MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dheera | 2026-02-19 19:55:22+00:00
They could also simplify tax law and they wouldn't need so much enforcement. There shouldn't be 5000 types of taxes spread all over the place.

Get rid of sales tax, property tax, exemptions, IRAs, 401ks, short capital gains, long capital gains, medicare, state, all of that bullcrap. Annualized, non-annualized, credits for having an EV on the 4th day of the second Tuesday while being a fisherman, end all of that.

Just have one income tax. It should be the sigmoid of your income normalized to the median income in your zip code, then scale it so that the total of everyone's taxes added up makes up for all the other types of tax that we're getting rid of.

The IRS should then distribute whatever is needed to the states. The states are part of the country, their hierarchy is not my problem; give me one number to pay. My tax return should be no bigger than a postcard.

Done.
by dzaima | 2026-02-19 19:55:46+00:00
To be clear I do kinda agree with the general idea that modding isn't that important to Minecraft Java; but it's still very important at least indirectly - were there not as large of a modding scene, I'd imagine many more content creators would've long ran out of content to make on it (or at least unique ways to do things), and the technical research/farms/whatever would be hampered by less available tooling.

(for what it's worth, last I played minecraft, like 1-2 years ago, I did so lightly-modded - Do A Barrel Roll for much more fun elytra; lithium; Distant Horizons; Hydrophobic Elytra to fix a stupid extremely-annoying elytra bug (might be fixed now?), BetterF3 (kinda superceded by the more recent F3 overhaul now I suppose?))
by mike97 | 2026-02-19 19:55:54+00:00
> OpenAI and Anthropic are both offering coding plans that are possibly severely subsidized

So does Google, in fact I believe their antigravity limits for Opus and Sonnet for the $20 plan has higher limits than CC $20 plan, and there is no weekly cap or I couldn't get it even with heavy usage, and then you have a separate limit for Gemini cli and for other models from antigravity.
by Traster | 2026-02-19 19:56:05+00:00
This is the case in all layoffs. Is there a bottom 10% of employees at OpenAI? By definition yes. If you do your absolute best to try and make redundant the bottom 10% of employees at OpenAI, how many of them do you think will actually be in the bottom 10%? I bet it's not all of them, it's probably not even close to half of them.

First you've got the good people who don't like the environment, they'll bite your arm off for the redundancy, then you've got the people who are doing fine but for whatever reason are happy enough to take their chances elsewhere, they'll be happy to be top of the redundancy list. Then you've got the good strong performer who pissed off the wrong person, they'll be on the list too. Then you've got the entire team that is really good and hardworking but senior management figure it's easy to just cut the entire team because their project isn't politically valuable. Before you know it the redundancy list is full and it has no correlation to the bottom 10% of performers, but because it's pretty much an almost random sample it does reduce your company's capability by 10%.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-19 19:56:39+00:00
Memory leaks very often don't fail loudly. Especially if they are slower leaks which don't immediately break the application.

A lot of the memory problems that you can see without a GC are hard to find and diagnose. Use after free, for example, is very often safe. It only crashes or causes problems sometimes. Same for double free. And they are hard to diagnose because the problems they do create are often observed at a distance. Use after free will silently corrupt some bit of memory somewhere else, what trips up on it might be completely unrelated.

It's the opposite of failing loudly.
by recursivecaveat | 2026-02-19 19:57:28+00:00
I definitely think needless whitespace flexibility often causes problems. For eg I'm pretty sure Bjarne chose :: instead of : for the namespace operator in C++ due to ambiguity. A little bit of required whitespace around jump labels and ternary expressions and we could have saved an extra character in an operator that often occurs multiple times per line. Everybody runs linters that enforce that anyways. Likewise the inability to use a hyphen in an identifier has wasted a lot of my time over the years, but nobody uses squashed subtraction expressions.
by pepdar | 2026-02-19 19:57:32+00:00
Key rotation doesn't change the account URI — ACME key rollover (RFC 8555 §7.3.5) replaces the key pair but keeps the same account URL, which is one of the reasons the draft uses account URI rather than a public key. Your DNS record stays unchanged through key rotations.

