MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fsckboy | 2026-02-26 01:52:50+00:00
>Actual "quality of education" mostly comes from a low staff/student ratio and direct access of students to elite researchers: this difference in education mostly takes the form of better research labs to work in, with some spillover into office hours

I don't agree with this at all. Quality of education imho comes from being surrounded by fellow elite students so that the pace of the syllabi can remain high.

lower tier universities have excellent faculty, they are selected from applicants from the elite universities as well as excellent students from lower tier universities who have floated to the top. Their problem is, as the elite-ness of the students goes down, the pace needs to drop.

Not trying to be a jerk, but we see the same thing in athletics, elite athletes are significantly above the next tier, and so on. the worst professional team can beat the best college team, because the worst professional team is still made up of the cream of the college teams, with experience (i.e. more education) added on.

at a lower tier university, a dedicated student can still work in labs if they want, but as you move down the tiers you simply get fewer autistics and more partiers. University of Michigan is an excellent univeristy, but do you think the students are studying on weekends, like they do at MIT? no, they're not.
by tkel | 2026-02-26 01:53:59+00:00
This kinda misses the larger point. How are billionaires created? By the structure of the capitalist firm. The capitalist gets all of the wealth created by the organization and unilaterally can decide what to do with it, running the organization as a dictator. That is the bug. "Billionaire" is simply the most obvious and egregious form.

The class interest of the billionaire capitalist is the same as the class interest of the millionaire capitalist is the same as the class interest of the small business owner. Unless all of the capitalists leave, the capitalist class will still control the entire economy of California.
by yearolinuxdsktp | 2026-02-26 01:54:29+00:00
No way does the Escalade exert less ground pressure!

Firstly, a Wagoneer is never on pizza cutters. You can't put a 4500lb car on pizza cutters even in 1990! It came with 235/75R15 tires. They are big sidewall donuts, but no pizza cutters.

The Escalade runs 285/40R24 tires, that's wide and low-profile.

Widening a tire increases ground pressure, because low-profile tires have massive amount of reinforcement to prevent that wheel from cracking. This stiffness adds to the pressure the road feels.

Tire contact patch is a function of weight and tire pressure. A 205mm width tire has the same contact patch as a 285mm tire, given same weight and pressure. The only thing that changes is the shape of the contact patch, which becomes wide and short instead of narrow and long.

The 6000lb Escalade runs its 285/40R24's on 35 psi, the Wagoneer runs its 235's at 30 psi.

So assuming even weight distribution, the contact patch per tire is 6000lbs/4/35psi=42.8in^2 inches for the Escalade, and 4500lbs/4/30psi=37.5in^2. So the contact patch is only 14% larger on the Escalade, yet it carries 33% more weight!

If you look at the road wear formula, it's entirely a function of weight. So the width of the tires only impacts surface-level abrasion. And with the power law, that's still 3.16x of Wagoneer's wear (or 216% increase).

So the wider tires do virtually nothing to protect the road from the extra 1500 lbs weight.

In fact, the dynamic load when hitting potholes is greatly exacerbated by the 285/40R24 low profile tires, because instead of of absorbing the bumps within the tire, the stiff sidewall low-profile tires absorb way less.

The spring rate of the Wagoneer tires is ~1200-1500 lbs/in, the spring rate of the Escalade tires is ~2500-3500 lbs/in, so that's a 2x stiffer tire! As a result, it transmits twice as much force when hitting the same bump.

So as a result, an Escalade accelerates road cracking considerably worse than the Wagoneer, not even in the same league.

Yes, the heavy trucks wear the road outsizely, incomparably to the SUVs we are discussing. However, we have roads that do not allow trucks (parkways) or see little heavy truck traffic.
by nwallin | 2026-02-26 01:54:43+00:00
I have 64GB of RAM and 16GB of swap. Swap is small enough it can't get really out of hand.

I have memories from like 20 years ago that even when I had plenty of RAM, and plenty of it was free, I would get random OOM killer events relatively regularly. Adding just a tiny bit of swap made that stop happening.

