MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by burlesona | 2026-02-07 03:43:39+00:00
Sad, although I guess I'm not surprised.

I think it's fair to say that, if not for Heroku, I would not have had a career in software. I learned how to code web apps from books, and had a breakthrough when I discovered Rails (in 2009 I think?). But for the life of me I did not understand how to deploy a Rails app.

I bashed my head against that wall for a while, then found Heroku, and it just worked. That let me ship a product when I barely knew what I was doing, which let me keep building and learning, until eventually I didn't need Heroku anymore. But I still always liked it, because I never enjoyed thinking about infrastructure.

RIP Heroku, you were legendary.
by refulgentis | 2026-02-07 03:48:19+00:00
Of course Minnesota has suffered industrial-scale fraud. FoF alone clears that bar. I've never said otherwise.

But your essay doesn't just claim fraud exists: it presents the 50% figure as the evidence that "staggers the imagination" and makes the case "beyond intellectually serious dispute." That's not parenthetical color. The paragraph is load-bearing on that number.

You charitably won't make me own $5M. I never claimed it. I've said in every reply the real number is likely substantially higher. My point has been the same throughout: you presented a disputed estimate as settled, from a report that explicitly could not settle it - in which the IG rejected it, DHS leadership called it not credible, the OLA said it "cannot offer a reliable estimate.", and the source themself named their lack of a standard beyond a vibe.

The essay is 5,000 words on why epistemic standards matter in fraud investigation. The critique is the essay's own standard, applied to the essay. You should apologize for the high school debate comment.
by bitwize | 2026-02-07 03:51:46+00:00
I dunno. On the one hand, I keep hearing anecdata, including hackernews comments, friends, and coworkers, suggesting that AI-assisted coding is a literal game changer in terms of productivity, and if you call yourself a professional you'd better damn well lock the fuck in and learn the tools. At the extreme end this takes the form of, you're not a real engineer unless you use AI because real engineering is about using the optimal means to solve problems within time, scale, and budget constraints, and writing code by hand is now objectively suboptimal.

On the other hand, every time the matter is seriously empirically studied, it turns out that overall:

* productivity gains are very modest, if not negative

* there are considerable drawbacks, including most notably the brainrot effect

Furthermore, AI spend is NOT delivering the promised returns to the extent that we are now seeing reversals in the fortunes of AI stocks, up to and including freakin' NVIDIA, as customers cool on what's being offered.

So I'm supposed to be an empiricist about this, and yet I'm supposed to switch on the word of a "cool story bro" about how some guy built an app or added a feature the other day that he totally swears would have taken him weeks otherwise?

I'm like you. I use code as a part of my thought process for how to solve a problem. It's a notation for thought, much like mathematical or musical notation, not just an end product. "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." I've actually come to love documenting what I intend to do as I do it, esp. in the form of literate programming. It's like context engineering the intelligence I've got upstairs. Helps the old ADHD brain stay locked in on what needs to be done and why. Org-mode has been extremely helpful in general for collecting my scatterbrained thoughts. But when I want to experiment or prove out a new technique, I lean on working directly with code an awful lot.
by gtowey | 2026-02-07 03:55:08+00:00
There is a massive difference between a result like this when it's a research project and when it's being pushed by billion dollar companies as the solution to all of humanities problems.

In business, as a product, results are all that matter.

As a research and development efforts it's exciting and interesting as a milestone on the path to something revolutionary.

But I don't think it's ready to deliver value. Building a compiler that almost works is of no business value.
by refulgentis | 2026-02-07 03:56:33+00:00
And there is absolutely nothing more valuable at G (no snark)

(cheers, don't read too much signal into my thoughts, it's more negative than I'd intend. Just was aware it was someone going off PR, and doing hero worship that I myself used to do, and was disabused over 7 years there, and would like other people outside to disabuse themselves of. It's a place, not the place)
by jascha_eng | 2026-02-07 03:56:47+00:00
Noone can correctly quantify what these models can and can't do. That leads to the people in charge completely overselling them (automating all white collar jobs, doing all software engineering, etc) and the people threatened by those statements firing back when these models inevitably fail at doing what was promised.

