MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by joecool1029 | 2026-02-21 22:15:43+00:00
> To top it all off you then go onto weird virtue signaling about children breathing recycling fumes, how about you climb off your high horse and maintain your own equipment for a change?

Apologies about this part, you are correct that this wasn't your words, the rest of what I wrote I still stand behind. Mostly, it's a problem that you seem to believe that because of incremental improvements in battery technology, we're at a point where it's acceptable to make devices an end-user can't service. That we can't design for water/dust ingress protection and have an easier to replace battery.

Realistically batteries currently made reach end of service life around 3 years, previously it was around 2. People using devices heavily (gaming/videoconferencing) or living in hot climates will have shorter service life. You can push them past the 80% health threshold, but then it's throttling, risk of bulging, etc. You got 9 or so years out of a SE using the battery long past its service life.

But you, (yes, you!) act like everything's currently fine with designs and that we won't burn up the batteries sooner. I'm saying that is misguided and it doesn't line up to the reality you've experienced directly (which is that batteries are still a consumable that need to be replaced eventually). You probably haven't got your hands dirty to DIY, nor are you aware of how they made it harder than it has to be (some manufacturers don't put adhesive tabs on the batteries to pull off). You don't understand that it's possible for the engineering divisions to design a no compromise device that's easier to service and the only reason manufacturers don't is because of the pervasive mindset of: 'Well the battery is cooked, time to buy a new device'. Apple basically still designs their devices for maintenance, but they did it in a way to require specialized equipment.

You're clearly not a device lessee if using the device that long, so why have lessee mindset?
by throwaway13337 | 2026-02-21 22:16:17+00:00
Maybe we needed to go through this dark age to appreciate that sort of future.

This sort of thing is more attractive now that people know the alternative.

Back then, people didn't want to pay for anything on the internet. Or at least I didn't.

Now we can kill the beasts as we outprice and outcompete.

Feels like the 90s.
by IshKebab | 2026-02-21 22:16:30+00:00
No because the syntax is so awful. Programming languages are consumed by machines but written by humans. You need to find a middle ground that works for both. That's (one of the reasons) why we don't all program in assembly any more.

Lisp and similar are just "hey it's really easy to write a parser if we just make all programmers write the AST directly!". Cool if the goal of your language is a really simple parser. Not so cool if you want to make it pleasant to read for humans.
by MaulingMonkey | 2026-02-21 22:16:40+00:00
> Would have to be F32, no?

Generally yes. `NonZeroU32::saturating_add(self, other: u32)` is able to return `NonZeroU32` though! ( https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/num/type.NonZeroU32.html#metho... )

> I cannot think of any way to enforce "non-zero-ness" of the result without making it return an optional Result<NonZeroF32>, and at that point we are basically back to square one...

`NonZeroU32::checked_add(self, other: u32)` basically does this, although I'll note it returns an `Option` instead of a `Result` ( https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/num/type.NonZeroU32.html#metho... ), leaving you to `.map_err(...)` or otherwise handle the edge case to your heart's content. Niche, but occasionally what you want.
by relaxing | 2026-02-21 22:16:47+00:00
90 days living there is the threshold.

You wouldn’t make a good candidate for a national security job, not that it sounds like you want to be. Investigators would want to know who you’d been associating with at all those different places, and tracking it all down would take a long time ( the wait for the investigation can be years, the period during which you’d be unhireable for the job you were going after.)
by TacticalCoder | 2026-02-21 22:16:47+00:00
I used to run pihole on a Pi and now I directly run unbound, still on a Pi. The difference on a great many sites is night and day: you simply get way fewer ads. And that's just by using a DNS blocklist.

Occasionally I'll get one site that refuses to load because I've got an "adblocker" but most sites do work fine, just with way fewer ads.
by obiefernandez | 2026-02-21 22:17:10+00:00
I just recreated most of Linear for my company in a few days. Making it hyper specific to what we want (metrics driven, lean startup style).

