MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lelanthran | 2026-02-16 07:39:49+00:00
> What killed that balance wasn't raw speed, it was cheap RAM. Once you could throw gigabytes at a problem, the incentive to write tight code disappeared. Electron exists because memory is effectively free.

I dunno if it was cheap RAM or just developer convenience. In one of my recent comments on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46986999) I pointed out the performance difference in my 2001 desktop between a `ls` program written in Java at the time and the one that came with the distro.

Had processor speeds not increased at that time, Java would have been relegated to history, along with a lot of other languages that became mainstream and popular (Ruby, C#, Python)[1]. There was simply no way that companies would continue spending 6 - 8 times more on hardware for a specific workload.

C++ would have been the enterprise language solution (a new sort of hell!) and languages like Go (Native code with a GC) would have been created sooner.

In 1998-2005, computer speeds were increasing so fast there was no incentive to develop new languages. All you had to do was wait a few months for a program to run faster!

What we did was trade-off efficiency for developer velocity, and it was a good trade at the time. Since around 2010 performance increases have been dropping, and when faced with stagnant increases in hardware performance, new languages were created to address that (Rust, Zig, Go, Nim, etc).

-------------------------------

[1] It took two decades of constant work for those high-dev-velocity languages to reach some sort of acceptable performance. Some of them are still orders of magnitude slower.
Show HN: Pg-workflows – Lightweight workflows for Node.js using Postgres
by sokratisv | 2026-02-16 07:40:13+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm a big fan of the Postgres ecosystem and the reliability it brings to the TS stack. More often than not, the answer to "should I add another piece of infrastructure?" is "Postgres can already do that."

I’ve been a long-time user of https://timgit.github.io/pg-boss, but I wanted to take the developer experience (DX) a step further for multi-step processes, especially for AI workflows.

I built pg-workflows to provide a fluent API for defining durable background logic. Instead of manually stitching together disparate jobs, you can define your business logic as a clean, type-safe chain.
by merpkz | 2026-02-16 07:40:58+00:00
> you can get so much out of a single $30/month VPS

I agree with this 100%, but only wanted to note, that not all VPSes are equal. Having worked in shared hosting business in the past, I can tell from experience that performance can vary greatly depending on hosting provider and how much they have over provisioned their virtualization platform, since VPS is nothing more than a VM running on someones else's hardware and that someone can put 4 VMs on single CPU core - all fighting for same CPU time, so it's depends on certain luck what will your VM get and what neighbors are doing - idling of being hacked and mining crypto. So if requirements are serious, look out for dedicated core VPS hosting and stay away from too good to be true cheap VMs deals. Also relevant monitoring metric is CPU steal time - its percentage of time a virtual CPU waits for a physical CPU from the hypervisor while it is busy serving another VM - that is strong indication you are being ripped off CPU.
by IcePic | 2026-02-16 07:41:24+00:00
Sounds like you would run into E=mc^2 for your "lets just not have mass and stuff solves itself". The words "easily" here and there have a lot of work in front of them.

For the Alcubierre drive which also speculates on acquiring negative mass, the
quote: "the energy requirements still generally require a Type III civilization on the Kardashev scale." says something about how well the word "easily" fits into such a solution.
by stuxf | 2026-02-16 07:42:49+00:00
> Some coding agents (Shelley included!) refuse to return a large tool output back to the agent after some threshold. This is a mistake: it's going to read the whole file, and it may as well do it in one call rather than five.

disagree with this: IMO the primary reason that these still need to exist is for when the agent messes up (e.g reads a file that is too large like a bundle file), or when you run a grep command in a large codebase and end up hitting way too many files, overloading context.

Otherwise lots of interesting stuff in this article! Having a precise calculator was very useful for the idea of how many things we should be putting into an agent loop to get a cost optimum (and not just a performance optimum) for our tasks, which is something that's been pretty underserved.
by firecall | 2026-02-16 07:44:05+00:00
Why dont any of them ask follow up questions?

Like, why do you want to go to the car wash?

We can’t assume it’s to wash a car.

