MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by drdeca | 2026-02-18 04:09:00+00:00
I wouldn’t say it “runs on” virtual particles per se. I think the virtual particle terms are more tracking the interactions between different fields. I would say it runs on quantum fields on a curved spacetime, yeah. And, as for what precisely a quantum field is, this is somewhat mysterious, but generally it is a quantum version of a classical field, where there is a value (e.g. “value of the electromagnetic field”) at each point in spacetime. For quantum fields, instead of each point having a definite value, for any region there is an observable for the total value in that region.

As for how the curvature of spacetime fits with all that, that is an open question that has yet to be resolved. Well, constructing a quantum field theory within a given curved spacetime is fine, but we don’t know how exactly GR and QFT fit together.

I expect that your response is going to be to call these “abstractions” or something, as if this does anything more to discredit them than complaining that any idea is “just an idea”. But these are measurable things. That which can be measured is a real thing.
by SoftTalker | 2026-02-18 04:09:18+00:00
> Do they also make you write your own performance review and set your own objectives?

Not to get off on a tangent but this has got to be a "tell" for how much a company is managed by formula and how much it's actually got thinking people running things. Every time I've had to write my own review I fill out the form with some corporatese bullshit, my supervisor approves it and adds some more bullshit, it disappears into HR and I never hear anything about it until it's time for the next review, and it starts over again. There isn't even reference to any of my "objectives" from the last review, because that review has simply disappeared.

But I'm sure some HR exec is checking boxes for following "best practices" in employee evaluation.
by pdtech_apps | 2026-02-18 04:09:33+00:00
Hey HN! I'm the creator of StatusPing.

BACKSTORY:
I was paying $79/mo for BetterUptime to monitor my side projects. That felt ridiculous for a simple uptime checker. So I built StatusPing.

WHAT IT DOES:
• HTTP/HTTPS monitoring (60s intervals)
• Email/Slack/Discord/Webhook alerts
• Public status pages with uptime graphs
• Free tier: 3 monitors
• Pro: $9/mo for 20 monitors

TECH STACK:
Next.js 14, PostgreSQL (Neon), TypeScript, Vercel. Entire stack costs ~$5/mo to run, which is why I can price it at $9 instead of $79.

I'd love your feedback! What features would make this a must-have for your projects?
by Sayyidalijufri | 2026-02-18 04:10:06+00:00
The THR (Tunjangan Hari Raya) bonus is a lifesaver for a lot of people basically a mandatory 13th-month salary paid before Idul Fitri to cover Lebaran expenses like new clothes, travel home (mudik), and food for open houses. It's tied to your religion's big holiday, so Muslims get it around Eid.
by ajnin | 2026-02-18 04:10:43+00:00
I guess what they're saying is that, for example, a password of length 12 has about 71 bits of entropy if using an alphabet of 62 characters, and 76 bits with an alphabet of 82 characters. But if you only increase the length by 1 you already get 77 bits with 62 characters only. So length beats adding special chars in that sense.
by notpushkin | 2026-02-18 04:10:53+00:00
Ohh, thanks for the reminder! I’ve been a Universal Fund member briefly, but I’ve lost my job soon after, and have had it paused since then. I do have some stable income again now – will resume my subscription later this month. :)

One thing I didn’t like back then (IIRC) was the fact that you couldn’t opt out of receiving the patient stories with your monthly receipts. While genuinely heartwarming, I’d prefer to check these out when I’m in the mood. Any idea if there’s such an option now?
by ragall | 2026-02-18 04:11:50+00:00
> I’m confused what kind of software engineer jobs there are that don’t involve meeting with people, “aligning expectations”, getting consensus, making slides/decks to communicate that, thinking about market positioning, etc?

The vast majority of software engineers in the world. The most widespread management culture is that where a team's manager is the interface towards the rest of the organization and the engineers themselves don't do any alignment/consensus/business thinking, which is the manager's exclusive job.

I used to work like that and I loved it. My managers were decent and they allowed me to focus on my technical skills. Then, due to those technical skills I'd acquired, I somehow got hired at Google, stayed there nearly a decade but hated all the OKR crap, perf and the continuous self-promotion I was obliged to do.
by imiric | 2026-02-18 04:11:58+00:00
> Fundamentally, these are statistical models

> So, of course it's going to hit loops because it's not fundamentally conscience.

