MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ahazred8ta | 2026-02-16 07:06:20+00:00
That's an urban legend. In real life physics, the traveler is being pulled forward by the black hole's gravity, faster and faster, and as it covers the last few miles it's traveling very close to light speed and crosses the last few miles in a tiny fraction of a second. The time dilation is not enough to cancel the increased speed. There's no wall of molasses. An object falling in goes faster, not slower. Objects falling into the black hole do not actually hover just short of the event horizon, despite appearances.
by albatross79 | 2026-02-16 07:06:26+00:00
I'm not interested really in how something behaves, that's an accounting or record keeping task. I am interested in why it behaves a certain way, or what it is. Why does the earth go around the sun? We're told it's because of space time curvature. Curvature of what? Where is space time and what it is made of that it has a shape or geometry? There is no ether, space is not made of anything. Yet it has a shape, or at least there is some accounting going on somewhere that keeps everything moving like it's supposed to. Where is that, what's the mechanism? What we have is a mathematical model that fits the data, but doesn't explain anything. Yes, A behaves in a certain way when B is in a certain position relative to A, we can model that and we call that relativity or whatever, but what is the mechanism? That's where the abstraction is. Are we satisfied with modelling an alien system that we can't understand in any other way? To me that's not that interesting, it just leads to getting lost in abstractions. Maybe relativity will be replaced by a more complicated model that covers more edge cases, but that doesn't tell you what it is. It just tells you how it behaves, as you said. It's like if what you thought was your dog meowed and liked to climb trees instead of barking and chasing squirrels. You don't know what it is anymore, it's not a cat it's not a dog, you don't know what it is but you can model it's behavior. That's what you're forced into. The familiarity is gone. Acting like that's some big accomplishment or achievement is a cop out. We found out the universe is not amenable to our knowing it with any familiarity. Is that something to celebrate? No, it's like finding out your parents were androids. So what are we left with, just accounting rules and accounting models. All they'll give us are ways to make better tools.
by KronisLV | 2026-02-16 07:06:31+00:00
Note: just be sure to have some sort of backup solution because when a deal seems to be too good to be true, sometimes the company will go under.

I had that happen years ago, consequently it meant my first ever VPS disappearing.

I think the deal back then was like 15 EUR per year.

Scaleway has small instances (Stardust) btw: https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/virtual-instances/

They seem expensive otherwise so I’d go with Hetzner for most other stuff. Heck I’ve even used Contabo too (they don’t have the best reputation, but it worked out okay for me).
by cynicalsecurity | 2026-02-16 07:07:31+00:00
It proves LLMs always need context. They have no idea where your car is. Is it already there at the car wash and you simply get back from the gas station to wash it where you went shortly to pay for the car wash? Or is the car at your home?

It proves LLMs are not brains, they don't think. This question will be used to train them and "magically" they'll get it right next time, creating an illusion of "thinking".
I built a free synthetic monitoring suite (Playwright based)
by rizqtek | 2026-02-16 07:07:36+00:00
I run a small dev agency and got tired of uptime monitors saying "200 OK" while my client's checkout flow was actually broken (silent JS error).

Enterprise tools like Datadog/New Relic charge a lot for "Synthetic Monitoring" (headless browser checks), so I built my own alternative over the weekend using Playwright.

It currently includes:

Checkout Defender (Visits product -> Add to Cart -> Verifies Payment Iframe)

Login Validator (Checks auth from US/EU)

API Deep-Check (Validates JSON structure)

It's free to use (no signup required for the basic audit).

You can try the tools here: https://app.pingsla.com

The stack is React, Node.js, and Playwright on DigitalOcean. Feedback welcome!
by fzeindl | 2026-02-16 07:08:00+00:00
While technically possible, it is a very unusual situation that the car is already parked at the car wash, while the owner is somewhere else.

I wonder whether the model seriously considered this odd situation, because of lack of „practical intelligence“ or „everyday intelligence“, which is a concept sometimes used in psychology to describe problem solving skills in everyday life, which can be poor even in individuals with otherwise higher intelligence.

