MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by arionhardison | 2026-02-18 19:17:39+00:00
I commented this earlier and it was instantly downvoted for some reason, but I totally agree with both points; I also think they are intrinsically connected in many ways because using customer-development to understand and build an initial audience often helps identify distribution channels. Here are a few examples I have found

1) I made a product to help people manage their diets; crowded space so it was hard to find users, following Steve Blank's customer-development process I found that the product should have been made for Dietitians not for end users. This may have been obvious to most but it was but to me at the time.

2) I made a product for Medicare/Medicaid but it was hard to get my foot in the door to even be considered for any of the Gov. contracts, so following the same model again I found that if I used politicians that had made promises during their campaign that my product could help them to fulfill then I could use them as distribution channels.

One thing I disagree with or don't understand is

> ship earlier now (often free and open source) to learn faster, but it doesn’t change the attention dynamics much.

I have found the opposite, it seems like the bar is much higher now and not even the boost in productivity that I have gotten from using AI has allowed me to ship secure/high quality products as fast as I would like to; perhaps I am just too insecure about my work but its all new I guess.
Portabase 1.2.7: Large database backup support, UI/UX improvements
by rambokdev | 2026-02-18 19:17:53+00:00
Hi everyone,

A few weeks ago I shared an update on Portabase. Since then, we’ve tackled major challenges with file upload and storage for large databases, and a new major release is out:

What’s new:

- Full UI/UX refactoring

- Upload/storage flow redesigned for large databases

- Agent now handles uploads; Dashboard only manages system metadata

- Backup compression with optional AES-GCM encryption

- React upgraded to 19.2.5 to patch CVE + bug fixes

- TUSd protocol implemented for local storage to enable streaming uploads

Make sure to update your agents and edge keys to get the full benefits. We’d love your feedback, please open issues if you run into anything.

Coming soon: OIDC support, new storage systems, and additional database providers

Repo: https://github.com/Portabase/portabase
by catapart | 2026-02-18 19:17:56+00:00
Asking the wrong question, friend. What should the penalty be for failing to process an immigrant through your system for ~7 years? Where does the fucking buck stop? The US immigration system is broken, and has been, so where are the penalties for this mismanagement? I'd love to see Republicans propose a punitive approach here, but all I seem to hear is though terminating cliches like "should we just have open borders?"

But, absolutely - after we fix the broken system and start processing immigration in a reasonable and timely manner, then we can start asking what the penalties should be for people who abuse our immigration system. But I don't have an ounce of energy to spare on that deflection until the former is done.
by keithnz | 2026-02-18 19:18:15+00:00
The branching strategy we use is features are branched off master, as features are finished we then pick what ones we want to bundle into a release, create a release branch from master, merge features into it, we go through QA, when that release is ready, we merge to master. Meanwhile new features are still being worked on based off master. This works really well as it gives you a lot of control over when things get released and manage testing impact / user impact. This also makes it really easy to back out of a feature without it polluting a "develop" branch that other features have branched off. All features are based on code that is actually deployed.
by selridge | 2026-02-18 19:18:33+00:00
But they’ve always basically required that you essentially become a programmer at the end of the day in order to get those benefits. The spreadsheet is probably the largest intruder in this ecosystem, but that’s only the case. If you don’t think that operating a spreadsheet is programming. It is.

What people are describing is that Normies can now do the kinds of things that only wizards with PERL could do in the 90s. The sorts of things that were always technically possible with computers if you were a very specific kind of person are now possible with computers for everyone else.
by shj2105 | 2026-02-18 19:19:06+00:00
Hmm got it not sure I entirely understand. The issue I have is I’m trying to connect two devices where one is behind a hard CGNAT that always causes the connection to be relayed even though the other one is not behind a cgnat with proper port forwarding. Would a peer relay solve this but is it like a DERP where I have to host it on a VPS separate from my existing two networks or is this something different where I can host the peer relay on the same network not behind a CGNAT and somehow it will link the two networks through it?
by ViktorRay | 2026-02-18 19:19:31+00:00
No this isn’t what the Nazis did. Comparisons like that are ridiculous.

