MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by roniemartinez | 2026-02-20 01:46:35+00:00
I used to work on a delivery area feature where I used Shapely to simplify and dissolve subsets of a shapefile. I thought that for this simple task, I don't need to use Python scripts or host a WFS/WPS

Inspired by how Cloudinary and imgproxy transform images through URLs, I built Geoblob (geoblob.com) to do the same thing but for geospatial data.

A few examples (simplified for readability - actual URLs include a signature and API key):

Filter features from a dataset:
https://api.geoblob.com/{signature}/{api_key_id}/@dataset:bo...

Simplify and dissolve:
https://api.geoblob.com/{signature}/{api_key_id}/@dataset:bo...

Get bounding box, area, and centroid without downloading anything:
https://api.geoblob.com/{signature}/{api_key_id}/@dataset:bo...

You can change the file extension to change the output format - .geojson, .kml, .gml, .svg, .wkt, .mvt.

Operations include buffer, clip, convex hull, Voronoi, K-Means clustering, hex/square grids, and more.

Would love to hear your thoughts - is this something GIS people would actually use? What operations or formats would be useful?
by rekabis | 2026-02-20 01:46:35+00:00
An open-source architect is one who creates standardized designs. All their plans are free to obtain, and since they are pre-certified by the municipality, all costs associated with approvals can be bypassed so long as the plans are followed exactly.

An open-source chef is one who works at a restaurant, but wants to spread around the joy of cooking like Alton Brown does, dropping knowledge and techniques that only someone with decades of experience would have.

An open-source electrician is one who reviews questions posed by DYI-ers and provides answers or designs that can help them solve issues while staying safe.

An open-source lumberjack is one who demonstrates how to harvest wood from private land sustainably, and how to process it appropriately with low-cost tools.

All of these involve “work” that does not get compensated for in any direct manner, yet improves the community as a whole and provides real aid for those who most desperately could use it.

And that is noble.

Sorry, but I reject your premise entirely. Open source work is noble, does produce material benefits in excess to what capitalism could ever provide, and brings power to the masses instead of concentrating it into the hands of a minuscule cadre of parasites and economic vampires who are already far more obscenely wealthy than the vast majority of us will ever get to experience.

Maybe if we weren’t enslaved to a violently coercive economic system that demanded we be wildly profitable to someone else least we suffer destitution, homelessness, and even death, we could have a chance of building a better system.
by diogenes_atx | 2026-02-20 01:46:41+00:00
UT Austin graduate here. Nowhere in this article does the word "censorship" appear. But that is exactly what is happening with this new policy. In recent years, UT Austin has suppressed peaceful protests and demonstrations on campus concerning the war in Gaza. Now the university is censoring "unnecessary controversial subjects," and although the new rule does not define what qualifies as “controversial,” it should be obvious to everyone what is prohibited.

Ironically, the state of Texas in 2017 enacted a law aimed at protecting free speech on public university campuses, a measure that was ostensibly intended to reinforce the First Amendment rights of students and faculty. Back then, conservative leaders were trying to ensure that so-called "woke" or "politically correct" instructors and administrators did not suppress or interfere with the articulation of conservative opinions.

It is time to change the school motto for UT Austin from "Disciplina Praesidium Civitatis" to something more appropriate for the institution: "All Students and Faculty Are Equal but Some Students and Faculty Are More Equal Than Others."
by Gormo | 2026-02-20 01:46:42+00:00
> If we subscribe to Economics' broken-window theory, then the investment into such repetitive work is not investment but waste. Once we stop such investment, we will have a lot more resources to work on something else, bring out a new chapter of the tech revolution. Or so I hope.

I'm not sure I agree with the application of the broken-window theory here. That's a metaphor intended to counter arguments in favor of make-work projects for economic stimulus: the idea here is that breaking a window always has a net negative on the economy, since even though it creates demand for a replacement window, the resources that are necessary to replace a window that already existed are just being allocated to restore the status quo ante, but the opportunity cost of that is everything else the same resources might have bee used for instead, if the window hadn't been broken.

I think that's quite distinct from manufacturing new windows for new installations, which is net positive production, and where newer use cases for windows create opportunities for producers to iterate on new window designs, and incrementally refine and improve the product, which wouldn't happen if you were simply producing replacements for pre-existing windows.

