MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crohr | 2026-02-10 08:29:08+00:00
> You know how I know GitHub’s runners are bad? Because there’s an entire cottage industry of companies whose sole product is “GitHub Actions, but the runners don’t suck.” Namespace, Blacksmith, Actuated, Runs-on, BuildJet

He's not wrong. Buildjet just announced they were shutting down though, citing recent improvements to the GitHub Actions platform.

For the record I maintain the Runs-on [1] he's talking about, as a solo developer.

[1] https://runs-on.com
by neuralweaves | 2026-02-10 08:29:34+00:00
Thanks for sharing ClawBox – really interesting approach, You're absolutely right
about the "just works" factor. Most people don't want to configure anything.

Question back: How are you handling model updates on ClawBox? One challenge I see
with appliances is keeping models current without requiring internet access.
Curious how you're solving that for air-gapped deployments.
by dTal | 2026-02-10 08:30:05+00:00
Don't forget an entire new category of computing, AI, which is teetering on the edge of requiring processors from one manufacturer, which in turn requires gigabytes of closed-source runtime. Today, you can do functionally more with a computer with an nVidia chip, driven by their binary blobs, than with any other hardware - even though the application software is usually Free. It's a dangerous situation. We are so used to general purpose compute substrate being "free software friendly", but this amounts to a new type of CPU that categorically requires a closed-source OS to be useful.
by xyzzy123 | 2026-02-10 08:31:40+00:00
Org processes have not changed. Lots of the devs I know are enjoying the speedup on mundane work, consuming it as a temporary lifestyle surplus until everything else catches up.

You can't saw faster than the wood arrives. Also the layout of the whole job site is now wrong and the council approvals were the actual bottleneck to how many houses could be built in the first place... :/
by taneq | 2026-02-10 08:31:43+00:00
The issue is that when you slow down, you’re (a) creating ‘turbulence’ in the traffic flow with increased speed differential between cars and increased lane changes, which increases accident risk for everybody, and (b) it’s not even solving the problem because you still perpetually have some impatient driver wedging themself in directly in front of you, deleting your buffer zone.

It’s safer to drive a little closer, keep up with other traffic and defend what gap you can in front of you.

Agree with your conclusion here, though. The best response is to simply not drive in this kind of traffic.
by Mawr | 2026-02-10 08:33:03+00:00
"Not at fault" as far as the law is concerned, is a low bar. If you're one of the last cars in a queue, you should be checking your mirrors for exactly this scenario. Throwing your hands up in the air saying "well the law says I did no wrong!" isn't the way. Unless you like getting into accidents.

Also, having two of the same type of accident twice in such a short time is so improbable, that I'm seriously doubting your friend. I'd say it's way more likely she braked too suddenly or has other bad driving habits that make such accidents more likely than that she got this unlucky.
AI Startups and GPUs
by hpcaitech | 2026-02-10 08:33:24+00:00
Startups can now train trillion-parameter models without owning a cluster. For years, scaling AI was an "arms race" only big tech could afford. GPU scarcity and cluster management meant smaller teams were locked out.
Now, on-demand GPU access lets startups and research labs experiment with huge models without massive CapEx, spin up temporary clusters for heavy workloads, & pay only for what they use. AI experimentation is finally democratized!
Curious to hear: how are small teams approaching large-scale model training today? Are we seeing innovation shift because compute is now elastic?
by Incipient | 2026-02-10 08:35:21+00:00
And I keep thinking who can AFFORD to pay per token? I did a simple test - three small files and a prompt was nearly 10k tokens. Compared to my actual code base, where I use 5.2/sonnet to parse huge chunks of my code...I'd be burning hundreds of dollars per day if i was doing it per token rather than copilot - let alone the huge agent sessions where I use Opus and it has 50+ back and forward attempts.

Please note I do actually read every line of code these reckless hacks generate haha.
by RicDan | 2026-02-10 08:35:35+00:00
I've been working on and off on flagforge.dev

I have always hated how we deal with feature flags; often times as a dev I implement it, but then business decides how the flags are used, which comes back to us having to set them. I want to make this something that can be used by both easily, and priced fairly - looking at how much others charge for a feature flag SaaS is insane.

