MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alphazard | 2026-02-21 23:44:29+00:00
> Regardless, polymarket seems to be on balance corrupting, by monetizing and normalizing use of inside information,

This is a common take on "inside information", but for most people this opinion is totally unaligned with their own goals.
The people who benefit from "no insider trading" in any market, are a small group of active traders, some institutional, some not.

For literally everyone else, insider trading is a net win. Insider trading improves price discovery. If you passively invest then you benefit from the price being more accurate when whatever fraction of your paycheck goes into the market.

I don't know your own situation, maybe you are one of those few traders who needs information to spread a certain way in order to make money. For everyone else, don't be fooled into promoting an idea against your own interests.
by unixpickle | 2026-02-21 23:44:42+00:00
The `try_roots` example here is actually a _counterexample_ to the author's main argument. They explicitly ignore the "negative discriminant" case. What happens if we consider it?

If we take their "parse" approach, then the types of the arguments a, b, and c have to somehow encode the constraint `b^2 - 4ac >= 0`. This would be a total mess--I can't think of any clean way to do this in Rust. It makes _much_ more sense to simply return an Option and do the validation within the function.

In general, I think validation is often the best way to solve the problem. The only counterexample, which the author fixates on in the post, is when one particular value is constrained in a clean, statically verifiable way. Most of the time, validation is used to check (possibly complex) interactions between multiple values, and "parsing" isn't at all convenient.
by zarzavat | 2026-02-21 23:45:03+00:00
I agree, but you don't have to outsource your thinking to AI in order to benefit from AI.

Use AI as a sanity check on your thinking. Use it to search for bugs. Use it to fill in the holes in your knowledge. Use it to automate grunt work, free your mind and increase your focus.

There are so many ways that AI can be beneficial while staying in full control.

I went through an experimental period of using Claude for everything. It's fun but ultimately the code it generates is garbage. I'm back to hand writing 90% of code (not including autocomplete).

You can still find effective ways to use this technology while keeping in mind its limitations.
Show HN: Ktop – a themed terminal monitor for GPU, CPU, RAM, temps and OOM kills
by brontoguana | 2026-02-21 23:45:12+00:00
I built a terminal system monitor that fills a gap I kept hitting when running local LLMs: GPU usage and memory (for both NVidia and AMD) alongside CPU usage and memory, temps, upload, download and OOM kill tracking. All in one view with 50 colour themes.

Consumes less cpu usage than glances (in my testing).

One line install.
Show HN: BetaZero, a diffusion climb generator for system boards
by EvanMcCormick | 2026-02-21 23:45:24+00:00
BetaZero is a free web application which allows users to generate, edit, and share board climbs. It currently supports the Kilter, TB2 and Decoy boards, with Moonboard 2016, 2019 and 2024 to be added next week. However, the underlying generative model works on any 2D system board, so long as that board is angled between 0* and 90* and the holds are properly formatted (For reference, this model was not trained on the Decoy board, so it's performance there is indicative of its general performance across home walls of a similar nature).
When I built my first homewall last year, I was psyched. 200 holds I could set however I wanted, and countless potential climbs to project. However, I quickly noticed that something was missing from this experience: Variety. I wanted the joy of opening an app, scrolling to some random climb I'd never have come up with myself, and projecting it.

At first I messaged my friends and asked them to couch-set some climbs for me. But my friends all live in Colorado while I'm stuck in upstate NY. They did send me some climbs, but having never actually climbed on my wall, most of their sets were impossible or too easy. I also tried setting climbs on international boards via Stokt, but with similarly lackluster results.

So... I built a generative model to set climbs on my homewall. It went through a couple of iterations.

V1. ClimbLSTM: LSTM Model trained on my homewall V2. ClimbDDPM: Diffusion Model trained on the BoardLib dataset V3. BetaZero, a free web app powered by ClimbDDPM.

