MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bitwize | 2026-02-07 21:53:46+00:00
Jonathan Blow is famously working on a programming language for games, called Jai; but he never mentions it by name when he streams. I think his concern is similar to Chuck Moore's: that the language should exist in the abstract, and when you start nailing it down too tightly by naming and standardizing it, you create problems later when you want to change those things. It's clay he can mold, something to experiment with. How much more true is that of Forth for Chuck.

The strange thing is that imho, as in many other things around language design, Scheme sort of had the right idea. I like having a well-defined semantics with wide agreement that I can write programs on. The fact that the Common Lisp standard is practically unchanged since the 80s, and the core of Ada has survived with only significantly useful extensions added on in later standards, is real neat to me, compared with C++0x/1x/2x being a completely different beast than the C++ of the 90s, and Rust and JavaScript undergoing constant churn. The RnRS process, historically, was all about defining a core that implementers could all agree on, calling it Scheme, and then letting implementers fuck around on top of that basis. R6RS and R7RS were controversial precisely because they deviated from this; although R7RS tried to please both the "small core" camp and the "Python with parens" camp. Which is kind of like trying to please both classic Sonic fans and post-Adventure Sonic fans.

But yeah, I think Chuck's advanced age and a general feeling of "I'm too tired for this shit" were the primary reasons for making that announcement. And you may be right, he may be just telling us not to get too attached to a particular artifact but to embrace the idea of Forth. Maybe the real ColorForth was the friends we made along the way. May the Forth be with you, my friend.
by kaydub | 2026-02-07 21:53:47+00:00
I knew nothing about game development a few months ago. Now I've built a simple godot game. I'm sure the game is all pretty common (simple 2d naval combat game) but it's still impressive that a couple claude/gemini/codex cli sessions spit out a working game (admittedly, I'm not a professional artist, so THAT part of it has been painful since I can't rely on generative AI to do that, I have to do it myself with aesprite. But maybe a professional artist would know HOW to prompt for the artwork)

Agentic programming still needs devs/engineers. It's only going to take your lunch if you let it. And by that, I mean the FUD and complete refusal to give good faith attempts to use the ai/llm tools.
by gambutin | 2026-02-07 21:54:38+00:00
It’s a bit odd how fast the discussion moves away from what actually happened and onto nitpicking the wording used to criticize it.

Even if you drop the word “sole” entirely, the basic expectation is still that a government does not kill unarmed civilians.

At that point, it is fair to wonder whether the objection adds any clarity, or just pulls attention away from the judgment itself.
by manwe150 | 2026-02-07 21:55:01+00:00
But think about it this way: something simple like Slack charges $9/month/person and companies already pay that on many behalf. How hard would it be to imagine all those same companies (and lots more) would pay $30/month/employee for something something AI? Generating an extra $400 per year in value, per employee, isn't that much extra.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-02-07 21:55:05+00:00
Isnt't the FBI trying to shut down archive.today

An anonymous site operator, serving CAPTCHAs to force users to enable Javascript, collecting a potential treasure trove of browsing history, trying to evade authorities with fluctuating IP addresses, an assortment of domain registrations and who knows what other tactics

It's a crowd favorite
by tsycho | 2026-02-07 21:55:07+00:00
But setups get equally complicated, even with human software engineers. The approach that the OP is talking about applies only to experienced, good architect-level SWEs, and I suspect that the code quality and its problems are going to be the same whether they are directing LLMs vs a set of junior SWEs to write the code.

There is an inherent level of complexity in projects that solve some real world problem, due to all the code handling edge cases that were added incrementally over time.
by AnotherGoodName | 2026-02-07 21:55:15+00:00
AI data centers are a whole lot of pipelines pumping data around utilizing queues. They want those expensive power hungry cards near 100% utilized at all times. So they have a queue of jobs on each system ready to run, feeding into the GPU memory as fast as completed jobs are read out of memory (and passed into the next stage) and they aim to have enough backlog in these queues to keep the pipeline full. You see responses in seconds but at the data center you're request was broken into jobs, passed around into queues, processed in an orderly manner and pieced back together.

With fast mode you're literally skipping the queue. An outcome of all of this is that for the rest of us the responses will become slower the more people use this 'fast' option.

I do suspect they'll also soon have a slow option for those that have Claude doing things overnight with no real care for latency of the responses. The ultimate goal is pipelines of data hitting 100% hardware utilization at all times.
by juanjmanfredi | 2026-02-07 21:55:32+00:00
Particle physicists working on collider experiments were among the first people that needed to deal with large quantities of digitally stored data. As a result, advances in the particle and nuclear physics have fed advances in computing, and vice versa [0]. The World Wide Web was invented at CERN, the largest particle physics and accelerator laboratory in the world [1]. Another example more relevant to this post is when a few physicists developed a CouchDB-based solution to handle the large amounts of data generated by their RHIC and CERN experiments. They spun that out into Cloudant, which was one of the pioneers for DBaaS [2].

