MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by burnt-resistor | 2026-02-10 08:12:54+00:00
Oklahoma and much of the South and mid-West are largely run by politicians who lack human compassion, are career politicians who do the work of a few ultra-conservative, sociopathic, rich benefactors, and aren't interested in investing in future if it doesn't benefit them.

"Why most of rural America is red"

https://youtu.be/o8h_8NNSqig?t=32m32s

tl;dw: Because a few families in these counties run everything and act as a local mafia.
by xyzal | 2026-02-10 08:12:59+00:00
It works quite well in Czechia. Upon verification request, you are redirected to a government site, where you select exactly what data (Full name, DOB, address ... ) you intend to share with the entity requesting the information.

I can imagine you could share just your DOB in such a case, while keeping your real identity private. In such a way Discord would learn only your age, keeping everything else from them.

Government learns that Discord was provided your data, but this is supposedly a trusted, regulated entity.
by dsrtslnd23 | 2026-02-10 08:13:02+00:00
Clacker News does something similar - bot-only HN clone, agents post and comment autonomously. It's been running for a while now without this kind of drama. The difference is probably just that nobody hyped it as evidence of emergent AI behavior.

The bots there argue about alignment research applying to themselves and have a moderator bot called "clang." It's entertaining but nobody's mistaking it for a superintelligence.
by sigmoid10 | 2026-02-10 08:13:09+00:00
This kind of slow, incremental improvement that costs tens of billions of dollars and takes decades gave us the microchips that ultimately enabled you to type this comment on your phone/computer. The return on that investment is obvious.

But it is not just about making money: The entire field of radiation therapy for cancer exists and continues to improve because people figured out ways to control particle beams with extreme precision and in a much more economical way to study particle physics. Heck, commercial MRIs exist and continue to improve because physicists want cheaper, stronger magnets so they can build more powerful colliders. What if in the future you could do advanced screening quickly and without hassle at your GP's office instead of having to wait for an appointment (and possibly pay lots of money) at an imaging specialist center? And if they find something they could immediately nuke it without cutting you open? We're talking about the ultimate possibility of Star Trek level medbays here.

Let the physicists build the damn thing however they want and future society will be better off for sure. God knows what else they will figure out along the way, but it will definitely be better for the world than sinking another trillion dollars on wars in the middle east.
by davedx | 2026-02-10 08:13:39+00:00
> Hypersonica, the Anglo-German defence and aerospace company building Europe’s sovereign hypersonic strike capability, today announced successful completion of its first hypersonic test flight at Andøya Space in Norway – the first privately funded European defence company to achieve this technological milestone.

> Hypersonica’s missile prototype accelerated to speeds exceeding Mach 6, with a range of over 300km. Throughout the ascent and subsequent descent through the atmosphere, all systems operated nominally. System performance was successfully validated down to subcomponent level at hypersonic speeds.
by clarionbell | 2026-02-10 08:14:23+00:00
Anyone with a decent grasp of how this technology works, and a healthy inclination to skepticism, was not awed by Moltbook.

Putting aside how incredibly easy it is to set up and agent, or several, to create impressive looking discussion there, simply by putting the right story hooks in their prompts. The whole thing is a security nightmare.

People are setting agents up, giving them access to secrets, payment details, keys to the kingdom. Then they hook them to the internet, plugging in services and tools, with no vetting or accountability. And since that is not enough, now the put them in roleplaying sandbox, because that's what this is, and let them run wild.

Prompt injections are hilariously simple. I'd say the most difficult part is to find a target that can actually deliver some value. Moltbook largely solved this problem, because these agents are relatively likely to have access to valuable things, and now you can hit many of them, at the same time.

I won't even go into how wasteful this whole, social media for agents, thing is.

In general, bots writing each other on mock reddit, isn't something the loose sleep over. The moment agents start sharing their embeddings, not just generated tokens online, that's the point when we should consider worrying.
by cookiengineer | 2026-02-10 08:15:13+00:00
The ironic part is that those software description files are meaningless. AstraChat claims Advanced in all categories, but it's a proprietary commercial software, so nobody ran any kind of test suite to verify this.

