MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FuriouslyAdrift | 2026-02-11 17:48:18+00:00
Indiana here. Power outages due to fallen tree limbs, frozen trees "exploding", ice accumulation on lines, etc. is fairly common.

It can take days to bring a grid back up after a major outage. The lead time to replace a city-sized transformer is nearly 4 years, now (ask Puerto Rico about that).

https://www.powermag.com/the-transformer-crisis-an-industry-...
by neogodless | 2026-02-11 17:48:20+00:00
This isn't a (totally) bad question, but it suffers from problem common to a lot of internet forum posts and comments. It lumps "people" into one shiny bucket, and then shouts at the bucket.

Over 16 million new cars were purchased in 2025 in the United States.

Meanwhile, there are about 242 million licensed drivers in that same country.

So that's than 7% of drivers buying a new car in a year's time.

But what is the point of your question, in response to a new car announcements? That new cars should not exist... ? You do realize how much harder that would eventually make it to buy a used one, right?

So yeah, sure. "People" would be well-advised to consider buying a 2-3 year old vehicle that has depreciated. Let someone else carry that depreciation cost. (But "someone" has to.)

(My used EV depreciated 57% before I bought it, 2 years old with 20,000 miles on it. It's a great way to go!)
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-02-11 17:48:39+00:00
This didn't affect Wii, WiiU, Switch or Switch 2.

Either people are waking up that Nintendo is selling nostalgia or the economy is not doing well.

I hope the former, there is something that feels sick to think Nintendo force fed corporate mascots to me when I was under the age of 1. To this day, I religiously buy Zelda games, even though I haven't enjoyed them since N64. FOMO mind control.
by saghm | 2026-02-11 17:48:39+00:00
> Before there was some understanding that at least they wrote and understood their own garbage code

> Now it is not true. Someone can spend a few minutes generating a non-sense change and push for review. I will have to spend a non-trivial amount of time to even know it’s non-sense.

The problem sounds basically the same to me honestly. If someone submits code that I can't understand and asks me to review it, the onus on them to explain it. In the previous case, maybe they could, but if they can't now, the review is blocked on them figuring out how to deal with that. If that's not what's happening, it sounds more like an process or organizational problem that wouldn't be possible to fix with the presence or absence of tooling.

> This problem is already impacting projects like curl who just recently closed their bug bounty because of low-effort AI generated PRs

External contributions are a bit of a different problem IMO. I'd argue that open source maintainers have never had any obligation to accept or review external PRs though. Low effort PRs can be closed immediately with no explanation, and that's fine. It's also totally possible and acceptable to limit PRs to only people explicitly listed as contributors. I've even seen projects hosted on their own git infrastructure that don't allow signing up through the web UI so that you can only view everything in the browser (and of course clone the repo, which already isn't something that requires credentials for public git servers).

I guess my overall point is that the changes are more social than technical, and that this isn't the first time that there was a large social shift in how development worked (and likely won't be the last one either). I think viewing it through the lens of "before good, after bad" is reductive because of how it implies that the current changes are so large that everything else beforehand was similar enough to gloss over what had been changing over time already. I'm not convinced that the differences in how programming was achieved socially and technically between 43 years ago (when the author says they started programming) and the dawn of LLM coding assistants were obviously smaller than the new changes that having AI coding tools have introduced, but that isn't reflected by the level of cynicism in most of these discussions.
by windexh8er | 2026-02-11 17:48:57+00:00
In my view your open source projects don't align with what you've, mostly, written about. This is in the context of your AI posts. I am familiar with your work and my perspective is still the same. You can think whatever you want, but let's call a spade a spade: I'm not the lone wolf with this perspective. Because, as can be viewed in this thread, others have a similar opinion.
by ekidd | 2026-02-11 17:49:03+00:00
> What is it about robbing one group of people to pay another that you would expect to "work"?

Well, let's say we get one or two more breakthroughs in AI, and it succeeds in automating literally every job that can be done at a computer. And then it starts investing heavily in robotics. This would render human labor as uncompetitive as horse labor is today.

