MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lokar | 2026-02-17 17:33:21+00:00
I'm not an expert, but a lot has been written on this.

Some areas:

- more and more administrative staff and "middle management". The assistant to the assistant vice chancellor for elm trees.

- Building and running very expensive science research operations. These may well be worthwhile efforts, but conflating them with undergraduate educations is a problem.

- more and more student amenities. Fancy dorms, student centers, rec centers, etc

- competitive athletics

A big part of this, is that they need to attract students, ideally ones who can pay or borrow. And students are putting a lot of weight on the research programs (they impact public ratings), fancy dorms, rec centers, football teams, etc. And they are spending loan money, and don't seem to fully grasp the economics. But even if they did, the highest rated schools are the ones spending all this money, and thus charging more, it's a cycle. And this propagates down to mid- and lower tier schools.

And then people in the leadership ranks of these schools are in part evaluated on how the ranking of their school changes. So if you can go from spot 150 to 140 by raising fees to build stuff you don't really need to teach (but improve your ranking), that is good for you.
by aleph_minus_one | 2026-02-17 17:33:24+00:00
What you are looking for (as an employer) is people who are in love of AI.

I guess a lot of participants rather have an slight AI-skeptic bias (while still being knowledgeable about which weaknesses current AI models have).

Additionally, such a list has only a value if

a) the list members are located in the USA

b) the list members are willing to switch jobs

I guess those who live in the USA and are in deep love of AI already have a decent job and are thus not very willing to switch jobs.

On the other hand, if you are willing to hire outside the USA, it is rather easy to find people who want to switch the job to an insanely well-paid one (so no need to set up a list for finding people) - just don't reject people for not being a culture fit.
by yoyohello13 | 2026-02-17 17:33:55+00:00
I have a sci-fi series I've followed religiously for probably 10 years now. It's called the 'Undying Mercenaries' series. The author is prolific, like he's been putting out a book in this series every 6 months since 2011. I'm sure he has used ghost writers in the past, but the books were always generally a good time.

Last year though I purchased the next book in the series and I am 99% sure it was AI generated. None of the characters behaved consistently, there was a ton of random lewd scenes involving characters from books past. There were paragraphs and paragraphs of purple prose describing the scene but not actually saying anything. It was just so unlike every other book in the series. It was like someone just pasted all the previous books into an LLM and pushed the go button.

I was so shocked and disappointing that I paid good money for some AI slop I've stopped following the author entirely. It was a real eye opener for me. I used to enjoy just taking a chance on a new book because the fact that it made it through publishing at least implied some minimum quality standard, but now I'm really picky about what books I pick up because the quality floor is so much lower than in the past.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-17 17:34:11+00:00
https://archive.today/KmhWL

Takeaway is that India currently has 154.4GW/year of solar manufacturing capacity, 3x the country's current annual demand.

"The problem is that India’s demand hasn’t kept pace. Granted, domestic consumption is increasing — the nation installed a record 38 gigawatts of solar power in 2025, according to official data, about 53 gigawatts in DC terms. That would still be dwarfed by manufacturing capacity of about 154 gigawatts at the end of the year."
by JosephjackJR | 2026-02-17 17:34:12+00:00
Retrieval performance is becoming a silent bottleneck for local first AI agents. While context windows are expanding, the latency involved in querying traditional cloud vector databases still sits in the 10ms to 50ms range due to network hops and pointer heavy graph structures.

I have spent the last few months building SYNRIX to see if we could reach sub microsecond retrieval by being extremely opinionated about hardware. Instead of a flexible graph, the engine uses a binary lattice—a rigid structure that relies on arithmetic addressing instead of chasing pointers.

This architectural rigidity leads to several unique properties:

Query time scales with the number of results you want rather than the total size of your database. We have validated this at 50 million nodes running smoothly on a standard 8GB RAM machine using memory mapped storage to scale beyond physical memory.

Because it runs entirely on your own hardware, there are no per query fees or subscription costs. This makes it a viable local first alternative for high volume applications that would otherwise face six figure cloud bills at scale.

