MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by petterroea | 2026-02-04 10:05:41+00:00
I've missed the same even since before AI because I've done far too much work that's simple but time intensive. It's frustrating, and I miss problems that keep me up all night.

Reverse engineering is imo the best way of getting the experience of pushing your thinking in a controlled way, at least if you have the kind of personality where you are stubborn in wanting to solve the problem.

Go crack an old game or something!
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-04 10:05:44+00:00
>You want the French authorities to focus on the Epstein files to the exclusion of all other corporate misbehaviour?

No i said no such thing, what I said was that the resources of authorities is a finite pie. If most of it goes towards petty stuff like corporate misbehavior that hurts nobody, there won't be enough for the grave crimes like actual child abuser that actually hurt real people.

Same how police won't bother with your stolen phone/bike because they have bigger crimes to catch. I'm asking for the same logic be applied here.
by Underqualified | 2026-02-04 10:06:08+00:00
This resonates with me, but I quit programming about a decade ago when we were moving from doing low level coding to frameworks. It became no longer about figuring out the actual problem, but figuring out how to get the framework to solve it and that just didn't work for me.

I do miss hard thinking, I haven't really found a good alternative in the meantime. I notice I get joy out of helping my kids with their, rather basic, math homework, so the part of me that likes to think and solve problems creatively is still there. But it's hard to nourish in today's world I guess, at least when you're also a 'builder' and care about efficiency and effectiveness.
by satonakamoto | 2026-02-04 10:06:21+00:00
"As expected, the contaminated Chinese samples gave off high levels of sulfur gases. But all but one of the U.S. samples emitted sulfur gases, as well — not at levels as high as the defective Chinese product. There were some American products that we tested that had higher emission than some of the new Chinese products that we tested.[23]"

???
by thegrim000 | 2026-02-04 10:07:20+00:00
You know, I was expecting what the post would say and was prepared to dunk on it and just tell them to stop using ai then, but the builder/thinker division they presented got me thinking. How ai/vibe coding fulfills the builder, not the thinker, made me realize that I'm basically 100% thinker, 0% builder, and that's why I don't really care at all about ai for coding.

I'll spend years working on a from scratch OS kernel or a vulkan graphics engine or whatever other ridiculous project, which never sees the light of day, because I just enjoy the thinking / hard work. Solving hard problems is my entertainment and my hobby. It's cool to eventually see results in those projects, but that's not really the point. The point is to solve hard problems. I've spent decades on personal projects that nobody else will ever see.

So I guess that explains why I see all the ai coding stuff and pretty much just ignore it. I'll use ai now as an advanced form of google, and also as a last ditch effort to get some direction on bugs I truly can't figure out, but otherwise I just completely ignore it. But I guess there's other people, the builders, where ai is a miraculous thing and they're going to crazy lengths to adopt it in every workflow and have it do as much as possible. Those 'builder' types of people are just completely different from me.
by muyuu | 2026-02-04 10:09:23+00:00
if you can be sued for billions because some overbearing body, with a very different ideology to yours, can deem your moderation/censorship rules to be "unreasonable" then what you do is err on the side of caution and allow nearly nothing

this is not compatible with that line of business - perhaps one of the reasons nothing is done in Europe these days
by aebtebeten | 2026-02-04 10:10:12+00:00
Yeah, the scaling is very unfortunate; maybe if AI puts everyone out of work we'll have enough teachers? (that's a joke: my understanding is that there's a knee at a 1:12 ratio that may not be as good as an Oxbridge 1:2 but certainly would've improved upon the 1:30+ classrooms of my youth)

Were you also fortunate enough to have Alisa Seleznyova in your classes, or was that part of general ed? Where I went to school, I had to rely on MAD magazine for propanal instruction! (subscription thankfully provided by the same parents who'd ensured my basic literacy before entrusting me to K-12)
by rTX5CMRXIfFG | 2026-02-04 10:10:16+00:00
Practical answer? I don’t know, man. I’m just building a todo list after all. Heck, I build more complex apps than that but front-end work is at such a high level of abstraction that, realistically, I just never bother. I don’t mind a smaller download size, but it’s just a nice-to-have.

