MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by raincole | 2026-02-17 15:17:24+00:00
> I cannot justify hiring a mediocre new grad in Seattle for $120k who will end up using Claude Code anyhow when I can hire an early-career employee doing something similar in Romania or India for around $20k.

Of course it's not justified, but I don't think it has anything to do with Claude Code or AI. It has always been true that you can hire competent programmers from eastern European at a discounted price, since forever.

If you believe (whether if this belief is based on reality or not) American programmers have "better working ethnics," "easier time to communicate with," or "skin in the game," then they still have these traits in AI era. If you don't then you should outsource anyway.
by bmn__ | 2026-02-17 15:17:50+00:00
> it always shocked me how bad their ex partners were

Besides the hybristophiliac degenerates who thankfully are rarely occurring, there's another much more widely applicable explanation not discussed yet in thus subthread so far. Because women are almost entirely unable to take accountability for their own toxic behaviour and their role in the downfall of a relationships, when they talk about their exes, they untruthfully portray the ex as an abuser and themselves as a victim. In most cases, not out of malice, but because of lack of mental fortitude.

Considering this, you should not be shocked about the supposed bad ex, but simply disregard any one-sided stories without hard evidence. If you want to know the truth, seek out the testimony of the ex. In the overwhelming majority, it's just a normal man who actually did nothing wrong and is not even aware of the slander behind his back.
by kolektiv | 2026-02-17 15:18:24+00:00
Are those people cutting the grass/operating the elevators happier/unhappier than they would be otherwise? (I don't know, but perhaps you do). You seem to be strongly implying that this is in some way "wrong" rather than a subjectively different view of the purpose of human existence - for what reason? (I'll ignore the glazier example as it seems quite extreme, and also comes with more obvious/specific "victims").
by palata | 2026-02-17 15:19:11+00:00
> If the Tiktok app passes your data to Play Services (say, to support notifications with GCM) then it doesn't make any difference that Play Services is nominally "sandboxed".

Sure, but that's the same if you run TikTok with microG (which will relay your data to the Google servers just like the Play Services) or in waydroid on a Mobile Linux. But you can't blame the system for what the apps are allowed to do by the user.

Take your Google Maps example: if the user wants to run Google Maps, obviously they will be sharing data with Google. It's very weird to blame the system for that.

What the sandbox brings is that for users who want to run the Play Services (because they want to run TikTok, knowing that it will share data with some servers, including but not limited to the Google servers through the Play Services), then at least the Play Services are not root on their OS. So then instead of running microG, you can run the Play Services and have the same kind of benefits.

Now if you don't want your apps to contact Google, then by all means, don't install the Play Services! But don't install microG either! And don't install Google Maps!

It's all about trade-offs, it's not an all or nothing situation. Sandboxed Play Services is better than privileged Play Services.
by bpt3 | 2026-02-17 15:19:34+00:00
I got it from two places:

1. Watching the standard of living in the US outpace the EU for decades and comparing their economic systems.

2. Basic common sense tells you that you need resources in order to fund a welfare state, a long list of positive human rights, and all the other things that the EU states want to do. Money buys resources, especially when you don't have direct access to them (which is the case for most EU states).
by canto | 2026-02-17 15:19:40+00:00
"A plugin/annotation system where users can teach the agent about custom resource types would scale better than hard-coding each one." - this is a fantastic observation and feedback! Many thanks!

"requiring N consecutive failures before marking down" - I do have the code for it, it's just hidden currently. StatusDude supports 2 types of worker/agents - cloud agents - that will re-verify from multiregion the service status and private agents - the ones we're talking about here - that I might just bring this option back as it makes more sense.

Correlating failures is a bit tricky as usually it requires some sort of manual dependency creation but, I guess for k8s ingress and similar I should be able to figure this out and at least send alerts with appropriate priorities and order.

As for the status page auto generation - currently it's based on namespace - I didn't wanted to bloat the user dashboard too much. Each monitor is tagged with cluster id, namespace and labels. Status Pages pickup monitors based on labels. Users are free to modify these and show exactly what they want :)
by hashmakjsn | 2026-02-17 15:20:21+00:00
I’ve been working on a key–value engine built directly on top of SQLite’s storage layer (without SQL).

While doing that, I ended up reading ~150K lines of SQLite’s source code to understand how its B-Tree, pager, and storage layers actually work.

This write-up focuses on the top-most layer:
→ how key–value operations map directly onto the B-Tree API

Some of the interesting parts:
- How inserts/reads bypass SQL and go straight to the B-Tree
- Cursor mechanics and traversal
- Page-level behavior during reads/writes
- Why removing the SQL layer gives significant performance gains

If you’re interested in deeper internals (b-tree, pager, WAL, OS layer), I’m planning to share those next.

