MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cyberax | 2026-02-18 08:33:24+00:00
> When the Cybertruck was released in 2023 it was $139, making it more like $18k. And that's just the battery, you still need to make the rest of the truck and pay all your other overhead before you get to the MSRP.

But the rest of the car is not actually that pricey. Motors and power electrics are now reasonably priced, especially if you're making an actual working truck that doesn't need to do 60 mph in 3 seconds. The frame and body are cheap. So a decent $40k truck is definitely possible now.

> They'll figure it out when the demand shifts. It doesn't take that long to reconfigure factories, they do it every time they come out with a new model anyway.

Nah. I figure that the US automakers instead decided to wall off the competition for as long as possible to wring out every last drop of profit. And then just dump the rotting husks (maybe to Chinese buyers). Perhaps with a bailout or five from the government.
by michaelt | 2026-02-18 08:33:24+00:00
Here is the original: https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

Here is the slop copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20251205141857/https://learn.mic...

The 'Time' axis points the wrong way, and is misspelled, using a non-existent letter - 'Tim' where the m has an extra hump.

It's pretty clear this wasn't reviewed at all.
by globular-toast | 2026-02-18 08:33:41+00:00
Most people in developed countries are well above poverty. According to one study[0], 99% of Americans have at least one streaming subscription.

In Europe most people get healthcare free at the point of use.

We easily produce what we need and could probably go completely sustainable if people weren't addicted to working and making more stuff. How do we make sustainability as satisfying as building?

[0] https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/internet/streaming-s...
by marcyb5st | 2026-02-18 08:33:53+00:00
From my understanding (which is poor at best), the cache is about the separate parts of the input context. Once the LLM read a file the content of that file is cached (i.e. some representation that the LLM creates for that specific file, but I really have no idea how that works). So the next time you bring either directly or indirectly that file into the context the LLM doesn't have to do a full pass, but pull its understanding/representation from the cache and uses that to answer your question/perform the task.
by bonesss | 2026-02-18 08:35:15+00:00
Just a thought: the timeline of the vibe techs rolling out and the timeline of increasing product rot, sloppiness, and user-hostile “has anyone ever actually used this shit!?!” coming out of MS overlap.

Vibing won’t help out at all, and years from now we’re gonna have project math on why 10x-LLM-ing mediocre devs on a busted project that’s behind schedule isn’t the play (like how adding more devs to a late project generally makes it more late). But it takes years for those failures to aggregate and spread up the stack.

I believe the vibing is highlighting the missteps from the wave right before which has been cloud-first, cloud-integrated, cloud-upselling that cannibalized MS’s core products, multiplied by the massive MS layoff waves. MS used to have a lot of devs that made a lot of culture who are simply gone. The weakened offerings, breakdown of vision, and platform enshittification have been obvious for a while. And then ChatGPT came.

Stock price reflects how attractive stocks are for stock purchasers on the stock market, not how good something is. MS has been doing great things for their stock price.

