MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by phil21 | 2026-02-14 18:00:13+00:00
I think it's hard for certain people with certain backgrounds to understand.

What I see as someone who grew up in a very working class family surrounded by those on benefits:

I see the janitor who busts their ass day in and day out to provide for their families totally lost in these conversations. They are expected to take money out of their check - doing a very difficult, thankless, and not all that well paying job - to even today help pay for a whole lot of people who are incredibly more privileged. I know quite a number of people who have college degrees but experienced "failure to launch" who see themselves as too good to go work in a kitchen, as a janitor, or what have you - but are quite happy to accept various form of public benefits due to their part time cushy employment.

I cannot square that circle. Having someone work themselves to a bone with no real hopes of retirement, so you can have other people live a much easier life than they are.

If you ask those taking said benefits who are working part time in a arts field or whatever, they will of course state that they are not the problem and "rich people" should pay more in taxes so the janitor also doesn't have to work. But now who is cleaning toilets or taking out trash? At some point the work has to be done and you run out of rich people to tax for wealth redistribution.

Considering how widespread this "condition" seems to be in my human experience, I cannot see a widescale implementation of "to each of their abilities, to each their need" ever working out simply due to how selfish humans appear to be. I love the idea - and I have often dream of starting my own commune of sorts of well-curated individuals who all have roles to play, but I just can't see it working out either in reality or in scale.

I am quite convinced that if you implemented UBI or other means for the average person to never work you'd simply get a whole lot of people doing effectively nothing, if not outright destructive (for society) things with their time.
by mmonaghan | 2026-02-14 18:00:21+00:00
I don't think this changes the dynamic one bit. Every subscription product still optimizes for engagement. Then there's the free speech aspect - sure it's easy to say "we don't want to see cigarette ads"- what about your local mom n pop restaurant buying ads to try and get more people to eat in?

The primordial domino tile is human nature, which you're not going to knock over. The solution is probably closer to what China does - punish companies that don't prioritize/train algos to prioritize the values we hold dear. Basically, just keep beating meta and bytedance until they decide to get their timelines out of the politics game and into the education game, for example, or the democracy game, or whatever your country's main issues are.

I think there's definitely room to regulate "divisiveness" though, and that's a little clearer than "addictive design".
by eduction | 2026-02-14 18:00:37+00:00
I confess I find the growing prevalence of these sorts of errors on HN dispiriting. Programming requires precision in code; I’d argue software engineering requires precision in language, because it involves communicating effectively with people.

In any single instance I don’t get very exercised - we tend to be able to infer what someone means. But the sheer volume of these malapropisms tells me people are losing their grip on our primary form of communication.

Proper dictionaries should be bundled free with smartphones. Apple even has some sort of license as you can pull up definitions via context menus. But a standalone dictionary app you must obtain on your own. (I have but most people will not.)
by rickcarlino | 2026-02-14 18:01:00+00:00
Do a real project with goals and expectations. Learn exactly what you need to get the task done. Do not buy a ROS book. Do not spend huge amounts of time exploring the ecosystem. Just focus on making it “do the thing”. The experience will come when the goals are met. Source: I built the entire initial software stack for the FarmBot project (minus the gcode handling firmware) and had zero hardware experience when I started. I can compile embedded Linux kernels from scratch and whatnot now.
by ragall | 2026-02-14 18:01:14+00:00
> To each their own I guess. I’ll happily move walls, add or remove a bathroom, add windows, etc.

A sign of the restlesness. Once you find a house to settle in, why would you need to change it ? European houses are typically versatile, US houses aren't due to having closets (which make a room's layout very inflexible) as well as electrical outlets being mandated exactly in the middle of the wall precisely where one would like to place furniture. US building codes are beyond stupid.

> Terrible carbon footprint for concrete too.

Carbon footprint is not that important. I want comfort.

> I know modern structures are better but I also don’t entirely trust block in an earthquake. Obviously less of a concern in most (not all!) of Europe.