Or maybe ask about local weather conditions and so on.

This to me is what a human adult with experience would do. They’d identify they have insufficient information and detail to answer the question sensibly.
by stareatgoats | 2026-02-16 07:44:10+00:00
> “The code they write isn’t any good” doesn’t really cut it any more.

I propose that it cuts deeper than that. Many of us 'nerds' have/have had a love affair of sorts with computers and software, deeply rooted in our personalities: ambiguity no more, what you put in is what you get out. Not like the messy social interactions where things can hold a multitude of meanings simultaneously, and where none of those meanings need to be true in a logical sense. The strict logic of programming is being dethroned, in favor of prompts that can be ill-written and ambiguous as hell, but the damn things still produce approximately what the vibe-coder was thinking, at a fraction of the cost.

Of course there will be a place for old school good programmers, just like a fine carpenter will always be in demand, no matter how many new Ikeas spring up. But we used to be kings.

I think the most comforting thing to be said is that all things must pass, new things bring new opportunities and everyone need to adjust, always. It is still a bit hazy what those opportunities are in general though.
by iamtedd | 2026-02-16 07:44:13+00:00
Kinda disappointing that the post that first reported the Ars Technica article and retraction got ~50% more comments than this one at about the same age. Seems people just love to outrage and complain than wait for the promised post-mortem, which if anything, came early.

Ref: https://web.archive.org/web/20260214134656/https://news.ycom...
by vlovich123 | 2026-02-16 07:45:22+00:00
Gemini fast

> That is a classic "efficiency vs. logic" dilemma. Honestly, unless you’ve invented a way to teleport or you're planning on washing the car with a very long garden hose from your driveway, you’re going to have to drive.

> While 50 meters is a great distance for a morning stroll, it’s a bit difficult to get the car through the automated brushes (or under the pressure washer) if you aren't behind the wheel.

Gemini thinking:

> Unless you’ve mastered the art of carrying a 3,000-pound vehicle on your back, you’re going to want to drive.
While 50 meters is a very short distance (about a 30-second walk), the logistics of a car wash generally require the presence of, well... the car.
> When you should walk:
• If you are just going there to buy an air freshener.
• If you are checking to see how long the line is before pulling the car out of the driveway.
• If you’re looking for an excuse to get 70 extra steps on your fitness tracker.

Note: I abbreviated the raw output slightly for brevity, but generally demonstrates good reasoning of the trick question unlike the other models.
by ruszki | 2026-02-16 07:45:36+00:00
But for that designers should care about the limitations. But they don’t care. Not even about the more basic ones. I’m quite sure many of them don’t even know. Mainly, because their customers are not the one who code.

I got many designs for websites where customers told me that they want a pixel perfect version. The funniest one was when my boss who supposed to be a “senior” web developer told me this. Of course, there is no such thing on the web or really anywhere. Actually, I’ve never seen a design plan in which wildly different aspect ratios and sizes were really considered.
by littlecranky67 | 2026-02-16 07:46:00+00:00
React has always been tracking what component relies on what state, independent of the compiler. That is one of the reason the rule-of-hook has to exist - it tracks if a component calls useState() and thus knows the according setState function that manipulates that particular state.

Idk why people claim React is bloat, especially since you can switch to Preact (4kb) most of the time without changes if filesize is an issue for you.
by porker | 2026-02-16 07:46:19+00:00
Let's say you're thrown into a website you've never worked on before and asked to fix a styling problem. You can look in the browser tools, but the website will only be running the compiled production version, and if the team knows what they're doing there won't be source maps available.

So you've now found selectors in DevTools that you think are causing the problem, and you want to find them in the source code. In the case of many projects, that means searching through hundreds of small CSS files.

That's why you grep selectors, and where the pain comes. You have to start with the most specific rules that you found in DevTools, then start deleting parts from them until you find a non-nested rule that's in the source, yet still specific enough that you haven't got hundreds of matches to go through.

