MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rep_lodsb | 2026-02-21 20:49:29+00:00
Thanks for trying to educate the young whippersnappers about hard drives, but a lot of this rambling seems entirely off-topic.

>Unless you can manually set CHS in BIOS to match, which a USB adapter won't let you do anything you want like BIOS. A Pi could substitute for that but it was never really a good idea, mainly useful to set a non-default CHS on one drive to match the default CHS on an established drive when both are plugged into the same motherboard.

USB hard drives act as SCSI block devices, they don't have a CHS geometry and sectors are addressed by a single number (LBA=Linear Block Address).

Again: the purpose of this device is to connect an OLD HARD DISK to a MODERN COMPUTER. Not the other way around! If you plug it in and try to boot from with a BIOS / UEFI CSM that supports this, it will make up a CHS geometry based on the total number of sectors, instead of using the (real or translated) one that the drive actually uses and reports in its "IDENTIFY DEVICE" response. Because it's connected over USB and behaves like any other USB mass storage device.

That may well lead to problems when booting DOS from a drive that was formatted in some other machine, because the MBR will not use the same geometry. But that's not what this is for.

>If I was being very skeptical, I would say it's possible the coder didn't even know that USB adapters exist.

From the second paragraph in the readme: «« While cheap, modern adapters usually only work with newer "LBA" type drives, ATAboy works all the way back to the earliest CHS only, PIO Mode 0, ATA disks. »»
by mmaunder | 2026-02-21 20:49:34+00:00
Yeah I don't think we ever got that fast in South Africa. I started out on a 1200 baud modem on something called Beltel which is like Prestel which was the UK equivalent. At the time our entire country's international internet connection was via a 9600 modem based at Grahamstown university and the other universities shared that link AFAIK. Then I got a borrowed VMS account at university of cape town which I could use to telnet to a sun unix box and run IRC and my life changed. Was also phone phreaking from Cape Town at a little later on using BlueBeep to connect to a BBS in Orange County called Digital Decay. Was suuuper lucky when I'd get a 14.4 connection on the international trunk. Mostly it was slower. But the AT&T home country directs had the best lines when they were seizable.
by madzarm | 2026-02-21 20:49:38+00:00
I've been using Claude Code a lot, but finding past sessions is a nightmare. The built-in --resume flag just gives you a flat list. If I want to find a specific database refactoring chat from last week, I have to scroll manually and guess based on truncated titles.

I got tired of this, so I built a searchable TUI for it. You type what you're looking for, hit Enter, and it instantly drops you back into the terminal chat via claude --resume <id>.

I wanted the search to actually be good, so it doesn't just use grep. It's written in Rust and does local hybrid search—BM25 via SQLite FTS5 for exact keyword matches, plus semantic search using an all-MiniLM-L6-v2 ONNX model to find conceptual matches. It merges them with Reciprocal Rank Fusion.

Everything runs 100% locally. No search data goes to the cloud, and the embedding model is small enough (~80MB) to run fast on any hardware.

It's completely open source. I'd love to hear what you think, especially from claude code power users.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-02-21 20:49:52+00:00
The reposts and crossposts are popular because while you may have seen it before, millions haven't.

I think I'm almost at the point of letting it go already. If AI becomes more egregious / apparent, I'm out. I was caught by one already - scrolled for too long, came across some manufacturing video (I love those), but as it went on it became less and less realistic. By the end I was like "huh, TIL robots can make jeans out of banana fiber end to end", but that wasn't true.
by estimator7292 | 2026-02-21 20:50:01+00:00
We won't get rid of natural gas any time soon. Ng pipelines are not in any way similar to H2 pipelines except the word 'pipe'. You can't just put hydrogen in them. You can't even retrofit them. You're looking at laying an entirely new pipeline either way.

Furthermore, most H2 is produced by fossil fuel extraction. We aren't cracking water to get H2, we're pulling it out of the ground. Cracking water is hideously expensive.

All in all, combustion engines are more efficient than green hydrogen. That's the core problem. We simply don't have the absurd amounts of unused energy required for green H2 production. If we did, we'd be pumping fully half of that energy into the atmosphere as waste heat.

