MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bickfordb | 2026-02-18 02:34:35+00:00
Church goers using parking lots like this is a use, but I doubt it's a productive charitable use that should to be subsidized by localities.

Every other contemporary development in my area that faces real economic reality is ground floor retail, commercial/residential on top, and optionally underground parking.

There are certainly productive religious charitable efforts using facilities like this: homeless shelters, community low-cost/free clinics, soup kitchens. I think these uses should be tax subsidized, but other mystical efforts should not be whether they generate a profit or not.

I think a good reform to the 501c3 system would be to make non-profits like these churches and hopstials classify their actual charitable activity and separate it from their other activity, just like individuals with a mix of personal/small business income/expenses are required to do.
by georgemcbay | 2026-02-18 02:34:48+00:00
Could not care less what Garry Tan's opinion of MacKenzie Scott’s charity work is.

Even if every penny she gave away did zero good and was just to spite Bezos, I'd still respect her far more than any of the tech oligarchs who are actively making the world worse just to see their own personal net wealth number go up.
by bee_rider | 2026-02-18 02:34:49+00:00
In Star Trek the humans have an off switch too, just only Spock knows it, haha.

Jokes aside, it is essentially true that we can only prove that we’re sentient, right? That’s the whole “I think therefore I am” thing. Of course we all assume without concrete proof that everybody else is experiencing sentience like us.

In the case of fiction… I dunno, Data is canonically sentient or he isn’t, right? I guess the screenwriters know. I assume he is… they do plot lines from his point of view, so he must have one!
by klardotsh | 2026-02-18 02:35:10+00:00
VSCode is not a “given” - I certainly don’t use, or ever intend to use, it.

Patch files are excellent for small diffs at a glance. Sure, I can also `git remote add coworker ssh://fork.url` and `git diff origin/main..coworker/branch`, and that would even let me use Difftastic (!), but the patch is entirely reasonable for quick glances of small branch diffs.
by Wowfunhappy | 2026-02-18 02:35:12+00:00
Also, if you are a human who does taste, it's very difficult to get an AI to create exactly what you want. You can nudge it, and little by little get closer to what you're imagining, but you're never really in control.

This matters less for text (including code) because you can always directly edit what the AI outputs. I think it's a lot harder for video.
by echelon | 2026-02-18 02:35:18+00:00
I don't know about AGI, but these models are automating a lot of work.

I think but do not know that we'll have higher level work that sits atop it.

I don't know if/when we won't be needed to orchestrate that work.

I'm worried that if we don't have open source models that are up to par with the work-automating models that we'll have a rosy future. One of my biggest fears right now is big capital owning all the big models and infra. And that one day, they'll own all the labor.
by prawn | 2026-02-18 02:35:22+00:00
I've been in web design since images were first introduced to browsers and modern designs for the majority of sites are more templated than ever. AI can already generate inspiration, prototypes and designs that go a long way to matching these, then juice them with transitions/animations or whatever else you might want.

The other day I tested an AI by giving it a folder of images, each named to describe the content/use/proportions (e.g., drone-overview-hero-landscape.jpg), told it the site it was redesigning, and it did a very serviceable job that would match at least a cheap designer. On the first run, in a few seconds and with a very basic prompt. Obviously with a different AI, it could understand the image contents and skip that step easily enough.
by cdegroot | 2026-02-18 02:35:28+00:00
I would expect it to be good - it's typeset with LaTeX and shipped as a regular (vector) PDF, the rest is on Lulu/Amazon but I don't expect issues there. To be completely honest, I'm still waiting for the author copy from Lulu, which I'm using as a final check before allowing wider distribution (channels that don't allow quick fixes). But I've ordered several books from Lulu in the past, and they were fine, to my (amateur) eyes looked the same as something from a regular publisher (the modern ones likely use the same/similar print-on-demand hardware).
Tell HN: Attackers using Google parental controls to prevent account recovery
by TazeTSchnitzel | 2026-02-18 02:35:46+00:00
Someone I know just had their Google account compromised, but the normal recovery methods don't work for an interesting reason: the attacker has made the account into a "child" account subordinate to an attacker-controlled "parent" account. This apparently blocks the ability to use any of the Google account recovery methods (backup phone number or email address etc) without parental consent.

