MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dsign | 2026-02-10 20:05:50+00:00
Following your argument, another solution would be simply to enact measures to revert that "certain level of intelligence and awareness", and it seems that some countries are doing just that, if not exactly for the sake of reproduction :-) . So there's hope for population growth I guess?

> Now that I think of it, maybe the problem is that human societies grew too big too fast and our brains didn't adapt. We're capable of self-sacrifice, just in a group of max 20, not 20 million. We need a completely new paradigm of organizing the society.

This however is something I agree with, fully.
by famouswaffles | 2026-02-10 20:05:52+00:00
>No it isn't. Type a question into a base model, one that hasn't been finetuned into being a chatbot, and the predicted continuation will be all sorts of crap, but very often another question, or a framing that positions the original question as rhetorical in order to make a point.....

To be fair, only if you pose this question singularly with no proceeding context. If you want the raw LLM to answer your question(s) reliably then you can have the context prepended with other question-answer pairs and it works fine. A raw LLM is already capable of being a chatbot or anything else with the right preceding context.
Show HN: After a year: a retirement calc that verifies or determines your number
by marcus-verus | 2026-02-10 20:06:09+00:00
Most retirement calculators either oversimplify things or ask you to link your accounts so they can make money off your data. I wanted something that actually helped me see if I was on track without handing over a bank login, so I built RetireNumber.

It's a privacy-first retirement planner. You type in your own numbers. No account linking, no selling your data, no VC. Just me and a subscription. The engine does real math: Monte Carlo with 1,000 runs, historical backtesting to 1928 using Shiller's Yale data, tax-aware withdrawal strategies, and scenario comparison so you can try different life paths. Whether you're still figuring out your number or you already have a target in mind, you can use it to get there or to check that your plan actually holds up.

You can try it without signing up: https://retirenumber.com/try. There's a demo mode and a short guided tour. Changelog and the full story are on the site if you want to dig in.

This isn't financial advice. It's a tool for checking your number and whether your plan holds up. There is still a lot to but I'd love to hear whether the results feel clear and useful.

-Mark
by wolvoleo | 2026-02-10 20:07:13+00:00
Ah yes I see, being new to the country does not help instill their confidence either. True.

From your nickname it sounds like you are from Romania so if that's so there might be a dose of xenofobia included there as well. That is kinda big in the UK right now, the whole Brexit was fuelled by it, sadly, especially concerning eastern Europe. I was on the receiving end of some of it myself too, being called 'a non-national' and eyed with distrust. I'm sorry.
by awesome_dude | 2026-02-10 20:08:16+00:00
FTR I am firmly of the opinion that LLMs are not the pathway to AGI - they work by word association, albeit at sentence/paragraph level, which does not require understanding of the words.

To put it in layman's terms

If I have words like jhgjkhg and kjhgsd (etc) and I know that the former always precedes the latter, with a spacing of 3 or 4 words, then I know to use those words at that spacing, and have an understanding of what words can go in the middle.

But at no point have I deciphered what those words mean, nor will I ever.

This differs from humans who have a central understanding of the meaning of a word.

That core understanding is where LLMs are failing and where I believe AGI lives.

How this will be achieved, or proved, I have NFI - I have long given up on ML as a pathway to AGI, and even if it was I don't think that I possess the skills/knowledge/creativity required to help find it.
by k310 | 2026-02-10 20:08:25+00:00
Well, that's about one career too late. (mine)

I scratched and clawed my way through. It sure was interesting and varied.

I took heart from a book "Refuse to Choose" by Barbara Sher (2006). Not sure if it's dated by now, but it might encourage generalists who are "serial masters", that is, who master one thing after another; in my case to succeed in various different jobs with a common foundation of computer skills, scripting, *nix and electronics (all self-taught).

I played out that old maxim: A physics degree qualifies you well for every job but physics.