Even in this example, lots of people writing lots of different variations of login pages has produced incremental improvements -- in fact, as an industry, we haven't been writing the same exact login page over and over again, but have been gradually refining them in ways that have evolved their appearance, performance, security, UI intuitiveness, and other variables considerably over time. Relying on AI to design, not just implement, login pages will likely be the thing that causes this process to halt, and perpetuate the status quo indefinitely.
by 0xy | 2026-02-20 01:47:15+00:00
Huh? You're saying the German Chancellor does not represent the German government? [1] Large swathes of the CDU support it as well.

Macron was responding to criticism of the Digital Services Act, which contains censorship provisions for 'hate speech', which is repeatedly and routinely used by European nations to crack down on protected political speech. For example, it has been used as an excuse to censor political views leaning anti-immigration.

The UK in particular has used Ofcom as a weapon to target American companies that enable free speech communications, notably 4chan.

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/germanys-merz-calls-real...
by electroly | 2026-02-20 01:47:52+00:00
That was the very first thing I tried, and I couldn't get it to work, but I'm sure I am doing something wrong. Everything seemed great at build time, and then it just precompiles again at runtime, without anything saying why it decided to do that. I'll give it another shot if you say it should be working. The PackageCompiler step is the longest part; if that can be removed, it'll make a big difference. I'd rather be wrong and have this working than the other way around :) I'll report back with what I find.
by Saline9515 | 2026-02-20 01:48:10+00:00
The reality is that you need to ask yourself wether you want a hobbyist' tool or a more common one for the same result.

Logitech's ergo k860 is affordable, has a palm rest (most mechanical keebs don't), and has an excellent ergonomical shape. And works right out of the box, with Bluetooth enabled.

The keys are membrane-based, which some may dislike because they are not mechanical - but it's actually more ergonomic, as they require much less pressure and travel length to achieve an input, meaning less wear on your fingers.
by jcgrillo | 2026-02-20 01:48:26+00:00
> a non-technical person

Otherizing your users like this IS THE PROBLEM. Every technologist was once a "nontechnical person" (for whatever definition of that useless term you like) who learned and grew and thereby became "technical". The very minute you start thinking of your users in these terms you have lost the entire fucking game.

I broadly agree with your point, but I think the causal root of the problem is this industry arrogantly treats it's users as, to quote Mark Zuckerberg, "dumb fucks." We didn't always do this. It used to be better.
by peyton | 2026-02-20 01:48:33+00:00
FYI freedom of speech in the US sense is not so much about self-expression as much as it is to prevent e.g. the King decreeing a law that “nobody can say the word ‘Parliament’”. Or for a modern example, “discussing what to do about xyz group is ‘hate speech’.”

Anybody can run their mouths. Discussing ideas with others is what’s protected.
by briHass | 2026-02-20 01:48:44+00:00
Even though I don't like the privacy implications, make sure you use the option to save and use past chats for context. After a few months of back and forth (hundreds of 'chat' sessions), the responses are much higher quality. It sometimes does 'callbacks' to things discussed in past chats, which are typically awkward non-sequiturs, but it does improve it overall.

When I play with it in 'temporary chat' mode that ignores past chats and personal context directives, the responses are the typical slop littered with emojis, worthless lists, and platitudes/sycophancy. It's as jarring as turning off your adblocker and seeing the garish ad trash everywhere.
by sega_sai | 2026-02-20 01:48:49+00:00
I guess it will allow to access information unless it is about abortion or it is negative about DJT.

It is really a joke to pretend that current US cares about freedom of internet access, given all the attacks on free press it things like voice of America radio in the states.

I assume US will also provide a portal to Russian citizen if it is so eager to allow people to bypassing content bans (/s).
by lesuorac | 2026-02-20 01:49:27+00:00
Also curious about their opinion.

