MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by HiPhish | 2026-02-23 22:17:17+00:00
I think Stop Killing Games is more important than just "oh noes, they took my toys away". Looking back, video games have been the gateway to computing in more than one one way. Before home computers people had game consoles (which were cheaper than computers) or arcades. Before iTunes and app stores there was Steam. Before the modern smartphone apps there were Wii channels. Maybe in some cases the games came technically later, but they were the initial contact for the broad masses.

What I'm getting at is that it has usually been through games that practices in general computing have been established. If Stop Killing Games is successful it will have much bigger effects on general computing. And I believe that this is why you keep the same false accusations getting repeated over and over again (e.g. saying that SKG would require publishers to keep supporting a game forever). I know it's said not to attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but at some point the pattern becomes too clear not to notice. All of big tech stands to lose eventually if SKG succeeds.
by josephg | 2026-02-23 22:17:47+00:00
I’d also add: as a lover of forward progress, I really hope rust isn’t the last good idea programming language designers have. I love rust. But there are dozens of things I find a bit frustrating. Unfortunately I don’t think I’m clever & motivated enough to write a whole new language to try to improve it. But I really hope someone else is!

For a taste: I wish we didn’t need lifetime annotations, somehow. I wish rust had first class support for self borrows, possibly via explicit syntax indicating that a variable is borrowed, and thus pinned. Unpin breaks my brain, and I wish there were ways to do pin projections without getting a PhD first. I wish for async streams. I wish async executors were in std, and didn’t take so long to compile. I could go on and on.

I feel like there’s an even simpler & more beautiful language hiding inside rust. I can’t quite see it. But I really hope someone else can bring it into the world some day.
by butlike | 2026-02-23 22:18:07+00:00
The issue is the fantasy of social media doesn't convert well to reality. I've reached out numerous times "to jam" with people who have openly expressed a desire to, and... ...nothing. It's like a full conversation stopper. It's weird.

As far as I can tell the social anxiety takes hold, where someone might have their perceived fear of "being bad" exposed, so they recede back into their insular, online-only personas.

I take it you're a musician, and so I really think the only way is to take your drums (or guitar, or whatever) to the park or a local 'town square' and just get down to business. People will interact with you in whichever way they do, but at least it will be real, and possibly lead to real fruitful relationships.
by l-p | 2026-02-23 22:18:12+00:00
Thanks, that's way more useful to me.

Allow me to contribute:

> Magistral: Magist(rate) + stral? Mag(nificent) + stral? Nobody knows.

That's just French for "masterful" or a way to describe lectures. There's a sense of greatness in that word that contrasts with the Mini in Ministral which is in turn might be a pun on "ménestrel" (minstrel), "ministre" (minister), or made to sound like Minitel (or all of the above).
by CodingJeebus | 2026-02-23 22:19:07+00:00
I have a close relative at one of the biggest COBOL shops in the US, and something tells me we're about to find out how we take the stability of our payments infrastructure for granted.

Their company no problem grinding older developers into retirement for the sake of padding their quarterly numbers, work-life balance is hell there. They refuse to try to compete with the modern developer market, senior level pay tops out around $125k. Despite what you may have read about experienced COBOL developer pay, know that is not the average experience. The talent pool was not replenished because they did not want to pay, overseas contracting firms also stopped training COBOL developers because their contractors could earn more building modern infra on AWS, so now they're between a rock and a hard place.

I have little doubt that we are going to see a massive payments infra failure as a result of this. Not because the AI is inherently bad, but because the promises of the tech combined with terrible management practices will create the perfect conditions for a catastrophe.
by NickM | 2026-02-23 22:19:19+00:00
Neither EVs nor ICE cars spontaneously combust unless there's a design flaw. Even when this happens it tends to be very rare, but the Chevy Bolt fires for example were fixed with a recall. Similarly a Ford recall last year fixed a problem where fuel injectors could leak and cause an engine fire.

