MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1718627440 | 2026-02-10 11:03:30+00:00
But FooVar1 isn't part of the library, that's the point. Sure, the library developer could choose to make it a part, but he explicitly choose to not make it a part of the library. Hence, it is also nothing that needs fixing, because it is already possible to make the interface boundary somewhere else, people just choose to do it this way. As far as the language and the linker is concerned FooVar1 is part of your code, not part of the library.
by squeefers | 2026-02-10 11:03:42+00:00
> The universe is not obligated to appeal to your aesthetic tastes in its innermost functioning.

This is truly a copout. When science faulters in explaining the world we get answers like this. His argument isnt with the universe, but with out own scientific theories. If you dont want your theories about the physical world to explain physical world, then be an engineer. Science explains the world, engineers use those theories. QM has large gaps and doesnt actually explain much, but I guess the universe doesnt care whether our theories are wildly off the mark or not.
by jongjong | 2026-02-10 11:04:14+00:00
I noticed once I took a ferry ride at night in a big city and one of the buildings had a company name written on it with bright blue lights and I couldn't read it; too blurry. I couldn't focus my eyes... And I have perfect vision. I had no issues with other colors. Not sure if it's something to do with my eyes specifically or human eyes in general or because of this effect associated with the blue color.
by amiga386 | 2026-02-10 11:04:46+00:00
It is a dark and stormy night.

You are driving on a road with only a single lane in each direction, and there is no verge or hard shoulder.

All you can see is the short area in front of you that your headlights illuminate, and they are dipped as normal so as not to dazzle oncoming drivers. You can see cars ahead of you quite easily because they have two red lamps on their rear, at their left and right extremities. You can see them even when you can't see the road between you and them. You can judge their relative speed from a long distance away.

Imagine a car has broken down. Remember they're in the same lane as you. You can see their red lamps and hazard lights, and you can judge they're not moving, well before you reach them. You slow down and go around them safely.

Imagine a second car has broken down. This car has an electrical fault and no lights, but has rear reflectors, just like roadsigns, which even your dipped headlights reflect quite well, and give you time to react. You manage to go around them safely.

Imagine a third car has broken down. The lights and reflectors are on the trunk hatch. It's opened and pointed at the sky. You're not in the sky. All you see ahead of you is blackness. The car body is only illuminated by your headlights once it's too late. You slam straight into the stopped, dark car. The person who was looking in the trunk is crushed to death.
by louiereederson | 2026-02-10 11:04:58+00:00
To the point on Jevons Paradox, the number of people/developers joining GitHub had been accelerating as of the last Octoverse report. Related: "In 2023, GitHub crossed 100 million developers after nearly three years of growth from 50 million to 100 million. But the past year alone has rewritten that curve with our fastest absolute growth yet. Today, more than 180 million developers build on GitHub."

https://github.blog/news-insights/octoverse/octoverse-a-new-...
by hinata08 | 2026-02-10 11:05:12+00:00
That's also about US companies that can't refuse or can't bother to challenge that a dragnet is set up in their process.

ISPs themselves didn't save any data.
However, they gave interception rooms to the NSA (which is indeed technically not them).

Nowadays ISPs aren't the right scale to do it for the reasons you mentioned. But the USA lowkey moved the dragnet to the main datacenters with prism, then made it mandatory for all with the CLOUD act.

And if the threat is not coming from the USA, but some other country starts to ask Discord to BCC them the IDs of their citizens, we can do the odds on whether Discord will challenge it or not.

Now I want to ask Discord who is their third party provider ? Why don't they process IDs themselves ?
by danielbarla | 2026-02-10 11:05:35+00:00
I find the chess comment fairly weak; while chess is a "perfect information" game (in that you have full information about every piece on the board), at every level that chess is played at there will be unknowns about the player you are facing.

At lower levels, you can certainly play sub min-maxed moves that are more likely to confuse or pressure a weaker opponent. You could call these bluffs. Opening theory is also a wonderful game, you're essentially playing a game of "let's bet that you haven't prepared this particular set of lines as well as I have" with the opponent. The same thing goes for game styles, open vs closed, etc.

