MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kens | 2026-02-15 00:15:19+00:00
The ROM in the 8087 was very unusual: It used four transistor sizes so it could store two bits per transistor, so the storage was four-level. Analog comparators converted the output from the ROM back to binary. This was necessary to fit the ROM onto the die. The logic gates on the chip were all binary.

I wrote about this in detail a few years ago: https://www.righto.com/2018/09/two-bits-per-transistor-high-...
by Swizec | 2026-02-15 00:15:52+00:00
> Though I think lawyers will be reduced to being "official human stamping machines" before software engineers are reduced to mere Product Owners

GeLLMan Amnesia – AI can fully automate every profession except the ones I’m deeply familiar with.

I’m a software engineer who wears the product owner hat a lot these days, there’s no way AI will automate this any time soon. Too much peopling and accountability.
by godelski | 2026-02-15 00:17:20+00:00
> Sure but they will often make comments or tests that aren't actually useful, or modify tests to succeed instead of fixing the code.

I've been deeply concerned that there's been a rise of TDD. I thought we already went through this and saw its failure. But we're back to we're people cannot differentiate "tests aren't enough" from "tests are useless". The amount of faith people put into tests is astounding. Especially when they aren't spending much time analyzing the tests and understanding their coverage.
by 0nabilbk | 2026-02-15 00:18:28+00:00
Hey HN! I'm Nabil, the founder of artifact.

I freelanced for years, design, product, whatever the client needed. The work was good. The calls were good. And then I'd spend two hours after every call doing the work around the work.

Not the actual work. The meta-work. Turning a conversation into a proposal.

Formatting scope. Second-guessing pricing. Exporting a PDF. Sending it. Following up. Chasing a signature in one tool, an invoice in another, a contract in a third.

AI made the delivery side of client work genuinely faster. A solo designer now ships what a team of five did three years ago. But the deal side, going from "great call" to "signed and paid" didn't move. Same blank doc. Same PDF. Same follow-up emails.

So I built Artifact. Paste your messy call notes and get a real proposal, not generic AI output, but something built from your services, your pricing, your templates. Then track the deal all the way to paid.

Every tool in this space treats the document as the product. But a proposal is not the product, the deal is. A proposal is just one view of a deal that has a client, a scope, a price, and a next step.
by ekipan | 2026-02-15 00:18:33+00:00
Oh, it's a list you can add to your uBO. I thought it was a descriptive headline: "(The) uBlock filter list (is going) to hide ..."

I only watch Youtube via browser now for both adblocking and my own custom userscripts, both on my laptop and my phone. A couple creators I watch mostly do shorts so I tolerate them but I wrote a userscript that changes all /shorts/<videoid> URLs into normal /watch?v=<videoid> to lessen the temptation to doomscroll.
by krapp | 2026-02-15 00:18:54+00:00
It's already happened to "vibe coding," which no longer refers to the specific process described by Andrej Karpathy but any use of AI assisted development.

The process of language drift is accelerated exponentially by the internet. 5-10 years and upwards is an obsolete timescale, these changes can happen in months now, sometimes faster depending on the community.
by miki123211 | 2026-02-15 00:19:28+00:00
Teams is definitely a solid success. It is by no means a good app. Those two things aren't the same.

Slack started with an aggressive "bottom up" approach, they made something actually good and got to worrying about the sales part later. You don't need sales as much when companies come to you, begging you for an actual contract that fulfills their enterprise requirements, knowing that rooting you out is almost impossible.

Teams went the other way, in typical Microsoft style. Microsoft sells it bundled with all the other Microsoft things it sells. Most companies want a Microsoft contract anyway, and have an established sales relationship with MS, so adopting Teams is a lot less compliance, integration and procurement work than adopting anything else. You don't need good UI if your sales strategy isn't predicated on users choosing you for UI.

