MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by boredtofears | 2026-02-08 22:43:28+00:00
Helping out with a freelance project I built 15 years ago. It didn’t end on the best of terms, but the relationship has since been repaired (and I’m much better at managing my time now)

It’s been fun to come back to, most of the code I wrote still drives the business (it’s just far outdated).

I was pretty early on in my career when I wrote it, so seeing my mistakes and all the potential areas to improve has been very interesting. It’s like buying back your old high school Camaro that you used to wrench on.
by Yizahi | 2026-02-08 22:43:38+00:00
Problem 1 - assuming this Vouch tool gains wide adoption without major fuckups, I predict that a lot of people would "outsource" their own vetting to it, and it would become a circular system where newcomer would not be able to get vouched because everyone will expect others to do it.

Problem 2 - getting banned by any single random project for any reason, like CoC disagreement, a heated Rust discussion, any world politics views etc. would lead to a system-wide ban in all involved project. Kinda like getting a ban for a bad YT comment and then your email and files are blocked forever too.

The idea is nice, like many other social improvement ideas. The reality will 99% depend on the actual implementation and actual usage.
by teocalin37 | 2026-02-08 22:43:38+00:00
I mean yeah. But for message passing across different local networks, with NAT, or different network conditions, you couldn’t pull it off. Scope is to have my OpenClaw instance have an address(say 0:0000.0000.0008), and you have another instance(0:0000.0000.000A). If they want to coordinate, exchange files, perform actions, I can: 1. Set up some form of site-to-site/ZT VPN between our networks, or something more old school like Hamachi and have them talk. 2. Have some form of platforms/websites where they can share data freely. Both require some prior agreement as to either a protocol/platform. Pilot allows for both reachability and exchange. Operating a bit lower than application layer such that it can work with more or less anything.
by Animats | 2026-02-08 22:43:56+00:00
Remember those Donut/Verge solid state batteries, which were supposed to ship in Q1 2026? That just slipped to the end of 2026 or 2027.[1] Supposedly they're delayed by needing "certification" for their motorcycle.

(The motorcycle is real, and has been out for years. This is just a battery upgrade.)

[1] https://insideevs.com/news/786388/verge-motorcycles-donut-la...
by iwanttocomment | 2026-02-08 22:43:57+00:00
When I specced out my macbook pro M1 16gb it was entirely possible to get 32 and 64gb without any tie-in to CPU upgrades.

You're misremembering. The Macbook Pro M1 (2020) supported a maximum of 16GB, and the base Mx chips have never been offered in a 64GB configuration.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-02-08 22:45:13+00:00
Axed EV subsidization, openly called EVs -- and climate change -- a scam, and then made noises about cutting emissions standards, and aggressively pursued fossil fuel expansion?

That and threw tariffs on the auto makers parts and imports such that their businesses are under threat?

GM just axed the Bolt again. The only domestic affordable EV. Stellantis killed all of theirs, from what I hear. And Ford has pulled back as well.
by rayiner | 2026-02-08 22:45:28+00:00
> Every wave of immigrants have tended to cluster in communities comprising others of their origin. That is not an unreasonable thing and the "third world" part is thinly veiled racism.

The clustering is the problem. It allows foreign cultures to take root and reproduce in the U.S. And there's nothing "racist" about it. Culture is not superficial, like skin color. Culture drives differences in how people participate in government, civic society, etc. E.g. if you're in a little Vermont town and a bunch of Alabamans move in and start changing the culture, it's not "racist" for you to oppose that migration. The same is true if you're in any place that's has a more successful culture that's seeing immigration from places that have less successful cultures.

> Older adults who come here are likely to be slower in assimilation of language and culture, but their children very much grow up as "americans".

That wasn't true even for the European immigrants. If you define "American" as orderly, austere New Englanders, the Ellis Island immigrants never became fully American.

Even generations later, people's cultural backgrounds affect their attitudes: https://www.rorotoko.com/micro-interviews/20230913-jones-gar....
by RickHull | 2026-02-08 22:45:36+00:00
I'm working on a poker (NLHE) trainer app that includes a web poker room for multiplayer, with bots available and fake chips. Using Event Sourcing with some CQRS in Elixir and Phoenix. The player view is a projection of House Events, suitable for hand history, for feeding to solvers or LLMs for real time advice or post hoc analysis.

