MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by parthdesai | 2026-02-08 16:30:57+00:00
My analogy is more akin to using Google Maps (or any other navigation tool).

Prior to GPS and a navigation device, you would either print out the route ahead of time, and even then, you would stop at places and ask people about directions.

Post Google Maps, you follow it, and then if you know there's a better route, you choose to take a different path and Google Maps will adjust the route accordingly.
by mickdarling | 2026-02-08 16:31:06+00:00
It looks like it does have an MCP Gateway https://github.com/github/gh-aw-mcpg so I may see how well it works with my MCP server. One of the components mine makes are agent elements with my own permissioning, security, memory, and skills. I put explicit programatic hard stops on my agents if they do something that is dangerous or destructive.

As for the domain, this is the same account that has been hosting Github projects for more than a decade. Pretty sure it is legit. Org ID is 9,919 from 2008.
by nonethewiser | 2026-02-08 16:31:47+00:00
> How can something be both “usually not a bottleneck” that usually “takes a significant amount of time” ?

I dont understand what you dont understand. Is everything that takes a significant amount of time necessarily a bottleneck? That seems implied by you but makes no logical sense.

The funnel into the programming work is often more difficult/time consuming/resource intensive than the programming.

Also, sometimes its not as costly but should be. And insufficient time and resources were spent up front which caused the coding portion to take a lot longer than it should. In which case the programming time may appear to be the bottleneck but it was still really the funnel leading into it.

> Sounds like you might really enjoy a PM role

Enjoyment isn't really a factor in terms of what work needs to be done. And designing technical features isnt really a PM responsibility.
by RunSet | 2026-02-08 16:32:01+00:00
> I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

I also can't believe it's actually happening. ;)
by _aavaa_ | 2026-02-08 16:32:13+00:00
They are not the same level, but that may be fine. As for productivity, I don't take that as a given. Maybe in a few years we'll be at the point where AI is better than AI + human, but we aren't there yet. The other models may be faster are pumping out code, but if you're building in the wrong direction more code is more bad.

> us as programmers are supposed to be creators/makers, not mere consumers/users

But that's a false dichotomy. As a programmer I am very much a consumer of the language I use, the IDE, the compiler, and of most of my dependencies. (to say nothing of the OS and the hardware).

I, and I'd wager most people around here, haven't and are aren't individually building at all layers of that stack at once.
by stackbutterflow | 2026-02-08 16:32:25+00:00
I'm saying this to help you. Whether you give it a shot makes no difference to me. This topic is being discussed endlessly everyday on all major platforms and for the past year or so the consensus is strongly against using copilot.

If you want to see if your project and your work can benefit from AI you must use codex, Claude code or Gemini (which wasn't a contender until recently).
by hedora | 2026-02-08 16:32:35+00:00
This will be especially true if people keep driving cars.

An EV with 300 mile range has something like 2-4x more batteries than a typical whole-house battery. It's easy to imagine houses will go into "away mode" when there's no car plugged in: The appliances would use as much power as possible to keep the solar from curtailing (imagine heat pump water heaters that go up to 210F then mix down to 120F on the output, freezers that cool way below typical temperatures, or HVAC systems with heat reservoirs). The houses would coast over night.

When the car is plugged in, they'd provision 25% of vehicle range for things like cooking, lighting and heating.

If the above is too expensive, then people would just add more house battery, which would cost less than their car. Either way, storage wins.
by coffeefirst | 2026-02-08 16:33:20+00:00
Somewhat. You have to set yourself up to manage your own attention because the context switching is rough. If you don’t you will burn out.

But the cycle is longer. When you help a person they don’t come back to you 4 minutes later.

I also only review PRs at specific times a day, because that’s more cognitively intensive and switching in and out pretty much ensures you’ll do it badly.

Either way, I’m really starting to think agentic as designed is a deeply flawed workflow. The future could be small, fast models that finish pseudo code and look stuff up to aide focus. Anthropic’s own research seems to support this.
Show HN: CarbonLint – Real-time carbon footprint tracker for code
by nishalk | 2026-02-08 16:33:25+00:00
https://github.com/nishal21/CarbonLint

Hi HN,

I built CarbonLint because while we have plenty of tools to profile CPU and memory usage, we rarely see the environmental cost of our development workflows in real-time.

