MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pjmlp | 2026-02-14 18:30:31+00:00
There is an announcement already planned at NDC Toronto 2026.

> Carbon: graduating from the experiment

https://ndctoronto.com/agenda/carbon-graduating-from-the-exp...

As for it being widely adopted, people keeping missing the point that Carbon is mostly for Google themselves, as means to integrate into existing C++ projects.

They are the very first ones to assert that for green field projects there are already plenty of safe languages to chose from.
by lupsasca | 2026-02-14 18:30:36+00:00
Hi, I'm an author on the paper. It was definitely a human-AI collaboration, but it is also true that the final simplified formula, Eq. 39 in the paper (which is what we had been seeking, without success), was conjectured and proved by GPT. So it derived a new result in theoretical physics. I'm genuinely puzzled by your complaint.
by rkourdis | 2026-02-14 18:30:38+00:00
I was very interested in athletic robots, so I left my job in software to build a quadruped and make it backflip [1]. I made the hardware at home (the design was open-source [2]) and wrote the framework to generate jumps, flips, etc. I started with basically zero robotics knowledge, so it was a lot of work, but it was incredibly fulfilling and super fun. I personally learn best by building things.

I'd say start playing with 3D printing and motors to make mechanisms that move (pendulums, simple walkers, ...). +1 to tinkering with the 3D printer itself (that someone mentioned) as you can learn a lot about how the machine works and figure out ways to improve it.

You've mentioned the physical aspect, but simulation could also be a good starting point. You can now very easily train RL agents in sim to say, walk, and transfer to real hardware afterwards.

Finally, if you like flying stuff, there's drones you can buy that are controlled programmatically (e.g. Crazyflie). I haven't played a lot with these, but I've seen them used to teach control and they seem like a nice, inexpensive platform to experiment with.

[1]: https://github.com/rkourdis/trajopt?tab=readme-ov-file#backf...

[2]: https://open-dynamic-robot-initiative.github.io
by epolanski | 2026-02-14 18:32:06+00:00
I'm not sure what are you trying to get at.

Of course an LLM can make a thorough design analysis and extract architectural patterns.

But it doesn't have infinite memory and context.

On top of that, it may recognize patterns, but not their intent and scope.

Documentation is gold for humans and LLMs. But LLMs have been the very first major moment in this field that has very little, to no, engineering practices to focus on documentation and specs.
by quickthrowman | 2026-02-14 18:32:07+00:00
> You might notice that these real engineering jobs also don't have a way to verify the product via tests like that though, which was my point.

The electrical engineers at my employer that design building electrical distribution systems have software that handles all of the calculations, it’s just math. Arc flash hazard analysis, breaker coordination studies, available fault current, etc. All manufacturers provide the data needed to perform these calculations for their products.

Other engineering disciplines have similar tools. Mechanical, civil, and structural engineers all use software that simulates their designs.
by analog31 | 2026-02-14 18:32:15+00:00
My hypothesis is that the $1000 cables help sell the $300 cables. I’ve seen comments to the effect of: “I’m not fooled by those $1000 cables, so I saved my money and got the $300 cables instead.”

In other words, they got fooled.

What’s happened in electronics is that there’s a cutoff, above which the audio quality doesn’t get any better, but that cutoff is much lower than anybody can believe. So the psychological cutoff is higher than the physical one, and a role of marketing is to raise that cutoff even further.
by michaelt | 2026-02-14 18:32:17+00:00
> You're telling me that if Tim Cook wasn't getting on his knees every couple of weeks Apple would end? That's farcical.

I think that a 30%, 64% or 145% tax on Chinese imports would be a huge blow for a $400 billion business importing Chinese-made phones.

And Trump can impose such taxes (and grant exemptions from them) at will, apparently.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-14 18:32:24+00:00
You mistyped "compress then encrypt".

Your argument explains correctly that "encrypt then compress" is not an option, because in this order compress will do nothing, except wasting time and energy.

