MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by reichenstein | 2026-02-28 21:59:00+00:00
Yes, subtle because one app is not the solution but using plaintext (likely with a light markup), splitting form and content is the way to go. And when we say that plain text is the way forward, this means that not one app is the solution but you're independent in your use of apps.

iA Writer is very well one very solid and proven solution for certain use cases. In fact, I would argue that, independent of what app you use, plaintext plus markup (with the right set of templates) is, methodically, economically and logically, a much more efficient solution than Word. And I'd even argue that it is more efficient in most government, school, NGO and corporate cases.

You may find that delusional. I'm certainly not delusional about the real challenge here. It is not what app you use, but the network of format and formatting expectations, and to make people change habits. After 15 years of trying to convince people to focus on content rather than form, we know very well just how incredibly hard it is to convince people and make them stay in what they enjoy more against everybody else.
by svilen_dobrev | 2026-02-28 21:59:32+00:00
sooo ...

> it actually did a good job.

applies when there is a sea of "prior art" on the topic requested. And that request (prompt) is actually framed/worded properly to match that prior art.

Which may be perfect if the target is reduceable to prior-art. Re-use, Mix-and-match, from opensource or stackoverflow, into my-own-flavour-hot-water, finally!

No, this is not sarcasm. i hate to (catch myself a month later) reinventing hot-water. Let something else do it.

The question that stays with me is, How to keep the brain-bits needed for that inventing / making new stuff , alive and kicking.. because they will definitely deteriorate towards zero or even negative. Should we reinvent each 10th thing? just for the mental-gym-nastics?
by next_xibalba | 2026-02-28 21:59:40+00:00
> you could make an automated system that just signs postcards and, if you give it enough access, it could wipe out the human race.

I mean this sincerely. You really ought to stop reading Bostrom and Yudkowsky. It is very hard to take this kind of hysteria seriously.

> Inevitability is not an argument, and I won't humor it.

It is and I don't care what you will or won't humor. Just answer me this: how will you convince all the other countries of the world to not build terminators? The leading example of "it is inevitable" is of course China. They are already testing and deploying semi-autonomous robots throughout their national security apparatus. If you're answer is: "Just because they do it doesn't mean anyone else should" then you're not to be taken seriously on this topic.

> killing and eating children

I'd really like to know what convoluted scenario you could conjure in which one would argue that killing and eating children is inevitable.
Show HN: O-O – HTML/bash polyglot files that rewrite themselves (update)
by jahala | 2026-02-28 22:00:26+00:00
Update on o-o (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47052729) — polyglot HTML/bash files that research and rewrite themselves.

New stuff: files sync to each other. Edit the CSS in any file, run --sync css, and every sibling file gets the update. No build tool, no shared imports. Just files copying sections between themselves using markers.

Dark mode, responsive layout, search — the usual. Still zero deps beyond bash and Claude Code.

Demo: https://jahala.github.io/o-o/example/index.o-o.html

Repo: https://github.com/jahala/o-o
by CrzyLngPwd | 2026-02-28 22:00:41+00:00
Do you think the USAs and Israel's unprovoked attack on Iran is a nasty business, or only that Russia's attack on Ukraine is a nasty business?

How about NATO attacking Yugoslavia unprovoked? Was that a nasty business?

NATO attacking Libya, unprovoked, was that a nasty business?

The USA attacking Afghanistan unprovoked, was that a nasty business?
by skuxxlife | 2026-02-28 22:00:59+00:00
If you see programming purely as a means to an end, then yeah, I get this perspective. But to many there is enjoyment in the _doing_ and the craft of it beyond the end result. It’s why people get into woodworking or knitting despite the fact that it’s much cheaper, faster, and easier to buy a table or a sweater than to make one yourself. Value is subjective, and for some the value of code is not primarily in what you can sell to others.
Show HN: Pure Python web framework using free-threaded Python
by grandimam | 2026-02-28 22:01:28+00:00
Barq is an experimental HTTP framework built entirely in pure Python, designed for free-threaded Python 3.13 (PEP 703). No async/await, no C extensions - just threads with true parallelism. The question I wanted to answer: now that Python has a no-GIL mode, can a simple threaded server beat async frameworks?

