MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mmooss | 2026-02-08 17:37:34+00:00
Maybe it's not dishonesty; maybe people can disagree genuinely; maybe others add their own points, and communication is difficult; maybe you even miscommunicated - such certainty and judgement is always a signal of not seeing other people's perspectives. Maybe, on a large scale, the world doesn't revolve around what you intend to say.

As an example, I talked about both large and small scale.
by energyscholar | 2026-02-08 17:37:40+00:00
We do consider this. The data is unclear. We estimate ~85% chance that it was not deliberate, which implies ~15% chance of deliberate suppression. Honestly, wd, I think it is higher than 15% change it was deliberate suppression. but I can't prove it and didn't want the paper to come across as 'conspiratorial'. Those numbers were picked out of the air (which I admit in the paper!) and are just a guess. Perhaps someday someone will leak proof! Until then it's an open question.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-02-08 17:37:53+00:00
I'm usually pretty pro-blog. I like when people have an interest in things. No ads, just someone wanting to prove their intelligence and popularity. But... OP... You didn't even explain the math.

Anyway, none of this is that surprising since deduction takes higher level ideas and tests them on lower level to prove the hypothesis.

If anyone wants to read Karl Popper, this will seem significantly less noteworthy.
by paodealho | 2026-02-08 17:37:58+00:00
Software dev has been promoted as a good career path for almost 2 decades now. Naturally you'll have a bunch of people going in only because of money.

A few years ago, when Agile was still the hot thing and companies had an Agile "facilitor" or manager for each dev team, the common career path I heard when talking to those people was: "I worked as a java/cobol/etc in the past, but it just didn't click with me. I'm more of a peoples person, you know, so project management is where I really do my best work!".

Yeah, right...
by Dylan16807 | 2026-02-08 17:38:05+00:00
You use your pile of lathes and mills to make replacement little parts. Probably skip making integrated circuits on-planet at first, but anything metal or plastic can be done by the huge group of machinists.

And for every fifty people on mars you can have a thousand people back on earth figuring out the best way to make every component.

The hard part is building chemical stocks of all these different things. And while that's a huge task, it's so much less hard than a make-anything machine. Once you have graphite, clay, rubber, and wood, making it into a pencil is simple. Cut, mix, extrude, clamp. Wood (and rubber if that's the easiest way) can be grown on-site, wood can be turned into graphite, and clay shouldn't be amazingly hard to get from martian soil. Oh and glue, we can figure out a glue.
by sebastiennight | 2026-02-08 17:38:12+00:00
So... the book is released under a Creative Commons license that does not authorize sharing derived works...

BUT...

If you use this tool I just vibe-coded with our good friend Claude:
https://onetake-ai.github.io/html-ebooks/

And point it at the repository: https://github.com/yan7109/yan7109.github.io/tree/main/ma-bo...

It will give you an ePub with all the chapters, including a bit of styling etc.

The code is MIT licensed, so do with it as you wish.
Show HN: NPM Scripts Deck – Run NPM scripts from Stream Deck with dynamic button
by ugaya40 | 2026-02-08 17:38:18+00:00
I built a VSCode extension that auto-generates Stream Deck buttons from your package.json. Press to run, press again to cancel. Supports monorepos and multiple VSCode windows — buttons always follow the active file's context.

To make this work, I also built Stream Deck Integration, a framework that handles VSCode–Stream Deck communication. A notable aspect is its multi-instance coordination. VSCode has no way for multiple windows to talk to each other, so the framework uses a Leader/Follower pattern over WebSocket. The first instance becomes Leader, later ones connect as Followers. If the Leader closes, a Follower promotes itself with a randomized delay to avoid port conflicts.

The framework is extensible — if you want to build a provider for Docker, Git, or anything else, you only implement single-instance logic. Multi-instance coordination is handled by Stream Deck Integration.

No physical Stream Deck? You can try it with Elgato's free Virtual Stream Deck.
by igravious | 2026-02-08 17:38:21+00:00
People on here keep trotting out this "AI-generation is not deterministic." (more properly speaking, non-deterministic) argument on here …

And my retort to you (and them) is, "Oh yeah, and so?"

