MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by muyuu | 2026-02-19 06:43:09+00:00
ENVY suffered of a problem that many other Smalltalk technologies suffered: a conflict between a culture of proprietary zeal as a business model and powerful network effects of adoption. Visualage in general was plagued by this. I used to blame Microsoft and Apple successes for the pervasive push for lock-in and "integration" as a feature that defined the era so strongly.

You had on the one hand had a technology that desperately needed adoption to build a culture and best-practices documentation, and on the other hand you had short term profit motive seriously getting in the way, so what you had that was completely cutting edge for decades, eventually it wasn't anymore - or the world moved in another direction and your once revolutionary technology became an ill fit for it.

By the 2000s with monotone and darcs, but specially with the rise of git, other standards for versioning have superseded what could have been. Smalltalkers already by the 2010s should have been wise to try to incorporate what is clearly a standard now but instead a bunch of invented-here systems for versioning and repositories and hybrids have developed in its place. And by incorporate i don't mean "let's make X for ST" but making it core in their implementation so that the system itself is more easily understood and used, even if its to take pieces of it away and use them which is actually a strength and not a weakness! contrary to some brand of 90s-era beliefs.

Generally speaking, to this very day it's regarded as cool and as a feature in ST world that something is ST-only, conveniently "integrated" into the system as tightly as possible and, implicitly but insidiously and glaringly, near-impossible to use elsewhere except maybe as a concept and laundered of its origin.
by stackghost | 2026-02-19 06:43:11+00:00
Indeed. I first encountered the "declaration of independence of cyberspace" a few years after it was written, and at the time I was immediately reminded of the Full Metal Jacket quote that goes something like "you can give your heart to Jesus but your ass belongs to the Marine Corps!"

That is to say the Declaration is pure cringe. The idea that cyberspace could become sovereign unto itself is patently absurd: The user's ass belongs to whichever country they inhabit.
by flomo | 2026-02-19 06:43:42+00:00
Good take. Even back in the 1990s, OpenStep was thought to be the best way to develop a Windows app. But NeXT charged per-seat licenses, so it didn't get much use outside of Wall Street or other places where Jobs would personally show up. And of course something like iPhone is easier when they already had a UI framework and an IDE and etc.
by Tor3 | 2026-02-19 06:43:49+00:00
Zerotier works fine for me, but with a huge exception which I just can't figure out. On my Linux laptop which also runs OpenVPN and with some specific routing set up, Zerotier will, after a minute or so, completely take over the routing and default everything through Zerotier, and nothing I do with the routing tables will change this. I have to stop ZT at this point and then it reverts to normal.
Every other computer in my ZT network behaves fine.

This is so problematic that I'm considering looking into Tailscale, I understand they work very differently but it looks like my use case could be covered by both.
by jimnotgym | 2026-02-19 06:43:58+00:00
> As an employer/employee takes a year to fire people even when they don’t show up, ergo the incentive is to coast.

That is not true in the UK. In the first two years of service you can fire someone without a reason so long as you were not being deliberately discriminatory. Burden of proof on the employee for this

After that you just have to go through a fair process. Your decision is not in question, just whether you followed a fair process. I have worked in a place that routinely fired people for being 1 minute late on three occasions. Late once, verbal warning, late twice, written warning, late three times fired.

> As a founder you’re buried in bureaucracy and taxes, so the incentive is to stay an employee.

As a sole trader in the UK you can set up instantly. You have 3 months to let the tax authority know what you did, but no real threat if you leave it a bit longer. Setting up a corporate entity takes 10 minutes online. You can have that done by your accountant and the annual accounts done for maybe £300. No need for an audit until you have cross 2 out of three of these thresholds

Annual turnover of no more than £15 million

Gross assets of no more than £7.5 million

Average number of employees of no more than 50

Immediately you get a significant tax advantage over employees.

Easy access to capital is harder, unless you went to high-end private school that is. Development capital is not that hard to get, but seed funding is harder.
by munksbeer | 2026-02-19 06:43:59+00:00
This is a very interesting aspect. I've been thinking along these lines.

