MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2026-02-14 10:13:57+00:00
Some people defend it because they are nondualists. They think the moral value of human life rounds to zero against the existence of something which can effortlessly outclass them in all domains. This is obviously confused, but they can't bring themselves to say "Very cool, and also I think humans are inherently special and deserve to continue existing even if all we do is lie around all day and watch the Hallmark channel."

Happy Valentine's day to those who celebrate btw <3
by toldnotmywrath | 2026-02-14 10:15:14+00:00
The problem with this "creative destruction" hand-wave is:

- there's no thought given to what happens in the interim. Forget the welfare of those displaced, consider what acts the desperation will lead them to.

- these replacement roles may very well never exist or will pay much, much lower than they do now.

- this disruption happens entirely in services, LLMs are not improving agricultural yield, most industries steeped in physical reality will mostly cut overhead for generating text.

- the gains from automation do not necessarily have to diffuse over us all, the capital can simply accumulate in the hands of the firms.

You cannot keep pointing to the past when you are suggesting an entirely new never before seen moment is upon us.
by benstopics | 2026-02-14 10:15:24+00:00
I did exactly that originally. But here is the reality. Michael only knows BASIC and he has felt the agency to continue patching and working on the code, adding features even, since it is still BASIC. When others tried to port it to C++ be felt like he had no agency and wasn't motivated to help. So while he's still motivated to work on it, it needs to stay in a language he can work with. And thanks for wishlisting!!!
by dwedge | 2026-02-14 10:15:38+00:00
I agree with you but I also agree with the person you wrote to. There's a section in Naomi Klein's No Logo about banning advertising, and what that would actually mean in effect. It essentially comes down to not allowing, for example, different cereal brands to have different designs because then the design of the box becomes a kind of advertising.

It might sound nit picking, and it absolutely is, but if we banned Internet advertising (at the exact definition you personally consider advertising to be), you can guarantee the advertising industry would be looking at exactly these loopholes until you reframed your definition.

It's much like how in the UK they banned advertising for tobacco, and years later had to expand it so that supermarkets cannot even show the products visibly because the brand has their own inherent advertising that's visible if you can see it.
by CipherBolt | 2026-02-14 10:16:05+00:00
Roblox paid out $1.5B last year, mostly to simple progression loops built on shared assets and a massive free library baked into the platform.

With Opus 4.6 we’re already cloning top-performing game archetypes end-to-end, which shifts the constraint from building to distribution.

BloxBot is free, open-source, built on OpenCode, and available now - optimized for the slop cannons. You still have to do the distribution though.
by stock_toaster | 2026-02-14 10:16:09+00:00
odin - jangafx’s embergen[1]

jai - thekla’s new game, announced but not yet released —- order of the sinking star[2]

[1]: https://jangafx.com/software/embergen

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Sinking_Star
by hi_hi | 2026-02-14 10:18:18+00:00
I'm not worries about AI job losses...yet.

I am worried about when they start wanting to make a profit on AI. I'm assuming we either have to pay the actual price for these things (I have no idea what that looks like, but I'm pretty sure it isn't $20 or $200 per month), or we have to put up with the full force advertising. Or most likely, we have to do both.

It'll be another one of those "I remember when..." stories we get to tell our kids. Like "I remember when emails were useful and exciting" or "I remember when I could order a taxi and it was clean, reliable and even came with a bottle of water..." or "I remember when I could have conversations with strangers on the internet that didn't instantly descend into arguments and hate".
by dgellow | 2026-02-14 10:19:55+00:00
I have an iPhone SE, and social signaling has literally not cross my mind at any point when deciding for it. It has the perfect size and form factor, I know it will be supported for at minimum 5y, and the cost is perfectly reasonable. That’s pretty much the only things I care about. It also has a fingerprint reader, and none of your reasons are things I do care about. I think I pay 2.99€ for monthly storage? Which is fine, that’s low enough that I couldn’t care less if that’s cheaper somewhere else

So, that’s a data point if you want to consider others perspective
by knbknb | 2026-02-14 10:21:46+00:00
That's what had to happen.

