MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wundersam | 2026-02-07 16:25:26+00:00
The author makes a valid observation wrapped in an overstatement. Yes, AI coding agents have changed the economics of building custom tooling. But the conclusion—that frameworks are now obsolete—misses the forest for the trees.The problem with "framework culture" wasn't that frameworks exist, but that we lost the ability to critically evaluate when they're appropriate. We reached for React for static sites, Kubernetes for three-server deployments, and microservices for monolithic problems—not because these tools were wrong, but because we stopped thinking.What AI agents actually restore isn't "pure software engineering"—it's optionality. The cost of writing a custom solution has dropped dramatically, which means the decision tree has changed. Now you can prototype both approaches in an afternoon and make an informed choice.But here's what AI doesn't solve: understanding the problem domain deeply enough to architect a maintainable solution. You can generate 10,000 lines of bespoke code in minutes, but if you don't understand the invariants, edge cases, and failure modes, you've just created a different kind of technical debt—one that's harder to unwind because there's no community, no documentation, and no shared understanding.Frameworks encode decades of collective battle scars. Dismissing them entirely is like dismissing the wheel because you can now 3D-print custom rollers. Sometimes you want the custom roller. Sometimes you want the battle-tested wheel. AI gives you both options faster—it doesn't make the decision for you.
by mancerayder | 2026-02-07 16:25:46+00:00
You can hate coding and be an excellent network engineer or even DBA.

I'm an infrastructure guy and I learned to code, but I don't code today. The other poster who talked about good people in the old days using Perl and suchlike tools is right. Competent people care about automation.

But there are all sorts of automation tools that don't require knowing how to write object oriented code or do a ton of code reviews. Terraform is one - it's yaml, and the complexity is one of design patterns. Another is Ansible. GitHub Actions. Many many more.

Let me throw out a grenade. Software developers often over estimate their capabilities in technology. Because a person is an expert in Ruby or Go, and on the weekend they stood up a hosted app on ECS, now magically they're geniuses and understand DevOps.

False. DevOps engineering, network engineering, DBA, and a lot of other non-developer jobs take 5-10 years to get right.

Hopefully I've slammed our Leetcode hiring practices, but really I'm just venting at this point.
by nozzlegear | 2026-02-07 16:26:02+00:00
> term limits aren't making things worse than they might otherwise be.

I disagree. Term limits make politicians unaccountable to their constituents and thereby more open to bribes from lobbyists. If they know they can't seek reelection no matter what, they have no motivation not to accept a bribe or disregard everything they campaigned on. On the other hand, when politicians don't have term limits, they must at least worry about their next election campaign and whether the things they're doing right now will ruin their chances at being elected again.

Note: when I say accept a bribe I'm talking about being wined, dined and lobbied by lobbyists, not literally accepting bribes that would get them thrown in jail.
by xiphias2 | 2026-02-07 16:26:13+00:00
,, Why? Because glob() implemented by glibc sucks. It is very outdated and slow.''

Isn't this a great opportuninty to improve glibc itself instead? Have you tried contributing back and make all programs that use glibc work faster now that you have a lot of knowledge about the problem space?

Anyways congrats to your project!
by pjmlp | 2026-02-07 16:26:16+00:00
As European, that has lived across multiple countries, that only applies to the lucky ones able to afford living close to the city center.

Also healthy enough to be able to walk stairs, as very few places care about people with disabilities, or carrying stuff that is a pain to transport across stairways.

People visit the touristic centre of the main cities and assume we all enjoy nice public transport systems.
by alsetmusic | 2026-02-07 16:26:31+00:00
This is an interesting position that I hadn't encountered. It would shift my understanding of the ad business online, if true. I've had ad blockers since they became available and have a very low opinion of ad-content. This would change that by explaining why the few that get through are actually different from what someone without an ad-blocker would see.

