MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by csallen | 2026-02-15 18:30:56+00:00
> The question is whether we are comfortable with an economic model where creative and technical labour consistently produces outsized returns captured by capital, not by the people who actually built the thing.

You have two mistakes in your thinking.

1. You assume that people are not comfortable with this economic model, when in fact millions of people are making the choice to be on the labor side of this model on a daily basis, who could actively afford to be on the ownership side.
2. You mistakenly believe that "the thing" that produces returns is the product/service/offering when in reality it's the entire business.

Let's start with #2.

Producing and capturing value is about more than just building the offering, i.e. coding something. Millions of people have coded something "valuable" and made $0, because building something is not enough. You have to make sure people learn about the thing, and they have to find it good enough to pay you for it, and then actually pay you for it, and you have to be able to make this happen repeatedly, a sufficient number of times and at a high enough price point to sustain and ideally grow the endeavor.

This goes far behind simply building a product. It requires building a business.

And let me tell you, my friend, software engineers at FAANG companies are only building the software, not the business. The people building the business are the ones making the biggest earnings.

Creators in every industry do not like to hear this. Take the music industry, for example. Everyone who can sing or create music hates the "middlemen". The record labels and whatnot. The DJs. They hate the grind. Every creator wishes that simply creating was enough, and many naively believe that it is. But we live in the real world, which has these things called markets and people and psychology. Markets are competitive, and people and psychology are complex, and someone who works to build a business (an offering + market research + a marketing/sales/distribution process + a viable business model) is going to beat the pants off someone who only wants to create the offering and do nothing else.

Building a business is incredibly difficult, and incredibly risky.

It's more likely than not that you will lose a ton of money and a ton of time. Most people would rather not face this challenge, take this risk, or endure these losses. Most would rather learn a fraction of the skills required (e.g. just the programming part, just the design part, just the singing part, etc.), then allow someone else to do the hard work of starting the business and turning it into something from nothing.

Most people would rather sell their time and services for a comfy salary instead of trying to become an owner. Which is why there are large numbers of well-paid white collar workers who make this choice every day, rather than quitting to start a business.

This is not slavery, it's people being content with what they have and trading risk for security. (God I hate writing any sort of sentence "it's not X it's Y" because AI has ruined this phrasing.)
by 12345hn6789 | 2026-02-15 18:31:10+00:00
Yes these are found in a few places in Egypt and notably some are dug vertically [0]. Along with these "scoop" marks there are a few tombs "boxes at serapeum" that have nearly perfectly squared off cuts and perfectly smooth surfaces. [1] These are the main points of contention

We are leaning into conspiracy theories / not accepted history but making these marks with the currently thought tools seems quite insensible, and are related to the article. Folks seem to think we have not found the real tools that created these structures. The vertical inward scoop marks are especially suspect.

[0] - https://www.theancientconnection.com/aswan-unfinished-obelis...
[1] - https://www.theancientconnection.com/megaliths/egypt/the-ser...
by pavel_lishin | 2026-02-15 18:31:23+00:00
Oh man, you weren't kidding. Part of me wants to print out some of these pages to use in my D&D game, somehow.

(Although, part of me is also uneasy with that idea - using someone's culture & heritage as set dressing, without paying it any of the actual respect it deserves. It would be just as easy to copy a few paragraphs from Wikipedia, & use a Star Trek font to make something look fantastical, which is something I've done in the past.)
by n8cpdx | 2026-02-15 18:31:44+00:00
It doesn’t just seem hard, it is hard. I’m working on it, but here’s a few examples:

- I want to delete my Amazon account because service has gotten worse and they mistreat their employees. I also want to be able to get groceries, but I don’t have a car and the walking distance grocery store just closed (due to mismanagement). Now I need to spend hours every weekend walking to the farmers market or to the Safeway a considerably distance away.

- I want my prescriptions, but the pharmacy I used to walk to is closing. Now I need to find a pharmacy delivery service that isn’t tied up with Amazon.

