MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NalNezumi | 2026-02-18 11:39:50+00:00
Can someone enlighten me WHO the customer to those million Optimus robots are?

I've been working in robotics for years now, I've talked with ex Optimus developers, FigureAI devs, some Japanese humanoid devs, researchers, talked to people in conferences and no one. Absolutely no one I've met take Optimus seriously. If a lab is considering buying a humanoid they'll go to China. Hell, even MIT professors that have been crucial to the development (Boston dynamics etc) seems to not put too much emphasis on Tesla.

But I've also been to industrial robotics conferences, mostly for customers and user focus and not developers and usually the perception is different in those circles.

So who are the optimistic customers
for Optimus?
by NoLinkToMe | 2026-02-18 11:40:17+00:00
Not necessarily. You could have 100 FTE on reports instead of 300 FTE in a large company like a bank. That means 200 people who'd normally go into reporting jobs over the next decade, will go into something else, producing something else ontop of the reports that continue to be produced. The sum of this is more production.

Looking at job numbers that seems to be happening. A lot less employment needed, freeing up people to do other things.
Show HN: Lumina – passive OSINT recon tool for domains
by surfruit | 2026-02-18 11:40:44+00:00
Hey! I built Lumina — a passive reconnaissance tool that
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Features:
- Subdomain enumeration (crt.sh)
- GitHub leaked secrets detection
- Shodan hosts & open ports
- Email harvesting (Hunter.io)
- DNS records (A, MX, NS, TXT, AAAA)
- Tech stack detection
- Beautiful HTML report

All API keys are free.

GitHub: https://github.com/surfruit/lumina
by monkeydust | 2026-02-18 11:42:31+00:00
The demise of saas has been overplayed imho. When companies buy software they are essentially buying something that solves a problem and the insurance that comes with that. Part of that means they get to pick up the phone and complain if something doesn't work and someone on the other end has to listen.

There is also a strong community aspect to software, someone asks for an enhancement others can benefit etc.

I just don't see a world where every corporation is building their own accounts, crm, hr software.

I do see one where they can much more quickly self-create within certain boundaries and this is where enterprises will differentiate in the near term.
by nnevatie | 2026-02-18 11:42:36+00:00
I think that funnily enough, the "semantic diffusion" itself is an example of how such things happen. I wasn't aware of that label and certainly will not be adopting it to my vocabulary. Sounds like a very complex way of saying something has changed its meaning.

Agile existed in a vacuum as a manifesto, then it existed as a driver for cults/zealots of the ideology, then as a de-facto process, and now it's just watered down to something execs repeat when they want to say "our company isn't like a regular stiff corporation, but something more adaptable than that".
by sledprocyon | 2026-02-18 11:42:37+00:00
Glad to hear you’re adding origin/destination. I’ve seen other users mention it as well, but being able to quickly filter or search by country would also be very useful.

Modelling only the most common aircraft types sounds like a good approach.

With the ICAO type code, maybe you could group aircraft (wide-body / narrow-body / regional / cargo) to provide an accurate visual fallback when a specific 3D model isn’t available. Also, a slightly different shade for the generic aircraft could help signal that it’s just a placeholder rather than a real model.
by Ohans_favour | 2026-02-18 11:43:25+00:00
Author here. I've been building agent infrastructure (Bluebag) and kept seeing the same pattern: teams write 4,000-word system prompts, get inconsistent results, then write even longer prompts. The onboarding metaphor clicked when I realized we'd never treat a new hire this way. Happy to answer questions about production agent patterns or the Skills architecture.
by akimbostrawman | 2026-02-18 11:43:43+00:00
>If you decide that everyone is lying to you all the time, you can't build a useful model of objective reality

I don't assume just know history, PRISM. I don't see how not trusting apple means I can't trust anybody. On hackernews people should know better to trust anything but transparency (source code) which might as well be the dictionary defined opposite of apple.
by viraptor | 2026-02-18 11:43:54+00:00
Nor will they be restricted by the LLVM design. That project is huge and generic trying to be everything and target everything (and takes ages to rebuild if you need some changes). Sometimes it's better to go simple and targeted - time will tell if that's the right choice.