CarbonLint is an open-source Electron desktop app that monitors your system resources (CPU, Memory, Network) and applies regional carbon intensity data to estimate the CO2 emissions of your builds, tests, and daily tasks.

Key Features: * Real-time dashboard with live energy usage (kWh) and Carbon (gCO2) tracking * Region-specific data (adjusts calculation based on your local grid's carbon intensity) * CI/CD integration to measure the environmental cost of pipelines * Budget alerts for daily/weekly carbon limits

The app is built with Electron, React, and Vite. I'm looking for feedback on the calculation methodology and suggestions for other metrics you'd find useful.

Thanks!
by aucisson_masque | 2026-02-08 16:33:29+00:00
This is a non issue imo.

> When each task takes less time, you don't do fewer tasks. You do more tasks.

And you're also paid more. Find a job that ask less from you if you are fatigued, not everyone want to sacrifice his personal life for his career. That's choices you got to make but ai doesn't inherently force you to become overworked.
by Terretta | 2026-02-08 16:33:32+00:00
Love the idea and the approach, both. Intend to try it.

Dislike READMEs written by or with the LLM.

They're filled with tropes and absolutes, as if written by a PdM to pitch his budget rather than for engineers needing to make it work.

At some point, reading these becomes like hearing a rhythm in daily life (riding subway, grinding espresso, typing in a cafe) and a rhythm-matched earwig inserts itself in your brain. Now you aren't hearing whatever made that rhythmic sound, but the unrelated earwig. Trying to think about your README or AskHN, instead thinking about LLM slop and confabulation and trust.

(Just like new account ChatEngineer's comment opening with “The [hard thing] is real.” which leaves the otherwise natural rest of comment more sus.)

Unsolicited opinion: Shouldn't be called total-recall, but curated-recall or selective-recall (prefer this one) or partial-recall or anything that doesn't confuse users or LLM as to (trope incoming, because where did they learn tropes anyway?): what it is (and isn't) …
by coldtea | 2026-02-08 16:34:08+00:00
The GDP per capita of the world has been slowly increasing for several millenia. Same for the advancements in core technology.

The industrial revolution increased the pace, but it was already there, not flat or randomly flunctuating (think ancient hominids versus early agriculture vs bronge age, vs ancient Babylon and Assyrian empires, vs later Greece, and Persia, later Rome, later Renaissance and so on).

Post 1970s most of the further increase has been based on mirages due to financialization, and doesn't reflect actual improvement.
by renewiltord | 2026-02-08 16:34:12+00:00
Spoilers for Anathem and His Dark Materials below

Xkcd 483 is directly referencing Anathem so that should be unsurprising but I think in both His Dark Materials (e.g. anbaric power) and in Anathem it is in-universe explained. The isomorphism between that world and our world is explicitly relevant to the plot. It’s the obvious foreshadowing for what’s about to happen.

The worlds are similar with different names because they’re parallel universes about to collide.
by zkmon | 2026-02-08 16:34:14+00:00
It depends on the place where you go to live, and what it expects from you.

Some people tried that a bit and they had to retreat back to the usual connected life. What happens is, that old non-digital disconnected world is no longer there waiting for you. It may pretend to be the old world you desired, but it is looking at you and judging you. You become an animal in a zoo, instead of an anonymous part of the old-time world.
by pwg | 2026-02-08 16:34:29+00:00
> Nevertheless, an optimum seems to have been reached around 20 years ago, and since then more often than not I see only worse interfaces that make harder

A consequence of having "UI designers" paid on salary instead of individual contract jobs that expire when the specific fix is complete. In order to preserve their continuing salary, the UI designers have to continue making changes for changes sake (so that the accounting dept. does not begin asking: "why are we paying salary for all these UI designers if they are not creating any output"). So combining reaching an optimum 20 years ago with the fact that the UI designers must make changes for the sake of change, results in the changes being sub-optimal.
by morshu9001 | 2026-02-08 16:34:30+00:00
When I got my first job long ago, I found that code review does involve arguing over things like for vs while loop, or having proper grammar in comments. Thought about quitting for a sec.

