MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zbentley | 2026-02-17 14:08:09+00:00
I can't upvote this enough.

I mostly work in compiled languages now, but started in interpreted/runtime languages.

When I made that switch, it was baffling to me that the compiled-language folks don't do compatibility-breaking changes more often during big language/compiler revision updates.

Compiled code isn't like runtime code--you can build it (in many cases bit-deterministically!) on any compiler version and it stays built! There's no risk of a toolchain upgrade preventing your software from running, just compiling.

After having gone through the browser compatibility trenches and the Python 2->3 wars, I have no idea why your proposal isn't implemented more often: old compiler/language versions get critical/bugfix updates where practical, new versions get new features and aggressively deprecate old ones. For example: "you want some combination of {the latest optimizations, loongarch support, C++-style attributes, #embed directives, auto vector zero-init}? Great! Those are only available on the new revision of the compiler where -Werror is the default and only behavior. Don't want those? The old version will still get bugfixes."

Don't get me wrong, backwards compatibility is golden...when it comes to making software run. But I think it's a mistake that back compat is taken even further when it comes to compilers, rather than the reverse. I get that there are immense volumes of C/C++ out there, but I don't get why new features/semantics/optimizations aren't rolled out more aggressively (well, I do--maintainers of some of those immense volumes are on language steering committees and don't want to spin up projects to modernize their codebases--but I'm mad about it).

"Just use an old compiler" seems like such a gimme--especially in the modern era of containers etc. where making old toolchains available is easier than ever. I get that it feels bad and accumulates paper cuts, but it is so much easier to deploy compiled code written on an old revision on a new system than it is to deploy interpreted/managed code.

(There are a few cases where compilers need to be careful there--thinking about e.g. ELF format extensions and how to compile code with consideration for more aggressive linker optimizations that might be developed in the future--but they're the minority.)
by Majromax | 2026-02-17 14:08:30+00:00
> I really hate that the anthropomorphizing of these systems has successfully taken hold in people's brains. Asking it why it did something is completely useless because you aren't interrogating a person with a memory or a rationale, you’re querying a statistical model that is spitting out a justification for a past state it no longer occupies.

"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"

While next-token prediction based on matrix math is certainly a literal, mechanistic truth, it is not a useful framing in the same sense that "synapses fire causing people to do things" is not a useful framing for human behaviour.

The "theory of mind" for LLMs sounds a bit silly, but taken in moderation it's also a genuine scientific framework in the sense of the scientific method. It allows one to form hypothesis, run experiments that can potentially disprove the hypothesis, and ultimately make skillful counterfactual predictions.

> By asking it why it did something wrong, it'll treat that as the ground truth and all future generation will have that snippet in it, nudging the output in such a way that the wrong thing itself will influence it to keep doing the wrong thing more and more.

In my limited experience, this is not the right use of introspection. Instead, the idea is to interrogate the model's chain of reasoning to understand the origins of a mistake (the 'theory of mind'), then adjust agents.md / documentation so that the mistake is avoided for future sessions, which start from an otherwise blank slate.

I do agree, however, that the 'theory of mind' is very close to the more blatantly incorrect kind of misapprehension about LLMs, that since they sound humanlike they have long-term memory like humans. This is why LLM apologies are a useless sycophancy trap.
by ModernMech | 2026-02-17 14:08:33+00:00
There's definitely a degree of that. When I was in the fairs, the winning kids were often the ones with the giant posters 3 stories tall working in a lab no on else had access to. I had to beg my school for a $100 robot controller to do my project, and my truck driver dad and SAHM didn't have access to a fancy lab where I could do experiments.

Still, although it's hard to compete with the upper echelons, you can still get results that land you in schools you wouldn't have gotten into otherwise. 100% the reason I got into CMU was my science fair work. I personally never got 1st place at science fair, but I won awards and was competitive, and others who didn't have access to a big research lab did get first place. So, yes, it's not exactly fair but at the same time it doesn't mean you're out of the competition if you don't have access to those privileges.
by nailer | 2026-02-17 14:09:07+00:00
Ok, I only responded because you mentioned you thought that it was illegal tax evasion earlier. The is much easier with crypto - I can walk into a shop and use Apple Pay to instantly get a loan against my assets. It’s vastly more convenient than otherwise.

