MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-02-12 08:54:56+00:00
I'm sorry but I just don't think that's the threat at all. I think these companies actually realize the existential risk and harm this data has, and do a lot to anonymize it quickly & effectively. If the government was actively backdooring Apple or Google to get realtime data like this, it would be found, and it would be a shitstorm that would greatly impact these companies.

We really need to get a little more discerning in our hatred. Apple especially I think is a real piece of work. But there are so many worse hideous monsters out there. Clearview AI just signed with DHS for access to a facial tracking database. Flock is out here basically giving playbooks to law enforcement to tell them to use only the most vague indirect reason when asking for data. There's so many other even less visible but incredibly dangerous data-broker foes to society, doing such harm.

Google and Apple have a level of caring far far far far far far above the vile anti-human campaign happening now. I just think you are off by a million miles, that you're not even on the right planet, for where the actual real harm is coming from.
by kajolshah_bt | 2026-02-12 08:54:56+00:00
The spending numbers are wild. More than the moon landing and we’re mostly using it to autocomplete emails and generate slide decks.

That doesn’t mean it’s useless. It just means the infrastructure is way ahead of the everyday experience.

What I keep noticing is that the big breakthroughs aren’t coming from bigger models. They’re coming from very specific product decisions.

Things like:

– Apps that understand context without you re-explaining everything

– Interfaces that predict what you need before you type

– Systems that remove 3–4 manual steps

That’s where the real shift is happening.

If all this spending just results in faster chatbots, the market will correct hard. But if it turns into software that genuinely reduces friction in daily work, then the long term value will be justified.

I wrote about this recently: what features will mobile apps need in 2026 if they don’t want to loose users. Most of it has nothing to do with flashy demos and everything to do with removing invisible friction.

Do others here think spending is ahead of product reality or if we’re underestimating what’s quietly being built?
by golem14 | 2026-02-12 08:54:58+00:00
All good advice in general. Could add others, like x-y problems etc.

This feels like a handbook for a senior engineer becoming a first level manager talking to junior devs. Which is exactly what it should be.

However, this will go horribly wrong if junior devs are thus “promoted “ to eng managers without having cut their teeth on real projects first. And that’s likely to happen. A lot.
by jfaganel99 | 2026-02-12 08:55:26+00:00
The thing nobody seems to be talking about here is "slime," the async RL training framework they built and open sourced (github.com/THUDM/slime). It's been behind GLM-4.5, 4.6 and 4.7 too.

Everyone's debating benchmarks but honestly the actual gap between frontier and non-frontier models right now is RL infrastructure, not pre-training compute. We've known since DeepSeek-R1 that RL on top of a strong base model is where the magic happens, but doing it efficiently at scale is a genuinely hard systems problem. Rollout generation alone eats 90%+ of RL training time, and their APRIL strategy for handling the long-tail problem is a real contribution.

The fact that both the model AND the RL infra are MIT licensed matters way more to me than whether it edges out Opus 4.5 on SWE-bench. Benchmarks are temporary. Training infrastructure compounds.
by INTPenis | 2026-02-12 08:55:38+00:00
Totally agree, it's the main reason I'll never recommend Linux to anyone, because you can't expect normal people to understand these things.

But it's kinda funny to me that you just said "I was going to run this code on my system, until I saw some other code in the same repo, and now I refuse to run it" :D It's all the same repo, you're willing to try part of the code, but not another part of it. Completely arbitrary.
by michaelt | 2026-02-12 08:55:45+00:00
> In fact, knowledge-based quizzes are used routinely by credit reporting agencies -- the big ones like Experian. And they've been presented by background check services, too.

Yes - and they don't work.

> They work like this: they scrape your credit reports and public records in a deep dive for your old addresses, employers, contact info, a whole smorgasbord of stuff.

Most of which don't work on an 18-year-old. No credit history, no past employers, no bill payments, no history of moving houses, address is their parents' house.

