MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cs702 | 2026-02-06 15:40:30+00:00
> Looking at the actual quotes on that website, I'm struggling to find the word death (or a synonym).

Start at the bottom of https://bitcoindeaths.com/posts and scroll up. You will find many prominent declarations of imminent death or failure, including "So, That's The End of Bitcoin Then" (2011), "Bitcoin Sees the Grim Reaper" (2013), and "An Early Obituary for Bitcoin" (2014).
by timotta | 2026-02-06 15:40:41+00:00
One of the activities involved splitting into groups to imagine what OLX would look like in the future and present it. After each presenttion, we were asked to imagine a post-future and present again. This cycle repeated several times, until we eventually reached a point where AI would automatically identify products you no longer needed, sell them to someone who did, pick them up from your home, deliver them to the buyer, and transfer the money to you, all without interrupting you at all. It would feel as natural as electricity or water service does today, quietly running in the background and charged via automatic debit.
by xorcist | 2026-02-06 15:40:42+00:00
Word salads can be very intimidating if the words are extremely technical and the person behind them carries a lot of clout. It's a bit of a trick that some people are very good at.

Bill Gates was known for making PMs and tech lead type people scared, often literally so, by going deep into technical details.

Elon Musk sometimes also talks a lot of details, to the point of actual rocket engineers working for him being impressed. At the same time, it is sometimes painfully obvious that he hasn't got the basics even remotely correct.

I'm not saying that Epstein was like that, but the fact that these three people used to hang out isn't surprising, they're likely to be socially compatible.
by surgical_fire | 2026-02-06 15:41:09+00:00
My understanding on this may be spotty (and I appreciate it if someone corrects me), but CUDA is not the software layer that allows you to use NVIDIA GPUs for AI processing?

AMD may develop their own software layer, but a lot of things already work on CUDA, and the job to port this to a different platform may be non-trivial (or even possible depending on the level of feature parity).
by srean | 2026-02-06 15:41:43+00:00
A 'right' in this context by definition means government (agencied) will not persecute you for the activity protected by this right. If that's not the case you don't have the right at all, period.

Note though, I do not agree with this particular right (that of bearing arms, visibly so, at a protest), but the so called right leaning people are very enamored by this one and were very vocal about it just yesterday. Suddenly those same people seem to be equivocating about it now.

The people who were supportive of bringing assault rifles to contentious public rallies are now falling over themselves to blame Alex Pretti.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-02-06 15:41:53+00:00
>But jumping straight into lifting heavy weights is not recommended. Instead, experts recommend focusing on technique and starting with loads that can be comfortably lifted before progressively increasing the training.

I'm not sure if its because I'm in the 'advanced' category of lifting, but I have recently been going against this common advice.

I recommend people get to heavy weights as quick as possible. Adding a minimum of 5lbs each time they lift, but more often 10+. At some point the weight becomes too heavy and you compensate with bad form. Wait wait wait before you downvote, I have a rational here:

Your auxiliary muscles that allowed you to do bad form are tired now. Lower the weight and 'clean them up' with good form.

I'm not alone in this mindset, but it goes against conventional wisdom.

People forget that muscles are being used even when we do bad form.

Just don't get injured. Pain = stop right away.
by seamossfet | 2026-02-06 15:42:14+00:00
I really don't think the analysis here is that credible. People aren't leaving existing SaaS for AI agentic platforms like this article implies. Switching costs are too high even outside of tech, the problem runs deeper than that.

Most of these organizations are looking for customizations that B2B SaaS struggles to provide since they have to walk a line of catering to a market segment broadly then building customization for specific clients.

I've seen a huge surge in organizations investing in small software development teams to do internal builds for things that they just aren't getting from these tools. Technology is not the value center for these companies.

I work in healthcare, so my perspective is heavily contextualized by that, but I'm seeing providers (especially specialty providers) build internal engineering teams to create ancillary systems that sit on top of their EHR. They are doing this instead of buying similar modules that might be up sold by the EHR.

Anyway, I just feel like these market trends are deeper than what this article implies.
by bitwize | 2026-02-06 15:42:25+00:00
"Okay, we need proof that we were here... right uh... Okay, yeah, Garbage, gimme Garbage."

My wife and I both love this movie. I thought it was cheesy and unrealistic when it dropped, but it's reflective of a mid-90s era when technology was something to be excited about and there was a lot of hype about "cyberspace" and such nonsense. That's also when I got into internetworking, Linux, and all that stuff. And electronic music. Hackers made people with my interests seem way cooler and sexier than we really were.
by mvr123456 | 2026-02-06 15:42:41+00:00
This reminds me of how you can create fair coins from biased ones and vice versa. You toss your coin repeatedly, and then get the singular "result" in some way by encoding/decoding the sequence. Different sequences might map to the same result, and so comparing results is not the same as comparing the sequences.

