MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwaway173738 | 2026-02-10 19:03:44+00:00
I know you’re making fun of baseless skepticism here but I remember seeing at least three different “miracle weight loss drugs” hit the market, give people fantastic results, and then get pulled years after some terrible long term side effects. I also remember similar marketing around SSRIs like Paxil being miraculous and GPs prescribing them to teenagers, and that did not go well for teenage me. So forgive me if I’m a little skeptical here.
by acdha | 2026-02-10 19:03:52+00:00
There are two competing factors: how much of a choice do women have and the opportunity cost of that choice?

If you look at the data, in rich countries much of the drop has been the reduction of unintentional teen pregnancies: women have better knowledge of and access to contraception, and they know that their lives will be better off from taking advantage of advanced education and building a career before having children.

Unless we’re talking about taking away the basic human right of bodily autonomy, that means that everything else must, as OP highlighted, focus on removing the negatives. This has to be done comprehensively to work: if, say, you provide free daycare but it runs 8-4, a professional parent probably isn’t going to change their estimate of the costs of having a child much at all since it’s still disruptive in ways which likely affect their long-term career trajectory. The richer the country, the more that matters: higher income is paired with higher cost of living and more opportunities which will be harder to take advantage of as a parent.
by andyjohnson0 | 2026-02-10 19:04:17+00:00
I'm a developer, mid/late fifties. My first computer was a Commodore Vic 20, so I guess I started writing code at about the same time as the OP.

This isn't the end of hand-written code. A few will still get paid to do it in niche domains. Some will do it as a hobby or craft activity - like oil painting or furniture making. But the tooling will move on and become more marginal and expensive. Think prosumer woodworking kit.

But software construction as an economic activity is clearly about to hit a singularity, and many of us who rely on our hard-won skills to pay the bills and survive are going to find ourselves unemployed and unemployable. A few will get to sip their artesanal coffee and "build beautiful things" while their agent herds toil. But most of us won't. Software has always mostly been just CRUD apps, and that is going to need a whole lot less people going forward. People like me, perhaps, or you.

Some, who have sufficient financial and chronological runway, will go off and do other things. Many won't have that opportunity. I have personal experience of late-career unemployment - although I'm currently working - and its not pretty. A lot of lives are going to to be irreparably disrupted by this. Personally, I'd hoped that I could make it through to some stable kind of retirement, but I just don't see it anymore.
by cedws | 2026-02-10 19:05:05+00:00
Unfortunately I can only give anecdotes, but in my experience the LLM's 'thinking' does not lead to code quality improvements in the same way that a programmer thinking for a while would.

In my experience having LLMs write Go, it tends to factor code in not so great way from the start, probably due to lacking the mental model of pieces composing together. Furthermore, once a structure is in place, there doesn't seem to be a trigger point that causes the LLM to step back and think about reorganising the code, or how the code it wants to write could be better integrated into what's already there. It tends to be very biased by the structures that already exist and not really question them.

A programmer might write a function, notice it becoming too long or doing too much, and then decide break it down into smaller subroutines. I've never seen an LLM really do this, they seem biased towards being additive.

I believe good code comes from an intuition which is very hard to convey. Imprinting hard rules into the LLM like 'refactor long functions' will probably just lead to overcorrection and poor results. It needs to build its own taste for good code, and I'm not sure if that's possible with current technology.
by LeifCarrotson | 2026-02-10 19:05:15+00:00
Are the drugs actually expensive, or just expensive for now because they can be?

Modern society basically decided that adding flouride to drinking water and iodine to table salt for everyone was better than dealing with tooth decay and gout.

I understand that peptide synthesis and cold-chain logistics are not as trivial as these elements, but this paper [1] estimates that GLP1 manufacturing costs can be under a dollar per person per month, orders of magnitude less than current market rates!

Perhaps our future society will normalize taking a daily GLP-1 agonist with their other multivitamins at breakfast.

[1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-10 19:05:34+00:00
So now we want to set it to the poorest county in the state? The middle? Where there are no jobs? Do the people who work at the Walmart in Forsyth not deserve to a “livable wage”?

