MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mcny | 2026-02-17 02:05:13+00:00
I feel like we are talking past each other.

1. I write hobby code all the time. I've basically stopped writing these by hand and now use an LLM for most of these tasks. I don't think anyone is opposed to it. I had zero users before and I still have zero users. And that is ok.

2. There are actual free and open source projects that I use. Sometimes I find a paper cut or something that I think could be done better. I usually have no clue where to begin. I am not sure if it even is a defect most of the time. Could it be intentional? I don't know. Best I can do is reach out and ask. This is where the friction begins. Nobody bangs out perfect code on first attempt but usually maintainers are kind to newcomers because who knows maybe one of those newcomers could become one of the maintainers one day. "Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere."

LLM changed that. The newcomers are more like Linguini than Remy. What's the point in mentoring someone who doesn't read what you write and merely feeds it into a text box for a next token predictor to do the work. To continue the analogy from the Disney Pixar movie Ratatouille, we need enthusiastic contributors like Remy, who want to learn how things work and care about the details. Most people are not like that. There is too much going on every day and it is simply not possible to go in depth about everything. We must pick our battles.

I almost forgot what I was trying to say. The bottom line is, if you are doing your own thing like I am, LLM is great. However, I would request everyone to have empathy and not spread our diarrhea into other people's kitchens.

If it wasn't an LLM, you wouldn't simply open a pull request without checking first with the maintainers, right?
by TacticalCoder | 2026-02-17 02:05:48+00:00
> "Signaling" is just the information that your visible choices send to those around you, including strangers. That's why it's called "signaling" -- your choices are broadcasting an information signal about you to others.

Where the theory falls flat re- signaling to strangers is that there are people that do dress very differently, use different cars, sometimes shave, sometimes not, on different days of the week.

And it's also very well known that many people simply do not pay attention to others. They mind their own business and that's it.

When I'm driving a random car and I'm dressed casually and not shaven, what signal am I sending to the strangers I'll see once during the day and who are anyway only minding their own business?

And the next day when I put on fancy shoes, an expensive watch, and I take out one of my Porsche and then go out and cross path with strangers, what signal am I sending? I'll only ever see them during that other day. Strangers who, also, only mind their own business.

The funny thing is: just like I don't give a flying fuck about other people, other people don't give a flying fuck about me.

But anyway how can I be signaling one thing to strangers on monday and another thing tuesday to other strangers?

Where it gets better: some days my wife prepares the clothes she wants me to wear (maybe because people shall come to the house later on or whatever), some days she doesn't and I just change underwear after my shower and put the same jeans I had the day before. Then I go to the garage: we both have several car keys. Maybe she decided to take my Porsche, maybe not.

So basically: I don't always pick the clothes I wear and my wife loves to sometimes take my Porsche.

What am I "signaling" to strangers? Not only I'm not totally in control of my outfit and my car but also simply don't care.

"Grug hungry. Grug grabs money or credit card. Grub puts whatever clothes on. Grug goes to whatever car is in the garage. Grub drives to groceries store to buy atoms to stay alive".

That's literally me.

Now maybe people in this thread meant to say: "signaling in the workplace towards people you see every day at work" but that's way different than "signaling to strangers".

To put it simply: I think a lot of people in this thread are way overestimating the level of caring other people exhibit.

I guarantee you that on the caring continuum most people by very far are on the "I couldn't care less" extreme.

There is such a thing as people who simply don't give a fuck and nobody is signaling anything to people who aren't even paying attention to you.

Grug goes to the groceries store to buy atoms to survive, not to look at other people's clothes/watch/car.

Signaling to people who aren't strangers: OK, that one I can buy. But to strangers I call horse load of shit because many people can "signal" two entire different things on two different days of the week. The only signal people see is the same as what people see reading tea leaves.
by just6979 | 2026-02-17 02:05:58+00:00
Pretty sure they're replying to the post that directly contrasts Discord/Slack and IRC.

TFA mentions both, yes, but as a direct example of service/platform (Discord) vs protocol (IRC, XMPP, etc). The comment asks a question that kinda misses the point of TFA.

Discord could be considered to have "won" in that it's got a lot of (new) users and removes some of the limitations of IRC, but that's _because_ it is a service/platform, and comes with all the trade-offs being discussed in other threads here.

Or one could consider IRC to have "won" because as a protocol it simply can't have some of the restrictions possible with a centralized platform.

It's trade-offs all the way down, but protocols will always have fewer restrictions of the kind currently in the zeitgeist, especially decentralized protocols.
by doodlebugging | 2026-02-17 02:06:05+00:00
This is an old story about an old investigation. It is old news dredged up to try to win sympathy for DHS/ICE. It is propaganda resurrected to make DHS look useful.