What about me asking Claude Code to generate a factorial function in C or Python or Rust or insert-your-language-of-choice-here is non-deterministic?

If you're referring to the fact that for a given input LLMs (or whatever) because of certain controls (temperature controls?) don't give the same outputs for the same inputs. Yeah, okay. If we're talking about conversational language that makes a meaningful difference to whether it sounds like an ELISA robots or more like a human. But ask an LLM to output some code then that code has to adhere to functional requirements independent of, muh, non-determinism. And what's to stop you (if you're so sceptical/scared) writing test-cases to make sure the code that is magically whisked out of nowhere performs as you so desire? Nothing. What's to stop you getting one agent to write the test-suite (and for you to review to the test-suite for correctness and for another agent to the write the code and self-correct based off of checking its code against the test-suite? Nothing

I would advise anyone encountering this but-they're-non-deterministic argument on HN to really think through what the proponents of this argument are implying. I mean, aren't humans non-deterministic. (I should have thought so.) So how is it, <extra sarcasm mode activated>pray tell</extra sarcasm mode activated> humans manage to write correct software in the first place?
by singingbard | 2026-02-08 17:38:49+00:00
To me, they all the same because they are all tools that stand between “my vision” and “it being built.”

e.g. when I built a truck camper, maybe 50% was woodworking but I had to do electrical, plumbing, metalworking, plastic printing, and even networking infra.

The satisfaction was not from using power tools (or hand tools too) — those were chores — it was that I designed the entire thing from scratch by myself, it worked, was reliable through the years, and it looked professional.

LLMs serve the same purpose for me.
by ticulatedspline | 2026-02-08 17:39:01+00:00
Noam strikes me as someone deeply attached to their "art", honestly this "linguistic challenge" feels like a nerd-snipe and Noam might have even done it for free.

I think the payment aspect works more in favor of Epstein than Noam. I don't think Epstein was oblivious to the "we go down together" nature of some of his relationships, quite the opposite.
by knorker | 2026-02-08 17:39:07+00:00
> The first batches of Quake executables, quake.exe and vquake.exe were programmed on HP 712-60 running NeXT and cross-compiled with DJGPP running on a DEC Alpha server 2100A.

Is that accurate? I thought DJGPP only ran on and for PC compatible x86. ID had Alpha for things like running qbps and light and vis (these took for--ever to run, so the alpha SMP was really useful), but for building the actual DOS binaries, surely this was DJGPP on x86 PC?

Was DJGPP able to run on Alpha for cross compilation? I'm skeptical, but I could be wrong.

Edit: Actually it looks like you could. But did they? https://www.delorie.com/djgpp/v2faq/faq22_9.html
by alsetmusic | 2026-02-08 17:39:18+00:00
No. My mother also told me I shouldn't joke about Jesus when I relayed a pretty harmless joke to her. It's a thing in the midwest.

I recognize the pet-God joke. I shared a meme pic with my partner that had that. Regarding cats and dogs, it's completely accurate. Our cats are in charge more than we are (or so they think).
by k9294 | 2026-02-08 17:39:49+00:00
Hey, I would really appreciate if you would try https://ottex.ai

I'm working on a Wispr/Spokenly competitor. It's free without any paywalled features, supports local models and a bunch of API providers including Mistral.

For local models ottex has - parakeet V3, Whisper, GLM-ASR nano, Qwen3-ASR (don't have voxtral yet though, looking into it).

btw, you can try new voxtral model via API (the model name to pick is `voxtral-mini-latest:transcribe`), I personally switched to it as my main default fast model - it's really good.
by nosianu | 2026-02-08 17:40:15+00:00
There is one thing different though: Technology allows surveillance on a level and scale that did not ever exist before. I would expect that that in turn allows far greater levels of oppression than ever before. And with all payments going more and more digital, if the powers decide to cut you off you can't even buy anything any more. Or get a job. Or go anywhere without being seen and identified by various cameras.

