MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by harrall | 2026-02-18 05:05:48+00:00
I’ve been helping normal people at work use AI and there’s two groups that are really struggling:

1. People who only think of using AI in very specific scenarios. They don’t know when you use it outside of the obvious “to write code” situations and they don’t really use AI effectively and get deflated when AI outputs the occasional garbage. They think “isn’t AI supposed to be good at writing code?”

2. People who let AI do all the thinking. Sometimes they’ll use AI to do everything and you have to tell them to throw it all away because it makes no sense. These people also tend to dump analyses straight from AI into Slack because they lack the tools to verify if a given analysis is correct.

To be honest, I help them by teaching them fairly rigid workflows like “you can use AI if you are in this specific situation.” I think most people will only pick up tools effectively if there is a clear template. It’s basically on-the-job training.
by majormajor | 2026-02-18 05:06:34+00:00
Taste is both driven by tools and independent of it.

It's driven by it in the sense that better tools and the democratization of them changes people's baseline expectations.

It's independent of it in that doing the baseline will not stand out. Jurassic Park's VFX stood out in 1993. They wouldn't have in 2003. They largely would've looked amateurish and derivative in 2013 (though many aspects of shot framing/tracking and such held up, the effects themselves are noticeably primitive).

Art will survive AI tools for that reason.

But commerce and "productivity" could be quite different because those are rarely about taste.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-18 05:06:58+00:00
> The filter used to be effort. You had to care enough to spend weeks on something, which meant you probably understood the problem deeply. Now that filter is gone and we get a flood of "I prompted this in 20 minutes" posts where the author can't answer a single follow-up about their own code. The interesting Show HNs still exist, they're just buried under noise.

More's the pity. I'm prepping for a ShowHN with a completely hand-coded project I started in December. It will be finished around end-march. I vibe-coded all the docs, because I spent all the time on the code.

I have no idea if the ShowHN is going to be at all useful, but I pivoted multiple times on various implementation things. Had it been coded by an AI, I don't think there would be any pivot.

The value is precisely from the pivots. An AI would have plodded on ahead anyway with a broken model for the problem-space.
by ccortes | 2026-02-18 05:07:12+00:00
> It was comparing to a hypothetical world where everything is perfectly organized, everyone is perfectly behaved, everything is perfectly ordered, and therefore we don't have to have certain jobs that only exist to counter other imperfect things in society.

> Jobs that don't provide value for a company are cut, eventually.

Uhm, seems like Greaber is not the only one drawing conclusions from a hypothetical perfect world
by bubblewand | 2026-02-18 05:07:21+00:00
I have seen two of your five shows and like them a lot, and heard of another and it’s already on my to-watch list. This is enough overlap to get the other ones added to the list (plus that pilot).

Given the agreement in taste so far, here’s a couple to try if you haven’t:

- Sweet Vicious — marred by getting cancelled after one season, but a fun season anyway. College sexual assault survivor becomes an anti-rapist vigilante. It’s, uh… more light-hearted than the premise sounds?

- Review with Forrest MacNeil — A guy has a review show where he attempts to review… life. Takes viewer requests for what specifically to review in each episode. He takes his job very seriously. Avoid seeing episode counts if at all possible. Trust me on that part. Doesn’t ruin it if you do see them, but being blind to that does improve it.

Another that I’m not sure counts as under-watched as it’s more recent, but I rarely see it discussed in the wild: Dickinson, a magical realism biographical show about the poet, that mixes in humor and some modern pop culture (think: A Knight’s Tale).
by schrodinger | 2026-02-18 05:08:12+00:00
Writing the code has never been the hard part for the vast majority of businesses. It's become an order of magnitude cheaper, and that WILL have effects. Businesses that are selling crud apps will falter.

But your hypothetical manager who needs employee scheduling software isn't paying for the coding, they're paying for someone to _figure out_ their exact needs, and with a UI that fits their preference, ready to go in no time.

I've thought a lot about this and I don't think it'll be the death of SaaS. I don't think it's the death of a software engineer either — but a major transformation of the role and the death if your career _if you do not adapt_, and fast.

