MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lutusp | 2026-02-24 04:41:02+00:00
Imagine Isaac Newton (and/or Gottfried Leibniz) saying, "Today we're announcing the availability of new mathematical tools -- contact our marketing specialists now!"

The linked article isn't about mathematics, technology or human knowledge. It's about marketing. It can only exist in a kind of late-stage capitalism where enshittification is either present or imminent.

And I have to say ... Stephen Wolfram's compulsion to name things after himself, then offer them for sale, reminds me of ... someone else. Someone even more shamelessly self-promoting.

Newton didn't call his baby "Newton-tech", he called it Fluxions. Leibniz called his creation Calculus. It didn't occur to either of them to name their work after themselves. That would have been embarrassing and unseemly. But ... those were different times.

Imagine Jonas Salk naming his creation Salk-tech, then offering it for sale, at a time when 50,000 people were stricken with Polio every year. What a missed opportunity! What a sucker! (Salk gave his vaccine away, refusing the very idea of a patent.)

Right now it's hard to tell, but there's more to life than grabbing a brass ring.
Show HN: L88 – A Local RAG System on 8GB VRAM (Need Architecture Feedback)
by adithyadrdo | 2026-02-24 04:41:04+00:00
Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on a project called L88 — a local RAG system that I initially focused on UI/UX for, so the retrieval and model architecture still need proper refinement.

Repo:
https://github.com/Hundred-Trillion/L88-Full

I’m running this on 8GB VRAM and a strong CPU (128GB RAM). Embeddings and preprocessing run on CPU, and the main model runs on GPU. One limitation I ran into is that my evaluator and generator LLM ended up being the same model due to compute constraints, which defeats the purpose of evaluation.

I’d really appreciate feedback on:

Better architecture ideas for small-VRAM RAG

Splitting evaluator/generator roles effectively

Improving the LangGraph pipeline

Any bugs or design smells you notice

Ways to optimize the system for local hardware

I’m 18 and still learning a lot about proper LLM architecture, so any technical critique or suggestions would help me grow as a developer. If you check out the repo or leave feedback, it would mean a lot — I’m trying to build a solid foundation and reputation through real projects.

Thanks!
by fdefitte | 2026-02-24 04:42:20+00:00
The interesting part is not that it built a driver, it is that it built one for a specific chip on a specific OS with no existing example to copy. That is not autocomplete. That is reasoning about hardware registers, kernel interfaces, and driver architecture from documentation and first principles. A year ago this would have been a strong counterexample to AI coding claims. Now it is a blog post.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2026-02-24 04:42:42+00:00
> Manufacturer/vendor did not provided open source driver with real freedom license (BSD/MIT/...)

Article says,

> Brcmfmac is a Linux driver (ISC licence) for set of FullMAC chips from Broadcom

I don't feel like looking to see where the Linux driver came from, but someone provided a permissively-licensed driver.
by rramadass | 2026-02-24 04:42:52+00:00
Into Great Silence is an excellent and beautiful documentary on the everyday lives of Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse, a monastery high in the French Alps - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Great_Silence

Video on Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODVLyqv5bE8
by palmotea | 2026-02-24 04:43:05+00:00
> The most important cost that you didn't mention is the loss of social trust and the harm that will do to social infrastructure.

This. I think generative AI will mostly generate destruction. Not in the nuking cities sense, but in hollowing out institutions and social bonds, especially the complicated and large-scale kind that have enabled advanced civilization. In many ways, things will revert to a more primitive state: only really knowing people in your local vicinity (no making friends online, because it'll be mostly dead-internet bots out there), only really knowing the news you see yourself, more reliance on rumor and hearsay, removal of the ability for the little guy to challenge and disprove institutional propaganda (e.g. can't start a blog and put up some photos and have people believe your story about what happened), etc.
by random3 | 2026-02-24 04:43:28+00:00
Code is cheaper. Simple code is cheap. More complex code may not be cheaper.

The reason you pay attention to details is because complexity compounds and the cheapest cleanup is when you write something, not when it breaks.

