MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmclnx | 2026-02-08 15:31:41+00:00
I do not say anywhere Korea Exploiting the US. I am saying the US and a few other nations used many countries to gain power and use that as chess games against each other. Without US support, S. Korea and Taiwan would not exist. The US is/has used these countries against China and the USSR.

Yes, they got better off due to it, but the US gets a bit more benefit from the arrangement. Fun fact, until about the 1980s, N. Korea had a much stronger economy that S. Korea due to support from the USSR.
by veltas | 2026-02-08 15:32:03+00:00
To me it just seems like they are prejudiced against Brits or something.

I don't buy their statement about legal concerns given it's as vague as GDPR, and equally as inapplicable to a www git, and yet they've not banned the EU.

It's quite toxic to ban a whole country from your project without good reason. I've seen people break more of a sweat worrying about whether Russia should be banned from open source projects than the UK. It's not unfortunately unexpected, people love being ignorant about the UK.
by eviks | 2026-02-08 15:32:11+00:00
> The fact that an idle Mac has over 2,000 threads running in over 600 processes is good news, and the more of those that are run on the E cores, the faster our apps will be

This doesn't make sense in a rather fundamental way - there is no way to design a real computer where doing some useless work is better than doing no work, just think about energy consumption and battery life since this is laptops.
Or that's just resources your current app can't use

Besides, they aren't that well engineered, bugs exist and last and come back, etc, so even when on average the impact isn't big, you can get a few photo analysis indexing going haywire for awhile and get stuck
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-08 15:32:34+00:00
>Ethanol is corrosive to engine and fuel system components.

Caca del toro.

Who needs imaginary horseshit when you can be spreading bull?

The Ethanol on my home planet consists of Ethyl Alcohol. In the chemical, beverage, and fuel world, pure Ethanol is a non-corrosive flammable solvent. More caution is always recommended to those who are least familiar with its properties.

>It is also hygroscopic and will suck water in which is bad news for your fuel system.

Sorry to deliver even worse news, Ethanol is not nearly as hygroscopic as you have been hoping for. A hygroscopic chemicals go, it hardly even qualifies. I can assure you that the water causing your fuel system such anguish did not come out of thin air because of fuel grade alcohol. Not any faster than it would if your fuel were plain conventional hydrocarbons under the same weathering conditions.
by agentultra | 2026-02-08 15:32:41+00:00
I agree, there is a nice language buried in all the features trying to escape.

The struggle is that if you choose a subset of the language to use and you have dependencies… well you’re including whatever features they use into your subset.

I don’t think C++ is a bad language at all or anything. Just that it nudges developers into certain modes of thinking based on the features it chooses to focus on. Might explain why some developers still choose C.
by thesumofall | 2026-02-08 15:32:41+00:00
I agree with the sentiment. I don‘t code a lot, but AI has sped up things in all fields for which I use AI (or at least the expectation of speed has grown). For me, it’s the context switching but also just the mental load of holding so many projects and ideas together in my head. It somewhat helps that the usable context of LLMs has grown over time so I tend to trust the „memory“ of the AI a bit more to keep track of things and somewhat try to offload stuff from my brain
by greatgib | 2026-02-08 15:33:05+00:00
The point of "greed" here is when you are starting to cut corners to make more money to the point of impacting the quality/safety/honesty of your product. Thinking that no one would notice.

You could buy whatever random Chinese milk powder brand. But Nestle is advertising itself on the upmost quality and care for you kids. Especially the brand impacted.

It's like going to a restaurant selling the best homemade luxury food and you go to the kitchen and you find that they cook expired supermarket frozen food because they greedily were thinking that it would be more profitable.
by testdelacc1 | 2026-02-08 15:33:57+00:00
I haven’t used a laptop other than a mac in 10 years. I remember being extremely frustrated with the Intel macs. What I hated most was getting into video meetings, which would make the Intel CPU sound like a 747 taxiing.

