MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hinkley | 2026-02-23 21:59:30+00:00
The reason I like to use the Polish example is that I got it straight from a Polish dissident, and a second one didn't correct me when I repeated it to him later.

Nobody has official numbers on populations that are a mix of documented and undocumented people. But I trust members of those groups and their relatives probably have a better estimate, even if it's offset by not having a degree in statistics.
by flambojones | 2026-02-23 21:59:55+00:00
I worked in mobile robotics for a defense contractor in the early-mid 2000s and we had a homegrown Lidar (though we always called it ladar) that was large, heavy, and cost $250k to make. I remember a year out of college driving 2 hours to a military base with it in the backseat of my car and being paranoid at every bump I hit. These things seem like a dream.
by n2d4 | 2026-02-23 21:59:57+00:00
Genuine question, why does Flock get so much hate in the US compared to other, much more infringing surveillance tech?

Your mobile provider knows your exact location at any point in time, and the NSA probably has access to most big tech data. Those tell you much more than a license plate reader.

In much of Europe, it is quite normal to see cameras everywhere both for traffic enforcement and for crime prevention. They are generally popular with the public, eg. in the UK with a >80% approval rate. In many cities, essentially every corner has CCTV.

Is it because Flock Safety also markets to private businesses, whereas in Europe CCTV and ANPR is usually managed by police? Or is it a cultural thing, eg. because Americans prefer driving over the speed limit, and Flock may end that?
by mikeayles | 2026-02-23 22:00:58+00:00
I was reading the NASA truck aerodynamics thread earlier and realised that commercial freight is one of those fields that touches everyone's daily life (everything you own arrived on a truck) but sits in a complete knowledge blindspot for most people.

I work in fleet fuel efficiency and wrote up the foundational mental model, covering why trucks weigh what they weigh, why they're all doing exactly 56mph, why diesel is so hard to replace, and why 1% fuel savings matters when you're burning 43,000 litres a year.

This is the first in a series, there's already a 2-part deep dive on hydrogen up as well. Tried to keep it accessible without dumbing it down.
by mikepurvis | 2026-02-23 22:00:59+00:00
I would say more significantly, 4 million people can read it. The changes required for any given quarter are probably miniscule, but the tricky part is getting up to speed on all those legacy patterns and architectural decisions.

A model being able to ingest the whole codebase and take you through it is probably the most valuable part of all.

Not to mention the inevitable "now one-shot port that bad boy to rust" discussion.
by amrocha | 2026-02-23 22:01:12+00:00
Ok, you do all that work at home and manage to block flock in your area. It doesn’t matter because the next city over where you work installed them so you get tracked anyway.

Then 2 years later a new city council gets elected and they install flock cameras in your city too. You can never get rid of them because it already passed and nobody wants to relitigate the same thing every couple of years.

Local politics does not work here.
by SiempreViernes | 2026-02-23 22:01:28+00:00
> Parents that want to restrict their kids struggle with ineffective parental controls: https://beasthacker.com/til/parental-controls-arent-for-pare.... Optional parental controls would fix this

Did you mean "mandatory" parental controls? All current systems are optional and as you describe they are frequently ineffective, so not clear why keeping things like they are would be different.
by observationist | 2026-02-23 22:01:29+00:00
This is an active research topic - two papers on this have come out over the last few days, one cutting half of the tokens and actually boosting performance overall.

I'd hazard a guess that they could get another 40% reduction, if they can come up with better reasoning scaffolding.

Each advance over the last 4 years, from RLHF to o1 reasoning to multi-agent, multi-cluster parallelized CoT, has resulted in a new engineering scope, and the low hanging fruit in each place gets explored over the course of 8-12 months. We still probably have a year or 2 of low hanging fruit and hacking on everything htat makes up current frontier models.

It'll be interesting if there's any architectural upsets in the near future. All the money and time invested into transformers could get ditched in favor of some other new king of the hill(climbers).

