MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by atombender | 2026-02-26 20:41:07+00:00
Wolfe is one of my favourite writers, and I highly recommend New Sun.

That said, it is a challenge for a lot of readers. It's a single, very long novel that introduces a complicated and mysterious cosmology that is rarely fully understood until the second or even third reading. A common saying among fans is that you don't read Wolfe, you re-read him. It requires a certain amount of patience.

An easier intro is The Fifth Head of Cerberus, which is also one of my favourite novels. It's very short, but its puzzle box structure is no less satisfying or challenging than New Sun. Parts of the fun is figuring exact out who is narrating the three different stories that make up the book — it's probably not who they claim to be — and exactly what happened.

Thinking about the article's reference to Herman Melville, Ursula LeGuin actually called Wolfe "our Melville", "our" meaning science fiction writers as a group.
by hydrogen7800 | 2026-02-26 20:41:45+00:00
This is perhaps a more common opinion than you think. Making it easy to catch bad guys is enough reason. I don't know how to effectively convince someone that the ease of law enforcement comes at the expense of liberty, which so many of the aforementioned opinion-holders also claim to be concerned about. I feel like it should be self-evident, that law enforcement and liberty are mutually exclusive, and that we have things like warrants to allow that infringement on liberty in very narrow circumstances. Dragnet surveillance is warrant-less evidence gathering.
by zotimer | 2026-02-26 20:41:46+00:00
The readme covers this question and a lot more and the repo includes all the materials I used.

This is partly questioning the way we do alignment. The 4.6 base persona actually gives me worse results than when I append Daneel to the system prompts.

It's really not about anthropomorphizing or inducing confidence, it's about keying into the right "culture" in the training data.

You can check out this study (mentioned in the readme) about how posing the same question in English and Chinese to the same LLM results in wildly different assessments of why a project failed:

https://techxplore.com/news/2025-07-llms-display-cultural-te...

https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/generative-ai-...
by kseniamorph | 2026-02-26 20:41:52+00:00
The comparison feels off to me. The Maker Movement was an actual movement with a shared ideology of self-transformation through building. People identified with it. Vibe coding is just a description of a practice.
The term covers a broad range of people: developers building components in languages they don't know, people trying to ship something fast and cash out, enthusiasts, and plenty of developers who are just too lazy to do their job. Any generalizations about what this "means for society" are going to be strained by definition.
The author partially senses this. He writes that vibe coding "skipped the scenius phase" but misses why. I think there was no scenius phase because there was no movement in the first place. The tool just became available to everyone at once.
by alex1138 | 2026-02-26 20:41:53+00:00
I could be wrong but I think they were basically forced to add Feeds by regulation (out of Europe?)

For ages it was Top Stories vs Most Recent. Most Recent didn't even work, and of course it would always change you back to Top Stories

With all the potential of the internet, we got stuck with fucking Zuckerberg? We know what he thinks about people.
by measurablefunc | 2026-02-26 20:42:30+00:00
In my experience a few hundred lines w/ a few crates w/ well-defined scopes & a detailed specification is within current capabilities, e.g. compressing wav files w/ wavelets & arithmetic coding. But it's obvious that a correct parser, compiler, & bytecode VM is still beyond current agents even if the specification is detailed enough to cover basically everything.
by verteu | 2026-02-26 20:44:35+00:00
> So what would you do if you ACTUALLY cared about the people and environment? Put high tariffs on dangerous process products

No, California can't do that. States cannot impose tariffs per the Constitution: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S10-C2-1...

They could push for more regulations at the federal level (and indeed, Californians do this quite often!)
by boznz | 2026-02-26 20:44:47+00:00
Ditto. I have done 6 projects over the last 12 months, and wrote up 3 of them on my web site, I also usually post a link either here, or hackaday, or the other maker sites, most of my work these days is repurposing broken commercial or consumer electronics by replacing the PCB's to give things a second life (eg <https://rodyne.com/?p=3380>). I've been making things since 1981, vibe coding just makes it easier for me to work with more complicated stuff.
Prepaid vs. Postpaid Mobile: The cost breakdown nobody talks about
by huntsmans | 2026-02-26 20:45:21+00:00
I spent years assuming postpaid meant better service. It doesn't. After finally running the numbers I feel genuinely embarrassed about how long I waited to switch.

