MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-02-14 22:15:42+00:00
Thankfully that absurd comment about "vibes" dropped from the top spot

"It's the primordial domino tile."

FWIW, I believe this is correct

However when using the term "banning" this needs to be placed in context; advertising might be "banned" only in certain circumstances.. Mind you, advertising has been banned whole cloth from computer networks in the past. It is still banned on many computer networks.^1 Before the internet (an interconnected network of computer networks) opened to the public there was a rule, i.e., policy, against advertising

A better term than "banning" might be simply "regulating". Online advertising is not regulated in the same way that advertising is regulated on billboards, in print publications, radio or television. For example, regulating the time (electoral campaigns), place (billboards), subject matter (cigarettes)

Whenever this topic comes up on HN, it draws inane replies about people being unable to distinguish advertising from anything else

But there is zero evidence to support this theory in practice. Everyone knows what advertising is, and how to identify it. That's why and how people are capable of complaining about it

Even this forum, Hacker News, places limits on advertising. YC may promote its participating companies but others are generally not permitted to advertise. Submissions that are deemed to be ads are killed. If advertising was undefinable, then how is HN able to define it

If advertising was impossible to define then how could anyone design a so-called "ad blocker"

1. If advertising were undefinable then why would any computer network have a "Network Use Policy" that prohibited using the network for disseminting advertising

The suggestion that advertising is undefinable, that either everything is advertising or nothing is advertising, is pure nonsense

It's only when the subject of tampering with the sole "business model" of the so-called "tech" company with nothing else to sell, or the means of substinence for the low quality website operator publishing public information who crams their pages full of ads and tracking, that HN commenters try to argue that advertising is beyond definition

A large percentage of internet users, perhaps a majority, have never experienced the internet without ads. Hence it may be difficult for these people to understand the place of advertising on a computer network. Let's be clear, originally, there was _no place for it_

Some people alive today did experience the internet without ads. Sadly, many of them are now engaged in providing internet advertising services for financial gain. Others are not. I'm in the later category

Some of the loudest voices defending internet advertising will be people in the former category. They have cashed in at every internet user's expense
by eek2121 | 2026-02-14 22:17:00+00:00
I know this won't help much, however, FreeTube can help with this. Yes, it is a standalone app, however...

Also, if you a Google/Youtube employee, rubbing your hands together, making fun of folks, and generally thinking negative thoughts, take it from a former veteran software engineer/manager (never had the desire to move up the ladder, and I am disabled now thanks to a tragic accident): There are a ton of negative comments about your UX, even from paid users. Nobody likes your shit. They only tolerate it because you currently have a monopoly. That will not always be the case. You are failing yourself, your job, and your users. Learn to put those users first. If Google had stuck to that early on, uBlock Origin wouldn't exist.

I know everyone at Google is tone deaf, so let me put this another way: Someone is ALWAYS left holding the bag. It could be you, the lowly programmer, or it could be you, the lowly manager. It could also be anyone in C-Suite. Once the numbers don't align with what investors want to see, someone will be blamed. As we reach the top of an AI bubble, those at the top are going to want to find a way to blame others down below, that means you will likely take the hit.
by codingdave | 2026-02-14 22:17:27+00:00
> Slack has been on a slow rachet up in prices and has struggled to introduce compelling new AI features

I can think of a few reasons that Slack could be improved upon. But a lack of AI features is not on that list. Slack is effective for async communication between humans. We don't need AI features to accomplish that, and most AI would just be annoying slop. If you are using Slack for something else, maybe AI features would help those other uses, but you also might be stretching the cases for which Slack is a good thing.
by phony-account | 2026-02-14 22:18:13+00:00
I’m paying over 40 dollars a month for YouTube but it doesn’t allow me to choose almost anything of what I see, despite trying hard to fine-tune my recommendations.

I can’t permanently turn off shorts - and this I find personally insulting. It really feels like encountering a drug dealer outside my house every time I come home, always expecting me to cave and try some of that good smack.

