MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by famouswaffles | 2026-02-10 22:47:35+00:00
>It's pattern matching, likely from typography texts and descriptions of umbrellas.

"Pattern matching" is not an explanation of anything, nor does it answer the question I posed. You just hand waved the problem away in conveniently vague and non-descriptive phrase. Do you think you could publish that in a paper ?

>Why am I confident that it's not actually doing spatial reasoning? At least in the case of Claude Opus 4.6, it also confidently replies "umbrella" even when you tell it to put the parenthesis under the J, with a handy diagram clearly proving itself wrong

I don't know what to tell you but J with the parentheses upside down still resembles an umbrella. To think that a machine would recognize it's just a flipped umbrella and a human wouldn't is amazing, but here we are. It's doubly baffling because Claude quite clearly explains it in your transcript.

>I feel like I have a pretty good intuition of what's happening here based on my understanding of the underlying mathematical mechanics.

Of Course you feel so. I'm telling you that you're wrong.

>Edit: I poked at it a little longer and I was able to get some more specific matches to source material binding the concept of umbrellas being drawn using the letter J: https://claude.ai/share/f8bb90c3-b1a6-4d82-a8ba-2b8da769241e

I honestly don't know what you think you've done here.
by m-schuetz | 2026-02-10 22:47:35+00:00
No, it's not usage flags with extra steps, it's less steps. It's explicitly saying you want device memory without any kind of magical guesswork of what your numerous potential combinations of usage flags may end up giving you. Just one simple device malloc.

Likewise, your claim about UMA makes zero sense. Device malloc gets you a pointer or handle to device memory, UMA has zero relation to that. The result can be unified, but there is no need for it to be.

Yeah, OpenGL does not do malloc. I'm flexible, I don't necessarily need malloc. What I want is a trivial way to allocate device memory, and Vulkan and VMA don't do that. OpenGL is also not the best example since it also uses usage flags in some cases, it's just a little less terrible than Vulkan when it comes to texture memory.

I find it fascinating how you're giving a bad VMA example and passing that of as exemplary. Like, why is there gpu-only and device-local. That vma alloc info as a whole is completely pointless because a theoretical vkMalloc should always give me device memory.
by its_magic | 2026-02-10 22:47:47+00:00
I didn't "lash out" at anyone. I simply asked why waste time on this when you can just use the original source code. It's a valid question, isn't it?

It's also a perfectly cromulent place to express my completely valid opinions about the abomination and complete waste of time and energy that is copyright law, isn't it?

So what is the actual problem here, other than your butthurt feelings, that are in fact a personal problem of your own creation and have nothing to do with me? ... Ah, it seems I answered my own question.

Again and again we come back to the root of the problem: Why are you so determined to find some kind of flaw in me and my opinions? Pull the log out of your own eye.

Why do you hate me so much that you enjoy censoring and shutting me down at every step, preventing me from expressing my valid thoughts?

Isn't that abusive behavior of the sort that one expects from a tyrant, not from a supposedly free society?

If you were truly correct in your own opinions, you could easily outargue me. A look at my post history will show at least one or two examples where I admitted the other guy was right when they clearly were. I guess that's considered an amazing superpower these days, since it never, ever happens anymore. No, you'd rather fight LITERALLY TO THE DEATH in some cases rather than allow for an alternate viewpoint.

And you wonder why people all over the world say your nation is corrupt and full of arrogant criminals. Gee, I wonder how they ever came to that conclusion.
by beepbooptheory | 2026-02-10 22:47:51+00:00
I don't get the pressure. I don't know about you, but my job for a long time has been continually learning new systems. I don't get how so many of my peers fall into this head trip where they think they are gonna get left behind by what amounts to anticipated new features from some SaaS one day.

How do you both hold that the technology is so revolutionary because of its productive gains, but at the same time so esoteric that you better be ontop of everything all the time?

