MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by giancarlostoro | 2026-02-06 14:47:33+00:00
I have a friend in the Bahamas who had setup his entire home up for solar and even to reclaim water from the roof. The builders messed up the reclaim water system I forgot the reason but he mentioned he cannot drink the water whatsoever because of the screw up, so he has to eventually rework all of that, but in terms of power he is better off than most since he is setup for it with batteries and everything.
by noisy_boy | 2026-02-06 14:47:39+00:00
I still use the chatbot but like to do it outside-in. Provide what I need, and instruct it to not write any code except the api (signatures of classes, interfaces, hierarchy, essential methods etc). We keep iterating about this until it looks good - still no real code. Then I ask it to do a fresh review of the broad outline, any issues it foresees etc. Then I ask it to write some demonstrator test cases to see how ergonomic and testable the code is - we fine tune the apis but nothing is fleshed out yet. Once this is done, we are done with the most time consuming phase.

After that is basically just asking it to flesh out the layers starting from zero dependencies to arriving at the top of the castle. Even if we have any complexities within the pieces or the implementation is not exactly as per my liking, the issues are localised - I can dive in and handle it myself (most of the time, I don't need to).

I feel like this approach works very well for me having a mental model of how things are connected because the most of the time I spent was spent on that model.
by qb0i | 2026-02-06 14:47:52+00:00
I built a site where you pay (starting at $2) to put a short message on a public leaderboard. Your score decays by 50% every 8 hours, so posts naturally fall off unless someone boosts them. Top 3 get their links displayed.

There's no signup — you just type a message, pay through Stripe, and you're on the board. The ranking formula is deterministic: score = amount × 0.5^(hours_elapsed/8).

Built with Next.js, Supabase for realtime updates, and Stripe for payments. The whole thing is one big React component which I'm not proud of but it works.

Would love feedback on the concept and the UX.
by bombcar | 2026-02-06 14:47:57+00:00
Just as there's a cottage industry for "I made the game the scam ads show" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRDhiN50Vo0 I think there will soon be a cottage industry for "the scam ad was good, let's make it for real".

That mug is amusing but it should't be too hard for China to make something similar - but real (at least without the weird piston).
by aleph_minus_one | 2026-02-06 14:47:58+00:00
> When an ad network has a strong profile on you, legitimate companies pay good money for those ad slots.

I have looked what interests for example Google stores about me

> http://google.com/ads/preferences

I am very certain that these don't describe me well, or I am classified wrong in some categories (without using any tracking/privacy protection! But I won't actively correct this misclassification).

My experience is rather that some people have very niche interests (among hacker-minded people, the proportion of these people is in my experience much higher than in the general population), and are hard to target using ads, so advertising networks and companies don't make the effort to target these users.

Also, when I google about prices for some product category, I often have other reasons than a buying wish. For example I recently googled about the prices of products in some category because some work colleague claimed that someone else bought a product of a specific vendor for a specific price, but I really felt that the claimed price was off; to substantiate my claims, I did some googling.

Or I google about products in a specific category because I am exactly not satisfied with what some established players that love to advertise have to offer.
by mickdarling | 2026-02-06 14:48:25+00:00
This is where the desire to NOT anthropomorphize LLMs actually gets in the way.

We have mechanisms for ensuring output from humans, and those are nothing like ensuring the output from a compiler. We have checks on people, we have whole industries of people whose whole careers are managing people, to manage other people, to manage other people.

with regards to predictability LLMs essentially behave like people in this manner. The same kind of checks that we use for people are needed for them, not the same kind of checks we use for software.
by halapro | 2026-02-06 14:48:27+00:00
You're thinking US. What happens when most of the world doesn't even have an ID? Does Facebook suddenly drop 80% of users? Do US Facebook users only see US content?

The internet is not only "the west." What you're thinking is what's already happening in the Chinese internet, and even they cannot really limit the amount of disgusting content released by Chinese websites.