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02828
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.16419
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05988

Current LLMs are going to get really sleek and highly tuned, but I have a feeling they're going to be relegated to a component status, or maybe even abandoned when the next best thing comes along and blows the performance away.
by apparent | 2026-02-23 22:02:27+00:00
Hope so! I have seen a few vehicles with higher capacity trims, so the real question is whether they'd shave $5k off the price of a vehicle and give it a quite-limited range (150 mile). Some people would be totally fine with that, especially as a second/third car.

But it would somewhat complicate manufacturing and make it a little more confusing for consumers to know what they're getting. Perhaps this corner of the market will continue to be served by sellers of years-old EVs, which can have lousy range but work well otherwise.
by hmokiguess | 2026-02-23 22:02:27+00:00
That's a great point, you actually reminded me of when I used to live in this small city and they had a valet style car wash. It was not unheard of to head there walking with your keys and tell the guy running shop where you parked around the block then come back later to pick it up.

EDIT: I actually think this is very common in some smaller cities and outside of North America. I only ever seen a drive-by Car Wash after emigrating
by pornel | 2026-02-23 22:02:38+00:00
Strong disagree. Rust copied C++ syntax to avoid looking weird to C++ programmers, but the similarity is skin deep. C can be tamed, because it's mostly a subset of Rust, but C++ idioms are a death from papercuts.

OOP, weakly-typed templates, and mutable aliasing create impedance mismatch in almost every C++ API.

Rust doesn't have data inheritance, and what looks like interface inheritance is merely extra requirements in a flat list of traits, so subclassing won't behave like C++ APIs expect. When you translate a class hierarchy to Rust, it needs lots of crutches which make it weird, boilerplatey, and tedious to use. There's no good recipe for OOP hierarchy in Rust, because the idioms are so different. The mismatch feels like writing an ORM.

For some C++ APIs mutability and circular references can be a pain too. Rust works well with DAG data structures and clear mostly-immutable data flow. Objects with some "parent" pointer are common in C++, but Rust sees them as potentially dangling, with shared mutable state, and requires much heavier control of them. It can be done, but it's ugly. Idiomatic Rust designs go to great lengths to avoid it unless necessary, but C++ APIs can have the extra pointers "for convenience".

There's a reason why Rust doesn't have typical GUI libraries - an arbitrary web of references between widgets and event handlers make it ugly in Rust, and that's on top of a view class inheritance.

C++ templates sit very uncomfortably between Rust's macros (duck typed) and Rust's generics (strictly typed at point of declaration).

C++ templates almost always are a mix of types they're attached to and some duck-typing in their expansion.

Rust's generics do not allow any duck typing at all. This makes translation of even a tiny bit clever C++ templates a chore. There's no specialization. No way to deal with SFINAE and such.

Rust macros have flexibility for all the syntax shenanigans (and even similarly bad errors at instantiation time), but macros can't see any types. Idiomatic Rust has very deliberate division between traits (usually much simpler and smaller in scope), macros and proc macros/derives. Splitting C++ templates like that can be a major redesign.
by snowhale | 2026-02-23 22:02:44+00:00
the COBOL migration part is probably the least of IBM's moat tbh. what's sticky is that the actual risk of a migration is 5% technical and 95% organizational -- regulatory sign-offs, audit trails, test coverage for systems that haven't had tests written in 40 years. AI can generate the Rust/Java equivalent but it can't own the migration project. that's still IBM consulting's territory for a while.
by user3939382 | 2026-02-23 22:02:52+00:00
> Bugs get fixed when systems are iterated on.

It’s not that simple. Especially not in politics but even in the domain you’re referencing, have you ever seen Mozilla’s bug tracker? Once your project is so big and involves so many people you move beyond fixing everything you want.

