MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dahart | 2026-02-14 15:49:28+00:00
In the 2024 preface:

> Copyright holders worry about how to exercise control over the use of "their" creative material for training models; but that begs the question of whether copyright holders ever had, or should have, a right to any such control. If a human can read a book and learn from it, and then write their own books, why shouldn't a computer?

There’s a small amount of irony in an article that’s discussing copyright, and the invisible but critical context of information, then dismissing the context of copying when it comes to copyright, as well as confusing what copyright protects. I’m certain the author knows that copyright does not protect ideas, it does not protect “colour”, it deliberately only protects the “bits”. In US copyright law this is called the “fixation” of a work. The Berne Convention uses similar terminology: “works shall not be protected unless they have been fixed in some material form.”

AI’s “learning” has a different colour than human learning. This has been debated at length on HN and elsewhere, and in the courts, but it’s definitely wildly misleading to compare ChatGPT training on all books ever written and then being distributed (for a profit) to everyone, to one human reading one book and learning something from it.
by reactordev | 2026-02-14 15:49:30+00:00
Which was copied from how open source projects do it, which was copied from how closed source projects did it, which was copied from the original demos of freetype when it was released…

The process hasn’t changed much at all in the last 30 years.

The biggest advancement in more than 2 decades came when SDF font rendering was introduced as a graphics technique.
by srean | 2026-02-14 15:49:38+00:00
Then there is this eternal conversation about whether on should encrypt and then compress or compress and then encrypt.

Encrypted data will not compress well because encryption needs to remove patterns and patterns are what one exploits for compression.

If you compress and then encrypt, yes you can leak information through the file sizes, but there isn't really a way out of this. Encryption and compression are fundamentally at odds with each other.
by benstopics | 2026-02-14 15:49:39+00:00
It is a cult and you should run while you still can. I would say to get to the point I'm so now I had to understand 40-50% of it. Let's face it, I work as a software developer and I don't remember half of the code in the project, maybe more, and I wrote it all! And this is way more complex than a business app. The reason I had to understand a lot is hard to explain but I will try... Basically a function might be called "FrontBuy". In this function contains all the math and all the decision tree logic and workflow for every possible situation to buy a stock. So now you say, let's replace all the Win32 dialogs with Electron front end. So what I did was I maintain essentially a high level GUI state manager in the Power Basic which controls the Electron app, using the C++ DLL as a FFI. That being said, you had to have some modicum of understanding of every function, maybe not all the math, but at the very least the workflow and structure of the PB code so that you don't break anything. And oh boy, did I break everything, many many times, to the chagrin of my beta testers.
by solatic | 2026-02-14 15:50:47+00:00
> The point is, even if I were Jesus Christ himself, someone would find a flaw that makes me undateable in their opinion.

Well yeah, Christ isn't really dateable because he would never be able to be vulnerable with you (after all, if he died for your sins, you can't really repay the favor, can you?). People want to take celebrities to bed, they don't want to date them. It's a different kind of relationship - more shallow.

But more to the point, a flaw is not what makes somebody undateable. We all have flaws. I have flaws. My partner has flaws. Some kinds of flaws make people undateable, others do not.

> Someone who still believes in Santa Claus

I mean, my partner makes me happier than Santa Claus ever did, and I don't have to wait until Christmas for her to pay me a visit, so....

> point to money as an example of an advantage of being in a relationship, not emotional support

Emotional support was literally the first example I gave ("warm fuzzy feelings"). I added the economic argument to address your framing. The emotional aspect is the #1 most important reason and I would be in my relationship for that reason alone, even without any economic benefits; the economic benefits are a silver lining and insufficient on their own to justify a relationship. But no, I'm not going to pretend that the silver lining doesn't exist.
by cosmicgadget | 2026-02-14 15:50:48+00:00
I'm not sure where they are at this moment, but a while back Google seemed to abandon EEAT and SEOed pages in favor of pure domain authority. So it no longer mattered if you page had the all-important "Key Takeaways".

