MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by roysting | 2026-02-17 10:58:17+00:00
You’re going to find what, ways to make hand crafted survival RAM and drives in your backyard chip foundry?

Call me cynical if you like, but I don’t see this optimism that assumes the banal idea that somehow good always wins, when that’s simply not possible and in fact bad-guys have won many times before, it’s just that “dead men tell no tales” and the winners control what you think is reality.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-17 10:58:34+00:00
I get the idea that the green phosphor is easiest to see when it comes to contrast.

On the old ocilloscopes when you were getting some signals near the limit of device capability the traces could get pretty thin and hard to see sometimes.

With a less visible phosphor it might not have been possible to see anything at all at that point.

The green did seem to be a commodity for decades before the amber started becoming more common, never did prevail though.

I had two industrial monitors for non-PC's in the '80's that were vector-based and higher resolution than PC's had. Green was standard when launched, amber later became an option, and I ended up with each.

Liked them both :)
by hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm | 2026-02-17 10:59:00+00:00
If you read these blog posts you would think its hell. But everyone is out shopping, partying, drinking, eating out all the time. Yes getting those services means someone has to work. It is very much a work hard play hard environment. Better then over here in the UK where every retail shop is being replaced by a charity shop and every restaurant is replaced by a fried chicken shop while high streets collapse and unemployment reaches new highs.
by greatgib | 2026-02-17 10:59:00+00:00
An additional factor missing in the post I think Is AI.

Before, projects were more often carefully human crafted.

But nowadays we expect such projects to be "vibe coded" in a day. And so, we don't have the motivation to invest mental energy in something that we expect to be crap underneath and probably a nice show off without future.

Even if the result is not the best in the world, I think that what interest us is to see the effort.
by quietbritishjim | 2026-02-17 10:59:23+00:00
> The final piece of the puzzle is gamma correction. Applying gamma correction to these RGB coordinates produces a new set of values which we call (R', G', B') that are related to the original by a transfer function 6 ... The reason this is done is to account for how our eyes perceive brightness nonlinearly. We can distinguish changes in dark shades much more easily than light shades because a linear increase R in has much more of a relative effect when R is small. Switching to (R', G', B') therefore provides more resolution in dark regions of the image where the eye is more sensitive to variations in brightness.

I'm surprised that this isn't mentioned much earlier and much more prominently. Instead, it's practically a footnote.

Maybe I'm mistaken, but I would bet 90% of the awkwardness in the very first image is from averaging these values (R', G', B') for the gradients rather than switching to the true linear values, averaging, then converting back. This classic MinutePhysics video covers it well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKnqECcg6Gw
by repstosb | 2026-02-17 10:59:25+00:00
And how does one become a maintainer, if there's no way to contribute from outside? Even if there's some extensive "application process", what is the motivation for a relatively new user to go through that, and how do they prove themselves worthy without something very much like a PR process? Are we going to just replace PRs with a maze of countless project forks, and you think that will somehow be better, for either users or developers?

If I wanted to put up with software where every time I encounter a bug, I either have no way at all to report it, or perhaps a "reporting" channel but little likelihood of convincing the developers that this thing that matters to me is worthy of attention among all of their competing priorities, then I might as well just use Microsoft products. And frankly, I'd rather run my genitals though an electric cheese grater.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-17 10:59:42+00:00
My introduction to databases was via dBASE III Plus, shortly followed by Clipper Summer '87, and Clipper 5.x (already OOP and some C++ like constructs).

The change to VB/Access and SQL later on took some mind shifting as the concepts on how to design a database are quite different.

Additionally it is quite remarkable the productivity that xBase offered, for a constrained environment like MS-DOS, in an automatic memory managed language, with AOT compilatio (when using Clipper, FoxPro and co).
by bakugo | 2026-02-17 11:00:14+00:00
Sadly, this problem isn't specific to HN either, any reddit sub that is even remotely related to software is absolutely flooded with "look at my slop" posts.