There may be central planning at play, in this case I assume there is, but to claim it necessarily is relies on an oversimplification that doesn’t exist in human political machines that are a giant ship of theseus essentially. There’s no identity -> management capacity proven anywhere enough to make that kind of claim. Institutions inherit and have emergent behavior driven by the dynamics of their constituents/individuals. That includes the inability to create imagined outcomes reliably. The platonic intent and physical regimes cannot be integrated.
by dmurray | 2026-02-23 22:02:53+00:00
It makes sense if you're Irish or British. People here who are blond and blue-eyed but whose ancestors come from Ireland assume they have Viking ancestry, and they're probably right since the Viking era was the main time Scandinavians mixed into the Irish gene pool. It doesn't have white nationalist connotations: the alt-right probably identify more with Celtic iconography if anything.

If you're American, it doesn't make as much sense, because Scandinavians and Germans have been coming to America for hundreds of years.
Threat hunting for home users and SMBs
by EricAUS | 2026-02-23 22:02:54+00:00
Threat hunting for home users and SMBs is becoming essential as attackers increasingly target environments with limited security controls. Without EDR, SIEM, or centralized logging, defenders must rely on host-level visibility and behavioural analysis.

A practical Windows-focused workflow:
1. Process analysis: Identify unsigned binaries, LOLBins, anomalous parent-child relationships, and processes executing from temp or user-writable directories.
2. Persistence review: Inspect scheduled tasks, services, Run/RunOnce keys, WMI subscriptions, and startup folders for new or modified entries.
3. Network telemetry: Examine outbound connections, DNS anomalies, beaconing patterns, and processes making unexpected network calls.
4. System modification review: Look for new accounts, privilege changes, security configuration drift, and recent software installations.
5. Script and PowerShell telemetry: Identify encoded commands, AMSI bypass attempts, suspicious module loads, and script execution from non-standard locations.
6. Correlation: Combine signals to identify multi-stage behaviours indicative of compromise.

Sapience simplifies this workflow by aggregating process, network, persistence, and behavioural indicators into a single interface. It highlights anomalies and maps certain behaviours to MITRE ATT&CK techniques, making it easier for non-enterprise defenders to spot early indicators of compromise without parsing logs or using multiple admin tools.
by Galanwe | 2026-02-23 22:03:26+00:00
I don't quite get your point. The signer is blind to what it signs, but that does not mean there is no identity per se.

A signed key is still unique.

- You can still check that user 1 and user 2 don't use the same key.

- You can still issue a challenge to the user every 10 days to make sure he has indeed access to his key and not just borrowed it.

- You can still enforce TPM use of said keys, so that they cannot be extracted or distributed online, but require a physical ID card.

- You can still do whatever revocation system you want for the cases when a key is stolen or lost.

Really the "blind" nature of the signature changes nothing to what you would normally do with a PKI.
by josephg | 2026-02-23 22:03:27+00:00
Yeah, I’m sure my Claude generated email client could be even faster if I wrote it by hand. Modern computers can retire billions of instructions per second per core. All operations that aren’t downloading or processing gigabytes of data should be instant on modern computers.

Claude’s toy email client gets closer to the speed limit than Gmail does. Why is Gmail so slow? I have no idea.
by HPsquared | 2026-02-23 22:03:49+00:00
Television and radio set the parameters for the "single-stream culture" that emerged in the 20th century. Mostly a result of the limited bandwidth of early broadcast technology, so everyone had to watch the same few channels.

Web 2.0 broke this into millions of creators. Generative AI produces everything on-demand, but again there is a small number of (polymorphic) models producing the content.
by carshodev | 2026-02-23 22:03:56+00:00
Every US company/citizen is not allowed to do trade with Iran due to the ITSR laws except under highly specific situations.

It gets more complex if a company is multinational though.

A citizen can travel to Iran but even if they buy something there on holiday if they bring it back to the US they need to go through complex customs procedures to make sure its legally brought back in.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-23 22:04:48+00:00
> you wouldn't consider someone vandalizing your home or the infrastructure in your neighborhood to be violence?

Very obviously not. Words have meaning. You are misusing words to garner emotional support for your preferred political position.

Burning down anything (including a business) is arson. Not violence. It only becomes violence if people are present and at imminent risk of physical harm.

