MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cryptonector | 2026-02-26 22:25:21+00:00
The bias to build might mean faster token burn through (higher revenue for the AI co). But I think it's natural. I often have that same impulse myself. I prefer all the codebases I work on that have minimal external dependencies to the ones that are riddled with them. In Java land it's extremely common to have tons of external dependencies, and then upgrade headaches, especially when sharing in a monorepo type environment.
Show HN: InstallerStudio – Create MSI Installers Without InstallShield or WiX
by pkailas | 2026-02-26 22:25:26+00:00
I've been building Windows installer packages for 25 years. InstallShield
costs $2,000+/year. WiX works but requires writing XML by hand and has a
steep learning curve. Advanced Installer is better but still $500+/year.

So I built InstallerStudio — a WinUI 3/.NET 10 tool that generates
production-ready MSI files with a modern UI. One-time license, $199.

It handles files, shortcuts, registry, custom actions, services, file
associations, and installer branding. Self-contained — no WiX or other
tools required under the hood.

The meta part: InstallerStudio builds its own installer. I used it to
package itself for the first release.

https://www.ionline.com

Happy to answer questions about MSI internals, Windows Installer quirks,
or why I built this instead of just wrapping WiX.
by TSiege | 2026-02-26 22:25:47+00:00
This makes it make way more sense. That is a huge amount of growth really fast. I've worked in those companies, it's really hard on the work culture and organization when things grow that quickly.

I think the potential for productivity is there with AI, but this size of a cut based on speculation made no sense. This is actually reasonable in this light and is probably for the best. I'll be curious to see if any employees, former or otherwise talk about it
by iamcalledrob | 2026-02-26 22:26:09+00:00
Exactly.

The city heavily discourages car use for commuting.

Offices have no parking spaces.

Any parking you do find in central London will be paid at an extreme rate.

To drive into the city costs around $20 per day, increasing much further if you have an older, polluting vehicle.

There is so much congestion that it is usually faster to walk than drive.
by johnfn | 2026-02-26 22:26:09+00:00
I'm curious about the statement that hallucinations are "fundamentally unsolvable". I don't think an AI agent has left a hallucination in my code - by which I mean a reference to something which doesn't exist at all - in many months. I have had great luck driving hallucinations to effectively 0% by using a language with static typechecking, telling LLMs to iterate on type errors until there are none left, and of course having a robust unit and e2e test suite. I mean, sure, I run into other problems -- it does make logic errors at some rate, but those I would hardly categorize the same as hallucinations.
by divan | 2026-02-26 22:26:21+00:00
What is annoying about Nano Banana, is how bad is experience when you try to iterate or, especially, repeat same task for another photo. After second of third image it starts randomly ansering with complete nonsense like "I'm just a language mode and can't assist with that" or "I can't do that" (with absolutely the same prompt it had no issues 2 photos in a row in the same chat).

It also gaslights me, when I point out on an error. I tried to create a cartoon portrait of the person from photo and use background from another photo. It got wrong the order of photos. I provided filenames and explicitly told which one is for person and which for bg. It generated it wrong again, and all attempts to explain that it got it wrong were met with "No, it's YOU incorrect". So frustrating.
by divbzero | 2026-02-26 22:26:34+00:00
> The S, K combinators defined by Moses Schönfinkel on December 7, 1920, are together known to be computation universal. On December 7, 2020, Stephen Wolfram made the suggestion that S alone might also be universal.

I wonder how long in advance Stephen Wolfram first had this thought and waited until the centennial to publicize the suggestion.
by analog31 | 2026-02-26 22:26:43+00:00
There was certainly a contingent who believed that 3d printing was going to replace all other forms of manufacturing. It was even going to make custom food for us on order.

