MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ZeroCooly | 2026-02-27 18:30:40+00:00
Just recalling from memory, Linus Torvalds wasn't making a free and open source kernel at first. He was making a kernel yes, but he attended a Richard Stallman speech where Stallman introduced GNU and expressed that he needed a kernel cause AT&T was cracking down on Unix clones. And Linus was moved by that enough to change gears and renamed the project to Linus Unix aka Linux. Anyone who remembers better or has sources, correct me below, I'm writing from memory. My point is though that Linus wasn't originally intending to make a free and open source kernel.
by ericb | 2026-02-27 18:31:01+00:00
> Materialism is the outlier here, not the default, and it has never explained how subjective experience arises from physical processes.

Being an outlier doesn't make it wrong.

> Materialism is the outlier here, not the default, and it has never explained how subjective experience arises from physical processes.

It's a pattern. The same way letters arise out of pixels on your screen.

From the screen's perspective, there are no letters, only pixels.
It doesn't mean there is a "pixel soul."
Show HN: VS Code tool that sends UDP on task success or failure
by sdrshnptl | 2026-02-27 18:32:03+00:00
Hi HN!

I’m sharing a simple but useful VS Code extension I built:
https://github.com/sdrshnptl/notifybuildresult

It broadcasts UDP messages whenever VS Code tasks complete (success or failure), so you can easily trigger external hardware or systems — like RGB LEDs, displays, IoT devices, dashboards, or automation workflows — based on build status.

Key features:
- Sends UDP broadcasts when tasks finish
- Works with custom task filters and message templates
- Offers status bar feedback and a history of broadcasts
- Includes Python/Node/ESP32 examples for receivers
- Configurable broadcast address and port (default 10203)

Use cases:
- Physical build-status lights
- Office / home IoT indicators
- Custom dashboards or CI signals
- Robotics or lab integrations

I’d love feedback on additional protocols (MQTT/WebSocket), security considerations, and ideas for broader dev integrations.

Thanks!
sdrshnptl
Show HN: Handoff-md – One command to generate portable AI context from any repo
by guvencem | 2026-02-27 18:32:18+00:00
Every time you switch AI models mid-project, the new model starts from zero. It doesn't know your stack, your conventions, or what you were working on five minutes ago.

I built handoff-md to fix this. It's a CLI tool that analyzes your git repo and generates a single HANDOFF.md file. Paste it into any AI model and it instantly understands your project.

What it does:

- Parses git history (last 20 commits, branches, uncommitted changes)
- Detects your stack (framework, ORM, DB, auth, deploy, test runner)
- Reads naming conventions, folder structure, API patterns
- Picks up existing AI config files (CLAUDE.md, .cursorrules, AGENTS.md)
- Outputs a single markdown file, around 3000 tokens

Usage: npx handoff-md

No config, no API keys, no dependencies beyond Node.js and git. Works with Claude, GPT, Gemini, Codex, local models, anything that reads markdown.

There's an open issue in Claude Code (#11455) requesting exactly this. Cursor, Windsurf, and Copilot don't have it either. So I built it as an open source CLI that works everywhere.

Built with TypeScript. MIT licensed. Feedback welcome.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-27 18:32:20+00:00
Classes and more importantly practices get watered down to accommodate them. The situation gradually looks less like university of the 1950s and more like highschool.

Loans that can't be discharged removes lender hesitancy thus removes some degree of downward price pressure from the market. Institutions then have an incentive to capture this money due to the sheer quantity of it - ie not to let marginal students wash out. Hence the changes.

They even start attempting to attract based on amenities rather than prices. I won't belabor the subject. Others have written about it in incredible detail over the past several decades.

> What do you propose people who are 18 - 22 or so do to figure out what they want to do with the rest of their lives?

I don't know but bending what were once rigorous academic programs to accommodate them seems like the wrong answer to me. Do these people see any real benefit from taking on debt rather than working for that period? It seems to me the "benefit" is the diploma and that the requirement of a diploma to apply for a job is most often an arbitrary one these days.

