MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by onecommentman | 2026-02-14 06:17:02+00:00
Obligatory mention of the linear time analog sorting algorithm known as the “spaghetti algorithm”.

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

https://every-algorithm.github.io/2023/11/25/spaghetti_sort....

The equivalent for positive link weight shortest paths is the “string algorithm” — build the network out of string and pull taut between the two knots/nodes, the resulting set of taut links is the shortest path.
by jason_oster | 2026-02-14 06:17:14+00:00
Those are also things that most retained mode GUIs ignore, unless they are "platform native". Only a small number of GUI implementations get these things right because they are hard. There are many, many GUI implementations, and most of them are pretty rough, to put it mildly.

It has nothing to do with how the state is managed. (This is the only distinction between immediate and retained modes.)
by gradys | 2026-02-14 06:17:21+00:00
This was long before. Google had conversational LLMs before ChatGPT (though they weren’t as good in my recollection), and they declined to productize. There was a sense at the time that you couldn’t productize anything with truly open ended content generation because you couldn’t guarantee it wouldn’t say something problematic.

See Facebook’s Galactica project for an example of what Google was afraid would happen: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/18/1063487/meta-lar...
by wolvoleo | 2026-02-14 06:17:41+00:00
Ease of access matters. To read those textbooks you have to basically be a chemist and know where to find them, which books etc. An AI model can just tell you step by step and even make a nice overview of which chemical will have the most effect.

Id compare it to guns. You can't just buy guns here in the corner store in most of Europe. Doesn't mean they are impossible to get and people could even make their own if they put enough effort in. But gun violence is way lower than the US anyway. Because really most people don't go that far. They don't have that kind of drive or determination.

Making a fleeting brain fart into an instantly actionable recipe is probably not a great idea with some topics.
by Alive-in-2025 | 2026-02-14 06:18:08+00:00
Of course a new genre defining company can do what existing companies did and vastly increase the market if they make it better, more efficient, easier whatever. All taxi companies are not all transportation needs, not even on the road. Busses, planes, etc. There will be really new market niches, how about if your RV lets you sleep comfortably and drives all night, you never need to pay or stop (if you can sleep in a moving vehicle), gas or charge itself up.

I was thinking it won't be just one company with this tech, so they'll compete and reduce the value of driverless cars down, by attacking the profit of each other. That would be healthier than having pseudo monopoly power because there are only 2 of them - like say ios and android are basically the world of cell phones, with a few very tiny other companies.
by silcoon | 2026-02-14 06:18:18+00:00
Kind of yes and kind of no. Not many reasons to use Common Lisp I agree, but the Lisp idea itself has still something to offer that couldn’t be found in other systems.

I’m comfortable to declare that are not macros the most powerful thing of Lisp, but the concept of an environment. Still in 2026 many languages now implement the concept of evaluating the code and make it immediately available but nothing is like Lisp.

Lower level programming languages today they all still requires compilation. Lisp is one of the few that I found having the possibility to eval code and its immediately usable and probably the only that really relies heavily on REPL driven development.

Env+REPL imo is the true power still far ahead of other languages. I can explore the memory of my program while my program is running, change the code and see the changes in real time.

The issue is that CL is old, and Clojure is so close to be perfect if it wasn’t for Java. Clojure replaces Java, not CL and this is its strength but also its weakness.
by gyomu | 2026-02-14 06:18:28+00:00
The problem isn’t so much that the original people aren’t there anymore - that’s just a fact of life, and is unavoidable.

The problem is that software design as a discipline has changed fundamentally in terms of core values. “Old school” designers had a bit more of a human factors training and would think about things like discoverability, information hierarchy, error recovery, etc. And the software from that era tended to be stable for many years in terms of design, in no small part because it shipped in boxes.

Current day designers work almost exclusively from a visual bling/marketing angle - what’s going to look good in a 5 second sizzle reel? And because software can be updated 5 times a day if you want, design is much more subject to the whims of a random exec/PM wanting to push their feature/whatever AB test is popular that week rather than stable, proven foundations.

