MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vicchenai | 2026-02-26 18:33:35+00:00
The maker movement comparison cuts both ways. What killed most Arduino projects wasn't skill gaps -- it was the cost of production at scale. The LED blinks fine; shipping 10k units breaks you. That constraint forced real learning.

Vibe coding skips that floor entirely. Software "just works" until it doesn't, and the failure mode is invisible until it's customer-facing. Hardware at least tells you when something is wrong because it sparks or stops blinking.

That said: the maker movement didn't die. It got serious -- RISC-V, open silicon, edge inference. The people who started with Arduinos are now doing real work.

My bet is vibe coding has the same trajectory. The floor failure will just be more catastrophic when it comes, because software doesn't spark.
by parliament32 | 2026-02-26 18:33:36+00:00
"Near billion users", yet less than 5% pay them a single penny[1]. Like you said, the vast majority of these will never pay anything, but I'd argue the majority will migrate to the "next" free provider as soon as OpenAI starts inserting too many ads into the product.

I watched my partner switch from OAI to DeepSeek during the last outage and she hasn't been back to OAI since. I am skeptical there is any actual stickyness when basically all of the chatbots do the same thing for the casual user.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/15/openais_chatgpt_popul...
by NewsaHackO | 2026-02-26 18:33:38+00:00
But curation was done mainly by the creators, who were the people who were able to do the creation in the first place (professional photographers, people who could afford to buy the expensive camera, people who could afford the software for editing photos/slideshows in mass etc.). Now everyone can curate, and consumers can actually pick which curated collection is truly the best.
by Teever | 2026-02-26 18:33:38+00:00
I've wondered how the world would be different right now if Jobs was still alive.

Asshole as he was, there's no way he would have stood for the kind of shit that is going on in America, and he would have vindictively used all of his resources as the largest shareholder of Disney and CEO of Apple to fight it.

Jobs was obviously not the greatest guy, and harmed a lot of people around him but it's unlikely that he would be seen within a mile of the current President and certainly wouldn't have been photographed in the WH handing him a tacky gold and glass paper weight like Cook.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-02-26 18:33:39+00:00
Gigafactory Nevada notably became the second-largest building in the world (by volume) and was a joint partnership with Panasonic, locating two major manufacturing facilities within the same structure. Seems like a big project with additional joint partner complexities.

Gigafactory Berlin is a different beast and produces a different product mix.

Gigafactory New York produces photovoltaic cells and Tesla Supercharger assemblies but does not produce batteries or vehicles yet another product mix.

Giga Shanghai just does final vehicle assembly (basically the easiest kind of factory and most minimally regulated) and is a million square feet smaller than the other factories and with no joint partnership/co buildout.
by selridge | 2026-02-26 18:34:18+00:00
>"If A and B are separately in the training data, the model can provide a result when A and B occur in the input because the model has made a connection between A and B in the latent space."

This statement (The one I was replying to) is fundamentally unbounded. There's nothing that can't be explained as a combination of "A" and "B" in "training data" because practically speaking we can express anything as such where the combination only needs to be convex along some high-dimensional semantic surface. Add on to that my scare quotes around "training data" because very few people have any practical idea of what is or isn't in there, so we can just make claims strategically. Do we need to explain a success? It was in the training data. A failure, probably not in the training data. Will anyone call us on this transparent farce? Not usually, no.

If a statement can--at will--explain everything and nothing, what's it worth?
by omgwtfbyobbq | 2026-02-26 18:34:27+00:00
You're both likely correct.

We can afford to do it right. It will cost more and we'll have to make more prudent, effective, efficient, etc... decisions about producing and allocating goods and services and would need to give up many of the net negative/zero economic activities we like.

We've also likely enriched ourselves by externalizing the negative externalities of some of our goods and services to other countries. That's our choice, and I don't think it's a great one.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-26 18:34:34+00:00
Of course we don't say that. You can't ask the (traditionally) programmed computer a freeform question and get a sensible answer back. We tried that for going on 50 years and it never really worked. (The highest achievement that comes to mind is answering jeopardy questions.)