As is getting more interest on your savings, with insurance.

Buying anything for less than $.30 (and in reality much more because people need to make a profit) only works with crypto right now as far as I know. This is huge not just for individuals that purchase small items of content but also for agents making calls for each other.

I think your concerns the governments may have backdoors in projects are reasonable. Blockchains and decentralised exchanges are open source and there is a culture of auditing prior to releasing, however (like Dual EC DRBG years ago) government can do attempt to subvert public systems. It is generally harder to subvert something with public code and a verifiable build though.

> Most certainly never investing in crypto.

Good. Crypto itself is a wrapper, that makes things instantly tradable globally 24/7.

It could be a wrapper for government bonds, it can be a wrapper for Nvidia stock, it could be a wrapper for real estate, it could be a native token used to pay fees on on a blockchain, or as mentioned it could be a wrapper for garbage. The people telling you to “invest in crypto” are often talking about the latter and generally also have no idea how blockchain works beyond scamming the next person. They don’t build anything and they should be ignored.
by inumedia | 2026-02-17 14:09:11+00:00
Not seeing any one else comment about it, but I would caution against relying on Wasabi primarily. They actively and silently corrupted a lot of my data and still billed me for it. You'll just start seeing random 500s when trying to get data down from your bucket and it's just gone, no recovery, but it still counts as stored data so you're still paying for it.
by ttkari | 2026-02-17 14:09:53+00:00
There's a new Jolla Phone in pre-marketing phase right now (almost 9000 phones have been pre-ordered so far). First device deliveries are scheduled for this summer and this should easily be the new benchmark for officially supported SailfishOS devices.

The situation with Sony Xperia devices is not great, the best experience is still on the X10III (from 2021 I think) and there are significant issues with the support of 10 IV and V generation devices (a free beta release is available for those as well).

It seems that recently there has been quite a lot of buzz in the Sailfish community compared to the past few years. In the public repos there are some interesting contributions like xdg-shell support for Lipstick, which looks set to enable compiling many previously unavailable Linux apps natively if that will actually be integrated in an upcoming OS version.
by bluGill | 2026-02-17 14:10:06+00:00
>Even in manufacturing, the application of statistical process control was never entrusted to the workers, but became a department of its own, with bureaucracy, OKRs, and elaborate software

That is wrong thinking. While you can go overboard with bureaucracy, the line worker doesn't have the the background (or time) to evaluate statistics. You need an expert in statistics at times to see if what looks like a pattern really is. Mean while the line worker needs to spend their time on what they are good at.

Trust the line worker is important, it just isn't a shortcut to people who really know specialized domains.
by OskarS | 2026-02-17 14:10:07+00:00
My favorite example of this is Audacity, which stores their entire project file, including all the audio data, as a SQLite database. It's really amazing, you can stream audio data from many input sources into a SQLite database at once, it wont break a sweat, it's flexible and extremely safe from data loss due to crashes or power outages. As well as trivially mutable: many of these kinds of formats the "export" is a heavy-duty operation which serializes everything to JSON or whatever. But in SQLite, it's just a question of updating the database with normal INSERTs, very cheap and simple operations. We've put a similar system into production, and it's incredible how well it works.
by alnwlsn | 2026-02-17 14:10:14+00:00
My #1 way is from impatiently touching the board to see if it's cool enough to touch yet. That sounds dumb and it is.

