MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by matheusmoreira | 2026-02-26 18:41:59+00:00
> Not a single atom on the planet has to be moved to extinguish all debts.

You should elaborate more on this bold claim.

> Then who has it?

Plenty of people. Treasury bonds holders. Pension funds. Insurance companies. Other countries. The government owes all of those people and regularly pays them interest.

> You seem to be basing your argument on some seriously outdated and thoroughly refuted models of money.

Fractional reserve banking is outdated and refuted?
by selridge | 2026-02-26 18:42:11+00:00
Why would it matter whether or not the robot looks something up if it makes a novel discovery?

Why would it matter that the discovery wasn't just novel but felt like an unconventional one to me, someone who is probably a total outsider to that field?

Both of those feel subjective or at least hard to sustain.

Look. What I'm trying to tell people is that the easy explanations for how these models worked circa GPT-2 is just not cutting it anymore. Neither is setting some subjective and needlessly high bar for...what exactly? What? Do we decide to pay attention to AI after it does all the above? That seems a bit late to the party for cheering on or resisting it.

Some new shit is afoot. Folk need to pay attention, not think they got it figured out already.
by tmp10423288442 | 2026-02-26 18:42:14+00:00
You kind of do need to vote Red - or, more precisely, make Red competitive again. Because Californians don't vote Red often enough, most of the candidates in the Republican Party in California are completely unserious. This has allowed the more impractical progressive side of the Democratic Party to increasing set the direction of the Democratic Party in California, to the detriment of governance for everyone.

Personally I hope that the two Republican candidates in California both win the jungle primary - maybe that will lead to some soul searching on how bad the Democratic politicians have become in the state.
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-02-26 18:42:31+00:00
His book Suttree is effectively biographical, down to his impoverished 1950s Knoxville streetslang.

I haven't read anything else, but the film No Country for Old Men is incredible storytelling (and I only started Suttree after a /hn/article from a few months ago described the polymathic dismantling of his impressive library).

His short article The Kekulé Problem sheds serious insights (to me, at least) on whether or not LLMs can, alone with language, ever become truly conscious (are words, alone, enough?). Not the main point of the article (rather: about lucid thinking/states leading to wordless solutions presenting themselves to "discoverers," dreaming).
by EarlKing | 2026-02-26 18:42:35+00:00
Well, speaking in the case of the US, this would constitute product development which is well outside the scope of what a 501(c)(3) organization should be doing, which could thereby jeopardize their tax status? Or, in the case of a state-run university, this raises all kinds of issues regarding how tax money is being given away to random schmoes instead of benefitting the public at large.

So, yeah, there's plenty of reasons why they don't do that.

Open source wouldn't have a funding problem if people would stop being so averse to just paying for what they use. Maybe... the world should stop expecting something for nothing.
by bonoboTP | 2026-02-26 18:43:07+00:00
I guess some of the appeal of those sparse photos is the element of fantasy and imagination. Wondering what it could have been. Looking at a low quality yellowing wedding photo of your grandma... It allows you to think and wonder. Seeing it in 4K video or a volumetric 4D gaussian splat in VR robs you of all that sentimental mystery.

Nostalgia and idealization of the past is also harder when you have a more representative cross section of past moments.
by chias | 2026-02-26 18:43:10+00:00
Not sure this is the reason but: it is generally not easy to get a satellite over the poles. You launch close to the equator in the direction of Earth's spin to take advantage of the (very substantial!) speed you already have due to the rotation of the planet. Getting from an equatorial orbit to a polar one requires a huge amount of fuel / energy. You can't just sort of "drive it over".

Source: played a bunch of Kerbal space program
by modeless | 2026-02-26 18:44:27+00:00
Google Earth and Google Maps 3D satellite view on desktop web have essentially the same rendering of Street View, which hasn't materially changed in 10 years or more and does not have the features I described. Google Maps on mobile never integrated the 3D satellite view at all, which represents another regrettable lack of investment on Google's part.

