MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mothballed | 2026-02-18 20:04:49+00:00
>> Regulation is what enables monopolies

>That's patently false. AT&T was a monopoly and they were broken up by antitrust regulation.

This is patently false in the context of the reply you have made -- after the invention of the telephone more and more and eventually hundreds of telephone services popped up. Then in 1918 (circa WWI), the government effectively quasi-nationalized AT&T by controlling it via a commission and the postmaster general and then AT&T leveraged politicians to create "universal telephone service" provided by AT&T and regulate competitors out of the market while using regulatory capture to use commissions to regulate rates, effectively creating a cartel that drove competitors out of business via regulation.

the whole idea of a "natural market process" here is absolute and utter hogwash. The majority of the market was AT&T competitor up until the regulators stepped in and turned it into an unnatural monopoly enforced by regulatory capture.

>The FDA, for all the flaws of its current incarnation, is the archetype of necessary regulation. Pre-FDA, the free market did nothing whatsoever to prevent nauseating practices like the adulteration of milk with powdered plaster, lead, and cow brains. The history there is fun but quite gross.

You're now arguing why we need regulation rather than whether they create monopolies or not. I see this as a complete red herring, although an interesting topic, that there are some counterpoints to.

> What is notable about Somalia is not its lack of regulation, but the fact that it is perhaps THE least stable country on the planet. It is not the basis for any useful comparison here.

What is notable is that the whole thesis is without regulation it turns into this monopolized hellscape and every inspection of that theory turns out to be false, and sometimes even the opposite.
by AndyKelley | 2026-02-18 20:05:44+00:00
bitpacked structs, good enums, arbitrary sized integers, optionals + non-nullable pointers, fast compiler, zig fmt, unit testing, ability to use standard library and the rest of the third-party ecosystem on freestanding, std.ArrayList, std.AutoArrayHashMap, std.MultiArrayList, std.crypto, more productive type system, comptime, SIMD, slices, labeled switch continue, error handling, custom panic handler, stack traces on freestanding, error return traces, zero bit types, the build system, package management, aligned pointers, untagged union safety, multi-object for loops, inline switch cases, semantically guaranteed inline functions, inline loops
by catapart | 2026-02-18 20:05:46+00:00
You make great points! I appreciate the detail of the comment, and I don't particularly disagree with any of it. I think someone else mentioned gravestones that are etched and filled with black, so your suggestion of just doing that with sensible scales and fonts seems like a slam dunk, to me.

Bummer that it doesn't really seem feasible for a hobbyist, though. 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?

Overall, I think I've mostly learned that "archiving format" is a broad term that really needs to be collapsed by describing how the archive will be stored (and what extremes/complications to expect). In any case, thanks for the links and again for the detailed discussion!
by ViktorRay | 2026-02-18 20:06:43+00:00
There is a gigantic difference between deporting people who are in a country illegally vs targeting people for discrimination based on ethicality and/or religion.

The Nazis targeting ethnic minorities and placed them into labor camps. Which later became death camps.

That’s different than placing illegal immigrants who violated immigration laws (and once again I repeat include people of every ethnicity and every religion) into facilities to later be deported.

If people were being thrown into labor camps in America just for their ethnicity that would be akin to the nazis. But people are being deported for violating immigration laws and are being placed into facilities to facilitate the deportation. Illegal immigrants I repeat again and again can be members of any ethnicity or religion. The Nazis placed people into labor camps because of their ethnicity and later murdered them.

Furthermore many legally immigrant groups and ethnic minorities in America such as the Latinos in South Texas and South Florida voted for Trump specifically so he could pursue these immigration policies.
I agree these policies have gone too far though. What happened to the little girl in this article was messed up.

