MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mindslight | 2026-02-07 08:23:38+00:00
The article frames the focus on grifting, not institutional rot. I would say that institutional rot enables grifters. But also grifters in leadership positions set examples encouraging others to grift. Heck, this current crop of grifters we've got "leading" us will outright airlift prominent up-and-coming grifters right up into their ranks, Gervais Principle style.

I'd say that institutional rot would be a much better framework for analyzing the situation of all these disabilities being claimed, but that is not where this article goes! Rather the only thing it seemingly offers is that we're just supposed to feel bad and aim to be more like the one person in the single example given, even as our societal leaders crassly do the exact opposite.

(As far as Trump "doing things" - yes, he's doing a lot of grift at the expense of our country. That's kind of the problem, right? Bureaucratic malaise was bad, and this is worse)
by shinycode | 2026-02-07 08:23:50+00:00
The difference with a purely still photograph is that code is a functional encoding of an intention. Code of an LLM could be perfect and still not encode the perfect intention of the product. I’ve seen that in many occasions.
Many people don’t understand what code really is about and think they have a printer toy now and we don’t have to use pencils.
That’s not at all the same thing.
Code is intention, logic, specific use case all at once. With a non deterministic system and vague prompting there will be misinterpreted intentions from LLM because the model makes decisions to move forward. The problem is the scale of it, we’re not talking about 1000 loc. In a month you can generate millions of loc, in a year hundreds of millions of loc.

Some will have to crash and burn their company before they realize that no human at all in the loop is a non sense. Let them touch fire and make up their mind I guess.
by twelvechairs | 2026-02-07 08:24:40+00:00
Agree with this. They are re-solving a problem that has been solved better by others before (with R-trees).

They may well be using some data storage where spatial indexing is not possible or standard. Geoparquet is a common one now - a great format in many ways but spatial indexing isnt there.

Postgres may be out of fashion but still an old fashioned postgis server is the simplest solution sometimes.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-07 08:25:00+00:00
It is the bootstrap that makes it interesting.

Creating the required primitives in Assembly, and then the remaining userspace out from them.

Afterwards it is programming like most languages.

I have done it with Lisps though.

Also on 8 bit home computers it provided the feeling to be coding close to Assembly while being close enough to BASIC as high level language.
by elitan | 2026-02-07 08:25:34+00:00
Heroku's git-push-to-deploy was magic in 2012. Sad to see it go out like this.

I've been building Frost https://github.com/elitan/frost, open source and self-hosted. Same idea, git push to deploy, automatic SSL, custom domains, but on your own VPS. Docker-native, no vendor lock-in, no pricing surprises.

The angle that's a bit different: it's designed for AI coding agents. Simple config they write correctly, clear errors, no K8s complexity to hallucinate. You give your agent the install URL and it sets up the whole server.
by matwood | 2026-02-07 08:25:44+00:00
Even if people don't want it to be about the money, it's still about the money because of the world we live in. Good vibes don't pay the mortgage or put food on the table. More money equates to better health and future outcomes for a person and their family, so how couldn't it always be about the money?

Of course once someone has money they can say it's not about the money, but that privilege is literally bought with...money.
by bionsystem | 2026-02-07 08:27:07+00:00
Maybe not, there are plenty of hard things to do at Microsoft scale, hypervisors (which I guess could count as "OS" but maybe not "Windows" in the consumer-product line sense), compilers, languages, hardware since Microsoft is doing that too, browsers (although the hard part is chrome-based, probably they contribute to it), databases, distributed systems for cloud products, etc. Plenty of hard things to do.
by commandersaki | 2026-02-07 08:27:31+00:00
You're just repeating yourself with AI slop, but staying incorrect on the point, which is another good reason to avoid this (at least with 1P I know I can talk to someone that doesn't respond in AI slop and actually has backbone). 1P Vaults are encrypted with a high entropy key just like your tool without needing to make a trade off. The master password aspect of 1P is a convenience, I imagine the same would be said about Bastion as you can simply lock and unlock a vault with a password.
by jellojello | 2026-02-07 08:27:31+00:00
waymo just hit it's first pedestrian, ever. It did it at a speed of 6mph and it was estimated a human would have hit the kid at 14mph (it was going 17mph when a small child jumped out in front of it from behind a black suv.