Differently put: „You can‘t learn everything out of a book.“
by open592 | 2026-02-16 07:08:05+00:00
Gemini flash thinking:

> Unless you’ve discovered a way to wash a car via remote control or telekinesis, you’re going to have to drive.

> Walking 50 meters is great for your step count, but it leaves your car exactly where it is: dirty and in the driveway. At that distance, the drive will take you about 10 seconds, which is probably less time than it took to read this.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-16 07:08:06+00:00
> I don't really understand the argument that AGI cannot be achieved just by scaling current methods. I too believe that (for any sane level of scaling anyway), but this-year's LLMs are not using entirely last-year's methods. And they, in turn, are using methods that weren't used the year before.

It's a tautology - obviously advancements come through newer, refined methods.

I believe they mean that AGI can't be achieved by scaling the current approach; IOW, this strategy is not scalable, not this method is not scalable.
by Topfi | 2026-02-16 07:08:47+00:00
Unless I am mistaken, that is all plain old markdown, arguably the easiest to migrate format for such data there can possible be.

Heck, that was half the pitch behind Obsidian, even if the project someday ended, markdown would remain. And switching between Obsidian and e.g. Logseq shows the ease of doing so.
by rndphs | 2026-02-16 07:09:07+00:00
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.02292
"We show that a variety of modern deep learning tasks exhibit a "double-descent" phenomenon where, as we increase model size, performance first gets worse and then gets better."
That is the first sentence of the abstract. The first graph shown in the paper backs it up.

Looking into it further, it seems that typical LLMs are in the first descent regime anyway though so my original point is not too relevant for them anyway it seems. Also it looks like the second descent region doesn't always reach a lower loss than the first, it appears to depend on other factors as well.
UFOs and the Higgs Field
by daly | 2026-02-16 07:09:53+00:00
I got into a discussion of UFOs. The question was how would they
be able to change directions and accelerate instantly. He was trying
to guess what kind of propulstion they used. This is the reply I sent.

The more I think about it it becomes clear that physics is wrongly constructed.

The ability to manipulate space-time directly solves a lot of problems.
Take, for example, the UFO problem I mentioned. Physics has the concept of
propulsion, equal and opposite "forces". If instead you could directly manipulate
"mass" as a variable then things change. The photon is massless which makes the
universe "flat" and leads to travel at the speed of light. If you could shed mass
at will you could easily approach the speed of light without "propulsion". Thus a
civilization that figures out how to manipulate "mass" would be able to travel
anywhere at the speed of light. You don't accelerate mass, which is dumb,
you "shed mass" and thus move without propulsion. Indeed, if you could
achieve "negative mass" (changing a gravity well into a gravity hill) you could
easitly exceed the speed of light.

Einstein felt that things got more massive as they approach the speed of light
and, in the limit, would have infinite mass. That's true under propulsion. It is not
true if you can "shed mass". Thus Einstein missed the very thing that mattered.

Shedding mass likely involves directly manipulating the Higgs boson.

Dark energy and dark matter might be "negative masses".

I don't know any physics professors but I'm pretty sure I'm talking nonsense :-)
by troad | 2026-02-16 07:10:09+00:00
And when all those unnecessary increases in the cost of living lead to increasing vote share for the far right - eventually maybe even a far right government - what then? How sustainable will that be?

Have you actually read the science on microplastics? [0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/13/micropla...
by dajt | 2026-02-16 07:10:37+00:00
> Exactly, VSCode is done by well known people from the GoF book, Visual Age and Eclipse IDEs.

That doesn't mean it's any good - which I admit is subjective. I'm sure they've put good devs doing a ton of work into making an IDE they believe in but having used it for a couple of years I don't enjoy the experience.

Nothing feels obvious or simple, and trying to work in Python or embedded C++ compared to using Jetbrains tools feels like I'm missing so much. I've gone back to pycharm community edition because IMO it's light-years ahead of vscode in usability.

I guess people say the same about emacs.