You can very carefully construct a query in a dedicated language, debug that query, and get useful results back. But that's clearly just a human using a tool, not a machine exhibiting understanding or general knowledge.

Meanwhile you can ask a multi-billion parameter LLM a freeform question in ~any human language and it can produce a coherent and meaningful response. It can one shot pieces of code. Track down bugs based on compiler error messages. It might not (yet) be human level in many cases but to get hung up on that is to miss the point.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-02-26 18:34:44+00:00
My point is that Anthropic are bullshit as "safety" and "gatekeeper" personalities because they're warning us of exactly the wrong things.

They'll ink deals with all sorts of nefarious parties and be involved in all sorts of dubious things while trumpeting their fake non-profit status and wringing their hands about imminent AGI and "alignment" of the created AIs.

The concern I have is not the alignment of the AIs. They're not capable of having one, no matter what role playing window dressing they put on it.

It's the alignment of Anthropic and the people who use their tools that is a concern. So far it seems f*cked.
by skydhash | 2026-02-26 18:34:47+00:00
The AI approach smells of waterfall and that has been deemed a bad approach to software projects. Not only because of the time cost (which some would argue it can be reduced by agents), but because the only real product is the one in use.

Every product solve some needs, and there are risks associated to the implementations of features. Trying to map every risk is not productive as the feature is not yet proven. Experience is needed to map the path ahead, but only if one has chosen to walk it.

So writing specs is not hated. It’s just that they’re not that different than a SF novels, as their foundation are just hypotheses. If you have a mountain to climb, you do it step by step, not by tracing paths with maps drawn from reports narrating hearsay.

So the most productive is to have an overall roadmap, plan the next months a bit according to your resources, and then fully focus on the next few tasks. Do periodic reviews to assess your progress.
by ryantgtg | 2026-02-26 18:35:41+00:00
Replying to myself. I just read the article. The gray/blue/green H2 fuel costs in the article do not reflect current U.S. fuel costs.

Gray is $8-10 for liquid delivery. This equates to a little over $1 per mile, which - compared to a CNG bus - is double the operating cost (and about 4x more than a battery electric bus per mile... just for fuel/electricity). And yeah, as I mentioned previously, capital costs will be like 1.3x of battery electric.

That said, there are lots of novel ideas out there for creating H2 fuel! Forest waste (with supposedly all carbon captured), methane pyrolysis (with carbon bricks as an output). The promises never end.
by aforwardslash | 2026-02-26 18:36:16+00:00
The other day I built a quick PoC to control 1024 rgb leds using RMT (esp32) and a custom protocol I was developing. Im pretty sure micropython would suck for that.

The other day I also developed a RGB-RGBW converter using a rp2040; claude did most of the assembly, so instead of taking a couple of days, it took a couple of hours.

I don't prefer no code; my point is software is a barrier on embedded systems, and if I - someone who can actually program in c/c++, python and assembly, see huge benefits in using LLMs, for someone at an entry level it is a life changer.
by bigyabai | 2026-02-26 18:36:34+00:00
Almost nobody is doing anything other than Snapchat or Instagram on their iPhones. That's the point, "the overwhelming volume of Apple sales" was the original claim and they're absolutely right. Compare every single Apple product on volume and you will not approach the volume of iPhones being sold. Even cult-classic product lines like the Mac cannot hold a candle in comparison to Airpods sales volume.

If the iPhone was a branded Android device, then sure, maybe this would be an elitist argument. But the iPhone is a proprietary platform with a locked-down browser, locked-down store, locked-down GPU drivers and OTA updates that decide how long your battery lasts. It is not elitist to point out that Apple customers by-and-large ignore these facts, it's the objective circumstances of the smartphone market.
by forthwall | 2026-02-26 18:36:57+00:00
Everyone wants heavy industry outcomes, no one wants heavy industry side-effects;

Do people want oil refineries that constantly catch fire or explode [1], or toxic superfund sites for fabs [2]?