All state changes are made with MCP so it saved me from having to spend time on any forms and most interactions other than filtering searching sorting etc.

Means we will be ditching Linear soon.

I know I’m an outlier but this sort of thing will get more common.
by cbeach | 2026-02-21 22:18:19+00:00
> I’ve always avoided client-side React because of its direct harm to end users (over-engineered bloated sites that take way longer to load than they need to).

A couple of megabytes of JavaScript is not the "big bloated" application in 2026 that is was in 1990.

Most of us have phones in our pockets capable of 500Mbps.

The payload of an single page app is trivial compared to the bandwidth available to our devices.

I'd much rather optimise for engineer ergonomics than shave a couple of milliseconds off the initial page load.
by cholmess21 | 2026-02-21 22:18:32+00:00
We’ve been experimenting with adding deterministic guardrails to LLM changes before merge.

When swapping models or tweaking prompts, subtle regressions can slip in:
– cost spikes
– format drift
– PII leakage

Traditional CI assumes deterministic output, which LLMs aren’t.

We built a small local-first CLI that compares baseline vs candidate outputs and returns ALLOW / WARN / BLOCK based on cost, drift, and PII.

Curious how others are handling this problem:

Are you snapshot testing?

Using SaaS evaluation tools?

Relying on manual review?

Not gating at all?

Would love to understand real workflows.
by ms_sv | 2026-02-21 22:18:38+00:00
Endorsements are good way, but limited and they can be bought and can be faked easily, which does not bring much credibility.Do you think there is a way to improve the endorsement system from LinkedIn into something that will be taken more seriously?

Yes that is the main assumption, seniors would not be interested in getting their skill verified they will be doing the verifying to a junior or whatever entry title there is, in order to help them gain their credibility even mentor them, so it would be easier for them to stand out.

That is a fair point, also that is going to be part of the verification process, engineers would be able to get badges verified for their projects, atm I can AI generate a whole project and add it to my portfolio, without having to do the system design work, but if I get into the verification process, then I would be able to prove I did it if I really did by explaining my system design, decisions, compromises so on.
by theptip | 2026-02-21 22:18:39+00:00
> we moved from "AI is dangerous"

There was never consensus on this. IME the vast majority of people never bought in to this view.

Those of us who were making that prediction early on called it exactly like it is: people will hand over their credentials to completely untrustworthy agents and set them loose, people will prompt them to act maximally agentic, and some will even prompt them to roleplay evil murderbots, just for lulz.

Most of the dangerous scenarios are orthogonal to the talking points around “are they conscious”, “do they have desires/goals”, etc. - we are making them simulate personas who do, and that’s enough.
by andoando | 2026-02-21 22:19:05+00:00
I use it for stuff like this from my phone:

- Setup mailcow, anslytics, etc on my server.

- Run video generation model on my linux box for variations of this prompt

- At the end of every day analyze our chats, see common pain points and suggest tools that would help.

- Monitor my API traffic over night and give me a report in the morning of errors.

Im convinced this is going to be the future
by slophater | 2026-02-21 22:20:00+00:00
exactly. recently "if the cto is shipping more than you, you're doing something wrong"

cto can't even articulate a sentence without passing it through an LLM, and instead of doing his job he's posting the stupidest shit to his personal bootlicking chat channel. I cringe every time at the brown-nosers that inhabit that hovel.

no words for what the product org is becoming too. they should take their own advice a bit further and just replace all the leadership with an LLM, it would be cheaper and it's the same shit in practice
by XorNot | 2026-02-21 22:20:23+00:00
That research was oriented towards making sure it wasn't possible though.

You're saying "of course it isn't" - but how do you know that?

At the time the Soviets had the same sort of projects. So until you're sure it's not possible, the potential capability is an enormous threat if it is.

