MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fourside | 2026-02-07 16:55:25+00:00
Yeah the “not invented here” syndrome was considered an anti pattern before the agentic coding boom and I don’t see how these tools make it irrelevant. If you’re starting a business, it’s still likely a distraction if you’re writing all of the components of your stack from scratch. Agentic tools have made development less expensive, but it’s still far from zero. By the author’s admission, they still need to think through all these problems critically, architect them, pick the right patterns. You also have to maintain all this code. That’s a lot of energy that’s not going towards the core of your business.

What I think does change is now you can more easily write components that are tailor made to your problem, and situation. Some of these frameworks are meant to solve problems at varying levels of complexity and need to worry about avoid breaking changes. It’s nice to have the option to develop alternatives that are as sophisticated as your problem needs and not more. But I’m not convinced that it’s always the right choice to build something custom.
by nephihaha | 2026-02-07 16:56:00+00:00
Not many high schools do ancient Greek, other than a handful of private ones, so I would consider gearing it a lot more towards the Koine Greek market. Then you would be able to attract people from colleges and universities where people are doing it as part of a religious studies/divinity course.

Latin appears to be undergoing an unexpected revival of interest just now... So there nay be a bigger market than you think. To advertise it you could sponsor various relevant YouTube videos.
by palata | 2026-02-07 16:56:11+00:00
> So how do you stop a function democracy becoming a non functioning democracy

I wish I knew :-). A functioning democracy seems to be an unstable equilibrium.

But it remains that a functioning democracy is what we should aim for.

> Ultimately it comes down to who has the power.

Well it starts with the people giving them power. Trump did not seize the power in the US, for instance. He was elected. Twice.
by mrkandel | 2026-02-07 16:56:19+00:00
if you like fantasy Tigana was pretty good.

The first book Orwell wrote is pretty good as well. Down and out in paris and london. It's a good picture of life in the slums at the time, and much more raw than other accounts - Orwell seems to have simply recounted his experiences.

It's a bit low for Asimov to just say Orwell was slumming it like a modern hippie. He was slumming it like in the olden days, and starved for weeks.
by larsiusprime | 2026-02-07 16:57:11+00:00
I had a question since there's growing interest in open source adoption for digital sovereignty purposes in Europe; I produce open source software for civil servants as well (for mass appraisal/property tax valuation specifically), and I was wondering if you could offer any advice about how to best meet the needs of/approach European governments (both local and national) about open source collaboration?
by MrDarcy | 2026-02-07 16:57:53+00:00
This comment ignores the key insight of the article. Design is what matters most now. Design is the difference between vibe coding and software engineering.

Given a good design, software engineers today are 100x more productive. What they produce is high quality due to the design. Production is fast and cheap due to the agents.

You are correct, there will be a reckoning for large scale systems which are vibe coded. They author is also correct, well designed systems no longer need frameworks or vendors, and they are unlikely to fail because they were well designed from the start.
by cjbgkagh | 2026-02-07 16:59:01+00:00
Theoretically it can be, though usually not, so the question is what should be the law to cover the general case. It wouldn’t be such a problem if it were easy for them to get around without driving. Either self driving cars, subsidized Ubers, public transit, walkable cities, home delivery, etc.

My opinion is that in the general case people over 70 shouldn’t be driving and I say this as someone who has 4 spritly grandparents in their 90s. I really don’t like how dangerous roads are, a fact that we accept because we did not really have good alternatives, now that we do we should implement them.
by 999900000999 | 2026-02-07 16:59:16+00:00
Honestly it's probably a good idea for governments to self host and self support anything that's important.

>Microsoft Used China-Based Engineers to Support Product Recently Hacked by China

https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-sharepoint-hack...

Open source alternatives, audited by international teams could be much more trust worthy than closed sourced black boxes.
by mmooss | 2026-02-07 16:59:24+00:00
It's not a slight correction, those claims are the exact problem - the propaganda of the powerful: Give up, there is nothing you can do.

People in democracies can easily vote to change where power lies, if that's what they want, and it's not hard to see how: The current situation is highly unusual for democracies; there is a long history of what to do and how to do it.

A major reason they don't do it is that they keep reading and believing they are powerless.
by deanc | 2026-02-07 16:59:53+00:00
> Older people in the UK already have free bus passes and various other substantial concessions regarding public transport. Cars are dangerous, and if you can't see clearly, you're obviously not fit to drive. It's true that there will be negative impacts on people who will fail the eye tests, and we should be compassionate, but ultimately those people aren't safe behind the wheel, and put other peoples lives at risk, not just their own.

