MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wateralien | 2026-02-17 15:39:15+00:00
The adoption of, or adherence to an "identity" is a very western habit. The thought that you or your value derives from a mental construct or external idea.

It's limiting and dangerous. Limiting because you're relying on a relatively small network in the brain, governed almost entirely by your conscious ideas to provide a set of features of who you are. And dangerous because if something else comes up, if you discover something new about yourself, you change, or your circumstances, or the world around you changes and it affects one of your "identities" - that alteration can leave you lost. As the author seems to be saying.

Instead of these quips of, "you need to know who you are", "who are you?", "know yourself" - we should rather be trying, continually, in a never ending process, to discover ourselves.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-02-17 15:39:30+00:00
> when it was seen as low-status profession in the late 80s.

I don't remember this at all. I became a professional programmer in 1987, but perhaps it was the fact that I went directly to Unix, did not pass go, did not collect $200 and worked entirely on systems programming that helped skip any of the "low-status" of people doing RDBMS/forms work ?
by kaelyx | 2026-02-17 15:39:45+00:00
I am yet to ever see any UK Government petition make any tangible difference to policy. If the Digital ID Petition with over 2.9 million signatures[0] didn't sway them, I sadly don't think this one will change anything either.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Parliament_petitions_websit...
by Havoc | 2026-02-17 15:39:50+00:00
> There is no reason people have to tolerate a technology that is destructive to society,

All evidence to the contrary. Aside from the French occasionally burning down some cars the western populations (me unfortunately included) have become remarkably relaxed about such things.

Even very extreme examples like blatant refusal by government to investigate absolutely horrific stuff like Epstein gets at most some mildly upset TikTok reels

Add some aggressive lobbying by big tech and perhaps a sprinkle of palantir population monitoring and I don’t think we’ll see a refusal to tolerate at scale
by leshokunin | 2026-02-17 15:40:01+00:00
Ignore the clickbait aspect. It is one of the craziest flexes in game development.

The guy had made Doom (nice fast pseudo 3D), Quake (fast 3D), and now made it look great.

Finding obscure math and figuring out that it was the correct fit for his renderer is just so bonkers.
by Leynos | 2026-02-17 15:40:45+00:00
With 5.3 Codex, the execplans skill and a well specified implementation task, you can get a good couple of hours work in a single turn. That's already in the scope of "set it up before bed and review it in the morning".

If you have a loop set up, e.g., using OpenClaw or a Ralph loop, you can stretch that out further.

I would suggest that when you get to that point really, you want some kind of adversarial system set up with code reviews (e.g., provided by CodeRabbit or Sourcery) and automation to feed that back into the coding agent.
by runjake | 2026-02-17 15:40:50+00:00
Counterpoint: I've been taking creatine (10-15mg/day) for over 8 months and I can't say that I notice a difference at all.

That said, while I think that creatine's effects on cognitive performance are often overstated, creatine is scientifically proven to increase brain performance in some cases[1].

And fortunately, creatine is safe and very cheap[2], so maybe worth a try.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatine#Cognitive_performance

2. https://www.bulksupplements.com/products/creatine-monohydrat...
by cbg0 | 2026-02-17 15:40:55+00:00
This is very dependent on what kind of work you're asking the agent to do. For software, I've had quite a bit of success providing detailed API specifications and asking an LLM to build a client library for that. You can leave it running unattended as long as it knows what it's supposed to build and it won't need a lot of correction since you're providing the routes, returned statuses and possible error messages.

Do some people just create complete SaaSlop apps with it overnight? Of course, just put together a plan (by asking the LLM to write the plan) with everything you want the app to do and let it run.
Show HN: Skill to annotate any Markdown file for AI feedback
by ramoz | 2026-02-17 15:40:56+00:00
Plannotator natively integrates with coding agent plan modes via hooks. The core feature set is the ability to annotate plans throughout the planning mode process.

Users submitted a feature request to be able to annotate any file. This is what that does.