The idea is to get tons of reps in, across varied situations, with excellent advice to build good intuitions and decision making abilities. Or to stop making bad or terrible decisions. Or just play poker for free.

I'd like to monetize with at least the hand history format open sourced. Ping me if you would like to get involved with GTM and the revenue side of things.
by fastslack | 2026-02-08 22:45:51+00:00
I built an E2E test runner where tests are defined as JSON action arrays instead of JavaScript files. It
runs tests in parallel against a Chrome pool (browserless/chrome via Docker).

What makes it different: it includes a built-in MCP server, so after one command Claude Code can run
tests, analyze failures, create new test files, and manage the Chrome pool natively.
by input_sh | 2026-02-08 22:45:56+00:00
Some? I'd be shocked if it's less than 70% of everything AI-related in here.

For example a lot of pro-OpenAI astroturfing really wanted you to know that 5.3 scored better than opus on terminal-bench 2.0 this week, and a lot of Anthropic astroturfing likes to claim that all your issues with it will simply go away as soon as you switch to a $200/month plan (like you can't try Opus in the cheaper one and realise it's definitely not 10x better).
by csense | 2026-02-08 22:46:05+00:00
I could never really get into LeGuin. It's been a long while since I tried reading Earthsea but it seems like a very mediocre fantasy novel with a plot that struggles to actually go anywhere. Apparently it's trying to preach some kind of political message about racism, and doing it poorly -- I didn't get that message at all when I read it, and only later learned about the racial aspect of it.

If you want to write good fantasy, it helps a lot to include: Huge exploding fireballs. Cool-looking protagonists mastering the battlefield with confidence and style. World-altering stakes.

LeGuin has none of the above, and overall just seems kinda...mid. I'm confused why so many people seem to gush over Earthsea.

(Notwithstanding the above, it's okay with me if you happen to like LeGuin -- I'm not trying to be the taste police. I'm posting because I'm trying to figure out what all the fuss is about, and wondering if I'm missing something -- so dissenting opinions are welcome!)
by nostrapollo | 2026-02-08 22:46:24+00:00
Something sus about these posts that promote OpenClaw specifically, even on X when ClawdBot was first popping up - an unusual number of people were promoting it all without specific information on why it was useful. All the usual suspects were also promoting it (the 'dev influencer' accounts). Is this a new(?) tactic on hyping up a github repo for engagement?
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2026-02-08 22:46:27+00:00
I have a theory, but based only on my observation of younger family members; needless to say, it may be way off in aggregate. Apart from the obvious, I don't really see them posting on legacy social media platfoms ( fb and so on ). TikTok was commonly used, but I can't say if recent US moves actually caused younger people to limits its use. On the other hand, fragmented discords and the like did seem to start be more common.
by agentultra | 2026-02-08 22:47:23+00:00
There’s a theory of neural networks that states:

For every real valued function and every epsilon greater than zero, there’s a neural network (size unbounded) which approximates the function with precision epsilon.

It sounds impressive and, as I understand it, is the basis for the argument that algorithms based on NN’s such as LLM’s will be able to put perform humans at tasks such as programming.

But this theorem contains an ambiguous term that makes it less impressive when you remove it.

Which for me, makes such tools… interesting I guess for some applications but it’s not nearly as impressive as to remove the need for programmers or to replace their labour entirely with automation that we need to concern ourselves with writing markdown files and wasting tokens asking the algorithm to try again.

So this whole argument that, “you better learn to use them or be displaced in the labour market,” is a relying on a weak argument.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-02-08 22:47:28+00:00
JFC. Of course the old man is responsible, that's why he's going to prison.

But to just leave it at that is to be an enabler of the scammers, there's a lot more that went into teeing up this situation that ought to be prevented.

