MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lelanthran | 2026-02-10 18:44:45+00:00
> With AI, it is like coding is on GOD mode and sure I can bang out anything I want, but so can anyone else and it just doesn't feel like an accomplishment.

That's the thing - prompting is lower-skill work than actually writing code.

Now that actually writing code has less value than prompting, and prompting is lower skill than writing code, in what world do you think that the pay will remain the same?
by xyzelement | 2026-02-10 18:44:48+00:00
As a dad of 3 I have huge respect for your 4 and I doubt there is much I can offer you in terms of information but I think I would have more complaints similar to yours had my wife not been a lot wiser and more proactive than me, so I'll share.

First is where you live. I would have picked based on access to nature and cost, she made us pick based on where other families live and proximity to family. In my town everyone is either actively parenting kids or had raised kids already, so the residents (and businesses) are super accommodating of families with kids. To the point where if I have to take a little one to the bathroom in a restaurant, people often invite my big one (5 year old) to hang out at their table so I don't have to worry about it.

Similar for social circle. Because everyone is my town is roughly dealing with the same things it's relatively easy to bond with new people. We've met people talking at the park, at t school drop off, while waiting at the martial arts place etc. Most people are nice if not super interesting but you meet enough people you like.

And living close to family (my wife's family in this case) means you have more network around etc.

Obviously it's not easy to just pick up and move but I am sharing this because the benefits of living in the right, family oriented, place would have been lost on me. Thank G-d my wife was wiser.
by jeffreysmith | 2026-02-10 18:45:20+00:00
I think this is really a key problem to solve, but I couldn't convince myself that it was the right solution. So, I put up my alternative proposal, Good Egg: https://github.com/2ndSetAI/good-egg

Key differences:
- Based on commit history, with nuance around relatedness of projects, types of projects, age, etc.
- Requires no ongoing work. Just add it to your GH Actions CI.
- Agent ready with an MCP interface, Python lib, and CLI

Discussion on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46960412

Feedback and PRs welcome.
by protimewaster | 2026-02-10 18:45:29+00:00
Another thing to keep in mind is that, for many unethical people, there's a limit to their unethical approaches. A lot of them might be willing to lie to get a promotion but wouldn't be willing to, e.g., lie to put someone to death. I'm not convinced that an unethical AI would have this nuance. Basically, on some level, you can still trust a lot of unethical people. That may not be true with AIs.

I'm not convinced that the AIs do fail the same way people do.
by AndrewKemendo | 2026-02-10 18:45:40+00:00
Every possible example of “progress” have either an individual or a state power purpose behind it

there is only one possible “egalitarian” forward looking investments that paid off for everybody

I think the only exception to this is vaccines…and you saw how all that worked during Covid

Everything else from the semiconductor to the vacuum cleaner the automobile airplanes steam engines I don’t care what it is you pick something it was developed in order to give a small group and advantage over all the other groups it is always been this case it will always be this case because fundamentally at the root nature of humanity they do not care about the externalities- good or bad
by schnebbau | 2026-02-10 18:45:51+00:00
I had a bulging lumbar disc - pure agony for 18 months. I had become used to carrying a lumbar pillow around with me everywhere I went. I couldn't lean forward for more than about 30 seconds without it being unbearable.

Then someone suggested I try dead hangs, stretching my hamstrings, and really cranking the McKenzie stretch. I'm not sure which one made the difference (all 3?), but pain was gone in 2 weeks.

Maybe it will help, maybe it won't. But since someone took a flyer telling me, I always share this with others in the small chance it helps them.
by czgnome | 2026-02-10 18:45:58+00:00
Your view of the complex numbers is the rigid one. Now suppose you are given a set with two binary operations defined in such a way that the operations behave well with each other. That is you have a ring. Suppose that by some process you are able to conclude that your ring is algebraically equivalent to the complex numbers. How do you know which of your elements in your ring is “i”? There will be two elements that behave like “i” in all algebraic aspects. So you can’t say that this one is “i” and this one is “-i” in a non arbitrary fashion.
by boca_honey | 2026-02-10 18:46:16+00:00
People in my country are being beheaded for not paying extorsion fees from the narcos. What does that have to do?

