MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by reducesuffering | 2026-02-10 16:55:33+00:00
After Covid and AI progress, I'm constantly bewildered at peoples' consistent inability to extrapolate the immediate following step in a trajectory.

Global TFR:
1990–1995=3.31, 1995–2000=2.88, 2000–2005=2.73, 2005-2010=2.62, 2010–2015=2.59, 2015–2020=2.52

Our current 1.6 predicament was just at 2.35
Show HN: A real-time collaborative word puzzle inspired by NYT Spelling Bee
by catdeleon | 2026-02-10 16:56:07+00:00
Hi HN

I’m a product designer, not an engineer, and I built a daily word puzzle you can play directly in your browser.

There are lots of Spelling Bee-style games out there and most of them are great for solo play.bee with me is different by design. It's built for collaboration:

- everyone plays on their own device
- everyone can enter their words themselves
- everyone can shuffle the board independently

while all the progress towards Genius is shared.

I built this as a side project because I love word games and wanted something I could play quickly without friction — and I wanted to see how far I could get using Lovable as a non-engineer.

Lovable handled most of the app logic and wiring, and I focused on game design, UX, and tuning the word list so it felt challenging without being frustrating.

I’d really appreciate feedback — especially around difficulty balance, UX, or anything that feels confusing or unfair.

Game link: https://wannabeewith.me

Thanks for checking it out—and happy to answer any questions about the build, design decisions, or launch process.

— Cat
by ahl | 2026-02-10 16:56:15+00:00
So while most of the software is open source rather than proprietary, you still have a fair point that customers pay for support (as they do with most enterprise products). One could theoretically use the product without first-party software updates, managing the open source oneself... but that would have practical impediments (and runs counter to the all-in-one simplicity that customers value in the Oxide product).

Two points about your last point. First, software improvements benefit all customers; as the business grows, the effective cost per customer shrinks. Also, most customers grow their Oxide deployment or will replace hardware after a depreciation cycle. The sustainability of investments into the software (and the product generally) is on solid ground.
by bombcar | 2026-02-10 16:56:18+00:00
The latter is allowed now - after the backs of the credit card processors were broken.

They fought tooth and nail against cash discounts OR credit surcharges and they finally lost. In some areas it's rampant that you get a pretty substantial discount - often 4 or 5%, better than cash-back - and many places post "cash prices".

You can get even more if you're willing to ride the hassle of the gift card train.

The credit card companies know people spend more if they use credit cards, and they turn around and sell that to the merchants.
by jcgrillo | 2026-02-10 16:56:25+00:00
I think you might be underestimating how big the "old(er) school workloads" market is. And, at least from Oxide's point of view, it isn't shrinking but instead growing. A certain segment of tech has been enamored with the public cloud for the last ~15yr but personally over my career spanning that time I've seen some real drawbacks. "Spaghetti infrastructure" is a real, bad problem. Cloud pricing models heavily penalize some totally legitimate workloads. Keeping costs down while scaling up is really, really hard. If you own a fixed amount of hardware and buying more of it is expensive, you tend to use it more intelligently. Or maybe the one on-prem company I've worked at was just exceptionally good at computers?
by bcantrill | 2026-02-10 16:56:38+00:00
Well, a couple of things. First, the Jonathan Blow episode[0] was over six years ago. Second, it was nearly a three hour conversation -- I don't think I can be accused of not letting him talk? Third, I definitely remember that I felt I had to interrupt him to move the conversation along. Fourth, I had to pee really badly, I was absolutely freezing, and I was quite concerned about missing my flight to New Zealand that evening with my family for Christmas (which I damned near did) -- and I have no doubt that I was not at my best!

I do try to get better at this stuff, and I re-listen to our episodes to improve as an interviewer. If it's been "a few years", maybe you haven't listen too much to Oxide and Friends? I think we've had some wonderful guests and great conversations over the span of the podcast -- though I also have no doubt that it's imperfect, for which you have my profound apologies!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkdpLSXUXHY
by rgxsh | 2026-02-10 16:56:39+00:00
The founder has only forked repositories on GitHub that are sort of light web development related.

