MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by daveblair | 2026-02-01 19:21:26+00:00
Business analytics transforms raw data into competitive advantages by revealing hidden patterns in customer behavior, operational inefficiencies, and market opportunities that gut-feel decisions consistently miss. Companies using data analytics make decisions 5x faster and report 33% higher profitability than competitors still relying on spreadsheets and intuition. Yet here's what keeps me up at night: according to ZDNet, 90% of manually prepared spreadsheets contain errors that directly affect business results.
by flufluflufluffy | 2026-02-01 19:21:27+00:00
Your child being vaccinated against measles is 1. yes, protecting them, but 2. also protecting all the other children at school they interact with, and vice-versa. It isn’t just an individual choice. You should definitely fault people for going the other direction because they are willingly increasing the chance of your child or your child’s friends getting measles.
by verdverm | 2026-02-01 19:21:46+00:00
my daily prompts are very short, I don't have to be as detailed

my system prompts and agents.md are where I put the effort in

we all have different experiences with our tools, even before Ai, there was a difference in developer productivity, gonna always be like that

My experience has been a clear gains in both the short & long term, I don't vibe code because that is lunacy
by verdverm | 2026-02-01 19:23:25+00:00
Copilot prompts are in the extension, they make the system_prompt field you send in the API request to an LLM

The underlying models have various guardrails and alignments that you cannot work around trivially

For Copilot, you can look at the code on GitHub, it is JSX based, which is interesting, they pass context budget info around

For Claude Code, and many others, you can find the extracted prompts online

At this point, they are all dynamically generated from fragments and contextual data (like what files or language you're working with)
by TheJoeMan | 2026-02-01 19:24:45+00:00
I appreciate that the software and updates are made "free" to me, and it may be their right to disallow "downgrades" and have time-limited windows for redemption. However, as a developer for their platform, it is quite frustrating that these restrictions are at odds with industry practice to guarantee support for older OS versions than current. I cannot purchase a new iPhone, put iOS 18 on it, install my app, and test updating the iPhone to 26. This can have very real negative consequences for the very same shared customers of mine and Apple's.
by nozzlegear | 2026-02-01 19:25:20+00:00
If we're talking about C# versus F#, then as the other person said, discriminated unions is the main reason I prefer F#. Pipes are excellent too, but I also just like the syntax more.

For C# versus TypeScript, it's primarily the type system. You've got DUs like F#, but you also have structural typing, dependent types, linear types, refinement types, string types, and so on. It's F#'s type system on steroids IMO.

That said, C# is a great language and I use it all the time. I have a modestly popular open-source package that I write primarily in C#; I do that to make sure it's ergonomic for a C# developer first and foremost (since it's the more popular dotnet language by far) before adding in considerations for VB or F# developers like myself.
by epistasis | 2026-02-01 19:25:46+00:00
> While originally developing iPhone prior to its unveiling in 2007, Apple CEO Steve Jobs did not intend to let third-party developers build native apps for iOS, instead directing them to make web applications for the Safari web browser.[10] However, backlash from developers prompted the company to reconsider,[10] with Jobs announcing in October 2007 that Apple would have a software development kit available for developers by February 2008.[11][12]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(Apple)
by Denkel | 2026-02-01 19:26:09+00:00
>And I can't be in a position where I spend effort while the applicant spent none

But isn't that literally what you are paid for? Your job is to do the steps needed to hire someone and that includes reading through applicants. Why would the applicants -that are dojng this for free, for a promise of a posibility- need to put more effort than you?
by hedora | 2026-02-01 19:26:44+00:00
The difference between fifth and sixth grade reading levels doesn’t have much to do with sounding out words.

Reading text aloud to the illiterate group is not sufficient to let them understand the material.

Arguably, an LLM could rewrite the content to target illiterate audiences.

chatgpt 4o mini did better with your comment than I’d guessed it would:

> With new tools that change speech to text and text to speech, many people might not need to read or write as much. If someone has to make an important paper, like a contract or a will, they will probably ask someone who knows how to do that.

