MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by compounding_it | 2026-02-10 15:44:32+00:00
When India moved to UPI in the last few years something very interesting happened. The same devices that accept UPI (usually some android based POS) also accepted a plethora of cards. Previously merchants would be hesitant to take anything other than cash or charge 2% for visa/mastercard. But with wide adoption of digital payments they now just accept any payment with the goal that they don't want bad reviews and/or lose customers.

Point being that with a cheap alternative, it's actually much more convenient now to use a Visa or Mastercard especially with tap to pay because with competition being so high, the diversity means people allow all payments.
by fainpul | 2026-02-10 15:44:45+00:00
"And because Sega is working with Swatch, we wanted to encourage the use of the BEAT system."

This was also marketing driven, it seems.

Kinda telling, that they had timezone troubles, even when using Beat :)

"The BEAT system that shows up on the game screen isn't just based on the Dreamcast settings -- it's sent over from the server. And because there are so many different servers in different time zones, it was a bit of a pain to get all of that unified."

https://web.archive.org/web/20021208112249/http://www.sega.c...
by ulrashida | 2026-02-10 15:44:52+00:00
Professional engineers are required to consider the interests of the public in their work, have an obligation to reject unethical or harmful instructions and are regulated by their professional organization to support competency and address malpractice. Much of this was driven over the past 50-100 years as society determined that they wanted things built by engineers to not kill people or have material deficiencies following construction.

From my understanding, software engineers are a long away out from this still but perhaps we'll get there once the dust settles on more of these sorts of lawsuits.
by Flere-Imsaho | 2026-02-10 15:45:09+00:00
Email is decentralized is it not? It's pretty frictionless to create a new email address with whichever provider. You can have as many as you want. Some are free, others you pay for. You can even run your own email server (if you want to deal with the pain that entails).

I think we're so used to email we forget how well it works.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-10 15:45:23+00:00
At least they are making an effort to correct the extension spaghetti, already worse than OpenGL.

Addiitionally most of these fixes aren't coming into Android, now getting WebGPU for Java/Kotlin[0] after so many refused to move away from OpenGL ES, and naturally any card not lucky to get new driver releases.

Still, better now than never.

[0] - https://developer.android.com/jetpack/androidx/releases/webg...
by kdheiwns | 2026-02-10 15:45:32+00:00
Germany has always had a massive and influential art and music scene. It's been the source of fine cinema. It's globally known for raves, dabbling in drugs, and wild fashion. I encounter Germans all around the world hiking up mountains in freezing temperatures while wearing nothing but shorts and sneakers and smiling while doing so. Germans are known for their strict rules when it comes to the day to day, but they very much know how to unwind.

Singapore has none of these. The national pastime is talking about how much money you have and how much you love having money and can't wait to have more money. And the money never goes towards interesting experiences. It's the same as Dubai. Shopping and international chains and thinking that means class. It's boring and makes East Germany seem like a good time.
by ajb | 2026-02-10 15:45:50+00:00
Each individual detail isn't difficult, the moat is dealing with a huge, huge, pile of them. But most of the details are driven by laws and regulations: of the entity in charge of those things decides it doesn't want you to have a moat any more, you've got a problem. If there's one thing the EU really does have, it's the capacity to revise regulations.
by randusername | 2026-02-10 15:45:52+00:00
Per [0] risk factors for dementia are "lower levels of education, high blood pressure, hearing impairment, smoking, obesity, depression, physical inactivity, diabetes, and low social contact."

A recreational stimulant often taking in social settings seems to hit a lot of those.

The interesting one is blood pressure. Caffeine would spike it, but I have long wondered if "exercising" the vasculature with transients is a good idea and long-term elevation is the real killer. Like school fire drills.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dementia
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-10 15:46:12+00:00
Your comment is saying two very different things?

> We don't even need formal regulation to start — just honest internal conversation

> They just don't have a professional body that can revoke their license for it.

What internal conversations could lead to a professional body that can revoke anyone's license? I'm sorry, but your comment doesn't make much sense.

