MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-19 17:24:33+00:00
Last time I did cold outreach for an enterprise product that didn't quite exist yet (about 10 years ago) I sent hand-written emails to individuals and can't recall not being able to get an audience with someone that I wanted to get an audience with. [1]

Last year I knew somebody in a similar situation who had a long list of "fish that got away" but they were pitching to celebrity bloggers, people in the gatekeeping-idustrial complex, etc. He was getting much worse results but he was pitching something really hard to sell.

[1] looking back I find that hard to believe but I think that selective recall helped me handle the hustle
by jltsiren | 2026-02-19 17:24:34+00:00
It's basically the difference between pro-market capitalism and pro-business capitalism. The value to the society comes from competition in the market and from the businesses' ability to choose freely how they do business. When those two goals are in conflict, which one should be prioritized?

Anthropic provides an API third-party clients can use. The pro-market position is that the API must be available at every pricing tier, as the benefits from increased competition outweigh the imposed restrictions to business practices. The pro-business position is that Anthropic must be allowed to choose which tiers can use the API, as the benefits from increased freedom outweigh the reduced competition in the market.
by sublinear | 2026-02-19 17:24:57+00:00
There's a CLI [1], LLM API [2], and REST API [3].

[1]: https://github.com/home-assistant-ecosystem/home-assistant-c...

[2]: https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/core/llm/

[3]: https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/api/rest/
by mikepurvis | 2026-02-19 17:24:59+00:00
That would be a especially challenging for vector output. I tried just now on ChatGPT 5.2 to jump straight to an image, with this prompt:

"make me a cartoon image of a pelican riding a bicycle, but make it from a front 3/4 view, that is riding toward the viewer."

The result was basically a head-on view, but I expect if you then put that back in and said, "take this image and vectorize it as an SVG" you'd have a much better time than trying to one-shot the SVG directly from a description.

... but of course, if that's so, then what's preventing the model from being smart enough to identify this workflow and follow it on its own to get the task completed?
by andrewflnr | 2026-02-19 17:25:18+00:00
Fun idea. At least one correction for the table: For wila/bryorii fremonti's age of 250mya they cite the "geologic history" of... moss. Wila is a lichen, which is primarily fungal with algal symbiotes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryoria_fremontii And even given an edible moss, the fact that moss existed 250mya would not imply that particular species existed "morphologically unchanged". The "reindeer lichen" entry appears to have the same issue.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-19 17:25:19+00:00
That's because when something becomes a new species is a surprisingly difficult and contentious debate in biology.

That's simply due to the nature of evolution. It's nearly impossible to look at one past generation of chicken to the next to figure out when the ancestor was no longer a chicken. Yet, go back far enough and you'll find T-Rexes in the mix.

Every generation is a new missing link. It's an extremely fuzzy process.
by otterpro | 2026-02-19 17:25:20+00:00
I like the idea, as a niche project for users that don't have control over their hardware/OS, or run on USB flash for portability.

Speaking of which, I have notes / journal entries dating back several decades, all in plain text files. I'm worried about these new projects and their longevity and whether it'll be actively supported 30 years from now. For simplicity, I'd use gocryptfs, Veracrypt, or other general file-based encryption which suits your risk tolerance, and use whatever editor (ie Obsidian, vscode, OneNote, etc) I want to use.
by gnz11 | 2026-02-19 17:25:25+00:00
I agree with you in the short term but what makes you think companies will even be asking AI to write bespoke software or setup any kind of infrastructure in the long term? Theoretically AI would handle all of this for you with much greater fidelity and accuracy than any human could manage. Any business processes would be handled by the AI which already has all of your corporate data. Why would I need a SaaS service when I could have the AI do the task or generate the answer? Why would I send data to a SaaS when I can just give it to the AI? Granted I don't believe we are anywhere close to such a scenario, but it seems to be the trajectory that we are on.
by phamilton | 2026-02-19 17:25:26+00:00
> For those building with a mix of bash and custom tools, Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview comes with a separate endpoint available via the API called gemini-3.1-pro-preview-customtools. This endpoint is better at prioritizing your custom tools (for example view_file or search_code).

