MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by delta_p_delta_x | 2026-02-19 16:26:26+00:00
Singapore is one of the last countries one will be a 'serf' in.

The parent contributor has conveniently left out the fact that the 37% of CPF contributions is split 20-17 in terms of employee-employer contributions[1], and has a ceiling of S$8000[2], so if one earns more than that, every additional dollar goes entirely to them, which is also taxed at globally low income tax rates[3]. One can put all one's post-tax money into any stocks/bonds/funds, and there is also no capital gains tax[4].

[1]: https://www.cpf.gov.sg/employer/employer-obligations/how-muc...

[2]: https://www.cpf.gov.sg/employer/infohub/news/cpf-related-ann...

[3]: https://www.iras.gov.sg/taxes/individual-income-tax/basics-o...

[4]: https://www.iras.gov.sg/taxes/individual-income-tax/basics-o...
by DemocracyFTW2 | 2026-02-19 16:26:31+00:00
There's also the adjacent phenomenon that when you have a bus that operates, say, every twenty minutes per day which is already inconvenient not least because of inevitable delays and the occasional early bus (meaning your average passenger will wait at least 15min just to make sure they don't miss the ride), and you then start to streamline efficiency by cancelling the worst-performing trips, now you have a schedule people can't easily memorize which is another hassle. As an effect, because transporting passengers is not exactly like herding cattle, people will try to find other means to do the commute, so thinning out your service will likely reduce ridership on all the other tours, too.
by nobody9999 | 2026-02-19 16:26:38+00:00
>This sort of deranged rhetoric doesn't win anybody over to your side. It's more likely to do the opposite.

That's odd. The Federal government is specifically using that data to (incompetently, at least for now) inappropriately disenfranchise people[0]

So no. Not deranged, actually happening[0] right now.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47003975
by adrian_b | 2026-02-19 16:26:55+00:00
Woolly rhinoceroses (related to the Sumatran rhinoceros and a different species from the one from the link in the posting above) have continued to live in Europe and Asia until much more recently, i.e. until around ten thousand years ago (i.e. around the same time when humans were forced to switch from hunting to eating seeds, presumably because of the depletion of the big animals that made hunting profitable).

That is certainly recent enough for their memory to persist in myths.

As you say, the narwhal tooth is indeed the source used for most medieval illustrations of unicorns, but not the source of the legends about them.
by giraffe_lady | 2026-02-19 16:27:00+00:00
Well, because I've worked in different places, and with different organizations, and can see for myself how different approaches to professional conduct manifest in the finished product, or the flexibility of the team, effectiveness of communication, etc.

Especially with things like code and writing, I assess the artifacts: software and prose. These stories of incredibly facility of LLMs on code and writing are never accompanied by artifacts that back up these claims. The ones that I can assess don't meet the bar that is being claimed. So everyone who has it working well is keeping it to themselves, and only those with bad-to-mediocre output are publishing them, I am meant to believe? I can't rule it out entirely of course, but I am frustrated at the ongoing demands that I maintain credulity.

FWIW I have sat out many other professional organization and software development trends because I wanted to wait and assess for myself their benefits, which then failed to materialize. That is why I hold LLMs to this standard, I hold all tools to this standard: be useful or be dismissed.
by benzible | 2026-02-19 16:27:03+00:00
We mostly agree. I'm really just making the point that focusing blame on the capitulators lets the people wielding state power off the hook. I suppose you could take the position that the industrialists who capitulated to the Nazis (I mean, those who didn't actively support them to begin with) were more at fault than the Nazis. Personally, I don't believe that.

And to be clear, I'm not saying fiduciary duty requires capitulation. CEOs can absolutely make the case that resistance serves long-term shareholder interests, and the evidence backs them up. Costco is thriving after, and arguably because, they held firm on DEI. Target capitulated and lost $12.5 billion in market value and its CEO resigned. I started shopping at Costco for this reason and haven't been in a Target since Trump took office, after shopping their regularly. What I am saying is that the short-term incentive structure of public companies makes capitulation easier, which is exactly why the coercion works so well and why it's the bigger problem. The system erects hurdles to doing what's right, and often what's even in a company's own long-term interest.
by cubefox | 2026-02-19 16:27:07+00:00
> Isn't that how color images printed paper works, too?

