MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mbreese | 2026-02-14 18:20:04+00:00
Or many other sources. If you’re writing about Space, you kinda need to cover SpaceX. If you’re opening critical of everything the owner says, pretty soon you won’t have any sources at SpaceX to give you the insights you need to do your job. I get the impression that the space field is pretty small, so you might not want to burn too many bridges.

Also, mission lengths can cover decades. In this case, it might be best to have a short memory when the story has a long time horizon.
by einpoklum | 2026-02-14 18:20:11+00:00
I am a lay user or vim. I use it daily for editing text files and a bit of code, but I always found the plugins and the scripting language rather daunting. There are different, conflicting, plugin management systems; and of course there's the scripting language that's vim-specific, and the few times I tried to delve into this stuff, I quickly found myself in over my head.

So - on the occasion of VIm 9.2 coming out - do people have a recommendation for a gentle path to "leveling up" one's VIm skills and engagement?
by lumost | 2026-02-14 18:20:14+00:00
Anthropic's primary Capex partner is AMZN. AMZN is presently willing to drop 200 billion a year into Capex for compute to rent to anthropic and others. This 30 billion only needs to fund their rental rates - unlike openai and google who need to put in the upfront capex for their compute as MSFT stopped footing the bills.

An interesting question is whether anthropic's capex needs may grow to the point that they can take down AMZN with them should they fail.
by amarant | 2026-02-14 18:20:15+00:00
Ars is already a anti-Elon echo chamber. I stopped paying my subscription after a moderator endorsed a commenter issuing a (almost certainly empty) death threat to Elon.

I think death threats are a bit too far.

But in that environment I have to applause Eric for sticking to the technical and not giving in to the angry mob think that surrounds him. A true tech journalist with integrity.

A mouth piece would be lauding Elon where uncalled for. I've never seen him do that, but feel free to prove me wrong!

Imo Eric Berger and Beth Mole are the only parts of ars worth a damn anymore. If they started their own blog I would be happy to pay a subscription to them
by SmirkingRevenge | 2026-02-14 18:20:32+00:00
They've been successfully blocked (for now). No current deportees are headed there so far as I know. But they are busy trying to build the system right here at home.

ICE detention is already beginning to resemble the Salvadoran prison system.

Due process rights get violated. Detainees get shuttled around to different facilities to be lost in the system through engineered incompetence, making it difficult for legal counsel or family to find them, or even to know who has been taken. They subject them to torturous conditions, abuse, and often hold people who've committed no crimes for months.

They are thwarting oversight and defying court orders left and right. And they are trying to scale up like 10x+. And once they do, the detention system won't just be for immigrants. They are going to target anyone they want.

D's have successfully blocked DHS funding for now, but if they (or SCOTUS) allow any of this to go forward, things are likely to get far worse
by RevEng | 2026-02-14 18:22:41+00:00
Be careful not to conflate AGI with the current generative AI revolution. Even if it may eventually lead to AGI, it is quite a way from that and the social implications of the current and near term AI is what we are talking about. We can only imagine what this will be like post AGI, but we have some idea of what shifts happen when a technology comes along that greatly amplifies human labor.
by somenameforme | 2026-02-14 18:23:25+00:00
You originally said: "In high cost-of-living areas, both nanny and childcare can be (significantly) higher than $6k/mo, and in lower cost-of-living areas they're typically a bit less."

You're now limiting your price to high cost of living areas with extremely experienced nannies (even that 'hire for your yacht here' page you dug up only gets into these $72k+ prices at 8+ years of experience and specialized skills), and working overtime every week. And in those conditions - sure, but that is quite atypical. A normal search for 'us average nanny salary' turns up about a million hits in the $19-$23 hourly range. I imagine off the books is rather lower yet still on average.

And yeah it sounds like you had some remarkably bad luck with nannies. I take most of those, like showing up on time, completely for granted, and would certainly never hire a nanny who smokes. And it's not just the stink. I mean I don't even understand how that's supposed to work - how do you even nanny while also taking smoke breaks? Yeah, just ridiculous.
by iggori | 2026-02-14 18:23:44+00:00
I spent a year building a 300k‑line production platform alone using AI‑assisted engineering. It worked — but only when AI was cheap and predictable. As model behavior shifted and costs rose, the entire system began to break in ways most teams haven’t experienced yet.

