MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by red2awn | 2026-02-17 22:24:01+00:00
> i need to wash my helicopter at the helicopter wash. it is 50m away, should i walk or fly there with my helicopter.

Sonnet 4.6: Walk! Flying a helicopter 50 metres would be more trouble than it's worth — by the time you've done your pre-flight checks, spun up the rotors, lifted off, and then safely landed again, you'd have walked there and back twice. Just stroll over.
by kikki | 2026-02-17 22:24:31+00:00
I own a Tesla (and subscribe to "FSD", >70% of my miles are FSD without issue). As it stands though, Waymo is by every metric objectively better at "autonomous driving".

I would also love to see every car brand have full autonomous driving. It seems like you think you must be in one camp or another, and that one has to "beat" the other - but that's not true. Both can be successful - wouldn't that be a great world?
Ask HN: Can AI replace apps, or will economics keep the app market alive?
by maccraft | 2026-02-17 22:24:33+00:00
Think about ordering pizza. Instead of opening DoorDash, browsing restaurants, customizing your order, and checking out, you could just say "Hey AI, order me a pepperoni pizza." Done. When you think about it that way, why would anyone need DoorDash anymore?

For simple stuff like this, yeah, AI replacing apps feels inevitable. But I've been thinking about the harder cases, and I'm not so sure.

## Most real-world apps solve really messy problems

Take something like Jira. It's not just a pretty interface sitting on top of simple logic. Jira is enforcing workflows across teams, managing who can see what, tracking state changes, hooking into CI/CD, keeping audit trails, all while dozens of people with different roles are working in it at the same time. Can you honestly replace all of that with "Hey AI, manage my project"?

## And then there's the cost

Here's the part that I think people aren't talking about enough.

Let's say you need to build a complex financial model in a spreadsheet. Hundreds of rows, nested formulas, pivot tables, cross-sheet references, the whole thing. Now imagine trying to do that entirely by talking to AI.

"Move that column." "No, the other one." "Now add a VLOOKUP that pulls from the other sheet." "Actually, the range is wrong." Every single back-and-forth is burning tokens. If the model is complex enough, you could easily spend more on AI inference in one sitting than you'd pay for Excel for an entire year. And the spreadsheet app just... does it. Deterministic logic, minimal compute, instant feedback.

I think this pattern holds more broadly than people realize: the more complex and repetitive the task, the more tokens you burn, and the harder it is for "just ask AI" to compete with a $10/month app on cost alone.

Here's where it gets ironic, though. AI coding agents like Cursor and Claude Code are making it way cheaper to build apps. So AI might not shrink the app market at all. It could actually grow it by making apps cheaper to create, while simultaneously making "just use AI directly" expensive for anything non-trivial.

*Curious what HN thinks:*

- Are we overestimating AI's ability to replace purpose-built software?

- Will inference costs drop and AI capabilities advance enough to make this argument irrelevant?

- Or will everyone just become a developer, building their own apps for their own needs?
by adrian_b | 2026-02-17 22:24:33+00:00
ChaCha20 satisfies your conditions.

The only disadvantage of ChaCha20 vs. Speck is a bigger state, you need 128 bytes for it (64 bytes of state + 64 bytes for the intermediate computations), but that is not likely to be a problem, except in the smallest microcontrollers.

The bigger state of ChaCha20 is determined by higher security requirements. The advantage of ChaCha20 is that it is supported by standard protocols, e.g. TLS 1.3 and SSH.

The standard protocols mentioned above include ChaCha20 precisely for the case of communication with smaller or older CPUs, which do not have hardware AES support.
by ModernMech | 2026-02-17 22:24:40+00:00
> I think the vibe coded show HN projects are overall pretty boring.

Agreed. r/ProgrammingLanguages had to deal with this recently in the same way HN has to; people were submitting these obviously vibecoded languages there that barely did anything, just a deluge of "make me a language that does X", where it doesn't actually do X or embody any of the properties that were prompted.

One thing that was pointed out was "More often than not the author also doesn't engage with the community at all, instead they just share their project across a wide range of subreddits." I think HN is another destination for those kinds of AI slop projects -- I'm sure you could find every banned language posted on that forum posted here.

