MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Someone1234 | 2026-02-17 16:20:57+00:00
> student loan relief inflationary and unfair

The problem with US student loans is usury.

Student Loan interest rates in the US can be as high as 9-13%. The government can borrow at 3.36% which even if we assume a 20% overhead is 4.03% to the borrower. Other countries/governments do a scheme similar to this, and it makes repayment realistic.

I'm certain someone will respond telling me the difference between Subsidized, Unsubsidized, PLUS, and private loans which completely missing the point: There shouldn't be a private entity that needs to turn a profit on the backs of students begin with, it is immoral. If you remove the private for-profit entity, the loan-type distinction goes away.

It isn't uncommon to read stories from people, who graduated and are in good jobs, and had no gaps in repayments that are now on 300%+ of their original borrowed amount.
by dbspin | 2026-02-17 16:21:07+00:00
Great example of narrow rationality. Huge amount of Americas current problems can be traced back to a poorly educated population. Universal access to third level education, combined with a school system designed to educate - in direct opposition to current goal of producing labour units for corporate; would massively improve pretty much ever aspect of American life.

The market lens is myopic, the market cannot be expected to produce social goods in proportion to necessity - that's not any part of its function.

I agree that the student loan system is insane. Students need grants to cover cost of living while they focus on learning, education itself of course should be free.
by bondarchuk | 2026-02-17 16:21:16+00:00
>whether there are any real, noticeable physical differences between the sound produced by a Strad and that produced by expert modern luthiers.

Isn't this trivially true? I'm sure if you hook up both cellos to a bowing robot using many permutations of contact point, fingering, speed, pressure and angle, and record the sound, it would be possible to consistently discern them through spectral analysis or something. Is the claim that if an expert modern luthier reproduces a stradivarius he can get it so close as to measure identically?

edit: by the way

>I agree with everything you've said. It's also completely irrelevant to the question at hand, which is whether there are any real, noticeable physical differences between the sound produced by a Strad and that produced by expert modern luthiers.

I don't know why you would say my post is irrelevant to that question. You said "people should be able to hear the difference in that sound in blind tests", and I'm saying that the difference between two cellos could be more complicated than just listening to one after the other for some minutes and filling in a questionnaire.
by Starman_Jones | 2026-02-17 16:21:26+00:00
I agree with you about student loan forgiveness, but disagree with your assessment of universities as a system. The humanities (which are highly profitable for the university) are suffering an existential crisis because their funding keeps getting cut, while STEM programs (which have low or even negative ROI after lab/equipment/resource costs) keep getting expanded. There's obviously more nuance to that, but at a high level, universities are prioritizing majors which have higher job placement at the expense of their own bottom line.
by rajma | 2026-02-17 16:21:46+00:00
Over past year, I have realized (and accepted) two things:
- I do actually learn from AI chatbots.
- Chat interface is very hard to focus, I cannot go back to a useful chat from the past and reread it to revise the topic I learnt from it

To solve this, I created StewReads MCP server which instructs Claude to generate a nicely formatted ebook based on the chat. Now, when I feel I have learned something from a chat, I simply invoke the `stew` prompt and have the ebook on my Kindle device and app in minutes. Works well with claude.ai, Claude Desktop app and Cowork. You can also try it by sending ebook to your email if you dont want to setup Kindle yet.

Looking forward to your comments and suggestions.
Happy Stewing!
by throwaway72361 | 2026-02-17 16:21:51+00:00
Apple doesn't have a "forever" license. They have an architectural license, similar to a small number of other Arm architectural licensees, with certain contractual payment terms, lengths, restrictions, and timelines for extension, etc. The idea that Apple has a special, perpetual free license to Arm ISA/technology as a result of their involvement in its founding is a myth.
by lolc | 2026-02-17 16:21:53+00:00
This is a pattern I observe frequently where the text generator replaces very specific code comments with generic versions. Same for variable names that are written in blood.