There is no smorgasbord. There's name, date of birth, parents' address - all of which are widely known matters of public record (which is why the credit rating agency has them in the first place).

> But it's multiple choice: "which of these did you live at? None of the above? All of them?" "Which one of these wasn't your employer?"

Fantastic, the credit rating agency has just told the fraudster several of your past addresses, and your past employers.

Sure, there's a phony or two in the list - but the fraudster can try as many times as they want, comparing employer and address lists between different credit applications.
by DamonHD | 2026-02-12 08:55:53+00:00
https://www.nationalgrid.com/the-great-grid-upgrade

Approx 10GW down the east coast alone in various stages right now, jumping the current bottleneck (B6) between Scotland and England...

Also see:

* https://wind-curtailment-app-ahq7fucdyq-lz.a.run.app/
* https://renewables-map.robinhawkes.com/#5/55/-3.2
by jayonsoftware | 2026-02-12 08:56:12+00:00
I signed an enterprise deal a week before the announcement. Here is what Heroku provides that I can't find anywhere else.

1. Deal under the SF Master Contract (I have one AE/SE to yell at and am treated like a major customer due to our overall spend. Heroku is only 1% of our overall SF spend)

2. Best support for C# apps

3. Heroku Connect provides a Postgres endpoint for SF Data (No need to mess with API's or Mulesoft)

4. Applink allows me to call apps running on Heroku (No need to mess with API's or Mulesoft)

Right now, I am sticking with Heroku.

I know most of their product team was gutted, so I don't know what is going to happen long term. Time will tell (And yes, I have started looking at alternatives)

PS: If you know of a provider who can provide all the above 4, let me know
by throwaw12 | 2026-02-12 08:59:41+00:00
thanks for responding and sharing your perspective.

What I would say, you could have omitted some negativity or judgement from your post about 4k devs starring something because it looks simple, because they might have different intentions for starring.

Here is another great example of 65K "not wrong" developers: https://github.com/kelseyhightower/nocode - there is no code, long before AI was a trend, released 9 years ago, but got 65K stars! Doesn't mean devs "not wrong", it means people are curious and saving things "just in case" to showcase somewhere
by whackernews | 2026-02-12 08:59:53+00:00
Yeh, same. I also have a strong “do it now” attitude to try and reduce as much fluff as possible. I know a lot of people where they will add sending an email to the bottom of their very long todo list and it basically won’t get done. It takes two minutes, just DO IT when someone asks. In fact when someone else asks me anything at work I drop everything I’m doing, find the answer, and my next reply to them will be with the answer. I know context switching can be tough but other people are your portal to how your perceived in the outside world so they should be treated as priority. People like this and you’ll be loved my your colleagues. Then you can go back to the optimisation rabbit hole you were half way down that probably wasn’t 100% asked for by the client anyway if you’re being honest.
by cdalex | 2026-02-12 09:00:43+00:00
Hi HN,

We’re building ilors.com — a platform where fashion designs are created with AI, validated by real demand, and only then produced on-demand.

The idea came from a simple problem:
Fashion massively overproduces. Unsold inventory gets discounted or destroyed.

We’re trying a different model:

AI generates fashion designs.

Designs go live to the community.

Production only happens once enough people actually want the item.

Everything is produced on-demand — no inventory.

This flips the traditional model:
Brands normally guess demand → produce → discount leftovers.
We validate demand first → then manufacture.

We’re also experimenting with:

Market price insights before publishing

Transparent manufacturing cost breakdown

On-demand fulfillment only after validation

Letting creators earn without holding inventory

Right now we’re early-stage and testing:

Whether AI-generated fashion can reach real demand

Whether transparent pricing improves trust

Whether community validation reduces returns and waste

Would love feedback from HN on:

Does this model make sense?

What would break at scale?

Would you trust AI-generated fashion?

What are we missing?

Happy to answer anything about tech stack, supply chain, or unit economics.

Alex
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-12 09:01:04+00:00
This is really not the type of legacy that I want to leave behind on hackernews but then again, I have been vocal that I just write what I think. Literally. It has its flaws but I am not sugar coating it.