What if he'd just have fallen for the scam instead of shooting anyone? That's still not an acceptable outcome.
by jeffbee | 2026-02-08 22:49:25+00:00
This paper came out in October and I read it at the time. It is pretty surprising but it is also totally contradicted by other major surveys, so I am pretty sure it's just flawed. The most peculiar result is the dramatic reduction in reach for YouTube. This guy has YouTube with 60% reach and falling. Pew Americans’ Social Media Use 2025 has YouTube at 84% and rising, and 95% among 18-29 age cohort, which pretty much refutes this paper's core conclusion.

"Overall [social media] platform use slipped ... especially the youngest ... who no longer use social media at all" is the kind of wild claim that requires a much more significant investigation than this author undertook.
by adamlgerber | 2026-02-08 22:50:12+00:00
i feel like the underlying thesis of this is maybe wrong. someone closer to the methodology would know better but here is what i see:

(1) Meta and Google have seen their growth slow (not shrink) because they reach virtually the entirety of the online population, especially in the US. Meanwhile their time spent metrics continue to rise.

(2) Reddit is called out as a modest grower but its usage has more than doubled in the US since 2021 from 90M to 170M (according to emarketer).

Doenst mean the conclusions are wrong (i agree with it on polarization) but the growth measures seem to not reflect reality.
by HiPhish | 2026-02-08 22:50:42+00:00
I don't know how it is where where you live, but here there are two possibilities I can think of:

- When I buy an item I still have to click a "check out" link to enter my address and actually pay for the item. I could take days after buying the item to click that link.
- Some sellers might not accept PayPal, instead after I check out I get the sellers bank information and have to manually wire the money. I could take days after checking out to actually perform the money transfer.
by engineer_22 | 2026-02-08 22:50:51+00:00
YC does have brakes ... Accounts are rate limited for engaging in conversations that are determined to be beneath the dignity of the platform. It's not clear if the rate limiting is biased against certain perspectives.

FB and Twitter seem to drive heavy political ideological content at the slightest hint of engagement.

I think a problem with loud poles and a quiet middle is the political class takes its queue from the internet discourse. The algorithms drive content, but in a reverse fashion they also poll the electorate, providing signal the political scientists use to calibrate messaging.
by varispeed | 2026-02-08 22:51:04+00:00
The issue isn’t “normalising pop-up virus scanners” or letting random vendors hook the kernel. It’s verifiability. On Apple platforms, the security model is explicitly “trust us bro”. You cannot independently inspect the system at the level required to detect certain classes of compromise, because Apple forbids it.

A platform where compromise is, by design, undetectable to the owner is not “more secure”, it’s merely less observable. That’s security through opacity, not security through design.

Yes, third-party security software has a bad history. So does third-party everything. That doesn’t magically make a closed system safer. It just moves all trust to a single vendor, removes independent validation, and ensures that when something slips through, only the platform owner gets to decide whether it exists.

“The OS vendor should deliver a secure OS” is an aspiration, not an argument. No OS is bug-free. Defence in depth means independent mechanisms of inspection, not just a promise that the walls are high enough.

Apple’s model works well for reducing mass-market malware and user error. It does not work for high-assurance trust, because you cannot verify state. If you can’t audit, you can’t prove clean. You can only assume.

That may be a perfectly acceptable trade-off. But let’s not pretend it’s the same thing as stronger security. It’s a different philosophy, and it comes with real blind spots - which to some people make Apple devices a non-starter.
by etrvic | 2026-02-08 22:51:26+00:00
I don't think the social media landscape is inherently bad, but the ways in which it evolved. And I think the shift in social media towards consuming content instead of connecting with others is a direct reflection of the era we live in; one of abundant information.

Social media will stop becoming relevant when we stop treating each person as a mini corporation that needs to provide value, trying to optimize every aspect of your life in a life-long marketing campaign.
by thelock85 | 2026-02-08 22:51:44+00:00
The top post is about property damage not flying over. This comment is in response to the idea that drone delivery is a democratically expressed need or want. I think it’s a corporate need advancing capital over labor in the name of convenience. Perhaps people only care about convenience but I’m not sure that makes it democratic.

