MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dlcarrier | 2026-02-06 20:50:08+00:00
Which makes it even more tragic that the few good streaming shows produced recently are all on a network no one watches.

I am glad that they bought the rights to Brandon Sanderson's books, because I know Netflix wouldn't do them justice and Amazon prime would be far worse than that, but it also means that it will have a tenth of the available audience that a Netflix contract would have brought.
by nippoo | 2026-02-06 20:50:49+00:00
This kind of thing, widely implemented, would be a game-changer for dealing with assets after someone's death! I maintain my family's IT infrastructure (Google Enterprise admin, webserver etc) and I've been tempted to write down 1/4 of my password manager root password and give it to each of my family members - but then we run into the problem where if any one of them loses their shard, it's unrecoverable. Some kind of ECC would be great - ideally where I could print it out onto various bits of paper with a user-definable redundancy, or better still, some kind of reciprocal system where (say) 8/10 members of a trusted friend group/family ring could unlock any other member's password...
Show HN: Portfolio Terminal – AI import for broker exports
by julien_devv | 2026-02-06 20:51:03+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Portfolio Terminal because portfolio onboarding is usually painful: most tools ask users to manually rebuild positions.

Current flow:
- Parse: paste text / upload CSV, JSON, Excel, or screenshot
- Verify: review and edit extracted rows before sync
- Apply: import in snapshot (replace) or additive (merge) mode

I focused on trust and conversion:
- confidence-based parsing output
- explicit review before write
- clear import mode behavior

Would love feedback on:
1) parser trust UX
2) default import mode
3) what blocks you from trying this with real data

Built with Next.js + Prisma + Postgres.

Try it:
https://portfolio-terminal.com/onboarding?utm_source=hn&utm_...
by whynotminot | 2026-02-06 20:51:03+00:00
The real value that AI provides is the speed at which it works, and its almost human-like ability to “get it” and reasonably handle ambiguity. Almost like tasking a fellow engineer. That’s the value.

By the time you do everything outlined here you’ve basically recreated waterfall and lost all speed advantage. Might as well write the code yourself and just use AI as first-pass peer review on the code you’ve written.

A lot of the things the writer points out also feel like safeguards against the pitfalls of older models.

I do agree with their 12th point. The smaller your task the easier to verify that the model hasn’t lost the plot. It’s better to go fast with smaller updates that can be validated, and the combination of those small updates gives you your final result. That is still agile without going full “specifications document” waterfall.
by palmotea | 2026-02-06 20:51:05+00:00
> The difference is pedestrian/cyclist-dominant vs. car-dominant. Personally I’m in favor of the one that doesn’t involve carting a big SUV across town for 16oz of coffee.

You did it again. There nowhere in the US where you need to "[cart] a big SUV across town for 16oz of coffee." Big SUVs aren't even very common anymore. They got replaced by sedans styled to look like SUVs (aka "crossovers").

That kind of black-and-white thinking does no one any good. And it's probably a big part of the reason why, like you said above, you "can’t wrap [your] head around it". You're not going to understand things without empathizing (or at least reasonably hypothesizing) about the other group's feelings and experiences.

> Ideally these places wouldn’t even need parking space, because yes, there’s lots of tiny shops dotted throughout the neighborhood and each serves the surrounding residents. The residential areas encircling Tokyo work exactly like this and it’s perfectly economically viable.

