MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by advael | 2026-02-07 22:12:18+00:00
I think robust crowdsourcing is probably the biggest capital-A Advancement in humanity's capabilities that came out of the internet, and there's a huge disparity in results that comes from how that capability is structured and used. Wikipedia designed protocols, laws, and institutions that leverage crowdsourcing to be the most reliable de facto aggregator of human knowledge. Social media designed protocols, laws, and institutions to rot people's brains, surveil their every move, and enable mass-disinformation to take over the public imagination on a regular basis.

I think LLMs as a technology are pretty cool, much like crowdsourcing is. We finally have pretty good automatic natural language processing that scales to large corpora. That's big. Also, I think the state of the software industry that is mostly driving the development, deployment, and ownership of this technology is mostly doing uninspired and shitty things with it. I have some hope that better orgs and distributed communities will accomplish some cool and maybe even monumental things with them over time, but right now the field is bleak, not because the technology isn't impressive (although somehow despite how impressive it is it's still being oversold) but because silicon valley is full of rotten institutions with broken incentives, the same ones that brought us social media and subscriptions to software. My hope for the new world a technology will bring about will never rest with corporate aristocracy, but with the more thoughtful institutions and the distributed open source communities that actually build good shit for humanity, time and time again
by Applejinx | 2026-02-07 22:12:18+00:00
Microsoft will be an excellent real-world experiment on whether this is any good. We so easily forget that giant platform owners are staking everything on all this working exactly as advertised.

Some of my calculations going forward will continue to be along the lines of 'what do I do in the event that EVERYTHING breaks and cannot be fixed'. Some of my day job includes retro coding for retro platforms, though it's cumbersome. That means I'll be able to supply useful things for survivors of an informational apocalypse, though I'm hoping we don't all experience one.
by WalterBright | 2026-02-07 22:12:48+00:00
When I developed D, a major priority was string handling. I was inspired by Basic, which had very straightforward, natural strings. The goal was to be as good as Basic strings.

And it wasn't hard to achieve. The idea was to use length delimited strings rather than 0 terminated. This meant that slices of strings being strings is a superpower. No more did one have to constantly allocate memory for a slice, and then keep track of that memory.

Length-delimited also super speeded string manipulation. One no longer had to scan a string to find its length. This is a big deal for memory caching.

Static strings are length delimited too, but also have a 0 at the end, which makes it easy to pass string literals to C functions like printf. And, of course, you can append a 0 to a string anytime.
Show HN: Poddley.com – Follow people, not podcasts
by onesandofgrain | 2026-02-07 22:13:45+00:00
Hey, so I built a way to search podcast transcripts by speaker and hence also a way to follow people within them.

Poddley let's you search quotes and filter by name and vice versa. You can find ev everything they've said across all their with timestamps and with a read-along UI.

You can also RSS feeds for specific people instead subscribing to entire shows. I started this because I wanted to find podcasts where my favorite speakers talked about my favorite things (in my case that was certain longevity-research).
However simply searching for stuff like "rapamycin", would yield quotes by 99% people I wasn't interested in.

I think this could be useful for people that are journalists, hobbyists, casual people and pretty much everyone that's interested in finding quotes and talking-areas in a podcast by people they respect/want to listen more to etc.

Currently indexing about 10 podcasts due to POC.
by pqtyw | 2026-02-07 22:14:23+00:00
> even should you want to operate in incredibly bad faith and add employer contributions,

How is that bad faith? It's basic common sense to count that together. Total cost is what matters to employers. You can't compare different countries either if you don't hacks like this that try to confuse the workers about how much they are paying.

e.g.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/Payroll_...

taxes in Denmark are presumably several times higher than in France?
by luckydata | 2026-02-07 22:14:51+00:00
honestly this blog post was pretty off base. Current AIs have a limited ability to keep up with complexity and using known frameworks helps with managing that complexity. If you need to write everything from scratch every time you have to go through the process of scaffolding and harnessing the whole system from scratch. I don't think it's worth rewriting react from scratch every time you make a browser application, even in the best case it's just a huge waste of tokens.
by Veserv | 2026-02-07 22:15:03+00:00
That is more likely a result of legal requirements. As a general rule any personal benefit you get counts as your income and is taxed accordingly. Expensing is not, instead counting as a business expense.

