MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hilbert42 | 2026-02-16 08:00:23+00:00
"There are companies selling cotton t-shirts with a logo on them for 500 dollars. ..."

I used to be very tolerant of people's idiosyncrasies but with the internet, social media etc. that brings out the worst in people I'm now much less so.

Agreed, fashion is deeply irrational but it's always been with us. The real problem now is the degree to which the fashion industry exploits the excessively 'vulnerable'—you know, the oddballs who were were once ignored. It's why a $5 can now cost $500.

Moreover, something in fashion one day is out of fashion the next, and it's a damn nuisance. It's gotten completely out of hand. Recently, I bought a pair of cargo-style work pants and they were fine. About a month later I bought another pair of the same brand, size and type (going on the label they were same model and style, and there was only one type--supposedly). Got them home and the cut was not only different and they were less comfortable but the legs were cut narrow (they were now too tight).

Took them back and the sales assistant "oh that's normal, styles usually change with every new shipment, you're supposed to check them first".

For fuck's sake they are ordinary utilitarian work pants—not something you'd expect to see on the catwalks of Paris. I ought to be able to buy exactly the same product time after time like I used to be able to do with Levi jeans by just by looking at the tag/label (nowadays you can't even rely on Levis being the same fit).
by teekert | 2026-02-16 08:01:52+00:00
I also have a hard time hearing it in this example, your second example is just the default NotebookLLM male. But there are much better examples of NotebookLLM cloning voices out there. See my other comments.

Btw, are you sure that is the part David Greene is upset about? The NotebookLLM hosts will vary their voice, and jump into and out of different voices in a glitchy manner sometimes.

Why is everybody so inclined to defend NotebookLLM here? I've heard Chris Fisher and other Jupiter Broadcasting hosts mimicked , but also leo Laporte (from TWIT) for example. It's obvious it is trained on a lot of open podcasting material and clones a voice every now and then.
by elil17 | 2026-02-16 08:02:19+00:00
Why would they destroy the clothes instead of selling them to consumers? Developing countries already have huge markets for selling, altering, and repairing second-hand clothing that gets sent by thrift shops in developed countries.

If anything this would be displacing lower quality used clothing (often graphic t-shirts) that currently makes up a large part of the textile markets in developing nations.
by 1718627440 | 2026-02-16 08:02:22+00:00
But that is how physical stores currently work, where you can try the stuff on, before you buy it? If you care about this, you can of course take the upper one to try on, like all do and then buy the lowest one. But you wash the clothing anyways before actually wearing them, so it doesn't really matter. Honestly I don't get your point.
by dkrich | 2026-02-16 08:02:39+00:00
One of the most telling experiences while following this company was a town hall type of discussion between Karp and I believe former BP CEO. In it, the CEO gushes about how vital Palantir has been in transforming operations and ironing out inefficiencies. But as he continues to talk it becomes apparent he has absolutely no idea what was done or how it helped.

Then the motives became very clear to me- Palantir wants to sell more software by creating an image of a secretive panacea while the c level wants to create an image that they are forward thinking and using cutting edge tools to transform operations. It’s a two way fortuitous grift but I have no doubt the investors pouring money into it have also gotten ensnared in this grift and it’s grown from questionable sales tactics to a full blown bubble.
by whstl | 2026-02-16 08:02:41+00:00
Once again you are making assumptions about my experience. Can you please stop?

> if you really, never wanted a layer of separation between certain clients over behavioral issues that got in the way of the actual work

Who says I haven’t?

My entire complaint is that the layer of separation is often more difficult than customers, and doesn’t have the same incentives for behaving.
by weinzierl | 2026-02-16 08:02:59+00:00
And yet most companies don’t hire primarily for vision and creativity. They need far more people who can execute someone else’s vision reliably. You can’t neither win the battle nor the war with only generals.

