MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aidenn0 | 2026-02-07 19:50:25+00:00
Yes, the original comment that this problem doesn't exist in Nix is wrong for a typical user environment.

It does contain the issue a bit though:

I'm running isync in a systemd service, yet the program "mbsync" is not in my path. I have several services installed, yet their programs aren't in my path. My e-mail client shells out to "file" for mime-type verification, yet "file" is not in my path.

Run "compgen -c |wc -l" to get a list of commands; its over 7000 on my Ubuntu system and right around 2000 on my NixOS system.

As an aside, the packages that put the most executables in my path are probably going to be in the path for most NixOS installs (231 just for coreutils+util-linux):

27 /nix/store/csxa6mi2mpjl9vqxbv2j0bha6sz6nbjw-cups-2.4.14
31 /nix/store/334afxah19b3hr6ll93pfxlcyhhh2vws-pipewire-1.4.9
31 /nix/store/h2jsb5i4yfblr2f3ac2c7zpmlmj7zjym-perl-5.40.0
33 /nix/store/914x32c982bs3i1998yxvkg9svm3ycr5-shadow-4.18.0
33 /nix/store/a6s3hzj3b2z6rsyfkjyxwn265iyfl2gn-mtools-4.0.49
33 /nix/store/jky7jszaci5n7g426wf6nsg5dmik9nfw-kbd-2.9.0
37 /nix/store/2v1l6mqz0d7mfpp4ksw2048v3g0a1a19-hplip-3.25.2
45 /nix/store/90wlc37ljr6rpy2lan46bp0gq19vbgl5-iptables-1.8.11
48 /nix/store/1byhxs7b28grh8s15jc2dvs2zg36swjb-lvm2-2.03.35-bin
61 /nix/store/9xwxjkrwxjsvc5gs1l0syr4wbfvvvvcn-bluez-5.84
64 /nix/store/zf8qy81dsw1vqwgh9p9n2h40s1k0g2l1-systemd-258.2
72 /nix/store/1igrj9w84w7s3r80l3nkxcqwd84sw9mz-qemu-10.1.2
106 /nix/store/v4q3154vdc83fxsal9syg9yppshdljyk-coreutils-full-9.8
125 /nix/store/3c6r8gh8zrqw8xmncmlj9vivz9rz6r30-util-linux-2.41.2-bin
by theropost | 2026-02-07 19:50:28+00:00
I mean, part of this is just math. If a government spends more, it’s literally injecting money into the economy, so of course you get more jobs and growth in the short term. That spending is the jobs. If you tighten spending to cut waste or rebalance the books, growth slows and jobs shrink, but that’s kind of the tradeoff when you’re trying to fix long-term issues.

Over the last few decades, neither party has really cared about deficits anyway. Everyone’s been spending, just at different speeds. The real question isn’t “who creates more jobs,” it’s whether the spending is efficient, sustainable, and actually creates long-term value. Eventually the bills come due, interest costs rise, and priorities shift from growth to just keeping the lights on.

So yeah, Democrats tend to show stronger job numbers, but spending more will almost always do that. Whether it’s good spending is a separate debate. Budget discipline isn’t partisan, it’s just basic economics.
by DennisP | 2026-02-07 19:50:41+00:00
A lot of the old stuff isn't so much about escaping Earth, as outgrowing it. A feeling that it's our destiny to expand to the stars, just as it was life's destiny to come out of the oceans.

The more we look for alien civilizations and come up empty, the more I feel like they were on to something. For all we know, life is exceedingly rare in the universe.
by stevejb | 2026-02-07 19:50:50+00:00
Isn't this like saying that if better woodworking tools come out, and you like woodworking, that woodworking somehow 'isn't your craft'. They said that their craft is about making things.

There are woodworkers on YouTube who use CNC, some who use the best Festool stuff but nothing that moves on its own, and some who only use handtools. Where is the line at which woodworking is not their craft?
by marklit | 2026-02-07 19:50:55+00:00
Glad you enjoyed it.

There should be enough SQL in the blog to re-purpose extracting out the Wildberries locations and seeing where they land on top of. I've never heard of this firm before you mentioned it.