Hydrogen cars aren't going to happen. We won't have grid-scale hydrogen. It's just a terrible idea. Hydrogen is too difficult to handle and incredibly dangerous to store. The efficiency is so ludicrously bad that you would genuinely do better to create syngas from captured atmospheric carbon and burn it in regular combustion vehicles.

Avoiding carbon emissions is not the only concern in regards to the climate. Focusing on carbon and nothing else leads you to really dumb and bad ideas like piping hydrogen gas across the continent.
by samrus | 2026-02-21 20:50:18+00:00
In my experience, the gist of it does reach management when its an existing vendor. Especially if management is tech literate

Becuase management wants to know why the graphs all went to zero, and the engineers have nothing else to do but relay the incident report.

This builds a perception for management of the vendor, and if the perception is that the vendor doesnt tell them shit or doesnt even seem to know theres an outage, then management can decide to shift vendors
by constantcrying | 2026-02-21 20:50:20+00:00
When comparing EVs to hydrogen cars it is very obvious that one is the superior solution.

An EV is a clear simplification of an ICE. Add a Battery and replace the mechanical complexity of a combustion engine with a relatively simple electric motor. So many components are now unnecessary and so many problems just go away. EVs also make charging simpler.

Hydrogen cars on the other hand are very complex and also quite inefficient, requiring many steps to go from hydrogen generation to motor movement. And they require a very sophisticated network of charging infrastructure, which has to deal with an explosive gas at high pressures. Something which is dangerous even in highly controlled industrial environments.

I just do not see a single reason why hydrogen cars would catch on. EVs are good already and come with many benefits.
by roberttod | 2026-02-21 20:51:25+00:00
I created my own version with an inner llm, and outer orchestration layer for permissions. I don't think the OTP is needed here? The outer layer will ping me on signal when a tool call needs a permission, and an llm running in that outer layer looks at the trail up to that point to help me catch anything strange. I can then give permission once/ for a time limit/ forever on future tool calls.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-02-21 20:51:26+00:00
No online platform has free speech. No online platform should have free speech. Besides, free speech is a constitutional / legal thing, a platform does not need to host it.

Claiming Twitter has free speech (as in absolutist, as in you can say what you want and won't get banned) means you've drunk the kool-aid / accepted the propaganda.
by phil21 | 2026-02-21 20:52:00+00:00
I’m sure there are other ways of doing what I’m doing, but openclaw was the first “package it up and have it make sense” project that captured my imagination enough to begin playing with AI beyond simple copy/paste stuff from chatGPT.

One example from last night:
I have openclaw running on a mostly sandboxed NUC on my lab/IoT network at home.

While at dinner someone mentioned I should change my holiday light WLED pattern to St Patrick’s day vs Valentine’s Day.

I just told openclaw (via a chat channel) the wled controller hostname, and to propose some appropriately themes for the holiday, investigate the API, and go ahead and implement the chosen theme plus set it as the active sundown profile.

I came back home to my lights displaying a well chosen pattern I’d never have come up with outside hours of tinkering, and everything configured appropriately.

Went from a chore/task that would have taken me a couple hours of a weekend or evening to something that took 5 minutes or less.

All it was doing was calling out to Codex for this, but it acting as a gateway/mediator/relay for both the access channel part plus tooling/skills/access is the “killer app” part for me.

I also worked with it to come up with a promox VE API skill and it’s now repeatable able to spin up VMS with my normalized defaults including brand new cloud init images of Linux flavors I’ve never configured on that hypervisor before. A chore I hate doing so now I can iterate in my lab much faster. Also is very helpful spinning up dev environments of various software to mess with on those vms after creation.

