MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chongli | 2026-02-20 01:57:03+00:00
I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone. The price would obviously have to be higher since you aren't just buying it for yourself. But perhaps the sense of "I'm helping build a better-informed world and helping broadcast my values" would encourage people to pay that higher price.

What you're asking for is the system we already have, except at a micro level rather than a macro level. Rich people buy out newspapers to signal-boost their own preferred messages to the public.

I think it's questionable that the "news that people feel is actually valuable" is what really ought to be spread. Some of the most valuable news is local reporting on the daily business of municipal governments. Regular people are notoriously uninterested in local politics, despite the outsized impact it has on their lives. Many of the most mundane decisions made in municipal councils go completely unnoticed yet they can destroy whole communities in the long run.
by al_borland | 2026-02-20 01:57:54+00:00
I’m a saver. I’ve had coworkers tell me I “live like a poor person.” I disagree, but can see how it might look that way sometimes.

The thing is, I have everything I want. On serval occasions I’ve gotten a bonus or something and decided I should recklessly spend a certain percentage of it. It’s hard, because there is nothing I want. I spend months trying to come up with ideas and buy some stuff, but rarely all of it. This last year, I just stayed at a really expensive hotel to finish out the reckless spending budget… and think I would have been happier at a less nice place. I own my home, my car is paid off, I go on a nice trip or two each year. I’m not sure what else I’d want.

I like the idea that I could buy something more than the reality of having it. In many cases, I find the idea of having more things stressful. Having multiple homes or cars just sounds like work. A boat sounds like a nightmare; the best boat is a friend’s boat.

If I won the lottery, my big splurge would probably be selling my house and going back to renting. I liked not having to care about anything as a renter.

My grandma lived to 104, and had she lived another couple months, there would have been a lot of uncomfortable talks about where the money would come from to keep supporting her. She died with about $1k left to her name. You could say she did it perfectly, but this caused a lot of stress for the people taking care of her. She also got lucky with various benefits, which a lot of work went into getting. She lived a very frugal life, so this was not overspending on her part… she just lived a long time. I don’t want anyone who might be taking care of me to need to worry like that, and I don’t want to need to worry either. I don’t know how much I’ll need, but would rather have it and not need it, than need it and not have it… and I don’t feel like I’m making any sacrifices for that. What would make me miserable is having to go back to work in my 70s, because I spent too much money on nonsense I didn’t even want when I was younger due to social pressure.

There is a lot of freedom is not being saddled with payments or expensive stuff. If I lost my job, I could probably make ends meet working just about anywhere. This gives me so peace of mind, and if I didn’t want to work for a few years, I could do that too.

I do like to buy nice stuff when I do buy things. I often wish I didn’t. I feel like there is also freedom is not having a bunch of nice stuff. When it’s too nice, the stuff ends up feeling like it needs to be treated with kid gloves and protected. I’d like to feel less attached to some of my things.

In college there were 2 kids who shared a dorm room and they had basically nothing. They never locked their door, because there was nothing to take. Move in/out probably took 10 minutes. I kind of envied the amount of freedom that gave them. I think about it often, even decades later. I knew other people who were robbed and they were always stressed out.

If people have ideas of things to spend money on to “save less”, I’m all ears. I have been out of ideas for years.
by just6979 | 2026-02-20 01:58:03+00:00
I don't think they "ran it through an AI image generator" to scrub it, I think someone asked an LLM for a description of a git branching model with an image to go along with it. Since there is _a lot_ on the web about GitFlow, it makes sense that the model would get connected to those embeddings, and of course the image is going to be connected as well.

I think this just show how plaigarize-y LLMs are. There has been a lot recently about how easy it is to get a model to generate entire books to 98%, and this shows how the same can be done with images. Prompt it the right way, and you can get shitty copies of anything it was trained on. Really shows how little (none?) new content is actually being created, and how much is basically just lossy compression (with really noisy decompression) of the training corpus.
by adrianwaj | 2026-02-20 01:58:38+00:00
Well, I just read this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47070173

Surprised it didn't get more upvotes. It says:

"AI Is a Mirror, Not an Equalizer"

well not yet anyway.

