MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-09 11:36:55+00:00
>Your response is, completely expected, an appeal to outrage.

How do you react towards ageism and discrimination?

>It’s just that account age is one of the few signals that an online platform has to go by.

None of that invalidates or even addresses my arguments. It's still about exclusion of people based on account date rather than WHAT they say.

>HN absolutely recognizes this in their policy, considering that they give new accounts an entirely different color to make them stand out from the rest, and that they don’t allow downvotes unless your account has achieved a certain karma level.

Except that my account is not green, and I AM allowed to downvote.
by deafpolygon | 2026-02-09 11:37:10+00:00
Both. It was the controls at first, I didn’t realize you had to press “E” or “Enter” to progress the dialog. Then I tried clicking the mouse and moving the cursor. Then once I figured out how to advance the dialog and move around, I wasn’t sure exactly what to do. The top left bars were blinking as if I needed to interact or do something with them. I eventually figured it out, but it was confusing to start off with.
Show HN: A website that proves you are richer than everyone else
by hjotha | 2026-02-09 11:37:11+00:00
Hi HN,
I built a small experiment called iamthericher.com

There is always only one “Richer”.
To take the title, you pay $1 more than the previous person.

If no one takes it for 14 days, it resets.

There’s no utility, no product, no link placement, no ads.
Just status, ego, and curiosity.

I wanted to see if people would pay for something that openly does nothing.

Feedback welcome.
by re-thc | 2026-02-09 11:38:55+00:00
> Maybe? I could see that happening.

It already is. Besides dedicated options (which are just as expensive) - those shared cores are so old the performance compared to current line AWS models is so far out that it isn't competitive.

> I could also see them being compared with companies still using venture capital to give stuff away for free. In that case, I'm OK with that tradeoff.

That's not the point. They are more expensive compared to hyperscalers.
by matus_congrady | 2026-02-09 11:39:17+00:00
https://stacktape.com

An alternative to tools lik sst.dev or serverless framework, or a PaaS services like Render.com or Flightcontrol.

Deploys to user's own AWS. IaC-first. Has a PaaS-like console UI.

The best features: auto-generates IaC config by scanning your code. Has built-in EC2 runner which is 2-6x faster than AWS CodeBuild.

We've now also implemented dev mode, which is similar to SST. It deploys parts of the stacks that can't be locally emulated (lambda functions, cognito, etc.) with fast re-deploy, and emulates everything else (containers, SQL databases, Redis, DynamoDb, etc.) locally. This means testing/developing is pretty much free, and you have the fastest feedback loops possible.

Whole Stacktape, and dev mode in particular is also very optimized for coding agents with `--agent` flag.

To try it, run `npx stacktape init`
by tombh | 2026-02-09 11:40:20+00:00
Thanks!

Well the record for the longest photographed line of sight is in the same region as our #3 longest line, at 483km https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/66661-lon... So not far off. And I think that even takes advantage of some favourable refraction. So not only might it be possible to see the longest view. But there may even be longer lines if we were to take into account extreme cases of refraction. Which is certainly something we'd love to try.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-02-09 11:40:21+00:00
I like this and I feel it would be a great part of my plan to someday really understand spreadsheets, except I am not wanting to learn anything in MS Office. But definitely seems like a good market to be in, and a nice tool.

I guess you could do stuff like find lots of common VBA, formulas etc. written in the past, from MSDN magazine articles and similar, and package them up as a library of add-ins that you would get as part of your membership automatically.
by gjulianm | 2026-02-09 11:40:26+00:00
> Read the freaking article

The freaking article omits several issues in the "compiler". My bet is because they didn't actually challenged the output of the LLM, as it usually happens.

If you go to the repository, you'll find fun things, like the fact that it cannot compile a bunch of popular projects, and that it compiles others but the code doesn't pass the tests. It's a bit surprising, specially when they don't explain why those failures exist (are they missing support for some extensions? any feature they lack?)

It gets less surprising, though, when you start to see that the compiler doesn't actually do any type checking, for example. It allows dereferences to non-pointers. It allows calling functions with the wrong number of arguments.

