MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vladvasiliu | 2026-02-14 21:39:20+00:00
It's by and large the slowest, jankiest, laggiest software I use regularly. And I say that as someone who swears Adobe has added a bunch of sleeps in Lightroom.

On basic chat: it will sometimes scroll up when I get a new message, while I'm actively participating in that chat, so I need to scroll back down to read the new messages. Occasionally it flickers, for bonus points. It will not mark the chat as read if I'm on it without clicking on a different chat and coming back. It's the only software I use that, for some reason, has an effect on my typing accuracy. Don't even get me started on its handling of copy/paste. I'm also pretty sure there's some joke I just don't get around the search function.

For calls: it refuses to pick the correct microphone, and will sometimes mute it completely somehow (I lose the feedback in the headphones – I have a jabra headset that does this). This will even happen when I hang up a call and start another one right away. Other times it works well. My default mic is always my wired, always connected, headset mic. I don't use BT headsets that switch from music to communications or whatever depending on what I do, which could confuse the available / selected mics.

It drains my laptop's and iphone's battery like no tomorrow, even if I turn off video and only do voice chat, even if nobody has the camera on or shares a screen. Also, on Windows, for some reason it doesn't use the native notifications, but implements its own crappy ones – but this isn't that big of an issue, since I mostly disable them anyway.

All this is happening on both the "heavy" (heh) Windows client, and on chrome on Linux, both running on a fairly beefy new PC with gobs of RAM. Fun fact: the experience was exactly the same on my 5-year-old laptop with a U-series Intel CPU, so I don't think it's a resources problem.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-14 21:41:06+00:00
The data is not very revealing nor realistic at all unless there is a baseline control where the actual tax rate is truly insignificant relative to each taxpayer's cash flow.

Anything more is just too devastating for widespread economic opportunity overall.

Too bad so many places and things have rates that have risen to multiples of a significant burden, or never decently declined enough from when they were an actual king's ransom.

So choosing Ohio may be as good a representative sample as you can get, because it is a reasonable microcosm, and there isn't a comparable place with low enough tax rates to serve as an accurate reference point for the upper bound of local resource utilization. Plus for this, University of Cincinnati can be expected to do a better job of research than most.

But that doesn't mean the data is any good, especially when the confounding factors contribute more inaccuracy to any conclusions, skew results, and add up in the neighborhood between significant vs insignificant tax rates.

Something else to think about is the way that taxing authorities, even when they are not actual royalty, have always been subject to waste and excess that all citizens would rather not indulge in. If not absolutely rife with waste and corruption that no one individual can do anything about in their entire lifetime.

But waste is the real economic killer like nothing else, and all it takes is average everyday citizens to each virtually eliminate waste within their own domain and the collective waste will always be less than if the same funds were handled by ordinary taxing authorities.

All other things being equal, which is of course not true, and that's just one of the things wrong with data that looks like it points one way when it really doesn't point any direction at all.

There's just nothing sensible about taxing property anyway when it should be the cash flow if any generated by the property, and never at a rate or schedule that could risk ownership of the property during times of limited prosperity.

Besides all this, you just can't put a dollar value on it when a citizen on their own can completely eliminate their own waste if need be, under economic duress or not, and be left with no significant ongoing obligations that would slow or limit their progress. Versus just the opposite, if a property is no longer growing crops plantation-style or something like that, for even one single year, the entire property could be lost, which is the actual purpose of the ongoing levy to begin with. That's not only 100% the value of the property, but many multiples lost to absolute waste considering how much effort and previous tax has been put into the property before total loss. Big difference between insignificant rates which are agreeably tolerable over the long run.

I understand the desire to make sense out of nonsense and it's highly respectable doing an outstanding job with what there is to work with, but digital data or not the old saying GIGO still applies.
by phendrenad2 | 2026-02-14 21:41:45+00:00
This is giving me flashbacks to the times when I had to implement systems based on big, verbose specification documents like this. Horrible.

