MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kulahan | 2026-02-09 02:43:28+00:00
>Microplastics are bad

I was just listening to something the other day about how there is essentially no way to study this right now, and the most common method of microplastic detection in samples has been proven largely inaccurate.

Is there some reason we think microplastics are more dangerous than the other nanoparticles of inorganic dust we consume and inhale every day? Serious question - I’ve got enough to worry about and this seems… very low on that list?
by skalkin | 2026-02-09 02:43:44+00:00
https://datagrok.ai

A platform to efficiently work with any data right in the browser. Like interactively visualizing millions or rows, and at the same time augmenting the data with domain-specific capabilities. For instance, the cheminformatics plugin automatically recognizes molecules and provides proper rendering, substructure search etc. Sort of a Swiss Army knife for scientific data.

Not really a new idea, been working on it for many years already :)
by biztos | 2026-02-09 02:44:16+00:00
As others have said, the benefit is speed, not quality. And in my experience you get a lot more speed if you’re willing to settle for less quality.

But the reason you don’t see a flood of great products is that the managerial layer has no idea what to do with massively increased productivity (velocity). Ask even a Google what they’d do with doubly effective engineers and the standard answer is to lay half of them off.
by TheTaytay | 2026-02-09 02:44:42+00:00
I agree with you, but I don't envy the maintainers. The problem is that it's really hard to tell if someone is skilled like you or just shoveling what an LLM wrote up to the maintainers to have them "figure it out." Honestly, getting a library hard forked and maintained by people that can keep up with the incoming PRs would be a relief to a lot of folks...
by spopejoy | 2026-02-09 02:44:52+00:00
I'm also getting really annoyed by AI-generated images like this article has that don't really help comprehension, but make the author feel like they're "pro blogging" because god forbid you have two paragraphs in a row without a subhead or an image.

Programmers complaining about AI but then ripping off umpteen illustrators' labor through AI is infuriating.
by deneckemedia | 2026-02-09 02:44:58+00:00
I’m building PointWiseSystem, a browser-based habit and responsibility system I originally built for my own family.

It uses a simple points model instead of streaks or financial-style tracking to make expectations visible, progress clear, and follow-through easier.

In real use it’s solving three main problems:
- As a Family Chore Chart — a digital chore system that actually gets kids engaged with responsibilities using points and rewards.
- As a Personal Habit Tracker — a way for individuals to organize routines, add notes, and earn points toward meaningful self-defined rewards.
- As Complete Homeschool Management — tracking assignments, logging progress by subject, and generating reports and transcripts for multiple students.

It’s entirely web-based (no app download) and works on phones, tablets, and desktops. I’m actively iterating on it based on real use, and it’s been most useful in situations where simpler systems actually get used instead of abandoned.

Check it out https://www.pointwisesystem.com/ Pre-Launch offering 6 months free
by D-Machine | 2026-02-09 02:45:09+00:00
"A human can't learn to ride a bike from a book, but an LLM could" is a take so hilarious you could only find it on HN.

Riding a bike is, broadly, learning to co-ordinate your muscles in response to visual data from your surroundings and signals from your vestibular and tactile systems that give you data about your movement, orientation, speed, and control. As LLMs only output tokens that represent text, by definition they can NEVER learn to ride a bike.

Even ignoring that glaring definitional issue, an LLM also can't learn to ride a bike from books written by humans to humans, because an LLM could only operate through a machine using e.g. pistons and gears to manipulate the pedals. That system would be controlled by physics and mechanisms different from humans, and not have the same sensory information, so almost no human-written information about (human) bike-riding would be useful or relevant for this machine to learn how to bike. It'd just have to do reinforcement learning with some appropriate rewards and punishments for balance, speed, and falling.

And if we could embody AI in a sensory system so similar to the human sensory system that it becomes plausible text on bike-riding might actually be useful to the AI, it might also be that, for exactly the same reasons, the AI learns just as well to ride just by hopping on the thing, and that the textual content is as useless to it as it is for us.

Thinking this is an obvious gotcha (or the later comment that anyone thinking otherwise is going to have egg on their face) is just embarrassing. Much more of a wordcel problem than I would have expected on HN.
by gcanyon | 2026-02-09 02:46:16+00:00
Something about how you phrased this makes me think you might appreciate Master of Five Magics by Lyndon Hardy. There are five kinds of magic, each with their own unique source, style, and pretty rigorous rule set, and the protagonist sets out to learn them all (unheard of, if not outright forbidden).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_the_Five_Magics
by zamadatix | 2026-02-09 02:46:58+00:00
For the benefit of anyone else trying to read along, it ?seems? there are 2 separate re-releases being referred to.

