MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by philipdavis | 2026-02-06 22:14:07+00:00
The MCP approach is brilliant! I've been solving the same friction problem from a different angle. I mostly use Anki to improve my vocabulary, and ended up building a tiny browser-side tool for myself (now called Wordwise / Anki Dictionary) that lets me double click any word on a webpage, get a clean definition + the sentence it appears in, and export it straight into Anki with one click.

It’s been a surprisingly good middle ground between fully manual cards and fully LLM dumps. If anyone’s curious: https://wordwise.me
by skybrian | 2026-02-06 22:14:42+00:00
McKenzie uses paraphrases to avoid writing certain keywords. For example, he never writes "DOGE" or "Elon Musk" in this article. Instead, he writes "We had a poorly-calibrated federal initiative led by a charismatic tech entrepreneur."

If you've been reading the news then you can decode these paraphrases, but they do make his articles significantly harder to read.

I'm tempted to ask an LLM to replace them with more straightforward references.
by bornfreddy | 2026-02-06 22:14:43+00:00
I found an easier way that Works For Me (TM). I describe the problem to LLM and ask it to solve it step by step, but strictly in the Ask mode, not Agent. Then I copy or even type the linws to the code. If I wouldn't write the line myself, it doesn't go in, and I iterate some more.

I do allow it to write the tests (lots of typing there), but I break them manually to see how they fail. And I do think about what the tests should cover before asking LLM to tell me (it does come up with some great ideas, but it also doesn't cover all the aspects I find important).

Great tool, but it is very easy to be led astray if you are not careful.
by dchu17 | 2026-02-06 22:14:48+00:00
Our initial goal with this project actually wasn't trying to get an edge in terms of better evaluating information, but rather, we wanted to see if an LLM can perform similarly to a human analyst at a lower latency. The latency for the market to react to catalysts is actually surprisingly high in biotech (at least in some cases) compared to other domains so there may be some edge there.

Appreciate the comment though! I generally agree with your sentiment!
by xandrius | 2026-02-06 22:15:47+00:00
Yep, I get that some people love the act of literally typing "x = 2;" but to me coding is first and foremost problem solving. I have a problem (either truly mine or someone else's), I come up with a solution in my head and slowly implement it.

Before I also had to code it and then make sure it had no issues.

Now I can skip the coding and then just have something spit out something which I can evaluate whether I believe is a good implementation of my solution or not.

Of course, you need the skill to know good from bad but for medium to senior devs, AI is incredibly useful to get rid of the mundane task of actually writing code, while focusing on problem solving with critical review of magically generated code.
by jader201 | 2026-02-06 22:16:03+00:00
> I largely stopped making music because imo unless you're in the top 5% of musicians AI is probably able to write better music than you.

It won't be long before this becomes:

> I largely stopped making _____ because imo unless you're in the top 5% of making _____ AI is probably able to make _____ better than you.

Especially where _____ is anything that can be created digitally.
by gck1 | 2026-02-06 22:16:22+00:00
Same here. I had to do a lot of being in the loop with Python, but with rust - compiler gives Claude all the information it may need and then it figures things out without me.

Writing rust scares me, but I can read it just fine. I've come up with super masochistic linting rules that claude isn't allowed to change and that has improved things quite a bit.

I wish there was a mature framework for frontend that can be configured to be as strict as rust.
by shermantanktop | 2026-02-06 22:17:06+00:00
Apple has a tv service and Apple also has exclusive content, which they brand with “Apple TV”…so it’s kind of both.

Same for the other big streaming services. Some of them (Netflix, Prime Video) are more involved in content production, up to and including having production facilities and an in house staff. But a lot of the “exclusive” branded content is made by semi-independent production companies.
by anyfactor | 2026-02-06 22:17:24+00:00
I think the "Heroku story" was less about technical limitations, but everything except technical limitations. More than a decade ago, I started learning and building on Heroku and hosted all my side projects and client projects on Heroku. Then when they got acquired, I was naive; then they removed their free tier and that broke my trust.

