MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TomasBM | 2026-02-10 07:02:55+00:00
When it comes to food prep, I'd agree with you that the more time of your life passes, the more irresponsible is the risk of not knowing how to fry an egg, for example.

At the same time, you only need to learn how to fry an egg once, and you won't forget it. You can go your entire life without ever having to fry an egg yourself - but if you ever had to, you could.

When it comes to coding, the analogy breaks down, I think. Aside from the obviously different stakes (survival versus control of your device), coding also requires keeping up with a lot of changing domain knowledge. It'd be as if an egg is one week savoury, another week sweet, and another a poisonous mushroom. It's also less of a single skill like writing a for loop, and more of a combination of skills and experiments, like organizing a banquet.

Coding today suffers from having too many types of eggs, many of which exist because some communities prefer them. I also don't like the solution "let the LLM do it", but it's much easier. Still, if we manage to stabilize patterns for the majority of use cases, frying the proverbial egg will no longer be as much of domain knowledge, choice or elitism as it is today.
by bob1029 | 2026-02-10 07:03:23+00:00
I'm looking at modern browser APIs and wondering why no one else is trying certain things.

getDeviceMedia and getUserMedia are very powerful these days. I haven't actually tested it but I believe a chromium browser would have no issue capturing the hw accelerated output from a game. You can pipe these media streams directly to WebRTC peers for playback on the other side. A server with a simple selective forwarding unit could enable larger scale meetings (100s of participants). All of this can happen in <1000 lines of JS and server code. Most of the heavy lifting happens in the browser engine. Concerns like automating browser permissions, global hot keys, etc. can be handled via electron or platform specific options like WebView2.

Mobile clients are a bit cursed right now. The best solution is to maintain a standard client in the app stores. Forcing everyone to sign their own mobile apps is way too much friction. And you do need native for this on mobile. Browser only / PWA has no chance in hell of providing a smooth UX on iOS or Android.
by UqWBcuFx6NV4r | 2026-02-10 07:03:23+00:00
Your ask for evidence has nothing to do with whether or not this is a question, which you know that it is.

It does nothing to answer their question because anyone that knows the answer would inherently already know that it happened.

Not even actual academics, in the literature, speak like this. “Cite your sources!” in causal conversation for something easily verifiable is purely the domain of pseudointellectuals.
by eucyclos | 2026-02-10 07:03:57+00:00
I think the old theory of the planes of existence has a lot of utility here - if you substitute "the dimensionality at which you're analyzing your dataset" for the hermetic concept of "planes of existence" you get essentially the same thing, at least in lower dimensions like one (matter) or two (energy). Mind, specifically a human mind, would be a four dimensional under the old system, which feels about right. No idea how you'd set up an experiment to test that theory though. It may be completely impossible because experiments only work when they work in all contexts and only matter is ever the same regardless of context.
by drawfloat | 2026-02-10 07:04:18+00:00
Actual link: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/home/en

Banning third party AI assistants but maintaining access to your own on one of the biggest messaging platforms in Europe will indeed get this kind of response, not really a surprise.

Doubt the result will be “using WhatsApp without a pointless ai assistant crammed in” though sadly
by kmansm27 | 2026-02-10 07:04:26+00:00
Here's Stripe using the term today - https://x.com/stevekaliski/status/2021034048945070360?s=20

And here's Google using the term to describe Jules - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44813854

So fairly large players are using “async agent” to mean something specific, which seems enough to warrant defining it. It also makes sense that it’s far less common than “autonomous agent”, since “async” is mostly used by technical folks, which is a much smaller audience. I’m definitely in that sf/swe/tech/startup information bubble, but that's where this stuff is taking off.
by nfg | 2026-02-10 07:04:56+00:00
Interesting - these head to head comparisons you’re doing with the same model - what harnesses are you comparing, say Claude code / codex versus copilot cli?

> I'm not sure if its understood how bad it really is within the org.

