MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by phil21 | 2026-02-15 17:27:27+00:00
I am not a power user of either, and I absolutely detest when someone insists on using Excel. Sharing and collaboration is such a giant pain, and it's like going backwards in time to the 90's with e-mailed versions of files back and forth. Our org does not have a MS 365 license, so I'm unsure of Microsoft's web versions of Excel or how good they happen to be these days. I know users of it who complain though, and end up using it locally on their workstation like the olden days.

Most of my use is incredibly simple and used for project planning, inventory counting, lists of things that are split up into status/to-dos among multiple people, etc.

I've also never had a use for "Advanced" powerpoint, so the simplicity of google slides is a breath of fresh are as I only ever use the 10% most common feature set.

I actually get a bit of anxiety when someone sends me an excel sheet these days. It's usually going to be overly complex using clever methods, and that person is going to be a real pain to work with on iterating anything most of the time.

I've noted some very rare and specific times Excel is warranted though - such as our CFO creating complex financial modeling. For those uses I totally get that Google Sheets would be like working with handcuffs on.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-15 17:27:42+00:00
Compared to Thiel Thunberg is the voice of reason. Actually, she is the voice of reason compared to a lot of wealthy and powerful people. And that's why they're scared shitless of her: you can't really argue with someone who has nothing to lose and speaks truth to power like that.

Thunberg has issues, sure. She's pretty open about them too. But that has zero bearing on her various positions and they are as solid as they are ethically clean. As always, there are people that would love to 'shoot the messenger' and in many cases this appears as a rather literal proposition. So far it hasn't happened but I'm afraid that one of these days it will. We need her. Far, far more than we need Thiel.
by roywiggins | 2026-02-15 17:28:02+00:00
I think the security/liberty tradeoff is actually often a false promise. You can end up trading away liberty for nothing at all. I don't like buying into this, even to say "liberty is better, we should do that instead" because it implicitly concedes that you would really get the security on the other side of the bargain.

And if you don't get the security you were promised, it's too late to do anything about it.
by simonw | 2026-02-15 17:28:32+00:00
> So there may not be a threshold below which cognitive debt isn’t an issue.

That's my hunch too.

The problem isn't "I don't understand how the code works", it's "I don't understand what my product does deeply enough to make good decisions about it".

No amount of AI assistance is going to fill that hole. You gotta pay down your cognitive debt and build a robust enough mental model that you can reason about your product.
by mjevans | 2026-02-15 17:28:51+00:00
It's been too long so I only vaguely remember Wave.

It was a little too early to market. Common PCs weren't quite good enough, and common Internet was very not good enough.

The UI also didn't quite help shape normal user workflows enough so it was hard for an average user to just pick it up and be productive.

---

I think I'd like to see some merger of 'checklists', 'events' (calendar / etc), and 'conversations' much more like Slack channels where each new topic is a thread / email chain.
by olivermuty | 2026-02-15 17:29:15+00:00
At 40gb and a rumoured 5 to 7 TB size of the proprietary flagships you are looking at several megawatts to run one single model instance. Cerebras is insanely power hungry. It is funny how they are essentially a parallell happenstance (chips being made for other compute stuff also works for LLMs) to gaming processors accidentally being good for LLMs.

The world will be much more interesting when real bespoke hardware built for actual LLM usage comes to market. This means silicon of the SIMD flavour or other variants, but using DRAM so you can pack more tightly.
by bryant | 2026-02-15 17:30:11+00:00
> Seems bizarre. It's not like companies didn't want to sell it--they'd prefer to have the revenue. This is just kicking them then while they're down. I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking since it increases the downside of launching an unpopular product.

Companies (Burberry is mentioned, but it goes unsaid that others engage in it) routinely burn stock to preserve exclusivity[1]. It's a pretty serious issue.

[1] https://www.vogue.com/article/fashion-waste-problem-fabrics-...
by jtrn | 2026-02-15 17:30:14+00:00
Makes sense. It’s already illegal to even attempt to commit suicide here, so compared to that, this is just another small way the state micromanages your entire life.