I primarily worked on PoC/MVP development where I worked to bring ideas to something barely tangible. And Heroku's free tier decisions meant it was a barrier for developers to develop on their platform. Pay first, develop later. It was like the rest of the industry.

After that, I just exited containerized platform-based application development entirely because convenience and having that weird developer philosophy "I must not pay because I can find a way" was less of a reason than sustainability. For me, containerized application platforms was about POC and MVP. If there was growth then me or the client can pay for the convenience. But if there was nothing, pretty easy to delete the project.

Then I committed to replicating the Heroku experience with a small VPS, backing up via rsync, and moving from PostgreSQL to SQLite. I can even charge clients for hosting (+ maintenance) on my VPS.

I do not know, to me containerized application platforms are limited by commercial challenges rather than technical ones. I see tons of containerised application platforms, but the trust has eroded because of a single company.

I have changed my development facility and laid the groundwork to not commit to these platforms. Sustainability over convenience.

Sure, I understand and respect folks at fly.io, render, railway, and even the open source variants of these companies (Caddy etc.). But there is no sustainability guarantee for these platforms. It was not just about the "free tier", to me it transcends to a philosophical point about building applications in general. Sure, there could be a new era with AI making MVP/PoC development easy through hosting in containerised applications, but that is a tangent point.

If Heroku were doing everything right, there would not be a dozen application platforms out there, but they made mistakes and, in my opinion, made the entire containerised application platform model untrustworthy.
Show HN: Vibe coded real-time Super Bowl Squares app (Claude Code and Opus 4.5)
by ksaville | 2026-02-06 22:17:26+00:00
I am a non-coder. Last year, I tried to build a squares app using Cursor and ChatGPT but hit a hard wall with the backend logic. I ended up with a local HTML file that looked good but could not handle remote users.

Two weeks ago, I tried again using Claude Code and the new Opus 4.5 model.

The difference was massive. I was able to build a fully functional application with a WordPress backend that handles real-time score updates across all player boards.

I also added some logic-heavy features:

Historical Heat Maps: Visualizes which number combinations have won most frequently in past Super Bowls.

Quick Pick: Allows users to randomly select squares instantly.

There is no registration or account requirement so it's easy to try out, happy to hear any suggestions.
by burnte | 2026-02-06 22:17:58+00:00
Some of that is extremely bad advice and explains why MS is in the pickle it’s in.

“Don’t come whining that you don’t have the resources you need. We’ve done our homework. We’ve evaluated the portfolio, considered the opportunities and allocated our available resources to those opportunities. That is what you have to work with.”

Right out of the gate they’re telling you that your judgment is irrelevant to the scope of the problem. Immediately the chances of success are reduced quite a bit because the SME is not trusted to help craft the terms of engagement. If you aren’t at the table to help draft the terms of engagement, to help define the scope and to help define the resources needed, you’re always going to be working from someone else’s plan. Success is defined by not by your ability to execute, but someone else’s ability to plan. They’re telling you that you may be the SME, but they’re the ones who will be making the judgement calls. Politics has risen above engineering and above business strategy.

“You only have 2 controls: 1) The clarity, culture, and energy you give your teams ; and 2) Resource allocation .”

Except we’ve determined you don’t get much of a say in resource allocation, they’ve allocated the resources you get. If you determine the way to win with the plan you were given is to change that, you have to convince other people why their planning was wrong, and that’s rarely easy.

And you, as a leader, have far more than “clarity, culture, and energy”, too.

This shows that some of the major flaws that drove me out of a cushy role in MS in 2004 are still there today. I think Nadella is a better leader than Ballmer in knowing how to respond to markets, but this speech explains to me with crystal clarity why the AI push has gone so poorly. They think they can still dictate the terms of engagement with the market.
by johnsmith1840 | 2026-02-06 22:18:01+00:00
During covid almost every prediction model like that exploded, everything went out of distribution really fast. In your sense we've been doing "CL" for a decade or more. It can also be cheap if you use smaller models.

But true CL is the ability to learn out of distribution information on the fly.