Blogs are still discoverable via aggregators and link sharing. But those are ephemeral, directories like this and search engines like marginalia are important resources.
Show HN: A "TLDR for the internet" – curious if this is your problem
by andrevaillant | 2026-02-14 15:51:12+00:00
Im consuming a lot of content on youtube then ever, news, science, programming, design, you name it. I know that youtube and other platforms change some rules about its algorithm and most creators are adapting to it. But very often I get the feeling that they are loosing a lot of time before going to the point just to keep me there - to make videos around 8min or 20min. I get it, they need to make money, but the worst part are those that don’t even deliver what the title was about, or are fake, just to grab my play.

So I decided to make something for myself, and i've been enjoying it.

(Chrome extension is not ready in marketplace, if anyone wants please send feedback on site i can share the package for testing)

Any feedback is super welcome.
by BobbyTables2 | 2026-02-14 15:52:43+00:00
I have mixed feelings on these.

For a full cart, I expect a cashier or to be available.

If I have 3-5 items, I’d rather do it myself than wait.

That said, even 20-30 years ago, long before self checkout, at places like WalMart, one could wait 15-20 minutes in line. They had employees but were too cheap to have enough. They really didn’t care.

I don’t even understand how that math works. I might have kept going there if they had a few extra lowly paid cashiers around.
by ragall | 2026-02-14 15:53:03+00:00
I'm from Italy and buildings from the 19th century are pretty common at the center of the cities. They were rich people's residences and have massively thick walls that make them very comfortable to live in, both because of thermal mass and acoustic isolation. They're mostly used for commercial purpose now, as they're in high demand as office space for lawyers, medical practices. Only rich people can afford living there (in the upper floors).
by Lerc | 2026-02-14 15:53:16+00:00
You seem to be quite certain that I had not read the article, yet I distinctly remember doing do.

By what proceess do you imagine I arrived at the conclusion that the article suggested that published quotes were LLM hallucinations when that was not mentioned in the article title?

You accuse me of performative skepticism, yet all I think is that it is better to have evidence over assumptions, and it is better to ask if that evidence exists.

It seems a much better approach than making false accusations based upon your own vibes, I don't think Scott Shambaugh went to that level though.
by somenameforme | 2026-02-14 15:53:26+00:00
They are basically the embodiment of the fact that sites and organizations don't matter, but individuals do. I think the overwhelming majority of everything on Ars is garbage. But on the other hand they also run Eric Berger's space column [1] which is certainly one of the best ones out there. So don't ignore those names on tops of articles. If you find something informative, well sourced, and so on - there's a good chance most their other writing is of a similar standard.

[1] - https://arstechnica.com/author/ericberger/
by bee_rider | 2026-02-14 15:53:30+00:00
I made a couple slings when I was a kid… I put a lot of effort into researching the right form of the thing, carefully braided it… and then couldn’t figure out how to use the thing even one bit. Couldn’t even figure out when to release the cord. I had poor hand eye coordination in the first place, but I could throw the rocks farther and more accurately by hand.

Still think they are very cool though.
by ozgrakkurt | 2026-02-14 15:53:58+00:00
As a counter argument to this. I was able to replicate the subset of zig that I wanted, using c23. And in the end I have absolute stability unless I break things to “improve”.

Personally, it is a huge pain to rewrite things and update dependencies because the code I am depending on is moving out from under me. I also found this to be a big problem in Rust.

And another huge upside is you have access to best of everything. As an example, I am heavily using fuzz testing and I can very easily use honggfuzz which is the best fuzzer according to all research I could find, and also according to my experience so far.

From this perspective, it doesn’t make sense to use zig over c for professional work. If I am writing a lot of code then I don’t want to rewrite it. If am writing a very small amount of code with no dependencies, then it doesn’t matter what I use and this is the only case where I think zig might make sense.
by Groxx | 2026-02-14 15:54:01+00:00
Yeah, so far I see mislabeled-pilot, and episodes 3 and 4.

That... does not (currently) look like "Babylon 5 is now free to watch". That looks like a minor probing to see if they can charge for it again somewhere. That kind of thing happens constantly, and it's rare that it ever finishes.
by andrevaillant | 2026-02-14 15:55:18+00:00
i got a bit further and did this for articles on web, with the chrome extension, they all go to the same Feed on the app.