They cherry-picked a story that they knew would win public sympathy since no one wants a child molester to run free. Lets show a time when an agent solved a case for an excellent outcome.

Pick a DHS/ICE story from this year and see what kind of dystopic shitshow you report on.

This is propaganda. Gullible people fall for this shit every day. Put some thought into the context before you swallow the turd.
by Maro | 2026-02-17 02:06:11+00:00
Some thoughts, feedbacks, well-meaning critcism:

- on non-supported browsers (eg. mobile) don't render the app, show a message instead

- Shift + Home/End for selecting text doesn't work

- Ctrl + N for a new page doesn't work

- things like the above ^, while it may be trivial, will turn off people who will not spend more than 10-20s to evaluate

- you're refer the simplicity of text files, but the editor is not fixed width, it's more like a Markdown-ish editor, closer to Google Docs with its default styles

- when typing - it creates a list, but the list's left margin (where the - starts) is not aligned on the overall left margin of the page, it's very annoying to me

- to me, this is too far away from the simplicity of a text file — this comment, I'm writing it up in Sublime in plain text, and then I'll copy it to Chrome/HN, but I wouldn't do it in your tool — I love being able to Alt-Tab to Sublime, hit Ctrl+N to get a new "file" which is a temporary/ephemeral workspace for typing text, typing and getting sasisfying fixed-width readable text, and then copy/pasting it to my destination, which almost always has a less pleasant editor

- eg. I also write my non-trivial ChatGPT conversations like that ^

- one of the few exceptions is Google Docs, I can directly work into that

- the reason I ended on Google Docs: after a few minutes of playing around, it's not clear to me how using your product would be significantly better for me than using Google Docs for notes (which I don't) — I can use GDocs to write roughly Markdown-equivalent structure, and there's plugins to import/export Markdown — and GDocs is backed by Google, has a working editor, apps, multi-user support, commenting, Google ecosystem integration, etc.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-02-17 02:06:18+00:00
Remember when projects were getting overwhelmed by PRs from students just editing a line in a README so they could win a t-shirt? That was 2020, and they weren't using AI. The open source community has been going downhill for a while. The new generation isn't getting mentored by the old generation, so stable, old-fogey methods established by Linux distributions are eschewed by the new kids. Technology advancement has made open source interactions a little too easy, and unnecessarily fragile. Some ecosystems focus way too much on crappy reusable components, and don't focus enough on supply chain security.

Here's the good news: AI cannot destroy open source. As long as there's somebody in their bedroom hacking out a project for themselves, that then decides to share it somehow on the internet, it's still alive. It wouldn't be a bad thing for us to standardize open source a bit more, like templates for contributors' guides, automation to help troubleshoot bug reports, and training for new maintainers (to help them understand they have choices and don't need to give up their life to maintain a small project). And it's fine to disable PRs and issues. You don't have to use GitHub, or any service at all.
by hsbauauvhabzb | 2026-02-17 02:06:24+00:00
There’s a pretty big difference between surveillance logging your every move your and scanning photos voluntarily uploaded to Facebook.

No, I don’t like Facebook using facial recognition technology, and no I don’t like that someone else can upload photos of me without my consent (which ironically could leverage facial recognition technology to blanket prevent), but these are other technical and social issues that are unrelated to the root issue. I also wish there were clear political and legal boundaries around surveillance usage for truly abhorrent behaviour versus your non-Caucasian neighbour maybe j -walking triggering a visit from ICE.

Yes, it’s an abuse of power for these organisations to collect data these ways, but I’m not against their use to prevent literal ongoing child abuse, it’s one of the least worst uses of it.
by anilgulecha | 2026-02-17 02:06:44+00:00
Prior to LLM the concept of "Open Source" could co-exist with "Free Software" - one was a more pragmatic view of how to develop software, the other a political activist position of how code powering our world should be.

AI has laid bare the difference.

Open Source is significantly impacted. Business models based on it are affected. And those who were not taking the political position find that they may not prefer the state of the world.

Free software finds itself, at worst, a bit annoyed (need to figure out the slop problem), and at best, an ally in AI - the amount of free software being built right now for people to use is very high.
by refulgentis | 2026-02-17 02:06:49+00:00
Submitter is Canadian and re: America, posted "I read recently that Patrimonialism is a good way of describing the current regime" about 10 months ago.

Doesn't sound like paid DHS/ICE psyopper.

Any reason to think it is?