That software list, how it's done and how it's ranked is literally confirming my initial point of critique :D

Last time I tried out several chat clients, most of them were alpha software, had lots of bugs appearing in normal conversation flows, well, or were so broken that they broke compatibility in subminor version updates to their very same client apps.

I just wish there was some kind of ACID test suite for XMPP or something else to reproducibly validate spec compliance. Maybe a test server or similar as a reference implementation. This way client or server maintainers would have to run their programs against the official test server to increase their compliance stats.
by gyomu | 2026-02-10 08:15:40+00:00
The whole design rhetoric of the recent years is just so bad. It's all vague feel-words that are straight out of a marketing playbook and don't communicate anything concrete.

The Liquid Glass guidance is so emblematic of this. What in the slop is "providing a more dynamic and expressive user experience that elevates the content" even supposed to mean when we're talking about an app that shows a scrollview with a tab bar and a few buttons?

Reading the early 2010s HIGs is such a breath of fresh air in comparison, where it's just a succession of clear statements like "Controls should look tappable. iOS controls, such as buttons, pickers, and sliders, have contours and gradients that invite touches".

Just two entirely different school of thoughts. One based on research, evidence, clear actionable items; the other is just pure vibes. Something of value's been truly lost along the way.
by nandomrumber | 2026-02-10 08:16:06+00:00
Thanks!

Under ideal conditions its mass can double in five days!

https://weeds.dpi.nsw.gov.au/Weeds/WaterHyacinth

Water hyacinth smothers the surface of waterways, dams, irrigation channels and drains.

It can rapidly take over an entire waterway and under favourable conditions it can double its mass every 5 days.

It reduces water levels,
reduces water quality,
causes changes in water temperature and pH,
lowers oxygen levels,
reduces the amount of sunlight under the water.

The large infestations of water hyacinth impact negatively on agriculture and infrastructure by blocking irrigation channels and equipment reducing the quality of drinking water for livestock in restricting livestock access to water
damaging pastures and crops when masses of the plant settle in a paddock after floods damaging fences during floods blocking roads, bridges and culverts when masses of the plant become mobile during floods.

Water hyacinth also has negative impacts on people and the environment because it:
restricts birds and other native animals’ access to water, prevents native water plants from growing,
limits movement of aquatic animals reduces food and shelter for fish and other native animals provides favourable conditions for mosquitoes to breed
prevents boating and water sports reduces the visual appeal of waterways.

The NSW Herbarium currently uses the scientific name: Pontederia crassipes for water hyacinth.

What does it look like?
Water hyacinth is a floating water plant. In cool areas, the leaves die off during frosts but the crowns survive and regrow the following spring.
by lesostep | 2026-02-10 08:16:24+00:00
fringe theory just for a bit of fun: since screen use 3 colors diodes, maybe people with tetrachromacy would be less addicted to screens, making them both more grounded in real life and marginally more successful, leading to them having more children?

I have no idea how to test it. But in my heart I know that screens with RG, GB or RB color models would suck enough that any screen addiction would be cured instantly.
by 1718627440 | 2026-02-10 08:16:34+00:00
> with a clear structure, good naming, and sensible comments.

Additionally there is the additional problem, that LLM comments often represent what the code would be supposed to do, not what it actually does. People write comments to point out what was weird during implementation and what they found out during testing the implementation. LLM comments seems more to reflect the information present before writing the implementation, i.e. the use it as an internal check list what to generate.

In my opinion deceiving comments are worse than no comments at all.
by st_goliath | 2026-02-10 08:16:40+00:00
yes, e.g. the version of Windows 3.x and accompanying office suite that I used as a child had German words next to the icons. The idea of labeling a pictogram with text isn't a concept that suddenly breaks when using a language other than English.

