MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by globular-toast | 2026-02-02 09:54:12+00:00
Yes, most people cannot think beyond first-order effects, but this can be equally applied to HS2 proponents. There are other solutions to cut the amount of cargo traffic, but most of them involve just consuming less stuff.

Building more and more infrastructure is not sustainable. It's been shown time and time again that more infrastructure only leads to more usage of said infrastructure. The number of lorries on the road will not decrease, we'll just start carting around even more stuff than before.

> because every time they drive somewhere they have to contend with massive potholes and insane amount of heavy cargo traffic anywhere they go

I don't buy that. The potholes are in residential and country roads. No amount of railways is going to do anything about that. The cargo traffic which could go via rail is on the motorways.

I'm all for more rail and less roads. But to stop the road usage we need to tax it more heavily, especially for heavier vehicles, and not just lorries. So far I haven't seen any evidence of replacing roads with rail, it's just more, more, more.
by charcircuit | 2026-02-02 09:54:30+00:00
AI can write a proper README. In fact, it's better than me at doing so and keeping it up to date. People writing README with AI are bothering to write it. In my experience AI won't automatically create README files for you when making projects with the exception of create project tools which create a default README, but in that case usually the AI ignores it and leaves it in the default state. People are just using a tool that lets them create without manually typing in each individual character.
by latexr | 2026-02-02 09:54:42+00:00
> Capitalism has still delivered with massive success in China, the US, India, Europe, etc etc.

Ah yes, the “massive success” where people can’t afford a place to live, struggle to cover basic necessities, are increasingly lonely, radicalised, unhappy, depressed… But hey, at least you can look at cat videos and listen to podcasts all day about how women don’t want to fuck you because of immigrants or some shit, all the while enriching a small number of individuals who humiliate you daily and don’t even afford you the dignity of not having to piss in bottles as you’re making them more money they will never be able to spend. Fantastic example of success.

Thank you for demonstrating my point. No matter how much mistreatment there is, we can always count on the defenders coming out of the woodwork to ask for more.
by roenxi | 2026-02-02 09:54:51+00:00
> The point is the wolf does not need managment.

If some dev rolls up to work and claimed that "I don't need to do anything to be a high value programmer" because he has mastered the zen of not getting in the way of good code, is anyone going to buy that? It is a lie for those who were born yesterday by someone justifying not being very good at their job. Ditto when a manager says it, even if they are important enough nobody is going to call them out directly. Under no circumstances is what the narrator describes a good response. All managers have limitations so sure maybe it is the best response he can muster and he's still a great manager otherwise, fair enough, but the story then isn't that wolves are amazing, but that the writer has a massive blind spot, it hasn't caused a big enough problem that they had to fix it and they've settled on tonic immobility as a strategy because they haven't figured out the productive action.

The situation is an employee is doing great things. Employees manager-once-removed agrees. The middle manager is trying to stop the employee. That isn't a story where the key is an amazing employee. It is a story where manager-once-removed doesn't know how to manage the middle manager, and the middle manager is either being undermined, is incompetent or both.

Now that is reading a lot into 2 blog posts, so I wouldn't go down on that ship. Maybe there are a lot of extenuating circumstances that aren't being written down. But the most likely fit of the facts in a software business is that management are flailing. Which is cool, management sometimes flails. But the focus should be on improving managers so they can do their job properly, not pushing the stress of dealing with their flailing down to the employees. It is unfair and stressful for the lower tiers of the org tree, and flailing management can get a lot of people fired.
by pjc50 | 2026-02-02 09:56:48+00:00
It's not even about freight! HS2 will increase passenger capacity. The existing trains are completely full at peak time and run at the maximum frequency. Building a whole new line will allow a lot more people to travel. The demand is clearly there despite the price, because it's also pretty congested to drive anywhere inside the M25.

If we wanted to address the freight situation it would be along the route of the A428/A14 from Folkstone (where much of the freight is landed) to the Midlands. That road already has a cheery sign on it pointing out how high the accident rate is.
by crustycoder | 2026-02-02 09:58:01+00:00
You are using mutexes, they are on the Actor message queues, amongst other places. "Just use mutexes" suggests a lack of experience of using them, they are very difficult to get both correct and scalable. By keeping them inside the Actor system, a lot of complexity is removed from the layers above. Actors are not always the right choice, but when they are they are a very useful and simplifying abstraction.

Horses for courses, as they say.
by HelloNurse | 2026-02-02 09:58:25+00:00
> ÆTHRA is output-oriented: you write a script → run it → get a WAV file.

You are competing with traditional noninteractive usage of CSound. What do you think you can do better than CSound? More generally, what are the peculiar and valuable ÆTHRA features that you want to develop well?