Or, try organizing any kind of movement that those with power don't like. It does not even have to be violent! Here in Germany, as soon as the previous government with the Green Party was in power, a huge never-ending campaign started. Easy - after all, the vast majority of the important media is owned by very few, just like in the US. Funny enough, after inevitably that government failed, turned out the CDU failed many if not most of the promises made, and in other areas does exactly what they heavily criticized.

The point is, surveillance, "soft" punishments, and media control and reach are on a whole new level. Trump wanted TikTok for a reason, and Musk wanted X not for the money that company could make.

The more tech we have, and it's conveniently concentrated too, the worse it can get if you don't want to play that game.

On top pf that, debt and a system of law heavily skewed for those with money, just because of its complexity and to gain access, and no more competition for minds from a block of socialist countries, so no clear alternative apart from obviously stupid ideas most people won't want to vote for, and this "democratic" system can go very far towards being very controlling and restricting for many.

We can see for example in Iran, or few decades ago in China, or since it was founded in North Korea what happens when people protest - and how nothing changes. Now we have billionaires who would love to have similar powers, who don't want to be "held back" by laws and regulations.
by jamesjolliffe | 2026-02-08 17:40:33+00:00
Another serious flaw with the modern American economy is that too much of our money is spent betting on whatever lottery ticket dream we are sold will grant the highest returns. For too long, we have been investing in software companies like Meta hoping for unicorn returns, paying no attention to the fact that many of these companies do little to materially improve the real world we live in, while our communities and infrastructure fall into disrepair. Who wants to invest in a lower-margin construction company, when there is a chance company some tech company X might come up with an addictive imaginary widget on our phone that has a marginal cost of almost nothing after the first one is built.

Now, all this new hardware we're building is powering AI that is only proven to improve the quality of our software, and will likely displace many of the middle class "white collar" jobs we have left. Buckle up boys, we are in for a bumpy ride.
by brigade | 2026-02-08 17:40:53+00:00
Your first example is a CPU limitation that Instruments doesn't model (does perf?), but is still mostly better than Intel chips that are limited to 4 dynamic counters (I think still? At least that's what I see in the Alder Lake's Golden Cove perfmon files...)

Your second example, is the complaint that Instruments doesn't have flamegraph visualization? That was true a decade ago when it was written, and is not true today. Or that Instrument's trace file format isn't documented?
by hereme888 | 2026-02-08 17:42:30+00:00
I hear you, especially as a man, because we're attuned at looking for trouble in the horizon. AI is not some transition from horses to cars, which just meant selling the horse, buying a car, and continue your transport business. It's intelligence that may be able to take over all aspects of our current professional training, thus potentially threatening our livelihoods.
by foldr | 2026-02-08 17:43:18+00:00
Primarily because there is no evidence that the challenge exists, and it's hard to imagine what it could even be. Chomsky's own research interests didn't really lend themselves to setting some kind of math olympiad style 'challenge'. If he was excited about setting up prizes or challenges in linguistics, you have to wonder why he never once did it. He certainly could have if he'd wanted to.
by igravious | 2026-02-08 17:43:49+00:00
They may not be wrong per se but that argument is essentially a strawman argument.

If these tools are non-deterministic then how did someone at Anthropic spend the equivalent of $20,000 of Anthropic compute and end up with a C compiler that can compile the Linux kernel (one of the largest bodies of C code out there).

There is clearly something that completely missies the point about the but-muh-non-determinism argument. See my direct response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46936586

You'll notice this objection comes up each time a "OpenClaw changed my life" or conversely "Agentic Coding ain't it fam" article swings by.
by mikenew | 2026-02-08 17:43:55+00:00
I played with it extensively for three days. I think there are a few things it does that people are finding interesting:

1. It has a lot of files that it loads into it's context for each conversation, and it consistently updates them. Plus it stores and can reference each conversation. So there's a sense of continuity over time.

2. It connects to messaging services and other accounts of yours, so again it feels continuous. You can use it on your desktop and then pick up your phone and send it an iMessage.

3. It hooks into a lot of things, so it feels like it has more agency. You could send it a voice message over discord and say "hey remember that conversation about birds? Send an email to Steve and ask him what he thinks about it"

It feels more like a smart assistant that's always around than an app you open to ask questions to.