If that article is to be believed, there are organizations that are really working well in the areas of "Design Engineering" and "Context Engineering." It would be worthwhile trying to work in one of those firms, if it is difficult to get to 10x productivity alone.

There's also probably going to be a new area of management consulting helping firms get to that high level of AI integration - could be a few years out, though.

I am thinking now a new type of organization could also arrive, like a Palantir 2.0.

CEOs will outsource their entire IT function to it after firing a lot of their staff. Also startup CEOs will sit down with a hologram and tell it what they want to do, and why they think they are uniquely positioned to execute on their vision compared to other humans in their field. The robot/hologram may end up working with a few humans in the same area, creating competition between them, but will eventually aim to drive them all to the ground in the end, like HAL.

But companies should be much more careful about where they host their "proprietary" code. Maybe some companies will start inventing their own languages and keep it in-house? Groups of companies may aggregate around their own AI? Why not groups of developers?

I shelved a startup from 15 years ago, built with Django that launched but never got any real users, as I put it on hold to focus on other things (crypto.) Perhaps people should look at working with multiple startups simultaneously and sticking with the one that takes off. If you got 10x productivity tomorrow, how are you going to leverage that? I like the idea of skipping equity and just have portions of revenue be returned to staff in real-time... "shortening the incentive-loop." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46882238

Because 10x productivity not only f$$$$$ average developers, it f$$$$$ investors to, right?
by reliefcrew | 2026-02-20 01:59:52+00:00
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262560993/the-little-schemer/

She can play along on the computer by installing mit-scheme and placing the snippet below into ~/.scheme.init

(define atom?
(lambda (x)
(and (not (pair? x)) (not (null? x)))))

(define lat?
(lambda (l)
(cond
((null? l) #t)
((atom? (car l)) (lat? (cdr l)))
(else #f))))

(define member?
(lambda (x l)
(cond
((null? l) #f)
((eq? (car l) x) #t)
(else (member? x (cdr l))))))

(define mber?
(lambda (a lat)
(cond
((null? lat) #f)
(else (or (eq? (car lat) a)
(mber? a (cdr lat)))))))
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-20 02:00:09+00:00
Reminds me of the way that Chairman Mao in China demanded adoration as he instituted more of a Communist Dictatorship during his "Cultural Revolution".

Actual free enterprise is the main enemy of a dictator, and it's so strongly associated with capitalism that Mao was killing two birds with one stone.

In case nobody has noticed, Trump has already taken more of a toll on capitalism than any president in history.

You want to have good business in international commerce like the way it was since 1776 up until recently, back when America was greater than it is now?

Too bad, no capitalism for you any more.

Don't worry the state will take care of you with the resources which remain to be apportioned to the masses, all you need to do is carry a banner emblazoned with his scowling face as you chant propaganda about how things are better than ever.

https://www.gettyimages.nl/detail/nieuwsfoto%27s/the-great-p...
by mwcampbell | 2026-02-20 02:00:42+00:00
Every little detail matters though. In SQL, do you want your database field to have limited length? If so, pay attention to validation, including cases where the field's content is built up in some other way than just entering text in a free-form text field (e.g. stuffing JSON into a database field). Want to guess why that scenario's on my mind? Yeah, I neglected to pay attention to that detail, and an LLM might too. In CSS, little details affect the accessibility of the UI.

So we need to pay attention to every detail that doesn't have a single obviously correct answer, and keep the volume of code we're producing to a manageable enough level that we actually can pay attention to those details. In cases where one really is just literally moving data from here to there, then we should use reliable, deterministic code generation on top of a robust abstraction, e.g. Rust's serde, to take care of that gruntwork. Where that's not possible, there are details that need our attention. We shouldn't use unreliable statistical text generators to try to push past those details.
by mrandish | 2026-02-20 02:02:18+00:00
> the first graphical RPG I ever played, Dungeons of Daggorath