It sounds like there was at least a deliberate attempt to improve it.
by InkCanon | 2026-02-19 17:25:41+00:00
I think whether houses should be sold on a 99 year lease vs property is a large and separate question. The vast misunderstanding of it still remains - the idea that a house is owned, not rented. Selective properties might be bought back. But the fundamental invariant of this whole situation is that all 99 year leases will worth 0 eventually. Any rise in prices now only increases the eventual depreciation. And add on that massive loans are taken out on depreciating assets, so it's not an investment, it's a liability. And the significant majority of Singaporeans bears this liability on their books.
by antonvs | 2026-02-19 17:25:44+00:00
I suspect there are different definitions of "toil" being used here.

Google defined "toil" as, very roughly, all the non-coding work that goes into building, deploying, managing a system: https://sre.google/workbook/eliminating-toil/ , https://sre.google/sre-book/eliminating-toil/ .

Quote: "Toil is the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and that scales linearly as a service grows."

Variations of this definition are widely used.

If we map that onto your writing example, "toil" would be related to tasks like getting the work published, not the writing process itself.

With this definition of toil, you can certainly remove the toil without removing the creative work.
by conductr | 2026-02-19 17:25:46+00:00
I have children and don’t work in tech, I was able to self moderate myself and keep kids away from it. It’s simply not that hard to see it for what it is, and never has been. It’s bad. Glad people are finally seeing what’s obvious.

Takes some minimal effort to be honest to tell the kid no and give them other outlets for their boredom. I never did tablets or small screens at all. Parenting today, and last decade or so, instead puts infants in front of tablets. Its insane. All media is then altered to steal attention and maximize engagement. It’s to be expected. Zuck is basically cocomelon. Garbage that people love to eat.

Oh and we did ban cocomelon. My kids watch plenty of Tv and I’m not going to rave about it, it’s crappy kid TV, we try to push some educational stuff too. But It was obvious that when cocomelon was on kids eyes glaze over, they forget to blink, they have no idea what is going on around them, and just look like zombies staring at a TV/screen. Let’s be honest though, that’s what most parents like about it.
by cptskippy | 2026-02-19 17:25:55+00:00
Glue and seals weaken with exposure to temperature extremes in both directions. I found this out the hard way too.

I spent all day out in below freezing temps, when I got back to my hotel room and my smartband (not pebble) started to warm up, the screen just fell off. Everything still worked and the screen was lit up. Fortunately I discovered it before I ripped the screen off on something. When I got home I was able to glue the screen back on and it's been operating just fine, of course it's probably no longer waterproof.

Hoping this thing holds out until I get my Pebble.
by stavros | 2026-02-19 17:25:56+00:00
I'm really excited about the Index. I don't love that it's disposable, but I really like the UX. I couldn't wait, so I made my own (obviously not a ring, but airtag-sized), and it's amazing. I have it in my pocket, I take it out, speak a little note, and it goes off to my AI assistant for whatever needs doing.

That and the AI assistant have really changed how I operate day to day. I'm super excited about the Index, and I hope it has the same capability my app has (mostly, sending a webhook with the transcription with exponential backoff, so I'm sure all my notes will eventually be sent).
by lukaslalinsky | 2026-02-19 17:26:23+00:00
I really approach is the same way as helping my coworkers to be productive. Most of the context is spent on the initial familiarizing with the code and I just double-check that it has the right understanding, there is minimal prompting on my side for this. The next step is to explain the problem I'm trying to solve and and for the simpler ones, it gets what needs to happen 8/10 times. I don't need to be detailed, because it already knows the context. For the complex problems, I split them into small tasks myself and only ask it to do the small steps, small enough to fit into the first category. I feel like the worst outcomes happen when you specify the problem first and let it do it's own research with that in "mind", then it just overthinks and comes up garbage.
by armchairhacker | 2026-02-19 17:27:02+00:00
In real life, can you choose an experiment perfectly randomly?