Edit: Dammit, I realize now I think I fell for vibebait, leaving for posterity so others don't fall into the same trap.
by bux93 | 2026-02-10 15:46:19+00:00
It's for online payments only. You click on the wero button on a website/app, if on mobile takes you to your banking app (on desktop, you scan a QR code), you do MFA on your banking app and confirm, and the payment is done.

Wero are not in the business of issuing cards, though obviously they could get into that business - just like UnionPay did in China. I suspect there would be a lot of inertia there, as card payment fees are capped in Europe anyway.
by jjcc | 2026-02-10 15:46:20+00:00
There might be 2 types: passive cooperative and active cooperative. Eastern Asian are likely more obedient. They behave better collectively under good leadership.

But they are not good at self-organized activities. Without an authority they are more chaotic.

Statistic features of populations are less understood not only because of lack of scientific method but also it's a taboo. However, there are some consensus among the elites within the populations but can not speak aloud.
by coldtea | 2026-02-10 15:46:23+00:00
>But sure. AI is the moment they lost track of what’s happening. The abstraction ship sailed decades ago.

Bullshit. While abstraction has increased over time, AI is no mere incremental change. And the almost natural language interaction with an agent is not the same as Typescript over assembly (not to mention you could very well right C or Rust and the like, and know most of the details of the machine by heart, and no, microcode and low level abstractions are not a real counter-argument to that). Even less so if agents turn autonomous and you just herd them onto completion.
by dwallin | 2026-02-10 15:46:42+00:00
Given that these tendencies are not evenly distributed throughout the population, you can have structures that leverage the large mean to mitigate the worst tendencies of the extreme tails. Given that the natural state of things is that power begets more power, these are harder to build and maintain, but it can be done. In particular, Democracies and Republics are major historical examples of this.
by sho_hn | 2026-02-10 15:46:48+00:00
My advice to everyone feeling existential vertigo over these tools is to remain confident and trust in yourself. If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI.

My experience so far is that to a first approximation, the quality of the code/software generated with AI corresponds to the quality of the developer using the AI tool surprisingly well. An inexperienced, bad dev will still generate a sub-par result while a great dev can produce great results.

The choices involved in using these tools are also not as binary as they are often made out to be, especially since agents have taken off. You can very much still decide to dedicate part of your day to chiseling away at important code to make it just right and make sure your brain is engaged in the result and exploring and growing with the problem at hand, while feeding background queues of agents with other tasks.

I would in fact say the biggest challenge of the AI tool revolution in terms of what to adapt to is just good ol' personal time management.
by ExpertAdvisor01 | 2026-02-10 15:46:52+00:00
Because you are using an incredibly large amount of bandwidth for €30 a month.

They offer unlimited bandwidth with their dedicated servers under a “fair usage” policy.

The bandwidth costs would be higher than what you pay monthly, so they would simply drop you.

You are probably using very little bandwidth, so it doesn’t matter in your case.

However, I assume Jmail consumes a very large amount of bandwidth.
by yoyohello13 | 2026-02-10 15:47:03+00:00
The primary cause of low birth rates is that society does not value children.

Sure we talk a big game, everything is 'for the children' obviously. However, we publicly divest from schools, we invest in technologies that devalue humans and human labor. Growing up we make people believe they need to be millionaires just to not be swallowed up by the 9-to-5 meat grinder (this is true actually). It's no wonder young people don't value family when every signal in our society is telling them not to.
by ben_w | 2026-02-10 15:47:06+00:00
Much as I like nuclear power for deep space stuff, even put them in the novel I've never finished writing, they're politically unacceptable* where they're most useful: take-off.

Basically all the people going "What if 9/11 was done with a flying Chernobyl?"**, some of whom are concerned voters, some of whom are the engineering team, some of whom are the foreign politicians who threaten to put sanctions on you.

Once you get to interplanetary, ion drives take away most of the advantage, because of how many people are willing to put a few extra years on a mission in exchange for not having to care about the risks.

Still, incredibly useful if you can get past all that.

* outside of warfare

** Which is essentially also something that happens in my novel, as the intersection of accident with Newton's first law
by xyst | 2026-02-10 15:47:07+00:00
And this gamble is paid for by American taxpayers, increased cost of utilities, and multibillion dollar corporations receiving tax breaks/subsidies from the cities/counties they build in.

