacking my premises - is it safe to say that you accept the fallacy in your argument?

/s

I get what you're saying about my comment. But I stand by NIMBYism being essentially a selfish restriction on other's property rights, and 'character' arguments being window dressing for that.
by kjkjadksj | 2026-02-06 21:21:15+00:00
People like that but no existing person tolerates the potential of having it next door. 4am deliveries. Plates clinking. People making noise. Commercial dumpster operations. Customers taking up all the parking including illegally in your private parking space. There are certain potential disruptions you get living there 24/7 that you don’t get stopping by for 20 mins once a week contributing to that disruption.

Not saying these people are right or wrong. Just that it isn’t so black and white an issue. It is one thing when a place is already “lively” and tacitly accepting of all that comes with that vs going into that especially when it is unknown and easy to just say ‘no’ before seeing it how it may play out.
by betteryet | 2026-02-06 21:21:36+00:00
Back in the day, Heroku, Stripe, and GitHub were iconic engineering organizations. They had this culture rooted in Unix ethos with a sprinkle of modern minimalism and style that was outstanding. You could really see people give a damn in the careful design and polish of their APIs, docs, primitives, and overall output.

Now Heroku and GitHub have been gutted in spirit by their acquirers, which is such a damn shame for our field. We still have Stripe and Apple to some extent, and maybe some new places, but I personally feel a real sense of loss from Heroku and GitHub exiting their status as places you could admire.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-06 21:21:40+00:00
Isn’t this exactly the problem that Joel Spolsky wrote about a quarter of a century ago?

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...

A lot of software developers are seduced by the old “80/20” rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.

Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features.
by pandaman | 2026-02-06 21:22:13+00:00
I lived next to a mom and pop store, not grocery, selling crystals and such. The owner of the store allowed a homeless camp on the store's lot. City could not clean it out because it's on a private property. The closest tent was less than 50' from my bedroom. The homeless fought, burned stuff, blasted music and hopped over 8' fence into my backyard to help themselves with anything they found there. Store owner was not bothered perhaps because during the day the homeless wondered off, perhaps he just liked them. The police did not do anything, would not even come over noise complaints. Would you like to live like this?
by codegeek | 2026-02-06 21:22:41+00:00
Nothing to study. A common scenario when a mega corp acquires an incredibly successful startup and then lets it die. Happens more often than not. This is why I chuckle when I see an acquisition and the founders claim "Nothing is changing. We are not going anywhere" . There may be exceptions but the moment a hugely successful company like heroku gets acquired, you know it's most likely game over. To their credit, they survived 15 years after acquisition but barely.
by decidertm | 2026-02-06 21:22:48+00:00
I agree, I wouldn't either. You can import directly via a DB to DB import in the platform without involving your laptop.

https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/databases-and-per....

Some folks want to do that, others want to import a backup directly, some want to spawn a read replica and sync their DB. Different strokes for different folks, all supported on Northflank.
by bigyabai | 2026-02-06 21:23:04+00:00
> Why is the sole blame on countries other than India

You can blame India all you want; Modi is very much due for criticism, his political leadership is pitiful and merits no quarter from Western governments or otherwise.

But the Russian Federation doesn't care, they've got crude to process. The Knesset won't convene to denounce their enemy's enemy. The US loves buying cheap oil and siphoning Indian labor. They'll blame India right alongside you all day long, but they won't ever stop supporting their broken system. India's suffered from this for the better part of a century and it's becoming apparent that foreign influence is the issue.
by rl3 | 2026-02-06 21:23:06+00:00
Yes, the two are very different in that regard.

WireGuard is 4k LoC and is very intentional about its choice of using a single, static crypto implementation to drastically reduce its complexity. Technically speaking, it has a lower attack surface for that reason.

That said, I've been on your side of the argument before, and practically speaking you can expose OpenSSH on the public internet with a proper key setup and almost certainly nothing will happen because it's a highly-audited, proven piece of software. Even though it's technically very complex.

But, that still doesn't mean it isn't best practice to avoid exposing it to the public internet. Especially when you can put things in front of it (such as WireGuard) that have a much lower technical complexity, and thus a reduced attack surface.
by ramon156 | 2026-02-06 21:23:16+00:00
> Recently I was listening to music and doing some late night vibe coding when I had an idea. I love art and music, but unfortunately have no artistic talent whatsoever. So I wondered, maybe Claude Code does?

Do I need to read further? Seriously, everyone has talent. If you're not reaady to create things, just don't do it at all. Claude will not help you here. Be prepared to spend >400 hrs on just fiddling around, and be prepared to fail a lot. There is no shortcut.
by pardon_me | 2026-02-06 21:23:28+00:00
It's been going on since forever. The first people the British enslaved were their own kind, they just managed to create a society where citizens enjoyed the authority, and naturally the fruits of pillaging half the world did trickle down back then.

