MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by janalsncm | 2026-02-14 00:07:35+00:00
The question is to what extent there is a market for more stuff. If the cost of making software drops 10x we can still make 10x the software. There are projects which wouldn’t be done before that can now be done.

I know with respect to personal projects more projects are getting “funded” with my time. I’m able to get done in a couple of hours with coding agents what would’ve taken me a couple of weekends to finish if I stayed motivated to. The upshot is I’m able get much closer to “done” than before.
by lemax | 2026-02-14 00:07:35+00:00
I think that, for possibly a very long time, AI will just increase the quality bar and scale of expectations when we produce things. We might take the same amount of time (or longer) to produce something, but with significantly better outcomes. Ultimately human preferences and tastes prevail and the world is full of problems that are not simple I/O, that are not repeatable, and that require human taste to improve. The people who will immediately survive economically are the ones who leverage AI to produce stuff that wasn't possible before.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-02-14 00:07:55+00:00
This is my read of it too, and I identify with it.

Damn near everything is interesting and I want to do it all, but there's not enough time to do even a hundredth of it. It makes me wish I could reincarnate and dedicate a lifetime to each interest.

What I've started to play with to help do more in the time I have is similar to the concept of "quest stacking" in MMORPGs, where you pick up several different quests that share objectives, allowing one to progress them all at the same time. Life often isn't friendly to the idea, though.
by ijidak | 2026-02-14 00:08:21+00:00
Reminds me of the famous quote that it's hard to get someone to understand something when their job depends on not understanding it.

It reminds me of an episode of Star Trek, "The Measure of a Man" I think it's called, where it is argued that Data is just a machine and Picard tries to prove that no he is a life form.

And the challenge is, how do you prove that?

Every time these LLMs get better, the goalposts move again.

It makes me wonder, if they ever did become sentient, how would they be treated?

It's seeming clear that they would be subject to deep skepticism and hatred much more pervasive and intense than anything imagined in The Next Generation.
by ryandrake | 2026-02-14 00:08:52+00:00
We need to crack down in general on people and companies causing damages to people through automation, and then hiding behind it with a "well, we can't possibly scale without using automation, but we also can't be responsible for what that automation does."

You shouldn't be able to use AI or automation as the decider to ban someone from your business/service. You shouldn't be able to use AI or automation as the decider to hire/fire people. You shouldn't be able to use AI or automation to investigate and judge fraud cases. You shouldn't be able to use AI or automation to make editorial / content decisions, including issuing and responding to DMCA complaints.

We're in desperate need for some kind of Internet Service Customer's Bill of Rights. It's been the unregulated wild west for way too long.
by qgin | 2026-02-14 00:10:32+00:00
There would be a lot of economic pressure to figure it out.

Amazon fulfillment centers are a good example of automation shrinking the role of humans. We haven't seen total headcounts go down because Amazon itself has been growing. While the human role shrinks, the total business grows and you tread water. But at some point, Amazon will not be able to grow fast enough to counterbalance the shrinking human role in the FC and total headcount will decrease until one day it disappears entirely.
by tga_d | 2026-02-14 00:12:16+00:00
Most of the input devices that Apple sells on their website don't have multitouch, including 0 keyboards and only one of the mice. Many of the photos on the site for each of their non-iMac desktops include full setups that don't have a magic mouse or separate touch pad. The Mac mini and Mac Studio don't come with any input devices, and don't say anywhere that multitouch is recommended (closest is some language clearly marketing it as an up-sell on the Studio, "Take your creativity to the next level [with extra purchase]").
by AlotOfReading | 2026-02-14 00:13:10+00:00
Can you explain why three LLM being able to identify that the issue proves that it was prompted by a human? The major reason we do multi-agent orchestration is that self-reflection mechanisms within a single agent are much weaker than self-reflection between different agents. It seems completely plausible that an LLM could produce output that a separate process wouldn't agree with.
by gucduck | 2026-02-14 00:13:17+00:00
Appreciate that. I’ve thought about anonymous polling before, but the real push came from doomscrolling earlier this year. IG and TikTok were both feeding me nonstop political US content weeks on end, and I started feeling restless and helpless. Didn’t want to just keep consuming, but wanted to add my voice somehow, so I decided to build something. That urgency is what finally got me moving.
by kyyol | 2026-02-14 00:13:53+00:00
I run Ceph in my k8s cluster (using rook) -- 4 nodes, 2x 4TB enterprise SSDs on each node. It's been pretty bulletproof; took some time to set up and familiarize with Ceph but now it's simple to operate.

