MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by f30e3dfed1c9 | 2026-02-08 20:02:30+00:00
"Also, having the garage open/door unlock as you pull up feels like magic, and I never get tired of it."

I pull into my driveway, press a button on a $15 remote, and the garage door is opened by a thing that is worth about $200. Nothing "smart" about it, and hard to see how being "smart" would improve it.

I get that some people seem to like the idea, but I have just never really understood the appeal of "smart home" stuff. I mean, "for the low, low price of several thousand dollars, we can make it so you don't have to flip light switches anymore!" is just really not an appealing offer. Flipping light switches is not a problem.
by Karliss | 2026-02-08 20:03:02+00:00
It's not that different from "real 3d" renderers. Especially in deferred rendering pipelines the rasterizer creates a bunch of buffers for depth map, normal map, color, etc but main shaders are running on those 2d buffers. That's the beauty of it parts operating with 3d triangles are kept simple simple and the expensive lighting shaders run once on flat 2d images with 0 overdraw. The shaders don't care whether normal map buffer came from 3d geometry which was rasterized just now, prerendered some time ago or the mix of 2. And even in forward rendering pipelines the fragment shader is operating on implicit 2d pixels created by vertex shaders and rasterizer from "real 3d" data.

The way I look at it if the input and math in the shader is working with 3d vectors its a 3d shader. Whether there is also a 3d rasterizer is a separate question.

Modern 3d games are exploiting it in many different ways. Prerendering a 3D model from multiple views might sound like cheating but use of imposters is a real technique used by proper 3d engines.
by D-Machine | 2026-02-08 20:03:28+00:00
It's also important to handle cases where the word patterns (or token patterns, rather) have a negative correlation with the patterns in reality. There are some domains where the majority of content on the internet is actually just wrong, or where different approaches lead to contradictory conclusions.

E.g. syllogistic arguments based on linguistic semantics can lead you deeply astray if you those arguments don't properly measure and quantify at each step.

I ran into this in a somewhat trivial case recently, trying to get ChatGPT to tell me if washing mushrooms ever really actually matters practically in cooking (anyone who cooks and has tested knows, in fact, a quick wash has basically no impact ever for any conceivable cooking method, except if you wash e.g. after cutting and are immediately serving them raw).

Until I forced it to cite respectable sources, it just repeated the usual (false) advice about not washing (i.e. most of the training data is wrong and repeats a myth), and it even gave absolute nonsense arguments about water percentages and thermal energy required for evaporating even small amounts of surface water as pushback (i.e. using theory that just isn't relevant when you actually properly quantify). It also made up stuff about surface moisture interfering with breading (when all competent breading has a dredging step that actually won't work if the surface is bone dry anyway...), and only after a lot of prompts and demands to only make claims supported by reputable sources, did it finally find McGee's and Kenji Lopez's actual empirical tests showing that it just doesn't matter practically.

So because the training data is utterly polluted for cooking, and since it has no ACTUAL understanding or model of how things in cooking actually work, and since physics and chemistry are actually not very useful when it comes to the messy reality of cooking, LLMs really fail quite horribly at producing useful info for cooking.
by throw1235435 | 2026-02-08 20:03:43+00:00
Software, and most STEM based jobs, have a lot of determinism and verifiability + some way to reduce the cost of failure so brute force iteration can cover up the remaining. There is often "a correct answer". They've also yet to be truly disrupted until now which makes them particularly vulnerable than any other job.

Most jobs don't have the same level of verification and/or repeatability. Some factors include:

* Physical constraints: Even the jobs that have productive output if they are physical it will take a long time for AI and more importantly energy density to catch up. Robots have a while to go as well - in the end human hands and your metabolism/energy density will be worth more than your brain/intelligence.

* Cost of failure/can't repeat: For things like building the cost of failure is high (e.g. disposal, cleanup, more resources, etc) -> even 70% of a "building bench" benchmark would be completely inadequate without low cost to repeat. Many jobs are also already largely automated but scaled (e.g. mining, manufacturing, etc) - they've already gone through the wave.