People rarely use the Street View feature because it's difficult to access, and difficult to understand spatially. Free camera motion is impossible and the transitions are jerky and stilted. As a result it's relegated to special places in the UI that are rarely visited. If it was seamlessly integrated into satellite view and directions then it would see much more usage.
by mothballed | 2026-02-26 18:44:39+00:00
I don't know it's a bad thing, just pointing out, the US does just prescribe opiate addicts more opiates basically for life without a plan to stop it. Responding to "They put them on lists and prescribed them dope and it spiraled out of control ... metering out hard drugs has always been a road to ruin" with the facts that's what we're already doing writ large. The thing many people argue shouldn't become the case is already the case and many are oblivious to it (thinking that it was just a thing in the past we stopped).

It isn't the same drug as fentanyl, but it never really stopped being the plan that we will take people from 'the list' and just keep metering opiates out indefinitely. GGP posted this in a way that seemed to allude this was not currently the case.
by amiga386 | 2026-02-26 18:45:17+00:00
systemd was the key to the whole backdoor.

OpenSSH is maintained by the OpenBSD developers. OpenSSH does not use liblzma (xz) at all.

Linux distros which chose to switch to systemd also chose to patch OpenSSH to call systemd's sd_notify() function, to inform systemd when sshd is fully started.

This sd_notify() function is in the huge, sprawling kitchen sink of a library called libsystemd. sd_notify() is only a few lines of code, but it's convenient (to Linux distro packagers) to make systemd a dependency of OpenSSH, link in the whole library and call that one function. It makes their patches of the upstream software smaller and easier to review for correctness.

In the sprawling libsystemd is an entire subsystem for reading/writing systemd's famous binary log files, and the user can choose compression (xz, zstd or lz4). It depended on and loaded all three of these compression libraries, whether you read/write compressed logs or not. In the video you hear about the imminent request to load these libraries dynamically on demand -- https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/31550 -- but this arrives many years adding these functions to the libsystem kitchen sink, and generally speaking most programs shouldn't use the libsystemd functions for reading/writing log files, they only need to send log messages to journald via syslog() or sd_journal_print()

So you can see this unwarranted dependency chain was introduced by Linux distros adding systemd to everything, and nation-state level hackers saw and tried to exploit it, seeking out the xz maintainer for social engineering.
by dralley | 2026-02-26 18:45:38+00:00
Red Hat noticed that something was off, but there was a new version published by "Jia Tan" that fixed the warnings and the performance issue, so it's not really clear that the original version would have still gotten as deep of an investigation as would have been needed to find the issue.

It's possible though. The noise around it did at least put Freund on alert and we should be very glad both that "Jia Tan" made the mistakes they made originally and that Freund followed up on their gut feeling
by shimman | 2026-02-26 18:45:54+00:00
The USA is priced out of manufacturing due to greedy capitalists and business owners. Acting like labor is an insurmountable expense is just hilariously out of touch.

Maybe those that own the wealth should pony up more in taxes or give away their factories to the workers so they can run it themselves (something tells me they'll do a better job than greedy owners that just care about money rather than building a community).
by mikestew | 2026-02-26 18:46:13+00:00
I loved Mr. Stanks follow up of "Privacy?! Why, you post your food on Facebook!". Because what I had for supper and where I've travelled during the day are on exactly the same level of privacy and concern. I have to assume that in the reporter's attempt to have a voice from the pro side and the con side, the best they could find was "if you're not doing anything illegal...".
by Conscat | 2026-02-26 18:46:28+00:00
I was a kid at the time, but adults, magazines, and other children convinced me that 3D printing at home would likely replace a huge number of products. This included extremely optimistic speculation, like printers producing smart phones or houses. Then I dated a boy who used his 3D printer to substitute The Container Store at a higher cost with greater effort and lower quality, and that soured me on the concept.
by cyberax | 2026-02-26 18:46:34+00:00
I actually am citing the traffic engineering handbook, the section about computing the efficacy of bus lanes. And I'm using deliberately conservative estimates.

> If there is an average of 15 passengers on the bus during the operations of the bus and there is an average of 1 driver on the bus during the operations of the bus, then it is 1/16th occupied by driver(s)

No. For the bus to be viable, all 3 drivers have to be "virtually present" there. A bus _has_ to be available at all times with a reasonable interval, otherwise it might as well not exist.