To bid for lucrative defense contracts (and who knows what else from which organizations and governments).

Also, competitors are much less constrained by safety constraints, and slowly grabbing market share from them.

As mentioned by others: Enormous amounts of investor money at stake, pressure to generate revenue.

Next up: they will replace "safe" with "lethal" or "lethality" to be in sync with the current US administration.
by Tyrubias | 2026-02-14 10:22:09+00:00
Even if what you’re saying is true, this just goes to show how badly we need to rein in the ultra-wealthy by taxing their unrealized gains. Like I’ve pointed out elsewhere in the comments, letting billionaires (some of whom will soon be trillionaires) get away with having tax-free spending power disenfranchises the many people who labor for a living. The very fact you so casually say “their media outlets” just goes to show how their concentrated wealth threatens the public discourse. As a society, we can’t allow people to use their wealth to influence government and civilization as a whole without at the very least being able to tax said wealth. The solution to taxing the rich isn’t to downplay the issue for electoral convenience. It is to educate and build a grassroots movement that can oppose the power of concentrated media ownership. The very points you make kind of undermine any principled opposition to taxing unrealized gains.
by bjackman | 2026-02-14 10:22:29+00:00
I think weird acting styles can be part of the joy of watching older media. Seems like films mostly switched over to "modern" acting in the 70s (?) and TV had a lot more variety in style (and quality lol) way up into the "modern era".

I'm not gonna say "it's not worse it's just different", coz TBH... It's worse lol. If modern acting was a rare minority style of practice I would seek it out voraciously. But, for the variety I do think it's fun to watch old stuff too!
by grey-area | 2026-02-14 10:22:51+00:00
Well I think it is interesting as an illustration of what it is actually doing - generating words based on the corpus, and what it is not doing - reasoning based on an internal world model or system of logic or mathematics.

People tend to forget and this is a useful reminder.

So if you target ‘complex systems engineering’ with such a model you will inevitably fail unless the work you’re doing is in the training data, in which case you’ll get a bad copy of it.
Markdown Notes for VS Code
by Elharis | 2026-02-14 10:23:01+00:00
I built a VS Code extension for managing Markdown notes in a sidebar while coding.

I know you can just create .md files, and that works great. This is for when you want quick sidebar access to notes without leaving VS Code - useful for project-specific documentation, debugging notes, or keeping context while coding.

WYSIWYG editor with formatting tools. Might help some people who prefer this workflow.

Repo: https://github.com/elhariss/BunNote
by arjie | 2026-02-14 10:23:27+00:00
One of the notable things about FAANG processes that I've observed from my friends there is that roles and processes are mechanized[0]. Individuals are placed like precision robotics in a bigger machine. This kind of structure means that you have a defined process for promotion or pay raises and you know what your role is. In fact, one might even posit that the ability for these large organizations to create a machine to extract surplus from labour in a systematic fashion is the reason for their success.

For most people, this is wonderful. Knowing what you will be valued for is very useful. It says "do the things that are useful to us" and "stop doing the things that are useless to us" and tells you "these are the things that are useful and those are the things that are not useful". At their scale, rare errors in the process will inevitably show up, but smaller companies often have these errors at higher rates. All that to say, success often comes from identifying what is useful to the organization and what is not, and then what is useful and what is not to the person who has control over one's role in the organization.

In mechanized organizations, this should be easier. In unmechanized organizations, one's skill at this will dominate one's technical skill at determining success. But it's just a skill, and if you cannot find a way to train it, the easiest workaround is to ask the person making the decision: "if I wanted it in 3 months, what would I have to do?".

You may get an answer that was untrue 3 months later, but you just shrank your timeline in a way that is much more meaningful, and perhaps more likely is that you'll either get an unrealistic timeline (which is useful signal), or you will hit it and get what you wanted (which is also desirable).