From Google:

> Citibank operates over 2,300 ATMs within more than 600 U.S. branches, with a total network of over 65,000 fee-free ATMs

So the 57,163 Citibank locations are probably a combination of their branches and ATMs.
by querez | 2026-02-07 19:50:58+00:00
I think you're underestimating what AI can do in the coding space. It is an extreme paradigm shift. It's not like "we wrote C, but now we switch to C++, so now we think in objects and templates". It's closer to the shift from assembly to a higher level language. Your goal is still the same. But suddenly you're working in a completely newer level of abstraction where a lot of the manual work that used to be your main concern is suddenly automated away.

If you never tried Claude Code, give it s try. It's very easy to get I to. And you'll soon see how powerful it is.
by oooyay | 2026-02-07 19:51:00+00:00
You know who else mourned the loss of craft? People that don't like PHP and Wordpress because they lower the barrier to entry to creating useful stuff while also leaving around a fair amount of cruft and problems that the people that use them don't understand how to manage.

Like iambateman said: for me it was never about code. Code was a means to an ends and it didn't stop at code. I'm the kind of software engineer that learned frontends, systems, databases, ETLs, etc -- whatever it was that was that was demanded of me to produce something useful I learned and did it. We're now calling that a "product engineer". The "craft" for me was in creating useful things that were reliable and efficient, not particularly how I styled lines, braces, and brackets. I still do that in the age of AI.

All of this emotional spillage feels for not. The industry is changing as it always has. The only constant I've ever experienced in this industry is change. I realized long ago that when the day comes that I am no longer comfortable with change then that is my best signal that this industry is no longer for me.
by bloppe | 2026-02-07 19:52:01+00:00
The acceleration of AI has thrown into sharp relief that we have long lumped all sorts of highly distinct practices under this giant umbrella called "coding". I use CC extensively, and yet I still find myself constantly editing by hand. Turns out CC is really bad at writing kubernetes operators. I'd bet it's equally bad at things like database engines or most cutting edge systems design problems. Maybe it will get better at these specific things with time, but it seems like there will always be a cutting edge that requires plenty of human thought to get right. But if you're doing something that's basically already been done thousands of times in slightly different ways, CC will totally do it with 95% reliability. I'm ok with that.

It's also important to step back and realize that it goes way beyond coding. Coding is just the deepest tooth of the jagged frontier. In 3 years there will be blog posts lamenting the "death of law firms" and the "death of telemedicine". Maybe in 10 years it will be the death of everything. We're all in the same boat, and this boat is taking us to a world where everyone is more empowered, not less. But still, there will be that cutting edge in any field that will require real ingenuity to push forward.
Ask HN: AI Generated Diagrams
by voidhorse | 2026-02-07 19:52:13+00:00
Does anyone genuinely like these diagrams or find them legitimately helpful?

I find them way too whimsical (no matter what style the authors choose, they always have a sort of off putting "maximalism" to them) and are too noisy to be of any use whatsoever, and yet they are increasingly being sprinkled everywhere, in business documents, blog posts, you name it. It makes me feel like everyone has collectively decided that business is now more like kindergarten, where we all need cutesy, useless little diagrams to jazz up our product docs or strategy papers to make them palatable, I guess? I remember when the software industry was taken at least semi-seriously (though to be fair, it's always been a little more lax than some other industries)

So what gives, am I missing something? Am I just not reading these right? Do you use these slop diagrams at work? Do you have prompt strategies that increase their utility?
by mschuster91 | 2026-02-07 19:52:13+00:00
I'm talking about proper German training, not the kind of shit that leads to what Cy Porter (the home inspector legend) exposes on Youtube.

Shoddy wiring can hold up for a looong time in homes because outside of electrical car chargers and baking ovens nothing consumes high current over long time and as long as no device develops a ground fault, even a lack of a GFCI isn't noticeable. But a data center? Even smaller ones routinely rack up megawatts of power here, large hyperscaler deployments hundreds of megawatts. Sustained, not peak. That is putting a lot of stress on everything involved: air conditioning, power, communications.

