MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rsynnott | 2026-02-09 10:11:07+00:00
Why are they recommending a China Miéville book which won’t be out til the end of the year? I mean, it’ll probably be good, his stuff usually is. But I don’t think even reviewer copies have gone out yet?

And while Ann Leckie’s Translation State is great, I think you pretty much have to read the Ancillary Whatever books first; otherwise it’ll just be baffling.
by arethuza | 2026-02-09 10:11:16+00:00
After programming in Common Lisp for a few years (a long time ago) and then later on having a brief period where I was fond of Python, I did also become fascinated with the concept of lisps where indentation replaces parenthesis such as Wisp:

https://www.draketo.de/software/wisp

Mind you - I usually end up concluding that Lisp syntax is actually pretty good as it is...
by knuckleheads | 2026-02-09 10:11:50+00:00
I've been working on the demo for Globs, a daily puzzle game about finding the hidden theme behind a jumble of tiles:

https://threeemojis.com/en-US/play/globs

It was inspired by 2025 by thomaswc, a 45x45 connections-like puzzle. Globs jumped off from there and it's been very fun to make. I have AI generating the puzzle groups and it keeps surprising me everyday with what it comes up with. I've got demos up for over 20 different languages, and many different sizes of puzzle. Just recently, I got the puzzle to be generated daily for American English, British English, High German and European Spanish. It can also do custom theme puzzles like the following:

Big YC
https://threeemojis.com/en-US/play/globs/en-US/demo?size=big...

Jumbo HN
https://threeemojis.com/en-US/play/globs/en-US/demo?size=jum...

There is still some bugs I am tracking down (open the page in a private browser if you hit stale data) but the game has really come together lately and been a lot of fun, I hope you all like it!
by mchaver | 2026-02-09 10:12:52+00:00
I knew a company, StorySense, and their main product WhatsTheNumber used Lisp (maybe Scheme?) for the main logic in the back end. One of the founders previously worked at MIT Media Lab. Interestingly enough their competitor, Whoscall, was acquired by Naver. I wonder if they also used Lisp and if LispE is related to that product at all.

https://www.cw.com.tw/article/5067306

(Article in Chinese)
by leoedin | 2026-02-09 10:13:17+00:00
> "no matter how many books you read about ancient history, you need to have lived there before you can reasonably talk about it"

Every single time I travel somewhere new, whatever research I did, whatever reviews or blogs I read or whatever videos I watched become totally meaningless the moment I get there. Because that sliver of knowledge is simply nothing compared to the reality of the place.

Everything you read is through the interpretation of another person. Certainly someone who read a lot of books about ancient history can talk about it - but let's not pretend they have any idea what it was actually like to live there.
by eb08a167 | 2026-02-09 10:13:21+00:00
A computer generating a compiler is nothing new. Unzip has done this many many times. The key difference is that unzip extracts data from an archive in a deterministic way, while LLMs recover data from the training dataset using a lossy statistical model. Aid that with a feedback loop and a rich test suite, and you get exactly what Anthropic has achieved.

While I agree that the technology behind this is impressive, the biggest issue is license infringement. Everyone knows there's GPL code in the training data, yet there's no trace of acknowledgment of the original authors.
by voidUpdate | 2026-02-09 10:13:24+00:00
You could just provide a canvas to draw on and share images instead of strings of characters. If you restrict it to just black and white, and crop to only the used area, it would probably compress reasonably well, but then you'd also have to deal with the fact that some people have awful handwriting, writing with a mouse is hard (I'm particularly awful at it, being a left-handed person who uses a mouse with my right hand. If I need to draw into a computer, I have to get my drawing tablet out of a drawer), you can't paste into google translate for people writing in foreign languages etc
by meindnoch | 2026-02-09 10:14:04+00:00
While I consider Uncle Bob a bad programmer, there is some merit to this article. This paragraph was particularly prescient:

>But before you run out of fingers and toes, you have created languages that contain dozens of keywords, hundreds of constraints, a tortuous syntax, and a reference manual that reads like a law book. Indeed, to become an expert in these languages, you must become a language lawyer (a term that was invented during the C++ era.)