The only true solution I know to continual learning is to completely retrain the model from scratch with every new example you encounter. That technically is achievable now but it also is effectively useless.
by Animats | 2026-02-06 22:18:11+00:00
Neon counting was compressed down to a single tube in the Dekatron.[1] One Dekatron could count from 0 to 9, so only one Decatron per decimal digit was needed.

Can be see in "Hot Rod Girl" at 00:25, as part of a racetrack timer.[2]

[1] https://display-tubes.org/dekatron/

[2] https://archive.org/details/hot_rod_girl_1956
by collimarco | 2026-02-06 22:18:26+00:00
I have moved all Rails apps away from Heroku in the last years. It was great 10 years ago, but then became expensive, full of bugs and with terrible support. All our Rails apps (Pushpad, Newsletter.page, etc) are running on Cuber gem + DigitalOcean Kubernetes... In the last years we achieved 100% uptime (five nines), zero subtle bugs and huge cost savings.
by dfltr | 2026-02-06 22:19:15+00:00
We make art because humans are compelled to express themselves. That's it. That's the whole thing. It's not stack ranked. Humans make art because, in the words of Pile, "I want answers to some questions that I can’t speak."

The idea that you'd stop trying to express yourself because you're comparing your own artistic voice to the output of an LLM and somehow seeing it as less valid, or less worthwhile, is just sad.

I don't mean that as an insult, I mean it's genuinely sad for you and for all of us as a species.
by mrguyorama | 2026-02-06 22:19:32+00:00
Title has been editorialized.

In terms of the continuing "education depression" as discussed by this article, we still haven't gotten rid of "No child left behind". Of course kids are less educated than they used to be, you don't need to be educated to graduate.

Maine specifically is an important example. There has been no real change in education policy in the state, yet there is still significant reduction in outcomes.

The much maligned unscientific way of teaching reading was adopted in Caribou Maine far far far earlier than educational outcomes started dropping. The neighboring town did not adopt that way of teaching reading. They did not see different outcomes. IMO, the outcomes clearly follow the generation of kids growing up in a school system where you cannot be held back for not doing the work.

The entire time education outcomes have been going down, state highschool graduation rates have been going up. This is not because teachers like giving good grades to kids who don't learn things.

"No child left behind" is a disaster.

I know many people in the state who are looking to become teachers. Everybody always reminds them how terrible an idea that is for them in particular. Schools cannot hire people, because even with "Higher" salaries, the salaries are still bad. They have mostly been adjusted for inflation, so it seems like they have gone up a lot, but they have been adjusted from a point when they were already terrible and not a good salary.

Meanwhile, my mother is a 40 year teacher here. The rich neighborhood school she switched to pays her well, but provides zero institutional support. They did not allow her to purchase anything. No textbooks, no test generators, no enrichment videos, nothing. They don't support her at all.

She's one of the best educators I've ever known and every student she has taught agrees. She's so effective at being an educator that students who come from shitty families and cause disruption in other classes choose to spend time in her classes, and choose to spend time in her study hall to do their homework and become better students. This is true for thousands and thousands of students who went through her classes. She is the sole reason some northern maine kids know how to do math. She's a french teacher.
by yunohn | 2026-02-06 22:19:57+00:00
While one can blame corporations, the most blame lands on the Indian government(s). Decades and decades of corrupt local, state, and central governance has led to dire poverty and high levels of unemployment. The current and past leaders have had no care to fix it, and it’s only getting worse. Their incompetence is what creates these kinds of jobs as alternatives to abject poverty and death.
by rahuljaguste | 2026-02-06 22:19:57+00:00
Falcon's Eye was an isometric graphical frontend for NetHack released in 2001. It added
256-color isometric tiles, MIDI music, sound effects, and a mouse-driven interface on top of the
original NetHack 3.3.1 gameplay.

Weekend vibe coding project - I ported it to the browser using Emscripten with help from Claude.
The main challenges were:

- Adapting SDL2 rendering to work through Emscripten's WebAssembly target
- Converting NetHack's blocking I/O model to async using Emscripten ASYNCIFY
- MIDI playback doesn't work in browser SDL2_mixer, so I converted all tracks to OGG Vorbis
using FluidSynth
- Setting up a virtual filesystem for game data and save files

Works in Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari. ~40MB total download (mostly game assets and music).