0: A classic example of this is that no one can "get you into Google/Facebook/whatever". This reveals the other non-obvious purpose of their interview process besides quality-control of hires: quality-control and rules compliance on interviewers.
by SparklyCircuit | 2026-02-14 10:23:43+00:00
Moreover openai (i.e. chatgpt) is facing a tricky financial situation. Openai's sources of income pertain to profitability from investors and API/subscription business model. Supposedly they are losing on every subscriber. And the reason why it held up is because there was a lot of hope generated causing investors to overinvest.

With the past investments of Nvidia into openai, the business model held up. Lately, AMD has caught up enough in AI efficiency that openai decided to built an entire stack of servers in AMD. openai's boyfriend i.e Nvidia did not like that and with Nvidia unable to guarantee return of investments via sales of it's cards to openai, Jensen Huang i.e. CEO of Nvidia is backing off from investing 100B$ simultaneously tanking a -6% of stock in a week.
by karinafromx | 2026-02-14 10:26:16+00:00
I've been exploring early-stage SaaS websites lately, a lot of incredible products with unclear presentation.

So I'm redesigning them, with focus on clarity, trust, and that "I want to use this" feeling.

3 so far
Veriad AI - https://x.com/karinaperetei/status/2022616581625237827?s=20
Voygr - https://x.com/karinaperetei/status/2022255610117447893?s=20
Martini - https://x.com/karinaperetei/status/2022015136253587755?s=20
by astrobe_ | 2026-02-14 10:26:30+00:00
France is considering a ban on certain social media for minors, and parental consent on all social media for minors under 15, pretty much like Australia. They had work around EU laws that prevented them to force service providers to do things, the trick they used is to make it illegal for those services to let minors register on the platform, because EU law acknowledge that local laws on forbidden content apply.

If this law passes and they "blacklist" some of these design-for-addiction (sorry, "engagement") platforms, I believe it should send a strong signal for adults as well. Most adults are pretty much aware that these platforms are bad for everyone; according to some polls, the public opinion is unambiguously in favor of these laws.
by thrdbndndn | 2026-02-14 10:29:16+00:00
I don't get how it works.

> Encoding: Files are chunked, encoded with fountain codes, and embedded into video frames

Wouldn't YouTube just compress/re-encode your video and ruin your data (assuming you want bit-by-bit accurate recovery)?

If you have some redundancy to counter this, wouldn't it be super inefficient?

(Admittedly, I've never heard of "fountain codes", which is probably crucial to understanding how it works.)
by bjackman | 2026-02-14 10:29:26+00:00
The thing is, I doubt anyone at TikTok ever says "this design choice is good because it's addictive". Almost certainly, their leadership gives them metrics to target, like watch time, and they just hypyothesise and experiment on changes with those metrics in mind. Almost certainly the design of TikTok is almost entirely emergent. Just like the scientific method is "revealing" truth I think TikTok is just "revealing" the design that maximises its target metrics.

So what we have is a machine designed to optimise for something adjacent to addictiveness, and then some rules saying "you can't design for addictiveness"...

What happens when an underspecified vibe rule clashes with a billion dollar optimisation machine? Surely the machine wins every time? The machine is already defeating every ruleset that it's ever come up against.

Feels like the only way regulation could achieve anything is if it said "you can't build a billion dollar optimisation machine at all".
by GaryNumanVevo | 2026-02-14 10:31:17+00:00
I always find it interesting that these conversations get flooded with new accounts making false equivalencies. Thermite grenades (~500g of explosive material) are not going to evaporate people like a 2000kg thermobaric weapon would. You might even say that Israel has more of an expectation of precision and reduction of civilian causalities given they have precise munitions.
by xorcist | 2026-02-14 10:31:53+00:00
That power isn't even a rounding error compared to their power today. In those decades you had commercial dominance over a niche sector. Today you play kingmaker together with the other oligarchs.

Big Tech today is the media. Taken together, they completely control what a majority of the populace knows about the world. It is considered completely impractical and somewhat suspicious not to carry one of their location tracking communication devices at all times.