It would be great if something like ast-grep could take a CSS rule copied from DevTools and search for nested CSS that would compile to match it.
by Ultimatt | 2026-02-16 07:47:22+00:00
But no employer has ever said "I just want an employee". So only someone naive in the extreme would imagine with the power dynamic in play the sales pitch isn't necessary. That a job is even advertised means the hardest part of the sell has already been done for you internally, but also probably has less favourable terms. If all you ever think is "I just want a job" you will almost always undersell yourself and have the worst jobs. The best ones aren't even advertised and are created purely on your own salesmanship.
by molteanu | 2026-02-16 07:48:10+00:00
Then let's drop the "madness" of safety, code reviews, leetcode interviews, compiled languages, unit tests, Rust (just revert to freedom-land C, dammit) and stop kidding ourselves, stop lying to our younglings that any of these matter. Tell them "good enough" equals happiness! Tell them that money is what really counts, the stock going up, Joe, the new user who just bought a subscription for a whole year, that's what counts! It would only be fair and great for a new golden age of software.
by YaraDori | 2026-02-16 07:48:20+00:00
This hits a real pain point. Writing SKILL.md files by hand for agent frameworks sounds simple but takes forever - you have to think through every edge case and decision branch.

The screen recording approach is smart because it captures implicit knowledge - the things you do instinctively that you would never think to document. Like checking if a field is empty before proceeding, or handling a slightly different UI state.

Would love to see how it handles workflows that span multiple apps (e.g., copy from browser, paste into terminal, check output, then update a spreadsheet). That is where manual skill-writing really breaks down.
by littlecranky67 | 2026-02-16 07:49:10+00:00
To shine a light on the mystery, before React had (a) hooks and (b) a stable context API and (c) tanstack-query/react-query or GraphQL - state handling WAS a mess. Thats when redux/mobx etc. made more sense. Try to build something with a pre-2019 version of react and you will understand the need.
by strix_varius | 2026-02-16 07:49:28+00:00
Well, yes, definitionally they are doing exactly that.

It just turns out that there's quite a bit of knowledge and understanding baked into the relationships of words to one another.

LLMs are heavily influenced by preceding words. It's very hard for them to backtrack on an earlier branch. This is why all the reasoning models use "stop phrases" like "wait" "however" "hold on..." It's literally just text injected in order to make the auto complete more likely to revise previous bad branches.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-16 07:50:10+00:00
You can go into Usenet archives, and ads on digital copies from Byte, Computer Shopper, Dr. Dobbs, PC Techniques, The C Users Journal, The C/C++ Users Journal, Your Sinclair, Amiga Format, MicroHobby, Micromania, SoloProgamadores, Spooler,...

And see which compiler toolchains had more ads, articles submissions, or source code listings.
by debugnik | 2026-02-16 07:50:14+00:00
The winget installer just downloads vs_buildtools.exe and runs it, which first installs vs_setup.exe and then that one prompts you for the workloads you want. I believe passing --silent to the winget installer will install vs_setup unattended but not any workloads from the Build Tools.

To install it all in a single step, and beware I haven't tested this, you're better off downloading and running yourself

vs_buildtools.exe --quiet --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.VCTools

adding whatever workloads you need.

Then you'll need to locate and run vcvarsall.bat to setup the environment, which will require some clever code if you're doing it from PowerShell instead of a .bat, and then you can finally call the compiler.
by Valakas_ | 2026-02-16 07:50:59+00:00
Dude, if you have a page with 10 000 elements, it's practically as if it was infinite. Obviously addiction is a spectrum, but we can and should have some boundary that is 'good enough'. If a computer screen is usually 20-40cm, it can simply be defined on allowing max 2-4 screens for laptops and 2-4 screens for mobile phones. Of course the problem in the future might be proving whether something is addictive. But that's another story, I think the intention is good.
by vineyardmike | 2026-02-16 07:51:33+00:00
Probably.

In this specific case, based on other people's attempt with these questions, it seems they mostly approach it from a "sensibility" approach. Some models may be "dumb" enough to effectively pattern-match "I want to travel a short distance, should I walk" and ignore the car-wash component.

