MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RamblingCTO | 2026-02-23 13:36:01+00:00
If someone chooses the 1h free hack, sorry, you're doing business wrong and focus on the wrong things. A mindset that keeps you small. You gotta invest in stuff that makes you money and solves your problems. If that's what makes me sound like a salesman, again, I don't think you own a business as well or are struggling to make a living with that.

Theres a whole lot between "I waste my time and do non-scalable things" and "I need an enterprise contract as a SMB".

> Shitty python script with DuckDB running locally on laptop, can get you long long way.

Yeah ... no. You do you, but if you want to get your business to a good size you need proper tools. Like a chef needs a good knive, your business needs good tools as well. That's not to say that a quick DIY integration is off the table, but the one thing you don't get back is time, not money. So when you waste time by doing shit that can go away with minimal investment, you're preventing your business from getting traction.

Sorry but that's a coder mindset. "I can do this myself". That's what's keeping you stuck. You need to think about every decision as an investment. Time vs money. What's the ROI for all alternatives? Then you decide on what moves the needle. It's that easy.

The calculation is simple: every minute you do stupid stuff like coding shit, you can't sell to someone paying you to make things. So you lose twice by doing something yourself: a) you can't sell your services or time in the mean time and b) you add complexity and maintenance to your very complex business life as well. For me, the biggest problem is too much to do and not enough time. So to scale my business I need to reduce complexity. If I can throw reasonable money for that to go away: good, I'll do it. Most business owners I know think like that. That's business, not sales.

There are so many good SaaS for cheap or even with a good free tier that get you started that it's just incredibly junior to just build it yourself.
by christalingx | 2026-02-23 13:36:03+00:00
AgentReady is an OpenAI-compatible proxy. You swap your base_url, and every prompt gets compressed before hitting the LLM — 40-60% fewer tokens, same responses, same streaming.

It uses a deterministic rule-based engine (not another LLM call): removes filler words, simplifies verbose constructions, strips redundant connectors. ~5ms overhead.

Works with any OpenAI-compatible SDK: Python, Node, LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, Vercel AI SDK.

Free during beta, no credit card: https://agentready.cloud/hn

Python: pip install agentready-sdk && agentready init

Happy to answer any technical questions.
by drysart | 2026-02-23 13:36:10+00:00
> If I start calling "bananas" "apples" then I devalue the meaning of the word "apple". You can't differentiate which I'm referring to.

In French, potatoes are called what translates to English as "apple of the earth". Nobody confuses a pomme de terre with an apple, because nobody calls a potato an apple without the adjective attached.

That's what the additional adjective as part of the title is for; like how apples and potatoes are vaguely related in that they're both plant-based food but are otherwise entirely different; turning "software engineer" into a compound term that has the extra word is specifically to differentiate it from expectations of it not having the extra word.

Software engineering is legitimately engineering going by the etymological meaning of engineering; but it's not really one going by some of the other (mostly orthogonal) things we've layered onto the term in many contexts over the years. It's creation through ingenuity. It has as much claim to the word as part of its title as any other usage of the word does.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-23 13:36:17+00:00
I also agree with Knuth and for me it has been extremely valuable to know the history of various technologies, and especially knowing the reasons why the optimum solutions have been replaced from time to time and the causal connections between various discoveries.

I see expressed frequently opinions that old scientific and technical publications are obsolete, but in my opinion this is very naive.

The optimum technology or algorithm for solving a certain problem changes when improvements are done in some different domains. However the range of kinds of solutions for a given problem is usually finite, so when the optimum solution changes in time it may necessarily change to a kind of solution that has already been used in the past.

Because of this, it is very frequent to see claims about the discovery of "new" things, where the so-called "new" things were well known and widely used some decades ago, or even much earlier.

The worst is not the time wasted with the rediscovery of old things, but the fact that the rediscoveries are usually incomplete, without also rediscovering the finer points about which are their most efficient variants and which are their limitations, which may make them non-applicable in certain contexts.

