MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crote | 2026-02-13 05:00:55+00:00
Only when the underlying product sucks. "Here's how the Torment Nexus is going to torment you - subscribe now!" is never going to be a popular message because it is actively making the world worse.

People aren't being luddites or not understanding innovation. They know perfectly well what is being sold, and they hate it.

Contrast it with the Dotcom bubble, where people mainly thought it wasn't for them or that they didn't need it. Look at interviews of people back then, and the services advertised are at worst described as "unnecessary": you would've had very little trouble convincing them that there would be some market for them.

But with those extreme AI examples? Normal people understand it, and they hate it.
by 22c | 2026-02-13 05:04:31+00:00
I can't help but feel there is a funny pattern going on.

A lot of companies want to embrace AI, agents, etc. so they make their platforms easier to use by AI, implementing whatever the latest craze is.

I imagine we're going to see a lot more APIs open up (agentic finances?), a lot of granular access controls, etc.

Where was all of this when regular users had been asking for it for _years_?

Empowering users in general is a good thing, so, in a way, it's a good thing that OpenClaw and things of this nature are exposing all the issues with access controls and API interactions that many of our services have.

Now we just need a reason for AI agents to need "dark mode" on websites...
by zapzupnz | 2026-02-13 05:05:05+00:00
Using a trackpad gesture is just as quick, easier, more spatially natural, and only uses one hand.

My left hand is not always on my keyboard. I'm not always typing. I'm not modelling 100% of my computer usage after "how to get RSI the fastest"; sometimes, I allow myself to lean back in my chair and just scroll the web, documents, photos etc. from time to time.
by maybelsyrup | 2026-02-13 05:05:39+00:00
The degree to which this is true is I think still underestimated, and comments like these need more upvotes.

You don’t need to appeal to shadowy cabals to explain why media professionals have been desperate for this stuff to not be true (and why, every day these days, you can still read examples of them absolutely writhing as they are obliged by public outrage to continue to report on it).

All you really need is to remember that a) they have mortgages to pay, too, so why rock the boat, and b) the people who end up writing for the WSJ and the people who end up in Jeffrey’s rolodex are by and large the same class of people. They went to the same colleges, they consume similar culture and media, they play the same games of keep up with the joneses, they read the Economist on their days off and fret over Gen Z slang and wonder whether the Chase card or the Amex will get them enough airline miles to fly to London for free with their spouse etc etc. They recognize themselves in the “Epstein class” — not in their crimes, but in their manners. So why would they be party to showing the world that class is so profoundly rotten? It’d give the lie to their whole lifestyle.

(And yes, to anticipate a critique here, of course there’s a difference between a producer at NBC and a billionaire! Not denying that. But they are cut from the exact same cultural and social cloth. The best proof of this is in the Epstein files themselves: not in the creepy or criminal bits, but in the mundane stuff. How he talks, what’s on his mind, the advice he gives, etc. It’s all American upper middle class humdrum stuff.)
by rstuart4133 | 2026-02-13 05:08:39+00:00
He's correct, even so.

Odds of dying from the AstraZeneca vaccine is about 1 in 50,000, or about 0.002% [0] for people over 60. In the USA there were 434,779 excess deaths [1] in the over 60 age group of 55M people, implying about 0.008% were killed by COVID. So taking AstraZeneca was the lower risk option, in the USA anyway.

In countries like Australia that largely managed to suppress COVID through quarantine and mass vaccination (using other vaccines), perhaps it wasn't the best option, and indeed Australia did opt to wait once the risks became evident. If you were in Peru or Mexico (both did a very bad job of managing COVID), if you were over 60 you would be mad not to have got the AstraZeneca jab if it was the only one on offer.

[0] https://www.health.gov.au/our-work/covid-19-vaccines/advice-...

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9304075/
by hunterpayne | 2026-02-13 05:09:25+00:00
What's worse is that there was never any public debate about if this was a good idea or not. It was just released. If there was ever a good reason to not trust the judgement of some of these groups, this is it. I generally don't like regulation, but at this point I am OK with criminal charges being on the table for AI executives who release models and applications with such low value and absurdly high societal cost without public debate.
by fixedprog | 2026-02-13 05:10:30+00:00
Hmm, I’ve been trying to work this out myself.

