MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mancerayder | 2026-02-07 22:01:37+00:00
>BTW: I am “expert” in cloud by any definition (did at a startup, worked at AWS ProServe, staff consultant at a 3rd party consulting company) and I develop. How hard do you really think it is for someone with a developer mindset to learn how system design works at scale and bring their same developer mindset to infrastructure as code?

It depends! Do you mean clicking in the AWS console and spinning up infrastructure? It takes a few days.

Learning terraform/CloudFormation so it's repeatable? Probably a few weeks.

Kubernetes design patterns and troubleshooting? I feel like it takes at least a few months of hands on and theoretical.

To build infrastructure that lasts, is monitored with an APM as well as infrastructure specific tooling (not Cloudwatch) has cost dashboards set up to account for workloads across a dozen product lines (not Cost Explorer), has a CI CD pipeline automation for hundreds of repos including automatic onboarding of new ones, understands cloud security enough to have designed a tight perimeter with some automation around detection and remediation, has strong network level knowledge and knows how to deal with external vendor/client connectivity options (since you have to adapt to their limitations or demands)... Instead of server babysitting, you know in advance how to prepare the inevitable situation where workloads need to scale, and already have tooling and horizontal and vertical auto scaling either automated or ready to go...

If you know these things after 2.5 years, and I say this fully seriously, you are in some sort of .5 percent elite in this industry and deserve something like 1M a year, or you should be leading something huge.

Otherwise there's a risk here that you don't know what you don't know, which was my original point about over confidence by software engineers when it comes to infrastructure.
by yassien | 2026-02-07 22:01:41+00:00
The core idea here of derivative laundering is the extrapolations get re-extrapolated, then repeated until they’re treated like input data. An unpacking tool proposal shows (Orders 0–4: observation → extrapolation → narrative upgrade → timeline certification → social propagation) plus an Extrapolation Debt Ratio to separate repeatable forecasts from testable ones.
by crvdgc | 2026-02-07 22:01:58+00:00
At least for this article it's more about the job, or to be precise, the past where job and passion coincided:

> Ultimately if you have a mortgage and a car payment and a family you love, you’re going to make your decision.

Nothing is preventing the author from continuing to write code by hand and enjoy it. The difference is that people won't necessarily pay for it.

The old way was really incredible (and worth mourning), considering in other industries, how many people can only enjoy what they do outside of work.
by WalterBright | 2026-02-07 22:02:05+00:00
And yet we still have a solar system, empty of life other than Earth, we can expand to. Why try to cross an ocean when everything we could want is across the river?

Two things baffle me:

1. The idea that Terran life is toxic and must not be allowed on other planets in the solar system.

2. The one person who is advancing our space faring abilities by leaps and bounds is routinely vilified and excoriated on HackerNews.
by thephyber | 2026-02-07 22:02:56+00:00
This sounds entirely too doomer.

There will obviously be companies that build a vibe coded app which too many people depend on. There will be some iteration (maybe feature addition, maybe bug fix) which will cause a catastrophic breakage and users will know.

But there will also be companies who add a better mix of incantations to the prompts, who use version control and CI, who ensure the code is matched with tests, who maintain the prompts and requirements documents.

The former will likely follow your projected path. The latter will do fine and may even thrive better than either traditional software houses of cheap vibe coding shops.

Then again, there are famous instances of companies who have tolerated terribly low investment in IT, including SouthWest Airlines.
by wudangmonk | 2026-02-07 22:02:56+00:00
If he doesn't use C++ features then there's no point of bothering with C++ at all. C++ is kinda but not really a superset of C. There are some nice features that are lacking in C++.

The fixie example wants to make the comparison that using C instead of C++ is deliverately done just to brag about doing something in a way that is more difficult than in should be. In reality the issue is that C++ might not offer you any benefit at all and it could potentially bring you issues later on for things such as interfacing with other languages.

