MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hdjrudni | 2026-02-25 05:07:01+00:00
That's just because corporations got greedy and made their apps suck.

Strip away the ads, the data harvesting, add back the power features, and we'll be happy again. I'm more willing than ever to pay a one-time fee good software. I've started donating to all the free apps I use on a regular basis.

I don't want to own my own slop. That doesn't help me. Use your AI tools to build out the software if you want, but make sure it does a good job. Don't make me fiddle with indeterministic flavor-of-the-month AI gents.
Show HN: Reduction Blockprint Planner/Simulator
by gh5000 | 2026-02-25 05:07:50+00:00
I’ll start this by saying I am not a programmer. As such, I’ve used Claude Code to do most of the coding, so I expect some issues on the vibe coding front.

As a hobby I do block printing - usually linoleum, sometimes I 3-d print plates to make prints. One of the techniques that I use to make multi-colored prints is called reduction printing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printmaking). Instead of carving multiple blocks, one for each color, you use the same block, and with each layer you leave behind in the negative space some of the previous color(s). It is sometimes difficult for me to visualize what this should look like, so I created this simulator/planner to help.

The workflow is:
1. Upload an image
2. Crop image (free or to an aspect ratio for your block). I think you need to at least acknowledge the crop even if using the whole image.
3. Quantize/posterize the image to a set number of colors.
4. Optionally flip the image so when it is relief printed it turns back the right way
5. Generate the layers
6. Export the layers as individual images.
7. Generate a gif that simulates what the printed image would look like one layer at a time.

This was originally made with server-side image processing in python (what i feel sort of comfortable with), but I figured I may as well try to get this all client-side in the browser so it can be deployed as a static site to Cloudflare Pages or Github Pages. After getting it working, Claude planned and executed the migration. This now runs totally in the browser. I was surprised that the projects persist between sessions, but they do.

For me this was as much an exercise in exploring what can be done with a bit of planning and some vibe coding as it is to help me with my hobby.

Any feedback is appreciated.

Github: https://github.com/greghirson/reduction_planner

I will eventually write a post about it at https://greg.hirson.xyz, where you can also see some of the block prints I’ve made (reduction or otherwise).
by SiempreViernes | 2026-02-25 05:08:11+00:00
It's a bit more complicated: the peace deal Trump got passed through the Security Council did create a board in charge of monitoring some aspects of the Gaza process (I'm not sure on the exact details) so there is a real UN body in the mix.

Then trump seems to have bolted on two or three entirely new and unrelated organisational levels "over" the UN affiliated board and declared himself king of all peacemaking.

There is much that is unclear about how things will work in practice, but the reality is there's a potentially important part of the Gaza deal being held hostage by this board of peace, and that's why the Arabs joined.
by signorovitch | 2026-02-25 05:09:15+00:00
Single-threading is also what allows you to stay up all night writing the 8 page essay that's due at 6:00am, what lets you drive for hours on end, what remembers protocol during a crisis. Not detracting from the OP's point at all, just single threading doesn't always have to be pleasant. One of its advantages is powering you through unpleasantries and getting what needs to be done done. Sometimes when we think we are 'multitasking,' we're just looking for ways to avoid the problem.
by floam | 2026-02-25 05:09:47+00:00
I found a flip phone in the fry’s parking lot, my dad turned it in to security, who accepted it with a smirk. I had gone through it and wrote down the phone number belonging to the phone. We called the number a week later and the guy said not only did they not have it in their lost and found, so he had to buy a new phone, but he spent hours with Verizon to make some kind of charges that hit after losing it go away. Maybe 2002 - 2003.

This was not a surprise
by indecisive_user | 2026-02-25 05:10:34+00:00
For vitamins/supplements specifically, there's Costco, iHerb, nootropics depot.

While they might not be the absolute cheapest options, they're usually a pretty good price and at least with those sources I'm not too concerned with counterfeit or tainted supplements, unlike Amazon [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20499808
by SiempreViernes | 2026-02-25 05:11:07+00:00
Not falling for an obvious distraction from the extremely blatant pattern of dehumanising Palestinians.