(Actually I think I’ll edit my original comment to include this reply as well since many other people replied to me as well. Better that than reply to each person.)
by fdefitte | 2026-02-18 20:06:49+00:00
Calling standard KYC paperwork for international wire transfers "dangerous and unethical" is a huge stretch. Every cross-border payment requires this stuff. The fund is literally trying to give away free money and the maintainer threw a fit because they had to fill out a tax form. I get being cautious about sharing personal info but framing compliance requirements as some kind of attack is drama for drama's sake.
by fdefitte | 2026-02-18 20:07:12+00:00
If you're worried about a rug pull, you should be. Not because Tailscale is shady, but because that's just how VC-funded infrastructure works. The free tier exists to build lock-in, not out of generosity. Headscale exists but honestly it's a pain to run compared to just paying Tailscale $18/user. The real answer is: if it's critical infrastructure, you should be running Wireguard directly and owning the coordination layer yourself. Everything else is renting convenience.
by conartist6 | 2026-02-18 20:07:41+00:00
I'm being a little coy because I do have a very detailed proposal.

In want the JS toolchain to stay written in JS but I want to unify the design and architecture of all those tools you mentioned so that they can all use a common syntax tree format and so can share data, e.g. between the linter and the formatter or the bundler and the type checker.
by deltoidmaximus | 2026-02-18 20:08:34+00:00
Not sure how common it is now, but based on repair manuals my TV's wifi is provided by a standard m.2 wifi module and can be trivially removed. That wouldn't stop them from changing the TV's OS to nag or otherwise disable itself afterwards but the hardware change is about as trivial as it could be.

Now why the disable wifi option isn't available on the TV when it appears in the user manual is another matter...
Show HN: An Agentic Supercomputer
by andyprevalsky | 2026-02-18 20:09:01+00:00
Hi HN :)

Wanted to show what I've been working on for the past few months, an agentic super computer that can take in any fathomable goal, recursively decompose that goal until sub-goals are proximate to existing ai agent capabilities, and then execute it by spawning up to 10k agents in parallel.

There has been a lot of new research around the space, from Kimi-2.5 swarms to Claude's Agent teams, but no system yet has what's needed in order to actually be able to accomplish most people's everyday goals.

1. Out-of-the box data integrations
2. A stable enough task decomposer that doesn't break under compounding errors
3. A harness that can persist runs stably for weeks on end

Would love to get any feedback & answer any questions, the product is open & open to free to use rn!

The vision here is build a system that allows anyone to be a compute-bender; if you can name what you want to see in reality, then Rose Labs orchestrates the stream of agents to accomplish it in the cheapest, most efficient way.
by hilliardfarmer | 2026-02-18 20:09:13+00:00
Thank you for the reply!

1. That's what I thought too, so went to a lot of work to test levels before, during and after breaths. I included results for at the end and beginning of a breath and found that levels JUST BARELY got below the OSHA allowed limit at the end of breathing in.

2. Yes, there is a lot of dead space on normal masks, the that's where the CO2 build up comes from.

3. I have found similar studies, one weirdly also vacuums the air out at the same time, but I'd suggest looking into it if interested and believe what you want. I'm just glad I know finally for myself, thought others might like to know too, and am satisfied :)
by A_Ilinskii | 2026-02-18 20:09:23+00:00
Hey HN! I'm a mobile developer who got tired of setting up the same GitHub Actions CI/CD workflows from scratch for every iOS and Android project. Mobile CI/CD is harder than web — you need macOS runners, correct Xcode versions, code signing, provisioning profiles, Gradle caching, etc.
So I built a visual configurator that generates production-ready .yml files. Pick your platform, choose distribution (TestFlight, Firebase, Play Store), and download a working workflow. No account needed, completely free.
Stack: Spring Boot + Kotlin backend, SvelteKit frontend, Mustache templates for YAML generation.
Would love feedback on the generated workflows — are they covering the right cases?
by dang | 2026-02-18 20:09:24+00:00
What was aggressive was the blunt and forceful way you issued the correction and then followed it with a snarky and personal question that was not really a question.

Some things you could have done instead which would have been less aggressive: (1) check whether "maths" vs. "math" is actually an error (e.g. like this: https://www.google.com/search?q=maths+vs+math&oq=maths+vs+ma...), (2) ask the other person why they said "maths" rather than "math", (3) bring up the analogy to "economics" in a curious way rather than as a hammer.

