MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jefflinwood | 2026-02-17 19:59:05+00:00
I tried the onboarding, but I think it timed out on the Analyzing screen because it couldn't find any issues in my Sentry environment. So I couldn't get too much further.

EDIT: It did let me in, but I don't know why it took so long.

I've worked on teams where there's been one person on rotation every sprint to catch and field issues like these, so taking that job and giving it to an AI agent seems like a reasonable approach.

I think I'd be most concerned about having a separate development process outside of the main issue queue, where agents aren't necessarily integrated into the main workstream.
by EdNutting | 2026-02-17 19:59:12+00:00
Depends if you're looking at startups/scaleups or the big companies. Arm, Imagination Tech, etc. for a very long time did not pay anything like as well (even if you were doing software work for them). That's shifted a lot in the UK in recent years (can't speak for the rest of the world). Even so, I hear Intel and AMD still pay lower base salary than you might get at a rival startup.

As for startups/scaleups, I can testify from experience that you'll get the following kind of base salaries in the UK outside of hardware-for-finance companies (not including options/benefits/etc.). Note that my experience is around CPU, GPU, AI accelerators, etc. - novel stuff, not just incrementing the version number of a microcontroller design:

* Graduate modelling engineer (software): £50k - £55k
* Graduate hardware design engineer: £45k - £55k

* Junior software engineer: £60k - £70k
* Junior hardware engineer: £60k - £70k

* Senior/lead software engineer (generalist; 3+ yoe): £75k - £90k
* Senior compiler engineer (3+ yoe): £100k - £120k
* Senior/lead hardware design engineer: £90k - £110k
* Senior/lead hardware verification engineer: £100k - £115k

* Staff engineering salaries (software, hardware, computer architecture): £100k - £130k and beyond
* Principal, director, VP, etc. engeering salaries: £130k+ (and £200k to £250k not unreasonable expectation for people with 10+ years experience).

If you happen to be in physical design with experience on a cutting edge node: £250k - £350k (except at very early stage ventures)

Can you find software roles that pay more? Sure, of course you can. AI and Data Science roles can sometimes pay incredible salaries. But are there that many of those kinds of roles? I don't know - I think demand in hardware design outstrips availability in top-end AI roles, but maybe I'm wrong.

From personal experience, I've been paid double-digits percentage more being a computer architect in hardware startups than I have in senior software engineering roles in (complex) SaaS startups (across virtual conferencing, carbon accounting, and autonomous vehicle simulations). That's very much a personal journey and experience, so I appreciate it's not a reflection of the general market (unlike the figures I quoted above) so of course others will have found the opposite.

To get a sense of the UK markets for a wide range of roles across sectors and company sizes, I recommend looking at salary guides from the likes of:
* IC Resources
* SoCode
* Microtech
* Client-Server
by mathgladiator | 2026-02-17 19:59:12+00:00
There should probably be "Show Vibe:" simply because this is something new. This is something radical.

I was a skeptic last year, and now... not so much. I am having Claude build me a distributed system from scratch. I designed it last week as I was admitting to myself the huge failure of my big "I love to code" project that I failed to get traction on.

It took me a week to even give the design to claude because I was afraid of what it meant. I started it last night, and my jaw is dropped. There is a new skill being grown right now, and it... is something.

It certainly isn't nothing, and I for one am curious to simply see what people are making with vibes alone. It's fascinating... and horrifying.

But, I have learned to silence that part of me that is horrified since the world never cared for what I find beautiful (i.e. terrible languages like JavaScript)...
by nalllar | 2026-02-17 19:59:25+00:00
It almost certainly is AI generated. It reads like it is, pangram thinks it is, https://www.pangram.com/history/02bead1c-c36e-461b-8fa7-8699... and pangram's unlikely to give false positives https://www.pangram.com/blog/third-party-pangram-evals
by lambda | 2026-02-17 19:59:34+00:00
I mean, GPT-OSS is delivered as a 4 bit model; and apparently they even trained it at 4 bits. Many train at 16 bits because it provides improved stability for gradient descent, but there are methods that allow even training at smaller quantizations efficiently.