On the other hand "compress then encrypt" is more secure then simple encryption, because even a weak encryption method may be difficult to break when applied only to compressed data, because this use is similar to encrypting random numbers, i.e. the statistical properties of the plaintext have already been hidden.

The only disadvantage of "compress then encrypt" is in the less frequent cases when you are more concerned with deceiving traffic analysis of the amount of data sent than with saving resources, when you will pad anyway your useful data with irrelevant junk, to hide the real length of the data.

If you send data that is highly compressible, even if you want to hide the length it may be advantageous to first compress the data, and then pad it with junk before encryption, to hide the length.

Thus, you might e.g. compress the data 8 times, then double the length by padding and still send less data than without compression, while also masking the true length.
by AnIrishDuck | 2026-02-14 18:32:28+00:00
This is an especially hilarious comment given what happened in June 1989 [1].

It's the prototypical example of authoritarian crackdowns and mass slaughter of innocent protestors.

Discussion or even mention of it is still forbidden in China.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests...
by fat | 2026-02-14 18:32:30+00:00
To be fair to GitHub (which i have a lot of love and respect for), we're building very different products.

GitHub is a social consumer coding product first. There's user models, review and discussion primitives, ci, etc.

Code Storage is just a headless, api-first infra product. No users, no review primitives, no rate limits, etc.

Our company is obsessively focused on only 3 things:

1. reliability at scale
2. performance
3. code api surface

happy to dive into any of these in more detail if you want to shoot me over an email jacob@pierre.co
by permo-w | 2026-02-14 18:34:01+00:00
What percentage of YouTube's revenue do you think is from subs?

The slop is already there. Even without the slop, which it would be borderline impossible to identify en masse, the hosting costs are still astronomical. I appreciate your idealism, but Youtube without advertising revenue would be a financial black hole, and even if it survived, creators would simply be the ones taking the hit

Unless you're suggesting Youtube would just start again from zero, in which case it would just fail and it might as well be the same as dying
by ronsor | 2026-02-14 18:34:08+00:00
NFTs lost because they didn't do anything useful for their proponents, not because people were critical of them. They would've fizzled out even without detractors for that reason.

On the other hand, normal cryptocurrencies continue to exist because their proponents find them useful, even if many others are critical of their existence.

Technology lives and dies by the value it provides, and both proponents and detractors are generally ill-prepared to determine such value.
by spankalee | 2026-02-14 18:34:14+00:00
> the ones who are having a magic robot write a thousand lines of code that almost, but not quite, does something sensible

Gee, I wonder which "side" you're on?

It's not true that all AI generated code looks like it does the right thing but doesn't, or that all that human written code does the right thing.

The code itself matters here. So given code that works, is tested, and implements the features you need, what does it matter if it was completely written by a human, an LLM, or some combination?

Do you also have a problem with LLM-driven code completion? Or with LLM code reviews? LLM assisted tests?
by thundergolfer | 2026-02-14 18:34:22+00:00
This is an absolutely beautiful personal website. Go click around it, there's so many 'wow' moments. Go to the homepage (https://maximeheckel.com/) and then click 'about', the transition is :chefskiss:

The blog's design style reminds me a lot of Alex Harri's[1], who also does excellent work. I wonder if one influenced the other.

Edit: Oh the homepage has its inspirations actually listed. Harri isn't there.

1. https://alexharri.com/blog/planes
by LexiMax | 2026-02-14 18:35:24+00:00
C? Never. I feel like that ship has sailed, it's too primordial and tied to too many system ABI's to ever truly go away. I think we'll see a lot of Rust or Zig replacing certain popular C programs and libraries, but I don't think C will ever go away.