As a thought experiment. Is there any particular reason an AA wouldn't have sufficed for the jobs that don't require specialized knowledge?
by Retric | 2026-02-27 18:32:25+00:00
> We are spending a fraction of what is necessary to keep infrastructure from failing.

I can’t help but chuckle at the idea you actually believe that. Stop reading headlines and do some actual research into what’s actually going on.

If the US was utterly failing in maintenance you’d see ~6,000 random bridge failures per year based on the number of bridges in existence instead they are incredibly rare showing that we are actually doing a great job overall.
Ask HN: What are service providers' responsibilities to prevent fraud?
by impendia | 2026-02-27 18:32:54+00:00
A scammer just attempted to phish several attendees at a scientific conference. They falsely claimed to be affiliated with the conference, and asked for their credit card numbers.

The request was made via a document signing service which is apparently legitimate. The email came from the signing service's domain.

I got in touch with their customer service, and they refused to claim any responsibility: "We do not take responsibility for the actions or communications of companies that choose to use our service. If the email you received originated from an external organization, any concerns about its content or legitimacy should be addressed directly with that organization, as the document's sender and owner."

Obviously I am not going to correspond with a scammer for any reason.

Is this legal?? Do I just need to accept that this is the world we live in?
by davorak | 2026-02-27 18:33:04+00:00
The language I found was:

> when the application is downloaded and launched

So it looks like the law only requires it on first launch. Which makes sense if the application can only be run from that one account. Apps that can be launched from multiple accounts are not singled out in the law, but the spirt of the law would have you checking what account is launching the app and are they in the correct age range.
by 5o1ecist | 2026-02-27 18:33:06+00:00
I'm not sure why you are getting downvoted.

It is indeed a naive, or more likely a dishonest thing to do.

Anyone can promise anything. When there's little to no accountability and public memory/opinion doesn't last a week (or is easily manipulated anyway), then promises mean literally nothing. Very like how, in politics, temporary means permanent.

Or HackerNews itself, with them implementing a little Big Brother. It will, of course, absolutely and without a doubt only "nudge" people and it will absolutely, under no circumtances, pinky promise, never get any worse or do anything else but that.

When there's millions of fools, then those, who actually recognize that they are being fooled, are rarely ever significant in numbers. They're drowned out by the fools, until said fools "wake up" and cry "if only we had known!".

Well ... you could have known, but in your mindlessness you didn't listen and think.

"It must be true, because they say so. D'uh. What are you, dumb?"
by yesfitz | 2026-02-27 18:33:24+00:00
With light CRM, Staffing, and Banking tools, it seems like Square's strategy is to be best-of-suite for small businesses rather than best-of-breed.

I've never seen Toast outside of bars/restaurants (although they are ubiquitous in that segment). Every other service or retail shop has been Square, especially farmers markets and craft fairs.
by jjj123 | 2026-02-27 18:33:32+00:00
What does “there are ripped men in prison” have to do with anything? Those men have intrinsic motivation for working out, but not everyone does, that’s kind of my whole point here.

>> how do you make someone do a thing they don’t want to do?

You make it part of the fabric of daily life. If it’s easier to walk than it is to take a car, more people will walk. Of course there will be those who cannot or refuse to, and that’s okay, but systemic changes can lift everyone up on average.
by ptnpzwqd | 2026-02-27 18:34:33+00:00
There are some really baffling takes here. And it doesn't really matter how good or bad coding agents are.

Coding agents greatly reduce the barrier to contributing something that at least looks okay at the surface, so reviewing contributions will quickly become even more of a bottleneck. Manual contributions used to filter away most low effort attempts, or at least they could easily be identified and rejected.

That dynamic is now different and the maintainers risk being swarmed with low effort contributions, that will take a lot of time to review and respond to. Some AI contributions might be reviewed and revised and overall be of acceptable quality, but how can the maintainers know which without reviewing everything, good and bad alike.

I think we will see multiple attempts like this to shift things back to the old dynamic, by rejecting things that can be identified as AI generated a glance, but I suspect over time it will be difficult to do so, so my prediction is that we will soon see more open source repos stop accepting outside contributions entirely.

