MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mcherm | 2026-02-19 16:33:00+00:00
> the goodwill they'd earned lately in my book was just decimated by this

That sounds absurd to me. Committing to not building in advertising is very important and fundamental to me. Asking people who pay for a personal subscription rather than paying by the API call to use that subscription themselves sounds to me like it is. Just clarifying the social compact that was already implied.

I WANT to be able to pay a subscription price. Rather like the way I pay for my internet connectivity with a fixed monthly bill. If I had to pay per packet transmitted, I would have to stop and think about it every time I decided to download a large file or watch a movie. Sure, someone with extremely heavy usage might not be able to use a normal consumer internet subscription; but it works fine for my personal use. I like having the option for my AI usage to operate the same way.
by nozzlegear | 2026-02-19 16:33:02+00:00
Depends on which cohort of Americans you're talking about, but it's less that they see it as the government supporting them and more that they see it as the government "giving back what they owe." Social Security and Medicare have always been framed as something you pay into now and get back later in life, like you're lending money to the government. That's why most Americans don't view it as government support in the way Europeans do, and why they see no hypocrisy in spitting venom at "government handouts" while cashing their Social Security check and Medicare coverage.
by scriptr | 2026-02-19 16:33:33+00:00
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by everforward | 2026-02-19 16:33:44+00:00
To me it sounds like a tax structured in a strange way so it doesn't obviously read as a tax.

It's essentially a forced loan to the government at subpar rates. The "tax" is the delta between what the government pays out for the bonds vs what a bond of equivalent risk in the free market would have paid.

The magnitude of the investment also probably makes it impractical for anyone but the very wealthy to retire before that starts paying out. Most other countries have lower rates on their retirement schemes, which makes it feasible for more people to live on their savings for a few years before the government retirement scheme kicks in. E.g. in the US it's pretty feasible for the upper middle/lower upper classes to retire a few years before Social Security kicks in, especially if they're willing to live frugally.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-02-19 16:33:44+00:00
Only using my historical experience and not Gemini 3.1 Pro, I think we see benchmark chasing then a grand release of a model that gets press attention...

Then a few days later, the model/settings are degraded to save money. Then this gets repeated until the last day before the release of the new model.

If we are benchmaxing this works well because its only being tested early on during the life cycle. By middle of the cycle, people are testing other models. By the end, people are not testing them, and if they did it would barely shake the last months of data.
by quinncom | 2026-02-19 16:34:08+00:00
Although I rarely hit my limit in my $20 a month Codex plan, I can imagine this would be very useful.

The issue I have more often is that I will start a conversation in ChatGPT, and realize an hour later that I needed all that context to be in Codex, so I’ll generally ask ChatGPT to give me a summary of all facts and a copy‑paste prompt for Codex. But maybe there is a way to extract the more useful content from a chat UI to an agent UI.
by saberience | 2026-02-19 16:34:08+00:00
I always try Gemini models when they get updated with their flashy new benchmark scores, but always end up using Claude and Codex again...

I get the impression that Google is focusing on benchmarks but without assessing whether the models are actually improving in practical use-cases.

I.e. they are benchmaxing

Gemini is "in theory" smart, but in practice is much, much worse than Claude and Codex.
by goolz | 2026-02-19 16:34:17+00:00
These days I wonder about that duty I have. It sure felt obligatory some time ago. I thought of myself as a patriot and that the rule of law was something we we should be proud of. A country whose own anthem spoke of "liberty and justice for all".

The current trajectory makes my question a lot of things, including this whole "government pays back that service with benefits" as it will be some time before I ever see a penny of SSI.

A lot of our taxes in this country seem like a giant waste or are grossly inefficient at best.
by reenorap | 2026-02-19 16:35:14+00:00
You sound like the people that initially said "the COVID vaccine will prevent you from infecting your grandmother" to "the vaccine was never intended to stop spread, only severe symptoms and hospitalization!"

Every economist in early 2025 said that tariffs would cause unemployment, and rising inflation and lower GDP. In fact, almost a year later, the opposite has been true. Almost no increased inflation, and GDP is expected to grow at over 4%.
by ekrsulov | 2026-02-19 16:35:16+00:00
Great point — those are supported.

Reverse path is available in the contextual menu, and also in the right sidebar under Subpath Operations when you select a subpath inside a path that contains multiple subpaths.

Fill rule / winding can be changed from the paint menu (the one with the colored circles that expands for fill/stroke options).

Thanks for bringing this up!
by the_duke | 2026-02-19 16:35:50+00:00
Gemini 3 is pretty good, even Flash is very smart for certain things, and fast!