And then there's Discord, which really isn't a bad work comms app if you're small enough not to need the compliance stuff. It gives you almost everything the big apps do for free, including unlimited calls, an advanced RBAC system, as many channels / messages as you want, a decent bot API (including media streaming), good notification management, multi-server / cross-organization support etc. They're actively disinterested in selling to businesses (which is what makes them so good, the features they paywall are the features needed by gamers, not serious professionals), but that also means you'll need to eventually migrate off of it when compliance requirements set in.
by daxfohl | 2026-02-15 00:20:15+00:00
Maybe. But so far ime most of the esoteric tools in the AI space are esoteric because they're not very good. When something gets good, it's quickly commoditized.

Until coding systems are truly at human-replacement level, I think I'd always prefer to hire an engineer with strong manual coding skills than one who specializes in vibe coding. It's far easier to teach AI tools to a good coder than to teach coding discipline to a vibe coder.
by nxobject | 2026-02-15 00:20:56+00:00
Brewster’s concerns about the historical record are real and will eventually affect news orgs: their journalism may as well be ephemeral now without separate archiving. If a Wikipedia contributor, for example has to jump through extra hoops to get a stable link of a Times article, why wouldn’t they end up choosing an equally reliable WaPo article instead?

Tragedy of the commons.
by M95D | 2026-02-15 00:22:58+00:00
> README that says “this is solid, reliable code that you should use for storing all of your financial data and family photos,”

Show me a readme like that! I'll wait.

Everybody writes a legalese disclaimer that basically say it's trash software and the author has no resposibility, but here's the thing: everybody ignores it. This is the reality of FOSS software.

Nobody has the time to audit the code of every FOSS they use. We all assume some basic quality such as not deleteting /var/db and the responsibility is yours to not do that or not publish it, no matter what you wrote in the readme/disclaimer.
by jongjong | 2026-02-15 00:25:08+00:00
Ah yes 100%, doctors have legal moats too.

It's kind of terrifying to think that all professions are going to have to shift away from value creation to pure politics to survive.

I have a feeling that big tech companies will be legally forced to pay royalties to software engineers. Once software engineers stop applying their reasoning skills to solving real problems and start vengefully focusing it on politics, we're going to corrupt the whole system in our favor. We have enough collective knowledge to frame such corruption as moral in the context of an already corrupt system.

Either software engineers will create regulatory moats for themselves or there will be a more broad political movement like communism. I've met many people working deep in the critical systems which underpin our society who are full-blown communists.
by mrandish | 2026-02-15 00:25:27+00:00
It's a very odd article with virtually no material facts and citing no credible sources. It's the kind of article which seems intentionally 'leaked' based on some ulterior motive.

I also struggle to think of anything a current LLM could contribute which would be of direct and significant military value exceeding the dedicated analysis and mission planning tools intelligence experts already use to develop assessments. That leaves indirect clerical usage like "draft a memo", "create a spreadsheet" or "search documents for..." which most people would find unremarkable.
by SirensOfTitan | 2026-02-15 00:26:09+00:00
I consider almost all news to be entertainment unless I need its perspective to make a decision (which is almost never). It is a lot safer to remain uninformed on a subject as it settles than to constantly attempt to be informed.

Information bias is unfortunately one of the sicknesses of our age, and it is one of the cultural ills that flows from tech outward. Information is only pertinent in its capacity to inform action, otherwise it is noise. To adapt a Beck-ism: You aren't gonna need it.
by throwaway150 | 2026-02-15 00:26:39+00:00
This I understand very well. It wasn't my question though. No, I wasn't asking anybody to organize a structure like Wikipedia. I was challenging the parent's comment where they said:

>> This would be overwhelmed with AI slop within days.

So I asked:

> What makes 10 people curating the list more susceptible to slop?

I don't think your reply addresses this question. Your reply addresses some point that I never made.

I think a 10 person project would be less susceptible to slop than a 1 person project. So I really wanted to understand why the grandparent thinks a 10 person project would be more susceptible to slop.
by twoodfin | 2026-02-15 00:27:44+00:00
Thanks for a far more thorough version of my comment.

