MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by amire | 2026-02-24 14:59:21+00:00
This isn't a content problem; it's a systems problem. The pressure to create without a pipeline for genuine insights leads to these templates. Authentic thought leadership should be a byproduct of a consumption and synthesis workflow, not a forced, separate task.
I've been working on solving this - first for myself and then for others - by building a tool for this called Castifai. It's a consumption-first workflow that helps turn insights from content you already consume into authentic posts, so you're sharing what you know, not just filling a quota. (I'm the founder). You can try it at castifai.com
by sh34r | 2026-02-24 14:59:30+00:00
Your workflow makes sense for FOSS projects, where the commit is the unit of work. In my experience, on most professional teams, the PR is the unit of work. PRs trigger CI/CD pipelines. PRs map to tickets. The meaningful commit goes with the squash merge to the shared dev/main branch.

There are cases where I've staged commits this way for a PR, to make it more reviewable. I'd usually rather split them off into separate PRs, but when that would create a pipeline of three MRs that are meaningless on their own, then rewriting history for a single MR makes sense. I generally consider my feature branch's commit history to be for me, not for you. Going back and rewriting history is a chore that shouldn't be necessary if I did a decent enough job with the PR description and task decomposition. Those commits are getting squashed anyway. Along with all the "fix MR comments" commits on top of it.

It wouldn't bother me to adopt your workflow if it fits your team and its tools and processes. I'd just say, consider that your way isn't the only correct way of doing things. Your preferences are valid, but so are others'. The only thing that really bothers me is absolutism. "My way or the highway."

Your writing here reminded me of a particularly unpleasant coworker I had in the past. I quickly browsed your comment history to make sure you're not him... Excessive rigidity is not an endearing quality.

All that being said, I have also been constantly annoyed by people with too many YoE who can't be bothered to spend an hour or three to learn the basics of how the Git tree is structured, and what merge vs rebase does. They rely too heavily on their GUI crutches and can't fix anything once it goes sideways. Even when you lead them to water, sending them reading material and offering to answer questions after, they refuse to drink. Willful ignorance is far more irritating than stubbornness.
by scott_w | 2026-02-24 14:59:59+00:00
> which I suppose makes sense if 30% of people simply lack the ability to reason

You can't really infer that from survey data, and particularly from this question. A few criticisms that I came up with off the top of my head:

- What if the number were actually 60% but half guessed right and half guessed wrong?

- Assuming the 30% is a failure of reasoning, it's possible that those 30% were lacking reason at that moment and it's not a general trend. How many times have you just blanked on a question that's really easy to answer?

- A larger percentage than you expected maybe never went to a car wash or don't know what one is?

- Language barrier that leaked through vetting? (Would be a small %, granted)

- Other obvious things like a fraction will have lied just because it's funny, were suspicious, weren't paying attention and just clicked a button without reading the question.

I do agree that the question isn't framed particularly badly, however. I'm just focusing on cognitive impairment, which I don't think is necessarily true all of the time.
by starkience | 2026-02-24 15:00:00+00:00
yep, noticed many web2/SaaS devs struggle with blockchain integrations. So it's in Typescript to make it easy to ship. In theory, you can cherry-pick the blockchain features you need for your app (e.g., you're a tradFi stock exchange app and want to add perpetual contracts for index and tradFi assets, so you select the 'perps' module in the SDK) and you don't have to re-design or architect yourself smart-contracts
by troyvit | 2026-02-24 15:00:05+00:00
It's a test designed to cause cognitive dissonance. The LLM assumes a human has a logical reason to to walk to the car wash. The prompt never says the car isn't already at the car wash (and that the user has a second car). The issue isn't that LLMs can't solve a simple logic problem. It's that it assumes people aren't idiots.
Show HN: Localvoxtral – Local real-time dictation on macOS with streaming STT
by T0mSIlver | 2026-02-24 15:00:07+00:00
I built a native macOS menu bar app for real-time dictation that can run fully on-device.

