MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by seanhunter | 2026-02-28 11:45:56+00:00
My uncle was part of the team in Bank of America implementing new ATM software at the time they moved to somewhat customizing the interface so it had a quick button on the first menu to give you your favourite withdrawal amount quickly, let you choose what notes you wanted etc. He said it was written in java and his favourite bit was writing the method that would be called (after all checks were done to make sure you had the money etc) to issue the cash. It was called “dispenseWithoutQuestion()”.

You could call dispenseWithoutQuestion(someamount) and the device would spit that amount of cash out so it was obviously tremendously pleasing to test.
by jnbridge | 2026-02-28 11:46:01+00:00
The framing assumes teams make a clean "pick one" choice, but in my experience the reality is messier. Most enterprises I've worked with end up running both .NET and Java — not because anyone planned it, but because acquisitions, third-party dependencies, and different team preferences make it inevitable.

The more interesting question might be: how well does your architecture handle having both? Teams that go all-in on one stack often find themselves 3-5 years later integrating with a Java service they inherited through an acquisition, or needing a .NET library that doesn't have a JVM equivalent.

To actually answer the question though: C# and .NET in 2026 are genuinely excellent. The language has evolved faster than Java in many ways (records, pattern matching, LINQ). But Java 21+ has closed the gap significantly with virtual threads, sealed classes, and the continued investment in GraalVM. For a greenfield project, the honest answer is both are fine choices — your team's familiarity matters more than language features at this point.

What I wouldn't do is pick a stack purely based on cloud vendor lock-in. That's the one decision that actually limits your future options.
by kzahel | 2026-02-28 11:46:19+00:00
Why would you be worried about junior engineers? I see this expressed a lot. It seems kind of condescending to me. It's just a different build toolchain. We can build faster, and having a lot of experience helps you know how things should fit together. People figure shit out. There are plenty of juniors that are way smarter than you or I. Do you mean like a junior who is not as clever as you will have a hard time getting their foot in?
by jnbridge | 2026-02-28 11:46:52+00:00
The tension between "streams as lazy sequences" vs "streams as async event channels" isn't unique to JavaScript. Every major runtime has hit this wall:

- Java went through it with java.util.stream (pull-based, lazy) vs Reactive Streams/Project Reactor (push-based, backpressure-aware). The result was two completely separate APIs that don't compose well.

- .NET actually handled this better with IAsyncEnumerable<T> in C# 8 — a single abstraction that's pull-based but async-aware. It composes naturally with LINQ and doesn't require a separate reactive library for most use cases.

- Go side-stepped the problem entirely with goroutines and channels, making the whole streams abstraction unnecessary for most cases.

What I find interesting about this proposal is it's trying to learn from that prior art. The biggest mistake Java made was bolting async streams on top of a synchronous abstraction and then needing a completely separate spec (Reactive Streams) for the async case. If JavaScript can get a single unified abstraction that handles both sync iteration and async backpressure, that would be a genuine improvement over what exists in most other runtimes.
by jnbridge | 2026-02-28 11:47:16+00:00
This is one of those problems that gets significantly harder when your system spans multiple runtimes or platforms.

A few patterns that have worked well in practice:

1. Idempotency keys at the API boundary — every side-effecting call gets a client-generated UUID, and the receiver deduplicates. Simple, but think carefully about the TTL of your dedup window.

2. Outbox pattern — instead of directly calling the external service, write the intent to a local "outbox" table in the same transaction as your state change. A separate process polls the outbox and delivers. Debezium + CDC makes this quite clean.

3. For cross-system workflows: treat the saga orchestrator as the single source of truth for step completion. Each step checks its completion status before executing, so steps must be idempotent OR the orchestrator tracks state.

In practice, designing for at-least-once delivery + idempotent receivers is more reliable than trying to achieve exactly-once through distributed coordination. Exactly-once across system boundaries is effectively a myth outside of systems that support two-phase commit (and even then it's fragile).
by hoangnnguyen | 2026-02-28 11:47:46+00:00
I appreciate you taking the time to write this. There are a few fair points here.

