MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fennecbutt | 2026-02-14 11:18:25+00:00
Tbf I'm fine with it only one way around; if a journalist has tonnes of notes and data on a subject and wants help to condense those down into an article, assistance with prioritising which bits of information to present to the reader then totally fine.

If a journalist has little information and uses an llm to make "something from nothing" that's when I take issue because like, what's the point?

Same thing as when I see managers dumping giant "Let's go team!!! 11" messages splattered with AI emoji diarrhea like sprinkles on brown frosting. I ain't reading that shit; could've been a one liner.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-02-14 11:19:15+00:00
I've linked actual informative useful sources, that bring references.

If you have a case to make, by all means! Make it! I am happy to actually hear some anti-section 230 talk that makes any sense. But this is just cheap digs of no merit, adding no specific or clarity to the conversation.

It's also, from everything anyone of any note has said, totally miserably absurdly wrong.
After a month my tiny VM in Rust can power todo app with programmable workflows
by tracyspacy | 2026-02-14 11:19:17+00:00
A month ago I shared my winter holiday project - Task Engine VM , since then there is some progress that I suppose worth to share.

What's new:

- NaN-boxing — All stack values are 64-bit (u64) encoding 6 distinct types (Null, Boolean(TRUE_VAL,FALSE_VAL), STRING_VAL, CALLDATA_VAL, U32_VAL, MEM_SLICE_VAL (offset: 25 bits, size: 25 bits)).

- InlineVec — Fixed-size array-backed vector implementation used for stack, control stack, call stack, and jump stack with specified limits.

- Dynamic Memory/Heap — growable Vec heap; memory slices use 25-bit offset and 25-bit size fields (limited by MEM_SLICE_VAL).

- Zero dependencies —Custom binary encoding/decoding implementation.

Furthermore I added an example to stresstest VM - a todo app with programmable tasks.

In this example, all todo operations — from simple CRUD to tasks own instructions — are executed by a virtual machine.

The concept is that any kind of automation or workflow can be enabled by task instructions executed by the VM, rather than hardcoded functions in the app. It’s close to the concept of rules engines.

There are 4 demo task instructions:

- chain - Creates next task once when another completes. Removes calldata after call - called once

- either - Sets complete if either one or another task is completed + deletes not completed task (see gif)

- destructable - task self destructs when it’s status set to complete

- hide - Keeps task hidden while specified task’s status is not complete.

It is possible to add your own instructions to calldata.toml and use them within todo example:

cargo run -- add <TASK_TITLE > -calldata <INSTRUCTION_NAME> <PARAMETERS>

todo example : https://github.com/tracyspacy/spacydo/tree/main/examples/todo

vm repo: https://github.com/tracyspacy/spacydo
by mchaver | 2026-02-14 11:20:06+00:00
I've always understood hackers to be a subset of users at HN. Maybe there were more in the early days, but with the growth of the startup business model, a lot of different users were attracted to the site.
The core value seems to be interest in technology and the cultures around it. Emphasis own the plurality of cultures because I think there are multiple, competing ones. Though, as per guidelines, any story interesting to users is acceptable for submission.
by mcv | 2026-02-14 11:20:16+00:00
This is exactly why I'm not that worried. I've noticed that AI is great at the parts of software engineering that I'm bad at, like implementing a new unfamiliar library, deploy pipelines, infra configuration, knowing specific technical details and standard patterns.

It's bad at the stuff I'm good at: thinking about the wider context, architecture, how to structure the code in an elegant, maintainable way, debugging complex issues, figuring out complex algorithms. I've tried using AI for those things, but it sucks at them. But I've also used it to solve configuration problems that I doubt I'd been able to figure out on my own.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-14 11:20:44+00:00
> I'm telling y'all about how the world is. How it's going to be.

This, together with grand claims that obviously don't hold up in reality, does make you an AI advocate no matter how much you dislike the label.

If you comment was more measured and had nuanced view, then I'd understand wanting to push back on it. But then you also say stuff like "Even a legacy code base can be poured into an LLM, which will grok it instantly" so no wonder others see you as a AI advocate.
by styluss | 2026-02-14 11:21:37+00:00
Mild Spoilers.