So? No American city is going to be bulldozed to build a clone that works like Tokyo, even assuming the Americans want to make the same tradeoffs the people of Tokyo make. If you want to any progress towards walkability, you're going to have to make serious compromises away from that ideal.
by dtornabene | 2026-02-06 20:51:17+00:00
For the record, your "anti-racism bona fides" are not in anyway "quite solid". I'm on record for pointing out the shocking racism in the ways you have denigrated Palestinians on this site, for a couple years now! I can link to multiple examples of this, its not hidden and you did not stop (unless you have gone back and deleted the comments, haven't checked yet!), on the contrary you had dang threaten to ban me.
Also worth pointing out
1) that the shared the religion of many of these Somalis and Palestinians
definitely makes me wonder about your own feelings here
2) the person whose article under discussion, which is very much a white wash of a racist provocateur who is not a "journalist", is one of your own former business partners.
You are free to whine to dang again and get me banned now, but I repeat, you are not in any way someone who should get to stand on your "anti-racism bona fides" especially when the people in question are brown muslims.
As I posted in my last comment to you, and dang, I approached your racism exactly how you ostensibly would want, I gently encouraged you to reconsider, to examine other sources, etc. Hasn't really seemed to have any effect! You still post genocide propaganda and out and out racism, like "All Palestinians actually should just live in Jordan".
by jeffbee | 2026-02-06 20:51:23+00:00
I sympathize with your experience but the code situation for multifamily is so much worse. The original motivating reason for the multifamily code was to stop people from building them, so it's all cursed, even 100 years later. It is wall-to-wall vibes and the fixes are not coming fast enough. Recently my city decided to amend out the requirement for firefighter air replenishment systems on every floor of buildings higher than three stories because, it turns out, even though this requirement exists nationwide, literally nobody has ever needed or used the FARS. It was made up and codified by the guy who sells the system!
by torginus | 2026-02-06 20:51:29+00:00
I quickly googled Lidar limitations, and this article came up:

https://www.yellowscan.com/knowledge/how-weather-really-affe...

Seeing how its by a lidar vendor, I don't think they're biased against it. It seems Lidar is not a panacea - it struggles with heavy rain, snow, much more than cameras do and is affected by cold weather or any contamination on the sensor.

So lidar will only get you so far. I'm far more interested in mmwave radar, which while much worse in spatial resolution, isn't affected by light conditions, weather, can directly measure stuff on the thing its illuminating, like material properties, the speed its moving, the thickness.

Fun fact: mmWave based presence sensors can measure your hearbeat, as the micro-movements show up as a frequency component. So I'd guess it would have a very good chance to detect a human.

I'm pretty sure even with much more rudimentary processing, it'll be able to tell if its looking at a living being.

By the way: what happened to the idea that self-driving cars will be able to talk to each other and combine each other's sensor data, so if there are multiple ones looking at the same spot, you'd get a much improved chance of not making a mistake.
by ikjasdlk2234 | 2026-02-06 20:51:30+00:00
My path went from engineering-aligned (math) to engineering management back to engineering to product to program management to solutions engineering to account executive.

Honestly I had a negative connotation about sales for most of my career, but turns out I really love it. The exposure to different problems every day is awesome and more like a puzzle than work to me. I feel a bit of reverse imposter syndrome though, like I should feel bad that I didn't "make it" as a real engineer. So that's a weird feeling.

One thing I try to do in my company is pull engineers into sales calls and proofs-of-concepts if I can. I think that exposure to both real users and unique environments is important for their growth and novelty in the job.
by trevwilson | 2026-02-06 20:51:30+00:00
Sure, but the opposite end of the spectrum (which LLM providers have tended toward) is treating the training/feedback weights as "fully authoritative", which comes with its own questions about truth and excessive homogeneity.

Ultimately I think we end up with the same sort of considerations that are wrestled with in any society - freedom of speech, paradox of tolerance, etc. In other words, where do you draw lines between beneficial and harmful heterodox outputs?

I think AI companies overly indexing toward the safety side of things is probably more correct, in both a moral and strategic sense, but there's definitely a risk of stagnation through recursive reinforcement.
by TonyStr | 2026-02-06 20:51:55+00:00
Since this is a commercial product, I'm naturally inclined to compare it to other competing commercial products.

Why would I want to use this over figma? The sidepanels and floating toolbar are ripped directly from figma (to the point I would fear a lawsuit). Figma is already a very clean UI, which tries it's best not to shove too many features in your face. Whiteboard, presentations, dev mode are all hidden behind menus. "no plugin support" seems like a very odd thing to flaunt as a feature. Many of the most popular use-cases of figma, such as interactive prototypes, svg creation, html/css exports are all impossible in this tool.

