MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anyfoo | 2026-02-26 02:42:53+00:00
I'm getting tired of typing this, but swap space is not just to increase available virtual memory. If you upgrade from 8 GB to 24 GB, then with proper swap space usage, you have 16 GB that could be used for additional disk cache.

Sure, you're still better off with 24 GB overall compared to 8GB+swap whether you add swap to your 24 GB or not, but swap can still make things more better.

(That says nothing about whether the 2x rule is still useful though, I have no idea.)
by apothegm | 2026-02-26 02:43:04+00:00
Nope. 90% of my company’s employees are doing highly skilled work that requires interacting with other humans face to face with physical presence.

And turning our tech over to AI would undoubtedly be a disaster of security and compliance fails in a highly regulated industry — if it didn’t simply hit a complexity wall that it couldn’t spaghetti code its way through.

And that’s setting aside UX. We have in-depth conversations around twice a week to make decisions at the intersection of data needed for business logic, compliance constraints, and managing both of those while keeping UX “delightful”. I’m not convinced an LLM will ever be able to handle those with halfway decent judgement.

YMMV if your product is an issue tracker, CRM less complex than salesforce, or newsletter platform, etc.
by gaigalas | 2026-02-26 02:43:06+00:00
Totally agree with the statement: Tech companies shouldn't be bullied into doing surveillance.

I would personally add "bullied, coerced and/or gaslighted into doing surveillance".

I don't understand why the US government is doing this though. Wouldn't it be much easier to do use some of the already passed laws on foreign intelligence to open a surveillance data pipeline? You know, like PRISM.

I mean, this is inconsistent with the previous M.O., and highly unusual.

I also feel very conflicted to suddenly have to "defend Anthropic", a company that has been systematically doing evil things (destabilizing markets, promoting misleading media campaings, etc). I don't want to defend those guys.

Can I just dislike both the US military and Anthropic at the same time, and say there are no good guys here?
by 0x00cl | 2026-02-26 02:43:44+00:00
Maybe here you'll find what you are looking for: https://www.w3.org/Daemon/

Though you can browse and download the latest version 3.0A (1996), there is a directory where they have older versions, but its a bunch of files mixed up with different versions. https://www.w3.org/Daemon/old/
by culi | 2026-02-26 02:43:52+00:00
Now compared that to this map of superfund sites and the pollutants they've left in our soils and groundwater. Statistically speaking, an average American lives within 10 miles of one of these sites

all sites: https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/EPA::epa-facility-registry-s...

npl sites: https://epa.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=...

Also funnily enough, the first place I checked from this site's list of facilities that have been grandfathered in led to this finding

> Lehigh Hanson's Permanente cement plant in Cupertino, CA, is
permanently closing following thousands of environmental violations and over 80 years of operation. The plant was a major source of air pollution and discharged toxic selenium into Permanente Creek.

Not being able to build a destroyer in California seems like a small price to pay for an ecosystem not poisoned
by johnfn | 2026-02-26 02:43:53+00:00
This article is significantly better written than most anti-OpenAI/AI articles, and for that I am really grateful. I am generally an AI booster (lol), so I am happy to read well-considered thought pieces from people who disagree with me.

That being said...

> The one place where OpenAI does have a clear lead today is in the user base: it has 8-900m users. The trouble is, there’re only ‘weekly active’ users: the vast majority even of people who already know what this is and know how to use it have not made it a daily habit. Only 5% of ChatGPT users are paying, and even US teens are much more likely to use this a few times a week or less than they are to use it multiple time a day.

This really props up the whole argument, because the author goes on to say that OpenAI's users are not really engaged. But is "only" 5% of users paying of a 8-900M user base really so inconsequential? What percentage of Meta's users are paying? Google's? I would be curious to see the author dig deeper here, because I am skeptical that this is really as bad as the author suggests.

Moving on to another section:

> If the next step is those new experiences, who does that, and why would it be OpenAI? The entire tech industry is trying to invent the second step of generative AI experiences - how can you plan for it to be you? How do you compete with this chart - with every entrepreneur in Silicon Valley?

