MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fauigerzigerk | 2026-02-14 20:48:06+00:00
Corporations want to sell as much as possible to make as much money as possible.

Whenever the frequency, quantity or intensity of use drives up earnings, you are bound to get the same result: More "addictive" designs are better for earnings than less "addictive" designs. The difference (if any) between addictive because fun and addictive by design is irrelevant for this outcome.

What I will grant you is that the link can be more direct with ad funding. If a newspaper publisher knows that some very loyal subscribers only ever read 5 articles every morning, making that particular group read 30 articles would not drive up earnings.

But I think on average across all readers the link between reading more and higher earnings would still exist and hence the incentive to make the product more "addictive".
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-14 20:48:08+00:00
> at least a few of them live in war zones

Which is a valuable perspective. But it's not a subsitute for a seasoned war journalist who can draw on global experience. (And relating that perspective to a particular home market.)

> I'm sure some of them would fly in to collect data if you paid them for it

Sure. That isn't "a news editorial that focuses on free content but in a newspaper-style, e. g. with professional (or good) writers."

One part of the population imagines journalists as writers. They're fine on free, ad-supported content. The other part understands that investigation is not only resource intensive, but also requires rare talent and courage. That part generally pays for its news.

Between the two, a Wikipedia-style journalistic resource is not entertaining enough for the former and not informative enough for the latter. (Importantly, compiling an encyclopedia is principally the work of research and writing. You can be a fine Wikipedia–or scientific journal or newspaper–editor without leaving your room.)
by bonesss | 2026-02-14 20:48:25+00:00
Parallel hypothesis: the intensity of competition between models is so intense that any high-engagement high-relevance web discussion about any LLM/AI generation is gonna hit the self-guided self-reinforced model training and result in de facto benchmaxxing.

Which is only to say: if we HN-front-page it, they will come (generate).
by crossbody | 2026-02-14 20:48:32+00:00
I see your point, however, consider this: to a farmer in 1900, our modern food system is already "end of history" post-scarcity sci-fi.
Back then, one farmer fed ~4 people. Today, thanks to automation, GMO and fertilizers, one farmer feeds ~170. We effectively solved the "calorie problem" for the developed world.

But the economy didn't flatline just because we hit THAT manufacturing ceiling. Value simply migrated from manufacturing (growing wheat, assembling cars) to services (Michelin dining, DoorDash, TikTok influencers). Radio did not turn out to be the last useful invention it was predicted to be. Knowledge generation has sped up dramatically.

Your point is fair regarding hardware - eventually you do run out of stars or hit the Landauer limit. But this is exactly Deutsch’s distinction between resources (finite) and knowledge (infinite). Even in a bounded physical system, the "software" (the art, explanations, and social structures) isn't bounded by the clock speed. We don't need infinite atoms to have infinite creativity and knowledge
by basket_horse | 2026-02-14 20:49:29+00:00
I took the “end” to mean the part of the exponential where it quickly trends towards infinity. So let’s say the x axis is time (by which you get more training data and more compute) and the y axis is model ability. So far, if we think we are in the beginning of the exponential, adding data/compute looks almost linear to the untrained eye in terms of model capability. But once you hit a threshold, where he thinks the model will start to generalize, a small amount of data/compute will result in a massive increase in model ability.
by n4bz0r | 2026-02-14 20:50:04+00:00
On the main page, shorts, as all the other videos, are served by the recommendation algorithm which should filter out general audience crap you'd see if you're not logged in or have view history disabled. You'd normally see the same stuff you're subscribed to there, plus a few random videos of cats. Maybe a wamen butt occasionally. Might as well hide the main page entirely if you're not that easily entertained. To be quite frank, the main page is such an echo chamber lately that I almost got myself unhooked from procrastinating on YouTube.

On the search page, shorts are mostly a mixed bag, but you do occasionally get useful results.

So what does this solve? Seems like a form of protest nobody important (those in power) cares about.

Another thing is, I have, to my own surprise, discovered a few decent channels that I like, that post their videos in form of shorts exclusively. That's a somewhat new trend and mostly relevant to humor-related or music channels, though.

Almost forgot to mention. YouTube recently added the scroll bar to the shorts so they aren't all that different from the other videos now.
by clint | 2026-02-14 20:50:41+00:00
Ken is still the EIC of Ars, and has been for nearly 30 years now, likely longer than most of people in this thread have been alive.

You can literally read the staff directory without having to guess: https://arstechnica.com/staff-directory/

Most of the people working at Ars are the exact same people who have been working there for the better part of their entire existence (source: me) Most of them _are_ experts in their fields, and most are vastly more qualified in their fields than pretty much anyone else publishing online (both now and 20 years ago).

It seems that _certain kinds of individuals_ have had rose-colored glasses on about pretty much everything online, but for Ars especially for some reason.