Zluda used LLVM and ended up bundling a patched version to achieve what they wanted https://vosen.github.io/ZLUDA/blog/zluda-update-q4-2025/

> Although we strive to emit the best possible LLVM bitcode, the ZLUDA compiler simply is not an optimizing, SSA-based compiler. There are certain optimizations relevant to machine learning workloads that are beyond our reach without custom LLVM optimization passes.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-18 11:44:17+00:00
M1 and M2 hardware isn't going anywhere. They're still great machines. And progress will be faster once the projects finishes getting their code merged into the existing Linux kernel and distros. They have a first alpha of M3 ready, they're just refraining from releasing it in that state because they're so busy with everything else they're doing - a key difference compared to when they first came out with alpha support for the M1.
by kmaitreys | 2026-02-18 11:44:23+00:00
I see the point.

Regarding changing the perception, I think you did not understand the underlying distrust. I will try to use your examples.

It's a moderate size project. There are two scenarios: author used git/some VCS or they did not use it. If they did not use it, that's quite weird, but maybe fine. If they did use git, then perhaps they squashed commits. But at certain point they did exist. Let's assume all these commits were pristine. It's 16K loc, so there must be decent number of these pristine commits that were squashed. But what was the harm in leaving them?

So these commits must have been made of both clean commits as well as broken commits. But we have seem this author likes to squash commits. Hmm, so why didn't they do it before and only towards the end?

Yes, I have been introduced to a new perception but it's the world does not work "if X, then not Y principles." And this is a case where the two things being discussed are not mutually exclusive like you are assuming. But I appreciate this conversation because I learnt importance and advantages of keeping clean commit history and I will take that into account next time reaching to the conclusion that it's just another one-shot LLM generated project. But nevertheless, I will always consider the latter as a reasonable possibility.

I hope the nuance is clear.
by tasuki | 2026-02-18 11:44:58+00:00
I had exactly this thought!

Though, I have a problem with even just the basic 16 colours:

black
red
green
yellow
blue
magenta
cyan
white
bright black
bright red
bright green
bright yellow
bright blue
bright magenta
bright cyan
bright white

~~~

Many themes take `black` to mean `black` and `white` to mean `white`. How is it supposed to work when one switches the theme between the dark and the light version?

What are `black`, `white`, `bright black`, and `bright white` supposed mean?

I take those as meaning (in order): `almost invisible on current terminal background`, `pretty contrasty`, `visible but not contrasty`, and `the contrastiest`.

I wish the colour names reflected that, instead of `black` and `white`: you usually care about the contrast, not about the precise colour.
by weatherlite | 2026-02-18 11:45:26+00:00
> What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value?

I think broadly that's a paradoxical statement; improving office productivity should translate to higher gdp; whatever it is you're doing in some office - even if you're selling paper or making bombs, if you're more productive it means you're selling more (or using less resources to sell the same amount); that should translate to higher gdp (at least higher gdp per worker, there's the issue of what happens to gdp when many workers get fired).
by anthk | 2026-02-18 11:46:36+00:00
Unix downvoters should have a look on 9front (the most featureful/supported plan9 fork out there) in order to realize that you can follow the Unix philosophy (even more than OpenBSD itself) tossing the VT100 emulators to the legacy 'vt' emulator if you want somehow use ancient software (or SSH) while setting actual graphical windows with the shell running inside with no terminals at all. No more damn control codes messing up everything. No more linebreaks. You can cut down your text with the mouse from day one. Even under Sam, which is something like a graphical Ed crossed with Notepad and much more powerful expressions than Ex/Vi ones.
by weatherlite | 2026-02-18 11:46:43+00:00
> This is an underrated take. If you make someone 3x faster at producing a report nobody reads, you've improved nothing

In the private market are there really so many companies delivering reports no one reads ? Why would management keep at it then ? The goal is to maximize profits. Now sure there are pockets of inefficiency even in the private sector but surely not that much - whatever the companies are doing - someone is buying it from them, otherwise they fail. That's capitalism. Yes there is perhaps 20% of employees who don't pull their weight but its not the majority.
by wiseowise | 2026-02-18 11:47:22+00:00
You’re not even trying to troll properly, are you? Jesus, it takes like a second to find that Ukraine’s population pre war was ~40 mil, Russia’s population ~140 mil. Active personal in Ukraine was ~200k, in Russia ~900k. So ~3x population and ~4x military force. And that is ignoring weapon and turf superiority, huge advantage of first hit and the West dragging their feet.

Russian army is a complete joke. Russia is a raketeer with nukes.
by breppp | 2026-02-18 11:48:10+00:00
> One obvious answer is we can make a lot more custom stuff. Like, why buy Windows and Office when I can just ask claude to write me my own versions instead? Why run a commodity operating system on kiosks? We can make so many more one-off pieces of software

yes, it will enable a lot of custom one-off software but I think people are forgetting the advantages of multiple copied instances, which is what enabled software to be so successful in the first place.

Mass production of the same piece of software creates standards, every word processor uses the same format and displays it the same way.

Every date library you import will calculate two months from now the same way, therefore this is code you don't have to constantly double check in your debug sessions.
by fsflover | 2026-02-18 11:48:31+00:00
> x86 virtualization isn't perfect at all

You cannot just say this without any links. Last escape from VT-d virtualization, which Qubes uses, was found in 2006 by the Qubes founder ("Blue Pill").

> Iirc it's not even possible to run QubesOS on hardware that has proper verified boot or non-meaningless secureboot.

You can run Qubes OS on something even better: Coreboot with Heads and with a hardware key. All based on FLOSS. Works for me.

> but the guest VMs which run traditional desktop OSes are generally much less secure than mobile OSes like Android OSes and iOS

First of all, you can in principle run any OS in Qubes VMs, including hardened ones. You can even disable the root account. Second, with such statement, you misinterpret the Qubes' approach to security. You isolate trusted workflows from untrusted ones, which gives you the strong security. You never open anything untrusted in trusted VMs, so their internal security plays no big role.
by bildung | 2026-02-18 11:48:38+00:00
But only if you ignore all the other market participants, right? How can we ever reach a point where all the i.e. smaller Chinese competitors perpetually trailing behind SOTA with a ~9 month lag but at a tiny fraction of the cost stop existing?

I mean we just have to look at old discussions about Uber for the exact same arguments. Uber, after all these years, still is at a negative 10 % lifetime ROI , and that company doesn't even have to meaningfully invest in hardware.

IMO this will probably develop like the railroad boom in the first half of the 19th century: All the AI-only first movers like OpenAI and Anthropic will go bust, just like most railroad companies who laid the tracks, because they can't escape the training treadmill. But the tech itself will stay, and even become a meaningful productivity booster over the next decades.