This stuff is all like a weird toy compared to other things I have taken the time to learn in my career, the sense of expertise people claim at all comes off to me like a guy who knows the Taco Bell secret menu, or the best set of coupons to use at Target. Its the opposite of intimidating!
by kypro | 2026-02-10 22:48:03+00:00
> I started programming when I was seven because a machine did exactly what I told it to, felt like something I could explore and ultimately know, and that felt like magic

I'm significantly younger than OP, but this was it for me too. I'm autistic and found the world around me confusing growing up. Computers were wonderful because they were the only thing that really made sense to me.

I was obsessed with computers since I was 5. I started programming probably around age 10. Then in my early teens I started creating Flash applications, writing PHP, Java, etc...

When I look back on my early career now it was almost magical. This in the mid to late 00s (late to some I know), but this was before the era of package managers, before resources like Stackoverflow, before modern IDEs. You had some fairly basic frameworks to work with, but that was really about it. Everything else had to be done fully by hand.

This was also before agile was really a thing too. The places I worked at the time didn't have stand-ups or retrospectives. There were no product managers.

It was also before the iPhone and the mass adoption of the internet.

Back then no one went into software engineering as a profession. It was just some thing weird computer kids did, and sometimes businesses would pay us to build them things. Everyone who coded back then I got along with great, now everyone is so normal it's hard for me to relate with me. The industry today is also so money focused.

The thing and bothers me the most though is that computers increasingly act like humans that I need to talk to to get things done, and if that wasn't bad enough I also have to talk with people constantly.

Even the stuff I build sucks. All the useful stuff has been build so in the last decade or so stuff I've built feels increasingly detached from reality. When I started I felt like I was solving real practical problems for companies, now I'm building chatbots and internal dashboards. It's all bollocks.

There was a post recently about builders vs coders (I can't remember exactly). But I'm definitely a coder. I miss coding. There was something rewarding about pouring hours into a HTML design, getting things pixel perfect. Sometimes it felt laborious, but that was part of the craft. Claude Code does a great job and it does it 50x faster than I could, but it doesn't give me the same satisfaction.

I do hope this is my last job in tech. Unfortunately I'm not old enough to retire, but I think I need to find something better suited to my programatic way of thinking. I quite like the idea of doing construction or some other manual labour job. Seems like they're still building things by hand and don't have so many stupid meetings all the time.
by georgeck | 2026-02-10 22:48:04+00:00
When people hear about AI summaries, this is what comes to mind. And I understand their concern. Wouldn’t a summary strip away the essence of a conversation? Let me explain with an analogy. When we’re overwhelmed with information, we benefit from a system that organizes it. For instance, I might use a tool to declutter my desktop files and categorize them into logical groups. Once the categorization is complete, I can view these clusters and focus on the specific files within those clusters that pique my interest. However, if the summarization process also alters the files, I wouldn’t want to use that tool.

In the context of HN Companion, our objective is to examine lengthy threads and group them into 3 to 4 topics. Within each topic, we present the actual discussion that represents that cluster. We invested significant effort in developing a system that enables you to not only read the actual comments but also seamlessly jump to that discussion and continue the conversation there.

I encourage you to explore a few of the summaries in the app. I’d greatly appreciate your feedback on how we can enhance our service.
by esseph | 2026-02-10 22:48:20+00:00
Ehhhh

Professionally I've only ran into a handful of Ubuntu installs.

Dozens of SUSE

Hundreds of thousands of RHEL.

So if I wanted to help someone new, I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu because it would be somewhat of a dead end.

Fedora gives you familiarity with the largest deployed commercial Linux, while still getting the newest packages out there through either fedora yum or flatpak. Best of both worlds.
by schnebbau | 2026-02-10 22:48:34+00:00
For hamstring stretch I find using a back extension station works well, doing one leg at a time (https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61TQEGNUgQL._AC_UF894,10...). Let gravity pull your torso down, which will stretch your hamstring. If that's not possible, using the corner of a wall works too (https://i.ytimg.com/vi/2U4ChnuL3JM/maxresdefault.jpg)

For the McKenzie stretch (https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e556aadfe97d3...), instead of just holding the stretch, do reps between laying flat and then going into the stretch. At the end of your final rep (I would do 8), rotate side to side gently when arched.

