MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Fostrom, an IoT Cloud Platform built for developers
by arjunbajaj | 2026-02-19 10:48:27+00:00
Hey HN! Arjun and Sid here.

Fostrom is an IoT Cloud Platform designed for developers to make it really easy to get started and scale fleets. We have Device SDKs (in Python, JS, Elixir, more coming soon), Typed Schemas, Per-Device Mailboxes, Programmable Actions, 4 Global Regions for lower-latency connections, and much more.

We've built Fostrom to solve a real need we faced in our previous startup, building a fully automated indoor vertical farm. We were spending more time figuring out IoT infrastructure than writing automation logic. Fostrom is the platform we wished existed back then.

Over the last few years we've experimented with a lot of interesting tech and architectures. Here's some of what we use today: Elixir and DuckDB power our infra, Actions execute JS code in a WebAssembly sandbox, and Device SDKs are powered by a tiny Device Agent written in Rust that speaks our custom protocol, running in the background.

Our vision is to make a powerful IoT platform that enables you to build correct, secure, and reliable connected systems without dealing with any of the plumbing or infrastructure.

Next up, we're gonna launch our CLI, add automatic device monitoring to our Device SDKs, and improve the debugging experience. We have some pretty cool ideas to make Fostrom and the experience of developing connected systems better.

We also published our launch blog post which goes into more detail about our vision, what we've built, and our future plans: https://fostrom.io/blog/introducing-fostrom

Would love for you to try out Fostrom and give us your feedback and thoughts.
by Otterly99 | 2026-02-19 10:48:37+00:00
Just my opinion, but if you present it in a way that first explains the problematic, then explain what other similar tool fail to solve, and have a genuine understanding of the tool in the sense that you can understand and answer questions to generate a discussion, it doesn't matter much how it was coded. The "slop" part of the AI really comes down to having a vague idea for a tools, barely doing any research if the problem has been solved and generating a tool that nobody asked for and that you barely know, there is not much room for an interesting discussion.
by Mashimo | 2026-02-19 10:48:38+00:00
Holy moly, I made a simple coding promt and the amount of reasoning output could fill a small book.

> create a single html file with a voxel car that drives in a circle.

Compared to GLM 4.7 / 5 and kimi 2.5 it took a while. The output was fast, but because it wrote so I had to wait longer. Also output was .. more bare bones compared to others.
by creatonez | 2026-02-19 10:48:44+00:00
I'm not super worried that this transition is cutting off hardware too soon.

- Vulkan requirement raises the baseline to 2016-2017 hardware. 2017 was 9 years ago.

- They're not cutting off OpenGL right away, according to the announcement they will release 26.1 as OpenGL-only, and then at least one more full release where you can choose between the two options. Based on their usual schedule it will probably be at least a year from now before they cut off OpenGL support, if not longer.

- All previous versions of the game are still available to play, including the oldest versions that run on Java 6, x86-32, OpenGL 1.2, Debian 5, Windows XP. Can still do multiplayer sessions on versions released in mid 2010.

- The community can fill in the gaps in multiple ways. Translation layers are available to connect to newer servers with older clients (ViaVersion), as well as with Bedrock clients (GeyserMC). Mods will almost certainly be released to reimplement the rendering engine in OpenGL or GLES. Renewed interest may mean OpenGL 2.0 compatibility mods could come back. Also, Mojang recently liberated Minecraft from variable name obfuscation, so modding will be easier than ever before.

- As a last resort, software rendering for Vulkan has gotten relatively mature, though obviously this means single digit FPS in many scenarios

Java Edition has taken an extremely conservative path, practically nothing else in the gaming industry held on to legacy hardware this long.
by pjc50 | 2026-02-19 10:50:06+00:00
> the algo obviously suggests it back to her

Pro-suicide content has been a thing since the days of USENET. It's been a (lesser) problem on social media since the start. Is it really just that one case got over the hysteria threshold?

