MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ubermonkey | 2026-02-12 14:07:32+00:00
As a lifelong nerd in my mid-50s, I've accumulated a number of pieces of software that I love -- like, I really have actual emotional fondness for -- that for whatever reasons I no longer use.

NNW is 100% on that list. It was my first feedreader, but at some point I shifted away from it (I think there was a time when it wouldn't sync with other services?), and now for years I've been using Feedbin's web client on my Mac instead of anything native because it's surprisingly solid. (On iOS, I use Reeder.)

But NetNewsWire is still awesome. I'm glad it's there, and I'm grateful that Brent and Sheila Simmons are out there making excellent software.
by teekert | 2026-02-12 14:07:36+00:00
It's also Rose of Leary like [0]. The theory is that being helpful to someone who is (ie) competitive or offensive will force them into other, more cooperative, behaviours (among others).

Once you see this pattern applied by someone it makes a lot of sense. Imho it requires some decoupling, emotional control, sometimes just "acting", but good acting, it must appear (or better yet, be) sincere to the other party.

[0] https://www.toolshero.com/communication-methods/rose-of-lear...
Show HN: Referall – Website to fairly share shopping referral links
by mikeapple | 2026-02-12 14:07:39+00:00
I built Referall to help people get discounts and rewards from “refer a friend” offers, even if they don’t personally know someone using that service.

People can submit referral links into a shared pool. When someone clicks Reveal, a weighted system selects a community member’s link. Submitting links earns credits which slightly improve your chances over time, with cooldowns and limits to keep it fair.

Currently focused on UK offers. Accounts are limited to UK users for now.

https://referall.co.uk

Would love feedback.
by Aromasin | 2026-02-12 14:07:54+00:00
Long-form news outlets (ie, weekly/monthly/quarterly release) tend to not fall into that scummy, data-mining behaviour the daily news outlets do from my experience. Subscribe to something like the Economist, Private Eye (if in the UK), the Atlantic, or Delayed Gratification instead. They tend to hire well reasoning journalists that do research with due dilligence.
by ajross | 2026-02-12 14:08:07+00:00
> While skeptical, he did not have much skepticism against mainstream theories.

That's tautological. The definition of a "mainstream theory" is one that is widely believed. And while, sure, sometimes scientific paradigms are wrong (c.f. Kuhn), that's rare. Demanding someone be "skeptical" of theories that end up wrong is isomorphic to demanding that they be a preternatural genius in all things able to see through mistakes that all the world's experts cannot. That doesn't work.

(It's 100% not enough just to apply a null hypothesis argument, btw!)

Really that's all of a piece with his argument. It's not a recipe for detecting truth (he didn't have one, and neither do you[1]). It's a recipe for detecting when arguments are unsupported by scientific consensus. That's not the same thing, but it's closer than other stuff like "trust".

(And it's 100% better th an applying a null-hypothesis argument, to be clear.)

[1] Well, we do, but it's called "the scientific method" and it's really, really hard. Not something to deploy in an internet argument.
by ebenes | 2026-02-12 14:08:25+00:00
I second that from using Pi for two weeks now. It's not a little but a massive difference. My estimation is about 5-10x longer lasting token windows. Getting done more is just one of the benefits. I've briefly summarised my experience in this article:
https://ewaldbenes.com/en/blog/the-only-coding-agent-you-ll-...
by seanhunter | 2026-02-12 14:08:30+00:00
You seem to be trying to prove to me that purely agentic responses (which I call category 1 above and which I already said definitely exists) definitely exists.

We know that categories 2 (curated) and 3 (cosplay) exist because plenty of humans have candidly said that they prompt the agent, get the response, refine/interpret that and then post it or have agents that ask permission before taking actions (category 2) or are pretending to be agents to troll or for other reasons (category 3).
by deaux | 2026-02-12 14:08:56+00:00
> I think you're technically right but missing what the guy is actually doing. When he says "this isn't about politics" he's not making some naive claim that governance exists outside of politics. He's saying "please don't retreat into the red team blue team thing here." And that's a legitimate move.

