MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by horsawlarway | 2026-02-17 17:01:02+00:00
Not really sure why this is getting downvoted.

I don't really think we need to forgive student loans - I think they should absolutely be dischargeable through bankruptcy, though.

Bankruptcy isn't a "get out of jail free" card - it puts a huge burden on a student relatively soon after graduating that makes it harder to start a family or buy a home. So it incentives are still aligned for the students taking the loans.

But the option that a student defaults brings some real light and transparency into a loan system that just feels wildly disconnected from reality right now. If a student can't pay the loan back with the job options in the field and is like to default... don't issue the loan.

I think it's absolutely abusive that student debt can't be discharged, and is pretty heinous as policy.
by reilly3000 | 2026-02-17 17:01:05+00:00
Maybe they choose not to exude those traits by choice (when a leader slot opens up), and can use them when they are circumstantially relevant. I have gone full founder, and I’m not happy with who I was. It’s an IC’s life for me.

The only thing is, we’re all managers now. We’ve been given a fleet of robots to support a set of outcomes. We have to set expectations, monitor outputs, coach, intervene, step back, onboard new team members, train regularly, make sure they have the tools they need, etc and so on. Are those “soft skills” or just engineering? I’m curious if and how people are lacking in these areas when it’s just text.
Show HN: 6cy – Experimental streaming archive format with per-block codecs
by yihac1 | 2026-02-17 17:01:08+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been experimenting with archive format design and built 6cy as a research project.

The goal is not to replace zip/7z, but to explore:
• block-level codec polymorphism (different compression per block)
• streaming-first layout (no global seek required)
• better crash recovery characteristics
• plugin-based architecture so proprietary codecs can exist without changing the format

Right now this is an experimental v0.x format.
The specification may still change and compatibility is not guaranteed yet.

I’m mainly looking for feedback on the format design rather than performance comparisons.

Thanks for taking a look.
Trata (YC W25) Is Hiring Founding Engineers (NYC)
by emc329 | 2026-02-17 17:01:15+00:00
We're killing Bloomberg chat (their crown jewel). We're building the fastest growing network of buyside investors. We facilitate voice conversations between investors on demand and are creating a library of these transcripts for our users to read. We work with a lot of interesting folks and some of the most well known funds in the world.

We are onboarding 1-2 funds a day and recently took in more money at a mark up from existing and new investors.

Join us- https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/trata/jobs/FTbjpSQ-fou...
by Analemma_ | 2026-02-17 17:01:32+00:00
Do they? When I was at AWS in 2019-2021 there were some servers in the fleet— not many, but they definitely existed— which dated to before 2010. Maybe it depends on the type:class, but I think hyperscalers run hardware until it dies, then junk it. Where have you seen hyperscaler hardware for sale?
by devmor | 2026-02-17 17:01:37+00:00
> But it's the jagged edges, the unorthodox and surprising prickly bits, that tear open a hole in the inattention of your reader, that actually gets your ideas into their heads.

This brings to mind what I think is a great description of the process LLMs exert on prose: sanding.

It's an algorithmic trend towards the median, thus they are sanding down your words until they're a smooth average of their approximate neighbors.
by MSFT_Edging | 2026-02-17 17:01:42+00:00
Probably an Amendment that needs amending.

It was used en masse with turn of the century vagrancy laws to arrest Black people who didn't have enough cash on hand, then send them to other states to work and/or die in coal mines as essentially slave labor.

Even happened to children who committed minor crimes.

The 13th Amendment provides incentive to incarcerate, and with private prison industries existing period, that incentive probably should not exist at all.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2026-02-17 17:01:46+00:00
The German model is pretty good. Tuition prices are reasonable. If you're studying something statistically considered a good investment - you get free tuition. If not, you pay for it.

The American model is terrible. The tuition prices are insane because no one pays for it now, and there's endless appetite to lend because your borrower is a systemically non-financially literate CHILD who is signing away their future wages with no right to default EVER.

No one would ever lend to the majority of these at these insane tuition prices. We'd quickly end up with reasonable tuitions like in Germany. And then most of the problem goes away.

Suddenly schools and degrees that WEREN'T good investments become good investments again.
by xnx | 2026-02-17 17:01:58+00:00
Definitely agree that LLMs are a big deal, but I'm holding out hope that they are a net positive. Even the current wave of false/fake news content could have benefits if it results in emphasizing chains of trust to reliable information.

Are there other technologies you think the negatives outweigh the positives? Leaded gasoline and paint come to mind for me.
by ckrapu | 2026-02-17 17:02:16+00:00
I don't like this article. In particular, this section is especially poor:

> Block 1: We couldn't calculate fast enough. Solution: The GPU.

> Block 2: We couldn't train deep enough. Solution: Transformer architecture.

> Block 3: We can't "think" fast enough. Solution: Groq’s LPU.