> In leaked recordings, Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva — then head of Israeli military intelligence — stated that for every person killed on Oct. 7, “50 Palestinians must die,” adding that “it doesn’t matter now if they are children.” He described mass Palestinian deaths as “necessary” to send a deterrent message.

> Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s declaration of a “complete siege” on Gaza — cutting food, electricity, fuel, and water — was accompanied by explicitly dehumanizing language. Announcing the policy on Oct. 9, Gallant stated: “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s assertion that “an entire nation out there is responsible” further blurs the institutional line between civilian and combatant.

> Such statements do not determine individual targeting decisions, but they shape the environment in which those decisions are made: how civilian life is valued, how much civilian harm is expected to be scrutinized, and how much is implicitly excused.
by ddtaylor | 2026-02-25 05:11:36+00:00
Fry's had an interesting warranty program that I really enjoyed and their employees would build a PC for you with the parts you purchased for free or help you put it together. This made it really nice for someone who was about to drop $2,000 on some parts and didn't trust their hands to break some pins etc.

Their warranty was transferable and they let you know about it. They would print the warranty paperwork out twice and give you a sticker you could put on the inside of the case for whoever ended up having the PC later it was still valid as it was the parts under warranty.

This meant that if you had a part that later on went out, like a motherboard, you could tell them the warranty information or show up at the store with the PC and they would figure it out. I thought this would be garbage like how Apple or Best Buy just wants you to buy a new one and try to scam you out of warranty replacement, but they actually would replace the part as needed and if that part no longer existed they would replace it with a similar one. I took a PC back there that had a motherboard under warranty that stopped working and that motherboard no longer existed, so they dutifully went and found a motherboard that had those same minimum features and substituted it without a cost.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-02-25 05:11:43+00:00
The greatest theft of intellectual property in the history of Man.

Copyright was always supposed to be a bargain with authors for the ultimate benefit of the public domain. If AI proves to be more beneficial to the public interest than copyright, then copyright will have to go.

You can argue for compromise -- for peaceful, legal coexistence between Big Copyright and Big AI -- but that will just result in a few privileged corporations paywalling all of the purloined training data for their own benefit. Instead of arguing on behalf of legacy copyright interests, consider fighting for open models instead.

In a larger historical context, nothing all that special is happening either way. We pulled copyright law out of our asses a couple hundred years ago; it can just as easily go back where it came from.
by cortesoft | 2026-02-25 05:11:51+00:00
> Good lord. The nearest Radio Shack (17 miles away) closed, so to get a resistor or cap, it's "order online". That's about as environmentally sound as nuclear testing above ground (perhaps a slight hyperbole there).

I wonder if this is true?

Let’s say you were to buy the item from a store. Suppose the store is five miles away. You drive to the store, buy the item, and drive home. You used 10 miles worth of gas, plus the wear and tear on the car (meaning it has to be replaced 10 miles earlier than it would have otherwise).

Now, suppose you order it from Amazon. A worker picks it off a shelf in the warehouse, puts it in an envelope, and puts it on a truck. The truck drives to your house to deliver it.

Even if they JUST delivered your package, it should be basically a wash in terms of energy, right? You had to drive from your house to the store, they had to drive from the distribution center to your house. There would be a bit extra packaging, but I am not sure how many gallons of burned fuel an envelope is equivalent to.

However, if you had say, an Amazon delivery, then that delivery truck is not just driving to your house. It is driving to dozens of houses along a route to deliver your goods.

If you imagine the alternative, where each of those deliveries instead has to have the owner drive to a store, that could be hundreds of miles of saved trips because of the delivery drivers only taking one trip.
by richardfeynman | 2026-02-25 05:12:04+00:00
Someone said I shouldn't be trusted because I'm a zionist. Not because I've gotten things wrong or made errors, but because of who I am. That's a classic ad hominem.

By contrast, I correctly pointed out that Forensic Architecture has a history of getting things wrong. That is true and useful as one heuristic in evaluating their present argument.

So there is a clear difference.

