MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BigTTYGothGF | 2026-02-19 14:55:04+00:00
Gallant always uses TRNGs. Goofus always uses a high-quality PRNG (CSPRNG if you like) that's seeded with a TRNG. Everything else they do is identical. What are circumstances under which Goofus's conclusions would be meaningfully different than Gallant's?

Suppose I'm doing something where I need N(0,1) random variates. I sample from U(0,1) being sure to use a TRNG, do my transformations, and everything's good, right? But my sample isn't U(0,1), I'm only able to get float64s (or float32s), and my transform isn't N(0,1) as there's going to be some value x above which P(z>x)=0. The theory behind what I'm trying to do assumes N(0,1) and so all my p-values are invalid.

Nobody cares about that because we know that our methods are robust to this kind of discretization. Similarly I think nobody (most people) should care (too much) about having "only" 256 bits of entropy in their PRNG because our methods appear to be robust to that.
by mothballed | 2026-02-19 14:55:31+00:00
Yes private sales have no background check, obviously I was referring to the "correct" case since that is part of "all" sales and the headline here is "all" apps. Why would I be referring to the incorrect case?

If you want to force a condition in which I'm wrong, in bad faith, then I can play that fuck fuck game with you too. I can walk into a "regulated" store and buy a perfectly functional and accurate 1889 Schmidt–Rubin bolt action cartridge rifle with absolutely no background check and even do it as a child -- so *ha ha ha you are incorrect!*.
by orwin | 2026-02-19 14:55:31+00:00
My country did the same. The answer is simple. Education research. Being one year behind isn't a big deal (and use not to be), but having a few 10-11 yo in the same class as 8 yo was detrimental to everyone. We then created special classes for people with learning disabilities, which is still detrimental to those kids, but at least the impact is limited.

Academic prowess shouldn't be such a social booster/crusher, especially pre-PhD, but it is, so we have to deal with it, and that mean not making kids repeat classes too much (two decade ago, it was max a year below 11, max two after that in my country, nowadays it's just avoided as much as possible).
by zimzam | 2026-02-19 14:55:33+00:00
I think I missed something: how do galaxies getting further away (divergence) imply that intelligent species will converge anywhere? It isn’t like one galaxy getting out of range of another on the other side of the universe is going to affect things in a meaningful way…

A galaxy has enough resources to be self-reliant, there’s no need for a species to escape one that is getting too far away from another one.
by bombcar | 2026-02-19 14:55:36+00:00
It's too bad the architecture is different, a Raspberry Pi compatible with peak Win98SE software would be an amazing low-power computer.

There were tons of amazingly well-made commercial software packages that have just been lost to time; in a large part due to open-source and other free options getting "good enough" - but many had features that simply don't exist anymore.
by MisterTea | 2026-02-19 14:55:52+00:00
Viscosity is the big problem in the kitchen. I am no 5 star chef by any means but pretty much everything I have mixed in a beater or blender is thick enough to require a sturdy mechanical link to the drive motor. The firm attachment also means you're not fishing out stirring bars from completely opaque liquids. Might be able to use a magnet but that one more thing to clean.
by ianmcgraw | 2026-02-19 14:56:09+00:00
OpenTelemetry has two competing semantic conventions for tracing agent behavior: the OTEL GenAI standard and OpenInference. We've found OpenInference to be significantly more useful for production agent workloads, offering richer LLM call metadata, first-class support for RAG and retrieval spans, and better distinctions between span types. We've found that projects that use OpenInference vs. OTEL GenAI standard are better positioned to improve individual components of their agentic architecture (eg: Prompts, Tool Calls, RAG, etc.), allowing them to ship faster and with more confidence. This post covers why, along with what to instrument and which frameworks give you strong observability out of the box.
by uecker | 2026-02-19 14:56:24+00:00
Or just do it in C.

#define span(T) struct span_##T { size_t len; T *data; }
#define span_access(T, x, i) (*({ \
span(T) *_v = (x); \
auto _i = (i); \
if (((size_t)_i) >= _v->len) abort(); \
&_v->data[_i]; \
}))

https://godbolt.org/z/TvxseshGc
by smashah | 2026-02-19 14:56:33+00:00
openai has largely not stood in the way of devs for opencode use. Anthropic has backtracked their policy and is not enforcing it. Now Google is (as usual) incinerating good will it gained for a product by banning not only free accounts for opencode use, but accounts that are paying them hundreds of dollars per month.