Now that I have more experience and manage other SWEs, I was right, that stuff was dumb and I'm glad that nobody cares anymore. I'll spend the time reviewing but only the important things.
by joebates | 2026-02-08 16:35:05+00:00
I've seriously wondered about merging a home office and home gym into one, and doing sets in between claude working. My usual workout has about 22-30 sets of exercises total and I probably wait on Claude that often in a day. It would be wonderful to be able to spread my exercise throughout the entire day. I'd also include an adjustable height desk so that I could be standing up for much of the workout/workday. I could even have a whiteboard in there.
by randycupertino | 2026-02-08 16:35:33+00:00
I watched some of the videos and you could see DNA paternity tests sitting around on the tables in front of the dancing girls his Manhattan townhouse (https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01648...) . Interestingly if you change the last couple of digits in the video links to just any random number combo it unlocks a ton more (many awful, disgusting) videos.

Changing the file names from .mp4 to .mov also opens up more, and changing file names in the links from .pdf to .mp4

The most interesting thing I've found is the word "don't" is often randomly redacted in emails which makes me think they ran a script to auto-redact "Don T" among other things. Example: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02440...
by mickdarling | 2026-02-08 16:36:04+00:00
I use an LLM behavior test to see if the semantic responses from LLMs using my MCP server match what I expect them to. This is beyond the regex tests, but to see if there's a semantic response that's appropriate. Sometimes the LLMs kick back an unusual response that technically is a no, but effectively is a yes. Different models can behave semantically different too.

If I had a nice CI/CD workflow that was built into GitHub rather than rolling my own that I have running locally, that might just make it a little more automatic and a little easier.
by otterley | 2026-02-08 16:36:12+00:00
Slackware Linux is way less complicated than MacOS. It runs far fewer, and much simpler, components and much less functionality in a default install. Like any Linux, there are myriad problems that can arise as users begin customizing the system, but until then, all those potential bugs remain deceptively hidden below the surface.

Put differently, you’re comparing a go-kart against a BMW.
Show HN: Generated implementation of StrongDM Attractor from Markdown specs
by brynary | 2026-02-08 16:36:15+00:00
Yesterday, I used Claude Opus 4.6 agent teams to generate a full TypeScript implementation of the StrongDM Attractor software factory from the Markdown specifications they published: https://github.com/strongdm/attractor

It took a few hours of mostly light prompting like "Implement the spec" and "Fix the gaps relative to the spec".
by pixl97 | 2026-02-08 16:36:41+00:00
The bell curve of IQ and being stupid probably don't have much to do with each other.

Think of stupidity as the consequences of interacting with ones environment with negative outcomes. If you have a simple environment with few negative outcomes, then even someone with a 80 IQ may not be considered stupid. But if your environment rapidly grows more complex and the amount of thinking you have to do for positive outcomes increases then even someone with a 110 IQ may find themselves quickly in trouble.
by morshu9001 | 2026-02-08 16:37:01+00:00
If I'm using the right tools for the job, I don't feel like the LLM helps outside of minor autofilling or writing quick one-off scripts. I do use LLMs heavily at work, but that's cause half the time I'm forced to use cumbersome tooling like Java w/ some boilerplatey framework or writing web backends in C++ for no performance reason.
by mcmcmc | 2026-02-08 16:37:22+00:00
I’m not sure why you’re so set on taking away free will.

> you can't do anything except join the unemployed until you get rehired from the pool of desperate people willing to do their bidding.

So there is a choice then. Does unemployment kill you in some way? Is going to a food bank a death sentence? Can you not adjust your lifestyle spending to match a lower salary if it means getting a job sooner? Is there no way to save up for periods of unemployment so you can be choosy about your next job?

