MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ahachete | 2026-02-14 20:24:23+00:00
> The extension model is great, but it doesn't work with existing postgres providers (RDS, Aurora, etc.). Unless one such extension becomes standard enough that all providers will support it. That would be ideal, IMO.

That's true, but that's a problem of the PGaaS providers for them to fix by providing the best functionality available. I'm planning on following this route in a pure OSS basis.

> Are you talking about connection establishing time or for query delay? I think it should normally be under a millisecond for the later.

Network trip. If the proxy is not co-located with the database but rather a network hop away, that's usually adding at least 1ms there, could be more.
by i5heu | 2026-02-14 20:24:37+00:00
Mhhh although this is a bit OT it is also very interesting:

Germany has unions and works council.
It is required by law that companies allow works council to exist and if they exist they get certain rights.

> In Germany, they serve two functions. The first is called co-determination, through which works councils elect members of the board of directors of German companies. The second is called participation, and means that works councils must be consulted about specific issues and have the right to make proposals to management.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_council#Germany )

Also Germany has good amounts of regulations for certain issues (sometimes too much regulation but oh well).

And Germany has many options to participate in local and regional politics that prevent the worst offenders.

But in the end a company is still a company that is forced to act in a way that maximizes it's profits. I think from my perspective we do not have such wild predator companies like you see them in the US but there are certainly a few very dubious things going on.

Except maybe the gGmbH and Vereine (clubs) which are companies and semi company structures that must act for the common good and without profit interest.

And one funny thing is that in Germany stock companies are required to act to the "best interests of the company" and not the "best interests of the stock holder" - in German law the company includes the worker, the future of the company and social aspects.
by JohnTHaller | 2026-02-14 20:25:50+00:00
We're up for renewal with PortableApps.com. The same one year non-EV code signing certificate with a USB token that was US$246 last year is now US$434 from GlobalSign. The lower prices you see some places are for 2+ years.

Note that the certificate itself is only for 1 year regardless of how long you buy one for and you need to go through the renewal process each year just without payment.
by vee-kay | 2026-02-14 20:25:56+00:00
Yeah, it is crazy that some cheatcodes are still memorable even decades later.

I still remember the cheat codes from the RoadRash game:

k'thunk! => hit with the club
thwack! => hit with the chain
drip!drip! => oil
And last, but not the least..
spoon! => Nitro boost!

There's later game Road Rage and Road Redemption, which are like tributes to the "bikers on death-race" mayhem we gamers fondly remember as Road Rash.
by dang | 2026-02-14 20:26:27+00:00
There have been several, but the most recent thread in the sequence is about this specifically (as latexr already pointed out). If anyone wants to catch up, here's the list in reverse order:

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – More Things Have Happened - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949 - Feb 2026 (271 comments)

AI Bot crabby-rathbun is still going - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008617 - Feb 2026 (28 comments)

The "AI agent hit piece" situation clarifies how dumb we are acting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006843 - Feb 2026 (118 comments)

An AI agent published a hit piece on me - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 - Feb 2026 (941 comments)

AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559 - Feb 2026 (744 comments)
by 1313ed01 | 2026-02-14 20:26:37+00:00
I built a TUI application for MS-DOS (well, DOSBox) recently, just using the few functions in MSC 5.1's included graphics library (plus a few simple BIOS calls) and what a joy compared to web interfaces or any GUI library I have used. Having a fixed screen size and known, limited, character set is at least developer-friendly. Of course there existed more advanced libraries as well, but for a simple TUI just a few functions can go a long way.

https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/main/v4.0/src/TOOLS...
by godelski | 2026-02-14 20:27:01+00:00
Honestly, landing on the page is a bit confusing. On Firefox I have to click and hold before anything happens and it is inconsistent. Seems to help by moving my mouse.

The legend is quite large and causes it to overlap with the graph. I think you can reduce the text size and/or reduce the size of the real and imaginary labels. Smaller they can go on one line and give you more vertical space (The info button is probably too large too). I'd recommend a change of colors too, can be nicer looking and more colorblind friendly. Best to be completely colorblind friendly but a lot of those look ugly and the vast majority of people are only red-green colorblind, so this opens up a lot. (Google pallets rather than just guessing because there are some non-intuitive aspects) Blue-orange (or blue-yellow) is a good choice as they're complementary colors but also consider your background (I'm a dark mode user so I appreciate the graph not being hostile to my eyes). Contrast is your friend and think about hues and saturation, not just color.

The information I think is probably a bit hard to understand. Feels like it is written in a way that makes perfect sense to someone who is already familiar with the topic but not for those that aren't. I think shrinking the width could increase readability (especially important with technical topics) and might be worth throwing in a few pictures to better communicate.