You can take a look at Japan. Modern buildings can withstand earthquakes. The issue in the US is that developers are allowed to just build without a civil engineer or architect designing the building. I wouldn't trust that either.
by fat | 2026-02-14 18:01:15+00:00
Ahh good question…

Here's the timeline if you're interested.

3 years ago we started building a direct competitor to GitHub with the theory that you need to build code storage, code review and CI to truly compete.

We spent about a year prototyping this all out, raised some money, and then started building this for real [tm].

Code storage felt like a HUGE moat for GitHub. Most of our competitors in the code review space:

- graphite
- linear
- (now cognition)
- etc

All built directly on GitHub's apis – but we wanted to go down to the metal (something wrong with us).

A year and half into doing this, a few folks reached out and asked how we were scaling git… i waved my hands around a bunch and explained how hard of a distributed systems problem scaling git was… explained git 3 phased commits, etc.

Fast forward a few more months, and we started standing up single tenant clusters of our infra for a few different codegen companies that also needed storage solutions.

And now here we are :)
by Aurornis | 2026-02-14 18:01:48+00:00
The people doing these kickstarters are outsourcing the work because they can’t do it themselves. If they use an LLM, they don’t know what to look for or even ask for, which is how they get these problems where the production backend uses shared credentials and has no access control.

The LLM got it to “working” state, but the people operating it didn’t understand what it was doing. They just prompt until it looks like it works and then ship it.
by vlovich123 | 2026-02-14 18:03:04+00:00
Depends how you compile it. If you’re compiling ReleaseFast/ReleaseSmall, it’s not very different from C (modulo as you said it has some language features to make it less likely you do it):

* Double free

* Out of bounds array access

* Dereferencing null pointers

* Misaligned pointer dereference

* Accessing uninitialized memory

* Signed integer overflow

* Accessing a union field for which the active tag is something else.
by cosmicgadget | 2026-02-14 18:04:01+00:00
I appreciate the observation, there's automated and manual curation that goes into this so there's definitely corpo stuff that shows up. We probably made things more difficult by wanting to include mainstream sources but heavily favor indie ones.

We have substantial lists of approved and denied domains so the authentic content is definitely there but it's not visible from a few clicks off of the categories page, we have more work to do.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-14 18:04:19+00:00
Nope. I use Linux and I also have a great number of external HDDs, both from Seagate and from WD.

On all of them, except on the Seagate Expansion model, SMART works fine over USB.

Seagate Expansion is made as an external drive by Seagate, so it is not some custom enclosure that could have been incompatible with the drive.
by kelipso | 2026-02-14 18:04:21+00:00
It depends on the experiment done… You need every intermediate point between the wires to be low distortion too. As in, audiophiles cannot distinguish between distortion and distortion+distortion is not really an interesting result.

You need source, digital to analog conversion, pre-amp, amp, speakers to have low distortion too, and you need the room to be appropriately treated too. I didn’t look at whether they did all that but I seriously doubt they did.
by einpoklum | 2026-02-14 18:04:39+00:00
tl;dr: A kit for targeting several old or old-ish platforms, with code in some languages popular in the 1980s: C89 (ANSI C), Pascal, Modula 2, Basic. A 'kit' here means: frontend, codegen, support libraries and some tools. This is apparently known as being the default toolchain for Minix 1 and 2.