The Nazi took members of ethnic minorities and put them into death camps and massacred them in horrible ways.

Comparing the deportation of illegal immigrants (illegals immigrants can be of any ethnic or religious background) with the industrial mass murder of entire ethnic groups? That’s an absurd comparison.

I agree that what happened to the young girl in the article was messed up but your comparison is still ridiculous.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2026-02-18 19:19:52+00:00
It doesn't really matter if it's 'just a wrapper', because said wrapper provides an ABI. Even if the underlying Native API changes, the interface the wrapper presents to other compiled binaries won't. The latter will contain caller/callee register setup, type layouts, function arguments and more for that wrapper.

Cygwin is also 'just a wrapper' for the Native API and Win32, and look how drastically it changes the ABI of applications.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-02-18 19:20:54+00:00
>You have to believe that Amazon is poised for much higher growth than they are to justify their current stock price.

How many decades now have we lived in a world where the demand for investment far outstrips sane investment opportunities? In such a world, do stock prices have to be justified as you insinuate? And what happens when the prices are far higher than can be justified? I ask not rhetorically, but rather whether I should be hoarding shotgun shells and canned goods and hiding in the basement.
by gorjusborg | 2026-02-18 19:21:12+00:00
These types of takes are getting really tiring. The game isn't over, just the metagame.

I'm not saying I have the next metagame figured out, but AI doesn't magically solve all the worlds problems by existing. It likely even creates a new classes of problems. In such an environment there's going to be opportunity.

Are the software shops and devs who were winning at churning out SaaS products going to be the best suited to this new environment? Maybe not, but adaptation wins over non-adaptation, something that has always been the case.
by kwakubiney | 2026-02-18 19:21:19+00:00
> every DERP server used by your tailnet must be accessible by every node on your tailnet at all times, otherwise you get hard-to-debug netsplits.

What would allow a given pair of nodes access a peer relay? Isn’t the peer relay by default also accessible by every node on the tailnet since it’s in the tailnet as well?
by ac29 | 2026-02-18 19:21:24+00:00
I think an X230 would be performant enough for 95% of the things I do, but a 14 year old CPU is going to have pretty terrible battery life for anything more than very light usage. And things that would be light usage on a recent PC, like watching video encoded with a modern codec, would be fairly taxing on an old CPU with no hardware decode.
by mmh0000 | 2026-02-18 19:21:43+00:00
I really like and hate this at the same time.

Years ago, I had a really fubar shell script for generating the DNS-01 records on my own (non-cloud) run authoritative nameserver. It "worked," but its reliability was highly questionable.

I like this DNS-PERSIST fixes that.

But I don't understand why they chose to include the account as a plain-text string in the DNS record. Seems they could have just as easily used a randomly generated key that wouldn't mean anything to anyone outside Let's Encrypt, and without exposing my account to every privacy-invasive bot and hacker.
by fossmaintainer | 2026-02-18 19:21:49+00:00
Here's the actual e-mail the fund sent:

Hey ******, I hope you're doing well. I apologise for the long delay on this disbursal from our end, and for not reaching out to you sooner.

I am writing to you with an update on GitHub Sponsors, your preferred mode of payment. Unfortunately, we're currently unable to process payments through GitHub Sponsors, Liberapay, OpenCollective, or similar platforms due to regulatory constraints. We still have no clarity on when this will become possible. We shared some context on this earlier here: https://floss.fund/blog/second-tranche-2025-anniversary/

We recommend that we move ahead with a wire transfer (although it involves some paperwork!). This involves:

1) Tax Residency Certificate (TRC) from your country of residence/incorporation for the current year.