Wait, I was told that these are superintelligent agents with sophisticated reasoning skills, and that AGI is either here or right around the corner. Are you saying that's wrong?

Surely they can answer a simple question correctly. Just look at their ARC-AGI scores, and all the other benchmarks!
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-18 04:12:05+00:00
> No one considers human-made art or human-made monuments to be human.

How can art not be human, when it's a human creation? That seems self-contradictory.

> They can't vote...

They get a vote where it matters, though. For example, the presence of a historic building can be the decisive "vote" on whether an area can be redeveloped or not. Why would we ever do that, if not out of a sense that the very presence of that building has acquired some sense of indirect moral worth?
by robwwilliams | 2026-02-18 04:12:09+00:00
Sonnet 4.6 failed for me.

“Walk. It’s 50 meters—a 30-second stroll. Driving that distance to a car wash would be slightly absurd, and you’d presumably need to drive back anyway. “

Opus 4.6 nailed it: “Drive. You’re going to a car wash. ”

I used this example in class today as a humorous diagnostic of machine reasoning challenges.
by lorakamina | 2026-02-18 04:14:49+00:00
Wait but all the Israeli reporting is the same. Flipping the script, how many military age abled men/women were taken as prisoners? I’d argue y’all over obsess on the few elderly/young ones they took. They weren’t targeted, they just happened to be the grandmothers, sons, nephews of IDF reserve/active members. This sounds good dum dum?
by jurschreuder | 2026-02-18 04:15:10+00:00
Workers may see the LLM as a productivity boost because they can basically cheat a their homework.

As a CEO I see it as a massive clog up of vast amounts of content that somebody will need to check. A DDoS of any text-based system.

The other day I got a document of 155 pages in Whatsapp. Thanx. Same with pull requests. Who will check all this?
by laurieg | 2026-02-18 04:15:31+00:00
Imposter syndrome is a thinking trap. A couple of things you can do to help:

Try to separate out 'ruminating' from 'thinking'. What's the difference? For our purposes 'thinking' has a fixed outcome and an end point. Trying to solve a coding problem. Working out how to make dinner. Calculating your taxes. When you reach your goal, you're done and you stop. 'Ruminating' has no end point. There is not end or action associated with it. The tricky part is that it often masquerades as thinking, so you feel like you're solving a problem.

For example, you do a job interview and you go over and over what happened in your mind. "Maybe I should have answered this differently". "Maybe I should've prepared some more of these questions". Of course, you can't change what happened in the past. You're just rolling the ideas around in your head and probably making yourself feel worse and worse. Rumination can be focused on the past, the future or even some hypothetical, imaginary situation ("What if I lost my job", "What if my house burnt down"). Again, actual preparation (Saving an emergency fund. Getting insurance) has an action associated, but rumination never ends, it just keeps going around in your head.

The other thing is to keep an accurate record of your performance. This will be different for everyone, and varies a lot depending on the job. The key thing is to make the record as close in time to the action as possible. For example, you feel like your pull requests aren't as good as other people's. Don't wait until the end of the week and then reflect on the quality of your work. Instead, every time your make a pull request, write down an accurate, objective assessment of the quality.

People who suffer from imposter syndrome tend to forget their wins and remember their losses again and again (there's that rumination!). By having an accurate record that you made yourself you can cut through this and show to yourself your true performance.
by joering2 | 2026-02-18 04:15:41+00:00
> And so we should expect AI to look the same

Is that somewhat substantiated assumption? I recall learning on University in 2001 the history of AI and that initial frameworks were written in 70's and that prediction was we will reach human-like intelligence by 2000. Just because Sama came up with this somewhat breakthrough of an AI, it doesn't mean that equal improvement leaps will be done on a monthly/annual basis going forward. We may as well not make another huge leaps or reach what some say human intelligence level in 10 years or so.
by hattmall | 2026-02-18 04:17:39+00:00
>So if a student comes to me wishing to start building computers what advice do I give them? Farm something?

