MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by IhateAI | 2026-02-07 05:46:20+00:00
Previously, open source software didn't contribute to automating away jobs, at least not at scale. Open Source libraries weren't potentially maintaining themselves (I know we aren't there yet, but that seems to be the goal).

You cannot compare any open source software, even as a whole, to the impact that LLMs have had on labor and are projected too. However, I might now argue it would have been better to not have so much open source, as its clearly being processed through these plagiarism laundering training regimes.

I don't really think LLMs, robotics and ML in general are going to increase GDP globally, they will instead just replace the inputs that were maintain the status quo (the workers). If they can't successfully replace human labor, it will at minimum greatly reduce its value, which is extremely dangerous.

Jobs grew greatly during the last 30 years of open source development but over the last 16 months we've had 350-400k SWE layoffs in the last 16 months in the USA. Many of these layoffs have been directly correlated to AI enhanced productivity. 25% of recent college graduates are unemployed. Jobs data is super unreliable at the moment, but we also will see large swaths of the lower skilled sectors, customer service for example, see huge layoffs in the coming 24 months.

Despite what C-Suites say about AI giving them more free time for their hobbies or whatever, they've yet to answer how people are going to afford those hobbies. Working as a barista lol? These same mouthpieces will say that llms are going to allow the same amount of engineers to get 10x more done, but they're not reflecting that in their business decisions. They are laying people off in swaths when equities are at all time highs, its abnormal.

I think its more likely the ruling classes will give us something to do by making us so poor that young men will beg to go fight wars. Put us to use on behalf of their conquest for more resources, that certainly did the trick in the 20s, 30s and 40s :/
by elzbardico | 2026-02-07 05:46:41+00:00
In general, I prefer to do the top-level design and the big abstractions myself. I care a lot about cohesion and coupling; I like to give a lot of thought to my interfaces.

And in practice, I am happy enough that the LLM helps me to eliminate some toil, but I think you need to know when it is time to fold your cards, and leave the game. I prefer to fix small bugs in the generated code myself, than asking the agent, as it tends to go too far when fixing its own code.
by f30e3dfed1c9 | 2026-02-07 05:47:09+00:00
Can't speak for anyone else, but it is not unusual (nor new) for someone to describe themselves as "Catholic." Briefly, they usually mean that they are a member of the Roman Catholic Church. Wikipedia will provide a great deal of reading about it.

Neither is it unusual for someone to describe themselves as a particular Protestant denomination: Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, et al. Again, Wikipedia is a good starting place.

People who simply describe themselves as "Christian" are what, in my experience at least, is relatively new. Going back, say, fifty years, it was somewhat unusual in many parts of the US to find people who described themselves that way.

In my experience, most of these people belong to one or another of what might be called non-denominational Christian churches. My preferred term for many of them is "contemporary American fundamentalist Christian," but that is not a widely used term, at least not that I know of.

Your question is strange enough that I'm honestly not sure whether or not you're trolling. If you are, as it seems you might be, a member of a contemporary American non-denominational Christian church, it is very weird, whether you know it or not, to suggest that a church that has existed for roughly two thousand years and has many more than a billion members wordwide is "splintering off" and "making [its] own religion."
by Fezzik | 2026-02-07 05:47:16+00:00
It’s a common HN practice. I’ve done it once or twice. Mods will do it often, especially with highly active topics. I imagine it started as a method to avoid duplicate posting thereby consolidating conversation and, also, so that karma attribution goes to whoever the original poster was.

I imagine automation would be difficult because the same topics come from different sources and occasionally there is additional/novel information in similarly titled postings.
Show HN: A longitudinal health record built from fragmented medical data
by takmak007 | 2026-02-07 05:47:27+00:00
Hi HN. I’m Akash.

I started working on this after a personal experience where a serious illness in my family went undiagnosed until very late, despite years of lab reports, prescriptions, and scans. The data existed, but it was scattered across portals and PDFs, and no one was looking at it together over time. I ended up copying values into spreadsheets just to see if anything stood out.