There was a paper that I had been looking at, that I can't find right now, that demonstrated what I mentioned, it showed only imperceptible changes down to 6 bit quants, then performance decreasing more and more rapidly until it crossed over the next smaller model at 1 bit. But unfortunately, I can't seem to find it again.

There's this article from Unsloth, where they show MMLU scores for quantized Llama 4 models. They are of an 8 bit base model, so not quite the same as comparing to 16 bit models, but you see no reduction in score at 6 bits, while it starts falling after that. https://unsloth.ai/docs/basics/unsloth-dynamic-2.0-ggufs/uns...

Anyhow, like anything in machine learning, if you want to be certain, you probably need to run your own evals. But when researching, I found enough evidence that down to 6 bit quants you really lose very little performance, and even at much smaller quants the number of parameters tends to be more important than the quantization, all the way down to 2 bits, that it acts as a good rule of thumb, and I'll generally grab a 6 to 8 bit quant to save on RAM without really thinking about, and I try out models down to 2 bits if I need to in order to fit them into my system.
by konart | 2026-02-17 19:59:40+00:00
Say I produce furniture.

I borrow from you. I now have debt.

I sell furniture. Now I can pay you back some part of it (up to 100%).

You (and other parties) see that I'm quite good at what I do and my products sells.

I now can borrow from you and other parties again to produce more (and possibly diversify my business).

I sell more, I open new businesses etc. I pay you and other parties back. And borrow again.

I can and will have debt (and it will grow over time) because this is what allows me and my business to grow.

I can borrow and be in debt till the day I die.

This basic concept is too foreign for people for whom "debt" is just a sum of money they borrowed from their friend and somehow now feel ashamed.
by shevy-java | 2026-02-17 19:59:56+00:00
But that is historically not quite true.

World War 2 was not won due to the economy. And while it is true that the USSR "lost" the Cold War, they actually spent too much and entered a recurring debt from which they could no longer get out. There was no direct war here, which is different to e. g. world war 2 (at the least USA versus Germany). USSR and USA only fought some proxy wars.
by cj | 2026-02-17 19:59:57+00:00
Devils advocate: I don’t think this would work due to the cash flow uncertainty the models causes.

If universities don’t know how much they’re going to bring in over the next few years, they won’t be able to budget effectively.

And then there’s the question of whether it’s acceptable for the lender to collect more than what was borrowed. E.g. if I graduate college, start a company, and sell it for $100 million.. am I then paying my alma mater (or lender) millions? If so, would universities make more money from the commons or are they banking on a very small percent landing extremely lucrative gigs post-graduation? I don’t think we want the model to resemble startup financing, where nearly all fail and a small handful pay for the rest (that works for startups, doesn’t work for people’s careers)

I like the concept though. In 2010’s when I was entering college, I actually made a website trying to solicit someone to pay for my education in exchange for a percentage of my future earnings. I found no takers at the time.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-17 20:00:42+00:00
> Repeating yourself doesn't make you right, just repetitive.

Good thing I didn't make that claim!

> Ignoring refutations you don't like doesn't make them wrong.

They didn't make a refutation of my points. They asserted a basic principle that I agreed with, but assume acceptance of that principle leads to their preferred conclusion. They make this assumption without providing any reasoning whatsoever for why that principle would lead to that conclusion, whereas I already provided an entire paragraph of reasoning for why I believe the principle leads to a different conclusion. A refutation would have to start from there, refuting the points I actually made. Without that you cannot call it a refutation. It is just gainsaying.

> Any definition of intelligence that does not axiomatically say "is human" or "is biological" or similar is something a machine can meet, insofar as we're also just machines made out of biology.

