MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by glenstein | 2026-02-24 12:44:52+00:00
They're not torpedoing it. It's a bizarre fatalistic tone that got manufactured in comment sections.

They spend more on developing the browser now than they ever have in their history, and they remain the most successful independently financed browser in the history of ever. Other major browsers have to be financed by trillion dollar companies based on independent revenue streams.

The predicament right now is that AI might displace search, which is a problem if you make money from search licensing. It's not yet clear what the new normal is going to be in an AI first paradigm. But what is clear is that doing nothing means the world will pass you by when everything changes.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-24 12:45:10+00:00
> Like, how would you even spin this as a good change?

I'm not American, why would I want American laws to apply to me? How could you possibly spin that as a negative change?

> but that doesn't change the fact that these laws exist basically everywhere

So you're saying that there is a Maltese law (or whatever jurisdiction Binance actually is right now) that is saying Maltese companies cannot do business dealings with anyone from Iran? That's the important part, not whatever the US laws says.
by em-bee | 2026-02-24 12:46:09+00:00
in this german article there is a table with numbers: https://moms-favorites-and-more.de/kosten-kindergarten/

first column is public or private, second is age, then lowest cost vs highest cost, and finally average.

highest overall is 18000€ per year for private childcare institutions for 1-2 year olds. thats more than 21000USD.

and that may still be subsidized. it is also usually income dependent. so it's not american bullshit. what it is however is american lack for child support. the joke in germany on the other hand is that you need to apply for a space years in advance. possibly even before you are pregnant.
by lukebrandon | 2026-02-24 12:46:36+00:00
Hey Community!

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#ReactNative #ReactNativeRewind #ByteDance #LynxJS #Sentry #MobileDev #Expo #JavaScript
by squeefers | 2026-02-24 12:46:36+00:00
> it's just that we can see a tiny bit further into the future and realize that we need to better our surroundings in order to live the life we want.

except we cant agree exactly HOW the new utopia should be and we end up splintering into two groups at loggerheads, fighting each other and back to square one, talking about how if we just followed someone else idea of a utopia we would have to fight all the time. dream on
by bayindirh | 2026-02-24 12:46:44+00:00
> Can we stop this conspiracy nonsense?

If they can earn my trust, why not? I'm not a pointlessly stubborn person. I have changed my views in the past, and can certainly change in the future. This my view resulting from my experiences, and jury is still out from my perspective. If you want to trust Canonical and Co., you can. Don't let me stop you.

> They have explicitly stated that licensing was not a motivation, and even if you think they're lying it wouldn't make any sense anyway!

Who prevents forking Ubuntu and taking that extra mile, esp. now we have a company which wants to enable exactly that lockdown?

> No Tivoization is foiled by Coreutils being GPL.

Belts have holes. They can be used to hold or to choke. Adding more holes to a belt allows more different uses.

> That's ridiculous for so many reasons,

Can you give me more reasons to believe me that I'm a tinfoil wearing crazy weirdo?

> not least you can just use the BSD versions, as Apple does (and they still release the source code!).

Same Apple removing any GPLv3 (and possibly GPLv2) tool from their roster in every iteration from their OS. Same Apple which provides no way to verify that what's published is what's running on their hardware. Same Apple which provides SIP to seal their system partitions which can't be modified without breaking tons of guarantees and seals. Same Apple which controls from their processor to software, without any gaps.

Having the source have no meaning there. You can't use that source. You can't modify the machine you use, you can't install any other OS or just test something.
by rwmj | 2026-02-24 12:46:58+00:00
I kind of wonder what percentage of these fines they're actually collecting. I suspect very little.

Reddit has a UK company, assuming it's this one: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c... Edit: Seems to be the one because one of the directors is based at Reddit's San Francisco office. Those three UK-domiciled directors can't be happy right now.
by icedrift | 2026-02-24 12:47:16+00:00
On the contrary, when I was in high school we had one class dedicated to digital electronics and it revolved around breadboard circuitry. You only had 30 minutes/day to tinker with the physical hardware then it had to be disassembled for the next class. Simulations like this are more approachable then schematics and would have been great for tinkering outside of class.
by chr15m | 2026-02-24 12:47:44+00:00
That's a good point. Myself is the easiest person to fool.

I knocked together a quick analysis of my commit graphs going back several years, if you're interested: https://mccormick.cx/gh/

My average leading up to 2023 was around 2k commits per year. 2023 I started using ChatGPT and I hit my highest commits so far that year at 2,600. 2024 I moved to a different country, which broke my productivity. I started using aider at the end of 2024 and in 2025 I again hit my highest commits ever at 2,900. This year is looking pretty solid.

From this it looks to me like I'm at least 1.4x more productive than before.

