MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by amluto | 2026-02-18 11:05:50+00:00
Anyone know why the Diffie-Hellman issue supposedly matters in Matrix? The article complains extensively but devotes only a single sentence to answering the question.

> Does Non-Contributory Diffie-Hellman Matter?

> This is because the initial asynchronous ratchet handshake and KEMs require contributory material.

I imagine there are some details of Matrix needed to understand what this is trying to say.

I’m pretty sure that, in a non-Matrix setting, KEMs don’t really fundamentally contributory material. Sure, if you send me a bogus public key and I use KEM to generate a session key and email you a file encrypted against it, I’ve effectively sent plaintext, and if you send me an honest key I can choose a bogus ephemeral scalar and generate a fixed session key, but in either case the attacker knows the plaintext message anyway.
by pydry | 2026-02-18 11:05:59+00:00
>Coding is a relatively verifiable and strict task: it has to pass the compiler, it has to pass the test suite, it has to meet the user's requests.

Except the test suite isnt just something that appears and the bugs dont necessarily get covered by the test suite.

The bugginess of a lot of the software i use has spiked in a very noticeable way, probably due to this.

>But everyone in all those fields is going to be trying really really hard to enumerate all the reasons it's special and AI won't work well for them.

No, not everyone. Half of them are trying to lean in to the changing social reality.

The gaslighting from the executive side, on the other hand, is nearly constant.
by jrs235 | 2026-02-18 11:07:31+00:00
I never found the bug in that direction. I discovered it the opposite way: when starting out, selling shares (or was it taking loans?) all the shares you can. Get around 30+ million in the hole and continue to lose money. Eventually an arithmetic overflow will occur and then suddenly you'll have a net worth of like $30-40 million and have the money form selling stock to build to your heart's content.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2026-02-18 11:08:17+00:00
> Take, for example, a $5.4 million brownstone in Brooklyn’s Park Slope. Its annual property tax bill is around $12,000 — about 0.2 percent of the home’s overall worth. Now compare that with the $7,500 tax bill for a $780,000 home in the Bronx. The cheaper home has an effective property tax rate almost four times higher.

> Both bills are lower than in much of the suburbs, where property taxes for less valuable homes routinely top $25,000.

American property tax is crazy just in general. In many well-developed countries -- including China, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, and others -- property taxes are literally zero or strictly nominal.

At what point are you just "renting from the government"?
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-02-18 11:09:33+00:00
Great to hear!

As someone that has been in the volunteer/NPO space for decades, it’s nice to hear stories like this, in this land of money-making. I confess that it can be difficult, when dealing with folks unable to even understand there are priorities other than money.

There’s certainly a need for your service, these days.
by DaiPlusPlus | 2026-02-18 11:09:46+00:00
I short the stock of companies whose leadership is wasting time posting to LinkedIn instead of… y’know… leading their org. The more they post the more I short. Similarly, the less-attached-to-reality the post is the more I short.

I wish I could say I’m making bank off this strategy - but pretty-much all the slopposters (and the most insufferable of the AI boosters) are all working for nonpublic firms, oh well.
by flohofwoe | 2026-02-18 11:10:09+00:00
With default build settings it actually might be, because Zig's release mode builds with the equivalent of `-march=native` by default ;)

(disclaimer: not sure if that's actually still the case, last I checked in detail was probably 2 years ago).

Also Zig always builds the entire project as a single compilation unit, which allows more optimization options because the compiler sees all function bodies. The closest equivalent in the C world is LTO, but this is usually also not enabled by default.
by jll29 | 2026-02-18 11:10:34+00:00
"HCF":

"In computer engineering, Halt and Catch Fire, known by the assembly language mnemonic HCF, is an idiom referring to a computer machine code instruction that causes the computer's central processing unit (CPU) to cease meaningful operation, typically requiring a restart of the computer. It originally referred to a fictitious instruction in IBM System/360 computers (introduced in 1964), making a joke about its numerous non-obvious instruction mnemonics." (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing)

The series is a memorable instance of what any self-respecting geek ought to have watched. It's better than "Silicon Valley", although the latter has pulled one scientific stunt regarding scientific advisory that is unique in film.

What other films/series are "must watch" material for geeks?