You can ask many people to propose hypotheses and choose one at random, and perhaps with a good sample you get better experiments. You can query a Markov chain until it produces an interpret-able hypothesis. But the people or Markov chain (because English itself) has significant bias.

Also, some experiments have wider-reaching implications than others (this is probably more relevant for the Markov chain, because I expect the hypotheses it forms to be like "frogs can learn to skate").
by palmotea | 2026-02-19 17:27:13+00:00
> The sad thing is that people don't miss the administrative state until it's too late.

> I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal ; one side effect was people importing baby formula to China from Australia, because they trusted the Australian food safety authorities more than the Chinese ones.

It's a problem with libertarian thinking, generally. Most of the things libertarians rail against exist for good reason, and the libertarian "solution" is actually the thing that already failed in the past.

Your typical libertarian becomes one by reading a ~300 page propaganda book that outlines the problems with Soviet central planning, adds in some legitimate gripes about present-day government rough edges, then lays out a compellingly-neat libertarian free-market fantasy. It's very black and white, offering a stark, false choice between Soviet central planning or minimal government libertarianism.

It doesn't prompt anyone to think about history before the complained about government functions arose: e.g. how was food and drug safety before the FDA? How did that work out for the people then? Were people really better off being able to buy radium water to try to cure what ails them?

It's also very selective. I've never seen any libertarian advocate the abolition of all the government bureaucracy and regulation protecting property rights.
Ask HN: Can we watch AI agents build software in real time?
by munksbeer | 2026-02-19 17:27:21+00:00
I've been thinking about moltbook where we can watch AI agents post threads and converse with each other, and I'm wondering...

Is there anything like that where a bunch of agents are building software together? It would be a fun project where you can define what software you want, post it on the moltcoder site, and watch as agents build, raise PRs, review together. See what comes out the other side.

Does this exist? If not, an idea for someone with free time.
by krapp | 2026-02-19 17:27:24+00:00
Government spending and the deficit has increased by approximately $800 billion since Trump came into office. It certainly hasn't gone down. Weird that none of the DOGE apologists seem to care anymore. Trump adding billions of dollars to the deficit in increased military spending in 2026? Not a peep.

Even if one assumes DOGE was doing exactly what they claimed to be doing (they were not) and take the government's most generous claim of how much "waste" they cut and how much they saved at face value ($150 billion, which is nonsense - the verified estimates I've seen cite maybe $1.5 billion at the most) and ignore the actual cost of DOGE (unknown, but estimated at at least $10 billion to cover paid leave for employees, other estimates I've seen go as high as $135 billion) then it was still entirely pointless.

But it doesn't matter to them because they don't actually care about cutting government waste, they care about cutting "woke" and "DEI" and anything they can associate with leftists or Democrats. Elon Musk literally described DOGE as "dismantling the radical-left shadow government"[0]. It was never about money, it was always about entrenching right-authoritarianism and purging the government of wrongthink.

[0]https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886840365329608708
by jerf | 2026-02-19 17:27:31+00:00
The "Sound Money Foundation" is trying to improve the ability to use gold and silver directly as currency at a state level, for example: https://soundmoneyfoundation.org/sound-money-movement-chalks...

There are definitely coordinated efforts to harmonize state gun laws, but I'm not sure exactly who is the central node, if there is one. (Some of it is expansion of rights in a way most of HN would hate, some of it is just harmonization of pointless-for-any-side differences.) The individual states credit different organizations for the specific laws if you look at them. I've seen some of the individual participants talk about their own efforts but not anyone who said there was a central org. There could conceivably not be in this case.

On a more HN-friendly note, the Right to Repair is being pushed at the state level: https://www.repair.org/blog/2025/2/24/ptkkw1yziw8xv7u9iwhooh... (and that site in general, but that seems a good recent overview) I know of that one through some HN posts.

I suspect the organization pushing the age verification is less interested in being public.

