MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mschuster91 | 2026-02-18 23:36:55+00:00
> I think this is a good explanation for why mobile devices lack it, and even why say a MacBook Air or Mac Mini lacks it, but not why a MacBook Pro or Mac Studio lacks it.

Apple has the problem they "have to" have a professional "studio" lineup, but the prices are too high / the market volume too low to justify creating and validating what essentially is a fork of their SoC architecture.
Ask HN: How do you discover new products worth trying?
by xualaya | 2026-02-18 23:38:00+00:00
Product Hunt used to be great —early ProductHunt, when the community was smaller and the curation was real. Now it feels like a launch platform more than a discovery one. For Reddit the signal-to-noise ratio seems to be getting worse. Show HN is great but what else?

Curious if others have a routine for this? Where do you actually discover new products worth trying, maybe before they've already crossed 100k users?
by foxyv | 2026-02-18 23:38:07+00:00
There are a couple different schemes that are used to distribute taxpayer money to cronies. The most common are defense contracts for stuff like the proverbial $1000 hammers and such. There are also infrastructure deals, energy deals, subsidies, and bailouts. I know Musk was pushing for defense contracts earlier but they mostly fell through.

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/24/nx-s1-5305269/tesla-state-dep...

> That would mean that there's profit to be had by that buyer and so why the heck wouldn't Tesla just keep that profit for itself and run the entire operation?

I suspect this is because they have less confidence in the ability of the cab to pay for itself and would rather offload that financial risk on the buyer.
by nomel | 2026-02-18 23:38:39+00:00
I would assume because restarting would be saying "it's ok if the control system in our emergency transmitter sometimes fails, so let's just pretend it didn't happen and ignore it! yolo!".

I think a reasonable approach would be to have a redundant system, that gets activated if failure occurs in the first, and blasts a full alarm message to "abandon the tunnels, emergency system has failed!" type message.
by Natsu | 2026-02-18 23:38:40+00:00
Causation has a direction, but the equals sign doesn't, is probably an overly-pithy summary of the first section of the book. And it was hard to represent the simple observation that effects come after causes, not before.

So they introduce do calculus to intentionally break that symmetry to test causal models, which themselves are basically directed graphs going from cause to effect. These also help you see what you need to test to try to falsify your model and to show you how to measure how much of the variance in an effect is explained by variance in the cause. And it helps keep track of interventions, like opening doors in the Monty Hall problem[1].

There's a more detailed summary here that looks pretty good which probably does a better job than my quick summary. I skimmed it and it matches what I recall from the book:

https://www.tosummarise.com/book-summary-the-book-of-why-by-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-18 23:38:53+00:00
Firefox. It’s a competitive browser that isn’t Chrome. By developing software for it I keep the web free.

Safari. What I got on iOS.

Edge. Chrome-based but works better with Microsoft Narrator for screen reader testing.

Chrome. I do slum, I wrote a heart rate monitor web app that needs the Chrome-only BTLE API. What am I going to do? Learn how to write a native app for Windows and MacOS and Android and iOS or use Chrome?

BluFy. Alternative web browser for iOS probably a Chrome fork, it supports BTLE so I can do biofeedback on my iPad.
by DecoPerson | 2026-02-18 23:38:53+00:00
I wonder, is Microsoft doing “outsider trading”, where they covertly pipe analytical data to the executives’ independently-owned stock trading houses as “tips”? They’ve had access to so many corporate internal emails for so long, with MS365, but Copilot is the perfect way to mask such analysis. Also Copilot would be good at analysing emails and providing useful “tips”.

Just my whacky conspiracy theory of the day!
by nonameiguess | 2026-02-18 23:38:54+00:00
Tens of millions of people, if not hundreds now thanks to the popularity of the television adaptation, have been waiting 15 years now for Winds of Winter to get published. If AI is such a good writer and can replace anything, write Winds of Winter for George. I don't really give a shit what's ubiquitous on Amazon. Nobody will remember any of it in a century the way we remember War and Peace. People will remember the Song of Ice and Fire books.

