MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Kerrick | 2026-02-09 17:59:33+00:00
Pretty dang common. OS X and macOS (and maybe iOS and iPadOS, though I'm not certain) have been autocorrecting "--" into "—" for over a decade. Windows users have been using Alt codes for them since approximately forever ago: https://superuser.com/q/811318.

Typography nerds, which are likely overrepresented on HN, love both em dash and en dash, and we especially love knowing when to use each. If you know what an octothorp or an interrobang are, you've probably been using em dashes for a long time.

Folks who didn't know what an em dash was by name are now experiencing the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon en masse. I've literally had to disable my "--" autocorrect just to not be accused of using an LLM when writing. It's annoying.
by bookman10 | 2026-02-09 18:00:11+00:00
My understanding is that ink tank printers can be cheaper per page, but lasers can be faster and possibly more durable. I think professional machines tend to be laser printers. I haven't had a problem with the heads drying out but I try to use my printers at least weekly.

I like the Epson ink tank printers and have been happy with them. I usually use cheap generic ink. I wouldn't be surprised at all if there are better options though.

I mostly do perfect bound books so I can use normal printer paper, center the pages, and it will be in the correct grain direction. Otherwise you'll have to order through dedicated specialty paper suppliers and also might need a larger format printer. In a pinch, you can ignore grain direction but the end result definitely isn't as good. Once I run out of my current cover paper, I'll probably order coated on 1 side short grain paper from some specialty paper supplier.

I also use a one sided laminator on the cover which makes the cover much more durable.

I think the manual cutter works well enough for me. It does work at 400 pages with some muscle. Upgrading to a programmable cutter would be the next step for me, but it would only be needed if you're making 5+ books a day.

I use a manual perfect binder like this:
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/A4-Size-Wireless-Desk...

It gives better results than thermal binding, but it's probably not worth the investment for most people.

I also like velobinding for short things.
by porise | 2026-02-09 18:00:17+00:00
I've had two accounts. I changed because I don't like the history (maybe one other person has the same opinion I did?). Anyways it's pretty obvious why this is an issue. Microsoft has a historical issue with being brutal to competition. There is no oversight as to what they do with the private data on GitHub. It's absolutely an antitrust issue. Do you need more reasoning?
by goatlover | 2026-02-09 18:00:18+00:00
Australia's mandatory detention is controversial. I don't see why people need to be detained while they have ongoing court cases. I don't see what harm an undocumented person causes by simply being in the country. Most of them are not criminals, they're just here for better living conditions, work opportunities or family.

Moving people around detention centers to hide them from lawyers and families, while too often ignoring court orders and due process is also extremely concerning. As are the poor conditions often reported in these detention facilities. The process should be humane and legal.
by TaupeRanger | 2026-02-09 18:00:43+00:00
This is pretty silly. Your memory obviously gets a little worse as you age, with most of the noticeable decline coming in very late age. But the artificial measures/definitions of things like "fluid" intelligence are mostly useless. Just pulling up one of the studies cited in the article which is supposed to measure the "reasoning" aspect of "fluid" intelligence, presents a huge host issues immediately [1].

Aside from the lack of randomization, you have obvious validity problems. The interpretation of nebulous words like "reasoning" as being accurately measured by e.g. accuracy on Raven matrices (construct validity?) and younger participants having been primed by recent test-taking experience while real-world reasoning skills aren't really reflected.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30211596/
by somenameforme | 2026-02-09 18:01:04+00:00
Or you could just join me and be in denial of it.

I'm only half joking. I think it's notable that chess players tend to peak in their mid to late thirties. But that's only looking at world class players who have reached something relatively close to their genetic potential for the understanding we have today. It's entirely possible for 'regular' humans to continue seeing major improvement well past 40. I know that some players have achieved the GM title in their 50s and 60s. These were already strong players beforehand, but maintaining the level of play to get those norms and ratings is a very significant task for anybody.

It's entirely possible that these observations are 100% consistent with the reported observations and analyses, but if so then those analyses don't really matter in the way that we intuitively think they'd matter.
by presidentender | 2026-02-09 18:01:22+00:00
I got one of those dongles from my insurance company that plugged into the ODB2 port and reported my driving habits.

I was a bad driver. It would frequently beep at me to let me know that I had braked too hard. I was mystified. "What should I have done differently," I'd think, as I raged at the objective machine that judged me so.

The next time my brother came to visit, he called mom. "Oh, and presidentender is a good driver now." I didn't put the pieces together right away, but it turned out that the dongle had actually trained me, like a dog's shock collar.

The reason for my too-frequent hard-braking events wasn't speed, although that would be a contributing factor. It was a lack of appropriate following distance. Because I'd follow the drivers in front of me too closely I'd have to brake hard if they did... Or if they drive normally and happened to have a turn coming up.