The first was the Rockstar Classics, which were slightly more modern repackagings of GTA and GTA 2 in the early 2000s https://www.ebay.com/itm/168127378760 which came out around the time gp also got their discs for San Andreas and Vice City

The second was The Trilogy, a much more current and deeper remaster of GTA III as well as those latter two OG games gp had (Vice City and San Andreas) which is actively distributed https://store.steampowered.com/sub/817628/

Speaking of all of these re-releases, I'm surprised Rockstar hasn't re-released GTA 4 recently. There are community made ways to make it run miraculously better on modern PCs as noted in https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_IV but I'm sure many would pay for something prepackaged (and maybe one or two other improvements). I guess they are too busy printing money with GTA V and hoping the next one will be the same :).
by chongli | 2026-02-09 02:47:04+00:00
I love SimCity 2000 and these roads look really cool but I'd really like to see a city-builder go in a different direction.

One of the biggest problems with North American cities is their endless, car-centric suburban sprawl. SimCity games may be really fun to play but they seem to reinforce this problem and anyone who grows up playing them will not learn about alternatives for more livable cities.

New Urbanism, traditional neighbourhood design, streetcar suburbs, one-way streets, bike paths, walking paths, mixed-zone walkable villages (light commercial with residential), smaller single-family houses and duplexes, triplexes, houses behind houses. Many of these are older and more traditional techniques to yield higher density neighbourhoods without building up to large apartment buildings.

It would be really cool to see a game that focused more on creating these kinds of realistic and aspirational living spaces instead of the usual cookie-cutter suburbs linked up by huge roads and a large downtown core.
by johnbender | 2026-02-09 02:47:05+00:00
Compilers don’t do this error free of course BUT if we want them too we can say what it means for a compiler to be correct very directly _one time_ and have it be done for all programs (see the definition for simulation in the CompCert compiler). This is a major and meaningful difference from AI which would need such a specification for each individual application you ask it to build because there is no general specification for correct translation from
English to Code.
by martin-t | 2026-02-09 02:47:25+00:00
To be honest, these models being bad is what gives me some hope we can figure out how to approach a potential future AI as a society before it arrives.

Because right now everything in the west is structured around rich people owning things they have not built while people who did the actual work with their hands and their minds are left in the dust.

For a brief period of time (a couple decades), tech was a path for anyone from any background to get at least enough to not struggle. Not become truly rich as for that you need to own real estate or companies but having all your reasonable material needs taken care of and being able to save up for retirement (or in countries without free education, to pay for kids' college).

And that might be coming to an end, with people who benefited from this opportunity cheering it on.
by hxtk | 2026-02-09 02:47:45+00:00
I’m not a fan of generative AI for the use case because it’s rote enough to do deterministically, but deterministic code generation is getting better and better.

Gazelle, the BUILD file generator for Go, now supports plugins and several other languages have Gazelle plugins.

I’ve used AI to generate BUILD file generators before, though. I had good luck getting it to write a script that would analyze a Java project with circular dependencies and aggregate the cycle participants into a single target.
by accelbred | 2026-02-09 02:47:46+00:00
I think you are entirely missing the author's point. The author is generalizing from the specific technicalities of C/Rust/etc UB, to the problem with UB which is that should it be triggered, then you can't know what the program will do. This does not have to be the result of language specification. If writing safe Rust yourself, yes no UB will occur usually, and you can know what will happen based off of what code you wrote. The author extends UB to vibecoding where there is no specification to understand the translation of prompts to code. Without thorough review, you are unable to be sure that the output code matches the intent of your prompting, which is analagous to writing code with UB. The issue the author has with vibecoded Rust is not that the code can trigger undefined behavior at the language layer, but that the perfectly "safe" code generated may not at all match the intended semantics.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-02-09 02:48:28+00:00
The way apple implemented things is great, no argument there. Others need to tech note. But the same thing could have been implemented without requiring device/iOS lock-in. I don't care to malign apple, but alternatives need to work as well, and as smoothly as apple passwords and passkeys, without the corporate malice.

> I would not bet against Apple's security failing.

I wouldn't either, but now the same tech is going to be used by everyone, and Apple's goal of vendor-lockin succeeds. Their security isn't in question, their malicious and anti-competitive practices are. They are secure, and it works well. You're also tied into their ecosystem, and devices. they collect information that isn't necessary for their products to work well, and securely. You can't fault them for being greedy, they're not particularly worse in that regard, but industry needs to standardize better alternatives that work well, without the whole "you have to trust apple, and it's okay that they lock in people to their ecosystem" angle.