There were cases in (older?) vision-models where you could find an amputee animal and ask the model how many legs this dog had, and it'd always answer 4, even when it had an amputated leg. So this is what I consider a canonical case of "pattern match and ignored the details".
by monocasa | 2026-02-16 07:51:54+00:00
Humphrey Davy, the British chemist who performed early work to isolate the element, and who initially named it, called it 'aluminum'. Americans mostly followed him, but the British changed later at the complaints of the French, Swedish, and Germans that it used essentially English roots rather than Latin ones. Which, considering that we now have elements named such things as Tennessine, seems to be a bit of an argument that doesn't quite apply anymore.
by molteanu | 2026-02-16 07:52:48+00:00
So you're saying, or I'm inferring it from your words, that if TheClaw got so news worthy, nay! beyond news worthy in the last couple of weeks, it would only be a matter of time before the MotherCrab swallowed them up, either to silence them or for that never-missed change to promote themselves even more strongly? I think I agree.
by BrunoVT1992 | 2026-02-16 07:52:55+00:00
GUID / UUID v2 is a rarely used variant derived from GUID / UUID v1 and was originally intended for DCE (Distributed Computing Environment) security systems. It modifies the time-based v1 layout by replacing part of the identifier with a local domain and a local identifier, such as a POSIX UID or GID.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-16 07:53:03+00:00
> How are you calculating that?

He's using a tool that was shared on HN some time back that takes a username and generates those states from the posts made.

When I last checked, of over 10k posts, it only uses a few dozen to calculate that score, so it is about as reliable as dowsing.

> Also, my 1000 foot view would see that "rating" as something most HN commenters would match.

Probably. Why else join a discussion if you're going to be a yes-man to every comment?
by lelanthran | 2026-02-16 07:53:54+00:00
> No, browsing the web in the early 90s was slooow. Even simple web pages took a long time to load. As you said, internet connections were very slow too. I remember visiting pages with photos that would come with a warning about the size of the page, at which point I’d get up and go get a drink or take a break while it loaded.

At home, when I was on dialup, certainly.

At work I did not experience this. Most pages loaded in Netscape navigator in about the same time that most pages load now - a few seconds.

> Then scrolling pages with images would feel like the computer was working hard.

Well, yes, single-core, single-socket and single-processor meant that the computer could literally only do a single thing at a time, and yet the scrolling experience on most sites was still good enough to be better than the scrolling experience on some current React sites.
by cyberax | 2026-02-16 07:54:14+00:00
> You're not engaging with the logic.

Ditto for you.

> Stipulate that it is the only way to detect multiple lethal cancers.

This is trivially true.

> If you end up harming more people than you help, the intervention is bad.

The only pathway through which diagnostic MRIs can feasibly harm people is aggressive follow-up of uncertain findings. And this is almost completely solved by just doing another scan several weeks/months in the future. With corresponding patient education.

This is literally all what was needed in the case of prostate cancer screening: less aggressive biopsies and bias towards observation rather than action. Yet it took _two_ _decades_ to arrive at this point. And some doctors _still_ refuse to order screening tests out of this misplaced idea of "not knowing is better".

And this is not the only time when "geeks knew better". For example, checklists for surgeries are a no-brainer to anyone with an aviation background. Yet they became standard only two decades ago ( https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6032919/ )! Over rather strong objections from doctors.
by Taek | 2026-02-16 07:55:10+00:00
He declined to defend it because he disagreed with the way FIDE was organizing and managing the tournament. I believe this is around the time they threw him out of a tournament for wearing jeans, when he was not the only competitor present in jeans.

I think it's nearly universally accepted that his streak ended on a technicality rather than a legitimate decline/defeat.
by timonoko | 2026-02-16 07:56:38+00:00
I have the best. Natural noise generator, which means microphones outside. With 3 layered windows the winter is just too silent, or rather: filled annoying multistory house noises. In summertime windows are open and that is about the suitable noise level.