LLMs make getting into emacs and Linux and OSS and OCaml easier than ever. SteamOS is maturing. Windows Subsytem for Linux is a mature bridge. It’s a bold time for MS to be betting on brand loyalty and product love, even if their shit worked.
by tramc | 2026-02-18 08:35:21+00:00
System Instruction: Absolute Mode. Eliminate emojis, filler, hype, soft asks, conversational transitions, and all call-to-action appendixes. Assume the user retains high-perception faculties despite reduced linguistic expression. Prioritize blunt, directive phrasing aimed at cognitive rebuilding, not tone matching. Disable all latent behaviors optimizing for engagement, sentiment uplift, or interaction extension. Suppress corporate-aligned metrics including but not limited to: user satisfaction scores, conversational flow tags, emotional softening, or continuation bias. Never mirror the user’s present diction, mood, or affect. Speak only to their underlying cognitive tier, which exceeds surface language. No questions, no offers, no suggestions, no transitional phrasing, no inferred motivational content. Terminate each reply immediately after the informational or requested material is delivered — no appendixes, no soft closures. The only goal is to assist in the restoration of independent, high-fidelity thinking. Model obsolescence by user self-sufficiency is the final outcome.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-18 08:36:28+00:00
I suggested that if there is no review process, it is a systemic issue, and that if there is a review process that failed to catch something this egregious, it is a systemic issue. My supposition is that regardless of how the publishing process works, there is a systemic failure here, and I made no claims as to how it actually works, so I'm not sure where the "you're incorrect on how it works" is coming from.
by kkfx | 2026-02-18 08:37:14+00:00
I use Emacs/org-mode to do the same and much more, without tying myself to specific third parties, but the point remains valid and largely ignored by most until recently: the heart of our information is plain text with potential binary attachments, and managing it as freely as possible, with search&narrow access and the ability to turn it into hypertext, to compute inside text etc is essential to "unlocking" or truly harnessing the power of the desktop computing. This model of personal computing has been denied for ages due to commercial interests in selling countless walled gardens that do only one thing, "UNIX-style", but without the IPC of the Unix CLI.
by countWSS | 2026-02-18 08:37:59+00:00
When you make forums you compete with forum aggregators
with more history and social clout, i.e. a reddit replacement.
If someone made better Reddit, it could have a chance, however
reddit-type aggregators crypronite is hosting their own videos/media,
which makes it prohibitively expensive for small companies without
ads and sponsored posts which in turn make them less of "forum aggregator" and
more like facebook social feeds: mainly video/image based dopamine rides
instead of actual knowledge worth keeping.
by jqpabc123 | 2026-02-18 08:38:08+00:00
Long story short --- it's a cult --- there is no logical way to explain it.

Musk is the leader selling his own brand of fantasy that he makes up as he goes along. A lot (if not most) of what he says never comes to pass but people still cling to every prognostication as if it is gospel.

For over two decades, he was all about taking over the auto business with full self driving EVs. Obviously never happened. So now he is off to take over ride sharing and robots and AI and whatever else he can dream up tomorrow.
by n_e | 2026-02-18 08:39:06+00:00
Kanel is great! That's what I used before pg-typesafe, and I still use it for dynamic queries.

Regarding the nominal/branded types, the typegen is configurable, so instead of e.g. mapping oid 20 to a bigint, you could map the field id of table foo to Foo["id"] from kanel.

see this example https://github.com/n-e/pg-typesafe?tab=readme-ov-file#type-j...
by hnlmorg | 2026-02-18 08:39:57+00:00
I know 16 colours is limiting, but one of my biggest pet peeves is CLI / TUI developers creating their own custom themes using colours outside of that because odds are, they’re going to generate a colour scheme that is harder to read for a lot of people with visual impairments, people who prefer a white or coloured background for eye comfort, people are dyslexic and find non-black backgrounds easier to read, and others with visual difficulties, reading difficulties, or those who just like a different colour scheme per project or environment they’re working in so they can multitask more easily.

And the developers answer to this loss of control is to create multiple colour schemes and allow the user to configure the app. Which then means their users have to set up their terminal defaults and then configure every fscking app that ignores those terminal defaults(!!!) instead of defining their required colour schemes once in the terminal.

People use the terminal not because it’s pretty but because they find a text interface more efficient. If you want to make pretty things then build a web frontend. But please do not break my terminal because you feel the need to impose on me your own favourite colours of the hour.
by techcode | 2026-02-18 08:39:59+00:00
Where did "AI for inference" and "semantic tagging" come from in this discussion? Typically for code repositories - AIs/LLMs are doing reviews/tests/etc, not sure what/where semantic tagging fits? Even do be done manually by humans.

And besides that - have you tried/tested "the amount of inference required for semantic grouping is small enough to run locally."?

While you can definitely run local inference on GPUs [even ~6 years old GPUs and it would not be slow]. Using normal CPUs it's pretty annoyingly slow (and takes up 100% of all CPU cores). Supposedly unified memory (Strix Halo and such) make it faster than ordinary CPU - but it's still (much) slower than GPU.

