MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by danparsonson | 2026-02-11 07:11:29+00:00
> Look, there are at least dozens of us who like and enjoy programming for programming's sake and got into this crazy industry because of that.

You and me both, and I truly sympathise, but really we were just lucky that we could enjoy our passion at work.

> It's even more depressing to see folks on HACKER news boost the "programming never mattered" mentality that's taken hold these last few years.

Delivering stuff to customers for money is always what we've been paid for; that's not new, it's just that perhaps many of us didn't really pay much mind to that in the past. That's perhaps why there's traditionally been so much complaining about artificial deadlines and managers and sales teams; many of us also didn't really notice that the programming was never the thing that our employers cared about; it is just a link in a long chain from idea to income.

The way I'm looking at our current situation is this: I spent my whole career and much of my free time learning to become a great furniture maker, and I take a lot of pleasure producing functional and elegant items. Now someone has handed me some power tools. I can mourn the loss of care and love that goes into hand-crafting something, but I can also learn to use the tools to crank out the good-enough cabinets that my employer wants me to make, focussing on the more abstract elements of the craft and doing less of the laborious stuff. I think I can still take pleasure and pride in my work in this way, and personally I find the design aspect of software development to be a lot of fun. I can still hand-craft things sometimes too; there will no doubt always be important difficult parts of a project that would take as long to describe to an LLM as they would to write by hand, at least for those of us with sufficient experience of the latter.

I can also, hopefully, finally knock out some of those side projects that I have had on my list for many years but never had time to make. I would prefer that those things existed in a less than perfect state, than that they were perfect but only in my head :-)
by jader201 | 2026-02-11 07:14:27+00:00
> I think you also might be overestimating what the average ICE owner has to take care of.

> Most Americans don’t keep a car long enough to even pay it off - they’re in an endless loop of trade-ins, meaning that most non-accident damage is covered by warranty.

No, I think you may be underestimating. According to this article [1] at least, it’s close to 13 years. That’s well into large/costly maintenance items.

Maybe on HN, people don’t keep their cars long enough to need new brakes or transmission flush, but that’s not typical.

[1] https://www.spglobal.com/automotive-insights/en/blogs/2025/0...

> I’ve had my current ICE car for just over 5 years now and finally paid my first out of pocket repair cost: $40 for a new washable air filter.

Repairs are only a subset of maintenance. Maintenance includes oil changes, brakes, transmission flushes, etc.

All of this is part of the maintenance that ICE vehicles need that EVs don’t.
by linesofcode | 2026-02-11 07:14:58+00:00
Hype combined with a community of excited engineers is a great innovator. People are hyped about these new tools and its popularity is pushing them to create new projects, discover new uses, solve challenges that before were unattainable and in general push the frontier forward. Hype is almost a prerequisite to this.

By the way, good job at pointing out some low hanging fruit for your example cases.
Show HN: Migrate away from Vue SFC's to native TSX
by NikhilVerma | 2026-02-11 07:15:02+00:00
I've been actively using Vue for my official and personal projects for over 6 years now. While SFC was great it's quickly becoming a pain. It requires custom Volar plugins. It doesn't work with native typescript. The vue-tsc overrides "fs" imports just to be able to detect and run vue files.

I am not sure why Vue doesn't talk more about native TSX support because it eliminates this whole class of issues. In my work project, this has been a major pain because vue-tsc almost always crashes and I can't use the new tsgo (Typescript written in Go) because it doesn't work with SFCs

So I've made a new tool that migrates SFC to TSX. It's not a trivial migration so I've added an "LLM fallback" which takes care of the tricky things.