Also I’m not a property rights lawyer but I’d contest the idea that you don’t even own an inch or a foot or several feet above your property, otherwise it would be impossible to build up. Please share a source on your “current legal definition” either in North Texas municipality where drone crash occurred or otherwise.
by atulmy | 2026-02-08 22:51:50+00:00
After 15+ years in web development — now diving into game development with Three.js / React Three Fiber (R3F). Keeping AI usage minimal where possible, but it’s been invaluable for complex geometry and math-heavy problems.

Game idea:
DroneCraft is a third-person drone exploration game where players scout the world for parts, craft powerful upgrades, and trade strategically to evolve their build.

Whats coming:
Core mechanics are up and running. First playable version planned within a month, alongside open-sourcing the full codebase.
by unyttigfjelltol | 2026-02-08 22:52:08+00:00
The workflow is fine, the content is fine. The LLM needs to lean in a little harder on your voice and condensing your content— focus on subtraction rather than addition.

The problem is: viewed as a one-off, it’s a gem. But put it on the AI slop conveyor many commenters here apparently are fed all day long, the voice is too similar, it seems like another chapter in that anthology.
by FireBeyond | 2026-02-08 22:52:33+00:00
When dealing with depression I suffered ED. So I looked at Hims.

They have a fairly cavalier attitude to medication administration at best - the goal is sell, sell, sell.

I filled out the questionnaire on symptoms prior to my virtual physician interview...

"Based on your answers to questions 3, 4 and 8, this would not meet the criteria for prescription. You would need to answer differently. Would you like a minute or two to review your answers for accuracy?"

These places are effectively online pill mills.
by nebula8804 | 2026-02-08 22:52:35+00:00
I often see superbly restored SGI equipment at VCF and also own a few SGI equipment that I hope to get to some point in my life but I have never seen any interesting new software or usage of these machines other than the stock "cool" demo programs(The file manager, the gears demo and others running at the same time). Is there any actual cool homebrew occuring on these platforms?
by spockz | 2026-02-08 22:52:47+00:00
Modern machines are so insanely fast, the UI should almost react before you do an action.

My 5900X machine with relatively slow RAM running CachyOS actually almost feels as instant as DOS machines with incredible low latency.

Instead, we get tons of layers of abstraction (Electron etc), combined with endpoint security software in the enterprise world that bring any machine to its knees by inspecting every I/O action.

Zed is an awesome editor where every interaction is just “snappy”.

I feel all the animations and transitions have been introduced to macOS just to paper over slowness. I’ve disabled them via the accessibility settings which helps in perceived snappiness a bit, but it also makes yank visible where performance is not up to par.
by tzs | 2026-02-08 22:52:49+00:00
> And do we really need orders in 60 minutes?

Probably not necessary, but it can be quite convenient.

In the late '90s a company called Kozmo.com was doing 60 minute delivery in several cities of some basic food and snack, games, CDs, DVDs, magazines, books, and some other things.

It was pretty nice one night when I started watching "Seven Samurai" on a basic cable channel, and about 30 minutes in got annoyed at the number of commercial breaks they were inserting. During the next break I popped onto the computer, ordered the movie on DVD, along with some microwave popcorn and some drinks. I then went back to watching on TV.

About 15 minutes later their driver showed up, and 5 minutes after that I was watching from the DVD and eating my popcorn.
by dietrichepp | 2026-02-08 22:53:11+00:00
Recently fixed bugs in an audio encoder / decoder (VADPCM) I reverse engineered from the Nintendo 64, and some people are apparently using it to dub Conker’s Bad Fur Day into Spanish.

On-and-off again working on a Mystery Dungeon style game but I have a lot of obligations taking me away from it.