There's also this fantastic part of the article where they explain that the LLM got the code to a point where any change or bug fix breaks a lot of the existing tests, and that further progress is not possible.

Then the fact that this article points out that the kernel doesn't actually link. How did they "boot it"? It might very well be possible that it crashed soon after boot and wasn't actually usable.

So, as usual, the problem here is that a lot of people look at LLM outputs and trust what they're saying they achieved.
by latexr | 2026-02-09 11:41:01+00:00
> We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality.

We literally are not, and we’d do well to stop using such hyperbole. The 1980s fantasy was of speaking to a machine which you could trust to be correct with a high degree of confidence. No one was wishing they could talk to a wet sock that’ll confidently give you falsehoods and when confronted (even if they were right) will bow down and always respond with “you’re absolutely right”.
by popalchemist | 2026-02-09 11:41:55+00:00
Immature take. Everything is political, or everything is affected by politics. If you say "we shouldn't discuss politics in _____ space" then you are simply supporting the status quo. In this case, the status quo is fascis/nazi takeover of the biggest superpower (technologically, economically, and militarily) in the world, and as the article says, that is having direct effects on software. So it is political whether you "make it" that way or not.

AKA whether you want to be an adult about it, or not.
by pydry | 2026-02-09 11:41:55+00:00
I agree, but i think his point applies more to haskell than, say, kotlin. There is a balance between type strictness and productivity and if you go too far in one direction you get horribly buggy code and if you go too far in the other direction you have a language that is grindingly slow to develop in.

Another thing I dont think a lot of people appreciate either is that types have sharp diminishing returns catching the kind of bugs tests are good at catching and vice versa.
Show HN: MadLab – A standalone desktop app for local LLM fine-tuning
by Archimedes1618 | 2026-02-09 11:42:55+00:00
I’ve spent the last few months working on MadLab. I wanted something that felt as polished as LM Studio but focused entirely on the training side of the house.
It’s a standalone desktop app (Windows/Linux/macOS) that automates the entire environment setup—GPU detection, PyTorch wheel selection, and venv creation—so you can go from zero to training in a few minutes. Under the hood, it’s managing the trainer logic for LoRA, QLoRA, and DoRA. One thing I’m experimenting with is a built-in Chat Assistant that acts as a fine-tuning coach. It doesn't just run commands; it helps recommend hyperparameters based on your model size and hardware limits. It's 100% open-source. I’d love to get some feedback from this community on the environment automation and the training UI. I'll be around to answer any technical questions!
by adrian_b | 2026-02-09 11:42:57+00:00
That is indeed a good price, but even so, two of those are equivalent with 5 mL of code liver oil, which in Europe costs around $50 per liter, with sales taxes (VAT) and shipping included.

Thus the price of equivalent fish oil is about 25 cents, a ratio of more than 2.6.

If you add to your price sales tax and shipping, it is likely that you arrive to the 3 times higher price that I have mentioned.

Because in most days I eat only food that I cook myself from raw ingredients, which is significantly cheaper than industrially-produced food, I can eat very healthy and tasty food for about $5 per day (in Europe).

The food includes the equivalent in fish oil of 4 of your gummies, which might cost around $1.50 with taxes and shipping.

Paying 30% of the daily budget for food only for a supplement taken in a quantity negligible in comparison with the other food, does not seem right.
by xorcist | 2026-02-09 11:44:22+00:00
> Most people have no idea how to hunt, make a fire, or grow food

That's a bizarre claim, confidently stated.

Of course I can make a fire, cook and my own food. You can, too. When it comes to hunting, skinning and the cutting of animals, that takes a bit more practice but anyone can manage something even if the result isn't pretty.

If stores ran out of food we would have devastating problems but because of specialization, just because we live in cities now you simply can't go out hunting even if you wanted to. Plus there is probably much more pressing problems to take care of, such as the lack of water and fuel.

