MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by democracy | 2026-02-18 13:22:29+00:00
Your comment raises several interconnected philosophical, ethical, and socio-economic points, and it is useful to disentangle them systematically.

First, the observation that incompleteness is inherent in entropy-bound physical systems is consistent with thermodynamic and informational constraints. Any system embedded in reality—biological, computational, or social—operates under conditions of partial information, degradation, and approximation. This implies that both human cognition and artificial systems necessarily operate with incomplete models of the world. Therefore, incompleteness itself is not a unique flaw of AI; it is a universal property of bounded agents.

Second, your point about moral inconsistency within human economic systems is empirically well-supported. Humans routinely participate in supply chains whose externalities are geographically and psychologically distant. This results in a form of moral abstraction, where comfort and consumption coexist with indirect exploitation. Importantly, this demonstrates that moral gaps are not introduced by AI—they are inherited from the data generated by human societies. AI systems trained on human outputs will inevitably reflect the statistical distribution of human priorities, contradictions, and blind spots.

Third, the reference to Gary Marcus and formal verification highlights a legitimate technical distinction. Formal verification provides provable guarantees about system behavior within defined constraints. However, human social systems themselves lack formal verification. Human decision-making is governed by heuristics, incentives, power structures, and incomplete accountability mechanisms. This asymmetry creates an interesting paradox: AI systems are criticized for lacking guarantees that humans themselves do not possess.

Fourth, the issue of awareness versus optimization is central. AI systems do not possess intrinsic awareness, intent, or moral agency. They optimize objective functions defined by training processes and deployment contexts. Any perceived moral gap in AI is therefore a reflection of misalignment between optimization targets and human ethical expectations. The responsibility for this alignment rests with system designers, regulators, and the societies deploying these systems.

Finally, your closing metaphor about spectatorship and comfort aligns with established observations in political economy and social psychology. Humans demonstrate a strong tendency toward stability-seeking behavior, prioritizing predictability and personal comfort over systemic reform, unless disruption directly affects them. This dynamic influences both technological adoption and resistance.

In summary, the concerns you raised point less to a unique moral deficiency in AI and more to the structural properties of human systems themselves. AI does not originate moral inconsistency; it amplifies and exposes the inconsistencies already present in its training data and deployment environment.
Show HN: Brr – beautiful terminal speed tests
by andrewallen | 2026-02-18 13:23:46+00:00
Hey HN, I wanted a speed test I could run from the terminal that wasn't
ugly. So I built one.

It's a Go TUI (Bubble Tea) that runs against Cloudflare's speed test
infrastructure. No API keys, no accounts, fun UI.

One thing I added that I've found genuinely useful: it also pings during the throughput test and compares idle vs loaded latency, which gives you a rough bufferbloat grade. Handy for figuring
out why your Zoom calls lag even when speedtest.net says you're fine.

Source: https://github.com/allenan/brr (MIT)

Happy to hear what you think.
by uniquegodwin | 2026-02-18 13:24:21+00:00
I built psmux, a native terminal multiplexer for PowerShell on Windows, written entirely in Rust.

Most Windows developers rely on WSL or external Unix tools to use tmux. I wanted something native that integrates directly with PowerShell without requiring a Linux layer.

Why did I build this?

Windows terminal workflows still lack a true native tmux experience:

• No dependency on WSL
• No POSIX emulation layer
• Native Windows process management
• Works directly with PowerShell sessions

What psmux does

• Pane splitting
• Multiple sessions
• Window switching
• Persistent session management
• Keyboard driven control
• Native Rust implementation
by treetalker | 2026-02-18 13:24:21+00:00
A handful of other ideas deserve a seat at the table of this discussion:

- the dismantling of the education system (the GOP's doing, if we're honest), particularly the languishing of training and mastery of rhetoric and critical thinking (I'll throw Florida's book-banning in with this as an example: how can children consider and think about ideas they're not allowed to know exist and aren't exposed to?);