First pedestrian struck. That's crazy.

Tesla just disengages fsd anytime a sensor is slightly blocked/covered/blinded.. waymo out here doing fsd 100% of the time and basically never hurts anyone.

I don't get the tesla/elon love here, i like my model 3 but it's never going to get real fsd, and that sucks, elon also lies about the roadmap, timing, etc. I bet the roadster is canceled now. Why do people like inferior sensors and autistic hitler?
by joostdecock | 2026-02-07 08:27:39+00:00
Joost here (FreeSewing maintainer)

Bless you for submitting this, but I doubt much of the people here are into sewing

That being said, they might care more about this FOSDEM talk about FreeSewing:https://youtu.be/ec7vgHoHwqQ?si=IPDEW4s9Q1oS18wl
by mikewarot | 2026-02-07 08:28:17+00:00
As a ham radio operator (KA9DGX), I tend to view all of this through the lens of impedance matching, it's my metaphor of choice.

You could use a badly designed antenna with a horrible VSWR at the end of a coax, and effectively communicate with some portion of the world, by using a tuner, which helps cover up the inefficiencies involved. However, doing so loses signal, in both directions. You can add amplification at the antenna for receive (a pre-amp) and transmit with more power, but eventually the coax will break down, possibly well before the legal limit.

It is far better to use a well designed antenna and matching system at the feed point. It maximizes signal transmission in both directions, by reducing losses as much as possible.

--

A compiler matches our cognitive impedance to that of the computer. We don't handle generating opcodes and instruction addresses manually very well. I don't see how an LLM is going to do that any better. Compilers, on the other hand, do it reliably, and very efficiently.

The best cognitive impedance matches happened a while ago, when Visual Basic 6 and Delphi for Windows first came out. You might think LLMs make it easier that that, but you'd be mistaken, for any problem of sufficient complexity.
by rramadass | 2026-02-07 08:28:49+00:00
You stated an opinion but i gave you hard data by pointing you to a documentary which you are refusing to watch. You have not even read the description for the video which gives you a ToC with timestamps to jump to for the major themes. I can point you to lots of relevant data on the web but the onus of educating yourself is on you.

If you had just spent 5-10mins watching excerpts from above timestamps you would have seen interviews with workers doing such jobs from rural America/Canada/Spain/France/etc., sleazeball CEOs of sleazy companies taking these sort of contracts from Facebook/etc. and then farming it off to poorer parts of the World in Asia/Africa/South America/etc., psychologists who study and warn of the very real dangers of such a job etc.

So before asking for more data, start with the one i have already given you. The psychological harm caused by repeated exposure to graphic imagery is well studied; AI image annotation is one subset of that.

Here is a detailed article; The Ghosts in the Machine: Inside AI’s Hidden Human Trauma - https://www.thebrink.me/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-inside-ai-...
by bionsystem | 2026-02-07 08:30:31+00:00
There are companies I wouldn't candidate for, even with kids I think, although it's hard to say, I don't have kids, and apparently there is a mind-shift happening when you get one. Oracle, Palantir come to mind. But maybe not Microsoft, I don't know about that one. It's probably bad, but maybe not "I prefer to watch my kids starving" kind of bad.
by jochem9 | 2026-02-07 08:30:59+00:00
So far in my career I have always had more requests coming in than implementations going out. If I can go 3 or 10 times faster, than I will still have plenty of work. Especially for the slew of ideas that are never even considered to put towards a dev, because it's already considered to be too low value to have it even be considered to be build. Or the ideas that are so far fetched they were never considered feasible. I am not worried work will dry up.

