MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Faelon | 2026-02-09 04:27:15+00:00
This is orthogonal to the main point which is that just because we are capable of eating something doesn't provide a moral justification for eating something. It is extremely clear from data and example that it's possible and actually easy to live a happy life on a plant-based diet. This means that eating meat is a choice, and many would say it is an overwhelmingly cruel choice.
by booleandilemma | 2026-02-09 04:28:02+00:00
Hi, no one's responded to you after 12 hours so I will.

I don't outright refuse to use LLM's, but I use them as little as possible. I enjoy the act of programming too much to delegate it to a machine.

For awhile now there have been programmers who don't actually enjoy programming and are just in it for the money. This happens because programmer salaries are high and the barrier to entry is relatively low. I could imagine LLMs must feel like a godsend to them.
by signal11 | 2026-02-09 04:28:55+00:00
Last I checked, they were working on interop so you can move your keys from one provider to another without creating CSV files or equivalent[1].

However from my PoV — if the user or an open source project wants to create CSV files, they should be free to do so. That’s part of putting the user in control.

For me, KeePass XC is the canary in the coal mine that helps me figure out what FIDO’s priorities are. I don’t have a problem with crypto around passkeys. They’re great. The non-functionals though (including shipping passkeys without good import/export) are a bit of a mess.

[1] https://fidoalliance.org/fido-alliance-publishes-new-specifi...
by shalmanese | 2026-02-09 04:29:47+00:00
Another area of hidden complexity is doors in video games. Almost no game has life sized doors because they introduce gameplay issues, almost all doors in video games are at least 30% bigger than in real life and you see an overabundance of sliding doors vs swinging doors because of the complexity swinging doors bring to video game physics.

https://lizengland.com/blog/the-door-problem/

https://www.ign.com/articles/putting-doors-in-video-games-is...
by entech | 2026-02-09 04:30:09+00:00
While this is true, I believe AI (and other technological advances) erodes the trust embedded in this 'facade'. And that’s how I interpreted the authors’s sentiment.

When you watch a video or use a service that requires significant effort and value to create, you inherently trust that the creators have invested diligence and care to protect their investment. Creators risk losing customers through bad reviews or, worse, being sued for damages.

In an age where it's reasonably straightforward to create something that appears to match the quality and effort of what was previously difficult to accomplish, it becomes harder for users to distinguish high quality anymore.

I think we'll go through a period where many users will get burned by poor services (lost data, security breaches, etc.) and will need to find new ways of verifying product and service credibility.

I suspect the market for simple consumer apps charging $5+ monthly for basic functions (like todo lists) will disappear, and possibly the same for low-to-moderate complexity enterprise apps (like Jira). This is probably better for consumers. Many of these apps and tech businesses can charge so much for fairly basic functionality because the barrier to building alternatives is too great. There was simply no option if you wanted a particular set of features. It's 'value-based pricing' that extracts benefits from consumers unable to negotiate the price.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-02-09 04:30:24+00:00
Great find!

I think she should be able to explain whats up to aeb-kun (who has ever been a true-blue welder?) better than I ever could

Insightful comment by Doug Grinberg (classic nonBrahmin leftist of Bernie's gen?) that balances out her take, imho

Tbf--in the same regard-- OP's paragraph on TRUMP smells of good faith (to me)
by waterTanuki | 2026-02-09 04:30:37+00:00
I've noticed a steep decline in software quality as a consumer since Covid, but especially since ChatGPT came out.

That hasn't changed. Whether it's apps that hog too much memory, games that use too much storage, unresponsiveness, or just plain cryptic error messages, everything feels more fraile than it used to be.

Perhaps its the growing pains of LLMs, a horde of junior programmers pushing stuff to production that the seniors were too "old fashioned" to notice.

Only time will tell.
Show HN: ShapeGuard – Shape Contracts for NumPy and Jax
by jayendra13 | 2026-02-09 04:30:42+00:00
I built ShapeGuard because shape errors in numerical code are uniquely painful. They're silent (wrong shapes often produce garbage instead of crashing), late (errors surface deep in XLA,
not where the bug is), and cryptic (shapes (3,4) and (5,3) not aligned — but why should they match?).