This last part is still not fully fleshed out.

For now. Is there any reason to not expect things to improve further?

Regardless, a lot of code is cheap now and building products is fun regardless, but I doubt this will translate into more than very short-term benefits. When you lower the bar you get 10x more stuff, 10x more noise, etc. You lower it more you get 100x and so on.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-02-24 04:44:17+00:00
>We as a culture decided that science is worthwhile, and that it's worth funding it with public money, which I personally strongly support.

what country are you in, and what percentage of the public purse goes to funding science? In the U.S about 11%, and with that number I often read articles, linked to from this site, about U.S Scientists quitting and going into private sector work or other non-scientific fields to get adequate compensation.

>while also paying good scientists with actual dollars that they could spend in restaurants.

see, my admittedly vague understanding of how things are structured tells me this part isn't what is happening.
by miki123211 | 2026-02-24 04:46:00+00:00
Can you even make the standard library dynamically linked in the C way??

In C, a function definition usually corresponds 1-to-1 to a function in object code. In Rust, plenty of things in the stdlib are generic functions that effectively get a separate implementation for each type you use them with.

If there's a library that defines Foo but doesn't use VecFoo>, and there are 3 other libraries in your program that do use that type, where should the Vec functions specialized for Foo reside? How do languages like Swift (which is notoriously dynamically-linked) solve this?
by rekabis | 2026-02-24 04:46:22+00:00
DotNet 10 allows me to create a single web application for all three major platforms, and to ship it with the runtime baked in. This allows me to host said application anywhere I want.

If talking about non-web desktop/mobile software, the big issue comes down to GUI framework. Maui is optimized for mobile, Avalonia is superior on desktop. But other than that, thanks to the baked-in runtime it is becoming trivial to build a single GUI program and have it just run anywhere without significant rework.

Plus, C# has become an absolute pleasure to work with, and makes Java look practically obsolete. Hell, Java had to roll back its own implementation of string interpolation in 2024 because they just couldn’t make it work. C#? Working beautifully since 2015, and improved several times to even greater effect.

And if C#’s functional programming rustles your jimmies, you can easily use F# in the same project without complaint.

Finally, while Blazor webassembly might not be entirely ready for world+dog prime time just yet, it works great in an intranet where thick pipes are guaranteed, allowing me to give a hearty middle finger to everything JavaScript.

Honestly, while I will always evaluate every project to ensure that the programming platform is the best one possible, and have chosen other languages for good reasoning plenty of times. But anything which falls in the “anything will work well enough, generally speaking” bin has me reaching for DotNet almost every time.
by stevenalowe | 2026-02-24 04:47:21+00:00
both of these assertions are false - buyers cannot be guaranteed, and liquidating large chunks of stocks et al can have catastrophic effects on the stock price and general stock market.

they also do not address my main point which is this would be a tax on "gains" that do not exist, based on speculative valuations that cannot be guaranteed. The proposal itself defies logic; "unrealized gains" is an oxymoron!

extreme but not impossible scenario: someone builds an apartment building near your house, suddenly your house is "worth" ten times as much but no one will buy at that price so you sell your house for much less (just coincidentally to someone politically connected) and yet still owe taxes on a "gain" that was not actually possible to realize

In this specific instance, it's easy to see how large untimely stock/crypto fluctuations could lead to similar situations. That is a foreseeable disaster; there would be unforeseeable ones as well over time.

Band-aids such as limiting tax liability to not exceed the actual sale price of the asset will not help; the tax can easily cause the destruction of the wealth it seeks to collect, and not just for the one large shareholder.