The system is built for production reliability with ACID style guarantees. It uses a Write Ahead Log and deterministic recovery to ensure 100% success in surviving restarts and crashes without data loss.

The engine is designed for cache line alignment and CPU prefetching. This approach ensures the software works with hardware realities to maintain sub microsecond hot path retrieval even as the memory substrate grows.

We have built compatibility layers for LangChain and Qdrant so it can act as a drop in replacement for existing stacks. The project has already seen about 40 clones since yesterday, so the need for low latency, offline first memory seems to be hitting a nerve. I am curious to hear from others working on high frequency agent queries—is retrieval latency currently a bottleneck for your workflows, or are you more concerned with inference time?
by mandevil | 2026-02-17 17:34:16+00:00
This whole fight is about something called the "bona fides news exception." Basically, in 2006 the FCC ruled that late night interviews were always bona fides news interviews (and therefore not subject to equal time), on January 21st FCC Chairman Brendan Carr wrote a letter suggesting (but not declaring) that the 2006 ruling was incorrect and might be revoked.

Separately, currently elected politicians are pretty much always considered to be bona fides interview subjects, even if they happen to be running for reelection, because e.g. the Governor of Pennsylvania expressing opinions is news.

If CBS lawyers wanted to fight and bring Talarico on, they would probably win- the letter is not actually changing the rule, and the FCC would have to defend the rule change in court and would probably lose. But the point is that CBS has determined to be working towards the Fuehrer, and wants to do so, and so they are doing what they are doing.
by toddmorrow | 2026-02-17 17:34:17+00:00
AGI = Reasoning

I can reason. Sometimes. It's very hard. My buddy Deepseek can't. This is like the scene in Blue's Clues where the answer is obvious and the kids are yelling but blue can't see it. Facts abound, but not conclusions based on those facts

There's a reachable intermediate step on the way before reasoning, and that's "keeping the plot". Not losing the line of thought.
by jezek2 | 2026-02-17 17:34:34+00:00
Thanks, it might be useful for macOS support of non-native widgets in my GUI library. I did some parsing but got stuck at some point.

Seems a better choice to just parse the files than using private APIs as I couldn't see much of the documentation for them (or rather reversed APIs in various projects) + image handling is weirdly complicated in macOS generally so I want to avoid that.

Currently I've experimented by just recreating the graphics from scratch using vector rendering but it's quite cumbersome.

Other libraries, such as Qt, try to draw the native widgets into offscreen image but it's extremely hacky way prone to GUI breaking with any OS update. Java has their own Apple blessed way, but seems quite limited to me and don't want to depend on that either.
by JackFr | 2026-02-17 17:35:03+00:00
It's a terrible look for CBS. At the same time, I find it unbelievable that they don't fire Colbert. This is obvious gross insubordination, and he is an employee.

His final show is coming in May, and I'm sure that they can expect Colbert to continue to embarrass them (as the spineless sycophants they are) every week until then. It's a tremendous self own.
by svara | 2026-02-17 17:35:19+00:00
I think that mostly depends on how good a writer you are. A lot of people aren't, and the AI legitimately writes better. As in, the prose is easier to understand, free of obvious errors or ambiguities.

But then, the writing is also never great. I've tried a couple of times to get it to write in the style of a famous author, sometimes pasting in some example text to model the output on, but it never sounds right.
by anovikov | 2026-02-17 17:35:42+00:00
When the answer is not general but particular - "better" or "worse" can be about many things including entirely non-quantifiable and subjective ones like "moral virtue" - but when it's about economy, it's easy to see how the average of "personal" metrics matches stats: things were going on average very well in the last 10 years for majority of people, excluding a slight spike fuelled by free printed money in the era of covid payments, and a slight depression after when inflation compensated for those - otherwise they were almost uniformly well without much visible change.

But the amount of doom-and-gloom messaging skyrocketed in the period and most people tend to believe the news and think that things suck for everyone else, just they are doing ok personally. And something in the middle for people they can personally observe like their town or district.