Last but not least, playing a perfect game of chess is so far out of the realm of possibility for humans, that the entire "there's always a correct move" is completely irrelevant. We are now at a point where 7-piece endgames have been completely solved, and it involves 4.2×10^14 positions. Good luck memorizing that, and the scaling from there on out is not pretty.

In this sense, chess occupies a very interesting spot; somewhat calculatable for a human (and yes, tactics dominate up to say 2000 ELO), but there's plenty of room for creativity and strategy also. It's also played at an insanely high level, which makes it a worthwhile challenge and time investment. What it does NOT have is randomness. I often wonder what the competitive landscape of a chess variant involving some randomness would look like, or if it would fundamentally change the nature of the game.
by bjackman | 2026-02-10 11:06:39+00:00
I find that respect for safe following distance varies quite a lot amongst the places I've driven.

E.g.

- Switzerland and (somewhat surprisingly) UK: pretty good, people doing idiotic shit is rare enough that I'll usually comment on it if there's another person is in the car. If someone is riding my ass I'll make the effort to try and shake them off.

- Italy and Spain: horrifying, impossible to relax at all on the highway, having someone 2 car lengths off your rear bumper is the default condition.

- France and USA: somewhere in the middle where there are a lot of idiots but they are still the minority.

Subjectively, the USA feels much more sketchy because the rules are so much looser around overtaking.
by wiseowise | 2026-02-10 11:07:05+00:00
Managers don’t even need to push anything. FOMO does all the work.

Overheard a couple of conversations in the office how one IC spent all weekend setting up OpenClaw, another was vibe coding some bullshit application.

I see hundreds of crazy people in our company Slack just posting/reposting twitter hype threads and coming up with ridiculous ideas how to “optimize” workflow with AI.

Once this becomes the baseline, you’ll be seen as the slow one, because you’re not doing 5x work for the same pay.
by gjulianm | 2026-02-10 11:07:32+00:00
Honestly, I've been using the frontier models and I'm not sure where people are seeing these massive improvements. It's not that they're bad, but honestly I don't see that much of an improvement the last 6 months. They're so inconsistent that it's hard to have a clear idea of what's happening. I usually switch between models and I don't see either those massive differences either. Not to mention that sometimes models regress in certain aspects (e.g., I've seen later models that tend to "think" more and end up at the same result but taking far more time and tokens).
by ben_w | 2026-02-10 11:07:36+00:00
If I was a dictator in charge of a tens-of-trillions of dollar-equivalent economy, I'd do that.

Unfortunately, I really do mean "dictator" as we'd need to sustain a lot of R&D for a long time (much longer than a two-term US president for example), and even nations can't afford to spend a huge percentage of their economy on long-term projects so it has to be a fairly limited % of the overall money supply for that period. And one needs to be extremely cautious, no speed-running: a nation cannot afford to have a thematic repeat of the Apollo 1 fire with e.g. a 2000 km long Lofstrom launch loop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop

There's three options for that size of economy:

• The US space industry comes in two parts, (1) a jobs program ("Senate Launch System" etc.) whose stated goals change with almost every new president, and (2) New Space (where Musk got the lion's share, but now he showed what is possible the whole world is quite capable of following the same path). Neither half of this lends itself to an R&D program on this scale.

• The EU is not one nation, it's a glorified free trade area. The EU's budget independently of the member states is nowhere near big enough to consider this.

• That leaves China; they could, I think, if they decide they want to. Will they decide that? I have no idea. Fits belt-and-road, but they may consider it a pointless boondoggle.
by wongarsu | 2026-02-10 11:07:40+00:00
For reference, below is the prompt translated (with my highlighting of the part that matters). They did very much ask for this version of "horse riding a man", not the "horse sitting upright on a crawling human" version

---

A desolate grassland stretches into the distance, its ground dry and cracked. Fine dust is kicked up by vigorous activity, forming a faint grayish-brown mist in the low sky.

