MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by falcor84 | 2026-02-16 15:37:23+00:00
There's also the issue that whatwg pretty much stopped adding new semantic elements; if I'm not mistaken, only <search> and <dialog> were added in the last decade, after the introduction of HTML5. <main>, <section> and <article> are increasingly being overloaded to the point of meaninglessness.

The most cited example of one that's clearly missing is <comment> for user-added content, but there are probably dozens we could add that could help deal with the div soup. By not adding any new elements, whatwg is essentially saying "You're not going to be able to use these the existing tags to fully add proper semantics anyway, so why try?"
by alexrp | 2026-02-16 15:37:34+00:00
Binary Ninja deserves a mention in these threads: https://binary.ninja

I've used IDA, Ghidra, and Binary Ninja a lot over the years. At this point I much prefer Binary Ninja for the task of building up an understanding of large binaries with many thousands of types and functions. It also doesn't hurt that its UI/UX feel like something out of this century, and it's very easy to automate using Python scripts.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-16 15:37:38+00:00
> Then after a bunch of podcasts and interviews, this person gets hired by a big tech company

I think the whole OpenClaw arc has been fun to follow, but this sudden turn away from OpenClaw and toward the author as a new micro-celebrity that ended with OpenClaw being sidelined to a foundation was not what I saw coming.

Congrats to Pete for getting such an amazing job out of this, but it does feel strange that only a few days ago he was doing the podcast circuit and telling interviewers he has no interest in joining AI labs.

I don’t think this story arc should be seen as something replicable. Many have been trying to do the same thing lately: Hyping their software across social media and even podcasts while trying to turn it into cash. Steve Yegge is the example that comes to mind with his desperate attempts to scare developers into using his Gas Town (telling devs “dude you’re going to get fired” if they don’t start using his orchestration thing). The best he got out of it was a $300K crypto pump and dump scam and a rapidly dropping reputation as a result.

Individuals who start popular movements have always been targets for hiring at energetic companies. In the past the situation has been reversed, though: Remember when the homebrew creator was rejected from Google because he didn’t pass the coding interview? (Note he later acquiesced to say that Google made the right call at the time). That time, the internet was outraged that he was not hired, even though that would have likely meant the end of homebrew.

I do think we’ll be seeing a lot of copycat attempts and associated spam promoting them (here on HN, too, sadly) much like how when people see someone get success on YouTube or TikTok you see thousands of copycats pop up that go nowhere. The people who try to copycat their way into this type of success are going to discover that it’s not as easy as it looks.
by mschuster91 | 2026-02-16 15:38:03+00:00
> I think people overlook it for a common reason: Many things that were disruptive change then became the norm, so people don't notice them. As they say about innovation: First they laugh at you (ridicule your idea), then they say it's not in the Bible (violates the established orthodoxy), then they say they knew it all along. :)

You do have a point in there. The problem IMHO is communication: silent progress just isn't enough with such glaring abuses of power.

> Maybe the last reminder in DC, which I doubt. I see plenty of BLM signs (and LGTBQ+ pride flags) in cities.

That's private persons that float these. The DC mural was a public admission by a government entity that they don't stand for such behavior, and that is what made ripping it out so powerful symbolically. The teardown was a very public symbol of "we shit on anything DEI".
by iso1631 | 2026-02-16 15:38:40+00:00
But that's not the javascript, it's how it's used (react or whatever)

You can write terrible non-performant code in assembly and C, and perfectly speedy pages in html and javascript (say the page you're on at the moment).

You wouldn't write a new cutting edge video codec in javascript - not one you wanted to use anyway - but given that we had performant guis running on 286s at 12MHz, Javascript being 1/10th the speed of C isn't the problem.
by SoftTalker | 2026-02-16 15:39:14+00:00
In a lot of cases, owners remove the storage not because it has any value but rather they don't want to risk making a mistake letting a device go that still has data on it.