by vintermann | 2026-02-18 11:48:42+00:00
Or, it could be that they didn't get a warrant, and don't want to get into the habit of giving the government things without a warrant (or, given that it's a big US internet corporation, something political in return would probably also work).

I'm not saying they're nice, they're not. But it's probably for the best that they don't (or didn't, again, it was 10+ years ago) give government everything they ask for without a warrant.

I repeat the question: why would it be so hard to get a warrant?
by tasuki | 2026-02-18 11:48:47+00:00
> which gives us a very high level of confidence that 146 will be a muted violet

Is there anything you can do with that information though? This piece of information only becomes useful if you know what colour the background is. And you should also know the colour of text and everything else.

What if the background is muted violet? What if the background is white and the foreground is muted violet? I don't want you to ever use "muted violet" in my terminal, since you have no idea what colours there are in my terminal.
by joleyj | 2026-02-18 11:49:23+00:00
Most of my software development career was spent working at a small company that sold a product that emulated the operating system developed and sold by a much, much larger company. The work was interesting and when you had a breakthrough or a small victory, it sure felt good. The challenge of keeping up was exhilarating and kept folks motivated to keep pressing forward.

But eventually it wears you down. It's nearly impossible to keep up in the long-term. Normal product evolution, the sheer size of the behemoth and sometimes even malice on their part to thwart the little guy make it really tough to stay current.

Think of Wine vis-a-vis Windows. They will never catch up.
by squeefers | 2026-02-18 11:49:48+00:00
social media in uk law = any website with a message feature.
social media in common parlance = anything from whatsapp and discord to youtube and tiktok, even sometimes aliexpress. anything with a doomscroll feature. anything showing videos, messaging between users allowed or not.

its common usage is confused, the same as the common usage of trolling has strayed from its original meaning because normies picked it up and started using it to mean anyone abusing someone from an online account.
by ben_w | 2026-02-18 11:49:51+00:00
Those profits have also gone down; the only year they made lower-but-still-positive profit than 2025 ($3794m) was the first year since their founding in which they made any profit (which was 2020 and $721m).

Tesla's total profits over its entire existence ($37,883m [0]) is about as much as Musk has personally made by selling Tesla shares ($40bn ish [1]), but of that profit I can find $12.8bn can be attributed to government incentives[2] that have now largely or completely gone away.

[0] Net lifetime based on all the ups and downs of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla%2C_Inc.#Finances

[1] I assume some of this got rounded: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/elon-musk-te...

[2] Between US federal ($11.4bn for just zero-emission vehicles standards) and local state incentives (and more, I didn't fully sum everything): https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/e...
by raphman | 2026-02-18 11:51:10+00:00
I'm not OP but:

- missing ")" on the left side

- extra "}" on the right side

- the apples example on the right side ("Short code") ist significantly longer than the equivalent "Long code" example on the left side (which might also be because that code example omits the necessary for loop).

- The headings don't provide structure. "Checking Each Apple" and "Only Red Apples!" sounds like opposites, but the code does more or less the same in both cases.
by anthk | 2026-02-18 11:51:47+00:00
Unix is not about a terminal, that the obsolete medium, kinda like preaching about DOS PC with 386's... and CGA video cards.

9front copes with actual text throwing the terminal as a different tool to run legacy stuff in such as SSH or some small ANSI C tools either with the APE compat layer or NPE binding ANSI C code to Plan9 native functins.

You can resize windows with shells under 9front freely, no more SIGWINCH. No more broken cuts and pastes while running a terminal multiplexer. No control code risks executing potential malware.
by disastronaut | 2026-02-18 11:52:21+00:00
The similarities are pretty strong as is. The method of images https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_images is used in both electrodynamics and aerodynamics because you can model sources and sinks for E fields and fluid flows using the exact same equations. Personally, EM didn't really click until I saw the vector calculus of EM applied to fluids.
by mrbungie | 2026-02-18 11:52:23+00:00
> full featured f/oss alternatives.

Assuming this comes from lower barriers of entry to software engineering skills at scale with LLMs, this is still begs the question: Who will pay for the tokens? One thing is giving away your free time for passion, other one is giving away money.

Maybe we'll see a future were people crowdsource projects supporting them directly via donations for tokens/LLM queries.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2026-02-18 11:53:03+00:00
44% of unicorns founders between 1997 and 2019 were foreign born. 20% of those were specifically from India.

It seems like if Americans were just so much more dominant, they’d form a much higher percentage of unicorn founders given that the percentage of foreign born people in the US was about 15% at the highest.