To avoid people just forming a personal company and declaring everything they spend a business expense and thus not taxed there are rules around what can be counted as a business expense.

If you instead want to take your salary in the form of Fiber One bars, but pay taxes on that spending in dollars, then your accounting department might have had fewer issues since they would not be mixing legally distinct costs and accidentally committing financial fraud.
by andyjohnson0 | 2026-02-07 22:15:23+00:00
> Now, I get to make beautiful things by speaking, guiding, and directing a system which is capable of handling the drudgery while I think about how to make the system wonderful and functional and beautiful.

For how long do you think this is sustainable? In the sense of you, or me, or all these other people here being able to earn a living. Six months? A couple of years? The time until the next-but-one Claude release drops?

Does everyone have to just keep re-making themselves for whatever the next new paradigm turns out to be? How many times can a person do that? How many times can you do that?
by doodlebugging | 2026-02-07 22:16:14+00:00
Most people in the economy do not use Slack. That tool may be most beneficial to those people who stand to lose jobs to AI displacement. Maybe after everyone is pink-slipped for an LLM or AI chatbot tool the total cost to the employer is reduced enough that they are willing to spend part of the money they saved eliminating warm bodies on AI tools and willing to pay a higher per employee price.

I think with a smaller employee pool though it is unlikely that it all evens out without the AI providers holding the users hostage for quarterly profits' sake.
by jjav | 2026-02-07 22:16:34+00:00
OP said "established hillside community with equestrian 1 - 5 acre lots".

It is reasonably likely that people who lived there chose the location because they wanted to have horses, otherwise why buy there?

When dense apartments get built next door, soon enough the city prohibits horses because the thinking goes that horses don't belong in a dense population area.

I'm not familiar with the area OP mentions, but exact same thing happened around here. Some 30 years ago most houses had horses, then a lot of smaller building came around and they prohibited horses.

Doesn't impact me personally but I'm sad for the long time residents who specifically moved here to have horses. Not fair to them. Some have moved of course, but moving isn't always easy if you have job and kids in school in town.
by caryme | 2026-02-07 22:17:31+00:00
Yes, though again, the language around registration gets really messy. Here's a great article (with a great title!) from the Journal of Singing by Christian T. Herbst "Registers—The Snake Pit of Voice Pedagogy": https://www.nats.org/_Library/JOS_On_Point/JOS-077-02-2020-1...

One relevant excerpt before the article goes into several pages discussing M11 vs M2:

> These four laryngeal mechanisms are typically termed as: vocal fry (M0, pulse
register); chest voice (M1, modal register); falsetto (M2, head voice?); and whistle register (M3).

Another article by Dr. Ingo Titze (an icon in the field of voice science and basically the father of SOVTs) about the debated "mix" register, starts this way:

> One is called chest voice, full voice, or modal voice, which is described by
a vibratory mechanism that some have labeled M1. Acoustically, harmonic energy above the fundamental dominates the sound spectrum in this register. The other anchor is called falsetto or light head voice, which is described by a
vibratory mechanism labeled M2.

(from https://vocology.utah.edu/_resources/documents/mixed_registr...)
by pqtyw | 2026-02-07 22:17:46+00:00
> They're employer _contributions_ to the system

No, they are the taxes you pay that are not shown on your payslip.

> They're the price you pay for a healthy, well educated working population

Yes, you as a worker pay it.