This essay is a field report from operating at the edge:
• how deterministic workflows collapse under model churn
• why reasoning‑first models break text‑pattern assumptions
• why AI engineering economics now resemble aviation, not cloud
• what architecture survives when the foundation keeps moving

If you’re building AI‑native systems, this is a look at the failure modes that are coming for everyone.
by bayindirh | 2026-02-14 18:24:05+00:00
No, I mean "cheating at the market". Some companies sell literal snake oil for 10x the price, then they make the market unreliable for everyone, and nobody believes a company which really uses more expensive components can get better sound.

If you want a good controlled experiment, create a literal black box, without any distinguishing features, or lose the box completely and give them an output (speakers or headphones) only.

Another bad thing is, sound is so subjective and experience changes between brands a lot. For example: headphone "burn in" is considered an hallucination, it mostly is. However I have bought a set of RHA MA750i earphones which changed from "This is not what it says on the box" to "am I sure that these are the RHAs I hated" in a month, because it's sound character changed so immensely. No other headphone I had in my life did that.

So, everything is so muddy, subjective and unreproducible. When a room's organization or floor carpet density can change its frequency response, you can't control anything. Moreover, every human's ear profile is different, so you can't be sure that their ear is hearing that the same (e.g. one of my ears have a notch in its hearing curve around mid frequencies. we don't know why it happened).

If anybody wants to learn some of the tricks which can be done to get better sound, please watch Mend it Mark's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RJbpFSFziI

While the £25.000 price tag on that preamp is literal snake-oil level and the builder has the audacity to erase the model numbers of the ICs (and OpAmps) he uses, some of the methods he uses are legit and Mark explains them exceptionally well.
by crims0n | 2026-02-14 18:24:14+00:00
Probably going to make some people mad... but I went down the Audiophile rabbit hole last year before ultimately coming to the conclusion that it just isn't worth it. I understand the appeal, especially someone who values a nice piece of hardware. There is so much to choose from... DACs, DAPs, amps, fancy looking balanced cables in quality braiding, headphones with solid wood accents, IEMs that look straight outa sci-fi.

A few things I learned that may save someone time:

(1) Sound quality is in the medium, not the build. Speakers almost always sound better than a pair of cans (headphones), headphones almost always sound better than IEMs, IEMs almost always sound better than over the ears.

(2) The difference in sound quality between something that is a few hundred dollars, and something that is a few thousand is so small that "diminishing returns" as a phrase doesn't do it justice.

(3) The stack of DACs, EQs, preamps, and neatly managed RCA/XLR cables looks cool on your desk - but they take up a lot of space and cost a lot of money for something that sounds maybe 10% better than a pair of AirPods Max (provided you remember to turn on lossless in apple music, which I forgot to!)
by inglor_cz | 2026-02-14 18:24:51+00:00
"Pharmaceutical companies are not interested in curing disease."

In practice, quite a lot of new drugs are curative. Gene therapy, for example, usually fixes the underlying problem once and for all. Even monoclonal antibodies are rarely of the type that needs to be used for the rest of your life.

If you succeed in putting someone's cancer into remission, that patient has to be monitored for the rest of their life, but they usually don't consume any expensive drugs anymore. The expenses are more on the necessary personnel side.

There is this unpleasant fact that most chronic diseases worsen in the last 2 decades of our lives, when our systems are already seriously dysregulated by aging. Hard to fix anything reliably in a house that is already halfway down.
by flax | 2026-02-14 18:24:55+00:00
This smells like bullshit to me, although I am admittedly not experienced with Claude.

I find it difficult to believe that a sleep mask exists with the features listed: "EEG brain monitoring, electrical muscle stimulation around the eyes, vibration, heating, audio." while also being something you can strap to your face and comfortably sleep in, with battery capacity sufficient for several hours of sleep.