Next steps include integration of an account/security system, and allowing users to upload, edit, and set climbs for, their own custom walls. (I already have a functional API for uploading and editing walls; its how I added the current set of boards to the database. However, there is not yet a security/permissions system to control who can edit/see which walls. I also want to improve the scalability of the app, and train an improved diffusion model, based on what I've learned from the prior training run.
by danpalmer | 2026-02-21 23:45:28+00:00
Did DarkSky ever make it out of the US? I know it was US only for a long time, as it seems this is.

Even recently Apple Weather was hilariously bad in Australia. I was always asking my partner for the weather because her Pixel weather app was reasonably reliable and Apple Weather was always wrong.

Weather forecasts are such a localised issue. I've never seen an app that does well globally.
by mettamage | 2026-02-21 23:45:29+00:00
Yea it's this. I have a job, I'm fine. I have 1 to 2 years of runway if I lose my job. I've been twice in a situation in my life where it took me 1 to 1.5 years to find a new job. During those times I lived for free at a family member's place so I was totally fine. But I know how dangerous things can get if I don't watch out. And even then still. Sometimes fate just hits you in the face.
by addaon | 2026-02-21 23:45:52+00:00
I think a challenge to me for typing assembly, unless you’re doing old-school C style minimally-useful types, is that assembly types tend to be both more ad hoc and more transient than types in higher level languages, because these types come from the intersection of the problem domain and the way of expressing the solution, instead of just from the problem domain. In C++ I might have a type for “aircraft velocity in mm/s”, but in assembly I might have that type on one line, and then go to velocity in 2x mm/s the next line to save a renormalization; or have types for various state flags, but have them pack differently into a word in different places in the code. This is all expressible, but I think it would make me favor a more implicit typing with a heavier emphasis on deduction, just to minimize the description of types that exist but are not in themselves interesting.
by 999900000999 | 2026-02-21 23:46:26+00:00
Who both has a computer too slow to handle electron applications ,and is spending 20$ a month on Claude code.

>There are downsides though. Electron apps are bloated; each runs its own Chromium engine. The minimum app size is usually a couple hundred megabytes. They are often laggy or unresponsive. They don’t integrate well with OS features.

A few hundred megabytes to a few gb sounds like an end user problem. They can either make room or not use your application.

You can easily buy a laptop for around 400 USD that will run Claude code just fine, along with several other electron apps.

Don't get me wrong, native everything ( which would probably mean sacrificing Linux support) would be a bit better, but it's not a deal breaker.
by Spivak | 2026-02-21 23:46:37+00:00
I don't understand why this is grey, this is exactly correct. Depreciation is good actually ignores the realities of why a car's value is tanking in the first place. The only time high depreciation is good for you as a buyer is if you think the market is mispricing cars and they're actually far more valuable than the cost they're being sold for. But best keep that secret because the market will be quick to correct once it's discovered.
by bcherny | 2026-02-21 23:46:40+00:00
Boris from the Claude Code team here.

Some of the engineers working on the app worked on Electron back in the day, so preferred building non-natively. It’s also a nice way to share code so we’re guaranteed that features across web and desktop have the same look and feel. Finally, Claude is great at it.

That said, engineering is all about tradeoffs and this may change in the future!
by kristianp | 2026-02-21 23:47:03+00:00
> He said that software accounts for 8% to 12% of a company's expenses, so using vibe coding to build the company's resource planning or payroll tools would only save about 10%. Relying on AI to write code also carries risks, he said.

> "You have this innovation bazooka with these models. Why would you point it at rebuilding payroll or ERP or CRM," Acharya said

> Instead, companies are better off using AI to develop their core businesses or optimize the remaining 90% of their costs
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-02-21 23:47:37+00:00
I would point out a subtlety here: deprecation is based on perceived value, and this perception tracks much more closely with the glacial knowledge of the larger public than it does with that of an informed individual.