Dead hangs: hang from a bar for 30 seconds, completely relaxed. Then 1 minute of rest. Repeat 3 times. This decompresses your spine.
by benoau | 2026-02-10 22:48:44+00:00
I think testing via browser automation is fantastic, API-driven web browsers are just amazing tools, but it's also the source of a lot of the flakiness because of the inherent difficulties determining when a page is completely in a state that it can do what you're expecting of it. Playwright improves a lot on this over Puppeteer but it's imperfect, I often end up with a wait for a selector, load state, or function evaluating when it's actually okay to proceed and sometimes I'll use a combination to really make sure, because what it's really waiting for is not just achieving some state but what actually happens after it does.
by thomassmith65 | 2026-02-10 22:49:14+00:00
I found this article while researching Lorillard tobacco company. Nicolas Darvas mentions the company in a book he published in 1960:

While most Wall Street stocks drifted or dropped, I continued my dancing tour of the world. In November 1957 I was appearing at the “Arc En Ciel” in Saigon when I noticed in Barron’s a stock unknown to me called LORILLARD.

I did not know then that they were the manufacturers of a particular brand of filter-tip cigarettes and the filter-tip craze was about to sweep America, causing their production to leap up astronomically. Out in Saigon, all I knew was that LORILLARD began to emerge from the swamp of sinking stocks like a beacon. In spite of the bad market, it rose from 17 until, in the first week of October, it established itself in the narrow box 24/27. Its volume for that week was 126,700 shares, which sharply contrasted with its usual 10,000 shares earlier in the year.

The steady rise in price and the high volume indicated to me that there was a tremendous interest in this stock. As for its fundamentals, I was satisfied as soon as I found out about the wide acceptance of their “Kent” and “Old Gold” cigarettes. I decided that if it showed signs of going above 27 I would buy it.

I asked my broker to cable me daily quotes. It soon became clear from these quotes that certain knowledgeable people were trying to get into this stock in spite of the general state of the market. Few people at that time had the faintest indication that LORILLARD was to make Wall Street history, that it was to shoot up to a most astounding high in a relatively short time, watched by the amazed and gasping financial community.
by h4kunamata | 2026-02-10 22:50:10+00:00
It is too late now!

When you have men being forced to pay child support, countries like Australia creating laws to educate men, feminist movement tagging men as the worst thing to live in society, you won't solve population decline.

Add to that, everything costs twice as much nowadays so having family isn't as easy anymore.
Men has zero incentive to want to have a family, everything is fighting against them.

The USA is crossing a strong "women/DEI first" phase, look at what is happening, companies going bankrupt, movies/games/services going bankrupt.

You cannot fix a society problem when the base of society is broken.
by MichaelZuo | 2026-02-10 22:50:37+00:00
Now that you mention it, it is pretty strange to see HN users parroting other people’s thinking (sci-fi writers) like literal sub-sapient parrots, while simultaneously decrying the danger of machines turning people into sub-sapient parrots…

Following that logic… the closest problem would be literally inbetween their ears.
by measurablefunc | 2026-02-10 22:50:57+00:00
Good point. OP was saying "no one knows" when in fact plenty of people do know but people also often conflate knowing & understanding w/o realizing that's what they're doing. People who have studied programming, electrical engineering, ultraviolet lithography, quantum mechanics, & so on know what is going on inside the computer but that's different from saying they understand billions of transistors b/c no one really understands billions of transistors even though a single transistor is understood well enough to be manufactured in large enough quantities that almost anyone who wants to can have the equivalent of a supercomputer in their pocket for less than $1k: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0.

Somewhere along the way from one transistor to a few billion human understanding stops but we still know how it was all assembled together to perform boolean arithmetic operations.
by Amezarak | 2026-02-10 22:51:46+00:00
This is a roundabout way of saying Americans are willing to spend more money on bigger car because they like them better.

