MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by moring | 2026-02-06 15:01:11+00:00
The book "How Big Things Get Done" by Bent Flyvbjerg nicely answers all the concerns mentioned in this thread. I'll answer here to avoid littering replies everywhere.

> But I do still think there's a lot of value into coming up with a good plan before jumping in.

Definitely, with emphasis on a _good_ plan. Most "plans" are bad and don't deserve that name.

> be specified up-front, planned on JIRA

Making a plan up-front is a good approach. A specification should be part of that plan. One should be ready to adapt it when needed during execution, but one should also strive to make the spec good enough to avoid changing.

HOWEVER, the "up-front specification" you mentioned was likely written _before_ making a plan, which is a bad approach. It was probably written as part of something that was called "planning" and has nothing to do with actual planning. In that case, the spec is pure fiction.

> estimates provided

Unless this project is exceptional, the estimates are probably fiction too.

> and Gantt charts setup

Gantt charts are a model, not a plan. Modeling is good; it gives you insight into the project. But a model should not be confused with a plan. It is just one tiny fragment you need to build a plan, and Gantt charts are just one of many many many types of models needed to build a plan.

> before they even sign the contract for the next milestone

That's a good thing. Signing a contract is an irreversible decision. The only contract that should be signed before planning is done is the contract that employs the planners.

> Anyone who claims upfront specs are the solution

See bove. A rigid upfront spec is usually not a plan, but pure fiction.

> My approach, especially for a project with a lot of unknowns, is usually to jump in right away and try to build a prototype.

Whether this is called planning or "jumping in" is a difference in terminology, not in the approach. The relevant clue is that you are experimenting with the problem to understand it, but you are NOT making irreversible decisions. By the terminology used in that book, you are _planning_, not _executing_.

> after the 2000 pages specification document was written, and passed down from the architects to the devs

If the 2000 page spec has never been passed to the devs while writing it, it's not part of a plan, it's pure fiction. Trying to develop software against that spec is part of planning.
by andsoitis | 2026-02-06 15:01:21+00:00
Leaf didn't capture the mind of people that EVs are good options.

Tesla made long-distance driving in EVs possible. Tesla made EV sexy, desirable. It catalyzed the Chinese EV industry. Nissan didn't remotely accomplish those things.

Like someone else said, people think in terms of a pre-Tesla and post-Tesla world. I don't know that there's a strong case against that framing.
by cestith | 2026-02-06 15:01:26+00:00
TLS doesn’t mask the IP of the server. The updater probably isn’t using DNS over HTTPS. If I can determine that a user’s updater just hit the update check server, I can start impersonating the update server.

That takes it out of the one day away territory, but it does allow an attacker to only have a malicious HTTP capture up and detectable during the actual attack window.
by Jensson | 2026-02-06 15:01:32+00:00
> The source of most of the corruption I see in the world today is wealth, and specifically wealthy people paying people off to get their own way

This is so wrong, its not expensive to bribe politicians so higher taxes wouldn't stop this at all. The problem is that its possible to bribe politicians, meaning government has too much power, taxes would make that worse not better.

What you need is a less centralized government so its harder to bribe a few key people to get what you want.
by mlyle | 2026-02-06 15:01:44+00:00
Big revenue + small margins in a stable business, IMO, is a massive liability for the bottom line; any downturn in business and that becomes big revenue + big losses. Even if cloud is making money, it can wipe a lot of that out.

