MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by masklinn | 2026-02-22 11:04:48+00:00
> Synthetic fuels (including hydrogen) do still make a lot of sense for heavy stuff like trucks, buses or trains

Synthetic fuels don't "make a lot of sense" for "heavy stuff", rail electrification has been the norm everywhere the capital costs were justified (it's at about 30% worldwide, 57% in europe, some countries like Switzerland are nearly 100% electric).

Synthetic fuels make sense for autonomy reasons when you can't tether the "heavy stuff", but fuel engines absolutely suck for heavy work loads, electric transmissions started being a thing before railway electrification even was.

And of course those are situations where hydrogen sucks, fuel is useful there because it's a stable and dense form of energy storage which is reasonably easy to move about without infrastructure, you can bring a bunch of barrels on a trailer, or tank trailers, to an off-grid site and fuel all your stuff (including electric generators). With hydrogen you're now wasting a significant portion of the energy you brought in trying to keep the hydrogen from going wild.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-02-22 11:06:40+00:00
> Excuses don’t save lives. You can’t trust pilots or drivers to always make the correct decision instantly. Any system designed in such a manner will get people killed.

Okay, so what's your answer? Stick yet another computer in to go wrong and fly the plane into the ground when it gets the wrong idea about a situation? Add yet more sensors to the car to prevent the driver steering away from an obstacle because it thinks they're not using their indicators yet?

> Things can be unrecoverable a full minute before impact.

Can you find an example of one that isn't down to gross mechanical failure, or just plain Operator Idiocy?
by xoz123 | 2026-02-22 11:06:42+00:00
If you consider total cost of ownership including long-term maintenance costs, it means building has not always been cheaper than buying. I think what's changing is that it's now becoming dramatically cheaper to build AND operate AND maintain "good enough" bespoke software for a lot of use cases, at least in theory, below a certain threshold of complexity and criticality. Which seems likely to include a sizeable chunk of the existing SAAS market.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I guess you don't even really need to maintain software if it's just a tool you hacked together in a week. You can build v2 in another week. You'll probably want to change it anyways as your users and your org evolve. It's a big question for me how you maintain quality in this model but again, if your quality standard is "good enough", we're already there.
by spwa4 | 2026-02-22 11:07:14+00:00
Really? Because the point is that when it comes to performance, just implementing your own "DOM" in C++ or some other low level language is going to have 10x the performance of electron, easily, in addition to having more features (better, smoother, file uploads would be welcome btw).

If you can put in unlimited coding engineering effort, why isn't Claude Code the very best it can possibly be?

Why isn't the fact that it can work 10% better an excuse to get claude to work on it for however long it takes?

I mean, most people here have done development with claude code, and we suppose the answer is simply: because that doesn't work without a capable engineer constantly babysitting the changes it's making, guiding it, nudging it, reminding it about edge cases, occasionally telling it it's being stupid ... it's a great product, incredible even, but it doesn't work without senior engineers.

Same question: Why doesn't it have more plugins and batch script and modfications than the app store? Surely it can by itself come up with 10000 good ideas and just implement them? Everything from little games to how to active bedroom lights by chinese vendor #123891791 ?
by 7777777phil | 2026-02-22 11:07:31+00:00
85% increase in walkaways is what happens when you optimize a spreadsheet line item without understanding why it exists.

Bussers aren't a cost center, they're part of what makes the dining experience work as a whole for most people...

Nike did this exact same thing with athlete partnerships and marketing: https://philippdubach.com/posts/nikes-crisis-and-the-economi...
by kaboomshebang | 2026-02-22 11:07:45+00:00
Reading some of the comments here. Perhaps the key to solid decentralization is solving the self-hosting problem. If self-hosting digital tools will always be a hassle to manage/update/maintain/upgrade/etc, then we will always rely on third parties. Almost every human owns a powerful device, but almost none have the know-how to run their own services. (That's why we rely on others, which has it's tradeoffs; honestly BlueSky seems a better tradeoff then Twitter, at least for now ;)
Show HN: Tickr – AI project manager that lives inside Slack (replaces Jira)
by tickr | 2026-02-22 11:08:39+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Tickr because I was tired of being the human reminder system on my team. Every project I've been on has the same failure mode: someone creates tasks in JIRA, nobody updates them, the PM spends half their day chasing people for status, and standups become 15 minutes of "I'll update the ticket after this meeting."