I agree that AI is not automatically better at planning than an experienced engineer. In fact, I would never outsource planning blindly. My point is not that AI replaces thinking. It is that planning becomes a collaborative loop. The engineer still owns the judgment. I also strong believe that human engineers are not going to be replaced by AI.

I also agree that many people under-ask AI because they assume it cannot handle complex work. That hesitation is real. In my experience, the bigger unlock is not complexity, but clarity. The more specific and constrained you are, the better the output. That part is 100 percent true.

On multi-agent workflows feeling tiring and cluttered, I understand that too. If it feels like mental overload, it is probably poorly designed. Multi-agent setups are not meant to increase cognitive stress. They are meant to reduce context switching and batch certain types of work. If they create chaos, the workflow needs redesign, not more pressure.

I also want to be very clear, this is not about squeezing more output from engineers or chasing 10x productivity. I do not believe in “AI as a magic pill” thinking.

Efficiency gains should create space. Not pressure. I believe if we can offload more things to AI, then we have more space to do a lot more innovative things.

If AI gives a team leverage, that leverage should go into better design, stronger testing, less firefighting, more sustainable pacing. Not into compressing people’s lives.

The last thing I want is engineers feeling like they burn out chasing some productivity narrative. That is not healthy, and it is not sustainable.

My article is about discipline in workflow, not about forcing intensity. The goal is long-term system quality and personal clarity, not squeezing hours out of people.

Thanks again for the sharing, it is a good perspective and I really appreciate it.
by cultofmetatron | 2026-02-28 11:48:05+00:00
The majority of you are descendents of european converts cosplaying as middleasterners.

That said, I support jews who were there before 1950s and the ones who are actually willing to make peace with palestinans and live alongside without an apartheid ethnostate. They are welcome to live in Israel and I wish them peace.

The rest of you who are defending or taking part in this genocide should absolutely be exiled.

that answer your question?
by throwawayheui57 | 2026-02-28 11:48:18+00:00
Oh these poor Iranians need saviors, they don’t know what’s good for them. We know better. They don’t learn.

Don’t you see any similarity between what you say and any colonial. And my brain is broken?

Let me put it in a way that’s easy to comprehend for you. War is bad and Iranian government is as much responsible for this war as the US. I don’t understand how this is so triggering for some.

edit.

> Evidently I care more about the hundreds of thousands of Iranian people that will die in this war than you.

Did you care equally when thousands of Iranians were massacred in the streets by the government or the “care” activates only when convenient?
by energy123 | 2026-02-28 11:48:31+00:00
Good points about Google.

I think where I don't agree is about the model. You're mostly correct right now, and your view is supported by how close everyone is.

Where I am more optimistic about the 2-4 biggest labs (not just OpenAI) is what the next 2 years looks like.

I expect this to happen:

- Synthetic data goes from 30% of training data to 90-97%+ of training data.

- Synthetic data becomes hugely varied, and the production of it is factory-like and parallelized.

The moat here is the data factory, and the scale/scope economies behind it.

Thoughts?
by mikkupikku | 2026-02-28 11:49:22+00:00
They made the right call, kind of, and only by accident. John Young had telemetry for the flap available to him in the cockpit but didn't notice it happen at the time. NASA ground control also had the telemetry, but also didn't notice / understand until after it was too late to eject (which was only possible during a narrow window for ascent, and not at all for reentry if the body flap had been inoperable.) They also simply got lucky the hydraulic system performed beyond it's designed safety margin.
by re-thc | 2026-02-28 11:50:13+00:00
> Why do we need a second, less detailed and less verifiable copy of the code

Because it requires people to know how to read or specify code.

Spec driven development is similar to the no-code movement i.e. the specs are closer to functional requirements than this strict spec or code.

