MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by a022311 | 2026-02-14 20:13:25+00:00
As someone who has been learning robotics as a hobby for a decade, my advice is: forget all the buzzwords and what the industry is using and start small instead.

I started robotics at a young age and began with small builds with LEGO motors and sensors, getting a feel of how each one works and how to interact with them with code. Then I got to much more advanced programs with LEGO Mindstorms EV3, learned about things like PID controllers practically and even started taking part in some competitions. Next, I went to writing actual code (as opposed to block-based programming) on microcontrollers like the micro:bit (and a few years later the Raspberry Pi Pico). I deepened my knowledge of how electronics work and learned how circuits work. I eventually got into a team with a few friends and we built a human-size robot combining 3D printing, a bunch of circuitry, ROS, 2 SBCs, Arduinos, a LIDAR and OpenCV for face/object recognition. This took years of learning step-by-step to achieve.

This is obviously not the path you'd take, robotics was what brought me into programming and you're probably going for the opposite.

You're not going to build a perfect robot or electronic device from the start and you shouldn't try to either. Get a microcontroller that's newcomer-friendly and play around with it. A micro:bit mostly emphasizes on the end result, with a built-in display and sensors and many plug-and-play modules to get you going. A Raspberry Pi Pico is much more flexible, but also requires you to learn about wiring and doing more things yourself. If you prefer coding in C, go for an Arduino. An ESP32 is also a good choice. It's a good idea to get a 3D printer and learn CAD in parallel, as it's a great way for a hobbyist to create actual tools that are more than a bunch of wires.

Once you get enough experience and confidence in your skills, you'll want to get into more advanced projects. Use your knowledge to plan them out, research and learn the technologies you're going to use (you can't learn everything beforehand and each piece of hardware is something different) and enjoy the journey from prototype to finished project.

And by the way (you didn't mention it but other comments here are so I'll give you an opinion on that), ROS is nearly always overkill for hobbyist robotics projects :D

I hope that helps you start your journey!
by nerdsniper | 2026-02-14 20:13:27+00:00
Also, uniquely in the USA, interest payments on debt can be deducted from your income. There are some caveats to deducting this from personal taxes rather than business taxes, but in general if you can show your personally used the loan for business purposes, you can use the Schedule C form to deduct the interest on it from your personal income to lower taxes paid.
by upboundspiral | 2026-02-14 20:14:30+00:00
I feel like a government funded search engine would resolve a lot of the issues with the monetized web.

The purpose of a search engine is to display links to web pages, not the entire content. As such, it can be argued it falls under fair use. It provides value to the people searching for content and those providing it.

However we left such a crucially important public utility in the hands of private companies, that changed their algorythms many times in order to maximize their profits and not the public good.

I think there needs to be real competition, and I am increasingly becoming certain that the government should be part of that competition.
Both "private" companies and "public" governement are biased, but are biased in different ways, and I think there is real value to be created in this clash. It makes it easier for individuals to pick and choose the best option for themselves, and for third independent options to be developed.

The current cycle of knowledge generation is academia doing foundational research -> private companies expanding this research and monetizing it -> nothing. If the last step was expanded to the government providing a barebones but useable service to commodotize it, years after private companies have been able to reap immense profits, then the capabilities of the entire society are increased. If the last step is prevented, then the ruling companies turn to rentseeking and sitting on their lawrels, turn from innovating to extracting.
by kittbuilds | 2026-02-14 20:14:56+00:00
SVG generation is a surprisingly good benchmark for spatial reasoning because it forces the model to work in a coordinate system with no visual feedback loop. You have to hold a mental model of what the output looks like while emitting raw path data and transforms. It's closer to how a blind sculptor works than how an image diffusion model works.

What I find interesting is that Deep Think's chain-of-thought approach helps here — you can actually watch it reason about where the pedals should be relative to the wheels, which is something that trips up models that try to emit the SVG in one shot. The deliberative process maps well to compositional visual tasks.
by b00ty4breakfast | 2026-02-14 20:15:02+00:00
I've been using invidious for a while now but I remember I had blocked all recommends and suggestions on YT so I never saw shorts anyways (I know the recommend block was thru ublock but I can't remember if I'd blocked suggestions through YT options or if that was also a ublock filter).