But look at what scripting did for me. I don't recall writing any low level code after learning assembler and C. That layer had sedimented for me while others were still hard at it writing large, complex programs. I just needed to solve a wide variety of problems very quickly,(laundry list withheld) My tools were perl (new at the time), tcl, even hypercard, which let me build interactive apps for non-computer-geek managers rapidly and with nice graphics (XCMDS to the rescue).

So, is this just moving solutions a layer above the previous? How often does this happen?
by red-iron-pine | 2026-02-10 20:08:26+00:00
CMDX is where we did a LOT of offshoring pre-COVID. Ditto for folks in Baja to cover timezones.

Definitely a paycut compared to the US but still pretty great for MX. Timezones and cultural overlap were pretty good, and there was a vibe that the folks coming out of Universities in CDMX were genuinely good, compared to iffy paper tigers in the Indian call centers.

The TN visa was also attractive, since we could just bring them north for a rotation or two. The Mexican workers love it since there was a big pay bump, but also the expectation they could continue their job back in MX later; bring em up to the RDU or Austin, put em in a few leadership roles, and then have them run a unit in MX, or help coordinate other LATAM efforts.
by godelski | 2026-02-10 20:08:33+00:00
Then go out and campaign to convince others to vote more similarly to you.

It would be a bad government if asdff's votes got to overrule everyone else's. Your favored candidate can lose. But the best thing to do is convince others to rally behind your candidate and your ideas.

Mind you, you can also write your congress critter. It's a bit more effective than writing to random people on the internet.
by hnfong | 2026-02-10 20:08:49+00:00
Pro tip: call it a "law of nature" and people will somehow stop pestering you about the why.

I think in a couple decades people will call this the Law of Emergent Intelligence or whatever -- shove sufficient data into a plausible neural network with sufficient compute and things will work out somehow.

On a more serious note, I think the GP fell into an even greater fallacy of believing reductionism is sufficient to dissuade people from ... believing in other things. Sure, we now know how to reduce apparent intelligence into relatively simple matrices (and a huge amount of training data), but that doesn't imply anything about social dynamics or how we should live at all! It's almost like we're asking particle physicists how we should fix the economy or something like that. (Yes, I know we're almost doing that.)
by impendia | 2026-02-10 20:09:19+00:00
I'm a professional mathematician and professor.

This is a very interesting question, and a great motivator for Galois theory, kind of like a Zen koan. (e.g. "What is the sound of one hand clapping?")

But the question is inherently imprecise. As soon as you make a precise question out of it, that question can be answered trivially.
by toast0 | 2026-02-10 20:09:23+00:00
Throwing an ebike is pretty impressive cause they're big and bulky. A regular road bike isn't too bad... hard to get a lot of distance, but you can toss them a bit. Rolling them is easier, if you push hard enough and they're reasonably balanced you'll get some good distance before they fall over.

At most, this was rolling it into traffic, but my view is he had a hand on the handlebar until right around the collision, so he was just walking with his bike.

But WTF is that traffic configuration? Why are people trying to drive through that lane in the wrong direction? Seems like a good way to get a head-on with a car in addition to pedestrians that weren't expecting a wrong way driver.

Vehicle operators usually have a duty not to proceed unless safe, even when they have right of way, I'm not sure how much that duty applies to pedestrians or if natural consequences is enough.
by r_lee | 2026-02-10 20:09:30+00:00
problem today is that there is no "sink" for money to go to when it flows upwards. we have resorted to raising interest rates to curb inflation, but that doesn't fix the problem, it just gives them an alternative income source (bonds/fixed income)

I'm not a hard socialist or anything, but the economics don't make sense. if there's cheap credit and the money supply perpetually expands without a sink, of course people with the most capital will just compound their wealth.

so much of the "economy" orbits around the capital markets and number going up. it's getting detached from reality. or maybe I'm just missing something.
by echelon | 2026-02-10 20:09:50+00:00
I'm happy the models are becoming commodity, but we still have a long way to go.

I want the ability to lean into any image and tweak it like clay.

