MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why were green and amber CRTs more comfortable to read?
by CalvinBuild | 2026-02-17 09:57:27+00:00
I have been looking into how early CRT displays were designed around human visual limits rather than maximum brightness or contrast.

Green and amber phosphors sit near peak visual sensitivity, and phosphor decay produces brief light impulses instead of the sample and hold behavior used by modern LCD and OLED screens. These constraints may have unintentionally reduced visual fatigue during long sessions.

Modern displays removed many of those limits, which raises a question: is some eye strain today partly a UI and luminance management problem rather than just screen time?

Curious what others here have experienced:

Do certain color schemes or display types feel less fatiguing?

Are there studies you trust on display comfort?

Have any modern UIs recreated CRT-like comfort?

Full write-up:
https://calvinbuild.hashnode.dev/what-crt-engineers-knew-about-eye-strain-that-modern-ui-forgot
by rkangel | 2026-02-17 09:57:44+00:00
There's an extra point here about how quickly home grown stuff can go from drawing board to manufacture. Because it takes us months or years, we go through multiple iterations of prototyping and discover a lot of design issues. They seem to go through much less iteration because they can get stuff manufactured quickly and so don't always discover longevity issues like a too-thin wire.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-02-17 09:57:56+00:00
I'm in two minds about this. Yes, there are severe privacy implications.

But also this happened, just a couple of hour's drive from where I live, about ten years ago:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-33505...

and similar things have happened about once a year ever since. Now in the news article I linked to a huge part of the problem was that the police didn't follow it up correctly, went to where the accident had been reported rather than where it had occurred, didn't see anything, and then gave up.

But if the car had rung from where it had actually crashed then the incident would have EISEC[1] data tagged to it, which would have given them actual co-ordinates to hit.

[1] https://www.derbyshire.police.uk/SysSiteAssets/foi-media/der... (first hit on google)
by psychoslave | 2026-02-17 09:58:33+00:00
Cut throat competition between nations is usually called war. In war, gathering as much information as possible on everyone is certainly a strategic wanna do. Selling psyops about how much benefits will come for everyone willing to join the one sided industrial dependency also is a thing. Giving significant boost to potentially adversarial actors is not a thing.

That said universe don't obligate us to think the cosmos is all about competition. Cooperation is always possible as a viable path, often with far more long term benefits at scale.

Competition is superfluous self inflict masochism.
by localforthewin | 2026-02-17 09:58:50+00:00
answer questions like "what does function X call?" or "what breaks if I change class Y?"

Design decisions:

- Zero runtime dependencies. Python's ast module gives you a complete AST for free. Regex handles TypeScript/JS. No
tree-sitter, no rope, no database.
- In-memory indexing. ~1-2s rebuild for typical projects. No persistence layer — just parse and query.
- Closure-based API. create_project_query_functions(index) returns a dict of callables. No framework, no class
hierarchy.
- Output size controls.

Every list-returning tool takes max_results, source tools take max_lines. AI agents can manage their own token budgets.

The most interesting tool is probably get_change_impact — it walks the dependency graph transitively to tell you every symbol that would be affected by changing a given function or class. Traditional approach: read every file and hope the AI figures it out. Indexed approach: 204 characters.

Works with Claude Code, OpenClaw, Cursor, and any MCP-compatible client.

pip install "mcp-codebase-index[mcp]"

GitHub: https://github.com/MikeRecognex/mcp-codebase-index

More on local LLMs and AI-assisted dev at https://lftw.dev
by uecker | 2026-02-17 09:59:05+00:00
I think this is not really true. Or rather, it depends on the UB you are talking about. There is UB which is simply UB because it is out-of-scope for the C standard, and there is UB such as signed integer overflow that can cause issues. It is realistic to deal with the later, e.g. by converting them to traps with a compiler flags.
by stevage | 2026-02-17 10:00:56+00:00
>> Paper is not a material that scales up

>Citation needed? It's made from a renewable resource (wood) and there's some 400+ million metric tons of paper production yearly (source: Gemini, so feel free to take with a grain of salt).

