MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kemotep | 2026-02-02 15:31:05+00:00
Microsoft really needs to get a better handle with the naming conventions.

There is Microsoft Copilot, which replaced Bing Chat, Cortana and uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 and 5 models.

There is Github Copilot, the coding autocomplete tool.

There is Microsoft 365 Copilot, what they now call Office with built in GenAI stuff.

There is also a Copilot cli that lets you use whatever agent/model backend you want too?

Everything is Copilot. Laptops sell with Copilot buttons now.

It is not immediately clear what version of Copilot someone is talking about. 99% of my experience is with the Office and it 100% fails to do the thing it was advertised to do 2 years ago when work initially got the subscription. Point it a SharePoint/OneDrive location, a handful of excel spreadsheets and pdfs/word docs and tell it to make a PowerPoint presentation based on that information.

It cannot do this. It will spit out nonsense. You have to hold it by the hand tell it everything to do step by step to the point that making the PowerPoint presentation yourself is significantly faster because you don’t have to type out a bunch of prompts and edit it’s garbage output.

And now it’s clear they aren’t even dogfooding their own LLM products so why should anyone pay for Copilot?
Show HN: AI-powered Git reports that write themselves
by inferno22 | 2026-02-02 15:31:09+00:00
Hey HN! I built Gitmore to solve a problem I kept running into: spending hours compiling what my team did each week for stakeholders.
What it does: Gitmore connects to your GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket repos (via webhooks, never touches your code) and uses AI to generate human-readable reports of your team's activity.

Example report: https://www.gitmore.io/example.html

Interactive demo: https://demo.arcade.software/5tZyFDhp1myCosw6e1po
by whynotmaybe | 2026-02-02 15:31:28+00:00
I used notepad for quick edit of simple files OR copy pasting and removing formatting.

Copilot excluded, who decided that it was a good idea to have multi tab notepad that remembers unsaved files between executions ?

"We solved that, just go into settings to toggle that behaviour !"

Who decided that notepad had to have a full settings page ?

"Just use the feedback hub" ?

So basically, you removed Wordpad and now regret this decision and are slowly turning notepad into Jeff Raskins' Archy ?
by observationist | 2026-02-02 15:31:58+00:00
Microsoft defected, now the correct move for the customer is to defect. Really, based on the pattern they learned, they can defect a thousand times before they lose enough customers over it that they have to publicly apologize and reverse a feature, so customers stepping in mid-game think that there's a tit for tat happening, but they don't realize they're starting off in the hole. We all should have left Microsoft a very long time ago.
by playlistwhisper | 2026-02-02 15:32:34+00:00
The main challenge lies in helping someone articulate their own emotions, feelings, and musical intentions. Personally, I find this difficult to achieve on my own. Structured dimensions can certainly support a music project, but they may lack effectiveness if there is no clear understanding of the intended objective from the outset.

Nice project! Thanks for sharing. I would say that a robust qualification process may constitutes the primary added value of your project. Much like a sales representative who can methodically understand a prospect’s needs, it may be worth helping users clarify their internal feelings first.

Exploring how other scientific or artistic disciplines address this challenge could also be valuable.
by taude | 2026-02-02 15:33:20+00:00
Agreed. I was an early adopter of Claude Code. And at work we only had Copilot. But the Copilit CLI isn't too bad now. you've got slash commands for Agents.MD and skills.md files now for controlling your context, and access to Sonnet & Opus 4.5.

Maybe Microsoft is just using it internally, to finish copying the rest of the features from Claude Code.

Much like the article states, I use Claude Code beyond just it's coding capabilities....
by neom | 2026-02-02 15:33:51+00:00
pack considerably more spinning disks bought off the shelf at radioshack than you ever reasonably should in a box in a colo, turns out they generate a lot of heat, I don't recall the year I'd guess around 2004/5-ish - was a big problem, site was down for quite some time. Same year someone found out who one of our mods was and showed up to their house with a gun. Ask me about hypergrowth, I'm not sure if the DeviantART stories or the DigitalOcean stories are more wild. heh. :)
by ralusek | 2026-02-02 15:34:45+00:00
I think Gemini is an excellent model, it's just not a particularly great agent. One of the reasons is that its code output is often structured in a way that looks like it's answering a question, rather than generating production code. It leaves comments everywhere, which are often numbered (which not only is annoying, but also only makes sense if the numbering starts within the frame of reference of the "question" it's "answering").