But - the repository is not "everything you need"; it actually relies on a lot from an existing platform - GCC, Lua, Make, Python etc. So, you would typically use this to cross-compile it seems.
by galangalalgol | 2026-02-14 18:04:52+00:00
It is a far right talking point, or just right now I guess? But it also is a reasonable one. Not from the blood and soil only Europeans are American standpoint, but from the standpoint of having an increasing percentage of first generation immigrants. Japan has seen issues with this at the same time they have benefitted from it. It isn't a matter of blaming the immigrants, it is a disservice to them too. We can't welcome them properly at the rates that would be necessary to fully offset fertility decline. That doesn't mean we shouldn't allow any immigration at all. We should do it as quickly as we can do it correctly. And that would be true even without the demographic problem. Having one or two immigrants in a school is probably too low, we can go faster than that. Having half the class be new from varying places doesn't work. It is also a problem for the donating countries. South America can't afford for all their working age people to head to Spain, they are already hitting their own demographic decline. Africa is on the other side still. They have too many children relative to the working age population. Taking only working age men and not their children harms Africa in a similar way.

I'm not saying allowing immigration in a steady controlled fashion won't help, just that it won't be enough, and that the levels that would be enough aren't possible without impacts on the immigrants, their new countries, and their originating countries being severe enough they don't balance.

Right now the US has 4.1% of its population residing unlawfully. That is 8-20x any European nation. It is largely due to the federated system and a suspicion of national identity systems, but just being able to bring in the rate we have been, but correctly through the system would be a start.
by neom | 2026-02-14 18:04:57+00:00
Alright well I can tell you're grumpy about this so how about we agree to disagree? I don't know Dario so I couldn't say, but I do trust Jack a lot. That aside: this is the 3rd time I've heard the racist towards Chinese thing, what exactly is that all about if you'd be willing to save me a google?
by radioactivist | 2026-02-14 18:05:10+00:00
Also a physicist here -- I had the same reaction. Going from (35-38) to (39) doesn't look like much of a leap for a human. They say (35-38) was obtained from the full result by the LLM, but if the authors derived the full expression in (29-32) themselves presumably they could do the special case too? (given it's much simpler). The more I read the post and preprint the less clear it is which parts the LLM did.
by keeda | 2026-02-14 18:05:43+00:00
There are some interesting dynamics going on at Ars. I get the sense that the first author on the pulled article, Benj Edwards, is trying to walk a very fine line between unbiased reporting, personal biases, and pandering to the biases of the audience -- potentially for engagement. I get the sense this represents a lot of the views of the entire publication on AI. In fact, there are some data points in this very thread.

For one, the commenters on Ars largely, extremely vocally anti-AI as pointed out by this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47015359 -- I'd say they're even more anti-AI than most HN threads.

So every time he says anything remotely positive about AI, the comments light up. In fact there's a comment in this very thread accusing him of being too pro-AI! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47013747 But go look at his work: anything positive about AI is always couched in much longer refrains about the risks of AI.

As an example, there has been a concrete instance of pandering where he posted a somewhat balanced article about AI-assisted coding, and the very first comment went like, "Hey did you forget about your own report about how the METR study found AI actually slowed developers down?" and he immediately updated the article to mention that study. (That study's come up a bunch of times but somehow, he's never mentioned the multiple other studies that show a much more positive impact from AI.)

So this fiasco, which has to be AI hallucinations somehow, in that environment is extremely weird.

As a total aside, in the most hilarious form of irony, their interview about Enshittification with Cory Doctorow himself crashed the browser on my car and my iPad multiple times because of ads. I kid you not. I ranted about it on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kunalkandekar_enshittificatio...
by phil21 | 2026-02-14 18:05:45+00:00
> Take even the most unskilled labor that people can think about such as flipping a burger at a restaurant like McDonald's. In reality that job is multiple different roles mixed into one that are constantly changing. Multiple companies have experimented with machines and robots to perform this task all with very limited success and none with any proper economics.

In actual reality, McDonalds has already automated to a vast degree. People were talking about burger-flipping robots as a trope 30+ years ago. Their future has come, just not in the way imagined.

If the McDonalds franchises near me are anything to go by we went from a busy lunch rush needing a staff of 20 or so individuals to properly handle, to around half a dozen. At least a half reduction in peak staffing needs - nearly entirely due to various forms of automation and supply chain optimization. The latter of which is just another name for automation further upstream and abstracted from the point of sale.

