MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kirkmaddocks | 2026-02-24 13:21:56+00:00
We haven't built quantisation-aware transfer yet, but the architecture lends itself to it better than you might expect.

Mode A (activation transfer) operates at the representation level, not the parameter level. The source model's knowledge gets projected into a 2048-dim hub space — the receiving model doesn't need to match architecturally or in precision. A 200M FP32 training model and a 5M INT8 edge model can both have UHS encoders/decoders. The hub space is agnostic to what's underneath.

Mode B (behavioural) is probably the most interesting path for your use case. It transfers decision boundaries rather than activations or weights. If the quantised model can reproduce the input-output mapping, internal precision is irrelevant.

It's similar in spirit to distillation but decoupled through the hub space — teacher and student don't need to be online simultaneously, and you get a full audit trail of what knowledge went where (which matters if you're shipping medical/industrial edge models under EU AI Act).

The gap today is the decoder side. DecoderMLP outputs FP32. We'd need a quantisation-aware variant that respects the INT8 grid — straight-through estimator at minimum, learned quantisation boundaries ideally. We'd also want empirical drift characterisation across FP32→FP16→INT8→INT4 so you'd know your expected fidelity floor for a given target.

The swarm angle is where it gets genuinely useful for edge fleets. If you've got N devices training locally on-site data, they contribute quantised-model tokens back to a full-precision aggregator. The robust aggregation strategy (Huber-style cosine clipping) handles quantisation noise across heterogeneous devices naturally.

We're planning a quantisation-aware transfer module next. If you're interested in testing against real Cortex-A INT8 workloads, we'd welcome the collaboration — repo is at github.com/incocreativedev/tessera-core.
by egberts1 | 2026-02-24 13:22:12+00:00
My only friction with hierarchy-type store of bookmarks is the orthogonal labeling scheme remains poorly or unsupported.

Slapping a tag or two (or many) is bandaid.

Need a way to navigate a tree for a bookmark that is repeatedly tagged and filed across hierarchy.

Perfect example: retirement, budget, investment firms, reviewed

Each day has a focus, and it often arrives differently to a same bookmark.

Handcrafted Wikipedia category tree is a good start but still no navigation panel and a search box thereof.
by andsoitis | 2026-02-24 13:22:49+00:00
> We will continue developing the engine in C++, and porting subsystems to Rust will be a sidetrack that runs for a long time.

So, even though they want the code base to be in Rust, they will continue writing new code in C++ and then translating it to Rust later to remove the C++ they just added.

There must be a really good reason for this, such as Rust doesn’t interop well with C++, otherwise this seems like a poor decision.
by mapt | 2026-02-24 13:23:11+00:00
Why was this flagged? Automatically / without review? This is a novel tech story, albeit one without a lot of technical detail.

https://www.earshot.ngo/what-we-do/audio-ballistics

https://forensic-architecture.org/

https://content.forensic-architecture.org/wp-content/uploads...

> Earshot used echolocation to analyze the audio on the recordings in order to arrive at precise estimates of the shooters’ locations. Echolocation is the process of locating the source of a sound based on an analysis of the sound’s echoes and the environment in which the sound travels. The Israeli military destroyed and cleared so many buildings in the Tel Al-Sultan area where the ambush of the aid workers took place that very few structures remained. This destruction actually strengthened Earshot’s ability to determine the positions and movements of Israeli soldiers, based on identifying the surfaces responsible for clearly distinguishable gunshot echoes. Rather than having multiple buildings reflecting the sound waves, there were only a few standing walls and the emergency vehicles themselves.

> “Earshot forensically analyzed over 900 gunshots fired at aid workers. It took one whole year of careful listening to reconstruct an auditory picture of what happened that dark night,” Lawrence Abu Hamdan, the director of Earshot, told Drop Site.

I'm not sure how much this was actually necessary to the eventual verdict if this is ever adjudicated, though, if "hiding the evidence" is a factor:

> Following the ambush, Israeli forces crushed all eight vehicles using heavy machinery and attempted to bury them under the sand.

> The body of Anwar al-Attar was found near the ambush site on March 27, and the bodies of the other 14 aid workers, all wearing identifying uniforms or volunteer vests of their respective organizations, were found in a mass grave near the site on March 30.