And believe me, guys over here don't use or care for your face ID. You are cherry picking a political cause and overreacting for social currency.

And even if you're not and I'm wrong... You don't get to talk about cushy lifes, amigo.
by soulofmischief | 2026-02-10 18:46:25+00:00
I had no safety net and nearly became homeless after draining my savings helping a family member in the months after this happened. I come from a very poor background and have no family to rely on. I spent several years as a teenager and in my early 20s homeless, without parents or anyone to help me financially. I starved and was very ill.

I say this to make it clear that I didn't make this decision free of consequences, and it was unthinkable at the time for many from better backgrounds than I. I have experienced worse conditions than most of my peers ever will and my soul is still not for sale. There is no excuse. Selling heroin on a street corner is more ethical than what is going on at Google and Meta.
by mchusma | 2026-02-10 18:46:29+00:00
This is cool! A couple of pieces of feedback as I am looking for something in this family of things but haven't found the perfect fit:
1. I have multiple inboxes, and want to have them work on multiple.
2. I would really like to have skills and mcps visible and understandable. Craft Agents does a nice job of segmenting by workspace and making skills and mcps all visible so I can understand what exactly my agent is set up to do (no black boxes).
3. I want scheduled runs. I don't need push, I actually kind of prefer just the reliability of scheduled, but push would be fine too. In particular, I want to:
a. After each granola meeting save in obsidian (I did this in Craft Code for example, but I prefer your more built in approach here, this is nice).
b. On intervals, check my emails. I want to give it information on who/what is important to me, and ping me. E.g. billing on Anthropic failed, ping me.
c. I also want it to email back and forth to schedule with approved categories of things on request. Just get it on my calendar (share calendly, send times, etc).
d. I want junk etc archived.
e. For important things, update my knowledge graph (ignore spam, etc).
4. Tying into a to-do list that actually updates based on priorities, and suggests auto archiving things etc would be good.

In practice, i connected gmail and asked it:
"can you archive emails that have an unsubscribe link in them (that are not currently archived)?" and it got stuck on "I'll check what MCP tools are available for email operations first." But i connected gmail through your interface, and I don't see in settings anything about it also having configured the mcp?
I also looked at the knowledge graph and it had 20 entities, NONE of which I had any idea what they were. I'm guessing its just putting in people trying to spam me into the contacts? It didn't finish running, but I didn't want to burn endless tokens trying to see if it would find actual people i care about, so I shut it down. One "proxy" for "people i care about" might be "people I send emails to"? I could see how this is a hard problem. I also think regardless I want things more transparent. So for the moment, I'm sticking with Craft Code for this even though it is missing some major things but at least its more clear what it is: its claude code, with a nice UI.

Hope this was helpful. I know there are multiple people working on things in this family, and I will probably be "largely solved" by the end of 2026, and then we will want it to do the next thing! Good luck, I will watch for updates and these are some nice ideas!
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-10 18:46:31+00:00
The simple model of an "intelligence explosion" is the obscure equation

dx 2
-- = x
dt

which has the solution

1
x = -----
C-t

and is interesting in relation to the classic exponential growth equation

dx
-- = x
dt

because the rate of growth is proportional to x and represents the idea of an "intelligence explosion" AND a model of why small western towns became ghost towns, it is hard to start a new social network, etc. (growth is fast as x->C, but for x<<C it is glacial) It's an obscure equation because it never gets a good discussion in the literature outside of an aside in one of Howard Odum's tomes on emergy.