The current language is relatively verbose and readable (more suitable for live coding than for a "music compiler"), but somewhat simplistic and ad hoc on the notation side (e.g. no separate tracks, parts etc.) and not very general on the sound synthesis and processing side (e.g. fixed waveforms and keywords for effects).
by logicchains | 2026-02-02 09:59:36+00:00
>Ah yes, the “massive success” where people can’t afford a place to live, struggle to cover basic necessities

Nobody is struggling to find enough to eat in Europe or America; even the poor unemployed are overweight to the point of obesity. Tens of millions of people from all over the world are costly flocking to those countries for a better life; they wouldn't be doing that if their systems delivered better outcomes.

If you like communism so much why not move to somewhere like North Korea or Cuba, the most communist countries in the world?
by graemep | 2026-02-02 10:00:24+00:00
> Either the UK experience is with private schools, in which case the statement is irrelevant, or it is with public schools

Amused by your use of two more terms that have different meanings in the UK (although young people are confusing things by adopting the American meanings)!

The point is that British universities are almost entirely private institutions that get a lot government funding, in particular for British students (so they pay much lower tuition fees) and research funding.

There is a heavy reliance on government funding at British universities so they are probably to some extent comparable to American public universities. On the other hand some have substantial resources of their own.

> Either the UK experience is with private schools, in which case the statement is irrelevant, or it is with public schools, in which case the statement is either wrong or irrelevant.

Yale has far more money than any British university so regardless of how you classify them, the question of why Yale charges fr things British universities do not is relevant regardless of how you clasify them.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-02 10:00:58+00:00
As a teen, I do feel like especially within 2025. The world moved way too fast for even me to catch up (well I caught up fine but got burnt out trying to follow geopolitics because I used to like geopolitics before hand)

Maybe Ignorance is bliss.

One of the issues I feel right now with my generation and myself included is that we feel powerless. I truly feel like politics can be better not just in any one country but world-wide. Politics can be over accepting that a lot of economical things have changed from the past and the things working within past weren't built on sustainable practices which have come to bite us now & that's okay. Together we can all concess on a lot of our wants to satisfy the needs of the people. I really don't know & I really don't want to pretend that I know :/

Really feels like shouting in the void sometimes and quite frankly right now too. Just gotta focus on yourself because at the end of the day, to me it feels like noones gonna come to save us. Perhaps we just have to work with some unjust-ness within the system and accept it as is to hopefully get power to influence. But power corrupts :/ AGGH

A lot of my frustrations come from the fact that I feel as if past was unsustainable & now the present a lot of problems feel distractions to the bottom line economical issue. That's okay but we can work together to fix it rather than having our politics be a distraction almost like a circus because at the end of the day, its my generation which is gonna suffer the most whether its in higher unaffordability of housing world-wide or the fearing towards job safety.
by anthk | 2026-02-02 10:01:01+00:00
Mobile computer games compared to the ones from the 80's, 90's, and early 00's? For sure. Ditto with tons of best sellers, which are very dull and dumbed down compared to what I could read in Spanish "Dollar Stores" like shops in Spain such as the books Clarke/PKD and Orwell novels for very little, less than what $2 were in Pesetas (pre Euro Spanish currency) in late 90's.

Nowadays you have AI generated books which are very surpar even if they look an impressive exercise of LLM's.
by Kodiack | 2026-02-02 10:01:10+00:00
Hey. I run a small community forum and I've been dealing with this exact same kind of behaviour where well over 99% of requests are bad crawlers. There used to be plenty of "tells" for the faked browsers, HTTP/1.1 being a huge one. As you said, however, they're getting a bit smarter about that and it's becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate it from legitimate traffic.

It's been getting worse over the past year, with the past few weeks in particular seeing a massive change literally overnight. I had to aggressively tune my WAF rules to even remotely get things under control. With Cloudflare I'm aggressively issuing browser challenges to any browser that looks remotely suspicious, and the pass rate is currently below 0.5%. For my users' sake, a successful browser challenge is "valid" for over a month, but this still feels like another thing that'll eventually be bypassed.

I'd be keen to know if you've found any other effective ways of mitigating these most recent aggressive scraping requests. Even a simple "yes" or "no" would be appreciated; I think it's fair to be apprehensive about sharing some specific details publicly since even a lot of folks here on HN seem to think it's their right to scrape content with orders of magnitude higher throughput than all users combined.

I really don't know how this is sustainable long-term. It's eaten up quite a lot of my personal time and effort just for the sake of a hobby that I otherwise greatly enjoy.
by BatteryMountain | 2026-02-02 10:01:26+00:00
Applied Akka Patterns by Michael Nash, Wade Waldron (Oreilly) was very digestible and relevant at the time, might be dated by now. Just read the intro to get the vibe.