The only case that requires a DNS update is creating an entirely new account, and that's deliberate — the record binds a specific account to the domain so a stolen record can't be used by someone else.

For your setup with CNAME delegation to a custom DNS server, this should actually be simpler than dns-01. You would point _validation-persist instead of _acme-challenge, and the target record is static. No per-issuance dynamic updates at all.
by dag11 | 2026-02-19 19:57:33+00:00
For me, charm and character.

I was an original Pebble Kickstarter wearer from 2012, then got the initial Time, then the first Android smartwatches (Moto 360!) then basically every Apple Watch from then to now. Even used Google Glass a few months in 2013.

I like my wearables. I use features on my Apple Watch constantly: NFC payments, voice reminders, fitness and sleep tracking, make my iPhone yell out so I can find where I put it, etc.

But not a single damn wearable I've had has captured a fraction of the charm the original Pebble and Pebble Time had. Their UIs are low-res by modern standards, and greyscale or largely solid colors, but wow.

Dug up some videos as reference. Here's one that highlights what the core system UI aesthetic is like. Notice the transitions as you use the UI. I remember it feeling really snappy too, and it feels great to use a UI that moves like that with physical tactile buttons, as opposed to scrolling a Digital Crown or using the touch screen on an Apple Watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdRENEQcymQ

And aside from the system UI, the community of apps that existed for it back then and no doubt will continue to grow now has a lot of charm too. The creators of all the apps are making them out of love, not to be a Top 10 on an Apple app store. And they don't exactly have a strong cohesive system UI to comply with unlike Apple. Human Interface Guidelines are wonderful for phones and tablets and for serious app ecosystems I depend on, but watches are Not That Serious as far as I'm concerned so the individuality and love within each app just fills me heart with joy every time I look down at my wrist.
by chasd00 | 2026-02-19 19:57:35+00:00
> not someone else's for their usage in your product.

what if the "product" is a setup of documents that concisely describe the product so that a coding agent can reliable produce it correctly. Then the install process becomes "agent, write and host this application for the user's personal use on their computer". Now all software is for personal use only. Companies released these things and, like Frankenstein, there's a strong possibility they will turn on their creators.
Show HN: Astroworld – A universal N-body gravity engine in Python
by salinas00 | 2026-02-19 19:57:50+00:00
I’ve been working on a modular N-body simulator in Python called Astroworld. It started as a Solar System visualizer, but I recently refactored it into a general-purpose engine that decouples physical laws from planetary data.Technical Highlights:Symplectic Integration: Uses a Velocity Verlet integrator to maintain long-term energy conservation ($\Delta E/E \approx 10^{-8}$ in stable systems).Agnostic Architecture: It can ingest any system via orbital elements (Keplerian) or state vectors. I've used it to validate the stability of ultra-compact systems like TRAPPIST-1 and long-period perturbations like the Planet 9 hypothesis.Validation: Includes 90+ physical tests, including Mercury’s relativistic precession using Schwarzschild metric corrections.The Planet 9 Experiment:I ran a 10k-year simulation to track the differential signal in the argument of perihelion ($\omega$) for TNOs like Sedna. The result ($\approx 0.002^{\circ}$) was a great sanity check for the engine’s precision, as this effect is secular and requires millions of years to fully manifest.The Stack:NumPy for vectorization, Matplotlib for 2D analysis, and Plotly for interactive 3D trajectories.I'm currently working on a real-time 3D rendering layer. I’d love to get feedback on the integrator’s stability for high-eccentricity orbits or suggestions on implementing more complex gravitational potentials.
by woodruffw | 2026-02-19 19:58:07+00:00
I think the thing that puts J6 in the "definitely an insurrection attempt" category is the fact that it happened while Congress was exercising its duty to formalize the electoral college vote. We don't have to reach for statistics about how many were armed or wearing costumes (a fact that seems immaterial in any case); the question is sufficiently answered by what they were attempting to stop.
by themafia | 2026-02-19 19:58:18+00:00
> AI writing will make people who write worse than average, better writers.