> back into the salary should it go away

It would be trivial for the government to make sure it does.
by nephihaha | 2026-02-07 22:17:49+00:00
I believe we already have the resources to colonise the Moon and maybe Mars right now. There would have to be considerable R&D, and willpower, and it would be very expensive but I think it is within our powers. Humans would have to live underground and deal with dust, maybe microbes in the case of Mars, but we could do it. The spaceships to go to Mars would have to be big but they could more easily be built on the Moon due to the lower gravity.
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-07 22:18:06+00:00
Pathetic. It really should be a 100% tax above 1B in net worth. If we didn’t have billionaires hoarding capital, we would have a more even playing field for capitalism. And we wouldn’t have oligarch corruption in our government. California has spending problems but ultimately the country needs a federal tax that goes my ch further to protect our society.
by munksbeer | 2026-02-07 22:19:07+00:00
I'm from the early 90s era. I know exactly what you're saying. I entered the internet on muds, irc and usenet. There were just far fewer people online in those communities in those days, and in my country, it was mostly only us university students.

But, those days disappeared a long time ago. Probably at least 20-30 years ago.
by mgibbs63 | 2026-02-07 22:19:09+00:00
I think there's a strong argument that the most useful product from collider science is the synchrotron light source. Researchers using collider rings realized that the x-ray synchrotron light these rings emit (an inconvenience to collider physics people) was a fantastic tool for structural biology and materials science. Eventually, they built dedicated electron storage rings that don't do collisions at all - the main goal is producing bright X-ray beams.

Synchrotron light sources have had wide-ranging, concrete impacts on "industrial products" that you probably use every day via studies in:
- Drug discovery (Tamiflu and Paxlovid are good examples)
- Battery technology (X-ray studies of how/why batteries degrade over time has lead to better designs)
- EUV photolithography techniques
- Giant Magetoresistance (Important for high capacity spinning-disk hard drives)
by bodge5000 | 2026-02-07 22:19:28+00:00
I get its necessary for investment, but I'd be a lot happier with these tools if we didn't keep making these wild claims, because I'm certainly not seeing 10x the output. When I ask for examples, 90% its claude code (not a beacon of good software anyway but if nearly everyone is pointing to one example it tells you thats the best you can probably expect) and 10% weekend projects, which are cool, but not 10x cool. Opus 4.5 was released in Dec 2025, by this point people should be churning out year long projects in a month, and I certainly haven't seen that.

I've used them a few times, and they're pretty cool. If it was just sold as that (again, couldn't be, see: trillion dollar investments) I wouldn't have nearly as much of a leg to stand on
by Aurornis | 2026-02-07 22:20:04+00:00
> Anthropic offering 2.5x makes me assume they have 5x or 10x themselves.

They said the 2.5X offering is what they've been using internally. Now they're offering via the API: https://x.com/claudeai/status/2020207322124132504

LLM APIs are tuned to handle a lot of parallel requests. In short, the overall token throughput is higher, but the individual requests are processed more slowly.

The scaling curves aren't that extreme, though. I doubt they could tune the knobs to get individual requests coming through at 10X the normal rate.

This likely comes from having some servers tuned for higher individual request throughput, at the expense of overall token throughput. It's possible that it's on some newer generation serving hardware, too.
by wasmainiac | 2026-02-07 22:20:33+00:00
I said he was right, but in your case you are wrong. Your shell loads thr profile script for login shells, but will load your bashrc regardless of login or not

Excluding this argument, overloading system commands is still bad practice lol. Have you ever logged into an embedded device and had a busy box environment? the behaviour of some utilities can be different from what you expect for utilities of the same name.
by jerkstate | 2026-02-07 22:20:41+00:00
The ad campaign was super campy, there were print ads in comic books, I remember making fun of it before the movie came out - this can’t be any good, they are going to misrepresent computer geeks, it’s going to be stupid. Of course as a teen I didn’t think it was authentic enough but over time I look at it with more respect. I showed it to my 10 year old not too long ago (forgot that there was a little nudity, oh well) and I was proud of claiming the culture it represented. The thirst for knowledge, the irreverence for authority, all of the different kinds of people making a community based on shared interest and respect, all night hackathons, the adults who just don’t get it - and yeah, the music and the fashion. That’s the stuff that matters, not a hacker using a Mac or goofy technical gibberish, and that’s the stuff they got right. It was a special moment in time, and I’m glad the movie is around to encapsulate it.
by buildsjets | 2026-02-07 22:21:48+00:00
Do you all know about the Gamma Forest? In 1961 the supergeniuses at Brookhaven National Labs decided it would be a good thing to drag a 9500 Curie Cesium-137 source into the middle of a forest just to see what would happen.