But the understanding that they were advanced upon in a walking wave of fire, and then the survivors were executed one by one at close range, may help.
by agentultra | 2026-02-24 13:23:24+00:00
I think this is true, it’s more about enabling a surveillance apparatus with plausible deniability built in.

The funny thing is, just like how politicians have been led to believe that AI data centres create jobs, politicians think this system can be managed responsibly so that only they can get access to its data [0].

[0] https://cybernews.com/security/global-data-leak-exposes-bill...
by wongarsu | 2026-02-24 13:23:26+00:00
That is indeed what the comment seems to be implying.

"No meaningful European competition" might be a bit too strong. There are many great EU hosters. OVH, Netcup, Scaleway, Strato, Ionos, Exoscale, to name a few. But Hetzner is probably the biggest and has the best name recognition. Doesn't hurt that their prices are among the best in the industry
by westurner | 2026-02-24 13:23:37+00:00
ScholarlyArticle: "Bio‐Inspired Cascade Photocatalysis on Fe Single‐Atom Carbon Nitride Upcycles Plastic Wastes for Effective Acetic Acid Production" (2026) https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aenm.20...
by lproven | 2026-02-24 13:23:43+00:00
I wish there were some cheap FPGA version of the 3rd party implementation of the planned successor, the TI-99/8.

It was called the Geneve 9640 from Myarc:

https://dressupgeekout.com/geneve/

http://www.mainbyte.com/ti99/geneve/geneve.html

Wikipedia has a decent article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneve_9640

12 MHz un-crippled 16-bit CPU, 80 column text, 256 colour graphics, up to 2 MB of RAM.

That would be much more promising for a Unix-like OS!

They are extremely rare these days, but a cheapo emulation would be great fun -- it's able to run most software for the 99/4A.
Show HN: Type.lol – Browse 800 independent type foundries, 14k typefaces
by marktjohnson | 2026-02-24 13:23:43+00:00
I started type.lol in 2015 with a friend as a simple list of independent type foundries — basically a styled airtable doc. I'm a designer and I kept running into the same problem: I'd want to explore type beyond the usual distributors, end up with 30 tabs open, and lose track of what I'd already looked at. The list helped but it wasn't enough.

I've since rebuilt it from scratch as a proper app. It now indexes 800+ foundries from 61 countries, 14k typefaces, and 1,500 designers. No signup required to browse. No ads, no sales, no commissions — it embeds actual foundry websites in iframes so traffic goes directly to them.

You can browse by carousel, list, virtualized table, force-directed graph (showing relationships between foundries/designers/typefaces), or a 3D globe plotting foundries by location. Filter by classification, variable fonts, trial availability, country, designer, language support, or release era.

Some technical details since this is HN:

- React 19 + Vite + TypeScript + Zustand + Supabase
- Three-tier data loading: IndexedDB cache (instant) → Supabase paginated fetch → static JSON fallback. Background staleness check.
- @tanstack/react-virtual for carousel and table views across 14k typefaces
- Client-side ranked search with related-entity expansion (match a designer → surface their foundries and typefaces)
- Graph view: react-force-graph-2d. Globe: react-globe.gl + three.js
- 577 of 779 foundry sites allow iframe embedding. Rest fall back to OG images or screenshots.

On the data pipeline: I scrape foundry websites, then use Claude Haiku to extract structured metadata (classifications, designer credits, language support, weights, etc.) from the page content. It's not perfect — some classifications are wrong, some designer credits are incomplete — but it gets me to ~80% and I manually correct from there. The enriched data goes through a build script into static JSON and syncs to Supabase.
by Zakaria_Gamal | 2026-02-24 13:23:56+00:00
Update: Chapter 4 is now complete and live in the repo!

This chapter dives into LangGraph for real agent orchestration:
- Build ReAct-style agents with tool calling
- Visualize graphs (nodes/edges/conditional routing) using Graphviz – super visual and satisfying
- Handle state updates live, multi-agent collaboration patterns, self-refinement loops
- Full executed notebook showing a simple agent reasoning through queries (e.g., math tools, search integration)

All local-first with Ollama, plus OpenAI/Gemini support.

