MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dylan604 | 2026-02-19 20:09:51+00:00
I wasn't that young, but we tried with a cheap plastic 20 gallon fish tank which gave us a bit more depth. It was before LEDs, so all we had were hot lights that wound up needing to be very close to the tank to get the amount of light needed. Over the course of the day, that heat actually melted the tank which meant we no longer had a 20 gallon tank but whatever the volume was below the melted part where it would start to leak.

I love your attempt at a practical to that level. I have one that I'm still working on with long exposure timelapse and motion control, but I just can't ever get my schedule to let me do it. I have models of flying saucers with little aliens at the helm that I've rigged up with LEDs connected to an Arduino. That also controls the motion control slider I have, and the camera shutter. The idea was to turn on the UFO lights for a very short duration while the shutter is open to keep from over exposing during the long exposure to capture the night sky in the background. There is no point in doing the shot, except just because. I have the problem of when I have free time, the weather is shite or the wrong time of the year for the part of the sky I want.
by guywithahat | 2026-02-19 20:10:06+00:00
Well it's a retort on the 2022 IRA bill, which increased the IRS budget by 80 billion over 10 years, and paved the way to hire 87,000 people. There has been a lot of hiring recently so it's hard to tell one thing from another but this isn't so much of mass layoff as an attempt at returning to normal.
by zahlman | 2026-02-19 20:10:11+00:00
> Contrast an Algol-descendant like C, Pascal, Java, or even Python with a pure functional language like Haskell. In the former, control structure names are reserved words and control structures have a distinct syntax. In the latter, if you see `foo` in the body of a function definition you have no idea if it's a simple computation or some sophisticated and complex control structure just from what it looks like. The former provides more clues, which makes it easier to decipher at a glance. (Not knocking Haskell, here; it's an interesting language. But it's absolutely more challenging to read.)

For what it's worth, Python has been moving away from this, taking advantage of a new parser that can implement "soft keywords" like 3.10's "match" statement (which I'm pretty sure was the first application).

Believe it or not, the motivation for this is to avoid reverse compatibility breaks. Infamously, making `async` a keyword broke TensorFlow, which was using it as an identifier name in some places (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51337939).

In my own language design, there's a metaprogramming facility that lets you define new keywords and associated control structures, but all keywords are chosen from a specific reserved "namespace" to avoid conflicts with identifiers.
by Spivak | 2026-02-19 20:10:41+00:00
You have described the lawmaking process of basically any country. We can't actually write laws to solve real problems because real problems are hard and you can actually tell whether they've been solved or not, but we can write laws to solve imaginary problems and then when nothing changes declare victory.

You can pretty much tell when any given administration has run out of ideas once they start making a huge amount of noise about laws that affect to first and second order literally nobody. 3-D printed guns is basically California's version of illegal immigrants voting in elections. Both things happen to a vanishingly small degree that it's not worth taking any action on either, but you can make them sound like they're the greatest threat to America if you have a megaphone loud enough.
by NoSalt | 2026-02-19 20:10:42+00:00
I have no idea ... it's just that 9 is the last, non OS X, Apple OS I used. It very well could look just like 8, which I also love.

Actually, given the state of UI these days, I would go so far as saying that I love Apple Macintosh OS 1.x through 9.x. I miss the heady days of "old school" computing and the wild west of the nascent internet.
by stephen_cagle | 2026-02-19 20:10:44+00:00
I also worked at Google (on the original Gemini, when it was still Bard internally) and my experience largely mirrors this. My finding is that Gemini is pretty great for factual information and also it is the only one that I can reliably (even with the video camera) take a picture of a bird and have it tell me what the bird is. But it is just pretty bad as a model to help with development, myself and everyone I know uses Claude. The benchmarks are always really close, but my experience is that it does not translate to real world (mostly coding) task.

tldr; It is great at search, not so much action.
by ineedasername | 2026-02-19 20:11:03+00:00
No, AI makes it easier to get boring ideas to more than an elevator pitch or "Wouldn't it be cool..". Countless people right now are able to get that initial bit of excitement over an idea and instead of a little groundwork on various aspects of it.

