MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tacostakohashi | 2026-02-13 14:51:05+00:00
Hmm, well I am not philosophically opposed to AI.

But, I don't like hype or having things forced down my throat, and there's a lot of that going on.

Psychologically, the part that seems depressing is that everything just seems totally disposable now. It's hard to even see the point of learning the latest and greatest AI tools/models, because they'll be replaced in about 3 months, and it's hard to see the point in trying to build anything with, or without AI, given the deluge of AI slop it will be up against.

I like the idea of spending a bit of time to learn something, like how to use a shell, how to ride a bike, how to drive a car, how to program in C or C++, and use the skill for years or decades, if not a lifetime. AI seems to have taken that away now everything is brand new and disposable, and everyone is an amateur.
by Aerroon | 2026-02-13 14:51:14+00:00
I think Google's downfall in a product can easily come from UX. Take livestreaming: YouTube is better on a technical level:

* Higher bitrate

* Ability to rewind

* Able to edit recordings (thumbnails, cutting out dead air etc)

* Much larger userbase

But you know what they fail at? The actual livestream watching UI with chat. There's wasted space, it doesn't darken the rest of it, getting chat on screen with as big of a video window as possible is annoying, the emotes pretty much all suck. And because of that watching on Twitch is a better experience.

Google sometimes fails at the small things. And those small things might be enough for a competitor to build a viable competing product.

You might think that they could easily solve all these problems. Maybe they could, but google.com still isn't equivalent in its mobile and desktop offering in 2026. Eg on desktop page I can select an arbitrary date range to filter results, on mobile I can only select from a preset drop-down at most until 1 year ago.

Could Google fix this? Sure, but I've been waiting for a fix for this for a decade. This isn't something that gave a competitor an edge, but Google being bigger doesn't necessarily mean they get good at the small things.
by avin01 | 2026-02-13 14:51:15+00:00
I relate to this a lot. For me, noticing the loop is already half the battle, but it doesn't mean I can exit it.

What's helped is switching from "debugging" to "externalizing". Writing the thoughts down, like logs, makes them feel less real and less recursive. Once it's on paper, it loses some power.

One small thought exercise I picked up from The Power of Now that surprisingly works for me: when I'm deep in a rabbit hole, I take a few deep breaths and ask myself, "What will my next thought be?" For a moment everything just goes quiet, and the mind kind of resets. I've used this hack multiple times.

Another thing that matters more than I expected is just building basic habits. Exercise, walking, sleeping on time, eating properly. Nothing fancy, but having a pattern makes the bad loops less frequent.

I've also learned anxiety isn't always something you can reason away. Sometimes it's just a physical state and you have to change the input before the mind follows.
by zamadatix | 2026-02-13 14:51:45+00:00
It makes more sense when you read all of the definitions together https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2119:

- `MUST: This word, or the terms "REQUIRED" or "SHALL", mean that the definition is an absolute requirement of the specification.`

- `SHOULD: This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular item, but the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course.`

- `MAY: This word, or the adjective "OPTIONAL", mean that an item is truly optional.`

In practical terms:

- MUST: It's always a failure to do this. E.g. you MUST have some form of stored energy in your car for it to propel itself down the highway.

- SHOULD: If you don't do this, it's likely to cause failures unless you really know the situation is one of great exception and have thought about what else this change may affect. E.g. you SHOULD maintain a large distance between yourself and then next vehicle on the highway (an example of an exceptional case might be a standstill backup on the highway).

- MAY: This is actually something which is optional. E.g. you MAY activate cruise control.
by markbnj | 2026-02-13 14:51:59+00:00
Like the author I've been in the process of archiving family memories since my parents passed away. In my Dad's case his early fascination with super 8mm film gave way to a lifelong quest to own more Kodak slide carousels than any other human. It's sort of an odd place to be, when you're in possession of so much that _seems_ emotionally, viscerally important, but that ordinary people living their everyday lives take very little actual interest in. I scanned all the slides with a Kodak thing I bought on Marketplace. There were more than 6500 of them and the archive has passed 20GB in size. Now I have a stack of plastic kodak carousels taller than I am and thousands of slides that I can't just put in the trash because it feels wrong.

I'm working on loose documents and photos now with a great Epson flatbed scanner that I've had for years. It's something of an obsession for me now: to finish the job and tie their lives and a good chunk of ours off neatly. When I'm done I'll pack it all onto thumb drives and send copies to my siblings and they will look at a few of them and then put the drives in a drawer and that will likely be the end of it. But I will have done my duty to the old folks, even though it took long enough that I became one. It has all reminded me of how I mourned when I lost a hard drive years ago, and then came to the realization that I hadn't looked at any of its contents in years and that if I lived to be 100 probably none of it would ever have been important again anyway. You can't really keep anything, so do your kids a favor and dispose of your stuff while you can :).
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-02-13 14:52:12+00:00
> But the gap between the marketing and reality for many of us is hard to describe.