It's also just not as good at being self-directed and doing all of the rest of the agent-like behaviors we expect, i.e. breaking down into todolists, determining the appropriate scope of work to accomplish, proper tool calling, etc.
by frizlab | 2026-02-02 15:34:51+00:00
Oh no, but I know! And it is indeed terrible.

I live in a city where there are new houses being built. They are ugly. Meanwhile, the ones that exist since a long time ago have charm and feel homely.

I don’t know, I‘m probably just a regular old man yelling at clouds, but I still think we’re going in the wrong direction. For pretty much everything. And for what? Money. Yay!

Hugh.
by crazygringo | 2026-02-02 15:34:53+00:00
> Compared to paper any software is a distraction

No it's not? Why on earth would it be...?

> That’s so obviously wrong

...but is it obviously wrong?

People tend to use these on their phones. They don't have a lot of reason to set them up on their iPad. Until very recently, Instagram didn't even have an iPad app, that's how low the demand is.
by bloomingeek | 2026-02-02 15:34:59+00:00
Kind of related: I own and still use an HP laptop that came with 8 GB of DDR4 SDRAM and 16 GB of Intel Optane memory. When MS told all of us that Win 10 was moving away from support, I decided to format and install Ubuntu. I have lots of experience with Linux, so it was gonna be a piece of cake.

Wrong! To my great surprise Linux wouldn't load, even after trying three different versions of Linux. After doing a massive search on the internet, I finally found a post that said I should crack open the case and remove the Optane chip, which I did. Presto, Linux was loaded and working fine!
by whalee | 2026-02-02 15:36:53+00:00
I think counter to the assumption of myself (and many), for long form agent coding tasks, models are not as easily hot swappable as I thought.

I have developed decent intuition on what kinds of problems Codex, Claude, Cursor(& sub-variants), Composer etc. will or will not be able to do well across different axes of speed, correctness, architectural taste, ...

If I had to reflect on why I still don't use Gemini, it's because they were late to the party and I would now have to be intentional about spending time learning yet another set of intuitions about those models.
by ontouchstart | 2026-02-02 15:37:00+00:00
That is a great point. People in this group are programming at a different abstraction level, i.e., allocating computing resources, both human and machine resources.

Now AI agents are cheap but they generate a lot of slop, and potential minefields that might be costly to clean. The ROI will show up eventually and people in the second group will find out their jobs might be in danger. Hopefully a third group will come to save them.
by bioaidevs | 2026-02-02 15:37:15+00:00
Today we're launching BIOS, a powerful AI Scientist. BIOS coordinates specialized subagents for literature search and data analysis, planning and executing multi-step research workflows while you steer.

BIOS's analysis capabilities rank #1 on BixBench, a challenging bioinformatics benchmark. BixBench tests real-world analytical scenarios spanning genomics, transcriptomics, differential expression, and more—tasks that require executing complete analysis workflows, not just answering from memory.

BIOS is powered by Deep Research, an iterative workflow that completes research cycles in minutes rather than hours. Where batch-processing systems like Kosmos require extended runtimes before producing results, Deep Research lets you steer the investigation as insights emerge.

Each cycle follows three phases: Plan, Execute, and Refine. The planning phase breaks your research question into concrete tasks. Execution delegates those tasks to specialized subagents in parallel. Reflection synthesizes the results, updates the working hypothesis, and proposes next steps.

BIOS is available now. For a limited time, we are offering free, full access to academic users with a .edu email address.

- Try BIOS here: http://chat.bio.xyz

- Tech blog: https://x.com/BioAIDevs/status/2016544598529638492

- arXiv paper, "Rethinking the AI Scientist": https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.12542

- Follow @BioAIDevs on X, where we'll share updates & insights from our lab.

