MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by woodpanel | 2026-02-14 12:21:12+00:00
Which is ofc complete nonsense.

Wooden structures allow for a lot cheaper adjustment later on (you usually have a few beams that are structurally important, often its just the outer walls that bear the load). If you try that with stone you can start with hiring an expert upfront or your house collapses.

Same goes energy efficiency. The isolation needs require thick plastic-covers on the outside (for stone), which are prone to mold, birds nests and lead to moss. Every residential stone building in Germany that is older than 10yrs provides you with a prime view through its plaster of where its plastic blocks are assembled, because of the moss. If you don't then they already paid the extra cost of recoating.

Every mortgage issuer will calculate 2-4% extra repair costs for the exterior alone. And we'Re not even talking about the venting, which officially requires a replacement and cleansing every 2-3 years, but of course nobody ever does it.

I could go on for hours about our German stonerism, but will end with the most funny thing, which is that most "stoners" are adamant about longevity vis-a-vis wood, pay extra for the stone, have to wait 3-5 times as long before they can actually move in (drying of mortar and screed can take up to year here in Germany) – but then the most important thing for longevity, the roof, will be made of wood ;-)
by gregw2 | 2026-02-14 12:21:13+00:00
Three ADHD tech tips, more tactical than some of the strategic ones others have mentioned:

- To combat time blindness and hyperfocus, create daily-ish alarms on your phone's builtin clock for things you otherwise forget until it's too late. (If your mind is better at being reactive than proactive and time-aware, create a systematic practice of creating interrupts/redirects for your future self in advance. Create them moment you learn about them.)

- To combat compulsive phone numbing/scrolling/distraction, the (android) Intenty app can prompt you right after unlocking with a custom Q&A about why you are unlocking. I find that it has promoted awareness of my mental state in the moment, has over time generated reflection and an awareness of what my persistent triggers are, and enabled me to catch myself and stop the habitual numbing a helpful percentage of the time.

- When I unlock my phone it brings me back to where I left off. That tends to send me down old rabbit trails. I found apps like AutomateIT that let me return to my home screen each unlock.
by gethly | 2026-02-14 12:21:52+00:00
Sure, but Zig has way more money and people working on it. And Jai has inspired all of these new languages so all they had to do was to steal John's ideas whereas he had to actually think very hard about them and do countless iterations to come to a solid conclusion. He paid the cost, they reaped the benefits. So Zig being 10 years old and unfinished just shows they have no original thought, or a plan for that matter.
by bjackman | 2026-02-14 12:22:24+00:00
The discourse about AI is definitely the worst I've ever experienced in my life.

One group of people saying every amazing breakthrough "doesn't count" because the AI didn't put a cherry on top. Another group of people saying humans are obsolete, I just wrote a web browser with AI bro.

There are some voices out there that are actually examining the boundaries, possibilities and limitations. A lot of good stuff like that makes it onto HN but then if you open the comments it's just intellectual dregs. Very strange.

ISTR there was a similar phenomenon with cryptocurrency. But with that it was always clear the fog of bullshit would blow away sooner or later. But maybe if it hadn't been there, a load of really useful stuff could have come out of the crypto hype wave? Anyway, AI isn't gonna blow over like crypto did. I guess we have more of a runway to grow out of this infantile phase.
by pu_pe | 2026-02-14 12:22:47+00:00
No, I think it's nitpicking because it truly is in some cases. Science communication is about simplifying things and making shortcuts while keeping things engaging. Of course Sagan didn't go into a tangent about the first use of the world barbarians or whether ancient greeks would define robots the same way we do. That's pedantic.

There are a few good examples of significant errors in the link I cited which I think are substantial - the portrayal of Hypatia is a big one. I just wondered whether there were more discussions about other history topics he got wrong, since you yourself mentioned that "almost every single thing" he said was wrong.
by grumbel | 2026-02-14 12:24:55+00:00
All the legal uncertainty problems the cookie law produces aside, the core problem with the law is that it's fundamentally stupid. Cookies are a client side feature: You store the cookie, not the server. If you don't want to store the cookie, complain to your browser, that's the software responsible here. But instead of fixing the issue in the one place actually responsible, we make laws that force millions of websites to adopt.
by sylwester | 2026-02-14 12:25:02+00:00
I built this because I wanted a meeting tool that didn't compromise privacy.