I do use LLMs to try and help me learn, use inquiry-based learning and have it guide me to solutions without telling me the answer, but I’m yet to work out whether I’m actually learning more.

I think it was Socrates who talked about needing a certain level of discomfort in order to learn effectively. I do feel that even with that approach, LLMs don’t provide enough discomfort.

The difficulty for me is that they are simply excellent at retrieving information about certain topics, so it also seems silly to avoid them entirely.

I’d be curious to hear other people’s experiences as well.
by crote | 2026-02-13 05:11:36+00:00
This isn't an inherently unsolvable problem. Peer-to-peer file sharing and video calls have been able to work around it for ages.

The same approach could be used for cameras - see for example Home Assistant's remote access. Sure, you'd still need a cloud-based STUN-like discovery service, but a small one-time fee should easily cover operating it.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-13 05:11:50+00:00
> The average user simply doesn't know any better, and likely isn't even aware of the API changes Reddit made. The user base didn't grow because of those changes: it's just no one cared.

That was literally the point I was making.

The comment I was responding to was claiming people were leaving Discord en masse. They're not.

> No one else won there, bro. The consumer was just forced to pay, that's all. Netflix won.

How did this conversation get to the point where people paying for a service they use is considered some sort of massive loss? That's just... how businesses work.
Show HN: Codeman – a blunt launcher forcing you to pick a Codex permission level
by shabers | 2026-02-13 05:11:58+00:00
I kept getting burned by “what permissions am I running with?” so I built Codeman: a thin launcher around codex that forces
an explicit security level each run (read-only, orkspace-write, networked, full), with a clear confirmation panel before higher-risk modes. It also supports resuming by session UUID and optional Slack/Discord webhook notifications. Repo:
https://github.com/shabo/codeman Feedback welcome: naming, UX, and whether the level breakdown matches how you actually work
with Codex.
by jolux | 2026-02-13 05:15:31+00:00
No point. Claude Code with skills and subagents is plenty. If they would stop breaking it constantly it would be fine.

The bottleneck has not been how quickly you can generate reasonable code for a good while now. It’s how quickly you can integrate and deploy it and how much operational toil it causes. On any team > 1, that’s going to rely on getting a lot of people to work together effectively too, and it turns out that’s a completely different problem with different solutions.
by ryandrake | 2026-02-13 05:15:46+00:00
You'd think this would be the story of the century, and that every news outlet would be running it 24/7 and falling all over each other to scoop new information. Child sex trafficking to wealthy and/or well known celebrities and government officials, including the actual president of the US! What news agency in the world wouldn't be salivating for something like this?

Yet, here we are, no media wants to report on it, and they all wish that we all just forget about it and go back to buying khakis.
by quadrifoliate | 2026-02-13 05:15:47+00:00
Seriously, I hope that none of the posters upthread arguing about SHOULD v/s MUST in some standards body document are in charge of real world money making software.

Google and Microsoft's email practices define a pseudo-RFC in practice. As an engineer, I hate this. As a civic participant I can vote against it. But as a person that sells my software services for a living, I am going to implement the Google/Microsoft standards to the letter, not argue about definitions in an RFC.
by pcurve | 2026-02-13 05:15:52+00:00
Screens are getting bigger and bigger, yet they make things smaller and harder to click on.

Back in the days when it was common for Macintosh to have 640x480 screens (or even smaller), they still fully visible window controls that were impossible to miss.

https://erichelgeson.github.io/blog/2021/03/23/ultimate-syst...
by Aurornis | 2026-02-13 05:17:44+00:00
> Steve Yegge said he feels "sorry for people" who merely "use Cursor, ask it questions sometimes, review its code really carefully, and then check it in."

Steve Yegge is building a multi-agent orchestration system. This is him trying to FOMO listeners into using his project.

From what I've observed, the people trying to use herds of agents to work on different things at the same time are just using tokens as fast as possible because they think more tokens means more progress. As you scale up the sub-agents you spend so much time managing the herd and trying to backtrack when things go wrong that you would have been better off handling it serially with yourself in the loop.