Tickr is a Slack bot that does the project management work that humans hate doing:

- Nudge engine: Automatically follows up with assignees when tasks go stale. It factors in priority, time estimates, grace periods, blockers, and snooze state, so it's not just a dumb cron job pinging people.
- AI standup generation: Synthesizes recent task updates into a daily standup summary. No more meetings where people read tickets aloud.
- Update quality evaluation: When someone posts a vague update like "working on it," Tickr pushes back and asks for specifics. Uses Claude to judge whether an update actually communicates progress.
- Slip detection: Scores tasks on 6 signals (staleness, estimate overrun, update quality trend, blocker chains, priority, velocity) to predict which tasks are about to slip before they do.
- Thread-to-task extraction: Mention @Tickr in any Slack thread and it parses the conversation into a structured task with assignee, priority, and estimate.

The whole thing runs on Slack's native UI, no context switching to a separate app. Tasks live in the channel where the work is discussed.

Tech stack: Python, Slack Bolt, Claude via AWS Bedrock (tool use for intent parsing), DynamoDB, ECS Fargate. The AI layer uses Bedrock's Converse API with tool definitions, the model returns structured tool calls like create_task or update_task, which get dispatched to handlers. No prompt-and-pray; it's constrained tool use.

What's different from other Slack task bots: Most Slack task tools (Asana integration, Trello power-ups, etc.) are just notification bridges, they tell you something happened in another app. Tickr is the app. The task lifecycle happens entirely in Slack. And the AI isn't a chatbot you talk to; it's an autonomous agent that nudges, evaluates, and detects problems without being asked.

Honest limitations:
- No Gantt charts, no sprint boards, no 47-field ticket templates. If you need that complexity, JIRA is probably right for you.
- AI quality evaluation occasionally misjudges technical updates as vague (calibrating)

Free 30-day trial, no credit card: https://heytickr.com

I'd love feedback from anyone who's dealt with the "nobody updates their tasks" problem. What did you try? What worked?
by LtWorf | 2026-02-22 11:09:09+00:00
Did you ever consider that perhaps for other people when something is unreasonably slow and consuming all of their battery, the "polish" is really not that high on the list of important characteristics?

Also, keep in mind that many people would like their applications to respect their preferences, so the "polish" that looks completely out of place on their screen is ugly (besides slow).
by adrian_b | 2026-02-22 11:10:15+00:00
The capacity per device is irrelevant.

What matters is the capacity per volume, per mass and per dollar.

The capacities per volume and per mass for these glass slabs are already very competitive. They are about the same as for the best tape cartridges currently available. The capacity per volume is about twice better than for the best HDDs, and the capacity per mass is much better than that, because HDDs are very heavy.

If such optical storage had not been so expensive as it is for now, it would have already been much better than any cloud storage. The slow writing speed is similar to that of file downloading or uploading over the Internet. Reading can be done much faster than writing, because it uses ordinary lasers and a video camera, not the very expensive femtosecond-pulse lasers used for writing.
by ezst | 2026-02-22 11:10:20+00:00
I got to use SolidWorks, Catia, Inventor before having my hands on pre-1.0 versions of FreeCAD. I never really understood the argument that it's too complex. The UI may be what it is (and admittedly full of shortcomings), but I found FreeCAD to be very conventional in the sense that you build out of sketches, define constraints that are identical from every other tool, compose those through extrusions, revolutions, etc.

The fact that it crashed on me for everything and nothing all at once seemed a bigger problem than "complexity".
by kbt22 | 2026-02-22 11:10:48+00:00
I really like Tufekci’s framing. The debate still feels weirdly powerless. You are either "pro" and in love with text parrots, or "anti" and dreaming of blanket bans, like you could outlaw 2+4 or 43x24. New techniques do not get uninvented. They just show up and stick around.

