MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by prathje | 2026-02-23 11:59:40+00:00
If you have worked with MotionCanvas or wanted to give 2D canvas animations it a try, you might notice that the website is currently not reachable and that the repo has not received any updates in over a year, suggesting that the project is not actively maintained at the moment.

However, you will also find that the community is still active and that, for example, Canvas Commons is an active fork of the original repo: https://github.com/canvas-commons/canvas-commons

Docs for Canvas Commons: https://canvascommons.io/
Furthermore, the old docs for Motion Canvas can be found here: https://archive.canvascommons.io/

Cheers!
Patrick
by xomiachuna | 2026-02-23 11:59:47+00:00
Cool idea! At some point I was musing about making or buying a dashboard tool like in the post, but over the years I found that I dont actually need the complexity that comes with it.

An analogue communication medium for myself and others is indeed something that might be much more impactful and human-cetric than a smart system.

Thanks for the inspiration!
by tim333 | 2026-02-23 12:00:12+00:00
I thought it was so so. The first ten minutes are saying like maybe these self driving cars are dangerous, ignoring that with Waymo the accident rates are about 1/3 that of human driven. Most of the rest is saying letting traffic dominate cities is bad but that's not a self driving thing. They may work quite well with public transport - it's easier to ban most cars and say take the train if there are cheap 24 hour robotaxis from the station.
by boxed | 2026-02-23 12:00:51+00:00
> Not a single line about what is the issue with those papers

Well that's a blatant lie. Here's a quote for you:

> After submitting that draft to the Elsevier finance ecosystem, that draft was scrubbed from SSRN, and in the final published version, an additional author (Samuel Vigne) was added as a new author, with an “equal contribution” statement

That's EXTREMELY BAD. It's someone approaching your team after the research is done and asking to be put on the paper in exchange for publishing it.
by vidarh | 2026-02-23 12:01:46+00:00
Written Dutch is fairly easy for me, on the basis of English + native Norwegian + German from school. Spoken Dutch is largely unintelligible for me, on the other hand, unless they speak very slowly.

> In fact, when I first faced the language, I would have said it was a combination of ~80% German, 10% English, 5% French, +5% Others.

But the vocabulary of English itself is majority of Germanic origin. So while Dutch is often closer to the modern German, there's definitely far more than 10% that has a common origin with English as well as German.
by Ndymium | 2026-02-23 12:01:46+00:00
For some reason, Facebook has been requesting my Forgejo instance's robots.txt in a loop for the past few days, currently at a speed of 7700 requests per hour. The resource usage is negligible, but I'm wondering why it's happening in the first place and how many other robot files they're also requesting repeatedly. Perhaps someone at Meta broke a loop condition.
by dependency_2x | 2026-02-23 12:02:12+00:00
Looking at the list, I feel timing makes a big difference*. You need to be early enough that people think you are a bit crazy, but not too early that the tech isn't there or even early adopters are not ready.

Openclaw for example could have been built in 2023, but it did well in 2026. I don't think 2023 was ready for it :-)

* Modulo survivor bias, execution, funding, brilliant fouders, great advisors, pure luck etc.*
by Freak_NL | 2026-02-23 12:02:15+00:00
I have no doubt that there are honest academics who publish research which actually contributes to humanity's corpus of knowledge. Whether that is some new insight into the past, observations on nature and man's interaction with it, clever chemical advances, or medical innovations which benefit mankind. People who publish works which will be looked upon as seminal and foundational in a decade or two, but also works which just focus on some particular detail and which will be of use to many researchers in the future.

But I can't shake the impression that a lot, perhaps the vast majority, of science consists of academics (postdocs and untenured researchers in particular I suppose) stuck in the publish-or-perish cycle. Pushing pointless papers where some trivial hypothesis is tested and which no one will ever use or read — except perhaps to cite for one reason or another, but rarely because it makes academic sense. Now with added slop, because why wouldn't you if the work itself is already as good as pointless?

The system, as you say, is fucked.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-23 12:03:17+00:00
I do not care much about the Maillard flavor, so even when I was using a gas grill I was using the kind with indirect heating, where the grill is enclosed in a box that has one opening on the bottom, where you put the flame. The opening is laterally from the grill, not under it, and it has a wall separating the grill from the flame.

With such a grill, the meat is cooked only by the hot air that comes from the flame without contact with something at higher temperatures, so the meat is browned only moderately at most.

Nowadays, I can cook meat in a microwave oven in a way that makes it pretty much equivalent with the meat cooked using that kind of grill with indirect heating.

I cut the meat in bite-sized pieces and I put them in a glass vessel covered by a glass lid, without adding water or anything else, except salt and seasonings spread on the meat.

Then I cook the meat in the microwave oven, using a low power, e.g. 400 W, and long times, e.g. 20 to 25 minutes for chicken meat and around 30 minutes for turkey meat.