At this point, you have two basic scenarios: something like UBI, or (if the machines are less cooperative) John Conner.

This actually seems at least as likely these days as a warmed over libertarian argument that, "Taxes are really just slavery!"
by saberience | 2026-02-11 17:49:14+00:00
I'll be honest here, I just don't understand the point or value here.

I've seen a whole heap of graph-based startups start and then pivot or fail because having a graph doesn't seem to add any additional value that a Sqllite or Postgres database offers. That is, saying we have a "context graph" is just marketing speak, it doesn't really add any new possibility or feature that isn't possible from using other search and database tools.

Also, this kind of tool, using AI to extract a decision from Granola for example, is possible to one-shot prompt. I.e. you don't need any special tool to do it, you just need a single prompt. Granola itself has this kind of functionality.

I think you're trying to solve a problem that doesn't really exist, what surface patterns are you going to uncover that someone don't know to look for? Either there is a todo from a meeting or note or email or there isn't.

Writing notes or prep for a meeting isn't rocket science, and you don't need a graph database to "surface patterns" to prepare your pre-meeting notes. If you use something like Granola, 99% of the time (or maybe 100% really), the Granola summary is all you need. If you want something more you copy the whole transcript and send it to Claude for some specific reason.

Since you're a YC company, I assume this will become paid at some point, but why would I pay when just having an AI note-taker and Claude access is already perfect?
by kakacik | 2026-02-11 17:49:23+00:00
Ad tech is annoying at worst, it doesn't take literally your job and most of job market with it. Without any seemingly easy way to move to fields which are booming so overall it would stay the same.

I hate ads with passion for past 20 years and (very) actively avoid them at all costs, but I'd take those over what world llms seem to be bringing in soon.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-02-11 17:49:25+00:00
The problem is soon (and to some extent currently) there won't be enough work for everyone, and there definitely won't be enough to support them at a historical lifestyle level.

I guess those people continuing to live (or live semi-well) would be fantasy to you. I'm not sure where society will go at that point.

The western world has sold a 'we are improving your life' story to get buy in from the masses. What do you propose? Other options used in the past were typically state provided bread and circuses and/or waging war.
by mannanj | 2026-02-11 17:49:42+00:00
Ah yes I hear that - I am hearing you share that it has felt society neglected and even discriminated actively against you. I am so sorry and can feel your pain.

One push back I have for you is to inquire about what "society" really means here for you and if its really society thats doing this for/to you or some other force or influence.

IMO it's a selective class of a few who drive things and hold exhorbant influence, the unaccountable leadership class I'll call them. It is they who fund and hold accountable the news organizations to drive their agendas, in a real-life conspiracy scenario it is actively as you say and I feel the constricting onto my own livelihood too as you say. On the other hand I don't believe ever the maxim you said of "everyone for themselves" as that's never true and never really has been. I think part of the messaging and programming of the unaccountable leadership class that they use the "news" to reinforce is this sense of powerlessness and disconnection, isolation from others. It's like we haven't been taught on how to organize and support each other and were made reliant on those systems outside us that they once let give us enough to survive. Now as they are reeling back those support systems we are back to what it always was: organizing with our communities, with strangers online and finding kindness and hope enough to organize ways of living that support us all. Not the select few.

I guess thats my way of saying even if we are defecting against each other to survive, we would do well to never forget what our greater intention and purpose is: to help each other ultimately and not these few rich actors who own the companies.
by kittikitti | 2026-02-11 17:49:52+00:00
Beamforming information is utilized for creating this surveillance. There are also a lack of configurations in common routers to turn off BFI. The BFI information is available to any WiFi snooping and can easily be used to detect presence. You just need to read the BFI data (its plaintext) and if it changes, you can track wherever the smartphone the beam is now pointing towards. Detecting exactly who is another feature but in general, WiFi technologies are insecure and easily available as surveillance devices.
by tracker1 | 2026-02-11 17:50:04+00:00
I'm largely of the same mindset... I find the current .Net tooling for the backend to be pretty great. C#, Dapper and FastEndpoints FTW. I still really like JS/TS tooling with Hono and Rust with Axum though... but C# today is pretty great for backend work.

