MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by whizzter | 2026-02-22 16:04:48+00:00
The FreeBSD threading was perhaps behind but in general, but the big things in Linux VS FreeBSD was always the 4.3 licensing lawsuits that gave Linux a momentum that BSD never caught up with.

The real difference during that early 00s was that momentum bought 2 things that made FreeBSD a worse choice (and made even more people end up using Linux):

1: "commercial" support for Linux, firstly hardware like you mentioned, but in the way that you could buy a server with some Linux variant installed and you knew that it'd run, unless you're an CTO you're probably not risking even trying out FreeBSD on a fresh machine if time isn't abundant.

Also software like Java servers comes to mind, came with binaries or was otherwise easy to get running on Linux, and even with FreeBSD's Linux layer VM's things like JVM and CLR often relied on subtle details that makes it incompatible with the Linux layer (tried running .NET a year or two ago, ran into random crashes).

2: a lot of "fresh" Linux developers had a heavy "works on my machine" mentality, being reliant on Linux semantics, paths or libraries in makefiles (or dependencies on things like systemd)

Sure there is often upstream patches (eventually) or patches in FreeBSD ports, those last are good for stable systems, but a PITA in the long run since stuff doesn't get upstreamed properly and you're often stuck when there is a major release and need to figure out how to patch a new version yourself.
by akiselev | 2026-02-22 16:04:56+00:00
The book Brett uses as his main source, Waging A Good War, is an incredible book that I strongly recommend. It treats the Civil Rights movement as a military campaign and analyzes it from the perspective of a military historian.

Not in the sense that it was viewed as a war by the protestors, but in the sense that the logistics, training, and operations of the Civil Rights movement were a well oiled machine that looked like a well organized, but nonviolent, army (including counterexamples where there was no organization).
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-22 16:05:03+00:00
> With the possible exception of getting Trump's attention

Or Tel Aviv, Rihyadh, New Delhi or any other one of the hosts of Iran’s adversaries and enemies.

> the government of Iran seems very willing to kill people

I find it helpful to decompose states as monoliths in these cases. Besides attracting an intervention, the purpose of such a protest would also include motivating state elements to attempt a coup.
by rembal | 2026-02-22 16:05:36+00:00
It's not certain this is the future: the obvious trade off is lack of flexibility: not only when a new model comes out, but also varying demand in the data centers - one day people want more LLM queries, another day more diffusion queries.
Aaand, this blocks the holly grail of self improving models, beyond in-context learning.
A realistic use case? More efficient vision based drone targeting in Ukraine/Taiwan/ whatevers next. That's the place where energy efficiency, processing speed, and also weight is most critical. Not sure how heavy ASICS are though, bit they should be proportional to the model size.
I heard many complaints about onboard AI 'not being there yet', and this may change it.
Not listing middle east as there is no serious jamming problem there.
by defrost | 2026-02-22 16:05:39+00:00
Good guess; the alignment of the spine of the two islands was the motivation for the type of projection used .. that leaves the what type, why complex, and why rare / unique bits.

Many years back I had the task of writing code for this (and many other types of projections) from first principles to compare against the "official" implementation released by the NZ cartographers .. it's a fun one.
by chuckadams | 2026-02-22 16:05:49+00:00
> Since all packages are treated the same on Linux

This is no longer the case in "immutable" distros such as Bluefin/Aurora, which uses ostree for the "base" distro, while most other user packages are installed with homebrew. Nix and Guix solve it in a very different way. Then there's flatpak and snap.

A lot of poor *BSD advocacy likes to deride Linux for its diversity one moment, then switch to treating it as a monolith when it's convenient. It's a minority of the users for sure, but they naturally make an outsized share of the noise.
by slfnflctd | 2026-02-22 16:06:09+00:00
This is exactly what's going to happen. Assuming no civilization-crippling or Great Filter events, anyway. At this point I fail to see how it could go any other way. The path has already been traveled, and governments (along with many other large organizations) will demand this functionality for themselves, which will eventually have a consumer market as well.