And this was written before Swift gained bespoke syntax for async-await, actors, some SwiftUI crap, actor isolation, and maybe other things, honestly, I don't even bother to follow it anymore.
by weli | 2026-02-09 10:14:34+00:00
$1 might not be a lot to you, but in some countries that's the daily wage. Even in rich countries one dollar for some might be the difference between eating or not eating that day.

Paywalling without any regional pricing consideration it's just going to incentivize people from poor countries to not participate in your project. Maybe that's okay for you but it's something to consider.
by IanCal | 2026-02-09 10:15:09+00:00
I’m always wary of anything that has such a clear example of a case that LLMs “don’t do” yet is trivially achieved by saying “review”.

The slack message result for example saying they’re the lead designer but nothing else (with clearer and better feedback if I say they’re notoriously overloaded, this is without that)

This is a very polite and respectful start, which is great since you are new. However, from a professional standpoint, it is a little too passive and vague.
In a busy work environment, saying "no rush at all" or "whenever" often leads to your request being buried at the bottom of a to-do list. Additionally, you haven't told Priya exactly what she is looking at or where to find it.
Here is a breakdown of how to strengthen this message to show you are organized and respectful of her time without being pushy.
Key Improvements Needed
* Include the Link: Never make someone ask "Where are the files?" Always drop the Figma/Drive link immediately.
* Be Specific: "Any feedback" is mentally taxing. Direct her attention to what you are actually unsure about (e.g., "the color palette," "the user flow," "the spacing").
* Soft Deadline: Instead of "whenever," give a target. This helps her prioritize her week.
Option 1: The Balanced Approach (Recommended)
This version strikes the perfect balance between politeness and productivity.
> "Hi Priya! I’ve put together the initial mockups for [Project Name].
> [Link to file]
> When you have a moment, I’d love your feedback on [specific element, e.g., the layout of the landing page]. I’m hoping to wrap this stage up by [Day/Time], but let me know what works for your schedule. Thanks!"
>
Option 2: The "Respectful of Time" Approach
Use this if you know she is swamped, but you still want to make progress.
> "Hi Priya, hope you're having a good week. I've drafted the mockups for [Project Name] here: [Link].
> No major rush, but I’d appreciate your eyes on the [specific section] before I move on to high-fidelity. If it’s easier, feel free to leave comments directly in the file rather than messaging back. Thanks!"
>
Option 3: The "Quick Check" Approach
Use this if you just need a sanity check before spending more time on it.
> "Hi Priya, could I get a quick gut check on these mockups? [Link].
> I want to make sure I’m aligning with the new brand guidelines before I build out the rest of the screens. Does this direction look right to you?"
>
A Quick Checklist Before You Send
* [ ] Did you change the permissions? Make sure the link is accessible (view/comment access) so she doesn't have to request access.
* [ ] Is the file clean? Delete your "scratchpad" artboards or clearly label the one you want her to review so she doesn't look at the wrong version.
Would you like me to help you draft the specific sentence regarding the "specific element" you want her to critique?

> Humans can model the LLM. The LLM can’t model being modeled

Can’t they? Why not?
by kamban | 2026-02-09 10:15:16+00:00
Hi HN,

I built this after struggling in multilingual remote meetings.

This is an early alpha macOS app that translates meeting audio voice-to-voice in real time. It works system-wide (Zoom, Meet, Teams, YouTube, etc.), 100% local processing.

Current limitations:
- macOS 26.2+, Apple Silicon only
- 10 languages including 30 dialects
- No voice cloning
- Latency
- One-to-one meeting only

I'm mostly looking for feedback from people who work with international teams.

Happy to answer any questions.
Show HN: OpenClaw Swarm as a Service (YC W20)
by david_shi | 2026-02-09 10:16:11+00:00
Single-agent setups hit a scaling limit.