I consider that meat cooked in this way has an optimum taste, but of course preferences vary.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-02-23 12:03:24+00:00
Coleman stove. Mine lives in the back of my elderly Range Rover along with the recovery gear, a kettle, some dixies, and some basic staples (tea, coffee, aeropress, instant noodles). I've always got a few litres of drinking water, and in any case I live in Scotland where you're generally not terribly far from perfectly drinkable water that's just sitting right there on the ground often spilling majestically over rocks and waterfalls which are slippy as hell when you go to fill the dixies and which you will get to experience right up close, considerably closer than you intended.

There is nothing like sitting on the tailgate up at a remote hilltop site on a pleasant spring day, drinking a cup of tea outside in the sunshine while you wait for the third attempt at a firmware recovery on a radio repeater to finish, contemplating chucking some sausages on for lunch.

Except, possibly, sitting inside the transmitter shed has it gets buffeted by storm winds listening to the rain battering against the roof and drinking a nice hot cup of cocoa as you wait for the 17th attempt at a firmware recovery to finish.

And if you run out of the expensive special magic Coleman fuel, it runs just as well on mogas so you can pop the inlet hose off the injector rail, scoosh some into the stove tank, and get right on back to cooking your dinner.

Me? No, I'm going to be out on site all day long, I won't be in your Teams call. Tell you what, want to come with? It'll be good for you to see some of the hardware in use. Grab a steak or something to do for lunch.
by threetwoonezero | 2026-02-23 12:03:34+00:00
Had a similar itch during my game development with libgdx, and had almost same architecture eventually

I found that I have two different ways to construct UI layout , from top down, and from down to top, those could be contradictory, wonder how one could solve this, seems like common problem in all frameworks that I saw, like flutter just fail with error on screen if it can't solve restrictions in such conflict , others just show jiberish
by HugoTea | 2026-02-23 12:03:48+00:00
This is the same for every internet service, and the primary experience when signing up to big centralised services like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. If they think your account is suspicious in any way, instantly gone with no way to appeal, I've seen a number of friends experience this recently and they're not even outliers using a VPN or 'unusual' email or anything.
At least with federated services, you have the opportunity to keep backups of your profile and sign-up with another instance whenever you want.
by sigmoid10 | 2026-02-23 12:04:14+00:00
The issue here is that the people commenting on whether something is a good or bad idea usually don't have the necessary insight to give useful comments either way. But with certain trendy topics, many people still feel the need to express their shallow opinions. That is especially true on HN, because many like-minded people will chime in, upvote and increase visibility as long as they themselves feel validated, irrespective of whether what was said is true or not.

In fact I'd love to see an inverse to this list. I.e. shit people celebrated here that failed miserably. Although failure as a business can have many reasons and must not necessarily be due to the core business idea. It's probably much harder to get this data than searching early HN threads for high value IPOs. You'd have to search for popular threads and then track down the companies and find out what happened eventually.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-23 12:04:52+00:00
This was getting obvious even before the 1970's when university attendance went wild.

>Academia is where B/C-list performers pretend they are A-list.

The ones having top credentials and little more have gotten more & more outnumbered by more capable thinkers every decade, it's been nothing but circling the wagons which ends up creating more of an insular environment for those who love eminence and an exclusive status more than anything else.
by spyder | 2026-02-23 12:04:52+00:00
Yea, even in the case they could match human level stereo depth perception with AI, why would they say "no" to superhuman lidar capabilities. Cost could be a somewhat acceptable answer if there wouldn't be problems with the camera only approach but there are still examples of silly failures of it.
And if I remember correctly they also removed their other superhuman radar in their newer models, the one which in certain conditions was capable of sensing multiple cars ahead by bouncing the signal below other cars.
by pHue | 2026-02-23 12:04:54+00:00
If AI does deliver on its promises, then this should result in an unprecedented increase in societal wealth and correspondingly living standards. However, this entirely rests on governments collectively fulfilling their wealth redistribution function.

My fear though is that without an effective world government, AI companies/companies using AI to replace workers (and the shareholders of both) will exploit the many loopholes in the global tax system (and there will be a race-to-the-bottom among states to attract 'investment' from these companies/individuals) to avoid paying anything like the current tax revenues governments receive from salaried workers — making UBI policies impossible.

Ideally, a world government could be established (though if the United Nations is anything to go by this might not be a great solution...) but in the absence of this effective Digital Services taxes will become essential to continue to fund current public services (nevermind UBI).
by ben_w | 2026-02-23 12:05:08+00:00
I wish I had a solution here rather than just an "I don't think this will work".

> Wha would you have? Bunch of dumb as shit dudes talking about sports and how much they hate women/immigrants/trans/gay/black/asian/[insert rest of humanity] -people. Things would change very fast.