EDIT: Got the "you're posting too fast", so in reply to OP below:

> Submitter's nationality has nothing to do with it nor does his post history. WTF

Well, yes it does, its exculpatory evidence for a stranger you publicly accused of dredging up the news to try and win sympathy for DHS/ICE. (twice now)

Original post, by you: "It is old news dredged up to try to win sympathy for DHS/ICE."
This post, by you: "why do they need to dredge it up today?"
by martinald | 2026-02-17 02:07:14+00:00
Yes a strange comment. Opus 4.5 is significantly better than before and Opus 4.6 is even better. Same with the 5.2 and 5.3 Codex models.

If anything, the pace has increased.

This may be one of the most important graphs to keep an eye on: https://metr.org/ and it tracks well to my anecdotal experience.

You can see the industry did hit a bit of a wall in 2024 where the improvements drop below the log trend. However, in 2025 the industry is significantly _above_ the trend line.
by JSR_FDED | 2026-02-17 02:07:22+00:00
I completely agree. Same experience with my father. Sites impossible to navigate.

You’re on your laptop, now go to your phone, find your banking app, enter your PIN code (no not the same one as your ATM card), find the tiny grey scanner icon, scan the QR code on the screen of your laptop, press confirm. Now put down the phone and switch back to the laptop.

Fails 100% of the time.

The Netherlands has a centralized system for signing into all government related web sites. It’s especially egregious. You want to log in? Do NOT press the Login button, press the one saying “connection code”. For “first world” countries that should have no problem understanding the concept of an aging population it should be a criminal offense to roll out this kind of “solution”.
by salawat | 2026-02-17 02:07:37+00:00
Oh, I felt attacked there for a moment. I have a circa 2015ish desktop that's actually got hard drives in it that consist of a Slackware15 install, a partial Kali, and I think an incomplete Linux From Scratch tool chain. I've nuked it so many times. Usually by falling victim to the temptation to fuck with libc after 8 p.m. This generally has to then be resolved by either recovery LiveUSB, or in one daring case, one SSH daemon session holding on for dear life after creatively tweaking the LD path to cannibalize libraries from another partially working/compiled distro to limp the system back to a bootable order. Learned a lot about how linker/loaders worked that weekend. Then there was the war of the bootloaders when it still had windows on it. Finally purged that with prejudice.

Now I just have to figure out how in the hell to setup bootloading with UBoot for an OrangePI 5 so I can actually start using kernels other than theirs, then I'm set for my next experience crashing system boards with no survivors.

When my juniors ask how I know so much about computers, I can honestly say it's because I am the single most poorly behaved user of other people's code on the planet.
by phire | 2026-02-17 02:08:33+00:00
Sex offender registries are just registries. They only work if someone decides to actually do a query. It might prevent them from getting a childcare job, but it doesn't really prevent them from accessing children at all.

The registers are also massively bloated, some people get put on them for nothing more than public urination.

The only sex offenders who actually get regular checks that might identify this type of thing, are those on parole, or similar court ordered programs.
by saimiam | 2026-02-17 02:09:13+00:00
> Now if agents do get so good that no human review is required, you wouldn’t bother with the library in the first place.

The comment you responded to is (presumably) talking about the transition phase where LLMs can help implement but not fully deliver a feature and need human oversight.

If there are reasonably good devs in low CoL areas who can coax a new feature or bug fix for an open source project out of an LLM for $50, i think it’s worth trialling as a business model.
by sleepyguy | 2026-02-17 02:10:00+00:00
I can't get any devices to understand my mother. She speaks to SIRI or Google Nest, incredibly difficult or impossible. She has to either repeat herself a half dozen times in between asking Google Nest to stop. It is a shit show just having it play a radio station. Her fingers are so dry that she can't use a tablet. My mother inlaw has had huge success with META Glasses but unfortunately my mother won't wear them. Really hoping AI can fix things and provide older folks with a way to communicate easily.
by hackingonempty | 2026-02-17 02:10:37+00:00
Only a handful of controlled tests have been conducted and listeners failed to identify or prefer the Strads. None of the experiments were very big so there might be a perceptible difference that can be detected with more statistical power. Blinding the eyes and noses of top level musicians might bias the results.

It is very difficult to obtain access to the instruments. The general sentiment from musicians and collectors seems to be that they don't want a bunch of scientists to come into their world and tell them that what they are or are not hearing or they just don't understand why controlled tests are required.
by lynndotpy | 2026-02-17 02:11:01+00:00
Yeah, this is just a low-quality post with mostly empty words. Even if this was human generated, it's not up-to-par.

At the risk of helping train the bots to generate more convincing garbage, the commit history is unrealistic for a human dev and "the amalgamation image below" is not something a human aware of how HackerNews works would write. Those are hints, as well as the heavy use of LLM-generated content on the devs domain. There's no apparent acknowledgement of the AI use in the repo, either.
by kerkeslager | 2026-02-17 02:11:11+00:00
> OPs comment isn’t a charade, he’s pointing out that it’s a very blurry line.