Aside from urban cores with limited parking and lots of narrow streets, it’s obvious that “bigger” means more utility regardless of marketing. You can fit more people and more stuff more comfortably (apparently people really prefer the spacious people room even above room for stuff). People are not being brainwashed by ads.
Show HN: I built RSS feeds for podcast guests
by onesandofgrain | 2026-02-10 22:52:24+00:00
I subscribe to people, not podcasts. Most episodes of any given show don't interest me — but when a specific person I follow shows up on some random podcast, I want to know about it.
This generates an RSS feed for any podcast guest. When they appear on a new episode anywhere, it shows up in your feed. Plug it into your reader of choice and never miss a guest appearance again.
by all2 | 2026-02-10 22:52:41+00:00
My options are 1) pay about a dollar per query from a frontier model, or 2) pay a fraction of that for a not-so-great model that makes my token spend last days/weeks instead of hours.

I spend a lot of time on plans, but unfortunately the gotchas are in the weeds, especially when it comes to complex systems. I don't trust these models with even marginally complex, non-standard architectures (my projects center around statecharts right now, and the semantics around those can get hairy).

I git commit after each feature/bugfix, so we're on the same page here. If a feature is too big, or is made up of more than one "big" change, I chunk up the work and commit in small batches until the feature is complete.

I'm running golang for my projects right now. I can try a more strongly typed language, but that means learning a whole new language and its gotchas and architectural constraints.

Right now I use claude-code-router and Claude Code on top of openrouter, so swapping models is trivial. I use mostly Grok-4.1 Fast or Kimi 2.5. Both of these choke less than Anthropic's own Sonnet (which is still more expensive than the two alternatives).
by PKop | 2026-02-10 22:52:55+00:00
Foreigners competing for jobs and housing stock and territory is bad for current citizens. Add to it the political effect of shifting the politics away from national and citizen interests and towards more support for foreigner interests, and it's worse.

The net fiscal impact from the cohort of immigrants we get now is negative; they cost taxpayers more than they contribute. They take more from welfare and social services than than they pay in and more than current citizens. Additionally there is increased crime. There are so many of these that are not adding any economic benefit period, and for those that do, that benefit accrues to a small subset of business owners and politicians, not the general population of citizens. H1B expansion of foreign worker visas for example is bad for displaced American workers. The mindset that considers their own fellow citizens lacking such that they want to replace them with foreigners is insane to me. None of these western countries needs something such that they must get it from others; they can cultivate all of this from their own people, and birthrates would increase if not for the crowding out through increased costs especially housing, insurance, and depressed wages from importation of immigrants.

When I drive on the roads, when I shop for housing or apartments, when I want to pay for car insurance, when I got public spaces, parks, cities, vacation spots, got to stores.... I've never ever had the thought "You know what would make my quality of life better? If we had 100 million more people especially those that come from a different culture and speak a different language here and everywhere else right now". That is such a ridiculously foolish mindset, and disservice to one's own neighbors and such. Makes no sense to me.
by eastbayjake | 2026-02-10 22:52:56+00:00
I replied downthread but I used "value chain" deliberately -- there are lots of intermediaries of which the card networks are just one link in the chain -- and the statement above is about risk being borne (and value being created for consumers) by the entire value chain that is different and difficult/impossible in a FedNow-style immediate settlement model: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46964968
by s1mon | 2026-02-10 22:53:24+00:00
Many have predicted the singularity, and I found this to be a useful take. I do note that Hans Moravec predicted in 1988's "Mind Children" that "computers suitable for humanlike robots will appear in the 2020s", which is not completely wrong.

