MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hibikir | 2026-02-22 17:08:01+00:00
There's no way I'd call what I do "radically different from what most people do" myself, under any circumstances. Yet in my last cross-team discussions at work, I realized that a whole lot of people were using AI in ways I'd consider either silly or mostly ineffective. We had a team boasting "we used Amazon Q to increase our projects' unit test coverage", and a principal engineer talking about how he uses Cursor as some form of advanced auto complete.

So when I point claude code at a ticket, hand it readOnly access to a qa environment so it can see how the database actually looks like, chat about implementation details and then tell it to go implement the plan, running unit tests, functional tests, run linters and all, that, they look at me like I have three heads.

So if you ask me, explaining reasonably easy ways to get good outcomes out of Codex or Claude Code is still necessary evangelism, at least in companies that haven't spent on tools to do things like what Stripe does. There's still quite a few people out there copying and pasting from the chat window.
by selridge | 2026-02-22 17:08:11+00:00
> "Did you check?" is the most expensive question, and one of the most feared in my experience in tech circles.

Here it’s a climb-down. Writing tests to validate translation is orders of magnitude less work (and less likely to fail or be too dull to do properly) than the alternative available prior to 2025.

The fact that they wrote tests and clearly established operational control is not some kinda gotcha! It’s how they managed to get this piece of technology to allow them to do the IMPOSSIBLE.

I am just really struggling to understand someone who reads that paper and thinks “yup, everything is still the same and we don’t need to re-evaluate any ideas” Like, if you want to say that they still need engineering discipline in order to do ISA transitions at scale then…ok? That’s true? But Gemini meant that this formerly impossible thing was now not only within reach but done.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-22 17:08:40+00:00
> Then all the "normies" got on it and my feed started to just be casual snaps by people I knew in real life... which rapidly lead to its final form

Most people who use social media want to see photos and updates from their friends they know in real life. This is the core value proposition.

If seeing casual photos from your real life friends you call “normies” is disappointing to you, Instagram is probably not what you want. Keeping in touch with friends is the primary use case of the platform.

However, you likely could get the experience you want by maintaining two separate accounts. One for your friends and one for photography. The app makes it easy to switch between the two.
by yoelf22 | 2026-02-22 17:09:28+00:00
I built a structured workflow for the awkward middle ground between hardware specs and software PRDs — products with firmware, sensors, companion apps, etc.

It's a set of markdown templates (high-level design, system description, 90-item gate checklist, skills map) plus Python scripts for generating product illustrations and presentation decks.

Works standalone or as a Claude Code skill (/electrum <product idea>) that walks through
all 7 phases interactively.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-02-22 17:10:16+00:00
What was it about? By the time the Democrats were crowing that he was a felon, no one eve remembered. Did Trump see or sign this paperwork? Didn't much matter to anyone. If he saw it or signed it, would he have known what it was? Did he read it first? Probably not.

With a tiny little wall of text, you might even manage to tell me why you think the paperwork was so horrible that he should be in prison for it, I suppose. But no one would read your wall of text, because if it takes you a wall of text to explain it, they figure it's all bullshit anyway. And this is why he won in 2024, and why his successor will win in 2028, and likely in 2032. It's why this November is going to shock you even though there's virtually no room left for surprises. Just remember, it's like 96% certain Hillary's going to beat him if you need to fantasize about a better time...
by 7777777phil | 2026-02-22 17:10:20+00:00
Middle power realism in practice. Poland isn't really banning cars, they're building a data sovereignty framework for defense infrastructure. Same pattern everywhere now, EU defense fund, European payments, Greenland. Countries stopped assuming one ally would always be reliable and started building sovereign capacity instead. Covered this shift from Davos: https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-rise-of-middle-power-rea...
by alephnerd | 2026-02-22 17:10:26+00:00
> Nobody wants missiles flying over their homelands. At the same time, both goverments have been supportive of America's non-proliferation work in Iran.

Absolutely

> My broad point is there are plenty of folks who may be open to covertly supporting the protesters beyond America blowing blowing god knows what up.

Makes sense. And yes that's true!

Also, despite all the bots on this page and any other Iran page on HN (pro-protest accounts in Iran please, please, please follow OpSec best practices and remove any personal references of yourself on HN), the reality is a large portion of Iranians do want the regime to end.

They most likely do not want the Shah, but they are tired of the incumbent regime as well. And unlike during the Green Movement, Iran is much more isolated.
by martin-t | 2026-02-22 17:10:45+00:00
Don't say sadly. Don't further the indoctrination that violence is bad.