However, it's worth stressing how terrible the software actually is. Not a single thing I attempted to do worked correctly, important issues (like the discord integration having huge message delays and sometimes dropping messages) get closed because "sorry we have too many issues", and I really got the impression that the whole thing is just a vibe coded pile of garbage. And I don't like to be that critical about an open source project like this, but I think considering the level of hype and the dramatic claims that humans shouldn't be writing code anymore, I think it's worth being clear about.

Ended up deleting it and setting up something much simpler. I installed a little discord relay called kimaki, and that lets me interact with instances of opencode over discord when I want to. I also spent some time setting up persistent files and made sure the llm can update them, although only when I ask it to in this case. That's covered enough of what I liked from OpenClaw to satisfy me.
by yallpendantools | 2026-02-08 17:44:15+00:00
> This topic is being discussed endlessly everyday on all major platforms and for the past year or so the consensus is strongly against using copilot.

So it would be easy to link me to something that shows this consensus, right? It would help me see what the "consensus" has to say about the known limitations of Copilot too. It would help me see the "why" that you seem allergic to even hint at.

Look, I'm trying to not be close-minded about LLMs hence why I'm taking time out of my Sunday to see what I might be missing. Hence my comment that I don't want to invest time/money in yet-another-LLM just for the "privilege" of debating the merits of LLMs in software engineering. If I'm to invest time/money in another coding LLM, I need a signal, a reason, to why it might be better than Copilot for helping me do my job. Either tell me where Copilot is lacking or where your "contenders" have the upper-hand. Why is it a "must" to use Codex/Claude/Gemini other than trustmebro?
by LifeOwner | 2026-02-08 17:44:34+00:00
I built an SSH client because every option out there either looks like it's from 2005, only runs on Windows, or wants a subscription for basic features.

Reach is a native desktop app (Tauri + Rust backend, Svelte frontend) that does SSH terminals, SFTP file browsing, port tunneling, encrypted credential storage, system monitoring, and serial console, all in
one tool. The SSH stack is pure Rust (russh), no OpenSSH dependency.

It also has a built-in playbook engine that runs Ansible-compatible YAML directly over SSH without needing Python installed. So it works from Windows too.

Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android. Free, source-available.

GitHub: https://github.com/alexandrosnt/Reach
Docs: https://alexandrosnt.github.io/Reach/
by metalman | 2026-02-08 17:44:57+00:00
wellllll, Canada has whooped the Americans AND the French before, Germans too.
The Americans will just kill us, but the euros will snide and sneer bit by bit slowly disolving anything recognisably Canadian under the impossible weight of there beurocracys, and then get back to good old neocolonialist plundering of resources, which will all be dutifly stamped "sustainable"
by b00ty4breakfast | 2026-02-08 17:45:24+00:00
As with most self-congratulatory inter-industry awards, the Oscars are mostly a joke. Obviously, lots of good films get recognition from The Academy but you can glance at the number of titles in any given year winning piles of Oscars and then disappearing into the mists of time because they were trash that hit all the buttons and played the game.

The most notorious of recent memory is Crash, a film you probably haven't heard of if you're just casually into film (or a sicko like me lol)
by profsummergig | 2026-02-08 17:45:41+00:00
There's a Taleb vs. Sornette debate (argument) on YouTube.

I thought Taleb won (complex system outcomes, in the sociopolitical realm, cannot be predicted). But then I'm a Taleb fanboy.

Sornette (my first and last exposure to him) came across as a relic from a different age. Pitifully out of touch.
by ted_bunny | 2026-02-08 17:46:02+00:00
Their argument is that NATO had agreed not to pursue membership with Ukraine, and broke that agreement. It is one point in a strategy of encirclement against them that hardly relented when the USSR fell.

But there was no formal or binding statement to that effect, only verbal statements during negotiations over East Germany in the 90s. Gorbachev corroborates this.

So you might see this as a bait and switch, depending on point of view. Given larger patterns in US/NATO, I do buy the encirclement argument.

