MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ToucanLoucan | 2026-02-19 20:51:50+00:00
I know no such thing. The number one type of gun death is by far, suicide. When a gun owner takes a gun home (or in this case, prints one) statistically speaking they are more likely to use it to end their own lives or harm themselves more than anything else.

You could make a similar case for this as was made for the banning of highly toxic coal gas in the UK in the 1960's. Most suicides are acts of distressed individuals who have quick, easy access to means of ending their own lives. The forced changeover from coal gas to natural gas is largely credited with a reduction of suicide by 40% after it was done. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC478945/

I don't think 3d printed guns have been around long enough to really provide meaningful data on whether this law will be effective, and on the whole, I'm not thrilled about it. But again, as was originally commented: this is an issue where states are, perhaps ineffectively and ineptly, attempting to solve what they see as problems, under a federal government that has shown itself incredibly resistant to common sense gun regulation that virtually everyone, including the gun owning community, thinks is a good idea.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-19 20:52:12+00:00
> For those developers who just want to build a thing to drive business value, or because they want a tool that they need, or because they think the end result will be fun to have, AI coding is great. It enables them to skip over (parts of) the tedious coding bit and get straight to the result bit.

Then they aren't programmers anymore, are they? We don't call people using no-code platforms "programmers" and we wouldn't trust them one bit to review actual code.

AI is simply the new no-code platform, except that the scope of what it can do is much larger while the reliability of what it produces is much lower.
by hibikir | 2026-02-19 20:52:33+00:00
I also don't have any proof that the article will be any good. When buying a whole newspaper for the day, if some of the articles are suboptimal, I can still make money from the reliably good stuff. But if I go look at an article, am I getting something good, or is it regurgitated Reuters I read before, plain AI, or completely wrong? The barrier is too high if I don't have a lot of faith in the source, and if I do, I should just subscribe
by parpfish | 2026-02-19 20:52:55+00:00
The free experience on the site for every small town newspaper or tv station is horrific. Genuinely among the worst, least usable websites on the internet.

The problem is that the horrendousness doesn’t drive people to pay, it drives them to social media.

And a big part of this is that local papers consider their online presence secondary to print. So paying will get you a physical newspaper and unlimited access to the worst site in the world
by lbreakjai | 2026-02-19 20:53:03+00:00
My head of engineering spent half a day creating a complex setup of agents in opencode, to refactor a data model across multiple repositories. After a day running agents and switching between providers to work around the token limits, it dumped a -20k +30k change set we'll need to review.

If we're very lucky, we'll break even time wise compared to just running a single agent on a tight leash.
by open592 | 2026-02-19 20:53:08+00:00
This is awesome, love the sense of humor and just downloaded it and started adding data.

Only small piece of feedback is that I would use `$VISUAL` when opening the editor. When I tried to use `Ctrl+e` it opened nano which I haven't used in ages.

Edit: Oh looks like you use `$EDITOR` - I just didn't have that set. Awesome!

These are the projects which make me love Show HN!
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2026-02-19 20:53:12+00:00
Something I realised a while ago: everyone can write and that makes it very hard to stand out as a writer, and make a career out of writing. Same thing with singing more or less (although it's harder to sing well than write at all well).

I think I realised that while reading Harry Potter. To be fair the writing in the books is abysmally bad. It's written by an adult woman but it comes across as the writing of a 14 year old child, and that's to be charitable.

And it doesn't matter one bit. It still became the best-selling book in history with 600 million copies sold worldwide (as Wikipedia tells me). That's not to say that there aren't many hundreds, possibly even thousands of better written series, even in the Young Adult space. There are. But they're not that successful.

Why? I guess because good writing doesn't matter so much as what's being written. And I guess that also doesn't matter that much. You just have to connect somehow, be in the right place at the right time, when the need to read a certain piece of writing sort of emerges naturally as a result of whatever forces shape ambient taste.