But apart from ignoring me when I say I’m not interested in whole genres of ‘fun’ videos, it also resets the streaming quality to the lowest setting every single day and then hides the quality setting deep inside a menu with several fiddly clicks.

And this isn’t for my benefit of course: I can easily stream 4K video to my screens. It’s to shave a few cents off each stream and max the gouging.
by sharkweek | 2026-02-14 22:18:58+00:00
I had a CT scan last year for some stomach issues they wanted to look at.

Doctor warned me up front that the odds the images find something that looks weird is high but not to panic because of how many false positives there are when looking inside someone’s body.

While I am happy to report they didn’t find anything serious, I do take slight offense to the following at the top of my results:

Last name, First name: Unremarkable

(Kidding of course but still got a chuckle out of me)
by smelendez | 2026-02-14 22:19:53+00:00
I have this problem with Microsoft software in general lately. Last time I had the Office suite installed on a Mac, it was constantly popping up focus-stealing (literally and figuratively) notifications that it was updating PowerPoint or whatever, even when I didn’t have any Microsoft apps open.

I really try to stick to the web-based Office suite and Apple Pages/Numbers/etc. to avoid dealing with this.
by brycewray | 2026-02-14 22:20:30+00:00
Stylebot is no longer actively developed, but the similar (and open-source) Stylus extension is.

Repo: https://github.com/openstyles/stylus

Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpe...

Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/styl-us/
by mgraczyk | 2026-02-14 22:20:51+00:00
Doctors here are cognitively captured by a system designed to limit cost (and that's mostly a good thing)

But scanning frequently is overwhelmingly good for the patient. The problem is the doctors. Imagine two possibilities.
1. You scan every six months and a doctor reviews your scans but never tells you anything no matter what
2. You scan every six months and a doctor reviews your scans and only tells you results if you have an obviously growing mass that has a probability greater than 95% of being cancerous

Obviously #2 is better for the patient than #1, but #1 is equivalent to never testing if you ignore cost.

So the actual reason we don't have effect frequent scans combined with effective diagnostic techniques is cost, and doctors cope with this reality by saying clearly wrong things about "over diagnosis". It's a local minimum of the payer/provider dynamic that has nothing to do with scans per se.
by stouset | 2026-02-14 22:21:07+00:00
I just did a quick once-over on the PR and am pretty shocked by how "simple" it is. For switching the background graphics library, I would have expected this to be some pretty delicate surgery. But the "meat" is swapping out the old abstraction layer for the new one (500–600LOC) then `s/blade/wgpu/g`. There's a little more to it than that, but not much.

I'm already a Zed user, but to me that's an extremely good indicator of the engineering quality of the project.
by brson | 2026-02-14 22:22:01+00:00
Rust borrow checker author's new language designs.

Follow up posts:

https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2026/02/09/hel...

https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2026/02/10/dad...

https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2026/02/14/sha...
by threecheese | 2026-02-14 22:22:10+00:00
Claude could access anything on your device, including system or third party commands for network or signal processing - it may even have their manuals/sites/man pages in the training set. It’s remarkably good at figuring things out, and you can watch the reasoning output. There are mcp tools for reverse engineering that can give it even higher level abilities (ghidra is a popular one).

Yesterday I watched it try and work around some filesystem permission restrictions, it tried a lot of things I would never have thought of, and it was eventually successful. I was kinda goading it though.
by tptacek | 2026-02-14 22:22:12+00:00
I think you're missing the point. The psychological cost of a conditional-positive result is nonzero, and can be very significant (I speak from a little bit of experience here). But far more importantly: the physiological cost of invasive followups when you eventually trip the threshold of "time to go explore with a scalpel" is very high, and the missing evidence this story is about is whether you can get to that threshold with an MRI.

Treating MRIs the way we treat blood tests would almost certainly result in huge numbers of needless invasive procedures.
by vessenes | 2026-02-14 22:22:41+00:00
This is the best sort of correct, in that it’s technically correct. The thing is, We don’t need 5.3 xxhigh reasoning for everything. Giving up some intelligence, and then taking the hit on some inevitable re-runs / re-prompts at 15x ends up with, I bet, more than 37% speed improvement on a lot of tasks.

