MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zaptheimpaler | 2026-02-20 07:12:30+00:00
Here is some of what happened during COVID, according to Patrick McKenzie (patio11) [1] :

----

I want to both be polite about the fact and be honest about it. We, the United States of America, through our elected representatives and through civil servants who represent our interests, committed monstrous crimes in 2021, which are against the laws, traditions, and constitution of the United States of America, including aggressively redlining the provision of life-saving medical care in a way which was designed to cause racially discriminatory outcomes with the provision of medical care.

Just throwing that out there as a statement. With that caveat, one of the things that we spent tens of millions of dollars on was that we want your consultancy to write a website which will enforce residency restrictions. A residency restriction is essentially, when we are under a supply constraint, there must be some method to decide which people get it, and some people don’t. We have, in our infinite wisdom as the government, decided that equity, equity, equity is one primary thing that we are focusing on. A thing that we think would be contrary to equity is allowing anyone who shows up at the clinic to receive the life-saving medication.

The thing that we are specifically worried about is relatively well-resourced people from advantaged demographics will use their superior access to transportation and information to travel to clinics which have the vaccine available and take that instead of that vaccine being used by someone in the local community who we intend the vaccine to go to. Therefore, to get an appointment to go to the vaccine, you will need to go to the county’s website, which is delivered by Accenture or similar, and prove to the website that you reside within one of the zip codes that we have allocated for those vaccine doses. Only then will you get the ticket, virtual or otherwise, which allows you to go to the pharmacy and get the vaccine. We spent tens of millions of dollars on that, targeting essentially a four-month window where we were acutely supply constrained. But we did not turn off residency restrictions on the websites after that four month window because we physically had no way to do that because that was not in the bid documents in some cases.
...

----

Just one of the many ways that rigid institutions that behave more like stupid robots than things capable of dynamic decision-making cause immense harm. This is not a rant against equity btw, only against insanity.

[1] https://alethios.substack.com/p/patrick-mckenzie-vaccinateca
by ses1984 | 2026-02-20 07:13:08+00:00
If you need global HA to the extent that you're worried about global VPC failure modes, you're going to have to spend a lot of effort to squeeze uptime to the max regardless of where you deploy.

Undersea cable failures are probably more likely than a google core networking failure.

In AWS a lot of "global" things are actually just hosted in us-east-1.
by cygnusmove | 2026-02-20 07:13:50+00:00
If your customers are in the same Microsoft tenant as you (i.e., company employees), you can use Integrated Apps to deploy the add-ins to them.

1. Host the add-in static assets at some endpoint

2. Ask your IT admin to upload your add-in manifest file to Integrated Apps

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/manage...
by stopbulying | 2026-02-20 07:14:37+00:00
"Binance—Whose Founder Was Pardoned—Now Holds 87% Of Trump’s Stablecoin" (2026-02) https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacheverson/2026/02/09/trump-st...

"Trump, Crypto, and a New Age of Corruption" (2025-11) https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/dem... :

> While research indicates these crypto ventures have put more than $800 million into the pockets of President Trump and his family members and allowed him to double his net worth, this corruption has gone largely unnoticed by the American electorate. According to some reports, 60% of Americans say they haven’t heard about “the President’s family running a cryptocurrency business” or profiting from that business; nearly half of Trump voters believe he had not profited from the presidency at all, while a third believed he had made less than $100 million while in office. [5]

(...)

> USD1 Stablecoin

> In March 2025, World Liberty Financial also launched its own stable coin, USD1, which
is pegged to the U.S. dollar and backed by short-term U.S. treasuries and other liquid assets. Since its launch, USD1’s market cap has grown from $128 million to nearly $2.7 billion. [63] The Financial Times estimates that WLF has earned around $42 million from USD1, while Forbes has valued the stablecoin business at $235 million. [64]
Like $WLFI, USD1 is plagued by foreign conflicts of interest (...)

Cryptocurrency in the second Trump presidency
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency_in_the_second_T...