Would love feedback, especially from folks familiar with database internals.

Project (SNKV): https://github.com/hash-anu/snkv/tree/master
by iogbole | 2026-02-17 15:20:58+00:00
Really interesting architecture choice separating motion from rendering. That feels like the right abstraction boundary if you want identity generalisation without retraining.

The latency numbers are what stood out to me though. ~70ms time-to-first-frame is genuinely impressive for an interactive loop. In real conversations, responsiveness dominates perceived realism way more than visual fidelity, so that correlation result makes intuitive sense.

Curious how robust the audio-to-motion mapping is under messy real-world input (overlapping speech, accents, background noise, etc.). Does the flow-matching variant help mostly with stability during training, or also temporal consistency during inference?
by 0xy | 2026-02-17 15:21:26+00:00
AGI is mathematically impossible given our current electrical infrastructure constraints and basic laws, so yes it is.

We're already seeing a dramatic slowdown in relative improvements.

The gap between Sonnet 3.5 (June 2024) and Opus 4.6 (Feb 2026) is large, but it's not 1,000x. Not even 100x.
by noisy_boy | 2026-02-17 15:21:53+00:00
This was quite accessible. If I had to pick one point, I wish there was more "handholding" from gradient to gradient-descent i.e. in the style of the math-focused introduction of the function with one parameter, two parameters etc that was done. It felt a bit of sudden jump from the math to the code. I think the gentle introduction to the math is very valuable here.
by nobody9999 | 2026-02-17 15:22:05+00:00
>Employers pay variable UI premiums and state UI funds now use Experience Ratings to increase insurance premiums on those companies where employees are not being fired for-cause

That's as may be, but we're specifically talking about firing people for cause, which makes the terminated employee ineligible for UI benefits.

And even if it was as you say, unemployment insurance is just another cost of doing business and, as such, is tax deductible as a business expense.

The wall of text notwithstanding, your "argument" is sorely lacking in relevance to the topic at hand.

I tried reading your diatribe as if it were in good faith, but the best I could do WRT that was assume you were uninformed.

Have a good day and I wish you nothing but happiness and success.
by hardwaregeek | 2026-02-17 15:22:06+00:00
The fundamental issue is that all of education and childhood accomplishments have become cynical, overly competitive games. Science fairs are now attempts for a child to piggyback off of a lab’s existing work and claim they discovered it. Sports are a vehicle to college admissions. Disability claims become another way to gain an academic advantage. It’s no surprise that the 30 under 30 are filled with scammers and criminals. It’s what we’re teaching students who want to get ahead.
by bpt3 | 2026-02-17 15:22:07+00:00
You'd think so, but paying all the people who sit around and think of things to regulate, the people who actually write the regulations, the people who enact the regulations, and the people who enforce the regulations is not a trivial cost, especially at the scale that the EU wants to regulate things.

Also, the actual political agenda is based around a welfare state, which absolutely costs money to maintain.
by RajT88 | 2026-02-17 15:22:13+00:00
People say they have mixed luck, but my daily driver I bought from the Dell Refurbished site, which is actually refurbed laptops used by FedEx I guess. It's a 2018 model, and has an NVidia Quadro M2200 and 32gb of RAM. 200 bucks out the door, plays a surprising number of games fine.
by timr | 2026-02-17 15:22:17+00:00
> Sometimes I feel like this is taken to the extreme for non-scientists that say that lack of evidence is in itself evidence.

But of course, the lack of evidence is itself evidence, if you have a sufficiently large data sample and haven't seen the thing you're looking for. Keep pursuing the increasingly unlikely outcome, and you're just engaged in science-flavored religious catechism.

I see the fallacy routinely misapplied by all sides of most hot-button science-meets-politics issues. A great many scientists will regularly substitute their own pet theories for conclusions, and strenuously ignore the lack of supporting evidence, citing the old "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" saw. Then they turn around and mock "non-scientists" for doing the same thing. Neither side is right, of course, but dressing in a lab coat doesn't make it better.

Just to circle it back to the topic of science education, I'd love to see a science curriculum at the middle- and high-school level that equipped people to reason through this kind of thing by focusing on tearing apart pop research. A "science fair" is actually hard to do well just because most science fails, but a "scientific bullshit fair" would have almost infinite fertile ground from nutrition studies alone.
by kqr | 2026-02-17 15:22:21+00:00
One of my favourite techniques from that book is to remove the centralised backlog. People's ideas for improvement shouldn't be everyone's administrative burden. There are too many ideas for that.