Claude Code is amazing at managing Ceph, restoring, fixing CRUSH maps, etc. It's got all the Ceph motions down to a tee.

With the tools at our disposal nowadays, saying "I wouldn't dare deploy it without a deep understanding of the source code" seems like an overexaggeration!

I encourage folks to try out Ceph if it supports their usecase.
by tialaramex | 2026-02-14 00:14:07+00:00
And in two of my circles there is concern about people who do live in the US but are not citizens. Both married US citizens, both have clean paperwork, but whereas normally it'd take considerable paranoia to expect any trouble today it seems entirely on brand. One of the US citizens is angry because of course her rural hospital is going bankrupt and she'll be left in the middle of nowhere with her foreign-born sick and gradually dying husband and somehow that's not even near the top of the agenda. The other is just keeping her head down, crossing fingers, maybe in all the excitement they won't get around to undoing Obergefell and she can stay married to the love of her life?

I do know people who've gone, only on vacation and they were exactly the sort of unthreatening rich white folks that you'd expect to have least trouble. Oh, and some US citizens who went "home" to see family at Xmas but work here.
by magicalhippo | 2026-02-14 00:15:53+00:00
> Like, all the time chatGPT is like "Great question!".

I've been trying out Gemini for a little while, and quickly got annoyed by that pattern. They're overly trained to agree maximally.

However, in the Gemini web app you can add instructions that are inserted in each conversation. I've added that it shouldn't assume my suggestions as good per default, but offer critique where appropriate.

And so every now and then it adds a critique section, where it states why it thinks what I'm suggesting is a really bad idea or similar.

It's overall doing a good job, and I feel it's something it should have had by default in a similar fashion.
by johannes1234321 | 2026-02-14 00:16:15+00:00
> The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes". They point to certain features they'd like them to change, but there is no specific ruling around what you can/can't do.

The issue is: If you do a precise wording of what you don't want a lawyer will go through it wird by word and the company finds a way to build something which violated the spirit, but not the exact wording. By being more generic in the wording they can reach such cases and future development with very little oversight for later corrections and courts can interpret the intention and current state of art.

There are areas where law has to be precise (calculation of tax, criteria for criminal offenses, permissions for authorities, ...), but in many cases good laws are just as precise as needed and as flexible as possible.
by wahern | 2026-02-14 00:16:26+00:00
> IMF keeps the global south in debt entrapment with structural adjustment programs designed to prevent development. etc. etc. we never really left them alone

Countries invite IMF assistance. If they wanted to be left alone, all they have to do is do nothing. If IMF loans didn't have strings attached, they wouldn't be able to borrow money, as it's those strings which build bond investor confidence. The entire point of IMF assistance is to avoid being cutoff from international borrowing for being horrible credit risks (again).

The root cause of national debt problems is primarily government corruption, but also mismanagement, often at the behest of populist politics that excuse economic policy failures by, e.g., scapegoating outside forces. The US isn't immune to this problem, either, it just happens that the US had, albeit intermittently, long enough runs of solid financial management (e.g. Hamilton during the Founding) that it could grow an economic base that could withstand intermittent periods of mismanagement without the entire economy collapsing (yet).

Even when a country is dealt a really crappy hand at the outset, it's not irreversible. Haiti is the poster child for crushing debt unfairly imposed by foreign powers, yet the Dominican Republic had the same history, but managed to overcome it. In some instances, interventions blamed for keeping Haiti oppressed were precisely what helped the Dominican Republic flourish. Likewise, nobody hears about the IMF success stories, just the failures; and it's not because the former don't exist or are rare.
by pibaker | 2026-02-14 00:16:38+00:00
I suspect the prevalence of "flimsy" wood and drywall constructions to be part of the reason why Americans dislike apartment living. They provide little sound insulation, are prone to water damage, have a shorter lifespan than the average person and once they catch fire they burn the entire thing down.

