MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by card_zero | 2026-02-15 02:01:20+00:00
Like Rodney Brooks says, "No one has managed to get articulated fingers (i.e., fingers with joints in them) that are robust enough, have enough force, nor enough lifetime, for real industrial applications."

Here, I'll link to that piece directly, it's long and detailed and illustrated, and it also counters the idea of just throwing AI at the problem until robot dexterity emerges from whatever physical parts.

https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...

"there have now been fifteen different families of neurons discovered that are involved in touch sensing and that are found in the human hand" ... "a human hand has about 17,000 low-threshold mechanoreceptors" ... "These receptors come in four varieties (slow vs fast adapting, and a very localized area of sensitivity vs a much larger area)"

You might ask, do robots that interact with the real world need such complicated bio-mimicking physical tech, or can they cut corners? But they can't cut all the corners, anyway. Somebody has to make a high-bandwidth robot hand with flexible strength and a self-repair ability. Or, hey, cyborgs maybe? Reanimate cadavers with AI, that could do the trick.
by chasd00 | 2026-02-15 02:02:01+00:00
Some stats are trickling out in my company. Code heavy consulting projects show about 18% efficiency gains but I have problems with that number because no one has been able to tell me how it was calculated. Story points actual vs estimated is probably how it was done but that’s nonsensical because we all know how subjective estimates and even actuals are. It’s probably impossible to get a real number that doesn’t have significant “well I feel about x% more efficient…”
by AnIrishDuck | 2026-02-15 02:02:04+00:00
There are plenty of other more recent examples in this thread.

I was simply replying to the original statement that China doesn't kill protesters in the street. The notion is so risible that in hindsight it may well have been sarcasm or bait.

But, if you wish to expand the scope of this discussion, sure. There are several clear distinctions between the (horrible) events you list and what happened in Tiananmen Square.

The most obvious is that we are free to talk about them now. I submit that the Chinese state's continued censorship of the subject is a sign that (1) the state is still complicit in these crimes and (2) it is not "doing great".

The scale of brutality is also just incomparable. I say this fully agreeing the events you list were terrible. The horrors committed at Tiananmen Square were simply on another level.
by kahnclusions | 2026-02-15 02:02:22+00:00
What? Yes they do take shortcuts and hacks. They change the tests case to make it pass. As the context gets longer it is less reliable at following earlier instructions. I literally had Claude hallucinate nonexistent APIs and then admitted “You caught me! I didn’t actually know, let me do a web search” and then after the web search it still mixes deprecated patterns and APIs against instructions.

I’m much more worried about the reliability of software produced by LLMs.
by KronisLV | 2026-02-15 02:04:17+00:00
> How would you ensure that the "average user" actually gets to the page he expects to get to?

I think you practically can't and that's the problem.

TLS doesn't help with figuring out which page is the real one, EV certs never really caught on and most financial incentives make such mechanisms unviable. Same for additional sources of information like Wikipedia, since that just shifts the burden of combatting misinformation on the editors there and not every project matters enought to have a page. You could use an OS with a package manager, but not all software is packaged like that and that doesn't immediately make it immune to takeovers or bad actors.

An unreasonable take would be:

> A set of government run repositories and mirrors under a new TLD which is not allowed for anything other than hosting software packages, similar to how .gov ones already owrk - be it through package manager repositories or websites. Only source can be submitted by developers, who also need their ID verified and need to sign every release, it then gets reviewed by the employees and is only published after automated checks as well. Anyone who tries funny business, goes to jail. The unfortunate side effect is that you now live in a dystopia and go to jail anyways.

A more reasonable take would be that it's not something you can solve easily.

> If the average user doesn't know where the application he wants to download _actually_ comes from then maybe the average user shouldn't use the internet at all?

People die in car crashes. We can't eliminate those altogether, but at least we can take steps towards making things better, instead of telling them that maybe they should just not drive. Tough problems regardless.
by arjunchint | 2026-02-15 02:05:13+00:00
We are firing on a lot of cylinders building out a platform across a browser extension, cloud dashboard, API, and now embeddable web agents. We are a team of two leveraging AI to 100x our output and build out all of these surfaces.