- I signed up for One Medical before it was Amazon and it was great. Now it sucks. There aren’t exactly a lot of great alternatives even if I wanted to pay a premium. Wtf do I do?

- I have a Microsoft account I want to delete. If I do that, I will lose access to my Xbox games, and I will lose access to download anything at all on my Xbox 360, which is loaded up with XBLA games I can only use because Microsoft has kept the download part of their store working.

- I’m not on Instagram, but businesses seem to think Instagram has completely replaced the World Wide Web - many restaurants don’t post their hours _anywhere_ but Instagram. I cannot access these details without logging in. A local “speakeasy” coffee shop has a password you have to get from the Instagram story. I just can’t go. Unfortunately the employees are not accommodating. I’ve left a nasty review but that can only go so far. Without a big tech account I can’t even do that.
by nine_k | 2026-02-15 18:32:11+00:00
Do high-end brands even produce 300 kilotons of clothing? Assuming, very generously, that a piece of clothing, with packaging and all, weights 1 kg, it would be 300M pieces of clothing; that could be an entire production run of something very ubiquitous (say, Levi's 501), but definitely not high-end.
by Terr_ | 2026-02-15 18:32:38+00:00
Aside, the original meaning of Franklin's words are less-inspiring but perhaps more-interesting.

He's saying the local democratic legislature must not give up its "freedom" to pass laws taxing the powerful Penn dynasty which almost owns Pennsylvania.

He wants to reject a deal offered by the Penns: A big lump of money for temporary military security now, in exchange for an agreement that they can never be taxed ever again.
by undeveloper | 2026-02-15 18:32:40+00:00
There's no kind way to interpret "They're pushing agendas, and not hiding it; rather, flaunting it." that isn't deeply hateful of news orgs a whole. Additionally this talk is almost always followed by "I therefore just allow myself to passively hear news through others (which have no biases)" or "I only get my news from hitlers-strongest-soldiers.com" or similar "unbiased" news sources (or maybe just "youtube"/"tiktok"). Deeply conspiratorial thinking and anti-intellectual to think literally everyone is out to get you. I don't think I'm smarter than everyone (which is why I rely on other people to give me the news), but I am at least smarter than this person.
by xp84 | 2026-02-15 18:33:25+00:00
Well, it's pretty hard to generalize that to the entire globe, or universe. Imagine if an alien race started landing thousands of crates on Earth full of cars, computers, clothes, etc. Every day for 30 years the crates come, all of it's free. Several dynamics can arise:

1. The elites grab the crates and hoard them, leveraging their existing power to make sure they enrich themselves and extend their power. They sell the items, but at a lower price than the Earthly-produced items, which is easy since they have 100% margin.

2. Whether or not #1 happens, it becomes impractical to make any of these goods for a living, so people stop. Eventually, the factories are dismantled or simply crumble.

Now Earth is dependent on the aliens to keep sending the crates. If the aliens ever get wiped out, or just elect a populist who doesn't like to give aid to inferior planets, then we won't have any cars, or clothes, or computers.
by idiotsecant | 2026-02-15 18:33:41+00:00
Yes, that is what many people thought because people assume that a state with a reasonable commitment to individual liberty would have safeguards in place to force merchants to not spy on them.

The fault is not with the idea of expecting that you own the data that you made and the equipment that you purchased. The fault here is the regulatory structure that makes you by default not the owner of your data or your things.
by RamblingCTO | 2026-02-15 18:35:12+00:00
AI is not killing SaaS, there is no real proof for that. No one wants to host, maintain, and be liable for shit other people can do better for less money. You share R&D costs with other customers. It's more efficient.

This take is so unimaginably stupid and far from the truth it makes me angry. You have network effects, liability, maintenance, mental/managerial complexity, integrations and on and on the list goes. I would be weary of anyone proposing an issue and selling you the solution right with it.

