MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by acjohnson55 | 2026-02-19 18:31:48+00:00
This is too broad of a statement to possibly be true. I agree with aspects of the piece. But it's also true that not every aspect of the work offloaded to AI is some font of potential creativity.

To take coding, to the extent that hand coding leads to creative thoughts, it is possible that some of those thoughts will be lost if I delegate this to agents. But it's also very possibly that I now have the opportunity to think creatively on other aspects of my work.

We have to make strategic decisions on where we want our attention to linger, because those are the places where we likely experience inspiration. I do think this article is valuable in that we have to be conscious of this first before we can take agency.
by quadruple | 2026-02-19 18:31:49+00:00
It doesn't sound strange, it actually sounds sane and what everyone should be doing.

At the same time, I can't imagine the last time I had a random exception I didn't think about in prod, but I guess that's the whole point of the BEAM, just don't think about it at all.

I might take a stab at Elixir, the concepts seem interesting and the syntax looks to be up my alley.
by pelagicAustral | 2026-02-19 18:31:54+00:00
I 100% agree with the sentiment, but as someone that have worked on Government systems for a good amount of time, I can tell you, boring can be just about right sometimes.

In an industry that does not crave bells and whistles, having the ability to refactor, or bring old systems back to speed can make a whole lot of difference for an understaffed, underpaid, unamused, and otherwise cynic workforce, and I am all out for it.
by foxyv | 2026-02-19 18:31:58+00:00
There is in fact a we. It's just not based on race, religion, ethnicity, language, gender, or sexuality. "We" are the ones who create and work for a living instead of living off the backs of others. "They" are immensely wealthy oligarchs that exploit us using their ownership of land, buildings, communication networks and machines we need to survive.
by IshKebab | 2026-02-19 18:32:00+00:00
A lot of programming is taste, and syntax gives you a very quick judgement about how good the language designer's taste is. How familiar they are with what we know about which syntax works well, and so on. For example if you're designing a language in 2026 that uses `type name` instead of `name: type`... that is highly suspicious.

Also syntax is the interface through which you interact with the language, so bad syntax is going to be something annoying you have to deal with constantly. Sure you'll be able to write good programs in a language with bad syntax choices, but it's going to be less fun.

> Odin’s rules, which are very similar to Python’s, are to ignore newline-based “semicolons” within brackets (( ) and [ ], and { } used as an expression or record block).

Honestly I always thought that was a bit crap in Python and I'm surprised anyone thought this was a sensible thing to copy. Really, just use semicolons. As soon as an "easy" rule becomes even vaguely difficult to remember it's better to bin it and just require explicitness, because overall that is easier.
by uean | 2026-02-19 18:32:06+00:00
> I've seen people say something along the lines of "I am not interested in reading something that you could not be bothered to actually write" and I think that pretty much sums it up.

Amen to that. I am currently cc'd on a thread between two third-parties, each hucking LLM generated emails at each other that are getting longer and longer. I don't think either of them are reading or thinking about the responses they are writing at this point.
by parpfish | 2026-02-19 18:32:16+00:00
i think a lot of people that use AI to help them write want it specifically BECAUSE it makes them boring and generic.

and that's because people have a weird sort of stylistic cargo-culting that they use to evaluate their writing rather than deciding "does this communicate my ideas efficiently"?

for example, young grad students will always write the most opaque and complicated science papers. from their novice perspective, EVERY paper they read is a little opaque and complicated so they try to emulate that in their writing.

office workers do the same thing. every email from corporate is bland and boring and uses far too many words to say nothing. you want your style to match theirs, so you dump it into an AI machine and you're thrilled that your writing has become just as vapid and verbose as your CEO.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2026-02-19 18:32:23+00:00
> I don’t care about apps, I just want a thing that measures my heart rate, notifies me if I get a call or text, has more than a couple days of battery life, and that’s it.

