MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nhhvhy | 2026-02-09 20:23:14+00:00
I don’t think people understand the true level of tech illiteracy of Gen Z. A couple years back I did an internship with the IT guy at my high school, and the vast majority of the problems students had with the Chromebooks we used were, in no specific order:

- Not understanding that a dead battery means it won’t turn on
- Trying to use them without an internet connection
- “The screen won’t work” when trying to non-touchscreen models like a tablet
- “I can’t see my stuff” when using the guest mode rather than their login, or when they used a PC and they couldn’t see the docs icon on their desktop

That’s not even to mention the abysmal typing skills of most students, so many 15WPM hunt-and-peck typers..

There’s a mountain of issues along those lines we ran into, and it was honestly frightening to watch.
by icedchai | 2026-02-09 20:23:24+00:00
You're not wrong about the sustainability, but we don't know if it's their only business. I'm not sure how many BGP / multihome hobbyists there are out there, but I'm guessing it's not a huge number. My guess is the LIR stuff is an add on for their colocation and hosting services.

When I first made the ARIN or RIPE LIR decision a few years back, ARIN required a $500 registration fee for an ASN. That was a few years of LIR fees right there. I felt it was worth the risk for the savings with a hobbyist setup.
by summa_tech | 2026-02-09 20:23:34+00:00
You could also consider MRAM. Which is available in larger sizes - up to 4 Mbit on SPI bus in the MR20H40, and 128 Mbit in EM128LXQ (but it gets unreasonably expensive when this big).

https://www.everspin.com/family/mr20h40?npath=259
by vharuck | 2026-02-09 20:23:36+00:00
Authoritarian governments are always more efficient than democracies. Their flaw is that citizens have no say in what goal will be efficiently pursued. When a technocratic authoritarian is in power, things improve overall (but there are still many "inefficient" people left behind or crushed). But when a cruel or incompetent authoritarian takes control, things hit lows that sound democracies wouldn't allow. Lows that take generations to recover from.
by remich | 2026-02-09 20:23:42+00:00
We're in a transition phase, but this will shake out in the near future. In the non-professional space, poorly built vibecoded apps simply won't last, for any number of reasons. When it comes to professional devs, this is a problem that is solved by a combination of tooling, process, and management:

(1) Tooling to enable better evaluation of generated code and its adherence to conventions and norms
(2) Process to impose requirements on the creation/exposure of PRDs/prompts/traces
(3) Management to guide devs in the use of the above and to implement concrete rewards and consequences

Some organizations will be exposed as being deficient in some or all of these areas, and they will struggle. Better organizations will adapt.
by lacoolj | 2026-02-09 20:23:47+00:00
So how do we know (other than obvious, NSFW servers) if we are in a server that is not "teen appropriate"? I don't feel the need to prove I'm old af, so if I'm in a server for sports betting, is that not teen appropriate? What about a pokemon server with a lot of swearing? Or just a custom server made by a friend for web dev, but has lots of random politics thrown around?

I really just don't know what isn't "safe" for teens, so hopefully this will be pretty clear somewhere.
by OneOffAsk | 2026-02-09 20:23:47+00:00
Aim to make the road laminar. Every time you hard brake, you're causing the milk jug to glug, making a ripple of entropy as momentum turns to heat from your brakes and those behind you, sometimes in perpetuity. I learned this while doing a 1.5hr daily commute in a Subaru with a clapped out manual transmission. I wanted to conserve energy shifting, but realized I was now participating in large choreographed dance of "smooth" with other drivers who already knew this. There are many of us. And we all glare at the driver blinking their red lights on the interstate indicating that they're loud and proud of introducing turbulence to an otherwise peaceful system.
by JoshTriplett | 2026-02-09 20:23:59+00:00
> A pile of morons in legislatures who insist there's a magic highly private way to do all this, but (see Australia) refuse to lay out the actual method.