The switch from a top spec, new Intel Mac to a base model M1 Macbook Air was like a breath of fresh air. I still use that 5 year old laptop happily because it was such a leap forward in performance. I dont recall ever being happy with a 5 year old device.
by nullbio | 2026-02-08 15:34:25+00:00
We're on the precipice of something very disgusting. A massive power imbalance where a single company or two swallows the Earth's economy, due to a lack of competition, distribution and right of access laws. The wildest part is that these greedy companies, one of them in particular, are continuously framed in a positive light. This same company that has partnered with Palantir. AI should be a public good, not something gatekept by greedy capitalists with an ego complex.
by softwaredoug | 2026-02-08 15:34:29+00:00
Even if Claude writes 100% code, I think there will be a bifurcation between people who are finicky about 10 lines of code. And those finicky about high level product experiences.

I think the 10 lines of code people worry their jobs now become obsolete. In cases where the code required googling how to do X with Y technology, that's true. That's just going to be trivially solvable. And it will cause us to not need as many developers.

In my experience though, the 10 lines of finicky code use case usually has specific attributes:

1. You don't have well defined requirements. We're discovering correctness as we go. We 'code' to think how to solve the problem, adding / removing / changing tests as we go.

2. The constraints / correctness of this code is extremely multifaceted. It simultaneously matters for it to be fast, correct, secure, easy to use, etc

3. We're adapting a general solution (ie a login flow) to our specific company or domain. And the latter requires us to provide careful guidance to the LLM to get the right output

It may be Claude Code around these fewer bits of code, but in these cases its still important to have taste and care with code details itself.

We may weirdly be in a case where it's possible to single-shot a slack clone, but taking time to change the 2 small features we care about is time consuming and requires thoughtfulness.
by ngruhn | 2026-02-08 15:34:43+00:00
> If you want to code by hand, then do it! No one's stopping you.

There are few skills that are both fun and highly valued. It's disheartening if it stops being highly valued, even if you can still do it in private.

> But we shouldn't pretend that you will be able to do that professionally for much longer.

I'm not pretending. I'm only sad.
The $5.5T Paradox: Structural displacement in the GPU/AI infra labor demand?
by y2236li | 2026-02-08 15:35:11+00:00
The Q1 2026 labor data presents a significant anomaly. We are observing a persistent high-volume layoff cycle (~25k YTD) occurring simultaneously with a projected $5.5T global economic loss attributed to unfilled technical roles (IDC).

This suggests we aren't witnessing a cyclical downturn, but a structural "displacement event" driven by a rotation in capital and compute requirements.

Three observations for discussion:

1. *The Infrastructure Bottleneck:* While application-layer development is being compressed by agentic IDEs and higher-level abstractions, the demand for the "underlying" stack (vector orchestration, GPU cluster optimization, custom RAG pipelines) has entered a state of acute scarcity.
2. *The Depreciation of Mid-Level Generalism:* We are seeing a "Mid-Level Squeeze" where companies prioritize either "AI-Native" entry-level talent (low cost, high adaptability) or Staff-level architects. The traditional 4-8 YOE generalist feature developer appears to be the primary demographic of the current layoff cycle.
3. *The Revenue-to-Engineer Ratio:* For the first time, we are seeing "Agentic" teams of 2-3 engineers maintaining systems that previously required 15-20. This shift isn't just about efficiency; it's about the fundamental unit of labor changing from "writing lines of code" to "orchestrating system logic."

Is the $5.5T "gap" actually fillable by the current workforce, or are we looking at a permanent bifurcation where a large segment of the legacy SWE population becomes structurally unemployable without a complete ground-up retraining in the data/inference pipeline?
by zagfh | 2026-02-08 15:35:29+00:00
Of course you are more tired: Code review is more difficult than writing code.

They you have to deal with slop, slopfluencer articles written under the influence of AI psychosis, AI addicts, lying managers, lying CEOs etc.