Sometimes I am unable to explain myself but the thing is that I write on HN to point out of some idea, some discussion. It's better written here than lost and yes most of my ideas might be incoherent but they make perfect sense to me in the moment, its quite hard to explain.

It seems that you have made an opinion & judgement about me and that's okay. I don't wish to change it.

I suppose while writing your comment, you must have been quite pissed to write it. Sorry for pissing you off in such sense, That wasn't my intention but I do hope that you can realize that your comment comes across as rude and quite frankly, I don't know how to respond to it and I don't want to throw myself to this level or continue in an argumentative tone.

We are more common than different actually. I suppose we both love open source and might share many hobbies. The difference is small when you think about it.

I hope that instead of fighting on our differences, we can work with our agreements. Teach me instead of such tone for I am interested in learning & let's hope that both of us and everyone can make a better future for the world & everyone living in it :D

Have a nice day, my friend. Hope the future's good for ya!

So answer me this, what's your favourite open source project and why? and I will answer mine when you respond later :]
by Emar7 | 2026-02-12 09:01:27+00:00
Contributed the BigQuery MCP tool (PR #3350) - lets agents query data warehouses with read-only SQL, cost tracking, and safety guardrails. Also just submitted a fix for runtime storage path validation (#4466).

The OODA framing resonates - treating exceptions as observations rather than crashes is exactly how the self-healing should work. The stress/neuroplasticity concept for preventing infinite loops is clever.

One thing I'd love to see explored more: structured audit logging for credential access. With enterprise sources (Vault/AWS/Azure) on the roadmap, compliance tracking becomes essential.
by Animats | 2026-02-12 09:02:01+00:00
That's interesting. It demonstrates that regenerative braking really works. The energy you expend going uphill, you mostly get back going downhill. The energy you expend speeding up, you mostly get back slowing down.
His tests were a round trip, so start and end altitude are the same.
And he kept a fixed speed on a freeway, so there wasn't much acceleration energy expenditure or energy loss into friction brakes.
You don't get drag or rolling resistance back, so that apparently dominates.
Those don't vary too much with load.

Nice result.
by rudhdb773b | 2026-02-12 09:02:08+00:00
Silly logical mistakes like that are rapidly decreasing in frequency as models improve, and I see no reason why they won't soon be a thing of the past.

For example, I haven't seen Grok make a mistake like that in a long time, and it has no problem with your question:

> Drive, obviously.
If you walk the 100m, your car stays parked at home, still dirty, wondering why you abandoned it. The whole point is to get the car to the car wash.
by kalterdev | 2026-02-12 09:02:18+00:00
I can relate. I enjoy the feeling of being free to close any window because it takes so little effort to bring it back. So, during a day, I close around a hundred of windows.

And it really helps to not think about accumulated junk.

The trick is to make the workflow really dynamic so that the process of managing it doesn’t stand in the way.

Some folks prefer to accumulate. I think this is fine as long as they make a system comfortable to navigate. Their approach wouldn’t work if they had to use a dynamic system that forced them to manage their dozens of sessions all the time. Conversely, their tools seem to be slow for a dynamic user.
by skocznymroczny | 2026-02-12 09:02:32+00:00
Arguably, most of the metaprogramming in D is done with templates and it comes with all the flaws of templates in C++. The error messages are long and it's hard to decipher what exactly went wrong (static asserts help a lot for this, when they actually exist). IDE support is non-existent after a certain point because IDE can't reason about code that doesn't exist yet. And code gets less self-documenting because it's all Output(T,U) foo(T, U)(T t, U u) and even the official samples use auto everywhere because it's hard to get the actual output types.
by einr | 2026-02-12 09:03:36+00:00
"Good tooling, good libraries, proven track record" are all relative concepts, it's not something you have or don't have.