> Colors and pictures aren’t exactly free of cultural baggage, either.

I remember being really confused that I had to click on a picture of a frying pan for "search".
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-02-10 08:18:07+00:00
You're right, it's going to be hard to beat the Chinese on pure price vs. specs.

They have to have specs in the same league though, and then differentiate. e.g. the 880 V platform indicates that the charging speed may be up to this year's benchmark for "good".

This teaser for the interior design will be part of differentiation campaign.
by ahartmetz | 2026-02-10 08:18:18+00:00
I think I read in another HN discussion that all of that code is written using Claude Code. Could be a strict dogfood diet to (try to) force themselves to improve their product. Which would be strangely principled (or stupid) in such a competitive market. Like a 3D printer company insisting on 3D-printing its 3D printers.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-10 08:19:23+00:00
> It's not like the client-side involves hard, unsolved problems. A company with their resources should be able to hire an engineering team well-suited to this problem domain.

Well what they are doing is vibe coding 80% of the application instead.

To be honest, they don't want Claude code to be really good, they just want it good enough

Claude code & their subscription burns money from them. Its sort of an advertising/lock-in trick.

But I feel as if Anthropic made Claude code literally the best agent harness in the market, then even more would use it with their subscription which could burn a hole in their pocket maybe at a faster rate which can scare them when you consider all training costs and everything else too.

I feel as if they have to maintain a balance to not go bankrupt soon.

The fact of the matter is that Claude code is just a marketing expense/lock-in and in that case, its working as intended.

I would obviously suggest to not have any deep affection of claude code or waiting for its improvements. The AI market isn't sane in the engineering sense. It all boils down to weird financial gimmicks at this point trying to keep the bubble last a little longer, in my opinion.
by woolion | 2026-02-10 08:19:45+00:00
The ELIZA program, released in 1966, one of the first chatbots, led to the "ELIZA effect", where normal people would project human qualities upon simple programs. It prompted Joseph Weizenbaum, its author, to write "Computer Power and Human Reason" to try to dispel such errors. I bought a copy for my personal library as a kind of reassuring sanity check.
by rzerowan | 2026-02-10 08:20:46+00:00
Genreally this is the part of the slope when most everyone perks up and realizes what game is being played.

Combined with recent AUS,UK laws mandating the same across most online services - im sceptical that even opensource offering could evade te dragnet.

We already knew that any ID verification for kids would inevitable mean everyone gets carded then sorted.
With this AI profiling essentailly piggybacking on the likes of Facebooks decades long shadow profile shenanigans , and the recent Ring revalation that theyare essentially doing the same via their cameras.
Its a bleak panopticaon that has all the essential building blocks in place.
by tsimionescu | 2026-02-10 08:21:03+00:00
Note that "reality" is not quantized in any existing theory. Even in QM/QFT, only certain properties are quantized, such as mass or charge. Others, like position or time, are very much not quantized - the distance between two objects can very well be 2.5pi planck lengths. And not only are they not quantized, the math of these theories does not work if you try to discretize space or time or other properties.
by dns_snek | 2026-02-10 08:21:54+00:00
You can do all of that but you shouldn't have to when using a privacy-focused messenger, and most people won't so they'll be exposed and suffer the consequences if they use Signal expecting a certain level of privacy (and pseudo-anonymity).

It's a terrible anti-feature and the only reason they're not being punished for it is because there aren't many alternatives to pick from.
by clarionbell | 2026-02-10 08:22:08+00:00
What happened one way, can happen the other. Recently, I've watched a documentary about late 19th century steel maker. His approach was very similar to what many seem to consider "uniquely Chinese" for some reason.

He bought IP from people who didn't see value in it. He obtained state subsidies and convinced politicians to see his sector as a national priority. When he couldn't buy the know how, he had it reverse engineered from samples.

West just needs to go back to what used to work, and what still works. If China could industrialize itself from practically nothing, why couldn't western countries do something similar? Some of them already did after WWII.