Apparently this person I know isn't alone, if you search you can find other people reporting they've been victims of this. And of course, Google support is nonexistent for ordinary users, so there's no real recourse. Let this be a warning about the consequences of ill-thought-out "child safety features"?
by intended | 2026-02-18 02:36:02+00:00
3 things

1) I don’t disagree with the spirit of your argument

2) 3D printing has higher startup costs than code (you need to buy the damn printer)

3) YOU are making a distinction when it comes to vibe coding from non-tech people. The way these tools are being sold, the way investments are being made, is based on non-domain people developing domain specific taste.

This last part “reasonable” argument ends up serving as a bait and switch, shielding these investments. I might be wrong, but your comment doesn’t indicate that you believe the hype.
by godelski | 2026-02-18 02:36:27+00:00
I really hate that all these companies play smoke and mirrors. Honestly, I don't see a major problem with companies using remote assistance in the transition to fully autonomous systems (jumping straight to autonomous seems insanely dangerous!), under the condition that it is disclosed and the users/public are aware. I don't see how anything short of just is anything but fraud.

To be clear, I think Waymo meets my bar. They appear to be working mostly autonomously and are clear about having assistance. They seem to have stated that from the very start and has been the response to many public questions.

But we waste so much time and money because of that fraud. It breeds distrust in our society and frankly I just don't understand why it's legal or fines are so small. Fraud kills legitimate businesses. It kills those playing fair. It makes people doubt those that do play fair so it just reinforces more fraud.
by marcosdumay | 2026-02-18 02:36:53+00:00
Personally, I just scroll through them. They break the feed into well defined "chapters" at the end of what I can decide to look into the next one or go somewhere else because there's nothing good there today.

Also there's this woman that makes very funny shorts about software development and good long videos that aren't as good. I look for her shorts too.
by okanat | 2026-02-18 02:37:11+00:00
And also majority of European businesses and governments and schools. Europe is well integrated into US. Quite a few STOXX 600 have US wings or acquired US companies.

Basically a substantial (non-software) enginerring or financial work is done in Microsoft's proprietary formats, occasionaly involving VBA.

Many businesses cannot even pay salaries without macro-ridden Excel documents.

With 365 Microsoft has even stronger moat: cloud integrated co-editing using desktop apps. No browser will exceed C++/C# Office apps running directly on the PC. Not even proprietary apps have equivalent experience.

On top of that add all Azure, SharePoint etc. All big companies without exception use those and put significant portion of their business knowledge on Microsoft platforms.

US can literally kill Europe by just forcing Microsoft to shutdown its operations. It is fucking scary.
by tim-tday | 2026-02-18 02:37:35+00:00
This is not uncommon. There have been dozens of reports of people who just dig because they find it peaceful and comforting.

It’s probably beneficial behavioral survival mechanism. As humans we like to think we’re immune to natural or inherited instincts, but that’s probably not true. If we slow down and listen we would probably hear a lot more of them.

Having a member of your tribe who likes to spend their free time digging tunnels turns out to be a beneficial survival trait in a lot of unexpected but lethal eventualities.
by FireBeyond | 2026-02-18 02:37:56+00:00
> a bit more lightweight

I don't want to be overly negative, but no plugins are mandatory, there's no "47 step setup guide" unless you want to heavily customize.

And as far as I can tell you mostly replaced some of the weight with AI?

AI "Search Notes", "Organize Notes", "List and filter, tags", "Clean up notes"

I guess I just see this as weight in a different area? You've pushed a lot of the weight and plugins to cloud-based AI?

I am, on principle, very much a fan of "native app, not another Electron view".
by Brajeshwar | 2026-02-18 02:38:16+00:00
I ~like~ love Obsidian. I also like Steph Ango and his philosophies. In fact, a lot of his ideas shaped and improved mine. His approach is opinionated.

So pick the good ones you like and make your own.

