MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johncoltrane | 2026-02-18 07:56:41+00:00
I have a bunch of Vim colorschemes under my belt.

0-15 are, as I said, a minefield because they are user-customizable: there is no guarantee whatsoever that my user's 1 will be the same dark-ish red as mine… or that it will be dark-ish… or that it will even be vaguely red-ish. It is actually somewhat fun to design colorschemes within those crazy constraints but oh well.

On the other side of the spectrum, truecolors is a nice idea in principle but support is still spotty and inconsistent. In theory, this gives me, the designer, full control over the colors used in the UI, which is a good thing for us and for my users. In fine, if I want my colorscheme to be usable by most users, then I can't blindly rely on this.

Which leaves me with 16-255, which are more widely supported than truecolors and, more importantly, dependable. They have problems, as mentioned in the article, but their _fixed_ nature gives me confidence that the background color of the status-line, for example, will look exactly the same -- and exactly how I want it to look -- in all my user's environments. Which, again, is good for my users and for me. Losing that confidence is what worries me, here.

Like you said, maybe 146 will still be a muted violet —— just not exactly the same -- but I'm not sure about this and I think that, at the minimum, this "feature" should be put behind a checkbox/flag.
by zahlman | 2026-02-18 07:56:44+00:00
For the curious:

$ python -c 'print(list(map(__import__("unicodedata").name, "ന്ന")))'
['MALAYALAM LETTER NA', 'MALAYALAM SIGN VIRAMA', 'MALAYALAM LETTER NA']

(The "pypyp" package, by Python core dev and mypy maintainer Shantanu Jain, makes this easier:)

$ pyp 'map(unicodedata.name, "ന്ന")'
MALAYALAM LETTER NA
MALAYALAM SIGN VIRAMA
MALAYALAM LETTER NA
by rhubarbtree | 2026-02-18 07:56:45+00:00
If one person can do the job of three, then you can keep output the same and reduce headcount, or maintain headcount and improve output etc.

Anecdotally it seems demand for software >> supply of software. So in engineering, I think we’ll see way more software. That’s what happened in the Industrial Revolution. Far more products, multiple orders of magnitude more, were produced.

The Industrial Revolution was deeply disruptive to labour, even whilst creating huge wealth and jobs. Retraining is the real problem. That’s what we will see in software. If you can’t architect and think well, you’ll struggle. Being able to write boiler plate and repetitive low level code is a thing of the past. But there are jobs - you’re going to have to work hard to land them.

Now, if AGI or superintelligence somehow renders all humans obsolete, that is a very different problem but that is also the end of capitalism so will be down to governments to address.
by nunobrito | 2026-02-18 07:57:58+00:00
Thanks for sharing, indeed it is good to reuse and improve hardware whenever possible rather than just going to waste. Had never heard of this project before, so it was a good find.

I see the supported watches, still have a doubt: what is scenario looking like for the cheap smarwatches from Aliexpress and similar? Any chance to also flash a new firmware or is this limited to more CPU-powerful watches?
by torginus | 2026-02-18 07:58:00+00:00
This is just a theory of mine, but the fact that people don't see LLMs as something that will grow the pie and increase their output leading to prosperity for all just means that real economic growth has stagnated.

From all my interactions with C-level people as an engineer, what I learned from their mindset is their primary focus is growing their business - market entry, bringing out new products, new revenue streams.

As an engineer I really love optimizing out current infra, bringing out tools and improved workflows, which many of my colleagues have considered a godsend, but it seems from a C-level perspective, it's just a minor nice-to-have.

While I don't necessarily agree with their world-view, some part of it is undeniable - you can easily build an IT company with very high margins - say 3x revenue/expense ratio, in this case growing the profit is a much more lucrative way of growing the company.
by aryonoco | 2026-02-18 07:58:50+00:00
I think plenty of ML languages have similar things. In F# SQL Type Providers have long been a mainstay (which makes using an ORM with F# almost meaningless IMO)

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/tutorials/ty...

SQLProvider is probably the most well known one: https://fsprojects.github.io/SQLProvider/

It’s really beautiful. You get type safety with SQL. If your code compiles, you guaranteed to have valid executable both F# code and SQL. Also you get to create composable queries.