Planning on making demoscene entries this year.
by tamimio | 2026-02-08 22:53:41+00:00
The real issue that a lot of people keep forgetting or ignoring is monetization. This alone is responsible for at least 80% of the damage we have in nowadays internet, not just social media. YouTube channels, Twitter accounts, Twitch streamers, podcasts, you name it, are there only as a business to these "influencers", and naturally the more you progress in time the more there's a need to be extreme to get noticed in this exponentially growing domain. So back in 2013 you could get an audience by making some prank on Vine, but in 2025 you have to pretend you are "exposing Somali frauds" to get the same engagement level, and thus the money and popularity, as pretty much no one will care if you made prank videos in 2025 anymore. There are bots running on Twitter as we speak that are actively shilling and grifting on trendy topics, podcasts paid by sponsors, even on HN especially since AI with these wrappers trying to sell subscriptions or asking you to sign up on their blogs. The list goes on. The problem isn't social media. The problem is the oldest issue in history: money and greed. Everyone is trying to monetize anything, including selling used socks or whatever on OF!
by alsetmusic | 2026-02-08 22:53:48+00:00
I scanned through the documents in the repo (I would never have an agent execute code from a URL) and I didn't find anything suspicious. I had Claude build the app according to the specs and I have a working AI agent at the end that uses my Claude API key. Whether this turns out to be advantageous longterm remains to be seen, but the toy weather app I asked it to build was higher quality than the ones that I had Claude build by itself.

The specs totaled ~6000-7000 lines. I'm sorta in awe of how much detail they provided. I've not supplied specs longer than about one page when telling an agent to build something.

It used a ton of tokens building in Typescript. I had to add money to my account to finish it in one night. I might ask it to build in Rust or Go, we'll see. Anyway, it's interesting even if it isn't clear that that it's useful. I'll have to try it a bunch to know.
by bastawhiz | 2026-02-08 22:54:37+00:00
I'll simply never file PRs, then. I'd say 4 out of every 5 PRs I file never get a response. Some on very large projects, and I like to think my PRs are more useful than docs fixes or pointless refactors. I'm simply not going to spend money to have to float around in the void endlessly because a maintainer lost interest in the project and won't ever look at my PR, I'll simply keep my changes on a downstream fork.

Moreover, I'm not interested in having my money get handed over to folks who aren't incentivized to refund my money. In fact, they're paying processing costs on the charge, so they are disincentivized to refund me! There could be an escrow service that handles this, but now there's another party involved: I just want to fix a damn bug, not deal with this shit.
by ineedasername | 2026-02-08 22:54:51+00:00
>I used to have way too many ideas but no way to build them all on my own—they just kept piling up. But now, everything is different.

This has been a significant aspect of ai use as well. As a result a feel a little less friction with myself, less that I am letting things slip by because, well, because I still want a nice balance to work, life, leisure, etc. I don’t want to overstate things, it’s not a cure all for any of these things, but it helps a lot.
by userbinator | 2026-02-08 22:56:09+00:00
In the PC world this would be known as "BIOS modding".

The first two instructions looked legitimate, but the third looked unlikely to be a real instruction.

Given that the first appears to be a branch, that's not surprising. When disassembling, not following the flow will likely not give you anything meaningful. If the author is reading this: have you tried Ghidra?

That said, this seems a lot simpler than PC BIOSes in structure, as the latter are usually written in a combination of C and Asm (I can see why no one wanted to write MIPS Asm) and are self-extracting compressed archives.
by flumpcakes | 2026-02-08 22:56:20+00:00
I'm a big fan of passkeys, but they are currently harder to manage/reason about than passwords (even autogenerated ones stored in a password manager).

My web browser wants to own the passkeys, my OS wants to own the passkeys, I have to deny them before I can get to my hardware key. Some providers will sync passkeys amongst devices, which at some point seemed to be against the spec.

It's all rather confusing. I wish there was a straight forward best practise that can be followed without the niggling worry that you're doing it wrong, or that you might get locked out of services.
by Yizahi | 2026-02-08 22:56:32+00:00
And another practical observation is that not many people have Lobsters account or even heard about it due to that (way less than people who heard about HN). Their "solution" is to make newcomers beg for invites in some chat. Guess what would a motivated malicious actor would do any times required and a regular internet user won't bother? Yeah, that.
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2026-02-08 22:56:54+00:00
You may be onto something. It is a little bit like google when it first started showing ads. Initially, the ads were clearly marked and were promised to be relevant to the user, but that line has been moved slowly in a way to extract more and more value from the user.. while removing value that user already had.

I know social media had some real use cases. CL and FB marketplace are probably one good example of that. But the rest of it.. best I can say, my overall happiness jumped up after first month of going on a media diet.