And you usually, the author of this article being an exception, get dumber and are only able to verbalize AI boosterism.

AI only works if you become a slopfluencer, sell a course on YouTube and have people "like and subscribe".
by rossdavidh | 2026-02-08 15:35:40+00:00
If you really don't know a single such person, you live in a very odd bubble. I know lots of people who used ChatGPT a lot when it first came out, found it funny and occasionally useful, then changed their mind to just finding it funny occasionally, and then eventually stopped because it wasn't that useful and was no longer funny.

None of them ever considered getting a paid account, nor would they have. I'm not saying nobody will, but if you actually don't know any such people then there is something unusual about the crowd you run with.
by jaapz | 2026-02-08 15:36:17+00:00
That's pretty funny because LLM's actually help me achieve flow state easier because they help me automate away the dumb shit that normally kind of blocks me. Flow state for me is not (just) churning out lines of code but having that flow of thought in my head that eventually flows to a solved problem without being interrupted. Interesting that for you the flow state actually means your mind shutting up lol. For me it means shutting up about random shit that doesn't matter to the task at hand and being focused only on solving the current problem.

It helps that I don't outsource huge tasks to the LLM, because then I lose track of what's happening and what needs to be done. I just code the fun part, then ask the LLM to do the parts that I find boring (like updating all 2000 usages of a certain function I just changed).
by dripdry45 | 2026-02-08 15:36:20+00:00
But you don’t define hand or tooth washing well enough. A pithy response means little if we haven’t broken down the comparison into appropriate component parts for meaningful comparison.

The other question is, is it even worth it? These things have worked for you well enough up to this point, all three. That’s fair and valid.

The question might be is it worth the cognitive friction to change those things?
I change the way that I brush my teeth, and now my overall health is better perhaps. Perhaps my mouth biome changed over decades, while I was unaware. A better way involves changing a habit, getting some new technology, and even this simple change may have knocked on effect in the rest of my life if I have a tight schedule and rigid habits, which benefit me. Is the trade-off worth it? Can we really know?

I’m not a surgeon so I don’t have an extensive method of washing my hands. However, some people don’t even wash their bodies more than once in a while. Science has discovered that this is probably healthier over the long-term, but other people simply take a shower and scrub scrub, scrub every single day. They say it benefits them, but the facts point to otherwise. They have a hard time changing that habit or believing the facts.

Same applies to an OS. Sure, looking backwards it has been good, but will it continue to be? Is it worth the cognitive friction to make those changes though? Honestly? For you, probably not at this point. But who is to say? Could what you have learned be leveraged in a different OS and bring you even more of what you feel benefits you? I suppose only you can know this, and that’s totally OK.

Past returns are no guarantee of future performance, in short.
Show HN: VideoZero – Generate 2D explainer videos from prompts
by prathje | 2026-02-08 15:36:31+00:00
Hello Hacker News! I've been lurking on hacker news, and it is amazing what people have built!
I'm Patrick and I built a 2D video generation tool at VideoZero.ai that can produce crisp technical videos (text, formulas, graphs) by using code instead of generating raw pixels.

After my PhD, I really wanted to do something more creative, and I started creating educational videos about computer science. I felt there was a huge need for engaging, short educational videos to counter all the let's say, "less brain-activating” short videos on social media. I came across Motion Canvas and its use of generator to define animations really resonated with the way I like to code. However, I quickly realized that making high quality videos takes forever! And, unfortunately, existing AI tools cannot generate technical videos that well, they can’t even handle simple text! But then I thought, wait a minute, creating videos with Motion Canvas? This is just code? I turned around and looked at my AI buddy Claude and I told him “you can do it”!

I spent the following months working on that vision of enabling LLMs to generate 2D videos that don't break after just 10 seconds. The result is now called VideoZero and you can try it for free at videozero.ai (paid from my personal credit card). For one, here is the result of visualizing Conway's Game of Life: https://videozero.ai/view/?id=040c6732-38f3-4990-baff-73d03d...

