MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tosti | 2026-02-04 08:06:30+00:00
I can't take this seriously. You've got the backend of some networked application and now you want to offload the database to a SaaSS which has... "SQLite compatibility"?

SQLite is an embedded database. Every Android app for instance gets a db through sqlite for free. You can easily compile it yourself and embed it in pretty much anything that has a CPU.

So you'd like to offload this embeddable database that's nowhere near postgres or even maria, and then it even says:

> Why care about database latency anyway?

Right. Because you can't even begin to think about introducing a network stack between your application and the database unless you can't be bothered all about the latency.

I can't imagine myself a customer for this.
by t0mas88 | 2026-02-04 08:06:46+00:00
I've done business the other way around, Western Europe with Finland. I think it's just different context? There are unwritten customs and meanings in Finland as well, just different ones.

Even UK vs Netherlands is a significant difference in how things work in business deals and that's just a 45 min flight. Unspoken expectations are different on how the other side is supposed to behave.
by Markoff | 2026-02-04 08:07:06+00:00
I wanted to argue China is gerontocracy as well, but it seems I remember wrong

Jiang Zemin in office in office 1993-2003 - 67-77yo

Hu Jintao 2003-2013 - 61-71yo

Xi Jinping 2013-2026 - 60-72yo

about time to replace XJP

US really went downhill into gerontocracy after Obama

if it would be up to me I'd set limits to terms of candidacy to somewhere between 35-65 at the day of elections
by factorialboy | 2026-02-04 08:07:57+00:00
Relevant question: How many YCombinator portfolio companies issue stable coins.

Stablecoin-adjacent YC companies:

• Bridge (acquired by Stripe for $1.1B) — stablecoin infrastructure, now offers "Open Issuance" platform for others to launch stablecoins

• PrimeVault (S2022) — helps enterprises issue & manage digital assets/stablecoins

• BlindPay (W2025) — stablecoin API for payments

• Coinbase (S2012) — issues USDC (with Circle)
by spoaceman7777 | 2026-02-04 08:08:55+00:00
He goes on about putting a mass driver on the moon for ultra-low-cost space launches.

His plan here clearly hinges around using robots to create a fully-automated GPU manufacturing and launch facility on the moon. Not launching any meaningful number from earth.

Raises some big questions about whether there are actually sufficient materials for GPU manufacture on the moon... But, whatever the case, the current pitch of earth-launches that the people involved with this "space datacenter" thing are making is a lie. I think it just sounds better than outright saying "we're going to build a self-replicating robot factory on the moon", and we are in the age of lying.
by aforwardslash | 2026-02-04 08:09:09+00:00
Why is it an example? Can you cite any case where "regulation" trumpled the construction of a properly designed datacenter?

Or what you meant was "those poor billionaires can't do as they please with common resources of us all, and without any accountability"?

As a quick anecdote, there is a DC in construction in Portugal with a projected capacity of 1.2GW, powered by renewables.
by rvz | 2026-02-04 08:09:22+00:00
It isn't.

Code generation progression in LLMs still carries higher objective risk of failure depending on the experience on the person using it because:

1. They still do not trust if the code works (even if it has tests) thus, needs thorough human supervision and still requires on-going maintainance.

2. Hence (2) it can cost you more money than the tokens you spent building it in the first place when it goes horribly wrong in production.

Image generation progression comes with close to no operational impact, and has far less human supervision and can be safely done with none.
by vladdoster | 2026-02-04 08:09:36+00:00
Location: Nashville, TN
Remote: true
Willing to relocate: boston || nashville
Technologies: Python, Django, IaC, Terraform, Golang, CI/CD, Azure/AWS, {ba,z}sh, Lua, Springboot,
Redis, Docker, Open Service Broker, {,non}relational & vector dbs, shared services, SOA
Email: mvdoster@gmail.com

resume: https://linkedin.vdoster.com && http://github.com/vladdoster

sr. cloud software engineer @ Mastercard (5 years)