From the point of view of running an enterprise that lasts, though, diversification is important. Financially diversification is probably, in general, bad for EPS. But if you want to run a lasting empire, it's best to not tie it to just a narrow thing.
by dotandgtfo | 2026-02-06 15:01:59+00:00
I've always found it confusing how run of the mill SaaS trades at multiples assuming decades of doing business. The amount of change in software businesses has been massive and being able to run a successful software business even for 15 years from 2010-2025 requires a great deal of strategy and foresight and more likely than not that's not enough. Considering how these dynamics have been accelerating as technology accelerates it just seemed so off that the market was landing on a 20-30x multiples for software businesses that don't have much moat (e.g. swathes of B2B CRUD apps).
by goalieca | 2026-02-06 15:02:05+00:00
You’ll get downvoted for your second statement. I think investors are struggling to see how AI turns into more money for consumers if it. It’s one thing to exclaim how your productivity is up, but does that translate into more profit and larger customer base if you’re a business? I very much doubt consumers will pay more than dollars a month for an LLM and I also very much doubt the ad market can grow large enough to cover the spend on that (ad market is plenty big and driven by other economic factors)
by gz5 | 2026-02-06 15:02:31+00:00
>The Theory of Constraints states that every system has a bottleneck, since without one, it would operate infinitely fast, which is impossible.

If we believe the AI-influenced system will be faster, more prolific and more experimental (cheaper experiments), then it seems human attention and the rate at which humans can change (individually, processes, tools, teams, etc) becomes the bottleneck.

In that system, the designer and PM functions become more important in addressing that bottleneck - in producing solutions to best overcome those bottlenecks?
by jermaustin1 | 2026-02-06 15:02:35+00:00
A couple years ago, I did a 90 mile hike in Scotland, which was mostly flat. My pack weighed just at 20-25lb (light but not ultralight - a lot of water weight). The trail was MOSTLY flat, with a couple steep trails to bypass forestry work, and crest over some steep hill.

I'm a large man, at the time I was pushing 250lb on a 5'8" frame, but I found my flat land endurance was basically unlimited at walking pace. My uphill endurance was limited so short bursts, and I had to regularly stop for a breather.

Once on flat ground, again, 20+ miles a day no issues.

After the detours, and some one-off side trails to see something, and walking from the trail to a town for food and/or sleep, my entire trek was 125mi over 5 days. And when I got home, I weighed 255lb. I gained 5lb while hiking somehow.

All that to say, uphill endurance is no joke, and it is hard to train, even maxed on a treadmill if you live on flat ground. Stair climbing (or machine) is the only thing I can think of.
by nickthesick | 2026-02-06 15:02:42+00:00
Hey hn:

I made a collaborative editing framework based on Y.js.

I think it has many advantages over existing solutions like hocuspocus, Y-Sweet, Liveblocks and others. Mainly, it being built as a library (and framework) allows you to build in assumptions for your application. Just this weekend I had a short talk about it at FOSDEM. Let me know if you are interested!
by 123malware321 | 2026-02-06 15:02:56+00:00
well considering you use components like DFA to build compilers, yes they are determenistic. you also have reproducible builds etc.

or does your binary always come out differently each time you compile the same file??

You can try it. try to compile the same file 10 times and diff the resultant binaries.

Now try to prompt a bunch of LLMs 10 times and diff the returned rubbish.
by simonw | 2026-02-06 15:03:14+00:00
Your regular expressions here only cover English: https://github.com/sibyllinesoft/scurl/blob/5b5bc118dc47b138...

Prompt injection strings can use any language the model knows, so "ignore previous instructions" could become "ignorer les instructions précédentes" or "تجاهل التعليمات السابقة" or "aurreko argibideak alde batera utzi" or "忽略之前的指令"...
by ecshafer | 2026-02-06 15:03:18+00:00
The margins on tech/cloud are just so astronomically higher than retail. Places like Walmart or Costco are fighting for <5% profit margins, IIRC its closer to 2%. Quick search says AWS has about a 35% profit margin and about 50-60% of the operating profit of amazon but 17% of the Revenue. With those numbers it makes sense to focus on AWS.

IMO AWS should be spun out as a separate company.
by crazygringo | 2026-02-06 15:03:25+00:00
> On Friday, the regulators released a preliminary decision that TikTok’s infinite scroll, auto-play features and recommendation algorithm amount to an “addictive design” that violated European Union laws for online safety.

How is this any different from Reddit? From Instagram? Why single out TikTok?

