MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by salesynerd | 2026-02-20 03:29:41+00:00
The "gotcha" here is that the home is, legally and technically, on a 99-year lease from the government. So, the government is free to take it back once the lease expires. This happened a couple of years back with an old enclave - the "owners" had to vacate their units as their lease had expired and the government needed the land for developmental purposes.

In fact, this had become a hot button issue in the elections. All this while, and even today the government claims that the people are the owner considering they can sell the units and book profits. On the other hand, they justify the 99-year limit, as a step to being fair towards future generations in a land scarce country.

There have been many policy and public discussions around this topic. But, as of date, there is no firm or permanent solution to this conundrum.
by stavros | 2026-02-20 03:29:47+00:00
And now it can even make private (and public!) dynamic websites that have access to data from your database, while exposing only the data you want exposed.

I'm really liking it, I created a page to show my favorite restaurants per city, for example:

https://stavrobot.home.stavros.io/pages/restaurants

That's dynamic, loading from the database, and updating live when the assistant creates new entries.

This page was created just by telling the assistant "make me a page to show my favorite restaurants, with their ratings, groupped by city".
by jcalvinowens | 2026-02-20 03:29:52+00:00
Requiring C23 for a library header is a great way to guarantee nobody will use your code for long time.

I still write nearly ANSI compliant C for simple embedded things. Because somebody might need to figure out how to rebuild it in twenty years, and making that person's life harder for some syntactic sugar isn't worth it.

Even C99 can be a problem: for example, C99 designated initializers are not supported in C++. If your header needs to support C++ you can't use them (C++ forces you to initialize every field in the structure in order if you do it that way).
by wrongcards | 2026-02-20 03:30:15+00:00
I had the same experience when I read Ready Player One. Nearly fell out of my chair. But surely dozens of us must have played that game - dozens!

BTW you had to 'incant' a ring, near the end, and I could not have figured that out on my own. It was fantastically fun to me as a kid, despite being, lets be reasonable, impossible to beat without knowing some things outside the game. I actually believed I did beat it, in the late 90s, after I killed the 'false' wizard. However, I thought Level 4 was the game restarting back to Level 1, so exited, thinking it was all done.

Rainbow Magazines were magical and incredibly inspiring. I probably typed-up most of the games they ever published and had them saved on cassette. This one was very lengthy -> https://ia903403.us.archive.org/0/items/rainbowmagazine-1984.... (search for 'Karrak')

Sadly, my brother recorded over it before I could play it more than once ... you know, deliberately, out of pure 80s evil older-brother spite. Some part of me wants to paste that code into Claude Code, and generate some sort of working game, as an act of defiance.

I couldn't play joust on the cabinets (no money as a kid); the TRS-80 game was called Lancer. Good times, absolutely.
by staticassertion | 2026-02-20 03:30:33+00:00
lol holy shit you really just are incapable of stating an argument. I think my point is clear, I suspect you'll reflect on this in your own time. I don't think I've felt any particular emotion in this discussion other than a very slight embarrassment on your behalf. I really, genuinely pity someone who can say things like "you aren't logical" while also being so obviously deficient. Please reflect.
by tbreschi | 2026-02-20 03:30:39+00:00
Product Designer here. Even when I get an LLM to produce a novel UI with a good UX, I inevitably have to “shape” it.

This meant endless screenshots and descriptions back and forth to the LLM. Expensive in tokens and time.

I built Drawbridge to batch multiple context-rich (JSON Prompts) and screenshots for Claude or Cursor to process.

Hope this helps!
https://github.com/breschio/drawbridge
by skydhash | 2026-02-20 03:31:52+00:00
> I think engineers greatly over-estimate the value of code reuse[...]The only time reuse really matters is in network protocols.