I personally do not see the point of using C++ if you do not use any of its features.
by dghlsakjg | 2026-02-07 22:03:03+00:00
I don’t have to be dense to raise my eyebrows at “character”.

It has been invoked in plenty of examples in the name of preventing other cultures and skin colors from a neighborhood, among other less defensible reasons. My parents weren’t sold a house because the seller thought “a good Christian family” would be better suited to the character of the neighborhood. That’s not a rare story. Ask some of your visible minority friends. So if you want others to assume what “character” means, you don’t get to be upset when people assume that your motives are rooted in hate, racism or bias. If that isn’t you, don’t be surprised when you find yourself standing shoulder to shoulder with a person like that.

That’s why I prefer if people elaborate what exactly they are objecting to. It keeps you from providing cover for assholes (or exposes you for one)
by rglover | 2026-02-07 22:03:05+00:00
I've been using it every day for nearly two years now, with your suggested productivity boost observed.

The difference is that I'm not just letting agents willy nilly commit code. I treat them more like a companion and guide their steps (I use Cline w/ Sonnet/Opus 4.5/4.6). Not only do I save a ton of money on tokens, but the results end up being infinitely better than the "yolo" mode outcomes (even with excellent prompting/context).

From my POV, the only divide is between a willingness to be an accountable professional versus someone who just "lets the AI do it" and whistles-with-hands-in-pockets when that code inevitably blows up in a way you couldn't predict (because you weren't checking, only the AI was, which you swore was "good enough").

That approach works if you're just sitting on your couch hacking up toys to dice roll on X. But if you're trying to build reliable, deterministic systems that aren't constantly buzzing you awake at 3am, you're asking for a serious humbling if no one in your organization can explain how or why anything your business relies on works the way it does (that's operationally suicidal, imo, but hey—America).

That gets misinterpreted as being a "luddite," when really it's just having been down the rabbit hole enough times to know that if you can't point to and understand why it's happening (and ideally, whodunit), you don't know shit.
by etamponi | 2026-02-07 22:03:18+00:00
> So as a senior, you could abstain. But then your junior colleagues will eventually code circles around you, because they’re wearing bazooka-powered jetpacks and you’re still riding around on a fixie bike. Eventually your boss will start asking why you’re getting paid twice your zoomer colleagues’ salary to produce a tenth of the code.

I might be mistaken, but I bet they said the same when Visual Basic came out.
by throwup238 | 2026-02-07 22:03:18+00:00
Loop it. Use another agent (from a different company helps) to review the code and documentation and call out any inconsistencies.

I run a bunch of jobs weekly to review docs for inconsistencies and write a plan to fix. It still needs humans in the loop if the agents don’t converge after a few turns, but it’s largely automatic (I baby sat it for a few months validating each change).
by nosianu | 2026-02-07 22:03:54+00:00
The Heritage Foundation, billionaires and a lot of other people who want this are all US citizens, and they planned for this for a long time. Let's not blame others for something entirely US-homegrown.

As an ex East German, I wonder how much of it is the disappearance of the competing model. Some of the old communists actually warned about this. Don't get me wrong, I participated in the demonstrations back then, socialism had clearly failed as a society and economically. Does not make that particular idea wrong though. The powerful want to go back, take back the power they think is theirs, consciously or as a reflex.

Note that Europe, Germany in particular, are far from the "socialist" examples some, or many, Americans think, welfare state and all that. Fact is, when it comes to rigid stratification of society, who rules, who owns, Germany is far on the side of capital, and according to a study the few thousand people at the very top are from the same 4% of the population almost exclusively.

What is happening in the US is happening in more places. Here in Germany we too now have more and more attacks on social systems. It's never the fault of inept leadership, no the people must work more and longer! They have zero new ideas. That is the only one they can think of. I am not really exaggerating, even the representatives of our powerful "Mittelstand" (much of Germany's industry) heavily criticized especially the conservative CDU in the government only a few days ago, publicly.