If you don't have someone else paying the bill for unlimited token usage it's going to be a very expensive experiment.
by seanhunter | 2026-02-13 05:18:04+00:00
For people not aware of how computer chess engines work or what a tablebase is. TLDR: chess would be fully solved if there existed a 64-piece tablebase. These guys have done the chess world a massive favour by computing the most important subset of the 8-piece tablebase and making it available to the world.

Long version: Chess engines normally work by doing a highly optimised search of the game tree to some depth, evaluating the board position in each state using some evaluation function and then propagating the evaluation backwards up the tree. Then it’s a matter of picking the moves that lead to the game trees with the most favourable board state assuming both opponents make the best possible moves from the current position. The strength of the engine depends on the available computation, the efficiency of any tree pruning you’re able to do and the accuracy of the evaluation function, which is always going to be somewhat subjective.

However when “few enough” pieces remain on the board (in the endgame), the number of possible game states is small enough that it’s possible to brute force solve the game from each state by enumerating all possible moves and resulting states so as to find the absolute optimal move for any given board position. Looking up the evaluation and best possible move for a given state if you had done all this computation beforehand is obviously much more efficient and accurate than the tree-search minimax thing I described initially, and being able to do this at the leaves of the game state during minimax evaluation massively improves the strength and accuracy of any engine. When you get to a state that’s in the tablebase, you can stop as you know the objective evaluation and best move so you can focus on computing evaluations of other states that aren’t fully solved.

A tablebase is the database containing these fully-solved positions and the corresponding objective evaluations and best moves, and all strong engines swap to a tablebase at some point. So this is a tablebase for an important subset of game positions where 8 pieces remain (which had not previously been computed by anyone as far as I know). It’s a massive amount of work to compute these so providing this for everyone is a huge contribution. But this is lichess, who literally provide a free chess website for anyone who wants to play or learn chess, so we sort of expect them to be awesome because they are.

Here is a piece from Cornell about how stockfish (the world’s strongest chess engine) works if you’re interested https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2022/09/30/game-theory-ho...
by ninjin | 2026-02-13 05:19:28+00:00
> Although I guess the argument will be that email clients should use AI to summarise the HTML into a plain text summary.

Or you could pass it through ~5,000 lines of C [1] and you will have it done in milliseconds even on hardware that would be old enough to drink.

[1]: https://codemadness.org/webdump.html
by stateofinquiry | 2026-02-13 05:22:48+00:00
Probably. Question is, who will be accountable for the bot behavior? Might be the company providing them, might be the user who sent them off unsupervised, maybe both. The worrying thing for many of us humans is not that a personal attack appeared in a blog post (we have that all the time!) its that it was authored and published by an entity that might be unaccountable. This must change.
by snasan | 2026-02-13 05:23:29+00:00
It's mid-February 2026, and if you blinked sometime around Thanksgiving, you missed approximately four paradigm shifts, two existential crises in SaaS valuations, an open-source AI agent with a critical RCE that somehow still has 157,000 GitHub stars, and at least one Chinese lab about to drop a model that will probably crash the stock market again.
by GeoSoft | 2026-02-13 05:23:39+00:00
Thanks for the nuanced reply!

To my mind, the main purpose of the tracking is to quickly answer the question "am I overspending".
I can definitely see that quickly extending to "what do I do with my money" though.

The point about impartiality definitely resonates - this was always something I found distasteful when Mint was still around (RIP).
by uecker | 2026-02-13 05:25:59+00:00
Na, there are only three classes: stuff where you need simplicity, fast compilation times, portability, interoperability with legacy systems, or high-performance - C. Stuff where you need perfect memory safety: Fil-C. And stuff where you need a combination: C + formal verification. Not sure where I would Rust/C++/Zig (none of those offers perfect memory safety in practice)
by petesergeant | 2026-02-13 05:26:05+00:00
"Claude writes, Codex reviews" has shown huge promise as a pattern for me, so I wrote a Dockerfile and some instructions on how to make that happen for agents, and ended up with https://github.com/pjlsergeant/moarcode

I am spending most of my day in this harness. It has rough edges for sure, but it means I trust the code coming out much more than I did just Claude.
by eclipticplane | 2026-02-13 05:26:15+00:00
rillian was so very helpful to me as an early engineer. I was trying to leverage Ghostscript libraries to format prescription labels for thermal printers - over serial or usb+serial connectors and using very questionable printers. It wasn't Ghostscript's problem but he was so kind in directing me to the right people to help and even following up to see if my problem was solved.