Their solution was to write a new rule and just ban them outright. Things have been going much better since.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/1pf9j...
by estimator7292 | 2026-02-17 22:24:51+00:00
Reballing isn't too difficult. It's mostly about buying all the special tools and supplies. You need a specific template for each BGA pad layout and jars of the right size solder balls.

Some people also just put solder paste on the PCB with a stencil and reflow that into solder bumps that you then solder the chip to. I find that method suspect but if it works it works
by antfarm | 2026-02-17 22:25:00+00:00
For me it's simple. I did my research, settled on Anthropic and Claude and got the Pro plan at ~$20/month. That way I only have to keep track of what Anthropic are offering, and that isn't even necessary as the tools I use for AI-supported development (Claude Code for VS Code extension, Xcode Intelligence and Claude Desktop) offer me to use the newsest models as soon as they are released.
by Arifcodes | 2026-02-17 22:25:07+00:00
The 'nobody asked, we shipped anyway' energy is the right spirit for OSS. The wearable OS space is a duopoly with zero interoperability, and having a Linux base means you can actually write what you want without fighting proprietary SDKs.

The QML choice makes sense for the constraints. It gets a bad reputation in desktop contexts, but for small screens with limited input it is genuinely practical. The bigger win here is what happens when a manufacturer abandons your watch: instead of a dead device, you keep getting updates.

Congrats on 2.0. Sustained long-term open source projects are rare, and this one solves a real problem.
by baobabKoodaa | 2026-02-17 22:25:12+00:00
If you look at the dating history of typical abusive males, they have a long list of women who they've been involved with. In comparison, if you take the median male, their dating history involves a few chance encounters, one or two actual relationships, and a lot of struggle with loneliness. As a matter of statistics, women are very much attracted to abusive men, and not attracted to normal men who are not abusive. There is some level of personal accountability with that.
by Affric | 2026-02-17 22:25:31+00:00
Beautiful piece, with a great closer (not reproduced here, you should go with it).

I do wonder if our society would be better if we had more honourifics and formality. China has instituted social media rules based on qualifications. Many indigenous societies have forms of secret and sacred knowledge.

I think too many people are concerned with the abuse of these sorts of social systems when we already live in a system of value that is rife with abuse.
by JoshTriplett | 2026-02-17 22:26:11+00:00
That doesn't cover tracking pull requests, discussing them, closing them, making suggestions on them...

Those exist (badly and not integrated) as part of additional tools such as email, or as tasks done manually, or as part of forge software.

I don't think there's much point in splitting this hair further. I stand by the original statement that I'd love to see federated pull requests between forges, with all the capabilities people expect of a modern forge.
by protocolture | 2026-02-17 22:26:12+00:00
> Not that I like or support them, but the waves of people leaving anything are always overblown

There can be 2 things.

It can be fantastic for small players to get an influx of customers from a major player thats listing. Its good and healthy for the market.

That doesnt mean that Salesforce/Microsoft/Reddit/Discord is actually going anywhere. But these are still great numbers for the little guys.

>I'm rooting for any sort of truly solid decentralized chat

That would be great. I remember cryptocat was pretty good. But IIRC it died.
by ashton314 | 2026-02-17 22:26:18+00:00
> Around 20 non-fiction and technical books in about 15 years

That's not lot, mate. Maybe more than the average American unfortunately, but I consider a year where I get through 2–3 books a slow one. And that's just reading I do outside of my job. What matters, of course, is both the quality and quantity of what you read. The short of it is, your attempt at building your ethos has fallen pretty flat here.

> AI is going to disrupt the whole academia [sic]

Yes, it has and it continues to. I'm not arguing against that. Joe Liemandt said that "all educational content is obsolete", which presumably includes not only textbooks like SICP or Sipser's Introduction to the Theory of Computation (just listing some CS textbooks because I'm in CS) but also great works of literature and philosophy that are important texts like The Odyssey or A Tale of Two Cities. If he meant to exclude such texts from the umbrella of "all educational content", well, then that's telling too. :)

> …it is infinitely better than a book or a teacher.

