MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by greatgib | 2026-02-13 20:58:11+00:00
I agree that your screenshots doesn't make any sense in relation with the content of your text.
It's like image randomly spread along the text without no meaningful relation.
So much that I was wondering if it was not an AI generated article or partially.

Everyone would expect that you show example of good and bad UX for each point that you are making.

Making me see confirm by myself with example that doing X is clearly looking nicer to understand than doing Y.
by DontForgetMe | 2026-02-13 20:58:17+00:00
Man, if you seriously would exclude someone from social interactions because of the colour of their speech bubble in group messages, I dread to think how m stressful it would be to interact with people who's entire bodies were different colours.

Not even joking. 'Its legit stressful if someone's messages use a different colour background' is not logically compatible with being ok having different coloured people in view. I'm not actually calling you a racist, because it would also mean you get distressed if people wear different colour clothes and have avatars that look different, and I think a social group like that would have struggled enough to realise that the solution might not be 'get the Wrongly Coloured Group Text Guy to purchase a different phone rather than, idk, stop spending so much time staring at screens.

But it was amusing to imagine how wildly conformist one would have to be to actually dislike someone because their phone number doesn't have enough 7's or their name is longer than everyone else's so it looks untidy or whatever.
by h3lp | 2026-02-13 20:58:23+00:00
There's graph-easy, which generates ascii by default but can also do box chars, and even SVG and png, as well as generating graphviz and other output.
It is not WYSIWIG---you feed it a description of a diagram:

echo "[ Berlin ] -- train --> [ Bonn ] [ Bonn ] --> [ Berlin ]" | graph-easy -as boxart

resulting in

┌───────────────────┐
∨ │
┌────────┐ train ┌──────┐
│ Berlin │ ───────> │ Bonn │
└────────┘ └──────┘

https://github.com/ironcamel/Graph-Easy
by adambuildstuff | 2026-02-13 20:58:25+00:00
By the old definition, you're right. I can't be a systems architect.
But this product exists. I built it. 15-phase pipeline. Multi-service architecture. Production.
That's not a contradiction to resolve. That's evidence the definition is changing.
You're using a frame that assumes understanding code is required to hold a system together. I'm the proof it isn't anymore.
by surprisetalk | 2026-02-13 20:58:41+00:00
Example: You've been wanting to take cooking classes, but you've also been wanting to join an improv group. If you don't have time/resources for both of these projects, you might choose a "metaproject" like "weekly dinner party with funny friends" -- it doesn't strictly meet the requirements from either project, but might achieve something deeper you're looking for.
by bananaflag | 2026-02-13 20:58:47+00:00
From that article:

> The quintic was almost proven to have no general solutions by radicals by Paolo Ruffini in 1799, whose key insight was to use permutation groups, not just a single permutation.

Thing is, I am usually the kind of person who defends the idea of a lone genius. But I also believe there is a continuous spectrum, no gaps, from the village idiot to Einstein and beyond.
by mh- | 2026-02-13 20:58:58+00:00
Thanks to another comment here I went looking for the strategy guides that are injected. To save everyone else the trouble, here [0]. Look at (e.g.) default/STRATEGY.md.jinja. Also adding a permalink [1] for future readers' sake.

[0]: https://github.com/coder/balatrollm/tree/main/src/balatrollm...

[1]: https://github.com/coder/balatrollm/blob/a245a0c2b960b91262c...
by davorak | 2026-02-13 20:59:32+00:00
> Can humans actually do that?

From my reading yes, but I think I am likely reading the statement differently than you are.

> from first principles

Doing things from first principles is a known strategy, so is guess and check, brute force search, and so on.

For an llm to follow a first principles strategy I would expect it to take in a body of research, come up with some first principles or guess at them, then iteratively construct and tower of reasonings/findings/experiments.

Constructing a solid tower is where things are currently improving for existing models in my mind, but when I try openai or anthropic chat interface neither do a good job for long, not independently at least.