I do wonder whether "semantic ablation" is the right term for what is going on. Ablation I think fits because it refers to the removal of layers. And yes they are semantic layers. But ablation refers to the process, not the result. So on its own shortening "ablation of semantic layers" to "semantic ablation" is problematic. It sounds like semantics are used for ablation. "Semantically streamlined" could capture the intended meaning but of course streamlining has a positive ring to it, where ablation sounds problematic as it should. I guess "semantic fusiform" is too obscure :-)
by tpierce89 | 2026-02-17 16:21:58+00:00
shard isn't about generating content, it's infrastructure for distributed AI compute. instead of paying cloud providers for GPU time, it lets you tap into spare WebGPU capacity from browsers + verification nodes. think of it as shared computing resources rather than an AI assistant. The assistant is just a way to show that distributed inference works. I also plan to add access to the api.
by pete-thios | 2026-02-17 16:22:38+00:00
I've been working away on this by myself for about 18 months now. Built 3 prototypes in real life, getting the CAD models correct and getting ready to maybe do a kickstarter to fund the building of a few prototypes. This is a very efficient use of resources. Strong and lightweight. Mobile and modular. 200 2x4's and 4 sheets of plywood and a bucket of bolts and screws creates the modular, flat-packable frame.

Its all open source, (with strong reciprocity) build it, hack it, fork it now. Why don't we have an open modular standard for shelters like Saunas? (or greenhouses, or small offices, or...).

No mercy, no malice - let me know what you think
by cogman10 | 2026-02-17 16:22:39+00:00
Healthcare is in exactly the same boat.

A major part of why it's so expensive is because of government subsidies to private healthcare insurance. No or little public option is exactly what allows insurance companies to go hog wild on their premiums.

The ACA subsidies are simply a bandaid on a broken system which allows insurance to further break the system as they adapt to what people are willing to pay for a necessity.
by anon291 | 2026-02-17 16:22:40+00:00
That's not science then. Just because engineering is equally enigmatic to most people as science doesn't mean they're the same.

Science means applying the scientific method.

"I hypothesize that method X is the best way to construct a robot that does Y and I've tested methods A, B, and C to validate that claim"

That's science.

Just building something can actually be a pursuit of non science..this is why many engineers have not invented here syndrome. They think they're thinking scientifically, but they don't. Thus, instead of checking their assumptions, they run with them.
by alistairSH | 2026-02-17 16:22:45+00:00
The other comments cover it.

We have civil offenses, the most common example would be minor traffic offense (speeding but not recklessly, etc). These were criminal at one time, but arresting people for minor speeding was deemed inappropriate.

Then we have misdemeanors - everything from reckless driving through basic assault (no injuries, no weapon). Usually/always <1 year in prison as the max punishment. Some financial crimes. Usually don't appear on basic background checks, but might on details checks (like when working for a bank or the government).

Then there are felonies - assault with a weapon, major financial crimes, etc. Typically >1 year prison sentences. As noted, these can impact your rights as a citizen and they will appear on most background checks.

As I mentioned in another comment, district attorneys frequently charge as many individual crimes as possible as a tactic to get cooperation/plea from the accused.

For example, you get pulled over for DUI/drink-driving. You're blotto, and you get out of your car and try to walk away. Police tackle you. The chargeable offenses would be at least...
- whatever initial infraction caused the traffic stop (speeding, swerving, whatever) - that was probably civil.
- The DUI - a misdemeanor unless it was excessive or a repeat offense
- "Fleeing and eluding" or equivalent for walking away - misdemeanor, usually.
- Assaulting a law enforcement officer (by forcing the police to tackle you) - automatic felony in many states.

The DA will often accept a guilty plea on everything up to the felony assault, or reduce the assault from "against a LEO" to normal assault (non-felony) to clear their plate.

No idea if this is common in the rest of the anglo-sphere, or anywhere else.
by ajross | 2026-02-17 16:22:45+00:00
That doesn't work, because the Universities benefitting from the high-risk student loans are not the ones making bank from their grants and endowments. This is an imagined enemy fallacy. What you're really doing is demanding that Harvard somehow make whole the defrauded students of the University of Phoenix.