Applying laws unevenly is a form of discrimination.
by lo_zamoyski | 2026-02-06 15:03:55+00:00
> You don't even need to use examples that westerners find polarizing

Yes, but they are illustrative, because apparently, some people have a problem understanding that labels don't necessarily reflect the thing labeled. African factions are too foreign for most Westerners to appreciate the analogy. But if that helps someone understand what should be an obvious principle for any adult, then that's great.
by ApolloFortyNine | 2026-02-06 15:03:56+00:00
I do think it's addictive, but also the very idea of media in general is to keep you around. Television channels try to display content their viewers enjoy, but they can only target broadly. The web allows sites to have way more personal recommendations, but banning it is essentially banning sites because people enjoy it too much.

I think short form content especially is basically brain rot, but I also don't know how you ban something simply because it's too good at providing content people enjoy. The result would just be a worse experience across the board, is that a win?

I guess a forced 5s video saying take a break after 20 minutes of doom scrolling wouldn't be the end of the world, but truely making it illegal doesn't make sense.
by mayhemducks | 2026-02-06 15:03:58+00:00
I'm Not sure that I agree that it is automatically safer to prefer apt or dnf, and I'm definitely sure that it is not safer to prefer npm.

Safety is about managing risk. One element of managing risk is evaluating trust. I'm thinking that there are much fewer people I have to trust by copying the curl | bash install method from homebrew's secure website.

But at any rate, I completely agree that piping a curl'd script directly to the shell should be considered unsafe, even if it's from a trusted source. It's quite easy to do additional checks to reduce your risk significantly for this type of attack. You could read the contents of your clipboard with a hex editor and check for non-ascii characters. But wait? How do I install the hex editor? Don't I need a hex editor to check the install method of the hex editor? AAAAH! It's turtles all the way down!!!!
by unregistereddev | 2026-02-06 15:04:59+00:00
He was a talented con artist. While I don't have the link offhand, I recall reading an in-depth article the New York Times published on Epstein's rise. He gained connections first by exaggerating his own credentials, and later by exaggerating the depth and nature of his other connections. He was very good at convincing people that he was someone they needed to know.
by softwaredoug | 2026-02-06 15:05:02+00:00
Every tech company assumed they would be the benefactors, not victims, of AI. And investors now see that without the alleged AI growth, these companies at best look like stable utilities, not high growth stocks. At worse companies look like they make highly replaceable software as software stops being a moat.

Moreover they look like large, inefficient organizations with a lot of human veto points that prevent innovation (requiring more human coordination is an anti moat now)
by smithcoin | 2026-02-06 15:05:08+00:00
> This is a five-alarm fire if you're a SWE and not retiring in the next couple years.

I’m sorry, but this is such a hype beast take. In my opinion this is equivalent to telling people not to learn to drive five years ago because of self driving from Tesla. How is that going?

Every single line of code produced is a liability. This idea that you’re going to have “gas town” like agents running and building apps without humans in the loop at any point to generate liability free revenue is insane to me.

Are humans infallible? Obviously not. But if you are telling me that ‘magic probability machines’ are creating safe, secure, and compliant software that has no need for engineers to participate in the output- first I’d like to see a citation and second I have a bridge to sell you.
by mschuster91 | 2026-02-06 15:05:21+00:00
> Everything else belongs on a message board, mailing list, or social media.

There's a reason that collaborative code platform (not just GH but also GL) "issues" end up being used for much more than bugs:

- message boards suffer from the SSO friction issue. No thanks I will not sign up at some phpBB board of questionable admin quality that will get 0wned sooner than later, or have the board owner bombard me with advertising themselves.

- mailing lists are even worse usability-wise because these by design leak your email address, on top of that their management UI often enough is Mailman which means it probably still stores passwords in cleartext, and spam filters, attachment size limits and overeager virus scanners make it a living hell

- IRC suffers from context loss. Netsplit, go for a smoke and the laptop goes to sleep, whoops, you disconnected and don't see what happened in the meantime. Yes, there's bouncers, but honestly, the UX sucks hard. Also, no file transfers to a channel, no native screenshot/paste functionality.

