MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rsynnott | 2026-02-09 16:44:57+00:00
You said:

> Models have gotten much better than even the most optimistic predictions.

We were promised Roko's Basilisk by now, damnit! Where's my magical robot god?!

But seriously, predictions a couple years back for 2026/27 (by quite big players, like Altman) were for AGI or as good as.

I do not, for the record, claim that they are totally useless. They are useful where correctness of results does not matter, for instance low-stakes natural language translation and spam generation. There's _some_ argument that they are somewhat useful in cases where their output can be reviewed by an expert (code generation etc), though honestly quantitive evidence there is mixed at best; for all the "10x developer" claims, there's not much in the way of what you'd call hard evidence.
by skinnymuch | 2026-02-09 16:44:58+00:00
This thread casually talks about Taiwan being a vassal state of the US during a civil war and Hong Kong being a colony of the British. Yet the world, largely the global south, should intervene and help the global north to exploit the rest of the world more?

Every one gets that far away countries across the world can’t put military bases right next to Europe or the US. However when it comes to China, that is not only acceptable but it’s the anti-cowardly move to support outsider aggressors.
by staplung | 2026-02-09 16:45:09+00:00
Very cool, thanks for putting this up.

Couple of observations:

- the page size drop down doesn't display any units (e.g. "6 x 9"). I assume there're all in inches but it would be a little more helpful if it said so and/or included a common name (e.g. US Letter) if one exists for that size.

- you might want to look into page imposition[1] something that's basically essential for any kind of stitched binding (as opposed to "perfect binding"). Full-blown imposition software is often ridiculously expensive and can have quite a few options so it's definitely both an engineering and UI challenge. In the meantime, Bookbinder JS[2] is a great site that I think runs entirely client side and can transform any PDF.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imposition

2: https://momijizukamori.github.io/bookbinder-js/?paperSize=LE...
by Arathorn | 2026-02-09 16:45:14+00:00
Hmmm. The main difference between the Matrix Fdn publishing a spec (https://spec.matrix.org) made out of Matrix Spec Changes (https://spec.matrix.org/proposals) versus IETF only publishing RFCs is simply that the Matrix Fdn also maintains a consolidated version of the spec. I'm not sure that makes the protocol governance fundamentally more vulnerable to govt influence?
by Torkel | 2026-02-09 16:45:32+00:00
See, this is why I put "inmates should have decent drinking water" first in my comment, and "inmates should have clean water" as the very last words.

It seems to me you are making the exact error in argument I react against. Stop making everything a "human right". You see, in the end, when you've made everything "human rights", the whole "human rights" concept will cease to have any meaning whatsoever and you will have lost.
by danr4 | 2026-02-09 16:45:43+00:00
i did not stop to get taller, it just felt like crap. I think as you get older and more independent it starts messing with your sense of self.

is it better to be on meds? maybe i don't know. all i have is my experience.
and looking back i'd much rather my parents told the school "fu im not giving my kid stimulants just challenge him" and to provide the challenge if the school didn't.

if you're top 1% (definitely not hn average), it's very likely you had "problems at school" simply because it was boring. don't know how old you are but with 1% there's really nothing preventing you from learning whatever it is you want to learn and go do something else.
by sumtechguy | 2026-02-09 16:45:46+00:00
That has more to do with where you work than AI.

Some places have military grade paperwork where mistakes are measured in millions of dollars per min. Others places are 'just push it in fix it later'.

AI is not going to change that. That is a people problem. Not something you can automate away. But you can fire your way out of it.
by asielen | 2026-02-09 16:45:56+00:00
I feel this. Since my team has jumped into an AI everything working style, expectations have tripled, stress has tripled and actual productivity has only gone up by maybe 10%.

It feels like leadership is putting immense pressure on everyone to prove their investment in AI is worth it and we all feel the pressure to try to show them it is while actually having to work longer hours to do so.
by petetnt | 2026-02-09 16:45:58+00:00
GitHub has had customer visible incidents large enough to warrant status page updates almost every day this year (https://www.githubstatus.com/history).