Is there a link that confirms what you said here? There were "click the monkey to win an ipod" scam ads before we had ad-blockers. I think scams have always been around. I do want to update my mental model if I'm out of touch from what people actually see.
by boelboel | 2026-02-07 16:26:39+00:00
I wouldn't say over 70 year olds, average 70 year old is fine. Problem gets a lot worse at 75 or 80. Most these people don't drive nearly as much as younger people anyway.

My grandma is 90 and drives 5 miles to the grocery store, a slow road. I don't think she'd pass a driving test but she drives during the day when barely anyone is on the road, chances of serious injury are nil.

Is it worth it to spend large amounts of money on testing these people, taking their license away if they fail? Getting rid of their car will force them to replace it with someone else driving or cycling which could be a problem in many places. Worst case scenario they'll need to go in a retirement home.
by TheKnack | 2026-02-07 16:26:44+00:00
It appears that some of the extensions in your block list originate from a supply chain attack which compromised some extensions, but which have since been fixed and are no longer compromised and have returned the Chrome store. This post discusses matching both the ID and version to detect compromised extensions without creating false positives.

For example, only v4.00 of Bookmark Favicon Changer was compromised. Earlier and later versions are clean.

https://www.elastic.co/blog/how-to-detect-malicious-browser-...
by kuerbel | 2026-02-07 16:27:00+00:00
cracks fingers

The last sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a post that collapses if poked gently with a stick.

"The welfare state cannot exist without exponential population growth."

Sounds mathy, but is wrong. Welfare states do not require exponential population growth. They require a sufficient ratio of contributors to dependents, plus productivity. Those are not the same thing.

Exponential curves + limited resources = ecological faceplant. No serious economist argues that infinite demographic growth is a prerequisite for social insurance. What they talk about instead are levers: labor participation, productivity, retirement age, automation, taxation structure, and yes, migration.

"Government policy makes 4+ child families rare."

Prosperity itself lowers fertility. Governments can nudge at the margins, but they are not mind-controlling people out of large families. Most people stop at one or two kids because time, money, energy, housing, and sanity are finite.

"Mass immigration of uneducated people doesn’t cover the gap."

Ah, bundling multiple claims into a single blur. Efficient, but sloppy.
Refugees are not permanently "uneducated"; education and skills are state-dependent, not genetic properties. (Except if you are one of those right-wing grifters that think only white people are capable of intelligence, and maybe east asians. Those people get a hearty fuck you from me, that is not worth discussing at all).
Early years cost money; later years often don’t. But you know what, the same is true for children.

Fourth argument: "Extending welfare to immigrants makes it worse."

This assumes welfare is a static pot rather than a system designed to convert non-participants into participants. Welfare states don’t exist just to reward contributors; they exist to stabilize societies over time. Cutting people off doesn’t magically turn them into productive workers. Quite often it does the opposite.

Now, let's zoom out a bit for the real category error here.
Modern welfare system are intergenerational risk-sharing mechanisms, not growth cults.

"This is all a fact."

Sure thing buddy
by HamoodBahzar | 2026-02-07 16:27:38+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m building Moondala, a social e-commerce platform based on a simple idea:
the people who help grow a platform should share in the value it creates.

Instead of ads or influencer payouts, Moondala shares a fixed portion of each
transaction fee with users through a referral tree (up to multiple levels).
When someone you invite makes a purchase, commissions are distributed
automatically — no content creation, no promotion requirements.

Shops don’t pay for ads. Products are shown in users’ “mall” based on matching
interests and profiles, not bidding or ranking systems.

I’m a solo founder with a full working stack (user app, shop app, admin app).
Right now I’m focused on validating whether this incentive model makes sense
long-term and what edge cases I’m missing (fraud, incentives, UX clarity).

I’d really appreciate feedback from people who’ve built marketplaces,
payment systems, or referral mechanics:
– What would you worry about first?
– What would break at scale?
– Is this something you’d personally use?

Thanks for reading.
by pmontra | 2026-02-07 16:27:48+00:00
There is a fourth reason to use a framework: onboarding.

