MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ehnto | 2026-02-18 03:27:15+00:00
I more or less agree specifically on the angle that no-code has existed, yet non-technical people still aren't executing on technical products. But I don't think vibe-coding is where we see this happening, it will be in chat interfaces or GUIs. As the "scafolding" or "harnesses" mature more, and someone can just type what they want, then get a deployed product within the day after some back and forth.

I am usually a bit of an AI skeptic but I can already see that this is within the realm of possibility, even if models stopped improving today. I think we underestimate how technical things like WIX or Squarespace are, to a non-technical person, but many are skilled business people who could probably work with an LLM agent to get a simple product together.

People keep saying code was never the real skill of an engineer, but rather solving business logic issues and codifying them. Well people running a business can probably do that too, and it would be interesting to see them work with an LLM to produce a product.
by stephen | 2026-02-18 03:28:22+00:00
Per "how to handle dynamic queries", it's admittedly pretty different b/c we're an ORM (https://joist-orm.io/) that "fetches entities" instead of adhoc SQL queries, but our pattern for "variable number of filters/joins" looks like:

const { date, name, status } = args.filter;

await em.find(Employee, { date, name, employer: { status } });

Where the "shape" of the query is static, but `em.find` will drop/prune any filters/joins that are set to `undefined`.

So you get this nice "declarative / static structure" that gets "dynamically pruned to only what's applicable for the current query", instead of trying to jump through "how do I string together knex .orWhere clauses for this?" hoops.
by techpression | 2026-02-18 03:28:31+00:00
In a team of one at work I see clear benefits, but having worked in many different team sizes for most of my career I can see how it quickly would go down, especially if you care about quality. And even with the latest models it’s a constant battle against legacy training data, which has gotten worse over time.
”I have to spend 45 minutes explaining why a one minute AI generated PR is bad code” was how an old colleague summarized it.
by KPGv2 | 2026-02-18 03:28:55+00:00
ever since I first heard about Obsidian, the vibe I get is that it's a solution in search of a problem. Every use case I get pitched, there's a better solution, or it's a "problem" that doesn't need to be solved.

If you aren't a researcher in a field, why do you need personal knowledge management? Even when I learn a subject, I find just...taking a flat note file to be way better than all these Zettelkasten stuffs. It all feels very pomodoro to me. It is useful for some people, but influencers have hyped it up into the Grand Unified Solution.

Same with mind mapping. I don't see the benefit. Maybe being AuDHD has something to do with it? Like...if it's an area I want more expertise, I'm already hyperfocused on it and remember everything. If I don't want expertise, I don't need PKM. I keep trying to use them, but it feels superfluous. Like I never have to refer back to it.
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-18 03:29:15+00:00
> Panel B shows that the decrease in UIWF during the slowdown period had particularly large effects in construction, manufacturing, and other services. Because UIWF was slowing in most places, this result implies that, on average, places experiencing the biggest slowdowns in unauthorized immigration saw the biggest slowdowns in employment growth in construction, manufacturing, and other services. The effect for the construction sector is particularly notable, because it suggests that falling UIWF in recent months could be slowing residential construction and hence slowing down the growth of housing supply.

Reducing the number of immigrants is going to surprise a lot of people when they spend more for the same things.
by xhrpost | 2026-02-18 03:30:21+00:00
There's an older article that gets reposted to HN occasionally, titled something like "I hate almost all software". I'm probably more cynical than the average tech user and I relate strongly to the sentiment. So so much software is inexcusably bad from a UX perspective. So I have to ask, if code will really become this dirt cheap unlimited commodity, will we actually have good software?
by nrclark | 2026-02-18 03:31:56+00:00
Not the grandparent, but I've used most of the OpenAI models that have been released in the last year. Out of all of them, o3 was the best at the programming tasks I do. I liked it a lot more than I like GPT 5.2 Thinking/Pro. Overall, I'm not at all convinced that models are making forward progress in general.
by nobody9999 | 2026-02-18 03:32:28+00:00
>The act of maintaining a central database of funds so that individuals can transfer money to one another is a relatively simple and cheap problem, one perfectly suited to be provided by the government. It should be infrastructure, just like printing money is infrastructure under the purview of the government.

