MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by corry | 2026-02-15 16:23:16+00:00
"how incredibly good their google workspace suite of tools is" - is that a common sentiment on HN?

To me, Google Sheets is 10% of Excel on desktop (Mac), Slides are 5% of PowerPoint on desktop (Mac), and the integration between the two (copying and pasting linked charts from Excel to Powerpoint with formatting) makes it a completely non-starter to consider the Google alternatives as primary drivers.

I'm probably a power-user of both, granted, but I took for granted Sheets/Slides are still just toys compared to the real stuff, so curious if I'm missing something.
by markbao | 2026-02-15 16:24:17+00:00
Everyone who has built software knows that the hardest parts involve making complex, tricky decisions with tradeoffs. Let’s say you make a grocery list app. Now you have to make decisions about all the different ways to specify quantity. Units, weight, dollars, bunches… oh, and fractional vs. decimal weight, etc…

The claim is that now every random person now will build their own app and have to make those hard decisions instead of paying $5 a month for someone else to do that work. Comparative advantage doesn’t just apply to the cost of writing code, but also the effort of making product decisions.

Edit: I don’t mean that a grocery app should cost $5/month, the grocery app was a toy example and the $5/month refers to an example of a separate app you’d pay for with much more value.
by justin66 | 2026-02-15 16:24:38+00:00
> students were forced to work on Minix long after that that made any sense at all

Not to defend the textbook grift or the lack of vision here, but I strongly suspect an undergraduate minix course taught at VU would be very good. It’s not obvious to me that it would be inferior to the xv6-based course taught at MIT, for example.
by somenameforme | 2026-02-15 16:24:39+00:00
If anybody is interested in just playing this game, the Sega Genesis version of this game is arguably the definitive one. It was released later on and took everything in the PC version and amped it up a step. It's amazing and easy to find emulators + the ROM online. I replayed it fairly recently and it definitely held up very well.

It's open world, clue based, and with some amazing plot. Like the article mentions, the ending twist alone makes it worth suffering through your notepad of a million little hints thrown at you throughout the game. It's also the sort of game you can beat in [literally] 5 minutes if you know everything ahead of time. So I would strongly recommend avoiding walkthroughs/spoilers. The whole game is about piecing together the puzzle of what's happening and it's amazingly immersive.

Generally a game that was way ahead of its time.
by generallyjosh | 2026-02-15 16:25:04+00:00
I'm finding the latest models are pretty good at debugging, if you give them the tools to debug properly

If they can run a tool from the terminal, see all the output in text format, and have a clear 'success' criteria, then they're usually able to figure out the issue and fix it (often with spaghetti code patching, but it does at least fix the bug)

I think the testing/verification part is going to keep getting better, as we figure out better tools the AI can use here (ex, parsing the accessibility tree in a web UI to click around in it and verify)
by dredmorbius | 2026-02-15 16:25:58+00:00
That's antithetical to how HN has operated in the past. Vouching for deads is fair when the account is an actual human, and happens to post valid content. I do this occasionally myself (I read with "showdead" on), though not especially often.

See, e.g., <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31525284> also the FAQ: <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch>.

Accounts killed for spamming AI content seem to me to violate that premise, and an unvouchable kill does seem appropriate, especially where it's not immediately evident to the casual reader that an account was killed for posting AI content.

I'm thinking of how I'd like to indicate such accounts myself, and am leaning toward adding a robot emogi via an ":after" CSS rule.
by garciasn | 2026-02-15 16:26:03+00:00
People like to have iStuff integrated w/OpenClaw (calendar, e-mail, and iMessage). You can't /easily/ get the same level of automation/data collection for the Apple Ecosystem if you're not using an Apple device and running on a cloud VM or RPI, for example. In addition, the integrated GPU w/shared VRAM is great for running local models on Apple Silicon.