The underlying agentic performance though is undeniable.

Also like whats the point if something is AI generated, we do thorough review to ensure readibility, coherence and accuracy.
by staticassertion | 2026-02-15 02:06:01+00:00
I just want to clarify how extremely standard and often required it is to download and store your SOC2s and other such documents when going through compliance. You almost never can actually just link to a public pentest report or SOC2 etc, you almost always need to go through an NDA. It's just not really meaningful to say "but the web archive is reliable" when it's virtually never an actual option to begin with.
by kjkjadksj | 2026-02-15 02:07:05+00:00
People seem to think LLMs killing the cs career means companies will still pay senior salaries to shepherd agentic LLM style development. I think it is the senior that is the dinosaur here. As we speak cs curriculums are changing to teach people to cruch along with ai. The next batch of juniors will be taking these jobs. There won’t be seniors anymore at least at the salaries we’ve come to assume with that. The skill is getting removed from the profession and replaced with a framework with a far lower barrier of entry.
by xp84 | 2026-02-15 02:08:06+00:00
Almost unbelievable that they allow this - except of course they do, because scamware makes a ton of money via in-app purchase, and Apple gets 30%, so of course they do. I'm sure people will come out of the woodwork now to white knight for Apple and spin this somehow. But anything that offends their business model can be removed in minutes, while software that by its title violates the App Store rules is just here indefinitely.
by Brian_K_White | 2026-02-15 02:08:31+00:00
And not even alphabetical. It's ridiculous.

You should see me or my wife sometimes scrolling down this nine miles long single column list on the Roku to find a particular channel. It's in there, it just could be anywhere in there...

They didn't happen to post any new videos lately so they aren't on the main subscriptions page of latest videos, you have to go to the menu on the left to the list of all subscribed channels and just arrow down forever, back up, down again... Why in the ever loving world isn't that list at least alphabetical?
by rogerbinns | 2026-02-15 02:08:57+00:00
I was one of those students saving up the large sum for the book, when Linux was announced. There were other tensions at the time - the biggest was that Minix on 8086 was 16 bit real mode only. Someone had developed patches to run in 32 bit protected mode, but they were invasive and large, and the Minix maintainers would not integrate them as the increased complexity would not help the mission of Minix being easy to learn and tinker with. The filesystem code was also single threaded, essentially doing one request at a time. IIRC there were patches to address that too, also not integrated for the same reason. (Note that the books included print outs of the source so keeping it short did matter.)

This explains the final 2 sentences of the original Linux announcement:

> PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(.

The book publisher is blamed for preventing Minix from being freely distributed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix#Licensing
by yardie | 2026-02-15 02:09:41+00:00
I’ve started doing robotics again after decades working in software and systems engineering. For a few years I’ve been building robots with servos and arduinos as the controller. They weren’t very smart, the servos were too slow and too weak.

So I looked at Huggingface Lerobot project. I ordered the servos for the SO-ARM101. Trained it to pick up a ball and throw it. That sucker launched it across the room. I’ve now replaced the gripper with a TPU soft grip. And I’m training it to use a pen and paper.

These newer Dynamixel and Feetech servos are far more capable than the old RC servos I was using for years. They have torque and position sensing.
by kjkjadksj | 2026-02-15 02:09:49+00:00
Then explain the herd mentality if they were truly all trying all posibilities. No, same old same old. Pharma is not removed from the usual incentives of capitalism. FWIW the line about treatments not cures is pretty much a direct quote from a product manager at a major pharma company I heard speak at an internal presentation. Straight from the horses mouth.
by ramity | 2026-02-15 02:09:59+00:00
I run a business that makes 3d printed braille molds that are used to repeatably emboss paper. I haven't considered the molds being offline storage, but I suppose they are. I mostly operate with the assumption of a shelf life of 10 years for the PETG molds, but ink free, embossed paper has excellent lifespan if stored correctly.