You mean like FedNow[0], which many banks are eschewing in favor of services life Zelle[1]?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelle
by KPGv2 | 2026-02-18 03:32:34+00:00
I use Calibre to maintain my PDFs. I've even got my taxes in there, but have been thinking recently that they don't belong in a library and probably should just be printed and stored with other important things like passports and birth certificates.

But every PDF I download, ebook, academic article, it goes in Calibre and out of my Downloads path.
by afcool83 | 2026-02-18 03:32:36+00:00
It’s a truly remarkable app you and team have built. I’m going to use the term _simple_ but please understand that that’s high praise.

To me, obsidian is a thought-taking app, not a notetaking app. Thoughts are amorphous and incomplete no matter how much you embellish them. They don’t belong in only one place with only one label or pinned to only one date. They reach out to each other. Merge and split. They sit inside each other sometimes.

Obsidian gets that. It offers _just enough_ structure and automation and operating system (of a kind) to force the binary file system on some silicon to work like our brains do...and not the other way around.
by aleph_minus_one | 2026-02-18 03:32:41+00:00
> I can't use words to ask a 3d printer to make something.

You can: the words are in the G-code language.

I mean: you are used to learn foreign languages in school, so you are already used to formulate your request in a different language to make yourself understood. In this case, this language is G-code.
by krick | 2026-02-18 03:32:49+00:00
I don't think this list is as famous as you assume it to be. The only "Carl Sagan reading list" I managed to find [0] is apparently his personal TODO note (books he plans to read, but haven't at the moment of writing). Which obviously isn't the same thing as "his famous reading list for students".

[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/get-inspired-by-carl-sagan-s-am...
by ntnsndr | 2026-02-18 03:33:46+00:00
I've been using Vim only about a year, and just finished drafting an academic-trade crossover book with extensive endnotes in it. I've tried Pencil and Goyo, but ended up finding that a pretty tiny vimrc file was all I needed. No plugins.

https://gitlab.com/ntnsndr/dotfiles/-/blob/master/.vimrc

I launch with `vim -O [2-3 working files]` and am good to go. Learning vim itself is hard enough, and rewarding enough, that plugins feel extreme, especially for prose writing.
by oivey | 2026-02-18 03:33:50+00:00
Again, the old car comparison is demonstrably untrue. To put the same example forward, computer modeling has wildly changed and accelerated car design in ways that were impossible for any sum of money in the 70s.

I think part of why this is hard to believe is that people strongly believe in the concept that time is money. On the margins for decisions like hiring someone to mow your lawn, it is true. For large scale things, you often cannot accelerate processes no matter how much money you dump into it. A good example of this is how long it has taken China to industrialize.

To be clear also, you have to prove your point that #2 is outpacing #1. The fact that the price keeps going up is not proof as there are other explanations. The poor quality of domestic manufacturers and their bad business practices, for example.
by dgacmu | 2026-02-18 03:34:13+00:00
Just for completeness, it's about $0.023/gal in Pittsburgh (1)-- still perfectly affordable but 23x more than 0.001. but still 50x less than Brent crude.

(1) Combined water+ sewer fees. Sewer charges are based on your water consumption so it rolls into the per-gallon effective price. https://www.pgh2o.com/residential-commercial-customers/rates
by rickcarlino | 2026-02-18 03:34:36+00:00
Since it is just markdown files and a tiny bit of JSON meta data, it’s trivial to use Obsidian as the GUI for a static site generator. I have some thin ruby scripts that compile my notebook to HTML and upload to my blog via SSH. I removed my previous static site generator library and just use simple markdown rendering libs now. https://rickcarlino.com/notes/
by tavavex | 2026-02-18 03:35:33+00:00
I'm not related to the rest of the conversation, but the "NATO expansion" talking point is so egregious at this point that it's impossible to pass by and ignore.