This is a case where there's plenty of evidence that it's actual malice, not just incompetence. Leaving aside that this shouldn't be done at all, there is no desire to do this in a privacy-preserving way, because destroying anonymity and controlling online discourse is the point for governments, not the "unintentional" side effect to be avoided. "Think of the children" is just the excuse to get people to unknowingly buy in, just as it has been for generations.

https://bsky.app/profile/tupped.bsky.social/post/3lwgcmswmy2...
by V_Shukla | 2026-02-09 20:24:08+00:00
AI video models like Seedance 2.0 are getting insanely powerful — multi-shot storytelling, 2K output, native audio.

But every cinematic sequence still begins with a strong visual foundation.

The frame defines mood. Identity. Emotion.

AI filmmaking is evolving fast.
The creators who win will be the ones who control the frame first — and build the rest of the stack on top of it.
by frumplestlatz | 2026-02-09 20:24:24+00:00
> ever so slightly

It’s not “slightly”. They’ll start with claiming to protect people under 18 from obviously problematic content — porn, grooming, etc.

It won’t stop there. The scope creep will extend to expressing or reading “incorrect” or “dangerous” views.

They’ll probably call some of it “hate speech”, but hate speech is whatever the people in power say it is; on X, “cisgender” is designated as a slur and gets your post censored.

The slippery slope fallacy is only a fallacy if the slope isn’t slippery — “think of the children” is a wedge bad actors are once again trying to use to open the floodgates of censorship.

They don’t even need to target adults; if you control what children can see and express, you have enormous control over all future generations of voters.
by ryanmcbride | 2026-02-09 20:24:28+00:00
Me too but I don't think these sorts of Solved Society endgames are likely to show up. Basically presents the same issue with a utopia.

Progression and regression are always going to be at war with each other. There will always be humans that want to hurt instead of help, there will always be humans who TRY to help but ultimately hurt. There will always be misinformation, there will always be lies, and there will always be liars.

The good news is there will also always be people trying to pull humanity forwards, to help other people, to save lives, to eradicate disease, educate, and expose the truth.

I don't think society will ever be solved in the way you're saying because there will always be hurtful people, but there will also always be good people to keep up the fight.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-02-09 20:24:37+00:00
There's a couple of bits of motorway in England with that, I'm pretty sure the M6 and the M1. There are white chevrons painted on the road and you keep two of them between you and the car in front.

Also "Keep Two Chevrons Apart" is going to be the name of my specialist Citroën breaker's yard.
by rvz | 2026-02-09 20:24:39+00:00
You might as well self-host at this point as that is far more reliable than depending on GitHub.

Additionally, there is no CEO of GitHub this time that is going to save us here.

So as I said many years ago [0] in the long term, a better way is to self host or use alternatives such as Codeberg or GitLab which at least you can self host your own.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803
by IshKebab | 2026-02-09 20:25:16+00:00
If you think about it "because air is blue when you look at it from the side" is about all the explanation we'd require if the sky was some normal object like an apple. Nobody asks "why is wood brown?" as if it's some deep question, but "why is the sky blue?" is somehow given greater gravitas, as if the reason is more mystical. I guess because the sky is so big and uniform?
by KaiserPro | 2026-02-09 20:25:36+00:00
If your budget is a bit more, and you want to hear a massive clunk every 30 seconds rather than a soft tick and you want to drive 2' (60cm) hands, then you might want this: https://waitingtrain.blogspot.com/2015/05/a-large-gents-turr...

The smaller ones look the same but are less beefy.

I used one to make this clock:

https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/projects/electromechanical-c...

Which instead of using a well disciplined time source, uses a tuning fork and 74xx logic to drive it
by D13Fd | 2026-02-09 20:25:47+00:00
I sent an Eagle Creek suitcase in and they honored the warranty even though it's maybe 15 years old. They sent it to a repair place who actually fixed every single issue with it (first a broken wheel, then later a torn pocket, broken buckle, and missing zipper pulls). I honestly can't believe that the repairs are cheaper than just replacing it, but it has worked out really well. It's a shame more places don't do that.
Show HN: Orange Juice Hacker News browser extension
by oj-hn-dot-com | 2026-02-09 20:26:12+00:00
Hi all,

I've been part of the Hacker News community since 2009 (under a different profile, latchkey), and over the years I've accumulated many ideas for improving the experience. I've used HNES, Refined Hacker News, and other extensions, and saved countless ideas along the way. Many promising projects were eventually abandoned. That may happen here too, but this is something I've wanted to explore personally for a long time. With AI making experimentation easier, now feels like the right time to do it.

