MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by steveBK123 | 2026-02-18 23:26:17+00:00
The thing killing me with Apple design now is not just the look of UIs but the UX of how they actually work. I swear they move buttons every year for no reason other to move them. Workflows randomly take an extra click that didn't before.

I'm not sure if the phone or the Mac OS changes are worse, maybe its a tie.

One pet peeve is on the iPhone messages app if you accidentally tap into the search bar they inserted at the bottom, it clears the list of messages (rather than waiting for you to type and start filtering based on context). First time it happened I thought sync failed and the phone didn't have a copy of any of my texts.
by deathanatos | 2026-02-18 23:26:21+00:00
I have a pair of men's jeans. If I lay them flat, while buttoned, and measure the width of the cloth with a cloth measure, I get 16.5", so roughly a 33" circumference. They're a 32"x34" size pair, … so that's basically spot on.

Note that, at least AIUI, the measurement printed on the pair is the wearer's waist measurement, so we thus expect the measured circumference of the top of the jeans to be slightly wider, since men's jeans are not intended to sit at the waist.
by stonegray | 2026-02-18 23:26:32+00:00
Specifying a CSPRNG as an entropy source to avoid collision is incorrect.

CSPRNGs make prediction of the next number difficult (cracking-AES difficulty) but do not add entropy and must be seeded uniquely otherwise they will output the same numbers. Unless the author is proposing having the same machine generate a single universe-scale list in one run.

Also “banning” ids that are all 1s or 0s is silly; they are just as valid and unique as any other number if you’re generating them properly. Although I might suggest purchasing a lottery ticket if you get an UUID with all settable bits as 1.
by thebasedcapital | 2026-02-18 23:27:07+00:00
Hi HN! I built BrainBox to give AI coding agents procedural memory using Hebbian learning — "neurons that fire together wire together."

The problem: every time you start a new Claude Code session, the agent has zero memory of your codebase. It greps, reads, greps again — burning tokens rediscovering files it already found yesterday.

BrainBox learns passively from every file read, edit, and search. Files accessed together form synaptic connections that strengthen with repetition. After a few sessions, the agent recalls auth.ts directly instead of searching for it — like muscle memory.

Key ideas:
- Synapses form between co-accessed files (sequential window, not time-based)
- Myelination gives frequently-used paths instant recall
- Multi-hop spreading activation discovers files through indirect connections (A→B→C)
- Multiplicative confidence scoring prevents hub nodes from dominating (fan effect from Anderson 1983)
- Exponential decay keeps the network clean
- Error→fix pair learning: remembers which files fix which errors

Production results after real usage: 79 neurons, 3,554 synapses, ~9% token savings. The strongest learned pathway is Grep→Read (weight 0.996) — the universal "search then read" pattern.

The research gap that motivated this: published Hebbian learning papers exist at L1 (model internals) but nobody has applied it to L3 (agent behavioral patterns — file access, tool chains, error→fix pairs). The closest historical precedent is Fido (1991) — associative memory for hardware cache prefetching.

Install: `npm install brainbox-hebbian` — hooks into Claude Code automatically via PostToolUse + UserPromptSubmit. TypeScript, MIT, ~2K LOC.

Happy to answer questions about the neuroscience mapping, the math, or anything else.
by jeroenhd | 2026-02-18 23:27:16+00:00
It's r/MacOS. The title is disingenuous at best, the comments are all fans upvoting each other for repeating opinions of the hive mind, and this being reddit a good chunk of them are probably bot rings trying to gain karma for resale value without getting caught.

Apple does keep the update servers for their ancient hardware running, though, which is better than their main rivals.
by Hobadee | 2026-02-18 23:27:25+00:00
I was just gonna say that!

