MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Sniffnoy | 2026-02-14 06:58:31+00:00
OK, so the actual disagreement here seems to be whether adding same-mass right-handed neutrinos counts as a significant modification to the Standard Model. I have generally seen adding any sort of right-handed neutrinos to be considered a significant modification. I agree that certainly adding same-mass ones, like all othe fermions have, makes everything simpler and more symmetric! And in an alternate history of physics, that would have been considered the Standard Model, the baseline. But as best I've seen, in the history of physics that actually happened, "no right-handed neutrinos" got codified as the baseline, so changing over to this alternate one would to my mind be a significant change from what people mean by "the Standard Model".

But that doesn't exactly seem like something it makes a lot of sense to argue over, now that we've identified the disagreement.

> Those would be heavy neutrinos which get their mass from physics beyond the standard model. Plain vanilla standard model fermions have the same mass whether they are left- or right-handed, so quite small for neutrinos [2].

Hm, is that true? I know these experiments can only detect certain mass ranges and IIRC you're right that they were looking for heavier ones, but my understanding was that they were not getting it from physics beyond "standard model plus right-handed neutrinos" (technically beyond the standard model but only a way that is necessary to even discuss the subject!), rather they were just getting it via the ordinary Higgs mechanism? (The bit you linked regarding this doesn't appear to contradict this?) Unless by "beyond the standard model" you just mean that the right-handed mass is different from the left-handed mass, in which case, well, see above, now we're just talking about what "the standard model" normally means.

I mean you say you're a particle physicist, so I guess you'd know -- when you talk to your colleagues, what do they think "the standard model" means with regard to neutrinos? That right-handed ones don't exist? Or that they do exist and have the same mass as their left-handed counterparts? At the very least all the popularizations I've seen (generally written by particle physicists) have said it means the former... you're really sure other particle physicists mean the latter? This may sound a little silly, but have you tried taking like a quick poll or anything to make sure?
by caspianm | 2026-02-14 06:58:56+00:00
I like open source and I don't want to lose it but its ideals of letting people share, modify and run code however they like have the same issue as what the AI companies are doing. Openclaw is open source, there are open source tools to run LLMs, many LLM model files are open, though the huge ones aren't so easy for individuals to run on their own hardware.

I don't have a solution, though the only two categories of solution I can think of are forbidding people from developing and distributing certain types of software, or forbidding people from distributing hardware that can run unapproved software (at least if they are PC's that can run AI, arduinos with a few kB of RAM could be allowed, and iPads could be allowed to run ZX81 emulators which could run unapproved code). The first category would be less drastic as it would only need to affect some subset of AI related software, but is also hard to get right and make work. Not saying either of these ideas are better than doing nothing.
Show HN: Mdr – TUI Markdown Reader
by seymores | 2026-02-14 06:59:39+00:00
mdr is a rust-based terminal Markdown reader with these core features:

- Renders Markdown well: headings, lists, emphasis, blockquotes, rules, tables, and syntax-highlighted code blocks.
- Multi-document queue: start with multiple files/directories, then move through docs in-app.
- Filesystem browser (o): starts at current working directory, lets you traverse folders and open Markdown files.
- Search: / to search, n/N next/previous, highlights all matches and current match.
- Link support: hover shows URL, Enter/mouse click opens links.
- Smooth TUI controls: keyboard + mouse scrolling, help overlay (h), quit (q), BeeLine mode toggle (b), plain mode toggle (m).

I vibe coded this for my own needs and I hope it can be useful to you.
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-14 06:59:59+00:00
Some people have claimed that LLMs that aren’t from the big foundational model providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini) are basically gaming benchmarks to get great results. Does anyone know if that’s actually true? I don’t understand this entire post but from the tables of benchmark scores, it seems like this model performs well in a large variety of things. It feels to me like the diversity of benchmarks may mean it’s not just something built to game a benchmark, right?
by derekdahmer | 2026-02-14 07:00:32+00:00
A H100 uses about 1000W including networking gear and can generate 80-150 t/s for a 70B model like llama.