I see no reason to try to blame the Chinese, or the Russians, or anyone. All of it comes from within, and not just in the US.
by CSSer | 2026-02-07 22:04:14+00:00
It seems strange not to mention ICE or even treatment of transgender individuals if you mention travelers. We've effectively taken out round-the-clock advertisements saying "If you're not a fire-breathing, straight WASP, tread lightly". Normally, out of a sense of egalitarianism for even conservatives, I would tag on "even though it's not true", but I fear the evidence simply doesn't bear this out anymore.

We're searching the phones of visiting punk kids. We're cruelly punishing Canadian residents for clerical errors by unnecessarily detaining them. We've told our own citizens that it's reasonable to interrogate them at any moment for looking brown or black. We told an entire class of people they simply do not exist as they or even their family, friends, and coworkers understand them. Finally, we're deporting people who, although they've been here unlawfully for years, have also contributed a great deal. I've left out the most egregious examples to remain focused on the system.

All of this is happening as a backdrop while droves of US-born and immigrant citizens alike lose their jobs and are unable to find new ones. To say the irony is palpable is an understatement.
by MallocVoidstar | 2026-02-07 22:04:34+00:00
Archive.today don't use Cloudflare, the admin mimics their captcha page because he hates them. He also used to captcha-loop anyone using Cloudflare's DNS resolver because they don't send the IP subnet of clients to upstreams.

I don't think it's a honeypot, though, it's not like he's learning much about me other than I like not paying for news sites.
by skeeter2020 | 2026-02-07 22:04:42+00:00
Even in your short, simple comment I see 4? 5? (or more?) pieces of administrative policy that need to be policed, and then we need a process to handle these rules - and the edge cases (ex: what if I'm travelling with someone in sales but I'm the senior employee and we take a client out for dinner? only sales can expense alcohol but typically the most senior employee must pay), and the resubmission process, and the approve of exceptions process, and on it goes...
by lordnacho | 2026-02-07 22:05:09+00:00
I don't know how nobody has mentioned this before:

The guy with 100k will end up rewriting the rules so that in the next round, he gets 105k and you get 5k.

And people like you will say "well, I'm still better off"

In future rounds, you will try to say "oh, I can't lose 5k for you to get 115k" and when you try to vote, you won't be able to vote, because the guy who has been making 23x what you make has spent his money on making sure it's rigged.
by theropost | 2026-02-07 22:06:02+00:00
Fair enough, I didn't dig too deep though here's what I have come up with - I'm sure there are many factors, but it is quite interesting here:

Historically, Democratic and Republican administrations have followed distinct fiscal and economic patterns: Democrats typically oversee deficit reduction and falling unemployment, often achieved by maintaining or increasing the tax burden. Conversely, Republicans typically oversee deficit growth and rising unemployment, largely driven by decreased tax burdens through legislative cuts. Statistically, since 1945, real GDP has grown faster under Democrats (4.3% vs. 2.5%), while modern Democratic presidents (Clinton, Obama, Biden) have all reduced the deficits they inherited, whereas every modern Republican (Reagan through Trump) left office with a larger deficit than when they started

So you'd think tax cuts would create more jobs, less unemployment but it has not. It seems like the opposite, I'm sure there is much more to it.
by _aavaa_ | 2026-02-07 22:07:27+00:00
Good by what standard? Compared to SOTA today? No they're not. But they are better than the SOTA in 2020, and likely 2023.

We have a magical pseudo-thinking machine that we can run locally completely under our control, and instead the goal posts have moved to "but it's not as fast as the proprietary could".
by crowbahr | 2026-02-07 22:08:27+00:00
Where on earth are you getting these numbers?
Why would a SaaS company that is fighting for market dominance withhold 10x performance if they had it? Where are you getting 2.5x?

This is such bizarre magical thinking, borderline conspiratorial.

