MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Quothling | 2026-02-08 00:15:36+00:00
> Entra and try telling the bank you’re working for that you have to have a Linux notebook. You’ll get laughed right out of a job.

Entra id private access will cover that (and it frankly can't become the norm soon enough). For an extra $5 per license. I wouldn't worry too much about that part of Microsoft though. They always knew how to sell stuff to enterprise. You gotta wonder what their Windows division is doing though, but maybe they just don't want private customers.
by Nextgrid | 2026-02-08 00:16:08+00:00
You hire the junior developer because you can get them to learn your codebase and business domain at a discount, and then reap their productivity as they turn senior. You don’t get that with an LLM since it only operates on whatever is in its context.

(If you prefer to hire seniors that’s fine too - my rates are triple that of a junior and you’re paying full price for the time it takes me learning your codebase, and from experience it takes me at least 3 months to reach full productivity.)
by Archelaos | 2026-02-08 00:16:13+00:00
This problem is not specific to AI, but a matter of social policy.

For example here in Germany, the Gini index, an indicator of equality/inequality has been oszillating about 29.75 +/-1.45 since 2011.[1] In other words, the wealth distribution was more or less stable in the last 15 years, and is less extrem than in the USA, where it was 41.8 in 2023.[2]

[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1184266/

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA
by Spooky23 | 2026-02-08 00:16:28+00:00
Honestly, that’s a 2016 argument. I flipped a few contact centers over to Linux desktops and had very few issues. If anything we probably spent 5x the resources getting Windows 11 certified internally.

Microsoft knows it, but they don’t care about windows. When IBM started offering Macs to employees, they figured out that the support burden was very low, significantly lower than windows, even with users having years of windows experience.

Intune was supposed to be the answer to that, making Windows management MDM like. But for their most entrenched enterprise customers, they can’t really switch without co-managing with Configuration Manager. Most of the people behind that product are laid off or otherwise attrited, as there’s no path to a subscription service.
by throwgraway | 2026-02-08 00:18:14+00:00
former email marketing automation company employee here: These lists have been sold multiple times before, there may be more "functional" mailboxes or distribution lists (like sales@, it@) than real people, they may be in a dire need of list hygiene, they may contain spam traps, and for the most important part - there is no consent given from the email owners to you. All unsolicited email will end up in spam or trash just because of lack of consent. And if you feed this lists to most of the email automation software then you are cruising for a bruising as they can terminate your account based on that.
by lconnell962 | 2026-02-08 00:18:23+00:00
Comment threads on the Closed Source OS topics like this regularly remind me about the large disconnect between skilled technical users and the "average" user. That average probably isn't your (great) grandparent who never learned how to type suddenly needing to learn the rapidly evolving early-days internet, but it's still just as dangerous to suggest "Use Linux" as the solution for everyone when plenty of "Average" users still don't know enough to be doing things safely in the console.

The "sudo rm -rf" and equivilant horror stories get told all too often as mistakes even made by "skilled users" who were in a hurry, and while that particular problem is becoming less common there is still a minefield out there. Wider use case where we need IT support is worse since there are plenty of Microsoft and Mac favoring restrictions and lockdowns required in the name of corporate level security requirements and certifications add to the mess and "security concerns" you can't get corporate to move away from.

I'm a daily Linux user who has had to put years of a software developer career's time into learning the easier system administration aspects and working with those who handle the harder issues, but doing this in my career I have had to step back every time someone comes to me with a problem. Once I understand the problem then go on to ask "at a guess, how much time will diagnosing this even take?" with the estimates varying based on how standard the OS install or deployment is.

Time and a relatively small amount of training is the problem with switching users from Windows to Mac or the reverse. Switching to Linux is training and introducing a technical mindset into a person. Idiot-proofing the system is a major issue Linux hasn't solved yet. VDI systems and the like might be a step in the right direction, but as soon as your use case for Linux requires a "average user" to open a terminal the problems will pile up and the minefield is exposed.

