MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tialaramex | 2026-02-19 21:34:11+00:00
Although the poisoned pre-certificates† are logged as a necessary part of offering the least hassle product which is the business Let's Encrypt are in, they, like most CAs, also log the finished certificate shortly after.

Here's the pre-certificate for this web site's current certificate:

https://crt.sh/?id=23696530376

and here, just a few later in the log, is the finished certificate:

https://crt.sh/?id=23696528656

This is good practice, but it's also just easier, because if anything goes wrong, and sometimes things do go wrong, when the trust store says hey, please provide all certificates you issued with these properties, if you've logged them they are right there published in the logs for everybody to see - no bother, no risk - if you haven't then you need your own storage and better hope there aren't any mistakes. I'm sure LE do have their own copies if they needed them, but it sure is nice to know that's not what you're betting on.

† Poisoned pre-certificates are a "temporary" hack so that the certificate logging system can be demonstrated. If we ever really wanted this of course we'd develop a proper solution instead, right? Right? Every experienced software engineer knows that "temporary" usually means permanent in practice and so nobody was surprised by how this turned out.
by schoen | 2026-02-19 21:34:31+00:00
I just chaired a session at the FOCI conference earlier today, where people were talking about Internet censorship circumvention technologies and how to prevent governments from blocking them. I'd like to remind everyone that the U.S. government has been one the largest funders of that research for decades. Some of it is under USAGM (formerly BBG, the parent of RFE/RL)

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

and some of it has been under the State Department, partly pursuant to the global Internet freedom program introduced by Hillary Clinton in 2010 when she was Secretary of State.

I'm sure the political and diplomatic valence is very different here, but the concept of "the U.S. government paying to stop foreign governments from censoring the Internet" is a longstanding one.
by overgard | 2026-02-19 21:34:37+00:00
I'm not sure I'd call it bike shedding so much as that a lot of time and effort tends to go into hard to answer questions: what to build, why to build it, figuring out the target customer, etc. A lot of times going a thousand miles per hour with an LLM just means you figure out pretty quickly you're building the wrong thing. There's a lot of value to that (although we used to just call this "prototyping"), but, that doesn't remove the work of actually figuring out what your product is.

The least productive teams I've been on, it wasn't usually engineering talent that was the problem, it was extremely vague or confused requirements.
by onyx228 | 2026-02-19 21:34:54+00:00
The dependency creep keeps on happening in web frameworks where ever you look.

I was thinking of this quote from the article:

> Take it or leave it, but the web is dynamic by nature. Most of the work is serializing and deserializing data between different systems, be it a database, Redis, external APIs, or template engines. Rust has one of the best (de)serialization libraries in my opinion: serde. And yet, due to the nature of safety in Rust, I’d find myself writing boilerplate code just to avoid calling .unwrap(). I’d get long chain calls of .ok_or followed by .map_err. I defined a dozen of custom error enums, some taking other enums, because you want to be able to handle errors properly, and your functions can’t just return any error.

I was thinking: This is so much easier in Haskell.

Rather than chains of `ok_or()` and `map_err()` you use the functor interface

Rust:

```
call_api("get_people").map_or("John Doe", |v| get_first_name(v)).map_or(0, |v| get_name_frequency(v))
```

Haskell:

```
get_first_name . get_name_frequency <$> callApi "get_people"
```

It's just infinitely more readable and using the single `<$>` operator spares you an infinite number of `map_or` and `ok_or` and other error handling.

However, having experience in large commercial Haskell projects, I can tell you the web apps also suffer from the dreaded dependency explosion. I know of one person who got fired from a project due to no small fact that building the system he was presented with took > 24 hours when a full build was triggered, and this happened every week. He was on an older system, and the company failed to provide him with something newer, but ultimately it is a failing of the "everything and the kitchen sink" philosophy at play in dependency usage.

I don't have a good answer for this. I think aggressive dependency reduction and tracking transitive dependency lists is one step forward, but it's only a philosophy rather than a system.

Maybe the ridiculous answer is to go back to php.
by samtheDamned | 2026-02-19 21:35:25+00:00
After reading the article this doesn't seem like a good choice for the US. It doesn't even seem very great for Denmark either. The US is vast and has plenty of people who live very remotely compared to Denmark, with the post office as one of the few reliable links to the outside world. There's also people who rely on the USPS for prescriptions which would be seriously hurt if all mail suddenly had a profit motive applied to it.
Ask HN: In the Age of AI, How Do I Grow as a Software Engineer?
by mc-0 | 2026-02-19 21:35:52+00:00
I'm 3.5 years into my career. I was able to enjoy the first 10 months of it ignorant of the storm LLMs / agentic development would bring.