Idk what's wrong about it. Fixing the messaging is unlikely because positive messages are not newsworthy and not clickable.
by throw46974228 | 2026-02-17 17:35:51+00:00
They have not expanded in 50 years because they have no desire to expand. It’s a scary bedtime story told to kids in certain cultures.

Do you also think that non-whites should leave Europe? Do you think that South Americans should be deported from North America. You think that lands belongs to races?

Your siblings in ideology are actively working to make Jews in America and around the world feel hated so that they are motivated to migrate to Isreal.

It’s the antisemitism of “anti-Zionists” that is boosting Zionism.
Show HN: Owlyn – See what your eng team shipped without asking anyone
by AhmadFahim | 2026-02-17 17:36:30+00:00
I'm a founder who got tired of spending 2 hours every morning piecing together what my eng team was shipping.
So I built Owlyn. It connects to Slack, GitHub, Linear, and Notion, then sends you a daily briefing: what shipped, what's blocked, what's at risk. Takes 5 minutes to set up.
The goal is simple: kill the daily standup without losing visibility.
Would love brutal feedback from HN. What would make you actually use something like this? What would stop you?
by georgemcbay | 2026-02-17 17:36:31+00:00
> Normal authoritarian state behavior, no?

Yes.

And the most surprising thing about this particular story to me is that a lot of people (here in the comments) seem surprised about it.

I don't mean to normalize this, because it isn't normal, but anyone surprised by this hasn't been paying attention over the past year+, this didn't arrive out of the blue.
by zvqcMMV6Zcr | 2026-02-17 17:36:50+00:00
Do you think non-recourse mortgage (the dominant type in USA) also should be banned? VC finds a bank that borrows them money to buy X, with X as collateral. It is exactly the same.
The mass selloff of assets and absurd cost-cutting is caused by new owners not giving a damn about the future of acquired company, its workers nor clients - it has nothing to do with leveraged buyout itself.
by fultonn | 2026-02-17 17:37:00+00:00
what I've done for a similar script in the past:

answer_initial = llm(prompt=prompt, site=site) # JSON with answer and any stuff needed to do heuristic checks.
heuristic_results = heuristics(answer_final) # rule based.
answer_final = llm(prompt-prompt, site=site, answer=answer_initial)
mark_for_review = ... # basically just a bunch of hard-coded stuff I add flag possible failures for review.

You can use an extremely small/cheap model for something like this -- granite 4.0 micro works fine for me, 3.3 8b did as well, both run on my macbook. YMMV / try different models and see how it goes.
by angst_ridden | 2026-02-17 17:37:42+00:00
A lot of the restricted stuff is cargo-cult fear of symbols that could be used in SQL-injection or XSS attacks.

A properly-coded system wouldn't care, but the people who write the rules have read old OWASP documents and in there they saw these symbols were somehow involved in big scary hacks that they didn't understand. So it's easier to ban them.
by sdenton4 | 2026-02-17 17:37:54+00:00
Taking a slightly closer look at the paper, you've got K repositories and create a set of test cases within each repository, totaling 130-ish tests. There may be some 'repository-level' effects - ie, tasks may be easier in some repo's than others.

Modeling the overall success rate then requires some hierarchical modeling. You can consider each repository as a weighted coin, and each test within a repository as flip of that particular coin. You want to estimate the overall probability of getting heads, when choosing a coin at random and then flipping it.

Here's some Gemini hints on how to proceed with getting the confidence interval using hierarchical bayes:
https://gemini.google.com/corp/app/e9de6a12becc57f6

(Still no need for further data!)
by thaumasiotes | 2026-02-17 17:37:57+00:00
None of the statements in your comment support the idea that the internet is a broadcast medium in the sense relevant to the FCC. It's a medium made entirely of 1-1 connections.

Note that newspapers are an older technology than radio, and they function in exactly the same way that the internet does, and there's never been a question of whether they are secretly "broadcast media".
by lokar | 2026-02-17 17:38:10+00:00
Healthcare is really complicated. No one factor makes up a majority of the excess (compared to other rich nations) cost.