There are opportunities to build safer systems of course, the capital is there but there's places with looser regulations where you can harm people for cheap.

Also, this website does not actually show what laws or reasons why things are banned, it just says it's impossible, no sources, how do I even know this is true?

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/A-look-back-at-s...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/23990525/semiconductor-biden-infras...
by overfeed | 2026-02-26 18:37:07+00:00
> I believe in procedural symmetry: if you ACTUALLY care about people and the environment, then you wouldn't let other poorer do these thing

America barely cares about the domestic poor[1] - do you think it's captains of industry will care about the poor abroad? Charity begins at home.

1. See locations of Superfund sites. Or for a modern example, where they are choosing to build AI datacenters powered by on-site diesel generators or gas turbines.
by chasd00 | 2026-02-26 18:37:16+00:00
Everything is the same until it's not, good luck predicting when "until it's not" is on the horizon though. Isn't technology innovation a power law thing? Everything hums along fairly regular and then, out of the blue, there's a massive impact. Personally, I think AI has made a pretty large impact in software dev and overall tech industry but I don't see AGI any time soon (and that hype has died down) and therefore I don't see the economics working out. The coding tools, API integrations, chatbots, those are great but I don't see them producing the returns required to keep companies like OpenAI running unless OpenAI takes all the customers and all the ad clicks from everyone else ( Athropic, Alhphabet, X, Amazon, Meta, even Microsoft ). I just don't see that happening.
by lotsofpulp | 2026-02-26 18:37:29+00:00
The biggest subsidy is the supply of people, although these days much of those come from outside of the UK rather than other regions in the UK. Other places (and people in those places) bear the cost of making and raising the new people, and London (and other metros) gain the productivity from those new people.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/visualisations/dvc2872/fig03/index.ht...
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-02-26 18:37:50+00:00
It might be fine but it's not a brag that 'the billionaire is contributing'.

Reminder that the Republican policy for 40 years has been to 'starve the beast' and in other ways sabotage government programs so that exactly your argument can be presented. Prior to that intentional sabotage by Republicans and aligned political partisans against the United States we had much less fraudulent and wasteful government. When half of the politicians/oversite/management ACTIVELY wants government (and by extension the country) to fail and engage in policies intended to created failure in the government, it's hard to have effective government.
by dd8601fn | 2026-02-26 18:38:02+00:00
I think the severity of this is wildly overblown in an effort to make it fit the thesis.

Like… if the maker thing was less of an insane cult that died out than genuine excitement about things that actually did matter… well the whole thing falls apart.

We’re just not required to accept the (false, I think) premise this depends on, even if we’re inclined to agree with what it says about vibecoding.
by browningstreet | 2026-02-26 18:38:04+00:00
Ever since OpenAI stuck the "Memory almost full" ad banner at the bottom of every chat, I've moved away from them. I have Grok in my car, Alexa+ on my alexas, Gemini Plus from my Google Workspace account, Microsoft Copilot at work, Claude Code because I like it, Opencode because it's free enough -- by spreading my chats around I'm not beholden to any single of them.

None of these can't be moved away from immediately. Even with my github repos, I use Antigravity, Claude Code, Opencode, and I might try Codex. I use one of them as a primary more than the other, but they're as close to interchangeable as possible.
by bgro | 2026-02-26 18:38:18+00:00
I’ve been pointing to Google Maps, drive as specific but not the complete set of fantastic innovation we saw around ~2007 for how great developers used to be.

I think the drift is specifically tied to the introduction of leetcode in the interview process. Which may sound like a wild connection at first but I’ve now lived through being blocked and seeing how creative devs can’t get through leetcode gatekeepers who are microfussing and blanket critiquing devs as bad when they don’t have leetcode answers pre memorized in a mental hasmap to be able to regurgitate from memory which allows the extra mental capacity to free up in order to hold a performative class lecture about it at the same time.