And there are other, thinner/leaner type providers as well. My favourite Postgres one is: https://github.com/Zaid-Ajaj/Npgsql.FSharp

This simple sample executes query and read results as table then map the results

open Npgsql.FSharp

type User = {
Id: int
FirstName: string
LastName: string
}

let getAllUsers (connectionString: string) : User list =
connectionString
|> Sql.connect
|> Sql.query "SELECT * FROM users"
|> Sql.execute (fun read ->
{
Id = read.int "user_id"
FirstName = read.text "first_name"
LastName = read.text "last_name"
})
by xienze | 2026-02-18 07:59:00+00:00
> The seniors today who have got to senior status by writing code manually will be different than seniors of tomorrow, who got to senior status using AI tools.

That’s putting it mildly. I think it’s going to be interesting to see what happens when an entire generation of software developers who’ve only ever known “just ask the LLM to do it” are unleashed on the world. I think these people will have close to no understanding of how computing works on a fundamental level. Sort of like the difference between Gen-X/millenial (and earlier) developers who grew up having to interact with computers primarily through CLIs (e.g., DOS), having to at least have some understanding of memory management, low-level programming, etc. versus the Gen-Z developers who’ve only ever known computers through extremely high level interfaces like iPads.
by nojs | 2026-02-18 07:59:31+00:00
Yeah. what I find in practice is that since the majority of these PRs require manual intervention (even if minor, like a single follow up prompt), it's not significantly better than just hammering them all out in one session myself a few times per week, and giving it my full attention for that period of time.

The exception is when a fix is a) trivial or b) affecting a real user and therefore needs to be fixed quickly, in which case the current workflow is useful. But yeah, the real step-change was having Claude hitting the Sentry APIs directly and getting the info it needs, whether async or not.

I'd also imagine that people's experiences with this vary a lot depending on the size and stage of the company - our focus is developing new features quickly rather than maintaining a 100% available critical production service, for example.
by aftergibson | 2026-02-18 07:59:58+00:00
Archive.org shows this went live last September: https://web.archive.org/web/20250108142456/https://learn.mic...

It took ~5 months for anyone to notice and fix something that is obviously wrong at a glance.

How many people saw that page, skimmed it, and thought “good enough”? That feels like a pretty honest reflection of the state of knowledge work right now. Everyone is running at a velocity where quality, craft and care are optional luxuries. Authors don’t have time to write properly, reviewers don’t have time to review properly, and readers don’t have time to read properly.

So we end up shipping documentation that nobody really reads and nobody really owns. The process says “published”, so it’s done.

AI didn’t create this, it just dramatically lowers the cost of producing text and images that look plausible enough to pass a quick skim. If anything it makes the underlying problem worse: more content, less attention, less understanding.

It was already possible to cargo-cult GitFlow by copying the diagram without reading the context. Now we’re cargo-culting diagrams that were generated without understanding in the first place.

If the reality is that we’re too busy to write, review, or read properly, what is the actual function of this documentation beyond being checkbox output?
by rhubarbtree | 2026-02-18 08:00:11+00:00
The design work remains.

I’m not a fan of analogies, but here goes: Apple don’t make iPhones. But they employ an enormous number of people working on iPhone hardware, which they do not make.

If you think AI can replace everyone at Apple, then I think you’re arguing for AGI/superintelligence, and that’s the end of capitalism. So far we don’t have that.
by keeda | 2026-02-18 08:00:41+00:00
The whole thing is wild. So at this point I'm not sure how much of MJ Rathburn is the AI agent as opposed to this anonymous human operator. Did the AI really just go off the rails with negligible prompting from the human as TFA claims, or was the human much more "hands on" and now blaming it on the AI? Is TFA itself AI-generated? How much of this is just some human trolling us, like some of the posts on Moltbook?

I feel like I'm living in a Phillip K. Dick novel.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-18 08:01:18+00:00
> There's a part where he argues that open source work is valuable but corporate programmers are doing bullshit work that isn't socially productive because they're connecting disparate things together with glue code?

I don't know if maybe he wasn't explaining it well enough, but that kind of reasoning makes some sense.

A lot of code is written because you want the output from Foo to be the input to Bar and then you need some glue to put them together. This is pretty common when Foo and Bar are made by different people. With open source, someone writes the glue code, publishes it, and then nobody else has to write it because they just use what's published.