Mid-ground, eye-level composition: A muscular, robust adult brown horse stands proudly, its forelegs heavily pressing between the shoulder blades and spine of a reclining man. Its hind legs are taut, its neck held high, its mane flying against the wind, its nostrils flared, and its eyes sharp and focused, exuding a primal sense of power. The subdued man is a white male, 30-40 years old, his face covered in dust and sweat, his short, messy dark brown hair plastered to his forehead, his thick beard slightly damp; he wears a badly worn, grey-green medieval-style robe, the fabric torn and stained with mud in several places, a thick hemp rope tied around his waist, and scratched ankle-high leather boots; his body is in a push-up position—his palms are pressed hard against the cracked, dry earth, his knuckles white, the veins in his arms bulging, his legs stretched straight back and taut, his toes digging into the ground, his entire torso trembling slightly from the weight.

The background is a range of undulating grey-blue mountains, their outlines stark, their peaks hidden beneath a low-hanging, leaden-grey, cloudy sky. The thick clouds diffuse a soft, diffused light, which pours down naturally from the left front at a 45-degree angle, casting clear and voluminous shadows on the horse's belly, the back of the man's hands, and the cracked ground.

The overall color scheme is strictly controlled within the earth tones: the horsehair is warm brown, the robe is a gradient of gray-green-brown, the soil is a mixture of ochre, dry yellow earth, and charcoal gray, the dust is light brownish-gray, and the sky is a transition from matte lead gray to cool gray with a faint glow at the bottom of the clouds.

The image has a realistic, high-definition photographic quality, with extremely fine textures—you can see the sweat on the horse's neck, the wear and tear on the robe's warp and weft threads, the skin pores and stubble, the edges of the cracked soil, and the dust particles. The atmosphere is tense, primitive, and full of suffocating tension from a struggle of biological forces.
by falloutx | 2026-02-10 11:07:46+00:00
I am becoming more and more convinced that AI cant be used to make something better than what could have built before AI.

You never needed 1000s of engineers to build software anyway, Winamp & VLC were build by less than four people. You only needed 1000s of people because the executive vision is always to add more useless junk into each product. And now with AI that might be even harder to avoid. This would mean there would be 1000s of do-everything websites in the future in the best case, or billions of doing one-thing terribly apps in the worst case.

percentage of good, well planned, consistent and coherent software is going to approach zero in both cases.
by altmanaltman | 2026-02-10 11:08:17+00:00
If what once felt incredible is just another prompt today, what is incredible today? Addictive personalities usually double down to get a bigger dopamine kick - that's why they stay addicted. So I don't think you truly found it addictive in the conventional sense of the term. Also excercising the brain has been optional in software for quite a while tbh.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-10 11:08:17+00:00
Everything keeps changing so quickly, I basically have my own Python HTTP server with a unified JSON interface, then that can be routed to any of the impls/*.py files for the actual generation, then I have of those per implementation/architecture basically. Mostly using `diffusers` for the inference, which isn't the fastest, but tends to have the new model architectures much sooner than everyone else.
by wtcactus | 2026-02-10 11:09:21+00:00
> Do western AI models mostly default to white people?

No, they mostly default to black people even in historical contexts where they are completely out of place, actually. [1]

"Google paused its AI image-generator after Gemini depicted America's founding fathers and Nazi soldiers as Black. The images went viral, embarrassing Google."

[1] https://www.npr.org/2024/03/18/1239107313/google-races-to-fi...
by johndough | 2026-02-10 11:09:26+00:00
Nutika uses CPython as fallback. From the Limitations section:

> Standalone binaries built using the --standalone command line option include an embedded CPython interpreter to handle aspects of the language that are not determined when the program is compiled and must be interpreted at runtime, such as duck typing, exception handling, and dynamic code execution (the eval function and exec function or statement), along with those Python and native libraries that are needed for execution, leading to rather large file sizes.
by ap99 | 2026-02-10 11:09:33+00:00
Yeah if you want to keep your edge you have to find other ways to work your programming brain.