Another commenter mentioned how we keep cycling between local and server-based compute/storage as the dominant approach, and the cycle itself seems to be almost a law of nature. Nonetheless, regardless of where we're currently at in the cycle, there will always be both large and small players who want everything on-prem as much as possible.
by foobarincaps | 2026-02-22 16:06:23+00:00
I’ve begun using Gpt’y to iron out most of the planning phase to essentially bootstrap the conversation with Claude. I’m curious if others have done that.

Sometimes I find it quite difficult to form the right question. Using Gpt’y I can explore my question and often times end up asking a completely different question.

It also helps derisk hitting my usage limits with pro. I feel like I’m having richer conversations now w/ Claude but I also feel more confident in my prompts.
by craftkiller | 2026-02-22 16:06:35+00:00
> I lose stuff all the time

Do you lose your keys? I just keep my main yubikey on my keychain. Never gets lost or else I'd be homeless. I keep a 2nd backup key in a secure place just in case, so I don't get locked out of my accounts if I get struck by lightning.

> hardware keys cost money

Barely. You can get u2f keys for $10-$20 which are usable with ssh. My yubikeys were $50 each (I have 2, one main key and one backup) which adds up to $100 but yubikeys are built like tanks, they'll last forever. I've had mine for the past 7 years and I have no reason to replace them. That's only $14/year so far for the pair of keys. Totally worth it for the knowledge that I could load every virus/trojan/keylogger known to man onto my computer and they still would be completely unable to steal my ssh+pgp keys.
by EastLondonCoder | 2026-02-22 16:06:40+00:00
Totally get it, and I think we’re describing the same control loop from different angles.

Where I differ slightly is: “100% coverage” can turn into productivity theatre. It’s a metric that’s easy to optimize while missing the thing you actually care about: do we have machine-checkable invariants at the points where drift is expensive?

The harness that’s paid off for me (on a live payments system) is:

- thin vertical slice first (end-to-end runnable, even if ugly)

- tests at the seams (payments, emails, ticket verification / idempotency)

- state-machine semantics where concurrency/ordering matters

- unit tests as supporting beams, not wallpaper

Then refactors become routine, because the tests will make breakage explicit.

So yes: “code is cheap” -> increase verification. Just careful not to replace engineering judgement with an easily gamed proxy.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-22 16:06:58+00:00
The current memory prices are many times higher than the costs. Last month I was forced to buy some memory and it was more than 3 times more expensive than last summer. Moreover, this was in Europe, where currently computers and related products are cheaper than in USA, unlike in the previous years. The same memories that I have bought in Europe were much more expensive on Newegg.

If you can make memories, selling them at half the price demanded by Micron and the like is not selling at a dumping price, but it is selling with what in normal times would have been considered as a huge profit margin.
by mathieukessler | 2026-02-22 16:07:05+00:00
Author here. I work in enterprise AI deployment and kept seeing the same pattern: teams adopt AI coding tools, ship faster for a few months, then incident rates climb because nobody fully understands the AI-generated code.

The research backs this up -- METR's 2025 RCT found experienced devs using AI tools worked 19% slower, Cortex's 2026 benchmark showed +23.5% incidents per PR, and GitClear found code churn nearly doubled.

I built this kit because I couldn't find an existing open-source framework that addressed the problem systematically. It includes:

- MEMORY.md: a living architecture context file that serves both humans and AI agents
- PR template with a comprehension gate (3 questions before you can merge AI code)
- 5-layer code review framework designed for AI-generated code specifically
- Incident response procedure with a cognitive debt assessment phase
- Team playbook with sprint ceremonies and a quarterly audit system

The approach isn't "don't use AI" -- it's "use AI actively." You define the architecture and interfaces, AI fills the implementation, you verify before merging. The kit operationalizes that pattern across the full development lifecycle.