Humans also often have a hard time with this in general it is not a skill that everyone has and I think you can be a successful scientist without ever heavily developing first principles problem solving.
by jgord | 2026-02-13 21:00:52+00:00
I posit that periods of relatively high creativity [ in art science music literature ] coincide with periods of relatively low inequality.

ie. if everyone is working so hard to pay rent / college, nobody has time to work on side projects in the garage, or go deep into books, or dedicate spare time to a craft or do down a science research rabbit hole.

Im not sure LLMs will free up much time for people in the middle of the economy - they might produce more but get paid the same.
by 013 | 2026-02-13 21:01:08+00:00
For the models? Directly from Anthropic and OpenAI. I'm running moltis via the docker container

edit: There is a gpt-5.3 model, but selecting that gives me the error:

Error
The model `gpt-5.3` does not exist or you do not have access to it.
Provider: openai

I don't see a 5.3-codex, and no opus 4.6...
by Manuel_D | 2026-02-13 21:01:40+00:00
Again, if you want to allege that these other people are white supremacists go right ahead.

But you wrote that "Clearview AI was founded by white supremacists". Even after your new set of links, this remains unsubstantiated. None of your links allege that the Clearview founders are white supremacists, they make an attempt at guilt by association.
by decidu0us9034 | 2026-02-13 21:02:13+00:00
I'm not sure you can call something an optimizing C compiler if it doesn't optimize or enforce C semantics (well, it compiles C but also a lot of things that aren't syntactically valid C). It seemed to generate a lot of code (wow!) that wasn't well-integrated and didn't do what it promised to, and the human didn't have the requisite expertise to understand that. I'm not a theoretical physicist but I will hold to my skepticism here, for similar reasons.
by jonahx | 2026-02-13 21:02:14+00:00
> The "AI replaces humans in X" narrative is primarily a tool for driving attention and funding.

It's also a legitimate concern. We happen to be in a place where humans are needed for that "last critical 10%," or the first critical 10% of problem formulation, and so humans are still crucial to the overall system, at least for most complex tasks.

But there's no logical reason that needs to be the case. Once it's not, humans will be replaced.
by materielle | 2026-02-13 21:02:21+00:00
I think the problem is actually political capital.

Someone who deeply understands how to qualify the product.

But with enough political sway to tell entire orgs of 1000s employees to shred their timelines and planning docs and go back to the lab until it’s right.

Without those two pieces, the problem is that individual devs and leaders know that there’s a problem. But the KPIs and timelines must lurch onwards!
by lunatuna | 2026-02-13 21:03:12+00:00
You are the project, and getting through your idea to something, is about building a better you. Which points back to the beginning:
--
Publish that novella, build an OS, converse in Mandarin, release an indie game, publish that other novella, dominate a continent --
--

Seem to be a lot of complaints about this post, I'm enjoying it. Interesting flow of thoughts and share similar frustration with all my ideas and trying to channel them, and get to something. If I get to something close to my thoughts that's a huge win for me.
by TGower | 2026-02-13 21:03:13+00:00
With a chess engine, you could ask any practitioner in the 90's what it would take to achieve "Stage 4" and they could estimate it quite accurately as a function of FLOPs and memory bandwidth. It's worth keeping in mind just how little we understand about LLM capability scaling. Ask 10 different AI researchers when we will get to Stage 4 for something like programming and you'll get wild guesses or an honest "we don't know".
by pfdietz | 2026-02-13 21:03:16+00:00
Link is to a paper with the title "Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty".

The paper with the submission title:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-67423-y

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.21.655380v2

"Nitrogen isotope fractionation (ε15N) in sedimentary rocks has provided evidence for biological nitrogen fixation, and thus primary productivity, on the early Earth. However, the extent to which molecular evolution has influenced the isotopic signatures of nitrogenase, the enzyme that catalyzes the conversion of atmospheric nitrogen (N2) to bioavailable ammonia, remains unresolved. Here, we reconstruct and experimentally characterize a library of synthetic ancestral nitrogenase genes, spanning over 2 billion years of evolutionary history. By engineering modern microbes to express these ancient nitrogenases, we assess the resulting ε15N values under controlled laboratory conditions. All engineered strains exhibit ε15N values within a narrow range comparable to that of modern microbes, suggesting that molybdenum (Mo)-dependent nitrogenase has been largely invariant throughout evolutionary time since the origins of this pathway. These results confirm the robustness of N-isotope biosignatures in the ancient rock record and bolster their utility in the search for life in extraterrestrial environments."
by worldfactory | 2026-02-13 21:03:21+00:00
Refreshing counterweight to the "18-month window" panic.