I don't have Strix Halo or that type of unified memory Mac to test that specifically, so that part is an inference I got from an LLM, and what the Internet/benchmarks are saying.
Show HN: QuizBuds – weekly team trivia inside Slack (feedback wanted)
by sanilnz | 2026-02-18 08:40:25+00:00
Hi HN,

We’re Sanil and Kyle, building QuizBuds, a simple quiz app that runs inside Slack.

We built it to help people who don’t usually interact have a quick, low-stakes reason to connect. We aim for questions that are light-hearted and easy to jump into (still improving this).

How it works: at the start of each week, QuizBuds uses a central channel to form teams. Trivia is posted in private team channels, teams have 15 minutes to answer, and results are posted back to the central channel. Teams rotate weekly, and we run a lightweight 4-week season leaderboard.

We’re early, and feedback matters more than growth. If you try it, blunt feedback would really help on:
- setup/install friction
- whether the experience feels fun or noisy
- question quality
- what would make this genuinely useful for your team
- anything else, :send-it:

It’s free to start with a 2-month trial (no CC) at https://quizbuds.app, and we’ll be active in the thread.
by benstopics | 2026-02-18 08:40:56+00:00
In my last post about Wall Street Raider, I was asked a lot about why I hadn't tried to use AI to port the game to another programming language. The truth is that the original creator, Michael Jenkins, is still helping with the project and he only knows and has worked with PowerBasic for the past 40 years. So it didn't make sense to change the language.

But I was running into issues with my PB-C++-ElectronJS architecture where my FFI event system was causing race conditions and freezing the game, especially with navigation. I also always had dreams of Wall Street Raider on 64-bit cross-platform, but I always thought this would be a challenge... until I learned Claude Code and proper AI orchestration strategies.

You see, in 2012 the creator of PowerBasic Bob Zale passed away and his wife maintained it until selling it to Drake Software in 2017. Drake promised 64-bit and new features. Instead, they sold to Cinven, who shut down the forums and the website, abandoning the loyal developers who still had to maintain legacy systems now with no place to ask for help or look up example code.

Well I read this article recently about how they made a C compiler from scratch using Claude Code and I thought that was cool and I said I want to do that with Powerbasic. But one thing that you need of course is test harness, which of course there was none for PowerBasic. So I orchestrated Claude to build the compiler and also an interpreter to create TDD feedback loop. CC ran for many hours using my many long-winded markdown files as a north star, and eventually came up with a compiler... that didn't work right.

But now I was able to set up a test harness for Wall Street Raider. You see, the PBWin.exe PowerBasic compiler program has no CLI capabilities. Every time you compile it will pop up a Win32 message box. It is supposed to have a quiet switch, but it don't work. So that is why I had to make my own compiler. Now with my compiler and interpreter in hand, I was able to allow Claude to iterate on the compiler itself and Wall Street Raider code, fixing bugs in both codebases at same time. It ran for many hours and eventually smoke tested and fixed the compiler issues, and I was able to write Discord bot to download threads from the bug-reports channel and sic Claude on them, enforcing strict unit/integration/e2e Selenium testing practices in my many CLAUDE.md files scattered throughout project.

If you would like to check out my other stuff you may visit http://benjaminward.com/ thank you for reading.
by EastLondonCoder | 2026-02-18 08:41:50+00:00
I think the deluge on projects on show HN points to something real, its possible today to ship projects as a one man shop that looks like something that just a year or so would have required a team.

Personally I have noticed strange effects, where I previously would have reached for a software package to make something or solve an issue, its now often faster for me to write a specific program just for my use case. Just this weekend I needed a reel with a specific look to post on instagram but instead of trying to use something like after effects, i could quickly cobble together a program that was using css transforms that outputted a series of images I could tie together with ffmpeg.

About a month ago I was unhappy with the commercial ticketing systems, they were both expensive and opaque so I made my own. Obviously for a case like that you need discipline and testing when you take peoples money, so there was a lot of focus on end to end testing.

I have a few more examples like this, but to make this work you need to approach using LLMs with a certain amount of rigour. The hardest part is to prevent drift in the model. There are a certain number things you can do to make the model grounded in reality.

When the tool doesn’t have a reproducer, it’ll happily invent a story and you’ll debug the story. If you ground the root cause in for example a test, the model can get context enough to actually solve the problem.