Repo: https://github.com/zkzkGamal/Agentic-AI-Tutorial (Chapter4 folder has the notebook + code)

Chapter 5 (Personal Finance Tracker Agent with FastAPI + ChromaDB RAG) is next and almost ready.

Feedback super welcome – especially on the LangGraph patterns or what real-world agents you'd like to see built!

Thanks for any upvotes/comments – still early days :)
by AyanamiKaine | 2026-02-24 13:24:07+00:00
I really like the idea of Ousterhout's tactical vs strategic programming. Where we either create a new feature as fast as possible vs focusing on architecture and keeping complexity in check.

I truly believe that LLMs are replacing tactical programming. Focusing on implementing features as fast as possible with not much regards to the overall complexity of a system.

Its more important then ever to focus on keeping complexity low at a system level.
LLMs feel more like CPUs than applications
by derverstand | 2026-02-24 13:24:52+00:00
I’ve been thinking about the current LLM wave and the historical microchip transition.

Microchips were never “products” in themselves. They were compute primitives. The real value emerged in operating systems, developer tools, and applications built on top.

Today, LLMs increasingly feel similar. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc. are building cognitive compute layers. Most “AI startups” look like early PC software – wrappers around a new primitive.

Agents then feel like early operating systems: orchestration layers around probabilistic compute, adding memory, tool access, execution loops.

If this analogy holds, the long-term value might not sit in the base models themselves, but in:
- workflow integration
- vertical domain systems
- data pipelines
- distribution
- orchestration layers

The open question:
Is this closer to the Intel/AMD era (infrastructure shift), or something fundamentally different because the primitive is stochastic and language-native?

Curious how others see the analogy.
by manphone | 2026-02-24 13:25:18+00:00
That may even be true, but many commenters here are saying these things because they actually happened to them and then they switched off of Firefox because it pissed them off. (Myself included) So when you say this is a comment or narrative it’s the commenters you’re talking to and you’re talking past them in a way that is confusing. I’m telling you that I hated the Firefox changes and I finally turned to another fork. This has nothing to do with a narrative.
by tambre | 2026-02-24 13:26:10+00:00
I've found inverter microwaves for example useful when making porridge. A traditional one at 50% power blasting at full for 5 seconds makes it boil over, but on an inverter microwave 50% continuous heats it evenly and consistently such that it doesn't boil over. Sure you may be able to lower the traditional one so it does it even shorter steps but then it takes longer to get done or the result might be rather poor due to the inconsistent heating steps.

I also could never get traditional ones to heat potatoes well. Scalding hot on the outside, cold on the inside. With inverter ones it's simpler: just a lower power setting for longer.
by sidewndr46 | 2026-02-24 13:26:20+00:00
I pretty much figure from the title it's self reported and yep: "We gather self-reports from a genotyped sample of thousands of partly related individuals from the Netherland".

And the author summary goes on to state: "Many people experience chills when listening to music, reading poetry, or viewing art. Yet not everyone feels these reactions in the same way.". So the subjects aren't even self reporting the same thing.
by Kazik24 | 2026-02-24 13:27:22+00:00
Shouldn't the verification be other way around? That is, you need to prove that you are a child. Then the site can present you more strictly filtered content. Parent can sign child's device on first boot, token stored in TPM so that it's hard to remove.

It's basically the same type of enforcement on sites, as they need to verify and filter content for children, or just block them. Most of the internet users are adults, why not make internet for adults by default.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-24 13:27:36+00:00
> By this same metric, do you refuse to use C because the vast majority of OSS C codebases are permissively licensed?

It's not comparable - the Rewrite-it-in-Rust community is aiming to replace the existing pro-user products, with new pro-business products.

The last significant online C community was the one that gave us the pro-user products in the first place.

> Surely you see that this makes no sense, yes? Neither Rust-the-language nor Rust-the-ecosystem are any more hostile to GPL than any other language and ecosystem.

I don't care whether or not they are hostile, that is not relevant. What is relevant to the complaints you are reading is that their primary goal is the spread of Rust, not the interests of the users.

It is totally reasonable to be against a community who are working very hard to replace pro-user software with pro-business software.
Show HN: Gist – Zero-cost app specs for AI coding assistants
by vnykmshr | 2026-02-24 13:28:01+00:00
Generates the parts of a spec you wouldn't think to prompt for -- UX states beyond the happy path (error, offline, stale, empty), content security policy per data source variant, mock data shapes, implementation checkpoints so you approve the design before real data gets wired up.