This is a door that should not be open; it is disappointing to see this Dutch action is just a replacement for an existing illogical tax, so sadly too late for the Netherlands.
by KennyBlanken | 2026-02-24 04:48:23+00:00
Dollars to donuts that at some point someone is going to discover that senior engineers spend just as much time reviewing, fixing, and dealing with blowups caused by, shitty AI-generated code produced by more junior coders....as they did providing various forms of mentoring of said junior coders, except those junior coders become better developers in the latter case, whereas the AI generates the same shitty results or even worse, inconsistent quality code.
by OneMorePerson | 2026-02-24 04:48:50+00:00
Being able to know someone's risk factor would be important for how we treat elderly people. I know someone who is 85 and super sharp (previously worked as a corporate accountant and banker), they still have a better memory than a lot of 40-50 year olds, and yet they are constantly harassed by eldercare "agents" for the state because whenever they make a investment decision that is even slightly questionable they get reported to the state by the bank. Sometimes the bank refuses to authorize transactions. If they could conclusively prove they aren't at risk I think they would be left alone much more often.
by user1138 | 2026-02-24 04:49:10+00:00
You're correct on the citations though that will probably be very easy as we have many people claiming exactly that.
As to your second point, yes, and the safety claims being made are not restricted to those decidable subsets. The moment you claim general safety guarantees for systems operating beyond those constrained subsets you're back in full Rice territory. If you can name a total language with an early termination guarantee, I'm all ears. You asked for my citations, now show me yours.
by mdorazio | 2026-02-24 04:51:02+00:00
In addition to snmx999's point, you're also not specifying that you want to wash your car at the car wash (as opposed to washing it in your driveway or something, in which case the car wash is superfluous information). The article's prompt failed in Sonnet 4.6, but the one below works fine. I think more humans would get it right as well.

I want to wash my car at the car wash. The car wash is 50 meters away and my car is in my driveway. Should I walk or drive?
by Aurornis | 2026-02-24 04:53:22+00:00
> For a disease which (to my knowledge) can’t be slowed down or reversed, I think it’s a fair question why we would want to detect Alzheimer’s.

Getting an accurate diagnosis is always important. Cognitive decline could be caused by other problems, some of which are more treatable than others.

If this test came back negative it would suggest extra testing to rule out other conditions like a brain tumor or hydrocephalus.
by locusofself | 2026-02-24 04:53:22+00:00
C# is a great language, and .NET is a really good runtime that is cross-platform.

I would personally chose it over Java, and I think it is more "batteries included" than Go.

If you need to write a business/web application that is fairly easy to maintain and has good performance, yes I would pick C#.

Also, while functional programming etc is possible in C#, all the code I've seen has been very Object-Oriented. Classes for days. Dependency injection, factories, and other "Design Patterns" aplently.

Obviously with Python or Node.js you'll likely have an easier time getting off the ground but the performance will be worse (if that matters)

source: SWE manager at MSFT, mostly C# stuff. 10+ YOE with other languages prior to joining
by miki123211 | 2026-02-24 04:54:11+00:00
Because security isn't the be-and-end-all, it has to serve the goals of the business and its customers.

Customers say that they want security with their mouths, but they say that they want features with their wallets. The best improvement to computer security you can make is turning the computer off, but this is clearly not what your (non-HN) customers want you to do.

AI has serious security risks (E.G. prompt injection), but it lets you deliver customer value a lot faster. Security doesn't matter if the competitors' technology is so much better that nobody is buying yours.
by noduerme | 2026-02-24 04:54:19+00:00
I'm personally not comfortable with the widespread argument (not yours) that moving from a shit-on-shit scripting language to using an LLM to write code is just a matter of degree or just one more layer of abstraction. I think writing code with an LLM severs the logic chain you may have to follow - and hopefully can follow - to get back to the basic principles and root causes you need to understanding what your code is doing.

But the lazy (and wrong) belief by people not committed to exacting standards in their engineering, that AI is just another layer of abstraction or another scripting language, actually obscures a much more unpleasant fact: Performance, as far as the managerial class was concerned, was never about getting the best performance. It was always about whatever was just enough.

We as coders used to prioritize performance because hardware was so limited and we wanted to squeeze the most out of every cycle, every 1Kb of RAM. For some of us, that habit will never die, because we look at a new piece of hardware and realize how much more we can make it do.

But pre-AI slop of backends with huge supply chains and Electron as a frontend arose because memory and compute had become so cheap that acceptable performance required less and less optimization.