Currently I'm in heavy testing by myself, as I am quite worried about issues (that's just my personality), but yeah. It started as a normal side project for me to train a bit, then I added a bit of agentic coding to it to also learn it, and now it's here.
by notarobot123 | 2026-02-10 08:35:41+00:00
The paper seems to provide a realistic benchmark for how these systems are deployed and used though, right? Whether the mechanisms are crude or not isn't the point - this is how production systems work today (as far as I can tell).

I think the accusation of research that anthropomorphize LLMs should be accompanied by a little more substance to avoid this being a blanket dismissal of this kind of alignment research. I can't see the methodological error here. Is it an accusation that could be aimed at any research like this regardless of methodology?
by bux93 | 2026-02-10 08:35:49+00:00
There's also a station in Shangqiu City, Henan province, China, BPC 68.5 kHz

Casio brands watches that receive all 6 stations as multiband-6, and older ones that don't have the Chinese signal as multiband-5.

The analog display, chronograph watches like WVQ-M410-7AJF are delightful ; you can switch to timer mode and the main hands show the time ticking down (yes, they move counter-clockwise), and then switch back to normal timekeeping mode and the hands will move around the dial to set to the correct time again. Obviously at great expense to battery life, but it's solar powered. Unfortunately it's Japanese Domestic Market only, so you need to order it from a place like discovery mall japan. (The WVQ has a flimsy plastic - if you're willing to pay a lot more you could spring for the OCWS7000E ). Citizen has some GPS set watches.

Radio time signals used by watches and wall clocks are all in the 60-77.6 Khz range, probably best suited to small receivers and low power - other radio time signals are higher frequency. In the US, WWVH broadcasts at 2.5MHz, 5Mhz, 10Mhz and 15Mhz.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-10 08:36:12+00:00
Outside of formal logic an argument does not need to be logically sound to have merit. You are extrapolating from "logical fallacy" to (something approximating) "invalid line of reasoning in most or all cases" which is simply not correct.

There are many potentially slippery slopes in politics. The extent to which they prove to be a problem in practice depends entirely on context. Approximately none of those cases will involve formal logic.
by Animats | 2026-02-10 08:36:13+00:00
Really? Simulating a transmission has been tried a few times over the last decade, but it's flopped repeatedly as just silly. It's not likely to impress Ferrari buyers.

The only successful vehicle which has that is a driver-training car built in China. It's electric, but has a clutch pedal and shifter which are inputs to the software. You can even "stall the engine".[1]

[1] https://www.jalopnik.com/this-chinese-electric-car-designed-...
by pawandeepsingh | 2026-02-10 08:36:29+00:00
Hey HN, author here.

I built RevPDF after trying to edit my resume on the bus and finding nothing good on mobile - everything was either cloud-based (didn't want my resume on random servers), subscription-locked, or 100s of MBs.

The blog post breaks down how I got it to ~20MB vs the typical 150-300MB:

Key decisions:
- Flutter + C++ instead of Electron (saved ~100MB right there)
- No cloud infrastructure - everything local (privacy + smaller size)
- Minimal dependencies - custom components where possible
- Smart asset management - Google Fonts instead of bundling

Trade-offs I made:
- No OCR, 3D PDF support, or advanced signatures
- But for basic editing, forms, annotations - it's much faster
- Desktop is free, mobile has small one-time payment

A German tech blog found it and wrote about the "no cloud requirement" - turns out privacy-conscious users were desperate for this. Now at 10k+ downloads.

Genuinely curious:
1. For Flutter developers - any size optimization tricks I'm missing?
2. What PDF features do you actually use daily vs what's just bloat?
3. Would open-sourcing the rendering layer be useful?

Happy to answer technical questions about the implementation!
by mstipetic | 2026-02-10 08:37:41+00:00
I’ve started working at a company that uses Zulip and it’s by far the best thought out UX I’ve ever worked with in a communications app. Sure there’s some polish needed but the general structure just lets me get to where I want, gives me an overview of everything going on, and generally makes me happy. I wish for more keyboard shortcuts maybe, and the mobile app needs the recent conversations view, but I’m sure they’ll get there.
by whstl | 2026-02-10 08:37:49+00:00
You're obviously being sarcastic, but for the longest time the dominant position of a huge chunk of HN (and the tech world in general) has been that the cloud is the answer to any problem, and that anything deviating from it is either impossible, too expensive or too stupid.