I haven’t really had it be very useful as a typical “personal assistant” both due to lack of time investment and running against its (lack of) security model for giving it access to comms - but as a “junior sysadmin” it’s becoming quite capable.
by verdverm | 2026-02-21 20:52:19+00:00
This is a good article [1] to get an overview of the "backend" of the protocol, it's very plug-n-play. One question I have about the setup you describe, how does moderation work? ATProto has the best moderation scheme I know of, "stacked." [2]

[1] https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers

[2] https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...
by sp00chy | 2026-02-21 20:53:45+00:00
Might be but sometimes you don’t have another choice when employers are enforcing AIs which have no „feeling“ for context of all business processes involved created by human workers in the years before. Those who spent a lot of love and energy for them mostly. And who are now forced to work against an inferior but overpowered workforce.

Don’t stop sabotaging AI efforts.
by fiddlerwoaroof | 2026-02-21 20:54:04+00:00
Yeah, there's something of a tension between the Perlis quote "It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than 10 functions on 10 data structures" and Parse, don't validate.

The way I've thought about it, though, is that it's possible to design a program well either by encoding your important invariants in your types or in your functions (especially simple functions). In dynamically typed languages like Clojure, my experience is that there's a set of design practices that have a lot of the same effects as "Parse, Don't Validate" without statically enforced types. And, ultimately, it's a question of mindset which style you prefer.
by mat0 | 2026-02-21 20:55:46+00:00
I read it for you. Spoiler alert, remained uninteresting until the end. I agree with the notion that we will have to adapt our workflows now that coding is getting cheaper (at least for now), but the author is suggesting to forgo PRs entirely and demonises humans for being slow and some sort of bottleneck. The author is suggesting that you can let agents go crazy on your codebase and that if you don't do it you are some sort of dinosaur that doesn't accept change. It's complete nonsense in my opinion.
by selridge | 2026-02-21 20:55:47+00:00
I do t see either of those as the premise.

This is about getting the computer to do the stuff we had been promised computing would make easier, stuff that was never capital-H Hard but just annoying. Most of the real claw skills are people connecting stuff that has always been connectable but it has been so fiddly as to make it a full time side project to maintain, or you need to opt into a narrow walled garden that someone can monetize to really get connectivity.

Now you can just get an LLM to learn apple’s special calendar format so you can connect it to a note-taking app in a way that only you might want. You don’t need to make it a second job to learn whatever glue needs to make that happen.
by arboles | 2026-02-21 20:56:14+00:00
Regarding BTPL, it's a license called Big Time Public License, which I mentioned in my original post. It was written by this guy that has written a bunch of experimental software licenses.[1]

If I were to choose a license in an informed way, I would want to really understand other people's choice of using OSS licenses. I almost exclusively use open-source/libre programs in my devices and make code contributions occasionally. I think I'm familiar with the ecosystem more than the commercial (proprietary) ecosystem. The freedom bestowed by owning the copy of the source code is very important in my opinion. While OSS is the best model we have right now, I and others see flaws, like dependency-chain failures, maintainer burnout, and not-so-good incentives like keeping your system unpolished/hard to use so support can be your income.

In plain terms, my question is, if you can tack on monetization to an open-source license, it would no longer be real open-source (true), why wouldn't developers want that?

[1] https://github.com/berneout
by vunderba | 2026-02-21 20:56:29+00:00
Nice job. I saw something like this a little while ago [1] which showed the Hayes AT-DT command but otherwise was pretty limited. Don't forget to use the Network tools to throttle your connection for a more faithful experience!

Feedback:

- The click sound is absurdly loud.

- Is 31,200 bps a UK thing? I grew up in the era of 14.4, 28.8, and 33.6 kbps.

- You should chop up the audio file so the number of tones matches the number of digits in the phone number field.

[1] - https://dialupmodemsound.com
Show HN: Llama 3.1 70B on a single RTX 3090 via NVMe-to-GPU bypassing the CPU
by xaskasdf | 2026-02-21 20:57:30+00:00
Hi everyone, I'm kinda involved in some retrogaming and with some experiments I ran into the following question: "It would be possible to run transformer models bypassing the cpu/ram, connecting the gpu to the nvme?"

This is the result of that question itself and some weekend vibecoding (it has the linked library repository in the readme as well), it seems to work, even on consumer gpus, it should work better on professional ones tho
by constantcrying | 2026-02-21 20:57:32+00:00
>We should embrace any way to get a clean running car on the road.