Sorry, I meant in the sense of physical scale - I wouldn't imagine the properties of paper at 50cm scale translate directly to say 5 or 10 metre scale.
by b112 | 2026-02-17 10:01:22+00:00
That's too arbitrary, and you say that as if a billion dollars is a lot of money.

It's not.

There was a time when millionaires were considered 'rich'. Now that's just a retiree, in most housing markets, who's paid off a house. Or even a townhome... and in some places, a condo!

It doesn't matter "whether it should" cost that much, that's irrelevant for my example. The point is, being a millionaire isn't a big deal. It's common. It doesn't mean wealthy.

Likewise when a company is large, and has infrastructure all over the world, and is worth much of a T, a B is nothing. Cash reserves in the billions is really not all that much, just fiscal prudence.

An alternate is that "banks should get free money, by forcing all companies to borrow money for capital projects". Because if you tax companies for "wealth", then they'll just spend all that capital on loan payments.

I feel people have such weird ideas about taxation. People see "oh no, someone has free money!" then get excited and want to tax. What? The goal of taxation isn't "take money from anyone we can", nor is it 'wealth redistribution', it's instead 'how to pay for joint projects' that all of society benefits from.

Losing track of that last bit, is when people stop asking "should we tax" and instead say "they have money, so tax"
by jolmg | 2026-02-17 10:01:42+00:00
> What happened to this block and the keyboard key arrangement?

There's also these:

| ASCII | US keyboard |
|------------+-------------|
| 041/0x21 ! | 1 ! |
| 042/0x22 " | 2 @ |
| 043/0x23 # | 3 # |
| 044/0x24 $ | 4 $ |
| 045/0x25 % | 5 % |
| | 6 ^ |
| 046/0x26 & | 7 & |
by treyd | 2026-02-17 10:01:48+00:00
The relay architecture is too limited so it encourages centralization through sticky defaults in user clients. UX noticeably improves when users have to query and publish to a smaller overall set of trackers. There's no structure to the protocol to encourage naturally spreading the load around.

This also means that it gets increasingly more expensive to run a relay as time goes on, making those parties have more sway over the network and giving the ability to selectively remove content.

So that's why I argue it's not fully decentralized, like BitTorrent. BitTorrent does have trackers, but they're only an accelerator over DHT/PEX. Peers can't manipulate content since you independently verify it. There would have to be some kind of in-protocol message exchange directly between participants, bypassing relays, when they were able to reach each other.
by throwaway2037 | 2026-02-17 10:01:58+00:00
> Is SQLite halfway to closed source software?

Is there a reason that you chose SQLite for your counterpoint? My hot take: I would say that SQLite is halfway to closed source software. Why? The unit tests are not open source. You need to pay to see them. As a result, it would be insanely hard to force SQLite in a sustainable, safe manner. Please don't read this opinion as disliking SQLite for their software or commercial strategy. In hindsight, it looks like real genius to resist substantial forks. One of the biggest "fork threats" to SQLite is the advent of LLMs that can (1) convert C code to a different langugage, like Rust, and (2) write unit tests. Still, a unit test suite for a database while likely contain thousands (or millions) of edge case SQL queries. These are still probably impossible to recreate, considering the 25 year history of bug fixing done by the SQLite team.
by latexr | 2026-02-17 10:02:07+00:00
> And if one works with enough people one can suddenly realize that they too are a Julius relative to someone smarter and more introverted.

No, Julius is not a spectrum. There is a line between being one or not being one. It’s not just a slider between “socially outgoing” and “technically competent”, it describes a particular type of individual.

> Oh and everything doesn't suck.

I think it was pretty clear I didn’t mean literally. Obviously the Sun doesn’t suck, nor does water, nor do an infinity of things which humans could not have as hand it.
by drysine | 2026-02-17 10:03:07+00:00
>Ukraine (slava)

"Slava Ukraine" (Glory to the Ukraine) is the slogan used by the Ukrainian nationalists who collaborated with Nazis and mass-murdered Poles and Jews.

"In the 1930s, it became widespread as a slogan of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), as well as Ukrainian diaspora groups and refugee communities in the West during the Cold War. ... Its use was revived again during the 2014 Ukrainian revolution and the Russo-Ukrainian War, during which it became a widely popular symbol in Ukraine."[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slava_Ukraini
by alexejb | 2026-02-17 10:03:11+00:00
> The Chechen Wars did not start because islamists started killing Russian people-it started because Islamists wanted independence from RF.