BUT it is not good at all at tool calling and agentic workflows, especially compared to the recent two mini-generations of models (Codex 5.2/5.3, the last two versions of Anthropic models), and also fell behind a bit in reasoning.

I hope they manage to improve things on that front, because then Flash would be great for many tasks.
by mistrial9 | 2026-02-19 16:36:16+00:00
add the recent public meeting with CA Gov's office in San Francisco, delivering 9 figures of new money to the homeless situation in CA.. with Democrat figures emphatically and pointedly declaring all the money legitimate and accountable.. at the very same moment that news headlines are showing court documents of the opposite at a large scale in multiple jurisdictions .. mostly Los Angeles to be clear

#--
Governor Gavin Newsom met with San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie on January 16, 2026, to announce over $419 million in new state funding for homelessness and mental health efforts in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. The funding comes from the sixth round of the Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention (HHAP) program and includes $39.9 million for San Francisco to support shelter operations, navigation centers, and services through June 2029.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-19 16:36:17+00:00
> It covers a major individual cost and need (retirement, medical, housing) instead of just throwing it into a tax.

Forced saving makes it a tax. It's essentially no different than payroll taxes in the U.S. that fund Social Security. Buying government bonds is still marginally better accounting than a complete Ponzi scam like Social Security in the U.S., but even that ultimately amounts to the same thing - the government is paying itself, so it's a wash.
by boelboel | 2026-02-19 16:36:33+00:00
A large part of it is originally rooted in racism if you look how the US implemented its welfare state. Many benefits were skewed towards white americans (GI Bill, right to claim land, redlining and social security). I'm sure most Americans aren't nearly as racist right now as back then but the being 'on their own' is linked to the 'don't want 'lazy' african americans to get benefits'.
by ekrsulov | 2026-02-19 16:36:54+00:00
In this case, “responsive” means the app itself works on mobile devices (touch interactions, layout adapting to smaller screens, etc.), not that it automatically generates responsive SVGs.

You can, of course, create SVGs that scale properly using `viewBox` and relative units, but VectorNest doesn’t automatically convert a fixed SVG into a responsive layout. The term here refers to the editor UI being usable on both desktop and mobile.
by bryanlarsen | 2026-02-19 16:37:39+00:00
It's not a base load problem, it's an intermittency problem. Which you solve with dispatchable generation. Which nuclear is particularly ill suited for.

> in the time available.

Which also eliminates nuclear as an option; Ontario is building new nuclear power that is projected to become available in the late 2040's. After the inevitable delays that'll be the 2050's. Way too late.

The solution is simple & cheap, though nobody wants to admit it. Use paid-for existing zero-carbon generation first (aka existing nuclear, hydro, etc), then add solar & wind to cover ~60% of needs, then add batteries to cover ~95% of needs, and then use natgas peakers to cover the last ~5%.

Environmentalists don't like it because it's not 100% carbon free. Anti-environmentalists don't like it because it's 95% solar/wind/batteries.

Economists and pragmatists should love it because it's the cheapest.
Show HN: Tauri2 Any WebApp Wrapper
by atmanactive | 2026-02-19 16:37:42+00:00
Doing my part for the AI Cambrian Explosion of software :) Tauri2 Any WebApp Wrapper is a simple portable executable that can wrap any website in the operating system's webview. This can come handy when you need to treat a WebApp like a desktop first class citizen, as opposed to having it just as a browser tab somewhere. Features include: easy configuration via JSON file, rename-able exe so you can give it a name of your WebApp, configurable taskbar icon, dark mode including force dark mode, size and position remembered, minimize on startup if needed. MIT license.
by lr001328 | 2026-02-19 16:37:51+00:00
We built a free scanner that checks 7 layers of AI discoverability — llms.txt, JSON-LD structured data, OpenAPI spec, A2A agent cards, health endpoints, robots.txt/sitemap, and whether you have a machine-readable service catalog.

You enter a URL, it streams results in real time via SSE, and gives you a score out of 100 with specific findings per layer.

Why we built it: 80% of URLs cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot don't rank in Google's top 100 for the same query. AI discovery is a fundamentally different layer from traditional search — and most sites are completely invisible to it.

Some things we learned building the audit engine:

- Structured data matters most. Sites with proper JSON-LD schema see measurably higher AI citation rates. Microsoft has confirmed schema markup helps their LLMs.

- llms.txt is aspirational. We check for it, but we should be honest: no major AI platform has publicly confirmed they read it, and statistical analysis shows no correlation with citation rates. We still think it's worth having as a context primer for dev docs, but it's not the silver bullet people think.

