MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0xy | 2026-02-17 16:51:55+00:00
I posit that an LLM with 100% coding and product management accuracy is an impossibility given current trends and hard barriers.

LLMs struggle with novel technical issues.

They still require review and agents work best when they're hand-in-hand with an experienced human.

Let me ask you something: think of the average VP or Director you've interacted with. Do you think this person is capable of directing 100,000 autonomous coding agents? Do you think they have the verbosity in prompt and the skill to know when it's not making a subtle error?
by rorylaitila | 2026-02-17 16:51:59+00:00
Yes I noticed this as well. I was last writing up a landing page for our new studio. Emotion filled. Telling a story. I sent it through grok to improve it. It removed all of the character despite whatever prompt I gave. I'm not a great writer, but I think those rough edges are necessary to convey the soul of the concept. I think AI writing is better used for ideation and "what have I missed?" and then write out the changes yourself.
by runarberg | 2026-02-17 16:52:09+00:00
GPs original claim was “[Machine Intelligence] already is influencing the grammar and patterns we use.”

Your claim above was “AI will accelerate “natural” change in language like anything else.”

Now these are different claims, but I assumed you were backing up your parent’s claim. These are far stronger claims than what you write now, in a way that it feels like you are arguing in Motte and Bailey.

First of all if GP claim is true, linguists should be able to find evidence of that and publish their findings in a peer review papers. To my knowledge, they have not done that.

Second of all, your claim about AI “accelerating” changes in natural language is also unfounded, unless you really mean “like everything else”, in which case your claim is extremely weak to the point where it is a non-claim (meaning, you are not even wrong[1]).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
by logicchains | 2026-02-17 16:52:59+00:00
>if college education produces a public good (a more competent workforce)

It doesn't achieve this; the % of college graduates has vastly increased over the past few decades, but this hasn't contributed to any significant improvements in standardised measures of graduate knowledge or intelligence. From a business perspective the primarily usage of college is as a filter, a proxy for intelligence and willingness to follow instructions, but its usefulness as a filter has been steadily decreasing as it becomes easier and easier to attend and graduate from college.
by RupertSalt | 2026-02-17 16:53:05+00:00
Consider the source of the idiom: rolling your own cigarettes.

Which involves taking some rolling papers, a pouch of loose tobacco (or whatever), and perhaps a little device if you're rich. As opposed to manufactured cigarettes, you're just doing some manual assembly for the end-product.

You don't need to cultivate the plants or pulp any trees to roll your own.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-17 16:53:13+00:00
I certainly don't think it's a bad thing to try to refine the information into a more digestible form. I think, for example, the dedicated "People", "Places", "Events", and "Map" sections are well-organized and interesting[1]. I would simply prefer if the presentation of this information did not detract from the ability to read the diary itself, as it does on the month pages. I am rather fond of reading historical diaries as part of a general curiosity about the past, and reading the experiences as they were written is as interesting to me if not more so than the aggregate information, personally.

[1] Although, of course, there is the question of reliability. For example, the "Boy Scouts" page says Boy Scouts have 2 mentions, but has references to 3 diary entries! Also, on further examination, Sep 1931 has broken dates (meaning my previous theory about it breaking only after Jul 1941 was wrong), and some pages appear to be out of order.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-02-17 16:53:16+00:00
Many have argued that Musk's shift to far-right politics is responsible for some of this decline -- and it certainly makes some sense -- but I wonder if the cause and effect are being conflated.

If Musk were aware that Tesla was going to lose this much ground due to factors beyond his own mismanagement, including the threat of Chinese imports and a widespread shift away from EVs driven by a right-populist sentiment swing that was already under way, then maybe his goose-stepping and Trump-humping act was an attempt to sync up with a trend that he saw as inevitable.

That's about the most charitable spin I can put on it.
by superjam2026 | 2026-02-17 16:53:19+00:00
Hey HN, creator here.

