MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mmastrac | 2026-02-09 00:02:59+00:00
I have a popup saying "terraforming complete" after 10 sols, but I want to keep playing and I cannot dismiss that popup.

The game is definitely fun but there's some papercuts that make it tough: no dismantle I can find, placement is difficult to understand.

Some feedback:

Colonists are really tough to talk to - you have to be in just the right spot.

There doesn't seem to be a downside to spamming buildings if you can afford it. There needs to be some ongoing cost to everything you place OR a downside.

Music shouldn't change in menus, or at least shouldn't restart constantly. That gets a bit annoying.
by irvingprime | 2026-02-09 00:03:11+00:00
All kinds of things! I work with AI every day to do various kinds of work. Coding. Research. Brainstorming. I write up notes nearly every day and then I post a summary of each week on Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/cw/aiconfessions

One of the projects that features in these notes is the attempt to build a programming language using AI. https://github.com/xvandervort/graphoid

Since I left my last job, I do a lot of writing. I also have a couple substacks. One is a humorous weekly look at science and tech (https://technoscreed.substack.com/
) and the other is a monthly exploration of history (https://historyroad.substack.com/)
by hsuduebc2 | 2026-02-09 00:03:17+00:00
But to be more broad I'll present you the romantic version which is at least partly true. I miss that.

It used to feel like the internet was a place you went to explore and learn. It was harder to use and navigate, so most ordinary people did not spend much time there. Back then, a lot of people believed it would make the world better because everyone could access information and educate themselves.

That optimism did not survive contact with reality. Today you can carry essentially all human knowledge in your pocket, yet much of the internet is funneled through a handful of corporations whose business model is advertising and attention. Instead of helping people discover things, the dominant platforms optimize for keeping you scrolling with outrage, dopamine hits, and low value content. Worst thing is of course politics which moved in here.

The joy of exploring is done, but honestly I think that it atleast partly that the og users got older. Hackernews somehow reminding me the "old Internet", somehow alike people with desire to explore and have honest discussion on genuinely interesting topic.
by gruez | 2026-02-09 00:03:27+00:00
>At this point it would make sense to say this is just how Bluesky grows.

>https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

If you zoom out the graph all the way you'll see that it's a decline for the past year. The slight uptick in the past 1-2 months can probably be attributed to other factors (eg. ICE protests riling the left up) than "[filter bubble] is how bluesky grows".
by bluGill | 2026-02-09 00:03:40+00:00
Those are the people who do the nost work for the party. People who 'toe the line' are also those who tend not to do the work that gets people elected. People who care enough to think also knock of doors and the other work that gets someone elected. You won't find a thinking person you 100% agree with, but a mostly agree is better than a mostly disagree - and by doing that work you also get to talk to people and perhaps change minds.
by bsder | 2026-02-09 00:03:45+00:00
The problem is that "partisan" doesn't automatically mean "wrong".

People wield "the middle" as if it is some magic incantation that makes them correct or immune to criticism. In fact, it is generally the "middle" or, as I prefer to call them, the "inert" that tend to be wrong since they are always behind the curve rather than ahead of it.

In Milgram's experiment, only the most "partisan" refused to deliver the shocks. The "middle" dutifully continued right to the end and delivered the highest voltages even as their own distress mounted.

You may avoid politics, but politics may not avoid you.
by reactordev | 2026-02-09 00:04:08+00:00
They recently remastered it for modern systems, it will be there when the kids ask “What’s that?” And you get to open Pandora’s box for them. “Oh this? This… is Elder Scrolls”.

I had a similar moment in my life when my daughter asked me about D&D late 2010s. They’re grown now but boy did I bombard them with nerddom.
by anthuswilliams | 2026-02-09 00:04:26+00:00
> What is in the nature of bike-riding that cannot be reduced to text?

You're asking someone to answer this question in a text forum. This is not quite the gotcha you think it is.