Orwell's Ministry of Truth could not dream of what Meta, Alphabet, OpenAI and Apple can do at any time, anywhere.
by elihu | 2026-02-14 10:32:31+00:00
A minor terminology quibble: the video refers to the Nth harmonic as if it's the fundamental frequency times N+1, but it's usually fairly standard to refer to the frequency that's N times the fundamental as the Nth Harmonic. So, the fundamental is the 1st harmonic.

For overtones, there's less of an established standard, but usually the 1st overtone is twice the fundamental, the 2nd overtone is 3x, and so on. (I tend to avoid talking in terms of overtones because of the ambiguity.)
by peebee67 | 2026-02-14 10:32:31+00:00
Third amendment was tested in 2011 when Nevada police decided they wanted to occupy the house of a disinterested neighbour to a suspect and then when he refused, bashed down his door, shot him with pepper balls, pulled him out of his house and jailed him for obstruction. Then went across the street to his dad's house, tricked him out of the house, and arrested him too when he tried to go back home. Charges were dropped, and courts ultimately decided that police are not peacetime military, so 3A doesn't apply.

http://www.allgov.com/news/controversies/in-rare-third-amend...
by logdahl | 2026-02-14 10:32:45+00:00
Super cool stuff! I love the idea of games being refurbished to the point that it can be kept, almost source original, and still played years down the line. For example, I love Another World for this, being just a bytecode blob where each port is just a VM (good writeup: https://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons/index.html).
by quietbritishjim | 2026-02-14 10:35:10+00:00
> Instead of debating for years (like other languages), zig just tries things out.

Many other languages do try things out, they just do it in a separate official channel from the stable release or unofficial extensions. Depending on how many users the language has, that may still be more implementation experience than Zig making all devs try it.

I suspect the actual difference is the final decision making process rather than the trial process. In C++, language extensions are tried out first (implementation experience is a requirement for standard acceptance) but committee debates drag on for years. Whereas Python also requires trial periods outside the stable language but decisions are made much more quickly (even now that there's a steering rather than single BDFL).
by arjie | 2026-02-14 10:35:10+00:00
Videos do disappear, though. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1ioz4x1/is_it_...

Searching hn.algolia.com for examples will yield numerous ones.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23758547

https://bsky.app/profile/sinevibes.bsky.social/post/3lhazuyn...
by dmit | 2026-02-14 10:36:05+00:00
A wrapper over what?? Bun includes the JavaScriptCore engine for JS evaluation, but it's so much more.

As for financial database concerns, if you're serious about including a project like that in your system, you have thorough correctness and performance testing stages before you commit to it. And once it passes the hurdles, at that point what difference does it make if it's written in a beta language, or a bunch of shell scripts in a trench coat, or whatever.
by thot_experiment | 2026-02-14 10:41:01+00:00
Is there an actually good alternative? I guess we're gonna swap to something on top of Matrix but I would really really like something that has the same streaming/voice chat capability and idioms. Probably half the time I'm using discord I'm in voice chat, and probably half the time I'm doing that I'm screen sharing, is there some way I can keep doing that?
by pjmlp | 2026-02-14 10:42:10+00:00
One should try, while being aware of the realities of language adoption.

I disagree Zig is that great deal of a language, it would have been if we were talking about 1990's programming language ecosystem, not in 21st century.

Use-after-free problems should not be something we still need to worry about, when tooling like PurifyPlus trace back to 1992.
by JackFr | 2026-02-14 10:42:50+00:00
Losing your job sucks. Typically, there is no silver lining. I’ve been laid off 2x and those were both among the worst experiences of my life.

> rawness is an excellent time to reflect on what went right and what I could've done better, before the brain starts coping with the trauma of the event in question.

But that isn’t what he’s done in the essay. I don’t think he’s doing an honest assessment of what he could have done better. Rather there’s a thin patina of “I should have realized . . .” and then a litany of complaints about the company. And the complaints about the company are the same usual ones that everyone makes. I HAVE BEEN THERE. I HAVE MADE THEM TOO.