Sorry, it just isn't, at least not in a lot of the examples he gave. It's not ambiguous whether "sponsored by" scenes on YouTube are ads: they're ads, and bringing them up only highlights how many OBVIOUSLY NOT BLURRY situations exist that we could easily ban.

> I’m not trying to gish gallop you here - the point isn’t to cherry pick any specific example it’s that advertising isn’t just a billboard or a sponsored VPN segment in a YT video.

Well, whether you're trying to gish gallop or not, you're succeeding!

You're simply ignoring the obvious: it seems you agree that billboards and sponsored VPN segments on YT videos are obviously ads. So we can ban those.

> That doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to have a discussion about it.

And I'm equally allowed to point out when what passes for "discussion" here is nakedly disingenuous pro-advertising FUD. Sorry, I just don't believe that you're too stupid to identify advertising when it's blatantly obvious. It's a compliment! You're intelligent!

Sure, there are some ambiguous situations, and that simply does not matter. Ban the obvious cases, then iterate to close further loopholes.

> I’m a hugely pro EU person, and support the vast majority of what they do. The Cookie Banner is a disaster and has just resulted in a massive step back for the Internet worldwide. The USB C charger rule missed the forest for the trees. Their stance on technology has been poor, misguided and misunderstood, and often pushes the needle towards US companies winning out.

Is this the "discussion" you're talking about? It seems like you're just bringing up irrelevant stuff.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-17 02:11:13+00:00
Most crimes like this are, sadly, committed by someone who has some connection to the family. It’s standard to investigate connections first. That’s not “appalling” to suggest, it’s just a sad reality of these crimes.

They should be focusing on everyone connected to the family if known. It would be negligent not to.

The confusion came from the way the article was written. They didn’t know the identity until afterward.
by daxfohl | 2026-02-17 02:11:47+00:00
Actually, anthropomorphizing a bit, if I take something I vaguely remember how to do, say integration by parts, then if I turn off my own brain's "reasoning", then the "skill" I would generate would almost certainly be wrong, and no help in solving a problem. But if I turn reasoning on, I'd probably be able to come up with the correct algorithm and write it as a skill, sure, but if reasoning is on, I'd be able to solve the problem without needing to write down the algorithm itself (and might even be more successful that way, with something concrete to work with).

OTOH something I know innately how to do, like long division, writing down the algorithm doesn't help at all. In fact if someone just gave me that algorithm and for whatever reason I didn't recognize what it was, I'd have a lot harder time following the instructions than just innately dividing the numbers.

If course anthropomorphizing is always dangerous, but it does provide potential reasons why my above rationale could be wrong.
by duxup | 2026-02-17 02:11:49+00:00
> I will sign today.

My first “real job” offer I got when I did an interview just for the experience. They offered me a job and I did not expect it. I would have to move many hours away to a big city.

I told them I needed time to think about it. That was my honest answer because I hadn’t even thought about the possibility that I would get an offer outright.

I drove home and they called and upped the offer. I didn’t even know I was playing the game…
by smoyer | 2026-02-17 02:12:28+00:00
Great article and it really takes me back to my past! I was fortunate enough to always have a VM700 or equivalent to assess the quality of my modulators but one low channel isn't it of reach. One quibble with:

> After realizing that broadcast television uses negative modulation ...

NTSC is actually vestigial side-band so while it's easy to notice the modulation below the carrier, the low frequencies which include the sync information are also present above the carrier with the effect of having twice the modulated power.
by jongjong | 2026-02-17 02:12:32+00:00
My current position is that AI companies should be taxed and the money should be distributed to open source developers.

There is a strong legal basis for this to happen because if you read the MIT license, which is one of the most common and most permissive licenses, it clearly states that the code is made available for any "Person" to use and distribute. An AI agent is not a person so technically it was never given the right to use the code for itself... It was not even given permission to read the copyrighted code, let alone ingest it, modify it and redistribute it. Moreover, it is a requirement of the MIT license that the MIT copyright notice be included in all copies or substantial portions of the software... Which agents are not doing in spite of distributing substantial portions of open source code verbatim, especially when considered in aggregate.

Moreover, the fact that a lot of open source devs have changed their views on open source since AI reinforces the idea that they never consented to their works being consumed, transformed and redistributed by AI in the first place. So the violation applies both in terms of the literal wording of the licenses and also based on intent.

Moreover, the usage of code by AI goes beyond just a copyright violation of the code/text itself; they appropriated ideas and concepts, without giving due credit to their originators so there is a deeper ethical component involved that we don't have a system to protect human innovation from AI. Human IP is completely unprotected.

That said, I think most open source devs would support AI innovation, but just not at their expense with zero compensation.