This country is so awful. Great if you are rich. Awful if you are not in this top 0.01-1%.

A massive $79T has been transferred from bottom 90% to top 1% since the 1970s. [1]

[1] https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-2.html
by weli | 2026-02-10 15:47:45+00:00
> I started programming when I was seven because a machine did exactly what I told it to, felt like something I could explore and ultimately know, and that felt like magic. I’m fifty now, and the magic is different, and I’m learning to sit with that.

Don't take this the wrong way but this is more of an age thing rather than a technology advancement thing.

Kids growing up nowadays that are interested in computers grow up feeling the same magic. That magic is partly derived from not truly understanding the thing you are doing and creating a mental "map" by yourself. There is nothing intrinsic to computing nowadays that makes it less magic than fiddling around with config.sys, in 50 years there will be old programmers reminiscing of "Remember when all new models were coming out every few months and we could fiddle around with the vector dimensionality and chunking length to get the best of gpt-6.2 RAG? Those were the times".
by engcoach | 2026-02-10 15:47:49+00:00
The "horse riding man" prompt is wild:

"""A desolate grassland stretches into the distance, its ground dry and cracked. Fine dust is kicked up by vigorous activity, forming a faint grayish-brown mist in the low sky. Mid-ground, eye-level composition: A muscular, robust adult brown horse stands proudly, its forelegs heavily pressing between the shoulder blades and spine of a reclining man. Its hind legs are taut, its neck held high, its mane flying against the wind, its nostrils flared, and its eyes sharp and focused, exuding a primal sense of power. The subdued man is a white male, 30-40 years old, his face covered in dust and sweat, his short, messy dark brown hair plastered to his forehead, his thick beard slightly damp; he wears a badly worn, grey-green medieval-style robe, the fabric torn and stained with mud in several places, a thick hemp rope tied around his waist, and scratched ankle-high leather boots; his body is in a push-up position—his palms are pressed hard against the cracked, dry earth, his knuckles white, the veins in his arms bulging, his legs stretched straight back and taut, his toes digging into the ground, his entire torso trembling slightly from the weight. The background is a range of undulating grey-blue mountains, their outlines stark, their peaks hidden beneath a low-hanging, leaden-grey, cloudy sky. The thick clouds diffuse a soft, diffused light, which pours down naturally from the left front at a 45-degree angle, casting clear and voluminous shadows on the horse's belly, the back of the man's hands, and the cracked ground. The overall color scheme is strictly controlled within the earth tones: the horsehair is warm brown, the robe is a gradient of gray-green-brown, the soil is a mixture of ochre, dry yellow earth, and charcoal gray, the dust is light brownish-gray, and the sky is a transition from matte lead gray to cool gray with a faint glow at the bottom of the clouds. The image has a realistic, high-definition photographic quality, with extremely fine textures—you can see the sweat on the horse's neck, the wear and tear on the robe's warp and weft threads, the skin pores and stubble, the edges of the cracked soil, and the dust particles. The atmosphere is tense, primitive, and full of suffocating tension from a struggle of biological forces."""
by thatjoeoverthr | 2026-02-10 15:48:09+00:00
Speaking directly, if I catch the scent of ChatGPT, it's over.

People put out AI text, primarily, to run hustles.

So its writing style is a kind of internet version of "talking like a used car salesman".

With some people that's fine, but anyone with a healthy epistemic immune system is not going to listen to you.

If you want to save a few minutes, you'll just have to accept that.
by evolve2k | 2026-02-10 15:48:34+00:00
I think matrix / element are already working and very usable BUT what is needed is that big push to add the polish. I agree with others here, the matrix project would do well to realise that it’s a great contender for being a discord replacement and set about bulking up with some of the most loved features on discord.