They are very capable but it's very hard to explain to what degree. It is even harder to quantify what they will be able to do in the future and what inherent limits exist. Again leading to the people benefiting from it to claim that there are no limits.

Truth is that we just don't know. And there are too few good folks out there that are actually reasonable about it because the ones that know are working on the tech and benefit from more hype. Karpathy is one of the few that left the rocket and gives a still optimistic but reasonable perspective.
by davely | 2026-02-07 03:56:57+00:00
Oh my, this brings me back! One of my fondest gaming memories involves a massive Civilization 3 PBEM match between a number of Civilization fan sites, where we all had private forums and ran these virtual nations against each other. This was way back in 2002 or 2003!

I believe Civfanatics was in it (run by “Chieftess” if I recall), Apolyton (which I was a member of — elected in as Minister of Public Works and had to come up with a plan to clear our pesky jungles) and a number of other sites.

It was such an awesome time. Real diplomacy and trade negations between turns. Man, it was fun.
by bsder | 2026-02-07 03:57:26+00:00
> Teacher-centered and direct approaches cope quite well with greater class sizes, but again they're unpopular among teachers.

Cite. All research I have seen completely contradicts this.

The limitation with larger class sizes is not "knowledge transfer"; it's "classroom management" aka dealing with a student causing an interruption for some reason (bathroom, injury, sickness, etc.).

I use the Gates Foundation as my primary citations because they are easily findable on the web and simply match all of the other findings. You max out at about 15 students per 2 teachers because one of the teachers can handle the inevitable disruption while the other teacher can continue teaching. The more students you add on top of the roughly 15, the more likely you wind up with 2 interruptions which stops the class cold irrespective of teaching technique.

And, as I have stated, most of the research focuses on elementary to middle levels. High school requires teacher specialization which confounds a lot of the data.
by Loughla | 2026-02-07 03:58:03+00:00
So when my kids were little, I read them bedtime stories. They loved the adventures that they got to hear about when I read books like Guards! Guards! And the Dark Elf Trilogy.

Win win baby. They get easy to digest fun stories, and I get to read fun books that I like.

Also, and everyone will tell you this but I can't stress enough how true it is, value your time with them when they're little. It's exhausting, awful, stressful, and seriously exhausting (yes that gets two call outs), but it goes so fast. It just goes so fast. You get into a groove and it's five years later. Then ten. They're only little once, and while that means you should try your best to make sure they have a good childhood - seriously don't forget to enjoy them just for yourself. Be selfish. Snuggle them every chance you get. Hold their little hands. Carry them everywhere. Call in sick to work to play dress up or build a fort or just look at bugs. Skip social obligations to eat popcorn and watch a movie with them. Give them kisses and hugs and be selfish about it. It's for them but it's also for you. A lot of parents forget that.
by supertrope | 2026-02-07 03:58:08+00:00
School financing needs drives a lot of local government decisions. It's an invisible force like gravity. Approving office buildings and retail stores adds tax revenue without adding to school district costs (enrolling students). Approving housing construction means more students to absorb.

The public cannot directly vote to reject the electric company's price increases, or more expensive groceries, or car dealers charging MSRP. Requiring voters to directly approve school taxes or public services is great for cost control. But you get what you pay for with austerity: long waits for service, crowding, short hours, lower quality employees. Voters only approve the school levy when the pain of overcrowded schools exceeds the pain of forking over another $$$/yr in tax. While residents choose politicians, over long periods of time politicians choose what mix of residents can move into the area! Think of downtown areas that are purely zoned for office buildings and parking garages.
by BrokenCogs | 2026-02-07 03:58:10+00:00
I fully agree, there is something unsettling about this post and I can't put my finger on it, but here is an attempt:

His girlfriend is going through this medical issue, but he's made this post about himself? He's going to be the hero to save his GF and others with this brain tumor using the medical equivalent of vibe coding. I don't know, it just sounds immature and wrong
Show HN: I built a RAG engine to search Singaporean laws
by ambitious_potat | 2026-02-07 03:58:51+00:00
I built a "Triple Failover" RAG for Singapore Laws, then rewrote the logic based on your feedback.

Hi everyone!

