MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-06 22:44:59+00:00
> That could be mitigated if you had so many coffee shops that none of them were busy enough for those externalites to matter (e.g. at most a handful of cars out front), but a coffee shop that slow may not make enough money to actually survive.

As many of them would survive as could be sustained. You don't get a situation where there are too many and then they all go out of business, you just increase the number until the constraint hits how to cover the now-lower costs instead of it being the locations where one can be built to begin with.

Your premise is that the median one couldn't survive unless it was inundated, but that's contrary to all the currently operating ones in locations where that isn't happening.

> So you may have a natural and legitimate resistance to more, because of the externalites.

What really happens is that people look at the traffic at one when there is a severe constraint on where they can be built and expect that to happen everywhere without that constraint, when the constraint is the reason for the traffic being concentrated in that one place to begin with.

> Grocery stores and coffee shops are like 10-15 minute drive away from most suburban homes, and there's never a jam.

The problem is the example was "45 minutes" which is actually pretty excessive, whereas the overall issue is "have to sit in traffic or circle to find parking to get there".

And then isn't your contention here contrary to your previous premise? If there is no traffic with that number of shops, what result when there are more, smaller shops so that each one has less traffic than that?
by Ferret7446 | 2026-02-06 22:45:27+00:00
Because they're spending all their mental cycles thinking "how can I extract as much money from the system as possible". Like only asking students to attend when they'll be counted for funds allocation.

Not that I agree with GP, but the problem is that no one (in positions of power in the educational system) is thinking of the children (in SFW ways, given the recent release of the Epstein files)
by yorwba | 2026-02-06 22:45:32+00:00
Don't forget about the examination system grouping students by ability and filtering out the worst performers altogether. Of ≈17 million students who took the zhongkao and graduated junior high school after grade 9 in 2024, ≈10 million were admitted to a high school, ≈4 million to a vocational school and the remaining ≈3 million disappear from education statistics, presumably directly entering the workforce. http://www.moe.gov.cn/jyb_sjzl/sjzl_fztjgb/202506/t20250611_...
by a456463 | 2026-02-06 22:45:58+00:00
It is perfectly valid that this issue is polarizing. on the one hand we have blind cargo culters and on the other hand we have "luddites". Being in one or the other "tribe" is cause for getting insulted or called out. Because the cargo culters want everyone to do what they are doing, just like the RTO crowd. The skeptics want to take a more reasonable pace. One side is we are done this is the future and the other side doesn't see the same results happening to them but the cargo culters think in absolutes and 100% only. It is all or nothing. All these other posts waxing and waning and insulting the skeptics are frankly insulting
by jval43 | 2026-02-06 22:46:31+00:00
I've actually come around to the Postgres way of thinking. We shouldn't want or need plan hints usually.

Literally every slow Postgres statement I worked on in the last few years was due to lack of accurate statistics, missing indexes, or just badly designed queries. Every one was fixable at the source, by actually fixing the core issue.

This was in stark contrast to the myriads of Oracle queries I also debugged. The larger older ones had accumulated a "crust" of plan hints over the years. Most not so well thought out and not valid anymore. In fact, often just removing all hints made the query faster rather than slower on newer Oracle versions.

It's so tempting to just want to add a plan hint to "fix" the suboptimal query plan. However, the Postgres query planner often has an actual reason for why it does what it does and overall I've found the decisions to be very consistent.
by toss1 | 2026-02-06 22:47:01+00:00
>>0 actual impact on you

Nonsense.

Sure, scenario A requires intent in advance

Scenario B requires intent ANY TIME. Someone in the system can decide they want to track me RETROACTIVELY and do it even more effectively than if they had planned in advance. With malicious intent, they can find or fabricate charges retroactively.