What I believe is going to be interesting is what happens when non-engineers adopt building with agentic AI. Maybe 70 or 80% of their needs will be met without anyone else directly involved. My suspicion is that it will just create more work: making those generated apps work in a trustworthy manner, giving the agents more access to build context and make decisions, turning those one off generated apps into something maintainable, etc.
by nunez | 2026-02-07 08:31:03+00:00
As a fellow public transit fan, you're on the money. Even the shining stars of transit in the US --- NYC MTA subway and CTA --- have huge qualuty of life issues. I can't fault someone for not wanting to ride trains ever again when someone who hasn't showered in 41 years pulls up with a cart full of whatever the fuck and decides to squat the corner seat closest to the car door and be a living biological weapon during rush hour. Or "showtime."

That's before you consider how it takes 2-4x as long to get somewhere by public transit outside of peak hours and/or well-covered areas. A 20 minute trip from a bar in Queens to Brooklyn by car takes an hour by train after 2300, not including walking time. I made that trip many, many times, and hated it each time.
by erwinx71 | 2026-02-07 08:31:15+00:00
That’s a fair question.
Signal is a very good messenger, but it makes a number of explicit trade-offs that EncroGram intentionally does not.
The main difference is not cryptography, but assumptions.
Signal encrypts message content very well, but it still relies on: – a global, centralized service – long-lived identifiers (phone numbers) – server-side knowledge of who communicates with whom and when – push-based delivery models that inherently leak metadata
EncroGram starts from a different premise: what metadata is structurally unavoidable, and what exists only because it’s convenient?
The project focuses on minimizing retained and observable metadata at the architectural level, even when that comes at the cost of convenience, instant delivery, or UX polish.
This does not make EncroGram “better” in a general sense. It makes it different.
Signal optimizes for usability and adoption under a realistic threat model. EncroGram optimizes for users who are willing to trade convenience for a smaller metadata footprint and clearer trust boundaries.
In short: – Signal is not the wrong solution. – EncroGram is for people who are dissatisfied with the remaining metadata Signal intentionally accepts.
Whether that trade-off is worth it depends entirely on the user’s threat model.
by ZeroGravitas | 2026-02-07 08:32:53+00:00
I think you should hate him.

He is after all a rapist, thief, liar, conman, bully, grifter, authoritarian, gangster, racist, sexist narcissist who may very well end the American empire and democracy, and with your help it seems.

Which seems on topic for an article about America becoming a nation of grifters.

But at least he's doing things!
by wakkawukka | 2026-02-07 08:33:00+00:00
Thermodynamics though.

Reducing runtime energy use over years won't really make up for the resource use that goes into building the data center. It's just moved around, similar to how Elon moves around money as needed to bolster the financials of a particular project.

Like with the airline industry it's not just the smog they blow on our food. Drink carts, seat belts, barf bags all have a resource intensive energy and materials pipeline.

Every server screw and power cable adds up.
by esperent | 2026-02-07 08:33:12+00:00
Most MCPs I've seen could be:

1. A cli script or small collection of scripts

2. A very short markdown file explaining how it works and when to use it.

3. Optionally, some other reference markdown files

Context use is tiny, nearly everything is loaded on demand.

And as I'm writing this, I realize it's exactly what skills are.

Can anyone give an example of something that this wouldn't work for, and which would require MCP instead?
by miki123211 | 2026-02-07 08:34:26+00:00
"cancel or allow" (which Microsoft still does) makes no sense, it just trains user to click "allow" every time. Users don't know what they should allow or not.

It makes a bit more sense on accounts that have a password set, as it requires you to confirm identity when introducing significant changes to the system (and this is something that Apple also does).

Gatekeeper is a different thing, it basically makes sure that the software you're trying to run has been pre-scanned for malware by a trusted party, similar to Windows's "smart screen" and Defender or APt's GPG keyring integration. It's a mechanism that is completely invisible to 99+% of users. If you see a Gatekeeper pop-up and the app in question is not mlaware, the developer is doing something very wrong.
by selvor | 2026-02-07 08:34:34+00:00
When he told about that in the Fireside chat, I was really puzzled at first. I think Chuck was just being the eccentric guy he is was telling a cautionary tale for the shock effect, in a kind of dark humorous way. Also the guy is 88 years old now, so it's somewhat understandable when your energy levels are extremely low, both physically and mentally. With the little time left of your life, you wouldn't want to spend it fixing some random breaking API change from Windows.