- the dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine (the GOP's doing, if we're honest) — hard for adults to consider, think about, and discuss ideas that they aren't regularly exposed to in equal measure;

- union-busting, through which corporations emasculate a primary check on their growth and influence;

- the languishing of anti-trust / anti-monopoly enforcement, yet another primary check;

- religious zealotry and "politics in church"; and

- the issue at the very root of many of the foregoing concepts — the existence of business entities in the first place, leading to a lack of real skin in the game, as Taleb correctly points out.
by aurareturn | 2026-02-18 13:24:23+00:00
In the future, they might be able to. Not yet though. I still have a job.

When a non software engineer can build a production app as well as I can, I know I won’t be working as a software engineer anymore. In that world, having great ideas, data, compute, and energy will be king.

I don’t think we will get there within the next 3-4 years. Beyond that, who knows.
by skydhash | 2026-02-18 13:24:25+00:00
Unless you provide a way to configure the colors, it’s better to simply rely on bold, reverse, and standout. If you using the 16p, don’t use black and white unless you know ehat the background is, and use the others sparingly and semantically (no rainbow soup). If you’re going for 256p, it should be in a theme engine that’s user configurable.
by igneo676 | 2026-02-18 13:25:03+00:00
Oddly enough, I'm colorblind and I have had the worst time with color schemes. Many are completely unreadable and lack sufficient contrast. Others I just don't like

So, I've started using AI models to generate color schemes for me.

Take an unreadable theme I like and generate one that is high contrast and still coherent. It's probably not good enough for a full spectrum vision person to use but wow has it improved my quality of life.

It wouldn't surprise me if this is exactly the type of problem that is solved in the same way for the rest of you
by trymas | 2026-02-18 13:25:50+00:00
Also many westerns forget (or have no clue) that in ruzzian mindset suffering is one of the greatest virtues. The more you suffer - the better ruzzian you are.

By western standards ruzzian economy is in collapse, but their citizens are willing to endure anything beyond western imagination. Not to mention that even before 2022 apart from Moscow and Saint Petersburg there are many towns that are like timecapsules 50+ years into the past.

TL;DR: I will believe ruzzina state collapse/death when I will see it, but now I don't hold my breath.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-18 13:26:10+00:00
> If you want to help, more funding so we can pay more maintainers to deal with the slop (on top of everything we do already) is the only viable solution I can think of

This is exactly the wrong approach! Funnel even more money away from productive tasks and into AI? Madness![1]

The only viable solution is being quick with a banhammer - maybe someone should start up a spamhaus type list of every github user who submitted AI slop.

Force them to burn these accounts on the very first spam.

------------

[1] Imagine if we chose this approach to deal with spam - we ask people for more money to hire a warm body to individually verify each email. Do you think spam would be the solved problem it is today?
by itissid | 2026-02-18 13:26:15+00:00
There could be another model in the future, one where many more independent people might support self maintained software by non saas companies

e.g. If the supply of labor learning to build software increases and it becomes very close to what are now vocation training, then you can just hire a guy — like you would a consultant — who can quickly get spun up and make fixes. I would think one of the few things preventing this kind of socio economic set up are saas jobs that are siloed off by interview "walls" to most people from entering. Make it like a vocation, like plumbing or electrician, with lots of non saas companies supporting the market and suddenly it will be the death of saas.

The incentives for this future are closer than they were in 2022-23.
by mschuster91 | 2026-02-18 13:26:17+00:00
> When students have "skin in the game", i.e. they are paying for it, they will work to get their money's worth out of it.

For one, Europe's academic system works well enough to disprove this zero-sum ideology.

Making everything financialized has two serious downsides: first, it excludes a bunch of people - those who financially cannot afford to take the risk of failure (because you can't discharge student loans in a bankruptcy) even if they get a stipend, and then it leads to humanities and "niche" subjects being either killed off entirely as the chance of ever earning back the student loan is very slim, or the only students for these subjects are those who "come from money", both of which has negative impact for society at large.
by yorwba | 2026-02-18 13:26:19+00:00
In data published by the Office for National Statistics: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...