Here's a report from Memorial about the situation before, during and after the war. Put it in a translator if you have problems understanding Russian.
https://memohrc.org/sites/default/files/rossia-chechnia_1edi...

Here's a stenography of Govorukhin's statement before the Duma about the Samashka incident.

https://www.warchechnya.ru/doklad-govoruhina-v-gosdume-o-zac...

I think it will give you a glimpse of what happened on the ground in Chechnya and you can compare both sources.

> Blinken summarized it pretty well [...]

If Blinken says so, it must be true!

> About Ukrainian identity: this type of struggles unite people into a nation.

I have family in western Ukraine on my mothers side, your statement is oversimplified at best.

> I do not know you personally, but your writing like a Russian shill.

I saw that you're from WA USA and I didn't expect anything else from you.
by mike_hearn | 2026-02-17 10:04:52+00:00
It's not new. BOMStore is a format inherited from NeXTStep. JSON didn't exist back then.

Also, it's a format designed to hold binary data. JSON can't do that without hacks like base64 encoding.

Binary file stores like this are very common in highly optimized software, which operating systems tend to be, especially if you go looking at the older parts. Windows has a similar format embedded in EXE/DLL files. Same concept: a kind of pseudo-filesystem used to hold app icons and other resources.
by piskov | 2026-02-17 10:05:00+00:00
Creatine really helps with “energy”.

Found myself practically stop longing for sweets during programming; have more energy during workouts (135 KG bench press and all the other stuff).

5 g daily is what considered to saturate your muscles.

Some report that any additional helps cognitive tasks (but I haven’t seen definitive studies besides the sleep deprivation).

I take 7.5 g
Show HN: RepoClip – Generate promo videos from GitHub repos using AI
by Kazutaka_S | 2026-02-17 10:05:26+00:00
Hi HN, I built RepoClip, a tool that takes a GitHub URL and automatically generates a promotional video for the repository.

How it works:
1. Paste a GitHub repo URL
2. AI (Gemini) analyzes the codebase and generates a video script
3. Images (Flux), narration (OpenAI TTS), and background music are auto-generated
4. Remotion renders the final video

Tech stack: Next.js, Supabase, Inngest, Remotion Lambda, Fal.ai

I built this because I noticed many great open source projects struggle with marketing. Writing docs is hard enough — making a demo video on top of that felt like something AI could handle.

Free tier available (2 videos/month). Would love to hear your feedback.
by rmnclmnt | 2026-02-17 10:05:27+00:00
And that makes total sense. Honestly working since a few days with Opus 4.6, it really feels like a competent coworker, but need some explicit conventions to follow … exactly when onboarding a new IC! So i think there is a bright light to be seen: this will force having proper and explicit contribution rules and conventions, both for humans and robots
by enraged_camel | 2026-02-17 10:05:35+00:00
Every time someone suggests Codex I give it a shot. And every time it disappoints.

After I read your comment, I gave Codex 5.3 the task of setting up an E2E testing skeleton for one of my repos, using Playwright. It worked for probably 45 minutes and in the end failed miserably: out of the five smoke tests it created, only two of them passed. It gave up on the other three and said they will need “further investigation”.

I then stashed all do that code and gave the exact same task to Opus 4.5 (not even 4.6), with the same prompt. After 15 mins it was done. Then I popped Codex’s code from the stash and asked Opus to look at it to see why the three m of the five tests Codex wrote didn’t pass. It looked at them and found four critical issues that Codex had missed. For example, it had failed to detect that my localhost uses https, so the the E2E suite’s API calls from the Vue app kept failing. Opus also found that the two passing tests were actually invalid: they checked for the existence of a div with #app and simply assumed it meant the Vue app booted successfully.

This is probably the dozenth comparison I’ve done between Codex and Opus. I think there was only one scenario where Codex performed equally well. Opus is just a much better model in my experience.
by Paracompact | 2026-02-17 10:05:53+00:00
It's very clear to me on its face that it's AI, but not "obvious as the sky is blue" others seem to be implying. I would dislike the writing style even if it weren't AI.

