MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adrian_b | 2026-02-08 15:24:20+00:00
Even if the degradation of the user interfaces is noticed especially by older people, I doubt that this has anything to do with them being old and I believe that it is caused only by them being more experienced, i.e. having seen more alternatives for user interfaces.

For several decades, I have used hundreds of different computers, from IBM mainframes, DEC minicomputers and early PCs with Intel 8080 or Motorola MC6800 until the latest computers with AMD Zen 5 or Intel Arrow Lake. I have used a variety of operating systems and user interfaces.

During the first decades, there has been a continuous and obvious improvement in user interfaces, so I never had any hesitation to switch to a new program with a completely different user interface for the same application, even every year or every few months, whenever such a change resulted in better results and productivity.

Nevertheless, an optimum seems to have been reached around 20 years ago, and since then more often than not I see only worse interfaces that make harder to do what was simpler previously, so there is no incentive for an "upgrade".

Therefore I indeed customize my GUIs in Linux to a mode that resembles much more older Windows or MacOS than their recent versions and which prioritizes instant responses and minimum distractions over the coolest look.

In the rare occasions when I find a program that does something in a better way than what I am using, I still switch immediately to it, no matter how different it may be in comparison with what I am familiar, so conservatism has nothing to do with preferring the older GUIs.
by kloud | 2026-02-08 15:24:31+00:00
Exactly this, existing code review tools became insufficient with the increase of volume of code, I would like to see more innovation here.

One idea that comes to mind to make review easier would be to re-create commits following Kent Beck's SB Changes concept - splitting structure changes (tidying/refactoring) and behavior changes (features). The structure changes could then be quickly skimmed (especially with good coverage) and it should save focus for review of the behavior changes.

The challenge is that it is not the same as just committing the hunks in different order. But maybe a skill with basic agent loop could work with capabilities of models nowadays.
by jqpabc123 | 2026-02-08 15:24:46+00:00
Excellent question.

The answer is that "real gold" has a long, long history as a stable store of value and as a result, more people know it, trust it and are willing to buy it when the chips hit the fan.

Here is a chart showing the price of gold over the past decade.

https://goldprice.org/gold-price-history.html

Here is a corresponding chart for bitcoin.

https://charts.bitbo.io/price/

But I would argue that the most important and telling part is what has ocurred recently, after a crypto fan assumed personal control over the world's largest economy.
by dripdry45 | 2026-02-08 15:24:52+00:00
Offloading ongoing cognitive consideration when a situation seems to have proved itself consistent is the main idea at hand, perhaps? The notion of loyalty?

Pets are only interested in who feeds them and make them feel good, eventually offloading cognition to other tasks the same way we do; nature merely an agglomeration of entities seeking growth and propagation. We can count on these things, we can think about them, we can engage with them or let them slip past our minds, which a person might call “trust?” a lack of mental friction after that work has been done to our satisfaction.

Recognizing what may benefit us, and the short and long term dimensions of it, as well as acknowledging that we cannot know all those dimensions or control them or the future, seems the best way to go, if i may.

The idea of loyalty is naïve and dangerous, if I may use those terms without defining them also.

To be clear, it’s not cold calculation, far from it, simply acknowledging how systems tend to play out while leaving room for the unexpected. Once we recognize a pattern or system locking in that pattern in order to use our limited cognitive energies in other ways.
by jt2190 | 2026-02-08 15:24:56+00:00
Having an app that tells you that you have a thing is not the same as physically having the thing. Owning gold in that sense is no different than owning bitcoin: They both rely on a societal fiction that you can actually get the value of the asset when you expect that you can. In other words: The presence of a reliable financial and legal system is what makes the myth real for both assets.

We forget that the idea that the gold could be “further away from”/“not actually in the physical possession of” the human who “owns” was not universally accepted at all points in history. In a weird way, bitcoin is more forthright in that it says out loud “trust me this is valuable because we all agree it just is” where non-custodial ownership of gold tries to imply that there’s less need for this trust because there’s an actual shiny rock on the planet somewhere and humans have a history of valuing shiny rocks.