There is no reason to believe any of the big AI players are serving anything less than the best trade off of stability and speed that they can possibly muster, especially when their cost ratios are so bad.
by cmiles74 | 2026-02-07 22:08:58+00:00
I have junior people on my team using Cursor and Claude, it’s not all great. Several times they’ve checked in code that also makes small yet breaking changes to queries. I have to watch out for random (unused) annotations in Java projects and then explain why the tools are wrong. The Copilot bot we use on GitHub slows down PR reviews by recommending changes that look reasonable yet either don’t really work or negatively impact performance.

Overall, I’d say AI tooling has maybe close to doubled the time I spend on PR reviews. More knowledgeable developers do better with these tools but they also fall for the toolings false confidence from time to time.

I worry people are spending less time reading documentation or stepping through code to see how it works out of fear that “other people” are more productive.
by ok123456 | 2026-02-07 22:09:21+00:00
This is romanticising the past.

The modal person just trying to get their job done wasn't a software artisan; they were cutting and pasting from Stack Overflow, using textbook code verbatim, and using free and open-source code in ways that would likely violate the letter and spirit of the license.

If you were using technology or concepts that weren't either foundational or ossified, you found yourself doing development through blog posts. Now, you can at least have a stochastic parrot that has read the entire code and documentation and can talk to it.
by Balgair | 2026-02-07 22:09:52+00:00
Had a family member pass away and was part of their long term care team. The exact same thoughts came through my head too.

The 'funny' thing is that for the first few days, you can do a lot, but with medical stuff, it's mostly just waiting anyway. Even the first month, you can power through a lot. You become an expert fairly quickly at the little health thing. And then find that we know next to nothing about biology.

But after weeks, it's supprising how little you can do that is 'extra'. The grind really gets to you fast. And your putting your own needs away for just that little time catches up on you. You end up needing support quickly too. Not wanting support, needing it.

In the end I was able to hold my head high and say I absolutely did everything I possibly could, even to the point of needing help myself. I was just surprised at how little ways that went towards affecting the outcome.

There but for by Grace go I
by nephihaha | 2026-02-07 22:10:10+00:00
I've never really agreed with putting SF together with Fantasy, because they are slightly different genres. Some science fiction writers have used genuine science to underpin their writings, one of the more recent examples of that would be "the Martian". Fantasy doesn't need that kind of technical detail.

It parallels other developments. There is an increasing scepticism around science, and a significant number of people do not believe in the Moon landing. The heroic age of space travel has been replaced by school teachers and guys busking in tin cans in near Earth orbit. It's become mundane and the most exciting things in space exploration are being done by probes not humans nowadays.
by doodlebugging | 2026-02-07 22:10:33+00:00
This is true though I think even if the employer provides all this on a per employee basis, the number of eligible employees, after everyone who stands to lose a job because of a shift to AI tools, will be low enough that each employee will need to add a lot of value for this to be worth it to an employer so the stated number is probably way too low. Ordinary people may just migrate from Apple products to something that is more affordable or, in the extreme case, walk away from the whole surveillance economy. Those people would not buy into any of this.
Show HN: AI Agent Tool That Keeps You in the Loop
by dshearer | 2026-02-07 22:10:34+00:00
Misatay: a VS Code extension that is not about running a bunch of agents autonomously, but rather working side-by-side with an agent.

So, yes, this is a bit counter-trendy at the moment.

(It's in an early state. Ideas are most welcome!)

Your new dev loop:
- Plan a feature with Misatay, then save your plan to your repo → Lose nothing when you switch AI session
- Let Misatay work on the plan's tasks and commit its changes to Git → Keep track of what changes go to what task
- AI-guided code reviews → Misatay tells you what changed and why, in the context of a task
- Misatay asks for help instead of spinning on problems → Save $$$ by wasting fewer tokens
by krapp | 2026-02-07 22:10:35+00:00
>Why try to cross an ocean when everything we could want is across the river?

That "river" is still vast and nothing we want is on the other side.

>1. The idea that Terran life is toxic and must not be allowed on other planets in the solar system.