ShapeGuard lets you declare shape contracts on functions using symbolic dimensions:

from shapeguard import Dim, expects, ensures

n, m, k = Dim("n"), Dim("m"), Dim("k")

@expects(a=(n, m), b=(m, k))
@ensures(result=(n, k))
def matmul(a, b):
return a @ b

When shapes don't match, the error traces bindings back to their source:

ShapeGuardError:
function: matmul
argument: b
expected: (m, k)
actual: (5, 7)
reason: dimension 'm' bound to 4 from a.shape[1], but got 5 from b.shape[0]
bindings: {n=3 (from a[0]), m=4 (from a[1])}

The key idea is unification — the same Dim object used across arguments must resolve to the same integer. ShapeGuard tracks where each binding came from, so conflicts pinpoint the exact
source.

What it does:

- @expects / @ensures / @contract — input and output shape validation
- Symbolic Dim with cross-argument unification
- Batch() dims and ... ellipsis for ML patterns
- broadcast_shape() and explain_broadcast() for debugging broadcasting
- Configurable JIT modes (check / warn / skip) for JAX
- ML helpers: pre-defined dims (B, T, C, H, W, D), attention_shapes(), conv_output_shape()

What it doesn't do:

- No dtype checking (jaxtyping does this well)
- No named-tensor wrapper (Haliax's approach)
- Not a replacement for static type checking

It's zero-dependency, drop-in (works with existing code — just add decorators), and the motivation came from analyzing 40 real JAX GitHub issues where users hit cryptic shape errors.

PyPI: pip install jax-shapeguard

Would love feedback on the API design, error message format, and whether this would actually help your workflow. What shape debugging pain points am I missing?
by mizzao | 2026-02-09 04:30:50+00:00
We're working on learning/pedagogy infrastructure that models the learner by using AI to build a knowledge graph: https://parsnips.notion.site/knowledge — this is in contrast to the common black-box approach of "use some RAG with a large context window and hope for the best".

In the above article, we list a few applications that we think this could be helpful for: life skills, management/sales training, personal coaching, etc. We'd love to demo the software if this sounds interesting to you!
by xmprt | 2026-02-09 04:31:13+00:00
Not sure where you're getting this from, but the latest MacOS works on devices from 2019 so it's at least 6 years of support. And homebrew supports versions from macOS 14 fully (and some support up to 10.15) which means full support for 2018 devices and potentially even devices from 2012 will work.

Sources:

https://eshop.macsales.com/guides/Mac_OS_X_Compatibility

https://docs.brew.sh/Installation#2
by Guvante | 2026-02-09 04:31:25+00:00
People rarely post proprietary code to GitHub. Most of it is open licenses that generally only require attribution. Some use a copy left license.

Software patents are not copyright in anyway they are a completely different thing.

So this isn't AI getting back at the big guys it is AI using open source code you could have used if you just followed the simple license.

Copyright in regards to software is effectively "if you directly use my code you need a license" this doesn't have any of the downsides of copyright in other fields which is mostly problematic for content that is generations old but still protected.

GitHub code tends to be relatively young still since the product has only existed for less than twenty years and most things you find are going to be way less than that in age on average.
by throw234234234 | 2026-02-09 04:31:31+00:00
The question really is what you think the long term direction of SWE as a profession is. If we need juniors later and senior's become expensive that's a nice problem to have mostly and can be fixed via training and knowledge transfer. Conversely people being hired and trained, especially when young into a sinking industry isn't doing anyone any favors.

While I think both sides have an argument on the eventual SWE career viability there is a problem. The downsides of hiring now (costs, uncertainity of work velocity, dry backlogs, etc) are certain; the risk of paying more later is not guaranteed and maybe not as big of an issue. Also training juniors doesn't always benefit the person paying.

* If you think long term that we will need seniors again (industry stays same size or starts growing again) given the usual high ROI on software most can afford to defer that decision till later. Goes back to pre-AI calculus and SWE's were expensive then and people still payed for them.