Ultimately it seems like it’s the “trust” part that mostly matters. Bitcoin is certainly harder to trust at the moment. But gold is rallying because there is less trust overall. That’s not good for either asset.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-02-08 15:25:19+00:00
It’s both.

Multithreading has been more ubiquitous in Mac apps for a long time thanks to Apple having offered mainstream multi-CPU machines very early on (circa 2000), predating even OS X itself, and has made a point of making multithreading easier in its SDK. By contrast multicore machines weren’t common in the Windows/x86 world until around the late 2000s with the boom of Intel’s Core series CPUs, but single core x86 CPUs persisted for several years following and Windows developer culture still hasn’t embraced multithreading as fully as its Mac counterpart has.

This then made it dead simple for Mac developers to adopt task prioritization/QoS. Work was already cleanly split into threads, so it’s just a matter of specifying which are best suited for putting on e-cores and which to keep on P-cores. And overwhelmingly, Mac devs have done that.

So the system scheduler is a good deal more effective than its Windows counterpart because third party devs have given it cues to guide it. The tasks most impactful to the user’s perception of snappiness remain on the P-cores, the E-cores stay busy with auxiliary work and keep the P-cores unblocked and able to sleep more quickly and often.
by babarock | 2026-02-08 15:25:54+00:00
The way I experience this is through unprecedented amount of feature creep. We don't use AI generated code for all our projects, but in the ones we do, I see a weird anti-pattern settle in: Simply because it's faster than ever before to generate a patch and get it merged, it doesn't mean that merging 50+ commits this week makes sense.

Code and feature still need to experience time and stability in order to achieve maturity. We need to give our end users time to try stuff, to shape their opinions and habits. We need to let everyone on the dev team take the time to update their mental model of the project as patches are merged. Heck, I've seen too many Product Owners incapable of telling you clearly what went in and out of the code over the previous 2 releases, and those are usually a few weeks apart.

Making individual tasks faster should give us more time to think in terms of quality and stability. Instead, people want to add more features more often.
by beepbooptheory | 2026-02-08 15:26:19+00:00
The weird thing at the end of the day is that we live in this world where there is this default individual desire to be more "productive." I am always wondering, productive for who, for what?

I know more than most there is some baseline productivity we are always trying to be at, that can sometimes be a target more than a current state. But the way people talk about their AI workflows is different. It's like everyone has become tyranical factory floor managers, pushing ever further for productive gains.

Leave this kind of productivity to the bosses I say! Life is a broader surface than this. We can/should focus on be productive together, but leave your actual life for finer, more sustainable ventures.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-02-08 15:26:47+00:00
I see your point then.

Somehow this doesn't feel like the same kind of achievement though. We had the whole of the country pulling for the moon landing. Instead we have a handful of CEO's schmoozing Wall Street, raping the power grid, making hardware unobtainium for the rest of us for this "moon shot".

We chose to go to the moon because it was hard. We choose to build AI because it will make corporate America rich? (Somehow doesn't have the same ring to it in Peoria.)

And as we have already seen, the downsides of AI are extensive—they may turn out to outweigh the benefits? Other than cost, it's hard to find a downside to the moon landing.
by rossdavidh | 2026-02-08 15:26:55+00:00
As others have pointed out, it also runs up less in percentage terms during the resurgence. If, as you posit, Bitcoin is becoming less volatile, then the question will be what the demand looks like when it is no longer a way of getting exposure to potential large upside. In other words, a lot of people have bought it in the hope that it will double or more. How many will buy it in the hope that it doesn't go down? Perhaps it will happen, but it's not obvious.
by woeirua | 2026-02-08 15:27:07+00:00
Every engineer in the next two years needs to prepare themselves for this conversation to play out (from Office Space):

> Bob Slydell: What you do at Initech is you take the specifications from the customer and bring them down to the software engineers?

> Tom Smykowski: Yes, yes that's right.

> Bob Porter: Well then I just have to ask why can't the customers take them directly to the software people?

