MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by varispeed | 2026-02-15 16:34:04+00:00
We talk about slavery as if it is safely sealed in the 19th century, like a museum exhibit with good lighting and a gift shop.

But the underlying pattern never really died. It just updated its paperwork.

Today we call it “employment.” In tech we even call it “talent acquisition,” which sounds almost humane. Yet the structure is familiar: people without capital create the ideas, write the code, design the systems that generate millions or billions. The upside flows upward. The risk flows downward.

Most software engineers do not own what they build. They sign it away on day one. IP assignment. Non-competes. Stock options that vest over four years so you behave. If the company exits, founders and investors get generational wealth. The average engineer gets a redundancy package and a LinkedIn badge saying “#opentowork.”

Yes, this is not chattel slavery. No one is being whipped into compiling C++. But the economic asymmetry is hard to ignore. You sell your time because you do not own productive assets. The owners sell your output because they do.

In IT the extraction is particularly clean. Code scales infinitely. A small team builds a platform that monetises millions of users. Revenue explodes. Valuation explodes. Engineers receive salaries that look high until you compare them to the equity multiple created from their labour.

Sometimes a few are “freed” through shares. Early employees hit liquidity and cross the line into ownership. The rest remain in the wage tier, cycling between companies, rebuilding empires they will never control.

The uncomfortable question is not whether this is morally identical to historical slavery. It obviously is not. The question is whether we are comfortable with an economic model where creative and technical labour consistently produces outsized returns captured by capital, not by the people who actually built the thing.

Antoine grafted pecan trees and created an industry. The plantation owner owned the trees.

In tech, we graft distributed systems and machine learning models. Someone else owns the orchard.

That parallel should at least make people uneasy.
by shevy-java | 2026-02-15 16:34:17+00:00
I mean, this does not come as a surprise. If you look at the US corporations, not just Amazon or Google but Facebook, or more recently Discord - and our all-time favourite chummer, Microsoft - this all screams of strategic mass sniffing and snooping after people. There is 0% chance that this is done solely on a per-corporate level. This is systematic sniffing.

I think the long term solution will have to be to become as independent as possible on these sniffer-corporations and to get real people into office rather than those lobbyists who work for those corporations. This will require a complete re-design of the whole system though. I am not sure we'll see that in our lifetime.
by voxl | 2026-02-15 16:34:43+00:00
I'll bite. We live in a society where the 2nd amendment is a rorschach test for interpreting century old English. Yet, because of how people feel, particularly a couple of activist judges, it has been given the strongest possible interpretation to impart the strongest possible freedoms to the citizenry.

Why have the other amendments not enjoyed this same individual freedom absolutism? Why are we cherry picking which amendments get expanded modern powers "in the spirit of the text"? It's because of how the judges feel.

So before you dismiss someone's opinion because how it might be, let's all be honest with ourselves and realize constitutional law of this nature does not depend on precedent and is largely do to the whims of the supreme court.
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-02-15 16:35:11+00:00
Are you downplaying the incentive for bad actors to generate false or misleading information online in order to create a margin for monetary gain?

This, in the same country that has allocated some of the greatest minds of our generation towards tasks like High Frequency Trading under the guise of “price discovery”?

Forgive me if I’m a little less credulous than you.
by Keyframe | 2026-02-15 16:35:14+00:00
This is what people don't get, what's coming up and it'll hit them like a ton of bricks. Software development, after toy examples, was a scale limiting factor for the better part of software development if you had domain expertise. Now, we hear constantly that it doesn't matter since "muh experience" and architecture, choices, tradeoffs etc for which you need seniority to operate LLM efficiently (or at all). This is true, of course. What people don't seem to get that that's what's coming next. Your experience won't mean crap anymore and then the ride starts full blast.
by ediblelegible | 2026-02-15 16:35:27+00:00
I think your intuition is correct and there’s nothing crazy novel happening

Recent surge Is mainly predictable growth in the same technical direction we’ve been trending. It’s just that it got good enough for people to notice.

In the 3 Body Problem series, the author describes a scenario where

(SPOILERS!!)

… humans are blocked on “fundamental” scientific gains but can still develop incredible technologies that make life unrecognizable

I think we’re seeing that scenario. Scaling RL for tool use and reasoning, improved pretraining data quality, larger models, better agent architectures, improved inference efficiency, etc, are all just incremental moves along the same branch, nothing fundamentally new or powerful

Which is not to say it’s not amazing or valuable. Just that it was not the result of anything super innovative from a research perspective. Model T to 2026 Camry was an amazing shift without really changing the combustion engine.
by somenameforme | 2026-02-15 16:35:38+00:00
Apple has already been outed as one of the participating companies in PRISM. [1] So that privacy boat has long since sailed. The public legal wrangling is likely just a mutually beneficial facade. PRISM is almost certainly illegal, but nobody can legally challenge it because the data provided from it is never directly used. Law enforcement engage in parallel construction [2] where they obtain the same evidence in a different way. So nobody can prove they were harmed by PRISM, and thus all challenges against it get tossed for lack of standing. It's very dumb.