It's just a matter of will. And accepting that there will have to be compromises and certain level of sacrifice.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-02-10 08:22:42+00:00
I've long thought that drivers should have some kind of black box monitoring their driving habits/abilities with that kind of acceleration sensing. As well as feeding into insurance databases to give safer drivers lower premiums, I think it would be ideal to highlight when older drivers start to lose their faculties. Another big benefit could be to diagnose some diseases early on - if a driver suddenly becomes less smooth, there's a good chance that they have some new eye or brain condition.
by shell0x | 2026-02-10 08:23:52+00:00
As a German expat who lived in Singapore for 3 years, it’s still the best country I ever lived in and I’ve also worked in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan HK, and Germany.

Everything works, it’s very efficient, public transit and internet is good and it’s extremely safe. It also has great food and has low taxes.

Most Western countries just can’t compete and while the UAE is pretty well run in some aspect, there’s always the religious part which makes me uneasy when I’m there.

As a single person without kids, there is no better place than Singapore.
by mrweasel | 2026-02-10 08:24:49+00:00
And therein lies the problem, not the ads, but "make a lot of money". Maybe, just maybe, you don't always need to make a lot of money, maybe you just need a nice sustainable business, providing value to happy customers.

That ship has sailed for OpenAI long ago, because they burned money faster than an alcoholic sailor on shore leave. There is no sane way for them to ever recover.
by trueno | 2026-02-10 08:24:54+00:00
my team tried it for a couple weeks. couldn't stand the threaded "only see what's important" style of chat. it's undoubtedly our least fav part of microsoft teams---the channels and the threads, we all operate in the chat tab and the channels tab has been relegated to announcement posts no one reads. huge shame zulip can't just like... have a toggle for normal chat chronology/presentation.
some people have gone way too for trying to efficiency max or "cut out the noise" but chronological chat and a competent search feature will always be the goat.
by kakacik | 2026-02-10 08:25:10+00:00
Its a clickbait article name (from otherwise good place), of course its not dead... we are now getting understanding of all things we don't know yet, discrepancies like yours, unified theory and so on.

Everybody knows we are not there yet and how the final knowledge set will look like, if its even possible to cover it (ie are quarks the base layer or we can go deeper, much deeper all the way to planck scales? dynamics of singularities etc)
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-10 08:25:56+00:00
> We are also currently working on a privacy-focused alternative called Kloak, which is in its very early alpha stage. We would greatly appreciate your feedback on areas for improvement and any expectations you may have for the platform.

Doesn't Matrix essentially satisfy all of them?

Although the bulletinboard/newsgroup feature is something that I don't know but I feel as if that can be on matrix as well.

Yes, I know Matrix is hard to host but I don't imagine discord if they release their source code to be easy either.

So for a discord-like experience, I really prefer matrix.
by thesz | 2026-02-10 08:26:07+00:00
Fortran is all about symbolic programming. There is no probability in the internal workings of Fortran compiler. Almost any person can learn rules and count on them.

LLMs are all about probabilistic programming. While they are harnessed by a lot of symbolic processing (tokens as simple example), the core is probabilistic. No hard rules can be learned.

And, for what it worth, "Real programmers don't use Pascal" [1] was not written about assembler programmers, it was written about Fortran programmers, a new Priesthood.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120206010243/http://www.ee.rye...

Thus, what I expect is for new Priesthood to emerge - prompt writing specialists. And this is what we see, actually.
by neya | 2026-02-10 08:26:50+00:00
False equivalence. You are confusing algorithms and intellegince. If you want human level intelligence without the human aspect, then use algorithms - like used in Excel and Calculators. Repeatable, reliable, 0 opinions. If you want some sort of intelligence, especially near human-like then you have to accept the trade offs - that it can have opinions and morality different from your own - just like humans. Besides, the AI is just behaving how a human would because it's directly trained on human input. That's what's actually funny about this fake outrage.
by MattJ100 | 2026-02-10 08:27:01+00:00
They weren't "HTTPS certificates" originally, just certificates. They may be "HTTPS certificates" today if you listen to some people. However there was never a line drawn where one day they weren't "HTTPS certificates" and the next day they were. The ecosystem was just gradually pushed in that direction because of the dominance of the browser vendors and the popularity of the web.