I genuinely don’t know the logic of policymakers (if there’s logic at all), but it is fair to point out that one of the main drivers of health care spending is pay to doctors.

So it’s not just a question of paying for their training: If we expand the capacity of the health care system by adding doctors, all else being equal we should expect costs to rise commensurately.
by dylan604 | 2026-02-15 00:29:29+00:00
> You'd think they'd want to notice that I _absolutely never_ watch shorts, and stop showing them to me, instead recommending something else.

Oh they've noticed, and they just haven't found the right recco just yet to get you to watch. Bear with them, as they will eventually find you something. Even if it is just a video you would normally watched cropped to format.
by culi | 2026-02-15 00:30:04+00:00
I don't see why not. I like Zulip. Its is self-hostable and OSS and they're the only ones who have "public channels" that allow your channels to be indexable by search engines on the internet if you want. One of the biggest complaints I hear on HN is how Discord killed the openness of the internet that forum-based communities supported

I wish more communities used Zulip.
by epolanski | 2026-02-15 00:30:20+00:00
A friend of mine worked two years in YouTube as a content admin.

Basically being given videos to watch all day, especially coming from the middle east (this was ISIS time so any video from the area had someone watching it as soon as uploaded).

Needless to say there's endless gold no view videos according to him.

It's also interesting that it was no open secret that already in 2018 they were all told that they were essentially training machines to do their job.
by slopinthebag | 2026-02-15 00:31:55+00:00
You know when someone is singing the praises about AI and they get asked "if you're so much more productive with AI, what have you built with it"? Well I think a bunch of companies are asking this same question to their employees and realising that the productivity gains they are betting on were overhyped.

LLM's can be a very useful tool and will probably lead to measurable productivity increases in the future, at their current state they are not capable of replacing most knowledge workers. Remember, even computers as a whole didn't measurably impact the economy for years after their adoption. The real world is a messy place and hard to predict!
by vibe101 | 2026-02-15 00:33:04+00:00
I’ve learned the hard way that in coding, every line matters. While learning Go for a new job, I realised I had been struggling because I overused LLMs and that slowed my learning. Every line we write reflects a sense of 'taste' and needs to be fully controlled and understood. You need a solid mental model of how the code is evolving. Tech CEOs and 'AI researchers' lack the practical experience to understand this, and we should stop listening to them about how software is actually built.
by themafia | 2026-02-15 00:33:23+00:00
You write more efficient software for the task.

Having had to support many of these systems for sales or automation or video production pipelines as soon as you dig under the covers you realize they are a hot mess of amateur code that _barely_ functions as long as you don't breath on it too hard.

Software engineering is in an entirely nascent stage. That the industry could even put forward ideas like "move fast and break things" is extreme evidence of this. We know how to handle this challenge of deep technical knowledge interfacing with domain specific knowledge in almost every other industry. Coders were once cowboys, now we're in the Upton Sinclair version of the industry, and soon we'll enter into regular honest professional engineering like every other new technology ultimately has.
Show HN: Twsnmp FK – Lightweight NMS Built with Go, Wails, and Svelte
by twsnmp | 2026-02-15 00:33:44+00:00
Hi HN, developer here.

I’ve been developing and maintaining a network management tool called TWSNMP for about 25 years. This new version, "FK" (Fresh Konpaku), is a complete modern rewrite.

Why I built this:
Most enterprise NMS are heavy, server-based, and complex to set up. I wanted something that runs natively on a desktop, is extremely fast to launch, and provides deep insights like packet analysis and NetFlow without a huge infrastructure.

The Tech Stack:
- Backend: Go (for high-speed log processing and SNMP polling)
- Frontend: Svelte (to keep the UI snappy and lightweight)
- Bridge: Wails (to build a cross-platform desktop app without the bulk of Electron)

I’m looking for feedback from fellow network admins and developers. What features do you find most essential in a modern, lightweight NMS?