I've over the years began to interface with a lot of PHP code and there's a lot of really neat configuration stuff you can do. Ex. creating different pools for the incoming requests (so logged out users or slow pages are handled by the same pool). Like it seems to me for all of the rust web servers you have to still do a lot of stuff all on your own through code and it's not like you can create an existing Pool-ing struct.
by rayiner | 2026-02-20 01:49:34+00:00
Whether you want that or not depends on what you're trying to achieve. China has pursued basically the approach you're talking about: focusing on key province to advance them to the cutting edge. The last time China participated international high-school testing, they published scores only four Beijing and three other wealthy provinces: https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/are-chinas-students-re.... And those scores were spectacular! Clearly that approach has some merit if your concern is competing with other countries rather than domestic equity.
by NGRhodes | 2026-02-20 01:49:34+00:00
i used to work, 15 years ago, on a (permissive, not covert) monitoring service for a UK national public service, the NHS spine core. We used switches to mirror ports and capture traffic in promisciouse mode on a few dozen servers
split across a few datacentres that all the traffic went througg. We had certs installed to decode https. We could get enough hardware to do this step easily, but fast enough storage was an issue, we had 1 petabyte of usable storage across all sitesn that could hold a few days of content. We aimed to get this data filtered and forwarded into our central Splunk (seperate storage) and also into our bespoke dashboards within 60s. We often lagged...
by virgil_disgr4ce | 2026-02-20 01:49:59+00:00
> But every user is in many ways non-average.

This is objectively true. There's an excellent 99PI about exactly this: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/on-average/

> Thus if you create a system tailored at the average user, then none of your users will be happy.

This is objectively false. Some users will find some frustration or unhappiness with certain things, but remarkably, there are plenty of software UIs that get the job done for just about everyone.
by ALittleLight | 2026-02-20 01:50:26+00:00
Nonsense. There are many ways to get free or reduced price medical care in the US, especially if you are poor. Your doctor will have resources to help you if needed.

You can also rack up huge medical debt and then not pay it. The hospital will sell your debt to bill collectors who will call you for a while, and eventually sue you. At that point you can offer to settle for pennies on the dollar, or you might lose the lawsuit and have to declare bankruptcy which would mean you have negative credit for a few years.

Obviously it will be a difficult time, and hopefully you have something else, but they won't just let you die because you can't afford it.
by tchalla | 2026-02-20 01:51:09+00:00
> Concrete examples - in Germany you are not allowed to insult politicians or the government in social media.

Germany restricts insulting individuals / your neighbour, police officer, a pastor or a minister. There’s no special law for politicians. Political criticism is protected under the Basic Law (constitution). Go ahead and be crucial about a politician’s actions but don’t insult their person’s honour or use a slur. That’s not your freedom of speech, that’s the dignity. In fact, you can even insult the government! You can say German government as the government is not a person.
Ask HN: What is the future of open source?
by andreybaskov | 2026-02-20 01:51:12+00:00
Agentic coding increasingly removes humans from the process of picking libraries. To me it always had some "human" touch - you'd look at the library, core maintainers, follow them on social media, etc. But with AI the typical customer of an open source project is now an AI agent. Essentially making maintainers write code for some LLM model rather than another human being.

We've seen stories of a flood of PRs in popular repos, Tailwind having to cut staff despite being used by every agent, etc. It feels like it creates some disbalance in already tough market, and the change will only accelerate from here.

Any thoughts on how automation of software engineering will shape open source?
by ajross | 2026-02-20 01:51:36+00:00
> I mean somebody could make a singular rust dependency that re-packages all of the language team's packages.

That's not the requirement though! Curation isn't about packaging, it's about independent (!) audit/test/integration/validation paths that provide a backstop to the upstream maintainers going bonkers.

> But what's the threat model here.

A repeat of the xz-utils fiasco, more or less precisely. This was a successful supply chain attack that was stopped because the downstream Debian folks noticed some odd performance numbers and started digging.

There's no Debian equivalent in the soup of Cargo dependencies. That mistake has bitten NPM repeatedly already, and the reckoning is coming for Rust too.
by codethief | 2026-02-20 01:51:45+00:00
> Concrete examples - in Germany you are not allowed to insult politicians or the government in social media.

You're not allowed to insult anyone, https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__185.html , though the term "insult" is not nearly as broadly defined as in everyday speech. The law dates back to the 18th century, and has largely been unchanged for 150 years. I really don't understand the recent outrage over these and other laws. We have been fine.

More background: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beleidigung_(Deutschland)
by iCarrot | 2026-02-20 01:51:50+00:00
You can turn off thinking in Gemini pro models by using completion mode.

Essentially, append a message with role=model and minimal text part, such as a simple "A", at the end of the "contents" array. The model will try to complete the message without using any thought tokens.