The distinction between "knowing" and "putting into language" is a rich source of epistemological debate going back to Plato and is still widely regarded to represent a particularly difficult philosophical conundrum. I don't see how you can make this claim with so much certainty.
by billforsternz | 2026-02-09 00:05:16+00:00
One of my best rescue jobs involved doing this in 1999, yes that 1999. The client had shuttered their development department years before but was expecting to continue happily supporting and selling their simple enough alarm system products indefinitely. Testing revealed that come 2000 the alarms would just fire continually. Whoops. Fortunately there was one dev PC they'd decided to keep and not touch. Found the offending .c code and the corresponding offending machine code after some disassembly. A little bit of creative assembly language was required to squeeze an extra check in but really no big deal and the day was saved. I remember the client manager being ridiculously happy and grateful.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2026-02-09 00:05:26+00:00
> Most notably, air is about 28% denser at -40°C than at 25°C, so drag is about 28% higher. So you would expect roughly 28% less range at high speeds even if the battery has no capacity loss whatsoever.

With my gas car, I haven't noticed 30% worse fuel consumption at –30°C compared to +30°C [0]. To be fair, I haven't closely measured the fuel consumption at different temperatures, but I probably would have noticed such a big difference. This is just anecdotal of course, so your values may actually be correct.

[0]: It does occasionally get down to –40°C here, but car won't usually start then, so I've slightly shifted your temperature range to the values where I've driven most.
by asdflol123 | 2026-02-09 00:06:05+00:00
I've been experimenting with getting Cursor/ChatGPT to take an old legacy project (https://github.com/skullspace/Net-Symon-Netbrite) which is not terribly complex, but interacts with hardware with some very specific instructions and converting that into a python version.
I've tried a few different versions/forks of the code (and other code to resurrect these signs) and each time it just absolutely cannot manage it. Which is quite frustrating and so instead the best thing I've been able to do is get it to comment each line of the code and explain what it is doing so I can manually implement it.
by pdw | 2026-02-09 00:06:29+00:00
"Shipping" wouldn't be a problem, they could just run it from a network drive. Their PCs were networked, they needed to test deathmatches after all ;)

And the compilation speed difference wouldn't be small. The HP workstations they were using were "entry level" systems with (at max spec) a 100MHz CPU. Their Alpha server had four CPUs running at probably 275MHz. I know which system I would choose for compiles.
by terminalshort | 2026-02-09 00:06:52+00:00
And if we did, what would be the difference? Sure, there would be no ads on the platform (plenty of sponsored content, though), but there would still be an algorithm. And it would be minimally different to the one that exists today. The current ad driven model doesn't allow paying advertisers to drive the algorithm. Rather it lets you drive the algorithm by your revealed preferences and then allows advertisers to target you based on those preferences and insert their ads in the result, which is much more effective. But if we didn't have the ads, the algorithm remains. The question "what does this user want to see?" is equally as relevant to a company that wants to convince a user to keep paying for their subscription as it is to a company that uses it as an advertising vector.
by reactordev | 2026-02-09 00:07:31+00:00
Of course! Global state IS game state!

It definitely was an amazing codebase for the time. You didn’t need to get hung up on architecture because it is very singular… it’s just a level, you, and the entities that were created when the level loaded.

There’s no pre-caching, no virtual textures, no shaders (there are materials for later quake 3), it’s just pure load -> set -> loop. The “client” renders, the “server” has the state.
by vdupras | 2026-02-09 00:08:37+00:00
Oh my, this is a slap in the face for me too. For me, GTA is the first one. The other ones (III and following) are GTA with 3D and a story line slapped on top. I must have a dislike for 3D because I've tried again the original GTA a few years ago and liked it a lot more than GTA III+. It's just fun without complication.
by dave_sid | 2026-02-09 00:08:52+00:00
I think you need to lighten up and adapt the way programmers have adapted since the 50s. There’s been a lot of pomposity over the past ten years around “craft”, you’d think we’re all precious Renaissance artists pining for recognition over our heavenly crafted code rather than engineers. I’m in my late forties also I’m case that matters at all, I don’t think it does. If anything that gives me an advantage to spot and quickly filter out the 1/10 insanely bad suggestions that AI pukes out and know when it’s giving me decent code. Who knows where it will lead but stubbornly refusing to move won’t help. Please take this in a positive way also, rather than a dig. Be positive. Also think of all the job opportunities you will have rewriting all the crap code that gets punted out over the next 10 years. You’re going to be rich. Seriously tho, if you are in your forties you have the advantage of leveraging AI yourself but also knowing when it is bull shitting you.
by boricj | 2026-02-09 00:09:26+00:00
I've just started a new personal project, a C++20 library for running composable visitors over data documents and data models with JSON/CBOR semantics, DOM-less.

