MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jodrellblank | 2026-02-08 23:36:57+00:00
> "The singularity is a specific belief that we will achieve AGI

That is one version of it, but not the only one. "John von Neumann is the first person known to have discussed a "singularity" in technological progress.[14][15] Stanislaw Ulam reported in 1958 that an earlier discussion with von Neumann "centered on the accelerating progress of technology and changes in human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue""[1]. A time when people before it, would be unable to predict what came after it because it was so different. (And which I argue in another comment[2] is not a specific cutoff time, but a trend over history of the future being increasingly hard to predict over shorter and shorter timeframes).

Apart from AGI, or Von Neuman accelerationism, I also understand it as augmenting human intelligence: "once we become cyborgs and enhance our abilities, nobody can predict what comes next"; or artificial 'life' - "if we make self-replicating nano-machines (that can have Darwinian natural selection?), all bets about the future are off"; or "once we can simulate human brains in a machine, even if we can't understand how they work, we can run tons of them at high speeds".

> and usher in a golden age. (Either for itself or us. That part's a bit under contention, from my understanding.)

Arguably, we have built weakly-superhuman entities, in the form of companies. Collectively they can solve problems that individual humans can't, live longer than humans, deploy and exploit more resources over larger areas and longer timelines than humans, and have shown a tendency to burn through workers and ruin the environment that keeps us alive even while supposedly guided by human intelligence. I don't have very much hope that a non-human AGI would be more aligned with our interests than companies made up of us are.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46935546
by FiniteField | 2026-02-08 23:39:01+00:00
>Federal troops assassinating kneeling protesters didn’t used to be “one side”

This is factually not true. Levels of violence by the state against citizens in the United States is at near historic lows. The state killed dozens of children in Waco in the 90s, bombed domestic buildings in Philadelphia in the 80s, shot protestors Kent State University in the 70s, going back to the early years of the USA where protests and rebellions were put down with private militias and bounties. The shooting by one officer of one protester in a scuffle with officers wouldn't have reached the history books in any other time.
by kwakubiney | 2026-02-08 23:39:15+00:00
Remixify[1]. What I mean to
do is target DJs and people who love to own their playlist curating process. We aim to help people find remixes to their favourite Spotify playlists. Alt versions, club mixes, remixed versions, whatever. Come build your new experience.

[1] https://remixify.xyz
by dan-robertson | 2026-02-08 23:39:40+00:00
I think it’s just very alien in that things which tend to be correlated in humans may not be so correlated in LLMs. So two things that we expect people to be similarly good at end up being very different in an AI.

It does also seem to me that there is a lot of variance in skills for prompting/using AI in general (I say this as someone who is not particularly good as far as I’m aware – I’m not trying to keep tips secret from you). And there is also a lot of variance in the ability for an AI to solve problem of equal difficulty for a human.
by avrionov | 2026-02-08 23:39:43+00:00
We've gone full circle. I asked Gemini what is the sale price and I got this answer:

"Within the tech community (such as discussions on Hacker News), estimates have varied wildly. While some speculate on a "9-figure" deal (over $100 million), others suggest a more modest range of $10–$20 million based on Polarr's estimated revenue and team size at the time of the sale."
by tim333 | 2026-02-08 23:39:59+00:00
We have a pretty good idea. Bitcoin holders and miners promote it. Punters buy because it's going up until it peaks and then they sell because it's going down.

The a value is approx <amount average person invests in bitcoin> x <number of people> / <number of coins (~16 mil)>

It goes up over the cycles as the number of people in it goes 1 mil, 10, 100, 1000 etc.
by sbinnee | 2026-02-08 23:40:50+00:00
I don't buy it. It's the same model underneath running whatever UI. It's the same model that keeps forgetting and missing details. And somehow when it is given a bunch of CLI tools and more interfaces to interact with, it suddenly becomes x10 AI? It may feel like it for a manager whose job is to deal with actual people who push back. Will it stop bypassing a test because it is directly not related to a feature I asked for? I don't think so.
by pedrosbmartins | 2026-02-08 23:41:27+00:00
I'm working on a (somewhat) realistic surfing game. Tired of arcade-style games, I decided to try my hand at something closer to the real sport, focusing on realistic breaking waves, speed generation and carving, rather than impossible air combos.

After one year of development, it's going better than I expected, so I'm considering building a demo to gather feedback and see if there's enough traction for working towards a Steam release.

Even if that's not the case though, it's been a blast learning about game dev in Unity/C#, as well as 3D modeling and animation in Blender!
by rafabulsing | 2026-02-08 23:41:49+00:00
I always find that characterization of Grey and the Cortex podcast to be weird. He never claims to be a productivity master or the most productive person around. Quite the opposite, he has said multiple times how much he is not naturally productive, and how he actually kinda dislikes working in general. The systems and habits are the ways he found to essentially trick himself into working.