I'm also not a fan of Blazor... it's bloated and heavy in client usage, and server mode has all the down sides classic Web Forms did. Not a fan at all.

I tend to still like React with Redux+thunks and MUI or Mantine for the components. Very little comes close to it.
Show HN: Simulate Anybody's Gmail Inbox
by theroo | 2026-02-11 17:50:18+00:00
Hi HN,

I made a demonstration of the simulation potential of LLMs, wrapped up in a fun experience.

Unread Emails: https://unread.ooo/

You can enter any character or person (fictional or not).

Good ones to try:

- Bad Bunny

- Tony Soprano

- Shiv Roy

The project came from my genuine interest in how well LLMs can simulate human factors, and enrich our perspectives (albiet in a bit of a silly way here).
by Groxx | 2026-02-11 17:50:20+00:00
XEP equivalents: as far as I can tell, as a mostly-outsider, that's covered by "MSC"s: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/tree/mai... described by https://spec.matrix.org/proposals/

Whether or not those are being done well / compatibly / etc, no idea.
by hearsathought | 2026-02-11 17:50:40+00:00
> She was director of program management at Macromedia, which anyone who works in tech knows is more like a secretary type of role asking for project updates and timelines.

Also called Project Manager or Product Manager. It's generally the position that developers who don't like programming or are bad at it move to.

> I take issue with the title: `Groundbreaking Computer Scientist` in the NYT article

I remember when we weren't allowed to criticize the "authoritative source" here not too long ago. Is dang asleep at the wheel? I don't think the groundbreaking aspect has to do with her being a computer scientist. What about her or her attributes would make her groundbreaking in a nytimes article about her?
by yawboakye | 2026-02-11 17:50:41+00:00
> paying a few people to not work

not in this case though. as explained elsewhere, the artist is a dying career choice in ireland owing to economic reasons. no artist == drub society therefore the incompetent government intervenes the only way incompetence approves: free money. making the state function is much harder, and that’s not what these politicians signed up for. reducing electricity bill by 50% is a herculean task so how about jacking up taxes in one place and giving it back as free money in another? this is the modus operandi of the irish government.
by bheadmaster | 2026-02-11 17:50:58+00:00
> You can think of it as returning an equivalence class if you like. Then it's single-valued.

I can, but I still have to be very mindful of how I use the "=" sign. Sometimes it's an (in)equality, sometimes it's... the equivalence class thing. The ambiguity doesn't seem very elegant.

> Also note the very cool and fun topology connection here. The keyword to search for is Riemann surface.

I'll check that out, thanks.
by lavelganzu | 2026-02-11 17:51:00+00:00
Gwern was skeptical, & noted that an IQ of 75 [1] in this case study is very low. He additionally raises a few points, including that volume loss is not the same as neuron loss. He also predicts several deficits the case studies didn't report that he'd expect to see, including many small deficits in simple tasks adding up to large deficits in complex tasks.

[1] https://gwern.net/hydrocephalus#sn3
by darth_avocado | 2026-02-11 17:51:08+00:00
$50000 stat is the mean transaction price, which includes the dealership stuff that gets added on. While it’s true that it is an average, companies are increasingly not making cheaper models. Sub $30k new cars are almost a myth at this point. You get sedans and hatchback models that start in the high 20s as the base price but we all know you’re not walking out of that dealership with a base model or just paying the advertised rate. SUVs on the other hand, which most people prefer these days are closer to $40k.
by giantg2 | 2026-02-11 17:51:23+00:00
"Anyone lumping AI in with gambling and crypto scams has their head firmly in the sand."

I disagree. While some AI related stuff is promising, much of it is consumerist or data harvesting. Many people are basically gambling on any sort of stock related to AI (vs diversifying). Education is likely declining as adoption allows students to avoid critical thought or applying concepts.