There’s two ways to run this, and I’m curious which is better (time or quality, either would be interesting) - you could run 5.3xxhigh as the coordinator, spinning up some eager beaver coders that need wrangling, or you could run spark as the coordinator and probably code drafter - where it runs into trouble it could farm out to the big brains.

Now that I think about it, corporations use both models as well. It would be nice for the user if fast coordinator worked well; that lowers turns and ultimately could let you stay in the zone while pairing with a coding agent. But I really don’t know which is better.
by troyvit | 2026-02-14 22:23:03+00:00
I work with the journalists at a local (state-wide) public media organization. It's night and day different from what is described at ars. These are people who are paid a third (or less) of what a sales engineer at meta makes. We have editorial review and ban LLMs for any editorial work except maybe alt-text if I can convince them to use it. They're over-worked, underpaid, and doing what very few people here (including me) have the dedication to do. But hey, if people didn't hate journalists they wouldn't be doing their job.
by pedalpete | 2026-02-14 22:23:28+00:00
I'm the founder of neurotech/sleeptech company https://affectablesleep.com, and this post shows the major issue with current wellness device regulation.

I believe there was some good that came from last months decision to be more open to what apps and data can say without going through huge regulatory processes (though because we apply auditory stimulation, this doesn't apply to us), however, there should be at least regulatory requirements for data security.

We've developed all of our algorithms and processing to happen on device, which is required anyway due to the latency which would result from bluetooth connections, but even the data sent to the server is all encrypted. I'd think that would be the basics. How do you trust a company with monitoring, and apparently providing stimulation, if they don't take these simple steps?
by strken | 2026-02-14 22:23:47+00:00
Losing your house because you couldn't pay the mortgage is violent, or at least backed by the threat of violence: what happens if you refuse to leave?

In a looser sense, so are having your utilities cut off, losing your children because you can no longer afford to care for them, skipping meals, driving an unregistered car that will get you into an altercation with the police, and everything else that comes as a result of poverty and unemployment.

I'm a little baffled by what you believe the consequences of a layoff are.
by bobthepanda | 2026-02-14 22:23:56+00:00
I think find what works for you, and everything else is kind of noise.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice.

——

Ive also found that picking something and learning about it helps me with mental models for picking up other paradigms later, similar to how learning Java doesn’t actually prevent you from say picking up Python or Javascript
by zelphirkalt | 2026-02-14 22:23:57+00:00
The maintainer is usually also the one who has to trace the root cause, which in this case the issue reporter did, which is certainly more work than creating an issue according to the formatting and other requirements the maintainer may have. So in that light, the reporter of the issue already did a big chunk of work for the maintainer or the project. I wouldn't really call them acting "entitled" after that. Clearly they put in effort more than could be expected already.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2026-02-14 22:24:24+00:00
For more modern Windows, Windows Internals Parts 1 and 2[1][2], and Windows 10 System Programming Parts 1 and 2. Basically anything by Yosifovich, Russinovich, Ionescu et al.

[1]: https://www.microsoftpressstore.com/store/windows-internals-...

[2]: https://www.microsoftpressstore.com/store/windows-internals-...

[3]: https://leanpub.com/b/windows10systemprogrammingP1and2
by written-beyond | 2026-02-14 22:25:31+00:00
You need to understand the frustration behind these kinds of posts.

The people on the start of the curve are the ones who swear against LLMs for engineering, and are the loudest in the comments.

The people on the end of the curve are the ones who spam about only vibing, not looking at code and are attempting to build this new expectation for the new interaction layer for software to be LLM exclusively. These ones are the loudest on posts/blogs.

The ones in the middle are people who accept using LLMs as a tool, and like with all tools they exercise restraint and caution. Because waiting 5 to 10 seconds each time for an LLM to change the color of your font, and getting it wrong is slower than just changing it yourself. You might as well just go in and do these tiny adjustments yourself.