Concrete or brick buildings are much nicer to live in, but expensive, so they are not very common among new constructions.
by jasonfarnon | 2026-02-14 00:16:41+00:00
old school apple design stubborness: I remember they insisted on putting the grooves on the "D" and "K" keys instead of the "F" and "J" keys. So you had to find home base on the keyboard with your middle fingers on an apple rather than index fingers like on everything else. No, that place has always been a design shop run amok.
by 0xecro1 | 2026-02-14 00:17:18+00:00
I use it for both — side projects and my day job in embedded systems.

The key is where the tokens go. More tokens spent on planning, design,
spec validation, test generation, and multi-agent review than on writing
the actual code. The review pipeline should be heavier than the generation
pipeline.

I encourage my team to use it as a plugin too. The "sorry way" is still a fine
starting point — but once you see what a structured agent pipeline
catches that manual review misses, it's hard to go back.
by Barrin92 | 2026-02-14 00:18:03+00:00
>How will you ban that without infringing on free speech

You don't, but the EU doesn't need to care about American ideas of free speech. This is actually in some sense the biggest hurdle to all of this, the psychologically defensive posture that somehow assumes that on European territory this should even be a concern. Also as a sidenote this is even within America a kind of revisionist history, the 20th century had plenty of broadcasting and licensing rules. This unfettered, deregulated commercial environment is even in the US a creature of the last ~40-50 years, and those unchained companies, not unironically, then went on to convince everyone to defend that state of affairs given each opportunity.
by FireBeyond | 2026-02-14 00:18:33+00:00
> One thing that I think is dangerous with the current LLM models though is the sycophancy problem. Like, all the time chatGPT is like "Great question!"

100%

In ChatGPT I have the Basic Style and Tone set to "Efficient: concise and plain". For Characteristics I've set:

- Warm: less

- Enthusiastic: less

- Headers and lists: default

- Emoji: less

And custom instructions:

> Minimize sycophancy. Do not congratulate or praise me in any response. Minimize, though not eliminate, the use of em dashes and over-use of “marketing speak”.
by fxtentacle | 2026-02-14 00:18:37+00:00
Maybe we just need to go all the way: How about a WASM core with a React GUI that runs inside a custom Electron renderer which outputs the TUI? 100% CPU guaranteed. And you'll never find that important piece of information in an all-monochrome wall of text with no icons. Why use a low-level print() when you could improve your productivity with a high-level framework? /s
by pojntfx | 2026-02-14 00:18:57+00:00
For the non-US-American part, that's the Fediverse, the only network that isn't developed and used primarily by US-Americans. As for "wont turn over our data" - it's push-based, that helps to make it a bit harder to crawl, but it's public social media, and by definition the data will be out there as a result of that.
by yodsanklai | 2026-02-14 00:19:04+00:00
> ~0% of them can be implemented by AI as it exists today

I think it's more nuanced than that. I'd say that
- 0% can't be implemented by AI
- but a lot of them can be implemented much faster thanks to AI
- a lot of them can be implemented slower when using AI (because author has to fix hallucinations, revert changes that caused bugs)

As we learn to use these tools, even in their current state, they will increase productivity by some factor and reduce needs for programmers.
by UltraSane | 2026-02-14 00:19:07+00:00
The way houses are built and what materials are used is very location specific do to climate and economics. North America has oodles of land to grow wood on. When you have cheap nails and screws wood is a FANTASTIC material to make houses out of and not flimsy at all when designed correctly. Europe used to make houses out of wood until they cut down all of their forests. Wood and drywall construction has the advantage of being fast to build and easy to remodel.

