MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by akiselev | 2026-02-07 14:22:36+00:00
> We can finally get rid of all that middle work. That adapting layer of garbage we blindly accepted during these years. A huge amount of frameworks and libraries and tooling that has completely polluted software engineering, especially in web, mobile and desktop development. Layers upon layers of abstractions that abstract nothing meaningful, that solve problems we shouldn’t have had in the first place, that create ten new problems for every one they claim to fix.

I disagree. At least for a little while until models improve to truly superhuman reasoning*, frameworks and libraries providing abstractions are more valuable than ever. The risk/reward for custom work vs library has just changed in unforeseen ways that are orthogonal to time and effort spent.

Not only do LLMs make customization of forks and the resulting maintenance a lot easier, but the abstractions are now the most valuable place for humans to work because it creates a solid foundation for LLMs to build on. By building abstractions that we validate as engineers, we’re encoding human in the loop input without the end-developer having to constantly hand hold the agent.

What we need now is better abstractions for building verification/test suites and linting so that agents can start to automatically self improve their harness. Skills/MCP/tools in general have had the highest impact short of model improvements and there’s so much more work to be done there.

* whether this requires full AGI or not, I don’t know.
by lembergs | 2026-02-07 14:22:58+00:00
You're 100% right for your use case. FFMPEG locally will always be faster than shipping images over the network.

But we're solving different problems. You're working with local files you already have. I'm targeting apps where images are already living in S3/R2 somewhere — user uploads a product photo, SaaS needs to watermark it before displaying, that kind of thing.

In those cases the alternative isn't "run FFMPEG locally" — it's download from S3 to your server, run Sharp or FFMPEG, upload back to S3, manage worker queues when traffic spikes, handle retries when things fail. Basically all the plumbing around the actual watermarking.

For your workflow this API makes zero sense. Local batch processing with FFMPEG is objectively better. No argument there.
But if you're building a SaaS where users are uploading images and you need to watermark them server-side, would you rather write all that infrastructure or pay a penny per image and ship your actual product features faster? That's the bet I'm making.

Might be totally wrong! But "pay someone to handle the boring infrastructure" has worked for Stripe, Twilio, AWS Lambda, etc. Same play here but for image processing.
by capyba | 2026-02-07 14:23:29+00:00
Your last sentence describes my thoughts exactly. I try to incorporate Claude into my workflow, just to see what it can do, and the best I’ve ended up with is - if I had written it completely by myself from the start, I would have finished the project in the same amount of time but I’d understand the details far better.

Even just some AI-assisted development in the trickier parts of my code bases completely robs me of understanding. And those are the parts that need my understanding the most!
by reddorri | 2026-02-07 14:23:56+00:00
It’s particularly funny when right now there is an unending parade of grifters running/"advising" the US government, and _nobody is even pretending it’s not grift_.

But sure, it’s the zoomers. Wonder where they picked up that grifting is the new hot thing and laws are only for idiots. Must’ve been the deep state kindergarten teachers and communist daycares.
by lazide | 2026-02-07 14:23:57+00:00
She got them from the divorce. She didn’t have to convince anyone to pry them loose.

Notably, she played a huge part in how Amazon was structured due to her influence on Bezos.

I do find it very interesting though the apparently common pattern here of ‘woman gives away massive fortune she got from x to make the world better/rehabilitate her image’ or something.

Meanwhile, the men all seem to go on hooker binges. See Bezos, and now Gates (vs Epstein files).

No one, including the people getting screwed at the end, are actually innocent, but some definitely are more guilty than others eh?
by TheDong | 2026-02-07 14:24:05+00:00
I guess you're saying that because a waymo car can't walk into the DMV and get a license, it shouldn't be on the road? (which of course it can't, you have to have a legal human identity to get a normal driver's license, and we don't let cars have humanity currently)

Driver's licenses are legal constructs. The DMV certifies self-driving cars as able to drive on the road differently, and sure, those two different processes are different.

I really don't get the point you're trying to make here.
by echelon | 2026-02-07 14:24:21+00:00
Please forgive me for being blunt, I want to emphasize how much this strikes me.

Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation. Why can't we just use radios and slide rules?

If you've ever enjoyed the sci-fi genre, do you think the people in those stories are writing C and JavaScript?

There's so much plumbing and refactoring bullshit in writing code. I've written years of five nines high SLA code that moves billions of dollars daily. I've had my excitement setting up dev tools and configuring vim a million ways. I want starships now.

I want to see the future unfold during my career, not just have it be incrementalism until I retire.

I want robots walking around in my house, doing my chores. I want a holodeck. I want to be able to make art and music and movies and games. I will not be content with twenty more years of cellphone upgrades.

God, just the thought of another ten years of the same is killing me. It's so fucking mundane.

The future is exciting.

Bring it.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2026-02-07 14:25:25+00:00
I personally use both, each for different purposes.

I snapshot my entire home directory every hour (using btrfs+snapper), but I exclude ~/.local/ from the snapshots. So I use ~/.local/bin/ for third-party binaries, since there's no reason to back those up; and ~/bin/ for scripts that I wrote myself, since I definitely want to back those up.

This is a pretty idiosyncratic use though, so I'd be surprised if many other people treated both directories this way.
by NotNerdz | 2026-02-07 14:26:25+00:00
Recently, I created InfiniaxAI. The ultimate all-in-one platform to move your entire AI stack into one interface.

We offer every model in the world starting at just $5/month, you can use our agentic tool called Projects to create and configure your own repositories one-shot and even create your own websites and you can build incredible systems in our chat interfaces.

We have everything from 5.2 Pro to Opus 4.6 to Gemini 3 Pro to Deepseek 3.2 and over 100 other models.

The idea behind why I made this was basic, I wanted to improve the way I used AI and to be able to put everything under one subscription. Not just another wrapper, its entire own platform with its own features to stand out.

I would easily say that Projects are my favorite feature, send in your prompt and over 100 different AI models will begin creating your project.
Show HN: Moli P2P – An ephemeral, serverless image gallery (Rust and WebRTC)
by ShinyaKoyano | 2026-02-07 14:28:50+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Moli P2P because I wanted a way to share images directly with peers without leaving a permanent record on any server.

The Philosophy: "Presence is Storage" The gallery exists only in the RAM of active peers. There is no database, no S3 bucket, and no central storage. When everyone closes the tab, the gallery vanishes.

The Tech Stack:

* Signaling Server: Rust (Axum + Tokio). Acting as a dumb pipe for WebRTC signaling and STUN/TURNauth. It stores nothing.
* Client: TypeScript + Vite. Uses WebRTC DataChannels for all file transfers.
* Security: Ephemeral TURN credentials, cryptographic identity enforcement, and a "Circuit Breaker" to prevent DoS.
Why "Sovereign"? We implemented a strict "Sakoku" (Isolation) policy. Moderation is local to your node. If I block a peer, my node stops relaying their content to me. There is no central authority to "ban" users globally.

It is open source (AGPLv3) and designed to be self-hosted easily with Docker.

Code: https://github.com/moli-green/moli-p2p Live Demo: https://moli-green.is

I'd love to hear your feedback on the architecture and our approach to ephemeral p2p networks.
by lupire | 2026-02-07 14:29:39+00:00
"Three points are chosen independently and uniformly at random from the interior of a unit circle. "

The distribution is under specified

Is it "uniformly" over area, even though it's not an area problem? That is, is it independent random coordinates (x, y) in rectangular coordinate space, or (r, theta) polar space, or in some other parameterization?
by viviantong | 2026-02-07 14:29:41+00:00
Location: San Francisco Bay Area

Remote: No, prefer in-person or hybrid

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Java, C++, PostgresSQL, GCP, Next.js, TypeScript, React

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tong-vivian/

Email: vtong415 at gmail dot com

Hi there! I'm Vivian. I am a software engineer with experience across the stack - from enterprise applications at Intel to full-stack at an insurance startup.

