MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Ekaros | 2026-02-07 13:21:37+00:00
As cynic I would imagine eventual collapse to be more likely. Probably slow degradation back to some sort of semi-advanced agricultural society. Say kinda post-apocalyptic world(without proper apocalypse) with larger societal structures still existing. Slow degradation of industrial output until some balance level is reached.

Probably not best sci-fi universe one can come up to. Or most selling one.
by comboy | 2026-02-07 13:22:01+00:00
I've been wondering about that yesterday quite a bit, I've came to the conclusion that a big part is kind of anti-China sentiment on HN. I think the discussion would be quite different if we were talking about instagram reels/youtube shorts.

Plus there seem to be not many users, most crowd here gets dopamine elsewhere (like coding), tiktok seems to be mostly associated with brain-rot and not learning and diving into new topics.
by wwfn | 2026-02-07 13:22:31+00:00
* I suspect many existing and reasonable regulations do not meet that "simply caught" classification. @rconti's comment above[1] gives some examples of regulations on process that are not observed in the output (food, child labor). I'll add accounting, information control (HIPAA, CUI, etc), environmental protections.

* Newsroom staff is incentivized to enforce the regulation. It protects their livelihood. From the article:
> Notably, the bill would cement some labor protections for newsroom workers

* Mandatory AI labeling is not impossible to enforce. At worst, it requires random audits (who was paid to write this story, do they attest to doing so). At best, it encourages preemptive provenance tracking (that could even be accessible to the news consumer! I'd like that).

One reason for the regulation is we fear hallucinations slipping into the public record -- even if most LLM usage is useful/harmless. Legal restrictions ideally prevent this, but also give a mechanism for recourse when it does happen.

Say a news story goes off the rails and reports a police officer turned into a frog [2] or makes up some law[3]. Someone thinks that's odd and alerts whatever authority. The publisher can be investigated, reprimanded, and ideally motivated to provide better labeling or QC on their LLM usage.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46915463
[2]: https://www.wate.com/news/ai-generated-police-report-says-of...
[3]: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/judge-fines-lawyers...
by mavhc | 2026-02-07 13:22:31+00:00
Yes, but the OS fundamentals are for Azure first, Windows last.

Azure makes money, 50% of Windows computers are basically free and need to get you to sign up for a subscription some how. The other 50% are Windows Pro/Enterprise, but MS assumes they'll get that money forever so doesn't put any resources into that. In 10 years the kids switching to Linux on desktop today will be in charge of the business deals and switch corporations to linux because they're not scared of it like the current business IT leaders
by wtetzner | 2026-02-07 13:23:33+00:00
> I don't presume this will immediately change your mind

I'm not saying that AI isn't useful. I'm just claiming it's not analogous to a compiler. If it was, you would treat your prompts as source code, and check them into source control. Checking the output of an LLM into source control is analogous to committing the machine code output from a compiler into source control.

My question still stands though. What does it mean for a tool to be reliable when the input language is ambiguous? This isn't just about the LLM being nondeterministic. At some point those ambiguities need to be resolved, either by the prompter, or the LLM. But the resolution to those ambiguities doesn't exist in the original input.
by wslh | 2026-02-07 13:24:31+00:00
> It’s kind of crazy that they have been slow to create real products and competitive large scale models from their research.

It’s not that crazy. Sometimes the rational move is to wait for a market to fully materialize before going after it. This isn’t a Xerox PARC situation, nor really the innovator’s dilemma, it’s about timing: turning research into profits when market conditions finally make it viable. Even mammoths like Google are limited in their ability to create entirely new markets.
by pandaman | 2026-02-07 13:24:51+00:00
>It’s the same man.

