MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by arty_throwaway | 2026-02-12 10:47:41+00:00
Contemporary artist here, with gallery representation. I also teach on, arguably, the best undergrad "fine art" program in the world.

It is worth pointing out what this artist's practice actually is. The audience here might be afraid of conjectures around the subjective phenomena of "taste", so let me propose this:

That thing that everyone complains about here when you make an interesting app, put it up, and there's a cheaper Chinese produced version of it within a month that's got a better ranking in the app store than yours? That's what this guy is doing in art terms. The "product" is derivative, and frankly, so is the hustle. That's not why most of us make art, and his work wouldn't stand up to scrutiny by my undergrads (much less the "art world" in general) who are typically optimizing for innovation in the field.

I would argue that this guy doesn't really need to be an artist, in the same way that we don't really need the 50th knockoff of the same app. Sure he can do it and I guess good on him for making some money from it, but those are separate questions compared to those of most artists. He could use those same skills he discussed to sell used cars or vapes or something. Or maybe just be a programmer and "ship"? Notice that he doesn't even attempt to explain what is novel or contextually relevant about his work, or even where his desire to do it, as opposed to selling any other product, comes from?

Personally, I use my teaching to create economic space for myself to not need to be in thrall to a flippant and cruel "market". I have some basic rules for my gallery (no sales to arms dealers, no sales to oil industry, leaning that way towards AI/tech tbh) but one of the reasons I have a gallery, in addition to lightening my cognitive load of all the admin and sales in general, is because I suspect it would damage my capacity to make cutting-edge work if I knew how the sausages were made. It's most certainly not the only way to do it, it's just how I've landed. I usually advise my students starting out to follow the Phillip Glass method (really, the 1970s-90s method): get a part-time job that pays the most you can get but that does the work that will kill your mind the least, so you have at least 1 extra day and the mental space to do your 'real' work with that 1 day plus the weekend. Then over time, if you get paid for the art, cut down on the part-time job, and repeat. I will admit it is getting much harder to do this now, so my advice may be outdated.

Anyway, I'm being snarky, and he would correctly argue it's gatekeeping. But just a bit of context for the discussion here.
by tsimionescu | 2026-02-12 10:48:13+00:00
I forgot to respond to this:

> And it seems that way. Say that you ignore taylor series formulation, skip it completely, and define the polar form to be r(10)^ix = cos(x)+isin(x), where r is radius and x is angle. JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN.

The thing is, you can't do this. Your numbers will not work out correctly. For example, (e^(pi*i))^i = 1/e^pi is a direct consequence of how exponentiation works and the definition of i. If you define 10^(xi) = cos x + i sin x, you will get:

(e^(pi\*i))^i =
= (10^(log_10 e \* pi \* i))^i
= (cos (log_10 e \* pi) + i sin (log_10 e \* pi)) ^ i
= 10^(log_10 $exp)i
= cos $exp + i sin $exp

I very much doubt that sin(cos (log_10 e * pi) + i sin (log_10 e * pi)) is 0, so this number can't possibly be equal to the real number 1/e^pi. So, with your definition, the property (a^x)^y = a^(x*y) doesn't hold for all a, x, y. So, your definition doesn't represent the exponential function at all.
by fedeb95 | 2026-02-12 10:48:45+00:00
this kind of reasoning will accumulate so much inefficiencies that it will eventually blow up. Or, in the best case scenario, create a proportional inflation that makes this subsidies useless.

Think about the big picture: your salary is a cost for someone else. In the case of "basic income" is a cost for the tax payers. Who decides what benefits the tax payers? The state can't possibly do it, if not for a limited extent. Today we don't have a method more efficient than free market and free prices. Planned economies have historically failed. It may work for now, we all love arts; but tomorrow it will be the artisans (were is the boundary between art and crafts?), then maybe small businesses?