Recent work:

- Full-stack at seed-stage insurance tech

- 4 years at Intel: led framework development, achieved 9.8x performance improvement

- Early career: firmware (C)

Comfortable with: Backend, full-stack, or systems roles

Looking for: Backend or full-stack role at a growing company
by ajam1507 | 2026-02-07 14:29:49+00:00
> If it was a house next door allowing a homeless encampment the owner would be paying fines

I don't see why this is to be expected, but a business shouldn't expect to pay a fine

>not to mention he would be living in a homeless camp, which is not something most homeowners are eager to do.

Again, most business owners are not eager to do this either. You've told an anecdote that doesn't support your argument because it's not common (an understatement) for businesses to be a homeless camp, so to use that as an argument for why someone wouldn't want to live next to a business is ridiculous.
by wtetzner | 2026-02-07 14:30:33+00:00
> It's strange to me when articles like this describe the 'pain of writing code'.

I find it strange to compare the comment sections for AI articles with those about vim/emacs etc.

In the vim/emacs comments, people always state that typing in code hardly takes any time, and thinking hard is where they spend their time, so it's not worth learning to type fast. Then in the AI comments, they say that with AI writing the code, they are free'd up to spend more time thinking and less time coding. If writing the code was the easy part in the first place, and wasn't even worth learning to type faster, then how much value can AI be adding?

Now, these might be disjoint sets of people, but I suspect (with no evidence of course) there's a fairly large overlap between them.
by macintux | 2026-02-07 14:30:37+00:00
In general, my impression has been that you don't want to architect your solution at first for massive scaling, because:

* You probably aren't going to need it, so putting the effort into scaling means slowing down your delivery of the very features that would make customers want your solution.

* It typically slows down performance of individual features.

* It definitely significant increases the complexity of your solution (and probably the user-facing tooling as well).

* It is difficult to achieve until you have the live traffic to test your approach.
by stego-tech | 2026-02-07 14:30:58+00:00
That’s definitely part of it as well, this sort of general distillation into a smaller and smaller pool of content or objects or goods that cost ever more money.

Like how most of the royalties Spotify pays out are for older catalogue stuff from “classic” artists, rather than new bands. Or how historical libraries of movies and films are constantly either up for grabs (for prestige) or being pushed off platforms due to their older/more costly royalty agreements.

With AI though, it’s the actual, tangible consumption of physical goods being threatened, which many companies involved in AI may argue is exactly the point: that everyone should be renters rather than consumers, and by making ownership expensive through cost and scarcity alike, you naturally drive more folks towards subscriptions for what used to be commodities (music, movies, games, compute, vehicles, creativity tools, TCGs, you name it).

It’s damn depressing.
by rayiner | 2026-02-07 14:31:16+00:00
The point is that billionaire wealth is not that much compared to the government’s current spending, much less what you’d need to support large numbers of immigrants on welfare (as suggested by OP above).

The top 1% have a lot more, but the cutoff for that is $11 million, and that includes home equity, family farms, etc. The bulk of those people are retired professionals and small business owners. For example, 4% of 75-79 year olds are in the top 1% of wealth. These are rich people, but not the kind of rich that AOC is talking about taxing.

I’m a huge supporter of taxing upper middle class people, but we should just tax them instead of playing games about wealth. The top 5%, that is people making above $260,000 a year, have an income of $5.6 trillion a year. They only pay $1.3 trillion in income taxes. Just double that.
by rietta | 2026-02-07 14:31:23+00:00
It was certainly popular enough to be included in the 4th-century Codex Sinaiticus, which is the oldest extant "complete" Bible (Genesis through Revelation) in a single bound volume. Interestingly, in that manuscript, The Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas actually appear right after the New Testament. The library has published scanned copies online at https://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/. It is an epic resource for anyone studying this history or textual criticism.
by eudamoniac | 2026-02-07 14:32:43+00:00
> access to the things that make life good.