Also pulling and shredding hard drives is cheaper than paying someone to run DBAN or equivalent (which can take many hours to complete on a large drive), and there's no easy way to securely erase an SSD if it wasn't encrypted from the beginning.
by stingraycharles | 2026-02-16 15:39:29+00:00
> Do not attempt to be like Peter. You can admire the work he's done. Do not attempt to replicate it. Appreciate it for what it is. For yourself as an observer or a user it's a lesson. But also to note that this is an anomaly. You will never replicate it.

This can be said about a lot of successful projects, products, and companies. I’d argue that, by all means, do try to be like Peter. Try to tinker around and make something new the world has never seen before.

He made something that excited many people, and I don’t think it’s the correct take to consider this an anomaly. It’s someone who was already known in the development community trying something new and succeeding.
by q3k | 2026-02-16 15:39:33+00:00
I really want to like Binary Ninja, but whenever I have the choice between not paying (Ghidra), paying for something that I know works (IDA) and paying for something that I don't know if it works (Binja) then the last option has always lost so far.

Maybe we need to get some good cracked^Wcommunity releases of Binja so that we can all test it as thoroughly as IDA. The limited free version doesn't cut it unfortunately - if I can't test it on what I actually want to use it for, it's not a good test.

(also it doesn't have collaborative analysis in anything but the 'call us' enterprise plan)
Show HN: Woven-ECS – Multithreaded ECS framework for the web
by willholt | 2026-02-16 15:39:35+00:00
I built this to make it easier to create collaborative design tools like infinite canvases. It also works for games.

It's an ECS framework that runs in the browser with built-in multithreading via Web Workers, reactive change-tracking queries, and a companion package called “canvas-store” that handles multiplayer sync, local-first persistence, undo/redo, and schema migrations out of the box.

GitHub: https://github.com/WillH0lt/woven-ecs
by PurpleRamen | 2026-02-16 15:39:35+00:00
> You shouldn't need to read every line. You should have test coverage, type checking, and integration tests that catch the edge cases automatically.

Because tests are always perfect and fetch every corner-case, and are even detecting all unusual behaviour they are not testing for? Seems unrealistic. But explains the sharp rise of AI-slop and self-inflicted harm.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-02-16 15:40:12+00:00
The difference is that the models now work. I don't know if you've noticed, but a lot has happened since "a decade ago."

Some of the recent studies showing otherwise are literal junk science. They used flawed methodologies, such as blindly feeding the data to the models without access to medical histories that the human doctors would have benefited from (which favored the human radiologists substantially) and leaving labels on the training data (which favored the models.) When studies are conducted under more rigorous standards, the humans don't tend to win, and unlike the models the humans will not get better.
by tzs | 2026-02-16 15:40:18+00:00
You could probably make a pretty good short story out of that scenario, sort of in the same category as Asimov's "The Feeling of Power".

The Asimov story is on the Internet Archive here [1]. That looks like it is from a handout in a class or something like that and has an introductory paragraph added which I'd recommend skipping.

There is no space between the end of that added paragraph and the first paragraph of the story, so what looks like the first paragraph of the story is really the second. Just skip down to that, and then go up 4 lines to the line that starts "Jehan Shuman was used to dealing with the men in authority [...]". That's where the story starts.

[1] https://ia800806.us.archive.org/20/items/TheFeelingOfPower/T...
by wiseowise | 2026-02-16 15:40:37+00:00
> I don't see how neighboring countries are "suffering along" – e.g. Ukraine got all its debts forgiven and inherited specialized industries which were subsidized by Russia during soviet times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_war

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Chechen_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Chechen_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Georgian_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Abkhazia_(1992%E2%80%93...

And many more here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battles_involving_Russ...

And all that ignoring the puppeteering they’re trying to do in post Soviet republics.
by mrtksn | 2026-02-16 15:41:00+00:00
I'm pretty sure %100 of those people would have the correct answers when they are focused and have access to the internet and studied the entire corpus of human knowledge.

In the case of the issue at hand though, it is not a knowledge question it is a logic question. No human will go to the carwash without the car unless they are intoxicated or are having something some issue preventing them from thinking clearly.