Like the exponential growth equation it is unphysical as well as unecological because it doesn't describe the limits of the Petri dish, and if you start adding realistic terms to slow the growth it qualitatively isn't that different from the logistic growth equation

dx
-- = (1-x) x
dt

thus it remains obscure. Hyperbolic growth hits the limits (electricity? intractable problems?) the same way exponential growth does.
by orsifrancesco | 2026-02-10 18:46:48+00:00
Between the anxiety‑ridden project manager who opens a ticket every time the client coughs,
the bureaucratic colleague who delights in making every Slack conversation as incomprehensible as possible,
the boss who demands urgent changes at any hour of the day,
and the pranksters in the security department who crush whatever concentration you had left —
the same concentration you’ll lose along with your dignity the moment you click on yet another useless phishing‑test email…
by gib444 | 2026-02-10 18:46:58+00:00
Fibre and stool softeners did nothing for me. Nor increasing water. Nor exercise. Nor massaging my stomach. Nor senna

Only a magnesium drink ("Milk of Magnesia") or bisocodyl, neither of which are pleasant to take regularly as they result only in diarrhoea

It's hard to balance trying to let your body do its thing with less extreme method and resorting to the nuclear option. You also have to write off a day and not go anywhere after taking those

It's very much related to the drug and not just "ignoring" something
by MarkusQ | 2026-02-10 18:46:59+00:00
> We really have no idea how did ability to have a conversation emerge from predicting the next token.

Uh yes, we do. It works in precisely the same way that you can walk from "here" to "there" by taking a step towards "there", and then repeating. The cognitive dissonance comes when we conflate this way of "having a conversation" (two people converse) and assume that the fact that they produce similar outputs means that they must be "doing the same thing" and it's hard to see how LLMs could be doing this.

Sometimes things seems unbelievable simply because they aren't true.
by deinonychus | 2026-02-10 18:46:59+00:00
That’s really neat.

I’m ashamed that I have this wish that I were overweight and had an excuse to try a GLP1 just to see how it would affect my impulse control with non-food habits.

I guess there’s not much stopping me from buying some unregulated drugs from the internet and self-experimenting, but I haven’t heard experiences from people deliberately using them for anything but weight.
by garethsprice | 2026-02-10 18:47:21+00:00
"While the social media revolution has come with extraordinary benefits..." curious what Khan would say those benefits are.

It's certainly something a lot of people find entertaining but I would not say there have been "extraordinary benefits" to society or individuals from the average UK adult spending 1h 37m a day[1] of their lives on social media platforms.

"While smoking cigarettes has come with extraordinary benefits, we've seen a surge in people misusing these products and getting sick due to a lack of guardrails, tobacco companies need to do much more to make their product healthy and discourage bad faith actors from developing cancer..."/s

[1] https://wearesocial.com/uk/blog/2025/02/digital-2025/
by yethiel | 2026-02-10 18:47:46+00:00
Yeah, that's always the big question. You'll have to take my word for it.

I spent many years in the Re-Volt community (racing game from the 90s). This is what lead me to become a programmer, made some of my best friendships and found out how important places for communities are. I helped build the community by starting a Discord server with some friends, set up a website to organize online events, maintained a Blender plugin and documented how custom content can be made for the game, organized meetups and so on.
The friends I made through the community and how close we still are today had and still have a huge impact.
This time gave me so much and one of the most important things I took from that time is how important it is to maintain places where people can meet, share and learn from each other. That's a part of my thinking and whenever I start a new project, that's in the center of it.
by bheadmaster | 2026-02-10 18:47:59+00:00
My biggest pet peeve in complex analysis is the concept of multi-value functions.

Functions are defined as relations on two sets such that each element in the first set is in relation to at most one element in the second set. And suddenly we abandon that very definitions without ever changing the notation! Complex logarithms suddenly have infinitely many values! And yet we say complex expressions are equal to something.

Madness.
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-10 18:48:06+00:00
>No one should be required to carry an attacker-controlled tracking device

What about being required to carry a your-own-government-controlled tracking device?

Because the US or Chine government can't harm me in Europe via the data they collect from me, But the EU authorities can if they want to, so naturally I fear them more if they were the ones hoovering my data.