The fact that your correction was wrong (in the sense that the other person's spelling was perfectly correct British English) is actually beside the point here, because even if you had been right, the GP comment would not have been a good way to express it.

Re the Milner quote: I'm glad you noticed it! It is an endlessly fascinating and profound statement, and every time I happen to notice that it's in my HN profile I'm glad I put it there.

Don't forget, though, that of the two important words there (toleration and conflict), it is toleration (not conflict) which has first place. The question is what it means to tolerate conflict rather than denying or trying to exclude it.
by radarsat1 | 2026-02-18 20:09:28+00:00
> The hardest part was figuring out OpenLDAPs configuration syntax, especially the correct ldif incantations ..

As a long time Linux user on personal machines, I found myself for the first time a couple of years ago needing to support a small team and given them all login access to our small cluster. I figured, hey it's annoying to coordinate user ids over these machines, I should just set up OpenLDAP.. little did I know.. honestly I'm pretty handy at dealing with Linux but I was shocked to discover how complicated and annoying it was to set up and use OpenLDAP with NFS automounting home directories.

For the first time in my life I was like, "oh this is why people spend years studying system administration.."

I did get it working eventually but it was hard to trust it and the configuration GUI was not very good and I never fully got passwd working properly so I had to intervene to help people change their passwords.. in the end we ended up just using manually coordinated local accounts.

The whole time I'm just thinking, I must be missing something, it can't be this bad.. I'm still a bit flabbergasted by the experience.
Show HN: OpenCastor – A universal runtime connecting AI models to robot hardware
by craigm26 | 2026-02-18 20:09:54+00:00
OpenCastor is an open-source Python runtime that connects AI models to robot hardware through a single YAML config file. You pick your brain (Claude, Gemini, GPT, or a local model via Ollama), pick your body (Raspberry Pi, Jetson, Arduino, Dynamixel servos), and it handles the wiring between them.

Origin story: I've been building ContinuonAI — a cognitive architecture for personal robots with on-device learning, memory, and safety systems. Deep stuff: HOPE dynamics, episode-based training, cloud pipelines. Along the way I kept hitting the same problem: every time I wanted to test a new AI model or swap hardware, I was rewriting integration code. The "connect brain to body" layer was always bespoke.

OpenCastor is that layer, extracted and generalized. It's modeled after the approach OpenClaw takes with personal AI assistants — practical, runs on your own hardware, minimal friction — but applied to robotics.

What it does:

- Define your robot in an RCAN config file (an open standard for robot capability descriptions)
- Swap AI providers by changing one YAML field — no code changes
- Built-in drivers for common hardware (PCA9685, Dynamixel, GPIO, serial)
- Safety validation layer sits between the AI and your motors — actions are checked against physical constraints before execution
- Continuous perception-action loop: observe → reason → act → repeat
- Optional messaging integration (WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord) to control your robot from your phone

Install and try it:

curl -fsSL opencastor.com/install | bash
castor wizard
castor run --config my_robot.rcan.yaml

The wizard walks you through model selection and hardware setup. Works on macOS, Linux (including Pi), and Windows. Pre-made config presets exist for popular ~$50 robot kits (Waveshare, Adeept, SunFounder) so you can get something moving quickly.

There's also castor demo which runs a simulated robot with no hardware or API keys needed, if you just want to see what the runtime does.

Where it's at:

Still early. 1,286 tests, the core loop is solid, but there's plenty of rough edges. I'd love feedback on the RCAN config format, the driver abstraction, and whether the safety layer is paranoid enough (or not enough). The project came out of real needs building ContinuonAI and I'm hoping it's useful to others working in the same space.

github.com/craigm26/OpenCastor

Happy to answer questions about the architecture, the ContinuonAI connection, or how it compares to ROS/other frameworks.
by zamadatix | 2026-02-18 20:10:04+00:00
I'm much more convinced Microsoft wants to do stuff like sell cloud subscriptions at the click of a button in the desktop than Microsoft gives a crap about those subscriptions being tied to a consistent account ID. The latter certainly sounds evil, but not in a way that particularly helps Microsoft over their competitors.