You can spend your time memorizing the test taking skills to be good at tests. Maybe memorize the answers too. Or you can be coming up with grand ideas like maps and street view and thinking about how all these things in the world come together to be able to do that.

Not many are good at both and the entire stack of people doing interviews is currently blocked at fixing this. Nobody wants to have wasted their time memorizing leetcode to just not gatekeep people who didn’t put in “the same effort,” and no hiring team wants to gamble on somebody who fails the leetcode test processes and turns out to be the occasional bad hire with the only paperwork saying they didn’t pass the industry standard test and shouldn’t have gotten hired in the first place.

So we’re now blocked with only slop workers getting hired who don’t feel the same comfort to take big risks and we get slop like Microsoft notepad plus copilot 365 as a result.
by deelayman | 2026-02-26 18:38:32+00:00
Lovely to hear about it going right. There's still many contrasting accounts of underperforming regulation for environmental cleanup in Canada's West.

And just today, another story on the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise position being unfilled since May 2025. With piling up reports of human rights violations and negative environmental impacts on Canadian companies operating abroad.
by cyberax | 2026-02-26 18:39:07+00:00
> Nothing about this addresses NJB's argument that self-driving cars take up more space than regular cars, because there will now be cars with 0 people in them.

And? There are also buses that trundle around with nobody but the driver in it. Or unused bikes and e-scooters that litter the sidewalks.

> Ultimately the thing you want to transport is not cars, it's people.

Yeah. And let's make it efficient. Put these people into 3-level bunk beds. This way they can travel all together in just 1 bus to their assigned workplace. And you don't need to run buses until they're allowed to clock off their shift.

Efficiency!

> On the other hand, when congestion is so bad that cars simply don't move

In this case you close the downtown offices and force them to work on alternate days, like they do in India with cars. Remote work already can replace 70% of all work, and with AI this number will grow.

Apart from that, mild carpooling will decrease the number of cars by 2x. Small vans with 6 seats can _easily_ remove all congestion.

> no matter how many lanes they have, getting people out of cars into more efficient forms of transport, will also help cars.

Just one ask for urbanists. Can you just stop lying, please? Just one thing. Don't say that "transit help cars". It doesn't. There is a lot of research from _you_ (e.g. https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/7/does-buildi... ) that proves this. Transit does NOT decrease the travel time for cars ("traffic") it _increases_ it by increasing congestion due to increased housing density that transit forces.

You want to pack people into 3x3 jails ("microapartments")? Fine. But be honest about it.
by fzeroracer | 2026-02-26 18:39:32+00:00
> “If you’re not doing anything illegal, why worry about it?” said long-time Jacumba resident Allen Stanks, 70.

Glad to see they dug out the most intelligent person to react to this information. It's also incredibly funny because the opposite should also apply to the government; if they're not doing anything illegal then they should have no need to hide their local surveillance network inside of abandoned trailers or other items. Just another reason to toss on the pile for dismantling CBP.
Show HN: Turning 2D floor plans into 3D-ready JSON with Detectron2
by acaciabengo | 2026-02-26 18:39:58+00:00
Hey HN,

For the past few weekends, I have been working on a computer vision pipeline to solve a specific PropTech problem: turning messy, highly occluded 2D floor plans into clean, structured data for 3D extrusion. I originally built this as a demo for a firm.

The Stack & Architecture I built an instance segmentation pipeline that relies strictly on pixel-perfect masking to extract the geometry.

The Backbone: Swin Transformer + Detectron2 + OpenCV
Training: Trained on 1024x1024 images using an RTX 4090.
Inference: Runs on CPU in < 10s.
Demo Performance: 67.1% AP50 for instance segmentation masks, and 38.2% AP across the strict 0.50:0.95 IoU thresholds.

Why I'm posting: A lot of virtual staging and architectural startups have beautiful Three.js rendering engines, but still rely on manual data entry to build the base geometry. I built this specifically as an extraction engine to sit underneath those UIs.