As long as non-verified users have access to the same internet as you, that content will continue to exist.
The tech stack I've been refining for 6 years
by creativedg | 2026-02-06 14:48:44+00:00
After rebuilding my setup way too many times, I've finally landed on a stack that I don't want to change. Took 6 years to get here, so figured I'd share what works for me.

Here's where it's landed:

Framework: Next.js 16 (App Router) React 19. Server Components, App Router for routing.

Auth: Clerk Magic links, passkeys, MFA, social logins (Google, GitHub, Apple, etc.), user impersonation. It works perfectly with Next.js.

Database: DrizzleORM Type-safe ORM. Works with PostgreSQL, SQLite, MySQL - but personally I prefer PostgreSQL. Drizzle Studio for exploring data, Drizzle Kit for migrations.

Local dev: PGlite This one's underrated. Full Postgres running locally, no Docker needed.

Styling: Tailwind CSS Utility-first, fast iteration.

Forms: React Hook Form + Zod Zod schemas validate on client AND server. Type-safe end-to-end.

Testing: Vitest + Playwright Vitest in browser mode replaced React Testing Library for me. Playwright handles integration, E2E and visual regression. GitHub Actions runs everything on PRs automatically.

Logging: LogTape Universal and unified logging for Browser, server and edge.

Monitoring: Sentry + PostHog Sentry for errors (with Spotlight for local dev - game changer). PostHog for analytics and session replays.

i18n: next-intl Built-in internationalization from day one. i18n-check catches missing translations before they hit prod.

DX tooling:

ESLint
Lefthook for git hooks
Commitlint + Conventional commits for consistent commits
Knip for catching dead code
Semantic Release for changelogs
Dependabot for dependencies update
Security: Arcjet Rate limiting and bot protection without thinking about it.

I put this all together into a setup I reuse - nothing hidden, everything customizable. If anyone's curious, the whole thing is documented here: https://github.com/ixartz/Next-js-Boilerplate

What does your stack look like? Curious if anyone's using different setups.
by jbstack | 2026-02-06 14:49:06+00:00
I didn't say I don't believe it happens. I'm saying I don't believe it's a based on a cost benefit analysis. I.e. that in a multi-billion dollar company someone consciously ran the numbers and decided "it's cheaper for us to pay to clean up the mess if there's a security breach than it is to hire someone to fix security bugs". The cost of the latter is too low for this kind of logic to make any sense.

I think it's more realistic that in any sufficiently large company the bureaucracy is so unwieldy that sensible decisions become difficult to make and implement.
by Revolution1120 | 2026-02-06 14:49:09+00:00
The evolution of European history is built upon the evolution of art, specifically in architectural history, music history, and painting history. It has never been reflected in the evolution of technology; even if technology has evolved, it is built upon the evolution of art, such as steampunk, atomic punk, and cyberpunk. All European culture is characterized by its art-driven approach. However, when, as is the case now, cultural evolution is dominated by programmers, geeks, and dictators, it becomes a dystopian phenomenon.
Art-driven approaches represent the correct way of sensory perception and intellectual summarization, much like the correct methodology offered by Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Technological dominance, on the other hand, becomes an erroneous approach of abstract mechanics and objective facts, much like mechanical materialism encountering quantum physics.
Remember my words.
by MonkeyClub | 2026-02-06 14:49:16+00:00
>> You are seemingly overriding the wishes of the community

> That's false. The overwhelming sentiment of the community is that HN should be free of LLM-generated content or content that has obvious AI fingerprints.

Yeah it is indeed, and for good reason: why would I spend time reading something the author didn't spend time thinking through and writing?

It's not that people don't like Postgres articles (otherwise, the upvotes would be much lower), but once you read a bit of the article, the LLM stench it gives off is characteristic. You know: Standard. LLM. Style. It's tiresome. Irksome. Off-putting.