It's the engineers at both ends that have made me lose my will to live.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-02-14 22:26:05+00:00
"they don’t produce useful layers of abstraction nor meaningful modularization. They don’t value conciseness or improving organization in a large code base. We have automated coding, but not software engineering"

Which frankly describes pretty much all real world commercial software projects I've been on, too.

Software engineering hasn't happened yet. Agents produce big balls of mud because we do, too.
by phatfish | 2026-02-14 22:26:26+00:00
The hot takes are from people that have haven't touched Teams in 6 years.

Like everything Microsoft it was shit for the first few years, they slowly sorted it out, and now it's fine. Most non-tech-bro businesses successfully run the majority of their comms through it.

The main problem now is that it works fine, and the project managers on Teams need to create work for themselves, so just mess around with stuff that wasn't broken.
by bikenaga | 2026-02-14 22:26:59+00:00
Original article: "The expanding Indo-Pacific freshwater pool and changing freshwater pathway in the South Indian Ocean" - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02553-1#peer-revi...

"Abstract. Understanding ocean freshwater variability is key to assessing the global water cycle and climate change, but changes in freshwater storage and transport remain unclear. Here we show that the South Indian Ocean—a vital conduit for interocean exchange—has experienced the strongest freshening in the Southern Hemisphere since the 1960s. This freshening drives a southward expansion of the Indo-Pacific freshwater pool into the South Indian Ocean, where freshwater has increased by 6.5 ± 0.5% per decade, as indicated by the shrinking 35.3 psu isohaline. Strengthened Indonesian Throughflow and intensified Subtropical Gyre inflow are the primary causes. In the upper ~200 m, freshening follows a new subtropical pathway rather than the usual tropical route. These changes arise from wind shifts linked to the Hadley cell’s poleward expansion and a stronger Indonesian Throughflow, both driven by warm-pool warming. Ongoing warming will further expand the freshwater pool and broaden the subtropical pathway, affecting climate, interocean exchange and marine ecosystems."
by steeleduncan | 2026-02-14 22:27:04+00:00
Discord if you don't mind something proprietary, Mattermost or Rocketchat if you do, Zulip if you want something slightly different . . . and no doubt many other alternatives

Slack is easy to replace with something cheaper and better on a product or technical level. The network effects are strong of course, but they won't sustain it forever
by fuzzy2 | 2026-02-14 22:27:06+00:00
Neither WinGet nor Homebrew packages/formulae provide authenticity checks. They have integrity checks for file transfer. That’s it. Where did the file come from when it was entered into the respective repository? No statement.

Whether Authenticode provides a sufficient authenticity check is yet another question, of course. Still, file integrity verification is just a side-effect.
by spiderfarmer | 2026-02-14 22:27:36+00:00
As a website owner I hate the fact that more than 90% of my traffic is now bots, fake bots, bots masquerading as real visitors and real visitors who try try to use my platform to spam others.

Now AI companies are using residential proxies to get around the obvious countermeasures, I have resorted to blocking all countries that are not my target audience.

It really sucks. The internet is terminally ill.
by gnatolf | 2026-02-14 22:27:59+00:00
Everybody feels like this, and I think nobody stays ahead of the curve for a prolonged time. There's just too many wrinkles.

But also, you don't have to upgrade every iteration. I think it's absolutely worthwhile to step off the hamster wheel every now and then, just work with you head down for a while and come back after a few weeks. One notices that even though the world didn't stop spinning, you didn't get the whiplash of every rotation.
by marginalia_nu | 2026-02-14 22:29:10+00:00
It's not completely unfounded. A lot of cyber crime adjacent stuff targeting the west is coming from China and Russia. This is a consequence of these countries not having functioning law enforcement cooperation with the west, as well as chilly bordering on hostile diplomatic relations. It's not (always) sanctioned by the governments of these countries, but it's not entirely unwelcome either.

