MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GoatInGrey | 2026-02-16 17:20:10+00:00
Even on codebases within the half-year age group, these LLMs often do perform nasty (read: ungodly verbose) implementations that become a maintainability nightmare. Even for the LLMs that wrote it all in the first place. I know this because we've had a steady trickle of clients and prospects expressing "challenges around maintainability and scalability" as they move toward "production readiness". Of course, asking if we can implement "better performing coding agents". As if improved harnessing or similar guardrails can solve what is in my view, a deeper problem.

The practical and opportunistic response is too tell them "Tough cookies" and watch the problems steadily compound into more lucrative revenue opportunities for us. I really have no remorse for these people. Because half of them were explicitly warned against this approach upfront but were psychologically incapable of adjusting expectations or delaying LLM deployment until the technology proved itself. If you've ever had your professional opinion dismissed by the same people regarding you as the SME, you understand my pain.

I suppose I'm just venting now. While we are now extracting money from the dumbassery, the client entitlement and management of their emotions that often comes with putting out these fires never makes for a good time.
by ericmcer | 2026-02-16 17:20:36+00:00
Totally agree, you have to figure it out for yourself. Not only do these diets affect people differently, they also affect each individual differently throughout their life. IF might be great when you are 45 but no good when you are 20.

I really struggled to get lighter a few years ago and what ended up working finally was cutting my protein way down. After repeated failures with high protein/low carb, I finally just went for low protein despite no diet recommending it. It worked great, I lost muscle but it made satiety way easier and my body naturally seemed to shift to a lighter composition.

I still don't see any diets recommending that. It seems like a useful tool, especially given how "fitness" nowadays is lifting weights and chugging protein, there are going to be a ton of dudes in their 30s/40s who put on a boatload of muscle in their youth and now are struggling to get lighter using all the recommended high protein diets. If you don't give the muscle up satiety is going to make it an insane battle.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-16 17:20:52+00:00
32 registers have been used in many CPUs since the mid seventies until today, i.e. for a half of century.

During all this time there has been a consensus that 32 registers are better than less registers.

A few CPUs, e.g. SPARC and Itanium have tried to use more registers than that, and they have been considered unsuccessful.

There have been some inconclusive debates about whether 64 architectural registers might be better than 32 registers, but the fact the 32 are better than 16 has been pretty much undisputed. So there are chances that 32 is close to an optimal number of GPRs.

Using 32 registers is something new only for Intel-AMD, due to their legacy, but it is something that all their competition has used successfully for many decades.

I have written many assembly language programs for ARM, POWER or x86. Whenever I had 32 registers, this made it much easier for me to avoid most memory accesses, for spilling or for other purposes. It is true that a compiler is dumber than a human programmer and it frequently has to adhere to a rigid ABI, but even so, I expect that on average even a compiler will succeed to reduce the register spilling when using 32 registers.
by austin-cheney | 2026-02-16 17:21:26+00:00
At every step in the cyclical evolution of software as a business people have said the exact same thing: nobody is going to stop doing X for Y. This is always proven wrong even as people continue to advocate for X over Y as Y fully replaces X. Businesses will evaluate this in consideration of expenses and liabilities. Once the Y becomes cheaper than X then X is only retained for emotional reasons.
by mindslight | 2026-02-16 17:21:52+00:00
> Why do you think there would be regulation to honor the "underage signal"

Our ancestor comment still has the direction backwards. This is the specific dynamic that makes sense to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47027738 .

This means any legislation should be aimed at directing device manufacturers to implement software that can respect content assertions sent by websites.

> relying on it will soon make these locked down devices mandatory for everyone under 18, and they will keep using it past 18

Okay, but in 2026 we're basically at this point? Show me a mobile phone that doesn't have a bootloader locked down with "secure boot." For this particular threat that we had worried about for a long time, we've already lost. Not in the total-sweeping way that analysis from first principles leads you to, but in the day to day practical way. It's everywhere.