Yes, it is only potential, until it is actualized. Potential energy is still energy, and it is still different from not having potential energy in place.
by _diyar | 2026-02-06 22:47:12+00:00
When people say ”AI is Killing SaaS”, that does not have to mean ”Claude Code can one-shot your full stack“.
More likely it means: AI code is going to distort the supply curve such that

1) previously healthy surplus in the SaaS market is shrinking

2) established SaaS companies have lost all existing moats

3) due to the previous two points, investors are reluctant
to spend new dollars in this market to expand or retain market share, making life in those companies miserable.

> But the path forward is brutal

And soon™ this is coming to your industry as well!
by lenkite | 2026-02-06 22:47:34+00:00
> They had a decade plus of no economic blockade from the U.S., and still they squandered the opportunity.

Err when was this decade plus of zero economic blockade ? I think you have confused less than two tiny years from 2015-2017. Nothing can be done in 2 years. By the time you setup trade, you are blockaded by the big bully who wants to make you suffer pain and you can do nothing. There is also a big bully base at home to ensure complete compliance to pain.

Blaming a victim for being abused is a really terrific argument.
by BLKNSLVR | 2026-02-06 22:48:06+00:00
I've been inline skating ten years now, and the last three years been doing long outdoor skates, 43km a couple of weeks ago.

It is the ideal move of transport! (if cars were less common and hills less steep).

I've got weak ankles from rolling them regularly playing other sports, but the inline boots strap em in nice and tight.

If you need some motivation, or just like to watch some decent skating, check out The Stuttering Skater on YouTube. I'm nowhere near even thinking about being that good, but he's great to watch weaving through NYC traffic.
by base698 | 2026-02-06 22:48:10+00:00
The legal history is a bit more complex. TLDR: assholes that were BASE jumping in Yosemite in the early 1980s did things like throw burning barrels off the top of El Capitan and take trucks on trails not designed for vehicle traffic.

Comparing the number of BASE jumpers (small thousands) and the number of hikers and climbers (millions) BASE jumpers just can't have the political influence for access.

Random note, Brendan Weinstein who posted here on occasion recently died BASE jumping: https://www.reddit.com/r/SkyDiving/comments/1q6n7v2/brendan_...
by exitb | 2026-02-06 22:48:24+00:00
We’re not „thinking with portals” about these things enough yet. Typically we’d want a detailed spec beforehand, as coding is expensive and time consuming, thus we want to make sure we’re coding the right thing. With AI though, coding is cheap. So let AI skip the spec and write the code badly. Then have it review the solution, build understanding, design a spec for better solution and have it write it again. Rinse and repeat as many times you need.

It’s also nothing new, as it’s basically Joe Armstrong's programming method. It’s just not prohibitively expensive for the first time in history.
by dandersch | 2026-02-06 22:49:25+00:00
Great idea. After telling claude to "make a song" and pointing it to the strudel docs, it gave me this:

https://strudel.cc/#Ly8gImFtYmVyIGRyaWZ0IiBAYnkgYW1wCi8vIEB2ZXJzaW9uIDEuMApzZXRjcHMoLjU1KQoKJDogbihgPAogIFswIH4gMiB%2BXSBbNCB%2BIDMgfl0gWzIgfiAwIH5dIFs0IDMgMiB%2BXQogIFswIH4gMiB%2BXSBbNCB%2BIDUgfl0gWzMgfiAyIH5dIFswIH4gfiB%2BXQo%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%2BIH5dIFt4IH4gfiB%2BXSIpLAogIHMoIn4gW3JpbToxLCBzZDoyXSIpLmdhaW4oLjgpLAogIHMoImhoKjgiKS5nYWluKHNhdy5yYW5nZSguMiwgLjcpKS5wYW4oc2luZSksCiAgcygifiB%2BIH4gb2giKS5tYXNrKCI8MCAwIDAgMT4vOCIpLmdhaW4oLjQpCikuYmFuaygiUm9sYW5kVFI4MDgiKQoucm9vbSguMykuc2hhcGUoLjIpCgokOiBuKCJ%2BIDxbfiA2XSBbNCB%2BXSBbfiAzXSBbNSB%2BXT4iKQouc2NhbGUoIkQ1Om1pbm9yOnBlbnRhdG9uaWMiKQouc291bmQoImdtX211c2ljX2JveCIpCi5yb29tKC45KS5kZWxheSgiLjU6LjE2Oi43IikKLmdhaW4ocGVybGluLnJhbmdlKC4zLCAuNikpCi5wYW4oc2luZS5zbG93KDgpKQ%3D%3D

