MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mmooss | 2026-02-08 17:29:42+00:00
> It is a strange comment to make about a film set inside a prison, but “The Shawshank Redemption” creates a warm hold on our feelings because it makes us a member of a family. Many movies offer us vicarious experiences and quick, superficial emotions. “Shawshank” slows down and looks. It uses the narrator’s calm, observant voice to include us in the story of men who have formed a community behind bars. It is deeper than most films; about continuity in a lifetime, based on friendship and hope.

I think Ebert is a brilliant reviewer; here I think something is overlooked: I agree about the emotional tone but not about the effect or the truth behind it. The prison is a fearful, traumatic place, of rape you can't stop, where life hangs by a thread, you take risks (for example with the bookkeeping) living on a razor's edge. The constant danger hangs over everything - you might not survive the day, you might be assaulted again, today might be the day they look more closely at what you're doing and you're caught.

That belies the calm narration and friendship. They provide an island of hope and love amid the trauma, in stark contrast to it, in constant tension with it.

You might say the narration is a device to make it palatable to middle-class audiences. That's something I notice a lot in Hollywood. First, the protagonist is someone they can identify with - a banker, a middle-class job - wrongly convicted, in this horrible situation. They are not, for example, a homeless person or someone semi-employed doing manual labor (someone much more likely to be wrongly convicted) - that would be a different movie and much less empathetic for many viewers, though objectively exactly as horrible. Then you have this calm, warm, reasonable voice telling the story - not a voice of terror or hate or trauma; that would be too much; the voice says 'it's ok'.

As Ebert says,

> The movie avoids lingering on Andy’s suffering; after beatings, he’s seen in medium and long shot, tactfully. The camera doesn’t focus on Andy’s wounds or bruises, but, like his fellow prisoners, gives him his space.

And I think also the following claim goes much too far:

> His film grants itself a leisure that most films are afraid to risk. The movie is as deliberate, considered and thoughtful as Freeman’s narration. There’s a feeling in Hollywood that audiences have short attention spans and must be assaulted with fresh novelties.

Sure, it's not the Avengers but it's a movie where the main plot elements are prison violence, a prison escape, and a grand con. This isn't Tokyo Story or In the Mood for Love.
by k9294 | 2026-02-08 17:29:48+00:00
Try https://ottex.ai/

I recently added support for Mistral provider, model is actually a very good one, I personally switched to it as my default model.

p.s. the app is free for personal user, has support for both local models and BYOK with OpenRouter, Groq, Mistral, Fireworks, and more coming soon.
by Qem | 2026-02-08 17:30:07+00:00
> But my understanding is non-DHA is not helpful so I may not be understanding correctly

Alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), the Omega-3 present in most plant sources, can get its chemical structure lenghtened to EPA and DHA in the organism. The problem appears to be, when people get older, the efficiency of this conversion takes a large hit.
by energyscholar | 2026-02-08 17:30:09+00:00
Good correction! Ermentrout is a fair example. You're right that a lot of neuroscience criticality work came from retrained physicists. The paper distinguishes between independent derivation and cross-trained import. The title for this post over-simplifies this. I made this change to try to increase engagement, since the full detailed title got zero engagement.

Where I'd push back: even after physicists brought the tools into neuroscience, the receiving field didn't connect it back to the parallel work in ecology or cardiology. Ermentrout's neural work and Goldberger's cardiac work used the same underlying math but didn't cross-cite. The silos reformed around the imported tools.

You're correct that "none of them knew" is too strong. Fair point. "Most of them didn't talk to each other even after import" is closer to what the citation data actually shows.
by coldtea | 2026-02-08 17:30:38+00:00
>Yes, coding is not software engineering

It absolutely is.

>Even if I generate a 1,000 line PR in 30 minutes I still need to understand and review it. Since I am responsible for the code I ship, this makes me the bottleneck.

You don't ship it, the AI does. You're just the middleman, a middleman they can eventually remove altogether.