Results against FastAPI (100 concurrent clients):

- JSON: 8,400 req/s vs 4,500 req/s (+87%)

- CPU-bound: 1,425 req/s vs 266 req/s (+435%)

The CPU-bound result is the interesting one. Async can't parallelize CPU work - it's fundamentally single-threaded. With free-threaded Python, adding more threads actually scales:

- 4 threads: 608 req/s

- 8 threads: 1,172 req/s (1.9x)

- 16 threads: 1,297 req/s (2.1x)

The framework is ~500 lines across 5 files. Key implementation choices:

- ThreadPoolExecutor for workers

- HTTP/1.1 keep-alive connections

- Radix tree router for O(1) matching

- Pydantic for validation

- Optional orjson for faster serialization

This is experimental and not production-ready, but it's an interesting datapoint for what's possible when Python drops the GIL.

Code: https://github.com/grandimam/barq
by Telaneo | 2026-02-28 22:01:45+00:00
I love the idea of hardware keys, and would absolutely use them for the essential stuff (email, domain registrar, bank) but they're just too expensive, while plain old TOTP 2FA is free and provides 99% of the benefits for my use case. TOTP also has a much better workflow in my experience, but this isn't that big of a problem for the things I'd consider essential, but it would be annoying if I were to use a hardware key for everything.

I can buy 6-8 physical keys for the front door of my house for the cost of one Yubikey. Even though there are options at half price, that then gets eaten into by the need to have two or three of them, since a backup is not optional for this sort of use case. I can't imagine convincing one's parents to buy 'a key for your email account' will be easy when the old way mostly 'worked fine' and was free, meanwhile the new one will cost them a non-trivial amount of money. It's an easy flow if you're their sysadmin, but I wouldn't want to throw my parents into the deep end of hardware keys and have to explain to them that they don't need the expensive one, but still have them be discouraged by the mere existence of 100+ dollar options for what should be damn-near throwaway hardware.

Passkeys somehow manages to have a worse workflow than both though.
by suprjami | 2026-02-28 22:01:50+00:00
The cheapest option is two 3060 12G cards. You'll be able to fit the Q4 of the 27B or 35B with an okay context window.

If you want to spend twice as much for more speed, get a 3090/4090/5090.

If you want long context, get two of them.

If you have enough spare cash to buy a car, get an RTX Ada with 96G VRAM.
by solarkraft | 2026-02-28 22:02:22+00:00
What are the recommended 4 bit quants for the 35B model? I don’t see official ones: https://huggingface.co/models?other=base_model:quantized:Qwe...

Edit: The unsloth quants seem to have been fixed, so they are probably the go-to again: https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3.5/gguf-benchmarks
by anonnon | 2026-02-28 22:02:22+00:00
Even people with the Internet growing up still learned largely through books, probably until StackOverflow really took off. One "hack" prior to SO that sometimes goes under-acknowledged was Google Groups. Around 2000, they bought and made free to the public the entire Deja News USENET archive, and suddenly you could search comp.lang.whatever and usually find someone who'd asked (and someone who answered) whatever question you had. And the signal-to-noise ratio was extremely high, given the barriers to entry (technical and financial) to being active on USENET's technical groups in the 90s.

Of course, asking a question was another matter, likely to result in a rebuke for violating the group's arcane decorum. But given how pervasive "RTFM" culture was back then, most "n00bs" were content to do just that (RTFM) until they came up against something that genuinely wasn't covered in some FAQ or manpage.
Show HN: Sampler Step Explorer – for understanding diffusion sampler updates
by bthornbury | 2026-02-28 22:02:46+00:00
I built a small standalone interactive to help make diffusion sampler steps more intuitive. It’s focused on the inference-time update: how the sampler moves from the current noised state toward a less-noisy state, one step at a time.

This grew out of a larger post where I try to explain diffusion models in less-dense terms, especially the parts that felt non-intuitive to me when first reading the papers. That post emphasizes that diffusion models incrementally “step” toward a solution rather than generating it all at once, and this interactive zooms in on that sampler-step idea specifically.