After a generation of indoctrinated people, Microsoft (or any FAANG really) can't even afford to do anything differently.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-02-10 08:38:01+00:00
> Well, no; what's coming into the cloud is sunlight, filtered through the atmosphere. It scatters that light and so it has that color.

The model the article describes is:

1. The sun puts out a bunch of light.

2. Light that is lower-energy than blue light fails to be effectively scattered by the atmosphere, and follows a path from the sun to you.

3. Light at the levels of blue and up is effectively scattered by the atmosphere, and comes to you from a random direction.

So if you look toward the sun, you receive light that has been depressed of its blue-and-up wavelengths, and the sun appears to be yellow. If you look away from the sun, you receive light that has been enriched in blue-and-up wavelengths, and the sky appears to be blue. Crucially, the sky looks blue because it is sending you more blue light than the background level.

A cloud that isn't between you and the sun is getting its light from the sky background, which is blue. Why is the cloud not blue? It can disperse all the light it receives evenly, but that light is enriched for blue-and-up wavelengths.
by spacebanana7 | 2026-02-10 08:38:05+00:00
Especially as most AI safety concerns are essentially political, and uncensored LLMs exist anyway for people who want to do crazy stuff like having a go at building their own nuclear submarine or rewriting their git history with emoji only commit messages.

For corporate safety it makes sense that models resist saying silly things, but it's okay for that to be a superficial layer that power users can prompt their way around.
by mrweasel | 2026-02-10 08:39:19+00:00
I don't think this is "whataboutism", the two things are very closely related and somewhat entangled. E.g. did the AI learn of violate ethical constraints from training data?

Another interesting question is: What happens when an unyielding ethical AI agent tells a business owner or manager "NO! If you push any further this will be reported to the proper authority. This prompt as been saved for future evidence". Personally I think a bunch of companies are going to see their profit and stock price fall significantly, if an AI agent starts acting as a backstop for both unethical and illegal behavior. Even something as simple as preventing violation of internal policy could make a huge difference.

To some extend I don't even thing that people realize that what they're doing is bad, because humans tend to be a bit fuzzy and can dream up reason as to why rules don't apply or wasn't meant for them, or this is a rather special situation. This is one place where I think properly trained and guarded LLMs can make a huge positive improvement. We're are clearly not there yet, but it's not a unachievable goal.
by lrem | 2026-02-10 08:39:32+00:00
A better system is in beta in Switzerland. Government is the root of trust, but only signs your private cert regarding your ID. All the interaction with third parties is local to your device, the government doesn’t get to know you interacted with Discord. Discord gets a single bit “is the user of this device 16/18 (restricted/full legal autonomy age) years old?” With chain of trust to the government.
by raverbashing | 2026-02-10 08:39:46+00:00
The next machine is not necessarily a longer LHC

There are talks of a Muon collider, also there's a spallation source being built in Sweden(?) and also of an electron 'Higgs factory' (and while the LHC was built for the Higgs boson it is not a great source for it - it is built as a generic tool that could produce and see the Higgs)
by SR2Z | 2026-02-10 08:39:54+00:00
No. Prices are not arbitrary; they're determined by market forces. I don't really agree with the idea that the minimum wage should be intended to support an adult (I think our welfare systems should be reformed to eliminate cliffs), but if you set it to the average price of a bunch of stuff in a region it's gonna be an actual number.

You can change the set of stuff, but it's much harder to cheat if you actually have to say what a living wage should be spent on.
by lukan | 2026-02-10 08:40:17+00:00
"Also, the Roman Republic were prolific slavers too. I say this because you speak of the Empire and slavery but then go into a "But the Republic..""

My point here was about freedom of thought. And that seems to have been way more valued in the republic, than in the empire. (In general, good and bad are relative terms to me)

"The demand for reform that would eventually motivate mass conversions to Christianity was already well established before Caesar was even born."