Uncle Bob probably would probably need to do a decent amount of work to figure out how to purchase a OneDrive subscription from having no account, particularly if they think "I've already got an account - that's how I log in!". If the PC forces Bob to walk through creating a cloud Microsoft account before he even sees the desktop then the only step remaining is to click to OneDrive (or whatever) sales notification and enter a credit card so his "important personal files stay backed up" (or however they pitch the service in the notifications).
by paojans | 2026-02-18 20:10:26+00:00
This is more titan submersible than first plane.

It’s dumb, everyone knows it’s dumb, and people do it anyways. The unsolved root problem isn’t new but people just moved ahead. At least with the sub the guy had some skin in the game. Openclaw dev is making out like a bandit while saying “tee hee the readme says this isn’t safe”.
by darth_avocado | 2026-02-18 20:10:31+00:00
> You have to actually do the hard part of interacting with people and understanding their needs and so on within the context of work.

Which is why it’s surprising that management is salivating at the idea of replacing employees and expecting 1 employee to do the work of 10 with the help of AI agents. If the value you bring is to manage people, you shouldn’t be happy at the idea of fewer people having jobs.
by moWerk | 2026-02-18 20:10:31+00:00
Full disclosure, i spent ~3 hours crafting this post to hit the tone i wanted to convey and am kind of proud of the wrist-size linux banger i came up with. I am usually not good with writing since it takes me ages and i might be a bit over sensitive right now. All i wanted was to spare you all the rocky grammar as a cherry on top. To now find that the polished version triggers your "its (completely?) Ai written" sensor. Lesson learned i guess.
by Leftium | 2026-02-18 20:10:34+00:00
> just a silent failure and your recording (I tend to talk for 5-10mins) is gone

One of the reasons for my streaming transcription app: https://rift-transcription.vercel.app

- You see results in less than a second as you talk.

My app also supports multimodal input: interleave talking with typing. (Click the Replay" button to see a color-coded demo.)

Supports local models (with a little setup: https://rift-transcription.vercel.app/local-setup)
by newsoftheday | 2026-02-18 20:11:30+00:00
Today I do the following:

/usr/bin/letsencrypt renew -n --agree-tos --email me@example.com --keep-until-expiring

Will I need to change that? Will I need to manually add custom DNS entries to all my domains?

PS To add, compared to dealing with some paid certificate services, LetsEncrypt has been a dream.
Show HN: Sieves, a unified interface for structured document AI
by rmitsch | 2026-02-18 20:11:35+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Sieves, an open-source Python library that makes it easy to build structured document AI pipelines without locking yourself into any specific LLM framework.

You can mix and match model frameworks (Outlines, LangChain, DSPy, GLiNER2, Transformers) for different tasks while keeping one declarative pipeline definition. E.g. fast local models for classification and frontier LLMs for more challenging tasks.

Includes:

- unified task and schema abstractions
- pipeline for task chaining
- execution across multiple backends
- built-in evaluation, optimization, and conditional task execution
- support for distillation to smaller models

Full motivation, design rationale, and examples in the linked blog.

tl;dr: I was doing a lot of consulting/prototyping for document AI projects and kept running into the same lock-in and boilerplate issues, so I decided to write a library that addresses this.

If you're working a lot with document AI in greenfield projects, this may be interesting to you.

Happy to answer questions or feedback!

Repo: https://github.com/MantisAI/sieves / docs: https://sieves.ai
by laffOr | 2026-02-18 20:11:50+00:00
Being a tailor is scalable, that's way there are way, way more cheap machine produced clothes today than in the past. Surely he did not miss that the textile industry was at the core of industrial revolution. So being a tailor is more like a post-scaling job - the automation has already happened and now there are only remnants left.

But how can you be sure a job is peak-automated? A few years ago, I would have said musicians are post-scaling - way fewer musicians jobs now that you can play recorded music. But it looks like generative AI will hit musicians again. Can some of welding be automated? Probably.
by PkLavc | 2026-02-18 20:11:53+00:00
I built Aegis Sentinel because I wanted to move beyond simple threshold-based alerting. Traditional monitoring (CPU > 80%) often misses silent failures like memory leaks that signify an impending crash.