Not at all. There are tons of businesses next to homeless camps in every American city, and the value of a business is not in the building but in the location and zoning, the code is the city code attached to zoning, the thing you don't have in Huston. The zoning for a residential and commercial is different thus you cannot apply residential zoning to commercial and vice versa.
by bm3719 | 2026-02-07 13:25:07+00:00
This is the trade-off to connectivity and removing frictional barriers (i.e., globalism). This is the economic equivalent of what Nick Land and Spandrell called the "IQ shredder". Spandrell said of Singapore:

Singapore is an IQ shredder. It is an economically productive metropolis that
sucks in bright and productive minds with opportunities and amusements at the
cost of having a demographically unsustainable family unit.

Basically, if you're a productive person, you want to maximize your return. So, you go where the action is. So does every other smart person. Often that place is a tech hub, which is now overflowing with smart guys. Those smart guys build adware (or whatever) and fail to reproduce (combined, these forces "shred" the IQ). Meanwhile every small town is brain-drained. You hometown's mayor is 105 IQ because he's the smartest guy in town. Things don't work that great, and there's a general stagnation to the place.

Right now, AI is a "capital shredder". In the past, there were barriers everywhere, and we've worked hard to tear those down. It used to be that the further the distance (physically, but also in other senses too, like currencies, language, culture, etc.), the greater the friction to capital flows. The local rich guy would start a business in his town. Now he sends it to one of the latest global capital attractors, which have optimized for capital inflow. This mechanism works whether the attractor can efficiently use that capital or not. That resource inflow might be so lucrative, that managing inflow is the main thing it does. Right now that's AI, but as long as present structure continues, this is how the machine of the global economy will work.
Show HN: Convert your articles into videos in one click
by kositheastro | 2026-02-07 13:25:42+00:00
Vidinie transforms your documents, articles, and links into polished, professional videos automatically. Simply paste a link or upload content, and our AI handles the heavy lifting and produce broadcast-quality videos optimized for social media, marketing, or education. Perfect for - Content creators repurposing blogs into social videos, - Marketers generating product demos and explainer videos - Educators creating engaging learning materials No video editing experience needed
by flohofwoe | 2026-02-07 13:25:44+00:00
I don't know, to the East of the Iron Curtain science fiction wasn't mostly about future optimism (at least after the initial "we're building a better society" optimism had been brutally murdered during the 1950s and 60s), but often a critical mirror of then-current society transported into the future to escape state censorship.

Maybe it's as simple as free societies not having the evolutionary pressure to produce great literature that requires an interested and intelligent reader to decode the hidden messages written between the lines ;)
by 0x696C6961 | 2026-02-07 13:25:54+00:00
How does the agent know what clis/tools it has available? If there's an `mcpcli --help` that dumps the tool calls, we've just moved the problem.

The composition argument is compelling though. Instead of clis though, what if the agent could write code where the tools are made available as functions?

tools.get_foo(tools.get_bar())
by wolfram74 | 2026-02-07 13:26:18+00:00
Your name is well earned! "can't cure cancers" is impressively counterfactual [0] as 5 year survival of cancer diagnosis is up over almost all categories. Despite every cancer being a unique species trying to kill you, we're getting better and better at dealing with them.

[0]https://www.cancer.org/research/acs-research-news/people-are...
by pfdietz | 2026-02-07 13:26:46+00:00
It's been there since day one. What, you thought early era SF used accurate science? No, they used made-up rules based on whether they could tell a good story.

Science fiction usually doesn't conform to how the world actually works in the same way pornography usually doesn't conform to the way sexual relationships work. They are both there to tell titillating stories, not describe reality.
by Ono-Sendai | 2026-02-07 13:27:31+00:00
I haven't thought about it deeply. But I guess it's about allowing the model to easily distinguish the prompt from the conversation. Models seem to get confused with escaping, which is fair enough, escaping is very confusing.
It's true that for the transformer architecture the prompt and conversation are in the same stream.
However you could do something like activate a special input neuron only for prompt input.
Or have the prompt a fixed size (e.g. a fixed prefix size).
And then do a bunch of adversarial training to punish the model when it confuses the prompt and conversation :)
by ajross | 2026-02-07 13:27:36+00:00
> I wrote a couple hobby compilers.