Here's the actual breakdown nobody lays out clearly:

The postpaid trap:
Major carriers charge $60-80/month for plans most people don't fully use. That's $720-960/year. The service feels premium because of the branding and retail stores. The network underneath is identical to what prepaid customers access.

Prepaid vs postpaid mobile — what actually changes:
The only technical difference is QCI priority levels. Postpaid customers get QCI 6-7, prepaid gets QCI 8-9. In practice this means slight deprioritization during peak congestion — concerts, stadiums, busy urban areas. For everyday use the difference is imperceptible.

Where the real gap is — annual prepaid:
Monthly prepaid is the obvious comparison to postpaid. But annual prepaid is where the math gets genuinely interesting. Most people comparing prepaid vs postpaid mobile never look at the annual tier.

Current annual prepaid landscape:

Mint Mobile: $240/year (T-Mobile network, 5GB-unlimited)
Visible: $300/year (Verizon network, unlimited)
US Mobile: $210-390/year (multi-network, flexible)
Infimobile: $75/year for 10GB, $125/year for 15GB (Verizon or T-Mobile)

My actual switch:
Ported my number to Infimobile three months ago. Was on a $65/month postpaid plan. The port completed in a few hours, no issues. Currently paying $75 for the entire year on T-Mobile network — unlimited calls and texts, 10GB data monthly. Coverage is identical to what I had before in every location I regularly use my phone.

Honest limitations with Infimobile and annual prepaid generally:

Upfront annual payment (mental hurdle but math immediate)
No unlimited data option on Infimobile — 10GB at $75/year, 15GB at $125/year
Choose Verizon or T-Mobile at signup, locked for the year
Slight deprioritization during peak hours like any MVNO

The numbers that actually matter:

PlanAnnual CostMonthly EquivalentPostpaid average$780/year$65/monthMint Mobile$240/year$20/monthVisible$300/year$25/monthInfimobile 10GB$75/year$6.25/monthInfimobile 15GB$125/year$10.42/month

The frustrating part:
The prepaid vs postpaid mobile conversation online almost always focuses on monthly pricing. Annual prepaid barely gets mentioned despite being a completely different cost category. Infimobile at $75/year sits so far below everything else that it genuinely looks like a mistake the first time you see it.

For light to moderate data users — anyone using under 15GB monthly — the ROI on switching from postpaid is immediate. My $75 annual payment paid for itself in 5 weeks compared to what I was spending before.

Curious whether others have done this analysis and what held them back from switching. The prepaid vs postpaid mobile debate feels settled on price — what am I missing on the postpaid side that justifies the cost difference?
by ignoramous | 2026-02-26 20:46:42+00:00
> Nowadays a lot of applications behave like this but back then it was a very different from everything I had ever used.

PalmOS designers & engs (along with MS WebTV / Danger Sidekick folks) ended up working on early Android (Astro Boy / Bender / Petit Four etc), and there's a lot of parallels between the two.
by kyboren | 2026-02-26 20:47:07+00:00
Look, I support Europe's push for computational sovereignty. It's frankly long overdue. But Europeans still consistently underestimate the scope and difficulty of that task, and it must be undertaken simultaneously with building military and energy sovereignty while China's eating their economic lunch.

There isn't the money, the attention bandwidth, the industry, the IP, the skilled labor with know-how, the tools, or the raw materials to do all of those.

> Chinese alternatives are starting to appear

Maybe, but they are seriously handicapped and not competitive. And certainly when it comes to inference: They also don't have the hardware capacity to supply their own market and the European market.

> will be very competitive in the next few years

Maybe. More likely they'll only be competitive in 10+ years.

> Europe also has some key strategic cards to play when it comes to hardware, such as access to TSMC.

Then why haven't they played them? Both Japan and America got commitments for significant domestic advanced node fab and packaging facilities from TSMC. Europe only got 40k WSPMs of already-outdated 12nm+ lines.