How they went about that research is where the waste creeps in.
by bscphil | 2026-02-21 22:21:00+00:00
I like this article a lot, but if I can put forward one mild criticism, it seems to depend entirely on having exactly the same measure of semantic distance for word pairs as the original generator. In that case, as the post shows, you only need several guesses to eliminate all possibilities other than the correct one, just like you only need a few GPS satellite locks to pin down your location.

It would be interesting to see a solver that works more like a human player, where it requires the "warmer" "colder" information from different guesses to hone in, rather than being able to simply look up which words have the exact semantic distance (+/- some fudge factor) from the guess.
by michaelt | 2026-02-21 22:21:14+00:00
> If the system is broken, this is actually a good thing.

Sometimes when you reveal extensive noncompliance with dumb requirements, the requirements get less dumb. Other times, the organisation doubles down and starts punishing the noncompliance.

My employer's official security policies say everyone should kensington lock their laptop to their desk at all times, even though the office is behind two guards and three security doors. Nobody does. But if someone made a load of noise about it, there's no guarantee they'd remove the widely ignored rule; they might instead start enforcing it.
Ask HN: What's one thing that interested you this week?
by subdomain | 2026-02-21 22:21:33+00:00
Hi HN! I'm Micah Blachman, a twelve-year-old who runs a weekly newsletter about tech, type design and more. I'm writing my post for this week, and I'd like to know: What's one thing that interested you this week (can be anything!)?

I'm purposely leaving it open-ended to hear what the community comes up with, and I'm looking forward to hearing the inspiration! Oh, and by the way, feel free to subscribe to my newsletter if you haven't already :)

https://micahblachman.beehiiv.com/subscribe
by newyankee | 2026-02-21 22:21:37+00:00
I think a few people were expecting the same cost curves that happened with batteries to happen with hydrogen but it seems the challenges are more difficult to overcome. Otherwise I think a Solar PV plant combined with Captive hydrogen production for refuelling on major highways sounds interesting, at least in countries like US, Australia etc. I believe this is not just about PEM or AEM electrolyser or specific tech, it never got the scaling boost.

Ironically the stack comprising fuel cells of different types is possibly very well studied since decades.

For me the Wells to wheel efficiency never made hydrogen worthwhile for short to medium distances and this battle is effectively over.
by sigbottle | 2026-02-21 22:22:08+00:00
[Autovectorization is not a programming model](https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/18/ispc-origins).

Sure, obviously, we will not undersatnd every single little thing down to the tiniest atoms of our universe. There are philosophical assumptions underlying everything and you can question them (quite validly!) if you so please.

However, there are plenty of intermediate mental models (or explicit contracts, like assembly, elf, etc.) to open up, both in "engineeering" land and "theory" land, if you so choose.

Part of good engineering as well is deciding exactly when the boundary of "don't cares" and "cares" are, and how you allow people to easily navigate the abstraction hierarchy.

That is my impression of what people mean when they don't like "magic".
by blundergoat | 2026-02-21 22:22:10+00:00
We treat webhooks as at-least-once delivery over an unreliable transport and design for duplicates and out-of-order events.

A few rules that have saved us:

- Persist before responding. Never process inline. Write payload to DB, return 200 fast.

- Idempotency key required. Either provider event ID or hash the payload.

- Async worker processes from queue. Exponential backoff + max attempts.

- Dead letter queue + dashboard. Humans need visibility.

- Alert on backlog growth, not single failures. One failure is noise. A growing retry queue is signal.

- Relying on provider retries alone has bitten us more than once.
by selridge | 2026-02-21 22:23:12+00:00
This is true. I was being brash. Let me say instead that the split in reasoning and evaluation as it exists on macOS in this area is rough and potentially not needed. Granted, I don't have a better answer in my back pocket, and the fact that Apple has kicked the can for 15 years on trying to harmonize these is a sign it's hard.
by gcanyon | 2026-02-21 22:23:41+00:00
I have no clue where I read it, that was back when meh.com launched eleven-ish years ago. I didn't find it in a hot minute of searching either. I did find these, some of which talk about the circumstances obliquely:

https://www.ecommercefuel.com/woot/

https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/27/woot-reborn-as-meh/

https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2014/july/...