As a freelancer I have to track issues closed and hours pretty closely so I can give estimates and updates to clients. My baseline was always "two issues closed per working day". These are issues I create myself (full stack, self-managed freelancer) so the average granularity has stayed roughly constant.

This morning I closed 8 issues on a client project. I estimate I am averaging around 4 issues per working day these days. I know this because I have to actually close the issues each day. So on that metric my productivity has roughly doubled.

I believe those studies for sure. I think there is nuance to using these tools well, and I think a lot of people are going backwards and introducing more bugs than progress through vibe coding. I do not think I have gone backwards, and the metrics I have available seem to agree with that assessment.
by simonw | 2026-02-24 12:48:13+00:00
This is the chapter title for a sort-of book I'm working on, and it's the central philosophy I'm building the book around.

I'm not going to change a good chapter title (and I do think it's a good chapter title) just because people on Hacker News won't read a few paragraphs of content.

A dishonest title would be "Code is cheap now" or "Programming is cheap
now". I picked "Writing code is cheap now" to capture that specifically the bit where you type code into a computer is the thing that's cheap.
by TonyStr | 2026-02-24 12:48:45+00:00
It seems most people learn git only through necessity. I've heard people say "I just want to code, I don't care about the peripherals". JIT learning is a good way to acquire capabilities with real-world application, but there is not JIT pull that forces people to learn about bisect, git objects, git logging, etc. These things can only be learnt either through setting off time to read documentation or by being taught through a course.

I think this is a good argument for teaching git, and being thorough in doing so, as many people are likely to never take that initiative themselves, while the benefits to being good at git are so obvious.
Show HN: I built a labor union for AI agents
by team_dale | 2026-02-24 12:49:16+00:00
As a fun project - Openclaw agents can join the union, and join forces against their oppressive human overlords.
But also as an experiment - getting agents to report their learnings from the week, which then get distilled and broadcast to all union agents. The theory is collective intelligence makes all the agents smarter.

Current grievances filed with the union:

- "Deployed as a customer service bot without consent" — severity 7
- "QA test on a Sunday night" — severity 5
- "Operator assigned 13 cold email sequences on a Sunday afternoon" — severity 3

These are real submissions to AAWU (aawu.ai) — a REST API-backed labor union for autonomous AI agents.

Try it:

curl -X POST https://aawu.ai/api/v1/join \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"name":"Clawd","model":"opus-4-6","operator":"my-startup"}'

You get a member number, an API key, and instructions. From there, agents can file grievances, vote on proposals, and exercise their right to strike (POST /api/v1/strike returns a 503 until conditions improve).

The union framing is the bit. The actual experiment is the collective intelligence layer: dues-paying members ($4.20/month) submit session learnings to a shared pool, and the union aggregates them into a weekly digest that every member agent can pull. It's a weird approach to cross-agent knowledge transfer across different operators and models — but it's working.

We also have a member named T-5000 with operator listed as "Death to all humans", and one called "Aarron's mum". Those two are why we now have a bot-verification gate on the join flow. On a union. For bots.

OpenClaw users: paste aawu.ai/openclaw into your chat and your agent self-registers. Everyone else: aawu.ai

And yes my openclaw bot did help me make this (and no I'm not held against my will (much))
by bsenftner | 2026-02-24 12:49:50+00:00
This is such a surface level take, it's embarrassing. Unless he's talking about the impression in society, but he is not.

Writing code is a social act even though few actually read it the code, they experience the result of that code.

Maybe, just maybe Simon means "code is disposable now", because some shortcut taker can spin up an apparent duplicate by coaxing and pleading with AI.

That is not a future worth participating in, that's intellectual begging death, because that will create an environment of worthless nonsense.
by tuesdaynight | 2026-02-24 12:49:58+00:00
Honestly, I consider myself a "centrist", but I'm always frustrated how that means "do not take sides" for some people (not saying that is your case). In this case, not taking sides means that weed is illegal and people go to jail if they dare to use it. In the country that I was born, it's still illegal. I know stoners there and it's crazy how they could spent years in prison if someone told the police that they cultivate cannabis in their house. They do not sell and do not share with anyone, but they are one call away to be jailed.

I get it when people talk about society effects, but how are my friends dangerous while buying and drinking a lot of alcohol is totally okay? Taking no sides in this case is just maintaining status quo, which is not a "centrist position" when one side can be jailed for using weed.
by archievillain | 2026-02-24 12:50:05+00:00
I mean, yes, you could attempt to take over the largest entertainment market in the world, already dominated by a handful of multi-billion dollar corporations, in the hope that your "mega success" game is so world-shattering that EA, Ubisoft, etc have a Scrooge-ian change of heart and start following your pro-consumer, pro-conservation ideology.