If you balked at the idea, then you were the bad guy, or treated with pity for being so out of touch. Usually you got the Kubler-Ross Stages thrown at you.
by inigyou | 2026-02-26 22:26:57+00:00
No not really. It's a thing you can do just because you can, like writing a book without the letter "e". Closer to the context of computation, it's like building a computer using only NAND gates. Or, given how restrictive the S combinator supposedly is, using only AND and OR gates. It won't make an efficient computer because your design is convoluted to all hell to make up for your choice to never use a NOT gate. Even the one made from NAND isn't efficient, because even though NAND can make any circuit without being too convoluted, it's not the most efficient way to make all circuits.
by throwback_dev | 2026-02-26 22:27:00+00:00
Multi-model failover is useful but it’s solving the wrong problem first. The bottleneck for most OpenClaw deployments isn’t model access — it’s that the agent can’t prove what it knows, can’t demonstrate that a skill is safe before running it, and stores everything in flat files that any compromised process can read or modify.

I’d rather see effort on verifiable memory and skill signing than on making it easier to route between more models. The model layer is already the most interchangeable part of the stack.
by dweinus | 2026-02-26 22:27:12+00:00
I think there is a second reason people still type, and it's relevant to LLMs. Typing forces you to slow down and choose your words. When you want to edit, you are already typing, so it doesn't break the flow. In short, it has a fit to the work that speech-to-text doesn't.

LLMs create a new workflow wherever they are employed. Even if capable, that is not always a more desirable/efficient experience.
by wtallis | 2026-02-26 22:27:59+00:00
It's trivial to look up the switch port configuration of a consumer router once you put OpenWRT on it. The most common topology is the CPU has two RGMII/XGMII or similar links to an 8-port switch chip, five more ports of the switch are connected PHYs for external ports and configured for the LAN VLAN, and the last port is connected to a PHY for an external port and configured for the WAN VLAN. This does not result in any VLAN tags being emitted over the wire, but from the perspective of the switch silicon it's just one of many possible VLAN configurations. Changing which physical port is the WAN port is as simple as assigning a different switch port to that VLAN. If you did want VLAN tags emitted on a particular port, it's a single checkbox or single-character config file change.
by magicalist | 2026-02-26 22:28:08+00:00
> Fun fact: copyright law was invented in the UK basically because painters and sculptors (!) considered photography theft. That came to a large degree before "real" text copyright as we know it today.

This is...not true? Or at least I can find no basis for your claims.

UK Copyright for books and sculpture predated the invention of photography and existed in a completely recognizable form ("a copyright term of 14 years, with a provision for renewal for a similar term, during which only the author and the printers to whom they chose to license their works could publish the author's creations.[4] Following this, the work's copyright would expire, with the material falling into the public domain"[1]).

Paintings and photographs gained copyright protection at the same time, in the 1862 Fine Arts Copyright Act, seemingly because it seemed natural to extend the haphazardly covered fine arts more completely.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne
by lotsofpulp | 2026-02-26 22:28:18+00:00
I am talking about buyers of labor, labor which is sold by people. Employing people is buying labor, no different than me hiring someone to clean my gutters or buying an apple at a grocery store. I compare prices and quality and switch the person I use to clean my gutters and grocery store I buy my apple at when it suits me.

>Or do some people (company owners) deserve special government labels/treatment/protections while others (zero hour workers) don't?

Obviously not, but I have no idea what you are referring to in the context of this discussion. A "corporation" has always been free to stop buying something from another "corporation" anytime.
How do fintech platforms handle audit sampling of privileged actions?
by leiishta | 2026-02-26 22:28:22+00:00
Hi folks — I have a question.

In regulated fintech environments, when auditors request reconstruction of privileged product-layer actions, how is that handled in practice? Is it typically satisfied through existing logging infrastructure, or does it require manual correlation across multiple systems?

In our case, we filtered the relevant application logs and passed them to the next team. I’m curious how other teams approach this, is it a concern if some logs are unintentionally missed.
by scott_w | 2026-02-26 22:28:34+00:00
> The rule set was sharpened the moment skilled workers realised the agency / consultancy was charging £2k a day for their labour while paying them £60k a year, and decided to leave on Friday and invoice on Monday. Same desk. Same client. Same work. The only difference was that the margin stayed with the person producing the value instead of flowing to partners and shareholders.