- AI crawlers don't execute JavaScript. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot — none of them run JS. If your site is a client-rendered SPA with no SSR, AI agents see an empty page.

- The A2A protocol is early but interesting. Google's Agent-to-Agent spec includes agent cards at /.well-known/agent-card.json. Almost nobody has one yet, but the spec exists and crawlers are starting to look for it.

Try it: https://clarvia.dev
by necovek | 2026-02-19 16:37:55+00:00
Thanks both for the perspective: yeah, even if simply scaled down proportionally, you are left with too long garments that you can fold/shorten, so a much better situation than tall men who can end up looking like cartoon caricatures if dressed with widely available garments.

And don't get me wrong, tall girls (my sister is 6'1") have it even worse.
by sergiomattei | 2026-02-19 16:38:12+00:00
I feel the same way.

> That includes code outside of the happy path, like error handling and input validation. But also other typing exercises like processing an entity with 10 different types, where each type must be handled separately. Or propagating one property through the system on 5 different types in multiple layers.

With AI, I feel I'm less caught up in the minutia of programming and have more cognitive space for the fun parts: engineering systems, designing interfaces and improving parts of a codebase.

I don't mind this new world. I was never too attached to my ability to pump out boilerplate at a rapid pace. What I like is engineering and this new AI world allows me to explore new approaches and connect ideas faster than I've ever been able to before.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2026-02-19 16:38:19+00:00
I think Singaporeans have a decent idea, and given their quality of lives, they have no problems with the trade-offs. If they do, they leave. And many go back, because the trade-offs in the West are even worse.

> Despite the iron mathematical law that these houses must depreciate their lease value

SERS means that houses slated to be torn down are resold back to the government at near-market rates excluding the effect of the 99-year leasehold.

In Singapore, the government owns everything, even ostensibly 'freehold' land. If they want to run an MRT line under your house, and they need to tear your house down to get to it, they will force you to sell your house and your land to them. Has happened before, will absolutely happen again. It's an island city-state smaller than London. There is literally no space anywhere else.
by zhyder | 2026-02-19 16:38:22+00:00
Surprisingly big jump in ARC-AGI-2 from 31% to 77%, guess there's some RLHF focused on the benchmark given it was previously far behind the competition and is now ahead.

Apart from that, the usual predictable gains in coding. Still is a great sweet-spot for performance, speed and cost. Need to hack Claude Code to use their agentic logic+prompts but use Gemini models.

I wish Google also updated Flash-lite to 3.0+, would like to use that for the Explore subagent (which Claude Code uses Haiku for). These subagents seem to be Claude Code's strength over Gemini CLI, which still has them only in experimental mode and doesn't have read-only ones like Explore.
by ekrsulov | 2026-02-19 16:38:26+00:00
Totally fair question.

The main idea is removing friction: you can open an SVG from your phone or computer and make quick edits without installing anything. That’s especially useful for small fixes, quick tweaks, or when you’re on a device where you don’t have your usual design tools.

It’s not meant to replace full desktop editors, but to make “edit this SVG right now” fast and accessible anywhere.
by DefineOutside | 2026-02-19 16:38:47+00:00
I've spent $17.64 on on-demand usage in cursor with an estimated API cost of $350, mostly using Claude Opus 4.5. Some of this is skewed since subagents use a cheaper model, but even with subagents, the costs are 10x off the public API costs. Either the enterprise on-demand usage gets subsidized, API costs are 10x higher, or cursor is only billing their 10% surplus to cover their costs of indexing and such.

edit: My $40/month subscription used $662 worth of API credits.
by redox99 | 2026-02-19 16:39:20+00:00
I don't think there's much recursive improvement yet.

I'd say it's a combination of

A) Before, new model releases were mostly a new base model trained from scratch, with more parameters and more tokens. This takes many Months. Now that RL is used so heavily, you can make infinitely many tweaks to the RL setup, and in just a month get a better model using the same base model.

B) There's more compute online

C) Competition is more fierce.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-02-19 16:39:31+00:00
> it was instrumental in taking away sovereignty from other countries. Even Mexico's elections were very recently manipulated by USAID as mentioned by the previous president of Mexico.

You're quoting the guy that weakened democratic institutions, attacked electoral authorities, attacked journalists, increased military power, spread disinformation, and worsened the COVID pandemic. Notice how he didn't call out USAID during Trump's presidency, but did call them out during Biden's? I'm sure him having a public friendship with Trump has nothing to do with him waiting to call out USAID. Or the fact that USAID funded Mexican free speech groups that spoke out against López Obrador. Yep, just a super nice president getting oppressed by the big mean international aid group, I'm sure that's all it was.