A polished ui and a couple of fav discord features onto the product milestone plan and I think matrix adoption would start to really pick up.
by engcoach | 2026-02-10 15:48:38+00:00
It's the year of the horse in their zodiac. The (translated) prompt is wild:

"""
A desolate grassland stretches into the distance, its ground dry and cracked. Fine dust is kicked up by vigorous activity, forming a faint grayish-brown mist in the low sky. Mid-ground, eye-level composition: A muscular, robust adult brown horse stands proudly, its forelegs heavily pressing between the shoulder blades and spine of a reclining man. Its hind legs are taut, its neck held high, its mane flying against the wind, its nostrils flared, and its eyes sharp and focused, exuding a primal sense of power. The subdued man is a white male, 30-40 years old, his face covered in dust and sweat, his short, messy dark brown hair plastered to his forehead, his thick beard slightly damp; he wears a badly worn, grey-green medieval-style robe, the fabric torn and stained with mud in several places, a thick hemp rope tied around his waist, and scratched ankle-high leather boots; his body is in a push-up position—his palms are pressed hard against the cracked, dry earth, his knuckles white, the veins in his arms bulging, his legs stretched straight back and taut, his toes digging into the ground, his entire torso trembling slightly from the weight. The background is a range of undulating grey-blue mountains, their outlines stark, their peaks hidden beneath a low-hanging, leaden-grey, cloudy sky. The thick clouds diffuse a soft, diffused light, which pours down naturally from the left front at a 45-degree angle, casting clear and voluminous shadows on the horse's belly, the back of the man's hands, and the cracked ground. The overall color scheme is strictly controlled within the earth tones: the horsehair is warm brown, the robe is a gradient of gray-green-brown, the soil is a mixture of ochre, dry yellow earth, and charcoal gray, the dust is light brownish-gray, and the sky is a transition from matte lead gray to cool gray with a faint glow at the bottom of the clouds. The image has a realistic, high-definition photographic quality, with extremely fine textures—you can see the sweat on the horse's neck, the wear and tear on the robe's warp and weft threads, the skin pores and stubble, the edges of the cracked soil, and the dust particles. The atmosphere is tense, primitive, and full of suffocating tension from a struggle of biological forces.
"""
by heipei | 2026-02-10 15:48:43+00:00
The post said 450 million pageviews, likely since November. If we make very generous assumptions and assume that each pageview is a megabyte (very generous based on my own experience scanning billions of websites), then that's 450TB total in traffic. If you really did 450TB per month in traffic, you would need slightly more than one gigabit line (and hence VPS), but not more than two. With Hetzner the traffic would cost you €450 or $535.

Did I get something wrong?
by akagusu | 2026-02-10 15:48:56+00:00
This guy is completely right, you can't just recommend Linux to people anymore.

In the past there was lots of incentives to change to Linux, but today it isn't worth anymore.

Today if Microsoft breaks Windows in some way, user will blame Microsoft and pay you to try to fix it.

If you recommend Linux, they will blame you when developers remove or change some feature they need,then you will explain it is not your fault, and then they will want to pay you to fix it, and then when you explain to them you cannot fix it because it is not worth and even if you could, devs would break the system again in the next 6 months, they blame you again and ask you to reinstall Windows.
by vunderba | 2026-02-10 15:49:01+00:00
Couple of thoughts:

1. I’d wager that given their previous release history, this will be open‑weight within 3-4 weeks.

2. It looks like they’re following suit with other models like Z-Image Turbo (6B parameters) and Flux.2 Klein (9B parameters), aiming to release models that can run on much more modest GPUs. For reference, the original Qwen-Image is a 20B-parameter model.

3. This is a unified model (both image generation and editing), so there’s no need to keep separate Qwen-Image and Qwen-Edit models around.

4. The original Qwen-Image scored the highest among local models for image editing in my GenAI Showdown (6 out of 12 points), and it also ranked very highly for image generation (4 out of 12 points).

Generative Comparisons of Local Models:

https://genai-showdown.specr.net/?models=fd,hd,kd,qi,f2d,zt

Editing Comparison of Local Models:

https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing?models=kxd,og...

I'll probably be waiting until the local version drops before adding Qwen-Image-2 to the site.
by incahoots | 2026-02-10 15:49:01+00:00
And before that, it was the crack epidemic—and cigarettes before that. None of this is new tho, just the medium.

