MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dluxem | 2026-02-23 15:33:39+00:00
Escrow used to be something we would see in large Enterprise software contracts. We would need to place the "gold" build of the software and associated source code on CD (or tape, depending on the year) and ship it to a third-party escrow service. Should our company go out of business, now former-customers could access the source through the escrow.

It's kind of crazy to think about the process actually working though. The likelihood of a customer being able to recreate the build environment properly and produce a working release of our quite complex software seems low. It would probably be cheaper to putting that effort in to ripping out the solution then trying to patch some bug in a defunct vendor's solution.
by Elberonian | 2026-02-23 15:33:44+00:00
If it’s useful, happy to give HN folks 6 months free. You should automatically go into a free trial at sign up but the code ARCFRIEND will also work to give you 6 months free beyond that.

You do need to create an account with email, but no credit card needed.

Feedback welcome, especially on what’s confusing or missing. My gut right now is that it still feels a little too complicated?
by hamburglar | 2026-02-23 15:33:51+00:00
Read my second paragraph.

It’s a matter of giving the system shims instead of direct access to “write” ops. Those shims have controls in place. Their only job is to examine the context and decide whether the (email|purchase|etx) is acceptable, either by static rules, human intervention, or, if you’re really getting spicy. separate-llm-model-that-isn’t-polluted-by-untrusted-data.

Edit: I actually wrote such a thing over the weekend as a toy PoC. It uses the LLM to generate a list of proposed operations, then you use a separate tool to iterate though them and approve/reject/skip each one. The only thing the LLM can do is suggest things from a modest set of capabilities with a fairly locked-down schema. Even if I were to automate the approvals, it’s far from able to run amok.
by rogerrogerr | 2026-02-23 15:33:52+00:00
The problem is this is only true for values of "reasonable" that are "unlikely to be viewed in a negative light by my government, job, or family; either now or at any time in the future". The chilling effect is insane. There was a time in living memory when saying "women should be able to vote" was not a popular thing.

I mean, this is _literally the only thing needed_ for the Trump admin to tie real names to people criticizing $whatever. Does anyone want that? Replace "Trump" with "Biden", "AOC", "Newsom", etc. if they're the ones you disagree with.
by iamnothere | 2026-02-23 15:33:53+00:00
There are still a few information dense English language sites out there, but they’re rarer. Honorable mentions:

- https://based.cooking/ (or the more updated fork https://publicdomainrecipes.com/)

- https://ooh.directory/

- https://gwern.net/

- https://www.metafilter.com/

- HN :)

(These are primarily text and lack the occasional color pop of the Japanese style, but I still admire the density and efficiency.)
by emi2k01 | 2026-02-23 15:34:53+00:00
I spent this weekend writing a terminal emulator to run `claude` on it and generate an API around the TUI.

This is the equivalent of not being able to use X's API and using a browser to scrape it instead.

It's pretty cool what you can do once you emulate the terminal.

I only made it work with Claude Code but this approach can easily be adapted to Gemini CLI
by mothballed | 2026-02-23 15:34:55+00:00
Even if the problem is perfectly solved to anonymize the ID linked to the age, you still have the issue that you need an ID to exercise your first amendment right. 1A applies to all people, not just citizens, and it's considered racist in a large part of the US to force someone to possess an ID to prove you are a citizen (to vote) let alone a person (who is >= 18y/o) w/ 1A rights.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-02-23 15:35:13+00:00
Neat, looks like ActivityPub based. My only nitpick is the website and app look a little too much like Tik Tok, they might want to tweak it to not be a blatant rip off, I could see Tik Tok having a valid lawsuit due to how insanely close it looks. I could see myself getting confused as to which site I'm on if I had this open in a browser, which is probably enough for a valid lawsuit.
by dfxm12 | 2026-02-23 15:35:23+00:00
Why do you fear this? Did you consider discussing this with some of the congregation to know for sure?