Would love feedback on:

- whether the interaction makes the sampler update easier to reason about

- what other diffusion concepts would be useful to turn into small interactives

Link:
https://www.bryanthornbury.com/interactives/sampler-step-exp...
Show HN: InstallerStudio – Create MSI Installers Without WiX or InstallShield
by pkailas | 2026-02-28 22:02:48+00:00
Hi, I'm Paul — 25 years of enterprise Windows development. I built InstallerStudio after WiX went from free/open source to $6,500/year support and InstallShield hit $2,000+/year. Every tool in this space is either unaffordable or requires writing XML by hand.
InstallerStudio is a visual MSI designer built on WinUI 3/.NET 10. No XML, no subscriptions, no external dependencies. Handles files, Windows services, registry, shortcuts, file associations, custom actions, and full installer UI. $159 this month, $199 after. 30-day free trial.
It ships its own installer, built with itself.
Happy to answer questions about MSI internals.
by tfehring | 2026-02-28 22:03:06+00:00
> For intelligence activities, any handling of private information will comply with the Fourth Amendment, the National Security Act of 1947 and the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act of 1978, Executive Order 12333, and applicable DoD directives requiring a defined foreign intelligence purpose. The AI System shall not be used for unconstrained monitoring of U.S. persons’ private information as consistent with these authorities. The system shall also not be used for domestic law-enforcement activities except as permitted by the Posse Comitatus Act and other applicable law.

My reading of this is that OpenAI's contract with the Pentagon only prohibits mass surveillance of US citizens to the extent that that surveillance is already prohibited by law. For example, I believe this implies that the DoW can procure data on US citizens en masse from private companies - including, e.g., granular location and financial transaction data - and apply OpenAI's tools to that data to surveil and otherwise target US citizens at scale. As I understand it, this was not the case with Anthropic's contract.

If I'm right, this is abhorrent. However, I've already jumped to a lot of incorrect conclusions in the last few days, so I'm doing my best to withhold judgment for now, and holding out hope for a plausible competing explanation.

(Disclosure, I'm a former OpenAI employee and current shareholder.)
by perrygeo | 2026-02-28 22:03:10+00:00
The entire zeitgeist of software technology revolves around the assumption that making things efficient, easy, and quick is inherently good. Most people who are "sitting in front of rectangles, moving tiny rectangles" have sometime grandiose notions of their works' importance; we're making X work better for the good of Y to enable Z. Abstract shit like that.

No man, you're just making X easier. If the world needs more X, fine. If not, woops.

The detachment from reality makes it all too easy to deceive yourself into thinking "hey this actually helps people".
by davnicwil | 2026-02-28 22:03:40+00:00
I think all it means when we say 'solve problems in real life' is just the stuff you have to do that tooling can't abstract you away from any more.

The sharp end of the debate now is around what exactly that means in the LLM world. It's extremely unclear what exactly the new level of abstraction unlocked is, or at least how general/leaky it is.

There's obviously just the stance of enjoying the craft, and that's one thing off to the side, but I think the major source of conflict for those who are more oriented towards living in the top level of abstraction (i.e. what you can do in real life) is between some of the claims being pushed about said level of abstraction and what many still experience in actual reality using these tools.
by rdtsc | 2026-02-28 22:03:41+00:00
> But after hearing about the book there, I was really put off by some of the things he said and concluded that the book would be a hard pass for me.

What are some of those things? I am not trying to be snarky, I like Herzog and I am curious.

One thing to keep in mind is he views documentaries are fiction almost. They are not supposed to be taken in as pure information or facts. Treat it like you’d treat any movie.

You said you liked Grizzly Man. Well there you can tell the reason he put in the coroner in there and he told him to “act” and the extra long pauses after the scenes are there to add awkwardness. It should be obvious what is going on.
by awesan | 2026-02-28 22:03:49+00:00
It's nice that people are taking this up, and one of the main benefits of open source in the first place. I have my doubts that this will succeed if it's just one guy, but maybe it takes on new life this way and I would never discourage people from trying to add value to this world.