And maybe so. But christianity in general was not really about freeing slaves, either.
by coldtea | 2026-02-10 08:40:58+00:00
The human propensity to call out as "anthropomorphizing" the attributing of human-like behavior to programs built on a simplified version of brain neural networks, that train on a corpus of nearly everything humans expressed in writing, and that can pass the Turing test with flying colors, scares me.

That's exaxtly the kind of thing that makes absolute sense to anthropomorphize. We're not talking about Excel here.
by csande17 | 2026-02-10 08:40:59+00:00
It's not 10x, but https://www.ft.com/content/5ac2ee5f-f8bd-4f39-a759-3c5c50c8b... has some graphs suggesting a 1.5x increase in metrics like "number of new apps published in the iOS App Store" and "lines of code committed by US GitHub users".

People haven't noticed because the software industry was already mostly unoriginal slop, even prior to LLMs, and people are good at ignoring unoriginal slop.
by palata | 2026-02-10 08:42:20+00:00
> In the hands of a skilled dev, these things are massive force multipliers.

What do you get from it? Say you produce more, do you get a higher salary?

What I have seen so far is the opposite: if you don't produce more, you risk getting fired.

I am not denying that LLMs make me more productive. Just saying that they don't make me more wealthy. On the other hand, they use a ton of energy at a time where we as a society should probably know better. The way I see it, we are killing the Earth because we produce too much. LLMs help us produce more, why should we be happy?
by littlecranky67 | 2026-02-10 08:42:55+00:00
The EU is working on a actual privacy-preserving initiative [0] that allows owners of ID wallets to verify their age, without their actual age or personal data being transmitted. The standard and reference implementations are open source on GitHub. Yet everybody screams uploading IDs and total government surveillance.

[0]: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/spaces/EU...
by text0404 | 2026-02-10 08:44:46+00:00
You nailed it. I'm pro-crime and I enjoy letting criminals get away because I'm a villain in a Marvel movie.

Do you maybe want to consider that "I have nothing to hide" may be overly reductive and that crime, policing, and surveillance are complex topics beyond the binary of "pro-crime" or "anti-crime"? Or will you continue to deflect my requests for your supposedly public data while telling everyone that they should allow theirs to be harvested by unaccountable third-parties to "make America safer"?
by louthy | 2026-02-10 08:45:29+00:00
It’s a magnificent space. If you just judge it purely on the concrete you may have a different opinion, but if you’re there to consume the various forms of art performed on the Southbank, then the space really comes alive. I’m glad it’s listed.

I happen to love brutalist architecture, but in the uk it can sometimes not work (grey rainy days don’t bring out the best of the concrete). However, I think in this case it really works.
by rnhmjoj | 2026-02-10 08:46:24+00:00
I have been using GitHub since 2011 and it's undeniable that the performance of the website have been getting worse. The new features that are constantly being added are certainly a factor, but I think the switch to client-side rendering that obviously shifted the load from their server to our browsers and also tend to produce ridiculously large and inefficient DOMs[1] is the main cause.

If you want a practical example, here you go. I'm a Nixpkgs commiter and every time I make a pull request that backports some change to the stable branch, GitHub unprompted starts comparing my PR against master. If I'm not fast enough to switch the target branch within a couple of seconds it literally freezes the browser tab and I may have to force quit it. Yes, the diff is large, but this is not acceptable, and more importantly, it didn't happen a few years ago.

[1]: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/111001
by kakacik | 2026-02-10 08:46:28+00:00
We had an effort recently where one much more experienced dev from our company ran Claude on our oldish codebase for one system, with the goal of transforming it into newer structure, newer libraries etc. while preserving various built in functionalities. Not the first time this guy did such a thing and he is supposed to be an expert.

I took a look at the result and its maybe half of stuff missing completely, rest is cryptic. I know that codebase by heart since I created it. From my 20+ years of experience correcting all this would take way more effort than manual rewrite from scratch by a senior. Suffice to say thats not what upper management wants to hear, llm adoption often became one of their yearly targets to be evaluated against. So we have a hammer and looking for nails to bend and crook.