Source: https://github.com/rahuljaguste/Nethack_Falcons_Eye

Open to contributions - especially mobile/touch support and IndexedDB save persistence.
by nine_k | 2026-02-06 22:20:46+00:00
Most engineers don't have too much trouble understanding things like List<T>, or Promise<T>, or even Optional<T>, which all demonstrate vividly what a monad does (except Promise in JS that auto-flattens).

A monad is a generalization of all them. It's a structure that covers values of type T, some "payload" (maybe one, like Promise, maybe many, like List, maybe even none, like List or Optional sometimes). You can ask it to do some operations on these values "inside", it's the map() operation. You can ask it to do similar thing when operation on each value produces a nested structure of the same kind, and flatten them into one level again: this is flatMap(). This is how Promises are chained. The result is again a structure of the same kind, maybe with "payload" of a different type.

This is a really simple abstraction, simpler than most GoF patterns, to my mind, and more fundamental and useful.
by servo_sausage | 2026-02-06 22:20:53+00:00
If you make a change in only one school, you end up with selection effects where interested parents move their children into (or away from) catchment areas based on vibes.

Then you can't really measure outcomes, because the strongest predictor of student performance is parents interest and resources.

You also run into issues with teaching skills and standards, you need a high level of planning and adherence to the supplied plan in order to measure outcomes; otherwise it's just vibes based on individual teachers.
by Fricken | 2026-02-06 22:21:12+00:00
The original Mobileye EyeQ3 devices that Tesla began installing in their cars in 2013 had only a single forward facing camera. They were very simple devices, only intended to be used for lane keeping. Tesla hacked the devices and pushed them beyond their safe design constraints.

Then that guy got decapitated when his Model S drove under a semi-truck that was crossing the highway and Mobileye terminated the contract. Weirdly, the same fatal edge case occurred 2 more times at least on Tesla's newer hardware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashe...
by wrs | 2026-02-06 22:21:23+00:00
If the reason you were making music wasn't that you enjoyed making music, perhaps stopping is the right choice for you. If that was the reason, then AI is irrelevant.

I do enjoy making music, and I don't do it "by hand". I use lots of tools (instruments, electronics, a computer for recording and mixing, the internet for distribution). As long as I'm the one directing the tools, it's still art and it's still my music.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-06 22:22:04+00:00
> Big SUVs aren't even very common anymore. They got replaced by sedans styled to look like SUVs (aka "crossovers").

A 1990s Ford Explorer weighs around 4000 lbs. That was considered big at the time. A current one is a couple hundred pounds heavier, a Ford Edge around the same, Toyota RAV4 or Honda CR-V a little less but still almost 4000 lbs. By contrast a 1990s sedan was generally under 3000 lbs with ~2400 lbs being pretty common.

The main difference isn't that SUVs got smaller, it's that sedans got bigger. A 1989 Honda Accord was ~2500 lbs, the 1990s ones were ~2800 lbs, the current ones are well over 3000 lbs.
by schiffern | 2026-02-06 22:22:06+00:00
>I've never really thought of Waymo as a robot in the same way as e.g. a Boston Dynamics humanoid, but of course it is a robot of sorts.

So for the record, with this realization you're 3+ years behind Tesla.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODSJsviD_SU&t=3594s
by dgxyz | 2026-02-06 22:22:15+00:00
Yeah valuations are up but the business and products are looking progressively more fucked every month. If there's anything I've seen it's there are barely any people without macbooks coming out of university now and they are the next wave of influence over the whole sector. No one in the sector wants half the stuff that changes - they just want it to work and stay working. No longer a guarantee. Literally there are teams of people all over the planet all trying to simultaneously unfuck Satya's entire vision to keep their businesses from going down the toilet.