The "constancy anchor" framing resonates. I've been building heavily with Claude Code lately and the bottleneck really has shifted from implementation to intention and judgment. The code writes itself; knowing what to build and why is the hard part now.

That said, I think the piece undersells how quickly the goalposts can move on what counts as "intention" and "taste." A year ago people said LLMs couldn't do system design. Now they meaningfully can, with the right prompting. I wouldn't bet the farm on any specific human capability remaining exclusively human on a long enough timeline.

But the core point (stop panicking, go take a walk, figure out what you actually care about) is probably the most productive advice anyone in tech can hear right now. The people I see thriving with these tools aren't the ones shipping the fastest; they're the ones who had a clear point of view before the tools showed up.

The "embodied intention" line is quietly the strongest point in the whole piece. For the constancy anchor to expire, an agent would need something we can't even define in ourselves yet. That's not a gap that closes in 18 months. It might not close at all.

The dig at the artifact-bragging-to-impressed-bosses pipeline is chef's kiss accurate.
by martin-t | 2026-02-13 21:03:32+00:00
What is the underlying problem and what are the potential solutions?

> saw dynamic+direct democracy as extremely dangerous

Are you saying that humans, on average, are bad/harmful/evil? Or that they commit to decisions without thinking them through and act on emotions instead of reason?

Because if the first, then making democracy indirect or otherwise limited should not help.

So I believe it is the second. Then the question becomes either how to get people to vote more rationally or how to weight votes by rationality. The second options is not well explored.
by NetOpWibby | 2026-02-13 21:03:46+00:00
Reading this felt like talking to myself…get out of my head!

With that being said, I have so many projects, so little time, but I’m prioritizing the ones that both fulfill me and have a decent chance at replacing my $DAYJOB.

Also, having a schedule so I don’t burn myself out. It’s been working well for about a month so far.
by maxverse | 2026-02-13 21:04:00+00:00
It's kind of crazy how nice people in multiplayer are. Nobody says anything about my mother or what kind of content I'm downloading to cause lag. Everyone's got the personality of, like, a chill dad now. People are more interested in a good game than just winning. It's really nice.

The other day, I was playing a noob game where one opponent on the other team was way better than the rest of us and rushed. His own team came down on him after.
by amluto | 2026-02-13 21:04:22+00:00
Suppose you have n elements to sort and you don't have duplicates. Each element is a string of L fixed size symbols (bits, bytes, whatever). And suppose that there are at least n/10 unique elements. You may replace 10 with any other constant. This means that, as you add more elements, you are not just adding more duplicates of the same values.

In order to have n/10 unique elements, you need to be able to construct n/10 different strings, which means that L needs to be at least log_(base = how many distinct symbols you have)(n/10), which is O(log n). So you have L * n = O(n log n) symbols to write down, and even reading the input takes time O(n log n).

As a programmer, it's very very easy to think "64-bit integers can encode numbers up to 2^64, and 2^64 is HUUUUGE, so I'll imagine that my variables can store any integer". But asymptotic complexity is all about what happens when inputs get arbitrarily large, and your favorite computer's registers and memory cells cannot store arbitrarily large values, and you end up with extra factors of log n that you need to deal with.