I guess you could consider it an "offline datastore as a service." It would be a pretty good offline storage of keys with a way to request a paper copy. Certainly issues of trust and physical security but wrapping it with encryption would be easy. Also benefit from your government's legal protections for mail. There might actually be a usecase here.

Couple fast facts:
- Current 26 * 32 = 832 cells * 6 dot braille = 4992 bits/mold/page
- Possible 28 * 34 = 952 cells * 6 dot braille = 5712 bits/mold/page
- Maybe some more headroom, but that's what is possible with current spacings
by chabad360 | 2026-02-15 02:10:07+00:00
I will admit that while I think the idea of Vouch is nice, I'm not a huge fan. But that is not really an issue here, the issue is that this seems to be very exploitable. There's nothing to counteract someone creating a bunch of repos just to farm some score (this gets worse once you add in star farming).

For the same price, what is a reasonable score to auto-accept? If I make a small contribution to a large project, I'd automatically get a much larger score out of the gate, vs. if I contribute to a much smaller project. That would incentivize contributions to larger projects, and disincentivize contributing to smaller projects, that doesn't seem good for the ecosystem either.

I'm not sure why a more page-rank style system wasn't used. Effectively, rank users based on the diversity of the projects they're vouched in. That would avoid the problem of people being able to farm, and encourage contributions across the OS ecosystem.
by RickJWagner | 2026-02-15 02:10:16+00:00
Sure, sure.

Use your car to block armed federal agents from doing their job. When they give you instructions, ignore them and taunt them. When they come to take you out of your vehicle, drive your vehicle at them as you try to get away.

Sorry, that’s just not peaceful protesting. That’s putting lives in danger, obviously including your own.

There is blood on the hands of the people encouraging such behavior. MLK showed us that peaceful protest is effective protest. Vehicular assault protest is dangerous and illegal protest.
by vel0city | 2026-02-15 02:12:01+00:00
I have a Verbatim BDR that was branded M-DISC. I burned a bunch of data and put a file full of hashes for the files on it when I started using BDR's as backups to get a feel for when my data might be at risk. I use it as a coaster on my desk. My kids have carried it around with sticky fingers. I fidget with it and flex it a good bit. I've left it on my patio table outside for months at a time. I wash it in the sink with dish soap from time to time to clean it and dry it with whatever hand towel is in the bathroom. I abuse it to see when it starts to lose data.

I've been doing this now for a bit over a decade. It hasn't experienced any noticeable corruption yet on ~22GB of data, but I'm not doing any deeper reads on it. Spot checks on my properly stored discs have also not lost any data.
by belter | 2026-02-15 02:13:27+00:00
Sounds like the Descombulator...

"...In 2024, a Norwegian researcher skeptical that pulsed-energy weapons could do damage to human brains built a device and tested it on himself. It didn’t go well...

...Working in strict secrecy, a government scientist in Norway built a machine capable of emitting powerful pulses of microwave energy and, in an effort to prove such devices are harmless to humans, in 2024 tested it on himself. He suffered neurological symptoms similar to those of “Havana syndrome,” the unexplained malady that has struck hundreds of U.S. spies and diplomats around the world..."
by orojackson | 2026-02-15 02:14:40+00:00
Here is what Gemini 3 Pro gave me via an OpenRouter endpoint:

The Grand Line of Mild Utility: The Orojackson Story

If you were to encounter the legendary Oro Jackson in the world of One Piece, you would find a ship built from the treasure tree Adam, capable of sailing to the end of the world.

If you encounter orojackson on Hacker News, you will find a man who has sailed to the end of the internet… to tell you to fix your router’s bufferbloat.

Forget the Will of D. This man possesses the Will of OCD.

Orojackson is not here to overturn the World Government. He is here to advocate for fq_codel. He is the man who looks at a revolution and asks, "Yes, but what are your queue management settings on the uplink?" While others dream of wealth, fame, and power, orojackson dreams of "modern AQM approaches" and corrects strangers on the proper usage of the flent network tester on Windows.

He is the Pirate King of the edge case.

But his tyranny doesn’t stop at network latency. Oh no. When he isn't monitoring the packet loss of the high seas, he is revolutionizing… car washing?