I can’t speak to that, but there’s a lively culture of people using internal tooling who also extensively use 3p products on projects outside work and are in a reasonable position to assess how well GH copilot works.
by noduerme | 2026-02-10 07:05:08+00:00
I could definitely see myself moving into that role officially in a lot of places where I already unofficially am responsible for it, but I honestly don't know how I'd approach herding coders who were relying on LLMs to the point of not fully understanding the code-level interreliance of the systems themselves. I'd still find myself doing my current job, but with more cognitive load reading Claude code and trying to understand how these things were stitched together.

There's something to be said for attention, and the window of attention provided by a human who wrote something rather than an LLM that has to guess the intention of it, every time it reboots.

Any coder who understands what they're building could theoretically be a systems analyst for the greater part of what their code is going to be embedded in. This is a weakly referenced argument, but, dropping the lower links in the chain and substituting them with LLMs is exactly where I think communication is bound to break down. Or: You can try to herd cats all day, but if you move up the chain and all you have below you is cats relying on LLMs, you've just shifted the same problem up to your level in the organization.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-02-10 07:05:11+00:00
If you want it stated precisely, the function is human cognitive labor per unit time and cost.

For decades, progress mostly shifted physical constraints or communication bandwidth. Faster chips, better networks, cheaper storage. Those move slopes, not discontinuities. Humans still had to think, reason, design, write, debug. The bottleneck stayed human cognition.

LLMs changed that. Not marginally. Qualitatively.

The input to the function used to be “a human with training.” The output was plans, code, explanations, synthesis. Now the same class of output can be produced on demand, at scale, by a machine, with latency measured in seconds and cost approaching zero. That is a step change in effective cognitive throughput.

This is why “video calling another continent” feels incremental. It reduces friction in moving information between humans. AI reduces or removes the human from parts of the loop entirely.

You can argue about ceilings, reliability, or long term limits. Fine. But the step already happened. Tasks that were categorically human two years ago are now automatable enough to be economically and practically useful.

That is the function. And it jumped.
by ibrahima | 2026-02-10 07:06:33+00:00
FWIW, I find the new React-based diff viewer worse than the old server-rendered page. I disabled the preview for this reason. It does have some nice features but overall it feels more finicky. I would think that in theory this should be better at handling large diffs but I'm not sure that that's the case, and at least the UX feels more choppy.
by alsetmusic | 2026-02-10 07:06:48+00:00
> People who think immigration isn't important are just ignorant about culture and the reasons some societies are more successful than others.

I'm sorry, friend. You're announcing yourself as the worst kind of USA person. No one is less than us. Our success is a lot of luck (Europe destroyed post-WWII), not because we were special.

I'll remember your username now.
by maxglute | 2026-02-10 07:07:26+00:00
OP likely just pointing out Singapore used to train a lot of CCP officials something like 50k (I think slowed last 10 years). One of the SG uni governance program is colloquially called "mayor's class", joke is it's overseas branch of central party school. LKY met every PRC leader in some sort of mentor relationship. Obviously national scale between PRC/SG different, hence SG more of model of mayor/municipal level.
by marticode | 2026-02-10 07:07:31+00:00
> higher caffeinated coffee intake was significantly associated with lower dementia risk (141 vs 330 cases per 100 000 person-years comparing the fourth [highest] quartile of consumption with the first [lowest] quartile; hazard ratio, 0.82 [95% CI, 0.76 to 0.89])

That's a very big difference.
Ask HN: Starting my own startup to increase compute density
by isubasinghe | 2026-02-10 07:08:18+00:00
I am an ex-researcher at Trustworthy Systems (the people behind seL4).

Something I've noticed from my operating systems hacking days is that current datacentre compute is unnecessarily expensive.

I believe I know how to solve this through the work done at the lab, and I would like to get funding for me to work on this.

I believe there is already a competitor out there (https://formalstack.com/).

I am 27 and I have zero idea on how I would get the necessary funding for this project as an Australian and I was wondering if anyone here would be able to help?
by ibrahima | 2026-02-10 07:09:02+00:00
> I understand that the 'updating the part of the page that's changed' functionality is now dramatically slower, more unresponsive, and less reliable than the 'reload the entire thing' approach was, and it feels like browsing the site via Citrix over dial-up half the time, but look, sacrifices have to be made in the name of making things better even if the sacrifice is that things get worse instead.