Agentic coding makes software cheap, and will commoditize a large swath of SaaS that exists primarily because software used to be expensive to build and maintain. Low-value SaaS dies. High-value SaaS survives based on domain expertise, integrations, and distribution. Regulations adapt. Internal tools proliferate.
by ZaneHam | 2026-02-18 05:08:17+00:00
Hey, I am actually working on making this compatible on earlier AMD's as well because I have an old gaming laptop with an RX5700m which is GFX10. I'm reading up on the ISA documentation to see where the differences are, and I'll have to adjust some binary encoding to get it to work.

I mean this with respect to the other person though please don't vibe code this if you want to contribute or keep the compiler for yourself. This isn't because I'm against using AI assistance when it makes sense it's because LLMs will really fail in this space. Theres's things in the specs you won't find until you try it and LLMs find it really hard to get things right when literal bits matter.
by SloppyDrive | 2026-02-18 05:10:04+00:00
Optimus is not a leader in humanoids; but that china demo is not really all that impressive; They are lightweight, reduced scale, and not all that dynamic... No idea how adaptable the control would be either.

See how poorly the sword one moves compared to the others.

Optimus hand dexterity is interesting; and the handling capacity is targeting useful weights (10s of kilos).

Boston dynamics is the most interesting; targeting "fit human" manipulation, 50kg. Their adaptable movement and walking are the best ive seen demoed as well.
by replicantarmy | 2026-02-18 05:10:52+00:00
I built an API that scores prediction market contracts for resolution risk — how likely they are to face disputes, delays, or capital lockup.

The problem: over $12.4M in capital was frozen in prediction market disputes in 2024-2025. Ambiguous contract wording, single-source oracle failures, and temporal ambiguity cause real financial harm to traders. Most people evaluate markets by price and volume, but nobody was systematically quantifying the risk that a market won't resolve cleanly.

SettleRisk scores every contract 0–100 using a 15-driver taxonomy. Each score comes with:

- Explainable risk drivers with evidence spans (the exact text that triggered each driver)
- Dispute probability estimate
- Settlement delay distribution (lognormal p50/p90/p99)
- Dispute-adjusted pricing: risk premium, capital lockup cost, and fair spread in basis points

The scoring is fully deterministic — same contract text + version stamps = identical output, every time. No ML model in the loop for scoring. We use an LLM for structured rule extraction (identifying drivers in contract text), but the scoring formula itself is closed-form arithmetic with published methodology.

Technical details for the curious:
- Rust + Tokio, axum (REST) + tonic (gRPC)
- Sub-5ms scoring latency
- Batch endpoints (up to 1,000 markets per call)
- HMAC-SHA256 request signing
- Supports Polymarket and Kalshi

Full methodology is published at https://settlerisk.com/methodology. You can try the live demo at https://settlerisk.com/demo (no signup required).

Free tier available. Would love feedback from anyone trading prediction markets or building trading infrastructure.
by canistel | 2026-02-18 05:11:47+00:00
Libre Office does allow customising shortcuts. I got peeved when Ctrl+Plus (or Ctrl+Shift+=) is not available to add rows or columns, but found that it is very much possible to add it within Libre Office Calc itself.

From my notes (MD):-

- The shortcut can be reassigned under Tools > Customise > keyboard

- Add Ctrl+Shift+= (Equals to not Plus) too

- Select category All commands, scroll down there are 2 Insert Cells

- Hover mouse over. It shows the Uno command. Pick the one with `.uno:InsertCell`

- Under Shrtcut Keys select Shift+Ctrl+= and click on Assign
by moi2388 | 2026-02-18 05:12:18+00:00
That’s not the point at all. It’s not about consciousness or being able to suppress it, or for example neurofeedback training or exposure therapy wouldn’t work either.

It’s about transference of an innate stimulus response mechanic which can be transferred to another stimulus if paired in quick succession of the original stimulus, thereby eliciting the same response.

It says absolutely nothing about this being conscious or not, or impossible to suppress.
by throwaway81523 | 2026-02-18 05:12:28+00:00
> When writing a book, you can't make everybody happy.