What happened, of course, is that it killed everything. It sterilized the microbes in the soil to the extent that 65 years later it is still mostly a kill zone, nothing larger than small surface weeds can grow. It is clearly visible in Google Maps. The site’s surface water drains to the Peconic river. I used to canoe in there, yay!

https://maps.app.goo.gl/fhjeJF4Todp5FWAa7?g_st=ic

https://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/bulletin/files/1962/1962011...

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/brookhaven-gamma-forest

BNL, of course, sits right on top of Long Island’s drinking water aquifer, and the aquifer layer that supplies drinking water is not even from below the allegedly impermeable clay layer.

https://www.nswcawater.org/water_facts/our-long-island-aquif...

I grew up on Long Island and I expect that it will eventually kill me. My elementary school, middle school, high school, and childhood home are all located within a Superfund site that was/is/will continue to be contaminated with cadmium and hexavalent chromium. The entire island is littered with WW2 and Cold War defense industry detritus.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
by GianFabien | 2026-02-07 22:21:50+00:00
As a project lead, I have worked on dozens of projects and 100s of contractors. Contractors have ranged from brilliant and productive to struggling incompetents. In almost every case, I worked with teams I was given and had no say in the hiring process. A typical case when management thinks they know better than their tech lead.

I very much believe that comprehensive domain knowledge and technical proficiency are both essential. Actual code production can be mostly delegated. If AI produces better quality code than the contractors available to you, then it is the preferable option.

IMHO a small team of experienced engineers using AI is the optimal choice.

Vibe-coded startups without competent technical oversight is tech-debt on steroids.
Show HN: Measuring how AI agent teams improve issue resolution on SWE-Verified
by NBenkovich | 2026-02-07 22:22:18+00:00
Hi HN,

We recently ran an experiment to answer a simple question:

Does coordinating multiple AI agents as a team actually help with real software engineering tasks, compared to a single strong agent?

To test this, we evaluated our system on SWE-bench Verified. The benchmark consists of real GitHub issues that require understanding codebases, modifying multiple files, running tests, and iterating.

Instead of treating software engineering as a single-agent patch generation problem, we model it as an organizational process.

Our system uses a team of agents with explicit roles:

* manager: plans work, assigns tasks, integrates results
* researcher: explores the codebase, issue history, constraints
* engineer: implements fixes in isolated environments
* reviewer: inspects changes, requests revisions, validates results

There is no fixed pipeline and no predefined number of steps. Agents communicate via structured artifacts (plans, diffs, reviews) and produce real GitHub pull requests with full history.

For evaluation, we compared three setups on SWE-bench Verified:

* single-agent baseline: GPT-5 medium reasoning + shell
* agent team (ours): GPT-5 (manager, researcher) + GPT-5 Codex (engineer, reviewer), both medium reasoning
* stronger single-model reference: GPT-5.2 (high reasoning)

Results:

* the agent team resolves ~7% more issues than the single-agent GPT-5 medium reasoning baseline
* despite using medium reasoning models, the agent team shows ~0.5% better quality than a single GPT-5.2 (high reasoning) agent

Beyond resolution rate, the main benefits are cleaner responsibility boundaries, context isolation, easier debugging and the ability to use different models for different roles.

Code + trajectories are open source:
https://github.com/agynio/platform

Paper with methodology and results:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01465

Would love to hear your thoughts.
by cmp0 | 2026-02-07 22:22:21+00:00
> Risk is much more tolerable in the last mile than the first one

Is that objectively true? I think you could also make the argument the other way that things compound when you innovate at the root.

I think it's your opinion that that's the case, and it generally makes sense to me as well, but I'm still saying it's a judgement call.