No. When you print a piece of paper some color, e.g. red, it will be completely red. But most e-paper screens will only be 33% red (optimistically) and 66% black. This is because physical pixels usually can't change color themselves, only brightness, so you use three of them, and darken the RGB components, to produce a colored pixel.

For displaying white on color e-paper screens you will have three non-dark RGB sub-pixels, but each color component only reflects at most a third of the incoming spectrum, either red, green, or blue wavelengths, while white paper (or monochromatic e-paper screens) will reflect all three wavelengths everywhere.
by unclad5968 | 2026-02-19 16:27:27+00:00
Government salaries are such a small percentage (less than 5% is what I'm seeing in cursory searches) of spending that it doesnt make a lot of sense to me that DOGE was a genuine attempt at cutting spending. I work in defense, and at least a few times a year, I see government contract money that could pay a dozen salaries wasted on equipment that never even gets installed. We have a government bought tool that cost $2million 8 years ago, and we plug it in when senators come tour our facility so we can pretend we use it. If anyone in the government cared about reducing costs, I don't think they would care too much about payroll. Its the equivalent of taking all the appliances out of your house because your electric bill was $200 when you take home $5k.

I won't pretend to know what the actual motives were, but financial "efficiency" seems suspect to me.
by saivishwak | 2026-02-19 16:27:32+00:00
Hi HN — quick, non-hype update and a request for feedback.

I built a Rust-based agent framework because I wanted something modular and lightweight for production deployments. My goals were simple: reduce runtime overhead, make executors and memory replaceable, and measure the real cost of the framework (not the model).

I ran a reproducible benchmark across seven agent frameworks with the same machine, same LLM, same prompts, and the same concurrency. The benchmark captures latency distributions (P50/P95/P99), CPU, and memory so you can inspect trade-offs rather than rely on anecdotes.

Key takeaway (short): at small scale the differences are already meaningful — Rust frameworks in my tests used roughly ~1 GB RAM at 10 concurrent sessions, while the Python-based frameworks were in the ~5–9 GB range at the same load. That gap grows with scale, so it becomes a real operational cost and reliability factor for production deployments.

If you want the data and scripts, both the framework and the benchmark are public:

AutoAgents — framework repo (liquidos-ai/AutoAgents)

autoagents-bench — benchmark repo (liquidos-ai/autoagents-bench)

I’m not arguing that Python ecosystems are wrong — the DX is excellent and they drove this space — but at production scale the runtime cost of convenience matters.

I’d appreciate:
Suggestions on places people typically miss when evaluating frameworks for production (metrics, failure modes, observability, cost modeling).

Feedback on the framework design and API for composability and safety.
Any ideas for additional benchmarking scenarios you’d like to see.

Thanks — I’m mostly interested in technical feedback and hard criticism.
by kaibee | 2026-02-19 16:27:41+00:00
> "the government made me spend 37% of my income on saving when I wanted to use it to raise kids."

This is a particularly funny one tbh. A nation's kids _are_ the retirement plan. It doesn't matter how many numbers you put in spreadsheets dated for 20-40 years into the future, if in said future, there isn't actually anyone to accept those numbers in exchange for labor.
by Hikikomori | 2026-02-19 16:27:55+00:00
I just finished carlins kings of kings episodes before visiting the british museum. Carlin mentioned the contrast between what was depicted in the Assyrian and Achaemenid empires palace/throne and being able to see it in the museum with the added context made me appreciate it so much more.