I’m a student developer. Recently, I created Explore Singapore, a RAG-based search engine that scrapes about 20,000 pages of Singaporean government acts and laws.

I recently posted the MVP and received some tough but essential feedback about hallucinations and query depth. I took that feedback, focused on improvements, and just released Version 2.

Here is how I upgraded the system from a basic RAG to a production-grade one.

The Design & UI
I aimed to avoid a dull government website.

Design: Heavily inspired by Apple’s minimalist style.

Tech: Custom frontend interacting with a Python backend.

The V2 Engineering Overhaul

The community challenged me on three main points. Here’s how I addressed them:

1. The "Personality" Fix
Issue: I use a "Triple Failover" system with three models as backup. When the main model failed, the backups sounded entirely different.

The Solution: I added Dynamic System Instructions. Now, if the backend switches to Model B, it uses a specific prompt designed for Model B’s features, making it mimic the structure and tone of the primary model. The user never notices the change.

2. The "Deep Search" Fix
Issue: A simple semantic search for "Starting a business" misses related laws like "Tax" or "Labor" acts.

The Solution: I implemented Multi-Query Retrieval (MQR). An LLM now intercepts your query. It breaks it down into sub-intents (e.g., “Business Registration,” “Corporate Tax,” “Employment Rules”). It searches for all of them at the same time and combines the results.

Result: Much richer, context-aware answers.

3. The "Hallucination" Fix
Issue: Garbage In, Garbage Out. If FAISS retrieves a bad document, the LLM produces inaccurate information.

The Solution: I added a Cross-Encoder Re-Ranking layer.

Step 1: FAISS grabs the top 10 results.

Step 2: A specialized Cross-Encoder model evaluates them for relevance.

Step 3: Irrelevant parts are removed before they reach the Chat LLM.

*

The Tech Stack
*

Embeddings: BGE-M3 (Running locally)

Vector DB: FAISS

Backend: Python + Custom Triple-Model Failover

Logic: Multi-Query + Re-Ranking (New in V2)

Try it out

I am still learning. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the new logic.

Live Demo: https://adityaprasad-sudo.github.io/Explore-Singapore/

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/adityaprasad-sudo/Explore-Singapore

Feedback, especially on the failover speed, is welcome!
by deaux | 2026-02-07 03:58:52+00:00
1 year isn't aggressive because of the modifier "successful". Most businesses that aren't profitable 12 months in go out of business not long after, having remained unsuccessful throughout their lifespan.

Restaurants have comparatively high start up costs and ramp up time. Compare to e.g. a store selling clothes. If for successful restaurants the average time is already a year, then in general for successful businesses it's going to be less.
by neya | 2026-02-07 04:00:28+00:00
They shot themselves in the foot a long time ago and never recovered from that, I guess. I remember back in 2012-13 they made some changes that ghosted their primary ICP - indie devs and startup owners. They made the platform incredibly expensive to run. A lot of us panicked and had to move to other vendors - I in particular chose Google's AppEngine which was hugely under-appreciated at the time and eventually became a GCP consultant. All thanks to Heroku. Some of my other friends switched to Engine Yard (for rails) and the rest just went on to learn how to self host stuff onto EC2 instances. Heroku knowingly or unknowingly made a lot of careers of the present day engineers in AWS and GCP (including myself). So, I am a bit sad to see them in such a situation if I'm being honest.
by Martin_Silenus | 2026-02-07 04:00:35+00:00
Maybe God was so angry seeing His fellows embrassing LLMs. So He asked vaguely one of those lame things, for the first time:

0. "Make something cool out of this insane amount of energy." (temp: 10^42 Kelvin)
1. He slept for a while.
2. Datacenter exploded His realm.
3. ~380 000 years passed and fiat lux.
4. ~13 billions years passed and here we are.
5. JMP 0.
by AdieuToLogic | 2026-02-07 04:00:42+00:00
>> Works if you supply the correct include path(s)

The location of Standard C headers do not need to be supplied to a conformant compiler.

>> You could arguably fault ccc's driver for not specifying the include path to find the native C library on this system.

This is not a good implementation decision for a compiler which is not the C compiler distributed with the OS. Even though Standard C headers have well-defined names and public contracts, how they are defined is very much compiler specific.