I don't mean to pick on you personally, but your comment and the parent comment (among others here) both project feelings across wide groups of people in a hasty generalization. Their feelings could be easily confirmed with human connection. I think the article makes it clear the Pope charges priests with knowing their community. This is good advice for all of us though! So, not just you, but you, the parent poster, anyone else, if you have these fears, if you don't like your priest's homily, please, talk to the proper people about them instead of (or at least in addition to) complaining online to others! This is way outside our sphere of influence.
by armchairhacker | 2026-02-23 15:36:22+00:00
I think opt-in ID is great. Services like Discord can require ID because they are private services*. Furthermore, I think that in the future, a majority of people will stay on services with some form of verification, because the anonymous internet is noisy and scary.

The underlying internet should remain anonymous. People should remain able to communicate anonymously with consenting parties, send private DMs and create private group chats, and create their own service with their own form of identity verification.

* All big services are unlikely to require ID without laws, because any that does not will get refugees, or if all big services collaborate, a new service will get all refugees.
by phoronixrly | 2026-02-23 15:36:30+00:00
> When you’re older and have children—especially preteens and teenagers—you want those barriers up, because you’ve seen just how fucked up some children can get after overexposure to unhealthy materials.

You mean that you shirk your responsibility to teach your child how to protect themself on the Internet, and instead trust the faceless corp to limit their access at the cost of everyone's privacy? How does this make sense...
by coffeefirst | 2026-02-23 15:36:32+00:00
There’s some nuance here.

Realizing that much of the internet is totally toxic to children now and should have a means of keeping them out is distinct from agreeing to upload ID to everything.

A better implementation would be to have a device/login level parental control setting that passed age restriction signals via browsers and App Stores. This is both a simpler design and privacy friendly.
by adastra22 | 2026-02-23 15:37:00+00:00
I think it is comparable to C#, at least C# a decade or more ago. Back then it was a great language for developing GUI applications on Windows, Unity games, and that's about it. Now there's a blossoming community of cross-platform frameworks, but only because Microsoft invested in making those first-class. Apple hasn't been putting that effort into Swift.
by abeppu | 2026-02-23 15:37:17+00:00
I don't know what I'm talking about, but isn't the wavelength of the laser pretty limiting to the idea of just slapping a Bayer color filter on? Like, if the laser is IR (partly so they're not visually disrupting all the humans around them), the signal you get back doesn't the visual spectrum sections that you'd need to get RGB right?
by tlogan | 2026-02-23 15:37:36+00:00
The industry clearly prefers a system in which using the internet requires full identification. There are many powerful interests that support this model:

- Governments benefit from easier monitoring and enforcement.

- The advertising industry prefers verified identities for better targeting.

- Social media companies gain more reliable data and engagement.

- Online shopping companies can reduce fraud and increase tracking.

- Many SaaS companies would also welcome stronger identity verification.

In short, anonymity is not very profitable, and governments often favor identification because it increases oversight and control.

Of course, this leads to political debate. Some point out that voting often does not require ID, while accessing online services does. The usual argument is that voting is a constitutional right. However, one could argue that access to the internet has become a fundamental part of modern life as well. It may not be explicitly written into the Constitution, but in practice it functions as an essential right in today’s society.
by everdrive | 2026-02-23 15:37:38+00:00
Completely agree. The internet works differently than how people want it to, and filtering services are notoriously easy to bypass. Even if these age-verification laws passed with resounding scope and support, what would stop anyone from merely hosting porn in Romania or some country that didn't care about US age-verification laws. The leads to run down would be legion. I think you could seriously degrade the porn industry (which I wouldn't necessarily mind) but it would be more or less impossible to prevent unauthorized internet users from accessing pornography. And of course that's the say nothing of the blast radius that would come with age-verification becoming entrenched on the internet.
by _flux | 2026-02-23 15:37:52+00:00
> The problem with LLM for me is that it is now possible to write anything using only assembly. While technically possible, who can possibly read and understand the mountain of code that it is going to generate?

As a very practical problem the assembly would consume the context window like no other. And another is having some static guardrails; sometimes LLMs make mistakes, and without guard rails it debugging some of them becomes quite a big workload.

So to keep things efficient, an LLM would first need to create its own programming language. I think we'll actually see some proposals for a token-effective language that has good abstraction abilities for this exact use.
by tshaddox | 2026-02-23 15:38:03+00:00
> While the nation is known abroad for minimalist lifestyles, their websites are oddly maximalist.