Consider design patterns, or clean code, or patterns for software development, or any other system that people use to write their code, and reviewers use to review the code. What are they actually for? This question is going to seem bizarre to most programmers at first, because it is so ingrained in us, that we almost forget why we have those patterns.

The entire point is to ensure the code is maintainable. In order to maintain it, we must easily understand it, and and be sure we're not breaking something when we do. That is what design patterns solve, making easier to understand and more maintainable.

So, I can imagine a future where the definition of "production code" changes.
by Hamuko | 2026-02-19 06:45:07+00:00
I can either add a Cloudflare API key and Certbot on my NAS, or I could generate a root certificate and add it to my desktop computers, laptop, tablet, phones, Apple TV, etc.

Doesn't seem that tough of a choice. I guess in the future I could even forego the Cloudflare API key and just have the persistent DNS record there once.
by shawnrad | 2026-02-19 06:45:34+00:00
I’m an independent inventor in California. I’ve developed a methane-independent pathway for liquid hydrocarbon synthesis.
Unlike existing methods, AshForge uses ash derived from most wood, biomass or even fermentation byproducts. This allows us to synthesize fuel while bypassing the high costs of both natural gas and Direct Air Capture.
Status: USPTO Priority Date secured Jan 29, 2026. Training complete. Applying for CA Pro Bono programs. I’m raising $1,500 for the final non-provisional filing fees (Micro Entity status).
I can’t discuss the specific mineral species or electrochemical activation parameters publicly yet, but I’m happy to discuss the Carbon Life Cycle and the Economic Disruptions of this model.
by Negitivefrags | 2026-02-19 06:45:36+00:00
Well our game runs faster in DX12 under Proton than Vulkan under Proton.

Of course since Proton uses Vulkan to implement DX12, it means that our Vulkan implementation is simply worse than the one that Valve created to emulate DX12.

I'm sure it's possible to improve that, but it implies that there way to get the best performance out of Vulkan is less obvious than the way to get it out of DX12.
by orbisvicis | 2026-02-19 06:46:32+00:00
> you can get in any clothes store and get plenty of clothes to wear

"Getting into the clothes" is a low bar. I can get into this brown paper bag. Comfort is underrated.

> if some women absolutely can't find something in their size from a specific brand, that makes the brand even more exclusive, like it being "for fit people only".

Heh I think mens sizing signals the opposite: too skinny = insufficiently masculine.
by gbear605 | 2026-02-19 06:47:15+00:00
I’m not familiar with the Claude Code subscription, but with Codex I’m able to use millions of tokens per day on the $200/mo plan. My rough estimate was that if I were API billing, it would cost about $50/day, or $1200/mo. So either the API has a 6x profit margin on inference, the subscription is a loss leader, or they just rely on most people not to go anywhere near the usage caps.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-02-19 06:47:59+00:00
I think Swift was developed to keep a number of constituencies happy.

You can do classic OOP, FP, Protocol-Oriented Programming, etc., or mix them all (like I do).

A lot of purists get salty that it doesn’t force implementation of their choice, but I’m actually fine with it. I tend to have a “chimeric” approach, so it suits me.

Been using it since 2014 (the day it was announced). I enjoy it.
by wald3n | 2026-02-19 06:48:35+00:00
I don’t understand why Mistral gets so little recognition. They consistently have a top model on benchmarks such as LiveBench and their models are open source. Hugging Face is French, Black Forrest Labs (Stable Diffusion) is German, Weaviate is Dutch, Hetzner for IaasS. There’s AI here. Maybe hardware production is the bigger problem?
by drysine | 2026-02-19 06:50:02+00:00
“When you walk by the side of these people you realise they have every human right to feel hatred towards any Russian,’’ she told the AP. “Still, I think it’s important to do even a small action to show them that maybe not all the people are thinking the same way.”

She has been living in Italy for 14 years, doesn't pay taxes to Putin, supports Ukraine, what's not to like?

I mean if you are Ukrainian, there is nothing to hate her for, right?

Wrong.