I think it's time all these companies embraced open source solutions to their substandard products instead of fighting against them - AG is good, but it's not as good as opencode. Why would Google risk losing all that revenue by banning outright use of Antigravity! Can this trillion dollar company not come up with a way to just block opencode requests? Which although I disagree with as it falls foul of The Digital Human Right of Adversarial Interoperability, Google also bans AI Ultra subscribers from using Antigravity itself!!

It may seem that those hundreds of dollars per account are better spent empowering Chinese model companies like z.ai instead so they can accelerate improvements to their GLM open models.
by asa400 | 2026-02-19 14:57:00+00:00
You can (and should) always handle whatever errors you actually want to and are able handle, so if that means catching a lot of them and forwarding them to a model, that's not a problem.

The benefit comes mainly from what happens when you encounter unknown errors or errors that you can't handle or errors that would get you into an invalid state. It's normal in BEAM languages to handle the errors you want to/can handle and let the runtime deal with the other transient/unknown errors to restart the process into a known good state.

The big point really is preventing state corruption, so the types of patterns the BEAM encourages will go a long way toward preventing you from accidentally ending up in some kind of unknown zombie state with your model, like for example if your model or control plane think they are connected to each other but actually aren't. That kind of thing.

Happy to clarify more if this sounds strange.
by Zigurd | 2026-02-19 14:57:08+00:00
Based on the code that it's good at, and the code that it's terrible at, you are exactly right about LLMs being shaped by their training material. If this is a fundamental limitation I really don't see general purpose LLMs progressing beyond their current status is idiot savants. They are confident in the face of not knowing what they don't know.

Your experience with Arabic and particular makes me think there's still a lot of training material to be mined in languages other than English. I suspect the reason that Arabic sounds 20 years ago is that there's a data labeling bottleneck in using foreign language material.
by estearum | 2026-02-19 14:57:23+00:00
Yep. Governments, by virtue of being the functional backstop on all possible negative outcomes, necessarily runs with enormous slack. The ones that do not simply break under stress and they're replaced over and over until a government emerges that figures out that extreme efficiency is a liability.

Not to mention the US government in particular was quite literally deliberately designed to be inefficient as a way to safeguard personal liberties as well.

Not to say we shouldn't cut inefficiencies where we can, but the early DOGE promises were obviously made from a place of profound ignorance and (worse) lack of curiosity.
by ananthakumaran | 2026-02-19 14:57:26+00:00
We have a similar use case. All Elixir code base, but need to use Python for ML libraries. We decided to use IPC. Elixir will spawn a process and communicate over stdio. https://github.com/akash-akya/ex_cmd makes it a breeze to stream stdin and stdout. This also has the added benefit of keeping the Python side completely stateless and keeping all the domain logic on the Elixir side. Spawning a process might be slower compared to enqueuing a job, but in our case the job usually takes long enough to make it irrelevant.
by rsdza | 2026-02-19 14:57:34+00:00
I haven't actually measured it, but that could be interesting to see over time!

So far it seems pretty sane with Claude and incredibly boring with OpenAI (OpenAI models just don't want to show any initiative)

One thing I neglected to mention is that it manages its own sleep duration and it has a 'wakeup' cli command. So far the agents (i prefer to call them creatures :) ) do a good job of finding the wakeup command, building scripts to poll for whatever (e.g. github notifications) and sleeping for long periods.

There's a daily cost cap, but I'm not yet making the creatures aware of that budget. I think I should do that soon because that will be an interesting lever
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-02-19 14:57:43+00:00
> You can create a bidir system that never requires annotations and uses unification to infer all types in the style of Haskell or OCaml.

There is no more bidir if you do that. It's just plain unification.

> In some sense I think HM == unification because you can't really implement HM without unification. The first time a type variable encounters another type you'd be stuck.

