MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ei23 | 2026-02-10 16:00:21+00:00
I'm sure someone has already written this kind of thought somewhere, but I still find it worth sharing here.

TLDR:

- Treat AI like a Colleague, not a Tool: When AI hits a limit, you are responsible for fixing the problem and finding the solution.
- The Jevons Paradox: AI increases efficiency, which often leads to more features rather than faster project completion.
- You Are Now a Manager: Using AI forces you to manage virtual resources, make prioritization decisions, and own the final outcomes.
- Strategic Restraint: Don't just do more because you can. Be mindful that AI consumes your attention; focus on quality over quantity.
by supertrope | 2026-02-10 16:00:28+00:00
The book Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam is about the decline of civil society.

Church membership is down. Labor union membership is down. Parents got crushed in the pandemic with school shutdowns, daycare shutdowns, and formula shortages. It takes two incomes to afford a family's lifestyle. Someone has to take care of the kid. Two people have to do the job of three people.
by nameless912 | 2026-02-10 16:00:30+00:00
I'm working on my fourth attempt at a first novel :D

In all seriousness, I am about 10k words into a new draft I started a couple weeks ago. It's a far-future post-catastrophe sci fi type story, with some inspiration taken from Dune and a whole bunch of post-collapse fiction. Writing is tough between a full time job, a toddler, and a social life, but I've managed to squeeze in at least a few sessions a week. Hopefully this will be the one that actually lands!
by indienow1 | 2026-02-10 16:00:53+00:00
I built this over 6 days to make Epstein related documents publicly searchable outside of the official DOJ site. I scraped 1.3M docs from DOJ, House Oversight, and estate proceedings, then processed them through OpenAI's batch API for entity extraction (found 238K+ people, lots of dupes) and document summarization. I built interactive network graphs to visualize connections between entities.
Features full-text search and accepts crowdsourced document uploads. Tech: Next.js + Postgres + D3.js. Happy to answer questions!
by sho_hn | 2026-02-10 16:01:06+00:00
I think this is something else, though. Even before AI really hit sweng, there were early signs of a collective tech depression a la "The best idea we can come up with is strapping screens to people's heads?", the "Are we the bad guys?" convo around social media, the crypto brain drain, etc. The queue of Next Big Things has increasingly felt more forced and controversial to many, and being in tech last lost much of its lustre to them.

I think it's healthy for everyone to evaluate whether one's personal reaction to AI is colored by this trend, or whether it's really being evaluated independently. Because while I share many of the negative feelings listed earlier, to me AI does still feel different; it has a lot more real utility.
by maja0027 | 2026-02-10 16:01:12+00:00
Hi HN, I'm Alex. Xi is a research language built around one idea: what if we remove the constraint that programs must be human-readable text?

The result is a binary graph format with exactly 10 primitive constructs (λ, @, Π, Σ, , μ, ι, #, !, var). These 10 are mathematically sufficient to express any computation, any data type, and any proof — similar to how the Calculus of Inductive Constructions works, but encoded as a content-addressed directed graph instead of syntax.

What's in the repo:

- Formal specification of the 10 primitives
- Reference interpreter + type checker in Python (~2k LOC)
- Pattern matching (ι-elimination) over inductive types
- Content-addressed module system (SHA-256)
- 144 tests, example programs (Fibonacci, factorial, Church numerals, an expression evaluator written in Xi)
- FPGA prototype sketch + Lean 4 formalization of the core type system
- Docker support: `docker run xi-lang demo`

Why not text? Three reasons:

1. AI generation — no syntax errors possible. The graph is always well-formed by construction.
2. Content addressing — every node is its SHA-256 hash. Structural equality = byte equality. Global deduplication is free.
3. Hardware — a graph reduction processor can execute Xi directly. No parsing, no compilation, just pointer chasing on silicon.

The tradeoff is obvious: humans can't read Xi directly. You use visualization tools (included) like you'd use a circuit viewer for GDSII.