Er, are any of these startups training foundation models? No? Then maybe that is how you compete? I suppose the author would say that the foundation model isn't doing much for OpenAI's engagement metrics (and therefore revenue), but I am not sure I agree there.

Still, really good article. I think it really crystalizes the anti-OpenAI argument and it gives me a lot of interesting things to think about.
by defrost | 2026-02-26 02:44:15+00:00
The arena of pragmatic debate here is in the billion tonne / annum heavy haulage mineral resources sector.

The few big players are keen to drop fossil fuels for many reasons and have had the capital to invest in meaningful R&D for the past decades which is still ongoing.

They also have an advantage of fixed controlled routes and total infrastructure control over extraction, haulage, and shipping sites; power, rail, roads, et al.

Recent notes from that edge include:

* Fortescue says Rio Tinto wrong about electric trucks, admits hydrogen tech at “very early stage” - https://reneweconomy.com.au/fortescue-says-rio-tinto-wrong-a...

* BHP and Rio Tinto welcome first Caterpillar battery-electric haul trucks to the Pilbara - https://www.riotinto.com/en/news/releases/2025/bhp-and-rio-t...

and

* Andrew Forrest pivots on hydrogen trucks - https://www.afr.com/companies/mining/fortescue-and-rio-say-b...

Forrest being one of the more pro-hydrogen billionaires in the mix.

FWiW I watch all the approaches with interest and expect to see more Red Queen racing before any trophies go out.
by us-merul | 2026-02-26 02:44:51+00:00
There’s a page “Robert’s comments on Tim’s MIT trip” that says:

“I hope this does not offend Brewster, but I hope, probably in vain, that the commercialists will stay out of the Web world. Selling information is like selling air and water to me, though of course you need to pay the people who provide the information. Your comment already points out some of the bad side-effects of selling per access, or worse, tariffs per type of information or per item! Like: today's newspaper is 10CHF because there is this item in it which everyone wants to know about.”

Interesting too that an article
on the front page the other day was about microtransactions for news.
by Bender | 2026-02-26 02:45:07+00:00
If I am being honest inequality will always vary wildly based on the monetary policies and all the things I mentioned. To me anything else is getting into vague unattainable unrealistic ideologies. No harm in dreaming, everyone should. No harm in envy either even if some think it is unhealthy. It's all human nature.

If someone has a gazillion gazillion gazillion mega-bucks that does not harm me in any way shape or form. More power to them. I would be fine with them also collecting medicare and social security especially if they, like me, had to pay into social security their entire working life and could not opt out.

If we can hold out for machines like a holodeck then we can truly live any fantasy and that may be a nice form of escapism. No idea how long it will be for such machines to exist.
by eongchen | 2026-02-26 02:46:02+00:00
This article is solving a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. If you're loading 84 MCP tools into every session, the issue isn't MCP vs CLI — it's that you've turned on everything without thinking about when each tool is actually relevant.

MCP's token cost is the price of availability. The fix isn't to replace the protocol, it's to only activate the tools that matter for the current context. Claude's Skills already work this way — lightweight descriptions loaded upfront, full definitions fetched on demand. That's essentially the same lazy-loading pattern CLIHub describes, just built into the model's native workflow.
by ddingus | 2026-02-26 02:46:04+00:00
I basically hate this thing. Sorry team. I know you are trying and you believe in your effort.

I know your intent is in the right place too.

But, here's the thing:

I value real conversation. It is the only conversation worth having.

This is a step toward Disneyland type conversation. And we don't live in Disneyland!

Profanity is a part of speech. There are ugly things, ideas and people in this world and that is what the profane gets at.

As for offending others... hoo boy!

Let us start with a hard to process reality: we all are as offended as we think we are.

What prevents others from abusing that reality to push an agenda, gain position in the rhetoric, and more?

Not much.

Worse, we do not control others. Many attempts at doing that fail. This one is extremely likely to fail too.