If they don't care enough to improve themselves at the task in the first place then why would they improve at all? Osmosis?

If this worked then letting a world renown author write all my letters for me will make me a better writer. Right?

Who cares if you're a "good writer?" Are you "easy to understand" is the real achievement.
by aaroninsf | 2026-02-19 19:58:25+00:00
Setting aside the marvelous murk in that use of "you," which parenthetically I would be happy to chat about ad nauseum,

I would say this is a fine time to haul out:

Ximm's Law: every critique of AI assumes to some degree that contemporary implementations will not, or cannot, be improved upon.

Lemma: any statement about AI which uses the word "never" to preclude some feature from future realization is false.

Lemma: contemporary implementations have already improved; they're just unevenly distributed.

I can never these days stop thinking about the XKCD the punchline of which is the alarmingly brief window between "can do at all" and "can do with superhuman capacity."

I'm fully aware of the numerous dimensions upon which the advancement from one state to the other, in any specific domain, is unpredictable, Hard, or less likely to be quick... but this the rare case where absent black swan externalities ending the game, line goes up.
by WorldMaker | 2026-02-19 19:58:27+00:00
That's absolutely an issue that a lot of it is bespoke and proprietary.

I found someone else's list of well known open source tools (in the middle of a big marketing page advertising monorepos as an ideal): https://monorepo.tools/#monorepo-tools

That list includes several I was aware and several I'd not yet heard of. It's the cross-over between monorepo management tool and build tool is. It's also interesting how many of the open source stacks are purely for or at least heavily specialized for Typescript monorepos.

I don't have any recommendations on which tools work well, just vaguely trying to keep up on the big names in case I need to learn one for a job, or choose one to better organize an existing repo.
by hyperpape | 2026-02-19 19:58:29+00:00
> I never got why compilers don't have pluggable syntaxes.

An interesting question, but the answer is "because it's a bad idea" that doesn't actually solve the problem.

That said, the right way to implement this is as a "transpiler" that compiles one syntax into another. And only the people who want to use it pay the costs.
by scottious | 2026-02-19 19:58:40+00:00
okay it's not a slippery slope, but it's something similar (that's why I said "feels like"). He's trying to establish a continuum of things that have a variety of addictive properties in an attempt to discredit the whole idea of addiction ("Don't try to make your video game fun, or some people may become addicted")..

> apart from very narrow categories, most people would not consider mere exposure to information or non-physical social interactions to be things that can inflict harm

That's an extremely disingenuous interpretation of social media. Huge straw man. We're talking about infinite-scrolling A/B tested apps that are engineered to keep eyeballs on the screen at the first and foremost priority for the primary benefit of the company, not the user.
by Intralexical | 2026-02-19 19:58:45+00:00
> I take your meaning with the wax and such, but I think my solution would just be to go bigger and store less data. And I mean bigger like, 20 characters per print bed, or something. But then, at that scale, maybe a QR code would hold up well enough in plastic, too?

Only way to know is to try it! I think you might be surprised. QR codes (with high redundancy settings) are very resistant to corruption.

The idea with the wax is to transfer the data into a more durable final product... Lost wax casting, you print wax, cover the wax in plaster, melt the wax, pour a metal (or epoxy) into the plaster mold.
by mitkebes | 2026-02-19 19:58:53+00:00
All models have improved, but from my understanding, Gemini is the main one that was specifically trained on photos/video/etc in addition to text. Other models like earlier chatgpt builds would use plugins to handle anything beyond text, such as using a plugin to convert an image into text so that chatgpt could "see" it.

Gemini was multimodal from the start, and is naturally better at doing tasks that involve pictures/videos/3d spatial logic/etc.

The newer chatgpt models are also now multimodal, which has probably helped with their svg art as well, but I think Gemini still has an edge here
by salawat | 2026-02-19 19:59:07+00:00
>What is it about FSD that results in this valuation though?