More on how Plannotator works in the video demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_AT7cEN_9I
by YuriKozlov | 2026-02-17 15:41:01+00:00
We built JudgeAI – deterministic legal reasoning (no precedent training). Tested on 200+ real cases across ICJ, SCOTUS, CJEU, ICSID – 96% match with actual rulings.

In one case the AI reached the opposite conclusion from the real court. At Stanford's CodeX, the audience found the AI ruling more just.

The test above lets you judge for yourself – 3 real cases, anonymous decisions, you vote first then see which was human
by Schiendelman | 2026-02-17 15:41:26+00:00
I know you're being sarcastic, but yes, that's exactly what's happening. And it's really hard to fight this kind of corruption when your allies get sarcastic and angry at you instead of listening and discussing. Please consider reading the HN guidelines and thinking about how your comment might not be aligned with them.

Hank Green has a really good video about how this is happening here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jOR4wuiPeEQ
by pixl97 | 2026-02-17 15:42:02+00:00
>I don’t understand why taxation is so off limits to this crowd.

HN is filled with lots of temporarily depressed millionaires and many actual millionaires too. These are the ones that have bought into zero tax, government is all bad, free market capitalism for me Rand'ian ideas without any systematic thought on how their ideas would work out in practice.

Add to this that a lot of media, and pretty much everything on TV, is owned by billionaires these days that use the news as their platform to propagandize on why they should own more of everything and become richer, so it's not exactly surprising we're at this place.
by sho_hn | 2026-02-17 15:42:39+00:00
My advice: Upgrade yourself from programmer to engineer, including the learning that involves.

I now enjoy going between software and hardware/EE/mech, between writing code and CAD, between bits and metal working, between creating structures both virtual and physical, and bringing an engineering mindset to it all. There's still a lot of creative outlets out there, and a lot of community.

Aim high and grow your identity!
by mikrotikker | 2026-02-17 15:42:41+00:00
The thing is everyone goes into the IDF. The smart ones get put into unit 8200 where they hone their persistent, iterative, troubleshooting skills. Then their service is over they leave and they've basically been trained in innovation and leadership.

Then they go about solving problems. Some of those problems are people dont have a good trustworthy pornsite. Some of them are their buddies that stayed in the military have a military related or adjacent problem.

Darknet diaries did a great podcast on unit 8200.
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-17 15:42:58+00:00
This is from 2017 but reveals a lot about the kind of organization Palantir is:

> The NYPD then asked Palantir for the information in a translated format — asking Palantir to do the translation itself — according to the people. Palantir responded this month, providing a file that was indeed readable. But according to the NYPD’s examination of the file, it contained only the original data the NYPD had fed into the system, the people said. The analysis appeared to be missing.

This feels more like malice not incompetence. Being purposefully obtuse and uncooperative to trap a captive customer. It’s especially dangerous when that customer is a government agency.
by slashtom | 2026-02-17 15:43:03+00:00
This does an honest good job of walking through the beginnings, I would still say understanding/decomposing a decision tree and going through the details and choices /trade offs one makes with how they prepare the tree like binary split or discrete/binning for continuous data. What reducing entropy means, etc. Maybe even start with parametric versus nonparametric modeling pros/cons. You really get to see how probability and statistics is applied in the formulas that eventually will be thrown into a dot function in python.

There is a lot of content on pytorch, which is great and makes a ton of sense since it's used so heavily, where the industry needs a ton of help/support in is really the fundamentals. Nonetheless, great contribution!
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-02-17 15:43:15+00:00
I agree with everything you've said. It's also completely irrelevant to the question at hand, which is whether there are any real, noticeable physical differences between the sound produced by a Strad and that produced by expert modern luthiers.

