MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by krick | 2026-02-10 04:04:53+00:00
Start using icons in data tables!

…What? I suppose, if the OP feels he can give you imperative commands, so can I. I'll spare you the pretentious text elaborating the command — it carries as much substance as no text at all, anyway. And, seriously, if you don't use icons in data tables, you should try and see how it feels. For me personally it's the magic trick that often makes all the difference between an unreadable wall of numbers and a vivid, crystal clear picture.
by kbenson | 2026-02-10 04:04:56+00:00
Oh, I thought you were speaking more to the topic and content of the article in question, which goes to great lengths to describe the sorts of problems that are much, much harder to catch than simple compiling of queries and checking them against the database, or the message store.

Even if you were to reduce the database to a simple API, the question then remains how do you make sure to version it along with the other portions of the system that utilize it to prevent problems. The point of the article seems to be to point out that while this is a much harder problem (which I think you are categorizing as "things that can't really be easily solved"), there are actually solutions being developed in different areas that can be utilized, and it surveys many of them.
by rablackburn | 2026-02-10 04:05:05+00:00
Hi Garrett,

I love the project -- even if I agree with a lot of the critique in this thread. Critique that is very high quality, professional feedback that you should take as a very big compliment.

I think every Front End developer or designer dreams of this idea(+) at some point, but you're the madlad who actually did it. It feels like you've posted an implementation of everyone's baby and tugged at our heart-strings ;)

It's fantastic, keep going.

(+) a truly consistent design system that Just Works. See GEB for why not :(
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-02-10 04:05:06+00:00
In summary, the user research we have conducted thus far uncovered the central tension that underlies the use of coding assistants:
1. Most technical constraints require cross-functional alignment, but communicating them during stakeholder meetings is challenging due to context gap and cognitive load
2. Code generation cannibalizes the implementation phase where additional constraints were previously caught, shifting the burden of discovery to code review — where it’s even harder and more expensive to resolve

How to get around this conundrum? The context problem must be addressed at its inception: during product meetings, where there is cross-functional presence and different ideas can be entertained without rework cost. If AI handles the implementation, then the planning phase has to absorb the discovery work that manual implementation used to provide.

They're emphasizing one thing too much and another not enough.

First, the communication problem. Either the humans are getting the right information and communicating it, or they aren't. The AI has nothing to do with this; it's not preventing communication at all. If anything, it will now demand more of it, which is good.

Second, the "implementation feedback". Yes, 'additional constraints' were previously encountered by developers trying to implement asinine asks, and would force them to go back and ask for more feedback. But now the AI goes ahead and implements crap. And this is perfectly fine, because after it churns out the software in a day rather than a week, anyone who tries to use the software will see the problem, and then go back and ask for more detail. AI is making the old feedback loop faster. It's just not at implementation-time anymore.
by dheera | 2026-02-10 04:05:26+00:00
Hi Tim! (We know each other :))

I'm curious whether you feel you're actually in control to actually make policy decisions about data protection or whether you feel you could be hit any day by the "$5 wrench" by the government any time they feel it necessary. I'm starting to feel that in this environment, nothing is safe, even if encrypted and on FOSS platforms.
by Garrett_Mack | 2026-02-10 04:05:58+00:00
Yep. It's way too large in linear scales. but if youre using an asymmetrical scale, it can be quite useful indeed.

You don't have to use it though. The system works with any scale factor. 1.618 is just the default.

This video explains in detail how the system works with lots of visual aids.

https://youtu.be/r1DANFZYJDw
by jacobgkau | 2026-02-10 04:06:04+00:00
That would make sense if apps like Twitter or Reddit were banned from the app store or had also decided to ban NSFW content, but they seem to be getting along fine with their verification-free "click here if you're an adult" systems. Why was Tumblr different?

To be sure, this move by Discord seems like a reflection of the same kind of decision that Tumblr made. But blaming it on the app store in Tumblr's case doesn't seem to make sense. Discord seems to be doing it either to comply with increasingly fragmented laws, out of actual moral desire to fix a problem, or to avoid lawsuits-- not because of app store policies.
by kshowkat | 2026-02-10 04:06:10+00:00
https://streamable.com/fcy9sg

I'm working on an images-as-first-class editor that makes opinionated calls on models used depending on your goal (Brood). Sort of like: what would happen if we treated images as an engineering problem.

Starcraft-themed because why not. Professionally have a background in product and data science so it's been fun to leverage coding tools for it :)
by tabbott | 2026-02-10 04:07:17+00:00
The advertised pricing is for workplace use where the users are on payroll; if you read the plans page carefully you'll see we have free or highly discounted pricing for other use cases, both in Cloud and self-hosted.