You can also cook your own food. But do you? Do you break your own bread? Do you make your own pasta? No you don't. You pay for an outcome. SaaS is the same. Just because you can do it yourself doesn't mean you should. The code is the smallest part of a SaaS.
This will be the same thing like "let's move devs to a cheaper country". Look how that turned out.
by lysace | 2026-02-15 18:36:03+00:00
This waste generates around 5.6 million tons of CO2 emissions – almost equal to Sweden’s total net emissions in 2021.

(Very) tongue in cheek: In 2024 Sweden was CO2 net neutral. Cause: Increased growth in forest mass after a few years of increased precipitation and reduced damage from spruce bark beetles.

(https://lantbruksnytt.se/den-svenska-skogen-binder-mer-koldi...)
by manwe150 | 2026-02-15 18:36:44+00:00
Seems in line with their original purpose still. They seemed to always want to be a source to suggest a product that is good enough for a consumer, to help avoid decision paralysis, and avoid fake products that are both expensive and flawed. Suggesting a list of gifts that are suitable and not deeply flawed is exactly what a lot of people are probably looking for around Black Friday.
by _diyar | 2026-02-15 18:37:24+00:00
AFAIK their business model is to send skilled engineers to client sites to be consultants and developers. Their selling point is not some product/code per-se (ie. they have a code base with existing analysis tools, but nothing crazy), but the fact that they jump into whatever situation and grind through problems.

The problem is that they also keep close ties to law-enforcement and (para-)military clients, and while they promise to keep your data safe, they would never inform you if they received a warrant from the government to share the data.
by JPKab | 2026-02-15 18:37:42+00:00
I've been on HN for well over 10 years. I literally volunteered for Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaigns, and my comments in that time period clearly show my politics. I taught free web scraping workshops at the Center for American Progress to journalists back then. None of my policy preferences have changed. What's changed is the frothing at the mouth radicalism and moralizing of the team I used to support.

I'm not religious, and hate religious radicals, but ideologues act identically, just with secular idols. I didn't see that until I watched what the leftist ideologies did to the quality of life in two places I used to live in:

SF and Boulder.

I'm a 2012 Democrat, which makes me a fascist to a 2026 Democrat.
by K0balt | 2026-02-15 18:38:01+00:00
I’m no industry insider, but tipping would seem to me to be a key indicator for discretionary spending, so a very valuable data point. I have no doubt that a dataset of 1m clients and their tipping patterns would be worth >500k per client (dataset user). A list of consistent, large or skimpy tippers significantly more. (Skimpy so as to know to target them with “deals”, big tippers for the upsell and value added advertising.
by mmooss | 2026-02-15 18:38:13+00:00
These comments appear everywhere, as if people never made changes. Look at the enormous changes prior generations have made. Look at the changes from the conservative/MAGA movement, #metoo, and the George Floyd protests. The claim doesn't stand up to any examination.

Comments like these are a distraction. All we need to do is get to work. If people took action every time they felt like posting these comments, we'd get a lot done.
by jibal | 2026-02-15 18:38:19+00:00
> you literally made baseless comment

It's sad that people lie here. It's commonly recognized that programs run 1.5-5 times slower.

> if something is actually 5x slower, it's very likely a performance bug that can be fixed, as FillC's author has made it clear in several opportunities.

Another lie from someone who doesn't even know what the program is called.
by brandonli28 | 2026-02-15 18:38:20+00:00
This actually won't work against YouTube's compression. The DC coefficient is always quantized, rounded, scale, and any other things. That means that these bits are pretty much guaranteed to be destroyed immediately. If this is the case for every single block, then data is unrecoverable. Also, chrominance is not used on purpose, because chrominance is compressed much more aggressively compared to luminance.
by nullsanity | 2026-02-15 18:39:03+00:00
Gwtar seems like a good solution to a problem nobody seemed to want to fix.
However, this website is... something else. It's full of inflated self impprtantance, overly bountiful prose, and feels like someone never learned to put in the time to write a shorter essay. Even the about page contains a description of the about page.