- Join fellow builders and give feedback in our Bio AI Discord: https://discord.gg/vwMSHKh58X
by alighter | 2026-02-02 15:37:39+00:00
Globalizing the intifada means pushing an agenda everywhere, including on HN, on posts where it is relevant and on posts where some obscure or conspiratorial connection can be made.

If HN is going to allow accusations to be slung against groups of people it has to allow others to respond, and that sets off endless debate amongst people who will not be changing their minds on the matter but will repeat the same argument on the next post.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-02 15:38:01+00:00
> burnt down one of the most famous brands in the world, MS Office, for zero reason other than to try and whitewash their Copilot name

Mac user and Office subscriber here. The wild thing is this soured me on the Copilot brand so broadly that I’ve recommended folks weighing it strongly avoid committing to it as their AI strategy. (None of them did.)

That infamous agentic OS tweet pretty much sums up the incentives and response to criticism at Redmond.
by digiown | 2026-02-02 15:38:18+00:00
Note there is no intrinsic reason running multiple streams should be faster than one. It almost always indicates some bottleneck in the application or TCP tuning. (Though, very fast links can overwhelm slow hardware, and ISPs might do some traffic shaping too, but this doesn't apply to local links).

SSH was never really meant to be a high performance data transfer tool, and it shows. For example, it has a hardcoded maximum receive buffer of 2MiB (separate from the TCP one), which drastically limits transfer speed over high BDP links (even a fast local link, like the 10gbps one the author has). The encryption can also be a bottleneck. hpn-ssh [1] aims to solve this issue but I'm not so sure about running an ssh fork on important systems.

1. https://github.com/rapier1/hpn-ssh
by pjc50 | 2026-02-02 15:38:21+00:00
As the author says, most incidents of this kind, in most of the world, are protesters vs. police, and the police have .. a substantial amount of control over whether the situation escalates or not. Including just opening up with tear gas.

Conflicting football ultras is basically the only case where this doesn't happen.

(I've never been near a tear gas kind of event, but I did witness the Met Police deploy "kettling" for the first time in May 2001, close enough that if I'd not paid attention to the police lines forming up I would have been imprisoned uncomfortably for eight hours.)
by EddieRingle | 2026-02-02 15:39:08+00:00
> Plus, it seems some of y’all love to hate the very industry which puts a roof over your head. You’re hoping and praying that it all burns down—yet where will that leave you? How do you feel about becoming a plumber—-until the robots take that job?

This probably isn't a line of argument you want to go down. I've been unemployed for 7 months, in part due to how difficult it is to get so much as an intro call because so many people have totally automated the process of spamming every open job posting with as many resumes (many of which were likely LLM-generated as well) as possible.
by taeric | 2026-02-02 15:39:17+00:00
The general fault I see here, is that we don't typically make our work tracking tools so that they look at the code for us. Instead, our ticketing systems only have what we have put in them, directly.

This is obviously obnoxious when it comes to stuff like warnings and deprecations. But is also annoying when doing migrations of any kind. Or when working to raise test coverage. Anything that can be determined by checking the source code.
by dragonwriter | 2026-02-02 15:39:44+00:00
> Static typing and duck typing both date back to the 1950s. You may have heard of Lisp.

> The last new significant thing invented in programming was OOP in the 1990s.

OOP is from the 1960s (Simula 67 is generally recognized as the first OOP language.) Probably not actually the last new significant thing invented in programming, though.
by freedomben | 2026-02-02 15:40:02+00:00
Yeah, you may have nailed it. Gemini is a good model, but in the Gemini CLI with a prompt like, "I'd like to add <feature x> support. What are my options? Don't write any code yet" it will proceed to skip right past telling me my options and will go ahead an implement whatever it feels like. Afterward it will print out a list of possible approaches and then tell you why it did the one it did.