* Human need for its own sake: Other jobs cater not just for productive output, but for some human need where it hasn't been made more efficient ever (e.g. care jobs). There are jobs that a human is more effective in the medium term because the receiver needs it from a human.

No -> this just affects white collar STEM based roles. Thinking we are in it together is just another form of "cope" sadly. There's a rational reason why others have optimism while we SWE's are now full of anxiety and dread.

For the people who it doesn't affect given their current place in many societies (nurses, builders, etc etc) there will be little sympathy.
by tfirst | 2026-02-08 20:03:55+00:00
The most interesting finding is that the non-DHA effect is much stronger than the DHA effect. This doesn't align with the mechanistic explanation. Either this this is a novel and interesting result, or it's more evidence that we're just measuring wealth and health consciousness.

Observational studies like these are useful for guiding future research, but, on their own, they're essentially useless for informing lifestyle changes.
by josephg | 2026-02-08 20:04:02+00:00
:( I get this from time to time, where people think my writing is at least partially AI generated. I wonder if it’s worth trying to change my writing style to avoid the stigma. If I hand wrote a CV, it would suck to be dumped in with AI generated slop. More small pithy sentences? or throw in some spelling and grammar mistakes? Bleh.
by gambiting | 2026-02-08 20:04:20+00:00
You mean EVs? Yeah, none that I'm aware of. But petrol/diesel cars? Loads of them. Even my 400bhp Volvo XC60 will easily do 650 miles on one tank of fuel. A diesel one will do 700-800. And a diesel Passat will go over 1000 miles on a tank without trying. Hell, even my basic 1.6dCI Qashqai could do 700 miles on its 55 litre tank
by cat-whisperer | 2026-02-08 20:04:35+00:00
> We’ll miss the feeling of holding code in our hands

I agree, I started feeling this a few months ago, where I was only writing the architecture and abstractions and letting AI fill in the gaps. It seems in the next few months it could probably do more than that. But is it so bad, I agree that I can't really mold an entire pot by my hand any more. But, if you ask AI to do it, it will create a pot with cracks in it and it would be your job to either plaster it of fill gold in those cracks.

I feel coding is going to be similar to kintsugi after this is all over
Ask HN: What to do instead of giving up on tech
by moon2 | 2026-02-08 20:04:45+00:00
I was fired from the fintech I used to work for last November, being a senior site reliability engineer. I was already pretty unmotivated about working in tech since ChatGPT appeared, and the emotional burden of being fired just made things worse. Even though I love computers and computer science (and infrastructure, my area of expertise), I grew to hate the tech market so much. Nothing I did seemed to bring me any joy or brainfood and nothing I did seemed good enough.

Finding a job is very bad. The first months I had only rejections, some didn't even mask that were made by AIs (one day I applied on a Friday night and got a rejection on Saturday morning).

When January started, I started to land the first interviews, some on FAANG companies. Even though I applied for jobs more related to infrastructure, they still required Leetcode-like interviews, which is odd. I failed some of them, but aced one that was more infrastructure related. However, even though I aced it and went pretty well, I still wasn't chosen for their opening (they probably had very limited openings).

I know there are lots of threads here asking "is the market bad right now", but I wanted to read your thoughts on the market right now, the impact of AIs in hiring (I dislike using AIs for mostly anything, I'm not sure if I'm on a disadvantage for having a resume written by myself or not) and if any of you have lost hope on continuing in tech.
by sossoecho | 2026-02-08 20:04:55+00:00
We've been building AI apps at GoReal-AI for 2 years. The #1 pain we kept hitting: prompt chaos. Prompts hardcoded as strings everywhere, no versioning, redeployment for every tweak, zero collaboration between engineers and prompt writers.

So we built PLP (Prompt Library Protocol) -- an open spec for managing prompts via REST. Three endpoints: GET, PUT, DELETE. That's the whole protocol.