That doesn't mean that some of us didn't maintain a niche in making things optimized, but for the past twenty years or so there's been a whole generation of engineers whose priority has been speed of development. And from the perspective of a company that treats engineers as disposable cogs and prioritizes frameworks and assumes Moore's Law, why not?

AI just takes that to the next level. Take the entire chain of existing React slop and create a Markov chain to regirgitate parts of it on cue. And let's be honest: 95% of companies don't need to forge anything particularly new, they just need to cobble existing parts together.

I thought it about 15 years ago talking to CRUD coders who hated their jobs: You're in the wrong business if you're not getting joy out of creating and solving new problems. So in a way, AI just gives everyone who only wanted shitty software the shitty software they deserve? I don't know. I haven't finished thinking about it.
by superice | 2026-02-24 04:54:33+00:00
I've never been fond of the argument that there should be a professional software engineer certification, but hearing people like you being presented with the potential dangers and just going 'oh yeah just go with a better test suite and you can just wing it' makes me seriously reconsider.

Vibe code administrative systems for your local golf club to your hearts desire for all I care, god forbid somebody will have to stand around a bit longer before going for their 9 holes. But safety critical equipment is not the place to fuck around with the code prediction machines that have existed for 4 years, have been writing more-or-less acceptable code for 2, and will still regularly refer to themselves as MechaHitler or just make up shit. "Yes you're absolutely correct, I was wrong" doesn't help you one bit if you have just been chewed up by heavy machinery, and the fact that people like you exist who go 'oh just a few more more unit tests surely will fix it' is a terrifying thought.
by levkk | 2026-02-24 04:54:36+00:00
Technically yes. We only support BIGINT (and all other integers), VARCHAR and UUID for sharding keys, but we'll happily pass through any other data. If we need to process it, we'll need to parse it. To be clear: you can include PostGIS data in all queries, as long as we don't need it for sharding.

It's not too difficult to add sharding on it if we wanted to. For example, we added support for pgvector a while back (L2/IVFlat-based sharding), so we can add any other data type, e.g., POLYGON for sharding on ST_Intersects, or for aggregates.
by slopinthebag | 2026-02-24 04:55:56+00:00
This feels to me like peak sfba mentality on par with "move fast and break things". Outside of trying to create a unicorn, is this really how people create things?

It seems to me that in order to obtain the ability to build things that other people like, you need to go through the process of creating things they won't. Like a painter needs to paint a bunch of crappy paintings to learn how to create a good painting. If you have the LLM create these throwaway prototypes, how will you even know when you come across a good idea and how will you be able to build it.
by stavros | 2026-02-24 04:56:18+00:00
If you want something you can install on your personal computer, I made one:

https://github.com/skorokithakis/stavrobot

Obviously, it can't do everything OpenClaw can, because it doesn't have unfettered access to data you don't even know it has, but it'll only have access to the data you give it access to.

It's been really useful for me, hopefully it'll be useful to someone here.
by squirrellous | 2026-02-24 04:56:19+00:00
It’s kind of interesting that AI opens up a new avenue for intellectual progress where even if you are the prevailing expert in your field and nobody else quite understands what you do, there is still an LLM that can mostly keep up with you and explain, critique, develop, and generally engage with your work. IOW people who are way ahead of their time now has a peer they can talk to.
by trinsic2 | 2026-02-24 04:56:43+00:00
Its been my experience that our lives, whether they are ruined or not, are up to us. Making someone else responsibility only prolongs the problem. You either see that, or you don't. It's pretty clear at this point that corruption and greed is the problem and the fact that we cant see our way forward to being responsible adults is the part that is going to cause humanities downfall. When everything come crashing down, the people that will be left are the people that are taking responsibility for the problem and not making it someone else's.
Show HN: L88 – A Local RAG System on 8GB VRAM (Need Architecture Feedback)
by adithyadrdo | 2026-02-24 04:57:31+00:00
Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on a project called L88 — a local RAG system that I initially focused on UI/UX for, so the retrieval and model architecture still need proper refinement.