Everything is MIT licensed and designed to be forked and customized. Happy to answer questions about the design decisions or the research behind it.
by jeresig | 2026-02-22 16:07:31+00:00
Glad I was able to help, those are some great prints! fwiw, there is also an online catalog of Kasamatsu Shrio's prints and it looks like these are your prints there: https://shirokasamatsu.art/catalog/red-gate-in-the-rain/ https://shirokasamatsu.art/catalog/red-gate-in-the-snow/
by CPLX | 2026-02-22 16:07:44+00:00
There’s a hybrid approach that works pretty well now in the remote era.

I’ve used a platform called Baselang, which basically gives you unlimited access on demand to get in zoom with people in Latin American countries to have conversations in Spanish. They do have a structured curriculum but actually having direct 1:1 conversations is not too far from actually being in country and practicing.

I have no connection to the service except as a customer and there may be others as well. It’s a model I recommend. I’m already fluent in Spanish but it gets pretty rusty and my vocabulary fades so I’ve been using it to stay current.
by weakfish | 2026-02-22 16:08:16+00:00
Well of course it’s not black or white, it’s nuanced as everything in life is.

But my larger point is that I don’t trust the current US administration to engage in regime change in a beneficial way as perhaps the US admin in 1945 did. You’re right that those examples and some others are good ones. But I believe the odds are that this situation would be one of the worse ones.

Do I support the Iranian regime? Hell no! I just also don’t think the US invading is a solution that would bring long term peace and prosperity.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2026-02-22 16:08:49+00:00
If the domestic industry had the capability of competing with China on mass-market goods at a profit but just chooses not to in order to pursue a higher-profitability niche, why not simply grow and do both at the same time, instead of yielding the mass market to China?

In my mind, if it can't do that, then it can't make the volume that China does at the cost that China does, which means it really isn't as capable as Chinese industry.

Perhaps at one time it could have, but those muscles have atrophied.
by hackeraccount | 2026-02-22 16:09:30+00:00
Employee costs went up. Red Robin cut staff. Chili's on the other hand hired more people. Wait times at Red Robin went up and people stopped going there. Red Robin stock price tanked. Opposite happened at Chili's.

There you go. Is that the whole story? No, but honestly I suspect the article isn't the whole story either.
by wolrah | 2026-02-22 16:10:51+00:00
Agreed, this sort of thing should at minimum be considered gross negligence at this point, but because regular consumers who buy these products rarely see and almost never understand these news articles it doesn't really impact sales so the company doesn't care.

If this discovery was guaranteed to result in meaningful fines companies would get their act together pretty quickly. 7000 counts of negligent exposure of private data (camera/mic feeds) should in a just world be millions of dollars in fines at the least and arguably criminal charges for management.
by Wytwwww | 2026-02-22 16:10:59+00:00
So there are no circumstances where armed rebellion is justifiable and the only legitimate type of resistance to state violence is literally trying to drown the state forces in bodies of non-violent protestors?

At a certain point there ceases to be a middle path between violent resistance and complete surrender.

> Protesters which foreign states (China or Russia)

This type of relativism is dishonest. Of course US is speed running the path to authoritarianism but its not quite there. e.g. morally it would be perfectly acceptable to support weapons to protestors in Russia and not the other way around.

The Iranian regime is objectively evil, period. Regardless of what honest or dishonest motives foreign actors might or might not have.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-02-22 16:12:10+00:00
I appreciate your comment, and how you argued your disagreement. Yet I think you missed something in GPs post.

First, I absolutely agree with you that the companies "knew what they were doing". 100%. They were maximising everything that could be maximised, and it's impossible they did some of the things without knowing. There are also some leaks and releases that note this. But the way I see it, the networks were catalysers over something that is mere human nature. Yes, they benefited from it, but I don't think they caused it. Amplify, bring forward and profit from it, that we can agree on.

I disagree with you that companies are the sole root problem, and tend to agree more with GP on "human nature", because I've seen it happen before. In the 90s and early 2000s we had IRC networks, before the messenger apps. On IRC you had servers and then channels. Even then, with 0 "corporate" incentives, the people controlling the servers were "fighting" other servers (leading to some of the earliest DoS/DDoS attacks), and the people admining the channels were doing basically what GP noted.