I also wonder how Claude probed bluetooth. Does Claude have access to bluetooth interface? Why? Perhaps it wrote a secondary program then ran that, but the article describes it as Claude probing directly.

I'm also skeptical of Claude's ability to make accurate reverse-engineered bluetooth protocol. This is at least a little more of an LLM-appropriate task, but I suspect that there was a lot of chaff also produced that the article writer separated from the wheat.

If any of this happened at all. No hardware mentioned, no company, no actual protocol description published, no library provided.

It makes a nice vague futuristic cyperpunk story, but there's no meat on those bones.
by longfacehorrace | 2026-02-14 18:25:40+00:00
Not just online; priests, CEOs, celebrities, politicians; don't make them happy you're a sinner, a bad employee, hater of freedom, etc.

Anyone with a rhetorical opinion but who otherwise provides little to getting cars off assembly lines, homes built, network cables laid.

In physical terms the world is full of socialist grifters in that they only have a voice, no skill. They are reliant on money because they're helpless to themselves.

Engineers could rule the world of they acted collectively rather than start personal businesses. If we sat on our hands unless demands are met, the world stops.

A lot of people in charge fear tech unions as we control the world getting shit done.
by qsort | 2026-02-14 18:26:09+00:00
AI makes advanced IDE features less relevant (or, more precisely, much easier to ignore or work without.)

I still have PyCharm, especially for working with data which I do a lot it helps quite a bit, but by default I'm back to a very vanilla Vim setup. Others have mentioned tmux which is great and I'd use anyway especially over ssh, but even just terminal tabs for instances of agents are fine frankly.
by Chris_Newton | 2026-02-14 18:26:10+00:00
B5 is still one of my favourite TV shows of all time.

The common criticisms are largely true: it does start slow with some weak episodes in season 1, some of the acting is a bit wooden, the CGI hasn’t aged well, season 5 is slightly anti-climactic because they largely wrapped up the main plot arc in season 4 in case the final season didn’t happen.

On the other hand, it had an epic storyline that spanned not just episodes but multiple seasons in a way that no-one had really tried in sci-fi before. That storyline made sense and weaves in and out of the individual episodes because it was planned out in advance. The world-building and development of different cultures and how they relate is generally strong.

Against that over-arching backdrop, it also had a lot of good individual episodes. They had genuine character development. They explored social and moral issues as well as any show of that period. They varied from diplomatic and political settings to the adventure of deep space exploration to almost pure action episodes. They varied in scale too, from relatable stories about a single individual, to stories about a whole planet or culture, right up to the fate of the known universe.

Much of the acting criticism is directed at the main leader characters, but I’ve always thought this is slightly unfair, because the script often relies on those characters to carry the plot and provide much of the exposition and those tend to be the more formulaic parts. The same show also features some of the best acting and main character arcs in TV sci-fi, with the relationship between Londo Mollari (played by Peter Jurasik) and G'Kar (Andreas Katsulas) being one of the great double acts. There were many good moments from the rest of the ensemble cast too, from the doctor wrestling with his conscience to a certain wave. And then there were some great supporting/recurring roles, from the light relief of Zathras (and Zathras, Zathras, Zathras, Zathras and Zathras, of course) to the much more serious Bester (arguably Walter Koenig’s finest work).

If you haven’t watched B5 and you’re a fan of epic space sci-fi, I highly recommend it even with its flaws. The first season is a slow burner (although it also has a lot of subtle set-up that you won’t appreciate until much later) but it picks up. If you’re the type of viewer who can’t stand filler episodes, there used to be some relatively spoiler-free guides to which early episodes you really need to watch and which you can skip, so you could look for one of those. Don’t watch In The Beginning first, though; it’s a prequel TV movie that has lots of spoilers about the main story that you’re not supposed to know yet when you watch the early series.
by bjackman | 2026-02-14 18:26:19+00:00
I was hesitant to make any concrete claims in my comment since I don't know much about it but I _think_ this is basically about The Method i.e. Method Acting.

From what I understand, although people still talk about it as if it's a specialised or niche thing, it's actually basically just how acting is done nowadays (at least for films and in the west).
by dizlexic | 2026-02-14 18:26:35+00:00
Of course they do. We gave the DHS (and any other government agency) far too much power and they flex it.