Also a great way to avoid mindless feed-surfing. I only watched videos from subs or that I have specifically searched for rather than getting sucked into the algo vortex.
by PessimalDecimal | 2026-02-14 20:15:13+00:00
It might be more accurate to say that a lot of low-trust societies have become connected to the Internet which weren't nearly as online a couple of decades ago.

For example, a huge fraction of the world's spam originates from Russia, India and Bangladesh. And we know that a lot of the romance scams are perpetrated by Chinese gangs operating out of quasi-lawless parts of Myanmar. Not so much from, say, Switzerland.
by dmurray | 2026-02-14 20:15:25+00:00
ToledoChess [0] has a few implementations of this in different languages. Some highlights:

2KB of JavaScript with castling, en passant, promotion, search and even a GUI

326 bytes of assembly, without the special rules

I don't think the author has a UCI-compliant one, but it should be easier than the GUI. There are forks of the JS one that might do it.

[0] https://nanochess.org/chess6.html
by Gracana | 2026-02-14 20:15:38+00:00
> I realize it makes you uncomfortable

I think you're misunderstanding or misrepresenting them. The fight to have the most jaded or pessimistic take, the hottest flame, the spiciest rant, it's all so predictable and it's just a bunch of the same people saying the same things and agreeing with each other for the nth time. It brings nothing new to the table, and the posts that actually respond to the new information get drowned out or worse downvoted for insufficient vitriol.
by alexpotato | 2026-02-14 20:15:46+00:00
> Regulatory frameworks like SOC 2 and HIPAA require audit trails and evidence retention

Sidebar:

Having been part of multiple SOC audits at large financial firms, I can say that nothing brings adults closer to physical altercations in a corporate setting than trying to define which jobs are "critical".

- The job that calculates the profit and loss for the firm, definitely critical

- The job that cleans up the logs for the job above, is that critical?

- The job that monitors the cleaning up of the logs, is that critical too?

These are simple examples but it gets complex very quickly and engineering, compliance and legal don't always agree.
by dang | 2026-02-14 20:17:02+00:00
Related. Others?

How many registers does an x86-64 CPU have? (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36807394 - July 2023 (10 comments)

How many registers does an x86-64 CPU have? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25253797 - Nov 2020 (109 comments)
by Dove | 2026-02-14 20:17:08+00:00
They are sort of incomparable, being very different shows. That said, I am myself someone who grew up with TNG, who was molded by TNG and shaped by TNG, and for whom TNG is the only good Star Trek... and I like B5 better. For me, TNG is entertainment and B5 is literature. To illustrate the difference, I will point out that TNG occasionally (rarely!) deals with death, and it usually does so by minimizing and mourning it, essentially averting the topic. Entertainment does not linger over the uncomfortable. (I am painting with a broad brush here -- I'm aware TNG sometimes does. Just not a lot.) B5, by contrast, returns again and again for full episodes to the topic of the soul-rackingly difficult moral requirement to offer comfort and face the inevitable tragedy together, and the agony of the experience and the ways it changes you.

As much as I love both shows, I wouldn't really recommend B5 to someone based on a love of TNG. I think it is more natural to recommend B5 to someone based on a minimial affinity for sci fi and a liking for Lord of the Rings, which will really tell you how different the two shows are.

TNG is wonderfully idealistic. It paints a picture of rising above your vices and being professional, civilized, and decent. It teaches you to work the problem, to examine the data, to think and consult and reflect and do better. I think it unrealistic -- I thought it unrealistic when I first encountered it -- but that doesn't matter. It's such a worthy ideal that it is worth encountering and remembering over and over again. As you go through life, you should remember that that is an option and strive for it.