It is a tool, it cannot be good or bad. States are the most prolific users of violence (even more when you also count potential/threatened, not yet materialized). Anyone who wants to claim that violence is bad has to oppose the existence of states.

Violence is risky, dangerous, unpredictable, costly, etc. But those are practical and legal, not moral, concerns.

Violence is also necessary, as you say, against governments or other actors which cannot be deterred, stopped or punished using other means.

Violence is also most effective when it's certain and overwhelming/indefensible. If we lived in a world where dictators and their flying monkeys get regularly shot or droned to death, we wouldn't have dictators. Not because they'd all end up dead but because nobody would dare try becoming or supporting one.

This is why we have to publicly support _proportional_ punishment of dictators and their supporters, both now and after they've been removed from power. Good people have to use the same tools as bad ones (after all, they are just tools, not good or bad).
by 7777777phil | 2026-02-22 17:11:33+00:00
well.. exoskeleton vs intern framing matters less than whose cognition gets amplified. AI converges to the mean through next-token prediction, so it amplifies average thinking well but struggles at the tails. The research on this is pretty clear, human-AI pairs only outperform when the human brings real domain knowledge: https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-impossible-backhand/
by tovej | 2026-02-22 17:11:41+00:00
A full adder is literally one of the easier theoretical computer science concepts, and a sine approximation is a simple Maclaurin series. And yes, if you can't do a simple series expansion, you are not an engineer. You may be a developer, but not an engineer.

These are both first or second year bachelors topics. Just because you're unable to work through simple math problems doesn't mean any semi-competent computer professional would be.
by Bender | 2026-02-22 17:11:41+00:00
Fair enough. I suspect when they reach such a point that length no longer matters then a plethora of old and currently used state sponsored complex malware will be realized. Beyond that I think the next step would be to attain attribution to both individuals and perhaps whom they were really employed by. Bonus if the model can rewrite sanitize each piece of code to remove the malicious capabilities without breaking the officially intended functions.
by ameliaquining | 2026-02-22 17:11:50+00:00
This isn't quite right. Go and JavaScript use semicolons pervasively throughout their formal grammars, and mostly don't use newlines; then, on top of that, they have special rules that allow the semicolons to be omitted in many cases depending on newline placement. Python uses newlines pervasively throughout its formal grammar, and only allows semicolons to be used in a couple specific places (at the end of a simple statement or to separate multiple simple statements on a single line).

The two systems have in common that you can either include or omit a semicolon when you've got a simple statement on its own line, but under the hood they're different; the missing semicolon at the end of a line in idiomatic Python is not "automatically inserted by the parser", it is simply not needed at all. There are also behavioral differences; for example, in Go and JavaScript a semicolon on a line by itself is legal and does nothing, while in Python it's a syntax error.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-22 17:13:20+00:00
The cognitive dissonance in some of these posts is strange.

> one have to ask a question, who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots.

> The only reason why I didn’t delete facebook is messenger, where I chat with old folks.

How are you confused about who still uses Facebook in one sentence and then immediately in the next sentence you describe yourself as a user and explain why it’s useful to you and the people you know.
by fortzi | 2026-02-22 17:13:40+00:00
Arabs are about 2% of Iran’s population [1], and most of the rest will be insulted if you called them arabs to their face. Many see themselves better than arabs, and many more are mad about the arab occupation that brought Islam to take over the then-dominant faith of Zoroastrianism.

The average Israeli doesn’t hate the average Iranian. Israeli social media is full of posts about how people hope to one day visit Tehran. No, not as an occupier, get over yourself.

Your hate blinds you.

[1] https://iranprimer.usip.org/blog/2014/sep/24/report-arab-min...
by unkulunkulu | 2026-02-22 17:13:46+00:00
> At this stage, it has nothing to do with xmin and xmax, but rather because other transactions cannot see uncommitted data

Am I missing something or this statement is incomplete? Also I find the visualization of commit weird, it “points to” the header of the table, but then xmax gets updated “behind the scenes”? Isnt xmax/xmin “the mechanism behind how the database knows what is committed/not committed”? Also, there could be subtransactions, which make this statement even more contradictory?

I enjoyed the visualizations and explanations otherwise, thanks!
by ryandrake | 2026-02-22 17:15:57+00:00
If you want to have some fun, experiment with this: add a step (maybe between 3 and 4):

3.5 Prove

Have the LLM demonstrate, through our current documentation and other sources of facts, that the planned action WILL work correctly, without failure. Ask it to enumerate all risks and point out how the plan mitigates each risk. I've seen on several occasions, the LLM backtrack at this step and actually come up with clever so-far unforeseen error cases.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-22 17:16:45+00:00
> Six percent of the individuals surveyed said they considered themselves vegetarian

In any casual poll like this, every number has a large margin of error. When 6% of respondents select an answer, some of those were mis-clicks, people who misread the answers, or people who were just clicking through randomly. The latter happens a lot when bad UX means the only way to see the results is to take the poll.