What's shipped:

Full protocol spec + OpenAPI schema
JavaScript SDK (@goreal-ai/plp-client)
Python SDK (plp-client)
Express middleware reference server
We also built EchoStash (echostash.app) as a production implementation on top of PLP, but the protocol itself is fully open, MIT licensed. Anyone can implement a PLP-compliant server.

Curious what HN thinks -- is prompt management a real problem you're hitting? What would you want from a protocol like this?

Happy to answer questions about the design decisions.
by win311fwg | 2026-02-08 20:05:26+00:00
It was said in the context of having bills to pay. Meaning that he is in deep and needs a high-priced developer salary to make ends meet.

Virtually all other careers that offer similar compensation have an old boys club gatekeeping the profession, requiring you submit many years and hundreds of thousands of dollars before they will consider letting you in. That might pencil out as a reasonable investment when you are 14, but once you are mid-career you'll never get back what you put into it.

Learning XYZ skill is something you can do at any age, and doing so will even get you an average paying job with ease. Learning the XYZ skill in the way that keeps the old boys happy is not a realistic option for someone who considers themselves old.
by NekkoDroid | 2026-02-08 20:05:50+00:00
The enrolling of the certs happen before the bootloader calls `ExitBootServices()` (I think that is what the function was called). Up until then the bootloader still has elevated priviledges and can modify certain UEFI stuff it can't after, including enrolling certs.

systemd-boot can do that if you force it to (only does it by default on VMs cuz expectedly UEFI implementations in the wild are kinda shit)[1, 2]

[1]: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...

[2]: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/load...
by mjr00 | 2026-02-08 20:05:56+00:00
I didn't mean the "fuck off" part to be quite verbatim... this ghostty PR[0] is a good example of how this stuff should be handled. Notably: there's no attempt to review or provide feedback--it's instantly recognized as a slop PR--and it's an instant ban from repo.

This is the level of response these PRs deserve. What people shouldn't be doing is treating these as good-faith requests and trying to provide feedback or asking them to refactor, like they're mentoring a junior dev. It'll just fall on deaf ears.

[0] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/10588
by yoz-y | 2026-02-08 20:06:02+00:00
The problem is not that it can’t produce good code if you’re steering. The problem is that:

There are multiple people on each team, you can not know how closely each teammate monitored their AI.

Somebody who does not car will vastly outperform your output. By orders of magnitude. With the current unicorn chasing trends, that approach tends to be more rewarded.

This produces an incentive to not actually care about the quality. Which will cause issues down the road.

I quite like using AI. I do monitor what it’s doing when I’m building something that should work for a long time. I also do total blind vibe coded scripts when they will never see production.

But for large programs that will require maintenance for years, these things can be dangerous.
by barrell | 2026-02-08 20:06:03+00:00
Visually I’m working on a new landing page for phrasing. It’s almost done, just need to record a few videos: https://phrasing.app/next

Behind the scenes I’m rebuilding the sync engine to properly support offline mode. Trying to get to instant opens for the app (and of course work offline). It’s probably my 5th sync engine. It’s been really fun to see how much easier, faster, better, etc each new iteration is.

(And the project at large is https://phrasing.app - a language learning app for polyglots. It’s like anki but designed to be enjoyed)
by joshstrange | 2026-02-08 20:06:16+00:00
It's just 1 more thing I don't think about. Like walking up to my car and it auto-unlocking when I put my hand on the handle. As I pull up to my house, the garage is opening and I pull right in. Same with auto-locking the door, I just close it and it will lock behind me. I like little bits of "magic" sprinkled into my day.
by jeffrallen | 2026-02-08 20:06:26+00:00
> (Visual Studio 6) I never used it but it must have felt like a dream at the time.

I used it in the mid-90's and yes, it was eye opening. On the other hand, I was an Emacs user in uni, and by studying a bit the history of Emacs (especially Lucid Emacs) I came to understand that the concepts in Visual Studio were nothing new.