Sarcasm aside, I wonder if they calculated how much we save by not trashing these items, versus the cost in time, bureaucracy, and administration this will demand. There is an episode of Freconomics that covered this. Managing and getting rid of free stuff is very expensive and hard. But that someone else's problem.
by danielhjacobs | 2026-02-15 17:30:44+00:00
Also a Ruffle developer here, though less involved with the actual emulation and more with the JS for browser integration. I'll add to Adrian's response that instructions for setting up the websockify proxy (by the webmaster of the site) can be found here: https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/wiki/Frequently-Asked-Qu....
by nmilo | 2026-02-15 17:30:50+00:00
I don’t really get the bus analogy. It seems like it massively increases latency but as soon as you’re “on the bus” throughput is normal? When in reality (if I understand correctly) opus-fast is just giving you a bigger portion of the batch so increasing throughput with little affect on latency? (I’m assuming anthropic gets enough volume that these batches fill up pretty much instantly)
by uyzstvqs | 2026-02-15 17:30:57+00:00
It'd be even simpler. If a device is in Child Mode (which would be activated by parents during setup, and require a separate PIN to disable), it'd respond with status.isMinor = true. Or even simpler, make it a HTTP header.

What I meant is that it doesn't exist yet. It'd require operating systems, apps, browsers, etc, to all implement this system before a company like Discord can actually use it.
by reeredfdfdf | 2026-02-15 17:31:28+00:00
Most likely these clothes will be just dumped to poorer parts of Africa and Asia, where they're finally sold for peanuts, or in worst case dumped into a landfill. That's what already happens for a lot of used clothes that people give away.

IMO selling the clothes to people that otherwise couldn't afford them is always better than destroying them, so EU is doing the right thing here.
by throwaway198846 | 2026-02-15 17:31:40+00:00
Well one link deeper says "Restrict the export of textile waste" but I'm still unclear why they preferred these measure over a carbon tax.

Edit: "To prevent unintended negative consequences for circular business models that
involve the sale of products after their preparation for reuse, it should be possible to
destroy unsold consumer products that were made available on the market following
operations carried out by waste treatment operators in accordance with Directive
2008/98/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council3. In accordance with that
Directive, for waste to cease to be waste, a market or demand must exist for the
recovered product. In the absence of such a market, it should therefore be possible to
destroy the product." This is a rather interesting paragraph which seems to imply you can destroy clothes if truly nobody wants it.
by lioeters | 2026-02-15 17:31:44+00:00
> cost $2,995 for binaries or $14,995 for sources

My goodness, this is hard to imagine from today when open source has driven the price of software (code itself) to nil. And that's the price from decades ago. While I'm glad I don't have to pay 15K for a C to PostScript compiler, as someone who might have written similar software if I'd lived back in those days - I can imagine an alternate timeline where I'd be getting paid to write such tools instead of doing it as a hobby project.

> NeScheme.txt

Nice rabbit hole about LispScript, what a cool idea. I've been re-studying Scheme recently, its history and variants like s7, and was appreciating its elegance and smallness as a language, how relevant it still is. One of the books I'm reading uses Scheme for algorithmic music composition. (Notes from the Metalevel: An Introduction to Computer Composition)
by jacquesm | 2026-02-15 17:32:13+00:00
That's fair, but it would be no less effective than a similar course based on Linux which would actually give the graduate a far more practical amount of knowledge. Acquisition of knowledge isn't free and to purposefully use a toy when the real thing is freely available for commercial reasons is just grift and AT and VU were well aware of this.