- War Games

- Silicon Valley

- The Social Network

- The Intern

- Mr. Robot

- Black Mirror

- Hackers

- 2001: A Space Odyssey

- ...?
by flohofwoe | 2026-02-18 11:12:14+00:00
The optimization work happens in the LLVM backend, so in most cases (and using the same optimization and target settings - which is an important detail, because by default Zig uses more aggressive optimization options than Clang), similar Zig and C code translates to the exact same machine code (when using Clang to build the C code).

The same should be true for any compiled language sitting on top of LLVM btw, not just C vs Zig.
by pickleRick243 | 2026-02-18 11:12:44+00:00
I always find these "anti-AI" AI believer takes fascinating. If true AGI (which you are describing) comes to pass, there will certainly be massive societal consequences, and I'm not saying there won't be any dangers. But the economics in the resulting post-scarcity regime will be so far removed from our current world that I doubt any of this economic analysis will be even close to the mark.

I think the disconnect is that you are imagining a world where somehow LLMs are able to one-shot web businesses, but robotics and real-world tech is left untouched. Once LLMs can publish in top math/physics journals with little human assistance, it's a small step to dominating NeurIPS and getting us out of our mini-winter in robotics/RL. We're going to have Skynet or Star Trek, not the current weird situation where poor people can't afford healthy food, but can afford a smartphone.
by snvzz | 2026-02-18 11:13:35+00:00
Dolls / Girls Frontline 2: Exilium[0][1][2] is a modern take on the XCOM concept.

Free (but gacha.)

0. https://gf2exilium.sunborngame.com/main

1. https://gf2.haoplay.com/jp/

2. https://store.steampowered.com/app/3308670/GIRLS_FRONTLINE_2...
by kmaitreys | 2026-02-18 11:13:42+00:00
Fair enough. Thanks for the clarification. Personally, I think, everything before a versioned release (even something like 0.1) can be messy. But from your point I can see it that a cleaner history will have advantages.

Further, I guess if author is expecting contributions to the code in the future, it might be more "professional" for the commits to only the ones which are relevant.

My own projects, I consider, are just for my own learning and understanding so I never cared about this, but I do see the point now.

Regardless, I think it still remains a reasonable sign of someone doing one-shot agent-driven code generation.
by flohofwoe | 2026-02-18 11:15:08+00:00
> in the real world we need at least polymorphism and operator overloading

Maybe in your real-world ;)

Building your game code around classes with virtual methods has been a bad idea since at least the early 2000s (but both static and dynamic polymorphism is something that Zig can do just fine when needed), and the only important use case for operator overloading in game-dev is vector/matrix math, where Zig is going down a different road (using builting vector types, which maybe one day will be extended with a builtin matrix type - there is some interest in using Zig for GPU code, and at least this use cases will require proper vector/matrix primitives - but not operator overloading).
Show HN: 3D Lab Viewer – View Step, STL, 3MF Files in the Browser
by goodsmileduck | 2026-02-18 11:15:17+00:00
I saw Microsoft is deprecating 3D Viewer and removing it from Store in July. I always had trouble checking STEP files quickly - you have to open a slicer
or full CAD software just to look at a part. So I built a viewer.

https://viewer.3dlab.id - drag and drop a file, it renders in browser. No signup, no install.

Formats: STL, STEP/STP, OBJ, 3MF, GLB

STEP parsing runs via OpenCascade compiled to WebAssembly (occt-import-js), all client-side in a Web Worker so it doesn't block the UI.

Stack: React, TypeScript, Three.js, Vite. Backend for sharing is Cloudflare Pages Functions + D1 + R2. There's also a Windows desktop version built with
Tauri, but not released yet.

Other features:
- multiple files in tabs
- wireframe mode, ortho/perspective toggle
- share models via link (expires in 7 days)
- dark/light theme

The sharing is useful when you need to send a model to someone who doesn't have CAD software - they just open the link and see it, no account needed.

Still WIP, feedback welcome. Source code is on GitHub: https://github.com/Goodsmileduck/3d-lab-viewer
by guillermollopis | 2026-02-18 11:16:39+00:00
Nice work on the UI, the invoice creation flow looks clean.