On the third hand, I hated customizing Emacs, which did not have "batteries included" for things like "jump to definition", not to mention a package manager. So the only times in the late-90s I got all the power of modern IDEs was when I was doing something that needed Windows and Visual Studio.
by kccqzy | 2026-02-08 20:06:35+00:00
I actually would love this to be built in to a language/compiler. A lot of times when I’m building a single-threaded program but I’m using libraries written by other people. These libraries don’t know whether they are being incorporated into programs with single thread or not. So they either take the performance penalty of assuming multi-threaded (the approach by std::shared_ptr) or they give callers choice by making two implementations (Rust Arc and Rc). But the latter doesn’t actually work because this needs to be a global setting, not just a decision made at a local call site. It won’t work if such a library is a transitive dependency.
by zem | 2026-02-08 20:06:38+00:00
another way to look at it is that management is a job with a set of skills, challenges, and rewards, just like any other, but as a civilisation we seem to have tied it to power and hierarchy, and made it something you need to be promoted into rather than choosing as a career from the outset (MBAs notwithstanding). maybe a lot of engineers would have gone into the engineering management path if they could have, and engineer was just seen as the more entry-level option.
by metalman | 2026-02-08 20:06:42+00:00
Anyone with a gun is 100% responsible for the outcomes of useing it. The training for carrying it and useing it must be in absolutes, you always dissable, unload, or holster a weapon unless imediatly required, chamber is checked, the barrell NEVER tracks across a human, there is never a situation where an armed person can not walk away from an unarmed person, repeated, tested, habitual life long habbits in gun handling.
Or some asshole who tried to get off on the crime of cold blooded murder of someone who he let in his house, had left his home after he got a gun, he followed her out and shot her, she tried to escape, he shot her 5 more times while she was backing away, and she THEN slammed his head in her car door.
True grit, wish she made it.
by dismalaf | 2026-02-08 20:06:47+00:00
Is it really necessary to have reverse colonialism to maintain a high quality of life?

We're essentially offloading the cost of raising people from childhood and much of their education to get fully grown workers who will accept lower wages. This in turn becomes a Ponzi scheme that no doubt has economic benefits but is also unsustainable without ever increasing immigration and does produce negative externalities (inflationary plus social disarray).

Also, even if we are on board with this reverse colonialism, are all immigrants contributing to the same degree? Surely the benefits could be maximized...
by the_pwner224 | 2026-02-08 20:07:40+00:00
My Bose headphones are at 8 years and in perfect condition with 90% of original battery life. Adjusted for inflation, they were way cheaper than those older headphones.

Excellent quality olive oil is incredibly easy to find, if you're buying bottom barrel junk then that's on you.

New vehicle prices when adjusted for inflation have not risen at all; when adjusted for features/comfort/reliability/luxury they've fallen a ridiculous amount.

Same for clothing. My $14.88 Walmart jeans lasted for years before I sized out of them. My $15 t-shirts from Target are going strong. I recently got $15 gym shirts from Target which seem to be excellent quality, thick material and good stitching. The cheap gym shorts I bought literally 10 years ago are still in perfect condition. And again you need to adjust for inflation when comparing to the older clothing you're talking about.

The OLED TV I got for $2700 a few years ago is now closer to $2k and has superior specs. And again, way superior to more expensive TVs from a decade or two ago.

For car repair... what repair do you even need on a modern Japanese car? They just work forever if you do even the bare minimum maintenance. And honestly even if you neglect that maintenance. Yes labor costs have gone up but that's not relevant to this discussion.

All your other complaints are about software which isn't really relevant to this discussion.

Honestly all of this sounds like a "you problem." No offense.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-02-08 20:08:15+00:00
There are a lot of options in this space. Armin Ronacher is working on Gondolin (https://github.com/earendil-works/gondolin) for example. I built agentd as a layer in front of this stuff so you can expose secure shell capabilities over the network as a tool rather than baking it into the harness, or running the harness in that environment.
by lukan | 2026-02-08 20:08:15+00:00
"can’t get arbitrarily complex or unreasonable or the reader will be lost or confused."

