MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vanderZwan | 2026-02-26 05:14:30+00:00
> I guess the part people don't like hearing is the implication techno is somehow not expressive.

I think of it more like a painter's palette: every instrument and tool involved in creating music has a different set of colors to choose from, and can also filter some "colors" out if we think of things like audio processing filters.

The tools and techniques typically used to produce techno filter out "colors" that feel essential to me to connect with a song, and yeah, that "controlled" aspect of it is probably a large part of that. That doesn't mean it's not expressive, it's just expressive in a way that I struggle to connect with.

EDIT: funny enough I actually have protanomaly, so my choice of analogy is slightly ironic there. Some visual art and design out there objectively looks terrible from my subjective experience, since the colors look completely off. But that doesn't mean I'm saying the art is objectively bad.
by BrendanEich | 2026-02-26 05:14:36+00:00
A mundane reason for why donations to the 501c3 parent Mozilla Foundation can't go to Firefox or Gecko engineers is U.S. tax law. We found out the hard way after the IRS San Jose office said we could run only as a foundation and take "sponsorship income" tax-free. They reneged and litigated; this led to the creation of the arms-length Mozilla Corporation that's wholly owned by the Foundation. Per IRS regulations, it cannot be funded by grants from the parent Mozilla Foundation.

The corporation could let users pay for Firefox, and pay tax on that revenue. While I was there, no one thought this would help enough to be worth the effort, compared to just working on other things while taking Google search revshare.

With Brave, I've pushed for user-pays as an option. We let a user buy Premium Search (no ads, but this is possible for free) to support us. It's a small but non-negligible amount of revenue per year, and growing slowly, but we did it on principle. Same will go for buy-once zero-telemetry Brave Origin, stripped down Brave coming in a month or two.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-26 05:15:47+00:00
Europe was investing €300B/year in the US. That capital is likely better invested domestically in Europe, and the direction Europe is headed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46722594

https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1qjtvtl/macron_says...
by goodmythical | 2026-02-26 05:15:50+00:00
Where's the hack?

The software punches out data it's found, sometimes without cross checking it. That's why there's often a double check button. It's a mimic for average human knowledge.

If you create extremely specific false information, and then ask it to retrieve that very specific information, it's going to....drum roll...retrieve the very specific information that you asked it to retrieve. How is this surprising?

>guys, I wrote a .txt file that said I have a trillion dollars in my bank and took a screenshot and posted it to facebook so I hacked facebook and now facebook says I'm the richest person alive

The fact that you've lied and it trusted you isn't hacking in any sense of the term.
by rob74 | 2026-02-26 05:16:16+00:00
I guess that with "throughout the country" you mean the US? There, building gigantic new pumped storage systems might work, e.g. somewhere on a mesa in a desert with few people living nearby (OTOH you need some source of water for pumped storage too, so a desert location is not really ideal), but in more populated locations (i.e. Europe) such a project would face opposition and interminable delays caused by all the NIMBYs living next to it.

Besides that: pumped storage is good for regulating short-term fluctuations (between day and night), not so sure about storing surplus renewable energy produced in summer to use it during winter, as the article proposes?
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-02-26 05:16:54+00:00
OK I've seen many people make this point on this site over just the last few months, but where do you think LLMs pick up these patterns? How did this rule of threes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(writing) get into the LLM so they are so damn recognizable as LLMs and not as humans?

HN Note: Yes the rule of threes is broader than just this particular pattern here, but in my opinion this common writing and communication pattern is a specific example of the rule of threes.

Punchy repetition in a set of 3. Yes. LLMs are able to capably mimic the common patterns that how to write books have suggested for the last 100 years as ways to make your writing more "impactful" and attention-grabbing. So are humans. They learned it from watching us.

I am a little bit worked up on this as I have felt insulted a couple times at having something I've written been accused of being by an LLM, in that case it was because I had written something from the viewpoint of a depressed and tired character and someone thought it had to be an LLM because they seemed detached from humanity! Success!