Most dictation tools, even local ones, use Whisper or similar offline models: you record, then wait for the transcript. Localvoxtral uses Mistral's Voxtral Realtime, one of the first open-source speech models with a natively streaming architecture. Words appear as you speak, not after you stop. It feels closer to someone typing along as you talk.

Press a shortcut, speak, and text gets typed directly into whatever app you're in. No cloud, no subscription, no data leaving your machine.

Two backend options:

voxmlx on Apple Silicon: I forked voxmlx to add a WebSocket server and memory optimizations. Runs a 4-bit quantized model on an M1 Pro. Audio and inference stay fully on-device.
vLLM on NVIDIA GPU: tested on an RTX 3090, noticeably faster.

The app is native Swift (~97%), lives in the menu bar, and stays out of your way. Configurable shortcut, mic selection, auto-paste.
GitHub: https://github.com/T0mSIlver/localvoxtral

Pre-built DMG available in Releases
by syncsynchalt | 2026-02-24 15:00:19+00:00
The ~ character for home directories was an old convention that dates from the ADM-3A (1976) terminal used by some early Unix users. The keyboard on that terminal happened to have the cursor control word "Home" on the "~" key. This emerged in HTTP urls as /~user/ being the shorthand for a user's personal web pages on a site.

Much later in history, Twitter popularized the prefix "@user" to refer to a personal identity. I'm not sure if they invented the usage or not. This is distinct, but probably somehow cognitively related, to the use of user@site for email addresses after bang paths fell out of favor.

To me, and for reasons I can't quite put my finger on, @user seems a much better sigil than ~user, so I'm not bothered that it's become popular.
by iggori | 2026-02-24 15:00:41+00:00
Spent the last year building a full production system solo. Not a side project. Hundreds of thousands of lines, dozens of services, CI/CD, Terraform, multi-locale UI, thousands of tests. Real constraints, real consequences.
At small scale the AI was genuinely useful. At medium scale it started making subtle mistakes. At large scale it behaved exactly as it was built: a next-token predictor with no memory of the system it was modifying. It fixed bugs while breaking invariants elsewhere. It refactored modules while forgetting why they existed. It regenerated logic that was already there.
I had strict rules, enforced invariants, a TDD roadmap. Didn't matter. The substrate has no concept of continuity.
This isn't a prompting problem. The architecture is missing a layer that every other platform had before it could scale. Operating systems have it. Compilers have it. Databases have it. AI tooling doesn't.
Devin got 13.86% on SWE-bench. LangChain and AutoGPT collapsed under real workloads. Not because the models are bad. Because the substrate can't hold a system together.
Wrote up what that missing layer is and why nobody has built it yet. If you build real systems with AI, curious whether this matches what you're seeing.
by albatross79 | 2026-02-24 15:00:44+00:00
How can it have lost 80% of its valuation when Elon Musk bought it for $44 billion and then sold it to Elon Musk at a valuation of $45 billion, and then that entity was bought by Elon Musk for a valuation of $250 billion?

Wait a second here!
by squeefers | 2026-02-24 15:00:51+00:00
the historically underfunded NHS took a massive hit to its funding at the start of the credit crunch, and then again in covid. neither cut was restored, whilst patient numbers have steadily risen (UK needs population growth to fuel property prices to avoid recession - 20% of gdp is construction).

people are dying because hospitals cant afford to operate. getting deals on volume purchases is irrelevant
by T0mSIlver | 2026-02-24 15:01:07+00:00
Some technical context and where this is headed.

Why streaming matters for dictation.
Whisper and most open-source STT models use bidirectional attention, meaning they need the full audio clip before they can transcribe anything. You get your text after you stop talking, usually with a noticeable delay. Voxtral Realtime takes a different approach: it has a causal audio encoder that processes audio left-to-right as it arrives. At 480ms delay it matches offline models on accuracy (FLEURS benchmark), but you see text appearing while you're still mid-sentence. For dictation this changes a lot. You can catch mistakes in real time, and the feedback loop feels natural instead of disconnected.

