MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ben_w | 2026-02-09 11:12:15+00:00
> Then they're not using the tools correctly. LLMs are capable of producing good clean code, but they need to be carefully instructed as to how.

I'd argue that when the code is part of a press release or corporate blog post (is there even a difference?) by the company that the LLM in question comes from, e.g. Claude's C compiler, then one cannot reasonably assert they were "not using the tools correctly": even if there's some better way to use them, if even the LLM's own team don't know how to do that, the assumption should be that it is unreasonable to expect anyone else to how to do that either.

I find it interesting and useful to know that the boundary of the possible is a ~100kloc project, and that even then this scale of output comes with plenty of flaws.

Know what the AI can't do, rather than what it can. Even beyond LLMs, people don't generally (there's exceptions) get paid for manually performing tasks that have already been fully automated, people get paid for what automation can't do.

Moving target, of course. This time last year, my attempt to get an AI to write a compiler for a joke language didn't even result in the source code for the compiler itself compiling; now it not only compiles, it runs. But my new language is a joke language, no sane person would ever use it for a serious project.
by tjpnz | 2026-02-09 11:13:05+00:00
To make Mars habitation sustainable you're going to need to launch hundreds of Starships every launch window. Some have speculated that it will take as many as 40 launches to fuel one Starship in orbit. The launch window lasts approximately 780 days so ~5 launches per day just for refueling - if something goes wrong you lose months.

For the moon you still have the refueling problem but you don't need to ship nearly as much to make a moon presence sustainable. You're not constrained by launch windows and there will be multiple providers able to plug shortfalls in the coming decades (I'm not sure the same can be said about Mars).
by ffsm8 | 2026-02-09 11:13:26+00:00
okay,the preceding paragraph I referenced of yours was

> It's the same with arms purchases now. France blocked Ukraine from using its money to buy British made weapons that are already available, since it expects that money to go back into the French economy, not to the economy of a competitor, even if the much needed weapons will arrive much later.

Which you the followed up with

> Yeah I know, UK isn't EU anymore, but the point still stands, as EU nations are still economically competitors to each other and they're not gonna spend their tax money to fund competing economies even in the EU block.

To which I responded with (just in case your ability to recall that fails you again) with

> Uh, no the point doesn't stand anymore if your example isn't actually a reflection of it - at least not anymore then any other unfounded opinion pieces with no collaborating evidence
by tngranados | 2026-02-09 11:13:49+00:00
Building a C compiler is definitely hard for humans, but I don’t think it’s particularly strong evidence of "intelligence" from an LLM. It’s a very well understood, heavily documented problem with lots of existing implementations and explanations in the training data.

These kinds of tasks are relatively easy for LLMs, they’re operating in a solved design space and recombining known patterns. It looks impressive to us because writing a compiler from scratch is difficult and time consuming for a human, not because of the problem itself.

That doesn’t mean LLMs aren’t useful, even if progress plateaued tomorrow, they’d still be very valuable tools. But building yet another C compiler or browser isn’t that compelling as a benchmark. The industry keeps making claims about reasoning and general intelligence, but I’d expect to see systems producing genuinely new approaches or clearly better solutions, not just derivations of existing OSS.

Instead of copying a big project, I'd be more impressed if they could innovate in a small one.
by virgilp | 2026-02-09 11:14:24+00:00
It's relative, not absolute. It's definitely more dangerous to not know how to make your own food than to know something about it - you _need_ food, so lacking that skill is more dangerous than having it.

That was my point, really - that you probably don't need to know "materials science" to declare yourself competent enough in cooking so that you can make your own food. Even if you only cooked eggs in teflon pans, you will likely be able to improvise if need arises. But once you become so ignorant that you don't even know what food is unless you see it on a plate in a restaurant, already prepared - then you're in a lot poorer position to survive, should your access to restaurants be suddenly restricted. But perhaps more importantly - you lose the ability to evaluate food by anything other than aspect & taste, and have to completely rely on others to understand what food might be good or bad for you(*).