That process is often long enough to think things through a bit and even have "so what are you working on?" conversations with a friend or colleague that shakes out the mediocre or bad, and either refines things or makes you toss the idea.
by thom_nic | 2026-02-19 20:11:07+00:00
> is this pressure from the gun manufacturing lobby

Definitely not, it's pressure from the anti-gun lobby that keeps pushing "one more bill that this time will actually change violent crime statistics, we promise!"

These bills are being introduced in the states that already have the most restrictive gun control already, yet to nobody's surprise, hasn't done much to curb violent crime. But the lobby groups and candidates campaign and fundraise on the issue so they have to keep the boogeyman alive rather than admit that the policies have been a failure.
by WillPostForFood | 2026-02-19 20:11:20+00:00
that wouldn’t survive if a significant share of that production wasn’t smuggled into Latin America

Let's look at actual numbers. ATF says 50,000 guns were smuggled into latin america between 2015 and 2022. So about 7,200 a year. There are about 15-20 million new firearm sales per year in the US.

So assume ~.03% of production gets smuggled out. I think the industry would survive if that was cut that off. It actually would be better for them because it would make lies and slanders about the industry harder to make.

https://www.thetrace.org/2024/06/atf-gun-trafficking-report-...
by nicbou | 2026-02-19 20:11:39+00:00
It makes sense. A vibe-coded tool can sometimes do the job, just like some cheap Chinese-made widget. Not every task requires hand-crafted professional grade tools.

For example, I have a few letter generators on my website. The letters are often verified by a lawyer, but the generator could totally be vibe-coded. It's basically an HTML form that fills in the blanks in the template. Other tools are basically "take input, run calculation, show output". If I can plug in a well-tested calculation, AI could easily build the rest of the tool. I have been staunchly against using AI in my line of work, but this is an acceptable use of it.
by shevy-java | 2026-02-19 20:11:43+00:00
This is the old "syntax does not matter" claim. Syntax is not the most important thing in the world when it comes to programming languages, but it does matter too. I was using perl, then PHP then ruby. There is no comparison here; ruby beats the other two languages hands down. I get to be able to do more, with less syntax and it is easier to read too (provided you write good code; you can write horrible code in any language of course).

Most of the languages that are created anew, end up being a clone of C or C++. Go is one of the few exceptions here; Rust is not an exception. It is basically C++ really, from the syntax - or even worse.

Sadly it is not possible to try to convince people who claim that syntax does not matter, that it does matter. They just keep on repeating that syntax is irrelevant. I don't think syntax it is irrelevant at all. It has to do with efficiency of expression. Clear thoughts. Clear design. It is all inter-connected.
by solarisos | 2026-02-19 20:11:59+00:00
Thanks for the context, Alex. It’s interesting to hear that the engineering lift was lighter by leveraging the exit node/subnet router plumbing—that’s a clever use of existing primitives.

The point about AWS NAT restrictions is a big one. I think a lot of people underestimate how often 'enterprise-grade' networking actually becomes a bottleneck for direct P2P. Moving that burden away from custom DERP management makes the 'it just works' magic of Tailscale feel much more sustainable for small teams.
by ChrisArchitect | 2026-02-19 20:12:12+00:00
Discussions on a number of the linked posts instead of this digest:

Mark Zuckerberg Grilled on Usage Goals and Underage Users at California Trial https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47075245

Zuckerberg overruled 18 wellbeing experts to keep beauty filters on Insta https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47070743

Mark Zuckerberg Lied to Congress. We Can't Trust His Testimony https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47060486
by qudat | 2026-02-19 20:12:13+00:00
Agreed. The bottleneck is QA/Code review and that is never going away from most corps. I've never worked at a job in tech that didn't require code review and no, asking a code agent to review a PR is never going to be "good enough".

And here we are, the central argument for why code agents are not these job killing hype beasts that are so regularly claimed.