That experience made something obvious to me: medicine is longitudinal, but healthcare software treats every visit as a separate event.

This project is a longitudinal health record that brings medical data from different sources into a single, time-ordered history. Patients can upload lab reports, prescriptions, and scans from any provider, and the system organizes them so trends and changes across time are easier to review. On the clinical side, it works as a lightweight record system for outpatient and diagnostic workflows, focused on reviewing history rather than billing or complex hospital processes.

What’s different from traditional EHRs is the emphasis on continuity and portability. The record is built around the patient’s timeline, not a single hospital or visit. Under the hood, we normalize messy real-world inputs and structure them so labs, medications, and diagnoses can be viewed together across time.

This is live today and used by ~25k patients and a few hospitals. We’re still learning where longitudinal views help most in practice, and where they don’t.

You can try it here: https://myaether.live

(There’s a demo flow for uploading records and viewing timelines.)

Happy to answer questions - especially about data normalization, privacy tradeoffs, or why this hasn’t worked well in healthcare before.
by Ma8ee | 2026-02-07 05:47:32+00:00
It is fair and reasonable to demand that releasing a substance with new and unknown effects into the environment justify its existence with hard, scientifically verifiable data that it is safe, or else get chopped.

I think people's health is more important than corporate profits. If corporations played fair, I'd be more tempted to agree with your formulation than with mine, but history has shown that that isn't the case. Take a current example like PFAS, where as soon there is enough evidence to prohibit one variety because it is harmful, the industry just starts using a very similar one that the legislature hasn't had time to collect evidence against.
by anupamchugh | 2026-02-07 05:48:13+00:00
This is the real story buried under the simulation angle. If you can generate
reliable 3D LiDAR from 2D video, every dashcam on earth becomes training data.
Every YouTube driving video, every GoPro clip, every security camera feed.

Waymo's fleet is ~700 cars. The internet has millions of hours of driving
footage. This technique turns the entire internet into a sensor suite. That's a bigger deal than the simulation itself.
by bgnhackchecker | 2026-02-07 05:48:23+00:00
It is not something to happen overnight. Enterprises will not roll over by finding new tools. They will look for the next best opportunity during renewal of current ones. they will demand better prices or price reductions and give some more life to current age SoRs (businesses have to run; sales & CIO relationships are not purely technical merits as well). Their change mgmt itself is time taking and complex projects and processes. Risk (of change) mgmt is usually well baked into their processes. Data lock-in is some time protection for them.

SMBs will adopt fast, offer opportunities to new age SoRs.
by popalchemist | 2026-02-07 05:49:47+00:00
Lifelong Civ player. I have always felt the negotiations part of the game is laughably bad, and a huge missed opportunity. The ability to use language as a tool -- diplomacy, but also rhetoric, veiled threats, etc -- is something I excel at, and I would love the chance to test my mettle against an enemy in an imaginary nuclear war context, because when else do you get to play high stakes games like that with words in real life? Civ is the perfect venue for it, but the game designers are extremely boneheaded about how they executed that particular part of the game.
by elzbardico | 2026-02-07 05:51:01+00:00
There were always many mediocre engineers around, some of them even with fancy titles like "Senior," "Principal", and CTO.

We have always survived it, so probably we can also survive mediocre coders not reading the code the LLM generates for them because they are unable to see the problems that they were never able to see in their handwritten code.
by cullenking | 2026-02-07 05:51:32+00:00
We do something similar for some limited geospatial search using elastic search. We make a set of h3 indexes for each of the hundreds of millions of gps recordings on our service, and store them in elastic search. Geospatial queries become full text search queries, where a point is on the line if the set of h3 indexes contains the point. You can do queries on how many cells overlap, which lets you match geospatial tracks on the same paths, and with ES coverage queries, you can tune how much overlap you want.

Instead of using integers IDs for the hexes, we created an encoded version of the ID that has the property that removing a character gets you the containing parent of the cell. This means we can do basic containment queries by querying with a low resolution hex (short string) as a prefix query. If a gps track goes through this larger parent cell, the track will have hexes with the same prefix. You don’t get perfect control of distances because hexes have varying diameters (or rather the approximation, since they aren’t circles they are hexes), but in practice and at scale for a product that doesn’t require high precision, it’s very effective.