So back of the napkin, for a decently sized 1000 token response you’re talking about 8s/3600s*1000 = 2wh which even in California is about $0.001 of electricity.
by efreak | 2026-02-14 07:01:23+00:00
> Why the apparently arbitrary numbers, I'm not sure, but Claude and ChatGPT both claim the codes were simply drawn from a more general-purpose sequence of product numbers used at IBM at the time.

Claude and chatgpt are (probably) wrong. Wikipedia has 3 citations for the following statement:

> Originally, the code page numbers referred to the page numbers in the IBM standard character set manual

The reason they're so high is because code pages were assigned to EBCDIC first.
by kerkeslager | 2026-02-14 07:02:03+00:00
It's called paying for goods and services. You know, basic capitalism.

I think one thing to understand about advertising is that it fundamentally breaks the way capitalists say capitalism works. If you really want capitalism to be about competition to create the best quality at the lowest cost, then you can't have advertising. Advertising inherently drives up cost because it costs, and it allows lower-quality, higher-ost products to outcompete higher-quality, lower-cost products if they are better advertised.

And before some advertiser comes along and says, "But how will we find out about goods and services!?" Search engines. Independent reviewers. Word out mouth. Experts. These are solved problems.

And more to the point, advertising is literally the worst way to find out about goods and services. Mostly, advertising is simply lies, and when it's telling the truth it's not telling you the whole truth. If you're concerned about people being able to find out about goods and services with any accuracy, then you should be against advertising. Ads aren't information, they're misinformation which prevents consumers from making accurately informed decisions.
by WalterBright | 2026-02-14 07:03:35+00:00
The Mayans used the corbeled vault, which is much more primitive than the arch. There's a reason people who invented arches never went back to the corbeled vault.

Compare any of the Mayan buildings with the Roman Coliseum in sophistication. I've been through Chichen Itza and spent some time looking closely at the construction of it and the neighboring buildings. I encourage you to do the same.

The Roman "style" of aqueducts used arches so they could cross valleys while maintaining a constant slope. I don't think the Mayans had that, and the Mayan aqueducts didn't seem to be very long, like 200 feet vs the Roman miles long ones.

The Romans also had hypocausts, which were a method of piping in heated air under the floor to warm the house.
by OKRainbowKid | 2026-02-14 07:05:12+00:00
What propaganda?

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-updates-us-travel-advice-after...

"Between January and July 2025, just under 780,000 German tourists flew to the US, around 12% fewer than the same period in the previous year. [...] People are also deterred by plans to require foreign tourists entering the US to share five years of their social media history, as well as reports of Germans suddenly finding themselves in detention or being deported. The number of applications for student exchanges in the US fell significantly last year with some media reports speaking of a 50% decline."
https://www.dw.com/en/threat-to-world-peace-how-germans-see-...
by throwaway743 | 2026-02-14 07:05:46+00:00
This is all inevitable with the trajectory of technology, and has been apparent for a long time. The issue isn't AI, it's that our leaders haven't bothered to think or care about what happens to us when our labor loses value en masse due to such advances.

Maybe it requires fundamentally changing or economic systems? Who knows what the solution is, but the problem is most definitely rooted in lack of initiative by our representatives and an economic system that doesn't accommodate us for when shit inevitably hits the fan with labor markets.
by deaux | 2026-02-14 07:05:50+00:00
> . I'm a hypocrite. I admit

Great, admission is the first step.

> but the pay is too good to find alternative.

Yet then you immediately undo it!

Try "I'm too greedy". You're the actor with the free will here. The subject of the sentencd shouldn't be "the pay". That is just an amount, a sum, that exists - neither too high nor too low. That is all in the eye of the beholder.
by bombcar | 2026-02-14 07:06:09+00:00
It's legal and done quite often in industrial installations - look around the next time the lights are up at your favorite restaurant, for example.

It is more expensive, by more than you'd think, and so it's rarely done.