These days I would recommend picking a framework and then ask claude & friends to do a deep dive with you and build an example project out. Ask it to explain concepts, architecture, trade-offs, scalability considerations, hosting considerations, compare it with other frameworks, hook it up to storage systems (sqlite, postgresql, blob storage) and so on. Try running them within a wireguard network and so on. Very interesting learning to be found.
by PreciousH | 2026-02-02 10:04:38+00:00
I built Prism AI because I was frustrated with the "wall of text" output typical of most AI research tools. While current LLMs are great at synthesis and citations, they often fail to communicate complex structural or numerical data effectively.
Prism AI is an open-source attempt to solve this by making the research process inherently visual.
Key Technical Details:
Orchestration: I'm using a "Plan-and-Execute" pattern powered by LangGraph. This allows the system to maintain a persistent state and perform recursive "gap analysis" on its own research.
Concurrency: The research nodes are built with Python’s asyncio, allowing it to scrape, crawl, and synthesize multiple sections of a report in parallel.
Visualization Engine: Rather than just generating Markdown, the agents are equipped with tools to generate 2D/3D illustrations, interactive animations, and dynamic charts. The system determines when a concept is better explained visually and generates the corresponding code on the fly.
Self-Hostable: Fully Dockerized and runs with a Next.js frontend.
I’m particularly interested in hearing how others are handling the "context drift" that happens in high-concurrency multi-agent systems. The code is MIT licensed.
GitHub: https://github.com/precious112/prism-ai-deep-research
The AI "Competence Speedrun" and the Organizational Trilemma
by eriam | 2026-02-02 10:05:05+00:00
This is a follow-up to the earlier discussion on "AI Over-Efficiency." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46827011)

Looking at the current cohort of CS/IT graduates and juniors, I’m seeing a "Competence Speedrun" dynamic that seems destined to collide with traditional organizational structures. I'm not talking here about technical-debt as I assume it will be absorbed by appropriate workflows.

These juniors are using AI to bypass the "struggle phase" of learning (syntax errors, basic debugging, reading docs) and jumping straight to high-velocity output. While this is impressive, it creates a "trilemma" for how this generation integrates into the workforce but also for employees jumping into full AI usage:

1. The Peter Principle Speedrun (The "Hollow Promotion" Risk) They are shipping code that looks like it was written by a Senior. The risk is that organizations will promote based on this output velocity, only to discover later that the engineer lacks the "failure intuition" to debug architectural collapses. We might be generating a wave of "Hollow Seniors" who can build complex systems but cannot fix them without the bot.

2. The Ego Exit (Expectation Mismatch) Many juniors now feel significantly more capable than their entry-level titles imply because they are "shipping faster than the seniors." When they enter a rigid HR band that pays based on years of experience (linear time) rather than output (exponential leverage), they feel undervalued. The accelerated Dunning–Kruger effect often leads to high churn among juniors who feel they are "10x engineers" being held back by "1x processes."

3. The Shadow Dividend (Hidden Efficiency): Juniors realizing that if they finish an 8-hour task in 2 hours using AI, the corporate reward is often just more work. So, the rational move is to become a "Secret Cyborg"—hiding their efficiency to preserve work-life balance or work on side projects. The organization captures zero percent of the productivity gain because the incentives discourage transparency.

The Friction It seems we are heading for a structural clash between Linear Tenure (how orgs measure seniority) and Exponential Output (how the new cohort generates value).

Are you seeing these "Speedrun" behaviors in your recent hires? How do you mentor someone whose output exceeds their understanding?
by tolerance | 2026-02-02 10:05:24+00:00
The man who closed the door might’ve had a reason not to expect violence from the guy with the remote. It’s possible that the man perceives violence/respect in ways similar to how it’s done in other parts of the world and saw thought that he could get away with his slight because remote guy didn’t pass as someone capable of violence or qualified for door man’s idea of ‘respect’.

No matter the case I agree that he’s making a gross estimate. I think that he [door man] collected evidence to support his estimate about his neighbor will before this happened. I’m not here to stick up for door man but I’m certainly not going to give remote guy a pass and then philosophize about aggression as to why.

Often talks of violence come from a place of resentment. They’re fantasies. If someone who you have even a limited familiarity with slights your capacity for violence they may have been given reason to. Talk about ‘how things are done’ but only from the perspective of the brute makes me wonder if there’s any familiarity with handling brutish behavior other than by proxy.

Passive aggression is a more frequent outlet than a more managed sort. If it leads to results like the one described here it’s easy to view it as the lesser of two evils, and sure, you can argue that. But the evil persists both in the rudeness and passivity of both parties. The former is readily identified and criticized. The latter often isn’t.
by wheybags | 2026-02-02 10:05:35+00:00
> though he incorrectly states that `uint64_t` is `unsigned long`

It probably is, he's just probably using MacOS, where both long and long long are 64 bit. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...