It's less the idea that Terran life is toxic and more that we're still hoping to find some forms of primitive life elsewhere in the solar system, and don't want those efforts thwarted by cross-contamination. You decided the rest of the solar system is dead, not the scientific community.

>2. The one person who is advancing our space faring abilities by leaps and bounds is routinely vilified and excoriated on HackerNews.

If you really can't comprehend the reason why Elon Musk is villified by people then there's no point in trying to explain it to you.

Suffice to say that owning a rocket company doesn't absolve a person of their sins to everyone, even on Hacker News.
by apitman | 2026-02-07 22:10:44+00:00
A large percentage of the code I've written the last 10 years is Go. I think it does somewhat better than the others in some areas, such as relative simplicity and having a robust stdlib, but a lot of this is false security. The simplicity is surface level. The runtime and GC are very complex. And the stdlib being robust means that if you ever have to implement a compiler from scratch, you have to implement all of std.

All in all I think the end result will be the same. I don't think any of my Go code will survive long term.
by dijit | 2026-02-07 22:10:49+00:00
Nothing happened to them, they're still around; just consolidated into industrial operations.

The "twist" is they rot as e-waste every 18 months when newer models arrive, generating roughly 30,000 metric tonnes of eWaste annually[0] with no recycling programmes from manufacturers (like Bitmain)... which is comparable to the entire country of the Netherlands.

Turns out the decentralised currency for the people is also an environmental disaster built on planned obsolescence. Who knew.

[0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09213...
by belter | 2026-02-07 22:11:39+00:00
I run the numbers on hyperscaler AI capex and the math is not
going to work out.

With these assumptions:

– Big 4 keep spending at current pace for 3 more years

– Returns only start showing after aprox 2 years

– Heavy competition with around 20% operating margin on AI and Cloud

– Use of 9% cost of capital

This is the current reality:

AWS aprox $142B/yr

Azure aprox $132B/yr

Google Cloud around $71B/yr

Combined its about $330B to $340B annual cloud revenue today

And lets says Global public cloud market of $700B total today.

To justify the current capex trajectory under those assumptions, by year 3
the big hyperscalers would need roughly $800B to $900B in new annual revenue
just to earn a normal return on the capital being deployed.

That implies combined hyperscaler cloud and AI revenue going from:
$330B today to $1.2T within 3 years :-))

In other words...Cloud would need to roughly do 4× in a very short window,
and the incremental revenue alone would exceed the entire current global cloud market.

So for the investment wave to make financial sense, at least one of these must be true:

1 Cloud/AI spending globally explodes far beyond all prior forecasts

2 AI massively increases revenue/profit in ads, software, commerce and not just cloud

3 A winner takes all outcome where only 1 or 2 players earn real returns

4 Or a large share of this capex never earns an economic return and is defensive

People keep modeling this like normal cloud growth. But what we have is insanity
by david-gpu | 2026-02-07 22:11:51+00:00
Russia has been involved in covert sabotage operations in Europe for more than a decade [1][2]. You can learn more about this from investigative journalist Christo Grozev [3].

What are the chances that the high-speed rail crash that occurred in Spain a few weeks ago was also caused by them? [4]

[1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-shadow-war-against-wes...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRU_Unit_29155

[3] https://m.youtube.com/@thechristofiles/videos

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Adamuz_train_derailments
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-02-07 22:11:52+00:00
This is an interesting idea but the problem is where to stop as you travel down through layers of frameworks?

Say we take it to an absurd extreme: You probably won’t have your agent code up Verilog and run your website on an ASIC.. and you aren’t going to write an assembler to code up your OS and kernel and all the associated hardware support, so you probably want a server and an OS to run your code and maybe some containers or a process model.. so the agentic reinvention has to stop somewhere.

One helpful mindset is to choose frameworks and components that avoid rediscovery. Tailwind for example contains some very well thought out responsive breakpoints that a ton of thought went into designing. With `:md` which is only a couple of tokens, your agent can make use of all that knowledge without having to reinvent everything that went into those decisions.