Or in other words, a passenger needs to be paying the salary for even the missing drivers.
by SunshineTheCat | 2026-02-26 18:46:35+00:00
This is related but also kinda an aside: has anyone been able to find a solid, reliable ad blocker for Twitch?

Brave use to block it for a while by default (it does great on YouTube ads).

There also use to be a ping pong between Twitch and some chrome extensions which worked temporarily and then Twitch broke a week later.

The best I've been able to find is Alternate Player for Twitch.tv which does hide the ads (essentially freezing the stream while they play), but I have been unable to keep the stream playing ad free for quite some time.
by dmit | 2026-02-26 18:47:20+00:00
class Bean {
private boolean sprouted;

public void sprout() {
this.sprouted = true;
// ...
}
}

or

data Bean = Dormant | Sprouted

sprout :: Bean -> Bean
sprout Dormant = Sprouted
sprout Sprouted = -- aw, beans, we could have modeled
-- this state as impossible to construct,
-- but you chose runtime checks, so
-- here we are.

As for pointing to the source line, I think JavaScript people solved that one for us with source maps. Just because we download and execute a single 4Mb line of minified code, doesn't mean we can't tell which line of the original source caused the error. :)
Show HN: Smplogs – Local-first AWS Cloudwatch log analyzer via WASM
by smplogs | 2026-02-26 18:47:22+00:00
smplogs analyzes your AWS CloudWatch log exports (Lambda, API Gateway, ECS) and turns them into severity-ranked findings, root cause analysis, and log signature clusters. The entire analysis engine is written in Go, compiled to WebAssembly, and runs client-side. Your log content never leaves your browser.

Why I built this: I got tired of the CloudWatch debugging loop - staring at raw log streams, writing ad hoc Insights queries, mentally correlating timestamps across invocations, and still not understanding why my Lambda was failing. I wanted something where I could drop a file and immediately see "94% of your failures occur within 200ms of a DynamoDB ProvisionedThroughputExceededException - switch the Payments table to on-demand capacity." Actual root causes, not just "error rate is high."

Technical approach: The core engine is a Go binary compiled to WASM (~analysis.wasm). At build time, Vite computes its SHA-256 hash and bakes it into the JS bundle. At runtime, the browser fetches the WASM, verifies the hash with crypto.subtle.digest before instantiation, and then all parsing and analysis happens in WebAssembly linear memory. The server only sees metadata (file size for rate limiting, a session key). No log content is ever transmitted.

Inside the WASM, there are four analysis modules: a SemanticLogClusterer (groups log lines by pattern, masks variables - so you see "ProvisionedThroughputExceededException: Rate exceeded for table *" appearing 48 times across 12 requests), a ResourceCorrelationEngine (links error spikes to upstream causes like throttling or cold starts), a ColdStartRegressionAnalyzer, and an AnomalyDetector (catches things like slowly increasing memory usage suggesting a leak).

The frontend is vanilla ES modules - no React, no framework. Vite bundles it. Tailwind for styling. The backend is just Vercel serverless functions handling auth, rate limiting, and encrypted storage for Pro users who want to save analyses.

There's also a browser extension (Chrome, Firefox, Edge) that injects an "Analyze" button directly into the CloudWatch console, so you can skip the export step entirely.

What's hard: Tuning the correlation engine thresholds. "94% of failures within 200ms of throttling" is a real finding from testing, but getting the confidence intervals right across wildly different log shapes(a 50-invocation Lambda vs. a 10,000-request API Gateway) is an ongoing challenge. I'm also debating whether to open-source the WASM engine.

What I'd love feedback on:

- Is the zero-knowledge / client-side-only angle compelling enough to overcome the "just another log tool" reaction?

- The free tier is 3 analyses/day. Too low? Too high?

- Would you want a CLI version that pipes CloudWatch logs directly?

You can try a no-signup demo on the landing page - just scroll a bit to see the analysis output on sample logs.

https://www.smplogs.com

Free tier available, no credit card required.
by the_af | 2026-02-26 18:47:23+00:00
Yes, and also many fandoms lack the maturity to know when to say "no, I do not want to know MORE details, and certainly not about this obscure secondary character's difficult childhood that explains everything they did later in life".