The real question is not "should AI exist?" It is "how do we keep our democracies sane" once cheap, scalable tools start melting effort, trust, and credibility. That part feels fixable.

Let’s get practical. Phones out of the bedroom. Kill infinite scroll. Notifications on a diet. One no-screen evening a week. Easy wins. And bigger picture: how do we relearn distrust without going full tinfoil? How do we stop asking screens for comfort and start asking them for facts, even when the facts are boring, ugly, or inconvenient? Screens are amazing at dopamine. They are bad at truth. The good news is we can design around that.
Show HN: The Bridge Language – Declarative dataflow for controlled egress
by aarnelaur | 2026-02-22 11:12:01+00:00
The Bridge is not a real programming language. It is a Data Topology Language.

Unlike Python or JavaScript, where you write a list of instructions for a computer to execute in order, a .bridge file describes a static circuit.

There is no "execution pointer" that moves from the top of the file to the bottom. The engine doesn't "run" your file; it uses your instructions to understand how your GraphQL fields are physically wired to your tools ... and can execute that circuit.

What can you do with this?

If you maintain a lot of 3rd-party integrations (like multiple payment providers, search APIs, or legacy inventory systems) then this will help.

It turns your integration layer from imperative code that you have to maintain, into a declarative schematic that the Bridge core executes for you.
by graemep | 2026-02-22 11:12:42+00:00
Great analysis. I do not think its conspiracy theorist to believe it to be intentional, or at least a result of KPIs.

One thing I think you are missing is that in person groups are usually far smaller. Anything with 1,000 people would be organised and there would be rules of behaviour, moderation of discussion etc. Most often if something is that big, its mostly an audience.

I think the other thing that happens in real life groups is that there is no community or real relationships. If you annoy people in real life it has consequences. In an FB group there are none.
by andai | 2026-02-22 11:16:17+00:00
Fair enough. Is that all it takes? The heartbeat is only a few more lines of code. Cron made the code a few hundred lines instead of a few dozen so I didn't like that.

(Also, I think heartbeat.md can emulate Cron? Using an LLM to expensively and inefficiently emulate Cron sounds a lot more in line with the Claw philosophy, doesn't it? ;)

The neat part is that it can modify/upgrade/restart itself. So if you are missing any feature, you just complain and it adds it to itself. (And it does that more reliably than OC in my experience, because it's small enough to actually understand itself.)
by andyjohnson0 | 2026-02-22 11:18:44+00:00
To explain:

I posted that comment because your post was not actually asking (or telling) hn anything substantive. You encountered an entirely mundane piece of technology - an ineffective chatbot, which is hardly either new or novel - and basically used Ask to publish a low-effort blog post recounting the encounter. I dont see any attempt to draw anything deeper from what happened.

If this had been posted on a blog, or on x/mastodon/whatever, and submitted to hn in the normal way, then I'm sceptical that it would have been noticed.

But yeah, it got up-votes and my comment was down-voted. I just don't think that's what matters here.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-02-22 11:19:40+00:00
I was trying to formulate my argument to disagree with the "cost center" thinking in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47107553, until I saw this comment. Now I feel that 'alephnerd might be right after all.

> (...) ops (...) a bunch of scripts to manage deployments.

Devops is prime example of work to be minimized and ultimately eliminated entirely by automation. Yes, it's a complex domain rich in challenges and there's both art and skill to do it right, but at the same time, it's also not the thing we want, just the thing we have to do to get the thing we want, because we can't yet do better.
by jemmyw | 2026-02-22 11:19:42+00:00
And actually further to your point, I would assume that many more people who code in Javascript have read the React codebase and not the v8 codebase.

I've read the react source, and some of v8. Imagine how you'd implement hooks, you're probably not too far away. It's messier than you'd hope, but that's kind of the point of an abstraction anyway. It's really not magic, I really dislike that term when all you're doing is building on something that is pretty easy to read and understand. v8 on the other hand is much harder, although I will say I found the code better organised and explained than React.
by nebula8804 | 2026-02-22 11:21:05+00:00
>Does the author live in a parallel universe where Sony didn't completely dominate gen 5 & gen 6 sales?