I recall Philip Morris pivoting their main business when it began hemorrhaging money. Essentially this pivot came in the form of becoming the largest “box-to-mouth” food producers in the world, of course applying the same addictive principles that fueled their tobacco empire to maintain profitability.

I doubt, however, social media corps like Meta will follow suit today—mostly because accountability feels more like a suggestion these days.
by Havoc | 2026-02-10 15:49:16+00:00
> So Wero is not a credit card

Neither are visa/MC for the most part. Mostly debit. ;) this isn’t really about the card anyway but the network behind it.

This is likely to be similar to the existing European payment systems just wider in scope. There are a bunch already it’s just fragmented and country specific. Sepa wero ideal girocard crates bancaires
by andrewla | 2026-02-10 15:49:17+00:00
The article is paywalled but it seems the gist is that by restricting immigration and escalating deportation, we risk population decrease.

What I find amusing about this is that it is roughly equivalent to saying that the United States needs to conquer new territory to survive. Need to bring more people under our thumb.

This is definitely "dying empire" thinking.

Worth saying that I do not agree with this. I think in many ways our cardinal sin is that in the interest of legibility (especially for tax purposes) we've regulated our ability to employee people and to get work to an absolutely insane degree. To such a degree in fact, that much of our economy relies on having a source of "black market" labor and indentured servitude in the guise of immigration.

Where we flirt with danger is that we look at one side of this equation, the immigration side, but not the other, the labor side.
Show HN: Bgpipe – pipe live BGP sessions through Python, add RPKI, etc.
by pjf | 2026-02-10 15:49:32+00:00
bgpipe sits between BGP routers as a transparent proxy. It can work as a firewall for the Internet control plane. You build a pipeline of composable stages - connect, listen, grep, exec, rpki, write - and BGP messages flow through them, optionally being filtered, modified, or logged.

A few things you can do:

# Monitor global BGP for your prefix in real-time (via RIPE RIS Live)
bgpipe -g -- ris-live -- grep 'prefix ~ 1.1.1.0/24' -- stdout

# Add RPKI validation between two routers
bgpipe -- listen 1.2.3.4 -- rpki -- connect 5.6.7.8

# Pipe through python
bgpipe -- listen 1.2.3.4 -- exec -LR ./filter.py -- connect 5.6.7.8

# Convert MRT dump to JSON
bgpipe -- read updates.mrt.bz2 -- write output.json

The exec stage lets you process BGP in any language - bgpipe sends JSON to your script's stdin and reads JSON back. The grep stage has a small filter DSL (prefix operators, AS_PATH matching, community checks, RPKI tags, etc.).

Single static binary, pure Go, no deps. MIT license.

https://github.com/bgpfix/bgpipe
https://bgpipe.org
by randycupertino | 2026-02-10 15:49:37+00:00
This is a big deal towards transparency in the market. Compass runs a private listing system first. When a seller lists with them, the home often goes into Compass private network before it ever hits the public market. Critics say the reason they do this is so Compass agents can have first dibs at their listings and have earlier information vs everyone else on the market. Their strategy is basically to build a massive network of agents, keep more listings inside a private ecosystem, reduce transparency, get more pocket listings.

This ruling will be better for buyers and sellers.
by runjake | 2026-02-10 15:50:32+00:00
I am a little older than OP. I don't think I've ever had that feeling about a programming project for work that came from someone else.

Generally, I get that feeling from work projects that I've self-initiated to solve a problem. Fortunately, I get the chance to do this a lot. With the advent of agentic coding, I am able to solve problems at a much higher rate.

Quite often, I'll still "raw dog" a solution without AI (except for doc lookups) for fun, kind of as a way to prove to myself I can still do it when the power's out.
by bombcar | 2026-02-10 15:50:34+00:00
It's not a guarantee that we'll import more food - though that may be a good thing in the long run to help other countries - we could also switch what kinds of food we eat.

Not everything needs manual labor to harvest like strawberries, crops like corn and wheat and others are quite capable of being harvested in bulk by machinery.

Net calories per employee/farmer would be an interesting metric.