I will always have a special place for Babylon 5. One time I was watching it with my father who lived under a dictatorship, watched a scene with Mr Morden and Lando, immediately said "this kind of talk is meant to put people against other people". He didn't care much for the extraterrestrial part of the show but was very interested in portrayal of authoritarianism.
by anthk | 2026-02-14 11:21:38+00:00
It wasn't a straight jump from Columbus or the Iberian unification, the Enlightenment and the late Middle Ages overlap a lot. I'd say from 1200's things began to 'instituonalize', from first proto-parliaments, to Iberian Fueros, to different merchants and thinkerers eroding the Ancient Regime a little by supporting capable people with the money of rich people (Maecenas? in Latin).
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-02-14 11:22:25+00:00
I want to add that if wifi 8 delivers half the reliability improvements it promises, we really need more IP A/V devices fast! Huge promise!

And those need good protocols, to get anywhere. Ideally with compression.

It's both overkill, but also, extending ST 2110 and or AES67 feels like a really good option, feels sort of like what we have for semi standard IP AV. There are some other notable interesting techs listed too. I don't have a horse in the race but I do want some maximalist big very capable protocols that are broadly adopted.
by asyncgabe | 2026-02-14 11:24:27+00:00
I've been building a mortgage affordability calculator (Next.js/TypeScript). I used v0 to generate the full UI — landing page, calculator, pricing — then threw away all the code and rebuilt from scratch.

The AI-generated designs were solid. The code behind them wasn't. Hardcoded numbers, no state management, no real logic. But as a rapid prototyping/design tool, v0 saved me from spending hours in Figma.

Documented the process here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=YvLX88Fr-y0

Curious if others have landed on a similar workflow — using AI tools for design intent rather than production code.
by danaris | 2026-02-14 11:24:34+00:00
But the whole reason it's called "the singularity" is because the "AI" improving itself is supposed to already be smarter than us, and better able to make those improvements. Thus, improvement builds on itself exponentially and we very quickly see massive changes, leading to huge new advances in science and technology.

It's not a singularity if we just get LLMs spitting out code to improve LLMs that's approximately what we could have done, just 40% faster and with 50% more bugs.
by WJW | 2026-02-14 11:24:47+00:00
That may be, but OP tried to claim that

> once Jai comes out, Zig will become obsolete

If Jai is happy to have limited adoption (which is fine), other languages will by definition not be displaced by Jai. That is even if we accept OPs implied point, that Jai is good enough to displace Zig, without further discussion. But even that seems to be rather doubtful.
by pnt12 | 2026-02-14 11:26:14+00:00
> then any good actor products will be crushed by profitmaxxing competitors

This is what I always say, and defended by many economists: The free market needs legislation and enforcement! Especially public companies, which are especially adamant to maximize shareholder profits at any cost.

Fee market only reacts in a positive way by default in matters that are clear to customers, eg pricing. But when the user isn't the customer, and the defects are not immediately sensed, winners will never do the good thing on their accord.
by BrouteMinou | 2026-02-14 11:26:27+00:00
I feel like it's worthless to keep up with Zig until they reach 1.0.

That thing, right here, is probably going to be rewritten 5 times and what not.

If you are actively using Zig (for some reasons?), I guess it's a great news, but for the Grand Majority of the devs in here, it's like an announcement that it's raining in Kuldîga...

So m'yeah. I was following Zig for a while, but I just don't think I am going to see a 1.0 release in my lifetime.
by roysting | 2026-02-14 11:27:09+00:00
You will just see the shift of the methods used in government corruption to circumvent such rules, e.g., your wife gets a wildly lucrative “book deal” right after you do something, and then when time has passed, you also get a “book deal” or are hired to speak at exorbitant fees or get hired in some BS position or are made a member of a board, or your children are hired as executives or even made board members.