But in any case the legal battles work as nice PR for Apple (see how much we care about privacy) and also as a great scenario for the government because any battles they win are domains where they can now legally use information directly to the courts and sidestep the parallel construction. That also takes the burden off of Apple PR in giving that information up because it can be framed as the courts and government forcing them, rather than them collaborating in mass data collection.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
by stockresearcher | 2026-02-15 16:35:49+00:00
> Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson planted pecans at their plantations

At the time of Washington and Jefferson, they were known in English as Illinois nuts. And, living in Illinois, a few years ago I bought a selection of 2-3 year old seedlings of Illinois-native trees from the state department of natural resources to plant on my property. Pecan seedlings were included...

When people say that pecan trees grow slowly, they are understating reality. Mine are growing at maybe an inch a year. I get one or two small leaves at the top. No branches yet. I planted a plum tree near one at the exact same time and it has doubled in height.
by harladsinsteden | 2026-02-15 16:36:07+00:00
> People die in car crashes. We can't eliminate those altogether, but at least we can take steps towards making things better, instead of telling them that maybe they should just not drive. Tough problems regardless.

I agree with the sentiment but there are limits to what we can and should do. To stay with your analogy: We don't let people drive around without taking a test. In that test they have to prove that they know the basics of how to drive a car. At least where I come from that means learning quite a bit of rules and regulations.

In other words: Don't let people off the hook. They need to do some form of learning by themselves. It's no different with what you do on the internet. If you're not willing to do some kind of work to familiarize yourself with how the bloody thing work then it's not the job of everyone else to make sure you'll be okay. It's _your_ job to understand the basics.

I'm getting tired of just another thing we must take off peoples minds so that they can "just" use whatever they want to use. Don't try to blame (or god forbid sue) someone else because you didn't do your homework.
by thehackergod | 2026-02-15 16:36:14+00:00
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by joebates | 2026-02-15 16:36:20+00:00
I wonder if this is a technique used by certain leaders of authoritarian regimes to take out people in power they they deem threats. Everyone in the party routinely breaks laws, knowingly or otherwise. The person in charge can decide they don't like someone and start an investigation, knowing they'll eventually find something illegal. Then they can delegitimize and remove them under the guise of "corruption".
by jayd16 | 2026-02-15 16:37:13+00:00
One major difference is the code has an owner who might consider what needs a test or ask questions if they don't understand.

To argue that all work is fungible because perfection cannot be achieved is actually a pretty out there take.

Replace your thought experiment with "Is one shot consultant code different from expert code?" Yes. They are different.

Code review is good and needed for human code, right? But if its "vibe coded", suddenly its not important? The differences are clear.
by hiccuphippo | 2026-02-15 16:37:41+00:00
I know Jonathan Marler for some of his Zig talks and his work in the win32 api bindings for Zig[0], they are even linked from Microsoft's own repo[1] (not sure why he has 2 github users/orgs but you can see it's the same person in the commits).

[0] https://github.com/marlersoft/zigwin32
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/win32metadata
by linsomniac | 2026-02-15 16:37:41+00:00
>Should you gamble your career? [...] Consider the case where [you let your skills stagnate and AI falls flat].

Sure. But the converse is true as well: consider the case where you don't learn the AI tooling and AI does improve apace.

That is also gambling your career. Are you ready for pointed questions being asked about why you spent 2 days working on something that AI can do in 15 minutes, so be prepared with some answers for that.
by vidarh | 2026-02-15 16:37:43+00:00
Because humans also make stupid random mistakes, and if your test suite and defensive practices don't catch it, the only difference is the rate of errors.

It may be that you've done the risk management, and deemed the risk acceptable (accepting the risk, in risk management terms) with human developers and that vibecoding changes the maths.

But that is still an admission that your test suite has gaping holes. If that's been allowed to happen consciously, recorded in your risk register, and you all understand the consequences, that can be entirely fine.

But the problem then isn't reflecting a problem with vibe coding, but a risk management choice you made to paper over test suite holes with an assumed level of human dilligence.
by whateveracct | 2026-02-15 16:37:58+00:00
> The right amount of usage is knowable - it's the amount which you've validated will actually work for your use case, in your industry, for your product and business.