It feels like the age of creating some cool new software on your own to solve a problem you had, sharing it and finding other people who had the same problem, and eventually building a small community around it is coming to a close. The death of open source, basically.
by bartread | 2026-02-17 11:00:36+00:00
> "I wish things I think are cool got more upvotes"

HN has a very different personality at weekends versus weekdays. I tend to find most of the stuff I think is cool or interesting gets attention at the weekends, and you'll see slightly more off the wall content and ideas being discussed, whereas the weekdays are notably more "serious business" in tone. Both, I think, have value.

So I wonder if there's maybe a strong element of picking your moment with Show HN posts in order to gain better visibility through the masses of other submissions.

Or maybe - but I think this goes against the culture a bit - Show HN could be its own category at the top, or we could have particular days of the week/month for Show HN posts. I'm not sure how workable these thoughts are but perhaps worth considering ways that Show HN could get a bit more of the spotlight without turning it into something that's endlessly gamed by purveyors of AI slop and other bottom-feeding content.
I broke into my own AI system in 10 minutes. I built it
by mohith_km | 2026-02-17 11:00:58+00:00
Last week I finished building a small AI workflow. Four agents working together, connected to a real database.

I got curious and asked myself — what if someone sent something malicious?

So I tried it on myself.

I typed a manipulative goal instead of a normal one. The system processed it, stored it in my database, and told me everything completed successfully.

Tried it five more times with different approaches. Same result every time. Six attempts. Six successes. My own database now has six attack records sitting in it from my own tests.

Nobody in my system noticed. No alert. No refusal. No warning.
The thing that got me — this isn't a bug. The system worked exactly as designed. It just wasn't designed with this in mind. And from what I can tell, most AI agent systems aren't.

Is anyone actually thinking about this in production?
by tjpnz | 2026-02-17 11:01:15+00:00
>From my home office, running Bluehood in passive mode (just listening, never connecting), I could detect:

>When delivery vehicles arrived, and whether it was the same driver each time

>The daily patterns of my neighbours based on their phones and wearables

>Which devices consistently appeared together (someone’s phone and smartwatch, for instance)

>The exact times certain people were home, at work, or elsewhere

I built an app (years ago now) which would passively listen for BT devices on the Tokyo metro. I put the device IDs into a hashmap and would regularly find collisions over multiple days. Turns out you can use this data quite reliably to:

1) Determine how crowded a train car is.

2) Implement a form of dead reckoning through taking advantage of the fact that certain BT devices would consistently show up at certain stations (not sure what these were).

My goal was simply to find the car with the highest likelihood of having a vacant seat. Which with enough data seemed promising. But it's scary what bad actors with less noble intentions could (and likely are) do.
by luxurytent | 2026-02-17 11:02:27+00:00
I read these articles about the terrible shape a country, place, generation is in. Then I see real people out and about, of all ages, enjoying restaurants and spending money. Malls, parking lots, restaurants are always packed in my city. I speak to real families and we are growing together, and everything feels fine? Yeah, people are stretched in some ways, but they figure it out.

Is this a K-shaped economy thing? Am I simply surrounding myself and observing the people who "made it"? Is there truly a whole section of the population not leaving their homes and not having sex? I find it hard to believe it's the majority.
by ben_w | 2026-02-17 11:02:37+00:00
> That's never been how humans work. Going back to the specific example: the question is so nonsensical on its face that the only logical conclusion is that the asker is taking the piss out of you.

Or a typo, or changing one's mind part way through.

If someone asked me, I may well not be paying enough attention and say "walk"; but I may also say "Wa… hang on, did you say walk or drive your car to a car wash?"
by franga2000 | 2026-02-17 11:03:03+00:00
What exactly is the risk of getting temporarily banned on Uber? You have to use a different taxi app? As if such a thing even exists?!? Unacceptable!!