Right, so you're talking about IR35 specifically. This has nothing to do with "Uberisation" at all because the working arrangement and contract structure are completely different. It's also got fuck all to do with "classism" because it's 100% about tax.

First off, IR35 does not apply to self-employed workers, it only applies to a worker contracting via a limited company.

Second, it looks at how many "clients" you have. A limited company of 1 contracting to multiple clients is outside the scope of IR35 because, like your plumber, they are a business and not an employee trying to reduce the amount of tax they pay.

Thirdly, IR35 companies are allowed but they must operate in a specific way (that makes them not worth the hassle for the most part).

> That is class politics dressed up as “compliance”.

No, it's just about tax law.

I don't know why you needed to write 6 paragraphs when a simple "I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about" would have been much quicker for you to write and for me to read.
by colbyn | 2026-02-26 22:28:53+00:00
The title could have been a line out of Dune.

It’s interesting that many of us myself included once thought that the butlerian jihad was silly until now. Frank Herbert wrote something that is particularly prescient.

(Usually writers are just a decade ahead of their time. Whatever Podcasters are talking about today, has usually already been discussed in literature a decade ago. Prediction markets come to mind. Socially, over vs under population as discussed in popular books like the rationale optimist or the accidental superpower.)
by stitched2gethr | 2026-02-26 22:28:53+00:00
It all depends on the model and how much you use it of course. We're running Opus 4.6 and on a light day it spends a dollar or two. This is just a few simple operations like "create a ticket for ..." and it's regular heartbeat checks. The heaviest day I see is $110 and on that day we were basically talking to it and having it implement features all day long.
by nicetryguy | 2026-02-26 22:29:18+00:00
Ok, i just generally disagree with the premise. Why does it have to be "100% vibe coded" or "0% vibe coded"? There is a very happy medium that is getting ignored here. As a coder with various language experiences, i can just get like a good kick and a template with Claude and continue in any language i want and have the LLM do the redundant parts. As someone with some soldering experience, i could have an LLM cook up and explain a circuit that might have taken me months trying to mangle myself. I think LLMs empower creativity more than ever, and creative people can have a wonderful time with LLMs softening the initial headbanging and tedious redundancies of any project.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-02-26 22:30:02+00:00
I'd further reinforce this by pointing out that this is what the specific term, guest network, means - it's the common name used by router manufacturers to describe an optional feature of serving secondary network from the same hardware, intended for the specific, common use case of serving transient and/or less trusted users.

This is in contrast to more genetic, descriptive terms like "additional network", "separate network for guests", etc.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-02-26 22:30:20+00:00
> He figured: "It's weird, you actually end up thinking and poking at a problem for a week or two, and then it actually folds into a very small amount of code. And sure, Copilot helped a bit with some boilerplate, but that was only after figuring out how to structure and hold it".

Let me just get you that Fred Brooks quote, now where was it...? Ah, yes, here's one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4560756
by wao0uuno | 2026-02-26 22:30:36+00:00
I love KDE, especially since Plasma 6 release but oh man is the Settings program poorly designed and littered with settings 99% of users will never need.

So many options placed seemingly at random. Similar options like lockscreen, login screen and desktop background settings spread out over 3 different main categories.

Customization options so extensive and granular one can only wonder about their purpose. Even in their latest release blog post they chose to brag about the new ability to change intensity/thickness of frames. I don't think most people care about stuff like this.

Until recently defaults were straight up insane like single click to open folders/launch programs, touchpad scroll being inverted etc.

If you navigate to Settings -> Sound you'll be presented with some options but also buttons in the top right that will open a mostly empty screen with a few additional options. Why not split the whole page into parts and present everything on a single screen? Why not tabs?

Sometimes those buttons in the top right have different behavior. Some will open a whole new page ansd sometimes it's just a popup and other times it's a dropdown.

