MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mothballed | 2026-02-18 21:52:35+00:00
>Anyway, what regulation is responsible for Walmart and Amazon putting local retailers out of business?

Walmart + Amazon combined are only ~16% of the retail business. They're not monopolies. The fact they put a small minority of businesses out of business does not mean they're a monopoly. This is likely part efficiencies and also part regulatory capture via the insane zoning/building regulations in this country and tax breaks that can favor large corporations.

> After a big merger put AT&T in charge of the majority of telephone lines in the US, the company used its control over infrastructure to drive its competitors out of business and increase its portfolio. The Justice Department tried to break up AT&T but failed; it was in the settlement of this case that AT&T was first federally regulated in 1913. Yes, AT&T's monopoly grew between 1913 and 1982, but your causality is backwards. They regulated it because it was already a monopoly.

... It was not already a monopoly. Hundreds of phone companies emerged and by shortly before your noted date of "regulation" those competitors held the majority market share. It became a "monopoly" after the government literally quasi-nationalized them (AT&T) to the point the fucking Postmaster General was basically in charge of it, they became intertwined with regulators, and then the drive for "universal telephone service" and regulatory commissions ensured the regulatory compliance pushed exactly into AT&Ts business model. AT&T intertwined lawmakers even brought in economics quacks to talk up natural monopolies to argue for policies to create the regulations that made AT&T a monopoly. So you have it backwards -- the regulated it from a minority market holder to an unnatural monopoly and lawmakers created this monopoly under the auspices they essentially needed to legislate a "natural" (misnomer) monopoly into existence.
by hashstring | 2026-02-18 21:53:05+00:00
Makes me wonder.

Say 5% of the free tier users converts to a paying customer within 5 years. And user growth is constant. Then over time, you will get a much larger free tier user base, compared to your paying customers (in absolute numbers).
At some point, it must become tempting to charge all free tier users a little bit to continue, because the group got so big, so there is a lot that can be earned there.

Is this wrong, or should we expect this?
by leflambeur | 2026-02-18 21:53:09+00:00
You may want to look into the genetic composition of modern-day Brazilians to consider whether "Amerindians were exterminated" is a coherent way to represent it.

edit: we are just comparing 2 completely different models here. You're not wrong about some things, you are just talking about a different thing than I :)

edit 2: you are lacking information if you think that Brazilian Amerindians did not also partner with European powers (France and the NL itself comes to mind) against the Portuguese and it's somewhat amusing that you think that Portugal was never challenged on that vast territory by other powers.
by jmaestrooper | 2026-02-18 21:53:09+00:00
>Forecasters expect Friday’s report on gross domestic product to show the economy expanded 2.7% in 2025, a solid pace by any standard for a developed country.

I would be very curious to see if any circular deals aka funny money have been factored in there.

Also, despite literal hundreds of billions presumably invested in data centers where's all the construction, energy, communication, and other infrastructure build activity?

> The latest monthly jobs report published on Feb. 11 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed job growth was weaker in 2025 than initially reported, but it also showed hiring picked up in January.

The 2025 numbers were revised down (by the largest number in history - again), and no changes have been made to the methodology/models, which means that January data will be revised, too, so nothing shows that "hiring picked up"
by teamchong | 2026-02-18 21:53:13+00:00
I built this after hitting GC stalls parsing streaming tool calls in my AI agent.
LLM outputs are getting large — code edits, file writes, 50-200KB JSON payloads.

Every AI SDK I looked at (Vercel, Anthropic, TanStack, OpenClaw) does `buffer += chunk; JSON.parse(buffer)` on every token.
That's O(n²) — a 100KB tool call arrives in ~8000 chunks, and each chunk re-parses the entire accumulated buffer from scratch.
The cumulative parse time adds up to 13.4 seconds for the Anthropic SDK.
Each intermediate buffer string and parsed object becomes garbage immediately,
thousands of short-lived allocations that put constant pressure on the GC.

VectorJSON scans only the new bytes on each chunk. O(n) total — same payload, 6.6ms.
Parsing happens in WASM linear memory, so no JS objects are created until you access a field.