And for that to hold up, your neighbor Joe who does all kinds of trades as long as he's getting paid in cash won't cut it.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2026-02-07 19:52:16+00:00
Reading has become a strongly gendered lifestyle and supposed status marker.

Most of the books are indeed paltry entertainment - soapy and saccharine romances, formulaically transgressive erotica, fantasies about unlimited witchy powers, and perfect book boyfriends - but it's still a huge market.

Men moved to video games and chan culture. Which are a different kind of paltry entertainment.

It's curious how there was a shift from male dominated niches, like Lovecraftian fantasy and heroic fantasy, through the imperial sci-fi peak in the 50s to 70s, through the Hollywood-influenced 80s, then into slow decline from the 90s onwards.

With a few exceptions, a bold imagination became more of a liability than an asset.

This is a culture which has no idea where it's going and would prefer not to get there.
by SoftTalker | 2026-02-07 19:52:37+00:00
I think this is really it. Being a musician was never a very reliable way to earn a living, but it was a passion. A genuine expression of talent and feeling through the instrument. And if you were good enough you could pay the bills doing work work for studios, commercials, movies, theater. If you were really good you could perform as a headliner.

Now, AI can generate any kind of music anyone wants, eliminating almost all the anonymous studio, commercial, and soundtrack work. If you're really good you can still perform as a headliner, but (this is a guess) 80% of the work for musicians is just gone.
by mccoyb | 2026-02-07 19:52:44+00:00
No, I agree! But I don’t think that observation gives us license to avoid the problem.

Further, I’m not sure this elevates my understanding: I’ve read many posts on this space which could be viewed as analogous to this one (this one is more tempered, of course). Each one has this same flaw: someone is telling me I need to make a “organization” out of agents and positive things will follow.

Without a serious evaluation, how am I supposed to validate the author’s ontology?

Do you disagree with my assessment? Do you view the claims in this content as solid and reproducible?

My own view is that these are “soft ideas” (GasTown, Ralph fall into a similar category) without the rigorous justification.

What this amounts to is “synthetic biology” with billion dollar probability distributions — where the incentives are setup so that companies are incentivized to convey that they have the “secret sauce” … for massive amounts of money.

To that end, it’s difficult to trust a word out of anyone’s mouth — even if my empirical experiences match (along some projection).
by cess11 | 2026-02-07 19:53:15+00:00
"Why do you ever need, for most of the use cases you can think of, a useless, expensive, flawed, often vulnerable framework, and the parade of libraries that comes with it, that you probably use for only 10% of its capabilities?"

Who outside of 'frontend web developers' actually do this?

I don't think this is a good description of, say, Apache Tika or Alembic's Ash.
by mlyle | 2026-02-07 19:53:57+00:00
> Actually the courts of the US have stated that mass dragnet surveillance is not allowed.

There isn’t a sweeping precedent that says “mass surveillance is illegal.

The Supreme Court has signaled concern (Knotts’ “dragnet-type” reservation; echoed in Jones/Carpenter), but mostly we rely upon older third-party/plain-view doctrines and very fact-specific scope/retention questions.

So we have things like law enforcement successfully subpoenaing gmail metadata at large scale.

The law is perhaps changing, slowly -- we have geofencing heading to the Supremes, and active litigation about ALPR.

Also, “private company” isn’t an automatic workaround—if a vendor is acting as an agent of law enforcement, Fourth Amendment limits apply.
by squeaky-clean | 2026-02-07 19:54:19+00:00
Science Fiction doesn't have to be fantasy, it can be speculative. But if your setting or plot relies on something we know to be scientifically untrue, and you don't put some effort into explaining why it somehow works in your setting, it's fantasy and not speculative.

Someone like Asimov never considered his books to be fantasy and that he could just insert whatever he wanted with no justification. In fact, he never considered sci-fi to be a genre, he always argued it was a setting and that his most famous stories were detective stories in a sci-fi setting. But detective stories don't work if your world isn't grounded in something real. Otherwise the reader can't reasonably build their own theory or deduce the answer because it's based on what the author thought was cool and not what logically connects.

