MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Johnny555 | 2026-02-08 09:16:25+00:00
The problem with this is that you don't know what future conflicts will be. You spend years training yourself to use your own "jq" alias and then you find yourself needing to use the "jq" program and you have to remember to prefix it with backslash every time you use it (including when you copy-and-paste a command line from a webpage), or rename your own alias and re-train yourself to use its new name.
by fauigerzigerk | 2026-02-08 09:17:37+00:00
>Somehow I doubt at this point in time they can even fail at something so simple.

I think it depends on your expectations. Writing good documentation is not simple.

Good API documentation should explain how to combine the functions of the API to achieve specific goals. It should warn of incorrect assumptions and potential mistakes that might easily happen. It should explain how potentially problematic edge cases are handled.

And second, good API documentation should avoid committing to implementation details. Simply verbalising the code is the opposite of that. Where the function signatures do not formally and exhaustively define everything the API promises, documentation should fill in the gaps.
by roenxi | 2026-02-08 09:19:39+00:00
> Multi-decade time frame can only be thought of as catastrophic when it comes to change of this magnitude.

If someone moves from Singapore to Poland is that a catastrophe? We'd be talking a smaller temperature delta than that and this is still a theoretical risk. That isn't necessarily something that people worry about beyond saying "it is very hot" or "it is very cold". It doesn't have a lot of implications beyond needing to move crops around and changing building standards (which is achievable over long periods of time).

Now just a 10-15 degree swing isn't the end of the story because if the average temperature crosses 0 that might well be a big problem. I dunno. But it sounds solvable, these aren't particularly scary scenarios being put forward. They're more of the expensive and inconvenient variety.
by manarth | 2026-02-08 09:20:07+00:00
The NotificationListenerService.

It has genuine use-cases such as this DoNotNotify app, but could easily be misused - e.g. malware intercepting a wallet OTP notification and forwarding it to the attacker.

Access to the API is controlled by a specific permission which users have to explicitly enable in "Special app access".

https://developer.android.com/reference/android/service/noti...
by nazgul17 | 2026-02-08 09:20:24+00:00
I've been taking classes for one year when I was in uni, about 15 years ago. I have always had the problem that I would run out of voice after 1-2 songs. My teacher at the time kept saying my problem was that I had to strengthen and use the diaphragm, which I did but only made little progress. Eventually, since every class felt like defeat, I gave up. Did I just not train enough? Likely. Do you have any advice to share?
by lelanthran | 2026-02-08 09:20:35+00:00
> It's entirely possible for prawns fished from the coast of Mozambique to simply...go extinct.

So? That isn't an irreplaceable staple, is it? Those prawns can be replaced by food that is grown in other places that are viable, whether newly viable or always viable is irrelevant.

> For areas with good arable land to be plunged into inhospitably cold temperatures, only for other areas with arable land to be made too hot to reliably support their crops.

I find it unlikely that all areas become non-arable at the same time. Not even the most extreme warnings about climate change go to this extreme.

What is your reasoning for considering a possibility so small that it exceeds all the most extreme models we have?
by CSMastermind | 2026-02-08 09:20:56+00:00
I'd recommend avoiding it for now. It still feels unfinsished and poorly thought out. I have many criticisms of their decisions with regards to game design, but even if you like the direction they went in, the UI is rough, and the actual experience of playing isn't fun.

They're releasing a big update in the spring where they reworked the core gameplay mechanic because so many people disliked it. If nothing else I'd wait until that comes out.
by nntwozz | 2026-02-08 09:22:03+00:00
On a tangent the movie Cold Mountain (2003) was translated to "Åter till Cold Mountain" in Swedish.

Now you may ask, where is the actual translation? They just added Swedish words to the original title (which just means back to Cold Mountain".

Who are these people and how do I apply for a job? It seems like a perfect workplace.
by thomassmith65 | 2026-02-08 09:22:08+00:00
Then maybe Boîte Noire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Box_(2021_film)

or

Das Leben der Anderen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others

I can't think of many contemporary American films that exactly fit the bill (which I interpret as: enthralling, everyday dialogue, without a pop singer's voice on the soundtrack competing for attention, or production like a music video).