What I'm wondering is, if LLMs are trained on "our" (in the wider sense of the word) writing style, and spew it back at us, what data set was it that overused this superficial emphatic style to such a degree, that it's now overwhelmingly the bog-standard generative output style?
by mrtksn | 2026-02-06 14:49:29+00:00
yeah, no. In centrist governments you don’t have a a secret police type law enforcement that go around and “enforce laws” without trials etc by intimidation and executions. That is a fascist thing.

Gain power is at all cost as a fascist trait is a good point, Tech companies do that all the time too so techies are often accustomed with that.
by WA | 2026-02-06 14:49:31+00:00
> How do I hack the human population to give me money

Make something popular or become famous.

> hack law enforcement to not arrest me

Don't become famous with illegal stuff.

The hack is that we live in a society that makes people think they need a lot of money and at the same time allows individuals to accumulate obscene amounts of wealth and influence and many people being ok with that.
by technothrasher | 2026-02-06 14:49:58+00:00
Naive me was pretty shocked when, after my financial advisor suggested I start a donor advised fund for the tax advantages, my lawyer then explained the loopholes to use to cheat and have the tax free money come back to me instead of actually to charities.

I guess I'm not cut out to be a "big shot". I opened the DAF, but use the money for actually donating to charitable organizations to which I have no other connection.
by bombcar | 2026-02-06 14:50:01+00:00
I would be willing to consider paying for vetted ads - in other words, you pay for the NYT and you get a guarantee that you're only seeing ads that have been personally vetted by the NYT for correctness, appropriateness, etc.

Advertising is speech and it used to be that if a magazine/newspaper printed a scam ad, it was horribly damaging to their business, both legally and morally.
by roywiggins | 2026-02-06 14:50:11+00:00
The problem is that it's always specific to a particular case. So, if one guy isn't being released according to court order, they could order someone held in the courthouse jail until he is, and probably just the threat will get him released. But then 1) nobody ends up in jail, because they're not in contempt anymore and 2) it doesn't do anything for any other cases, and there are so many other cases.

You might think "ok can't they be held in contempt for the pattern of ignoring court orders" and, well, you'd think so. But that looks a lot like a universal injunction or a class action and SCOTUS has deliberately been nerfing those.

If they've simply been committing crimes then judges don't have anything to do- they'd have to be prosecuted by someone, or I guess sued civilly, but that won't put them in jail either and takes forever.
by zlkanter | 2026-02-06 14:50:17+00:00
Amazon missed earnings and promptly doubled down on AI spending:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-plans-200b-ai-spending...

It is encouraging to see that investors are punishing what is the greatest misallocation of capital since the dotcom bubble. Investors have figured out that AI is limited to probabilistic and annoying chatbots that are for entertainment and for looking up trivia questions.
by Terretta | 2026-02-06 14:50:35+00:00
> You're no longer developing software, you're doing therapy for robots.

Or, really, hacking in "learning", building your knowhow-base.

> But it delivers enormous compounding gains, and you can use your agent to do significant parts of it for you.

Strong yes to both, so strong that it's curious Claude Code, Codex, Claude Cowork, etc., don't yet bake in an explicit knowledge evolution agent curating and evolving their markdown knowledge base:

https://github.com/anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins

Unlikely to help with benchmarks. Very likely to improve utility ratings (as rated by outcome improvements over time) from teams using the tools together.

For those following along at home:

This is the return of the "expert system", now running on a generalized "expert system machine".
by giancarlostoro | 2026-02-06 14:50:49+00:00
Contrast with Apple TV+ which has insanely high quality shows. I feel like they arent advertising it enough and investing in it enough. One of my favorite shows that my daughter watches is on Apple TV+ the other on Amazon (If You Give a Mouse a Cookie).

Apple is really messing up in my eyes they have so much potential they are throwing away.
by ura_yukimitsu | 2026-02-06 14:51:33+00:00
I really don't think it's fair to minimize someone's struggles just because their situation could be worse. Is only the most miserable person on the planet (by what metric anyway?) allowed to complain about their condition?