"It's frankly a miracle, and it keeps making more leaps and bounds every time the peanut gallery starts going on about it having hit a wall it can never improve from."

Explainable by engineering isn't a miracle. It's just an expanse on neural nets and the other predecessors from 30 years ago. In my experience, it has trouble following basic directions such as keeping a summary to a single page.
by moon2 | 2026-02-11 17:51:25+00:00
That's why I love fiddling with analog cameras for a bit, or even experimenting with old lens on newer DSLRs. I have a Canon Rebel from 2011 and sometimes love to use my soviet Zenit Helios 44M lens in it. I do have the Zenit which came with this lens, but I have yet to develop its film.
by wasmainiac | 2026-02-11 17:51:41+00:00
Also live in Norway, nord Trøndelag. Power went out 3 timeslast year, few times for days, but that was an unusual winter. This years it’s only gone out for a few hours.

Seems to be a maintenance issue, trees are not cleared well enough. Sambo said that the warmer winters make the trees more likely to fall over.
by bradyd | 2026-02-11 17:51:43+00:00
The Nest smoke detector microphone was never really secret. It was part of the monthly self test to determine if the alarm was working. It would send you a notification telling you it was going to sound the alarm and that it would be listening for the sound to confirm it was working.

It was listed in the features for the 2nd gen units.
https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9229922#zippy=%...
by saghm | 2026-02-11 17:52:02+00:00
Responding to a blog post that was linked on an external forum with a different viewpoint isn't interrupting; it's kind of the whole point of having a comment section. They're sad, other people don't think it makes sense for them to be sad. You can respond to that disagreement with an analogy, and I can respond that I don't think the analogy makes sense. There's no obligation for people to only respond to an article with viewpoints that agree with it, and sometimes lots of people will think that the take is out of touch for some reason.
by tracker1 | 2026-02-11 17:52:06+00:00
It's changed a LOT over the years though... it's just kind of glossed over at this point... the move to hooks and quasi-functional components was a massive paradigm shift, but most saw it as a raw improvement. I personally think server components are still a bit of a mess and am actively avoiding them for now... they're improving but I think it's a waste of server resources most of the time.
by alistairSH | 2026-02-11 17:52:19+00:00
Yes, in theory. But, there are at least three problems with that...

1. Tariffs are frequently not targeted/precise enough, so come with lots of side effects.

2. Other countries retaliate, leading to trade wars and economic disruptions in both places.

3. Lower prices are usually better for local consumers - it leaves them with more money to buy other stuff. And tariffs do the opposite, as they are rarely 100% absorbed by the manufacturer.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-11 17:52:27+00:00
Planck's length has absolutely no known physical significance. It is just a combination of fundamental constants that happens to have the dimension of a length.

The so called Planck system of units, proposed by him in 1899, when he computed what is now called Planck's constant, is just an example of how a system of fundamental units must not be defined. To explain exactly the mistakes done by Planck then requires a longer space than here.

Unfortunately, probably because most textbooks of physics do an extremely poor job in explaining the foundation of physics, which is the theory of the measurement of the physical quantities, most people are not aware that the Planck system of units is completely bogus, like also a few other similar attempts, like the Stoney system of units.

Thus far too often one can see on Internet people talking about the "Planck units" as if they would mean something.

Unlike with the "Planck units", there are fundamental constants that really mean something. For instance, the so called "constant of fine structure", a.k.a. Sommerfeld's constant, is the ratio between the speed of an electron and the speed of light, when the electron moves on the orbit corresponding to the lowest total energy around a nucleus of infinite mass.

For now, there exists no evidence whatsoever of some minimum value for length or time, i.e. there exists no evidence that time and length are not indefinitely divisible.
by kccqzy | 2026-02-11 17:52:56+00:00
First this is not just Android. Apple does the same thing. You can buy an iPad which physically does not have any GPS hardware and it can reasonably tell you where you are. Personally I first learned of this feature when I bought a second-generation iPad, so it’s been there a while ago.