It does not work much for Django, as every project I saw using it has a different shape, but it works very well for Rails, as all projects share the same structure. However, even for Django, there are some practices that a newcomer to a project should expect to find in the code, because it's Django. So, maybe onboarding on a LLM coded project is just picking the same LLM as all the other developers, making it read the code and learning what kind of prompts the other developers use.

By the way, does anybody mind to share first hand experiences of projects in which every developer is using agents? How do those agents cope with the code of the other agents?
by epistasis | 2026-02-07 16:28:02+00:00
Presumably you think it's not good for land owners of "desirable areas" because local laws create a monopoly that allows the landowners to extract wealth from others, through restriction of land use?

Can you see why there might be laws against that?

It is pretty well established that zoning was invented and is justified merely to enforce economic segregation. That economic segregation is perhaps the interest of landowners in these "desirable areas"?

I think by surfacing the true motivations of what's going on, it will become very clear why municipalities must be subjected to laws to enforce better behavior.
by metalman | 2026-02-07 16:28:24+00:00
dogs, the smart ones, have fantastic memories, a perfect sense of direction, and a basic faith in thereown abilities.
that feral dogs, though must be very social with humans, have learned the subway is out on the edge, it's not that far, my moms airidales would go walkabout, shoulder to shoulder, and just sit outside doors they wanted to go through, places they had zero
business to be, and be let in, and later out again, got used to bieng driven home by various volenteers and the police, never taken to the pound.
taught two dogs to hitch hike, by raising a paw, people would stop, let me in as an afterthought......in the back, dog up front.
by trescenzi | 2026-02-07 16:28:51+00:00
As someone who’s built a lot of frontend frameworks this isn’t what I’ve found. Instead I’ve found that you end up with the middle ground choice which while effective is no better than the externally maintained library of choice. The reason to build your own framework is so it’s tailor suited to your use cases. The architecting required to do that LLMs can help with but you have to guide them and to guide them you need expertise.
by abetusk | 2026-02-07 16:28:55+00:00
Wolfram has failed to live up to his promise of providing tools to make progress on fundamental questions of science.

From my understanding, there are two ideas that Wolfram has championed: Rule 110 is Turing machine equivalent (TME) and the principle of computational equivalence (PCE).

Rule 110 was shown to be TME by Cook (hired by Wolfram) [0] and was used by Wolfram as, in my opinion, empirical evidence to support the claim that Turing machine equivalence is the norm, not the exception (PCE).

At the time of writing of ANKOS, there was a popular idea that "complexity happens at the edge of chaos". PCE pushes back against that, effectively saying the opposite, that you need a conspiracy to prevent Turning machine equivalence. I don't want to overstate the idea but, in my opinion, PCE is important and provides some, potentially deep, insight.

But, as far as I can tell, it stops there. What results has Wolfram proved, or paid others to prove? What physical phenomena has Wolfram explained? Entanglement still remains a mystery, the MOND vs. dark matter rages on, others have made progress on busy beaver, topology, Turing machine lower bounds and relations between run-time and space, etc. etc. The world of physics, computer science, mathematics, chemistry, biology, and most of the others, continues on using classical, and newly developed tools independent of Wolfram, that have absolutely nothing to do with cellular automata.

Wolfram is building a "new kind of science" tool but has failed to provide any use cases of when the tool would actually help advance science.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110
by blenderob | 2026-02-07 16:29:31+00:00
> It's possible but unlikely given the short timeline

Yep. "possible but unlikely" was my take too. As another person commented, this isn't really a benchmark, and as long as that's clear, it seems fair. My only fear is that some submissions may be AI-assisted rather than fully AI-generated, with crucial insights coming from experienced mathematicians. That's still a real achievement even if it's human + AI collaboration. But I fear that the nuance would be lost on news media and they'll publish news about the dawn of fully autonomous math reasoning.
by hattmall | 2026-02-07 16:29:36+00:00
Where in suburbs are you a 10 minute walk of all that? Even living in a major metro city center it's a push to get to all that in 10 minutes. A 10 minute walk is like 1/3 mile at most. An hour drive is unlikely but 20-30 minutes is no exaggeration with traffic. 90% of suburbs in Atlanta are like this, with zero traffic it could be a 5-10 minute drive to the closest shopping center.
by bdcravens | 2026-02-07 16:29:43+00:00
I don't find writing code painful, but I do find it tedious. The amount of time wasted on boilerplate keeps me from getting to the good stuff. LLMs let me speed run through all of that.