With that said, it is fair of you to ask me to refute the specific claims. Here are some problems I notice based on a skim.

- No independent verification: raw audio/video isn’t published, no hashes/chain-of-custody, and key artifacts are "available upon request" (shot-marking files, scripts). They also use ML denoise for speech enhancement. In a poisoned info space, that’s a giant trust-me step, no good for OSINT.

- Model guided by testimony: the minute-by-minute reconstruction claims relies on witness walk-throughs in a 3D model to fill gaps. Wartime testimony (especially in Gaza) is notoriously unreliable, yet the writeup reads like courtroom certainty.

- Headlin eexaggeration. "point blank range" reads like the whole event was muzzle-close. In the report it’s basically "8 shots from between vehicles" + one inferred 1–4m shot. That’s not killed point blank.

- Overconfident negatives: no exchange of fire is a strong claim based on limited recordings. Absence of audible return fire in a few clips isn’t proof.

- Quick search reveals names of 15 dead are
PRCS: Mustafa Khafaja; Ezz El-Din Shaat; Saleh Muammar; Refaat Radwan; Muhammad Bahloul; Ashraf Abu Libda; Muhammad al-Hila; Raed al-Sharif.
Civil Defense: Zuhair Abdul Hamid al-Farra; Samir Yahya al-Bahapsa; Ibrahim Nabil al-Maghari; Fouad Ibrahim al-Jamal; Youssef Rassem Khalifa; Anwar al-Attar.
UNRWA: Kamal Mohammed Shahtout.

The IDF claims that the six in the Hamas civil defense force were militants. I can't personally verify this, but I'd say that's a rather important detail missing from this article.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-25 05:12:11+00:00
> That being said, anyone who’s operated a two-sided marketplace knows that one of the biggest problems is consumers using your site as an index, and then seeking to dodge your fee by meeting with the seller on another platform, where they don’t have to pay it.

There is a company that operates an index where people can search for things and doesn't charge the site or the customer for things that rank well in organic search results. I think they're called Google. From what I understand they make quite a bit of money by selling ads next to the listings.

That model seems like it would work pretty well for such a platform, unless there was some major company preventing anyone from offering a lower price than they have on their own site so that everybody goes to their site instead of using a price search engine to find a site with a lower price.

I mean come on. If they're really using your site just to find a product, you think that's a problem?

Meanwhile a platform's fee should be going to things like payment processing, warehousing and shipping, and then if you're offering a competitive price for those services they should want to be paying you because they need those things and can't get a better deal on them somewhere else. If they can get a better deal on them and are only using your site because you're forcing them to with a dirty trick, maybe they're right to object?
by nomel | 2026-02-25 05:12:24+00:00
> The ability to record without my knowledge or consent

All major brands have a clear indicator for when they're recording.

Someone could block that indicator out, but someone could also just go to Amazon.com and select one of hundred of available pinhole cameras or not-smart camera glasses.

These aren't enabling an ability that hasn't been enabled for decades. If anything, seeing someone with main brand smart glasses makes it more obvious.
by dangus | 2026-02-25 05:12:44+00:00
Factory wages in China are almost $2 more per hour than factory labor in Mexico.

I don't buy this argument.

Sure, labor protections in China are weak, but let's use our mirrors: the US has no guaranteed paid time off of any kind, it has unions on paper only, 1 in 10 Americans have no health insurance, and it's nearly the only country where medical bankruptcy exists as a concept. The largest employer in the US runs a scheme where their workers are intentionally kept part-time with low enough wages to need SNAP assistance and other social safety net programs, as well as avoiding any obligation to provide health insurance, effectively subsidizing their corporate profits with tax dollars. America's middle class has been shrinking via housing, healthcare, and education cost inflation while China's middle class has been growing as its industries have continually moved further up the value chain.

"China is just cheap labor" is a last-Millennium viewpoint. China is a manufacturing ecosystem where you can walk into a physical marketplace and find rows of vendors with skilled technicians who all know how to work on electronic or machinery or other manufacturing skills, where they offer services like chip-level NAND upgrades where they solder on storage upgrades to your iPhone while you wait.