Tired of the 3-hour new Mac ritual. Brewfile only covers packages — OpenBoot handles the whole stack: packages, dotfiles, shell, macOS prefs, git identity.

Killer feature turned out to be `openboot snapshot` — captures your setup as a shareable URL, team clones it with one command.

Go + Bubble Tea, MIT, zero telemetry.

What do you use to solve this? Brewfile? nix-darwin? What am I missing?
by tasty_freeze | 2026-02-17 16:53:23+00:00
Bible Scholar and youtube guy Dan McClellan had an amazing "high entropy" phrase that slayed me a few days ago.

https://youtu.be/605MhQdS7NE?si=IKMNuSU1c1uaVCDB&t=730

He ended a critical commentary by suggesting that the author he was responding to should think more critically about the topic rather than repeating falsehoods because "they set off the tuning fork in the loins of your own dogmatism."

Yeah, AI could not come up with that phrase.
by culturalgeology | 2026-02-17 16:53:28+00:00
Via art historian Matthew J. Milliner:

“Now that I know AI’s counselling allure experientially, I aim to resist it all the more. It is an act of human defiance to be there for each other anyway, to continue to fill the spaces the machines would all too willingly fill in our absence.

Baring my interiority to AI felt like Pippin looking into the palantír in The Two Towers, after which Gandalf says to the young hobbit:

“You have taken no harm. There is no lie in your eyes, as I feared. But he did not speak long with you. A fool, but an honest fool, you remain, Peregrin Took. Wiser ones might have done worse in such a pass. But mark this! You have been saved, and all your friends too, mainly by good fortune, as it is called. You cannot count on it a second time.””
by bananaflag | 2026-02-17 16:53:29+00:00
It's a hard problem and so far not a profitable one (I hope the solution will emerge as a byproduct of another innovation)

https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/778041178124926976/hy...

https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/792464928029163520/th...
by chasd00 | 2026-02-17 16:53:33+00:00
As a parent of a 16 and almost 14 year old i'm effectively home schooling personal finance with them. My wife and I got none from our parents and were preyed upon constantly. I think I was 45 when i finally got my student loans paid off. My wife did many years in a dangerous, low-performing, HS as a teacher to get hers forgiven. Sending an 18 year old off to college without a solid understanding of finance is like throwing an 18 year old in the ocean while bleeding profusely and tasking them with swimming to shore, maybe a couple make it but the sharks will get the rest.
by RandomPenguin | 2026-02-17 16:53:58+00:00
> It's mind boggingly stupid that they lock down apps like this, when you can just open the thing in a website anyway. I can use my bank on some linux distro, crazy that they trust me since it is not Windows - the truly secure OS!

I'm worried the day will come when some sites will require, even on a computer, a full-chain verification from the bootloader to the OS, all the way down to the browser. By requiring that each of these elements be digitally signed so that if you're not on a "secure" platform, from the bootloader to the browser, sites such as home banking could restrict access. Imagine not being able to login to your home banking because your linux box is rooted.

Btw, the good old days of modding are gone...
by co_king_5 | 2026-02-17 16:54:13+00:00
> Semantic ablation is the algorithmic erosion of high-entropy information. Technically, it is not a "bug" but a structural byproduct of greedy decoding and RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback).

> Domain-specific jargon and high-precision technical terms are sacrificed for "accessibility." The model performs a statistical substitution, replacing a 1-of-10,000 token with a 1-of-100 synonym, effectively diluting the semantic density and specific gravity of the argument.

> The logical flow – originally built on complex, non-linear reasoning – is forced into a predictable, low-perplexity template. Subtext and nuance are ablated to ensure the output satisfies a "standardized" readability score, leaving behind a syntactically perfect but intellectually void shell.

What a fantastic description of the mechanisms by LLMs erase and distort intelligence!

I agree that AI writing is generic, boring and dangerous. Further, I only think someone could feel this way if they don't have a genuine appreciation for writing.