Each of this "tax exemptions" or subsidies eats the profits of someone else. Very rarely it's the richest luxuries that are taken away. Usually it's the middle-low class that doesn't receive exemptions and subsidies who's penalized. Ironically, that same class that most could consume art, crafts, and products in general. This way society spirals toward an halt.
by closewith | 2026-02-12 10:49:05+00:00
> Society has not disintegrated.

Obviously not because of this income scheme and not complete disintegration, but Irish society is under extreme strain from housing pressures, rising living costs, and growing polarisation that is tearing at social cohesion.

It's frustrating to see funds allocated to this scheme when health, housing, transport, etc are all failing apart.
by patrick4urcloud | 2026-02-12 10:49:07+00:00
Love this, brings back LAN party vibes!
Sound notifications for Claude Code are a real pain point.

I built something in the same space but took a different approach — less fun, more engineering:
Vox (https://github.com/rtk-ai/vox) — local TTS in pure Rust, no API key, no cloud dependency.
by microtonal | 2026-02-12 10:49:29+00:00
A bit of nitpicking, a temperature of zero does not really exist (it would lead to division by zero in softmax). It's sampling (and non-deterministic compute kernels) that makes token prediction non-deterministic. You could simply fix it (assuming deterministic kernels) by using greedy decoding (argmax with a stable sort in the case of ties).

As temperatures approach zero, the probability of the most likely token approaches one (assuming no ties). So my guess is that LLM inference providers started using temperature=0 to disable sampling because people would try to approximate greedy decoding by using teensy temperatures.
by pjc50 | 2026-02-12 10:49:33+00:00
> how our planet will survive this critical phase.

> trillions in valuation.

This is more or less literally the "yes we destroyed the planet, but for a brief moment we created trillions in shareholder value" meme. Perhaps we need to take a step back and ask to what extent this benefits humans as humans, not as economic units. Especially given the explicit threat in the AI marketing material to destroy all creative industries and replace human fulfilment and even connection with AI.
by lossolo | 2026-02-12 10:49:45+00:00
Years ago I got interested in D. It's a great language, but at the time its garbage collector was leaky. There weren't any D entries on the Benchmarks Game back then, so I ported most of the programs to D and optimized them as best I could as a newcomer. Performance wise, D was in the C/Rust/C++ range and in many cases it even beat Rust and C++. I tried to get the community involved to help the language gain wider adoption, but nothing really happened. I think everything has its moment, and D's moment has passed. They didn't make the most of the window when D could have gone mainstream.
by arcadia_leak | 2026-02-12 10:50:31+00:00
> The fact that C# is becoming the GC language in game dev is proving my point.

Respectfully, it doesn't prove your point. Unity is a commercial product that employed C# because they could sell it easily, not because it's the best language for game dev.

Godot supports C# because Microsoft sponsored the maintainers precisely on that condition.
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-12 10:50:44+00:00
Both can be right. Some people in the debate think it's very important to check ages, while other people want to collect data, and a third group of people want excuses to shut down platforms.

The US is repealing section 230, and it appears to be a pretext for shutting down platforms that don't block anti–Trump speech. Australia has an age verification law that seems to actually be about keeping kids off social media.
by jimnotgym | 2026-02-12 10:50:52+00:00
Exactly. A sketchbook and pencils cost next to nothing. But being able to take that and turn it into an oil painting on a giant canvas costs real money.

Writing a few songs on a guitar from Facebook marketplace is cheap. Turning that into a live show is expensive and time consuming.

Writing some Irish language poems on your lunchbreaks is cheap. Doing public readings as an unknown poet is not.

Well done Ireland.
by RupertSalt | 2026-02-12 10:51:01+00:00
Okay, my fault for skipping a lot of stuff in the middle, but a question began to burn in my mind. They have determined the full inscription, calculated the Olmec date, and correlated it to our Gregorian reckoning. The end of the article says:

So, while 32 BC seemed awfully early for the Olmecs to carve this stone, there’s no way they could have done it later. (Or earlier, for that matter.)