This is an absurd take. I grew up in a town of ~60,000 people in the UK. The public transport, was, and _still_ is terrible. To get to the nearby shopping center which was the only place with bowling and a movie theatre, and any shops that weren't charity shops involved 2 trains and a bus taking about an hour and a half. A drive would be 20 minutes and a negotiation with my parents to give me a lift.

I'm a lot older now, and have travelled a bit around the three major cities. The situation there is better, but there's not many 70 year olds living there.
by SoftTalker | 2026-02-07 17:00:02+00:00
Yes this happens in every framework I've ever used. My approach used to be to try to work around it, but now I've got these local exceptions to what the framework does and that is inevitably where problems/bugs pop up. Now I simply say "we can't implement the feature that way in this framework, we need to rework the specification." I no longer try to work against the framework, it's just a massive time sink and creates problems down the road.
by consp | 2026-02-07 17:00:31+00:00
> Definitely a source of slowness.

I would first blame the programmers, the design and lack of specialty offloading before blaming any programming language. Well designed web calls scale nearly linearly with usage and usually poor design or programming is the source of slowness. You can always trade language complexity for speed but assuming it is the cause of all perceived slowness is a poor man's view.

It is the same story every time again, first it was java, which has so many large scale projects most people won't even know it's running things they use, now it's apparently python who is to blame for all slowness on the web. When the next JIT or scripted language comes along which is not someone's favourite pet that will get the blame.
by siliconpotato | 2026-02-07 17:00:40+00:00
I'm in the UK.
Normal conversation: what did you do on Sunday? I was in church. "Oh are you a Christian" "yes".
Now, if the first person is not a Christian , that's often the end of the conversation.
If first person is also a Christian they would say "oh me too! What sort of church do you go to".
They might then answer, oh I got to st Luke's, have you heard of it. Or I go to so and so in the town. The baptist church? Yeah that one"
It's very unusual for a non Catholic to go straight to denominations in answer to the "are you a Christian", because that's not the question, and due to the appeal to unity, because of the belief that we're all part of god's family, rather than go straight for dividing lines. And never would anyone identify as "I'm a protestant", that would be odd.
by globular-toast | 2026-02-07 17:00:52+00:00
The shift from male to female is fascinating. In younger drivers accidents are disproportionately male, I guess due to high testosterone buffoonery but in older drivers it's disproportionately female. My personal observation is that older male drivers are much more slow and less confident whereas females tend to be overly confident and driving way too fast, especially the ones in huge cars.

According to this women become more dangerous than male 17-24 year old drivers only when they reach 80+ whereas for men they only become more dangerous than female 17-24 year old drivers at 86+.

I actually think more should be done about younger drivers than older.
by vunderba | 2026-02-07 17:01:27+00:00
Nice job! Here's some feedback:

- The exercises in focus mode feel too short, maybe they could get longer over time?

- Disable text selection within the lesson container (using `user-select: none`). Not strictly necessary, but right now I can just Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V and hit 1000 WPM, which is pretty amusing.

- After completing an exercise, allow advancing to the next one via keyboard (Space or Enter). At the moment, the player has to take their hand off the keyboard, grab the mouse, and click "Next Exercise." For a game about focus, it kind of breaks the flow.
by kube-system | 2026-02-07 17:01:39+00:00
If you are preparing for accidents where memory loss might be an issue you might also want to consider that you could quickly be in a situation where:

* you forget that you have a clever password scheme

* you forget that you have data to decrypt

* your mental capacities are deteriorated enough that someone else takes over decisions making for you. This person may not know you or your data protection scheme.

* you are physically injured where biometrics are non functional. Or a biometric system with a limit on tries may have been tripped by those trying to help you.

* you were in an incident that your friends/family were also affected by

In my opinion, the best way to protect against these is simply write stuff down in plaintext somewhere that relies on physical security, like with documents in your home. Also notate what they are and why someone would need to access them and how.
by simonw | 2026-02-07 17:01:58+00:00
This is the stealth team I hinted at in a comment on here last week about the "Dark Factory" pattern of AI-assisted software engineering: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46739117#46801848

I wrote a bunch more about that this morning: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/7/software-factory/

This one is worth paying attention to to. They're the most ambitious team I've see exploring the limits of what you can do with this stuff. It's eye-opening.
by lo_zamoyski | 2026-02-07 17:02:17+00:00
Not quite. A formal system is a system of syntactic rules defined over an alphabet of symbols. They can be mechanized in principle. Peano arithmetic is one example.

A „logical” semantics can be assigned to such a formal system, but it is not a necessary entailment of the syntax, even if such systems are typically motivated by particular semantic models. Model theory might examine how the same formal system affords different interpretations.