It also allows all of the trades save the drywaller/painter to be rough and tumble with what they're doing; it doesn't have to look nice behind the walls.
by D-Machine | 2026-02-14 07:07:00+00:00
The tricky part is that LLMs aren't just spewing outputs from the distribution (or "near" learned manifolds), but also extrapolating / interpolating (depending on how much you care about the semantics of these terms https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09485).

There are genuine creative insights that come from connecting two known semantic spaces in a way that wasn't obvious before (e.g, novel isomorphism). It is very conceivable that LLMs could make this kind of connection, but we haven't really seen a dramatic form of this yet. This kind of connection can lead to deep, non-trivial insights, but whether or not it is "out-of-distribution" is harder to answer in this case.
by virgildotcodes | 2026-02-14 07:07:21+00:00
So I don’t really see why this would be a difference in kind. We’re effectively just talking about how high up the stack we’re attempting to brute force solutions, right?

How many people have tried to figure out a new maths, a GUT in physics, a more perfect human language (Esperanto for ex.) or programming language, only to fail in the vast majority of their attempts?

Do we think that anything but the majority of the attempts at a paradigm shift will end in failure?

If the majority end in failure, how is that not the same brute force methodology (brute force doesn’t mean you can’t respond to feedback from your failed experiments or from failures in the prevailing paradigms, I take it to just fundamentally mean trying “new” things with tools and information available to you, with the majority of attempts ending in failure, until something clicks, or doesn’t and you give up).
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-14 07:07:59+00:00
> When the same professionals advocating "don't look at the code anymore" and "it's just the next level of abstraction" respond with outrage to a journalist giving them an unchecked article.

I would expect there is literally zero overlap between the "professionals"[1] who say "don't look at the code" and the ones criticising the "journalists"[2]. The former group tend to be maximalists and would likely cheer on the usage of LLMs to replace the work of the latter group, consequences be damned.

[1] The people that say this are not professional software developers, by the way. I still have not seen a single case of any vibe coder who makes useful software suitable for deployment at scale. If they make money, it is by grifting and acting as an "AI influencer", for instance Yegge shilling his memecoin for hundreds of thousands of dollars before it was rugpulled.

[2] Somebody who prompts an LLM to produce an article and does not even so much as fact-check the quotations it produces can clearly not be described as a journalist, either.
by hoangnnguyen | 2026-02-14 07:08:18+00:00
I also wrote a detailed breakdown of:
- How tokens and context windows actually affect stability
- Why coding degrades faster
- A practical context stack model
- Why on-demand CLI retrieval is often more context-efficient

Full post: https://codeaholicguy.com/2026/02/14/tokens-context-windows-...
by laichzeit0 | 2026-02-14 07:08:35+00:00
All these so-called safe jobs still depend on someone being able to afford those services. If I don't have a job, I can't go see the vet, the fact that no one else can do the vets job is irrelevant at such a point.

I would like to know if there's some kind of inflection point, like the so-called Laffer curve for taxes, where once an economy has X% unemployment, it effectively collapses. I'd imagine it goes: recession -> depression -> systemic crisis and appears to be somewhere between 30-40% unemployment based on history.
by jama211 | 2026-02-14 07:09:11+00:00
No? You don’t only gain justification for automation by cutting costs. You can gain justification by increasing profits. You can keep the same amount of people but use them more efficiently and you create more total value. The fact you didn’t consider this worries me.

Also the statement “show why automation hasn’t taken over” is truely hysterically wrong. Yeah, sure, no automation has taken over since the Industrial Revolution
by efreak | 2026-02-14 07:10:18+00:00
Windows Terminal allows this, afaik. It might be a feature of clink, but I feel like I've seen it in powershell and cmd both. Not sure if it's available in traditional console window, I rarely use those much these days though (sudo on windows is nice, the only reason to use an elevated window is for multiple commands, like browsing system directories you don't have access to; I just wish it had a different 'official' name)
by justinclift | 2026-02-14 07:10:37+00:00
> All supported by the goodwill of individuals, non-profits, and businesses ...