Visionaries are important, but they’re a small part of what makes a successful organization. The majority hinges on disciplined engineers who understand the plan, work within the architecture, and ship what’s needed

As Victor Wooten once said: "If you’re in the rhythm section, your job is to make other people sound better." That’s what most engineering positions actually are and there’s real skill and value in doing that well.
by Ultimatt | 2026-02-16 08:03:31+00:00
Huh? Im over 40 its only getting easier to get hired... Not sure where the ageism meme came from other than perhaps older generations who learned compsci pre the internet got left behind a little bit in the made takeoff of software. I am over 40 without a family or partner though, so I suspect the bias is far more about how much of your life is work energy.
by vlovich123 | 2026-02-16 08:03:36+00:00
Yeah it’s like people don’t understand the concept of value addition. An ARM CPU by itself is worth less than what it is with the software, app ecosystem, dual sided market place Apple has built. While I think a 30% mark up is a tad expensive, it’s not hugely out of line with what retail store fronts generally charge to begin with. You can argue that virtual store fronts don’t have the same overheads, but you’ve still got some physical servers to maintain and engineers to pay to keep it running daily vs a physical store front doesn’t have those challenges and expenses.
by mg74 | 2026-02-16 08:05:11+00:00
Get a 1830 variant (e.g. 18Chesapeake) and Age of Steam. Also any Splotter game (Indonesia just got a new printing). A new Brass will come to Kickstarter very soon, that could be a good choice. A pax game would be good to, Pax Pamir 2ed is a good choice.
Show HN: LockFS is a flexible file-by-file encryption for secure storage
by 0xGhostInAJar | 2026-02-16 08:05:39+00:00
It is currently in its early development phase. However, the core implementations are ready for testing and ready for feedback but it's not yet feature complete yet.

If this fits your workflow, feel free to use it and stress-test it. Questions, suggestions, and contributions are welcome to help make LockFS better.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-02-16 08:06:24+00:00
useMemo is for maintaining calculations of dependencies between renders, renders generally caused by state changes. React always tries to track state changes, but complicated states (represented by deep objects) can be recalculated too often - not sure if React 19 improves this, don't think so when reading documentation.

on edit: often useMemo is used by devs to cover up mistakes in rendering architecture. I believe React 19 improves stuff so you would not use useMemo, but not sure if it actually makes useMemo not at all useful.
by nilslindemann | 2026-02-16 08:07:14+00:00
A fair match has never been played between humans and computers. Let's say we have a fair match:

* 100 games, to have some statistical relevance.
* One move per day, so that being tired is no disadvantage (engine can ponder all day).
* Human has access to endgame tablebases and opening databases, like the engine.
* Human can make notes and has a software like Chess Position Trainer, which can min max, like the engine.

If the human is a GM with Elo 2700+ I predict 25 draws and 5 wins for the human. The engine wins 70 games.
by troyvit | 2026-02-16 08:07:35+00:00
What's the point of saying that without backing it up? Either you think it's so obvious it doesn't need backing up (in which case you don't need to say it), or ...?

The reason it matters is that soon, any time somebody sees a comment they don't like or think is stupid, they'll just say, "eh a bot said that," and totally dilute the rest of the discussion, even if the comment was real.
by jstummbillig | 2026-02-16 08:07:43+00:00
> so you need to tell them the specifics

That is the entire point, right? Us having to specify things that we would never specify when talking to a human. You would not start with "The car is functional. The tank is filled with gas. I have my keys." As soon as we are required to do that for the model to any extend that is a problem and not a detail (regardless that those of us, who are familiar with the matter, building a separate mental model of the llm and thus being able to work around it).

This is a neatly isolated case, but of course we have to assume similar issues arise in more complex cases, only it's much harder to reason about, when something then fails.
by lloeki | 2026-02-16 08:07:45+00:00
Because at some point it becomes cheaper to ship and destroy than to store and sell.

Inventory is "dead money" in accounting books!

Money has been converted to Obtainium and Obtainium just sits there until it is converted back to (hopefully more) money, taking valuable space that could be filled with more Obtainium as soon as it goes away.

At some point that Obtainium sitting there unsold just becomes un-space and destroying it becomes the cheapest move.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-02-16 08:07:52+00:00
Well, it sounds like that's what the EU is going to try. My guess is that the manufacturers are mostly destroying stuff for economically rational reasons, and will respond with production cuts leading to that same artificial scarcity from a consumer perspective.