I maintain VC++ was a better experience than vscode; whoever is working on it.
by Kerrick | 2026-02-16 07:11:24+00:00
Results testing with 4 levels of Gemini (Fast, Thinking, Pro, Pro + Deep Think): https://ruby.social/@kerrick/116079054391970012

My favorite was Thinking, as it tried to be helpful with a response a bit like the X/Y Problem. Pro was my second favorite: terse, while still explaining why. Fast sounded like it was about to fail, and then did a change-up explaining a legitimate reason I may walk anyways. Pro + Deep Think was a bit sarcastic, actually.
by DeathArrow | 2026-02-16 07:11:40+00:00
Grok:

>You should drive.
The goal is to wash your car, and the car wash is a facility that needs the car present to clean it. Walking the 50 meters gets you there, but leaves the car behind—unwashed.
Driving the 50 meters is the only way to actually accomplish the task. Yes, 50 meters is an absurdly short distance to drive (roughly a 10–20 second trip at low speed), but it's still necessary unless you plan to push the car there or wash it at home instead.
by globular-toast | 2026-02-16 07:12:12+00:00
The funny thing is when I got my first car at 29 I had similar thoughts. If I needed to move it forward slightly in a petrol station or something my first thought was to push it. Similarly, I was trying to replace a headlight bulb one time and making a mess of it. I dropped a spring or something inside the headlight unit. I kept having this thought of just picking the car up and shaking it.

Nobody writes in depth about the mundane practicalities of using a car. Most people don't even think about it ever. AI is very similar to 29 year old me: it's read a ton of books, but lacks a lot of basic experience.

How will AI get this experience that you can't read in a book? How will it learn what kneeding dough feels like? Or how acceleration feels if your body is mostly water? Interesting times ahead...
by smileybarry | 2026-02-16 07:13:11+00:00
Windows SDKs, WDKs (driver dev), Visual Studio releases, and .NET SDKs all coexist peacefully on a machine. If a project build breaks due to newer SDKs, it's because it was configured with "use newest version". (Which is usually fine but sometimes requires pinning if you're using more "niche" things like WDK)
by hmottestad | 2026-02-16 07:14:07+00:00
This is the voice model, which doesn’t have any «thinking» or «reasoning» phase. It’s a useful model for questions that aren’t intended to trick the model.

I’ve used it for live translation with great success. It tends to start ignoring the original instructions after 20 min, so you have to start a new conversation if you don’t want it to meddle in the conversation instead of just transferring.
by prasoonds | 2026-02-16 07:14:48+00:00
I've used LLMs enough that I have a good sense of their _edges_ of intelligence. I had assumed that reasoning models should easily be able to answer this correctly.

And indeed, Sonnet and Opus 4.5 (medium reasoning) say the following:

Sonnet: Drive - you need to bring your car to the car wash to get it washed!

Opus: You'll need to drive — you have to bring the car to the car wash to get it washed!

Gemini 3 Pro (medium): You should drive.

--

But OpenAI 5.2 reasoning, even at high, told me to walk. My first instinct was, I had underspecified the location of the car. The model seems to assume the car is already at the car wash from the wording. GPT 5.x series models behave a bit more on the spectrum so you need to tell them the specifics. So I asked:

"I want to wash my car. My car is currently at home. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

GPT 5.2 Reasoning (medium):

"Drive—your goal is to get the car to the car wash, and it’s only 50 meters, so a slow, careful drive is simplest.

One small optimization: if you’re worried about starting the car for such a short trip or you want to avoid idling in a line, you can walk over first to check if there’s a queue / if it’s open, then come back and drive the car over when it’s your turn."

Which seems to turn out as I expected.
by agenticmail | 2026-02-16 07:14:49+00:00
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Happy to answer any questions!
by andersmurphy | 2026-02-16 07:17:31+00:00
Did you try several times per model? In my experience it's luck of the draw. All the models I tried managed to get it wrong at least once.

The models that had access to search got ot right.But, then were just dealing with an indirect version of Google.