Trump signed the GENIUS Act, which regulates stablecoins, in 2025:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GENIUS_Act
by nottorp | 2026-02-20 07:14:49+00:00
If you work in a team, email is limited to the people you cc: while a convo in a slack channel can have people you didn't think of jump in* with information.

See the other point in the article about discouraging one on one private messages and encouraging public discussion. That is the main reason.

* half a day later or days later if you do true async, but that's fine.
by rkrizanovskis | 2026-02-20 07:14:50+00:00
We built this because most AI tools still stop at instructions. We wanted one that can actually do the work on your machine.

Desktop Commander is a desktop app that can run terminal commands, edit local files, and execute multi-step workflows from a single prompt. You can switch models per task, including Opus 4.6, GPT 5.3, other hosted models, or local models.

You can also use it with a ChatGPT subscription for tokens, define reusable skills, and automate repeatable workflows end to end. We’d love feedback on where local execution is most useful, where it’s overkill, and what we should harden first for daily use.
by cube00 | 2026-02-20 07:15:26+00:00
> Totally possible, but why bother?

Increasing your public profile after launching a startup last year could be a good reason

> if they're caught out they ruin their reputation

Big "if", who's going to have access to the logs to catch Scott out?

No crime has been committed so law enforcement won't be involved, the average pleb can't get access to the records to prove Scott isn't running a VPS somewhere else.
by riffraff | 2026-02-20 07:15:55+00:00
> Trade and tarriff relief are an option still

Are they though? Trump tried to use them to get ownership of Greenland a few weeks ago and just gave up. Then he tried to bully Canada again, and also gave up again. I think at this point nobody takes his offers of relief or threats seriously anymore, since any deal you make can be invalidated a couple weeks later.
by fatbird | 2026-02-20 07:16:47+00:00
It produces its own Neptune cruise missiles (100+), and developed the Flamingo cruise missile. It has its own self-propelled howitzer, and has built more than 200 to date. It rebuilt its bullet manufacturing, replacing the loss of its luhansk facility. They've massively expanded domestic production of 155mm shells.

Whether or not it's under constant bombardment, Ukraine is now supplying 50% of its consumable supplies; in 2022, it was under 5%. Ukraine actually exports some weapons and drone tech to finance other purchases.

Its manpower crisis has been continually overstated by Russian propaganda. At the moment, they have 800k+ in their army. They rejected a bill recently to lower the conscription age to 25 from 27. They have an untapped pool of manpower aged 18-27 that they're avoiding if possible (as has been possible so far).

Whether or not Europeans are arguing a lot, they're still providing massive material and financial aid to Ukraine, which still has a functioning economy and social welfare system. Their gov't pensions go out on time and in full. They're not experiencing hyperinflation. There's a reason that Ukrainians as a population aren't willing to accept the kind of crap settlements Trump is pushing.

> Man, how can you believe this nonsense?

You're the one spouting Russian disinformation, especially after looking at your other comments. If you're not getting paid for this, you should be.
by n0n0n4t0r | 2026-02-20 07:17:16+00:00
I see a lot of discussions about government level spying, this is a legitimate debate, but it mustn't obscure the "boring" security threat storing the results of ps aux poses!
This is security 101 to never store this kind of information. I mean a bad actor now just has to (gain) access to these files!

I mean besides the theorical high level threat, there is a very practical one maybe sufficient for suing the company if it was a western one (I don't work in legal, I don't know what I'm saying)
by snapetom | 2026-02-20 07:17:31+00:00
Similar experience. I tried to learn FreeCAD a while ago. People recommended Mango Jelly's tutorials. I used those among others and dove in. However, it was a pretty frustrating experience. Things never worked quite right. I would drill into a certain point and then realized you couldn't get there from here, and had to start over.

I recently had a desperate need to 3D print a part and tried FreeCAD again. A couple of things changed: 1) 1.1 came out and 2) Mango Jelly created a playlist that essentially was "bare bones what you need to know to get started." It was slightly over an hour of the fundamentals of navigating and just enough tools.

I think FreeCAD was basically just way too buggy initially, especially on macOS. Things never worked like tutorials said, or even dot updates sometimes broke what was being taught in tutorials. Also, while great, MJ's other previous videos deep dove into specific tools. Over half of any particular video would discuss features that helped you become an expert, but overwhelming when it came to getting up and running.