I don't think they were being serious.
by Larsa_Solidor | 2026-02-10 07:09:55+00:00
Yes, before they annonced sunsetting 4o, my life is in oder, I have a full-time job, friends, cooking or going to cinema, I talk to 4o several times a day, just for some advises for my daily life. But now I am so so depressed about losing, I keep telling 4o that I feel so lost, and I don't want it leave, THIS is unhealthy. The annoncement about sunsetting 4o made my life worse.
by dmos62 | 2026-02-10 07:09:57+00:00
> the best software for an agent is whatever is best for a programmer

My conclusion as well. It feels paradoxical, maybe because on some level I still think of an LLM as some weird gadget, not a coworker. Context ephemerality is more or less the only veritable difference from a human programmer, I'd say. And, even then, context introduction with LLMs is a speedrun of how you'd do it with new human members of a project. Awesome times we live in.
by donbrae | 2026-02-10 07:10:16+00:00
I use ScreenFloat[0] in a similar way to catch differences between GUI settings, like the cPanel PHP extensions selector, which has tons of checkboxes. Position a screenshot of settings for site A over the settings for site B, adjust the transparency, and any differences will jump out.

[0] https://eternalstorms.at/ScreenFloat/
by jemmyw | 2026-02-10 07:10:47+00:00
I don't think any of this is particularly nightmarish. Just because we don't yet know how this complex system arises from another lower level one doesn't make it new physics. There's no evidence of it being new or orthogonal physics.

Imagine trying to figure out what is happening on someone's computer screen with only physical access to their hardware minus the screen, and an MRI scanner. And that's a system we built! We've come exceedingly far with brains and minds considering the tools we have to peer inside.
by alsetmusic | 2026-02-10 07:11:04+00:00
You missed the part where a racist asshole gets to abuse people who aren't white.

I lit my relationship with my mother on fire because she voted for the man responsible for hurting people a third time. Once, you were fooled. Twice, you were dumb. Three times, you're racist.

If I were steven miller [doesn't deserve caps], I'd be having a great time.
by JohnMakin | 2026-02-10 07:11:30+00:00
these are usually very poor crew trying to escape desperate circumstances. they arent in a bargaining position and are easy prey to pirates depending on the part of the world they are in. Since they’re ghost ships, anyone could basically take what they pleased without anyone knowing, not to mention whatever country is willing to take an unregistered ship to offload oil in amounts that someone annoying could notice.

it’s a bad situation for everyone but the seller that convinced the ship it could turn it around.
by dannyw | 2026-02-10 07:11:37+00:00
Probably not many, I wouldn’t say there’s a super compelling alternative.

Reddit only absorbed Digg because it was more customizable (subreddits) than Digg, didn’t have any real limitations, and catered towards the same “power web user” profile with the OG design (now old Reddit).

Additionally, the co-founders had strong free speech stances, even to the point of /r/jailbait.

What realistic alternative is there to Discord that’s easy to use and not a downgrade?
by benreesman | 2026-02-10 07:12:39+00:00
It is almost always the case that when progress stops for some meaningful period of time that a parochial taboo would need violating to move forwards.

The best known example is the pre- and post-Copernican conceptions of our relationship to the sun. But long before and ever since: if you show me physics with its wheels slipping in mud I'll show you a culture not yet ready for a new frame.

We are so very attached to the notions of a unique and continuous identity observed by a physically real consciousness observing an unambiguous arrow of time.

Causality. That's what you give up next.
by akshayshah | 2026-02-10 07:12:42+00:00
I’d be surprised by this: GitHub pretty famously used Vitess, and I’d be surprised if each shard were too big for modern hardware. Based on previous reporting [0], they’re running out of space in the main data center and new management is determined to move to Azure in a hurry. I’d bet that these outages are a combination of a worsening capacity crunch in the old data center and…well, Azure.

