MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nerdsniper | 2026-02-17 15:34:28+00:00
This is exactly my experience as well. The feature interaction matrix is growing as models get better, and I tend to build "prompt library components" for each project which saves time on "you prompt very precisely but this also takes time".

But so far that doesn't change the reality - I can't find any opportunities to let an agent run for more than 30 minutes at best, and parallel agents just seem to confuse each other.
by blibble | 2026-02-17 15:34:44+00:00
> Have you ever run a business?

yes

> Literally all anyone cares about is profit.

I would agree there's a lot of people that this is the case for

but it is not everyone

if my back was up against the wall I would rather shut down than e.g. dump PFAS into watercourses (3M style)

or fly-tip

or use AI
by LeonidBugaev | 2026-02-17 15:34:45+00:00
I had a few useful examples of this. In order to make it work you need to define your quality gates, and rather complex spec. I personally use https://github.com/probelabs/visor for creating the gates. It can be a code-review gate, or how well implementation align with the spec and etc. And basically it makes agent loop until it pass it. One of the tips, especially when using Claude Code, is explictly ask to create a "tasks", and also use subagents. For example I want to validate and re-structure all my documentation - I would ask it to create a task to research state of my docs, then after create a task per specific detail, then create a task to re-validate quality after it has finished task. You can also play around with the gates with a more simple tooling, for example https://probelabs.com/vow/

Hope it helps!
by leoqa | 2026-02-17 15:34:58+00:00
This was always my least favorite part about being a software engineer (and the downfall of many): being a software engineer has become an identity crutch for many. I’ve see so many kids whose whole identity is being good at computers; they go through middle/high school, college getting affirmations about their value and intelligence. Then they get out of Stanford, Berkeley and show up to the feature treadmill that must keep moving but is weighed down by the 10000 short cuts made by the people who came before.

They burn out, or worse become toxic, because their shallow identity led them down the path to being a “Real” engineer and at the end of the day we’re not actually participating in any sort of real value creation beyond attention monetization.

The mystique wears off quickly and they don’t have real hobbies or interests, they basically talk about RSU packages at lunch and the latest tweets etc. I used to joke privately because almost every time we had lunch they spent most of the time discussing the optimal path to walk.

It’s unique in some way- you can’t be a good doctor or lawyer in middle school and the value system is geared towards maximizing paychecks and working in big tech. Once the reality sets in that you’re going to be doing sprint planning + standups for the next 20-30 years it can be a weird shock.

My first job was at a FANG and I lasted about 2 years- I remember riding the escalator in and seeing how miserable everyone looked on my first day. As an eager junior I reached out to the principal engineer in my org for mentoring, asking him what I could do to be better, faster. He told me: “go find a wife and don’t worry about work- you’ve got a long time left”.

At one point I looked at the senior guy running sprint planning and realized I didn’t want to be him. I bought a 1 way ticket and put in my 2 weeks. Went on to backpack around for a year then ended up at a startup where I made a bunch of friends working on real problems.
by throwway120385 | 2026-02-17 15:35:22+00:00
In my experience, the line worker's instincts are to be trusted but verified. If we blindly follow every crisis from the line we'd quickly find ourselves in a pit. These crises need to be backed up with context and a sense of criticality as there are finite resources to work through problems, and solving one person's immediate problem on the line may have a crushing impact elsewhere.
by stevenfoster | 2026-02-17 15:35:28+00:00
Ensure your career isn't your religion. After a decade in tech, mostly in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, I realized people had not ascended to some higher intellectual belief but sleep walked into a half baked religion, myself included to some degree.

The world of tech is experiencing schisms and reformations all at a pace unseen in history. But tech is still not worth making one's religion or identity.

Delight in whatever you do and find ways to be in service of others. I am certain many of the brilliant people here reading this will not be doing the same thing a decade from today, but many of those who we consider good people, will be doing new things with the same heart of generosity. Perhaps from that is where we should build our identity.
by ineedasername | 2026-02-17 15:35:46+00:00
* Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.*

That’s a lot harder, and more expensive in the short term. It’s also something that benefits from having long term employees that both understand the organization and don’t view the organization as hostile to their employee interests whenever some other metric of short term profitability is a mutually exclusive choice.

Without this, you’re limited to people who may have more natural or intuitive leadership capabilities instead of those who can learn, given the opportunity and example.

In short, corporate practices have systematically eliminated the circumstances under which there would grow a sufficient number of people with leadership skills.
by vladms | 2026-02-17 15:35:50+00:00
The original comment was saying:

> If you are not in good standing with Google, you cannot bank!!

> I cannot stress how inane it is, to have Google or Apple as the gatekeeping to identify verification. How not having an active, in good standing account with one of these two, means you cannot bank.