Difficult to ascertain. Sales wise of course Sony will sell more. It was N64's 388 worldwide games vs Sony's 4,074 titles. More games than you could possibly try + Lower prices + higher install base will lead to more game sales and frankly I have seen so many more "experimental" titles on Playstation.

Never thought i'd be playing as a beach ball escaping a maze while eating watermelons and listening to egyptian trance but it happened on Playstation.

https://youtu.be/OcaNdzEXch8?t=7

Plus Sony always felt like a "global" console. They expanded the user base to not only non gamers but a truly international audience (latin america, middle east etc.) It was probably the modchips that made it happen but still.

But "winning the console war" is more than just raw sales. For example, of that extremely small 388 titles it is astounding how many of those games have won numerous prestigious awards, were genre defining, moved its genre in a direction that all others copied, or are still cited as one of the best games of all time.

The N64 really laid down an entire historial footprint for the millennial generation despite its significantly smaller sales. I guess a lot of that is down to Nintendo and many of their games demonstrating why they have been in a league of their own. But the console also had superb titles released by third parties as well.
by Tor3 | 2026-02-22 11:21:52+00:00
Yep. The dialect I grew up with, and which I could actually read in older written works, which meant it was pretty stable in the past, is now completely gone from my town. Everything which made it special has disappeared. And nationally? Some pronunciations inherited all the way from PIE are now disappearing in certain areas. Oh well. Languages change. I just wish they didn't change is such a, to me, boring direction..
by spwa4 | 2026-02-22 11:21:55+00:00
No Iran had a parliamant until it was overthrown in a socialist revolution. Then the ayatollahs started killing people, taking power. The KGB, of course, was also involved, on the side of the ayatollahs, like all socialists (the socialist international supported Khomeini personally). I kind of agree that the CIA is not always on the right side, but in Iran, is it so hard to say that at the very least the CIA was a lot better than the alternative?

Hell, the ayatollahs even gave communist housing a shot. They failed, just like they failed at everything, but they gave it a shot.

So you can ask the direct question: just like Venezuela was way better off with oil extraction before Chavez/Maduro ... and also in Iran you can easily say the situation was better before ... so is oil extraction and participating in the global economy not a lot better, at least for anyone actually living there?
by b112 | 2026-02-22 11:22:09+00:00
There is only one car in that database that has even close to a 700km range on long trips, and that is only under perfect conditions.

As with any car, you don't wait until out of fuel to recharge. Instead, you seek to do so well before. These pages at least understand a little of that, and cite a real-world range under perfect conditions of 450km before recharging, with a range of 300km afterwards.

Yet these figures are with no heat or AC, with it not below -10C, and with an incredibly slow speed of 110km/hr, which is illegal on some freeways in the US and Canada (yes, too slow on a freeway is illegal). At least, according to this page.

And yes, this is a "long trip" after all. I often have circumstances where I drive 1600km a day.

For current situations, although the future can be different, if you click on the details, it's actually 22 minutes to get an 80% charge, and of course with 400kw thrown at it. You have to get to the charger, hope one is free, then start this business. Just the on/off plus charging would realistically be 30 minutes, and taking 1 1/2 hours off to charge is ridiculous.

The current real world problems are, you'll never find that level of charging anywhere along the route of your long trip. Not with assurances it actually works, and that you don't have to redirect 100s of kms out of the path you wish to take. I cite current, because the future is just that. However, you'll literally have to spend trillions on infra just to do anything more than that, because if you're having literal parking lots full of cars charging at turn-offs on interstates, that's going to require massive, new long-haul electricity infra.

Which is really the point. Very slow to charge, hard to get charged, and once the infra is in place, there's still issues. Like recycling. And weight of car. And peak demand vs storage (such as with h2). And more.