They detest change in a publication that covers the reality of actual life and technology, rather that commit suicide and stay covering stuff the same way they did in 1997—which 8 people total want to read (and not pay for, by the way).

Ars has been operating at an exceptionally high level for their entire history and have outlasted many other flashes-in-the-pan which are now relegated to the dust bin of history.
by eliotik | 2026-02-14 20:50:56+00:00
Working on https://2cents.club/ - it's a simple site to get cashback on travel (and soon retail).

We're backend engineers, so we used AI to build the frontend while focused on the backend logic. It's been a wild ride trying to make AI-generated UI responsive, but it allowed us to ship.

We realized that our registration was (still is) a friction. We moved from a forced sign-up model to a no registration required flow to get people to their travel links (Booking.com/Expedia) faster.

You can now withdraw via bank account or crypto wallet. Looking for feedback on the UX as we move to add the retail soon -_-
by exceptione | 2026-02-14 20:51:02+00:00
You can't make a bad speaker good, but also: people spend lots on gear, but forget the room. The room can break a good speaker easily.

Also... 'good' is something you first need to agree on when talking with people. Some people like to have 'distorted' playback (compared to the original), because they "like" that better. That is the moment retailers can sell objectively worse but overpriced stuff.

Genelecs for instance are very detailed, neutral etc (there is a reason you see them everywhere in professional settings), but consumers don't necessarily have an appetite for 'objectivity'.
by mrguyorama | 2026-02-14 20:51:04+00:00
Thank you. Your reply is more respectful than I earned.

On paper americans have all these rights, but surely you are seeing how the paper is not matching the reality in many ways, and very little is being done to fix that as tens of millions of americans outright support the paper being ignored, so how can you trust that disparity to not come for your paper rights to speak? Already those same courts you are relying on have thrown away real rights, and the administration itself flouts those same courts regularly.

Chinese citizens have a lot of rights on paper too, including right to freedom of expression. I would bet you could find occasional cases or situations in China where some lowly citizen "wins" against the government, as that always looks good, but that doesn't make it meaningful and I can't read or speak any Chinese languages to back up this suspicion.

It's only going to take one Supreme Court case to change the paper rights. Do you feel this supreme court has shown a preference for principles over administration?
by alestainer | 2026-02-14 20:51:08+00:00
Interesting thing: I've got my internal request that is similar to this pelican. And there was 0 progress on it in the past ~2 years. Which might have at least a couple of explanations. 1. Spillage into the pre-training: some real artist had drawn a pelican riding a bicycle. 2. Seeing it as an important discourse for model intelligence in the training data might affect allocation of compute into solving this problem, either thru engineers or the model itself finding the texts about this challenge.
by sdenton4 | 2026-02-14 20:51:09+00:00
This is a very reasonable drawing of a bicycle. It has a solid rear triangle, and forward swept front fork, which is an important detail for actually being able to steer the bike. The drivetrain is single speed, but that's fine, and the wheels are radially laced, which is also fine: both of those simplified details are things which occur in real bicycles.
by OutOfHere | 2026-02-14 20:51:19+00:00
Yes, the risk is: Weeks long now = decade long in a decade.

The key determining factor could be whether any American boots land on the ground or not. Once they do land, there is then no end to the op. I am assuming a simple Venezuelan-style kidnapping of their leader won't work here, or it would have happened already. Fwiw, Iran of course is substantially larger than both Afghanistan and Iraq, so the risk of a prolonged operation is longer.
by iggori | 2026-02-14 20:51:32+00:00
I’m not trying to present myself as a guru or a celebrity engineer. My background is in product and technical leadership, not in being the “hero coder.” I didn’t build an AI system — I built a real production platform where AI was one of the tools in the workflow.

The article isn’t meant to be profound. It’s just a practical report from someone who pushed AI‑assisted development into a full product environment and saw where it helped and where it broke. I shared it because some of these patterns might be useful to others, and because I’m also interested in learning from people who’ve taken different approaches.

If your experience is different, I’d genuinely like to compare notes — that’s the whole point of posting it here.
Show HN: DevDay – End-of-day recap for AI coding session
by ujjwaljainnn | 2026-02-14 20:51:35+00:00
I built devday because I use multiple AI coding tools (OpenCode, Claude Code, Cursor) and wanted a single command to see what I actually accomplished each day. It reads local session data, cross-references with git commits, and optionally generates standup-ready summaries via OpenAI or Anthropic.

Everything runs locally — no data leaves your machine unless you opt into LLM summaries.

Install with npm install -g devday.