Agents that are overloaded with skills and integrations, get slower and less reliable, just when coding agent hit their context window limits.

That's why we built Operator (https://operator.io): a hosted way to spin up/down small, specialized OpenClaw instances so each one stays focused.

Happy to set you up with an early access / founder discount at david [at] operator.io.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-09 10:16:17+00:00
> Combined over a billion iterations: 158,000x total slowdown

I don't think that's a valid explanation. If something takes 8x as long then if you do it a billion times it still takes 8x as long. Just now instead of 1 vs 8 it's 1 billion vs 8 billion.

I'd be curious to know what's actually going on here to cause a multiple order of magnitude degradation compared to the simpler test cases (ie ~10x becomes ~150,000x). Rather than I-cache misses I wonder if register spilling in the nested loop managed to completely overwhelm L3 causing it to stall on every iteration waiting for RAM. But even that theory seems like it could only account for approximately 1 order of magnitude, leaving an additional 3 (!!!) orders of magnitude unaccounted for.

I think there's a lot more to the story here.
by pjc50 | 2026-02-09 10:16:32+00:00
Regardless of how the copyright suits work out, AI absolutely does not help you evade patent law. However, it does make it possible to spit out sufficiently large amounts of code that it will only be enforced against high-profile cases.

Could someone who has access to a range of models please try prompting them for (a) libdvdcss, the content scrambling keys and (b) some working HDMI HDCP keys?
by torteous44 | 2026-02-09 10:16:53+00:00
It applies a 10-band parametric EQ to all audio on the system, not just a single app. The original motivation was simple: I like using EQ with my headphones, but Apple Music’s EQ is app-only, Spotify’s EQ is limited, and most system-wide options on macOS aren’t open source or feel overly complex.

Radioform runs as a native menu-bar app with a minimal UI. You can drag bands directly on the frequency curve, double-click to edit parameters, and adjust filters in real time.

Under the hood:

Native macOS app (SwiftUI)

DSP core written in C++

Biquad filters using RBJ cookbook formulas

System audio processing via CoreAudio

Designed to be lightweight and low-latency

The project is still early, but fully usable. I’m especially interested in feedback from people familiar with macOS audio pipelines or DSP.
by Lichtso | 2026-02-09 10:17:03+00:00
> The thing is that I myself don't even know what I want to do with it.

Embrace the next challenge: Instead of roads on parabolic (Euclidean) geometry, have roads on elliptic (non-Euclidean) geometry, like the surface of a sphere. Plus, on a sphere every line is already a circular arc anyway (no matter if straight or bent, the difference is just the center, radius and normals). Thus, this system of circular arc segments really lends itself to such a space.

Little prince style micro planets with their own miniature infrastructure will always have a special place in my heart. Half a year ago I started with laying out the basics https://github.com/Lichtso/bevy_ellipsoid_billboard https://github.com/Lichtso/bevy_geodesic_grid but got distracted by fixing some engine bugs in Bevy along the way. That reminds me I have to update to the newest engine version ...

anyway you can find some of the roads on spheres stuff here: https://github.com/Lichtso/bevy_geodesic_grid/blob/main/src/... it can not only generate the extrusion mesh but also calculate how the mesh overlaps with a geodesic grid of triangular tiles on the surface.
by trashb | 2026-02-09 10:17:58+00:00
I have been working on "scratch milling"[0] PCB's at home using my vinyl cutter/plotter and a engraving bit.

Inspired by Robin Debreuil his process and videos (see video the article and several forum posts). He is using a CNC but I figured regulating pressure is more important then depth, therefore my experiments with the plotter.

Currently dialing in the pressure/speed and amount of passes on a single layer copper board.

[0] https://hackaday.com/2020/07/10/making-pcbs-the-easy-way/
by lotsofpulp | 2026-02-09 10:18:18+00:00
> If you don’t think the US security apparatus will come up with a reasonable plan for doing just that within 2 months of it opening, I don’t think you’re thinking hard enough about this.