(And they got it right for the wrong reasons... I.e this is a known question designed to confuse LLMs)
by matt89 | 2026-02-16 07:17:56+00:00
tried Gemini 3 and it said to drive, even dropped a type of joke:

> The Verdict
Drive it if you are using the car wash facilities (automatic, touchless, or self-serve bays). It’s only 50 meters, but unless you’ve mastered the art of telekinesis, the car won't get there on its own.
by anonnon | 2026-02-16 07:18:15+00:00
I changed the title because most people have never heard of David Gelernter.

He's a professor of CS at Yale (emeritus, I guess?) who created the Linda programming language and came up with the concept of "Life Streams," a forerunner to temporal feed-based social media, like Twitter and Instagram: http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html

He's also arguably something of a patent troll: https://yaledailynews.com/articles/yale-prof-loses-625-5m-ap...

And he was also famously attacked by Ted Kaczynski, presumably because Kaczynski anticipated the significance of Gelernter's ideas (that, or the old Harvard-Yale rivalry got a little too heated).
by dwoldrich | 2026-02-16 07:18:57+00:00
Good hit him with her car and he is law enforcement. She should have put her car in park and surrendered to the officers as they were instructing her to do. The agents and the Goods both didn't appear there in the street out of a vacuum, clearly she was there to obstruct. Seemed like Good was afraid and chose to flee consequences.

Pretti may have had an accidental discharge of his gun, which he took to a confrontation with law enforcement. Sad and foolish way to go out, seemed like a suicide by cop situation to me.

Everything I just wrote is opinion, just like everything you wrote. Who is right? Maybe neither of us, it's complicated/messy.

Considering only the timing of these events, I conclude this ice stuff is poorly concocted psyops meant to enrage people and distract from other news.
by peterspath | 2026-02-16 07:19:10+00:00
Grok 4.1:

Drive.

50 meters is nothing — literally a 30-second walk or a 10-second drive — but the key point is: your car isn’t going to wash itself.

If you walk to the car wash, you arrive alone. The car stays parked at home, still dirty.

If you drive, the car actually gets to the car wash and gets cleaned.

So unless you’re planning to push the car the whole way (which is technically possible but ridiculous), the only practical option is to drive it there.

Bonus reality check: Driving 50 meters uses a tiny amount of fuel (maybe 0.005–0.01 liters in a normal car) and produces a negligible amount of emissions. Walking would be “greener,” but it literally doesn’t solve the problem.

Verdict: Get in the car, drive the 50 meters, wash it, and drive back.

You’ll have a clean car and still be home in under 5 minutes. Walking is for when you don’t need to move a 1.5-ton vehicle.
by imiric | 2026-02-16 07:20:01+00:00
Fake engagement doesn't need to be bought anymore.

This person created a bot factory. It's safe to assume that most of the engagement is coming from his own creation. This includes tweets, GitHub stars, issues and PRs, and everything else. He made a social network for bots, FFS.

He contributed to the dead internet more than any single person ever. And is being celebrated for it. Wild times.
by qnleigh | 2026-02-16 07:20:02+00:00
Yeah Gemini seems to have a sense of humor about the question

> Here is the breakdown of why:
The Mobility Problem: Unless you are planning to carry your car 50 meters (which would be an Olympic-level feat), the car needs to be physically present at the car wash to get cleaned. If you walk, you’ll be standing at the car wash looking very clean, but your car will still be dirty in your driveway.
by doodlebugging | 2026-02-16 07:20:04+00:00
...and the SAE system like me (older American here) then you would be able to provide the answers that confuse your audience the most when they ask about volumes, velocities, dimensions, etc. and you would have as much fun in life as I have had. Your metric system is for people who need to have things simplified in order for them to be understandable and relatable. It's about as dumbed down as you can make something. Lowest common denominator type stuff. Americans have always thrived on challenge and that is why we stupidly cling to the complexity of the SAE system of units. It fits so we sits.
by samrus | 2026-02-16 07:20:13+00:00
I cant quite tell if the tests that passed were sqlites own famously thorough test suite, or your own.