https://repebble.com/watch says the Pebble Time 2 has

> Heart rate, step and sleep tracking

Isn't that what you want?
by igor47 | 2026-02-19 18:32:46+00:00
Well the claim was that AI makes you boring. The counter is that interesting people remain interesting, it's just that a flood of previously already boring people are pouring into tech. We could make some predictions that depend on how you model this. For instance, the absolute number of interesting projects posted to HN could increase or decrease, and likewise for the relative number vs total projects. You might expect different outcomes
by McGlockenshire | 2026-02-19 18:32:51+00:00
"Simple, cheap, fast," and somewhere between inaccurate and wrong. From the article:

> To flag grants for their DEI involvement, Fox entered the following command into ChatGPT: “Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation. Do not use ‘this initiative’ or ‘this description’ in your response.” He then inserted short descriptions of each grant. Fox did nothing to understand ChatGPT’s interpretation of “DEI” as used in the command or to ensure that ChatGPT’s interpretation of “DEI” matched his own.

The culture warrior understanding of the term "DEI" does not reflect reality. The prompt is trash. Garbage in, garbage out.

This is somehow even stupider than similar reports of grants being canceled simply for containing specific keywords commonly used in scientific research but also on the culture warrior no-no list.
by josefresco | 2026-02-19 18:32:52+00:00
While I agree overall, I'm going to do some mild pushback here: I'm working on a "vibe" coded project right now. I'm about 2 months in (not a weekend), and I've "thought about" the project more than any other "hand coded" project I've built in the past. Instead of spending time trying to figure out a host of "previously solved issues" AI frees my human brain to think about goals, features, concepts, user experience and "big picture" stuff.
by layer8 | 2026-02-19 18:32:58+00:00
I noticed that as well. Also misleading titles like “Eliminating Serialization Cost using B-trees” where the cost savings are actually for deserialization (from a custom format), and neither the self-balancing nature of B-trees isn’t actually relevant, as no insertion/deletion of nodes occurs in the (de)serialization scenario, so a single tree level is sufficient. It’s a stretch to refer to it as a B-tree.
by rglullis | 2026-02-19 18:33:16+00:00
> But that's not a product that they're offering

Of course it was.

- It was possible to do it.
- OpenCode did not break any security protocol in order to integrate with them.
- OAuth is *precisely* a system to let third-party applications use their resources.

It's not what they wanted, but it's not my problem. The fact that I was a customer does not mean that I need to protective of their profits.

> (from their business perspective)

So what?!

Basically, they set up an strategy they thought it was going to work in their favor (offer a subsidized service to try to lock in customers), someone else found a way to turn things around and you believe that we should be okay with this?!

Honestly, I do not understand why so many people here think it is fine to let these huge corporations run the same exploitation playbook over and over again. Basically they set up a mouse trap full of cheese and now that the mice found a way to enjoy the cheese without getting their necks broken, they are crying about it?
by solarisos | 2026-02-19 18:33:40+00:00
A quick follow-up for those in the infra space: I'm seeing a weird discrepancy where 'Verified' status from most APIs seems to rely on the RCPT TO command.
However, I've noticed more enterprise gateways are now returning a 250 OK for every address at a domain to thwart enumeration, but then silently dropping the packet at the transport layer if there's no sender history.
If the SMTP handshake is now a 'liar,' is there any technical signal left that actually confirms a mailbox is reachable, or are we effectively flying blind?
by Terr_ | 2026-02-19 18:33:41+00:00
> Singapore's economic policies are complicated and often misdirecting. [...] it's sovereign wealth

Tangentially, I've had a similar gripe around how some US folks discuss Singapore's old rival Hong Kong. I see advocacy that "Hong Kong shows X works, we should do X here here", while ignoring the other half of the system required to make things work, aspects that they would not support adopting.

For example, celebrating its "tax freedom" while glossing over public/subsidized housing, and the revenues of its large [0] sovereign-wealth fund.