2) Signed copy of the "No Permanent Establishment in India Declaration" (Template attached)

3) Form 10F to avoid double taxation for non-Indian entities and individuals. This is an online form that has to be filled out on the Indian Tax Department website. Instructions on how to fill it out are attached to this email. Please refer to this FAQ for more details.

4) Service Agreement – Please fill in the sections marked in yellow and send it back to us (Attached)

5) Invoice for the grant amount (sample attached with required fields highlighted, feel free to use your own invoice template if needed. Please mention "project development support" in the invoice description).

Once you have these, please send them over so that we can begin processing the payment.

Please note that these documents are required in our jurisdiction (India) for processing foreign payments. A percentage of the payment will be withheld as per the DTAA (Double-Taxation Avoidance Agreement) between India and your country, which the recipient can claim back while filing tax returns in their country. The specific withholding rate depends on the DTAA regulations between your country and India.

If you have any questions, please feel free to write to us.

Thank you once again for your patience
by bccdee | 2026-02-18 19:22:38+00:00
> Regulation is what enables monopolies

That's patently false. AT&T was a monopoly and they were broken up by antitrust regulation. The absolute most you can say is that some regulations enable monopoly. I contend that we simply should pass the good kind of regulations instead.

Monopoly is enabled by market forces such as economies of scale. Monopolization is a natural market process which happens on its own unless it is actively prevented.

> big pharma loves high regulatory barriers because it keeps competitors out

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.

> Somalia

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.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-18 19:22:49+00:00
> The moat isn't money for out-marketing your idea that 750 other people are building, it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody else is solving well.

This is a very naive take. Any good idea you have can now be cloned trivial in no time at all.

The clones just need to out spend you on marketing even though it is your idea that the LLM cloned.
by cestith | 2026-02-18 19:23:00+00:00
- Sneakers

- Pirates of Silicon Valley

- Snowden

- The IT Crowd

- Real Genius

- The Great Hack

- Virtuosity

- The Conversation

- Who Am I

- Anon

- Ghost in the Shell (Anime)

- The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

- The Accountant & The Accountant 2

- Office Space

- The Imitation Game

- I Am Mother

- Eye in the Sky

- The Circle

- 1984

- Elysium

- Minority Report
by namtim | 2026-02-18 19:23:34+00:00
The `TS_NO_LOGS_NO_SUPPORT` option opts out of all log collection, and says in the name why it is collected in the first place. Tailscale has support for all users, including free, and having access to logs has to be how they can provide free support. Having quick access to logs reduces the time it takes to handle tickets, so they can help more people quickly and don't need to limit support to only paying users.

The core client code is open source, feel free to inspect it yourself.
by Mixtape | 2026-02-18 19:23:47+00:00
Great. As if Learn articles weren't already a mess to begin with.

A few weeks ago, I needed some syntax information to help with building out a PowerShell script. The input and output parameter sections each included "{{ Fill in the Description }}"[1] in lieu of any meaningful content. There wasn't even a link to the data type's description elsewhere in the Learn database. I was ultimately able to get done what I needed to do, but it really irked me that whoever developed the article would publish it with such a glaring omission.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...
by evanjrowley | 2026-02-18 19:23:59+00:00
A great presentation video on Heaper by it's creator Jan Lunge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd_v_3CcVno

The judging an optimal balance between organization and descriptive naming is a hassle that makes me allergic to information hierarchies. I have to decide if it was the right level of abstraction, if the inclusion of details should be done consistiently or as a one-off, evaluate the tradeoff between copying vs. moving data across parts of the hierarchy, etc. Tag-based approaches for filesystem and note management have been very attractive to me and I'm glad to see Heaper extends this even further with the "block" concept.

Self-hosting, synchronization, and support for Restic are also great bonuses.
by dietr1ch | 2026-02-18 19:24:55+00:00
My plan to buy a TV is to get one that can be kept offline, or one that can be made able to stay offline through flashing or dismantling into its very core elements.