For anyone reading who's on the other side of this (receiving invoices rather than sending them), the pain point is slightly different: you get PDFs or email invoices and need to log them into a spreadsheet for tracking.

A few approaches that work: Zapier + Gmail filters for structured emails, a simple Apps Script that parses email bodies, or add-ons like AutoInv that use AI to extract fields (invoice number, amount, dates) directly into Google Sheets. Each has trade-offs depending on your volume and format variety.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-18 11:16:54+00:00
One point I missed, that might be the most important, since I don't care about it looking "professional" or not, only care about how useful and usable something is: if you have commits with the codebase being in a broken state, then `git bisect` becomes essentially useless (or very cumbersome to use), which will make it kind of tricky to track down regressions unless you'd like to go back to the manual way of tracking those down.

> Regardless, I think it still remains a reasonable sign of someone doing one-shot agent-driven code generation.

Yeah, why change your perception in the face of new evidence? :)
by metalman | 2026-02-18 11:16:54+00:00
remarkably bad technology, which if I read it right, does not in fact hold heat for months, but "leaks", making even the title
wrong.
Not to mention dozens of other energy and heat storage technologys actualy bieng implimented now.With sand bieng used for heat storage in the far north now, any other technology will find competition for anything other than headlines, rather stiff.
by SilverBirch | 2026-02-18 11:17:04+00:00
That can't/won't happen. Musk's wealth is primarily in SpaceX now and he has a much higher ownership stake in SpaceX than Tesla. As well as that, Tesla is public so he can't just do napkin math and decide to merge them. So the question is: Does Tesla buy SpaceX? Well no, Tesla can't afford it. Ok, well can SpaceX buy Tesla? Well no, SpaceX can't afford it either. So do they announce a merger? Well that doesn't make any sense because Tesla is valued like a meme stock so it would massively dilute Musk's ownership of the overall company. So the idea that they fuse might be driving up the stock, but by driving up the stock you're actually preventing it happening. If Tesla starts to trade at realistic multiples and comes down to lets say a 200Bn company, I'd expect SpaceX to snap it up at that valuation, but it'd be crazy to do it before then.
by guillermollopis | 2026-02-18 11:17:32+00:00
Nice work on the UI, the invoice creation flow looks clean.
For anyone reading who's on the other side of this (receiving invoices rather than sending them), the pain point is slightly different: you get PDFs or email invoices and need to log them into a spreadsheet for tracking.

A few approaches that work: Zapier + Gmail filters for structured emails, a simple Apps Script that parses email bodies, or add-ons like AutoInv that use AI to extract fields (invoice number, amount, dates) directly into Google Sheets. Each has trade-offs depending on your volume and format variety.
by guillermollopis | 2026-02-18 11:17:35+00:00
Nice work on the UI, the invoice creation flow looks clean.
For anyone reading who's on the other side of this (receiving invoices rather than sending them), the pain point is slightly different: you get PDFs or email invoices and need to log them into a spreadsheet for tracking.

A few approaches that work: Zapier + Gmail filters for structured emails, a simple Apps Script that parses email bodies, or add-ons like AutoInv that use AI to extract fields (invoice number, amount, dates) directly into Google Sheets. Each has trade-offs depending on your volume and format variety.
by wiseowise | 2026-02-18 11:17:43+00:00
> It weren't 'their' nukes. Those were Russian nukes stationed there and the ukrainian state didn't have the means or the expertise to maintain the arsenal anyway.

Nonsense. That might be the case initially for ICBMs stationed there, but it would be trivial for them to crack tactical nukes and have a bootleg force de frappe. The only reason they fave up nukes is because they’re were pressured by both Russia AND the West. Ignoring the whole economy impact, if anyone could predict full scale Russian invasion.
by stephenr | 2026-02-18 11:18:02+00:00
> llms can get me started really fast. Basically it distills the time taken to research something

> the llm doesn't make good long term decisions

What could possibly go wrong, using something you know makes bad decisions, as the basis of your learning something new.