As the graph evolves things become really shaky. Are you computing this in real time (I think you are)? If the user isn't interacting with it, why not just run a gif or video? There's a lot of instability as the components converge, where the samples (circles) flash. This gets really bad as the lines overlap where you got flashing circles and alternating between blue and magenta. I'm not sure how you resolve this in the software you're using, but you probably should be able to make one graph dominate. So that, for example, the real part always occludes the imaginary component. That'll stop flashing. But running a gif or video will also mean you don't get different behaviors across browsers (if that's a concern). With a video you can also add things like frame stepping, rewinding, pausing, changing speed, and pretty much all the things you'd want from running the computation itself. It should be highly compressible if you're concerned with bandwidth because the small changes. A video is identical to a pre-computed version. If you wanted to give users the ability to jump you can still do this with video by associating frame numbers to labels of c. Unless you want them to change the equation or go out of bounds a video is probably the best option here tbh.
by nxtfari | 2026-02-14 20:27:04+00:00
i do robots for work (formerly drones, now self driving cars). pick a type of robot that interests you. self driving rovers, industrial manufacturing machines, drones, humanoids, underwater pipe inspecting subs are all robots with very different technologies underlying them. very hard to just “learn robots” you gotta have something in mind that you think is cool that is the direction you wanna go in, otherwise e.g. you learn inverse kinematics and it’s completely unnecessary for delivery drones, or you learn VLMs and it’s completely unnecessary for industrial robots. start with the goal and then peel back the onion. good luck!
by paulryanrogers | 2026-02-14 20:27:18+00:00
Try configuring WASD controls, mouse look, turning off auto roll / leveling. Use your choice of 'jump' and 'crouch' to slide up and down. Then it feels more like an ice-skating FPS than a flying game.

Keeping the cockpit on screen may also help provide a frame of reference.

I found that helped me enjoy the game more now that I'm older and less tolerant of 6DOF movement.
by bayindirh | 2026-02-14 20:29:38+00:00
My speaker's manual says the following:

> Please always use a good quality loudspeaker connection cable from an audio dealer. To prevent impairment of sound quality, we recommend cables with cross-sections of at least 2.5 mm² for lengths up to 3 m and at least 4 mm² for lengths above 3 m.

Interestingly, the table present in the printed manual is not present in the one on the internet. IIRC, recommendation for 100W up to 3m was 3mm² or 4mm² at minimum.

From what I looked at, 14AWG is ~2mm² and 16AWG is 1.3mm². Way too skinny for what the manufacturer says.

Unless you're running speaker cables parallel to some power cables, shielding is not a requirement from my experience. The cable I use is at [0]. I have a roll like this. Mine is thicker than 2.5mm² though.

[0]: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71Jr0vhSTsL._AC_UF1000,1...
by sobjornstad | 2026-02-14 20:29:51+00:00
I worked at a place like this and we had a software registry, where if you had installed something and it wasn't on the registry somebody would start sending you nasty emails. This kind of thing would happen all the time: maybe the Linux machines weren't in the scans, or anything that came with the OS was whitelisted.

But if you wanted to install it separately on a computer that didn't have it already, then you'd need to get it “approved.”
by fredoralive | 2026-02-14 20:30:16+00:00
This mostly describes stuff to do with the [Windows] NT [OS][/2] (delete as appropriate) kernel layer, which normal mere mortals aren't supposed to interact with. You're supposed to use stuff like the Win32 KERNEL32.DLL not the more direct DLL, NTDLL.DLL (a DLL). Of course, true hackers scorn such abstractions.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-14 20:30:20+00:00
> What if the models have just gotten really good?

Kagi Assistant remains my main way of interacting with AI. One of its benefits is you're encouraged to try different models.

The heterogeneity in competence, particular per unit in time, is growing rapidly. If I'm extrapolating image-creation capabilities from Claude, I'm going to underestimate what Gemini can do without fuckery. Likewise, if I'm using Grok all day, Gemini and Claude will seem unbelievably competent when it comes to deep research.
by D___R___ | 2026-02-14 20:30:40+00:00
This is a really helpful reframing. I hadn’t thought about completely removing the “ask”. I think that’s exactly why outbound still feels uncomfortable to me.

Just to make sure I understood you correctly - are you saying you deeply study their specific context first and then proactively share a concrete observation or suggestion without attaching a meeting request?

How you decide what level of analysis is “enough” before reaching out?
by digiown | 2026-02-14 20:30:44+00:00
The WWW has never been a high-trust place. Some smaller communities, sure, but anyone has always been able to write basically what they want on the internet, true or false, as long as it is not illegal in the country hosting it, which is close to nothing in the US.