This is a research project, not a production language. I'd love feedback from the PLT community — especially on the choice of 10 primitives and whether the inductive type encoding is complete enough.
by Curiositiy | 2026-02-10 16:01:28+00:00
This is what these peeps advocating for an "EU-based payment system" don't get, as they typically don't travel worldwide. VISA + Master just work. Have a debit plus credit for one each. (And no, Google / Apple pay won't do it, everyone who calls themselves a "hacker" should know that you too often can't even pay for transport using a rooted phone).
by miroljub | 2026-02-10 16:01:35+00:00
No every, you just don't know it ;)

There was a recent case of one Serbian company being sanctioned by the USA, and Visa and Master refused to process payments. No big deal, since even a small country like Serbia has its payment system called Dina that kept the company afloat.

There's not a single technical reason for bigger and richer countries to develop their own card payment system. It's not rocket science. The only reason they didn't is their regulators wanted a dependency on the USA payment processors.
by dangus | 2026-02-10 16:02:04+00:00
I'd love to hear about your economical plan to extract resources and populate the rest of the solar system.

It currently costs approximately $4,000 per kg to transport anything into space, that's current bargain basement SpaceX pricing. It also consumes non-renewable fossil fuels to do so.

Let me know how you plan to figure out planetary terraforming, gravity manipulation (so we can live on planets with vastly different gravity), planetary climate management, off-earth mining. How many of these problems have been solved even with 1-5% progress?

Can you name one material we are currently mining from space? Maybe mining space junk orbiting earth, that would be a low hanging fruit, right?
by hnuser123456 | 2026-02-10 16:02:09+00:00
I would absolutely start looking for an actual wife if I had any certainty I would not be renting at some point, and my parents sold the detached house they raised my brother and myself in to move into a condo closer downtown, so they didn't even profit. But with rent very nearly doubling from 800 to 1400 for a single bedroom apartment since covid, my savings is evaporating and not even going into something I can sell, so I intentionally got with an infertile girlfriend instead.
by jimnotgym | 2026-02-10 16:02:11+00:00
Whereas an accountant is taught that they should resign rather than get involved in unethical practices, like profit manipulation for example. I interview people with ethics questions. I discussed them frequently when training.

I refused the pressure to be unethical when I was pushed, even when I knew I would be fired (which I was). I was able to discuss it with old mentors, who made time to meet with me, even when I hadn't worked at their company for years.

Lastly I disclosed why I was fired at interview for a new job (without the confidential details), and was hired partly on the strength of it by a person who had been through much the same.

And I didn't learn it at University, I learnt it on my professional qualification, that was around 3 years long and was postgraduate level, although had non-degree based entry routes for technicians. It also required a wide range of supervised experience.
by fusslo | 2026-02-10 16:02:19+00:00
I know there's a lot of questions why it's so expensive, but can I just extol the work done by Riley and team?

Since the Epstein files dropped they've cloned gmail, gdrive, gmessages, amazon orders, transcribed court proceedings (yes with AI), fights, facebook, and imessages.

It's an insane amount of work. They added the latest batch of files, photos, videos in like 2 weeks. And he's keeping up files that the justice department took down.

jmail has made it so much easier for everyone to explore the files.

I don't know how Riley has planned to monetize this or if it's simply for the public good. I can totally understand not wanting to optimize for cost from the outset. And I see a lot of abject criticism on every social media platform rather than constructive.
by duggan | 2026-02-10 16:02:21+00:00
My take is more optimistic.

I think it will make prototyping and MVP more accessible to a wider range of people than before. This goes all the way from people who don't know how to code up to people who know very well how to code, but don't have the free time/energy to pursue every idea.

Project activation energy decreases. I think this is a net positive, as it allows more and different things to be started. I'm sure some think it's a net negative for the same reasons. If you're a developer selling the same knowledge and capacity you sold ten years ago things will change. But that was always the case.

My comparison to iOS was about the market opportunity, and the opportunity for entrepreneurship. It's not magic, not yet anyway. This is the time to go start a company, or build every weird idea that you were never going to get around to.