I certainly appreciate all the emotions and culture that go into making beautiful music on a cello. But it's important to separate that placebo affect ("I think it sounds better because I know it's a Strad"), from the real physical differences, because people have gone to great lengths to find "the secret of Strad": was it his varnish, the Maunder Minimum, an extended drought, special wood treatment to prevent woodworm, etc. etc. Except time and time again we find there is no "Strad secret", beyond his expert craftsmanship, attention to detail, and fundamental changes he made to the shape of the plates of his instruments compared to his predecessors.
by canu21 | 2026-02-17 15:43:18+00:00
The : prefix marks OmniQL commands, the action you want to perform (:GET, :CREATE, :DELETE, etc.). It's how the parser distinguishes OmniQL syntax from native SQL or other query languages.
WHERE, AND, OR, LIMIT etc. are clauses. They modify the command but aren't commands themselves. So the rule is simple: commands get :, clauses don't.
Think of it like a terminal. You prefix the command (git push) but not the flags (--force). Same idea here.
by Schiendelman | 2026-02-17 15:43:34+00:00
I'm suggesting that you can see clear differences in incentives between the big tech companies, paying attention to their business models and the differences in what they claim, in writing, shows you quite a bit of information about how they treat your data.

If you decide that everyone is lying to you all the time, you can't build a useful model of objective reality. You just end up frustrated and not taking simple actions you can to make improvements for yourself and others. Don't fall into that trap.
Show HN: I wrote a technical history book on Lisp
by cdegroot | 2026-02-17 15:43:39+00:00
The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and
has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find
a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical
details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy
to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)).

My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been
using the latter for much longer and for my current projects, Common Lisp is a better fit, so I call myself "a Lisp-er" these days. If people like what I did,
I do have plans to write some more (but probably only after I retire, writing next to a full-time job is heard). Maybe on Smalltalk, maybe on computer networks - two topics close to my heart.

And a shout-out to Dick Gabriel, he contributed some great personal memories about the man who started it all, John McCarthy.
by giraffe_lady | 2026-02-17 15:44:00+00:00
Right, the registry is public in most places, you can just check. When I open it for some of the places I've lived & surrounding areas it is overwhelmingly very serious crimes, the majority of them against minors, a large percentage minors under 13 which is a different category of offense here.

You sometimes need to get familiar with the local legal jargon to interpret it correctly, for example where I live there is no crime "rape" it is recorded as "sexual battery," things like that. And don't assume something is not serious because it is "second degree" or whatever, look up the statutes or sentencing guidelines. I have to seek pretty hard to find anything that could even plausibly be something like an overcharged public urination.

The first one I found, I looked up the case, and the offense took place at 3:40 pm at a city bus stop two blocks from a high school. Pretty decent odds that guy tells all his friends he got booked for trying to take a piss. He might even say that on reddit and HN.
by gmmachine | 2026-02-17 15:44:02+00:00
Strange, I love GNU screen, and find the key combinations very easy and intuitive. However, I could never seem to master GNU's Emacs and what I find are very strange default key commands. I love vim for the reason of, what I personally find, very intuitive key combinations.

I just downloaded VSCode for the first time recently -- which I was delighted to find has a VIM mode. From what I read VSCode's VIM mode does not respect the undo tree of actual VIM.
by BoxOfRain | 2026-02-17 15:44:32+00:00
I miss the low-pressure sodium street lights that used to be ubiquitous in Britain. The light was virtually monochromatic, which created a very specific aesthetic at night. Modern white LEDs feel more like a bad approximation of day rather than embracing the idea night should look different I think.

LEDs are much more flexible with colour anyway, we should have tried to keep some visual continuity rather than going straight for the harsh high-K white in my opinion.
by notpushkin | 2026-02-17 15:44:38+00:00
> Can the PIN change?

You can change it in the app, yes.

> How to issue new key if needed?

I think you’ll have to reissue your ID.

There’s also digi-ID (similar e-signature certificate on a card, but without any ID features), Mobiil-ID (e-signature on a SIM-card, no idea how it works), Smart-ID (in app, tied to secure storage in Android/iOS, cross-signed by the server which is supposed to check the device somehow) and probably something else I don’t remember. All of these are independent options, so you can, for example, revoke your Mobiil-ID if you lose your phone, and still use the your main ID card to sign things.
by NoGravitas | 2026-02-17 15:44:43+00:00
> If everyone is out of a job, then what is the point of the economy? Who is doing what work for whom? If nobody can afford anything, then why are we even doing this?