[0] Not nearly as large as Singapore or Norway, but significant. To put it in context (and per-capita)... if the US is 1x, then HK=80x, Singapore=356x, Norway=379x.
by strogonoff | 2026-02-19 18:33:46+00:00
While at first glance LLMs do help expose and even circumvent gatekeeping, often it turns out that gatekeeping might have been there for a reason.

We have always relied on superficial cues to tell us about some deeper quality (good faith, willingness to comply with code of conduct, and so on). This is useful and is a necessary shortcut, as if we had to assess everyone and everything from first principles every time things would grind to a halt. Once a cue becomes unviable, the “gate” is not eliminated (except if just briefly); the cue is just replaced with something else that is more difficult to circumvent.

I think that brief time after Internet enabled global communication and before LLMs devalued communication signals was pretty cool; now it seems like there’s more and more closed, private or paid communities.
by nzach | 2026-02-19 18:34:05+00:00
> Do you think that by having that feature and having the Openfuse solution self-hosted, it would be something you would give a try?

No, I don't think this is compelling enough to try it at work.

> By the way, if you don't mind, how often do you have to run that type of recovery?

I would say we use this feature once every 3 months.
by snailmailman | 2026-02-19 18:34:17+00:00
I’m pretty sure YouTube’s built-in AI summary is also biased towards not “spoiling” the video.

Like if the title is a clickbait “this one simple trick to..” the ai summary
right below will summarize all the things accomplished with the “trick” but they still want you to actully click on the video (and watch any ads) to find out more information. They won’t reveal the trick in the summary.

So annoying because it could be a useful time saving feature. But what actually saves time is if I click through and just skim the transcript myself.

The ai features are also limited by context length on extremely long form content. I tried using the “ask a question about this video” and it could answer questions about the first 2 hours in a very long podcast but not the last third hour. (It was also pretty obviously using only the transcript, and couldn’t reference on-screen content)
by travisgriggs | 2026-02-19 18:34:22+00:00
So once that's achieved, I wonder how well it deals with unsuspected variations. E.g.

"Give me an illustration of a bicycle riding by a pelican"

"Give me an illustration of a bicycle riding over a pelican"

"Give me an illustration of a bicycle riding under a flying pelican"

So on and so forth. Or will it start to look like the Studio C sketch about Lobster Bisque: https://youtu.be/A2KCGQhVRTE
by vlovich123 | 2026-02-19 18:34:51+00:00
The wider industry data gathered indicates that for memory unsafe languages 80% of issues are due to memory vulnerabilities, including mature codebases like Linux kernel, curl, V8, Chrome, Mach kernel, qemu etc etc etc. This doesn’t mean that logic bugs are less common, it just means that memory safety issues are the easiest way to get access.

As for why your experience may be different, my hunch is that either your code was super simple OR you didn’t test it thoroughly enough against malicious/unexpected inputs OR you never connected the code to untrusted I/O.

Keep in mind the data for this comes from popular projects that have enough attention to warrant active exploit research by a wide population. This is different from a project you wrote that doesn’t have the same level of attention.
by LocalH | 2026-02-19 18:34:51+00:00
From another post on their blog:

> having tried to sabotage its Kickstarter campaign back in 2018 by viciously attacking me and attempting to have me "cancelled" for opposing his hysterical far-left views supporting the LGBT agenda and the degenerate filth of unfathomably evil "trans people" aka demonic monsters (views which, for the record as a conservative Christian, I unapologetically find utterly vile and abominable).

Flagged because people like this don't need attention
by kzemek | 2026-02-19 18:34:56+00:00
We also had a similar use case, so I built Snex[0] - specifically for Elixir-Python interop. Elixir-side spawns interpreters with Ports managed by GenServers, Python-side has a thin asyncio runtime to run arbitrary user code. Declarative environments (uv), optimized serde with language-specific objects (like `%MapSet{}` <-> `set`), etc. Interpreters are meant to be long lived, so you pay for initialization once.