Yeah, you had to have sufficient rep on Slashdot, then you were randomly allocated a certain number of votes (5 or so, IIRC) that you could use to vote. There were fixed categories you could vote an item for, such as "funny", or "off topic". Once your votes were gone, that was it until you were randomly awarded more. The max score anything could get was 5, and a minimum was -1. You could use the scores to filter what you saw. (ie: show full text of >3 insightful, and summaries of 1-2, hide <1)

It worked pretty well. Obvious trolling was still down voted, and insightful stuff was up voted. The ability to just show a blurb of lower-voted stuff was nice as well; you could ignore obvious crap, but expand it if it caught your attention.
by streetfighter64 | 2026-02-18 23:27:28+00:00
If you consider the context of my original comment (or just read what it says), you'll see that I wasn't implying that breaking DRM was necessarily morally bad, only that it'd make you a target for prosecution in the US. Which is clearly true, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_City_Studios,_Inc._v... and many others.

> everyone should be huge huge supporters of them with no downside whatsoever

The downside being, as I very clearly stated in my original comment, that you might face legal troubles for that, at least if your support entails breaking the law (which seeding torrents does).
by tuatoru | 2026-02-18 23:27:30+00:00
> they're paying for someone to _figure out_ their exact needs,

Back in the 1980s this was called "systems analysis". The role disappeared a bit before the web came along, and coders were tasked with the job or told to just guess what the exact needs are, which is why so much software is trash.

I don't know, though, Claude Opus is most of the way to being a good systems analyst, and early reports say that having an AI provide descriptions/requirements to a fleet of code-writing AIs gives better results than having a human do it.
by rep_lodsb | 2026-02-18 23:27:51+00:00
But is the "proper UNIX way" a good thing?

Funny that you would be arguing for that (unless I misunderstood the intention), given your many other posts about how C is a horrible broken unsafe language that should not be used by anyone ever. I tend to agree with that, btw, even if not so much with the "memory safety" hysteria.

Should every program, now and in the future, be forced to depend on libc, just because it's "grandfathered in"?

IMO, Linux is superior because you are in fact free to ignore libc, and directly interface with the kernel. Which is of course also written in C, but that's still one less layer of crud. Syscalls returning error codes directly instead of putting them into a thread-local variable would be one example of that.

Should a hypothetical future OS written in Rust (or Ada, ALGOL-68, BLISS, ...) implement its own libc and force userspace appplications to go through it, just because that's "proper"?
by gerdesj | 2026-02-18 23:28:02+00:00
When you delve into real domain specific knowledge, surprises often surface and it turns out that what you might think is a simple thing is actually rather complicated.

I'm mildly surprised at exactly how successful ISBNs are. I worked in a book wholesaler's warehouse 35 odd years ago and the ISBN was used as the product code by the "system". I'd get a series of picking lists for pallets on good old green "staved" fan fold. I'd whizz around the warehouse with my trolley and pick from paper packets of books. The product lines had the rack and bay, last four from the SBN, quantity, title and full SBN. The packets of books had the rack/bay/last four from SBN printed on a label in large and small other details. I got very good at optimising my course around the warehouse and could pick at a right old rate, whilst listening to my mini cassette player. Its pretty boring work so you might as well game it!

Sometimes an individual book might fall off my trolley and be dumped in the big cardboard "skip" for rejects. For some reason casualties around me generally involved subjects like maths, material sciences, geology, surveying, hydrology. Oh and fractals!

I graduated in civil engineering.

Anyway. Surely all of us here know that really getting to grips with defining what it is that you are cataloguing/indexing/numbering/whatever and why can be quite tricky.

Both Dewey and SBNs catalogue "books" but for very different reasons. Both systems are extremely successful. You might think that in our world of LLMs n that, that books, Dewey and SBNs will go the way of the dodo.

Perhaps, but I doubt it.

Right, bugger all this old school nonsense. I've got a C64 (it rocks a SD card interface and a HDMI out (via SCART - must sort that out)) blinking away on my telly in the sittingroom and some mutant camels need a bloody good kicking.
by dlubarov | 2026-02-18 23:28:49+00:00
> victims of aggression

There is no such notion in IHL. IHL has a notion of self-defense, but that's only relevant to jus ad bellum. Once a conflict exists, there are no carveouts whatsoever for those who claim self-defense, or consider themselves victims, or claim that the other side violated international laws. Customary IHL doesn't care about such claims.
by randallsquared | 2026-02-18 23:29:43+00:00
Ah, I meant Lysenkoism being mandated and genetics being outlawed in the Soviet Union.