Even if LLMs one day will be good enough to quickly produce code that is on par with humans (which I strongly doubt), why would the contributors have any incentive to have someone else do that (the easy part), rather than just doing it themselves?
by michaelt | 2026-02-27 18:34:50+00:00
> why does the operating system need to be involved in this?

Well, the politicians probably meant to say “Apple, Google, Microsoft, plus maybe Sony and Nintendo”

i.e. the companies that already have biometrics, nigh-mandatory user accounts, app stores linked to real identities, parental controls, locked down attested kernels, and so on.

If phones had workable parental controls that let parents opt their kid into censorship, that’s better than the give-your-passport-to-the-porn-site approach the UK have taken.

Of course if they have applied it to every OS, not just the big corporate-controlled options, that’s a dumb choice.
by zhengyi13 | 2026-02-27 18:35:09+00:00
> There are outcomes where the US government seizes the company. Not super likely, not impossible.

Are there historical examples in the US specifically where we've nationalized a business?

Because we've certainly invaded countries and assassinated leaders over exactly the same.

ETA: I could have answered my own question with two minutes of research. Yes, we have: https://thenextsystem.org/history-of-nationalization-in-the-...
by AuryGlenz | 2026-02-27 18:35:29+00:00
No, see both. LLMs are great for second opinions, as long as you give it the relevant info and don't try to steer it. Even though we all know we're supposed to get second opinions on medical things, we usually don't bother because it's too expensive in both time and money.

If it could be an emergency, see a doctor.
by michaelsshaw | 2026-02-27 18:35:49+00:00
Essentially, neoliberalism. The goal of everyone on the project is now higher and higher profits. Delivering a working product doesnt necessarily mean best profits anymore. Spacex would rather drag the project along with ships that dont work than to just make something that works. The government has privatized so much of their workload into so few specialized companies that they really can't stop them from doing this.
by stackghost | 2026-02-27 18:35:53+00:00
alloca()'s availability and correctness/bugginess is platform dependent, so it probably sees only niche usage since it's not portable. Furthermore, even its man page discourages its use in the general case:

>The alloca() function is machine- and compiler-dependent. Because it allocates from the stack, it's faster than malloc(3) and free(3). In certain cases, it can also simplify memory deallocation in applications that use longjmp(3) or siglongjmp(3). Otherwise, its use is discouraged.

Furthermore:

>The alloca() function returns a pointer to the beginning of the allocated space. If the allocation causes stack overflow, program behavior is undefined.

https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/alloca.3.html
by conartist6 | 2026-02-27 18:36:27+00:00
Yeah I think people took away "It's better to be uniform" since they were trying to block out the memory of much-feared Zalgo, but if you read the article carefully it says in big letters "Avoid Synthetic Deferrals" then goes on to advocate for patterns exactly like MaybeAsync to be used "if the result is usually available right now, and performance matters a lot".

I was so sick of being slapped around by LJHarb who claimed to me again and again that TC39 was honoring the Zalgo post (by slapping synthetic deferrals on everything) that I actually got Isaacs to join the forum and set him straight: https://es.discourse.group/t/for-await-of/2452/5
by spacechild1 | 2026-02-27 18:36:37+00:00
alloca() is super useful, but it's also quite dangerous because you can easily overflow the stack.

The obvious issue is that you can't know how much space is left on the stack, so you basically have to guess and pick an arbitrary "safe" size limit. This gets even more tricky when functions may be called recursively.

The more subtle issue is that the stack memory returned by alloca() has function scope and therefore you must never call it directly in a loop.

I use alloca() on a regular basis, but I have to say there are safer and better alternatives, depending on the particular use case: arena/frame allocators, threadlocal pseudo-stacks, static vectors, small vector optimizations, etc.
by tliltocatl | 2026-02-27 18:36:45+00:00
IANAL, but the whole thing feels quite problematic. Should we interpret the prohibition as a licensing condition "a resident using our IP is violating the contract" or as an informative note "we are not compliant and we are not ever going to be compliant so a resident using the IP is violating local laws"? I'd expect the intent to be the latter, but would it hold in front of a judge? If the notice is a licensing condition, the whole thing is problematic as hell:

- Does such prohibition has any legal force at all? Does it do anything to prevent responsibility according to the bill? Wouldn't just saying "CA/CO have zero jurisdiction over us, get screwed" be a saner choice (of course it would be better if the project wouldn't host on M$'s servers).