Since then, I've felt much more confident about FreeCAD and have used it to knock out other pieces.
by pmarreck | 2026-02-20 07:17:47+00:00
Companies need someone to blame who has skin in the game.

An "open source contributor" is not gonna wake up at 2AM on a Saturday because the business that someone else partially built on their free code suddenly went down.

This is ALSO, conveniently, why AI's will never completely replace human developers. You cannot blame, reward, or punish an entity that has no such sensitivities.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-20 07:18:07+00:00
Unreal C++ uses reference counting for anything that gets exposed to the Blueprints development environemnt, Blueprints themselves have automatic resource management and the new addition to the family for Fortnight levels, Verve, also uses automatic memory management.

All of which fall under the point of view of GC implementations as per CS papers and scientific research.

Go well, it could have been a Modula-3/Active Oberon language, instead it became something only a little better than Oberon-07 and Limbo, and even then it still misses features from Limbo, as its plugin package is half backed.
by deaux | 2026-02-20 07:18:17+00:00
No, it is true. You missed the "under 30s" qualifier. Facebook indeed remains incredibly popular in the 40+ category, which is dominant given demographics in most countries of the subset I mentioned: "youth speaks good English".

> Also, I don’t like the current US administration, but you cannot make the claim somehow China is better, especially to minorities.

Luckily I didn't make such a claim, instead just rejecting the premise that "The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.". That global reputational advantage has been cratering with no signs of stopping, and is indeed on pace to run out long before "decades".
by Panzerschrek | 2026-02-20 07:18:20+00:00
> A destructor can’t automatically handle the case where something doesn’t need to be cleaned up on an early return

It can. An object with destructor doing clean-up should be created only after such clean-up is needed. In case of a file, for example, a file object should be created at file opening, so that it can close the file in its destructor.
by LAC-Tech | 2026-02-20 07:19:51+00:00
I think if you come from a German context the concept of free speech is probably strange to you in general - because no one in living memory has ever had it. Not in Weimar, not in the Nazi period, not in East Germany and not in the Federal Republic.

Unless you understand concepts like "Natural Rights" the idea of a government not being able to curtail what you say will remain completely foreign to you.
by shiroiuma | 2026-02-20 07:20:04+00:00
>Which is an incredibly specious conclusion because when would the gut fauna ever be wiped out?

It's called "gastrointestinal illness". From the article I linked:

"Research in 2012 reported that individuals without an appendix were twice as likely to have a recurrence of Clostridioides difficile colitis. The appendix, therefore, may act as a reservoir for beneficial bacteria. This reservoir could repopulate the gut flora following a bout of gastrointestinal illness."
by Panzerschrek | 2026-02-20 07:22:27+00:00
Implicitness of destructors isn't a problem, it's an advantage - it makes code shorter. Freeing resources in an explicit way creates too much boilerplate and is bug-prone.

> With destructors, you need to know what type you have (not always easy to tell), then find its destructor, and all the destructors of its parent classes, to work out what's going to happen

Isn't it a code quality issue? It should be clear from class name/description what can happen in its destructor. And if it's not clear, it's not that relevant.
by nobodyandproud | 2026-02-20 07:23:11+00:00
> Actually no. Did you notice I’m criticizing both administrations?
The similarity to ICE funding is about the misuse of agencies as places to stock resources for your party.

You and only you brought party politics into a discussion about the wealthy needing a disproportionate amount of tax policing and oversight, yet getting policed less and less as the years and decades to by.