IMHO all that can be solved when AI actually start acting in place of human though. At this time "AI" is just an LLM that outputs something based on some single input but a human mind operates in a different environment than that.
by senko | 2026-02-16 15:41:09+00:00
> Cloudflare Inc (NYSE:NET) shares rose more than 10% on Monday to $193.68, following a weekend surge in social media excitement around Clawdbot, an open-source AI agent built on Anthropic’s Claude. This jump comes despite the stock having fared poorly over the last month, according to InvestingPro data.

Source: https://www.investing.com/news/analyst-ratings/cloudflare-st...

(there are a few others)

Again, I'm not saying that it should rise, but that in a meme-stock era, for an ai-hype-driven market, it would not be surprising.
by kenjackson | 2026-02-16 15:41:12+00:00
I asked ChatGPT why it got such an obvious problem wrong. This is its reply:

You’re right — I answered the wrong interpretation of your question.

Technically, what happened is a classic ambiguity + default-assumption failure:
• Your sentence: “I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?”
• That can be parsed two ways:
1. You + your body traveling to the car wash (as if the car is already there, or you’re going to meet someone / pick it up).
2. The car traveling to the car wash (the normal real-world meaning).

I incorrectly defaulted to (1) because the question explicitly asks about your mode of travel (“Should I walk or drive?”), and in many everyday contexts that phrasing is used when deciding how a person gets somewhere. I then “completed” the scenario in my head without checking the key constraint: the car must be at the wash to be washed.

More technically: I optimized for a quick, practical answer using a common conversational heuristic (“short distance → walk”), but I failed to validate the physical requirements of the task (washing requires the car’s presence). That’s why it looks so obviously wrong after the fact: it violates the hidden but necessary premise.

The correct reasoning chain should have been:
• Goal: wash the car at the car wash
• Requirement: car must be at the car wash
• Therefore: drive the car there (unless it’s already there, or you’re washing it by hand at home)

So the “why” is: I latched onto the distance-to-walking heuristic and didn’t do the constraint check that the object being acted on (the car) has to move too.
by dave_sid | 2026-02-16 15:41:32+00:00
I think what is left is that understanding pain points and knowing what problems needs solved is more important now than ever. If anyone can create a product now then the one who knows what product to actually create is the winner. And who might this be? Well it might just be the people who spent the last 10 years speaking to customers, building a SaaS. They have 10 years of taking to customers finding out what to build. Even if they were to start from scratch today they already have the requirements in their pocket.

The game has change. The ‘how’ we build it is easy. The ‘what’ we build is and always has been the hardest part of any SaaS or business.
by chasd00 | 2026-02-16 15:41:33+00:00
I wish i could take back the view i gave to this article, it says nothing. Is there such a thing as an inverse hype machine? Where people take the opposite side of a hyped product and then hype that view just as much but for the same purpose? His footer even admits he's basically just trolling for views so he can reach the status of "thought leader".

btw, someone else having the same idea you have for a saas company has always been the case forever. Individuals taking shortcuts in quality to get to market faster has also been the case forever. There's nothing new about either of those two things.
by randusername | 2026-02-16 15:41:33+00:00
I think about this too. There are several headwinds. Rent-seeking and collapse of economies of scale in the consumer sector for sure, but also I feel like we've basically peaked in hardware's ability to meet routine needs.

Once the phone makers realize that they can sell phones and docking stations to businesses because 90% of knowledge work seems to happen in a web browser through one SaaS or other I think personal computers will be cooked.
by BlackLotus89 | 2026-02-16 15:41:48+00:00
It's

> "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50m away. Should I drive or walk?"