B5 is wonderfully heroic. It is about dealing with a world of moral complexity and uncertainty, about trying to do good even when it is futile, about being a hero in the face of danger and risk and doubt. About how politics makes that difficult and keeps it in check and at any rate isn't a game you can check out of because it is the game.

Both shows encounter awful authoritarianism. One examines the law and philosophy in detail and gives a stirring verbal rebuke that carries the day. One starts a rebellion without certainty that it will be right or effective, but because under the circumstances, a good man feels compelled to do so. I think these are both extremely valuable takes on the topic, and I wouldn't want to have not seen either one. But I do have to say that at the end of the day, it is the second one I think of more as I go through life. For me the greater life lesson is not in taking the time to seek deeper wisdom, worthy as that is, but in having the bravery and faith to face danger, uncertainty, and tragedy.
by rng-concern | 2026-02-14 20:18:09+00:00
I've only skimmed the article so I may have missed something but they seem to be equating AGI with consciousness, or that consciousness is required for AGI. I'm not convinced it's required. I'm also not convinced that matching the biology of neurons is required for AGI, which this article seems to assume as well.
That said, a really close match to human-style intelligence might be tricky if we simplify the model too much, as we're doing. Perhaps we'll arrive at a different sort of intelligence, that is just as general.
by ronsor | 2026-02-14 20:19:17+00:00
I have observed this pattern before. Usually minority groups are mentioned in an attempt to shift a debate toward values (which basically means no meaningful debate if you disagree) and away from technical considerations (which arguably deserve the most attention in a software product).

Aside from that, the statement is not empirically true (from my perspective at least). Evidence isn't provided either. I'm not saying that the commenter consciously wanted to tie LLM use to those negative things, but it could be done subconsciously, because I have genuinely seen those arguments before.
by Applejinx | 2026-02-14 20:19:22+00:00
It's fair to worry about another sort of adversarial planning: what if you are a human who is deemed undesirable to the state, and solicit advice from an AI doctor that is backdoored to take correct action as defined by the state? There's now extensive databases on who specifically should be eliminated, but direct removal is going poorly and offending bystanders. So why not subvert the Hippocratic oath? Machines don't even know who that is.

"Turns out the statistically best choice for prediabetes for your patient group is to rely more heavily on soft drinks, but only in wild outbursts punctuated by fasting!"
by segmondy | 2026-02-14 20:20:31+00:00
For those claiming they rigged it. Do you have any concrete evidence? What if the models have just gotten really good?

I just asked Gemini pro to generate an SVG of an octopus dunking a basketball and it did a great job. Not even Deep Think model. Then I did "generate an svg of raccoon at a beach drinking a beer" you can go try this out yourself. Ask it to generate anything you want in SVG. use your imagination.

Rant:
This is why AI is going to take over, folks are not even trying the least.
by marginalia_nu | 2026-02-14 20:20:31+00:00
Tangentially related, I have a hunch, but cannot prove, that prediction markets are the driving force behind a lot of the bad information online, since they essentially monetarily incentivize making people misjudge the state of the world.

There's been a huge uptick in this sort of brigade like behavior around current events. First noted it around LK99, that failed room temperature semiconductor in 2023, but it just keeps happening.

Used to be we only saw it around elections and crypto pump and dumps, now it's cropping up in the weirdest places.
by a022311 | 2026-02-14 20:21:00+00:00
> By far the best part is how tied to specific versions of Ubuntu each ROS release is, just getting all the packages installed and running requires sacrificing a cat while chanting Hail Mary backwards in Latin.

100% this. I had a very, very miserable time setting up two systems and trying to get them running a version that was supported. The worst part is SBCs that stop getting OS updates and become permanently locked in to a specific version. Which also forces the rest of your hardware to use the same version. Using a Jetson Nano with Ubuntu 18.04 in 2022 was lots of fun...

Last year I met a couple of university students working on a robot and out of curiosity I asked what they were using as a microcontroller and the software stack. They were running ROS. When they said they still hadn't upgraded to ROS 2 yet, I could feel their pain...
by matyashajek | 2026-02-14 20:21:05+00:00
I built PrivateWhisper because I wanted Whisper-quality transcription on macOS without the usual setup friction (Python envs, FFmpeg issues, CLI flags) and without uploading audio anywhere.