The point about Xcode being complex, I disagree with. Honestly I could think of so many additional features to make my workflow easier.
by jon-wood | 2026-02-04 10:10:38+00:00
Grist[1] is great for this stuff, at first glance its a spreadsheet but that spreadsheet is backed by a SQLite database and you can put an actual UI on top of it without leaving the tool, or you can write full blown plugins in Javascript and HTML if you need to go further than that.

[1] https://www.getgrist.com/
by saubeidl | 2026-02-04 10:11:03+00:00
This is accountability for the crimes of humans.

The crime is creating a system that lets schoolboys create fake nudes of other minors.

You don't just get to build a CSAM-generator and then be like "well I never intended for it to be used...".

The humans running a company are liable for the product that their company builds, easy as that.
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-04 10:11:08+00:00
You're beating it around the bush not answering the main question.

Anyone skilled at photoshop can do fake nudes as good or even better than AI, including kids (we used it to make fun fakes of teachers in embarrassing situations back in the mid 00s and distribute them via MSN messenger), so then why is only the AI tool the one to blame for what the users do, but not Photoshop if both tools can be used to do the same thing?

People can now 3D print guns at home, or at least parts that when assembled can make a functioning firearm. Are now 3D printer makers to blame if someone gets killed with a 3D printed gun?

Where do we draw the line at tools in terms of effort required, between when the tool bares the responsibility and not just the human using the tool to do illegal things? This is the answer I'm looking for and I don't think there is an easy one, yet people here are too quick to pin blame based on their emotional responses and subjective biases and word views on the matter and the parties involved.
by danw1979 | 2026-02-04 10:11:14+00:00
I’m not certain spacex is generating much cash right now ?

Starship development is consuming billions. F9 & Starlink are probably profitable ?

I’d say this is more shifting of the future burden of xAI to one of his companies he knows will be a hit stonk when it goes public, where enthusiasm is unlikely to be dampened by another massive cash drain on the books.
by 72deluxe | 2026-02-04 10:11:49+00:00
In wxWidgets you use sizers, so you don't work on pixel-level alignments. I can understand if you're using an ancient framework like MFC, but even then I seem to recall there was a sizer equivalent system (or it is easy enough to write a class to do so, moving components).

I think it is a daft thing to move to shipping a colossal web framework and entire browser simply because of 1px UI alignments (which have been a solved problem for decades in C++ anyway).
by pointlessone | 2026-02-04 10:11:49+00:00
Whatever it is it’s not driven by sense or even feasibility of data centers in space.

To me it looks like the next Musk’s grift. Remember Mars? Have you heard about it recently? He threw it to the Internet and everyone got excited for a minute. Then nerds did quick math and it didn’t make any sense. And so everyone forgot about Mars. This is the same. Hype everyone up for a week or two to inflate stock before the merger/purchase/IPO/whatever. That is all.
by deofoo | 2026-02-04 10:11:53+00:00
The truth is that I put a lot of work in at the beginning to define the data structure and flows by myself. AI was very useful later to experiment with how to build the views on top of it and to fix some issues.

I still had to think hard about how to make this simple and easy for someone who does not have deep knowledge of this manufacturing domain.

*Lessons learned:*

1. Data structure is almost everything, then comes business logic
2. You must have deep domain knowledge of what you are building
3. Iterate fast on the views built on top of the data structure

*PS*

All mobile fixed had been resolved and deployed ;)
by itay-maman | 2026-02-04 10:12:00+00:00
There's all this discourse about "you don't need to say thank you to AI" (Sam Altman said it costs a fortune). I agree with the economic perspective, but there's something deeper.

LLMs are trained to complete threads based on data collected from the internet. Conversations where people say "thank you," "not quite," "we're getting close but..." have different continuation patterns than ones where people are terse or dismissive. These gestures are in the training data, so they will influence how the model continues your thread.