>Now, I would be lying if I said I didn’t use LLMs to generate code. I still use Claude, but I do so in a more controlled manner.

"I can quit if I want"

>Manually giving claude the context forces me to be familiar with the codebase myself, rather than tell it to just “cook”. It turns code generation from a passive action to a deliberate thoughtful action. It also keeps my brain engaged and active, which means I can still enter the flow state. I have found this to be the best of both worlds and a way to preserve my happiness at work.

And then soon the boss demands more output, like the guys who left it all to Claude and even run 5x in parallel give.
by _dky | 2026-02-08 17:31:14+00:00
Back in 2003, implemented a Win32 profiler using Berkeley DB for offline indexing and visualizing profiler data.

https://github.com/mechanicker/cramp

Later in ~2011, used BDB for indexing filesystem metadata at a large storage vendor for enhancing data management in a storage cluster.

Clean API with language bindings makes it easy to integrate with different languages.
by brandall10 | 2026-02-08 17:31:30+00:00
This has generally been my experience with most highly acclaimed movies over the past 10 years. Most recently had this w/ Marty Supreme... last year had this w/ The Brutalist and The Substance.

The first half has me thinking instant classic, my hope is sky high. But then toward the end I find myself looking at my watch and realize it's simply not going to the stick the landing.

OTOH, many acclaimed streaming series have generally done this well. My take is that as long-form storytelling has evolved, movies have transitioned into this post-modernist phase as directors/writers don't feel they have the runway to tell something truly cohesive that doesn't end up being trite. It's much more about saying 'something' or imbuing a feeling than telling a fully fleshed 3 act story.
by zmalik | 2026-02-08 17:31:44+00:00
We’ve all seen the benchmarks: "Lazy-pulling reduces container startup from 5 minutes to 500ms!"
It looks great on a chart, but it hides a dangerous trade-off.

I built a benchmark to measure Readiness—the actual time until a container can serve an HTTP request, rather than just pull time. The results were surprising. While lazy-pulling (eStargz/FUSE) made pulls 65x faster, it made the application's first successful response 20x slower compared to a local registry full-pull.

Why? Because lazy-pulling doesn't remove the cost of downloading bytes; it just shifts it to the runtime. Your registry becomes a runtime dependency, and every uncached import torch becomes a network round-trip.
In my latest post, I dive deep into:

- The OCI file format limits (DEFLATE chains) that make this hard.

- Why containerd’s snapshotter is the bottleneck.

- The operational risks of FUSE on your GPU nodes.
by tgv | 2026-02-08 17:32:01+00:00
I always got the feeling Chomsky went for "the big picture" so to speak, and ignored the details. At least, that would be consistent between his political and his linguistic work. In the latter, he built systems that were simply too complex to be representative of the human mind. I can imagine that he saw himself as a kind of continuation of Marx and Hegel, where the system matters, and human life is just a detail.
by Analemma_ | 2026-02-08 17:32:03+00:00
Honestly, that would actually be better than the reality of the situation; at least they’d be doing it to get that bag. But I saw some of the organizing around this on Twitter, and several of the people who went are True Believers who really do think billionaires are making our lives better and that they deserve more appreciation.

When I first read some Lovecraft stories, one part that always stuck out to me as unbelievable was the Cthulhu worshippers. Why would you worship Cthulhu, the evil god who won’t even reward you for it? But more recently I’ve started to get it.
by webdevver | 2026-02-08 17:32:12+00:00
love software archaeology like this.

there was another article where someone bootstrapped the very first version of gcc that had the i386 backend added to it, and it turns out there was a bug in the codegen. I'll try to find it...

