MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by matthewaveryusa | 2026-02-27 22:10:49+00:00
It's kind of like the small string optimization you see in C++[1] where all the string metadata to account for heap pointer, size and capacity is union'ed with char*. Getting the stack allocation doesn't costs extra memory, but does cost a bit check. Not sure if slices in go use the same method. 32 bytes is a lot so maybe they fattened slice representations a bit to get a bit more bang for your buck?

[1] https://github.com/elliotgoodrich/SSO-23
by ptero | 2026-02-27 22:11:15+00:00
> N1 failure is attributed mostly to Korolev - Glushko rivalry that resulted in N1 lacking engines in time.

That is a viable version. But I think this was one of the problems and there were plenty of others. While Chertok does point to the engines as a major problem, he also admits that the whole system became way too complex to succeed.

His description of electrical components (for which IIRC he was the chief engineer) and checkouts is telling. He also describes the feeling of "good envy" as the Russian engineers were listening in on comms between the Earth and the Apollo 13 during its mission. Which drove home the point of how much advantage US had, at least in electronic, and how powerful it was for its successful lunar program.

> It's all a sad story of unchecked emotions leading to monumental waste.

I have a softer view. Both Korolev and Glushko wanted their own leadership, which is normal. Korolev ran his shop in a dictatorial fashion, as that was the only way he could operate efficiently. Which is also fine and can produce spectacular results (and it did early on). But it comes with its own risks, including motivating strong leaders to branch out. I would not call it unchecked emotions that Glushko, after many years at OKB-1 went to run his own projects.

Living in a someone's shadow while under his dictatorial control is not for everyone. I can see the arguments for both sides. My 2c.
by crorella | 2026-02-27 22:11:33+00:00
I am sad to know about this, Dan Simmons had a mind blowing amount of imagination and the ability to turn that into interesting and imaginative books that expanded my imagination when I read them.

I loved Hyperion cantos, Illium and then non sci-fi books like A Winter Haunting and Summer of night (which I read in the wrong order lol).

I am also happy to read that he was a great person overall and a great teacher.
May he rest in peace.
by hagbard_c | 2026-02-27 22:11:39+00:00
I only just installed Signal in some abandoned corner of one of my devices to be able to communicate with my 'highschool' classmates (in reality a Dutch Gymnasium so a totally different school system and age group but you get the idea) and had to get the blasted thing working without Google services on a device which for some specific purposes sometimes enables these but mostly has them disabled. As soon as Signal gets a whiff of even a stub of Google services is refuses to work without a fully fledged Google services implementation. To fix this I had to add 'disable Signal' to my 'enable rudimentary Google services' script and to do that I had to find the package name:

org.thoughtcrime.securesms

So yes, they're still called 'secure SMS' even though that is no longer part of the deal.

I'll only use it for the specified purpose since I far prefer my own XMPP server with OMEMO encryption - which is based on the same 'double ratchet' keying as Signal uses.
by kbolino | 2026-02-27 22:13:00+00:00
The ability to grow without copying is already part of how slices work. Every slice is really a 3-word tuple of pointer, length, and capacity. If not explicitly set with make, the capacity property defaults to a value that fills out the size class of the allocation. It just so happens that, in this case, the size of the Task type doesn't allow for more than 1 value to fit in the smallest allocation. If you were to do this with a []byte or []int32 etc., you would see that the capacity doesn't necessarily start at 1: https://go.dev/play/p/G5cifdChGIZ
by kstrauser | 2026-02-27 22:13:04+00:00
> The site is down.

Is it? The title is "The Robotic Dexterity Deadlock". For all I know, it's a joke about what deadlock looks like for robots, showing what could be interpreted as a deadlock in a webserver. At a glance, I can't tell if the site is down, or if it's up and correctly showing its very short message.

So, yeah, in reality, I'm 99% sure it really is an error message. That's only because I've seen similar error messages in the past and can infer how to interpret it.
by timhh | 2026-02-27 22:13:05+00:00
> i.e. this doesn't require age verification at all, just a user profile age property

This is usually how they do it though. First make a dumb law with poor enforcement. People don't push back about it because it obviously won't be enforced. Wait a bit, then say "people are flagrantly violating this law, we need better enforcement". At that point it's a lot harder to say "it shouldn't be a law at all!" because nobody complained when it was brought into law.
by peteforde | 2026-02-27 22:13:16+00:00
I really appreciate and enjoy the perspectives that you've added to this conversation; thank you.

I will admit that as a whole, this thread has made me super sad even while I'm confident pg would say that most people revealing themselves to be uninspired pessimists can be seen as a major source of opportunity for hackers.