In case you didn't know Dungeons of Daggorath (1982) for the Radio Shack Color Computer featured significantly in the best-selling sci-fi book "Ready Player One" (although it was not an element in movie). https://readyplayerone.fandom.com/wiki/Dungeons_of_Daggorath

I got my Color Computer in 1982 and banged my head on Daggorath for many hours. Randomly reading Ready Player One in 2012 was surreal. There were so many impossibly obscure references to esoteric 80s computer and arcade trivia that was personally very significant to me - but to almost no one else - it felt like I was being punked by someone that knew me. And the more I read, the more bizarre coincidences kept piling up - from Daggorath on the Coco to knowing how to beat a Joust arcade cabinet with the arcane pterodactyl bug which was only present in Red/Yellow Joust cabinets. The Coco was obscure, maybe 1/100th as popular as the Commodores and Ataris, and Daggorath wasn't even close to a top selling game on it.

In the early 80s, every time I'd go to an arcade I was always on the lookout for a red/yellow Joust so I could drop a high score. I also read Rainbow Magazine every month and even flew across the country to attend the first RainbowFest in Chicago. Good times, indeed.
by _wire_ | 2026-02-20 02:02:48+00:00
Because AIs can have no idea about correct code?

Corellary: The extreme excitement and surprise about AI output in a media culture of cherry-picking has produced epic confirmation bias, which feeds a hype machine that eclipses the stark reality.

As AI (mis)application accelerates, the stories about coping with AIs limitations are usually couched in a tone of opportunity: "I made a tool to help you find where your AI is wasting money!"

There's a simple question that can be asked about any application context of AI that puts the hype into proper perspective: Why hasn't the AI already accounted for and mitigated your problems with applying it?! From the vantage of this simple question, you realize that you believe there's a line about what AI cannot be expected to do... so the next question you face is: why do I think this line of AI limits can be drawn beyond the scope my desired application rather than within the scope?

At this point, you will notice that AI-application success stories too commonly sound like "I tried this and it looks like it works," whereas actual engineering is the application of proven principles, techniques and methods to the solution of problems that pre-exist any novel technology used for the solution.

Repeat: For any problem you are facing applying AI, ask "Why can't AI solve this problem?" then get on with traditional approaches to engineering free of confirmation bias.

Referring back to the example of excitement about tools that help you overcome AI limits, the misapplication of
Unpaid – AI payment reminders that verify, escalate, and auto-reply
by SnapExp | 2026-02-20 02:05:01+00:00
I built a tool because I was tired of writing this email:

"Hi, just following up on my invoice from 3 weeks ago..."

I ran a small business from 2016 to 2019 and lost it because
clients didn't pay on time. The stress of constantly following up,
not knowing what to write without sounding rude, feeling like
you're begging to be paid — it eventually broke the business.
I sold at a loss and went back to full-time employment.

Years later, with an IT background going back to 1993, I looked
at what was available. Every tool on the market is template-based.
Same robotic email every time. Complex setup. Priced for enterprise.
And they all still need you to manually check if the customer
actually paid.

So I built Unpaid.

It connects to Xero, QuickBooks, or Stripe and uses AI (Claude by
Anthropic) to write genuinely unique payment reminders — starting
with a courtesy heads-up before the due date, then a 5-stage
escalation from friendly nudge to final notice.

What makes it different from templates:

- If a customer says they've paid, Unpaid verifies it against your
accounting data automatically. If it can't confirm after 3 days,
it sends a polite follow-up asking for a payment reference.
- If a customer disputes an invoice, reminders pause automatically
and you're notified.
- If a customer asks for the invoice to be resent, it's resent
automatically.
- All alerts and approvals come to your email. You don't need to
log into a dashboard.

You can also create invoices directly in Unpaid — they sync to
your accounting software with your branding, logo, and payment
link, exactly as if you'd created them in Xero or QuickBooks.

I tested every feature with live Xero, QuickBooks, and Stripe
accounts. Registered a sole trader business, used family as
clients, made real payments with my own credit card. No sandbox,
no demo mode.

Stack: FastAPI + SQLAlchemy, Next.js, Claude (Anthropic), APScheduler,
PostgreSQL, deployed on Railway + Vercel.