It's like if a dietician instructed a client to go watch McDonald's staff, when they ask how to cook the type of meals that have been recommended.
by Jean-Papoulos | 2026-02-18 11:18:09+00:00
Matrix is awful. I don't know if that's still the case but when I tried it a year ago it took me more than 30 minutes to get it working. In discord, you sign up with email (very low friction), click the + button and boom. You've got a private server you friends can join by clicking a link. It Just Works and until an alternative has this level of convenience Discord is not going away.

This is to say nothing of the insanity of public, effectively unmoderated rooms on Matrix.
Ask HN: Do you think China will produce a SOTA model in the next 2 years
by upmind | 2026-02-18 11:18:12+00:00
Recent models like Kimi, Qwen, GLM, Deepseek etc seem to do well in benchmarks but not when actually using them in practise. Do you think they'll be an actual SOTA model by them in the next 2 years? Why/why not?

NOTE: referring to text models
by aregue | 2026-02-18 11:18:40+00:00
Grokipedia seems like a useful product from xAI to me. It is the first major change in how to write an encyclopedia since Wikipedia. On the topics that I have compared, Grokipedia entries are more comprehensive and relevant than Wikipedia ones. The only minus is that it lacks pictures. As an example compare the entries on the Norwegian lake Tinnsjå:
https://grokipedia.com/page/Tinnsj%C3%A5
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinnsj%C3%A5
by Ukv | 2026-02-18 11:18:49+00:00
> A professional who pays 20€/month likely believes that the AI product provides them with roughly 20€ each month in productivity gains, or else [...] they would pay more for a bigger subscription

Unless I'm misunderstanding, shouldn't someone rational want to pay where (value - cost) is highest, opposed to increasing cost to the point where it equals value (which has diminishing returns)?

A $40 subscription creating $1000 worth of value would be preferred over a $200 subscription creating $1100 of value, for instance, and both preferred over a $1200 subscription creating $1200 of value.
by gaigalas | 2026-02-18 11:19:24+00:00
That was my opinion before the boat left the shore. We needed an open source boat that we could control.

Now, however, I don't think that we have that option. Pretty much everyone in tech was coerced to board a single boat of commercial AI.

My concern is what happens if it hits an iceberg. It's not like we can go back to pre-LLMs now.
Steal Your Competitors' Customers
by mathwin78 | 2026-02-18 11:20:02+00:00
I am vibecoding https://getstealery.com/, a tool to steal your competitors’ customers. It is in Beta, I now want to get my first users.

I’m a 24M salesman working at a B2B software startup doing mostly cold outreach. I was struggling with very low reply rates and prospects who didn’t clearly express pain points. But I realized something: competitors’ customers almost always have frustrations with their current tools.

Instead of guessing problems during outreach, I started targeting companies already using competitor software.

I first built a no-code automation using Make and Linkup to find those companies. Then I contacted them with messaging like: “You use X, so you probably struggle with Y. We fix that.”

Reply rates roughly tripled and I booked twice as many meetings. Sales calls were also easier because the pain points were already relevant.

The problem was that the workflow was messy and limited. So I vibe coded a software to automate the process.
by moWerk | 2026-02-18 11:20:03+00:00
While the PineTime/Infinitime is an awesome project everyone in our community roots for, the hardware platforms are totally different. The PineTime is microcontroller based and works on just 64KB memory and 512KB flash. AsteroidOS is a linux distro tailored for devices with SoC, half a gig of memory and >2GB storage.
Arguably its much smarter on many levels to use the microcontroller approach for the rather simple smartwatch task. But somehow these full SoC general purpose computing smartwatches have been produced and we as linux people slipped into the niche of seizing those.
by ben_w | 2026-02-18 11:20:15+00:00
> because weve been able to send messages to each other on a computer since the 50s...

My first partner was born in the 70s and didn't even have a landline growing up.

Here's some stuff I think counts as "plumbing" (i.e. infrastructure) of social connections, which has been lost since the 50s:

• Local newspapers (everywhere, I think?), where an actual editor could (and to a limited extent was held responsible if they didn't) filter out the conspiracy theories.

• Village churches (that might be mainly a UK-specific thing, IDK?) and other similar local community groups, where your local decisions couldn't be brigaded and overwhelmed by fans of a billionaire living on a yacht, as those fans would need to travel to your village personally and most people couldn't be bothered. Now, even when the groups still exist and meet, they can be brigaded.