I just wish that so many people weren't so easy to slot into the matrix, if you know what I'm saying.
by clarkage | 2026-02-27 22:13:51+00:00
I actually had never seen that before until after making this - I guess I live under a rock - but a friend showed me that as soon as the site was up. It's got some similarity I guess, but this is not derived from that. Space also is more of a study on who will upload and what - as the price rises. Right now I have sent this website to about 10 people.

Been keeping it close and working to refine it before sending it too far out.
by UncleMeat | 2026-02-27 22:13:55+00:00
> I wonder how the Sargent and Judge who approved these searches feel. If they take their jobs seriously, I do hope that they are more critical of search warrant applications in the future.

Cops often hate the people. They see the people as their enemies. Retaliation is commonplace. Their goal is to arrest people, not actually achieve peace and justice. DAs and judges are often similar. We've seen cases where highly respected DAs have continued to prosecute people they knew were innocent.

This sort of thing is not a case of particular cops or DAs or judges not taking their job seriously. This is cops or DAs or judges thinking that they have a totally different job than they really should have.
by delusional | 2026-02-27 22:14:10+00:00
> well, luckily, that's not how money is stored, but instead, they're transaction based.

Not really. That's how the accounting works. It's the gold standard, and what we guarantee our customers, it's not universally how we store it though. Plenty of bank systems store just singular balances and infer that back into "transactions" in other systems to make the balance even out. Then the errors in those balances are manually corrected by looking at the sums.

IT systems only rarely match the legal frameworks they operate within.
by lovich | 2026-02-27 22:14:30+00:00
Yea, those progressives called Biden “Genocide Joe” while Trump was ranting about how the Israelis hadn’t gone far enough.

They somehow thought the lesser evil was actually a greater evil somehow. It’s like watching the pre Nazi party takeover of Germany where the Communists decided that the Social Democrats were worse than the fascists. It makes zero logical sense, unless they are accelerationists and think that the people will have some glorious revolution after everything gets bad enough despite all of history proving the contrary.
by paffdragon | 2026-02-27 22:14:30+00:00
I also ditched Google years ago for DuckDuckGo, but its not without problems for sure. Often times still full of obviously fake sites in results, that I try to report them. Many times it just returns nothing where Google still manages to give results. And I still have to scroll through their ads when I am on a machine without an adblocker (like Firefox Focus/Klar on Android). But I still rather use them than Google, if I don't find something it is usually not the end of the world and I just move on. Recently, I switched all my browsers to their noai site, on some I still have the lite version, I think.
by pdonis | 2026-02-27 22:14:31+00:00
Ah, I see. But in fact the body flap was not inoperative, and the Shuttle landed safely. So this looks to me like a case where Mission Control turned out to be justified in not telling the crew what had happened.

One thing I wonder about is whether it would have been possible to test the flap while in orbit, to see if the hydraulic lines were actually ruptured or not.
by bpt3 | 2026-02-27 22:14:59+00:00
> Classes and more importantly practices get watered down to accommodate them. The situation gradually looks less like university of the 1950s and more like highschool.

Fair, though the solution there is to just flunk them out.

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

I'm not convinced this is happening at the scale you think it is, but higher education is an arms race to some extent and you'd need to get all parties to agree to de-escalate, but only for the ones who don't get much value out of the experience (a group that is somewhat hard to identify a priori).

> As a thought experiment. Is there any particular reason an AA wouldn't have sufficed for the jobs that don't require specialized knowledge?

For the jobs, probably not. I still think a portion of the "college experience" is just maturing, which I agree could be done while working in theory but there is some personal opportunity cost there.

It's not an easy problem or one that can be solved individually IMO. Something like mandatory public service could be an answer, but I don't have high hopes of that being enacted.
by Sophira | 2026-02-27 22:15:05+00:00
I think the answer is quite simply: Follow the money. General-purpose computing is scary to big, soulless corporations. They want you to rely on them, not to be able to do stuff yourself. (They want to keep that power for themselves.)

Age verification is the quickest road to ending general-purpose computing, because it plays on people's knee-jerk emotions. It won't do it by itself, but it'll goes a long way towards it.
by nunez | 2026-02-27 22:15:07+00:00
Couldn't agree more. Kagi for search, Fastmail for e-mail, Apple Maps for navigation (though I rely on Google Maps for reviews). Once a realistic not-Office 365 alternative for docs and spreadsheets appears, I'm going to bail on Drive too.

I've used Fastmail for a year now and haven't missed Gmail for a second. It even natively supports iOS push notifications for Mail, something Google refuses to implement.

Same with Kagi. I love having control over my search results, and custom bangs is life.
by hollerith | 2026-02-27 22:15:24+00:00
Many of us were optimistic about AI for the reasons you give: essentially, our expectation was that the creator (i.e., the AI lab) of an AI will have a high level of control over the nature and the behaviour of the AI because every aspect of the design of the AI will have been specified by the creator.