Battery degradation is extremely overrepresented in the minds of the public for example and based mostly on the performance of early entrants like the original Nissan Leaf. Since then, chemistries and management systems have progressed dramatically and rendered it a moot point — most EVs made in the past several years will have their batteries outlast the useful life of the vehicle. In the case the Ariya, Nissan appears to have overcorrected for the Leaf's reputation to such a point that they can be fast charged to 100% for many dozens of cycles and still show no capacity loss.

This is a gap in knowledge that smart buyers who are willing to do a little bit of research can exploit and get much more car for their money than would otherwise be possible.
by necovek | 2026-02-21 23:48:03+00:00
I think you are mistaken. Just like neither Windows nor MacOS have really solved the desktop app sandboxing story, so neither has Linux.

Because, as I said in a sibling comment and cosmic_cheese notes further below, this requires rethinking the usage model altogether: files and folders, and even file types, don't work anymore.

If an app needs to access any related files, it basically needs access to my entire $HOME, and once that is granted, well, any sandboxing is out the window.

I think Linux community is well aware of that, and basically what we get from sandboxing of desktop apps is all the nuisance with no benefit.

Android model is also broken from a usage perspective: having files "owned" by an app is just as wrong, and precludes there being multiple apps operating on the same file. Example of VLC with subtitles is a common one, but if you've never used multiple apps on the same file, this is the challenge that is unsolved by any sandboxing approach today, because it is more of a UX problem, than a sandboxing technical problem.
by scoodah | 2026-02-21 23:48:26+00:00
You shouldn’t be denied for smoking weed in college and disclosing it. I had no issues with that. The other thing is you can appeal a denial of your clearance if you can demonstrate the issue is not an issue. If you truly did only smoke weed in college and get denied due to that, you could appeal and make your case that your weed use is not ongoing, ended in college, and not an issue in your personal life. It’s not guaranteed to be a successful appeal, of course, but the process does exist.

The bigger problem is when people fib about their usage. Saying you only used it in college when you’ve used it more recently is something people do fairly often, and seemingly are encouraged to fib about.
by lateforwork | 2026-02-21 23:48:30+00:00
> Electron apps are bloated; each runs its own Chromium engine. The minimum app size is usually a couple hundred megabytes.

I only see these complaints on HN. Real users don't have this complaint. What kind of low-end machines are you running, that Chromium engine is too heavy for you?

> They are often laggy or unresponsive.

That's not due to Electron.

> They don’t integrate well with OS features.

If it is good enough for Microsoft Teams it is probably good enough for most apps. Teams can integrate with microphone, camera, clipboard, file system and so on. What else do you want to integrate with?
by b00ty4breakfast | 2026-02-21 23:48:33+00:00
Plenty of things we could be wasting money on if the only criteria is "how do you know it's not real?", why stop at killing goats with mind bullets? We could be looking for yetis or Atlantis or lunar nazi spaceships.

It was a giant waste of time and money and, this being the CIA, it likely harmed many people.
Show HN: My Degenerate Craps Simulator
by nutwinkle | 2026-02-21 23:48:48+00:00
Hello HN:

I love the randomness of the universe. I've been spending some time creating a Craps simulator to help experience this love without having to shell out like a real degenerate.

For others similarly fascinated: I would love to hear any and all feedback you've got on this. It's meant to be unique in the sense that it's a community-oriented, infinite simulation.
by antirez | 2026-02-21 23:49:16+00:00
Cluade is an Electron app because this is a cultural issue, not a technological one. Electron could make sense if you are a startup with limited development force. For big companies that want to make a difference, to hire N developers and maintain N native apps is one of the best bet on quality and UX you can do, yet people don't do it even in large companies that have the ability, in theory, to do it. Similarly even if with automatic programming you could do it more easily, still it is not done. It's a cultural issue, part of the fact that who makes software does not try to make the best possible software anymore.
by nine_k | 2026-02-21 23:49:34+00:00
I won't call it a social networking site. I'd call it a business-card-exchange site, plus a corporate-flyers-handout site, and of course a self-promotion site.