What do we control?

How we respond to offensive speech!

And we have options, but a person wouldn't know that because the number one response is righteous indignation!

There are so many other choices!

We can just ignore speech we don't like.

We can employ humor! When an ass gets called one by a clown, I laugh! It is laughable.

Same for the people blowing pages discussing who is the bigger asshole. I say they all deserve that conversation.

We can redirect by asking a direct question, or by making the subject of our response more germane to the topic at hand too.

There are many more options that make a hell of a lot more sense than blathering on with righteous indignation fueling it full on.

Now, here is another dynamic in the same vein:

Say I declare someone is a racist! Just full on judge them on the spot hard.

They are not gonna like that too much are they? Nope. And what is worse, if we are in a position to do some advocacy, the person so harshly judged won't hear any of it.

And being judged like that sticks. Say they stop being racist. They still gotta live with that crap for a long time.

Now, we could say, "are you sure you want to say that? It comes off racist to me."

The idea being you offer help or a way for them to see the harm, while also giving them an out so they are not judged harshly.

They could reconsider next time, or just stop and that is great! They won't have to fight down ugly exchanges.

I could go on for pages. I believe I said enough to make my point.

We can only control how we respond to speech we don't like.

Attempting to control others to the point where they simply cannot offend or cause grief means we also have sanitized our discourse to the point of being worthless.

No thanks.

I have a very thick skin. Others do too.

More of us can manage how we respond and if we put half the energy we put into trying to control others it would be much better.
by nnx | 2026-02-26 02:46:42+00:00
This looks very interesting, but I wonder how's the rewrite approach gonna impact the long-term maintenance and porting changes _back_ from Tree Sitter.

As you mention WASM-readiness, did you consider using the official Tree Sitter WASM builds nicely packaged with wazero (pure Go WASM runtime) ?

It may help staying sync with upstream for the long term and, while probably a bit slower, has nice security and GC advantages too.
by rvz | 2026-02-26 02:47:10+00:00
> It makes you wonder how much fraud occurs in tradfi but it goes undiscovered because nobody can self-custody their paper metals or paper stocks.

Better not mention the FinCEN files either. [0] Where over $100B to $2TN dollars worth of illicit transations from criminals and fraudsters were knowingly allowed by banks and even ponzi schemes were freely allowed as well [1].

[0] https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/global-bank...

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54225572
by Skunkleton | 2026-02-26 02:47:46+00:00
It's not just fork. The operating system overcommits memory all over the place. For example, when you map memory, that can/will succeed without actually mapping physical pages. Even "available" memory is put to some use and freed in an asynchronous way behind the scene, a process that is not always successful.

Honestly, I think overcommit is a good thing. If you want to give a process an isolated address space, then you have to allow that process to lay out memory as it sees fit, without having to worry too much about what else happens to be on the system. If you immediately "charge" the process for this, you will end up nit-picking every process on the system, even though with overcommit you would have been fine.
by eszed | 2026-02-26 02:48:28+00:00
Not the poster you asked, but I think their point stands for (at least many) non-elite liberal arts schools. (Heck, I think it stands for some community colleges, too.) Teachers at those institutions have often attended elite programs, and in any case have self-selected into (primarily) teaching roles, and you'll get a lot of their individual attention, which you wouldn't at a big school.

(For the benefit of students reading this: go to office hours, especially early in the term, even if it's just to shoot the breeze. If you don't, you're cheating yourself out of the main advantage of that institutional model.)

Where your take is correct, and even demands greater emphasis, is the value of the alumni network, and the "name recognition" of a degree from somewhere people, well, recognize. As someone who deeply believes in the value of education for its own sake it pains me to be this cynical, but those are the only things that matter in the world at large.

That's the honest take, which, indeed, no one in higher education will ever put so baldly.