Instead, keep a central record of the things that need to be done right now, and if something is important to do later, then someone will probably keep track of it personally and bring it up later when it is more relevant.
by mikrotikker | 2026-02-17 15:22:36+00:00
This is why I struggled and struggled to omit JS at all costs on a greenfield project - many apps from even 5 years ago by now fired teams fail to build with cryptic npm messages. And if you get past that you have to deal with webpack or some such junk. We settled with go fyne which compiles to wasm to handle both local and remotely accessible use cases. Trade off is not as much freedom and a fixed feature set but I know it's gonna work after 5 godamn years.
by Swizec | 2026-02-17 15:22:45+00:00
> At the end of the day, I like the mental model of programming, and I am somewhat uninterested in shaving every millimeter of friction off of every surface I touch on my computer. Does that make me a worse programmer? Maybe? I still delivered plenty of high quality code.

In every pursuit there are secretly 3 different communities. Those who love doing the thing, those who love tinkering with the gear, those who love talking about it.

HackerNews and the internet in general are dominated by people who like to nerd out about the gear of programming (IDEs, text editors, languages, agent setups, …) and the people who like to talk about programming. The people doing most of the work are off on the side too busy doing the thing to be noticed.
by HolyLampshade | 2026-02-17 15:22:48+00:00
I think that's the issue I have with using these tools so far (definitely professionally, but even in pet projects for embedded systems). The mental load of having to go back through and make sure all of the lines of code do what the agent claims they do, even with tests, is significantly more than it would take to learn the implementation myself.

I can see the utility in creating very simple web-based tools where there's a monstrous wealth of public resources to build a model off of, but even the most recent models provided by Anthro, OpenAI, or MSFT seem prone to not quite perfection. And every time I find an error I'm left wondering what other bugs I'm not catching.
by MontyCarloHall | 2026-02-17 15:22:48+00:00
>Are those people cutting the grass/operating the elevators happier/unhappier than they would be otherwise?

There are numerous studies that show menial labor leads to poor mental health. Perhaps these people employed as makework automatons are happier than they would be if they had no employment whatsoever and were destitute on the street, but these are not the only two alternatives.

>I'll ignore the glazier example as it seems quite extreme, and also comes with more obvious/specific "victims"

The "victims" at the Taj Mahal/department store are the visitors/customers who have to pay slightly higher prices as a result. While not as extreme as the glazier in the broken window fallacy, the grass cutters/elevator operators exist on the exact same spectrum.
by hdhdhsjsbdh | 2026-02-17 15:22:49+00:00
So then the corps find a way to fire you for something other than AI displacement, replace you with AI anyway, and you’re on your own. Basically identical to firing someone in a clever way that avoids having to pay unemployment, which already happens quite frequently.

I don’t understand why taxation is so off limits to this crowd. We seem to live in a death cult where avoiding a slight inconvenience to 100 people is more important than providing a decent standard of living for the other 345 million people. You can invent whatever clever little solution you want in the meantime but eventually the chickens will come home to roost.
by kps | 2026-02-17 15:22:54+00:00
They put : ; immediately after the digits because they were considered the least used of the major punctuation, so that they could be replaced by ‘digits’ 10 and 11 where desired.

(I'm almost reluctant to to spoil the fun for the kids these days, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%A3sd )
by gertlex | 2026-02-17 15:22:55+00:00
> You’re making a choice to prioritize profit (or foreign countries) over the country that you benefit from. This is an immoral and short sighted business decision, as you will eventually see a backlash from the host countries you’re effectively operating as a parasite in.

I have the vague sense we're far enough into e.g. offshoring that it's not purely about "profits" but about being competitive because all your competitors are doing the same thing.

But, then again, wealth inequality increase doesn't seem to be slowing (so profits /are/ being achieved), and I mostly think about businesses in robotics (and I don't spend that much time pondering it) where there's a lot of complexity in the stack, needing more "manpower", and being smart with money spent is maybe /more/ important. Robotics is a smallll sliver of software dev companies... (thus, "vague sense")
by cxr | 2026-02-17 15:23:34+00:00
The comment you're responding to is obnoxious, but authoring in Google Docs and exporting to HTML+CSS would be viable and is 10x more accessible than the simultaneously over- and underengineered toolchains and work practices that the professional web developer class has turned out, and doesn't produce output substantially worse than the now-widespread practice of sending mangled/minified payloads to UAs, which in the worst cases involves turning content into opaque blobs that you have to squirt through a JS runtime to get anything meaningful on screen.

