MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by imiric | 2026-02-15 13:18:25+00:00
> I'm not making a judgment about this person [...] just stating a reasonable conclusion that the author suffered from mental illness.

You're not making a judgment, but are somehow able to diagnose mental illness from a blog post? Wild.

It's far easier to conclude that the system has failed this person, as it habitually fails millions of people in the US, in these same circumstances. Are they all mentally ill?

And even if mental health is an issue, does that mean that they are somehow less worthy of assistance? That it's OK for a human being to live under a bridge?

The level of self-righteousness and lack of empathy in your comments is baffling.
by graphpilled | 2026-02-15 13:18:33+00:00
Hi HN, I've been obsessed with the idea of visual ML model building since mid-2024. I experimented with a bunch of approaches: Three.js to PyTorch, a Three.js to OCaml compiler with a custom Lisp-inspired IR targeting CUDA. None of them felt right, so I paused to work on other projects.
In December I rethought the whole approach. Instead of targeting CUDA (which requires a server), I asked: what if the entire compiler ran in the browser? WebGPU had matured enough that it seemed possible.
So I built this. ReScript compiles to JavaScript and generates WGSL compute shaders. I defined 208 operations as algebraic types, wrote a shape inference engine with broadcasting and convolution rules, and built a codegen module (3500+ lines) that emits optimized WGSL for every op. The compiler handles topological sorting, buffer allocation, and dispatch scheduling. Autograd generates backward kernels for each differentiable operation. No server, no ONNX runtime—just your browser and GPU.
The demo is a 3D block builder where you drag layers onto a canvas and watch four code views update live: the high-level nn.js API, the ReScript compiler graph, the raw WGSL shaders, and the dispatch table. You can load preset architectures (CNN, Transformer, Autoencoder, LSTM) or build your own.
What I'm most pleased with is the INT4 quantized matmul—column-major weight layout for coalesced reads, vec4 dot products, per-group dequantization. I got Qwen 2.5 7B running entirely in-browser at decent speed even on my crappy used ThinkPad.
Source: https://github.com/graphpilled/visual-web-ai
Try it out and tell me what you think.
by arter45 | 2026-02-15 13:18:52+00:00
I think there's an additional, more fundamental reason.

The thing about software, unlike many other kinds of engineering, is that it often feels disconnected from hardware and actual, you know, physics.
Of course there are physical limits to software (speed of light, the size of a CPU, ...), but they are usually abstracted away or they are managed in some other ways (like scaling).

Also, consider that the fundamental tools of software engineering, programming languages, are built to be able to support essentially everything you can think of and define precisely (functional Turing completeness).

Finally, there has been a lot of push towards the idea that to be a good SWE you need to code as a hobby, too, "dream code", and essentially live your own life thinking about technology.

When you are a successful tech person (you're good at what you're doing), and the approach to your job (define things accurately enough and you can do essentially everything, abstract way the "real" stuff, ...) becomes the approach to your hobbies and your entire life, and your social circles are exclusively made of tech people, the temptation to treat everything as a SWE challenge can drive you to the extremes.

Tech (especially software wise) is something you can drive to your own goals with little obstacles, so why not treat old age as a "bug" to be removed? Why waste "life cycles" to prepare and taste actual food, when you get nutrients in a more time-efficient way? And so on.

The less extreme step to this is working in tech domains which are "cool" regardless of the actual impacts on people's lives and society. This is of course not specific to SWE, but I feel like SWE somehow amplifies this because of the immaterial nature of code.
by dotancohen | 2026-02-15 13:19:05+00:00
How is Israel a bully? We've been constantly attacked our entire existence, and even before we had an independent nation. We've done everything that we reasonably can to be peaceful with our neighbours, who have vowed our destruction for over a century.