EDIT: Found in, infact there was a HN discussion about an article referencing the original article:

https://miyuki.github.io/2017/10/04/gcc-archaeology-1.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39901290
by clarity_hacker | 2026-02-08 17:32:32+00:00
Build environment archaeology like this matters more than people realize. Modern CI assumes containers solve reproducibility, but compiler version differences, libc variants, and even CPU instruction sets can silently change binary output. The detail about needing to reinstall Windows NT just to add a second CPU shows how tightly coupled OS and hardware were — there was no abstraction layer pretending otherwise. Exact toolchain reproduction isn't nostalgia; it's the only way to validate that a specific binary came from specific source.
by bakugo | 2026-02-08 17:32:33+00:00
There is no code, there are no tools, there is no configuration, and there are no projects.

This is an AI generated post likely created by going to chatgpt.com and typing in "write a blogpost hyping up [thing] as the next technological revolution", like most tech blog content seems to be now. None of those things ever existed, the AI made them up to fulfill the request.
Show HN: Fragno Forms, form builder and response collection as a library
by duckerduck | 2026-02-08 17:32:55+00:00
For a project I'm working on, I needed Google Forms/Typeform functionality that is built into the application. Rather than building it directly into the app, I decided to build it as a TypeScript library that anyone can use.

The library is full-stack, meaning it comes with database schemas for the form/response tables, backend route handlers for creating/updating forms and collecting form submissions.

I use JSONForms [0] to define how forms should be rendered, and implemented a new JSONForms renderer for shadcn/ui projects. (But you can use any other compatible renderer).

An overview of the features:

- DB Schemas, request handlers, and frontend hooks included

- Form builder shadcn/ui component with Google Forms-like UX

- Integrates with any TypeScript stack

- Form validation using JSON Schema + Zod

In the future, I might look at creating data analysis and export functionality.

Live demo: https://fragno.dev/forms

Docs: https://fragno.dev/docs/forms

Code: https://github.com/rejot-dev/fragno/tree/main/packages/forms

[0]: https://jsonforms.io/

Everything under MIT license
by RobertSerber | 2026-02-08 17:33:32+00:00
Totally agree. We treat structural validation as a separate, deterministic “compiler phase” before anything executes.

Draft (AI output) → normalize/canonicalize → link/type-check (cross-refs, relationship/FK semantics, datasets/metrics) → append-only migration ops → canonical DSL + stable hash.

This is also why we’re building it as a compiler pipeline rather than “prompting harder”: the output is an auditable artifact (canonical DSL + hash + migration checksum) that makes contract tests/regression diffs trustworthy.

Next step is what you call out: a signed attestation per compile (schemaHash + pinned validator/version/options + canonicalHash), so identical input yields identical outcomes across services/languages.

You’re right it doesn’t solve semantic drift alone (renames can still validate), but once the deterministic floor exists we can layer semantic checks + rename-safe migrations on top without debugging the toolchain itself.
by energyscholar | 2026-02-08 17:33:35+00:00
Good question. It's closest to dynamical systems, which usually lives in applied math or physics departments. But that's kind of the problem — it gets taught as theory in one department and never reaches the engineers and clinicians who'd actually use it.

If you've done diffeq and linear algebra you have the prerequisites. Appendix B (page 17 of the paper) is our attempt at making it practical — worked examples rather than proofs. Would be curious if it lands for someone with your background.

We plan to do a follow-up paper that provides a standard format for this math that could be taught across domains. That doesn't belong in this first paper. First priority was to show the pattern and get people thinking about it.
by bigyabai | 2026-02-08 17:33:35+00:00
They don't have to eliminate it, that wasn't my complaint. They need a competitive ecosystem with real-world stakeholders (a-la Epic) and third-party community support like emulators.

iOS is so far behind in this regard that even uttering it in the same sentence as "gaming" almost exclusively implicates gachapon titles or microtransaction slop. Other platforms don't suffer as much.
by clarity_hacker | 2026-02-08 17:33:53+00:00
The interesting tension here is that lazy-pulling optimizes deployment metrics but degrades runtime behavior. Faster pull times look great in dashboards, but you've moved the latency to first-request, which is often the metric that actually matters to users. The registry becomes a runtime dependency instead of a build-time one, so a registry outage now takes down running services, not just deployments. This pattern shows up everywhere: optimizing for the observable metric while shifting the cost somewhere less visible.
by MiguelNasarre | 2026-02-08 17:34:03+00:00
Hello everyone! I just finished creating a long time project called Chaotic, a 3D rendering library for mathematical plots. It uses Win32 and DirectX11. Some cool features:

* Requires no knowledge of Win32 or DirectX11 or graphics rendering.