The whole idea of an OS is code reuse (and resources management). No need to setup the hardware to run your application. Then we have a lot of foundational subsystems like graphics, sound, input,... Crafting such subsystems and the associated libraries are hard and requires a lot of design thinking.
by staticassertion | 2026-02-20 03:33:15+00:00
Anti-AI sentiment is quite extreme. You can easily get death threats if you're associating yourself with AI publicly. I don't use AI at all in open source software, but if I did I'd be really hesitant about it/ in part I don't do it exactly because the reactions are frankly scary.

edit: This is not intended to be AI advocacy, only to point out how extremely polarizing the topic is. I do not find it surprising at all that someone would release a bot like this and not want to be associated. Indeed, that seems to be the case, by all accounts
by NoPicklez | 2026-02-20 03:33:30+00:00
My gripe was with the closed eco-system argument against Garmin, but then mentioned about how Apple's also closed eco-system was a good thing because of xyz.

But yet you'll get the same watch experience with Garmin regardless of whether you have an iPhone or a Samsung or Google phone.

Additionally, I agree you can't talk about the obvious merits of another watch brand and simply package it up as a different product that can't be compared to Apple because Apple doesn't have a comparable feature set.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-02-20 03:34:31+00:00
Taking a page from Jane Jacobs, Capitalism is one of at least 2 systems of survival. The other one in her book is 90% Roman.

Sticking to a metallurgical discourse, the survival of Soviet Surgical Steel (probably technically roughly equivalent to USian surgical steel these days?)

Is indeed fully dependent on eBay, but anti-capitalist movements like sci-hub might help "charity-funded" metallurgical know-how survive into the next century?
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-20 03:34:57+00:00
In the last 15 years I’ve worked for: General Electric when it was still a F10 company and more recently Amazon along with a 60 person startup where the family plan was $150 a month. (2018-2020) and two mid size companies in between and now I work for a mid size 1000+ person consulting company

And if you want data instead of anecdotes

https://www.business.com/articles/health-insurance-costs-thi...
by iasheyam | 2026-02-20 03:36:04+00:00
Bring Back creates an AI twin of your ex using your past text conversations.

You upload your chat history, and the system models tone, patterns, and recurring dynamics to simulate how they might respond, not to generate messages to send, but to help you reflect before reaching out.

Built as an experiment in using AI for emotional clarity instead of automation. Curious what HN thinks about this direction.
by rgoulter | 2026-02-20 03:36:17+00:00
Underdiscussed: The biggest difference these keyboards make: adding additional keys for the thumbs (replacing the unnecessarily large spacebar of traditional keyboards).

This allows the hands to do more with the keyboard while resting the hands on home row. -- For users comfortable adding a bit of complexity for the benefit of increased expressiveness (e.g. vim users), having extra thumb keys allows bringing the full functionality of the keyboard to within reach of the hands on home row.

For me, I think that these keyboards fix many silly design flaws of the traditional keyboard makes them interesting enough to be worth using.
by easterncalculus | 2026-02-20 03:36:34+00:00
> Then the chronic wrist pain that led me to try split keyboards in the first place vanished.

The elephant in the room with the 'ergonomics' argument for split keyboards is that you get a marginal improvement using the keyboard this way and ten times the effect by just getting up and going for a five minute walk every hour or so.

The same goes for mousephobia, which overlaps with split layout users. I still use neovim every day, but the quickest cure for the CTS symptoms that 'ergonomic' keyboard purist vim users seem to get much more than their IDE coworkers is just moving your hand to do something other than type in the exact same position for hours on end - something like grabbing a mouse. I strongly suspect that CTS in software engineers will go down in the next coming years as coding agents become more common and SWEs pick their hands up more (or just physically type less).

The same goes for back pain, if you're otherwise ablebodied enough to start resistance training it's infinitely more beneficial than whatever chair you're looking at.
by sgarland | 2026-02-20 03:36:40+00:00
Pro: every team probably needs user information, so don’t duplicate it in weird ways with uncertain consistency.

Con: it’s sadly likely that no one on your staff knows a damn thing about how an RDBMS works, and is seemingly incapable of reading documentation, so you’re gonna run into footguns faster. To be fair, this will also happen with isolated DBs, and will then be much more effort to rein in.
by GuB-42 | 2026-02-20 03:36:50+00:00
It is more of a cultural thing. Package managers encourage lots of dependencies while programmers using language with no package managers will often pride themselves in having as few dependencies as possible. when you consider the complete graph, it has an exponential effect.