Years removed from using a Mac I still think of it as the most "child-proofed" OS. Windows being less restrictive but still doing a good-enough job of locking up the more dangerous things while also not drawing attention to them on a regular basis. Linux is like seeing the dangers left out in the open with few useful warning signs beyond some generic unspecified danger signs around the worksite.
by hackyhacky | 2026-02-08 00:18:49+00:00
> Is the LLM paying for hosting in this scenario, too? Is the LLM signing up for the new hosting provider that supports PHP after initially deploying to github pages?

It's an implementation detail. The user doesn't care. OpenClaw can buy its own hosting if you ask it to.

> Feels like the non-programmer is going to care a little bit about paying for 5 different hosting providers because the LLM decided to generate their burger website in PHP, JavaScript, Python, Ruby and Perl in successive iterations.

There's this cool new program that the kids are using. It's called Docker. You should check it out.
by entangledqubit | 2026-02-08 00:19:42+00:00
I was under the impression that they were initially allowed to produce the drugs since they were on FDA drug shortage lists. As expected, the compounders scaled up their pipelines to meet demand and now that the drugs have been taken off the shortage list the compounders are incentivized to figure out how to keep things legal. (Of course, they should have had clean supply chains this whole time.)

I'm curious if one of these outfits got bought out to end the supply shortage.

Related:
https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-and-availability/fda-c...
by mcny | 2026-02-08 00:20:41+00:00
> For the most part, personal income is taxed on gross and business income is taxed on net

This bothers me a lot.

So basically a wealthy billionaire can take one company that makes profits and acquire a large loss making company that he also owns and Viola suddenly the profit making company doesn't need to pay as much in taxes anymore.

Or Google takes out huge ads on its own properties but it doesn't have to pay anyone and therefore doesn't have to pay any sales tax on those ads.

It feels like we are structurally encouraging vertical integration and bigger businesses.

We need to have some kind of alternative minimum global tax for companies based on gross receipts rather than net.
by toprerules | 2026-02-08 00:20:49+00:00
Staff engineer (also at FAANG), so yes, I have at least comparable experience. I'm not trying to summarize every level of SWE in a few sentences. The point is that AI's infallibility is no different than human infallibility. You may fire a human for a mistake, but it won't solve the business problems they may have created, so I believe the accountability argument is bogus. You can hold the next layer up accountable. The new models are startling good at direction setting, technical to product translation, and providing leadership guidance on technical matters and providing multiple routes for roadblocks.

We're starting to see engineers running into bugs and roadblocks feed input into AI and not only root causing the problem, but suggesting and implementing the fix and taking it into review.
by jimnotgym | 2026-02-08 00:21:02+00:00
Why do you assume it is finance departments making these decisions?

Finance departments get hit with the same clueless 'cost saving' as everyone else! Often because the savings are so 'obvious' to MBA wielding middle managers, the decisions are made without Finance advice.

It is also often just a corporate politics thing. Your department has to save money, but there is no measure of how much money you cost other departments. In my experience this is more often done to Finance than by them. Pushing more work from frontline departments to back office departments sounds great to an Ops manager, and this frontline departments often contain people who are good at selling their idea.
by input_sh | 2026-02-08 00:21:07+00:00
It's pretty much like drugs or gambling.

Sure, the tiny rushes of dopamine are free, but that's just enough to get your foot into the door and pretty soon they won't hit the same. If you don't quit while you're ahead, it's either gonna financially ruin you or turn you into a zombie that never uses its brain for an extended period of time and you end up writing posts like this one to self-rationalise your completely irrational behaviour because you've been scared into thinking your career is gonna be ruined if you don't keep diving head-first into this addiction.

Not a coincidence that this is happening at the same time as "bet on anything" apps.
by omoikane | 2026-02-08 00:21:28+00:00
Seems like the article picked a poor example if the main point they are trying to get across was to minimize friction and optimize for momentum, because Concur consistently gave me the impression that it was optimized to increase friction.