This kind of question is called "political economy". It used to be basically synonymous with "economics", but after one 19th century economist wrote a very detailed and convincing study that provided solid answers that were not politically acceptable, economists turned away from political economy, and declared this kind of question out of scope, and focused on working out all the mathematical details of a political economy in which all those questions had, as you say, fairytale answers.
by hulitu | 2026-02-17 15:45:16+00:00
> with AI that amplifies human expertise

Well, that's the point. The moment AI's output must be fixed, which seems to be always the case, it creates additional work. Now multiply this with each development phase and you are in shit till the neck. Development time was decreasing since some good years while complexity increased. The current crisis is also related to this fact.
New projects need a Jira engineer, just to sort the mess of PRs and CRs. Adding AI only made the problem worse.

You want to throw AI down my neck ? I show AI one customer requirement and it shall implement the system and software requirement and the test cases for the above requirements. Without failure. Without hallucinating. Just like a normal colleague. Then, we can talk.
by vasilyt | 2026-02-17 15:45:18+00:00
Hey HN,
I built Daymon because I kept running into the same problem — I use Claude daily, but every conversation is a dead end. No way to schedule recurring tasks, no way to pick up where you left off.

Tools like OpenClaw exist, but they run on API calls. If you're already paying $20/mo for Pro or $200/mo for Max, why pay again per token? Heavy automation on the API can easily hit $100–2,000+/month on top of your subscription.

Daymon works with your existing Claude subscription. No API keys, no per-token billing. It's a Mac desktop app that connects to Claude via MCP. You install it, and Claude gains new capabilities:
Task scheduling — cron, one-time, or on-demand. "Summarize my inbox every morning at 8" just works.
Session continuity — scheduled tasks resume previous sessions, so a daily research task builds on yesterday's work.
Workers — named agent configs with system prompts. Set up a "Research Analyst" or "Code Reviewer" and assign tasks to them.
File watchers — trigger actions when files change in a directory.
The name is a nod to Unix daemons — background processes that run without user interaction.

Tasks get smarter every time they run. First run, Claude figures out the approach from scratch — that might take 30 seconds. By the third run, session continuity means it already knows what worked. Same task, 4 seconds. You don't configure anything. It just happens because each run builds on the context of previous ones.

When you hit your session limit and Claude tells you to come back later, you don't have to stop. Say "schedule this to continue" and Daymon queues it up.

Everything runs locally. Tasks execute via claude -p "prompt" as subprocesses. MIT licensed.

Stack: Electron, TypeScript, React, Tailwind, better-sqlite3, node-cron, chokidar, MCP SDK.

Limitations: Mac only for now (Linux planned). Requires Claude CLI. DMG is ~250MB due to Electron. Early stage, solo developer.
On whether Anthropic will build this natively: Probably, eventually. But their consumer model relies on session limits to push users from Pro to Max. Native scheduling would undermine that — if Claude can queue work across your limit window, there's less pressure to upgrade. Your subscription sits idle every time you close the tab, and that idle time is arguably working as intended. Daymon exists because I don't think you should have to wait for them to figure out their incentives.

Would love feedback on the architecture and what you'd want to see next.
by superkuh | 2026-02-17 15:45:25+00:00
See also, https://objectiveunclear.com/airloom.html?airport=MSP . Another very nice 3D viewer for adsb info.