See:

- All of Wookiepedia and most of Star Wars Expanded Universe.

- "The Hunt for Gollum".

- Every movie in the franchise after "Alien" and "Aliens".

- The sadly upcoming expanded universe/sequels/shows for Blade Runner.

Etc, etc. Everyone has their exceptions ("this one was cool"), but in general the point stands: fandoms ruin everything. They simply don't believe in the adage that "less is more". They always want MORE, and the industry is only happy to oblige.
by TYPE_FASTER | 2026-02-26 18:47:29+00:00
The effective federal tax rate, and the amount of federal tax Meta paid as a percentage of income, are two different things.

More details here: https://itep.org/meta-tax-breaks-trump-mark-zuckerberg/

The 10-K filed by Meta is linked to in that article, and can be found here: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/0001...

If you dig into the details in the Income Tax Disclosure block, Meta paid $2.8B in Federal income taxes for the year ended December 31, 2025.
by ben_w | 2026-02-26 18:47:36+00:00
> quick edit to add: At it's peak Folding@Home was utilizing 2.4 EXAflops worth of silicon. At that moment that one single distributed computational project had more compute than easily the top 100 data centers at the time. Let that sink in: The first exa-scale compute was achieved with smartphones, PS3s, and clunky old HP laptops; not a "hyperscaler"

A DGX B200 has a power draw of 14.3 kW and will do 72-144 petaFLOP of AI workload depending on how many bits of accuracy is asked for; this is 5-10 petaFLOP/kW: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/dgx-b200/

Data centres are now getting measured in gigawatts. Some of that's cooling and so on. I don't know the exact percent, so let's say 50% of that is compute. It doesn't matter much.

That means 1GW of DC -> 500 MW of compute -> 5e5 kW -> 5e5 * [5-10] PFLOP/s -> 2500 - 5000 exaFLOP/s.

I'm not sure how many B200s have been sold to date?
by chetangangappa | 2026-02-26 18:47:45+00:00
A week on the sofa with a fractured leg. Good conditions for an honest look at a year that moved too fast to examine at the time.

In 2025 I delivered a complete platform alone — end to end, two business lines, direct stakeholder ownership, requirements, architecture, delivery. Not because I coded faster. Because AI made coding cheap enough that the bottleneck shifted to understanding the problem, designing the solution, owning the outcome. The things we'd been told were someone else's job.

We spent a decade narrowing software engineering down to coding. Built entire organisational structures around that definition. AI didn't create a new kind of engineer — it just made the old definition impossible to ignore. The post covers what that looked like in practice, what it broke, and what it means for the generation of engineers who learned to code when coding was supposed to be enough.

https://chetangangappa.me/blog/ai-in-sdlc-2025-retro
by 3rodents | 2026-02-26 18:48:10+00:00
The project has involvement from people who have spent decades dedicated to these ideas — it doesn’t seem like a vanity project or a play for control. The most cynical view is that it is beneficial to the OP because it provides access to potential investments, which, sure, isn’t a pure philanthropic venture, but that seems a pretty small price to pay. The people involved are the people you would surely want running this project.
by bdangubic | 2026-02-26 18:48:14+00:00
> 90% of engineers who have been working on CRUD apps

I am a 30-year "veteran" in the industry and in my opinion this cannot be further from the truth but it is often quotes (even before AI). CRUD apps have been a solved problem for quite some time now and while there are still companies who may allow someone to "coast" doing CRUD stuff they are hard to find these days. There is almost always more to it than building dumb stuff. I have also seen (more and more each year) these types of jobs being off-shored to teams for pennies on a dollar.

What I have experienced a lot is teams where there are what I call "innovators" and "closers." "Innovators" do the hard work, figure shit out, architect, design... and then once that is done you give it to "closers" to crank things out. With LLMs now the part of "closers" could be "replaced" but in my experience there is always some part, whether it is 5% or 10% that is difficult to "automate" so-to-speak
by mytailorisrich | 2026-02-26 18:48:41+00:00
In the UK: "A record for all vehicles passing by a camera is stored, including those for vehicles that are not known to be of interest at the time of the read. At present ANPR cameras nationally, submit on average around 60 million ANPR ‘read’ records to national ANPR systems daily." [1] (ANPR = Automatic Number Plate Recognition)

The data is kept for 12 months. So basically if you get onto the police radar for whatever reason they can roughly see how you used your car, and others they know you had access to, in the last 12 months (just saying, hum, hum).