Such syntactic systems have computational properties, and it is how computer science kicked off historically.
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-07 17:03:37+00:00
All these tech companies have cowards for leaders, and Sundar Pichai is no different. And he’s a non white immigrant! The CEOs fear being attacked by the administration through regulations or anti trust or not being given contracts. They are some of the most powerful people and yet they bend the knee so easily. Andy Jassy of Amazon is the worst though - funding the Melania documentary is so blatantly corrupt.

This era is evidence for why we cannot continue allowing individuals or mega corps to accumulate the kind of money and power they have. It is too easy to corrupt them.
by esbranson | 2026-02-07 17:04:05+00:00
India and Sweden don't have US-elite-level institutions governed by the admissions processes you discuss. KTH is not Harvard, and KI is not HMS. There are American universities with such processes, and enough students admitted under them in California and Texas and a few other US states to repopulate Sweden, and I would think for every Swedish university there is an equivalent or better US university with such an admissions process. I hazard the same thing could be done for all of Europe.
by boelboel | 2026-02-07 17:04:19+00:00
Proper self driving is furthest away from being able to handle these cities as well, don't see these driving in Sicily before 2040.

Many of these older people don't even know how to use a smartphone so even a 'perfect solution' will take some effort.I still have to help my grandpa with landline calls because he never had one himself (I live in one of the most developed countries in the world).
by rawgabbit | 2026-02-07 17:04:24+00:00
“Outsized Success” should be replaced with long term success that our customers value.

For enterprise customers, that means security and stability which may mean a complete re-architecture of our software and our organization. For price conscious consumers, that doesn’t mean they don’t value security and stability; it just means they can’t pay for it. However it is important to support these customer in a non adversarial way. Warn them, yes, there is another zero day exploit that is trying to steal all your data and use your machine to mine shitcoin. Long term, we need to create a product development pipeline that will make customers beg us to take their money. Many of those ideas will never see daylight; but if we don’t have new products to sell we don’t have a company.
by kakacik | 2026-02-07 17:06:01+00:00
Its not mutually exclusive - most of the world thats not in stone age has better public transport than US, I guess everybody knows that and its not by accident but for good (well bad but logical) reasons.

That some PT is still not covering somebody's full needs for long term living is understandable too I presume, especially if its few days gaps in service.
by Zigurd | 2026-02-07 17:06:35+00:00
The amount to which supposedly engineering based rationales are applied to Elon's decisions is cult like behavior. Here's what's really going on:

That thing I called full self driving just to troll government regulators? Just make it work and don't complain about what I called it.

That rocket that's way too big for orbital payloads but can't go beyond orbit without sending 20 more rockets full of fuel? Just make it work. Occupy Mars!

The two car models that work and have a halo effect on the rest of the product line? I'mma cancel that! Just make the stupid truck we're keeping work!

We've all had a boss like that. I'm sure they salute each other.
by 112233 | 2026-02-07 17:06:42+00:00
> The difference is that we've more or less hit a stable Pareto front in education and healthcare. Gains are small and incremental;

You probably mean gains between someone receiving healtcare and education now, as compared to 10 years ago, or maybe you mean year to year average across every man alive.

You certainly do not mean that person receiving appropriate healthcare is only 2% better off than one not receiving it, or educated person is noly 2% better of than an uneducated one?

Because I find such notion highly unlikely. So, here you have vast amounts of people you can mine for productivity increase, simply by providing things that exist already and are available in unlimited supply to anyone who can produce money at will. Instead, let's build warehouses and fill them with obsolete tech, power it all up using tiny Sun and .. what exactly?

This seems like a thinly disguised act of an obsessed person that will stop at nothing to satisfy their fantasies.
by GuB-42 | 2026-02-07 17:07:06+00:00
I don't think they can win over large company, they are just a small nonprofit organization, large companies want to work with other large companies.

Where they can make a difference is for fellow organizations and maybe small companies. A lot of them go to Google because that's the most convenient, even if it sometimes against their principles, they are proposing an alternative.

One minor criticism I have is that while they are not hiding the fact that they are rebranding off-the-shelf free software, they could give them a bit more visibility, should users want to self host at some point.
by CPLX | 2026-02-07 17:08:17+00:00
Cowardice is the wrong word here. It implies that these people have a desired action that they're not taking because of fear, weakness, or hesitation.

What tech companies actually have is rapacious sociopaths for leaders. They have purposely brought about the current state of affairs through intensive lobbying, spending, and direct action.