I too would like to be able to reliably detect when something has been written by an LLM so I can discount it out of hand, but frankly many of the attempts I see people make to detect these things seem poorly reasoned and actively detrimental.

People have learned in classes and from reading how to improve their writing. LLMs have learned from ingesting our output. If something matches a common writing 101 tip it is just as likely to be reasonably competent as it is to be non-human. The solution to escape being labelled an LLM is not to become less competent as a writer.

I have been overly verbose here, as I am somewhat worked up and angry and it is too late in the morning to go back to sleep but really too early to be awake. I know verbosity is also a symptom of being an LLM, but not giving a damn is a symptom of humanity.
by radioshakeshack | 2026-02-26 05:17:56+00:00
From a pure numbers standpoint, absolutely. We're already seeing a wave of folks shipping more PoC products with AI tools. The distinction is that most of these aren't true "competitors" to established companies, more filling gaps and niches if they aren't just a toy clone.

That's the more interesting angle here to me. Rather than building a direct competitor at 10% the cost, agent assisted tooling could make it individually profitable to target small cap, cottage industry type problems that have too much nuance for a one size product. Areas where someone already has deep business insight that provides the value proposition moreso than the labor around coding. Not competitors at 10% the cost, but filling niches that wouldn't have been profitable otherwise.

The danger is that if agents get more capable, the niche markets start to erode. If a generic solution agent can acquire domain knowledge and coordinate with customers, even these 'competitors' become risky again.
by dwd | 2026-02-26 05:18:15+00:00
Ed O'Brien from Radiohead worked with Fender to develop a Strat with a Fernandes Sustainer.

https://au.fender.com/products/fender-eob-sustainer-stratoca...

You might enjoy this video. He really goes deep into using the guitar to create textures and emotions. He talks about the Edge (U2) and his Infinite Guitar and that he actually calling Michael Brook to see if he could get one. Eventually Fender did a custom build on his Clapton Strat which became the Fender EOB Sustainer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK4Fmrlqz3I
by cthalupa | 2026-02-26 05:18:20+00:00
This article is pretty disingenuous in the parts where it focuses on topology. CAD files are imported all the time into CG software with awful topology - looking very similar to that mess.

There's lots of software and tooling, automated and otherwise, to significantly improve topology. This is a very common problem in this space and not acknowledging that is silly. It's not perfect, and remodeling things is indeed a common solution - but retopo addons and software are big business because they're good enough for a whole lot of use cases.
by hliyan | 2026-02-26 05:18:27+00:00
I recently thought my keyboard was faulty. I take my notes on notepad, and after a recent update, sensed that keystrokes occasionally get missed or delayed. After a few days, I noticed it was not happening on Google Docs. On a whim I checked Notepad settings and found a new setting, enabled by default: "AI features > Copilot". I disabled it, along with "Autocorrect", and haven't had the problem since.

Notepad is supposed to be a bare bones editor -- where you go when everything else fails. The VI of Windows. If they want a rich editor, they should bring back WordPad.
by golem14 | 2026-02-26 05:18:28+00:00
the site immediately ran out of tokens. Nice idea.

My struggle is to motivate my students to just to their homework. Doing anything on top of that is very hard. Unless you convince schools to use your system (or Khan academy) instead of regular homework, it will be tough to make headway for all but the best students who breeze through homework - but those don't need your product as much.

BTW, the site ran out of tokens before it could even complete one step (8000 tokens), so I could not fully evaluate.

This seems easy enough (at least for K12 math) that you could probably host it from home on a local model, ignoring all the cloud API limits.

Good luck!
by kofdai | 2026-02-26 05:19:00+00:00
I understand the skepticism—the line between "AI-generated" and "AI-assisted" has become incredibly blurry. Let me clarify the architectural distinction.

1. The Inference Engine is 100% Deterministic:
The "solver" is a standalone Python program (26K lines + NumPy). At runtime, it has zero neural dependencies. It doesn't call an LLM, it doesn't load weights, and it doesn't "hallucinate." It performs a combinatorial search over a formal Domain Specific Language (DSL). You could run this on a legacy machine with no internet connection. This is fundamentally different from o1/o3 or Grok-Thinking, where the model is the solver at test-time.