Who knows. But most people wouldn't know what good writing looks like anymore than they could write well themselves, so it's obvious that the ability to write well is over-rated.

And so now we have LLMs generating prose and that's what we'll be reading henceforth. I think it will be gradual, but it's unavoidable. One day nobody will read anything anyone else has written anymore. Why do that? If you can just ask an LLM to generate whatever you want to read?
by chrash | 2026-02-19 20:53:20+00:00
the idea of one language to rule them all is very compelling. it’s been promised a lot, and now everyone hates Java.

but the truth is that Rust is not meant for everything. UI is an abstraction layer that is very human and dynamic. and i can come and say, “well, we can hide that dynamism with clever graph composition tricks” à la Elm, React, Compose, etc, but the machinery that you have to build for even the simplest button widget in almost every Rust UI toolkit is a mess of punctuation, with things like lifetimes and weird state management systems. you end up building a runtime when what you want is just the UI. that’s what higher level languages were made for. of course data science could be done in Rust as well, but is the lifetime of the file handle you’re trying to open really what you’re worried about when doing data analysis?

i think Rust has a future in the UI/graphics engine space, but you have to be pretty stubborn to use it for your front end.
by gertlex | 2026-02-19 20:53:24+00:00
Do you think the category of people that "consume their news" via primarily reading headlines from aggregators (google/apple mobile built-in "news") is significant or no?

(this is a big part of my consumption, and is combined with scrolling HN/reddit headlines; often to paywalled sites, which leads me to mostly reading comment discussions on those two sites)

(edit: disclaimer after reading a few other comments: I use Android; so don't have personal experience with Apple News, which may in fact be significantly different/better product)
Show HN: Pokémon Booster Box Restock Alerts on Amazon
by user1222 | 2026-02-19 20:53:35+00:00
Stop Refreshing Amazon. Get Emailed When It Restocks. Pokémon booster boxes and Elite Trainer Boxes on Amazon sell out without warning and restock unpredictably. Set a free Pokémon TCG restock alert and get an email the instant your set is back in stock at your target price. No more manual checking.
by almosthere | 2026-02-19 20:53:48+00:00
No, this is probably an illegal CA law.

I'm a strong believer in 2a rights. However I think every type of weapon might require a license. So if you 3d print a gun that you would be allowed to own if you had already completed your background check, then you're gold.

If you end up 3d printing a nuclear bomb, the licensing requirements for that would be a billion times harder. (secure facilities, 24/7 guards, blood oath to the United States etc...)
by anigbrowl | 2026-02-19 20:54:10+00:00
I don't think that's fair. The US has so many administrative layers with taxing powers - federal, state, county, and municipal, and in many cases administrative bodies also charge massive filing fees, and courts charge large fees to finance themselves because they're consistently under-funded by legislatures.

So Americans get taxed a lot at many different levels of activity. The cognitive load of having so many different points of taxation is annoying and exhausting to a lot of people. It makes household budgeting a lot more work than it really needs to be.

But it is this way because of the Constitution

They maybe we should change that and have a simpler system with much less complexity. Dismissing people who object to the painful complexity of the US tax regime as 'evaders' is npt insightful or helpful.
by porcoda | 2026-02-19 20:54:18+00:00
Yes. This is one of the things that drives me nuts about a lot of titles on here: the context like “for the web” changes how it’s is interpreted a great deal. I see the same thing when I see posts about other languages and AI and such. Context matters versus making it sound like a broad, general statement. Alas, the broad, general statements likely get more engagement..
by kube-system | 2026-02-19 20:54:36+00:00
It was confirmed for the previous ~130 or so, at least, since United States v. Cruikshank... although I certainly wouldn't want to go back to those days before the Bill of Rights were incorporated against state/local governments... Basically it was a blank check for racists to suppress minorities.