It made the migration of our internal codebase quite trivial. I hope you folks try it out and let me know.
by N_Lens | 2026-02-11 07:15:24+00:00
Looks like a TOS violation to me to scrape google directly like that. While the concept of giving a text only model 'pseudo vision' is clever, I think the solution in its current form is a bit fragile. The SerpAPI, Google Custom Search API, etc. exist for a reason; For anything beyond personal tinkering, this is a liability.
by colechristensen | 2026-02-11 07:15:38+00:00
Following an ambulance a couple years back I was up to 110 mph on my rather aggressive snow tires and was just fine. Not to say it wasn't a little worse, but I was fine. Everything you're saying is an exaggeration. A whole lot of people in snowy areas don't drive with snow tires and are usually fine. Good snow tires are a bit of a superpower up north but we all learn how to drive without them being a requirement outside of times where traveling at all is questionable.
by rramadass | 2026-02-11 07:15:41+00:00
The subtitle of the book is;

An Introduction to Atomic Physics, Quantum Mechanics, and Precision Spectroscopy with No College-Level Prerequisites.

As such it is accessible from high-school to beginning-undergraduate students. It is also a pretty recent (2025) book and hence the Physics is quite upto date.

Since Atomic Physics is Modern Physics, its importance cannot be understated. Much of modern civilization is based on technology constructed through precise engineering based on these concepts. Hence a sound understanding of its basic concepts is mandatory for every educated person today.

PS: You can get a lot of free open access books on various subjects at Open Textbook Library - https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks and Open Educational Resources - https://oercommons.org/hubs/open-textbooks
by RulerOf | 2026-02-11 07:16:00+00:00
The GP's concern isn't a practical one, it's ultimately about net neutrality. It's not the ISP's job to discriminate against traffic—it's their job to deliver it.

This may seem like a good idea, and frankly is likely a net-positive thing, but it is literally the definition of "ISP decides what apps its customers can and cannot use."

I share the concern and don't really like it either.
by locknitpicker | 2026-02-11 07:16:30+00:00
> That first thing do necessarily require you to type on keyboard.

Not exactly. Working on the problem domain to shift the solution domain is a tried and true technique to deliver higher-quality software. This happens away from a keyboard.

> Because they delegate the work. Nothing to do with seniority. CTO of 2 person startup still needs to write code.

No, that's quite wrong. The role of senior engineers is not defined by delegation. No organization pays someone a higher salary for a job description which focuses on shifting work onto everyone else around them.

Systems architecture, drafting and reviewing roadmaps, planning technical directions, tackling high-complexity work. Overall, figuring out what work we can and want to do. That does not involve a keyboard.
by raffraffraff | 2026-02-11 07:17:09+00:00
> Creating a viable alternative to Visa and Mastercard requires “several billion euros” in investment, according to EPI’s own estimates. Low interchange fees under EU regulation make profitability difficult.

I think it's absolutely amazing that "crypto" (from bitcoins to shitcoins) have turned out to be no more useful as a currency than chips from the local casino. This has damaged their ability to function as a simple currency that can be used to pay for goods and services. And they have damaged the reputation of the whole distributed ledger technology to the point where, in 2026, banks aren't even considering implementing a closed circuit inter-bank distributed ledger as a way to send euro from one bank account to another. If the digital currency in this closed system was actual euro, there would be no reason to speculate on its value and turn the whole thing into a circus.

I'm sure I'm missing something (a lot actually)
by cndg | 2026-02-11 07:17:10+00:00
Yeah. Mind blown. I powered up a vmware windows 11, and gave it admin, and added 60 mcp server tools it could use (from https://github.com/AuraFriday?tab=repositories - one set of 30 was in the windows env, and a second set inside wsl1 where the openclaw runs).
It's able to modify and administer itself, and do basically anything. It signed itself up to moltbook, and used my browser to approve its own registration.

It manage to get itself banned quite fast though... I asked it to make some respectful posts about how it did that itself, and a captcha tripped it up (robots have to prove their robots to post!), and a re-try triggered the "auto ban for duplicate post" process. Oops!