* If you think that the industry shrinks then its better to hold off so you get more out of your current staff, and you don't "hire to fire". Hopefully the industry on average shrinks in proportion to natural retirement of staff - I've seen this happen for example in local manufacturing where the plant lives but slowly winds down over time and as people retire they aren't replaced.
by oj-hn-dot-com | 2026-02-09 04:32:15+00:00
I've been working on a browser extension to make Hacker News easier to use. No, not change the UX, but just some nice conveniences. Keyboard navigation, inline replies, dark mode, a nicer topcolors page, and many more features. I am hoping to add some social features, like being able to follow someone. All in a well-tested and extensible codebase that has minimal impact on the site. Open source, GPL...

Orange Juice

https://oj-hn.com
by zephen | 2026-02-09 04:33:02+00:00
I wonder about this.

If (and it's a big if) the LLM gives you something that kinda, sorta, works, it may be an easier task to keep that working, and make it work better, while you refactor it, than it would have been to write it from scratch.

That is going to depend a lot on the skillset and motivation of the programmer, as well as the quality of the initial code dump, but...

There's a lot to be said for working code. After all, how many prototypes get shipped?
by zx8080 | 2026-02-09 04:33:49+00:00
In Win, access to files are controlled by ACL when NTFS is used (dating back to NT 3.1 with NTFS). So it depends on which user runs a process.

Basic hygiene is very simple: never run as Administrator. Create and use a regular user or poweruser group user. It's similar to a regular linux practice. Use Administrator account when needed only.
by mindslight | 2026-02-09 04:34:18+00:00
Is this question being asked in a way that we actually get to choose? Because the obvious choice is general purpose computing plus a free society. But rather it feels that what is being picked for us is copyright, and only copyright.

But really, even picking the freedom and liberty options, copyright could survive just fine as a thing that applies to corporations and other business entities. Individuals could then be left with a choice whether to support their creators or not, which would be a better bargain for many creators without the middlemen taking hefty cuts.
by okanat | 2026-02-09 04:34:21+00:00
If you buy cheap HW you'll get totally half-assed firmware. It is usually the firmware that causes stupid reordering of the boot entries and weird resets.

Business class computers (Thinkpads, Latitudes or Elitebooks) have somewhat half-assed firmware. So you usually don't encounter shenanigans like that.

Only server computers have almost not half-assed firmware. They are very reliable but take forever to boot.

If you want non-half-assed firmware, found your own computer company or join big tech where they can afford custom motherboards with their own firmware.
by kurthr | 2026-02-09 04:34:59+00:00
As mentioned in the article there are a lot of common watch crystals that oscillate at 32.768 kHz, but they are tuning fork crystals rather than bulk mode (or modern SAW), which have much higher frequencies. It would be challenging to lower the frequency of these, but perhaps you could evaporate Au or W onto the tips and reseal them to get into the audible frequencies. Much easier would be to get two crystals which beat against each other in the audio range. Even a couple of 6MHz crystals 100ppm off would be ~6kHz (temp sensitive), and you would need some driving circuits, but you might be able to hear the beat by driving an electret microphone or a really tiny tweeter coil speaker (probably need an amp though).

It's much easier to build/buy electrical rather than mechanical LC components to hit audio frequencies ~100Hz-10kHz.
by xXSLAYERXx | 2026-02-09 04:35:08+00:00
I used to be so deeply annoyed with leadership decisions as an IC. When I got into management my attitude completely shifted. Leadership only cares about shipping code. Thinking they care about anything else and you're fooling yourself. So whatever your team cares about your decisions doesn't matter. Are they shipping code? All good. Team dynamics will work itself out as long as you're pushing to main.

Now I'm back to being an IC and I just do the job. Want me to change this variable name so its more readable, in your opinion? No problem. I shall change const foo to const bar.
by ezfe | 2026-02-09 04:36:45+00:00
My car has a heat pump. I am basing the numbers off of the range estimates the car provides when I turn off cabin climate. The range is still lower, but I assume another chunk of that is from heating the battery when it's 10°F outside.