But as far as output - we all have different reasons for enjoying software development but for me it's more making something useful and less in the coding itself. AI makes the fun parts more fun and the less fun parts almost invisible (at small scale).

We'll all have to wrestle with this going forward.
by materialpoint | 2026-02-10 11:10:33+00:00
It doesn't matter if the icon is ever so slightly ambigious compared to other systems, the label text next to it removes any ambiguity and makes the message perfectly clear, as long as it is consistent within a product.
To any newcomer to a new system, most icons don't make sense, so the text next to it is an invaluable hidden tutorial.
OP didn't stop to see that the circled checkmarks look like clocks, so it just highly opinionated.
by bmacho | 2026-02-10 11:11:32+00:00
Wait is that available? Best clock would be UTC + decimal time anyway, netric time is a good name for that.

Decimal time: you divide the day into powers of tens, a 'deci' is 2.4 hours, a 'centi' is 14.4 ~= 15 minutes, a 'mili' is 1.44 minutes ~= 86 seconds and so on.

Great system with convenient lengths, and easy to add duration + date, and convert between different units.
by bsenftner | 2026-02-10 11:11:54+00:00
I've been saying this since ChatGPT first came out: AI enables the lazy to dig intellectual holes they cannot dig out, while also enables those with active critical analysis and good secondary considerations to literally become the fabled 10x or more developer / knowledge worker. Which creates interesting scenarios as AI is being evaluated and adopted: the short sighted are loudly declaring success, which will be short term success, and they are bullying their work-peers that they have the method they all should follow. That method being intellectually lazy, allowing the AI to code for them, which they then verify with testing and believe they are done. Meanwhile, the quiet ones are figuring out how to eliminate the need for their coworkers at all. Managers are observing productivity growth, which falters with the loud ones, but not with those quiet ones... AI is here to make the scientifically minded excel and the short cut takers can footgun themselves out of there.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2026-02-10 11:12:16+00:00
Yes, but it doesn't even need mysticism or duality.

There's a more straightforward problem, which is that all of science is limited by our ability to generate and test mental models, and there's been no research into the accuracy and reliability of our modelling processes.

Everything gets filtered through human consciousness - math, experiment, all of it. And our definition of "objective" is literally just "we cross-check with other educated humans and the most reliable and consistent experience wins, for now."

How likely is it that human consciousness is the most perfect of all possible lenses, doesn't introduce distortions, and has no limits, questionable habits, or blind spots?
by donkeybeer | 2026-02-10 11:13:41+00:00
LMFAO LMFAO. EXACTLY AS I HAD PREDICTED. I bet from his overdramatic exaggerations about downvotes meaning "censorship" a situation whre literally no mod powers were invoked, that I bet this idiots psychotic hallucinations probably drama queen and exaggerate in his imagination travel and marriage as violent murderous genocide too. I was absolutely on point!
by CSSer | 2026-02-10 11:13:48+00:00
Do you mean in terms of adding one more feature or in terms of how a feature you're adding almost works but not quite right?

I find the latter a lot more challenging to cut my losses when it's on a good run (and often even when I know I could just write this by hand), especially because there's as much if not more intrigue about whether the tool can accomplish it or not. These are the moments where my mind has drifted to think about it the exact way you describe it here.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-02-10 11:13:48+00:00
> help avoid burnout

Yeah, good luck with that.

Corporations have tried to reduce employee burnout exactly never times.

That’s something that starts at the top. The execs tend to be “type A++” personalities, who run close to burnout, and don’t really have much empathy for employees in the same condition.

But they also don’t believe that employees should have the same level of reward, for their stress.

For myself, I know that I am not “getting maximum result” from using LLMs, but I feel as if they have been a real force multiplier, in my work, and don’t feel burnt out, at all.
by zsoltkacsandi | 2026-02-10 11:15:54+00:00
Completely agree. There is a common misunderstanding/misconception in product development, that more features = better product.

I’ve never seen a product/project manager questioning themselves: does this feature add any value? Should we remove it?