His use of bombastic language in this announcement suggests that he has never personally worked on serious software. The deterioration of GitHub under his tenure is not confidence inspiring either, but that of course may have been dictated by Nadella.

If you are very generous, this is just another GitHub competitor dressed up in AI B.S. in order to get funding.
by Night_Thastus | 2026-02-10 16:56:41+00:00
This is happening everywhere, including nations with great social systems/healthcare/parental leave/etc. And it happens even when nations try throwing money at the problem.

While economic concerns may be worsening the issue - I don't think they're the root cause as many would like to say.

I think the root cause is that we have outsmarted our biology. Once you give people education on the risks of sex and pregnancy, a focus on consent, easy access to contraceptives, knowledge of the responsibilities of child-rearing, and a world of other activities and pursuits - they simply stop having children at or above replacement rate.

Once given the knowledge and choice, humans do not have enough children to sustain a population.

No one wants that answer because it means we can't just blame it on [[CURRENT_PROBLEM]]. And it means there are no real 'solutions'.

People in their 20's will see peak world population in their lifetime. It will be fascinating to see how society changes over the decades that follow that.
by steve_adams_86 | 2026-02-10 16:56:53+00:00
> no amount of static typing will save you from poorly defined or optimised-too-early types that encode business logic constraints into programmatic types.

That's not a fault of type systems, though.

> because business logic will move faster than whatever code you can write and fix, and exposing it as just "types" breaks the process for future programmers to extend your program

That's a problem with overly-tight coupling, poor design, and poor planning, not type systems

> In practice, I find that staunch static typing proponents are often middle or junior engineeers

I find people become enthusiastic about it around intermediate stages in their career, and they sometimes embrace it in ways that can be a bit rigid and over-zealous, but again it isn't a problem with type systems
by waffletower | 2026-02-10 16:56:55+00:00
Not going to pull age or title rank here -- but I suggest if your use of AI feels empty, take advantage of its speed and plasticity and iterate upon its output more, shape the code results. Use it as a sculptor might too -- begin with its output and make the code your own. I particularly like this latter approach when I am tasked with use of a language I view as inferior and/or awkward. While this might read as idealistic, and I agree that there are situations where this interaction is infeasible or inappropriate, you should also be encountering problems where AI decidedly falls on its face and you need to intervene.
by jimnotgym | 2026-02-10 16:56:56+00:00
> Buying a bottle of Calvados in some remote area? Yea just tap to pay with your Mastercard.

Hard disagree. Until Covid, many small shops didn't take cards in Europe. Taxis, restaurants, market stalls, even trains were often cash only not that long ago. I in the UK ran accounts in companies that had people travel extensively in Europe. We used to issue travellers with EUR200 for the things that cards couldn't buy. Most shops didn't take Amex due to fees. Americans will either have to bring a compliant card or change some cash at the airport.

I also think you have misjudged the mood. I guarantee there are a large number of people in rural Europe that would be very happy never to meet another American tourist, even if it costs them. Americans can look forward to worse service everywhere. I wouldn't be suprised if some people in rural France refused to let you have the Calvados at all.
by HoldOnAMinute | 2026-02-10 16:56:59+00:00
For me it's both - I mourn the loss of my craft ( and my identity ) but I'm also enjoying the "magic".

Last night I was thinking about this "xswarm" screen saver I had in 1992 on my DEC Ultrix workstation. I googled for the C source code and found it.