So this defect is a "somethingburger."
by rgoulter | 2026-02-07 04:02:36+00:00
No.

While there are many comments which are in reaction to other comments:

Some people hype up LLMs without admitting any downsides. So, naturally, others get irritated with that.

Some people anti-hype LLMs without admitting any upsides. So, naturally, others get irritated with that.

I want people to write comments which are measured and reasonable.
by ahf8Aithaex7Nai | 2026-02-07 04:03:20+00:00
Apparently, there's this guy who's really good at optimizing computer performance and makes a lot of money doing it. At the same time, he writes mediocre school essays that are actually a bit embarrassing. Guys, if you have the opportunity to land a very well-paid job, then do it. Take the money. Live your life. But please spare us the public self-castration.
by SanjayMehta | 2026-02-07 04:04:16+00:00
In 2000 flying from Mumbai to Frankfurt I got upgraded to 1st class and ended up sitting next to the CEO of a smaller pharma company. He got a little drunk and opened up about why he was always in Mumbai instead of Europe or US.

Lower costs for human testing were only a small part of it, the real reason was weak and unenforced regulations. And he could easily pay a consultant to bribe the officials.

Part of the problem is of our own making, we have a corrupt bureaucracy and no enforcement.

One of the key positives of the covid pandemic was how our govt firmly kept the mRNA "vaccines" out of the country. I suspect Bill Gates disgusting testing of HPV played a role in this.
by ryandrake | 2026-02-07 04:04:52+00:00
It's wild how distorted everyone's bubble is. If you go to conservative news sites or r/Conservative, you'd think this daycare business was the biggest problem that has ever faced the United States since 9/11. Every other article is about daycare and Somalis. Like, really? This is the big story of 2025???

In the real world, this maybe makes page 3 of the "crime" section of the newspaper for a single day.
by permo-w | 2026-02-07 04:05:55+00:00
And yet consistently the arguments you hear against regulation are these "let's pretend there's no such thing as nuance, how can we ever regulate an extreme case of something when we don't regulate minor cases?" arguments that act like no law has ever successfully regulated a nuance and improved people's welfare. Should we also allow heroin in baby food because cliff-hangers are allowed in films? Don't restrict my personal freedom to choose to be addicted to heroin from day 1!

I'm not saying these feeds are as bad as heroin for your health, but the difference in addictiveness between cliff-hangers in film and tiktok on your phone is about as big, and I equally think nicotine should be heavily regulated for similar reasons
by rmunn | 2026-02-07 04:07:00+00:00
Ghostty turned on Discussions and made it the first place for users to go report bugs, make feature requests, etc., then promotes those to issues once it's detailed enough for the maintainers to accept: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/3558

Later, Hyprland followed suit: https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/9854

I'm sure there are other projects doing the same, but those are the two I know about off the top of my head.
by surajrmal | 2026-02-07 04:07:39+00:00
Humans are complex and have multiple sources of motivation. You don't know whether he took the offer with the highest pay. He's likely wealthy enough that he can pay less attention to his income and focus on his other sources of motivation if he wants to. That's not to say pay is not a factor in his choice, but it need not be the only or primary one. This is a luxury of the privileged for sure, which can make it difficult to relate to.
by Der_Einzige | 2026-02-07 04:07:48+00:00
We should have never tried to let grandma on computers. Wait until the genAI revolution is complete (2027) and she can entirely use her voice and an AI agent in natural language to do things. This but unironically. Gate keeping is very good and keeps enshittification at bay. We see what happens when Apple tried to let in too many normies and wouldn't let them get darwin awards.
by cyberax | 2026-02-07 04:08:22+00:00
Graphite reactors are not a good idea because they inherently have, well, graphite. That can burn.

The worst possible case for water-moderated reactors is uncontained meltdown. And it's not _terribly_ horrible. You will get contamination with volatiles, mainly cesium. But there's not a lot of it in the reactor, so it'll affect only a small area around the plant. Some fuel might get initially mobilized by steam explosions, but again, only a fraction.

The worst case for a graphite reactor is an uncontained core fire. That can burn for weeks and spread a significant part of the fuel as particulates over large territories (Chernobyl).