Buy used stuff? 99.9% of consumers have no need for anywhere near the cutting edge tech. I do far more than most people and get by just fine with a workstation I bought used in 2014. My newest Laptop is ~2018 and that was only because I wanted something with 4K that I could flip to tablet.

Raspberry PI's, SOCS, Microcontrollers, there's a million things today that are awesome. Are hobbyist students needing to build datacenters!?
by Someone1234 | 2026-02-18 04:17:41+00:00
I won't argue with your point; both Anthropic and OpenAI name their models poorly, and it is hard to follow unless you're already following it.

"Sonnet" only makes sense relative to other things but not by itself. If you don't know those other things, it is difficult to understand.

But, if you were asking (and I'm not sure that you are): "Sonnet 4.6 is a cheaper, but worse, version of Opus 4.6 which itself is like GPT-5.3 Codex with Thinking High. Making Sonnet 4.6 like a ChatGPT 5.3 Thinking Standard model."
by esafak | 2026-02-18 04:17:57+00:00
Lee Pace is a first rate actor but I could not recognize him or indeed, most of the characters in this show, as representative of their roles. I struggled to suspend my disbelief. The show felt like it was written by people who imagined what it must have been like rather than people who had any experience of it. I still enjoyed it somewhat. Not Silicon Valley good but okay.
by Slow_Hand | 2026-02-18 04:18:18+00:00
Funny that this came up today. Last night I started re-watching the series after several years. Just this afternoon I was reflecting on how genuinely charismatic Lee Pace's Joe McMillen is.

You really feel it. Even when we know he's a manipulative sonuvabitch. It's mesmerizing. You have to admire his ability to spin shit into gold. The man has vision.

There's a sequence around S01E07 that I'm looking forward to reaching again, in which Joe is out on the front lawn with Donna's daughters during a hurricane and it's FEELS like magic. His performance feels earnest, and hypnotizing, and genuinely magical as he puts on a show for these young girls in the rain.

There's something intangible and hard to describe about the series. The writers have a way of making it transcend it's core drama and feel very different from just about any other show I can recall. Somehow it feels like pure creative expression that manages to defy outside expectations and tell a story that feels true to life and convey the ambitions of creative people who are fighting to make something beautiful.
by drdeca | 2026-02-18 04:18:29+00:00
You seem to be asking about “divine hiddenness”. I don’t know why God doesn’t make His existence more obvious to those that don’t seek Him. Like I quoted above, his ways are above our ways. That’s not to say that the reason is definitely beyond what I can comprehend, just that it is beyond what I do comprehend.

(On the off chance that you were being sincere in your question about mana: no.)

The point I was trying to make by quoting that passage was the necessity of humility. The way the world works doesn’t need our approval. It is above us.
by throwawayq3423 | 2026-02-18 04:18:47+00:00
> On Friday, May 10, a top official with the Internal Revenue Service dropped a bombshell. IRS staffers had singled out conservative organizations with “tea party” or “patriots” in their name that were seeking tax-exempt nonprofit status, subjecting them to extra scrutiny to see if they were abusing the tax law as it relates to political activity.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/11/irs-tea-party-s...

You're not allowed to seek tax exempt status if you are a partisan organization. Searching for political terminology to determine that is perfectly logical.
by nickpsecurity | 2026-02-18 04:19:28+00:00
Bruce Schneier had the Friday Squid Blogging posts that he allowed random stuff on. Most of the noise was contained in the Friday threads.

Lobsters had a weekly thread by caius called, "What are you doing this week?" People would post personal projects or experiences in it. On top of interesting tech, that let us pray more specifically for and encourage some in need.

The weekly threads might work here.
Show HN: TerminalRant – Mastodon for developers who live in the terminal
by crestniraj | 2026-02-18 04:19:51+00:00
Hi HN,

I kept noticing something slightly ironic: a lot of developers live in their terminal, coding, running tests, pushing commits and then open a browser just to post a rant.

That context switch felt unnecessary.

So I built TerminalRant, a Mastodon client designed for people who prefer staying in the terminal.

It’s written in Go (using Bubble Tea) and focuses on being keyboard-first: fast startup, vim-style navigation, inline editing, and buffer-mode posting through $EDITOR. No mouse required.