There are so many opportunities to create software and companies, we're not running out of those just because it's faster to generate some of the code.
by kijin | 2026-02-10 16:02:27+00:00
Do you get updates to the proprietary software stack if you go without a subscription license?

If the answer is no, then you might own the hardware on paper, but you don't control any of the software that makes said hardware useful.

If the answer is yes, on the other hand, then one must ask who is paying for those updates, because that can't be sustainable.
by globular-toast | 2026-02-10 16:02:29+00:00
Basically it makes people feel good. Growth is exciting and motivates people to do stuff. Shrinkage makes people sad, depressed and more likely to try to protect what they have. It's often irrational, but that's just the way it is.

Growth isn't sustainable, of course. If you're a gardener you get to experience the joy of growth every year, but you have to "pay it back" in autumn and winter as everything dies back and resets. The seasons force it on you in the garden, but we can't force it on ourselves. We'll just keep having summer after summer until it all goes boom.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-10 16:02:35+00:00
There's nothing "hollowed out" about directing an AI effectively, the feedback is as quick and tight as it always was. The trick is that you don't just "vibe code" and let the AI one-shot the whole thing: you should propose the change first and ask the AI about a good, detailed plan for implementing it. Then you review what the robot has proposed (which is trivial compared to revising code!) make sensible changes, ask for feedback again, and repeat. By the time the AI bot has to write actual code, it's not running on vibes anymore: it's been told exactly what to do and how to assess the result. You spend more time upfront, but a lot less on fixing the AI's mistakes.
by alexgarden | 2026-02-10 16:02:39+00:00
Wow... I really relate to this. I'm 50 as well, and I started coding in 1985 when I was 10... I remember literally every evolutionary leap forward and my experience with this change has been a bit different.

Steve Yegge recently did an interview on vibe coding (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw) where he says, "arch mage engineers who fell out-of-love with the modern complexity of shipping meaningful code are rediscovering the magic that got them involved as engineers in the first place" <-- paraphrased for brevity.

I vividly remember, staying up all night to hand-code assembler primitive rendering libraries, the first time I built a voxel rendering engine and thinking it was like magic what you could do on a 486... I remember the early days at Relic, working on Homeworld and thinking we were casting spells, not writing software. Honestly, that magic faded and died for me. I don't personally think there is magic in building a Docker container. Call me old-fashioned.

These days, I've never been more excited about engineering. The tedium of the background wiring is gone. I'm back to creating new, magical things - I'm up at 2 AM again, sitting at my desk in the dark, surrounded by the soft glow of monitors and casting spells again.
by internetter | 2026-02-10 16:03:00+00:00
(I am a social democrat, not a libertarian) All models require to some extent the youth working, but not all require a part of the youth's fruits of their labour being taken and put into social security. A libertarian might say that the onus is on the boomers to save enough money to fund their own retirement so that they're not reliant on the social security safety net.
by paulmooreparks | 2026-02-10 16:03:04+00:00
I'm 55 and I started at age 13 on a TI-99/4A, then progressed through Commodore 64, Amiga 2000, an Amiga XT Sidecar, then a real XT, and on and on. DOS, Windows, Unix, the first Linux. I ran a tiny BBS and felt so excited when I heard the modem singing from someone dialing in. The first time I "logged into the Internet" was to a Linux prompt. Gopher was still a bigger thing than the nascent World-Wide Web.

The author is right. The magic has faded. It's sad. I'm still excited about what's possible, but it'll never create that same sense of awe, that knowledge that you can own the entire system from the power coming from the wall to the pixels on your screen.
by alt227 | 2026-02-10 16:03:07+00:00
I prefer to see it as the automtion of the IT age.

All other professions had their time when technology came and automated things.

For example wood carvers, blacksmiths, butchers, bakers, candlestickmakers etc etc. All of those professions have been mostly taken over by machines in factories.

I view 'ai' as new machines in factories for producing code. We have reached the point where we have code factories which can produce things much more efficiently and quicker than any human can alone.

Where the professions still thrive is in the artisan market. There is always demand for hand crafted things which have been created with love and care.