RIP, Ralph.
by ChadNauseam | 2026-02-13 05:27:03+00:00
Rust + React is a beautiful combination. For my project, I use Rust for the actually complicated logic that needs to be correct and performant. And then I just use React for the UI. It works pretty great. The communication between the two with wasm-bindgen and tsify is just so easy. It's almost as if they're the same language. It's really crazy, honestly. A feat of engineering.

React Vello seems super cool, by the way. Thanks for sharing it!
by politelemon | 2026-02-13 05:28:30+00:00
Having gone through his interview just now, his advice and experience seems centered around Vibe coding new applications and not really reflective of the reality of the industry.

> But I feel sorry for people who are good engineers – or who used to be – and they use Cursor, ask it questions sometimes, review its code really carefully, and then check it in. And I’m like: ‘dude, you’re going to get fired [because you are not keeping up with modern tools] and you’re one of the best engineers I know!’”

I would certainly take a careful person over the likes of yegge who seems to be neither pragmatic, nor an engineer.
by ryanbberger | 2026-02-13 05:31:16+00:00
It was definitely quite a bit of effort to get every line of sight. We felt it was necessary if we were going to try and prove that there are none longer.

Regular viewshed algorithms really aren't built for it, and being able to do it cheaply while also maintaining a cluster of compute that can shut down at any time is also its own mess (these were all spot instance so we could get 75+% off).

The 530km number takes into account both the curvature, along with refraction. It's a simple elevation adjustment when you are doing your angle of elevation calculations.

If you want a synopsis of how we calculate lines of sight and all the parameters we use I have a shorter, less whitepaper-y blog post here:

https://ryan.berge.rs/posts/lines-of-sight/
by econ | 2026-02-13 05:32:42+00:00
The solution is obvious and not going to happen. Extra tax, super cheap rent with conditions: Minimum number of products, product diversity, open x days per year (etc?)

30 years ago there was this lovely shop here full of hand crafted wooden dolls and beautiful wooden statues about the size of a garden gnome. They were reasonably expensive but an absolute joy to look at without buying anything.

I don't think selling tickets like in a museum would work for a place like that. If they tax me 10 bucks the city could buy the building and continue to lure me into town.
by vasughanta09 | 2026-02-13 05:33:41+00:00
Most programming languages use the IEEE 754 floating-point standard to represent real numbers. Decimal fractions like 0.1 don’t have exact binary equivalents, so when you write 0.1 or 0.2 in code they are stored as close approximations. Adding those approximations results in tiny rounding errors — e.g., 0.1 + 0.2 evaluates to 0.30000000000000004 instead of 0.3. This isn’t a language bug but a fundamental consequence of binary floating-point math. If you need exact decimal results (for currencies, scientific data, etc.), you often have to use integers or arbitrary-precision/decimal libraries, or compare floats within a tolerance rather than by exact equality.
by JnthnMyrs | 2026-02-13 05:34:43+00:00
You want to share an article with a friend.

But also you don't want to share the pop-ups, ads, flyouts, surveys, ads, cookie things, random videos in the corner, ads, weirdo health tips about eating a banana 2 minutes before going to bed, and ads.

https://justthearticleplease.com

A simple article reader for the web.

Paste in the article url, and enjoy.

Copy a link to just the article and share it with a friend or two.

You know, like back in the good old days.

Enjoy!

P.S. It doesn't work with all sites and won't get past paywalls (obviously). But it's nice.
by altmanaltman | 2026-02-13 05:34:48+00:00
I mean yeah but that's not what the study says though... full link here: https://dtg.sites.fas.harvard.edu/WILSON%20ET%20AL%202014.pd...

