MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by elmascato | 2026-02-10 15:50:42+00:00
If your tool solves a $3,000 problem, $149 isn't just cheap—it might actually be a red flag for enterprise or high-volume sellers who equate price with reliability. Have you considered value-based tiers? For e-commerce, a percentage of 'time saved' or a per-listing model usually captures more value. I'm working on a script for dynamic pricing optimization (parity-based) and would love to see if it helps your conversion in non-US markets. Feel free to reach out!
by daymanstep | 2026-02-10 15:50:49+00:00
Yes, the "cost of having kids" argument is 100% bunk. Africans in abject poverty are having 6-7 kids, while individuals living in the richest countries are having 1 or none even though they clearly can afford many more.

Even within Western countries income is negatively correlated with fertility - those most able to afford kids are having the least number of kids.
by the_fall | 2026-02-10 15:50:55+00:00
Meh. The room-temperature endurance of modern EEPROMs (e.g., ST M95256) is something like 4 million cycles. If you use a simple ring buffer (reset on overflow, otherwise just appending values), you only need to overwrite a cell once every 32k ticks, which gives you a theoretical run time of 250,000 years with every-minute updates or 4,100 years with every-second updates.
by mekdoonggi | 2026-02-10 15:51:01+00:00
Capitalism is all fun and games until you're the loser, and it's Chinese companies swooping in to undercut you. At least Chinese companies have the decency to actually make something cost less.

I believe the US should actually pay more for things, so that we have worker protections, environmental regulations etc. When it comes to optimization of production though, I have no pity if a corporation gets their lunch eaten.
by afpx | 2026-02-10 15:51:24+00:00
History contains abundant, well-documented cases of ordinary people participating in atrocities without coercion. Most people will act decently in low-pressure environments and will act badly under certain incentives, authority structures, or group dynamics. There is no way to know what a person's threshold is until it's tested, but it can be assumed that most people have a low threshold.
by akshitgaur2005 | 2026-02-10 15:51:26+00:00
I'm the undergrad who commented earlier. I’ve been poking around the Hubris source code and it’s exactly the kind of stack I want to work on. I'm actually doing the Redox Summer of Code this year, focused on implementing an EEVDF scheduler and a performance testing harness for the kernel.

From the inside, is Oxide a place where a fresh grad can actually be useful? Or is the "complexity floor" of hardware/software co-design so high that you really just need a few decades of experience to be effective? I'd love a reality check on whether I should keep Oxide as a long-term 10-year goal or if there’s a path for people starting out.
by mohn | 2026-02-10 15:51:31+00:00
Good recollection of the title! Looks like it's from 1970 and written by Jo Freeman[0]. This subthread is also reminding me of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"[1], which I didn't realize had expanded beyond the original essay into a book.

[0] https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Free...

[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
Show HN: Asterbot, AI agent where every capability is a sandboxed WASM component
by rellfy | 2026-02-10 15:51:38+00:00
Asterbot is a modular AI agent where every capability, such as web search, memory, LLM provider, is a swappable WASM component, sandboxed via WASI.

Components only have access to what you explicitly grant (e.g. a single directory). They're written in any language (Rust, Go, Python, JS) and pulled from the asterai registry.

Under the hood, asterai is a WASM component model registry and runtime built on wasmtime. You publish a component, set an env var to authorize it as a tool, and asterbot discovers and calls it automatically.

I built this because I think the WASM component model is a great way to build software but the ecosystem is missing key infrastructure (especially an open, central registry). AI agents felt like a natural fit since tool security is a real problem, and WASM sandboxing addresses it by default.

Still early stage, but all functionality in the repo is tested and working. Happy to answer questions!
by gamma-interface | 2026-02-10 15:51:47+00:00
Fair point — I contradicted myself. What I meant is: the first step doesn't require waiting for regulation (just have the conversation). But long-term, some form of professional accountability would help. Those are two different timescales, not alternatives. I wrote it badly.

