MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dgxyz | 2026-02-14 08:08:44+00:00
I'm seeing a worrying pattern in this space. Some engineers I work with treat LLMs like unquestionable machine gods. I've rejected PRs which are quite frankly trash piles and have received responses which are clearly LLM generated defending the PR using reasoning at the level of an elderly rat.

The problem is that a not insignificant portion of engineers out there in the real world don't care if something is good or not as long as someone signs it off. And another not insignificant portion of engineers out there really can't tell if something is good or not. They take no responsibility for it - it's just seen as a way of abstracting themselves from the responsibility. I can't fathom how their reasoning works there either.

As always, human problems. LLMs make the worst of us faster and more demanding at being terrible. The are definitely a net loss in a large org or a Dunning Kruger inflicted team.
by pseudohadamard | 2026-02-14 08:09:11+00:00
That's actually impossible to answer. I maintain or contribute to or have contributed to several FOSS projects whose number varies depending on how you want to count them, and neither myself nor anyone else who contributes to any FOSS project has the faintest idea how many people use them, especially if they're included in widely-used distros where the number is anything from zero to $number_of_distro_users.
by dwb | 2026-02-14 08:09:33+00:00
I’m definitely not advocating more little electron apps, and I’m totally with you on TUI’s benefits. I’m bemoaning the lack of imagination that has ended us up here and not in a situation where we can have, say, a small, low-footprint application that can deliver a more structured UI with minimal dependencies. It’s not an impossibility, it’s not even that difficult to imagine, we just don’t have the exact technology.
by D-Machine | 2026-02-14 08:10:26+00:00
> What does out of distribution even mean?

There are in fact ways to directly quantify this, if you are training e.g. a self-supervised anomaly-detection model.

Even with modern models not trained in that manner, looking at e.g. cosine distances of embeddings of "novel" outputs could conceivably provide objective evidence for "out-of-distribution" results. Generally, the embeddings of out-of-distribution outputs will have a large cosine (or even Euclidean) distance from the typical embedding(s). Just, most "out-of-distribution" outputs will be nonsense / junk, so, searching for weird outputs isn't really helpful, in general, if your goal is useful creativity.
by sneak | 2026-02-14 08:10:29+00:00
> The pink slip comes as a total surprise. It always comes as a surprise. You did everything you were told, even waited patiently like you were asked. You trusted the organization to reward you in turn - and now you've lost your job.

Your reward is your paycheck. On Friday night, the balance anyone owes anyone is zero.

You didn’t “trust” them at all. They had no further obligations to you, nor you to them. You seem to have invented obligations that don’t exist.
I intend to refactor Gastown for the following
by vanxv | 2026-02-14 08:10:36+00:00
I intend to refactor Gastown for the following reasons:
The system is extremely user-unfriendly with almost no consideration for user experience.
The naming conventions are chaotic – terms like "task" and "main" would be intuitive, yet the inappropriate term "mayor" is unnecessarily used instead.
The workflows are disorganized and there is barely any meaningful interaction design.
I plan to rebuild this system using Rust and incorporate additional workflow capabilities into it.
by shevy-java | 2026-02-14 08:13:38+00:00
Personally I don't like infinite scrolling - but the EU also needs to stop wasting time and energy on trying to micro-manage everything. We already had that disaster where pop-ups fly out "do you want to accept those cookies". That is just a usability nightmare. People are forced into extensions, just to stop wasting their time here.

Also, while I dislike infinite scrolling, why should the EU regulate the design of a website? I don't like this idea as a principle. This clearly comes from overpaid bureaucrats. I am not at all saying the EU should not become stronger, in the face of a very hostile and abusive USA - but the focus by these bureaucrats is wrong. Those micro-regulations will not get rid of US dominance in the software sector.
by simonjgreen | 2026-02-14 08:13:52+00:00
First example I thought of is the titanium punch sheets and wordlists for crypto wallet recovery phrases
https://shop.ledger.com/products/cryptotag-zeus and https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039/bip-003...

There is also Microsoft Project Silica which I recall seeing in person at their EBC playing back a movie from it https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil...