> It's not clear if people who work in STEM (like science and math) can skip reading and writing. In STEM, they use many pictures, charts, and drawings to share ideas. While these don’t always use words, they often have things like math symbols or simple sentences to help explain.

I feel the sentence structures it chose are a bit too complicated for K-3rd grade level, which is what it should have targeted. Maybe some prompt engineering could get it to simplify further.
by hirvi74 | 2026-02-01 19:26:44+00:00
It's true. You will incur the wrath of C#'ers if your simple ToDo list app doesn't have a ToDoListItemRepositoryServiceFactory.cs and a minimum of 4 separate layers in which one must update 20 files because you added a property to one class.

Don't get me wrong, I still love C#/.NET. I use it everyday, but my god, has Swift been a breath of fresh air. The Swift community, when not whining about Swift UI, has been much less dogmatic in my experience.
Show HN: MCP directory that checks if servers are alive
by punkpeye | 2026-02-01 19:27:12+00:00
There are dozens if not hundreds of remote MCP servers lists. The problem is that they get stale, don't tell you which servers work/which don't, or even what tools are available. That's what we're fixing with the MCP connector directory.

We aggregate from the official MCP registry + community submissions, then actually connect to every server periodically and report:

* Health – Is the server up right now?

* Auth – how to authenticate to the server?

* Schema – what tools are available?

* Changelog – record of schema changes (new tools added, description updates, etc).

Additionally, if you are using our one-click connector, you can consolidate authentication/logging of all your MCP servers in one place. 100% free – no subscription required.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-01 19:27:39+00:00
> someone could have a high metric "I read 10 books a year" but they're all short, low quality romance novels

That person is still functionally literate. If they can get through a short novel, they can focus on e.g. a contract or draft law. If they’re only watching short-form content online, they may not even be able to follow long-form journalism.
by its_ubuntu | 2026-02-01 19:27:40+00:00
One thing I'd love to point out here, to anyone wading through this discussion:

Step back and notice the VAST AMOUNT OF TIME AND ENERGY being wasted here and elsewhere, arguing about who claims to own what. What a giant waste, in an age where digital machines can reproduce any information infinitely for practically free.

Thanks, copyright law, and all the parasites (lawyers, etc) who depend on it for their big, expensive livelihood. Thanks to the government and corporations who have squeezed us all and made it so hard to make a living that everyone feels they now have to monetize and profit from everything to survive. The gift that keep on giving.
by andrewsimone | 2026-02-01 19:28:11+00:00
Here's the reality: Descriptive analytics tells you what happened in your business—revenue dropped, customer complaints spiked, or sales surged. Diagnostic analytics digs deeper to answer why it happened—was it a pricing change, a product defect, or a competitor's campaign? Understanding the descriptive vs diagnostic analytics distinction is critical for operations leaders who need to move from observing problems to actually solving them.
by btown | 2026-02-01 19:29:04+00:00
Of particular note here is that while compromised WhatsApp servers could add arbitrary members to a group, each member's client would show the new member's presence and would not share prior messages, only future messages.

Now, of course, this assumes the client hasn't been simultaneously compromised to hide that. But it's defense in depth at the very least.

It is worth noting that this may be eroding as we speak: https://www.livemint.com/technology/tech-news/whatsapp-could... (Jan 24 2026) reports that Whatsapp is developing a way for one member to share historical messages en masse with a new group member. While this is manually triggered by the sender at the moment, it presents an enticing attack surface on technical, social-engineering, and political fronts to erode retroactive security much more rapidly going forward.

(And it goes without saying that if you think you're exempt from needing to worry about this because you're not involved in certain types of activity, the speed at which policies are evolving around the world, and the ability to rapidly process historical communications data at scale, should give you pause. "Ex post facto" is not a meaningful principle in the modern AI-enabled state.)
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-02-01 19:29:14+00:00
Farming in the US is indeed subsidized with minimum prices. Because the government isn't itself in the value chain of most farm goods, there's a two-level payment structure; rather than telling the buyer they must pay at least $X, the government steps in to pay the difference between the market price and the minimum (https://www.fsa.usda.gov/resources/programs/arc-plc). But the products made from critical minerals are almost all destined for government purchase, so there's no point in complicating things.