You describe an app idea, answer questions about data sources and scale, pick your hosting. Output is a markdown spec with architecture guidance, trust boundaries, and a pre-ship checklist. Three complexity tiers based on your answers: minimal (plain HTML/CSS/JS, no build tools), standard (static site + optional edge proxy), full (SSG + edge proxy + KV cache + cron). Defaults to Cloudflare free tier but the stack choices are yours.

Spec generation is entirely client-side -- conditionals and templates, no LLM. Built with Astro 5 on Cloudflare Pages + Workers. Follows the same zero-stack pattern it generates specs for.
by prmoustache | 2026-02-24 13:28:34+00:00
> Firefox market share has been going downhill for most of my life

Firefox market shares are the best of any non OEM device[1] and is beating competition from a number of OEM browser (like Samsung's one on mobile) and is fairly competitive compared to the desktop version of Safari (only 1% below on desktop market share).

Yes market share have been going downhill but mostly because they were abnormaly high in late 90's early 2000's due to:

- the inertia of being born from the ashes of Netscape, which was the default browser at the beginning of eternal september.

- it had its highest market share at a time when its strongest competition was Internet Explorer: a magnet for malwares.

So its market shares are quite good actually. Note that Opera (and now Vivaldi) never got close despite being appreciated by many.

[1] yes it comes with many linux distro but it is sold with virtually zero device.
by veunes | 2026-02-24 13:28:36+00:00
He had the full source code of a working Linux driver that does exactly the same thing, just in a neighboring kernel dialect. The task was to translate, not invent. Sure, it's still impressive (given the difference in kernel APIs), but it's not the same as writing a driver from scratch using only a PDF datasheet. Now, when an AI takes an undocumented Chinese chip and writes a driver by sniffing the bus with a logic analyzer - then I'll call it "reasoning"
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2026-02-24 13:28:47+00:00
If you told me an individual powerful person did a good thing, then I could believe it. But I'm speaking about the characteristics of groups of people and a very long history of human civilization teaches us that, as a group (individual exceptions exist both in people and in actions), that the rich and powerful do things primarily for the purpose of increasing their own power, wealth, status, and control. No conspiracy is required. Its just people in a position to gain power use that power to get more power. The people who do that the most and are the best at it are disproportionately the ones with the most power. So, as a group, the rich and powerful are much more likely to do things in self serving interest (even at the cost of wider spread harm and suffering) than a random group a people. The proportion of sociopaths in CEOs is many times that of the regular population.
Show HN: Git-wt – A Bash wrapper for Git worktrees
by kuder | 2026-02-24 13:28:52+00:00
I built this because I was using git worktrees heavily for running parallel AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor) and the native commands were too manual.

git-wt is a pure Bash tool (~300 lines, zero dependencies) that wraps `git worktree` with:

- Auto-generated memorable names (adjective-noun combos)
- Centralized storage in `~/.git-wt/` instead of inside the repo
- `--copy-env` to duplicate .env files into new worktrees
- Bash/Zsh completions
- Direct editor opening (`git wt open <name> --editor code`)
- Built-in SKILL.md so AI agents (Claude Code, etc.) can discover and use git-wt autonomously

Installs in 5 seconds via curl. Works as a git subcommand.

The main use case for me is running 3-5 AI agents on the same repo simultaneously, each in its own worktree. But it's useful any time you work with multiple branches.

https://github.com/kuderr/git-wt
by cgriswald | 2026-02-24 13:28:53+00:00
Yeah. Anyway, porn, cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs were very accessible to me despite being a good kid with parents who cared in a world where those were all legally forbidden to me.

All this talk of “glimpses” is you trying to read too deep into a single example.

I’m not using my adult mind to figure out how I could have gotten this stuff as a kid. I’m using my adult mind to recognize that if I had been motivated as a kid, there are additional ways I. as a kid, would have been able to figure out how to get it.