Knowing a detailed technical and scientific history avoids such cases.
by mikeayles | 2026-02-23 13:36:21+00:00
As someone who works in commercial fleet fuel economy (powertrain, not aero, but you keep an eye on the whole stack since technologies compound), it's worth noting how far the industry has moved since the 1970s NASA Dryden work.

The sheer amount of "snake oil" bolt-on products sold to fleets in the 90s and 00s means the industry now demands rigorous third-party validation. The best open source testing I've seen comes from Mesilla Valley Transportation Services (https://www.m-v-t-s.com/certified-technologies/). They don't rely on ECM dashboard readouts or pump receipts. They run a control truck and test truck simultaneously on a track or controlled highway loop so weather, air density, and wind are identical. Anemometers on the trucks algorithmically factor out wind speed/direction, tyre temp, and weight. Tests are designed to answer the actual question rather than tick a standard's boxes. Their chief test engineer was ex NASCAR, IndyCar and F1.

My team actually tested a dual-fuel system with MVTS. The engineering was sound, testing proved a slight thermal efficiency improvement, but cheap US diesel versus the cost of the alternative fuel meant the ROI was non-existent. The physics worked, the math killed the project. (The economics work in Europe, thankfully.)

A lot of what's being discussed in this thread is already standard too. Mirrorless cabs are more the rule than the exception now (as pjc50 linked above), close-coupled trailers with gap fairings, wheel covers, under-trailer aero, all commonplace. A couple of current ones worth knowing about: the Scanias with the "Super" powertrain run a really aggressive overdrive at around 900rpm at the 90km/h (56mph)EU limit, where a conventional truck sits around 1200rpm. Requires huge low-end torque but claims 5-8%. The Mercedes Actros L claims 3% from its slippery front end alone. It is absolutely hideous though, so make of that trade-off what you will.

The biggest factor though is driver variability. All the aero and powertrain hardware in the world doesn't matter if the driver thinks they are the stig. The biggest shift in the last decade has been removing human inconsistency from fuel economy entirely.

Automated Manual Transmissions are now completely dominant in modern fleets. They shift perfectly for fuel efficiency every single time, totally capping the penalty of a bad driver. Layer on top of that Predictive Cruise Control. Modern trucks use GPS and 3D topographical maps to "see" miles ahead. The truck's computer knows exactly when to back off the throttle before cresting a hill to coast over the top, and exactly how much momentum to carry into the next dip. A human driver relying on their eyes simply cannot compete with a powertrain that knows the exact gradient of the road three miles ahead.
by bigfishrunning | 2026-02-23 13:36:29+00:00
> Given that humans have been ascribing intention to inanimate objects and systems since time immemorial, this outcome is preordained.

This is true, but there's a big difference between "My car decided not to start" and "The computer wrote a hit piece about me". In reality, both of these events came from the same amount of intention, but to lay-people, these are two very different things. Educating about those differences (and very intentionally not blurring the lines) can only be a good thing.
by g-mork | 2026-02-23 13:36:36+00:00
The massive DC overbuild matches demand, prices normalise somewhat in 3-5 years.

The massive DC overbuild does not match demand, prices tank in 3-5 years.

Third possibility: some approach like Taalas renders the current storyline meaningless. Would put 3 in 10 odds of this happening but I'd looove to see it.

Fourth: entire planet gets profoundly sick of emdashes, we all move back into caves and live in eternal gratitude of the moment humanity woke up to how little all of this really matters.
by throwatdem12311 | 2026-02-23 13:37:16+00:00
If the priest is using AI to write homilies what is even the point of going to Church I could just get an AI to be my priest and stay home.

Using AI generated text to interact with a human that is expecting a human touch is gross.

Even AI generated corpo-slop emails give me the ick. To me, it shows a deep lack of respect for the other person. I would rather something in broken English than bot vomit.