https://meh.com/forum/topics/year-one-meh-stats--mediocre-st...
by zmj | 2026-02-21 22:23:46+00:00
Testing the "whole system" for a mature enterprise product is quite difficult. The combinatorial explosion of account configurations and feature usage becomes intractable on two levels: engineers can't anticipate every scenario they need their tests to cover (because the product is too big understand the whole of), and even if comprehensive testing was possible - it would be impractical on some combination of time, flakiness, and cost.
by tokenless | 2026-02-21 22:24:50+00:00
The difference is the loom is performing linear work.

Programming is famously non-linear. Small teams making billion dollar companies due to tech choices that avoid needing to scale up people.

Yes you need marketing, strategy, investment, sales etc. But on the engineering side, good choices mean big savings and scalability with few people.

The loom doesn't have these choises. There is no make a billion tshirts a day for a well configured loom.

Now AI might end up either side of this. It may be too sloppy to compete with very smart engineers, or it may become so good that like chess no one can beat it. At that point let it do everything and run the company.
by JamesLeonis | 2026-02-21 22:25:14+00:00
I agree.

I find it a bit ironic that this site regularly talks about banning whole countries and IP ranges on our servers, then acts shocked when users do the same. The fact that somebody went to the effort to create and share this shows how poorly the public sees the web.

The reality we face is "Check your AdBlocker" is the new "Check your spam folder" and we should adjust accordingly.
by bccdee | 2026-02-21 22:25:19+00:00
Yeah they're describing a real problem, but the cause of that problem—a seamless centralized sign-up funded by VC money—is the reason bluesky took off to begin with.

Bsky offers an on-ramp to a more decentralized experience, but most people won't pay the money and experience the friction to move take that ramp. Platforms like Mastodon are entirely decentralized, but that means the friction of decentralizing happens immediately upon sign-up. The people who don't want to self-host PDSes never signed up for Mastodon to begin with.

I try to be skeptical, but I feel like bsky (or something like it) is the best way can do re: bringing decentralization to the masses.
by bensyverson | 2026-02-21 22:25:27+00:00
Yes, LLMs can basically short-circuit the entire product design and development process if you want them to. You can write "Give me a goal tracking app" and pretty reliably one-shot it. Success?

I think a lot of folks would benefit from re-reading the Agile Manifesto [0]. Unfortunately in the corporate world, "Agile" became almost a perfect inversion of the original 12 principles, but in the age of AI, I think it's more relevant than ever. Back when you could only get through a handful of "user stories" per week, there was tremendous pressure on developers to prioritize the "right" ones, which led to more and more layers of planners, architects and delivery leads.

Now the feedback loop between the customer, business and developer is as tight as it always should have been.

[0]: https://agilemanifesto.org
by measurablefunc | 2026-02-21 22:26:22+00:00
Even if you reduce all the non-determinism you still will not get consistent results b/c of floating point rounding & instruction scheduling in the GPU. There is no way to guarantee that the GPU pipelines will execute your instructions exactly in the order you want it to be executed b/c GPUs are now essentially equivalent to sufficiently smart compilers & perform all sorts of clever instruction re-ordering behind the scenes. Expecting complete reproducibility at scale is a pipe dream.
by grogenaut | 2026-02-21 22:26:37+00:00
Lazy is a bit pejorative.

Other than the people that hang out here, most people don't want to write software, they want to make problems go away and things happen and make their lives easier and more fun.

we can magically have the ai do things for us now... for most people that's perfect. it opens programming up to others but do they care how it happens? does your ceo care what programming language or library you use (if they do do you want to work there)?
by godelski | 2026-02-21 22:26:49+00:00
> I sincerely doubt you produced the source

Either I did or didn't. What is not in question is that I provided a source.

> I read what you wrote, pal.