Codex is the best at following instructions IME. Claude is pretty good too but is a little more "creative" than codex at trying to re-interpret my prompt to get at what I "probably" meant rather than what I actually said.
by jrockway | 2026-02-02 15:40:22+00:00
I love this site so much. I learned that there are two typologies of shoelace knots -- one falls apart instantly (https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm), and the other is as secure as a double knot. I also learned the fast way to tie shoes, https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm. The latter is fun, I have used it every day for decades and people are always amazed when you teach them.
by mlmonkey | 2026-02-02 15:40:41+00:00
Unlike most normal people in the world, I was never taught how to tie shoelaces. And not because my parents and siblings did not try; but because I was too obstinate and wanted to do it my way! Needless to say I implemented a complicated knot that takes way too long and and a source of mockery. But it is my knot and I like it.
by coreylane | 2026-02-02 15:40:45+00:00
RClone has been so useful over the years I built a fully managed service on top of it specifically for moving data between cloud storage providers: https://dataraven.io/

My goal is to smooth out some of the operational rough edges I've seen companies deal with when using the tool:

- Team workspaces with role-based access control
- Event notifications & webhooks – Alerts on transfer failure or resource changes via Slack, Teams, Discord, etc.
- Centralized log storage
- Vault integrations – Connect 1Password, Doppler, or Infisical for zero-knowledge credential handling (no more plain text files with credentials)
- 10 Gbps connected infrastructure (Pro tier) – High-throughput Linux systems for large transfers
by jFriedensreich | 2026-02-02 15:40:54+00:00
Important to note that termux, while it was always great and indispensable, is getting increasingly interesting now because android is getting full desktop mode at the same time as XR glasses (xreal, viture etc.) are becoming mainstream. You can have a linux desktop in your pocket everywhere without rooting, hacking or tinkering, just install termux and x11 server. While not all packages work, llms are increasingly powerful, just an example porting deskflow from a debian package to termux took about 4 hours max, something i would not even have had an idea how to start just 4 months ago.
by NoGravitas | 2026-02-02 15:41:03+00:00
There was '50s nostalgia in the '80s, though: Happy Days and Back To The Future.

There was some interesting counterculture in the '40s and '50s, but how could there not be when the dominant culture was so conformist and bland. You have to dig at least a little for that stuff today, because those countercultures didn't really become legible until the '60s, when they were already changing into something less interesting.
by _factor | 2026-02-02 15:41:10+00:00
So let me get this straight. You believe a tort claim would stand with an unbiased judge with the following parameters:

Company A sends multiple letters to individual X for different solicitations. These letters know when they are opened and scan the environment as they are read. This includes reading gait and face data where available and any other peripheral data cost-effectively mined.

As a result of this invasive marketing, individual X begins to have a robot read all of their mail to prevent the data collection.

You’re arguing that any fair judge would rule in favor of company A over individual X?

Just because it’s easy and hard to visualize, doesn’t change how ridiculous it sounds.
by vunderba | 2026-02-02 15:42:00+00:00
Pro tip: I’ve seen plenty of dedicated extensions that could have just been simple snippet equivalents in Tampermonkey - an extension that lets you run JS limited to wildcarded websites.

I've used it to inject download links on sites, autoclose modals, etc. You can either write them yourself, or review other people before installing them.

It’s not a perfect solution, but at least it reduces the surface area to a single extension.

FYI: Just set Script Updates to Never.

https://github.com/Tampermonkey/tampermonkey
by mgkimsal | 2026-02-02 15:42:36+00:00
> No, there is Github Copilot, the AI agent tool that also has autocomplete, and a chat UI.

When it came out, Github Copilot was an autocomplete tool. That's it. That may be what the OP was originally using. That's what I used... 2 years ago. That they change the capabilities but don't change the name, yet change names on services that don't change capabilities further illustrates the OP's point, I would say.
Show HN: I build an AI Avatar to master real spoken conversations
by rafmardev | 2026-02-02 15:43:08+00:00
I built this because of a problem I kept running into: I freeze in certain conversations.

In situations like job interviews, first conversations with native speakers in a foreign language, or high-pressure discussions, my mind goes blank. Words and phrases I know just don’t come out. Reading and writing were fine, speaking wasn’t.

Most language tools focus on vocabulary, grammar, or scripted dialogues. They don’t simulate the stress, unpredictability, and pace of real conversations.