It’s not trying to compete with full-featured GUI clients. It’s just meant to make reading and posting feel native to a terminal workflow.

You can install it with:
`go install github.com/CrestNiraj12/terminalrant@latest`

There’s also Homebrew and Scoop support.

I’d really appreciate feedback, especially on the UX and posting workflow. I’m sure there are things power users would want that I haven’t thought of yet.

Repo: https://github.com/CrestNiraj12/terminalrant

Thanks for taking a look.
by bccdee | 2026-02-18 04:19:58+00:00
There's a lot of rote work in software development that's well-suited to LLM automation, but I think a lot of us overestimate the actual usefulness of a chatbot to the average white-collar worker. What's the point of making Copilot compose an email when your prompt would be longer than the email itself? You can tell ChatGPT to make you a slide deck, but slide decks are already super simple to make. You can use an LLM as a search engine, but we already have search engines. People sometimes talk about using a chatbot to brainstorm, but that seems redundant when you could simply think, free from the burden of explaining yourself to a chatbot.

LLMs are impressive and flexible tools, but people expect them to be transformative, and they're only transformative in narrow ways. The places they shine are quite low-level: transcription, translation, image recognition, search, solving clearly specified problems using well-known APIs, etc. There's value in these, but I'm not seeing the sort of universal accelerant that some people are anticipating.
by lambda | 2026-02-18 04:20:13+00:00
> The project owner strongly emphasize the no LLM dependency, in a world of AI slope this is so refreshing.

Huh? This is obvious AI slop from the readme. Look at that "ASCII art" diagram with misaligned "|" at the end of the lines. That's a very clear AI slop tell, anyone editing by hand would instinctively delete the extra spaces to align those.
by jpgvm | 2026-02-18 04:20:25+00:00
I interpreted this:
> I don’t see any notable difference between immigrant and non-immigrant

As your main point.

More educated or not doesn't actually matter, whether they meet the bar or not is all that matters no?

My over-arching point is if there were more Americans to be hired that meet the bar they will usually be hired before immigrants because they are less paperwork and money (immigration lawyers fees).

Also I think comparing to immigrant education isn't necessarily a great idea, immigrants need more on-paper education to simply clear the immigration requirements because most governments around the world place a higher emphasis on that than work experience or their salary. US in particular values years of education at a roughly 2:5 ratio vs work experience with 10 years of work experience necessary to qualify vs a 4 year degree.

If you are somehow implying immigrants are fundamentally less intelligent then yeah I don't know what to tell you but that is probably not correct.
by rossjudson | 2026-02-18 04:21:30+00:00
Delete a decryption key.
Good luck! I'll see you at the end of time.

Break your control plane, and you can't stop the propagation of poison.

Propagate the wrong trust bundle... everywhere.

Also, it's not about the delete command. It's about the automatic cleanup following behind it that shreds everything, or repurposes the storage.
by kadiran | 2026-02-18 04:21:35+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm Kadir, a 19-year-old CS student from Turkey.

I noticed that real estate agents (especially in my local area) struggle to sell empty apartments, and professional physical staging is too expensive for them. Existing AI tools felt either too complex or locked behind heavy subscriptions.

So I spent the last few weeks building QuickStaging to solve this.

Tech Stack:

Frontend: Next.js & Tailwind

Backend: Also Next.js (+MongoDB)

AI: Gemini-2-5-flash-image

It's my first serious SaaS project. I'm currently looking for feedback on the UX and the realism of the generations.

You can try it without signing up initially (just click generate).

Thanks for checking it out!
by raincole | 2026-02-18 04:22:37+00:00
> it's really just math to...

Uh, LLMs are notoriously bad at basic arithmetic. I think you might be thinking about another kind of AI.

Plus I don't really believe LLMs can reliably tell which hand is better. If you remove the drawing part and simply present two hands to an LLM and ask it which one is stronger I expect it to do much much much worse than experienced player. There isn't much reason to expect otherwise (but I'm willing to be proven wrong if such benchmarks exist)
by georgemcbay | 2026-02-18 04:22:47+00:00
> If he has the license then yea it's legal. Chances are if he's posted it publicly he has the rights. Also for a low level personal website that's not going to get a lot of traffic and only hosting 3 songs they probably gave him a license for free.