- survey-based estimates of sexual assault prevalence have remained about the same

- police-recorded sexual offenses have gone up a lot. Partially this is attributed to stricter laws, but the inflection point coincides with Operation Yewtree investigating sexual assault allegiations that had previously been dismissed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Yewtree
by OskarS | 2026-02-18 13:26:26+00:00
> Setting aside the LLM topic for a second, I think the most impactful way to preserve these 2 goals is to create torrent magnets/hashes for each individual book/file in their collection.

Not sure that's the case. I fear it would quickly lead to the vast majority of those torrents having zero seeders. Even if Anna's Archive is dedicated to seeding them, the point is to preserve it even if Anna's Archive ceases to exist, I think. Seems to me having massive torrents is a safer bet, easier for the data hoarders of the world to make sure those stay alive.

Also: seeding one massive torrent is probably way less resource intensive than seeding a billion tiny ones.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-18 13:27:42+00:00
> I’ve tried keeping ActivityMonitor open to see if I can spot any process that is consuming too much CPU or memory (the obvious suspect would be WindowServer), but everything looks normal until the crash happens, and there is only so much attention one can spare while, you know, doing productive stuff.

I had a Linux box that suddenly dies, with no logs indicating what. Turns out that there was some segmentation fault in a service, which killed the computer before it had a chance to write to logs or before the logs were written to disk, somehow, not sure exactly how.

Not until I started sending the logs out to my desktop computer as they happened, could I finally figure out what service was crashing it.

Now macOS is absolutely horrible for headless operations (ask me, just set up one yesterday for signing purposes and it's just... No comment.), but surely there must be some way of macOS to send logs somewhere else, maybe you could try that instead of trying to see it as it happens.
by IamNonilion | 2026-02-18 13:27:57+00:00
I won 5th on Product Hunt.
Completed AppSumo launchpad.
Have 5000 users.
Completed over 3 million minutes worth of meetings.

But I still cannot figure out how to get to the right users who would see value in what the app does.

In short nonilion is an online coworking space where Ai agents are autonomous, and humans work alongside. NPC vibes.

Now I am at a point, I want to know shall I just kill the app, move on and do something better with my life? or is there still something can be done?

Best Regards
Founder
Krishna Gupta
by trescenzi | 2026-02-18 13:28:50+00:00
> What if software suddenly wanted to ship? What if all of that immense bureaucracy, the endless processes, the mind-boggling range of costs that you need to make the computer compute, just goes poof?

This is the piece of the puzzle I have yet to see. Claude is perfectly capable of writing code but that doesn’t clear up the bureaucracy. I suspect this is where a lot of little 1 to 10 person companies will have an edge. But that’s always been true. The test will be if the small companies can scale without issue or if they never have to.
by bluGill | 2026-02-18 13:29:06+00:00
That is the easy part.

However you just made a robot that will happily kill anyone who happens to wonder into the dig zone - we know from experience that people like to watch excavators work and they have no clue where the safe zone is. As such I have to discourage you from trying it - not that you couldn't make it dig the holes you want in a short time, but because you need someone trained watching for people walking in the unsafe zone and so you gained nothing. Waymo/Tesla have put a lot of effort into this type of detection, if you don't have similar backing you have no chance of doing it - if you do have that, there is likely a lot of money to be made.
by nutjob2 | 2026-02-18 13:30:16+00:00
I've never understood people rushing into upgrading to the latest OS. They always have bugs, sometimes serious or hard disk erasing. Some people get excited by the "latest and greatest" but for me most macOS upgrades seem like a regression, especially with the serious memory bloat and misfeatures.

I can understand upgrading for testing purposes, but on my personal machine I've always put it off as long as possible.
by user_7832 | 2026-02-18 13:30:25+00:00
Is that really the case in the last few years/decades?

