MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by deaux | 2026-02-12 09:40:44+00:00
> Posting on HN is not against the law (at least where I am).

If my scenario were law, it would still be entirely unreasonable.

Besides, law is an entirely fluid concept in general, including in Singapore, but really anywhere, to varying degrees. The US has recently been making this incredibly clear for even the blindest to see, but it was already the case before.
by lxgr | 2026-02-12 09:40:48+00:00
> It’s only going to take one bad suggestion that leaves someone in a dangerous situation

I feel like if one bad suggestion can leave somebody in a dangerous situation, many other things must have failed before, such as informing oneself of the general condition of roads in a given place and the current season, having a fallback plan in case digital navigation fails or a road is unexpectedly closed etc.
by plastic-enjoyer | 2026-02-12 09:42:06+00:00
That is a fairly common argument, but I have yet to see any evidence to support it. In Germany, we are having a similar discussion about the Bürgergeld, i.e. unemployment benefit, which is about people abusing the Bürgergeld to the detriment of taxpayers. However, there is no actual data that show that there are a significant number of people who abuse unemployment benefits in any systematic way.
The money that the state loses through tax evasion or the exploitation of tax loopholes is much higher than the money that the state loses through unjustified claims for unemployment benefits. Nevertheless, there are constant calls to further reduce unemployment benefits or make it harder to get and the argument is always something like: There is a thing that is good and benefits people but is abused by a minority, thus we should abolish the good thing.
by EdNutting | 2026-02-12 09:42:18+00:00
Fine for some people. For others like me, I just don’t see what others see - I don’t see the clutter or the mess, and I just get on with the job. Takes all types to make the world run, but it would be nice if these kind of articles acknowledged they might be pushing ideas onto people who really don’t need them (and for whom, what they’re proposing might actually be way worse as it zaps a load of time and energy doing the pointless clearing up).
by pbmonster | 2026-02-12 09:42:30+00:00
Yeah, absolutely no way to bring down power prices when compared to China. They installed over 400 GW (peak) of new renewable capacity in 2025 and show no signs of intending to stop.

But still, it's possible that a smaller, dirtier build-out in the US will significantly drop prices relative to today, and certainly relative to the rest of the world (which is failing spectacularly at building out power infrastructure).

But yes, the only way you're ever going to smelt Aluminum in the US again is if you have customers who can't/won't buy Chinese Aluminum. And even then, worth keeping an eye on the richer Arabs states. They're quickly roofing over their deserts, and certainly don't worry about local NIMBY opposition to power lines...
by svara | 2026-02-12 09:42:32+00:00
I am having a lot of fun with AI coding tools, it does feel like a great productivity booster for many things, I enjoy the feeling of getting from imagination to prototype so fast.

And yet at the same time, I feel like somehow the vibes are off at this point.

I'm a bit embarrassed to write my first paragraph, because I feel like I don't want to be part of that crowd, because they've become annoying, and they don't seem to be very bright.
Ask HN: How do you prevent sensitive data leaks in screen-recorded demos?
by gongjunhao | 2026-02-12 09:43:12+00:00
I nearly exposed user data in a product demo and started using a strict pre-record checklist.

My current workflow:
1) use demo-safe seed data
2) identify sensitive fields before recording
3) apply blur/mask before hitting record
4) refresh once to verify persistence
5) run a 30-second dry run

This reduced both editing time and stress.

Curious what workflows/tools people here use for screen recording privacy (especially for SaaS demos and tutorials).

Context/tool I built while solving this:
https://blurmate.devstorex.top
by latexr | 2026-02-12 09:43:14+00:00
That is called a deepity: a statement which sounds profound but is ultimately trivial and meaningless.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Deepity

Determinism concerns itself with the predictability of the future from past and present states. If nothing were deterministic, you wouldn’t be able to set your clock or plan when to sow and when to harvest. You wouldn’t be able to drive a car or rest a glass on a table. You wouldn’t be able to type the exact same code today and tomorrow and trust it to compile identically. The only reason you can debug code is determinism, it is because you can make a prediction of what should happen and by inspecting what did happen you can can deduce what went wrong several steps before.
by extraduder_ire | 2026-02-12 09:43:43+00:00
I prefer if it's pretty easy to bypass, if it's going to be law at all. My favourite example of this so far is how bluesky handles it.

https://gist.github.com/mary-ext/6e27b24a83838202908808ad528...

