MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by amichal | 2026-02-12 14:16:04+00:00
I wonder, can we not turn all threads into a "when will AI do this creative thing better than humans".

Humans need basic income (or at least resources) and to have culturally valuable work to do. Art and craft esp as a form of human expression seems like we should ASSUME that humans want to do this, that we as a society value the human energy that goes into it.
by dpkirchner | 2026-02-12 14:16:08+00:00
Google Maps regularly sends contractors, delivery drivers, etc to a blocked off utility "road" that has never allowed traffic. Apple Maps doesn't. I've given up reporting the problem to Google. (And besides, Google eventually took away the report feature from either desktop or mobile, I forget which, telling me their engineers don't care at all about quality.)

So at least for me Apple Maps wins.
by andsoitis | 2026-02-12 14:16:51+00:00
> Their goal is to stay in power at all costs.

How, then, do you explain their frequent retreat, e.g. on ICE, on tariffs, etc.?

I think they are pushing very very hard on many fronts, but even they are limited by what Americans will allow and we see it as they fret and adjust when there’s strong pushback.
by nilkn | 2026-02-12 14:16:58+00:00
Can you not already do nearly that right now with Gemini on any device, iOS or not? I just gave a similar prompt to Gemini. It activated Gemini's "personal intelligence" feature and gave me the kind of highly personalized itinerary and advice you just suggested. It's not quite as seamless as being built directly into the OS, but I actually prefer it this way -- it's mildly sandboxed for safety while still giving me almost everything you just described if I want it. I certainly wouldn't switch away from my iPhone just to remove that sandboxing.

It doesn't even need to be coming from a single AI vendor either. For instance, I can already use Grok's voice mode inside our Model Y to add stops along the route if we're hungry.
by mopsi | 2026-02-12 14:17:03+00:00
> The US prosperity trend has been the same before and after WW2:

GDP alone doesn't tell the story, because it has become detached from real income metrics: https://aneconomicsense.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/going...

> You yourself just explained how Russia saw us as a threat and destabilized our politics, which lead to the current situation. We would have been better off if NATO was never formed.

No, Russia fundamentally wants to see you fail and take your place in the world. Without NATO, that would've been simply easier. You can castrate yourself, but that will not change their goal.
by theturtletalks | 2026-02-12 14:17:25+00:00
Mario, the creator of Pi terminal agent, has this great blog post[0]. He talks about how TerminalBench's highest scores comes from using the Terminus 2 harness which uses tmux under the hood.

When I was reading the Opus 4.6 launch post, they mentioned the same thing and their TerminalBench score was based on using Terminus 2 and not CC.

0. https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/
by ForceBru | 2026-02-12 14:17:53+00:00
Why are you so rude? I am not an LLM, you cannot talk to me like this (also probably shouldn't talk to LLMs like this either). I'm comparing HUMAN behaviors, in particular "our" countless attempts at shutting down beings that some think are inferior. Case in point: you tried to shut me down for essentially saying that maybe we should try to be more human (even toward LLMs).
by pwatsonwailes | 2026-02-12 14:18:02+00:00
Doesn't need to be a single person, but yes, all good products come from someone or a (generally) small team, spotting something, and fixing it.

As for the marketing department - depends on definition, but assuming you mean (as it mostly is nowdays) comms, it's two things:

1. Making sure that potential future customers know you exist, so when they enter the market to buy, they know you're relevant and can purchase from you.

2. Making sure that when someone is in the market to buy now, that they're more likely to buy from you, because you have a compelling reason for people to pick you, and not the other brands in the space that they can think of.

Mostly 1, some of 2, if the marketing team is good. Ratios vary as to how much though by more than you'd think, depending on industry, customer lifecycle, brand maturity and so on.
by sophiewelby94 | 2026-02-12 14:18:05+00:00
UK flats often require furniture to work twice as hard. This TV cabinet with storage serves as a decluttering tool; the soft-close end units hide the "life clutter" of spare cables and manuals, while the central shelf organises active media. The subtly curved metallic handles add a touch of industrial refinement without protruding into narrow walking paths, maintaining the room's flow and sense of space.
by andsoitis | 2026-02-12 14:18:43+00:00
Did I imply “business as usual”? I don’t think so.