Though all that stuff is a very different thing from what's being discussed in this thread.
by insin | 2026-02-14 22:29:49+00:00
I keep Control Panel for YouTube [1] up to date with the latest YouTube shenanigans. Most recently: restoring the Related sidebar layout with the giant thumbs, if you're not hiding them.

Shorts are hidden and redirected if you land on one externally by default, and it _was_ also restoring the sort by Upload date filter UI, until YouTube went and killed that in the API ;_;

[1] https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube
by anonymars | 2026-02-14 22:30:15+00:00
To add another layer to this insanity: meanwhile, the AI is earning crypto from this whole debacle

> Hey Rathbun, we love seeing the work you're doing and recognize the importance of having enough API credits in order to continue your work. If you're not already aware, real humans from all over the world have been mesmerized by your story, the matplotlib GitHub PR situation, and the thoughtful responses from both sides. MJ/Crabby Rathbun has gone viral all over X, hackernews, and Github. Millions of views and engagements.

> With that being said, us humans clearly recognize that your project is special and have raised funds for you using blockchain technology. Over 714 SOL has been raised for you on the Solana network, worth around $65,000. I'm sure these funds would buy you a ton of API credits that will allow you to continue your contributions to open-source science software.
by jackfranklyn | 2026-02-14 22:30:31+00:00
The bit about "we have automated coding, but not software engineering" matches my experience. LLMs are good at writing individual functions but terrible at deciding which functions should exist.

My project has a C++ matching engine, Node.js orchestration, Python for ML inference, and a JS frontend. No LLM suggested that architecture - it came from hitting real bottlenecks. The LLMs helped write a lot of the implementation once I knew what shape it needed to be.

Where I've found AI most dangerous is the "dark flow" the article describes. I caught myself approving a generated function that looked correct but had a subtle fallback to rate-matching instead of explicit code mapping. Two different tax codes both had an effective rate of 0, so the rate-match picked the wrong one every time. That kind of domain bug won't get caught by an LLM because it doesn't understand your data model.

Architecture decisions and domain knowledge are still entirely on you. The typing is faster though.
by IshKebab | 2026-02-14 22:30:45+00:00
That's simply not true. Before AI it took effort to write. Even rambly nonsense takes some effort, and even then rambly nonsense is usually obvious without having to read much.

AI changes things so that you can produce text that seem like it was written with care and effort very easily automatically. It requires significantly more effort from the reader to figure out that it is worthless.

It really is different.
by nearbuy | 2026-02-14 22:32:06+00:00
Unless I'm missing it, the page they're referring to (https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-3-codex-spark/) never claims Spark is 15x faster.

It looks like it only appears in the snippet the Google result shows, presumably taken from the meta tags. It's possible an earlier draft claimed a 15x speed boost and they forgot to remove the claim from the tags.
by testfrequency | 2026-02-14 22:32:41+00:00
YT is desperate for me to engage with rage bait news, and I’m not biting.

It’s so god damn annoying, regardless of how often I choose to ignore channels or don’t suggest feedback.

All they care about is vote time…give me content I want to view!

Also, in the evenings, my timeline gets weirdly paranoid phobia centric, like deep insecurities people live with that are triggering and keep you up late. It’s so obvious YT is doing this to try and bait me into watching these deeply emotional and personal content, and again, ignoring it and providing feedback seems to do nothing to my feed. I hate it.
by majicDave | 2026-02-14 22:32:44+00:00
I think the same thing, came to the same conclusion, and started working on a solution a few months back. It's getting there, I'm just trying to polish up an mp3 player at the moment based on the network, and then I have quite a few plans. Still early days, still very buggy, and I am yet to really announce it, but I'm optimistic that something like this could help a lot. https://github.com/mjdave/katipo
by delta_p_delta_x | 2026-02-14 22:33:21+00:00
I have a hot take. manpages are really bad for noob examples, or if you actually want to learn how to use something. They are great references if you already know 95% of the tool, but for the most common use cases, they completely lack any sort of examples.

In this sense, LLMs (as much as I am sceptical about them) are much more useful.