[1] https://www.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/rs/road-...
by MadxX79 | 2026-02-26 18:48:55+00:00
From your link:

"We excluded reasoning models from our analysis of per-token prices. Reasoning models tend to generate a much larger number of tokens than other models, making these models cost more in total to evaluate on a benchmark. This makes it misleading to compare reasoning models to other models on price per token, at a given performance level."

It's just price per token. Token usage is exploding.
by jamiecode | 2026-02-26 18:49:11+00:00
The failure mode split nobody's naming: Claude gets regexes right about 95% of the time, which is annoying but catchable. Gets auth logic or state management right 95% of the time and you've got silent data corruption showing up 3 months later on an edge case nobody tested.

Vibe coders treating those as the same category is what actually worries me. Even in regular software there's a feedback mechanism - unit tests go red, CI breaks. Vibe coding skips that too. You get working code that passes the happy path and nothing that tells you which 5% failure rate is the dangerous one. That judgment about problem category severity is the thing that's hard to develop without breaking things first.
by mosselman | 2026-02-26 18:49:20+00:00
Hey HN, I'm Achilleas. I built Decoy because I didn't feel like running Docker every time I needed to test some webhooks. All I really wanted was to return a custom response on localhost to test my application code interacting with external systems.

Decoy is a native Mac app (SwiftUI + Network.framework) that lets you create mock HTTP endpoints. You pick a method, define a response (JSON, HTML, XML, a file, a redirect), and it just works. Incoming requests show up in real time with full headers and body, which is handy for debugging webhooks. It supports parameterized paths like /users/:id and you can group endpoints into projects with subdomain support. Requests are persisted to SQLite immediately and CORS is handled automatically.

To be clear about what it isn't: it doesn't send requests (not a Postman replacement), it's not a proxy, and it's Mac only.

It's $24.99 on the Mac App Store, one-time purchase. I'm an indie developer — no team, just me building tools I want to use myself.

Happy to answer questions about Decoy!
by em-bee | 2026-02-26 18:49:30+00:00
xkcd turned stick figure drawings into an art form. sometimes it is not about how something was created, but about the story being told.

some people build apps to solve a problem. why should they not share how they solved that problem?

i have written a blog post about a one line command that solves an interesting problem for me. for any experienced sysadmin that's just like a finger painting.

do we really need to argue if i should have written that post or not?
by staticassertion | 2026-02-26 18:49:49+00:00
I really don't get that. I look at pictures I've taken in a digital world and I'm moved, just as I am when I see pre-digital pictures. Perhaps older images are sometimes "more special" but that's an artifact of the distance between who I was then vs now. Why would I stop feeling an emotional attachment to photos just because I have many? I really can not understand this at all.
by fzeroracer | 2026-02-26 18:49:58+00:00
This is what I think a lot of the people who advocate for 'AI generated images being art' don't get. There's no effort or intentionality into what's being created; it has the look and appearance of 'polished art' (that breaks down when you look closer) but behind it is nothing.

It's also why AI generated code is a nightmare to read and deal with, because the intention behind the code does not exist. Code outputting malformed input because it was a requirement two years ago, a developer throwing in a quick hack to fix a problem, these are things you can divine and figure out from everything else.
by tmp10423288442 | 2026-02-26 18:50:20+00:00
Massachusetts is unusually good though, probably because of the high concentration of elite universities in Boston, which is also the capital of the state, which means politicians there take education most seriously - and don't forget the demographic effect of the number of professors and other highly-educated professionals.

Texas, California, and Florida are all fairly similar, with California doing somewhat worse than Texas and Florida. Unfortunately, the dedication of California to effective education is going down over time, while even the Deep South, which has consistently been at the bottom, is going up.