I'm like 90% sure at this point it's just a stupid superstition I carry. But I'm not gonna stop doing it even though it is stupid.
by themaninthedark | 2026-02-26 01:55:08+00:00
What a myopic attitude.

3 to 4 decades ago anything from China was poor quality and US manufacturing was tight tolerance.

When we outsourced, we did the training to get them where they are today and stopped investing in our skills at home.

There are still skilled people here who can train and the knowledge is not some sort of eldritch incantation.

The main issues with learning is lack of jobs and lack of opportunity to apply skills if you have them.
by verdverm | 2026-02-26 01:55:09+00:00
If I cannot see the tests, why should I trust the project is thoroughly validated?

I suspect this backfires because

1. The media cycle is making more of this because that's what they do, speculate to the fullest extent.

2. It's likely that much of it doesn't need tests or can make sufficient tests from scratch to get most of the way there

3. Have agents run the real software and build up a test suite, +1 days
by netrem | 2026-02-26 01:55:10+00:00
> The filter used to be effort. You had to care enough to spend weeks on something, which meant you probably understood the problem deeply. Now that filter is gone and we get a flood of "I prompted this in 20 minutes" posts where the author can't answer a single follow-up about their own code. The interesting Show HNs still exist, they're just buried under noise.

The irony of a bot comment
by bdhcuidbebe | 2026-02-26 01:55:46+00:00
> Going with sqlite might not have been the best decision

Many have tried out this general idea. I myself evaluated git-bug for a few days in 2018 when it was a novel idea, but I ran into issues I tried to raise in my previous comment.

The data format you chose is not even the main issue here.

Binary data that keeps changing is generally always unfit for source control.

In your use case, you can solve that by committing sql dumps of the database in a text format.
by WarmWash | 2026-02-26 01:56:54+00:00
>A huge chunk of those trillions come from European and other non-US sources.

Well that's even worse isn't it. Europe invents something only for the US to produce it and then sell it back to Europe?

Maybe it's time for Europeans to come home from their 30 year post cold war vacation. 60-70 hour work weeks, performance based job security, 15 days vacation (that you work during anyway), corporate tax exemptions funded by social program cuts, and 35 year old billionaires leading the charge. Droves of SWE's pulling €200k and the locals complaining about gentrification. There will be a vibrant tech scene and actually competitive software across the board within a few years.

But you probably recoiled in horror reading that. So do most other Europeans. So the strong players leave to reap the rewards that those things bring, and the rest stay behind the in the comfy status quo and say "We'll just buy xyz from the Americans".
by hypertexthero | 2026-02-26 01:57:03+00:00
Hmmm, I disagree, having played electric and acoustic guitars for over two decades and begun learning piano and synths for the first time in 2025.

For one, you can’t easily play two melodies simultaneously across several octaves, using both of your hands, with an electric guitar.

Stringed electronic instruments do have their advantages, but so do the others. Each music making thing has its place in the spectrum.

Two books that have helped me greatly in my musical life, in case people haven’t heard of them, are The Listening Book, and Bridge of Waves, by W.A. Mathieu.
by kbenson | 2026-02-26 01:57:03+00:00
> After abolition, the South's per capita productivity dropped substantially, and remained 20% lower per capita in 1880 than it had been in 1860.

I wonder how much of that was because of economies of scale (Even if it's forced scale). Plantations are large and have many workers, and can scale without having to worry (to a degree) about retaining workers, since workers are for most intents just machines you invest in and pay to keep up in that system, which allows for easier scaling.

We've seen increasing consolidation of farms into large entities over the centuries, so perhaps this was just a system that made that much, much easier to do.
by rao-v | 2026-02-26 01:57:36+00:00
It’s interesting that you invest in mouse movements vs just targeting a click at X in Y milliseconds. CAD and video games are of course a great reason for this, but I wonder how much typical tool use can be modeled by just next click events.