So did most of us, join the club. What you can't do is write such a compiler for $20k if you want to put food on the table, or do it in two weeks (what it costs to buy your time currently until AI eats your job). And let's be honest: it's not going to build something of the complexity of Linux either. Hobby compilers run hobby code. Giant decades-old source trees test edge cases like no one's business.
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-02-07 13:28:24+00:00
I wouldn’t expect only one fiction subgenre to have such a dramatic increase of proportion of abstract titles while other related subgenres did not. In other words, I would expect all of these graphs to have a negative correlation with time due to a general abstraction of titles across all fiction subgenres. I would be surprised if there was enough consumer differentiation to support abstraction in one subgenre but not the others.

Another interpretation might be that as fewer books are released in a subgenre, their titles also become more abstract, which would increase the effect seen in the data presented as well.

But I would hesitate to believe that the observed effect should be chalked up to only title abstraction, and not a decline in popularity. Occam’s razor.
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-07 13:28:31+00:00
Why should something not be banned just because it's a design pattern?

In fact hard drugs are a pattern. There's no molecular fragment that makes something a hard drug. It's a label we apply based on patterns. Not design patterns though since drugs are discovered not designed.

In fact we do ban design patterns of drugs. There used to be an industry of slightly altering an illegal drug so it would have the same effect without being the banned chemical. They banned this by banning design patterns: no tryptamines with psychedelic effects, etc.
by deng | 2026-02-07 13:29:02+00:00
The greatness of human accomplishment has always been measured by size. The bigger, the better. Until now. Nanotech. Smart cars. Small is the new big. In the coming months, Hooli will deliver Nucleus, the most sophisticated compression software platform the world has ever seen. Because if we can make your audio and video files smaller, we can make cancer smaller. And hunger. And AIDS.

Gavin Belson
by flohofwoe | 2026-02-07 13:29:19+00:00
> Barnes and Noble

...this might be the main problem (same with Thalia in Germany), those large book store chains are aggressively optimized for monetization, and that kicks off a death spiral of filling the available space with cheap industrially produced trash.

The good stuff might still be there, but it's much harder to find, and you need to know where to look (same thing that happened to music basically).
by unsupp0rted | 2026-02-07 13:29:58+00:00
Yes, we're getting better at treating cancers, but still if a person gets cancer, chances are good the thing they'll die of is cancer. Middling results.

Because we're not good at curing cancers, we're just good at making people survive better for longer until the cancer gets them. 5 year survival is a lousy metric but it's the best we can manage and measure.

I'm perfectly happy investing roughly 98% of my savings into the thing that has a solid shot at curing cancers, autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases. I don't understand why all billionaires aren't doing this.
by sixddc | 2026-02-07 13:30:33+00:00
I built a Telegram bot that lets you monitor and interact with Claude Code sessions running in tmux on your machine.

The problem: Claude Code runs in the terminal. When you step away from your computer, the session keeps working but you lose visibility and control.

CCBot connects Telegram to your tmux session — it reads Claude's output and sends keystrokes back. This means you can switch from desktop to phone mid-conversation, then tmux attach when you're back with full
context intact. No separate API session, no lost state.

How it works:

- Each Telegram topic maps 1:1 to a tmux window and Claude session
- Real-time notifications for responses, thinking, tool use, and command output
- Interactive inline keyboards for permission prompts, plan approvals, and multi-choice questions
- Create/kill sessions directly from Telegram via a directory browser
- Message history with pagination
- A SessionStart hook auto-tracks which Claude session is in which tmux window

The key design choice was operating on tmux rather than the Claude Code SDK. Most Telegram bots for Claude Code create isolated API sessions you can't resume in your terminal. CCBot is just a thin layer over tmux
— the terminal stays the source of truth.