What it does:
It uses an Isolation Forest model to analyze system metrics. It learns what "normal" behavior looks like and triggers automated recovery (restarting containers, clearing caches) when it detects a multivariate anomaly.

Key Tech:

Python 3.11 (Async/Await)

Machine Learning (Isolation Forest)

Structured JSON Logging

Docker SDK for automated healing

I'm looking for feedback on how other engineers are structuring "Healer" modules to avoid restart loops in automated recovery.
by guywithahat | 2026-02-18 20:12:10+00:00
I mean if I want two day/fast shipping, it's still the only place that can do it without costing me $45, and even then a lot of places won't get it in the mail that fast. They also have a much more reliable and robust return policy, which is a headache for other sites. While I agree the experience has worsened it's still the best online store as far as I'm aware
by sifar | 2026-02-18 20:12:32+00:00
>> rather than something more like the difference between programming GPUs and CPUs.

Again, I get your point, but you are really trivializing HW design here and I don't want anyone starting or migrating from SW to get a wrong impression that you can just pick it up. Sure, with enough thought, patience, skill and hard work anyone can do it - but that applies to anything. But don't expect that just because you know Scala or are a good parallel programmer, you can design good HW that is PPA competitive. You have a better shot than others, but that's it.
by altmanaltman | 2026-02-18 20:12:37+00:00
Apple Pay (launched around 12 years ago, and likely costing billions) is exactly the counter-example here. The 'code' was the easy part. The moat was the decade of hardware R&D and the leverage to force banks to adopt a new standard. An LLM might write the API wrapper in seconds, but it can't hallucinate a relationship with Visa and Mastercard. You literally cannot create a new Apple Pay in a week or even years, no matter how much you vibe code.

I'm sometimes baffled by what people think can pass as a product in a real sense.
by mghackerlady | 2026-02-18 20:12:50+00:00
Or you can either do what I do and buy an old TV. I have a nearly 20 year old plasma that looks great and isn't gonna listen in on me. If you absolutely need a higher resolution than 1080p or need an OLED display, you can buy them as "digital signage" (though, usually with a pretty high markup)
by ssgodderidge | 2026-02-18 20:13:00+00:00
I also love iSH. However, I haven't been able to run agents directly from my phone on it like I would hope.

I spent a few hours trying to get GitHub Copilot CLI or Claude Code installed only to discover that the version of Node is pegged to 14, which prohibits installation of several of these tools via NPM.

Has anyone had success with this? I'd love to see the packages updated to support later versions
by tda | 2026-02-18 20:13:02+00:00
Yes my router has open ports, but it does not do any port forwarding. So I can 'directly' connect any device behind my router without my router needing to know any specifics of which device that is. And I don't need to do any port forwarding of anything on my network and thus expose them to the whole internet; I just expose them to the users of my tailscale network (only me)
by a2128 | 2026-02-18 20:13:11+00:00
I don't think Google considers such legislation to be their enemy. It would effectively kill F-Droid and other third-party app distribution methods, and would fully lock them in a place of high power over their platforms and pull the ladder up beneath them, and nobody would be able to blame Google for it. I mean, why would anybody submit their ID to a brand new unproven app store? Seems quite risky, better to just use Google Play
by scoofy | 2026-02-18 20:13:12+00:00
The point of doing something non-scalable is that you can enter and exit the market fairly easily. You don't need to be a tailor your whole life. You can make a living as a barber, electrician, teacher, or nurse.

I'm not saying it's easy! It's hard as hell. It sucks when your job gets automated. I'm just saying that aiming for something non-scalable means you're not always tilting at windmills, and the game can't be rigged against you.
by montyanne | 2026-02-18 20:13:12+00:00
The ATProto underlying BlueSky social network is similar. It uses a content-addressed DAG.

Each “post” has a CID, which is a cryptographic hash of the data. To “prove” ownership of the post, there’s a witness hash that is sent that can be proved all the way up the tree to the repo root hash, which is signed with the root key.

Neat way of having data say “here’s the data, and if you care to verify it, here’s an MST”.