China is now a country where you would pay a price premium to buy their products over competitors.
by duskwuff | 2026-02-25 05:13:58+00:00
Another important detail which the article glosses over is that, when Frys' supplier relationships started failing around 2019-2020, their product selection absolutely went to hell. When I visited a store in 2020, they had zero hard disks in stock - internal, external, mechanical, SSD, you name it, they didn't have it. I don't think they had any computer motherboards, CPUs, or memory, either. Plenty of cheap, generic shelf-fillers like hand sanitizer and light bulbs, though!
by Hobadee | 2026-02-25 05:14:53+00:00
The Egyptian Fry's in Campbell was my local store. Fry's was amazing - you just had to know that the salespeople were on commission and avoid them. I never had one come up to me in line and try to get a commission, but that honestly doesn't surprise me. As a nerd, I would even sometimes go and just help random people there - the salespeople sure didn't help anyone there!
by TimorousBestie | 2026-02-25 05:16:09+00:00
> China used its low-margin low skill work to bootstrap the rest of the stack, and now they can make air to air missiles with range exceeding US missiles: https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/china-first-close-...

We’ve got to get you some better sources, mate. This is a straight-up Russian propagandist pretending to operate out of the UK while having a mailing address in South Korea.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/military-watch-magazine-bias/
by hdjrudni | 2026-02-25 05:16:42+00:00
Honestly, I think this the correct behavior.

If it's technically possible for an agent to circumvent a security policy, it should.

Telling it not do something via AGENTS.md was never secure. This is just an expedient way of pointing out all the flaws in your setup. And if it's not even doing it for nefarious reasons, just trying to do what you asked of it, I think it's fair.

I've even found it genuinely helpful. I've sandboxed my Codex so it can't run certain things. Things I'd actually like it to run but I've restricted it too much, so it finds clever ways of doing it anyway.
by wtallis | 2026-02-25 05:17:07+00:00
Thunderbolt isn't literally four PCIe lanes; Thunderbolt can encapsulate and carry PCIe traffic, and Thunderbolt controllers are typically connected with four PCIe lanes, though the amount of PCIe traffic a Thunderbolt link can carry is not necessarily as much as four PCIe lanes.

Directly exposing literal PCIe signals cuts out the pair of expensive Thunderbolt controllers.
by kombine | 2026-02-25 05:18:44+00:00
> That the anti-Israelis are going to latch on it as proof that Israel is evil is an unfortunate side effect.

Defenders of Israel always try to put a label on us: anti-Semites, anti-Iaraelis etc. You are trying to make it seem like this was some kind of isolated incident, an unfortunate consequence of the war. It wasn't: Gaza is in ruins, Israel continues ethnic cleansing in West Bank all while gaslighting everyone who opposes it. Israel is evil.
by solidsnack9000 | 2026-02-25 05:20:05+00:00
Choosing the lowest price is rational for the consumer. Setting the trade policy that allowed that lowest price -- the USA has less protection for the semiconductor industry than it has for textiles -- was the mistake.

Free trade does result in the best prices but it has other, negative effects, and it is when we think as policy makers -- as citizens, not consumers or business owners -- that we are accountable for those effects.
by chakmanli | 2026-02-25 05:20:15+00:00
I set a hard 48-hour constraint to see how far I could get building a web Game Boy Advance emulator with Codex.

I started without deeply knowing the hardware spec. I used one seed prompt, then let Codex drive task decomposition, sequencing, and prioritization.

I ran 4 Codex coding agents in parallel on core emulator work, plus 1 Codex agent focused on testing and UI features. I used a continuous review and merge loop to keep all streams aligned.

Current result: I can render gameplay in the browser, and the game responds to action buttons. Runtime performance is still slow at around 11 FPS on average.

My current view is that performance can likely improve by running the agents longer and adding a dedicated performance-focused Codex agent to target hot paths.

If there is interest, I can share the Codex worker template, task format, and workflow.