I also don't think it's fair to exploit people who are in terrible situations by pushing jobs we don't want onto them, pay them a handful of crumbs, and then say they should be happy with what they get because their neighbor who does another job gets half a handful of crumbs.
by louiereederson | 2026-02-06 14:51:34+00:00
It is true that employment and pay are good. The question is a) are proper protections in place for workers and b) does pay adequately compensate for traumatic stress. Studying the issue is valuable, particularly given the potential for labor exploitation given the power imbalance between the largest, most powerful organizations in the world and a labor base which as you point out could otherwise be disenfranchised.

I think with this info we can assess whether the wage is indeed competitive. Otherwise claiming "well they're getting paid" can be used to justify exploitative labor practices or negate the need for ethical inquiry.

Also calling psychological harm metaphysical is questionable. Is PTSD experienced by American troops coming back from deployment metaphysical? Not necessarily comparing these cases in degree.

I'm not sure what invoking neocolonialism adds to the discussion. Best to engage on a factual rather than ideological basis.
Show HN: Reverse Turing Test (convince an LLM that you are an LLM)
by empath75 | 2026-02-06 14:51:34+00:00
I often see people throw out the idea that a Turing Test is a way to determine if an AI has general intelligence, but a lot of people don't consider that the situation is symmetrical. It is quite possible to run the test in the opposite direction, with humans trying to trick an LLM into believing that they are also an LLM. If you can't convince an LLM that _you_ are an LLM, are _you_ "generally intelligent?".

So I vibe-coded up an app with claude. (I am a developer, but I don't know javascript at all).

You can run it locally if you have LLM api keys, or I have it running at:

https://reverse-turing-pi.vercel.app/

until my openai/vercel credits run out.

The LLM will ask you 3 questions, then it will interview an LLM, and then it will try to guess which one is the human pretending to be an LLM. The LLM interviewee has been instructed to give brief answers, so you don't need to write a novel. A few sentences should be good enough? I don't know, I've never been able to fool it. And this is with it only running 4o-mini.

I'm not storing anything, not even in logs. Please don't do anything that will violate OpenAI's terms, but feel free to try and fool the prompt anyway you like, including prompt injections. A win is a win.

You can even just copy and paste your answers from an LLM if you want, but that just kind of proves the point.
by carlosjobim | 2026-02-06 14:51:52+00:00
You fund the army with war bonds, and then extract tribute from your enemies after having won the war. Taxation has historically always been something done against enemies, and any government which taxes the labour of "their own" population is a hostile occupational government.

The greatest war efforts in history have been funded by war bonds, including the mass war industrialization of the US during WWII. President Roosevelt rejected funding the war with taxes, and went instead with war bonds.
by AnssiH | 2026-02-06 14:51:59+00:00
> Like, where were they years ago saying “hey TikTok, we think your design is addictive and probably illegal, you need to change or face penalties.”

That is basically what happened today. No penalties have been issued at this point.

Also Commission had sent various requests for information to TikTok in 2023 before they opened these proceedings in early 2024 (https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...) - this didn't come out of the blue.
by wackget | 2026-02-06 14:52:07+00:00
You are not acknowledging the fact that the companies producing these addictive apps are very much doing it intentionally. They are specifically making it as engaging as possible because that's how they make money. And they have billions of dollars to sink into making their products as irresistable as possible.

The average person has zero chance against all-pervasive, ultra-manipulative, highly-engineered systems like that.

It is, quite simply, not a fair fight.
by jbstack | 2026-02-06 14:52:12+00:00
> The calculation is "what could that engineer be doing instead and what is that worth vs fixing this issue?"

I don't agree with this, because it pre-supposes that there's a limited number of engineers available. The question isn't "shall I pull engineer X off project Y so that he can fix security bugs?", it's "shall I hire an additional engineer to fix security bugs?". The comment above mine suggests the answer to that question is "no, because it's too expensive to do that compared to just paying to clean up security breaches after they happen", which is what I was questioning in my first comment.
by hnthrow0287345 | 2026-02-06 14:52:15+00:00
>We will probably see fewer full-stack engineer openings and more roles for back-end and front-end engineers. This doesn't mean they will do only one or the other, but they will be expected to be an expert in one area.