Currently supports OpenCode, Claude Code, and Cursor on macOS. Would love feedback on what other tools to support.
by freehorse | 2026-02-14 20:51:38+00:00
In addition to the unhook addon that others also recommended and is great, I would also suggest, as an alternative, setting a redirection rule from "www.youtube.com/shorts/XYWZ" to "www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYWZ". This will play the short but in the classical youtube video (landscape) format, with no infinite scrolling, or replay or autoplay (assuming these are in general disabled), which takes away a big part of the addictive aspect of shorts.
by tt24 | 2026-02-14 20:51:40+00:00
> Not necessarily as easily as you can vote for a different politician

Voting is easy. Of course that doesn't actually do anything, you're entirely held hostage by the 51%. Unlike switching jobs, which is entirely consensual and determined by you. If you dislike the arrangement you made with your boss you are more than welcome to leave at any moment.

If I dislike the arrangement made by 51% of people my only option is to leave - an option that I have to pay exit taxes in order to exercise.
by allenu | 2026-02-14 20:51:54+00:00
I think before Friendster, Myspace, then Facebook, there was a period where there were discussion forums for local communities. I think it was useful for meeting people. I remember friends in the late '90s used them frequently for chatting and some made new friends in real life that way. It was a short period, though, as more established companies came along that had a wider reach.
by travisgriggs | 2026-02-14 20:52:04+00:00
To make this go away, I think you’d have to change/mitigate the economic incentives (real and perceived) that influence programming practitioners.

People see the languages/libraries they use as their sellable articles. And why wouldn’t they? Every job application begins with a vetting of which “tools” you can operate. A language, as a tool, necessarily seeks to grow its applicability, as securing the ROI of if its users.

And even when not tied to direct monetary incentives, it can still be tied to one’s ability to participate and influence the direction of various open source efforts.

Mix in barely informed decision makers, seeking to treat those engineers as interchangeable assets, and the admirable position being promoted above falls down the priority chain.
by happytoexplain | 2026-02-14 20:52:31+00:00
Immigration is a broad topic. Immigration can be a valuable tool that benefits everybody, and it can destroy communities. Development has the same dichotomy (any kind - residential or otherwise). I'm certainly "anti-immigration" by some standards (i.e. "we're doing immigration bad", not "immigration as an idea is bad"). At the same time, I'm highly liberal (American). Stance on immigration and development is not nearly as strongly correlated with left/right as other wedge issues like reproductive rights, government secularism, etc.
by i5heu | 2026-02-14 20:52:32+00:00
I will update it later down the line as YT changes its layout and for bug fixes... but i think this was not what your question.

I don't think that something super bad can happen with these uBlock filter, they will sanitize the filter heavily.

Maybe a potential attack vector for these lists in general is to hide the body of a few sites but this is more annoying then dangerous AFAIK.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-14 20:53:17+00:00
The connection to a computer does not have any special challenges, except that the computer must be a desktop with a free PCIe slot.

Unless you have a server motherboard with an on-board SAS controller, you need to buy a SAS HBA card, put it in your desktop and also buy a compatible SAS cable, in order to connect an LTO tape drive to the computer.

New tape drives are extremely expensive, e.g. $4500 for the last generation of LTO-9 tapes (18 TB/cartridge), but if you store at least a few hundred TB of data you recover the cost of the drive from the cost difference between HDDs and tape cartridges.

I have an older LTO-7 (6 TB/cartridge) tabletop drive, which has cost me $3000 about 7 or 8 years ago (new), and there are several years since I have recovered its cost.

If you do not intend to store more than 100 TB, the cheapest solution is to buy external HDDs, but for long term storage you must plan to migrate the data periodically, as the lifetime of HDDs is hard to predict and unlikely to be much greater than 5 years.
by bayindirh | 2026-02-14 20:53:36+00:00
> Where do you live?

Somewhere far w.r.t. US. :)

> 16AWG CL2 cable is fantastic speaker wire,

Yet, it's way thinner than the manufacturer of my speakers recommend, which start at 13, and only go up. In my case I need 12 or 11. I don't remember honestly.

The good thing is, I managed to get a roll of the correct cable made by Acoustic Research. While the cable is not "fancy", it's copper, has the correct thickness and it's jacket still feels like day 1, and that thing is 10+ years old at this point.

For RCA cables I still use the factory default set came with my amplifier. Japan made, with very flexible jackets and gold plated connectors. That provides more than enough clarity for me.
by DannyBee | 2026-02-14 20:54:00+00:00
I've worked for 25+ years in mid and large size corporations, including IBM, Google, and other places (so a pretty large gamut of cultures and behaviors), and i think it's exactly right, FWIW.

For example - there is little to no understanding presented by the OP as to the actual perspectives of others - IE giving factual examples of what happened, and how this made OP view the other person's perspective. Instead, you get exactly one side of a story, without really any facts, and then a cartoon caricatures they are presenting as the other side (also without any real facts).
What is the actual example of what the other side of any of these stories did that is being used to back up these perspectives?

The post you are responding to points this (and other things) out , in a fairly kind way, and it's totally right to do so.