Indeed, but that is always the challenge of a writer. But if you introduce magic in your story, and you do it in a way to show the limitations and what is roughly possible, then you can give hints later, if there was a murder with the help of a magic trick. But I actually think I only ever read one detective fantasy story

https://www.der-spurenfinder.de/

(just in german as far as I know)

It mostly works, but in one instance there was a surprise fantasy ability, that I could have not guessed before. But the actual murderer in the end, there were enough hints that gave them away despite magic, as the skills were explained and then you could combine.
by seltzered_ | 2026-02-08 20:08:38+00:00
Likely No. Undecided with Matt Ferrell recently did a video on how sodium ion batterys startup in the US (not necessarily for EVs, but other power applications) have had challenges largely due to the falling price of lithium making sodium batteries less competitive on price the past couple years: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nrTCgZmUFCY

OTOH, there are seemingly more lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery ev options now - rivian now uses LFP, Ford mustang mach-e has had a LFP variant since fall 2023 (and should have other models using LFP in 2027), I think the 2026 chevy bolt uses LFP, etc.
by idan | 2026-02-08 20:08:58+00:00
https://github.github.io/gh-aw/#gallery down the page has a list of concrete applications

For examplpe, https://github.github.io/gh-aw/blog/2026-01-13-meet-the-work... has several examples of agentic workflows for managing issues and PRs, and those examples link to actual agentic workflow files you can read and use as a starting point for your own workflows.

The value is "delegate chores that cannot be handled by a heuristic". We're figuring out how to tell the story as we go, appreciate the callout!
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-08 20:09:07+00:00
> This happens with all agents I've used and package.json files for npm. Instead of using `npm i foo` the agent string-edits package.json and hallucinates some version to install.

When using codex, I usually have something like `Never add 3rd party libraries unless explicitly requested. When adding new libraries, use `cargo add $crate` without specifying the version, so we get the latest version.` and it seems to make this issue not appear at all.
by indubioprorubik | 2026-02-08 20:09:17+00:00
And every scam across borders is a flyer for nationalism, isolationist politics and a cold shower to multiculturalism - as it shows the prevalence of "scams" beeing different and socially accepted beeing very different in different cultures. And when scamming the elderly can be socially accepted career in a society, the opinion of the affected on that society will corelate.
by Dumblydorr | 2026-02-08 20:09:20+00:00
Typical HN comment. They’re so in the weeds of edge case 1% concerns they can’t see the golden age around them.

Most people living through golden ages might not know it. Many workers in Industrial Revolution saw a decline in relative wages. Many in the Roman Empire were enslaved or impoverished. That doesn’t mean history doesn’t see these as golden ages, where golden age is defined loosely as a broad period of enhanced prosperity and productivity for a group of people.

For all its downsides, pointed out amply above, the golden age of computing started 100 years ago and hasn’t ceased yet.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-02-08 20:09:41+00:00
>These posts got less than 5 upvotes, they didn't make it to home page. And while overall quality of Show HN might have dropped, HN homepage is still quite sane.

top 24 hours is a better way to get sentiment. Here's the top 5 for today (not including this post at #2)

> DoNotNotify is now Open Source

> I am happier writing code by hand

> Show HN: LocalGPT – A local-first AI assistant in Rust with persistent memory

> Slop Terrifies Me

> Vouch

real shame, we just missed the politics post at #7.
by lowbloodsugar | 2026-02-08 20:09:51+00:00
That is a fucking travesty. If there’s one thing we should be able to rely on C for it’s that it works with assembly, and it’s always been the case that 0 is false and any other value is true. That’s a compiler bug as far as I’m concerned. I don’t use C++ because it’s gone in a ludicrous unhelpful direction since 2000 or so, but it’s sad to learn that C of all languages decided to favor pedantry over working code.