Then there is m-disc which uses the DVD+R and BD-R/BDXL standards but writing to a sort of glass rather than to the traditional medium. These are cool as they play back n regular players too. https://www.mdisc.com/
by throwawaypath | 2026-02-14 08:13:57+00:00
>ICE's current mission isn't to deport illegal immigrants.

You're correct, their mission is to "Protect America through criminal investigations and enforcing immigration laws to preserve national security and public safety."

>Its current mission is to antagonize anyone who is not a WASP, and seemingly these days, anybody who stands up for non-WASP citizens in the US.

The majority of the US are not WASPs.

>So your questions don't matter because you're arguing about a reality that doesn't exist.

Always fun to read comments like "a reality that doesn't exist" from people that think men can get pregnant.
by dwb | 2026-02-14 08:14:46+00:00
Funnily, Emacs is getting closer to what I’m after (it’s my main editor).

> That's not necessarily bad. Not everything has to be open ended.

I think it is necessarily bad and everything should be open ended. Bad in the sense of low quality, but if we’re talking about critical accessibility (someone is unable to use your application at all), morally bad too.
by tsimionescu | 2026-02-14 08:16:10+00:00
While I don't think anyone has a plausible theory that goes to this level of detail on how humans actually think, there's still a major difference. I think it's fair to say that if we are doing a brute force search, we are still astonishingly more energy efficient at it than these LLMs. The amount of energy that goes into running an LLM for 12h straight is vastly higher than what it takes for humans to think about similar problems.
by benstopics | 2026-02-14 08:16:25+00:00
Options pricing was not correct, which MJ knew because he simply based it on lookup table using ratios of a spread on a random security in his brokerage account decades ago! I tried to implement Black-Scholes best I could, my one contribution to the engine thus far. MJ has patched several things such as runaway interest rates and commodity prices, too-easy crypto price movements. Typos here and there. Certain edge cases that only a highly skilled player would ever come across, which due to the Discord server brought those players out of the woodwork to battle harden the game and a place for them to report the things they always knew but never had the motivation to report. But for the most part the engine is pretty damn solid.
by shevy-java | 2026-02-14 08:16:47+00:00
> but are ruling against addictive design and pointing to infinite scrolling as an example of it

I still don't like that explanation at all. They imply that infinite scrolling is a sign of addictive design. How do they reach this conclusion? I can think of other ways that don't necessitate an addictive design. Some art form for instance. It may not be your cup of tea but that is art in general. I just don't see the logical connection.

Not that I am against taxing these greedy and evil US corporations. But that argument by the EU is simply not sound.

> Regardless of your take around whether this is EU overreach, I'm glad they're not implementing strict laws around what you can/can't do - there are valuable situations for these UI patterns, even if in combination they can create addictive experiences.

But why would you be in favour then? Does this make sense?

> but the regulated friction of major platforms (ie discord w/ ID laws) is on a collision course

This will happen anyway. Trump and his TechBros leverage the US corporations for their wars. You only need to listen to Vance, or Rubio doing his latest dance. Sadly the european politicians are also too weak to do anything other than talk big.
by neom | 2026-02-14 08:18:06+00:00
I was just thinking about that, I think where I live in the UK it was after dinner but also back to back, seem to recall DS9 was first? Either way I found that period of TV annoying as DS9 is objectively the worst old trek, and Babylon 5 is a little more than a little corny, personally can't stand Babylon 5.
How does token bucket enforces bursty output traffic?
by shivajikobardan | 2026-02-14 08:18:26+00:00
Leaky bucket and token bucket algorithm are congestion control algorithms.

Congestion control means to stop overwhelming the network.

I understand the leaky bucket algorithm to some extent.

In leaky bucket:

- there is a small hole in the bottom.

- so the output rate is always constant, irrespective of what the input rate is.

- Bursty traffic is thus converted into a uniform traffic by the leaky bucket.

But what is token bucket?

I get that the purpose of token bucket is to allow some bursty output traffic. But I do not get how.

Here are the steps of token bucket algorithm:

- in regular intervals, token are thrown in the bucket.

- the bucket has a maximum capacity.