I understand that we have been villainized by the armies of propaganda funded by oil money. But any interested party could look at the facts of history and realize who is the real bully here.
by Eisenstein | 2026-02-15 13:19:33+00:00
You haven't addressed the argument at all; all you are doing is mentioning specific qualms you have with how this country is being run. Nothing about the structural problems with the US system or the situation we are in right now, or racism, has anything to do with whether or not the public good is better served by public servants rather than for profit interests. Did you forget that slavery was a for profit system which took government intervention to abolish?

And there are many places in the middle between 'government always bad' and 'private always bad'. Extreme positions never get you a good version of the thing you want.
by Argonaut998 | 2026-02-15 13:19:52+00:00
1. Because it is referring to the Super Bowl which was last week

2. Because everyone knows China is a surveillance state. It’s also entirely done by the state.

3. As above, the US’ surveillance is masked under private companies. This is far different from everywhere else.

4. Whataboutism (although I generally hate this newspeak term).
by xx123122 | 2026-02-15 13:20:10+00:00
Let me clarify the team structure to avoid any misunderstanding.

We are actually three first-year Master's students. This project is indeed a summary of our learning from this past semester, which we rushed to wrap up right before the Chinese New Year break.

When I mentioned 'Project Lead,' I was referring to a senior PhD candidate in our lab. He acts as a mentor to review our code and ensure quality control, but the learning and implementation are very much ours. And yes, to move fast and polish the English, we did utilize LLMs during the writing process.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-15 13:20:44+00:00
"static inline" is not the same as "inline".

In the former case the compiler is allowed to always inline the function.

In the latter case, even when the compiler chooses to inline the function, it also emits code for an independent instance of the function, because the function is public and it may be called from another file.

So "static inline" in the worst case does nothing, but it suggests to the compiler that the function should be inlined everywhere, which it will probably do, unless it decides that the function is too long (or it uses some features forbidden in inlined functions, e.g. variadic arguments, setjmp, alloca, etc.), so the benefits of inlining it may be less than the disadvantages.

When the compiler refuses to follow the suggestion of inlining the function, it can be made to tell the reason, e.g. with "-Winline".

So the compiler does not ignore the suggestion, even if it may choose to not follow it.
by foldr | 2026-02-15 13:21:37+00:00
Again, you're suggesting an equivalence between someone who has strong views and someone who's simply disconnected from reality. Thunberg is right to be concerned about the environment. You could argue that she's too concerned (maybe). Thiel is not right to be worried about the antichrist and Armageddon.

We don't need to find some kind of mythical middle ground between people who are too worried about the antichrist and people who aren't sufficiently worried about the antichrist. Rather, we should just set eschatological eccentrics aside when it comes to orienting our political outlook.
by gempir | 2026-02-15 13:21:40+00:00
I have used Slack Connect once in my 8 years of using slack. I agree it can be a moat, but that's not the case for everyone.

Slack doesn't have one "main thing" it's doing perfect. They have just all around great product, with some weaknesses here and there.

- Solid mobile app

- very good API with good SDKs

- easy to build very rich slack bots, with good building blocks

- Good notification management

- Workflows for non technical people that make automation easy

- Good level of customization

- Good enough performance

- Video/Audio calls are good enough

So when a company is questioning what tool to use Slack is an easy go-to. "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM" type of tool.

Can you live without it? yeah. But do you really wanna focus on what chat platform your company should be using or just focus on your product?
by luqtas | 2026-02-15 13:21:42+00:00
> It would be funny if it wasn't auch a successful con.

sometimes i remember about this space and laugh. i guess i found thinking i would find some data for a speaker i was looking for back in the days but it turned out into audiophiles typing their absurd: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php

another funny demographics is mechanical keyboard enthusiasts by rating sound of switches and discussing over minimal numbers of gf (grams-force) in same type of switches (linear, clicky etc.). often times there are videos showing sounds of hundreds of USD keyboards with owners hunting and pecking hahaha
by invader | 2026-02-15 13:23:00+00:00
Yes, Descent II OST is on a totally different level compared to the MIDI-only Descent I soundtrack. And by famous musicians to boot - like Type O Negative and Ogre of Skinny Puppy, who created my favorite "Glut" and "Ratzez" tracks. It was the time when games became big enough to bring popular musicians aboard for the soundtrack, Quake with Trent Reznor being a perfect example.

