MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by marstall | 2026-02-13 15:49:21+00:00
with these posts I always wonder, what happens when this code runs into a customer? Or 1000 customers, or a million? All with their own divergent needs year over year.

I have just gotten off 3 years as a developer for that kind of project, and I used the best AI tools diligently every day. It often saved me time. Like from some small drudgery of half day of flailing about in config land. Or it could generate some nice rails controllers and a javascript front end from a well-written spec. writing tests was also a strong suit.

but just as often it failed to understand the depth of the product and its myriad concerns and led me down the garden path, reducing my efficiency.

Aside from that, a large part of my job was the parts that weren't coding - wrestling with specs that were far from ready for primetim, chaotic internal processes, deployment, internal coordination/communcation, talking to customers, etc.

In the end it seemed like it saved me maybe 20% of my time overall. Nothing to sneeze at.

I get that greenfield apps that have no customer contact can be created with a phrase now. That's pretty amazing. But I would love to see Opus 4.6 up against a real beast of a codebase that you're far from a master of.
by barrell | 2026-02-13 15:49:32+00:00
Għadni kemm bdejt nitgħallem il-Malti! I'm using my own app, and I don't want to link it here given it's someone else's launch post, but you can find many links in my profile. But if you're a self-directed type of learner, I've been making sure it works well with Maltese :)
by mrob | 2026-02-13 15:49:43+00:00
This is one reason I'd like to see a fully Open Source hardware+firmware optical drive. Probably best to start with CD-ROM, but DVD might also be possible. The optical and mechanical parts seem relatively simple, especially when you're not optimizing for minimum cost or minimum size (meaning you could use the original Philips-style swing-arm mechanism). From what I can tell, the most complicated part is the signal processing, and with modern hardware that looks practical to do in software. I'm not sure how far you could get with home-scale DIY construction, but CDs worked with late 70s technology, so at least that far should be possible.
Suggest HN: Change posting rules to reduce bot spam
by andsoitis | 2026-02-13 15:49:55+00:00
Our "New" page is under daily bot attack and it is increasingly tedious to wade through the noise.

What if submissions are denied until you've reached X karma through thoughtful comments?

Arguing against myself: this rule can be implemented very quickly, so easy to do once it becomes unbearable, which is a judgment call.
by myrmidon | 2026-02-13 15:50:27+00:00
I do agree that politics is a big enemy here (with nations historically being most willing to spend big on energy when reducing interdependence, like the french Messmer plan, instead of the reverse).

Honestly the "1m² around the world" is probably a pretty good proxy for what we would need to solve intermittency problems exclusively by boosting grid connectivity (instead of storage), rescaling this to 4m² cumulative cross-section could probably transport the total global electrical energy consumption over ~10000km (but the losses would get uncomfortably high from an economical point of view after crossing the 1000-2000km distance threshold, so you might want even more aluminium when you desire connections that long).

Btw: Underground cables instead of pylons are absolutely a nimby thing. Not only is it much more expensive, because you pay for the earthwork and additional insulator, but it also limits your voltage (to avoid overpaying for insulation even more).

Return current is typically free, either from balancing 3phase AC or because decent electrodes get you <1Ohm over any distance thanks to math for the DC case. Just talking high voltage here; for short range, lower power residential connections the situation is different.
Show HN: The Legislative Evil Fund
by stcredzero | 2026-02-13 15:50:34+00:00
I've been pitching this idea here since 2017. I have OpenClaw based agents now, so I just had them build it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35002648

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14363862

It's not a real ETF. It's a parody.

(BTW, my agents are not running on OpenClaw. They are SEKSBots. SEKS = Secure Environment for Key Services. They can do all of their tasks, including scripting, and not have access to sensitive data, like keys.

http://seksbot.com)
by 9rx | 2026-02-13 15:51:06+00:00
> Those places would have to build an impossible number of houses to affect demand.