We have so many agencies that can regulate businesses to death without any congressional intervention that it would be beyond idiotic to stand against them.

Not to mention that it's been proven again and again that the American populations attention span is far too short to do anything meaningful about the aforementioned powers / abuses.

Maybe it's age, or the attention I've paid to the erosion of liberties post 9/11. but is this headline a surprise to anyone?
by WorldMaker | 2026-02-14 18:27:08+00:00
The original filming was apparently Super 35 [0][1] which is neither 16:9 nor 4:3 but is often cropped to either or both. The show was framed while they were filming it so that they could use the full 16:9 crop (for "cinematic effect"), but the effects were often only composited for the 4:3 crop. (A special few apparently had a chance to be done at the full Super 35 frame, but budget stopped them from doing that with every effects shot.)

So yeah the 16:9 crop we did get in the 90s (on TNT on cable and then on DVD) was cropped further from the 4:3 crop, but it mostly worked because the previous framing for the "full" Super 35 16:9 crop allowed for it.

Reviewing the helpful Wikipedia diagrams, the 4:3 crop actually uses more overall "volume" of the Super 35 frame than the best 16:9 crop, so I think I appreciate the 4:3 version we have a bit better.

I also found this useful visual comparison of the two crops that we have today: https://www.engadget.com/babylon-5-original-4-3-ratio-video-...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_35

[1] https://www.b5tv.com/threads/explain-the-widescreen-issue-to...
Show HN: Tilth v0.3 – 17% cheaper AI code navigation (279 runs, 3 Claude models)
by jahala | 2026-02-14 18:27:20+00:00
tilth gives AI agents structural code intelligence (tree-sitter definitions, callee resolution, smart outlining) via MCP. I benchmarked it on 21 code navigation tasks across 4 real repos (Express, FastAPI, Gin, ripgrep).

-> https://github.com/jahala/tilth

Results: Sonnet 4.5 — 26% cheaper per correct answer (79% → 86% accuracy). Opus 4.6 — 14% cheaper (and the only model+mode combo to crack the hardest task). Haiku 4.5 — 82% cheaper when forced to use tilth (69% → 100% accuracy at $0.04/answer).

We measure “cost per correct answer” — what you’d expect to spend before getting a usable answer under retry. A wrong answer isn’t a cheap success.

Interesting finding: smarter models adopt MCP tools voluntarily (Sonnet 95%, Opus 94%), but Haiku ignores them (9%). Instruction tuning didn’t help. Removing the overlapping built-in tools did.

https://github.com/jahala/tilth/blob/main/benchmark/README.m...

PS: I dont have the budget to run the benchmark a lot with Opus, so if any token whales has capacity to run some benchmarks, please feel free to PR results.
by epolanski | 2026-02-14 18:27:51+00:00
Sure, but considering that Zig is a modern C alternative, one should not and cannot afford to forget that C has been successful also because it stayed small and consistent for so long.

The entire C, C ABI and standard lib specs, combined, are probably less words than the Promise spec from ECMAScript 262.

A small language that stays consistent and predictable lets developers evolve it in best practices, patterns, design choices, tooling. C has achieved all that.

No evolving language has anywhere near that freedom.

I don't want an ever evolving Zig too for what is worth. And I like Zig.

I don't think any developer can resolve all of the design tensions a programming language has, you can't make it ergonomic on its own.

But a small, modern, stable C would still be welcome, besides Odin.
by imperio59 | 2026-02-14 18:28:21+00:00
Yes. During COVID so many opinions were censored, including the medical opinion of actual Medical doctors and experts, if it did not fit the "accepted narrative".

Now we certainly see some excesses with companies like Palantir and others ramping up government surveillance.