The problem with the direct approach, i.e., “ban advertising”, is that it is hung up on a specific term, not the underlying dynamic/system. It’s fighting a symptom, not the disease/cause.
by danaris | 2026-02-14 11:27:51+00:00
I think there's a meaningful difference between a gun manufacturer and an LLM service provider like OpenAI.

A better analogy would be some kind of "guns-as-a-service" model, where the company sends down a drone with a gun and fires it at whoever you point it at, then the drone flies back to base.

I think it would be very clear in cases like that that the service provider should be held liable.
by ThunderSizzle | 2026-02-14 11:28:18+00:00
Every website would then become a snake oil salesman for buying their subscription.

It'd be like streaming today. Fragmented, expensive, and useless.
And no one would like it.

Beyond that, websites would still need people to be addicted to justify the sub.

And furthermore, "sponsorships" will still occur behind the sub wall.
by bell-cot | 2026-02-14 11:29:09+00:00
> While the morning rush is under way, the 2.8-kilowatt-hour battery can directly power the commercial oven to reduce the company’s reliance on the electric grid [...] Two more batteries are paired with energy-intensive refrigerators in the front.

> Businesses like Black Seed often pay hefty demand charges on their utility bills that reflect the maximum amount of power they use during a month – costs that can represent as much as half their total bill, on average. By shifting to battery power during key times [...]

All 3 "smart" batteries are provided, "free", by a local retail energy provider - which acts as an intermediary between local business and Con Ed, the local electrical utility.

Nice sounding, and little businesses gotta do what they can...but it sounds like 99% of the potential savings are higher up in the system. Could New York force Con Ed to allow connecting Tesla Megapacks (or similar at-scale energy storage units) to their grid? A 2.8k battery can't power Black Seed's commercial oven for long. And stacking the batteries up 'till they can would have obvious issues with inefficiencies of scale, local complexity, electrical/fire safety, and maybe floor loading.
by 1718627440 | 2026-02-14 11:29:15+00:00
> For example, no fractional scaling for 4k monitors.

I don't have a 4K monitor, but what does `xrandr --output HDMI1 --scale 0.8x0.8` do? I have a 1024x768 monitor and do to all the useless whitespace in modern programs, I scale into the opposite direction.

But I agree Gnome lost the plot completely, and sadly Gtk too. Which is a pity, because I prefer GTK+ to Qt, but they deprecated so much useful Widgets and the alternative given is 'just don't do that'.
by kasey_junk | 2026-02-14 11:30:43+00:00
I’ll concede it’s my impression not any facts, but when I talk to non-tech users they tend to hate the ai being embedded in all of their apps. I think the ai google search results are at best polarizing.

For technical users it’s very rare to hear people picking Gemini for general use cases unless they are required to for other reasons.

Google models do seem to get used a lot for specialized tasks though.
by fennecbutt | 2026-02-14 11:30:52+00:00
If it wasn't numbers showing finance it was previously unrealised numbers showing muscle, bone density and height.

Imo, if we took tribe numbers now and went back to old world cave and stick we would see similar problems as we do today.

And yes agree about participation within one or more tribes, very similar to prisoner's dillema but with n>2 participants this time, and defection therefore has more of a payoff for every n.
by edaus | 2026-02-14 11:30:55+00:00
It's probably because the calorie maintenance is a range and not a set number so you have to adjust accordingly so if you eat less -> you move less -> tdee goes down. All those while you feel lower energy and hungrier. That's where exercise comes in as a satiety regulator.

If 200-400 kcals deficit doesn't work, just lower by 100 more each week until you get to a desired weight loss rate.

I've found great success with this approach and also changing my thinking to 'is this thing something sustainable and healthy long term?'. Like of course I can lose a lot of weight fast with a huge deficit, but then I'll just default to my initial habits and gain it back.
by Madmallard | 2026-02-14 11:31:11+00:00
Something I don't quite understand about this Discord fiasco.

Every single thing you ever put into discord via text or voice has already and was already being sold to advertisers. If you were ever logged into Google simultaneously while on Discord it's already linked up to the real information they have about you.

I've just seen numerous things I've talked about or typed about with friends promptly appear on my YouTube feeds.