Good. Fullstack roles are like giving away free options contracts away to businesses when they were only buying some stock. Sure, you don't work twice as much as fullstack and shouldn't get twice the pay, but the flexibility should have a price.

When fullstack engineers are making just as much as front-end/backend only engineers, they are giving the options away for free. Engineers simply didn't stand up for themselves to assert their worth in these positions, which led companies to prioritize hiring them over specialists. Any decrease in fullstack positions will help our compensation.
by cardanome | 2026-02-06 14:52:16+00:00
> Don't let the AI lobby insist on anything that's touched an LLM getting labelled, because if it gets slapped on anything that's even passed through a spell-checker or saved in Notepad

People have been writing articles without the help of an LLM for decades.

You don't need an LLM for grammar and spell checking, arguably an LLM is less efficient and currently worse at it anyway.

The biggest help a LLM can provide is with research but that is only because search engines have been artificially enshitified these day. But even here the usefulness is very limited because of hallucinations. So you might be better off without.

There is no proof that LLMs can significantly improve the workflow of a professional journalist when it comes to creating high quality content.

So no, don't believe the hype. There will still be enough journalists not using LLMs at all.
by CGMthrowaway | 2026-02-06 14:52:21+00:00
>LLMs are not deterministic, so they are not compilers.

"Deterministic" is not the the right constraint to introduce here. Plenty of software is non-deterministic (such as LLMs! But also, consensus protocols, request routing architecture, GPU kernels, etc) so why not compilers?

What a compiler needs is not determinism, but semantic closure. A system is semantically closed if the meanings of its outputs are fully defined within the system, correctness can be evaluated internally and errors are decidable. LLMs are semantically open. A semantically closed compiler will never output nonsense, even if its output is nondeterministic. But two runs of a (semantically closed) nondeterministic compiler may produce two correct programs, one being faster on one CPU and the other faster on another. Or such a compiler can be useful for enhancing security, e.g. programs behave identically, resist fingerprinting.

Nondeterminism simply means the compiler selects any element of an equivalence class. Semantic closure ensures the equivalence class is well‑defined.
by plastic-enjoyer | 2026-02-06 14:52:38+00:00
> It’s that the programming interface is functionally underspecified by default. Natural language leaves gaps; many distinct programs can satisfy the same prompt. The LLM must fill those gaps.

I think this is an interesting development, because we (linguists and logicians in particular) have spent a long time developing a highly specified language that leaves no room for ambiguity. One could say that natural language was considered deficient – and now we are moving in the exact opposite direction.
by pbhjpbhj | 2026-02-06 14:52:45+00:00
Spelling and grammar checkers are free; online translators have been better than that for many years now.

It could be sloppiness, but I think scammers just organically copied efforts that worked, and those were the ones with poor presentations because they pre-filter and so target the scammers efforts more efficiently. The scammers need not be aware of why it works.
by a_better_world | 2026-02-06 14:52:53+00:00
gems and turds. The far right consipiracy stuff was filtered out, likewise the neonazi/technocracy stuff (and yes, there is clear historical links between technocracy and nazi idologies, see the history of Joshua Norman Haldeman (1902–1974), the American-born Canadian maternal grandfather of Elon Musk, and why they moved to South Africa)
by artisin | 2026-02-06 14:52:55+00:00
I was curious about the scale of 1TiB of text. According to WolframAlpha, it's roughly 1.1 trillion characters, which breaks down to 180.2 billion words, 360.5 million pages, or 16.2 billion lines. In terms of professional typing speed, that's about 3800 years of continuous work.

So post-deduplication, I think it's a fair assessment that a significant portion of high-quality text could fit within 1TiB. Tho 'high-quality' is a pretty squishy and subjective term.