Sometimes the videos are quite good, on other occasions, let's say they need a bit of refinement.

Would love to hear what you think and what you would like to visualize.

Cheers and have a good weekend! Patrick
by noisy_boy | 2026-02-08 15:37:05+00:00
> Someday years from now we will look back on the era when we were the last generation to code by hand. We’ll laugh and explain to our grandkids how silly it was that we typed out JavaScript syntax with our fingers. But secretly we’ll miss it.

Why will I miss it? I will be coding my small scripts and tools and hobby projects by hand because there is no deadline attached to them. Hell, I will also tag them as "bespoke hand-crafted free range artisanal" code. There will be a whole hipster category of code that is written as such. And people will enjoy it as they enjoy vinyl records now. Many things would have changed by then but my heart will still be a programmer's heart.
by safety1st | 2026-02-08 15:37:11+00:00
I'm not at all convinced that "break your concentration and go check on an agent once every several minutes" is a productivity increaser. We already know that compulsively checking your inbox while you try to code makes your output worse. Both kill your focus and that focus isn't optional when you're doing cognitively taxing work--you know, the stuff an AI can't do. So at the moment it's like we're lobotomizing ourselves in order to babysit a robot that's dumber than we are.

That said I don't dispute the value of agents but I haven't really figured out what the right workflow is. I think the AI either needs to be really fast if it's going to help me with my main task, so that it doesn't mess up my state of flow/concentration, or it needs to be something I set and forget for long periods of time. For the latter maybe the "AIs submitting PRs" approach will ultimately be the right way to go but I have yet to come across an agent whose output doesn't require quite a lot of planning, back and forth, and code review. I'm still thinking in the long run the main enduring value may be that these LLMs are a "conversational UI" to something, not that they're going to be like little mini-employees.
by SaberTail | 2026-02-08 15:37:14+00:00
I'd speculate we had a few factors working against us that made us hit the "limit" sooner.

Several different engineering teams from different parts of the company had to come together for this, and the overall architecture was modular, so there was a lot of complexity before we had to start integrating. We have some company-wide standards and conventions, but they don't cover everything. To work on the code, you might need to know module A does something one way and module B does it in a different way because different teams were involved. That was implicit in how human engineers worked on it, and so it wasn't explicitly explained to the coding agents.

The project was in the life sciences space, and the quality of code in the training data has to be worse than something like a B2B SaaS app. A lot of code in the domain is written by scientists, not software engineers, and only needs to work long enough to publish the paper. So any code an LLM writes is going to look like that by default unless an engineer is paying attention.

I don't know that either of those would be insurmountable if the company were willing to burn more tokens, but I'd guess it's an order of magnitude more than we spent already.

There are politics as well. There have been other changes in the company, and it seems like the current leadership wants to free up resources to work on completely different things, so there's no will to throw more tokens at untangling the mess.

I don't disbelieve the success stories, but I think most of them are either at the level of following already successful patterns instead of doing much novel, or from companies with much bigger budgets for inference. If Anthropic burns a bunch of money to make a C compiler, they can make it back from increased investor hype, but most companies are not in that position.
by saagarjha | 2026-02-08 15:37:21+00:00
Both of your examples are actually very good at explaining my point. Both Instruments and perf largely expose the same information, since they use trace features in the hardware together with kernel support to profile code. Where they differ is the UI they provide. perf provides almost nothing; Instruments provides almost everything. This is because perf is basically a library and Instruments is a tool that you use to find performance problems.

Why do I like Instruments and think it is better? Because the people who designed it optimized it for solving real performance problems. There are a bunch of "templates" that are focused on issues like "why is my thing so slow, what is it doing" to "why am I using too much memory" to "what network traffic is coming out of this app". These are real, specific problems while perf will tell you things like "oh this instruction has a 12% cache miss rate because it got scheduled off the core 2ms ago". Which is something Instruments can also tell you, but the idea is that this is totally the wrong interface that you should be presenting for doing performance work since just presenting people with data is barely useful.