Maybe Gone Girl, or Marriage Story, or something.
by AIorNot | 2026-02-08 09:23:06+00:00
I’d like to say its possible

But heres the reality from me- I’m in my 50s and I don't have it in me to grind at the level of 20 year olds to achieve some level of security in an untried business model - and this is someone who has launched 2 AI startups in the past 2 years

In one we got VC funding but I left after setting up their agent platform and tons of AI assisted coding only to not meet impossible deadlines and over-promised AI value to enterprise customers - I was literally working 20 hr days at stretch for 170k salary competing and half benefits against 25 year olds out of stamford with no lives- far lower than the 250+ with stock and benefits I got in my EM role at a big company which now evaporated - I was edged out of that startup role for not delivering “on time”

My second AI startup I cofounded with friends and trusted colleagues its bootstrapped (all of us are over 40) - so we have more experience and better deadlines now but its up to the business gods on how well it will do- crossing my fingers

But its a lot of pressure for sure and I currently have no health insurance and my wife was laid off in December and we lost her benefits

So I wouldn’t call myself optimistic in the end stage capitalistic hellwhole that is modern “middle class” America

I hope a better work model can be found - but having some any salary and medical benefit security would be nice

I went to an AI meetup last week and it was filled with gray hairs - i could sense the desperation as many people I met told me they were laid off recently and trying to dive in

Ironically looking at them it reminded me of those interviews they used to do in Appalachia or something when a town was out of work and advisors came in and said “learn to code instead of mining” (ok I may be exaggerating somewhat but I even know a ex Microsoft manager who had to resort to a go-fundme to keep his family afloat)
by aebtebeten | 2026-02-08 09:23:22+00:00
Overheard: "an אנגלו-סקסונית is someone with really weird ideas about religion"

Does 2022 count? Looks like VVP sent some of his best; not only ABP but also MAG: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leiz5L-B6Vo

EDIT: a Dorn, that can be part of a Baum, but otherwise I'm not getting many hits for А?Р. ЭРР?
by burnt-resistor | 2026-02-08 09:23:57+00:00
Yep. Traditionalists hate renewables and facts. Here in Texas, there's been an absolute boom in solar post snowpocalypse. I'd gladly vote for shifting corn and soy subsidies to renewables, especially as grants for 1-300 MW solar/wind facilities for municipal co-operatives. And for solid state and sodium municipal and infrastructure energy backup and v2g.

And, I think we should heavily tax data centers federally because they're electricity, water, and land extractive and sound pollution vampires hostile to communities they invade (often to the chagrin of locals because of NDA backroom deals with corrupt politicians).. they're tantamount to giant petrochem facilities in "sacrifice zones". The rich people can cry about leaving, as did FDR's friends did, but it's always an empty threat.
by manarth | 2026-02-08 09:24:00+00:00
Android does, at the level of "Allow notifications from app X" and "Block notifications from app X".

DoNotNotify gives granularity and rules (which a specific app may have chosen not to implement).

For example:

"Allow <budget airline app X> to display notifications of gate changes"
"Block <budget airline app X> from displaying advertising notifications"
by spiderfarmer | 2026-02-08 09:25:08+00:00
Calling Reddit a CRUD app isn’t wrong, it’s just vacuous.

It strips away every part that actually makes Reddit hard.

What happens when you sign up?

A CRUD app shows a form and inserts a row.

Reddit runs bot detection, rate limits, fingerprinting, shadow restrictions, and abuse heuristics you don’t even see, and you don’t know which ones, because that knowledge is their moat.

What happens when you upvote or downvote?

CRUD says “increment a counter.”

Reddit says “run a ranking algorithm refined over years, with vote fuzzing, decay, abuse detection, and intentional lies in the UI.” As the number you see is not the number stored.

What happens when you add a comment?

CRUD says “insert record.”