Having to register some phone number (does not need to be your main number, a sim card is quite cheap) to a "fake/unused" email address (even if as you say you are required yo) does not require you to "be in good standing with Google" and they are not gatekeepers of identity.

At this point in time I feel the banks and the mobile phone operators are much worse managers of identity, because, for example they even accept stolen identifiers to make an account in "your name" - for me that's more ridiculous, not that they require some multiple factor of authentication.
by MontyCarloHall | 2026-02-17 15:36:02+00:00
>I'd expect to see movements to force government regulation of AI.

I agree. It will be an interesting debate to watch play out, because a) lots of end-users love using AI and will be loath to give it up, and b) advances in compute will almost certainly allow us to run current frontier models (or better) locally on our laptops and phones, which means that profits no longer accrue to a few massive AI labs. It would also would make regulating it a lot tricker, since kneecapping the AI labs would no longer effectively regulate the technology.
by microtonal | 2026-02-17 15:36:14+00:00
I think they mean breaking free from Google Analytics, Google Play Services, Google Play, Google Location Services, etc. Play Services and Play are not installed on GrapheneOS by default, so it is possible to run your phone with just GrapheneOS with your choice of open/closed source apps on top.

I think breaking away from open source Google code is not really meaningful. It's kinda like saying "I don't want to run Linux because it contains code from IBM/Google/Meta". AOSP is a great and useful project. If the day that Google stops releasing AOSP ever comes, a consortium of interested organizations can fork it. But it does not make a whole lot of sense to start a new mobile ecosystem completely from scratch, if one that is great and open source already exists and buys you compatibility with millions of apps.
by mountainb | 2026-02-17 15:36:17+00:00
Yes because that is how regulations really work and what the purpose is. In practice all companies both tiny and massive do everything that they can to use the state to quash competition and to reduce the risks of litigation.

Software in general has been subject to light touches in part because most of the damage that software can really cause is economic and not personal injury. The lines blur when the companies release products that cause mental injuries to users that courts interpret as physical injuries; or if the software reasonably contributes to someone e.g. going crazy and killing another person.

No one would seriously think of holding Microsoft liable if a kidnapper uses Word to draft a ransom note. But if CoPilot tells you to microwave a baby and you do it, many judges will want to take a close look at the operation of that software service irrespective of voluminous contract disclaimers. The only way the Microsofts of the world can escape that type of liability is with comprehensive regulation.
by talkingtab | 2026-02-17 15:36:31+00:00
The fundamental issue is that our public school system turned into a training ground to serve corporations. To teach us all to be followers. Raise you hand. Sit still all day. Now there are fewer and fewer corporate jobs so that purpose is outmoded. Why train every American young person to be a drone when there is no need for drones?

Why do we still have schools then? Why do people still fund these outmoded institutions? Because now both parents need to work in order to earn enough live. As a result schools (junior and high) are simply glorified day care or prisons. And yes they serve some purpose and do some good for some, maybe even many people. But for many of our young they simply instill unproductive ideas and behaviors.

If we are interested in our children having good productive lives, our high school are for many kids of zero value or negative value.

We do not need more followers/drones. We need doers.

A science fair can be one of the few opportunities a young person has to do, as opposed to follow. Lets enhance that and provide more.
by raincole | 2026-02-17 15:36:38+00:00
I mean... yes? But I really don't think there is any 'irony' here. The author clearly stated:

> It’s thanks to them that we even have the option of at least partially freeing ourselves from Google (Android) and Apple (iOS)

partially. And I do think they successfully did this. Asking Gemini questions when you really have something to ask is very different from integrating your whole digital life with Google.
Show HN: Price Per Ball – Site that sorts golf balls on Amazon by price per ball
by rockdiesel | 2026-02-17 15:36:46+00:00
I took inspiration from diskprices.com, but applied it to my golfing hobby.

For someone who can't always keep it in the fairway, golf balls can get rather expensive, so I decided to build a way for me to view Amazon listings by how much they cost per ball. Hence the name of the website.

The site is hosted on Cloudflare pages and I use Github actions to trigger a python script that fetches and checks the prices. It runs twice a day. If the script encounters any new ASINs, it stores them for future checks, so the list of golf balls being price checked should keep growing over time. Changes are then pushed to Cloudflare pages.

There can sometimes be some pricing oddities when the product title says one count, but the unit count being returned from Amazon is another number, so I'm trying to add some checks to help accommodate for that. Right now, I just have some manual overrides for certain ASINs, but I'm looking to improve on it in the future.

The frontend is just some basic HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Listings on Amazon can be inconsistent sometimes because, for example, product titles will say used balls, but the seller lists them as new. I added some filters to that allow you to exclude used/recycled balls, plastic golf balls, etc... You can also filter by brand.