The ACA is a bandaid, and may be making things worse over time, at least in some areas. But Americans don't see to have the appetite to really change anything. Probably because most voters are insulated from this by good (enough) employees plans.
by 72deluxe | 2026-02-17 17:38:15+00:00
I used OrganicMaps for navigation from the UK through France, Germany, Switzerland, back into France and then Spain last year on a 2 week enjoyable camper van trip. It can take a while for routing changes if you ignore it and decide to drive elsewhere, and I don't really use the voice alerts (I just have it on my phone on the dashboard via a magnet), but all in all it worked really well.

Although I would like speed limits shown in MPH in the UK, OrganicMaps' KMH limits were useful on the Continent.
by morgengold | 2026-02-17 17:38:18+00:00
I wonder how much of it could be prompted away.

For example the anthropic Frontend Design skill instructs:

"Typography: Choose fonts that are beautiful, unique, and interesting. Avoid generic fonts like Arial and Inter; opt instead for distinctive choices that elevate the frontend's aesthetics; unexpected, characterful font choices. Pair a distinctive display font with a refined body font."

Or

"NEVER use generic AI-generated aesthetics like overused font families (Inter, Roboto, Arial, system fonts), cliched color schemes (particularly purple gradients on white backgrounds), predictable layouts and component patterns, and cookie-cutter design that lacks context-specific character." 1

Maybe sth similar would be possible for writing nuances.

1 https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/skills/fronte...
by Retric | 2026-02-17 17:38:32+00:00
I agree it’s difficult to do these calculations as society evolves with technology. Trains enable long distance evacuation from hurricanes. Street cars and subways allow for medical transportation but it looks very different than an ambulance. Similarly do we exclude helicopters assuming cars were simply banned rather than our failing to design IC engines or whatever.

That said, there are modern enclaves without cars mostly on islands or in very remote locations. They make due just fine without cars, it’s the low population density that’s at issue for medical care.
Show HN: Blog and other OpenClaw features without a language model
by safestclaw | 2026-02-17 17:39:29+00:00
I was inspired by the automation that people loved in openclaw and realized your data could actually stay on your device. You don't have to get an api key. You can write to it. It will tell you the weather, it will write a blog for you if you give it the sources to crawl, and nearly everything else openclaw does. I love stars. Hope you check it out.
Picknar – Lightweight YouTube Thumbnail Extractor (No Login, No API Key)
by Picknar | 2026-02-17 17:40:02+00:00
I built Picknar as a lightweight tool to extract YouTube thumbnail images in max resolution without requiring login, extensions, or third-party API keys.

The main focus was performance and simplicity:

No account required

Direct thumbnail extraction

Supports Shorts

Minimal frontend dependencies

Optimized for fast response time

The idea came after noticing that most similar tools were either overloaded with ads, slow, or required unnecessary steps.

I’d appreciate feedback on:

UX improvements

Technical architecture decisions

Monetization approach (currently ad-supported)

Long-term defensibility in a competitive niche

Happy to answer questions about implementation or tradeoffs.
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-17 17:40:28+00:00
Communicating that you know what you are talking about and that you're different is a lot of work. I think being visibly "anti-AI" makes you look as much of an NPC as someone who "vibe coded XYZ." It takes care, consistency and most of all showing people something they've never seen before. It also helps to get in the habit of doing in person demos, if you want to win hackathons it really helps to be good at (1) giving demos on stage and (2) have a sense of what it takes to make something that is good to demo.

I have two projects right now on the threshold of "Show HN" that I used AI for but could have completed without AI. I'm never going to say "I did this with AI". For instance there is this HR monitor demo

https://gen5.info/demo/biofeedback/

which needs tuning up for mobile (so I can do an in-person demo to people who work on HRV) but most all being able to run with pre-recorded data so that people who don't have a BTLE HR monitor can see how cool it is.