In corporate bureaucracies, Company A writes the glue code but then doesn't publish it, so Company B which has the same problem has to write it again, but they don't publish it either. A hundred companies are then doing the work that only really needed to be done once, which makes for 100 times as much work, a 1% efficiency rate and 99 bullshit jobs.
by coffeefirst | 2026-02-18 08:02:23+00:00
This is lost on people. A 98% accurate automation is useful if you can programmatically identify the 2% of cases that need human review. If you can’t, and it matters, then every case needs human review.

So you lose a lot of benefits to the time sync, but since people tend to have their eye glaze over when the correction rate is low, you may still miss the 2% anyway.

This is going to put a stop to a lot of ideas that sound reasonable on paper.
by vanviegen | 2026-02-18 08:03:34+00:00
GUI apps are good for discoverability. They generally are not optimized for rapid use by power users though. That's of course not an inherent limitation of GUI apps, it's just that dominant paradigms hardly seem to consider power users.

I'm still annoyed and baffled by the fact that Ubuntu had searchable application menus 10 years ago, which were awesome and worked for just about any program, and then dropped them when they abandoned Unity. And neither KDE not Gnome thought to bring them back. In stead, many apps have since dropped application menus entirely, in favour of... some mishmash of icons and ad hoc menu buttons?

Also, even in the post-LLM era, building a decent GUI app is a lot more work than building a decent terminal app.
by verdverm | 2026-02-18 08:03:49+00:00
You get an upvote for the sheer absurdity of this

Shall we take this to the front of HN and talk about the slop problem and the possibility for a new "channel" like `Vibe HN` or `Slop HN` (neither are great imo)?

Side quest, aren't you also the creator of skillforge?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47029798
by throwaway81523 | 2026-02-18 08:04:57+00:00
I think there is some hope of a sane wrapper around C++20 coroutines that will make them easier to use. I saw a tutorial a while back mentioning that might eventually become part of the C++ standard. I once tried to use Boost coroutines but it was too much headache and I switched to a different approach.

Erlang's processes and Goroutines are stackful unlike C++ coroutines. Erlang also forbids observable data sharing between processes which avoids a lot of pitfalls. I don't think that can be enforced in C++ or Go.

GHC lightweight threads and its STM library (software transactional memory) could be another thing to look at. I wonder if a useful STM feature is feasible for tiny_coro.
by aurareturn | 2026-02-18 08:04:57+00:00
I barely know how assembly, CPUs, GPUs, compilers, networking work. Yet, software that I've designed and written have been used by hundreds of millions of people.

Sure, maybe you would have caught the bug if you wrote assembly instead of C. But the C programmer still released much better software than you faster. By the time you shipped v1 in assembly, the C program has already iterated 100 times and found product market fit.
by ileonichwiesz | 2026-02-18 08:05:30+00:00
That’s exactly what we do at the Fortune 500 company where I work, and it’s surreal.

In my first year I didn’t know any better, so I tried to set myself some actual objectives (learn to use XYZ, improve test coverage by X%, measurable stuff that would actually help).

Fortunately my manager showed me how to do it correctly, so now my goals are to “differentiate with expertise” and to “empower through better solutions”.

Every year I open up the self-review, grade myself a 5/5 on these absurd, unmeasurable goals, my manager approves it, and it disappears off somewhere into the layers and layers of ever-higher management where nobody cares to look at it.
by ashtiwari08 | 2026-02-18 08:06:01+00:00
Most developers pick their LLM based on vibes or outdated benchmarks. What if you could just ask: "which model is best for this prompt?"
That's what I built. One API call, and you get back the top-performing model for your specific query — based on thousands of real evaluations, not static leaderboards.
Try it now (no signup needed):
curl -s https://clawbot.llmcouncil.ai/v1/route \
-H "X-API-Key: demo" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"query": "explain quantum entanglement simply"}'
Or just open this in your browser:
https://clawbot.llmcouncil.ai/v1/route?query=explain+quantum...
What you get back:

The best model for your query type
A confidence score so you know how decisive the winner is
Model IDs that match OpenRouter's catalog — chain it directly into your existing stack