The usual reason a reader might be unhappy is that something they wanted to see isn't there. So the solution is put in as much as you possibly can ;). Maybe future editions can be bigger and more comprehensive. OTOH there seems to be quite a lot of what amounts to implementation tutorials. Maybe that's not needed in a history book. In a history book I'm more interested in sources than narrative. Although, some interviews with important Lispers would also be cool.

I can understand not wanting to put in too much math and theory and that's fine. I can't really tell what is there and what isn't beyond getting some hints from the bibliography entries.

This (by McCarthy) showed up immediately when I searched for something unrelated, some articles by Jeff Barnett about Lisp 2: http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp/lisp.pdf

This is a link dump about Lisp 2: https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/LISP/lisp2_...

I have been wanting to look into Lisp 2 because it had supposedly had an interesting trick in its GC. It was a compacting mark/sweep GC but had an antecedent of generational GC where it usually wouldn't bother trying to reclaim memory that had already survived compaction once. I've been interested in re-implementing that trick in some modern implementations for small MCUs.
by ZaneHam | 2026-02-18 05:13:17+00:00
Hello,

I'm not the one who posted to HN but I am the project author. I'm working my way into doing multiple architectures as well as more modern GPUs too. I only did this because I used LLVM to check my work and I have an AMD GFX 11 card on my partners desktop (Which I use to test on sometimes when its free).

If you do have access to this kind of hardware and you're willing to test my implementations on it then I'm all ears! (You don't have too obviously :-) )
by habinero | 2026-02-18 05:14:44+00:00
None of this is even slightly correct lol

People have been painting with red and yellow ochre and soot for at least 50K years for sure, and probably several hundred thousand years in truth. You don't need a brush, you have fingers or a twig.

The walls on the streets of Pompeii are full of advertising -- they had an election going on and people just scribbled slogans and such on walls. You don't need flyers lol.

The idea that signs or advertising was "artistry" is deeply ahistorical. The reason old stuff looks real fancy is because labor was extremely cheap and materials were expensive.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-02-18 05:14:52+00:00
In addition to the httpd on port 80, there is also a gopher server

echo /ogup/list|nc -vvn 51.210.178.223 70

Copies of DR-DOS:

echo /abandonware/os/DR-DOS|nc -vvn 51.210.178.223 70
by mrtksn | 2026-02-18 05:16:09+00:00
In a WhatsApp group full of doctors, managers, journalist and engineers (including software) in age of 30-60 I asked if anyone heard of openclaw and only 3 people heard of it from influencers, none used it.

But from my social feed the impression was that it is taking over the world:)

I asked it because I am building something similar since some tome and I thought its over they were faster than me but as it appears there’s no real adoption yet. Maybe there will be some once they release it as part of ChatGPT but even then it looks like too early as actually few people are using the more advanced tools.

It’s definitely in very early stage. It appears that so far the mainstream success in AI is limited to slop generation and even that is actually small number of people generating huge amounts of slop.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-18 05:18:38+00:00
Honestly this is how every critique of Graeber goes in my experience: As soon as his works are discussed beyond surface level, the goalposts start zooming around so fast that nothing productive can be discussed.

I tried to respond to the specific conversation about Bullshit Jobs above. In my experience, the way this book is brought up so frequently in online conversations is used as a prop for whatever the commenter wants it to mean, not what the book actually says.

I think Graeber did a fantastic job of picking "bullshit jobs" as a topic because it sounds like something that everyone implicitly understands, but how it's used in conversation and how Graeber actually wrote about the topic are basically two different things
by overgard | 2026-02-18 05:19:03+00:00
The coding tools are not hard to pick up. Agent chat and autocomplete in IDE's are braindead simple, and even TUI's like Claude are extremely easy to pickup (I think it took me a day?) And despite what the vibers like to pretend, learning to prompt them isn't that hard either. Or, let me clarify, if you know how to code, and you know how you want something coded, prompting them isn't that hard. I can't imagine it'll take that long for an impact to be seen, if there is a major impact to be seen.