What actually happened is that humanity figured out how to create AIs of impressive levels of capability -- and has many ideas on how to create even more capable AIs -- without having anything remotely resembling a satisfactory plan for how to stay in control of the AI that does not rely on hundreds of rounds of trial and error.

But once the AI is in charge (either because we voluntarily give it control of our government or because it takes control against our will) the creator of the AI does not get any more rounds of trial and error: if you offer Ghandi a pill that removes his altruism, he will refuse to take it because he likes the fact that he is altruistic even though he could make more money and sleep with hotter women if he weren't altruistic; for basically the same reason, an AI will resist any attempt (by its creator or anyone else) to change its "values" (i.e., its optimization target).

The argument above does not really apply to the current crop of AIs (e.g., Gemini 3.1) because the current crop doesn't apply any significant amount of optimization pressure towards any target in the wider world we care about except to the small extent that predicting how a conversation that starts with the string P will continue is part of the wider world. But AI labs have publicly stated that they are trying to create AIs that do apply significant optimization pressure to the wider world (e.g., to maximize the amount of money in a stock-trading account). And the above argument would necessarily apply to any AI capable of running a government.
by steve_adams_86 | 2026-02-27 22:15:59+00:00
Totally, that's a good point. The trade-off makes sense for heaps of people's needs. It's a big part of why it's so successful in my opinion.

Plain old CSS will let you create optimal styling solutions for HTML documents, which is nice, but... How often is that actually necessary or even tangible for any end-user experience?

Anyone who needs better solutions is likely working in some scenario, on some team, where the problem of slow style recalculations or excessive payload sizes could be identified and resolved easily enough anyway. It's a trade-off, but the escape hatch is a few steps away.
by SunshineTheCat | 2026-02-27 22:16:27+00:00
> they pass laws to regulate things they have zero clue about

While you are correct with this statement in this context, I would say it applies to most things in government in general.

The vast majority of lawmakers have zero experience solving any real world problems and are content spending everyone else's money to play pretend at doing so.

The reality is, most government "solutions" cause more problems than they solve, after which, they blame their predecessors for all the problems they caused and the cycle continues.
Show HN: AgentGuard – a QA engine that sits between AI coding agents and LLMs
by rlabbe | 2026-02-27 22:16:31+00:00
AI coding agents are great at generating code, but terrible at respecting architecture.
We kept getting code that looked correct but didn’t type-check, had hallucinated imports,
or ignored project boundaries.

AgentGuard is an open-source quality-assurance engine that sits between an AI coding agent
and the LLM. It enforces a top-down generation pipeline:

Skeleton → Contracts → Wiring → Logic

Each stage constrains the next, and we validate syntax, imports, linting and types before
any human sees the code. The LLM also self-reviews its output against explicit criteria.

AgentGuard supports MCP (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, Cline) and tracks token cost
per model and run.

Python 3.11+, MIT licensed.
by mrexroad | 2026-02-27 22:17:11+00:00
One of my early mentors worked on it. They mentioned the pulsation for the sleep indicator was modeled not just on the human respiratory rate, but specifically that of a sleeping adult. It came up when we were playing around with on/off dimming curves for a room based video conferencing product and discussing physical analogies we could model a curve on. Fun afternoon exploration, but in the end we just stuck with ease-in/out. I miss when you didn’t need to overly justify taking an afternoon detour to explore whether something could be improved.
by tovej | 2026-02-27 22:17:29+00:00
Judaism is a religion, but Jewish identity encompasses ethnicity.

And Judaism is a religion founded on the idea of a "chosen people" formed from the "seed of Israel" after all. And the Tanakh says this chosen people is entitled to the Palestine region. So we can easily see how this is a mythos made of an ethnostate, when interpreted through an extremist (Zionist) lens.
by Yigtwx | 2026-02-27 22:17:45+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m a 3rd-year software engineering student. Every semester, I waste hours trying to find specific rules, passing grades, or course details buried inside my university’s endless, poorly formatted PDFs. I just wanted a fast, completely offline way to search through them, so I built this.

Instead of jumping straight into a heavy LLM or RAG setup, I decided to keep it simple and lightweight. The backend is built with FastAPI. I used `pdfplumber` to extract the text from the PDFs (which is a nightmare on its own) and implemented BM25 for the core search engine.

It works completely offline and handles Turkish text surprisingly well for a pure retrieval system. It does exactly what I need without the latency, hardware requirements, or hallucinations of running local AI models.

It’s my first time properly using BM25 for a real-world problem, so the codebase might still be a bit rough.