And here we go AGAIN! I already agree with this point!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Please, for the love of god, read the words I have written. I think machine intelligence is possible. We are in agreement. Being in agreement that machine intelligence is possible does not automatically lead to the conclusion that the programs that make up LLMs are machine intelligence, any more than a "Hello World" program is intelligence. This is indeed, very repetitive.
by Aachen | 2026-02-17 20:00:46+00:00
I am not a chip designer but from my limited understanding, this "somewhere" is the problem. You can have secret memory somewhere that isn't noticed by analysts, but can it remain secret if it is as big as half the cpu? A quarter? How much storage can you fit in that die space? How many AES keys do you handle per day? Per hour of browsing HN with AES TLS ciphers? (Literally all supported ciphers by HN involve AES)

We use memory-hard algorithms for password storage because memory is more expensive than compute. More specifically, it's die area that is costly, but at least the authors of Argon2 seem to equate the two. (If that's not correct, I have a stackoverflow post or two to correct so please let me know)
by Nevermark | 2026-02-17 20:00:52+00:00
> These are far stronger claims than what you write now

> unless you really mean “like everything else”, in which case your claim is extremely weak

The web accelerated most social change. Social media accelerated social changes more. Mobile + social even more. I don't think its controversial to see the ripple of changes in how people work, recreate, and communicate with AI as a change strong catalyst in how we think and communicate.

If you are looking for peer-reviewed journal level confirmation, that may take a while to catch up.

Holding out for studies is reasonable.

But statements of "not even wrong" make no sense. Change producing change is the default. But, opinions can reasonably differ on how much change we perceive, until there is a rigorous survey.
by SimianSci | 2026-02-17 20:01:06+00:00
Conservatism has largely been unpopular outside of rural townships, and the nation continues to undergo a process of urbanization as young people continue to move to cities.
Normally, a healthy response to this would be to realign and target a more popular set of messaging and policy objectives. Instead the American Right has decided instead that this popularity (and the reflection in media) is a threat to its ability to continue serving a shrinking pool of wealthy benefactors.

It should come as no surprise that the moment they were handed the power, they began to push the boundaries of what is acceptable when it comes to censoring media they see as a threat.
Republicanism doesnt work for anyone but the wealthy, it will do everything in its power here.
by cmger | 2026-02-17 20:01:17+00:00
Hi HN,

Creator here: My OpenSCAD projects always ended up looking like spaghetti code. I'm a web developer and used to building things with components and props (React, JSX), so I wanted to see if that could still spit out something that runs in OpenSCAD.

So I built react-scad. It’s a component-based authoring layer that emits plain .scad. You describe the model as a tree of React components and it writes a file that opens in OpenSCAD or any slicer. I’m sharing it in the hope it makes OpenSCAD more accessible and opens up the community to people who think like me.

It's all open source: https://github.com/react-scad/react-scad

Happy to answer questions
by CGMthrowaway | 2026-02-17 20:01:39+00:00
This is how a country slides into oligarchy. Quiet threats, regulatory scrutiny, tax audits, license reviews aimed at TV networks and newspapers until they decide it’s safer to stay quiet. And once the media falls in line, you have to ask what else is being forced into compliance behind closed doors, long before the public realizes what’s happening. What's next? Protesters swept up under sweeping surveillance and detention policies, speech narrowed in the name of "public safety", certain narratives becoming untouchable, etc.
by kergonath | 2026-02-17 20:01:56+00:00
> That's misunderstanding the model of actors. "Russia" isn't "Putin". "Countries" act in the best interests of their power structure, not their leaders.

No, I am not misunderstanding. For all intents and purposes, at the moment Putin’s will is Russia’s will. And it looks like he knows his weaknesses within the country and is willing to let marginal populations bear the weight of his ambitions while keeping his power base comfortable enough. Of course he might end up like Stalin, at which point who knows? But it might not be much better for Ukraine, and in the meantime Putin keeps giving the orders.

> Basically: the way this ends is when the collective will of the power centers (generally the armed forces, though not always) decide that they'll be wealthier and happier with Putin gone than by following more orders.

He can get most soldiers rich enough for this to drag on for quite a long time. They probably would be happier elsewhere, but they don’t have a say. The generals is another problem, but so far Putin is quite effective at finding loyal ones.
by tgtweak | 2026-02-17 20:01:56+00:00
Can you code up a quick sqlite database of inbound emails receieved (md5 hashed sender email), subject, body + what your claw's response would have been, if any. A simple dashboard where have to enter your hashed email to display the messages and responses.