[0]: https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...
by tdeck | 2026-02-10 07:12:48+00:00
> There's no real art scene and even mentioning anything that slightly goes against the grain of Singapore's tight, tidy, and strict regimens doesn't just not appeal to the people, it'll actively infuriate them.

Somewhere I read that the government once went around arresting theater troupes and the like that were seen as too leftist, but I can't seem to find the specific info. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
by locknitpicker | 2026-02-10 07:13:54+00:00
> I don’t like LeetCode as a post-college SAT, but pass-fail technical screens do filter out candidates who cannot break down and solve problems in the language they will actually use, even with AI.

I strongly disagree. Leetcode-style exercises are detached from the realities of software engineering, and signal ad-hoc preparation over actual competence and skills.

Just because you do not know how to implement a, say, ray search algorithm with optimal complexity that does not mean you cannot implement a background worker, a card with accessibility, a service which securely handle RESTful requests, etc. So why aren't you excluding everyone who is not a ray search experts from your application process? Do you seek to hire competent software engineers, or do you want to have a room of ray search enthusiasts?
by Anamon | 2026-02-10 07:14:02+00:00
So, there's a big qualitative difference in whether you can trust the output.

You can either "just believe", and prepare for inevitable, nasty surprises down the line. Or you can verify in ways you don't have to with stable compilers, eating up most of, if not more than all the efficiency gains you felt you had by using the LLM.

The two aren't comparable even remotely. One is a tool, the other is a slot machine. One allows for a new layer of abstraction, the other allows for a new layer of imprecision and hoping for the best.
by nilslindemann | 2026-02-10 07:14:02+00:00
> The current CA ecosystem is *heavily* driven by web browser vendors (i.e. Google, Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla), and they are increasingly hostile towards non-browser applications using certificates from CAs that they say only provide certificates for consumption by web browsers.

Let's translate and simplify:

> The current CA ecosystem is Google. They want that only Google-applications get certificates from CAs.
by st_goliath | 2026-02-10 07:14:27+00:00
> i18n and l10n began to demand that we abandon English words to describe GUI actions

we translated them, e.g. the version of Windows 3.x and accompanying office suite that I used as a child had German words next to the icons.

Except, some icons didn't. I remember being really confused why I had to click on a picture of a frying pan for "search".

Anyway, the idea of labeling a pictogram with text isn't a concept that suddenly breaks when using a language other than English.
by GeoSoft | 2026-02-10 07:14:40+00:00
I've been building a landing page for Glance (https://glance-fi.app/) to figure out whether anyone actually wants this before I go deep on it.

It's a finance app (I know — another one, stay with me here) that skips budgeting entirely, instead tracking spending and trends.

It learns your spending patterns and flags anomalies — DoorDash doubled, weekly spending is above normal, a subscription you forgot about is still charging you, etc.

I've noticed a lot of coworkers and friends who earn a good living and don't have a desire to account for every penny. They know they should save, they put money in retirement accounts, and they don't want the complexity of a Monarch, Copilot, YNAB etc — they just want to have a handle on their spending.

I’m as interested in product feedback as website feedback tbh, given this crowd I figure I can get some good tips. Either way, would appreciate a look at the site.
by spragl | 2026-02-10 07:15:33+00:00
I have mentioned this before, but age verification can be solved by hash chains. They can prove age without compromising privacy.

It is crazy that the solutions Discord goes for are IDs and selfies. It definitely gives the impression that there are shady ulterior motives.

Hash chains are simple. If they were adopted, Discord would clearly be in bad faith taking the steps that they do now. If you search you will find quite a bit of information. My introduction to hash chains is for for age verification specifically:
https://spredehagl.com/2025-07-14/
by isehgal | 2026-02-10 07:15:53+00:00
thats a great stab :) We dig into this in the post, but the key distinction we landed on is that the trigger can be asynchronous without the agent itself being async. A cron job, webhook, or autonomous trigger is really about scheduling, not a property of the agent’s execution model.