The web, rather than desktop, being the primarily delivery vehicle for software also changes what kind of design gets built.

And with more and more software being AI designed in the years to come, this won’t get much better I’m afraid.
by vladdoster | 2026-02-14 06:18:38+00:00
Location: Nashville, TN
Remote: true
Willing to relocate: boston || nashville
Technologies: Python, Django, IaC, Terraform, Golang, CI/CD, Azure/AWS, {ba,z}sh, Lua, Springboot,
Redis, Docker, Open Service Broker, {,non}relational & vector dbs, shared services, SOA
Email: mvdoster@gmail.com

resume: https://linkedin.vdoster.com && http://github.com/vladdoster

sr. cloud software engineer @ Mastercard (5 years)

Designed and built Platform-as-a-Service for microservice workloads running on Azure and AWS
to migrate on-prem workloads to the cloud. The platform operates globally, allowing teams to
deploy to several Azure-backed regions worldwide. Helped plan and create regional landing zones
in Azure for application teams wanting to perform globally. Designed platform components using
Terraform, Go, and Node; developed support tooling using Bash, Python, and Azure CLI. De-risk the
platform by addressing security vulnerabilities and ensuring the platform is PCI compliant.

api/devops software engineer @ Harvard Medical School (2 years)

Worked as part of the DevOps team to manage a 15k core CentOS HPC cluster. Designed and implemented
Python-based security scanning pipeline to securely deploy & run Apptainer images via SLURM.
Coordinated cross-team emergency patching eﬀorts. Collaborated with researchers and engineers across
3-letter institutions to deliver secure research infrastructure. Built CI/CD Pipelines with GitHub, Jenkins,
to automate code builds, testing, and deployments. Wrote Puppet modules to manage configuration of HPC fleet.
Wrote custom Puppet module & Python scripts to automatically remediate Tenable findings.

full-stack software engineer @ Global Prior Art (3 years)

Used Django, Celery, Selenium grid, and AWS API Gateway for IP rotation to scrape USPTO patent PDFs,
apply CV for data extraction, and generate reports with relevant claims, saving employees 4-5 hours daily.
Wrote E2E black-box/fuzzing unit tests. Automated on-premise deployment via Github Actions and Ansible.
by D-Machine | 2026-02-14 06:18:55+00:00
> It's interesting to me that whenever a new breakthrough in AI use comes up, there's always a flood of people who come in to handwave away why this isn't actually a win for LLMs.

>> OP's original comment is something that is actually happening in a bunch of comments on this very thread

OPs original comment was obviously a general claim not tied to responses to this thread. As usual, you fail to understand even the basics of what you are talking about.
by jcgrillo | 2026-02-14 06:19:05+00:00
Apologies for the delay, this site appears to be rate limiting me. Yeah used correctly they're great. But they're almost never used correctly in practice. I agree this is bozotry in the extreme, but it's widespread. To avoid it all they'd need to do is read like 4 pages of well-written accessible documentation, but sadly that bar is too high. I don't blame protobufs! It's just that, somehow, what should be an elegant, simple system turns into a nightmare in practice. Every. Goddamn. Time. Not unlike when people try to use Kafka. That isn't to say the tool shouldn't be used, just that maybe we need a better way to organize/educate/hire engineers so they don't ruin things so badly. Or at least some way to impose an upper bound the damage they can do. Maybe there's some kind of regularization effect if you force everyone to work with Map<Object, Object> JSON. Or maybe it's just the state everything devolves to eventually.
by SashaCui | 2026-02-14 06:21:55+00:00
We introduce an automated activation‑steering approach that plugs into standard labeled datasets—no handcrafted prompt pairs or feature annotation. On 18 tasks and 3 open‑weight models, the introspective variant (iPAS) yields the strongest behavior improvements, and layers on top of ICL/SFT.