There are a lot of things / decisions at a company that don't strictly matter for the customer immediately but they still eventually matter for the customer - because they have a downstream impact. In this case, maybe you save that money and spend it somewhere else.
by sunshowers | 2026-02-07 22:22:51+00:00
I believe that countries and borders exist as a descriptive fact about the world. But I also believe that it's impossible to square immigration control regimes with any robust notion of freedom and liberty, and also that there isn't room for much disagreement on this specific point once you understand the intrinsic nature of such regimes. See Kukathas, Immigration and Freedom for more.

I know most people (of any nationality, not just Americans) don't understand this, but you and I are not most people. I believe things because it is correct to believe them, not because most people believe them (or not).
by nephihaha | 2026-02-07 22:22:54+00:00
1) There may well be other biospheres in the solar system. There is some indirect and inconclusive evidence of microbial life on Mars, and even in the Venusian atmosphere. This dates back to results from the Viking and Venera, as well as more recent research. Earth life could be destructive to native life in these places, and vice versa (since they would likely be extremophiles) resulting in invasive species.

2) Musk is putting a lot of money into these things but he is still heavily subsidised by US government money and facilities (a loophole in the Outer Space Treaty allows individuals and corporations to claim other planets but not countries.)
by nine_k | 2026-02-07 22:22:58+00:00
Interstellar space contains neutral hydrogen atoms. Hitting a spaceship, they would produce electromagnetic radiation. When the collision speed goes past about 0.25c, the radiation becomes hard gamma rays which are dangerous to living things, and cannot be efficiently shielded against.

At this speed, the time dilation is slightly above 3%, so you're still not going to reach even Alpha Centauri in one human lifetime, or maybe you barely can.
by cyphar | 2026-02-07 22:23:11+00:00
> Since you wrote it in Rust, I'd suggest compiling it to wasm and releasing a browser-based version

That was my eventual plan for having a single GUI for everything, the only problem is that there isn't a really obvious way to support scanning a PDF you upload -- basically you need a pure-Rust PDF renderer and there isn't one up to the task as far as I could tell. On mobile you could scan each QR code separately (though doing this from a webapp is probably going to be a fairly awful UX and most people would prefer to photograph the whole document and get everything scanned automatically).
by zer00eyz | 2026-02-07 22:23:36+00:00
> are only capable of writing small pieces well.

It excels at this, and if you have it deeply integrated into your workflow and IDE/dev env the loop should feel more like pair programing, like tennis, than it should feel like its doing everything for you.

> I also primarily write Elixir,

I would also venture that it has less to do with the language (it is a factor) and more to do with what you are working on. Domain will matter in terms of sample size (code) and understanding (language to support). There could be 1000s of examples in its training data of what you want, but if no one wrote a commment that accurately describes what that does...

> I think the ease of use of AI can cause us to over produce and as a result we miss the forest for the trees.

This is spot on. I stopped thinking of it as "AI" and started thinking of it as "power tools". Useful, and like a power tool you should be cautious because there is danger there... It isnt smart, it's not doing anything that isnt in its training data, but there is a lot there, everything, and it can do some basic synthesis.
by apublicfrog | 2026-02-07 22:23:48+00:00
I cannot empathise. If you love writing code, there is nothing stopping you writing code. I write code for fun with no commercial intent all the time, and have for decades. Very few oil painters had a salary.

This is a complaint someone is making about their job propspects thinly wrapped in floral language. I know for some people (it seems especially prominent in Americans I've found) their identity is linked to their job. This is a chance to work on this. You can decouple yourself and redefine yourself as a person.

Who knows? Once you're done you may go write some code for fun again.
by teo_zero | 2026-02-07 22:23:51+00:00
You can surely create a std::string-like type in C, call it "newstring", and write functions that accept and return newstrings, and re-implement the whole standard library to work with newstrings, from printf() onwards. But you'll never have the comfort of newstring literals. The nice syntax with quotes is tied to zero-terminated strings. Of course you can litter your code with preprocessor macros, but it's inelegant and brittle.