I've been building open source software to orchestrate the frontier editing models (skip to halfway down), but it would be nice if the models were built around the software manipulation workflows:

https://getartcraft.com/news/world-models-for-film
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-02-10 20:10:00+00:00
> The Singularity: a hypothetical future point when artificial intelligence (AI) surpasses human intelligence, triggering runaway, self-improving, and uncontrollable technological growth

The Singularity is illogical, impractical, and impossible. It simply will not happen, as defined above.

1) It's illogical because it's a different kind of intelligence, used in a different way. It's not going to "surpass" ours in a real sense. It's like saying Cats will "surpass" Dogs. At what? They both live very different lives, and are good at different things.

2) "self-improving and uncontrollable technological growth" is impossible, because 2.1.) resources are finite (we can't even produce enough RAM and GPUs when we desperately want it), 2.2.) just because something can be made better, doesn't mean it does get made better, 2.3.) human beings are irrational creatures that control their own environment and will shut down things they don't like (electric cars, solar/wind farms, international trade, unlimited big-gulp sodas, etc) despite any rational, moral, or economic arguments otherwise.

3) Even if 1) and 2) were somehow false, living entities that self-perpetuate (there isn't any other kind, afaik) do not have some innate need to merge with or destroy other entities. It comes down to conflicts over environmental resources and adaptations. As long as the entity has the ability to reproduce within the limits of its environment, it will reach homeostasis, or go extinct. The threats we imagine are a reflection of our own actions and fears, which don't apply to the AI, because the AI isn't burdened with our flaws. We're assuming it would think or act like us because we have terrible perspective. Viruses, bacteria, ants, etc don't act like us, and we don't act like them.
by ameliaquining | 2026-02-10 20:10:00+00:00
A single process waiting on multiple sockets is basically no more expensive than a single socket, but if each app has its own background process then that is more expensive. So for best performance you really want to delegate all the push-notification-listening for all the apps on a device to a single background process owned by the OS, but it'd be fine for each app to use its own push server (though of course most apps do not actually want to self-host this).
by the_fall | 2026-02-10 20:10:10+00:00
Because inexplicably, there's random pixel-level noise baked into the blue area. You can't see it unless you crank up contrast, but it makes the bitmap hard to compress losslessly. If you remove it using threshold blur, it doesn't change the appearance at all, but the size is down to 100 kB. Scale it down to a more reasonable size and you're down to 50 kB.

Modern web development never ceases to amaze me.
by unholiness | 2026-02-10 20:10:10+00:00
Not sure this is necessarily for faster growth. Riding out the AI bubble's rise and/or its bursting will each present a lot of need for capital and a lot of barriers to raising it. They're not an AI company but they obviously have tons of exposure across the stack to these markets. They may simply be making the call that this is a better time to be raising money than the years to come.
by hamdouni | 2026-02-10 20:10:13+00:00
Total resonance with this part :

"They’re writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs in a V8 engine written in C++ that’s making system calls to an OS kernel that’s scheduling threads across cores they’ve never thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with caching layers they couldn’t diagram, all while npm pulls in 400 packages they’ve never read a line of."
by segmenta | 2026-02-10 20:10:16+00:00
We use a two-layer approach.

The raw sync layer (Gmail, calendar, transcripts, etc.) is idempotent and file-based. Each thread, event, or transcript is stored as its own Markdown file keyed by the source ID, and we track sync state to avoid re-ingesting the same item. That layer is append-only and not deduplicated.

Entity consolidation happens in a separate graph-building step. An LLM processes batches of those raw files along with an index of existing entities (people, orgs, projects and their aliases). Instead of relying on string matching, the model decides whether a mention like “Sarah” maps to an existing “Sarah Chen” node or represents a new entity, and then either updates the existing note or creates a new one.
by Shank | 2026-02-10 20:10:18+00:00
> I've only been in tech for like 20 years or so but I feel like either I'm missing something substantial or some kind of madness is happening to people.