For the most part, they don't believe that they should be held accountable for their behavior. They don't fundamentally believe in democracy, and many of them don't really believe humans and human life are more important than some other abstract concept that they have in their heads. At root, they all believe in rule by the elite.

This may seem like an argumentative distinction, but I would counter that it's crucial to understanding what we have to do next, which is not to try to convince them, but rather to take back the power that they've accumulated over us, against their best efforts to stop us.
by bcrl | 2026-02-07 17:09:16+00:00
Given the tectonic shift in priorities for Linux kernel development over the past decade, I'm willing to bet that many key developers would be open to a microkernel architecture now than ~25+ years ago. CPUs now have hardware features that reduce the overhead of MMU context changes which gets rid of a significant part of the cost of having isolated address spaces to contain code. The Meltdown and Spectre attacks really forced the security issue to the point where major performance costs to improve security became acceptable in a way that was not the case in the '90s or '00s.
by einpoklum | 2026-02-07 17:09:21+00:00
So, I went and did that:

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

> workers who opposed the use of certain types of automated machinery due to concerns relating to worker pay and output quality... Luddites were not opposed to the use of machines per se (many were skilled operators in the textile industry); they attacked manufacturers who were trying to circumvent standard labor practices of the time.
by FireBeyond | 2026-02-07 17:09:42+00:00
Which often leads to this point, as in Lord of War:

> Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names - Liberation this, Patriotic that, the Democratic Republic of something-or-other... I guess they can't own up to what they usually are: the Federation of Worse Oppressors than the Last Bunch of Oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves Freedom Fighters.
by p1esk | 2026-02-07 17:09:42+00:00
What you described makes sense, and it's just one of the things to try. There are lots of other research directions: online learning, more efficient learning, better loss/reward functions, better world models from training on Youtube/VR simulations/robots acting in real world, better imitation learning, curriculum learning, etc. There will undoubtedly be architectural improvements, hardware improvements, longer context windows, insights from neuroscience, etc. There is still so much to research. And there are more AI researchers now than ever. Plus current AI models already make us (AI researchers) so much more productive. But even if absolutely no further progress is made in AI research, and foundational model development stops today, there's so much improvement to be made in the tooling around the models: agentic frameworks, external memory management, better online search, better user interactions, etc. The whole LLM field is barely 5 years old.
by ddtaylor | 2026-02-07 17:09:44+00:00
I understand how it plays out, but these are backup codes that I put into a backup strategy for serious life events and both times I needed them they failed to accomplish what they are for =(

Had I followed Googles own advice and relied entirely on these codes (which I thought I was doing) I would still be locked out of all those accounts, purchase history, Google Play Developer, etc.
by mc-0 | 2026-02-07 17:09:58+00:00
My experience working at a large F500 company:

A non-technical PM asked me (an early career SWE) to develop an agentic pipeline / tool that could ingest 1000+ COBOL programs related to a massive 30+ year old legacy system (many of which have multiple interrelated sub-routines) and spit out a technical design document that can help modernizing the system in the future.

- I have limited experience with architecture & design at this point in my career.

- I do not understand business context of a system that old and any of the decisions that occurred in that time.

- I have no business stakeholders or people capable of validating the output.

- I am the sole developer being tasked with this initiative.

- My current organization has next to no engineering standards or best practices.

No one in this situation is interested in these problems except me. My situation isn't unique with everyone high on AI looking to cram LLMs & agents into everything without any real explanation of what problem it solves or how to measure the outcome.

I admire you for thinking about this kind of issue, I wish I could work with more individuals who do :(
Show HN: Which chef knife steels are good? Data from 540 Reddit tread
by p-s-v | 2026-02-07 17:10:03+00:00
I wanted to see if "super-steel" marketing actually matched reality, so I scraped ~500 threads from r/chefknives and ran sentiment analysis on the specific steels mentioned.

The results:

MagnaCut: 28:1 positive ratio. The hype is real.

Ginsan: The sleeper favorite. High satisfaction because it almost never chips.

VG-10: Most controversial. High volume, but highest statistical ratio of "micro-chipping" complaints.

How I saved tokens (Inverse Masking): Feeding raw threads into an LLM just to find common terms like "Wüsthof" is a waste of money. I built a hybrid pipeline instead:

Fuzzy Match: Fuse.js catches 80% of common brands for $0.

Mask: Replace those entities with placeholders.

LLM: Feed the "masked" text to the model to catch obscure artisan makers and nuanced sentiment the fuzzy matcher missed.

Stack is Node.js + MongoDB. Full charts and the steel-by-steel breakdown are here: https://new.knife.day/blog/knife-steel-comparisons/all

Would love to hear thoughts on the methodology or if the data misses your favorite steel.