Free 14-day trial at https://getunpaid.io (code PRODUCTHUNT for
30 days free).

Would love feedback from HN — especially on the AI email generation
approach and the verification flow.
by comex | 2026-02-20 02:05:06+00:00
This project is hardly some emergent property of the Internet or even Internet culture. The existence of VPNs and proxies in general is. They are easy to set up and hard to block. But this project, if it launches, will be a single well-known target which, at a technical level, countries could easily block access to. Whether blocking actually occurs will depend on the whims of geopolitics, but it’s not exactly a robust situation.
by wonger_ | 2026-02-20 02:05:08+00:00
I keep htop and some vim buffers open regularly, and I keep some tools open while a work on a project e.g. https://github.com/Canop/bacon.

But everything else is opened as needed. Especially toys like this weather thing.

EDIT - I use a 4k monitor and the window manager niri, so it's easy to fit multiple terminals on a screen
by sothatsit | 2026-02-20 02:05:10+00:00
You cannot just directly compare prices like this. It is like comparing share prices, it doesn't really mean much unless you also know how many tokens the models use.

For example, GPT-5.2 is even cheaper than Gemini, but in real-world usage it ends up costing similar amounts to Opus 4.6 because it uses a lot more tokens.
by SllX | 2026-02-20 02:05:17+00:00
> rationally priced micropayments rather than be forced into the ad circus

And when the rational price is zero, or rounds down to zero, they won’t survive either way, even with the magic fintech of your fantasies.

If something is worth paying for, then pay for it. People don’t want to pay because the real value of most news to them is actually just $0.00. Making the fraction of a penny small enough while somehow dodging all the middlemen that want their cut might get a few charitable folks on board, but it won’t replace ads, subscriptions, or anything else a news org can do to sustain its business model. It’s not about how small and frictionless you can make the cost to potentially charitable individuals, it’s about convincing them that it is worth doing at all when they already either pay nothing because it’s worth nothing to them or pay a lot because it’s worth a lot to them. The middle ground is where ads and free newsletters live.
by andsoitis | 2026-02-20 02:06:32+00:00
> TikTok.

Case that it's not censorship: it is not about what content TikTok shows, it's about who owns the algorithm and data. Forcing a sale to a US owner keeps the platform available while removing a (perceived) national security risk. The government isn't suppressing any particular speech.

Case it is censorship: forcing the sale of a platform used by 10s of millions of Americans does affect speech of both creators and viewers. The government is making a structural intervention in a speech platform based partly on the potential for future manipulation.

The argument that some would use is that it is more accurately framed as economic nationalism or geopolitical competition dressed in free speech clothing. Others see it as a legitimate national security risk with acceptable free speech tradeoffs.
by XorNot | 2026-02-20 02:06:43+00:00
We can also live just fine without an appendix. Literally the only thing the organ can do is suddenly develop a severe infection and kill you without surgery which has only become reliably available in the past 100 years or so. (Blah blah bacterial reservoir or whatever: that's of evidently very low value compared to sudden and painful death)

There's also no reason we shouldn't be immune to funnel web poison: cats make an enzyme which deactivates it, whereas primates don't.
by just6979 | 2026-02-20 02:07:03+00:00
The dev branch can be useful with larger team sizes where there might be lots of overlapping work being done. Or a shop that isn't fully into automated continuous delivery, ie: a human needs to press the button to actually deploy to prod. Not unheard of for high security things or anything where the accountability chain needs to be very explicit. The dev branch allows you to go full CI-CD-automation-everywhere to get changes into dev/sandbox deployment quickly, and then once it's fully and completely vetted there it can be merged to main and deployed to prod.