The next control we're staring down is remote attestation, which is already being implemented for niches like banking. The scaffolding is there for it to be implemented on every website - "verifying your device's security" - I get that on basically everywhere these days. As soon as 80% of browsers can be assumed to have remote attestation capabilities, we can be sure they will start demanding these signals and slowly clamping down on libre browsers (as has been done with browser/IP fingerprinting over the past decade)

Any of these talks of getting the server involved intrinsically rely on shoring up "device security" through remote attestation. That is exactly what can end ad-blocking and every other client-represents-the-user freedom.

> The problem should be controlled at the source, not the destination, if feasible.

You've already acknowledged VPNs and foreign jurisdictions, which means "at the source" implies a national firewall, right?

Unless your goal is to undermine any solution on this topic? I'm sympathetic to this, I just don't see that being realistic in today's environment!
Show HN: I.T. Never Ends – IT Support Simulator Built with React/Tauri/Supabase
by euphoric_series | 2026-02-16 17:22:06+00:00
Hi HN,

I am the solo developer behind this.

The Pitch:
It is a card-based resource management game (inspired by Reigns) where you work IT support for a corporation taken over by eldritch horrors. You have to balance ticket resolution, budget, and entropy while dealing with printers that violate causality.

The Architecture:
The entire game is built in React/JavaScript. Under the hood, it is basically a giant state machine. I chose this stack because it allowed me to iterate quickly on the UI and text-heavy elements, which are 90% of the gameplay. I've published other games that were more run of the mill and made in Godot, but I'm a full stack developer by day and most of my day-to-day is in nextJS. I just... I just missed easy state work, ok? Don't shoot me. I was half afraid that building executables/binaries for Steam would be a nightmare but it turned out (after a bit of futzing about with Tauri for linux) to be not too bad.

The Build Pipeline (Tauri vs Electron):
Packaging a web app for Steam Deck was the biggest hurdle.

Windows: I use Tauri. It is lighter and creates a much smaller binary since it uses the OS webview.

Steam Deck / Linux: I had to use Electron. SteamOS does not have a reliable pre-installed webview for Tauri to hook into out of the box.

The Rig: I build everything using a Docker setup on a Windows machine to handle the Linux cross-compilation.

The Data & Feedback Loop:
The web build has seen 10,000+ plays on itch in the last 2 months with a 4.9/5 rating.
An additional 3000 players have picked up the demo on Steam since February 1st.
To gather player feedback efficiently at the edge where the player is, I built a custom system directly into the demo:

The game client has write-only access to a Supabase project.
An ingame (thematically fitting) feedback form allows the user to fill in purchase intent (0-10), pricing data, and friction points.

This pipes directly into a Discord webhook via edge functions and it's broadcasted live to the game's discord server for everyone to see.
The idea is to let the community decide, by popular vote, what the actual price of the full game will be. Right now price seems to be converging around the 12-13$ price mark.

The link above is to the free web build (Itch). I also just released a downloadable demo on Steam today if you prefer a standalone version: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4225400/IT_Never_Ends/

Happy to answer any questions about the React state management or the Steam Deck build issues.
by shermantanktop | 2026-02-16 17:22:07+00:00
This is a very confused comment chain. Anyway, my use of "modern" was not relative to art history periods, but in the naive, common-sense form: it's happening currently and in the very recent past.

And I've seen plenty of contemporary art, read my share of ARTNews articles, and read plenty of artist's statements. I'm enlightened enough - there's great and terrible art being made now, just like there was in 1750. But the frisson of "art talk" happening currently is what I was referring to, and I'd separate that from the merits of the art itself.

That said, I will now channel the curmudgeon you describe and observe that some contemporary artists seem to put a great deal of effort into the art talk side of presenting their work, as though the art talk is in fact part of the piece. And I get it, it kind of is, and nothing exists outside of a context. But as a viewer I just don't want someone talking in my ear telling me what to think.
by neallindsay | 2026-02-16 17:22:31+00:00
If someone is charged with and found innocent of a crime, you can't just remove that record. If someone else later finds an account of them being accused, they need a way to credibly assert that they were found innocent. Alternately if they are convicted and served their sentence, they might need to prove that in the future.

