MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vel0city | 2026-02-11 20:15:03+00:00
Ok, feel free to rephrase "you need to" to "will you", and have the only real reason why you didn't respond be because you just didn't feel like responding at that moment. It'll still be frustrating having the other party just be willfully absent to the conversation.

My point is, there are types of messages which are highly time sensitive to the point where the response is meaningless past a certain point, and to many in this day and age instant messaging is the format for such inquiries to be made. Sure, one could be busy and be unable to respond, and one should be understanding of that. But it the reason why my spouse was unreachable was because they didn't bother responding to me at that moment to an obviously important time critical message we've got some problems in our relationship to figure out.
by beanshadow | 2026-02-11 20:15:06+00:00
> And, no, AI won't solve it; unfortunately, it only makes it worse.

A conclusive argument for this still seems out of reach. AI does solve some problems, and it's not exactly clear which problems AI "only makes worse". It's not clear how much energy all of our AI systems will use, and while it's tempting to outright believe they'll simply use more and more, even that's not yet clear based on arguments presented.
by mym1990 | 2026-02-11 20:15:10+00:00
I think if the hope is that the whole world comes together to reduce emissions to a meaningful level, there is little to no chance of that. Even in the face of clear evidence, many leaders either do not believe it or do not think it will affect them in their lifetime. Capitalism and globalization march to a different drum.

The hope becomes that we can innovate our way out of the problem with technology, that is the race to the finish. AI will likely help us get there faster, but 2nd place will not be an option.

You could say industrialization was a solution to a problem we didn't have...but efficiency and profit is always the pursuit of business, and unfortunately that is a lot of the world we live in.

And I say this as someone who loves the idea of energy that doesn't come from burning things.
by stunpix | 2026-02-11 20:15:21+00:00
I’m literally fed up with half-minded techbros throwing around such overhyped writings. They’re absolutely detached from reality and talk about something that doesn't pass any fact checks.

After reading this writing, I was really curious "are we really got a breakthrough" so I subscribed to a Claude to personally check the state of the matter. As my personal test, I'm using a task that must be relatively simple for an experienced programmer: write an SSH agent that manages keys. The protocol is very simple, and the agents exist for decades now. I already tested that a year ago with Claude, and I was curious how it would do this time.

I installed up the Claude Code CLI tool, created CLAUDE.md with instructions that sounded like "this project is to build a fully functional SSH agent application that listens on a UNIX socket and implements the SSH agent protocol according to RFC specification <link> and all functionality must be covered with tests, create a plan, track progress, etc. The ultimate goal is to have a fully functional application with all SSH agent features." There were more details, of course, but you got it.

Opus 4.6 model worked autonomously for 30 minutes or so. During the process, it had been producing non-compilable code, which it had to fix. Then it stopped at a half-baked project that wasn't working as an SSH agent even closely and had zero tests pretending the job was done.

The truly intelligent technology should finish the project. Why did it stop? How is it intelligent if it makes mistakes that it needs to fix? Why can’t it finish the project while it understands a goal? How much must I push it to finish a project? How someone can claim that "this" is going to replace us?

I can't buy someone's claims that “we are one step before replacing everyone’s jobs" when the facts are saying that nothing has changed for the last year and LLMs are literally not capable of finishing things or concentrating on small important details. They always miss something important. What are we talking about here? Snake oil. This is not intelligence; the technology is a world's blurred snapshot compressed into a couple of gigabytes blob and acts as a dumb parrot.
by klodolph | 2026-02-11 20:16:02+00:00
> But on the other hand, I think following "therefore X is Y" to its logical conclusion will lead you to commit to things you don't really believe.

I would love to hear an example… but before you do, I’m going to clarify that my statement was expressing a notion of what “is” sometimes means to a mathematician, and caution that

1. This notion is contextual, that sometimes we use the word “is” differently, and

2. It requires an understanding of “forgetfulness”.

So if I say that “Cauchy sequences in Q is R” and “Dedekind cuts is R”, you have to forget the structure not implied by R. In a set-theoretic sense, the two constructions are unequal, because you use constructed different sets.