I understand not sending the reply via actual email, but the reply should be visible if you want to make this fair + an actual iterative learning experiment.
by comboy | 2026-02-17 20:02:05+00:00
Yeah, I think the company that opens up a bit of the black box and open sources it, making it easy for people to customize it, will win many customers. People will already live within micro-ecosystems before other companies can follow.

Currently everybody is trying to use the same swiss army knife, but some use it for carving wood and some are trying to make some sushi. It seems obvious that it's gonna lead to disappointment for some.

Models are become a commodity and what they build around them seem to be the main part of the product. It needs some API.
by mrguyorama | 2026-02-17 20:02:13+00:00
>“The new crashes include a collision with a fixed object at 17 mph while the vehicle was driving straight, a crash with a bus while the Tesla was stationary, a collision with a heavy truck at 4 mph, and two separate incidents where the Tesla backed into objects, one into a pole or tree at 1 mph and another into a fixed object at 2 mph.”

>Electrek analysis found that the vehicles have traveled roughly 800,000 paid miles in that time period, amounting to a crash every 57,000 miles. According to the NHTSA, US drivers crash once every 500,000 miles on average.

Jesus, 10x worse than the average US driver is crazy. There's serious variability in human driving demographics, with some subsets already being that much worse than other subsets, things like "What city do you live in" can bring that stat down significantly.

So, to all the people who insist that autopilot is "better than human", do you still believe it? Assume it drives as many unpaid miles, that's still 5x worse than average drivers, which includes things like alcoholics, people who consistently drive high, people who don't really know how to drive, and that person you see on the road eating a fucking meal and doing their makeup and reading a book, and drivers who are currently asleep.

I uh did not actually expect the data to be this bad. Statistically, we need more data, but this is concerning. Not slowly tapping into objects that cannot move is probably a good way to improve those stats. Did Tesla abandon the industry standard ultrasonic sensors everyone else studs their bumpers with? Many other cars in the industry can parallel park themselves through these sensors, and reliably do not hit parked objects.
by Arifcodes | 2026-02-17 20:02:13+00:00
The framing of "Is Show HN dead?" misses something fundamental. Show HN was never a separate product. It's just a tag on the same ranking algorithm that handles everything else. Stories rise and fall by the same gravity formula, and Show HN posts compete directly with major tech news, drama, and viral essays.

I've launched multiple side projects through Show HN over the years. The ones that got traction weren't better products. They hit the front page during a slow news hour and got enough early upvotes to survive the ranking curve. The ones that flopped were arguably more interesting but landed during a busy cycle. That's not a Show HN problem, that's a single-ranking-pool problem.

What would actually help is a separate ranking pool for Show HN with slower time decay. Let projects sit visible for longer so the community can actually try them before they drop off. pg's original vision was about making things people want. Hard to evaluate that in a 90-minute window.
by j45 | 2026-02-17 20:02:24+00:00
Accuracy is relevant though, and testing your assumptions before heading out, or keeping track of the particular changes (if any) aroudn what you're publishing is another thing.

Still, you have a more valid point :). Publishing is about publishing, not necessarily progress.

I just want folks on HN to remember they might be the cutting edge, or the tip of the arrow more times than they realize.
by tadfisher | 2026-02-17 20:02:32+00:00
> If they're worried about liability, why not check the security patch level and refuse to run on phones that aren't up to date?

Google doesn't provide an API or data set to figure out what the current security patch level is for any particular device. Officially, OEMs can now be 4 months out-of-date, and user updates lag behind that.

Your guess is good, but misses the point. Banks are worried about a couple things with mobile clients: credential stealing and application spoofing. As a consequence, the banks want to ensure that the thing connecting to their client API is an unmodified first-party application. The only way to accomplish this with any sort of confidence is to use hardware attestation, which requires a secure chain-of-trust from the hardware TEE/TPM, to the bootloader, to the system OS, and finally to your application.