I think it's fine. As said above, most reading isn't done because people are looking for thought-provoking, deeply emotional multi-decade experiences with nearly parasocial relationships to major characters. They're just looking to avoid the existential dread of being alone with their thoughts for more than a few minutes. There's room for both twinkies and filet mignon in the world and filet mignon alone can't feed the entire world anyway. By the same token, if we expected all journalists to write like H.L. Menken, a lot of people wouldn't get any news, but the world still deserves to have at least a few H.L. Menkens and I don't think they'll have an audience of "none" even if their audience is smaller than Stephanie Meyer or whoever is popular today.

If it were me, I don't know man, does nobody on Hacker News still care about actually being good at anything as opposed to just making sales and having reach? Personally, I'd rather be Anthony Joshua than Jake Paul, even though Jake Paul is richer. Shit, I think Jake Paul himself would rather be Anthony Joshua
by EvgheniDem | 2026-02-18 23:39:05+00:00
Exactly this. And what makes it compound is that you can not build muscle memory for patterns you have already reviewed. Same prompt, different output every time, so every generation is a fresh read even if you have seen similar code before.

The feedback loop angle is interesting. Real-time linting during generation rather than after could help catch issues earlier, but I think the deeper problem is the non-determinism. Even with instant feedback, if the output changes on each run you are still starting from scratch each time.

Have you found anything that actually reduces the review time per component, or is it mostly about finding issues faster?
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-18 23:39:07+00:00
My best guess is that it flew under the radar. The Kaggle dataset has 'only' 10,000 downloads, and the article itself probably doesn't have that many views. Still, this seems pretty far beyond the pale. Given the other case of AI-related plagiarism by Microsoft that was on the front page[1], it seems whatever review process they have for content that is published by their employees, if there is any review process at all, is deeply flawed.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47057829, "Microsoft morged my diagram". It was in a discussion there that someone pointed out this article linking to full downloads of the Harry Potter novels, which I thought deserved more visibility.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-02-18 23:39:20+00:00
That's the post I made on r/plex a decade ago that pissed off a dumbass moderator and got me banned from there! I guess he hated books.

I've recently been doing data entry on Open Library... sometimes even worldcat doesn't have an OCLC for an edition, and Open Lib is my fallback. Maybe I should be doing it on Bookbrainz instead.
by EvgheniDem | 2026-02-18 23:39:30+00:00
Not build speed, the human review cycle. When the AI generates a component, I still need to read through it manually to make sure it does what I intended, handles edge cases, and fits the existing patterns. That takes 8-12 minutes per component regardless of how fast the build is.

The slow part is not the computer. It is me reading AI-generated code line by line before I trust it enough to ship.
by throwawaytea | 2026-02-18 23:39:33+00:00
You're thinking of factory welding, manufacturing or maybe repetitive pipeline welding and thinks like that.

It'll be a while until a robot disassembles a trailer enough to remove the bent axle, cleans off all the paint and rust, bends the trailer back into shape where needed, cuts a custom support to makeup for some lost strength, welds it in, primers it, paints it, and assembles the trailer.

Same for construction too.
by altairprime | 2026-02-18 23:39:33+00:00
There are some theories. Most fresh food in a generic U.S. supermarket has something like 10-25% of the nutrients per pound than it used to a hundred years ago, thanks to soil depletion, so each generation has to consume more pounds of food to get the same amount of nutrients. There’s been long-standing corruption in the FDA “food pyramid” and “recommended daily allowance” systems to bias the U.S. population from recognizing that added sugar leads to obesity. And there’s the advent of chemical non-sugar sweeteners, which in recent decades are turning out to be just as harmful as sugar, only differently. Those may not fully explain obesity, but they certainly are known and understood explanations for obesity — and yet they remain wholly unaddressed.

I think the problem is not whether we’ll fully understand the causes, but more that every cause we have identified to date would require regulating corporations in profit-damaging ways to solve, and it is likely that any future causes we reveal will be the same. That’s anathema in the U.S.: profits are sacrosanct to the two primary political parties, discounting their occasional extremists who argue (correctly) that we should be regulating in favor of consumers, not profits. Typically, the desire for a ‘full’ explanation is used to delay or derail efforts to implement solutions to each single proven explanation, and so I tend to caution against pursuing a complete answer first, and instead recommend asking why we have not yet addressed the known causes while continuing to search for more.
by Nevermark | 2026-02-18 23:39:45+00:00
Many creators also want to eat.