Trust your eyes. You can see what it actually does, therefore the marketing is lying to you.

But it sounds like your problem isn't knowing what to believe. Your problem is that you know the truth, and you're tired of having to wallow in the lies all day. I don't blame you; lies are bad for your mental health. Well, there's a solution: Turn off the internet. You can, you know. Or at least you can turn off the feed into your brain. Stop looking at posts about AI, even on HN. If you can't dodge them well enough, just turn off social media. Go outside, if the temperature is decent. If it isn't, go to a gym or an art museum or something. Just stop feeding this set of lies into your brain.
by FuriouslyAdrift | 2026-02-13 14:52:39+00:00
Packaging is a support industry (other than stock boxes which are bulk manufacturerd for things like moving companies, etc).

So... the more companies making things or shipping things, the more boxes are needed. Financial and govt analysts use the packaging industry as kind of a canary for the general health of mnaufacturing and retail as it is on the end of the long tail for supply chains. Packaging is the first to decline and the last to pick up with the cycles of the economy.
by ben_w | 2026-02-13 14:53:15+00:00
If divergence were an argument against the clone having been created, by symmetry it is also an argument against the living human having been allowed to exist beyond the creation of the clone.

The living mind may be mistreated, grow sick, die a painful death. The uploaded mind may be mistreated, experience something equivalent.

Those sufferances are valid issues, but they are not arguments for the act of cloning itself to be considered a moral issue.

Uncontrolled diffusion of such uploads may be; I could certainly believe a future in which, say, every American politician gets a thousand copies of their mind stuck in a digital hell created by individual members the other party on computers in their basements that the party leaders never know about. But then, I have read Surface Detail by Iain M Banks.
by t312227 | 2026-02-13 14:53:20+00:00
hello,

as always: imho. (!)

ah ... babylon 5 :))

this was one of the best scifi shows back in the mid 1990ties.

it introduced a lot things which we take for granted today ... together with startrek "deep space nine" which roughly aired during the same time:

* telling a "story arch" over multiple seasons

* 2 parallel story-lines within episodes

* causally show people doing "every-day" life things, like going to the toilet - you may laugh, but 30+ years ago, for example in various startrek spinoffs - tng, ds9, voyager - nobody went to the toilet ... ever!!

don't get me wrong, i'm a big fan of startrek too ;))

* despite their budget decent CGI for the time

if i remember it correctly: they used a software called "lightroom", which ran on the amiga hardware-platform at first, for later seasons they moved to PC hardware...

just if you wonder about the quality of the CGI ... this was some 680x0 computer running at something like 16 or 32 MHz (!) with a few MB (!) of memory.

not a scifi "blockbuster" utilizing multimillion us$ SGI clusters like ILM productions of the era did!

absolutely recommended:

"the lurker's guide to babylon 5"

* http://midwinter.com/lurk/lurker.html

just my 0.02€
by agentzed | 2026-02-13 14:53:30+00:00
I just wanted to let everyone know the “Greys” did travel back through time and prevented humanity’s nuclear annihilation by America’s nuclear weapons.

Humanity as we know it was not destined to survive 2012.

https://pastebin.com/42dTemNe

Other legends, such as that of the Hopi also talked about “this event.”
by NeuralLead | 2026-02-13 14:53:34+00:00
Hi HN,
Over the past months we’ve been building Vector, an AI system that works at OS level rather than inside a single application.
Instead of generating responses, it executes actions:
navigates the browser
opens real desktop applications
creates and edits documents
moves files
sends emails
handles multi-step workflows from a single high-level instruction
No RPA scripts, no predefined flows, no sandboxed demos.
The hardest parts so far haven’t been model accuracy, but:
reliable UI understanding
state management across applications
failure recovery (partial execution, retries, rollbacks)
making autonomy predictable instead of “clever”
We’ve put together a short public overview here:
https://www.neurallead.com/vector/
I’m mostly interested in feedback from people who’ve worked on:
autonomous agents
RPA / automation at scale
OS-level tooling
human-in-the-loop systems
What do you think are the biggest technical pitfalls with systems like this?
What would you not trust an OS-level agent to do?
Thanks, happy to answer questions.
by hackersk | 2026-02-13 14:53:57+00:00
Hey HN! I built BLIP because I saw someone in a group chat wishing they could have a private 1-on-1 conversation, but there was no way to do it without leaving traces.

The idea hit me immediately: share a link, chat, and shred everything when you're done.

I started imagining something like a wartime walkie-talkie for secret conversations. During this process, I became convinced that conversations between two people should be unhackable, and I began building a pure chat service that stores nothing, anywhere.