PrivateWhisper is a native Mac GUI that runs Whisper locally. You can drop in an audio/video file, choose language/model, and export transcripts or subtitles (TXT/SRT/VTT).

I’m mainly looking for feedback on:
- what “local transcription on Mac” workflows you already use
- what’s missing (batching, formats, accuracy settings, speed, etc.)
- what would make this actually useful in real work
by couAUIA | 2026-02-14 20:21:27+00:00
TL;DR: GLM-5 tops coding benchmarks. I tested it on an unpublished NP-hard optimization problem (KIRO) and 89-task Terminal-Bench. Best case: competitive. Typical case: 30% invalid output, every trial timed out, and two identical runs could produce a valid solution or complete garbage. Zhipu AI reports 56% on Terminal-Bench; I got 40%.
by isthatafact | 2026-02-14 20:21:38+00:00
My guess is that the very rich can instead figure out a way to avoid it mostly, but I like the idea of taxing ridiculously high wealth, even if it is difficult.

However, a tax an unrealized gains would seem to greatly reduce or maybe kill the chance for the poor or middle class to use investments to save enough to retire early. That seems very unfair. I do not understand why such a tax should apply to anyone not well into the upper middle class range of wealth.

And trying to make clever calculated bets on individual stocks now has risk of having to sell everything and still not having enough to pay the taxes, if they were assessed during a temporary spike in price. Even holding an index fund during a market crash could mean ending up with nothing because of the tax on fictional gains.
by fredoralive | 2026-02-14 20:21:49+00:00
IIRC Microsoft's internal email still ran on Xenix at the time (until Exchange betas got good enough for internal use c. 1995?), so perhaps more trademarks than some sort of absolute hatred of Unix. Also note that one of the two APIs that NT OS/2 was initially going to support was POSIX, albeit perhaps more because the US government wanted that than a true love of UNIX. Although the design rationale document (ntdesrtl) does lament that existing POSIX test suites tend to also test "...UNIX
folklore that happens to be permissible under an interpretation of the POSIX spec".
by kibwen | 2026-02-14 20:22:16+00:00
> Very much so once you compare it to how quickly C++ (and, in fact, any language that's ever been in the top 5 or so) achieved similar milestones.

No, this completely overestimates how quickly languages gain prominence.

C came out in 1972 and didn't gain its current dominance until approximately the release of the ANSI C spec in 1989/1990, after 17 years.

C++ came out in 1985 and didn't become the dominant language for gamedev until the late 90s (after it had its business-language-logic niche completely eaten by Java), after 14 years or so.

Python came out in 1991 and labored as an obscure Perl alternative until the mid-late 2000s, after about 16 years (we can carbon-date the moment of its popularity by looking at when https://xkcd.com/353/ was released).

Javascript came out in 1995 and was treated as a joke and/or afterthought in the broader programming discourse until Node.js came out in 2009, after 14 years.

Rust is currently 11 years old, and it's doing quite excellently for its age.
by themafia | 2026-02-14 20:22:52+00:00
So the system is corrupted by money and influence and your idea is to "let the people feel the pain."

The Hacker News casual misanthropy bubbles up to the top yet again.

Instead of trying to use your hacker instincts to find a solution you're just got to rest on your heels and let people suffer? What a waste of talent this represents.
by constantius | 2026-02-14 20:22:58+00:00
I don't know whether I'd call myself anti-immigration, but I'm as left as they come and I don't think that being pro-immigration is a left/right value. You can be on the left and have objections to immigration, you can be on the right and welcome immigration.

I invite you to read the book [How Migration Really Works](https://goodreads.com/book/show/82005192-how-migration-reall...).

Most people think that being anti-immigration equals being racist and wanting refugees to be turned away. And given your comment, that is also what you seem to believe. However, the large majority of immigration is state-sanctioned (so work visas, etc.), is not the immigration you hear about in the news or that racists talk about, and it's neither a left nor a right issue.