Deep Dive: https://open.substack.com/pub/sashacui/p/painless-activation...
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2509.22739
Show HN: HelloAria – AI task manager where you talk instead of type
by saitharun_stk | 2026-02-14 06:22:47+00:00
I built HelloAria because every task manager I tried required too many steps to do something simple.
The core idea: say "remind me to review the PR tomorrow at 10" and it creates the task, sets the reminder, and files it. No forms, no manual input.
It works on iOS natively and also through WhatsApp, Telegram, and email — so you can capture tasks from wherever you already are.
Tech stack: Swift/SwiftUI on the client, with NLP handling the intent parsing and entity extraction from natural language input.
Looking for feedback from the HN community. What would make this actually useful for your workflow?
App Store: : https://apps.apple.com/us/app/helloaria-reminders-to-dos/id6...
by Arun2009 | 2026-02-14 06:25:15+00:00
A key meta-requirement is to want to think critically about issues.

If there is no desire to discover the truth of a matter and evaluate it against supporting evidence and opposing claims, then all efforts at inculcating critical thinking are dead in the water. On the other hand, if there is a genuine desire to assess arguments and claims critically, there are plenty of resources today that can teach you how.

This is a never-ending process. But the desire to think critically has to be in place before it can even begin. Critical thinking cannot occur without a strong commitment to epistemic hygiene.

In India, the problem is that many people do not even want to think critically. We tend to gravitate toward beliefs that buttress our tribal affiliations. Our tribes are defined by our worldviews, and our tribes must prevail. Hence our worldviews must be proven true, regardless of whether they are in fact true.

There is a striking indifference toward truth as a value - ironic for a country whose national motto is "Truth alone triumphs." Many people have yet to realize that truth - satya - is not something you place on a pedestal and worship, but something you actively pursue, overturning long-held beliefs where necessary.
by buremba | 2026-02-14 06:25:54+00:00
This is very neat! IMO inspecting the queries the agents run on the database is a better approach to understand how the code works, even more than reviewing the code.

I just tried and it works smoothly. For those who doesn't want to plug in the agents to their database directly, I built a similar tool https://dbfor.dev for the exact purpose, it just embeds PGLite and implements PG wire protocol to spin up quick PG databases with a traffic viewer included.
by idiotsecant | 2026-02-14 06:26:32+00:00
Coal is expensive, but it's still cheaper than nuke and peaker thermal. If you want power fast and your state and federal government aren't worried about a few pesky environmental regulations you might see coal come back. Part of coals attraction is that it takes a lot of people to run a coal plant, and people need jobs. Those people vote and politicians like votes.
by hysan | 2026-02-14 06:26:49+00:00
Another fascinating thing that the Reddit thread discussing the original PR pointed out is that whoever owns that AI account opened another PR (same commits) and later posted this comment: https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31138#issuecom...

> Original PR from #31132 but now with 100% more meat. Do you need me to upload a birth certificate to prove that I'm human?

It’s a bit wild to me that people are siding with the AI agent / whoever is commanding it. Combined with the LLM hallucinated reporting and all the discussion this has spawned, I think this is making out to be a great case study on the social impact of LLM tooling.
by virgildotcodes | 2026-02-14 06:28:40+00:00
> throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks, once something finally does report it as grandiose and claim to be "intelligent".

What do we think humans are doing? I think it’s not unfair to say our minds are constantly trying to assemble the pieces available to them in various ways. Whether we’re actively thinking about a problem or in the background as we go about our day.

Every once in a while the pieces fit together in an interesting way and it feels like inspiration.

The techniques we’ve learned likely influence the strategies we attempt, but beyond all this what else could there be but brute force when it comes to “novel” insights?

If it’s just a matter of following a predefined formula, it’s not intelligence.

If it’s a matter of assembling these formulas and strategies in an interesting way, again what else do we have but brute force?
by simongray | 2026-02-14 06:28:54+00:00
> And what's the actual result? Just look at the market capitalization of European companies compared to US companies..