So like.. ?
by masswerk | 2026-02-14 11:31:16+00:00
A few more candidates for the ranking: Peter Samson (of Expensive Planetarium fame, the background star simulation of Spacewar!, and known for his music on the PDP-1, also author of the TMRC Dictionary [0], still active with the CHM PDP-1 team) born in 1941, Ellen Kuhfeld (Minnesota Spacewar [1] for the CDC 3100 at the University of Minnesota, 1966-68) is also in her 80s.

[0] https://www.gricer.com/tmrc/dictionary1959.html

[1] https://masswerk.at/spacewar/kuhfeld/
by fyredge | 2026-02-14 11:31:32+00:00
I don't quite agree with this. Feature discovery is much easier in GUI when most commonly used features are either in the first layer of menu or in standard hotkeys. In the worst case, you would do a search in GUIs that provide them. In CLI / TUI, no such function is present and you would basically have to man and scroll through all possible commands to find it, though I guess grep helps.
by jtrn | 2026-02-14 11:32:04+00:00
No. What you say is obviously true. My question is: Why do, on average, people always make wrong claims in the same DIRECTION? Towards negativity.

Let's say we had objective data on things people say that we know are wrong regarding LLMs. The amount of people who WRONGLY say "It's getting worse" dwarfs the amount of people who WRONGLY think it has gotten better.

All I said is that I'm starting to get more interested in the psychological factors for this observation, the negativity bias, than actually investigating if the latest in a series of "OMG MODEL DEGRADATION" or "UI SUCKS NOW" posts; is actually true.
by kristoff_it | 2026-02-14 11:32:09+00:00
Here's some advice:

1. if you're a casual user (ie you don't follow the development) don't try incomplete APIs that not even the creators of fully know how they are supposed to work (because they're still tinkering with them) also you can't expect docs until the design is somewhat finalized (which is not yet, fyi)

2. llms don't help when trying to make sense of the above (a feature that is not complete, that has no docs other than some hints in commit messages, that changes every other commit), reserve llms for when things are stable and well documented, otherwise they will just confuse you further.

If you want to try new features before they land in a tagged release, you must engage with the development process at the very least.
by itopaloglu83 | 2026-02-14 11:32:44+00:00
These are very volatile assets, so maybe it shouldn’t be possible to take credits against them unless one realizes the gains or pays taxes for them.

This is also one of the reasons why financial crisis go out of hand so quickly, because once the value of an asset goes down, these credits become worthless as well, but rich people bought real assets with those credits, so the crisis just keep expanding to other sectors.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-14 11:32:53+00:00
It should be noted that while in general metallurgy was less advanced in America, there also was a domain where it was more advanced than in the rest of the world.

There is one metal that has been discovered by the South-American natives, before the contact with Europe, and which was unknown elsewhere: platinum. The Europeans have learned from them about platinum.

Moreover, not only the South-Americans had discovered platinum, but they had also developed a technology to make objects of platinum. This is no small achievement, because platinum was impossible to melt or forge with the means available at that time.

The South-Americans have worked around this, by inventing a form of powder metallurgy. To make things of platinum, they sintered platinum powder and nuggets with gold.

This technology has been lost after the Spanish occupation, so the Europeans have developed techniques for platinum processing only much later, around the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century.

While platinum itself had been unknown in the rest of the world before the contact with South America, some platinum-group metals had been known, i.e. the natural alloy of osmium with iridium was known in the ancient Egypt, Greece and Roman Empire, in the form of nuggets that were mixed with those of gold in alluvial deposits. However none of the ancient Mediterranean people discovered any method for forging or melting the Os-Ir nuggets, so they were called "adamant", i.e. "untamed" (which has been distorted in the modern "diamond"). This was the original meaning of adamant/diamond. Only after the wars of Alexander the Great in India, the Europeans have learned about what are now called "diamonds", which were then named by the Greeks and Romans "Indian diamonds", to distinguish them from the Os-Ir diamonds. Later, the knowledge about Os-Ir nuggets has been forgotten and the references to them in Hesiod, Platon or Pliny the Elder have been mistranslated until now.
by xg15 | 2026-02-14 11:32:57+00:00
The first part sounded good, the "every platform is different, we have to decide everything case-by-case" and the specific focus on TikTok less so IMO.