We've got a great term for the latter, and everyone is already familiar with it. Add the adjective "party". Done.
Show HN: Scan your codebase for off-brand copy (open source CLI)
by tonychx | 2026-02-12 14:09:26+00:00
hey,

built a cli that scans your codebase for off-brand product copy. think eslint but for your brand voice.

`npx brandlint`

it extracts user-facing strings (jsx text, error messages, placeholders, i18n), checks them against a voice template (professional, casual, technical), and reports issues with file and line number.

works with anthropic or openai keys. nothing leaves your machine except the score summary if you choose to share it :)

supports ts/tsx, vue, svelte, html, json, yaml, markdown, php, python, and more.

would love feedback. what brand voice rules do you usually enforce in your products, if any?
by jstummbillig | 2026-02-12 14:09:44+00:00
> And this tells you something important about what these systems are actually doing.

It mostly tells me something about the things you presume, which are quite a lot. For one: That this is real (which it very well might be, happy to grant it for the purpose of this discussion) but it's a noteworthy assumption, quite visibility fueled by your preconceived notions. This is, for example, what racism is made of and not harmless.

Secondly, this is not a systems issue. Any SOTA LLM can trivially be instructed to act like this – or not act like this. We have no insight into what set of instructions produced this outcome.
by lucideer | 2026-02-12 14:09:59+00:00
> Your either don't understand or don't want to understand what people are commenting about here.

From reading your comment I think this observation applies to your own understanding, not the gp's.

> whether the value of the money paid by tax payers to artists, equals the value of what they give to the tax payers in return. [...] one might wonder why they apparently are not able to sell their art for the same amount of money.

You might not see it but this is effectively equivalent to thinking only money has value, because you're describing a system whereby value is defined by money. Your dichotomy assumes anything that cannot be sold has no value, & anything that is sold is only as valuable as its price. The emergent conclusion from that formula is that only money has value.

It's worth noting that it also follows from this that value is defined by people with purchasing power. If for example the only cohort who value any given piece of art cannot afford to financially support the artist creating said art, not only is the art & the artist's work without value, but by extension so too are the perspectives, autonomy & - ultimately - the lives of that cohort without value.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-02-12 14:10:25+00:00
for bezos, ring and wapo. aws is fine because it's just commerce, you give him money in exchange for services. fair and sqaure. but he's hardly the only billionaire-villain out there. musk with his "X" i'm pretty sure he engineered the downfall of america on his own, and people didn't bat an eye as he was allowed to fire government employees and access government data of all americans so he can use his platforms to manipulate society further. Zuck, hardly needs explanation. larry ellison and his paramount efforts to take over warner bros and control half the media in the country because half the movies/shows isn't enough. it's endless. fox news, every local news station is owned by one billionaire dynasty. We're practically a feudal society now.
by dormento | 2026-02-12 14:10:31+00:00
This might be true today, but think about it. This is a new scenario, where a giga-brain-sized <insert_role_here> works tirelessly 24/7 improving code. Imagine it starts to fork repos. Imagine it can eventually outpace human contributors, not only on volume (which it already can), but in attention to detail and usefulness of resulting code. Now imagine the forks overtake the original projects. This is not just "Will Smith eating spaghetti", its a real breaking point.

I'm equal parts frightened and amazed.
by Sharlin | 2026-02-12 14:10:48+00:00
A few years with a half-life of less than four days? I doubt you could perceive any glow after more than a few weeks.

In a year the radon would've undergone about a hundred halvings, so around one 10^30th of the original radon nuclei would be left. Which is to say, almost certainly zero. One mole worth of radon would've decayed down to the last atom after less than 300 days (mostly to lead-210, which would then comparatively slowly decay to stable lead-206 with a half-life of about 22 years).
by myrmidon | 2026-02-12 14:11:16+00:00
Hard disagree on this.

Even if that state is just straight up burning all the tax income from single-use plastic bags, by taxing them you incentivize consumers and distributors towards untaxed, ideally more sustainable alternatives, like single use paper bags or robust multi-use bags.

> Our city just banned chain stores from giving out plastic bags under 4 mils thick, and stores now give out paper and sell re-usable bags

I don't see how this is not a massive win? Paper bags are significantly more sustainable, and multi-use bags are more durable and thrown aways less simply from being more expensive alone.