If authentication requires the website/app to demand anything that can only be obtained on an apple device, that is a user hostile and anti-competitive feature. What confounds me is that Apple has a strong user-base, doing this the right way doesn't cost them much. Making a user friendly authentication protocol that works without attestation and hardware-lockin doesn't hurt them. They don't need to play dirty and lockin users, their fanbase is already strong. They're just being greedy for that extra 0.001 increase.
by sneak | 2026-02-09 02:49:35+00:00
This seems to me, despite being cool, like the exact type of “too clever by half” code that Go was explicitly designed to avoid.

I like Go because most code is (if a bit verbose) not written like this. It’s written as if the person reading it is a little sleep deprived or one drink in - it doesn’t require much brainpower to reason about.

Adding methods that return functions that return closures is the kind of thinking with portals that I need to rev up my brain to be able to debug, and that’s a liability when there are deadlines involved.
by phendrenad2 | 2026-02-09 02:50:42+00:00
I feel like this misses what's actually going on. The "small, sharp, ideologically extreme" discussions aren't going away, they're just happening elsewhere. From the abstract, the reason for the decline is: "the youngest and oldest Americans increasingly abstaining from social media". The young people are talking in private Discord groups, and the old people are talking in private text groups. These private groups don't show up in social media studies. The paper even states this directly: "everyday communication increasingly migrates from large,
open networks to semi-private spaces such as group chats and messaging apps".
by harry8 | 2026-02-09 02:50:54+00:00
The criticism is that an aspect of the work is jarring. In my life, women feature. I can't think of any shared enterprise in which I have taken an interest where they do not. So for me it is jarring when in 3 separate short stories there are none. (Why? Is it a choice? Is it limited by author ability? Something else?) It damages the hell out of suspension of disbelief at the minimum.

The film Amélie "Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain" is not a racist screed. In fact it is a hugely entertaining and charming movie I do not hesitate to recommend to just about anyone. Set in Monmatre, the homogeneity of the heritage of both the characters and extras is jarring because Monmatre is just not like that. If you know Monmatre noticing this will crash right through your suspension of disbelief in the story. You will recover. Still absolutely worth the watch.

Foundation is still worth the read despite the glaring and obvious fault.

Your assertion on whether the work is or is not misogynistic is something you can perhaps discuss with someone else. I am sure there are two schools of thought on the point, but it is not at all relevant to this criticism.

Maybe that helps you understand?
by wdkwdkwdk | 2026-02-09 02:50:59+00:00
Hi HN, OP here.

I built Webattle because I felt most AI character generators stop at the "image" phase. I wanted to turn those generations into a fully playable RPG loop.

What makes it different:

Instant Video Generation: It doesn’t just generate a static sprite. The system creates a dynamic video loop for every Buddy, making them feel alive immediately after generation.

Visual Battles: Combat isn't just text logs. It features full VFX (particle effects, skill animations, hit reactions) to visualize the turn-based action.

RPG Progression (Nurturing): It’s a full game loop, not just a generator:

Skill Wheel: You can roll for new abilities (Attack, DoT, Heal, Buffs) to customize your build.

Learning System: An idle mechanic where Buddies study over time to gain XP and trigger random events.

Equipment: Loot and equip gear to boost specific stats for strategic depth.

I just pushed a big update to the battle effects and the learning system. I’d love to hear your feedback on the game loop!
by jryle70 | 2026-02-09 02:51:21+00:00
Well, you can't call your loved ones from anywhere with rotary phone, when you need them, so which one is better? I know which one I'd choose.

SSD is not only faster but also quieter and more efficient. See how much power a modern laptop consumes vs 20 years ago?

> Some things have been improved, some things have gotten worse, but however good things are right now you can bet they will be made worse going forward. Enshittification is real and increasing all the time.

You said everything is trade off but choose to believe the future will get worse. Seems contradictory? I believe life will go on, and in 2046 people will complain about modern life and talk about how good things were 20 years earlier.
by SR2Z | 2026-02-09 02:52:54+00:00
Intel IS cranking up the cache. Unfortunately, Intel chose to allocate significant resources to improving their fabs instead of immediately going to TSMC and pumping out a competitive chip, and in the years where they were misspending their resources, their competitors were gobbling up market share. Their new stuff that's competitive with Apple is all built by TSMC.

It's worth noting that Intel is not a stranger to building CPUs with lots of cache - they just segmented it into their server chips and not their consumer ones.

It matters because it is useful to understand why a given chip is faster or slower than its competitors. Apple didn't achieve this with their architecture/ISA or with some snazzy new hardware (with some notable exceptions like their x86 memory emulator), they did it by noticing how important cache was becoming to consumer workloads.
No one on Hacker News can answer this question
by mholubowski | 2026-02-09 02:53:43+00:00
Hey everyone. I have a simple question and have had a very tough time finding the answer, and no one here can give a sensible answer. Just give it a shot. At first glance it seems obvious, but then you'll realize you have no idea.