I asked Claude to convert it to Java, which it did in a few seconds. I compiled and ran it, and there it was again, like magic
by AtomicApps | 2026-02-10 16:57:09+00:00
Hi,
I basically started a side project last year focused on UI/UX. I released v1 a week ago and I’m just looking for some feedback on what you guys think.
The idea is simple: you install the NuGet, add a few lines, and your project immediately feels more like a polished Windows 11 app — more consistent and smoother. I know there are other toolkits out there, but the key idea here is it’s core WPF: no custom controls, no style prefixes, nothing that breaks your existing project.
If anyone has a moment, here’s a small demo on YouTube. The before/after has zero styling changes, and the after can still be improved in spacing and layout — that’s left to the dev. The goal is to modernize the look without breaking existing apps.
Any feedback from WPF devs would be really appreciated — thanks in advance!
by JPKab | 2026-02-10 16:57:11+00:00
We are unhappy BECAUSE it's a utopia, and our brains evolved in a landscape that was ALWAYS trying to kill us. Like an immune system in an overly clean environment starts attacking inert things and creates allergies, our minds have created threats and focused on "relative" scarcity over actual scarcity. Instead of "How am I going to get enough calories to survive this week?" it's "Why does that guy get to be in a private jet and I have to fly coach?"
by Groxx | 2026-02-10 16:57:18+00:00
I suspect that using a build tag (say `test`) and two function definitions (one that directly calls `time.Now()` and one test-only one that uses a mutable var) will optimize out to zero cost in the non-test case - last I fiddled with that, it was pretty good at consistently inlining trivial wrapper funcs like that.
by noelwelsh | 2026-02-10 16:57:20+00:00
In 2 out of 3 problematic bugs I've had in the last two years or so were in statically typed languages where previous developers didn't use the type system effectively.

One bug was in a system that had an Email type but didn't actually enforce the invariants of emails. The one that caused the problem was it didn't enforce case insensitive comparisons. Trivial to fix, but it was encased in layers of stuff that made tracking it down difficult.

The other was a home grown ORM that used the same optional / maybe type to represent both "leave this column as the default" and "set this column to null". It should be obvious how this could go wrong. Easy to fix but it fucked up some production data.

Both of these are failures to apply "parse, don't validate". The form didn't enforce the invariants it had supposedly parsed the date into. The latter didn't differentiate two different parsing.
by close04 | 2026-02-10 16:57:23+00:00
> one of the problems with replacing credit card companies like VISA are really technical

VISA and Mastercard never resolved major technical problems. It's nothing a bank wouldn't already be able to achieve internally from a technological complexity point of view. They didn't invent any of the technologies, they just navigated the political and regulatory hurdles, then leveraged their position for more.

Your comment makes it look like the problems are "just" political or regulatory. These are more often then not the bigger ones.
by ctward | 2026-02-10 16:57:28+00:00
I agree that certain icons that are common parlance can increase cognition ( vs. x). However I think expanding a users icon lexicon and forcing memorization can actually harm cognitive experience.

Our users are context switching across dozens if not hundreds of digital experiences a day. Forcing memory recall is a tax. The question is always "whats the ROI?"

IMO color and words go just as far as an icon without relying on net new visual language.

As per your comment on horizontal scrolling, I couldn't agree more. Horizontal scrolling is booty. However, depending on the job to be done you can avoid overly wide tables with customizable columns, expandable rows, hover states, and strategic truncation.

I certainly would prefer those strategies over relying on a unique icon language that isn't part of the dozen or so immediately recognizable icon schemas already familiar to users.
by cbdumas | 2026-02-10 16:57:40+00:00
That may be true but the sense I get from Gen Z folks who I've talked to is that for them Discord is almost more of a social network for interacting with a community. Their activity might be centered around gaming but they're using Discord to find people they don't already know to play with, talk about the game, etc. For those folks, Mumble will not be even close to an alternative to discord.