My guess is they're doing it for those primary reasons; not necessarily because they don't understand how to spin up a VM.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-02-15 16:26:21+00:00
Well theres an open source GPT model you can run locally. I dont think running models locally is all that cheap considering top of the line GPUs used to be $300 now you are lucky if you get the best GPU for under $2000. The better models require a lot more VRAM. Macs can run them pretty decently but now you are spending $5000 plus you could have just bought a rig with a 5090 with mediocre desktop ram because Sam Altman has ruined the RAM pricing market.
by xantronix | 2026-02-15 16:26:40+00:00
You're not wrong; mainly this is an exercise in coming up with a solution that can evolve with the needs of a modestly-sized community with decentralisation. (Oh fuck I hope I didn't just accidentally propose a blockchain, I'm gonna kms) I'm not particularly married to one particular solution or another, or even to the idea of a control plane, or its scope or locality.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-15 16:27:04+00:00
Looking at the script:

> curl -L -o msvcup.zip https://github.com/marler8997/msvcup/releases/download/v2026...

No thanks. I’m not going to install executables downloaded from an unknown GitHub account named marler8997 without even a simple hash check.

As others have explained the Windows situation is not as bad as this blog post suggests, but even if it was this doesn’t look like a solution. It’s just one other installation script that has sketchy sources.
by cruffle_duffle | 2026-02-15 16:27:34+00:00
3d printing is something I think about. LLMs do their best work against text and 3d printers consume gcode. I’ve had sonnet spit out perfectly good single layer test prints. Obviously it won’t have the context window to hold much more gcode BUT…

If there was a text based file format for models, it could generate those and you could hand that to the slicer. Like I’ve never looked, but are stl files text or binary? Or those 3mf files?

If Gemini can generate a good looking pelican on a bicycle SVG, it can probably help design some fairly useful functional parts given a good design language it was trained on.

And honestly if the slicer itself could be driven via CLI, you could in theory do the entire workflow right to the printer.

It makes me wonder if we are going to really see a push to text-based file formats. Markdown is the lingua franca of output for LLMs. Same with json, csv, etc. Things that are easy to “git diff” are also easy for LLMs…
by Apes | 2026-02-15 16:28:09+00:00
> An MRI is great at identifying which ways your body doesn’t look like a textbook reference body, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you what those things are or whether they will ever cause you problems.

Its the doctors doing this, not the MRI.

There's this weird definition switch that always happens with the "overdiagnosis" defense where the information gets blamed for the overdiagnosis. An MRI doesn't provide any diagnosis in any sense of the definition. A doctor does.

Claiming an overdiagnosis defense is essentually implying the medical industry is worse for most than doing nothing.
by dotancohen | 2026-02-15 16:28:13+00:00
I understand from your comment, please correct me if I misunderstood, that you oppose Jews building houses in the West Bank.

The West Bank is a part of the state of Israel that was occupied by Jordanian forces from 1948 to 1967. It was then captured by Israel and many Israelis, many of whom lived there before it was occupied by Jordan, moved (back) there.

The West Bank was settled by both Arabs and Jews before 1948 - for literally thousands of years Jews had lived there. In 1856 many more Jews and Arabs began moving there due to changes in Ottoman law meant to encourage settlement of the area (the Ottomans needed tax revenue). It should be noted that Jerusalem was Jewish majority even before the Ottoman land laws changed in 1856. In 1936 there was a large Arab slaughtering of Jews in Hebron, so many Jews were evacuated from Hebron. In 1948 the Arabs rejected the UN partition plan, and started a war. Israel won that war, and thus became the sole successor state of Mandatory Palestine. Jordan occupied part of that successor state (the West Bank). In 1952 (I may have the year wrong) the Arab league declared that no Arab assistance would be provided to those displaced in the war, because only the suffering of those displaced will cause the destruction of the Zionist Entity. In 1964 the Soviets advised a group to represent the Arabs of the West Bank, the Gaza strip, and those displaced in 1948, and that group adopted the name Palestinians to refer to the populations it represents. Israel conquered the Jordanian-occupied territory in 1967 after Jordan attacked Israel, two months later the Arab League adopted it's policy of No Peace,
No Negotiation, No Recognition of Israel. In 1995 the West Bank was divided into separate areas. Predominantly Arab areas were given autonomy for self rule, under the Palestinian Authority (mostly PLO) with the intention of all parties to see the establishment of an Arab state called Palestine after final borders and other issues are agreed. Predominantly Jewish areas have Israeli rule redeclared in three year cycles, pending final border agreements. Every single final border solution has been rejected by the Arab side, who have also employed extreme violence both in rhetoric and in actions.