Keep in mind that in Europe, TikTok is still run by the original owners with China connections - unlike the new "American TikTok" after the owner change in the US.

The US legislature only seemed to discover its concern about addictive behavior when foreign actors or pro-palestinian content were involved, but had no problem with YouTube or Facebook doing the same stuff.

I seriously hope it's different in the EU but wouldn't bet on it.
by jackfranklyn | 2026-02-14 11:35:56+00:00
Fair enough - I'm probably biased because I mostly see small practices (1-3 people) where headcount can't really shrink further. In that context it's about throughput per person. But you're right that in a larger org with a CFO making staffing decisions, the efficiency gains get captured as cost savings rather than more clients served. The 5-to-3 scenario you describe is realistic and happening now.
by Shish2k | 2026-02-14 11:36:47+00:00
I do love jetbrains for its nice-to-have features (eg highlight a few lines in the middle of a spaghetti function -> right click -> extract to new function) and was paying for it out of my own pocket for several years; but had to switch to vscode for a couple of required features that jetbrains was missing (remote dev over ssh, and devcontainers); and now switched to zed for being "like vscode but faster"
by hirako2000 | 2026-02-14 11:37:01+00:00
The parallel is what's ridiculous..because of the social understanding. Even if you face a sandwich every day, the offer could end anytime..a one off surely doesn't set expectations.

With open source it does. If an indie open sources and get a baby or lose interest, it is understood as fair to suddenly stop maintenance.

When a company surfs on the open source wave to get contributions, grow penetration, then smoothly slows maintenance and announces to get a license, that's gaming the open source community.

See the numerous cases of popular open source repo where the parent or new parent company took over to gain the user base without any respect for the maintenance if not development aspect: community fork and take over the community.

Mariadb, a more recent illustrative example of that is the hashicorp drama that occured when investors decided it was time to gear towards profit at the detriment of the community that largely contributed to the tools.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-14 11:37:01+00:00
For that to matter OS vendors that only care about C on their platforms, have to also care about Zig.

Otherwise the only users are going to be the ones happy to do some yak shaving instead of the actual application code with the vendor tools.

It also ignores that C doesn't stand still, the competition is C2y, not C89.
by Bender | 2026-02-14 11:38:33+00:00
I think there is an aspect of this people may be missing. Companies are dropping entry level jobs for AI. Should that continue there will eventually not be humans in what was the first few tiers of a job role. AI only exists because the military needs are propping it up. Civilians are always the first to beta test and refine military services. Should the military not find AI to be as useful as their were sold it will lose funding and the house of cards comes crashing down thus leaving all these companies with broken and hollowed out roles with all the experienced people having retrained in something else. That may impact share holders and shake confidence in a few markets.
by luqtas | 2026-02-14 11:39:02+00:00
i'm just typing the way i de-romanticize them. we don't know much about their culture nor how much effected Amazon's biodiversity. what if it had twice the amount of species before their extensive practice of growing hyper dominant species? 11,000 years of human settlement on a land that evolved for millions of years in various separated isles that later got together via geologic events (thus the rich biodiversity of the region) can have a great impact

from the very 1° comment i made i typed a (probably) when i touched this subject. if Europeans took indigenous knowledge to their land, maybe Europe forests wouldn't be ripped out. maybe it wouldn't work because their ecosystem. who knows. i'm not comparing indigenous people to anyone, i'm just trying to reflect they weren't magic saints of the forest as people portray. as a vegan i also dismiss a bunch of their living practices

also California has nothing to do with the Amazon. that land catches fires naturally by lightning. various places that this phenomena happens evolved to deal with it. have you ever been to Amazon? it's so humid. regions of "terra preta" (indigenous practice of making the soil fertile, which involves burning) allowed them to grow various stuff but again, they were into hyper dominant species not expanding the forest (i guess). and as far i researched, terra preta regions are less than 2% of the whole Amazon forest