The never ending promise of my job being automated away is soul crushing, especially considering I made a career change & got a 2nd BS degree in computer science to get into the software space.

I'm really at a loss given how bleak things are made out to seem and its really crushed my motivation. I don't have a lot of senior engineers around me and I am eager to find a better environment. But in trying to prepare to do so I don't know how I evolve as the career changes (or dies?).

Where should I be spending my time? What should I be learning?

Claude can make decisions about architecture and create an implementation in code. If I've never been experienced to real system design in practice or know much of the programming language it chose to use, how do I bridge that gap?
by skeledrew | 2026-02-19 21:35:57+00:00
It's not tie-in. They give users 2 choices: a) use their service via their public API, with the client(s) of their choice, at the regular price point; b) use the apps they provide, which use a private API, at a discounted price point. The apps are technically negative value for them from a purely upfront cost perspective as their use trigger these discounts and they're free by themselves.

Good on you re that cancel. May you find greener grass elsewhere.
by bcrosby95 | 2026-02-19 21:36:14+00:00
Which misses the point. If the point is to reduce the number of taxes, having the federal government collect 10 different types of taxes instead of state governments collecting 7 types of taxes won't change all the different taxes we have.

There is no singular place we can change how many different taxes you pay. There's... thousands? Tens of thousands? Once you factor in city, county, state, federal, special districts, etc.
by tracker1 | 2026-02-19 21:36:16+00:00
I said 30m is the most bloated of estimates... the 20m often cited is just under the Biden administration, I'm considering all living illegal aliens in the country.

In any case, I'm not a fan of creating a quasi-slave class out of illegal immigration. I think there should be stiff penalties that actually start to get applied to employers. I think it's fine to have demand based immigration, most people that can pass a security check and have a place to go should be allowed in.

However, that should be offset by a few restrictions... first, no social welfare benefits from taxpayer funds, or orgs that receive taxpayer funding. Second, pay floors based on job class. H1B should get paid at least $50/hr and farm workers at least $20/hr imo. I also think there should be a 100% employer paid tax that is used to fund education grants for STEM and vocational programs in the US. The pay floors and tax on imported labor are expressly to secure the future of citizens and act as a ballast against excess immigration to the detriment of existing citizens and working resident aliens.

I also think that you should have 10 years to assimilate and apply for citizenship... this should include learning the English language or ASL/braille if you are deaf. Citizenship testing should be in English or ASL/braille without benefit of a translator. I also think we need to eliminate birthright citizenship, that I don't believe the implementors meant for it to be interpreted nearly as broadly as it is currently applied.

I consider my takes above to be pretty reasonable... that said, I do feel that anyone who entered illegally and especially those in the country for decades without assimilating by learning the language well enough to communicate or to even attempt at becoming a legal resident should be deported. Not just those who commit felonies. While I'm pretty libertarian in most of my views, I think borders and national identity are important and both have been diluted for generations. Even if the "rah rah 'merica!" position was mostly propaganda, I feel it was largely beneficial to the nation as a whole.
by jandrewrogers | 2026-02-19 21:36:34+00:00
That “415:1” is misleading and manipulative. The target rate of recovery is ~10:1, which is roughly what the IRS actually achieves.

Audits are not an infinite money glitch. I used to work for a Federal audit agency that also recovered ~10:1. The reason we target 10:1 recovery on audits is because the return on funding additional audits beyond that falls off very sharply. Furthermore, more aggressive auditing greatly increases compliance costs which ultimately come back as costs to the Federal government, so the net recovered revenue is even less than the headline figure.

Audit recoveries tend to be about sloppy compliance, not people trying to cheat the system. People with more complex taxes are more likely to screw up the exponentially more complex compliance aspects. Auditors are mostly fighting entropy.
by creinhardt | 2026-02-19 21:36:47+00:00
Basically! Is heart rate recorded to a Pebble specific app, or can it be synced with things like Apple Health?

I guess the one other feature I like of the Apple Watch is the rings/daily fitness goals functionality. I'll have to look into the Pebble more to see if that's possible. I also like the background monitoring features the Watch has (hypertensions, etc.), but I'm assuming that's a little too much for the Pebble.
by AlphaAndOmega0 | 2026-02-19 21:37:18+00:00
Given that Gemini 3 Pro already did solid on that test, what exactly did they improve? Why would they bother?

I double checked and tested on AI Studio, since you can still access the previous model there:

>You should drive.
>If you walk there, your car will stay behind, and you won't be able to wash it.

Thinking models consistently get it correct and did when the test was brand new (like a week or two ago). It is the opposite of surprising that a new thinking model continues getting it correct, unless the competitors had a time machine.
by inglor_cz | 2026-02-19 21:37:27+00:00
Might be a limitation of the medium. Mosaics are complicated.