Where in all this are the Jews who live in the West Bank a reason to "lose all faith" that Israel has good intentions. Israel's first intention is to secure the safety of her citizens, just like any other nation. Israel has committed to, and taken reasonable steps to, establish a separate state for those who demand Arab rule.
Show HN: R.A.T.A. v3 – Sub-Atomic Information Density on Solana"
by Codedwaves | 2026-02-15 16:28:33+00:00
"Hi, I've just launched the v3 release of the R.A.T.A. Protocol. We’ve achieved 312M:1 transduction using the 0xBF watermark on Solana. I thought your team at [Google/Samsung] would find the density metrics interesting for your 2026 storage goals. The site is live for review."
by michaelsbradley | 2026-02-15 16:29:13+00:00
Okay, but that just seems to be perpetuating the misunderstanding of what MSYS2 is intended for.

It gives you a *nix-like shell/dev environment and tools, but you build native software that runs on Windows systems that don’t have or need to have all/parts of MSYS2/Cygwin installed.
Show HN: A mayor simulator where corruption is gameplay
by playbgames | 2026-02-15 16:29:26+00:00
Hi HN,

We’re a small indie team working on a political sandbox game.

It starts like a traditional city builder, but escalates into gang conflicts, media manipulation, elections and police investigations.

One design challenge we’re facing:

How do you make “illegal mechanics” feel like meaningful systems instead of gimmicks?

We’re preparing for Next Fest and refining the core loop.

Would love feedback on:
- The core concept
- Whether this feels niche or scalable
- What would make this interesting long-term

Happy to answer any technical or design questions.
by xethos | 2026-02-15 16:29:34+00:00
We have that today though - it's called Matrix. While other platforms aren't literally built upon it like Hangouts was in the beforetimes, it allows inter-op with more platforms. Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Google Chat (née Google Hangouts)... and those are just the ones I'm using. The full list includes more [0]

We can disagree about what counts as good enough for the mass market in the modern era, whether normal people will actually use this vs whether normal people used XMPP's interop in 2005, and quibble about feature sets (video calls weren't initially supported in '05, and most bridges don't support them today), but for chatting with friends, you still only need one app - and because Matrix is an open standard, you can even change which app you want it to be.

Post script: I look forward to hearing about how terrible Matrix was, last time someone tried the (over-crowded) default server 12-18 months ago. The software dev community here will follow up and say that software cannot have gotten better since then, either.

[0] https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/
by calibas | 2026-02-15 16:29:42+00:00
You seem to be playing dumb here. You realize us "normal people" believe the Bill of Rights is to protect us from the government, and the 4th means the government doesn't get to spy on everybody indiscriminately?

And yes, they are spying on everybody. They have access to things like cellphone metadata, which to a normal human being is a very clear violation of privacy.

It's also my firm belief that our legal system has been undermining these basic concepts for decades now. It benefits the federal government to make this all very vague, as if modern technology suddenly means you have no expectation of privacy anymore. They've also mixed in some of that wonderfully authoritarian "for purposes of national security".

There's actual lawyers saying these same things, if you'd like someone to properly debate with.
by arter45 | 2026-02-15 16:29:42+00:00
These are interesting graphs, but at least in some of them the focus around 2012 seems arbitrary. "Time spent partying" started decreasing since 2006 at a rate (-2 mins/day in a year) that you only see from 2014 to 2015. "Total Consumer Credit Outstanding" is almost linear from 2009 to 2014, why is 2011-2013 so special? Ditto for "Number of satellites in orbit" which looks essentially linear from 2000 to 2014.