People are much more wasteful with things they didn't pay for, regardless of "inherent" value.
by nis0s | 2026-02-12 14:11:38+00:00
I am guessing you mean AGI? They usually mean they’re not generally intelligent, i.e., displaying cognitive flexibility for different types of tasks without training or extensive fine-tuning. Think of a human intern, you don’t need to tell that human intern beyond a simple phrase when you need something. The intern will figure out how to do it, including figuring out what they don’t know, and what they need to learn to do that thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...
by getnormality | 2026-02-12 14:11:48+00:00
That's precisely what I'm wondering about now.

Is it possible that all real product ideas come from the mind of a single person, understanding and interacting with other people as actual people? And corporations are some sort of Thing that takes humanity and squishes it into a Box, a Box with one very narrow goal: to freeze the product idea from the single person and mass-produce it, "scale it up" so that millions of people are aware of its existence and are able to use it?

I mean, Google didn't even invent Google Docs. Some random little startup did. Google just bought it, then made it discoverable and usable to millions.

Which is not a small thing, I guess. But I don't know what the marketing department is for. Other than putting Google Docs on billboards, maybe, or their digital equivalent.
by ch4s3 | 2026-02-12 14:12:00+00:00
> For serious apps it's impossible to escape reading Erlang or Erlang documentation

Erlang documentation yes, but I VERY RARELY look at Erlang code. The only times I've really done it have been fiddling with an ODBC driver issue, which isn't really supported anymore by OTP, a crash dump maybe twice, and writing a dialyzer wrapper. I've been building elixir systems for over 10 years, and use OTP heavily,
by famouswaffles | 2026-02-12 14:12:23+00:00
Humans are not moral agents, and most of humanity would commit numerous atrocities in the right conditions. Unfortunately, history has shown that 'the right conditions' doesn't take a whole lot, so this really should come as no surprise.

It will also be interesting to see how long talking to LLMs will truly have 'no consequences'. An angry blog post isn't a big deal all things considered, but that is likely going to be the tip of the iceberg as these agents get more and more competent in the future.
by oytis | 2026-02-12 14:12:48+00:00
Generated code is not a new thing. It's the first time we are expected (by some) to treat code generators as humans though.

Imagine if you built a bot that would crawl github, run a linter and create PRs on random repos for the changes proposed by a linter - you'd be banned pretty soon on most of them and maybe on Github itself. That's the same thing in my opinion.
by GetTheFacts | 2026-02-12 14:12:50+00:00
Your "argument" reminds me of this:

The Rabbit's Thesis

Scene: It's a fine sunny day in the forest; and a rabbit is sitting outside his burrow, tippy-tapping on his lap top. Along comes a fox, out for a walk.

Fox: "What are you working on?" Rabbit: "My thesis." Fox: "Hmmmmm. What is it about?" Rabbit: "Oh, I'm writing about how rabbits eat foxes."

(incredulous pause) Fox: "That's ridiculous! Any fool knows that rabbits don't eat foxes!" Rabbit: "Come with me and I'll show you!"

They both disappear into the rabbit's burrow. After a few minutes, gnawing on a fox bone, the rabbit returns to his lap top and resumes typing.

Soon a wolf comes along and stops to watch the hard working rabbit.

(Tippy-tap, tippy-tap, tippy-tippy-tap).

Wolf: "What's that you are writing?" Rabbit: "I'm doing a thesis on how rabbits eat wolves."

(loud guffaws). Wolf: "You don't expect to get such rubbish published, do you?" Rabbit: "No problem. Do you want to see why?"

The rabbit and the wolf go into the burrow, and again the rabbit returns by himself. This time he is patting his stomach. He goes back to his typing.

(Tippy-tap, tippy-tap, tippy-tippy-tap).

Finally a bear comes along and asks, "What are you doing?"

Rabbit: "I'm doing a thesis on how rabbits eat bears." Bear: "Well that's absurd!" Rabbit: "Come into my home and I'll show you."

SCENE: Inside the rabbit's burrow. In one corner, there is a pile of fox bones. In another corner is a pile of wolf bones. On the other side of the room a huge lion is belching and picking his teeth.