The result of United States v. Cruikshank was that southern states were allowed to to prohibit black from owning firearms to defend themselves from the KKK. Not exactly a great example of gun control.
by throwa356262 | 2026-02-19 20:54:40+00:00
I think the idea of simplicity is still relevant, but the problem is not as simple as (no pun) having a certain look to your ISA anymore. ISA transformed to something unrecognisable 2-3 steps into the pipeline, the rest of the CPU doesn't see much of the ISA.

Maybey we should abandon "reduced instruction set" and instead evaluate how ISA is suitable for out of order execution or speculative execution or backtracking and so on
by Gormo | 2026-02-19 20:54:47+00:00
Actual text from your link is:

> (a) Any business that produces or manufactures three-dimensional printers for sale or transfer in California shall take both of the following steps

This is worded a bit ambiguously: it's not clear whether it's meant to be "manufactures ... in California" or "for sale or transfer in California". IANAL, but wouldn't the latter be unconstitutional inasmuch as it conflicts with federal jurisdiction over interstate commerce? It seems unlikely that California would be able to enforce this against businesses that have no operational presence there, and are merely shipping 3D printers to California from other states.

And if that's the case, the only meaningful effect of this bill passing will be to further motivate anyone making or selling 3D printers to leave California for other states.
by lunar_mycroft | 2026-02-19 20:54:57+00:00
None of those changes address the issue jdlshore is pointing out: self assessed developers productivity increases from LLMs are not a reliable indication of actual productivity increases. It's true that modern LLMs might have less of a negative impact on productivity or increase it, but you won't be able to tell by asking developers if they feel more productive.

(Also, Anthropic released Claude Code in Febuary of 2025, which was near the start of the period the study ran).
by keeda | 2026-02-19 20:54:57+00:00
The real takeaway here -- also corroborated by the DORA 2025 report https://dora.dev/research/2025/ -- is that more than anything, AI amplifies your current development culture. Organizations with strong quality control discipline enjoy more velocity, those with weak practices suffer more outages.

Expecting AI to magically overcome your development culture is like expecting consultants to magically fix your business culture.

Furthermore, by various estimates, engineers only spend 10 - 60% of their time on actual code. So, given that currently AI is largely used only for coding activities, 10% is actually considerable savings.

Also this is the result of retro-fitting AI into existing workflows; actual "AI-native" workflows would probably look very different, likely having refactored in other parts of software engineering. Spotify's "Honk" workflow is probably just a starting point.
by chasd00 | 2026-02-19 20:55:51+00:00
is the tooling moat and secret sauce in Claude Code the client? That's super risky given the language it was written in ( javascript ). I bet Claude Code itself can probably reverse engineer the minimized javascript, trace the logic, and then name variables something sensible for readability. Then the secret sauce is exposed for all to see.

Also, can you not setup a proxy for the cert and a packet sniffer to watch whatever ClaudeCode is doing with respect to API access? To me, if you have "secret sauce" you have to keep it server side and make the client as dumb as possible. Especially if your client is executes as Javascript.
by y-curious | 2026-02-19 20:56:07+00:00
I’m in my early 30s and am starting to think about getting a screening. Problem is, it’s not trivial to do. You have to really upsell your doctor to get one so early, even though it’s a relatively benign procedure.

There is a noninvasive testing method called Shield but it is way too flawed to be reliable (with poor positive rates for malignant tumors)
by dang | 2026-02-19 20:56:58+00:00
You've been breaking the site guidelines so often and so badly that I've banned the account.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
by legitster | 2026-02-19 20:57:07+00:00
A 3D printer being able to identify what it's actually printing is much harder than it seems. Also, the majority of what gets printed are parts - how do you distinguish between a legal gun owner printing accessories and parts that go towards a ghost gun?

Also, good luck farming off the job to the DOJ right now. The ATF has already mostly shrugged at the prospect of 3D printed guns, and that was before the administration gutted it. I don't think they have any interest/ability to cooperate with tech regulation at this time.

