MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by locknitpicker | 2026-02-08 19:40:57+00:00
> (...) where doing some useless work is better than doing no work (...)

This take expresses a fundamental misunderstanding of the whole problem domain. There is a workload comprised of hundreds of processes, some of which multithreaded, that need to be processed. That does not change nor go away. You have absolutely no suggestion that any of those hundreds of processes is "useless". What you will certainly have are processes that will be waiting for IO, but waiting for a request to return a response is not useless.
by glaslong | 2026-02-08 19:41:01+00:00
I don't really think management is good or bad, just different, and not really for me. The management career ladder though I do feel goes higher in large organizations than small.

For myself it is the hands-on work I find most fulfilling unfortunately. I have some sort of brain worm that makes me want to practice all the new things at home/weekend if work isn't letting me. I'm sure it'll burn me out at some point, but to paraphrase a famous creep: I keep getting older, my brainworm stays the same age.
by bitwize | 2026-02-08 19:41:19+00:00
This is what you get when a programmer designs a system.

The end user wants to be able to just pick up a computer from Best Buy and have it work, out of the box.

Microsoft can't even conceptualize why you would want to run anything but the Windows that came with the machine. If the expected Windows kernel and files aren't there, or have been altered, that is evidence of malicious tampering—malware that must be stopped. (I'm deliberately steelmanning their perspective here.)

Streaming services want a secure content path. Game vendors want protection against cheating. In order to comply with local/regional/national laws, web sites need you to verify your age, and they need to know your computer is not lying (remote attestation). Nobody wants to be hacked.

The incentives for everyone else besides techies align against techies getting to run arbitrary code on their devices. The Secure Boot system is working precisely as designed.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-08 19:41:28+00:00
Fish metabolize and concentrate the oil.

Cows eat grass for protein, we can't really skip the middle man and eat grass to get protein.

I don't know if it's true, but it wouldn't be unusual for there to be benefit from getting omega 3 from fish rather than algea because of something like this. AFAIK, we mostly only know about the benefits of eating fish.
by jlarocco | 2026-02-08 19:42:03+00:00
I have mixed feelings about .Net.

I think C# and .Net are objectively better to use than Java or C++.

But the tooling and documentation is kind of a mess. Do you build with the "dotnet" command, or the "msbuild" command? When should you prefer "nuget restore" over "dotnet restore"? Should you put "<RestorePackagesConfig>true</RestorePackagesConfig>" in the .csproj instead? What's the difference between a reference and using Nuget to install a package? What's the difference between "Framework" and "Core"? Why, in 2026, do I still need to tell it not to prefer 32-bit binaries?

It's getting better, but there's still 20 years of documentation, how-to articles, StackOverflow Q&A, blogs, and books telling you to do old, broken, and out of date stuff, and finding good information about the specific version you're using can be difficult.

Admittedly, my perspective is skewed because I had never used C# and .Net before jumping in to a large .Net Framework project with hundreds of sub-projects developed over 15-20 years.
by hnlmorg | 2026-02-08 19:42:05+00:00
Except it's not. Traditional algorithms are well understood because they're deterministic formulas. We know what the output is if we know the input. The surprises that happen with traditional algorithms are when they're applied in non-traditional scenarios as an experiment.

Whereas with LLMs, we get surprised even when using them in an expected way. This is why so much research happens investigating how these models work even after they've been released to the public. And it's also why prompt engineering can feel like black magic.
by the_pwner224 | 2026-02-08 19:42:29+00:00
> We haven't got more battery life

15 years ago even the high end smartphones could barely make it half the day before dying. Now all-day battery life is the norm, and the Chinese phones with the latest battery tech can easily last 2 days (Samsung, Google, Apple are very behind here).

Laptop battery life isn't even comparable to what it was 20 years ago.

And software getting slower doesn't change the fact that our material goods (pixels, bytes, flops) have improved orders of magnitude while getting cheaper.
by bitwize | 2026-02-08 19:42:36+00:00
> IMO systems should be shipped in "Setup Mode" by default with no keys preinstalled. On first boot which ever OS you decide to install should be able to enroll its keys.

Nobody wants to "install" an operating system. Computers should come with an OS preinstalled and ready to run. Everything else is a dead letter in terms of the marketplace.
by coldtea | 2026-02-08 19:43:14+00:00
Doesn't have to be "a clear definition", a rough defition within some quite lax boundaries is fine.

You can just say to Claude for example "Make me an app that accepts daily weight measurements and plots them in a graph" and it will make one. Tell it to use tha framework or this pattern, and it will do so too. Ask for more features as you go, in similar vague language. At some point your project is done.