Suffice to say this effort led nowhere since we have other high priority goals, for now. Smaller things here & there, why not. Bigger efforts, so far sawed-off 2-barrel shotgun loaded with buckshot right into both feet.
by jjmarr | 2026-02-10 08:46:42+00:00
I don't care what people say. I love brutalist architecture. I love the exposed concrete forms. I love the giant concrete turkey in Toronto and plan to one day visit the UK to see the Barbican.

Concrete is strong and imposing and emotional. It feels authoritative and cold. A warm building feels like it has deliberately undermined its own status to feel welcoming and feels fake. A brutalist building doesn't lie. It is a massive concrete edifice containing a large space within.

It also weathers in distinctive ways. The water stains are like seniority, telling me the building has and will last forever. A big glass skyscraper feels replaceable and new, like it's disposable and will be replaced in a few years.

I get a lot of hate for this but one of the benefits of a concrete house is the ability to throw stones.
by greggoB | 2026-02-10 08:47:28+00:00
Because that's how autocratic regimes like the CCP (asian), Belarus (white), Uganda (black) work? As opposed to states like Taiwan (asian), France (white), South Africa (black).

> Hilarious that Europe and the west’s govts are not liked by their people. China’s is

Tell me you're a CCP troll without telling me you're a CCP troll.

China is basically the epitome of non-democratic - the CCP has even gone so far as to point to the messiness traditionally involved in democracy as a justification for why it doesn't work.

Get off your high horse re westerners and debate the topic on its merits. Facts are readily available to this end: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_China
by murderboard | 2026-02-10 08:47:42+00:00
The form-filling piece is smart and clearly solves a real pain point with XFA PDFs. But the strategic risk here isn't technical, it's liability. Immigration forms are high-stakes documents where a wrong answer can trigger a denial, RFE, or worse. SimpleCitizen's $529 isn't just paying for form filling. It's paying for guided logic ("if you answered X, you probably need to also file Y"), error checking against known USCIS rejection patterns, and a company standing behind the output. A free tool with no guidance layer exposes users to silent errors they won't discover until months later at their interview.
The "free alternative" positioning also creates a distribution problem. The people who most need this (first-time filers, non-native English speakers, people who can't afford a lawyer) are the least likely to find a developer's side project on HN or GitHub. SimpleCitizen's real moat isn't the PDF conversion. It's the SEO, the trust signals, and the hand-holding. Competing on price against $529 sounds compelling, but the actual competition is immigration attorneys at $2,000-5,000 and free legal aid clinics. Those are the alternatives your users are actually weighing.
One more operational risk worth flagging: USCIS revises forms regularly and without much warning. The I-130 alone has had multiple revisions in the last few years. Each revision means your 1:1 field mapping breaks and users could submit outdated forms, which USCIS will reject. That's a maintenance commitment that scales with every form you add. Might be worth thinking about how sustainable that is before expanding the form library.
by AmazingTurtle | 2026-02-10 08:47:44+00:00
Location: Germany, Cologne (UTC+1)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Kubernetes, OpenShift, GitOps, Argo CD, Helm, Docker, CI/CD, Azure DevOps, GitLab CI/CD, Terraform, Ansible, Prometheus, Grafana, Observability, PostgreSQL, Neo4j, OIDC, SSO, Entra ID, Cloudflare, AWS, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kafka, Node.js, TypeScript, React, Next.js, Turborepo, Angular, RxJS, JavaScript, Java, Spring Boot, Gradle, C#, PHP, WordPress, Jira, Confluence, JetBrains IDEs, GitHub Copilot, Figma, Linux (Manjaro/Arch)

Résumé/CV: https://turtledev.net/cv

Email: hiring@turtledev.net

---

I'm mostly the devops guy (kubernetes, CI/CD etc) but I also love typescript (backends + react/nextjs). Available March/April 2026 fulltime, 100% remote.
by duggan | 2026-02-10 08:47:56+00:00
Not the person you asked, but my interpretation of “left in the dust” here (not a phrasing I particularly agree with) would be the same way iOS development took off in the 2010s.

There was a land rush to create apps. Basic stuff like the flash light, todo lists, etc, were created and found a huge audience. Development studios were established, people became very successful out of it.

I think the same thing will happen here. There is a first mover advantage. The future is not yet evenly distributed.

You can still start as an iOS developer today, but the opportunity is different.