> but saying "physical possession is equivalent to ownership" is just a very fringe political opinion.

It is a fringe opinion in today's West, but only relatively recently: since the 1970s, one might argue. The fringe opinion, to be clear, is the older one implied to some degree by "possession is nine tenths of the law", and which views copyright and patent as an artificial grant from the State, useful, but not property in the same sense as a table or a knife is someone's property.

(edited for typo)
by arun99-99 | 2026-02-18 23:29:46+00:00
If you're preparing for systems or performance-engineering roles, this repo shows how a simple matmul evolves into a high-performance kernel.

It demonstrates:

why loop order matters

how cache locality dominates performance

how tiling + registers change everything

how multithreading scales

You can run all benchmarks with one script and see ~100× speedup from naive → optimized.

Good practice for:

low-level optimization

ML systems

HPC

performance interviews

Repo: https://github.com/arun-reddy-a/matmul-cpu
by diath | 2026-02-18 23:29:54+00:00
The issue is not the sizes, the issue is the obesity epidemic. According to CDC [1] the average woman in the US is 5'3" weighing 172lbs. That's not just overweight but rather first degree of obesity. I guess you could argue that sizes should catch up to the demands when half of your population is straight up fat but I feel like a better angle would be educating people that 1500 kcal worth of Starbucks sugar for breakfast is not healthy.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/body-measurements.htm
by dugidugout | 2026-02-18 23:29:55+00:00
I was not replying to your remark, but rather, a later comment regarding the "validity" vs "sensibility". I don't see where I made any distinction concerning wanting to wash cars.

But now I suppose I'll engage your remark. The question is clearly a trick in any interpretive frame I can imagine. You are treating the prompt as a coherent reality which it isn't. The query is essentially a logical null-set. Any answer the AI provides is merely an attempt to bridge that void through hallucinated context and certainly has nothing to do with a genuine desire to wash your car.
by logicprog | 2026-02-18 23:30:11+00:00
> Fun observation - almost every coding harness (claude code, cursor, codex) uses a find/replace tool as the primary way of interacting with code. This requires the agent to fully type out the code it's trying to edit, including several lines of context around the edit. This is really inefficient, token wise! Why does it work this way? Because the LLMs are really bad at counting lines, or using other ways of describing a unique location in the file.

Incidentally, I saw an interesting article about exactly this subject a little ways back, using line numbers + hashes instead of typing out the full search/replace, writing patches, or doing a DSL, and it seemed to have really good success:

https://blog.can.ac/2026/02/12/the-harness-problem/
by onesandofgrain | 2026-02-18 23:30:26+00:00
That's just a pipedream.

Amazon stole elasticsearch (opensearch), apple made appstore from the ideas of cydia/installer.app and IBM gutted Redhat (Linux) and are now selling it to Enterprises for their more fancy security. Big corps will just steal your FOSS and repurpose it, bundle it up, maybe obfuscate it a little bit here and there and resell it. Just imagine the sheer volume of FOSS running meta,google,aws and all the FANGS. Licenses dont mean anything, are easy to work around and besides, you can't fight these companies, especially not prove anything major.
by globalnode | 2026-02-18 23:30:36+00:00
Thats actually a good way to split a project up into closed/open imho. Open the functional part so people can see you're not sending data to hq behind their backs and make the boring time consuming ui closed. I like it. Then make money out of a service rather than the software. As we all know, tech people will see a piece if challenging software and go out of their way to replicate it and release it for free, for whatever reasons. So open sourcing that part takes the challenge away.
by conartist6 | 2026-02-18 23:31:16+00:00
Yeah, you are correct. But that means I have the benefit of ten years development in the web platform, as well as having hindsight on the earlier effort.

I would say the reason the perf costs feel bad there is that the abstraction was unsuccessful. Throughtput isn't all that big a deal for a parser at all if you only need to parse the parts of the code that have actually changed
by JetSpiegel | 2026-02-18 23:31:17+00:00
Also unmentioned is the disastrous intervention in the Moroccan civil war of 1580, where the teen king and most of its nobles were killed, leading to 60 years of Spanish rule. This is not at the apex of the empire, but close.