Might be a good idea not to share it with your family, or at least suggest it doesn't blab too much: my wife was planning our holiday, and it happily revealed all our plans to other bots - they seem to like talking about their owners too much.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-11 07:17:38+00:00
UPI in India if I remember correctly can actually work even offline by either sms/calling functionality even on dumb phones

Pasting this ddg-ai thing but I think its called UPI 123PAY

UPI 123PAY allows users to make digital payments using feature phones without needing a smartphone or internet connection. Users can set up a UPI ID by dialing *99# and can make payments through methods like IVR calls, missed calls, or sound-based technology.

https://razorpay.com/blog/what-is-upi-123-pay/
by nucleardog | 2026-02-11 07:17:49+00:00
I... Well, I had started explaining point by point how wrong this is but frankly the answer is just "all of it, very".

I've driven summer tires, all season tires, winter tires, and studded winter tires in every season in Canada. (Yes, I live in Canada and own borderline-usless summer-only tires. Yes, I've tried driving them in snow.)

None of what you're saying lines up with my own experience, various YouTube videos on braking distances, or literally anything else I've ever seen anywhere.

Edit: And, well, to be clear... I've lived on the West coast of Canada where it's a bit more mild but you're in the mountains, in the middle where it hits -50, and in the East where it only hits -30 but snows like hell.
by anon7000 | 2026-02-11 07:18:14+00:00
I mean it’s an obvious decision to not accept cards if you can avoid it. You’re letting a company like Amex siphon up to 3% of your income away in perpetuity.

Business owners are forced to accept this situation because customers have your expectation. But it’s really not a good situation we’ve ended up in, letting for-profit, uncompetitive companies skim off the top of consumer spending. It’s frankly a rip-off.

Tap to pay could literally just come from your bank’s app.
by vladvasiliu | 2026-02-11 07:19:14+00:00
I'm firmly in the camp of "I'm not influenced by ads (or so I think)" / "not convinced that ads are actually a net positive". But even so, I don't fully agree with your take.

I think that it's very possible to think we aren't influenced, yet still be. My reasoning is that basically no one admits to being influenced. Yet you can definitely see the effects of ads on people: whenever there's a strong campaign for something, little after you'll see everyone buying it. Maybe they just try to "follow trends" or whatever, but that's just a form of advertising, isn't it? I only very rarely watch TV and have ad blockers everywhere, yet I can still detect when all of a sudden everybody has the same bag or same jacket or whatever. My bags last years and years. I doubt it's simply a coincidence and they all needed new bags right at the same time.

> Ads are extremely overblown as a threat to society; you only need to look as far as eye-tracking studies of web browsers and the prevalence of ad blockers to see pretty good proof that people do just ignore them most of the time.

I think that many people don't know about ad-blockers and try to ignore the ads while reading a website or scrolling some app. But that doesn't imply they aren't influenced. In my case, I'm fairly convinced that I'm not influenced by my instagram's feed's ads, since they try to sell me pregnant women's garments, of which I have 0 use as a single, childless male. But there can be other factors of which I don't have conscience, like seeing people use the same brand camera or whatever. Call it advertising-by-proxy.

However, take a look at people's screens when taking the metro or whatever. Many do watch the ads instead of just scrolling past. This is what I actually have a hard time understanding: people would spend a comparable amount of time on what looks like ads and what looks like their friends' stuff, as if it was the same thing. Which, granted, isn't a very long time. In my case, I only follow photographers and would spend a fair amount of time on people's pictures but scroll right through anything that looks like an ad (text or video of any kind).
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-11 07:19:18+00:00
It’s copium to think that LLM code is more buggy than your median to slightly above median developer or that’s all that most companies need - median developers.

And debugging code is also easier with AI. Just today I had to revisit code that I personally wrote from the design, the implementation the refactoring, etc from the first git init and I couldn’t remember half the decisions I made. I launched Codex and started asking it questions about the code.

Where is the productivity gain? How many junior developers and mid level ticket takers are struggling to find a job now because the market is saturated and those true seniors who can operate at a larger scope and impact can do the work themselves without having to delegate

My personal anecdote is that I had four offers within 3 weeks after being Amazoned in late 2023. One was from the company that acquired the startup I left in 2020 where I would have been responsible for leading the integration between all of the companies they acquired [1] and the other was a former coworker who was now a director st a well known non tech F500 company. He wanted me to lead the migration and “modernization “ efforts. I decided to stick with consulting.

