MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by atriarch | 2026-02-06 16:06:24+00:00
Someone still has to orchestrate. I read every decision the LMs make and will stop and pause it and test it's assumptions and output. Sure that will occur less and less, and the feedback loop may go up a few levels (I.e. it breaks in production and requires a team of investigators, a code detective, and a techno-theologist, perhaps), but the feedback from the real world (nature vs nurture) will still occur. The laws of thermodynamics and system equilibrium still apply, and the need for those to architect and orchestrate will still be needed.

In the future, I see a small percentage of benevolent system-thinkers, hackers, and architects still at the helm. And, even if 95% of the time they are the guy who feeds the dog that protects us from touching the machines, occasionally nature will force us to convene and tell the machines what to do (or at least bargain with them).

The rest of humanity will go back to the default state: digging potatoes out of the ground in a village of 200 down by the river.
Show HN: Whispem – a small, readable interpreted language
by whispem | 2026-02-06 16:06:29+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Whispem, a small interpreted programming language implemented in Rust.

The goal was not to be fast or feature-rich, but understandable.
Every feature must justify its existence, and the whole language should be small enough to reason about end-to-end.

Whispem currently has:
• 14 keywords
• 9 built-in functions
• 4 core types

The implementation is a straightforward tree-walking interpreter (lexer → parser → AST → interpreter), written in pure Rust with zero external dependencies.

The intent is that:
• the language semantics are easy to explain
• the runtime behavior is easy to follow
• and the entire codebase can be read and understood without jumping through abstractions

I’m particularly interested in feedback on:
• whether the minimal feature set feels coherent or incomplete
• design tradeoffs in keeping semantics simple vs. expressive
• whether a language like this could be useful for teaching programming or language implementation

Repo: https://github.com/whispem/whispem-lang

Thanks for taking a look — happy to answer questions or discuss design decisions.
I’m especially interested in constructive feedback on the language design, the interpreter structure, and any edge cases or inconsistencies you notice while reading or trying it.
by Wowfunhappy | 2026-02-06 16:06:44+00:00
> Traditional SaaS products literally “write code” for you (they implement business logic). See: Zapier, Excel.

Eh, I'd call those a sort of programming language. The user is still writing code, albeit in a "friendlier" manner. You can't just ask for what you want in English.

> The enshittification is that the costs are going up faster than inflation and companies like OpenAI are talking about adding advertisements.

In 1980, IT would have cost $0 at most companies. It's okay for costs to go up if you're getting a service you were not getting before.
by jandrewrogers | 2026-02-06 16:06:57+00:00
Some systems require a total commitment to the complexity because it is intrinsic. There is no "simple" form that also works, even if poorly. In many contexts, "systems thinking" is explicitly about the design of systems that are not reducible to simpler subsystems, which does come up in many types of engineering. Sometimes you have to eat the whole elephant.

There is a related phenomenon in some types of software where the cost of building an operational prototype asymptotically converges on the cost of just writing the production code. (This is always a fun one to explain to management that think building a prototype massively reduces delivery risk.)
by alistairSH | 2026-02-06 16:07:04+00:00
Ultimately, lowering the value of their property.

Is this regularly true? IME, in Northern VA, land values have always increased with infill development. Thinking specifically of Arlington in the Courthouse/Ballston/Clarendon strip in the 90s and 00s. And now Reston.

Traffic and noise concerns might be legitimate, but I'm not buying the loss of value argument.
by kube-system | 2026-02-06 16:07:13+00:00
Yeah, the cost of a flight alone is often cheaper than driving. The issue that I am getting at is that flights do not provide door-to-door service.

The transportation to/from the airport at either end can often be significant, as many parts of the US are not accessible via public transit. And rural destinations often have no final-destination options other than an expensive rental car. It is common to incur these costs.
by baggy_trough | 2026-02-06 16:07:20+00:00
I think the ROI criticism is generally off the mark. Most homeowners that resist rezoning, etc. are concerned about quality of life issues rather than home values (although those are aligned if significantly lower quality of life reduces home values). For example, the idea that I'd benefit if my area was upzoned because I could sell my home/land for much more doesn't appeal to me at all. I don't want to sell my home, and I don't want the neighborhood to change around me in a way that I would eventually want to.
by jplusequalt | 2026-02-06 16:07:23+00:00
>If you make 10k/mo -- which is not that much!,

This is the sort of statement that immediately tells me this forum is disconnected from the real world. ~80% of full time workers in the US make less than $10k a month before tax.