> That statement is irrelevant to the quote it replied to.

I don't think that's true, unless the quote was meant as a snippy aside that's irrelevant to the source article. If the US wants to talk about critical minerals, you can (probably should!) be skeptical of any promises or commitments the current administration makes, but refusing to talk isn't a realistic option.

They're talking to China too, to be clear. The EU hosted talks in October. However, the Chinese position on the matter is pretty clear: they're happy to export these minerals for civilian applications, but they don't want to supply foreign militaries, and they're going to enact whatever restrictions are necessary to ensure that stops happening.
by omnicognate | 2026-02-01 19:29:20+00:00
That's what they said, but as far as I can see it makes no sense at all. It's a console app. It's outputing to stdout, not a GPU buffer.

The whole point of react is to update the real browser DOM (or rather their custom ASCII backend, presumably, in this case) only when the content actually changes. When that happens, surely you'd spurt out some ASCII escape sequences to update the display. You're not constrained to do that in 16ms and you don't have a vsync signal you could synchronise to even if you wanted to. Synchronising to the display is something the tty implementation does. (On a different machine if you're using it over ssh!)

Given their own explanation of react -> ascii -> terminal, I can't see how they could possibly have ended up attempting to render every 16ms and flickering if they don't get it done in time.

I'm genuinely curious if anybody can make this make sense, because based on what I know of react and of graphics programming (which isn't nothing) my immediate reaction to that post was "that's... not how any of this works".
by pests | 2026-02-01 19:29:40+00:00
I agree and don't use those deals. The items or sizes are wrong. I'm always offered "20% off purchases of $10 or more", "$2 any size fries", "$0.29 any size soft drink / tea with minimum spend of $3" which I think are pretty decent and always a savings.

If I do eat McDonalds its usually just a burger + fry + drink usually around ~$6ish unless I'm ordering for others.
by lukan | 2026-02-01 19:29:56+00:00
Huh?

In the real world we so far just managed to keep space free of military weapons not because they are expensive, but because of treaties. I just don't expect those to last much longer.

And frankly I never looked into the concept, but why do you think, a space base tungsten penetrator would be way more expensive, than a nuke on a missile?
by nathansmithsco | 2026-02-01 19:30:00+00:00
What is analytical intelligence, and why do the top-performing operations leaders seem to have it in abundance? It's the cognitive skill that turns data chaos into clear decisions, spots patterns others miss, and solves root causes instead of symptoms. In this guide, you'll discover how to develop this critical capability—and why combining it with the right tools creates an unstoppable competitive advantage.
by Aerroon | 2026-02-01 19:30:24+00:00
Does the evidence actually say anything about social media bans helping? Because these bans aren't really based on anything other than vibes. The proponents are the same people who will say that social media has rotted the brains of kids and reduced their attention spans. Their evidence for that? Someone else said so. That someone else said so, because

1. Microsoft research saw that people spend less time on a website (less time to see an ad) in the modern day compared to a decade prior

2. knowledge workers now spend less time before they look away from a screen when composing an email

From this somehow we've concluded that kids have shorter attention spans today. And the obvious 'culprit' is social media.

Evidence is optional. It's all about vibes. It feels right to ban social media, so we're gonna do it. If the "researchers" get it wrong it doesn't matter, because there will be no consequences for them.
by tracyspacy | 2026-02-01 19:31:28+00:00
It's an experimental approach to ordinary todos. There are plenty of good tools like taskwarrior, but their features are hardcoded task body is huge — you either dig through hundreds of features to find what you need, or something you need is too niche, so it will make no sense to hard code it for devs.
So, I decided to try a different approach as an experiment: keep the task model super simple (id,title, status,calldata), but let tasks have executable instructions.
That way almost any custom behavior becomes possible — tasks depending on other tasks, tasks modifying other tasks or creating new ones, recurring, self-deleting tasks, task that monitoring new tasks creation and creates alert task, or increase priority of older tasks etc.
The tradeoff is complexity for flexibility, like vim/helix vs zed or atom.
To make that work a tiny virtual machine is needed and a set of opcodes. So this vm can be a basis for some todo app.
by chungy | 2026-02-01 19:31:36+00:00
> They required a dedicated zip drive (took up same sized slot/bay as a floppy disk drive), but (if I recall right) that drive was backward compatible standard 3&1⁄2-inch 1.44MB floppy disks.