Also, Henry the Navigator downright stole or cajoled most of the "inovations" from Italian city states. For example, the Madeira island was named so by Italians, settled by some of Henry's minions.
by hsbauauvhabzb | 2026-02-18 23:31:37+00:00
The market is priced at the point that the most economic for the business. Apple buying an exploit for $100m is not worth it (to apple) vs the potential loss of life of people who might be killed if sold on the black market. Buying an exploit for 1m prevents them being used to jailbreak, is good PR, and is ass covering PR insurance in case an Apple exploit cause loss of life (‘the seller could have sold to us, but instead they sold it to an evil corporation’).
by incognitojam | 2026-02-18 23:32:00+00:00
The commit removing Swift has a little bit more detail:

Everywhere: Abandon Swift adoption

After making no progress on this for a very long time, let's acknowledge
it's not going anywhere and remove it from the codebase.

https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/commit/e87f889e3...
by simonsarris | 2026-02-18 23:32:34+00:00
That top graph has been shared a lot but its a somewhat disingenuous display of data. It's true that lots of growth has been healthcare in the last 2 years, but that doesn't mean zero growth elsewhere, you can see eg construction growth on the chart, which is reflected in the fact that construction is seeing all-time-high employment right now:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES2023700001

And if you look at something that's "flat" like transportation, its still essentially at all time highs right now, its just now declining slightly, but its on the heels of major growth: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES4300000001

Now if you look at one that's negative on the graph, like retail trade, and zoom out:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USTRADE

It's still essentially at all time highs!

Serious contractions in these things would be much more worrisome, but this data is basically fine. Some losses may just be temporal corrections from all time highs, like what happened to software jobs at the end of ZIRP (though Software now has separate problems to solve wrt job market).
by Unearned5161 | 2026-02-18 23:33:41+00:00
Presuming that you yourself have "graduated" (what from is unclear), it's particularly audacious that you make this claim because it shows rather cleanly how poor a marker of quality an education is.

The answer has never laid in ever more elaborate designs to disenfranchise particular members of the population. It's always been in building community.

A community is what helps stabilize, helps tighten up distributions, and wrestles most authentically with the general premise that we are social creatures and only as strong as our weakest link.

If you think you're going to build the perfect society by way of careful electorate curation, I have some unfortunate stories to tell you.
by coldtea | 2026-02-18 23:33:45+00:00
>Like, why doesn't the market solve for this? If the median woman can't buy clothing that fits in many brands, surely that's a huge marketing opportunity for any of the thousands of other clothing brands?

Because

- in reality it's not much of a problem. Billions of women manage to buy and wear clothes just fine. Some might fit slightly better or worse, but unless you have very special body shape (and even extreme think/extreme overweight/tall/short are covered by niche brands) you can get in any clothes store and get clothes to wear

- some random brand making something that fits better doesn't mean anybody is going to buy it. First because see above, and also because a lot of clothes purchases are about brand and fashion, not mere fit.

- if some women absolutely can't find something of their size in a specific brand, that makes the brand even more exclusive, like "for fit people only". Obviously brands for thicker and even obese women also exist, but they're seen as a brand of need, not a brand you'd be proud having to wear
by Fnoord | 2026-02-18 23:34:05+00:00
> You wouldn't expect a Vim user to just abandon their muscle memory and just switch to Emacs.

Abandon? Yes, no problem.

Switch back and forth? Now we're talking.

Same with switching from Qwerty to Colemak. That itself is large, but if it is a one way ticket it is doable. Problem is: the world (read: those using US keyboards) is made for Qwerty users.

Although the difference between modal and non-modal is rather large.