Give it a spin and let me know if you run into any issues or have any feature ideas to make it more useful.
by iberator | 2026-02-17 15:36:47+00:00
I lost my job as a programmer and I think it's over for me.
No, you will not hack the device drivers in the basement but you're gonna be flipping burgers and out of cash or energy for anything else. Worst thing: you never gonna even be good at flipping burgers without experience or young age...
Once you are out of the field, and your money is gone: suddenly you are useless, old trash. No one even wants to employ ex programmers as they simply don't fit into any other workfield...

/rant
by toss1 | 2026-02-17 15:36:50+00:00
Possibly a most archetypal example of Goodhart's law:

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

Parents find kids get ahead by not only good grades but also by winning in science fairs, sports, or disability claims, so they figure out ways to game those systems . . . and, their value as a measure is eliminated.

With few exceptions, these are now only a measure of how well their parents gamed the system.
by sidewndr46 | 2026-02-17 15:36:58+00:00
I've heard this dichotomy in terms of military command presented in many different ages and different ways. It is primarily the difference between communicating the goals of an operation versus communicating how to achieve those goals. Most recently I've listened to accounts that it explains Russia operational failures in the invasion of Ukraine. I've also read analysis suggesting that it was a relevant difference in the battle of waterloo.
by alsetmusic | 2026-02-17 15:37:14+00:00
> an encampment under a freeway in Florida as it was the only place people on the sex offender registry could legally live

I listened to a podcast that talked about this encampment years ago. The people living there are quite literally trapped. They aren't allowed to move to another city because of their parole and the city they are in has no other location that isn't within some distance of schools, playgrounds, etc that they're forbidden from being near.

One person interviewed had some petty offense like peeing in public when drunk and talked about the violence and crime that occurred in the camp. Listening to him made me so angry at the injustice that people caught in edge cases are subjected to. He drinks too much, pees on the side of a building, and is now forced to live among rapists and predators.

The OP mentioned high school students in totally normal relationships being criminalized. Another example given in the podcast ep was teens sending nude selfies to their bf/gf that got charged and convicted for distributing csam. This is not how enforcement of these laws should work. I'm glad I grew up before smart phones cause I was really stupid when I was a teen.

Meanwhile, if you're a rich old white guy…
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-02-17 15:37:14+00:00
I love programming, but the idea of hanging out with and chatting with other programmers as a regular part of my social life leaves me cold. I'm happy to be a part of online conversations about code and hardware and design, but away from the computer ... not really. I'd rather be talking about food, or hiking or travelling or culture or relationships. There have been very few people I've ever met in person that I really enjoyed "being a programmer with", and none of them live within 1000 miles of me. And that's all just fine.
by matula | 2026-02-17 15:37:31+00:00
> constantly point out what they perceive as problems with...

Yeah, screw those people. I count myself as lucky that I've only worked with 1 person who was seriously CRITICAL of the way other's worked... beyond just code quality. However, I always enjoyed a good discussion about the various differences in how people worked, as long as they could accept there's no "right" way. That's what the article brought up for me, and I wonder how much that happens these days.

One of my fondest memories was sitting around with a few other devs after work, and one had started learning Go pretty soon after its public release... and he would show us some new, cool thing he was playing around with. Of course those kind of organic things stopped with remote work, and I wonder how much THAT has played into the loss of identity?
by EPWN3D | 2026-02-17 15:37:38+00:00
Exercise is a magic pill in every sense except for losing weight. That's almost entirely controlled by your diet.

If you're exercising to lose weight, you're probably thinking that more exercise means more weight loss, which means that you could be overtraining.

I recently got a second Apple Watch to wear to bed to track my sleep, and it's given me some really great insights into when I'm hitting the red zone and need to dial back training. For exercise, more intensity is not always better. What matters is consistency, not consistently high intensity.
by notanastronaut | 2026-02-17 15:37:48+00:00
I found that unpredictability to be interesting. I'm doing super simple projects with these models and a year, or even six months ago, it would give me a block of code and as soon as you ran it, it would fail. And you'd have to paste the error in and keep going until it was smoothed out.

The other day though I asked for something simple and it one-shotted the problem. To me, that's new.

I know this success was a statistical outlier, however. I grok how to use it and to not trust it. I'm just shocked so many people smart people fail to understand it.
by Tade0 | 2026-02-17 15:38:24+00:00
I knew a person who died because they believed in dangerous horseshit.

In the same town, another person died from a different type of dangerous horseshit - specifically the kambo ritual.

In terms of methods dangerous horseshit outnumbers actual medical practice 10:1 at least. How do you know which one works?

The latter at the very least is tested for safety and efficacy.
by a_better_world | 2026-02-17 15:38:29+00:00
Soooo many times in my career I've had to come back and "extract that variable into a function" that I just do it right away by force of habit.

Point is, this isn't trivial, it is the kind of thing that ends up saving work over the long haul.

Or include this in my agent 'rules' files.