Even before AI the vast majority of software is not written with any "clear definition" to begin with, there's some rought architecture and idea, and people code as they go, and often have to clarify or rebuilt things to get them as they want, or discover they want something slightly different or the initial design had some issues and needs changing.
by athrowaway3z | 2026-02-08 19:43:54+00:00
That was very vague, but I kinda get where they're coming from.

I'm now using pi (the thing openclaw is built on) and within a few days i build a tmux plugin and semaphore plugin^1, and it has automated the way _I_ used to use Claude.

The things I disagree with OP is: The usefulness of persistent memory beyond a single line in AGENTS.md "If the user says 'next time' update your AGENTS.md", the use of long-running loops, or the idea that everything can be resolved via chat - might be true for simple projects, but any original work needs me to design the 'right' approach ~5% of the time.

That's not a lot, but AI lets you create load-bearing tech-debt within hours, at which point you're stuck with a lot of shit and you dont know how far it got smeared.

[1]: https://github.com/offline-ant
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-02-08 19:43:57+00:00
>almost too good to be true

Since the Lithium battery prices dropped, there are many Sodium battery companies simply abandoning the research or shuttering. Not a good sign when smart people jump ship.

The Na cells also have lower energy-density, and currently fewer viable charge cycles. One can still buy evaluation samples, but it takes time to figure out if the technology will make economic sense.

Best regards =3
by jrjeksjd8d | 2026-02-08 19:43:59+00:00
"The Left Hand of Darkness" was published in 1969. I'm a transgender person in my 30s and Le Guin's writing makes me emotional every time I reread it. The ideas about gender and sexuality are more mainstream than they were almost 60 years ago, but the future is not evenly distributed and I think TLHOD would be eye opening for a lot of readers. Le Guin's prose and world building also place her among the best science fiction writers of all time.
by rcxdude | 2026-02-08 19:44:04+00:00
The CO2 for the power you use (directly and indirectly) is much, much more than what you breathe out. And heat pumps can supply heating without CO2 emissions. Planting trees is good but it's only a net carbon sink on an infeasibly large scale and only if you also cut down and bury the trees periodically.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-02-08 19:44:04+00:00
> It's really funny to me that Microsoft's attempt to finally stamp out desktop Linux once and for all

SecureBoot exists on servers too. And that's the domain of Linux, not Windows.

Microsoft should never have had so much influence in SecureBoot but there's no way they're getting rid of Linux on servers. Microsoft is mostly irrelevant there.

> The continued Linux desktop solely relies on antivirus vendors writing crappy insecure software. So we'll be fine forever.

That's also a weird take. It's antivirus vendors who are going to be fine forever: they rely on Microsoft to write crappy insecure software. And that is a given.
by zahlman | 2026-02-08 19:44:07+00:00
It seems hard to square that with the fact of the files being released, or indeed of the FBI being able to obtain files in the first place. You'd have to suppose that "the ruling class" expected/expects to be able to tank vast hordes of deeply obsessed Internet randoms poring through all that data, but not be able to tank Epstein himself speaking publicly.

On the other hand, as far as I can recall, nothing significant happened after the Panama Papers, so.
by wasmainiac | 2026-02-08 19:45:32+00:00
> If you would like to grieve, I invite you to grieve with me.

I’m not against AI in itself, but the current implementation (read market) can eat my shiny metal … I got kids to feed and bills to pay. Yes AI was all about post scarcity. Hiring in our industry is already feeling the brunt of AI, where is the UBI? Where is our soft landing? I’m too old to learn XYZ skill if I get laid off, it will be life changing, and for what? For some rich person to be richer while simultaneously destroying the climate and my energy bill?

I would push back, but I do not know how. Hope for the market to pop I guess.
by xrd | 2026-02-08 19:45:48+00:00
If you go to Ebert's wikipedia, you can almost miss the link to the screenplay he wrote:

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

This was co-produced with Russ Meyer, who basically made a bunch films which are as close to porn as you can get without being technically porn. He also made a ton of porn films as well. I haven't seen any of them, but many are now cult films. It feels debatable that he intended these to become cultural relics.

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

I was surprised to see Roger Ebert was involved in that film! Gene Siskel, his long time partner, rated Valley of the Dolls 0 out of 4 stars, which is funny.
by ml0dy | 2026-02-08 19:46:13+00:00
Location: Poland (Europe)
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Swift, SwiftUI, Objective-C, UIKit, Combine, RxSwift, AI tools (Codex, Claude Code)
Résumé/CV: Available upon request
Email: iosdeveurope@gmail.com

Product-focused iOS engineer specializing in high-scale B2C apps. 10 years of experience in mobile development.

Experience gained in fast-growing startups with quick iteration cycles and larger, well-established teams.

Responsible for building teams and leading projects.

I'd love to work on iOS apps but I'm open to work in other technologies as well.
by eddyg | 2026-02-08 19:46:16+00:00
The iPhone automatically goes into BFU (Before First Unlock) after 72 hours of inactivity (it actually reboots the phone). This can’t be disabled.