If most people actually couldn't cook their own food, should they need, that would be a huge problem. Which makes the comparison with IT apt.
by oliwary | 2026-02-09 11:44:43+00:00
I am working on my first multilingual word game: https://changeword.org

My previous games have all been exclusively in English, but this one also has Spanish, French, German, Dutch and Swedish. It's a take on the classic word ladder game, with golf scoring mechanics.

Still needs a bit of fine-tuning for the word lists and puzzle generation, but I think it's already pretty playable. :)
by archon | 2026-02-09 11:45:08+00:00
> Find an online community that has self-selected for some kind of criterion

I’ll add onto that: find real-life friends/acquaintances who are both not brain dead and read books. Frequently ask them “what are you reading lately?” Not only does this lead to good conversations and deeper friendships, it results in an endless stream of book leads.

Most of the good books I’ve read for the past several years have been curated for me by two friends who are prolific readers and do all the work for me of finding new books. I occasionally find something they haven’t read, but they certainly do most of the heavy lifting.
by codethief | 2026-02-09 11:46:11+00:00
Are we sure about that? I mean, we have seen that LLMs are able to generalize to some degree. So I don't see a reason why you couldn't put an agent in a loop with a profiler and have it try to optimize the code. Will it come up with entirely novel ideas? Unlikely. Could it potentially combine existing ideas in interesting, novel ways that would lead to CCC outperforming GCC? I think so. Will it get stuck along the way? Almost certainly.
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-09 11:46:55+00:00
>unfounded opinion pieces with no collaborating evidence

My evidence was (as you typed it yourself) that with the war in Ukraine and arms demand flourishing, France only spends money on subsidies with the guarantee that money is going back towards its own economy, as does every other major EU economy, not just for arms, but for semiconductors too.

If you were too thick to get that, or you refuse to belive it on some ideology, or want to die on a hill over a technicality, then I'm sorry, but nothing more I will do or say will convince you, when you've already made up your mind otherwise.
by sph | 2026-02-09 11:48:00+00:00
> Something wonderful happened on the road leading to 3.0: Offpunk became a true cooperative effort. Offpunk 3.0 is probably the first release that contains code I didn’t review line-by-line.

I felt true dread reading a sentence like this. I had to reread to make sure the author means there are other trusted contributors now.

As it is often the case these days, some projects are quite proud of announcing that no human has written or reviewed their code.
by czottmann | 2026-02-09 11:48:52+00:00
I'm working on a macOS app that identifies music playing around you, constantly. You can scrobble them to Last.fm, ListenBrainz, LB-compatible sites, a Mastodon account, local Shortcuts workflows, and/or or local files. It also support Apple Music and Deezer.

I built it because most scrobblers only keep track of Apple Music or Spotify plays, but I have streaming stations on all day long, or the radio is on, and those never make it into my playing charts or recommendations etc.

Early days, more to come, public beta is ongoing, and I am looking for testers :)

https://actions.work/listening-post/?ref=hn
by Surac | 2026-02-09 11:49:55+00:00
for me there is a clear problem in all those languages. The exception paradigma opens a second way to exit a function. This is clearly a burden for every programmer. it is also a burden for the machine. you have to have RTTI, Inconvinient stack undwindings and perhaps gerneric types. Also nullable types are a but of a letdown. first we specify a "reference" kind type to neverhave to deal with null violations, then we allow NULL to express a empty state. Better have Result return types that carry a clear message: Result and Value. Also have real Reference type with empty and value. by accessing a empty value you get back the default value. i think c# has mastered that realy nice, but far from perfect
by NicuCalcea | 2026-02-09 11:49:57+00:00
> Where, when and how were the samples for that barometer taken?

This is all publicly-available information, I trust you can find it.

> why don't we have referendum

Referendums are the prerogative of member states, the EU doesn't have the legal powers to organise a referendum. If you want one, speak to your MP.
by tovej | 2026-02-09 11:50:51+00:00
The Erdos problem was solved by interacting with a formal proof tool, and the problem was trivial. I also don't recall if this was the problem someone had already solved prior but not reported, but that does not matter.

The point is that the LLM did not model maths to do this, made calls to a formal proof tool that did model maths, and was essentially working as the step function to a search algorithm, iterating until it found the zero in the function.