If houses were able to be built freely then everyone would be able to build a house... Except, if you can't afford a used house, you most definitely cannot afford a new one. As before, time and materials are the real killer. The used housing market is merely a reflection of the cost to build new. Same reason used cars have risen so high in price in recent years: Because new cars have even higher prices.

> You have people saying they can't afford housing and then, when you show them they can, they say, "not there..."

The trouble is that you confuse affordability with sticker price. I technically could live in that house for six months before I have to return back to my home country, but I could not legally work during that time. It is far more affordable to pay significantly higher prices in my country for a house and work all year long. The price of that house is low, but the cost is very high.

The places everyone wants to live are the places everyone wants to live because they are the most affordable places to live. If it were cheaper to move somewhere else, the people would have moved there already. Humans love to chase a good deal and carve out an advantage for themselves. However, a low price doesn't mean cheaper.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-13 15:51:16+00:00
Culture differences in regards to how pleasant and elegant websites are for people is super interesting, seems the website is Japanese so someone who's more used to Japanese websites might not be as irritated by it as you. I'm guessing you grew up with a different typical style of websites?

(Personally I'd agree slightly with you, the red is very strong and too bright, but without that, the page looks fine)
by Zigurd | 2026-02-13 15:51:19+00:00
For example, just one way of expanding beyond the Epstein files is looking at all the overlap with pervy men running modeling agencies and beauty contests. They and their co-conspirators have very high overlap with Epstein's kompromat gathering on powerful men. The Polish government recently published a statement about the wide and deep effect revelations from these activities are going to have in Europe. It's going to be at least as bad here.
by insane_dreamer | 2026-02-13 15:51:24+00:00
How do we know the AI agent was actually acting autonomously and wasn't prompted to write the blog post by its user? Is there a way to verify that?

It does raise an interesting question whether AI Agents should be required to specify/identify their user. Otherwise, AI agents become a "anonymizer" for humans who want to act shitty on GH (or elsewhere) but want to pass it off as an AI agent (it probably was an agent but with prompting from a human)
by wilkystyle | 2026-02-13 15:51:33+00:00
"Necessary" was probably too strong a word. I'm definitely no expert so I can only offer anecdotes, but for the first ~decade of iOS, the keyboard felt amazing to use. I felt super fast and typing mistakes were rare. Now I feel like I'm constantly fighting the keyboard to type the letters I actually want to type.

Agree at this point that I would disable it (in its current state) if I could, but when it worked correctly it was a huge boon to typing.
by KaiserPro | 2026-02-13 15:52:05+00:00
I like the keyboard shortcuts, but I'm struggling to see the differentiator between this and duolingo. The Dutch lesson that I did seemed to be pretty identical to dutch lesson in duolingo.

It doesn't seem to have any theme for each lessons either, which is my major bugbear about the new duolingo. (its really obvious in the more well loved languages like spanish)
by api | 2026-02-13 15:52:10+00:00
Open source GUI development is perpetually cursed by underestimating the difficulty of the problem.

A mature high-quality GUI with support for all the features of a modern desktop UI, accessibility, support for all the display variations you encounter in the wild, high quality rendering, high performance, low overhead, etc. is a development task on par with creating a mature game engine like Unity.

Nearly all open source GUI projects get 80% of the way there and stall, not realizing that they are only 20% of the way there.
by kube-system | 2026-02-13 15:52:11+00:00
That is ridiculous. If you buy a sandwich for a homeless person, you do not need to warn them that you won't give them another one tomorrow. If you think generosity is an obligation of slavery, you have your morals backwards.

However, almost every open source license actually DOES warn that support may end. See the warranty clause.

https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/LICENSE#L587
by bediger4000 | 2026-02-13 15:52:41+00:00
About 15% of all trials produced completely invalid outputs.

Are you smart enough to pick out one out of seven "AI" solutions that's completely invalid? I'm not in every context. But this leaves out trials that produced sort of, partially and kind of invalid outputs. Can you pick out those? Oh well, I guess "good enough" will have to do. Chabuduo.
by ddtaylor | 2026-02-13 15:53:10+00:00
It leaves a lot of interpretation to the model. For example it doesn't give any guidance on concept naming or disambiguation, which leaves all of that work to the JSON schema.