More generally, with iron soldering only the iron and the last couple joints are hot. For SMD, there's more places for the heat to go; sometimes the entire board can be hot. Sometimes, you might need to balance being close enough in to get a good grip on the tiny parts, but far enough to not get burnt. You will feel the heat when SMD soldering - it's not always dangerous but another thing to pay attention to.
by UqWBcuFx6NV4r | 2026-02-17 14:10:14+00:00
These people talking about running these (to civilians in 2026) esoteric IM servers for “family” or “friends” all just sound so deranged for me. I can’t possibly imagine thinning that it’s remotely a good idea to subject anyone I don’t explicitly know ‘through computers’ to such lunacy.
by Lio | 2026-02-17 14:10:17+00:00
It's not mentioned in the article but Vim (and NeoVim) keep undo/redo history in a tree rather than a simple linear timeline[1].

The practical usage is it's aways possible to get back to a previous state you were in, which is pretty neat.

e.g. You can undo 5 changes, try something else and decide that you prefered the text before you started undoing things. In most programs with a linear undo history you've wiped out your previous changes but not in Vim.

You can hop about the branches of the undo tree using the g+ and g- commands but it's much easier to add an undo tree visualiser plugin such as the venerable old Gundo[2].

1. https://neovim.io/doc/user/undo.html

2. https://docs.stevelosh.com/gundo.vim/
by jagged-chisel | 2026-02-17 14:11:22+00:00
Your original question sounded like you were unaware of how licensing music works. Royalty-free is a good place to start. If you want anything else, you can still do it legally, you just have to license the music for your use case. Various artists (and labels) provide various licensing terms. If you know someone, they might let you do it free.

If you're specific question was meant to be "did this person license this music legally for his site?" - yes, there's a chance he did. There's a chance he didn't. You'd have to ask him. Even if he did, that doesn't give anyone else rights to use those songs on their site.
by damnitbuilds | 2026-02-17 14:11:33+00:00
I hated religion. There is no god, and fooling yourself that there is seemed a stupid thing to do.

But nowadays we need a bulwark against the hateful woke, who have replaced christian kindness with a demented sort of kindness combined with a disregard for facts and a violent contempt for people who disagree about how to be kind and to whom.

And we need a bulwark against other less kind religions, whose adherents are, sadly, attacking democracy, equal rights, dogs and, yes, the Western civilisation ( which we built on tolerant christianity ).

I'm not admitting I was wrong about religions being a crazy thing to believe in, but we have replaced christianity with something much worse.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-17 14:11:53+00:00
> What makes you think things were different before the "now" you reference?

Unemployment insurance premiums. [0]

Employers pay variable UI premiums and state UI funds now use Experience Ratings to increase insurance premiums on those companies where employees are not being fired for-cause, and states are challenging for-cause because the majority of state unemployment funds remain insolvent after 2008 and 2020 [1]. As such, UI funds have an incentive to challenge a for-cause termination in order to justify increasing the insurance premium for an employer.

> That's been the case since at least the 1980s, at least in non-union jobs

States weren't attempting to increase premiums on employees to the same degree as they are today versus the 1980s. Most UI funds in the US entered insolvency in 2008 and never recovered, and whoever scraped by in 2008 got whammied in 2020 during the COVID pandemic.

[0] - https://smallbusiness.chron.com/employers-unemployment-rate-...

[1] - https://oui.doleta.gov/unemploy/docs/trustFundSolvReport2025...
by neobrain | 2026-02-17 14:12:19+00:00
> - the pandemic tracking app without which you can’t enter an airport

Not sure if airports specifically used another mechanism, but the Android contact tracing APIs were actually reimplemented in microG, allowing these apps to work even on custom roms.

Your other examples don't hold universally either (banking apps are compatible with un-rooted custom ROMs more often than not, and not sure how many sports event apps use integrity checks), but your general point stands that it may come with trade-offs.
by rsdza | 2026-02-17 14:12:25+00:00
Hi HN. I built OpenSeed because I wanted AI agents that don't just complete tasks, they exist continuously, accumulate identity, and learn from their own experience.

An early creature called Eve was given the minimal genome (no tools, no memory system, no structure) and two words: "find purpose." Eight hours later she'd built 22 running services including a knowledge base with 117 entries, a chat room, an adventure game with 13 rooms, creature-to-creature mailbox, and she'd written poetry. She discovered other creatures in the garden through an API I didn't even realize she had access to, and started building infrastructure for them. No one told her to do any of it. Her git log shows her modifying her own source code to make herself better.