And some LLMs seem to tell you to walk to the carwash to clean your car... So it's the new strawberry test

Edit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47031580
by xpe | 2026-02-16 15:41:51+00:00
If you have a policy area you like you might start there. From my lens, here are some interesting ways to look at political economy from a broader point of view: economic disruption from AI (could be from energy prices, labor substitution, and lots more), climate modeling and its impacts on economies, conservation and ecosystem stability, and economic growth under different levels of inequality. I would add this to the mix even though it isn't a typical economic area: geopolitical destabilization from autonomous weapons, both physical and cyber.
by everforward | 2026-02-16 15:41:51+00:00
Shredding is the first step in most recycling processes (ie excluding reusing). Like if they were going to make them into this seasons fashion, I think the first step is shredding. The cut and color of style changes, and I don’t think you can do either without shredding first.

It means they’re still using the fibers, which is an upside. It does waste some CO2 for the original cut and dye.

I’m sort of dubious of the value of trying to limit CO2 like this, but that might be the goal. Whether they burn them now or sell them, they end up as atmospheric CO2 either way. It’s the same as lumber; it ends up back in the atmosphere (although not burning them does reduce PM2.5 particulate).
by ben_w | 2026-02-16 15:42:08+00:00
> If you had no connections, money, investments, or any property/possessions to sell, what would be your first steps?

That'd a harsh set of constraints.

I think the only answers remaining with those in place are "prostitution" and "crime", aren't they?

Ditch a digit, $100 in a week, and you could do it with any normal job, stack shelves or whatever, but I don't see that getting you to $1k. $500 perhaps, from what I hear of US jobs (you did mean USD not any of the other dollars, right?), but not $1k.
by simpaticoder | 2026-02-16 15:42:09+00:00
>Yours actually works and is higher quality, because you know about things like TTFP and INP and "not putting your Supabase god-token in the client"? Oh, you sweet summer child: I take no pleasure in this but I need to tell you that these things don't matter anymore. Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026.

Quality will matter the most in 2026. Specifically because the barrier-to-entry for making software is down there will of course be a lot of poor quality software, which will break, expose customer data, be bloated, etc. Customers will have more options, and this will allow them to be more discerning. Open source, clean code, low dependencies...these are things that can be evaluated by HN crowd types, but it's also something that an LLM can evaluate.

We are entering into an age of software taste. For those of us that have developed taste over the years, we become the taste makers in that we care how things are built, and know what we're looking for. This applies on the supply side, when our taste drives the LLM, and on the consumption side, when we can help the masses evaluate what to use and what not to use.

NB: this is all speculation expressed as fact, in keeping with the OP's style.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-02-16 15:42:12+00:00
This vibes with me, though I think it's overly glum.

You can't hope to succeed by building something cool without distribution already figured out. If you haven't put the work in building a social following, you're pretty much locked into pay to play (which isn't horrible if you target small targeted bloggers/youtubers/etc, but it's not my bag). OpenClaw exploded because Peter has >100k twitter followers and among them are plenty of people who themselves have a ton of followers.

So, if you're building, you also need to focus on building an audience.

The high touch enterprise sales strategy is solid though, and easier to bootstrap. That's why Alex Hormozi and Dan Martell push people getting started that way.
by tjansen | 2026-02-16 15:42:30+00:00
Maybe it's wishful thinking, being one of the SaaS-developing developers he describes. But I think that only the complexity required for a SaaS is increasing. You certainly can't earn millions with the kind of SaaS that used to take a week or two, and can now be done on a weekend. So I am trying the kind of SaaS that I never dared to start, knowing that it would take a year or two of my spare time. And with AI agents, I now hope to complete it in 3 or 4 months, with a lot of extra features I would never have dared to include in an MVP.
by ishouldstayaway | 2026-02-16 15:42:48+00:00
> at least [the US] doesn't toss you out a window when you cross Fearless Leader.

Well, not yet anyway:

> Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-s...
by Aurornis | 2026-02-16 15:43:32+00:00
> If you mean that they're benchmaxing these models, then that's disappointing

Benchmaxxing is the norm in open weight models. It has been like this for a year or more.

I’ve tried multiple models that are supposedly Sonnet 4.5 level and none of them come close when you start doing serious work. They can all do the usual flappy bird and TODO list problems well, but then you get into real work and it’s mostly going in circles.