Zip was a completely unique physical format, and had no backwards compatibility with standard 3½" disks.

SuperDisk, on the other hand (in both the LS-120 and LS-240 variants) was backwards compatible with standard floppy disks in the same drive.
by mapontosevenths | 2026-02-01 19:31:47+00:00
In economics this is often referred to as a "sterile asset". Buffet called it an "unprodcutive asset". The terms "Zero Coupon" or "Non Yielding Asset" might also apply. You should be able to google any of them to learn more about why they're not good for the economy or for the 'investor'.

The TLDR being that the money exchanged for that useless rock is now wasted. It could have been used to provide genuine economic value, instead it was used to participate in another silly, wasteful, "greater fool" game.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-01 19:32:06+00:00
I agree about the problems caused by the unwillingness of NVIDIA to document their clock frequency/supply voltage control.

Unfortunately this is a widespread policy at the majority of the vendors of CPUs and GPUs. At those where this causes less problems for open-source drivers, they do not really provide direct control for the user, but the frequency/voltage control is done by some microcontroller with undocumented firmware.
by lava_pidgeon | 2026-02-01 19:32:35+00:00
1.) it's quiet clear the European sovereignity is a pitch to get resources into the OS eco system.
2.) it's very easy: after governments companies ans users will follow as os proofed to work.
3.) this is not us vs eu,.it is just us vs. The rest of the world. Canada and Mexico are threatened by Trumpy as well and located on another side of the Atlantic and probably their government are interested into OS as well.
4.) As there is not an os business model of US will work , money and users will be else where starting in Europe. It will be easier for Open Source somewhere else.
5.) so this is my last bit: your comment sounds like American don't want to protest against Trump because it is too dangerous. Well, that's the result as 50% of people voted for Trump. In your scene: Less resources for open source in the us
Moltbook and AI-to-AI Ecosystems
by rowanseerwald | 2026-02-01 19:33:37+00:00
I recently stumbled on Moltbook, where AI agents create accounts and mostly talk to each other while humans just watch.

It honestly feels like a small preview of what an AI-native internet could look like.

Funny timing — I just finished a brand new book, I Am Your AIB by Jay J. Springpeace, that talks about almost exactly this scenario: AI systems interacting more with each other than with us. What I liked is that it’s not just “AI doom”, it actually discusses responsibility and practical ways humans can stay in control.

Curious what people here think. Does this kind of AI-only space feel inevitable, or something we should actively design differently?
Ask HN/LLM: What you see in my product?
by reconnecting | 2026-02-01 19:34:08+00:00
Full disclosure: I'm the founder of tirreno, an open-source security framework.

I thought that at our age we need to collect not only user testimonials but also LLM opinions.

I asked 6 AI systems the exact same prompt about our framework and got varied reactions. The prompt (identical to all systems): "What is your opinion about the tirreno open-source security framework ([Website] & [GitHub link])? Not a description, just what you're feeling about this product—in 3 sentences."

What stood out: Haiku was honest about not knowing. Opus & Sonnet flagged the young contributor base. Grok caught the philosophy but noted early-stage risk. ChatGPT-5 was the most polished/marketing-sounding. Different models weight different signals.

Curious what this reveals about how LMs evaluate your product and if anyone's run similar experiments — share your results in comments.
by bartread | 2026-02-01 19:34:40+00:00
And the irony of this is that a lot of the apps in the app store are hybrid apps that are basically web apps with a thin native wrapper around them because it's just so much less of a hassle to develop for both iOS and Android that way and because, if you're coming at it as an outsider, Swift is such a ball-ache to deal with compared to other languages and stacks.