The appeal of something like The Expanse just falls apart if you introduce a FTL engine just because it makes for a more dramatic story moment somewhere in the plot unless there is some serious justification as to why the author didn't just break all the rules of their world (which is supposed to be our world, but in the future).
by vascocosta | 2026-02-07 19:54:21+00:00
I totally resonate with the author of the post. My main requirement to enjoy a language deeply is often simplicity, so I love languages like, C, Golang, Odin and Zig.

That said, I also acknowledge that often times I need to solve problems that can benefit from a language that embraces what I call necessary complexity, but do it in elegant ways. Whenever I need to prioritise code correctness, especially memory and concurrency safety, using a mostly functional pattern instead of OOP, but without going as extreme as say Haskell, I unquestionably choose Rust, my favourite complex language. I often work with network code that is highly concurrent, must be as correct as possible and benefits from good performance, so then again, Rust feels natural here.

On the other hand, I love coding simple indie games and for that particular case, I like a simple and performant language using an imperative, non-OOP style. In my opinion C, and in particular Odin more recently are quite a good fit. If Jonathan happens to be reading this comment, since he mentioned Golang, I would suggest him Odin as perhaps the best of both worlds between C and Golang. It has all the simplicity of Golang, but without a garbage collector, plus it is quite easy to code a game using Raylib.
by SoftTalker | 2026-02-07 19:54:31+00:00
Depends how long you've done it, and how much the landscape has changed since then. I can still hop back into SQL and it all comes back to me though I haven't done it regularly at all for nearly 10 years.

In the web front-end world I'd be pretty much a newbie. I don't know any of the modern frameworks, everything I've used is legacy and obsolete today. I'd ramp up quicker than a new junior because I understand all the concepts of HTTP and how the web works, but I don't know any of the modern tooling.
by terminalbraid | 2026-02-07 19:55:20+00:00
The better analogy is you're now a shop manager or even just QA. You don't need to touch, look at, or think about the production process past asking for something and seeing if the final result fits the bill.

You get something that looks like a cabinet because you asked for a cabinet. I don't consider that "woodworking craft", power tools or otherwise.
by webdevver | 2026-02-07 19:55:25+00:00
its funny how writing games in C is now seen as some kind of 'hardcore mode', despite the fact that a huge number of excellent titles up to and including the 2000s were written that way.

the core of games tend to be a 'world sim' of sorts, with a special case for when a select entity within the world sim gets its inputs from the user.

where C becomes a chore is the UI, probably has to do with how theres many more degrees of freedom (both in terms of possibilities and what humans consider appealing) in the visual plane than there is in the game input 'plane', which might be as little as 6 independent inputs plus time.
by zer00eyz | 2026-02-07 19:56:17+00:00
If you want to build a house you still need plans. Would you rather cut boards by hand or have a power saw. Would you rather pound nails, pilot hole with a bit and brace and put in flat head screws... or would you want a nail gun and an impact driver.

And you still need plans.

Can you write a plan for a sturdy house, verify that it meets the plan that your nails went all the way in and in the right places?

You sure can.

Your product person, your directors, your clients might be able to do the same thing, it might look like a house but its a fire hazard, or in the case of most LLM generated code a security one.

The problem is that we moved to scrum and agile, where your requirements are pantomime and postit notes if your lucky, interpretive dance if you arent. Your job is figuring out how to turn that into something... and a big part of what YOU as an engineer do is tell other people "no thats dumb" without hurting their feelings.

IF AI coding is going to be successful then some things need to change: Requirements need to make a come back. GOOD UI needs to make a comeback (your dark pattern around cancelation, is now going to be at odds with an agent). Your hide the content behind a login or a pay wall wont work any more because again, end users have access too... the open web is back and by force. If a person can get in, we have code that can get in now.

There is a LOT of work that needs to get done, more than ever, stop looking back and start looking forward, because once you get past the hate and the hype there is a ton of potential to right some of the ill's of the last 20 years of tech.
by Kon5ole | 2026-02-07 19:56:23+00:00
I have to admit I'm flip-flopping on the topic, back and forth from skeptic to scared enthusiast.

I just made a LLM recreate a decent approximation of the file system browser from the movie Hackers (similar to the SGI one from Jurassic park) in about 10 minutes. At work I've had it do useful features and bug fixes daily for a solid week.