In addition, there are additional restrictions where your passcode will be required. For example, if the passcode has not been used to unlock the device in the last six days and Face ID has not unlocked the device in the last eight hours, then you must use a passcode to access the device (in other words, biometric unlock is automatically disabled).

If you've ever wondered why you've had to enter your passcode after a good night's sleep and haven't entered your passcode recently, that's probably why!

Given these built-in precautions, a click-bait headline like this is a bit excessive for most people.
by skaul | 2026-02-08 19:47:32+00:00
Programming languages need to give the developer a way to iterate (map, fold, for-loop, whatever) over a collection of items. Over time we've come up with more elegant ways of doing this, but as a programmer, until LLMs, you've still had to be actively involved in the control logic. My point is that a developer's relationship with the code is very different now, in a way that wasn't true with previous low-to-high level language climbs.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-02-08 19:48:05+00:00
Half an hour of typing would be above average attention span for the youth these days. That's pretty much how Pomodoro Timers start out for people who can't focus at all.

>if the environment is too loud, make it quieter.

we shifted to open office setups over the decades. There may not even be anyway to make things "quieter" externally.
by jaytaylor | 2026-02-08 19:48:15+00:00
I'm testing a theory that large-scale (LoC) generated projects in Rust tend to have fewer functional bugs compared to e.g. Go or Java because Rust as a language is a little stricter.

I've not yet formed a full opinion or conclusion, but in general I'm starting to prefer Rust.

Re: generalizing mocks, it sounds interesting but after getting full-fidelity clones of so many multi-billion dollar SaaS offerings, I really like it and am hooked. It pays nice dividends for developing using agentic coders at high scale. In a few more model releases having your own exhaustive DTU could become trivial.
by rorylaitila | 2026-02-08 19:48:35+00:00
I don't know if this is the right solution, but I appreciate the direction. It's clear that AI slop is trading on people's good names and network reputation. Poisoning the well. The dead internet is here. In multiple domains people are looking for a solution to "are you someone/something worthy of my emotional investment." I don't think code can be held to be fully AI-free, but we need a way to check that they are empathy-full.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-02-08 19:48:53+00:00
what does space-y mean in this context? Spacey, as in trippy (vernacular definition), in the way that Phillip K. Dick is? Or set in outer space?

If the second, there was a lot of sci-fi set in space for decades before The Left Hand of Darkness, and the cultural focus of that book and a lot of the new wave of science fiction writers of that time was a reaction against the outdated space focused science fiction of the previous generations.
by JoshTriplett | 2026-02-08 19:49:47+00:00
> I don't think that trust is easily transferable between projects

Not easily, but I could imagine a project deciding to trust (to some degree) people vouched for by another project whose judgement they trust. Or, conversely, denouncing those endorsed by a project whose judgement they don't trust.

In general, it seems like a web of trust could cross projects in various ways.
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-02-08 19:49:56+00:00
They've got that information scattered around a few pages. The Help page says they use (a modified version of) Datamuse for lookup, with Wikipedia, Wiktionary and WordNet providing dictionary definitions. The Datamuse API (https://datamuse.com/api/) uses a variety of GOFAI databases, plus word2vec: it's all pre-2017 tech. OneLook additionally uses https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.02783 for one of its filters (added 2022): more details can be found on the Datamuse blog: https://www.datamuse.com/blog/. https://web.archive.org/web/20160507022201/http://www.oneloo... confirms the "longer queries" support (which you described as "LLM-like") was added in 2016, so it can't possibly be using LLMs; though I'm not sure how it does work. There may be some hints in the OneLook newsletter (e.g. https://onelook.com/newsletter/issue-10/ (10 July 2025?) cryptically notes that "Microdefinitions are algorithmically generated […] they go through a series of automated cross-checks against public domain dictionaries, and the suspicious ones are vetted by humans"), but the newsletter isn't about that, so I doubt there's much information there.
by zahlman | 2026-02-08 19:50:27+00:00
> What are you working on?

Myself, mostly. Trying to wrestle with realizing how much time I've not been spending on my supposedly main project (PAPER, a pure-Python ~(pip/pipx replacement), from scratch with an emphasis on simplicity and elegance) and questioning whether it's really worth doing.

> Any new ideas that you're thinking about?

Way too many. Writing todo lists is part of working on myself.
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-08 19:50:31+00:00
You shouldn't lose an ASN or PI block, they are registered to you at RIPE, only managed by the LIR and can be transferred to another LIR in exceptional or routine circumstances. I think you'll have to pay another fee though.