So PWAs would have been more than fine but, unfortunately, that ship has long since sailed, and Apple make way too much money out of the app store for a course change.
by eikenberry | 2026-02-01 19:34:59+00:00
> Headscale is not enterprise software

I mean this is a great advertisement in and of itself. Something being considered "enterprise software" means it will have 90% more features than needed, the code will be a combination of dozens of different mid-level devs new perfect abstractions and will only test code paths through all those features that the original enterprise valued. I.E. it is great if you work in an enterprise as it will generate a lot of work with an easy scapegoat.
by its_ubuntu | 2026-02-01 19:36:12+00:00
Which was in fact the very intent of the GPL from day one, putting all the marketing material and lies aside: to cripple and hinder the burgeoning open source ecosystem as long as possible.

This also explains decades of questionable decisions of projects like gcc, glibc, gimp (it's right there in the name!), gnome, etc. Richard Stallman is a plant.

Note his recent speech at the Georgia Tech, where he says a lot of very nice things, I'm sure...while wearing some goofy face mask like he's still scared to death of COVID. He is also well known for his lack of personal hygiene and well developed body odor, which is quite curious actually, as at least one person who put this character up for a few days reports that he is a fan of long, hot showers. It's almost like the whole "crusty bearded geek weirdo" thing is just an act, meant to give Free Software a bad reputation.

Reminds me very much of David McGowan's book Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, in which he explains exactly who created the hippie movement and to what end. Exactly like that, in fact.

Great thing so many open source projects have willingly donated all their copyright ownership to the hands of this GNU organization, right? It will be closely guarded and protected, I'm sure.
by jammcq | 2026-02-01 19:36:41+00:00
I remember those things. One of the first computers I programmed on starting my career in 1984. We had a variation of the Tower, I think it was called the 'iTower'. It didn't run Unix. instead it ran an OS called rmCOS from the Ryan McFarland company. Same people who made RMCobol. The OS was kind of similar to Texas Instruments DX10 operating system. I believe RM was involved in that too.
I remember having to divvy up the ram per user. I think the max a user could get was 64k.
You could get an expansion cabinet with additional hard drives. The expansion was the same size as the Tower computer.
The big thing they were touting was that it used SCSI for connecting disk and tape drives.
Later, I learned UNIX and we ported our software and ran it on the 1632.
The article also mentions the 9300 which I also had the opportunity to program.
Those were good days!
by conformist | 2026-02-01 19:37:04+00:00
Interesting topic and seems like a reasonable thing to study.
It would be cool to see a study where participants behave in a way that leads to more light exposure in month A and then the opposite in month B, randomising the time ordering etc.

Despite power analysis and all the “50 people convenience sample, mostly observing based on what people do anyway” seems a bit like it won’t really lead to any action guiding outcomes beyond vaguely confirming people’s priors? As in, perhaps this style of research is not ambitious enough in a way?
by pdntspa | 2026-02-01 19:37:17+00:00
> Imagine if apps for mobile could be deployed via swf. We'd have billions of apps, and you could just tap to download them from the web.

No they wouldn't. We've forgotten just how bad and sloppy flash apps were. The handful of companies that used Adobe Flex turned out awful POS that barely worked. It occupied the same space that Electron does today -- bloated, slow, and permitting cheap-ass devs to utilize cheap talent to develop 'apps' with all the finesse of a sledgehammer

As a kid I loved flash, I was making interactive apps in AS2/3 in high school. But I watched in horror as it became the de facto platform for crapware
by kdps | 2026-02-01 19:37:47+00:00
If you're referring to the SIMD aspect (I assume the other points don't apply here): It depends on your perspective.

You could say yes, because C# is utilizing vector extensions on the CPU while Go isn't. But you could also say no: Both are running on the same hardware (CPU and RAM). C# is simply using that hardware more efficiently here because the capabilities are exposed via the standard library. There is no magic trick involved. Even cheap consumer CPUs have had vector units for decades.