It's a very different approach than ex_cmd, as it's not really focused on the "streaming data" use case. Mine is a very command/reply oriented approach, though the commands can flow both ways (calling BEAM modules from Python). The assumption is that big data is passed around out of band; I may have to revisit that.

[0]: https://github.com/kzemek/snex
by logicprog | 2026-02-19 18:36:15+00:00
I think this is generally a good point if you're using an AI to come up with a project idea and elaborate it.

However, I've spent years sometimes thinking through interesting software architectures and technical approaches and designs for various things, including window managers, editors, game engines, programming languages, and so on, reading relevant books and guides and technical manuals, sketching out architecture diagrams in my notebooks and writing long handwritten design documents in markdown files or in messages to friends. I've even, in some cases, gotten as far as 10,000 lines or so of code sketching out some of the architectural approaches or things I want to try to get a better feel for the problem and the underlying technologies. But I've never had the energy to do the raw code shoveling and debug looping necessary to get out a prototype of my ideas — AI now makes that possible.

Once that prototype is out, I can look at it, inspect it from all angles, tweak it and understand the pros and cons, the limitations and blind spots of my idea, and iterate again. Also, through pair programming with the AI, I can learn about the technologies I'm using through demonstration and see what their limitations and affordances are by seeing what things are easy and concise for the AI to implement and what requires brute forcing it with hacks and huge reams of code and what's performant and what isn't, what leads to confusing architectures and what leads to clean architectures, and all of those things.

I'm still spending my time reading things like Game Engine Architecture, Computer Systems, A Philosophy of Software Design, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Thinking in Systems, Data-Oriented Design, articles in CSP, fibers, compilers, type systems, ECS, writing down notes and ideas.

So really it seems more to me like boring people who aren't really deeply interested in a subject use AI to do all of the design and ideation for them. And so, of course, it ends up boring and you're just seeing more of it because it lowered the barrier to entry. I think if you're an interesting person with strong opinions about what you want to build and how you want to build it, that is actually interested in exploring the literature with or with out AI help and then pair programming with it in order to explore the problem space, it still ends up interesting.

Most of my recent AI projects have just been small tools for my own usage, but that's because I was kicking the tires. I have some bigger things planned, executing on ideas I have pages and pages, dozens of them, in my notebooks about.
by discreteevent | 2026-02-19 18:36:20+00:00
> Original ideas are the result of the very work you’re offloading on LLMs. Having humans in the loop doesn’t make the AI think more like people, it makes the human thought more like AI output.

There was also a comment [1] here recently that "I think people get the sense that 'getting better at prompting' is purely a one-way issue of training the robot to give better outputs. But you are also training yourself to only ask the sorts of questions that it can answer well. Those questions that it will no longer occur to you to ask (not just of the robot, but of yourself) might be the most pertinent ones!"

Both of them reminded me of Picasso saying in 1968 that "
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers,"

Of course computers are useful. But he meant that they have are useless for a creative. That's still true.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47059206
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-19 18:36:23+00:00
Tesla, used in this example, was built by someone who lucked out from a capital perspective (Paypal) to itch an obsession. As you point out, most startups fail. Why has China succeed? State support, not venture capital. Why has Europe not succeed? Lack of will to provide state support to build the state capacity. Nation states have capital, they have workers, they can build or not build these systems. It is a choice.

Europe doesn't need a Tesla, they need a BYD. Learn from China, not the US. Innovation does not require what the author is calling for, imho.

What Is State Capacity? Does China Have It? Does America Really Lack It? - https://www.governance.fyi/p/what-is-state-capacity-does-chi... - November 13th, 2025

The size of BYD's factory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42228138 - November 2024
by greedo | 2026-02-19 18:36:26+00:00
If you accept cancer as a death sentence, you're an idiot. I had cancer at age 41. If I left it untreated, sure I'd be dead, probably by age 43. But I'm not an idiot, I had good health insurance, I was treated, and now that health event is over twenty years in the past.