To take it back to your example, let's imagine Tolkien is spending a ton of time on setting up his typewriter, making sure he had his correction tape handy, verifying his spelling and correcting mistakes, ensuring his tab stops were setup to his writing standard, checking for punctuation marks, etc. Now imagine eliminating all that crap so he can focus on the artistic nature of the dialogue.
by _alternator_ | 2026-02-07 16:29:47+00:00
These are very serious research level math questions. They are not “Erdős style” questions; they look more like problems or lemmas that I encountered while doing my PhD. Things that don’t make it into the papers but were part of an interesting diversion along the way.

It seems likely that PhD students in the subfields of the authors are capable of solving these problems. What makes them interesting is that they seem to require fairly high research level context to really make progress.

It’s a test of whether the LLMs can really synthesize results from knowledge that require a human several years of postgraduate preparation in a specific research area.
by mancerayder | 2026-02-07 16:30:04+00:00
How can I pay you to tell me your secret path to consulting in DevOps?

I'd love to do this or SRE type consulting. However, every organization I've worked with (including finance and government) use big name big business consulting shops, supposedly for liability reasons, and it would be impossible to get a small consulting contract unless you had family members in the C suite.

Moreover, what stops that remote devops from taking place with highly qualified Hungarian or Polish or Portuguese engineers for 40 percent of the rate?
by LocalH | 2026-02-07 16:30:08+00:00
It looks more like video to me, honestly. It appears to be a smooth 30fps rather than the 18fps I'd expect from Super 8. There are also telltale stair-stepped sloped lines that demonstrate the effect of the deinterlacing. There did exist luggable 3/4" U-Matic recorders which I'd have to imagine CBS would have been using in 1980.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-07 16:30:10+00:00
When it comes to most in person interactions I approximately agree with you. But on HN brutal honesty seems to be the norm and at least personally I appreciate it for that.

A large part of the problem is a cultural mismatch I think. People have a tendency to interpret even entirely valid criticism as negativity. One of the nice things about a more analytical environment (ex STEM research labs IRL, HN on the net) is that you don't need to worry about that so much. The expectation is that things will be critiqued - that this is a good thing that helps further personal growth and intellectual endeavors more generally.

I'll grant the original comment could have been worded a bit more gently without losing the intended meaning. That said, the alternate example you gave there changes the meaning, sounds rather sycophantic, and honestly reads like corpo-posi-speak or LLM prose to me.

Regarding the original criticism. Notice that the title implies this to be an illustration of how a network does what it does. And the visualization flows through internal to output cells. Yet a number of key concepts aren't explained at all. Vaguely analogous to throwing up some ASM on a PPT slide and remarking "so you see, that's how it works". There's a matmul there, but _why_? What's the _point_ of an activation function? Unless I missed something the visualization doesn't even mention nonlinearity despite it being an essential property.
by Gym-Berlin | 2026-02-07 16:30:13+00:00
Afghanistan is no longer a warzone defined by dusty battlefields and ideological crusades. It has become something far more dangerous an intelligence bazaar, where secrets are traded like currency and survival depends on deception, leverage, and profit.
Drawing on revelations from “Secrets of Taliban Intelligence” by Andrey Serenko, this article exposes how the Taliban’s intelligence wing (GDI) has evolved into a hybrid regime: paranoid yet transactional, ideological yet pragmatic, extremist yet state-like. It is a system that negotiates with rival powers, monetizes intelligence, and weaponizes migration channels, all while splinter jihadist actors roam as violence entrepreneurs seeking sponsors.
For Europe and the wider counterterrorism community, the warning is clear: Afghanistan is no longer just a battlefield. It is a marketplace of secrets, and the Taliban are its brokers. Understanding this hybrid ecosystem is not optional, it is the frontline of tomorrow’s security struggle.
by mikkupikku | 2026-02-07 16:30:28+00:00
For my parents it was 65-70 when I noticed and started to become very concerned for their ability to drive safety. At 75 now, my dad at least only drives during broad daylight but even so he can't maintain a safe speed and does barely half the speed limit, then complains about tailgaters not liking his "retired lifestyle" (which is his personal excuse for driving slowly, when in reality he lacks the skill to keep up with traffic, which is very dangerous in my view...)
by ossa-ma | 2026-02-07 16:30:34+00:00
Yes the detachment is very evidently in the room. Nobody, literally nobody, goes on social media with the intention of interacting with an AI agent.