A PA block is just part of a LIR's block that they give you permission to use, so I doubt you could keep that if they went out of business, but maybe RIPE has a procedure for it.
by christoph123 | 2026-02-08 19:51:07+00:00
https://donethat.ai/profile/christoph

An AI based time tracker: reconstructs your day from whatever it sees you doing. Screenshot based but never stores them.

https://donethat.ai/data

The same tech stack is pretty easily adaptable to openclaw tracking. If anybody would like to try, DM

Also looking into AI based security tools for monitoring security of DoneThat. Thinking of using zeropath would love to hear if people tried them / have other suggestions
by aurareturn | 2026-02-08 19:51:28+00:00
Great post. I have observed the same thing. On Reddit investment subs, the vast majority of posters believe that there is an AI value bubble and it has "peaked" or close to it. They're waiting for AI companies to collapse. They're saying OpenAI is a scam or that the AI data center build out is based on fake demand.

Meanwhile, I'm like you, using AI to do everything from automating my work to building a relationship app for me and my partner. I'm definitely an advanced user.

I use this misinformation to my advantage by investing heavily in AI companies now. I believe what I can do today will be made easy for more people in a few months.
by nharada | 2026-02-08 19:51:29+00:00
This is awesome and I'm really happy to see this progress. Landing a new chemistry in a production car THIS YEAR is some crazy velocity, especially compared to where other Na-Ion batteries are in the development cycle elsewhere. Is anyone else even close to having a car on the road with their cells?

The reason this is so exciting for me personally is for stationary energy. Because the raw materials are so abundant and have good cold weather performance, both grid and home level energy storage costs should come down significantly as this is commercialized further.
by djoldman | 2026-02-08 19:51:40+00:00
For calculating price changes over time, there will always be the question: "is this the same product as earlier?"

Without a reasonableness factor, prices can't be compared for anything. An egg from a chicken in 1940 is different from one in 2026. If we want to be pedantic, every egg is different.

But I think it's pretty uncontroversial that the prices of TVs, cell phones, and most appliances, with similar features, have fallen considerably over the last few decades.
by johnvanommen | 2026-02-08 19:51:42+00:00
Great summary.

Art Bell is another one:

He was on at one in the morning, and a big chunk of his audience was calling in to the show drunk or high. 99% of the audience knew it was fake.

And twenty years later, the conspiracy stories live on, via YouTube, but without the CONTEXT that the Art Bell show was broadcasting to a VERY niche audience.
by snailmailman | 2026-02-08 19:51:47+00:00
It is not super easy to get around that tech. It used to be easier a long time ago. Apple patches the methods every time they can, and have made hardware adjustments in attempt to make it as hard as possible. A lot of these methods involve tricking the counter so it doesnt increment at all, or somehow rolling it back. If the phone isnt set to wipe after 10 attempts, tricking the timer that time has passed would be enough.

Im not sure if anyone other than Cellebrite knows the exact details of what they are doing. (If they can even unlock latest iPhones that are properly secured. I’m seeing a recent article that implies recently unlocked iPhones had biometrics enabled) I wouldn’t be surprised if their techniques involved disassembling the phone, and tampering with every connection of the chips involved, or depowering them in weird ways as they are counting attempts, or even desoldering and transferring the chips to other boards. I suspect that if apple knew and could patch the method, they would.

It’s impressive that it is so hard to get into iPhones imo. People use 6 digit passcodes to lock their entire digital life. That would be considered horrendously insecure for anything that isn’t an iPhone. You can (and should) increase it to a full password. But a lot of people don’t.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-08 19:52:37+00:00
> trust-based systems only work if they carry risk. Your own score should be linked to the people you "vouch for" or "denounce"

This is a graph search. If the person you’re evaluating vouches for people those you vouch for denounce, then even if they aren’t denounced per se, or vice versa, their denounced vouch for people you vouch for, you have gained information about how trustworthy you would find that person.
by jonathanlydall | 2026-02-08 19:52:56+00:00
“Not my job” award winner.

We use a “Managed Azure DevOps Pool”. This allows you to use Azure VM types of your choosing for build agents, but they can also still use the exact same images as the regular managed build agents which works well for us since we have no desire to manage the OS of our agent (doing updates, etc), but we get to choose beefier hardware specs.

An annoying limitation though is that Microsoft’s images only work on “Gen 1” VMs, which limits available VM types.

Someone posted on one of Microsoft’s forums or GitHub repositories to please update the images to also work on Gen 2 VMs, I can’t remember for sure right now which forum, was probably the “Azure Managed DecOps Pools” forum.

Reply was “we can’t do anything about this, go post in forum for other team, issue closed”.

As far as I’m concerned, they’re all Microsoft Azure, why should people have to make another post, at the very least move the issue to the correct place, or even better, internally take it up with the other team since it’s severely crippling your own “product”.

Useless and lazy employees.
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by TallSession9532 | 2026-02-08 19:53:34+00:00
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