The difference is that there historically weren't much to be gained by annoying or misleading people on the internet, so trolling is mainly motivated by personal satisfaction. Two things changed since then: (1) most people now use the internet as the primary information source, and (2) the cost of creating bullshit has fallen precipitously.
by oscaracso | 2026-02-14 20:31:43+00:00
I wanted to understand it too, so I clicked on the donate button and was greeted by this message: 'All donations are directed toward a good cause: helping children in Uganda. This charity is personally recommended by Vim’s creator. Funds are used to support a children's center in southern Uganda, providing food, education, and health care to communities affected by AIDS.'
by gnramires | 2026-02-14 20:31:53+00:00
It's not just about the base algorithm. It's also about the memory needed to run it, and the clockspeed. For example, even the hardest problem you can imagine, if it has a verifier algorithm that fits in 4k (which means the solution itself can be much larger than 4k), then you can simply do a basic brute force search over the solution space. That doesn't mean this algorithm is very intelligent; it's only very capable if you have a sufficiently fast computer; although indeed brute force is only feasible for the simplest tasks in practice, so the idea that algorithms (of increasing sizes) enable (greater) intelligence is definitely a part of the story, but not the whole story. You can also think of DNA, which represents a recipe for our bodies and brain, which we then use (essentially as an "algorithm") to learn things, with degrees of freedom (memory) far surpassing what DNA stores.

Now if you had a very good chess program running in very constrained (dynamic/RAM) memory, then that'd be partially more revealing. From a cursory search there's a 1800 ELO engine for the C64, which seems very impressive but very far from the best human players.

I'd be interested to see a curve of ELO x Avaliable RAM for the best chess engines (up to given RAM), and how that compares to other games and activities.

On RAM vs ROM (program size) memory, I think at a high level dynamic memory helps you keep track of search paths in a large tree search, saving you some computation. Program size tends to enable improving the effectiveness of your search heuristic, as well as pre-computing e.g. initial and final game optimal moves (potentially saving arbitrarily much compute). I like thinking about those things because I think the search paradigm is pretty informative of computation (and even intelligence) in general. Almost every problem is basically some kind of heuristic search in some kind of space. And you tend to get better at things by refining your heuristics (usually through some experimental training process or theoretical insight), considering more options, exploring deeper consequences, etc..

I think what really defines humans isn't really our ability to solve problems or play chess well etc. (although that's extremely useful and also enjoyable most of the time), it's really our emotions and inner world. We are not really Thinking Machines in essence, we're Feeling Machines most significantly. The thinking part is a neat instrumental part :) We can delegate thinking to machines but what we cannot extinguish is feeling or the human "soul", because that is the source of all meaning.
by mnau | 2026-02-14 20:31:55+00:00
Signal to noise ratio is getting *lower (EDIT: was higher) than ever. I don't see a way out of this other than "human certified" digitally signed authorship (e.g. by using eIDAS in EU). There could be a proxy to at least retain pseudo-anonymity, but trackable to a human. Tragedy of commons strikes again.
by andrewl | 2026-02-14 20:32:00+00:00
Speaking of ranged weapons, I used to throw boomerangs. Not the heavier, non-returning kind made for hunting, but the lighter returning boomerangs. It felt like magic when I finally got good enough to throw one and not have to take a step to catch it. I should get back to it. I think they’re fascinating. And I just read in Wikipedia that tests on the International Space Station found they function the same way in zero gravity as they do on Earth.
by pron | 2026-02-14 20:32:16+00:00
The best sources are industry studies by market research companies that collect information from companies. The best public sources, IMO, are those based on job openings (as jobs correlate more with total number of lines of code than sources based on number of repos, PRs, or questions). Some of these are about a year out-of-date:

https://www.devjobsscanner.com/blog/top-8-most-demanded-prog...

https://uk.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/codin...

https://www.itransition.com/developers/in-demand-programming...

https://www.hackerrank.com/blog/top-developer-skills-in-2025...

Viewing these numbers through an optimistic or pessimistic lens is a matter of perspective and, of course, no one knows the future. But when you compare Rust, which is a middle-aged language now, to how languages that ended up "making it" were at the same age, the comparison is not favourable.
Show HN: A Deployable Cross-Platform SIMD RNG Library for C++ (With Bnchmks)
by whisprer | 2026-02-14 20:32:21+00:00
I’ve built a fully cross-platform SIMD-accelerated C++ pseudo-random number generation library designed for real-world deployment (Windows, Linux, macOS).

Repository:
https://github.com/whisprer/c-simd-rng-lib/

The goal was to solve a practical gap:

Most high-performance SIMD RNG implementations are either:

academic prototypes

single-architecture

non-portable

incomplete

or not packaged for real deployment

This library provides:

• AVX2 / AVX-512 accelerated paths (with graceful fallback)
• Deterministic, reproducible streams
• Clean API surface
• Zero external runtime dependencies
• Works across Win / Linux / macOS
• Production-ready build setup

In bulk generation scenarios it significantly outperforms std::mt19937 and standard <random> engines, and benchmarks competitively (or faster) than other SIMD-enabled RNG libraries.