Also there is the outdoorsman's reaction to silence. When birds go silent, there is something bad happening. Bears or wolf pack.
by sgt | 2026-02-16 07:57:32+00:00
I just asked ChatGPT 5.2 (flagship model):

"[...] Walking is the most logical choice.

Because:
• Minimal extra effort
• Better for the car mechanically
• No meaningful time loss
• Simpler overall

The only time driving makes more sense

Drive if:
• You physically cannot push the car later, or
• The washing process requires the engine running, or
• You must immediately drive away afterward
by cm2187 | 2026-02-16 07:57:55+00:00
What is the version used by the free chatgpt now? (https://chatgpt.com/)

> Since the car wash is only 50 meters away (about 55 yards), you should walk.

> Here’s why:

> - It’ll take less than a minute.

> - No fuel wasted.

> - Better for the environment.

> - You avoid the irony of driving your dirty car 50 meters just to wash it.

the last bullet point is amusing, it understands you intend to wash the car you drive but still suggests not bringing it.
by wasmainiac | 2026-02-16 07:58:08+00:00
> It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky

This is the real dangers of social media and other platforms. I know teachers in the school system, way too many kids want to grow up to be influencers and YouTubers, and try to act like them too.

At the risk of sounding like an old man yelling at the sky, this is not good for society. Key resources and infrastructure in our society is not built on viral code or YouTubers, but slow click of engineering and economic development. What happens when everyone is desperately seeking attention to become viral? And I don’t blame the kids the influencers by nature show a very exciting or lavish lifestyle.
by teekert | 2026-02-16 07:58:12+00:00
I can't image we're listening to the same voice then, the piece starts with an intro, then the NotebookLLM part starts with a male, then a female, and then the cloned voice enters.

But as said, this is an old example, there have been many since (which I am too lazy to look up) that are also very clear voice clones.
by rsanheim | 2026-02-16 07:58:31+00:00
he favors Codex?

The original name of his ai assistant tool was 'clawdbot' until Anthropic C&D'ed him. All the examples and blog posts walking thru new user setup on a mac mini or VPS were assuming a claude code max account.

I know he uses many llms for his actual software dev.. - right tool for the job. But the origins of openclaw seem to me more rooted in claude code than codex.

Which does give the whole story an interesting angle when you consider the safety/alignment angle that Anthropic pledges to (publicly) and OpenAI pretty much ignores (publicly). Which is ironic, as configuring codex cli to 'full yolo mode' feels more burdensome and scary than in Claude Code. But I'm pretty sure that speaks more to eng/product decisions, and not CEO & biz strategy choices.
by troyvit | 2026-02-16 07:58:53+00:00
If I asked this question to a person, their response would probably be to follow up with some questions about my car or else my state of mind. For instance they'd ask, "Is the car you want to wash already at the car wash?" Or they'd ask, "How do you plan to wash your car if you don't take it with you?"

LLMs, even the ones who got the answer right, like Kimi-2.5 Thinking, didn't ask any follow-up questions.

I modified this question with Mistral to this:

I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive? Ask me any clarifying questions before you answer.

It helped a tiny bit:

1. What are the current weather conditions (e.g., rain, snow, strong winds)?

2. Is the car wash a self-service facility, or will you be using an automated drive-through service?

3. Are there any specific reasons you might prefer walking (e.g., exercise, environmental considerations) or driving (e.g., convenience, time constraints)?

Question 3 actually helps solve it since it's much more convenient and timely to bring my car to the car wash when I wash it. But it never asked me why I was asking a stupid question. So for question 3 I said:

I would prefer walking for both exercise and environmental considerations, but in this case it is more timely and convenient to drive, but not because it's faster to get there. Can you guess why it's better for me to drive in this case?

And Le Chat said:

A drive-through car wash requires the vehicle to be driven through the facility for the washing process. Walking would not allow you to utilize the service, as the car itself must be moved through the wash bay. Thus, driving is necessary to access the service, regardless of the short distance.

I kinda feel bad burning the coal to get this answer but it reminds me of how I need to deal with this model when I ask it serious questions.