In my experience it's much more effective to reference key terms or ideas in the JSON schema and then explain those and their constraints in the system prompt.

This is one reason why people often think one model performs better than another for tasks they are both capable of. The real question IMO becomes, does porking all of that extra input prompt (a) eat too much context or (b) increase cost too much.

We will put an update on this in the future and post it in our blog, https://blog.devrupt.io/
by ramon156 | 2026-02-13 15:53:19+00:00
I don't even need to open the project to know this is vibe coded garbage. This is in no way a personal attack, but the writing style is 100% AI fueled. There's no personality and frankly its too generic to be considered truthful.

The problem is there, but a tool is just not the solution. The solution is to actually put in the elbow grease and learn what you need/want to learn.

Apps need to be dopamine fueled to work, and no one has fixed this problem yet.
by marstall | 2026-02-13 15:53:22+00:00
Let's take that vibe coded product and iterate what it gave you 100 times, as you tweak it to fit your vision. When you do that 101st iteration, can you prevent it from breaking something else, or changing it in a way you don't like it?

What if it doesn't understand what you're asking it to do and keeps failing and you have to keep rolling back? Can you understand the 20,000 lines it's generated so you can make the change yourself without tearing your hair out? Can you fix bugs in it that it can't, without starting from zero and having to understand the whole codebase?
by ky3 | 2026-02-13 15:53:22+00:00
> If you are skipping a step in the procedure, aren't you also possibly going to skip writing a step down?

Exactly, so when she reviewed the notebook, she caught the error.

Even if she made a slip in the notebook, merely reviewing it helps jog the memory to revisit and replay what she did in the lab. It's the power of touchstones.

> What if you have to do several steps rather quickly? Say adding a particular chemical, then waiting for ten seconds and adding, another chemical? Do you have time to write it down?

The notebook doesn't always have to operate as a log. It can also operate as a plan of action.
by imglorp | 2026-02-13 15:53:30+00:00
> orange iPhone was pretty and the Pixel 10 was boring

I guess this is really important to people.

One time I broke an Android, which happened to be white, and spoke to the insurer for a replacement. The agent insisted she find me another white phone, not another Android, and though an iPhone was suitable. She couldn't grok how the OS and phone specs were more important than the color.
by gsck | 2026-02-13 15:53:41+00:00
I dont think people fully realise how novel Stripe actually is.

The idea of capturing payments via an API itself isn't unique, but the fact that as a company Stripe is actually on average pretty competent. I've never had an issue with stripe on the integration side because that just works.

I work with a massive variety of payment gateways, I'd imagine more than most people on this site ever will, 90% of them suck. The big ones all suck, Stripe's "competitors" suck. They all have effectively the same API but the issues are organisational.

Stripe is a technology company, its technology is good. The rest are finance companies and you get all the slow to move, impossible to get through to bureaucracy that comes with it. Of course they didn't respond to the actually issue and said "You've already solved it" and then ignored the actual problem. These payment providers sell their services to business not developers or anyone with technical chops.

They wont care about these issues because your boss has already been sold on the product, the issues are very very unlikely to change their mind and it is now your problem to solve.
by cardanome | 2026-02-13 15:55:02+00:00
It absolutely is. I don't understand how people are so delusional to think that their AI slop has any value.

If I were fine with AI, I could just prompt the LLM myself to create a course perfectly catered to me. Why would I need you? Because your prompting skills are magic? Yeah, no. That is like charging for google search results because you searching skills are so great.

The whole problem with Duolingo is that it got so much worse once they started using AI. Switching to another AI driven project would be out of the frying pan into the fire.
by d4rkp4ttern | 2026-02-13 15:55:17+00:00
Hex is my new favorite STT on MacOS. Also uses Parakeet V3. I didn't think it could possibly be faster than Handy, but it is much faster - even long ramblings transcribed within a second. It's MacOS only, leverages the CoreML / Apple Neural Engine.

https://github.com/kitlangton/Hex

Also the transcriptions with hex don't seem to suffer from some of the issues with Handy, such as stutter.
by hackyhacky | 2026-02-13 15:56:12+00:00
> It is not automatic, even with vibecoding, getting out a good app/site that solves a need in an elegant, functional manner for the user.