Some graphs are correlated and probably share trends, like "Time spent Partying/socializing" is negatively correlated with "Young Adults Reporting No Sex in Past Year".
by shevy-java | 2026-02-15 16:30:32+00:00
To me it seems as if Microsoft wants to make it deliberately harder to have
software developers. Now - I installed all the required things and compiled
on Windows too, but it is very annoying compared to Linux. Microsoft should
simply have ONE default build, e. g. "download this and 80% of developers
will be happy". No need for a gazillion checkboxes.
by markbao | 2026-02-15 16:30:33+00:00
Yes, that’s a possibility! And for app types that have a limited ceiling of how much value they can provide, that will definitely be a thing as an AI app can saturate all of that value.

But for apps that have a lot of ceiling, people will still gravitate to apps that have had more care and attention than someone vibe coding it once and throwing it on the store, just like how people choose those well-built and maintained apps today over using their built-in Reminders app.
by mc-0 | 2026-02-15 16:31:03+00:00
I feel like no one talks about how people who are "supposed to be reviewing the LLM outputs, guiding the agents, etc.", actually acquire the knowledge to do a decent job. When I see discussion on LLMs making SWEs more productive, I assume they mean compared to someone who knows significantly less than they do.

Here is a real scenario encountered in corporate America:

A new CS grad in their first job after college is given a task in a domain they're unfamiliar with to solve a problem they've never seen. They ask an agent to implement it in code in a language they've never used, and have it give a breakdown of it's process, the tradeoffs encountered, things to consider in the future, etc.

They have no time to actually learn anything, because they should be moving faster, being more productive, AI has already solved all of our problems.

So they submit a 700+ line PR to which whoever reviews it just pushes it through because they don't have time as they need to be moving just as fast and do not have the cognitive capacity to sit through and comprehend what's actually happening.
by mistrial9 | 2026-02-15 16:31:17+00:00
"trust"? Lot's of ambitious people are selling extra refined new additions to surveillance right now! "business is good" for example the 90s PDF architect Leonard Rosenthol recently put up ads promoting a brand of Ring cameras that have extra features. Of course he is making money on it. Someone on LinkedIn said "what is this?" and the reply was "adding ownership attributes to Ring camera footage is a step towards publication rights for the owner" .. almost too strange to believe but yes, this is the actual move.
by areoform | 2026-02-15 16:31:25+00:00
There are no lizard people coordinating our march towards dystopia. Just individual people who will–like me–read this article, think we should do more, and then probably do nothing.

There doesn't have to be an explicit conspiracy for a conspiracy to emerge. Conspiracies can be spontaneous, organic emergent behavior. For example, the killing of Ken McElroy; an entire community decided to spontaneously kill someone and then decided to cover up the crime collectively (and - also - spontaneously) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_McElroy

It's very much possible for people to brand the surveillance state as cute; and for consent for a surveillance state to spontaneously emerge / be generated from the attempts of marketers trying to make the Ring dystopia cute.
by wiether | 2026-02-15 16:31:46+00:00
> see if it falls apart after handling one request per second

Most of the problems you talk about are problems if you intend your software to be used at scale.

If you're building an app for yourself to track your own food habits; why does DB, framework, best practices matters?

People used to do this in an Excel sheet.

Now they can ask Claude to make them a nice UI similar to MFP or whatever.

Data can be stored in a single JSON file.

It's going to take years before they see actual performance issues.

And even though it becomes an issue, right now an AI Agent can already provide a fix and a script to migrate the data.

My only concern really is about security.

But a private VPS only reachable through Tailscale and they're ahead of 99% of the rest.
by shevy-java | 2026-02-15 16:31:56+00:00
LLVM-MinGW sounds external to Microsoft though. I think the blog focused on in-Microsoft solutions. And I am not sure the "contrary to the blog content" is valid - compared to Linux, the Microsoft stack is much more annoying to install. I installed it, but it was annoying to no ends and took ages.