Here comes Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman feeling offended by her ethnicity:

"The fact that the International Olympic Committee chose a Russian to carry the plaque with the name [of Ukraine] is shameful. It goes beyond any human morality and any principles..."[0]

I hope she learned her lesson about the nature of Ukrainian nationalists.

[0] https://news.liga.net/en/politics/news/kyiv-wants-investigat...
by deanCommie | 2026-02-19 06:50:56+00:00
Are we watching the same clip? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

This is from the pilot and I watched it based on high recommendations, and I couldn't keep going because the character you're describing as so convincing and charismatic is so dramatically unlikeable!?

In this scene, he is:

* disrespectful and entitled with a coworker

* privileged and self-important about his background with a client

* then makes an admittedly pretty rousing speech, but TBH the show doesn't really trust us to understand that "this is meant to be inspirational" because it keeps cutting to the other character reacting "inspired", which is significant because

* he doesn't make the sale

* then proceeds to verbally scream abuse at the other character.

and then i'm supposed to be excited about watching the two of these start a computer company together? ..........why?
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-19 06:51:57+00:00
Conversely, every person calling LLMs "agents" never had any credibility to begin with. Despite my many attempts to coerce an example out of people here, I am still waiting for one (1) singular demonstration of "agentic software" that is capable of replacing production-grade software at scale. Software created by agents that solves a real-world problem and is used by tens of thousands or millions of people. Candidates include an OS, a web browser, an IDE, image editing software akin to Photoshop, a fully-featured Discord/Slack/etc. replacement, a non-trivial video game, music production software, enterprise-grade database software etc., really anything that isn't just another AI tool to produce another AI tool to produce another AI tool culminating in complete psychosis and detachment from anything people do in the real world. If you would like to be the first to provide evidence that these things are more capable than chatbots in concrete terms, by all means, go ahead.
by xiaodai | 2026-02-19 06:52:19+00:00
i am a mathematician wanna-be. I have an undergrad honours degree in maths. As a retirement or pre-retirement project, I want to learn LEAN and contribute to it either via development or via developing the Mathlib or both!

Pointers welcome. As long as they are not null. Btw, I am also interested in compilers.
by galkk | 2026-02-19 06:52:30+00:00
I worked a little bit in the area. (it was 10 years ago in the area of book catalogs matching, per different stores/countries/bestseller lists)

ISBN is a an attribute/key, but not primary key, in database terms :)

ISBNs are messy and in real world you’ll see crazy amount of broken/edge cases that shouldn’t happen by the letter of the standard, but happen all the time in reality.

For example, isbn can be reused by publisher for completely different book. 2nd edition, while very different, may have same isbn. Reissue of the same book could have different isbn. Textbook of same author for 6th and 7th grade could have same isbn.

If you ask yourself - wtf? You’re not alone.
by vander_elst | 2026-02-19 06:53:20+00:00
> bring it to your neighborhood tailor. Most alterations are simple and not very expensive.

I think, this is a misconception, some "simple" things like resizing a shirt, when done properly, might require multiple hours + a decent amount of skills and the alterations might be cheap because they are performed by underpaid workers. Nonetheless, I like the idea of supporting local tailors and I'd be in for paying premium for a local premium product.
by eqvinox | 2026-02-19 06:55:14+00:00
As a German:

Merz is a fucking idiot, the first genuinely incompetent chancellor we've elected in a long time. Kohl, Schröder, Merkel, Scholz… you could disagree with their politics, but they weren't stupid. Merz is.

(Of course if we wanted truly competent, we could've had Habeck, but true competency is too dangerous to be electable in German politics.)
by mc3301 | 2026-02-19 06:55:22+00:00
I think I was wearing vibram fivefingers (it was 2012ish, they were cool!) when I did it, from 0 meters, as I started at the ocean. I had a little hip-bag with some rice balls and water. It was about 23 hours to reach the top. My accompanying friend did the whole thing in barefeet.
by rmast | 2026-02-19 06:55:44+00:00
I feel the same way, wondering if there’s a point.