The goal isn't to redesign Hacker News. Its minimal UX works, and no one wants to relearn an interface that already does the job. Instead, this project focuses on small, thoughtful improvements—adding features and polish that make HN more pleasant to use without changing its core.

I'm also interested in exploring social features. HN is already a massive social network, but interactions feel fragmented. There's room for tools that make engagement richer, not through obvious features like live chat, but through more creative, viral ideas I plan to experiment with.

Take a look, feedback welcome!
by tibbar | 2026-02-09 20:26:20+00:00
Github used to publish some pretty interesting postmortems. Maybe they still do. IIRC that they were struggling with scaling their SQL db and were starting to hit the limits. It's a tough position to be in because you have to either to a massive migration to a data layer with much different semantics, or you have to keep desperately squeezing performance and skirting on the edge of outages with a DB that wasn't really meant to handle what you're doing with it now.
The OpenAI blog post on "scaling" Postgres to their current scale has much the same flavor, although I think they're doing it better than Github appears to be doing.
by hilbert42 | 2026-02-09 20:27:11+00:00
Funny you should mention that another hobby of mine was rescuing old harmoniums and making them playable again—you know, fixing and replacing reeds, renewing bug-eaten felt, sealing rat holes in the bellows, etc.

I grant you it's not in the same league as voicing a diapason though. :-)

I reckon adjusting and tweaking things goes with the territory. I'm pretty much at home tweaking crystals, fixing reeds, aligning IF stages in radio and TV equipment, there's much of a sameness in the way one tackles all of them.

BTW, I've actually repaired reeds by soldering them. Not a good fix though as the solder can fatigue with use. Throws out equal temperament a bit too but most can't hear the difference.
by overgard | 2026-02-09 20:27:24+00:00
I bought Steve Yegge's "Vibe Coding" book. I think I'm about 1/4th of the way through it or so. One thing that surprised me is there's this naivete on display that workers are going to be the ones to reap the benefits of this. Like, Steve was using an example of being able to direct the agent while doing leisure activities (never mind that Steve is more of an executive/thought leader in this company, and, prior to LLMs, seemed to be out of the business of writing code). That's a nice snapshot of a reality that isn't going to persist..

While the idea of programmers working two hours a day and spending the rest of it with their family seems sunny, that's absolutely not how business is going to treat it.

Thought experiment... CEO has a team of 8 engineers. They do some experiments with AI, and they discover that their engineers are 2x more effective on average . What does the CEO do?

a) Change the workweek to 4 hours a day so that all the engineers have better work/life balance since the same amount of work is being done.

b) Fire half the engineers, make the 4 remaining guys pick up the slack, rinse and repeat until there's one guy left?

Like, come on. There's pushback on this stuff not because the technology is bad, (although it's overhyped), but because the no sane person trusts our current economic system to provide anything resembling humane treatment of workers. The super rich are perfectly fine seeing half the population become unemployed, as far as I can tell, as long as their stock numbers go up.
by amarant | 2026-02-09 20:27:53+00:00
Not quite everywhere. There's a common denominator for all of those: Microsoft.

Their business is buying good products and turning them into shit, while wringing every cent they can out of the business. Always has been.

They have a grace period of about 2-4 years after acquisition where interference is minimal. Then it ramps up. How long a product can survive once the interference begins largely depends on how good senior leadership at that product company is at resisting the interference. It's a hopeless battle, the best you can do is to lose slowly.
by CGMthrowaway | 2026-02-09 20:28:50+00:00
> The ID is immediately deleted. We do not keep any information around like your name, the city that you live in, if you used a birth certificate or something else, any of that information.