[0] https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/the-coevolution-of-...

[1] https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudant
by wat10000 | 2026-02-07 21:55:38+00:00
It’s not very good in context, for one thing. Context isn’t that big, and RAG is clumsy. Working with an LLM agent is like working with someone who can’t form new long term memories. You have to get them up to speed from scratch every time. You can accelerate this by putting important stuff into the context, but that slows things down and can’t handle very much stuff.
by JamesTRexx | 2026-02-07 21:55:39+00:00
I'm pulling apart and rewriting so far a little in C a personal fork of OpenTTD 12.2. I began on it a few years ago for the first time for the heck of it after patching for realtime, began again while adding features I wanted until I hit a bad enough snag, and now began again by first extracting most used functions and profiling with Valgrind inbetween.

Things I noticed are inconsistent coding styles, overly complex processes, unused(!) functions, inefficient data use, nothing surprising with a project worked on by various people in their spare time and their own ideas on how to code. And this isn't even talking about later versions. To me it's an example of how unrestricted access to bling features causes a mess.

Eventually I want it converted to C (C23), split apart in seperate functions with a decent source code organisation, and simplified processes to make it easier to understand what's going on and extend fuctionality. For this I need it simplified as possible and weed out the layer of complexity caused by C++ first. Going to take plenty of time, but I'm still having fun doing it (most of the time anyway :-p ).

I'm not advocating anything, but it's satifying to me to bring clarity to code and see small improvements to performance during the process at the same time. It also gave me an opportunity to develop a unique syntax style that visualises parts of the code better for me.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-02-07 21:56:09+00:00
There's an interesting phenomenon I noticed with the "skeptics". They're constantly using what-ifs (aka goalpost moving), but the interesting thing is that those exact same what-ifs were "solved" earlier, but dismissed as "not good enough".

This exact thing about optimisation has been shown years ago. "Here's a function, make it faster". With "glue" to test the function, and it kinda worked even with GPT4 era models. Then came alphaevolve where google found improvements in real algorithms (both theoretical i.e. packing squares and practical i.e. ML kernels). And yet these were dismissed as "yeah, but that's just optimisation, that's easyyyy. Wake me up when they write software from 0 to 1 and it works".

Well, here we are. We now have a compiler that can compile and boot linux! And people are complaining that the code is unmaintainable and that it's slow / unoptimised. We've gone full circle, but forgot that optimisation was easyyyy. Now it's something to complain about. Oh well...
by blackjack_ | 2026-02-07 21:56:21+00:00
Because they want to build cool things or tasteful things or things that actually help people.

I'm ex Lockheed, where I worked alongside the NASA software engineers building and testing and verifying software for human spaceflight in the ITL. 70 to 80 hour weeks happened quarterly, and people worked with it. Because an important thing is actually being built and deployed and billions of dollars and human lives depend on it. I jumped ship because things progressed slow AF, but there was no shortage of people who wanted to build cool things at reasonable salaries (yes low for software, but not low salaries generally).

This same thing is what has driven SpaceX and Blue Origin in the private sector. The same thing drives the whole nonprofit sector. The government is a similar employer, though in the past couple of years obviously not as good.

Big Tech self selects for money grubbing and willingness to chase it at expense of everything else in your life. Many others are happier at smaller companies with lower pay scales and healthier work/life balances, or where they get to work on interesting problems with huge scales and they are paid enough to not worry about money anymore (this is possible in most non VHCOL places).
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-07 21:56:23+00:00
> has there been any discovery made with the help of a collider that found its way into an industrial product?

Yes. SLAC has an excellent public-lecture series that touches on industrial uses of particle colliders [1].

If you want a concrete example, "four basic technologies have been developed to generate EUV light sources:" (1) synchrotron radiation, (2) discharge-produced plasma, (3) free-elecron lasers (FELs) and (4) laser-produced plasma [2]. Synchrotrons are circular colliders. FELs came out of linear colliders [3]. (China has them too [4].)

We have modern semiconductors because we built colliders.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_M6sjEYCE2I&list=PLFDBBAE492...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S270947232...

[3] https://lcls.slac.stanford.edu

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Synchrotron_Radiation...
by sseagull | 2026-02-07 21:56:24+00:00
Over the long term, yes. However, universities like Buffalo might have some peculiarities. They are overall run by the state government, and professors/students/staff are state employees. In addition, the money that pays their salary often comes from the federal government (NSF, DOE, NIH) which comes with their own restrictions and regulations beyond typical accounting practices.

So things like reimbursements are handled by a university trying to implement a state government's interpretation of both granting agencies desires and federal and state laws/regulations.