I am hoping this stays true for my coding analogy. Then people who really care about making a good product will still have a market from customers who want something different from the mass produced norm.
by notanastronaut | 2026-02-10 16:03:09+00:00
I think something a lot of people miss out on is that we're not all the same. We all have different internal thought models, whether it is a biological difference (ADHD brain?), educational differences, and overall abilities. And it seems a lot of people have this idea everyone uses "AI" the same way. That's a lack of lateral thinking. Making assumptions we're all burning "calories" in the same way implies we all think, and work, alike.

We are not alike.
by pessimizer | 2026-02-10 16:03:13+00:00
Wanting them gone isn't the same as putting the blame on them. It isn't a personality conflict or a troubled relationship; immigrants shouldn't feel guilty for wanting to stay and the people competing with them should feel guilty for wanting them to go. Or rather, who cares? Shouldn't people be allowed to have their inner states to themselves? Can't we own anything? How did a discussion about labor exploitation turn into a discussion about feelings?

And why is it a discussion about some workers' feelings vs. other workers' feelings? How did the boss manage to completely recuse himself?
by throwmeaway820 | 2026-02-10 16:03:16+00:00
> A massive $79T has been transferred from bottom 90% to top 1% since the 1970s

This assertion is based on comparing reality with a counterfactual where income distributions remained static from 1975 to the present. Real median personal income roughly doubled over this time period.

The use of the word "transferred" seems a little intellectually dishonest here. The use of the counterfactual seems to suggest that income distribution has no relationship with growth in total income, and total income would have been exactly the same regardless of income distribution. I see no reason to assume that to be the case.
by shimku | 2026-02-10 16:03:19+00:00
Do be building Klava – a BlackBerry-inspired iOS keyboard with zero tracking (https://www.klava.space/)

Klava got:
- Themes that are based on BlackBerry, Windows Phone and other OSs / aesthetics
- Above-word suggestions that you can flick up, it's super nice + on-device LM
- Gestures: swipe left to delete words and such
- Full customisation: turn stuff on and off (incl. things mentioned above) as you will
- Slack-like emoji suggestions such as :fire
- 25+ languages
- And more stuff cooking

Showing some love on today's ProductHunt launch would be appreciated immensely y'all :) https://www.producthunt.com/products/klava
by simonsarris | 2026-02-10 16:03:20+00:00
> The feedback loop has changed. The intimacy has gone. The thing that kept me up at night for decades — the puzzle, the chase, the moment where you finally understand why something isn’t working — that’s been compressed into a prompt and a response

It's so strange to read because to me its never been more fun to make software, its especially never been easier for an individual. The boring parts are being automated so I can work on the bespoke and artistic parts. The feedback loop is getting shorter to making something nice and workable. The investigation tools for profiling and pinpointing performance bottlenecks are better than ever, where Claude is just one new part of it.
by sho_hn | 2026-02-10 16:03:22+00:00
It's also that when you move to being a leader, you suddenly have to learn to quantify and measure your productivity in a different way, which for a while can really do a number on your self-image.

What does it mean to be a productive developer in an AI tooling age? We don't quite know yet and it's also shifting all the time, so it becomes difficult to sort yourself into the range stably. For a lot of accomplished folks this is the first time they've felt that level of insecurity in a while, and it takes some getting used to.
by kvark | 2026-02-10 16:03:54+00:00
The main problem with Vulkan isn't the programming model or the lack of features. These are tackled by Khronos. The problem is with coverage and update distribution. It's all over the place! If you develop general purpose software (like Zed), you can't assume that even the basic things like dynamic rendering are supported uniformly. There are always weird systems with old drivers (looking at Ubuntu 22 LTS), hardware vendors abandoning and forcefully deprecating the working hardware, and of course driver bugs...
So, by the time I'm going to be able to rely on the new shiny descriptor heap/buffer features, I'll have more gray hair and other things on the horizon.
by boxed | 2026-02-10 16:03:58+00:00
> And I'm broadly skeptical of the Claude Code productivity discourse, the idea that AI tools will let you 10x your output if you prompt them correctly.