Further: Which European company is designing or will soon design competitive CPUs/GPUs/switching to hand off to TSMC? Will a European company cut in line for cutting-edge tools, conjure up IP and know-how from nothing, and start selling HBM and DRAM, too? And will all these fantasy companies be decoupling from US EDA tools, as well?

Finally: If you're saying that Europe will be able to outplay the US in a zero-sum game for access to TSMC wafer spins, you might want to consider also the strategic cards that the US can play to prevent that.

> Europe will be a consumer/bystander in the AI race, not a protagonist

That's not just likely, that's absolutely guaranteed. Sorry, Mr. Draghi.

> For that, you don't need a lot of hardware

How do you serve inference at scale without a lot of hardware? If both US and China are supply-constrained for GPUs that they're turning into high-value-added products/services, why would they give Europe any hardware at all?

If I can turn a $100k GPU into $1M of value, there aren't enough GPUs in the world, your companies don't have the fiscal firepower to be price-setters, and your products/services compete with mine on global markets--why the fuck would I sell you any GPUs? Charity?

And if the plan is for European computing to remain totally dependent on US and CN... what are we even talking about here?

> But it can lose that post in the future

Sure, nothing lasts forever. But I thought this was about European computational sovereignty, not dependence on the US specifically. I guess not: Depending on the US is a crisis, but depending on Qatar and China is A-OK. What could go wrong?
by sukinai | 2026-02-26 20:47:33+00:00
This is super useful. I really like the idea of treating memory as an SLO surface rather than just a storage layer.

Retrieval precision@k against a small gold set is a very strong suggestion. That feels like a much better early warning signal than just latency or token usage, because those can look fine while memory quality is quietly degrading.

Write amplification and duplicate-rate tracking also make a lot of sense. Near-duplicate buildup is exactly the kind of thing that makes a memory system look healthy on the outside while slowly poisoning recall underneath.

I have basic duplicate detection in /nemp:health, but I haven’t framed it yet in terms of retrieval quality metrics the way you described. That’s a really good direction. Thank you
by pavel_lishin | 2026-02-26 20:47:37+00:00
> This is perhaps a more common opinion than you think.

Oh, I know it's a common opinion. That's why I'm so upset about it.

> the ease of law enforcement comes at the expense of liberty, which so many of the aforementioned opinion-holders also claim to be concerned about.

Because they're convinced that because they have nothing to hide, the law will never turn against them.
by monitron | 2026-02-26 20:47:54+00:00
Just a regular brag, I'd say! He mentions it at the top of every blog post, including irrelevant details like the case. "Weird flex, but OK"

The visuals are neat looking but I was hoping to see more details like correlating capture recency with countries, population, economic status, etc. to see what causes areas to get the most and least love from Google.
by almosthere | 2026-02-26 20:48:14+00:00
For all of those, there is a gartner hype cycle. The thing that matters is when it comes out the back end, is 1m, 1b, 6b people using it?

for all the things you listed, less than 1000 people are using it, with AI we're clearly not finished with the gartner hype cycle, but the back end is going to be over a billion users.
by bsder | 2026-02-26 20:48:20+00:00
> It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale, did it?

It's really hard to beat injection molding for scale.

However, what 3D printing did shift was building molds and prototypes. And that shifted small volume manufacturing--one offs and small volumes are now practical that didn't used to be. In addition, you can iterate more easily over multiple versions.

The limiting factor, however, has always been the brain power designing the thing. YouTube is littered with videos that someone wants to build a "thing" and then spends 10-20 iterations figuring out everything they didn't know going into the project. This is no different from "real" projects, but your experienced engineering staff probably only take 5 iterations instead of 20.
by yvdriess | 2026-02-26 20:48:21+00:00
The problem is that there is no baseline for measuring GC overhead. You cannot turn it off, you can only replace and compare with different strategies. For example sbrk is technically a noop GC, but that also has overhead and impact because it will not compact objects and give you bad cache behavior. (It illustrates the OP's point that it is not enough to measure pauses, sbrk has no pauses but gets outperformed easily.)