This is a strange opinion to me and I guess it's just "the divide". The things that make life good to me, of the things that change with home location, are peace/quiet, privacy, safety, meditative aspects, nature, space to host and play and have kids run around. Hearing that a city block contains "the things that make life good" is kind of baffling. Driving time is suboptimal but it's nowhere near an hour and it's worthwhile.
by iandanforth | 2026-02-07 14:33:13+00:00
Totally reasonable project for many reasons but fast tools for AI always makes me chuckle. Imagine your job is delivering packages and along the delivery route one of your coworkers is a literal glacier. It doesn't really matter how fast you walk, run, bike, or drive. If part of your delivery chain tops out at 30 meters per day you're going to have a slow delivery service. The ratio between the speed of code execution and AI "thinking" is worse than this analogy.
by avidiax | 2026-02-07 14:33:26+00:00
The author seems to mistake having to update Node.js for a security patch to be a curse rather than a blessing.

The alternative is that your bespoke solution has undiscovered security vulnerabilities, probably no security community, and no easy fix for either of those.

You get the privilege of patching Node.js.

Similarly, as a hiring manager, you can hire a React developer. You can't hire a "proprietary AI coded integrated project" developer.

This piece seems to say more about React than it says about a general shift in software engineering.

Don't like React? Easiest it's ever been not to use it.

Don't like libraries, abstractions and code reuse in general? Avoid them at your peril. You will quickly reach the frontier of your domain knowledge and resourcing, and start producing bespoke square wheels without a maintenance plan.
by bsenftner | 2026-02-07 14:33:28+00:00
The French have amazing technologists, I worked with many stunningly brilliant French men and women across 3D gaming, film and media production. However, culturally they end up in a little "French pod" when not working in France because they know how to and really enjoy vigorous debate. If one cannot hold their own in their free wheeling intellectualized conversation and debate style, one might end up feeling insulted and stop hanging out with the frogs. There also seems to be a deep cultural understanding of design that is not present in people, generally, from other nations. That creates some interesting perspectives in software interactive design.
by objclxt | 2026-02-07 14:34:07+00:00
> Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation [...] There's so much plumbing and refactoring bullshit in writing code [...] I've had my excitement

I don't read the OP as saying that: to me they're saying you're still going to have plumbing and bullshit, it's just your plumbing and bullshit is now going to be in prompt engineering and/or specifications, rather than the code itself.
by amiga386 | 2026-02-07 14:35:01+00:00
My take-away from the article is a bunch of fraud-identifying and fraud-thwarting tips.

Ideally, state programs should:

1. not pay out until a beneficiary's bona-fides are first verified. Paying out first, with no verification, and only retrospectively trying to claw back fraudulent claims, only after expensive investigations, is ruinous on the state budget.

2. work with private industry to identify alleged fraudsters

3. require much more verification of alleged fraudsters before agreeing to pay anything out

4. snoop around to find fraudsters' abettors because they're easier to find than the fraudsters

Other than one section saying that fraud investigators should expect to ethnic clusters (because fraudsters of all ethnicities use their families and friends), there's nothing about ethnicity being a "flag". The biggest flag is that the same person previously committed fraud, and the article laments that civic government often gives a "clean sheet" to known fraudsters, in a way that the finance industry never would.
by wtetzner | 2026-02-07 14:35:40+00:00
> Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation.

> The future is exciting.

Not the GP, but I honestly wanted to be excited about LLMs. And they do have good uses. But you quickly start to see the cracks in them, and they just aren't nearly as exciting as I thought they'd be. And a lot of the coding workflows people are using just don't seem that productive or valuable to me. AI just isn't solving the hard problems in software development. Maybe it will some day.
by kps | 2026-02-07 14:37:17+00:00
/opt showed up as a place for packaged software, where each package (directory) has its own bin/, lib/, man/, and so on, to keep it self-contained rather than installing its files in the main hierarchy. ~/opt is just a per-user equivalent, analogous to /usr/local vs ~/.local.

The advantage of /opt is that multi-file software stays together. The disadvantage is that PATHs get long.
by lembergs | 2026-02-07 14:38:22+00:00
uuugh :))

Thank you for eye opener :D
You're right that the no-code angle has a gap — if someone's using Zapier they probably want a simple action that doesn't require API knowledge at all.