Sometimes people are unfairly ostracized for their past, but I think a policy of deleting records will do more harm than good.
by data-ottawa | 2026-02-16 17:22:41+00:00
It’s not black and white though. The body does adapt and respond to just reducing calories in or fasting.

It’s better to do portion control, consume fiber and better calories, and exercise to increase metabolism.

That all balances the calories out side of the equation in ways where fasting itself won’t.

https://theconversation.com/its-time-to-bust-the-calories-in...

https://theconversation.com/is-weight-loss-as-simple-as-calo...
by squidbeak | 2026-02-16 17:23:43+00:00
This presumably also falls under the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 which forbids this kind of citizen data being relayed to third parties without permission. The company don't have a leg to stand on here, which is why it is basing its public appeals now on the impact to its users (journalists). But no company has a right to flout data protection regulations or its agreed conditions of use without serious consequences. Since the data has already been passed on, the breach itself can't be fixed, so it is totally proportionate to order the service to be closed and its data deleted. Frankly, fuck companies with the arrogance to behave this way - cheating agreements and responsibilities in order to make more money, and then expecting indulgence because of the uniqueness of their service.
by TrackerFF | 2026-02-16 17:23:56+00:00
I think the realistic take is to treat SaaS products like any other extremely skewed distribution, like income in sports.

Most people will barely make anything, some will be able to supplement their income, very few will be able to make a living. Even less will become "rich". For every product that blows up, there are thousands that will barely make anything.

But of course, it all depends on what your product does. If you make the millionth TODO / GenAI image editor / food calculator app and hope to make some money, good luck.
by dylan604 | 2026-02-16 17:24:10+00:00
> and was busy praising it on stage

I mean, yeah, if you were picked to present "on stage" (when was the last time a stage was actually involved???) then of course you're going to be a team player and read the script enthusiastically. It's not like Federighi is going to present something "and now, here's the thing that I argued against doing, but was shouted down in all the meetings so here's this thing I don't like and you shouldn't feel obliged to like it either"
by brynnbee | 2026-02-16 17:24:11+00:00
I personally learn best by doing which is why I love learning with LLMs. They're going to be wrong a lot, and give bad advice, and do things in silly ways. I learn well from the process of working with them, seeing them fail constantly, then learn the tool yourself by researching what it's doing wrong to fix it. I just attempted to use Ghidra to reverse engineer the game Shenmue from Dreamcast. I was previously unfamiliar with Ghidra and I mostly did it as a learning exercise, but it wasn't really the right tool for the job. However the project itself made lots of progress without it:

https://www.newyokosuka.com/
by sensanaty | 2026-02-16 17:24:50+00:00
> Maybe in the distant future we'll realize that the most reliable way to prompting LLMs are by using a structured language that eliminates ambiguity, it will probably be rather unnatural and take some time to learn.

We've truly gone full circle here, except now our programming languages have a random chance for an operator to do the opposite of what the operator does at all other times!
by gs17 | 2026-02-16 17:25:11+00:00
It changes some behavior, but there's some things that are frustratingly difficult to override. The GPT-5 version of ChatGPT really likes to add a bunch of suggestions for next steps at the end of every message (e.g. "if you'd like, I can recommend distances where it would be better to walk to the car wash and ones where it would be better to drive, let me know what kind of car you have and how far you're comfortable walking") and really loves bringing up resolved topics repeatedly (e.g. if you followed up the car wash question with a gas station question, every message will talk about the car wash again, often confusing the topics). Custom instructions haven't been able to correct these so far for me.
Show HN: Synrix local-first memory engine (O(k) retrieval, no vectors, no cloud)
by JosephjackJR | 2026-02-16 17:25:39+00:00
I’ve been building Synrix, a local-first memory engine for AI systems.

The idea is simple: instead of pushing memory into vector databases or cloud services, Synrix runs entirely on your machine and focuses on predictable, targeted recall rather than global similarity scans.