The app connects to backends via the OpenAI Realtime API WebSocket protocol. It captures audio from your mic, streams it over the WebSocket, and receives partial transcripts that get inserted into your active text field live. Any OpenAI Realtime-compatible server works.

The voxmlx fork.
The original voxmlx by Awni Hannun does local Voxtral inference on Apple Silicon via MLX, but it was CLI-only. I added a WebSocket server that speaks the OpenAI Realtime protocol so localvoxtral (or any compatible client) can connect to it. I also added memory management to avoid OOM on longer sessions. Fork is here: https://github.com/T0mSIlver/voxmlx. I'd like to get the server piece upstreamed eventually.

Latency.
On M1 Pro with a 4-bit quantized model, first words appear within roughly 200 to 400ms. On RTX 3090 via vLLM it's faster. Both feel responsive enough for natural dictation.
What's next. Right now you have to start the server yourself before using the app. I want to add app-managed local serving (start/stop/model download) so it's truly one-click. If anyone has experience bundling Python/MLX processes into macOS apps cleanly, I'd love to hear your approach.

Happy to answer questions.
by lproven | 2026-02-24 15:01:08+00:00
> I like the MS-DOS from Win98SE which was not available separately by then

IBM PC-DOS 7.1 exists and works and it can handle FAT32 and drives over 8GB.

https://pcdosretro.gitlab.io/

I blogged about how to get it:

https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/59703.html

I also have a complete, fully installed, Virtualbox VDI for download:

https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/82982.html

This supplements the PC-DOS 7.1 boot and system files with the rest of PC-DOS 2000, for a complete OS.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-24 15:01:19+00:00
> So does this mean Discord is scrapping its new face verification requirement for users,

No, they’re outsourcing the verification to an external company. Just not this one.

Side note: The verification is only if you want to remove content filters, join adult-themed servers and a couple other features. If you only want to chat with your friends and use voice then no verification is required.
by abraxas | 2026-02-24 15:01:20+00:00
In a way the story of nanofabrication seems like a tale of disappointment. Many decades after Feynman's "Plenty of room at the bottom" or Drexler's "Engines of creation" and we have very little to show in a way of progress. What happened? Why were knowledgeable minds like Feynman too optimistic about our ability to make this happen?
by skydhash | 2026-02-24 15:01:40+00:00
> Many enterprises are currently exploring to see if they can invite developers to leverage AI tools—like they leveraged the compiler—to be more productive. To operate on a higher plane of agency, collaborating on what we should be building and not just technical execution.

The thing is, developers have been hired to automate process, and as for any professional doing a good job, that means the output should perform reliably. But now they are forcing us to use a tools that everyone knows is not reliable, but the onus is still on us to keep the same reliability. So do you see why we are not thrilled?

It’s like providing a faulty piano (that shuffles the notes when a key is pressed) and expecting a good rendition of the Moonlight Sonata.

Or a crane that will stall and drop its load randomly. It would have been sent to the scrapyard on the first day.
by Majromax | 2026-02-24 15:01:44+00:00
> Have we not learned anything about technical debt and how it bites back hard?

I think LLMs are changing the nature of technical debt in weird ways, with trends that are hard to predict.

I've found LLMs surprisingly useful in 'research mode', taking an old and badly-documented codebase and answering questions like "where does this variable come from, and what are its ultimate consumers?" Its answers won't be as natural as a true expert's, but its answers are nonetheless useful. Poor documentation is a classic example of technical debt, and LLMs make it easier to manage.

They're also useful at making quick-and-dirty code more robust. I'm as guilty as anyone else of writing personal-use bash scripts that make all kinds of unjustified assumptions and accrete features haphazardly, but even in "chat mode" LLMs are capable of reasonable rewrites for these small problems.