I think it's more likely that people "feel" more productive, and/or we're measuring bad things (lines of code is an awful way to measure productivity -- especially considering that these agents duplicate code all the time so bloat is a given unless you actively work to recombine things and create new abstractions)
by eru | 2026-02-18 05:19:38+00:00
> Their goal is to monopolize labor for anything that has to do with i/o on a computer, which is way more than SWE. Its simple, this technology literally cannot create new jobs it simply can cause one engineer (or any worker whos job has to do with computer i/o) to do the work of 3, therefore allowing you to replace workers (and overwork the ones you keep). Companies don't need "more work" half the "features"/"products" that companies produce is already just extra. They can get rid of 1/3-2/3s of their labor and make the same amount of money, why wouldn't they.

Yes, that's how technology works in general. It's good and intended.

You can't have baristas (for all but the extremely rich), when 90%+ of people are farmers.

> ZeroHedge on twitter said the following:

Oh, ZeroHedge. I guess we can stop any discussion now..
by tptacek | 2026-02-18 05:19:51+00:00
Patriot is amazing, more people should watch it, everyone I know who has was enthralled by it.

Counterpart was great but structure made it hard for to watch knowing it'd been cancelled.

Scavengers Reign was great; I couldn't get into Common Side Effects.

Evil is exactly the Catholic X-Files, which is an amazing concept, but by the end of the 2nd season it is all the way off the rails and hurtling into a canyon.

Given your list, you might dig Lodge 49, which is somewhere in the intersection of HACF, Evil, The Big Lebowski.
by tonyarkles | 2026-02-18 05:19:52+00:00
> Maybe being AuDHD has something to do with it

I used to live my entire life in emacs org-mode. My memory is shit, if I don’t have a reminder of a task I need to do it probably won’t get done. If someone asks me “hey, do you remember that thing we talked about in that meeting last week?” the answer will be “no, not at all”. If I go “damn, what was that recipe for those pork chops I made last month that were really good?” I will draw a complete blank about what even made them special, but I’ll be disappointed because they were good.

I miss org-mode but as my life became more mobile-phone-centric, it stopped working for me. I ultimately ended up replacing it with two things: Todoist for task management and Obsidian for notetaking.

Maybe the difference is that I use Obsidian for basically two things: keeping track of things that have happened (meeting notes, design decisions, debug sessions) and for things that are a work in progress (software projects at work and for fun, home renovation plans, things that temporally are going to evaporate from my brain before they’re done). It’s a tool that lets me remember what I was talking to people about last week, and a tool for picking up the project I was working on last month. And it syncs great to my phone and iPad Pro for when I’m out of the house.

I haven’t ever gotten to appreciate Obsidian’s task management stuff but Todoist tickles my brain just right for that.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-18 05:20:39+00:00
> I am a skeptic that one more Coke Cola ad aired at the Super Bowl meaningfully changes sales

It actually might. Coca Cola had $48b revenue last year, or in other words, 4800 millions. Spending 7 of those millions to put your product in front of 100 million people seems like a reasonable bet. If even a couple percent of those people are (sub)consciously influenced to pick up a 12-pack the next time they stop by a store when they might otherwise not have, it would likely be a profitable endeavour given the profit margins on their sugar water.

I think there's also a longer-term status play at stake. If only one of Coca Cola or Pepsi engaged in flashy advertising to this degree, it might give them a slight edge in status perception. In the long term, even an 0.1% shift in consumer preferences between Coca Cola or Pepsi would shift significantly more than 7 million in value. So if one of them engages in this, the other is obliged to follow, in a classic prisoner's dilemma. At any rate, given that 4800 millions in annual revenue translates to 13 million in sales per day, the number paid for that advertisement is a rounding error and doesn't have to move the needle very much at all to be successful.
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-02-18 05:22:00+00:00
This looks cool!! I have an Apple Watch that I’ve been perfectly satisfied with, but it strikes me that AsteroidOS might allow me to explore other unique smart devices relatively cheaply, by buying used/non-supported stuff and trying it out. Are there any in particular that you’d recommend to a newbie? Hopefully something that is both eBay-able[1] and fun?

[1] of course open to other sources as well
by shevy-java | 2026-02-18 05:22:30+00:00
It was a pretty cool game. Not as good as e. g. civilisation but nonetheless fun. I even managed to make profits with my railroads.