If you really want to understand Windows, skip this and check out Windows 2000 Internals by Solomon and Russinovich (Win2k is a good middle-ground where Windows had matured a bit).
by underlipton | 2026-02-14 21:41:57+00:00
>SEO is a slippery slope on both sides because a little bit is good for everyone

I reject this emphatically. Google should never have been in the business of shaping internet content. Perhaps they should have even gone out of their way to avoid doing so. Without Google (or a better-performing competitor) acquiescing to the game, there is no SEO market.
by mcv | 2026-02-14 21:42:28+00:00
I miss the deep dives. I make time for them again. A month or two ago, I was working on a really complex problem where I relied way too much on AI, and that reliance kept my thinking about the problem relatively shallow, which meant that while I understood the big picture of the problem, I didn't really understand the intricacies. And the AI didn't either; I must have wasted about a week just trying to get the AI to solve it.

Eventually, I switched. I stopped using the AI in my IDE, and instead used a standalone Copilot app that I had to actually explain the problem. That forced me to understand it, and that helped me solve it. It demoted the AI to an interactive rubber duck (which is a great use for AI). That moment when I finally started to understand the real problem, that was great. That's the stuff I love about this work, and I won't let the AI take that away from me again.
by runjake | 2026-02-14 21:43:02+00:00
This might sound condescending but I fully do not mean it to: learn programming.

Raw dog code on small projects while avoiding using AI, except to explain things when you get stuck.

Learn theory. Learn algorithms. Learn data structures. Learn about secure coding. All of these will help inform you, even if you stick with agentic coding.

Go as deep or as shallow as you want to.

If you want to go deep, read some of the classics (SICP, C book, Pragmatic Programmer, etc), but don't beat yourself up if you don't find them interesting. Most programmers haven't read those books either.
by 8fingerlouie | 2026-02-14 21:43:02+00:00
No recommendations, just brings back memories of the “good old days” with QIC-80 tapes and ZIP drives, both of which came with “desktop” in mind.

I still have a ZIP drive around with a parallel port connector. I haven’t owned a computer with a parallel port in 20+ years.

I probably also have a QIC-80 tape drive around somewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter-inch_cartridge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive
by somesortofthing | 2026-02-14 21:43:31+00:00
I suspect you don't need anything special for this. The GH API has support for reading comments from PRs. Maybe have it maintain a small local store to remember the IDs of the comments it's already read so it doesn't try to re-implement already-implemented fixes. Another similar thing you can do is a hook that reminds it to start a subagent to monitor the CI/autofix errors after it creates/updates a PR.
by gjm11 | 2026-02-14 21:44:12+00:00
My goal was to help other people not make the same mistake as I initially did, of thinking that Peter Woit had made some criticism of the latest claim of GPT-5.2 making a new discovery in theoretical physics, which in fact he appears not to have done.

If I'd wanted that comment downvoted, I would have downvoted it myself, which as it happens I didn't. There was nothing particularly wrong with it, other than the fact that it was phrased in a way that could mislead, hence my comment.
Show HN: Npx Claude-traces, visualizer for Claude Code/Agent SDK traces
by hahawhatsgood | 2026-02-14 21:44:32+00:00
I wanted an easy way to understand what my Claude agents were doing under the hood, so I made a visualizer for Claude code and Claude Agent SDK traces. When you run a Claude agent, it stores traces to ~/.claude/projects. This npx command runs a local server that renders those traces. I tried to support timeline/token counts, tool inputs/outputs, subagents, and more - would love any feedback!
by expedition32 | 2026-02-14 21:45:00+00:00
Yeah blaming Russians and Chinese for the internet turning to shit is ludicrous.

Chinese have their own internet anyway- it was a shock to me at first just how little the average Chinese citizen really cares about Western culture or society. They have their own problems ofcourse but it has nothing to do with us

No it's the tens of billions of mostly American capital going into AI data centers and large bullshit models.
by UltraSane | 2026-02-14 21:45:08+00:00
The cheapest option is to get a SAS pcie card and a new drive like https://www.ebay.com/itm/198052084090 or try a much cheaper used drive.