Are you willing to accept the ugly answer? Because the point of FSD isn't what they pitch. The replacing human drivers to save lives yada yada... That ain't it. The point is creating a handful of leverage points through which the autonomy of the populace to move wherever they want can be controlled through. Once the tech is the majority driver, people can finally be properly managed as the little work units they are. That's the dark part of the valuation. The power aspect. The ones who own the means to locomote are the ultimate rent collectors. There's simply no arguing that can be done by a populace that can be prevented from showing up to any attempt at collective protest via geofencing. Or if they do show up, can be added to a comprehensive list for participating in disruptive activities.

Capabilities, ladies and gentlemen. We have to assess these things on the ground of what they enable. Delegating transport entirely to a third party necessarily creates a vulnerability of society to manipulation by the ones running the damn thing; and the ones running the damn thing want money, and security for themselves.
by patrickdevivo | 2026-02-19 19:59:10+00:00
thanks for sharing. some of the highlights we found interesting:

* Growth rate of new repos doubled in 2025 (driven by AI?)
* Microsoft leads Big Tech in repo creation, contrary to narrative the company is closed
* a16z captured nearly as much OSS value as all other early-stage VCs combined

Also, AI repos since 2023 have seen an outsized share of attention relative to other categories of repo (as measured by GitHub stars). This is not surprising, but interesting to see it playing out in the data.
by racl101 | 2026-02-19 19:59:57+00:00
MedCline relief system. It's like a plastic casing with a specific pillow for wedging your arm underneath a hole but also sleeping on an incline and a body pillow to wrap your other arm or your leg around so it's not so rough on your hips too. It's kinda weird sounding ... but it works.

And yes, try not to eat right before bed. Especially greasy food.
by Paul-E | 2026-02-19 20:00:02+00:00
I want to address this one point:

> Similar thing can be said about writing SQL. I was really happy with using sqlx, which is a crate for compile-time checked SQL queries. By relying on macros in Rust, sqlx would execute the query against a real database instance in order to make sure that your query is valid, and the mappings are correct. However, writing dynamic queries with sqlx is a PITA, as you can’t build a dynamic string and make sure it’s checked during compilation, so you have to resort to using non-checked SQL queries. And honestly, with kysely in Node.js, I can get a similar result, without the need to have a connection to the DB, while having ergonomic query builder to build dynamic queries, without the overhead of compilation time.

I've used sqlx, and its alright, but I've found things much easier after switching to sea-orm. Sea-orm has a wonderful query builder that makes it feel like you are writing SQL. Whereas with sqlx you end up writing Rust that generates SQL strings, ie re-inventing query builders.

You also get type checking; define your table schema as a struct, and sea-orm knows what types your columns are. No active connection required. This approach lets you use Rust types for fields, eg Email from the email crate or Url from the url crate, which lets you constrain fields even further than what is easy to do at the DB layer.

ORMs tend to get a bad reputation for how some ORMs implement the active record pattern. For example, you might forget something is an active record and write something like "len(posts)" in sqlalchemy and suddenly you are counting records by pulling them from the DB in one by one. I haven't had this issue with sea-orm, because it is very clear about what is an active record and what is not, and it is very clear when you are making a request out to the DB. For me, it turns out 90% of the value of an ORM is the query builder.
by interroboink | 2026-02-19 20:00:09+00:00
I didn't see it on the feature list, but it might be nice to allow it to run as a cron job and send email for reminders. These days, most mobile phones have an associated email like your-phone-number@vztext.com (depending on carrier), so you can send yourself text messages about chores and whatnot.

Or, perhaps just as good, have a way for it to dump out data as json, and could be consumed by some other send-the-email tool. There is the "-json" sqlite option, of course, but I'm not sure if your schema is meant to be stable.

I have a perl script for reminders like this that has been super handy over the 10+ years I've been using it. Never bit the bullet to put it in a nice UI or have a backing DB like this project, though.
by monsharen | 2026-02-19 20:01:04+00:00
I've collected size charts for every shoe model across 200 brands and found that it's not uncommon for any given size to vary +-1.5 sizes (a range of 3 sizes total). And that's size charts from manufacturers.