That said, I shared a cool post I came across (not a Show HN) about drone hacking. It basically got 0 traction. Not even 10 hours later someone else shared the exact same link and got 100+ upvotes and decent discussion. Which seems to point to a giant element of luck and the right eyes seeing the thing shared.
by zdragnar | 2026-02-19 06:55:47+00:00
Even if it more expensive, people will prefer subscription pricing over pay per use.

When you ask it to do something and it goes off the rails, the payment plans have wildly different effects:

Subscription- oh well, let's try again with a different prompt

Pay per use- I just wasted money, this product sucks

Even if it is less common than not, it has an outsized impact on how people feel using it.
by Manheim | 2026-02-19 06:56:00+00:00
The European digital scene isn't a pipeline problem; it's an institutional 'safe harbor' problem. We have world-class publicly funded research and education, and the talent, just look at the startup floor at Vivatech or WebSummit, but European Private Equity and late-stage capital remain structurally locked into 'Old Economy' models.

In Europe, valuation is still largely tied to tangible assets and steady EBITDA. This creates a massive 'Patient Capital' gap. While US investors have evolved to price the long-term unit economics of digital scaling, where high initial burn is the cost of building a global moat, European private equity remains culturally risk-averse. They prefer the predictable, incremental returns of a specialized factory over the 'winner-takes-most' volatility of digital platforms. By prioritizing collateral over code, our domestic capital is effectively subsidizing the past rather than financing the future. That's our problem.
by nostromo | 2026-02-19 06:57:10+00:00
They'll all do this eventually.

We're in the part of the market cycle where everyone fights for marketshare by selling dollar bills for 50 cents.

When a winner emerges they'll pull the rug out from under you and try to wall off their garden.

Anthropic just forgot that we're still in the "functioning market competition" phase of AI and not yet in the "unstoppable monopoly" phase.
by aurareturn | 2026-02-19 06:57:54+00:00
then declined as sponsored results and SEO degraded things

It didn't decline because of this. It declined because of a general decade long trend of websites becoming paywalled and hidden behind a login. The best and most useful data is often inaccessible to crawlers.

In the 2000s, everything was open because of the ad driven model. Then ad blockers, mobile subscription model, and the dominance of a few apps such as Instagram and Youtube sucking up all the ad revenue made having an open web unsustainable.

SEO only became an issue when all there is for crawlers is SEO content instead of true genuine content.
by nxobject | 2026-02-19 06:58:42+00:00
My bad – that was a misleading thing to say! Thanks for pointing that out. I figured out what I said wrong. (Caveat emptor, I do biostatistics now.)

The context IIRC was this: one of the key results of the class was generalized Stokes' theorem, but this case (since was a 200-level class) we mostly just looked at differential forms on open spaces in R^n, and then said a few quick things about differentiable manifolds.

At this more concrete level, then, I remember that we constructed de Rham cohomology (fixing an open subset of R^n) beginning with the cochain complex given by vector spaces of k-differential forms and exterior derivatives, instead of doing the construction on a cochain complex on modules. But IIRC the difference doesn't this matter for our purposes: you can get Mayer-Vietoris by showing that de Rham cohomology satisfies the Eilenberg-Steenrod axioms (stated for cohomology), but you only need abelian groups for that. So I did give you a red herring, apologies!
by JuniperMesos | 2026-02-19 06:59:37+00:00
I definitely remember seeing Gen1 pokemon art as a kid that seemed, not washed out exactly but a bit less saturated compared to, say, the Pokémon anime that aired on American TV. To the extent I thought about this, I guess I assumed that when the original creators of Pokemon in Japan were first working on it (I doubt I had heard the name Tajiri Satoshi at that point in my life), they were doing hand-drawn experimental art, still trying to get the final design correct.
by bonesss | 2026-02-19 06:59:44+00:00
Bumping into those limits is trivial, those 5 hour windows are anxiety inducing, and I guess the idea is to have a credit card on tap to pay for overages but…

I’m messing around on document production, I can’t imagine being on a crunch facing a deadline or dealing with a production issue and 1) seeing some random fuck-up eat my budget with no take backs (‘sure thing, I’ll make a custom docx editor to open that…’), 2) having to explain to my boss why Thursday cost $500 more than expected because of some library mismatch, or 3) trying to decide whether we’re gonna spend or wait while stressing some major issue (the LLM got us in it, so we kinda need the LLM to get us out).