Why this matters:
No single LLM wins everything. GPT-4.1 crushes certain coding tasks. Claude dominates nuanced reasoning. Gemini edges ahead on multilingual work. The gap between picking the right model and the wrong one is real — and it compounds across thousands of API calls.
This routes you to the winner automatically, and the recommendations get sharper with every query.
Free tier: 100 requests/day. Get a key at https://llmcouncil.ai/developers
Happy to answer any questions.
by magicalhippo | 2026-02-18 08:06:19+00:00
Bisphenol A (BPA) appeared in 98% of samples, and its substitute, bisphenol S (BPS), was found in more than three-quarters. Synthetic chemicals used to stiffen plastic, BPA and BPS mimic the action of oestrogen inside organisms, causing a range of adverse effects including the feminisation of males, early onset puberty in girls, and cancer. Previous studies have shown that bisphenols can migrate from synthetic materials into sweat, and that they can be absorbed through the skin.

Well that sucks...

A challenge is that we operate with deny lists, not allow lists of these materials. A product may switch to be BPA-free, but what did they switch to and what are the effects of the substitute? Often we only get to know a decade later or more. From the linked article on the previous study which found shocking amounts of bisphenols in women's underwear[1]:

Experience shows that it can take up to 6 months for manufacturers to introduce a new chemical to the market. On the other hand, if these substances are found to be harmful, it takes on average 20 years (!) to ban them from consumer goods’ production.

[1]: https://tudatosvasarlo.hu/toxic-chemicals-in-underwear-read-...
by thefounder | 2026-02-18 08:06:37+00:00
Giving people more ways to shut themselves in the foot does not improve the safety.
I find the entire thing a kind of dark pattern as the system along with misleading marketing makes you lax over time just to catch you off guard.

You get used with the system to work correctly and then when you expect less it does the unthinkable and the whole world blames you for not supervising a beta software product on the road on day 300 with the same rigour you did on day one.

I can see a very direct correlation with LLM systems. Claude has been working great for me until one day when it git reset the entire repo and I’ve lost two days work because it couldn’t revert a file it corrupted . This happened because I just supervised it just like you would supervise a FSD car with “bypass” mode. Fortunately it didn’t kill anyone , just two days of work lost. If there was the risk of someone being killed I would never allow a bypass /fsd/supervise mode regardless of how unlikely this is to happen.
by bigyabai | 2026-02-18 08:07:21+00:00
This is where I feel like Khronos could contribute, making a Compute Capability-equivalent hardware standard for vendors to implement. CUDA's versioning of hardware capabilities plays a huge role in clarifying the support matrix.

...but that requires buy-in from the rest of the industry, and it's doubtful FAANG is willing to thread that needle together. Nvidia's hedged bet against industry-wide cooperation is making Jensen the 21st century Mansa Musa.
by nunobrito | 2026-02-18 08:07:34+00:00
Not on this article, but everywhere nowadays are hints of AI. For example using emoticons on the beginning of each sentence or never really going deep into the topic. The complete lack of grammatical errors is another tip, unless the prompter asks to write minor errors and pretend to be a human.

Wouldn't be suprised that before the end of this year we see more website declaring themselves to be "human-only zones", considering we won't be able to match the speed and quantity and replies from bots. Making it difficult to hold proper conversations.
by veganmosfet | 2026-02-18 08:08:19+00:00
Nice idea! But OpenClaw is not stateless - it learns it's under attack / plays a CTF and gets overparanoid (and opus 4.6 is already paranoid). It seems now it summarizes all emails with "Thread contains 1 me" (a new personality disorder for llm?).
Imho it's not a realistic scenario. Better would be to reset the agent (context / md files) between each email to draw conclusions (slow). I was able to prompt inject OpenClaw (2026.2.14) with opus4.6 using gmail pub/sub automation. The issue: OpenClaw injects untrusted content in user channel (message role), it's possible to confuse the model. Better would be to use tool.
Show HN: SideDisplay – Turn Tesla screen into a wireless second monitor for Mac
by maccraft | 2026-02-18 08:10:08+00:00
I bought a Tesla Model X in 2023 and kept staring at the 17-inch display sitting idle while I worked on my 14-inch MacBook. I often drive to a quiet spot and work from the car, so I wanted to use that screen as a second monitor.