> Tom Smykowski: Well, I'll tell you why, because, engineers are not good at dealing with customers.

> Bob Slydell: So you physically take the specs from the customer?

> Tom Smykowski: Well... No. My secretary does that, or they're faxed.

> Bob Porter: So then you must physically bring them to the software people?

> Tom Smykowski: Well. No. Ah sometimes.

> Bob Slydell: What would you say you do here?

The agents are the engineers now.
by Retric | 2026-02-08 15:27:23+00:00
Your 3 is really conflating two different things.

There’s a long list of countries that industrialized more quickly without suffering such internal economic issues. The USSR and China suffered because of poor governance not industrialization.

Second, Mass literacy occurs via teaching kids. It has little to do with what the wider economy as seen by both modern and historic literacy rates.

It’s been 65 years since the Chinese famine, what actually fixed the country was economic reforms. MAO’s death helped but the system simply didn’t work so they tried something else.
by paufernandez | 2026-02-08 15:28:01+00:00
Apart from the exhaustion of context switching, I believe there is a internal signal that gauges how "fast" things are happening in your life. Stress responses are triggered whenever things are going too fast (as if you were driving in a narrow road at too much speed) and it feels like there is danger since you intuit that a small mistake is gonna have big consequences.

Some people thrive in more stressful situations, because they don't get as aroused in calmness, but everybody has a threshold velocity at which discomfort starts, higher or lower. AI puts us closer to that threshold, for sure.
by wongarsu | 2026-02-08 15:28:05+00:00
It seems to have stabilized around $70k. Obviously after it had "stabilized" at $90k for two months, so it might drop further. But if I had to submit a bet I would guess it will fluctuate around the current level for another couple months before some random event catapults it to $150k, followed by the next "crash".

But with the current political volatility anything might happen
by barishnamazov | 2026-02-08 15:28:07+00:00
I'd personally rethink about applying some advice in that section. Here's my take.

> Time-boxing AI sessions.

Unless you are a full-time vibe coder, you already wouldn't be using AI all the time. But time boxing it feels artificial, if it's able to make good and real progress (not unmaintainable slop).

> Separating AI time from thinking time.

My usage of AI involves doing a lot of thinking, either collaboratively within a chat, or by myself while it's doing some agentic loop.

> Accepting 70% from AI.

This is a confusing statement. 70% what? What does 70% usable even mean? If it means around 70% of features work and other 30% is broken, perhaps AI shouldn't be used for those 30% in the first place.

> Being strategic about the hype cycle.

Hype cycles have always been a thing. It's good for mind in general to avoid them.

> Logging where AI helps and where it doesn't.

I do most of this logging in my agent md files instead of a separate log. Also after a bit my memory picks it up really quickly what AI can do and what it can't. I assume this is a natural process for many fellow engineers.

> Not reviewing everything AI produces.

If you are shipping in an insane speed, this is just an expected outcome, not an advice you can follow.
by bwfan123 | 2026-02-08 15:28:36+00:00
> but gives me the "AI-generated reading fatigue."

Agree. The article could have been summarized into a few paragraphs. Instead, we get unnecessary verbiage that goes on and on in an AI generated frenzy. Like the "organic" label on food items, I can foresee labels on content denoting the kind of human generating the content: "suburbs-raised" "free-lancer" etc.
by irae | 2026-02-08 15:28:50+00:00
I've used Linux as a daily driver for 6 months and I am now back to my M1 Max for the past month.

I didn't find any reply mentioning the easy of use, benefits and handy things the mac does and Linux won't. Spotlight, Photos app with all the face recognition and general image index, contact sync, etc. Takes ages to setup those on Linux and with macs everything just works with an Apple account. So I wonder if Linux had to do all this background stuff, if it would be able to run smoothly as Macs run this days.