Like, why does Concur have separate categories for long distance rail versus short distance rail? Why not put all travel expenses under a single "travel" category? Maybe there is some business reason why Concur expense reports are so nitty-gritty, but whatever the reason was, it was the opposite of minimizing friction.
by jweir | 2026-02-08 00:21:28+00:00
I switched back to 4.5 Sonnet or Opus yesterday since 4.6 was so slow and often “over thinking” or “over analyzing” the problem space. Tasks which accurately took under an minute in Sonnet 4.5 were still running after 5 minutes in 4.6 (yeah I had them race for a few tasks)

Someone of this could be system overload I suppose.
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-08 00:22:08+00:00
With D-D fusion it might be possible to "live off the land" between the stars which probably have numerous interstellar objects of various sizes between them with a much larger cumulative mass than planets orbiting stars -- and it may be possible to completely disassemble those kind of bodies which are much richer overall in carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen than terrestrial planets.

A species with that kind of capability would be able to visit another solar system in 10,000 or so years but might care less to mess around with dry little solar system bodies like the Earth. The case against "grabby" aliens is that Ceres and Pluto are still here, not that we can't find evidence of them on Earth.

I like to imagine that if that kind of interstellar traveler were to visit Earth it might take them a few decades to perfect a "reverse space-shuttle" because they'd gone 10,000 years without doing anything like that... And they can't just 3-d print one out of 10,000 year old plans because they've improved their 3-d printers to print the stuff they've been printing all that time better.
by blacksmith_tb | 2026-02-08 00:23:07+00:00
Not the OP, but I would think most people would expect to see a word processor, a spreadsheet, some kind of presentation tool, and maybe a simple database. That's not just comparing to MS Office, that's LibreOffice as well? La Suite seems to have more and better collaboration tools than LO, but it is also less document-focused, just looking through their repos.
by calvano915 | 2026-02-08 00:23:30+00:00
> I highly recommend checking out the terms of trumprx.gov - not endorsing the entire government here, but it is actually working and quite cleverly written to ensure Americans are getting the lowest cost drugs in the world now.

Brief research indicates otherwise unless you're talking about a handful of Brand name Rx. For generics, CostPlus and other options are still better pricing.

https://www.healthcompiler.com/cost-plus-drugs-vs-trumprx-ho...
by richardw | 2026-02-08 00:25:44+00:00
It’s a $90k engineer that sometimes acts like a vandal, who never has thoughts like “this seems to be a bad way to go. Let me ask the boss” or “you know, I was thinking. Shouldn’t we try to extract this code into a reusable component?” The worst developers I’ve worked with have better instincts for what’s valuable. I wish it would stop with “the simplest way to resolve this is X little shortcut” -> boom.

It basically stumbles around generating tokens within the bounds (usually) of your prompt, and rarely stops to think. Goal is token generation, baby. Not careful evaluation. I have to keep forcing it to stop creating magic inline strings and rather use constants or config, even though those instructions are all over my Claude.md and I’m using the top model. It loves to take shortcuts that save GPU but cost me time and money to wrestle back to rational. “These issues weren’t created by me in this chat right now so I’ll ignore them and ship it.” No, fix all the bugs. That’s the job.

Still, I love it. I can hand code the bits I want to, let it fly with the bits I don’t. I can try something new in a separate CLI tab while others are spinning. Cost to experiment drops massively.
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-02-08 00:25:52+00:00
This is part of a new trend towards “harness engineering”. You should automate away as much of the software construction and validation process as possible, but also the QA and integration (which includes debugging).. take yourself progressively out of those loops, that’s the new job.

For example you can iteratively automate code review. Every time you notice an issue during review, pop open your coding agent and ask it how it might be instructed to catch such a thing. There’s going to be an 80/20 rule here - you probably can’t eliminate every issue, but there’s bound to be low hanging fruit.