Then i started to have fun and pulled my likes to make mani podcasts and revisit content on the go, and i actually enjoyed 1 or 2 lol! but that wasnt the core.

Now im kind of in a crossroad, for me personally is cool, i like and use it everyday. But it has some costs, openAI, Supadata (to get trasncripts), etc. For me its ok, but to scale i dont see people paying for this, and i cant keep that cost. I thought that maybe i could let people add their api keys and use it if they will, but im not sure i want to save those with me (im not engeneer so i dont really understand the security problem).

Some thoughts that also crossed my mind during the process:
- TLDRing everything, am i incentivizing this high-speed consumption, short attention spans? A toxic culture of “no one has time for anything”?
- It feels like more and more people are becoming creators. And with AI many are doing 10x more content optimized for algorithms and retention (which I understand).

Will this be worse in the near furutre? Do you feel the same?
Show HN: We built AI to help bidding teams – mentioned by Kunal Bahl on ET Now
by tanmayjuneja8 | 2026-02-14 15:55:28+00:00
Kunal Bahl mentioned us on ET Now.
As a founder, you try to stay composed. But it’s hard not to feel something when your team’s effort gets acknowledged like that.

When the video came in, our team had one of those rare moments where we genuinely teared up.

We shared the clip with our families too - not for validation - but because it’s difficult to explain what you’re building every single day until someone like that says your name out loud.

And right after the joy came something else: responsibility.

Because we’re not building AI for headlines.

We’re building ContraVault.AI to change procurement for good - globally. The United States, Europe, India, Middle East & South East Asia.

To make tender and RFP bidding processes less exhausting, less manual, and far more rewarding.

We want procurement teams to spend less time buried in documents and more time making real decisions.

We want bid teams to go home earlier.
And we want lean teams to compete with the same confidence as the biggest players.

Thank you, Kunal, for the mention.

It meant a lot to the entire ContraVault AI team - and it raised the bar for what we’re here to build.

YouTube Link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSaekquMGHo&t=470s
by bfrog | 2026-02-14 15:56:24+00:00
It’s the taxi app wars all over. Yes Claude is great. But how many people are going pay once the subsidies are over?

Like uber I believe current pricing is heavily subsidized by capital investment. The investors likely believe the bot with the users is a winner.

The real winner will be the good enough bot with customer hardware and scale to run it cheaply. There’s exactly one current contender as far as I know with both.
by metaltyphoon | 2026-02-14 15:56:43+00:00
> Very much so once you compare it to how quickly C++

C++ came out in 1985 and competed with C, COBOL, Pascal and FORTRAN. It was an overall improvement than those and therefore there is a legit reason for it to take off.

> how many of them end up using it (and to what extent) you see it's not like it's been with languages that ended up achieving real popularity

I assume many places that have a huge codebase in C++ would just do a port to Rust. That would almost always cause problems but for greenfield projects it's a no brainer IMO.
by freetonik | 2026-02-14 15:56:56+00:00
I also maintain a human-curated directory (and search engine) of personal blogs at https://minifeed.net

You can submit a blog here: https://minifeed.net/suggest

Criteria is pretty simple:

- Must be written by a human.

- Must be in English (for now).

- Must have a valid RSS feed.

- Must not be purely a "micro-blog", i.e. must have some content other than tweet-sized status updates or links.
by dylan604 | 2026-02-14 15:57:01+00:00
Or the other side of at what point into ending capitalism in favor of socialism should that stop?

Yes, I enjoy "both sides" coverage when it's done in earnest. What passes for that today is two people representing the extremes of either spectrum looking for gotcha moments as an "owning" moment. We haven't seen a good "both sides" in decades
by throw0101c | 2026-02-14 15:57:09+00:00
> This wouldn't mean this type of content would disappear - for every single business producing such content there's a bunch of people doing the same for free.

For some definition of "same" which may or may not mean "equal" (in the sense of quality, quantity, etc).