Also, the series was followed by Descent Freespace I/II, leaving a significant impact on the genre of space shooters. Though there are completely different games that have nothing to do with the original series.
by johndough | 2026-02-15 13:23:13+00:00
Only if chip-to-chip communication was a bottleneck. Which it isn't.

If a layer completely fits in SRAM (as is probably the case for Cerebras), you only have to communicate the hidden states between chips for each token. The hidden states are very small (7168 floats for DeepSeek-V3.2 https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.2/blob/main/c... ), which won't be a bottleneck.

Things get more complicated if a layer does not fit in SRAM, but it still works out fine in the end.
by miki123211 | 2026-02-15 13:23:52+00:00
No single piece of content (unless you're a really large website) is worth the paper that such a contract would be written on.

This is the problem with AI scraping. On one hand, they need a lot of content, on the other, no single piece of content is worth much by itself. If they were to pay every single website author, they'd spend far more on overhead than they would on the actual payments.

Radio faces a similar problem (it would be impossible to hunt down every artist and negotiate licensing deals for every single song you're trying to play). This is why you have collective rights management organizations, which are even permitted by law to manage your rights without your consent in some countries.
by DannyBee | 2026-02-15 13:24:15+00:00
I agree. I will say the slowness i could kind of understand - just poor network protocol optimization/etc on their part, etc. Not that i excused it, but i at least could understand how you get there - you are always on a fast network and so you just don't notice what it's like when you aren't.

The brokeness was always what got me. I had to believe either they had no unit tests, or 1000's of them were failing and they released it anyway. Because it was so fragile that it would have been impossible to test it and not notice easily broken things.
by codethief | 2026-02-15 13:24:58+00:00
> The only reason we did the scans were because we were making a significant life decision that we didn’t want to have to backtrack if either got diagnosed with cancer within a year .

Interesting. If it's not too personal, would you mind elaborating on the kind of life decision you were making?

I have never heard of anyone getting checked up for cancer before they make an important life decision. I mean won't a cancer diagnosis disrupt your life anyway?
by TacticalCoder | 2026-02-15 13:26:10+00:00
> ... if regular scans were widespread, it's likely this result in innovations that would drive down costs, improve accuracy, as well as producing a much larger corpus of data with which to guide diagnosis and reduce false positives.

And if there's one thing where AI models really do already excel at it's classifying and noticing patterns.

Many dermatologists (not all of them yet, at least not in the EU), for example already have software classifiers using pictures of one's skin and helping guide diagnosis. I've lots of moles/nevi and freckles on my skin: I'm one of those Gen X kids raised by parents that had no idea that sun exposure and sunburns was a bad thing so I regularly get warning shots and my body, especially my back, if full of scars for for my entire life dermatologists have regularly removed concerning little buggers and sent them to the lab for further analysis.

Nowadays my dermatologist is helped in her classification by hardware/software.

I don't see why that wouldn't be the way forward for full scan MRI: they'll begin to be more and more hooked up to AI classifiers.

It always takes time: it's not as if the tech comes out and in 48 hours every hospital/physician is equipped with it.

It's literally the future is here (classifiers helping dermatologists find concerning nevi), just not evenly distributed (many dermatologists still don't have access to these latest machines).
by viraptor | 2026-02-15 13:26:23+00:00
Why? You may end up with something that doesn't get much attention anymore, but none of the official gui approaches have ever been removed as far as I know. Win32, MFC, winforms, wpf, winui, maui are all still available and apps using them are functional. Even winjs still works apparently, even if it was handed over.

I wouldn't start an app in most of them today, but I wouldn't rewrite one either without a good reason.
by fauigerzigerk | 2026-02-15 13:26:45+00:00
This sort of "addiction" has caused moral panics for centuries starting with reading addiction in the 18th century. During my own lifetime we had this sort of hysteria about comic books, video games, TV and now social media.