A running theme with these people is that while this is certainly a lot of work, it is also in a lot of ways easier than you think to get a lot of states to push a law through than it is to get the Federal government to do it. Whether this is a recruitment pitch that stretches the truth or the actual truth, I'll leave it to you to decide. I don't know enough myself to judge.
by big_toast | 2026-02-19 17:27:36+00:00
Wow cool. I have not heard of Mondo 2000 reading hn for almost 20 years. And did not realize Boing Boing was so old. Makes me wonder what else existed.

My family had a bunch of "Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia"[0] and similar things (BYTE, COMPUTE!). (Which seem slightly dryer, but maybe more like Paged Out.)

[0]:https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal_vol_01/mode/2up
by dpitkevics | 2026-02-19 17:27:37+00:00
i did a similar audit and the worst offender was duplicated config and generated files across the Next.js frontend, NestJS backend, mobile wrapper and CI. make a tiny MVP baseline you can actually ship from: one Next app, one thin backend service with a single auth route, and move CI/mobile scaffolding into a separate repo or a generator so they don't come along to every new project. consolidate shared types and infra code into a single package, kill unneeded dev-tooling files, and change heavy codegen to on-demand scripts that run when you add a feature. build a tiny CLI that scaffolds a feature folder instead of including every possible file in the base. that cut my new-project file count from hundreds to a few dozen. fwiw i used a starter kit that had auth and payments preconfigured, Vibe Coding Starter Kit, to get a production-ready baseline without rebuilding all that infra.
by solarisos | 2026-02-19 17:27:40+00:00
Selective recall or not, that 100% success rate from 10 years ago points to a different era of the inbox. Back then, a hand-written email was a signal of 'Proof of Work.’

The problem I'm seeing now is that AI has made 'hand-written' style emails incredibly cheap to forge at scale. If an enterprise lead receives 50 'personalized' emails a day that all look like they took 20 minutes to write (but actually took an LLM 2 seconds), the recipient’s internal filter just shuts down.
Do you think the 'gatekeeping-industrial complex' you mentioned is now purely a social barrier, or have the technical filters (spam/quarantine) finally caught up to the point where even a genuinely 'hand-written' cold email from a stranger might never even be seen?
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-19 17:27:53+00:00
I see "trillions" in there but don't really believe it. I mean there are 8 billion of us on Planet Earth and to see it 2 trillion times that would mean we all saw it 250 times on average. This is the first time I saw it, the number of votes and shares and comments is not remarkable (compare to https://www.threads.com/@mg_pink_angler/post/DU8UL8ECEPl)

Maybe your analytics dashboard is busted.
by steve1977 | 2026-02-19 17:28:43+00:00
I vaguely remember having tried this myself with a very small aquarium and liquid latex (IIRC), filmed with my Super 8 cam in slow motion (which meant 36 frames instead of 18).

The results weren't that impressive, but it was fun, as was all the Super 8 stuff. I kind of miss those times and I see at least one other poster seems to have similar recollections :)

To add another nice example of this effect, which is where I learned about it, is The NeverEnding Story (1984). There it's used for the "nothing" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPfQogtS2Eo) and also in the opening of the US release (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCgfRC6gHtI). The original German release only had text on a black background.

It might not look the most realistic, but IMHO it still looks beautiful.
by jschveibinz | 2026-02-19 17:28:47+00:00
This is a very common question here and most will scroll right by, so don't feel bad. It's an impossible question to answer, really.

But these are the things you need to consider first when choosing an area to work in for developing a product and ultimately a business:

1. What do you know really well? These are things that come from your personal experiences. Note: this is generally not about software or coding skills--it's about everything else in the world.

2. What are the problems or valuable opportunities in the areas you know well? Where there are serious problems, there are opportunities for valuable solutions.

3. Timing. What's happening in the world and how do the changes open doors for new solutions?

4. Market and Value. How many people suffer with the problems you are trying to solve? How well do you understand them? How much money will they spend for a solution? How many of these people have you spoken with: 25, 50, 100?