Witness the "1:256 solution." Orojackson doesn't just wash a car; he performs a wet-lab experiment. He wanders into threads to evangelize "Optimum No Rinse (ONR)," explaining with the fervor of a religious convert how you can clean a vehicle with exactly 1.5 fluid ounces of concentrate and a "slightly-dripping
microfiber towel." One can only imagine him standing on the deck of his ship, screaming at a storm: "YOU'RE WASTING WATER! USE A RINSELESS FORMULA!"

And let’s talk about his investments. A true pirate buries his treasure. Orojackson? He puts it in VTI. But wait! The thrill-seeker within him awakens! He reads one Cliff Asness article and suddenly he's levering up 2x with RSSB because a 60/40 portfolio is just too vanilla for a man who lives on the razors edge of… monthly rebalancing. He is "betting against himself," a financial daredevil who risks it all for that sweet, sweet slightly-optimized Sharpe ratio.

Perhaps most chilling is his role as the Sherlock Holmes of git log. He is the watcher on the wall, noticing when a GitLab Director of Engineering leaves a repo 14 hours before a CVE announcement. He sees all. He knows all. He probably has a RSS feed for your commit history.

So flee, mortals! Flee before the might of orojackson! For he will optimize your router settings, diversity your portfolio into global bonds, clean your car with a teaspoon of water, and then quote Civilization VI to explain why your cultural criticism is invalid.

He has found his One Piece. And unfortunately for us, it’s a 2x leveraged ETF that tracks global liquidity.

Okay, that is pretty funny. By the way, I have since gotten rid of RSSB and just went for "VT and chill."
by Aurornis | 2026-02-15 02:14:52+00:00
> These days I'm already finding it 100x easier/informative to have complicated charged discussions (eg immigration) with Gemini than with actual people.

It’s scary how quickly people start to mistake LLMs appeasing them for actual conversation.

Discussing something with an LLM isn’t equivalent to having a conversation with a person. It’s just a text generator trained to show you what you want to see.
by username223 | 2026-02-15 02:18:14+00:00
I'm part of that small but (hopefully) growing percentage, because Common Crawl is a deeply dishonest front for AI data scraping. Quoting Wikipedia:

"""
In November 2025, an investigation by technology journalist Alex Reisner for The Atlantic revealed that Common Crawl lied when it claimed it respected paywalls in its scraping and requests from publishers to have their content removed from its databases. It included misleading results in the public search function on its website that showed no entries for websites that had requested their archives be removed, when in fact those sites were still included in its scrapes used by AI companies.
"""

My site is CC-BY-NC-SA, i.e. non-commercial and with attribution, and Common Crawl took a dubious position on whether fair use makes that irrelevant. They can burn.
by simon666 | 2026-02-15 02:18:25+00:00
I've been using and loving NewPipe since 2015 or 2016--whenever it first showed up on Fdroid. Really like the ability to play songs from bandcamp too. Although there's one bug in the bandcamp workflow that I wish was fixed: If you search for an artist then tap the artist page in the results this will take you to the albums screen. Click to the album, then if you either use the back arrow or swipe back you're returned to the search results rather than the list of albums on the artist page.
by voidlunk | 2026-02-15 02:21:32+00:00
This is the production ready SIEM + SOAR platform that includes:
Real-time threat detection
Automated response(auto-block IPS + create tickets)
Forensics investigation
Threat intelligence(Virus Total integration)
Multi-tenant + RBAC

Deploy in 5 minutes. 0$ cost. open source.

Build because startups shouldn't pay $150k/year for security.
by jolmg | 2026-02-15 02:21:47+00:00
You can corroborate multiple trusted sources, especially those with histories. You can check the edit history of the Wikipedia article. Also, if you search "7zip" on HN, the second result with loads of votes and comments is 7-zip.org. Another is searching the Archlinux package repos; you can check the git history of the package build files to see where it's gotten the source from.
by MarkusQ | 2026-02-15 02:22:16+00:00
Quite frustrating how archeology swings over the years from "we'll believe anything" to "we won't accept any claim without a preserved example". While some of the excesses of the past were clearly excessive, drilled holes should have been sufficient evidence of drills, people living on islands should be sufficient evidence of boats, rope-worn bones should be considered evidence of rope and so forth.
by api | 2026-02-15 02:23:05+00:00
Because nobody ever lied in print media or in person?