I’ve ended friendships people that can’t help themselves from pulling out their phones to ask their AI about something we’re talking about in-person. Like come on I want to know what YOU think.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-23 13:37:51+00:00
I also don't think you're right that it never happened for the dedicated servers :) I'm only using Hetzner for dedicated servers, and found an email from 2022 where they mention price updates:

> Unfortunately, we are forced to increase the prices on these Server Auction models [...] old price 37.60 Euro -> 59.29 Euro, comes into effect 2022-03-03

Citing raising energy prices at that time.
by xtiansimon | 2026-02-23 13:38:21+00:00
Back in my undergrad years c1994 a professor brought a new assignment to our special topics course in design thinking. It was a report from a NY telecommunications firm.

I can’t recall the details. Only that I “predicted” a dark vision of your refrigerator competing in a foods market to buy your staple products at the best price whenever your stock became low. And then, of course it all goes awry when you end up with 6 cases of milk.

I tried searching for some hint of the telecom project that was the start of our class assignment. No luck. But I did find this viddy on YouTube with a great intro with interviews of the “person on the street”.

https://youtu.be/waQy2WKHiwY
by throwaway2037 | 2026-02-23 13:38:35+00:00
> I’ve been part of at least 2 successful rewrites. I think that Joel’s post is too often taken as gospel. Sometimes a rewrite is the best way forward.

HN nerd-snipe alert! OK, you got me good. Can you share some battle stories? I have also been part of rewrites in my career, but my experience is mixed. I'm not here to simple brush away your experience; I want to know more about why you think (in retrospective) it was a good idea and why it was successful.

I can recall recently, listening to an Oxide and Friends podcast where they spent 30 minutes dumping all over "Agile Dev", only to have a very senior, hands-on guy join from AWS and absolutely deliver the smack down. (Personally, I have no positive experiences with Agile Dev, but this guy really stunned the room into silence.) The best part: The Oxide crew immediately recognized the positive experence and backed off the give this guy the space he needed to tell and interesting story. (Hats off the Ox crew for doing that... even if I, personally, have zero love for Agile Dev.)
by spiffyk | 2026-02-23 13:39:28+00:00
> What if something is costly, that you need to compute dynamically, but not often, makes it into the frame? Do you separately now create a state flag for that one render object?

The point of immediate mode UIs is not necessarily that there is no state specific to the UI, but rather that the state is owned by user code. You can (and, in these more complex cases, should) retain state between frames. The main difference is that the state is still managed by your code, rather than the UI system ("library", whatever).
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-23 13:39:33+00:00
> My best guess is either low hardware

If there was other apps we use that had the same issue, I'd chalk it up to hardware too, but maybe they simply don't test it on representative hardware? That might explain it.

> they likely went with something HTML/CSS-based, which would explain the performance issues

Not sure, the web browser in the TV seems to handle things just fine, and much faster than Amazon's app, so I don't think HTML/CSS is to blame here. Probably shit architecture/software design, as usual.
by gus_massa | 2026-02-23 13:39:36+00:00
For a second year, he runs a Chess Championship using chatbots.

The openings are quite fine because they have a lot to copy from the training material, but once one of the chatbots make an unusual move it may get chaotic.

Some chatbots play quite well in unusual situations and others make ilegal moves, make piece apear from thin air or forget they still have a piece on the board. If you look carefully, many ilegal moves look sensible for a different game, like they are copying the move from the training material, but sometimes it's difficult to guess.

Anyway, he accept most illegal moves to get funny content, unless the chatbot is cheating too much, sometimes deciding it arbitrarily. I'm not sure how this mess with the internal representation the other chatbot has. Once a ilegal move is played it's hard to guess if the future ilegal moves are error or a different interpretation of the consequences of the ilegal move.

Quarter final 1: ChatGPT vs Gemini

Quarter final 2: Grok vs Copilot

Quarter final 3: Snapchat vs Claude

Quarter final 4: Meta AI vs DeepSeek
by Silhouette | 2026-02-23 13:40:05+00:00
What we're seeing is the natural conclusion of VC distortion in a market. There is so much money being pumped into AI speculatively now that it's hurting normal and sustainable businesses in other parts of the economy.

The solution might have to be mandatory rationing of some kind to avoid a situation where only a handful of AI giants are able to buy essential components. We can't just throw the rest of the economy under a bus to support the AI bubble for a few more months.