Honestly, I don't fully trust phrases like "thorough confidentiality guaranteed" or "user data is encrypted." I figured if I built this and said "we don't store any records," nobody would trust that either. That's what pushed me to make it fully open source.

Key features:
- No accounts, no profiles, no history
- E2E encrypted
- Share a link to start chatting instantly
- Everything is destroyed when the session ends
- Zero analytics tools
- Fully open source: https://github.com/greatsk55/BLIP

Live demo: https://blip-blip.vercel.app

New features will be driven by GitHub issues. Would love your feedback!
by mylxsw | 2026-02-13 14:54:33+00:00
Squirrel is a high-performance, production-ready proxy service that unifies access to multiple Large Language Model (LLM) providers. It acts as an intelligent gateway between your applications and LLM services, providing seamless failover, load balancing, comprehensive observability, and a modern management dashboard — now with first-class OpenAI Responses support and smooth protocol conversion across OpenAI Chat, OpenAI Responses, and Anthropic Messages.
by righthand | 2026-02-13 14:54:39+00:00
I followed your link and for the 3rd flipping time to the original poster and you, we have "soft squishy white bread" in the US or wonder bread or whatever brand you want to tout. However that is not the bread that I am talking about that is whole grain, sourdough, whole meal, etc. The bread I am talking about that doesn't have sugar, is available to people in the US. The conversation is about US health and both you and the other commenter are trying to talk as if German's are the only people who've made bread. I get it, Germans have bread and they have squishy white bread too. So do Americans. In the US it's usually pre-sliced and bagged. You don't have to buy the garbage squishy white bread in either place.

Have you taken a minute to read anything I've written and try not to tell me I have no clue what bread is?
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-13 14:55:10+00:00
Those were not really "proofs" by the standard of 1stproof. The only way an AI can possibly convince an unsympathetic peer reviewer that its proof is correct is to write it completely in a formal system like Lean. The so-called "proofs" done with GPT were half baked and required significant human input, hints, fixing after the fact etc. which is enough to disqualify them from this effort.
by thefounder | 2026-02-13 14:55:53+00:00
>> The fact that self-driving cars are not permitted on most of the world’s roads is 100% the fault of regulators and those who vote for them.

Maybe a part of the fault is also the self driving systems themselves that keep crashing and killing people. I don’t have data to say with certainty whether self driving cars are safer or less safe than humans(I think they are less safe especially if taken out of their “trial” zones/sampling) but I can tell you that is less acceptable for self driving cars to kill people than it is for humans for “obvious” reasons especially when the self driving cars does stupid mistakes than a normal driver would not (I.e goes straight into another car).
by avin01 | 2026-02-13 14:56:39+00:00
If you are enjoying vibe coding, the biggest "aha" for me is realizing that software is mostly about managing state, data flow, and failure, not syntax.

Once you get how data moves, where state lives, and what happens when things break, a lot of the "magic" disappears. Learning basic debugging and reading stack traces also compounds forever, even with AI.

One thing that helped me: think a bit like a PM. Spend time crafting good prompts (use chatgpt for generating prompts and feed it to your AI coder ;) ) for ChatGPT/Claude/Cursor, ask it to generate docs and explain what it just did. Over time, patterns emerge and things feel less mysterious.

LLMs write code well, but they don't give you mental models. That part you still have to build.
by alfonsodev | 2026-02-13 14:56:41+00:00
Anyone else has noticed the "is not about X it's about Y" pattern more and more present in how people talk, at least on Youtube is brutal, I follow some health gurus and WOW, I hope they are just reading the chatGPT assisted script, but if they can't catch the patterns definitively they are spreading it.

I refuse to get contaminated with this speech pattern, so I try to rephrase when needed to say what it is, not what is not and then what it is, if that makes sense.

Some examples in the AI rant :

> Not because it was wrong. Not because it broke anything. Not because the code was bad.

> This isn’t about quality. This isn’t about learning. This is about control.

> This isn’t just about one closed PR. It’s about the future of AI-assisted development.

Probably there are more, and I start feeling like an old person when people talk to me like this and I complain, to then refuse to continue the conversation, but I feel like I'm the grumpy asshole.

It's not about AI changing how we talk, it's about the cringe that it produces and the suspicion that the speech was AI generated. ( this one was on propose )
by travisjungroth | 2026-02-13 14:57:09+00:00
So like 30x the population (not thousands).

The thing about Reddit is it really amplifies voices. 10-100 people can be on the same subreddit and comment or post something, and it looks like “a lot” of people.

It’s also much easier to be a non-representative sample at 3% of the population than 50%. And, there’s a big sample bias for this sort of thing. I think someone is way more likely to post “I’m getting rid of X” versus “I don’t care and I’m keeping X”.
by sbuttgereit | 2026-02-13 14:57:14+00:00
It's just market value.