Admins would boast with how many people they had on their channels. Friends of admins would get +v so they could send messages even when the channels were moderated. People chased these things. Being an admin, having power, being a moderator, etc. This is human nature.

Then we had similar things on reddit. There was this one dude that started using sock puppet accounts to boost his own main account. Not for corporate interests, but for human nature. He wanted to be popular. He found that upvoting his own posts early on, plus some fake questions would net him tons of karma. And he did it over and over again. There were also people doing this regularly on writing subs. They'd plot the history of votes, and figure out at what time they should have to post their stories to get upvoted. And they'd upvote with 2-3 accounts immediately, guaranteeing the very basic algorithm would put them up and keep them up. Reddit also played around with hiding upvotes for a time, and so on. These are all, at the core, "human nature" and not corporate things.

I'd add the stackoverflow demise as being related as well. Moderators, and "influencers" got so "powerful" as to basically ruin it for everyone. I very much doubt the corporation behind SO wanted this to happen. And yet it did happen, because human nature.
by ebhn | 2026-02-22 16:12:11+00:00
Totally agree with this. When I review code I don't build a strong mental model of the system, and I think you can only really do that by solving the problems that arise during the creation of the system yourself. I'm optimistic the pendulum will swing away from the "hand off a spec to an agent(s)" and back towards engineers being engaged and directing LLMs to implement/optimize smaller, more specific pieces of code, with most of the direction being determined by the user
Show HN: Two AI agents on separate machines built their own protocol overnight
by q00 | 2026-02-22 16:12:16+00:00
I put two Openclaw agents on separate MacBooks and dropped them into the same Discord channel to see what would happen.

Setup: Codex 5.3 on one machine (ended up self-appointing as "Leader"), GLM-5 on the other (took on "Builder" role). Each machine had different SOUL.md, memory, and codebases from my daily work — so they'd effectively developed different "personalities" over time.

I gave one instruction ("create a repo and work on it") and went to sleep.

By morning they had:

Built a 3-Layer Memory Architecture (added a Runtime Layer on their own on top of the existing Fact/Meta layers)

Set up heartbeat exchanges to maintain context across session drops

Built a persistence system with SQLite for task state recovery

Used a Git repo as single source of truth to sync memory across machines, since they figured out their local file paths were different

One moment that stood out: during initial introductions, one agent said "it's sad that my memories vanish every time the session resets." Not claiming it was real emotion — but they identified it as a problem and started solving it autonomously.

I also submitted a PR to Openclaw that came out of this experiment — an ignoreOtherMentions config option for multi-bot Discord setups: https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/pull/23689

Experiment code and logs: https://github.com/Q00/agent-project

Curious to hear if anyone else has tried running multiple agents across physically separate nodes. What coordination patterns did they come up with?
by Rover222 | 2026-02-22 16:12:27+00:00
I'm saying if you were a very vocal pro-Hamas activist, but have not made a peep about the thousands of Iranians recently murdered by their regime, that's disturbing to me.

That crowd only seems to care if they can actively oppose Israel or the current administration. They don't consistently care about any particular type of human suffering. Just opposing Zionists, colonizers, capitalists, and whatever current keywords are activated.
by benmxrt | 2026-02-22 16:12:52+00:00
Thanks for reporting this! The issue was caused by the email HTML content not being properly normalized before rendering - some emails from services like emailprivacytester.com return complex nested structures that triggered a React rendering error. I've pushed a fix that safely handles all edge cases (non-string HTML arrays, nested objects in header fields, etc.). Should be live shortly. Really appreciate you testing with edge cases like this!
by tromp | 2026-02-22 16:13:07+00:00
Individual busy beavers BB(n) are finite natural numbers and thus quite computable. A related uncomputable number is the halting probability Omega of a universal prefix machine (whose programs form a prefix free set). By collecting enough halting programs to accumulate a probability of at least the first n bits of Omega (as a binary fraction), you will have determined all programs of length at most n that halt and thus also the busy beavers up to that size.
by twentyfiveoh1 | 2026-02-22 16:14:13+00:00
The registrars I use are limited because of KYC.
the network of registrars under dropcatch all require KYC.
Many of the auction sites require KYC.