Built on zimdjson (Zig port of simdjson by @travisstaloch) compiled to WASM.
Fields materialize lazily through a Proxy — if you only read 3 fields from a 100KB payload, the other 97% never touches the JS heap.
Deep comparison runs entirely in WASM memory — 2-4× faster than recursive JS deepEqual with 24× less heap pressure.

Not a replacement for JSON.parse — for single-shot full materialization, JSON.parse is faster (it's optimized C++ in V8).
VectorJSON is built for streaming, partial access, and deep comparison.
by ericmay | 2026-02-18 21:53:16+00:00
> Yes, and it required a Constitutional amendment to remove it.

Yea but I can think of lots of other examples. You are missing the point.

> You’re welcome to try and push through an amendment to limit free speech rights, but it won’t pass!

I'm in favor of free speech so I wouldn't want to limit it.

> I doubt it! The media is mostly dead or coopted, and the powerful won’t willingly set up a system where you can rat them out.

Sounds like defeatism.

> Yes, to avoid retaliation. Your point?

He's not just there in Russia because of that. My point is he is either an actual traitor, or someone who was duped into doing what he did.

> Good, you’re getting it.

Haha I think you missed the point, but I can explain it for you. If you are relying on social media for these things, you have already screwed up. Regulating them one way or another is immaterial, because the dependency is a far greater problem.

> The popularity of anonymous outlets for this shows that most people don’t share your opinion. It would have a chilling effect.

I don't think it'll have a chilling effect. People publicly complain about their employers all the time using their real information. The popularity of something isn't an acceptable argument to me.

> Thanks for making my point for me. It’s even easier to target people when they are not anonymous. A number of left and right wing commentators are having to pay for private security because of threats. The ones who successfully remain anonymous don’t have to do this.

Maybe you shouldn't say things that result in you needing private security? It's no different than walking down the street yelling vulgar or offensive things. You might get punched. I see much more harm done by anonymous broadcasting here than I see benefits. Plus you are never truly anonymous on these platforms. Sure it's slightly more difficult for someone to identify you, but if you make enough people mad you will be identified and no amount of "anonymity" will save you. If the government itself wanted to identify you it can do so at the snap of a finger.
by stevenwoo | 2026-02-18 21:53:24+00:00
He frequently has campaign rallies and press conferences where he makes statements on both sides of the issue, though if the audience is limited he will tailor the message so only the side present hears the argument in their favor. Every post speech interview I've seen and heard from Trump supporters discount every thing he says that they personally disagree with and heartily approve everything he says that they agree with. Somehow he has insulated his own actions/words and his supporters, and it makes it difficult to reason with these supporters when you bring it up to them - it's quite uncanny.
by varenc | 2026-02-18 21:53:37+00:00
The CLI version of the Tailscale client on macOS can be compiled from source and installed without the app store:

go install tailscale.com/cmd/tailscale{,d}@latest

https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/wiki/Tailscaled-on-ma...

So fully available in situations with limited connectivity. The GUI version of the client is closed source though, and it's available as a package or from the app store.
by kurnikas | 2026-02-18 21:53:43+00:00
So I've actually built patterns using their system. Basically you define a layout using JS and defining a series of points and offsets and lines. You can refer to variables such as body measurements or other dimensions for bags. https://freesewing.eu/ is their more "consumer" facing site where you can enter your measurements and then download sewing patterns sized for you specifically.

One of the other nice things they do as part of the pattern design process is testing the pattern makes sense at many "scales" and so you can actually define a "body" the size of a doll and use this for defining dolls clothing, or make really size inclusive clothing, there are members of the community with varying disabilities such as forms of dwarfism who otherwise struggle to find appropriately sized clothes.
by fauria | 2026-02-18 21:54:01+00:00
Spain was the first globalization, not Portugal. The article forgets to mention two key elements:

1) The Manila galeon[1], the first trading route connecting Europe, America and Asia. This was the first trully global trade route. Portugual never established a trans-Pacific route.