C++ on the other hand? Possibly, though I think that it's just as much because of the own-goals of the C++ standards committee as it is the successes of Rust. I don't really consider Zig a competitor in this space because if you're reaching for C++, you are reaching for a level of abstraction that Zig is unwilling to provide.
by lyu07282 | 2026-02-14 18:36:35+00:00
It is kind of fascinating how the rhetoric shifted from the 'white mans burden' and scientific racism of colonialism to the modern day liberal international order with their purpose built institutions and their 'nobel prize in economics'. Like today it's: of course we buy coffee and cocoa beans for cheap from them, transport them and add 500% of the value to the final product, that's just how economics works, are you stupid? The 'its just in their blood, it's nature' became 'its just economics 101', it just happens to keep them under our crushing boot, it's nature. The contradictions are wild.
by kibwen | 2026-02-14 18:36:35+00:00
I'm not expecting to convince you of this position, but I find it to be a feature, not a bug, that Rust is inherently hostile to companies whose business models rely on tossing closed-source proprietary blobs over the wall. I'm fairly certain that Andrew Kelley would say the same thing about Zig. Give me the source or GTFO.
by dchuk | 2026-02-14 18:37:05+00:00
Looks like a good architecture. I feel like this needs a complimentary mobile app instead of relying on a chat system like telegram, so you can both plain text interact but also do more advanced stuff like see the backlog of tasks, see the log of completed work, have more robust interactions that include stateful iteration on long form stuff, etc

Very cool build though, will try it out
by jdsnape | 2026-02-14 18:37:06+00:00
I used to work for a large enterprise, and tried to get vim ‘approved’ for internal use. I remember this charityware clause caused our legal department to get tied up in all sorts of arguments about how we could be opening ourselves to liability if we used it without donating. It was my first lesson in navigating large company processes.

In the end I just kept quiet about the fact that it ships in all the Linux package repos.

(Just to be clear, I fully support what Bram did here)
by Youden | 2026-02-14 18:37:11+00:00
"Against the Swiss constitution" doesn't really make sense here. This is a popular initiative; if accepted, it amends the Swiss constitution. Here's the text: https://www.bk.admin.ch/ch/d/pore/vi/vis555t.html

The only way you could argue an initiative is "against the Swiss constitution" in my opinion would be if it runs afoul of the rules: https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/1999/404/en#tit_4/chap_2

Unless you want to argue that this violates the mandatory provisions of international law, I don't think you have an argument. The text of the amendment specifically clarifies that any of the actions it mandates on parliament have to adhere to the mandatory provisions of international law, so I don't think that's an avenue you can pursue.
by bikenaga | 2026-02-14 18:37:40+00:00
Original article: "Fiscal policy and economic activity: new causal evidence" - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sjoe.70011

"Abstract. Utilizing a quasi-natural experiment design, we identify an exogenous cut in local taxes accompanied by an equivalent reduction in local government spending, and we estimate the impact of these exogenous changes on income. We exploit a unique regional dataset that combines local income data with local voting outcomes on current expense tax levies. Taxes and the associated spending change abruptly at the 50 percent vote share cutoff below which a tax levy fails to pass. This cutoff determines which observations serve as controls and which receive treatment: a reduction in local taxes and government spending. Voting percentages around the cutoff are a source of exogenous variation, with observations around this quasi-randomly assigned and very similar across characteristics. We find that balanced budget reductions in taxes and spending cause a large drop in local incomes in the first two years after the vote, suggesting that government expenditure effects on income are larger than fiscal revenue effects. The cumulative government spending multiplier of a balanced-budget change in spending for our baseline is a sizable 1.5. This effect of local tax-financed government spending is prominent in low-income and high-poverty areas, suggestive of mechanisms related to the share of liquidity-constrained agents."
by pstuart | 2026-02-14 18:38:18+00:00
People might be triggered by the word "worthless" but I totally get your point.

I hear great things about the language but only have so many hours in the day and so many usable neurons to spend in that day. Someday it would be nice to play with it.

The easiest way to embrace any new language is to have a compelling use to use it. I've not hit that point yet.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-14 18:38:51+00:00
To this day C++ has hardly won the hearts of C devs on the embedded space, on both sides of the camp there are individuals that start religious discussions about the C/C++ abreviation, there is something like Orthodox C++ that basically means using C++ compiler to write what is mostly Better C, and most frameworks that were so hyped in the 1990's are now gone, or subsyst in maintenance contracts on applications that when the time gets to be rewritten it won't surely be C++.