Reddit applies subreddit-specific rules, spam filters, block lists, automod logic, visibility rules, notifications, and delayed or conditional propagation.

What happens when you post a URL?

CRUD stores a string.

Reddit fingerprints it, deduplicates it, fetches metadata, detects spam domains, applies subreddit constraints, and feeds it into ranking and moderation systems.

Yes, anyone can scaffold a CRUD app and style it like Reddit.

But calling that a clone is like putting white lines on your lawn and calling it the Bernabeu.

You haven’t cloned the system, only its silhouette.
by mike_hearn | 2026-02-08 09:25:25+00:00
> Why pay an expensive architect to design your new office building, when AI will do it for peanuts?

Will it? AI is getting good at some parts of programming because of RLVR. You can test architectural designs automatically to some extent but not entirely, because people tend to want unique buildings that stand out (if it weren't the case architects would have already become a niche profession due to everyone using prefabs all the time). At some point an architectural design has to be built and you can't currently simulate real building sites at high speed inside a datacenter. This use case feels marginal.

There's going to be a lot of cases like this. The safe jobs are ones where there's little training data available online, the job has a large component of unarticulated experience or intuition, and where you can't verify purely in software whether the work artifact is correct or not.
by whilenot-dev | 2026-02-08 09:31:12+00:00
...so what? "Most stories about politics" are considered Off-Topic, as per the guidelines[0], and some members favor the flag- over the hide-button more than I'd like. It's still on place 19 on the active list[1], and a far cry from any practiced censorship like on Reddit, where stuff just gets [deleted] out of existence.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/active
by ted_bunny | 2026-02-08 09:32:11+00:00
Exactly why they are singled out for chilling effect. They cannot retaliate substantially.

Evidence is not easy to find on these topics. It's espionage for christ's sake. You need to analyze material incentives and be familiar with the methods used. You cannot expect the media to hand you the answers, because that is not the purpose of the media especially on topics like this.
by impossiblefork | 2026-02-08 09:34:44+00:00
Ah, I don't think that's the right solution.

I think the right solution is strict test-based admissions, like in Sweden, and forbidding schools from admitting other than on test results. In addition to that, making things like getting top government jobs also test based. In Sweden we do this for diplomats. You have to get a university degree, but whether you get in doesn't depend primarily on prestige or interviews, it depends on whether you pass a somewhat difficult test.

In this way you ensure that what university you went to doesn't really matter, and over time what I imagine is a more distributed university system where co-operation with institutions and someone's particular ideas matters more than what institutions he's associated with, and where the extreme prestige of particular schools disappears.

I think it's especially important to eliminate the hoop jumping, so that people can know that, as long as the extreme prestige universities exist, they can get into them if they perform well enough on exams, with nothing being able to interfere with that-- no individual judgement, no subjectivity, no hoop you haven't jumped. Just pure merit, like the Swedish or French system.
by tgv | 2026-02-08 09:34:59+00:00
Wrt to the remarks about this being bad design: not everything is meant for (immediate) usability. Sometimes, a web page functions or doubles as marketing material.

And there's more than "minimal number of interactions" functionality. People generally like good looking stuff. While it may be superfluous, it may feel more pleasing than yet another dark gray text on a light grey square. It may even help remembering navigation, since it's easier to remember deviating design.
by riedel | 2026-02-08 09:35:04+00:00
Even if a large conspiracy isn't involved, I believe that biases in worldview can contribute to these effects. However, I still think it's important to inform people of things they might be missing and hold media accountable for their choices, regardless of whether those choices are random or unknowingly biasedWe need to be careful not to fall into the allure of "fake media" in our outrage, as this could ultimately benefit populists in the long run.
by coronapl | 2026-02-08 09:35:58+00:00
Give way to people crossing the street.