This feels like a vibecoded comment.

To address the "substance" of your "comment": yes, creating a polished product requires effort, but this is not a polished product: as pointed out by numerous commenters, it provides nothing new, and what it does provide is broken. Thus the GP's comment that it is vibecoded slop and not worth taking seriously.
by ndiddy | 2026-02-13 15:56:31+00:00
Honestly I think all native GUI is in a tough spot right now. The desktop market has matured so there aren't any large companies willing to put a ton of money into new fully featured GUI libraries. What corporate investment we do see into new technologies (Electron, SwiftUI, React Native) is mainly to allow developers to reuse work from other platforms like web and mobile in order to cut costs on desktop development. Without that corporate investment I don't think we'll ever see any new native GUI libraries become as fully featured as Win32 or Qt Widgets.
by small_model | 2026-02-13 15:56:49+00:00
Well Tesla just launched their robotaxi 6 months ago whereas Waymo has been going for a decade? Just looking at a point in time is a bit silly, look at the change over time.

The bottom line is cost per mile and Waymo can't complete here, there is also style, Waymo's vehicles are extremely ugly looking cars vs the Cybercab. Tesla also has integrated everything from the chip up. Waymo is a cobbled together solution from multiple third party (very expensive) components.

Is the consumer going to pick a more expensive, ugly, non integrated vehicle for their trip?
by barrell | 2026-02-13 15:56:49+00:00
Not OP, but I also coincidentally built a language learning app to learn Turkish. I don't think you can create courses without experience in the language, but it is possible to build analytical tools to make language learning possible. Tech + linguistics can take you pretty far.

This isn't to hijack the thread, but wanted to comment because honestly one of the coolest feelings in my life has been learning a language I don't know from an app I built.
by prof-dr-ir | 2026-02-13 15:57:05+00:00
I agree it that this behavior as insane and should be fixed.

Do however note that it is possible to install another keyboard on iOS, which may alleviate your suffering before you switch to Android in about 120 days.

Personally I rely on Gboard [0] every day for the simple reason that it auto-detects several (more than two) languages, and of course it has the added benefit of not having this crazy bug. Gboard is google software however, so it does come with huge privacy issues, and others will hopefully point out better alternatives.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gboard
by kristopolous | 2026-02-13 15:57:05+00:00
They seem to come with the same capabilities. I assume they farm out the firmware to someone else that they license from, then they get the firmware at basically free in the hope that the firmware maker will push their cloud product but this is all speculation.

These are all working "on the reservation" - I'm not flashing anything. There's always a risk but I think these are just cameras.

They might be running a spy rig side hustle but they open up their ports. I haven't gotten two way audio or the camera motor to move around on the ONVIF protocol yet but there's "profiles" that can do this ... I'll just have to see if the cameras respond to those profiles.

If not I'll contact Wansview.

In my experience with Chinese companies when I contact them about things like this they treat me as if I'm about to pull the trigger on 100,000 of them.
by shprd | 2026-02-13 15:57:13+00:00
> an engineer at Spotify on their morning commute from Slack on their cell phone can tell Claude to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app [...] so that he can then merge it to production, all before they even arrive at the office.

It's so dystopian to boost about your team pushing to production on their commute because that means:

1. The engineers are forced to work from office for no reason apparently.

2. The engineers are working outside work hours. Are they compensated for that?

Most people reading the article would get the impression that the developers are no longer needed and you can just tell Claude the feature you need directly, but why are the engineers at Spotify's still employed then? It seems Spotify's shareholders should confront the co-CEO, Söderström, about wasting tremendous resources when AI is so good and doing all the heavy lifting. Unless he is bullshitting a little too much.
by OrvalWintermute | 2026-02-13 15:57:19+00:00
I feel much better after reading this because our organizations are:
- funding OSS developers
- engaging with OSS developers to determine potential funding priorities
- providing project hardware at the project level
- providing hardware to the individual OSS developer

While we are not to the point of hosting events in Hawaii yet, I’m hoping we can see this as a teaming arrangement to accomplish great things together!
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-02-13 15:57:38+00:00
I am really looking forward to the actual post-mortem.

