MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jandrewrogers | 2026-02-14 15:35:03+00:00
Not concrete blocks but steel-reinforced concrete. Just about anything will survive an earthquake with enough steel in it. This becomes expensive when building to an extreme seismic standard due to the amount of materials and labor involved.

Some recent skyscrapers in severe seismic zones don't use conventional reinforced concrete. Their cores are built from welded steel plates, between which they pour concrete. It is much less labor-intensive and purportedly has excellent seismic properties.
by bentcorner | 2026-02-14 15:35:14+00:00
I met a user from an antique land
Who said: Two squares of a clip of video
Stand in at the end of the search. Near them,
Lossly compressed, a profile with a pfp, whose smile,
And vacant eyes, and shock of content baiting,
Tell that its creator well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these unclicked things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the title these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, Top Youtuber of All Time:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and like and subscribe!"
No other video beside remains. Round the decay
Of that empty profile, boundless and bare
The lone and level page stretch far away.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-14 15:35:17+00:00
No, it's not just a cultural thing. There are very real problems with standard Rust facilities not being accessible/usable from an unsafe context even though the C/C++/Zig idiomatic equivalent would be (i.e. would not invoke instant UB), and these problems are solvable. Sophisticated Rust developers are aware of the issue.

> If anything, the Rust language would benefit from adding as much friction to unsafe code as possible

The friction is there already. I'm not advocating for getting rid of explicit 'unsafe' markings, 'SAFETY' comments or even clunky boilerplate, just for closing a very real gap in capability.
by benstopics | 2026-02-14 15:35:26+00:00
Most people enjoyed it. It is the same as the game. Most people like the remaster direction, a subgroup vehemently dislike specific design decisions and they don't always overlap. The more people that learn about the game the volume of feedback goes up and so does the volume of negative feedback. Just telling you feel my perspective, take it when a grain of salt. So you learn to take negatively, especially emotionally charged negativity, with a grain of salt. And you have a compulsion to ignore it. But I'm a very self aware person and I try to see the other side. I may not understand it, I may not agree, but I try to listen and understand. But to say I blanket missing the criticism is a flippant remark in my opinion. I'm not an idiot... It's easy to tell AI was involved and it turned many people off. But they also crap on the stuff I wrote from scratch. So is it AI or just that I suck at writing? It was just to share the story. I reread it multiple times and I enjoy the story even knowing it like the back is my hand. I lived it. I write stuff for me. I remastered the game for me and to share with like minded people. Honestly, the article being anti-AI rage bait is a low pass filter for people who could have said anything, and instead, they chose to NIT the article. But I try to be open minded and do better, but I am only human, not an AI, I have emotions and opinions. I'm sure most of those opinions are flawed. But I'm not mad at any of the criticism and I appreciate it.
by lazide | 2026-02-14 15:36:16+00:00
Most European housing is made of concrete, stone, or brick.

It absolutely is different from typical US housing, because unless you want to run surface mount everything (which most people don’t in residential), it’s an insane amount of work to run new anything.

‘40’s homes in the US, you typically just tear down to the studs, re-run new stuff, and throw up new drywall. Boom, done.

Unless you’re in a place that did block/brick etc like some of the big cities, then yeah it’s a nightmare there too.
by mrugge | 2026-02-14 15:36:20+00:00
Connoisseurs of calligraphy may disagree.

My point was that humans are very connected to and identify deeply with their tools. Probabilistic autocomplete we are so excited about these days is just another slab on a deep stack of abstractions humans use to interact with the world.

A stick and the campfire are also tools that do not pre-exist. Just try to make a campfire without a matches or try to make a stick without a cutting tool. Also try to write the next great novel using a stick and a campfire instead or a fountain pen. Tools that are available become the defining factor of the great works a generation can produce. Nothing is different this time.
by Lerc | 2026-02-14 15:36:24+00:00
There is no goalpost moving here.

I read the article.

My claim is as it has always been. If we accept that the misquotes exist it does not follow that they were caused by hallucinations? To tell that we would still need additional evidence. The logical thing to ask would be; Has it been shown or admitted that the quotes were hallucinations?
by silverquiet | 2026-02-14 15:36:58+00:00
I'm quite capable of snark and I wouldn't say that I was being particularly so, but maybe something adjacent to it. Mostly I think this is amusingly naive. America has a history of attempts to create utopian communities, but I'm unaware of any that have persisted for terribly long. I think the one I'm most fond of are the Shakers, whose biggest legacy is their carpentry skills which is a hobby of mine.

I didn't really get an explicit yes or no out of the above, but I take it to mean no? That's the interesting question to me - who would be allowed to join such a community, and if someone was discovered to be undesirable for one reason or another, what would be done with them?
by zdw | 2026-02-14 15:37:05+00:00
The main problem with technology coverage is you have one of 3 types of writers in the space:

1. Prosumer/enthusiasts who are somewhat technical, but mostly excitement

2. People who have professional level skills and also enjoy writing about it

3. Companies who write things because they sell things

A lot of sites are in category 1 - mostly excitement/enthusiasm, and feels.