This should not be normal for any service, even at GitHub's size. There's a joke that your workday usually stops around 4pm, because that's when GitHub Actions goes down every day.

I wish someone inside the house cared to comment why the services barely stay up and what kinds of actions are they planning to do to fix this issue that's been going on years, but has definitely accelerated in the past year or so.
by komali2 | 2026-02-09 16:46:08+00:00
The PRC will happily sell chips to the West. I live in Taiwan, I don't want it to happen, but people need to stop acting like countries will prevent an invasion because it means the CPC will control chip manufacturing.

The choice is between possible nuclear war, or, the 5090s are more expensive and sometimes Americans can't buy them when the PRC is punishing the west for something.
by rbanffy | 2026-02-09 16:46:22+00:00
My biggest concern is the apparent lack of testing and validation. After the Apollo 1 accident uncrewed flight of Apollo, we had half-a-dozen flights, 3 of which uncrewed, before they did an end-to-end validation on Apollo 10, to finally land with Apollo 11. Is NASA that confident SLS and Orion will perform adequately that they will add astronauts to SLS's second (and Orion 3rd) flight?
by throwaway150 | 2026-02-09 16:46:27+00:00
> This is a subthread of "I wonder why matrix isn't more widespread at this point".

Exactly. My point is that the question itself is misplaced. It reflects a consumer mindset, which makes sense when you are paying for a product, but feels out of place with open source projects built largely through voluntary effort.

However noble the foundation's mission sounds, the reality is that Matrix is a complex protocol sustained by people investing their time and energy because they care about it.

It will not magically solve every user problem. If something does not work for you, the constructive path is to help fix it or at least propose concrete improvements. Otherwise, choosing a proprietary solution is perfectly reasonable but expecting open source projects to behave like consumer products is out of place.
by jakubtomanik | 2026-02-09 16:46:30+00:00
Does AI write 100% correct code? No, but under my watch it writes code that is more correct than anything that anyone else on the team contributed in past year or more. Even better when it is wrong I don’t have to spend literal hours arguing with it nor I have to be mindful how what I’m saying affects others feelings so I get to spend more time on actual work. All in all it’s a net positive
Show HN: Merlin (trymerlin.ai) – Exam creation tool for educators
by warkanlock | 2026-02-09 16:46:31+00:00
Hey HN,

We’re building Merlin, an assessment SDK for educators, that intent to help educators go from “materials” > “exam” > “results” without stitching together five different tools

What it does today:

1. Generate exams using AI (including from PDF/PPTX source material)

2. Share exams via links with specific users

3. Run/monitor exams in real time (focus on exam integrity / anti-cheating)

4. Evaluate submissions (auto-grading where possible) and track results

5. Analytics on outcomes so you can see what students actually struggled with

Check it out on: https://trymerlin.ai/

If you run assessments at any scale (university, bootcamps, training), I’d love to provide for free the license to use it in exchange for feedback on where existing workflows break: authoring, question quality, grading, proctoring, or reporting.
by reedlaw | 2026-02-09 16:46:34+00:00
This article, (https://michaelmangialardi.substack.com/p/the-celestial-mirr...), came to similar conclusions as the parent article, and includes some tests (e.g. https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1kTqyoYpTcbvaz8tiYgj...) showing that LLMs, while good at understanding, fail at intellectual reasoning. The fact that they often produce correct outputs has more to do with training and pattern recognition than ability to grasp necessity and abstract universals.
by skeeter2020 | 2026-02-09 16:47:23+00:00
do you think this is inherent in AI-related work, or largely due to the current state of the world, where it's changing rapidly and we're struggling to adapt our entire work systems to the shifting landscape, while under intense (and often false) pressures to "disrupt ourselves"? Put another way, if this was similarly true twenty years ago with the rise of Google, is it still true today?
by rdm_blackhole | 2026-02-09 16:47:46+00:00
> When big tech tosses money at Republicans and the Trump inauguration, they get what they paid for.