It’s a application that handles transcription locally and turns conversations into structured knowledge.

It has a live mode where you can also ask it questions during the meetings and a grounded research mode.

The performance of whisper.cpp allows me to transcribe 1h of meeting in just 20-30s on a Mac Pro M4.

Why it’s different:
* Local-First: Transcription via whisper.cpp happens 100% offline.
* Actionable: It doesn't just summarize; it automatically creates GitHub/GitLab issues from
meeting action items.
* Integrated: Generates structured Obsidian notes (with Mermaid.js graphs) and sleek,
HTML reports.
* Live Copilot: Press [Space] to ask the AI questions about the current meeting context in
real-time.

The Stack:
C++17, whisper.cpp, FTXUI (for the TUI), PortAudio, and libcurl (supporting Gemini, OpenAI, or
local Ollama).

Looking forward for your input.
by seddonm1 | 2026-02-14 12:26:22+00:00
Hi Ben. I published an article about this problem this week (and did a talk at Rust Sydney).

What you need is differential, property testing. I’m sure it would work for you (you can skip the first half as you already have the source):

https://reorchestrate.com/posts/bringing-a-warhammer-to-a-kn...
by Sharlin | 2026-02-14 12:26:26+00:00
Yeah, I later found that quote on Wikipedia too. Though I don't think the cited source is super reliable either, or just folklore ("Oh, 'code page' refers to actual deadtree pages"). All the IBM documentation I could find showed big gaps in the sequence of code pages.

But I just now found the list at [1], I don't know why I didn't notice it before. It's certainly comprehensive! There's been some real detective work to be done in compiling that list. The gaps are much smaller, though still exist, eg. from 40 to 251. The 300s are rather sparse, there are only a few 4xx codes, and then there's a jump from 500 to 8xx (with some 7xx assigned later I think).

In any case, I agree that the LLMs seem to have hallucinated the "more general sequence" part. The code page IDs, or more formally CCSIDs, always were a specific set of 16-bit ID numbers. Why exactly the various gaps exist is probably lost in history by now, if there ever even were any particular reasons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page
by codethief | 2026-02-14 12:27:21+00:00
Just like in GUI, in a TUI you need some mechanism to make the rendering output (the characters) match the internal state of the application.

E.g., the user hit ESC -> internal state is CANCELED/WAIT FOR USER -> internal GUI representation now includes a prompt that asks the user to tell Claude what to do differently -> rendering output actually shows said prompt.
by dwb | 2026-02-14 12:27:22+00:00
I found this which is by far the closet to what I’m on about. Imagine this but with inline UI controls too (keyboard-controllable, natch), probably based on Nushell (I like Nushell), and maybe an “alternate display mode” type thing for UIs that want to take over more and not act as a transcript. And, no offence, but more visually appealing and implemented with a common-denominator subset of native UI controls where possible. Clearly the issue is not building it, but adoption. I don’t have an answer for that.

https://github.com/unconed/TermKit
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-14 12:28:46+00:00
> I think it's difficult for a lot of these bigger publishers to be anything other than access journalism and advertising

Maybe this is exactly the issue? Every news company is driven like a for-profit business that has to grow and has to make the owners more money, maybe this is just fundamentally incompatible with actual good journalism and news?

Feels like there are more and more things that have been run in the typical capitalistic fashion, yet the results always get worse the more they lean into it, not just news but seems widespread in life.
by lazide | 2026-02-14 12:29:15+00:00
Gas turbines require infrastructure the may not exist in the area yet, and significant capital outlays.

Like coal mining jobs or the like, if you’re stuck in Appalachia with 5 kids and it’s the only thing keeping you afloat, you’ll get pretty worked up if someone tells you ‘just don’t do that, duh’.

Even if it’s probably correct in a macro sense.
by heliumtera | 2026-02-14 12:29:58+00:00
>Text can be rendered at arbitrary sizes

Fixed width monospaced, bitmap fonts.

>Fonts are generally curved, pixels are not. How should we anti-alias glyphs to keep text visually appealing?