Designed and built Platform-as-a-Service for microservice workloads running on Azure and AWS
to migrate on-prem workloads to the cloud. The platform operates globally, allowing teams to
deploy to several Azure-backed regions worldwide. Helped plan and create regional landing zones
in Azure for application teams wanting to perform globally. Designed platform components using
Terraform, Go, and Node; developed support tooling using Bash, Python, and Azure CLI. De-risk the
platform by addressing security vulnerabilities and ensuring the platform is PCI compliant.

api/devops software engineer @ Harvard Medical School (2 years)

Worked as part of the DevOps team to manage a 15k core CentOS HPC cluster. Designed and implemented
Python-based security scanning pipeline to securely deploy & run Apptainer images via SLURM.
Coordinated cross-team emergency patching eﬀorts. Collaborated with researchers and engineers across
3-letter institutions to deliver secure research infrastructure. Built CI/CD Pipelines with GitHub, Jenkins,
to automate code builds, testing, and deployments. Wrote Puppet modules to manage configuration of HPC fleet.
Wrote custom Puppet module & Python scripts to automatically remediate Tenable findings.

full-stack software engineer @ Global Prior Art (3 years)

Used Django, Celery, Selenium grid, and AWS API Gateway for IP rotation to scrape USPTO patent PDFs,
apply CV for data extraction, and generate reports with relevant claims, saving employees 4-5 hours daily.
Wrote E2E black-box/fuzzing unit tests. Automated on-premise deployment via Github Actions and Ansible.

maintainer @ Zinit (5 years)

Develop and maintain a zsh plugin manager on Github with 4k stars. Implemented unit tests,
containerization, bug fixes, and new features.
See: https://github.com/zdharma-continuum/zinit

contributor @ Open-source documentation (5 years)

Contributed hundreds of documentation corrections and enhancements to 400+ open source projects.
by metalman | 2026-02-04 08:10:16+00:00
they are loosers.
they spent decades and billions and billions
and billions of dollars , sort of rebuilding used shuttle parts(SLS= shuttle leftover systems), and cant fill the fucking tanks, cant get things to seal, there thruster valves(old shuttle stuff) sieze up, and they are a bunch of bumbling grifter loosers.(sorry! to the many good people caught up in this debaucle)
by tokyobreakfast | 2026-02-04 08:10:18+00:00
Maybe the sarcasm was lost in translation but a $1200 lamp is out of reach (or out of the question) for most people. A Juicero of lamps. I feel sorry for the guy because in a way you're right, clones of this will be going for $60 on AliExpress, probably built in the same factory with the same tooling.
by southerntofu | 2026-02-04 08:11:07+00:00
Disclaimer: i'm rather hostile to ATProto for reinventing the wheel without bringing much value over AP/XMPP/Matrix.

I don't think that's a fair characterization. Most AP implementations famously don't have privacy features: it was by design (and therefore no surprise to us tech folks), but i remember it was quite the scandal when users found out Mastodon instance admins could read users' private messages. A later "scandal" involved participation in the EUNOMIA research project about "provenance tracking" in federated networks [1], which to be fair to conspiracy theorists does sound like an academic front for NSA-style firehose R&D.

That being said, Bluesky is much harder to selfhost and is therefore not decentralized in practice. [2] See also Blacksky development notes. However, Bluesky does bring a very interesting piece to the puzzle which AP carefully ignored despite years of research in AP-adjacent protocols (such as Hubzilla): account portability.

All in all, i'm still siding on the ActivityPub ecosystem because i think it's much more ethical and friendly in all regards, and i'm really sad so many so-called journalists, researchers and leftists jumped ship to Bluesky just because the attraction of "Twitter reborn" (with the same startup nation vibes) was too strong. At least in my circles, i did not meet a single person who mentioned the choice of Bluesky was about UX or features.

But now, i'm slowly warming up to the ATmosphere having a vibrant development community. Much more so than AP. And to be fair to ATProto, it is worse than AP from a centralization standpoint, but at least it's not as bad and complex as the matrix protocol which brought 0 value over AP/XMPP but made implementations 100x more complex and resource-intensive.