Visited Rome/Pompeii with my GF and she said it was like having a private tour guide. I just felt like I knew so little and could only add sparse bits of context.
by InkCanon | 2026-02-19 16:27:58+00:00
I'll be blunt and say most Singaporeans have a very poor idea of how these policies work. Another major one - virtually all Singaporeans believe they own their houses, and it is a point of pride and financial security. Most houses are on 99 year leases, but the idea that is deeply lodged is that this is longer than you can live so this is inconsequential. While this is true if they only cared about living in it, houses have huge financial/investment value to Singaporeans. Despite the iron mathematical law that these houses must depreciate their lease value, most Singaporeans believe house prices will continue to rise based on historical trends. The math just doesn't work out.
by svilen_dobrev | 2026-02-19 16:28:01+00:00
so... anyone who's not native english, reading all these overpuffed texts, is cooked? The nuances are most times lost on me

And even if the style is (or isn't) LLM'ish, it does not say/help if the (even-filtered) content makes sense / is correct or is BS

Style does matter, sure..

https://hbr.org/1982/05/what-do-you-mean-you-dont-like-my-st...
by vunderba | 2026-02-19 16:28:16+00:00
Nice job! I corresponded with Hutchens back in the day about MegaHAL. What made it stand out compared to other Loebner chatbots was that it didn’t just zoom in on a couple of keywords in the user’s input and then run a forward-only chain - instead buiding both forward and backward Markov models, generating text in both directions along with calculating entropy/surprise to produce a novel response.
by FireBeyond | 2026-02-19 16:28:37+00:00
This is absolutely endemic to many police departments.

Remember the case where the cop arrested the nurse for refusing to administer a blood draw without a warrant following a car accident?

He was so anxious to get the blood draw because his supervisor had told him to, because the other party in the MVA was an off-duty cop who was drunk and had blown through a red light. They were desperate to find anything to pin on the person in hospital (who later died) while stalling on a blood test for their fellow cop, so they could shift/diminish liability.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-02-19 16:29:22+00:00
I don’t value the imperfections. I value the experience despite the imperfections.

I value a great video game or piece of software often despite its bugs and issues. If they had fewer bugs and issues I’d value it more. It would be better. I don’t value the imperfections.

We should not conflate tolerance and appreciation. Just because people tolerate it doesn’t mean they value it. At this point I just don’t know how many different ways to say this so I’ll just leave it there. Have a good one.
by droopyEyelids | 2026-02-19 16:29:31+00:00
Seeing my neighbors gathering ginkgo nuts made me curious enough to try them, and I waded right in without understanding the risks! TLDR— they're not a great food source. It's yet another one of those cases where you have to wonder what "delicacy" means.

The actual fruit (looks like a rotten plum, smells terrible) has ginkgolic acids which cause contact dermatitis (think poison ivy).

Then the nuts themselves contain Ginkgotoxin, which interferes with your B6, screwing up your nervous system and causing seizures. Cooking reduces but does not eliminate Ginkgotoxin.

I only ate one, and ate it raw. It was a delightful texture, but tasted like chewing random plant matter. Like leaves from a tree. Was maybe half a cubic centimeter of matter. Escaped any ill effects.

According to my research, kids can have seizures from as few as 10 nuts, which would probably be like 1.5 spoonfuls if you mashed them up. The guidelines I found don't seem very scientific but supposedly a kid can safely handle 3-5 nuts over the course of a day, and an adult could handle 5-10. So it doesn't seem like there is a good margin of safety.

Overall a real risk to health for an insignificant amount of food that doesn't taste special. But a nice texture.
by ricketycricket | 2026-02-19 16:29:48+00:00
Here are some thoughts on it from José Valim: https://dashbit.co/blog/why-elixir-best-language-for-ai

LLMs absolutely understand and write good Elixir. I've done complex OTP and distributed work in tandem with Sonnet/Opus and they understand it well and happily keep up. All the Elixir constructs distinct from ruby are well applied: pipes, multiple function clauses, pattern matching, etc.