My university seems to be going crazy with rules lately. My hypothesis is that the state, and by extension the university, wants to button down everything so as not draw attention of the federal government (given who is in charge). It's taking already stressed professors (funding cuts, etc) and piling on more stress.
by bstsb | 2026-02-07 21:56:29+00:00
upon remembering, it was actually just Token Auth - for some reason, when i created a machine identity in my parent organization, tbe CLI would always return a 403 for any project ID, regardless of whether i gave the identity the adequate permissions.

i got around it by just generating an identity for each project, which was probably a better idea anyway for granularity
Show HN: Animated beach scene, made with CSS
by ahmedoo | 2026-02-07 21:57:16+00:00
Started as an experiment to make an animated curtain, and ended up with a beach. I was curious what level of graphics you can create with just CSS and HTML in 2026. I learned that some animations (like animating box-shadows and gradients) are expensive and there's some hardware acceleration special case for mobile OSes. There's a little JS to fetch the time and and autoplay a 24-hour cycle.

https://github.com/ahmed-machine/beach-scene/tree/main
by nosuchthing | 2026-02-07 21:57:59+00:00
Slop influencers like Peter Steinberger get paid to promote AI vibe coding startups and the agentic token burning hype. Ironically they're so deep into the impulsivity of it all that they can't even hide it.

- Factory, unconvinced. Their marketing videos are just too cringe, and any company that tries to get my attentions with free tokens in my DMs reduce my respect for them. If you're that good, you don't need to convince me by giving me free stuff. Additionally, some posts on Twitter about it have this paid influencer smell. If you use claude code tho, you'll feel right at home with the [signature flicker](https://x.com/badlogicgames/status/1977103325192667323).

+ Factory, unconvinced. Their videos are a bit cringe, I do hear good things in my timeline about it tho, even if images aren't supported (yet) and they have the [signature flicker](https://x.com/badlogicgames/status/1977103325192667323).

https://github.com/steipete/steipete.me/commit/725a3cb372bc2...
by designerarvid | 2026-02-07 21:58:07+00:00
Figma has an isolation mode for individual vectors, press enter while it’s selected.

Not what you’re after, but working with groups in Figma can be handy.

Try cmd+click to select elements inside groups directly. Then shift+enter to select the parent group. You can do enter again to select all elements in the group. You can cycle selection in the group with tab. All of this works with multi-select, which can be very efficient.

IMO working with groups in Figma is much more powerful than illustrator Depends what you are trying to do, of course.
by dvfjsdhgfv | 2026-02-07 21:58:11+00:00
If we want to get really narrow I'd say real determinism is possible only in abstract systems, to which you'd reply it's just my ignorance of all possible factors involved and hence the incompleteness of the model. To which I'd point of practical limitations involved with that. And that reason, even though it is incorrect and I don't use it in this way, I understand why some people are using the quantifiers more/less with the term "deterministic", probably for the lack of a better construct.
by cjbgkagh | 2026-02-07 21:58:28+00:00
You are wrong on the definition of arbitrary.

I’m pretty sure laws can be changed easier than lifespans can doubled. You can’t always do things right the first time because knowledge unfolds with time, you’ll always know more later. You are proposing a waterfall design versus an iterative design. It would be easy enough to run an experiment for a few years to see if the lives saved are worth it.
by eslaught | 2026-02-07 21:59:37+00:00
It's that, but it's also that the incentives are misaligned.

How many supposed "10x" coders actually produced unreadable code that no one else could maintain? But then the effort to produce that code is lauded while the nightmare maintenance of said code is somehow regarded as unimpressive, despite being massively more difficult?

I worry that we're creating a world where it is becoming easy, even trivial, to be that dysfunctional "10x" coder, and dramatically harder to be the competent maintainer. And the existence of AI tools will reinforce the culture gap rather than reducing it.
by jdjuwadi | 2026-02-07 22:00:00+00:00
Hey thanks! You will still need have Xcode and Simulator installed but we aim to allow you complete your project without configuring Xcode.

1) Yes but we're happy to supply additional credits if need be to complete your project
2) You do have to setup an Apple Developer account which means you will own the app you publish
3) Absolutely, we have a Supabase integration and you do not have to share that data with us

If that all sounds good, you can sign-up and download the build on www.milq.ai/hacker-news
by orochimaaru | 2026-02-07 22:00:15+00:00
Didn't you have a specific per day expense budget? I think there is a department of labor guidance for local travel and a department of state guidance for international travel.

Usually, if your per day expense is less or equal to the guidance (where I work we do $90/day), no one cares. If you go above, you pay. The per day expense is for food. Alcohol cannot be claimed as an expense unless you are in sales.
by jmyeet | 2026-02-07 22:00:36+00:00
The popularity of a genre is deeply tied to the historical context of what's going on in the real world. In the 1950s and 1960s you obviously had the Space Race, which itself was a product of the Cold War. Some commments view this as optimism. I disagree. I view it as an expression of patriotism.