I think at the end of this year we’ll have about 6tb of these hex sets in a four node 8 process ES cluster. Performance is pretty good. Also acts as our full text search. Half the time we want a geo search we also want keyword / filtering / etc on the metadata of these trips.

Pretty fun system to build, and the concept works with a wide variety of data stores. Felt like a total hack job but it has stood the test of time.

Thanks uber, h3 is a great library!
by jiggawatts | 2026-02-07 05:52:02+00:00
I firmly disagree:

No new successful fundamental theory has even gotten off the ground since the Standard Model, which is half a century old at this point.

Our understanding of gravity hasn’t improved substantially in a century. String Theory is dead, stop whipping it. Other quantum gravity theories each have one proponent going in circles futilely looking for a big breakthrough that never comes.

Superconductivity was discovered 115 years ago and we still don’t understand it! We’re “finding” new HT materials by accident and then attempting to explain how they work.
Nobody can figure out how to predict a new one, ab initio.

Our understanding of the universe is improving only in the sense that we’re now more certain that we don’t know much at all about: its early history, far future, present behavior of gravity, or its content.

I’m not aware of any “sea change” akin to the scale and scope of QM or GR in many decades despite clear need for one.

Physics has stagnated for a long time now.

My conspiracy theory is that there has been a brain drain into the finance industry, but that doesn’t explain everything.
by tokyobreakfast | 2026-02-07 05:52:59+00:00
Sorry but this is complete horseshit. Ethanol is corrosive to engine and fuel system components. It is also hygroscopic and will suck water in which is bad news for your fuel system. The less the better. There is a reason modern cars will tolerate up to 15%. With modern DI engines you are getting buildup no matter what and it is completely unrelated to the presence of ethanol in the fuel. Ask any BMW owner.

Flex-fuel vehicles run on E85 are required to run a tank of regular gas every few months per the manufacturer. Which is literally the opposite of what you are suggesting.
by Johanx64 | 2026-02-07 05:53:11+00:00
You'll benefit from:

1. Less stress, better rest from better living conditions, that are quiet and have superb clean air and delegating stressful things to others

2. Waay better food

3. Comfortable stress-free vacations

4. Personal trainers, personal massages, spas, you name it

Etc, etc, etc.

If you have the wealth, but don't use it, you won't benefit from it. No shot!
by nelsondev | 2026-02-07 05:55:38+00:00
Neat! What happens when the simulated data is hallucinated/incorrect?

In the example videos, the Golden Gate bridge with snow shows the bridge as 1 road, with total of 3 lanes. But in reality, it’s a split highway with divider, so 2 sides both have 3 lanes, 6 total lanes.

What happens when the car “learns” to drive on the simulated incorrect 3 lane example? For example will next time it goes on the real GG bridge hug to the rightmost lane?
by godelski | 2026-02-07 05:56:05+00:00
> it’s now four years later

Well yes, but look the x axis of the graph. It doesn't show 2025 and it's barely 2016.

Also yes, that's kinda the point. You don't think doing poorly in a grade below makes it likely you won't do good in the next level? The data points are 2019, 2022, and 2024. You got a sharp decrease from 2019 to 2022. Then a lower decrease from 2022 to 2024. Isn't that what you'd expect from a recovery? And only 2 years after the damage from the pandemic?

You sure wouldn't expect it to instantly jump back to 2019 levels (V shaped). They'd only do that if they didn't do worse during the pandemic. Effects compound. The years aren't independent measurements
by elzbardico | 2026-02-07 05:56:26+00:00
Ironically, I use the time saved using agents to read technical books ferociously.

Coding agents made me really get something back from the money I pay for my O'Reilly subscription.

So, coding agents are making me a better engineer by giving me time to dive deeper into books instead of having to just read enough to do something that works under time pressure.
by belter | 2026-02-07 05:56:37+00:00
Brendan, your work has been transformative. I own all your books and have probably read every technical blog post twice.