You can argue that you can just ask the LLM to explain back and forth but it can still be too much.
by Schmerika | 2026-02-28 11:50:24+00:00
And as an aside to this: even the people coopting the rebel iconography are supporting genocide, atrocities and war crimes.

Like, Mark Hamill himself is a massive Israel + Biden supporter [0].

Guys, George Lucas didn't make the Empire thinking about Trump, or Republicans. He made it about America.

0 - https://www.nme.com/news/film/hollywood-stars-sign-open-lett...
by idop | 2026-02-28 11:50:40+00:00
Yes, Israel was founded specifically to be a safe haven for Jews after 2/3 of them were murdered in Europe, and it passed this (somewhat ridiculous) law in 2018 because it knows full well that once Jews cease to be the majority in Israel, they'll cease to be, period.

You can view it as racist, you can hate it, you can want to see Israel destroyed in favor of yet another 100% Arab country, it really doesn't matter, because the fact is you're all hypocrites who only have the safety that you have because of genocides, brutal wars, land capture, regime toppling and forced conversions. That's the only thing we learned from the rest of the enlightened world. Kill, destroy, erase, force convert, and somehow be deemed a beacon of freedom and democracy.

In real life, Israel is more ethnically and religiously varied than all its surrounding countries, and non-Jews in Israel have rights that even I, as a Jew, don't have (such as freedom of religion). Jews are a minority in the Galilee, and there's no law for the Judaization of the Galilee.
by virgildotcodes | 2026-02-28 11:50:58+00:00
I believe Grok is already as deeply integrated into the gov as can be, but it's objectively the least capable model family behind OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini.

So the Gov could very well rely on it alone, purely on ideological grounds, but then they'd be condemned to using inferior tech at a time when everyone is really nervous about staying ahead in AI usage (rightly or wrongly). Not sure they'd be willing to accept that, and it does put pressure on them.
by altmanaltman | 2026-02-28 11:51:30+00:00
Isn't this superbly stupid, though? Like if the users don't even know how LLMs work or what they are good at, why are they being forced to find new ways? Is it just FOMO? Surely a better way would be to allow expert researchers/app developers create AI apps that work for niche use-cases and have domain-appropriate guardrails etc, right? And then everyone (including non technical people) can use it and improve productivity or whatever

It's like forcing someone who has never driven a car to figure out how to make it go faster
by halflife | 2026-02-28 11:52:32+00:00
Amazing answer, all wrong.

Jews maintained their tradition and lineage for 2 thousand years. So much so that you can identify European Jewish heritage with a DNA test.

Second, half of the Israeli Jews were ethnically cleansed from Arabic and Muslim countries.

And thank you for having the 1950 cutoff, since my family came to Israel before that.
by dcminter | 2026-02-28 11:52:42+00:00
While these are all reasonable points, there is a distinction between criticising people for using ${lang} (bad) and criticising the language (neutral).

Some people get their egoes attached to their choices (for or against Rust).

Also there's a time and a place for all criticism. If the conversation is not fundamentally about language choice then it's very irritating to have it brought up.
by AussieWog93 | 2026-02-28 11:52:54+00:00
Apparently inference itself is profitable, at least according to an interview I watched with Dario. They even cover the cost of training itself, if you look at it on a model-by-model basis.

The cash burn comes from models ballooning in size - they spend (as an example, not actual numbers) 100M on training + inference for the lifetime of Sonnet 3.5, make 200M from subscriptions/api keys while it's SOTA, but then have to somehow come up with 1B to train Opus 4.0.

To run some other back of the envelope calcs:
GLM 4.7 Air (previous "good" local LLM) can generate ~70 tok/s on a Mac Mini. This equates to 2,200 million tokens per year.

Openrouter charge $0.40 per million tokens, so theoretically if you were using that Mac mini at 100% utilisation you'd be generating $880 per annum "worth" of API usage.