Architecturally it’s different from typical vector DB approaches:

Queries scale with matching results (O(k)), not total dataset size

Runs fully local (no network calls, no cloud dependency)

One binary, tier controlled by signed key (SDK is MIT, engine is proprietary for scale)

Designed for structured + semantic memory (agents, RAG, task stores, etc)

On local datasets (~25k–100k nodes) we’re seeing microsecond-scale prefix lookups on commodity hardware. We haven’t published formal benchmarks yet, but plan to add reproducible tests soon.

I’m especially interested in feedback from people who’ve built agent memory systems, RAG pipelines, or dealt with scaling vector databases.

Questions I’d love input on:

Do you think local-first memory makes sense for agents, or does cloud still win?

Have vector DBs been working well for you at scale?

What would you want to see in benchmarks?

Repo here:
https://github.com/RYJOX-Technologies/Synrix-Memory-Engine

Happy to answer anything.
by e145bc455f1 | 2026-02-16 17:25:52+00:00
>The only way to combat this is the same way to combat toilet paper shortages.

I buy one hard disk, AI company busy 40% of global supply. Me not buying that one hard disk is not going to change anything.

>According to Western Digital, thanks to a surge in demand from its enterprise customers, the consumer market now accounts for just 5 percent of the company's revenue.
by bikenaga | 2026-02-16 17:25:53+00:00
Original article: "Cenozoic evolution of earth’s strongest geoid low illuminates mantle dynamics beneath Antarctica" - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-28606-1

Abstract: "Constraining the long-term evolution of geoid anomalies is essential for unraveling Earth’s internal dynamics. While most studies focus on present-day geoid snapshots, we reconstruct the time-dependent evolution of Earth’s strongest geoid depression, the Antarctic Geoid Low (AGL), over the Cenozoic. Unlike geodetic reference frames that place the deepest geoid low in the Indian Ocean, a geodynamic perspective – relative to a hydrostatic ellipsoid – reveals the strongest nonhydrostatic geoid depression resides over Antarctica. Using a back-and-forth nudging technique for time-reversed mantle convection modeling, we leverage 3-D mantle density structures derived from seismic tomography and geodynamic constraints. Our results show that the AGL has persisted for at least ~70 Myr, undergoing a major transition in amplitude and position between 50 and 30 Ma. This transition coincides with an abrupt lateral shift in Earth’s rotation axis at ~50 Ma, independently validated through paleomagnetic constraints on True Polar Wander. Initially, the AGL was supported by stable lower mantle density anomalies, but over the past ~40 Myr, an increasing contribution from upper-mantle buoyancy – particularly above ~1300 km depth – amplified the AGL magnitude. This shift reflects the interplay between long-term deep subduction beneath the Northwest Antarctic margin and a broad, thermally driven upwelling of buoyant material sourced from the lowermost mantle. These results contrast with earlier interpretations by demonstrating the crucial role of time-dependent coupling between both positive and negative mantle buoyancy in shaping global geoid anomalies. By integrating seismic, geodynamic, and mineral-physics data, our reconstructions provide a dynamically consistent view of mantle flow beneath Antarctica and offer new insights into the coupling between deep and shallow mantle processes that govern Earth’s long-wavelength geoid evolution."
by sathish316 | 2026-02-16 17:26:16+00:00
Peter clarified “I don’t read code” part in Lex Fridman interview - he said “I don’t read the boring parts of the code” that are about data transformation or writing to/reading from databases.

He distinguished between what he calls “Agentic Engineering” and “Vibe coding”, and claimed majority of the time he is not just Vibe coding.

He has 80,000+ GitHub contributions in a year across 50+ projects. I’m not sure how he averages 200 commits per day by just looking at diffs from a terminal, but it’s just Superhuman - https://github.com/steipete
by plexui | 2026-02-16 17:26:51+00:00
The real issue isn’t whether Claude hides actions or shows them. It’s that once you move from “assistant” to “agent”, observability becomes a hard requirement, not a nice-to-have.

When an agent can read, modify, and orchestrate multiple parts of a codebase, you need the equivalent of logs, traces, and diffs — not just summaries. Otherwise debugging becomes guesswork.