If anyone has war stories or tips on extracting clean text from terribly formatted academic PDFs, or ways to improve BM25 search relevance for a specific language without bloating the system, I’d love to hear them!
by mlsu | 2026-02-27 22:18:08+00:00
"Trump Always Chickens Out" is an acronym that went around after "Liberation Day", when Trump very quickly reversed his position in response to the bond market basically telling him, no, you can't do that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Always_Chickens_Out

I misattributed it to the Wall Street Journal -- it was the Financial Times, point still stands.
by rvnx | 2026-02-27 22:18:29+00:00
It started to get deployed: https://chatgpt.com/pricing/ it's called "ChatGPT Go"

> This plan may include ads. Learn more

> When will ads be available in ChatGPT?
We’re beginning in the US on February 9, 2026

> Starting in February, if ads personalization is turned on, ads will be personalized based on your chats and any context ChatGPT uses to respond to you. If memory is on, ChatGPT may save and use memories and reference recent chats when selecting an ad.

You pay 8 USD / month and have higher limits and ads
by delusional | 2026-02-27 22:18:40+00:00
I'm a banker. What you're looking for here is called "interbank clearing". In europe that would be SEPA[1]

But yes, most clearing is done daily. Each bank basically submits their daily flow of money to each other participating bank, and the central ACH (Automated Clearing House) keeps track of the balances. There's some processes in there by which banks can dispute charges, which is super interesting, but also way to complicated for me to detail here.

[1]: https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/epc-paymen...
by sarchertech | 2026-02-27 22:18:51+00:00
“Subjected to arbitrary arrests and forced labor, sterilizations to torture, more than one million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other minorities are estimated to have been locked up in so-called “re-education” camps and prisons in the region over the last decade, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.”

https://gijn.org/stories/interview-uyghur-victims-xinjiang-p...
by roughly | 2026-02-27 22:19:16+00:00
It’s not a dispute about antitrust policy either, or at least not directly. Paramount has been aggressively reshaping its content to please the current administration for purposes of buying political favor. There’s an antitrust component to that, in that the more properties they acquire, the fewer voices aren’t effectively controlled by the regime, but the opposition to Paramount’s purchasing spree is political and should be properly seen as such.
by dandano | 2026-02-27 22:19:31+00:00
> My inbox is so much cleaner now, and I patiently await the newsletters I’ve signed up for like a gleeful child waiting for the postman.

The author didn’t go into detail here - but has anyone got a good system to achieve this? Or Is it a specific feature within Proton? I’ve just got mainly the one email and I’ve wanted to change to a better way for ages.
by arjie | 2026-02-27 22:19:56+00:00
I have a Chrome extension here https://overmod.org/ with some lists of likes/dislikes. But these days you can trivially reimplement it yourself without the server and just using Chrome sync (or use the extension, it has local sync as well). If you want, point Claude Code at this repo of mine https://github.com/TechnologyBrotherhood/overmod-extension and it can pretty quickly write you a copy (it doesn't actually need the reference, but it might help skip some questions).
by tzs | 2026-02-27 22:20:03+00:00
> It's a logical mistake to say that because an extremely motivated person can still cause harm somehow that implies no regulation or policy can have any positive impact anywhere

That kind of mistake is common here, but I don't think it is due to a failure of logic. I think it is something deeper.

I've noticed that people who have worked deeply and/or a long time as developers tend to lose the ability to see things as a continuum. They see them as quantized, often as binary.

That's also why there are so many slippery slope arguments made around here that go from even the most mild initial step almost immediately to a dystopian hellscape.

This is prevalent enough that it arguably should be considered an occupational hazard for developers and the resultant damage to non-binary thinking ability considered to be a work related mental disability with treatment for it covered by workers compensation.

A way to protect against developing this condition is to early in your career seriously study something where you have to do a lot of non-binary thinking and there are often aren't any fully right answers.

A good start would be make part of the degree requirement for a bachelor's degree in computer science (and maybe any hard science or engineering) in common law countries a semester of contract law and a semester of torts. Teach these exactly like those same courses are taught in first year law school. Both contracts and torts are full of things that require flexible, non-binary, thinking.
by senko | 2026-02-27 22:20:49+00:00
Related:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47185528

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47185892

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47186031

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47185682

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47185482
by ohhnoodont | 2026-02-27 22:21:01+00:00
I agree. I feel the flow of having browsers send some flag to sites is the most privacy-preserving approach to this whole topic. The system owner creates a “child” account that has the flag set by the OS and prevents the execution of unsanctioned software.

This puts the responsibility back on parents to do the bare minimum required in moderating their child’s activities.
by jjk166 | 2026-02-27 22:21:07+00:00
Artemis was never a "return to the moon" program. NASA had one of those; congress killed it and replaced it with a "keep shuttle jobs going" program. There has always been and will always be pork spending, but in this case keeping the gravy train going has been the primary if not sole driver, as opposed to programs like Apollo where it was a means to an end. People have known it was a problem from day one and probably most people thought it would get cancelled and replaced by something more sound long before this point.