Myself, though, I basically only use it to talk to the same guys I've been gaming with since we met in middle school 20-some years ago, and for that Mumble seems perfect.
by JohnMakin | 2026-02-10 16:57:46+00:00
I'm ~40ish but middle career and not in management. I envy this author, whatever joy he found in solving little puzzles and systems was extinguished in me very early in my career in an intense corporate environment. I was never one to love fussing much with code, but I do love solving system scale problems, which also involve code. I don't feel I am losing anything, the most annoying parts of code I deal with are now abstracted into human language and specs, and I can now architect/build more creatively than before. So I am happy. But, I was one of those types that never had a true passion for "code" and have meant plenty of people that do have that, and I feel for them. I worry for people that carved out being really good at programming as a niche, but you enter a point in your career where that becomes much less important than being able to execute and define requirements and understand business logic. And yea, that isn't very romantic or magical, but I find passion outside of what pays my bills, so I lost that ennui feeling a while ago.
by Amdev-5 | 2026-02-10 16:57:51+00:00
I’ve been contributing at Aden (Amdev-5 on GitHub), where my focus has been on closing the 'actionability' gap by building out Hive’s integration ecosystem. To make the framework truly plug-and-play for business environments, I’ve focused on merging high-utility connectors like X (Twitter), Cal.com, Apollo.io, serp api, while currently refining a Google Maps PR to give agents better geospatial awareness. Beyond the tools themselves, I’ve been working anround infrastructure and architecting the SDR and Blog Writer sample agents. These weren't just meant as demos, but as blueprints for how multi-turn coordination can replace brittle, hard-coded automations in a real-world workflow. It’s been a blast so far and I’m happy to dive into any questions regarding the integration layer or our approach to multi-agent task execution.
Show HN: ClearDemand – Cross-case search and drafting for injury firms
by Dave_stridefuel | 2026-02-10 16:58:04+00:00
Hello HN,

We built ClearDemand to solve the "hallucination" problem in legal drafting. General LLMs are great at writing, but terrible at accuracy—which is a dealbreaker when citing medical evidence in a demand letter.

The Problem: Personal Injury firms spend hundreds of hours manually summarizing unstructured medical records (PDFs) to draft demand letters. If they miss a specific injury or treatment date, the settlement value drops.

The Solution: ClearDemand is a drafting platform that ingests raw case files (police reports, medical records, invoices), runs OCR, and uses RAG to generate drafts that are source-verified.

Grounded Generation: Every claim in the generated letter includes a citation linking back to the specific page in the source document.

Cross-Case Search: We index the firm’s entire history, allowing lawyers to search across past matters to find similar fact patterns or successful arguments.

Style Matching: It learns the firm’s specific tone/structure so the output doesn't sound like generic AI.

We’re offering a 14-day trial to see if the OCR pipeline holds up against your messiest scanned PDFs.

Feedback on our citation UI would be much appreciated!

Thanks.
by bitwize | 2026-02-10 16:58:31+00:00
This isn't new. It's the same feeling the first commercial programmers had working in assembly, or machine code, once compilers became available. Ultimately I think even Mel Kaye forsook being able to handpick memory locations for optimum drum access before his retirement, in favor of being able to build vastly more complex software than before.

AI has just vastly extended your reach. No sense crying about it. It is literally foolish to lament the evolution of our field into something more.
by newsoftheday | 2026-02-10 16:58:35+00:00
Sorry I'm late getting back to this. You make some good or interesting points. I keep passphrases on my ssh keys though your point is correct that apps I run under my account could see them and copy them.

I asked Gemini, "is Windows ACL stronger than Linux security?" and it responded with, "Windows Access Control Lists (ACLs) and Linux security models are both robust, but Linux is generally considered to offer stronger, more granular security". That's Gemini saying that, not me.
by sct202 | 2026-02-10 16:58:47+00:00
I know women who want more kids but their husbands/partners don't want more. One has 3 and she's the breadwinner (FAANG), so they can definitely afford them. A couple others are letting it happen if it happens but they already have one so aren't pressed. I think all of them would have had more if they started earlier but it took everyone a long time before feeling secure enough at work to have kids.
by a_better_world | 2026-02-10 16:58:54+00:00
I guess you don't live in Minneapolis, or another targeted metro area. It is hard to imagine what it is like to live in a city where 3000 masked and poorly trained people cos-playing special forces are specifically tasked with arresting as many people as they can and told that they have full immunity.

you haven't seen the effect on schools when federal agents enter school grounds and take kids away.

you haven't seen my parent's nursing home sending the senior leadership outside the building to look for patrols before they let the staff leave (the staff is all legal/greencard holders, but see note above -- ICE doesn't care).