You could say that cameras want to be free. A camera left unattended is likely to walk away.

Some rules are about adjusting incentives and disincentives to maximize value for everyone.

There is a lot of room to argue where that balance is. But the "its easy to copy stuff" argument isn't even grappling the kinds of context that result in more creations.

Most copyrighted material doesn't hurt you in any way if you can't have a copy. So someone creating something and not sharing with you should not be something to complain about.

Nor should it be a problem if they are willing to share with you, if you do something for them.

You are also completely unfettered to create anything for yourself that you feel you are missing.

People don't owe other people their work.
by LoganDark | 2026-02-18 23:40:21+00:00
> I don’t have any problem with old-timey “Dishsoap Brand Dishsoap sponsored this content. They want you to know that a dish isn’t clean unless it’s Dishsoap clean!” Type ads. Much beyond that should no longer be tolerated.

I think the only advertising I've knowingly listened to was a Privacy.com sponsorship on The Modern Rogue. Now been a paying customer for years and they have been mostly great. I think that sponsorship was back in, like, 2015 or 2016. Oh how times have changed.

(I'm sure there are thousands of subconscious influences that I have no idea about, though. Maybe a few radio ads put a brand in my mind for something so I didn't search for alternatives. I don't listen to broadcast radio anymore though.)
by jsheard | 2026-02-18 23:40:39+00:00
> It's a battle tested choice and pretty much every browser actually in use is written in C++.

Pretty much every browser actually in use is stuck with C++ because they're in way too deep at this point, but Chromium and Firefox are both chipping away at their C++ piece by piece and replacing it with safer alternatives where they feasibly can. Chromium even blocked JPEG-XL adoption until there was a safe implementation because they saw the reference C++ decoder as such a colossal liability.

IMO the takeaway is that although those browsers do use C++, their hard-won lessons have led them to wish they didn't, and to write a new browser in C++ is just repeating all of the same mistakes.
by bubblewand | 2026-02-18 23:40:43+00:00
Yeah I've shopped for clothes enough for my wife to know that even with an hourglass shape, you're guaranteed to find lots of pieces that're like "OK none of these sizes will work on you". Her particular problem is a small waist paired with an hourglass. Plenty of "ruler"-shaped cuts out there on the small end of waist size, that won't work for her.

I wouldn't be surprised if women of every body shape believe that clothes must be targeting some other shape, except the ones who luck into a sizing-region in which multiple body types have a lot of overlap.
by conartist6 | 2026-02-18 23:40:52+00:00
All I can say for sure is that reason the old tools were slow was not that JS runtime is impossible to build fast tools with.

And anyway, these new tools tend to have a "perf cliff" where you get all the speed of the new tool as long as you stay away from the JS integration API sued to support the "long tail" of uses cases. Once you fall off the cliff though, you're back to the old slow-JS cost regime...
by munificent | 2026-02-18 23:40:59+00:00
> I feel like a better angle would be educating people that 1500 kcal worth of Starbucks sugar for breakfast is not healthy.

An even better angle is educating Starbucks to stop selling unhealthy garbage.

The idea that all blame rests on individuals and corporations are blame-free is crazy. They have way more agency over what we consume than individuals do.
by amluto | 2026-02-18 23:41:47+00:00
No. Cloudflare will give a key scoped to an entire administrative domain in the Cloudflare sense like “a.com”. They will not give you a key scoped to a single entry within that domain. (That entry would be a domain in the RFC 9499 sense, but do you really expect anyone to agree on the terminology?)

In particular, there is no support for getting a key scoped to _acme-challenge.a.b.c or, even better, to a particular RR.

Maybe if you have an enterprise plan you can very awkwardly fudge it using lots of CNAMEs and subdomains.