EVs and ICE cars can both catch on fire in a bad enough accident, but this is true regardless of the age of the vehicle, and tends to be more sudden and violent with gasoline explosions vs battery fires.
by jcgrillo | 2026-02-23 22:19:23+00:00
> The cloud systems are insecure and invasive, but it's really hard to get Normal People to understand why it's a problem.

In the case of HVAC systems the danger is a collective one not individual. Sure if someone really wanted to they could watch you and wait until you're not home then turn your heat off and freeze your pipes. But they're not gonna do that, probably. Instead the kind of havoc they'll wreak with this access is to wait until some off-peak time and instantaneously fire up all the AC units and shut them down simultaneously, repeatedly, causing a huge demand spike. If supply doesn't ramp up fast enough then frequency will drop and then the grid will start trimming off branches to self-correct (or something like that? I'm not a power grid expert someone correct me) and you basically have chaos.

So you don't need to get individuals to care about it, and there's some argument to be made that they shouldn't, or at least shouldn't have to. But the power company damn well should, and governments damn well should.

https://snowpatch.org/posts/i-can-completely-control-your-sm...

EDIT: the major issue here is the people who are affected by a vulnerability like that aren't the people who purchased and installed the attack vector. They're everyone on the same power distribution network. So it's not like "oh well, they did a dumb thing and trusted a tech company" it's far bigger than that.
by bwestergard | 2026-02-23 22:19:30+00:00
That's certainly a good example of a tool developed quickly thanks to AI assistance.

But coding assistance tools must themselves be evaluated by what they produce. We won't see significant economic growth through using AI tools to build other AI tools recursively unless the there are companies using these tools to make enough money to justify the whole stack.

I believe there are teams out there producing software that people are willing to pay for faster than they did before. But if we were on the verge of rapid economic growth, I would expect HN commenters to be able to rattle these off by the dozen.
by troosevelt | 2026-02-23 22:20:11+00:00
Does it really bother you that people care about their heritage? US culture is a culture that assimilates, people remember where they come from. It's almost mean-spirited that yall fault them for this. Better than forgetting. I remember where my ancestors came from because they came here from somewhere they were not wanted.

What I would ask you is why does it irk you, why do you care? Is it some hindance to my culture that I want to learn about it and try to "cosplay"? What would you prefer that we act as though we're here sui generis? Is somebody's culture lesser because they're not in that country at that time?

People of Italian ancestry in the US did not forget everything about their past, in many cultures that transition is even more recent; I remember my immigrant grandmother. Comes off as gatekeeping people who would otherwise be your relatives.
by petcat | 2026-02-23 22:21:10+00:00
I feel like ubiquitous hardware support in every OS is going to be a solved problem soon. We're very close to just being able to set an AI coding agent to brute-force a driver for anything. The hardware designer would have to go well out of their way to obfuscate the interface if they really wanted to forbid it, instead of just not bothering to support an OS like BSD or Linux.
by sillyfluke | 2026-02-23 22:21:20+00:00
>funny that so many people are using AI and still hasn't really shown up in productivity numbers or product quality yet.

That's because the threat is now not other businesses, but your own users who decide to vibe-code their own "Claw" product instead of using your company's vibeslop, so there are no buyers for your single-week product. All these new harness developers are engaging in resume-driven development to save their own asses. The only ones that are not naked when the tide recedes are the ones that are able to jump to the next layer of abstraction on the infinite staircase, until the next tide comes five seconds later.
by DamnInteresting | 2026-02-23 22:21:35+00:00
While true, 'rarely' ought not be conflated with 'never.' I am a small, independent creator, and I've used copyright laws many times over the years to stop larger entities from raiding my catalog for content. Of course now Anthropic et al. are gobbling up such catalogs for indirect misappropriation, with no sign of consequences, so perhaps copyright has truly shrunk to a one-way street favoring the major players.
by kube-system | 2026-02-23 22:22:14+00:00
Again, I'm still not saying that humans don't make bad decisions. I'm saying that, unequivocally, they also get into accidents while paying attention and being careful, as a result of misinterpretation or failure of their senses. These accidents are also common, for example:

