MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by clcaev | 2026-02-28 18:06:40+00:00
> I generally feel like people should be free to do whatever insane stuff they want with their own lives.

The problem with people doing insane stuff with their "own money" is the burden they often exact on their family or society.

Perhaps the realm of independence starts when loans are reasonable and current, there is sufficient child support, and they are meeting a base savings rate for their retirement.

Speaking of which, perhaps any UBI could also use a minimal criteria, reviewed annually but without any barriers on first year eligibility.
by nudpiedo | 2026-02-28 18:07:13+00:00
I get where you come from, but really needs it to be a whole SQLite instance per database? Wouldn’t be more efficient just logic separation in a larger DB?

Better usage of resources and it always allows a parent style agent do complex queries (e.g: intersection of two different actors data doesn’t need to fetch all, copy and do it in buggy non sql code)
by dijit | 2026-02-28 18:07:26+00:00
I often find that when I'm criticising something to be specific about what; in this case, which guideline you think I am in violation of.

Given the quote from Jason:

> This works so much better when there are living people who care.

What's the strongest interpretation of this given the context?

There's two ways to make this a reality:

1) Stop them caring

2) Stop them living

Given that the international community has been pushing hard for nearly a century for option 1; I'm guessing Jason means option 2.
by cruffle_duffle | 2026-02-28 18:07:28+00:00
“Seriously, this is currently bleeding Edge. Things have not even begun to settle yet.
We're way too early for the industry to normalize around llms yet”

That’s the exciting part isn’t it? This stuff is completely uncharted water. The interesting thing is there is huge forests of low hanging fruit to harvest too.

The interesting thing is this tickles all the same things “actual programming” does. It’s just the programming language changed to precise English and while the fundamental CS constrains are the same there is a new layer of constraints. Some, like speed of inference, I suspect will be solved (which will be incredible) but others like context management and size will always exist for LLMs. Understanding how little adjustments to what you prompt them can have dramatic changes to their output will never go away. Knowing what to put into context is a hugely important skill.
by dist-epoch | 2026-02-28 18:07:59+00:00
> but after Brockman had donated 25M to Trump’s PAC

> In capitalism, the market decides.

> In oligarchy, connections and donations decide.

Author is confused about what Capitalism is. It worked exactly as expected, Capital used itself to advance it's own needs - maximizing (own) growth.

Capitalism is not about markets, it's about Capital.

There is a reason why lobbying is an accepted practice in one of the most Capitalistic countries in the world, and generally forbidden in Socialist EU.
by readitalready | 2026-02-28 18:08:10+00:00
It doesn't matter if it's the #1 issue or not. What matters is the few % of people that cause tight elections to shift. And it was enough to cause Kamala Harris to lose the election. Israel's attack on Gaza was the primary reason Biden 2020 voters chose not to vote for Harris, per scientific polls (YouGov). And that was from 2 years ago. America has only become more pro-Hamas since.

You can defend the existence of the foreign genocidal state all you want but you really have to understand that Israel is cooked. There is no turning back. It's a dead state walking. And the vast majority of their base of support is in the elderly, which will all die off in 20 years.
by ajshahH | 2026-02-28 18:08:22+00:00
> In oligarchy, connections and donations decide. It sure look like the US is transitioning from the former to the latter

Transitioning? That happened post WW2. How many more wars in the Middle East do we need to convince people?

Though, I think it’s hard for Marcus’ generation to see this. Odd given Vance’s connections to Thiel et al.
by eudamoniac | 2026-02-28 18:08:28+00:00
I wish there was some way to A/B test search engines while blinded. I think DDG is worse than Google last I tried it, but I can never really know without a blind trial. There ought to be some proxy service that shows you results in the same UI from a random source and you can mark the results as good or bad.

This would probably be a good business idea for Kagi to implement, if they are confident they would win.
Show HN: Mdspec.dev – open-source spec management platform for technical teams
by zameermfm | 2026-02-28 18:08:43+00:00
mdspec.dev - build and manage specs adapted to the speed of agentic software development.