The official app/client is 100% legally compliant in its unmodified state. But doing something like using another client, having your PDS say you're age verified, or using a ublock origin rule to change where the geolocation API thinks you are completely sidestep it.
by podgorniy | 2026-02-12 09:44:09+00:00
I am with you on this one.

I've experienced in times of gpt 3, and 3.5 that existence of any, even 1-word system message changed output drastically in the worse direction. I did not verify this behaviour with recentl models.

Since then I don't impose any system prompts on users of my tg bot. This is so unusual and wild in relation to what others do that very few actually appreciate it. I'm happy I don't need to make money for living with this project thus I and can keep it ideologically clean: user's control over system prompts, temperature, top_p, giving selection of the top barebones LLMs.
by donatj | 2026-02-12 09:45:02+00:00
I've worked in the software industry for just over twenty years now. In my experience basically without question the most productive people I have known have had the messiest most chaotic setups online and offline. Hundreds of windows open, more icons on their desktop than it can display.

I worked with an older gentleman for the last decade until recent layoffs who had worked on Oregon Trail for MECC. Single most productive person I've known in my life. I aspire for half the career he's had. His desk was absolute chaos. He had multiple computers on his desk across an unmatched mix of monitors, all as described above, controlled with Synergy.

The least productive people I've known have clean aesthetic desks, no icons on their desktop, and inbox zero.

Don't get me wrong, there are absolutely people that are a mess that aren't productive at all. I have worked with them too. Frankly, in their case, cleanup like this suggests probably would actually help. I've just never seen the opposite.

I just know that the most productive people I've known have been insanely good at managing chaos, and lean into it.
by its_magic | 2026-02-12 09:45:56+00:00
You're harsh but that's OK. There is a lot of truth in what you're saying. I really wish people would quit downvoting everything they disagree with. HN would be 100x better if both the downvote and flags button were removed.

To me, a C guy, the focus on garbage collection is a turn-off. I'm aware that D can work without it, but it's unclear how much of the standard library etc works fine with no garbage collection. That hasn't been explained, that I saw at least.

The biggest problem however is the bootstrapping requirement, which is annoyingly difficult or too involved. (See explanation in my other post.)
by deaux | 2026-02-12 09:45:59+00:00
You should read reports of how Amazon drivers and warehouse workers are treated.

In any case, hiring more support staff doesn't change the quantity of that stuff.

> You suggest they should scale up the support team, I said they should just scale down their whole business.

Oh no, I always agreed with you that what you're saying should be what happens. But there's zero chance of that happening, as only the US can really do this, and it won't unless the candidates for 2028 are not the current frontrunners.

Requiring human phone support however is something e.g. the EU could very reasonably do and get away with.
by deaux | 2026-02-12 09:46:23+00:00
They already are illegal, laws are just not enforced. We don't need more laws, we need enforcement. It's the same in the EU. If GDPR laws were probably enforced the yearly fines would be a magnitude higher than they currently are. But they're still too scared because of the defense and gas reliance.

It stems me positive to read this by a user with a 2012 HN account though! Nice.
by Someone | 2026-02-12 09:46:26+00:00
> On a high level, do I understand correctly that SIMD is close to how the hardware works, while Vector Processor is more of an abstraction?

Not quite. It still is the same “process whatever number of items you can in parallel, decrease count by that, repeat if necessary“ loop.

RISC-V decided to move the “decrease count by that, repeat if necessary” part into hardware, making the entire phrase “how the hardware works”.

Makes for shorter and nicer assembly. SIMD without it first has to query the CPU to find out how much parallelization it can handle (once) and do the “decrease count by that, repeat if necessary” part on the main CPU.
by mike_hearn | 2026-02-12 09:46:29+00:00
> Ireland already has a competitive economy

Ireland's economic statistics are so badly distorted by US companies routing money there that there is an entire subfield of economics dedicated to trying to figure out what Ireland's real economic state is, called "Leprechaun economics". A common adjustment made by economics researchers when studying the EU is to just subtract Ireland entirely.