[Proceeds to write as if this is not only true but underselling it]

I do agree with the premise though that when smaller teams can do more there's less coordination. But that's only part of why companies exist no? You don't gain trust between individuals because both run Claude Code, the brand and institution still has enormous importance.
by bombcar | 2026-02-10 16:04:18+00:00
We do pay people to have kids in the USA - once you're on welfare. Your WIC and EBT allowances go up per kid.

And even if you're not that poor, you get subsidized kids through things like the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit. It's annoying that while some of those support 3+ kids, many "top out" at three and stop increasing.

I've often thought of searching for "sponsorships" for additional children (though we'd probably have them anyway) - not sure I want my son to be named Facebook X AI though ;)
by Aurornis | 2026-02-10 16:04:32+00:00
DDR4 is not being manufactured at scale any more so it’s becoming very expensive too.

> if they had gone with DDR5 it would have doubled

They charge a premium for their hardware due to the software. They have plenty of room for RAM price fluctuations. It would nowhere near double the price.

> Looking forward to the discounted DDR3 Opteron-based option.

I know you’re joking, but anything DDR3 based is really slow and power inefficient relative to current gen hardware.
by reliabilityguy | 2026-02-10 16:05:19+00:00
With all due respect, but this extremely biased and US-centric view. IT was not easier to have kids in 2024 or 2023, both in the EU or US. Childcare is expensive, pace of life today (and the past 20 years at least) implicitly treats kids as a liability and a detriment to career progression and financial security.
by TimPC | 2026-02-10 16:05:24+00:00
I think more than ever programmers need jobs where performance matters and the naive way the AI does things doesn't cut it. When no one cares about things other than correctness your job turns into AI Slop. The good news right now is that AI tends to produce things that AI struggles to do well with so large scale projects often descend into crap. You can write a C-compiler for $20,000 with an explosive stack of agents, but that C-compiler isn't anywhere close to efficient or performant.

As model costs come down that $20,000 will become a viable number for doing entirely AI-generate coding. So more than ever you don't want to be doing work that the AI is good enough at. Either jobs where performance matters or being able to code the stack of agents needed to produce high quality code in an application context.
by MadVikingGod | 2026-02-10 16:05:26+00:00
This is all possible and quite neat to dive into the specifics, but if you really want to be able swap a std lib call, just turn it into a variable and change it.

// code.go
var now = time.Now

// code_test.go
func TestCode(t *testing.T) {
nowSwap := now
t.Cleanup (func() {
now = nowSwap
}
now = func() time.Time {
return time.Date(...)
}
}

Examples
Code: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go/blob/main...
Test: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go/blob/490f...
by mytailorisrich | 2026-02-10 16:05:39+00:00
> Why did he ignore his obligation to build a lunar lander, having been paid to do that?

Didn't know about that. That's good insight.

"An uncrewed test flight was planned for 2025 to demonstrate a successful landing on the Moon which has since been delayed. Following that test, a crewed flight is expected to occur as part of the Artemis III mission, no earlier than mid-2027.[3] NASA later contracted for an upgraded version of Starship HLS to be used on the Artemis IV mission." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_HLS
by hirako2000 | 2026-02-10 16:05:42+00:00
The concept of a physical card is obsolete. That North Americans and western Europeans for a good part still use them is just stickiness of the infrastructure, and habits.

Developing countries have mostly leapfrogged to total contactless payments.

In South Aast Asia, you typically scan a QR code and approve a payment from your own phone. Far less fraud as a result. Nobody is able to touch your card, you don't have one.

Europe likely identified they better make the jump.
by pjc50 | 2026-02-10 16:05:47+00:00
Back of an envelope suggests that to really make this work you'd need most women in the 20-40 range to have the job title of "parent" and a lower middle class or more salary paid by the state, so .. 10-20% of GDP? Nobody wants to contemplate just how expensive this is going to be, including the fact that now you have a short-term labour shortage (because they're out of the regular workforce as well!)