Zulip is not designed to support 2M user accounts in a single organization. But if you enable the public access option (https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option), such that no account is required just to read content, you can end up with 1-2 orders of magnitude fewer "total accounts" that just wanted to see something once and don't actually use the server.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-02-10 04:07:30+00:00
I mean you talk about it as if it's a "benefit"

I'm talking about it in the same sense as the "benefit" of using typescript over javascript. Not just a "benefit" but it's the obvious path, the obvious better way.

Everything about monorepos and polyrepos are basically mostly just debates about opinions and styles and preferences. But most people don't understand... the monorepo is definitively better. Don't think of it as a benefit, this makes that style of error literally impossible to occur.
Claude /fast mode consumes money fast
by diavelguru | 2026-02-10 04:08:05+00:00
I got a $50 credit from Claude for the /extra-usage command which I turned on and cleared context and had it debug a particularly thorny issue related to a C app conversion to swift with lots of external resources. While it didn't solve the issue (I switched /fast off after two rounds), I think it got me far enough to solve the problem with [regular] Claude. After the first round it used $17 of the $50 and after the second issue to fix/diagnose it used $35 of $50. This isn't a complaint and I might use it more on focused, targeted debugging/solutions - or getting me there quicker. I enjoyed the speed. It's not blazing but as they say I can see a 2.~ speedup. I just need to beware that my deposit will go quickly. Just some thoughts after using it.
by tombert | 2026-02-10 04:08:23+00:00
As somewhat of a functional programming nerd, and a perpetual user of Linux and Unix, I think F# is really very cool.

I am one of the happy few who has had paying work with F# when I worked at Jet and Walmart. I came in with primarily a Haskell background, and so I was expecting to hate it because I hate most things that Microsoft has attached its name to, but I ended up really liking it.

Just a note, while its syntax is similar to OCaml, its semantics are a bit different. You don't have the cool OCaml functors in the same way, but you do have Haskell-style "do" notation with monads, which is nice.

I haven't used OCaml in awhile so I can't go into a lot of detail on the differences between them, but the only things I really missed from Haskell are monad transformers and software transactional memory.

I definitely think it's worth playing with for an afternoon.
by heliographe | 2026-02-10 04:09:15+00:00
I always found this UI pattern a bit odd, because there just aren't that many situations where you want to compare the left side of image A and the right side of image B.

I see it a lot in photography, to show before/after processing - but what you want to be able to quickly compare are the same part of an image with and without the processing applied.

One of the photography tools I make is a LUT viewer/converter - and while I didn't have the slider at first, I guess it's standard enough at this point that people asked for it and I added it.

But I made two additions to it that make it more useful IMO:

- have labels on the left/right top corners, so it's immediately clear which version of the image you're looking at

- click and hold on the image to preview the full unprocessed version; release to revert to the view. That makes it easy to quickly compare the two versions of the same spot of a photo. (similar to what you suggest, but non-latching)

I have a video of it in action here:

https://lutlab.com/#viewer-photo
by raincole | 2026-02-10 04:09:43+00:00
It's not 'internal politics,' what are you talking about. It's the politics in our real world. UK gov is requiring ID verification for adult sites. France gov is calling a social media ban for teenagers.

We're talking about elected European governments here. It's not like Discord shareholders just woke up this morning and decided to make themselves poor.

Switching to another centralized service won't do shit as long as voters keep falling for 'protect the kids.'
by fmstephe | 2026-02-10 04:10:17+00:00
Last time this was asked I was working on this

https://github.com/fmstephe/simd_explorer

A little TUI app for interactively running different SIMD instructions and seeing the outputs.

Since then I have completed the tool for AVX/2. At this stage that's as far as I intend to go.

It's potentially valuable as an interactive quick reference guide for SIMD instructions.

It works on Windows, Linux and with the right environment variables it will successfully pretend to be AMD64 running on an Apple M chip.

Arm NEON instructions are not supported at all, currently Go's assembler does not include these instructions directly, so I didn't attempt to build for them. Maybe one day.

Next up, learn Zig - be happy.
by dang | 2026-02-10 04:10:33+00:00
Can you please make your substantive points without swipes? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

If you know more than someone else, that's great! By all means, share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn. Just please do it without putdowns.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
by Garrett_Mack | 2026-02-10 04:11:23+00:00
Hi, I'm the author, it me. You're right, I need to be clearer that golden ratio doesn't automatically equal beautiful. It's not sacred geometry. It's just pretty. I like it. And studies show people at large tend to find the proportions pleasing.

It's just a rule of thumb, that's all. I just went crazy on the copywriting because I thought I'd need to in order to get the kit to stand out.