This has nothing to do with republicans in particular. This is concerted effort by lobbying groups around the world who want to get more of your data.

Case and point: all the EU countries that are currently banning teens from using messaging services and social media apps which can only be enforced if you force everyone using these services to provide some form of ID to prove that you are allowed to use them.

Not too mention the EU itself trying force a backdoor into every messaging app "to protect the children".

Be mad at the US politicians if you want but just know that the situation is not better in the EU, on the contrary it's going downhill very fast and that has nothing to do with Trump.
by AndrewKemendo | 2026-02-09 16:48:30+00:00
Fs is the frequency at which whatever your measuring is most efficient at vibrating

So it’s a combination of the composition of the thing and the environmental coupling with other vibrating things

Size and material composition are the primary factors

So for this case, the photon spectrum interact with nitrogen-oxygen mixture most efficiently at the frequency that reflects blue

I mostly studied sound frequency mixing with static objects (matching or cancelling the fs of room/space with the fs of a driver) but the principles of resonance hold across media
by hackyhacky | 2026-02-09 16:48:59+00:00
You use these words like "woke" "TDS" "MDS" "mind virus", not because you want to contribute to the conversation, but because you want to justify your inattention to the conversation.

These words are thought-terminated cliches. Relevant link for HN today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
by superkuh | 2026-02-09 16:49:52+00:00
Sorry if I was inexact in my wording. It's settling on the existence of your bank account proving who you are. The ID services require you to give them your bank login credentials (ie, Plaid). So there are two levels of denial, at Plaid (and related ID services) themselves and the banks deciding weather or not they want to allow it (work with Plaid, or Plaid with them, etc) and if they want to give you a bank account.
by kantselovich | 2026-02-09 16:50:03+00:00
Working on MacOS app that detects an active meeting in one of the commonly used apps and then turns on a LED "presence" light. The purpose to let others know that you are "on air" at this moment.

Current release candidate supports detecting Teams Meeting and Slack Huddle.

https://github.com/kantselovich/LuxaforPresence/pull/3
by skinnymuch | 2026-02-09 16:50:07+00:00
The smugness and superiority about how the rest of the world are immoral barbarians and the global status quo of white/western hegemony is amazing and very moral is pretty funny.
It’s pretty obvious these same people in the past would’ve said the US’s chattel slavery is not that bad because other countries do slavery too. The equivocations westerners will do.
by zelphirkalt | 2026-02-09 16:50:09+00:00
Are you saying the rest of the world should have stood up for what ultimately is colonialism? And colonialism of the British out of all the people? And also in a territory, that is directly on or neighboring the Chinese landmass? The Chinese people have a long history of others trying to conquer them or colonize them. They are probably pretty allergic to such notions, and will reject them. Realistically speaking, no one would have had the resources to force HK staying the same enclave it has been. This all sounds rather unrealistic.

We can agree on the treatment of HK being far from ideal, and I would go as far as saying, that even economically for China itself, it was not good to handle the matter as they did. That is where their ideology shows. HK was an economical hub. In recent times though many businesses left and more are unwilling to invest. This is the economical downside, that could simply have been avoided by not doing what they did. The question should be asked "Why not just leave it as it is, since it is working well, economically?" But they had to mess with it. Another downside is international reputation damage of course. China has achieved many great things in the past decades and now has cities more modern and convenient than most of what you find in Europe. Their one problem remains ideology. That they sometimes feel the need to do things, that are not economically sound, for the sake of ideology.

However, I can't agree with anyone arguing, that HK should not be part of China, like some people do in the comments here. It's a separate matter from policies implemented. Of course I wish for HKers to keep their freedoms. Who doesn't. Of course I wish China would not implement policies, that endanger the freedom of its people. But territorial? Nope, HK always was bound to become a part of China.