Source: https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/
by krapp | 2026-02-06 16:08:14+00:00
>Well, liquor quite famously is considered as something to be protected in the U.S.; we had widespread civil unrest about removing legal restrictions on it!

And yet there's no Constitutional right to liquor, nor is access to liquor generally recognized as a fundamental human right. The civil unrest was due to the obvious result of banning liquor being the creation of mafia-run black markets. Same as the "war on drugs." Banning drugs only makes black markets and cartels more effective.

>As for cigarettes: what's different about my right to express myself in speech and my right to put what I want in my body?

Cigarettes aren't speech. Speech has value, even if it can do harm. Social media, being a means of effecting speech, has value even if it can do harm. Cigarettes have no value and can only do harm.

>We also heavily restricted speech then; take off the rose-tinted history glasses. Broadcast media restrictions were insane.

Sure. The argument for regulating broadcast tv and radio was the spectrum being a limited resource - but the web is not a limited resource. No matter how big Facebook or Twitter get, we're not going to run out of internets for new platforms.

>I just don't think the way to do that is to stake out deliberately absolutist positions--either because you think an absolutist outcome is good or out of a flawed believe that an extreme position will somehow help move the consensus position in the direction of the extreme.

I don't believe my position is necessarily absolutist - although it gets interpreted as such - I believe that social media platforms have the right and the moral duty to police themselves and deplatform dangerous and extremist content. Free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequence nor does it oblige you a platform. I just don't believe that having governments step into that role is a good idea, and I think recent history in the US and UK back me up in that regard.

And yes, social media platforms may (and will) get things wrong, but they can't send men with guns to shoot me in the head.

But staking out extreme positions to the contrary is sometimes necessary when confronted with extreme positions. I consider the position that social media is more addictive and dangerous than heroin to be extremist, that algorithms need to be banned, that social media platforms need to be nationalized, all of that hyperbole is getting ridiculous to me, and it smacks of a moral panic. But almost no one seems willing to push against it or even question it.
by jessiefisher | 2026-02-06 16:08:16+00:00
Built by a 19-year-old dev, this iOS app pulls real, rider-specific prices from Uber, Lyft and Waymo and shows them on one screen so users can price-shop before booking.

Prices reflect surge and discounts from the user’s own accounts (no estimates or scraping). Selecting an option sends you back to the native app to book.

Inspired by Waymo price swings in the Bay Area. Similar to Obi, but intentionally bare-bones and focused on final price.
by ranjha | 2026-02-06 16:08:16+00:00
Location: Cuttack, India

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1z6gmYqrWf_Uj_0UwrQeUSBn4hfB...

Email: agarwal.harshit117@gmail.com

Github: https://github.com/harshit-agarwal7

Technologies: Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Next.js, Flask, PostgreSQL, NoSQL (Datastore), AWS, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes
by GJim | 2026-02-06 16:08:19+00:00
> sellout trash

A trifle offtopic, but.....

In the 1990's and for us Gen-X'ers, the worst thing you could do was to sell out; to take the mans money instead of keeping your integrity. Calling people and bands 'sell outs' (sometimes without justification!) was to insult them.

With the rise of 'influencers' the opposite appears to be the case; people go out of their way to sell out and are praised for doing so. This is a massive change in the cultural landscape which perhaps many born in the 2000's aren't aware of. (Being aware of this helps give some perspective to Gen-X media and films like hackers).
by jeffbee | 2026-02-06 16:08:31+00:00
If you live in California I can assure you beyond any doubt that people from some far-away place have had outrageous levels of influence on your local housing policy. Almost the entire body of CEQA jurisprudence has been developed by two lawyers and a handful of labor union executives.