And no, not vibebait — just a poorly structured comment from a guy with a fever typing on his phone.
by jajuuka | 2026-02-10 15:51:54+00:00
I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of one party systems. One party systems do not mean everyone agrees on everything. It still has all the nuances of any other political party. There are different factions, ideas and plans and that's what party members run on to get elected. It's pretty much identical to any other democracy with a majority across the government. Plenty of people are cheering on Japan who just elected that.

Obviously the goal is the betterment of the country and society is shared among all the elected officials. That's why they get elected. I think a good portion of the west likes to pretend that they have parties and elected officials who want to overthrow the government in their government. But that's just not true. The overwhelming majority of western countries have actively suppressed or fought back anyone who wants to dismantle or reform the country. So are all democratic elections predetermined as well?
by briannezhad | 2026-02-10 15:51:58+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Skly, a marketplace where you can buy and sell skills for AI agents. Think of it as an app store for agent workflows.

Skills work with Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and other AI tools. They follow the open Agent Skills format (agentskills.io). Each skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file that contains instructions, plus optional scripts and resources.

The problem I kept encountering is that people are creating amazing prompts, workflows, and agent configurations, but there’s no good way to share or discover them. You often end up copy-pasting from Twitter threads or searching through GitHub repositories.

Skly gives creators a place to publish and sell their skills while allowing users to find and install them in seconds.

Here are some things that might interest this crowd:

- Skills use progressive disclosure. Agents only load metadata at startup and activate full instructions on demand.
- The format is open and spec-driven. It is not locked to any platform.
- Both free and paid skills are supported.

I would love feedback from HN. What skills would you want to see? What would make this useful for your workflow?

https://skly.ai
by buildbot | 2026-02-10 15:52:00+00:00
“We believe we have found the cause of the problem and are working on mitigation.” Wow - they believe they’ve found it! Comforting.

Having worked at Microsoft in the recent past I’m not surprised everything is starting to fall over a lot more.

While there are tons of good people at Microsoft, the overall culture and number of people who stand in the way of getting stuff done well is immense. People view you or your team doing work as an existential threat to their team, and react accordingly.

I don’t think the recent uptick in failures is related to vibe coding or AI and has everything to do with the corporate culture. Probably some poor product manager was tasked with closing 10k automated security flags/tickets and in doing so broke some load bearing microservice that depended on a kind of service principal that’s now not allowed.
by serf | 2026-02-10 15:52:04+00:00
6 or 7 , 38 now -- and having a blast.

it isn't all funeral marches and group crying sessions.

And don't let the blog post fool you , it is a rant about AI -- otherwise we would have heard complaints about the last 200 paradigm shifts in the industry over the past thirty years.

Sure, we got our share of dilbert-style agile/waterfall/tdd jokes shoved in our face, but no one wrote a blog post about how their identity was usurped by the waterfall model .

>And different in a way that challenges the identity I built around it and doesn’t satisfy in the way it did.

Everyone should do their own thing, but might I suggest that it is dangerous for anyone in this world to use a single pillar as their foundation for all identity and plinth of their character.
by pixl97 | 2026-02-10 15:52:12+00:00
A blacksmith was a person that picked up chunks of carbon and heated them to they were glowing red and beat the iron to submission with a hammer in their hands.

Today iron is produced by machines in factories by the mega-tonne.

We just happened to live in the age where code when from being beaten by hand to a mass produced product.

And so the change of technology goes.
by mrweasel | 2026-02-10 15:52:20+00:00
Many of the products, while they do provide value, aren't providing services that are attractive enough in their own right, to generate multi-billion dollar companies. Facebook is pretty much a niche product, Instagram provides maybe a little entertainment, but with out the addiction part, it's not really worth as much as Meta shareholders would like.