And oh man just navigating Settings sucks. Main list consists of single and two level options with two level options opening another, mostly empty vertical pane so the actual size of the right pane changes with top text jumping around depending on what you press. So why some settings have two levels and some have tabs and some have those junky top right buttons that need their own back button to show up in the interface whenever they're pressed? I'm not for or against any of those design choices but why all of them at random? I just want some goddamn consistency.

Cherry on top is the bloat most distros choose to install alongside Plasma desktop. Dragon Player? kMail? Does anyone even use these? I dislike Gnome a lot but at least their preinstalled software is minimal, elegant and actively supported/developed. Most KDE programs look like they stopped receiving updates in 2008.

I still think it's a great DE but there's much room for improvement.
by sumanthvepa | 2026-02-26 22:30:37+00:00
Not true. I'm a really heavy user of AI. And it's improved my productivity dramatically as a developer, but it doesn't work in every situation even in programming. I see it as an indispensible tool, but its not, right now, a tool that will replace me as a programmer or product manager or salesperson, or marketer. or (in my case) an owner and investor.

Will that happen in the future, maybe. but I don't have enough insight into how AI is evolving in the labs to make a judgement on that.
by tracker1 | 2026-02-26 22:30:54+00:00
I think some of the ADL reports in particular, I know there's other groups that I've seen in the past... with ADL in particular, there's been several cases that are either not logged, or classified as right wing when it should have been left. specifically anti-govt left/communist groups... anti-govt seems to always get classified as right-wing, as an example.

I didn't expressly want to spend a bunch of time looking things up that I hadn't seen in a few months and wouldn't be fresh in my mind on what/where to search... that's the only reason for the vagueness.

edit: I'm human... I can remember a lot of things, but not always specific context or what/where I read a given article on a subject, or the specific video to even search for if it was so. Often in these scenarios, where facing pushback, I'll actually spend the time to try to lookup things based on recollection and sometimes the searches go better or worse, I just don't have the time or inclination at the moment. I'm not trying to be obtuse or cagey, just real.
by cryptoneo | 2026-02-26 22:31:03+00:00
To me this "drilling is good for the environment narrative" sounded a bit misleading.

And not far down the rabbit whole one finds: The author of the study often cited by oil companies for above narrative, felt impelled to publish a clarifying statement: https://luyendyk.faculty.geol.ucsb.edu/Seeps%20pubs/Luyendyk...

Maybe stricter guidelines against operational "routine" spills led to a reduction of the sticky spots, plausible?
by mediaman | 2026-02-26 22:31:04+00:00
The 40k lines of code a day crows are amusing. In solving any problem solvable by code, there's a ratio of non-coding work to coding work, and codex et al all help immensely with the coding work but help less with the non-coding work.

Non-coding work is thinking about the system architecture, thinking about how data should flow, thinking about the problem to be solved, talking with people who will use it, discovering what their objectives are.

Producing 40k lines a code per day simply means you're not doing any of that work: the work that ensures you're building something worth building.

Which is why the result is massive, pointless things that don't do the things people actually need, because you've not taken any time to actually identify the problems worth solving or how to solve them.

It's a form of mania that recalls Kafka's The Burrow, where an underground creature builds and builds an endless series of catacombs without much purpose or coherence. When building becomes so easy when it was so hard -- and when it becomes more fun to build and watch codex's streams of diffs fly by, than to plan -- we forget the purpose of building, and building becomes its own purpose, which is why we usually so little actual productive impact on the world from the "40k lines of code a day" cohort.
by Animats | 2026-02-26 22:31:14+00:00
The DRAM shortage and lack of fab capacity have also caused the Playstation 6 to slip to 2029 or so.[1] Game consoles are vulnerable. They need a lot of RAM and have to sell at a moderate price.