So I built an AI avatar that you talk to out loud. It responds in real time, adapts to your level, and lets you practice difficult scenarios repeatedly until the response becomes automatic.

The goal isn’t perfect language, it’s reducing hesitation and building fluency under pressure.

This is an early version and very much a personal project. I’m curious if others here have faced the same “freeze” problem and whether something like this would be useful to you.
by mindslight | 2026-02-02 15:43:24+00:00
Maybe we should talk about the first time the US had this level of political resistance against "lawful authority". That seems like a better analogy for what's going on here.

Also I feel compelled to point out that "lawful authority" does not mean "authority acting lawfully", which is painfully demonstrated by being in a thread discussing the use of respirators in response to government jackboots suppressing lawful first amendment activity. The obvious alternative is to let the protests happen, per our Constitution.
by tim333 | 2026-02-02 15:43:25+00:00
>He argues that the technology industry will eventually hit a dead end in its A.I. development

I'm not sure it'll be a dead end. Probably not straight ahead but they may branch off into variations.

Already large language models have modified into multimodal models that can work with images and video.

Something is probably needed so model weights can be updated from experience rather than just pretraining but that doesn't necessarily mean scrapping it all and staring over.
by bluGill | 2026-02-02 15:44:04+00:00
They still need to prove that isn't just a saying. A good reputation takes a long time to develop and very little time to lose. With safety gear I would not take a chance.

If I'm going to take a chance I'd prefer to support a small company. Amazon is big, but I find most things they sell I can find a small company that sells the same for a similar price and they know their product and so will direct me to what works well.
by jpfromlondon | 2026-02-02 15:44:30+00:00
In the above model prices converge on a mean, reducing the potential savings for those that price really matters (the poor are the ones most likely to check existing price discovery sites), thus it's regressive - the government are either seeing it as an opportunity to marginally increase tax rake, or more likely are oblivious to the externality of the poor bearing the burden.
by PurpleRamen | 2026-02-02 15:44:32+00:00
> So why not just merge into one and be 16 times as effective? Sorry for the sarcasm but your calculation is just a wild assumption.

The division is on purpose, to divide power and make it harder for a second Hitler to rise again. And the calculations are no assumption, it's a common topic in Germany how much additional time and money this all costs.

> How does the US do it? They have a fair amount of states too with their own laws, don't they?

Why do you assume they are different? Or better?

> E.g. you can have different school systems in different states and see what works better

You can also have this without federalism, without maintaining a dozen different administrations which are all doing the same in different flavour.

> People are also different in different states. This also applies to Europe and its member states.

Compared to Europe, people in the USA are not that different per state. At least not on the level where individual administration is necessary. The different groups are mainly independent of the state they are living in.
by kemotep | 2026-02-02 15:44:38+00:00
The confusion is when I say “I have a terrible time using Copilot, I don’t recommend using it” and someone chimes in with how great their experience with Github Copilot is, a completely different product and how I must be “holding it wrong” when that is not the same Copilot. That Microsoft has like 5 different products all using Copilot in the name, even people in this very comment section are only saying “Copilot” so it is hard to know what product they are talking about!
by thundergolfer | 2026-02-02 15:44:52+00:00
I presume if you invest in Google you are indirectly (but significantly) invested in Waymo, like it is with Anthropic?

Waymo is the best service I've used in many, many years. The jump from Uber->Waymo is similar to the quality jump from Taxi->Uber 12 years ago, but I don't see an obvious way for Waymo to get enshittified.
by freedomben | 2026-02-02 15:45:23+00:00
just my experience of course, but it had a lot of hype. It got into a lot of people's workflow and really had a strong first mover advantage. The fact that they supported neovim as a first-class editor surely helped a ton. But then they released their next set of features without neovim support and only (IIRC) support VS Code. That took a lot of wind out of the sails. Then combined with them for some reason being on older models (or with thinking turned down or whatever), the results got less and less useful. If Co-pilot had made their agent stuff work with neovim and with a CLI, I think they'd be the clear leader.