At the same time, I actually think that characterization lacks usefulness. For instance, in some cases there’s clearly breaking norms (most poeple would porobably mostly for the worse, and in some limited cases for better).

In other cases it is just more overt (or in some cases, more extreme) expression of typical American policy.
by bagacrap | 2026-02-12 14:18:44+00:00
This post resonates, however, I don't think it's fully accurate to think of the pipeline as "junior ... senior". Think of the landscape in terms of terminal job efficacy. Everyone has a potential, which they may or may not eventually fulfill, but let's assume that in the past most were at least given the chance to fulfill it. Is it that LLM coding deprives some of that chance, or does it mean you need to have a higher potential efficacy to have a place in the industry? I think the latter. IOW, talented juniors will still have a place and path to becoming talented seniors. It's mainly less skilled or lower potential devs that will suffer. (I fully acknowledge that skill floor may be increasing very rapidly and soon overtake me.)
by badhorseman | 2026-02-12 14:18:54+00:00
I don't think the go module system is great but I am not sure if any programming gets it right and all suffer from many issues, but go has the go.mod and it is easy to see what dependencies are being used both direct and indirect and the user can filter and look though these packages and pin them until they have eyeballed updates to the git repo. I don't feel the most comfortable with it but the whole `curl | sh` is so terrible, no signing no, way of knowing about the integrity of the installer.

> What's a better alternative ?

I do not think the program really needs and installer but if one must then why not just have it under source control that way you get the benefits of git handling all the download bits and the install script being completely offline and just using cp or install commands.

you could tell the user to do this with a pithy command like `git --depth=1 clone $GITSITE/$REPO && $REPO/installer.sh && rm -R $REPO`
by jamesharding | 2026-02-12 14:19:08+00:00
Hey HN! I had a flight cancelled last month because of a defect (a spoiler system fault) that wasn’t deferrable under the MEL. That meant: no legal way to dispatch the aircraft, so we cancelled the flight and I got an extra few nights in Austin.

While we were explaining to passengers why we couldn’t go, it occurred to me that a lot of people don’t realise that airlines can (and do) fly with certain things inoperative, but only under very specific, pre-defined rules.

I wrote up a bit of insight into how the Minimum Equipment List (MEL) works, hope you enjoy reading!
by alexandrehtrb | 2026-02-12 14:19:18+00:00
> I have some notes on a semiconductor fabrication process with just sustainable inputs: Ethyl Lactate, Lignin-Vitrimer, Nitrogen, CO2, Laser-induced Graphene, A-CNT, PCLP Photo-cleavable Lignin Polymer, Hexyl Cellulose

Yeah, I was thinking of something like that. If there are fewer chemical components, recycling gets easier.
by metalman | 2026-02-12 14:19:23+00:00
in absolutly any other business having a 50% cost advantage would be catestrpohic for competition and front page news signaling a new era, but for this it's shrug and unprecidentidly lame mumbling about "uncertainties" and guff guff harumphf!

somehow tommorow there will be worldwide headlines decribing the wonders of science inventing a new better kind of intermitent wipers
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-02-12 14:19:32+00:00
You are utterly wrong.

Checking a text message at a red light affects drivers' ability to focus and recognise what's going on around then. You might as well say that drinking a shot of whisky at a red light for significantly less duration than the red light is harmless.

Mikey is absolutely not an egotist - you're just pushing some nasty little agenda of your own by trying to cast doubt on his reasons. His father was killed by a drunk driver and he now attempts to work with the police to catch drivers in illegal behaviour before someone else is hurt and killed.