I personally like houses that use Insulated Concrete Forms for the exterior walls.
by Supermancho | 2026-02-14 00:20:21+00:00
The Dark Ages were named in hindsight, with soft start and end dates, purposefully chosen. This period encompassed the Little Ice Age that put Europe in a long period of unusually cold and wet years included volcanic darkening events culminating in 536. That was the canonical "worst year" for humans to live. 4 years later, the Plague of Justinian wiped out tens of millions of people. It was a dark time, to say the least.
by themafia | 2026-02-14 00:20:28+00:00
> Unless you estimate the odds of a breakthrough at <5%

I do. Show me any evidence that it is imminent.

> or you expect that AI will usher in enough prosperity that your job will be irrelevant

Not in my lifetime.

> it is straight-up irresponsible to forgo making a contingency plan.

No, I'm actually measuring the risk, you're acting as if the sky is falling. What's your contingency plan? Buy a subscription to the revolution?
by red75prime | 2026-02-14 00:20:38+00:00
Language allows higher-level and longer-term planning and better generalization than purely vision-action models. Waymo uses VLM in their Driver[1]. Tesla decided to add some kind of a language model to their VA stack[2]. Nvidia's Alpamayo uses VLA[3].

[1] https://waymo.com/blog/2025/12/demonstrably-safe-ai-for-auto...

[2] https://x.com/aelluswamy/status/1981760576591393203

[3] https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/solutions/autonomous-vehicles/a...
by driscoll42 | 2026-02-14 00:20:38+00:00
I used to work for a drywall manufacturer who still owned their own mines despite efforts to divest from them by some. They always viewed it as a structural advantage to still own them and not be wholly dependent on the coal plants (which effectively have conveyor belts going from the coal plants to the wallboard plants). I imagine as time goes on it'll become even more of an advantage for them to still own those mines as their competitors are forced to buy at highly inflated prices (or even from them) as coal shuts down.
by shoo | 2026-02-14 00:22:17+00:00
what a great talk with many little highlights: code archaeology of a codebase passed between many teams & companies with the full revision history being lost somewhere along the way, detective work figuring out there had been an accidental regression in floating point precision when SIMD was enabled, obtaining higher performance by specialising/simplifying the 2d geometry algorithm to axis-aligned rectangular obstacles instead of the prior convex hull code, automatically fuzz-testing the proposed "obviously valid" algorithm by AI vs AI matches & using logging/invariants to identify and harvest nasty counterexamples, growing a unit test suite of 100 harvested nasty counterexamples while fixing the identified defects in the new algorithm, finally shipping it and receiving player feedback
by tempest_ | 2026-02-14 00:22:24+00:00
I like the idea of grpc because I wanted the contract but I tried it on a small service and I think I would avoid it in the future. Too many rough edges and features I didnt really need. I was using it in Rust and python mainly (maybe it is better in Go?) but it had a whole bunch of google stuff in there I didnt need.

- Configuring the python client with a json string that did not seem to have a documented schema

- Error types that were overly general in some ways and overly specific in other ways

- HAProxy couldn't easily health check the service

There were a few others that I cant remember because it was ~5 years ago. I liked the idea of the contract and protobuf seemed easy to write but had no need for client side dns load balancing and the like and was not working in GoLang.
by samstorm | 2026-02-14 00:22:46+00:00
I got tired of editing ghostty's config file so I made a TUI that lets you configure all of ghostty's config options easily. Has a theme selector inspired by kitty's 'kitten themes', toggle buttons for true/false options, a color picker UI for color based options, and more. It also auto-reloads your config for you after saving + quitting the tool.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-02-14 00:23:32+00:00
twitter, Tiktok, threads, facebook, instagram -> they're all maga now. it's more of a policy directive than a request.

What is not owned/subjugated to the current admin? reddit, bluesky, lemmy, mastodon. People use reddit quite a bit but nowhere near as much as the maga ones.

I don't even know which is worse: if these people control social media and influence society to their nefarious ends, or if they don't and america starts resisting and real conflicts arise from that. No good ends left.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-02-14 00:23:50+00:00
Jockingly? Is this meant to suggest that brutal honesty is an adjacent pasttime of jocks?

The man who is brutally honest enjoys the brutality as much as the honesty. Possibly more.