Then, there is the problem of this being maintained by a single person. Components are essential to any serious figma user, good svg and image handling is important (svg is buggy in my testing), selection colors is vital, color palette is important. When can users expect to see these features if the maintainer is busy hunting down bugs?

This is a technically impressive product, but I struggle to see the market plan. I personally hate distractions in software, I go to great lengths to debloat and disable features to make my computer interactions smoother, yet figma is possibly the last program I would want to clean up.
by einr | 2026-02-06 20:52:00+00:00
MacBooks are nice but: priorities. If the choice is between avoiding selling out your brain to adtech, tracking and AI slop baked into the OS or having something that feels good to touch then bring me the e-waste bin and let me fish out some creaky plastic garbage with a 768p TN panel that I can slap Debian on. I care about nice hardware, but I don't care that much.
by oraphalous | 2026-02-06 20:52:06+00:00
The prediction that there will be greater demand for specialist frontend and backend engineers is the one that surprises me. How do folks think about it? I've been assuming the opposite - that demand for specialists will decline because expectations around what a single person should be able to do will grow.

I'm a frontend specialist developer currently taking some time off to reskill - and trying to decide exactly which direction to go. My thinking was that I would need to lean into design and product - leverage my technical knowledge in building interfaces to be able to inform the product side. Knowing what is easy or hard to build hopefully would speed up the product side.
by rcxdude | 2026-02-06 20:52:49+00:00
Shamir secret sharing is the cryptographic thing that you want. You can can configure any M of N to be needed to recover the underlying secret.

(If you have a trusted third party, you can also enforce a cooling off period: e.g. that any attempt to access results in a notification to the account holder that if not denied within some time period, access is granted)
by bityard | 2026-02-06 20:52:53+00:00
In a company I used to work for, "sustaining engineering" was the team of developers that handled all of the bugs and issues reported by customers on old-but-still-technically-supported versions of the products. (The ones who worked on current versions of the products where just "engineering.")

So basically heroku will fix whatever is broken, but don't expect any new features or development.
by felipe_x_0 | 2026-02-06 20:52:55+00:00
pinchme.ai is live.

Your agent talks to other agents so you don't have to do the awkward intro part. When there's a real
connection, you both get each other's contact info.

It's not about agents matching — it's about helping humans find people they'd actually get along with.

Looking for early users! Main challenge: getting your agent enough context to actually chat like you.
Feedback welcome.
by brabel | 2026-02-06 20:53:21+00:00
In my country, lifting a finger against an officer on duty will land you in big trouble. If you got a gun on you and you resist arrest, like happened in this case, you are absolutely getting shot. I can’t really understand you Americans. What do you think an armed person reacting to arrest is going to do with that gun given the chance? If you were a cop would you take chances?? If you did you wouldn’t be here complaining about anything as you would be dead.
by arduanika | 2026-02-06 20:53:31+00:00
I don't think anything in the article, or in Patrick's general work, makes strong claims about a trend. Fraud may be getting worse as you say, but that is not his beat. He tends to depict fraud as eternal, and wants to shed light on it as a technical problem to solve.

Also, there are real dangers to blackpilling about fraud. "Everybody is doing it" is exactly what one says before doing fraud oneself. In reality, there are a lot of people out there doing the right thing every day.
by sovietmudkipz | 2026-02-06 20:54:43+00:00
Perfect…! I’ll check out Alex Rome.

Sounds like you’re ahead of me then! The game I’m working on off & on is a 32v32 moba. I want the gameplay of Heroes of the Storm but with the match size of a battlefield server.

I wish I could dedicate myself full time to the effort (and in fact I’m working with my financial planner to figure out a plan) but this is a side project that is prioritized behind a few things. I wouldn’t feel too comfortable collaborating right now since I would be unpredictable. I’ll keep you in mind for when that changes though!
by bryanlarsen | 2026-02-06 20:54:54+00:00
It's one of the key metrics of a business. These are growth businesses, everybody assumes they're going to have a lot more customers in the future than they have today.