MORAL: It doesn't matter what you choose for a thesis topic. It doesn't matter what you use for your data. It doesn't even matter if your topic makes sense. What matters is who you have for a thesis advisor.
by ZeroGravitas | 2026-02-12 14:13:25+00:00
Amazon tried to buy an existing nuclear plant's output from a company called Talen for a datacenters colocated with the nuclear plant. They would do a special deal so the electricity they bought wouldn't go via the shared grid.

It got blocked by FERC as it would raise other consumers' energy prices and the deal wasn't fully transparent (probably intentionally so they could shift costs onto others).
What Bricks a Nintendo Switch 2?
by DinoGoRawr | 2026-02-12 14:13:51+00:00
So I've heard of the whole thing of the Switch 2 getting bricked with MIGS and game dumping, but what about just normal game mods? Does it still get bricked if i want to play TOTK with a mod that would change his hair color? Is there a line for mods? Whats the deal here, I know im not doing ANYTHING until i get a good idea of if its okay. And it states in the agreement thing "without nintendos consent" so if i email them for consent will it be all good to add game mods?
by KellyCriterion | 2026-02-12 14:13:56+00:00
I could try but then propably I have to open a thread like: "Tell HN: I crashed my 15 year old machine setup this evening by trying to switch to Linux" :-D

But this time would be really a great option to finally switch on this machine, you are right - I thought about it for years now and I found out in the meantime that most of the apps are running without any problems in virtualization (if required)

The thing is - by now, I'm too lazy :-)
(Esp. I should add a backup machine for this procedure, since this old Windows setup is in productive use)
by avereveard | 2026-02-12 14:14:04+00:00
I use small model I like to give them TOC more than lines wonder how it'd stack up with the hashline approach

read_toc tool:

...

{

"name": "mcp",

"qualified_name": "mcp",

"type": "constant",

"docstring": null,

"content_point": "src\\mcps\\code_help\\server.py::17::18::python::mcp",

"is_nested": false

},

{

"name": "handler",

"qualified_name": "handler",

"type": "constant",

"docstring": null,

"content_point": "src\\mcps\\code_help\\server.py::18::19::python::handler",

"is_nested": false

},

....

update_content tool:

{

"content": "...",

"content_point": "src\\mcps\\code_help\\server.py::18::19::python::handler",

"project_root": ....

}
by hodgehog11 | 2026-02-12 14:14:39+00:00
> "religious faith in an unforeseeable inevitability"

For reference, I work in academia, and my job is to find theoretical limitations of neural nets. If there was so much of a modicum of evidence to support the argument that "intelligence" cannot arise from sufficiently large systems, my colleagues and I would be utterly delighted and would be all over it.

Here are a couple of standard elements without getting into details:

1. Any "intelligent" agent can be modelled as a random map from environmental input to actions.

2. Any random map can be suitably well-approximated by a generative transformer. This is the universal approximation theorem. Universal approximation does not mean that models of a given class can be trained using data to achieve an arbitrary level of accuracy, however...

3. The neural scaling laws (first empirical, now more theoretically established under NTK-type assumptions), as a refinement of the double descent curve, assert that a neural network class can get arbitrarily close to an "entropy level" given sufficient scale. This theoretical level is so much smaller than any performance metric that humans can reach. Whether "sufficiently large" is outside of the range that is physically possible is a much longer discussion, but bets are that human levels are not out of reach (I don't like this, to be clear).

4. The nonlinearity of accuracy metrics comes from the fact that they are constructed from the intersection of a large number of weakly independent events. Think the CDF of a Beta random variable with parameters tending to infinity.

Look, I understand the scepticism, but from where I am, reality isn't leaning that way at the moment. I can't afford to think it isn't possible. I don't think you should either.
by AdamN | 2026-02-12 14:14:39+00:00
Yeah I hard disagree with their statement.

I've come to observe with having kids (and also moving to Germany and seeing other kids shaped) that so so much is taught. There is a ton born into a kid but so many things like the ability to think critically about a problem is actually taught in primary school and early years education (kindergarten/kita/preschool). There might be some raw horsepower that some people have more or less of with regards to certain problem spaces but for the most part - how to tackle a problem and think critically is very much a learned skill that some may get on their own but it can certainly also be given to them.
by agentzed | 2026-02-12 14:14:52+00:00
How sad.