That's clever use of the LLM as a component in a search algorithm, but the secret sauce here is not the LLM but the middleware that operated both the LLM and the formal proof tool.

That middleware was the search tool that a human used to find the solution.

This is not the same as a synthesis of information from the corpus of text.
by panick21_ | 2026-02-09 11:51:48+00:00
That not correct. Methane is very good even if you only go to the moon. And if you produce fuel on the moon its still perfectly reasonable option.

And also Raptor engines were not a redesign but a completly new design. Even if you stick to RP-1 they would have moved to a close cycle and a new engine.

The main reason for methane is reusability. There is a reason RocketLab, BlueOrigin, SpaceX and Stoke all switched methane for next generation reusible engine.

And no you can't just scale up F9. That complete nonsense. at most you could build a new rocket with the same fuels and materials. But even then, the difficult part is the reusable second stage and that is a 100% redesigned.
by 7bit | 2026-02-09 11:53:16+00:00
Websites blocking FIDO vendors is nothing new. In corporate environments this may be necessary. Imagine a 2-tiered environment where generally all vendors are allowed (no blocks) for accessing tier-1 information, but to access tier-2 you need a special vendor. That is not uncommon.

By the way, SAML has similar authentication restrictions, so this is not something FIDO came up with.
by jstanley | 2026-02-09 11:53:23+00:00
Are you standing on a raised platform when you see the Half Dome?

This is what I get when I set the observer height to 20m, and increase the "max distance" to 300km (200km = ~124 miles so may not be enough).

https://img.incoherency.co.uk/6478

It's also possible that the half dome is too short and the sampling rate of the line-of-sight jumps over it!
by kremi | 2026-02-09 11:55:01+00:00
> The model can be prompted to talk about competitive dynamics. It can produce text that sounds like adversarial reasoning. But the underlying knowledge is not in the training data. It’s in outcomes that were never written down.

With all the social science research and strategy books that LLMs have read, they actually know a LOT about outcomes and dynamics in adversarial situations.

The author does have a point though that LLMs can’t learn these from their human-in-the-loop reinforcement (which is too controlled or simplified to be meaningful).

Also, I suspect the _word_ models of LLMs are not inherently the problem, they are just inefficient representations of world models.
by brucehoult | 2026-02-09 11:55:01+00:00
I tried the summit of Mt Ruapehu here in NZ and got 358.8 km to Mt Owen. Not bad as I was expecting Tapuae-o-Uenuku which is a little shorter at 342 km.

One advantage in NZ is that on a nice day you actually have a good chance of seeing it.

Oh ... clicking on Mt Owen doesn't return the favour ... or the other nearest peaks. But Culliford Hill does show a return back to Ruapehu, 355.4 km. Clicking on Tapuae-o-Uenuku also, as expected, gives a line to Ruapehu: 342.3km.

Mt Cook is high, but has too many other high peaks near it.

Mt Taranaki is isolated, but doesn't turn up any very long distances.

I don't expect any other candidates in NZ.

What is the longest in North America? Or Europe proper -- not Elbrus (which I've not been to but have been close enough to see, from several places e.g. from a house in Lermontov (~94 km only), summit of Beshtau (93 km), Dombai ski field (~63 km), somewhere on A157 (~50km).
by tovej | 2026-02-09 11:55:04+00:00
You did not address the second issue at all. You are inverting the implication in your argument. Whether gradient descent helps solve the language model problem or not does not help you show that this means it's a useful world model.

Let me illustrate the point using a different argument with the same structure:
1) The best professional chefs are excellent at cutting onions
2) Therefore, if we train a model to cuy onions using gradient descent, that model will be a very good profrssional chef

2) clearly does not follow from 1)
by liu3hao | 2026-02-09 11:55:17+00:00
Hi HN, I am working on Circuitscript, a language based on python to describe electronic schematics: https://circuitscript.net/. A basic IDE (called the Bench) to try Circuitscript is available online: https://bench.circuitscript.net/

I have created a usb-uart converter board with the CH340 chip. The complete schematic was coded with Circuitscript and then imported as a netlist into kicad pcbnew to do the pcb layout. The design was produced with JLCPCB and after receiving the boards I tested them and they do work! The design files are here https://github.com/liu3hao/usb-uart-bridge. The circuitscript code file is here https://raw.githubusercontent.com/liu3hao/usb-uart-bridge/re... and the generated pdf from the circuitscript code is here: https://github.com/liu3hao/usb-uart-bridge/blob/main/usb_uar...