But I am not sure if this resolves the burning question: what makes everyone believe that the inscription corresponded to the current date? Certainly, that is a common custom when erecting a monument, but what if Olmec logic said "let us commemorate this auspicious event that occurred 300 years ago!" or "Let us anticipate the far future in 5,000 years from now!" for example.
by assaddayinh | 2026-02-12 10:51:33+00:00
Art is basically a value tokken store for the super wealthy and they keep it valuable by limiting the supply to what is "valuable" art by forming one huge cartell. Gallerys, museums, art brokers are either in this cArtel or they are not.

Your value as an artist depends not on the quality of your art, but mostly by your ability to sell yourself to and into service to these cArtells. Like any scam demanding free labour and enthusiasm by the young, the art industry has an aura that it projects to scoop up daydreamers and those rebelling.
by elsjaako | 2026-02-12 10:52:30+00:00
I pay for a (local, non-english) newspaper. The reporting certainly isn't perfect, but:

- They seem less sensationalist, I guess because they don't depend on clicks to survive
- They tell a more complete, less dumbed down story than free sources
- They are more boring than free sources

If you want to be informed, the "pay for journalists" model is much better than "hope that advertisers or billionaires pay for you" model.

You can argue that being informed is pointless, but I would argue that independent people working to get informed and then questioning issues is a vital point in a democracy. One model for this is journalists, even if you're not actually reading it.
by extraduder_ire | 2026-02-12 10:53:07+00:00
Enterprise Ireland is the largest VC firm in the world by amount paid and number of clients.

Due to EU rules on state aid though, it's technically a quango and not part of the government despite being spun off of the then privatised national sugar company.

They also pay Ireland's contributions toward ESA, so the Irish flags you see printed on the side of Ariane rockets aren't a direct result of what the government is doing.
by deaux | 2026-02-12 10:53:17+00:00
This is absolute peak irony given that Ireland is the number two valiant protector of US big tech - right behind the US itself - including the main AI corps. Shielding them from prosecution for all the laws they violate across a population of 450+ million. And then they give their own citizens this UBI from a sliver of the protection money they get paid. Fuck you, got mine.

It's despicable, they're as much as an insider threat as Hungary.
by apothegm | 2026-02-12 10:53:44+00:00
They knew about and could identify solstices, which gives you day of the year. So then it’s just a matter of matching years, which can be done on the basis of things like comets.

Supernovae could also play a factor. Or using tree rings to identify years mentioned as having droughts or floods.

Probably a bunch of other things we haven’t thought of.
by roenxi | 2026-02-12 10:54:18+00:00
A lot of those relevant writings became relevant because of the horrible experiences the author went through forged them into an interesting writer. If we're assuming that we only know retrospectively whether the writing is important then the best course of action would be for people to write as a hobby and make choices that are likely (rather than unlikely) to lead to a comfortable life. Particularly in this current era where we might suspect that writing and publishing a book is getting much easier thanks to technology.
by optionalsquid | 2026-02-12 10:54:51+00:00
My (likely unfair) impression of D is that it feels a bit rudderless: It is trying to be too many things to too many people, and as a consequence it doesn't really stand out compared to the languages that commit to a paradigm.

Do you want GC? Great! Do not want GC? Well, you can turn it off, and lose access to most things. Do you want a borrow-checker? Great, D does that as well, though less wholeheartedly than Rust. Do you want a safer C/memory safety? There's the SafeD mode. And probably more that I forget.

I wonder if all these different (often incompatible) ways of using D ends up fragmenting the D ecosystem, and in turn make it that much harder for it to gain critical mass
by 1718627440 | 2026-02-12 10:55:43+00:00
> your Russia problem

Unless you have already prescribed to the acceptance of big countries swallow the small ones at whim, it is not only our problem. Also Russia gaining control means often the USA loosing.

> Why don't you ask your new friend China for help?

Who said China is the friend of Europe? The USA has become a new unpredictable adversary, while China is an old enemy. Human nature is just to choose certainty over uncertainty even if that is actually worse.