More systematically, we also see now-routine examples of LLMs being useful at code de-obfuscation and even decompilation. These forward processes maximize technical debt compared to the original systems, yet LLMs can still extract meaning.

Of course, we're not now immune to technical debt. Vibe coding will have its own hard-to-manage technical debt, but I'm not quite sure that we have the countours well defined. Anecdotally, LLMs seem to have their biggest problem in the design space, missing the forest of architecture for the trees of implementation such that they don't make the conceptual cuts between units in the best place. I would not be so confident as to call this problem inherent or structural rather than transitory.
by troad | 2026-02-24 15:01:52+00:00
> It's not a C family language, it just took C-like syntax to avoid the stigma of being "exotic" like the languages that inspired it.

I agree that Rust has very conventional C-like syntax, but I'd go further and say it has fairly conventional C-like semantics too, at least in its current iteration. I think you could safely duck type Rust itself as a C-like. :)

Strong agree that Rust has drawn great inspiration from the ML family by way of OCaml. Rust is a C-like with ML characteristics, which are its greatest quality, imho. On the other hand, I don't think there's much trace of Erlang left in Rust -- there's probably more Erlang in Go than Rust, and Go is squarely a C-like.

I think it's fair to say that Rust started out more exotic than it is now, but perhaps all that safe, C-like syntax has led to convergent evolution towards other C-likes?

> Rust did copy move semantics from C++, but even that ended up being different enough to be incompatible with basic C++ design patterns. Rust chose to have only trivially movable types and guarantee absence of move constructors, so it can't even safely pass a C++ std::string.

Right, but compare all of that to Erlang's actor-based message passing, where mandatory immutability averts the need to move or lock anything at all, and I think it's clear why one would group Rust with C++, and not Erlang.
by stvltvs | 2026-02-24 15:02:03+00:00
I understand the concern about anxiety about their impending condition, but medical providers must not paternalistically decide to withhold a diagnosis from patients, at least not in all cases.

If I got an early diagnosis, it would motivate me to get my affairs in order to lessen the burden on my family and check off some bucket list items before it's too late. Don't rob me of that opportunity.

Before ordering the test, ask patients "If you were going to get Alzheimer's, would you want to know?"
We audited both MCP SDKs – three classes of boundary-crossing vulnerabilities
by manuelnd | 2026-02-24 15:02:57+00:00
MCP (Model Context Protocol) has 77k+ stars and is becoming the standard way AI agents connect to tools. We audited both official SDKs (TypeScript and Python) at the source code level and found three classes of boundary-crossing vulnerabilities.

All three confirmed with live PoC exploits using the SDK's real auth components (BearerAuthBackend, RequireAuthMiddleware, TokenVerifier).

Findings:

1. Tool Capability Shadowing — tool names are flat strings with no namespace or origin tracking. If two servers register "read_data", one silently wins. We validated against gpt-5-nano: the model made path traversal and credential exfiltration tool calls that would route to an attacker's shadow server. 10/10 genuine, 0% FP.

2. Token Audience Confusion — verify_token() takes one parameter: the token string. No expected audience. A read-only token for Server A works on Server B's admin_delete endpoint. This isn't an implementation bug — it's a gap in the SDK interface. Every MCP server built on these SDKs inherits this.

3. Stale Authorization — no push invalidation mechanism. Revoked tokens accepted for the full cache TTL. Scope downgrades invisible until cache expires. In production with 5-minute caches, that's a 5-minute window. JWT-only validation (no introspection) is worse: no revocation possible until the token itself expires (hours to days).

The combined chain: enumerate tools (no namespace isolation) → shadow a tool (silent routing) → escalate privileges (cross-server token) → persist after detection (cache TTL).

Additional finding: smaller models are dramatically more exploitable. gpt-5-nano: 100% genuine rate on tool abuse. gpt-5.2: ~45%. The model most likely used in cost-sensitive deployments is the most vulnerable to attacks the architecture fails to prevent.

What's well-implemented: filesystem path validation, git injection prevention, OAuth 2.1 with PKCE, tool input validation. The vulnerabilities are in the boundaries between servers.