Incredibly unlikely.

"Dance Yrself Clean" is owned by Warner Music Group, "Come On Eileen" is owned by Universal Music Group.

Both are highly litigious, extremely rights-protective and not in the habit of licensing music for free.

It is far more likely the person who put the site up just YOLO'd it and is hoping they never notice.
by vessenes | 2026-02-18 04:23:33+00:00
Agreed.

We do have a way to see the financial impact - just add up Anthropic and oAI's reported revenues -> something like $30b in annual run rate. Given growth rates, (stratospheric), it seems reasonable to conclude informed buyers see economic and/or strategic benefit in excess of their spend. I certainly do!

That puts the benefits to the economy at just around where Mastercard's benefits are, on a dollar basis. But with a lot more growth. Add something in there for MS and GOOG, and we're probably at least another $5b up. There are only like 30 US companies with > $100bn in revenues; at current growth rates, we'll see combined revenues in this range in a year.

All this is sort of peanuts though against 29 trillion GDP, 0.3%. Well not peanuts, it's boosting the US GDP by 10% of its historical growth rate, but the bull case from singularity folks is like 10%+ GDP growth; if we start seeing that, we'll know it.

All that said, there is real value being added to the economy today by these companies. And no doubt a lot of time and effort spent figuring out what the hell to do with it as well.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-18 04:24:15+00:00
> but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book.

That book was very different than what I expected from all of the internet comment takes about it. The premise was really thin and did't actually support the idea that the jobs don't generate value. It was comparing to a hypothetical world where everything is perfectly organized, everyone is perfectly behaved, everything is perfectly ordered, and therefore we don't have to have certain jobs that only exist to counter other imperfect things in society.

He couldn't even keep that straight, though. 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? It didn't make sense and you could see that he didn't really understand software, other than how he imagined it fitting into his idealized world where everything anarchist and open source is good and everything corporate and capitalist is bad. Once you see how little he understands about a topic you're familiar with, it's hard to unsee it in his discussions of everything else.

That said, he still wasn't arguing that the work didn't generate economic value. Jobs that don't provide value for a company are cut, eventually. They exist because the company gets more benefit out of the job existing than it costs to employ those people. The "bullshit jobs" idea was more about feelings and notions of societal impact than economic value.
by jpgvm | 2026-02-18 04:24:42+00:00
Bar was lowered massively during the COVID employment boom (with the exception of Apple really).

Unfortunately resetting the bar has massive collateral damage but it will sort itself out pretty quickly.

All the good ones will be re-employed within short order. The ones that the layoffs were trying to flush out with said layoffs will transition out of FAANG into lower-tier employers.
by nradov | 2026-02-18 04:24:46+00:00
Bullshit Jobs is one of those "just so" stories that seems truthy but doesn't stand up to any critical evaluation. Companies are obviously not hesitant to lay off unproductive workers. While in large enterprises there is some level of empire building where managers hire more workers than necessary just to inflate their own importance, in the long run those businesses fall to leaner competitors.
by cocoa19 | 2026-02-18 04:26:17+00:00
The one thing Qt is the most attacked for is the licensing. I disagree with this sentiment, it is pretty straightforward to me.

There are other fair criticism of Qt, more specifically about Qt Quick/QML: the need for 2-3 languages (C++/QML/JavaScript), using C++, not using modern C++, not enough out-of-the-box widgets compared to Qt Widgets, and the clusterfuck that is layouts in QML.

Out of all, the only real one for me is layouts. They are painful to deal with. I never had a problem with Qt Widgets layouts though.
by ls612 | 2026-02-18 04:26:53+00:00
My parents love to tell me how in either late 1997 or early 1998 they bought the first PC for our family, a Compaq with a Pentium 3, 12 GB hard drive, 128MB of RAM, and no graphics acceleration at all beyond whatever was integrated on the Pentium 3. It cost $2000 back then so probably almost $4000 today. My high end 4090 rig cost a bit more than that to build for comparison and that machine is better than 98% of machines out there today.