Selling emails is of course bad, but expecting your email that you give to any big corporation to stay private for a long time is, alas, naïve. I've read the fine print; in most EULAs it includes a ton of clauses about sharing your contacts with a bunch of third parties, etc. LinkedIn, in particular, explicitly says that it may share your contacts with advertising partners.

In other words, if you need to enter this space, wear a hazmat suit, expect no niceties.
by KPGv2 | 2026-02-21 23:50:16+00:00
I have much more than `build` to block. IDE-specific stuff, smalls scripts I write to help me (and go in root) but don't belong in the repo, etc.

And what if for some reason you accidentally copied a big Linux ISO to that directory by mistake. Without a whitelist, you might accidentally add and commit a 700MB file to your main and not even notice. What a pain when you push later and have to git amend, rebase -i, etc.

Better to block all except whitelist. The only downside is it's less obvious how to do this than allowing all except blacklist to new git users.
by TheSpiceIsLife | 2026-02-21 23:51:14+00:00
And, the two major byproducts of burning hydrocarbons are water and carbon dioxide.

Literally essential plant nutrients, essential for life.

Tangentially related, the 2022 Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai volcanic eruption ejected so much water vapour in to the upper atmosphere, it was estimated to have ongoing climate forcing effects for up to 10 years.

Water vapour is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

And we heard precisely nothing about that in the media other than some science specific sources at the time and nothing on an ongoing basis.

From Wikipedia:

The underwater explosion also sent 146 million tons of water from the South Pacific Ocean into the stratosphere. The amount of water vapor ejected was 10 percent of the stratosphere's typical stock. It was enough to temporarily warm the surface of Earth. It is estimated that an excess of water vapour should remain for 5–10 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Hunga_Tonga%E2%80%93Hunga...
by misir | 2026-02-21 23:51:33+00:00
They don't have to reinvent electron. They shouldn't need to use a whole virtualized operating system to call their web API with a fancy UI.

Projects with much smaller budget than Atrophic has achieved much better x-plat UI without relying on electron [1]. There are more sensible options like Qt and whatnot for rendering UIs.

You can even engineer your app to have a single core with all the business logic as a single shared library. Then write UI wrappers using SwiftUI, GTK, and whatever microsoft feels like putting out as current UI library (I think currently it's WinUI2) consuming the core to do the interesting bits.

Heck there are people whom built gui toolkits from scratch to support their own needs [2].

[1] - https://musescore.org/en
[2] - https://www.gpui.rs
by reconnecting | 2026-02-21 23:52:19+00:00
Oh yeah, I found the way — single file AWK program to convert MD to HTML FRAMESET docs (1).

But only because it is not something I would like to invest real engineers' paid time in, and second because it's an absolutely isolated task — even if it fails, no one gets hurt.

1. https://github.com/tirrenotechnologies/hellodocs
by sixtyj | 2026-02-21 23:52:22+00:00
Yes, Claude Code can write an analysis or a plan and store it into folder. When I try anything larger, I got stuck, sooner or later, and I have to rewrite requests into very small chunks of what I want to code. And then I have to be very careful and go step by step.

On the other side, all LLMs are really good in writing some smaller scripts, e.g. to batch rename all files in folder, or extract some metadata.

Anything bigger in context? Unfortunately - maybe I have bad luck…

But I don’t get how they code in Anthropic when they say that almost all their new code is written by LLM.

Do they have some internal much smarter model that they keep in secret and don’t sell it to customers? :)
by aucisson_masque | 2026-02-21 23:52:42+00:00
> $25/year subscription

I don't get it, is there even a market ? People get free and quite accurate weather information from Google and others. I don't think that a few radar view and probability prediction are worth that amount of money.

But then, how much was dark sky ? And did it succeed ? Getting bought by apple is a kind of success but I mean success as in profitability.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-21 23:52:53+00:00
It is your view that's dogmatic. The law in this area has yet to be fully tested in court, let alone any prospective changes that might be made to it in the near future.

Regardless, I thought this was a discussion about what the law ought to say.