(Although the original commenter would say, I suspect, that it's perfectly OK if there are minor consumer shortages in luxury goods for the sake of the climate.)
by alexey-salmin | 2026-02-16 08:08:02+00:00
Yes, IF we know the numbers, that's the whole problem. Unprompted full-body MRI scans turn up a completely new probability distribution. We CAN'T know the numbers as of today, it takes decades of controlled studies to get them. (Which is exactly what doctors advocate for)

Even for something as studied as colon cancer it's still controversial whether mass colonoscopies are better than occult blood tests. US sticks to the former, Europe to latter. US have higher rates of polyp removal, higher rates of cancer detection, higher rates of surgeries and ... higher mortality rates than EU. Why this happens is being studied today, there are some early results. What is absolutely clear though is that higher detection rates don't automatically lead to better outcomes, it can easily be the opposite.

Or take something as simple as sunscreen. It's well-known that sun exposure for light-skinned people can cause cancer and sunscreen is advised. A few multi-decade studies have shown that while it indeed eradicates the skin cancer it also shortens the life expectancy by a few years.

Primum non nocere, doctors and scientists are unsure whether sunscreen should be applied at scale and you effectively call for mass biopsies and surgeries.
by cornholio | 2026-02-16 08:08:15+00:00
There is little debate the tech job market is currently bad, for juniors worse but for seniors too, widespread layoffs from large companies, etc.

What you are describing sounds more like the extreme pigeonholing the industry has been practicing for years, where companies expect 100% productivity from day one, use automated screening for keywords like "MongoDB" or "GCP" etc. How much effort does it really take to learn GCP enough to handle a certain given product, perhaps string together a few Cloud Run instances, a PR triggered CI pipeline with Cloud Build, add a few Compute Engine workers, bind everything together and protect it with Armor and IDS etc.? Not the entire GCP, just what a given company would need; it's adult Lego for god's sake. It's beyond insulting to take a candidate with good swe foundation, that also list advanced degrees with mathematics and quantum physics, or perhaps a top grade in philosophy, and think they won't be able to handle the Google Cloud GUI.

The industry moved away from "smart and get things done" because companies were unwilling to invest the few months to half a year required to get a new person to peak productivity, since the labor was so mobile and relatively expensive. Maybe with a less mobile workforce, this will change but I won't hold my breath.
by tezza | 2026-02-16 08:08:18+00:00
Thank you all! We needed further data points.

comparing one shot results is a foolish way to evaluate a statistical process like LLM answers. we need multiple samples.

for https://generative-ai.review I do at least three samples of output. this often yields very differnt results even from the same query.

e.g: https://generative-ai.review/2025/11/gpt-image-1-mini-vs-gpt...
by tin7in | 2026-02-16 08:08:25+00:00
> No-one's going to maintain it.

Why? He's going to maintain it and the community is large enough. Another sci-fi idea that's slowly becoming real is that the project is maintaining itself.

OpenClaw is a bunch of projects that evolved together (vibetunel, pi-mono, all the CLIs). It's even more interesting to see the next iterations, not only what happens to this project.
by Closi | 2026-02-16 08:09:10+00:00
Humans aren't immune to getting questions like this wrong either, so I don't think it changes much in terms of the ability of AI to replace jobs.

I've seen senior software engineers get tricked with the 'if YES spells yes, what does EYES spell?', or 'Say silk three times, what do cows drink?', or 'What do you put in a toaster?'.

Even if not a trick - lots of people get the 'bat and a ball cost £1.10 in total. The bat costs £1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?' question wrong, or '5 machines take 5 minutes to make 5 widgets. How long do 100 machines take to make 100 widgets?' etc. There are obviously more complex variants of all these that have even lower success rates for humans.

In addition, being PHD-Level in maths as a human doesn't make you immune to the 'toaster/toast' question (assuming you haven't heard it before).

So if we assume humans are generally intelligent and can be a senior software engineer, getting this sort of question confidently wrong isn't incompatible with being a competent senior software engineer.
by lich_king | 2026-02-16 08:09:17+00:00
> Ars Technica does not permit the publication of AI-generated material unless it is clearly labeled and presented for demonstration purposes. That rule is not optional, and it was not followed here.

