Social networks become attention media & Fix broken debuggers first - Hacker News (Feb 22, 2026)

Today's topics: Social networks become attention media - A critique of modern social platforms shifting from friend-following to algorithmic feeds, infinite scroll, and “bogus notifications,” with Mastodon as a calmer alternative. Fix broken debuggers first - A debugging story about a breakpoint that never hit, where the real solution was a one-line debugger configuration fix—highlighting tooling as a force multiplier. Fresh File Explorer for VS Code - Fresh File Explorer is a VS Code extension that surfaces recently changed files using Git history and pending changes, with smart trees, pinning, heatmaps, and deleted-file recovery. FreeBSD remote dev with VS Code - A FreeBSD workflow guide showing how to run VS Code Remote SSH server components under Linuxulator (Rocky Linux base), making remote editing fast and extension-friendly. SQL transactions and isolation levels - PlanetScale’s explainer covers BEGIN/COMMIT/ROLLBACK, consistent reads, MVCC vs undo logs, and isolation anomalies (dirty/non-repeatable/phantom reads) across Postgres and MySQL. Shuru microVM sandboxes for agents - Shuru runs local-first, ephemeral Linux microVMs on macOS via Virtualization.framework, with checkpoints, opt-in networking, and safe environments for AI agent tool use. Git’s “magic” repository files - An overview of Git-controlled config files like .gitignore, .gitattributes, .gitmodules, .mailmap, and .git-blame-ignore-revs that shape diffs, merges, LFS, submodules, and attribution. CSS box-sizing border-box basics - A practical reminder that box-sizing: border-box makes CSS layout math predictable by keeping padding and borders inside declared widths, popularized by Paul Irish. https://susam.net/attention-media-vs-social-networks.html https://ochagavia.nl/blog/fix-your-tools/ https://github.com/FreHu/vscode-fresh-file-explorer https://planetscale.com/blog/database-transactions https://css-tricks.com/international-box-sizing-awareness-day/ https://hayzam.com/blog/02-linuxulator-is-awesome/ https://shuru.run/ https://nesbitt.io/2026/02/05/git-magic-files.html