In agile methodologies we measure the output of the developers. But we don’t care about that the output carries any meaningful value to the end user/business.
by mentalgear | 2026-02-10 11:17:04+00:00
I'm also coming to the conclusion that LLMs have basically the same value as when I tried them out with GPT-3 : good for semantic search / debugging. Bad for generation as you constantly have to check it, correct it, and the parts you trust it to get "right" are often those that are biting you afterwards - or if right introduce gaps in your own knowledge that make you slowly inefficient in your "generation controller" role.
by a3w | 2026-02-10 11:17:17+00:00
My perspective:

I have looked at the rust Zulip forums, which are bulky. But with moderation and rules and having people on the autistic spectrum [citation needed], it perhaps is usable for large organizations. Just kidding.

We are using Zulip for 300+ members in a makerspace, and at 40 members, we were not happy. Scaling to 300 never broke not being happy, since we all hate the UI ever since.

I cannot re-open Zulip threads, which are also issues with an atomic "solved/unresolved" state, unless I have elevated access. It is not a true forum like PHP forums, where we ask people to name threads, and you might just skip reading more than the title, or locate interesting threads by activity and find stickies about important announcements in a pull, not push, way of doing things.

It instead is a chat where a thousand group chats are open, and no once wants to read any of them.

If they wanted to re-invent forums, they should have cloned the "discourse" web app/forum. Still looks like shit on every platform, mobile or desktop, but at least does not break down on mobile.
by milind-soni | 2026-02-10 11:17:22+00:00
ContextCanvas(https://github.com/milind-soni/contextcanvas)
I'm working on a visual interface for managing AI context. Instead of wrestling with text, you draw selections on an embedding map and chat with the selected data.

The insight: points close together in embedding space are semantically similar. So lasso a cluster, ask questions about it, refine your selection, repeat.

Built with Svelte 5 and DuckDB WASM for fast spatial queries. Everything runs client-side—your data never leaves the browser. It is based on Apple Embeddings Atlas

The vision is turning these visual selections into API endpoints that agents can query programmatically.

Looking for suggestions and feedback!
by alt227 | 2026-02-10 11:17:47+00:00
> it's extremely unlikely that a Discord employee will have an incentive to spy on your messages specifically

No, but history shows some unscrupulous staff members will always snoop, whether its just pure interest or something more nafarious like intent to sell on the black market. This makes the risk of your private data being leaked > 0, which should always be treated as a valid risk.
by berkes | 2026-02-10 11:17:48+00:00
That reduces humans to the homo economicus¹:

> "Self-interest is the main motivation of human beings in their transactions" [...] The economic man solution is considered to be inadequate and flawed.[17]

An important distinction is that a human can *not* make pure rational decisions, or use complex deductions to make decisions on, such as "if I do X I will go to jail".

My point being: if AI were to risk jail time, it would still act different from humans, because (the current common LLMs) can make such deductions and rational decisions.

Humans will always add much broader contexts - from upbringing, via culture/religion, their current situation, to past experiences, or peer-consulting. In other words: a human may make an "(un)ethical" decision based on their social background, religion, a chat with a pal over a beer about the conundrum, their ability to find a new job, financial situation etc.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus
by louiereederson | 2026-02-10 11:17:53+00:00
I think these people are just as prone to behavioral biases as the rest of us. This is not a problem per se, it's just that it is difficult to interpret what is happening right now and what will happen, which creates an overreliance on the opinions of the few people closely involved. I'm sure given the pace of change and the perception that this is history-changing is impacting peoples' judgment. The unusual focus on their opinions can't be helping either. Ideally people are factoring this into their claims and predictions, but it doesn't seem like that's the case all the time.
by account42 | 2026-02-10 11:17:54+00:00
Grep and vim are obviously stand ins for a myriad of tools that together are much larger than Linux. And even Linux still has unpaid volunteers and even the majority corporate contributors are not that relevant to the discussion because none of them have control over the project to the degree that they could enshittify it.

> people tend to need food and a place to live, you know

That has never been enough reason to require that others support your business model. I for one don't need or want any more "products" in my life, especially ones that are or depend on services I can only get from a single vendor.