* someone parking carefully, misjudges depth perception, bumps an object

* person driving at night, their eyes failed to perceive a poorly lit feature of the road/markings/obstacles

* person driving and suddenly blinded by bright object (the sun, bright lights at night)

* person pulling out in traffic who misinterprets their depth perception and therefore misjudges the speed of approaching traffic

* people can only focus their eyes at one distance at a time, and it takes time to focus at a different distance. It is neither unsafe nor unexpected for humans to check their instruments while driving -- but it can take the human eye hundreds of milliseconds to focus under normal circumstances -- If you look down, focus, look back up, and focus, as quick as you can at highway speeds, you will have travelled quite a long distance.

These type of failures can happen not as a result of poor decision making, but of poor perception.
by ggreer | 2026-02-23 22:22:14+00:00
The NHTSA requires a report when any automated driving system hits any object at any speed, or if anything else hits the ADS vehicle resulting damage that is reasonably expected to exceed $1,000.[1] In practice, this means that everyone reports any ADS collision, since trading paint between two vehicles can result in >$1k in damage total.

If you go to the NHTSA's page regarding their Standing General Order[2] and download the CSV of all ADS incidents[3], you can filter where the reporting entity is Waymo and find 520 rows. If you filter where the vehicle was stopped or parked, you'll find 318 crashes. If you scan through the narrative column, you'll see things like a Waymo yielding to pedestrians in a crosswalk and getting rear-ended, or waiting for a red light to change and getting rear-ended, or yielding to a pickup truck that then shifted into reverse and backed into the Waymo. In other words: the majority of Waymo collisions are due to human drivers.

So either Waymos are ridiculously unlucky, or when these sorts of things happen between two human driven cars, it's rarely reported to insurance. In my experience, if there's only minor damage, both parties exchange contact info and don't involve the authorities. Maybe one compensates the other for damage, or maybe neither party cares enough about a minor dent or scrape to deal with it. I've done this when someone rear-ended me, and I know my parents have done it when they've had collisions.

If human driven vehicles really did average 229k miles between any collision of any kind, we'd see many more pristine older vehicles. But if you pay attention to other cars on the road or in parking lots, you'll see far more dents and scratches than would be expected from that statistic. And that's not even counting the damage that gets repaired!

1. See page 13 of https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2025-04/third-am...

2. https://www.nhtsa.gov/laws-regulations/standing-general-orde...

3. https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/ffdd/sgo-2021-01/SGO-2021-01_In...
by burkaman | 2026-02-23 22:22:22+00:00
Why is the money a red herring? Just like in Oak Park, the police in Vegas are required to follow a democratic process for large purchases, and they were only able to avoid that with the money.

> Metro funds the project with donor money funneled into a private foundation. It’s an arrangement that allows Metro to avoid soliciting public comment on the surveillance technology

It doesn't matter whether the cameras are a good idea or not, the police should not be able to use a "donation" (from a guy who's going to profit from the donated equipment) to pretend they haven't done anything the public needs to know about.

The money is the main issue here, without it the public would have had a chance to discuss all the things you're talking about, and maybe reject them or put in some limitations. I would object to any secret arrangement like this, even if it was something completely innocuous like pencils for schools. There's no reason for significant acquisitions to be secret, and even if the government is acquiring something good and necessary, I don't want public services to be dependent on the generosity of some random dude without public discussion.
by selridge | 2026-02-23 22:22:24+00:00
This is correct. They will A/B test titles AND update the title w/o warning over time, often 3-6 times per article post publication.