2) The Real de a Ocho[2], the first global currency, used virtually everywhere including the US until the modern dollar replaced it in 1857. It still lives through the $ symbol, representing the Pillars of Hercules and the "Plus Ultra" script [3].

It also downplays the role of Spain in the first circumnavigation. Sure, Magellan was born in Portugal, but he sailed for the Spanish Crown. The expedition was financed by Spain, sailed Spanish ships and finished its trip commanded by a Spanish sailor (Juan Sebastián Elcano).

Finally, it is worth mentioning that the Spanish was not an empire of mere territorial possession, it was a civilization. Spain has currently 50 sites inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage [4], and from the ~150 sites in the Americas, ~50 were built by Spain. These includes entire cities, universities, hospitals, infrastructure, defenses and more [5].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGRn5qCAXBI

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_dollar

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plus_ultra

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_Heritage_Sites_i...

[5] https://greatbritainandtheusatheirtruehistory.quora.com/33-c...
by Windchaser | 2026-02-18 21:54:04+00:00
Yeah, and don't even get me started on historic emissions.

China has only produced significant CO2/capita in the last decade. The US and Europe are responsible for the accumulated GHG that have gotten us into the current mess. We blew nearly the entire CO2 "budget" for keeping us under 2C of warming, just by ourselves, so it's kinda odd to be pointing fingers at the foreigners who are just now halfway catching up to what we're emitting now.
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-02-18 21:54:23+00:00
> Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now

My family is fundamentalist protestant, very midwestern, and I think about half of them believe that the earth is warming. Not trying to "win", just trying to say that a lot of this depends on the crowd you interact with. I don't know the percentage, but certainly there are still way too many people that don't even believe it. The very tired response is "well i wish it would warm up here slaps knee". Using the phrase 'Climate Change' at least reduces that objection.
by ekipan | 2026-02-18 21:54:45+00:00
"Agreement" of time is probably nonsense. I realized after posting so I edited in the parenthetical, but as [3] notes, locality probably makes this less of a real issue.

Apparently with the birthday paradox 32 bit random IDs only allow some tens of thousands per second before collision chance passes 50%. Maybe that's acceptable?

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065241
by QuiCasseRien | 2026-02-18 21:54:50+00:00
I really love everything related to Cosmology but I always struggle with two contrary concepts that lead to paradox (for me) :

- Infinity : from school, we learn our universe is infinite.

- We often do calculation with upper limit like this one : 10^240. This is a big number butttttt it's not infinite you know. 10^240+1, 10^240+2...

So :

1. if it's infinite, why doing upper limit calculation ?

2. if it's limited, what is there outside that limit ?

Extremly paradoxal
by xserhio | 2026-02-18 21:54:54+00:00
Hi HN,

I built env-rx out of pure frustration with a painfully common problem. Someone on the team adds a new environment variable locally, forgets to share it or add it to the CI secrets, and the pipeline crashes right during deployment.

What makes it different: There are plenty of great secrets managers out there (like Doppler, Infisical, or Vault), but they often require team-wide buy-in, cloud syncing, and complex setups. I didn't want a heavy SaaS tool. I just wanted a lightweight, fast CLI utility that you can drop into any project, and it will loudly catch missing variables before you push or deploy.

It's designed to be zero-config. I’m releasing this open-source version first because I want to gather harsh, honest feedback from developers. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the DX or any edge cases I might have missed. If you manage to break it, please let me know!
by Animats | 2026-02-18 21:54:54+00:00
It's nowhere near Marvelous Designer. Marvelous Designer is for making 3D clothing for games, animation, and such. It's a limited version of Clo[1] , which is for making real-world clothing. Clo lets you design clothing, put it on an avatar, and watch it move and drape with clothing physics. It looks real. When you see good clothing in a game, it was probably created with Marvelous Designer.