If your local building code requires an elevator that can accommodate a hospital stretcher, which is almost certainly does, that was jotted down in the building code by literally one guy from Glendale, Arizona, on the basis of a whim.
by delichon | 2026-02-06 16:08:44+00:00
I'm so NIMBY that I moved my backyard from a county with 4,000 to 1 people per square mile. A big attraction was the dark nights for amateur astronomy. Then the state decided that this was the perfect place to build 100 megawatts of 630 foot tall wind turbines with a blinking red beacon on top of each one.

My best bet now may be to move to orbit like S.R. Hadden. But it'll have to be high orbit, away from the satellite constellations.
by troyvit | 2026-02-06 16:08:50+00:00
Nah I'm just saying that Microsoft has more disposable money to throw at Teams than Europe has to throw at Matrix because Microsoft is a corporation that is choosing how to spend its money internally and Europe (or the EU, but why leave Switzerland, GB, etc. out of the fun?) would be funding an external entity in a (possibly?) new way.

I'm still learning how the EU applies grants to open source projects for specific feature sets, but I'm guessing that there's a lot of friction that could be removed.

And yeah, I agree that the money needed to improve Matrix is nothing. It's about getting organized and applying that money well.

To me Europe's push for digital sovereignty has the potential to reshape open source software's competitiveness around the world and in turn, Europe's.
by ericmcer | 2026-02-06 16:09:02+00:00
> one of them filed a complaint with the California State Bar, saying that I was practicing law without a license. They said because I’m not an attorney (which is true), I was offering “legal analysis,” which only licensed attorneys are allowed to do.

Do lawyers still really believe they can just throw some legal jargon at laypeople and we will just get confused and back down? Like not only do we have every single law and legal precedent on a device in our pocket, we also have AI's that can instantly answer questions. I am sure shit like that might have worked before 2010 when you would have to scramble to figure out if what they were saying was true or not, but it just seems antiquated to attempt it nowadays.
by haotian24 | 2026-02-06 16:09:09+00:00
Location: Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Remote: Yes or In person

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Python, TypeScript, Rust, JavaScript, SQL, Golang, React, Next.js, AWS, GCP, PostgreSQL, Solidity

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sY7x4B3AVnJiQZo6n9YWfwU97Vw...

Email: lihao9440@gmail.com

Junior at the University of Michigan, currently one of the founding engineers at Synthesis building a prediction markets terminal ($250K+ raised). Looking for Summer 2026 SWE internships or part time work for Fall 2026.
by antves | 2026-02-06 16:09:25+00:00
We love these tools but they were designed for testing, not for automation. They are too low-level to be used as they are by AI.

For example, the playwright MCP is very unreliable and inefficient to use. To mention a few issues, it does not correctly pierce through the different frames and does not handle the variety of edge cases that exist on the web. This means that it can't click on the button it needs to click on. Also, because it lacks control over the context design, it cannot optimize for contextual operations and your LLM trace gets polluted with incredible amount of useless tokens. This increases cost, task complexity for the LLM, and latency

On top of that, these tools rely on the accessibility tree, which is just not a viable approach for a huge number of websites
by MontyCarloHall | 2026-02-06 16:09:46+00:00
Animated Engines first came online in 2000 [0], and has essentially been frozen in time ever since. Now contrast it with this [1] from 2021. It's amazing how much web technology progressed in those two decades.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20090216150235/http://animateden...

[1] https://ciechanow.ski/internal-combustion-engine/
by giraffe_lady | 2026-02-06 16:10:24+00:00
I don't think we're on the same page here, I don't see that trump's policies are particularly central to the appeal or power of his movement. They aren't even important to trump.

The tea party was a right wing populist movement and maga is an extreme right populist movement that emerges a handful of years later, with astounding overlap in membership, and you don't think they're connected? ok.
by foxbarrington | 2026-02-06 16:10:29+00:00
A common reaction I get to https://forty.news is that the stories “need sources” which I always find funny. I don’t hear the same demand of sources from every other news outlet (I find it extra weird because all FN’s stories are 40 years old, simple to verify, and can’t push an agenda the same way).