I'm working with a business right now that would like to buy some new servers for sensible, boring business reasons. It is having trouble because the prices from their normal suppliers are now extremely high - if the components are even available at all. This business has nothing to do with AI or Big Tech and yet it's at risk of being unable to continue normal operations in much the same way that a business would be affected if the phone networks were all switched off or the water supply to its office was cut. We regulate those industries because their continued reasonable operation is essential to make sure everyone else can continue to operate reasonably as well.
by thegrey_one | 2026-02-23 13:40:12+00:00
I thought this was pretty much a known fact by now. To make more money. They sell the data, or monetize it somehow. They disguise doing it under all kinds of "features" which indeed might be useful for some people.
What should ring your alarm bells is any device that needs you to make an account, at least once when setting it up. That's valuable data, who/where/email/phone number etc. If you cannot fully use the product without at least one initial access to the internet, your data will be monetized, that's the reason you're not able of using it, they need to get something out of you.
Of-course there's features that don't work, or make any sense, without internet access. But if you cannot wash your clothes without an account/initial access to the internet...that's sus.
by Nextgrid | 2026-02-23 13:40:13+00:00
> Perhaps someone at their end screwed up a loop conditional, but you'd think some monitoring dashboard somewhere would have a warning pop up because of this.

If you've been in any big company you'll know things perpetually run in a degraded, somewhat broken mode. They've even made up the term "error budget" because they can't be bothered to fix the broken shit so now there's an acceptable level of brokenness.
by mrweasel | 2026-02-23 13:40:30+00:00
Even if they haven't added any cache control headers, what kind a of lazy Meta engineer designed their crawler with to just pull the same URL multiple times a second?

Is this where all that hardware for AI projects is going? To data centers that just uncritically hits the same URL over and over without checking if the content of a site or page has chanced since the last visit then and calculate a proper retry interval. Search engine crawlers 25 - 30 years ago could do this.

Hit the URL once per day, if it chances daily, try twice a day. If it hasn't chanced in a week, maybe only retry twice per week.
by RamblingCTO | 2026-02-23 13:40:35+00:00
> This stuff might be new to you, but it's not new.

But it's not new to me, I studied this shit. Maybe don't assume so much.

Clawdbot was the first where it worked as good as it did. Not BabyAGI or all the other stuff we had before. Similar in approach, but clawdbot just worked better. Might be a synthesis between models getting better, having skills and more MCP servers available and clawdbot having enough integrations to make it interesting, but it doesn't matter. The ipod wasn't the first anyway, but it was the one that made it stick. If you like it or not.

> I can do this as well. "This is it! The singularity is here. Use this or get left behind! Everybody rush and use my thing!
So good I was afraid to put it out, scared of how awesome it is!"

I think that's a you problem tbh. Just check it out yourself and don't buy in on the hype. Simple. Use whatever makes you happy.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-23 13:40:47+00:00
> like an invasion of privacy/user telemetry

Could be. Interesting anecdote on that, we're using the Vodafone TV app on the very same TV, and that app you can toggle "send analytics to Vodafone" on or off in the settings, which of course defaults to on.

At one point I toggled it to off, and suddenly the whole app became as fast as all the others, while when the toggle is on, the application is as slow and laggy as the Amazon one. So that might actually very well be the reason.
by Yizahi | 2026-02-23 13:41:15+00:00
The power imbalance between an individual human and a soulless megacorps, who claim to make us homeless in about 1 to 5 years, is astonishing. Which is why it is fun to at least poke those same megacorps for their hypocrisy. It's a variation of gallows humor I think, most of us are going down, but at least we can get a good laugh on the way.