> This is a complete non-reality in the restaurant industry. Every piece of equipment they have cost them significant amounts and ongoing maintenance even if it's the most basic equipment such as a grill or a fryer.

Perhaps grills are the hardest bit to automate, so they may never not be staffed by humans. I'd argue some places have done a fairly good job "automating" this aspect too if you squint a little. Stuff like double-sided grills where the top comes down and cooks a burger from both sides at once. Doubles your line throughput. Call this mechanization if you want, but it's in the same bucket to me.

But look at soft drink machines. They are now fully automated with some locations able to go from 3-4 people staffing two machines during a busy lunch rush, down to a single person who simply puts caps on stuff coming off the tiny conveyor belt. Mistakes are also cut down to close to zero, including stuff like "less ice" or "more ice" customizations.

The locations I'm aware of now operate fryers on a rotation so the "wait for fresh fries" experience is a thing of the past. This probably wasn't a major capital investment - just an improvement in the automation of data collection, modeling, and demand prediction. Still an automation though, as it replaces some manager making those decisions.

Ordering kiosks are the obvious one everyone knows about, so not worth discussing. They are universal in large cities these days, and I'm starting to see them more and more even in small towns during road trips. App-based ordering is also not someone anyone predicted 20 years ago either. Locations went from 6-8 cashiers on duty down to 1 or 2.

It already happened. Fast food is getting more out of less workers, just as predicted. It just happened incrementally over decades. Sure, a typical fast food franchise will never be operated in a "lights out" style manner with a roving team of highly paid technicians simply responding to alerts. But the labor force has been reduced and optimized for efficiency, and will continue to be chipped away little by little as technology gets better.
by tomsmithtld | 2026-02-14 18:05:53+00:00
the shared MQTT credentials pattern is unfortunately super common in budget IoT. seen the exact same thing in smart plugs and air quality sensors. the frustrating part is per-device auth is not even hard to set up, mosquitto supports client certs and topic ACLs with minimal config. manufacturers skip it because per-device key provisioning adds a step to the assembly line and nobody wants to think about key management. so they hardcode one set of creds and hope nobody runs strings on the binary.
by sebringj | 2026-02-14 18:06:14+00:00
so I made this and frankly i was in shock that it worked so well, so i decided to make it plugable as an MCP, i have used this approach for 3 projects now and I frankly can't live without it. I hope other people find it useful but ya you never know. Coding in a vacuum isn't useful so lmk what you think if you try it out etc.
Show HN: Aurora-OS.js – High fidelity hacking simulator pre-alpha
by mentalos | 2026-02-14 18:06:19+00:00
Extensible web OS game and hacking simulator framework for developers and gamers. Virtual OS experience with scripting, apps, terminals & sandboxed gameplay, set in the mental.os() universe.

Born from the intersection of digital art and cyberpunk culture, this project reimagines the operating system as an immersive game world. It is a high-fidelity hacking simulator built on modern web technologies (React, Vite, Electron), designed to blur the line between utility and gameplay.

Currently in its pre-Alpha stage, it serves as the foundation for a future MMO hacking universe - a persistent world where you script, hack, and uncover the lore of an emerging game universe.

Contributors & testers wanted!
by jitl | 2026-02-14 18:06:45+00:00
well the library ecosystem, developer tooling, and gradual typing support for lua is far ahead of what’s available for vimscript. in my experience lua is #2 behind javascript/typescript’s #1 when it comes to scripting language LSP stuff. both python and ruby suffer from a profusion of alternative type checkers and whatnot that cause pain and fragmentation when it comes to tooling.

it’s pretty great to have my vimconfig give red squiggle in editor if i’m doing it wrong before i save & reload.

but i’ve not followed vim9 script as its evolved perhaps there’s a good type checker for it at this point?

even before neovim, there were vim extensions written in lua so it feels gravity of lua code has been considerable for a long time.

to me vim9script feels like perl5/raku split - evolution too late to grow new users, a remnant for a niche that will fade to oblivion slowly over the next 10 years.
by reg_dunlop | 2026-02-14 18:06:54+00:00
Now that I've looked at the community discussion over on GH and looked at Hashimoto's Vouch system, I'm failing to see how any of the suggested solutions actually place a human-in-the-loop.