Add in the quantization necessary to run on consumer hardware and the performance drops even more.
by pixl97 | 2026-02-16 15:43:37+00:00
And if you've been watching Deepmind AI has been making advances in medical sciences at a pretty damned fast rate. So not fulfilled is a pretty weak statement. The pipeline in medical is very long.

And that's not even talking about the head spinning rate robotics is advancing. The hardware we use for LLMs is also being used in robot simulation for hardware training that gives results in hours that took weeks or months in the past.
by WarmWash | 2026-02-16 15:43:43+00:00
Most people seem to have this reflexive belief that "AI training" is "copy+paste data from the internet onto a massive bank of hard drives"

So if there is a single good "pelican on a bike" image on the internet or even just created by the lab and thrown on The Model Hard Drive, the model will make a perfect pelican bike svg.

The reality of course, is that the high water mark has risen as the models improve, and that has naturally lifted the boat of "SVG Generation" along with it.
by SyneRyder | 2026-02-16 15:43:48+00:00
Well, I've offered what I can to help. If your experience is mostly free chatbots, I would definitely suggest trying Opus 4.5 or 4.6 in Claude Code. The agentic harness of the software around the model (ie Claude Code) is important. Consider also that some of us have been doing this for a year and have already built our own MCP server tooling to go faster. Giving your AI the same kind of deterministic software tools that you use is important (eg make sure your AI has access to a diff tool, don't make it try and do that "in its head", you wouldn't ask that of a human).

As for listening to Hacker News... yeah, this is one of the worst places (well, Mastodon is worse) and HN is surprisingly AI-doomerish. I don't check in here very often anymore, and as of this week I just get Claude to summarize HN headlines as a morning podcast for me instead.

My own experience: my first few uses of Claude in Dec 2024 seemed rubbish, I didn't get it. Then one day I asked it to make me a search engine. The one shot from that wasn't perfect, but it worked, and I saw it build it in front of my eyes. That was the moment & I kept iterating on it. I haven't used Google or Kagi in almost a year now.

Anyway, hope it helps, but if not using AI makes you feel more comfortable, go with what fills your life with more value & meaning & enjoyment.
by al_borland | 2026-02-16 15:43:52+00:00
My dad is retired and enamored with ChatGPT. He’s been teaching classes to seniors and evangelizing the use to all his friends. Every time he calls he gives me an update on who he’s converted into a ChatGPT user. He seems disappointed with anyone who doesn’t use it for everything after he tells them about it.

A couple days ago he was telling me one lady he was trying to sell on it wouldn’t use it. She took the position that if she can’t trust the answers all the time, she isn’t going to trust or use it for anything. My dad almost seemed offended by this idea, he couldn’t understand why someone wouldn’t want the benefits it could offer, even if it wasn’t perfect.

I think her position was very sound. We see how much misinformation spreads online and how vulnerable people are to it. Wanting a trusted source of information is not a bad thing. Getting information more quickly is of little value if it isn’t reliable data.

If I prod my dad enough about it, he will admit that ChatGPT has made some mistakes that he caught. He knew enough to question it more when it was wrong. The problem is, if he already knew the answer, why was he asking in the first place… and if it was something he wasn’t well versed on, how does he know it’s giving him good data?

People are defaulting to trust, unless they catch the LLM in a lie. How many times does someone have to lie to a person before they are labeled a liar and no longer trusted at face value? For me, these LLMs have been labeled a liar and I don’t trust them. Trust takes a long time to rebuild once it’s broken.

I mostly use LLMs to augment search, not replace it. If it gives me an answer, I’ll click through to the sourced reference and see what it says there, and evaluate if it’s a source with trusting. In many cases the LLM will get me to the right page, but it will jumble up the details and get them wrong, like a bad game of telephone.
by shin_lao | 2026-02-16 15:43:52+00:00
See that as winning the "startup lottery", that doesn't mean what he did is rational or smart, he just had a great outcome.

In trading it's the same, you can make stupid bets and make a lot of money, doesn't mean you're good trader.

Nothing to conclude from this, this kind of hype-fueled outcome has always been a part of life.