I have now been extremely informed that this is not the case.
by renewiltord | 2026-02-10 04:11:37+00:00
For comparison tables and dense information, overuse of detail is noise. Text is required to avoid a legend, and color is useful to distinguish among many, but icons add no distinction. This is not universal. The classic comparison involves only two icons: green box checked white and red x or red container crossed white. In this case text is unhelpful.

I have never found text plus icon useful in a table that has colour.
by kbenson | 2026-02-10 04:12:52+00:00
> For some reason people frequently suggest that my problem with LLM writing is that it's too good.

> I felt as though this article was, through its headers and overuse of specific rhetorical devices, constantly trying to grab my attention in that same shallow manner.

I think perhaps you're quick to assess a certain type of writing, which many see as done quite well and in a way that's approachable and is good at retaining interest, as AI. Perhaps you just don't like this type of writing that many do, and AI tries to emulate it, and you're keying on specific aspects of both the original and the emulation and because you don't appreciate either it's hard for you to discern between them? Or maybe there is no difference between the AI and non-AI articles that utilize these, and it's just your dislike of them which colors your view?

I, for one, found the article fairly approachable and easy to read given the somewhat niche content and that it was half survey of the current state of our ability to handle change in systems like these. Then again, I barely pay any attention to section titles. I couldn't even remember reading the ones you presented. Perhaps I've trained myself to see them just as section separators.

In any case, nothing in this stuck out as AI generated to me, and if it was, it was well enough done that I don't feel I wasted any time reading it.
by tombert | 2026-02-10 04:13:04+00:00
I feel like Erlang is a functional language that's honest about systems, not just a program. You are almost required to write distributed apps with Erlang, just because it's not weird to spin up thousands of Erlang processes, and you don't have any real way of knowing the order they're going to run so you have to build your applications around async messaging.

It makes me a little sad that Erlang/Elixir is kind of the only platform that does this though...
by emmanueloga_ | 2026-02-10 04:13:08+00:00
How about framing this in terms of two orthogonal axes the article doesn’t name: concurrency (actors) and continuity (durable execution).

* Durable execution: long‑running, resumable workflows with persistence, replay, and timeouts.

* Actors: isolated entities that own their state and logic, process one message at a time, and get concurrency by existing in large numbers (regardless of whether the runtime uses threads, async/await, or processes under the hood).

Combine the two and you get a "Durable actor", which seems close to what the article calls an “async agent”: a component that can receive messages, maintain state, pause/resume, survive restarts, and call out to an LLM or any other API.

And since spawning is already a primitive in the actor model, the article’s "subagent" fits naturally here too: it’s just another actor the first one creates.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-02-10 04:13:17+00:00
No Datadome Javascript:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/cybersecurity/senator-s...

Text-only:

http://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1VB52W/

(Yes, Microsoft is now using HTTP not HTTPS)
by raincole | 2026-02-10 04:13:54+00:00
French lawmakers vote to ban social media use by under-15s (
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/27/france-social-...)

Online age verification in the United Kingdom (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_age_verification_in_the...)

Blaming Discord and switching to another centralized service won't do shit as long as voters keep falling for 'protect the kids.'
by safety1st | 2026-02-10 04:14:23+00:00
I'm sure I'm in the minority here, but I read the announcement and other than the risk of a slippery slope into more invasive ID demands, I'm not sure I have a huge problem with it.

The default experience will be the "teen" experience - they list what that entails - stuff that's flagged as adult/NSFW/etc. is blurred out until your age is verified, which for most(?) people will require ID or face scan. DMs/friend requests from people you don't know take some extra clicks to view. Fine.

It depends on how broad the definition of adult content ends up being I guess, but I'm simply not convinced that requiring ID to view "adult" content is the end of the world. If that means porn, I'm 100% OK with it, put porn behind gates. It has become far too easy to access. It's 2026 and we now have a generation of gooning addicts out there who never have actual sex and it's basically a guarantee that they won't find partners or start families any time soon, exacerbating an already problematic decline in the birth rate. This is not a version of society or anyone's "rights" that I care to defend. You want to goon, show ID. That's how it was before the Internet anyway.

On the other hand if it means any speech that the platform deems to be "controversial" will be blurred out then my response will not be to submit ID, I'll simply limit how I use the platform. Anonymous speech continues to matter and needs protection. But Discord was never the entity that was going to provide that protection.

I mean Discord is a gaming chat room. Expectations should be set by that fact. I don't need a gaming chat room to be NSFW, or even host i.e. political speech really. I get that people have used it for more than gaming, but it was always pretty clear what it was. If people don't like that this gaming chat room no longer supports other uses, they should switch to an alternative.
by skeptic_ai | 2026-02-10 04:14:28+00:00
I think we should ban all users until they provide 10 photos of their face from different angles and lighting. Passport and birth certificates and a lawyer letter confirming it’s really you trying to sign up under the username: LexiMax

Then all this will be synced with govs so can read all your messages. And sell to ad companies to spam you later. (They can link your phone number, email etc to you as you provided real id on all those).