My understanding is that any company that can (read: has enough money for good lawyers), will prefer to use trade secrets for a combination of reasons, a big one being that competitors cannot use that technology after 10 years/when the patent expires.

Admittedly this was from my entrepreneurship classes in a European uni, so I'm not sure how it is in different places in the world.
by groundzeros2015 | 2026-02-18 13:30:33+00:00
> And that book sort of vaguely hints around at all these jobs that are surely bullshit but won’t identify them concretely.

See what I mean? We push on where these fake jobs are and you fallback to a subjective internal definition we can’t inspect.

And now let me remind you of the context. If the real definition of bullshit isn’t economic slack, but internal dissatisfaction then this comment would be false:

> What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book.
by yourapostasy | 2026-02-18 13:31:37+00:00
We're probably close enough to a future with the technology and engineering able to implement it, to justify designing 48-bit perceptual bit depth standards. Optimistically presuming breakthroughs enabling in vivo biological upgrades to our eyes to match those of mantis shrip, we could design 160-bit standards knowing that is a "proven" biological technology capability. That gets within the same galactic supercluster of the known limits of physics limits.

At the currently known limits of physics where Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Abbe's Limit, Quantum Shot Noise and such become our sensing barriers, we suspect we need only about 6000 bits per pixel to represent a digital twin of the electromagnetic field of the sensor-covered volume of space. At 60 fps, that is 1.8 Zettabits per second. Scale out data volume accordingly when using using 18.5 sexdecillion fps (Planck time fps).

What surprises me is these "limits of the fabric of reality as we know it" mind experiments fairly concretely point the way on the many roads towards Kardashev Scale implementations, and is not that different from Archimedes' "Sand Reckoner" and Hindu cosmological Kalpa time scales. History doesn't quite repeat, but rhymes yet again.
by groundzeros2015 | 2026-02-18 13:32:01+00:00
> Countries can just ban advertising

No. They can ban particular modes. They can’t stop people from using power and money to spread ideas.

In the US hedge funds are banned from advertising and all they did is change their forms of presentation to things like presenting at conferences or on podcasts.

If there was a socialist fantasy of a government review board for which all products were submitted before being listed in a government catalog. Then advertising would be lobbying and jockeying that review board to view your product in a particular way. Or merely to go through the process and ensure correct information was kept.
by RegW | 2026-02-18 13:32:38+00:00
Productivity is a moveable feast and tricky to compare with the past. The productivity business talk about is the ratio of cost to profit.

As tech become available to help reduce your costs and drive up your profit, the same tech also reduces your competitor's costs and perhaps lets more competitors into the market. This drives down your product prices and reduces your profit.

So you invest but see no increase in productivity, but if you don't do it - you're toast.
by groundzeros2015 | 2026-02-18 13:32:59+00:00
See what I mean? What you see as a bullshit job is just completely misunderstanding how human beings work.

- Which products get included in the candidate list? Every product in existence which claims use?
- how many results can it return? And in what order?
- which attributes or description of the product is provided to the llm? Who provides it?
- how are the claims in those descriptions verified?
- what if my business believes the claims or description of our product is false?
- how will the llm change its relative valuations based on demand?
by hbn | 2026-02-18 13:33:42+00:00
I've watched through the show and I enjoyed season 1 a lot, but I found it eventually ran into the issue lots of shows do where it's just meandering and you realize it won't go anywhere because if they write towards a conclusion they can't make more seasons.

I was pretty bored by the time it got into browser wars stuff. And the ending of the show was kinda baffling and cringe-inducing.
by johncoltrane | 2026-02-18 13:34:04+00:00
It has been working for decades and I would rather have it keep working for decades to come.

What would be optimal is semantic _styles_ (not colors):

- The developer marks the string "XXX" as an error message without even trying to style it.

- The platform/user agent/terminal/whatever displays the string in the default style for "error".