For instance, I’m pretty well-organized, and I like it that way. This leads me to native organizations using folders and some patterns that I learnt aloong the way. Nothing more complicated. One day, if I have to walk off Obsidian, I can, and I will still know where things are.

Right now, my organization is a loose combo of PARA[1] and Johnny Decimal.[2]

Obsidian is another tool; it just happens to be one hell of a good tool.

1. https://fortelabs.com/blog/para/

2. https://johnnydecimal.com
by Simboo | 2026-02-18 02:38:30+00:00
Don’t over complicate this everyone.

This is the best file-explorer GUI ever made hands down.

All your files map 1-to-1 with the OS filesystem. No double clicking files over and over again. No getting lost in endless unsorted directories. Launch any file extension type straight from the same explorer GUI.

I use this app less as a second brain and more as a personal document vault. (Markdown is ugly sorry about it) I get lots of pdf’s and such so it’s all in one place.

Cool, end of speech. Peace out
by kamaal | 2026-02-18 02:38:34+00:00
One part of the system moving fast doesn't change the speed of the system all that much.

The thing to note is, verifying if something got done is harder and takes time in the same ballpark as doing the work.

If people are serious about AI productivity, lets start by addressing how we can verify program correctness quickly. Everything else is just a Ferrari between two traffic red lights.
by MeetingsBrowser | 2026-02-18 02:38:59+00:00
> Did anyone actually read the article ... If anything this shows Tesla making an effort to report everything.

Meanwhile, the article if you read it

> What makes this especially frustrating is the lack of transparency. Every other ADS company in the NHTSA database, Waymo, Zoox, Aurora, Nuro, provides detailed narratives explaining what happened in each crash. Tesla redacts everything.
by josephg | 2026-02-18 02:39:17+00:00
I don't think claude code is like 3d printing.

The difference is that 3D printing still requires someone, somewhere to do the mechanical design work. It democratises printing but it doesn't democratise invention. I can't use words to ask a 3d printer to make something. You can't really do that with claude code yet either. But every few months it gets better at this.

The question is: How good will claude get at turning open-ended problem statements into useful software? Right now a skilled human + computer combo is the most efficient way to write a lot of software. Left on its own, claude will make mistakes and suffer from a slow accumulation of bad architectural decisions. But, will that remain the case indefinitely? I'm not convinced.

This pattern has already played out in chess and go. For a few years, a skilled Go player working in collaboration with a go AI could outcompete both computers and humans at go. But that era didn't last. Now computers can play Go at superhuman levels. Our skills are no longer required. I predict programming will follow the same trajectory.

There are already some companies using fine tuned AI models for "red team" infosec audits. Apparently they're already pretty good at finding a lot of creative bugs that humans miss. (And apparently they find an extraordinary number of security bugs in code written by AI models). It seems like a pretty obvious leap to imagine claude code implementing something similar before long. Then claude will be able to do security audits on its own output. Throw that in a reinforcement learning loop, and claude will probably become better at producing secure code than I am.
by ggm | 2026-02-18 02:39:55+00:00
A note to writers, when a stroke or other brain injury victim relearns speech the worst comparison you can make is "speaking french" or "like Steffi Graf" because it's not an acquired foreign accent syndrome, it's a brain injury.

It's a speech impairment. They're relearning how to form words. Just because one culture forms a rhotic R one way and another culture forms it another way or even deprecates it doesn't make you speak in their accent.

Myabe a bit pedantic but I've always disliked this "my husband spoke French after his stroke" thing.

I admit .. "like Steffi Graff" signals how it sounds, at least to somebody. My friends with stroke speech impairment spoke like they'd had dental local anaesthetic, or were talking through a mouthful of marbles. It's as if they had lost control of some of the finer grained muscles related to speech and had the gross motor skills for the breath, the vocal cords, and the jaw only.
by bee_rider | 2026-02-18 02:40:06+00:00
I’d probably pause loan repayments (no need to dig a deeper hole), make student loans dischargable via bankruptcy, wait a bit for the market to figure itself out. Once we’ve figured out what the value of each degree is, we can refund the difference to everyone who’s paid.