In anything longer than a very short exchange, your tone and feedback signals genuinely help steer the agent in the right direction.
by InsideTehMatrix | 2026-02-04 10:12:11+00:00
AST Spacemobile is successfully deploying cell towers in space; to compete with Elons Starlink. Not to mention ASTS is collaborating with American Tower, Google, ATT, Verizon, Nokia, and other big dogs for this venture. Now a DC is magnitudes different then a cell tower/satellite but hey .. if the RoI is there, it can be done
by reaperducer | 2026-02-04 10:12:36+00:00
Last time I opened an account with Comcast they required your social security number. Same with an AT&T cell plan.

Strictly speaking they require /a/ Social Security Number, not necessarily /your/ SSN.

When I signed up for my most recent cellular service, I hesitated at giving my information to the guy in the store. I told him that since it was a pre-paid account I wasn't asking for credit, so there's no need for him to have my information.

He was OK with that, and pulled out an ID card the store keeps in a drawer for just such occasions.

Salespeople have a sales quota, not an enforce-the-rules quota.
by imtringued | 2026-02-04 10:12:41+00:00
Embryo selection is a thing. At an IVF clinic, they will always fertilize multiple eggs at once. Once the embryo has divided into eight cells, it is possible to take the eight cell and perform DNA sequencing. You can then choose the embryo that doesn't have heritable diseases (with some degree of luck).

Note that I'm not advocating for nebulous polygenic risk scores and especially not for selecting aesthetic traits but simple genetic screening for known genetic diseases.
by panda-giddiness | 2026-02-04 10:13:11+00:00
Essentially all of your concerns concerns can be mitigated by building somewhere else.

Worried about natural disasters? Build some place less prone to natural disasters.

Worried about the strain on local communities? Build some place more remote.

Worried about energy availability? Build near a nuclear power plant or hydroelectric power station.

Worried about hostile governments? Don't build data centers within the territories of hostile governments. (If you consider every country a hostile government, that is a you-problem.)

For the cost of building a data center in space, you could instead build a second (or third, or fourth, ...) data center somewhere else.
by gordian-mind | 2026-02-04 10:13:56+00:00
European courts have repeatedly said that in France the procureur (public prosecutor) isn’t an “independent judicial authority”.

The European Court of Human Rights has reminded this point (e.g. 29 Mar 2010, appl. no. 3394/03), and the Court of Justice of the European Union reaches a very similar conclusion (2 Mar 2021, C-746/18): prosecutors are part of the executive hierarchy and can’t be treated as the neutral, independent judicial check some procedures require.

For a local observer, this is made obvious by the fact that the procureur, in France, always follows current political vibes, usually in just a few months delay (extremely fast, when you consider how slowly justice works in the country).
by Raviteja_ | 2026-02-04 10:14:42+00:00
Stop burning $20/mo on Claude credits. I unlocked the Prompt Optimizer for free.

If you're hitting the message cap on Claude/Cursor, you're sending too much fluff. "Please", "Thank you," and verbose context contexts are eating 30% of your token budget.

I built Risk Mirror to mathematically compress prompts (removing filler, preserving logic).

It’s usually a Pro feature, but is completely free for now while I benchmark compression rates.

Free Tools Included:

* Prompt Optimizer (Save 40% tokens)

* Safe Share (Redact PII from LOGS/Text instantly)

* Risk Scanner (Check prompts before pasting)

* Clarity Analyzer (Fix vague inputs)

Grab it before I have to close the free tier
by jurgenaut23 | 2026-02-04 10:15:10+00:00
Man, this resonates SO MUCH with me. I have always loved being confronted with a truly difficult problem. And I always had that (obviously misguided, but utterly motivating) feeling that, with enough effort, no problem could ever resist me. That it was just a matter of grinding a bit further, a bit longer.

This is why I am so deeply opposed to using AI for problem solving I suppose: it just doesn’t play nice with this process.
by n4r9 | 2026-02-04 10:15:32+00:00
It's also not quite as easy to declare and build an array. You can't just write

var arr = [ 1, 2, 3];

You have to write something like

var arr = new int[] { 1, 2, 3 };

However if you have previously declared `arr` to be of type `int[]` (or another collection type such as `List<int>`), then you can write

arr = [ 1, 2, 3 ];

I haven't used TypeScript so don't know if it distinguishes between arrays and lists, and if so how it determines one or the other in inferred types. Would be curious to know.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-04 10:15:59+00:00
> It's the primary reason behind the TSA and its continuous expansion, for example.