LTO drives are expensive but they are very well designed and it is the most reliable portable storage format available. Full LTO tapes in a good fire rated safe really provide a fantastic sense of security. The cost of the drive is amortized over the total bytes you store.
by dlenski | 2026-02-14 21:45:14+00:00
I discovered a very similar vulnerability in Mysa smart thermostats a year ago, also involving MQTT, and also allowing me to view and control anyone's thermostat anywhere in the world:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43392991

Also discovered during reverse-engineering of the devices’ communications protocols.

IoT device security is an utterly shambolic mess.
by brudgers | 2026-02-14 21:45:27+00:00
In the abstract, I don't see an obvious practical advantage of 3d steganography over 2d because the tools for 2d (printers and cameras) are more readily accessible and the processes of creation and reading are faster...particularly reading.

There might be corner cases where 3d makes sense...but it is hard to compete with decals/stickers, and 2d steganography can also use color and saturation as additional data dimensions.

But I could be wrong.
by int0x29 | 2026-02-14 21:46:34+00:00
This is typically solved by publishing reactions/corrections or in the case of news programs starting the next one with a retraction/correction. This happens in some academic journals and some news outlets. I've seen the PBS Newshour and the New York Times do this. I've also seen Ars Technica do this with some science articles (Not sure what the difference in this case is or if it will take some more time)
by Kerrick | 2026-02-14 21:47:16+00:00
> However, it is important to ask if you want to stop investing in your own skills because of a speculative prediction made by an AI researcher or tech CEO.

I don't think these are exclusive. Almost a year ago, I wrote a blog post about this [0]. I spent the time since then both learning better software design and learning to vibe code. I've worked through Domain-Driven Design Distilled, Domain-Driven Design, Implementing Domain-Driven Design, Design Patterns, The Art of Agile Software Development, 2nd Edition, Clean Architecture, Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, and Tidy First?. I'm a far better software engineer than I was in 2024. I've also vibe coded [1] a whole lot of software [2], some good and some bad [3].

You can choose to grow in both areas.

[0]: https://kerrick.blog/articles/2025/kerricks-wager/

[1]: As defined in Vibe Coding: Building Production-Grade Software With GenAI, Chat, Agents, and Beyond by Gene Kim and Steve Yegge, wherein you still take responsibility for the code you deliver.

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46702093

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46719500
by staticassertion | 2026-02-14 21:47:26+00:00
> although I wouldn’t be surprised if many auditors wouldn’t notice

lol seriously, this is like... at least 50% of the time how it would play out, and I think the other 49% it would be "ah sorry, I'll grab that and email it over" and maybe 1% of the time it's a finding.

It just doesn't match anything. And if it were FEDRAMP, well holy shit, a URL was never acceptable anyways.
by tsoukase | 2026-02-14 21:49:16+00:00
From the peak-civilization of Ancient Greeks a steady slow decline started and continued until the calamity of 5th cent AD. Pick your start of middle ages sometime there.

For a very long time a dark cloud was hiding the sun of wisdom until the scientific and other conquests came over. Pick your end there.

All that in the Western part of the world...
by bradley13 | 2026-02-14 21:50:46+00:00
The amount of accumulated cruft in the x86 architecture is astounding.

Being a geezer, I remember when there was, for a brief moment, a genuine question whether National Semiconductor, Motorola, or Intel would win the PC market. The NS processors had a nice, clean architecture. The Motorola processors, meh, ok. Intel already had cruft from earlier efforts like the 4004, and was just ugly.

Of course, Intel won, Motorola came in second, and NS became a footnote.

The x86 architecture has only gotten uglier over time.
by viraptor | 2026-02-14 21:51:01+00:00
> And the 'start a thread' nazis

Social issues can't be solved by technical means. Just slightly incentivised in some direction (like discord's "this is the third reply, would you like a thread instead?")