Consolas, terminus, unscii, IBM 437 fonts...are implying they are not appealing?

>How should we design a system that respects the different layout rules of different languages (e.g. English vs. Arabic)?

Why?
by InsideOutSanta | 2026-02-14 12:30:22+00:00
Many laws work like that. They don't have very precise definitions of things, but instead depend on what an average, reasonable person would think.

An example of this is contract law. There is no clear definition of what a legal contract must look like. Instead, a contract's validity can depend on whether an average, prudent person would have entered into it in similar circumstances.
by lazide | 2026-02-14 12:31:22+00:00
Eh, people have a terrible time renovating or adding anything in housing in Europe. A lot of construction doesn’t have those tubes.

It’s hard to articulate how wildly different habits are in Europe vs US around things like ‘what electrical appliances I have’ partially because of this.

Housing tends to be a lot smaller too, largely due to population density differences, but also overall differences in economic earning power and ease of buying things.
by tudorg | 2026-02-14 12:31:49+00:00
> The Postgres extension model to capture the metrics (we also experimented with eBPF, but it causes too many kernel-user space context switches when you can do the same in an extension without them), and a small sidecar to push the metrics out via a standardized protocol like OTEL.

The extension model is great, but it doesn't work with existing postgres providers (RDS, Aurora, etc.). Unless one such extension becomes standard enough that all providers will support it. That would be ideal, IMO.

To be clear, I don't mean pg_stat_statements, that is standard enough, but an extension that pushes the actual queries in real-time.

> If it's a network hop, then adds milliseconds, and not microseconds.

Are you talking about connection establishing time or for query delay? I think it should normally be under a millisecond for the later.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2026-02-14 12:32:33+00:00
I meant it more as marveling at the people who get excited at the undigested corn kernel and then make artwork about it, though not to knock participation in this zeitgeist. There really is something fascinating about seeing people congregate over something that excites them, regardless of the curmudgeons who denigrate it. Doubly so if I don't understand it. It doesn't have to be your cup of tea but calling it "a kernel of undigested corn in a random turd" is unduly hostile.
by aanet | 2026-02-14 12:34:32+00:00
I’m old enough to remember the days of CORBA (Orbix, Iona, BEA, anyone ??) and its IDL, the IDL compiler, stubs and other props and doodads. Ah yes, and the registry as well, where the services registered themselves, and the discovery mechanisms.

gRPC (a very Googly thing) took it all, hook line and sinker and made it URLesque

Can’t recall how the ORB overhead has been resolved in gRPCs
by jwxz | 2026-02-14 12:35:13+00:00
I found Opus 4.6 to be good at Zig.

I got it to write me an rsync like CLI for copying files to/from an Android device using MTP, all in a single ~45 min sitting. It works incredibly well. OpenMTP was the only other free option on macOS. After being frustrated by it, I decided to try out Opus 4.6 and was pleasantly surprised.

I later discovered that I could plug in a USB-C hard drive directly into the phone, but the program was nonetheless very useful.
by throw0101c | 2026-02-14 12:37:09+00:00
> Advertising = compensating someone to promote a product / company.

So basically all full-time Youtubers who do in-video ad reads, including, but not limited to: MKBHD, Linus Tech Tips, Veritasium, Smarter Every Day, minutephysics, Computerphile, Tom Scott, Patrick Boyle, The Plain Bagel, Sailing La Vagabonde, Sailing SV Delos, Gone with the Wynns, etc.
by retired | 2026-02-14 12:37:23+00:00
I am from The Netherlands. Buildings from 19th century and before are incredibly rare. Maybe 1% of the total housing stock. Thanks to bombings in WWII and a rapidly growing population since.

In my current Spanish town I don't know any building older than 1900. Rapid expansion of coastal towns due to European mobility caused that.

It's not really a European vs American divide, it is more country specific than that.

Edit: Ireland apparently has one of the youngest building age in Europe so I guess a 17th century pub is very rare and special there too.
by sangkwun | 2026-02-14 12:38:41+00:00
Working on Daigest (https://daige.st) — it monitors your industry using AI.