Many online stores use outdated or outright wrong sizes charts. One of Europe's largest online retailers don't even bother providing official manufacturer size charts at all. They have one generic size chart for almost all of the shoes, so it's pretty much down to the consumer to return and retry. Kind of crazy state of things.
by KPGv2 | 2026-02-19 20:01:05+00:00
actually the #1 criticism i had has been fixed since the last time i made reading progress: one-click progress updates from Home. I launched the app on my phone and bam, it's right there!

I'm not sure there is anything I'd improve. I recall when I started creating a list of Akutagawa Prize winners in translation, it was a bit painful because I had to input a lot of ISBNs for rarer books. Also I struggled for a couple books with picking the right version so the page count was correct.

But I haven't done either of those in a while since I haven't read more rare stuff in a year. Possibly they've gotten better, too.
by vel0city | 2026-02-19 20:01:13+00:00
I don't know what language you speak but here is a part of the bill in English

This bill would require, on or before July 1, 2028, any business that produces or manufactures 3-dimensional printers for sale or transfer in California to submit to the department an attestation for each make and model of printer they intend to make available for sale or transfer in California, confirming, among other things, that the manufacturer has equipped that make and model with a certified firearm blueprint detection algorithm. If the department verifies a printer make and model is properly equipped, the bill would require the department to issue a notice of compliance, as specified. The bill would require, on or before September 1, 2028, the department to publish a list of all the makes and models of 3-dimensional printers whose manufacturers have submitted complete self-attestations and would require the department to update the list no less frequently than on a quarterly basis and to make the list available on the department’s internet website. The bill, beginning on March 1, 2029, would prohibit the sale or transfer of 3-dimensional printers that are not equipped with firearm blocking technology and that are not listed on the department’s list of manufacturers with a certificate of compliance verification, except as specified. The bill would authorize a civil action to be brought against a person who sells, offers to sell, or transfers a printer without the firearm blocking technology.

Let me point out the statement:

> The bill, beginning on March 1, 2029, would prohibit the sale or transfer of 3-dimensional printers that are not equipped with firearm blocking technology and that are not listed on the department’s list of manufacturers with a certificate of compliance verification, except as specified.

It seems pretty clear this would prohibit the sale of 3D printers that are not approved by the California DoJ.
Show HN: TWFF – A container format for declaring AI use in writing
by normanbell | 2026-02-19 20:01:23+00:00
TWFF (Tracked Writing File Format) is my proposal for moving away from so called AI detection to verifiable declaration.

Instead of an external model guessing if a text is AI-generated, TWFF is a ZIP-based container (similar to an EPUB) that stores the document alongside a Process Transcript (JSON).

How it works:
1) It captures Revision Velocity: the delta between human drafting and AI injections.
2) It intercepts paste and AI-interaction events, wrapping them in deterministic metadata.
3) It’s local-first. The audit trail stays with the author until they choose to export the signed container.

This is a v0.1 reference implementation built in Python/NiceGUI. I’m looking for feedback on:
> The container structure (XHTML vs. Markdown).
> The JSON event schema.
> The Revision Distance logic: can we create a fingerprint for human effort that is as difficult to fake as the writing itself?

MVP Demo: demo.firl.nl
TWFF spec:https://github.com/Functional-Intelligence-Research-Lab/TWFF...
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-02-19 20:01:24+00:00
This follows the same logic as the claim that Biden bulldozed the border wall to make immigration law unenforceable. If you deliberately weaken enforcement capacity (and also burden/cripple government with unsustainable debt), you can then point to dysfunction as proof the system doesn’t work.

The difference is that in this case, the stated goal of ‘starve the beast’ is broader. Underfund agencies, expand deficits through tax cuts, then cite the resulting debt and institutional breakdown as justification to dismantle more of government.

It almost makes the people who were outraged at the idea of sabotaging border enforcement seem disingenuous that they don't now care that undermining federal capacity is public strategy.