That goodwill seems to be in short supply since... hmmm the mid 2000's (rough guess). And goodwill like that seems to be honestly not even understood by the generation(s)* since then.

* Saying "generations" (plural) there because we've had quite a few people go through their formative years during this time and not just a single clearly defined generation.
by BrenBarn | 2026-02-14 07:12:35+00:00
The thing is that that same argument can be used to justify just about anything. If the scum of the earth is in power, they will ignore whatever rights you thought you had put into the constitution anyway. We are seeing that now. And I am already cursing the day that we decided on the restrictions we currently have. The Trump administration is declaring with complete legality that Trump won the 2020 election and is punishing people who believe that. Right now they're not taking the direct route, but it's abundantly clear that government power is being used to punish people who say things that Trump doesn't like.

There is no way of listing rights on paper that can protect you if truly evil people get into power. But there are ways of listing rights on paper that can allow good people who believe in those rights to defend them in ways that involve preventing evil people from getting into power. Free speech is not a magic bullet in either direction.
by myvehicle | 2026-02-14 07:12:50+00:00
Reminds me of a blog post from a few days ago by Melanie Mitchell on a talk she gave about the recently-passed Brian Cantwell Smith:

Judgment, he wrote, is “a form of dispassionate deliberative thought, grounded in ethical commitment and responsible action, appropriate to the situation in which it is deployed.”

On the other hand, there is reckoning: the “calculative prowess” at which AI systems already excel. AI reckoning has lead to gold medals in mathematics competitions, to generating complex code, to predicting protein structure, and even to carrying out fluent conversations. But reckoning without judgment is a dangerous thing...

https://aiguide.substack.com/p/on-brian-cantwell-smith-and-t...
by edaus | 2026-02-14 07:13:32+00:00
Everyone seems interested only in weight loss. But the scale is just a poor proxy for what people actually care about ( looks, health or physical aptitude ). Your bodyweight remaining the same while gaining muscle should also be a huge win since that's building muscle, bone density and losing fat.

Do people actually just want to lose weight momentarily through diet? Instead of keeping it off long term, which is way easier achievable through diet + exercise?

Also no mention of body composition, bone density and cardiovascular health, which should be the actual metrics, instead of the proxy used for them.
by KingOfCoders | 2026-02-14 07:13:45+00:00
ACP is so much worse than Claude Code CLI - the quality is not there. Everyone assumes the JSON-CLI-API is the same as the CLI but it is not. Tool usage is different, and I assume agent system prompts are different and agents are different.

Integration like in Cursors, I use the CLI and Claude Code knows what files are open, uses Cursor for diffs etc.
by usefulposter | 2026-02-14 07:14:27+00:00
Incredible. When Ars pull an article and its comments, they pull the linked XenForo forum thread too (at least for logged-out users) but Scott's post there was archived. Username scottshambaugh:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260213211721/https://arstechni...

>Scott Shambaugh here. None of the quotes you attribute to me in the second half of the article are accurate, and do not exist at the source you link. It appears that they themselves are AI hallucinations. The irony here is fantastic.

Instead of cross-checking the fake quotes against the source material, some proud Ars Subscriptors proceed to defend Condé Nast by accusing Scott of being a bot and/or fake account.
by Poppyyy | 2026-02-14 07:15:21+00:00
AI video models keep improving, but the gap between them is narrowing.

What still feels hard isn’t generating clips, but deciding what should happen next. Once you move beyond single shots, the real work becomes scripting, shot ordering, pacing, and keeping a narrative consistent across scenes.

This makes me think the next shift won’t be about better generators, but about tools that can translate high-level intent into structured video workflows — something closer to a video creation agent than a prompt-to-video tool.

If that’s true, the bottleneck moves from model quality to storytelling and direction. Curious whether others see this as where AI video is heading, or if most use cases will stay single-shot and disposable.
by chasil | 2026-02-14 07:16:18+00:00
> A feature without telemetry is a liability in disguise.

Let me just find the quote in the awk book, give me a minute...

"We, being the authors, "knew" how the language was supposed to be used, and so we only wrote one-liners.