So the more likely explanation is not that people were calling themselves vegetarian but also eating meat recently, it’s that around half of those reporting vegetarians were either mis-clicks or people blindly clicking things. It happens a lot in online polls.
by jazz9k | 2026-02-22 17:16:48+00:00
I'm cool with that. Let them fight their own battles...but also don't ever ask or expect the US to help.

The problem with your stance is that too many people want it both ways: They don't want the US to intervene, but then also want support in terms of money and special treatment for people emigrating from these countries (and blame the US for the deaths that occur for a terrible government).
by martin-t | 2026-02-22 17:17:16+00:00
Differentiate legal, practical and moral reasons.

Hitler was so bad that anybody is willing to publicly talk about killing him, there are movies glorifying it, people talk about going back in time and killing baby Hitler. He was so bad that the very strong taboo against killing does not work on him.

So, when _exactly_ did it become OK to kill him? Think about it.

What cumulative sum of his actions between 1889 and 1945 tipped the balance?

Now, do those same rules apply to current dictators or people in the process of becoming dictators even if the taboo is still strong there?
by hamdingers | 2026-02-22 17:17:57+00:00
This is a ridiculous mindset. Llama 3.1 8B can do lots of things today and it'll still be able to do those things tomorrow.

If you baked one of these into a smart speaker that could call tools to control lights and play music, it will still be able to do that when Llama 4 or 5 or 6 comes out.
by Trickery5837 | 2026-02-22 17:18:04+00:00
The final transition happened with the death of online forums. I still miss those dearly. I've met extremely interesting and competent people with a true desire to interact with passionate peers. They thought me how to ask for and give advice, how to express opinions in public, the value of growing a community around common interest, and the joy of laughing and getting angry on the OT section.
by jlev1 | 2026-02-22 17:20:17+00:00
A couple more I could decode from your question marks:

- rauenes: ravens

- “all that heard him were adrade”: I’m guessing it means “were filled with dread”, maybe “were adread”

- I think deme is actually a conjugation of the archaic verb “to doom”, as in “I doom thee to the death”

- “none shall thy biwepe” would be roughly “none shall beweep thee”

Aside: typing this is hard on my phone, it’s so close to modern English that nearly every word gets autocorrected.
by Zak | 2026-02-22 17:21:12+00:00
I never saw Instagram as appealing to photography hobbyists. Instead, I saw it as deliberately nerfing things where hobbyists have advantages (image quality, choice of aspect ratios, posting from desktop PCs), likely to increase participation by making it less intimidating to share snapshots taken on phone cameras.

It's probably impossible to make something that's good for any kind of enthusiast that's also effective at maximizing usage regardless of audience.
by AnonymousPlanet | 2026-02-22 17:21:47+00:00
Just a few examples of what makes Windows 2000 barely usable for me (and pretty much anyone who grew up with later UIs):

No central place to search for software, files, or settings. You have to dig through layers of menu trees like an idiot.

No visual preview to find the right open window. You have to alt-tab through a list of windows like an idiot.

No way of separating windows into work spaces / desktops (whatever you might call them). You have to either constantly kill windows or work your way through layers of them. The point above doesn't help with that.

This one has less to do with Windows 2000 but was part of the state of the art of the time for software: Walls of icons and buttons and not even a way to group them. Sometimes the entire window is just one wall of tiles sometimes there's the tool bar of doom at the top.

On top of lacking usability, Windows 2000 is ugly. Mostly because all main UI elements like buttons are visually thrust into your face by faux 3d elevation. This had it's place at the time when most of your users would not have had experience with computer UIs in the first place. With those users UI designers back then felt they needed to overemphasize visual cues from the real world. Nowadays you can show the user just a box or something that looks like a link (because people are used to browsers now). Maybe give a cue by changing the emphasis on hover.

The other reason that comes to mind why Windows 2000 is so ugly is colors. Again, this is due to its time and the capabilities of graphics cards back then that mostly didn't allow more subtle color differences.

I'm just using Windows 2000 as pars pro toto here. Pretty much all graphical UIs back then were lacking modern usability features and UI sensibilities, regardless of OS.

> Perhaps it's that well-known psychological effect where people self-report higher productivity when using an interface they find more visually appealing, whereas studying them proves the opposite is true.