2. The "Novel Human Input" is the DSL Design:
Using an LLM to help write Python boilerplate is trivial. Using an LLM to design a 7-phase symbolic pipeline that solves ARC is currently impossible. My core contributions that an LLM could not "reason" out are:

The Cross DSL: The insight that ~57% of ARC transforms can be modeled by local 5-cell Von Neumann neighborhoods.

Iterative Residual Learning: A gradient-free strategy where the system synthesizes a transform, calculates the residual error on the grid, and iteratively synthesizes "correction" programs.

Pruning & Verification: Implementing a formal verification loop where every candidate solution is checked against the 3-5 training examples before being proposed.

3. Scaling through Logic, not Compute:
While the industry spends millions on "Test-time Compute" (GPU-heavy CoT), Verantyx achieves 18.1% (and now 20% in v6) using Symbolic Synthesis on a single CPU. The 208 commits in the repo represent 208 iterations of staring at grid failures and manually expanding the primitive vocabulary to cover topological edge cases that LLMs consistently miss.

If using Copilot to speed up the implementation of a deterministic search algorithm invalidates the algorithm, then we’d have to invalidate most modern OS kernels or compilers written today. The "intelligence" isn't in the typing; it's in the program synthesis architecture that does what pure LLM inference cannot.

I'd encourage you to check the source—it's just pure, brute-force symbolic logic: https://github.com/Ag3497120/verantyx-v6
Show HN: NovelStar – a functional novel writing suite in a single HTML file
by pixeldude84 | 2026-02-26 05:19:03+00:00
NovelStar is a retro-styled, Windows 95-inspired desktop novel writing application built as a single portable HTML file. It brings professional manuscript formatting, scene/chapter organisation, word count tracking, and full-manuscript PDF export into a clean, distraction-friendly writing environment — no subscription, no cloud, no account required.

It runs entirely in your browser as a standalone .html file

Written by: pixeldude84
Code generated by: Claude (Anthropic AI)
License: GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPL-3.0)
by CSSer | 2026-02-26 05:19:26+00:00
I'm mostly interested in how the article more or less accidentally highlights the central problem of the whole industry. Training needs to be solved for these businesses to be viable and sustainable. These products are obviously valuable and monetizable but not at the burn rate we're seeing, and knowledge doesn't stand still. In fact, if the usefulness of these tools is to be believed, it's accelerating. So how do you shorten that feedback cycle without obliterating margin? Software is a largely attractive business because your margins expand dramatically once it's stable, and it's winner-take-all the majority of the time. From an investment perspective, we're looking at something that is not that. And we're supposed to pretend that's acceptable because if we squint really hard we forget it's still a mechanical turk? This ain't a scene, it's an arms race...
by nobodyandproud | 2026-02-26 05:19:40+00:00
Worth a read (5-10 minutes). I found myself agreeing more than disagreeing.

That aside, some gems:

“…Among certain weak natures, coffee produces only a kind of harmless congestion of the mind; instead of feeling animated, these people feel drowsy, and they say that coffee makes them sleep. Such individuals may have the legs of serfs and the stomachs of os- triches, but they are badly equipped for the work of thought.”

“If the experience of the English is typical, heavy tea-drinking will produce English moral philosophy, a tendency toward a pale complexion, hypocrisy and backbiting.”
by sentinelowl | 2026-02-26 05:19:40+00:00
We digitally reconstructed Tesla's magnifying transmitter from his patents and Colorado Springs notes, modeled the EM fields, and found something nobody's published before.

Key findings:

• Marconi's 1901 transatlantic signal traveled via ground wave, not skywave — Tesla was right, textbooks have been wrong for 125 years
• Tesla's "longitudinal waves" aren't pseudoscience — they're TM₀ guided modes in the Earth-ionosphere waveguide with a longitudinal E-field component
• Full Wardenclyffe reconstruction shows it would have worked as a global VLF comm system
• You can build a modern version for ~$2,000

20 experiments, 47 plots, Python, peer-reviewable paper included. arXiv submission pending.
by lern_too_spel | 2026-02-26 05:20:16+00:00
Texas celebrates Confederate Heroes Day as a state holiday on January 19 each year. This occasionally coincides with the third Monday of January on which MLK Jr. Day is celebrated as a national holiday. Democrats in the Texas legislature have repeatedly tried to remove or rename the holiday, but these attempts have so far failed to get out of committee.