This is a side project of mine. I have made it as an open source spec management platform. Self host of you want and I run a hosted version.

And a spec is a md (markdown) file within your projects.

As we are building with AI agents either via Cursor, VScode or Antigravity, we can see md files or specs (software term for md files) are fast becoming AI infrastructure. A communication layer.

I have used specs mainly for,
- Developing spec for a new feature or a bug, generally a new development artifact and discuss the specs with the technical teams. AI agents are good at exploring the features in technical depth, costs, security aspects etc. that can be in one document or more. If there are changes, we can ask the AI agents to change them.
- If we need an analysis from a codebase that we need like a compliance analysis on a certain part. Spec that is filtered for the understanding of the target audience or a tool. I have built cost simulation tools based on the codebase, where I built yaml based infrastructure specs that fed into simulation tool. Beauty of these solutions are, the target audience doesn’t need access to whole codebase.
I think spec driven engineering is enabled only by AI agentic era. It was there before but it was time consuming and not scalable.
In essence,
- Specs give AI agents the context they need to build correctly.
- They also give teams clarity into why and how something was implemented.
- Specs are filtered to provide as inputs to other tools or analysis

But AI agentic development is really fast. As with all fast things, we could see two problems were emerging:

- Discussions across teams became long and fragmented. Compliance needs those specs. Design needs those specs. Risk Modeling needs those specs.
- Specs were duplicated, scattered, and hard to reuse across projects.

I built mdspec to remove that friction. I made it open source to make sure anyone can bend it any way they see fit for their own use cases.

mdspec is a specification management platform designed for fast phased AI-driven development. It helps you:
- Create structured, reusable specs
- Link specs across features and projects
- Maintain clarity as development speed increases
- Give AI agents reliable, durable context
- When specs become first-class citizens, teams move faster, without losing alignment.
- Go cross team securely.

I'm exploring the possible integrations to integrate this back into AI agents and external tools.

https://mdspec.dev
by RickJWagner | 2026-02-28 18:08:53+00:00
That’s a poor way to look at things.

If you always insist you are right, and that society is wrong, it will lead to any number of negative results. ( Among these, your own mental health will decline. )

There are laws and rules around murder. When people carry firearms and fight with government agents, the agents are given wide latitude to protect themselves. This is with good reason.

You can hold your breath, stamp your feet, and insist you are right. You won’t be. Laws and rules matter. Please confine your arguments to the factual, else you’ll gaslight yourself.
by tikhonj | 2026-02-28 18:09:16+00:00
> you can't spec out something you have no clue how to build

Ideally—and at least somewhat in practice—a specification language is as much a tool for design as it is for correctness. Writing the specification lets you explore the design space of your problem quickly with feedback from the specification language itself, even before you get to implementing anything. A high-level spec lets you pin down which properties of the system actually matter, automatically finds an inconsistencies and forces you to resolve them explicitly. (This is especially important for using AI because an AI model will silently resolve inconsistencies in ways that don't always make sense but are also easy to miss!)

Then, when you do start implementing the system and inevitably find issues you missed, the specification language gives you a clear place to update your design to match your understanding. You get a concrete artifact that captures your understanding of the problem and the solution, and you can use that to keep the overall complexity of the system from getting beyond practical human comprehension.

A key insight is that formal specification absolutely does not have to be a totally up-front tool. If anything, it's a tool that makes iterating on the design of the system easier.

Traditionally, formal specification have been hard to use as design tools partly because of incidental complexity in the spec systems themselves, but mostly because of the overhead needed to not only implement the spec but also maintain a connection between the spec and the implementation. The tools that have been practical outside of specific niches are the ones that solve this connection problem. Type systems are a lightweight sort of formal verification, and the reason they took off more than other approaches is that typechecking automatically maintains the connection between the types and the rest of the code.