[1] https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/825171/reporting

[2] https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/
by lxgr | 2026-02-04 08:11:24+00:00
I've had the completely opposite experience as somebody that also likes to think more than to build: LLMs take much of the legwork of actually implementing a design, fixing trivial errors etc. away from me and let me validate theories much more quickly than I could do by myself.

More importantly, thinking and building are two very different modes of operating and it can be hard to switch at moment's notice. I've definitely noticed myself getting stuck in "non-thinking building/fixing mode" at times, only realizing that I've been making steady progress into the wrong direction an hour or two in.

This happens way less with LLMs, as they provide natural time to think while they churn away at doing.

Even when thinking, they can help: They're infinitely patient rubber ducks, and they often press all the right buttons of "somebody being wrong on the Internet" too, which can help engineers that thrive in these kinds of verbal pro/contra discussions.
by eimrine | 2026-02-04 08:12:07+00:00
I think 100% wealth tax for billionaires is too kind, they are definitely experts in hiding their money. I would suppose 101-110% for them which makes things much more fair then letting them to have those funds which they have stolen earlier, before setting the 100% tax. And wait a minute, there will be no any single islang on Earth having less than 100% wealth tax.

Have I continued your logics correctly?
by hnlmorg | 2026-02-04 08:12:17+00:00
Have you actually tried high temperature values for coding? Because I don’t think it’s going to do what you claim it will.

LLMs don’t “reason” the same way humans do. They follow text predictions based on statistical relevance. So raising the temperature will more likely increase the likelihood of unexecutable pseudocode than it would create a valid but more esoteric implementation of a problem.
by alkonaut | 2026-02-04 08:13:14+00:00
I disagree. It's like the lumberjack working from home watching an enormous robotic forestry machine cut trees on a set of tv-screens. If he enjoyed producing lumber, then what he sees on those screens will fill him with joy. He's producing lots of lumber. He's much more efficient than with both axe and chainsaw.

But if he enjoyed being in the forest, and _doesn't really care about lumber at all_ (Because it turns out, he never used or liked lumber, he merely produced it for his employer) then these screens won't give him any joy at all.

That's how I feel. I don't care about code, but I also don't really care about products. I mostly care about the craft. It's like solving sudokus. I don't collect solved sudokus. Once solved I don't care about them. Having a robot solve sudokus for me would be completely pointless.

> I sense a pattern that many developers care more about doing what they want instead of providing value to others.

And you'd be 100% right. I do this work because my employer provides me with enough sudokus. And I provide value back which is more than I'm compensated with. That is: I'm compensated with two things: intellectual challenge, and money. That's the relationship I have with my employer. If I could produce 10x more but I don't get the intellectual challenge? The employer isn't giving me what I want - and I'd stop doing the work.

I think "You do what the employer wants, produce what needs to be produced, and in return you get money" is a simplification that misses the literal forest for all the forestry.
by lsy | 2026-02-04 08:13:56+00:00
I think the analogy to high level programming languages misunderstands the value of abstraction and notation. You can’t reason about the behavior of an English prompt because English is underspecified. The value of code is that it has a fairly strong semantic correlation to machine operations, and reasoning about high level code is equivalent to reasoning about machine code. That’s why even with all this advancement we continue to check in code to our repositories and leave the sloppy English in our chat history.
by DSMan195276 | 2026-02-04 08:15:03+00:00
Just because you believe X is going to happen doesn't mean you can make money in the market off of that information, that requires judging what _everyone else_ thinks will happen and thus how the market is priced. You could just as easily get stuck in the situation where the market as a whole was expecting it to be worse than it was and didn't move far enough for you to make your money back.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-04 08:15:16+00:00
> Are you sure about that? Because thats exactly what Klarna is doing/has done.

That link does not say that they are switching away from a system that requires armies of consultants to implement.

AFAICT, they are switching away from Jira (Atlassian/confluence products). Those are not ERP systems.

Once again, I must point out that the these sorts of assertions reveal that the person making the assertion has never been involved in an ERP rollout, neither a big one nor a small one.