#2 is outright wrong. Deep networks were made viable from residual layers and their refinement. #3 is also incorrect; "think" = compute so this is the same statement as #1.

Also, the "limestone" analogy is pretty weak.
by barrkel | 2026-02-17 17:02:18+00:00
Have you not seen it any time you put any substantial bit of your own writing through an LLM, for advice?

I disagree pretty strongly with most of what an LLM suggests by way of rewriting. They're absolutely appalling writers. If you're looking for something beyond corporate safespeak or stylistic pastiche, they drain the blood out of everything.

The skin of their prose lacks the luminous translucency, the subsurface scattering, that separates the dead from the living.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-02-17 17:02:43+00:00
Are you talking about the link in your parent comment? It's a judgment that overturns the guy's placement on a public registry. (He does seem to be placed on a different registry not accessible to the public.)

He is appealing his placement on the registry on three grounds:

1. He can't be guilty of a qualifying offense, because he has no prior conviction;

2. The officer who put him on the registry did so solely on the basis that his risk of reoffending was "moderate", when it was also necessary to find that he posed a "moderate" danger to the public;

3. He did not in fact pose a danger to the public.

And the judgment rules against him on argument 1 while ruling for him on arguments 2 and 3, nullifying his registration.

Given that this judgment overturns a judgment below, it is evidence that you can be placed on a public registry for purely spurious reasons. That's what happened originally, and it's what was affirmed in the judgment below.
by lkey | 2026-02-17 17:02:44+00:00
Is your argument that because these territorial incursions have not been successful to the degree the the Israeli government desired, that those incursions are unacceptable to resist?

> Isreal[sic] is a tiny sliver on that scale and has not expanded in the last 50 years.

My sibling in [your preferred Deity], you cannot spell Israel?? What are we doing?

Do you acknowledge that expanding militarily is always illegal, or not? You can't make an argument like "Israel is just a smol bean that needs lebensraum" and make it sound normal in 2026.

I want middle-aged Jewish people that have 'purchased' stolen land in the West Bank to move back home to the States and be my neighbors again! That isn't 'wiping them out', quite the contrary!

Forestalling that, I want integration and democracy and an accounting of what was stolen, along with reparations. I want the children of that land to grow up and not understand why their parents were in conflict. To barely comprehend how it could have been so bad.

This is what I want for the United States as well. An accounting and reparations for both the decedents of the enslaved and those we committed genocide against, within our borders and without. We never completed reconstruction and we are all poorer for it.

This is why the current administration is tearing down monuments that remember our past, they'd rather live in a muscular fantasy of restoration forgotten 'white' greatness than acknowledge what we owe to each other. That we must find solidarity and love in shared humanity to resist the forces that divide us.
by novatrope | 2026-02-17 17:03:08+00:00
Very much like my experience with Claude. First, gave it some simple tasks (Getting this error on my site, etc) The results were surprisingly good. Then I started giving Claude broader tasks, and learning how to write the prompts. Now I have come to the point where I haven't written a line of code in several weeks (quite a change for someone who learned to program on a Burroughs b5500 back in the 70's) So I guess I am a convert.
by chasd00 | 2026-02-17 17:03:12+00:00
> Student loans currently carry no risk. They can't be discharged. Interest is the payment to the lender to accept risk.

you make a good point, if there's no risk there should be no interest. Or at worst, the interest rate should track COLA adjustments to social security. Some basic adjustment relative to inflation so the lender gets back what they lent out.

Now that schools can pay their athletes I hope the rest of the student body take notice and start asking questions about school funds allocation. It should make it plain as day to the average student that their school has plenty of cash and choses to force them into debt.
by mrnotcrazy | 2026-02-17 17:03:46+00:00
I have agents run at night to work through complicated TTRPG campaigns. For example I have a script that runs all night simulating NPCs before a session. The NPCs have character sheets + motivations and the LLMs do one prompt per NPC in stages so combat can happen after social interactions. IF you run enough of these and make the prompts well written you can save a lot of time. You can't like... simulate the start of a campaign and then jump in. Its more like you know there is a big event, you already have characters, you can throw them in a folder to see how things would cook all else being equal and then use that to riff off of when you actually write your notes.

I think of my agents like golems from disc world, they are defined by their script. Adding texture to them improves the results so I usually keep a running tally of what they have worked on and add that to the header. They are a prompt in a folder that a script loops over and sends to gemeni(spawning an agent and moving to the next golem script)

I also was curious to see if it could be used it for developing some small games, whenever I would run into a problem I couldn't be bothered to solve or needed a variety of something I would let a few llms work on it so in the morning I had something to bounce off. I had pretty good success with this for RTS games and shooting games where variety is something well documented and creativity is allowed. I imagine there could be a use here, I've been calling it dredging cause I imagine myself casting a net down into the slop to find valuables.