Dismantling it would probably ensure it's ugly af, but maybe if you try to go for one of those TV-in-a-frame things it might not look hideous.
by Brian_K_White | 2026-02-18 19:25:14+00:00
Every useful tool is useful for bad things.

Everything with the power to protect the innocent, also has exactly the same power to protect the guilty. The two facets are inseperable.

Observing only the negative side, or only the positive side, is a null argument. The fact that a tool can be used for bad is exactly cancelled out by the fact that it can be used for good. Neither is a valid basis for any kind of policy.

Except that on balance, it's better for everyone that we have tools and capabilities and knowledge than not.

It's better that we have knowledge of say, poisons, than not, even though some people apply the knowledge to do harm.

This manifests in at least a couple different dimensions. The simplest one: there are more good or neutral people using knowledge and tools for good things than not. A less direct way: It's better for you to have options to help yourself and others deal with problems and meet needs than not.

Even if someone can use a tool against you, you are still better off having a lot of useful tools at your disposal in general than not, including to counter the one going against you, which zeros that out, and then also to deal with everything else, which becomes a net positive.

The alternative is to be an animal. Either a wild animal totally at the whims of nature, or worse a voluntarily domesticated animal that knows that tools exist, but has abdicated all responsibility for their own welfare to some farmer claiming to take care of them. And you still have the exact same bad guy problem, only now without any ability to deal with it.

Acting like the bad side of a useful thing is the only side, or even the most important side, is simple bad math.

Aside from any other unflattering quality that results in fear of any obvious easily identified harm being one's highest priority that outweighs all other considerations.
by techtalksweekly | 2026-02-18 19:25:26+00:00
That's why I started Tech Talks Weekly https://www.techtalksweekly.io/

YouTube's algorithm is built to maximize engagement for a broad audience. Especially shorts with animated "jumping" captions and videos that zoom in and out every three seconds providing no useful content most of the time.

I found it really frustrating that almost every tech conference talk ends up on YouTube, yet it's surprisingly hard to discover the ones I'd find interesting.

So I wrote a script that fetches all the talks from the channels I follow each week, groups them by conference, and sorts them by view count. That way, I spend about five minutes a week and quickly find the really good ones.

In 2024, I turned it into a newsletter. I use the exact same script and I just copy and paste the results into Substack. It turns out many people are facing the same problem because it grew to over 8,400 subscribers as of today.
by iJohnDoe | 2026-02-18 19:25:58+00:00
It's not an unfair comparison. They are building concentration camps. We hope they don't turn into death camps. If you read other investigations you'll find that people are dying in these detention centers (concentration camps).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46896823

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/10/us/ice-detain-irish-man-five-...

https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2026/0209/1557514-seamus-cul...

> Then it was 42 hours of waiting in the airport holding rooms. Eventually they were put on a plane — then a minivan — to the facility in Texas. Maria Antonia said she didn’t really understand where they were going until they saw the center out the window.

> they had been detained for nearly four months.
by ikari_pl | 2026-02-18 19:26:32+00:00
That's also exactly what the system says. The quality of it is impressive, though.

Of course I'm a techie, a gadget freak, the first person to have a tri-foldable phone, a 3D monitor, or an e-ink monitor, just to see if it's cool.

I'm genuinely impressed by the advances of the technology and the complexity of the models here. There is a lot of curating going on—making sure the prompts are ordered correctly, the tools work, the context doesn't get full of garbage. I use the knowledge of the technical side of LLMs to see where this can go.

This is how I came up with the creative side of the project: a free cycle every now and then to come up with any random thoughts, ideas, evolving them, seeing where it leads. Seeing what happens, if you give the bot a lot of autonomy, and soften the guardrails.

Unsurprisingly, the outcome is not "machines will decide to kill us all", despite the words that my every sleep may be my last.