Is it likely? Nope. But there are black swan events: earthquakes, mega-hurricanes, meteorite strikes, Godzilla attacks.
by ra7 | 2026-02-07 04:09:17+00:00
> Tesla is executing the strategy that most quickly scales to 100% of the population.

So, uh… where is this “scale” then? This “strategy” has been bandied about for better part of a decade. Why are they still in a tiny geofence in Austin with chase cars?

Waymo is doing it right now. Half a million rides every week, expansion to a dozen new cities. Tesla does a few hundred in a tiny area.

Scale is assessed by looking at concrete numbers in hand, not by “strategies” that haven’t materialized for a decade.
by Der_Einzige | 2026-02-07 04:09:42+00:00
The total war games are like civilization but with actually good combat. Especially if you get mods like DEI for Rome 2, RTR for Rome 1 remastered, etc. It's regrettable that we let the grimdark warhammer crowd define the series.

The paradox grand strategy games are like civilization but with real agency and at times straight up historical accuracy.

Meanwhile I have to deal with Ghandi actually nuking everyone (the bug is ACTUALLY REAL IN CIV 5, the best modern civ game!). Not sure why Indians aren't mad as hell at the whole series.
by Marsymars | 2026-02-07 04:10:55+00:00
I was big into Civ4. Put about 100 hours into Civ5 and felt that I'd entirely exhausted its strategic depth. Didn't bother with Civ6. Tom Chick hasn't bothered reviewing Civ7 but doesn't seem to be a fan based on forum comments, so I won't be bothering to play it.
by polyglotfacto | 2026-02-07 04:11:11+00:00
Point is: it doesn't matter if agents can do it faster and cheaper than a team of humans: it's slop.

It's like writing a novel in a week that no one wants to read. If in six months you can do it in an hour, there is still zero value.

I haven’t seen credible compiler engineers engage with it. Look at the repo: issues and pull requests look like spam.

Finally, if you read the description of the techniques used in the parallel agent harness: there are no novel ideas.

I mean the blog acknowledges this with things like: "This is a very early research prototype. I haven’t yet implemented any other method for communication between agents, nor do I enforce any process for managing high-level goals".

But this is 2026, and the company is on its way to a trillion dollar valuation. Maybe research some distributed systems first and then try to apply those in a way that is a unique fit for agents.

Couple of obvious ideas: use a CRDT, use some existing lightweight synchronization algorithm like Lamport's bakery. Do some initial TLA+ modeling. Anything really. Just show us something better than slop at the level of the harness and that of the code output.

One year old example of an impressive and useful agent harness: "TxGemma: Efficient and Agentic LLMs for Therapeutics" from https://deepmind.google/research/publications/153799/
by D-Machine | 2026-02-07 04:11:37+00:00
Yes the argument quality has become poor too, and there is less nuance than before.

And like obviously society benefits from some paternalism for things like this, and we really do need to see good, concrete recommendations be proposed.

Imagine if HN were discussing the merits of things like "interrupt every X minutes of infinite-scrolling with reminders / popups / forced X/10 minute breaks" or other actual concrete, balanced solutions to such problems. This would introduce the nuance and make things interesting again.

But it is increasingly the case I find I need to look elsewhere for such discussions.
by rmunn | 2026-02-07 04:11:42+00:00
That's going to be an interesting question.

One use of AI, I think, is going to be uncontroversial: autocomplete suggestions. I've watched a coworker use Supermaven as a Jetbrains plugin (back before it was folded into Cursor) that basically gave him autocomplete on steroids. Instead of autocompleting the function name he was typing, it figured out based on code context which variables he was likely to pass in as parameters. If it was wrong, he kept typing. Once it was right, he hit Tab and saved himself 30 more seconds of typing than he would have saved with traditional autocomplete. Doing that a hundred-plus times over the course of an 8-hour workday adds up pretty quickly. And more importantly, it's obvious to anyone that the code was entirely the creation of his own brain, and the AI autocomplete tool was being used as a typing aid.

When the AI tool is generating entire functions, or entire files, the question of authorship is going to become a lot more unclear.