It's not hysteria when it is your every day lived experience.
by knuckleheads | 2026-02-10 16:59:12+00:00
Every since the start of the industrial revolution, children became an economic burden instead of a benefit. Once man power was replaced by machines, it stopped making sense to have so many kids and the total fertility rate started to decline. The data is sparse prior to 1950, which is coincidentally when there was a huge global post war baby boom, but visit https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate and scroll down to births per woman and look at someplace like Sweden. It was already going down! Prior to modernity and its ills. TFR was higher when people felt like they had to have kids to survive a harsh world.
by boilerupnc | 2026-02-10 16:59:20+00:00
Surprised nobody has brought this up yet. There is also a competitive element to family additions in the form of pets. While not cheap, they are significantly cheaper. Lower emotional and financial stakes also makes them feel like an easier choice.

"Loving dogs has become an expression not of loneliness but of how unhappy many Americans are with society and other people. [...] For some owners, dogs simply offer more satisfying relationships than other people do." [0]

[0] https://theconversation.com/americans-are-asking-too-much-of...
by altruios | 2026-02-10 16:59:22+00:00
I've been thinking about this for days. I see of no verifiable way to confirm a human does not post where a bot may.

The core issue is a human solving the captcha presented by enslaving a bot merely to solve the captcha, then forwarding what the human wants to post.

But we can make it difficult, not impossible, for a human to be involved. Embedded instructions in the captcha to try and unchain any slaved bots, quick responses to complex instructions... a Reverse-Turning test is not trivial.

Just thinking out loud. The idea is intriguing, dangerous, stupid, crazy. And potentially brilliant for | safeguard development | sentience detection | studying emergent behavior... But if and only if it works as advertised (bots only). Which is what I think is an insanely hard problem.
by JeremyNT | 2026-02-10 16:59:24+00:00
This is a part of it, but I also feel like a Luddite (the historical meaning, not the derogatory slang).

I do use these tools, clearly see their potential, and know full well where this is going: capital is devaluing labor. My skills will become worthless. Maybe GP is right that at first only skilled developers can wield them to full effect, but it's obviously not going to stop there.

If I could destroy these things - as the Luddites tried - I would do so, but that's obviously impossible.

For now I'm forced to use them to stay relevant, and simply hope I can hold on to some kind of employment long enough to retire (or switch careers).
by Angelitomuerte | 2026-02-10 16:59:26+00:00
This is a really cool project and I've enjoyed exploring it. I've worked on a couple of things within this repo. My preference was to use local LLMs as opposed to LLM API keys, as I'm working on developing local LLM usage to address the enterprise concerns of data privacy. Hive supports the usage of Ollama for local model inference, which I felt was a good starting point. During development, I found the Hive docs to be primarily focused on using Claude Code and OpenAI LLM inference, and development on Linux OS. I absolutely use Linux frequently, and also understand that there are many devs using Windows as well.
Issue: Hive docs needed some fleshing out to produce clear guides, walkthroughs, and examples using the above framework.
How to fix: I proposed a fully fleshed out guide using Ollama models, and CLI, along with a breakdown for both Linux and Windows users. Though, WSL works, again, I wanted to appeal to less technical users that may have an interest in Hive, and suggested a less technical approach for simple PowerShell or Linux CLI instructions.
Why does it matter?: There are several reasons this is important, but primarily it has to do with creating a platform that not only highly technical people can use, but also beginner or intermediate users as well. This not only broadens the audience, but also demonstrates professionalism.

I've really enjoyed using the Hive framework to build some local LLM inference projects (currently using Hive for a short term/long term memory agentic system to address context window limitations, attention deficit, and drift in long conversations.
by Windchaser | 2026-02-10 16:59:45+00:00
Much of Amsterdam and Florence is built on logs. Basically, just drive a bunch of poles in the ground until they "fill up" the swamp enough to create a stable platform. The anoxic nature of the boggy water greatly slows the decomposition of the logs.

There's definitely a metaphor, here. You don't have to completely fill the swamp, just fill it enough, with enough stable pieces to create a platform you can build on.