Each tech stands poorly against gas cars, in terms of usability, reliability, range, fueling issues, and so on. That's to be expected though, with over 100 years of relentless development of carbon beasts, in planes, ships, cars, engines of all sorts.

It will take decades at the very least to get as good with electric in any form.

Yet what do I hear and see?

What madness do I see relentlessly spouted?

That one tech is the only answer, that R&D will change nothing, that even though range is an issue, the person is the problem, not the range, and so on.

Like the crass "use an airplane" comment.

Ah well.
by alsetmusic | 2026-02-22 11:22:12+00:00
I was able to run the app on MacOS 14, but I can't update (Hacker News menu > Check for updates…) without MacOS 15. "Your macOS version is too old" message. I praised building for older versions of MacOS in my feedback and now I'm gated from using the latest version?

Please build for those of us who don't want the slop Apple is pushing. Pretty cool that you responded and added text sizing, would love to have it. Cheers!
by gpderetta | 2026-02-22 11:23:30+00:00
> it's impossible to support the same API as you're used to with std::shared_mutex

If I understand the problem correctly, the standard library could specialize the scoped lock objects for the shared mutex, online allocate the waiter object in the lock (so it will be in the stack) and use an internal dedicated API.

It might be harder (but not impossible) to interoperate threads using direct lock calls with threads using the scoped API.

In any case it is a moot point, as I don't think any std library does it nor will never do as it would probably be ABI breaking.
by impure-aqua | 2026-02-22 11:24:21+00:00
I don't know if that tracks, senior leadership was heavily influenced towards implementing the one child policy by the works of Song Jian, who came from a rocketry background and presented a model whereby the population would grow to an unsustainable level unless corrective control was applied.

I think it is unlikely philosophers would have suggested to treat population growth like tuning a PID controller.
by imiric | 2026-02-22 11:24:51+00:00
A lot of words to say that for all intents and purposes... it's nondeterministic.

> Yes, it's a departure from the fully deterministic systems we're used to.

A system either produces the same output given the same input[1], or doesn't.

LLMs are nondeterministic by design. Sure, you can configure them with a zero temperature, a static seed, and so on, but they're of no use to anyone in that configuration. The nondeterminism is what gives them the illusion of "creativity", and other useful properties.

Classical computers, compilers, and programming languages are deterministic by design, even if they do contain complex logic that may affect their output in unpredictable ways. There's a world of difference.

[1]: Barring misbehavior due to malfunction, corruption or freak events of nature (cosmic rays, etc.).
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-02-22 11:25:55+00:00
you give an LLM control of your computer.

Yesterday I told it to make a website and it opened the browser, did a bunch of steps, (I did have to authenticate). But then it connected some html on my computer with a server with google sheets.

Consider its a massive security risk. You are giving it full access to everything your computer can do. (Potentially, you can limit stuff)
by blashyrk | 2026-02-22 11:26:02+00:00
"The fix is not to lock the code away. The fix is to separate participation from final control. Give the entire team access to the code so people (with or without agents) can work on it. Keep merges limited to engineers."

Oh great. The engineers now have to review 100x more code AND still be the ones responsible when something goes wrong. How convenient!
by OneMorePerson | 2026-02-22 11:26:24+00:00
I assume you mean electric cars since they were more of a "real product", but I have to say I think they were pushed too early and too fast. I am super curious how many early Nissan Leafs quickly ended up in the landfill due to the attempt to use premature battery tech.

Toyota is kinda on the wrong side of this one now (lagging) but they had an idea that larger and larger hybrids should have been the way (like going from regular hybrid to PHEV to eventually fully electric). Subsidizing less (like $3k not $7k) on a whole bunch more hybrids would have done a lot more to influence real adoption and rack up fuel efficient miles than purely electric cars. A lot of people don't get hybrids cause they are like ~$8k ish more than basic gas and the math doesn't quite work out for people for a long time, tilting that math would have made a big difference.

Especially for people who live in the city but sometimes drive long distance and only have one car, a PHEV is so ideal compared to having to have two cars or go rent or something.