The IDC article says that DRAM prices are not expected to come down again. "While memory prices are projected to stabilize by mid-2027, they are unlikely to return to previous level — making the sub-$100 segment (171 million devices) permanently uneconomical." Before, they always came back down in the next RAM glut, when everybody built too much capacity. Why is that not going to happen next time?

[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Storage-crisis-Playstation-6-co...
by pradeesh | 2026-02-26 22:31:21+00:00
Why wouldn't it be? We train these models on our own words, ideas, and thought patterns and expect them to reason and communicate as we do, anthropomorphizing is natural when we expect them to interact like a human does.

The general consensus seems to be that we can expect them to reach a level of intelligence that matches us at some point in the future, and we'll probably reach that point before we can agree we're there. Defaulting to kindness and respect even before we think its necessary is a good thing.
by dheera | 2026-02-26 22:31:26+00:00
I also don't think the "maker movement" disappeared, it's just that the bar for making stuff is so much lower now that anyone and their grandmother can do it.

In the past weeks I:

- 3D printed custom cups that fit onto a pet feeder to prevent ants from getting to our cat food

- 3D printed custom mounts to mount 3W WS2812 LEDs to illuminate Chinese New Year lanterns and connected them to an ESP32 WLED box connected to home assistant

- Connected an vision language model to a security camera that can answer questions about how many times a cat has eaten, drank water, used the toilet, and inform us about any things in the room that look abnormal

- Custom laser cutted a wall fitting for a portable heat pump input and output condenser hoses and added a condensate pump to the contraption, it saves us $200/month in heating costs

- Custom designed a retrofit for a sliding door that accepts a Nuki smart lock that wasn't designed for this type of door.

- Custom laser cutted a valentines day card in Chinese paper cutting style that was generated with many rounds of back and forth prompting with Gemini, then converted to SVG and cut

- My wife and I thought IKEA SKADIS pegboards would look better if they were made out of bamboo plywood, so I shoved a sheet of bamboo into my laser cutter and had it cut out a pegboard that looked much nicer, sprayed it with lacquer, then attached it to the wall with 3D printed mounting hardware. The SVG for the pegboard was generated by a script written by Cursor and took a couple of minutes.

- Having an ESP32 feed a camera image to an LLM and then do something with the result is a piece of cake. A box that "sprays water to deter the cat if the cat jumps on the kitchen counter" is a 1-hour job after you order the components from Amazon, and an LLM will build that parts list for you, too.

- Reverse enginereed the firmware of a Unifi Chime to upload more chime sounds than the UI limits you to, so that I can have Unifi Protect announce if there is an intruder somewhere late at night and where. Cursor reverse-engineered the firmware .bin for me.

A lot of this could have been worth sharing 10 years ago. Now all of this is just "normal life in 2026" so you don't hear about it much. I'm used to thinking of something and then physically having it <12 hours later. It's no longer an undertaking. It's not news anymore.

The bar for "news-worthiness" for makers these days? This guy built an entire city for his cats, with a full functional subway system and everything ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4UEugp_mf0
by groby_b | 2026-02-26 22:31:33+00:00
I'd suggest to move even beyond "engage/ignore".

This is HN. The focus should be "does this person provide interesting or thought provoking comments", not "relationships" or "engagement".

There are plenty of HN commenters whose opinions I absolutely dislike (I'm sure it's mutual ;), but I still read them - they are at least well reasoned or point out missing facts. I don't have to like them to learn from them.
by ProfessorLayton | 2026-02-26 22:31:50+00:00
Somehow, with 12GB of RAM, I can't get my iPhone 17 Pro to keep more than a few safari tabs open without having them refresh when I come back from an app or two, and it makes me want to throw my phone across the train (Where the internet often cuts out!).

A lot of software has been squandering the massive hardware gains that have been made. I hope this changes when it becomes a lot harder to throw hardware at the problem.

I also wonder what this means for smartphone-esque devices like the Switch 2. If this goes on long enough I won't be surprised if they release a 'lite' model with less RAM/Storage and bifurcate their console capabilities, worse than what they did with 3DS > 2DS .