We will see where this goes!
by nixosbestos | 2026-02-08 00:26:52+00:00
If I could wave a wand and ban a single class of comments on HN, it would be this. Rambling, non-specific handwaving useless text.

> user experience is nowhere to be found in the linux landscape.

It's ignorant, and its insulting, and it's stupid. You can read one or two KDE blog posts, look at the roadmap for Cosmic, look at the attention Valve has put into Linux and know that sentence is just rude. It's just so frustrating.

> People will tell you try this or that distro.

Dumbasses on reddit will. No one that has a single clue encourages distro-hopping.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-02-08 00:27:33+00:00
> The moment someone makes a non macbook air, that does the same as a macbook air in terms of being cold to touch, battery life and no-noise I'm leaving for Linux though.

I think a lot of people are waiting for a non-Apple Macbook, but we unfortunately might be waiting for a while. It seems to pain other manufacturers to not cut corners in some critical area or another…
by pyuser583 | 2026-02-08 00:28:02+00:00
Scripture is pretty clear the name of Christ matters. The genealogies refer to a specific individual, not a message. The Epistles even single out Christ’s name as worthy of praise.

The messages of the gospel aren’t obvious, or obviously good. Without an actual man-god preaching them, I don’t see why we should love our enemies as we love ourselves.
by Rochus | 2026-02-08 00:28:25+00:00
This is a competent introduction to Stoicism; it successfully debunks the most common myth, that Stoics are emotionless robots. However, the text presents a somewhat "sanitized" version of the philosophy; it focuses heavily on the "self-help" aspects (resilience, mindset) while glossing over the more rigid physical aspects of Stoic theory, such as their materialist view of the universe.

Personally I find Stoicism still pretty depressing and boring, and much prefer the philosophy of Epicurus, who valued enjoyment, frugality and the minimization of suffering.
by bediger4000 | 2026-02-08 00:28:44+00:00
This kind of article is repetitious. 15 or 20 years ago, it might be interesting or relevant, but by now we know for a fact that "Word" or Adobe Photoshop or Excel or heaven help us PowerPoint can't be replaced, the business world and the legal system can't function without exactly and precisely those apps. It's always the same.
by singpolyma3 | 2026-02-08 00:29:03+00:00
If all you were doing is taking requirements from someone else and poorly coding them up (and yes I know a decent % of the industry matches close to this) then yes you are obsolete. Something just as useless but much faster now here.

If you are part of the requirements process. If you find problems to solve and solve them. If you push back on requirements when they are not reasonable. Etc. Then you still have a career and I don't see anything coming for you soon.
by SatvikBeri | 2026-02-08 00:29:55+00:00
I use one Claude instance at a time, roughly fulltime (writes 90% of my code). Generally making small changes, nothing weird. According to ccusage, I spend about $20 of tokens a day, a bit less than 1 MTOK output tokens a way. So the exact same workflow would be about $120 for higher speed.
by Spooky23 | 2026-02-08 00:30:45+00:00
The issue isn’t the technology, it’s that there’s more than one way to do everything and people tend to scratch their itches.

If you started a company today, you can immediately and cheaply hire people or an MSP to manage Windows PCs. I hire entry Windows techs for $70k. M365 E-whatever is $30-60/mo.

Apple fully aligned their products, so the guys running the iPhone fleet can run the Macs. They may need some higher level assistance to setup the configurations. Unless you have a lot of compliance work, enroll in MDM, done.

With Linux, other than Chrome, there’s no standard. You’re gonna need a smart/expensive person to setup things and you’re going to need smart/expensive people to operate. If you have compliance requirements appear, you’ll need to buy RHEL or something and rework stuff, which is more expensive than windows.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2026-02-08 00:30:46+00:00
Tilt is great but it doesn’t solve the problem you’re asking about. This project more directly addresses that. Fundamentally the problem is that you want to maintain the lifecycle of several services during an ephemeral ci run and tear them down when you are done. As you mentioned it gets unwieldy and annoying to try to run all of these on a single machine and doubly so when you have a lot of services/containers. Kubedock is more like what you are looking for, it translates compose calls to Kube equivalents and each service in the compose file is it’s one kube pod with its own lifecycle. It should be possible under that to do what you are saying, spawn multiple docker composes from a single run.