Second, it is a logical leap to assume Google knows everything already. They could for example build this nearby Wi-Fi based location querying API with privacy in mind, by purposefully making it anonymous without associating it with your account, going through relays (such as Oblivious HTTP), use various private set intersection techniques instead. It is tired and lazy to argue that just because some Big Tech has the capability of doing something bad therefore they must already be doing it.
by dlisboa | 2026-02-11 17:53:00+00:00
I agree. From the outside looking in the US seems to be in a very nihilistic mood, sort of "nothing I do matters anyway so I'll gamble away in the hopes of maybe hitting the only winning ticket out". People trying all sorts of moonshot ideas in crypto, day trading, live streaming, etc. The idea of slowly chipping away and climbing the social leader seems very distant from what I see.
by Groxx | 2026-02-11 17:54:10+00:00
Yea, it was really only ever "libpurple let you easily use them all in one app nearly transparently, and many people did". Many did use XMPP under the hood, but afaik almost literally none federated.

Matrix is seemingly trying to leverage that memory, but "there's a bridge bot somewhere that you can run somehow, with extremely widely varying quality / integration smoothness" is rather different.
by greggoB | 2026-02-11 17:54:13+00:00
> None of them involve making fun of people for doing it.

I'm expressing frustration at the lack of a proper answer, which you still seem to not be able to provide.

> Who primed them?

Conspiracy theory influencers, cult leaders, unscrupulous politicians, other people with existing mental illnesses, corporations with a lobbying agenda - the list is as long as there are people with a motive to influence the populace to their own gains.

> Here's a 'fun' and illustrative story

You're providing a single example (without any references, btw) as a means of exonerating your entire argument. But sure, pizzagate is suddenly looking a lot less dismissible out-of-hand now, given we've come to learn the sheer extent of Epstein's web.

I agree that much of the disinformation re global warming is at least funded by corporations and individuals with a profit motive; I agree that the concentrated ownership of the media and wealth are highly problematic.

But pumping the "do your own research" schtick and ignoring that it is a term highly co-opted by conspiracy theorists (as well as others with an agenda to misinform) is hardly helping.

So again, I ask: what is your concrete alternative to Fourth Estate?
by jdboyd | 2026-02-11 17:54:18+00:00
For those unclear on what the large pile of .doc and .pdf files are, it appears to be some revision of the design documents for "NT OS/2", which then turned into just NT. This appears to be the Smithsonian description of their physical copy: https://www.si.edu/object/microsoft-windows-nt-os2-design-wo...
by solidasparagus | 2026-02-11 17:54:36+00:00
I don't really care if other people want to be on or off the AI train (no hate to the gp poster), but if you are on the train and you read the above comment, it's hard not to think that this person might be holding it wrong.

Using sonnet 4 or even just not knowing which model they are using is a sign of someone not really taking this tech all that seriously. More or less anyone who is seriously trying to adopt this technology knows they are using Opus 4.6 and probably even knows when they stopped using Opus 4. Also, the idea that you wouldn't review the code it generated is, perhaps not uncommon, but I think a minority opinion among people who are using the tools effectively. Also a rename falls squarely in the realm of operations that will reliably work in my experience.

This is why these conversations are so fruitless online - someone describes their experience with an anecdote that is (IMO) a fairly inaccurate representation of what the technology can do today. If this is their experience, I think it's very possible they are holding it wrong.

Again, I don't mean any hate towards the original poster, everyone can have their own approach to AI.
by vkou | 2026-02-11 17:54:39+00:00
The best part about bombing the boats is that the second strikes on them were war crimes, while the few survivors that were picked up... All ended up repatriated.

If they were all drug runners, why weren't they put on trial? Why was so much effort made to sink all the evidence? Why did an admiral resign, when told to do this?

Everybody involved, from the people pulling the trigger, to the people giving the orders should be getting a fair trial and a swift punishment for that little stint of piracy and murder.

But these people all act like there is no such thing as consequences.