I come from Mexico, where millions of people walk and take public transport every day. Unfortunately, poor infrastructure and our mobility culture hurt pedestrians the most. Sometimes people have to wait several minutes just to cross a street. Years ago, a teacher told me that giving way to pedestrians was a simple action to make the world better. It makes a real difference for those who don't have the privilege of being in a car. This stuck with me, and I try to do it whenever possible. It might not apply everywhere with better infrastructure, but I find it to be a small yet meaningful action.
by burnt-resistor | 2026-02-08 09:36:00+00:00
There's many ways to do it: JMP (absolute or relative), NOP if fall-through is acceptance, or less favorably: invert the JMPcc such that invalid input becomes valid.

If I were a paranoid DOS-compatible publisher of expensive software, I would add layers of checks:

- checksum the entire executable on disk, at different points

- checksum the entire program resident in memory, at different points

- use a serial number and activation verification system based on public key cryptography and hardware attributes, and spread those checks around critical functionality. Store the activation code in the end of the root directory as phantom deleted file entries.

Ultimately though, does the increase in hassles and decrease in goodwill create more sales than it pushes away? I'd argue that intentionally no-DRM/no-cp software (GOG style) encourages brand goodwill and loyalty and there's even a nonzero conversion funnel from warez to paying customers. Cp is, thus, mostly an exercise in the practice of footgunnery by performative restrictions that do not deter technically-inclined persons. But like a sign that says "restroom for customers only", it doesn't add positive value. If they had instead spent more engineering time on the software and making the software priced for normal humans, they would have had more customers and more profits.
by mna_ | 2026-02-08 09:36:17+00:00
Your allies tried to warn you guys more than a decade ago:

>According to the report, GCHQ began passing information about contacts between Trump campaign officials and Russian operatives in late 2015. Agencies from Australia, Germany, Estonia, France, the Netherlands and Poland also passed on information until summer 2016.

https://www.politico.eu/article/british-spies-discovered-tru...
by prmoustache | 2026-02-08 09:36:24+00:00
EVs are better than ICE in term of local emissions, however they do not solve all environmental issues.

The answer is fewer cars and more shared transportation. People always mention lack of public transport possibilities, affordability and rentability but the offer would develop immediately and would be much more efficient than what we have now if private passenger motorized vehicles weren't allowed as it would reduce the overall traffic significantly if only emergency, public and good transports were allowed.
by IshKebab | 2026-02-08 09:36:59+00:00
That's only really true for solo projects. For example I worked in a company on a C++ SDK for a while and it was written by one of those clever people who has zero taste in software development and thinks you have to use GoF patterns everywhere. The god object was a CRTP inheriting from about 20 templated base classes.

I spent about a year trying to sort out that mess and then quit.

To be clear I would still always pick C++ over C because C makes simple stuff (strings and containers mainly) waaaay more painful than they should be. But I also don't really agree with the "C++ is simple - just don't use the complex bits!" argument.

Anyway it's kind of academic now because 99% of the time Zig is an obviously better choice than C and Rust is an obviously better choice than C++.
by wundersam | 2026-02-08 09:39:01+00:00
The railway comparison is apt, but the pace is striking. JPMorgan calculates tech needs 650B in new annual revenue just to break even on ROI. That's an extraordinary bet.The shortage effects are real and measurable. But capital doesn't easily substitute — you can't just redirect 700B into infrastructure without immediately hitting bottlenecks in skilled labor and materials.I use LLMs daily for coding. They're helpful for scaffolding. But the gap between "useful tool" and "justify restructuring the entire economy" is massive. If this is a bubble, the legacy won't just be stranded GPUs — it'll be years of diverted resources and accelerated power consolidation. The railway boom left railways. What does an AI boom leave if the returns don't materialize?
by matheus-rr | 2026-02-08 09:40:20+00:00
The intermediate product argument is the strongest point in this thread. When we went from assembly to C, the debugging experience changed fundamentally. When we went from C to Java, how we thought about memory changed. With LLMs, I'm still debugging the same TypeScript and Python I was before.

The generation step changed. The maintenance step didn't. And most codebases spend 90% of their life in maintenance mode.