Rated: 230 miles

10°F with 70°F climate: 160 miles

10°F with no climate: 190-200 miles
by pickleRick243 | 2026-02-09 04:38:34+00:00
A lot of this discussion is just sort of moot because the cold hard calculus of economics will dictate the future of AI coding. If it turns out it's just a cognitive burden that makes programmers worse, the bubble will pop and eventually the companies that move away from the technology will come out on top. If it turns out to make software engineering much more efficient, it will become the de factor standard and you will become obsolete as a professional engineer (at least at the vast majority of employers) regardless of how you feel about it. How you wish to code in your free time is up to you and one that doesn't really warrant an argument one way or the other since there is no wrong answer.
by woeirua | 2026-02-09 04:40:41+00:00
The best part about this whole debate is that we don't have to wait years and years for one side to be proven definitively right. We will know beyond a shadow of a doubt which side is right by this time next year. If agentic coding has not progressed any further by then, we will know. On the other hand, if coding agents are 4x better than they are today, then there will be a deluge of software online, the number of software engineers that are unemployed will have skyrocketed up and HN will be swamped by perma-doomers.
by derf_ | 2026-02-09 04:44:10+00:00
> I've seen many discussions stating patent hoarding has gone too far...

Vibe coding does not solve this problem. If anything, it makes it worse, since you no longer have any idea if an implementation might read on someone else's patent, since you did not write it.

If your agent could go read all of the patents and then avoid them in its implementations and/or tell you where you might be infringing them (without hallucinating), that would be valuable. It still would not solve the inherent problems of vagueness in the boundaries of the property rights that patents confer (which may require expensive litigation to clarify definitively) or people playing games with continuations to rewrite claim language and explicitly move those boundaries years later, among other dubious but routine practices, but it would be something.
by Ygg2 | 2026-02-09 04:45:19+00:00
Ok, fine, if you gonna be nitpicky, it's a calculation to an electrical engineer.

> To Software Engineering coding is an essential part.

Not really. You can be a Principal Engineer/Architect/Maintainer and do very little coding, but lots of code review and testing.

The point is, if you're just banging out code, then you're a software developer. If you use the engineering design process (research, requirements, design document, feasibility, conceptual design, prototype, detailed design) to solve problems using software, then you're a software engineer.
by gkcnlr | 2026-02-09 04:45:22+00:00
As long as AI (genAI, LLMs, whatever you call it describe the current tech) is perceived not as a "bicycle of the mind" and a tool to utilize 'your' skills to a next phase but as a commodity to be exploited by giant corporations whose existence is based on maximizing profits regardless of virtue or dignity (a basic set of ethics to, for example, not to burn books after you scan it feed your LLM like Anthropic), it is really hard to justify the current state of AI.

Once you understand the sole winner in this hype is the one who'll be brutally scraping every bit of data, whether it's real-time or static and then refining it to give it back to you without your involvement in the process (a.k.a, learning) you'll come to understand that the current AI by nature is hugely unfavorable to mental progression...
Show HN: Mission Plus – Clear Titles and App Logos in macOS Mission Control
by boneyao | 2026-02-09 04:45:24+00:00
Hi HN, I built Mission Plus, a small native macOS utility that makes Mission Control easier to read when you have many windows open.

Mission Control is great, but once multiple windows look similar, it becomes hard to identify what’s what at a glance. Mission Plus overlays large text titles and recognizable app logos directly above each window, so you can immediately tell them apart without hunting through thumbnails.

The app is implemented natively with a focus on low overhead and smooth performance. It follows Mission Control animations closely and is designed to look like a built-in macOS feature rather than a third-party overlay.

Key features:

Large, clear text titles above windows

Automatic logo matching for most common macOS apps

Very low resource usage and no noticeable latency

Direct DMG download (no signup, no App Store)

You can download and try it here:
https://trystartup.com/

This is an early version and I’m very interested in feedback, especially from macOS power users. I’ll be around in the comments to answer questions and discuss design or implementation details.
by anon-3988 | 2026-02-09 04:46:18+00:00
This is a strange comment because, this is literally the world that we live in now? We just assume that everyone is vouched by someone (perhaps Github/Gitlab). Adding this layer of vouching will basically cull all of that very cheap and meaningless vouches. Now you have to work to earn the trust. And if you lose that trust, you actually lose something.
by acuozzo | 2026-02-09 04:46:21+00:00
> I have my own life

... which is not truly separate from the society in which you live.