Over the period I had the insurance spy box in my truck I learned without thinking about it to increase my following distance, which meant that riding with me as a passenger was more comfortable and it beeped less often. Of course since I'd been so naughty early during the evaluation they didn't decrease my rates, but I think the training probably did make me statistically less likely to crash.
by grog454 | 2026-02-09 18:01:36+00:00
The landing page video's first incident is a car coming from behind and from the right, cutting off the filming car. The filming car didn't react at all when instant (but measured) braking would've been safer to start building a distance buffer.

One thing HPDE taught me is that most people under brake in dangerous situations because they simply don't know the limit of their vehicle nor the sensitivity range of the brake pedal.

The hard braking heuristic makes sense when estimating risk of road segments, but not as a proxy for driver competence.
by RupertSalt | 2026-02-09 18:01:39+00:00
So first of all, I believe that St. Katherine of Alexandria's hagiographies are the personification of the mythical Library, especially because her monastery now boasts the largest collection of ancient papyrus and codices ever assembled. It is rather clear to me that the Sinai monastery is the actual successor and that the vast majority of Alexandria's collection never burned at all. (The monastery also hosts Moses' burning bush and famously, a fire extinguisher is mounted next to it.) Muhammad himself ordered the sparing of the community during seige times.

That being said, I also believe that the ancients were well-aware that the Sun was a local star. And by extension, that stars were distant suns. I have been doing research on the Star of Bethlehem, and it is painfully, obviously clear that the Star sought by the Magi is the Sun itself, since when they met with Herod, they first described Springtime (late April through June) and then the Winter Solstice as they pursued the Sun to Bethlehem. Furthermore, anyone traveling for seven months, and only at night, in the ancient world, while bearing priceless treasures, would have been fools, unless they also carried torches, weapons, mercenaries, and medical supplies.

Anyway, yeah, recently the descriptions of the large-scale copying at the Port of Alexandria has convinced me that the Library amassed a gigantic collection of knowledge and texts, and those were, for the most part, safely transferred to Sinai when the time was right. And palimpsests notwithstanding, there are still tons of texts still unread, unindexed, and undiscovered in there.
by mftrhu | 2026-02-09 18:02:13+00:00
Not quite - the chip the article refers to is the 47L04 [0], which is "just" NVSRAM built out of a RAM + EEPROM. I do agree on FeRAM being cool, though - I have a few I2C chips en route, and I can't wait to get my hands on them.

[0] https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/47L04
by epistasis | 2026-02-09 18:02:28+00:00
"It requires Ukrainian cooperation" is a weird to say that "It required SpaceX cooperation."

Why would you reverse the roles like that? As if Ukraine hasn't wanted something exactly like this?

> If SpaceX had acted on their own, the blame would fall on them.

Who is asking SpaceX to act on their own, another really weird framing.

> The blame is on the Ukrainian government now.

There's zero blame on the Ukrainian government, unless you're one of the Russian invaders trying to kill civilians and commit genocide.

Are you a Russian soldier? If not, why speak in this utterly detestable fashion?

If you're a SpaceX employee or fan, that reflects very badly on SpaceX and makes them look even worse than they did up until now.

Personally the only explanation for SpaceX not doing this sooner is probably that they're looking at IPO and are trying to become respectable before they have to go out on the roadshow. As if, they kept this basic bit of human decency in their back pocket until they could cash it in somehow.
by goatlover | 2026-02-09 18:03:24+00:00
What harm was he doing being here for 20 years? Was he engaged in criminal activities? If not, then I just don't see the point in detaining people who have a life here. Have him jump through the hoops to acquire legal status, that's fine. But deportation is cruel. The US is not in danger of being overpopulated. The whole narrative of dangerous illegals over running the country is a far-right boogey man.
by tom_tom_watson | 2026-02-09 18:03:34+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m working on an API that provides heuristic signals about whether a piece of text is likely LLM-generated.

The system uses an ensemble of techniques, and on my internal evaluation set (details below) it achieves ~99.8% accuracy. I’m fully aware that general-purpose AI text detection is hard and adversarial, so this is meant as a probabilistic signal rather than a definitive classifier.

There’s a simple demo site: https://checktica.com

And public API docs (no API keys required): https://api.checktica.com/v1/docs

I’d really appreciate critical feedback, especially on:

- Failure modes you’ve seen in similar systems

- Whether this framing makes sense at all

- Where such a tool might actually be useful (or useless)

Happy to answer technical questions.
by hackingonempty | 2026-02-09 18:03:38+00:00
I wouldn't expect God to go through the trouble of personally delivering his most important message then leave it to chance, knowing he wouldn't be around to answer questions and knowing nobody would write it down for decades, that only parts would survive, that there would be differences in interpretation. Knowing the fate of people who misunderstood.