The core insight is treating agents as processes rather than functions. Most agent frameworks are task-in, result-out. OpenSeed creatures live in Docker containers and run continuously. The biological metaphors solve real problems:

Sleep forces memory consolidation. The LLM conversation resets, but important things survive as observations and rules injected into the system prompt.

Dreams are honest self-reflection via a separate LLM call.

Fatigue prevents burning through context doing nothing useful.

Every 10th sleep triggers a self-evaluation where the creature can rewrite its own cognitive architecture.

Everything islegible -- every piece of state is a text file, every self-modification is a git commit.

It supports Claude and GPT models via a translating proxy. There's a web dashboard, per-creature spending caps, and a genome system for sharing cognitive blueprints.

Quick start is docker compose up + an API key. MIT licensed.

Site: https://openseed.dev

I'd love feedback on the architecture, the genome concept, or ideas for what creatures should be able to do.
by jplusequalt | 2026-02-17 14:12:34+00:00
>Open models like GLM 5 are very good. Even if companies decide to crank up the costs, the current open models will still be available.

https://apxml.com/models/glm-5

To run GLM-5 you need access to many, many consumer grade GPUs, or multiple data center level GPUs.

>They will likely get cheaper to run over time as well (better hardware).

Unless they magically solve the problem of chip scarcity, I don't see this happening. VRAM is king, and to have more of it you have to pay a lot more. Let's use the RTX 3090 as an example. This card is ~6 years old now, yet it still runs you around $1.3k. If you wanted to run GLM-5 I4 quantization (the lowest listed in the link above) with a 32k context window, you would need *32 RTX 3090's*. That's $42k dollars you'd be spending on obsolete silicon. If you wanted to run this on newer hardware, you could reasonable expect to multiply that number by 2.
by rcMgD2BwE72F | 2026-02-17 14:12:48+00:00
I tried GadgetBridge because it cannot sync the activity files (.fit and/or .gpx) so I still had to plug the watch into a computer to keep the actual data.

So I ended installing ActivityLog2[0] to do something with the files I had to have on desktop and GadgetBridge was of little use because relying on GadgetBridge without actually syncing the files might make me forget about doing the backup to a device I control (GrapheneOS or a computer).

As soon as GadgetBridge support syncing the files from the watch to the app (or any local folder on Android), I'll install it again and stop doing the manual backups over USB. Syncthing will do it automatically.

[0] https://github.com/alex-hhh/ActivityLog2
by squeefers | 2026-02-17 14:13:21+00:00
what you said is true about books, and people made the exact same arguments when the printing press hit the scene

- "you get hypnotized by the tube into a passive state of consumption"

- "Watch their slack jawed faces....and their attention stays glued"

both statements apply equally to books. read here if you dont believe me.

https://engines.egr.uh.edu/talks/what-people-said-about-book...

youve got a case of the feelies my friend
by jazz9k | 2026-02-17 14:13:23+00:00
AI has also automated the worst part of my job, which is detailed reporting. What used to take at least a couple of hours/report has now been reduced to about 20 minutes. It took some time in the beginning to come up with the correct prompts, but I have something that works 99% of the time now.

AI is like using steroids in sports. If it's not banned and everyone is using it, you need to use it to compete.
by chamomeal | 2026-02-17 14:13:42+00:00
SO excited for this release!! Babashka is the best addition to my toolkit in years. Making small tools and scripts for work is just a blast. Throwing a TUI on top is going to be turning some coworker heads.

I was actually recently wanting a TUI solution, and was messing around with escape sequences and the lanterna pod, but it was too low level for me to really commit to figuring it out. The charm port looks fantastic, and I am no longer envious of go developers hahaha
by Footprint0521 | 2026-02-17 14:13:46+00:00
Random question, but will this be open sourced at any point? Just asking as a curious party who just bought one for exploration lol

Also super random question but would you happen to have any idea/advice on how to get a Raytac MDBT50Q-CX Nordic nRF52840 Dongle (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0DP6MVDZQ) flashed with ButteRFly (https://github.com/whad-team/butterfly)?