What I can say more from visiting HK twice is, that they still got Internet (uncensored), in contrast to other parts of China. Every week I am speaking with someone from HK, using Signal, which is not practical for anyone from (most?) other parts of China. When traveling in China, I used a HK eSIM, to have reliable and uncensored Internet. I hope that these aspects still remain intact for a long time, or that the rest of China will open up. At some point they should have the confidence in their own economy to compete on global scale.
by hdersch | 2026-02-09 16:50:27+00:00
"Viewsheds" of any location can be calculated and matched with photographs using "GeoImageViewer", an application I wrote a couple of years ago. Any feature in the photo can be interactively identified in a mapview and vice versa, including the boundary of the viewshed. See the link below for a couple of examples.

I wonder how atmospheric refraction is handled in the calculations for the longest line of sight. Since it (a) strongly affects the line of sight, and (b) depends on temperature and weather, how is a static "world record" possible, or even defined? E.g. objects may appear 400m higher in 200km distance under typical conditions.

https://hdersch.github.io/Viewing.html
by Valodim | 2026-02-09 16:50:28+00:00
> - Messages by default are encrypted in transit. Client to server. Yes Telegram does have access to those messages.

No connection over the internet is not transport encrypted these days, but that is not what this conversation is about. It's about whether messages are encrypted so the server cannot read them. And Telegram is commonly mistaken to have this property, including OP I was responding to.

If you go around telling people that telegram is "encrypted", please stop. You are spreading disinformation.
by illithid0 | 2026-02-09 16:50:45+00:00
I've worked as a security consultant with one or two companies (who shall remain nameless) whose sole product was a hardware device with a black-box software stack meant to be a plug-and-play lawful intercept compliance solution. Telecoms should be able to buy it, install it, and access a web panel to do their government-mandated business.

In the three or four year I worked with them, they would only let me do penetration testing of their user network, and never the segments where the developers were, and never the product itself. In speaking with their security team (one guy - shocker) during compliance initiatives, it was very clear to me that the product itself was not to be touched per the explicit direction of senior leadership.

All I can say is that if the parts of their environment they did let us touch are any indication of the state of the rest of their assets, that device was compromised a long time ago.
by KellyCriterion | 2026-02-09 16:51:06+00:00
Interesting here is: Actually, for most blue butterflies, it’s not even a pigment-it’s just a trick of the light.
Since blue is so rare in the biological world (hardly any plants or animals can produce real blue chemicals), they evolved structural colors.
Their wings have these microscopic ridges that reflect blue light while canceling out other colors.

It’s basically the same reason the sky looks blue, just built into a wing. If you were to look at the wings from a different angle or get them wet, the blue often disappears because you're messing with that physical structure
by rdm_blackhole | 2026-02-09 16:51:20+00:00
They already exists except that most people don't know about it and also it is extremely hard to move over all the existing users from Whatsapp to something less popular and less user friendly.

Until that changes, then the governments around the world are going to keep pushing to get access to all our messages in order to "protect the children" TM and ask you to prove that "you are not a child" TM
by titzer | 2026-02-09 16:51:26+00:00
I think I may end up coming full circle on Virgil. Circa 2005 Virgil I compiled to C and then with avr-gcc to AVR. I did that because who the heck wants to write an AVR backend? Circa 2009 I wrote a whole new compiler for Virgil III and since then it has JVM, x86, x86-64, wasm, wasm-gc and (incomplete) arm64.

I like compiler backends, but truth be told, I grow weary of compiler backends.

I have considered generating LLVM IR but it's too quirky and unstable. Given the Virgil wasm backend already has a shadow stack, it should now be possible for me to go back to square one and generate C code, but manage roots on the stack for a precise GC.

Hmm....
by bojo | 2026-02-09 16:51:45+00:00
Humetrical ( https://humetrical.com ) -- A wellness platform that puts people's mental health first by showing work metrics that matter. Because burnout blindness leads to exit interviews.