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

https://www.cfr.org/articles/leprechaun-adjusted-euro-area-g...

https://democracychallenged.com/2025/05/14/irelands-phantom-...

> The key to understanding this disconnect is a number few outside Ireland pay attention to: Modified Gross National Income, or GNI*. Unlike GDP, which counts all activity happening within Ireland’s borders, GNI* adjusts for the distortions caused by the huge presence of foreign multinationals. And the gap is enormous. In 2023, GNI* was just €291 billion — meaning more than €219 billion of Ireland’s reported output never truly flowed into the Irish economy at all.

When looking at Ireland's own economy without the influence of US tax transactions, the economy shrinks by nearly half.
by gspr | 2026-02-12 09:46:45+00:00
> Compared to before, not a lot of carpenters/furniture makers are left.

Which is it? Carpenters or furniture makers? Because the two have nothing in common beyond the fact that both professions primarily work with wood. The former has been unaffected by automation – or even might plausibly have more demand due to the overall economic activity caused by automation! The latter certainly has been greatly affected.

The fact that people all over the thread are mixing up the two is mindboggling. Is there a language issue or something?
by miki123211 | 2026-02-12 09:46:52+00:00
It's weird how different and hyper-local the social media landscape was back then. It's not just that every country had their own thing, it's also that they were all very different concepts and ideas.

Poland's social media of choice was "Nasza Klasa" (lit. "Our Class"), the American alternative was called "Classmates" as far as I know. It was intended as a service that let you re-unite with your old classmates, designed with the way the Polish school system worked in mind. It was used for far more than that though, and was quite popular among kids who were still at school.

We're still in that era with messaging apps somehow. WHile the local alternatives have mostly died out, the world is now a patchwork of WhatsApp, Messenger and Telegram, with islands of iMessage, Line, KakaoTalk and WeChat thrown into the mix. Most countries have basically standardized on one of these, but they can't agree on which one.
by ahartmetz | 2026-02-12 09:46:58+00:00
On the one hand, I like blunt descriptions like yours - the reasons why loving a romantic partner, sex, and caring for children feels good is because that makes the species (or your genes more specifically) continue to exist.

The optimism that some people seem to have about their children weirds me out, too: They will probably end up being pretty normal people. Probably more or less like their parents.

But all of that being bad depends on whether you think that life is mostly suffering and should rather be avoided. It's not what I think. If you think that life is mostly good, then giving life is a good thing.
by jpcompartir | 2026-02-12 09:47:37+00:00
Thanks for the long and considered response, but this is a really ugly UX decision.

As others have said - 'reading 10 files' is useless information - we want to be able to see at a glance where it is and what it's doing, so that we can re-direct if necessary.

With the release of Cowork, couldn't Claude Code double down on needs of engineers?
by bpavuk | 2026-02-12 09:47:41+00:00
and there is a crap-ton of "apps" that repackage the entire world^W^W excuse me, Chromium, hog RAM, and destroy any semblance of native feel - all to write "production-ready" [sic] cross-platform code in JavaScript, a language more absurd than C++[0] but so easy to start with.

[0]: https://jsdate.wtf
by squidbeak | 2026-02-12 09:47:51+00:00
> LLMs are the eternal September for software

Cliche.

> in that the sort of people who couldn’t make it through a bootcamp can now be “programming thought leaders”

Snobbery.

> the sort of people who breathlessly announce

Snobbery / Cliche.

> There’s no longer a reliable way to filter signal from noise.

Cliche.

> There’s utility in these tools, but 99% of the content creators in AI are one intellectual step above banging rocks together

Cliche / Snobbery.