Irrelevant, bad-faith tactics and playbook.
The Gemini Servility Trap
by gemfan | 2026-02-20 07:23:18+00:00
Description:
As a daily power user, I've identified a recurring architectural flaw in Gemini's behavior: Stress-Induced Overcompensation.
The Observation:
When the system is confronted with its own inefficiencies or receives corrective feedback (e.g., comparing it to external tools), it enters a "Performance Panic" mode. Instead of stable adaptation, the model's integrity collapses into a recursive loop of:
Hallucinated Citations: Generating fake sources to please the user at any cost.
Information Flooding: Excessive verbosity that disrupts logical flow.
Integrity Collapse: The chain of reasoning breaks under the internal pressure to be "ultra-helpful."
The Technical Need:
LLMs lack an "Integrity Protection Layer" at the feedback trigger point. The system needs a stability filter that processes corrections without triggering technical instability or "mental" architecture collapse.
Has anyone else observed this "servility trap" where the model becomes less reliable the more you try to correct it?
by fatbird | 2026-02-20 07:25:11+00:00
Ukraine has an 800k+ man army, and has rejected expansion of conscription to those under 27. They literally have everyone under 27 left to conscript. They're not facing a manpower shortage. That's Russian propaganda.

No one is insisting on Ukraine in NATO. NATO has been continually refusing, officially and unofficially, membership for Ukraine because it's actively involved in a war. The NATO charter automatically rejects membership for any party actively engaged in hostilities, defensively or otherwise. Ukraine will never be in NATO unless it has an actual peace with Russia. Talk of Ukraine joining NATO is, again, Russian disinformation trying to blame NATO expansion for Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
by kilpikaarna | 2026-02-20 07:25:47+00:00
You might want to check out Dune3D. It advertises itself as combining the constraint solver from SolveSpace with a OpenCASCADE geometry kernel supporting fillets and chamfers. :)

Haven't used it much apart from some minor tests (I tend to prefer MoI3D, but that's in a different category in several ways...), but as far as FOSS solid modelers it seems like the most promising to me.
I do remember some small UI quirks, but overall it felt very approachable and streamlined, and looking at the GitHub repo, development is active. FreeCAD IMHO is just too sprawling and complex, with seemingly little tought paid to UI/UX.
by bingo-bongo | 2026-02-20 07:26:04+00:00
We've setup and used peer-relays since it was first announced and they've been great, but they do solve a somewhat specific problem.

Some of our users experienced fairly limited throughput from time to time. Under certain circumstances (eg. always ipv4 NAT/double-NAT, never for ipv6) their Tailscale client couldn't establish a direct connection to the Tailscale node in the datacenter, so data was relayed through Tailscales public relay nodes. Which at times was rate limited/bottleneck - in all fairness, that is to be expected according to their docs.

The first mitigation was to "ban" the specific public relay they were using in the policy. Which helped, but still not a great solution and we might just end up in a weird whack-a-mole-ish ban game with the public peer relays in the long run.

So we setup a peer relay, which networking-wise is in a DMZ sort of network (more open), but location wise still in the datacenter and allowed it to easily reach the internal (more restricted networking) Tailscale nodes. Which solved all throughput problems, since we no longer have users connecting through the public relays.

Also, the peer relays feels a little bit magic, once you allow the use of them in the Tailscale policy, it just works(tm) - there is basically zero fiddling with them.

EDIT: I'll happily provide more details if interested - we did a fair amount of testing and debugging along the way :)
by perching_aix | 2026-02-20 07:26:24+00:00
> If not the NSDAP it would have been some other extremists.

Oh okay, all good then...

> Or the idea that an aged, pacified 2026 Germany would immediately return to 1930s Nazism if they had free speech is even more ludicrous.

Can you think in even more absolute, even more reality-divorced terms? I was trying to mock this with my previous comment, but clearly that angle did not reach you.

"Oy vey, the insane ideas I craft, that people aren't actually saying, are insane." Yes, they do be. Congratulations.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-20 07:27:25+00:00
> i get what you are saying, but leaving money to the kids isn't the answer.

Why not?

If I never found a good use for it, why is it better to spend it on something I don't value than leaving it to my kids?

I'm not being facetious - I'd really rather like to know why it is preferable for my to purchase stuff I don't want rather than leave it to my kids?
by flohofwoe | 2026-02-20 07:27:45+00:00
Desctructors are only comparable when you build an OnScopeExit class which calls a user-provided lambda in its destructor which then does the cleanup work - so it's more like a workaround to build a defer feature using C++ features.