People are extremely eager for a helpful AI assistant that they are willing to sacrifice security for it. Prompt injection attacks are theoretical until they hit you. Until you're hit you're just having fun riding the wave.
by Reubachi | 2026-02-10 20:10:20+00:00
I almost can't beleive adults are having this conversation.

You have never been sitting at a light, and see everone around you with their heads down, while the light has been green for 4 seconds?

Inverse, Have you ever been rear ended because a person staring down at their phone at a red light just decides to roll forward because someones brake lights in the pack deluminate for a moment?

I ask, because point 1 happens to me daily, and point 2 has put my car in the shop for weeks twice in the last 5 years.

A totally separate point to make; what could you possibly be doing on the phone? Like how addicted to social media or work must one be that they wait for the briefest of moments to distract themselves? I ask that not to judge or poke fun, but to say that you MUST be doing something that you find so important, and thus taking your attention, that it is now your priority. Or else, you would choose to wait.

I know you, as a reasonable adult on this forum, know what people are talking about here.
by adamduren | 2026-02-10 20:10:46+00:00
Lift AI | Senior Software Engineer | Remote (US timezones, LatAm/Canada OK) | Full Time | $100K + 0.50–0.75% equity

Lift AI builds software for the elevator industry, where paper inspection reports and faxed maintenance tickets are still normal. Almost no one is building software for this market. We manage ~5,000 properties and have 1,000+ IoT deployments on elevators across the US. The platform handles asset management, maintenance workflows, contract tracking, and an AI pipeline that extracts structured data from elevator industry documents. Django/PostgreSQL backend, React/TypeScript frontend, all on AWS. The CEO's family has been in the elevator industry for 40 years — we're not outsiders guessing at what the market needs.

You'd be our third engineer. The team is me (CTO, I write code daily, Central Time), one engineer who's been here two years and knows the domain well, and our Chief of Product who handles the PM side. No QA team, no DevOps. You own what you build.

First project: we acquired a field maintenance product that currently runs on Firebase/Firestore. You'd design the migration of its backend onto our Django/PostgreSQL stack, including figuring out a replacement for Firestore's offline sync (we're looking at ElectricSQL). You define the API contract, our other engineer builds the frontend against it. Beyond that, we're actively building AI features. One example: an invoice dispute agent that communicates directly with service providers. You'd help architect those.

Stack: Django 5 / DRF, PostgreSQL, Redis, Django Q, React Router v7, TypeScript, MUI, AWS (CDK, ECS Fargate, ElastiCache, RDS), GitHub Actions. AI features use Claude, OpenAI, and LangChain.

We're async but not siloed — Slack, GitHub PRs, and Linear are where most collaboration happens, with the occasional video call. No standups. We follow Shape Up with 4-week cycles. I review architecture proposals for your first ~90 days, then you own your domains. No on-call rotation. We don't do evening releases, and when something rare breaks, everyone pitches in.

$100K base + 0.50–0.75% equity. We have ~5,000 customers and growing revenue, so the equity isn't a lottery ticket. $100K is below big-city market rate and we know that. We're not focused on titles or hierarchy. Growth here means the scope of what you own keeps expanding, and comp grows with it.

5+ years experience. Python (Django, Flask, or FastAPI) and React/TypeScript in production. You've built something from architecture to deployment without someone telling you how. If you've been engineer #2-5 at a startup, or you're a senior engineer tired of process overhead, or you're at an agency and want to go deep on one product, this is that kind of role.

hiring@liftai.com — send something you've built that you're proud of, and tell us why.
by bgirard | 2026-02-10 20:10:55+00:00
Your experience sounds exactly like mine. My son is very autistic as well. I've had to cut off friends with families because either their didn't understand meltdown and were incredibly judgy because they were blaming my parenting for his ASD meltdowns, or others because my autistic son was a "bad influence". God forbid their (later diagnosed) kid have some exposure to a child with different neurodiversities.

That's not even going into my traumatic health care experience to getting my son help when he needed it.