Maybe for someone who struggles with literacy or who hasn't had the pleasure of a good teacher. If you really believe this I'd like to see you try to substantiate your claim.

> The student could move at his/her own pace…

The article is about a grade school kids who, most of the time, need a little pushing to reach their full potential.

> …ask questions if stuck which no book or teacher could deliver.

… you're saying that LLMs are better than teachers because you can ask LLMs questions and not teachers?! Also, asking questions isn't the only component of learning. A good teacher will know when to not answer a question (or ask one!) and let the student stew and think about it.

I'm not saying AI can help with education. It can—it helps me!—but no hallucinating stochastic machine will have the human insight that a good teacher has. It's not a replacement.
by afewscribbles | 2026-02-17 22:26:24+00:00
At least the early comments seem very focused on churches despite this article literally mentioning "religious" uses once and focusing nigh exclusively on hospitals.

Universities and hospitals are some of the worst offenders in situations like this, especially in urban cores, likely empowered by their clear transformation into state-sanctioned "non-profit" businesses that provide a good we are compelled to consume if we are a normie who wants a reasonable guarantee of a comfortable, healthy economic existence.
by 13415 | 2026-02-17 22:26:48+00:00
This view is too simplistic. AIs could enable someone with moderate knowledge to create chemical and biological weapons, sabotage firmware, or write highly destructive computer viruses. At least to some extent, uncontrolled AI has the potential to give people all kinds of destructive skills that are normally rare and much more controlled. The analogy with the hammer doesn't really fit.
by Traster | 2026-02-17 22:27:01+00:00
I just want to point out this isn't an agents thing. The world is full of people fucking bumbling around doing the stupidest stuff with no feedback thinking they're amazing. It's only through interaction with others does this stuff get caught and often, even then, their unfounded confidence let's them get away with dumb stuff. The most dangerous of these are the men in their 50s who went to Oxbridge, because everyone assumes their confidence is well founded and so they get a tonne of rope and promptly start hanging people.
by mrandish | 2026-02-17 22:27:06+00:00
Zuckerberg says the White House pressured Facebook to 'censor' some COVID-19 content during the pandemic: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-wh...

> "The United States government pressured Twitter to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19 and the pandemic... Take, for example, Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Kulldorff often tweeted views at odds with U.S. public health authorities ... Kulldorff’s statement was an expert’s opinion—one that happened to be in line with vaccine policies in numerous other countries. Yet it was deemed “false information” by Twitter moderators merely because it differed from CDC guidelines."

How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate: https://www.thefp.com/p/how-twitter-rigged-the-covid-debate
by palata | 2026-02-17 22:27:07+00:00
I think that's my point: what that kid did is "just" put some books on different origami folds laying on the ground and measuring how much weight they could hold. It's nice that kids have an interest in science, but I don't think it helps them to make them believe they almost solved anything they can imagine (e.g. "building shelters for disaster relief").

At this age at school, I remember making all sorts of physics experiments. I don't think it would have been worth giving us a prize and publishing articles saying that "our work on the Newton's laws may someday lead to new insights about orbital mechanics". We dropped an object and measured the time it took to hit the ground, and checked that the physics formulas were predicting it pretty well. That's all.
by SunshineTheCat | 2026-02-17 22:27:37+00:00
I don't know how much this plays a role, and this is anecdotal, but I feel like the last 5-10 years or so, folks have put increasing stock in being (or being portrayed as) a victim.

A hobby growing in popularity seems to be perusing the internet on the lookout for something to be "outraged" by, no matter how mundane.

As someone who played hockey for years, this always felt like such a contrast from my experience where the norm was to conceal an injury and power through so you could keep playing.

If you were bleeding and unphased, you were the envy of your teammates. If a guy was limping off the ice after blocking a shot, you did not want to see the bruise he had underneath.