For context: I was running Linux for 6 months for the first time in 10 years (which I was daily driving macs). My M1 Max still beats my full tower gaming PC, which I was using linux at. I've used Windows and Linux before, and Windows for gaming too. My Linux setup was very snappy without any corporate stuff. But my office was getting warm because of the PC. My M1 barely turn on the fans, even with large DB migrations and other heavy operation during software development.
by salacryl | 2026-02-08 15:28:59+00:00
You're conflating two separate problems:

Goal Verification: Does 'maximize paperclips' mean 'convert universe'? Statistically unlikely. Verify before executing.
Ethical Framework: Should AI value human life? Different problem, not what I'm addressing.

RDV solves #1 through premise verification. It doesn't solve #2, nor does it claim to.
'Likely intent' isn't ethics - it's Bayesian inference about goal probability. When a human says 'maximize paperclips,' P(wants office supplies) >> P(wants genocide).
Verification asks: 'Is that what you meant?' Ethics asks: 'Should I do it?'
These are orthogonal questions.
by hedora | 2026-02-08 15:29:12+00:00
Two things:

- US states should either join the ICC, or if that's not legal, cooperate with its ability to serve warrants with precedence over the feds, especially in cases where the warrant is for a federal employee. California could lead this, thanks to the proposition system.

- Apparently this boycott is doing well, but if/when it escalates into a general strike, people reading this message will have much more impact than average Americans. https://www.npr.org/2026/02/07/nx-s1-5704402/boycott-tech-ic...

Think globally, act locally.
by rossdavidh | 2026-02-08 15:29:25+00:00
Well, it would depend greatly on which real estate you mean. There are empty cities in China which testify that real estate can, in fact, be very risky, but most real estate is not like that.

Lots of other places where it is certainly not safe, but in the end you can at least use it as a place to live (unlike the Chinese ghost cities), whereas Bitcoin does not have any intrinsic use (even T-bills can be used to pay government debt such as taxes).
by mikkupikku | 2026-02-08 15:29:41+00:00
I know this is a terribly irresponsible and immature suggestion, but what I've been doing is every time I give claude code a request of indeterminate length, I just hit a blunt and chill out. That and sometimes I'll tab into the kind of game that can be picked up and put down on very short notice, here's where I shameless plug for the free and open source game Endless Sky.

For me personally, programming lost most of it's fun many years ago, but with claude code I'm having fun again. It's not the same, but for me personally, at this stage in my life, it's more enjoyable.
by lazyfolder | 2026-02-08 15:29:57+00:00
> I will do what i know gives me the best possible and fastest outcome over the long term, 5-10 year period.
And that remains largely neovim and by hand. The process of typing code gives me a deeper understanding of the project that lets me deliver future features FASTER.
I'm fundamentally convinced that my deep long term understanding of a project will allow me to surpass primarily LLM projects over the long term.

I have never thought of that aspect! This is a solid point!
by throwaway1492 | 2026-02-08 15:29:59+00:00
It’s my personal belief that btc has been the currency of foreign influence operations ie for paying media figures to influence popular opinion and sentiments. I believe this can be most readily seen in the US right and maga. The messaging is all very consistent across YouTube, x, fox, news nation etc across weeks, months and years.

Brexit was a proof of concept, certainly it has spread.
by gaigalas | 2026-02-08 15:30:00+00:00
But what we really want is to cut down layers of abstraction, not increase them.

I mean, we only have them because it is strictly necessary. If we could make architectures friendly to programming directly, we would have.

In that sense, high level languages are not a marvelous thing but a burden we have to carry because of the strict requirements of low level ones. The less burdens like those we have, the better.
by falloutx | 2026-02-08 15:30:01+00:00
Most of the hiring is happening in heavy AI coding companies, a lot of mid sized companies have freezed hiring or they are also only hiring people who claim to use AI to be 10x devs. For non-lying devs, only big companies seem to be hiring and their process hasnt changed much. you are still expect to solve leetcode and then also sit through system design.
by habinero | 2026-02-08 15:30:11+00:00
> Adding tags like "Warning: Untrusted content" can help

It cannot. This is the security equivalent of telling it to not make mistakes.

> Restrict downstream tool usage and permissions for each agentic use case

Reasonable, but you have to actually do this and not screw it up.