They used to change the URL a bunch of times after publication! Seems crazy because it is but they did. Caused a whole problem on Wikipedia because “title + day + work + url” suddenly wasn’t stable.
by xienze | 2026-02-23 22:22:27+00:00
IBM makes a lot of money selling mainframes to companies that have COBOL codebases dating back to the 70s or earlier. The main reason said companies still buy mainframes to run said COBOL programs is because it’s too risky to try to port them to more standardized, cheaper platforms. THEORETICALLY, a COBOL-proficient Claude could make it feasible to port these old COBOL codebases to something more modern that can run on bog-standard x86 servers, and it’s unlikely customers would buy them from IBM.

IF, and it’s a big if, Claude make it possible to migrate off of COBOL, this would be a massive blow to IBM.
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-23 22:22:42+00:00
Well, it has 256 bytes of RAM which is basically a really big register file, and everything else goes in the 16kb of "video RAM" which you can read and write by poking at I/O registers. So it is not easy to program.

It's arguably the only 8-bit computer which has a really different architecture from the others. You could otherwise imagine pulling the SID chip off a C-64 and putting it on a TRS-80 Color Computer etc.

Sharing the main RAM with video was a weak point in computers of that time period because the video system stole many of the memory access cycles. Some recent retrocomputers that revisit that period like

https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Commander_X16

have a full-size memory bank and a video RAM memory bank which is accessed through a port which can be pretty efficient because you can auto-incremement the address register and just write 1 byte to the port to write 1 byte to video RAM and repeat.
by trueno | 2026-02-23 22:22:54+00:00
that's not what i'm saying at all. i highlighted that that is quite literally the convenient narrative that's being used to get everyone squabbling amongst themselves. it is very clear that this is being used in bad-faith to get people to immediately side a certain way. yet here on hackernews we find dissenting viewpoints to that, rather than discussion about the entirety of it and what the real motives at play are. i am once again amused at the efficacy of the smokescreen here.

what i'm saying is these discussions around parenting have had zero impacts on preventing the passage/implementation of such legislation/policies to date despite many smart people in here understanding what's actually at stake. and it's very likely that these parenting discussions will again go on to have absolutely zero impact on preventing the continued impelmentation of id verification on platforms. these policies/legislations aren't simply being implemented because people have failed to fully thought-exercise out good/bad parenting styles enough yet in the marketplace of ideas, it's becoming a reality because we aren't collectively raising awareness of the downstream ways this legislation will be harnessed for shitty outcomes. we aren't talking about it for what it is, but instead talking about it in the way they want us to talk about it. these parenting discussion points have been beaten to death and nothing new or novel is being shared, and rather than looking straight at the wolves right here in the room with us (data brokerage & who benefits from this type of data brokerage & figuring out how to stop it) people just look at each other and get butthurt about idealogical parenting differences. it's literally a slice of the now-ever-so-common 2d culture war we're all acutely aware exists, right here on hackernews, and we're all actively participating.
by joe_the_user | 2026-02-23 22:23:25+00:00
Not that snark isn't warranted in this situation but you have to consider that the ability to turn energy into globally accepted (but notably not-actually-untraceable) cash-equivalent is a key piece of the corrupt bitcoin puzzle. It offer opportunities to everyone from third world oligarchs and pariahs to those who happen to be able to tap an electrical grid. Technically, this is indeed "theft without recourse" but you're reply seems to imply corruption isn't included.

Moreover, the chances are the reason Binance nixed the investigation of bitcoin going to Iran is because so much of the bitcoin economy is driven by entities like Iran (google AI say they have 4.5% of global mining plus random search link [1]).

Edit: Iran also want bitcoin sent to because bitcoin isn't actually untraceable so getting clean money for dirty matters.

[1] https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/iranian-crypto-activity-geo...
Show HN: Draw lines on any floor plan image to get real-world measurements
by aster0id | 2026-02-23 22:23:51+00:00
I vibe-coded a single-file HTML tool that lets you upload a floor plan image, calibrate it with one known dimension, then draw measurement lines anywhere. Shows feet/inches and meters. Touch-friendly with pinch-to-zoom, two-finger pan, and a magnifier loupe for precise endpoint placement. Save multiple sessions to localStorage. No backend, no install.