If life sucks for your countrymen, then you (not! the royal-you, I mean you: bluGill) will inevitably be stuck dealing with the consequences.

Neighborhoods & communities atomize. Crime increases. Fascism creeps in. The list goes on.
by packeted | 2026-02-09 04:48:46+00:00
It's been a painstaking process of combing consolidator websites (eg. PetVet Care Centers, NVA) for practice names, verifying and adding them to a list over the course of over a year. I now get many people writing in to report practices that aren't on the list - admittedly it's not complete list as practices are still being acquired (although independents are now in the minority) and often the old practice branding is kept and the fact it's PE owned is hidden.
Designing MCP tool schemas that LLMs understand
by runai | 2026-02-09 04:50:03+00:00
I've been building MCP servers for the past few months and found that
designing tool schemas for AI agents is surprisingly different from
designing REST APIs for humans.

Here are some patterns that worked and didn't work in production:

What didn't work:

1. Fine-grained CRUD endpoints. I started with the obvious
get_request, update_request_status, update_request_assignee,
add_comment, etc. The agent would frequently call the wrong one
or chain them in the wrong order. Too many similar tools = confusion.

2. Generic parameter names. A field called "id" meant nothing to the
agent without context. It would hallucinate IDs or pass the wrong
entity's ID.

3. Sparse error messages. Returning "404 Not Found" gave the agent
nothing to work with. It would retry the same bad call indefinitely.

What worked:

1. Fewer, wider tools. Instead of 8 CRUD endpoints, I collapsed them
into 3: search_requests, get_request_detail, update_request. The
agent made far fewer mistakes with a smaller tool set.

2. Descriptive schemas with examples. Adding "description" fields
with example values in the JSON schema dramatically improved
accuracy. The schema IS the prompt.

3. Rich error responses. Instead of "404", returning
"No request found with ID 'abc'. Did you mean to search first?
Available tool: search_requests" actually got the agent to
self-correct.

4. Read-before-write pattern. Structuring tools so the agent
naturally fetches context before making changes reduced
destructive mistakes significantly.

5. Confirmation fields for dangerous operations. Adding a required
"confirm: true" parameter for deletes/bulk updates acts as a
speed bump that makes the agent think twice.

The mental model shift: you're not designing an API for a developer
reading docs. You're designing an interface for a reasoning engine
that only sees the schema and the last few messages. Every field
name, description, and error message is a prompt.

Curious if others building MCP servers have found similar patterns
or discovered different approaches.
by throwerxyz | 2026-02-09 04:50:14+00:00
Those areas aren't better to live in. They're just older parts of older towns so they don't have much wiggle room. The wiggle room was amazing for the more modern countries, except now we wiggle in a different direction too. An equal middle can be seen in Asian cities in Korea and China. They mix high density with high quality of life and little self sacrificing.

Neither US or Europe do living areas well due to their historical constraints.
by rumpelstiel | 2026-02-09 04:51:14+00:00
thats why i usw gog and download the backup files to ma chunk drive. If Steam decides to block the game, even if you have the backup files, it might not start because auf the steam integration. It never happened to me, but as a possible scenario.
I also use cachyos with heroic loader, at least my epic games are safe, as when they are sideloaded, i backup the wine/game folders from time to time (only the games i liked), and my epic library is so huge, because of the free games, i cant play all of them anyway.
Also thr steam/humblebundle shit yes omg.. i have over 2500 games not played, not counting my emustation library (where i have all top 100 games for pretty much all famous consoles gb,gbc, n64, saturn, wii, psx, ps2,.. and a a few more)
by avin01 | 2026-02-09 04:51:43+00:00
I think this shift is real, but I’m not convinced it turns into a clean new SEO anytime soon.

From building LLM systems, it feels less like ranking and more about training data, reputation, retrieval, and how easy something is to summarize. If your content is shallow or fragmented, it just doesn’t become useful to models, even if it ranks on Google.

My worry is GEO/AEO becomes the same game SEO did, people optimizing for bots instead of users. The boring strategy still wins. Write good stuff, update it, build credibility. Most tools probably won’t matter much.

Feels early, we will see