And before someone makes childish allegations of me being a nefarious state actor propagandist, I don't support Putin or Russia. Ridiculous that I have to add this but no one seems capable of dispassionate discourse anymore.

Dialectical Materialism is a powerful explanatory and predictive framework that makes me rarely surprised by international developments. One needs not be a Marxist to use it. I am not one of those either, but I do have an anti-imperialist bias.
by adamredwoods | 2026-02-08 17:46:04+00:00
I agree with the nolanlawson's sentiment. What's interesting is many of the opposing statements here seem to be less interested in the actual code, and more interested in the final state. Both are valid, but one is going away due to technological advancements. That is the mourning.

There are some of us who enjoyed the code as a thing to explore. Others here don't seem to like that as much.
by tablatom | 2026-02-08 17:46:18+00:00
I’m really happy to see this take. It’s not the first time but it’s not said often enough. I once had the thought that anything AI can do really well is probably something that should not be being done at all. That’s an overly broad statement but I think there’s some truth in it. The grand challenge of software engineering is to find beautifully elegant and precise ways to express what we want the computer to do for us. If we can find them, it will be better to express ourselves in those ways than to prompt an AI than do it for us, much in the same way that a blog written by an LLM is not worth reading.
by lokar | 2026-02-08 17:47:49+00:00
I wonder if some of the divide in the LLM-code discourse is between people who have mostly/always worked in jobs where they have the time and freedom to do things correctly, and to go back and fix stuff as they go, vs people who have mostly not (and instead worked under constant unrealistic time pressure, no focus on quality, API design, re-factoring, etc)
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-08 17:47:53+00:00
You can use who you're physically connected to. If you have a physical or point–to–point connection to iFog and Lagrange Cloud, you don't need tunnels to reach them. Both these companies offer VPS services.

If your goal is to learn this stuff join dn42, the global networking lab, instead of wasting money with real allocations.
by graemep | 2026-02-08 17:47:56+00:00
> Where I grew up there were a lot of homeschooled kids that belonged to religious organization. These groups had very little motivation to ensure they were intelligent, but instead nice dumb little worker bees that would stay with said organization

Not true in the UK. Studies in many countries (the UK, US, Australia) and others have shown that home educated kids have better outcomes than school going kids after correcting for parental education, wealth etc.

Yes, there are exceptions, but there are also bad schools and some terrible schools.

UK law also requires children to receive a "suitable and efficient" full time education and there are legal mechanisms for sending children to school if they do not.

> They were also at a much higher risk of being sexually abused/sexually trafficked as they were given little to no education about sex or risky adults.

Stats in the UK show home ed kids are MUCH less likely to be abused, to self harm, or commit suicide.

Of course there are bad home educating communities, but there are also some horrific schools and the latter are a lot more common. Does that mean we should shut down schools?
by ninkendo | 2026-02-08 17:48:16+00:00
> Now, those 600 processes and 2000 threads are blasting thousands of log entries per second, with dozens of errors happening in unrecognizable daemons doing thrice-delegated work.

This is the kind of thing that makes me want to grab Craig Federighi by the scruff and rub his nose in it. Every event that’s scrolling by here, an engineer thought was a bad enough scenario to log it at Error level. There should be zero of these on a standard customer install. How many of these are legitimate bugs? Do they even know? (Hahaha, of course they don’t.)

Something about the invisibility of background daemons makes them like flypaper for really stupid, face-palm level bugs. Because approximately zero customers look at the console errors and the crash files, they’re just sort of invisible and tolerated. Nobody seems to give a damn at Apple any more.
by swat535 | 2026-02-08 17:48:21+00:00
Programming stopped feeling fun for me once MBAs and bean counters took over. There's rarely time to write thoughtful code anymore. Even convincing management to invest in a sane architecture feels like an endless uphill battle.

Engineer teams are nothing but an annoying expense on the balance sheet and the goal is to cram as many features, as quickly as possible to get the sale.

That's exactly why I'm happy to use every tool available to get the work done efficiently. To this end, LLMs have been great for me, especially when dealing with large amounts of boilerplate code.

Long gone the days of crafting artisan code.