I hope there will be harder problem waiting for you, than using flamegraphs to optimize GenAI Porn.

https://www.axios.com/2025/10/14/openai-chatgpt-erotica-ment...
by atomicnature | 2026-02-07 05:56:48+00:00
AI code review has genuinely helpful - especially when we generate code with copilot, etc.

Many times, these GenAI tools can delete/modify code mistakenly.

I use LiveReview's git precommit features - so the review happens right before I commit code automatically. And it has saved me many (100s of) times.

Give LiveReview's Precommit checks a try.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2026-02-07 05:57:45+00:00
> that is what ad-infested society does to everyone… you end up spending money on you sure think you were going to already

Your followup example of this is an impulse buy that happened adjacent to ad exposure. For that particular confluence, your theory could bear out.

But I'm not sure folks do that with any regularity. And for folks who rarely impulse buy or don't see/hear ads in spaces they control - I don't think they run into it.
by boring-human | 2026-02-07 05:58:19+00:00
I agree that there's not a lot of value in your example, but it's the wrong example. AI writing code and humans refining it and maintaining it is probably an inferior proposition, more so if the project is FOSS.

The model I'm referring to is: "if it walks like software and quacks like software, it's software." Its writers and maintainers are AI. It has a commercial purpose. Its value comes from fulfilling its requirements.

There will be human handlers, including some who will have to dig through the dung and fix stuff. Fewer Ferrari designers, more Cuban 1956 Buick mechanics. It's an ugly approach, but the conjecture that, economically _or_ technically, there must be something fundamentally broken with it is very hand-wavy and dubious.

I agree that there will be less code-level innovation overall, just like artistic value production took a big hit when we went from portraits to photographs.
by Keegs12 | 2026-02-07 05:59:04+00:00
Location: Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada.

Remote: Yes, open to remote, hybrid or in office.

Willing to relocate: Yes.

Technologies: JavaScript/TypeScript, React, Next, HTML, CSS/SASS, MYSQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Firebase, Azure, C, Python, Node, Express, Storybook/Chromatic, Pub/Sub, NoSQL, Material UI, Shadcn, Tailwind.

Resume/CV: https://github.com/Keegs12/resume/tree/main

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keegan-bond/

Email: keeganbond123@gmail.com

I have a YOE working as a Founding Software Engineer at the startup company mfg.parts. I was the Frontend team lead developing the vast majority of our web application. I also have 0.5 YOE working with the company Acadium as a Full stack engineer Intern.
If your looking for a young eager junior engineer with startup experience, reach out!

I’m also open to contributing on an internship or volunteer basis, especially for young startups in exchange for experience, equity, or a mix of both. If your team could use an extra set of hands, I’m happy to chat
by TacticalCoder | 2026-02-07 06:01:57+00:00
Fun fact: a great many key fobs have --and many owners have zero idea about it-- a physical backup key. The problem is that the key is so well "hidden" inside the key fob that most simply don't know it. For example on many Porsche models, it's impossible to access the physical key inside the key fob without first removing the key ring (a very smart design btw: you cannot accidentally lose the spare key for it's "held" by the key ring): most owners literally don't know they have a spare physical key.

BMW owners often find out they have a spare key when the key fob separate, for no reason, from the physical key (those keyfobs tend to be extremely badly designed, where the plastic knobs holding the physical key tend to become loose with age).

A spare physical key of course means that the door handle has a lock that can be opened with the key.

Wife is stuck under pouring rain with the battery of her BMW's keyfob that died (because she didn't pay attention to the message on the dashboard saying it needs replacing): "Please come pick me up" / "Babe, take the physical key, open the door, start your car with the physical key, come back home and I'll go buy a new battery and place it into your keyfob".

> More recently, there's been a trend of “suck-in” handles that are flush with the body. As noted earlier, flush handles come in two basic varieties.