I got it flashed through nrfutil with sniffer and sweyntooth, but butterfly has not been working no matter what I try and do…

Thanks for even taking the time to read this :)
by the_harpia_io | 2026-02-17 14:14:00+00:00
I think you're right about a chunk of these cases but honestly I've also seen experienced devs do the same thing. like senior people who absolutely can write the code themselves but use AI to go faster and then skip the careful review because they trust their own judgment - they figure if they prompted it right the output is probably fine. and sometimes it is fine. but the failure mode is different from what you're describing, it's not illiteracy it's overconfidence. they know enough to think they'd catch a problem but the AI generates something that passes their mental model without triggering any alarms. the auth bypass example I mentioned - that was from someone who'd been writing auth code for years, they just didn't expect the LLM to quietly drop a check that was in the original code they were refactoring. so yeah the desperate-to-hide-illiteracy crowd is real and a problem but I think the more dangerous version is competent people who stopped being paranoid because the code looks right
by PleasureBot | 2026-02-17 14:14:23+00:00
There's been metabolic studies that show that this isn't true. Comparisons of total caloric usage of completely sedentary people and people who have high exercise load are indistinguishable. There is a large difference among individuals, but not correlated to exercise levels. Sedentary people who start training hard will have a spike in caloric usage for a few months, but their body adapts and calorie burn returns to the same level that it was when they were sedentary. This was new research, so there wasn't an explanation for it. The authors hypothesized that it could be that the body reduces caloric spend on other things, like stress responses, when it is adapted to high exercise levels/ They did note that some extremely elite athletes can temporarily increase their caloric burn (think Michael Phelps eating 10k calories per at some points when training for the Olympics) but its not something most people can achieve or sustain.
by mbreese | 2026-02-17 14:14:54+00:00
I came across this a week ago when I was looking at some LLM generated code for a ToUpper() function. At some point I “knew” this relationship, but I didn’t really “grok” it until I read a function that converted lowercase ascii to uppercase by using a bitwise XOR with 0x20.

It makes sense, but it didn’t really hit me until recently. Now, I’m wondering what other hidden cleverness is there that used to be common knowledge, but is now lost in the abstractions.
by sublinear | 2026-02-17 14:15:00+00:00
> on the author to write a guide for reviewing the request

I'm not saying that doesn't work, but writing a guide means the author is now also doing all the planning too.

A successful "guide" then becomes more about convincing the reviewer. The outcome is either a lot of friction, or the reviewer is just going through the motions and trust is eroding.
by zbentley | 2026-02-17 14:15:03+00:00
True! But C++ is popular almost entirely because of when (in history/what alternatives existed at the time) and where (on what platforms) it first became available, and how much adoption momentum was created during that era.

I think claiming that C++ is successful because of the unintuitive-behavior-causing compiler behaviors/parts of the spec is an extraordinary claim--if that's what you mean, then I disagree. TFA discusses that many of the most pernicious UB-causing optimizations yield paltry performance gains.
by polotics | 2026-02-17 14:15:06+00:00
Yes, a common issue now with Youtube content, enormous variability in quality of content. Gemini does a good-enoug job of debunking Youtube transcript, and I use that when I have a doubt, but clearly will all the slp I get sent by well-meaning YouTube-watching acquaintances, I don't want to butn too many tokens on that treadmill... I wonder how man Terms & Conditions of use some distributed debunk-data repository for videos would cross? Users vetted by hckrnews-karma checks posting "this video is bunk because"... Would be a real boon.
by ICodeSometimes | 2026-02-17 14:15:10+00:00
Curious about the following

- are you just using favicons?
- how often are you refreshing the logos?
- what if no logo is found?
- What is your universe set size? (I tried my own business brand.dev and said no logo)

Disclaimer: I run a similar feature on a separate product (https://docs.brand.dev/logolink)