"Awk quickly spread to other groups and users pushed hard on the language. were surprised at how rapidly awk became popular as a general-purpose programming language; our first reaction to a program that didn't fit on one page was shock and amazement. What had happened was that many people restricted their use of the computer to the shell (the command language) and to awk. Rather than writing in a "real" programming language, they were stretching the tools they liked."

New features are dangerous, but sometimes they open unexpected doors.

https://archive.org/download/pdfy-MgN0H1joIoDVoIC7/The_AWK_P...
by deserts | 2026-02-14 07:16:47+00:00
> Risk is being pushed upward instead of owned locally

I don't view this as a bad thing or at least not in many contexts, in many orgs, risk is actively pushed downward. Vibe coded PR slop is poor hiring/culture blowback.

It is an amusing inversion of the situation in which higher level decisions by seniors/exec are made that then have to be implemented by lower levels in the org; with those lower levels having to smooth and mitigate the risks and negative consequences of aforementioned higher level decisions.
by verisimi | 2026-02-14 07:22:33+00:00
These numbers are surely numbers on a spreadsheet, unless you are referring to literal bodies that have been counted.

In this article itself, we read that:

> When Estrada-Belli first came to Tikal as a child, the best estimate for the classic-era (AD600-900) population of the surrounding Maya lowlands – encompassing present day southern Mexico, Belize and northern Guatemala – would have been about 2 million people. Today, his team believes that the region was home to up to 16 million

The point is that spreadsheet estimates can be so wrong, they are verging on meaningless.
by palata | 2026-02-14 07:22:40+00:00
> Building a project is a lot about building a community around it and while I understand that not everyone can do it, I prefer those who can for completely rational reasons.

And I totally agree with that!

I am not saying that authors must take a firm stance. What I am saying is that users need to understand that they are not entitled to anything at all. It's all bonus.

I do help the users of the projects I maintain, as much as I can. Still they are not entitled to anything at all, I do it because I'm trying to be nice. And what I see is that it's not rare for them to not understand that; they behave as if it was my job.
by disfictional | 2026-02-14 07:23:04+00:00
The key to the essay is that "ordinary people will be fine." Software Engineers will be highly impacted, though not in the way most commenters seem to think. Management isn't going to arbitrarily decide that, "AI can do 65% of the job, so we'll lay off 65% of the engineers." They won't hire. Attrition? New projects? "Just use AI tools to be more productive. Find the bottlenecks and automate them. Focus on your core value." AI isn't going to be a fast slash to the workforce; it will be a constantly accelerating drain. Yes, ordinary people will be fine, but those of us who aspired to be artisans of building these systems will be stretched further and further until all we do is maintain AI code full-time for a discounted price.
by usefulposter | 2026-02-14 07:23:13+00:00
Just like in the original thread that was wiped (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012384), Ars Subscriptors continue to display lack of reading comprehension and jump to defending Condé Nast.

All threads have since been locked:

https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards...

https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/is-there-going-to-be-a...

https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/um-what-happened-to-th...
by neomantra | 2026-02-14 07:24:07+00:00
Building a TUI was easy before, especially with the great toolsets for their respective languages BubbleTea / Textualize / Ratatui. And thanks to those frameworks, LLMs can manifest useful tools.

Similar to WebApps, it's only since the November'25 renaissance that I felt I could use them to create TUIs. Once I had that revelation, I started going into my backlog and using it.

I maintain a TUI Charting library, NTCharts. In January, I fixed a bug - totally obvious once identified - that I personally failed to find earlier. But the test harness, prompting, and Gemini got it done [1]. Gemini's spatial understanding was critical in completing the task.

I've been vibe-crafting a local LLM conversation viewing tool called thinkt. After scraping ~/.claude and making a data model, this is the point in PROMPTS.md where I start creating the TUI using BubbleTea. [2].

[1] https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/ntcharts/issues/7#issuecomm...

[2] https://github.com/wethinkt/go-thinkt/blob/main/PROMPTS.md#2...