This is fair. And what I've been doing it. I still mostly code the way I've always coded. The AI stuff is mostly for fun. I haven't seen it transformatively speed me up or improve things.

So I make that assessment, cool. But then my CEO lightly insists every engineer should be doing AI coding because it's the future and manual coding is a dead end towards obsolescence. Uh oh now I gotta AI-signal for the big guy up top!
by jkla562 | 2026-02-15 16:38:08+00:00
The article's right that build costs are collapsing, but that was rarely the hard part. The cost of a real product is architecture decisions, security, data modeling, ops — stuff that doesn't disappear because Claude wrote your CRUD layer.

What I think actually changes is the packaging. Per-seat subscriptions assumed humans in dashboards. That's the part on borrowed time. The workflow logic underneath still has value — it just gets consumed differently as agents start doing the clicking.
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-02-15 16:38:30+00:00
> It's the same as with crypto rug pulls, nobody is going to fall for that several times.

Same grift, different mask. NFTs, shitcoins, blockchain startups, AI startups. We continually see that even if it’s not the same mark, there are plenty of fools easily separated from their wallets.
by everforward | 2026-02-15 16:38:40+00:00
I got some decent mileage out of aider and Gemma 27B. The one shot output was a little less good, but I don’t have to worry about paying per token or hitting plan limits so I felt more free to let it devise a plan, run it in a loop, etc.

Not having to worry about token limits is surprisingly cognitively freeing. I don’t have to worry about having a perfect prompt.
by garrickvanburen | 2026-02-15 16:38:54+00:00
If I recall correctly, the impetus for Christiansen to even look into this was to answer the question: “why are there so many milkshakes sold in the morning via drive thru?”

That’s a different question than, “how do we make our breakfast menu more popular?”

Now, perhaps the latter question begat the former, but either way it is not a product innovation story, it’s a customer/market research story articulating the shape of customer demand (which I fully support).

If there was a second part of the story - like, McD started marketing milkshakes in their breakfast menu and sales shot up ##% or they developed a breakfast flavor milkshake and sales shot up - then we’d have the product innovation story.
by jstanley | 2026-02-15 16:38:57+00:00
> While this entity-attribute-value model enables the developer to break out from the structure imposed by an SQL database, it loses out on all the benefits,[1] since all of the work that could be done efficiently by the RDBMS is forced onto the application instead. Queries become much more convoluted,[2] the indexes and query optimizer can no longer work effectively, and data validity constraints are not enforced. Performance and maintainability can be extremely poor.

This is only true if you try to do this for all of your data.

I've used key-value tables loads of times, it's convenient for storing things like global configuration.

What else can you do? Make a table that has every configuration value as a separate column and populate it with only a single row? That seems absurd and worse.
by DangitBobby | 2026-02-15 16:39:09+00:00
Meanwhile, last time I had a video call in Teams, when I went into the call settings to change my microphone, my computer slowed to a crawl and became inoperable until the person who called me ended it. We eventually settled on a phone call. When I try to share a file over a certain arbitrary size limit, Teams refuses to do so, indicating some undesired and complicated permissions interaction with Teams and SharePoint.
by Alifatisk | 2026-02-15 16:40:00+00:00
> It’s so vast that Microsoft distributes it with a sophisticated GUI installer where you navigate a maze of checkboxes, hunting for which “Workloads” or “Individual Components” contain the actual compiler. Select the wrong one and you might lose hours installing something you don’t need.

I have a vague memory of stumbling upon this hell when installing the ldc compiler for dlang [1].

1. https://wiki.dlang.org/Building_and_hacking_LDC_on_Windows_u...
by VibeCodingFG | 2026-02-15 16:40:06+00:00
I vibecoded and built a document ingestion and search system over ~1.3M public PDFs (2.7M+ pages total).

The original goal was to extract structured information (people, places, relationships) via OCR + AI analysis. The pipeline looks roughly like this:

• Bulk ingest via torrent (aria2c)
• Normalize + upload to Cloudflare R2
• OCR and text extraction
• Media classification + AI prioritization
• AI analysis (DeepSeek) for entity extraction
• Load structured results into PostgreSQL
• Generate person↔document and person↔person relationships

At this scale, the bottleneck wasn’t storage — it was AI cost and throughput.

Running full AI enrichment over millions of pages is slow and compute-intensive. Because of that, only portions of the corpus were initially enriched with structured metadata.