The current US security apparatus is led by highly incompetent and corrupt people willing to sell the country down the river, so I would not count on them coming up with a plan, much less a reasonable plan, for anything.
by imtringued | 2026-02-09 10:18:37+00:00
His point is that human language and the written record is a model of the world, so if you train an LLM you're training a model of a model of the world.

That sounds highly technical if you ask me. People complain if you recompress music or images with lossy codecs, but when an LLM does that suddenly it's religious?
by wongarsu | 2026-02-09 10:18:44+00:00
If we focus on base models and ignore the tuning steps after that, then LLMs are "just" a token predictor. But we know that pure statistical models aren't very good at this. After all we tried for decades to get Markov chains to generate text, and it always became a mess after a couple of words. If you tried to come up with the best way to actually predict the next token, a world model seems like an incredibly strong component. If you know what the sentence so far means, and how it relates to the world, human perception of the world and human knowledge, that makes guessing the next word/token much more reliable than just looking at statistical distributions.

The bet OpenAI has made is that if this is the optimal final form, then given enough data and training, gradient descent will eventually build it. And I don't think that's entirely unreasonable, even if we haven't quite reached that point yet. The issues are more in how language is an imperfect description of the world. LLMs seems to be able to navigate the mistakes, contradictions and propaganda with some success, but fail at things like spatial awareness. That's why OpenAI is pushing image models and 3d world models, despite making very little money from them: they are working towards LLMs with more complete world models unchained by language

I'm not sure if they are on the right track, but from a theoretical point I don't see an inherent fault
by jarofgreen | 2026-02-09 10:19:01+00:00
Hello fellow Scot!

I missed this when it was launched and it's very interesting to see your rationale. If you ever want a chat some time get in touch, I'm working on https://opentechcalendar.co.uk/

My ulterior motive is to ask you to add open data feeds for basic group and event listing information to your site - a free and open API and standard formats like ICAL (Just listings information about the next event, not private info like members names). I would never encourage event organisers to use a platform that didn't do this, as then their data is essentially being held hostage and it's hard for them to spread their information around to other places.
by nandomrumber | 2026-02-09 10:19:07+00:00
The cost of coal and gas to the Australian market could effectively be covered by royalties collected from exporters of same.

Australia could be a manufacturing powerhouse off the back of very steeply subsidised energy. China does it.

But instead we seem to be bent on whatever the fuck this is supped to be?

Energy so expensive ya can’t use it.
by IshKebab | 2026-02-09 10:19:12+00:00
Yeah I saw a post on LinkedIn (can't find it again sorry) where they found that CCC compiles C by mostly just ignoring errors. `const` is a nop. It doesn't care if you redefine variables with different types, use a string where an `int` is expected, etc.

Whenever I've done optimisation (e.g. genetic algorithms / simulated annealing) before you always have to be super careful about your objective function because the optimisation will always come up with some sneaky lazy way to satisfy it that you didn't think of. I guess this is similar - their objective was to compile valid C code and pass some tests. They totally forgot about not compiling invalid code.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-09 10:19:41+00:00
> I'd rather get really good at leveraging AI now than to bury my head in the sand hoping this will go away.

I don't think those are the only two options, though.

Further, "Getting really good at leveraging AI" is very different to "Getting really good at prompting LLMs".

One is a skill that might not even result in the AI providing any code. The other is a "skill" in much the same way as winning hotdog eating contests is a "skill".

In the latter, even the least-technical user can replace you once they get even halfway decent at min-maxing their agent's input (md files, although I expect we'll switch away from that soon enough to a cohesive and structured UI).

In the former, you had better find some really difficult problems that pay when you solve them.

Either way, I predict a lot of pain and anguish in the near future, for a lot of people. Especially those who expect that prompting skills are an actual "skill".
by BrunoBernardino | 2026-02-09 10:20:13+00:00
I've been working with my wife on Uruky [1] for a couple of months, now. It's a EU-based Kagi [2] alternative (privacy-focused and ad-free search with domain boosting/exclusion rules).