Financial damage is not violence. Speech is not violence. Please take your doublespeak back to reddit; it doesn't belong on HN.
by hunterpayne | 2026-02-23 22:04:55+00:00
Well that's your mistake right there. You hired someone from Harvard. Unless you are hiring that person to use their connections to market your product, there is no reason to hire someone from Harvard. They just bring bad ideology and STDs from Russian hookers to the table and nobody wants that.

PS This post is partly satire, I will leave it to you as to which part is serious.
Show HN: Pantagruel, an Accessible Specification Language
by crux | 2026-02-23 22:05:08+00:00
Hi HN!

Seven years ago I posted the very first version of PANTAGRUEL (my phone has started autocorrecting to all-caps; I have no idea why but I like it), a “lightweight formal methods” language.

Since then it’s gone through many iterations. I want to post it here because in the recent months it’s acquired a consistent, well-formed and documented type system, and an actual model checker.

In other words, it’s now a language of the same kind as something like TLA+ or Alloy. It differs from those in being (hopefully) radically simpler. It’s designed to be approachable with far less learning and specialization, and it’s designed to be effective in specifying not just software, but any type of formal system, including poetry and games.

If you’ve ever been interested in “tools for thought” and ways to make your own descriptions of things more precise and rigorous, it might be worthwhile to you.
Show HN: Gix – A Go CLI for AI generated commit messages
by codebyagon | 2026-02-23 22:05:36+00:00
gix is a small Go CLI that reads your staged git diff and generates a conventional commit message.

Example:
gix commit

It analyzes the diff and suggests something like:
feat(auth): add JWT refresh token handling

Design goals:

Stay fully in the CLI

Bring your own API key (OpenAI or Gemini)

Minimal, fast startup

Clean provider interface for adding other models

The project is focused on one thing: generating structured commit messages from diffs.

Repo: https://github.com/ademajagon/gix

Feedback on CLI UX and architecture is welcome. Happy to answer technical questions.
by xg15 | 2026-02-23 22:05:47+00:00
> The large networks, trans-atlantic, trans-pacific cables, all that stuff is beyond the control of individuals and even countries. If they don't like your HTTP(S) traffic, the rest of the world won't see it.

Not really having a plan here, so if nothing else this is out of curiosity, but I'd like to know who is actually owning that stuff.

For something that seems so ubiquitous and familiar like the internet, it would probably be good to understand who owns most of its infrastructure.
Show HN: Nodal.gg – Game recommender with interactive map
by A_Random_Forest | 2026-02-23 22:05:52+00:00
Hi HN, I built Nodal.gg, a Steam game recommender with an explorable map UI instead of a plain ranked list.

How it works: blends tag-based similarity with player-library overlap, then visualizes the neighborhood so you can browse clusters.

No signup — just search and click around.

Would love feedback on: (1) whether the map helps you find games faster than lists, and (2) what you’d want as a power-user feature/filter.
by msephton | 2026-02-23 22:05:55+00:00
Cheers! I thought it was a fun concept and I wanted a project to ease me back into work after being away for a week. I'm also kinda addicted to making extensions and have done a dozen or so.

Nova has a git sidebar which does some of the same thing, but I do think there's something more that is useful to yours. Yours is definitely better because of the heatmap colouring, sadly I can't do that in Nova.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-23 22:06:32+00:00
> Strictly speaking there is no "routing through the government" of any information. The government just "issues a certificate" valid for X days without knowledge with whom, how or when you are using it.

I don't understand how you keep claiming there is no "routing through the government" right next to your explanations that the government is the one providing the documents every 30 days.

Obviously something in the document is tied to your ID and the government has mechanisms to revoke it. No matter how many layers you put on top of that, this all has to come back to the government's control.

I understand that the salts can be sent to 3rd party websites. However there's obviously a reason that those are only valid for 30 days instead of indefinitely.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-02-23 22:06:36+00:00
Highly recommend this book on the subject: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99746.An_Island_to_Onese... (An Island to Oneself by Tom Neale). The guy spent years on an island in the middle of the pacific all alone (almost, he has pets and animals).