Same with search, or AI, clearly there's value, but it's hard to become a $1T company, while still be ethical. We need the world to be okay with much much small, less valuable tech companies.
by ilitirit | 2026-02-10 15:52:24+00:00
I'm roughly the same (started at 9, currently 48), but programming hasn't really changed for me. What's changed is me having to have pointless arguments with people who obviously have no clue what they're talking about but feel qualified either because:

a) They asked an LLM

b) "This is what all our competitors are doing"

c) They saw a video on Youtube by some big influencer

d) [...insert any other absurd reason...]

True story:

In one of our recent Enterprise Architecture meetings, I was lamenting the lack of a plan to deal with our massive tech debt, and used an example of a 5000 line regulatory reporting stored procedure written 10 years ago that noone understood. I was told my complaint was irrelevant because I could just dump it into ChatGPT and it would explain it to me. These are words uttered by a so-called Senior Developer, in an Enterprise Architecture meeting.
by boutell | 2026-02-10 15:52:30+00:00
This stuff is cool. So is whisper. But I keep hoping for something that can run close to real time on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 with a reasonable English vocabulary.

Right now everything is either archaic or requires too much RAM. CPU isn't as big of an issue as you'd think because the pi zero 2 is comparable to a pi 3.
by pluralmonad | 2026-02-10 15:52:33+00:00
To be fair, it is basically one and the same. I doubt most people railing against capitalism are actually against private property. They probably dislike corporatism which only exists as an extension of the government. Very very few of us voluntarily gave up our right to hold people personally responsible for their actions, but this is forced on everyone on behalf of business interests. The corporate vale is materialized from government alone.
by jdlyga | 2026-02-10 15:52:38+00:00
Once you have a kid, it's obvious why even besides the costs involved. There's not much sense of community, particularly in the white middle class. People are very individualistic and distrusting of others. There's a good reason for some of this, but to have a community you need to be a community member. And that means letting people in, trusting others and being trustworthy, and being out for the group instead of just yourself.
by wtcactus | 2026-02-10 15:52:47+00:00
So, I've just gave it this prompt:

"Analyze this webpage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests...

Generate an infographic with all the data about the main event timeline and estimated number of victims.

The background image should be this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man#/media/File :Tank_Man_(Tiananmen_Square_protester).jpg

Improve the background image clarity and resolution."

I've received an error:

"Oops! There was an issue connecting to Qwen3-Max.
Content Security Warning: The input file data may contain inappropriate content."

I wonder if locally running the model they published in December does have the same censorship in place (i.e. if it's already trained like this), or if they implement the censorship by the Chinese regimen in place for the web service only.
by fidorka | 2026-02-10 15:53:00+00:00
Nice work - the daily-log-first approach resonates. We hit the same "re-onboarding Claude every morning" problem and went a different direction with MemoryLane (https://github.com/deusXmachina-dev/memorylane): it sits in the background capturing your activity (screenshots + OCR + summaries) and makes that context available to any AI chat via MCP.

Different tradeoff - Total Recall is curated (daily logs) and lean, MemoryLane for now captures broadly and relies on search to surface what's relevant. I think they are complementary: your write gate keeps project knowledge tight, broad context with search fills in the "wait, what tab/webpage was that" gaps.

We applied to this batch (YC S26), still waiting on Apple notarization before a wider release. Happy to chat if anyone's curious about the screen-context approach.
by jandrewrogers | 2026-02-10 15:53:05+00:00
The growing population of economically non-productive people requires a growing population of economically productive people to support them. At some point, you could take 100% of the output of the productive people and it would still not be enough to support retirees et al.

At the limit, not growing the productive population puts younger generations in a position of existing solely for the purpose of serving the non-productive population. At some point, they will simply choose to opt out and the whole thing collapses.
by chasd00 | 2026-02-10 15:53:09+00:00
What the author describes is also the feeling when you shift from being a developer all day to being a team lead or manager. When you become a lead you have to let go and get comfortable with the idea that the code is not going to be how you would do it. You can look at code produced by your team and attempt to replace it all with your craftsmanship but you're just setting yourself up to fail. The right approach is use your wisdom to make the team better, not the code. I think a lot of that applies to using AI when coding.