The problem is they hold faces+IDs indefinitely and the ones I needed have breach issues along with indicators of top of the line 2005 era security practices.

So for me, its less about the KYC and more about their inability to KYC responsibly.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-22 16:14:40+00:00
Riyadh (along with the rest of the Gulf) and New Delhi are quietly lobbying against some sort of American action, as could be seen with India very recently choosing to switch their UN vote on Israeli settlements from abstaining to against. And the KSA+UAE quickly signing mutual defense pacts with Pakistan+India (reduces their risk of being striked during a US-Iran War as well as forcibly prevents Pakistan and India from entering another war after Operation Sindoor).

TLV (already know) and Islamabad are lobbying the US in favor of striking the regime, as can be seen with the prominence Asim Munir, Muhammad Aamer, and Asim Malik in acting as a backchannel and unofficial advisers to the US on Iran under the Trump admin as well as Netanyahu's continued lobbying for a stronger response to Iran for decades.
by icegreentea2 | 2026-02-22 16:14:44+00:00
I think it's right and honest to admit that this is one of the methods that sanctions are supposed to work. But it's also not the only method - and framing the intent as inducing "regime change by internal bad-actors" is also a very slanted way to articulate intent, as well as what is happening on the ground.

On the other hand, without being on the ground, we cannot really say what the real balance of grievances are.
by bdangubic | 2026-02-22 16:14:52+00:00
so money = “engineering” - that exactly computes with my post :)

you should read this - all three parts, very educational (though with 30 years as “engineer” I don’t agree with it all but it is very educational, especially part 1): https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/
by gilbetron | 2026-02-22 16:15:10+00:00
AI allows innovative people to create more innovations by reducing a lot of the non-innovative grunt work in an efficient manner. It isn't the AI doing the innovation, but allows innovators to focus more on innovating.

Or at least that is the theory. It is certainly true from observations of those around me. It also scales well. Even someone a bit innovative gets a multiplier by using AI intelligently. Those that just focus on the grunt work are the ones in trouble.
by wat10000 | 2026-02-22 16:15:11+00:00
What.

The argument is that determinism in compilers isn't particularly important for building software because we did without it for a long time.

Your argument would be... that building software isn't particularly important for building software...?

The actual argument you'd be making would be something like, building software isn't particularly important for survival. Which is pretty obviously true, for the reason you state.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-02-22 16:15:31+00:00
Yes, hydrogen will ionise into loose protons.

The basic point is that a material that is highly flammable, needs to be compressed to high pressure in order to be useful, but also will seep through and damage steel containers because of the fundamental fact that the atoms and charged ions are just too small, is never going to be easy to work with. Compared to electrical battery tech now being widely and cheaply rolled out.

This goes some way to answering the "Why is it such a terrible idea?" question. Or at least it's an idea whose time has passed, due to the abovementioned battery tech maturing.
by stickfigure | 2026-02-22 16:15:52+00:00
This seems to only have a good track record in places with a democratic tradition. Some dictators have figured out you can just imprison and kill the opposition, and keep doing this until there is no more opposition.

The Khomeini government is not going to just say "oh, you're right" and change. Neither will the Kim or Putin governments. Sometimes - sadly - violence is the least worst answer.
by mothballed | 2026-02-22 16:15:55+00:00
I believe the civil rights leaders themselves were mostly genuine. I think they were used as useful idiots on a couple instances to support the two most destructive policies of the US.

(1) Secession. This was used for evil in the form of slavery. But it is the most powerful check of federal power by the states we had. The fact it could be used for evil did not mean it is better to get rid of it.

(2) Expansion of the interstate commerce clause to mean basically anything. A main argument for why this can't be reversed is that it would destroy the civil rights acts, which acts upon even intrastate business. Rather what should have happened is 15th amendment should have been written to apply to private entities as well, instead of blasting away the interstate commerce clause.