Everyone says this, including the TSA. But they never say they don't keep a hash, or an eigenvector of your biometric. Which is equally as important.
by D-Machine | 2026-02-09 20:29:02+00:00
> There's no such thing as a "world model"

There obviously is in humans. When you visually simulate things or e.g. simulate how food will taste in your mind as you add different seasonings, you are modeling (part of) the world. This is presumably done by having associations in our brain between all the different qualia sequences and other kinds of representations in our mind. I.e. we know we do some visuospatial reasoning tasks using sequences of (imagined) images. Imagery is one aspect of our world model(s).

We know LLMs can't be doing visuospatial reasoning using imagery, because they only work with text tokens. A VLM or other multimodal might be able to do so, but an LLM can't, and so an LLM can't have a visual world model. They might in special cases be able to construct a linguistic model that lets them do some computer vision tasks, but the model will itself still only be using tokenized words.

There are all sorts of other sensory modalities and things that humans use when thinking (i.e. actual logic and reasoning, which goes beyond mere semantics and might include things like logical or other forms of consistency, e.g. consistency with a relevant mental image), and the "world model" concept is supposed, in part, to point to these things that are more than just language and tokens.

> Obviously not true because of RL environments.

Right, AI generally can have much more complex world models than LLMs. An LLM can't even handle e.g. sensor data without significant architectural and training modification (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46948266), at which point, it is no longer an LLM.
by crowcroft | 2026-02-09 20:29:39+00:00
"Ads that support free access and don’t change ChatGPT answers."

I understand what they're trying to say but this statement is factually incorrect. Answers never used to have ads, and now they do.

In the very first example, if ChatGPT wasn't running ads Heirloom Groceries wouldn't show up, therefore it is a different answer.

OpenAI is splitting hairs and implying that the ad and the 'answer' are two separate components making up a response, but that is not how users will see things, and OpenAI will have ever increasing incentives to blur the two.
by sujalbhakare | 2026-02-09 20:29:45+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m building Tactis, a low-cost, refreshable braille interface designed to make digital information accessible without the $2k–$5k price barrier of existing displays.

Problem:

Braille displays are expensive, fragile, and limited in capability.

Screen readers alone don’t work for literacy, math, or structured technical content.

Most visually impaired users are forced into audio-only workflows.

What this is:

A compact refreshable braille surface for reading and input.

Integrated voice → text and text → voice for hybrid interaction.

Designed from the ground up for affordability, repairability, and scale.

Hardware-first approach, not a tablet accessory or locked ecosystem.

What’s different:

Focus on cost reduction at the actuator/mechanism level.

Modular design so the same platform can support education, navigation, and productivity use cases.

Built with the assumption that braille literacy still matters.

Status:

Early prototype stage.

Validated problem through user interviews and assistive-tech orgs.

Currently refining the braille actuation mechanism and system architecture.

I’m sharing this to get:

Technical feedback on low-cost refreshable braille mechanisms.

Input from anyone who has built hardware for accessibility.

Reality checks from visually impaired users or educators.

Site: https://braillepadpro.web.app/

This is not polished, not finished, and not a pitch deck. It’s a real problem that needs better engineering.
by 0_____0 | 2026-02-09 20:30:22+00:00
Corruption definitely happens in China but even as a US person I can think of at least one major case where there were very real consequences for that. How many US govt officials have been executed for corruption? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Zaiyong

Millions starving during the Great Leap forward was very much NOT part of the plan, it was the result of some very misguided agricultural practices.

My point is that in the same period, China has gone from "oops we accidentally caused the 2nd largest mass starvation event in history" to "we have the largest high speed rail network and manufacturing base in the world and nobody is even close."

While the US went from "what's a postwar superpower to do? How bout some megaprojects?" To "I'm drowning in entitlements and houses now cost the same as the average lifetime GDP per capita".
by greentea23 | 2026-02-09 20:30:34+00:00
Popularity is irrelevant imo, it's a general purpose FOSS tool. Ignore Element and matrix.org, the open protocol is what matters. These features are useful even if matrix never gains any network effect:
1. talking among a small-ish specific group that needs sovereign communication, e.g. when forming a company or a tight knit in person friend group
2. only data limit is the size of my harddrive
3. bridge to every other popular protocol
4. personal bots and automation with no restrictions
5. Unlimited and customizable clients with no restrictions
6. Combinations of 1-5.