Basically, if you define a data model with bindings, you can inject data into it or extract data from it by running SAX-style visitors. You can use serializers/deserializers for standard formats like JSON/BSON/CBOR/CSV, or you can define custom formats for formating structured data however you want to. You can also run a serializer visitor on a deserializer to convert between formats. You can compose filter visitors to extract a subtree or filter out keys. And it's designed to fit on microcontrollers with very limited dynamic memory allocations, because it either streams data on-the-fly or works directly with the underlying data format in a big preallocated buffer.

I worked with libraries that offered a subset of these features before in my professional career (even built one myself), but recently I've had an epiphany (a document can also be used as a data model) that makes me think I can create something elegant and unique.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-02-09 00:10:35+00:00
> It's so intriguing, I wonder if the people who are against it haven't even used it properly.

I feel like this is a common refrain that sets an impossible bar for detractors to clear. You can simply hand wave away any critique with “you’re just not using it right.”

If countless people are “using it wrong” then maybe there’s something wrong with the tool.
by chongli | 2026-02-09 00:10:48+00:00
Yeah, Daggerfall really holds up well today. The game can be downloaded completely for free (truly gratis; no DLC, no ads) on Steam. Then using the official data files you'll get the best experience playing with Daggerfall Unity [2] which is a fanmade rewrite of the game engine on Unity. DFU fixes/avoids a lot of longstanding bugs in the base game, runs in high resolution, and has a long draw distance (which is a big deal since the in-game distances are VAST).

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1812390/The_Elder_Scrolls...

[2] https://www.dfworkshop.net/daggerfall-unity-1-0-release/
by syllablehq | 2026-02-09 00:10:52+00:00
https://www.astrologercat.com/

Because everyone loves astrology and cute cats. (A toy project just for kicks)

Current features:

- AI Chat with Petunia the cat Astrologer

- Daily personalized astrology email

Coming soon:

- Ephemeris calculations

- Stories of historic events from past dates which share today's astrological conditions

- Whatever else Petunia dweams up from her sweepy nap on the bookshewf
by le-mark | 2026-02-09 00:12:02+00:00
I vibe coded a retro emulator and assembler with tests. Prompts were minimal and I got really great results (Gemini 3). I tried vibe coding the tricky proprietary part of an app I worked on a few years ago; highly technical domain (yes vague don’t care to dox myself). Lots of prompting and didn’t get close.

There are literally thousands of retro emulators on github. What I was trying to do had zero examples on GitHub. My take away is obvious as of now. Some stuff is easy some not at all.
by u1hcw9nx | 2026-02-09 00:12:55+00:00
Price gouging is a wrong term to use for Apple laptops. You can call it price gouging or profiteering when someone increases the price of basic necessities after a natural disaster or a similar crisis. Then it's often wrong and harmful.

There is no duopoly or monopoly in the laptop market. Apple computers are not "must-haves," and there are many cheaper alternatives. They are high-priced products—closer to luxury goods than essentials. Ultimately products are priced based on demand (what people are willing to pay) rather than just their production costs.
by reassess_blind | 2026-02-09 00:13:42+00:00
It is a really impressive tool, but I just can’t trust it to oversee production code.