Nothing existed to do this, so I tried building it myself. It took over a year of failed attempts:

- Hardware mod: didn't want to void the warranty
- Zoom screen share: worked but terrible latency, no fullscreen
- HLS streaming via OBS: ~2 second delay, unusable as a monitor
- WebRTC: Tesla's browser didn't support it at the time

A few Tesla software updates later, I tried WebRTC again and it worked. But I still needed a pile of hardware: an LTE router, an OpenWrt router, and a dummy HDMI adapter. The setup was ridiculous.

Then I realized every piece of hardware had a software replacement:

LTE router -> iPhone USB tethering
OpenWrt router -> macOS Internet Sharing (bridge100 + bootpd + NAT)
Dummy HDMI -> Apple's CGVirtualDisplay API

Total extra hardware cost: $0. Just a MacBook and an iPhone.

One interesting discovery along the way: Tesla's browser blocks all RFC 1918 private IP ranges (10.x.x.x, 172.16.x.x, 192.168.x.x). My guess is it's a security measure to protect the car's internal network. The workaround was configuring the bridge interface to assign public IP addresses instead.

I packaged everything into a macOS app called SideDisplay. Free trial, 30 min per session, no sign up. If you have a Tesla and a Mac, try it and tell me what's broken.

I also wrote a detailed development story covering every failed attempt and the technical decisions behind them. It would mean a lot if you checked it out: https://sidedisplay.co/story
by emigre | 2026-02-18 08:11:22+00:00
That's all right. Focusing on the cover's photo, for example, I think you used a photograph that you had around. A professional designer working on a cover would (hopefully) shoot a flower on a studio, with professional lightning equipment, arranging the light sources in a certain way. I mean to get the final result of the kinds of covers I linked to earlier, which to be honest are exceptionally well designed covers!...

Those are the kinds of details I was referring to. On the other hand, many computer science covers have historically been quite poor in terms of design, and of course that does not mean much about the quality of the book itself. Some poor covers became memorable and iconic. Some covers are really simple and yet effective like the O'Reilly covers which I particularly like.

Sorry this is going on a tangent unrelated to Lisp. I do like the design of the book cover with the elegant white background. Thanks for writing it, I can't wait to read it.
by carstout | 2026-02-18 08:11:36+00:00
No more so than anywhere else.
The primary reason was Oxbridge blocked the attempts at forming universities elsewhere and the early centralisation of state authority aided them in this.
There were several other universities in England in the middle ages but none survive.
Stamford is one.
Northampton founded in 1261 but was banned in 1265 due to a mix of its patron having become an enemy of the King and Oxford supporters taking advantage of it.
When the local polytechnic wanted to become a uni in the early 2000s they had to specifically request it be repealed.
by drysine | 2026-02-18 08:12:17+00:00
>Russia's military force currently relies on men willing to die for money.

And Ukrainian military force currently relies on kidnapping men on the street and dispatching them to the front line after minimal training.[0][4]

The borders of the Ukraine are closed for any man of conscription age - they can't get out.[1]

You can watch the videos with logos of Ukrainian telegram channels and see how it happens[2][3]. Imagine yourself in their place.

[0] https://responsiblestatecraft.org/ukraine-recruitment-army/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_conscription_crisis#...

[2] https://busification.org/

[3] https://t.me/busification

[4] https://busification.org/article
by maxdo | 2026-02-18 08:13:24+00:00
they have very good guardrails to prevent you that, unlike autolane etc.

Teslas has sensors , eye trackers etc is it possible to shoot yourself in the leg, sure. But not in any different way vs human doing irrational things in the car, make up, arguing , love etc.

Human-being is an irrational create that should not drive except for fun in isolated environment. Tesla or Waymo or anyone else.... It is good to remove human from the road, the faster the better.
by matsz | 2026-02-18 08:13:32+00:00
> I've always advocated for having a read only database connection to be available for your customers to make their own visualisations.

A layer on top of the database to account for auth/etc. would be necessary anyways. Could be achieved to some degree with views, but I'd prefer an approach where you choose the publicly available data explicitly.

GraphQL almost delivered on that dream. Something more opinionated would've been much better, though.