* Allows for real time interaction with your plots.

* Has all kinds of widgets to interact with plots provided by ImGui.

* It is fully self-contained in its headers.

* Can plot anything that comes to mind with your own functions!

I've been developing this tool for a while since I never liked what C++ had to offer in terms of mathematical plotting. And I am hoping I can make it reach the correct audience and it is helpful to some people.

In the repository itself you will find all the information, as well as some cool plots done with the library!

I am more than ready to hear feedback from the community. If there is stuff you plot with the library I would love to see it. If you find bugs or issues that would be great too!
by k9294 | 2026-02-08 17:34:34+00:00
Hey, I would really appreciate if you will try https://ottex.ai

I'm working on a Wispr/Spokenly competitor. It's free without any paywalled features, supports local models and bunch of API providers including Mistral.

btw, the model name to pick is `voxtral-mini-latest:transcribe`, I personally switched to it as my main default fast model - it's really good.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-02-08 17:34:36+00:00
The way it’s conceptualized on Apple platforms is primarily user-initiated vs. program initiated, with the former getting priority. It’s positioned as being about tasks within a program competing for resources rather than programs competing with each other.

So for example, if I’m an email client the user has initiated the export of a mailbox, that is given utmost priority while things like indexing and periodic fetches get put on the back burner.

This works because even a selfish developer wants their program to run well, which setting all tasks as high priority actively and often visibly impedes, and so they push less essential work to the background.

It just happens that in this case, smart threading on the per-process level makes life for the system scheduler easier.
by brushfoot | 2026-02-08 17:34:51+00:00
Even without hacks, Copilot is still a cheap way to use Claude models:

- $10/month

- Copilot CLI for Claude Code type CLI, VS Code for GUI

- 300 requests (prompts) on Sonnet 4.5, 100 on Opus 4.6 (3x)

- One prompt only ever consumes one request, regardless of tokens used

- Agents auto plan tasks and create PRs

- "New Agent" in VS Code runs agent locally

- "New Cloud Agent" runs agent in the cloud (https://github.com/copilot/agents)

- Additional requests cost $0.04 each
by mystraline | 2026-02-08 17:35:12+00:00
"People like (me)".. And what are me and people like me like?

How's about you say what you're comparing me and people like me to.

In my experience, people who use terms like "You people" are just using that as a placeholder for racism, sexism, or ableism. Which is it in your case?

And 100 years ago, when industry took over something, the new thing still needed people. But thats not a hard economic law - thats just what happened before. There is no guarantee of that observation to still hold true.
by albert_e | 2026-02-08 17:35:37+00:00
On the other hand ... I recently had to deal with official Microsoft Support for an Azure service degradation / silent failure.

Their email responses were broadly all like this -- fully drafted by GPT. The only thing i liked about that whole exchange was that GPT was readily willing to concede that all the details and observations I included point to a service degradation and failure on Microsoft side. A purely human mind would not have so readily conceded the point without some hedging or dilly-dallying or keeping some options open to avoid accepting blame.
by gbnwl | 2026-02-08 17:35:41+00:00
I really enjoy the actual content of the few chapters I read so far, but the styling is 100% LLM, and it's so hard to get through multiple pages of the same exact mannerisms repeated over and over and over.

It kind of feels like reading the world's longest LinkedIn post. I really wish this wasn't the case because I really want to take in the story and lessons, but it's literally too fatiguing to get through much in one sitting.
by ghaff | 2026-02-08 17:35:42+00:00
In this day and age, how often do you actually need to have your car serviced? And there is no shortage of places that will do it for you in a few hours.