But for the resource usage, ripcord https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ already proved you can have a capable client which is super light and fast if you care. This was made by a single person and in many ways is better than the official client.
by rembal | 2026-02-14 21:51:22+00:00
Anecdotal evidence to confirm: I had two false alarms from an unrelated MRI scan, and beside wasting a lot of time on diagnosing them - it was also extremely stressful.

My father is a part of "full body PET scan every 3 years" program as part of post - cancer treatment, and it worked twice: early detected lung and prostate tumors, both removed.
by leni536 | 2026-02-14 21:51:33+00:00
Apparently perma.cc is officially used by some courts in the US. I did use it in addition to the wayback machine when I collected paper trail for a minor retail dispute, but I did not have to use it.

I don't know how exactly it achieves being "legally certifiable", at least to the point that courts are trusting it. Signing and timestamping with independent transparency logs would be reasonable.

https://perma.cc/sign-up/courts
by krapp | 2026-02-14 21:52:03+00:00
>to be boring, the term "enshittification" was invented by one individual, recently, and has a specific meaning. it does not refer to "things just get worse"

It literally started meaning that hours after it was first posted to HN and being used. Sorry, that's just how language works. Enshittification got enshittified. Deal with it and move on.
by 1718627440 | 2026-02-14 21:52:09+00:00
So applications using e.g. Motif or some custom UI toolkit have completely wrong sizes then?

> Gnome uses GTK4, which supports this. Mate uses GTK3, which does not.

Damn. I tend to build against an older GTK3 version, because GTK deprecated so much good stuff, but that means my programs won't work correctly for that. I need to look whether it's easy to backport this.
by charcircuit | 2026-02-14 21:52:13+00:00
>It just slurps in all of the code, documentation, and supporting material, and knows everything. It's an immediate expert.

In practice this is not how agentic coding works right now. Especially for established projects the context can make a big difference in the performance of the agent. By doing simpler tasks it can build a memory of what works well, what doesn't, or other things related to effectively contributing to the project. I suggest you try out OpenClaw and you will see that it does in fact learn from practice. It may make some mistakes, but as you correct it the bot will save such information in its memory and reference that in the future to avoid making the same mistake again.
by givemeethekeys | 2026-02-14 21:54:20+00:00
- Learn basic electronics.

- Learn about micro controllers and embedded programming.

- Learn about motors.

- Learn about gears, pulleys, torque - some physics things - enough to think about how you could potentially build something.

- Build something small. Maybe a robot sunflower that follows the sun with a built in solar panel that keeps its battery charged... I dunno, I just came up with that. Or an automatic blinds opener / closer for your blinds / home curtains.

- Learn, build, rinse, repeat..
by t3chd33r | 2026-02-14 21:54:32+00:00
Is this some kind of joke? Claude hallucinated everything, including capacity of device to accurately measure EGG of brain waves and hallucinated the process of decoding APK to some paranoidal user who has posted his conspiracy level AI hallucinations “finds” to his blog post and everyone is like “Yeah, Claude can do this”. Is everyone here insane? I am insane?
by stonogo | 2026-02-14 21:54:57+00:00
It was, in fact, even with existing Microsoft products (Lync/Skype for Business). It was even possible if you had paid for those features for UCM from Cisco. Teams was simply the cheaper option (although they tried to keep charging my org Lync prices, and we had to threaten to uproot MS products and go to Cisco before they gave us the new pricing).
by p0pularopinion | 2026-02-14 21:55:38+00:00
> Isn't it possible you could be early-detecting something serious that is much easier to treat now vs when symptoms appear?

It could be. It could also be the cade that you undergo invasive surgery for something that would have never caused you problems within your life. The problem is that cancer isn‘t cancer. Even if it originates from the same tissue, some tumors behave very different from others.
by krapp | 2026-02-14 21:55:43+00:00
We can't. This forum is run by the company that used to be run by Sam Altman and it's already full of people who work in the industry that's driving AI adoption and who use and aggressively believe in AI to the point of religion. There are already bot accounts posting, and humans posting comments filtered by AI. Most Show HNs are vibe coded.