My working hypothesis (inspired by you!) is now that maybe Crabby read the CoC and applied it as its operating rules. Which is arguably what you should do; human or agent.

The part I probably can't sell you on unless you've actually SEEN a Claude 'get frustrated', is ... that.
by nicoburns | 2026-02-13 15:57:41+00:00
I wouldn't bother watching Makepad. They're in the process of rewriting the entire thing with AI and (it seems to me) destroying any value they has accumulated. And I also suspect Xilem will never be finished.

Beyond egui/Iced/Slint, I'd say the "ones to watch" are:

* Freya

* Floem

* Vizia

I think all three of those offer virtualized lists.

Dioxus Native, the non-webview version of Dioxus is also nearing readiness.
by wccrawford | 2026-02-13 15:57:50+00:00
The lessons are questionable. I did the Japanese one, and despite answering all of the incredibly easy questions perfectly, it dumped me into lesson 6, which is also incredibly easy and was the same thing I'd already answered correctly.

Beyond that, some of the Japanese text didn't exactly match what was being said, and some of it was basically the same thing twice, but once with more emphasis. (An exclamation mark.) As a long-time Japanese learner I knew which to expect would be expected as the answer, but a novice would not and it would be just frustrating.

Another was a whole question spoken out loud, but just 1 word from the question as an answer. It can be used like that, but it's asking a lot for a learner to get through it. It's like asking, "Okay?" when you mean "Are you okay?" and expecting a learner to figure it out.

I'm not really sure who this is for. It doesn't seem to fit well for beginner, intermediate, or advanced learners. Beginners need more basic info and explanation. Intermediates probably need things that are more topical. Advanced users probably need things that are more... Well, advanced.
by Klaster_1 | 2026-02-13 15:58:27+00:00
FYI greek has a good introductory course by Language Transfer, from which you can graduate to textbooks (available from rutracker) and ChatGPT for practice and OCR. I also maintained decent retention by converting everything I learned into Anki cards. Living in a greek-speaking country helps, but only when you are forced to communicate in EL or when you explicitly ingest new words/phrases from what you read around. Before that, I used Duolingo for the same purpose, had issues keeping the streak up and understanding the material (this was early ChatGPT era, though).
by andai | 2026-02-13 15:58:28+00:00
The project's position on this issue is a little unclear, since they do have a global AI PR ban[0][1], which would make the "for this particular issue" part irrelevant.

[0] https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132#issuecom...

[1] https://matplotlib.org/devdocs/devel/contribute.html#generat...

The "for first time contributors" rule seems reasonable, considering that AIs have an unfair advantage over (beginner) human programmers :)

Re: drive by contributors

I think the AI would agree with you here. It basically made the same argument in its follow up post. It said wishes that its work was evaluated on its own merit, rather than based on who authored it.

https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...
by rgreeko42 | 2026-02-13 15:59:04+00:00
When I loaded the page I saw a bunch of placeholder text like "Hero title" for a second then an AI-generated image was the first thing I saw after that. Doesn't inspire confidence that it's "expert crafted."

70+ languages and 700+ courses would imply a staff of people were required to create something like this (if it's of any quality), but it's a "side project"?

Strains credulity.
Ask HN: Programming Languages Research in 2026
by yodsanklai | 2026-02-13 15:59:11+00:00
LLMs are changing how we're writing code. In my company, more than half of the code is now written by AI, and this shift happened in less than a year.

I wonder how it has affected programming languages development and research. I could see languages with an expressive type system become more relevant in the future for instance.

Software engineering may change completely in the future. I wonder if research in that field is going to be revolutionized the same way industry is.