It's actually an interesting point—I'm pretty much against the hype. Everyone is adding useless "AI features" to everything. You can buy an "AI compatible monitor" if you're susceptible enough. But if you channel that power-to-heat conversion well, you can get out something that helps you reflect on what matters in life. And that suggests a ton of good reading.
by stvltvs | 2026-02-18 19:26:34+00:00
> The Nazi took members of ethnic minorities and put them into death camps and massacred them in horrible ways.

That's not how it started. It started with labor camps for political enemies and other undesirables. They became death camps step by step, over time.

We have to nip them in the bud before they have a chance to become death camps. People are already dying of neglect.
by themafia | 2026-02-18 19:27:12+00:00
Take your judgement somewhere else. No one asked for them. You're being rude, bullying, and arrogant. Which is worse than "useless."

I would rather, all day, deal with "useless pedantry" than deal with your kind of attitude. You are the worse type of person that vistis hacker news. Perhaps a different forum would suit your, uh, "needs," a little better.
by whatever1 | 2026-02-18 19:27:20+00:00
There is only so much cash a company can burn.

Amazon spent last year 100B in Capex. They announced they will spend 200B this year. These numbers are INSANE. Greater than GDPs of entire countries.

They literally don't have the cash to do it. Either they need to grow their cash flow significantly, or deplete their cash reserves or take a huge loan (likely a combination of them).

Jassy is playing Russian roulette with the company and his career.
by palmotea | 2026-02-18 19:27:46+00:00
>> What indication has "the top" given to show they have that kind of foresight and control? The closest is the AI-bros advocacy of UBI, which (for the record) has gone nowhere.

> Tech bros selling “no more software engineers” to cost optimizers, dictatorships in US, Russia, China pressing with their heels on our freedoms, Europe cracking down on encryption, Dutch trying to tax unrealized (!) gains, do I really need to continue?

All those things are non sequiturs, though, some directly contradicting the statement I was responding to, as you claim it should be interpreted. If "90% of modern jobs are bullshit to keep cattle occupied" that implies "the top" deliberately engineered (or at least maintains) an economy where 90% jobs are bullshit (unnecessary). But that's obviously not the case, as the priority of "the top" is to gather more money to themselves in the short to medium term, and they very frequently cut jobs to accomplish that. "Tech bros selling “no more software engineers” to cost optimizers," is a new iteration of that. If "the top" was really trying "to keep cattle occupied" they wouldn't be cutting jobs left and right.

We don't live in a command economy, there's no group of people with an incentive to create "bullshit" jobs "to keep cattle occupied."
by ddtaylor | 2026-02-18 19:28:03+00:00
As a 25 year Firefox user this is spot on. I held out for 5 years hoping they would figure something out, but all they did was release weird stuff like VPNs and half baked services with a layer of "privacy" nail polish.

Brave is an example of a company doing some of the same things, but actually succeeding it appears. They have some kind of VPN thing, but also have Tor tabs for some other use cases.

They have some kind of integration with crypto wallets I have used a few times, but I'm sure Firefox has a reason they can't do that or would mess it up.

You can only watch Mozilla make so many mistakes while you suffer a worse Internet experience. The sad part is that we are paying the price now. All of the companies that can benefit from the Chrome lock in are doing so. The web extensions are neutered - and more is coming - and the reasons are exactly what you would expect: more ads and weird user hostile features like "you must keep this window in the foreground" that attempt to extract a "premium" experience from basic usage.

Mozilla failed and now the best we have is Brave. Soon the fingerprinting will be good enough Firefox will be akin to running a Tor browser with a CAPTCHA verification can for every page load.
by sleepyguy | 2026-02-18 19:28:24+00:00
I’ve heard that Amazon’s capital expenditures have exceeded its annual cash flow, leading it to borrow and cut jobs to fund AI investments. Unlike Microsoft and Google, which appear able to fund capex internally, Amazon seems to be in a costly growth race with deeper-pocketed competitors. My view, this could mean continued heavy borrowing and limited to no profitability in the near term.