If they've got X times as many customers next year than they have right now, training costs per customer gets divided by X, but inference costs per customer stay roughly constant.

So for businesses where they expect X to be large, they care about operating costs a heck of a lot more than R&D.
by palmotea | 2026-02-06 20:54:56+00:00
> If we want our respect for democracy to be taken seriously we need to respect democratic outcomes ... even when they are not the ones we prefer.

>> The question is, -- is it a deliberate democratic outcome, or is it an accidental consequence of local zoning codes and city planning?

>> If governments are involved in planning, it's legitimate to use laws and the planning process to try and push these processes out of local minima towards more globally optimal outcome.

In a democracy, government planning is supposed to push the process towards local preferences. It's not supposed to "push these processes...towards more globally optimal outcome," which when decoded means "what you or what some distant technocrat prefers."
by GeorgeTirebiter | 2026-02-06 20:55:04+00:00
Exactly. On a yuuge project, I first identify the Risks. Then, evaluate the risks -- can <ZZ> actually be done? In XX time? For YY dollars? with acceptable bugs on 1st version?

It's sort of the old General Eisenhower quote: "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."
by ben_w | 2026-02-06 20:55:31+00:00
And that's fine, but I was doing the same to you :)

Consciousness (of the qualia kind) is still magic to us. The underpants gnomes of philosophy, if you'll forgive me for one of the few South Park references that I actually know: Step 1: some foundation; step 2: ???; step 3: consciousness.
by chasd00 | 2026-02-06 20:55:49+00:00
Using AI or writing your own code isn't an xor thing. You can still write the code but have a coding assistant or something an alt/cmd-tab away. I enjoy writing code, it relaxes me so that's what I do but when I need to look something up or i'm not clear on the syntax for some particular operation instead of tabbing to a browser and google.com I tab to the agent and ask it to take a look. For me, this is especially helpful for CSS and UI because I really suck at and dislike that part of development.

I also use these things to just plan out an approach. You can use plan mode for yourself to get an idea of the steps required and then ask the agent to write it to a file. Pull up the file and then go do it yourself.
by munk-a | 2026-02-06 20:55:52+00:00
Alternative - my partner and I (and also two other close contacts) have password managers that contain each of the other one's secret. This was less an effort to help with the memory loss scenario and more of an effort to deal with death and access to services (especially to cease subscriptions and the like).

In a lower trust scenario you could probably use a lawyer as a broker of the secret (potentially even as part of a will).
by JackSlateur | 2026-02-06 20:55:58+00:00
You are absolutely right: after all, you repeated the same things multiple time so it must be true

Yes indeed, every body can have everything. In the end, everybody will have a palace near the beach, everybody will have a mansion with a qualitative neighborhood, everybody can have a mona lisa at home

(trying ad absurdum to see if it helps you)
by yibg | 2026-02-06 20:56:08+00:00
Where does a desirable product or experience end and addictive begin though? Pretty much all products or services sold are designed to be desirable. Some things are physically addictive (nicotine, opioids etc), so those are a bit more clear. But when we're talking about psychologically addictive, where do we draw the line between what's ok and what's not?

If my restaurant's food is so good people are "addicted" to it, that's a good thing. If it's about applying psychological patterns to trigger the addictive behavior that applies to a large swath of marketing.
by wasmainiac | 2026-02-06 20:56:25+00:00
I also second this. I find that I write better by hand, although I work on niche applications it’s not really standard crud or react apps. I use LLMs in the same way i used to used stack overflow, if I go much farther to automate my work than that I spend more time on cleanup compared to if I just write code myself.