- if there is a ready pakcet, a token is removed from the bucket, and the packet is sent.

- if there is no token in the bucket, the packet cannot be sent.

I do not see traffic enforcement scenario in this definition. How does token bucket differ from leaky bucket exactly?
by dwb | 2026-02-14 08:18:44+00:00
Not even close. Apple UIs - despite recent graphical howlers - have excellent accessibility APIs and are regularly praised by people that track such things. I’ve recently been building a macOS app and the UI testing is also based off it. There are apps that allow full keyboard navigation using it. I do agree that the window management side is much less customisable, though, and that does frustrate me.
by shevy-java | 2026-02-14 08:19:19+00:00
> Notably this was the first time I felt that using Claude Code for something non-arbitrary was significantly faster than doing it myself

Well, it is like code completion on a higher level.

I still don't like this approach. Besides, who is going to maintain that code?
Such code will probably forever be required to be maitnained via Claude. So no
humans involved. Just autogenerated stuff. I dislike this idea a lot.

Humans are slower, ok, but they built excellent software before Claude. What is
coming next? Claude Linux-like Kernel? Top500 supercomputers will run it?
by qxxx | 2026-02-14 08:19:46+00:00
Just tried it out. Works fine. Love it!
I tried it with a wordpress site. It is showing hundreds of sql queries in one request (thats probably why that wordpress site is so slow lol)

What I would love to see here is:

- some kind of sorting: eg. by excecution time or order. So I can see the slowest queries.

- search/filter feature.

- faster scrolling with pgup/pgdown keys.

- maybe how often the same query was executed. I could check the code and maybe optimize the queries.
by benstopics | 2026-02-14 08:19:51+00:00
The reason I discovered options prices were wrong is because for fun I created an In-The-Money visualization graph for when you're doing advanced options spreads and I noticed that the graph was asymetrical and profitability and loss made no sense. So with the help of Claude we debugged the code and came up with a pricing strategy that was closer to Black-Scholes. And it really is because it takes into account industry volatility and such it was a fun side quest and Michael is happy with the result which I am very proud of! It really makes me confident that one day, long live the king but, he is in his 80s. Decades from now I will be able to survive on my own, I hope.
by ab5tract | 2026-02-14 08:20:39+00:00
To state it a different way: yes, of course and without doubt their very presence affected biodiversity.

But you were talking about their practices, which tended towards custodial over exploitative. And overall these practices clearly supported biodiversity as a whole, otherwise we wouldn’t note the biodiversity of this region as anything special (see again the quote I took from your first article).

I apologize anyway for my slightly combative tone. I appreciate the resources you shared even if I haven’t had time to absorb them in full yet.
by 9dev | 2026-02-14 08:20:55+00:00
No need to guess, the SO survey is probably still representative of the state of development environments:

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology#1-dev-id-es

Note that respondents may use multiple tools, but around 76% answered VSCode, whereas 24% answered Vim.

So, I’d wager you’re indeed in a *nix bubble.
by flomo | 2026-02-14 08:23:38+00:00
Apparently PowerBasic was the successor to Borland TurboBasic and complied to a native executable. So this wasn't an interpreted 'line number' Basic like our kiddie computers. It also probably had the Borland Windows GUI stuff.

(However it wouldn't surprise me if older 'line number' programs still mostly worked. iirc VB6 also supported this.)
by seszett | 2026-02-14 08:23:38+00:00
> why should the EU regulate the design of a website?

There are laws regulating many things that could be considered "design", for example misleading packaging, mandatory information on some categories of ads, cigarette packaging, container sizes, accessibility requirements, etc.

I would say regulating against addictive design (infinite scrolling is not banned per se, it just makes for a catchy headline) is well within what laws are meant for.
by rustyhancock | 2026-02-14 08:24:10+00:00
I'm sure there is truth in original author saying tax code complexity as the core challenge. But that's not what makes this hard. That's domain complexity we all come up against it's accidental complexity that killed the ports.

The real problem is idiosyncratic and esoteric coding practices from a single self-taught accountant working in a language that didn't encourage good structure.