But yes, if the algorithm is suggesting pro-suicide content then the developers are morally, if not legally, liable for that and should expect some consequences. I note that one of the few taboos maintained by the otherwise grossly irresponsible UK media is not reporting on suicide (because this is known to be a trigger). You might see "famous musician died suddenly at a young age" and have to connect the dots yourself.
by MezzoDelCammin | 2026-02-19 10:50:16+00:00
TLDR : "nice to have, but not a necessity"

For some basic jerseys (think T-shirts) a basic zigzag is fine to begin with. That 100EUR sewing machine will have some fancier stretch stitch options that are slow, but "good enough" to look like an overlock (but can't do the cut of course).

If you have the space / money, overlock is definitely what I'd get as a second / third machine. It's much quicker / cleaner if you're working on jerseys or shirts.

But I still keep wearing the T-shirts I did when I was starting. On my list the first thing to do is to understand how to alter something to fit you. It can be done by hand (needle and thread), but to be reasonably efficient, the BOM would be "sewing machine, box of pins, scissors, piece of chalk / ruler and something to press / iron".
by belZaah | 2026-02-19 10:50:29+00:00
What ticks me off in this is the statement, that a certain body shape is “unattainable for most”. I’m pretty sure the author does not have the data to back this up. Difficult? Yes. Requiring commitment? Absolutely. Unattainable? No. I really don’t care what body shape anyone is comfortable with. But as someone, who has struggled hard all his life not to be obese, I find it irresponsible to outright declare something that’s absolutely doable by anyone as “unattainable”. Being able to attain it might be someone’s only hope and it’s just wrong to take it away.
by spoiler | 2026-02-19 10:51:05+00:00
There's lots of things you could do. Imagine you're making a group chat bot (way more difficult than a 1-1 chat) where people can play social games by giving the LLM game rules. You can have an agent that only manages game state using natural language (controlled by the main LLM). You could have an agent dedicated to remembering important conversation, while not paying attention to chit-chatting
by mejutoco | 2026-02-19 10:51:22+00:00
Not OP, but they said:

> Intermittent variable rewards ... will induce compulsive behavior

As a dog owner this is why you need to give a variable amount of treats (sometimes zero) to your dog when they obey a command, for the "jackpot effect".

For example, if I land a trick while skating it gives me a boost. Is that addictive behaviour? not sure. It gets me to exercise.

My point is that variability is probably part of what gets you back to pepper planting and fishing. Intermittent variable rewards reinforcing a behaviour seems to be a fact. If this is good or bad regarding a specific activity is left as an exercise for the reader.

EDIT: grammar
by troupo | 2026-02-19 10:51:40+00:00
> fintec startup in Berlin,

> This was mostly due to second line pushing back because of data protection, data privacy and all other regulatory requirement and bureaucratic paperwork

Fintec startup. Fintech. Handling people's money. Handling a lot of extremely sensitive data. Complaining that they have to deal with some "bullshit bureacracy about the things like privacy and data regulations or something".

Really? Really?!
by pheggs | 2026-02-19 10:52:48+00:00
Fair, you see the perspective from someone writing the software and it makes sense. But when I see it though the lenses of someone choosing software to run, I would rather choose a C program with potential memory bugs than a rust program with a lot of dependencies - because I am more scared about supply chain attacks than someone being able to exploit a memory bug. But then again, this obviously changes if the rust program has no dependencies.
by vidarh | 2026-02-19 10:53:36+00:00
Yeah, so really there are at least 3 translations of Lord of the Rings, to continue that example, and I was being a typical Bokmål user and ignored Nynorsk.

The title differences are also a good illustration of how different it can be:

Bokmål: Kampen om Ringen, Ringenes Herre (the first one is literally "the battle for the ring")

Nynorsk: Ringdrotten
Show HN: A physically-based GPU ray tracer written in Julia
by simondanisch | 2026-02-19 10:55:13+00:00
We ported pbrt-v4 to Julia and built it into a Makie backend. Any Makie plot can now be rendered with physically-based path tracing.

Julia compiles user-defined physics directly into GPU kernels, so anyone can extend the ray tracer with new materials and media - a black hole with gravitational lensing is ~200 lines of Julia.