I can say that anecdotally, CC/Codex are significantly more accurate and faster working with our 250K lines of Elixir than our 25K lines of JS (though not typescript).
by topaz0 | 2026-02-19 16:30:03+00:00
I think your intuition comes from the assumption that the experimental subjects are already coming to you in a random order. If that's the case, then you might as well assign the first half to control and the second half to treatment. To see the problem with poor randomization, you have to think about situations where there is (often unknown) bias or correlations in the order of the list that you're drawing from to randomize. Say you have an ordered list of 10 numbers, assigned 5 and 5 to control and (null) treatment groups. There are 252 assignments, which in theory should be equally likely. Assuming they all give different values of your statistic, you'll have 12 assignments with p <= .0476. If, say, you do the assignment from a 256 bit random number such that 4 of the possible assignments are twice as likely as the others under your randomization procedure, the probability of getting one of those 12 assignments something between .0469 and .0625, depending whether the more-likely assignments happen to be among the 12 most extreme statistics, which is a difference of about 1/3 and could easily be the difference between "p>.05" and "p<.05". Again, if you start with your numbers in a random order, then this doesn't matter -- the biased assignment procedure will still give you a random assignment, because each initial number will be equally likely to be among the over-sampled or under-sampled ones.

Also worth noting that the situations where this matters are usually where your effect size is fairly small compared to the unexplained variation, so a few percent error in your p-value can make a difference.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-19 16:30:26+00:00
Part that stuck out to me:

> It is in your own best interest not to make any sort of comment that is violent in nature or could by a large language model be interpreted as being violent.

Not only do you need to try to follow a rule that isn't clear in the first place, now you have to also try to guess how a LLM (which one? Unclear) might perceive and interpret your comment. GLHF.

Remember when reddit was considered "a bastion of free speech"? Was a long time ago this point, but clearly the places where people can openly speak without getting banned site-wide is getting fewer and fewer.
by paulrpotts | 2026-02-19 16:30:35+00:00
I have a 2008 Mac Pro that was my daily driver for video and audio production for 16 years before I had to give up on it. The only real reason I had to give up on it was that I couldn't upgrade the software and all the certs were expiring. I was using it for a network music server as well, until Apple broke iTunes home sharing functionality. It's sitting in the hall in my basement. The hardware still functions perfectly. It had four hard drives in it, and I've got all that stuff on a Synology now. It remains the most reliable computer I have ever owned. It literally only was ever off when there was a power outage. I might wind up installing Linux on it for my kids but we already have several little i5 NUCs that are far faster and quieter and easier on our electric bill, so I'm not sure there's much point to that.
by erxam | 2026-02-19 16:30:44+00:00
> To be honest, I think having a few more popular US/UK/EU YouTube channels doing any kind of FPGA-based or silicon-based hardware design (i.e. not just RPi or PCB stuff) would help hugely. I've not worked out how a content strategy in this space that I think will work - yet!

It doesn't exist because it's impossible. Practical experience valuable enough to get you an apprenticeship is inexistent without knowing an engineer dedicated enough to take out the two or three hours of downtime they have to teach you for free.

Software pays, hardware never will.
by TimorousBestie | 2026-02-19 16:31:33+00:00
> Alabama requires MMR for entry to public k-12 schools

For now. Your state legislature has multiple bills in progress to increase vaccine exemptions and reduce requirements, following the national trend.

> and has a 95.3% vaccination rate

93.8% the year prior, see below. We’ll see if it’s an upward trend or an outlier soon enough.

> But you're making up some stupid bullshit about "ow [sic] childhood vaccine rates".

Here’s a weighting of various vaccination metrics by state: https://www.newsweek.com/states-that-vaccinate-most-map-2127... (2025)

And a local report from a couple months ago: https://alabamareflector.com/2025/12/08/alabama-sees-lower-v...

> The vaccination rate for children aged 13-17 nationwide remained high in 2024, but it drops significantly in Alabama as children age. Where about 70% of 4-10-year-olds are up to date on vaccines statewide, only 25% of children 11-18 years old are up to date.

And as I said to the sibling commenter, I’m not advocating doing nothing about absenteeism. It’s perfectly reasonable to criticize a specific method while endorsing its intended effect.
by anishathalye | 2026-02-19 16:31:39+00:00
We (@anishathalye, @jjgo, @jonhoo) returned to MIT during IAP (January term) 2026 to teach a new iteration of Missing Semester, a class covering topics that are missing from the standard computer science curriculum.