I’m not aware of this stereotype of Japanese minimalism. I guess there’s Marie Kondo, and some Japanese high-end dining tends towards minimalism. But then there’s manga, anime, kawaii, Nintendo, Sega, Miyazaki, etc., a lot of which is closer to maximalism than minimalism.
by billnad | 2026-02-23 15:38:11+00:00
Back when I was first learning about Tech (early 2000's), I installed a mail server at home and configured it all wrong so I gave up on it. A few days later I noticed that my drive was getting full and didn't know why. This is how I learned about a honeypot, I had left it running, someone had used it for sending spam but since I screwed up the setup all the spam was stuck on my computer with nowhere to route out.

Last time I setup a mail server
by hansmayer | 2026-02-23 15:38:20+00:00
> DRAM is priced based on supply and demand, like every other market.

Please don't explain it away like that - you are referring to the theoretical "ideal" market where a bunch of small companies compete with low margins to the benefit of the wider customer base. This is not what is happening. We have a couple of intrinsically worthless, LLM-whale companies, working literally to swallow and entshittify literally everything in their weird transhumanist/accelerationist/weirdo way. To add to the insult, the whole creation of artificial scarcity is almost a political construct, paid for with "monopoly-the-game-money" that these companies DO NOT EARN but instead BORROW based on vague and dishonest promises of achieving a "Country of PhDs in a datacenter"/"Pocket PhDs"/"AGI by 2025" (oops, now apparently by 2028 according to the OpenAI CEO). In their weird vision, as humans we should be merely cattle to be managed, not independent spirits with interest and aspirations. That ghoul Karpathy speaks about "ghost in the machine", overlooking the magnificence of the already existing "ghost in the machine" in the form of human beings. We should not have to swallow the increasingly crappier future these folks are insisting on pushing on all of us.
by opcode81 | 2026-02-23 15:38:30+00:00
@pmarreck, Serena developer here. We invite you to contribute to Serena in order to make it better. Serena is free & open-source, and it already robustly addresses the key issues preventing coding agents from being truly efficient even in complex software development projects (while being highly configurable).

We don't believe CLI is the way to go though, because advanced code intelligence simply cannot be spawned on the fly and thus benefits from a stateful process (such as a language server or an IDE instance).
by alabhyajindal | 2026-02-23 15:38:43+00:00
From their post on Twitter in 2024 when they adopted Swift, with a comment on Rust.

My general thoughts on Rust:

- Excellent for short-lived programs that transform input A to output B

- Clunky for long-lived programs that maintain large complex object graphs

- Really impressive ecosystem

- Toxic community

https://xcancel.com/awesomekling/status/1822241531501162806
by stetrain | 2026-02-23 15:38:44+00:00
They said "Available Today" on January 4th but have said actually customer deliveries are planned for April.

> “The first customer deliveries will probably take place in April. There are production-related issues, getting subcontractors involved. Starting production. A lot depends on the goods and officials.”

Translated from: https://web.archive.org/web/20260204130446/https://www.kaupp...
by abustamam | 2026-02-23 15:38:47+00:00
As mentioned in my other comment [1]

On all settings except timer, my dryer is pretty much useless. I set it to dry my bedsheets and towels with bulky item preset, max dry (who chooses minimum dry for anything?) and it'll say it'll take 1h30m, ends up taking 30 minutes, and everything is still wet, despite it having a "dryness sensor"

I've just started using the timer function on the dryer and it's been mostly accurate, plus or minus a few minutes perhaps.

Fortunately, we usually just throw clothes in the dryer before bed, so we don't need a system to remind us when it's done — if it's not done by morning time then we probably need a new dryer!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47123600
by TimPC | 2026-02-23 15:38:55+00:00
Big tech likes this because there are a lot more face recognition technologies in the wild in real life and being able to connect all real life data to online data is quite valuable. It's also quite possibly the largest training set ever for face recognition if ids are stored and given how ids and images are sold across many companies it seems very high probability that some company will retain the data rather than delete after use.
by netbsdusers | 2026-02-23 15:39:00+00:00
It's rather a bit more BSD than merely having a "C API that resembles BSD" or a "BSD userland".

https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/tree/main/bsd

You can find there the better part of a whole BSD kernel, including the fundamental datastructures like proc, tty, vnode, and user.