I think people like that would post a lot of pictures of women, some of which may be real pictures of people (even though in this hypothetical that would be without their consent), some of which may be AI-generated; so unfortunately, I don't think it would shift anything.

Self-entitled jerks don't stop being so when faced with the consequences of their actions, they victim-blame. The men who are able to be better than you describe, and I hope I'm better than that, may not even realise something is amiss during such a strike until it gets pointed out to them.
by PreciousH | 2026-02-23 12:05:12+00:00
I'm a visual learner. Whenever I try to understand something hard like dynamic programming, vector calculus, how attention mechanisms work, reading about it only gets me so far. I need to see it move.

So I built Prism AI. When you ask it to explain something, it doesn't just return a report. If the topic calls for it, it generates an interactive visualization inline. Ask it to explain dynamic programming and you get a 2D animation with the code on one side and a decision tree on the other, recursively solving subproblems as a highlighter steps through each line. Ask it how a vector field works and it renders an interactive 3D field you can rotate and probe. Ask it how the attention mechanism in a transformer works and it shows you the actual weight matrix lighting up across tokens.

The research pipeline underneath is a Plan-and-Execute setup , a PlanningAgent breaks your query into a roadmap, then multiple Researcher Agents crawl sources in parallel via asyncio, with a LangGraph state machine handling retries when sources are weak. But the viz generation is honestly the part I care about most and the part I'm still iterating on hardest.

Open source (MIT): https://github.com/precious112/prism-ai-deep-research

Feedback I'd value: 1. What complex topic would you most want explained this way? 2. Has anyone found a clean way to decide when an agent should generate a visual vs just write prose — that decision boundary is still the messiest part of my pipeline.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-02-23 12:05:54+00:00
I quite like how mine has a rotary knob that sets preset programmes (which I never use) but also you just tap it to increase the time in 30 second increments. Tap tap tap - wait - <HUUMMMMMM> and it's on for a minute and a half.

I do prefer the mechanical wind-up timers though.
by herbertverdida | 2026-02-23 12:06:16+00:00
Automation on the web is very common and often legitimate. Things like automated testing, price monitoring, security research, uptime checks, SEO auditing, even AI agents interacting with sites that explicitly allow it.

A lot of companies run automation against their own systems as well.

The issue we kept seeing was that entire cloud IP ranges get flagged by default, even when the activity itself isn't abusive.

Definitely not trying to encourage breaking rules. Just trying to make legitimate automation more reliable.
by FpUser | 2026-02-23 12:06:25+00:00
Below is one of the comments poster to original article, reading it makes me think that most of the whole article has been regurgitated by some AI:

>"This misleading article contains numerous factual errors regarding automotive lidar. Here are the most glaring:

There are multiple manufacturers, including Hesai, that use mechanical means for at least one scan axis and are already sold for a fraction of the "$10k - $20k" price noted by the author. Luminar itself built this class of scanners before going bankrupt.

Per Microvision's own website, the Movia-S does not use a phased array and also does not have a range anywhere near 200m.

Velodyne and Luminar do not even exist as companies anymore. Both have gone bankrupt and been acquired by competitors."
by dwedge | 2026-02-23 12:06:26+00:00
Both blog posts have been on hn in the last fews. I guess you know the market you are writing for.

Interesting that you write off flagship android for poor software but accept worse versions. I know it's the price, because I did the same with a $60 and then an eink Mudita. However I would not say they are fine, they are annoying to use and that was the point
by flohofwoe | 2026-02-23 12:06:35+00:00
Isn't it the other way around?

The more dynamic/animated an UI is, the less there's a difference between a retained- and immediate-mode API, since the UI needs to be redrawn each frame anyway. Immediate mode UIs might even be more efficient for highly dynamic UIs because they skip a lot of internal state update code - like creating/destroying/showing/hiding/moving widget objects).

Immediate-mode UIs can also be implemented to track changes and retain the unchanged parts of the UI in baked textures, it's just usually not worth the hassle.

The key feature of immediate mode UIs is that the application describes the entire currently visible state of the UI for each frame which allows the UI code to be 'interleaved' with application state changes (e.g. no callbacks required), how this per-frame UI description is translated into pixels on screen is more or less an implementation detail.
by gaigalas | 2026-02-23 12:06:41+00:00
> A startup switching languages after years of development is usually a big red flag.

Startups are not a good comparison here. They have a different relationship with code than software projects.

Linux has rewriten entire stacks over and over again.

The PHP engine was rewritten completely at least twice.

The musl libc had entire components rewritten basically from scratch and later integrated.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-23 12:06:44+00:00
> even though long-nosed trucks are vastly more aerodynamic

Are they? I mean by intuition I'd assume the same, but seems it isn't considered so black and white as far as I can tell, I can find reasonable research pointing both ways, but I'm guessing you're basing that on something more conclusive? Mind sharing the link so I could too read up on it?