According to claude:

It layers a pentatonic guitar melody with filter sweep, a saw/triangle bass, warm e-piano chords, TR-808 drums, and a sparse music box that drifts across the stereo field.

I'm blown away.

I do acknowledge the possiblity that it might be heavily plagiarized from an original composition in the training set - I wouldn't know.
by anigbrowl | 2026-02-06 22:49:27+00:00
(eg in asylum arguments)

If you were applying for asylum because the conditions in your country were so oppressive to you as a political actor or member of a disfavored ethnic group, you could support your application with relevant data from the CIA world factbook describing general conditions in that country. As a publication of the US government, those factual claims would not be lightly dismissable or disputable the way third party opinions might.
by TonyStr | 2026-02-06 22:49:43+00:00
I applaud your effort, and I love to see others practice the love of building. Though my original comment didn't suggest this, I would love to see your project succeed and gather a user base. Competition is always good, and this is a very solid start for a project.

> endeavour to scratch my own itch during the pandemic

Was this an "itch to build something", or an itch as in an annoyance you had with an existing tool? I'm skeptic of whether bloated UI is an itch many users have with figma or similar, which is why I'm critical of presenting this as the selling point for Vecti. If you manage to find an itch many people do have, and you provide the salve, you'll attract paying users.
by sigbottle | 2026-02-06 22:49:51+00:00
I tend to remember techniques more than specific algorithms, but:

One really fun algorithm involved optimizing an n^2 naive tree algorithm to O(n), ignoring logs.

For me, the way I reasoned about it was expanding the number of objects to consider (n^3), then there were observations you could apply to bring it down to O(n).

If you asked me what exactly the correspondence was between the final reduction and the original problem statement, I couldn't tell you. Maybe there was a more direct way to get to the solution.

But that style of thinking carries on with me to real tasks too. Sometimes it's easier to simplify, other times it might actually be easier to complexify, as long as you trust that you're not going down "arbitrary" complexity.
Show HN: 33rpm – A vinyl screensaver for macOS that syncs to your music
by kaniksu | 2026-02-06 22:49:53+00:00
I built a macOS screensaver that displays a spinning vinyl record synced to whatever you're listening to. The record spins while music plays and stops when you pause.

Works with Spotify, Apple Music, or any app that reports to Now Playing (podcasts, YouTube, etc.).

A few technical details HN might find interesting:

- Zero permissions required. I use distributed notifications and the MediaRemote framework to read now-playing state without requesting any system access.

- Album art comes from Spotify's public oEmbed API and iTunes Search API—no auth tokens needed.

- Native Swift, not Electron. It's a proper .saver bundle that installs to ~/Library/Screen Savers.

- The vinyl color can match the dominant color of the album art, which required some fun image processing.

Requires macOS 13+. Free download, no tracking, no account.

Would love feedback on the rendering or ideas for other integrations.
by strawhatguy | 2026-02-06 22:49:53+00:00
Spending is the issue. That money is spent on something, and it isn't (all) teaching either.

The chart in the link below shows employee vs students headcounts over 6 years. Even though student rolls went down almost all employment in the school system went up. Do we really need a +22% increase in Student Support Services when there are fewer students? Even teachers (only?) went up by 2.8% according to this (and again, students went down)? And why would librarians of all positions seem to be the ones whose positions were cut?