Note that all I'm doing here is taking AT at his word that he developed Minix solely because the source to Unix wasn't free to universities to hack on. They could have adopted Linux from the day that it became available then, or at least the beginning of the next academic year.
Neural Web renamed to Larkos, fixes and improvements
by Okerew | 2026-02-15 17:32:27+00:00
Improved neural kernels, code changes, simplified some functions, fixed bugs, removed pybinding version (still kept cuda pybinding version though) replaced it with C version ment to be used with ctypes, renamed project to larkos in https://github.com/Okerew/larkos
by eddythompson80 | 2026-02-15 17:32:30+00:00
Who said anything about that? The argument was "if you're not using AI RIGHT NOW, you will fall behind forever"

This is the nonsense management and CTOs are pushing. Use it now if you want, I do. Wait for things to cool down if you want. You'll be fine either way. The comical view that it'll be a "winner takes all" subset of developers who some how would have figured out secret AI techniques that make them 10Kx more productive and every other developer will be SOL is laughable.
by noduerme | 2026-02-15 17:32:32+00:00
Hi! You have done amazing work, and I'm ever grateful to your team for keeping AS3 alive!

I used sockets in some of my multiplayer games, but that's not where I ran into problems with Ruffle. Since those games only upgraded to sockets after an initial HTTPS connection, I haven't even gotten to the point of trying sockets yet. I mainly just used NetConnection.connect() for routine API calls, not to open a socket. AFAIK .connect() didn't open a socket, although I guess it had some two-way capabilities with Flash Media Server, but that's not how I used it. I just used it to initialize the NetConnection instance with the URI of a server endpoint that could receive AMF messages (usually translated on the backend with AMFPHP). I don't think it really left any sort of connection open. After that, you'd just make RESTful calls over that connection using netconnection.call(...args), and could send complex objects - even SQL result sets - back and forth without going through JSON or XML. But it was just a bunch of HTTP calls sending that data in Flash's own serialized format. You'd listen for NetStatusEvent or SecurityEvent to handle the results or errors. No sockets were involved. In conjunction with AMFPHP it was basically like a URLRequest without any structuring or destructuring needed to parse the results into AS3-friendly data types.

It would be amazing if only the RESTful kinds of NC connections and calls could work again through Ruffle, I think it might be all that's stopping my old games from running!
by Aurornis | 2026-02-15 17:33:01+00:00
In my experience in other physical goods industries (not textiles specifically) there is a big difference between products that are good but aren’t ever sold for some reason and products that are deemed not sellable for some reason.

For example, if a custom returns a product that was opened but they claim was never used (worn in this case) you can’t sell it to someone else as a new item. With physical products these go through refurbishing channels if there are enough units to warrant it.

What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems? You can’t sell it as new, so it has to go somewhere. One challenge we discovered the hard way is that there are a lot of companies who will claim to recycle your products or donate them to good causes in other countries, but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some cases being injected back in to retail channels through some process we could never figure out. At least with hardware products we could track serial numbers to discover when this was happening.

It gets weirder when you have a warranty policy. You start getting warranty requests for serial numbers that were marked as destroyed or that never made it to the retail system. Returned serial numbers are somehow re-appearing as units sold as new. This is less of a problem now that Amazon has mechanisms to avoid inventory co-mingling (if you use them) but for a while we found ourselves honoring warranty claims for items that, ironically enough, had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service.

So whenever I see “unsold” I think the situation is probably more complicated than this overview suggests. It’s generally a good thing to avoid destroying perfectly good inventory for no good reason, but inventory that gets disposed isn’t always perfectly good either. I assume companies will be doing something obvious to mark the units as not for normal sale like punching holes in tags or marking them somewhere]
by washadjeffmad | 2026-02-15 17:33:14+00:00
There's more to it, but on the heels of the egg crisis and poultry instability following years of consolidation of small and independent producers into large, corporate farms following the 2008 and 2014 Farm Bills, the perspectives of national leadership seem to be simplified to financials over a clear understanding of what contributes to the health and security of domestic food production.

I'd say I was worried, but there's not much to do about it. I've just watched ag and dairy dry up over the last quarter century as farmers in my state chase anything that will give their families security, even if it means being paid not to produce, not letting their children learn the business, or selling off land.
by mindslight | 2026-02-15 17:33:33+00:00
You keep focusing on these small slices of the issue where you can go A+B->C "yup looks good!". Meanwhile the larger context here is exactly what's important.