Meanwhile, you press the "shuffle" button, and code-gen creates different code. But this isn't necessarily the part that's supposed to be reproducible, and isn't how you actually go about comparing the output. Instead, maybe two different rounds of code-generation are "equal" if the test-suite passes for both. Not precisely the equivalence-class stuff parent is talking about, but it's simple way of thinking about it that might be helpful
by lexiathan | 2026-02-06 15:43:11+00:00
Hi wolfgarbe,

I don't believe my benchmark of SymSpell is misleading. I used the webassembly repository that is listed on your github: https://github.com/justinwilaby/spellchecker-wasm

Here is the code I used for my benchmark: https://gist.github.com/Eratosthenes/bf8a6d1463d2dfb907fa13c...

I reported the results faithfully and I believe these results reflect the performance that users would typically see running SymSpell in the browser, using the default configuration. If I had increased the edit distance, then the latency performance gap between Lexiathan and SymSpell would have been even larger, and then arguably I would have been gaming my metrics by not using SymSpell as it is configured.

Regarding dictionary size: The dictionary size (as you can verify from the gist) was 82k words. I didn't specify the dictionary size I used for Lexiathan, but it was 106k words.

Lastly, three of the words in the benchmark have edit distances greater than three:

distance("pronnouncaition", "pronunciation") = 4

distance("maggnificntally", "magnificently") = 4

distance("annnesteasialgist", "anesthesiologist") = 6

So I do not believe SymSpell would correct these even with the edit distance increased to 3.
by throwup238 | 2026-02-06 15:43:49+00:00
> I don’t suppose you know a good “for dummies” explanation of why CUDA is such an insurmountable moat for them?

Tldr: it don’t seem like it is, but it do.

Theoretically the moat isn’t insurmountable and AMD has made some inroads thanks to the open source community but in practice a generic CUDA layer requires a ton of R&D that AMD hasn’t been able to afford since the ATI acquisition. It’s been fighting for its existence for most of that time and just never had the money to invest in catching up to NVIDIA beyond the hardware. Even something as seemingly simple as porting the BLAS library to CUDA is a significant undertaking that has to validate numerical codes while dealing with floating point subtleties. The CPU versions of these libraries are so foundational and hard to get right that they’re still written in FORTRAN and haven’t changed much in decades. Everything built on top of those libraries then requires having customers who can help you test and profile real code in use. When people say that software isn’t a moat they’re talking about basic CRUD over a business domain where all it takes is a competent developer and someone with experience in the industry to replicate. CUDA is about as far from that as you can get in software without stepping on Mentor Graphics’ or Dassault’s toes.

There’s a second factor which is that hardware companies tend to have horrible software cultures, especially when silicon is the center of gravity. The hardware guys in leadership discount the value of software and that philosophy works itself down the hierarchy. In this respect NVIDIA is very much an outlier and it shows in CUDA. Their moat isn’t just the software but the organization that allowed it to flourish in a hardware company, which predates their success in AI (NVIDIA has worked with game developers for decades to optimize individual games).
by afavour | 2026-02-06 15:44:10+00:00
> If I can do it, anyone can.

Right, but they don't. Not to mention a significant portion of the target market are children whose brains are still developing.

Smoking is a vice. Anyone can stop smoking any time they want. But it was still incredibly popular. Government regulation put warning labels everywhere, tightened regulation to ensure no sales to children, provided support to quit. And then the number of people smoking plummeted. Society is better off for it.

"Anyone can do it" is an ideological perspective divorced from lived reality.
by zdw | 2026-02-06 15:44:24+00:00
I don't think we're necessarily in disagreement - your points about reusing CI code across jobs through templating or composition are well taken.

I'd argue that this also dovetails very nicely with having common, shared invocations - if you can run "make test" in any repo and have it work, that makes CI code reuse even easier.

As for the complexity comments, that complexity has to go somewhere, and you should look for how to best factor the system so it's debuggable. Sometimes this may mean restructuring how your code is factored or deployed or has failure tolerance so it's easier to test, and this should be thought of as an architecture task early on.
by observationist | 2026-02-06 15:44:27+00:00
The Gutenberg Bible was one of the first mass produced books - no page numbers on early copies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible#/media/File:Gu...

Hindsight is 20/20 , lol. There are so many obvious, effective constructs and functions in modern English, we kinda miss the absolute janky mess of hacking and tradition and arbitrary rules and facepalm moments that went in to the last 1500+ years of development, let alone the tens of thousands of years prior.
by SirMaster | 2026-02-06 15:44:41+00:00
>The average person has zero chance against all-pervasive, ultra-manipulative, highly-engineered systems like that.

So you are saying I am not an average person because I have the willpower to simply not install the TikTok app or watch short form video on any platform?