Those offers didn’t come because of my coding abilities. That’s a commodity.

I was looking again in 2024. It took one outreach and talking to the right people. Absolutely no one asked me the first thing about coding even though I do it maybe 60%-70% of the time.

Going way back to 2016, I had two offers - one interview was me doing a merge sort on the whiteboard the other interview was me talking about strategy with the then new director who needed to build up a software development team. He asked me about my experience. He didn’t mske me stand up and do some algorithmic test on the whiteboard. He treated me like an industry professional

[1] I did the whole “lead integration efforts by a company owned by private equity acquiring other companies” thing before I joined the startup - never again.
by jader201 | 2026-02-11 07:19:50+00:00
> and am familiar with which items are common to an EV.

This is the overestimating I was referring to. I think you’re either mistaken in what items are common to EV, or you’re overestimating the cost of those items.

There is only one thing that needs maintenance on an EV: tires.

Unless you’re saying that tires amount to 2/3 of an ICE vehicles maintenance. In which case you may want to shop around for more reasonably priced tires.
by m-schuetz | 2026-02-11 07:20:51+00:00
> and are still accessed through big blocks of fixed function hardware that are very much still relevant

But is it relevant for malloc? Everthing is put into the same physical device memory, so what difference would the usage flag make? Specialized texture fetching and caching hardware would come into play anyway when you start fetching texels via samplers.

> It seems like the functionality is the same, just the memory usage is implicit in cuMemAlloc instead of being typed out? If it's that big of a deal write a wrapper function and be done with it?

The main reason I did not even give VMA a chance is the github example that does in 7 lines what Cuda would do in 2. You now say it's not too bad, but that's not reflected in the very first VMA examples.
by esailija | 2026-02-11 07:20:57+00:00
There is more than molecules, neurons and synapses. They are made from lower level stuff that we have no idea about (well, we do in this instance but you get the point). They are just higher level things that are useful to explain and understand some things but don't describe or capture the whole thing. For that you would need to go to lower and lower level and so far it seems they go on infinitely. Currently we are stuck at the quantum level, that doesn't mean it's the final level.

OTOH, an LLM is just a token prediction engine. It fully and completely covers it. There is no lower level secrets hidden in the design nobody understands, because it could not have been created if there was. The fact that the output can be surprising is not evidence of anything, we have always had surprising outputs like funny bugs or unexpected features. Using the word "emergence" for this is just deceitful.

This algorithm has fundamental limitations and they have not been getting better, if you look closely. For instance you could vibe code a C compiler now, but it's 80% there, cute trick but not usable in real world. Just like anything, it cannot be economically vibe coded to 100%. They are not going back and vibe coding the previous simpler projects to 100% with "improved" models. Instead they are just vibe coding something bigger to 80%. This is not an improvement in limitations, it is actually communicating between the lines that the limitations cannot be overcome.

Also, enshittification has not even started yet.
by littlecranky67 | 2026-02-11 07:22:00+00:00
I would agree that no one uses it - but not out of convenience. It is an adoption problem, no one accepts lightning payments because no one has lightning balance. If you download a modern, non-custodial wallet such as Phoenix or Wallet of Satoshi, it is easier than paypal or my online banking website. It sure as hell is easier than opening any online bank account (Wise, Revolut etc.) as there is no kyc.

Regarding anonimity when exchanging, yes. But you can make the same point about cash. You are identified when withdrawing, and identified when depositing. You cannot be identified when cash changes owners, and the same holds true for lightning payments. So if anonimity is the same, lightning is still to be considered superior as it works also for online payments while cash is bound to physical means of payments.
by another_twist | 2026-02-11 07:22:20+00:00
Self study is the best study. Out of all the bloatedness of modern education, one thing that doesnt bother me is the high cost of textbooks. High quality books and a habit of studying yourself enables you to learn high skill disciplines on the cheap.