No. We should embrace the technically most feasible, which opens up new technology to the most people.

EVs are the clear winners. Every cent spent on hydrogen infrastructure is a cent wasted, because it could go to making the one feasible technology better. Arbitrary openness to technology long after it has been clearly established that the technology is inferior is not a good thing, it is a path to stay on ICEs forever.

Hydrogen is a bad idea. The only way to defend it is by pretending modern EVs do not exist, since they solved all the existing problems and offer numerous benefits over hydrogen.

Additionally the customer has already chosen and he has chosen the right technology, because the value proposition of an EV is far greater than that of a hydrogen car.
by verdverm | 2026-02-21 20:57:51+00:00
The work to make the PLC not centralized has already begun

1. Non-profit (separate entity from Bluesky)

2. Moving to Switzerland (get the f' out of the US)

3. Consortium control (proof-of-authority)

A PLC read-only mirror implementation was released the last week. I've been running one for a almost a year, redoing my hardware right now, so it's currently down. There are others out there.
by tadfisher | 2026-02-21 20:58:11+00:00
I used to get into arguments all the time about how triple-buffering reduces latency, and I think it's because we lacked resources like this; people assume it adds the additional back buffer to a queue, when the traditional implementation "renders ahead" and swaps the most recently-completed back buffer. It's a subtle difference but significantly reduces the worst-case latency vs. a simple queue.

I think most people get their information from help blurbs in settings menus for PC games, which are often hilariously vague or incorrect.
by matltc | 2026-02-21 20:58:55+00:00
Wut

None of this is true today. Maybe it becomes true, but I don't know what planet this guy is on where he doesn't have to worry about version control and gets perfect code from the agent everytime so no need to check and not a single person types code

I agree that sdlc is changing, but dead? Come on

The poles at the ai hype scale are taking on religious qualities with these grand proclamations and imagined reality
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-21 20:58:57+00:00
I have never in my life felt imposter syndrome between 30 years and 10 jobs. I was honest at the outset about my strengths and weaknesses and they hired me knowing what they were getting.

For me for instance, I’m very honest about not doing web dev and failing miserably every time I tried (of course I know JS). I want to be filtered out if that’s a requirement.
Show HN: Nexus – A social platform where your GitHub profile is your identity
by tita-n | 2026-02-21 20:59:01+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Nexus because I kept asking why developers share their work on Twitter when GitHub already has everything that matters — contributions, repos, streaks, stack.

Nexus uses GitHub OAuth so your profile is built automatically. No bios to write, no follower games. Features so far: project showcases with repo previews, syntax-highlighted code snippets in the feed, threaded discussions, and a trending algorithm.

Just shipped the social feed (Phase 3). Very early, very few users. Looking for honest feedback from people who actually build things.

What would make you use this over just tweeting about your projects?
by tejohnso | 2026-02-21 21:00:23+00:00
I read the whole thing and thought I had very little interest in this kind of thing. I'm not sure if the writing is exceptional, or if I was captured by the idea that the style would change as I read on. Maybe a bit of both, but either way, this was very interesting. I wonder, if a similar thing were done with hand writing, whether many of us would be lost a lot sooner.
by cptskippy | 2026-02-21 21:00:58+00:00
> It's not generally good financial advice to pay the overhead of an insurance company for costs you can easily pay yourself

For a lot of companies, a lawsuit would be the end of them even if it's not financial ruin. Often times the decision to purchase insurance isn't made by the CEO but rather by the board of directors.

Board directives are often why you see companies adopting or trending towards certain activities that don't necessarily make sense. They might be at the benefit of a member of the board or one of the other companies they chair.
by apothegm | 2026-02-21 21:01:29+00:00
I also use VSCode and derivatives. Also mostly without mousing. But I don’t HAVE to, because I know how to use CLI tooling to not only edit files as needed but also handle things like version control — which I’ve noticed a disappointing percentage of my colleagues, even those with a decade in the field, are mystified by. I haven’t touched VSCode’s git integrations, but the astonishment at being introduced to CLI rebasing — followed by interactive rebasing — was eye-opening.
Show HN: Gdansk – Generate React front ends for Python MCP servers
by mplemay97 | 2026-02-21 21:02:48+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Gdansk to make it easy to put a React frontend on top of a Python MCP server.