You could stop collecting performance counters around GC phases, but you even if you are not measuring the CPU still runs through its instructions, causing the second order effects. And as you mentioned too-short-to-measure barriers and other bookkeeping overheads (updating ref counters etc) or simply the fact that some tag bits or object slots are reserved all impact performance.

There is a good write-up of the problem and a way to estimate the cost based on different GC strategies, as you suggested, here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.07880

The way I found to measure a no-GC baseline is to compare them in an accurate workload performance simulator.
Mark all GC and allocator related code regions and have the simulator skip all those instructions. Critically that needs to be a simulator that does not deal with the functional simulation, but gets it's instructions from a functional simulator, emulator or PIN tool that does execute everything. It's laborious, not very fast and impractical for production work. But, it's the only way I found to answer a question like "What is the absolite overhead of memory management in Python?". (Answer: lower bound walltime sits around +25% avg, heavily depending on the pyperformance benchmark)
by normalocity | 2026-02-26 20:48:26+00:00
Fair points. I guess I was asking if this is a new, or fundamentally different problem from pre-AI. I could be over-simplifying -- what do you think?

This makes me think of risk assessment in general. There's a tradeoff between risk and reward. More risk might mean more _potential_, but it's more potential for both benefit and ruin.

Do you think we'll figure out a good balance?
by jen20 | 2026-02-26 20:48:51+00:00
Even better, IIRC on the Treo the phone key would turn it on?

I had a Treo 600 and and then 650 from around 2003 until 2007 when the iPhone came out. The 600 was among the best devices I've ever had. Rock solid, did exactly what it said it did. The 650 would crash randomly just sitting there. Not quite as bad as a Windows phone of the era, but a substantial regression.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-26 20:49:16+00:00
Instant corrective upvote.

Yes, consuming is an experience, and experience is one of the ideal things to do on vacation in particular.

Surely it's still legal to have just as many new and rewarding experiences, in a new or familiar environment for the same duration of time, and none of them are actual consumer activities.

It can be as fantastic as possible without doing any more significant or out-of-the ordinary consumption than otherwise.

If you can't get the most out of both plain experiences and dedicated consumption, any travel might not be as worthwhile as it could be.
by aziaziazi | 2026-02-26 20:49:40+00:00
Lovely story but the beautification is a bit off.

> Hardin Woods would bake [...] using fresh ingredients local to her home in Salem, Oregon

> She baked her first pie, a lemon meringue

> The next day Hardin Woods made a peach pie

> After that came a chocolate cream pie

Does lime, peach and chocolate ripen within the same season in Oregon? Vickie cooking for is community is already touching, this claim about freshness and locality is skimmed by people who are already convinced, spotted by those who disagree and raise critics of the skeptics.
by don-code | 2026-02-26 20:50:11+00:00
I'm sort of curious where the law stands on this (I am not a lawyer).

Since it has a license plate on it, it in theory displays some ownership info. Is that enough for me to say, "it's clearly not mine now"? If it didn't, does that give me any right to take something off a public roadway?

Obviously, I know that the letter of the law, and what actually will be enforced, are two different things. Taking something that belongs to CBP would almost definitely be prosecuted in this case, regardless of whether it's legally fair game to do so.

It appears that I can't direct-link to it, but look up case 19S-CR-00528 on public.courts.in.gov - this was a case in which the Supreme Court of Indiana overturned an earlier ruling that removing a GPS monitoring device from your own car, when you weren't aware it was there, was theft.
by jmalicki | 2026-02-26 20:50:14+00:00
I know multiple people who went to CMU who dropped out of CS to CE because they couldn't handle the rigor of the OS fundamentals course required for the CS major, as the OS course where you had to implement large parts of a kernel was required for CS, but not for CE.