The state of the art in Web publishing is such a mess that paid practitioners have, seemingly without realizing it, quietly eliminated the main reason why anyone should even have an expert handle the "lowering" from concept to HTML+CSS instead of using a quasi-WYSIWYG tool or some other crummy sitebuilder and working with whatever shoddy markup they give you.

berkshirehathaway.com (<https://berkshirehathaway.com/>) makes the rounds every now and then, and people ooh and aah over it in the comments, but you can tell they never really get it because then they just turn around and dump their next Vercel-hosted monstrosity on the world.
by neelc | 2026-02-17 15:24:26+00:00
About his comment:

> Unfortunately, I must recommend Windows 10/11 here, because then you don’t have to mess around with any drivers; it’s the simplest option.

When I worked at Microsoft but ran FreeBSD at home, I often used my work Windows laptop to install custom ROMs. This is because FreeBSD was finicky with adb.

Now I run Fedora and the Android drivers are pre-installed. I installed GrapheneOS on both a Pixel 10 Pro (main) and Pixel 9 (spare) that way.

On Windows, I've had more trouble with Android drivers than I did on non-Windows.
by happymellon | 2026-02-17 15:24:34+00:00
> self-checkout machines

I'm sorry, what? What sort of self checkout machines are bow requesting tips?

> The idea is that workers earn a subminimum wage and then customer tips make up the difference to get workers up to minimum wage.

This is really the root cause of all this toxic American tipping behaviour. They should get at least minimum wage, and the tips on top.
by palata | 2026-02-17 15:24:44+00:00
I'm confused. You say:

> It's arguably quicker to open your wallet and use a debit card with an NFC chip than it is to use QR codes

So I assume that even though QR codes are available where you live, you use your debit card with an NFC chip because it is quicker than using QR codes...

Anyway, the important part is that NFC doesn't require an internet connection, and I had missed that. Now I wonder why a QR code couldn't work without an internet connection just the same. I'll have to look into that!
by SecretDreams | 2026-02-17 15:24:53+00:00
I align to everything in this post except the below excerpt. I think it's important to be a lot of things and nothing at the same time and to tie fulfilment to internal metrics rather than externalities.

> AI hasn't eliminated programmers or programming, and it never will.

It might not fully eliminate them tomorrow, but this technology is being pitched as at least displacing a lot of them and probably putting downwards pressure on their wages, which is really just as harmful to the profession. AI as it's being pushed is a direct attack on white collar CS jobs. There will always be winners and losers, but this is a field that will change in many ways in the not so distant future because of this technology - and most current CS prospects will probably not be happy with the direction the overall field goes.

Even if you do not personally believe this, you should be concerned all the same because this is the narrative major CEOs are pushing and we know that they can remain crazy longer than we can remain solvent, so to speak.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-02-17 15:25:10+00:00
I'm just going to wait it out, as these trends come and go; before AI it was Rust, before Rust it was IoT, before IoT it was big data, crypto was weaved through it, etc.

I'm sure someone's done the numbers on HN trending topics over time aaand yup http://varianceexplained.org/r/hn-trends//.
by jongjong | 2026-02-17 15:25:13+00:00
I don't live in the US but I'm definitely feeling the negative effects of the fiat system really harshly. From my perspective, I believe that the effects would be similar regardless of which country had the superpower status. Interlinked fiat currencies are just a perfect mechanism to allow militarily or economically dominant countries to manipulate the global economy in their favor. As a superpower, you can leverage corruption in foreign countries to load them up with debt denominated in your currency to allow you to export your inflation to them... You can also leverage foreign corruption to sign large, unjust trade deals or oversized military contracts which will prop up your currency.

Still, at the root, I blame the system itself, not specific participants.
by krisoft | 2026-02-17 15:25:15+00:00
Yeah. It has a very strong "and then everyone clapped" vibe to it.

But even if the teacher "grew very quiet" in actual fact there can be many reason behind that. The story as told tries to imply that they realised that they were wrong somehow for doing these presentations. It is also possible that they went quiet because they realised that there is no point in asking whatever they wanted to ask under such a hostile interrogation.

It is also lovely to note that the supposed interaction happened with "someone who gave a presentation at an education conference". I guess that someone must have been born with the skills to present, because they (according to the story) think very lowly about the idea of practicing it.
by Xenoamorphous | 2026-02-17 15:25:35+00:00
Why would demand go up?

Yes electricians are definitely safer than those of us who work in front of a computer all day, but I don’t think AI is good for them either. First of all, more young people might try to become one, potentially crowding the sector. Second, if the rest of us are poorer we’ll also spend less in housing and other things that require an electrician.
by LordHumungous | 2026-02-17 15:25:44+00:00
If the worst predictions about AI's effect on employment turn out to be correct, then I'd expect to see movements to force government regulation of AI. Particularly if it becomes the case that profits are accruing to a few massive corporations who run the AI.

There is no reason people have to tolerate a technology that is destructive to society, anymore than they have to tolerate companies selling fentanyl at 7/11.