For the record, an AI detector that appears to have put work into reliability and that I trust very much from my own testing, Pangram (https://www.pangram.com), says this is 100% AI generated. I've used it plenty before when experimenting with AI-collab writing, both fiction and non-fiction, and it's frustratingly accurate in identifying what is and isn't my contribution. I have since largely given up trying to do AI-collab writing, because no matter how nice the writing looks in the moment, it always reeks when read closely, or on later days.
by concats | 2026-02-17 10:06:06+00:00
> Sidenote: I wonder what's going to happen when the crazy money runs out and Anthropic, OpenAI & co have to start charging for more than it costs them to run the models. Hopefully by then the open source models will have caught up?

How brutal will the enshittification phase of these products be?

Will the 10x cost or whatever be something that future employers will have to pay, or will it be a more visible impact for all of us? Assuming no AGI scenario here and the investments will have to be paid back with further subscription services like today.

I really hope Open Source (Open Weights) keep up with the development, and that a continuation of Moore's Law (the bastardized performance per € version) makes local models increasingly accessible.
by discreteevent | 2026-02-17 10:06:37+00:00
A project was one of the easiest ways to evaluate a stranger. It was a great bullshit detector. If they can make something like this then they are probably someone with ability and experience and so the rest of what they have to say is probably worth listening to. But I also agree with the parent. HN seems to be flooded with hustle and rubbish since AI has taken off. It's eternal LLMber.
by pllbnk | 2026-02-17 10:07:08+00:00
It's different this time because the build-up since the last recession (excluding pandemic which didn't cause real recession but instead added more coal to the fire) has been the longest in history by far. Unless economists learned to prevent recessions, which is very unlikely, long build-up may mean spectacular crash. On the other hand, it may indicate that we are in a recession, hence the graph's similarities to 2007-2009 period, but it's just going to take a long time and then crash spectacularly, too. I am just speculating but it "feels" that way.
by sdfhbdf | 2026-02-17 10:07:30+00:00
This is well-intentioned but I think it oversimplifies in ways that can actually be harmful. "Just get used to being hungry" is rough advice to give people - chronic hunger is one of the main reasons diets fail, and framing weight loss as a willpower contest against hunger ignores that satiety is heavily influenced by _what_ you eat, not just how much. A 400 kcal meal of protein, fat, and fiber will keep you full for hours; 400 kcal of simple carbs will leave you hungry again in 45 minutes, in part because of the insulin and blood glucose dynamics involved.

The calories in/out model isn't wrong exactly, but it's so reductionist that it becomes misleading in practice. It omits hormonal responses (insulin, leptin, ghrelin), the thermic effect differences between macronutrients (your body burns 20-30% of protein calories just processing them vs 0-5% for fat), gut microbiome composition, sleep quality, stress hormones, meal timing, and individual metabolic variation. Two people eating identical calorie counts can have very different outcomes. Telling someone "just eat less and accept the hunger" without any of that context can set them up for a miserable yo-yo cycle - or worse, a disordered relationship with food.
by alin23 | 2026-02-17 10:08:13+00:00
I love Kino! I film all my wood carving videos with it for my Instagram profile [1]. I'm so glad to hear it's getting updates this year. If you're open to feedback: I like playing with white balance a lot, and it takes just a little too many steps in the current interface. I think Kino would benefit from having a "remember/preserve white balance" setting, and a gesture for changing it without tapping.

For example, I like how we can swipe down to show the exposure slider, then swipe left/right to adjust exposure. Maybe it would make sense to have these hidden sliders on all 4 sides: right side could show a focus slider, left side could be white balance etc.

In any case, even without that, it's my most used new app of the year. Thanks for giving us such a simple way to get good looking color grading out of the iPhone!

[1] https://www.instagram.com/alin.panaitiu
by theteapot | 2026-02-17 10:08:50+00:00
Right now I'm trying to get an AI (actually two ChatGPT and Grok) to write me a simple HomeAssistant integration that blinks a virtual light on and off driven by a random boolean virtual sensor. I just started using HomeAssistant and don't know it well. +2H and a few iterations in, still doesn't work. Winning.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-17 10:09:03+00:00
I'll go against the grain and claim this might be a good thing long term. Yes, it sucks also, I was planning to expand my NAS but guess I'll figure out how to compress stuff instead.