Which I think is what people gather from him, but somehow think he's hiding it or pretending is not the case? Which I find strange, given how openly he's talked about it.

As for his productivity going down over time, I think that's a combination of his videos getting bigger scopes and production values, and also he moving some of his time into some not so publicly visible ventures. E.g., he was one of the founders of Standard, which eventually became the Nebula streaming service (though he left quite a while ago now).
by benbojangles | 2026-02-08 23:41:59+00:00
Grovia - Lora mesh farming data: https://github.com/benb0jangles/Remote-greenhouse-monitor

I hope to add ai data tools & saas, but really I'm just happy to have a running working live setup on my small farming plot ready for the growing season - https://benb0jangles.github.io/Remote-greenhouse-monitor/
by hypeatei | 2026-02-08 23:42:33+00:00
> they want the keys stored in an encrypted way, is that too much to ask for

Well, they are encrypted but the issue is talking about exports. The maintainer of KeepassXC already mentions the issue with that: portability. A backup of such sensitive data (a password manager) is going to be stored somewhere secure (to the user) already. Why would you encrypt the contents and add another layer of complexity that other tools may not be able to handle? I want to be able to rely on those backups in the future and copy paste them around manually if needed. It's user choice, put simply.

A specification committee should never be deciding what a user does with their data, period. The security maximalist is always going to advocate for the most secure thing but most of the time that's not practical or friendly to humans.
by digiown | 2026-02-08 23:42:44+00:00
> Approximately nobody thinks users shouldn't be able to access their keys in the general case

Citation needed. To me it seems to be the quiet part that they aren't saying out loud. If it's just a consequence of the spec being unfinished, then they shouldn't threaten to ban KeepassXC for this. The purpose of a system is what it does, and commercial passkey implementations lock users out of their credentials and uses it to strengthen vendor lock-in.

> Is it a super useful feature? No

It's security theater and a way for websites to annoy users unnecessarily.

> KeePassXC is not "being threatened with being banned via attestation".

https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10406#iss...

It's a thinly veiled threat. Making a certification process and refusing to certify KeepassXC is exactly the same as banning it.
by Retric | 2026-02-08 23:42:45+00:00
You can experience things second hand. I wouldn’t object to someone saying my experience with chemo when talking about their spouse’s disease. They can tell you not just the symptoms but what their insurance company did etc.

Still while watching a loved one deal with cancer is an intense experience and gives you way more insight than you had before, but you didn’t have the lived experience of having cancer you observed someone having cancer.
by philipp1234 | 2026-02-08 23:43:30+00:00
I built a free app to track which animals I've seen in zoos and explore zoo inventories.

https://ZooTracker.app

You can see which animal you can see in what zoo.

And for each zoo you can see their (vertebrate) animal inventory.

You can log which animal you saw and collect lifer lists.

I have just promoted the android app from closed testing to production and I am working on the iOS app.

It has been available as a web app for a few months now.
by stego-tech | 2026-02-08 23:43:34+00:00
Finding work after a corporate restructure. Also migrating my workloads from VMs and strewn-about containers onto a Talos K8s node, so I can break the cycle of bespoke builds at home and get back to enjoying projects.

Speaking of projects, I’m roughing out a method of pulling cost data for common services (compute, storage, databases, etc) across the three major cloud providers and making recommendations as to where to put things for optimal cost; a key component of a “universal cloud” idea I’ve been kicking around since 2020 or so, where the base cloud services are abstracted away into commodities rather than bespoke products or locked-in vendors. The goal is to basically have something like Terraform that will transpose its code to the destination cloud chosen by the cost analyzer at execution, and eventually auto-migrate load as prices or needs change (e.g., a client churning early and shifting that reserved instance to another customer for a higher margin).

Write once, and trust the pricing model to deploy it where it makes the most fiscal sense. No more learning Azure/GCP/AWS for bog-standard workloads anymore.
by EvanAnderson | 2026-02-08 23:44:34+00:00
Sticking a piece of cardboard over a portion of the radiator was a common sight during the winter when I was growing up in rural Ohio. I didn't think our winters were that cold, but maybe late 70s to early 80s vehicles were more susceptible to running cold.

I had a car that developed a stuck-open thermostat and did the cardboard trick to get by until I could replace the faulty part.
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-08 23:45:00+00:00
"Ownership" is frequently a bad smell, it makes me think of the NFT nerd who crashed your party or a high-pressure sales pitch for a timeshare in Florida.