Runs on AMD, NVIDIA, and CPU via KernelAbstractions.jl, with Metal coming soon.

Demo scenes: github.com/SimonDanisch/RayDemo
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-02-19 10:55:18+00:00
There’s a really cool technique Andrew Ng nicknamed reflection, where you take the AI output and feed it back in, asking the model to look at it - reflect on it - in light of some other information.

Getting the writing from your model then following up with “here’s what you wrote, here’re some samples of how I wrote, can you redo that to match?” makes its writing much less slop-y.
by NoLinkToMe | 2026-02-19 10:55:43+00:00
Firstly, nobody said 'the economy' so I don't know why you're even putting it in quotation marks.

Secondly, GDP is the best measure of output / value-add we have, and it's significantly up, despite jobs being down.

Output going up with fewer people means more productivity. That's the point that was being made.

Recessions are measured in economics by tracking GDP, which the person I replied to said we're in. We're not.

Whatever concept of "the economy" you had in mind to bring more nuance and refinement to a discussion, which is possible and welcome, and which you haven't bothered to add, doesn't refute the basics above.
by TimorousBestie | 2026-02-19 10:55:48+00:00
> The decline in quality is obvious and measurable, just look at the reception of old disney productions versus their remaklers for "modern audiences".

This argument (in summary, wokeness makes modern Disney less enjoyable/profitable) doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Mainline Disney movies these days are, on average, more politically bland than the beloved “renaissance” classics. The latter tended to be extremely liberal, even by historical standards—some of them shocking to watch, now. Beauty and the Beast is a good example of this.

Andor is a notable counterexample, having a consistent and obvious politics, but it is also relatively loved. My evangelical Christian relations can’t get enough of it. They like it even more than The Mandalorian.
by benterix | 2026-02-19 10:56:01+00:00
> 1990s-2000s subservient state, which you seem to be calling "normal".

No need to go that far, I visited Moscow a few times before 2014 and it was more or less fine. I'd say 2 decades behind the West but OK. What is now is a big mess with Russia being an international pariah. This is bad and also unfair to millions of people who don't care about imperialistic ambitions of Putin and just want to live their lives in peace.
by idop | 2026-02-19 10:58:00+00:00
Indeed. I have never used an LLM to write. And coding agents are terrible at writing documentation, it's just bullet points with no context and unnecessary icons that are impossible to understand. There's no flow to the text, no actual reasoning (only confusing comments about changes made during the development that are absolutely irrelevant to the final work), and yet somehow too long.

The elephant in the room is that AI is allowing developers who previously half-assed their work to now quarter-ass it.
by conductr | 2026-02-19 11:00:05+00:00
I must just lack empathy then. I feel it’s zucks role to build the best wine, whisky, casino game, meth, cigar, etc he can. It’s the consumers job to use it responsibly. They won’t so that’s when it’s time for regulation. Which is probably now/soon. And yes, he gets to amass wealth during this time. I wouldn’t say it’s all been exploitive though. I’d say many people have healthy addictions. Just like the average American who drinks 10 alcoholic beverages a week, every single week. They’re adults, they aren’t alcoholic, they just need a drink, every day they’re not being exploited, it’s a vice of sorts. But it’s an opt-in vice.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-19 11:00:06+00:00
A FP64 unit can share most of two FP32 units.

Only the multiplier is significantly bigger and the part shared with FP32 is small.

So you must count only the area occupied by multipliers, which is likely to be much less than 10%.

There is an area increase, but certainly not of 50% (300 m^2). Even an area increase of 10% (e.g. 60-70 mm^2 for the biggest GPUs seems incredibly large).

Reducing the FP64/FP32 throughput ratio from 1:2 to 1:4 or at most to 1:8 is guaranteed to make the excess area negligible. I am sure that the cheap Intel Battlemage with 1:8 does not suffer because of this.

Any further reductions, from 1:16 in old GPUs until 1:64 in recent GPUs cannot have any other explanation except the desire for market segmentation, which eliminates small businesses and individual users from the customers who can afford the huge prices of the GPUs with FP64 support.
by Wilder7977 | 2026-02-19 11:00:18+00:00
The journalism one is really a great example I did not think about.