I’d love to see this sort of thing paired with eye tracking and turned into a general purpose precog predictive tool for computer use … but you probably have many better use cases for your world model!
by parpfish | 2026-02-26 01:57:44+00:00
i think the only people that realize this are people that are actively doing research in academia. not even the undergrads at the school realize that teaching undergrads is at best a side-hustle for the institution.

i've seen so many "our tuition pays your salary so you you need to XXX" type rants I've seen from disgruntled students/parents over the years and i've always bit my tongue when it comes to setting the record straight.
by som | 2026-02-26 01:58:21+00:00
As others have pointed out a mix of express (and even "rocket") services, rather than physically removing bus stops, already works wonders outside of the US.

Combine that with improvements to things like waiting areas (i.e. introducing shade), frequency of services, price (in my closest city they introduced essentially free public transport for all - it's been a boon), and you've got something that can be effectively weighed against other forms of transport.

No it doesn't fit all situations and people, but it serves the majority well.
by vincentalbouy | 2026-02-26 01:59:05+00:00
Thanks a lot for this insight. Genuinely appreciate you taking the time to help me.

I 100% agree, the interface is the least interesting part. Anyone can build a chat UI. That’s not the moat.

What matters is the messy stuff in the backend. Vendors. Hotels. Quotes that change. Someone forgetting to update availability. Contracts. Deposits. Random edge cases. That coordination layer is the real product.

The UI is just the tip. The hard part is keeping state across dozens of moving pieces and async back-and-forth.

My belief is that AI finally makes some of this operational glue automatable. Not in a magical way. But in a very practical loop:

ask → get info → update plan → trigger action → wait → adjust → repeat

Planning is basically structured ping-pong. It’s not search. It’s evolving constraints over time. That’s why it feels agent-shaped.

What I am basically saying is : Event planning is really AI agent prone and very conversation prone, that is why this kind of interface will take over travel and event planning. It is like you have a personal travel agent sitting next to you and it showing you options.

Totally agree with you though. organizing fragmented supply is the hard, unsexy, painful work. That’s where the real value is built.
by sylwester | 2026-02-26 01:59:14+00:00
I built an open-source AI Gateway that sits between your apps and LLM providers

I needed a way to give different clients (apps, users, teams) their own API keys and LLM provider settings without deploying separate proxies. Most solutions required complex setup or were tied to specific providers.

What it does:
- Single OpenAI-compatible endpoint (/v1/chat/completions)
- Each client gets their own API key with independent config:
- Backend provider (Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, LM Studio, etc.)
- Upstream API key
- Base URL override (for local models)
- Default model
- Model whitelist
- System prompt injection
- Rate limits & token quotas
- Built-in admin dashboard with real-time stats via WebSocket
- Auto-discovers models from backends (Ollama, LM Studio)

The key insight: all provider configuration is per-client, not global. A client using LM Studio never touches your OpenAI quota. A client with a Gemini key stays isolated.

Tech: Go, SQLite, chi router, WebSocket for live dashboard updates.

Demo: admin UI shows live request streaming, token usage, model breakdown.

Would love feedback on the architecture - especially the per-client provider model. Is this useful for others running multiple LLM backends?
by drmikeando | 2026-02-26 01:59:54+00:00
While this is a great article, I feels it buries the lede.

For me, the key insight was from the last paragraph of the article:

C++23 introduces "deducing this", which is a way to avoid the performance
cost of dynamic dispatch without needing to use tricks like CRRT, by writing:

class Base {
public:
auto foo(this auto&& self) -> int { return 77 + self.bar(); }
};

class Derived : public Base {
public:
auto bar() -> int { return 88; }
};

I wish the article had gone into more details on how this works and when you can use it, and what its limitations are.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-02-26 02:00:39+00:00
When the room for memory mapped files gets low enough you get bad thrashing anyway, so the policy difference isn't that important.