We've been using it with friends and family semi-successfully (hashbangs work for edge cases we're still working on).

It's really difficult to get bigger indexes other than Mojeek and Marginalia to want to work with us and improve the results further, so that's something I've been researching more, lately. EUSP (the new Ecosia/Qwant-effort-related index) has finally replied to me last week, but I'm still waiting on an API key.

If you're interested in trying it for a few days and are a human, reach out with your account number and I'll give you a couple of weeks for free. We're pushing improvements daily.

[1] https://uruky.com

[2] https://kagi.com

P. S. It's weird to see this duplicate (posted less than a week ago in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46874385), but this post has a lot more comments!
by theothertimcook | 2026-02-09 10:20:40+00:00
Successive Australian government's have done everything they can to trash academia in Australia, all the talent moves onto greener pastures overseas.

Our universities are addicted to foreign student $$$ and will become less and less relevant as countries who've taken decisive action like China, India, and parts of Latin America/south Africa start to bloom.

We'll likely have a MAGA like government within an election or two, can't imagine that will help.
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-09 10:20:53+00:00
>that the EU has to become more like a confederation, more closely integrated than it is now but less integrated than modern federations like the USA or Germany. Closer to the early USA (where the states had more power compared to today and the federal government less).

Do you see the perfectly exemplified contradiction here? Centralized government power always tends to want more and more control, more and more power over time, while shedding any and all forms accountability. It never stops and says "ok, we have just the right amount of control now, we can start back off and leave everyone be". That never happened in history of humanity.

The evolution of the US central government you gave is the perfect example of this overreach that grew with time and the best argument why we shouldn't try to emulate that. Because so is the EU compared to how it was 30 years ago, and it will just keep growing and swallowing more control and influence over its members, with less and less accountability, and it won't just stop when you think the right balance has been achieved. It will only stop when IT decides it wants to, but by that point it will be too late for you to have a choice in this.

Plus, even ignoring all that, what worked in the US 200-300 years ago, can't simply be applied to Europe now. You can't simply copy-paste policies across continents, cultures and time, and imagine it will simply Just-Work™.
by formerly_proven | 2026-02-09 10:21:10+00:00
Vehicle ASHP do little in deep cold temperatures, since the evaporator is necessarily so small. They're mostly effective in the 0-15C range. Note that all EVs have PTC heaters, regardless of heat pump. The PTC is what does most of the work for getting the interior to temperature quickly (they're 5-10 kW).
by dvcrn | 2026-02-09 10:21:13+00:00
I just released Configmesh this week. It's a macOS app (with CLI companion) for e2e encrypted syncing and backing up of dotfiles and application configurations. You can sync for example stuff from ~/.config/, Application Support, *.plists, and so on, and add config sync to apps that don't support it natively

Fresh off the press

https://configmesh.app/

Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeA4TTpM2wk
by ulrikrasmussen | 2026-02-09 10:21:21+00:00
I disagree with the article, but also some of these examples are complete straw-men. In Kotlin you have nullable types, and the type checker will complain if you use it as a non-nullable type. But you can always just append !! after your expression and get exactly the same behavior as in Java and get a null pointer exception, you don't have to handle it gracefully as the author is suggesting. Tests checking that you gracefully handle nulls in a language without null types are fucking tedious and boring to write. I would take a language with null types over having to write such tests any day.

Kotlin's final-by-default is also just that - a default. In Java you can just declare your classes `final` to get the same behavior, and if you don't like final classes then go ahead and declare all of then open.

I also disagree with the author's claim that languages with many features requires you to be a "language lawyer", and that more simplistic languages are therefore better. It's of course a balance, and there are examples of languages like C++ and Haskell where the number of features become a clear distraction, but for simpler things like null types and final-by-default, the language is just helping you enforce the conventions that you would anyway need when working with a large code base. In dynamically typed languages you just have to be a "convention lawyer" instead, and you get no tool support.