There are serious projects being written in D as we speak, I'm sure, and the language has a track record of having been consistently maintained and improved since 2001, and has some very good libraries and tooling (very nice standard library, three independent and supported compiler implementations!) It does not have good libraries and tooling for all things; certainly integrations with other libs and systems often lag behind more popular languages, but no programming language is suitable for everything.

What I'm saying is there's a big world out there, not all programmers are burdened with having to care about CV-maxxing, community or the preferences of other devs, some of them can just do things in the language they prefer. And therefore, not everything benefits from being written in Rust or whatever the top #1 Most Popular! Trending! Best Choice for System Programming 2026! programming language of the week happens to be.
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-12 09:04:31+00:00
>The solution is parents using the parental control feature on their children’s devices.

Yeah but many parents are stupid and want the government to force everyone to wear oven mitts to protect their kids from their poor/lack of parenting. What do you do then?

Remember how since a lot of men died in WW2 so kids were growing up in fatherless homes which led to a rise in juvenile delinquency, and the government and parents instead of admitting fatherless homes are the issue, the "researchers" then blamed it on the violent comic books being the issue, so the government with support from parents introduced the Comics Code Authority regulations.

People and governments are more than happy to offload the blame for societal issues messing up their kids onto external factors: be it comic books, rock music, MTV, shooter videogames, now the internet platforms, etc.
by mrweasel | 2026-02-12 09:04:37+00:00
It's hard to imagine that just killing off Siri would hurt iPhone sales. It would be interesting to know how many people actually use, or even want Siri, or any type of voice assistant for that matter. The primary value of Siri is to check a box for investors, who are riding the AI wave. The same people how rode the voice assistant wave 15 years ago.

There's a lot of AI features that makes sense for Apple to include and develop, a voice assistant isn't one of them. If they want to turn Siri into an Apple ChatGPT, then that's slightly different, and more about getting yet another product that would make users sign up for a monthly iCloud subscription. If it's all on device though, that doesn't really seem like the goal.
Show HN: Tymr – simple time tracking and invoicing for freelancers
by hustlecoding | 2026-02-12 09:04:52+00:00
I freelance part-time and wanted a very simple flow: start timer, stop timer, generate invoice.

Most tools I tried felt team-oriented and heavy for my use case, so I built Tymr:
https://tymr.digital

Current functionality:
- persistent timer (tab switch/refresh safe)
- entries with billable/non-billable + rates
- invoice generation and PDF export

Built with Next.js + Supabase.

I’d love feedback on:
1) what’s missing for your freelancer billing workflow
2) what would make this trustworthy enough to replace your current tracker
by kakacik | 2026-02-12 09:05:27+00:00
I get what you want, its pretty sophisticated and yes probably a huge added value if it works reliably.

And there is no fucking way I want that in my life or my family's lives, ever. I will fight this very actively, with my wallet, voting and voice. Thats far beyond 1984 and at this point, in 2026, we know all that info will be weaponized against me, will try to manipulate me into decisions I would not do otherwise, for ads and other purposes. Also, it removes a lot of joy from one's life with discovering places and just being an adult and deciding for oneself, but that can be subjective.

If I dare to speak out, if I dare to disagree with official opinions, if I dare to have higher morals than those at the power at given moment. Look at all the shit happening even former bastion of democracy - US. Do you really think this is the bottom? We/You are still far from that and who knows if you bounce back. Past performance doesnt indicate future and all that.

Even when I am well shielded in proper bastion of true democracy and freedom - Switzerland in my case, nobody is immune. EU hates additional freedoms Swiss have and push hard for their dissolution, a reminder in their heart how better a very diverse European country can be run compared to mess EU is. US, at least current gov, hates this place too based on their moves.
by insanedeisgn | 2026-02-12 09:05:44+00:00
This conflict shows a pattern across AI products today.

Most tools are still designed with programmers as the default user.
Everyone else is treated as an edge case.

But the real growth is outside that bubble.
AI won’t become mainstream by hiding everything.
And it won’t get there by exposing everything either.