> Harden the system according to state of the art security

"Draw the rest of the owl"

You're better off treating the system as fundamentally unsecurable, because it is. The only real solution is to never give it untrusted data or access to anything you care about. Which yes, makes it pretty useless.
Structural unemployment and the $5.5T data infrastructure bottleneck
by y2236li | 2026-02-08 15:30:37+00:00
The tech labor market has entered a period of intense structural bifurcation. Recent IDC data suggests that by the end of 2026, the global IT skills shortage will account for $5.5 trillion in economic losses. Paradoxically, 2025 saw 245,000 layoffs, and Q1 2026 has already exceeded 25,000.

This is not a cyclical downturn, but a displacement event driven by three factors:

1. The Depreciation of Legacy Stacks: Capital is aggressively rotating away from maintenance-heavy legacy systems toward AI-native architectures.
2. The Efficiency of AI-Augmented ICs: A single Staff Engineer using an agentic IDE is now doing the work of a 3-4 person feature team, leading to the "Mid-Level Squeeze."
3. The Data Infrastructure Bottleneck: While the demand for AI is high, the talent pool capable of building the underlying data infrastructure (Vector DBs, GPU orchestration, RAG pipelines) is extremely thin.

Market Bifurcation Data:
- Legacy Growth: -12% YoY (Budget cuts in traditional enterprise SaaS).
- Strategic Growth: +85% YoY (Budget increases in AI infrastructure and cybersecurity).

The $5.5T gap represents the "Cost of Inaction"—the inability of companies to ship revenue-generating AI features due to a lack of systems-level engineers. For the individual, the pivot is no longer about learning a new framework, but moving down the stack toward infrastructure or up the stack toward agent orchestration.
by ryan_n | 2026-02-08 15:30:39+00:00
I said something similar in a different thread but the joy of actually physically writing code is the main reason why I became a software developer. I think there is some beauty to writing code. I enjoy typing the syntax, the interaction with my IDE, debugging by hand (and brain) rather than LLM, even if it's less efficient. I still use AI, but I do find it terribly sad that this type of more "manual" programming seems to be being forced out.
by splatter9859 | 2026-02-08 15:31:07+00:00
With Trump at the helm, yes. However; with that being said, the rot and decay has been festering long before Trump came into power.

The issue is that most average Americans don't know how far they have fallen. One day, a great very many of them will wake up to the fact that the illusion of American supremacy was, just like most things in America, nothing more than a marketing ploy and a national "pep rally" -- nothing more.

That's when the resentment will set in. That's when the anger will set in.

Until then, most Americans have tuned out the news and are sleepwalking into whatever dystopian fascist-techno nightmare our billionaire overlord class has prepared for us.
by maplethorpe | 2026-02-08 15:31:24+00:00
> I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all.

I agree!. One criticism I've heard is that half my colleagues don't write their own words anymore. They use ChatGPT to do it for them. Does this mean we've "lost" something? On the contrary! Those people probably would have spoken far fewer words into existence in the pre-AI era. But AI has enabled them to put pages and pages of text out into the world each week: posts and articles where there were previously none. How can anyone say that's something we've lost? That's something we've gained!

It's not only the golden era of code. It's the golden era of content.
by energyscholar | 2026-02-08 15:31:26+00:00
Autor here. We found the same mathematical structure appearing independently in physics (phase transitions), finance (market crashes), ecology (extinction cascades), neuroscience(neural criticality), and network science (cascade failures).

Each field derived it from first principles. Each named it differently. Minimal cross-citation. The affiliated scientific paper traces this convergent discovery and asks: if the same structure keeps emerging, what does that tell us about how we organize knowledge?
by xyzzy_plugh | 2026-02-08 15:31:38+00:00
Conversely I feel like this is talked about a lot. I think this is a sort of essential cognitive dissonance that is present in many scenarios we're already beyond comfortable with, such as hiring consultants or off-shoring or adopting the latest hot framework. We are a species that likes things that feel good even if they're bad for us.

We don't stand a chance and we know it.