I view this patriotism as a crutch in uncertain times. Another example of this is the rise of the superhero genre in the 21st century. Marven was skirting with bankruptcy in the 1990s. A perpetual Spiderman license was sold for a fraction of what it would today. And I think it's no coincidence that the superhero genre ascended post-9/11.

I used to read a lot of fantasy but many years ago I pretty much switched almost entirely to sci-fi. For me the reason was because sci-fi asked questions. I mean there's also space opera and it scratches the same itch as fantasy (IMNHO) but my personal interest in sci-fi is more in the "what if" category.

That's a very broad category that goes all the way from, say, the Iain M. Banks Culture series, which really poses the question of what an ultra-high tech post-scarcity civilization looks like to something like The Handmaid's Tale (yes, that's sci-fi). We've also had some superb sci-fi on the screen in recent years like Severance, Silo and The Expanse.

For me, fantasy is a far more limited genre. Like I'm trying to read Brandon Sanderson recently and while he's a good writer, it's just not hooking me yet in the same way that, say, Revelation Space did. I think the last fantasy series to really hook me was A Song of Ice and Fire. The first three books are some of the finest books ever written.

But as for the decline of starships, I think that the readership has evolved too. More vintage sci-fi simply projected the era of exploration and colonization onto space and it's become pretty clear how unrealistic that is because of the vast distances involved. You have to remember that popular media in the 1960s expected Moon bases and such in the not-too-distant future. Star Trek was really the last gasp of this and, interestingly, Star Trek is fundamentally socialist, which is noteworthy given that it originated in the Cold War.

Star Wars on the other hand was a tale of the resistance to imperialism. George Lucas has said he modeled the resistance on the North Vietnamese. Cyberpunk came about in the 1980s (eg Neuromancer, Blade Runner) that had nothing to do with starships but they really reflected a societal pessimism. Cyberpunk is inherently xenophobic (ie because of fears of the Japanese).

I wonder if the popularity of fantasy is fundamentally escapist and an expression of helplessness. Think about it: fantasy usually revolves around the outsized impact of individual actions, of a hero or heroine.
by skeeter2020 | 2026-02-07 22:00:53+00:00
37 signals has a story about this, and the birth of policies & procedures that cost far more than the "crime" they're intended to prevent, because in your case it was $5 in granola bars, but that scenario will repeat itself for the rest of time, and extra resources will likely be dedicated to this "problem area". This seems inevitable as companies grow, and is one of the signals I use that it's close to my time to leave.
by AdrianB1 | 2026-02-07 22:01:28+00:00
Agree, but your explanation stops short of the full explanation: because fraud appeared, people were not punished for it, so it grew until it mattered, so everyone was punished with bureaucracy. If fraud would be quickly and severely punished (by termination), it would be at a level close enough to zero to even ignore it. But I think companies think it is better to get lower paid employees with less ethics and save 10k while losing 1k to fraud, per employee.
by kykat | 2026-02-07 22:01:29+00:00
I'm just going to say: When opening the "twins" (bad clones) screenshots, I pressed the right key to view the next image, and surprise, the next "article" of the top navigation bar was loaded, instead of showing the next image.

Is this the quality we should expect from agentic? From my experiments with claude code, yes, the UX details are never there. Especially for bigger features. It can work reasonably well independently up to a "module" level (with clear interfaces). But for full app design, while technically possible, the UX and visual design is just not there.

And I am very not attracted to the idea of polishing such an agentic apps. A solution could be:
1. The boss prompts the system with what he wants.
2. The boss outsources to india the task of polishing the rough edges.

===

More on the arrow keys navigation:
Pressing right on the last "Products" page loops to the first "Story" page, yet pressing left on the first page does nothing. Typical UX inconsistency of vibe coded software.
by throwaway0123_5 | 2026-02-07 22:01:33+00:00
> 3d graphics

Seems like the G in GPU is very obsolete now:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-h100-benchmarkedin-...

> As it turns out Nvidia's H100, a card that costs over $30,000 performs worse than integrated GPUs in such benchmarks as 3DMark and Red Dead Redemption 2
by sprice | 2026-02-07 22:01:35+00:00
I disagree the opportunities created for software engineers are reduced to those of a "glorified TSA agent".

We now have more opportunity than ever to create more of the things we have wanted to. We are able to spend more time leaning into our abilities of judgement, creativity, specific knowledge, and taste.

Countless programming frustrations are gone. I, and all those I talk to are having more fun than they have ever had.

I'm still not sure what analogy fits for me. It's closer to product manager/maestro/artist/architect/designer that helps a number of amazing systems create great code.