> NATO wants to put missiles on their doorstep.

No they didn't. Joining NATO was never really on the table for Ukraine, because by the time there was political willpower, Russia had already created enough territorial disputes to prevent it from even being a hypothetical possibility. Not only was Ukraine never close to being in NATO, but you talk of "putting missiles" somewhere, which is like five steps further than that.

If they cared so much about NATO, you'd think they would've done something in 2004, no? When all the Baltic states were added into NATO, putting their borders 100km away from St. Petersburg and about as far from Moscow as Ukraine's borders are? And yet nothing happened...

Nothing was happening between NATO and Ukraine before full-scale war started. Russia could've kept the situation as it was indefinitely. They chose to go to war not because they were desperate and terrified of something, but because they thought they could win the war really easily.

Then when their war led to Finland joining NATO, Russia's official response was to look mildly displeased and forget about it soon after. Because they never cared about those borders. Those borders were close to them for close to 20 years then.

> US state department had been plotting the Zelensky revolution

The "Zelensky revolution"? The one where Zelenskyy suddenly hopped off the stage and became a US-backed revolutionary leader? Not knowing that he was elected a full government change after the revolution, all the way in 2019, shows that you know nothing of Ukrainian politics despite being so confident about it.

There's a weird consensus between Americans who really love and really hate their country that the US has its hands in all the cookie jars, and that nothing in the world can happen without America's involvement. Ukraine has a student protest that snowballs out of control due to escalations, resulting in the country preferring democratic countries over the bright future of becoming a Belarus-like slave state? Must have been the US. Sure, this definitely was something the US liked a lot, but the connections to it are a lot more tenuous than things the US did meddle in. Stop trying to pretend that Ukrainians have no agency and are just a cardboard cutout with Uncle Sam standing behind it. The US has a lot of power, and it has access to lots of variables they can tweak to try and influence the situation, but the primary parties here are Russia and Ukraine.
by ethbr1 | 2026-02-18 03:35:50+00:00
Depends on whether you think good software comes from good initial design (then yes, via the monkeys with typewriters path) or intentional feature evolution (then no, because that's a more artistic, skilled endeavor).

Anyone who lived through 90s OSS UX and MySpace would likely agree that design taste is unevenly distributed throughout the population.
by fhub | 2026-02-18 03:36:49+00:00
They use the word "Sonnet" 60+ times on that page but never give the casual reader any context of what a "Sonnet model" actually is. Neither does their landing page. You have to scroll all the way to the footer to find a link under the "Models" section. You click it and you finally get the description

"Hybrid reasoning model with superior intelligence for agents, featuring a 1M context window"

You then compare that to Opus Model description

"Hybrid reasoning model that pushes the frontier for coding and AI agents, featuring a 1M context window"

Is the casual person meant to decide if "Superior" is actually less powerful than "Frontier"?
by tptacek | 2026-02-18 03:37:22+00:00
It's quite good, but it gets very Six Feet Under by the end, and you have to suspend a lot of disbelief about technology; it's a little like Hackers in the sense that it's trying to communicate a feeling about operating in specific eras of computing, but not so much trying to realistically depict what it was like.

Christopher Cantwell, the showrunner, is also doing the new series of The Terror (aka North Pole Bear Show) that's premiering this year.
by DrFunke | 2026-02-18 03:37:34+00:00
Season 1 was wonderful. The showrunner had initially written the pilot to get a job on Mad Men. It was eviscerated by critics for being too male, too masculine and seasons 2 onward pivoted into a girlboss series with Lee Pace's character taking a backseat and Scooter's character becoming a stay at home house husband. But if you like Breaking Bad and Sopranos, S1 is very well written.
by hattmall | 2026-02-18 03:40:01+00:00
I find that highly unlikely, coding is the AIs best value use case by far. Right now office workers see marginal benefits but it's not like it's an order of magnitude difference. AI drafts an email, you have to check and edit it, then send it. In many cases it's a toss up if that actually saved time, and then if it did, it's not like the pace of work is break neck anyway, so the benefit is some office workers have a bit more idle time at the desk because you always tap some wall that's out of your control. Maybe AI saves you a Google search or a doc lookup here and there. You still need to check everything and it can cause mistakes that take longer too. Here's an example from today.