Another thing I am tuning up for "never saw anything like this" impact is a system of tokens that I give people when I go out as-a-foxographer

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116086491667959840

I am used to marketing funnels having 5% effectiveness and it blows my mind that at least 75% of the tokens I give out get scanned and that is with the old conventional cards that have the same back side. The number + suit tokens are particularly good as a "self-working demo" because it is easy to talk about them, when somebody flags me down because they noticed my hood I can show them a few cards that are all different and let them choose one or say "Look, you got the 9 of Bees!"
Show HN: Lap – Fast photo browsing for libraries (Rust and Tauri)
by julyxx | 2026-02-17 17:40:53+00:00
I’ve been a software engineer for 10+ years and a hobby photographer for even longer.
Over time my family archive grew to 100k+ photos and videos, and browsing it smoothly on macOS became surprisingly hard.

So I started building Lap app.

The current focus (v0.1.6) is simple:
fast local photo library browsing and management
- Smooth scrolling through very large libraries
- Works directly on your existing folders (no import/catalog)
- Fully local

Planned next: deduplication, photo comparison tools, and RAW support.
by thomastjeffery | 2026-02-17 17:41:39+00:00
> We should have been chopping the cruft away and replacing it with deterministic abstractions like we’ve always done. That’s what that Larry Wall quote about good programmers being lazy was about. It did not mean that we would be okay with pulling a damn slot machine lever a couple times to generate the boilerplate.

I can finally put into words my frustration with NixOS. The most elegant solution to the ultimate problem already exists, yet no one is actually interested in solving the problem! In the end, we just got another convoluted system of incomprehensible boilerplate to wrap the existing boilerplate with, and incompatibilities are resolved just-in-time with more boilerplate.
by izacus | 2026-02-17 17:41:40+00:00
You'll quickly find out - as people are finding out in EU nowadays - that *no* bank will go through the trouble of fighting checklist security auditors to keep your linuxes working.

Wait till you find out that your prefered Linux bank won't have the same mortgage terms as you'd like and you'll be running to buy a Google/Apple phone to get those % down.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-02-17 17:41:41+00:00
>The work is mandatory,

It isn't. It's just often preferable to sitting in a cell 23 hours per day.

>The "wages" are typically something like 25 cents per hour,

Why should a felon be permitted to earn whatever it is that you think they should be paid (the wages of a free man)? They are being punished. One of the aspects of the punishment is that they can't go out and get a good-paying job.

> and sentences can be extended if you refuse to work

This is a blatant lie. Sentences can't be extended without additional convictions. While it's not impossible to be charged with crimes committed in prison (murders occur there often enough), no one's being convicted of "refusing to work in prison".

I know that this blew up a few years on reddit, but maybe you should learn about it from more reputable sources.
by vharuck | 2026-02-17 17:41:47+00:00
I'm a government statistician, and a private researcher I'd worked with asked me to give a talk at a STEM charter school about to start their science fair. She asked me to focus on the reports and data tools the state publishes, so I used them as the "middle step" in some hypothetical science projects (e.g., which has a bigger effect on the rate of heart disease deaths, race or wealth?). I explained that these data couldn't replace a controlled experiment, but they were invaluable for the most important part of the scientific process: genuine attempts to disprove your own idea.

I felt good about the presentation, and then the Q&A started, with the researcher (who was smiling the whole time) joining in more and more. I quickly understood the kids didn't plan, and weren't being encouraged, to do anything like the scientific process. They wanted to pull some of the data from our tools, draw a few chats, add a little commentary, and smack it on poster board. I even attended the science fair event, and saw too many exhibits with screenshots of our website and what amounted to status reports. Reports that can be automated.

That isn't how things should work.
by abeppu | 2026-02-17 17:42:04+00:00
But isn't part of the point of this that you want people who are eager to learn about AI and how to use it responsibly? You probably shouldn't want employees who, in their rush to automate tasks or ship AI powered features, will expose secrets, credentials, PII etc. You want people who can use AI to be highly productive without being a liability risk.

And even if you're not in a position to hire all of those people, perhaps you can sell to some of them.
by gruez | 2026-02-17 17:42:11+00:00
>I am of the opinion that incarceration should be "for the benefit of society"; that the person should be behind bars because because they are a threat to society. If they're done with thing because, they may do it again. And that incarceration should be working helping that person become one that would _not_ repeat that crime. Life sentences should only ever be the case for someone that will always be a threat to society.

How do you know whether a murderer won't be a repeat murderer?