LLMs help smooth out the learning curve for using specification languages, and make it much easier to generate and check that implementations match the spec. There are still a lot of rough edges to work out but, to me, this absolutely seems to be the most promising direction for AI-supported system design and development in the future.
by roywiggins | 2026-02-28 18:09:25+00:00
"With your permission, Copilot may execute code or bash commands in this folder." could be interpreted either way I suppose, but the actual question is "do you trust the files in this folder" and not "do you trust Copilot to execute any bash commands it wants without further permissions prompts".

The risk isn't solely that there might be a prompt injection, Copilot could just discover `env sh` doesn't need a user prompt and just start using that spontaneously and bypassing user confirmation. If you haven't started Copilot in yolo mode that would be very surprising and risky.

If it usually asks for user confirmation before running bash commands then there should, ideally, not be a secret yolo mode that the agent can just start using without asking. That's obviously a bad idea!

"Actually copilot is always secretly in yolo mode, that's working as designed" seems like a pretty serious violation of expectations. Why even have any user confirmations at all if the LLM can just bypass them at will?
by fastball | 2026-02-28 18:09:37+00:00
We recently replaced an isolated feature built on Durable Objects with Rivet Actors, to allow for much better interop with the rest of our infra (which is built on AWS/Vercel), and are happy with it so far.

There have been some small issues but nothing show-stopping, and the Rivet team has been very responsive to help get things sorted (or help us understand when it was us doing something wrong).

Not using the SQLite datastore yet, but I am excited about the possibilities!
by raincole | 2026-02-28 18:10:05+00:00
It's interesting that the both replies under this comment are saying exact same thing, with the exact same term ("raison d'etre"... how often do you hear two random people think of this phrase at the same time?).

It might be nothing, but it'd be funny if karma farming bots are doing some 'reply frontrunning' over the internet.
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-02-28 18:10:09+00:00
>I don't see how any rational investor could still see US companies as a secure investment.

2025 was also the first year that the majority of stocks were traded off-market (i.e. hedgie darkpools, no public price discovery).

----

Hope ya'll bought your gold before Monday.

#RemindMe2days [gold@5290USD, this post]
by nine_k | 2026-02-28 18:10:16+00:00
More like architects, in the civil engineering sense. Even if you don't pour concrete or drive nails yourself, you have to have a lot of technical understanding, including the low level, to be able to design a building competently. And, very certainly, you have to be able to inspect how the nails are driven and how the bricks are laid, whether your contractors are humans or robots.
by guerrilla | 2026-02-28 18:11:00+00:00
> The world in which America is a military superpower.

No, you missed my point. Iran dies no matter what happens. Better go down after eliminating Israel, taking out a huge % of the world's oil supply and banging up some Americans. Instead they were extremely restrained, squandering their capacities.

> They have been. They've been getting levelled. If the U.S. can staunch the flow of arms to the Houthis, they'll become irrelevant, too.

Incorrect.
by guerrilla | 2026-02-28 18:12:05+00:00
> Houthi and Huzb do not have the organized armies to wage long-term war where they conquer territories.

Hezbollah did. They did it before and they were predicted by all analysts to be able to do it again, which is why Israel took the route they did with the espionage, assassinations and terrorism instead of confronting them on the battlefields.

The Houthis also are doing that right now.
by lo_zamoyski | 2026-02-28 18:12:28+00:00
I an opposed to Trump's unhinged offensive, but let's not fall prey to media narrative. Nobody called similar actions "fascism" before (or they did, as the word is thrown around casually in the US, but then nothing has changed). Similarly, when Obama vastly expanded deportations and the like, nobody cared.

I don't like Trump. At all. I think he's a terrible president on the whole and a shameless opportunist. But I don't like one-sided politics and hypocrisy even more so, and I dislike hysteria. History and long term trends paint us a different picture of current events. Most people's horizons are limited to the shallow, tendentious, cherry-picked, and sensationalist news cycle, unfortunately, regardless of outlet. Should we criticize Trump? Yes. But we should criticize all leadership when they do what they should not be doing.