> And then there's patreon et al.,

Except for MKBHD and Linus Tech Tips, all (most?) the channels I listed have Patreon, and still find it necessary to in-video ads because it's not enough.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-14 15:57:11+00:00
Walk around Google Geneva or Novartis Basel and count how many "Swiss" nationals there are. A large portion are white collar immigrants from the CEE or Asia.

Switzerland's comparative advantage as an innovation hub was due to it's permissive capital structures and historic openness to white collar immigration.

All that a rule like this does is incentivize moving jobs out of Switzerland. Heck, look at UBS axing 3,000 jobs across all functions and shifting them to India [0].

If UBS, Novartis, Google Geneva, etc cannot continue to attract employees they will leave, and given the extremely friendly FTAs and BITs Switzerland has signed either unilaterally or part of the EFTA, it's extremely easy.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/ubs-plans-hire-3000...
Show HN: Rune-stone | A spec pattern for consistent AI code generation
by vict00r99 | 2026-02-14 15:57:23+00:00
AI coding tools generate different code every time for the same requirement. RUNE is a specification pattern that fixes this: define a function's signature, WHEN/THEN behavior rules, and test cases upfront. Give the same spec to any AI tool — the generated code has the same behavior.

It's a pattern, not a framework. Works as YAML files or Markdown sections. Any language, any AI tool, no installation.

Includes 7 skills (markdown files you load into your AI tool) for the lifecycle: create specs, validate, refine, generate tests, detect drift, reverse-engineer from code, multi-language generation.

This is the GitHub project: https://github.com/vict00r99/Rune-stone
by program_whiz | 2026-02-14 16:00:07+00:00
Not the GP, but I've noticed that because if you don't anticipate how you might need to mutate or share state in the future, you can have a "footgun" that forces large-scale code changes for relatively small "feature-level" changes, because of the rust strictness. Its not a footgun in the sense that your code does what you don't expect, its a footgun in that your maintenance and ability to change code is not what you expect (and its easy to do). I'm sure if you are really expert with rust, you see it coming and don't use patterns that will cause waves of changes (but if you're expert at any language you avoid the footguns).
by eastbound | 2026-02-14 16:00:48+00:00
It brings a very interesting question of whether a country is more economically powerful, and therefore able to defend their territory on the long term, if it has few happy and well-educated citizens, or masses of uneducated randoms who kill each other (to wit, the Crans Montana owner was French, with the name of Macron’s first minister of justice, but that’s an aside compared to the few hundred Frenchs who die every year in street violence).
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-02-14 16:00:56+00:00
huh, not sure if life imitates snark and bull
https://medium.com/luminasticity/great-products-of-illuminat...

"The ZZZ mask is an intelligent sleep mask — it allows you to sleep less while sleeping deeper. That’s the premise — but really it is a paradigm breaking computer that allows full automation and control over the sleep process, including access to dreamtime."

or if this is another scifi variation of the same theme, with some dev like embellishments.
by flohofwoe | 2026-02-14 16:01:13+00:00
> so I had it write a language guide for 0.15.2

Tbh, while impressive that it appears to work, that guide looks very tailored to the Zig stdlib subset used in your projects and also looks like a lot more work than just fixing the errors manually ;) For a large code base which would amortise the cost of this guide I still wouldn't trust the automatic update without carefully reviewing each change.
by dwroberts | 2026-02-14 16:01:44+00:00
This was an interesting story, but implying this is some unique insight irked me a little - perhaps because it is LLM-flavoured text that hypes it too much, and makes it sound like some kind of major breakthrough? Keeping the original game as-is, underneath a modern port 'layer', is a pretty popular and common way to update things, you can see it being done in a bunch of modern remasters.
by kmeisthax | 2026-02-14 16:02:55+00:00
I remember somewhere around 2014 or 2015, when Reddit was being split by the gender wars and I picked the "woke" side (and by "woke" I mean "not willing to harass women for stupid shit"). People were talking about these really reactionary academics, and while I agreed with them that they were A Problem, I didn't entirely see how it was connected to the stupid culture war shit going on in, say, the gaming space. Turns out it was all caused by one really well-connected finance scammer with a private island and no conscience.