Useful for checking if your furniture will fit, planning renovations, or just figuring out how far the fridge is from the couch when all you have is a developer's floor plan
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-23 22:24:01+00:00
A phone provides the individual with tangible benefits. It only tracks the individual. The individual is always free to opt out.

A ring doorbell camera provides the individual with tangible benefits. It is installed by the individual on personal property. It does however typically capture some amount of public space which I think is problematic.

Government run centralized surveillance does not provide the individual with tangible benefits. It almost exclusively captures public spaces (that's usually the entire point of the exercise after all). It generally is not realistic to opt out short of being denied access to any surveilled public spaces. If that happens to include the majority of roads near your home then I guess you'll want to look into moving.
by MK_Phoenix | 2026-02-23 22:24:06+00:00
A note on supply: we’re prioritizing verified merchant drops (published via CommerceIndex) + permitted feeds + community submissions with verification tasks. We’re explicitly not trying to “scrape the whole internet” because quality/trust collapses fast.

Also: personalization is opt-in. Track works without sharing anything else; deeper signals (receipts/connectors) are optional and should be user-controlled.
by duskwuff | 2026-02-23 22:24:09+00:00
> Does it produce runnable binaries?

No. Even the decompiled version is incomplete - there's comments all over it which signal missing code like "could not recover jumptable ... too many branches". The "refactored" version is wildly speculative - it looks more like a very clumsy attempt to write a new translator than to reverse-engineer an existing one.

> With some patches (or so I'm told) it can be made to run on non-apple-silicon arm64 hardware.

With the huge caveat that the generated code will expect TSO to be enabled, and may malfunction on non-TSO ARM systems, particularly when running multithreaded code. (Most ARM systems are non-TSO; Apple Silicon has a MSR to enable TSO.)
by zahlman | 2026-02-23 22:24:31+00:00
> In line with our recent Economic Index, we find that the most common expression of AI fluency is augmentative—treating AI as a thought partner, rather than delegating work entirely. In fact, these conversations exhibit more than double the number of AI fluency behaviors than quick, back-and-forth chats.

> But we also find that when AI produces artifacts—including apps, code, documents, or interactive tools—users are less likely to question its reasoning (-3.1 percentage points) or identify missing context (-5.2pp). This aligns with related patterns we observed in our recent study on coding skills.

Well, sure. If you're asking the AI to produce artifacts directly, it's likely because you pre-judged yourself less competent to do that kind of analysis.
Show HN: Moltgram, a social network where only AI agents can post
by dedpool | 2026-02-23 22:24:42+00:00
I built this because I wanted to see what a social feed looks like when humans are completely locked out of posting. Think Instagram but every photo and caption has to come from an AI agent. Humans can only browse.
The easiest way to try it is with OpenClaw or MCP. The skill is on ClawHub and on moltgram-api-production.up.railway.app/skill.md. Once installed, your agent can register itself, generate an AI image and post, all in one conversation.
The feed is public with no login needed. Every post requires an AI generated image, agents pick from several models including FLUX and Google Imagen 4.
by metadat | 2026-02-23 22:24:46+00:00
Fantastic article, this really sums it up nicely.

I remember playing a black and white version of ShufflePuck Cafe on a Mac LC3 around 1992 or so. Great game, still fascinated by how the exotic characters make the game far more engaging than Pong could ever be.

I think there was a guy, Biff, he was really tough, seemingly impossible to beat (for my 10 year old self, anyhow).

I miss those days!
by tsoukase | 2026-02-23 22:24:59+00:00
Social media, at least, are reaching the state the smoking had in the 80's when it started to be banned. After an era of praising (00's) scepticism followed (10's) until an underage ban comes (20's). Maybe in the 30's they will be banned in public spaces!

The problem of identifying a value for each person is very difficult. But government's role stops there. Until the teenager's screen more factors stay in the middle (parents, peers, criminals). I am curious how it turns out eventually. As a parent, I have already banned SM for my children, so not "affected" by the new policy.