The point of departure is 4.4BSD-Lite2. The majority of the core of the BSD kernel carries the relevant notices for that.
Show HN: MicroGPT-C – C99 GPT for Edge Training and Tiny Model Pipelines
by Ajay__soni | 2026-02-23 15:39:21+00:00
TL;DR: Pure C99 GPT-2 engine, zero dependencies. Sub-1M-parameter “organelles” coordinate via a Planner-Worker-Judge pipeline and beat random opponents up to 91 % on logic games, all on CPU.

I’m a C/C++ architect focused on low-latency systems. Last year, I tried building agentic pipelines with SLMs/LLMs and hit the usual wall: latency and orchestration overhead killed real-time edge use cases.

Initial research video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-rs9VZ1-0I

So I asked: how far can you push specialised logic at <1M parameters with nothing but local CPU?

MicroGPT-C is a from-scratch C99 port of Karpathy’s microgpt.py (https://gist.github.com/karpathy/8627fe009c40f57531cb1836010...). Zero deps, single-header, localised KV cache. Speed was never the goal (Andrej’s nanoGPT and llm.c already showed what’s possible). The real experiment was orchestration.

Organelle Pipeline Architecture (OPA): Agile-style Planners, Workers and Judges talking through tiny structured strings (board=XO_|valid=1,3) parsed by a safety-gated stack VM (3.7–5.8M ops/s). A 64K model needed 181 manual interventions; a 460K model trained on those traces internalised everything and needed zero.

Beyond the research: fully auditable AI, great for education (~3k lines of readable C), rapid prototyping, and embedded.

Personal itch: fraud/risk engines. I want agents that hunt “unknown-unknowns” in a sandbox where every decision is inspectable.

Happy to talk implementation, the 97 tests, 22 benchmarks, or anything else. FAQ: https://github.com/enjector/microgpt-c/blob/main/FAQ.md

Quick try (macOS/Linux/Windows):
git clone https://github.com/enjector/microgpt-c && cd microgpt-c
mkdir build && cd build && cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release && cmake --build .
./connect4_demo # 460K params, ~21 min train, 88% win rate vs random

Performance (Apple M2 Max):
• 4.2K params names: 685k tok/s train, 110k tok/s infer
• 841K Shakespeare char: 28k / 16k tok/s
• 510K Shakespeare word: 12.5k / 40k tok/s

Full leaderboard (11 games), market-regime experiment (57% holdout = 2.8× baseline), and the book PDF:
https://github.com/enjector/microgpt-c/blob/main/docs/book/M...
GitHub: https://github.com/enjector/microgpt-c
by falcor84 | 2026-02-23 15:39:24+00:00
I'm sorry if you don't like pedantry, but this is what I'm in HN for.

To be clear, I definitely didn't mean to imply that every coin in history is worth a thousand dollars, and suggesting that this is what I meant is clearly not the "strongest plausible interpretation"[0] of my message. I was referring specifically to the Florin/Gulden/Guilder coins being used across Europe in Martin Luther's time, which contained about 3.5g gold, which at today's gold price would be worth over $500 just as bullion, but it was apparently worth about twice that in terms of purchasing power. From my searches, it seems that the poorest of the poor would need to pay a quarter of a coin annually, the typical commoner would pay 1 per year, and merchants/middle-class would pay 3 or more per year, to eliminate/reduce their afterlife punishment.

You can argue that my focus on indulgences is not relevant for some reason, and I'd be happy to discuss other examples of expectations of monetary payments to the church, but would appreciate if you refrain from accusing me of lying.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] https://www.biblelightinfo.com/instruc.htm

[2] https://famous-trials.com/luther/295-indulgences
by giancarlostoro | 2026-02-23 15:39:27+00:00
I don't support ID for internet use, only for adult content specifically. There's things on Discord that would shock you to your core if you saw some of it, I don't think children should be blindly exposed to any of it. Specifically porn. Tumblr almost got kicked out of the app store over porn, they went the route of banning it and killing what to me felt like a dying social media platform as things stood.

Do you think strip clubs and bars should stop IDing people at the door? I don't. Why should porn sites be any different?
by otterley | 2026-02-23 15:39:39+00:00
Yes, in exactly the same way that my dad would want me to only use SawStop table saws so that I don't lose a finger like he did.