(*) even now, you can't really "do your own research", that's not how the world works. We stand on shoulders of giants - the reason we have so much is because we trust/take for granted a lot of knowledge that ancestors built up for us. But it's one thing to know /prove everything in detail up until the basic axioms/atoms/etc; nobody does that. And it's a completely different different thing to have your "thoughts" and "conclusions" already delivered to you in final form by something (be it Fox News, ChatGPT, New York Times or anything really) and just take them for granted, without having a framework that allows to do some minimal "understanding" and "critical thinking" of your own.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-09 11:14:30+00:00
> And a thinkpad running Linux is just not doing it for me. I want my power efficient mac hardware.

I'm using a decade old thinkpad running linux and it is definitely 'doing it for me'. And 'm not exactly a light user. Power efficient mac hardware should be weighed against convenience and price. The developer eco-system on Linux is lightyears ahead of the apple one, I don't understand why developers still use either Windows or the Mac because I always see them struggle with the simplest things that on Linux you don't even realize could be a problem.

Other OSs feel like you're always in some kind of jailbreak mode working around artificial restrictions. But sure, it looks snazzy, compared to my chipped battle ax.
by thenaturalist | 2026-02-09 11:14:31+00:00
You are clearly and deliberately "arguing" aka. rage-baiting from an angle of bad faith.

You seem much more pre-occupied with vague conspiracy theories about how bureaucrats work to the detriment of society than an actual topical discussion about medication or the article linked here.

Drugs (as used by you and colloquially as something to get high and negatively connotated with health outcomes) and medications are not the same thing.

Yet you pretend they are, without taking into account the contrasting realities of how medication is vetted and approved.

Nobody is trusting a overworked bureaucrat, because that's not how this works.

People far more qualified than you can imagine using standardized processes and thousands of people vet medication before it becomes available to the public.

Ritalin hs been around for decades.

I am all for informing the public and empowering people to make autonomous decisions for their health.

I am against people playing moral superiority when actually all they're doing is spouting non-scientific conspiracy theories about some bad bureacurats following an evil plan drugging the populace.
by acatton | 2026-02-09 11:14:31+00:00
Airbus was never born as a European giant. It was a merging of many national champions (Aérospatiale, DASA and CASA) that were each already making full airplanes. They figured out how to spread out the manufacturing later.

Airbus currently has two factories finalizing the airplane assembly: one in Toulouse and one in Hamburg. You could copy this model and just open different fab in different countries to spread production.

Also, another model is one country making wafers, one country making EUV-lithography machines and parts, one country mining and refining silicon, etc.
by cookiengineer | 2026-02-09 11:15:50+00:00
As a German, pretty much all of the intersections shown in the article trigger me quite a bit. In Germany, there's a standardized Autobahnkreuz [1] most of the time. If it's a construction site or an incompleted Autobahn intersection, it's usually called Autobahndreieck (and not -kreuz) on the signs.

This way, all drivers can already sort themselves onto the matching lanes without even having seen the signs yet.

The standardized Autobahnkreuz also has always identical ways to change directions, where the left lane leaving the highway is made for change in opposite direction or for turnarounds. So if you took the wrong exit, you can always save yourself by just driving that lane 3 times across the bridge.

If the traffic increases over time, usually the right exit lanes are doubled and that fixes the problem.

Rarely though there's different setups like around the A61 and A67 where the traffic around and towards Frankfurt city / airport is too huge for that system.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobahnkreuz
by voxleone | 2026-02-09 11:15:52+00:00
I’ve been working on something we call the Functional Universe (FU), a modeling framework and experimental codebase that treats systems as sequences of irreversible functional transitions, rather than objects evolving against a global clock.

It started as a computational experiment, but it’s been interesting how naturally it lines up with ideas from QM (aggregation vs collapse), relativity (proper time), and distributed systems (event-driven causality). Still very much a work in progress, but already useful as a way to think clearly about time, causality, and scheduling in real systems.

- Concept>> https://github.com/VoxleOne/FunctionalUniverse/blob/main/doc...