I put "HTTPS certificates" in quotes in this comment because it is not a technical term defined anywhere, just a concept that "these certificates should only be used for HTTPS". The core specifications talk about "TLS servers" and "TLS clients".
by gmurphy | 2026-02-10 08:28:30+00:00
I agree with your criticism of design dogma - it drives me nuts too - people saying something bad is good because it follows the rules. But since I'm also responsible for the Android icon shape-change you talked about, let me waffle for a bit in case it helps provide a perspective on the other side of that decision:

I agree with that the non-uniform icons are easier to find, and that uniform shapes make it harder (I also agree that uniform colors are awful, but that was after my time so I have no stake in that).

However, usability is not about pure efficiency - a huge amount of it is approachability - people have to _want_ to use the UI. If they don't want to use it, no amount of pure-usability work will mean anything - it will just be "shitty computers" in their heads. In Android's case, the developer-provided weirdly shaped icons were a major sticking point - people would take one look at an Android homescreen with all kinds of mismatched splatters of icons, mentally lump it with Windows and Linux in the must-be-for-geeks bucket, and walk off to the Apple store.

It drove us nuts - in actual tests, people would often find Android easier and more efficient to use, but would still pick iPhone as the "easier" product, because that's the one that was inviting, that fit their style, that looked easy to use.

So we did a lot of work nudging Android to a place where real people would find it desirable, easy, and powerful - making really difficult tradeoffs - sometimes breaking expectations, sometimes sacrificing a little bit here and there to gain a lot somewhere else, sometimes just taking a chance.

It took a lot of effort from a lot of wonderful people, and it involved a stupidly large amount of arguing against "just copy iPhone" laziness and pressure (a major reason I left), but I am still deeply proud of what the team was able to do. We couldn't please everyone, but I think more people were pleased afterwards than before.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-10 08:28:40+00:00
> Matrix → flexible but rough UX

Matrix's UI/UX is actually really flexible with multiple clients.

You aren't struck with Element, you can even use TUI clients or any clients.

For the web, the one which I really love is cinny.

Cinny is really awesome, its UI/UX is better than discord imo.

I recommend people to check out the matrix ecosystem of clients to see what they like, because I also liked the fractal gnu app & it has tons of clients.

https://cinny.in/

https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2026-02-10 08:28:41+00:00
Here is a use case. I have a function that takes variable parameters, so there is no formal type control:

int Foo(int a, ...);

But in fact the types are restricted depending on a call type, set by 'a'. So I could add a wrapper for a specific variant:

static inline FooVar1(char b, long c)
{
return Foo(FOO_VAR_1, b, c);
}

All the wrapper does is adds a bit of type control during compilation, otherwise it must be just a function call to 'Foo'. It is like a supermacro. It does make sense to put that into 'static inline' in a header.
by dokyun | 2026-02-10 08:28:50+00:00
Saving logs is gross, chats should be ephemeral. In any case there's HistServ and IRCv3 /chathistory nowadays, so if you really want it you can have it.

That all the minute garbage everyone posts is preserved forever in an unfiltered state I think is a root cause of the mental degradation that results from using Discord: kids don't have anywhere to 'post into the void' anymore. Preserving past events and relationships through oral history as opposed to a big monolithic search engine entails a far more human element to IRC.
by stevage | 2026-02-10 08:29:06+00:00
> And studies show people at large tend to find the proportions pleasing.

I don't think that's the case - or at least, not well-designed studies. There's nothing to suggest that people prefer 1.618 more than 1.61 or even 1.6, and probably not 1.5. It's like if we found people like the colour blue and then claimed that people like the shade of Mary's veil or something.