Something happened around newyears 2026. The clients, the skills, the mcps, the tools and models reached some new level of usefulness. Or maybe I've been lucky for a week.

If it can do things like what I saw last week reliably, then every tool, widget, utility and library currently making money for a single dev or small team of devs is about to get eaten. Maybe even applications like jira, slack, or even salesforce or SAP can be made in-house by even small companies. "Make me a basic CRM".

Just a few months ago I found it mostly frustrating to use LLM's and I thought the whole thing was little more than a slight improvement over googling info for myself. But the past week has been mind-blowing.

Is it the beginning of the star trek ship computer? If so, it is as big as the smartphone, the internet, or even the invention of the microchip. And then the investments make sense in a way.

The problem might end up being that the value created by LLMs will have no customers when everyone is unemployed.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-07 19:56:33+00:00
> stomach the dull and hard work of actually being creative

This strikes me as the opposite of what I experience when I say I'm "feeling creative", then everything comes easy. At least in the context of programming, making music, doing 3D animation and some other topics. If it's "dull and hard work" it's because I'm not feeling "creative" at all, when "creative mode" is on in my brain, there is nothing that feels neither dull nor hard. Maybe it works differently for others.
by Nextgrid | 2026-02-07 19:56:47+00:00
LLMs are only a threat if you see your job as a code monkey. In that case you're likely already obsoleted by outsourced staff who can do your job much cheaper.

If you see your job as a "thinking about what code to write (or not)" monkey, then you're safe. I expect most seniors and above to be in this position, and LLMs are absolutely not replacing you here - they can augment you in certain situations.

The perks of a senior is also knowing when not to use an LLM and how they can fail; at this point I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what is safe to outsource to an LLM and what to keep for a human. Offloading the LLM-safe stuff frees up your time to focus on the LLM-unsafe stuff (or just chill and enjoy the free time).
by TheOtherHobbes | 2026-02-07 19:57:00+00:00
9/11 was the turning point. We'd been fed a future "in the year 2000." When we got there, that future turned into a nostalgic vision of the past.

It's still possible to imagine new bright futures, but that kind of imagination is very much against a cultural tide that's fervently regressive and nostalgic.
by eranation | 2026-02-07 19:57:36+00:00
I like coding, I really do. But like you, I like building things more than I like the way I build them. I do not find myself miss writing code by hand as much.

I do find it that the developers that focused on "build the right things" mourn less than those who focused on "build things right".

But I do worry. The main question is this - will there be a day that AI will know what are "the right things to build" and have the "agency" (or illusion of) to do it better than an AI+human (assuming AI will get faster to the "build things right" phase, which is not there yet)

My main hope is this - AI can beat a human in chess for a while now, we still play chess, people earn money from playing chess, teaching chess, chess players are still celebrated, youtube influencers still get monetized for analyzing games of celebrity chess players, even though the top human chess player will likely lose to a stockfish engine running on my iPhone. So maybe there is hope.
by behindsight | 2026-02-07 19:57:54+00:00
It's explicitly called out as excluded in the blue info bubble they have there.

> Fast mode usage is billed directly to extra usage, even if you have remaining usage on your plan. This means fast mode tokens do not count against your plan’s included usage and are charged at the fast mode rate from the first token.

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/fast-mode#requirements
by victor106 | 2026-02-07 19:58:14+00:00
> I mean, part of this is just math. If a government spends more, it’s literally injecting money into the economy, so of course you get more jobs and growth in the short term.

Thats not necessarily true. During Bill Clinton's presidency he cut the deficits and the debt and yet the economy saw very strong job growth.

https://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/the-budget-and-deficit-und...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobs_created_during_U.S._presi...
by kaydub | 2026-02-07 19:58:23+00:00
I think a lot of the people pro-llm are already in the middle. It's the naysays that are sticking to a strict definition of "vibe coding" as if it's random people typing in "make me $app but make no bugs" and getting a 100% working $app with no bugs. You have the gastown folks trying to do that, but nobody serious putting in good work with llm agents is "vibe coding" in that way.