I don't deny that it can cause problems. I remember a time as a kid when I was reading so much all day every day that I actually got depressed and lonely when I was forced to interact with the real world. I wanted to live in the story I was reading.

I also used to procrastinate a lot here on Hacker News. There's even a setting you can enable called "noprocrast" to stop your addiction if you want.

My wife told me she had trouble staying awake at school for years because she was reading novels into the early morning.

Some people believe that what we are currently seeing is something new that wouldn't exist without ad funded media companies deliberately causing it. My experience tells me that this is not true.

But to answer your question. I have no solution. If anything, the solutions may exist on an individual level - lifestyle, social connections, etc. Banning this or that medium or various kinds of advertising tricks will have no effect whatsoever.
by kibwen | 2026-02-15 13:26:56+00:00
No, services that lean too heavily on Github routinely receive messages from the admins asking them to do what they can to dial back usage of server resources. It happened to Homebrew, it happened to Rust, and it happened to various other projects who thought they were being good citizens by recommending shallow clones (turns out, shallow clones are somehow harder on the server than full clones).
by veganmosfet | 2026-02-15 13:27:01+00:00
Second part of the saga, now escaping sandbox with multi-layered prompt injection:

BrokenClaws: Escape the Sub-Agent Sandbox with Indirect Prompt Injection in OpenClaw (via Gmail Hook, 0-Click RCE)

https://veganmosfet.github.io/2026/02/15/openclaw_sandbox.ht...
by cowboylowrez | 2026-02-15 13:27:22+00:00
sorry, I probably needed to spell it out for you, when you buy an 18+ or 21+ age limited product, you have to physically show up for it and show your id. registering to vote is also pretty age limited. Now at least for the alcohol thing, parents I think can actually give their kids drinks and get away with it if they don't get caught heh I remember my dad gave me my first beer but you can rest assured that if I proceeded to be knocking back my brothers secret stash of 90 proof shit on the regular in front of my dad, well shit would have turned out pretty much the same as when my brother ratted me out for stealing his own hash pipe lol

oops forgot to mention, you can check the potential internet customer's id also at the time of purchasing the internet connection or obtaining a wifi login. I hope that I've clarified the similarity here and that there was actually no "Weird jump between voicing my political points online and which beer I prefer"
by Neywiny | 2026-02-15 13:27:37+00:00
That's what gets me too. It feels so easy. Just don't store the source data. They usually say they don't, they claim it's deleted quickly or never saved to disk at all or other stuff and its always lies. Just don't save it and there's no attack vector. Same thing with plaintext passwords. The amount of password leak attacks I've seen in recent years is 0 (though I'm sure they're still around). Stored IDs and PII for verification is uncountable
by ekidd | 2026-02-15 13:27:46+00:00
I have been a lead engineer for a few decades now, responsible for training teams and architecting projects. And I've been working heavily with AI.

I know how to get Claude multi-agent mode to write 2,500 lines of deeply gnarly code in 40 minutes, and I know how to get that code solid. But doing this absolutely pulls on decades on engineering skill. I read all the core code. I design key architectural constraints. I invest heavily in getting Claude to build extensive automated verification.

If I left Claude to its own devices, it would still build stuff! But with me actively in the loop, I can diagnose bad trends. I can force strategic investments in the right places at the right times. I can update policy for the agents.

If we're going to have "software factories", let's at least remember all the lessons from Toyota about continual process improvement, about quality, about andon cords and poke-yoke devices, and all the rest.

Could I build faster if I stopped reading code? Probably, for a while. But I would lose the ability to fight entropy, and entropy is the death of software. And Claude doesn't fight entropy especially well yet, not all by itself.
by aleph_minus_one | 2026-02-15 13:28:38+00:00
> The Visual Studio toolchain does have LTSC and stable releases - no one seems to know about them though.

You only get access to the LTSC channel if you have a license for at least Visual Studio Professional (Community won't do it); so a lot of hobbyist programmers and students are not aware of it.