Personally I'm basically ambivalent about deporting illegal immigrants. I am NOT ambivalent about the first amendment, the second amendment, abducting citizens/legal immigrants, due process and coercion, inhumane conditions, an administration that doesn't respect the loss of American life, an administration that continues to announce that their goal is much more than merely deporting illegal immigrants, etc.

I thought Obama was presiding over an inhumane machine as well, although I was both-sidesing at the time so I didn't see a political lever that could be pulled to affect it. But has it occurred to you that even if you consider the net actions the same, fewer people protested Obama precisely because Obama could sell those policies by engendering trust and demonstrating respect for at least some traditional American values?
by tokyobreakfast | 2026-02-15 17:33:34+00:00
Everyone has known Google reads your email since day one. In the early days they would spin it as a good thing: "that's why the spam filtering is great!"

Why is everyone suddenly outraged Ring has access to your footage? These cloud-connected cameras...hosted on someone else's servers. It's literally how they work. "But I didn't think they would use the video in a way I didn't personally approve after giving it to them!"

So instead, people are rage-returning Ring cameras and posting their receipts and exchanging them for...Chinese cameras. Which do the same thing, except this time the servers are overseas and completely uncontrolled.

It's hard to have any empathy when the warning label was already on the box for all these products.
by bryant | 2026-02-15 17:33:45+00:00
> They would rather destroy it than sell it at $300.

This is exactly it. The actual landed cost is 1/10th of the sales price, and most of the rest of the margin pads the marketing and exclusivity machine. If for instance LV starts selling their $200-landed Neverfull bags at $500 or even $1,000, all the infrastructure sustaining the image becomes unsustainable.
by ankit219 | 2026-02-15 17:33:55+00:00
People are misunderstanding Anthropic's fast mode because they chose to name it that way. The hints all point to a specific thing they did. The setup is costlier, its also smarter and better on tougher problems which is unheard of in terms of speed. This paper[1] fits perfectly:

The setup is parallel distill and refine. You start with parallel trajectories instead of one, then distill from them, and refine that to get to an answer. Instead of taking all trajectories to completion, they distill it quickly and refine so it gives outputs fast and yet smarter.

- paper came out in nov 2025

- three months is a good research to production pipeline

- one of the authors is at anthropic

- this approach will definitely burn more tokens than a usual simple run.

- > Anthropic explicitly warns that time to first token might still be slow (or even slower)

To what people are saying, speculative decoding wont be smarter or make any difference. Batching could be faster, but then not as costly.

Gemini Deepthink and gpt-5.2-pro use the same underlying parallel test time compute but they take each trajectory to completion before distilling and refining for the user.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01123
by jacquesm | 2026-02-15 17:34:44+00:00
> The ones that wanted to work on Linux could just do that.

Sure, but time is a very finite quantity and wasting a couple of years on Tanenbaum's pet project may have resulted in some residual knowledge about how operating systems in general worked but looking at most of the developments they pursued the bulk were such dead-ends that even outside of VU there was relatively little adoption. The world had moved to Linux and VU refused to move with it.

From being ahead they ended up being behind.
by instagib | 2026-02-15 17:35:38+00:00
400 pages at 400 words per page is 160,000 words.
X1.33 tokens
≈212,800 tokens

Most models local or cloud have issues with very long contexts even if they “support” 1M context window.

I’ve tried local models and around 30K context, it starts making up or summarizing content to store it in memory and will not fully reproduce the input.

You could try re-training a local model on a book or implementation of RAG.

I don’t know how latest local models would handle 200k context window but RAG may help keep the memory context clean.
by the__alchemist | 2026-02-15 17:35:59+00:00
Ah sorry. I should clarify. Not referring to specifically cross compiling; just general compiling. In rust weather PC or embedded, I run Cargo run. For C or C++, it's who knows. A provincial set of steps for each project, error messages, makes me get frustrated. I keep a set of notes for each one I touch to supplement the project's own docs. I am maybe too dumb or inexperienced in some cases, but I am having a hard time understanding why someone would design that as the UX.