Assuming a power draw of something 50W, you're only looking at 440kWh per annum. At 20c per kWh that's $90 on power, plus $499 to get the hardware itself. Depreciate that $499 hardware cost over 3 years and you're looking at ~$260 to generate ~$880 in inference income.
by _heimdall | 2026-02-28 11:53:50+00:00
My understanding is that OpenAI's deal, and the deal others are signing, implicitly prevents the use of LLMs for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons because today one care argue those aren't legal and the deal is a blanket for allowing all lawful use.

Today it can't be used for mass surveillance, but the executive branch has all the authority it needs to later deem that lawful if it wishes to, the Patriot Act and others see to that.

Anthropic was making the limits contractually explicit, meaning the executive branch could change the line of lawfulness and still couldn't use Anthropic models for mass surveillance. That is where they got into a fight and that is where OpenAI and others can claim today that they still got the same agreement Anthropic wanted.
by everdrive | 2026-02-28 11:54:09+00:00
This is a really strong example of how both the left and the right have been moving away from liberalism (ie, "classical liberalism," the general belief that people should be free to make their own choices and pursue their own interests) for the past 16 years or so. A bill like this could have just as easily come from Texas.

Practically, I think this is tough. How does a business verify their 20k Linux servers in AWS? What prevents Linux users from simply modifying their code such that they no longer do age verification? I think it's easy to imagine circumventing this one law, but this is another brick in the wall. Maybe your bank stops working on Linux. Maybe major websites stop working unless they get your citizen ID and age verification data from your OS. Maybe no one makes a browser that doesn't try to grab that information.

Not joking; stock up on books and keep a collection of media that you own personally. Perhaps your linux computer will start looking a lot like your PC from the early 90s: not connected to the internet, just used for word processing, some installed games, and media.
by bsenftner | 2026-02-28 11:54:55+00:00
The US educational system has been manufacturing these dual career specialists that are competent in their careers and believe that makes them specialists in all other area, but they get played like fools constantly. The level of discourse, of public conversation, is like 7th graders. Until you get to politics, then it's "sports talk" with "winning" being all that matters, even if winning means the destruction of law and of completely corrupt forever future.
by josephg | 2026-02-28 11:55:13+00:00
> what's the justification of not using a memory-safe language

Use Go, Java or Fil-C, and memory safety is achieved at the expense of runtime performance. Tracing garbage collectors make your programs run slower and use more RAM.

With Rust you pay with complexity. Rust has new, weird syntax (lifetimes, HRTB, etc) and invisible borrow checker state that you've gotta understand and keep track of while programming. Rust is a painful language to learn, because lots of seemingly valid programs won't pass the borrow checker. And it takes awhile to internalise those rules.

I personally think the headache of rust is worth it. But I can totally understand why people come to the opposite conclusion.
by skydhash | 2026-02-28 11:55:16+00:00
TLDR: Clarity in software engineering means detailing all the constraints, which no user (apart from lawyers and engineers) usually do, as the real world has constraints that software does not.

The hardware offers so little guarantees that the whole OS job is to offer that. All layers are formal, but usefulness doesn't comes from that. Usefulness comes from a consistent models that embodies a domain. So you have the hardware that has capabilities but no model. Then you add the OS's kernel that will impose a model on the hardware, then you have the system libraries that will further restrict it to a certain domains. Then you have the general libraries that are more useful because they present another perspective. And then you have the application that use this last model according to a certain need.

A good example is that you go from the sound card to the sound subsystem, the the alsa libraries, to pipewire, to an audio player or a media framework like the one in the browser. This particular tower has dozens of engineers that has contributed to it, and most developers only deal with the last layers, but the lesson is that the perspective of a user differs from the building blocks that we have in hand. Software engineering is to reconcile the twos.