Everything you do in life is a choice.
by northfield27 | 2026-02-08 16:37:49+00:00
Agreed but sadly, many people are too optimistic with AI and are completely forgetting that they can be the part of next layoffs.

And others are not able to believe the (not extreme) but visible speed boost from pragmatic use of AI.

And sadly, whenever the discussion about the collective financial disadvantage of AI to software engineers will start and wherever it goes…

The owners and employers will always make the profits.
Tell HN: Claude Code freezes on long inputs
by logicallee | 2026-02-08 16:38:24+00:00
Just a PSA in case anyone else is careful with their context but sometimes wants to paste some long reply in the text entry part. Claude code (latest version, Claude Code v2.1.34 running Opus 4.6) will freeze if you type a long input (the limit is around 1,400 characters or so, about one very long paragraph.) You can test it reliably by typing more than this amount and it will freeze every time, losing the conversation history until that point.
by rnhmjoj | 2026-02-08 16:38:24+00:00
> MSS clamping is non-negotiable with tunnels. Every layer of encapsulation eats into the MTU.

Can this tunnel be avoided somehow? If I have to choose between owning my prefix and having 1500 MTU, I'd probably take the latter: MTU issues are so annoying to deal with, and MSS-clamping doesn't solve all of them.
by kgeist | 2026-02-08 16:38:35+00:00
There was an article by Raymond Chen where he argued that giving app developers an API option to say "run me under high/low priority" rarely works because every developer views their program as the main character on the stage and couldn't care less about other programs' performance, and they are incentivized to enable the "high priority" option if given a chance because it makes their program run better (at the expense of other programs). So unless there's a strict audit on some kind of app store or some API rules which enforce developers don't abuse the priority API, sometimes it's better to let the OS decide all the scheduling dynamically as the programs run, so that the scheduling was fair.
by nishalk | 2026-02-08 16:38:40+00:00
Hi HN, creator here!

I built CarbonLint because while we have plenty of tools to profile CPU and memory usage for performance, we rarely see the environmental cost of our local development workflows in real-time.

The app monitors system resources (CPU, Memory, Network) via systeminformation and node-powershell, then applies regional grid intensity data to estimate the CO2 emissions of your builds, tests, and background tasks.

The stack: Electron, React, Vite, and TailwindCSS.

A note on the stack: I realize the irony of using Electron (which isn’t known for being lightweight) to build a tool for energy efficiency! I chose it for rapid cross-platform UI development, but I’ve tried to keep the background monitoring processes as lean as possible. I am very open to feedback on how to further optimize the footprint of the observer itself.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on:

The calculation methodology (specifically regarding regional grid intensity).

Any other metrics you’d find useful in a "Green Ops" dashboard.

Thanks for checking it out!
Ask HN: How do you handle Canadian income tax brackets in software?
by jbsgermain | 2026-02-08 16:39:00+00:00
I’ve worked on a few tools that need Canadian income tax brackets (federal and provincial) for calculations, projections, or estimators. This is not about sales tax or invoicing.

I was surprised there doesn’t seem to be a clean, structured, versioned source that’s easy to consume, especially once you factor in provincial differences and historical years.

When you need this kind of data, how do you usually handle it? Do you scrape the CRA site, hard-code values, rely on spreadsheets, or just avoid the problem entirely?

Genuinely curious if I’m missing an obvious solution.
by w-m | 2026-02-08 16:39:10+00:00
An iterative prompt with GPT-5.2 on Copilot CLI spits out a dense two-page proof for problem 10 after less than 60 minutes of working. A review of the generated proof with Claude 4.6 on Copilot attests it mathematical correctness, identifying only minor issues, mostly in the presentation.

But as a non-mathematician I'm not following any of it. How many people are there who are willing to check the generative results? And how much effort is it for a human to check these? How quickly can you even identify math-slop?

Here's the generated proof:

https://github.com/w-m/firstproof_problem_10/blob/2acd1cea85...
by hedora | 2026-02-08 16:39:14+00:00
Our cars have a total of 8x the capacity of our home batteries. We're ~ one dongle away from doing what you describe.