Disclosure: graduated from, and also spent five years teaching at a (very) non-elite liberal arts college. The education was good - even great, in some programs / by some professors - but the professional advantages absolutely nil. I will council my own son not to attend a similar school (should any of them even survive by the time he gets there - they're by and large on life-support right now); even tuition-free it wouldn't be (economically) worth it, and at the actual price it's the worst life decision many of those students will ever make.
by reaperducer | 2026-02-26 02:49:22+00:00
Around 1987 I mostly completed a Unix-like OS for the C-64 called MATRIX. I was probably around six weeks away from burning it to a PROM when I got a new girlfriend and completely lost interest in the project.

I don't remember too much about it, other than:

- Because Commodore drives had ludicrously long file names for the era, paths like /etc/dev/joy1 didn't need any weirdness.

- Password encryption? What's that?

- What we would call "metadata" today was stored in USR files.

- Directory listing was agonizingly slow. I remember commandeering tracks 16 and 17 for my own hair-brained directory structure in an effort to speed things up.
by re-thc | 2026-02-26 02:49:31+00:00
China doesn't need to buy it. They can continue their policy and look good.

They've already found a better route. Buy it elsewhere e.g. in Singapore. Train their models there using Nvidia hardware.

Ship the result and fine tune back in China.

So "China" is and has always been buying it. No difference. The politics can keep raging.
by dyauspitr | 2026-02-26 02:51:13+00:00
The Trump administration is intentionally trying to kill solar so that their oil buddies can make money for another 5-10 years.

It’s insane to think that close to 80% of cars in shenzen are electric. I don’t even understand how that works. These EV cars have been around for about a decade. How has the entire population of the city purchased a new vehicle in that short span of time.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-02-26 02:51:46+00:00
Joining a forum is meaningless in itself, but it's a pointer towards broader differences in attitudes towards enforcement. Japan is a big country which multiple companies I've worked for do business with, yet I've never had to take a training course about what I, not living or working in Japan, must do to comply with Japanese data protection law.

(Should I have had to, and companies just don't bother because Japan is smaller? I guess I'd believe that, although I'd still be surprised that I've never heard about a Japanese data enforcement action against a foreign company.)
by anyfoo | 2026-02-26 02:51:52+00:00
Oh sure, it might or might not make a significant difference at all. Chances are, if you do a lot of I/O on a large (or very large) amount of data, and you also have a lot of rarely used but resident anonymous memory, then swap space should help, as that anonymous memory can get paged out in favor of disk cache, but I have no idea how common that is.
by eongchen | 2026-02-26 02:52:00+00:00
I've had to deliberately strip em-dashes from my writing, even though sometimes they're genuinely the right punctuation for expressing a complex thought. The reason? I use AI to polish my professional writing (including this one), and em-dashes are the first thing I remove during review because leaving them in makes it look like I just hit "send" on an AI response without reading it.

The irony is that in tech, almost everyone is using AI to improve their writing at this point. And often it does make things clearer and more concise. But we've created this weird social norm where the output needs to look like it wasn't touched by AI, even when everyone knows it was. So we all spend time manually roughing up perfectly good text to maintain the illusion of authenticity.
by rfv6723 | 2026-02-26 02:53:03+00:00
Solid state batteries are overhyped because their production complexity makes them a pricing nightmare for the average consumer. Sodium ion batteries are the practical choice for short distance transport because they are affordable and charge incredibly fast.

When it comes to long distance shipping or aviation, the energy density of liquid fuel is simply too hard to beat. Fossil fuels will stay dominant for decades, likely evolving into carbon captured or bio derived alternatives rather than being replaced by batteries.
by duskwuff | 2026-02-26 02:53:50+00:00
The negative parallelism pattern is broader than the literal phrasing "not X, but Y". Here are some examples from the article:

- "A new lawsuit doesn’t just revisit the $40 billion Terra-Luna meltdown; it questions whether..."

- "Ten minutes is not a coincidence. It is a trade."

- "It reads less like a rescue offer and more like a firm positioning itself..."

- "These are not isolated; they are part of Snyder’s broader efforts..."