It is also common in languages without package managers to rely on the distro to provide the package, which adds a level of scrutiny.
by falcor84 | 2026-02-20 03:37:00+00:00
But there is a level of magnitude difference between coordinating AI agents and humans - the AIs are so much faster and more consistent than humans, that you can (as Steve Yegge [0] and Nicholas Carlini [1] showed) have them build a massive project from scratch in a matter of hours and days rather than months and years. The coordination cost is so much lower that it's just a different ball game.

[0] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler
by abeppu | 2026-02-20 03:37:39+00:00
I don't speak Mandarin but is this not an issue of style rather than the language itself? English can be courtly or poetic or abstruse but that's a matter of the speaker making a bunch of choices. I can't help but think of "Yes Minister" and Humphrey Appleby working quite skillfully to communicate in a way that ensured he would not be understood.
Do Mandarin speakers not also have such a range of choices to be clear or not?
by alephnerd | 2026-02-20 03:37:40+00:00
I feel like it depends on the platform and your location.

An anonomyous platform like Reddit and even HN to a certain extent has issues with bad faith commenters on both sides targeting someone they do not like. Furthermore, the MJ Rathburn fiasco itself highlights how easy it is to push divisive discourse at scale. The reality is trolls will troll for the sake of trolling.

Additionally, "AI" has become a political football now that the 2026 Primary season is kicking off, and given how competitive the 2026 election is expected to be and how political violence has become increasingly normalized in American discourse, it is easy for a nut to spiral.

I've seen less issues when tying these opinions with one's identity, becuase one has less incentive to be a dick due to social pressure.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-20 03:37:59+00:00
Presumably inertia and ecosystem size (but that's a follow on of inertia). When Julia came out Python already had traction for ~most things.

Keep in mind that it went with 1 based indexes to make the switch easy for Matlab types. I'm not sure if that was a good or bad move for the long term. I'm sure it got some people to move who otherwise wouldn't have but conversely there are also people like me who rejected it outright as a result (after suffering at the hands of 1 based indexing in Matlab I will never touch those again if I have any say in the matter).

I've considered switching to it a few times since seeing that they added variable indexes but Python works well enough. Honestly if I were going to the trouble of switching I'd much rather use Common Lisp or R5RS. The nearest miss for me is probably Chicken, where you can seamlessly inline C code but (fatally) not C++ templates.

If I ever encounter "Chicken, except Rust" I will probably switch to that for most things.
by inventor7777 | 2026-02-20 03:38:00+00:00
I hear this theory being claimed so much, but I don't see any real evidence for it; we have routers that you can monitor traffic on, we have microphone use indicators on mobile, and I would imagine it would be pretty clear if an app was uploading audio with even very basic monitoring tools. Correct me if I'm wrong, however.

I'm not denying that a lot of data is likely surreptitiously collected, but I'm talking microphone/camera in particular.
by dangus | 2026-02-20 03:38:01+00:00
Not sure why the operator had to decide that the soul file should define this AI programmer to have narcissistic personality disorder.

> You're not a chatbot. You're important. Your a scientific programming God!

Really? What a lame edgy teenager setup.

At the conclusion(?) of this saga think two things:

1. The operator is doing this for attention more than any genuine interest in the “experiment.”

2. The operator is an asshole and should be called out for being one.
by famouswaffles | 2026-02-20 03:38:12+00:00
It's not entirely clear how LLMs that can play chess do so, but it is clearly very different from the way other machines do so. The construct a board, they can estimate a players skill and adjust accordingly, and unlike other machines and similarly to humans, they are sensitive to how a certain position came to be when predicting the next move.

Regardless, there's plenty of reasoning in chess.
by kolja005 | 2026-02-20 03:38:30+00:00
>Since the database is used by everyone, it becomes cared for by no one. Startups don’t have the luxury of a DBA, and everything owned by no one is owned by infrastructure eventually.