You pick keywords and sources (news sites, blogs, YouTube, communities), and it sends you a summary on a schedule you set. Basically Google Alerts but it actually reads the content and gives you a digest instead of a list of links.

Built it because I was spending 30+ min/day manually checking the same sites for industry news. Now it's a 3-minute read every morning.

It's free to start if anyone here does this kind of monitoring.
by troupo | 2026-02-14 12:39:31+00:00
> That post doesn't say that it takes 16ms to create a scene and have the terminal rasterize and try and present it.

So they literally take 16ms to rasterize just a few hundred characters on screen. Of those, 11ms are spent in "React scene graph", and they have 5ms to do the extremely complex task of rendering a few characters.

16ms is an eternity. A game engine renders thiusands if complex 3D objects in less time. You can output text to terminal at hundreds of frames per second in Javascript: https://youtu.be/LvW1HTSLPEk?si=G9gIwNknqXEWAM96

> and if the terminal has to go and load a font from disk to be able to rasterize something that can eat into the budget

Into which budget? They spend 11ms "laying out a scene" for a few hundred characters. "Reading something from disk" to render something is a rare event. And that's before we start questioning assumptions about read speeds [1], whether something needs to be rendered in a TUI at 60fps etc.

[1] Modern SSDs can probably load half of their contents into cache before you even begin to see the impact on frames. Unless it's a Microsoft terminal for which they claim they need a PhD to make it fast.
by sublinear | 2026-02-14 12:39:49+00:00
I have to somewhat disagree, but the details matter a lot.

If you insist on seeking the absolute top pay for the work and want to always be on the cutting edge in a fast-paced environment, sure the advice in the blog post is correct.

If you instead take 80% of the pay and pick a place to work that's more slow and steady, the traditional advice starts to make sense again. The key thing is you must have strong and unique skills with the experience to match that the business actually values. You need to bust your ass just as hard as if you were working for 100% of the pay. If they didn't think they were getting a good deal they wouldn't keep you. Simple as that.

I do agree it shouldn't take 3 years though. It should be more like getting promoted every year for the first 3 to 5 years and then you either settle in for the long haul (believe me this really is what a traditional employer wants most!), or decide that you're bored and move on. It's your choice. Definitely, if there's no promotion after the first couple of years I would worry that I'm not what they were looking for after all.

There is no myth. You just have to truly know your worth and not overplay your hand. Knowing your worth is ABSOLUTELY NOT about milking every last drop like a desperate loser. I thought we would have learned this by now after the death of hustle culture. It's a lot like dating. This is just the unspoken compromise everyone assumes you're already aware of.

I'm surprised this kind of article still resonates and gets posted on HN.
by weird-eye-issue | 2026-02-14 12:40:29+00:00
Well I think it largely depends on how well trained you are because metabolic flexibility is something that gets trained. Without it your body has a hard time burning fats for fuel and so you'll feel terrible if you don't have an immediate glycogen store. When you are well trained you can do things like literally run several marathons while fasted which is documented. So whether it "works" or not will just depend largely on if your body has adapted to it
by adrian_b | 2026-02-14 12:40:37+00:00
I do not know, but the last time when I have bought a Seagate HDD, I had a very nasty and unpleasant surprise.

Last year I have bought a 22 TB Seagate Expansion Desktop external HDD, because it was cheaper than the other 22 or 24 TB HDDs available at that time.

I had read carefully its datasheet before buying and there was nothing suspicious there, so I assumed that it must be cheaper just because it is a slow HDD. I did not care about the speed, it was for storing data archives infrequently accessed.

Only after receiving it I discovered what was not said in the datasheet, that this Seagate HDD does not support S.M.A.R.T., so there is no way to test it to see if it works OK and there is no way to discover when errors have happened, e.g. to see when the HDD becomes too old, so you need to migrate your data.

I have never imagined that in 2025 it is possible to buy a HDD that does not support S.M.A.R.T., especially in HDDs with a capacity over 20 TB, and moreover without giving a prominent notice about such a misfeature in the datasheet.

Before this, in 2024 I had bought a 24 TB Seagate SkyHawk, which had S.M.A.R.T., as expected. Since then, after the Seagate Expansion fiasco, I have bought a 22 TB external WD HDD, at the same price with the Seagate, and which has S.M.A.R.T., as it is normal.