Has anyone seen what multi-agent code workflows produce? Take a look at openclaw, the code base is an absolute disaster. 500k LoC for something that can be accomplished in 10k.
by mbh159 | 2026-02-19 20:12:16+00:00
77.1% on ARC-AGI-2 and still can't stop adding drive-by refactors. ARC-AGI-2 tests novel pattern induction, it's genuinely hard to fake and the improvement is real. But it doesn't measure task scoping, instruction adherence, or knowing when to stop. Those are the capabilities practitioners actually need from a coding agent. We have excellent benchmarks for reasoning. We have almost nothing that measures reliability in agentic loops. That gap explains this thread.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-02-19 20:12:48+00:00
All programming languages are basically Algol or Lisp, even the ones I like.

C? Basically Algol. Pascal? Basically Algol, actually quite closely. Go? Basically Algol, via Pascal. Lua? Basically Algol, surprisingly closely.

Forth? Basically Lisp. Postscript? Basically Lisp.
by solarisos | 2026-02-19 20:13:00+00:00
That ephemeral node bootstrap issue is a classic 'edge case' that becomes a nightmare in CI. It makes sense that centralized DERP might struggle with the sheer churn of nodes popping in and out of existence. Using a Peer Relay that lives permanently on your internal net as the 'anchor' for those CI nodes seems like it would solve that race condition entirely.
by IncreasePosts | 2026-02-19 20:13:09+00:00
It's not the IT department's fault, but it makes one wonder if the IT department needs to actually be that large, since customers need to do so much on their own.

Per capita the UK has 2.5x the IT workers in tax collection compared to the US (~25 IT per million vs 65 IT per million). But, those tax collection IT workers help create a system which means UK citizens don't spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year just to file their taxes.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-19 20:13:17+00:00
sqlx doesn't build queries, or at least it minimally builds them. Which I think is the thing the OP is complaining about.

And, IMO, making dynamic queries harder is preferable. Dynamic queries are inherently unsafe. Sometimes necessary, however you have to start considering things like sql injection attacks with dynamic queries.

This isn't to poo poo sea-orm. I'm just saying that sqlx's design choice to make dynamic queries hard is a logical choice from a safety standpoint.
by GrinningFool | 2026-02-19 20:13:24+00:00
> No, he called some Mexican migrants into the US rapists.

It was more than that.

In his own words, 'some' of those migrants[1] are good people (/maybe/ - he's apparently never met one), but everyone else...

"They're not sending their best. They're sending people with lots of problems. And they're bringing those problems with us[sic]. They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some - I assume - are good people."

[1] being 'sent' here, apparently?
by taminka | 2026-02-19 20:13:29+00:00
actually you may be right, according to project zero by google [1], ~50% is use after free and only ~20% for out of bounds errors, however, this is for errors that resulted in major exploits, i'm not sure what the overall data is

[1] https://projectzero.google/2022/04/the-more-you-know-more-yo...
by vhiremath4 | 2026-02-19 20:13:54+00:00
My good friend Sam Corcos is leading these efforts as the CIO of the Treasury Department. I know a good conspiracy theory about lowering taxes for the rich is much juicier, but if anyone is interested in learning more, he did an excellent interview on Chris Williamson’s podcast about how inefficient the IRS is:

https://youtu.be/u4odAXoqRT8?si=UCpIBm8yy5aIaJcg
by ajspig1 | 2026-02-19 20:14:12+00:00
There are so many SOTA memory claims out there.
There are also very few memory benchmarks (if any) that measure "memory" realistically.
Not to mention the industry can't seem to decide on what "memory" even means.
We need more general-purpose long-term memory systems.
We need ways to measure those. Verify they fulfill the need and are actually SOTA.
by jdlshore | 2026-02-19 20:14:26+00:00
This is self-reported productivity, in that devs are saying AI saves them about 4 hours per week. But let’s not forget the METR study that found a 20% increase in self-reported productivity but a 19% decrease in actual measured productivity.