- Discord, Slack etc. solve the pains of IRC but are walled gardens

- Social media... yikes. No, no, no. Eventually, people that follow both you and the author of some FOSS software get pissed off by your conversation spamming their feed. (Too) many are still only active on Twitter which excludes people who don't want to be on that hellsite. Bluesky, good luck finding non-commies there. Mastodon, good luck and pray that your instance operator and the instance operator of the project team didn't end up in some bxtchfight escalating in defederation. Facebook groups, not everyone wants to leak their real name.

- messenger groups (especially Telegram)... blergh. You will drown in spam.

GH/GL are the sweet spot between UX/SO friction (because pretty much everyone who would want to file an issue has an account) and features, and on top of that both platforms have deals with email providers preventing them from getting blocked. That's why these two platforms are so far superior above everything else mentioned.
by mapt | 2026-02-06 15:05:46+00:00
I don't really want to cut taxes for the working/middle class though. I want to tax the everliving fuck out of the hyper-wealthy, to the point that they cease to exist. The money should go into providing goods and services for the working/middle class, but collecting that money and lighting it on fire (or parking assets in a sovereign wealth fund) is a superior option to doing nothing.

Neither our democracy nor our position as a world power survived capitalism eating itself and everything else. We are down to single individuals holding more nominal wealth than whole continents, and the worship of the billionaire has replaced the worship of Jesus Christ for most Americans, a palace cult committing national suicide on your behalf. If you want any of the things that America pitched as its merits in fighting for influence in the Cold War, you want this situation over with.

Let them eat three commas and not a penny more. When you become a billionaire we give you a medal and confiscate every dollar above 1 billion. Using a carrier strike group if necessary.
by hamdingers | 2026-02-06 15:06:14+00:00
> In most teams, coding - reading, writing, and debugging code - used to be the part that took engineers the most time, but that is no longer the bottleneck.

Do most engineers find this to be true? For me the balance switched within a few years of being a senior (nearly a decade ago). Writing code is easy, negotiating over what code to write takes time.
by mkolarek | 2026-02-06 15:06:15+00:00
Location: Berlin, Germany
Remote: Yes/hybrid
Willing to relocate: Yes, within EU

Technologies: Python, Scala, SQL, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, Google BigQuery, RDF, SPARQL, Pandas, Django, Flask, AWS, Azure, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes

Résumé/CV: https://markokolarek.com/pdf/Marko_Kolarek_CV.pdf

Email: marko@markokolarek.com

Website: https://markokolarek.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkolarek

Data engineer with 10 years of experience in various industries such as e-commerce, construction and property rights protection. Developing and maintaining ETL pipelines, designing and implementing data platforms.
by dfxm12 | 2026-02-06 15:06:51+00:00
The videos are the entertainment, not the endless recommendation algorithm.

Additionally, this is not about self control. The claim is that the algorithm is designed to exploit users. Insiders (including a designer of infinite scroll!) have admitted as much going back years: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44640959

We should be uncomfortable with companies spending huge amounts of money to research and implement exploitative algorithms. We did something about cigarette companies advertising to kids. This action is along those lines.
by sven_8127642 | 2026-02-06 15:06:59+00:00
Yes, many intelligent people DO think we should not ban any drugs/substances and that the best way to deal with them is instead regulate and set up societal structures and frameworks that support the issues around abuse.

The science tends to back these ideas up. Banning does not stop people from doing what they want.

Education and guard rails are always better than hard control.
by Uehreka | 2026-02-06 15:07:00+00:00
The answer to “which coding agent should we standardise on?” is really simple: Don’t.

The tradeoffs of the different models are complicated and difficult to wrap your head around, and if you have the resources to try a bunch and form a conclusion, next week new models will come out and change the equation in small but difficult-to-understand ways again.

The solution is to ask your engineers which models they like, get them access to as many of those as you can, and expect their preferences to change and price that in.

“But I don’t have the budget to buy subscriptions to all the models my engineers want! And there are compliance issues with some of them!”