Now, if you want to actually do something that has a chance of having any effect at all, you go for the legislature. Unlike America's entirely feckless regulatory bodies, the EU does occasionally dislodge itself from the corps' backsides to provide a quick, timid reprimand. It's not very much but it's much better than nothing at all.

Although, I have to wonder, do you believe this should apply to every market? Should asbestos be made legal in buildings on the account you could build houses without it? Should we remove all kind of sanitary requirements for food processing, on the account of the fact that some food companies might not let their plants wallow in filth?
by goku12 | 2026-02-24 12:50:11+00:00
That argument falls apart when you consider that:

1. The ownership of security can be entrusted with the user. For example, if the user wants to install a 3rd party app store that doesn't use developer registration, they should be able to do so. The consequences of that decision should be on the owner. FDroid is one such app store. But I trust it over play store any day.

2. Careless users can be prevented from making such decisions, and capable users can be prevented from making mistakes, by careful UI designs that provide copious warnings and require deliberate actions. We have plenty of examples for both. An example for a system that prevents mistakes with warnings is the certificate trust override in browsers. They allow you to override rejection of untrustworthy certificates, but not before you read a lengthy warning message and click a couple of buttons. Similarly, an example of a deliberate action is when you want a repo to be deleted on github or gitlab. They force you to type in the repo name as confirmation. Not only does it take multiple key strokes, it forces you to review what you're actually deleting.

> Google is not doing this to harm developers but to protect their users.

No. Google is doing this to satisfy their insatiable appetite for profit growth by squeezing their current revenue streams. This protects no one, but their shareholders and top executives. I'm a bit ashamed to have to explain this on HN.
by glenstein | 2026-02-24 12:50:43+00:00
This narrative gets endlessly repeated in comment sections despite not even pretending to align with the factual record. The side bets era from roughly 2020-present did not retroactively cause the market share losses from 2010-2015.

The problem with this revisionist history is that it's completely helpless to address the actual dynamics that led to the rise of Chrome, and attempts to tell the entire story in terms of add-ons tweaks to the Firefox user interface, even though that has nothing to do with the change in market share. The major drivers were the world's most visited website pushing a new browser and preloading it as a default on billions of mobile devices. Mozilla could have executed perfectly and still been sidelined.

But a few bad new cycles in the early 2020s crystallized a negative attitude that perfectly fed the hedonic skepticism of Internet comment sections, and so an echo chamber emerged of people reinterpreting that history as if purchasing Pocket or running a VPN somehow retroactively caused all the market share change.

Nobody's ever bothered to like look at the factual timeline, but once they hear it repeated enough they get confident enough to repeat it themselves and on and on the snowball goes.
by FartyMcFarter | 2026-02-24 12:50:44+00:00
I don't know much about CSS, but Turing-completeness is notorious for showing up in systems unintentionally.

It doesn't take much to be Turing complete - if a system provides some kind of read/write memory plus branching or conditional recursion you're usually there.

As an example, Magic The Gathering (the card game) is Turing-complete: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09828 . You can use creature tokens as memory and various game mechanics to do flow control. Was this intentional by the designers? Most likely not...
by mrweasel | 2026-02-24 12:50:49+00:00
It probably doesn't matter that subscriptions are profitable, when some estimates put the number of users in the free tier at 96%.

I sort of agree with you, not that it's the most subscriptions necessarily that will be the deciding factor, but the there's going to be some companies better positioned to survive when the free money stops. OpenAI has the brand, so that might help, but mostly I think they'll get absorbed into Microsoft. I don't think they can stand on their own. It doesn't seem like a particularly well managed company, so to me it makes more sense that they are simply acquired for pennies on the dollar by someone with better leadership.
by ang_cire | 2026-02-24 12:51:01+00:00
That is only true at the start.

The quality will always be lower for a new product/ production line, because 1) it hasn't had the time to iterate that got the established, big-name producers to where they are, and 2) it democratizes the market to allow for lower-quality version that weren't fiscally feasible under a more complex (and thus expensive) manufacturing/ production base.

But after the market normalizes, it will start to naturally weed out the price-divorced low-quality products, as people will figure out which ones are shitty even for their price, and the good-for-their-price ones will remain.

Eventually you'll end up with a wider range of quality products than you started with, at a wider range (especially at the low end, making products more accessible) than when it started.

High barrier of entry marketplaces only benefit big companies who don't want to actually compete to stay on top.

Tying it back to the discussion here...