It is worth noting that Kubedock has some really annoying limitations, part of it is that it’s one person the other part is that some concepts don’t translate to kube very well. So make sure that whatever you will be doing fits into those constraints before you try it
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-08 00:31:26+00:00
It's easy if you can build some kind of machine like what Eric Drexler talked about that could manufacture absolutely everything. Otherwise it's impossible.

The best hope for that is to send the one thing to Mars that people absolutely refuse to send to Mars which is bacteria and yeast and microbes. That could be a synthetic biology platform that could make pretty much all the molecules you need and then you assemble them with 3D printing or something like that.
by lbreakjai | 2026-02-08 00:31:43+00:00
I guess where I was leading to is who owns the compute that runs those models. Mistral, for example, lists Microsoft and Google as subprocessors (1). Anthropic is (was?) running on GCP and AWS.

So, we have multiple providers, but for how long? They're all competing for the same hardware and the same energy, and it will naturally converge into an oligopoly. So, if competition doesn't set the floor, what does?

Local models? If you're not running the best model as fast as you can, then you'll be outpaced by someone that does.

1. https://trust.mistral.ai/subprocessors
by stoneforger | 2026-02-08 00:31:51+00:00
You are measuring differently..they measure in how much stuff they ship. They don't measure if it's going to break , if it is not very maintainable, or how much it will cost to keep using the LLM I. The future. Remember its an extraction grift: buy now, pay later. Preferably after you have made the model an intrinsic part of the process. Oh snap, now we definitely need to bailout LLMs cause noone knows how this stuff works. Please help. Useful idiots all around. Classic case of not using their brains the way they evolved for.
by hackyhacky | 2026-02-08 00:33:52+00:00
Huh? No.

The output of the LLM is nondeterministic, meaning that the same input to the LLM will result in different output from the LLM.

That has nothing to do with weather the code itself is deterministic. If the LLM produces non-deterministic code, that's a bug, which hopefully will be caught by another sub-agent before production. But there's no reason to assume that programs created by LLMs are non-deterministic just because the LLMs themselves are. After all, humans are non-deterministic.

> I can send specific LLM output to QA, I can’t ask QA to validate that this prompt will always produce bug free code even for future versions of the AI.

This is a crazy scenario that does not correspond to how anyone uses LLMs.
by HappMacDonald | 2026-02-08 00:33:55+00:00
Man, that video was disappointing.

My factory produces squares, and every square is between 1ft and 3ft in side length.

Now what is the probability that the next square it outputs will be between 1ft and 2ft long?

The probability is zero percent, of course. Because my factory only produces squares with a side length of exactly 2.5ft (to within a micrometer tolerance, hooray!), day in and day out.

And as anyone can easily verify, every single one of those squares is between 1ft and 3ft in side length.

Notice how I didn't have to even begin to talk about areas?

The video's thesis is simply that "Talking out of your ass when you have insufficient information has the capability of backfiring sometimes: oh the horror" and I find the subject approximately as uninteresting as the fact that different interpolation methods (nearest neighbor, bicubic, "ask AI image gen to fill in the gaps", etc) are capable of inventing completely different false details into an image or dataset.

But I probably only find it equally uninteresting due to the claims being isomorphic.

When you don't have enough data, guessing at what is missing can be incorrect, and guessing in different ways can be incorrect in different ways, and you have to allow that to wash out as enough genuine data arrives (which means washing out the differences between potential methods of interpolation) and maintain your error bars correctly in the meantime instead of throwing them away.

So to loop back to the start: the probability that the next square will be between 1ft and 2ft is 50% plus or minus 50%, which is just an over-engineered way of saying "there is literally not enough information yet offered to make a guess of any trustworthiness at this point".