Basically, 'education' is nothing more than a jobs program for the politically connected, as clearly the focus is not on kids. And education is safe, because it's hard to argue against it, even if you're not talking about actual teachers.

Honestly I would expect if funding were cut, and particularly the admin, support, 'paraprofessional', and other non-teaching staff were fired, you'd find those test scores approach the pre-pandemic levels.

Will that happen? Of course not. These are politically connected people after all. We should all be angry.

https://x.com/johnfaig/status/2019108852365656477?s=20
by Mountain_Skies | 2026-02-06 22:50:00+00:00
The tech world is often criticized for being trend obsessed but it seems to happen in education quite often too. My high school was built in the 1970s during the wall-less open learning community fad. That flopped hard and the school ended up with several different physical hacks for dividing up those spaces into something resembling a traditional classroom. The chemistry lab was the only room to get actual masonry walls. Most everywhere else had what were little more than oversize cubicle partitions, which meant noise from every class ended up leaking into every other class. It is baffling that anyone thought having a high school without walls was a good idea, but our high school was far from being the only one built that way during that time period.
by SebastianSosa | 2026-02-06 22:50:02+00:00
Very concerned with this direction of training
“counterfactual events such as whether the Waymo Driver could have safely driven more confidently instead of yielding in a particular situation.” Seems dicey. This could lead in the direction to a less safe Waymo. Since the counterfactual will be generated, I suspect that that the generations will be biased towards survivor situations where most video footage in its training data will be from environments where people reacted well not those that ended in tragedy. Emboldening Waymo on generated best case data. THIS IS DANGEROUS!!!
by mc32 | 2026-02-06 22:50:03+00:00
That’s pretty wild. It absolutely makes sense that if you can, you would try to minimize rider (and driver) risk. I also agree I can’t see this ever being shown to a rider or driver. (that would expose them to other risk)

That said, this system is a double edged sword. It allows you to provide safer services to your customers but it paradoxically also exposes you to another risk. So even though on the whole this system prevents many instances of violence, when it misses and it results in violence, it can come back to bite you. Implied is that if they didn’t have this system more violence on their services would happen, but because they don’t measure driver risk score, they wouldn’t be as liable.
by shakna | 2026-02-06 22:50:30+00:00
Most models are multi-paradigm, and so they get... Fixated on procedural language design. Concepts like the stack, backtracking, etc. violate the logic they've absorbed, leading to... Burning tokens whilst it corrects itself.

This won't show up in a smaller benchmark, because the clutching at straws tends to happen nearer to the edge of the window. The place where you can get it to give up obvious things that don't work, and actually try the problem space you've given.
by yef | 2026-02-06 22:50:32+00:00
Be an organ donor. Donate blood on a regular basis. Skeptoid had a podcast today that talks about blood donation with some interesting tidbits about shelf life of platelets and whole blood. (5 days vs 42 days)

(Disclaimer: the site I hacked for myself to help me consume podcasts)
https://spokengoods.com/podcasts/385078-skeptoid/mic-d-up-br...
by BSOhealth | 2026-02-06 22:50:36+00:00
I’m in the same boat. AI can gen better UI forms, and a database is a database is a database. Customers want MCP and API access to do their own thing on their own terms. Model co’s and folks like Palantir come in to “partner” but the writing is on the wall.

So what are we going to do about it? Genuinely up for a startup here.
by olivia-banks | 2026-02-06 22:50:38+00:00
I have the opposite experience, very few of the articles are behind a paywall, which is the main reason why I stick with it. That, and I'm a fan of Apple News Quartiles, and their crossword UI is nice :-)

That's hardly a reason to stick with News+, but it's already in my bundle.

Also, I probably split my non-tech news time between News+, the NYT App, and Reeder (I'm in the process of moving more to RSS).
by unicorn_cowboy | 2026-02-06 22:51:16+00:00
SaaS is very much not my area of expertise, but this makes sense to me: https://x.com/DavidOndrej1/status/2019126831761572169

TLDR excerpt:
- Top layer — the AI agent. The thing that actually executes the work.
- Middle layer — the SaaS UI. The dashboards, the workflows, the buttons you click.
- Bottom layer — systems of record. The databases, CRMs, and ERPs that store the real data.