I imagine his ColorForth has been more like a retirement hobby for the past decade. He used to screenshare from his ColorForth during the calls, but that could have been overcome more easily with a VGA->HDMI capture dongle and running ColorForth natively. And I doubt he needed the TCP/IP stack directly on his ColorForth based on what he shared so far. So I don't see the point of porting over to Windows to begin with. After all, ColorForth runs more easily on bare metal, on UEFI/BIOS or whatever, so it didn't ever need BitBlt to draw things on screen for sure. The guy built a ColorForth processor, and the devkit from GreenArrays has a VGA connector, etc. So I believe Chuck was on to something else when he shared that, perhaps just to stimulate thinking, but people tend to take things at face value.

On another note, ColorForth (or FORTH for that matter) is not meant to be owned/controlled by him or a committee. So it's not like he was maintaining it. AFAIK, he didn't even endorse or support FORTH standardization efforts, and somewhere said it's silly. I also find it interesting that in his book A Problem Oriented Language, there is not a single mention of FORTH even once (except in the preface, and in his bio) yet he describes FORTH in the book, just calls it as "A Problem Oriented Language" without naming it. So it's almost like FORTH doesn't exist. It's just an idea. And what doesn't exist cannot be broken.
by raincole | 2026-02-07 08:36:15+00:00
If you reduce energy consumption of training a new model by 25%, OpenAI will just buy more hardware and try to churn out a new model 25% faster. The total consumption will be exactly the same.

And they're 100% justified to do so, until they hit another bottleneck (when there is literally not that much Nvidia hardware to buy, for example.)
by bionsystem | 2026-02-07 08:36:58+00:00
You are missing out the entire point. In a justice system, a single innocent in prison is a thousand times worse than a free criminal. This is where most people draw the line if they think about it. Because when you put innocents under arrest, suddenly you are no better than dictatorships and terrorist state.

The real justice is investing in a security system that tracks, investigates, and condemn actual criminals, in a targetted way, so that honest people can live securely and free. Believe it or not, plenty of countries manage to do that pretty well.
by laluser | 2026-02-07 08:36:59+00:00
I have been attempting to write a lot more with AI, but it's so gimmicky. It's always spitting lines like this: " it's not just about x – it's about y." like in this post. I find it so frustrating that no matter the prompt I throw at it, it eventually repeats itself again after some time. Good technical and succinct writing is almost impossible to iterate on with AI for me.
by mathisfun123 | 2026-02-07 08:38:22+00:00
> don’t like Trump, but he’s the first guy in a long long time to actually do things and not just talk about doing things.

Have you really never heard the phrase "it's much easier to tear things down than build them up"? Is the manifest obviousness of that phrase really not obvious to you?

Yes you too can

1. Talk about blowing up buildings

2. Blow up buildings

So he's not the first of anything in any length of time because this is what assholes all around the world do every day.
by uxhacker | 2026-02-07 08:38:39+00:00
So there are now 55000 and 1 Asian elephants*. I don’t understand the newsworthiness of having an extra Asian elephant joining the other 15000 Asian elephants in captivity.

Wild Asian elephants roam between 100km2 to 1500km2. This elephant will spend a life confined to just how many square km’s?
by accidentallfact | 2026-02-07 08:39:01+00:00
Thermodynamics doesn't apply to the body in any meaningful way. It sounds like a 19th century idea of how the body might work that people repeat with no understanding.

And, you not only need to get fuel from the food, but also the materials to build the engines, and for making spare parts and consumables. And everything that actually uses the energy. There will be no energy spent on lighting if you can't get the indium needed for making LED lights, and the body only knows how to make LED lights.
by dragonwriter | 2026-02-07 08:39:05+00:00
> The track record of this administration at the SCOTUS is 90%.