What's wrong with an honest day's pay for an honest day of work? Maybe the working class is fine with being the working class, but it just wants a fair deal. See

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwxQb1CIIyo
by abustamam | 2026-02-08 23:45:17+00:00
I think the historical record pushes back pretty strongly on the idea that determinism in engineering is new. Early computing basically depended on it. Take the Apollo guidance software in the 60s. Those engineers absolutely could not afford "surprising" runtime behavior. They designed systems where the same inputs reliably produced the same outputs because human lives depended on it.

That doesn't mean complex systems never behaved unexpectedly, but the engineering goal was explicit determinism wherever possible: predictable execution, bounded failure modes, reproducible debugging. That tradition carried through operating systems, compilers, finance software, avionics, etc.

What is newer is our comfort with probabilistic or emergent systems, especially in AI/ML. LLMs are deterministic mathematically, but in practice they behave probabilistically from a user perspective, which makes them feel different from classical algorithms.

So I'd frame it less as "determinism is new" and more as "we're now building more systems where strict determinism isn't always the primary goal."

Going back to the original point, getting educated on LLMs will help you demystify some of the non-determinism but as I mentioned in a previous comment, even the people who literally built the LLMs get surprised by the behavior of their own software.
by ethin | 2026-02-08 23:45:34+00:00
I mean... It's ugly from a modern standpoint. Zero encapsulation to speak of. Global state everywhere. But doing the modifications I did were pretty easy all things considered. So yeah, the code is clean, if "ugly" when viewed from a modern standpoint. It was definitely fun to do either way! Idk what other changes I'll make, we'll see. Especially since I don't know the architecture very well yet
by hyperhello | 2026-02-08 23:45:40+00:00
My understanding of UB is that in programming, there are corner cases which should be ignored by the language system. For example, C writing to a zero pointer is not “wrong”, you told it to write there when you dereferenced a zero pointer and assigned a value. The effects and the mitigation thereof just need to be outside the language, because otherwise you are saying that each and every memory access needs to be checked. So UB is just the language system saying “hey, I don’t know what happens, and we are not going to guarantee anything, and you can expect the world to explode if you do this, but not really, but yes really.”
by timenotwasted | 2026-02-08 23:45:56+00:00
I've been a word game fan for a long time and always wanted to try my hand at building a unique take on the genre since so many fall into a Wordle type clone these days. I came up with the concept for SpellRush a few months ago and finally got it to what I think is a pretty fun concept over the past few weeks. Would love feedback from anyone that is up for giving it a try! https://spellrush.com/
by aeldidi | 2026-02-08 23:45:57+00:00
> The C compiler that Anthropic created or whatever verb your want to use should prove that Claude is capable of doing reasonably complex level of making software.

I don't doubt that an LLM would theoretically be capable of doing these sorts of things, nor did I intend to give off that sentiment, rather I was more evaluating if it was as practical as some people seem to be making the case for. For example, a C compiler is very impressive, but its clear from the blog post[0] that this required a massive amount of effort setting things up and constant monitoring and working around limitations of Claude Code and whatnot, not to mention $20,000. That doesn't seem at all practical, and I wonder if Nicholas Carlini (the author of the Anthropic post) would have had more success using Claude Code alongside his own abilities for significantly cheaper. While it might seem like moving the goalpost, I don't think it's the same thing to compare what I was saying with the fact that a multi billion dollar corporation whose entire business model relies on it can vibe code a C compiler with $20,000 worth of tokens.

> The problem is people have egos, myself included. Not in the inflated sense, but in the "I built a thing a now the Internet is shitting on me and I feel bad" sense.

Yes, this is actually a good point. I do feel like there's a self report bias at play here when it comes to this too. For example, someone might feel like they're more productive, but their output is roughly the same as what it was pre-LLM tooling. This is kind of where I'm at right now with this whole thing.

> The "open secret" is that shipping stuff is hard. Who hasn't bought a domain name for a side project that didn't go anywhere. If there's anybody out there, raise your hand! So there's another filtering effect.

My hand is definitely up here, shipping is very hard! I would also agree that it's an "open secret", especially given that "buying a domain name for a side project that never goes anywhere" is such a universal experience.

I think both things can be true though. It can be true that these tools are definitely a step up from traditional IDE-style tooling, while also being true that they are not nearly as good as some would have you believe. I appreciate the insight, thanks for replying.

[0]: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler
by idopmstuff | 2026-02-08 23:46:27+00:00
I left my job as a PM a couple of years ago to start acquiring small e-commerce brands that sell on Amazon. I'm currently running those, and mid-acquisition on one.