Some people take umbrage at being lumped into a large heterogenous group called People of Color. I can assure you that the people who celebrate Confederate "Heroes" have no issue with lumping all of those people into a group of Colored People. That is where the grouping originated.
by exodust | 2026-02-26 05:21:37+00:00
He was insulted on two counts. Firstly doubting his intelligence. Secondly the insinuation of deception: "You aren't that smart, surely you cheated."

The insulting didn't end there. You asked his parents! Even then you only landed at 90%, yet another insult because why can't he earn 100%? Ethical dilemmas on all sides!
by klooney | 2026-02-26 05:21:58+00:00
> Retroactive Privilege Expansion. You created a Maps key three years ago and embedded it in your website's source code, exactly as Google instructed. Last month, a developer on your team enabled the Gemini API for an internal prototype. Your public Maps key is now a Gemini credential. Anyone who scrapes it can access your uploaded files, cached content, and rack up your AI bill. Nobody told you.

Malpractice/I can't believe they're just rolling forward
by holysoles | 2026-02-26 05:24:21+00:00
The Verge had some good coverage about this, but TLDR: probably. Flagship phones may not raise in price to fully reflect it. They might cut costs elsewhere like keeping the same camera, or eat some of the cost increase in their margin.

https://www.theverge.com/tech/880812/ramageddon-ram-shortage...

They discussed it on the decoder podcast as well.
by ggm | 2026-02-26 05:24:25+00:00
Farming is odd, because there's a huge inter-generational phobia about selling the heritage, but there's also a degree of pragmatism (bad year? shoot the cows) going on. And, there's also often a massive debt overhang, tolerated by the system as a whole, because of the boom-and-bust nature of the business. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of land owners told "$14m for your paddocks" would only see a low value in that, because of the debt overhang.

It also would not surprise me if a lot of these prices are tail payment, and predicated on the plan getting up, and involve middlemen who are brokering the land up to bigger players in the hyperscaler space. Lots of NDA, not much money up front.

I would think that there are brownfield ex-factory sites which make more sense.

Farming is agribusiness is big business. People who are in farming for the long haul. But, if its not a family enterprise (and a lot isn't any more) and if there's a board, and shareholders, then the temptation to cash out and move money to another place is there. So I expect despite all these refusals from one cohort of the farm sector, there's another one which is looking at the merits of this and for the right package, will jump. But they will want a lot more than ag. value per hectare/acre on this, they won't settle for the value as soybeans, they want the value as a multi-billion dollar enterprise outcome.

I sure hope some of them really are the green heart, who value nature. But I think the story is going to be a lot more multi dimensional than that.
by vessenes | 2026-02-26 05:24:30+00:00
Woof. Impedance mismatch outcome from moving fast - the GCP auth model was never designed to work like oAI's API key model; this isn't the only pain point this year, but it's a nasty one. I'm sympathetic, except that dealing with GCP has always been a huge pain in the ass. So I'm a little less sympathetic.
by DavisGrainger | 2026-02-26 05:24:37+00:00
That’s the core focus, yep: MCP server for agent-driven campaign creation, ad copy, and image gen, specifically for Meta/Facebook. The differentiation: we’re API-first (devs/agents can run everything programmatically), and creative/image gen is now way better (Seedream 4.5 integration, robust image URLs, no base64 weirdness).

We’ll expand into other ad platforms over time, but Meta is where the tooling gap is biggest today. If you’re building agents or auto-ad workflows, would love any feedback or feature requests.
by 9rx | 2026-02-26 05:25:19+00:00
I know "objectively" is completely made up just as much as the rest of English, so perhaps you are not using it as I recognize the word, but as I recognize it there is nothing objective about English. It is all just made up and used as one feels like. Obviously "boiling water" can be a word, just like "six men", "good idea", "large rock", etc. can be.