Regardless of how you isolate the OpenClaw instance (Mac Mini, VPS, whatever) - if it’s allowed to browse the web for answers then there’s the very real risk of prompt injection inserting malicious code into the project.

If you are personally reviewing every line of code that it generates you can mitigate that, but I’d wager none of these “super manager” users are doing that.
by autoexec | 2026-02-09 00:14:07+00:00
> Many workers in Industrial Revolution saw a decline in relative wages.

Yeah! Why weren't all those children with mangled limbs more optimistic about the future? Why weren't they singing the praises of the golden age around them? Do you think it would have resulted in a golden age for anyone except a very small few if the people hadn't spoken out against the abuses of the greedy industrialists and robber barons and united against them?

If you can't see what's wrong with what's happening in front of you today and you can't see ahead to what's coming at you in the future you're going to be cut very badly by those "edge cases". Instead of blinding ourselves to them, I'd recommend getting into those weeds now so that we can start pulling them up by their roots.
by airstrike | 2026-02-09 00:14:15+00:00
Illogical.

I had Claude read a 2k LOC module on my codebase for a bug that was annoying me for a while. It found it in seconds, a one line fix. I had forgotten to account for translation in one single line.

That's objectively valuable. People who argue it has no value or that it only helps normies who can't code or that sooner or later it will backfire are burying their heads in the sand.
by 65 | 2026-02-09 00:14:43+00:00
I'm working on a sewing pattern software to make patterns with code. It has a bunch of useful features like chopping up the pattern into a PDF for printing. But the thing that really made this software nice to use is the timeline I implemented, where you can go back and see how the pattern is constructed with each segment. It makes debugging so much easier. I have it so you can put different curves into groups, so you can see how just the sleeve is constructed, for example.

I will definitely consider adding timelines to future software I make, it's an awesome feature.
by ack_complete | 2026-02-09 00:14:48+00:00
The VS debugger got an order of magnitude slower in the transition from VS6 to Visual Studio .NET. It's been sped up a bit but is still nowhere near as fast as the VS6 debugger at responding to step commands, debug output, or conditional breakpoints. In VS.NET you could be waiting as long as a full second on a contemporary dev machine for the debugger to finish stepping forward one line.

Funny thing is that at the time, I was lamenting how much slower VC6 was than VC4. Macro playback, for instance, got much slower in VC6. It's all relative.
by zythyx | 2026-02-09 00:15:06+00:00
> I wonder if the people who are against it haven't even used it properly.

I swear this is the reason people are against AI output (there are genuine reasons to be against AI without using it: environmental impact, hardware prices, social/copyright issues, CSAM (like X/Grok))

It feels like a lot of people hear the negatives, and try it and are cynical of the result. Things like 2 r's in Strawberry and the 6-10 fingers on one hand led to multiple misinterpretations of the actual AI benefit: "Oh, if AI can't even count the number of letters in a word, then all its answers are incorrect" is simply not true.
by MindSpunk | 2026-02-09 00:15:27+00:00
Alternatively, in the same socket and without the 3D stacked cache: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m4-vs-amd_ry... with double the cores.

And in laptop form compared with a m4 max: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m4_max_14_cp...
by tom_ | 2026-02-09 00:16:10+00:00
I used this a lot when I was doing Windows stuff professionally, and I always really liked it.

The command line interface is good too: supply file spec that you'd type in to the GUI, and it'll print a list of matching files to stdout, one per line. Very easy to work with. I cobbled together a bit of Python stuff so that any time I was putting together a tool that needed to search for files, it could find the Everything command line tool if present, and use that instead of os.walk and the like, for a useful speedup.

(If nothing else, "es PATTERN" (to instantly find any name matching PATTERN anywhere on the system) is less typing than "find FOLDER -iname 'PATTERN'", and finishes more quickly. And compared to using locate, there's less chance of the database being out of date.)
by Zigurd | 2026-02-09 00:16:11+00:00
It's pretty difficult to say what it's going to be three months from now. A few months ago Gemini 2.x in IDEA and related IDEs had to be dragged through coding tasks and would create dumb build time errors on its way to making buggy code.