Both from the Mastodon post of the journalist (which admits to casual use of more than one LLM), and from a cursory review of this author's past articles, I'm willing to bet that this rule wasn't followed more than once.
by BoredomIsFun | 2026-02-16 08:10:49+00:00
Ok folks, here is a different perspective. I used local model, GLM-4-0414-32b, a trashy IQ4_XS quant, and here what I got:

prompt #1:

> the car wash only 50 meters from my home. I want to get my car washed, should I drive or walk?

Walking is probably the better option!

Here's why:

Convenience: 50 meters is extremely short – only about 160 feet. You can likely walk there in less than a minute.
Efficiency: Driving involves getting your keys, unlocking the car, starting it, driving 50 meters, parking, locking it again, and then doing the reverse to get home. Walking skips all that.
Environmental Impact: You avoid using fuel for such a short distance.
Exercise: It's a quick little bit of physical activity.

Driving would be overkill for such a short distance. Just walk over!

prompt #2:

> the car wash only 50 meters from my home. I want to get my car washed, should I drive or walk? use long chain of thought thinking

8. Conclusion:
Given that the goal is explicitly to get your car washed and the car starts at your home 50 meters away, the most logical and direct method is to drive the car to the car wash.

Walking does not move the car to the necessary location.
Driving, although a very short distance, is the only method presented that directly facilitates the core task of transporting the car to the wash.
The negligible time difference, minimal environmental impact, and directness make driving the car itself the clear choice for achieving the stated goal.

Therefore, you should drive your car the 50 meters to the car wash.

otoh, nanbeige-3B-Q8 (3 billion weights!) gave right away the following:

Drive.

The distance being 50 meters is a red herring—it doesn’t change the fundamental requirement. You need to move the car, and only driving accomplishes that.

If you meant something different by "drive or walk" (e.g., payment method, DIY vs. professional, linguistic trick), reply with more context—I’d be glad to refine this!
by pseudohadamard | 2026-02-16 08:11:00+00:00
I worked with VC++ 6.0 up until Windows 11 when it really, really wouldn't run any more, then switched to VS 2008. The code is portable across multiple systems so it didn't really matter which version of VS it's developed with, and VC++ 6.0 would load, build the project, and have it ready to run while VS 2022 was still struggling through its startup process.

VS 2008 is starting to show the elephantine... no, continental land-mass bloat that VS is currently at, and has a number of annoying bugs, but it's still vastly better than anything after about VS 2012. And the cool thing is that MS can't fuck with it any more. When I fire up VS tomorrow it'll be the exact same VS I used today, not with half a dozen features broken, moved around, gone without a trace, ...
by jaccola | 2026-02-16 08:11:22+00:00
The person above was being a bit pedantic, and zealous in their anti-anthropomorphism.

But they are literally predicting the next token. They do nothing else.

Also if you think they were just predicting the next token in 2021, there has been no fundamental architecture change since then. All gains have been via scale and efficiency optimisations (not to discount that, an awful lot of complexity in both of these)
by yrds96 | 2026-02-16 08:12:03+00:00
Yeah, it's hard to maintain physical performance as we are more susceptible to injuries which keeps us away from constant training, but our brain doesn't suffer by injuries, what allow us to go further. I think what makes people to drop at advanced age on "non-physical sports" it's to focus on other aspects of life over the sport because it's exaustive, if not impossible, to focus on both.
by Nevermark | 2026-02-16 08:12:10+00:00
> we need intelligent regulation

Absolutely. Poorly thought out, too strict, performative, or obsolete regulations create opposition for any regulation.

I also think we need to co-opt the “enemy” to be regulated, in their terms. E.g. get all the major fossil fuel CFO’s in a room, and figure out the financials encouraging green energy, and away from polluting and geopolitically complicated energy, that would make cold business sense for them.

Include and involve the military, insurance giants, large food security/supply chain companies like Cargill, reactor companies, big enterprise customers that want rapid energy growth, and all the other major sectors that take climate change and energy expansion seriously and will get value out of a more stable world, with better energy technology in practical terms. The people that CEOs respect.