You can't implement HM without unification but you can do unification which is not HM. Actually a lot of what people call HM is not really HM but evolution of it and sometimes significant evolution.
by Papazsazsa | 2026-02-19 14:57:47+00:00
Whether DOGE's motivations were reform, political theater, or budget slashing is irrelevant to whether the underlying problem – IC integration into civilian development infrastructure – is a legitimate issue worth addressing.

For people with operational experience, the concern is real and predates DOGE by decades – USAID cover compromised actual development workers, created force protection problems, and poisoned the well for legitimate civilian programs.
by ckcheng | 2026-02-19 14:57:57+00:00
Well they already chose Swift over Rust because they said:

> Swift is strictly better in OO support and C++ interop

So I guess from their point of view that’s why not rust.

I don’t have a horse in the race.

I was genuinely interested in why they didn’t even consider D given they already ruled out rust for those particular reasons, for which it seems D would fulfill nicely.
by skytin1004 | 2026-02-19 14:58:14+00:00
Hi HN,I help maintain translations for several Microsoft open-source education repositories. The hardest part wasn’t translation quality. It was keeping documentation in sync whenever the English version changed.So I built Localizeflow, a GitHub App that detects documentation changes and automatically opens translation pull requests. No config files, no Api keys.

I've been running it across 14 Microsoft OSS repositories for the past few months. It turned a weekly maintenance task into something that just runs in the background.

Would love feedback from maintainers who've dealt with documentation localization at scale.

The engine is open-source here:
https://github.com/Azure/co-op-translator
by MrRubin | 2026-02-19 14:58:17+00:00
Most AI browser tools make the LLM do the hard part: interpret a screenshot and guess coordinates, or generate CSS selectors that break on the next deploy.

BrowserClaw flips it. Snapshot the page's accessibility tree, get a numbered text map, AI picks a ref, Playwright resolves it to the exact element. The AI does what it's good at (reading text), the library does what it's good at (hitting elements reliably). No vision model, no selectors, no guessing.

Extracted from OpenClaw (github.com/openclaw/openclaw) and packaged as a standalone library -- battle-tested CDP/Playwright internals plus ongoing community fixes, without pulling in the full runtime. Drop it into any agent loop.

npm install browserclaw
https://github.com/idan-rubin/browserclaw
by gpresearch2025 | 2026-02-19 14:58:21+00:00
Open to full-time, freelance, contract arrangements or interns

About the role
We're looking for a senior backend engineer to build the core permission rules that decide whether a person/system is allowed to access data. This includes turning access on/off, expirations, and clear deny reasons. Bonus if you can also own database design.

What you'll do
• Build and maintain the "is access allowed?" backend logic
• Implement expiry and revocation reliably (access can be turned off immediately)
• Design for edge cases and prevent bypass/workaround paths
• Write automated tests to keep permission behavior correct as the system evolves
• (Bonus) Own database structure and scaling for audit/event data

Required (must-have)
• Strong backend experience building permissions/access control in production
• Can implement time-based access (expires) and revocation reliably
• Thinks through edge cases and designs safe defaults (no easy workarounds)
• Strong automated testing discipline to prevent regressions

Nice-to-have
• Database design experience (schemas, migrations, scaling large log/event tables)
• Experience with audit logs that record allow/deny attempts without leaking sensitive data

Compensation
Commensurate with experience and scope of responsibility
by dgacmu | 2026-02-19 14:58:23+00:00
This is kind of amazing - I still have a bunch of Titan V's (2017-2018) that do 7 TF FP64. 8 years old and managing 1/4 of what Rubin does, and the numbers are probably closer if you divide by the power draw.

(Needless to say, the FP32 / int8 / etc. numbers are rather different.)
by amelius | 2026-02-19 14:58:55+00:00
I think it was a problem with the language as well as how they handle it internally. It was basically the algorithm that dictates how the language works, and consequently there was no way to have one material touch more than one other material. But I might misremember.

Anyway, I'm looking at this from the user's perspective. I wanted to do some physics-based ray-tracing with lenses and pbrt is what I ended up trying. As such, I really needed the multi-material aspect to work correctly. Also, it would be nice to be able to describe surfaces using a z=f(x,y) kind of formulation, or a way to place a hook in the renderer.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-19 14:59:11+00:00
I think the meme is trying to discredit LLMs by saying they don’t read your mind and produce exactly what you wanted from vague prompts.