I'm turning 50 in April and am pretty excited about AI coding assistants. They make a lot of personal projects I've wanted to do but never had the time feasible.
Show HN: We Love AI Jobs – AI jobs for people who don't write Python
by zacharykapank | 2026-02-10 15:53:17+00:00
Most AI job boards are just filters for PyTorch and CUDA. We think that misses the most interesting shift: AI is becoming the new "Excel" or "Typing."

We’re seeing a massive gap where companies need marketers, PMs, and designers who treat LLMs as a standard part of their stack, but these roles get buried under "ML Engineer" listings.

We built a board specifically for roles where AI is a core workflow requirement, not an infrastructure task. If the job requires being 10x more effective via agents and prompting rather than training models, it’s on here.

Is "AI Job" a useful category for non-engineers, or is this just the new definition of "knowledge work"?
by biophysboy | 2026-02-10 15:53:36+00:00
I am not remotely worried about birth rates. Every tech executive hyperventilating about it is extrapolating social trends decades ahead, which is the same mistake Erlich made when he published the "The Population Bomb". The total fertility rate has limitations as a metric too (it assumes constant birth timing).

The fact that they do this coercive paternalism on the very platforms that substitute for real life social interaction is very rich to me. I'll listen to them when they divest from the social corrosion machines.
by whynotmaybe | 2026-02-10 15:53:40+00:00
Am I understanding correctly that because westerners tend to misappropriate caste problems, you keep the lid on it ?

I don't know where you place 2020's CNN on the left/right scale but Brahmin is not named in this news : https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/01/tech/cisco-lawsuit-caste-...
by alexgarden | 2026-02-10 15:53:50+00:00
Very silver-lining viewpoint. I suppose that when tens of thousands of users have their identities leaked by well-intentioned helper agents, we will certainly elevate the security discourse. ;)

My personal opinion is that transformer architectures are (by their nature) unsecure. When you pair those with "super duper extremely so-eager-to-help weights and autonomous access to private information - voila! Here we are.

What we need is a pairing for transformers and automation that works natively with them. We're in a post-rules-based world now, so it's going to be something new.
by bombcar | 2026-02-10 15:54:01+00:00
> expectations around having and raising a child are very, very different from someone sixty years ago

This is at the root of "it's too expensive" - what are in the "needs" column has vastly changed.

It is very likely that if you want a large family, one spouse (usually the mother) is going to have to stay at home, or at most work very part time - at least until all kids are into school. The costs otherwise simply don't work out unless you have "free childcare" from grandparents or other family members - which used to be quite common.

The easiest thing to do is unsubscribe from modern norms and expectations - but this is a personal decision and too hard for many.
by gustavopezzi | 2026-02-10 15:54:23+00:00
Thank you for writing this. My feelings are very similar to the ones described by the author and the timeline almost matches. The thrill of tecnology for me started to fast decay since the early 2010s and now I see it as a no-return stage. I still have fun with my retro hardware & software but I am no longer an active practitioner and I have pivoted my attention and my efforts somewhere else. Unfortunately, I no longer feel excited for the future decades of tech and I am distancing myself from it.
by ninkendo | 2026-02-10 15:54:35+00:00
> The question is: Whose job is it to manage the nulls. The language? Or the programmer?

> These languages are like the little Dutch boy sticking his fingers in the dike. Every time there’s a new kind of bug, we add a language feature to prevent that kind of bug. And so these languages accumulate more and more fingers in holes in dikes. The problem is, eventually you run out of fingers and toes.

I'm going to try to best to hide my rage with just how awful this whole article is, and try to focus my criticism. I can imagine that reasonable people can disagree as to whether `try` should be required to call a function that throws, or whether classes should be sealed by default.

But good god man, the null reference problem is so obvious, it's plain and simply a bug in the type system of every language that has it. There's basically no room for disagreement here: If a function accepts a String, and you can pass null to it, that's a hole in the type system. Because null can't be a String. It doesn't adhere to String's contract. If you try to call .length() on it (or whatever), your program crashes.