FWIW - i'll point you did a variant of the same behavior OP did- you say it betrays someone as being naieve, but provide no examples that actually back this up (IE what facts and examples do you have that make you believe it is naieve), and then sort of try to place the burden of them to prove you wrong by asking how long they worked at corporations?

This is nowhere near as bad an example as what OP did, but I would offer, similar to the post you responded to - it is much more effective and helpful if, rather than sort of try to paint someone else with your feelings, instead provide your experience and why it made you agree or disagree.

That is actually helpful in understanding your perspective on the situation, and enables folks to have a real discussion about it.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2026-02-14 20:54:06+00:00
I was recently running into this while playing the latest Hollow Knight game. Several sloppified sites which obviously were trying to tailor mechanics/items of the original game into the new one. The new release is only ~six months old, so there is just not that much hard content available to reference.

My question is -why? Is it really worth the ad revenue to trick a few people looking into a few niche topics? Say you pick the top 5000 trending movies/music/games and generate fake content covering the gamut. What is the payback period?
by zestyping | 2026-02-14 20:54:07+00:00
Whether they are sentient isn't even relevant. I agree with you that they aren't, but sentience is the wrong thing to focus on. It's also the sort of hairy, sensational question that will easily lead people down rabbit holes (and unfortunately that includes journalists).

Children are sentient, but we still hold their parents accountable. Adults are sentient, but in coercive situations we hold the party in power accountable. The fact that they are sentient is not determinative.

What matters is that we have _no accountability mechanism_ for them. There is no effective way to hold AIs accountable, therefore we must hold their operators accountable, full stop.
Ask HN: How do you deal with fragmented attention?
by yokuze | 2026-02-14 20:54:28+00:00
Since coding agents have become more capable, I often have them working on 2-5 disparate tasks simultaneously during my work day. The tasks are often in separate or even unrelated repos. Or worse, sometimes the tasks are similar enough that they are easily mixed-up.

Much of my attention goes to switching: Checking on results, restarting stopped tasks, fixing errors or providing hints, etc.

The context-switching takes a toll in the form of distraction and inefficiency.

What do you do that helps with this?
by kayodelycaon | 2026-02-14 20:55:06+00:00
> When you increase the resolution too much, the problems in old/remastered sources become apparent, and you can't enjoy that material anymore.

It doesn’t need to even be that old. I’ve got stuff from small musicians and they don’t have the equipment to make perfect recordings. You can’t tell with good headphones, but you put it through an amazing pair of speakers and it gets fuzzy.
by ferroman | 2026-02-14 20:55:21+00:00
This is exactly my experience (and I've been doing this fo 20 years now). Saw it on every job I had. The usual bs is "we are developing new performance and grows framework" "promotions will happen on next cycle" "we are reorganizing now" "we want to add more transparency" etc.
But somehow they always know who to call when shit hit th fan.
Don't fall for it. Look for another job once you see this. Looking for new job nowadays take a while and it's better to be employed during this process.
by underlipton | 2026-02-14 20:56:06+00:00
It comes down to Google's failure. Rather than outright defeating the SEO eldridge abomination by adopting a zero-tolerance policy to those tactics, Google made a mutually advantageous bargain with them of - course, leaving out a third party: us. They could do this because they had no competition. Now, the culture of enabling bad actors is, unfortunately, set.

Google did all the innovation it needed to and ever is going to. It needed to be broken up a decade ago. We can still do it now. Though I don't know how much it will save, especially if we don't also go after Apple, and Meta, and Microsoft.
by latexr | 2026-02-14 20:56:24+00:00
I understand your point and believe you believe it, which is why I mentioned I don’t think you were arguing in bad faith. What I am saying is I don’t think the commenter in question was acting in bad faith either, because that requires deception. In other words, it seems to me that commenter—like yourself—was arguing genuinely. If one agrees with their argument (or yours) is a different matter altogether, but bad faith it doesn’t seem to be.

Hope that clarifies what I’m getting at.
by freehorse | 2026-02-14 20:57:23+00:00
> Seems like a form of protest

Filtering content is not "a form of protest", it is about deciding what content you want to see in your browser and what not. Youtube, even the paid version, does not offer much in terms of customising one's experience (imo the "algorithm" deciding what you should watch based on your history does not count as one) and shorts is a proven addictive pattern that one may not want to encounter online.

It is fine if you like watching shorts, such filter lists are for those who do not want to watch shorts.
by zmmmmm | 2026-02-14 20:58:04+00:00
I honestly don't really know. Notice they can't even actually say "human", they say "provider" above. So they are pretty much admitting, the alternative isn't that you get a life long relationship with a person. You're getting a lifelong attachment to a corporate entity either way. People become sentimentally attached to inanimate objects all the time. It's all about what it means to them. There really isn't a rule book here, we have to figure it out.