And, again, I reiterate, the only threat is to small players in the market, who don't have a community to hire from. Because to become a big player, you need to gain traction as a small player, and if every small ERP system can be replaced with an AI generated system, non single one is ever going to gain traction (Why pay $10/user/month for a basic system when you can have AI generate that for a once of fee and some employee time?)
by aylmao | 2026-02-04 08:15:21+00:00
If you told people in 2006 that 20 years later the best open-source IDE would be open-source, web-based and come from Microsoft, they would've thought you're crazy.

Back then Apple had made waves introducing Safari, which was not only great and cross-platform, but had an open-source renderer (WebKit), and JavaScript engine (JSC). Safari was crushing web standards while IE lagged, seemingly trying to purposefully choke the web to stop it from canibalizing Windows software. Apple was betting on web: one of the big features on their brand-new Mac OS 10.4 Tiger was the Dashboard with widgets that were all built with HTML/CSS/JS, and they were shipping a new, free IDE (Dashcode) to build them too.

Mac OS X was heavily marketed for being UNIX vs Microsoft's proprietary and closed Windows NT. They were building Safari and iTunes for Windows, and had just introduced the first Intel Macs; it seemed like they were out to put a fight against a very closed, very walled, and very incompatible Microsoft who had gotten too comfortable with the Wintel and IE monopolies.

Fast-forward two decades, and not only can you now run a native GNU/Linux environment on Windows, but the best IDE out there is web-based and open-source Microsoft software while Apple lags behind on developer experience. They seems to have missed the bus on web technologies too. They went from leading charge with a stellar browser pushing web standards forward, to being an obstacle out of fear Safari might canibalize iOS software.

Apple hasn't gone full early-2000s Microsoft (thankfully) and Microsoft hasn't gone full early-2000s Apple (unfortunately) but times have really changed.
by RobinL | 2026-02-04 08:16:15+00:00
My wife's old company, a fairly significant engineering consultancy, ran it's entire time/job management and invoicing system from a company wide, custom developed Microsoft Access app called 'Time'.

It was developed by a single guy in the IT department and she liked it.

About 5 years ago the company was acquired, and they had to move to their COTS 'enterprise' system (Maconomy).

All staff from the old company had to do a week long (!) training course in how to use this and she hates it.

In future I think there will be more things like 'Time' (though presumably not MS Access based!)
Show HN: Gennie – AI voice agent for creating tasks via phone call
by vishal__sahu | 2026-02-04 08:17:37+00:00
Hi HN - we built Gennie, an AI voice agent that lets you create and update tasks by calling a dedicated number.

Instead of typing into Trello or Asana, you can say:
“Create a task to ship v1 by Friday and assign it to Alex.”

Gennie parses the command (title, assignee, due date, priority) and syncs it directly to your connected workspace.

We built this after noticing that most actionable ideas occur away from a keyboard, commuting, walking between meetings, or during calls, and often get lost.

We’re not replacing task managers. We’re adding a voice layer on top of them.

Currently supports Trello and Asana.
Looking for feedback on real-world use cases and failure modes.

Happy to answer questions.
by Markoff | 2026-02-04 08:18:00+00:00
pretty sure young adults are reporting lower life satisfaction across whole Europe considering toxic (social) media, youth unemployment and high cost of living (especially housing)

but yeah, it would be great to see comparison with country which has much less immigrants compared to Sweden like Finland (or Poland), Finland seems like great comparison

also for people unfamiliar with situation in Sweden, this movie is great to illustrate what's happening there - Play (2011) and situation in the last 15 years got only worse than it already was when they shot the movie
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1376717/
by BoostandEthanol | 2026-02-04 08:18:14+00:00
I’d been feeling this until quite literally yesterday, where I sort of just forced myself to not touch an AI and grappled with the problem for hours. Got myself all mixed up with trig and angles until I got a headache and decided to back off a lot of the complexity. I doubt I got everything right, I’m sure I could’ve had a solution with near identical outputs using an AI in a fraction of the time.

But I feel better for not taking the efficient way. Having to be the one to make a decision at every step of the way, choosing the constraints and where I cut my losses on accuracy, I think has taught me more about the subject than even reading literature would’ve directly stated.
by lloeki | 2026-02-04 08:18:37+00:00
Heh (in the EU at least) the div container has a `has-reject-all-button` class.