So even though C++ is the language I reach for outside Java, C#, TypeScript, I would assert that downplaying Rust adoption by Amazon, Adobe, Microsoft, Google, is losing track where things are going.
by deadbabe | 2026-02-14 18:39:16+00:00
If you find yourself having to use LLMs to write a lot of tedious code, you have bad architecture. You should use patterns and conventions that eliminate the tedium, by making things automagically work. This means each line of code you write is more powerful, less filler stuff. Remember the days when you could create entire apps with just a few lines of code? So little code that an LLM would be pointless.
by wccrawford | 2026-02-14 18:39:25+00:00
#2 - Can be. Or it might actually make a difference.

We had 2 "living room" setups for a while, upstairs and down. We eventually realized how dumb that was, and condensed to 1.

Doing that, we stopped using some really expensive speakers and started using some that were 1/5 the price because we couldn't tell the difference.

Then, one day, I brought those expensive speakers down and set them up. Wow. There was a definite difference after all. I'm not an audiophile and can't tell you what that difference was, just that both of us could immediately tell the expensive speakers were better, and we were not going back to the cheaper ones. Nothing else in the setup changed.

Also, I eventually upgraded the receiver to something that could better drive those speakers. An upgrade from $600 to about $900. And there was a definite difference there, too. The older box should have been enough, but it just wasn't.

Do I recommend that someone on a budget spend $4000 instead of $1500? Nope. It's not enough difference. But for stuff we already had, or for someone that really cares, it's definitely better.
by rootnod3 | 2026-02-14 18:39:51+00:00
Ah, so I need to pay 100s of $ and use the "frontier" model, which is always a moving BS excuse. Last month Opus 4.5 was the frontier, gotta use it, now it's 4.6, and none of them so far have produced anything consistently good.

It is NOT reasoning about code. It's a glorified autocomplete that wastes energy. Associating "reasoning" to it is an antropomorphizateion.

And calling hallucinations "lateral thinking" is a fucking stretch.

"Let's use tool `foo` with flag `-b`" even if the man page doesn't even mention said flag.

Sure, they might be able to create numerous iterations of containers, testing them, burning resources....but that is literally a thousand monkeys smashing their heads on typewriters to crank out 4chan posts.
by nec4b | 2026-02-14 18:39:55+00:00
>>"Islam's objective is to grow and convert as many people as possible" is it? says who?

Do you not learn anything about Islam in schools where you live? I'm sure you must have spent at least few hours at History class covering Islam expansion starting with Mohamed.

>> What do you even mean by "family values", send woman back to the kitchen and that'll make people have kids? I doubt that's what you mean so what is your solution?

You want more people from cultures who think exactly like that. You believe Muslim women should be baby factories for the West.
by llm_nerd | 2026-02-14 18:40:52+00:00
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/selepu/dreampilot-ai-gu...

Found that in seconds. EEG, electrical stimulation, heat, audio, etc. Claims a 20 hour battery.

As to the Claude interactions, like others I am suspicious and it seems overly idealized and simplified. Claude can't search for BT devices, but you could hook it up with an MCP that does that. You can hook it up with a decompiler MCP. And on and on. But it's more involved than this story details.
by toast0 | 2026-02-14 18:40:56+00:00
Why wouldn't mains cable make good speaker wire? Probably much larger diameter than needed for audio and therefore more expensive if fairly priced, but if you've got to wire speakers and that's what you've got, should be fine.

About the only things you could do wrong would be using wire that's too small to carry the load, is frayed/broken/severely corroded, or is coiled in a way that inductance becomes a real issue. Running parallel and near electrical or signal wires is problematic, and largely different run lengths can make a difference.
by pron | 2026-02-14 18:41:32+00:00
Growing in absolute numbers doesn't mean growing the market share, and even a growing market share is not necessarily sufficiently fast growth to become a safe bet. All languages that ended up becoming very popular grew their market share much faster than Rust does. Being an old language with some real market share is obviously better than being an old language with negligible market share, but being an old language with real, but small, market share is not exactly a sign of confidence.