This is based on the premise that LLM-corpos are right. And if they are wrong, then the laughs about their hypocrisy is doubly deserved :) .
by __s | 2026-02-23 13:42:10+00:00
fraud here is real, but

> a good journal—it has an 18% acceptance rate

is this supposed to be read as sarcasm?

amusing when the quality of a journal is measured by denying papers. kind of reminds me of one of the last People I (Mostly) Admire interviews, with Michael Crow of Arizona State https://freakonomics.com/podcast/a-new-kind-of-university where he critiques elite universities as measuring their value on how many students they reject, which ultimately makes them infeasible as institutions to distribute knowledge as much as possible
by Rochus | 2026-02-23 13:42:29+00:00
Unfortunately a really good question gets downvoted instead of causing a relevant discussion, as so often in recent HN. It would be really interesting to know, why Ada would not be considered for such a large project, especially now when the code is translated with LLMs, as you say. I was never really comfortable that they were going for the most recent C++ versions, since there are still too many differences and unimplemented parts which make cross-compiler compatibilty an issue. I hope that with Rust at least cross-compilation is possible, so that the resulting executable also runs on older systems, where the toolchain is not available.
by gck1 | 2026-02-23 13:42:32+00:00
Here's an easy experiment to conduct: look around the room at your home and count all the devices that have a CPU, RAM, SSD or HDD.

Then take a look at your bank statement to see what are the services you pay for monthly that also require the same hardware.

Now, imagine that these devices or services can no longer procure RAM, SSD or HDD. There's no more available supply for these components, because this is what's happening.

Would you still be able to have these devices if they all broke tomorrow? What about your hypothetical Backblaze subscription? Would you still be able to have an off-site backup?
by Crespyl | 2026-02-23 13:42:53+00:00
Is it possible that the iPhone filters are weaker due to FaceID requirements? I seem to recall that FaceID (and similar systems, like Windows Hello) depend on IR to get a more 3D map of the face, so it'd make sense that they want to be more sensitive in that range.

Laptops aren't generally being used in the same areas as cars though, so you wouldn't expect to see as many cases involving Windows Hello compatible laptops/cameras.
by jcgrillo | 2026-02-23 13:43:22+00:00
They also attract grifters, frauds, conmen, snake oil peddlers, and every stripe of bullshit artist. I'm someone you probably would view as a hater, but I truly don't hate LLMs. I hate the lies. Projects like this are interesting, I wish there was a lot more of this and a lot less of the "trust me bro" stuff.
by jcattle | 2026-02-23 13:43:27+00:00
That is kind of my point. Outside of a few fields (some branches of chemistry certainly being one of the exceptions) will someone pay you to do your research.

I just pulled up the newest published math paper from arxiv. No one except universities will pay you to research "Quenched path limits and periodization stability for tilted Brownian motion in Poissonian potentials on Hd"

Just because your specific thing you are interested in researching has value to the free market, doesn't mean that all are so lucky.
Show HN: Local knowledge vault plugin for Claude Code
by aneequrrehman | 2026-02-23 13:43:30+00:00
While working on multiple projects within the same domain, I had to repeatedly explain domain concepts and other recurring patterns to Claude Code. So I created this plugin for myself that saves domain knowledge and some working context as markdown files. And since it's all local, the vault works great with Obsidian.

Curious to see if anyone is doing something similar.
by BatteryMountain | 2026-02-23 13:43:51+00:00
For interest sake, have a look at the flutter engine. It does this kind of diff on each build (meaning, each time the ui tree gets modified & triggers a rebuild); they split their objects into stateful & stateless, and then in your own code you have to make sure to not unnecessarily trigger rebuilds for expensive objects. So it kinda force you to think & separate cheap & expensive ui objects.
by WA | 2026-02-23 13:44:09+00:00
So true. I used Pinterest for art references and inspiration and they have 3 issues that are entirely self-owned:

1. Ads, ads and more ads. I had their app and it had to go, because every third pin was an ad.

2. Ads that seem to be pins: there are ads that are a mini collage. One image, 2-3 thumbs below. All "images" with the same rounded border like the regular pins. So you click them and because the upper image is visually detached from the rest of the ad, you don’t realize that you just clicked an ad when it is too late. A very nasty dark pattern.

3. No timestamps. It’s sometimes hard to tell if something is AI-generated. I don’t want AI-generated when it comes to art. Pinterest could choose to display pin timestamps when they were pinned for the first time, but they don’t.

So, they dug their own hole and I have zero sympathy for them, too.