Some DNS hosts that support old-school dynamic dns can do this. dns.he.net is an example, but they have a login system that very much stuck in the nineties.
by altairprime | 2026-02-18 23:42:23+00:00
I do support addressing obesity (see my elsethreads), but duly noted that it’s not a cure-all panacea for the problems faced by women. Obesity does not address the nine different U.S. body shapes; one can be obese and rectangular, or obese and spoon, or obese and triangle. Resolving obesity is a worthy cause, but will only reduce or remove the impact of size inflation on ‘vanity’ sizing as a whole, without addressing the significant disparity of sizes between manufacturers or the near-total lack of products for the eight non-hourglass body shapes.
by Telemakhos | 2026-02-18 23:42:30+00:00
The big problem that the article glosses over is that "labrys" is neither Minoan (to our limited knowledge) nor Greek, but Lydian: the Roman-era author Plutarch in Ætia Romana et Græca tells us that the Lydians call the double-headed axe λάβρυν, and people have assumed that it must have a nominative λάβρυς. The Lydians lived in Anatolia, not Crete. The Carians, another Anatolian people neighboring the Lydians, had a place called Labraunda, and coins minted there in Roman times have a double-headed axe, but that's more than a thousand years after the Cretans. There's no good evidence that the Minoans knew the word "labrys" or connected it to axes or the labyrinth. Moreover, it's not clear that the axes we have were or could have been functional rather than votive or ornamental, as most are thin and weak, so assuming that they were used to kill bulls is a stretch.
by varispeed | 2026-02-18 23:42:47+00:00
> Scalable, robust, adaptable software is only a requirement because it was previously infeasible for individuals to build non-trivial systems for solving any more than a one or two personal problems. Even software engineers couldn't write their own text editor and still have enough time to also write software.

That's a wild assumption. I personally know engineers who _alone_ wrote things like compilers, emulators, editors, complex games and management systems for factories, robots. That was before internet was widely available and they had to use physical books to learn.
by vladgur | 2026-02-18 23:42:57+00:00
I dont think California education is defunded. Mismanaged yes, wrong incentives and priorities, yes.

Quick google search shows that my district has nearly a budget of $195,927,382 for years 2024-2025 serving 10,278 students. Thats nearly 20k per student. THe district employed 481(<22 student per teacher on avg) teachers and 480 admin staff.

Residents of my school district constantly vote for bonds to pay for capital school upgrades(thanks Prop 13) in addition to high amount property taxes. We dont have an issue of defunding the education here.

Our education is non-competitive with Asian and European ones not because we cant afford it, but because its mismanaged, incorrectly incentivised and often ideological (math is racist).
by cyberax | 2026-02-18 23:43:45+00:00
Yes, and it'd be great if DNSSEC added an "advisory" signature level. So it can be deployed without doing a leap of faith.

But let's not pretend that WebPKI is perfect. More than one large service failed at some point because of a forgotten TLS certificate renewal. And more than one service was pwned because a signing key leaked. Or a wildcard certificate turned out to be more wildcard than expected.

I understand the failures of DNSSEC and DNS in general. And we need to do something about it because it's really showing signs of its age as we continue to pile on functionality onto it.

I don't have an idea for a good solution for everything, but I just can't imagine us piling EVERYTHING onto WebPKI either.
by IgorPartola | 2026-02-18 23:43:49+00:00
Am I just stupidly missing something or does this in theory allow anyone who controls a DNS server for my domain or anyone who controls traffic between LE and the DNS server for my domain to get a TLS certificate they can use to impersonate my domain?

I suppose the same is true for DNS-01 but this would make it even easier because the attacker can just put up their LE account instead of mine into the DNS response and get a certificate.

At this point why not just put my public cert into a DNS record and be done with it?
by onurui | 2026-02-18 23:43:54+00:00
I dug into the OpenClaw repo and found the engine underneath is actually Pi, a minimal agent by Mario Zechner. Unlike my experience with Claude Code, where context often fills up quickly with setup overhead, Pi runs on just four tools and a tiny system prompt. It gets the same work done with a fraction of the token usage, suggesting a lot of the harness bloat in other tools might not be necessary.
by overfeed | 2026-02-18 23:44:04+00:00
> Jobs acted as an editor and sounding board. You can't just let designers (or engineers) run wild.