That’s a lot of extra shizz on top of already tricky situations.
by telmo | 2026-02-19 07:00:01+00:00
I am old enough to remember variations of this conversation from 20 years ago. If you scratch, you always find ideology underneath: an antipathy for regulation that puts people before money and for sharing the cost of social safety nets. I like living in Europe. It's not perfect (what is), but it's pretty good. Living my life well vs. worrying about my country not buying enough GPUs to keep the markets excited? Choices, choices...
by gbalduzzi | 2026-02-19 07:00:44+00:00
That is why I said "also", it should not be the only factor.

The conversation was moving between two possibilities only: either collect bug bounties or sell on the black market. I believe most (again: most, not all) security researchers collecting bug bounties right now would not start selling on the black market in case bounties disappeared. They would change their focus to something else to sustain themselves
by kqr | 2026-02-19 07:01:53+00:00
I have long thought about ways to make the board game of go (baduk, weiqi) more into a real-time srategy game. I found this game while doing research and it isn't quite it, but comes close.

I figured HN might be interested because it is one attempt at distilling the RTS genre down to just its core components: one resource, two unit types, a handful of types of terrain, a supply mechanic, unit health and morale rewarding micro.
by wtallis | 2026-02-19 07:02:00+00:00
Your framing is what's backwards. NVIDIA artificially nerfed FP64 for a long time before they started making multiple specialized variants of their architectures. It's not a conspiracy theory; it's historical fact that they shipped the same die with drastically different levels of FP64 capability. In a very real way, consumers were paying for transistors they couldn't use, subsidizing the pro parts.
by netik | 2026-02-19 07:02:17+00:00
This a great idea, but it's a great idea when on-prem.

During some thread, some where, there's going to be a roundtrip time between my servers and yours, and once I am at a scale where this sort of thing matters, I'm going to want this on-prem.

What's the difference between this and checking against a local cache before firing the request and marking the service down in said local cache so my other systems can see it?

I'm also concerned about a false positive or a single system throwing an error. If it's a false positive, then the protected asset fails on all of my systems, which doesn't seem great. I'll take some requests working vs none when money is in play.

You also state that "The SDK keeps a local cache of breaker state" -- If I've got 50 servers, where is that local cache living? If it's per process, that's not great, and if it's in a local cache like redis or memcache, I'm better off using my own network for "sub microsecond response" vs the time to go over the wire to talk to your service.

I've fought huge cascading issues in production at very large social media companies. It takes a bit more than breakers to solve these problems. Backpressure is a critical component of this, and often turning things off completey isn't the best approach.
by conradev | 2026-02-19 07:02:17+00:00
Apple moved it there in macOS Sequoia, from Utilities, because they were worried it would be confused with the Passwords app. Apple reminds you that you're actually looking for the Passwords app at every turn:

Tip: You can find all your passwords, passkeys, and verification codes in the Passwords app on your Mac.

https://support.apple.com/guide/keychain-access/what-is-keyc...
by apswin | 2026-02-19 07:02:44+00:00
Hey HN, creator here. Happy to answer questions on how the scoring works. Potatometer checks both traditional SEO signals and GEO factors, things like structured data, citation-friendliness, entity clarity, and topical authority, then gives you specific actionable fixes rather than just a score.
Also building out AI citation scoring and a content roadmap for AI search visibility if anyone is interested in that direction.
by bayindirh | 2026-02-19 07:04:57+00:00
I believe the rules are simple.

1. Don't do anything you don't want to experience yourself.
2. If you don't want to find out, do not fool around.

As an arguable middle ground, they can plead to Scott non-anonymously while addressing the public anonymously. That'd work to a point, but it's not ideal.

Also, their tone is coming through very cocky. Defining their agent as a "God!", then giving it a cocky and "you're always right, don't stand down" initialization prompt doesn't help.

All in all, they doesn't give impression of being a naive person who did a mistake unintentionally, but on the contrary.