This, like every other bill on the subject that has been attempted from around the country, is bound for a quiet death by committee.
by yieldcrv | 2026-02-19 20:57:09+00:00
It's called Band Steering and it messes up older devices. Its truely an L direction that the wifi industry has gone, its a reaction to overcrowding of the 2.4Ghz spectrum by automatically moving capable devices to the 5Ghz SSID

so happens that its not backwards compatible very well to 2.4Ghz only devices. Not because of the frequency itself but because of the band steering implementation from the router
by AndrewStephens | 2026-02-19 20:57:12+00:00
I get the sentiment but micropayments just don’t work - the main problems are not technical but social. Even in the gaming sector, nobody really charges less than about a dollar for items - that is the smallest unit of money where putting up with fraud, complaints, and chargebacks becomes worthwhile.

Add to this the huge race to the bottom (they are charging 3 cents for their article, read my summary for 2 cents) and you quickly begin to see why micropayments have never taken off.

Finally, I wrote a blog post along these lines with more detail[0]. For those who disagree, ask yourselves; would you pay me 2 cents before you click that link.

[0] https://sheep.horse/2024/11/on_micropayments.html
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2026-02-19 20:57:13+00:00
<< This shows that the author is not very curious because its easy to take the worst examples from the cheapest models and extrapolate.

I find this line of reasoning compelling. Curiosity ( and trying to break things ) will get you a lot fun. The issue I find that people don't even try to break things ( in interesting ways ), but repeat common failure modes more as a gospel and not an observed experiment. The fun thing is that even the strawberry issue tells us more about the limitations of llms than not. In other words, that error is useful...

<< Their status, self worth and everything is attached to it. Anything that disrupts this routine is obviously worth opposing.

There is some of that for sure. Of all days, today I had my manager argue against use of AI for a use case that would affect his buddy's workflow. I let it go, because I am not sure what it actually means, but some resistance is based on 'what we have always done'.
by unsnap_biceps | 2026-02-19 20:57:24+00:00
I'm traditionally conservative and have many law enforcement in my extended family. Law enforcement is very required for society, but it's a blunt tool.
There are classes of crime that will not be reduced no matter how many people you put in jail. Mental health and addiction issues (often they go hand in hand) really should be solved differently than just jail time.

My small town has a swat team and two bear cats. They've never been used outside of training. They're very likely never going to be used outside of training. This is a ton of money that the police justified by "If we don't spend it, we lose it". That's not fiscally responsible and it's something as a conservative we do need to push back on and some of that involves defunding the police's overly excessive budgets and reducing taxes or at least reallocating it towards other social programs that will help beyond just locking people up.
by claytongulick | 2026-02-19 20:57:41+00:00
> who want to bury us in deepfakes, extreme right wing bullshit

It's a shame with articles like this that are otherwise insightful, they just lose me with sentences like that.

Like, if you don't have enough insight to recognize that bullshit is a general political issue, and has been forever, how can I rely on any other analysis you make?
by jasonvorhe | 2026-02-19 20:58:06+00:00
Most of the stuff I published anywhere was moved into a new git repo with a fresh commit history, often in one commit. Don't want to worry about some overeager hiring manager or client to assume my sloppy commits and git push -f use in personal projects is representative of my paid work. Seems to be quite the common practice, though I have no numbers to back this up of course.

I can empathise with the short fuse when it comes to suspecting AI slopped stuff though. Even some of the few people I still look up to push a lot of takes that reek of being slopped. Guess we'll have to wait this out.
by Gormo | 2026-02-19 20:58:10+00:00
> These are objective facts.

The characterization of the federal government as "broken" (at least in this capacity) and "dysfunctional" is a normative judgment you're making based on your own subjective value preferences.

Some -- perhaps most -- Americans regard the federal constitution's ability to restrain states from enacting policies that transgress against generally accepted individual rights as desirable, and working as intended.
by al_borland | 2026-02-19 20:58:12+00:00
Is this code for something else?

I am red-green color blind. If given the choice, I will choose a rocking chair every time.

When reading the questions they asked...