I think this weird notion of “is” is the only sane way to talk about math. YMMV.
by swiftcoder | 2026-02-11 20:16:10+00:00
So are humans (we breathe out CO2 constantly!). A process emitting greenhouse gases is not an inherent reason to eschew it, so long as the entire end-to-end process isn't net-positive.

Use that compost to fertilise a tree, and you are still net negative on carbon, versus sending those food scraps to the local trash incinerator.
by port11 | 2026-02-11 20:16:13+00:00
I understand. It’s a great reply.

To my dismay, I’ve never worked in a place like the first one you’ve described. Managers have certainly been confident enough in me to just let me ship stuff I built alone, or obviously that a team built without the usual red tape. Your model is very intriguing, I’ll try to implement something similar if I’m ever again able.

It’s true that code reviewers can become feral and the smallest detail a source of contention. I’ve had otherwise good team leads completely rewrite my code after accepting a review. It’s okay, maybe it wasn’t that good. Egos hurt and get hurt.

About QA: well, companies — I hope — eventually pay the price. Apple’s image of software quality now contrasted with a company that lost the trust of power users. QA and unit tests are complementary. If anything, it’s acceptance and integration tests that hurt QA, but I’ve never seen these 2 done properly anywhere.
by jajuuka | 2026-02-11 20:16:27+00:00
I imagine scheduling lined up for the 26.3 release and it wasn't considered dangerous enough. They did this with 26.2 as well including a fix for a zero day. I wonder if they are leveraging that to get people to update sooner. Imagine some people might be turned off of updating with the bugs and visual changes in 26. It's not like 26.2 or 26.3 have any major changes that are enticing.
by 2001zhaozhao | 2026-02-11 20:16:28+00:00
GLM-4.7-Flash was the first local coding model that I felt was intelligent enough to be useful. It feels something like Claude 4.5 Haiku at a parameter size where other coding models are still getting into loops and making bewilderingly stupid tool calls. It also has very clear reasoning traces that feel like Claude, which does result in the ability to inspect its reasoning to figure out why it made certain decisions.

So far I haven't managed to get comparably good results out of any other local model including Devstral 2 Small and the more recent Qwen-Coder-Next.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-11 20:16:31+00:00
Nest cameras upload video clips to the cloud without an active subscription.

This fact is explained right in the Google support page linked by this article

> *The 3 hours of event video previews is available without a Google Home Premium subscription for the Nest Cam (battery) and Nest Doorbell (battery).

All of these articles trying to spin this as some surprise revelation are getting old.
by timmg | 2026-02-11 20:16:41+00:00
> I feel like especially the West is regressing on climate change with the rise of the far right

Is it the "far right"? Or is it that technology and fertility have actually lowered the risks substantially?

Solar plus batteries, right now, seems to be the cheapest form of new energy. Given that, you would expect most of new energy to be "green". (And if you look at the stats, that seems to be coming true.)

Electrification of transportation is happening quickly. China is cranking out cheap electric cars that are generally better than ICE cars of yesterday. And the world seems to be transitioning.

And fertility rates are dropping everywhere. So the amount of people we will need to support in the future continues to decline.

I've mostly stopped worrying about climate change. Not because I don't think it is real. But because I think we are clearly on the path to mitigating the worse scenarios.
by reactordev | 2026-02-11 20:16:53+00:00
Yuk…

http {
# ... other http settings
limit_req_zone $binary_remote_addr zone=mylimit:10m rate=10r/s;
# ...
}

server {
# ... other server settings
location / {
limit_req zone=mylimit burst=20 nodelay;
# ... proxy_pass or other location-specific settings
}
}

Rate limit read-only access at the very least. I know this is a hard problem for open source projects that have relied on web access like this for a while. Anubis?
by NinjaTrance | 2026-02-11 20:17:12+00:00
Microsoft fell into this trap in the 90s -- they believed that they could hide the DOS prompt, and make everything "easier" with wizards where you just go through a series of screens clicking "next", "next", "finish".