The real test of whether prompts become a "language" is whether they become versioned, reviewed artifacts that teams commit to repos. Right now they're closer to Slack messages than source files. Until prompt-to-binary is reliable enough that nobody reads the intermediate code, the analogy doesn't hold.
by HumanOstrich | 2026-02-08 09:40:31+00:00
I beg to differ, and so do a lot of other people. But if you're locked into this mindset, I can't help you.

Also, Codex isn't a model, so you don't even understand the basics.

And you spent "several hours" on it? I wish I could pick up useful skills by flailing around for a few hours. You'll need to put more effort into learning how to use CLI agents effectively.

Start with understanding what Codex is, what models it has available, and which one is the most recent and most capable for your usage.
by tengwar2 | 2026-02-08 09:40:53+00:00
I used Modula-2 to build an automated lab system. It worked, but I found myself being annoyed by small features. For instance the type conversion keywords seemed to have no pattern to them, and the case sensitivity meant you were always hammering shift. Some good ideas, but I'm not sure that the problems of the time and the size of the available computers made them particularly useful.
by matheus-rr | 2026-02-08 09:41:15+00:00
The "junior dev" analogy is the one I keep coming back to, but the part people miss is the review surface area problem.

When a human junior writes code, they leave breadcrumbs of their thinking — commit messages, PR descriptions, comments explaining why they chose approach A over B. You can reconstruct their reasoning from the artifact trail.

Agents don't do this naturally. You get a diff with no context for why it went that direction. So the reviewer has to reverse-engineer the thinking from the code alone, which is actually harder than reviewing human code because there are no "tells" — no familiar coding style, no consistent patterns that hint at the developer's mental model.

The semi-auto approach mentioned upthread works precisely because it solves this: you were there for every decision, so there's nothing to reconstruct. The productivity loss from staying in the loop is offset by the time you save not having to audit opaque changes after the fact.
by latexr | 2026-02-08 09:41:30+00:00
It is fascinating that someone can tell an obvious joke with an obvious point, where the characters themselves spell out what’s wrong, and yet we can be certain someone will genuinely believe and defend that “no no, actually eating a random pile of shit you found on the floor makes sense and is worth it”.

Has it occurred to you, especially since one of the economists in the joke admits they feel they ate shit for nothing, that they actually do not feel the exercise was worth it? Have you never spent money on something, thinking it would be worth it, then afterwards realised it was a waste of money? Have you also never taken a job and then realised “I didn’t charge enough for the trouble”?

I’m reminded of a bit of news I heard a while back, where one teenager challenged a friend to eat rat shit they found on the street. The eater died shortly after, because the poop contained rat poison. I doubt any of them found it worth it.
by trinix912 | 2026-02-08 09:41:46+00:00
The Xcode interface up to v3 was an even bigger mess. Interface Builder and Xcode were two separate programs, you'd quickly fill your screen with 15 little windows that you had to constantly drag around, open, close, switch between... The IB didn't even have a canvas so you'd have all your screens inside a NIB just floating around the code windows, the inspector panels, the controls toolbox... Want to switch to this or that IB screen? Move all other windows out of the way, then bring the inspector and toolbox back, and so on. Nowadays you just Cmd-Shift-] a few times.

Putting it all into a single window was a good idea IMO, they should just make it more flexible - allow sidebars/panels to be reorganized and windows to be dragged out of the main window.
by whilenot-dev | 2026-02-08 09:41:57+00:00
FYI [flagged] articles are still present on the front[0] list. I'd suggest you check out the active[1] or the newest[2] list instead.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/front

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/active

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest
by mike_hearn | 2026-02-08 09:42:44+00:00
Yes it's only a prediction based on what I'm seeing. And I'm not disagreeing with the investors that there's overinvestment right now. Prices need to rise, spending on R&D needs to fall for this stuff to make economic sense. I'm only arguing that there's plenty of demand, and assuming price rises happen smoothly over not too short of a period, any demand destruction at the lower levels will be quickly counter-balanced by demand creation at higher value-add levels.

It's also possible non-tech industries just have a collective imagination failure and can't find use cases for AI, but I doubt it.