It wasn't until we had a leadership retreat at my day job with a fantastic speaker (Woodrie Burich) that the idea for my platform spawned. She talked about how the $50B wellness industry is doing it wrong. Your company is giving you useless yoga stipends, when truth is they should be paying attention to your overall well being. One idea she presented that resonated with me was using a traffic light-like system to gauge where your employees are mentally at.

I took that to heart and verbally applied it to my team. Then I realized that a platform would give better visuals of the data and be easier to incorporate into everyone's day to day. A couple months later I finally released it.
by avin01 | 2026-02-09 16:51:50+00:00
We’ve gone back and forth on this a few times.

Early on, we used Metabase for speed. It’s great for internal dashboards and quick customer access, but starts to feel clunky once you care about UX, permissions, and embedding deeply.

For customer-facing analytics, we eventually leaned toward building thin custom views on top of a metrics API / warehouse. More work upfront, but you control performance, access, and product experience.

The tradeoff is obvious, tools get you to v1 fast, custom gets you to v2+. If analytics is core to your product, I’d build. If it’s a feature, I’d buy and move on.
by solomonb | 2026-02-09 16:52:24+00:00
Yeah I'm pretty happy with HTMX. I first cut my teeth on programming in the early 2000s with LAMP stack then Ruby on Rails and Django. It feels pretty great to be able to do a web 2.0 style application but still get most of the functionality of a SPA.

https://github.com/solomon-b/kpbj.fm
by catigula | 2026-02-09 16:53:00+00:00
I'm not totally convinced of this.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/reactionary

>relating to, marked by, or favoring reaction

It doesn't denote primarily political usage, although that is my interpretation. Here are a few given examples:

> The Clippers so far have been reactionary in the playoffs. — Los Angeles Times, 13 June 2021

> The demise of the style was spurred by a reactionary resurgence of Classicism. — Regina Cole, Forbes, 1 Jan. 2023

> However, the signing had been in the works for weeks and was not a reactionary move in the wake of Sjöberg’s injury. — Daniel Boniface, The Denver Post, 14 Mar. 2017

>But in most people, facial bloating and undereye puffiness are usually just reactionary. — Georgia Casey, Allure, 6 Feb. 2026
by em-bee | 2026-02-09 16:53:06+00:00
it's possible to integrate jitsi in such a way that the chat has a function that will open a jitsi room and share the link to that. on irc this could be a bot. for people used to irc that's seamless enough. for something more convenient you'd want to integrate that feature into the chat client interface such that it can track who is in which jitsi room, etc...

of course this has yet to be built.
by mholt | 2026-02-09 16:53:16+00:00
We can of course host our code elsewhere, the problem is the community is kind of locked-in. It would be very "expensive" to move, and would have to be very worthwhile. So far the math doesn't support that kind of change.

Usually an outage is not a big deal, I can still work locally. Today I just happen to be in a very GH-centric workflow with the security reports and such.

I'm curious how other maintainers maintain productivity during GH outages.
by erelong | 2026-02-09 16:53:39+00:00
Reminds me of a short writing "I, Pencil"

The problem is education, and maybe ironically AI can assist in improving that

I've read a lot about programming and it all feels pretty disorganized; the post about programmers being ignorant about how compilers work doesn't sound surprising (go to a bunch of educational programming resources and see if they cover any of that)

It sounds like we need more comprehensive and detailed lists

For example, with objections to "vibe coding", couldn't we just make a list of people's concerns and then work at improving AI's outputs which would reflect the concerns people raise? (Things like security, designs to minimize tech debt, outputting for rradability if someone does need to manually review the code in the future, etc.?)

Incidentally this also reminds me of political or religious stances against technology, like the Amish take for example, as the kind of ignorance of and dependence on processes out of our control discussed seem to be inherent qualities of technological systems as they grow and become more complex.