Anandtech, TechReport, and to some extent Arstechnica (specially John Siracusa's OS X reviews) are the rare category 2.

Category 3 are things like the Puget Systems blog where they benchmark hardware, but also sell it, and it functions more as a buyer information.

The problem is that category 2 is that they can fairly easily get jobs in industry that pay way more than writing for a website. I'd imagine that when Anand joined Apple, this was likely the case, and if so that makes total sense.
by ch_sm | 2026-02-14 15:37:10+00:00
> Safari is still working on pulling theirs back up.

not sure about this take, given that chrome‘s rendering engine was famously based on Safari‘s - WebKit - before they forked it (Blink). V8 was indeed faster than Safari‘s JS engine at the time. However, today, Safari is objectively faster in both rendering (WK) and JS performance (JSCore).
by kccqzy | 2026-02-14 15:37:27+00:00
I’ll use Ghostty as an example because that’s the only software I use that I know is written in Zig. It’s also a moderately complex project not a toy project.

Its Zig 0.15 effort started in August and was only complete in October (see first PR at https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/8372). And many issues were encountered and solved along the way. And of course during all of this they also had to report an issue in Zig itself: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/24627
by foxygen | 2026-02-14 15:37:27+00:00
You are completely ignoring the impact that having billions of dollars at your disposal to spend on keeping users addicted to your platform can have. There is no way a free platform can compete with X/Instagram/TikTok, even if such platform had a better product(which they do btw). Just look at Whatsapp/iMessage, both are terrible apps, there are MANY better options, with way more features, and somehow they are still the most used messaging apps in the Western.
by piva00 | 2026-02-14 15:37:30+00:00
He wants to focus on community building (as stated in the letter), wouldn't you say that communities in developed countries have been hollowed out? It's also one of the most important aspects of humanity, we are community builders first, that's how we always survived.

Being atomised hasn't improved how meaningful our lives are even though we created a lot of technology going that way. Can you say we have more meaning in life by being splitted apart? We have lots of entertainment and things to keep us busy but for a lot of people gratification comes from doing things together.

As a personal anecdote: I've personally enjoyed much more my times during summer helping a community of friends to build houses in their land than any time I was just travelling around. I pass by their houses every few weeks, have dinner with them here and there, and feel extremely happy to see those people living in structures I helped to build together with them. It's much more meaningful to me than any software I helped to develop used by literal hundreds of millions of people.

The lack of community untethers people from being humans, you can clearly see that in anyone that is chronically online.
by din707 | 2026-02-14 15:37:36+00:00
Hey everyone,

I’m a solo dev and I’ve been working on a project called PromptMate. I wanted a way to turn my 5-word "lazy" prompts into professional frameworks without having to manually type out persona instructions every time.

The Logic: It uses a Next.js backend (on Render) to wrap your input in a "Senior Developer" or "Marketing Pro" persona. It's totally free and I built it with 0 budget.

I need your help with two things:

Does the output actually feel better than a raw prompt to you?

What other "Personas" would be useful? (Thinking about adding a 'Lawyer' or 'Scientific Researcher' next).
by srean | 2026-02-14 15:37:37+00:00
His point was when you eat more calories than you need, then the body can afford to be sloppy (inefficient) about absorbing all those calories.

When you cut down a little on food but are still above or at your daily calorie requirement, the body can adapt by increasing its conversion absorption efficiency and in that case one wouldn't lose weight, because metabolically it's still absorbing the same amount of calories.
by gspetr | 2026-02-14 15:38:50+00:00
B5 in a fantasy setting wouldn't make much sense, the key issue is the namesake.

What would be the equivalent of B5 in a fantasy? A floating sky island? A neutral world in a multiverse? Both have been done, but I've never heard of one actually being the centerpiece and the namesake of a series. There's also the issue of "porting" B4 into such a setting.

Having a series of "prototype" worlds or prototype floating islands would likely make the series overly contrived.
by throwaway150 | 2026-02-14 15:39:38+00:00
> it just feels so low effort when it's just "look what AI made"

I don't know how many more of these posts will hit HN front page. It's like this forum has been taken over by vibecoder sloppers. what is the intellectual curiosity in "Look, AI made this stuff" if there is not even an analysis of what was done. What are we supposed to learn from it or be curious about? Yet these posts keep hitting the front page everyday.
by pwg | 2026-02-14 15:39:43+00:00
> Why would I want to mess with using a web browser for video in my living room

No need for all that. Just use yt-dlp (https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp) to download them as video files, and then just play the video files as you would any other video file.