Our startup wants to build and use an agent. I want to give the agents skills, access to our APIs, etc. I do not want to reinvent any wheels, I do not want to reinvent an agent loop.

Ideally, we'd effectively have a hosted version of Claude Code with company specific skills, an API access layer, etc. In the way that Claude Code / Cursor has access to our codebase + skills, thats effectively what we want and then start exposing it in a limited fashion to our internal team and then later to our customers. And, for example, add specific features to our existing product such as "summarize this with AI" but instead of that api call going to a model provider, it would go to 'our' agent.

Does this make sense?

Could someone please point me in the right direction on what the best / simplest solution would be? I feel like it should be easy and obvious but I'm struggling to find a clear path forward. Thank you all! - Mike
by ycombinatornews | 2026-02-09 02:54:20+00:00
Learning the autonomous coding, there are so many different skills, tools and ways and only some of them seem to work.

That means I have to:
- build something so I can evaluate the results.
- track each of these projects separately otherwise they turn into dust after quite some time. Gladly claudesidian seems to be working well with the unstructured stream of inputs. Feel like hooking it up with some task tracker cli and calendar and notifications could make life a bit better too.
- plan next projects to keep evaluating other skills and tools

It’s been discussed so many times the amount of new or personalized software that appears and will appear and it seems so true.

Whatever I built I am actively using myself - a text rewriter that cleans some of the AI speak and has MCP and cli (at https://www.refineo.app). Math teaching and solving extension at https://math.photos and a self hosted stock opportunity discovery tool that runs locally. This is just to automate what I did before manually and scale it up a bit.

> Any new ideas

There’s no product yet to cover the needs of all of us launching the software into the internet void. Any ad platform out there is a hot and very outdated mess and I just can’t.
There is going to be a better way with all the capabilities we have and someone is going to really nail it.
by seanwilson | 2026-02-09 02:54:46+00:00
So for my tool and needs, I really need the live UI mockup to tell if the colors work (e.g. often the off-white/very-light colors used for backgrounds are too vibrant otherwise), the control-point based curve editing helps to quickly sculpt and explore hue/saturation/lightness curves around a locked-in brand color, and the option to link the lightness curves between scales makes it easy to build palettes with predictable contrast between color steps.

Barely any designers I work with know about P3 colors (feels like it mostly appeals to developers right now?), so I'm not that interested in P3 when using OKLCH for this makes the color picker look unfamiliar and intimidating. My tool uses HSLuv, which looks familiar like an HSL color picker, except only the lightness slider alters the WCAG contrast, so HSLuv (while limited to sRGB) is great for exploring accessible colors.

I've actually got support for APCA, but I find many struggle understanding WCAG contrast requirements already, so there's some work there introducing people on how to use it.

Anyway, there's lots of overlap with different color tools but the small details are important for different workflows and needs.
by AlotOfReading | 2026-02-09 02:55:40+00:00
That would be a much nicer definition of UB than is actually the case. What the standards say is that a program that writes to a null pointer (distinct from a zero pointer) is semantically meaningless. The compiler can assume the write doesn't happen at all, call some other functions first, initialize the pointer with a value it takes later, or whatever else it wants. One effect of this is so-called "time-traveling", where the entire execution trace before the point of UB in the execution trace is also semantically undefined. C23 updated to clarify that time travel isn't a valid interpretation, but it remains valid in C++.
by b1temy | 2026-02-09 02:55:48+00:00
> Never follow a shortened link without expanding it using a utility like Link Unshortener from the App Store,

I am unfamiliar with the Apple ecosystem, but is there anything special about this specific app that makes it trustworthy (e.g: reputable dev, made by Apple, etc.)? Looking it up, it seems like an $8 app for a link unshortener app.

In any case, there have been malicious sites that return different results based on the headers (e.g: user agent. If it is downloaded via a user-agent of a web browser, return a benign script, if it is curl, return the malicious script). But I suppose this wouldn't be a problem if you directly inspect and use the unshortened link.

> Terminal isn’t intended to be a place for the innocent to paste obfuscated commands

Tale as old as time. Isn't there an attack that was starting to get popular last year on Windows of a "captcha" asking you to hit Super + R, and pasting a command to "verify" your captcha? But I suppose this type of attack has been going on for a long, long, time. I remember Facebook and some other websites used to have a big warning in the developer console, asking not to paste scripts users found online there, as they are likely scams and will not do what they claim the script would do.

---

Side-Note: Is the layout of the website confusing for anyone else? Without borders on the image, (and the image being the same width of the paragraph text) it seemed like part of the page, and I found myself trying to select text on the image, and briefly wondering why I could not do so. Turning on my Dark Reader extension helped a little bit, since the screenshots were on a white background, but it still felt a bit jarring.