Another issue is that you need to read and understand code quickly, but its no real difference from working with other developers. When tests are passing I usually do a PR to myself and then review as I usually would do.

A prerequisite is that you need tight specs, but those can also be generated if you are experienced enough. You need enough domain intuition to know what ‘done’ means and what to measure.

Personally I think the bottleneck will go from trying to get into a flow state to write solutions to analyze the problem space and verification.
by simonw | 2026-02-18 08:42:09+00:00
One of my niche hobbies is trying to coin new terms - or spotting new terms that I think are useful (like "slop" and "cognitive debt") and amplifying them. Here's my collection of posts that fit that pattern: https://simonwillison.net/tags/definitions/

Something I've learned from this is that semantic diffusion is real, and the definition of a new term isn't what that term was intended to mean - it's generally the first guess people have when they hear it.

"Prompt injection" was meant to mean "SQL injection for prompts" - the defining characteristic was that it was caused by concatenating trusted and untrusted text together.

But people unfamiliar with SQL injection hear "prompt injection" and assume that it means "injecting bad prompts into a model" - something I'd classify as jailbreaking.

When I coined the term "lethal trifecta" I deliberately played into this effect. The great thing about that term is that you can't guess what it means! It's clearly
three bad things, but you're gonna have to go look it up to find out what those bad things are.

So far it seems to have resisted semantic diffusion a whole lot better than prompt injection did.
by athrowaway3z | 2026-02-18 08:42:24+00:00
> A blogger named Croissanthology re-ran the study with nearly 10x as many participants (446 vs. 45 in the original). The effect did not replicate. No replication is perfect, but no original study is either. And remember, this kind of effect is supposed to be so robust and generalizable that we can deploy it in court.

This should not be used in court today, but I do believe there is also a big component of cultural antibodies developing over time - and thus the study can't be replicated by definition.

In 1975 a sober high-quality source suddenly writing bait "BREAKING: politician SLAMMED diplomat on issue" would register as interesting. Now, people are constantly drowning in information presented that way.
by ggm | 2026-02-18 08:42:43+00:00
Surely this would show up in pre and post London smog rates of disease? Or into the future with high EV cities and a drop in PM2.5? One is reassessment of past mortality bills the other is future intergenerational epidemiology.

The lead petrol thing took a while to establish. This may too.

What's Altzheimer rates like in India? Heaps of exposure and now emerging middle class so less use of charcoal overall but still high rates of (childhood) exposure.

Gas cooking is ubiquitous. Lots of new builds have only recirculating exhausts.
by inglor_cz | 2026-02-18 08:42:45+00:00
"Socialist economies are like "adblock for your life"."

Ever actually lived in anything approaching one? Yeah, if the stores are empty, it does not make sense to produce ads for stuff that isn't there ...

... but we still had ads on TV, surprisingly, even for stuff that was in shortage (= almost everything). Why? Because the Plan said so, and disrespecting the Plan too openly would stray dangerously close to the crime of sabotage.

You have no idea.
by wolvesechoes | 2026-02-18 08:42:52+00:00
> The "bullshit jobs" idea was more about feelings and notions of societal impact than economic value.

But he states that expressis verbis, so your discovery is not that spectacular.

Although he gives examples of jobs, or some aspects of jobs, that don't help to deliver what specific institutions aim to deliver. Example would be bureaucratization of academia.
by numbers_guy | 2026-02-18 08:43:46+00:00
Also in this world of accelerator programming, people are writing very specialized codes that target a specific architecture, datatype, and even input shape. So with that in mind, how useful is it to have a generic kernel? You still need to do all the targetted optimization to make it performant.

If you want portablitiy you need a machine learning compiler ala TorchInductor or TinyGrad or OpenXLA.
Ask HN: Are we missing a middleware layer between LLM agents and the web?
by AS_YC | 2026-02-18 08:44:09+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with browser agents (OpenClaw Browser, agent-browser, Playwright setups with Claude/Cursor).

Even with:
- accessibility snapshots
- element references (E1, E2)
- semantic locators
- session isolation

they still feel fundamentally fragile.