If we're going to remember that USAID has been used for evil, then you must also remember how it was used for good. 92 million lives were saved over 20 years. That's potentially 92 million dead people over the next 20 years if USAID remains shuttered.
by creatonez | 2026-02-19 16:39:34+00:00
That's still the official name of bedrock, but it was never meant to establish a hierarchy or a plan for ending Java, they always seemed very careful in their words to avoid making it sound like it does.

If anything, they might have just done the rename simply for standardization over 9 different app stores with different requirements, branding requirements, and length limits before truncation occurs.
by Omakidx | 2026-02-19 16:39:39+00:00
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by FireBeyond | 2026-02-19 16:39:39+00:00
I think it's a little disingenuous to try to compare high/er end Apple laptops with soldered storage to $2-300 Chromebooks and budget devices with soldered eMMC (which is much more like a CF/SD card than anything else) in your argument in the first place.

As you acknowledge. When you look at actual competitors to Apple, you're forced to acknowledge that yup, no other manufacturer solders storage.

But yes, with due pedantry, the statement that "no other laptop has a soldered SSD" is technically wrong.

You could get into additional debates on whether eMMC and eUFS would map to most people's understanding of "SSD", but...
by roryirvine | 2026-02-19 16:39:48+00:00
December 2025 was the 5th warmest December since records began in 1850, with an anomaly of +1.05°C above the C20th baseline : https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/monthly-report/g...

January 2026 was the 5th warmest January since records began in 1850, with an anomaly of +1.12°C above the C20th baseline: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/global-climate-202601

The anomaly for the first two weeks of February 2026 was greater still, at +1.69°C. Perhaps the last few days have been incredibly cold, but until then we were on course for it to be the third warmest February in recorded history.
by danielvaughn | 2026-02-19 16:40:35+00:00
The way I like to think about it is to split work into two broad categories - creative work and toil. Creative work is the type of work we want to continue doing. Toil is the work we want to reduce.

edit - an interesting facet of AI progress is that the split between these two types of work gets more and more granular. It has led me to actively be aware of what I'm doing as I work, and to critically examine whether certain mechanics are inherently toilistic or creative. I realized that a LOT of what I do feels creative but isn't - the manner in which I type, the way I shape and format code. It's more in the manner of catharsis than creation.
by dzaima | 2026-02-19 16:41:06+00:00
Speedrunning is very much modded - ranked (the big content) is just flat out modded (not just the match setup, there are game tweaks too (guaranteed blaze drops after 20 or so iirc, guaranteed dragon perch in ≤3 mins)), and even RSG/SSG/AA/etc have a long list of allowed mods (much quicker seed rerolling, timer, perf improvement mods, etc). Many(/most/all? idk) Many (/most/all? idk) hermits use mods (esp. freecam, replaymod for creating timelapses / pretty camera perspectives). Never mind shaders sprinkled in a portion of everything.
by falkerdev | 2026-02-19 16:41:56+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m building a Hex editor in C#/.NET that focuses on extreme performance and binary modification. Most modern editors either feel bloated with dependencies or are too old-school. I wanted something lightweight that can "swallow" massive binaries or DLLs instantly.

Technical highlights
Performance Built using Memory-Mapped Files (MMF) for instant handling of huge files.
Rendering Engine I’ve optimized the display engine to the point where it can render ASCII video at 60 FPS (I even built a video player inside it to stress-test the UI).
Custom DSL I’ve implemented a strict, reliable Domain Specific Language for patching. It’s designed to be robust—once you write a script, it works regardless of the environment.
Live Patching The editor watches the script file and reapplies changes on the fly. You can see bytes being rewritten in real-time as you edit your DSL code.

Why I’m doing this
I want to lower the barrier for learning reverse engineering. Instead of sharing cryptic instructions, users can just share a small script file that others can run to understand or patch an EXE/DLL. It's about knowledge sharing at the byte level.
I chose GPL v3 to ensure this stays an open community tool. I know C# is a controversial choice for low-level tools, but with modern .NET, I'm hitting millisecond speeds for compilation and patching.
I'm braced for your feedback on the architecture and the DSL approach. How can I make this even faster?
by jajuuka | 2026-02-19 16:42:04+00:00
I'm not sure why you're absolving yourself of free will. When courts ruled that chattel slavery was legal and just, were they correct? What if a court today ruled that chattel slavery was legal and just. Would the judges who support abolition be "losers shouting into the void"? It seems like your position falls apart pretty quickly to anyone with basic morals.

Courts and judges are not perfect. Are you just clinging to that belief to justify a predetermined opinion?