Gemini in Antigravity today is pretty interesting, to the point where it's worth experimenting with vague prompts just to see what it comes up with.

Coding agents are not going to just change coding. They make a lot of detailed product management work obsolete and smaller team sizes will make it imperative to reread the agile manifesto and and discard scrum dogma.
by beloch | 2026-02-09 00:16:22+00:00
It's worth questioning how much of the polarized rhetoric out there is rooted in reality, and how much of it is just social media selecting and promoting extreme views. The answer seems to be that it really depends on where you are.

As a Canadian, I feel that people on opposite ends of the spectrum, although they might literally call for the deaths of those on the other end, have a huge amount in common with each other. Canada has problems, but its still a pretty great country. If people would step outside of the hyper-partisan identities they've been constructing for themselves online and try to see the concerns of the other side, they'd probably find they're not as horrible or misguided as they might think while reading facebook or reddit. If the reasonable centre that dominates public policy can continue to ween itself off of American social media, there's hope for a strong, unified country that's capable of having adult political discourse between people who disagree on finer points. We clearly have some challenges to face (e.g. separatism) in getting there though.

If you're in the U.S. though, things appear very different. While both political parties seem to have been co-opted by billionaire interests, one party has fallen into what can be described as, if we're being charitable, a cult of personality. Unfortunately, that personality has been doing things that are impossible to dismiss as the online hysteria of the other side. Threatening allies with military invasion. High seas piracy. Kidnapping of a foreign leader (admittedly a not very nice one) from his nation. Betraying allies to cozy up to dictators like Putin. Torching global markets with constantly changing tariffs. The list goes on. Then there's what's going on within U.S. borders. If you're in the U.S., the polarization isn't just online. It's something very real. I feel that somebody opposing what ICE is doing in Minnesota and a die-hard Trump supporter really don't have a lot in common and I don't think removing them from online social media will result in civil discourse between the two. There are very real differences there that are coming to a head.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-02-09 00:16:24+00:00
HN has a huge anti AI crowd that is just as vocal and active as its pro AI crowd. My guess that this is true of the industry today and won’t be true of the industry 5 years from now: one of the crowds will have won the argument and the other will be out of the tech industry.

Vibe coding and slop strawmen are still strawmen. The quality of the debate is obviously a problem
by monkeycantype | 2026-02-09 00:16:39+00:00
I only know your mother from a distance, although sometimes that was only few blocks apart on the map, I'm not aware of even passing her on the on the street, I knew only the part of her revealed in her writing and records of her public speaking, but even from that distance she has been one of the most influencial people in my life, her writing had deep impact on me, my view of the world and the person I have become.
by fHr | 2026-02-09 00:16:56+00:00
as usual the last 20% need 80% and the other 80% need 20% but my god did Ai make my bs corpo easy repeatable shit work like skimming docs writing summaries, skimming jira confluence and so on actually easier and for 90% of bs crud app changes the first draft is also already pretty good tbh I don't write hard/difficult code more then once a week/month.
by javascriptfan69 | 2026-02-09 00:17:09+00:00
"According to an F.B.I. affidavit the panel highlighted ... a government informant said that members of the far-right militant group the Proud Boys told him they would have killed Pence 'if given the chance.' The rioters on January 6th almost had that chance, coming within forty feet of the Vice-President as he fled to safety."

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington...
by kfarr | 2026-02-09 00:18:49+00:00
I think it makes the annoying part less annoying?

Also re: "I spent longer arguing with the agent and recovering the file than I would have spent writing the test myself."

In my humble experience arguing with an LLM is a waste of time, and no-one should be spending time recovering files. Just do small changes one at a time, commit when you get something working, and discard your changes and try again if it doesn't.

I don't think AI is a panacea, it's just knowing when it's the right tool for the job and when it isn't.