If its sqlites suite then its great the models managed to get there, but one issue (without trying to be too pessimistic) is that the models had the test suite there to validate against. Sqlites devs famously spend more of their time making the tests than building the functionalities. If we can get AI that reliably defines the functionality of such programs by building the test suite over years of trial and error, then we'll have what people are saying
by manuelmoreale | 2026-02-16 07:21:32+00:00
Asked gemini the same question and it produced a similar-ish image: https://manuelmoreale.dev/hn/gemini_1.svg

When I removed the plot part and simply asked to generate an SVG it basically created a fancy version of the Gemini logo: https://manuelmoreale.dev/hn/gemini_2.svg

This is honestly all quite uninteresting to me. The most interesting part is that the various tools all create a similar illustration though.
by petesergeant | 2026-02-16 07:21:46+00:00
5.2 showing some sass this morning:

—-
> OK I walked there but now my car is still at home

Bold strategy.

You have three options:
1. Walk back, drive it over (most sensible).
2. Push it 50 meters (excellent workout, questionable life choice).
3. Accept that your car is spiritually clean and go home.

Real answer: walk back and grab it. You’re already warmed up.
—-
by blobbers | 2026-02-16 07:21:56+00:00
ChatGPT 5.2:
...blah blah blah finally:
The practical reality

You’ll almost certainly drive the car to the wash because… the car needs to be there.

But the real question is probably:

Do I walk back home after dropping it off?

If yes → walk. It’s faster than the hassle of turning around twice.

My recommendation

If conditions are normal: walk both directions.
It’s less friction than starting the engine twice for 50 m.

--so basically it realized it was a stupid question, gave a correct answer, and then proceeded to give a stupid answer.

---
I then asked: If I walk both directions, will the car get washed?

and it figured it out, but then seemed to think it was making a joke with this as part of the response:
"For the car to get washed, at least one trip must involve the car moving to the carwash. Current known methods include:

You drive it (most common technology)

Someone else drives it

Tow truck

Push it 50 m (high effort, low ROI)

Optimal strategy (expert-level life efficiency)

Drive car → carwash (50 m, ~10 seconds)

Wash car

Drive home

Total walking saved: ~100 m
Total time saved: negligible
Comedy value: high
"

Why is that funny? what's comedic?
This thing is so dumb.
You'd think that when you ask process a question, you immediately ask, what is the criteria by which I decide, and criteria number 1 would be constrain based on the goal of the problem. It should have immediately realized you can't walk there.

Does it think "does my answer satisfy the logic of the question?"
by input_sh | 2026-02-16 07:22:00+00:00
I'd go as far as saying it's counter-productive. I have a hobby-level project with actual users earning me some money on the side while requiring very little day-to-day involvement (roughly 2h per week) and there's no quicker way to get my door shut doing interviews than by mentioning it.

There's simply no way to package that which doesn't make the other side think that I'm gonna steal company's time at best and that I'm only looking for like a temporary gig until it takes off at worst.
Show HN: A lightweight library for real-time data visualization
by sokratisv | 2026-02-16 07:23:59+00:00
Hi HN,
I built [Package Name] because I was frustrated with [Specific Problem]. Most existing solutions were either too heavy or didn't support [Specific Feature].
Technically, it works by [briefly explain a cool implementation detail, e.g., using a custom proxy or a specific algorithm]. I've tried to keep the footprint under [Size] and ensured it has zero dependencies.
You can install it via npm install [package-name] or check out the live demo at [Link].
I'd love to hear your thoughts on the [specific technical choice] or any features you think are missing!
by johnfn | 2026-02-16 07:24:30+00:00
It was trivial to debunk two statements in your post just by reading a little bit. I would need to spend more time to verify whether he "faked benchmarks for financial gain", but given your track record on the other points (and how you ignored my response pointing that out) it seems like you are distorting the truth in order to make your argument, so I don't think the additional time investment is worth it here.