Traditional software became reliable only after we built strong observability tooling around it. Agent workflows will need the same evolution: clear execution traces, deterministic diffs, and full transparency into what happened and why.
by arkensaw | 2026-02-16 17:27:02+00:00
> This isn't directly relevant to your point

Well, that kind of was exactly my point, although I feel now I didn't make it very clearly.

Someone might shoot down a prospective author who intends to write a book featuring a young protagonist getting a formal education in magic because it's "been done", but the resulting works are very different. It was a counterpoint to the article saying that we should not try to realise our ideas because someone somewhere has had "the same idea". They probably have had an idea which could be described in a similar fashion, but it doesn't really mean its the "same idea"

I probably stumbled a bit describing those books as the same concept when I should have put "same idea" in quotes
by zajio1am | 2026-02-16 17:27:03+00:00
XMPP had rather bad name. Well-known design issues causing message losses, fractioned ecosystem due to varying implementation of extensions, unsuitability for mobile clients, absence of synchronization between clients, absence of end-to-end encryption. Most of these issues were (much) later fixed by extensions, but Matrix (or Signal for those who do not require federated one) was already there, offering E2EE by default.

Even today, E2EE in XMPP is rather inconvenient compared to Matrix due to absence of chain-of-trust in key management.
by NTCTech | 2026-02-16 17:27:06+00:00
Found this via a related paper on Lobste.rs today. The author makes a compelling argument that we've hit the limit of "Vibe Coding" (LLMs guessing via tokens) and need to move to "State-Space Exploration" (Formal Verification).

They claim their neuro-symbolic approach closes a 40%+ accuracy gap in reasoning tasks by forcing the LLM to construct a formal model rather than just predicting the next token. Curious if anyone has tried their CodeLogician agent yet, or if this is just more symbolic AI hype?
by marc_g | 2026-02-16 17:27:21+00:00
So I'm not sure if anyone has tried this in the over 700 comments here, so apologies if it's been double-posted, but the rationale from ChatGPT almost makes me understand where it's coming from when you ask it to create an image of what it's thinking.

Here's the image: https://imgur.com/a/kQmo0jY

Here's the chat: https://chatgpt.com/share/69935336-6438-8002-995d-f26989d59a...

Still not really sure why you would need to get the water from the carwash next door, but maybe the soap quality is better?
by d4rkp4ttern | 2026-02-16 17:27:53+00:00
Speaking of audio + AI, here's a "learning hack" I've been trying with voice mode, and the 3 big AI labs still haven't nailed it:

While on a walk with mobile phone + earphones, dump an article/paper/HN-Post/github-repo into the mobile chat app (chat-gpt, claude or gemini), and use voice mode to have it walk you through it conversationally, so you can ask follow up questions during the walk-thru and the AI would do web-search etc. I know I could do something like this with NotebookLM, but I want to engage in the conversation, and NotebookLM does have interactive mode but it has been super-flaky to say the least.

I pay for ChatGPT Pro and the voice mode is really bad: it pretends to do web searches and makes up things, and when pushed says it didn't actually read the article. Also the voice sounds super-condescending.

Gemini Pro mobile app - similarly refuses to open links and sounds as if it's talking to a baby.

Claude mobile app was the best among these - the voice is very tolerable in terms of tone, but like the others it can't open links. I does do web searches, but gets some type of summaries of pages, and it doesn't actually go into the links themselves to give me details.
by mindslight | 2026-02-16 17:27:58+00:00
You're saying that monarchies never had perverted debauchery? It sounds like you need to read a little more broadly, rather than just contemporary writings that seek to burn down all of Chesterton's fences.

And keep in mind that the monarchies of old were still constrained by religion, and by the lack of networked communications! What is being pushed today is better characterized as autocracy.

Also I think you meant "capitalists" rather than "anti-capitalists". That people who were successful under capitalism want to move to a different system does not imply that their favored system is also capitalist! If monarchy is "capitalist" then North Korea is also "capitalist" and the word is meaningless.

(also it seems like you're still in denial about the implications of Epstein's emails, regardless who was or was not partaking in the minors)