- Code >> https://github.com/VoxleOne/FunctionalUniverse/tree/dev
by gloosx | 2026-02-09 11:16:04+00:00
I like how it accumulated 3 such replacements before finally getting fixed as a reaction to this comment with PR 14543[0], but after review, two "fix unit tests" commits were added, one of which replaces claude with copilot and the second one messing up the docs markdown, getting merged after that. Agentic workflows are the battle...

https://github.com/github/gh-aw/pull/14543
by mrkeen | 2026-02-09 11:16:08+00:00
> For example, in Swift, if you declare a function to throw an exception, then by God every call to that function, all the way up the stack, must be adorned with a do-try block, or a try!, or a try?.

Funnily enough, Uncle Bob himself evangelised and popularised the solution to this. Dependency Inversion. (Not to be confused with dependency injection or IOC containers or Spring or Guice!) Your call chains must flow from concrete to abstract. Concrete is: machinery, IO, DBs, other organisation's code. Abstract is what your product owners can talk about: users, taxes, business logic.

When you get DI wrong, you end up with long, stupid call-chains where each developer tries to be helpful and 'abstract' the underlying machinery:

UserController -> UserService -> UserRepository -> PostgresConnectionPoolFactory -> PostgresConnectionPool -> PostgresConnection

(Don't forget to double each of those up with file-names prefixed with I - for 'testing'* /s )

Now when you simply want to call userService.isUserSubscriptionActive(user), of course anything below it can throw upward. Your business logic to check a user subscription now contains rules on what to do if a pooled connection is feeling a little flakey today. It's at this point that Uncle Bob 2017 says "I'm the developer, just let me ignore this error case".

What would Uncle Bob 2014 have said?

Pull the concrete/IO/dependency stuff up and out, and make it call the business logic:

UserController:

user? <- (UserRepository -> PostgresConnectionPoolFactory -> PostgresConnectionPool -> PostgresConnection)
// Can't find a user for whatever reason? return 404, or whatever your coding style dictates

result <- UserService.isUserSubscriptionActive(user)

return result

The first call should be highly-decorated with !? or whatever variant of checked-exception you're using. You should absolutely anticipate that a DB call or REST call can fail. It shouldn't be particularly much extra code, especially if you've generalised the code to 'get thing from the database', rather than writing it out anew for each new concern.

The second call should not permit failure. You are running pure business logic on a business entity. Trivially covered by unit tests. If isUserSubscriptionActive does 'go wrong', fix the damn code, rather than decorating your coding mistake as a checked Exception. And if it really can't be fixed, you're in 'let it crash' territory anyway.

* I took a jab at testing, and now at least one of you's thinking: "Well how do I test UserService.isUserSubscriptionActive if I don't make an IUserRepository so I can mock it?" Look at the code above: UserService is passed a User directly - no dependency on UserRepository means no need for an IUserRepository.
by jstanley | 2026-02-09 11:17:25+00:00
Neat. I did a related project a little while ago. I wasn't interested in how far I can see from everywhere, so much as what I can see from one place in particular.

So in mine you can click on a spot and it draws black lines over any land that is occluded by terrain, within 100km.

(But all with AI-generated JavaScript, not cool Rust and SIMD stuff)

https://incoherency.co.uk/line-of-sight-map/
Show HN: Developed key value storage using SQLite's b-tree APIs directly
by hashmakjsn | 2026-02-09 11:17:44+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with using SQLite as a key–value store without going through the SQL layer.

SQLite’s B-Tree implementation is extremely mature and well-tested, but most access goes through the SQL compiler, VDBE, and query planner. I wanted to see what happens if you bypass all of that and interact directly with the B-Tree APIs.