Everyone who uses LLMs knows that it’s an iterative process where you need to provide specific instructions. It’s only the LLM naysayers who think that pointing out that “Generate a modern UI for me” doesn’t create perfect results on the first pass is an indictment of LLMs.
by lunias | 2026-02-19 14:59:17+00:00
I'm not a fan of forcing sites to police themselves. As far as I'm concerned, that's what the police are for. Simply removing such an image does not necessarily mean that the uploader is being held accountable. This also only affects the lowest of IQ predators while creating an additional barrier to entry (regulatory capture) for anyone that wants to run their own "social media site".

Can we also get a legal definition of "social media"? Is that really just as simple as "services which allow multi-directional communication"? Hate to break it to them, but the internet proper is, itself, a service which allows multi-directional communication. No matter how many walled gardens are created, the 1s and 0s will continue to flow unimpeded.
Show HN: Free, open-source, and cross-platform alternative to WisprFlow
by josiahsrc | 2026-02-19 14:59:37+00:00
Hey HN, I'm Josiah. We love voice dictation, but wanted an open source version for transparency, privacy, and something that everyone could contribute to. So we built Voquill, an open source alternative to WisprFlow, Monologue, and Willow.

It lets you dictate into any desktop app. Press a hotkey, talk, text gets inserted. You can run Whisper locally, use our server, or wire up any provider you want (OpenAI, Claude, Groq, OpenRouter, whatever). You have full control over where your data goes.

Runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Open source, AGPLv3, built with Tauri and Rust. We're working on a mobile app too (Flutter).

To try it: Download from the repo or voquill.com. Click "local setup" on first launch. Hope you like it!
by vanderZwan | 2026-02-19 14:59:46+00:00
> Perhaps none of us have in that Forth doesn't have much of a large dataset to train from?

Well, being terse as heck is the point of Forth so of course the dataset isn't large /j.

More seriously, I think the bigger issue is that Forth isn't exactly uniform. It is so moldable that everyone has their own style
by oliwary | 2026-02-19 15:00:06+00:00
I have found them to work quite well for frontend (most recently on https://changeword.org), although it sometimes gets stuff wrong. Overall, I feel like I need to pay less attention to frontend since an error will usually just result in an ugly or broken frontend. Two things that have helped me:

1) Using the prompt provided by anthropic here to avoid the typical AI look: https://platform.claude.com/cookbook/coding-prompting-for-fr...

2) If I don't like something, I will copy paste a screenshot and then ask it to change things that I dont like.
by 5o1ecist | 2026-02-19 15:00:23+00:00
There must be many peoplem who seriously believe, that this is an attempt at doing something beneficial for the people. To you, specifically, I have a bridge to sell to. It has features you appreciate, is exactly how you like it and will benefit you massively.

After all this time of degenerating and programming the brains of both children and adults alike, this move is more likely meant to make sure that this absurdly effective way of mass manipulation isn't used against their own best interest. Not ours. Theirs.

If this makes no sense, consider a more relatable perspective: It is like the difference between exposing a generation of children with the achievements of "Great People" and anything that sparks curiosity, compared to exposing them to entertainment and fun.

Perplexity: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/does-china-really-force-tik...

-----

In China, kids use Douyin, not TikTok; it’s a separate app with its own rules and algorithm, though owned by the same company (ByteDance). In youth mode, the feed for minors is curated to push educational, cultural, science, history, and patriotic content, plus “positive energy” themes like academic or athletic achievement.

For Western teens, the default feed is much more entertainment‑driven: viral dances, humor, trends, aesthetics, drama, etc., though there is educational content if you actively seek it.

----

You may, all for yourself, decide which side actually is the one that's bad for the people.
by Daedren | 2026-02-19 15:00:34+00:00
I think the key to smartphone keyboards is something like Nintype, two-finger swiping. It's incredibly fast and doesn't require you to learn a completely new keyboard layout to succeed.