It can certainly be done without the dev branch, but you usually end up with lots of extra rules around merges and [ab]uses tags like branches in weird way. And it's way harder to revert things if it comes down to that. In short, if you need a semi-waterfall, less devops-ish, release process, the dev branch can assist that. If not, then it's just extra merges to manage and adds a bunch of work on keeping things in sync, especially with any kind of hotfixes in the picture.
by tired-turtle | 2026-02-20 02:07:14+00:00
Chinese is not too difficult a language, but it’s likely very different from your native language. Chinese morphology, tense, and overall grammar are far easier to learn than most European languages. Chinese speakers are extremely forgiving too because modern Chinese speakers span dozens of dialects but all (except 东北人) learn a second dialect: Mandarin.

The characters are indeed a nuisance, but can be overcome with Anki/SRS. Chinese learners struggle with its tonal nature due to a lack of exposure to speaking/listening because they have no experience with tones. English speakers always decry Chinese tones as insurmountable as if it’s the only tonal language, but half of all languages are tonal, so it’s doable with practice.

In fact, Chinese has become more similar to Indo-European languages over the past century. Chinese now has an odd form of hypotaxis (think: conjugation, inflection, etc.), whereas it previously only had parataxis (combine two characters to generate something new). For example, 药性 (medicinal) is OG Chinese (ish), but now you have words like 科学性 and 简化, which make a lot more sense to an English speaker because they were noun-ified. Modern Chinese does this (literally) everywhere: all you see is 是, 性, 化, 的, 被. This makes the language much more amicable to an Indo-European native speaker.

Perhaps your difficulty is due to modern Chinese’s verbose (almost bureaucratic) syntax? These examples you gave make sense to me if you follow their literal reading. They sound stupid if translated to English, but not necessarily nonsensical.
by llm_nerd | 2026-02-20 02:07:54+00:00
>and the flurry of domain experts responding like "wtf, no one needs this"

People have been saying this about Show HNs for time eternal. There have been an insane number of poorly thought out, poorly considered, often Get-Rich-Quick type of creations, long before AI. Things where the submitter clearly doesn't understand the industry they're targeting, doesn't provide any sort of solution, etc. Really strange if people actually think this is a new phenomenon.

Indeed, a recent video that I rather loved touches on this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km2bn0HvUwg

Its subject is "Everything was Already AI", the point being that everyone is quantizing and simplifying and reflecting everyone else and the consensus, in such a fashion that people acting like AI ruined everything...yeah, it was already ruined. We already have furry artists drawing furry art just like countless other furry artists, declaring it an outrage that someone used AI to draw furry art, and so on. As the video covers, the whole idea of genres is basically people just cloning each other.

Be right back, going to put on a cowboy hat and denim and sing in a drawl about pickups and exes.
by voidmain | 2026-02-20 02:08:04+00:00
In the immortal words of Scott Alexander [1],

> I used to think that the alternative medicine people were overestimating how evil Big Pharma was. But now I know that’s not right.

> Now I know they’re underestimating it.

> If it were discovered tomorrow that potatoes cured cancer, then people wouldn’t “suppress” this “natural” remedy. Two years from now there would be an ultrapurified potato extract called POTAXOR™®© that was, on closer examination, physically and chemically identical to mashed potatoes. But these mashed potatoes would be mashed in a giant centrifuge by scientists with five Ph. Ds each. Any time someone got cancer, their doctor would prescribe POTAXOR™®© and charge $6,000 per dose, and the patient would get better, and the thought of just going out and eating a potato would never occur to anybody. Not to the doctor, who doesn’t want to sound like the idiot who tells her cancer patients to eat potatoes. Not to the FDA, who doesn’t know whether potatoes might be contaminated with lead or potato fungus or ketchup or God-knows-what. And certainly not to the patient. They would have to pay 60 cents for a potato at the supermarket, but if they have a good enough insurance the POTAXOR™®© is free!

> This system, bizarre as it is, is your guarantee against the pharmaceutical companies suppressing a promising new natural medication. Your insurance company pays $300 on fish oil, and in exchange you go to sleep at night secure that no one has discovered that potatoes cure cancer but decided to cover it up to protect their bottom line. Good deal? Given the current health system, it’s better than you had any right to expect.

Potatoes aren't on Schedule 1; that makes this situation suck a little more. But probably the alternative scenario is just the treatment remaining illegal forever.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/15/fish-now-by-prescripti...