The result is a small prototype KV store that:

Uses SQLite’s internal B-Tree interfaces directly

Avoids parsing, planning, and VDBE execution

Keeps SQLite’s ACID guarantees intact

In local benchmarks with mixed read/write workloads, this approach showed noticeably lower overhead compared to equivalent SQL-based access patterns.

please let me know if you face any bug, let me know area of improvements that i can add in it.
by metalman | 2026-02-09 11:18:27+00:00
How is this flagged?
It only details what everyone here knows about big tech's direct willing partispation in the genocide of the Palistinian people.
Zionism is the main neocolonialist front, and is useing Judaisim as it's blanket shield for crimes bieng commited against hundreds of millions of people. The cynisism of "antisemitism" bieng used for this, is the final horror for many Jews, there suffering branded, comodified, and now in the tertiary marketing phase as cover for genocide.
by dhbradshaw | 2026-02-09 11:18:42+00:00
I've been building a flutter django app around sharing and using checklists.

I use it myself by iterating on checklists and then tracking my usage of them and recently added orgs for privately shared checklists.

So it's easy to create an org around a shared task and then create a run through that task and track.

https://checkipe.com
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-02-09 11:19:57+00:00
I spent about a week, writing this[0].

It’s a special UIKit map package, designed to be integrated into SwiftUI, as map support is a big SwiftUI Achilles heel.

I have integrated it into another package (a SwiftUI admin tool, that isn’t public), and it works exactly as I planned.

I often do this kind of thing. If I can break some module out of my work, and publish it, I spend the extra time, polishing and documenting it. No one else really cares, but it forces me to do a really good job, so I get an extremely high-Quality component, that I don’t have to worry about, later.

[0] https://github.com/LittleGreenViper/BigJuJuMap
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-09 11:20:14+00:00
It's not about following the law — it's about avoiding penalties in practice.

Did they get penalised? Is anyone getting penalised? No? Then there's no reason for legal to block it.

And remember when you put the GPL license on a project, that's only worth your willingness to sue anyone who violates, otherwise your project is public domain.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-09 11:20:18+00:00
For the same amount of stored energy, one needs a triple mass of sodium vs. lithium.

However, sodium-ion batteries and lithium-ion batteries do not have metal electrodes (because for now it is not known how to ensure that those will survive an acceptable number of cycles), so the actual mass and volume of the electrodes are significantly greater than that of the sodium or lithium that is used.

Because of that, the difference in energy densities is much lower than the mass ratio seems to imply.

The parent article claims that the energy density of the Na-ion batteries is in the same range with that of the LFP batteries (i.e. lower than that of the Li-ion batteries with Ni or Co based electrodes).
by mschuster91 | 2026-02-09 11:20:31+00:00
> The US protected Taiwanese sovereignty for decades before they even had a single semiconductor fab.

That was before the current administration wiped out the very idea of "soft power" and put everything including NATO up for disposal.

There is, frankly, no way for anyone to trust the US again until the US undergoes steps similar to post-1945 Germany.
by tomkarho | 2026-02-09 11:20:34+00:00
The big appeal for me was that Tauri didn't ship an entire Chrome browser to make it work. It never even occurred to me to gauge the webview used in such detail.

> On Linux, Tauri not only ships its own webview, it's also an old and fundamentally broken webview

I'd love to hear some details on this. What is Tauri shipping now and what should it ship instead?
Show HN: An AI mock interviewer that keeps asking follow-ups (export transcript)
by oftentom | 2026-02-09 11:20:38+00:00
I often use GPT by asking it to challenge my thinking with questions, and that worked surprisingly well for clarifying my own ideas. I recently had an interview coming up, so I built this small web app (using Codex) that acts as an interviewer and drills follow-up questions—so I can practice the “go deeper / explain why” pressure.

When I realize I don’t actually know something, I use that gap to study right away. After the session, I can download the transcript and paste it into Notion/Obsidian for review.

It’s currently running on my own API credits, so I’m not sure how long it will stay up. If you try it, I’d really appreciate blunt feedback:
Do the follow-up questions feel realistic?
What part felt awkward or unhelpful?
What’s the one feature you’d expect next?
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-09 11:21:47+00:00
Yes, that comment by gasche is a very good general explanation for why vibe coded slop still doesn't cut it for contributing to any non-trivial FLOSS project. When you're building towards a large feature (DWARF support in this case) it's critical for contributions to be small and self-contained so that maintainers and reviewers don't get overwhelmed. As things stand, this means that human effort is an absolute requirement.