Previously he wrote down ten commandments on stone tablets, and with his power he could easily write the most perfect book in a language everyone could understand that would leave no doubts as to what is required to be saved then ensure it survived forever. There would be no need for later writers on soteriology.
by jonahx | 2026-02-09 18:04:21+00:00
> That means writing in a way that most of your audience finds compelling, readable, and not intimidating.

I would agree with that. And I think emojis and unnecessary reassurances subvert that goal. It's fluff, it's more to read, and if the writing isn't already clear, they don't fix the problem.

> But few readers are emotionless automatons that need nothing but dry technical content

Nothing in my post argues for dry technical content.

Bartosz Ciechanowski's superb work, which may have inspired the author, gets the balance just right without any hand-holding asides:

https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/
by mindslight | 2026-02-09 18:04:34+00:00
This is a core idea of what used to be called conservatism - the belief that Western values and institutions have inherent merit. Both at home in the terms of Constitutionally-limited government, the rule of law, etc. And internationally through diplomacy to do what we can to spread those values - in this case a few strongly worded letters would have been a step up.

And on both topics, it is the same group of anti-American traitors overtly trashing our values, both domestically and internationally, while abusing the cloak of "conservatism" to obscure what they actually stand for. So no, there is really no conflict when criticizing both.
by wduquette | 2026-02-09 18:04:34+00:00
It's certainly the case that I don't always know how the layer below works, i.e., how the compiled code executes in detail. But I have a mental model that's good enough that I can use the compiler, and I trust that the compiler authors know what they are doing and that the result is well-tested. Over forty years and a slew of different languages I've found that to be an excellent bet.

But I understand how my code works. There's a huge difference between not understanding the layer below and not understanding the layer that I am responsible for.
Show HN: Revibe – Turn any codebase into interactive, multi-level documentation
by selvaprakash | 2026-02-09 18:04:58+00:00
Hey HN,

I come from a data analytics background and picked up web dev on the side. When I started learning web development, my way in was always to trace real actions through a codebase — how does login actually work? What happens when a user uploads a file? Where does that data end up?

No tool did this for me. So I'd manually dig through code, follow the trail, and piece together how things connected. It was the best way I found to actually understand an application — but it was painfully slow.

With AI now being able to genuinely understand codebases, I realized I could finally build the tool I always wished I had.
So I built Revibe (https://revibe.codes). It takes any codebase and reverse-engineers interactive, multi-level documentation:

Bird's-eye view — high-level architecture, how the major pieces fit together, data flow between components
User Journey — see how a user interacts with the application and drill down to the exact code component involved in that action
Module/feature level — what each part of the app does and why, how components interact
Guided code navigation — "Start here, go here next" walkthroughs that explain your code the way a senior dev would on your first day

You can start at whatever level makes sense and drill down (or zoom out) as needed. A founder can stay at the architecture level. A new developer can go deep into specific modules. Everyone gets context without reading every file.
Works on any codebase, but especially useful for vibe-coded projects and inherited codebases where documentation was never a priority.

Hope it is able to help others as well. Would love feedback.

Thanks for taking a look.
by jonathanlydall | 2026-02-09 18:06:12+00:00
Clocks which are designed to be able to auto set their time in the US will actually also do the auto setting at least as far away as Johannesburg, South Africa.

I know this because when my mother was visiting the US over a decade ago, she found a clock she felt was aesthetically perfect for her psychology practice room at her house.

Twice a year the clock changes its time to be 10 hours (or thereabouts) behind, no doubt due to daylight savings change over.

So she has to readjust the time whenever this happens which she says she doesn’t really mind.
by munificent | 2026-02-09 18:06:24+00:00
Really cool article! Tangential:

> “Scattering” is the scientific term of art for molecules deflecting photons. Linguistically, it’s used somewhat inconsistently. You’ll hear both “blue light scatters more” (the subject is the light) and “atmospheric molecules scatter blue light more” (the subject is the molecule). In any case, they means the same thing

There's nothing ambiguous or inconsistent about this. In English a verb is transitive if it takes one or more objects in addition to the subject. In "Anna carries a book", "carries" is transitive. A verb is intransivite if it takes no object as with "jumps" in "The frog jumps.".

Many verbs in English are "ambitransitive" where they can either take an object or not, and the meaning often shifts depending on how it's used. There is a whole category of verbs called "labile verbs" where the subject of the intransitive form becomes the object of the transitive form:

* Intransitive: The bell rang.

* Transitive: John rang the bell.

"Scatter" is simply a labile verb:

* Intransitive: Blue light scatters.