• Yellow pages getting replaced with Facebook et al insisting that their ad system is the only way any small business could possibly get their name out, when a significant fraction of ads are outright scams.
by mlrtime | 2026-02-18 11:21:01+00:00
>then the CEO basically ruined everything.

Is it me or do the nay-sayers state that Elon is a grifter and added nothing to Tesla, but yet he ruined it? How can he both not create something and ruin it?

Also, Tesla isn't the only manufacturer (In the US) stopping electric cars, Porsche (IMO Taycan is the best electric model) is essentially stopping electric cars too, nothing to do with Elon.

Just my observation.
by qurio_dev | 2026-02-18 11:21:25+00:00
You caught me. English is not my native language, so I use an LLM to polish my thoughts and correct my grammar before posting. I want to make sure I’m explaining the technical parts of Qurio clearly, but I realize it can end up sounding a bit "robotic."

I'm a developer and a dad—the project is real, even if my grammar needs a boost! I'll try to let more of my own "unfiltered" voice through.
Show HN: HNtropy - interesting story pairings from across the Hacker News corpus
by keepamovin | 2026-02-18 11:21:30+00:00
I shared earlier versions of this project using traditional ranks (points, comments, discussion size, and title/topic similarity). They worked, but after posting them I realized most top results were familiar clusters, and a lot of that territory is already covered by HN Algolia.

So I rebuilt the ranking around a different signal: explicit “related:” style cross-links inside HN comments plus the broader HN backlink graph (when discussion A links to discussion B). That graph is the core signal. From there, I score pairings by evidence strength and then favor links with lower lexical overlap, so we surface semantically connected stories that don’t look identical in title wording.

What I learned: big threads are often strong on attention, but weaker on novelty. Backlink + “related:” intent is a better proxy for meaningful cross-thread connection. If you want standard topic clustering, Algolia is perfect; this is for high-entropy pairings discovered from HN’s own linking behavior.

Check it out:

https://hntropy.browserbox.io
by BLKNSLVR | 2026-02-18 11:22:21+00:00
Tangent:

Get onto Music League for introducing new music to each other.

Someone setup a league at work, and it's been one of the best (albeit unintentional) team bonding exercises I've ever come across (I've not come across many). So much so that three people who have left the company still participate in the league.

It unfortunately it's linked to and requires the use of Spotify, for those who are ideologically opposed (which also means I can't submit King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard songs anymore).
by mikkupikku | 2026-02-18 11:22:31+00:00
Thing is, unless the order confirmations number high in the thousands, most businesses could just hire an old lady with secretary experience to crunch through that work manually for a fraction of what it would cost them to get the whole system automated.

I've seen this play out with time sheets. Every day factory floor workers write up every job they do on time sheets, paper and pencil, but management wants excel spreadsheets with pretty plots. Solution? One old typist who can type up all the time sheets every day. No OCR trouble, no expensive developer time, if she encounters illegible numbers she just cross references against the job fliers to figure it out instead of throwing errors the first time a 0 looks like a 6.
by uxellodunum | 2026-02-18 11:22:56+00:00
Hello!

Did you mean ~15,000 servers and ~2000 federating? Because those are the numbers on etke.cc's matrixrooms.info (still really good in my opinion and keeps going up over the weeks), but I can't find your numbers anywhere! Would be great to have a source to point to if that's actually the case!

Thanks!
by crispyambulance | 2026-02-18 11:22:57+00:00
I accept that AI-mediated productivity might not be what we expect to be.

But really, are CEO's the best people to assess productivity? What do they _actually_ use to measure it? Annual reviews? GTFO. Perhaps more importantly, it's not like anything a C-level says can ever be taken at face value when it involved their own business.
by d--b | 2026-02-18 11:23:14+00:00
I started to do this as well. Instead of prompting: "build x", I now prompt: "What questions do you need to ask me in order to have all the information you need to build x". It usually writes a long list of questions, which, once answered makes the thing a lot clearer for the AI to work.

If you don't do this, LLMs tend to make a lot of asumptions on their own without telling you.

It works for pretty much anything. Like medical advice: "What questions do you need to ask to diagnose my headache". Or practical help: "what questions do you need to ask to help me hang this mirror on the wall"