(It used a clever and rigorous technique for measuring productivity differences, BTW, for anyone as skeptical of productivity measures as I am.)
by OkayPhysicist | 2026-02-19 20:14:54+00:00
It's not "going after" the poor. You have to be out-right negligent to end up with any penalty at all, and the penalties involved are relatively small (20% of how much extra you owed them anyway). The vast majority of these low-income audits consist of "hey, we know you made money X, you didn't report it on your taxes. Fix it".
by O-stevns | 2026-02-19 20:15:12+00:00
No need to defend yourself, I share this sentiment as well. If I'm going to spend time writing and reading a lot of code in a new learning language, I want my previous knowledge to be somewhat reusable.

For this reason I was able to get into Odin as opposed to Zig because of some similarities with Swift Syntax as well how easy it is to parse.

The less I need to rewire my brain to use xyz language, the greater the chance of me getting into it.

If my life depended on it, I could get over such a shallow reason to dismiss a language but fortunately it doesn't and that's why I write Swift rather than Rust.
by michaelbrave | 2026-02-19 20:15:16+00:00
This is bullshit. It's a clear power grab to re-seize democratized means of production, and added surveillance. Both suck. The proposed bill in Washington is even worse, and blanket bans nearly any kind of machining or manufacturing that doesn't use surveillance. I'm going to have to actually write letters to lawmakers now as if there wasn't enough bullshit happening already.
by akdev1l | 2026-02-19 20:15:17+00:00
Using the same lease is better but still could cause IP conflict if the lease was revoked and reused (though I guess that’s much rarer)

that said I do agree with you that the behaviour was probably not as described or at least not present in current systems because it would wreak havoc on public wifi etc

I’ve never dhcp being any sort of bottleneck so I hope their just doing the regular dhcp thing
by casey2 | 2026-02-19 20:15:21+00:00
We don't need real world benchmarks, if they were good for real world tasks people would use them
We need scientific benchmarks that tease out the nature of intelligence.
There are plenty of unsaturated benchmarks. Solving chess using "mostly" language modeling is still an open problem. And beyond that creating a machine that can explain why that move is likely optimal at some depth.
AI that can predict the output of another AI.
by ozozozd | 2026-02-19 20:15:52+00:00
Wholly agree.

I'd also add that it's not about the relevance of the conventions, but one's (in)ability to "read the room" and follow the conventions signals to others how well-adapted (or "aligned") of a human they are.

Not following conventions may be a result of inability to recognize them or outright disrespect and/or unwilling to cooperate, play by rules, honor the social contract, etc.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-19 20:16:03+00:00
This is so dumb. It isn't the printers where you could solve this but the slicers and slicers are for the most part open source. Effectively this is another ban on particular numbers. The printers just execute G-code and to make a printer aware of what it is that it is printing requires a completely different level of processing than what is normally present in the printers. Besides that, you could break anything up into parts that don't necessarily look like the complete article.
by robocat | 2026-02-19 20:16:21+00:00
Voting em out: I reckon the hidden key to democracy, is being able to vote disliked politicians out.

Managed democracy seems fine so long as you can remove the bastards if they become Putin-like.

There's a lot of hot air about democracy being voting for parties or politicians for the policies we like. Personally I have never felt that I've ever positively influenced policy with my voting. I have voted against a party because I disliked their policy, but that counterfactual is harder to judge (either my vote loses, or the policy doesn't occur : either way it is unclear if my vote mattered?).

I'm rather cynical about democracy - it feels mostly like children's participation awards (which are great!).
by robviren | 2026-02-19 20:16:42+00:00
I find the dependency creep for both rust and node unfortunate. Almost anything I add explodes the deps and makes me sweat for maintenance, vulnerabilities, etc. I also feel perpetually behind, which I think is basically frontend default mode. Go does the one thing I wish Rust had more of which is a pretty darn great standard library with total backwards compatibility promises. There are awkward things with Go, but man, not needing to feel paranoid and how much can be built with so little feels good. But I totally understand just getting crap done and taking off the tin foil. Depends on what you prioritize. Solo devs don't have the luxury.
by snsjzhhz | 2026-02-19 20:16:43+00:00
This has been my experience as a dev, and it always confuses me when people say they prefer to work at a “higher level”. The minutiae are often just as important as some of the higher level decisions. Not everything, but not an insignificant portion either. This applies to basic things like correctness, performance, and security - craft, style, and taste are not involved.
by ChadNauseam | 2026-02-19 20:16:50+00:00
Running rust in wasm works really well. I feel like I'm the world's biggest cheerleader for it, but I was just amazed at how well it works. The one annoying thing is using web APIs through rust - you can do it with web-sys and js-sys, but it's rarely as ergonomic as it is in javascript. I usually end up writing wrapper libraries that make it easy, sometimes even easier than javascript (e.g. in rust I can use weblocks with RAII)
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2026-02-19 20:17:06+00:00
That's great, but I wonder whether SE Asian people are any better at telling e.g. what European country someone is from, or what African country etc. It's a bit shit but we all look the same if you look from far enough away. Like, I'm Greek but I have fair hair, skin and eyes despite most people in the UK expecting me to be "olive skinned" and I have friends who could easily pass for Swedish, or, conversely, Libyan or Pakistani. You just can't tell.