So you need a way for security people working for banks to feel confident that it's the bank's code which is operating on the user's behalf to do things like transfer money. They care less about exploits for unsupported devices, and it's inconvenient to users if they can't make payments from their five-year-old device.

And this is why Web Environment Integrity and friends should never be allowed to exist, because Android is the perfect cautionary tale of what banks will do with trusted-computing features: which is, the laziest possible thing that technically works, and keeps their support phone lines open.
by shevy-java | 2026-02-17 20:02:43+00:00
That's good. I am getting very annoyed at how US-dependent Europeans have become, ever since Trump keeps on threatening us non-stop. The Canadians understood the issue; European politicians are WAY too slow. There is a reason why Trump is also known as Agent Krasnov. Yuri Bezmenov predicted this in the 1980s; he literally explaind the "Flood the zone with shit" tactic, which is a KGB strategy (or, even older than the KGB). Steve Bannon only steals stuff; his mind is unable to devise anything on his own.

I have not used Codeberg that much myself. I have known about it, but the UI is a bit ... scary. Gitlab also has a horrible UI. It is soooo strange that github is the only one that got UI right. Why can't the others learn from KEEPING THINGS SIMPLE?
by Jach | 2026-02-17 20:02:44+00:00
This is a nice and unexpected release, thanks for writing it. Getting a RPG endorsement is great. I just finished reading his foreword and skimming the table of contents and bibliography from the preview. I'd have liked to see a sample of a middle chapter to really see how technical and deep it gets (e.g. Land of Lisp gives its chapter 8 as a sample which I think is very representative for that book). But I plan to get this book regardless -- just not right now.

The back blurb hints that expert systems might be mentioned, but how much? No one ever seems to go much into their implementation or usage.[0] It also mentions writing some JS, which I guess is part of chapter 5, I wonder if that was a publisher request. (My favorite take on that subject in recent years is https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp)

Would it be fair to say this is mainly a history told through the lens of AI and PL research?

Amusingly I think part of me is already setting myself up for some disappointment -- it seems too short with too few references! But it's good to have a Lisp history book like this looks to be and I'm sure I'll learn things from it, and the promise of more RPG writings inside is enticing. Besides, any complete telling would take multiple books. (There's so much of historical interest locked up in proprietary applications and companies with their own histories, and so many papers published, there's also so much that can be dug through in the standardization mailing list (and other lists, like emacs) archives[1], the SAIL archives[2], the Xerox PARC archives[3], the CMU archives[4], and the many undigitized things sitting in boxes at the computer history museum...[5])

[0] Norvig's PAIP gives a small taste, one of the files: https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/main/lisp/mycin-r.l... And a book about a particular system, MYCIN: https://www.shortliffe.net/Buchanan-Shortliffe-1984/MYCIN%20... And a short video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=a65uwr_O7mM

[1] http://ml.cddddr.org/ and http://cl-su-ai.lisp.se/

[2] https://www.saildart.org/

[3] The url I had before is down... I made a local copy but https://archive.org/details/2014.01.ftp.parc.xerox.com might be the same content

[4] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/ai-repository/...

[5] Even in the earliest Lisp reports like https://www.researchgate.net/publication/42766480_Artificial... there are interesting things mentioned like a two-move checkmate program or "Other projects on which work continues include the Advice Taker, visual pattern recognition, and an artificial hand." Multiple times I've tried to track down those sorts of things mentioned in really old papers only to hit dead-ends on so many of them. Sometimes things were embellished, or were abandoned, or were just lost to time, and sometimes there's an undigitized box at the museum that might contain printouts etc. (There might be MYCIN source code, even.)
by dbspin | 2026-02-17 20:02:46+00:00
A liberal education serves a social function. It makes human beings.

There's a student loan crisis because US education is dominated by for profit colleges (in start contrast to most other countries) and because student loans lack ordinary consumer productions (in stark contrast to all other countries).

In the US students act as guarantors for debt obligations between the government and commercial institutions. The reverse of the usual arrangement.