Project repo: https://github.com/s0s0s0/Browser_GBA_Emulator
by otterley | 2026-02-25 05:20:55+00:00
Fry’s would frequently accept returned items, and instead of returning them to the vendor to refurbish them, they would simply re-shrink wrap them and put them back on the shelf with a different colored price sticker. The item could be fine, or it could be damaged, have parts missing, etc.

A term was coined for this: “re-Fryed.” As in, “don't buy that video card! It’s been re-Fryed!”
by Animats | 2026-02-25 05:21:21+00:00
> Now, suppose you order it from Amazon.

You do not order electronic parts from Amazon. You order them from Digi-Key or Mouser. They're organized to ship efficiently from a huge inventory of small parts, and they buy directly from manufacturers, so the supply chain is solid. If you order a Panasonic resistor, you will get a Panasonic resistor, not some random floor sweepings.
(This does not apply to DigiKey's "marketplace", which is third party resellers. DigiKey does claim to monitor their resellers, and DigiKey, not the reseller, handles customer complaints.)
by wtallis | 2026-02-25 05:21:50+00:00
> To reiterate, this is absolutely a comparable machine to the Mac Mini in terms of performance.

Reiterating is not the appropriate response after someone has already detailed many ways in which the performance a 5800h is not in the same league, none of which you have even attempted to refute.

The more truthful claim you could have made is that you don't need the extra performance (far more plausible, given that you bought a new machine with a four year old chip), or that you needed storage capacity more than you needed performance.
by linuxhansl | 2026-02-25 05:22:03+00:00
Fry's was mentioned in Douglas Coupland's "Microserfs".
I loved that book and thoughts Fry's was cool even before I set foot in one.

Years later I entered a store, and somehow it was already nostalgic then :)

So weird, I haven't thought Fry's for the past 20 years.

> There was something about wandering the aisles and seeing the merchandise and getting ideas

That. Exactly.
by raintrees | 2026-02-25 05:22:45+00:00
I learned early on not to trust anything with a sticker that claimed warranty supported by Fry's (that meant it was a return and tested No Problem Found and sold as is).

Too many return trips eats up any profit reselling parts to my clients.

But it was a blast back in the day when I could get shrinkwrap tubing, RAM modules, individual electronics components (resistors, capacitors, etc.) personal care items like combs, brushes, snacks, etc.

And then there were the books... With a cafe built into the store. I spent a lot of time and money at a number of the Silicon Valley Frys locations.
by antognini | 2026-02-25 05:23:16+00:00
I think the long term impact of this will be to strengthen the importance of social ties in academic publishing. As it is there are so many papers published in many fields that people tend to filter for papers published by big names and major institutions. But the inevitable torrent of AI slop will overwhelm anyone who is looking for any gems coming from outsiders. I suspect the net effect will be to make it even more important that you join a big name institution in order to be taken seriously.
by dataflow | 2026-02-25 05:23:22+00:00
> many users have databases that fall in the range of 10-100MiB

> use one of the many other ways to operate the database as a single file and be on your way

Don't you still have to download and upload that 100MB pretty often? I feel like password databases get modified every few days, not every few months.

Moreover, if an app really wants to optimize the file-not-modified case for people who don't modify it often, can't it just internally cache an encrypted version of the database in another format -- in SQLite, even! -- and use that when the checksum/file time/whatever matches what they expect?

I feel like a client that actually cares about the user should tell them how much more expensive the file gets with each entry being added: "Hey, based on your recent download/upload speeds on this device, embedding this 1MiB file would add a 5-second delay." Switching the entire world from XML to SQLite seems like it completely misses the fundamental issue.
by Retric | 2026-02-25 05:23:24+00:00
Here’s an example where Amazon strait up increases prices.

There’s a great deal of self published fiction posted online for free. Amazon is happy for people to sell bundle that into a book and sell that.

Kindle Unlimited specifically requires authors to remove earlier copies of their own works to become part of kindle unlimited. Thus increasing the minimum price for everyone above what it would otherwise be.

Some authors make the transition and win, but many destroy their audience and thus current and future revenue sources like donations and patron subscribers. It’s a tempting infusion of cash, but the long term consequences can be devastating making the whole thing really predatory.