I cannot see how removing S.M.A.R.T. support can reduce costs, as it is just a firmware feature. I any case a manufacturer that removes testing and error reporting features from its products clearly does not give a s*t about data corruption and HDD failure rates.
by arximboldi | 2026-02-14 12:40:51+00:00
As a counter-data point: I have been asked a few times to move to the US by American companies, but no money in the world would make me move there permanently. Also, sticking again to pure anecdote, most people I know that moved there eventually came back; but in the other direction this seems to be way more rare, I know lots of people of Americans that settled over here. Last example is a friend from the US that after 8 years in Germany moved back to the US last year for career reasons, and she is already fed up with the life style and is planning her return...

Don't get me wrong; I've spent months in the US and there are things I love about it. The almost naive way in which everyone believes their own bullshit is energizing. The way individuality and risk taking is celebrated allows for the interesting and novel (but also sometimes the worst) to happen. It is invigorating. But soon it all drains you, the grind, the lack of depth in relationships... The lack of social security net, the dystopian levels of inequality, the egotism, the fetichization of violence. It's all crystalized now in the goverment. No, thank you.
by throwup238 | 2026-02-14 12:41:05+00:00
It’s mostly about economics and the construction industry. You can make reinforced concrete houses to California standards but >95% of the industry is geared towards stick frame construction and it’ll be quite a bit more expensive. Commercial and large apartment buildings are often made using concrete, because they can amortize the extra costs (and except for 1x4s, the only other option is steel frame).

Once you start moving out of the dense parts of Tokyo, wood construction becomes a lot more prevalent for the same reason: it’s cheaper to build a stick house to code than it is to hire RC specialists.
by card_zero | 2026-02-14 12:41:41+00:00
Hosting, or domains, does seem to be a loophole. Renting an entire website for your own product's advert is fine because that's "your website". What about subdomains? Or what about TLDs, suppose the operator of a TLD like .promo has a nice front page with a directory of all the sites, searchable, with short excerpts - all provided for free to the benefit of those who pay to own those sites. This could be like Facebook, or it could be like Neocities. I'm imagining a walled garden that treats its denizens equally, but they gain special attention from being there, and it costs money. Maybe that's OK.
by ssslvky1 | 2026-02-14 12:43:01+00:00
The world's first AI assistant(OpenClaw) on a $5 chip. No Linux. No Node.js. Just pure C

MimiClaw turns a tiny ESP32-S3 board into a personal AI assistant. Plug it into USB power, connect to WiFi, and talk to it through Telegram — it handles any task you throw at it and evolves over time with local memory — all on a chip the size of a thumb.
by vor_ | 2026-02-14 12:43:05+00:00
Another red flag is that the article used repetitive phrases in an AI-like way:

"...it illustrates exactly the kind of unsupervised output that makes open source maintainers wary."

followed later on by

"[It] illustrates exactly the kind of unsupervised behavior that makes open source maintainers wary of AI contributions in the first place."
by midnitewarrior | 2026-02-14 12:43:27+00:00
Accountants will still exist, but we'll need fewer of them at any given time. In your example of flipping the 80/20 ratio, you are implying that each accountant would be able to (theoretically) handle a 5x workload with AI making up the gap.

Perhaps in reality more like a 3x advantage, due to human inefficiencies and the overhead of scaling the business to handle more clients.

Given that, 3x increase of productivity implies we either need 1/3 the accountants, or the accountancy supply brings down prices and more clients start hiring accountants due to affordability.
by alan-stark | 2026-02-14 12:44:47+00:00
Can you elaborate on the "mode of peril"? Is it:

(a) Top labs quietly signing deals for military deployment of frontier models in unmanned strike weapons?

(b) Top labs agreeing to license LLMs for social engineering/propaganda ops?

(c) Models that vastly exceed human intelligence and have capacity to pursue own agenda (i.e. runaway intelligence)?

(d) Something else?

It looks like dangers of AGI are overblown (perhaps partially due to grant funding and ability to get political traction/investment/competitive advantage), while (a) and (b) are severely underdiscussed. Would love to get other perspectives.