He also argued that computing power would continue growing exponentially and that machines would reach roughly human-level intelligence around the early to mid-21st century, often interpreted as around 2030–2040. He estimated that once computers achieved processing capacity comparable to the human brain (on the order of 10¹⁴–10¹⁵ operations per second), they could match and then quickly surpass human cognitive abilities.
by aftergibson | 2026-02-10 22:53:27+00:00
Yeah, I’m not disputing that AI-assisted engineering is a real shift. It obviously is.

My issue is that we’ve now got a million secondary “paradigm shifts” layered on top: agent frameworks, orchestration patterns, prompt DSLs, eval harnesses, routing, memory, tool calling, “autonomous” workflows… all presented like you’re behind if you’re not constantly replatforming your brain.

Even if the end-state is “engineers code less”, the near-term reality for most engineers is still: deliver software, support customers, handle incidents, and now also become competent evaluators of rapidly changing bot stacks. That cognitive tax is brutal.

So yes, follow where the ball is going. I am. I’m just not pretending the current proliferation is anything other than noisy and expensive to keep up with.
by wedog6 | 2026-02-10 22:53:30+00:00
If you don't believe in the power and corruption of the military procurement industry and the military itself, then your comment is so unrealistic as to be deluded.

If you do believe in it, then it's simply irrelevant. Given the other reasons that the US military is spent with profligacy on US manufactured goods, maintaining 'truck know-how' does not register. If the know how consideration did not exist the money would still be spent in exactly the same way.
by K0balt | 2026-02-10 22:54:56+00:00
Population decline is disastrous for developing nations like the United states. It’s bad for fully developed nations as well, but it’s cyanide for developing countries. Infrastructure build out requires a strongly growing population, or it’s just not fundable.

For low density countries like the USA, infrastructure is already a disproportionate burden. Population decline will spark a crisis of crumbling regressions and the loss of economic vitality.
by Rudybega | 2026-02-10 22:55:04+00:00
I mean, Waymo gives a lot of examples of the situations, in their blog post about Fleet Response where they detail this, released May 21, 2024. They're very explicit that the Waymo Driver autonomous system is in control the entire time.

This isn't something new.

https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response
by Spooky23 | 2026-02-10 22:55:30+00:00
The protections aren't quite the same with merchant issues. Notably, most situations that you attempt in good faith to resolve, purchased within 100 miles of your home are protected for credit cards.

But even if it were - most people operate one checking account, and most folks don't keep an especially large balance. If your debit card gets compromised or there is an erroneous charge, it will process up to your balance. It is incumbent on you to notice the fraud and take action. If the bad dip is today, and tomorrow morning my mortgage and other payments bounce or hit overdraft, I have a mess to clean up.

With a credit card, you're typically hitting a larger credit line that isn't fully utilize -- you may not notice the bad charge for a month, but there's no impact to you... the thief stole the bank's money.
by marginalia_nu | 2026-02-10 22:55:31+00:00
I think an additional big part of why LLM-aided coding is so draining is that it has you constantly refreshing your mental model of the code.

Making sense of new or significantly changed code is very taxing. Writing new code is less taxing as you're incrementally updating the model as you go, at a pretty modest pace.

LLMs can produce code at a much higher rate than humans can make sense of it, and assisted coding introduces something akin to cache thrashing, where you constantly need to build mental models of the system to keep up with the changes.

Your bandwidth for comprehending code is as limited as it always was, and taxing this ability to its limits is pretty unpleasant, and in my experience, comes at a cost of other mental capabilities.
by lovlar | 2026-02-10 22:55:40+00:00
As a backend development consultant, I lacked a way to automatically create time reports and invoices from them, so I created this tool.

- Automatic time reporting, very useful for consulting

- One page - very straightforward

- Ad-free

- No sign-up

- Upload existing invoices to auto-advance dates, invoice numbers, and time reporting

- Real-time preview as you edit

- Your data stays in the browser (no backend, except openstreetmap autocomplete)

- 5 different invoice types: regular, receipt, pro forma, quote, credit

- 5 different templates

- Supports complex VAT and discount scenarios

- 10 languages supported

I plan to keep it free of charge!

happy to hear feedback or feature requests