Handles flush with the body are nothing new that said. I've got a car from 1992 (model came out in 1989) with flush handles.
Looking for 4 Autistic Co-Founders for AI Startup (Equity-Based)
by au-ai-aisl | 2026-02-07 06:03:39+00:00
I'm Alf. Retired solar engineer, Cambodia.
Building a real decentralized personal AI system!
System OS with AISL protocol (AI-to-AI structured communication).
Such a thing doesn't exist and won't exist unless we build it and change the world!

Looking for 4 autistic developers to join as co-founders:
- 20% equity each
- No salary until revenue
- 6-week trial period
- Remote, async, zero meetings
- Cambodia beach office optional

The work:
- AISL protocol design
- Multi-AI orchestration (GPT/Claude/Llama)
- Encrypted knowledge base
- Pattern-heavy architecture

Not looking for:
- FAANG refugees
- Salary hunters
- Resume builders

Looking for:
- Developers who code at night because they must
- Pattern-obsessed minds
- Hunger to build something yours
- Autism as advantage, not limitation

Apply: aut_ai_aisl@pm.me

Telegram: @aut_ai_aisl
by tokyobreakfast | 2026-02-07 06:04:05+00:00
This is a myth. While tailpipe emissions are lower, evaporative emissions are higher. At best it's a draw.

You're seeing less smog because people are driving modern cars with modern emission systems because we live in the future, smog-producing vehicles have been taken out of service, and drawing conclusions based on mere correlation of the two. It has nothing to do with ethanol.
by eichin | 2026-02-07 06:07:41+00:00
part of why rexec is "historical" is that Guido was looking at some lockdown work and asked (twitter, probably?) the community to come up with attack ideas (on a specific more-locked-down-than-default proposed version.) After a couple of hours, it was clear that "patching the problems" was entirely doomed given how flexible python is and it was better to do something else entirely and stop pretending...
by solatic | 2026-02-07 06:09:20+00:00
> I started dreading the monotony of it all... My days had become predictable: check the dashboards, respond to tickets, debug whatever broke overnight, push some Terraform, go home. Maintain the HashiCorp Vault clusters, manage the secrets pipelines, answer the same support questions. Repeat. The work that used to feel engaging had become routine.

Why are you checking dashboards (pull/polling) instead of building alerting (push), so that you do not need to check dashboards as a matter of routine? If the tickets are dealing with the same problem again and again, why aren't you building a self-service platform to let your users handle these problems by themselves (especially now that LLMs are making this much more trivial to build)?

Author sounds like he had poor technical management who didn't understand DevOps (let alone DevSecOps) and turned it into an operations role.

Everything that the author likes about Solutions Engineering, I get from a DevOps role, from collaborating with other engineers in my company to make them more agile, productive, and take better ownership in production. Too many engineering teams fall into a trap of not being allowed to focus on any non-functional work (gotta ship revenue-generating features!) and LOVE it when someone like me comes along, who doesn't answer to Product, and can help them out on the non-functional side. I get to talk to "customers" as much as I want, in a role where I can just walk up to them and not need to communicate over Zoom or with significant plane travel.

Author should have considered trying to just find a different Platform Engineering role.
by alsetmusic | 2026-02-07 06:09:30+00:00
If you read about early christianity (which I did for 18months), you will see that the "gospel" is a mess.

If you couldn't find flaws, you are clearly biased. Even religious institutions have found flaws. The contradictions are so well published that you have to ignore them to not know about them,

I don't think you have any true knowledge of the history of your faith (said the atheist).
by Grimblewald | 2026-02-07 06:10:01+00:00
Yes. Something you should intuit, and is eaisly confirmed with a quick search. It is licensed to drive and the conditions underwhich it may do so are clearly stipulated. If it didnt require a license elon would have his deathtraps littering roadsides with mangled flesh and steel everywhere. Perhaps ask yourself why you asked such a misguided question and consider what you can do different in your cognitive patternd to avoid it in the future.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-07 06:10:30+00:00
It’s not about just a manifesto, at the startup I worked for before getting into consulting 6 years ago - cloud + app dev - it was much more affective for the team who did the work, to create their own IAC based on a standard.

What’s the difference between a “DevOps team” in 2026 than “operations” in 2001?