I can translate well-written code without understanding what it does functionally, so long as I understand what it's doing mechanically.

The original author seems to build in the assumption you're not going to translate my code you'll need to rewrite it from the the tax code!
by vasco | 2026-02-14 08:24:12+00:00
What about TV, how come the channels are always playing?? They should shut off after 30mins and I shouldn't be able to press down button to do zapping all night long.

What about video games? We need session limits of 30mins, kids get too addicted to it.

In fact we're going to put a timer in every bedroom so that if you have sex with your wife for too long we'll fine you because it can turn into a real addiction.
by techpression | 2026-02-14 08:26:04+00:00
That is correct, living in Sweden with pretty high levels of social protection, but even so, high levels of white collar unemployment would make our very high risk housing market (we as a population has a very high loan ratio, much of it committed to housing) collapse once people can’t pay. That would make the banks likely to collapse because their money no longer exist and they’re all of a sudden real estate brokers with inventory far below what they paid out in loans.
Union coffers would deplete fast, there would be no blue collar work so they also get dragged in with the storm.
Oh and of course, the stock exchange will crash completely.

Covid gave us a glimpse, this would make it look like child’s play, because there’s no solution and it’s not getting better.

The rich will of course get richer, even if absolute value goes down, the relative value of their wealth will go up.
by seec | 2026-02-14 08:27:03+00:00
Yep.
Basically the iPhone was very good at the start because Jobs smelled the future with his legendary intuition, but it was still a flawed product.
They won because it took competitors years to meaningfully catch up.

But now they are falling behind quite hard. In general, you just can't compete alone against a free market, and Apple gets a lot more profit compared to their volume, but they are unable to use it for meaningful improvement.

If nothing changes at Apple, I think they'll have a hard time in the next decade.
Apple being forced to rely on a competitor for AI is just the sign of complacency that will get them in trouble.
by keiferski | 2026-02-14 08:27:28+00:00
The fact that so many companies operate this way is really depressing. I want to work with people I trust to have some genuine respect for my future, personally or career wise.

There is nothing more destructive than talking to people daily, having a good working relationship with them, and then randomly getting laid off with no warning or explanation. Years of positive interactions go up in smoke overnight, because the company couldn’t bother to treat you like a human with needs, and instead act as if you’re just a mercenary.

And to be clear, I’m not talking about budgetary or performance issues that lead to layoffs. I mean when you’ve done good work for a company for years, then out of the blue, get a meeting request for a Friday afternoon.

It makes for a cold, mercenary world that I want no part of.
by benstopics | 2026-02-14 08:27:31+00:00
I figured the engineering crowd here would enjoy the technical journey and I am so grateful it got to front page so that I may talk about the technical side which I enjoy doing. I am not a hermit by nature and posting on HN really was a cry for someone to ask me a question about the backend. So I really appreciate all the technical questions gives me an opportunity to get into the weeds a bit.
by ETH_start | 2026-02-14 08:27:41+00:00
Another factor was tech and crypto. The Biden administration was widely seen as hostile to crypto and DeFi, which turned off a lot of younger and online voters and created unexpected opposition to Harris.

There was also a perception of politicization in agencies that are supposed to be neutral. People pointed to things like EV summits excluding Tesla, or regulatory pressure and delays affecting SpaceX launches and Tesla investigations. Whether justified or not, the optics made it look selective and punitive.

Individually these aren't huge voting blocs, but at the margins they likely added to the broader dissatisfaction.

And what also didn't help was the perception that the Harris campaign operated in something of an ideological bubble. For example, reports that staff discouraged her from doing a Joe Rogan interview because they disliked him reinforced the idea of an echo chamber, which ties into your point about trans issues.
by svara | 2026-02-14 08:28:12+00:00
One of the things about this story that don't sit right with me is how Scott and others in the GitHub comments seem to assign agency to the bot and engage with it.

It's a bot! The person running it is responsible. They did that, no matter how little or how much manual prompting went into this.

As long as you don't know who that is, ban it and get on with your day.
by anwar_nairi | 2026-02-14 08:28:41+00:00
Promising! I like the tidy design. I think the "Control" menu is missing one explaination about how can one return a rox_result[T].