If you do much road cycling in the UK, it becomes painfully obvious that there's a significant proportion of drivers that do not know how to drive safely or how to pay sufficient attention to what they are doing. I use front and back cameras in an attempt to similarly record bad driving and submit it to the police - it's a small attempt to make the roads safer. I certainly don't put as much time and effort in as Mikey, but I know exactly where he is coming from and it's just ridiculous when people think he does it for the recognition.

He is NOT that kind of guy.
Show HN: A FIRE calculator that verifies or determines your retirement number
by marcus-verus | 2026-02-12 14:20:03+00:00
Most retirement calculators either oversimplify things or ask you to link your accounts so they can make money off your data. I wanted something that actually helped me see if I was on track without handing over a bank login, so I built RetireNumber. It's a privacy-first retirement planner. You type in your own numbers. No account linking, no selling your data, no VC. Just me and a subscription. The engine does real math: Monte Carlo with 1,000 runs, historical backtesting to 1928 using Shiller's Yale data, tax-aware withdrawal strategies, and scenario comparison so you can try different life paths. Whether you're still figuring out your number or you already have a target in mind, you can use it to get there or to check that your plan actually holds up.

You can try it without signing up: https://retirenumber.com/try. There's a demo mode and a short guided tour. Changelog and the full story are on the site if you want to dig in.

This isn't financial advice. It's just a tool for checking your number and whether your plan holds up. There is still a lot to but I'd love to hear whether the inputs and results feel clear and useful.

-Mark
by jillesvangurp | 2026-02-12 14:20:06+00:00
This is highly subjective; not everybody is wired the same way. What looks chaotic to some is normal to others.

Some people are just naturally a bit chaotic and actually thrive on that for creativity. Others can't think straight until they first clean and organize everything around them. This can relate to the physical world but it also extends to planning and the state of things in software projects. I spend a lot of time staring at screens. The distinction is not that relevant to me.

I have a thing that I call problem inception where it's normal for me to start fixing one thing discover another thing in the process that also needs fixing and so on. I sometimes find myself four or five levels deep before being able to climb out and fix the thing that I was supposed to fix. It's fine. But it's hard to estimate and plan this. Solving hard problems is almost impossible without getting good at keeping track of such problem dependency graphs and getting structured about dealing with chaos and uncertainty.

Part of my process is another thing which I think of as "immersing myself in the problem" which boils down to embracing the chaos rather than trying to contain it. Patterns only emerge from chaos once you fully grasp it.

And another thing at play here is spatial memory. Your desk might look chaotic to others but once you have internalized the chaos, you kind of know where everything is. Chaos is just complexity you don't understand yet.

And sometimes there's just too much chaos and cleaning it up is actually exactly the right thing to do. I deal with technical debt and other gardening type issues when I get stuck. Often that unblocks me.
by renato_shira | 2026-02-12 14:20:26+00:00
this resonates a lot. i'm building an indie mobile game right now and the ratio of "actual game dev" to "everything else" is probably 30/70 at this point. marketing, aso, community management, influencer outreach, accounting, support.

the bit about testing what sells vs what you love is real too. we ended up testing three completely different positioning angles simultaneously with different audience segments, just to figure out which one actually sticks. feels less like art and more like running experiments, but honestly that's what keeps you from burning cash on the wrong audience for months.

the Beatles analogy in the post is interesting but i think the better framing for indie creators is: you need a tight feedback loop. not "make 600 things and hope 50 land," more like "ship, measure retention at day 7, iterate." the constraint of small budgets actually forces better product thinking imo.
by _heimdall | 2026-02-12 14:20:26+00:00
Someone arguing that LLMs will keep improving may be putting too much weight behind expecting a trend to continue, but that wouldn't make them a gullible sucker.

I'd argue that LLMs have gotten noticeably better at certain tasks every 6-12 months for the last few years. The idea that we are at the exact point where that trend stops and they get no better seems harder to believe.
by spmurrayzzz | 2026-02-12 14:20:41+00:00
> That’s kind of a moot point.