The defense is that the model is not designed to output Harry Potter verbatim, and in fact will not unless you jump through lots of hoops. Image generation would probably provide you with a stronger position here since those setups can easily output likenesses without needing to carefully engineer the prompt to cause them to do so. But even then it is clearly not the intention of the people training or deploying them that they be used that way.
by _pdp_ | 2026-02-21 23:53:02+00:00
Code is not and will never be free. You pay for it one way or another. It will take a couple of years for things to cool down to realise that there is more to software than writing the code. But even if AI can write all the code - who is going to understand it. Don't tell me this is not needed. RTFM is what gives hacker the edge. I doubt any company want to be in a position where they simply have no clue how their main product actually works.
by stoneman24 | 2026-02-21 23:53:07+00:00
Just reacting to the headline (not a telegraph reader). While initially the idea of energy security and base load power is attractive, having worked (long ago) on a nuclear power station simulator (as a contractor) for a uk energy company, I came away with the idea that keeping the station running effectively (with maintenance and upgrades) was very difficult and expensive.

Perhaps investing in multiple distributed facilities capable of grid level storage (of renewable energy, wind , solar) would be a much better investment for the country.

Maybe I am being unfair in comparison of old systems with the huge drop in costs of wind and solar. And while developments are happening in large scale storage are happening, it’s not quite a settled solution yet.
by jimmaswell | 2026-02-21 23:53:40+00:00
The better the code is, the less detailed a mental map is required. It's a bad sign if you need too much deep knowledge of multiple subsystems and their implementation details to fix one bug without breaking everything. Conversely, if drive-by contributors can quickly figure out a bug they're facing and write a fix by only examining the place it happens with minimal global context, you've succeeded at keeping your code loosely-coupled with clear naming and minimal surprises.
by astrostl | 2026-02-21 23:53:50+00:00
The quality of the ChatGPT Mac app is a major driver for me to keep a subscription. Hotkeys work, app feels slick and native. The Claude Mac app I found so poor that I'd never reach for it, and ended up uninstalling it — despite using the heck out of Claude Code on a Max plan — because it started blocking system restarts for updates.
by vladms | 2026-02-21 23:55:09+00:00
To make a parallel to actual human language: you can understand well a foreign language and not be able to speak it at the same level.

I found myself in that situation with both foreign languages and with programming languages / frameworks - understanding is much easier than creating something good. You can of course revert to a poorer vocabulary / simpler constructions (in both cases), but an "expert" speaker/writer will get a better result. For many cases the delta can be ignored, for some cases it matters.
by pyrale | 2026-02-21 23:55:22+00:00
> pointing out that

Certainly, you mean: "claiming that".

In the terms of Mandy Rice-Davies [1], "well he would, wouldn't he?"
Especially, his claim that the data isn't used for training by companies that are publicly known to have illegally acquired data to train their models doesn't look very serious.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_he_would,_wouldn%27t_he%3...
by hodgehog11 | 2026-02-21 23:55:26+00:00
I agree with your counterpoint to OS integration, but Microsoft Teams is infamous for not being "good enough" otherwise. Laggy, buggy, unresponsive, a massive resource hog especially if it runs at startup. It's gotten a bit better, but not enough. These are not complaints on HN, they're in my workplace.

Not everyone is running the latest and greatest hardware, very few actually have the money for that. If you're running hardware from before this decade, or especially the early 2010s, the difference between an Electron app and a native app is unbelievably stark. Electron will often bring the device to its knees.
by Capricorn2481 | 2026-02-21 23:55:28+00:00
Because it's remarkably easier to write bugs in a code base you know nothing about, and we usually try to prevent bugs entirely, not debug them after they are found. The whole premise of what you're saying is dependent on knowing bugs exist before they hit Prod. I inherit people's legacy apps. That almost never happens.

In sufficiently complicated systems, the 10xer who knows nothing about the edge cases of state could do a lot more damage than an okay developer who knows all the gotchas. That's why someone departing a project is such a huge blow.