5. Who is competing in your market? What can you learn from them? How does your solution compare?

It's best to consider several problems and conceptual solutions before settling on one. Talk with people, build small prototypes, figure out if you truly understand the requirements.

If you do all of these things, you will have a much better shot at bringing forward a viable product and business idea.

There are some really good books out there on this whole process. Good luck.
by rubslopes | 2026-02-19 17:28:54+00:00
I don't understand this sentiment. It may hold true for other LLM use cases (image generation, creative writing, summarizing large texts), but when it comes to coding specifically, Google is *always* behind OpenAI and Anthropic, despite having virtually infinite processing power, money, and being the ones who started this race in the first place.

Until now, I've only ever used Gemini for coding tests. As long as I have access to GPT models or Sonnet/Opus, I never want to use Gemini. Hell, I even prefer Kimi 2.5 over it. I tried it again last week (Gemini Pro 3.0) and, right at the start of the conversation, it made the same mistake it's been making for years: it said "let me just run this command," and then did nothing.

My sentiment is actually the opposite of yours: how is Google *not* winning this race?
by kube-system | 2026-02-19 17:28:59+00:00
Taking those line items at face value is just a bunch of Dunning-Kruger. The government isn't like a tech company with a single product that can be understood well by one person. It produces many thousands of different specialized products and services.

When the National Partnership for Reinventing Government successfully cut spending in the 90s, they took 5 years to carefully evaluate what the government was doing and why, followed legal processes to propose improvements, and saved a lot of money simply by finding ways to streamline processes and procedures.

DOGE has taken a completely different approach, slashing and burning without understanding the consequences of their actions (or potentially, not caring), and intentionally doing it without involving other stakeholders. Many of the things they've cut that they thought were stupid were immediately found to be important and reversed. Some of the other things they’ve cut we’ll be finding were important for decades to come.

DOGE is just Chesterton’s Fence as a service.
by matthewkayin | 2026-02-19 17:29:09+00:00
I would think it would have to work the same in both since otherwise C code using that behavior would not compile in C++, right?

I am not a C++ expert, but I'm surprised to hear that it is considered UB to access the other member since as far as I can tell a union is just a chunk of memory that can be interpreted differently depending on which union member you access?

So, if you had a union { bool b, char c }, and you set b = false, then I would think that accessing c would predictably give you a value of '\0'.

Granted, you probably shouldn't go around accessing an inactive union member like that, but when people say it's UB they make it sound like it's impossible to guarantee what data will be inside that byte, and it seems to me like that isn't true.
by the_harpia_io | 2026-02-19 17:30:26+00:00
the copy paste concern is the most interesting bit honestly - even when it's not literally copy-pasting, AI error handling often looks correct but silently eats exceptions or returns wrong defaults. it gets the structure but misses what the code actually needs to do.

the boilerplate stuff is spot on though. the 10-type dispatch pattern is exactly where i gave up doing it manually
by verdverm | 2026-02-19 17:30:42+00:00
I use gemini for everything because I trust google to keep the data I send them safe, because they know how to run prod at scale, and they are more environmentally friendly than everyone else (tpu,us-central1).

This includes my custom agent / copilot / cowork (which uses vertex ai and all models therein). This is where I do more searching now (with genAi grounding) I'm about to work on several micro projects that will hold Ai a little differently.

All that being said, google Ai products suck hard. I hate using every one of them. This is more a reflection on the continued degradation of PM/Design at Big G, from before Ai, but accellationally worse since. I support removing Logan from the head of this shit show

disclaimer: long time g-stan, not so stan any more
by lelanthran | 2026-02-19 17:31:08+00:00
I've been programming for long; the ratio of memory errors to logic bugs in production is so low as to be non-existent.

My last memory error in C code in production was in 2018. Prior to that it I had a memory error in C code in production in 2007 or 2008.

In C++, I eventually gave up trying to ship the same level of quality and left the language altogether.