Simply put, "boiling water" is a word whenever someone uses it as a word. It is reasonable to say that it isn't commonly used as a word, but that's kind of the point of the article: Asking when a word becomes worthy of inclusion in the dictionary. The very similar "hot water" is a word that is found in the dictionary. Of course, it is a word used frequently, so the inclusion isn't suspiring.

But it remains unclear where the line is between worthy of inclusion and not worthy of inclusion. The article is asking where that line is.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-26 05:25:38+00:00
Or China could stop antagonizing blocs like the EU by solidifying ties with Russia [0][1][2], imposing rare earth export restrictions on the EU [3], and undermining EU institutions [4].

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/xi-putin-hail-tie...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-president-xi-meet...

[2] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-calls-closer-defen...

[3] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/eu-steps-up-efforts-cut-...

[4] - https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3316875/ch...
by Proworkk | 2026-02-26 05:25:59+00:00
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by scoofy | 2026-02-26 05:28:34+00:00
Again, they have $1B in the current deficit. The have $1B in outstanding bonds. They have myriad other outstanding obligations that won't show up on the balance sheet for 20+ years.

Strong Towns wrote an entire piece on this: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2025-10-27-ground-zero-l...
by kgeist | 2026-02-26 05:29:38+00:00
>but where do you think LLMs pick up these patterns?

>LLMs are able to capably mimic the common patterns that how to write books have suggested for the last 100 years as ways to make your writing more "impactful" and attention-grabbing. So are humans. They learned it from watching us.

Don't forget that LLMs (at least the "instruct" versions) undergo substantial post-training to align them with the authors' objectives, so they are not a 100% pure reflection of the distribution seen on the internet. For example, it's common for LLMs to respond with "You're absolutely right!" to every second message, which isn't what humans usually do. It's a result of some kind of RLHF: human labelers liked to hear that they're right, so they preferred answers containing such phrases, and those responses became amplified. People recognize LLM-generated writing because LLMs' pattern distribution is different from the actual pattern distribution found in articles written by humans.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-02-26 05:31:03+00:00
Their 'paying in' is capped at a ridiculously low rate thanks to their continuous lobbying and equal to what doctors pay in.

Brin paid more for his new home that his lifetime charity giving according to Forbes.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswealthteam/2026/02/09/ame...
by rasz | 2026-02-26 05:31:55+00:00
My Fry's anecdote:

AMD K6-3 333MHz CPU officially doesnt exist. No official AMD documentation ever acknowledged it despite plenty specimen documented on the net over the years. Quite weird 3.5 x 95 MHz model. Turns out there was only one source of this processor, year 2000 Fry's Electronics Black Friday deals:

Soyo SY-5EMA+ mb/cpu/ATX case $99

FIC PA2013 mb/cpu $79

AMD K6-3 333MHz cpu only $29

Weird outdated non standard CPU ordered special from AMD with weird underclocked specs just to hit super low price points.
by 0x38B | 2026-02-26 05:32:16+00:00
I replaced the battery in my Kindle Touch with one from Aliexpress (1 & 2). It was an easy project; finding a battery with the correct dimensions took more time than soldering. With a new battery, my Kindle Touch is still a great device to read on.

1: picture: https://nexus.armylane.com/files/kindle-touch-battery-I-used...

2: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2251832791337189.html
by oblio | 2026-02-26 05:32:36+00:00
1. From you own link:

> But the GDPR does not apply to occasional instances. Rather, regulators look for other clues to determine whether the organization set out to offer goods and services to people in the EU. To do so, they’ll look for things like whether, for example, a Canadian company created ads in German or included pricing in euros on its website. In other words, if your company is not in the EU but you cater to EU customers, then you should strive to be GDPR compliant.

2. As a general rule Europeans are MUCH less lawsuit addicted than Americans. Plus the way the GDPR works is that generally complaints are filed with a government agency that investigates.

You analysis starts from a position of deep fear.