> We need to reallocate money away from our military, and towards our healthcare system

I don't think EU countries have a problem with that. They rather complain, that you are currently allocating money to a military, that wants to attack EU states and to a para-military that attacks USA citizens.

> So we need to drop sanctions on Russia, like China has done, so that the Europeans will like us more?

It is that China is seen as evil anyway, so nobody expects them to sanction Russia for real, while we didn't saw the USA that way.

> For years, Europeans have sharply criticizing the United States for sometimes partnering with authoritarian countries.

You don't criticize enemies, you criticize friends. I think the criticism also was more that you create authoritarian countries, partnering was also done by European nations, that's called realpolitik.
by program_whiz | 2026-02-12 10:56:03+00:00
The models are differentiable, they are trained with backprop. You can easily just run it in reverse to get the input that produces near certainty of producing the output. For a given sequence length, you can create a new optimzation that takes the input sequence, passes to model (frozen) and runs steps over the input sequence to reduce the "loss" which is the desired output. This will give you the optimal sequence of that length to maximize the probability of seeing the output sequence. Of course, if you're doing this to chatGPT or another API-only model, you have no choice but to hunt around.

Of course the optimal sequence to produce the output will be a series of word vectors (of multi-hundreds of dimensions). You could match each to its closest word in any language (or make this a constraint during solving), or just use the vectors themselves as the compressed data value.

Ultimately, NNets of various kinds are used for compression in various contexts. There are some examples where guassian-splatting-like 3d scenes are created by comrpessing all the data into the weights of a nnet via a process similar to what I described to create a fully explorable 3d color scene that can be rendered from any angle.
by dn3500 | 2026-02-12 10:56:56+00:00
Engineering notebooks were required at my first job in the 1970s, for patent reasons. The notebook pages are numbered and it has a real sewn binding, making it harder to remove or insert a page without being noticed. We were required to date and sign each page and start a new page every day.

By the time I retired I think I was the only one at my company using one. I had to special order to get a proper one with the quad ruling, numbered pages, and sewn binding.
by vladms | 2026-02-12 10:57:22+00:00
> but the internet today has a lot more pedos and groomers online than in the 90s

Without some data analysis I honestly don't know. Even before Internet (ex: FidoNet) there was plenty of very bad stuff out there, I don't see any clear reason why the pedos and groomers would have avoided it.

> We have to separate kids from adults on the internet somehow

I think what is much worse than in other mediums is the actual lack of a community that observes. In real life, for many cases, you would have multiple people noticing interactions between kids and adults (sports, schools, parks, shops, etc.), so actions might be taken when/before things get strange. On some of the social networks on the internet it is too much one-to-one communication which avoids any oversight.

So, for me, the idea of "more separation" seems to generate on the long term even more problems, because of lack of (healthy) interactions and a community.
by tromp | 2026-02-12 10:57:22+00:00
> The term “proof of work” is apt. The work is the proof. Finding a valid hash demonstrates that you did the computational work to find it.

This whole article equates Proof of Work with hashing.

But the term Proof of Work is more general than the particular instance used in Bitcoin (Hashcash).

Other forms of Proof of Work require finding a solution to a puzzle after fixing the header and nonce. For example, Cuckoo Cycle requires finding a 42-cycle in a huge bipartite graph.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-02-12 10:58:04+00:00
The meta issue here with AI companies is that they while they excel at producing LLMs, they don't have any inherent advantages when eating their own dog food and it shows in the quality and UX of their products.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI have been maintaining a high pace of releasing often poorly thought through new products and experimenting with features. A lot of their product releases show all the hallmarks of vibe coding: randomly breaking features, poor QA and testing on releases, etc.

OpenAI seems to have the upper hand in UX currently. Their products feel a bit more polished and they've clearly tried to up their game. Taking over Jony Ive's company a few months ago is a clear signal that they want to do better. The Codex AI desktop app was a clear step up from their web app and cli. I've been using both before that was released.