Had I self-funded with a (non-existent) nest egg, I would still be in debt over $600k. Instead, my insurance had to deal with that...
by femi2k26 | 2026-02-19 18:36:37+00:00
I can't write code. I've never written code.

In May 2025 I started building Floaty — an AI platform that handles dev, sales, legal, finance, marketing, and ops for early-stage founders. I used Claude and Gemini as my engineering team. I provided architecture, requirements, and direction. They wrote every line.

9 months later: 900,000 lines of TypeScript. Live product.

The meta point: Floaty's thesis is that AI can replace a technical cofounder. I proved it by building Floaty that way. The product is the proof.

What's actually working:
- Dev Studio: generates and deploys full apps from a prompt, with live preview
- Ghost browser engine: autonomous web automation (login, forms, scraping, CAPTCHA)
- 55+ AI agent workflows covering every business department (sales, legal, finance, HR, ops)
- Fusion router across 10+ LLMs (Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, Moonshot) — picks the best model per task with cost optimization
- RAG memory system with pgvector — agents share context across departments
- Multi-agent reasoning: LATS tree search, mixture-of-agents council, self-improvement loop
- Mobile app, desktop app (Electron), VS Code extension, Kubernetes deploy

Live at <https://floaty.pro> — free account, no credit card. Early stage, looking for the first people willing to break it.

I'm not here to claim I'm a genius. I genuinely don't know if the architecture is good. What I know is it runs, it ships, and I built it alone. Tell me what you think — "this is dumb" is more useful to me than silence.
Ask HN: Are hackathons still worth doing?
by kwar13 | 2026-02-19 18:36:54+00:00
I used to love attending hackathons and also participating as mentor/judge at times. With the explosion of vibe coded submissions, 1- the number of submissions has exploded, 2- it's much harder to judge quality of project as it's mostly become judging the quality of tool they used.

I'm not really throwing shade at using ai. There are parts where the vibe coding really shines, such as front-end dev which tends to do a great job at, but anything more complex I'm still not convinced.
Show HN: Argeo – AI Visibility and Generative Engine Optimization (Geo) Advisory
by faruk_tugtekin | 2026-02-19 18:37:04+00:00
Hi HN, I'm Faruk, founder of ARGEO (argeo.ai).

We're an advisory firm focused on AI visibility and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) — helping brands manage how AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini interpret and reference them.

The core insight: traditional SEO optimizes for search engine crawlers, but AI systems form brand understanding differently — through training data patterns, citation authority, and semantic consistency. We call this gap "Perception Control."

I've written about this on Medium and published a whitepaper on SSRN. Happy to discuss the technical side of how LLMs form entity associations, or the broader implications for brand strategy in an AI-mediated world.

What's your experience with AI systems referencing (or misrepresenting) your projects?
by JohnMakin | 2026-02-19 18:37:09+00:00
I am saying a lot of the time these type of posts are a nonexistent problem, a problem that is already solved, or just thinking about a "problem" that isn't really a problem at all and results from a lack of understanding.

The most recent one I remember commenting on, the poor guy had a project that basically tried to "skip" IaC tools, and his tool basically went nuts in the console (or API, I don't remember) in one account, then exported it all to another account for reasons that didn't make any sense at all. These are already solved problems (in multiple ways) and it seemed like the person just didn't realize terraformer was already an existing, proven tool.

I am not trying to say these things don't allow you to prototype quickly or get tedious, easy stuff out of the way. I'm saying that if you try to solve a problem in a domain that you have no expertise in with these tools and show other experts your work, they may chuckle at what you tried to do because it sometimes does look very silly.
by alt227 | 2026-02-19 18:37:49+00:00
This only really matters if you think humans are really important and should exist forever no matter what.

I personally think that humans are a blot on the earths history, and soon should be wiped out to let nature and evolution retake its course. From this perspective we are just following the natural course of the earth, and will be made extinct just like other various groups of large animals on this planet in the past.

We may require the rare climate, but other species certainly dont and more will evolve to take the place of humans when we cannot survive on these planets conditions any longer.