Yes, you need solid fundamentals. I am saying CE/EE is not where you get them unless you actually are designing circuits. If you're doing the hard tech like you're describing, take the more academically rigorous program of CS instead of the easy CE/EE program where you learn irrelevant skills like circuit layout (that is now done by an AI anyway!) rather than very relevant skills like OS and networking, and algorithms which is not required by EE.
by efreak | 2026-02-26 20:50:24+00:00
Unfortunately if you don't start out using that, then your email address is already spread across the web. And back when I was looking at gitlab/bitbucket/etc for feature comparison, each forge used their own domain and couldn't be persuaded to combine commits from multiple addresses into your own profile (to be clear, that's not really necessary, but it does make it more difficult to find a commit created by someone when their commit address isn't the address associated with their account)
by ianburrell | 2026-02-26 20:50:58+00:00
You can buy styluses for iPhone (or any smartphone) but they have round squishy tips for the capacitive touch screen. They aren't any better than a finger, probably cause the display is tuned for a finger. I only use mine when phone or tablet is on stand.

Apple could put the technology for Apple Pencil in iPhone, but probably not worth the cost for number of people who would use it.
by WhatsTheBigIdea | 2026-02-26 20:51:37+00:00
Agreed that staffing the bureaucracy with good people costs a lot.

There is a large opportunity to simplify and rationalize the regulations. This would dramatically reduce the cost of both bureaucracy and compliance. In addition to massively reduced cost, it would enable people in CA to do more cool stuff faster!

But simplification, rationalization, and acceleration is not in the interest of the bureaucracy or the incumbents... so we are very unlikely to see change until there is an existential crisis.
by Humanista75 | 2026-02-26 20:51:43+00:00
It's neither purely random 7 nor like drawing from a bag. It's a little bit more complex.

If I were to explain it the technical way:
I use a custom Linear Congruential Generator (LCG) seeded by the current date (YYYYMMDD) to ensure deterministic gameplay—everyone gets the exact same piece sequence every day. I don't use flat probabilities; instead, I run the LCG output through a weighted roulette that changes based on the day of the week (e.g., higher probability for 'I' pieces on Mondays, higher for 'S' and 'Z' pieces on Sundays). Lastly, there's a system to mitigate consecutive identical pieces.

In simpler terms:
I use a formula based on the current date to generate a different sequence of pieces every day, guaranteeing it's exactly the same for all users on that specific day. Then, I adjust this sequence using a probability matrix so that on Mondays you get more of the easy pieces (like the line or square), and on Sundays you get more of the hard ones (like S or Z).

This is the probability matrix:

const pieceProbabilities = {
1: [0.20, 0.18, 0.16, 0.14, 0.14, 0.09, 0.09], // Monday
2: [0.18, 0.17, 0.15, 0.14, 0.14, 0.11, 0.11], // Tuesday
3: [0.16, 0.15, 0.15, 0.14, 0.14, 0.13, 0.13], // Wednesday
4: [0.14, 0.14, 0.14, 0.14, 0.14, 0.15, 0.15], // Thursday
5: [0.12, 0.12, 0.12, 0.15, 0.15, 0.17, 0.17], // Friday
6: [0.10, 0.12, 0.12, 0.15, 0.15, 0.18, 0.18], // Saturday
7: [0.09, 0.10, 0.13, 0.15, 0.15, 0.19, 0.19] // Sunday
};

I hope this explains it well!
by ozgung | 2026-02-26 20:52:03+00:00
> 3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX.

I’ve never heard half of the things and the other half is mostly consumer electronics or specific product names. The closest example here is Quantum Computing, which is also a serious technology in development. I think for the OP these are all tech buzzwords that he invests in without understanding what they really are. That’s why he thinks all these unrelated things are the same.
by lelandbatey | 2026-02-26 20:52:08+00:00
They do have a billing check, but that check is looking at "eventually consistent" billing data which could have arbitrary delays or be checked out-of-order compared to how it occurred IRL. This is a strategy that's typically fine when the margin of over-billing is small, maybe 1% or less. I take it from your description that the actual over-billing is more like dozens of dollars, potentially more than single-digit percentages on top of the subscription price. Here's hoping they tighten up metering <> billing.
by svilen_dobrev | 2026-02-26 20:52:20+00:00
> will partner with local nonprofits

mmh. be very careful when choosing those. Esp. in former socialistic countries, and esp. in some of them (hint), where $$$ scheming has become bread-and-butter of the.. kind-of-former-but-new aparatchiks.. it's like an official mafia. Electrically speaking, they manage to find ways to ground and leech on any potential.. $100 or $100M alike.