Forgive me for not believing you. I linked a source and you made speculations about what was in it. If you can't bother to read that then why should I believe you read anything else? Reading requires more than saying the words aloud in your head. At least if you want to read above a 3rd grade level. Yes, I'm being mean, but if you don't have the patience to actually read the comment you're responding to you then you shouldn't expect anyone to have the patience to respond to your rude behavior with kindness.
Show HN: GitHub Tray for GNOME gets a big update: notifications, Actions, issues
by debba | 2026-02-21 22:26:57+00:00
What's new n v9:

GitHub Notifications panel — a full accordion UI to browse and manage your notifications directly from the tray

GitHub Actions workflow runs — see the status of your CI/CD pipelines at a glance

Refresh button — manually refresh notifications without waiting for the next poll

Mark as read on open — notifications reload automatically when you open them

Scrollable & paginated list — handles large notification lists without cluttering the UI

Translations — added German , Spanish , and French

Bug fixes — properly clears timers and nullifies managers on destroy (no more memory leaks)

Feedback on the UI styling from last time was noted too and you can check here.

Install it from GNOME Extensions: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/9307/github-tray/

Source: https://github.com/debba/github-tray-gnome-extension

As always, join the Discord for feature requests and discussion: https://discord.gg/YrZPHAwMSG
by jesse_dot_id | 2026-02-21 22:27:05+00:00
The LLM paradigm will never lead to AGI and to attach something other than AGI to all of your personal data and files — and setting it free whilst you sleep — is about as dumb as anything I can imagine.

The frontend will remain a requirement because you cannot trust LLMs to not hallucinate. Literally cannot. The "Claw" phenomenon is essentially a marketing craze for a headless AI browser that has filesystem access. I don't even trust my current browser with filesystem access. I don't trust the AI browsers when I can see what they're doing because they click faster than I can process what they're doing. If they're stopping to ask my permission, what's the point?

Mark my words, this will be an absolute disaster for every single person who connects these things to anything of meaning eventually.
by retrac | 2026-02-21 22:27:06+00:00
I recently skimmed a grammar of Faroese [0]. Not much has been written about the language in English; only a few books, and an English-Faroese dictionary was only first published in the 1980s.

It's spoken by about 50,000 people in the Faroe Islands, which are between Iceland and Scotland. The isles were settled by Viking-era Norse about a thousand years ago and then largely forgotten by the rest of the world. But they kept speaking their version of Old Norse and it became its own language. There are many dialects and the writing system was designed to cover all of them, so it is is etymologically informed by Old Norse and it is very conservative. It's not at all indicative of how it's really pronounced. The written form is somewhat even mutually intelligible with Icelandic / Old Norse, but the spoken language is not.

Underneath those æ and ð is a language that is oddly similar to English, like parallel convergent evolution. It's a North Germanic language not a West Germanic language so the historical diversion point is about 1500 years ago.

But it has undergone an extensive vowel shift (but in a different pattern). And also like English, it has also undergone extensive affrication (turned into ch/j) of the stop consonants and reduction of final stops and intervocalic stops. It has the same kind of stress - vowel reduction interaction that English has. That further heightens the uncanny effect.

I came away with the impression that it is English's closest sibling language, aside from Dutch. Some vocabulary:

broðir "broh-wer" (brother), heyggjur "hoy-cher" (hill/height), brúgv "brukf" (bridge), sjógvar/sjós "shekvar/shos" (sea), skyggj "skooch" (sky/cloud), djópur "cho-pur" (deep), veðirinn "ve-vir-uhn" (weather). Rough pronunciations given between quotes; all examples are cognate with English!

There's an extended story reading by a native speaker here [1] if you want an example of what it sounds like. No idea what they're saying. The intonation reminds me a bit of the northern British isles which also had a Norse influence.

[0] https://annas-archive.org/md5/4d2ce4cd5e828bbfc7b29b3d03349b...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSXu2fuJOTQ

Repost of an earlier comment of mine.