Just tested yt-dlp on s1e1 to verify it worked, and it worked perfectly to download the video.
by vunderba | 2026-02-14 15:40:55+00:00
Well, one of the most fundamental algorithms for building a chess AI is minimax [1] (or variants like negamax), and that’s been around for close to a century. The key difference is that as compute power and available RAM have grown, it’s become possible to search much deeper and evaluate far more plies.

So while 4k is still very impressive for the code base, it comes with a significantly larger runtime footprint.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax
by viking123 | 2026-02-14 15:41:08+00:00
The stuff they have internally might be slightly better than what they have now lmao. You have to super dense to believe otherwise.

Also I don't need the Anthropic ghouls telling me what I can or can not ask their stupid bot. At least Elon doesn't play this sad censorship game where you cannot say "boob" to it without it locking down.
by hollerith | 2026-02-14 15:42:26+00:00
>>[I prefer] TNG because it’s about the future, about science, rationality, open-mindedness and new perspectives

>TNG isn't actually about science

I agree with your point that
TNG is very bad at being scientifically realistic (e.g., in its plots) but TOS and TNG are very good at creating positive feelings about science and technological progress.

Technological progress is one of the few things that large numbers of people have become so enthusiatic about that it becomes a sort of lens through which they evaluate the goodness or badness of literally everything that happens. (Jesus and dismantling oppression are other examples.)

In other words, the first two Star Trek shows (i.e., the only 2 that Roddenberry exerted direct control over) seemed to have been extremely good at attracting people to the technophilic ideology.
by ragall | 2026-02-14 15:42:46+00:00
Why wouldn't I want to stop the noise of my neighbour's lawn mower, or the garbage truck very slowly passing by at 7:30 when I should be sound asleep, or the washing machine furiously spinning, or my visiting inlaws cooking in the kitchen when I want to get an afternoon nap ? These sh*tty houses let all noises through.
by dotancohen | 2026-02-14 15:44:53+00:00
I'm not pointing out a contradiction. I am pointing out that this site - which otherwise seems great - it heavily promoting the popular-online side of a very controversial subject.

It looks like they know how to grow an audience at the expense of discourse, because those adherent to the popular-online side will heavily attack all publications that discuss the other side. Recognising this, it is hard to seriously consider their impartiality in other fields. It's very much the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."

-Michael Crichton
by viking123 | 2026-02-14 15:45:21+00:00
Yeah and my dad works at Nintendo. If they want us to listen they really need to stop with releasing all the bullshit and over exaggeration what their chat bot does. And stop freaking whining about "MUHHH CHINA". Those ghouls stole almost all the books in the world, I hope China steals all from them and keeps releasing the free models.
by magicalhippo | 2026-02-14 15:45:30+00:00
Actual title is "NATO Has Seen the Future and Is Unprepared".

The current title, "10 Ukrainian soldiers eliminated 2 NATO battalions in a half a day of training, is editorializing (so against rules) but also off by an order of magnitude:

A single team of some 10 Ukrainians, acting as the adversary, counterattacked the NATO forces. In about half a day they mock-destroyed 17 armored vehicles and conducted 30 “strikes” on other targets.

Aivar Hanniotti, an Estonian Defense League unmanned aerial systems coordinator, led an adversary unit of about 100 that included Estonians and Ukrainians.

Overall, the results were “horrible” for NATO forces, says Mr. Hanniotti, who now works in the private sector as an unmanned systems expert. The adversary forces were “able to eliminate two battalions in a day,” so that “in an exercise sense, basically, they were not able to fight anymore after that.” The NATO side “didn’t even get our drone teams.”
by ben_w | 2026-02-14 15:46:09+00:00
42 now, it's difficult to draw conclusions given the number juniors I've seen makes it more "anecdote" than "survey", but what I have seen is that juniors used to and still do usually miss half the picture*, but which half was never consistent: one example on the small-scale was in Swift, where optionals kept being declared with ! rather than ? because they didn't understand the difference; one on the big scale was having thousands of lines of code lying around commented out for lack of a better way to think about what they were doing. Looking at my own archived code from when I was a junior as well as all the others I can remember, the only commonality was insufficient (or absent) automated testing.

But have juniors gotten worse? I'd say no. Possibly because the languages themselves have gotten easier to work with, possibly because more and better checks have become automated by the compiler (e.g. on iOS, it now alerts you to not do do UI anywhere but the main thread, whereas 20-30 years ago in C you'd be lucky to get the correct warning about which line was missing a semicolon), and it is a small sample size, but I would say the code juniors produce today is (slightly) better than it used to be.

But even 20 years back, a decent junior given a goal and freedom abut how to reach it, could make some very nice end-results.