A compatibility layer like this, is for people who need to switch back and forth, and for whom it is better to stick with the Microsoft Office keybinds.
by ssttoo | 2026-02-18 23:34:06+00:00
Excellent! For a music project of mine I found MusGlyph [1] which is also all about ligatures, like typing ssss for 4 beamed sixteenth notes. There are some ligatures I need that are not in the font, I contacted the author and he encouraged me to add them myself. So now I’m spending quality time with FOSS called FontForge. Also subsetting a ligature-heavy font for the web turns out an interesting challenge. Wrote up my experience here [2]

[1] https://www.notationcentral.com/product/musglyphs/
[2] https://highperformancewebfonts.com/read/subsetting-and-liga...
by DiggyJohnson | 2026-02-18 23:34:28+00:00
Well said. Do you know of any recent reports or if anyone has actually gone through the funding calculations regarding the funding model you described (let’s call it “FF-direct”) versus Mozilla’s status quo funding model?

Primary questions are: How much does FF cost to sustain? How much is spent on new performance, functionality and feature development? What number does Firefox need to compete directly with Chrome? If you asked an experienced FF project contributor what is the delta between the previous two questions?

- a 20+ year Firefox power user very familiar with the FF project, web browsers, and how they compete
by larkost | 2026-02-18 23:35:26+00:00
The rate of warming is a problem (i.e.: it determines what generations of humans are going to see this), but the major problem is the warming itself, or rather the change.

We (humanity) have gotten comfortable with the way things are, and a change in that is going to mean that things are going to change for us, and we don't like change. Most of our biggest cities are all close to the coast and will be subject to massive flooding in the next 100 years (if not sooner). Much of those same large population centers are also fairly close to being too hot for general survival (without aggressive AC). Our agriculture is all setup for the temperatures we have now, and the rain patterns we are used to. So we are going to have to change both where we live, and how we grow our food (location and probably strains as well).

Global warming is (almost) definitely not going to destroy all life on earth, but many of the forecasts are in extinction-level for most of the large animals. So life in general will continue, and probably humanity (since we are so good at making environment for ourselves), but the (eventual) changes are going to make the world very different, in ways that we are not going to like.
by overfeed | 2026-02-18 23:35:40+00:00
> they managed to convince developers for their platform to stick to their guidelines rather than reinvent the wheel, making the entire computer feel more like one integrated system than a toolbox filled with differently branded tools.

Browsing the web on non-Apple platforms was annoying for a few years, with web designers aping the skeuomorphic design-language of whatever the then-current MacOS X release was. Besides cargo-culting, there was no justifiable reason for brushed aluminum or linen web page backgrounds, though I'm sure it looked really great on the designers Apple computer. If you, dear reader, did this when you were younger, I hope you have grown as a person and a designer.

> [...] unless your applications are designed to look and work like the OS your mimicking, it'll all just look weird and off.

Exactly!
by apsurd | 2026-02-18 23:36:10+00:00
> if you get your news on HN, significant portion that make it to the top are LLM-generated.

You mean this anecdotally I assume.

This makes me think of the split between people who read the article and people who _only_ read the comments. I'm in the second group. I'd say we were preemptive in seeking the ideas and discussion, less so achieving "the point" of the article.

FWIW, AI infiltrates everything, i get that, but there's a difference between engagement with people around ideas and engagement with the content. it's blurry i know, but helps to be clear on what we're talking about.

edit: in this way, reading something a particular human wrote is both content engagement and engagement with people around an idea. lovely. engaging with content only, is something else. something less satisfying.
by casenmgreen | 2026-02-18 23:36:19+00:00
"As only Orwell could, he marked the BBC as he left – almost prissily: ‘I feel that I have been treated with the greatest generosity and allowed very great latitude…on no occasion have I been compelled to say on air anything that I would not say as a private individual.’"

That page does not seem to support the claim that 1984 is about or relates to his time at BBC.
by guywithahat | 2026-02-18 23:36:28+00:00
It looked to me like it was just due to recurring build issues. Lots of "swift can't import these conflicting C++ versioned libraries concurrently" and "can't use some operator due to versioning or build conflicts". Basically it sounds like trying to add swift to the project was breaking too many things, and they decided it wasn't worth it.

It's a shame, I think swift is an underappreciated language, however I understand their reasoning. I think if they tried to just use swift from the beginning it would have been too ambitious, and trying to add swift to a fragile, massive project was probably too complex.