P.S. For fun, you can try to extend the above analysis to the case where the number of unique elements is sublinear in the number of elements. The argument almost carries straight through if there are at least n^c unique elements for 0 < c < 1 (as the c turns into a constant factor when you take the log), but there's room to quibble: if the number of unique elements is sublinear in n, one might argue that one could write down a complete representation of the input and especially the sorted output in space that is sublinear in L * n. So then the problem would need to be defined a bit more carefully, for example by specifying the the input format is literally just a delimited list of the element values in input order.
by idle_zealot | 2026-02-13 21:05:01+00:00
> The fact that a full screen window creates a whole new virtual desktop is hilarious and I dare you to justify it.

I can kind of see the idea here. The alternative is that all the other windows in the working desktop get hidden behind the fullscreen window. That's pretty bad UX. I personally avoid it on Linux by always moving a window to its own desktop before fullscreening it.

That said, the implementation is awful, and exposes the rotten foundations of Mac's window management paradigm.

IMO floating windows always fall apart and should be reserved for modals and transient dialog boxes only. Everything gets a lot easier to understand when applications can't occlude one another or occupy the same space.
by numpad0 | 2026-02-13 21:05:06+00:00
The actually issue according to another comment
[0] is this[1]:

> Around iOS 17 (Sept. 2023) Apple updated their autocorrect to use a transformer model which should've been awesome and brought it closer to Gboard (Gboard is a privacy terror but honestly, worth it).

> What it actually did/failed to improve is make your phone keyboard:

> Suck at suggesting accurate corrections to misspelled words

> "Correct" misspelled words with an even worse misspelling

> "Correct" your correctly spelled word with an incorrectly spelled word

Which makes me wonder: is Transformer model good with manipulating short texts and texts with errors at all ? It's kind of known that open weight LLMs don't perform well for CJK conversion tasks[2], and I've also been disappointed by their general lack of typo tolerances myself as well. They're BAD for translating ultrashort sentences and singled out words as well[3]. They're great for vibecoding, though.

Which makes me think, are they usable for anything under <100 bytes at all? Does it seem like they have a minimum usable input entropy or something?

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006171

1: https://thismightnotmatter.com/a-little-website-i-made-for-a...

2: The process of yielding "㍑" from "rittoru"

3: No human can translate, e.g. "translate left" in isolation correctly as "move left arm", but LLMs seem to be more all over the place than humans
by gsmecher | 2026-02-13 21:05:15+00:00
Towards the end of my EE degree in the mid-2000s, I hoodwinked Ralph into dropping by my dingy east-Vancouver rental for a tech demo. I was trying to find a home for my thesis research project, which was a very niche-y DSP algorithm that had only the very faintest relevance to Xiph's mission. I was 100% enthusiasm and 0% practical sense.

Ralph was interested and engaged, and when he turned down the project (absolutely the right call) he was beyond gracious about it. It is rare that you can call someone "classy" and "nerdy" at the same time. Ralph was it.
by philipkglass | 2026-02-13 21:05:34+00:00
It wouldn't be a solution for a personal existential dread of death. It would be a solution if you were trying to uphold long term goals like "ensure that my child is loved and cared for" or "complete this line of scientific research that I started." For those cases, a duplicate of you that has your appearance, thoughts, legal standing, and memories would be fine.
by awesome_dude | 2026-02-13 21:05:57+00:00
I've also seen maintainers complain about "drive by contributors" where one complaint is that the submitter has provided a good patch/PR, but doesn't stick around to support it.

From the submitters point of view, why /would/ you stick around if your first (and only) interaction with the project is less than "ideal"

FTR I absolutely understand the "burnout" maintainers experience dealing with contributors that drain energy as well.
by brianweet | 2026-02-13 21:06:15+00:00
Reminds me of some research I once did in order to reduce typos on low-end Firefox OS devices. The capacitive touchscreen had horrible limitations, especially for typing. It had bands across the screen where it could only detect one finger at a time. Once you picked up typing speed it ended up in similar misses you see in the YouTube video, albeit even worse (you end up with a letter between your two fingers).

Eventually found two simple but effective ways to improve autocorrect/typing performance. First build a personalized and adaptive touch model trained on the device itself, mainly to fix simple typos.
Second to fix low end screen limitations, use simple heuristics based on touchstart, touchmove and touchend [1].