Assistant is dispatching a courier to get medical records. AI auto completes to include the address. Normally they wouldn't put the address, the courier knows who we work with, but AI added it so why not. Except it's the wrong address because it's for a different doctor with the same name. At least they knew to verify it, but still mistakes like this happening at scale is making the other time savings pretty close to a wash.
by ahepp | 2026-02-18 03:40:08+00:00
I read an article in FT just a couple days ago claiming that increased productivity was becoming visible in economic data

> My own updated analysis suggests a US productivity increase of roughly 2.7 per cent for 2025. This is a near doubling from the sluggish 1.4 per cent annual average that characterised the past decade.

good for 3 clicks:
https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/97861f...
by kjellsbells | 2026-02-18 03:41:23+00:00
Correctness like this doesn't really matter, if you are some EVP at BigCorp: you don´t really need AI to be genuinely superior to your human workers. You need AI to appear to be useful enough for two or three quarters, max. It gives you cover to justify eliminating jobs and still have the stock price rise. It gives you exposure to the people who might hire you for your next golden gig ("thought leader", "visionary" etc). And you'll be bailing shortly anyway, before reality comes knocking.
by tptacek | 2026-02-18 03:41:34+00:00
Season 1 is Soul of a New Machine-ish, but about personal computing, not minicomputers, and is set in Texas.

Season 2 is roughly about BBSs and Compuserve, and still in Texas.

Season 3 is about the early commercial Internet, same characters, SFBA.

Season 4 is about the Yahoo era of the Internet and about venture capital, also SFBA.
Managing Docker Composes via GitOps
by anuragxd | 2026-02-18 03:42:15+00:00
Built a small tool called ConOps for deploying Docker Compose apps via Git. It watches a repo and keeps docker-compose.yaml in sync with your Docker environment. This is heavily inspired from Argo CD (but without Kubernetes). If you’re running Docker Compose on a homelab or server, this lets you deploy via Git instead of SSH. Includes CLI and a clean web dashboard. MIT licensed.

Try it out if you have a second. Would love some feedback:).

Github: https://github.com/anuragxxd/conops

Website: https://conops.anuragxd.com/
by nichochar | 2026-02-18 03:42:22+00:00
We ran some tests at mocha (we have a coding agent with our own harness to build web apps, with a lot of tools and medium length tasks (3min to 10min).

Our notes:

Sonnet 4.6 feels like a fundamentally different model than Sonnet 4.5, it is much closer to the Opus series in terms of agentic behavior and autonomy.

Autonomy - In our zero-shot app building experiments, Sonnet 4.6 ran up to 3-4x longer than Sonnet 4.5 without intervention, producing functional apps on par in terms of quality to the Opus series. Note that subjectively we found Opus 4.5 and 4.6 are better "designers" than Sonnet 4.6; producing more visually appealing apps from the same prompts.

Planning / Task Decomposition - We found Sonnet 4.6 is very good at decomposing tasks and staying on track during long-running trajectories. It's quite good at ensuring all of the requirements of an input prompt are accounted for, whereas we were often forced to goad sonnet 4.5 into decomposing tasks, Sonnet 4.6 does this naturally.

Exploration - In some of our complex "exploration" tasks (e.g. cloning/remixing an existing website), Sonnet 4.6 often performs on par or better than Opus 4.5 and 4.6. It generally takes longer, and takes more tokens, though we believe this is likely a consequence of our tool-calling setup.