It's true that the total market share for low level languages (C + C++ + Rust + Zig + others) continues declining, as it has for a couple of decades now (that may change if coding agents start writing everything in C [1] but it's not happening yet), but that's all the more reason to find some "safe bet" within that diminishing total market. Rust's modest success is enough for some, but clearly not enough for many others to be seen as a safe bet.

[1]: https://stephenramsay.net/posts/vibe-coding.html
by wild_egg | 2026-02-14 18:41:37+00:00
Just want to say upfront: this mindset is completely baffling to me.

Someone gives you a hammer. You've never seen one before. They tell you it's a great new tool with so many ways to use it. So you hook a bag on both ends and use it to carry your groceries home.

You hear lots of people are using their own hammers to make furniture and fix things around the home.

Your response is "I accept what you say about the best way to use these hammers. But my worry is that there is nothing that requires people to use them in that way."

These things are not intelligent. They're just tools. If you don't use a guide with your band saw, you aren't going to get straight cuts. If you want straight cuts from your AI, you need the right structure around it to keep it on track.

Incidentally, those structures are also the sorts of things that greatly benefit human programmers.
by DonHopkins | 2026-02-14 18:41:45+00:00
>"Please don't assume Lisp is only useful for Animation and Graphics, AI, Bioinformatics, B2B and Ecommerce, Data Mining, EDA/Semiconductor applications, Expert Systems, Finance, Intelligent Agents, Knowledge Management, Mechanical CAD, Modeling and Simulation, Natural Language, Optimization, Research, Risk Analysis, Scheduling, Telecom, and Web Authoring just because these are the only things they happened to list."

>Kent Pitman

He left out Guessing Animals!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Pitman

>While in high school, he saw output from one of the guess the animal pseudo-artificial intelligence (AI) games then popular. He considered implementing a version of the program in BASIC, but once at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), instead he implemented it in several dialects of Lisp, including Maclisp.

Kent Pitman's Lisp Eliza from MIT-AI's ITS History Project (sites.google.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39373567

https://sites.google.com/view/elizagen-org

https://climatejustice.social/@kentpitman/111236824217096297

https://web.archive.org/web/20131102031307/http://open.salon...

https://youtu.be/hHNDZnxiwlE?t=740

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38402813
by SmirkingRevenge | 2026-02-14 18:42:46+00:00
They're for small government and anti-censorship in the same way they are for "secure elections". An election is secure when they win. It's fraudulent when they lose.

Republicans today are far-right extremists straight out of an authoritarian regime, operating within the friend-enemy mode of politics ("everything for my friends, the law for my enemies"). And the project is to preserve this hierarchy with themselves at the top.

https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/your-comprehensive-guide-to-...

> The far right is animated by the revolutionary project of reconfiguring society along the exclusionary or hierarchical lines patterned after a “divine” or “natural” order. Far-right figures envision societies organized through hierarchies—whether racial, ethnic, religious, or ideological. They aspire to deploy state power to defend the “true people” (sometimes called the Volk), who often already occupy the top rungs of society, from a constellation of perceived enemies or from relative or outright disempowerment. The far-right ideal is a homogeneous society, and that ideal is diametrically opposed to a liberal, pluralistic order. The far right believes that liberal pluralism represents a dangerous and unprecedented upheaval of the natural order. The far right blames most or all social problems on that upheaval—that is, on liberalism. Instead of seeing social order as emerging from the interactions of many diverse persons and groups cooperating in a polycentric system, the far right believes a homogeneous order must be imposed—and imposed in a holistic fashion, incorporating all forms of social interaction, from the structure of the nation-state to the most intimate relationships in the home.

> The far right’s commitment to freedom extends only to the “true people,” whose values align with far-right goals. This is an exclusionary conception of freedom, entirely contraposed to a neutral rule of law. Generally for the far right, discussion and deliberation are denigrated in favor of authoritarianism and “decisive action,” although the far right will also frequently invoke values like “freedom of speech” to exert pressure on discourse communities to welcome its ideas and rhetoric (see Why do far-right groups often talk about “freedom”?).