Participants did not choose to give themselves electric shocks continuously. The average was around once during the entire 15-min window. It also showed a stark difference in gender: only 25% of women participants did it while 67% of men did it. All of them did not enjoy it (but that's obvious). 1 man shocked himself more than 190 times during the 15-min period, so the average data is much higher because of him.

So overall, it is correct that the human mind will seek stimulus (even negative ones) if they're bored/have nothing to do but nothing suggests they will give themselves continous painful "electric shocks than be alone".

Additionally, they were alone, but they also had no cellphones, no computers, nothing to engage their brains with other than the possibility to give themselves a small 4 volt shock. And most of them did it once and not again. I think it speaks more to human curiosity than the idea that you'll prefer pain to social isolation.
by p0tk3ttle | 2026-02-13 05:35:24+00:00
"Software engineer who will gain financial benefits if everyone hires them to encode business context as a model of memory addresses wants everyone to hire software engineers."

Biology is self-selecting. Let's dispense with the notion you're an altruist. You are aware of the options for bartering for food and settled on one that was not a 996 in a textile sweatshop. Left that for the 12 year olds in Asia.
by noduerme | 2026-02-13 05:35:55+00:00
Right..Or instead of STUN/TURN just use Tailscale for now. I think the reason no one's packaged this into a slick Ring-like plug-and-play probably comes down to corporate greed and how hard it is to raise money if your intention is to start a business that doesn't have ever-expanding verticals. Like, this is a set of solved problems. They just need to be smoothed and packed for the user.
by Davidzheng | 2026-02-13 05:37:41+00:00
We will see at the end of April right? It's more of a guess than a strongly held conviction--but I see models improving rapidly at long horizon tasks so I think it's possible. I think a benchmark which can survive a few months (maybe) would be if it genuinely tested long time-frame continual learning/test-time learning/test-time posttraining (idk honestly the differences b/t these).

But i'm not sure how to give such benchmarks. I'm thinking of tasks like learning a language/becoming a master at chess from scratch/becoming a skill artists but where the task is novel enough for the actor to not be anywhere close to proficient at beginning--an example which could be of interest is, here is a robot you control, you can make actions, see results...become proficient at table tennis. Maybe another would be, here is a new video game, obtain the best possible 0% speedrun.
by tbrownaw | 2026-02-13 05:38:10+00:00
Sometimes I tell the AI to change something, sometimes I just do it myself. Sometimes I start to do it and then the magic tab-complete guesses well enough that I can just tab through the rest of it.

Sometimes the magic tab-complete insists on something silly and repeatedly gets in the way.

Sometimes I tell the AI to do something, and then have to back out the whole thing and do it right myself. Sometimes it's only a little wrong, and I can accept the result and then tweak it a bit. Sometimes it's a little wrong in a way that's easy to tell it to fix.
by lubujackson | 2026-02-13 05:40:03+00:00
I think Yegge needs to keep up with the tech a bit more. Cursor has gotten quite powerful - it's plan mode now seems about on par with Claude Code, producing Mermaid charts and detailed multi-phase plans that pretty much just work. I also noticed their debug mode will now come up with several thesises (thesi?), create some sort of debugging harness and logging system, test each thesis, tear down the debugging logic and present a solution. I have no idea when that happened, but it helped solve a tricky frontend race condition for me a day or two ago.

I still like Claude, but man does it suck down tokens.
by the_king | 2026-02-13 05:40:39+00:00
I just tested it on a very difficult Raven matrix, that the old version of DeepThink, as well as GPT 5.2 Pro, Claude Opus 4.6, and pretty much every other model failed at.

This version of DeepSeek got it first try. Thinking time was 2 or 3 minutes.

The visual reasoning of this class of Gemini models is incredibly impressive.
by fromMars | 2026-02-13 05:40:43+00:00
The age of consent in most European countries is 15 and 14 in some like Italy and Portugal.

In my mind someone like Larry Nasser or all those Catholic priests who raped alter boys are pedophiles.

I agree that it's pretty gross behavior but it seems to be normalized in many countries.

Technically attraction to 15-19 year olds is called
Ephebophilia whereas Pedophilia is attraction to 14 and under.