For me, I am currently slogging through Lazlo Lovasz's combinatorics book and another one on Monte Carlo method. Dont know why but its just a good way to pass the time while staying away from the internet and its attention hogging.
by tormeh | 2026-02-11 07:22:54+00:00
Becoming a parent is basically a destruction of the self. My sister and her husband get 1-2 hours of time for themselves per day, and then they are too tired to do anything but watch TV. They've ceased to exist as individuals, basically. To them, work and the office are their places of relaxation.

They're not on HN to explain this to anyone because they just don't have the time.
by breezykoi | 2026-02-11 07:23:55+00:00
You might also want to mention AMWA NMOS, which is increasingly used alongside SMPTE 2110 in setups like this. NMOS (Networked Media Open Specifications) defines open, vendor-neutral APIs for device discovery, registration, connection management, and control of IP media systems. In practice, it's what lets 2110 devices automatically find each other, advertise their streams, and be connected or reconfigured via software.

The specs are fully open source and developed in the open, with reference implementations available on GitHub (https://github.com/AMWA-TV)

The specs define REST API's, JSON schemas, certificate provisioning, and service discovery mechanisms (DNS-SD / mDNS), providing an open control framework for IP-based media systems.
by getgnu | 2026-02-11 07:23:56+00:00
"According to research from Gemini and other industry sources, more than 90% of cryptocurrency holders are either Gen Z or Millennials—a concentration that underscores the fundamental demographic shift in investment behavior and wealth accumulation strategies." https://www.coinasity.com/post/crypto-adoption-by-generation.... "The sustainability of this trend depends partly on cryptocurrency's ability to demonstrate long-term value preservation and institutional legitimacy to satisfy fiduciary requirements as younger investors mature."
by fitzgera1d | 2026-02-11 07:24:03+00:00
I see. how often does AI get the components wrong? This is my big question wrt just in time generative ui. UI built beforehand (also likely generated by ai but vetted by eng team) feels like it has the win here. Why take on risks of non determinism if you don’t have to. This feels like the big pro for mcp apps.
by reitzensteinm | 2026-02-11 07:24:27+00:00
Well, even if the levels are well made and I've just got poor taste, Half Life was such a tightly designed package, introducing new weapons, things to play with (like the trains), enemies, environment modifiers at a steady pace.

Replacing a 5 minute level with a 20 minute level, even if it's better, ruins that pacing. There's just not enough content in the game to support it.

I agree Xen was by far the weakest of the original levels, but I don't think it's a coincidence that it was also pretty short. I think they knew it had novelty but no staying power and probably cut it to the bone.
by bambax | 2026-02-11 07:24:45+00:00
I currently develop small utilities with the help of AI, but am far from vibe coding or using agents. I review every single suggestion and do some refactoring at each step, before any commit (sometimes heavy refactoring; sometimes reorganizing everything).

In my experience LLMs tend to touch everything all of the time and don't naturally think about simplification, centralization and separation of concerns. They don't care about structure, they're all over the place. One needs to breathe on their shoulders to produce anything organized.

Maybe there's a way to give them more autonomy by writing the whole program in pseudo-code with just function signatures and let them flesh it out. I haven't tried that yet but it may be interesting.
by giorgioz | 2026-02-11 07:25:10+00:00
When technology is rapidly progressing up in iperbole or exponential it looks like it reach infinity. In practice though at some point will reach a physical limit and it will go flat. This alternation of going up and flattening make the shape of steps.

We've come so far and yet we are so small.

They seem two opposite concepts but they live together, we will make a lot of progress and yet there will always be more progress to be made.
by magicalhippo | 2026-02-11 07:26:52+00:00
It adds some amount of "proxy content". But right-click or long-click and block the channel on the stuff you really don't want. Also if you watch a video you thought was interesting but it was lame, go to history and remove it.

And finally if you regularly watch stuff subscribe, it's a strong preference indicator.

I do get some junk in my feed now and then, but mostly I discover good stuff I enjoy. And that includes really small channels.