- The main project license is GPLv3. GPLv3 clearly has no provisions to introduce arbitrary prohibitions into the license without losing compatibility. But they still keep GPLv3 LICENSE.txt, which is problematic in itself - if LICENSE.txt says one thing and LEGAL-NOTICE.txt another, the conclusion might be that no license applies so no one may use the software at all!

- If they are reusing any GPL software that they don't hold copyright on, they might be or might not be in violation (would need a real lawyer to say if that's the case or not).

And on the actual matter of things, it's really sad to see California to be on the front line of this crap (this screams ageism). And, dear "adults", screw your parental authority so much. Whatever skills I've gained before the university I've done against an explicit parental prohibition. This is what I live off now. Screw you all.
by iamnothere | 2026-02-27 18:37:01+00:00
> Also, where does anything in the CA bill mandate age verification? It's saying the OS needs to prompt for age bracket info and allow the third party apps to query that. That is far different from verification.

Regardless of the technical details of the law(s), the devs are sensibly refusing to prompt for age on a fricking calculator.

Hopefully Linux distros get on board with this and announce non-CA/CO compliance as policy.
by gloryjulio | 2026-02-27 18:37:27+00:00
We can have different opinion on how much inflation is too much. But the universal consensus is that a little bit of inflation is good. It's ok if you think 2% too high. Maybe 1.25% is better.

But we cannot just dispute this basic economic model and thinking that 0 or negative inflation (which would cause the stop of investment), or no consensus(that would just cause more chaos) is better. That's just absurd
Show HN: NeuroSync – An experimental Python library for neural cryptography
by TheDumb1 | 2026-02-27 18:37:27+00:00
Hi HN,

I built NeuroSync originally as a final year school project to explore Neural Cryptography. The main idea is the use of adversarial learning to train two NNs (Alice and Bob) to encrypt and decrypt data while a third one (Eve) is trying to break the cipher. While that isn't new I made it into a usable library with an interface that allows to easily switch parameters and experiment with them to help research in this field.

To make it functional, I implemented a hash-based correction system to ensure 100% decryption accuracy (bypassing the usual 0.2% probabilistic errors of neural synchronization), alongside packet sequencing and periodic key changes.

It is definitely still a work in progress, and the "Eve" (attacker) network currently needs a lot of work. But the first version is usable and the core communication protocol works.

I added a Jupyter Notebook in the repo so you can test the key exchange and encryption without setting anything up. I'm sharing this mostly to get your feedback, hear your ideas, and maybe find some folks interested in this field too.

Would love to hear your thoughts or critiques!
by allthetime | 2026-02-27 18:37:32+00:00
The simple version: get off social media.

The dilemma for me is that aspects of social media (namely information sharing and learning) are incredibly useful, while others (contrarian argumentation, propaganda, attention black holes) are very harmful.

I go through cycles of abstaining from online interaction because I’ve sunk into the dark side too much but then return with a stronger intention in order to feed my hobbies and mind. I’ve found that it’s not so simple to just “not believe” what you see and read as being constantly bombarded with political messaging necessarily pushes you to one side or the other unconsciously.

So yeah, for me the best way is to cut that feed off entirely, instead of pretending I have any kind of effective fire wall against its deeper mental effects.
by shimman | 2026-02-27 18:38:12+00:00
Why should workers care about productivity growth when income inequality is at its highest levels in the United States? Companies already don't take chances on American workers, hence why companies need so much corporate welfare to stay competitive.

I'm sorry but American workers are getting bad deals, and let's not act like the largest companies in human history can't pay more in taxes to fund training, education, and healthcare for workers.