I think Vouch does a good job of creating a system of admission, but there's still the effort of reviewing and/or prioritizing which PRs receive attention.
by philgyford | 2026-02-14 18:07:09+00:00
Yeah, from a HN point of view I imagine most blogs are tech blogs. But for me, trying to curate a wider selection, tech blogs should be a very small minority. There are so many non-tech categories that I’m much more interested in populating, never mind categories that don’t even exist yet. A real joy is finding a niche topic where there are loads of current blogs, all linking to each other. Blogspot is full of that kind of thing.
by autoexec | 2026-02-14 18:07:49+00:00
> I think the aversion to subscribing to a streaming service for a single series has more to do with the recurring nature of the subscription than it does the price.

I think it's about not necessarily getting what you pay for. Shows are constantly leaving streaming platforms which is a problem if you want to watch something specific as opposed to just being happy to pay to watch whatever they feel like letting you see this week. Then they'll also silently censor content or remove entire episodes so you can't be sure if you've even watched the entirety of whatever show you intended to see if they have it at all.

They also like to reorder shows and even renumber seasons which can result in confusion and spoilers. Netflix is horrible when it comes to this. One example is the The Great British Bake Off. For some reason they insist on reordering them so that it starts with whatever the newest series is and then plays them backwards which is a pretty big problem. At the start of one series they even recap all of the winners of previous series spoiling them all for everyone watching the show on netflix.

If you just want to watch "something" by all means pay a monthly fee for a streaming service. If you want to watch a specific show and you want it to be there for you the next you want to watch it you're better off getting physical media or doing a little research and getting everything off the high seas.
by Hnrobert42 | 2026-02-14 18:08:32+00:00
This is a bummer. Ars is one of the few news sources I consistently read. I give them money because I use an ad blocker and want to support them.

I have noticed them doing more reporting on reporting. I am sure they are cash strapped like everyone. There are some pretty harsh critics here. I hope they, too are paying customers or allowing ads. Otherwise, they are just pissing into the wind.
by Manuel_D | 2026-02-14 18:08:34+00:00
At this point you've stopped attempting to argue that banking's information collection requirements is "avoiding" the law, and instead have pivoted to speculation about whether the Supreme Court might reinterpret the Constitution such that it prohibits this kind of data collection mandates.

But until such a ruling from the Supreme Court is made, the previous ruling is the law of the land. So as I said: it's not the government avoiding a law by acting through a third party, you just don't like the law. And it sounds like you don't disagree.
by turnsout | 2026-02-14 18:08:49+00:00
This may be an unpopular opinion, but if people believe they can hear a difference in their $1000 cables, and they enjoy purchasing and testing them, I'm inclined to let them enjoy themselves. I have a basic hi-fi setup with rational cables, and enjoy the cost savings, but to each their own.

I feel the same way about wine. At a certain point, it's not really about objective improvements, it's about vibes and lore.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-14 18:08:56+00:00
Even without using ZFS (I prefer XFS as significantly faster) all the files that I store have content hash values in extended attributes, for data integrity verification (and also for data deduplication).

Whenever I write that drive, after a power cycle (to be sure that the files are read from disks and not from some cache) I run a script that checks the integrity of the files, to be sure that I can remove them from elsewhere without risking data loss.

With SMART-enabled drives, I usually do that only in the rare cases when a drive reports corrected errors, because I have seen cases when a drive miscorrected some errors, resulting in corrupted files. With a HDD without SMART, when the drives finds errors, but it believes to have corrected them successfully, there is no external sign that something could have gone wrong.