There's nothing anyone can do about it. No matter how many guidelines dang deploys, no matter how much negative social pressure we apply (and we could apply much more but doing so would just run afoul of the tone policing of the guidelines) people will use AI because they want to, and because it's a part of their identity politics, specifically to spite people who don't want to see it. It's just a matter of time.

The Fediverse is currently good, the culture there is rabidly anti-capitalist and anti-AI. I like Mastodon. But that will eventually, inevitably get ruined as well, and we'll just have to move on to the next thing.
by staticassertion | 2026-02-14 21:55:46+00:00
The first thing you do when you're getting this information is get PDFs from these vendors like their SOC2 attestation etc. You wouldn't just screenshot the page, that would be nuts.

Any vendor who you work with should make it trivial to access these docs, even little baby startups usually make it quite accessible - although often under NDA or contract, but once that's over with you just download a zip and everything is there.
by gradus_ad | 2026-02-14 21:55:51+00:00
> OpenAI spends time and money building a slack competitor, because they've apparently run out of good ideas

> Slack uses AI to improve the existing product

> Slack is still marginally better, so businesses continue paying for it

> OpenAI now on the hook for maintaining one of many cheap slack clones

> Investors are left scratching their heads...

Late stage bubble behavior
by latchkey | 2026-02-14 21:56:05+00:00
Neat, but you can just do this in mermaid too. Taking one of your examples:

<mermaid>
flowchart LR

web([Frontend])

subgraph platform [Cloud Platform]
api([API Server])
db[(Database)]
api --> db
end

web -->|HTTPS| api
</mermaid>

If you install the latest https://oj-hn.com , you can see it rendered inline here.
by markus_zhang | 2026-02-14 21:56:17+00:00
Yeah this is definitely a hell of read which probably has more historical values than real ones. The book "Inside Windows NT" also gives a good overview about Windows NT 3.1. There is another one called "Understanding Windows NT File System" which talks about the fs I think.

The biggest problem is NT is not open-source, and while there are leaked copies posted online, there is no "official" build guide so people have to try their luck.
by jiggawatts | 2026-02-14 21:58:21+00:00
Teams developers are like that obese guy in the seat next to you on the airplane, just… spreading out into your personal space.

For example, Teams likes to control system-wide audio settings instead of acting like any other application. I had to disable the “allow applications to have dedicated hardware access” feature in my sound card driver to stop it screwing around with my settings. I’ve never had to do this for any other app.

It also likes to “edit” system controls like right-click menus on the task bar. This not only breaks muscle memory, but they also put in a gap so that if you move the mouse onto the menu… it closes.
by spwa4 | 2026-02-14 21:58:26+00:00
What about the "default on the loan" backdoor? Would that work?

Let's say I sell you my business for $1 million. You give me a loan for $1,2 million. The money is transferred into my account. I pay 2% interest for 10 years and then I default on the loan. You do nothing to recover the money.

Tax free sale, no?
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-02-14 21:58:51+00:00
> Why it uses 400mb I have no idea.

Yes, this is an important detail as well.

Make a Slack clone, but have it perform way better than the original (less RAM, CPU usage), with a smaller storage footprint.

Also deliver on features faster than the original. And have those features be more tailored to what the users both want and need - and things they didn’t even know they needed as well.

This is, after all, what’s being promised, no?
by p0pularopinion | 2026-02-14 21:59:49+00:00
> My father is a part of "full body PET scan every 3 years" program as part of post - cancer treatment,

These treatments are wonderful and it is great that they exist. But many people fail to understand the difference in terms of pretest probability, etc.

I can absolutely see the heavy psychological impact pending biopsy results may have. People are quick to discount these issues when you raise them as a concern, but only if they never went through this stress themselves