I didn’t randomly choose Forsyth County. I use to live there.

Or should they have to do an hour commute from a lower cost of living area in metro Atlanta?

What is living wage based on single? Head of household with kids?
by sebastiennight | 2026-02-10 19:05:49+00:00
That is a valid argument. I do think that

> the real physical world, plus pretty much all of human society and culture

is only a tiny part of the problem (more data plus understanding more rules) and the main problem is "getting smarter".

You can get smarter without learning more about the world or human society and culture. I mean, that's allegedly how Blaise Pascal worked out a lot of mathematics in his teenage years.

My point is that the "getting smarter" part (not book-smart which is your physical world data, not street-smart which is your human culture data, but better-at-processing-and-solving-problems smart) is made of math. And using math to make that part better is the self-improvement that does not necessarily require human input.
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2026-02-10 19:05:54+00:00
This. I know me and all my peers roamed the neighborhood and my wife's life was not that different despite being born on different continents. Doing the same now risks a visit from state child neglect referral, which is enough to give most a pause. Parents seem to get all the risk and less benefits, while getting the stink eye when kid is not behaving properly.

In short, I am entirely confused on what would be easier today. If anything, things have gotten exponentially worse.. if you care enough to do it right.
by mindslight | 2026-02-10 19:05:57+00:00
I'm getting tired of these comments that normalize being in the middle of the slippery slope as if it is merely the same as being at the top of the slippery slope was. They may not have been "good" times, but they were certainly better times when government agencies at least aimed to carry out their roles in good faith rather than minmaxing the rules to cause the most damage to enemies of the Party. Applying judgement while exercising delegated authority is exactly why these agencies were given wide leeway in the first place. And while we can say this was naive, it is even more naive to normalize the current behavior.
by nine_k | 2026-02-10 19:06:01+00:00
> * enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly*

Here comes my favorite notion of "epistemic takeover".

A crude form: make everybody believe that you have already won.

A refined form: make everybody believe that everybody else believes that you have already won. That is, even if one has doubts about your having won, they believe that everyone else submit to you as a winner, and must act accordingly.
by nozzlegear | 2026-02-10 19:06:02+00:00
> But isn't the promise of Apple Pay that you never expose your real credit card # to the merchant? So they can't track you? I know Walmart in Canada really resisted Apple Pay for a few years because it would mean no more ability to track people by their payment methods.

Yes, this is exactly what Walmart does in the US since they still don't accept Apple Pay/Google Pay. When I go in and make a purchase using my credit or debit card, they'll associate it with my Walmart account and it'll show up as a "recent order" in the Walmart app because I have the same card saved there for ordering groceries online. They use those in-store purchases to recommend things to add to my grocery orders all the time.
by dakolli | 2026-02-10 19:06:02+00:00
Just say it simply,

1. LLMs only serve to reduce the value of your labor to zero over time. They don't need to even be great tools, they just need to be perceived as "equally good" to engineers for C-Suite to lay everyone off, and rehire at 50-25% of previous wages, repeating this cycle over a decade.

2. LLMs will not allow you to join the billionaire class, that wouldn't make sense, as anyone could if that's the case. They erode the technical meritocracy these Tech CEOs worship on podcasts, and youtube, (makes you wonder what are they lying about).
- Your original ideas and that Startup you think is going to save you, isn't going to be worth anything if someone with minimal skills can copy it.

3. People don't want to admit it, but heavy users of LLMs know they're losing something, and there's a deep down feeling that its not the right way to go about things. Its not dissimilar to any guilty dopaminergic crash one gets when taking shortcuts in life.

I used like 1.8bb Anthropic tokens last year, I won't be using it again, I won't be participating in this experiment. I've likely lost years of my life in "potential learning" from the social media experiment, I'm not doing that again. I want to study compilers this year, and I want to do it deeply. I wont be using LLMs.
by duxup | 2026-02-10 19:06:36+00:00
I have only a distant visibility to that topic but I find the folks talking about fertility have a weirdly high effort discussion (they want to talk about it), but it's just not a real political force to DO anything.