Because they're relatively low-effort (Amazon is terrible for sellers in many ways but man do they provide an incredible amount of infrastructure), that leaves me plenty of time to play with AI, and it just so happens that the business serves as a giant, practical eval as new models come out.

I've been vibe coding apps for internal use and using Nano Banana for listing images and whitebox photos, and more recently I've started to lean on Claude Code heavily as an assistant. It's got API creds for my Amazon account, so I use it for everything from figuring out when I need to reorder to filling out spreadsheets for companies that safety test my product.

And of course I am writing a Substack that I must shamelessly self promote that goes into the practical use cases of AI in my business: https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/
by taikon | 2026-02-08 23:47:05+00:00
https://taiko.taikohub.com - Working on the TAIKO-01, a split concave ergonomic keyboard.

I'm an physician who previously had wrist tendinosis and carpal tunnel and made the keyboard for myself. I'm trying to get the keyboard registered as a medical device for treatment of hand/wrist repetitive strain injury. Currently getting design for manufacturing finalized, and waiting on injection mold prototypes. Hoping to launch on Kickstarter in the next few months.

Also concurrently waiting on ethics approval for a clinical study, which will happen after launch. We had quite promising results from user testing, so I'm cautiously optimistic about the study.
by logicprog | 2026-02-08 23:47:08+00:00
"It’s very unsettling, then, to find myself feeling like I’m in danger of being left behind - like I’m missing something. As much as I don’t like it, so many people have started going so hard on LLM-generated code in a way that I just can’t wrap my head around.

...

’ve been using Copilot - and more recently Claude - as a sort of “spicy autocomplete” and occasional debugging assistant for some time, but any time I try to get it to do anything remotely clever, it completely shits the bed. Don’t get me wrong, I know that a large part of this is me holding it wrong, but I find it hard to justify the value of investing so much of my time perfecting the art of asking a machine to write what I could do perfectly well in less time than it takes to hone the prompt.

You’ve got to give it enough context - but not too much or it gets overloaded. You’re supposed to craft lengthy prompts that massage the AI assistant’s apparently fragile ego by telling it “you are an expert in distributed systems” as if it were an insecure, mediocre software developer.

Or I could just write the damn code in less time than all of this takes to get working."

Well there's your problem. Nobody does roll-based prompts anymore, and the entire point of coding agents is that they search your code base, do internet searches, and do web fetches, as well as launch sub agents and use todo lists, to fill and adjust their context exactly as needed themselves, without you having to do it manually.

It's funny reading people planatively saying, "I just don't get how people could possibly be getting used out of these things. I don't understand it." And then they immediately reveal that it's not the baffling mystery or existential question there pretending it is for the purpose of this essay — the reason they don't understand it is that they literally don't understand the tech itself lol
by k2xl | 2026-02-08 23:47:11+00:00
Chess67 - Website for Chess coaches, club organizers, and tournament directors

https://chess67.com

Chess67 is a platform for chess coaches, clubs and tournament organizers to manage their operations in one place. It handles registrations, payments, scheduling, rosters, lessons, memberships, and tournament files (TRF/DBF) while cutting out the usual mix of spreadsheets and scattered tools. I’m focused on solving the practical workflow problems coaches deal with every day and making it easier for local chess communities to run events smoothly.
by zelphirkalt | 2026-02-08 23:47:13+00:00
Better focus on developer platforms, than stretch resources too thin. Even if they managed to pull it off, they would need to maintain it. It is quite the different compile target too. Even if Windows was supported, probably many package definitions would have to change to support installing them on Windows. Ultimately, who is to say how Windows updates/MS will break everything? I really don't think they have the resources at this point to pull that one off. How about MS themselves spends time and effort to make things work on their proprietary platform instead, if they want to deliver a very usable platform?
by tdb7893 | 2026-02-08 23:47:20+00:00
I'm always surprised that papers don't include some "chat" apps as social media. I don't see Discord mentioned in this paper but I use it almost identically to how I used Facebook in like 2010 and at least among people I know that's very common. I think the use cases from more traditional "social media" has migrated a lot back to chat apps. It's been funny to see things come kinda full circle from my AOL Instant Messenger days as a kid.
by bossyTeacher | 2026-02-08 23:47:23+00:00
> Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Amazon, Reka AI, Alibaba (Qwen), 01 AI, Cohere, DeepSeek, Nvidia, Mistral, NexusFlow, Z.ai (GLM), xAI, Ai2, Princeton, Tencent, MiniMax, Moonshot (Kimi) and I've certainly missed some.

This is not a lot competition though. And you need to assume, that like other industries, mergers and acquisitions will happen over time which will put you in an increasingly worse position.