And if you travel to some country that doesn’t approve what you ever said, maybe you broke their law, so you deserve a few years in prison.
by noduerme | 2026-02-10 04:15:42+00:00
I found this interesting:

>> Small decisions have to be made by design/eng based on discovery of product constraints, but communicating this to stakeholders is hard and time consuming and often doesn’t work.

This implies that a great deal of extraneous work and headaches result from the stakeholders not having a clear mental model of what they need software to do, versus what is either secondary or could be disposed of with minor tweaks to some operational flow, usage guidance, or terms of service document. In my experience: Even more valuable than having my own mental model of a large piece of software, is having an interlocutor representing the stakeholders and end users, who understands the business model completely and has the authority to say: (A) We absolutely need to remove this constraint, or (B) If this is going to cost an extra 40 hours of coding, maybe we can find a workflow on our side thet gets around it - or find a shortcut, and shelve this for now so you can move on with the rest of the project.

Clients usually have a poor understanding of where constraints are and why some seemingly easy problems are very hard, or why some problems that seem hard to them are actually quite easy. I find that giving them a clear idea of the effort involved in each part of fulfilling a request often leads to me talking to someone directly who can make a call as to whether it's actually necessary.
by evmaki | 2026-02-10 04:15:47+00:00
US incarceration rates increased 500% in the decades following the enactment of war on drugs legislation, starting with the Controlled Substances Act in 1970.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...

More speculatively, I think the prison system has also taken over the role of the mental health institutions that were wound down under Reagan. Over half of the incarcerated population has a mental health condition, and likely are not receiving adequate mental health care while incarcerated.
by roxolotl | 2026-02-10 04:15:51+00:00
To give you an example in disparity of culture a relative of mine visited me a few years back from Austria. We took a train into NYC and the notices the sign that said “Assaulting transportation personnel is punishable by up to 7 years in prison” and couldn’t stop laughing all day. They are a lawyer and had never encountered a non murder case with a sentence that harsh.
by veyh | 2026-02-10 04:16:02+00:00
Well, even if Jitsi doesn't have Push-to-Talk, you can still easily get it by using a hotkey to mute/unmute the mic system-wide.

For exampple, if you're on PC, MicMute [1] can be used for free, or if you want more customization, I would humbly present my side project, AutoPTT [2].

[1] https://github.com/SaifAqqad/AHK_MicMute/

[2] https://autoptt.com/
by ethin | 2026-02-10 04:16:45+00:00
> Parents need to have personal responsibility, but corporations get to use section 230 to absolve themselves of any. Game seems rigged.

This is not at all what section 230 does. All section 230 does is get rid of lawsuits that wouldn't be able to satisfy standing of a first amendment lawsuit or similar. Section 230 has to be one of the most misunderstood and confused laws known in the modern day. Absolutely nowhere in the text of the law does it say or imply that an interactive computer service, or the operator of such service, gets total immunity for anything and everything they do. Yet this myth is constantly perpetuated.
by mkw5053 | 2026-02-10 04:16:56+00:00
While I agree that believing the US is "uniquely great, superior to other nations, destined for a special role in the world" is silly, this article feels just as cherry-picked, on the other extreme. The US is an outlier in plenty of negative ways, yes. But it's also an outlier in GDP per capita, venture capital investment, Nobel Prizes, university quality, immigrant demand, medical innovation, and cultural export. Any honest look at the data shows a country that is simultaneously world-leading and world-lagging depending on which metrics you choose. Picking only one side of that ledger isn't analysis.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-10 04:16:58+00:00
> They are not challenges solved or to be solved by functional programming.

These challenges can be solved by the usual tools of FP, but this requires each version of the system to be explicitly aware of the data schema varieties used by all earlier versions that are still in use. Then it's a matter of interpreting earlier-versioned data correctly, and translating data to earlier schema varieties whenever they may have to be interpreted by earlier versions of the code.

(It may also be helpful to introduce minimally revised releases of the earlier codes, that simply add some amount of forward compatibility re: dealing with later-released schemas, while broadly keeping all other behavior the same to avoid unwanted breakage. These approaches are not too hard to implement.)
by glompers | 2026-02-10 04:17:13+00:00
The entire County of London[0] had an average population density of 60 people per acre (38,400 per square mile) in 1911 and 42 per acre in 1961.

60 per acre being averaged over nonresidential land uses meant that it was still common to find residential densities higher than 40,000 people per square mile (15,000 per sq. km) at that time. Only Tower Hamlets and Islington remain around that density to this day.[1]

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

[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_districts_by_p...