I did have an idea where all my sites and UI would be checked against some UI heuristic like Oregon State's inclusivity heuristic but results have been mixed so far. The initial reports are fine, the implementation plans are ok but it seems like the loop of examine, fix, examine... has too much drift? That does seem solvable but I have a concern that this is like two lines that never touch but get closer as you approach infinity.

There is some usefulness in running these guys all night but I'm still figuring out when its useful and when its a waste of resources.
by tristor | 2026-02-17 17:05:19+00:00
Yeah that quote fundamentally misunderstands what it meant to make depositors whole. That's not bailing out the bank, it's bailing out the depositors, which is exactly what the FDIC is for. In the case of SVB most of the depositors were businesses, but in any case depositing money in a bank is intended to not be a risky activity at all, and FDIC is part of how the government acts to ensure that is so.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-17 17:05:19+00:00
> Why can I, as an 18 year old, sign for a loan that _cannot_ be forgiven, graduate into a crashed economy, and still be held accountable for choices that impact me when I only had a small part in them?

Because you took the money promising to pay it back, spent it on something you wanted, and now it's gone and someone has to pay the money you spent.

It's like saying why can I, as an 18 year old, purposely drive a car into someone else's house, cause six figures in costs, and then be expected to be on the hook for that because auto liability insurance doesn't cover intentional acts? You're the one who chose to do that.

The price of tuition and the expectation that you pay back the money are not secrets kept from you until after you've already signed, or if they somehow are then maybe fix that.
by randusername | 2026-02-17 17:05:40+00:00
> But then I think about the next generation who will be coming along and bringing with them, against all odds, a love for learning and creating. Because that is a human thing. I try to imagine a beginner somehow coming across one of my pages and maybe the way I worded the explanation is what finally makes the topic make sense. That’s good motivation.

I think this is a great take. Culture is not a monolith in space or time. Write for the rebels far away or the ones yet to come.
by hluska | 2026-02-17 17:05:53+00:00
I’m not the person you replied to but I took a look at the data and this is an interesting one. You found a really cool data set and this will be fun.

Consider the top four most expensive golf balls on your current list:

TaylorMade 2021 TP5x (3+1 Box) 4DZ Golf Ball Pack, White — uses 4DZ in title, 48.0 in unit count in product specs.

Bridgestone Golf Tour B RXS Quadfecta - nothing in the title, unit count in product specs is 4.0. This one shows 4 dozen in a different spot than other balls.

TaylorMade Golf 2024 TP5 Golf Balls 3+1 Box Four Dozen — Four dozen in the title, unit count in product specs is 1.0 but it has 4.0 dozen in the same div as the Bridgestone balls.

Srixon Z Star Yellow Golf Balls - Buy 2 DZ Get 1 DZ Free — Title shows buy 2 DZ get 1 free. That’s represented as 2+1 or 3+1 in other data. In product specs it shows a unit count of 1.0.

— In that extremely limited sample, the product weight is a pretty good metric to show that the unit count is flawed though that only works in comparison to others. I wonder if you could do a multi pass approach, where you sort data first and then do a unit count versus weight check to find outliers and then start rocking through the titles? You’ll still end up digging through a lot of edge cases and that won’t be much fun but a multi pass would at least give you some insight into those weird edge cases.
by delis-thumbs-7e | 2026-02-17 17:05:58+00:00
I personally think “generative AI” is a misnomer. More I understand the mathematics behind machine learning more I am convinced that it should not be used to generate text, images or anything that is meant for people to consume, even if it is the most blandest of email. Sometimes you might get lucky, but most of the time you only get what the most boring person in the most boring cocktail party would say if forced to be creative with a gun pointed to his head. It can help in multitude of other ways, help human in the creative process itself, but generating anything even mildly creative by itself… I’ll pass.
Thank HN: You helped save 33,241 lives
by chaseadam17 | 2026-02-17 17:06:18+00:00
13 years ago, we launched Watsi.org with a Show HN [1].

For nearly a year, this community drove so much traffic that we couldn’t list patients fast enough. Then pg saw us on HN, wrote us our first big check, and accepted us as the first YC nonprofit (W13). The next few years were a whirlwind.

I was a young, naive founder with just enough experience to know I wanted Watsi to be more efficient, transparent, and innovative than most nonprofits. We spent 24/7 talking to users and coding. We did things that don’t scale. We tried our best to be walking, talking pg essays.

Over the years we learned that product/market fit is different for nonprofits. Not many people wake up and think, "I'd love to donate to a nonprofit today" with the same oomph that they think, "I'd love a coffee" or "I'd like to make more money."

No matter how much effort we put into fundraising, donations grew linearly, while requests for care grew exponentially. I felt caught in the middle. After investing everything I had, I eventually burned out and transitioned to the board.