I want to focus on the project itself; not jump through hoops in the build process. It feels hostile.

For cross compiling to ARM from a PC in rust in particular, you do one CLI cmd to add the target. Then cargo run, and it compiles, flashes, with debug output.

These are from anecdotes. I am probably doing something wrong, but it is my experience so far.
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-02-15 17:36:00+00:00
3. Video Rental Protection Act (1988)

>we don't seem to want to

Congress protects only itself and its actual constituents — wealthy corporate persons.

----

Citizens United (2012) and the surveillances themselves make this monitoring self-capturing: the only way to prevent it is to convince most people to not install, but most people want the installed benefits.

Even getting your neighbors to re-position their Ring cameras (which they have every right to install) can become very difficult.

After city councils individually ban Flock-like CCTV traffic monitoring within their jurisdictions, their police can (and often do) still access neighboring jurisdictions' to monitor border crossings. You can't escape This System, even without license plates nor cell phones.

----

Term Limits now? end Citizens United. release The Files!
by pfp | 2026-02-15 17:36:14+00:00
I wouldn't be surprised if they "sold" (at a nominal price) the extra stock to a company outside the union for "resale" (burning in India or dumping into the ocean)

What we really need is 10x more expensive, durable clothing that you buy every 10 years. And the cultural shift to go along with it. Not Mao suits for everyone but some common effing sense. But I guess that's bad for business and boring for consumers, so...
by tgtweak | 2026-02-15 17:36:37+00:00
Yes and in the wild believe it or not you'll find windows 7 and windows 8.

We had just deprecated support for XP in 2020 - this was for a relatively large app publisher ~10M daily active users on windows. The installer was a c++ stub which checked the system's installed .NET versions and manually wrote the app.config before starting the .net wrapper (or tried to install portable .NET framework installer if it wasn't found at all).

The app supported .NET 3.5* (2.0 base) and 4 originally, and the issue was there was a ".NET Framework Client Profile" install on as surprising amount of windows PCs out there, and that version was incompatible with the app. If you just have a naked .NET exe, when you launch it (without an app.config in the current folder) the CLR will decide which version to run your app in - usually the "highest" version if several are detected... which in this case would start the app in the lightweight version and error out. Also, in the app.config file you can't tell it to avoid certain versions you basically just say "use 4 then 2" and you're up to the mercy of the CLR to decide which environment it starts you in.

This obviated overrides in a static/native c++ stub that did some more intelligent verifications first before creating a tailored app.config and starting the .net app.
by Insanity | 2026-02-15 17:37:04+00:00
I removed Facebook about 11 years ago now. I made new friends who know I’m not on social media so we organize through text or discord. And for my core friend group they also moved to discord servers, so that made the switch easier.

I guess it can be hard initially though. Also, my core group of friends is less than 10, but that’s enough for me. I don’t need to follow what 100 other people are doing in their day to day haha.
by wao0uuno | 2026-02-15 17:37:25+00:00
Oh no, poor fast fashion companies won't be able to continue maximizing their profits by using slave labor to manufacture ginormous amounts of garbage that goes out of fashion in a week. Guess they'll have to reduce their garbage output or switch to manufacturing quality stuff that can hang out on a store's shelf for a bit longer. The fucking horror.
Fuck them.
by jjkaczor | 2026-02-15 17:37:36+00:00
Well - "run as admin" wasn't a problem for that scenario - as I was also configuring the various servers.

(And - it is better on a shared-machine to have everything installed "machine-wide" rather than "per-user", same as PowerShell modules - had another client recently who had a small "C:" drive provisioned on their primary geo-fenced VM used for their "cloud admin" team and every single user was gobbling too much space with a multitude of "user-profile" specific PowerShell modules...)

But - yes, even with a highly trimmed workload it resulted in a 80gb+ offline installer. ... and as a server-admin, I also had physical data-center access to load that installer package directly onto the VM host server via external drive.