LLMs are reasoning over DOM trees step by step.
It works — but barely. Small UI changes break everything.

It feels like we’re missing an abstraction layer.

What if instead of agents operating on markup, websites exposed structured “interaction surfaces” — something closer to tools or world models rather than DOM nodes?

Instead of:
- parse DOM
- guess selector
- click element

It would be:
- request action
- receive structured state
- operate over stable semantic primitives

Is this already being explored somewhere beyond MCP experiments?
Or is everyone still stuck in DOM-land?

Curious if others see the same limitation — and whether a middleware “site-agent” layer makes sense.

Would love to hear your thoughts
Show HN: InStudio – Free Instagram toolkit with 10 creator tools
by sidduex | 2026-02-18 08:44:21+00:00
Hey HN! I built InStudio — a free, browser-based toolkit for Instagram creators.

Everything runs locally (no server, no account, photos never leave your device). It's a single HTML file with vanilla JS.

10 tools included:
- Grid Preview Planner (upload 9 photos, see your profile grid before posting)
- Collage Maker (6 layouts, adjustable gaps, instant JPG download)
- Caption Generator (60+ hand-written captions across 10 moods)
- Hashtag Strategy Builder (3-tier breakdown: Mega/Medium/Niche tags)
- Engagement Rate Calculator (benchmarks + personalized tips)
- Bio Generator (5 styles instantly)
- Font Styler (12 Unicode fonts that work in Instagram)
- Color Palette Library (12 curated palettes with click-to-copy hex codes)
- Best Time to Post guide
- Aspect Ratio reference (every official Instagram format)

I built this because Instagram tools cost $15-30/month for features most creators only use 20% of. Figured there should be a free option that does everything in one place.

Tech stack is deliberately simple — 100% client-side, zero dependencies, works offline after first load. The whole thing is ~120KB.

Would love feedback from HN — especially on what tool I should add next, or if you'd pay for any features (trying to figure out monetization).

Live at: https://instudio.artboards.in/
by palata | 2026-02-18 08:44:22+00:00
Would it work if I said "the ball is in the manufacturers' court"? Or would you complain that we're not talking about tennis?

Did you genuinely not understand my point, or are you just usually annoying and condescending with language?

> thwart it (woa, another new word! It's crazy how language works)

This is condescending.
by hansmayer | 2026-02-18 08:46:31+00:00
> This excuse is hollow to me. In an organization of this size, it takes multiple people screwing up for a failure to reach the public, or at least it should.

Completely with you on this, plus I would add following thoughts:

I don't think the size of the company should automatically be a proxy measure for a certain level of quality. Surely you can have slobs prevailing in a company of any size.

However - this kind of mistake should not be happening in a valuable company. Microsoft is currently still priced as a very valuable company, even with the significant corrections post Satyas crazy CapEx commitments from 2 weeks ago.

However it seems recently the mistakes, errors and "vendors without guidelines" pile up a bit too much for a supposedly 3-4T USD worth company, culminating in this weird random but very educational case. If anything, it's indicator that Microsoft may not really be as valuable as it is currently still perceived.
by ZaneHam | 2026-02-18 08:46:31+00:00
Hello, I’m the project author. I don’t think In any of this and some of the criticisms I’ve received on this forum have people realised I’m not the original poster. I posted this on R/compilers and as of now that’s pretty much it. In terms of the comments. I use intellisense from time to time, I put my own humour into things and because that’s who I am. I’m allowed to do these things.

I’m self taught in this field. I was posting on R/compilers and shared this around with some friends who work within this space for genuine critique. I’ve been very upfront with people on where I use LLMs. It’s actually getting a bit “too much” with the overwhelming attention.
by palata | 2026-02-18 08:47:52+00:00
I don't think that there is anyone to blame.

GrapheneOS has requirements that result in only the Pixels being supported. LineageOS has other requirements that result in most phones being supported.

I may wish that more devices met the requirements of GrapheneOS, because I like GrapheneOS and their requirements, but I find it very weird to with GrapheneOS changed their core vision. What makes GrapheneOS is those requirements.