Totally agree with you: all newspapers should cite sources. What’s silly to me is how selectively people care—big outlets get to hand-wave the “trust me” part even when a piece is basically a lightly rewritten press release, thinly sourced, or reflecting someone’s incentives more than reality.
by vee-kay | 2026-02-06 16:10:48+00:00
“Project Molecule": a proposed megafund in collision with Epstein, seeded with Gates-foundation capital and JPMorgan clients, with a sinister purpose : controlled pandemics!

Buried in the Epstein files is a 14-page JPMorgan proposal called Project Molecule—a formal partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to transform pandemic preparedness into a permanently governed, privately controlled, transnational system of vaccine procurement, surveillance, and global health finance—developed within the same institutional ecosystem in which the convicted sex offender (Epstein) operated as a connective broker between Wall Street, global health, and political power.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/magazine/jeffrey-epstein-...

https://portside.org/2025-09-15/how-jpmorgan-enabled-crimes-...

https://www.tumlook.com/katiepavlich/post/807627515385561088

https://www.moneycontrol.com/world/how-jpmorgan-enabled-jeff...
by Jtsummers | 2026-02-06 16:10:54+00:00
> There are two main schools of thought in software development about how to build really big, complicated stuff.

> The most prevalent one, these days, is that you gradually evolve the complexity over time. You start small and keep adding to it.

> The other school is that you lay out a huge specification that would fully work through all of the complexity in advance, then build it.

I doubt many people (if they stop to think about it) actually fit into either of these two schools of thought, they're both extremist positions. It's like claiming that the US population is filled with people believing in either big government autocracy and communism or small government libertarianism and free markets. That's an absurd position to take, just as these opening paragraphs are absurd.

The most generous interpretation is that the author is setting up a strawman.

These are extremist positions. No one except a fool would think that they can design a truly large system from scratch before ever writing a piece of code, and no one but a fool thinks they can write the code for a large system without ever thinking about the design.

The reality is that it sits in between, the author figures this out by the end, fortunately, but wants something they can't have:

> There should be some balanced path in the middle somewhere, but I haven’t stumbled across a formal version of it after all these decades.

First, they at least admit that they're stumbling. That's good, groping around in the dark is not an effective way to find an answer, turn on the lights. You aren't the only one thinking about this subject.

Second, for small projects and simple projects, or rehashes of projects you've done before, the approach often doesn't matter. This only matters for large, complex, and/or novel projects.

Software development is a design process.

Again, in case this was missed: Software development is a design process.

The idea of separating design from development is foolish (BDUF). The idea of separating development from design is equally foolish (extreme take on Agile, see Ron Jeffries failing at sudoku because he tries to use a development technique, TDD, without thinking about the design).

Take the "over 3000 active systems" from paragraph 4. There is no way anyone could have designed all 3000 active systems (either as the 3k systems or in a compressed form) from scratch in a reasonable amount of time. The only reason the author can think of a better design is because they have a design, even if it's not formally documented. The existing software is the design [0] that they can draw from to come up with the better design.

But wait, the foolish BDUF people would not try to refine the system, they'd try and build a new system from scratch. Don't be a fool.

The foolish extreme Agile people would not look at the whole (or a large enough section) and think about refining it, they'd just add to it or change the existing systems.

The sensible person says, "Wait, I acn'
by vladdoster | 2026-02-06 16:11:00+00:00
Location: Nashville, TN
Remote: true
Willing to relocate: boston || nashville
Technologies: Python, Django, IaC, Terraform, Golang, CI/CD, Azure/AWS, {ba,z}sh, Lua, Springboot,
Redis, Docker, Open Service Broker, {,non}relational & vector dbs, shared services, SOA
Email: mvdoster@gmail.com

resume: https://linkedin.vdoster.com && http://github.com/vladdoster

sr. cloud software engineer @ Mastercard (5 years)