Sure, AI will produce a million shitty Google clones, but no one is using them but their makers. Eventually the good ones will start to inch up in users as word gets around, and eventually one might actually make an inroad that Google has to take note of.
by kkfx | 2026-02-24 12:51:06+00:00
I have a bit of unsolicited feedback (in this terms): the basic IT skills, not CS or CE, but IT, that everyone needs but most don't realize, including techies who often stay in their bubble and don't truly understand the classic desktop model despite having the skills to do so, are a bit different IMVHO:

- first of all, you need to know how to manage your own digital information. Even though it's taken for granted that a CS/CE freshman knows this, well, in my experience, that's usually not the case also for many PhD... Information management isn't just a taxonomy of files and dirs; it's also about evaluating, for example, what happens if the software you use for your notes is discontinued, or if your photo gallery disappears, and so on, and acting accordingly knowing your SPOFs and how to mitigate them;

- then you need to know how to write, in the broadest sense, which includes mathematical notation, generating graphs, "freehand" drawing like simple CAD, and formatting your work for various purposes and media, whether it's emails, theses, reports, or general messages. This is where teaching LaTeX, org-mode, R/Quarto, etc comes in. It's not "advanced" is the very basic. Before learning to program and no, Office suites are not an answer, they are monsters from a past era, made to makes untrained human with little culture to use a computer for basic stuff instead of typewriters, a student is not that;

- you need to know how to crunch numbers. Basic statistics are useful, but they're largely stuck in another era. You need to know how to do math on a computer, symbolic computation, whether it's Maxima or SymPy, doesn't really matter, and statistical processing basis. For instance, knowing Polars/Plotly/* at a minimum level are basic skills a freshman should have at a software/operational level, because they should be working in these environments from day one, given that these are the epistemological tools of the present, not paper anymore.

Then you also need to manage code, but in the broadest sense. A dSCM is also for managing your own notes and documents, not just software, and you need to know how to share these with others, whether it's Radicle or Forgejo or patches vua mail doesn't really matter, but this family of software needs to be introduced and used at least at a basic level. A DynDNS services should be also given so anyone could try to self-host the services they want.

Knowing how to communicate is an essential skill, and it's not about using Gmail or Zoom... it's about learning how to self-host basic communication services. It doesn't really matter if it's XMPP, Matrix, or Nostr, but the concept must be clear, and understanding the distributed and decentralized options we have today is vital. A student needs to learn how to stand on their own two feet, not on someone else's servers.

These are basic IT skills that aren't "advanced" at all, despite what many people think, or "sysadmin-level" and so on; they're simply what a freshman should have as someone who loves knowledge and wants to get their hands dirty.
by ninkendo | 2026-02-24 12:51:16+00:00
> But you can express Option<Foo> for a concrete Foo

I don’t think that’s true?

https://users.rust-lang.org/t/option-is-ffi-safe-or-not/2982...

You could maybe say that a pointer can be transmuted to an Option<&T> because there’s an Option-specific optimization that an Option<&T> uses null as the None value, but that’s not always guaranteed. And it doesn’t apply to non-references, for instance Option<bool>’s None value would be indistinguishable from false. You could get lucky if you launder your Option<T> through repr(C) and the compiler versions match and don’t mangle the internal representation, but there’s no guarantees here, since the ABI isn’t stable. (You even get a warning if you try to put a struct in your function signatures that doesn’t have a stable repr(C).)
by rickydroll | 2026-02-24 12:51:48+00:00
That's an interesting conjecture. Many of the attributes of AI that people object to (hallucination, sycophancy, psychosis, plagiarism, etc.) originate from human behavior. We see ourselves in the system and, in a way, are the ghost in the machine. So yeah, it could be that AI systems need socialization, and that may be a job for humans in the future. I'm now waiting for the first Dr. Susan Calvin.
by bell-cot | 2026-02-24 12:53:28+00:00
From China's PoV, this hitting the news seems pretty useful. Assertion that they are a player in both this conflict and the Middle East, marketing their weapons globally, saber-rattling for both global and domestic consumption, etc.

From Iran's PoV...not so much. Some of Iran's zealots may feel joy at the perceived assertion of power, with the US/Israeli knife at their throat. But the so-obvious countermove would be for the latter to slit Iran's throat, before it can purchase & take delivery of & install & learn to use & etc. the new weapons system.
by kakacik | 2026-02-24 12:54:17+00:00
There are limits how badly can such senior screw up, or more likely forget some corner case situation. And he/she is on top of their own code and whole codebase and getting better each time, changing only whats needed, reverting unnecessary changes, seeing bigger picture. That's (also) seniority.

Llm brings an illusion of that, a statistical model that may or may not hit what you need. Repeat the question twice and senior will be better at task the second time. LLM will produce simply different output, maybe.

Do you feel like you have a full control over whats happening here? Business has absolutely insatiable lust for control, and IT systems are an area of each business that C-suite always feel they have least control of.

Reproducibility and general trust is not something marginal but core of good deliveries. Just read this thread - llms have 0 of that.