I feel strongly that LLMs are positioned as an anti-literate technology, currently weaponized by imbeciles who have not and will never know the joy of language, and who intend to extinguish that joy for any of those around them who can still perceive it.
by notpushkin | 2026-02-17 16:55:29+00:00
Idk, pedestrian navigation has been pretty decent for me so far. (There’s been one case of it showing a path in Tbilisi that would require me to jump from a 3 m wall, but it was exactly once.) I suppose it depends on which city you’re in and how well mapped it is on the OSM.

Where it’s lacking is POIs – there’s way more stuff on Google Maps, and if I’m looking for some place in particular, I usually go straight to Google, then copy the location over to CoMaps.¹ I then try to add it to OSM when I have the time. Still again, there’s no reviews or photos (in the app; OSM does support photo linking).

Public transit is another problem. It’s usually okay for metro (MRT/LRT/etc), but I wouldn’t trust it with buses just yet.

¹ – yes, there’s been another fork: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoMaps#History
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-17 16:56:10+00:00
Bankruptcy affects your credit score for 7-10 years. Someone who graduates from college in their early 20s with six figures in debt could file for bankruptcy immediately and have it be off their credit history by the time they've saved up a down payment and want to get a mortgage.

There is also the obvious drawback that if more people can discharge the debt, the interest rate goes up, and then everyone else has to pay for the people who took out loans they didn't pay back.
by Aachen | 2026-02-17 16:56:13+00:00
My bank has always had hardware attestation, but it was their hardware that was being attested. Customers get it loaned when signing up

I have no problem with a device that they trust being used for transaction approval, but that device shouldn't also be the device I use for my daily life and do all sorts of private things on. We should want to be able to inspect that one
by zanehelton | 2026-02-17 16:56:44+00:00
I remember an article a few weeks back[1] which mentioned the current focus is improving the technical abilities of LLMs. I can imagine many (if not most) of their current subscribers are paying for the technical ability as opposed to creative writing.

This also reminded me that on OpenRouter, you can sort models by category. The ones tagged "Roleplay" and "Marketing" are probably going to have better writing compared to models like Opus 4 or ChatGPT 5.2.

[1]: https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/sam-altman...
by tialaramex | 2026-02-17 16:56:52+00:00
What convention? Is the problem here that you didn't realise this claimed to have been written either in December 2026 (ie months in our future) or, if you're willing to stomach a weird YYYY-DD-MM formatting - a mythical thirteenth month of the year?

The actual article was, eventually, updated to give a real date: Last updated on 2026-02-16

But originally it said 2026-12-13 and that's why I commented.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-02-17 16:57:03+00:00
> The solution is to do what Germany and most of the EU does - pay universities with tax money and do not charge students anything at all (or maybe a few hundred to thousand euros).

This is a totally fine system, but would change US tertiary education massively. Much of the state university increases in tuition since the GFC have been driven by exactly the opposite behaviour (cut state funding, make it up in tuition).
by pphysch | 2026-02-17 16:57:16+00:00
Recall it was the same lawnmower^W Ellison-owned CBS that last minute pulled a 60 Minutes report on CECOT. They didn't blame that one on the government.

Given that, I believe the higher ups at CBS wanted this to happen, but are colluding with the executive branch or misrepresenting the situation to shift responsibility.
by viking123 | 2026-02-17 16:57:19+00:00
If I lose my job and fail to get another one in reasonable time, I guess I'll try my own business, if that also fails it might be the rope then.

At least I am not tied by family so I can be relatively mobile, I moved to Singapore from my European country since the market was not great and I managed to get hired here.

Anyway in my current company the bottlenecks are completely different than AI so it will take a fair amount of time to even apply AI properly to development here.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-02-17 16:57:22+00:00
>poor throw it over the wall mentality

And that's exactly why managers keep hiring them. If you're a defensive manager who just wants to keep your head down and grind out the years before moving getting a "senior" or "principal" manager job somewhere else then a bunch of compliant workers who'll punt anything messy onto some other team is exactly what you want.
by icegreentea2 | 2026-02-17 16:57:23+00:00
Even more precisely, human writing contains unpredictability that is either more or less intention (what might be called authors intent), as well as much more subconsciously added (what we might call quirks or imprinted behavior).