As OpenAI and Claude app stores gain traction, apps are becoming the primary interface to external tools. Many of us build serious backend logic in Python, but the UI layer is often slow to ship. Gdansk bridges that gap.

You write your logic in a Python MCP server. Gdansk generates a React frontend that connects to it out of the box.

Repo: https://github.com/mplemay/gdansk
by nextos | 2026-02-21 21:03:00+00:00
As a heavy user of formal methods, I think refinement types, instead of theorem proving with Lean or Isabelle, is both easier and more amenable to automation that doesn't get into those pitfalls.

It's less powerful, but easier to break down and align with code. Dafny and F* are two good showcases. Less power makes it also faster to verify and iterate on.
by skydhash | 2026-02-21 21:03:06+00:00
I also don't like magic, but React is the wrong definition of magic in this case. It's an abstraction layer for UI and one that is pretty simple when you think about it conceptually. The complexity is by third party library that are building on top of it, but proposing complex machineries instead of simple ones. Then you have a culture of complexity around simple technology.

But it does seems that culture of complexity is more pervasive lately. Things that could have been a simple gist or a config change is a whole program that pulls tens of dependencies from who knows who.
by verdverm | 2026-02-21 21:03:07+00:00
The first challenge most people have when starting AP / Mastodon is that they are presented with a choice "pick a server" before anything else. That's what I hear most often anyway.

The other challenge that AP has as an ecosystem is that they have been hostile to anyone wanting to build an index or business. People need to eat and they turned off a lot of developers who'd love to make their living building social media tech outside of the corporate oligarchy.

ATProto welcomes all, even if there is the occasional drama or hostility.
by 3form | 2026-02-21 21:03:50+00:00
I think it's "this is the way things are done in order to achieve X". Where people don't question neither whether this is the only way to achieve X, nor whether they do really care about X in the first place.

It seems common with regard to dependency injection frameworks. Do you need them for your code to be testable? No, even if it helps. Do you need them for your code to be modular? You don't, and do you really need modularity in your project? Reusability? Loose coupling?
by Esn024 | 2026-02-21 21:03:58+00:00
Very neat! My native language is Russian. I could understand it pretty well up to 1300, then only about 40% of the 1200 section (not at all the beginning, but the last paragraph was easier), then quite little after that - though I understood enough to glean that there was some woman who had showed up that caused the Master to flee.

I really got into reading Spenser's "The Faerie Queene" (about 1497) about a year ago, and I suspect that really helped me with this exercise, since he uses some language that was archaic even back then.

I really wish there was an audio recording of this story. I found the spellings in the earlier years more and more confusing.
by tokenless | 2026-02-21 21:03:59+00:00
> So really what I want is some sort of galaxy brained proxy where it can ask me for access to certain subsets of my inbox. No idea how to set that up though.

Though of the same idea. You could run a proxy that IMAP downloads the emails and then filters and acts as IMAP server. SMTP could be done the same limited to certain email addresses. You could run an independent AI harmful detector just in case.
by tpdly | 2026-02-21 21:04:03+00:00
I think these are reasons that Mastodon and Nostr aren't ever going to have a critical mass of users, remaining a niche thing for people who care about the hypotheticals (which is fine). Imho, BlueSky is the only distributed social media project that has a chance of meeting users where there are with usable search, realtime discoverability, and other consequences of centralizing event-busses.

People wine about BlueSky being too centralized, but the fact is that this type of infrastructure isn't self-hostable. You can do social-media over email a la Mastodon (which admittedly is pretty great), but most people will trade that for a walled garden.

The big problem is that all this AT infra is pretty much charity, which doesn't feel sustainable. I wish it could be funded more like public libraries than ad tech.