I made a classic founder mistake and intertwined my self-worth with Watsi's success. I believed that if I could somehow help every patient, I was a good person, but if I let down some patients, which became inevitable, I was a bad person.

This was exacerbated by seeing our for-profit YC batch mates raise massive rounds. I felt like a failure for not scaling Watsi faster, but eventually we accepted reality and set Watsi on more of a slow, steady, and sustainable trajectory.

Now that I have perspective, I'm incredibly proud of what the org has accomplished and grateful to everyone who has done a tour of duty to support us. Watsi donors have donated over $20M to fund 33,241 surgeries, and we have a good shot of helping patients for a long time to come.

In a world of fast growth and fast crashes, here's a huge thank you to the HN users who have stuck by Watsi, or any other important cause, even when it's not on the front page. I believe it embodies the best of humanity. Thanks HN!

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424081
by privatiser | 2026-02-17 17:06:49+00:00
I built Privatiser, to allow the pasting of configs, logs, and code into ChatGPT/Claude but without risk leaking API keys, IPs, passwords, and customer data.

It detects and replaces sensitive values with consistent pseudonyms — so the AI can still reason about your text (e.g., "these two servers share the same IP") without seeing the real data. Then you paste the AI's response back and restore everything with one click.

What it catches: API keys (AWS, OpenAI, GitHub, Slack, etc.), JWTs, bearer tokens, SSH keys, connection strings, IPs, domains, emails, phone numbers, credit cards, SSNs, AWS ARNs/account IDs, Azure/GCP identifiers, UUIDs, and 200+ keyword-based patterns for passwords, hostnames, usernames, database names, etc.

It also understands natural language context — "password is secret123" and "host set to prod-db.internal" both get caught, not just key = "value" syntax.

Everything runs locally in your browser. No servers, no telemetry. Available as a Chrome/Firefox (Firefox is currently pending review) extension and a web tool.

Would love feedback on patterns you'd want added or things it misses.
by benzible | 2026-02-17 17:06:51+00:00
"Unobjectionable editorial reasons" is Orwellian framing. This is not how journalism works, and the fact that a major news org is now being operated this way is a five alarm fire, not business as usual.

The segment was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi wrote internally that "pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one."

The critical point: Alfonsi's team had requested comment from the White House, State Department, and DHS. They refused. Weiss then used that silence to kill the story, saying they needed "the principals on the record and on camera." As Alfonsi put it, "Government silence is a statement, not a VETO." Accept that standard and the administration has a pocket veto over any story simply by not responding.

Weiss's other objections included demanding the men be called "illegal immigrants" instead of "Venezuelan migrants" (many had applied for asylum and were not here illegally), and pushing for a Stephen Miller interview, which the administration had already declined - hence the "pocket veto". The decision came days after Trump publicly criticized CBS.
by MarsIronPI | 2026-02-17 17:06:59+00:00
> I challenge you and anyone else reading this to find an example of someone who is on the sex offender registry due to public urination.

When I was in high school, our school police officer once gave our class a talk about how to stay off that list. He strongly warned us against sending nudes, because he claimed 18-year-olds getting nudes from their 17-year-old girlfriends was a common way for 18-year-olds to get on the registry.

So, no it's not a concrete example and it's not as non-sexual as public urination but it's still a thing cops are telling young adults to take seriously.
by co_king_5 | 2026-02-17 17:07:19+00:00
> I think AI writing is better used for ideation

It shocks me when proponents of AI writing for ideation aren't concerned with *Metaphoric Cleansing* and *Lexical Flattening* (to use two of the terms defined in the article)

Doesn't it concern you that the explanation of a concept by the AI may represent only a highly distorted caricature of the way that concept is actually understood by those who use it fluently?

Don't get me wrong, I think that LLMs are very useful as a sort of search engine for yet-unknown terms. But once you know *how* to talk about a concept (meaning you understand enough jargon to do traditional research), I find that I'm far better off tracking down books and human authored resources than I am trying to get the LLM to regurgitate its training data.
Show HN: Agent Breadcrumbs – Unified Work Log Across Claude, Codex, OpenClaw
by ejcho623 | 2026-02-17 17:07:28+00:00
Even within our small team the different AI clients (Codex, Claude Code/Work, Cursor, ChatGPT) used for coding, marketing, product is exploding and getting hard to track.

Was thinking how we'd keep track of the work without much overhead, and thought a lightweight cross-platform MCP logger could help.

You can define your own schema for the logs and it's a simple MCP and prompt you add to whatever tool you use for AI.

It's been reliable for Codex, ChatGPT, Claude and even cron-based jobs on OpenClaw. It's also nice to see all the work log aggregated across clients.

Please give it a try and test it with the client you're using. Should be a 2 min setup. Would be great to get any feedback if it's useful for you.