The other thing we need to see to really replace grids are panels that are optimized for overcast days. Currently, production drops to 0-10% when it's cloudy, even though the fraction of wattage hitting the panels is way higher than that.

At some point, I think we'll end up with panels that produce linearly to the amount of light (this is probably hard), or that are high efficiency in winter / high altitudes, but low efficiency at peak (this is probably easy).

Currently, panels are marketed on wattage under full sunlight at high temperatures. This is important for air conditioning use cases, but the grid is overproducing on those days already and we'd curtail if we took them off grid.
by krupan | 2026-02-08 16:39:20+00:00
This author puts to words several thoughts of mine that have been jelling recently. In the end I still seems to miss that AI is totally optional. It's a depressing read because the basic gist is, this AI stuff is weird and depressing and addicting to the point of losing productivity, but I have to use it so here are some ways to try and counter those negatives.

Dude! You don't have to use it!! Just write code yourself. Do a web search if you are stuck, the information is still out there on stack overflow and reddit. Maybe us kagi instead of Google, but the old ways still work really well.
by wouldbecouldbe | 2026-02-08 16:40:11+00:00
I appreciate sarcasm, but this is just snarky.

But yeah improving build speed & parallel running I think are one of the biggest advances devs can do to speed up development time in the AI age. With native apps that can be a challenge. I restructured a react native project to make it faster to iterate, but I have a feeling you might not be fond of rn.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-02-08 16:40:18+00:00
Chomsky is about as far from post-modernist and post-structuralist as you can get in terms of the American left. He spent his career insisting on rational & logical discourse and using reason as a tool and opposing the postmodernist turn in the left.

He believed in true and false, and insisted those were tools to be used to disarm the powerful. Which... man that would be nice right about now.

I don't always like the guy or agree with his arguments, but this is a bizarre claim from you.
by coldtea | 2026-02-08 16:40:25+00:00
>I think you may have missed the other 6 billion people on the planet getting massive improvements in their quality of life.

I think you have missed that it's easy to get "massive improvements in your quality of life" if you start from merely-post-revolution-era China or 1950s Africa or colonial India.

Much less so if you plateaud as US and Europe, and live off of increased debt ever since the 1970s.
by doctorwho42 | 2026-02-08 16:40:48+00:00
Or, wealth inequality has gotten so out of hand that people are forced to buy the cheaper products.

It's the age old paradigm of buying a pair of shoes/boots, the poor man keeps buying $20 shoes/boots that wear out in a year or two. The wealthy man looks perplexed and states, "this is why they are poor, they don't understand investing in a quality pair of shoes/boots... For a measly $100 they could buy a pair of shoes/boots that would last them 10+ years". But what is always overlooked, is that the poor man doesn't have the flexibility of spending to afford to invest better quality purchases, because the money needs to be applied to other problems in their lives.

I would argue that this is one contributing factor, outside of companies just chasing the lowest quality/cost, that contributes to crappier stuff.
Show HN: Computerscienceresources.com – A Crowdsourced Learning Platform
by CatBread | 2026-02-08 16:41:05+00:00
The best CS resources shouldn't be hidden in newsletters, GitHub repos, and outdated blog posts. ComputerScienceResources.com brings them together in one organized, community-driven hub. Explore curated learning materials for data science, algorithms, databases, infrastructure, and every corner of computer science. Join learners at every level who are discovering, sharing, and growing together.
by daveguy | 2026-02-08 16:41:11+00:00
No. Algorithm analysis is much more sophisticated and well defined than that. Most algorithms are deterministic, and it is relatively straightforward to identify complexity, O(). Even nondeterministic algorithms we can evaluate asymptotic performance under different categories of input. We know a lot about how an algorithm will perform under a wide variety of input distributions regardless of determinism. In the case of schedulers, and other critical concurrency algorithms, performance is well known before release. There is a whole subfield of computer science dedicated to it. You don't have to "prove optimality" to know a lot about how an algorithm will perform. What's missing in neural networks is the why and how any inputs will propagate, through the network during inference. It is a black box of understandability. Under a great deal of study, but still very poorly understood.