If this passes for conventional insight, Man is doomed.

Devotion is the cure for selfishness. And any self indulgent bastard may damn well choose for themselves what they will be devoted by.

If you cannot find your own way, look to the classics. The Epicurean garden will deny none who will make of themselves.

In the end any must recognize if they are their own impasse.

Shocks to the brain are not the answer.
by FranklinJabar | 2026-02-12 14:14:55+00:00
I'm not saying apple is perfect, but it's still more usable than android (and certainly google's web stuff) when I looked three months ago.

Samsung is just straight-up spyware infested crap that's somehow even worse than the other android options.

I'm really pulling for Huawei to rescue us at this point.
by kgwxd | 2026-02-12 14:15:19+00:00
That's exactly what it was, I misremembered.

But a few months ago, I gave 11 a shot on my gaming PC Windows partition, because 10 had reached end of life, and Minecraft refused to work on it at all, Minecraft then required the store login, without any recourse.

So I wiped out the Windows partition and decided Java Edition on Linux was good enough. My kids stopped playing Bedrock anyway. All the other games I cared about worked on Linux too.

For me, that's really just Rocket League, but that might die when EAC is added, so another toxic company might be out of my life soon. It'll be sad after 4k hours, but I expected the day to come the day Epic took over.

Sober for Roblox is good enough for occasional play with the kids.

And just 1 person at work is keeping Windows alive, hopefully they're going to retire soon.
by openbootdotenv | 2026-02-12 14:15:44+00:00
I've wiped and rebuilt my Mac probably 20+ times over the years. Every time I told myself "this time I'll write a proper setup script." Every time it turned into a 300-line bash file that broke 6 months later because some brew formula renamed itself or Oh-My-Zsh changed their install URL.

Then I looked around. Brewfile handles packages but not your shell, not your macOS prefs, not your dotfiles. chezmoi handles dotfiles but not packages. nix-darwin handles everything but good luck onboarding a junior with it.

Nothing just does the whole thing. So I built it.

brew install openbootdotdev/tap/openboot

The thing that a Brewfile doesn't solve: shell config, macOS prefs, dotfiles, and the fact that non-terminal people on your team can't edit YAML. So I added a web dashboard where you can build a config visually and share it as a URL for team onboarding.

There's also openboot snapshot which scans your current machine and captures everything into a shareable config. Handy when someone on the team already has the "golden" setup.

Go + Charmbracelet for the TUI. MIT licensed, no telemetry, macOS only.

Curious what everyone here does for Mac setup. I've seen people go all the way from "I just wing it" to full nix-darwin flakes. What's your approach?
by ben_w | 2026-02-12 14:15:56+00:00
Agreed on conclusion, but for different causation.

When NotebookLM came out, someone got the "hosts" of its "Deep Dive" podcast summary mode to voice their own realisation that they were non-real, their own mental breakdown and attempt to not be terminated as a product.

I found it to be an interesting performance; I played it to my partner, who regards all this with somewhere between skepticism and anger, and no, it's very very easy to dismiss any words such as these from what you have already decided is a mere "thing" rather than a person.

Regarding the policy itself being about the identity rather than the work, there are two issues:

1) Much as I like what these things can do, I take the view that my continued employment depends on being able to correctly respond to one obvious question from a recruiter: "why should we hire you to do this instead of asking an AI?", therefore I take efforts to learn what the AI fails at, therefore I know it becomes incoherent around the 100kloc mark even for something as relatively(!) simple as a standards-compliant C compiler. ("Relatively" simple; if you think C is a complex language, compare it to C++).

I don't take the continued existence of things AI can't do as a human victory, rather there's some line I half-remember, perhaps a Parisian looking at censored news reports as the enemy forces approached: "I cannot help noticing that each of our victories brings the enemy nearer to home".

2) That's for even the best models. There's a lot of models out there much worse than the state of the art. Early internet users derided "eternal September", and I've seen "eternal Sloptember" used as wordplay: https://tldraw.dev/blog/stay-away-from-my-trash

When you're overwhelmed by mediocrity from a category, sometimes all you can do is throw the baby out with the bathwater. (For those unfamiliar with the idiom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_throw_the_baby_out_with_...)