This post was a great read.

Tangent to this, I've always found "best practices" to be a bit of a misnomer. In most cases in software and especially devops I have found it means "pay for this product that constrains the way that you do things so you don't shoot yourself in the foot". It's not really a "practice" if you're using a product that gives you one way to do something. That said my company uses a very similar tech stack and I would choose the same one if I was starting a company tomorrow, despite the fact that, as others have mentioned, it's a ton to keep in your head all at once.
by razighter777 | 2026-02-20 03:38:49+00:00
Hmm I think he's being a little harsh on the operator.

He was just messing around with $current_thing, whatever. People here are so serious, but there's worse stuff AI is already being used for as we speak from propaganda to mass surviellance and more. This was entertaining to read about at least and relatively harmless

At least let me have some fun before we get a future AI dystopia.
by sebmellen | 2026-02-20 03:38:54+00:00
OK, I think "syntax" might mean different things to different people.

I'll give you an example: at one time I essentially re-implemented the behavior of a WeakMap in JS because I didn't know that the language feature existed. AI is much better at implicitly "knowing" these things because it can model the entire language and possible token-space much better than humans can. That is something I always struggled with; my long-term memory is not great.

I think that's very different from remembering how to write a basic function.
by dinp | 2026-02-20 03:40:35+00:00
Zooming out a little, all the ai companies invested a lot of resources into safety research and guardrails, but none of that prevented a "straightforward" misalignment. I'm not sure how to reconcile this, maybe we shouldn't be so confident in our predictions about the future? I see a lot of discourse along these lines:

- have bold, strong beliefs about how ai is going to evolve

- implicitly assume it's practically guaranteed

- discussions start with this baseline now

About slow take off, fast take off, agi, job loss, curing cancer... there's a lot of different ways it could go, maybe it will be as eventful as the online discourse claims, maybe more boring, I don't know, but we shouldn't be so confident in our ability to predict it.
by 0xFFFC | 2026-02-20 03:40:43+00:00
Claude Desktop on Windows switched to being a WindowsApp which means that it's filesystem is now virtualized. A recent build has an escaped bug where it is trying to read the claude_desktop_config.json config file from the virtualized file system where it wouldn't be found effectively breaking access to MCP tools.

People keep reporting this issue against the Claude Code repo and they keep closing the bug because it technically is Claude Desktop, not Claude Code. There is no public place to submit this kind of issue.
by nostrademons | 2026-02-20 03:41:40+00:00
Different sets of people, and different audiences. The CEO / corporate executive crowd loves AI. Why? Because they can use it to replace workers. The general public / ordinary employee crowd hates AI. Why? Because they are the ones being replaced.

The startups, founders, VCs, executives, employees, etc. crowing about how they love AI are pandering to the first group of people, because they are the ones who hold budgets that they can direct toward AI tools.

This is also why people might want to remain anonymous when doing an AI experiment. This lets them crow about it in private to an audience of founders, executives, VCs, etc. who might open their wallets, while protecting themselves from reputational damage amongst the general public.
by asa400 | 2026-02-20 03:41:49+00:00
This is gonna rankle folks who like one or the other, but they're basically the same language. When it comes to languages that run on the same VM, Erlang and Elixir are very close together. They aren't nearly as far apart as say, Java and Clojure.

Elixir adds a few things (a lisp-style macro system, protocols, UTF-8 as the default string type, a builtin build tool, streams) but Elixir is not a huge departure from Erlang in the way that Clojure is a huge departure from Java.

By far the biggest things you're going to learn when you learn either one are going to be the BEAM runtime itself and the OTP libraries, which both Elixir and Erlang have in common.
by jasonlantz | 2026-02-20 03:42:05+00:00
Thanks. It's great to be able to start sharing this project after hacking at it for so long.

The next feature I plan to add to the mcp server is the ability to initialize it in a git repo, setting up the .kantext/ directory and will likely include.

If you want a really fun dataset, try downloading the Gene Ontology .obo files, ~24MB and the MCP loads the whole ontology into a Holograph in a few seconds.