I don't know if anyone else gets "unemployed megalomaniacal lunatic" vibes, but I sure do.
by noduerme | 2026-02-15 18:39:07+00:00
Friend, while I was driving a taxi in 2001, I conceived of a system that would let anyone directly order a taxi driver from a pool of drivers who signed up through a central SMS messaging system and updated their zip code when they were waiting for a fare. The main problem with that idea was that it was completely illegal because it was outside the licensed taxi system.

When Bitcoin emerged, I wrote a gambling site. That also was illegal in America, so I kept it closed to the US but tried to get my original games licensed in Nevada, which was a fool's errand since it takes $500k just to get them to look at a game and there's a 3 year waiting list, mostly Bally. And look where we are now with online gambling.

The lesson of my life isn't that I need ideas with a bigger moat. It's that being able to code my ideas well is meaningless compared to having half a billion dollars to buy off a legislature. I'm a coward, I guess, because I never wanted to break the law. Now I live in a timeline where every major company in those two sectors achieved market dominance and legality because the people who started them were willing to flout the law, raised enough capital and fought off lawsuits long enough to bribe their way into legitimacy.

I have a fantastic idea for an AI service, too, and it wouldn't be hard to implement... but it will almost certainly raise dozens of legal issues until someone with more balls than me comes along and just does it. Money is nice but I don't need that kind of trouble. That's why those ideas stay on the wall.
by b00twhy | 2026-02-15 18:39:17+00:00
But why?

In this synthesized machine states era do I want to still run a bloated, buggy web browser?

I think I will keep working on synthesizing a replacement for the desktop metaphor of a blank viewport/canvas and sampling from a model of vision data, tweaking at the edge when labels are missing or wrong, edges don't align, saving it back to model

Think "boot to Blender" or Unreal Engine, synthesizing desktop and text files and such inside that environment

There is increasingly little reason to import all the state of legacy software beyond a minimal Linux distribution

Prompt to binary is on the way, skipping the generation of the intermediary code layer altogether

Code is legacy technology from the 1950s era of using machines; arbitrary syntax for labeling with human context the use case of a memory address

No reason the labeling has to be at the machine level. That can be vectors and labels of human value applied right to what's shown onscreen

What tech people should be focused on is political action that keeps hardware open and models open and not locked behind data center.

Software dev as we knew it is already over technology wise, social acceptance has yet to propagate, but social acceptance is an eventually consistent system. It’ll happen
by crazygringo | 2026-02-15 18:39:23+00:00
Its switch to a swiping interface didn't happen until a couple years after Match bought it. And everything became like Tinder, not just Match apps. Because it genuinely worked better.

And yeah I can totally see how the long profiles could be useful for finding friends. But that's not what the site was ever primarily meant for.

The reality is that OkC basically started out for grad students in Brooklyn to be able to find each other, the kind of person who loves writing and reading profiles. But that's not most people, and so as they expanded across the country they shifted to the format that worked better for most people.
by tomjen3 | 2026-02-15 18:39:55+00:00
Your comment is shocking to me. AI coding works. I have seen it with my own eyes last week and today.

I can therefore only assume that you have not coded with the latest models. If you experiences are with GPT 4o or earlier all you have only used the mini or light models, then I can totally understand where you’re coming from. Those models can do a lot, but they aren’t good enough to run on their own.

The latest models absolutely are I have seen it with my own eyes. Ai moves fast.
Show HN: PolyMCP – A framework for structuring and orchestrating MCP agents
by justvugg | 2026-02-15 18:40:05+00:00
I’ve been working on PolyMCP, an open-source framework designed to make it easier to build and coordinate agents using the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Most MCP tooling today focuses primarily on exposing tools. PolyMCP instead targets the agent layer: how to structure agents properly, connect them to multiple MCP servers, and make them reliable in real-world workflows.