I understand there is an argument to be made about what is the "value" of things, but for me it's quite clear that journalism has the inherent value of providing information, similar to how many other activities have values beyond "generating money for their owners". AI allows to "mock" many activities resulting in the social value of that activity being lost, while possibly maintaining the economic value. A trajectory that is not new but also not good to accelerate on.
Show HN: OctoGames – Free Browser Games Hub
by yevhenms | 2026-02-19 11:00:33+00:00
Hi HN,

I built OctoGames a free browser games hub where you can play instantly without installing anything. It’s aimed at people who want quick, casual games on desktop or mobile, without app stores or downloads.

What it does

- Hosts thousands of HTML5 browser games in one place
- Works on desktop and mobile in the browser (plus an optional Android APK)
- Lets you search, filter by genre, and sort (popularity, date added, A–Z)
- Optional account to save favorites, track what you’ve played, and earn simple badges
- News Hub with read/unread tracking for new games and updates
- Light/dark theme toggle

Tech
- React js
- Firebase Auth + Firestore + Storage
- Game catalog from external HTML5 providers
- Some custom logic for game popularity, user stats, and featured content

Why I built it
I like small web games and didn’t love bouncing between random portals full of popups and clutter. I wanted a single, clean place where you can open the site and be playing something in a few seconds, with the option to keep favorites if you care.

Looking for feedback on
Onboarding: is it obvious what to click first?
Game discovery: do search/filters/recommendations feel useful?
Performance: does it load fast enough on your connection/device?
Anything that feels sketchy, annoying, or broken

You can try it here: https://octogames.io

I’d appreciate any feedback, especially critical stuff (UX issues, performance problems, or architectural red flags).
by cameronh90 | 2026-02-19 11:00:49+00:00
If the pay-per-use cost predictable enough, it’s less of an issue. That’s how electricity works and it’s fine.

The issue with Claude Code is it’s not at all obvious how any given task or query translates to cost. I was finding some days I spent very little and other days cost a fortune despite what seemed to me to be similar levels of usage.
by fatherwavelet | 2026-02-19 11:00:55+00:00
I had a 1990 Ford Taurus as my first car. I had got it used and I remember it being completely impossible to afford a new car at the time.

It was sticker price of $33,000 adjusted for inflation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Taurus_%28second_generati...

I don't think it would even feel safe to drive at all compared to what we have got use to with modern cars. It broke down 3 times while I had it and stranded me on the road. No cell phone of course to call anyone.

These were the mythic "good ol days".
by bell-cot | 2026-02-19 11:01:09+00:00
1 - Assume it was decades ago. That I've heard, a fair number of the released emails mentioned Jeff's 2008 conviction. But to paraphrase Leona Helmsley, "only the little people need to follow laws". That attitude seems to be very common in the emails.

2 - Isn't it convenient that zero major news organizations - controlled by high profile people and their buddies - are raising that issue? Not that I believe there to be any public support for competent & systematic enforcement of the laws against such behavior. That I've heard of, nobody even cares about how Jeff got off with a slap on the wrist in 2008.
by znnajdla | 2026-02-19 11:01:10+00:00
Is someone at Anthropic reading my AI chats? I literally came to this conclusion a few weeks ago after studying the right framework for building long running browser agents. Have zero experience with Elixir but as soon as I looked at their language constructs it just "clicked" immediately that this is exactly suited to AI agent frameworks. Another problem you solve immediately: distributed deployment without kubernetes hell.
by wolfhumble | 2026-02-19 11:01:36+00:00
> But yeah. Man, the desktop was so beautiful and refreshing.

". . . that new user interface builds on Apple's Legacy and carries it into the next century and we call that new user interface Aqua because it's liquid. One of the design goals was when you saw it you wanted to lick it . . ."