Anyways, I'm no iPhone user but interesting to read. It would drive me nuts.

[0]: https://www.brianweet.com/2015/03/24/implement-touch-model.h...
[1]: https://www.brianweet.com/2015/04/08/low-end-touchscreen-lim...
by DarkUranium | 2026-02-13 21:06:17+00:00
I 100% agree on pretty much everything. The "webapp masquerading as a native app" is a huge problem, and IMO, at least partially because of a failure of native-language tooling (everything from UI frameworks to build tools --- as the latter greatly affect ease of use of libraries, which, in turn, affects popularity with new developers).

To be honest, I've been (slowly) working towards my own native GUI library, in C. It's a big undertaking, but one saving grace is that --- at least on my part --- I don't need the full featureset of Qt or similar.

My plan for the portability issue is to flip the script --- make it a native library that can compile to the web (using actual DOM/HTML elements there, not canvas/WebGL/WGPU). And on Android/iOS/etc, I can already do native anyway.

Though I should add that a native look is not a goal in my case (quite a few libraries already go for that, go use those! --- and some, like Windows, don't really have a native look), which also means that I don't have to use native widgets on e.g. Android. The main reason for using DOM on the web is to be able to provide for a more "web-like" experience, to get e.g. text selection working properly, as well as IME, easier debuggability, and accessibility (an explicit goal, though not a short-term one --- in part due to a lack of testers).
Though it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to allow either canvas or DOM on the web at that point --- by treating the web the same as a native platform in terms of displaying the widgets.

It's more about native performance, low memory use, and easy integration without a scripting engine inbetween --- with a decent API.

I am a bit on the fence between an immediate-mode vs retained-mode API. I'll probably do a semi-hybrid, where it's immediate-y but with a way to explicitly provide "keys" (kind of like Flutter, I think?).
by staticassertion | 2026-02-13 21:06:26+00:00
> The alternative is that all the other windows in the working desktop get hidden behind the fullscreen window. That's pretty bad UX.

How? It means I could have a full screen video and then overlay something smaller over it, or maintain my alt-tab behavior as it plays in the background, etc. I'd maintain the same UX. Why would full screen have such a weird behavior?
by brailsafe | 2026-02-13 21:06:27+00:00
I've been an Android & Mac & Windows user for the last 15 years, (Windows just for gaming), iOS only on an old iPad, and have no plans to change that, but while I do have frustrations with all 3 systems, iOS is wildly irritating to me. Thankfully I've only been forced to use it on a phone for a short term work requirement, but my god I was happy to not have an iPhone in my life after that. Keyboard and notifications were unavoidably annoying to interact with. I've always loved Apple hardware though, and hope that they can turn things around on the mac software side
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-02-13 21:06:31+00:00
This is simply wrong, and missing the point, simultaneously.

Flight (like "intelligence") means more than one thing. Planes fly, birds fly, but they not only use a different mechanism, they can't even do the same kind of flying that the other does.

Sometimes, the difference doesn't matter. Sometimes it does. Same for "intelligence".
by Aurornis | 2026-02-13 21:06:59+00:00
> got a form to fill from a Deloitte consultant about security once.

It could be someone trying to extract free work, but in my experience this person was probably trained by someone else about how to handle vendor compliance for contracted vendors.

Some times the people in these grunt work consulting positions aren't really knowledgable about the space. They're in those positions because they can follow directions and will diligently grind out billable hours. Their default mode for getting things done is to try what worked last time, and if that fails they just start looking for names to send the request to until someone does it.

As others mentioned, you could have said "Compliance forms are $1000, payable to ____" and the consultant may have diligently gone through their mental process about where to direct invoices for work.
by rpdillon | 2026-02-13 21:07:07+00:00
Having worked at multiple companies and talked to multiple legal teams about this, they tend to be very conservative. So the guidance I've gotten is that if we store any information at all on the person's computer, even to know whether they've visited the site before, we still need a cookie banner.

Basically, the law created enough fear among the lawyers that software developers are being advised to include the cookie banner in cases where it isn't strictly needed.