GitHub: https://github.com/twsnmp/twsnmpfk
by tombert | 2026-02-15 00:34:57+00:00
Yeah, as far as I can tell TLA+ can accomplish more or less the same stuff as Colored Petri Nets. You get a pretty graph with CPNs and it can be interesting to watch the data flow around in the animators, but I've had trouble doing anything terribly useful with Petri Nets.

I haven't really done anything with it, but I've heard Alloy gives you a graphical animation while giving you similar utility to TLA+.
by buildbot | 2026-02-15 00:35:07+00:00
I'm confused - I and many others basically have these cobbled together LTO setups. I'm only "Prepping" by finally moving some of my backups away from home, so in case of a fire or whatever I'm not out of luck. You could cobble one together now for anything from OG DAT tape to LTO-10 for ~10K, if you need. So big fire happens, you file an insurance claim, and as part of the payout buy whatever setup you need, or hire some specialists. Once we are at LTO-20, there's no reason to assume LTO-10 and older drives are totally gone from the used market?

I'm not preparing for some asteroid impact level event, in that case the loss of my backups will presumably not really matter all that much.
Ask HN: How to combat Android malware without mandatory developer verification?
by marcprux | 2026-02-15 00:35:20+00:00
In August 2025, Google announced that starting in late 2026, they are going to lock down Android to require that all app developers register centrally with Google or else their apps will be blocked from being installed on Android certified devices, regardless of how the app is distributed (competing app stores, direct download, etc). This measure is allegedly to combat malware and slow the ability of repeat offenders to simply re-build and re-sign apps that have been blocked by Google Play Protect.

There is a lot of opposition to this effort (e.g., keepandroidopen.org, which I organize) along with widespread distrust of the claimed motives for the program. And yet there is indeed a problem with the proliferation of malware in some regions (Southeast Asia being most frequently cited in reporting).

Recent advances like "Restricted Settings" in Android 14 and "Enhanced Confirmation Mode" in Android 15 have enacted technical barriers that address many of the most common scam/phishing/malware tactics. What additional technical measures could be implemented that would help protect vulnerable Android users against being victimized? Is a program of increasing awareness about personal security a viable solution? Or is the only solution to lock down the Android platform to require developer registration and verification before an app can be distributed?
by y0eswddl | 2026-02-15 00:35:40+00:00
If the author thinks that AI is "smart", then theyre at least right that they definitely arent the smartest type of thing on earth... :?

LLMs don't think. They don't even approximate thinking.

How LLMs Generate Text | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKnZYvZA7w4
by jagged-chisel | 2026-02-15 00:36:01+00:00
I think this untangling problem gets underestimated because people aren't consciously aware of what they're using to analyze and address a tangle. The input is not all vision - you've got sensation in your fingers giving you feedback with which you update your model of the problem as you progress. The operation varies in strength depending on so many factors.

At the point you have enough sensor input, enough force application variability, and the power to process this in the ballpark of real-time (comparable to a human brain), you now have a being who's going to advocate for the removal of slavery and the application of rights.
by saagarjha | 2026-02-15 00:36:13+00:00
Honest question, does anyone appreciate these “case studies”? It seems like they’re always based on some random quote and they go way in detail on what the various technologies are and how they might possibly apply to the subject in question, but with almost no real insight besides “I think this is how it might work”. What kind of case study is that?! If you don’t have real examples how is this better than just presenting the original source for the quote and Wikipedia links to the various technical terms?
by mindslight | 2026-02-15 00:36:27+00:00
It's a particular type of insanity to insist that it is the responsibility of everyday citizens to react perfectly calmly and rationally while being assaulted by armed agents of the state (themselves often acting impulsively and rashly), and to then justify civilians being summarily executed when they inevitably do not.

Furthermore, it's disingenuous to talk about "unlawful behavior" while skipping over the federal government violating the much deeper laws that were explicitly written into its charter.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-15 00:36:38+00:00
The relevant bit:

" Shortly before beginning the GNU Project, I heard about the Free University Compiler Kit, also known as VUCK. (The Dutch word for “free” is written with a v.) This was a compiler designed to handle multiple languages, including C and Pascal, and to support multiple target machines. I wrote to its author asking if GNU could use it.