Yes, it was easier. But it dumbed down a generation of developers.

It took them two decades to try to come up with Powershell, but it was too late.
by benrutter | 2026-02-11 20:17:16+00:00
That's sort of true, although in reality Airbyte was only truly "open source" for a very small period[0].

In reality, since about 1 year into the project, it's operated with a mix of open and "less open" licenses for different parts of the codebase, in a way that would make it difficult to just use the MIT licensed bit.

I think that kinda proves the point you were going for.

[0] https://github.com/airbytehq/airbyte/commits/master/LICENSE
by program_whiz | 2026-02-11 20:17:43+00:00
interestingly, with the Guthrie disappearance, her camera had been disabled with no subscription, but they were still able to "find the footage" that was being stored on backend servers. Whoops... Looks like it just always records, they just don't let you access it unless you pay subscription. I'm sure the prospect of using it for AI training and surveillance is just too juicy to pass up.

It wasn't ring (amazon), it was Nest (google), but same thing. I have no doubt that "disabled no-subscription ring cams" are probably streaming video that is stored in perpetuity as well. (Most of which you aren't allowed to see yourself, even of your own property).
by yndoendo | 2026-02-11 20:17:52+00:00
Fuel coast only go up and never down. The market and politicians make it seem like it will go down but in the end it still rises slowly. This is something that most people cannot understand nor want to.

I drive a car and will never buy a truck or SUV because it allows me spend the least amount on fuel. It also allows me to see in front of the vehicle while making it easier to maneuver in tight spots.

American car culture is built on self projection not about functionality.

Great example of this are people who say they bought a truck so the can take home large items from a hardware store. Yet they only will do this less than ten times a year ... making renting a truck and owning a car more economical in the long run.

Evolution of the tuck bed being 60% and cap being 40% in the 1950s to cab being 60% and bed being 60% shows it is not even about functionality of a truck being a truck.

If I have to haul something, I will rent and not waste my time and money maintaining a large vehicle.
by Balinares | 2026-02-11 20:18:04+00:00
I find it's a great test, actually. There are lots of "should I take the car" decisions in putting together software that's supposed to do things, and with poor judgement in how the things should be done, you typically end up with the software equivalent of a Rube-Goldberg machine that harnesses elephants to your car and uses mice to scare the elephants toward the car wash while you walk. After all, it's a short distance, isn't it?
by a_better_world | 2026-02-11 20:18:21+00:00
sounds a bit like
https://thechoiceengine.substack.com/p/the-strip-mining-of-t...

"The strip mining of trust" is a metaphor describing the unsustainable extraction of social capital—honesty, reputation, and goodwill—for short-term, selfish efficiency or profit. Similar to ecological destruction, this process erodes long-term, foundational trust, leaving behind hollowed-out institutions and requiring massive future effort to restore.
by caseyohara | 2026-02-11 20:18:28+00:00
I guess it depends on what "large file" and "regular size SD card" mean to you.

The best selling SD card on B&H is 128 GB. Let's consider that "regular size".

Fujifilm's GFX100 II is a popular medium-format mirrorless camera. Its sensor is 102MP. So each 14-bit RAW image is about 170 MB.

102M pixels x 14 bits = 1.428B bits = ~178M bytes = ~170 MB

So a 128 GB SD card can hold ~771 images that are 170 MB. That's a lot more images than a standard roll of film.
by rezonant | 2026-02-11 20:18:52+00:00
> Why do you need good clocks? For audio, even with simultaneously playing speakers, you only need to synchronize within a couple of ms unless you need coherence or are a serious audiophile. If if want to maintain sync for an hour I suppose you need decently good clock.