* Seniors don't get it all right either, it's more like missing a quarter, then an eighth, etc.
by boca_honey | 2026-02-14 15:46:28+00:00
It also feels low effort in the way that the game has no personality. It looks like something you would find in a shovelware demo CD 20 years ago. No art direction, no sound direction, nothing to talk about.

Games made by individuals (indie games) are interesting and fun because you can almost see the person that made it. I can't see anything here.
by tlb | 2026-02-14 15:46:54+00:00
A naive estimate of accuracy is that, at a rotation speed of 5/sec (1800 degrees/sec) a 1 ms error in release time causes a 1.8 degrees aim error, or 3 yards at 100 yards. You could hit the broad side of a barn, but not a buffalo.

But humans can’t reliably time things to 1 ms, and good slingers aim better than that, so there’s more to the technique than the naive version.
by sigmoid10 | 2026-02-14 15:47:09+00:00
If you look at the current winner [1], it does a lot more than just brute force tree search. The space state for chess is simply too big to cover without good heuristics. Deep Blue may have been a pure brute force approach to beat Kasparov after Deep Thought failed using the same core algorithm, but modern chess engines search far deeper on the tree with far fewer nodes than Deep Blue ever could thanks to better heuristics.

[1] https://github.com/MinusKelvin/ice4
by davedx | 2026-02-14 15:48:00+00:00
But wait... That's a real phenomenon in markets, called volatility skew!

Volatility Skew: An uneven curve indicating directional bias. Commonly, equity markets show negative skew (higher implied volatility for OTM puts), signaling concerns about downside risks.

Options pricing is a real rabbit hole.

https://www.luxalgo.com/blog/volatility-smile-vs-skew-key-di...
Show HN: Whisper Money – Open-source, privacy-first personal finance app
by falcon_ | 2026-02-14 15:48:02+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Whisper Money because I was frustrated that every personal finance app wanted full access to my bank credentials, fed my transactions into AI systems, or sold my spending data to third parties.

Whisper Money takes a different approach:

- *No bank credential sharing* - Import your transactions via CSV/XLS exports from your bank. No Plaid, no OAuth to your bank, no third-party integrations that can get breached.
- *No AI snooping* - Your transactions are never fed into AI systems you don't control.
- *No third-party data sharing* - Your financial data is never shared with advertisers or data brokers.
- *Self-hostable* - Run it on your own infrastructure via Docker or Coolify (one-click deploy template included).
- *Open source* - Full code transparency so you can audit the security yourself.

Features:
- Multi-account tracking with budgets and cashflow analysis
- Automation rules to auto-categorize transactions (built with JSON Logic)
- Visual spending insights and reports
- CSV/XLS import (a year of transactions in ~10 seconds)
- PWA support - works as a mobile app
- Dark mode, multi-language support

Tech stack: Laravel 12, React 19, Inertia.js v2, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS v4, MySQL, Redis.

There's also a hosted version at https://whisper.money if you don't want to self-host, and a demo account you can try without registration: https://whisper.money/login?demo=1

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the approach. Is "no bank integration" a feature or a dealbreaker for you?

GitHub: https://github.com/whisper-money/whisper-money
by Joker_vD | 2026-02-14 15:48:25+00:00
So, let's take a function with 40 alive temporaries at a point where it needs to call a helper function of, say, two arguments.

On a 16 register machine with 9 call-clobbered registers and 7 call-invariant ones (one of which is the stack pointer) we put 6 temporaries into call-invariant registers (so there are 6 spills in the prologue of this big function), another 9 into the call-clobbered registers; 2 of those 9 are the helper function's arguments, but 7 other temporaries have to be spilled to survive the call. And the rest 25 temporaries live on the stack in the first place.

If we instead take a machine with 31 registers, 19 being call-clobbered and 12 call-invariant ones (one of which is a stack pointer), we can put 11 temporaries into call-invariant registers (so there are 11 spills in the prologue of this big function), and another 19 into the call-clobbered registers; 2 of those 19 are the helper function's arguments, so 17 other temporaries have to be spilled to survive the call. And the rest of 10 temporaries live on the stack in the first place.

So, there seems to be more spilling/reloading whether you count pre-emptive spills or the on-demand-at-the-call-site spills, at least to me.
by apitman | 2026-02-14 15:48:26+00:00
On desktop it can be pretty simple. On mobile it can be a hot mess. Essentially with LGPL you have to provide a way for users to replace your version of the LGPL lib with one they choose.

Also the company seems to be trying to wiggle out from under the open source spirit of the license the last few years, which doesn't bode well.
by fhdkweig | 2026-02-14 15:49:09+00:00
In a two party system, no one wants to get rid of the loopholes. Those currently in power don't think their opponents will have the opportunity to use it, and those not in power want to use it later when they finally get to be in power.

Check out the two parties wanting the Line Item Veto thinking only their side would be able to use it yet horrified to see the other side use it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-item_veto_in_the_United_S...