<div id="onetrust-button-group-parent" class="ot-sdk-columns has-reject-all-button ot-sdk-two">
<div id="onetrust-button-group">
<button id="onetrust-accept-btn-handler">
Accept All
</button>
<button id="onetrust-reject-all-handler">
Essential Cookies Only
</button>
<button id="onetrust-pc-btn-handler" aria-label="Show Purposes, Opens the preference center dialog">
Show Purposes
</button>
</div>
</div>

Would be funny if the button was merely hidden outside of the EU xD
by roadbuster | 2026-02-04 08:18:59+00:00
> Whenever a new layer of abstraction is added

LLMs aren't a "layer of abstraction."

99% of people writing in assembly don't have to drop down into manual cobbling of machine code. People who write in C rarely drop into assembly. Java developers typically treat the JVM as "the computer." In the OSI network stack, developers writing at level 7 (application layer) almost never drop to level 5 (session layer), and virtually no one even bothers to understand the magic at layers 1 & 2. These all represent successful, effective abstractions for developers.

In contrast, unless you believe 99% of "software development" is about to be replaced with "vibe coding", it's off the mark to describe LLMs as a new layer of abstraction.
by tommica | 2026-02-04 08:19:00+00:00
Yes, the quality has gone down, but not much quality can be had in 140 characters in the first place - so it is impressive that it was managed in the first place.

> their users are either racists, bots, or simply garbage people

It is a bit intolerant to go and blanket label a large group of people like that. Sure there are extreme views, but that is what is bound to happen when you have a large amount of users on a platform. So it is on reddit, bluesky, YouTube and what-not. But there are also a lot of milder people.
by sibellavia | 2026-02-04 08:19:08+00:00
I don't agree with OP. I still think hard. I can guarantee anyone that in complex contexts, where you have to work on large distributed systems and very large codebases, with multiple people involved, OP’s argument falls apart. Quite simply, compared to before, we now delegate the "build" part to AI. But the engineering and architectural side always remains a product of my own mental process. We’ve moved to a higher level of abstraction; that doesn’t mean you have to think or reason less about things. On the contrary, sometimes we end up reasoning about more important problems.
by hnlmorg | 2026-02-04 08:19:17+00:00
You’re both right. It just depends on the problems you’re solving and the languages you use.

I find languages like JavaScript promote the idea that of “Lego programming” because you’re encouraged to use a module for everything.

But when you start exploring ideas that haven’t been thoroughly explored already, and particularly in systems languages which are less zealous about DRY (don’t repeat yourself) methodologies, the you can feel a lot more like a sculptor.

Likewise if you’re building frameworks rather than reusing them.

So it really depends on the problems you’re solving.

For general day-to-day coding for your average 9-to-5 software engineering job, I can definitely relate to why people might think coding is basically “LEGO engineering”.
by practal | 2026-02-04 08:19:18+00:00
I see the current generation of AI very much as a thing in between. Opus 4.5 can think and code quite well, but it cannot do these "jumps of insight" yet. It also struggles with straightforward, but technically intricate things, where you have to max out your understanding of the problem.

Just a few days ago, I let it do something that I thought was straightforward, but it kept inserting bugs, and after a few hours of interaction it said itself it was running in circles. It took me a day to figure out what the problem was: an invariant I had given it was actually too strong, and needed to be weakened for a special case. If I had done all of it myself, I would have been faster, and discovered this quicker.

For a different task in the same project I used it to achieve a working version of something in a few days that would have taken me at least a week or two to achieve on my own. The result is not efficient enough for the long term, but for now it is good enough to proceed with other things. On the other hand, with just one (painful) week more, I would have coded a proper solution myself.

What I am looking forward to is being able to converse with the AI in terms of a hard logic. That will take care of the straightforward but technically intricate stuff that it cannot do yet properly, and it will also allow the AI to surface much quicker where a "jump of insight" is needed.

I am not sure what all of this means for us needing to think hard. Certainly thinking hard will be necessary for quite a while. I guess it comes down to when the AIs will be able to do these "jumps of insight" themselves, and for how long we can jump higher than they can.