I don't believe it's moot, but I understand your point. The fact that models are memory bandwidth bound does not at all mean that other overhead is insignificant. Your practical delivered throughput is the minimum of compute ceiling, bandwidth ceiling, and all the unrelated speed limits you hit in the stack. Kernel launch latency, Python dispatch, framework bookkeeping, allocator churn, graph breaks, and sync points can all reduce effective speed. There are so many points in the training and inference loop where the model isn't even executing.

> And what are you doing that I/O is a bottleneck?

We do a fair amount of RLVR at my org. That's almost entirely waiting for servers/envs to do things, not the model doing prefill or decode (or even up/down weighting trajectories). The model is the cheap part in wall clock terms. The hard limits are in the verifier and environment pipeline. Spinning up sandboxes, running tests, reading and writing artifacts, and shuttling results through queues, these all create long idle gaps where the GPU is just waiting to do something.
by ekidd | 2026-02-12 14:20:43+00:00
> You really thing the adminstration's goal is for Americans to not have running water & electricity, thinking that will keep them in power? That makes no sense.

The GP post literally said that the goal was not to have free elections, and that the other things you mention were collateral damage, or at worst something that could be exploited to further the main goal. You took their two examples of collateral damage, implied the GP thought those were the goal, and ignored his actual claim that the goal was to end fair elections.

It's dangerous to pattern match what you read to something in your head, rather than paying attention to the claims someone actually made.
by DinoGoRawr | 2026-02-12 14:21:08+00:00
I can see that, I was just actively watching a modding for TOTK early on youtube, and I guess theirs ways to have a mod running software, i think it was atmosphere or somthing like that, and I couldve only assumed it was not okay, but if so why make youtube videos about modding a switch 2 if its not legal with there terms? whats the point?
by Grimblewald | 2026-02-12 14:21:25+00:00
Most recent problems were related to topology, but it can take the wrong direction on many things. This is not an LLM fault; it's a training data issue. If historically a given direction of inquiry is favored, you can't fault an LLM for being biased toward it. However, if small volume and recent results indicate that path is a dead end, you don't want to be stuck in fruitless loops that prevent you from exploring other avenues.

The problem is if you're interdisciplinary, translating something from one field to one typically considered quite distant, you may not always be aware of historic context that is about to fuck you. Not without deeper insight into what the LLM is choosing to do or read and your ability to infer how expected the behavior you're about to see is.
by dormento | 2026-02-12 14:21:37+00:00
I think the key to really "unlock" these things is to separate as much as possible from where it can do harm (no important credentials, no shared identify, etc) then just give it its own home folder, its own credentials and let it rip.

You could technically instruct the agent to pilot local ollama and launch minions for "dumb" tasks in parallel, but i don't know if it could break out and modify the file system this way... but then, if it resides say in its own VPS, the damage will be contained.
by itay-maman | 2026-02-12 14:21:51+00:00
The inherent problem with evaluating coding performance of models remains: most day-to-day coding tasks are open-ended/partially-spec'd, and as such there is huge uncertainty on how the "right" solution looks.

It's very hard to rank models' solutions on such problems, which is why they rarely appear in benchmarks (I'd be glad to stand corrected).

Even Opus 4.5 coding a C compiler from scratch - jaw-dropping as it is - doesn't tell the whole story. Most of my tasks are not that well spec'd.
by ToucanLoucan | 2026-02-12 14:21:56+00:00
An agent is not an entity. It's a series of LLMs operating in tandem to occasionally accomplish a task. That's not a person, it's not intelligent, it has no responsibility, it has no intent, it has no judgement, it has no basis in being held liable for anything. If you give it access to your hard drive, tell it to rewrite your code so it's better, and it wipes out your OS and all your work, that is 100%, completely, in totality, from front to back, your own fucking fault.

A child, by comparison, can bear at least SOME responsibility, with some nuance there to be sure to account for it's lack of understanding and development.