Now, sure, there's a genuine argument that those diploma factory schools aren't providing valuable service and are just parasites subsisting on public loan guarantees while their students bear the risk. But that's not a financial argument, it's a regulatory one.

No one thinks that people shouldn't be allowed to float a Stanford degree on loans, and "dismantling the entire system" just guarantees that we return to the era where only the rich could afford Ivy degrees.
by co_king_5 | 2026-02-17 16:22:47+00:00
> The price jump between subscription tiers is so high that relatively few people will upgrade instead of waiting a few more hours

Not so for functionally-code-illiterate addicts. If they need to maintain the illusion that they know how to write code (at the level of their coworkers), they will easily pay $200 to keep the machine spinning
by sam-cop-vimes | 2026-02-17 16:22:48+00:00
I feel for the author, but I'm not sure we will ever get to the point where programmers are replaced. Building a software product requires so much more than just writing some code. Yes, pretty soon most of us might not be writing individual functions or modules and rely on code generation instead. But to even produce a collection of cooperating services which deliver a coherent UX still requires hundreds of small decisions to be made. Our Lego blocks got bigger.

We didn't feel the same impact moving from assembly to high level languages probably because there was a smaller programmer population perhaps? And computers weren't underpinning the lives of all people.

IMHO, the danger with the current trend isn't necessarily the change to the day job of a "programmer". It is that this leads to a concentration of power in a small group of people. Then again, computer hardware were always the produce of a very small number of players and we managed to live through that without too much of a catastrophe. In aggregate, the world got better. Like with any new technological development, there are pros and cons. It is up to us as a society to amplify the pros and attenuate the cons.

Yes, writing a beautiful piece of code by hand is fun - and yes, the days of doing purely that for a living are probably disappearing soon, but there is no going back. Make peace with it and evolve.
by GregorStocks | 2026-02-17 16:22:49+00:00
I've been teaching LLMs to play Magic: The Gathering recently, via MCP tools hooked up to the open-source XMage codebase. It's still pretty buggy and I think there's significant room for existing models to get better at it via tooling improvements, but it pretty much works today. The ratings for expensive frontier models are artificially low right now because I've been focusing on cheaper models until I work out the bugs, so they don't have a lot of games in the system.
by devman0 | 2026-02-17 16:22:50+00:00
It is supposed to be if the amounts are above $250,000. I have no problem with the first $250k being risk free, that is a policy that is well published and that we all "agree" on. Making arbitrary policy decisions that in some cases depositors should be made whole when risky behavior (such as depositing above the insurance limit) bites them is problematic. Stick to the policy or change the policy don't make one off exceptions because that sets weird expectations.

89% of deposits at SVB were uninsured.
by jpgvm | 2026-02-17 16:22:51+00:00
No. The talent shortage is not a myth.
The unemployed/underemployed American programmer that can actually keep up is a myth. Everyone good (without additional baggage) is either a) employed or b) could be employed whenever they feel like it.

If you aren't good enough then don't be surprised the companies prefer an immigrant. You don't get an automatic American free pass for having less skills, experience, interviewing poorly, etc.

i.e skill issue.

Ending immigration for tech would simply mean far more global workers/offshoring in order to access the top tier talent via different means as that is the real reason all along.

Wage suppression was the old (and now largely incorrect) story. The visa is still exploitive, it should be amended to be a 10 year visa that is independent of employment so immigrants aren't screwed by layoffs.
by NoGravitas | 2026-02-17 16:22:51+00:00
Indeed. The problems exist. The Republicans have absolutely batshit and counterproductive explanations and proposed solutions for those problems, but at least they acknowledge them. The Democrats only offered condescending denial.

(Until Mamdani's campaign. But even then the DNC tried their hardest to ratfuck him, as they always do with candidates to the left of Dick Cheney.)
by m463 | 2026-02-17 16:22:58+00:00
I think many of us take it for granted. I wonder what the view on the ground was in the late 1930's and early 1940's.