Europe is actually doing quite well at the moment. The European stock markets have over-performed quite decently vs. the US ever since Trump became president, despite the various curveballs thrown at Europe in recent years. Market capitalisation in the US is held up primarily by the Magnificent 7 who are great outliers in the American stock market.
by jeandejean | 2026-02-14 06:29:00+00:00
Aren't you happy that when you buy food, it doesn't contain cocaine? Regulations are totally necessary and addictive online social media is a well documented plague in our youths especially.

This very US lobbyists narrative that Europe regulate while missing out on the economy is used and abused anytime something look like contrary to US interests in MAGA land.
by Dr_Birdbrain | 2026-02-14 06:29:13+00:00
I don’t work at a dating company, but I do work in machine learning applications.

My best guess is this: they are not optimizing for good vs great matches, and they are probably not even building a model of what that would even mean, not even trying to represent the concept in their algorithms.

Most likely they are optimizing for one or more metrics that are easy to measure and hence optimize, and these metrics have the side effect of producing an excitement for the user without actually pairing them up.

Example metrics:
- time spent on the site

- times they “swipe right” or whatever

- messages sent

- money spent
by 8note | 2026-02-14 06:31:10+00:00
why not print onto paper and put it in a safety deposit box?

your X/Y resolution isnt going to be fantastic woth filament, but your Z is gonna really suck.

you could instead print(emboss?) like a barcode on some paper, and encase that in resin. the big benefit being that you can read it non-destructively. keep it out of the sun so whatever ink doesnt fade and you're set
by srcreigh | 2026-02-14 06:31:32+00:00
It’s literally not possible. It has nothing to do with intelligence. A perfectly intelligent AI still can’t read minds. 1000 people give the same prompt and want 1000 different things. Of course it will need supervision and intervention.

We can synthesize answers to questions more easily, yes. We can make better use of extensive test suites, yes. We cannot give 1000 different correct answers to the same prompt. We cannot read minds.
by D-Machine | 2026-02-14 06:32:05+00:00
Even more generally than verification, just being tied to a loss function that represent something we actually care about. E.g. compiler and test errors, LEAN verification in Aristotle, basic physics energy configs in AlphaFold, or win conditions in e.g. RL, such as in AlphaGo.

RLHF is an attempt to push LLMs pre-trained with a dopey reconstruction loss toward something we actually care about: imagine if we could find a pre-training criterion that actually cared about truth and/or plausibility in the first place!
by k310 | 2026-02-14 06:34:05+00:00
I feel there's a lot of emphasis in the piece on negatives that we already know, such as the hypocritical "Board of Peace" and less on the solution.

What solution?

The author quotes Thich Nhat Hanh [0]

> To work for peace is to uproot war from ourselves and from the hearts of men and women.

When enough people turn from consumerism, racism, nationalism, and feel strongly about equality, while celebrating our individual differences, honor every individual, and act with fairness, opportunists playing the fascist playbook will not be able to take power, given the % of the population adamant against untruth (racism and division are taught), vile intention, speech and action.

Hypocrisy, the bending and breaking "the golden rule" of treating others as we would like to be treated, will be loudly and widely called out, not whitewashed.

Some Buddhists call this a "human revolution" [1]

> “Human revolution” is the term used by second Soka Gakkai President Josei Toda to describe a fundamental process of inner transformation whereby we break through the shackles of our “lesser self,” bound by self-concern and the ego, growing in altruism toward a “greater self” capable of caring and taking action for the sake of others—ultimately all humanity.

Such "enlightened" people will fight (peacefully) against killing, racism, xenophobia, inequality, wars and militarism, the insane concentration of wealth, and consequent unequal opportunity and unequal access to the benefits of society: ESPECIALLY among the most vulnerable.

The fascist playbook always targets the most vulnerable, dehumanizing them.

[0] If you can spell his name from memory, you're well read.