That said I increasingly have a very strong distaste of these AI generated articles. They are long and tedious to read and it really makes me doubt that what is written there is actually true at all. I much prefer a worse written but to the point article.
by juleiie | 2026-02-28 22:04:10+00:00
One fictional character that I think is helpful to bring is Luke Skywalker. It’s not about politeness, but about genuinely knowing why people behave the way they are and then offering them alternative other than QAnon.

Listening to QAnon is a desperate attempt to understand the world after every other mainstream figure of authority failed that person.

What I am talking about is not politeness. Politeness is tone management. The McCain/Romney approach. I respect my opponent, let's find common ground, here's my reasonable plan. That is only decorum.
But Trump did validate. That's precisely why he won. He just validated the ugliest parts. When he said the system is rigged, that the elites despise you, that your way of life is under siege, millions of people heard the first person in power say what they felt. The content was often vile, the solutions were fraudulent, but the emotional recognition was real. He didn't win by being polite. He won by being the first one to say your rage makes sense.

The mistake is thinking validation means being nice. It doesn't. It means demonstrating that you understand what someone is actually experiencing before you ask them to go somewhere with you. Trump does this instinctively, he just leads people somewhere destructive.
by jmclnx | 2026-02-28 22:04:30+00:00
This got me playing with an old 3.5" USB Diskette Drive I got from work on NetBSD. It works great. All I need is one of those for 5.25 diskettes :)

A long time ago I had to get a file off of a 3.5" diskette that was corrupted. Linux would panic but NetBSD just came out with the rump kernel. So I installed NetBSD and used rump. Rump crashed a few times but the system stayed up. So after a few tries I got about 80 - 90% of the document.

I miss the convenience and cheapness of diskettes.
by solarkraft | 2026-02-28 22:05:07+00:00
Smells like hyperbole. A lot of people making such claims don’t seem to have continued real world experience with these models or seem to have very weird standards for what they consider usable.

Up until relatively recently, while people had already long been making these claims, it came with the asterisks of „oh, but you can’t practically use more than a few K tokens of context“.
by yoavm | 2026-02-28 22:05:21+00:00
Iran tends to lie about these things while Israel usually says the truth, at least after running an investigation. It's pretty simple: one is a dictatorship without free media, and the other one isn't. It's easy to lie when you can tell the newspapers what to write, and it's much harder when they're doing their job. You want an example? Khamenei. Iran says he's safe and wasn't hurt. Israel says he's dead. Let's see.
by Macha | 2026-02-28 22:05:21+00:00
The copyright for Minio consists of:

- Code written by the Minio team, which they have full ownership of and can relicense as they wish

- Code written by third party contributors, where Minio required the contributors to provide Minio a BSD license to use the contributions but only published it to other people under AGPL.

So the AGPL doesn't bind Minio themselves because of their licensing policy. (Which is why while pure AGPL might be the open source maximalist license, AGPL + CLA is almost at the opposite end of the scale)
by ksec | 2026-02-28 22:05:48+00:00
>In this article I will try to explain why I find his framing fascinating but incomplete. Evans structures technology history in cycles. Every 10-15 years, the industry reorganizes around a new platform: mainframes (1960s-70s), PCs (1980s), web (1990s), smartphones (2000s-2010s). Each shift pulls all innovation, investment, and company creation into its orbit. Generative AI appears to be the next platform shift, or it could break the cycle entirely.

A lot of the AI and LLM argument on whether it is really eating the world misses one point, and I think Evans implied but not pointed out explicitly.

Had it not been AI investment, we wouldn't have the current hardware improvement and innovation rate.

Most people have heard about the limit of Moore's law, but every single time it appeared in headline is an economic model limit rather than limit of physics. We were predicting a stop to growth in 90s because we couldn't see a 400M PC market shipment in 2010. Turns out Smartphone carried that forward, and it is what funded growth of TSMC when most on HN even knew much or heard of TSMC. The same goes with LPDDR RAM, Pure Play IP, Wireless, Network, etc. All the hardware improvements that came with Smartphone is now continued to be developed at rapid pace due to AI and Hyperscaler.