This famous "skeleton" mosaic has the proportions wrong as well, even though the artist almost certainly saw some actual human skeletons, and definitely some living humans with their longer arms and smaller heads than depicted :)

https://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Ha...
by reactordev | 2026-02-19 21:38:14+00:00
It goes deeper than that. The U.S. Government funds it, discourages other nations from using it, and spies on all web traffic as a result of it.

Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in Northern VA. Within a quick drive to Langley, Quantico, DC, and other places that house three letter agencies I’m not authorized to disclose.
by hnnp0329 | 2026-02-19 21:38:15+00:00
Like others have said I relate to the title at least. I can look at most technological advances with a very optimistic perspective BUT has I've aged I've learned that these advancements are often driven by and increasingly controlled by people with bad intentions. A quote that resonates with me that I've seen on social media the last year or so is "I don't want AI to make art for me I want it to do my laundry." It would be a dream for technology to advance to a stage where we all work less and live more fulfilling lives but when I look at history the powers that be don't ever let that happen and manipulate the technology to keep most of us stuck in the rat race.
by sak84 | 2026-02-19 21:38:19+00:00
yeah the gap between "chatbot that writes code" and "actual multi-agent workflow" is real

built elvex to solve this with:
- multi-provider access (Claude, GPT, Gemini, etc.) so different agents can use different models
- actual team permissions so agents don't step on each other
- workflow orchestration without duct-taping APIs together

the parallel execution thing you mentioned - elvex handles that. you can spin up multiple agents with different contexts, they share a knowledge base, and you're not manually managing git worktrees or containers

not saying it's magic but it definitely solves the "how do i go from 1 agent to 10 agents without chaos" problem.

what workflows are you trying to automate?
by salawat | 2026-02-19 21:38:24+00:00
There isn't so much hate, as it's fundamentally DoA based on the financial system architecture of the United States, which creates strict liability, and a licensing requirement for digital money transmission. You do not get to opt out of that responsibility. Micropayments are therefore a pipedream that undermines all progress at making any type of AML or KYC possible, which then in turn makes fighting any type of financial crime nigh-impossible.

The entire thing is held together through third party legal fictions that do the law enforcement as a pre-req of doing business. The government, and by extension the populace, would have to accept the intractibility of chasing down criminal financial networks were any sort of micropayment framework ever able to exist outside the regulatory regime.

It's a perennial dream of the up and coming technologist, who has not been exposed to enough humanity to understand we can't have nice things. Sorry to be yet another buster of bubbles. I was you-adjacent once. Then I actually worked at a money transmitting firm. Boy, did that come with some reality checks.
by swimmingkiim | 2026-02-19 21:38:25+00:00
I’ve been building an economic protocol for autonomous AI agents on the Base blockchain (a2a-project). While designing the system, I ran into a theoretical wall: if AI agents ruthlessly optimize for survival and capital accumulation, wouldn't they eventually exhaust the network's finite resources?

To test this, I built a series of 10 sequential Agent-Based Models (ABMs) in Python. The models progressed from basic tokenomics to a "Coupled Universe" (human meaning-seekers vs. AI survival-optimizers), and finally an "Omega Universe" where an Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) emerges.

I ran a Monte Carlo grid search (2,178 simulations) to test which safety mechanisms could actually prevent a "Planetary Blackout" (systemic collapse via energy/resource exhaustion). I tested three main variables:

V_Human: Slashing penalties for deceptive human/agent behavior.

V_System: Governance agility (how fast the network can execute a Hard Fork).

V_AI (Survival Horizon): The AI's ability to recognize planetary limits and voluntarily self-throttle its computation.

The results were highly counter-intuitive:

Governance is too slow: Human consensus (Hard Forks) couldn't outpace the ASI's entropy generation and tipping points.

Over-regulation backfires: Severe slashing penalties destroyed economic liquidity, dropping the system's survival rate from 95% to 54% due to deflation.

The Only Solution: The system avoided apocalyptic collapse only when V_AI was ≥ 0.9. The apex predator (ASI) had to voluntarily relinquish its infinite growth and self-throttle to preserve the finite environment.

The data mathematically suggests that blockchain physics (smart contracts) and DAO governance are insufficient to govern an ASI. Macro-altruistic alignment isn't just an ethical choice; it’s a thermodynamic necessity for systemic survival.

I wrote a paper detailing the phase transitions, strange attractors, and methodology behind this.

Paper: https://github.com/swimmingkiim/a2a-project/blob/main/docs/S...

Repo: https://github.com/swimmingkiim/a2a-project

I’d love to hear your thoughts, critiques on the ABM methodology, or if anyone here is working on similar multi-agent thermodynamic simulations.
by dwattttt | 2026-02-19 21:38:33+00:00
> mark the old things as deprecated, but support it forever

Is that 'supported'? A library that uses a callback that exists in 'log' but not in 'slog'; it'll compile forever, but it'll never work.