Both companies are spread very thin trying to do both end user and developer oriented products and features while keeping existing paying users happy as well. Both companies also have had a string of rushed product releases that kind of fizzled out: OpenAI's Atlas, which was a response to Anthropic's Comet. Neither of which seem to be very popular at this point. Several false starts with apps (OpenAI), Claude Cowork, etc. There are a lot of half formed product ideas there that than don't get the attention they deserve.

And it's not like MS, Google, and Apple are any better. If anything they are more hesitant and out of their depth here. They are all dancing around the hard issues here which are UX and security/trust models. Also, while coders get a lot of toys, nailing agentic tools for business users is proving to be a lot harder. Blanket access to everything via an agentic browser is not a viable solution. I can agentically code a structured document via latex or markdown. But the same tools are relatively useless in spreadsheets, presentations, and documents. And while you can do a lot of potentially interesting things if you surrender your inbox, the security failure modes around that remain a show stopping obstacle for wide adoption.

There's a lot of stage fright, hesitation, and immature product management in this sector. There's a bit of gold rush in terms of rapid experimentation. But as the stakes get higher, a lot of these companies are increasingly lacking the freedom to move as fast as needed. Fear of liability issues is preventing them to do a lot. Which is why most progress is concentrated around developer tools.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-02-12 10:58:10+00:00
> The result is OK. It has all the features I asked for, and includes document sharing, collaborative editing in real time, support for fonts and line spacing, etc. etc. I could not have paid a developer $170 and got this. The problem, of course, is that, while abstractly impressive, this is completely useless

Well, what would you expect from a few hours of running in a loop with these constraints?

> This project exists to build a document editor from the ground up. Violating these constraints defeats the entire purpose.

> FORBIDDEN dependencies (do NOT install or use these):

> Rich text editor frameworks: ProseMirror, Slate, Quill, TipTap, Draft.js, CKEditor, TinyMCE, Lexical, or any similar library

> CRDT/OT libraries: Yjs, Automerge, ShareDB, OT.js, or any similar library

> Full CSS frameworks: Bootstrap, Tailwind, Material UI (small utility libs for specific needs are OK)

> ORMs: Prisma, TypeORM, Sequelize (use raw SQL or a thin query builder)

I can't help but wonder what you thought you would achieve, and how getting "mostly what you asked for" is still disappointing to you.

> there is no taste being applied.

There are 0 lines in AGENT_PROMPT.md about "taste". You have instructed something/someone on how to build more than what to build.

Your goals are (from a quick skim):

- The goal of this project is ultimately to generate a working alternative to Google Docs with the same functionality.

- You are an autonomous software engineer building AltDocs, a from-scratch alternative to Google Docs.

I see a FEATURES.md file, but not clear if this is from you or expanded by the model. It seems pretty slim.

All in all, I don't get the "disappointment". It seems, from your blog post, that the "model" did most of the things you asked for. The disappointment might come from what you asked for, more than from the "model" being bad... To paraphrase a line from a sitcom: "Damn, Andrew, I can't control the weather!" :)
by rafaelmn | 2026-02-12 10:58:14+00:00
I'm not saying D didn't have nice features - but if D/C#/Java are valid options I'm never picking D - language benefits cannot outweigh the ecosystem/support behind those two. Go picked a niche with backend plumbing and got Google backing to push it through.

Meanwhile look at how popular Zig is getting 2 decades later. Why is that not D ? D also has comp-time and had it for over a decade I think ? Zig proves there's a need that D was in the perfect spot to fill if it did not make the GC decision - and we could have had 2 decades of software written in D instead of C++ :)
by squeefers | 2026-02-12 10:58:34+00:00
> the Indians had hundreds of thousands of soldiers

the "Indians" were all fighting each other, so Im not sure you can count their numbers together like that. India proper might have been on paper a force to be reckoned with, but the reality of it was actually dozens of smaller, poorer countries all vying for power AGAINST each other, not in cooperation. that isnt a formidable enemy, Im sorry