I’m not throwing my hands up in the air and saying this is impossible or that we should just open up access. I’m saying requiring ID for access wasn’t effective before and it won’t be effective in a world with easier access. Yet the cost of that is quite high. Scan these threads for actual ideas, I’m not arguing for any particular one but there are plenty of them and some I think are good.
by einr | 2026-02-24 13:28:58+00:00
RAM was very expensive then and 16 bit CPUs weren't that much faster to justify the cost if you were aiming for the home market.

Both true, which makes this an even more baffling choice -- why pick the more expensive, state of the art 16-bit CPU* that you're getting little or no benefit from + 16K of extremely slow-to-access combined video and system RAM? You could have used a cheaper 8-bit CPU and maybe for the same budget have fit 4K or 8K of system RAM on the bus + some amount of dedicated video RAM for the VDP. This would have been faster and more useful in nearly all real world applications, make for a much cleaner board design, easier development, and probably cheaper. That's what everyone else did.

Then again, what was this machine's target market?

Home computing, so yeah.

http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/retroscan/...

* The reason is probably that TI wanted to show off their state-of-the-art CPU tech and be able to point to the spec sheet and say "look, it's 16 bit! All our competitors are only 8 bits -- that's half as many bits!"
Show HN: Physics-based simulator for distributed LLM training and inference
by zhebrak | 2026-02-24 13:29:14+00:00
I built an analytical simulator that estimates MFU, training time, memory, throughput, and cost for distributed LLM training and inference. 70+ models, 25 GPUs, all major parallelism strategies (FSDP, TP, PP, EP, CP, ZeRO). Runs entirely client-side — no backend, no data collection.
by entuno | 2026-02-24 13:29:27+00:00
This kind of thing always makes me nervous, because you end with a mix of methods where you can (supposedly) pass arbitrary user input to them and they'll safely handle it, and methods where you can't do that without introducing vulnerabilities - but it's not at all clear which is which from the names. Ideally you design that in from the state, so any dangerous functions are very clearly dangerous from the name. But you can't easily do that down the line.

I'm also rather sceptical of things that "sanitise" HTML, both because there's a long history of them having holes, and because it's not immediately clear what that means, and what exactly is considered "safe".
by berkes | 2026-02-24 13:29:38+00:00
It suprises me how often I see some Dockerfile, Helm, Kubernetes, Ansible etc write .env files to disk in some production-alike environment.

The OS, especially linux - most common for hosting production software - is perfectly capable of setting and providing ENV vars. Almost all common devops and older sysadmin tooling can set ENV vars. Really no need to ever write these to disk.

I think this comes from unaware developers that think a .env file, and runtime logic that reads this file (dotenv libs) in the app are required for this to work.
I certainly see this misconception a lot with (junior) developers working on windows.

- you don't need dotenv libraries searching files, parsing them, etc in your apps runtime. Please just leave it to the OS to provide the ENV vars and read those, in your app.

- Yes, also on your development machine. Plenty of tools from direnv to the bazillion "dotenv" runners will do this for you. But even those aren't required, you could just set env vars in .bashrc, /etc/environment (Don't put them there, though) etc.

- Yes, even for windows, plenty of options, even when developers refuse to or cannot use wsl. Various tools, but in the end, just `set foo=bar`.
by mapt | 2026-02-24 13:29:49+00:00
Echolocation based on audio from a cell phone video, with the reports echoing off flat walls in the area, establishes 3D troop movement during the massacre, and the eventual close-range executions. Including of the person whose cell phone it was.

Eyewitness accounts may be dismissed for any number of biases by the motivated reasoner, but echoes are echoes.
by xmcqdpt2 | 2026-02-24 13:29:54+00:00
That would be great because "I got it from Wikipedia and Arxiv" isn't exactly useful.

From reading your second link (and please tell me if I got it wrong) it sounds like it isn't actually tracking to training data but to prototypes which are then linked a posteriori to likely sections of the training data. The attribution isn't exact, right? It's more like "these are the likely texts that contributed to one of those prototypes that produced the final answer." Specifically the bit in PRISM titled "Nearest neighbour Search" sounds like you could have a prototype that takes from 1000 sources but 3 of them more than the others, so the model identify those 3, but the other ones might matter just as much in aggregate?

It says that the decomposition is linear. Can you remove a given prototype and infer again without it? That would be really cool.