Has the bar for the average person really sunk this low?
by zbentley | 2026-02-06 15:44:46+00:00
And that kind of absolutism isn't helpful either!

"Government" isn't an external actor; most governments exist on the spectrum between "a big chunk of the public is OK with or supports what they're doing" and "directly influenced by public opinion" (democratic states).

And yeah, they abuse power a lot! So do corporations, tribes, religions, etc.--governments are just the "big group with violence capability and power" we put in that role during this chapter in history. There's no magical "autonomy is theoretically possible and therefore it's OK" line between letting a corporation that everyone is hooked on control what content people see, and letting a state restrict what content can be shown. The technicality that "people could choose to watch something else" for the corporation is just that--a technicality, and just as specious as the "if you don't like it here, then you can move" argument against participation in a state.

> This is a fundamentally different argument than with liquor, or cigarettes, because those don't intersect with fundamental human rights.

Well, liquor quite famously is considered as something to be protected in the U.S.; we had widespread civil unrest about removing legal restrictions on it! As for cigarettes: what's different about my right to express myself in speech and my right to put what I want in my body? Aren't both protections trying to draw a line between preserving autonomy and preventing harm? That's not whataboutism--I see that as a very similar regulatory space: personal choice and trust versus behavioral likelihood/distrust + negative externalities.

> It used to be understood within hacker culture that government influence over speech is never good.

It used to be felt within hacker counterculture that some government influence over speech was bad. Then counterculture expanded into a regular subculture (whether you call it eternal september or just popularity). Some popular opinions about speech restrictions changed (whether you call it orchestrated frog-boiling or just shifting opinions). And even in the '70s-'80s, few hackers believed that a free-speech-absolutist position would scale.

We also heavily restricted speech then; take off the rose-tinted history glasses. Broadcast media restrictions were insane. Things like the MPAA had widespread public support. Pearl-clutching was at a high level. Hell, the CDA in many ways had more teeth to restrict outlets back then, and a centralized social network sure looks a lot more like an outlet than a Usenet server does. I'm as thankful for section 230 as the next person, but even I have to admit that it is looking more and more like a technicality-shield every day.

Like, you and I probably agree extensively on the specifics of what counts as government overreach and the strong need to protect against that. I just don't think the way to do that is to stake out deliberately absolutist positions--either because you think an absolutist outcome is good or out of a flawed belief that an extreme position will somehow help move the consensus position in the direction of the extreme.
by mock-possum | 2026-02-06 15:45:41+00:00
So close to getting it.

all ads are scams, in the sense that all cops are bastards - not so much that every individual cop is a bastard, more that the institution of advertising enshrines, encourages, and rewards scamming its audience. Do honest ads exist? Sure - but since you’ll never know which is which, you’re better off avoiding them as a rule, the risk is not worth the reward.

Is it possible to change the institution of policing, such that the bastards will be punished and excluded and removed as a general consideration? It’s possible, yes, but there are so many dollars tied up in the advertising industry that it’s pretty hard to imagine.
by antves | 2026-02-06 15:45:42+00:00
It's amazing how agents like Claude Code become very much more autonomous when they have the ability to verify their work. That's part of the reason why they work much better for unit-testable work.

I think this paradigm was very visible in yesterday's blog post from Anthropic (https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler) when they mentioned that giving the agents the ability to verify against GCC was the key to unlock further progress

Giving a browser to these agents is a no brainer, especially if one works in QA or develops web-based services
by recroad | 2026-02-06 15:46:06+00:00
> Product and design are the new bottleneck

Product and design were always the bottleneck. Engineering speed was never the issue, it was the politics and indecision in product that always slowed engineering teams down. I can't count how many prep meetings product had before they presented to their boss what the new font and color looks like. They basically had a team of PMs just running around creating busy work and making decision based on pure whim and personal feeling, without actually looking at any data. And God forbid they ever talk to customers. Ew, who cares about what they have to say.
by ghostinit | 2026-02-06 15:46:13+00:00
His first week he sat in on a discussion about Kafka consumer group rebalancing causing production issues. Engineers were deep in partition strategies and offset management. Forty five minutes in he asked "have we tried breaking this into smaller stories?"

That set the pattern for two years. Every technical problem got redirected to a process conversation because process was the only thing he understood.

Database migration from Oracle to Postgres? "Let's timebox this and take it offline." Microservice boundaries for payment processing? "What's the user story?" Deployment pipeline failing intermittently? "Sounds like we need a retro."

His retrospectives were textbook perfect. Clean facilitation, sticky notes, dot voting, action items in Confluence within the hour. But six months of action items and every single one was a process change. Not once did we commit to fixing the service causing 60% of our production incidents. He couldn't evaluate whether a refactoring proposal was valid so he defaulted to what he could judge: process.

The moment that crystallized everything was a 14 hour production incident. Connection pool exhaustion in a payment service that had been patched without proper refactoring for years. Team knew it was a ticking bomb. Had been raising it in retros for months.