Which goes into why I think this might be good. Developers have kind of treated disks as "oh well" with binaries ballooning in size, even when it can easily solved, and there is little care to make things lightweight. Just like I now figure out a different solution to recover space, I'm hoping with a shortage this kind of thing will be more widespread, and we'll end up with smaller things until the shortage is over. "Necessity is the mother of all invention" or however it goes.
by el_dockerr | 2026-02-17 10:09:08+00:00
Hi HN, author here.

I've been working on optimizing perception pipelines for SWaP-constrained FPGAs (like in satellite or drone payloads). I realized that we often run out of DSP slices for simple 3x3 convolutions.

I implemented a method to approximate these convolutions by learning coefficients that map strictly to Powers-of-Two (PoT). This allows replacing the constant multipliers with bit-shifts and adders (LUTs).

The results:

Reduces DSP usage by 33% (2 Muls instead of 3 per atomic dot-product).

Achieves >99% SSIM on correlated images.

The error manifests as a global DC-offset, which Batch Norm layers in CNNs can typically absorb.

I wrote a blog post detailing the math and the hardware implementation. The full C-benchmark and PoC code is on GitHub (linked in the post).

I'd love to hear from the FPGA folks here: Is this trade-off (accuracy vs. resources) something you'd use in production payloads?

Other sources:

[blog] https://www.dockerr.blog/blog/lowrank-hardware-approximation

[git] https://github.com/el-dockerr/Low-Rank_Hardware_Approximatio...

[LinkedIN] https://www.linkedin.com/in/swen-kalski-062b64299/
by didntcheck | 2026-02-17 10:09:56+00:00
Yep

> If I had sent out an email with even a quarter of the typos they had, I probably would've lost my job.

I don't know their life, and they may be right, but I think they may well just be imagining it. I also went from excessive formality to short conversational tone as I became more experienced. But it wasn't due to any promotions, but because I realized nobody had ever cared

I mean this is a standard cliché even in fictional works: the young new worker who keeps falling over themselves to perform what they think is necessary formality, only to be shown that they can just chill out and act like a human
by iovrthoughtthis | 2026-02-17 10:10:08+00:00
As I've experienced getting older I've found it's more about the lack of available time and focus.

I don't have the hours of time a young person does and I don't have the focus, there are a lot of other thoughts, emotions and responsibilities competing for my attention.

Would love someone who's aware of the literature to throw their hat in the ring though.
by qurio_dev | 2026-02-17 10:10:27+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m a dev and a dad to a 10-year-old. I built this because I caught my daughter using ChatGPT to do her history homework. She wasn't learning; she was just acting as a "middleware" between the AI and the paper.

The Backstory: I realized the problem isn't the AI—it's the zero-friction answers. Most "AI for kids" apps are just "parrots"—they mimic intelligence by repeating patterns.

What’s Different: Qurio is a "Bicycle" for the mind. It treats the child like a future "Architect" rather than a "Junior Executor." Technically, it wraps an LLM in a strict "Socratic Loop." It detects intent to "cheat," refuses the direct answer, and generates a leading question based on the user's current logic level. It forces "Healthy Friction" back into the learning process.

The stack: Next.js 14, Supabase (Auth/DB), Vercel AI SDK.

Mods: I've added the backstory and differentiator as requested. Ready for the re-up! Thank you.
by sherr | 2026-02-17 10:10:57+00:00
I think the possible age restriction on VPN use will be problematic in many ways. The direction of travel here is a worry even though I agree that children need some protections from social media use. The site ISP Preview [0] has an article about this as well :

'The UK Prime Minister, Kier Starmer, has today proposed last minute amendments to two Bills that will enable the Government to set a minimum age limit for social media (i.e. greater use of Age Verification), as well as options to age restrict or limit children’s use of Virtual Private Networks (VPN), where it “undermines safety protections and changing the age of digital consent".'

[0] https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2026/02/government-set...