There are many microphones involved in a production, and humans are quite good at detecting desync between audio/video when watching a presenter talk. You cannot fix desynchronization further down the chain if the desynchronization is variable for each source.
by jakderrida | 2026-02-11 20:19:08+00:00
They cut down the sample size about 5-7 years ago, anyway, by like 90%. I learned this not through a press release, but by going through their metadata. This was a long time coming. Their business model just isn't very profitable. I wish, instead, they just sold it off to another company to continue the same methodology and maintain the prior data. This frequently happens. There's value in having a poll that has been running for at least 5 years. Much value in a poll that has been running for like 100 years.
by ericd | 2026-02-11 20:19:29+00:00
Great list!

For those in the US, I'd add lobbying your congresspeople to support the revival of the Energy Permitting Reform Act. It's something that didn't make it across the line before the end of the last congress, but basically, making it easier to bring new generation capacity on the electrical grid disproportionately benefits renewables, because they make up the vast majority of wattage waiting in the queue. As we've seen by the explosion of deployment in less regulated grids (Texas, and most of the world), the economics now favor solar+storage and wind, we just have to let people build as much of it as they want to.
by panarchy | 2026-02-11 20:19:38+00:00
We can't say for sure that the current feedback loops will be identical to those that did or did not exist in the past. Differences in the initial state could result in different outcomes.

For example was there as much methane trapped in the arctics during the last time CO2 was high?

Does the rate of the increase of CO2 and temperature have an effect? Because it's currently getting hotter far faster (absurdly so) than any other period we have records for.
by stillpointlab | 2026-02-11 20:19:39+00:00
I'm old, so I remember when Skyrim came out. At the time, people were howling about how "dumbed down" the RPG had become compared to previous versions. They had simplified so many systems. Seemed to work out for them overall.

I understand the article writers frustration. He liked a thing about a product he uses and they changed the product. He is feeling angry and he is expressing that anger and others are sharing in that.

And I'm part of another group of people. I would notice the files being searched without too much interest. Since I pay a monthly rate, I don't care about optimizing tokens. I only care about the quality of the final output.

I think the larger issue is that programmers are feeling like we are losing control. At first we're like, I'll let it auto-complete but no more. Then it was, I'll let it scaffold a project but not more. Each step we are ceding ground. It is strange to watch someone finally break on "They removed the names of the files the agent was operating on". Of all of the lost points of control this one seems so trivial. But every camels back has a breaking point and we can't judge the straw that does it.
by schiffern | 2026-02-11 20:20:41+00:00
>Despite decades of research and sophisticated computational climate modeling, the magnitude and pace of these events have surprised scientists, raising questions about how well current climate projections capture risk.

"Yet again, worse than we predicted."

When this always-revise-in-one-direction phenomenon happened with the electron charge, it was considered a priori "proof" that scientists were fudging their data to match expectations. The Millikan Oil Drop Experiment is still studied in fundamentals of science class.[0]

If climate scientists are constantly revising their predictions upward, then this is equally "proof" that climate scientists are under pressure to revise their estimates downward. Far from being "alarmist," such terms are actually cudgels used to discourage climate scientists from making their data look too bad.

The result is the predictable fudging of climate data to look better than it really is.

[0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's...
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-11 20:21:32+00:00
No citations to hand but Antarctica used to be temperate rainforest and many of the conditions of present day tropical rainforests and savanna could be found much farther from the equator.

The paleocene–eocene thermal maximum makes for interesting related reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_therm...
by Aurornis | 2026-02-11 20:21:41+00:00
> Most of these cloud connected cameras always stream footage through their cloud service, regardless of whether you pay for a subscription. Because people don't know how to configure port forwarding, etc, in their firewall.

No consumer product should have users do port-forwarding or punch holes in the firewall. You don't want an IoT device on your network accepting packets from the internet.

The proper way to do this is with a cloud server arbitrating connections, which is what a lot of products do.