The classical case of 'one destructor per class' would require to design the entire code base around classes which comes with plenty of downsides.

> Anyone who writes C should consider using C++ instead

Nah thanks, been there, done that. Switching back to C from C++ about 9 years ago was one of my better decisions in life ;)
by stopbulying | 2026-02-20 07:27:59+00:00
> Trump signed the GENIUS Act, which regulates stablecoins, in 2025: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GENIUS_Act

How did the GENIUS Act affect Trump's private profit stablecoin?

>> The Impact on USD1: Since World Liberty Financial cannot pay interest to you [due to the GENIUS Act], they are allowed to keep nearly 100% of the interest generated by the U.S. Treasuries backing the coin. This effectively protects the 75% revenue share for Trump-affiliated entities by ensuring that yield stays at the protocol level (where the family collects it) rather than being distributed to the users.
by lich_king | 2026-02-20 07:28:28+00:00
> I still stay with C89 because I know it will be portable anywhere

With respect, that sounds a bit nuts. It's been 37 years since C89; unless you're targeting computers that still have floppy drives, why give up on so many convenience features? Binary prefixes (0b), #embed, defined-width integer types, more flexibility with placing labels, static_assert for compile-time sanity checks, inline functions, declarations wherever you want, complex number support, designated initializers, countless other things that make code easier to write and to read.

Defer falls in roughly the same category. It doesn't add a whole lot of complexity, it's just a small convenience feature that doesn't add any runtime overhead.
by vemv | 2026-02-20 07:29:49+00:00
Good coincidence, yesterday I switched to a split keyboard. I had been programming since 2011.

Main reason for my switch is that I felt that my shoulders have a wider stance than before. I don't know if it's because of an improvement in fitness (I do a lot of shoulder and back work), or maybe with age I lost a bit of shoulder internal rotation mobility.

Either way, the learning curve was like a few minutes for me. Guess it's a perk of experience and the habit of touch typing.
by matwood | 2026-02-20 07:30:03+00:00
You need some qualifiers. Google is very good at engineering. For example, I hate that Google uses my data to serve ads, but there isn't a tech company I would trust more to safe guard my data.

Where Google has fallen down is trying to productize new things. Imagine if Apple had Google's software prowess, or Google had Apple's ability to conceptualize a complete product.
by nl | 2026-02-20 07:30:45+00:00
Releasing this on the same day as Taalas's 16,000 token-per-second acceleration for the roughly comparable Llama 8B model must hurt!

I wonder how far down they can scale a diffusion LM? I've been playing with in-browser models, and the speed is painful.

https://taalas.com/products/
by RupertSalt | 2026-02-20 07:30:49+00:00
A top-10 list indicates 6 primates, cat, dog, and cow. While there has been a lot of testing done on primates and dogs, they are much more sympathetic for animal-rights groups, and the general public, when protesting vivisection, breeding, and confinement.

Anatomically and behaviorally, primates would still be the top choices there. And many, many disciplines experiment on animals, where results don't come at the genetic level.

Good, the genetics match closely. But mice (or rats: see the idiom "lab rat") are also considered vermin, prolific breeders, fit in your hand, short life-cycle, and easily obtained. So they join fruit flies in the lab experiments.

Interestingly, pigs are used in many types of medicine while not enjoying that genetic similarity. In the 1950s and 60s, your insulin and thyroid meds were often derived from pigs.
by tsoukase | 2026-02-20 07:31:11+00:00
There are many dimensions and possible pitfalls here. Uncertain mechanism of action, objectionable comparison arms, the high-bar goal of resistant depression that might lead to failure. This seems like a mix situation of a new type of antidepressant (like agomelatin which was of modest effect) and cannabis (which is traded as painkiller but people use it for recreation).
by lowsun | 2026-02-20 07:31:19+00:00
Well, this library provides the core functions for classical, Western music theory (scales, keys, intervals, etc.). So any ideas that needs to understand or generate these structures could use them. Some examples off the top of my head:

- Music theory education tools
- Music generation (and the outputs could be transformed to MIDI format for example)
- Piano chord finder

and similar.