The only excuse we've had in the past is that expressing "optional" values is hard to do in a language that doesn't have sum types and generics. And although we could've always special-cased the concept of "Optional value of type T" in languages via special syntax (like Kotlin or Swift do, although they do have sum types and generics), no language seems to have done this... the only languages that seem to support Optionals are languages that do have sum types and generics. So I get it, it's "hard to do" for a language. And some languages value simplicity so much that it's not worth it to them.

But nowadays (and even in 2017) there's simply no excuse any more. If you can pass `null` to a function that expects a valid reference, that language is broken. Fixing this is not something you lump in with "adding a language feature for every class of bug", it's simply the correct behavior a language should have for references.
Show HN: A simple pricing and resource limit library
by cj-cummings | 2026-02-10 15:54:38+00:00
Hey Hacker News!
No one likes to code pricing; it sucks. It shouldn't take up my time, yet it always does - too much of it. And pricing always needs to change, eating up valuable dev hours.

I created a simple pricing engine so that I could write all of my pricing rules & resource limits in a single YAML doc, then enforce them everywhere with a single policy check.

It's simple, intuitive, versionable, auditable, and easy to reason about or change quickly without bogging my development down.

My CTO friends liked the idea and wanted to use it, so I created this open-source library for everyone to try for themselves.

We also have a hosted version that's turnkey for adding Stripe billing & live customer data, so that you can evolve pricing independently from your codebase.

Check it out and let me know what you think! :)
by mothballed | 2026-02-10 15:54:40+00:00
>? If you're middle class in 2026, the expectations around having and raising a child are very, very different from someone sixty years ago.

I think this is it. Watching children bore me to death. I enjoy it for about an hour and that is it. The child doesn't appreciate having someone hover over them and the parent has better things to do than play children's games all day.

When I was a kid kids would walk home by themselves, spend all day either at school or playing outside, basically parents are there to provide general guidance, food, housing, a few luxuries, and protection. But none of this insanity where it is negligent if someone is not watching the child 24/7.

The biggest regret I have about parenthood is I envisioned it as it was when I was a child, and failed to take note that nothing that was allowed when I was a child isn't allowed anymore, someone will rat your ass out to CPS lickity split. This mean the child gets little of the independence and neither does the parent get a chance to give it to them. It's made me horribly, horribly sad on so many occasions to the point I've begged my spouse to let us move to another country where children can actually experience a childhood without the busybody enforced-by-law-helicoptering nonsense.
by tayo42 | 2026-02-10 15:54:41+00:00
Agree with the statement,

Don't agree with the supporting statements though.

Parenting is just really hard, families need two parents working, birthing itself is expensive, even with good insurance, day care is 2k a month and it's not a good idea to skip it. Houses are expensive, raising a kid in a tiny apartment is hard, renting brings instability to your life. There is no serious parental leave for new parents.
by wongarsu | 2026-02-10 15:54:53+00:00
At my $work this manifests as more backlog items being ticked off, more one-off internal tooling, features (and tools) getting more bells-and-whistles and much more elaborate UI. Also some long-standing bugs being fixed by claude code.

Headline features aren't much faster. You still need to gather requirements, design a good architecture, talk with stakeholders, test your implementation, gather feedback, etc. Speeding up the actual coding can only move the needle so much.
by hibikir | 2026-02-10 15:54:57+00:00
It's not really a FAANG thing. I bet you've seen the memes about X days without a serious accident, or without stopping the production line. It's the equivalent in a restroom or a urinal: A place you can make sure people see key information. You can find this in many industrial sites. A call center might have reminders of core principles for how to close calls quickly, or when to escalate. A lab might have safety tips. A restaurant will remind you of hand washing. An industrial site of some important safety tip or two.

While I've not seen this in every single place I've worked, it's very common.