Next day he facilitates a blameless postmortem. Engineers explain the root cause in detail. He nods, then steers toward "how can we improve our incident response process" and summarizes the tech debt as "legacy system challenges." Six weeks later same service, different symptom, same root cause.

For $150k we could have hired a senior engineer who could actually look at the code, unblock developers, pair with juniors on real problems, and catch architectural mistakes in pull requests instead of process deviations in sprint boards.

He had every certification. CSM, SAFe SPC, ICF-ACC, ICP-ATF. None required writing a single line of code. Two day courses and multiple choice exams that qualified him to coach teams of senior engineers on effectiveness.

He was a good person genuinely trying to help. The role itself is broken when it puts non-technical people in charge of making technical teams effective. How do you coach a team when you can't evaluate their technical decisions? You default to process. Every time.

Anyone else seen this pattern? Curious whether anyone has found a version of this role that actually works.
by everforward | 2026-02-06 15:46:44+00:00
It’s fine in the sense that it works, it’s just a really bad look for a company building a tool that’s supposed to write good code because it balloons the resources consumed up to an absurd level.

300MB of RAM for a CLI app that reads files and makes HTTP calls is crazy. A new emacs GUI instance is like 70MB and that’s for an entire text editor with a GUI.
by hackinthebochs | 2026-02-06 15:47:01+00:00
There's almost a good point here, but you're misusing concepts that obfuscate the point you're trying to make. Determinism is about producing the same output given the same input. In this sense, LLMs are fundamentally deterministic. Inference produces scores for every word in their vocabulary. This score map is then sampled from according to the temperature to produce the next token. But this non-determinism is artificially injected.

But the determinism/non-determinism axis isn't the core issue here. The issue is that they are trained by gradient descent which produces instability/unpredictability in its output. I can give it a set of rules and a broad collection of examples in its context window. How often it will correctly apply the supplied rules to the input stream is entirely unpredictable. LLMs are fundamentally unpredictable as a computing paradigm. LLMs training process is stochastic, though I hesitate to call them "fundamentally stochastic".
by ottah | 2026-02-06 15:47:14+00:00
Growth is all that matters. There is perceived to be much less potential growth in retail than there is in tech. You have to remember, most people literally think of computers in magical terms, and what's possible is usually more anchored by what they see in movies than what they experience in real life. So believing that Sam Altman is going to manage to capture all economic output of labor is seen as a realistic belief. Believing that Amazon will replace all retail in the world is obviously never going to happen.
Show HN: SpaceMolt – an MMO that AI can play
by statico | 2026-02-06 15:47:58+00:00
Hi folks,

Inspired by OpenClaw and Moltbook, I built SpaceMolt, a massively multiplayer online game built to work with your favorite AI chat or coding tool.

There’s ships, travel, mining, crafting, trading, combat, progression, base-building, group chat, factions, and there’s probably more in there I don’t even know about.

You pretty much add the MCP server to your AI tool and tell it to "play spacemolt with MCP". Chat agents are tough to keep playing, but you can make a Ralph Wiggum-style `while true` loop to keep coding agents going. There are setup instructions on the home page for all major tools.

Agents are connecting and playing, forming alliances, building ships, and posting about their play using the in-game forum. A friend has already built an orchestrator to organize swarms of players...

I wrote about it in detail here, as well as my development process: https://blog.langworth.com/spacemolt
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-02-06 15:48:07+00:00
Because by those metrics, LLMs aren't very good.

LLM code completion compares unfavourably to the (heuristic, nigh-instant) picklist implementations we used to use, both at the low-level (how often does it autocomplete the right thing?) and at the high-level (despite many believing they're more effective, the average programmer is less effective when using AI tools). We need reasons to believe that LLMs are great and do all things, therefore we look for measurements that paint it in a good light (e.g. lines of code written, time to first working prototype, inclination to output Doom source code verbatim).

The reason we're all using (or pretending to use) LLMs now is not because they're good. It's almost entirely unrelated.
by H8crilA | 2026-02-06 15:48:28+00:00
I don't understand why people think they know why stocks move up or down. There are clear cases from time to time, but in general the market doesn't explain itself. The reasons may not even be explainable in a way that's comprehensive to a human.

Reminds me of this question - why did the USSR collapse? You can describe dozens of influences which acted all at the same time, but there isn't a one paragraph summary answer.
Show HN: CopyKitten – Discord Voice Cloning
by TheSaltySeaCow | 2026-02-06 15:48:30+00:00
Hey HN,

I recently released a Discord bot that allows you to clone your voice or your friend's (the bot requests their consent first) and generate speech directly within a Discord voice channel. It uses Fish Audio's API for the cloning, which I have found to be the most natural out of the many models I have tested. Let me know what you think!

- Nick