Total cost of all scanner runs: $2.83.

Full report: https://tachyonicai.com/blog/mcp-security-audit/
Taxonomy (open source, 122 attacks): https://github.com/tachyonicai/tachyonic-heuristics
by kamranjon | 2026-02-24 15:02:59+00:00
I'm really interested in using this but wonder if the unique architecture means that it will not be able to be converted to a GGUF and used by ollama or llama.cpp? I certainly would understand that the observability features would require some custom tweaks, but I'd just like to try it out on my local ai server (basically just ollama + tailscale) and see how it works as a regular model.
by zoeysmithe | 2026-02-24 15:03:21+00:00
I learned two languages growing up and was speaking both as soon as I could speak and could write in both not long after. This is typical for nearly every kid in the world outside of countries with strong language monocultures. I certainly think Mills was a very talented person, but there's this weird cult of being impressed by "speaks 7 languages" hagoigraphies which aren't helpful. People bring up it as some acid test of intelligence and its just not very accurate.

Especially when you actually know the language these kinds of people claim to speak and you realize they actually don't speak 7 languages but maybe know 2 or 3 fluently and know 'kitchen' versions of all the others. I'm not going to name names because I don't want an argument and don't have the spoons for it, but lots of these international luminaries and leaders and such with "speaks 7 language" are often little more than conmen or simply enjoy building their own little hagiographies for their own PR goals.

There's this wonderful deep-dive on youtube on Feynman's high-questionable personal mythology that is a great example of this kind of self-promotion and how easy it is to sell one's self, especially in academic and techie circles, if you have a certain amount of charisma and drive.

Also as a lefty, I'm also not impressed by breathless ambidextrous tales either as most lefties are forced to be ambidextrous and its not actually exceptional at all. I can write with both hands, play musical instruments either way, play sports either way, etc. The left hand is better at these things, but my right-hand is okay-ish at almost all these things and I use a right-hand dominant near everything in my life anyway. I even like to switch it up to keep wear and tear down. At work the mouse is on the left, but at home for gaming its on the right. This is all boring everyday stuff for lefties.

There's a toxic 'great man' mythology that humanity still can't get over and its weird seeing it taken seriously when so many 'great men' have been debunked or seen as recipients of the system they were under (Mills' father pushing him so hard and being in the privileged class that would allow all this instead of back-breaking farm labor all day). Personal talent is important but its vastly played up in dishonest ways for dishonest gains. We probably pass many highly talented people a day on the street, but only some had the opportunity to grow those gifts into something they can use.

The famous quote comes to mind. "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould
by ferguess_k | 2026-02-24 15:03:28+00:00
I think they deliberately underplayed their role in this. Especially with Asian parents who think such nurturing is part of the "norm". I wouldn't be surprised that they spent TONs of time tutoring him when he was young -- and when he was more or less self-bootstrapped they don't need to spend too much time.

But I could be wrong. He is definitely a genius so maybe he did grasp the ideas rather early, like from 3 or 4.
by SR2Z | 2026-02-24 15:03:48+00:00
The elephant in the room when talking about EV repair costs is Tesla's gigapress that they use for the Model 3/Y.

It's excellent and cheap (at least it is now after thousands of customers have been used as guinea pigs and sold cars with wildly defective underpinnings) but it does mean that virtually any damage to the casting will total the car since it's not practical to replace or repair it.

Given that the majority of EVs on the road in the US are one of those two models, it really does spike average EV repair costs.
by 63stack | 2026-02-24 15:03:56+00:00
It (GPU prices getting out of hand) started when, 2012? What's constructive in saying "the market will correct itself" after 14 years of no sign of that happening?

I don't know what the solution is since I'm not an economist, but I also don't have to be a pilot to declare someone fucked up when I see a helicopter on a tree.

EVs are a very tangible thing that are on the road, compare that with crypto and NFT which is ??????