E.g. one of the Mongol invaders from Medieval Total War II had a soundbite that said "You all look the same to me!". I guess we all do.
by xienze | 2026-02-19 20:17:30+00:00
> Regulating actual guns that are frequently used in crime? Unlikely.

Well, two things. First, your phrasing implies there’s no regulations around firearm ownership at all, which is not true.

Second, much to the chagrin of California and similar states, that pesky second amendment exists. Which makes the kind of regulations they _want_ around firearms (i.e., regulate/tax them out of existence) kind of tricky. But presumably regulations around what you can do with a 3D printer are much easier to handle from a constitutional perspective.
by m463 | 2026-02-19 20:17:48+00:00
i've actually set up gitea on a home system and it had loads of crap I just didn't need, and I went to a simpler setup.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Git_server

compare to:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gitea

or

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GitLab
by numpad0 | 2026-02-19 20:18:51+00:00
US requires only the serialized part of a firearm treated as guns. For the AR-15, which is like PC/AT of guns, it's a nearly cosmetic part of it, sort of a motherboard backplate. Or like, a collar for a dog rather than the heart of a dog. As such, that part reportedly can be printed and used to shoot live rounds fine. Most other guns apart for AR-15 don't even matter, like how an E-ATX motherboard with dual PowerPC hardly matter in any talks concerning a PC - if you'd be wondering what about Raspberry Pi, that would be SIG P320 or something like that.

In most place of the world, including where I am, pressure bearing parts such as the barrel, the bolt that locks onto the end of the barrel to seal it as it fires, the firing pin that ignites the cartridge, the live cartridge containing gunpowder, etc etc, rather than the part that merely carries its nameplate, are controlled. It is illegal in such places to buy or possess functionally relevant parts of a gun, at least without a license, and/or prior approvals. This is more like buying a CPU or motherboards would be controlled rather than cases and faceplates. In some places, what is considered a gun in US hardly qualify as such, even almost slipping through customs(allegedly).

You guys gotta fix that broken classification before trying to offload onus onto the global 3D printing community. Or drop it altogether.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-19 20:19:20+00:00
For determining the maximum performance achievable, the performance per watt is what matters, as the power consumption will always be limited by cooling and by the available power supply.

Even if we interpret the NVIDIA claim as referring to the performance available in a desktop, the GPU cards had power consumptions at most double in comparison with CPUs. Even with this extra factor there has been more than an order of magnitude between reality and the NVIDIA claims.

Moreover I am not sure whether around 2010 and before that, when these NVIDIA claims were frequent, the power permissible for PCIe cards had already reached 300 W, or it was still lower.

In any case the "100" factor claimed by NVIDIA was supported by flawed benchmarks, which compared an optimized parallel CUDA implementation of some algorithm with a naive sequential implementation on the CPU, instead of comparing it with an optimized multithreaded SIMD implementation on that CPU.
by roughly | 2026-02-19 20:19:29+00:00
Influence isn’t all about the raw numbers - if yours is the browser of choice for developers, that’s going to give you a stronger voice than just being the fourth best browser. Think about Twitter - by all accounts, Twitter’s user numbers were dwarfed by the other networks, but they punched way above their weight because the entire political policy making and reporting apparatus was on there.