Looks like foreign born immigrants are punching about 3 times their weight as startup founders.

https://gfmag.com/capital-raising-corporate-finance/us-unico...
by poly2it | 2026-02-18 11:53:56+00:00
Is that really optimal? It is already true in that case that your colour schemes do not work for people with opinionated colour settings. Isn't this just relying on a quirk? The point of not using truecolor is to respect the colour preferences of the user.

XKCD 1172? https://xkcd.com/1172/
by metalman | 2026-02-18 11:55:17+00:00
As a small bespoke manufactuter of things made out of metal, I have recently begun implimenting a policy of abandoning most online services, including banking, well almost as customers can still send me money online, but I have to go to a branch to see or get funds, except for monthly reports.
It is awsome, the web brings me customers via 2 web sites, and searches useing AI, but the whole thing is asymetrical, as it has been more than a year since my last online purchase or filling out a form, aplication etc, all done on paper, in person, or I live without whatever it is.
The result is a work environment that is focused on customers and production, and external obligations, requirements are litteral, as they must be managed efficiently in person and in such a way as to be finnished or stable, none of the death by 1000 emails brain rot.
The mental state of haveing zero knowledge of what is happening on a millisecond by millisecond basis and letting everything go,
and lo the world grinds on just fine without me, and I get a few things done.
Mr Solow called it long ago, and my intuition has always been that the busy work was shit, and have now proven that in my one specific circumstance.
by squeefers | 2026-02-18 11:55:38+00:00
i feel like peter hitchens saying this, but i agree the british social life is decaying. i thought you meant something else by social plumbing. i cant argue other than i dont think the village churches actually do prevent brigading, locally anyway, and its that small minded middle-englander mindset that the internet actually smashes. my nan was all bout dat life, and they ostracized hetero divorcees, and you can imagine what they thought of gay people... so if you agree with them its fine, but if its your only choice of social group its not so great. ill take the point there is very little public space where people can even assemble to create a group in the first place though
by NoLinkToMe | 2026-02-18 11:56:28+00:00
The latest company I worked in had your typical fee-earners and fee-burners categories of employees.

The fee-earners had KPIs tied to the sales pipeline, from leads to contracts to work completed on fixed contracts or hours billed on variable-rate contracts. It's relatively easy to measure improvements here. Though it's harder to distill the causes of that and tie it to LLMs.

The fee-burners like in IT, legal, compliance, marketing, finance, typically had KPIs tied to the department objectives. This stuff is a LOT more subjective and a lot more prone to manipulation (goodhart's law). But if you spend 60 hours a week on work in such a department, you tend to have a pretty good idea if things are speeding up or not at all. In a department I was involved in there was a lot of KYC that involved reviewing 300+ pages per case, we tracked case workload per person per day, as well as success rates (percentage of case reviews completed correctly), and could see meaningful changes one could attribute to LLM use.

Agreed though that I'm more interested in a few case studies in detail to understand how they actually measured productivity.
by topocite | 2026-02-18 11:56:44+00:00
This is the standard stupidity here based on emotion and denial. This is the narrative that people want to hear.

Of course, trying to automate with chatGPT 4o was stupid. Trying to automate with Sonnet 4.6 will work better. Trying to automate with the models a year from now will work all the better.

To believe we are going to stop and go back to 2019 at this stage is seriously delusional.

I wish it were true. I would love to go back to 2019 but we obviously are not. We never go backwards.
by csneeky | 2026-02-18 11:57:08+00:00
Is it really the case companies like OpenAI and Anthropic will repeatedly visit this archive and slurp it all up each time they train something? Wouldn’t that just be a one time thing (to get their own copy) with maybe the odd visit to get updates? My take is the article is about monetizing unique training info and I see them being paid maybe 10-20 times a year by folks building LLMs which is maybe nothing and maybe $$$$ I don’t know.
by sallyparkes1994 | 2026-02-18 11:57:40+00:00
Standard storage solutions struggle with irregular objects - guitar cases, photography equipment, sports gear like tennis rackets or cricket bats. An ottoman bed single provides an uninterrupted storage cavity large enough to accommodate these awkward items horizontally. Unlike drawer-based divans where items must fit specific compartments, the ottoman's open space allows flexible arrangement. Photographers store equipment cases, backdrop stands, and lighting gear securely out of sight between shoots. Musicians keep instruments away from radiators and direct sunlight whilst maintaining easy access for practice sessions. The bed's single size suits spare rooms where larger ottomans would overwhelm the space, yet still provides sufficient storage for specialised equipment or hobby supplies that don't belong elsewhere in the home.