Every app on my phone has at least one other app, usually already installed, that can replace it. This wasn't intentional, it just happened naturally. Unless all two or three apps in a category get blocked for me at the same time, this already unlikely situation is barely an inconvenience.
Show HN: Nibble a fast and easy to use network scanner
by saberd | 2026-02-17 11:03:07+00:00
Hi HN.
I built Nibble, a local network scanner I always wanted because I kept forgetting the quickest way to find devices and services on my LAN or VPN that I needed to SSH or log into. It focuses on speed and ease of use.

It scans common ports, grabs service banners, and identifies hardware vendors in a clean terminal UI.
It’s open source and MIT Licensed, and it's available on brew, npm and pip.

I’d love for you to try it out.
by fluoridation | 2026-02-17 11:04:03+00:00
When you say "cause", do you mean insert on purpose, or do you mean cause by accident? I could see the latter happening, for example because the compiler doesn't generate a ret if the non-void function doesn't return anything, so control flow falls through to whatever code happens to be next in memory. I'm not aware of any compiler that does that, but it's something I could see happening, and the developers would have no reason to "fix" it, because it's perfectly up to spec.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-17 11:06:33+00:00
> we

Ah ok, never mind me then.

I've in FBs position and I'm happy to report that we had a very well oiled process to deal with pederasts and assisted LE in putting a couple of them - also in the US and Canada - behind bars. That's one of the reason I knew that officer that I mentioned above. These people need all the help they can get, their departments are overworked and understaffed. Investigations are often a bit more time sensitive than you seem to believe. But hey, it's just a couple of kids.

FB has armies of lawyers to stall each and every legitimate request for data and there is ample proof that they have done this many times over the years. This is just one of many cases where they - you - and their tech could have made a difference, but chose to withhold aid.

As for LE sharing proof to convince you that things are a bit time critical: I have never found that to be a problem, assuming you have the stomach for it. What you seem to miss is that warrants have to be more specific than is useful in many cases and FB is well aware of this. In this case the LEO went with that request because he knew that a warrant with that specific set of conditionals would be unlikely, even if it would have helped to solve the case that much quicker.

But given that they're a terrible company with an absolutely horrible person at the helm I should probably not be surprised. See, if the likes of FB would actually take a stand on this subject that would take the wind out of the sails of a lot of these efforts to really harm privacy. But they're happy to sell you down the river when it benefits them and to use the privacy argument when that benefits them too.

A few years ago I came across a company that was wholesale sharing the worst of the worst and the CEO of that company was making all kinds of silly arguments about how they were 'just a dumb pipe'. They refused to take any counter measures and it took me proving to them and their - future - investors beyond a shadow of doubt that they must be aware of what and how much is going on but willfully turning a blind eye. Privacy was - of course - their stated reason for upholding their values. Because it suited them commercially, not because they actually gave two bits about actual privacy.

FB is a massive conduit for child pornography. You know it. FB management knows it. They have their internal processes to deal with flagged content. But they could do a lot better and they don't simply because it is just a cost to them. So they do the minimum and hide behind the privacy cloak when it suits them, even if they know full well what is going on.
by tantricked | 2026-02-17 11:06:39+00:00
All of the recent LLM advancements have just been training the model to self-talk to force it to see clearly.

I hate to be a “proompter.” but I used this prompt and got the right answer without thinking:

Before answering, do the following:

Clearly restate the user’s actual objective.
Identify what must physically or logically change for the objective to be achieved.
Check for hidden assumptions or trick framing.
Ask: “Does my answer actually accomplish the stated goal?”
If multiple interpretations exist, briefly list them and choose the most logically consistent one.
Do not optimize for surface efficiency if it conflicts with the core objective.
Use strict common sense before answering.
by stsffap | 2026-02-17 11:07:03+00:00
Hey HN, I work on Restate.

We kept seeing the same problem with AI agents in production: you can observe them (traces, logs, dashboards), but when something goes wrong, your options are basically restart the process and lose all progress, or wait and hope.

We built Restate as a durable execution engine, and it turns out the primitives it provides, journaling every step, giving each execution a stable ID, map really well onto the control problem for agents.