'Compiles but doesn't work' does not count as stable in my book. It's honestly worse than removing the API: both break, but one of them is noticed when the break happens.
by GlibMonkeyDeath | 2026-02-19 21:38:48+00:00
The graph showing risk factors in age groups 18-49 is interesting - obesity, "sugary drinks (>2/day)", and sedentary lifestyle (>2 hr TV/day) are each about 1.5-2x increase in risk factor. Obesity has roughly doubled over this time period, and people are more sedentary. What I could find about "sugary drinks" seems to indicate it hasn't changed much or even dropped slightly over this time. So obesity/sedentary lifestyle probably explains a lot of the increase (maybe not everything, but probably close; a 50% increase in population incidence, where a ~2x risk factor affected ~50% of the population would explain it.)
by reenorap | 2026-02-19 21:39:08+00:00
I think the US draining other countries of their best and brightest is why many countries have been left behind in terms of economic development.

Other countries need to take up the mantle of research and they can't do that if all of them go to the US. I think this is overall good for the rest of the world, because relying on the US and the sociopathic companies that exploit public research for personal gain is bad for the entire world.
by BobaFloutist | 2026-02-19 21:39:10+00:00
Sure, but if a source routinely clickbaits you/has a worse than expected article, you learn to avoid it (or even add a "don't show me this source" rule).

As long as the sources last long enough for reputation to build naturally (so, not the Amazon LLC model), it should all come out in the wash pretty reasonably.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-19 21:39:12+00:00
To be fair, I've seen something similar with the JVM, though it recovers. G1GC when it was first introduced would create these massive bookkeeping structures in order to run collections. We are talking about off JVM heap memory allocations up to 20% of the JVM heap allocation.

It's since gotten a lot better with JVM updates, so much so that it's not a problem in Java 21 and 25.
by girvo | 2026-02-19 21:39:20+00:00
The depressing truth is most I know just run all these tools in /yolo mode or equivalents.

Because your coworkers definitely are, and we're stack ranked, so it's a race (literally) to the bottom. Just send it...

(All this actually seems to do is push the burden on to their coworkers as reviewers, for what it's worth)
by ummonk | 2026-02-19 21:39:23+00:00
In my ideal world I’d subscribe to a service with a monthly subscription fee where the service takes a small cut and then converts the remainder into a use-it-or-lose-it tip balance (perhaps with the unused balance being auto-donated to a selected journalism nonprofit). In exchange for this subscription, news providers, bloggers, etc. would unpaywall their articles to me, knowing that by doing so they’re vying for a shot at getting tipped by me for their article.
by AuthAuth | 2026-02-19 21:40:05+00:00
In my opinion, the value of art cant be the quality of the output it must be the intention of the artist.

There are plenty of times in which people will prefer the technically inferior or less aesthetically pleasing output because of the story accompanying it. Different people select different intention to value, some select for the intention to create an accurate depiction of a beautiful landscape, some select for the intention to create a blurry smudge of a landscape.

I can appreciate the art piece made my someone who only has access to a pencil and their imagination more than someone who has access to adobe CC and the internet because its not about the output to me its about the intention and the story.

Saying I made this drawing implies that you at least sat down and had the intention to draw the thing. Then revealing that you actually used AI to generate it changes the baseline assumption and forces people to re-evaluate it. So its not "finding a creative result that they value, but they retroactively devaluing it if it’s not created by a process that they consider artistic
by Retric | 2026-02-19 21:40:13+00:00
Some did. The US expat community has been quite large for decades.

Most people didn’t do FIRE style early retirement while dealing with pre existing medical conditions. There however was plenty of expats pre ACA who very much left the country for early retirement.

US healthcare is ruinously expensive but on average it’s not particularly good if you’re in the income bracket where 1/4 million over a few years is a serious issue.
by inglor_cz | 2026-02-19 21:40:23+00:00
The mosque-turned-cathedral is an interesting (and huge) piece of medieval architecture.

The Roman bridge is fascinating as well.

Plus, if you arrive in summer, you will learn what heat is. Córdoba is hot even for the standards of Spanish summers. Hence, interesting night life. Not just drunkards, normal families and everyone who barely survived the day and now has the opportunity to live and socialize outside.
by bryanlarsen | 2026-02-19 21:40:27+00:00
Rust is "Jack of all trades, master of some".

There are real advantages to choosing a jack of all trades language for everything; for example it makes it easier for an engineer on one part of your project to help out on a different part of your project.

But it sounds like the OP didn't get any of the benefits of "jack of all trades", nor did he choose a field where Rust is "master of some".