You're telling people that are fighting for scraps to start fighting over dirt.

My Qs for you are why are you so greedy? Why do you think you deserve so much because of pure luck? Why do you think workers don't deserve a larger share of the pie when the elites and rich have rat fucked this country into having more money than necessary?
by ses1984 | 2026-02-27 18:38:17+00:00
You could just read the article.

This is outside my domain, and I don’t know the details, but in many cases Jane street functions as a market maker, market makers have access to information they can exploit to skim from anyone that trades through them, especially retail investors who place market orders.

Pump and dump is a strategy that whales can use to bully smaller traders, not unlike how in poker the smaller your stack is in relation to the minimum bet, the easier it is for someone with a big stack to squeeze you out. This is possible for whales even when they don’t have access to the information that market makers have, and it’s not allowed on many regulated exchanges.

It’s like the reverse of the GameStop short squeeze, except instead of retail investors ganging up, propping up the price to liquidate institutional short positions, it’s an institution using its fat stacks to cause little crashes which they have opened short positions to exploit.

One arm of the firm creates a waves in the price, and the other arm rides the wave.

Please correct me if I’m wrong.
by mechanicalpulse | 2026-02-27 18:38:22+00:00
It's possible that he's taking "hope for the best, prepare for the worst" to its logical if unhealthy extreme by interpreting every ambiguous 802.11 frame as one with ill intent. However, just because he's paranoid doesn't mean there aren't misaligned people, devices, and applications out there probing networks.

It's probably a good idea for anyone to check themselves every now and then by playing Angel's Advocate just as much as they might play Devil's Advocate, but I don't think rejecting his premises out of hand with a drive-by diagnosis is all that helpful.
by bandrami | 2026-02-27 18:38:25+00:00
Let me amend that: one of my vendors has a new diffusion-based noise-reduction plugin that's pretty good though the resource usage is still too high. I imagine that will come down as they improve it. And that's pretty cool. But it didn't come out any faster it's just that it uses diffusion in the plugin itself. But docker was a much bigger impact on the software we use at work than AI has been so far.

I was even trying to come up with a list of software I use in my personal life to see if any of that has started coming out faster, and I came up with:

KDE

Supercollider

Puredata

Mixxx

Renoise

CUDA and ROCM

none of which have had any kind of release acceleration that I know of (though obviously the hardware to use the last two has gotten mind-blowingly expensive, alas). I use maybe three apps on my phone and they aren't updating any more frequently than they used to.

I get that for whatever reason this bugs people, but I'm in a very tech job and have a very tech personal life (just not webdev in either case) and literally have not seen anything I deal with change other than needing to learn to scroll past the AI summary at the top of search results.
by drnick1 | 2026-02-27 18:38:32+00:00
The law is irrelevant when it comes to open source. There is no one to turn to and bully for compliance. A government could presumably request that GitHub delete the repo, but the software will then simply move somewhere else, in a jurisdiction where these laws don't apply, or be distributed peer-to-peer. These attempts at curbing the freedom to write and distribute software are pathetic and will fail.
by WhatsTheBigIdea | 2026-02-27 18:39:07+00:00
I like this definition of corruption, though there are many...

"The abuse of entrusted power for private gain"

Jaywalking is breaking the law, but it is not corruption.

Civil disobedience is also typically breaking the law, but is not corruption.

It is important to recognize that just because a system is codified in law does not mean that it is not corrupt.
Show HN: Cloud file conversion security model (S3-only, 24h retention)
by maniazi83 | 2026-02-27 18:39:21+00:00
Hi HN — I’m building Docpose.cloud (online file conversion + API). File processing is a trust problem, so I wrote a security + processing architecture page that explains exactly how files move through the system.

Highlights:

S3-only pipeline: workers read from object storage and write results back

No permanent local disk persistence on workers

Source files deleted immediately after processing

Converted files expire after 24 hours by default

Operational logs kept up to 30 days (metadata only, no file contents)

I’m posting this because security questions come up every time someone evaluates file-processing infrastructure. Feedback welcome — especially on what you’d want clarified for a vendor security review.