> whether they had a sugar baby now, whether they had made cradle-rocking plans for after they're gone, and about the rocking chairs themselves.

I'm confused. A "sugar baby"? Are we talking about a younger woman who is financially dependent on her "sugar daddy"? What is a "cradle-rocking plan"? Is this like "robbing the cradle"... another old guy with younger girl thing?

What does any of this have to do with rocking chairs? Is this some kind of fetish code I'm unaware of?
by MostlyStable | 2026-02-19 20:58:16+00:00
I'm impugning the entire field of research, why would I then provide an opposing citation? My own claim should lead you to not trust it. I'm also not making any particular directional claim that would require such a citation.

I'm arguing that your statement, citation supported or otherwise, was stronger than I believe is warranted. You (correctly) criticized the original comment for making a stronger claim than they were able to support. You then technically did a better job in supporting your own claim (in the sense that you made any attempt to support it at all), but, in my opinion, you still made the same mistake of making a claim that was much stronger than warranted.
by rtkwe | 2026-02-19 20:58:31+00:00
Most tax returns these days are prepared and submitted electronically so the basic work of the arithmetic involved should be as close as possible to perfect already. Evaluating that is going to be pretty mathematically intensive though and LLMs have been pretty bad at that. Tool usage has gotten it better so maybe they'll just hand off the validation to the existing traditional computing and mostly be vibes based, 'does this return look legit?' evaluation.
by pwdisswordfishy | 2026-02-19 20:58:34+00:00
"new"

Microsoft's Project Silica: Is glass the future of long term storage?. October 2023. Comments (13): <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37895643>

Project Silica. October 2023. Comments (14): <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38056035>

Project Silica 2022. May 2023. Comments (1): <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36089007>

Project Silica proof-of-concept stores movie on quartz glass. November 2019. Comments (102): <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21482904>
by ZeeSee | 2026-02-19 20:58:43+00:00
It's rare but can happen where long distance running causes ischemic colitis which is where on a long run enough blood is diverted from the large intestine that it damages the intestine long term. It isn't surprising to me that there's higher likelihood of colon cancer given this. It seems like repeated bouts of lower blood for the intestine on long runs has a cumulative impact and damages the colon even if it doesn't cause ischemic colitis.
by WolfeReader | 2026-02-19 20:58:44+00:00
"every critique of AI assumes to some degree that contemporary implementations will not, or cannot, be improved upon."

They're token predictors. This is inherently a limited technology, which is optimized for making people feel good about interacting with it.

There may be future AI technologies which are not just token predictors, and will have different capabilities. Or maybe there won't be. But when we talk about AI these days, we're talking about a technology with a skill ceiling.
by enobrev | 2026-02-19 20:58:59+00:00
I'm similarly unpredictable in my home. Add to that the others in my house, and it's impossible to even guess what everyone's intentions are at any given time.

Sometimes I daydream about a "solo mode" where the timings on lights are tighter and my music can follow me around the house when I'm up at night and nobody else is. But most times I'm trying to find the get-out-of-way averages that keep everyone happy.

Some things work great: Automated lights everywhere. Automated dimming of lights at night or sunset or whatever. Notifications when the laundry is done, or the cat litter is ready to be changed, or someone is at the door, or the garage door has been left open - all great. What music to play in what room at any time? Always changes. When to "dim all the lights" because Plex started a movie? But my son is building Legos in the dining room, and my wife is knitting and needs the couch light on. Sometimes I want it, but not every time.

For those things having a single button press is still a huge win over opening multiple apps and getting the right things set the right way for each participant.
by TSiege | 2026-02-19 20:59:02+00:00
This is a false equivalency if I just share torrented data I can go to prison. These companies downloaded and seeded copy righted material and then sold a product made from that data. If I a civilian did this I would face time in prison. If you think this is fine great, but what people are made about is the hypocrisy of the current moment.

As the title said "Techno-cynics are wounded techno-optimists"