Right now, value is getting sucked upward into the agent layer and downward into the data layer. Everything in the thin middle gets crushed.
by altmanaltman | 2026-02-06 22:52:22+00:00
> What's the point if human-made art isn't interesting or artistically worthwhile?

Because it is a human making it, expressing something is always worthwhile to the individual on a personal level. Even if its not "artisticallly worthwhile", the process is rewarding to the participant at the very least. Which is why a lot of people just find enjoyment in creating art even if its not commercially succesful.

But in this case, the criteria changes for the final product (the music being produced). It is not artistically worthwhile to anyone, not even the creator.

So no, a person with no talent (self claim) using an LLM to create art is much less worthwhile than a human being with no/any talent creating art on their own at all times by default.
by layer8 | 2026-02-06 22:52:29+00:00
Of course things could be better. That doesn’t mean that we can just ignore the constraints imposed by the existing software landscape.

It’s not just C. There are a lot of things that could be substantially better in an OS than Linux, for example, or in client-server software and UI frameworks than the web stack. It nevertheless is quite unrealistic to ditch Linux or the web stack for something else. You have to work with what’s there.
by wffurr | 2026-02-06 22:52:33+00:00
>> * New computer labs, laptops, digital textbooks, learning software licenses, smart boards, and other and other expensive crap that is at best neutral from a learning perspective.

I think we should be actively removing these things from schools, but it's a tough fight as parents against an entire well-funded EdTech industry pushing these things with a firehose of VC money.

>> * Pointless building improvements that don't service education but instead service the prestige and egos of the administrators of the schools.

This makes me crazy. We have a very fancy, very large new school building my city which is LEED platinum certified. I can't possibly imagine that that certification level is cost effective. I'm sure we could have built a very good school with a healthy safe learning environment and environmentally conscious decisions for heating, cooling, power, etc. for significantly less if the city were willing to forego the press release headline. This is also a really hard problem that pits taxpayers against a well-funded industry full of lobbyists.

Both of these can be traced back to the principal agent problem, which really is blaming the administrators, because they're making decisions and then don't have to deal with the consequences (actually integrating and using EdTech in a classroom, paying more taxes for the same or worse education, etc.).
by ezwoodland | 2026-02-06 22:52:50+00:00
Something along the lines of reed-solomon codes could work for you:

If you want to share your password with M family members such that you only need N to agree to recover the original:

Split your password into ordered chunks.

Make a polynomial p, of power N where the p(1) = chunk1, p(2) = chunk2, ...

Evaluate the polynomial at M other points: p(N+1),p(N+2)...

Gives those M new points to your family along with their index (+1,+2,...).

If less than N family members get together, they will not be able to figure out the password much better than guessing. If N get together, they can interpolate their points to form the unique polynomial which will match p. Then evaluate p at p(1),p(2),... to get your original password.

If you put the whole password into 1 chunk, and pad it with random extra content to make the polynomial of sufficient degree, then they get literally no information on the password. If you make multiple chunks then they can do a little correlation between the chunks without knowing the whole thing.

This is sufficiently simple you can even work this out by hand without a computer, though it would be somewhat tedious.
by simondotau | 2026-02-06 22:53:06+00:00
Obviously both will exist and compete with each other on the margins. The thing to appreciate is that our physical world is already built like an API for adult humans. Swinging doors, stairs, cupboards, benchtops. If you want a robot to traverse the space and be useful for more than one task, the humanoid form makes sense.

The key question is whether general purpose robots can outcompete on sheer economies of scale alone.
by victoriak77 | 2026-02-06 22:53:14+00:00
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What we are looking for: Builders!!!!

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