That is not someone you should not take advice from.
by luqtas | 2026-02-06 22:22:17+00:00
i built a set of wheels following his instructions, using my brake pads as the reference for centering and truing, rode dozen of thousands kilometers on them, daily, part of my courier job. all the wheels i had after that old Mongoose were also built the same way. i cycle a 1997 Trek 430 as my main transportation and i freaking love it. soldered a custom rack for panniers after its geometry. farewell Sheldon, i literally read your entire blog, at least twice

if i had found a cycling crazie to date back in the days, i would certainly use "building a tandem" section of that blog for suuuure
by giozaarour | 2026-02-06 22:22:31+00:00
it's not art (for humans) if it's not made by a human with a human story.
AI can be used as the tool with which art is made, but not as the maker itself.
now, on the other hand, maybe AI can make it's own form of art for other AI's to consume. However, for the human, the creation of art will always need the human taste and story involved
by nerdsniper | 2026-02-06 22:22:32+00:00
Don’t need events that extreme. Regular branch banks have stuff go missing from the safety deposit boxes shockingly regularly. The locks aren’t particularly secure and various people are able to access them. It can be hard to find articles about them because they don’t make the news like the more remarkable incidents do. Examples of boring security box failures (but that were noteworthy in other ways so they did make the news): Jennifer Morsch, Roberta Glassman, Lianna Sarabekyan (multiple customers affected), Philip Poniz, Wells Fargo in Cape Coral FL, Wells Fargo Katy TX (many customers affected, blamed on road construction down the street), lots of individual stories where banks just totally stopped following their own procedures on ID checking and logging.

The vast majority of these don’t make the news because there’s no proof there was even anything inside the box in the first place so anyone could be lying.

> Mr. Pluard, who tracks legal filings and news reports, estimates that around 33,000 boxes a year are harmed by accidents, natural disasters and thefts.

> Oddly, the bank returned to him five watches that weren’t his. “They were the wrong color, the wrong size — totally different than what I had,” Mr. Poniz said. “I had no idea where they came from.”

https://archive.is/j8e6x
by ajross | 2026-02-06 22:22:45+00:00
OMG. It's the !?%!@# pandemic. All education statistics measuring across 2020 are horrifyingly polluted. Kids who stayed at home for a year are behind relative to the same cohorts before or since, AND YET WE KEEP FLOGGING THESE NUMBERS as if they're signal and not noise.

I've seen this on the front page of HN like three times now.
by AlotOfReading | 2026-02-06 22:23:06+00:00
They can't take as much force and they're less reliable. Sometime in the 90s-ish a new test came into force that greatly increased the impact they had to take without unlatching and continue working. The pull bars made it easier to meet because they're secured on both sides.

The pull-up latches also caused issues for people with long nails. In some places spiders liked to nest inside them. Places with snow had issues with a sheet of ice forming over the entire panel, an issue that also occurs with modern flush latches.
Show HN: Chiptune Tracker
by iamdan | 2026-02-06 22:23:25+00:00
I built a browser-based tracker app that let's you compose audio across 4 channels. Inspired by the Gameboy audio system - not quite a true recreation but a fun toy nonetheless. Song data is persisted in local storage so you don't lose your progress.

https://github.com/daniel-black/chiptune-tracker
by orwin | 2026-02-06 22:23:49+00:00
I don't care about that, that wasn't the point, no one truly care about that. I wanted to know if the feeling of reading meandering writing that can't go to the point when reading AI-generated content was only mine, or if other people who "wiki walk" a lot did the same on Grokipedia (basically spend hours clicking on links and reading random pages). I didn't manage to do it because the writing was too "bad" for me (and i was taken by wiki walk on wookiepedia once, so my tolerance is high). I just wanted to know if it was shared. Did you wiki walk on grokipedia, or do you just use it for "controversial subjects"?
by positron26 | 2026-02-06 22:24:32+00:00
Are there still people under the impression that the correct way to use Stack Overflow all these years was to copy & paste without analyzing what the code did and making it fit for purpose?

If I have to say, we're just waiting for the AI concern caucus to get tired of performing for each other and justifying each other's inaction in other facets of their lives.