- "Not just as bystanders, but as alleged participants..."
by flyinghamster | 2026-02-26 02:53:56+00:00
Eeeeeep. I was lucky that my big CS courses were done on a Sequent Balance 8000 equipped with six NS32032 CPUs and room for six more. Yup, SMP in the mid-1980s. That machine positively flew on loads that would bring the neighboring Pyramid 90x to its knees.

I had an account on a 3B20, and it did not impress me in the least, but the 3B2/400 boxes in one lab were pretty reasonable for being small systems. What a shame that the WE32000 didn't get any traction.

Before I went down to UIUC, the junior college had a Prime 650, and all compile jobs were run through a queue precisely to avoid having the machine get crushed.
by miki123211 | 2026-02-26 02:54:03+00:00
I'd add to that that every tool should have --json (and possibly --output-schema flags), where the latter returns a Typescript / Pydantic / whatever type definition, not a bloated, token-inefficient JSON schema. Information that those exist should be centralized in one place.

This way, agents can either choose to execute tools directly (bringing output into context), or to run them via a script (or just by piping to jq), which allows for precise arithmetic calculations and further context debloating.
by al_borland | 2026-02-26 02:54:51+00:00
There have always been a million small POC clones of popular apps. Twitter, Trello, <insert popular todo app>, etc.

Doing a subset of what a market leader is doing, but worse, with no path to scale or support, isn’t going to go anywhere.

Yesterday someone vibe coded a password manager in 20 minutes and posted it here. Should anyone use it? Absolutely not. It’s a security nightmare, won’t get support, and the architecture is complete trash, requiring the use to run a local server the background that the app and browser extension talk to. Not to mention it will likely never see an update.

Successful competitors do something new. A lazy vibe coded clone doesn’t nothing new, and they don’t even do all the basics.
by apothegm | 2026-02-26 02:55:13+00:00
I’m going to nitpick this to death out of sheer boredom.

This diagram contains a horrifying omission of cereals and yogurt-oriented or cottage cheese breakfasts. It also misreads quiche as flour-free (quiche comes in a pie crust). Breakfast burritos and egg-and-cheese sandwiches are an omission, as is grilled cheese. Bagel with cream cheese? Hard boiled egg? French toast?
by tolerance | 2026-02-26 02:56:38+00:00
> “If the law is against you, talk about the evidence,” said a battered barrister “If the evidence is against you, talk about the law, and, since you ask me, if the law and the evidence are both against you, then pound on the table and yell like hell”

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/07/04/legal-adage/
by wesammikhail | 2026-02-26 02:56:47+00:00
> But is "only" 5% of users paying of a 8-900M user base really so inconsequential? What percentage of Meta's users are paying? Google's? I would be curious to see the author dig deeper here, because I am skeptical that this is really as bad as the author suggests.

The difference is in the unit economics. OpenAI has to spend massively per free user it serves. The others you mentioned have SaaS economics where the marginal cost of onboarding and serving each non-paying user is essentially zero while also gaining money from these free users via advertising. Hence, the free users are actually a net positive rather than an endless money sink.

Keep also in mind that AI has always been, and will always be, a commodity. The moment you start forcing people to convert into paying customers is the moment they jump ship at scale.

Just something to keep in mind.
by akoboldfrying | 2026-02-26 02:57:00+00:00
Thanks, I think I get it now. The hash value would be a pure function of the method's signature (argument types and return type) and its name, so that two interfaces with a same-name, same-signature method would hash to the same value and thus invoke the same underlying method; the constraints would be that, after modulo, different methods must map to different indices; and the objective function to minimise would be the vtable size (which I think would be common across all classes).

But maybe I don't get it, since this would require knowledge of all interfaces, and as soon as you require that, it's straightforward to build a minimal-size mapping from method name+signature to integer index: e.g., just form the union of all method declarations appearing in any interface, sorry them lexicographically, and use a method's position in this sorted list as its index. Lookups in this map are only ever done at compile time so there's no runtime inefficiency to worry about.