Both this post's viewer and the older one I linked directly above have greatly exaggerated vertical scaling. It is not proportional to the distances on the map. With actual 1:1 height scale all these planes, even the stratospheric jets, would be much closer to the ground.
by rossdavidh | 2026-02-17 15:46:09+00:00
Many years ago, as a grad student in Electrical Engineering, I got asked to help judge at a high school science fair. It was fairly disillusioning. The best presentations were pretty obviously done with a lot of parental "help", or otherwise were presenting an experiment designed by adults (this was clear from questioning). It was more like competitive science homework, than a bunch of science experiments.
by digitalsushi | 2026-02-17 15:46:11+00:00
if software engineers get displaced, they will eventually drift into other jobs that benefit from people who solve problems like software engineers. and if the former software engineers are willing to work at a rate reduced to their former positions, and if they bring better efficiencies with them, then there will be a slow cascade.

it doesn't follow that all software engineers are excellent at other work, please don't take that from my quip. but i could see the pattern, over time, being large enough to identify.

since software engineering jobs historically are very well paid, it does give some plausibility that former engineers working for less money would have this displacing effect.

its all icky no matter what i think, maybe someone else can tell me why i'm wrong and cheer me up
by reliabilityguy | 2026-02-17 15:46:22+00:00
> I'm arguing that science is great because it produces better output than the people that make it as long as they stick to good methods.

I don’t think we have a contradiction here. What I am saying is that science is made by people, and we as scientists have to be extremely vigilant today not to let “ends justify the means” crowd to use the name of science for their own agenda.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-17 15:46:27+00:00
> you can do ":earlier 5m" to go back to where you were 5 minutes ago

That's crazy! I've used vi/vim/neovim for so long, probably two decades, and I've never heard anything about this feature, yet so many cases this would have been helpful.

Must be hundreds of these features I still don't know about. What's the wildest less-known vim features people sit on and haven't shared with the rest of us yet? :)
by microtonal | 2026-02-17 15:46:37+00:00
Besides the already mentioned point of getting one refurbished, Pixels tend to get really cheap towards the end of the yearly cycle. At that point, they were mostly going to make money from you using their ecosystem and then you are sticking it to them by installing GrapheneOS :p (probably they don't care).

E.g. a new Pixel 9a is currently 369 Euro in The Netherlands and 367 Euro in Germany. The Pixel 10a will be released soon, but the 9a will run GrapheneOS just fine (same SoC except modem as the vanilla 9).
Show HN: Built a Product Hunt alternative with user–product matching
by Tjerkienator | 2026-02-17 15:46:49+00:00
I built a Product Hunt alternative focused on matching new products to relevant users instead of just listing them.

Most launch platforms give you traffic, but not necessarily real users. I’m experimenting with a recommendation engine that clusters users by interests and behavior, then routes launches to people likely to care.

Current version is early but live: quick AI-assisted submission, data collection on interactions, and product–user matching over time.

Built mainly to explore recommendation systems and better ways for founders to get their first real users.

Curious what HN thinks — what would make a launch platform actually useful to you?
by wongarsu | 2026-02-17 15:46:52+00:00
Looks cool to look at. Something that would be cool to have in an airport lounge, or just any public space near an airport

I wonder how feasible it would be to render all airplanes at once, not just those near the chosen airport. A quick google says there are about 12-14k planes in the air at any given time, which sounds reasonable to render with some optimizations
by azalemeth | 2026-02-17 15:47:17+00:00
Oh, I completely agree with you. What does help however is if the back benchers get a ton of emails about this and pressure the government from the inside – when Boris Johnson was teetering on the edge the volume of correspondence MPs received apparently made a big difference in encouraging him to be shoved out.

I'm going to try to meet with my MP the next time I'm back in the UK and hopefully get some sort of sense talked with them...
by pixelesque | 2026-02-17 15:47:23+00:00
Some UK banks (Nationwide and Barclays I know for certain) have had mini card-reader PIN devices since around 2010 that they've given customers, that basically generate on an LCD screen an 8-digit code for authentication.

When confirming a large transfer, you also need to enter the payment amount in the device, and I assume this gets hashed into the number as well.

More recently (last 3/4 years), you can also use their mobile app to do this instead / as well as.
by ASalazarMX | 2026-02-17 15:47:47+00:00
How do we know if the visual cortex isn't conscious? There are conscious parts of our brain that we aren't aware of, just as we are alive, but we can't be aware of how all our cells are also alive.

I think quantifying consciousness is a problem we are absurdly far from solving yet. Most we are able to do is philosophize about it.