Over the years, the three of us helped teach several classes at MIT, and over and over again we saw that students had limited knowledge of tools available to them. Computers were built to automate manual tasks, yet students often perform repetitive tasks by hand or fail to take full advantage of powerful tools such as version control and IDEs. Common examples include manually renaming a symbol across many source code files, or using the nuclear approach to fix a Git repository (https://xkcd.com/1597/).

At least at MIT, these topics are not taught as part of the university curriculum: students are never shown how to use these tools, or at least not how to use them efficiently, and thus waste time and effort on tasks that should be simple. The standard CS curriculum is missing critical topics about the computing ecosystem that could make students’ lives significantly easier both during school and after graduation (most jobs do not formally teach these topics either).

To help mitigate this, the three of us developed a class, originally called Hacker Tools in 2019 and then renamed to Missing Semester in 2020 (some great past discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22226380, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19078281). Over the past several years, we’ve seen the course translated into over a dozen languages, inspire similar courses at other universities, and be adopted by several companies as part of their standard onboarding materials.

Based on feedback and discussions here and elsewhere, along with our updated perspective from working in industry for several years, we have developed a new iteration of the course. The 2026 edition covers several new topics such as packaging/shipping code, code quality, agentic coding, and soft skills. Some things never change, though; we’re still using this hacky Python DSL for editing our multi-camera-angle lecture videos: https://github.com/missing-semester/videos.

As always, we’d love to hear any feedback from the community to help us improve the course content!

—Anish, Jon, and Jose
by ogimagemaker | 2026-02-19 16:31:57+00:00
The fundamental tension here is that AI companies are selling compute at a loss to capture market share, while users are trying to maximize value from their subscriptions.

From a backend perspective, the subscription model creates perverse incentives. Heavy users (like developers running agentic workflows) consume far more compute than casual users, but pay the same price. Third-party tools amplify this asymmetry.

Anthropic's move is economically rational but strategically risky. Models are increasingly fungible - Gemini 3.1 and Claude 4.5 produce similar results for most tasks. The lock-in isn't the model; it's the tooling ecosystem.

By forcing users onto Claude Code exclusively, they're betting their tooling moat is stronger than competitor models. Given how quickly open-source harnesses like pi have caught up, that's a bold bet.
by minimaxir | 2026-02-19 16:32:01+00:00
Price is unchanged from Gemini 3 Pro: $2/M input, $12/M output. https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing

Knowledge cutoff is unchanged at Jan 2025. Gemini 3.1 Pro supports "medium" thinking where Gemini 3 did not: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/gemini-3

Compare to Opus 4.6's $5/M input, $25/M output. If Gemini 3.1 Pro does indeed have similar performance, the price difference is notable.
by mindslight | 2026-02-19 16:32:37+00:00
You're still missing where I'm coming from.

> Without Section 230, your aunt would take down her knitting pattern discussion website/chat room/mailing list/whatever within half a day, with whoever it was posting something objectionable (or just off topic) and when your aunt deletes it, file a lawsuit claiming censorship.

I don't want "my aunt" to be running a knitting pattern discussion website. I want "my aunt" to only be publishing/hosting what she herself writes, while her discussion partners each publish/host what they themselves write. I then want all of these messages stitched together to form a cohesive presentation on each person's computer, by software that represents their interests.

There was the better part of the decade after the CDA passed that the tech community was still focused on protocols that worked this way. Section 230 immunity made sites that centralized user content feasible rather than legally radioactive. Centralized sites then took off because they were easier to develop, and investment-wise they caused Metcalfe's law power to accrue to the entity running the site rather than to an abstract protocol.

I do agree that in the current context, there is a strong path dependence here - neutering section 230 would not cause the clock to rewind. And the present political push is from a movement that wants to control speech even harder than corpos already currently do. I'm talking about what could have been.
by Fnoord | 2026-02-19 16:32:42+00:00
There's so many these days. Just have a look at AliExpress. There were various KS/IGG campaigns, too. One thing which kind of stood out was a smartwatch remote with what I will summarize as 'Flipper Zero capabilities'. I think I saw it on Etsy. It looked terrible though. For red teaming, you'd want something which looks professional, and blends in. Ideally with a watchface as, ehh.. 'screensaver'.