The first requires intention, something that as far as we know, LLMs simply cannot truly have or express. The second is something that can be approximated. Perhaps very well, but a mass of people using the same models with the same approximationa still lead to loss of distinction.

Perhaps LLMs that were fully individually trained could sufficiently replicate a person's quirks (I dunno), but that's hardly a scalable process.
by calgarymicro | 2026-02-17 16:57:30+00:00
> Carr suggested the exemption should no longer apply to programs he characterized as being “motivated by partisan purposes.”

I know the timing makes this seem cravenly partisan, but revoking an exemption like this could be motivated by a desire to ensure fairn-

> while the FCC chair was targeting late-night talk shows, he had made clear that right-wing talk radio would not be subject to the equal time notice.

Ah, well.
by palmotea | 2026-02-17 16:58:01+00:00
> The solution is to allow judges the discretion to default them in bankruptcy after X number of years after graduation. Lenders need to accept the risk. With no risk, they can loan as much as they want and have guaranteed repayment. This drives tuition higher and higher.

This. The whole student loan mess is a direct result of their special treatment during bankruptcy.

> It tells universities that they can keep charging exorbitant tuitions because kids can still get loans to pay them.

I wouldn't be opposed to some kind of tuition claw-back from schools, when a student loan goes into default (but only by the government, not private lenders). The universities need more skin in the game to keep tuition under control.
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-17 16:58:23+00:00
> Private equity is a convenient whipping boy for ignorant, low-information HN users who don't understand the basics of how finance works. You can certainly find examples of destructive or unethical behavior if you dig deep enough. What you don't see in the news are all the cases where PE saved companies that would have otherwise gone bankrupt.

This is an unnecessarily aggressive comment and not appropriate.

But also, your own comment is information-free. Why don’t you share actual examples and we can determine if those are significant enough to erase the anecdotal evidence from the other side. Virtually all examples of PE I’ve seen are extractive. They don’t result in a better product. They are instead just lazy arbitrage relying on the power of capital, vendor lock-in, switching costs, and the limited capital of their abused customers.

As for “how would that work exactly” - like anything else. We can come up wiht ways to classify companies as private equity and enact enormous taxes on them.
by 13pixels | 2026-02-17 16:58:41+00:00
One angle thats underappreciated here is discovery. Even if the SoR survives as the backend, the interface layer is shifting to AI agents and assistants.

We've been looking at how LLMs actually recommend software tools (audited ~150 B2B SaaS across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini) and there's a massive bias toward products with clean, parseable documentation and structured data. The "vibe-coded" replacements often win here not because they're better products, but because they're easier for an agent to read and integrate with than a legacy SoR hiding behind a login wall or a PDF.

If your product is invisible to the agent doing the recommending, the quality of your backend stops mattering. Has anyone else noticed this shift in how enterprise software gets discovered?
by adolph | 2026-02-17 16:59:23+00:00
> Where Deming reads like a science paper, Drucker reads like an installation guide.

If you are looking for "do this" then Deming is not your person. If you seek understanding that drives transformation (knowing what to do in your context based on a broadly applicable value system), then Deming's system can deliver.

Lessons from the Red Bead Experiment include the fallacy of rating people and ranking them in order of performance for next year (based on previous performance), as well as attributing the performance of the system to the performance of the “willing workers” in this simulation of an organization governed by what Dr. Deming referred to as the “prevailing system of management.”

https://deming.org/explore/red-bead-experiment/
by vdqtp3 | 2026-02-17 16:59:34+00:00
3D printing is probably the easiest entry point in today's world. You can assemble already designed components into a structure and learn about how they work, tweak them for customization, design your own parts to produce, and "graduate" into designing custom printers and printer parts. The Voron and Annex communities have a ton of folks in this space designing everything from cosmetic accessories to novel mechanical components that bring meaningful improvements to functionality (Monolith, for example).