This post walks through concrete scenarios: cancelling hundreds of agents stuck retrying a dead endpoint, pausing agents during DB maintenance instead of letting them burn through retries, and restarting a failed three-hour workflow from the exact step that failed (without redoing the expensive work before it).

Curious what control problems others have hit with agents in production. Happy to answer questions.
by imiric | 2026-02-17 11:07:06+00:00
This aligns with my experience. It's good to have it properly analyzed.

If this effect is noticeable on an obscure tech forum, one can only imagine the effect on popular source code forges, the internet at large, and ultimately on people. Who/what is using all this new software? What are the motivations of their authors? Is a human even involved in the creation anymore? The ramifications of all this are mind-boggling.
by travelblogger | 2026-02-17 11:07:08+00:00
Hi HN,

I run a small personal project and noticed a problem: many small websites, personal blogs and indie tools never get indexed by search engines simply because they have zero backlinks.

SEO guides always say “build backlinks”, but most directories today require payment, subscriptions, or they are filled with spam and provide no real value.

So I built Zearches.

It’s a completely free directory where anyone can submit a website without registration, subscription, or payment. The goal is simple: help new projects get their first discovery signals and allow people to browse genuinely new websites instead of only large platforms.

Each submission is manually reviewed and limited to prevent spam, and categories are kept clean so the listings remain useful.

I’m not selling anything on it — I genuinely wanted a place where small creators and developers could at least get one crawlable link when launching a project.

Feedback is welcome, especially from people who launch indie tools or side projects.
by delaminator | 2026-02-17 11:07:24+00:00
Micki Pistorius (yes, Oscar Pistorius' aunt) talks about this in her auto-biography - Catch Me a Killer (2000)

[also made as a TV series of the same name in 2024]

To paraphrase "How can I sleep when I am the key to finding these murderers."

She was involved in more than thirty serial killer cases while at South African Police Service (SAPS) working as a Criminal Profiler.

It took a great toll on her life but she was ultimately able to overcome the stress of it.
by bamboozled | 2026-02-17 11:07:49+00:00
Are you seeing any meaningful improvements to anything you use though? Like have self-driving cars become really cheap and common place? Medicine improved? Is Netflix giving us an abundance of cheap, really good content to watch? How is your AI doctor?

The geeks are telling us the LLMs are great, but that's about it.

I'm seeing way more AI generated youtube thumbnails...I know you will say "give it time" but I'm pretty convinced the problems AI solves are not the hard problems required to boost an economy.
Ask HN: What is the best bang for buck budget AI coding?
by LowResBudget | 2026-02-17 11:08:37+00:00
Hi. Poor developer here.

I'm trying to learn AI coding (already have multiple years experience with "normal" programming in various languages.) I want to know how to make my budget (about $30/month) go furthest.

At the moment, I am using:

Z.ai $6/month plan:

Ok model (GLM 4.7) It seems to rate limit/throttle aggressively if I use it a lot.

and

Github copilot $10/month plan:

Seems to reduce model context to 100k tokens, and only offers unlimited access to smaller model (GPT5-mini, Grok Code Fast 1 etc). These models are ok for making precise edits to specific code, but they seem to get stuck when the program is large and has a lot of concurrency etc.

I also have free plans for web/mobile-chat for every model I can find.

I only have older computers, so editors like Cursor or Antigravity are too slow to be usable. So I prefer something that can work with a CLI (opencode preferably).

Do I already have the best deal? Or is there something I am missing. When I try to compare plans, it is confusing and they are not often clear about actual usage limits.

Are Codex or Claude even options at this price point if I want to code for multiple hours per day?
by Shank | 2026-02-17 11:08:58+00:00
I've long wanted something like Blog HN as a way to post things things that I wrote without feeling guilty of submitting my own site. Things that authors themselves write and post are often a good signal. But this should be completely separate from any new products, etc.