What Evan were suggesting is much simpler, could AI automate things that previously were not possible for 99% of business outside of Tech and Software. The answer is a simple yes. And worth pointing out ChartGPT is closing in on a billion weekly active user.

A lot of HN discussion about AI often centered around software development. And whether it is good enough of it. Most of the world outside are happy enjoying AI for many things. What used to require a mildly technical person to do on excel can not be done without one. It is opening up software to even more people. It is creating more value than people imagine, and users are willing to paid for it.
by specialp | 2026-02-28 22:06:07+00:00
Well it depends. Being that the federal government constitutes 20% of the US economy, telling federal agencies you cannot contract with someone because they are adversarial to the USA is indeed pretty severe. When in reality they are not adversarial. We have no choice but to pay taxes and make the federal government 20 percent of our economy. There is no single company or any other entity that is close. And extending it to everyone who has a government contract probably makes it the majority of the economy. So it is not at all equivalent to a private company making a choice
by layer8 | 2026-02-28 22:06:21+00:00
I think the issue was that most irrational/transcendental numbers aren’t finitely representable. This means that they are mathematical objects which, each of them individually, somehow consist of an infinity (e.g. an infinite decimal expansion). They are the result or end point of infinitely many steps (e.g. a converging sequence) that you can’t actually reach the end of in practice, and for most of them can’t even write down a finite description on what steps to perform, and which therefore arguably doesn’t “really” exist.

Another point of contention was the notion that the continuous number line would be formed out of dimensionless points. Numbers were thought of as residing on the line, but it was hard to grasp how a line could consist solely of a collection of points, since given any pair of points, there would always be a gap between them. “Clearly” they can’t be forming a contiguous line.
by piker | 2026-02-28 22:06:27+00:00
It certainly was intended as such. In a commercial transaction, that's what they're doing. They don't think it's moral to use their product in certain ways. They are thus prohibiting their customer from using it in such ways.

But, as I've said, I tend to agree with both Anthropic and the Administration's positions. What was wrong here is that rather than just terminating the contract, the Administration went nuclear.
by Tanjreeve | 2026-02-28 22:08:13+00:00
The amount of "apps" I've had dumped on my team that are everything from un-releasable to deployed on some random shit-cloud we haven't approved (vercel comes up a lot). If you needed hand holding to release things or had to throw software over the fence to others to "productionise" etc then you probably don't know what you're talking about.
by varispeed | 2026-02-28 22:08:46+00:00
You just wrote: "If the person wants to be a business owner, then operate as a self-employed contractor and not an employee." That is the class assumption, stated plainly. You are telling a person who incorporated a company, took on commercial risk, and invoices for their services that they are an employee until they prove otherwise. No one says this to any other type of business. No one tells a consultancy that its embedded workers are "actually employees of the client" and demands they prove otherwise. The presumption of illegitimacy only runs one way.

You say "they're not a repeat customer, they're the only customer." A business with one large account is still a business. Plenty of legitimate companies derive the majority of their revenue from a single client. No one questions their legitimacy. A defence contractor with one government contract is not told it is disguised employment. A law firm with one anchor client is not subjected to a status test. This suspicion is reserved exclusively for worker-owned companies.

You say the consultancy comparison is "irrelevant" and "completely different types of work and working arrangement." You keep asserting this. I keep asking you to explain what is different about the work when the person is at the same desk, same hours, same equipment, same client, same duration. You have never answered this. You answer with "the contracts are different," which is the product of the legal framework, not an independent fact.

You say "class doesn't come into it" and "it triggers the test, it does not determine the outcome." I have not claimed ownership determines the outcome. I have asked, repeatedly, why ownership determines who gets tested. You have now acknowledged that it does. A large company supplying a worker in identical conditions is never tested. You say that is because their worker is "already an employee." Right - employed by a company that captures the margin. When the worker owns the company and keeps the margin themselves, suddenly a test is needed. The variable is not the nature of the work. The variable is who keeps the profit. That is a class distinction.