But I would advise, in six months in a year when you’re in a new job, to take a HARD look at yourself. Try not to cast people as villains and thus can be a learning experience.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-02-14 10:43:16+00:00
> We do this to give contributors a chance to learn in a low-stakes scenario that nevertheless has real impact they can be proud of, where we can help shepherd them along the process. This educational and community-building effort is wasted on ephemeral AI agents.

I really like that stance. I’m a big advocate of “Train by do.” It’s basically the story of my career.

And in the next paragraph, they mention a problem that I often need to manually mitigate, when using LLM-supplied software: it was sort of a “quick fix,” that may not have aged well.

The Ars Technica thing is probably going to cause them a lot of damage, and make big ripples. That’s pretty shocking, to me.
by Tyrubias | 2026-02-14 10:43:19+00:00
Whenever I bring up the idea of taxing the rich via unrealized gains, people oppose it by saying it’ll hurt investment. The reality is that years of huge stock market returns haven’t made life easier for the vast majority of people who actually do the work that makes companies successful. At least in the US, wages haven’t kept up with housing, healthcare, or basic costs, and I’m sure European workers face these kinds of problems too. At some point, it’s fair to ask why protecting unlimited tax-free growth for the top 0.1% should matter more than the financial stability of the workers actually doing the hard work to drive that growth. If the Netherlands finds that people avoid taxes by investing into real estate rentals, then maybe there should be laws covering those loopholes too.
by jimnotgym | 2026-02-14 10:43:33+00:00
My dad, who has been a carpenter for over 50 years used to rail against boxing in pipes.

"Once upon a time people were just glad to have running water, now it has to arrive by magic"

In his house there is a duct behind the skirting boards upstairs. You can fish a wire to most places from there.

His other pet hate was glued down cupboard flooring. Squeaky floors were a common complaint in new houses. It was normally caused by not levelling the first floor joists properly (levelling the tops is the correct way), and just dropping them on the walls. The solution industry came up with was to glue the tounges and grooves together, and later to glue the boards to the joists as well. This is a big problem if you need to take up the floor for a leaking pipe. Whereas before you just cut the tongue of a board with a circular saw, pulled it up, and put a noggin under the joint, now you have to destroy a board, and try and buy a similar one
by the_mitsuhiko | 2026-02-14 10:45:48+00:00
I’m a casual user and the 0.16 changes scare me. I tried multiple attempts now, even with full LLM support to upgrade and the result is just a) painful and b) not very good. I have high doubts that the current IO system of 0.16 will make it for another release given the consequences of their choices.
by alhirzel | 2026-02-14 10:46:19+00:00
So many new features! The little things like 45 degree crosshairs, dynamic animation of overlapping lines, indication when bumping up against a selection filter - truly great polish. Board variants, propagation delay profiles, groups - the future is here! I hope KiCad is the next Blender-grade success story in OSS. It is certainly poised to disrupt commercial options.
by moogly | 2026-02-14 10:46:48+00:00
The projected world population by 2035 is around 8.9 billion.
I don't know how many humanoid robots (capabilities undefined) we have today, but any we do have are not likely going to be in operation, but it has to be below 1 million, so let's just round down to 0 for simplicity's sake.

So someone's going to have to build just shy of 1 billion robots per year that can be robust enough to remain being operable 9 years later, starting now. What do you think?

Did you perhaps type a 0 when you meant to type a 2?
by arjie | 2026-02-14 10:47:12+00:00
That's on the harness - the device actually sending the prompt to the model. You can write a different harness that feeds the problem back in for however long you want. Ask Claude Code or Codex to build it for you in as minimal a fashion as possible and you'll see that a naïve version is not particularly more complex than `while true; do prompt $file >> file; done` (though it's not that precisely, obviously).
by Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe | 2026-02-14 10:47:54+00:00
> the pay is too good to find alternative.

You don't sound psychopathic so I'm genuinely curious what you do with your money to keep your conscious clean.

Bevause I think your salary is practically blood money at this point.

Blood of the additional instagram girls with anorexia.
The additional children with severe myopia.
The additional people murdered by persons radicalized by media that had to polarize news to survive the loss in readership or by the false advertising of quality control on hate speech.
And the list goes on.