What people do instead with perf is they have like 17 scripts 12 of which were written by Brendan Gregg to load the info into something that can be half useful to them. This is to save you time if you don't know how the Linux kernel works. Part of the reason why flamegraphs and Perfetto are so popular is because everyone is so desperate to pull out the info and get something, anything, that's not the perf UI that they settle for what they can get. Instruments has exceptionally good UI for its tools, clearly designed by people who solve real performance problems. perf is a raw data dump from the kernel with some lipstick on it.

Mind you, I trust the data that perf is dumping because the tool is rock-solid. Instruments is not like that. It's buggy, sometimes undocumented (to be fair, perf is not great either, but at least it is open source), slow, and crashes a lot. This majorly sucks. But even with this I solve a lot more problems clicking around Instruments UI and cursing at it than I do with perf. And while they are slow to fix things they are directionally moving towards cleaning up bugs and allowing data export, so the problems that you brought up (which are very valid) are solved or on their way towards being solved.
by ryukoposting | 2026-02-08 15:37:42+00:00
Work for a smaller company with more reasonable expectations of a knowledge worker.

You're an engineer, not a manager, or a chef, or anything else. Nothing you do needs to be done Monday-Friday between the hours of 8 and 5 (except for meetings). Sometimes it's better if you don't do that, actually. If your work doesn't understand that, they suck and you should leave.
by pydry | 2026-02-08 15:37:48+00:00
The nail in the coffin moment for me when i realized AI had turned into a full blown cult was when people started equating a "hand crafted artisinal" piece of software used by a million people with hand crafted artisinal chair used by their grandma.

The cult has its origins in taylorism - a sort of investor religion dedicated to the idea that all economic activity will eventually be boiled down to ownership and unskilled labor.
by skeltoac | 2026-02-08 15:38:24+00:00
Enthusiastic amateur here. I have no film school or real writing experience.

I’d use it to explore branching first. My system has a rich knowledge tree and could write some very detailed prompts. We would discuss the results and integrate them into our tree.

I want to have that visual graph representation for myself as well, but it seems like my text repo really needs some structural formality.

I also think your system would be a good consultant for mine. We have questions about story writing, you have an endpoint for that.

My current story is being written for the page, no film contemplated yet, so I haven’t thought about access your screenplay tools yet.
by jodrellblank | 2026-02-08 15:38:39+00:00
Tomy made the Dustbot robot vacuum in 1985, Electrolux made the Trilobite robot vacuum in 1996, and then washing machines, dishwashers, tumble-dryers, microwaves, microwave meals, disposable diapers, fast fashion, and plug-in vacuums, floor steamers, carpet washers, home automation for lights and curtains, central heating instead of coal/wood fires and ash buckets, fridge-freezers and supermarkets (removing the need for canning, pickling, jamming, preserving), takeaways and food delivery, people having 1-2 children instead of 6-12 children. The amount of human labour in housework has plummetted since 1900.

Plenty of flying cars existed through the 1900s, including commercial ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_car

The International Space Station was launched in 1998.
by dpnet | 2026-02-08 15:38:45+00:00
Thank you for raising this — it’s a fair and important question, and I appreciate the respectful tone.

From my perspective, trust and transparency are fundamental for any hosting provider, regardless of location. Our goal is to operate with clear policies that prioritize customer privacy, data security, and legal clarity.

Like any provider, we are required to operate within applicable laws and regulations, but we aim to minimize risk for users through technical and operational practices such as limiting data retention, avoiding unnecessary data collection, and being transparent about how requests are handled.

We believe infrastructure providers carry responsibility, and our intention is to build a service that respects users while maintaining operational integrity. This is one of the reasons I’m asking for community feedback — to understand expectations and concerns early on.