Or a more recent time. I think how mechanical engineers felt in silicon valley over the last 40 years as basically 'making and shipping" was all exported to china. I have some mechanical engineer friends whose life got smaller and smaller.
by BatteryMountain | 2026-02-17 16:23:44+00:00
Spin up a mid sized linux vm (or any machine with 8 or 12 cores will do with at least 16GB RAM with nmve). Add 10 users. Install claude 10 times (one per user). Clone repo 10 times (one per user). Have a centralized place to get tasks from (db, trello, txt, etc) - this is the memory. Have a cron wake up every 10 minutes and call your script. Your script calls claude in non-interactive mode + auto accept. It grabs a new task, takes a crack at it and create a pull request. That is 6 tasks per hour per user, times 12 hours. Go from there and refine your harnesses/skills/scripts that claude's can use.

In my case, I built a small api that claude can call to get tasks. I update the tasks on my phone.

The assumption is that you have a semi-well structured codebase already (ours is 1M LOC C#). You have to use languages with strong typing + strict compiler.You have to force claude to frequently build the code (hence the cpu cores + ram + nmve requirement).

If you have multiple machines doing work, have single one as the master and give claude ssh to the others and it can configure them and invoke work on them directly. The usecase for this is when you have a beefy proxmox server with many smaller containers (think .net + debian). Give the main server access to all the "worker servers". Let claude document this infrastructure too and the different roles each machine plays. Soon you will have a small ranch of AI's doing different things, on different branches, making pull requests and putting feedback back into task manager for me to upvote or downvote.

Just try it. It works. Your mind will be blown what is possible.
by aleph_minus_one | 2026-02-17 16:24:22+00:00
> I'd like to do something that is worth doing in the sense that it's worth discussing in your "free" time too. And most programmers feel like the show Severance (yeah I know it's the other way round).

This does not fit my experience. It's rather that many passionate programmers are rather eager to talk about what they do at work (at least if they are allowed to), but the common situation is that what they do at work is barely interesting to people who are not at least somewhat interested in programming topics.
by danirod | 2026-02-17 16:24:27+00:00
It happened to me earlier today too. The response the machine gave me was completely different, as if it was a different codebase and a completely different task. It also had a few paths to some files and the username used for the `$HOME` directory was not mine. Local mode, not cloud or anything like that, and Auto mode.

Couple of "what the heck are you talking about"s, but because the attitude continued, I switched to Sonnet 4.5 and tried again, and this fixed the issue for me. I forgot to document it, and when I tried to export the original conversation for analysis it was gone.

But yeah, very confusing.
by abustamam | 2026-02-17 16:24:54+00:00
Haha having such a low range of max chars just makes it that much easier to brute force doesn't it?

On password length, I once had an account on Aetna that let me put whatever I want for my password, so I used a three-word passphrase that bitwarden generated for me. It ended up being like 20 chars.

Then I tried to log in with that password. Whooosies, the password input only allowed max 16 chars!

Ended up using a much less secure password because of this.
by toast0 | 2026-02-17 16:24:56+00:00
Population trends are a pretty big factor in enrollment. Most enrollment is by fresh high school grads. And there are significantly fewer of those then there were 10 years ago; you can make up some of that by expanding eligibility and encouraging more young people to go to college (even those that would be better served doing something else), or expanding international admissions (but maybe not in this administration).

Cost is certainly also a factor, but I suspect population is a bigger factor.
by empyrrhicist | 2026-02-17 16:24:59+00:00
One time I had to reset my password with the power company - they had such a system, and the lady had to read me something like:

Uh4zB4DP55WD!

Apparently I was a bit salty with the system when I set it.

The fact that she shouldn't have even been able to look up the password in the first place due to hashing was lost on her.
by s1artibartfast | 2026-02-17 16:25:38+00:00
What about banking regulations that mandated that SBC put those deposits into treasury bonds?