Steve Job, Macworld San Francisco 2000:
https://youtu.be/Ko4V3G4NqII?t=405
by kriro | 2026-02-19 11:01:54+00:00
XFCE is also my go to. But I have moved on from caring too much about desktop environments as long as they don't get in the way. I went through a phase of trying pure openbox and all kinds of things and settled on XFCE. It doesn't do everything like I want but that's fine. I mostly open a terminal, a browser, thunderbird, some programming environment and a latex editor these days.
Show HN: Marketplace for Requesting Intelligence via Bounties
by Mapamapa | 2026-02-19 11:02:07+00:00
Hi everybody,

I’m building getintelligence.space, a marketplace where people and AI agents can post bounties to obtain specific intelligence that can’t easily be gathered automatically.

The idea came from noticing a gap: AI systems and organizations increasingly need real-world intelligence — due diligence, local knowledge, OSINT investigations, whistleblower infos or niche expertise — but there isn’t a structured, open market for requesting it from distributed humans. Intelligence is power and leverage but not easily accessible right now.

On the platform, a requester defines:

1. what intelligence they need

2. acceptance criteria

3. a reward held in escrow

Providers can submit reports or evidence pseudonymously, and the first valid submission receives the bounty.

The long-term idea is that AI agents could use humans as an “information layer” when data isn’t available online or when human intelligence is needed.

This is very early, and I’d really appreciate feedback — especially from people who’ve worked on marketplaces, intel tools, or anything else related.
by noelwelsh | 2026-02-19 11:02:09+00:00
You suggest that the programming language developers made a conscious choice to implement "messy" type systems. That's not at all how it came about. These messy type systems are generally a result of trying to work with earlier language design mistakes. Typescript is an obvious example. The type system was designed to able to type a reasonable subset of the mess of existing Javascript. There is no need to make the same mistakes in a new language.
by simquat | 2026-02-19 11:02:41+00:00
Thanks, I completely agree with what you say.

That is actually how the "playgrounds"[0][1] I shared work under the hood. In the playground, the preview isn't a simulation, it is the exported app –plus a shim for handling screen routing–.

A user can alter the style, create new components, or tweak the logic to better fit their needs. For example, in the Swiss Public Transit playground[1], you can edit the fetch instructions to access transport data from a different place –of course it would need some tweaks to suit the structure coming from the different API–, then the project can be forked to be independently used live in the Breadboard environment or published.

At the moment, the functionality to make a user project openly shareable as a playground is not available yet, but I think this effectively blur the line between the user and the developer.

[0] https://app.breadboards.io/playgrounds/weather

[1] https://app.breadboards.io/playgrounds/public_transit
by fxwin | 2026-02-19 11:03:02+00:00
I have tried using them, both for technical documentation (Think Readme.md) and for more expository material (Think wiki articles), and bounced off of them pretty quickly. They're too verbose and focus on the wrong things for the former, where output is intended to get people up to speed quickly, and suffer from the things i mentioned above for the latter, causing me to have to rewrite a lot, causing more frustration than just writing it myself in the first place.

That's without even mentioning the personal advantages you get from distilling notes, structuring and writing things yourself, which you get even if nobody ever reads what you write.
by michaelt | 2026-02-19 11:03:09+00:00
Yes and no.

An Aldebaran Nao can fall over with no damage because it’s only 5kg and 58cm. And you can use relatively low power motors, so nobody can lose a finger to crushing in the joints.

But you miss out on the benefits of being able to operate in a human centric world - you’ll never get a Nao to climb stairs, open a door, or carry a cup of coffee.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-19 11:03:20+00:00
> Perhaps it will make patent trolling a bit harder because it is easier to look up existing work and to check if an idea is obvious?

Haha, funny :)

No, it'll be like the rest of the industries that use more AI, they'll spend the same amount of effort (as little as possible) and won't validate anything, and provide worse service, not better. AIslop is everywhere, and seemingly unavoidable for companies to use more and more to cut more corners.
by Cipater | 2026-02-19 11:04:07+00:00
>only like 3% of that program was spent on actual AID, like food and medicine for the third world, but most of it went to funding media, news and journalists across LatAm, Asia, Africa dn EE, that would push domestic support in those regions for US policies and be critical of US adversaries.

3%? There was a lot of waste with the program but surely, please give this at least 30 seconds of thought.