So people may know how the things should look or behave on their hand, but they have no idea on what the building blocks on the other hand. It's all abstract. The only thing real is the hardware and the energy powering it. Everything else needs to be specified with code. And in that world that forms the middle layer, there's a lot of rules to follow to make something good, but laws that prevent something bad are little. It's not like physical engineering where there are things you just cannot do.

Just like on a canvas you can draw anything as long as it's inside the boundary of the canvas, you can do anything in software as long as it's inside the boundary of the hardware. OS in personal computers adds a little more restrictions, but it's not a lot. It's basically fantasia in there.
by eru | 2026-02-28 11:55:48+00:00
> And at the time, it was a complete waste of money. I don’t regret it at all.

I think, spending 50 bucks on bitcoin back then wouldn't have been a complete waste of money: in the worst case, you could have kept them as a souvenir from a passing fad to tell your grandchildren about. Like pet rocks.

However, I heard about bitcoin around the same time, and even read the whitepaper etc (I'm a mathematician and did some actual cryptography at the time), but still didn't buy any.
by socketcluster | 2026-02-28 11:56:52+00:00
Yeah well it's like money these days; having a $10 million net worth doesn't actually say much about a person; maybe it fell on their lap because they knew the right people or maybe they had to struggle to earn every cent. It's the same with GitHub stars.

Unfortunately, those who had it easy tend to get much more attention and are much more visible; attention is how they got there in the first place so of course there is not much merit behind their work. A lot of software tooling is a Potemkin village. It's over-hyped and developers/users are forced into it by their boss who happens to be an investor in the project founder's company.

It often seems like nobody from Millennial or Gen Z generations built any good popular software tool or library... It's like nothing innovative came out since the time of Linux, GNU and GIT... No competent software developers since John Carmack? It's not true of course, it's just that we are a heavily suppressed and manipulated generation. Firstly, we are demoralized, so there are less of us actually putting in the effort to build quality stuff, but even those who do, our work is often marginalized and covered up by algorithms. Often nipped in the bud.

We have to consider that Linus Torvalds didn't build Linux all by himself. Had the community not come together and made all these distros, today, nobody would even know what Linux is and Linus Torvalds would be a failed developer living in the shadow of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
by cultofmetatron | 2026-02-28 11:58:01+00:00
> Second, half of the Israeli Jews were ethnically cleansed from Arabic and Muslim countries.

And the solution to that was to create an apartheid state where you forced palestinians to live as second class citizens in their ancestral home?

Last I checked, there are plenty of jews in morocco and Iran. I've met a few.

> And thank you for having the 1950 cutoff, since my family came to Israel before that.

Glad that you found a loophole that lets you defend literal genocide while clinging to your land claim as if that was the part I had a major problem with. you certainly got me there.
by enrightened | 2026-02-28 11:58:52+00:00
You know some of us have a different opinion than you. I suggest you travel in India. You will find a billion people who support Israel. And if you are smart enough you will understand why. Anyway come out of the hubris that anyone with a different view is an AI agent. Go read history from at least 1900s rather than watching TikTok videos.
by akshshha | 2026-02-28 12:00:31+00:00
> Pre-emptive violence; not even justified with a narrative of escalating threat.

This is basically Purim. Which is in a few days, what are the odds!

At some point Americans will realize ethnic Jewish groups exist and operate in their own interests in America, and that is at odds with American interests. Or maybe not - top private donor the IDF Larry Ellison (an American, supposedly) looks like he’s expanding his media empire even further with WB. Should go a long way in helping his personal friend Netanyahu’s 8th front.

Small coordinated groups always win out over fragmented larger ones.
by 8cvor6j844qw_d6 | 2026-02-28 12:00:38+00:00
Just a heads up for people that used phone numbers to verify their account before you decide to proceed with account deletion.

> New accounts are still subject to our limit of 3 accounts per phone number. Deleted accounts also count toward this limit.

> Deleting an account does not free up another spot.

> A phone number can only ever be used up to 3 times for verification to generate the first API key for your account on platform.openai.com.