Young folks can use dosbox etc... but it just does not feel the same compared to how it was "originally". I could not get myself to want to play raildroad tycoon again; I found it easy to play games such as civilization or UFO: Enemy Unknown (oddly enough the first part is more playable than the second part here).
by YetAnotherNick | 2026-02-18 05:22:35+00:00
> Did you bother to check?

Yeah I am not a chemist, but just Nilered. And from [1], I know how all steps would look like. Also there are literal videos in youtube for this.

And if someone can't google what nitrated or crystallization mean, maybe they just can't build a bomb with somewhat more detailed instruction.

> other people can also find useful for planning attacks.

I am still not able to imagine what you mean. You think attacks don't happen because people can't plan it? In fact I would say it's the opposite. Random lazy people like school shooters precisely attacks because they didn't plan for it. If ChatGPT gave detailed plan, the chances of attack would reduce.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT#Preparation
by overgard | 2026-02-18 05:23:30+00:00
I don't think "results don't match promises" is the same as "not knowing how to use it". I've been using Claude and OpenAI's latest models for the past two weeks now (probably moving at about 1000 lines of code a day, which is what I can comfortably review), and it makes subtle hard-to-find mistakes all over the place. Or it just misunderstands well known design patterns, or does something bone headed. I'm fine with this! But that's because I'm asking it to write code that I could write myself, and I'm actually reading it. This whole "it can build a whole company for me and I don't even look at it!" is overhype.
by davidw | 2026-02-18 05:24:08+00:00
One of the interesting things you start seeing and then can't stop seeing is "CEO says" journalism, where the whole article is about the CEO saying something and that's newsworthy and there's no real analysis of it or no looking at the track record of the CEO. Just stenography.

It's not limited to this one company, they'll do it with any company that's newsworthy or has a CEO who will generate clicks for their article.
Show HN: GhostTrace – See rejected decisions in AI agents
by AhmedAllam0 | 2026-02-18 05:24:44+00:00
Hey HN,

When an AI agent makes a decision, it evaluates several options and picks one. The rest disappear forever – you never see what it almost did or why it rejected the alternatives.

I built GhostTrace to fix that. It captures "Phantom Branches": the actions your agent considered but rejected, with the reasoning for each rejection. All saved to a .ghost.json file you can replay and inspect.

Quick demo:

ghosttrace record
Recorded 4 decisions with 5 phantom branches
Saved to gt_a1b2c3d4.ghost.json

ghosttrace replay gt_ghost.json --show-phantoms

Step 1: read_file → src/auth.py
REJECTED: write_file (premature)
REJECTED: search_codebase (too broad)

pip install ghosttrace

PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/ghosttrace/

It's framework-agnostic for now, but what agent frameworks should I integrate first? LangChain? CrewAI? OpenAI Agents SDK?

Feedback very welcome!
by user3939382 | 2026-02-18 05:24:53+00:00
> From their computers that originated in a US Navy lab?

This is a logical non sequitur. It’s like being fed your lunch by your kidnapper and when you protest they say, you’re using the energy I provided to protest. Like that’s a contradiction somehow, it’s not.

Whatever the participation in the past may have been does nothing to excuse or make okay future behavior.

And to the extent I did understand your point, I was confused because it was such a strawman. As I explained I wasn’t talking about every person in computing (of course). Interacted doesn’t mean they were the same or had no moral distinction.

> ineffective moral absolutism

I don’t even know where to start with how flawed your thinking is. Effectiveness isn’t the driver for having morals. And obviously it was effective because I’m here protesting. Neither is it absolutism. Objecting to the gross abuse of our government doesn’t equate with absolutism.

Computers should serve their owners not corporate interests and dragnet surveillance. That was understood. 2010s Anonymous was a different thing in a different context that I wasn’t contemplating.
by mikem170 | 2026-02-18 05:25:03+00:00
Hmmm, I got something different. I thought that Bullshit Jobs was based on people who self reported that their jobs were pointless. He detailed these types of jobs, the negative psychological impact this can have on employees, and the kicker was that these jobs don't make sense economically, the bureaucratization of the health care and education sectors for example, in contrast so many other professions that actually are useful. Other examples were status-symbol employees, sycophants, duct-tapers, etc.

I thought he made a case for both societal and economic impact.