* Transitive: Atmospheric molecules scatter blue light more.
by sigseg1v | 2026-02-09 18:06:52+00:00
Adding on to this, a common reaction I see to online videos of driving incidents is "why did this person just stop? of course you are going to crash into them. They shouldn't have stopped" and many people agreeing with it. It seems they are blind to the fact that if the following driver was using a safe following distance and speed, they should easily be able to stop, making the incident the fault of the driver following too close, not the one stopping.
by komali2 | 2026-02-09 18:06:54+00:00
All you can muster to eek a gram of joy in your 996 life is internet trolling on foreign forums while you playact at being a communist - because you know as well as I that you can't even talk about communism on PRC social media.

The irony of enjoying the more open free speech of liberal democracies through a VPN while pretending to be a communist vanguard in a socialist paradise is absolutely beautiful to me, my friends and I are very much enjoying your comments. Please don't stop!
by MarcusMas | 2026-02-09 18:07:01+00:00
MastarRec is a specialist recruitment partner connecting skilled professionals with high-impact roles across Cybersecurity, FinTech, Sustainable Energy, Biotechnology, and Healthcare Technology.

We work with forward-thinking organizations to deliver talent for critical roles through targeted sourcing and strong market insight. Supporting employers and candidates across the United States and global markets, MastarRec helps teams grow and careers move forward with confidence.
by 0xy | 2026-02-09 18:07:02+00:00
I did not assume anything. He specifically mentions he was able to work because of an EAD associated with his I-485 Adjustment of Status application, which is the only possible pathway to green card after marriage to a USC.

There is no U.S. visa which allows 20 year stays with no work authorization. Doesn't exist. So he entered illegally.

>Why throw him in a detention center

Because he committed immigration fraud? Overstaying means you lied to CBP. Entering illegally is a crime, too.
by thomasguide | 2026-02-09 18:07:10+00:00
Without wanting to paint with too broad a brush, I would say in my experience driving in 10x countries, U.S. drivers, being most habituated to spending their lives in cars, drive in the most distracted, least careful way. Especially in places where the typology is the U.S. default of low-density, car-oriented sprawl. Accordingly there are an appaling number of deaths and injuries on the road: 1 in 43,750 people dies each year in the U.K. in automobile accidents vs. 1 in 8,500 in the U.S.A.

Inb4 deaths per mile driven, I'd argue higher VMT in the U.S.A. only proves the point - too many cars being driven too much because of silly land use. High VMT is acutally a symptom of a dangerous mobility system as much as a cause.
by D-Machine | 2026-02-09 18:07:15+00:00
AI ≠ LLM.

It would be more precise to say that complex world modeling is not done with LLMs, or that LLMs only supplement those world models. Robotics models are AI, calling them LLMs is incorrect (though they may use them internally in places).

The middle "L" in LLM refers to natural language. Calling everything language and words is not some gotcha, and sensor data is nothing like natural language. There are multiple streams / channels, where language is single-stream; sensor data is continuous and must not be tokenized; there are not long-term dependencies within and across streams in the same way that there are in language, making self-attention expensive and less obviously useful; outputs are multi-channel and must be continuous and realtime, and it isn't even clear the recursive approach of LLMs could work here.

Another good example of world models informed by work in robotics is V-JEPA 2.

https://ai.meta.com/research/vjepa/

https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09985
by guywithahat | 2026-02-09 18:07:23+00:00
I mean the most important factor is the students and their backgrounds. Lots of places will never have good schools or will always have high ranking schools due to the kids attending just being smarter or less so.

That said, the research is quite clear that unions hurt student performance, and if your only goal is improving student performance non-union charter schools seem to be the best option. By giving parents as much choice as possible, parents tend to pick better schools, and poorly run schools are force to lay off staff or go out of business, so better run schools can replace them.
by Someone1234 | 2026-02-09 18:07:36+00:00
This type of research is highly valuable but too rare; this is generally because of how we view Road Accidents at a core level:

- Road Accidents: "A driver caused this, let's determine who, and find them at fault."

- With Air Accidents: "The system caused this, let's determine which elements came together that ultimately lead to this event."

The first is essentially simplifying a complex series of events into something black and white. Easy to digest. We'll then keep doing it over and over again because we never changed the circumstances.

The second approach is holistic, for example even if the pilot made a mistake, why did they make a mistake, and what can we do to prevent that mistake (e.g. training, culture, etc)? But maybe other elements also played a part like mechanical, software, airport lightning, communications, etc.

I bet everyone reading this knows of a road near them that is an accident hotspot and I bet they can explain WHY it is. I certainly do/can, and I see cops with crashed cars there on a weekly basis. Zero changes have been made to the conditions.
by WarmWash | 2026-02-09 18:07:41+00:00
If you take a seasoned motorcycle rider and put them in one of those dashcam subs, they'll rip their hair out.

Most people have near zero defensive driving skill, and view someone pulling out in front of them as "nothing I could have done", when the dashcam shows the offending driver showed 5 signs of pulling out ages before the accident occurred.