Can't speak for non-self hosters or people who aren't serious about chat, but for chat enthusiasts who can setup a server with bridges and bots, matrix is incredibly useful.
by chad_oliver | 2026-02-09 20:30:56+00:00
Credit scores are universally hated but they make it possible to offer lower interest rates to more people. Without credit scores, fewer people would have access to credit.

Similarly, people often don't like it when insurers track and score their driving. However, this allows insurers to offer lower insurance fees to more people by _not_ offering lower insurance fees (or instead charging higher fees) to people that are driving in a risky manner. This does of course assume a competitive market for insurance but I think in most countries that's a reasonable assumption.

There's nothing fairer than user-pays, especially when users can choose to pay less by changing their behavior.
by manuelmoreale | 2026-02-09 20:30:57+00:00
> Several of the biggest companies today are fueled by ads, and OpenAI has the perfect ad vehicle. What else were you expecting?

I'm old enough to remember when these people were claiming AI was as important and as revolutionary as fire and electricity. I don't know about you, but I pay for my electricity and the power companies don't have to run ads on my power lines in order to run their business.
by 8xeh | 2026-02-09 20:31:16+00:00
They'll have to "partner" with some company that's in the business of building a database of IDs and biometrics to do AI things with. Other companies in this space (Jumio) have a bad habit of ignoring privacy laws and will keep your information for years.

I wouldn't mind showing my ID to a person (in person), but there's no way I'm letting some company get a scan of my ID or passport to store in some giant database that's a rich target for hackers. Might as well give them access to all my bank accounts (Plaid) too.

(It sure would be nice if there were a national privacy law in the US.)

Also, it's illegal for companies to use facial recognition in my jurisdiction, so if I allowed them to "verify" me, they'd be breaking the law.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-02-09 20:31:24+00:00
I pay for nitro as of now (not for much longer). If absolutely nothing else, I'm not going to give them monthly payments (which generally required a CC. Aka "I'm an adult") and still not be trusted to be an adult.

And that's the thing, these policies are always loose and will be abused.

- M rated game? Okay, it's adult only now. Sure.

- Emulators? Well they can play adult stuff. Now they just happen to add friction on something that is convenient for billionaire studios.

- LGBT content? Well you're talking about sexuality. Of course you need to be an adult. Here let's take face scans and totally not be a sitting duck for any malicious parties looking to identify traditionally disenfranchised people

The escalation is fairly obvious at this point. We've seen it happen in real time.
by neilv | 2026-02-09 20:31:25+00:00
Yay for GitLab and Forgejo/Gitea.

My previous two startups used GitLab successfully. The smaller startup used paid-tier hosted by gitlab.com. The bigger startup (with strategic cutting-edge IP, and multinational security sensitivity) used the expensive on-prem enterprise GitLab.

(The latter startup, I spent some principal engineer political capital to move us to GitLab, after our software team was crippled by the Microsoft Azure-branded thing that non-software people had purchased by default. It helped that GitLab had a testimonial from Nvidia, since we were also in the AI hardware space.)

If you prefer to use fully open source, or have $0 budget, there's also Forgejo (forked from Gitea). I'm using it for my current one-person side-startup, and it's mostly as good as GitLab for Git, issues, boards, and wiki. The "scoped" issue labels, which I use heavily, are standard in Foregejo, but paid-tier in GitLab. I haven't yet exercised the CI features.
by ghaff | 2026-02-09 20:31:51+00:00
In the US, my observation is that some relatively-highend shopping malls are reasonably successful in some cities. But, near me, there's basically a dead mall that used to have Sears, Macys, and Penny as anchor tenants. All gone. I do have big box complexes (including around dead mall) that have some stores that seem to be pretty successful--supermarket and DIY.

But I don't know the last time I was in an indoor mall. In Asia and some areas of Europe, at least, I do think you have multi-floor complexes where you have pretty good eating but that doesn't tend to be the case in the US.