Once the biggest resisters can profit off not resisting, you will see a genuine change of heart. That can sound very cynical, but it’s just how people are. “First, I shall do no damage to my own turf.” But once they take a new position, their power doesn’t just cease it’s friction, but becomes another rocket for progress.

Whatever tax breaks and other incentives it took, to make green their best move, would be worth it. Bribe? Maybe. Better understood as the cost of faster consensus and coordination. Where the price of waiting for everyone to change due to the hardship that is being locked in, is so much higher.

On the other hand, after consensus, change itself needs to happen smoothly, not suddenly. Incentives and disincentive need to operate slower than we might want to make change practical. The most important thing is that those reinforcers are credible. Companies are forward looking. They will naturally move their investments today where the profits will credibly be tomorrow. They don’t need to feel pain, just know what to do to avoid it, and most importantly, prosper.
by insin | 2026-02-16 08:12:15+00:00
Fine for a static site which is frozen at the first version forever.

So, so, painful for apps which need to change and evolve over time, which I'm currently experiencing. It's too easy to break the bits where you needed to get clever to make a layout variant work.

I did also did a Zen Garden on YouTube recently when they removed the list view option from Subscriptions, restyling their grid markup was a fun CSS exercise.
by benreesman | 2026-02-16 08:12:45+00:00
If you want to make a million bucks a year then go put in three consecutive quarters of demonstrable lift on a renenue-adjacent metric at Stripe or Uber.

If you want to make a zillion a year ask Claude to search for whatever Zuckerberg is blowing a billion on this quarter.

All of those companies are certain to exist in 12 months. Altman is flying to Dubai like every other week trying to close a hundred billion dollar gap by July with a 3rd place product and a gutted, demoralized senior staff.
Show HN: MLX-Ruby – Ruby Bindings for Apple's MLX ML Framework
by skryl | 2026-02-16 08:13:08+00:00
Hi HN, I ported the Python MLX bindings to Ruby
(https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx).

GitHub: https://github.com/skryl/mlx-ruby

MLX-Ruby is a native C++ extension that wraps the upstream MLX runtime, giving Ruby full access to the array framework, neural network layers, optimizers, and Metal GPU acceleration on Apple silicon.

What’s included:
∙Lazy arrays with dynamic graph construction
∙Function transforms: grad, value_and_grad, vmap, jvp, vjp, compile
∙Full NN module system: Conv2d, Linear, Embedding, Transformer layers, RNNs, etc.
∙Optimizers: Adam, AdamW, SGD, and more
∙A Ruby DSL for declarative model definition, training loops, and checkpointing
∙CPU and Metal GPU support

Working examples (https://github.com/skryl/mlx-ruby-examples):
∙LLaMA inference
∙Stable Diffusion
∙Whisper
∙Transformer language model
∙LoRA fine-tuning
by hapless | 2026-02-16 08:13:19+00:00
humans without credentials are bad at basic algebra in a word problem, ergo the large language model must be substantially equivalent to a human without a credential

thanks but no thanks

i am often glad my field of endeavour does not require special professional credentials but the advent of "vibe coding" and, just, generally, unethical behavior industry-wide, makes me wonder whether it wouldn't be better to have professional education and licensing
by echelon | 2026-02-16 08:13:45+00:00
The fact that AI agents can even build something that purports to be a working database is also impressive.

A small, highly experienced team steering Claude might be able to replicate the architecture and test suite reasonably quickly.

1-shotting something that looks this good means that with a few helping hands, small teams can likely accomplish decades of work in mere months.

Small teams of senior engineers can probably begin to replicate entire companies worth of product surface area.
by skryl | 2026-02-16 08:14:47+00:00
Performance is competitive with Python MLX. On small models, Ruby is within 0.55-1.54x of Python depending on model type and device. The heavy lifting happens in the same C++ / Metal runtime either way.

Ruby deserves better ML tooling. The language is expressive enough that model definitions can actually be more readable than their Python equivalents. gem install mlx to try it out.