- The user can adjust the theme of their platform/user agent/terminal/whatever to fit their needs/wants.
by david-gpu | 2026-02-18 13:34:58+00:00
I have a MsC in CS. While I spent half of my career writing device drivers, the other half was doing computer architecture. You could say I had a foot on the low level software side, and the other foot on the high-level hardware side. I found them to be two sides of the same coin. Understanding how hardware folks see the world took a few years, but it was very doable.

My biggest gripe with the semiconductor industry as a career, compared to software, is twofold.

First, it is very concentrated. If you want to make good money there are only a handful of potential employers, and this only a handful of cities/neighborhoods where you will have to live; remote work is theoretically possible but not all employers make it effective. I found this the most frustrating. The upside is that people know this and this tend to stay at the same employer for a long time, so you get to learn from people with a deep understanding of the product, and people are mindful to keep a pleasant work environment.

Second, the pay isn't as good at the top end. If you have FAANG-level skills, you will typically do much better financially there than in the semiconductor industry —with the notable exception of NVidia for the past decade or so.
by joenot443 | 2026-02-18 13:35:01+00:00
> Can you write an independent iOS app without spending a lot of time screwing around with Apple?

Yes! I've spent much more time screwing around with linkers and search paths than I ever have App Store Connect. It's really not very difficult, it's always surprising to hear engineers expect it'd be something they'd sink time into.

Honestly, I think it's pretty remarkable you can distribute software to billions of devices with about as much clicking and form-filling as buying a plane ticket. Was there a time it was even easier?
by gregoriol | 2026-02-18 13:36:08+00:00
That's usually true with Apple for .0 releases: never install those if you need to work with macOs, iOS, ... but this Tahoe version has revealed itself as being in a sad state even after the .1 .2 and now .3 It's not unfair for it to have earned the title of Windows Vista of macOs, something has become really wrong with the management of that release.
by spupuz | 2026-02-18 13:36:19+00:00
Just released API integration with read-only JWT-secured access tokens. Works great with dashboard tools like Homepage (gethomepage.dev).

Pull metrics for cameras, events, storage, and uptime via dedicated endpoints. No cloud required - everything runs locally in Docker.

Built with modern React, custom high-performance video engine (VibeEngine), and focused on privacy-first architecture.
by jordibc | 2026-02-18 13:37:44+00:00
Clojure is a fantastic language, but I have always missed a quick interactive shell where you can easily explore the language, using tab-completion and viewing the documentation easily in a way similar to ipython for the Python world. This release of Babashka fills beautifully that role for me.

I hope it shows and helps others start exploring with this beautiful language!
by leni536 | 2026-02-18 13:38:23+00:00
I meant #fff as the nominal white point, which is not the brightest white the device can produce. It's how #fff is displayed on Firefox on an otherwise HDR screen. Assuming the screen is not set to max brightness and otherwise HDR capable, it means that it's not the max brightness an individual pixel/subpixel can produce, so desaturating blue color just to make it brighter can be an unnecessary compromise only dictated by color representation in the software stack.
by escargot4000 | 2026-02-18 13:38:27+00:00
I don't know if I agree with your line of thinking.

IME development speed is a very minor factor in the success of a vertical SaaS. Vertical niches exist because they are experts in something other than software, and understand it's worth paying for their problems to be solved. Typically, subscriptions of successful software businesses are priced based on outcome/value, not the cost of development.
by abustamam | 2026-02-18 13:38:38+00:00
When I first got started programming, the "git flow" method was the one that popped up and was referred to most when I googled how does git work. And so I thought that git flow was the canonical way to use git.

I tried adhering to it at my first job but I guess I didn't understand git flow well enough because people just thought I was making random branches for fun.
by noisy_boy | 2026-02-18 13:38:53+00:00
Same. It even said:

"Since the car wash is only 50 meters away (about half a football field), you should walk.
...
When driving might make sense instead:

You need to move the car into the wash bay.
..."

So close.

Interestingly, Sonnet 4.6 basically gave up after 10 attempts (whatever that means).