Tool-use - Sonnet 4.6 seems eager to use tools; however, we did find that it struggles with our XML-based custom tool use format (perhaps exclusive to the format we use). We did not have a chance to assess with native tool use

Self-verification - Similar to Opus 4.5/4.6, Sonnet 4.6 has a proclivity for verifying it's work.

Prompting - We found Sonnet 4.6 is very sensitive to prompting around thinking, planning, and task decomposition. Our prompt built for sonnet 4.5 has a tendency to push sonnet 4.6 into incredibly long thinking and planning loops. Though we also found it requires significantly less careful and specific instructions for how to approach problems.

How are we thinking about this:

We can't launch this model day 0, it requires more changes to our harness, and we're working on them right now.

But it reminds me a bit of 3.5 to 3.7 --> It's a pretty different model that behaves and responds to instructions in new ways. So it requires more tuning before we can extract its full potential.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-18 03:42:57+00:00
It has nothing to do with "pride". Anonymity is about being able to speak freely without having to feel the need to self-censor one's views. I don't want to feel hesitant to make a comment on a controversial subject out of fear that it will be permanently associated with my projects in a detrimental manner.

This is doubly true with anything that involves your real name. I don't think enough people understand that there is a genuine, non-zero risk that commenting on political matters with your real name risks getting you imprisoned or killed 5, 10, 20 years later. The internet is a permanent record for your views, and history has given us many examples of dictators who have purged millions of people deemed intellectuals, enemies of the regime, etc. This is true regardless of how much you trust your current government, because governments change and authoritarianism can happen anywhere. Even the self-proclaimed bastion of free speech is currently attempting to prosecute people criticising the government online[1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-s...

(...that said, the LLM spam situation is so dire that even with these views on anonymity, I would be willing to create a new account where I carefully self-censor everything I say until I meet whatever proposed threshold would be necessary to post on ShowHN, so I'm not opposed to such a limit out of necessity.)
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-02-18 03:43:51+00:00
Fwiw fortune had another article this week saying this J-curve of "General Technology" is showing up in the latest BLS data

https://fortune.com/2026/02/15/ai-productivity-liftoff-doubl...

Source of the Stanford-approved opinion:
https://www.ft.com/content/4b51d0b4-bbfe-4f05-b50a-1d485d419...

https://www.apolloacademy.com/waiting-for-the-ai-j-curve/
by anonymid | 2026-02-18 03:44:10+00:00
I've been developing an ai coding harness https://github.com/dlants/magenta.nvim for over a year now, and I use it (and cursor and claude code) daily at work.

Fun observation - almost every coding harness (claude code, cursor, codex) uses a find/replace tool as the primary way of interacting with code. This requires the agent to fully type out the code it's trying to edit, including several lines of context around the edit. This is really inefficient, token wise! Why does it work this way? Because the LLMs are really bad at counting lines, or using other ways of describing a unique location in the file.

I've experimented with providing a more robust dsl for text manipulation https://github.com/dlants/magenta.nvim/blob/main/node/tools/... , and I do think it's an improvement over just straight search/replace, but the agents do tend to struggle a lot - editing the wrong line, messing up the selection state, etc... which is probably why the major players haven't adopted something like this yet.

So I feel pretty confident in my assessment of where these models are at!

And also, I fully believe it's big. It's a huge deal! My work is unrecognizable from what it was even 2 years ago. But that's an impact / productivity argument, not an argument about intelligence. Modern programming languages, IDEs, spreadsheets, etc... also made a fundamental shift in what being a software engineer was like, but they were not generally intelligent.
by SchemaLoad | 2026-02-18 03:45:06+00:00
The idea that all customer data will be deleted is far fetched, but I feel like there have been some massive incidents. Crowdstrike comes to mind, but I feel its entirely possible that Apple/Google/etc could push out some kind of config update which bricks phones in a way they are unable to download another update to fix them.

Though I'm sure the major players are all over this risk which is why it hasn't happened.