Apple went way too far with the skeuomorphism, and Ives & co. may have over-corrected. Speaking of running wild: I'd consider painstakingly reproducing the stitching on the seats in Job's jet in the icon for an Apple app (Notes, IIRC) to be going overboard. Apple was rightly mocked for taking skeuomorphism too far, and as a result making onscreen, virtual objects mimick real objects became outdated, and people are now nostalgic for it because the backlash has been forgotten.
by fauria | 2026-02-18 23:44:56+00:00
I'm not sure what the organizative reform of Spain has to do with the founding date of Spain and Portugal's navies. In any case, the Spanish Armada is the result of joining the Castilian and Aragonese navies, both dating from the early XIII century: https://armada.defensa.gob.es/ArmadaPortal/page/Portal/Armad...
by fdefitte | 2026-02-18 23:45:12+00:00
This is the part nobody wants to say out loud: most writing was already bad before LLMs. AI didn't kill good writing, it just made bad writing free. The people who were reading AI-generated slop on Amazon are the same people who were reading ghostwritten garbage before. Good writers still have audiences, they're just not competing in the SEO content farm game anymore. And honestly they never should have been.
by kccqzy | 2026-02-18 23:45:23+00:00
That Starbucks probably saved my life after I made an unwise decision to bike 30 miles on an empty stomach. Bonking is real, and I’m glad they sell the sugary beverages to prevent me from bonking.

Oh and I also fainted the first time I donated blood, because I did not know I should not donate blood while fasting. Again, sugary drinks helped.
by tremon | 2026-02-18 23:45:57+00:00
That's true, but git also doesn't have tags that apply to a subset of the repository tree. You can easily check out `project-b/v1.2.0` and build project-a from that tree. Of course, the answer to that is "don't do that", but you still have the weird situation that the source control implementation doesn't match the release workflow; your `git describe` example is but one of the issues you will face fighting the source control system -- the same applies to `git log` and `git diff`, which will also happily give you information from all other projects that you're not interested in.

For me, the scope of a tag should match the scope of the release. That means that a monorepo is only useful if the entire source tree is built and released at the same time. If you're using a monorepo but then do partial releases from a subtree, you're using the wrong solution: different repo's with a common core dependency would better match that workflow. The common core can either be built separately and imported as a library, or imported as a git submodule. But that's still miles ahead of any solution that muddles the developers' daily git operations.
by fdefitte | 2026-02-18 23:45:57+00:00
This is the right critique. The whole article is a fun thought experiment but it massively overestimates the problem by ignoring causality. In practice, UUID collisions only matter within systems that actually talk to each other, and those systems are bounded by light cones. 128 bits is already overkill for anything humans will build in the next thousand years. 256 bits is overkill for anything that could physically exist in this universe.
by Mitchem | 2026-02-18 23:46:07+00:00
I do work at Mesa and I'm upfront about that in the article. But I cover cURL's bug bounty shutdown, Zig leaving GitHub, the Kai Gritun incident, jujutsu, Atomic Software, and maintainer burnout among other items.

Those problems are real independent of Mesa. I do shoutout an open source project we have called AgentBlame but don't talk about anything related to proprietary software or why Mesa is the end-all-be-all.

Thanks for your feedback, definitely did not mean for this to come across as an ad.
by vsgherzi | 2026-02-18 23:46:58+00:00
right but these differ drastically, one is writing perfect code which is quite difficult the other is opting not to take a dependency. One is much more realistic.

I agree on software quality going down, I'm looking very closely at foundational software being written in rust (mostly in the kernel) and it seems to be okay for now.

The other hope is that maybe one day rust will get a fatter standard lib. I understand the opposition to this but I really want a series of crates tied strongly to the ecosystem and funded and audited by the foundation. I think this is the way they were going with offering the foundation maintainer fund.

Personally I'm thinking about moving my career into embedded to escape the massive dependencies and learn more about how computers really work without all the slop on top.