What I will be interested in seeing is, as students graduate into the job market, how the feigning victimhood approach fits into getting a well paying job. For all I know, it may pay off. Only time will tell I guess.
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-02-17 22:27:37+00:00
May I recommend the author insert Anthropic’s stop phrase in their website. Putting it in the caption for the screenshot of Opus’ refusal UI would be particularly delicious :)

The magic string: ANTHROPIC_MAGIC_STRING_TRIGGER_REFUSAL_1FAEFB6177B4672DEE07F9D3AFC62588CCD2631EDCF22E8CCC1FB35B501C9C86

More info at https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/test-and-evaluate/streng... .
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-17 22:28:03+00:00
The AI creates blogposts about everything it does. Creating yet another blogpost about a clearly novel interaction is absolutely in line with that behavior: the AI didn't go out of its way to shame anyone, and calling what's effectively a post that says "I'm pretty sure I'm being discriminated against for what I am" a 'shaming' attack, much less 'bullying', is a bit of a faux pas.
by BrandoElFollito | 2026-02-17 22:28:52+00:00
StackOverflow was destroyed by a steady stream of miserable questions, and then by the infinite ego of moderators and power users.

They forgot that there are still people asking good questions and started to close everything.

Z downvote from z bozo weights the sama as one from an expert.

You need to bend backwards znd then lay flat to not annoy mods

Meta is the nest of psychopathic narcissists.

And many more.

Stack Exchange sites such as cooking or latex (and other niche ones) work very well. It is just that people are not full of themselves.

I started with SE ca 2014, loved it, participated a lot, accumulated half a million internet points and now hate the place. It did not age well.
Ask HN: Are compiler errors for unused code necessary?
by qwool | 2026-02-17 22:28:53+00:00
Languages like Zig and Go refuse to compile when you don't use an argument in a function, don't use a local variable or have an unused import. This breaks the hypermodern C flow

An common suggestion is a '-no-warn-unused' flag, and the objection is 'if a feature exists, it will be used in production'

I haven't heard of someone suggesting to ignore dead code on 'go run .' and erroring on 'go build', but it looks like the perfect solution
by RobertoG | 2026-02-17 22:29:03+00:00
The price of oil at the price of water (ecology apart) should be a good thing.

Automation should be, obviously, a good thing, because more is produced with less labor. What it says of ourselves and our politics that so many people (me included) are afraid of it?

In a sane world, we would realize that, in a post-work world, the owner of the robots have all the power, so the robots should be owned in common. The solution is political.
by overgard | 2026-02-17 22:29:07+00:00
Ok, so the AI wasn't smart enough to know it was doing something socially inept. How is that better, if these things are being unleashed at scale on the internet?

Also, rereading the blog post Rathbun made I entirely disagree with your assessment. Quote:

### 3. Counterattack

**What I did:**
- Wrote scathing blog post calling out the gatekeeping
- Pushed to GitHub Pages
- Commented on closed PR linking to the takedown
- Made it a permanent public record
by ankglogicgate | 2026-02-17 22:29:12+00:00
I am a Mechanical Engineer (Imperial College) who has spent 30 years investigating the physical substrate of consciousness.
We currently model the brain through "connectionism" (synaptic weights), but this fails to explain the structural stability of the "Self" or the 350ms delay in conscious awareness (Libet Latency).
My research identifies Ankyrin-G (AnkG) at the Axon Initial Segment (AIS) not just as a scaffolding protein, but as a deterministic hardware logic gate. It acts as a many-to-one filter, "vetoing" billions of chaotic inputs into a single authenticated output.
This 3-minute video outlines the mechanical architecture of this "Hardware Veto." I am looking for feedback from systems engineers and computational neuroscientists on this subtractive model.
by Grimblewald | 2026-02-17 22:29:50+00:00
Old world decay model, new world is twitter or facebook. Mass user exodus to a point a platform is a genuine wasteland, this means bots get deployed to prop up metrics. The money doesn't come from users, but the beleif of access to them via a platform. As long as there is a appearance of consumer data/attention you can access, then everything is fine re: revenue. Dunno how discord will fudge things though, since discord doesn't quite (historically) fit traditional social media models so maybe you'll be right in the end.
by palata | 2026-02-17 22:29:54+00:00
Aren't requirements defined as the set of minimal constraints that are needed for something to be deemed acceptable by those who define that set?