The reason most consumers want cloud storage isn't for ease of access, though. It's because they want the footage stored securely somewhere. If the thief can just pick up your camera and walk away with the evidence, it's not very useful to you.
by tastyfreeze | 2026-02-11 20:21:43+00:00
I make lots of compost for my own use. Composting is at best delaying carbon release. As soon as you stop recycling materials the carbon will be released to the atmosphere. In permaculture circles the goal is to close open loops of waste/resources. If you want to permanently lock carbon in your soil, and improve fertility, make biochar. Throwing charcoal in your compost is the easiest way to make it into biochar. It really works and is a permanent amendment.

If you wanted you could even weigh the raw charcoal to quantify the carbon you have sequestered.
by Robdel12 | 2026-02-11 20:21:58+00:00
I’m a heavy Claude code user and it’s pretty clear they’re starting to bend under their vibe coding. Each Claude code update breaks a ton of stuff, has perf issues, etc.

And then this. They want to own your dev workflow and for some reason believe Claude code is special enough to be closed source. The react TUI is kinda a nightmare to deal with I bet.

I will say, very happy with the improvements made to Codex 5.3. I’ve been spending A LOT more time with codex and the entire agent toolchain is OSS.

Not sure what anthropic’s plan is, but I haven’t been a fan of their moves in the past month and a half.
by smileysteve | 2026-02-11 20:22:07+00:00
To put this in perspective, there are huge issues recyling lead acid batteries exposed this year.

I consider lead acid batteries relatively simple with all materials being large and not particularly binding.

But it's somehow easy to outsource this to a smelter with inappropriate smelting, and no controls on worker safety.

So anything smaller, more complex, or more interewined, with things like silica involved...
by drnick1 | 2026-02-11 20:22:16+00:00
> Should you get rid of your Nest camera over privacy concerns?

Absolutely, and you shouldn't have bought and installed this garbage in the first place. Their primary purpose is not to protect you but to spy on you for Google's benefit, much like the rest of their dis-services (email, cloud storage, mobile operating systems).

If you absolutely need surveillance cameras for your safety, use generic IP cameras connected to your own NVR (network video recorder), possibly with Frigate for offline AI processing and notifications. Nothing should ever leave your network; the data should be encrypted and only shared with the police when it is in your interest.
by mrandish | 2026-02-11 20:22:33+00:00
> Many people have been taught that streamlining and removal is positive.

Over the past ten years or so the increasing de-featuring of software under the guise of 'simplification' has become a critical issue for power users. For any GUI apps which have a mixed base of consumer and power users, I mostly don't update them anymore because they're as likely to get net worse vs better.

It's weird that companies like MSFT seem puzzled why so many users refuse to update Windows or Office to major new feature versions.
by hackyhacky | 2026-02-11 20:22:39+00:00
Individual habits will not be decisive in fighting climate change. Telling people to follow this advice will (a) inconvenience them in the short term (b) lull them to a false sense of security that they are fighting climate change (c) set them up for disappointment when climate change happens anyway, and (d) worst of all, these suggestions let the real perpetrators off the hook.

If you want to see real progress on the climate, a few thousand people changing their daily habits is not enough. Governments need to take action and hold industry to account. That looks to be an increasingly unlikely event, but that doesn't justify taking ineffective action instead as a placebo.

It reminds me of the '90s when we are all told that recycling was necessary for saving the environment. Decades later, we'll still spending time sorting our garbage, despite evidence that no one wants recyclable waste, it still ends up dumped somewhere, and it costs more money to handle. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyMs2xox_hE
by PaulKeeble | 2026-02-11 20:22:39+00:00
We have had the technology to decarbonise the grid since the 1950s and we have known about the problem since the 1970s. Politics however has driven the use of CO2 instead of nuclear energy and required the drastic development of high end wind and solar. Even that wasn't enough, it also had to get considerably cheaper than CO2 producing energy sources and the entire time the entire worlds population has been subjected to massive amounts of propaganda to keep burning oil, gas and coal. This transition was possible 55 years ago when the problem was first surfaced, the political will just wasn't there so it didn't happen.

Its not an education issue, it has always been governments getting in the way and refusing to change the power source. its why I think Solar will win out, it can be deployed on an individual house level unlike everything else and that changes things enormously.