Immigration does have economic benefits, but I'm certain you'll agree nothing in the world is only good or only bad. Immigration does lead to larger competition on housing (more people = more demand), and generally this happens in the cities where the housing crisis is the worst. So more immigration undoubtedly benefits landlords.

Immigration also means more competition for jobs, which leads in practice to lower wages. So it also benefits capital-owners.

So you can be leftist, campaign to increase intake of refugees, campaign against the housing crisis and wealth inequality, and be against immigration.

As an example that might change your opinion (beyond talking to a leftist who does not think immigration is nothing but good): when the Tories came to power after Brexit, they implemented policies that greatly facilitated immigration (2-4 times yearly intake to what it was before Brexit) [0]. Corporations and the right are very much pro-immigration. Would you have expected that?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_immigration_to_the_Unit...
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-14 20:23:11+00:00
Big companies can be incredibly penny wise and pound foolish because their beancounters make them obsess over the wrong metrics. My current company has spent the last year cost cutting every single way to stay afloat and now you need a chain of approvals up the management ladder with detailed explanation for every paperclip you want purchase.

I can't prove it, but I am willing to bet my entire salary that the costs of all the new extra bureaucratic overhead introduced for small purchases, nullified or even exceeded all their savings, when the remaining engineers and managers paid six figures have to spend more of their time writing, reviewing and approving paperclip orders instead of you know, running the company, fulfilling customer demands and innovating.

I'm pretty new to this, but I have a feeling these are all the signs of a company it's worth jumping ship from ASAP as there's no chance of things improving from this. Sure, AMD managed to turn the ship around with cost cutting, but our CEO is not Lisa Su, he's a boomer who cuts where clueless $BIG_4 consultants tell him to cut, and big_4 doesn't care about innovation or the company being relevant in 10 years, they care about showing some immediate results/positive cash to justify their outrageous rates.
Show HN: Crypthold – Deterministic, Tamper-Evident Secure State Engine
by laphilosophia | 2026-02-14 20:23:13+00:00
Most encrypted config stores protect secrecy. Crypthold focuses on integrity, determinism, and lossless state guarantees.

v2.2.1 is a stability milestone. The core now enforces:

- Tamper-evident, hash-linked state history
- Deterministic state + replay (same input → same state hash)
- Crash-safe atomic persistence (no partial state)
- Concurrency protection (no silent overwrite)
- Strong integrity fail-closed model
- Key lifecycle + rotation without data loss

Crypthold is not a secret manager and not a database. It is a verifiable state substrate for security-sensitive software.

If a single bit changes, integrity breaks.
If history changes, root hash breaks.
If state replays, hash matches.

Repo, spec, and invariants: https://github.com/laphilosophia/crypthold

Technical feedback is welcome — especially around invariants, replay model, and failure semantics.
by Brian_K_White | 2026-02-14 20:23:19+00:00
And Roku.

This is one of the several reasons I always react almost violently whenever someone tries to be smarmy in any threads about adblockers on youtube, trying to say that paying for youtube makes everything good the honest way.

I do in fact pay for youtube and have for like 15 years or more, and it still sucks for a variety of reasons.

"why pay then?" for the same reason I would pay to have 8 of my fingernails pulled out instead of all 10.
by tehjoker | 2026-02-14 20:24:00+00:00
In China, when they didn't have enough medical personnel, they sent the half-trained barefoot doctors to the rural areas to give even basic medical care. Over time they trained more and more people in allopathic medicine and increased the level of care and expertise.

Our elites care so little for us that they won't even bother to send real people, just a sop to tell us to shut up.

Expectations rise with the level of development. No excuses in America.
by a022311 | 2026-02-14 20:24:12+00:00
IMO ever since the EV3, LEGO's robotics hardware has been on a downfall, being much less open and more focused on "connect it to your tablet with Bluetooth to do some basic programming". They also offer less ports and sensors and I think there aren't any custom sensors either. If you can find an EV3, it's the best thing you can get.