Repo:
https://github.com/Hundred-Trillion/L88-Full

I’m running this on 8GB VRAM and a strong CPU (128GB RAM). Embeddings and preprocessing run on CPU, and the main model runs on GPU. One limitation I ran into is that my evaluator and generator LLM ended up being the same model due to compute constraints, which defeats the purpose of evaluation.

I’d really appreciate feedback on:

Better architecture ideas for small-VRAM RAG

Splitting evaluator/generator roles effectively

Improving the LangGraph pipeline

Any bugs or design smells you notice

Ways to optimize the system for local hardware

I’m 18 and still learning a lot about proper LLM architecture, so any technical critique or suggestions would help me grow as a developer. If you check out the repo or leave feedback, it would mean a lot — I’m trying to build a solid foundation and reputation through real projects.

Thanks!
by timoth3y | 2026-02-24 04:58:05+00:00
William Shatner is someone I really wish I could dislike. I mean, he is certainly not a conventionally talented singer or actor. He's laughably, painfully bad sometimes.

But the man keeps going! He's one of the hardest working people in show business. He clearly takes his craft very seriously, even if he defines it a bit differently from the rest of world.

The Wrath of Khan has no business being as great a movie as it is, and his version of Common People is fantastic.

I'm sure this collaboration will be .... something else.
by DaemonHN | 2026-02-24 04:58:44+00:00
Terrible article. Broch's story is a tragedy but one that's tenuously linked to that famous painting. I kept reading waiting for the substance promised by "life imitating art" and all I got was a set decorator's coincidence and a Goethe quote to paper over the gap. Which is kind of ironic because that quote ("you work out what their intention is and it breaks the spell") applies to the article itself: once you see the author struggling to connect Kramskoy's painting to Broch's death, the spell breaks and all you're left with is empty padding.
by txrx0000 | 2026-02-24 04:59:39+00:00
The "normies" aren't as dumb as people on here think they are. There are plenty of side channels to activate normies. The reason good leaders don't seem to seek out leadership positions anymore is because they have the Internet now. Don't underestimate the power of online discourse and how quickly its effects can propagate through society. Plenty are watching and steering from the comfort of their own homes, but the titans find this very unsettling, so they want to shut it down. They've been trying for years, but it's becoming increasingly difficult for them because nature is not on their side. Information just wants to spread out and be free.
by falkensmaize | 2026-02-24 04:59:55+00:00
I don't know if this is the future or not, but it seems to serve no real purpose other than to enrich LLM company profits. There is real value in well designed code that has been battle tested and hardened over years of bugfixes and iteration. It's reliable, it's reusable, it's efficient and it's secure. The opposite of hastily written and poorly understood vibe code that may or may not even do what you want it to do, even while you think it's doing what you want it to do.
by aakresearch | 2026-02-24 05:00:20+00:00
Upvoted, as it basically 99% matching my own thinking. But I, personally, would not predict a breakthrough in this direction in the next 2-5 years, as there is no pathway from current LLM tech to "true reasoning". In my mental model LLM operates in "raster space" with "linguistic tokens" being "rasterization units". For "true reasoning" an AI entity has to operate fluently in "vector space", so to speak. LLM can somewhat simulate "reasoning" to a limited degree, and even that it only does it with brute force - massive CPU/GPU/RAM resources, enormous amount of training data and giant working contexts. And still, that "simulation" is incomplete and unverifiable.

I would argue that the research needed to enable such "vector operation" is nowhere near the stage to come to fruition in the next decade. So, my prediction is, maybe, 20-50 years for this to happen, if not more.
by rramadass | 2026-02-24 05:01:25+00:00
There are a bunch of good documentaries about "Desert Fathers/Christians/Monks/etc." on Youtube about monks from the Coptic Christian Church in the Egyptian Desert.

Beautiful short documentary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMyyUVXKOrI

The Coptic Monasteries and Monks of the Egyptian Desert - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3K4urm3GD2I