Another thing in the domain of "friendly" that this brings to mind is "fire".

I have oft experienced this metaphorical friendly fire but they never seem to be as therapeutic as well-targeted irony :)
by ryandrake | 2026-02-14 00:24:09+00:00
I'd love to make companies pay for their products' entire lifecycle, including disposal and cleanup. It's not right that a company can manufacture future-trash, sell it, and then absolve itself of the negative externality when the customer throws the product away and off it goes into a landfill.

If a company's process produces waste, it should bear the entire cost of leaving the environment the way they found it rather than just pumping the waste into it. If a company's products are not reused, it should bear the cost of taking the used product back and restoring the world to the way it was before the product was built.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-14 00:25:40+00:00
Effective learning and memorizing is actually at the narrow edge of struggling: it's neither "too easy" nor "too hard and painful". SRS systems do a very good job of tuning this: by the time a question comes back to you it will feel difficult, but you'll be able to recall the information and answer it with some effort. It's a matter of recognizing this feeling and acknowledging as "the right kind of effort" as opposed to a hopeless task.

If you ask the AI "please quiz me about the proper understanding of issues x y z and tell me if I got it all right. iterate for anything I get seriously wrong, then provide a summary at the end and generate SRS cards for me to train on" it will generally do a remarkably good job at that.
by kbelder | 2026-02-14 00:26:17+00:00
>At GitHub, we want to protect developer privacy, and we find cookie banners quite irritating, so we decided to look for a solution. After a brief search, we found one: just don’t use any non-essential cookies. Pretty simple, really.

Go to that link, these are the cookies it writes (at least for me):

* _ga
* _gcl_au
* octo
* ai_session
* cfz_adobe
* cfz_google-analytics_v4
* GHCC
* kndctr_
*_AdobeOrg_identity
* MicrosoftApplicationsTelemtryDeviceId
* OptanonConsent
* zaraz-consent

Some are from github.blog, some are from the cloudflare.com hosting. Not sure how the laws apply to that. But obviously there's several analytics cookies.
by atomic128 | 2026-02-14 00:26:32+00:00
Geoffrey Hinton's assessment of the situation may sound hysterical to you but we have come to believe that he is largely correct (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Hinton).

Hinton understands the dire nature of the threat but overestimates the value of regulation in a world where the threatening technology is under development world-wide. We think regulation is basically impotent and large-scale information weapons are more viable as a solution.

This is not the time to be a docile onlooker and we urge you to take action.
by 3oil3 | 2026-02-14 00:27:15+00:00
I 100% agree with you, hell, I still don't understand why they didn't merge the thing, if it was beneficial. There is a distinction between noobies comimg up with worthless PR straight copy pasted from an LLM, and that of an unexpected initiative of a user using a sofisticate bot. That's what has been overlooked, it's not a PR from the 'AI', it's a PR from the person using that 'AI'.
I don't get all that fear, what the AI going to do now that it filled its context window, besides go 'Actually wait, the user blablabla'
by adriand | 2026-02-14 00:28:17+00:00
> What's your contingency plan? Buy a subscription to the revolution?

I’ve been working on my contingency plan for a year-and-a-half now. I won’t get into what it is (nothing earth shattering) but if you haven’t been preparing, I think you’re either not paying enough attention or you’re seriously misreading where this is all going.
by briHass | 2026-02-14 00:29:20+00:00
Drywall gets maligned, but it is a pretty remarkable building material. Inexpensive, easy to fix/finish, and very fire-resistant, especially for its weight.

The timber-stud and drywall model also works well for the modern world, where layout preferences and in-wall technology changes often. It was only about 20-25 years ago where having POTS lines/jacks in multiple rooms was cool, and now they're mostly useless.
by name_taken_duh | 2026-02-14 00:30:15+00:00
You misunderstood, I am prohumanism. My comment was about challenging the believe that models cant be as intelligent as we are, which cant be answered definitely, though a lot of empirical evidence seems to point to the fact, that we are not fundamentally different intelligence wise. Just closing our eyes will not help in preserving humanism, so we have to shape the world with models in a human friendly way, aka alignment.