On the other hand, their existence is in my experience very well-known among people who use Visual Studio for work at some company.
Show HN: Chaos Studies – attractors and spatial audio (iOS/Mac/Playdate)
by jlong | 2026-02-15 13:30:04+00:00
My friend built this and I'm blown away with how much fun it is and the high level of polish. It renders 9 different strange attractors (Lorenz, Rössler, Aizawa, Chen, etc.) as particle systems — thousands of particles tracing chaotic paths in real time. You can rotate and zoom with touch/trackpad in 3D.

The sound is the part that surprised me. It's not a soundtrack — the audio is generated from the motion itself using spatial audio, so tones shift as the attractor's behavior changes and the sound moves around you as you rotate the form. Put on headphones.

The Playdate version uses the crank to rotate the attractor. Pure black and white. It's a completely different vibe.

My 9-year-old loves it too, which I wasn't expecting. Would love to hear what HN thinks — especially if anyone has suggestions for other attractor systems worth adding.
by dgxyz | 2026-02-15 13:30:04+00:00
It’s not the environmental campaigning that’s the issue. I am very much aligned with that. In fact I’ve done a fair bit of that myself and you’ll occasionally find me at demonstrations. I think most people are well aligned with that.

It’s the deep dive into geopolitics which is now being used to discredit her that is the problem. There’s things you don’t touch with a pole and she’s been all over them. That’s why the media have shut up about her. There isn’t universal support or consensus there. She did a lot of damage to the environmental cause getting involved.

That makes her a pariah on all causes.

The mid ground is a rational scientific approach and consistent pressure and staying within the rails that are your primary cause.
by the__alchemist | 2026-02-15 13:30:12+00:00
You have to do this for certain rust things too. I can't remember which, but I inevitably run into a need to install the MSVC toolchain to compile rust. I think it might be related to FFI, or libs which use FFI? The same thing comes up in Linux, but the process to install it is different.

I got anxiety reading the article, describing exactly why it sucks. It's nice to know from the article and comments here there are ways around it, but the way I have been doing it was the "hope I check the right checkboxes and wait a few hours" plan. There is usually one "super checkbox" that will do the right things.

I have to do this once per OS [re]install generally.
by lowsong | 2026-02-15 13:30:41+00:00
You'd be out of your mind to trust an OpenAI built Slack competitor. Slack, for all of it's many faults, is two things:

- Reliable, both in terms of "service uptime" and in terms of "Slack isn't going to rugpull your features"
- Secure. Slack don't have a history of major breaches or data exposure.

Both of these means that people feel comfortable relying on it. Who would possibly trust OpenAI with data security, or that their app will still be around in 3 years.
by imiric | 2026-02-15 13:30:46+00:00
I got your poor attempt at sarcasm. I just don't think it's a good argument.

The person who understands how lower levels of abstraction work, will always run circles technically around those who don't. Besides, "AI" tools are not a higher level of abstraction, and can't be compared to compilers. Their goal is to replace all cognitive work done by humans. If you think programming is obsolete, the same will eventually happen to whatever work you're doing today with agents. In the meantime, programmers will be in demand to fix issues caused by vibe coders.
by blincoln | 2026-02-15 13:31:19+00:00
> At least in America, high-tech scans are treated as a cash cow. And cheap & reasonable tests, if done, are merely an afterthought - after the patient has been milked for all the scan-bucks that their insurance will pay out.

Maybe it's a regional thing, but that hasn't been my experience. I've had one MRI and one CT scan in the 25+ years that I've been a full-time employed adult with insurance.

I'd have been happy to sign up for more so I could have proactive health information and the raw data to use for hobby projects.
by kibwen | 2026-02-15 13:31:21+00:00
No, this is silly. You can look at the availability and maturity of toolchains, the rate of release of projects written in that language, the rate of release of books and learning materials, the rate at which universities begin teaching the language, the volume of discourse devoted to that language in magazines and the online venues which did exist (e.g. Usenet), and crucially the declining metrics of all of the above for the direct competitors of that language.