I don't fully understand what those folks motivations are who talk about it, but I feel like their motivations are all over the map (from racist guy to village priest), and it is strange that they they're even talking.
by anarticle | 2026-02-10 19:06:40+00:00
I've written sse2 optimized C, web apps, and probably everything in between (hw, datasci, etl, devops).

I like coding with AI both vibe and assisted, since as soon as the question enters my head I can create a prototype or a test or a xyz to verify my thoughts. The whole time I'm writing in my notebook or whiteboard or any other thing I would have gotten up to. This is enabling tech, the trouble for me is there is a small thread that leads out of the room into the pockets of billion dollar companies.

It is no longer you vs the machine.

I have spent tons of time debugging weird undocumented hardware with throwaway code, or sat in a debugger doing hex math.

I think one wire that is crossed right now in this world is that computing is more corporate than ever, with what seems like ever growing platforms and wealth extraction at scale. Don't let them get you down, host your own shit and ignore them. YES IT WILL COST MORE -> YOUR FREEDOM HAS A PRICE.

Another observation is that people that got into the game for pure money are big mad right now. I didn't make money in the 00s, I did in the end of the 10s, and we're back at job desolation. In my groups, the most annoyed are code boot campers who have faked it until they made it and have just managed to survive this cycle with javascript.

Cycles come and go, the tech changes, but problem solving is always there.
by tavavex | 2026-02-10 19:06:41+00:00
This proposal feels really vague to me, I don't really understand what this actually does. Can you explain more? What exactly is a computer with permanence? What is software that forces a user to treat the computer it runs on "as an appliance"? In what ways is this different from any general-purpose computer, and what's the reason why a user would pick this over something standard?
by ajross | 2026-02-10 19:06:53+00:00
> believe that their children will have good lives

Again, no. That's a patronizing abstraction implying you need to convince them of the general value of the activity, and assumes she's doing it all "for the kids" and not for herself. You aren't chasing your dreams for abstract ideas of future children, why should she?

I'm saying that a mother needs to know she'll be just as wealthy, in a practical (if not 100% literal) sense, by having a child than by chasing a career. If you aren't willing to hand that cash over, then, to be blunt, GTFO. She's not going to bear kids for your utopia.
by shawnmfarnum | 2026-02-10 19:07:04+00:00
I built a real-time sentiment tracker for WallStreetBets and trading subreddits because I wanted to start trading, but got frustrated manually scanning hundreds of comments to figure out what retail traders were actually bullish on.

Built this over my Christmas break as a solo developer.

Tech stack: Next.js 16, Supabase PostgreSQL, adaptive rate limiting for Reddit's API, OpenAI for sentiment analysis (users provide their own keys), Vercel for hosting.

Challenging parts:
• Reddit's rate limits (100 requests/min) required building a deduplication system and adaptive backoff
• Detecting sarcasm in WSB posts ("this stock is going to the moon " could mean anything)
• Real-time updates without killing the database (30-second refresh with caching)
• 9-layer sentiment scoring system (volume, options flow, cross-subreddit divergence, etc.)

Free tier available. Premium tiers add historical data, AI predictions, and portfolio alerts.

Open to technical feedback!
by rybosworld | 2026-02-10 19:07:08+00:00
I'd argue that "good", or at least "good enough", is when they reach a point where it becomes preferable to spend your time prompting rather than reading and writing code. That the final output meets the feature specifications is more or less the goal.

A lot of developers are having a difficult time accepting that the code doesn't matter nearly as much anymore, myself included. The feedback cycles that made hot fixing, bug fixing, customer support, etc. so expensive, have shrunk by orders of magnitude. A codebase that can be maintained by humans is perhaps not a goal worth pursuing anymore.

To really see this and feel this, I think it's worthwhile to spend at least a weekend or two seeing what you can build without writing or reviewing any of the code. Use a frontier model. Opus 4.6 or Codex 5.3. Probably doesn't matter which one you choose.