From there you can explore automation like pick n place machines, engraving, CNC plasma/routers, CNC subtractive machines (lathes/mills/etc). Or you can come back towards programming with PCB design and custom firmware.

If none of that sounds interesting, you can pick up an old project car from an MG to a Jeep XJ and everything in between.

The world is huge and getting your hands dirty is a really nice balance to time on the keyboard. The only downside is there's no ctrl+z or ^[u but sometimes that's where you learn the most.
by CGMthrowaway | 2026-02-17 16:59:40+00:00
The article calls it a "FCC crackdown," but where is the evidence that specific guidance or threats came from the FCC? Colbert cited only network lawyers offering conservative counsel. An alternate possibility - though unlikely - is that this was cooked up as a PR stunt to Talarico past Crockett in the Democratic primary

Already in 2026, Colbert has hosted Senator Jon Ossoff and
Governor Josh Shapiro who are both up for re-election this year. So I'm not sure why he couldn't air James.
by virgil_disgr4ce | 2026-02-17 16:59:46+00:00
Seconding this. I recommend Blindsight whenever the subject of consciousness—specifically lack thereof—comes up. It basically asks the question "What would it mean for there to be an intelligent species that was not conscious?"

Even more relevant now with LLMs (not that they're an "intelligent species." But a lot of people seem to think they are)
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-02-17 16:59:57+00:00
> How many German universities are ranked top 40 globally? How many American?

University rankings are mostly nonsense. They generally over-weight English speaking universities because most of the "high impact" journals are in English. The UK also does well by these metrics, but fundamentally academic research and teaching are very different things, and incentivising high output research institutions to focus on the research breaks the social purpose of universities which is to turn out educated undergraduates.

The German model is to focus more on teaching, which is a more sustainable approach than chasing the finite research dollars.
by 1970-01-01 | 2026-02-17 16:59:58+00:00
>People throughout the AI industry are calling the release of GPT-5.3 Codex and Claude Opus 4.6 (as well as Claude Code and Cowork) as harbingers of a massive shift

"This is the best and most secure version of Windows yet!" -Microsoft, on every release. I'm tired of the hype.
by brandall10 | 2026-02-17 17:00:06+00:00
Low status is underselling it, but it certainly wasn't seen as an alternate path for those looking at becoming a doctor/attorney, or even finance.

I started my CS degree in '94, and my junior year was... weird. We saw an influx of finance types suddenly in the CS lab. And even then, FAANG levels of comp absolutely were not a thing unless you took a founder path.
by rectang | 2026-02-17 17:00:39+00:00
From Maternal Perceptions Of And Responses To Child Sexual Abuse https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4845772/ :

> But it was estimated that from 30% to even 80% of victims do not purposefully disclose their misuse before adulthood.

[...]

> Arata found an inverse relationship between the disclosure and severity of abuse. Subjects reporting contact sexual abuse were significantly less likely to disclose it than those reporting non-contact sexual abuse.

> The duration of sexual abuse has a significant impact on its disclosure – the longer children are abused, the more hesitant they may be to disclose their abuse.
by loeg | 2026-02-17 17:00:54+00:00
Sort of. The CECOT segment was temporarily held for unobjectionable editorial reasons in December. It aired one month later, in January.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT

https://www.npr.org/2025/12/22/g-s1-103282/cbs-chief-bari-we...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46365646
by web-cowboy | 2026-02-17 17:01:00+00:00
Rough spot in time to be:

- Once print newspapers were no longer a thing, even local news outlets are struggling to stay alive, and are resulting to sensationalism and entertainment as news
- Corporate sponsors retain a huge influence in mainstream news (or have outright purchased it and use it for partisan politics).
- "Social" media resides in (you guessed it) corporate-owned walled gardens.
- Even those willing to speak out are being targeted by federal agencies

Wondering where others are finding great places to learn what's going on, what's actually relevant to me, and what I can actually do about it.