It gets there by translating action into intent.
By showing progress in human terms.
By making people feel they’re still in control.

The teams that figure this out won’t just win an argument on GitHub.
They’ll reach the much larger audience that’s still waiting on the sidelines.

My detail here: https://open.substack.com/pub/insanedesigner/p/building-ai-f...
by oulipo2 | 2026-02-12 09:06:40+00:00
No we shouldn't be "glad that people can become billionaire".

We should be glad that people can get reasonable wealthy, say, $100M net worth would be more than plenty, and would ensure that: people who worked hard got a lot ($100M!!), but nobody alone or in very small numbers can try to destroy the fabric of society

Is that hard for you to understand?

The fact that at your age you're still mistaking "generating billions in value" (this doesn't mean anything) with "extracting money from the system and selfishly refusing to give some of it back in a meaningful way" means that you still have to learn about how the world really works
by lxgr | 2026-02-12 09:07:45+00:00
> Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business in the same way that search engines aren't core to their business.

Apple's core business is providing well-crafted products and user interfaces for all kinds of interactions. Do you really think AI/LLMs won't change the way we use computers?

> They can trivially pay Google a billion a year for Gemini.

I'd be willing to bet that in less than 5 years, this will sound like saying "they can trivially pay Accenture a billion a year for slightly better UX design" today.
by oulipo2 | 2026-02-12 09:07:47+00:00
Exactly. Also it's not the "billionaires" who are "making value". They are lousy at making anything. It's the workers (engineers, farmers, factory workers) that "make".

The billionaires are just good at "capturing" value, and not giving back the rightfully owned share by the people.

They are leeches
by manuelmoreale | 2026-02-12 09:10:32+00:00
I know they're not compatible. I'm asking if you're also ok with those. There are also plenty of situations where you are asked to provide an ID, digitally, when above a certain age. For example booking hotels and other accommodations.

Personally I'm still trying to figure out where my position is when it comes to this whole debate because both camps have obvious pros and cons.
by foo42 | 2026-02-12 09:10:40+00:00
Same for me. I also make extensive use of adding links to anything relevant. Spent a bunch of time discussing something in a slack thread: link it. Read some documentation: link it. Had a chat with an llm in a chat window: link it. Writing notes about how a bunch of code works : link to the functions. For this last one I've registered a custom vim:// URL scheme on my system which lets me link to a symbol within a given file, and when clicked focuses the relevant tmux window and navigates the relevant vim instance (using named pipes) to the symbol, or opens a fresh one if not already open.
by onion2k | 2026-02-12 09:10:44+00:00
I'm not arguing that the feature wouldn't be used at all, just that I believe I'm fairly typical in not using clever phone features. It'd be used by a small number of people but that wouldn't make a noticeable change in marketshare if Android had it and iOS didn't.

To be honest, there probably isn't any feature of a phone OS would make a difference these days. People have decided which camp they're in and they're not going to change.
by drdaeman | 2026-02-12 09:10:46+00:00
Nothing changed since ’87. Machines still can’t be accountable and still shouldn’t make managerial decisions. Acceptance control is one of those decisions, and all the technical knowledge still matters to form a well-informed one. It may change, of course, but I have an impression that those who try otherwise seem to not fare well after the initial vibecoding honeymoon period. Of course, it varies from case to case - sometimes machines get things right, but long-term luck seems to eventually run out.
by altairprime | 2026-02-12 09:11:27+00:00
If you mean "Messages in iCloud":

I ended up having to "delete messages from icloud" on all devices, escalate to support after they weren't deleted 45 days later (the UI shows -15 days in that scenario), reenable sync and then see it still failing to complete a Sync Now, redisable sync and re-delete messages in cloud, wait another 45 days, and then ask them to escalate to the iCloud backend team to run a purge on their end of just my messages in icloud records. It worked, but I don't know if they've had enough time for whatever corruption they found to be patched into their automated ops-repair/cleanup processes (and they wouldn't tell me if I asked), it's only been a couple months.