So now I have all the hardships of raising a family, and I'm restricted friendship within the small ND accepting community of my area. So my support network is incredibly small and I barely get any support. It sucks.

Reading the responses to your story that are nitpicking it over your daycare experience is a perfect representation of the problems that families face.
by alexey-salmin | 2026-02-10 20:11:05+00:00
There are ways to build C that result in:

1) Exactly one C

2) Exactly two isomorphic Cs

3) Infinitely many isomorphic Cs

It's not really the question of whether i and -i are the same or not. It's the question of whether this question arises at all and in which form.
by nozzlegear | 2026-02-10 20:11:33+00:00
What does it mean to be "cheated by all the ones who didn't"? Their ire, if it's a real thing, is directed at the wrong people. They should direct it at the ones who made becoming an American citizen a long, drawn-out bureaucratic process, not their fellow immigrants who came to the US seeking a better life through hard work. As a true blue and red-blooded American, I'd vote a hundred times to make it as simple for those people to become an American citizen as it was for my forefathers, who only had to hop on a boat over in Europe and not shit themselves to death before they got here.
by aaroninsf | 2026-02-10 20:11:59+00:00
What is your argument for why denecessitating labor is very bad?

This is certainly the assertion of the capitalist class,

whose well documented behavior clearly conveys that this is not because the elimination of labor is not a source of happiness and freedom to pursue indulgences of every kind.

It is not at all clear that universal life-consuming labor is necessary for a society's stability and sustainability.

The assertion IMO is rooted rather in that it is inconveniently bad for the maintenance of the capitalists' control and primacy,

in as much as those who are occupied with labor, and fearful of losing access to it, are controlled and controllable.
by phendrenad2 | 2026-02-10 20:12:19+00:00
Oddly enough, this comes from Google having a monopoly on web advertising. If you're an advertiser, let's say for the sake of argument you're a company with $80 billion in revenue, and you find your ads placed next to a ragebait post, you might complain to Google, and they will promptly send you a canned response and send your email to Gemini for use in training data. If human eyes ever chance to see your email, it's a good chance that people in that department aren't working hard enough and they should do a layoff.
by candiddevmike | 2026-02-10 20:12:21+00:00
Now if only the Go gods would grant us in line ternaries to avoid all of the overly verbose nil checks, I'd be more likely to use pointer values in structs. Right now they're big foot guns that the compiler won't catch (and AFAIK no linter will check if you did a nil check before accessing).

I have a tech debt TODO on my backlog to rationalize null usage (waiting on encoding/jsonv2) where I'll go through structs and better determine which properties should be null (or even empty) both from a JSON and DB perspective, especially with custom types in the mix. Hopefully reducing the amount of possible values the TS frontend needs to handle...
by andrewla | 2026-02-10 20:12:27+00:00
Would you mind linking to some of the videos? You link here to an episode of This American Life featuring 911 calls.

While disturbing to listen to, without context, I don't hear anything to substantiate the claim of ICE agents menacing anyone they come across.

All the videos I've seen, [1], [2], [3], for example, from a quick check, are ICE reacting unprofessionally and with excessive force against people who are deliberately attempting to obstruct or interfere with them. Let's not play games here and say that they are menacing innocent people walking down the sidewalk. That's not to say that these assaults are justified or appropriate, but let's start the conversation in a good faith position, and not make up bullshit about ICE walking around menacing innocent bystanders.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5aK7o6fEJg

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5w05TcQIVQ

[3] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tOaJAd3lkdM
by echelon | 2026-02-10 20:12:29+00:00
They're working on a few really lofty ideas:

1. real time world models for the "holodeck". It has to be fast, high quality, and inexpensive for lots of users. They started on this two years ago before "world model" hype was even a thing.

2. some kind of hardware to support this.

David Holz talks about this on Twitter occasionally.

Midjourney still has incredible revenue. It's still the best looking image model, even if it's hard to prompt, can't edit, and has artifacting. Every generation looks like it came out of a magazine, which is something the other leading commercial models lack.