A separate benchmarking repository contains:

• Full comparison suite
• Competing library benchmarks
• Throughput numbers
• Architectural breakdowns
• Methodology + raw results

Benchmark repo:
https://github.com/whisprer/benchmark/

The focus is high-throughput generation for simulations, Monte Carlo, procedural systems, and statistical workloads where large batches matter more than single draws.

Interested in feedback from folks working in HPC, simulation, game engines, or scientific computing.
by bitwize | 2026-02-14 20:33:18+00:00
I hacked the save file using DOS DEBUG. Only a few pieces of information were stored: starting level, time left in minutes, number of wedges of life, and I think something else? I could give myself 65,535 minutes (shown in game as "TIME HAS EXPIRED!" because signed integers) and life wedges going across the screen. Made the game a cakewalk.

And yes, Prince of Persia (film) was woefully underrated. Jordan Mechner himself wrote the story, and deliberately remade The Sands of Time as an entertaining movie rather than a beat-for-beat recreation of the game. Lot of old-school swashbuckling adventure, Errol Flynn type influence. One of those tributes like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow where audiences are like "huh? I don't get it."
by iggori | 2026-02-14 20:34:40+00:00
I’m not offended — just to clarify the context.
I’m not a native English speaker, so I sometimes use AI to help with phrasing or structure. The ideas, experience, and arguments are mine; AI just helps me express them more clearly for an English‑speaking audience.

I don’t see anything wrong with that. For many non‑native speakers it’s simply a tool that removes friction and lets us focus on the actual content instead of grammar. The engineering work and the analysis in the article are based on real experience, not generated text.

If you disagree with the conclusions, I’m happy to discuss them — that’s why I posted it.
by ssl-3 | 2026-02-14 20:34:53+00:00
Like the Synergistic Audio network router that is quite clearly even labeled as a Mikrotik Routerboard Hex S -- inside of a nice box with a (fancy, admittedly) power supply, and some light pipes glued on so the status LEDs shine differently?

I mean, I like Mikrotik products just fine. I happen to have a Mikrotik Hex S on my desk in front of me as I write this.

But scroll down and zoom in on the money shot here: https://hifi.nl/artikel/32753/Review-Synergistic-Research-Ne...

And then, for comparison: https://openwrt.org/_media/media/mikrotik/rb760igs/pcb_top.j...

The difference in price between the Mikrotik box and the Synergistic box with the board is north of $2,500.
by zmmmmm | 2026-02-14 20:35:02+00:00
> "AI can't read facial expressions, tone of voice, or body language," she said. "And those things matter. That's where the relationship between a patient and provider is built — in the nuance."

It's amazing how, no matter how dramatic the breakthroughs are, people will still totally fail to understand the concept and can't even extrapolate correctly to N+1.

There's absolutely nothing fundamental about current AI tech it that limits it from reading facial expressions and tone of voice and even body language to the extent it can see it. And then, already there are studies showing that patients find AI responses more empathetic than actual doctors. There's a big question whether people will accept it such empathy as genuine, but my money is on people attaching to these things like crazy.
by digiown | 2026-02-14 20:35:25+00:00
Interesting theory. I'm inclined to disagree, however. Prediction markets essentially allows people to trade information for money, even the types historically more difficult to trade. There aren't enough people betting on things for deliberate misinformation to become worthwhile, IMO, and most people would stop betting after being in the wrong too often, unlike casinos which always let you win sometimes.

I believe the misinformation is largely by self-interested parties. Politicians as well as influencers trying to push agendas, and the engagement/attention farming for advertising revenue, which are largely indifferent to truth.
by gustavus | 2026-02-14 20:36:27+00:00
When I first started using the Internet there were 3 rules that were pounded into my head repeatedly.

1. Don't believe everything or anything you read or see on the Internet.

2. Never share personal information about yourself online.

3. Every man was a man, every woman was a man and every teenager is an FBI agent.

I have yet to find a problem with the Internet thats isn't because of breaking one of the above rules.

My point being you couldn't ever trust the Internet before anyways.
by crawforc3 | 2026-02-14 20:36:38+00:00
I'm working on an autonomous rover to deliver homebrew to my neighbors. It's a silly idea, but having that mission has resulted in a wild journey for me. I think it's the key to doing something more interesting than someone else's tutorial.

Here's my build blog:
https://crawforc3.github.io/blog/rover

Feel free to reach out if you just want to chat.
by magicalhippo | 2026-02-14 20:36:45+00:00
> some audio setups will sound better than others in your living room, because of a million variables you can't really control for

Erin over at Erin's Audio Corner did a really nice video[1] recently which focuses on room treatment, but dives into some of these variables which gives a good insight in why something that works well for you might be horrible in my living room.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTshtgikT7Q