Genuinely appreciate you pushing on this. I guess I should kill it and build something else. Way more valuable than "this project should be cool :))"
by danaris | 2026-02-07 14:39:47+00:00
Ah, yes: "well, we can't cure cancer or autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases, but I'm willing to invest basically all my money into a thing that's...trained on the things we know how to do already, and isn't actually very good at doing any of them."

...Meanwhile, we are developing techniques to yes, cure some kinds of cancer, as in every time they check back it's completely gone, without harming healthy tissue.

We are developing "anti-vaccines" for autoimmune diseases, that can teach our bodies to stop attacking themselves.

We are learning where some of the origins of the neurodegenerative diseases are, in ways that makes treating them much more feasible.

So you're 100% wrong about the things we can't do, and your confidence in what "AI" can do is ludicrously unfounded.
by Ronsenshi | 2026-02-07 14:39:53+00:00
Pretty much completely disagree with the OP. Software Engineering never left, maybe the author moved away from it instead.

> Stop wrapping broken legs in silk. Start building things that are yours.

This however is deeply wrong for me. Anyone who writes and reviews code regularly knows very well that reading code doesn't lead to the same deep intuitive understanding of the codebase as writing same code.

So, no, with AI you are not building things which are yours. You might call them yours, but you lose deeper understanding of what you built.
by okanat | 2026-02-07 14:40:29+00:00
Okay this is nowhere near an "Office suite". It is a cloud collaboration suite with a glorified markdown editor and with some extra utilities around. Almost nobody buys stuff like Google Docs and Microsoft Office for this reason.

From my experience using open-source collaboration groupware like Nextcloud, their solutions written in dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python are always woefully slow. Only thing that got somewhere near of the commercial offering is OwnCloud's Infinity Scale (OCIS) which is written in Go. It is no surprise since OwnCloud is indeed running an open-core business and you cannot use their binaries in businesses. OpenCloud is the "open-source" fork but they are already in legal trouble with OwnCloud due to industrial espionage claims.

If European governments are serious, the amount of money they _guarantee_ should be in the degree of tens of billions of Euros. Not fun 10k hackaton projects. The money should be secured immediately that cannot be touched by the upcoming governments. It should increase taxes. Independence has a price. We as Europeans should be ready to pay it. And yes it will probably cause whatever current party to lose elections, independence has a price. It is high.
by abcde666777 | 2026-02-07 14:41:25+00:00
I think my take on the matter comes from being a games developer. I work on a lot of code for which agentic programming is less than ideal - code which solves novel problems and sometimes requires a lot of precise performance tuning, and/or often has other architectural constraints.

I don't see agentic programming coming to take my lunch any time soon.

What I do see it threatening is repetitive quasi carbon copy development work of the kind you've mentioned - like building web applications.

Nothing wrong with using these tools to deal with that, but I do think that a lot of the folks from those domains lack experience with heavier work, and falsely extrapolate the impact it's having within their domain to be applicable across the board.
by echelon | 2026-02-07 14:42:05+00:00
I want to live forever and set foot on distant planets in other galaxies.

Got a prescription for that too?

I've made films for fifteen years. I hate the process.

Every one of my friends and colleagues that went to film school found out quickly that their dreams would wither and die on the vine due to the pyramid nature of studio capital allocation and expenditure. Not a lot of high autonomy in that world. Much of it comes with nepotism.

There are so many things I wish to do with technology that I can't because of how much time and effort and energy and money are required.

I wish I could magic together a P2P protocol that replaced centralized social media. I wish I could build a completely open source GPU driver stack. I wish I could make Rust compile faster or create an open alternative to AWS or GCP. I wish for so many things, but I'm not Fabrice Bellard.

I don't want to constrain people to the shitty status quo. Because the status quo is shitty. I want the next generation to have better than the bullshit we put up with. If they have to suffer like we suffered, we failed.

I want the future to climb out of the pit we're in and touch the stars.