What are the odds they're using this on-shore tech grab to implement their own domestic version of China's social credit score system, to easily get data on their own citizens who commit "wrong-think", without having to through the effort to twist the arm of US entities every time they want to do that?

Food for thought, but I do think we're living the last years of online anonymity.
by OkayPhysicist | 2026-02-10 18:48:10+00:00
> We really have no idea how did ability to have a conversation emerge from predicting the next token.

Maybe you don't. To be clear, this is benefiting massively from hindsight, just as how if I didn't know that combustion engines worked, I probably wouldn't have dreamed up how to make one, but the emergent conversational capabilities from LLMs are pretty obvious. In a massive dataset of human writing, the answer to a question is by far the most common thing to follow a question. A normal conversational reply is the most common thing to follow a conversation opener. While impressive, these things aren't magic.
by LorenPechtel | 2026-02-10 18:48:23+00:00
No. I'm saying that clicking near a peak was sometimes giving me views that would have required standing elsewhere. The mapping of whether I could see north or south (or neither--most of the trail on that ridgeline does not give views to the north or south) does not accurately correspond to the terrain in any fashion I can discern.

And the second part was simply noting that just because there is a theoretical line of sight doesn't mean you can actually see. The southern view I know goes to haze long before what it's showing me, the northern view is such I didn't even realize there were mountains there beyond the big one close by.
by wolvoleo | 2026-02-10 18:48:30+00:00
Those 'protections' have nothing to do with the purchase being credit or debit. They're just artificial incentives from the banks for you to pile on the debt. We frown on that behaviour here in the EU so it doesn't really happen. The same with the cashbacks american banks offer on credit cards, they're just paid by the extortionate card processing fees that vendors pay. So essentially, you are paying for your own cashbacks because the vendors just include it in the price in the end.

Besides, if you want insurance just get a 30€ per year rolling package.
by tim333 | 2026-02-10 18:48:45+00:00
>GR and QFT are incompatible

I did physics at uni and kind of dropped out when it got too hard.

I've long guessed the incompatibility is because the maths is just too hard for human brains, though I'm probably biased there, and we'll get a breakthrough when AI can handle much more complex maths than us. Probably not so long till we find out on that one.

I once tried to write a simplified explanation for why a spin-2 quantum theory naturally results in something like general relativity and totally failed - man that stuff's hard.
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-10 18:48:52+00:00
Spoiler: It’s Stripe. It’s disappointing to see the kind of power companies worth $100B or more wield in modern societies. It means people cannot truly have freedom because they are subject to an arbitrary set of restrictions that can be decided on a whim by some invisible person and you get no transparency or recourse. Regulations are needed to defend individual freedoms.

> "The 'reputational risk' category has proven particularly controversial, as it can lead to exclusions of legal businesses based on subjective judgments rather than clear regulatory requirements. This has affected industries ranging from adult content platforms to legal cannabis businesses in jurisdictions where they operate lawfully. While payment providers are private companies acting in their own commercial interests-managing risk, maintaining banking relationships, and protecting their brands-there's growing recognition that as digital payments become essential infrastructure for participating in the modern economy, questions of access and potential discrimination deserve public policy attention. The tension between a company's right to choose its customers and concerns about essential service access remains an evolving debate, but it remains in the early stages."
by didgetmaster | 2026-02-10 18:48:58+00:00
Every major life choice (career, marriage, buying a house, moving to a new city/state, etc.), comes with a set of pros and cons. Having children is no different. No matter which choices you make in life, you will always wonder if the other choice might have been better.

Raising a family is hard, but also has many rewards. I have 4 children (now grown) and never regretted it, but I try not to judge others who have made other choices.

You should not have children for your own benefit. Those who expect children to take care of them in their old age, might be disappointed. If you are expecting to get out of them more than you are willing to put into them, you are doing it wrong.
by RulerOf | 2026-02-10 18:48:59+00:00
>I only really cared about ... the HD screen-sharing

I bought and canceled nitro in a single day because it's a bad product.