TFA literally has NASA doing research and seemingly reaching a different conclusion than "long-nosed trucks are vastly more aerodynamic", seems to be about more things than just the hood, and those can be/are optimized on both variations.

But again, I know little about all of this, but would welcome being educated on it more.
by mark_l_watson | 2026-02-23 12:07:47+00:00
Maybe have to pay for search? I am experimenting with paying Proton another $10/month for a paid lumo+ account. lumo+ is a private chat like ChatGPT that uses a strong Mistral model and also privacy-preserving web_search LLM tooling under the hood. For about a month I just use lumo+ with the web_search tool enabled. I may not do this forever, but for now I like just having one tool to use. Note: I still use gemini for technical work, but lumo+ for day to day chat and web search.

In the past I just use DuckDuckGo for most search, occasionally Google. That also worked well for me.
by hnlmorg | 2026-02-23 12:08:22+00:00
Some of those comments are completely fair:

> Dropbox: I think competitors can duplicate Dropbox’s nice front end

That’s exactly what happened.

> Bitcoin: “Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency.”

This is still true even now

> DDG: “I can’t ever see anyone saying ‘just duckduckgo it.’ The name just sounds silly. It makes me think it’s a search engine for toddlers.”

And I still think the name holds them back. I say to my friends “I googled…” or “I searched…” because DDG sounds ridiculous.

> DDG: “How many people would go to Google and search for ‘new search engine’? DuckDuckGo is not even in the top 10 pages.”

This is completely legitimate feedback. Not a criticism.

> Uber: Two months after this thread, Uber received an actual cease-and-desist from San Francisco — seemingly validating every skeptic. Travis Kalanick’s response was to ignore it and expand to five more cities.

So they’ve literally said that the comments were correct here and still published it anyway.

> AirBnB: “All my experiences with it as a user have been too unreliable to expect that it can scale to truly massive usability. I just don’t see it swallowing up the whole hotel industry.”

Which is completely correct.

> Stripe: “I really don’t get or see how Stripe is different? Why would I use it instead of PayPal, 2CheckOut, e-junkie, etc?”

That’s a question, and a valid one at that.

I gave up reading after that because of the obnoxious hijacking’s of the scrolling on mobile.
by xomiachuna | 2026-02-23 12:08:23+00:00
It's a pattern among tech folks to try to solve things with technology.

It is hard to stop yourself from treating every minor inconvenience as nail for which you have a handy hammer, and I find myself overcomplicating things in my life as a result.

The goals are noble but the methods bring a lot of the complexity simply repackaged (and potentially amplified).
by graemep | 2026-02-23 12:08:42+00:00
That is not the distinction I am making here. I even partly agree with you (with some nuances).

I am making a distinction between being made to pay through general taxation (e.g. as a pacifist is forced to pay for the military, an extreme libertarian for public services in general) and being made to pay in order to use the service (e.g. like a Netflix subscription). Almost everywhere they exist, subsidies for religion are like the former, not the latter.
by aurareturn | 2026-02-23 12:08:47+00:00
He's thinking like an AI CEO. I don't think his goal is to eliminate 3,000 human births so he can use the energy to train a new model.

In his mind, he must be thinking that I can train a model that uses as much energy as 3,000 humans so that it can be used by billions of humans. He thinks it's a positive statement.

Again, the optics are bad. Read between the lines. I can see how most people are offended by his statement.
by masklinn | 2026-02-23 12:08:47+00:00
Europe has length limits on the entire thing, so US trucks would require shorter trailers, which nobody really wants. Euro trucks also have significantly smaller turning radii, which makes navigating european cities and country roads… feasible.

Furthermore Europe has relatively strict speed limits on trucks, which makes aero something of a lesser factor since drag grows to the square of speed: european trucks at european speeds have a pretty significantly higher efficiency than US trucks at US speeds.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-23 12:10:43+00:00
Agree, and it's also such a shame that none of the AI companies actually focus on that way of using AI.

All of them are moving into the direction of "less human involved and agents do more", while what I really want is better tooling for me to work closer with AI and be better at reviewing/steering it, and be more involved. I don't want "Fire one prompt and get somewhat working code", I want a UX tailored for long sessions with back and forth, letting me leverage my skills, rather than agents trying to emulate what I already can do myself.

It was said a long time ago about computing in general, but more fitting than ever, "Augmenting the human intellect" is what we should aim for, not replacing the human intellect. IA ("Intelligence amplification") rather than AI.

But I'm guessing the target market for such tools would be much smaller, basically would require you to already understand software development, and know what you want, while all AI companies seem to target non-developers wanting to build software now. It's no-code all over again essentially.