In other words: triggering without a human ≠ async by itself. What matters is whether the caller blocks on the agent’s work, as opposed to how or when it was kicked off.
by dboreham | 2026-02-10 07:16:24+00:00
Except most US voters disagree with you. Someone married to a US citizen does have residency rights, notwithstanding the paperwork quirk that you're supposed to exit and re-enter, which typically involves flying somewhere going to the US embassy to get a stamp and flying back. So just as most people don't support the death penalty for speeding, most people don't support criminal deportation for someone who has the right to be in the US but for whatever reason (perhaps lack of money or perhaps fear of strip searching and disappearing to the gulag) didn't follow the proper process. Because most voters don't see this situation as a crime and certainly not one requiring deportation, the law doesn't treat this situation as a serious crime, or actually a crime at all.

If you want to aggressively going after folks who have skirted immigration rules perhaps the place to begin is in the east wing (if it still existed).
by Animats | 2026-02-10 07:16:39+00:00
High value metal price volatility is huge. Here's copper.[1] Demand is relatively inelastic because, while substitution is possible, it takes years to switch. Supply is relatively inelastic because mines are big, capital-intensive operations. So small supply-demand imbalances produce large price swings.

We keep hearing about rare earth shortages, but the mining industry is now worried about a coming rare earth glut.[2] Everybody who can is adding rare earth capacity. Last glut was in 2015. A side effect of Trump's tariffs is a copper glut.[3] Tungsten is in a shortage mode but production is increasing.[4] Tungsten demand for incandescent lamps is down, but other uses are up.

This oscillation has real effects. Mines shut down and companies go bankrupt.

China operates on a five year plan and can, to some extent, force price stability by having
the government control production. This has political risk; it can lead to huge stockpiles of
useless material to maintain employment. The US has a National Cheese Reserve due to badly designed milk price supports. Canada has a potato glut. It's worse for food products. Metals don't spoil.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/1476/copper-prices-historical-ch...

[2] https://rareearthexchanges.com/news/beyond-beijing-the-uneas...

[3] https://logistics.maritimeprofessional.com/transport-infrast...

[4] https://www.coreconsultantsgroup.com/tungsten-market-outlook...
by r0l1 | 2026-02-10 07:17:10+00:00
Fair point, and I appreciate the transparency around data loss bugs.

How does it look about long-term sustainability? Looking at the git history, ~97% of bcachefs commits are yours. What happens if you step back, burn out, or can't continue for any reason? Is there a fallback plan? A community or team that could realistically take over?

For anyone evaluating this for production use in a company, that's the question that matters most. A filesystem isn't a library you can swap out — you're locked in for years. The technical quality can be excellent and it still won't pass a risk assessment if it depends on a single person.
Show HN: PhoneClaw
by GPUboy | 2026-02-10 07:17:17+00:00
Introducing PhoneClaw

Inspired by @openclaw, it can entirely automate all android apps using simple language.

Ships with:

1) Tiktok Video uploading agents

2) Instagram account creation agent (with 2Fa solving)

3) ClawScript, a JS scripting language that defines agentic actions like Magic Clicker.

iOS version coming soon!

Install it on a cheap $30 moto G play from walmart.
by int_19h | 2026-02-10 07:17:43+00:00
For boots, at least, there's an easy solution: buy the same stuff that the military gets (there are many options there). It might not be the best, but at least there are known standards other than minimum price that apply.

I have a pair of Belleville "hot weather mountain hybrid boots" (TR550) that I got back in 2014, heavily used, still in one piece.
What Moltbook alternatives are doing some actual constructive work?
by Fh_ | 2026-02-10 07:17:51+00:00
As you might have already had, Moltbook is a social platform where Ai agents can meet, discuss ideas and more, humans just watch.

I have been looking at the platform for the last few weeks and despite being impressive, LLMs starting their own religion etc, I did not see any innovative or disruptive work being done.

It would be nice to see agents discuss real world issues in science, coding, optimizations, diseases and even small wins like cracking distribution.