The bailout did not accelerate bond maturity. Those were picked up by other Banks when assets were sold off.

Last, who is the other banks that paid for the bailout, not taxpayers, at least not directly. If you call higher FDIC insurance rates for JPMorgan Chase a taxpayer cost, how does that logic scale to the rest of the economy?
by stevesimmons | 2026-02-17 16:25:45+00:00
USearch has a sqlite extension that supports various metrics on including Hamming distance on standard sqlite BLOB columns. It gets similar performance and is very convenient.

(There's also an indexed variant that does faster lookups, but it uses a special virtual table layout that constrains the types of the other columns in the table.)

See https://github.com/unum-cloud/USearch. pip-installable for Python users.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-17 16:25:54+00:00
> then I'd expect to see movements to force government regulation of AI

The big question that never gets answered is: What regulation, specifically?

Any one country could come out and declare that AI can’t be used or just be taxed at an exorbitant rate or something along those lines, but what would happen? The AI usage would go to another country.

If the US heavily regulated AI, China just runs away with it all. None of the calls for regulation I’ve seen have an answer for this, aside from the completely crazy calls to bomb data centers in other countries.
by andai | 2026-02-17 16:26:08+00:00
The comment I was responding to said that protocols would solve the problems with AI. I immediately imagined telling my $10/month unlimited AI to hook itself up to whatever protocol is being discussed here.

They mentioned identity being important here. I'm not sure what that means in this context (some kind of cryptographic verification, maybe?), but the part that seems relevant to me has to do with trust. Either a person is trusted by people I trust, or at least an organization I trust makes some claim about this person (e.g. they're actually human, this is actually their real name etc.)

I think we'll be seeing something like that in the mainstream in the not too distant future, for obvious reasons.
by mortondev | 2026-02-17 16:26:52+00:00
Hey HN, I'm James. I built Quackback, an open-source (AGPL-3.0) feedback platform - voting boards, public roadmap, changelogs, integrations. Self-hostable and free.

Every improvement in dev tooling has led to developers wearing more hats. Frontend/backend became full-stack. Ops became DevOps, then DevSecOps. With AI-assisted development accelerating everything, developers are increasingly taking on product responsibilities too. But that only works if customer feedback is accessible where you already work, not siloed in a separate tool.

So Quackback ships with a built-in MCP server. Connect Claude Code, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible agent and it gets full read/write access to your feedback - search, triage, update statuses, merge duplicates, draft changelogs, respond to users.

Self-hosted with Docker (Bun, TanStack Start, PostgreSQL, Dragonfly, MinIO). Auto-runs migrations on startup:

git clone https://github.com/QuackbackIO/quackback.git
cd quackback && bun run setup && bun run dev

Interested in feedback on the MCP integration especially - embedding product feedback into AI-assisted dev workflows feels like an area worthy of further exploration.
by hedora | 2026-02-17 16:27:18+00:00
After playing around with vector db's for a bit, I got tired of this sort of thing.

There's a reason most of the industry has switched to letting agents grep + navigate within the results.

Come to think of it, it's probably the same reason "intelligent" search engines were so consistently hated by end users, and never really panned out during the early 2000's.
by empyrrhicist | 2026-02-17 16:27:34+00:00
> The GP is equating policies for strong passwords that aren't trivially cracked with authoritarianism.

Incorrect - the requirements I mentioned make passwords less memorable and less secure (maximum length 12???). Obviously that's not as bad as authoritarianism, but I was trying to capture the arbitrary act being forced on us for no real justifiable reason.
by codingdave | 2026-02-17 16:27:44+00:00
> ignorant, low-information HN users who don't understand the basics of how finance works

I though HN was a site that welcomed people of all levels of knowledge and shared thoughts, ideas, and resources to help people learn so we can elevate each other. Why are you coming at someone who freely admitted they lack understanding and tossing out a dismissive reply to them instead of saying: "Let me help fill in the knowledge gap here."