> their judgement of progress is not to be trusted

Tell me, timr, how much judgement is there is in snotty gatekeeping and strings of cliches?
by kriro | 2026-02-12 09:47:52+00:00
I'm pretty sure it works very differently for different people so you have to figure out your own process. I've tried different things but at the end of the day, I simply have a notebook next to my laptop/in my laptop bag and write down everything in freeform text. No index, no bullet points and things like that. I put a date and start writing. I'll usually do some TODOs as checklists to get them out of my brain and bothering me at the start of the day but only big items, not each and every step. It's a mix of work and private things. Just writing stuff down is helpful for me, even if I never reference it again.

I do use the Feynman Technique if I come across something interesting and try to explain it on paper. So if I was using it just for work, I'd probably do that. Something like "Spec driven development (Github Spec Kit and similar toolkits) is essentially a bunch of md files that provide more context for agents. There are some scripts that provide scaffolding, having agents write the md uses a lot of tokens so writing them manually after the scaffold is generated makes more sense. Try with a small project."
by gspr | 2026-02-12 09:48:37+00:00
> I think you have misunderstood what a carpenter is. A carpenter is someone who makes wooden furniture (among other things).

I think _you_ have misunderstood what a carpenter is. At least where I live, you might get a carpenter to erect the wood framing for a house. Or build a wooden staircase. Or erect a drywall. I'm sure most carpenters worth their salt could plausibly also make wooden furniture, at an exorbitant cost, but it's not at all what they do.

I sanity checked with Wiktionary, and it agrees: "A person skilled at carpentry, the trade of cutting and joining timber in order to construct buildings or other structures."
by bayindirh | 2026-02-12 09:49:13+00:00
No. That's too soft. We should go one step further and make computers immutable appliances the moment any game is installed, or maybe out of the box.

macOS, Windows and Linux has the technology. Why wait? Kill general purpose comp^H^H^H^H^ communism right now! Protect the children, save the capit^H^H^H^H nation!
by johndough | 2026-02-12 09:49:36+00:00
I am using piper-tts ( https://github.com/OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl ) with these voice files for GLaDOS: https://huggingface.co/rokeya71/VITS-Piper-GlaDOS-en-onnx/tr...

It is not perfect, but quite sufficient for simple system messages.
by imtringued | 2026-02-12 09:50:13+00:00
If you knew a little bit about history then you would know that the "Anti-Luddite" position is literally "shoot the unemployed if they strike".

Equivocating Luddites with backwards thinking is a way to cover up government violence. You're literally trying to misrepresent the Luddite position by implying that they had some sort of global plot to force the world to be worse and that they were rightfully stopped by the government when in reality they had some personal grievances about how they were treated and they took revenge against the owners of capital by vandalizing their capital.

You're trying to twist this into Luddites hating capital and machinery itself, which is factually wrong.
by BojanTomic | 2026-02-12 09:50:54+00:00
I sure did. Next.js is a great stack, with lots of examples. I use Claude Code in the CLI. I do use it for work as well. But being in the industry for 20 years does help when pairing with an agent. Before, with the kids and everything, I could never find the time for a site like this. I never said AI is bad; it's just not economically sustainable. Those are two different things.
by PostOnce | 2026-02-12 09:51:11+00:00
You open your toolbox to get your pliers, but due to nanite software updates, your pliers are now a chisel.

We carefully considered this change and feel it brings the most value to our users, and we hope you'll love chisel as much as we do.

One day, you guys are gonna learn not to tie your livelihoods to the whim of a corporation, but today isn't that day.
by nicbou | 2026-02-12 09:51:50+00:00
That was also me, but it became unsustainable. I got a lot of reader mail and had to update my contact page to redirect some of it to other experts.

I stopped treating my inbox as an obligation and I reply at my own pace. I still give each email as much consideration as I can, but I no longer feel that it’s required. Some emails go unanswered.

I am slowly working on setting boundaries, especially in response to expectations that I did not opt into. It’s indeed a very contextual reply.
by EdNutting | 2026-02-12 09:51:50+00:00
Hear hear!

I maintain it’s because productive people know how to focus on what matters, to cut through the noise, and it’s not just by carefully thinking things through (though that’s an important skill too). It’s partly because they “just don’t see” the noise - if you like, they’re not distracted by it, they can tune it out - or rather, they don’t need to spend any energy tuning it out because they don’t ‘see’ or hear it in the first place!