(that's the best linkable reference I could find, unfortunately).

I've run into a similar problem where an overload resolution for uint64_t was not being used when calling with a size_t because one was unsigned long and the other was unsigned long long, which are both 64 bit uints, but according to the compiler, they're different types.

This was a while ago so the details may be off, but the silly shape of the issue is correct.
by veunes | 2026-02-02 10:05:59+00:00
All of this speedrun hits a wall at the context window. As long as the project fits into 200k tokens, you’re flying. The moment it outgrows that, productivity doesn’t drop by 20% - it drops to zero.
You start spending hours explaining to the agent what you changed in another file that it has already forgotten. Large organizations win in the long run precisely because they rely on processes that don’t depend on the memory of a single brain - even an electronic one
by flakeoil | 2026-02-02 10:06:13+00:00
Yes, wire-wrapping is/was so great. Really good quality connections, no accidental connections due to solder ending up at the wrong places, easy to remove or change.

And no solder-iron that risks burning stuff. And no smoke either.

The only draw-back is that it seems to be so expensive and almost non-existant today.
by MrJohz | 2026-02-02 10:07:50+00:00
I think the other aspect is that if the README feels autogenerated without proper review, then my assumption is that the code is autogenerated without proper review as well. And I think that's fine for some things, but if I'm looking at a repo and trying to figure out if it's likely to work, then a lack of proper review is a big signal that the tool is probably going to fall apart pretty quickly if I try and do something that the author didn't expect.
by danaris | 2026-02-02 10:07:52+00:00
It's not for "signaling," and it's not for "high prestige" jobs.

It's for jobs, period. Because a) as the world grows more complex, more and more jobs genuinely require higher education, and at the same time b) with the near-total disappearance of training by employers, they expect job seekers to come into every job with all the skills needed, and with the decline in labor power (as compared to the late 20th century), there's very little meaningful resistance to that.
by garblegarble | 2026-02-02 10:08:34+00:00
>does this limit the agent's ability to run standard Linux tooling? Or are you relying on the AI to just figure out the BSD/macOS equivalents of standard commands?

Slightly counterintuitively, Apple Containers spawns linux VMs.

There doesn't appear to be any way to spawn a native macOS container... which is a pity, it'd be nice to have ultra-low-overhead containers on macOS (but I suspect all the interesting macOS stuff relies on a bunch of services/gui access that'd make it not-lightweight anyway)

FYI: it's easy enough to install GNU tools with homebrew; technically there's a risk of problems if applications spawn commandline tools and expect the BSD args/output but I've not run into any issues in the several years I've been doing it).
by lelanthran | 2026-02-02 10:10:14+00:00
Both the points:

1. I don't want to see political messages in unrelated delivery mechanisms

and

2. I created $PRODUCT as a delivery mechanism for a political message

are equally valid.

I feel that the problem that comes about is when a $PRODUCT was not created as a delivery mechanism but is being co-opted into being one at some later stage; the audience feels deceived and the creator feels that the audience is ungrateful.

I'm not very familiar with Notepad++ (having never used it, nor experienced any desire to try it), but I'm fairly certain that the creator has been political long enough now that the audience cannot complain about the message being delivered with the product.

It's like complaining about Vim having a message for the plight of Ugandans - it's been there for decades; too late to complain now about it.

I'm more sympathetic to complaints over projects which never had a specific political message suddenly acquiring one when they realised what a large audience they had, or when new people join a decades-old project and introduce a political message that was never there before. I can sorta understand outrage then.
by debugnik | 2026-02-02 10:10:23+00:00
Can't do it externally, kinda. Last year I succeeded in joining a device reachable only through IPv6 to a Netbird network, but their service would fail when I tried to configure IPv6 nameservers for it; the web UI did accept them fine though, they just didn't work. A shame, since I was otherwise fine with IPv4-only for the Netbird network.
by int_19h | 2026-02-02 10:11:25+00:00
Microsoft provides C# LSP for VSCode (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotne...).

The problem is that it's closed source, and its license specifically prohibits its use with anything other than VSCode. Unfortunately, this is becoming the usual modus operandi for first-party Microsoft extensions for VSCode for all the talk about how they "love open source".
by Quothling | 2026-02-02 10:11:44+00:00
Is this an USA thing? I know I left the management track, but in my world, promotions is something you ask for and then you figure out how to get them, and then you... well get them. Like if an IT support guy wants to get into sysadmin, they will then plan it with their manager. Usually this means they'll work to get some sort of related certificate and then once they get it, they'll move into a role that suits their new abilities. Sometimes they'll need to "level up" their abilities a few times before they completely leave support, but they'll get there as quick as possible. If you don't they'll just leave for another company.

I guess this article is for the management track?