You have your condescending explanation for why we disagree and I have mine. Let me give you a hint quoting Douglas Adams:

"I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-02-22 17:22:46+00:00
>The thing is, that declining birth rates in the west are more about economic and social factors

If that were the case, this declining fertility rate would cluster around certain socioeconomic cohorts in ways we just don't see. The pattern I see is a more alarming one, where it follows more closely teenage suicide patterns in a contagion-oriented model. Even in those places in Africa where fertility remains high, it drops most sharply among those who are in contact the most with people from the west, and in proportion to the amount of contact.

When self-surveyed people say "it's the economy", they're being put on the spot to answer a question they've thought little about and don't even really know why. They grope for whatever answer makes them sound the least stupid.

>People dont want to have 2.2 children so we can even maintain replacement levels.

Likely, people want far more children than that, and do not know it. This is why the women who "do not want children" are the ones that have had 3 abortions these past 10 years despite the ease with which one might remain sexually active and yet not pregnant. They think they want one thing, and far more primitive parts of their brains/psychologies want something else. Why people hop from "relationship" to "relationship", because that's the impulse when mating was barren long ago... and they chalk it up to some personality incompatibility out of a magazine article.
by al_borland | 2026-02-22 17:23:45+00:00
Facebook’s best feature, at its peak, was that everyone was there. My friends and family aren’t on Mastodon, and likely never will be. If the goal of a social network is to connect with people I know in real life, rather than follow various Internet personalities, it fails at this for me.

This isn’t Mastodon’s fault, but it’s the reality of the situation.

I’m not on Facebook anymore due to what the site has become, but I found the same emptiness on Mastodon, as my friends aren’t there. I’m not influential enough to get everyone to move to a new platform just for me.

When I joined Mastodon, I ended up following a bunch of developers, but ultimately felt like a fly on the wall to a friend group I wasn’t part of, as a lot of these people had been real-life friends or co-workers. I guess if your friend group is all geeky enough to join Mastodon, it can work. I have very few real-life connections that fall into that bucket, which I think is the case for most people.

The people I know who still use social media seem more than happy with Meta’s products. The others just stopped using these things all together and don’t seem to care about finding an alternative.
by chihuahua | 2026-02-22 17:24:05+00:00
Ugh, this brings on flashbacks to when I had to work with Ruby, and the *** debugger would break with every single release. The RubyMine IDE that 45% of the company used was based on some bizarre custom Ruby gems to enable debugging, and that crap would take a month to be fixed by JetBrains. 10% used VSCode where debugging would sometimes work and sometimes not.
by kdheiwns | 2026-02-22 17:24:22+00:00
That's a hypothesis that I've seen a lot, but it has zero basis in reality. Wealthy countries have fewer births. Countries that offer benefits and incentives to have kids have fewer births. What countries have the most births? Ones where women are treated as cattle.

Now the interesting thing: those countries also have rapidly declining birth rates. Birth rate decline is a global thing that knows no borders. Even in countries where kids are still seen as free labor, almost nobody is having the 12 kids that they used to.
by Neywiny | 2026-02-22 17:24:28+00:00
I think it's about being a configuration management nightmare. If every device has a unique password, you need the decoder ring for serial number to password. However, not all processors have unique IDs. So you either need to find a way to reliably serialize each board during manufacturing and hope it stays (like a sticker/laser/printer/etc) or add a serial number chip which is cost and complexity. It's not impossible, it's just extra work that usually goes unrewarded.
by ctoth | 2026-02-22 17:25:10+00:00
The specific dishonesty is the sentence: "None of them answer the question legislators actually care about: what is this vehicle doing, moment to moment, on our roads?" Legislators did not care about that question. They cared about the Transport Workers Union and the New York Taxi Workers Alliance telling them they'd face primary challenges. No amount of cryptographically signed telemetry data changes that calculus.
by kurthr | 2026-02-22 17:25:22+00:00
I hear all these words and try to imagine what useful tools could be written that didn't rapidly enshittify the commons where they were used, but all I see is a highly capable footgun.

I feel fairly sure that clever folks will come up with useful (not just interesting or funny) things to do with them, but I'm also fairly sure there will be a lot of missing feet.
by craftkiller | 2026-02-22 17:25:28+00:00
Not that I'm aware of. FreeBSD did recently gain support for OCI containers and therefore has podman. I see podman-compose is in the ports tree, but I haven't tried it myself.

https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/oci-containers-on-freebsd/
https://www.freshports.org/sysutils/podman-compose/