There’d be a bit of fudging as we’d need to adjust for inflation and the reputation of colleges fluctuate over time, but this seems like the fairest way to do it.
by mwwaters | 2026-02-18 02:40:16+00:00
Maybe I’m biased working in insurance software, but I don’t get the feeling much programming happens where the code can be completely stochastically generated, never have its code reviewed, and that will be okay with users/customers/governments/etc.

Even if all sandboxing is done right, programs will be depended on to store data correctly and to show correct outputs.
by Haven880 | 2026-02-18 02:41:00+00:00
The only way is just to cede the land and move on. Keep the people alive. 100 years later one can renegotiate. This kind of copium hope wishing the economy collapse or something like Mongol collapse is just not practical. The longer this drag on, the lesser fertile men exist in Ukraine and the population recovery will take even longer while Russian outbirth in the long run. Sometime to win one has to abide by time. Joan or Arc and King Goujian of Yue demonstrated that principle well either by divine intervention or human vengeance. Russia is doing very well. You can check with your Russians or Northern China friends that see the conditions with their eyes and not western propaganda.
by Jonovono | 2026-02-18 02:41:04+00:00
It’s a BYOK so the ai is optional. (And if you really don’t want it it’s a package in the open source app that can easily be pulled out) Since it’s markdown and on filesystem you can just edit your notes with Claude code if you want similar to obsidian.

By lightweight I mean it’s not a super heavy and bloated electron app on desktop and a slow and janky capacitor app on mobile that takes 10 seconds to launch and that the project can be greppable in a day to build on
by AlotOfReading | 2026-02-18 02:42:27+00:00
I suppose I don't understand your point. On one hand, you can have different algorithms for each of 32, 64, etc with potentially different pitfalls and usage requirements. On the other, you can have one algorithm that implements all of them. I wasn't trying to comment on how that should be exposed in the library (because crypto lib design is a whole 'nother topic), but I'm not opposed to it being explicit.

Same as CRCs, really. You can easily write a function that performs CRCs of any size and expose different parameterizations as CRC-8/16/32/64 etc.
by watersb | 2026-02-18 02:42:42+00:00
A couple of years ago, National Geographic magazine had a feature on the use of origami in engineering and art; the print edition featured a striking cover photograph of a gold colored sunshade for a space telescope under test at JPL.

The web site is aggressively paywalled, to such a degree that I cannot determine the date of publication.

But they had a public access podcast and transcript here

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/podcasts/article/unfoldin...
by throwaway81523 | 2026-02-18 02:42:52+00:00
Chapter 8 sample pdf has a typo(?) in the first paragraph. Carl Hewitt's last name is spelled both Hewitt and "Hewitz", maybe even in the same sentence.

Using an accumulation parameter with tail recursion was per Wikipedia introduced in one of the LTU papers, sometime before Scheme. So the description in the chapter is at best imprecise. But, I would want to look further back historically to see whether any Algol compilers used the technique.

Overall the book looks readable as an intro to Lisp and Lisp implementation, but in a history book I'd like to see more precision and depth, careful citations, etc.
by kamaal | 2026-02-18 02:43:45+00:00
Start ups mostly move fast skipping the necessary ceremony which large corps have to do mandatorily to prevent a billion dollar product from melting. Its possible for start ups because they don't have a billion dollar to start with.

Once you do have a billion dollar product protecting it requires spending time, money and people to keep running. Because building a new one is a lot more effort than protecting existing one from melting.
by kace91 | 2026-02-18 02:43:49+00:00
The comparison seems flawed in terms of cost.

A Claude subscription is 20 bucks per worker if using personal accounts billed to the company, which is not very far from common office tools like slack. Onboarding a worker to Claude or ChatGPT is ridiculously easy compared to teaching a 1970’s manual office worker to use an early computer.

Larger implementations like automating customer service might be more costly, but I think there are enough short term supposed benefits that something should be showing there.
by afcool83 | 2026-02-18 02:44:02+00:00
Just for context, Steph Ango is the CEO of Obsidian. His approach to notetaking in his own app made the rounds in the PKM (personal knowledge management) community for how _counterintuitive_ it was.