Good to know LLVM works on windows too though.
by noelsusman | 2026-02-15 16:33:14+00:00
A grocery list app is the perfect example of the kind of thing that AI will make obsolete. Why would I pay $5/month for a list app when I can pay Claude $0.30 one time to make it for me?

I in fact did just that. I used Claude to reverse engineer my grocery store's API and build a grocery list app that automatically pulls in the aisle information for each item and sorts it by how I typically walk through the store. It's the kind of thing that would be incredibly difficult to scale but works just fine when you only have one user. No SaaS grocery app can hope to compete with me being able to tailor my own shopping list app to my exact preferences.
by floo | 2026-02-15 16:33:15+00:00
hey HN! been working on this project on the side for a couple years now.

as a kid i got an audiobook along with a text copy to learn english. i found that to be a very nice combination.

i have been trying to learn more languages, but found that purely reading tends to worsen my pronunciation, but my listening comprehension is not good enough for audiobooks.

so i took some public domain audiobooks, synchronized them with text, paired it up with translations in some of the most spoken languages, and put it all on a website.

as this is for learning, i am avoiding ai generated audio entirely.

looking for feedback and happy to discuss details!
by pavel_lishin | 2026-02-15 16:33:18+00:00
I run a D&D campaign, and am frequently inspired by the things I see around me - but almost none of them make it into the game on a purely 1:1 basis. I take bits and pieces, shuffle and rearrange them.

Shakespeare seeing some images, and taking bits and pieces that fit the story best seems so plausible to me.

(But also, what I know about Shakespeare can probably be written down on a post-it with a sharpie, so take my opinions with whatever amount of salt required.)
by bwfan123 | 2026-02-15 16:33:38+00:00
> This is the same dynamic that kept IBM dominant for decades

IBM still sells mainframes but is no longer a growth darling.

> Markets are right to reassess multiples. But reassessing multiples is very different from pricing in extinction

What you are missing is that the SaaS companies were extremely overpriced. For instance, crm after all the carnage is still priced at 25 times earnings which is historically high for anything that is not a growth company. The perception was that these companies would print money year after year selling software trinkets on their platforms and as such were placed in the growth category. Now, it is plainly obvious that these software trinkets can be produced easily by anyone using AI. Their pricing-power has dramatically declined. Hence the re-rating. None of this contradicts the thesis in your ai-assisted article that these businesses have moats just like IBM and its mainframes.

These businesses are now in a vicious reflexive narrative loop where the narrative will cause impact in the real-world in the form of demand for discounts which will further fuel the narrative.
Show HN: Ingglish – What if English spelling made sense?
by ptarjan | 2026-02-15 16:33:54+00:00
My 5-year-old is learning to read and I keep having to say "yeah sorry, that letter is silent" and "no, those letters make a different sound in this word."

So I built Ingglish — English where every letter always makes the same sound. "ough" alone makes 6 different sounds (though, through, rough, cough, thought, bough). In Ingglish, every letter has one sound, no silent letters, no exceptions.

- Paste text to see it translated instantly
- Translate any webpage while preserving its layout
- Chrome extension to browse the web in Ingglish
- Fully reversible — Ingglish text can be converted back to standard English (minus homophones)

The core translator, DOM integration, and website are all open source: https://github.com/ptarjan/ingglish

I'd love your feedback! Thanks.
by outloudvi | 2026-02-15 16:34:00+00:00
> Is there good public discussion on root expiration?

Haven't seen a specific one but I guess the most relavant public discussion on root CA-led device bricking issues might have occurred around the time when DST Root CA X3 (naturally) expired - that's around September '24: https://letsencrypt.org/2023/07/10/cross-sign-expiration.htm...

I personally believe most issues blocking old device reuse can be solved by manufacturers returning the root permission back to users, so that users can install modded systems with up-to-date stuffs. However, it's a pity that manufacturers aren't willing to do it, as it hurts their interest on selling new devices. Will laws on "right to repair" work? Time will tell.