Jeffrey Epstein will go down in history as the man who broke America from beyond the grave.
by enobrev | 2026-02-14 16:03:07+00:00
In Chicago, code requires EMT for all electrical, which can be annoying for adding a new run, but at the very least it makes it less likely for rodents to chew through or other interference.

After wiring my whole house with Ethernet and ceiling speakers, and now dealing with a couple leaky pipes and several problems from previous owners, I'm considering ways to make these things easily accessible/replaceable while keeping an eye toward aesthetics.
by neom | 2026-02-14 16:03:13+00:00
Well, if your dad isn't one of the founder of Nintendo your point is moot. Given I was on the founding team of digitalocean as head of strategy till the IPO, and one of the founders of anthropic is a former tech journalist who covered my startups, maybe my friend is a founder of Anthropic?! Sorry your dad didn't work anywhere cool tho. :(
by rebel_druid | 2026-02-14 16:03:46+00:00
From what I have seen over the years, the problem with such aggregation sites has been that the maintainer eventually loses interest or does not renew the domain etc.

The only way to maintain long term interest in such sites would be to have it as a github site/or a long term commitment, community contributions with some kind of community filtering/voting to maintain the quality of submissions.
by csense | 2026-02-14 16:04:19+00:00
You should either bundle the DOS version with the game, or release it separately somewhere. If you broke the DOS frontend and don't want to get it working again, maybe release the last working DOS version?

Consider releasing on GOG. This game is great nostalgia bait, and if you release the DOS version, the GOG staff are quite experienced at building modern, cross-OS installers for DOS games and tuning DOSBox.

FWIW I never played this particular game but around the turn of the millenium I put probably over 100 hours in Trevor Chan's Capitalism games [1].

[1] https://www.gog.com/en/game/capitalism_plus
by galangalalgol | 2026-02-14 16:04:49+00:00
The president only nominates them. The Senate confirms. Until the obama administration, judges required a supermajority of the senate to confirm, but a gop minority were filibustering all his nominees. So he asked the senate to remove the filibuster for judges. It was really the only use of the filibuster that made sense. Most democracies have independent commissions. Perhaps they all do now...
by alephnerd | 2026-02-14 16:05:25+00:00
Sure in finance (and even then it has been overshadowed by London, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam by the 2000s), but not really in innovation industries like the Life Sciences - which has historically been Switzerland's strongest niche and a major reason for Switzerland's modern success.

This was largely due to the success of Biogen in the 1980s which helped link American biopharma IP with the Swiss ecosystem along with a fairly permissive PR program for skilled foreign nationals.

Edit: cannot reply

> Roche and Lanza

Roche and Lanza would have remained CDMOs if it wasn't for Biogen bringing an entire generation of Harvard and MIT Biopharma researchers to Switzerland in the 1980s and helped build an ecosystem for therapeutics and biopharma R&D.

Much of Roche's biopharma and therapeutics leadership and IP is derived from Biogen alumni.
by solatic | 2026-02-14 16:05:25+00:00
> a footgun is a surprising defect that's pointed at your foot and easy to trigger

Close, but not the way I think of a footgun. A footgun is code that was written in a naive way, looks correct, submitted, and you find out after submitting it that it was erroneous. Good design makes it easy for people to do the right thing and difficult to do the wrong thing.

In Rust it is extremely easy to hit the borrow checker including for code which is otherwise safe and which you know is safe. You walk on eggshells around the borrow checker hoping that it won't fire and shoot you in the foot and force you to rewrite. It is not a runtime footgun, it is a devtime footgun.

Which, to be fair, is sometimes desired. When you have a 1m+ LOC codebase and dozens of junior engineers working on it and requirements for memory safety and low latency requirements. Fair enough trade-off in that case.

But in Zig, you can just call defer on a deinit function. Complexity is the eternal enemy, and this is just a much simpler approach. The price of that simplicity is that you need to behave like an adult, which if the codebase (hotpath optimization) is <1k LOC I think is eminently reasonable.