If you are in PropTech or building a product that could benefit from embedding this model under the hood, I would love to chat.
by jmull | 2026-02-26 18:40:06+00:00
> The central promise—that distributed digital fabrication would bring manufacturing back to America, that every city would have micro-factories, that 3D printing would decentralize production—simply didn’t materialize.

I never heard that. It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale, did it? Units per hour and dollars per unit was never its strength. It was always going to be small things (and if anything big grew out of it, those would naturally transition to the more efficient manufacturing at scale).

Vibe coding, on the other hand, is competing against hand coding, and for many use cases is considerably more efficient. It’s clearly replacing a lot of hand coding.

BTW, I think a lot of people were/are greatly overestimating the value of coding to business success. It’s fungible from a macro perspective, so isn’t a moat by itself. There’s certainly a cost, but hardly the only one if you’re trying to be the next big startup (for that, the high cost of coding was useful — something to deter potential competitors; you’ll have to make up the difference in some other way now).

Also, software is something that already scaled really well in the way businesses need it to — code written once, whether by human or LLM, can be executed billions of times for almost nothing. Companies will be happy to have a way to press down the budget of a cost center, but the delta won’t make or break that many businesses.

As always, the people selling pick-axes during the gold rush will probably do the best.
by ane | 2026-02-26 18:40:31+00:00
I am also glad the
commercial niche illustration markets like Magic the Gathering are extremely hostile to AI art, though of course I would think Wizards of the Coast, the company that publishes MTG, probably see artists as a cost. Maybe.

Perhaps in the future artists will be used to train models that can output a certain style of art and the artist will receive royalties based on their influence on the trained model and its popularity.
by dundarious | 2026-02-26 18:40:54+00:00
I am just today experience an issue where the volume is reset 100% for each ad. Ads play, I turn volume down to 8%, I have the tab still on display (though I have focus on a separate window), and when the 1st ad ends, the 2nd ad is as loud as 100% even though the slider remains at 8%. Click to reset it to 8%, then 3rd ad plays at 100%.
by mrguyorama | 2026-02-26 18:41:03+00:00
Disney is also sort of stuck in a bad place. More human beings want to visit these parks than is physically, or at least safely, possible. They've implemented this entire virtual queuing system that absolutely sucks to use and experience and plan around but what the hell else are they supposed to do? Auction off rides? Use a lottery system?

It's not like you can just scale up the magic kingdom.

Disney theme parks are a scarce resource.

I loathe Disney but there's no such thing as the Disney park of 2000, today.

This is happening to a lot of tourism because there's just way more tourism today than 50 years ago. There are way more wealthy people who can just throw money at the problem of "I want to do <thing>". They will always be able to outcompete the normal family of yesteryear who got to experience magic on a budget.

Of course Disney doesn't want you to think about how they really wanted this to happen and worked towards this goal as they have sought more international revenue so it's partially their fault.
by modeless | 2026-02-26 18:41:35+00:00
The difference is that it's useful for navigating the real world. You could have way better directions displays that show directions in context instead of just schematically. It would make the petabytes of imagery that has already been collected much more accessible and therefore useful, instead of being relegated to a special clunky Street View mode that is rarely visited. It would enable exploring real spaces in a way that provides much better spatial context, to build a spatial memory that helps your navigation when you get to the real place. And yes, it would be fun. At one time, Google was into that sort of thing.
by guywithahat | 2026-02-26 18:41:37+00:00
I don't think we're priced out, there's still a lot of competitive manufacturing in the US. I think it stems from a regulatory side, primarily in unions and logistics, which is unfortunate because these provide very little or no benefit to citizens but make it sometimes impossible to invest heavily in manufacturing here. People can't create dense factories cities like Detroit if a union may come in and destroy it, and we can't move fast enough if it's going to take years to get regulatory approval to develop a large factory (the Micron factory in Syracuse comes to mind, although there are many like it).