Then Clo exports a file for fabric cutting compliant with the ASTM D6673-10 standard, Standard Practice for Sewn Pattern Data Interchange, which is used for the production of garment patterns. It's kind of clunky, being based on Autodesk DXF, AutoCAD's export format from the 1980s, but it's what the industry uses. You can bring such files into anything that reads DXF and view them. So a widely used formal descriptive language for fabric cutting already exists. You can send those files to a contract garment manufacturer and get garments back.

Marvelous Designer is just Clo minus the cutting pattern export feature.

[1] https://www.clo3d.com/en/

[2] https://www.normsplash.com/Samples/ASTM/191361149/ASTM-D6673...
by alephnerd | 2026-02-18 21:54:56+00:00
My point still stands. Their culture was completely decimated and they were largely replaced by European and African migrants, indentured servants, and slaves.

Subjugating a native people that lacked metalworking, gunpowder, and literacy is different from conquering multiple nations that had all of those and was backed by the Ottomans, Mughals, and Americans.
by noirscape | 2026-02-18 21:55:07+00:00
Given I don't disagree with you about GOS being the best on security, I think there's only one thing really worth mentioning:

> The attacks towards us including your libelous claims about us here are what's absurdly toxic.

I want to make this clear upfront: I have no connection to /e/, Calyx, DivestOS or whatever other projects you've had issues with over the years. If you've had trouble with them I find that very unfortunate for you, but they are entirely unrelated to this conclusion. I do not consider these claims to be libelous when they're fairly easy to check:

The reason I consider GOS' community to be extremely toxic and find official channels enabling this is for a few very simple reasons:

1. I've seen several incidents of GOS users coming into adjacent Android communities to start beef with those communities while giving off the attitude of zealots. For a concrete example, the F-Droid forums have a thread about Googles impending changes to letting users install their own software. The original OP for this thread has a pointless attack on the F-Droid project, declaring GOS to be superior. Moderators eventually changed this, but I've seen similar behavior in other places - there's a reason that a lot of Android communities generally respond with trepidation and annoyance whenever the project is brought up and it's because of this behavior from the userbase.

2. I can read the GrapheneOS forums; they're public. Nearly every issue I've seen people have with GOS on the forums is effectively met by a "you're holding it wrong". This sets a tone for the community that makes it come across as extremely hostile to potentially interested users.

3. In the same sense, it's trivial to notice that the official GrapheneOS account on this forum is a frequent participant in these discussions, generally backing up the hostility on the virtue of technical accuracy. This to me suggests endorsement of this attitude. (See a sibling to my initial comment where the official account makes a post on the GOS forums on an unrelated blog for daring to recommend a different ROM/phone combo. This to me is not indicative of healthy communications, but rather of an obsession to promote GrapheneOS at every corner.)

4. I remember the futzing with the Vanadium license in an attempt to prevent other Android Chromium forks from making use of it's patches for the crime of... considering a contribution from someone the GOS project has beef with. That to me is the most telling thing really. The goal with that license futzing was never to actually help advance privacy/security or anything like that. It was to try and force a different project to conform to GrapheneOS' demands over something extremely minor and GOS went ballistic the moment the maintainer asked for a bit more information. Cromite (the fork of Bromite, as Bromite's maintainer went AWOL) still doesn't include Vanadiums hardening patches because of this. It's fucking absurd.

4 is the big one for me. It is absolutely unacceptable, unbecoming and to put it plainly: toxic behavior from an official voice in the project.
by lambdas | 2026-02-18 21:55:10+00:00
I’ve never used them first hand, but crackpots sure do love claiming to solve Riemann hypothesis, P vs NP, Collatz conjecture etc and then peddle out some huge slop. My experience has solely been curiously following what the LLM’s have been generating.

You have to be very, VERY careful. With how predisposed they are to helping, they’ll turn to “dishonesty” rather than just shut down and refuse. What I tend to see is they get backed into a corner, and they’ll do something like prove something different under the guise of another:

They’ll create long pattern matching chains as to create labyrinths of state machines.

They’ll keep naming functions, values and comments to seem plausible, but you have to follow these to make sure they are what they say. A sneaky little trick is to drop important parameters in functions, they appear in the call but not in the actual body.