Its not quite that high of cases (21 out of 25 where the administration is a party in 2025, per [0], with one additional loss since the beginning of 2026 (Tangipa v. Newsom [1] seeking an injunction barring the CA redistricting map, where the administration wasn't in the heading but was a party as a plaintiff-intervenor.) Note that all of the decided cases at issue are interim orders (orders concerning actions before the final decision on the case, where the Administration either wants an injunction or wants to not have an injunction against it, mainly), and reading the track record of the cases that actually get decided on the interim docket neglects the effect of the Administration's losses there on which cases it could appeal it chooses not to so they never reach the docket at all, as argued in [2].

[0] https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/01/looking-back-at-2025-the-...

[1] https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/tangipa-v-newsom...

[2] https://www.scotusblog.com/interim-docket-blog/#the-federal-...
by danwills | 2026-02-07 08:39:23+00:00
I totally loved the plasma effect from whenever I first saw it, and implementing it myself in Pascal/DOS was one of the first times I really started to understand a 'shading'-like context where you are coming up with a value for every pixel, the pixels can be made to have 2D 'coordinates' (even though they are actually a 1D chunk of VRAM! -> modulo to the rescue!) and that you could transform the 'space' such that you feed in the coordinates (including time) and evaluate different-enough sine functions (then sum them, in this case) to create a beautiful soft-waves-evolving-over-time result! Was definitely an eye-opener about how to make it have nice colors as well! Great to see things like this being documented in this way!
by subsection1h | 2026-02-07 08:39:24+00:00
There are plenty of tech forums that don't discuss AI. I think your confusion might be the result of you equating tech with "writing code for employers."

By the way, have you seriously never written[1] so much as a single backup script to back up a personal system? You only use GUI backup software?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46634535#:~:text=As%20f...
by lovich | 2026-02-07 08:40:09+00:00
Yes, and you are the reason everytime I went to buy a house in the neighborhood I was renting in, the value doubled.

If you want to be selfish feel free to be openly selfish, but don't be surprised when people like me respond in kind.

I am down for property taxes 10xing to fund building homes because of people like you.

>My own specific benefit as sleeping at night...

invest in ear plugs
by D-Machine | 2026-02-07 08:40:38+00:00
Generalizations are just doing better than random guessing by just paying attention to base rates, or, equivalently, describing the majority / bulk of distributions. This isn't meaningless, it is just simple statistical summary in common language.

Also, with modern tools like sentiment analysis and other semantic analysis tools enabled by LLMs, it is pretty trivial to do empirical tests of claims like this (further proving how empty the claim that generalizations about a thing are "meaningless").

Being for paternalistic, censorious policies that restrict software behaviour so broadly is very obviously not "Hacker" (even if you agree with these policies), and this would have been far more surprising 10 years ago to see on HN. This is a "generalization" of the ideological shifts of HN, yes, but a meaningful one (which of course people are free to agree or disagree with).
by rezabeye | 2026-02-07 08:40:51+00:00
Thanks! So the idea is you just speak or type your tasks naturally — "call dentist tomorrow, buy groceries tonight, finish proposal by Friday" — and the AI splits them apart, assigns priority (do now / today /
soon / someday), estimates time, picks a category, and schedules them. No manual tagging needed.

It's basically an Eisenhower-style system under the hood — the AI maps urgency and importance automatically based on the language you use. Say "urgent" or "ASAP" and it goes to Do Now. Mention a future date and
it slots into Soon. Vague stuff like "eventually learn piano" goes to Someday. You can always override it, but the point is to remove that friction so you can just brain dump and get on with it.

Re: PARA — that's actually something I'm looking at for a future update (projects + areas as organizational layers on top of the priority system).

As for 2do import, there's no direct integration right now, but it's an interesting idea.
Show HN: Gettorr – Stream magnet links in the browser via WebRTC (no install)
by BenaouidateMed | 2026-02-07 08:40:59+00:00
I built Gettorr because I wanted a way to stream legal torrents (like Linux ISOs or Archive.org content) on my Chromebook without needing to install heavy clients like uTorrent.

It uses WebTorrent under the hood to handle the P2P connections in the browser. I focused on making the UI as minimal as possible—just paste a magnet link and start streaming.

I’d love to get your feedback on the streaming performance and if you run into any issues with different browser versions!