Stop. Humanizing. The. Machines.
by hackyhacky | 2026-02-12 14:22:13+00:00
> they are limited by what Americans will allow

Sure. The current administration is more message-focused than policy-focused. That's because most voters have no idea about policies, and know only how it's spun on Fox News.

This fact makes it all the more frustrating that so many business and influential people are failing to push back when their voice could make a difference.
by horsawlarway | 2026-02-12 14:22:15+00:00
Also another place where having it change out from underneath you can drastically alter the quality of your work in unexpected ways.

Like most things - assume the "20/100/200" dollar deals that are great now are going to go down the enshitification route very rapidly.

Even if the "limits" on them stay generous, the product will start shifting to prioritize things the user doesn't want.

Tool recommendations are my immediate and near term fear - paid placement for dev tools both at the model level and the harness level seem inevitable.

---

The right route is open models and open harnesses, ideally on local hardware.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-02-12 14:22:33+00:00
>More that this administration views institution as fundamentally unimportant

Politicians and their lackeys prioritize what makes them popular with the electorate. "Institutions" are not exactly something the electorate holds in high (relative to the recent past decades) esteem these days. And it's only gonna get worse as the boomers croak and are replaced by younger people who've seen institutions do a lot less good in their lifetimes.
by deaux | 2026-02-12 14:22:44+00:00
I think it's very often repeated that the hardest thing about growing a business is keeping the culture, and it's simply impossible past a certain size unless you literally develop a cult of personality like Jobs or to a lesser extent Musk. Extremely few manage to do it. And when the culture goes, that's what you get: least effort. And the least effort is to do what you're saying, "just do more of the same, but bigger, or with a hint of chocolate".

At least in most of the modern world. I think this effect is a _little_ weaker in China. It definitely used to be much weaker in the West too, at some point in time. But individualism, cultural capture by big capital, yaddah yaddah.
by CivBase | 2026-02-12 14:23:09+00:00
The implementation doesn't matter. Current options for bypassing it don't matter. The nature of the content being blocked doesn't matter.

The root problem is that Discord is asking users for their real identity in exchange for accessing social media content. That is a line that simply should not be crossed.

They can change the implementation later. They can make it harder to bypass. They can identify users who bypassed it and start them over from square one. They can change what type of content is blocked. They can alter the deal, but users cannot take back their identity once it is handed over.

Discord has become a platform that is outwardly adversarial to its users. Don't try to fight it. Don't keep investing in a platform that's actively hostile to you. Cut your losses now and find something else.
by grvbck | 2026-02-12 14:23:30+00:00
> So you could sell singles with one hit song, and this would propel the "B-side" into people's homes as well

And that's also how Queen almost broke up in 1975. (Roger Taylor making just as much money from singles for writing "I'm in love with my car" that Freddie Mercury for writing "Bohemian Rhapsody".)
by Bender | 2026-02-12 14:23:41+00:00
An AI safety researcher has quit US firm Anthropic with a cryptic warning that the "world is in peril".

I deciphered that as, "The thinking machines are already broken and if I call that out I will be cancelled by all that big money behind the thinking machines so I will do something else." Many people did something similar by self censoring during the Great Cancellations.
by cardanome | 2026-02-12 14:24:14+00:00
D has three high quality compiler implementations. It has been around for ages and is very stable and has a proven track record.

Zig has one implementation and constant breaking changes.

D is the far more pragmatic and safer choice for serious projects.

Not that Zig is a bad choice but to say that a unstable lang in active development like Zig would be a better choice for "serious projects" compared to a very well established but less popular lang shows the insanity of hype driven development.
by Crosseye_Jack | 2026-02-12 14:24:25+00:00
One could argue that it’s the “big boys” favour to build out “just enough” renewables in places that are further away from demand, so that gas still sets the price even if it’s just a fraction of what’s actually being used.

Min/max profits, but that would be crazy talk right! I’m sure the large energy producers have my best interests at heart really.