If you give it an honest try, you'll see that a lot of the limitations are self-imposed. Said another way: the root problem is some flavor of the user under specifying a prompt, having inconsistent design docs, and not implementing guard rails to prevent the AI from reintroducing bugs you previously squashed.

It's a very new way of working and it feels foreign. But there are a lot of very smart, very successful people doing this. People who have written millions of lines of code over their lifetime, and who enjoyed doing it, are now fully delegating the task.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-02-10 19:07:17+00:00
It is interpolation but that is what human thinking is as well. Interpolation is so broad it can cover agi conceptually.

But I get it, the interpolation you’re talking about is limited. But I think you missed this insight: human interpolation is limited too. In the short term everything we do is simply recombination of ideas as you put it.

But that’s the short term. In the long term we do things that are much greater. But I think this is just an aggregation of small changes. Change the words in a poem 5000 times: have the LLM do the same task 5000 times. Let it pick a random word. The result is wholly original. And I think in the end this what human cognition is as well.
by renewiltord | 2026-02-10 19:07:52+00:00
Fast personal transportation is so high utility that people will dismiss many externalities. If you offered teleportation anywhere in the world except it would pick a random African and kill him at a 1E-6 to 1E-4 chance (depending on your skill at Tetris while being teleported), I suspect many in the West would do it without a question.
by 01100011 | 2026-02-10 19:07:56+00:00
Funny, after semaglutide I developed moderate arthritis in my MTP(foot) joint.

I wonder if it was gout because it seemed to come on fast. They say semaglutide shouldn't cause gout but I'm not convinced. It has some very weird effects on my hydration. I drink a fair amount of water, but specifically at night I now have to urinate a dozen times throughout the night and wake up with my mouth almost dried shut.

I've lost 10% of my bodyweight(probably >1/3 muscle, sadly) which is great and it's taking the load off my joints, but man this foot thing is a bummer. I need to find a sports Dr because most foot docs seem to take the "just stop running/hiking and switch to biking/swimming" approach which doesn't work for me.
by fsloth | 2026-02-10 19:08:15+00:00
" It is now an enterprise OS"

You really want enterprise standards support for your graphics API.

Bleeding edge ...is not nice in graphics. Especially the more complex the systems get, so do the edge cases.

I mean in general. If you are writing a high end game engine don't listen to me, you know better. But if you are a mid-tier graphics wonk like myself 20 year old concepts are usually quite pareto-optimal for _lots_ of stuff and should be robustly covered by most apis.

If I could give one advice for myself 20 years ago.

For anything practical - focus on the platform native graphics API. Windows - DirectX. Mac - OpenGL (20 years ago! Predates metal!. Today ofc would be metal).

I don't think that advice would be much different today (apart from Metal) IF you don't know what to do and just want to start on doing graphics. For senior peeps who know the field do whatever rights for you of course.

Linux - good luck. Find the API that has best support for your card & driver combo - meaning likely the most stabilized with most users.
by moffkalast | 2026-02-10 19:08:23+00:00
Yeah it seems that some politicians have noticed that they can enact a lot of self serving authoritarian legislation that wouldn't fly otherwise if they push it as populist independence-from-US thing. Can't let a good crisis go to waste, of course.

One only needs a few looks at what the EU Commission has been doing lately to see that if left unchecked their plan is a UK-like total surveillance state.
by r00fus | 2026-02-10 19:08:27+00:00
If you don't have a regime that supports the medication, you could suffer some real problems. Drinking a LOT of water is mandatory. As well as eating lots of fiber - like good p-fruits (plum/pear/peach/etc) or benefiber/laxative.

I've had no problems following the advice of my weight loss program and r/Zepbound etc.
by dakolli | 2026-02-10 19:08:28+00:00
It seems pretty obvious to me the ruling class is preparing for war to keep us occupied, just like in the 20s, they'll make young men and women so poor they'll beg to fight in a war.