BTW, the Dept. of War was the original name from 1789 to 1947. Curiously, it was soon after the change to Dept. of Defense that people like Eisenhower began to worry about the Military-Industrial Complex. That should give us pause. The name change conceals the intention, and coincides with a hungry imperial war machine that WWII helped bring into existence. Recall that Americans were largely isolationist before that.
by cstoner | 2026-02-28 18:12:39+00:00
My friend once told me an analogy about modern software engineering that went something along the lines of the following.

There are piles of money just sitting around waiting for someone to pick them up. Unfortunately it's really hard to do because the piles are scattered around and hard for any one person to pick up.

So the best way to coordinate picking up all of these piles of money is to figure out how to convince a bunch of people with autism spectrum disorder to program machines to do it for you.

In this analogy you can get rich by doing one of a few jobs:

* Finding the piles of money (sales)

* Coding robots to pick up the piles of money (engineering)

* Coordinating the above two in come capacity (management)

AI certainly makes it less lucrative to pick up some of these piles because there will be more people picking them up. But will probably also be the case that it will let us pick up piles of money we didn't even know existed before. Or ones that we knew about but were hidden deep inside of sprawling caves that were intractable to search before.

If it turns out that we don't need any coordination to pick up these piles any more, then pretty much everyone is out of a job. Not just software engineers, but pretty much every white collar job. Once that's done it'll only be a matter of time before they can automate away the blue collar jobs, too.

I guess I'm just skeptical that we'll actually automate away all of the white collar jobs.
by frogperson | 2026-02-28 18:12:42+00:00
Im sorry to say the turning point has well passed. The US is a facist country with leaders who will flaunt the rule of law.

Please memorize the 14 points of fascism, you will see examples of this multiple times a day. Its ecerywhere.

https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.html
by adrianzevenster | 2026-02-28 18:12:47+00:00
The Hacker News Pitch
Location: Cape Town, South Africa (UTC+2)
Remote: Yes (Remote only)
Willing to relocate: No / [Optional: Yes, to EU/UK]
Technologies: Java 21+, Spring Boot, Project Reactor (Reactive Streams), Vertex AI / Gemini, ClickHouse, Google Spanner, Kafka, Kubernetes.
Résumé/CV:
Email: a.zevenstar@gmail.com

High-Impact Engineer | AI Orchestration & Distributed Systems

I am a Senior Engineer specializing in building deterministic, production-grade systems on top of non-deterministic LLMs. Most recently, I architected a Document Verification Service extension that handles high-volume bank statement extraction with a focus on auditability and precision.

Key Achievements:

LLM Orchestration: Designed strict JSON schema contracts and Vertex Schema builders for Gemini, ensuring type-safe, structured output from unstructured financial documents.

Confidence Frameworks: Developed a proprietary "template-aware" row-confidence scoring engine. This system aggregates and propagates confidence levels across extraction pipelines to mitigate LLM hallucinations.

Performance Engineering: Implemented "single-page fast paths" and deterministic PDF sampling logic, significantly reducing latency and token costs for multi-page document processing.

Reactive Systems: Deep experience with Project Reactor and WebClient for high-throughput, non-blocking service-to-service communication.

Observability: Built deep-dive extraction analytics using ClickHouse to monitor model performance and confidence drift in real-time.

I am looking for a Staff or Senior role where I can bridge the gap between AI research and production-ready engineering. I bring a "multiplier" mindset to teams, focusing on reducing cognitive complexity and building scalable architecture.
by pindab0ter | 2026-02-28 18:12:55+00:00
This post resonates with me. I recognize everything you said except for the metrics part, since my employer luckily doesn't do that.

It's addictive. You're fast, efficient, you feel like you're in control. All while you're slowly losing grip.

I love how nuanced your takes are. The biggest challenge of this new programming paradigm is not to see how you can use it to its fullest extent. It is to find out what a sustainable pace is, both sort and long term.