The motivation for creating Circuitscript is to describe schematics in terms of code rather than graphical UIs after using different CAD packages extensively (Allegro, Altium, KiCAD) for work in the past. I wanted to spend more time thinking about the schematic design itself rather than fiddling around with GUIs.

Please check it out and I look forward to your feedback, especially from electronics designers/hobbyists. Thanks!
by seanwilson | 2026-02-09 11:55:22+00:00
> The rules of the language insist that when you use a nullable variable, you must first check that variable for null. So if s is a String? then var l = s.length() won’t compile. ...

> The question is: Whose job is it to manage the nulls. The language? Or the programmer? ...

> And what is it that programmers are supposed to do to prevent defects? I’ll give you one guess. Here are some hints. It’s a verb. It starts with a “T”. Yeah. You got it. TEST!

> You test that your system does not emit unexpected nulls. You test that your system handles nulls at it’s inputs.

Am I reading or quoting this wrong?

Just some pros of static type checking: you can't forget to do it, it's exhaustive for all edges and across the whole project, it handholds you while refactoring, it's faster than waiting for a test suite to run, it pinpoints to the line where the problem is (vs having to step through a failed test), and it provides clear, concise, and accurate documentation (instead of burying this across test files).

It's so much better and less risky that I think expecting tests instead is...irresponsible? I just can't take it seriously anymore. I feel like I'll never understand why a few type annotations are such a burden.
by jama211 | 2026-02-09 11:55:36+00:00
Y’all were having fun? I always had fun making things, but the coding part was always a means to an end for me, and one that caused endless frustration at times. I never have to debug regex or write a single date format line by hand ever again, and I will never ever miss it.

Every bit of coding that did anything other than give me meaningful progress on features on the thing I was actually trying to build, which at times was 80%+ of it, was always terrible.
Show HN: Memy – track and find directories and files you use frequently [video]
by andrewf99 | 2026-02-09 11:56:32+00:00
memy is intended as a remixing of the concepts of zoxide and fasd, a tool to track files and directories you use frequently. Written in Rust and using SQLite, it's modern, fast, and flexible, intended primarily as a backend for you to built meaningful ways to use the output.
by sham1 | 2026-02-09 11:56:50+00:00
> So in your opinion, the solution is that individual national serenity should be abolished and the EU should have the liberty, nay, the authority to fleece its highest payers into the system, like France and Germany, and then redistribute their money to whoever and whatever it sees fit, for the "greater good" of the union, with no accountability or obligation to provide them equal benefits in return?

There indeed won't be equal benefits, but instead France, Germany etc are going to benefit a lot more in this kind of situation than without the integration. We've already seen the massive benefits of the single market integration for example for the German economy and industry. It'd be strange to think that further erosion of barriers and better integration wouldn't bring further benefits to the economies involved.

> How is this not communist tyranny with extra steps?

Um, by the fact that the EU wouldn't be taking over the means of production when it'd be integrating? Like come on, this is just silly, to call a block dedicated to free market principles and social capitalism "communist tyranny".

I swear, this kind of economic illiteracy is going to be the end of us all.

> How do you expect those people footing most of the bill to give up their status quo and voluntarily sign up for something like this? Oh wait, I remember, that's why they're pushing chat control and digital-ID on us.

The EU isn't pushing for the Chat Control and whatever, it's only certain member countries like Denmark doing that. They should absolutely be reprimanded for that, but nevertheless the difference is important.

Also, the people "footing most of the bill" would also be benefiting massively, for example by making sure that we would no longer have a situation like the Greek debt crisis messing everything up for the entire currency block.