When contributions are small and tightly human-controlled it's also less likely that potential legal concerns will arise, since it means that any genuinely creative decisions about the code are a lot easier to trace.

(In this case, the AI seems to have ripped off a lot of the work from OxCaml with inconsistent attribution. OxCaml is actually license compatible (and friendly) with Ocaml but obviously any merge of that work should happen on its own terms, not as a side effect of ripoff slop code.)
by armitron | 2026-02-09 11:21:55+00:00
Very smart people on discord sounds like an oxymoron: why would anyone very smart contribute to the siloization of knowledge and support grow a corporate entity possessing highly questionable incentives? Discord is not a great place to discuss anything of substance.

If that's not clear to some now, it will be once monetization kicks in and the inevitable blowup and loss of accumulated knowledge follows.
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-09 11:22:20+00:00
It's not about copyright or anti–copyright — it's about how you will get fined 500 million dollars and go to prison for life for downloading a song, but a big company can download all the songs and get away with it for about tree fiddy. It's about the double standard.

And then Anna's Archive downloads all the songs, with the intent to share them with the companies that were allowed to download them anyway, and gets the USA to shut down all aspects it can reach.
by graemep | 2026-02-09 11:23:58+00:00
I am not aware of any argument for that. Even if the output is a derivative work (which is very doubtful) that would make it a breach of copyright to distribute it under another license, not automatically apply the GPL.

If the output is a derivative work of the input then you would be in breach of copyright if the training data is GPL, MIT, proprietary - anything other than public domain or equivalent.
by mrtksn | 2026-02-09 11:25:10+00:00
What you are suggesting is vertical integration. If Europe goes crazy, can do that. From start to finish this chip thingy can become "magic crystals from Europe" as they already have control over the tooling. How many billions it will take to build the fabs with these tools and hire the talent from all over the planet and put all that in special economical zones? I don't know but I bet its less than those who don't have and end up buying the tools.

Europe is already a great place to build your life and despite the narrative about "EU killing businesses with over regulations", Europe is an exporter, that is EU makes physical things in large quantities(that's why USA is able to blackmail EU with tariffs). EU produces and exports so much, more than it consumes. Its closer to China than USA in this regard, you can check out the recent stats here: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-euro-indicators/w...

The infrastructure is in place and there are both many nuclear reactors that were decommissioned early or not yet commissioned but canceled/put on hold as well as regions with plenty of sunshine or hydro power opportunities and also has all the expertise to re-work those quickly.

It's really a political decision to push for something like that or not. Geopolitics may eventually make it happen, who knows? At this time it makes more economical sense to make the tools and send them close to the larger supply chain of electronic products production.
by eitally | 2026-02-09 11:26:14+00:00
I am not sure if I'm experiencing what you describe. I just see a radiating circle of black lines, no matter where I click. I decided to click a local, notable "long line" viewpoint -- Lick Observatory outside San Jose. From here, on a clear day, you can see Half Dome in Yosemite, 120mi away. I still just see a black circle.
by tryanythingonce | 2026-02-09 11:28:50+00:00
My daughter drew a word puzzle game on paper — rules, name, game board, everything. We built it into a real daily puzzle over a weekend.

It's a word chain: each word starts with the last letter of the previous one, climbing from 3 to 7 letters in a pizza-slice shape. Certain letters are locked in each day (pepperoni) so every puzzle is different. Scrabble-style scoring with row multipliers.

Stack: vanilla JS (no framework), Cloudflare Pages + D1 for the leaderboard. Single HTML file, ~90KB. Dictionary is NWL2023 filtered to 3-8 letter words. Puzzles are deterministic via seeded RNG so everyone gets the same puzzle each day.

We used AI heavily in the build process — she had the idea and the rules, I used Claude to translate her design into working code fast. The whole thing went from paper sketch to playable in about an hour, then we've been iterating since.