It is hard to understate how difficult that is.
Ask HN: If AI boosts productivity so much, why would a company lay anyone off?
by ex-aws-dude | 2026-02-28 18:13:09+00:00
Say hypothetically the productivity boost from AI is 2x per employee and a company has 10,000 employees.

Wouldn't number of employees be a huge point of leverage?

Why would you do a layoff when your 10,000 employees are now equivalent to 20,000

Aren't you technically in the best possible position for growth?
by gigatree | 2026-02-28 18:13:15+00:00
I’m sure you have good intentions, but that view works against the very thing you’re arguing for. Anthropic is leaving a ton of capital on the table, maybe for moral reasons, probably for PR reasons, but whichever it is they’ll have no incentive to scale back the unethical if doing so doesn’t earn them any goodwill because “oh look they stole books they’re just as bad as the AI companies creating tech to bomb civilians”.

The world is a dark place, better to reward any sliver of good than write it off for being tainted.
by jmull | 2026-02-28 18:13:39+00:00
> Being so absolutist is silly but their counter argument is very weak.

The entire point is that being so absolutist is silly.

The comment reflects the previous poster's logic back at them so they (or others) can hopefully see how little sense it makes.

You seem to be trying to see some additional argument about rust being bad/invalid, but there isn't one... The reason that argument is, indeed, "very weak" and "so thin", as you say, is that it isn't even there at all.
by decimalenough | 2026-02-28 18:14:06+00:00
When Hitler invaded Poland, it took all of two days for basically all of Europe to realize that they were about to replay the Great War (which we now call WW1).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarations_of_war_during_Wor...

Of course it took longer for it to blow up into a truly global war (Pearl Harbor etc), but a conflagration across Europe is hardly a "small regional war".
by parpfish | 2026-02-28 18:14:12+00:00
i recently joined a new company.

using ai coding assistants has allowed me to onboard faster because i can take a new ticket and ask the agent to help orient me in the codebase about where to start looking.

BUT the downside is that i'm much slower at building a cohesive mental model of the codebase. this has two problems:

- it encourages continued dependence on the ai tools because its hard to fall back on my own knowledge

- imposter syndrome is magnified 100x
by borzi | 2026-02-28 18:15:06+00:00
> For example, to add pagination to this website, I would read the Jekyll docs, find the right plugin to install, read the sample config, and make the change. Possibly this wouldn’t work, in which case I would Google it, read more, try more stuff, retest, etc. In this process it was hard not to learn things.

How is this any different than building Ikea furniture? If I build my "Minska" cupboard using the step-by-step manual, did I learn something profound?
by Atotalnoob | 2026-02-28 18:15:08+00:00
No, those are the models. They are NOT the same as Claude code/codex.

GitHub copilot agent mode is quite bad, and advanced premium models like opus4.6/codex 5.3 are making it barely usable.

Claude code and codex are night and day comparatively.

Additionally, GitHub copilot admins can enable/disable models. Each model has different ToS, so perhaps their admin has not turned it on.

I would suggest you not immediately insult people with ad hominem attacks.
by rafaelmn | 2026-02-28 18:15:29+00:00
I meant in the physical sense of muscles/physical adaptations. I haven't read/written C++ in 10 years - it would take me a month to get back up to speed. If you never written C++ it would take you at least 6 months/year to get to the same level (depending on what we're comparing here).

Likewise for physical exercise - it took me a year to hit 100kg squat when I started getting into shape 10 years ago. I haven't been very physically active for years but I'd hit 100x5 in a month of starting gym again.
by barrkel | 2026-02-28 18:15:33+00:00
There's another gap, actually. Imprecise specification.

When you need to implement something yourself, you have to make decisions when faced with the reality of turning ideas into code.

An AI agent sometimes surfaces these; and sometimes it just makes a choice.

The risk is tests just embed these decisions as policy in code, without there have been proper consideration.

Often there's a core ambiguity in a conception somewhere, and because of the limited context of an AI, it can implement things one way and then another for the next feature, without actually hitting the inconsistency.