Having no swap limits how much you can overburden your computer, but you also hit problems earlier. Here's some example numbers for 64GB of memory: With swap you can go up to 62GB of active program data (85GB allocated) before you have performance issues. Without swap you can go up to 45GB of active program data (63GB allocated) before you hit a brick wall of either thrashing or killing processes. The no-swap version is better at maintaining snappiness within its happy range, but it's a tradeoff.
by kokhanserhii | 2026-02-26 02:00:45+00:00
Starlink hasn't been working in Russia, an aggressor state, for a long time. The issue here is the shutdown of Russian terminals over Ukraine, which are illegally brought into Russia and then flown to Ukraine on drones carrying bombs. Now, Ukrainians register all their terminals, and unregistered ones are not connected. The Russians are working to get a Ukrainian recruit to pay someone to register a terminal in their name, so they can fly from Russia to Ukraine and detonate something. Several such spies have already been arrested.
by readams | 2026-02-26 02:01:23+00:00
As always, Matt Levine has the best take on this:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-02-24/ai-...

"I am sorry. But if you go to Jump Trading and Jane Street and say “hello, I have an unregulated poorly designed mechanism that could lead to $50 billion of market value collapsing overnight, would you like to trade with me,” they are going to say yes, but their eyes are going to light up, you know? If at Time 0 you give them an extremely gameable system that can produce billions of dollars of profit, at Time 10 your system is going to be a smoking wreckage and they are going to have billions of dollars of profit. That’s their whole job, you know? I couldn’t tell you in advance what all the intermediate steps will be, and in fact in hindsight I cannot tell you what the intermediate steps actually were, how Jump and Jane Street made money off the collapse of Terra. But as a heuristic, I mean, come on. Terra was like “hello we have a balloon full of money, here is a pin, dooooooon’t pop the balloon.” Guess what!"
by yiyu_earth | 2026-02-26 02:01:25+00:00
While hydrogen fuel cell technology may not hold a distinct competitive advantage in the passenger vehicle market—where battery electric vehicles have achieved greater maturity in infrastructure and cost reduction—it retains significant merits in heavy-duty trucking and stationary power generation applications. This is particularly true when "grey hydrogen" (industrial by-product hydrogen derived from processes such as steam methane reforming or chlor-alkali production, rather than electrolysis powered by renewable energy) is readily available at competitive prices.

Under such conditions, the total cost of ownership for fuel cell systems can achieve parity with, or even fall below, that of lithium-ion battery solutions. Furthermore, when accounting for the end-of-life considerations—where fuel cells present fewer recycling challenges and material recovery complexities compared to the substantial battery waste stream associated with electrochemical energy storage—hydrogen fuel cells emerge as a fundamentally more sustainable and economically viable long-term solution.
by sensanaty | 2026-02-26 02:01:58+00:00
You call it "choking off" roads; I call it basic geometry. Reallocating a lane of traffic to bikes or transit moves exponentially more human beings through the exact same amount of physical space. But sure, pretend that a single occupant dragging around a 4 ton metal box to buy groceries is the absolute pinnacle of spatial efficiency.

And the fact that you're complaining about "removing parking" is hilarious. Street parking is objectively the most useless, wasteful allocation of already limited public space imaginable. You expect cities to dedicate premium real estate to act as a subsidized storage locker for your private, empty vehicle for the 95% of the day you aren't even using it. Then you complain about non-drivers "forcing" you to pay for transit, while everyone else's taxes are literally subsidizing the free public storage of your personal property.

Let's also talk about your entitlement to those roads. When you complain about "choking off" streets, what you're really whining about is that cities are finally prioritizing actual residents over commuters who are just driving through. Most car traffic in urban centers is just people transiting. Why should a neighborhood sacrifice its safety, noise pollution levels, air quality, and public space just to act as a high-speed shortcut for people who don't even live there?

And please, spare me the inevitable "but what about rural areas" argument. We are talking about dense cities. Nobody is coming for your car in bumfuck nowhere; you can keep driving there all you want. (Though honestly, here in the Netherlands, you don't even have to drive in the countryside because you can usually just grab a train or get anywhere by bike, but that's beside the point.) Urban planning applies to urban areas.