He responded derisively, stating that the university was free but the compiler was not. I therefore decided that my first program for the GNU Project would be a multilanguage, multiplatform compiler."

And not only was the university 'free' and the compiler not, neither was 'Minix', which was put out there through Prentice Hall in a series of books that you had to pay a fairly ridiculous amount of money for if you were a student there.

So the VU had the two main components of the free software world in their hand and botched them both because of simple greed.

I love it how RMS has both these quotes in the same text:

"Please don't fall into the practice of calling the whole system “Linux,” since that means attributing our work to someone else. Please give us equal mention."

"This makes it difficult to write free drivers so that Linux and XFree86 can support new hardware."

And there are only a few lines between those quotes.
by godelski | 2026-02-15 00:37:50+00:00
That's a very strong claim. I don't think people expect their circuits to ignite, LLM instruction or not. But I'd expect learning from a book or dedicated website would be less likely for that to occur. (Even accounting for bad manufacturing)

You're biased because you're not considering that by definition the student is inexperienced. Unknown unknowns. Tons of people don't know very basic things (why would they?) like circuits with capacitors bring dangerous when the power is off.

Why are you defending there LLM? Would you be as nice to a person? I'd expect not because these threads tend to point out a person's idiocy. I'm not sure why we give greater leeway to the machine. I'm not sure why we forgive them as if they are a student learning but someone posting similar instructions on a blog gets (rightfully) thrashed. That blog writer is almost never claiming PhD expertise

I agree that LLMs can greatly aid in learning. But I also think they can greatly hinder learning. I'm not sure why anyone thinks it's any different than when people got access to the internet. We gave people access to all the information in the world and people "do their own research" and end up making egregious errors because they don't know how to research (naively think it's "searching for information"), what questions to ask, or how to interrogate data (and much more). Instead we've ended up with lots of conspiratorial thinking. Now a sycophantic search engine is going to fix that? I'm unconvinced. Mostly because we can observe the result.
by zmgsabst | 2026-02-15 00:38:10+00:00
Those roles seem to be diverging:

- crowdsourced data, eg, photos of airplane crashes

- people who live in an area start vlogs

- independent correspondents travel there to interview, eg Ukraine or Israel

We see that our best war reporting comes from analyst groups who ingest that data from the “firehose” of social media. Sometimes at a few levels, eg, in Ukraine the best coverage is people who compare the work of multiple groups mapping social media reports of combat. You have on top of that punditry about what various movements mean for the war.

So we don’t have “journalist”:

- we have raw data (eg, photos)

- we have first hand accounts, self-reported

- we have interviewers (of a few kinds)

- we have analysts who compile the above into meaningful intelligence

- we have anchors and pundits who report on the above to tell us narratives

The fundamental change is that what used to be several roles within a new agency are now independent contractors online. But that was always the case in secret — eg, many interviewers were contracted talent. We’re just seeing the pieces explicitly and without centralized editorial control.

So I tend not to catastrophize as much, because this to me is what the internet always does:

- route information flows around censorship

- disintermediate consumers from producers when the middle layer provides a net negative

As always in business, evolve or die. And traditional media has the same problem you outline:

- not entertaining enough for the celebrity gossip crowd

- too slow and compromised by institutional biases for the analyst crowd, eg, compare WillyOAM coverage of Ukraine to NYT coverage

https://www.youtube.com/@willyOAM
by kh9000 | 2026-02-15 00:38:14+00:00
The section coding.pdf has their code style guidelines, colloquially known as Cutler Normal Form, CNF for short. I'm conflicted on it. Definitely overly verbose, but you can't argue with the results of the NT team. Such a rigid style guide almost feels like the technical version of a dress code. And there's an idea called "enclothed cognition" which is like, if you wear a business suit to work, it exerts a subconscious influence that results in you taking the work more seriously, focusing your attention, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclothed_cognition