[1] https://www.sokaglobal.org/resources/study-materials/buddhis...
by arjie | 2026-02-14 06:35:01+00:00
It's just a reinforcement loop where the more of something you have the more it accelerates. It happens in many places: bank runs (as soon as people start taking money out, more start doing so), the dead sea effect (where the best people leave and people start leaving as the median quality of coworker drops), hiring (where the more capable you are the more likely you are to get hired, so it gets harder and harder to hire the later you are to the game - most obvious with when you're interviewing interns or whatever), and so on.
by tomwojcik | 2026-02-14 06:37:20+00:00
AoM is not as popular, but I can't give you the numbers. All I know is I'm very good in AoM, and very bad in AoE2. AoE is easy to learn and hard to master, imo. I assume it's the biggest old school strategy franchise with a PvP scene that refuses to die, and it's not driven by hype or marketing.
by utopiah | 2026-02-14 06:39:38+00:00
See what I replied just earlier https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47011884 namely the different regimes, within paradigm versus challenging it by going back to first principles. The ability to notice something is off beyond "just" assembling existing pieces, to backtrack within the process when failures get too many and actually understand the relationship is precisely different.
by chowells | 2026-02-14 06:40:20+00:00
Please explain to me how you can hash n distinct strings into O(n) buckets in O(1) time. Please note that this process needs to work as n goes to infinity.

Hash tables are O(log n) structures when you don't hand-wave away the "compute a hash" part. The thing is, search trees are far worse than that in practice and you aren't hand-waving away the "compare two elements" part. That's where the real speed savings come from.
by seydor | 2026-02-14 06:41:25+00:00
I move that they should kill infinite regulation.

What is next? Sex? Sex is addictive we should put a limit, ban after 33. How about chess? Running? Partying?

Making heroes out of social media users was not something expected in my lifetime. Imagine facebook users bragging how they managed to jailbreak their locked down feeds. That's a comical future
by mint5 | 2026-02-14 06:42:08+00:00
Egh pontzer and his misinterpreted studies again.

Exercise burns extra calories, just not as much as one would expect based on simple calcs.

At least this time the article is mostly okay, last article I saw here a while back was basically saying exercise doesn’t burn extra calories despite his works actually showing levels of activity influencing ~1,000 calorie difference in energy expenditure. Although speaking from experience, good luck trying to maintain high activity levels if one underfuels.
by zapzupnz | 2026-02-14 06:42:44+00:00
> Using a trackpad gesture is just as quick.

> Definitely not

Sounds like a you problem.

> easier.

> It's harder [...]

Sounds like a you problem.

> [...] because you have to memorise more gestures and perform more complicated ones.

Oh no, how will I ever remember (checks notes) swiping. On a Trackpad!? Insane.

> More spatially natural

> That makes no sense.

I swipe left, window goes left. I swipe right, window goes right. I swipe up, window goes up. I swipe down, windows goes down.

It's as close to actually flicking the windows around the space provided without getting a touch screen.

> and only uses one hand

We agree.

> unless, of course, your other hand is always near a corner

Corner of what?

> you don't need to type to have your left hand rest [...]

Big assumption that I'm left-handed. The modifiers on the right-hand side of some keyboards, including on notebooks, are seriously iffy.

> [...] rest near the left near corner of the keyboard

If my other arm isn't anywhere close to the computer, then it's nowhere near the keyboard, let alone the corner.

> you've just moved your RSI to your right hand

How often am I swiping windows? Barely.

Are you also saying any use of the trackpad or mouse, no matter how little, is automatically RSI?

Whereas having your fingers nearly-permanently at the ready over (or near the corner of) the keyboard is A-OK?

> Also hands have the same length, so leaning back doesn't prevent leaving one finger on a modifier

Back to the RSI angle because my hands are not glued to the keyboard. The way you seem to think so tells me you only sit at a desktop when using a computer, you never slouch, you never slump, you never use a notebook computer.

> it's just that none of your arguments support it.

Or your imagination cannot allow it.