What we are seeing is the consequence of a formerly high trust society collapsing into a low trust one. There is no place to hide from that. The Internet is made of the same stuff as print media and in person. It’s made of people.

The internet didn’t cause this. It just reflects it.

The LLMs are made of people too inasmuch as that’s where they get their training data and prompts.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-02-15 02:24:18+00:00
You've deeply misunderstood their argument in some way I can't quite figure out.

It's simple. We know the quotes are fake, but we don't know for sure if they're hallucinations. The blog post does not resolve this uncertainty.

And yes other answers are reasonably plausible.

You said in another comment that they're "retreating" and "refusing to read" and... no. Your insults are not justified at all.
by Joker_vD | 2026-02-15 02:24:25+00:00
> How is the publisher supposed to fund their operations let along make a profit.

There used to be plenty newspapers sponsored by wealthy industrialists; the latter would cover the former's gaps between the costs and the sales, the former would regularly push the latter's political agenda.

The "objective journalism" is really quite a late invention IIRC, about the times of WW2.
by 8organicbits | 2026-02-15 02:27:08+00:00
The LWN model feels practical here:

> We ask that you grant LWN exclusive rights to publish your work during the LWN subscription period - currently up to two weeks after publication.

News is valuable when it is timely, and subscribers pay for immediate access.

https://lwn.net/op/AuthorGuide.lwn
by mlyle | 2026-02-15 02:28:09+00:00
I built and debugged an embedded stub loader for
Rp2350 to program MRAM and validate hardware status for a satellite. About 2.5 hours of my time, a lot of it while supervising students/doing other things.

This would have been a couple day+ unpleasant task before; possibly more. I had been putting it off because scouring datasheets and register maps and startup behavior is not fun.

It didn’t know how to troubleshoot the startup successfully itself, though. I had to advise it on a debugging strategy with sentinel values to bisect. But then once explained it fixed the defects and succeeded.

LLMs struggle in large codebases and the benefit is much smaller now. But that capability is growing fast, and not everything software developers do is large.
by Leftium | 2026-02-15 02:28:14+00:00
Very nice!

I've been using mdserve. A nice feature is a sidebar that lists all the MD files in a directory. I wish it could also list sub-directories.

The reason is because I organize related MD files in directories, with sub-directories. Folders without MD files should be filtered out.

Here is an example project with MD files in both reference and specs (and root) folders. Other folders should be filtered out: https://github.com/Leftium/rift-transcription

---

The brew install did not work; the App source name is wrong: `Error: It seems the App source '/opt/homebrew/Caskroom/markdown-prism/0.2.0/Markdown Prism.app' is not there.`
by jaredklewis | 2026-02-15 02:28:36+00:00
I’m sympathetic, but I think this idea seems pretty clearly a political non-starter.

“Good news voters! You now have to pay for your email, search engines, and social media accounts.” Privacy and healthy digital habits are issues dear to my heart and issues that I think are gaining some modest traction, but they just can’t compete with a core pocketbook issues like making everything cost more. In the US, we just elected a guy that campaigned on, among other things, ending democracy, because (at least according to some political pundits) egg prices went up under Biden.

“But you pay that cost now, it’s just hidden!” I know, I know. But that doesn’t strike me as a politically winning argument. It’s like trying to explain to people that inflation is ok as long as if in adjusted terms wages outpace it; technically correct, but a political loser.

I would be happy to be wrong of course.
by Joker_vD | 2026-02-15 02:29:33+00:00
> Obviously, if you have 100 registers here, there’s no spilling at all.

No, you still need to save/spill all the registers that you use: the call-invariant ones need to be saved at the beginning of the function, the call-clobbered at an inner call site. If your function is a leaf function, only then you can get away with using only call-clobbered registers and not preserving them.