GOOD EXAMPLE

query=f"""
SELECT foo
FROM {sometable}
WHERE {condition}
"""
answer=spark.sql(query).toPandas()

BAD EXAMPLE

answer=spark.sql(f"""
SELECT foo
FROM {sometable}
WHERE {condition}
""").toPandas()
by candiddevmike | 2026-02-17 15:38:33+00:00
My kids are in things that seem like competition doesn't really need to be a thing and places undue stress on those involved. I'm left wondering, why does everything seem to turn into a a competition with schools (or humans in general)? Why can't folks just do something without needing to compare themselves to others? I'm guessing science fairs (and similar things) didn't start out as a competition, why "poison the well"?
by azalemeth | 2026-02-17 15:38:53+00:00
I think this article is a great opportunity to mention two under-used statistical techniques: Deming regression [0] and the Theil-Sen estimator [1].

They both fit straight lines to noisy data.

Deming regression is an errors-in-variables model that tries to fit the line of best fit when you have errors in both x and y and they are both known and in general _different_; the Theil-Sen estimator is based on medians and is particularly robust if you have an error process that fails more "one way" than the other. Simple linear regression is everywhere in our lives and yet remarkably not robust to errors that are not IID normal, particularly with a small number of data points: a process that can only fail in one direction if it breaks is likely to completely and utterly bugger up the line that you fit. Both approaches have their place and I wish were more widely used, particularly by people who like fitting linear models to complex phenomena because they are easily understood.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deming_regression
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theil%E2%80%93Sen_estimator
by sepeth | 2026-02-17 15:38:56+00:00
I haven’t been using Emacs for a long time now, but isn’t the Emacs way better? With undo tree you don’t lose any history, but the same is true for what Emacs does by default and it is much easier to navigate the history, since every change is part of a linear history and undos and redos also get added to it.
by nisten | 2026-02-17 15:39:00+00:00
I switch from iPhone to a pixel 9 fold, and installed graphene after 2 weeks on stock android.

Look, it's better than stock android overall, UI much more simplified even though it gives you a lot more security control, battery feels slightly longer, but there are drawbacks, i.e. twitter/x wouldn't install, neither would my bank's app. However from time to time I go to use iOS on the iphone and it just feels like better software, with better ergonomics overall, the combination of the xnu kernel plus the design and feel of the..buttons.. on iOS is still years ahead in my opinion. So keep that in mind if you're switching away from apple to it, as android still feels like decade plus old software.

Now for the upsides.. there's a built in terminal and debian vm you can install and run your agentic AI tools (claude code,opencode etc) in a portable sandboxed environment which you just don't get onios. You can even fire up a graphical xfce session albeit that takes quite a bit of work to get it to go.

As for the tablet form factor of the phone itself when unfolded, i found it amazing the first few weeks and then later found myself rarely using it.

Overall I'm going to stick with itand will never go back to stock android, but am quite annoyed at how much better it could actually be.
by microtonal | 2026-02-17 15:39:01+00:00
Are you in the US? I get the impression that iMessage and RCS are only big there. Almost nobody uses them here in Europe. (It's mostly WhatsApp where I live and Signal is slowly getting more popular.)

As an aside, from the latest release notes: Sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer: add toggle for granting Play services access to ICC auth in order to support RCS with carriers requiring it for RCS in Google Messages including T-Mobile (see RCS usage guide)

https://grapheneos.org/releases#2026021200

https://grapheneos.org/usage#rcs
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-02-17 15:39:02+00:00
Deming's observations and suggestions can be widely implemented.

- Process improvement can be applied all over the place. In how you merge PRs, how you run tests, how you manage sprints, how you deploy safely, etc

- SPC is just used to identify defects. It does not inherently create stress; how you use it matters

- You can identify quality issues in any engineering discipline. High-level method: identify a quality measure ("time to merge PRs", "website is up", "tests are not flaky"), observe it, record the observation, plot it on a chart. Chart trends down? Quality issue. Process improvement cycle to attempt a fix. Chart trends up? Quality issue abated. Must add intelligent study/reasoning though, not just chase metrics.

- Training workers improves output by ensuring there is uniform and correct knowledge of tasks required. Software engineering is particularly guilty of hiring workers without ever giving them specific training, and it results in frequent mistakes from simply not understanding the technology they're using (most devs today will probably never read an entire technical manual).

- Look at the rest of his advice. Drive out fear (improving trust in changes allows shipping more changes faster), improve leadership (help staff improve, don't just make sure they're writing code), break down barriers (improving cross-team collaboration makes changes easier and better), eliminate numerical quotas (focus on quality over quantity makes a better product), remove barriers to pride of workmanship (a dev that makes good code is a happy dev), institute education and self-improvement (brings in new techniques that improve output), take action for transformation (make everyone responsible for improving the org), improve constantly (look for ways to improve, don't coast), etc. All these apply to SWE.