It makes one wonder what they expect to come out the other side of such a late-stage/modern war, but I think what they care about is that there will be less of us.
by Fogest | 2026-02-10 19:08:30+00:00
I only had an issue because I was taking an iron supplement at the same time which also can further cause constipation. I stopped taking that and it resolved my constipation issues.

I'm not too sure what you're referring to with a "write off day". I am on the highest dose currently and don't have this issue. I maybe get some sleepiness the day after taking it but I can still do things. However that effect has also subsided a lot after taking it for long over.

Every medication will have pros and cons. I'm having huge success on the medication and the slight issues I have are a worthy tradeoff personally.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-10 19:08:59+00:00
I understand what you are trying to see but this is the price of freedom. Freedom of having multiple clients.

But Ignorance is also bliss and I recommend you (or many people) as such to be ignorant if it feels frictional to them and just use cinny.

"Just use cinny" It really can't get any simpler than that for most purposes in my opinion

cinny is really improving in adding features plus its open source and I do feel like its UI/UX done right for the most part.

So I get what you mean but there's no free lunch. I really don't know what we are comparing against given that discord is literally adding User ID verification. This feels such an non-issue to it and I hope you can agree with that.

So in essence, to break the network effects of discord. I recommend people to embrace cinny for the most part if they are worried about lack of UI/UX or the amount of options and what to pick. I had done some amounts of search and this is what I landed on for the most part.

Just use cinny, my friend :)
by Avamander | 2026-02-10 19:09:26+00:00
I do call it cherry-picking because you chose scenarios that either apply to it also without TLS or the scenarios are just (intentionally) extremely narrow in scope.

You have repeatedly ignored that we're speaking about protections against a MITM, not malicious endpoints. Because of that your desperate attempt at talking about the "whole stack" talk is also nonsense. Even if you include it, a modern TLS stack is a very difficult target. The additional surface added that hasn't been inspected with a fine-toothed comb is microscopic.

As such you've excluded the core of the problem - how an unprotected connection means that you have to simultaneously ensure that your HTTP, PGP and Apt code has to be bulletproof. This is an unavoidable result, signatures or no signatures, all that surface is exposed.

You've provided no proof or proper arguments that all three of those can achieve the same level of protection against a MITM. You've not addressed how the minuscule surface added by the TLS stack is not worth it considering the enormous surface of HTTP+PGP+Apt that gets protected against a MITM.

TLS also provides more than just privacy, I recommend you familiarize yourself with the Wikipedia page of TLS.
by GorbachevyChase | 2026-02-10 19:09:37+00:00
I was young and cool once. I traveled, I did wild things that make good stories, and I did wild things that I will never tell a soul. I think that I had all the adventures that I could handle without having a criminal record. But once I had my first child, all of those things seemed so petty and inconsequential. I don’t miss the night life, the hobbies, or the drinking buddies. My life revolves around the little people I brought into this world, and nothing I’ve ever done has made me more fulfilled. If I had the chance to give up all of my 20s and all those hedonistic pursuits and settle down 10 years earlier, I would do it without hesitation. I know some people resent being parents, but seeing my kids is a rewarding feeling in a way that I never could have understood until I had experienced it. Don’t let the TV tell you what joy is.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-02-10 19:09:38+00:00
I hadn't even thought about this angle, but you're right. Furthermore, not only is it not acceptable or normal today, it's largely not even possible.

Cheap econobox starter cars have disappeared from the market, used car prices are through the roof for anything that's reasonably safe and not basically dead already, and there's nowhere for young people to go anymore even if cheap cars did exist.
by ericmay | 2026-02-10 19:09:40+00:00
Most Americans with the means to travel also have access to credit cards with no foreign transaction fees and by selecting "pay in local currency" you get the best exchange rate.

There's still an ongoing trick that some European businesses do where they'll try and get you to pay in dollars because they can arbitrarily set the exchange rate. It's obviously within "reason" but on the higher end for no purpose other than to make extra money. I find such behavior to be dishonest and deplorable.