On the subject, I'll say that voluntary solitude is amazing, loneliness sucks. However, the number of people you interact with has nothing to do with either.

What matters isn't the number of people you meet or the amount of human interaction you have, but the amount of intimacy you desire and how much of that is fulfilled. With that said, the road less traveled is always harsh, humans are social animals; fighting nature is a tumultuous affair.
by dylan604 | 2026-02-23 22:06:40+00:00
> Just because criminals and evildoers use US $100 bills doesn't mean they are not useful and valuable to honest people too.

Like all of the ATMs near a dispensary that was always out of cash because 20 individual $20 bills runs out a lot faster than 4 $100 bills. Until dispensaries became legal, it was rare for me to see an ATM with anything other than $20s. Now, I see $20, $50, $100 dispensing machines regularly.
by sakopov | 2026-02-23 22:07:00+00:00
I think I've seen 2 initiatives to move off of AS/400 to a something else in my lifetime and neither one completed. One was at a bank another at an insurance company. Not to mention that a typical COBOL programmer is more interested in retiring than learning to vibe code. At this point I think the software stocks have reached peak panic and hysteria. There is just no rhyme or reason for sharp declines like this.
by Retr0id | 2026-02-23 22:07:15+00:00
Does it produce runnable binaries?

The repo does not make it clear, but Apple ships Linux builds of Rosetta 2 that can be used inside Linux VMs on apple silicon hardware [0]. With some patches (or so I'm told) it can be made to run on non-apple-silicon arm64 hardware.

Even if it's not fully decompiled yet, it should be possible to relink the decompiled subsections into an original binary.

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...
by bgsgv6 | 2026-02-23 22:07:16+00:00
Ofcourse there are. Thats why all religuous systems produce monastic orders of one kind or another. Secular institutions are much younger so have much less mature versions of it. And out of these spaces you get some of the best human studying and thinking ever done.

The emergence of monastic life and how religion/cultures create space for it, in a sustainable way(cuz why even bother?), is fascinating for what its implications are about group behavior.

Think of monk like personality traits within any group being out of phase with the majority. Rather than filtering it out it survives. Not just in one culture. But in all.

One great example of what comes out of monestaries (trying to self sustain) is the emergence of Pastoral Care as a core feature of the church (some say more than any other feature it has contributed to how the Church survived down fall of empires, nations and kings that supported them). So Irish monks would walk into the local village listen to peoples problems in exchange for food and drink. That turned out to be so popular (probably the earliest forms of therapy) that it became institutionalized.
by ndiddy | 2026-02-23 22:07:27+00:00
Yeah the blog post isn't saying distillation is illegal, it's saying that it should be illegal:

> These [distillation] campaigns are growing in intensity and sophistication. The window to act is narrow, and the threat extends beyond any single company or region. Addressing it will require rapid, coordinated action among industry players, policymakers, and the global AI community.

> Illicitly distilled models lack necessary safeguards, creating significant national security risks. Anthropic and other US companies build systems that prevent state and non-state actors from using AI to, for example, develop bioweapons or carry out malicious cyber activities. Models built through illicit distillation are unlikely to retain those safeguards, meaning that dangerous capabilities can proliferate with many protections stripped out entirely.

> Anthropic has consistently supported export controls to help maintain America’s lead in AI. Distillation attacks undermine those controls by allowing foreign labs, including those subject to the control of the Chinese Communist Party, to close the competitive advantage that export controls are designed to preserve through other means.
Show HN: Dating App Height Verification
by ryantrw | 2026-02-23 22:07:29+00:00
We just launched the first ever height verification feature in our dating app, Tenr.

Many lie about their height, but the reality is it's important to people. So we integrated with the Apple ARKit to bring height verification directly into the app.

Try it out via an App Clip at http://tenr.co/height with no sign-up or download required. You just need an iPhone 12 Pro or newer (LiDar sensor required).

It's much more accurate with a friend but there is a DIY mode that is pretty accurate too.

Let me know what you think and if it's accurate for you!