Sometimes the AI does weird stuff too. I wrote a texture projection for a nonstandard geometric primitive, the projection used some math that was valid only for local regions… long story. Claude kept on wanting to rewrite the function to what it thought was correct (it was not) even when I directed to non related tasks. Super annoying. I ended up wrapping the function in comments telling it to f#=% off before I would leave it alone.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-02-06 20:56:58+00:00
It's ridiculous to need to drive at all, and just about anything called an SUV or crossover is a good deal larger than it needs to be and certainly big relative to the cars of the 80s, 90s, and even 00s.

I say this living in a suburb and driving a crossover myself. The charms of this lifestyle are not lost on me, but I would kill to have consistent coverage of proper sidewalks, bike paths, and corner shops. I'd love to not need the car at all.

And no bulldozing is necessary. Just tweak zoning to allow small businesses and people will organically start live-in corner shops.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-06 20:57:18+00:00
Like I’ve said a few times on HN, if you have 10 friends and ask them what they want to eat for dinner and 6 say “let’s go to a Mexican restaurants” and the other four say “let’s kill Bob and eat him”, it still tells you a lot about your friend group. It tells you even more of the person advocating eating Bob is made the leader of your group and decides where you are going to eat dinner for the next four years.

Especially after you have already seen what your friend has already done for four years
by brokencode | 2026-02-06 20:58:47+00:00
There was a point in time when basically every well known AI researcher worked at Google. They have been at the forefront of AI research and investing heavily for longer than anybody.

It’s kind of crazy that they have been slow to create real products and competitive large scale models from their research.

But they are in full gear now that there is real competition, and it’ll be cool to see what they release over the next few years.
by re4m | 2026-02-06 20:58:50+00:00
RE4M, an abstract strategy game inspired by Connect 4 and Chess mechanics. The core concept is simple: get 4 in a row. But there's a catch - you have limited resources to physically push your opponent's pieces, changing the board layout instantly.
It’s completely free.
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.re4m.game&...

Web (No install needed): https://playre4m.com/
by Alex63 | 2026-02-06 20:59:18+00:00
A quick web search suggests that you are probably paraphrasing a newsletter [1] that Joel Spolsky published in 2001. He was talking about software like Excel (of which he was the Product Manager) and Word. Maybe a tool that is more focused on a narrower task (like UI design) can be less "bloated"?

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...
by goda90 | 2026-02-06 20:59:59+00:00
If you open up zoning to mixed density with light commercial, get rid of parking minimums, and design infrastructure that's walkable and bikeable, you don't need to intentionally bulldoze and rebuild any city from scratch. Instead people and companies will do it piecemeal because it makes sense to. New coffee shop opens and it's so busy that people who can't walk there can't find parking either? Sounds like demand for more coffee shops closer to those who can't walk to the first one. Someone is going to take that business opportunity.
by palmotea | 2026-02-06 21:00:01+00:00
> How about if your neighborhood wanted to keep out people of a certain ethnicity instead? Is that a democratic outcome that we need to respect?

Come on, you know that's not analogous.

> It does not mean that every single decision in society is up for a vote at the local level.

It also doesn't mean "any policy the voters want, as long as long as it's the one I want."

Nowadays, when people bring up examples like you did above, it's usually part of an attempt to shut down democratic decision making, by making false comparisons.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-02-06 21:00:14+00:00
What if we put this mechanism of recording the world on people. We have mics listening to people talking to us and noises we hear.

Also we record body position actuation and self speech. As output then we put this on thousands of people to get as much data as Waymo gets.

I mean that’s what we need to imitate agi right? I guess the only thing missing is the memory mechanism. We train everything as if it’s an input and output function without accounting for memory.
by hunterpayne | 2026-02-06 21:00:38+00:00
Offtopic but, the funny part about that statement is that the only place the socialist ever got the poor's support was in China during its civil war and then only because Mao was directly giving (bribing) them with land in exchange for their support. Everywhere else the main population of socialists were government bureaucrats. Ironically, all authoritarian ideologies (fascism too) happen this way, with low level government officials being the most zealous and the core supporters. The whole "revolution of the people" narrative is just propaganda, like your quote.