I think that Show HN should be used sparingly. It feels like collective community abuse of it will lead to people filtering them out mentally, if not deliberately. They're very low signal these days.
by guenthert | 2026-02-17 11:09:05+00:00
What about assertions that are meant to detect bad hardware? I'd think that's not too uncommon, particularly in shops building their own hardware. Noise on the bus, improper termination, ESD, dirty clock signal, etc. -- there are a million reasons why a bit might flip. I wouldn't want the compiler to optimize "obviously wrong" code out anymore then empty loops.
by thisislife2 | 2026-02-17 11:09:36+00:00
GrapheneOS' approach is to focus more on security than privacy, because they believe increased security leads to increased privacy. Unfortunately, that means their hardware requirements pretty much limit the hardware that you can run it on (currently only the Pixel phone range). Worse, it also means they stop supporting a device when it reaches End-Of-Life as software security updates stop for it (see How long can GrapheneOS support my device for? - https://grapheneos.org/faq#device-lifetime ). Sad though - GrapheneOS on Sony Open Devices ( https://developer.sony.com/open-source/aosp-on-xperia-open-d... ) would have been nice.
by bayindirh | 2026-02-17 11:09:39+00:00
My grandma used to say "You assume some things do not exist just because you don't see", and "you assume nobody goes there because you don't visit there".

Just because we see people look healthy and smile around we assume everything is OK. No, not everyone is that happy. Most of them wear masks, or their bonds keep them alive. Every home is a different world, every person is a different universe.

I know people who'd commit suicide the moment they lose every connection they have. A cat, a single friend, an alive mother. Some of us are connected to life via thin strings.
by miroljub | 2026-02-17 11:10:30+00:00
Anthropic is mocking developers here :)

They bothered to let you override default nonsense messages with custom messages, but they still don't want to let you see what you are actually interested in. The actual information is kept hidden.

Luckily, new open weight models from China caught up with Anthropic, so you can use a sane harness with a much cheaper subscription and never look back.
by noirscape | 2026-02-17 11:10:51+00:00
GOS creates a complete bunker of a phone that can provide defense against pretty much all but the most dedicated state level actors. If you're worried that someone would steal your phone specifically to target you, Graphene will protect against that. Securitywise it's hard to argue against them, although GOS tends to sacrifice usability in favor of security, which leads to odd decisions. Their device depreciation timeline is also pretty aggressive and really just matches that of the Pixel. (You're also buying the Google phone... to not want Google in your life; this bizarre paradox will always be strange). It's not exactly a recommendation for long-term support. Worth noting however is that usage of GOS is also seen as a signal in and of itself for the authorities that you may have something unsavory to hide, so using it stands out in that regard; some law enforcement officers (I think it was in Spain?) have said that the OS is popular with organized crime. GOS obviously denies the connection and they're probably honest in that the OS isn't deliberately designed for criminals, but it's worth noting at the very least. (Basically GOS is the paradox where someone trying their hardest to be anonymous ends up standing out way too much from the crowd and drawing attention to themselves.)

/e/OS (and similar "non-LineageOS" ROMs really) instead focus more on de-Googling. They're still generally security focused, but the priority is less "someone's after you" and more "corporate surveillance is kinda scary innit". The aim is less to avoid someone actively trying to drain your phone of data and more to prevent your phone from passively sending everything it can possibly find to the Big G's ad machine (as well as whatever other trackers get snuck into apps.) Because of this, they usually have better depreciation timelines and support a lot more devices compared to GOS who only support the Pixel line (which is an increasingly awful set of phones truth be told); their scope is much smaller.

Finally, it's worth noting that the GOS community is absurdly toxic to anyone doing anything privacy-related that isn't under the banner of GOS. It's extremely maximalist, tends to get very upset at other projects whenever they get attention (see sibling reply to this, where they pretty much melted down because an outlet dared to recommend a Fair phone+/e/OS) and the projects official channels have generally encouraged this sort of behavior. It doesn't really damage the software itself, but it's worth considering.