Each side ramps up the encroachment on privacy and civil liberties without realizing the next time the other side comes into power they will gladly use and abuse everything the previous administration put in place during their rule.
by boredtofears | 2026-02-14 18:28:29+00:00
I guess you're right - getting your podcast big enough that it becomes a necessary checkbox for book/media tours is a skill.
You're correct that he brings absolutely nothing to the podcast, but he interrupts plenty - usually with superficial pet theories about the "oneness of the universe" or "how all we need is love, actually". He never seems well prepared for his guest beyond a chatgpt summary, never gets any kind of interesting answer out of a guest that they weren't already going to give, just absolutely zero criticality to anything in the interview.

A podcast with guests is an interview. Interviewing is a skill. The difference between a good and bad interviewer is night and day.
by LexiMax | 2026-02-14 18:28:39+00:00
> Compiler vendors are free to chose what ABI stability their C++ implementations provide.

In theory. In practice the standards committee, consisting of compiler vendors and some of their users, shape the standard, and thus the standard just so happens to conspire to avoid ABI breakages.

This is in part why Google bowed out of C++ standardization years ago.
by 01100011 | 2026-02-14 18:28:58+00:00
I agree but also wonder if editor plugins fall squarely in the range of things an LLM could vibe-code for me?

There is a large class of problems now for which I consider the chosen programming language to be irrelevant. I don't vibe code my driver code/systems programming stuff, but my helper scripts, gdb extensions, etc are mostly written or maintained by an LLM now.
by jahala | 2026-02-14 18:29:06+00:00
It was really helpful to make and run a benchmark - it led to some important changes and improvements, so thanks again for your question kp!

The result is ~17% reduction in raw cost. If calculated per correct answer, its ~25% reduction per correct answer.

Just posted the update -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47016959
by simonbw | 2026-02-14 18:29:44+00:00
Ok, obviously unethical to do it, but this sounds like you've got the power to create some sci-fi shared dreaming device, where you can read people's brainwaves and send signals to other people's masks based on those signals. Or send signals to everyone at the same time and suddenly people all across the world experience some change in their dream simultaneously.

Like, don't actually do it, but I feel like there's inspiration for a sci-fi novel or short story there.
by philipallstar | 2026-02-14 18:30:02+00:00
> It seems like previous civilizations have mastered technology that we cannot figure out.

That was true for a while (e.g. in Britain they spent 500 years figuring out what the colonising Romans had done to try and recreate their advances), but I don't think we're now in that situation. The best thing would've been to mostly convert electricity to nuclear in the 1980s, as by now we'd be handing over ultra advanced nuclear designs and low carbon to the future. Now we're just playing catch-up with the 1980s.
Show HN: AuraSpend " Voice-first expense tracker using Gemini for NLU
by subhanzg | 2026-02-14 18:30:02+00:00
I built an expense tracker where the primary input is voice. The thesis: expense tracking apps fail because manual entry has too much friction, which is why most people abandon them within weeks.

How it works:
- Open app, tap mic
- Say "yesterday I spent 30 dollars on lunch at Chipotle"
- AI extracts: amount, merchant, category, date
- One tap to confirm and save

Other features:
- Receipt scanning with ML Kit OCR + Gemini Vision for parsing
- Background notification listener that catches bank alerts and creates pending entries
- GPS-based currency detection for travelers
- Multi-language with native script fonts (Nastaliq for Urdu, Devanagari for Hindi, Amiri for Arabic)
- Offline-first with Google Drive sync

Tech: Flutter, Riverpod, Hive, Gemini 2.0 Flash

The hardest part was prompt engineering for consistent JSON output across languages. Had to build "Supreme Laws" into the system prompt - things like "never translate native text" and "extract currency from context."

Free tier available. First 500 users get Pro free for a year.

Play Store: AuraSpend

Happy to discuss architecture, prompt engineering approach, or take technical feedback.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-02-14 18:30:15+00:00
As an American, I can freely oppose the current regime. I routinely say, both online and in real life under my government name, that Donald Trump and his cronies are criminals, that everyone should work hard to stop them from achieving their goals and ideally they should all get life sentences once we throw them out of office. I’ll never face legal or even professional consequences for saying this, and even within the most authoritarian regime in generations few officials argue that I should.

Unless I’ve been severely misinformed, someone saying similar things about Xi Jinping on a Chinese tech forum would be swiftly banned and likely arrested.