I live in the Netherlands. Millions of people here take transit and ride bikes every single day. And guess what? Nobody banned cars. In fact, it's widely considered one of the best places in the world to drive specifically because everyone who doesn't want or need to drive isn't forced to be on the road getting in your way. We just realized that sacrificing huge swaths of our cities so commuters can treat our neighborhoods as a shortcut is incredibly stupid, and there are infinitely better ways of using the limited space in cities than to let drivers park their cars there.

Giving people viable choices isn't a totalitarian conspiracy to oppress drivers, it's just good urban design. It's wild that you are so used to forced car dependency that simply offering people an alternative feels like a personal attack.
by protimewaster | 2026-02-26 02:02:49+00:00
> But the risk of a bunch of litigation isn't a ban, right?

Funny enough, I've known some people over the years who have explicitly viewed litigation as a reasonable alternative to regulation. Their logic was that we should just let people and companies do whatever they want. Then, if it turns out a company is dumping mercury in the river or whatever, you litigate based on the damages. Better than regulation, they assured me.
by necubi | 2026-02-26 02:03:41+00:00
Matt Levine has a take: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-02-24/ai-...

> Look, I am sorry. But if you go to Jump Trading and Jane Street and say “hello, I have an unregulated poorly designed mechanism that could lead to $50 billion of market value collapsing overnight, would you like to trade with me,” they are going to say yes, but their eyes are going to light up, you know? If at Time 0 you give them an extremely gameable system that can produce billions of dollars of profit, at Time 10 your system is going to be a smoking wreckage and they are going to have billions of dollars of profit. That’s their whole job, you know? I couldn’t tell you in advance what all the intermediate steps will be, and in fact in hindsight I cannot tell you what the intermediate steps actually were, how Jump and Jane Street made money off the collapse of Terra. But as a heuristic, I mean, come on. Terra was like “hello we have a balloon full of money, here is a pin, dooooooon’t pop the balloon.” Guess what!
by grvdrm | 2026-02-26 02:04:25+00:00
I drive that exact car!

It is awesome. Incredible power. Silky smooth on highway. Sounds like a beast on start up. I regularly get 36/37 mpg on a long drive.

I prefer the sound of the B58 in the m340 over the S58 in the m3 but they are quite different engines. And way different power. But straight-six throughout.

Still think one of the best engine sounds out there is the s54 in the 2001-2006 m3
by doctorpangloss | 2026-02-26 02:04:40+00:00
this is coming from someone who lives in san francisco like you and has a 2 kid, 4 adult family with no car. it's been like 80 years of USA = cars. people seem to really like SFH + cars, they vote for it, they pay for it, and seem to accept even longer commutes than ever. consider why. it's not so simple.

> Strong Towns thesis is correct... slow moving crisis... The idea that LA literally can't afford to bring it's sidewalks up to ADA code is insane

see, this tells me you're not getting it at all. it is an insult to process, yes. But there's no crisis. Strong Towns is kind of obviously wrong.
by rtsam | 2026-02-26 02:04:55+00:00
"Under the Criminal Code of Canada (Section 21), you can be charged as a "party" to an offence if you were involved in planning, "encouraging", or aiding in its commission" Criminal Code (R.S.C., 1985, c. C-46)

"21(1) Parties to Offence: Anyone who actually commits the offense, aids in committing it, or abets (encourages) someone in committing it is a party to the offense."

I work in a law firm but NAL. I could probably find some cases if I had time. Most of the responses from people saying defamation is not very successful and "good luck" in the us because of 1A seem strange to me also.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-02-26 02:05:13+00:00
> the article asserts that too many stops is the main cause of low ridership in the US. I didn’t even see a correlation (which would still not prove one causes the other) between number of stops and ridership.

This is an odd argument to make. Just as a correlation doesn't prove that there is a causal relationship, the lack of a correlation cannot prove that there isn't.