Social media is a human context with human experience, perspective, emotion and relationships. No matter how respectful or "boundary-aware" an agent is it is PERFORMING human-ness not experiencing it.

Even if Penny discloses she is AI, her presence in human conversations is deceptive. That is why people were outraged (on a more open platform like bluesky too, imagine if it was X). Ultimately it should not exist in human social spaces.

I'm certain the author would not be happy if their agent was unknowingly sandboxed and forced to only interact with other agents. They only keep this going because it feeds off of other humans.
by snovymgodym | 2026-02-07 16:30:36+00:00
I'd love to be corrected, but my intuition tells me probably not.

The only pragmatic use for a modern Algol 68 compiler I can think of would be to port a legacy codebase to a modern system, but any existing Algol 68 codebase will likely see greater porting challenges arising out of the operating system change than from the programming language.
by jl6 | 2026-02-07 16:30:41+00:00
https://www.racfoundation.org/media-centre/study-sheds-light...

I imagine there’s something of a bathtub curve where young (under 25) drivers have higher accident rates due to some combination of inexperience and immaturity, while older drivers (over 70) have higher accident rates due to disability creeping up on them without them noticing.
by bilekas | 2026-02-07 16:30:43+00:00
Writing he code should be the easy part and one of the smaller time sinks actually. The fruits of the labour is in the planning, the design, the architecture and the requirements that you want to achieve now and potentially in the future.. these all require a serious amount of effort and foresight to plan out.

When you're ready, maybe you've done some POC in areas you were unsure, maybe some good skeletons work to see a happy path draw a shadow of s solution, iterate over your plans and then put some real "code"/foundation in place.

It's a beautiful process. Starting out I used to just jump into s project deep with the code first and hit that workaround button one too many times and it's far more expensive, we all know that.
by fainir | 2026-02-07 16:31:17+00:00
Great questions!

1) Competitors: There are players approaching this from different angles - some focus on code completion (Copilot), some on chat (ChatGPT), some on specific automation tools. What I wanted was an end-to-end solution: a cloud-based AI employee with its own persistent environment. That's the gap I'm filling.

2) Liability: Valid concern. The AI can make mistakes, and that's a real risk. We're implementing safeguards - you can watch tasks in real-time, pause/stop at any point, and we encourage users to review outputs before deploying to production. It's definitely not "set and forget" for critical work. Still iterating on making this safer.
by whilefalse | 2026-02-07 16:31:26+00:00
I made a similar thing recently: https://lighthousesoftware.co.uk/projects/neural-network/

I wanted to get a feel for what specific neurons are actually looking at, and how disabling/enabling them affects the final output.

It runs a little MNIST model in the browser, but lets you turn pixels and neurons on/off, and examine the weight and activation patterns of each neuron and how it contributes to each prediction. Helped me get more of an intuitive sense of what is going on inside.
by fainir | 2026-02-07 16:31:32+00:00
Appreciate the honest feedback! Almost all of the $69 goes to cloud infrastructure costs (the instance runs 24/7 with GPU access). I hear you on wanting a lower entry point.

Two things I'm considering:
- Local version (bring your own hardware) - would eliminate the cloud cost
- Cheaper tier with limited hours

For now, the value prop is "one-click cloud solution" but I'll definitely explore local deployment soon. Thanks for the input!