> *SECTION 1. (a) The maximum amount of any ad valorem tax on real property shall not exceed One percent (1%) of the full cash value of such property. The one percent (1%) tax to be collected by the counties and apportioned according to law to the districts within the counties.*

(https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x...)

At sales time basically the sales price establishes the assessed value for taxes.

Again, this isn't a precise reading, but the general idea.
by basilikum | 2026-02-13 14:57:33+00:00
> Waiters also explicitly aren't allowed to be paid less. They must make at LEAST minimum wage. If they don't make minimum after tips, their hourly rate is raised each paycheck to equal minimum wage.

That means they are allowed to be paid less than minimum wage. Wage is paid by the employer, not the employer's customer. If the employer can deduct the tips from the minimum wage, that explicitly means that they are allowed to pay tipped workers less and that tipping does not provide any additional income but instead only shifts the responsibility of paying people for their work to the customer. Tips are are nothing but gifts to the employer.

> and it's an easy way to show appreciation.

If something is socially expected simply as part of protocol and people only do it out of the social pressure not to deviate from the norm and be seen as assholes, then that is not appreciation.
by DoctorOetker | 2026-02-13 14:57:40+00:00
for the simple reason that other energy consuming industries have physical products in and physical products out, which is costly to transport from space, while uploading extra corpus tokens and downloading new weights is essentially free from space (compared to the hardware shipping costs).

people have been correctly indoctrinated about global warming and the dominant heating terms coming from excess CO2 concentration, but because of this over-emphasis they neglect the prompt heating that comes with nearly all energy generation mechanisms (from fossil fuels, to solar panels to nuclear energy).

when the whole world starts raising their living conditions, and when a computational race erupts, there is no taming of total human energy consumption.

but what we can do is offload the bulk of computational energy consumption, like training common goods such as LLM weights...
by acdha | 2026-02-13 14:57:49+00:00
> If offering a tie in thing supposedly free of charge without warning that would end once it serves a party less profit purpose then yes

Claiming that you’re entitled to free R&D forever because someone once gave you something of value seems like a great way to ensure that nobody does that again. You got over a decade of development by a skilled team, it’s not exactly beyond the pale that the business climate has changed since then.
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-02-13 14:58:48+00:00
In a way, this seems similar to the "web framework of the month" that everyone wrestled with for a while. There's a new tool! You're obsolete if you don't switch now!!!!!

Meanwhile, some of us were over here, building embedded systems with C and C++. The big switch was from Green Hills or VxWorks to embedded Linux. The time scale was more "OS of the decade". There's hype and fads, and there's stuff that lasts.
by chankstein38 | 2026-02-13 14:59:00+00:00
I liked using it like this but my problem is that it wouldn't reliably respond to commands while music was playing. There were times I had to unplug it to get music to stop. And other times I'd want a song with an explicit word in the name and it'd pretend it didn't exist.. like wtf I'm an adult in my own house I think you can manage to play the song I asked for whether or not it has a big mean curse word in it.
by avin01 | 2026-02-13 14:59:22+00:00
I've seen everything from strict 15–20 days to unlimited, and in practice the number matters less than the culture.

At places with real support and sane planning, people actually take 20–25+ days. With unlimited, it often ends up being less, because no one wants to be the first to disappear.

The worst setups are low fixed PTO with no flexibility. That just burns people out.

On my team, I actively encourage people to take time off, sometimes even without formally applying, when I can see burnout creeping in. That matters way more than whatever policy exists on paper.

What feels normal to me now is ~20 days + holidays, or unlimited with managers who actually push people to use it.
by dejans | 2026-02-13 15:00:09+00:00
Founder here. Some behind-the-scenes context:

The hardest part was the Remove Objects tool. It uses a two-canvas mask editor where you paint over what you want removed.
On mobile, I had to build a custom pinch-to-zoom system with a 5-state machine (idle/drawing/pinching/panning/cooldown) to distinguish between "user is painting a mask" and "user is zooming in."
Getting that right on iOS took more iterations than I'd like to admit.

For the AI pipeline, the server crops only the masked region (with context padding), processes it at 512x512 via LaMa, then feather-blends the result back into the full-resolution original.
Non-masked pixels are completely untouched - zero quality loss outside the edit area.

The standard tools genuinely make no network requests. Easiest way to verify: open any standard tool, turn on airplane mode, and it still works.
That's also why the PWA has offline support for those tools. Both img.tara.vision and our PDF toolkit (pdf.tara.vision) share about 90% of their frontend code.
Same auth, billing, PWA infrastructure, UI components. Building the second product took a fraction of the time because of that.

Happy to answer questions about the architecture, privacy approach, or anything else. Feedback on the mobile UX is especially welcome - that's where I've spent most of my time lately.