Also I tried to remove the error check ("if (isOk(res))"), and the compiler did not complained. You might 1. want to add a "match" operator to force handling errors and/or 2. tell the compiler to check for this unhandled error handling (your app may crash otherwise).

I thought/brainstormed on 100% type safe language syntax a while ago, and for this reason I decided to only allow "repeat" for loops and "match" for conditionals.

Keep up the good work!
by pjmlp | 2026-02-14 08:28:48+00:00
I even remember WinG, Win32s and co.

You are forgeting most folks did not use bare bones C with WM_PAINT and nothing else.

Most sane devs were quick to adopt C++, even Petzold books moved into C++ still during Windows 3.1 days, although the code samples stayed pretty much the C subset common to both languages, see the preface on his book.

As such many games had their own retained frameworks built on top of Win32 controls, wrapped into C++ classes, or if they were casual games, they would build upon OWL, VCL (Borland TP, C++, Delphi), MFC (VC++), VB.

The kind of games where you would get a bootload of shovelware CDs when buying a Media PC with MS-DOS/Windows 3.1.
by troupo | 2026-02-14 08:29:07+00:00
> My argument Emacs/Vim have great, well loved TUIs.

They... are not great. They provide the absolute bare minimum of an UI.

An UI, even a terminal one, is more than a couple of boxes with text in them. Unfortunately, actual great TUIs more or less died in the 1990s. You can google Turbo Vision for examples.
by thbb123 | 2026-02-14 08:29:52+00:00
Even Knuth, in TAOP, acknowledges that using O(n) asymptotic behavior as a measure of performance is just a heuristic and not an absolute.

Cache-awareness and structure discovery are 2 important tools of the engineer to optimize practical problems.

If we wanted a reliable measure of the difficulty of a problem instance, it should rely on a function of O(K(n)) where K is the kolmogorov complexity of the input.
by hunglee2 | 2026-02-14 08:30:53+00:00
Amazing series, which somehow survived a forced change of lead actor, and got even better. The story was only marred by rushed ending to the story arc for Season 4, and then a nothingburger of a Season 5. Still, up there with BattleStar Galactica and The Expanse as the greatest TV sci-fi series of all time.
by ofalkaed | 2026-02-14 08:31:21+00:00
I always like seeing Forth submissions and TFA is one of the sources I referenced when I first started getting into Forth, but I think the bias towards Forth being primarily useful because it is small and easy to port, harms Forth more than it helps it, same with the emphasis put on the repl and interactive development. Forth always getting reduced to these few tricks keeps most from ever seeing it as the high level language it really is. If I were a blogger I would write a long blog post about the joys and power of using a well developed and mature Forth like gforth and developing through source files instead of interactively on the repl, but I am not a blogger so I will just make my occasional short rant on HN. Small and easy to port is not of much use to most devs, lets start advocating Forth in context of most devs instead of the tiny minority.
by DonHopkins | 2026-02-14 08:31:55+00:00
American citizens are having bad health advice AND PUBLIC HEALTH POLICIES officially shoved down their throats by a man who freely and publicly admits to not being afraid of germs because he snorts cocaine off of toilet seats, appointed by another angry senile old man who recommends injecting disinfectant and shoving an ultraviolet flashlight up your ass to cure COVID. We don't have 10 years left.
by Sharlin | 2026-02-14 08:32:19+00:00
Season 2 is good to great, not mediocre. It’s just that S3 and S4 are even better. Season 1 you can skip most of the fillers if you’re in a hurry. There’s a plenty of curated S1 episode lists on the internet that tell you which episodes you don’t want to miss. It’s much better this way than the usual "first season excellent, second season okay, the rest are crud and only exist to make money".
by rhdunn | 2026-02-14 08:32:45+00:00
There are several stand-out episodes in season 1 and 2, as well as several stand-out scenes; plus the second half of season 2 is not mediocre. You also miss out on character and world-building that happens in those episodes that help contextualize a lot of the later seasons.

Plus, many reactors now have liked season 1 a lot better than when it initially aired.