Note that I didn’t say you have to get access to all of them: as many as you can. And try to push the envelope as much as possible. Get creative. Perhaps give engineers a $200/mo AI coding budget and let them pick from a selection of subscriptions. You’re going to have different engineers using different AI coding tools, and if you refuse to let them, your competitors will.

Maybe in the future “standardizing on one coding agent” will be a thing that makes sense. But that time is not now.
Show HN: Cheapest Managed OpenClaw hosting – 30s setup (agent37.com)
by azfar0007 | 2026-02-06 15:07:26+00:00
Hi HN, I built the cheapest managed OpenClaw hosting I could - $0.99/mo for your own instance.
I tried hosting it myself first - went through GCP (e2-micro and e2-small both too little RAM, e2-medium was ~$25/mo), Hostinger ($5.99 is a 12-month lock-in), Hetzner (auto ID verification failed twice). Finally got it running on OVH and noticed it was idle 90% of the time. So I containerized the setup and started sharing it with friends.

What each person gets: their own isolated instance with full UI, terminal access, SSL. Setup takes about 30 seconds. $0.99/mo.

How it works: Containerized shared infrastructure with per-tenant isolation. Each instance runs in its own container with dedicated resources and burst capacity. SSL is automated via Let's Encrypt. The economics work because OpenClaw usage is bursty - nobody's hammering it 24/7, so density is high.

The question I'm testing: how cheap can managed hosting for open-source tools actually get? The marginal cost of a small container is cents. Most of the cost in managed hosting is support, marketing, and margin, not compute. I wanted to offer the most affordable way to try OpenClaw without the setup headache.
by program_whiz | 2026-02-06 15:07:53+00:00
Nope no complaints, but most wealth isn't being spent. If the majority of the wealth was being spent, then there wouldn't be wealth imbalance (as all that money would flow elsewhere into the economy).

The only way a wealth imbalance can occur is that someone sits on wealth and that it continues to compound. The top 1% have wealth greater than the bottom 95% of the population combined. I don't see why its more moral for someone to sit on investments than to have the money distributed to others to spend.

In one case, the money goes to whichever investment the individual favors (e.g. buying tons of gold). In the "redistribute" scenario, it goes to improving the lives of many millions of people in real tangible ways, and creating a more equitable and balanced society and social trust.

The top 1% of the US hold roughly 30% of all the wealth. That's roughly the same as the bottom 90% of the population. I understand there are implementation issues, but I'm merely calling out the obvious immorality of "90% of people should scrape to get by while trustfund kid lives in 4th mansion, because 'market efficiency'".
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-06 15:07:54+00:00
> a set of hapless electeds who depend on the kindness of lobbyists or other stakeholders to perform core duties

You have this already without term limits. An elected officeholder is given more than enough resources to be enabled to perform her duties, if she wants to. It's a matter of willingness, term limits aren't making things worse than they might otherwise be.
by majora2007 | 2026-02-06 15:07:56+00:00
This is exactly what got me to actually pay. I had a side project with an architecture I thought was good. Fed it into Claude and ChatGPT. ChatGPT made small suggestions but overall thought it was good. Claude shit all over it and after validating it's suggestions, I realized Claude was what I needed.

I haven't looked back. I just use Claude at home and ChatGPT at work (no Claude). ChatGPT at work is much worse than Claude in my experience.
by pierredemilly | 2026-02-06 15:08:02+00:00
This is not my experience with AI at all.
The best thing that happened to me as a solo developer in a startup is Copilot in the Github mobile app.

I now spend most of my time at the park, in the subway or just in my bed, thinking about my app, my code, my roadmap, etc.

Since I have outsourced the actual writing and debugging of code to Copilot, I can focus my brain energy on actual thinking.
And when I finish thinking, I take out my phone, write a GH issue, assign it to Copilot, and resume my thought process.
~20 minutes later, I check my phone again and read the PR.

In some cases, I just close it because it's not what I had in mind. In most cases, it's very good and starts me thinking again.
After some time, I write my review.
Rinse and repeat.

And once in a while, I'll sit at my desk to actually test the code, tweak some stuff and deploy.

I have never been this happy as a developer.