CCBot was built using itself: iterating on the code through Claude Code sessions monitored and driven from Telegram.
by meixyz | 2026-02-07 13:30:37+00:00
For all those who think they're not talented and therefore can't learn how to sing, some good news here: Learning to sing is a matter of coordinating and strengthening muscles, so it can be practiced and improved just like anything else. The predisposition is largely the same for everybody (vocal pathologies excluded).

The reason why most people can't just naturally sing well is that singing is not a primary biological function, but a bi-product of a survival mechanism (vocal folds, aka airflow control / airway protection).

The muscles interacting with the vocal folds (thyroarytenoid and cricothyroid) have antagonistic function and work on reflexes rather than control, so the hard part of learning how to sing is to train them to coordinate properly rather than work against each other.
Show HN: MCP App to play backgammon with your LLM
by sam256 | 2026-02-07 13:31:47+00:00
I learned to play backgammon the same week the MCP App Extension standard came out. So...

You can now play backgammon with any AI client that supports MCP App (which includes Claude Desktop, VSCode, ChatGPT these days). Actually you can do more than that -- you can play against a friend and have they AI comment; you can watch the AI play itself (boring); you can play against the LLM and have it teach you the finer points of the game (my use case!).

The one problem--and this is a limitation of the current spec--is that the board gets redrawn each time the AI takes a turn. That's actually not that bad, but when the spec adds persistent/reusable views it will be even cooler.
by Loughla | 2026-02-07 13:31:55+00:00
We have keys. In the event those are lost or destroyed, they will provide access to an approved list of individuals and drill the lock for $40.

Also they're small town banks, so that makes it easier as well. We don't really need to worry about providing ID, but if we did and couldn't access ID or something like that, we have four other people listed with access, one of which lives hours away in case of a disaster impacting everyone else on the list. They don't have keys but could get into it for us. So for a few hundred dollars, we're set and insured for the declared value of the contents of the boxes (250k max for another $15/year) if the banks are both destroyed as well!
by Alex-Programs | 2026-02-07 13:32:47+00:00
This is motivated pessimism. We knew in the 50s that breaking the speed of light was highly unlikely. We dreamed of the stars anyway. Now we refuse to dream, or to even attempt to solve the problems (a common pattern when discussing spaceflight is people who are blatantly searching for problems, rather than solutions), because we are pessimistic, devoid of imagination, and seek to legitimise our collective depression through scientific and engineering arguments.
by vel0city | 2026-02-07 13:33:07+00:00
https://maps.app.goo.gl/xEkHB8ZQiCUAZH7T6

https://maps.app.goo.gl/KmSjG465pkAGJia19

https://maps.app.goo.gl/DvCv5oMbhfXRDVAR6

https://maps.app.goo.gl/14duytarnCn8UPR37

They're kind of all over the place. It seems to me non-walkable suburbs are the default from the places I've lived and visited. Unless you're either living near the town square of a small town or adjacent to the downtown area of a big city it's probably not really walkable.
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-02-07 13:34:24+00:00
I believe people use the word “hard” to differentiate more scientifically rigorous scifi. I’m not well-versed enough to know when that started being a term, or what the status quo was before it was a term.

Interestingly there’s also “high” fantasy to differentiate between earth like and non earth like subject worlds, and then even “historical fiction” to describe books that try to be faithful to some degree to some historical time period on earth.

Anyway, this is all to say maybe “how far science-fiction has fallen” might be a narrow interpretation of what’s been happening to fiction in general over the past 75 years. More options than ever, maybe…
by muzani | 2026-02-07 13:34:33+00:00
HN is the low AI version.

Social media has made it normal to have closed social circles. You like a couple posts by Karpathy and LeCun and your feed is now full of AI. Or you like a post by the anti-AI folks and your feed is now on how useless or harmful it is.

With HN, we all see the same news. But now it's far to the extreme of either party.

HN is often around the early majority of the Innovation Adoption curve. I was actually going to ask why Clawdbot wasn't even mentioned on HN when it had been everywhere else... but the news did hit the front page a few days later. There's a few killer updates from the AI coding groups which only get 0-2 upvotes and disappear.