Similarly, if money were no real object within reason, I'm not sure what I would really need done on a day-to-basis that I couldn't just order or contract for pretty easily.
by throw7272855 | 2026-02-08 17:35:44+00:00
Coding with AI falls in one of three categories:

1. The thing to be written is available online. AI is a search engine to find it, maybe also translate it to the language of choice.

2. The thing (system or component or function) is genuinely new. The spec has to be very precise and the AI is just doing the typing. This is, at best working around syntax issues, such as some hard-to-remember particular SQL syntax or something like that. The languages should be better.

3. It‘s neither new nor available online but a lot to type out and modify. The AI does all the boilerplate. This is a failure of the frameworks and languages to require so much boilerplate.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-02-08 17:35:47+00:00
My perspective from watching people a generation older than me become elderly (parents, friend's parents, etc.) is that judgement is one of the more unfortunate and first things to really decline.

I've watched people taken in by online and phone scammers who would have been way more distrustful in their younger years.

I don't want to make excuses for Chomsky here on that basis though. Especially because I think his partner is doing him a disservice with this non-apology and also probably her role in these decisions. Being a partner or child etc to an elderly person involves caretaking this aspect and helping them make decisions.

In fact it's the whole of any spouse or loved one to help check the decisions of those they love.
by dijksterhuis | 2026-02-08 17:35:49+00:00
> Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things.

nitpick: most users don’t care about these things until something goes significantly wrong and it impacts them, e.g. a massive data breach or persistent global downtime.

then they get angry. very angry.

just because people don’t care about it now doesn’t mean they won’t care about it in the future.

edit — these are the hidden requirements.

> For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long.

until requirements change, or the hidden requirements come out to play … most software engineers can probably recall multiple times when the requirements changed half way through. hell, i’ve done it on solo projects.

now we’re stuck with boots that can only last 20 miles, but we need to go 35.
by richard_todd | 2026-02-08 17:36:03+00:00
The craft is still there just like painting is still an alternative to a photograph. It's just not going to be valued by society anymore, and far fewer will learn how to do it. Natural language is the new programming language. For now, understanding the craft is still an edge in making better prompts, but already I can see that telling Antigravity "now look for ways to make this more efficient" works almost as well as guiding it specifically on how it had duplicated some code flows.

I do feel a kind of personal loss in the sense that society is in the process of stopping to value or admire the design and coding skill I've cultivated since I was 6yo. At the same time, I'm kind of thrilled that I can write a detailed readme.md and tell an agent to "make it so" and I can iterate to a utility program in 20 minutes instead of an hour. When I feel a pit in my stomach is when that utility program uses some framework that I haven't learned, and don't need to because their code worked perfectly the first time. Surely that means I'm going to basically stop learning the details, as the details I've accumulated over my life quickly begin to not matter anymore.

Honestly I'm planning to use AI to make a kick-ass retro development environment a la "Sending Modern Languages Back to 1980s Game Programmers" (https://prog21.dadgum.com/6.html) and spend my retirement having fun in it.
by serf | 2026-02-08 17:36:47+00:00
everything I see people do with openclaw is less like LLM work and more like 'Yahoo! Pipes' work.

I haven't been able to find a good use for myself yet. Almost everything I use an LLM for has some kind of hard human-in-the-loop factor that is as of yet inescapable -- but I also don't really use LLMs for things like "sort my email.". mostly entirely coding.
by Barry987 | 2026-02-08 17:37:01+00:00
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by c-linkage | 2026-02-08 17:37:28+00:00
Litigation can be one reason, but I think the more likely reason is that people want to avoid confrontation.

Could you tell the person taking the pizza that that is inappropriate behavior? Sure. But that is confrontational. The people who might set the boundary are worried both about how they will appear to others (am I being a bully?) AND about the possible repurcissions (is the guy I'm telling off going to yell at me or threaten me?)

Its far easier to just stop buying the pizza.