PolyMCP provides:
• A clean way to implement MCP-compatible tool servers in Python or TypeScript
• An agent abstraction that can connect to multiple MCP endpoints (stdio, HTTP, etc.)
• Built-in orchestration primitives for handling multi-step tasks
• A CLI to scaffold projects and run an inspector UI to debug tools and agent interactions
• A modular architecture that makes it easier to compose skills and reuse components across projects

The goal is to reduce ad-hoc glue code between models and tools. Instead of manually wiring everything together for each new setup, PolyMCP offers a structured way to:
• Register tools as MCP servers
• Attach them to one or more agents
• Explicitly manage execution flow and state
• Inspect and debug interactions

It’s MIT licensed and aimed at developers building production-grade automation, internal copilots, or multi-tool assistants.

Repository: https://github.com/poly-mcp/PolyMCP
Show HN: Custom ML model – if Spotify was instrumental
by day6 | 2026-02-15 18:40:06+00:00
Come make use of my 1TB Cloudfront free tier and try out my BiMamba UNet model :D

This is not SOTA, though it was also only trained for 3 days on a singular A40 (~$30). It was also vibe coded in a week, very much possible thanks to combining existing ideas in the space and opus.

I had a custom dataset of ~500 songs, from finding official instrumentals and vibe-code aligning them together + some vibe coded synthetic snippets coming from "please get some vocal / voice and instrument textures/datasets and piece them together", "please generate edge cases like vocaloid filters, or really quiet instrumentals over very loud voices", etc.

I have one GPU running all conversions rn, so new imports might be slow but once done, they should be good forever! (and an existing pool of songs exist)
Show HN: Microgpt is a GPT you can visualize in the browser
by b44 | 2026-02-15 18:40:35+00:00
very much inspired by karpathy's microgpt of the same name. it's (by default) a 4000 param GPT/LLM/NN that learns to generate names. this is sorta an educational tool in that you can visualize the activations as they pass through the network, and click on things to get an explanation of them.
by randomtoast | 2026-02-15 18:41:17+00:00
I think part of the ArchWiki’s strength is that it treats documentation as first-class infrastructure. There is a shared expectation that if you solve something nontrivial, you upstream it into the wiki in a reasonably neutral, upstream-oriented way. That creates compounding returns over time. It also helps that Arch has a relatively coherent user base with similar assumptions about init systems, packaging, and defaults.

Many other distributions fragment their knowledge across mailing lists, forum posts, bug trackers, and random blog entries. That worked when search engines were good at surfacing niche technical content. With current search quality, especially the SEO noise layer, the absence of a canonical, well-curated wiki becomes very visible.
by daveguy | 2026-02-15 18:42:23+00:00
The failure mode is getting lumped into AI because AI is a lot more likely to fail.

We've done this with Neural Networks v1, Expert Systems, Neural Networks v2, SVM, etc, etc. only a matter of time before we figured it out with deep neural networks. Clearly getting closer with every cycle, but no telling how many cycles we have left because there is no sound theoretical framework.
by rustyhancock | 2026-02-15 18:42:23+00:00
Stunning work! Astounding progress since its under 3 months old from PCB to this result.

Funnily enough I've been musing this past month would I better separate work if I had a limited Amiga A1200 PC for anything other than work! This would nicely fit.

Please do submit to HackaDay I'm sure they'd salivate over this and it's amazing when you have the creator in the comments. Even if just to explain no a 555 wouldn't quite achieve the same result. No not even a 556...
by jjkaczor | 2026-02-15 18:43:12+00:00
Why do you want those brands to exist?

Some perspectives would say that they serve no real purpose other than performative wealth display and distribution. They appeal to everyone at fundamental psychological levels to "fit in" with a popular trend or "in group".

Their actual quality is often no better than other manufactured goods. It is their perceived quality and style that are the entire reason their brands exist.

(and... I can admit that certain "luxury brands" are definitely appealing to me personally, even if they make little "logical sense" to own - maybe not clothing so much, but... watches...)