He eschews a lot of the common wisdom pushed by influencers in this space who tout "the one true way™" to stay organized. File splattered in the root? Sure. Unresolved links to notes that don't exist and probably never will? Why not! Blank daily notes that aren't carefully manicured journal tomes? Heck yeah.

His point is "perfect is the enemy of good." You could carefully curate and perfect your pkm...or you could have a life.
by ocdtrekkie | 2026-02-18 02:44:19+00:00
Ah, but you fail to account for Google's incredible knack for building tools designed to do things at scale. Or put AI in things that don't need it.

The possibility Google will either manage to unleash a malicious AI on their infrastructure and/or develop a way to destroy a lot of data at scale quite efficiently or some combination of the two is far from zero.

Bear in mind, this "Little Oops" should also have been impossible: https://www.techspot.com/news/103207-google-reveals-how-blan...
by Brajeshwar | 2026-02-18 02:44:50+00:00
Similar to mine. I use Apple Notes for quick, ephemeral notes and for Shared Family Notes. If they are the ones that are more important, they go into the plain-text notes in the Obsidian folder.

The Notes folder(s) is sync with a Cloud Service. So, I use iA Writer[1] (a brilliant Notes App) to have a pleasant writing experience on other mobile devices. They are just Markdown, so I can open them in any Notes App that supports Markdown. I paid for iA Writer once, like 10+ years ago.

1. https://ia.net/writer
by josephg | 2026-02-18 02:44:54+00:00
> Also, if you are a human who does taste, it's very difficult to get an AI to create exactly what you want.

I wonder if it would be possible to fine train an AI model on my own code. I've probably got about 100k lines of code on github. If I fed all that code into a model, it would probably get much better at programming like me. Including matching my commenting style and all of my little obsessions.

Talking about a "taste gap" sounds good. But LLMs seem like they'd be spectacularly good at learning to mimic someone's "taste" in a fine train.
by Aachen | 2026-02-18 02:46:28+00:00
The authenticator preserves account integrity with the compromised host attack you describe. The device I have shows something like "you are authorising a transaction of 1337€ to RU07BANK012345678, y/n?". What an attacker can do is read along while I log in, but not modify data

The server generates the challenge that's sent to the authenticator. The attacker can modify and replace it by being in your browser and show any text on your computer screen, but the authenticator will either show the truth, or the approval code it generates doesn't match the server's challenge

> That's not what I am saying. The authenticator is irrelavant to this attack.

If you need to change the security measures (take out the authenticator) in order to be able to mount an attack, maybe that means the security measure is working? xD

Trying to understand your point here. If you're merely saying that phones have better process isolation then I can only agree, but I wasn't saying that it doesn't. You can use online banking on your phone OS if you like, or use Android on your laptop. The comment you replied to upthread said that I'd like to have ownership of and freedom within my own hardware, in order to have privacy. When banks require that my phone is DRM'd with some keys from Google, Samsung, or Apple, then suddenly that has a lot of consequences for what I can and cannot do with, or inspect about, the device. Using an external authenticator, which they can attest to their heart's content, is the solution that I'm using and aligns with all parties' goals. Banks don't need to require that everyone's phone is locked down in order to use the banking software, just like it isn't in the browser, while still meeting their security goals
by charlieflowers | 2026-02-18 02:47:37+00:00
This reminds me of the old idea of the Lisp curse. The claim was that Lisp, with the power of homoiconic macros, would magnify the effectiveness of one strong engineer so much that they could build everything custom, ignoring prior art.

They would get amazing amounts done, but no one else could understand the internals because they were so uniquely shaped by the inner nuances of one mind.
by ehnto | 2026-02-18 02:48:04+00:00
It does make the lowest common denominator easier to reach though. By which I mean your local takeaway shop can have a professional looking website for next to nothing, where before they just wouldn't have had one at all.

I think exceptional work, AI tools or not, still takes exceptional people with experience and skill. But I do feel like a certain level of access to technology has been unlocked for people smart enough, but without the time or tools to dive into the real industry's tools (figma, code, data tools etc).