I'd also add that the TSA is a good reason why we shouldn't expect talking legislators to gun ranges would make better gun laws.

The reason the TSA is what it is is because legislators fly more than most people. If you've ever been to DC you see a lot of this sort of security theater everywhere.

So much of the TSAs budget should be redirected towards what would actually make long distance travel safer, improving the ATC and Amtrak.
by moffkalast | 2026-02-04 10:17:25+00:00
It really doesn't matter if I don't know the paragraph eight of rule one hundred and thirty four, I know that if you can't do something without poisoning people you should not get to do it. That's as much as there is to it, and it's an argument you can't ever win without proving lead is harmless or something.

You can't just run piston engines on jet-a but you can run them on regular high octane from any regular gas station or any of the actual alternatives, my point was you can swap them for small turboprop powerplants and run the plane on jet-a. Afaik reducing knocking is not really the point of avgas either, which I'm sure you know, but vapor lock at high altitudes, which you can easily avoid by... not flying high, which by your own point is the main use case for piston aircraft. I guess we'll just spray lead over everyone instead, cause it's "safer".
by whywhywhywhy | 2026-02-04 10:17:31+00:00
I feel tired working with AI much faster than I did when I used to code, dunno if it's just that I don't really need to think much at all other than keep in mind the broad plan and have an eye out if a red flag of the wrong direction shows in the transcript, don't even bother reading the code anymore since Opus 4.5 I haven't felt the need to.

Manually coding engaged my brain much more and somehow was less exhausting, kinda feels like getting out of bed and doing something vs lazing around and ending up feel more tired despite having to do less.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-04 10:18:44+00:00
> Hope you're not one of them.

I've been part of enough ERP contracts to know that customers evaluate their options based on how easy it is to hire consultants on the open market.

I did do quite a lot of custom software prior to AI-slop, and that market is completely destroyed with vibe-coding agents. The ERP one looks like it is simply going to further entrench the big players, because new ERPs evolve from some custom application, and once that pipeline is gone, your choices are going to be "build it yourself with no ability to hire for it" or "Go with one of the existing behemoths".

My argument is that AI will remove the pipeline that leads to incumbents seeing more competition.
Show HN: Glintlog – Self-hosted log aggregation in a single binary
by caioricciuti | 2026-02-04 10:18:50+00:00
Hello all!

I built Glintlog because I wanted a simple way to aggregate logs without spinning up Elasticsearch, Loki, or a SaaS that costs my kidney…

What it is: A self-hosted log aggregation tool that runs as a single binary. No Docker, no dependencies, no config files required.

How it works:
```
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ibero-data/glintlog/main/s... | bash
```

That's it. Open localhost:8080 and you have a log viewer with search, filtering, and live tail.

Tech:
- Go backend with embedded DuckDB for storage
- Native OTLP support (gRPC on 4317, HTTP on 4318)
- Works with any OpenTelemetry SDK out of the box

Why I built it:

I run small side projects and wanted observability without the complexity. Existing solutions either require too much infrastructure (ELK), are SaaS-only, or don't support OpenTelemetr natively. Glintlog is meant to be the SQLite of log aggregation – simple, embedded, good enough for most use cases. I use a lot for ETL’s now… (I’m a data engineer too)…

It's not meant to replace SaaS that has a 500-person company. It's for small teams, and enthusiasts who want logs without the overhead, also covering all we need for it…

Docs: https://glintlog.com/docs
GitHub: https://github.com/ibero-data/glintlog

Would love feedback. What features would make this useful for you? Would you pay per year?
by BlackFly | 2026-02-04 10:19:42+00:00
I really find this kind of appeal quite odious. God forbid that we expect fathers to have empathy for their sons, sisters, brothers, spouses, mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, etc. or dare we hope that they might have empathy for friends or even strangers? It's like an appeal to hypocrisy or something. Sure, I know such people exist but it feels like throwing so many people under the bus just to (probably fail) to convince someone of something by appealing to an emotional overprotectiveness of fathers to daughters.