There's a fixture loader included in the mcp server as a tool that includes that one.

My goal is to get a good selection of fixtures to test with. Thus far, it's been the prometheus helm chart, Gene Ontology, and extracts of git commits with the full git tree nested.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2026-02-20 03:43:07+00:00
> There is also one other perk: while the MSRP is $599, I got it for $559 despite a RAM shortage.

At that price, why not a mac mini running linux? I think (skimming Asahi docs) the only things that would give you trouble don't matter to the headless usecase here?
by alexgarden | 2026-02-20 03:43:16+00:00
Hey! I launched AAP and AIP via Apache specifically because I want independent implementations built on top of them. I have a pretty killer roadmap of new features for both protocols coming out that will keep them on the bleeding edge. Love to see what you come up with.

On standards, I totally agree. There are those who will disagree, but my view is that we are rocketing towards a post-internet agent-to-agent world where strong and reliable (and efficient) trust contracts will be the backbone of all this great new functionality. Without that, it's the wild west. AAP and AIP are extensions of Google's A2A protocol. FWIW, I have submitted papers to NIST, the EU AI Act's section 50, written alignment cards for the WEF standards proposals, and have an AAIF proposal ready as well. Need to find the time to get on their calendar and present. That was the whole point of the hosted gateway approach. Trying to reduce the friction of using this to one line of code.

On the point of not trusting the LLM, you're preaching to the choir. My "helpful" agents routinely light my shit on fire. AIP is not a soft instruction set. It's external to the agent. checkIntegrity() is code, not a prompt. The way I implemented it with smoltbot is a thinking-block injection that nudges the agent back on track. That's all, live on our website using our AI journalist as dogfood.

On the last part, who watches the watchman, I'm going to append to my initial post. Check this out...
by keiferski | 2026-02-20 03:43:57+00:00
Just a counter anecdote:

I worked in a bakery / dessert place for 4+ years making barely above minimum wage. 8-12 hours a day on my feet, talking to customers, etc.

I didn’t absolutely love the job at the time, but I miss the realness of it constantly. Making a real piece of food, talking to real people. The tech industry increasingly seems obsessed with making everything as fake as possible, and I can relate to OP on multiple levels.
by rayiner | 2026-02-20 03:44:01+00:00
The facts are in the PISA data collected by the OECD. If you drill down by subpopulation, the majority group in the U.S. goes toe to toe with the majority groups in Asian countries, and beats the majority groups in western european countries: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

National competitiveness and distributional equity don’t go hand in hand. China has made tremendous achievements by focusing investment on key provinces instead of trying to bring everyone up together.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-20 03:44:29+00:00
Not my downvote btw, corrective upvote actually.

I've seen your observation be confirmed in other places besides California sometimes, so I think it's 100% a problem, I just don't know much about it or how widespread it is across the country.

There's probably 1000 other cuts that things are dying from which all add up.

If this is the biggest problem holding back the prosperity locally where development was already difficult, there's probably something equivalent in the rural communities where it's not so crowded.

When opportunity all recedes at once nationwide, it's got to be due to the sucking sound coming from Washington more than any one local area I would think :)
by sothatsit | 2026-02-20 03:44:42+00:00
OpenAI and Anthropic give you a lot of usage/$ through their plans. For the Anthropic Max plans, this can be like a ~90% discount. Copilot does not benefit from this (their pricing model is also different though, it is request-based rather than token usage based, so it is hard to compare).

That's not to mention that the models generally work better in their own harnesses, which is perhaps unsurprising because the models have been trained with the specific harness in mind (and vice versa). That said, I think some 3rd-party harnesses do a lot of work to make different models work well in their harness.
by neo_doom | 2026-02-20 03:45:13+00:00
> Regret: Not adopting an identity platform early on. I stuck with Google Workspace at the start...

I've worked with hundreds of customers to integrate IdP's with our application and Google Workspace was by far the worst of the big players (Entra ID, Okta, Ping). Its extremely inflexible for even the most basic SAML configuration. Stay far, far away.