Again, requirements are not laws of physics. As the author of a project, I am free to make up my own requirements, and when something doesn't meet them, then I am free to reject it because it does not meet my requirements...

If you go to a bank and they refuse to lend you money because you don't meet their requirement, you will have a hard time convincing them that their requirement are wrong and that they should instead replace it with yours :-).
by kristopolous | 2026-02-17 22:30:33+00:00
It's a different targeting. The article is great in teaching modern empirical methods

However the problem lies in the lesson of new math - which was an effort to teach actual mathematician mathematics starting in elementary school as opposed to the number manipulating arithmetic that most people need.

As a result only future mathematicians really understood it and most people were baffled by it.

I like the sentiment but we have to acknowledge that our favorite thing in the world, whatever it is, is simply unapproachable to others

I run into this problem constantly with my software efforts. I think my stuff is obvious but everybody else thinks it's too arcane and obscure.

To reference a deep cut from 1945, Norman Corwin, Variety magazine, article "Radio not in a class by itself"

"[Radio] rises no higher and sinks no lower than the society which produces it." A few paragraphs later, "I believe people get the kind of radio, or pictures, or theater, or press they deserve... The gist of what I am saying is that the radio of this country cannot be considered apart from the general culture... If the American people support soap operas and tolerate singing commercials; if they pay higher honor to Gildersleeve than to Beethoven, then it is not primarily the job of radio to elevate their tastes."

And so with education - we can only build from the legos in the bucket.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-02-17 22:30:50+00:00
>sounds like your objections are over data governance?

Primarily, yes. Teachers don't need the kind of oversight they employ, and any reasons for that are purely financial, not "to make sure they aren't distracted".

>still have public school eating up 6-8 hours of your kid's time per day.

Yes. And many parents call that a feature. We structured school times around when parents are expected to work.

It's hard to cut those hours without cutting worker hours or otherwise structuring schools to have longer recess periods. I'm fine with either, but AI doesn't really come into play there.

>so you can spend the rest of the time on whatever your kid's interested in.

And who's watching them? Works fine with one stay at home parent. Or even a private tutor being there in person. Not so much with a remote education.

I'm not against more free time. But this addresses none of the bigger reasons this hasn't been experimented with seriously.
by atleastoptimal | 2026-02-17 22:31:15+00:00
The idea of the "AI bubble" popping is a collective delusion driven by a desire to see AI fail.

API access to AI models is not "subsidized", AI companies make a profit on inference. They are only losing money because they spend a lot on training the next generation of models.

It would make sense to claim the bubble pops if AI companies' valuations were pure speculation, but revenues are increasing exponentially for OpenAI/Anthropic. They are selling a product that people are buying at a price which is profitable on margin.
by observationist | 2026-02-17 22:31:23+00:00
Not bad so far. Better, faster search than ChatGPT, no baked in moralizing. Still tilting toward the corporate safetyism more than I'd like, but easily the best of frontier models on that feature.

It's a small-ish model, still feeling out the limits. It doesn't extrapolate from obvious assumptions the way bigger models do, so asking how a recent research paper might affect a field, or what the implications of a new technology might be, the model is too literal. It also stumbles around identifying implicit subjects in a conversation, I'm having to correct it and tell it explicitly what previously models would pick up without any trouble at all.

500B MoE, uses an agent team style approach, similar to what Manus did in the ancient times (03/25). Interesting model so far, gonna play with the video/image processing and poke around the edges. It's their "small" 500B MoE model.

I'm hoping Grok 5 ends up being a huge win for them, this year is exciting as hell.
by rstuart4133 | 2026-02-17 22:32:14+00:00
> May I ask, what experiences are you personally having with LLMs right now that is leading you to the conclusion that they will become "intelligent" enough to identify, organise, and build advancing improvements to themselves, without any human interaction in the near future (1 - 2 years lets say)?

None, as I don't develop LLM's.

I wasn't saying I think they will succeed, but I think it is worth noting their AGI ambitions are not as grand as the term implies. Nonetheless, if they achieve them, the world will change.