To avoid discoverability being limited by enrichment progress, I added:

• Full-text search across all 2.7M+ pages
• Page-level deep linking into source documents
• A conversational “Ask the Archive” feature that retrieves from the indexed corpus

The architecture today is:

Ingestion → OCR → Indexed text store → AI enrichment (incremental) → Postgres for relationships → Search + Graph + Chat layer

Some of the more interesting challenges:

• Entity collision from messy OCR output
• Preventing high-degree “hub” entities from polluting graph queries
• Incremental reprocessing when improving extraction
• Balancing precomputed graph edges vs. query-time joins
• Handling burst traffic (20–55k visits/day)

I’d appreciate feedback on:
1. Whether moving relationship storage to a graph-native DB would make sense long-term
2. Better strategies for incremental AI enrichment at this scale
3. Techniques to reduce noisy edge generation in large document graphs

Happy to answer technical questions.
by otterley | 2026-02-15 16:40:09+00:00
I'm not going to argue over principles, as that's not law, and I largely agree with them.

However:

> They have access to things like cellphone metadata, which to a normal human being is a very clear violation of privacy.

In the U.S., when you study 4th Amendment law in Criminal Procedure, you learn there is a "third party doctrine" that says that if you voluntarily provide a third party with information--even information you consider private-it's the third party's property and you can no longer object to it being sought by the Government. There's a good overview of this on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

The Supreme Court declined to extend the third-party doctrine to tracking one's location via cell-phone metadata in Carpenter v. U.S., 585 U.S. 296 (2018), so it's not absolute.
by benjiro | 2026-02-15 16:40:11+00:00
> I think you overestimate the ability of AI to write perfectly secure apps. Humans can't do it, and AI is trained on their work.

Ironically, AI tend to be better at securing code, because unlike the squishy human, it is much more cable of creating tons of tests and figuring out weaknesses.

Let alone the issue when lots of meatbags with different skill levels are working on the same codebases.

I have barely seen any codebase that has been in production for a long time, that did not have glaring issues.

But if you tried to do a code audit, your spending somebody their time (assuming this is a pro), for a long time. Where as a AI with the correct hints on what too look for, can do insane levels of work, testing, etc...

Ironically, when you try to secure test a codebase, and you use multiple different LLMs, you get a very interesting list of issues they can find. Many that are probably in tons of production level software.

But its up to you, as the instructor of that LLM codebase, to actually tell it to do regular security audits of the codebase.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-15 16:40:21+00:00
I don’t have to give you reasons, those putting forth these proposals have their reasons and potentially the votes required to pass it. Economic rationality or consideration of potential immigrants wanting inexpensive housing somewhere they aren’t a citizen are not factors.

If Switzerland doesn’t want high population density throughout their country for quality of life reasons, that’s a choice, through their votes. If you don’t have a vote, you don’t get a say. There’s 8B+ humans on the planet and that will peak between ~9-10B before the end of the century, not everyone is going to get to live where they want to live during their life and runtime on the timeline. Is it sad and/or unfortunate? It just is.
by guld | 2026-02-15 16:40:31+00:00
I totally get what you are feeling, I felt the same just 6 weeks ago.

It just did not click for you yet.

There is probably some key feature missing, that you deeply care about, but do not yet see it solved, or on the horizon of becoming solved by the application of a personal "Jarvis" yet.

Personal assistants fulfill different needs for everyone. I personally care a lot about having fun at coding again, that's what the OpenClaw craze made me feel for the first time in decades. I build my own OpenClaw assistant generator from scratch using a simple Markdown file because it is just so fun. Not so much using it for anything notably yet but starting to see their potential.

Just ponder what it is that you get out of using ChatGPT and imagine how it could be better, more personal to you. You may find some key feature missing from OpenClaw or have some completely orthogonal project idea that excites you.
by parpfish | 2026-02-15 16:40:45+00:00
I’m torn about this.

I agree that employment is “value extraction” and people without upfront capital (or risk tolerance) are selling off their IP to other people.

It’s unfortunate, but in most cases I’d struggle to even call it exploitation. So relating it slavery a bit too far and really underselling the horrors of slavery. I can quit my job or go to a new one. Tech companies aren’t running international mass-kidnapping schemes to get their headcount.
by markbao | 2026-02-15 16:40:47+00:00
That is exactly the type of awesome app that can now be built. I edited my comment to clarify that the grocery app and $5/month app are separate examples, but I think your example shows that someone with coding knowledge can build something extremely useful for n=1 users which I fully support.

I just don’t think most people will end up doing that just like how most people don’t 3D print their own desk drawer organizers even when Gridfinity does all the work for you. Automation doesn’t fully replace the volition to build a thing and make tricky decisions that are familiar to us software engineers but not others.