Designed and built Platform-as-a-Service for microservice workloads running on Azure and AWS
to migrate on-prem workloads to the cloud. The platform operates globally, allowing teams to
deploy to several Azure-backed regions worldwide. Helped plan and create regional landing zones
in Azure for application teams wanting to perform globally. Designed platform components using
Terraform, Go, and Node; developed support tooling using Bash, Python, and Azure CLI. De-risk the
platform by addressing security vulnerabilities and ensuring the platform is PCI compliant.

api/devops software engineer @ Harvard Medical School (2 years)

Worked as part of the DevOps team to manage a 15k core CentOS HPC cluster. Designed and implemented
Python-based security scanning pipeline to securely deploy & run Apptainer images via SLURM.
Coordinated cross-team emergency patching eﬀorts. Collaborated with researchers and engineers across
3-letter institutions to deliver secure research infrastructure. Built CI/CD Pipelines with GitHub, Jenkins,
to automate code builds, testing, and deployments. Wrote Puppet modules to manage configuration of HPC fleet.
Wrote custom Puppet module & Python scripts to automatically remediate Tenable findings.

full-stack software engineer @ Global Prior Art (3 years)

Used Django, Celery, Selenium grid, and AWS API Gateway for IP rotation to scrape USPTO patent PDFs,
apply CV for data extraction, and generate reports with relevant claims, saving employees 4-5 hours daily.
Wrote E2E black-box/fuzzing unit tests. Automated on-premise deployment via Github Actions and Ansible.

maintainer @ Zinit (5 years)

Develop and maintain a zsh plugin manager on Github with 4k stars. Implemented unit tests,
containerization, bug fixes, and new features.
See: https://github.com/zdharma-continuum/zinit

contributor @ Open-source documentation (5 years)

Contributed hundreds of documentation corrections and enhancements to 400+ open source projects.
by kevin_thibedeau | 2026-02-06 16:11:02+00:00
C specifies minimum sizes. That's all you need 99% of the time. I'm always annoyed by the people who assume int is 32-bits. You can't assume that in portable code. Use long or ensure the code works with 16-bit ints. That is how the type system was meant to be used. int was supposed to reflect the natural word size of the machine so you could work with the optimum integral type across mismatched platforms. 64-bit platforms have mostly abandoned that idea and 8-bit never got to participate but the principle is embedded in the language.
Show HN: VideoZero – 2D Video Generation
by prathje | 2026-02-06 16:11:07+00:00
Hello Hacker News!
I've been lurking on hacker news, and it is amazing what people have built!

I'm Patrick and I built a 2D video generation tool at VideoZero.ai that can produce crisp technical videos (text, formulas, graphs) by using code instead of generating raw pixels.

After my PhD, I really wanted to do something more creative, and I started creating educational videos about computer science. I felt there was a huge need for engaging, short educational videos to counter all the let's say, "less brain-activating” short videos on social media. I came across Motion Canvas and its use of generator to define animations really resonated with the way I like to code. However, I quickly realized that making high quality videos takes forever! And, unfortunately, existing AI tools cannot generate technical videos that well, they can’t even handle simple text!
But then I thought, wait a minute, creating videos with Motion Canvas? This is just code? I turned around and looked at my AI buddy Claude and I told him “you can do it”!

I spent the following months working on that vision of enabling LLMs to generate 2D videos that don't break after just 10 seconds. The result is now called VideoZero and you can try it for free at videozero.ai (paid from my personal credit card). For one, here is the result of visualizing Conway's Game of Life: https://videozero.ai/view/?id=040c6732-38f3-4990-baff-73d03d...

Sometimes the videos are quite good, on other occasions, let's say they need a bit of refinement.

Would love to hear what you think and what you would like to visualize.

Cheers and have a good weekend!
Patrick
by robocat | 2026-02-06 16:11:22+00:00
I try to challenge myself by reading the article to form an opinion, and then I learn by testing my opinion for faults (using good HN comments). Sometimes I test myself by writing comments.

My recent binge has been trying to understand what's going on when smart people simplify complex topics down to single root causes (causes that often feel like memes to me).

I also enjoy a good rationalisation myself!