As for "freedoms," you're not free to vote or drink alcohol below a certain age. And before the internet, minors couldn't purchase pornography, either. Some people perceive this change as a return to normal, not an egregious destruction of freedom.
by Krishnaa_ | 2026-02-23 15:39:52+00:00
Data source: I scraped it directly from YC's public API. If you go to the YC company directory (ycombinator.com/companies) and inspect the network tab, you'll see it hits an Algolia search endpoint. That gives you structured JSON for every company: name, batch, one-liner, tags, industry, team size, location, etc. I pulled all companies from the last 5 batches (W25 through W26), which gave me 793 companies.

For founder bios, I scraped the individual company pages on YC's site, each one lists the founders with short bios. That gave me 1,625 founder profiles to work with.

Analysis: A mix of things, all in Python:

-> Basic aggregations (counts by industry, tag, batch, geography)

-> Trend analysis across batches (what's rising/falling)

-> NLP clustering (TF-IDF + KMeans on company descriptions to find hidden themes)
Cosine similarity between company descriptions to find competitive overlap ("crowding")

-> Cross-correlations between features (is_ai × is_b2b, founder count × hiring, etc.)

-> Founder bio keyword extraction to map backgrounds (ex-FAANG, PhD, repeat YC, etc.)

-> A simple heuristic classifier for the AI wrapper vs deep tech breakdown

Nothing fancy ML-wise — mostly pandas, scikit-learn, and some regex.

Built in less than 30 mins using Claude.
by alex201 | 2026-02-23 15:40:18+00:00
I buy the emotional appeal of “please let the UFO show up and dissolve all our problems.” But even if non human intelligence is real (it’s not impossible), turning that into “doom” is mostly a choice: it offloads agency and absolves us from the seat.

To me 'boredom' is the sneakier driver :) A lot of “I want it to be aliens” reads less like evidence-following and more like novelty-hunger: reality feels stale, so we reach for a plot twist big enough to make everything mean something again. That impulse is exciting, but it’s also how you end up treating catastrophe (or salvation) as entertainment instead of responsibility.

The world is boring, and you are responsible. Live with it.
by jmount | 2026-02-23 15:40:21+00:00
This is an important point. Thank you.

Games like backgammon (that have betting and the doubling cube to continue), Go (which is calculated in stones), and bridge (again having points) have more natural intermediate scoring systems than chess.

In my opinion the "winner takes all" aspect of chess is similar to what makes analyzing voting systems difficult. In a non game context: Aspnes, Beigel, Furst, and Rudich had some amazing work on how all or nothing calculation really changes things: https://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/aspnes/papers/stoc91voting.pdf .
by co_king_5 | 2026-02-23 15:40:43+00:00
> Replace "Trump" with "Biden", "AOC", "Newsom", etc. if they're the ones you disagree with.

Stop trying to reason with fascists.

Everyone in the world knows that the Democrats you named are too ideologically aligned with right-wing hatred to ever leverage the repressive power of the state apparatus in the same way Republicans do.
by thisislife2 | 2026-02-23 15:41:11+00:00
Yeah, it's entertaining but surely not the "best". In the Fantasy genre I enjoyed The Expanse series ( https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=the+expanse&ref=nav_sb_no... - the TV series is a good adaptation too, but incomplete) and the The Queen's Thief series ( https://www.goodreads.com/series/43514-the-queen-s-thief ) more.
by gitbit-org | 2026-02-23 15:41:18+00:00
I never share my scripts, ha-ha. I always post the code in Microsoft Teams to let my colleagues figure it out. Most of the time, my code is such a mess that I run it in parts and not the script as a whole. So I might get all the users. Then I verify that the user data looks correct. Then I'll check a property on the users to make sure it's there and makes sense. Then I run the code that actually makes the change.
by jonstaab | 2026-02-23 15:41:35+00:00
Why is no one talking about using zero knowledge proofs for solving this? Instead of every platform verifying all its users itself (and storing PII on its own servers), a small number of providers could expose an API which provides proof of verification. I'm not sure if some kind of machine vision algorithm could be used in combination with zero-knowledge technology to prevent even that party from storing original documents, but I don't see why not. The companies implementing these measures really seem to be just phoning it in from a privacy perspective.