HN is not the place to go to be up to date on AI, it's where you go to see the news that has hit the mainstream. Opus 4.6 was "leaked" on media and hyped as if it were Claude 5 or something. By the time the news was actually out, people had formed their opinions.
by xtiansimon | 2026-02-07 13:34:50+00:00
That was fun.

I recall an early editorial of the podcast Escaped Pod describing science fiction as a means to more directly engage with topics of the human condition by using the conceits of science fiction. _Have a difficult time discussing your relationship with your parents? Write a story about orphans raised by space aliens._ That sort of thing.

Maybe something is going on with our human condition that science fiction is not as productive a foil as it once was?

I don’t know. I’m not a fiction writer. But I can say that since I bought my second motorcycle (back on a moto after 20 years away) I am enjoying spaceships in my science fiction.
by kingstnap | 2026-02-07 13:34:52+00:00
When you are know a doctor and overhear conversations with some ranting doctor friends you learn.

It's not a small problem in Canada. Funny was this patient who got rear ended like 8 times in a few years and needed time off and massage treatment every time.

Shameless grifters are everywhere my dude. This victimhood grifiting in the article above has been obvious for over a decade. If you listened to those anecdotes and vibes you would have known this well in advanced.

Anecdotal stuff / vibes are actually really useful. The "scientific" stuff isn't as formal as you might imagine. Going to conferences is a good way to learn that the vibes are what you are going to learn.

You'd think science is supposed to be this amazing rigorous way to do things. But the way you collect the data and the way you do the analysis and the reports you choose to write is anything but. Ultimately because, well, grifters are everywhere.
by Schmerika | 2026-02-07 13:36:08+00:00
I think you'd have to plot a curve based on the potential reward of betrayal... I suspect that many Americans* would have their 5th closest friends committed or worse for low 6 figures. If in ~dire straits, as about half all Americans are, that number could get much lower.

* If my use of the word 'Americans' above is triggering, feel free to substitute it with 'people'.
by caryme | 2026-02-07 13:37:37+00:00
This is cool! There's a lot of bad (and by bad, I mean misaligned with modern voice science and science-informed pedagogy) on the internet, so it's nice to see a resource striving to organize some good information.

A couple recommendations I'd suggest exploring to be even better aligned with current understanding:

Current literature does not distinguish between head voice and falsetto. While "falsetto" often carries a connotation of breathiness, that is not inherent to the register. Both are referred to in literature as laryngial mode M2, in which the Cricothyroid muscle is dominant in shaping the vocal folds. In contrast, chest voice or M1 is Thyroarytenoid dominant. While that may be a bit in the weeds, I found wrapping my head around this very helpful in cutting through a lot of confusing language around head voice .

Use of these different registers changes across genre and voice type. Classical sopranos and mezzos use head voice in their upper range, while musical theatre sopranos and mezzos bring their chest voice up (i.e. belting). Meanwhile, tenors and basses typically use chest voice for their full range in both classical and musical theatre genres, with much more use of head voice in pop/contemporary genres.

One other suggestion is to more prominently feature SOVTs (semi occluded vocal tract exercises). You reference them in your warm up section (lip trills and straw phonation) but these are highly effective and evidence-based tools to develop efficient phonation.

Further, for anyone looking to learn to sing (and anyone can learn to sing!), there's no better resource than a voice teacher. Most teachers nowadays teach online as well as in person. A great place to start looking for a teacher is through NATS or ICVT.
by WillAdams | 2026-02-07 13:38:19+00:00
California had a great mechanism for this in their land grant colleges, which back before the protests of the Vietnam War were required to offer the valedictorian of nearby high schools (or the person with the highest GPA who accepted) full tuition and room and board --- then Governor Ronald Reagan shut down this program when the students had the temerity to protest the Vietnam War --- it was also grade inflation to keep students above the threshold necessary for a draft deferment which began the downward spiral of American education.