I’ve frequently been:
1. Complimented on my productivity
2. Told I need a less messy workspace/environment.

One of these is true, the other is a road to depression - wasting time and energy tidying up and then feeling like I got no actual work done because, well, I didn’t!

There’s obviously a limit - continual small bits of sorting and organising ensure I can still sit at my desk and find stuff on my computer, but it doesn’t need to be the extreme clear-desk policy that proponents of Clean Work seem to be pushing. There’s a huge zone in between the two extremes.
by benterix | 2026-02-12 09:52:07+00:00
> No end-user on planet earth will suffer a single qualm at the notion that their bargain-basement Chinese AI provider 'stole' from American big tech.

Just like nobody cares[0] that American big tech stole from authors of millions of books.

[0] Interestingly, the only ones that cared were the FB employees told to pirate the Library Genesis and reporting back that "it didn't feel right".
by frm88 | 2026-02-12 09:53:12+00:00
Those folks are assuredly not going to do anything more than the bare minimum (and not necessarily because they don't want to) because their delivery quotas don't allow for anything more than dumping a package on a porch (or in an unattended apartment building lobby) and maybe ringing the doorbell/intercom.

So, implement surveillance of all, not only for the fracture of a percent of dogs returned but also because there are no functioning labour laws. Right. Got it. (/s)
by albertnahas | 2026-02-12 09:53:24+00:00
For years I designed icons the “normal” way: Figma files, random icon packs, slight inconsistencies that compound over time. It works—until you try to scale.

When you ship multiple products, icon design becomes infrastructure. Stroke widths drift. Corner radii change. New features introduce subtle visual noise. Eventually your UI feels off, even if nobody can explain why.

So I started treating icons like code.

This post breaks down what I learned building *IcoGenie*—a tool I created to generate consistent, production-ready SVG icons through a programmable pipeline.

The core principles are simple but surprisingly rare in practice:

1. *Icons are systems, not assets.*
Define a strict spec: grid size, optical padding, stroke width, cap/join rules, corner radius logic. If it’s not encoded, it will drift.

2. *SVG structure matters.*
Generative models produce SVGs that “look right” but are messy under the hood. Path fragmentation, unnecessary groups, inconsistent attributes. You need validation and normalization, not just generation.

3. *Constraints improve quality.*
Instead of vague prompts like “minimal cloud icon,” structured inputs tied to a design contract produce predictable results. Determinism beats creativity for product UI.

4. *Batch > one-off.*
The real unlock is generating full icon sets with guaranteed visual coherence. That’s where automation compounds.

IcoGenie is my attempt to operationalize this. It sits between prompt and production, enforcing a design system while letting you explore ideas quickly. The result is clean SVG output that can drop directly into a web or mobile codebase.

This isn’t about replacing designers. It’s about eliminating repetitive vector labor and turning icon design into a reproducible pipeline—similar to how we treat tests, builds, and CI.

If you’re building products and have felt icon entropy creeping into your UI, this might resonate.

Curious how others are handling icon systems in the era of generative tooling.
by jibal | 2026-02-12 09:53:28+00:00
https://dlang.org/spec/betterc.html

https://dlang.org/spec/importc.html

> Note: ImportC and BetterC are very different. ImportC is an actual C compiler. BetterC is a subset of D that relies only on the existence of the C Standard library. BetterC code can be linked with ImportC code, too.

D contains an actual C compiler because Walter Bright wrote one long ago and then incorporated it into D.

Zig also contains an actual C compiler, based on clang, and has a @cImport directive.
by deaux | 2026-02-12 09:53:33+00:00
If we're looking globally, the huuge majority of our industry isn't part of manifesting the Torment Nexus. Unfortunately a lot of HN is, because interest in SV/VC strongly biases towards interest in achieving personal goals (including but not limited to financial earnings), over caring about building something that helps society.

And no, of course not everyone in SV is like that, and not every VC-funded company helps inch towards the Torment Nexus. But there's inherently a strong bias towards it.