You should want to protect all of the people in your life from such a thing or nobody.
by em-bee | 2026-02-04 10:19:48+00:00
the problem here is where to draw the line. the thing is though, a perfect line can't be drawn. i can still read your code, and learn something from it. so there is some benefit.

the question is how do we measure benefit?

you could also imagine a project that could be of huge benefit, but nobody knows about it because just publishing it on my website or even on github is not enough.

so maybe benefit is the number of people downloading and using the code. few people would use your firmware, so the benefit would be small.

we are already facing this question with small libraries projects that many other projects depend on. which of these libraries deserve or need our support. if you can answer that question you can also decide if a project is of public benefit.

when it comes to officially recognizing projects, the cost of enforcement is also an issue.
it may be unfair that a project like this firmware gets recognized as being of public benefit, but it is also unfair to not recognize other projects that do need the recognition don't get it.

it is not reasonable to reject an idea just because you can construct examples that are not deserving and would exploit a loophole. just like we don't cancel social security benefits just because there are a few bad sheep that are unfairly taking advantage of it.

i find it really frustrating that every good idea is shot down just because some people could benefit unfairly.
by SuperMouse | 2026-02-04 10:20:12+00:00
I'm currently thinkering of building a balloon with a 2.4GHz LoRa transmitter (SX128x) and a low-power STM32U microcontroller.

Why?

- You can repurpose 2.4GHz Wifi gear opening many doors

- You can easily include volunteers dumping data from HF into a IP sink for telemetry. TTGO offers boards with 2.4GHz LoRa.

- Theoretically you still can add a "low rate" 868MHz/433MHz and a "high rate" 2.4GHz for transmitting pictures and other stuff more quickly.

- BOM friendly. As the balloon might get lost you have to plan a bit for costs.
by lambdaone | 2026-02-04 10:20:36+00:00
The thing I find most notable is the lack of any concrete information on how these things are to be cooled, other than quotes like "space cooling is free".

If you want to radiate away the heat, you are either limited by the Stefan-Boltzmann equation which requires extraordinarily large radiators at any reasonable operating temperature, or have to develop a "super-Planckian" radiator technology, something which while it may be theoretically possible doesn't seem to actually exist yet as a practical technology.

The only other plausible technology I can think of would be to use evaporative or sublimation-based cooling, but that would consume vast quantities of mass in the process, every bit of which would have to be delivered to space first.

Has anyone seen any published work that suggests it is actually anywhere near economically feasible to dissipate megawatts of power in space, using either these or any other technology?
by aebtebeten | 2026-02-04 10:20:53+00:00
I'm pretty sure Tarantino (sharing the culture in which I was steeped) meant to be confrontational, but probably the rest of the audience, being blissfully unaware of things "everyone knows" you're not supposed to actually say, thought expressive more than transgressive.

FWIW it was "Hateful 8" (2015), so I don't think the old country has shifted out from under me — unless it's either all been in the last decade, or younger audiences there are also not nervously laughing? Guess I'll have to make some inquiries...

Nervous laughter, as in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That%27s_Not_Funny,_That%27s_S...
by lolive | 2026-02-04 10:21:22+00:00
In my company, [enterprise IT] architects are separated into two kinds.
People with a CV longer than my arm who know/anticipate everything that could fail and have reached a level of understandind that I personnally call "wisdom".
And theorists, who read books and norms, who focus mostly on the nominal case, and have no idea [and no interest] in how the real world will be a hard brick wall that challenges each and every idea you invent.

Not being hands-on, and more important not LISTENING to the hands-on people and learning from them, is a massive issue in my surroundings.

So thinking hard on something is cool. But making it real is a whole different story.

Note: as Steve used to say, "real artists ship".
by levario_studio | 2026-02-04 10:21:42+00:00
Features:

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Brand Integration: Easily upload your company logo to the center of any code with automatic "error correction" to ensure it remains scannable.
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