They’ll do something like taking a Complex value, but only working with the real projection, rounding a number, creatively making negatives not appear by abs etc etc

So even when it compiles, you’ve got the burden of verifying everything is above board which is a pretty huge task.

And when it doesn’t work, introducing an error or two in formal proof systems often means you’re getting exponentially further away from solving your problem.

I’ve not seen a convincing use that tactics or goals in the proof assistant themselves don’t already provide
by ericmay | 2026-02-18 21:55:31+00:00
No it wouldn't. Accounts would be identified right so you would know that some account is a China bot farm or Russian military or whatever. And then when Jane down the street starts talking about the need to kill "insert group here" well you know who they are and you can go down and have a talking to them or tell their employer, or whatever. If you say crazy stuff maybe there should be repercussions. Today there are none. It has a moderating effect when there are consequences.
by pmarreck | 2026-02-18 21:56:03+00:00
Gee, good thing I didn't make a blanket statement and qualified it by saying "often", which is true, my contrarian dude. https://tigerbeetle.com wouldn't have chosen it unless they found it faster than C- and there's a significant quantity of money riding on that decision, so it likely wasn't done lightly at all.

The rest, you can google yourself, but in short, sorry to tell you that it is sometimes faster. Often, sometimes, some portion of the time.
by k310 | 2026-02-18 21:56:09+00:00
Nathan Kalman-Lamb reports on BlueSky [0] that

> Today, after @propublica.org published this story, the camp was raided to confiscate letters from the children.

MuellerSheWrote adds [1]

> NEW: ICE has raided dormitories at the Dilley concentration camp to confiscate letters from children per
@pabloreports.bsky.social

> I have filed a FOIA request for them.
@joaquincastrotx.bsky.social
: the second we get anything, we will send it to you. [2]

These are concentration camps, not "detention centers". The administration and its good friends (you know who) have a record of cruelty to and abuse of children. There is NO excuse for cruelty.

[0] https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:tgw3d4hvw3x5ijrxax7lg26u/po...

[1] https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:x4g4laxkmsrczwvnvbbgsm7g/po...

[2] https://www.muellershewrote.com/p/new-ice-confiscates-childr...
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-18 21:56:15+00:00
I’d be curious how this squares with 100,000+ churches that are expected to close in the next few years in the US. From a longitudinal study perspective, one would expect dominance to decline as structural systems it relies on head towards failure.

15,000 churches could close this year amid religious shift in U.S - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46484284 - January 2026
by amiga386 | 2026-02-18 21:56:52+00:00
This reminds me of MusicBrainz, whose database stores "release groups", e.g. the album Nevermind by Nirvana is one, which can have hundreds of "releases", as different media (tape, CD, LP, promo, ...), different countries, later re-issues, etc. [0]

Sometimes these have different catalogue numbers or barcodes to distinguish them, sometimes they don't but they're still different. I've seen releases where the only difference is the label in the centre of the LP, or the back of the CD case has a two-column tracklisting vs a one-column tracklisting. Music publisher uses the same code and says it's identical and yet it's clearly not.

Then there's the "recordings" on an album, which even if they're never re-recorded can still end up chopped up, bleeped or remastered. They're not the same sound. MusicBrainz likes to track when they are exactly the same recording (e.g. the LP recording of a song appearing on a compilation album verbatim) and when they're not (e.g. radio edits of the LP recording). And if we're going beyond recordings by one artist of "their" song, i.e. cover versions, or just plain standards, those are "works", with composers, lyricists, and can be recorded thousands of times by different artists...

I greatly appreciate the pedantry and flexibility for noting down when creative works are the same versus where they differ, in relational database form.

[0] https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/1b022e01-4da6-387b-865...
by iamnothere | 2026-02-18 21:58:17+00:00
> Maybe you shouldn't say things that result in you needing private security? It's no different than walking down the street yelling vulgar or offensive things. You might get punched.

Maybe you shouldn’t have spoken up. Maybe you shouldn’t have walked down that street. Maybe you shouldn’t have worn that dress.

Done with this convo, I think this says enough.