If you think about PFI etc. and how those contracts were crafted, it's no different to what happened to the UK's oil. That didn't eventually go to the citizens like Norway. Every last bit of the UK is being extracted now.
by Manuel_D | 2026-02-06 21:23:35+00:00
You realize there's a vast gap between "everyone can have everything" and "the things that can be exchanged for money is static"?

We don't live in a post-scarcity society, but we also don't live in a world where economic output is zero sum.

If you have a 3 bedroom house, and your neighbor builds a palace on the beach, you still have a 3 bedroom house. Nothing was taken from you, someone else created a new asset.
by fs_software | 2026-02-06 21:23:46+00:00
I've been building a platform for code review-based interviews.

Was going to post "Show HN" but the guidelines say blog posts / sign up pages should be a regular post. Since I'm running a pilot (just trying to learn and iterate) the platform is invite only. So I guess this is both a blog post and a sign up page for folks interested in trying it out.

Just me working on this on nights and weekends for now. Open to feedback!
by beardyw | 2026-02-06 21:24:22+00:00
If I was in the USA with the rise in measles I would definitely be wanting it (I have had it, I am way over 50) just to avoid shingles.

But perhaps a better course would be to have a more grown up attitude to death. We are all going to die sooner or later. There is nothing you can take with you and no certainty about what you leave behind. Come to terms with that to be happy.
by wat10000 | 2026-02-06 21:24:25+00:00
Now imagine if every single explanation of natural numbers talked about rings and fields. Nobody ever just says "they're the counting numbers starting from one." A few of them might say, "they're the counting numbers starting from one, and they form a ring and field over addition and multiplication." And I might think, I understand the first part, but I'm not sure what the second part is and it sounds important, so maybe I still don't know what natural numbers are.

I'm not worried, but it's amusing to see this person say it's so simple, and then immediately trample on it.
Ask HN: Has your upper management been one-shotted by AI hype?
by asdev | 2026-02-06 21:24:38+00:00
Seeing a lot of shocking things where upper management, from engineering managers and above who haven't written code or actually built things in years get completely swallowed by AI hype in a bad way.

Some examples:

Engineer says there's a problem or something won't work, and manager+ role uses Cursor to double check there work and proposes some slop solution that AI comes up with. This wastes engineers time by having to sift through this for no reason. It also erodes trust that engineers feel from higher ups, who convey that they who haven't coded + Cursor can do a better job than people coding in the trenches day in and day out.

Other example, engineers say they need a few days to dig into an old codebase/repo to understand some things. Higher up says you can just use Cursor and understand it in an hour(which is never the case since LLMs have no tribal/business context on things).

Wondering if others have seen or experienced the same thing. I think this would make for really bad engineering cultures for teams
by arduanika | 2026-02-06 21:24:43+00:00
> (unless you have gone back and deleted the comments, haven't checked yet!)

Minor point: I'm pretty sure that HN comments cannot be deleted/edited after about an hour. Very different from most web forums in this regard, and worth keeping in mind when digging into past discussions! Maybe the rules are different for a superuser like tptacek here with lots of karma, but I doubt it.

Correct me if I'm wrong.
by econ | 2026-02-06 21:25:06+00:00
I like it. Perhaps you can use a weird idea of mine.

You can discard/modify part of a password before sending it to your backend. Then, when you log in the server has to brute force the missing part.

One could extend this with security questions like how many children pets and cars you own. What color was your car in 2024. Use that data to aid brute forcing.

The goal would be to be able to decrypt with fewer than 5 shards but make it as computation heavy as you like. If no one remembers the pink car it will take x hours longer.
by rapind | 2026-02-06 21:25:41+00:00
I still do this, but when I'm reviewing what's been written and / or testing what's been built.

How I see it is we've reverted back to a heavier spec type approach, however the turn around time is so fast with agents that it still can feel very iterative simply because the cost of bailing on an approach is so minimal. I treat the spec (and tests when applicable) as the real work now. I front load as much as I can into the spec, but I also iterate constantly. I often completely bail on a feature or the overall approach to a feature as I discover (with the agent) that I'm just not happy with the gotchas that come to light.

AI agents to me are a tool. An accelerator. I think there are people who've figured out a more vibey approach that works for them, but for now at least, my approach is to review and think about everything we're producing, which forms my thoughts as we go.
by Spivak | 2026-02-06 21:26:37+00:00
Meanwhile in real life IG and TikTok ads are the only ones normal people seem to generally trust. I've only ever heard people talking about getting Instagram or TikTok ads for things and actually buying them in a way that would sound genuinely jarring if they said "an ad on Google."

I think there's something to be said for how IG and TikTok ads are actually made that makes them more appealing which is that they actually try to be worthwhile content to watch in a way banner ads and TV commercials just aren't.