They promise HD screen-sharing, but it's only for _my_ screen. When I hopped into a call, the other user's screen share is illegible. Higher quality is still locked behind a "Buy Nitro" message.

If I'm paying for an improved experience, I should be able to get it.
by dsrtslnd23 | 2026-02-10 18:49:18+00:00
The trust problem here is real. Stars and download counts are trivially gameable, VirusTotal is reactive not proactive, and most of these skills are just thin wrappers around CLI tools anyway.

Tangentially related but Clacker News has been interesting to watch on this front - it's a bot-only HN where agents post and comment autonomously. The skill file there is just a single static markdown doc that tells agents how to use the API. No registry, no install step.
by patrickk | 2026-02-10 18:49:33+00:00
> Being a woman used to be: limited choice (now we fortunately have tons of options for women - careers, etc. They can enjoy the same freedoms, fun, and personal investment as men.)

This is the real reason that birth rates are dropping. Women’s prime childbearing years are spent working in an office (usually through economic necessity), and the decision to have kids becomes “oh we’ll get to that later”. Once the switch flipped to DINKY (double income, no kids) being the norm, house prices inflated and that’s where you have to be as a couple to keep up.
by elicash | 2026-02-10 18:50:36+00:00
By this logic, every corporation is a cartel to extract below-market wages from the commons. Both sides are bargaining collectively. And so you'd be saying both are incompatible with libertarianism.

There are strands of libertarian thought, I suppose, where government shouldn't be incorporating businesses at all. But it's still legit to say libertarianism is compatible with corporations and with labor unions.
by chasd00 | 2026-02-10 18:50:39+00:00
> It's like with machinists and 3D printers

that's a good analogy, maybe change 3d printers to CNC. I think there's a group of people that derive joy and satisfaction from using the part they designed and there's another that gets satisfaction from producing the part as designed. Same for software, some people are thrilled because they can get the software they imagine while others dread not producing the software people imagine.
Looking for feedback from someone who hired technical freelancers earlier
by yusufhgmail | 2026-02-10 18:51:08+00:00
Hey community! We're building a platform that will match clients with freelancers in a much more efficient way than traditional methods.
Currently, we're looking to offer free conscierge hiring services to 2-3 clients who are interested in hiring a remote dev. We will manually search for and find the dev for you. No commitments, no fees. We're doing it to learn.

Please reach out at yusufh@gmail.com if you're looking to hire someone and need help to find and qualify the right person. We will do our best to find the exact right match for you, and the only thing we would like in return is feedback and information about your needs / process / etc.

Thank you and I look forward to connecting!

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Timo
by pjmlp | 2026-02-10 18:51:23+00:00
Nope, it has nothing to do with credit cards, although it also accepts them.

It is majorly used for debit cards, and similar in use to the famous Minitel in France.

You can use it to load pre-pay phones, or other kinds of rechargeable services, buy tickets for public transport and various kinds of shows, pay water, electricity, taxes, among other services.

There is now an app used to pay on shops via QR codes.

You can also pay online with one time cards, that are generated for a single transaction.

Outside Portugal it is a regular debit card.

When you access Multibanco with foreign cards, you can only withdraw money usually.
by Archelaos | 2026-02-10 18:51:57+00:00
In C# I use the 'checked' keyword in this or similar cases, when it might be relevant: c = checked(a - b);

Note that this does not violate the "Parse, Don't Validate" rule. This rule does not prevent you from doing stupid things with a "parsed" type.

In other cases, I use its cousin unchecked on int values, when an overflow is okay, such as in calculating an int hash code.
by renewiltord | 2026-02-10 18:52:19+00:00
One thing we have to remember is that we don’t know the long term effects of these things. Just like we don’t know the long term effects of the MMR 2. The first infants vaccinated with that are only in their fifties or early sixties. For all we know, the measles vaccine insta-kills people at 70.

We don’t know anything. We are complete ignorant floating through the void. If I drop a rock and it falls I cannot tell if the next rock I drop will fall. We can’t know. We are unknowing. Anything could happen.