It's also a lot more comfortable for one-hand typing since you can do multiple swipes per word.

Unfortunately I haven't seen anyone since Nintype (and the older Keymonk) to give it an attempt.
by hinsonchan | 2026-02-19 15:00:35+00:00
Twilio suspended our account for no reason, charges anywhere from $250 - $5000/month to even access their support for faster replies. If you want help, good luck with a ticket; you'll get a reply in anywhere from a day to a week. My primary use case previously was with WhatsApp; having it be reliable and not randomly go down was critical for connecting with and maintaining conversations users. With Meta's documentation not much better and their support next to non-existent, I wrote this quick post to pretty much entirely drop-in replace Twilio for literally zero extra maintenance cost, while paying next to nothing. I hope this helps someone!
by wwweston | 2026-02-19 15:00:37+00:00
I haven't read _Who is Government_ yet (in spite of the fact that it has a better title!) but _The Fifth Risk_ was a fantastically illuminating paradigm-shifting read for me.

"What roads would any dare to tread, what safety would there be in quiet lands, or in the homes of simple men at night, if the Dúnedain were asleep, or were all gone into the grave?"
Show HN: Offerlog – buy or sell anything on your own terms
by TheBigA | 2026-02-19 15:00:43+00:00
I had the idea for this site when I wanted to hire a CAD designer to turn a drawing of a simple enclosure into a 3D model. Fiverr wasn’t gonna work for me: fees cut into what I could pay the freelancer, flat rates don't reflect project complexity, and hourly rates are unpredictable when you're a broke college student on a tight budget. I'd rather share a form made to collect offers, then pay whoever offered a good deal directly. So I built offerlog.io.

Offerlog is a free and simple tool to hire, sell, barter, buy, or auction without being restricted by an online marketplace:

- No account necessary
- Create and customize your campaign
- Share your public URL (on campus, social media, around town, …)
- Receive offers via private link

It's 2 parts Google Forms, one part Craigslist, one part eBay :)
This is my first launch — any feedback is a huge win. Try it out and let me know what you think, bonus points if you find a bug!
by davidee | 2026-02-19 15:00:54+00:00
As someone whose core workflow in neovim involves no tabs, limited panes/split views and a copious amount of 'ff' (while also being incapable of spelling), this tickles me right where I itch.

My current fuzzy find key combinations include:
ff: fuzzy find, limited to current project
fc: fuzzy find (c)ode -> expand search scope to all projects
fg: fuzzy find (g)lobal -> let's just search my entire home folder

I imagine I'd have to limit it to the first and remap 'fg', I use 'gf', 'gc', 'gg' for the grep versions of these commands.

Either way, very cool.
Show HN: Addicted to My Own Dogfood
by laurentenhoor | 2026-02-19 15:01:31+00:00
I built an OpenClaw plugin to automate my dev workflow and accidentally became its most addicted user.

Every Telegram group becomes a dev team with DEV and QA agents that write code, review each other's work, and argue through issue comments until things are actually good. I go to sleep, wake up to closed issues and merged PRs with full paper trails of which agent did what and why.

It picks the cheapest model per task because nobody's paying Opus to fix a button color. Sessions stay alive so agents don't get amnesia between tasks. Scheduling burns zero tokens because "what should I do next" is not a question that needs a genius to answer.

At this point I'm building DevClaw with DevClaw, which means when it breaks I'm both the angry user and the on-call developer.

If you're running OpenClaw I'd genuinely love people to try it and tell me what's broken. I'm too deep in my own supply to see the problems anymore.

https://github.com/laurentenhoor/devclaw
by alphazard | 2026-02-19 15:01:49+00:00
What no one wants to hear is rust is destined for the same fate. If you want to see the future of rust, look at C++.
Rust has a much better initial state, but the rules evolving the system (the governance model, the kinds of developers that work on it, etc.) are the same as C++ and so we should expect the same trajectory.

Unless you have a system that says "no" a lot, and occasionally removes features, programming languages decay, and the game has been (historically, before LLMs) to pick a language that would be in the sweet spot for the time that you need to use it, while keeping your eye out for something else to switch to once it becomes sufficiently unusable.