You can also set the model message to start with "think" or something along that line and watch it thinks out loud (or melts down with over-thinking and stop due to reaching maximum output token)

```
[
{
"parts": [{"text": "hello"}],
"role": "user"
},
{
"parts": [{"text": "*think"}],
"role": "model"
}
]
```
by timr | 2026-02-20 01:52:30+00:00
Go look at the graphs again. The “split by age” graph shows an increase in diagnosis of ~60%, but an increase in mortality of only ~10%. That’s not a small difference, and we aren’t that good at curing colon cancer.

GP’s hypothesis is one of the leading explanations for this trend, but of course gets rejected by advocates for colonoscopy. Taking into account error bars on these numbers (which author doesn’t show, because they are inconvenient to the argument being made), it seems at least somewhat likely that the explanation for the rise in younger cases is due to increased screening, with the “increased” mortality either being statistical noise, or misattribution of deaths that also would have occurred in earlier periods.
by fdb | 2026-02-20 01:53:05+00:00
This came from a piece by Margaret-Anne Storey on "cognitive debt", picked up by @simonw, and which I personally also encountered. While building a synth engine from scratch, I kinda lost the plot. Then I let Claude document each "phase", and from that I generated Remotion videos. It worked quite well, and I learned a lot, much more than I would have from just reading the source code!

Code for synth and Remotion setup is open source: https://github.com/fdb/vamos
by levodelellis | 2026-02-20 01:54:10+00:00
You don't really need to deal with gcc backend. Most languages are expressible in C89. It'll obviously be less readable since generated lines look nothing like source lines but C89 beats llvm in most cases, especially if the C compiler supports assembly. I stuck to using intrinsics only because I heard of compilers producing worse code when it hits asm blocks since it can't understand it as well as intrinsics. I took out llvm last time it broke my compiler because it didn't add any value
by camillomiller | 2026-02-20 01:54:25+00:00
As a disgruntled journo who’s doing mostly very different things to live, I believe the fundamental issue is that we keep treating journalism as a business.
It is not sustainable as such anymore for a long time, and keeping it structured as a business creates all sorts of wrong incentives.
Good journalism today comes mostly from no profits, and that is the only model that makes sense in my view. Make it so that foundations and governments can legally fund newspapers from a non political organ and have a charity-style funding process.
That’s true for newspapers but not really for tv, so this is not a panacea.
In general I find it fascinating how we try to analyze all sorts of business cases for newspapers except this one (aka they’re not a business anymore).
by ojr | 2026-02-20 01:55:28+00:00
I primarily use Gemini 3 Flash with a GUI coding agent I made by myself and its been able to successfully one-shot mostly any task I throw at it. Why would I ever use a more expensive reasoning and slower reasoning model? I am impressed with the library knowledge Gemini knows, I don't use any skills or MCP and its able to implement functions to perfection. No one crawls more data than Google and their model reflects that in my experience.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-20 01:55:59+00:00
> It rarely trends to maximization or the largest possible efficiency, since those conflict with "good enough".

Sometimes things get trapped in a local minima. Particularly when a seemingly inconsequential detail at a much much earlier stage becomes a dependency of lots of downstream stuff, but then it turns out that this just so happens to conflict with a better option in the here and now.

More commonly, the "perfect" solution is extremely brittle while the (supposedly) "good enough" solution is incredibly robust to all sorts of environmentally inflicted bullshit. In other words, most of the time evolution is practical while the humans criticizing the outcome are ignorant idealists.
by jvican | 2026-02-20 01:56:15+00:00
Have you looked into zmx? [0]

It doesn't have built-in notifications and there's no panel to see all the open sessions, but I wonder how hard that would be to add.

I've used zmx since I ran into it a few weeks ago. Uses libghostty as well. It's great because it allows me to replace tmux completely in all my ssh sessions, and can keep one session per assistant.

[0]: https://github.com/neurosnap/zmx
by FileFormatCom | 2026-02-20 01:56:41+00:00
Plain text simplicity or rich formatting power? This comprehensive guide cuts through the debate to help you choose the right document format for your team. Discover how Markdown revolutionizes version control and developer workflows, while DOCX remains essential for polished, print-ready documents. With practical comparisons, real-world use cases, and a clear decision framework, this post helps technical writers and developers stop arguing about formats and start creating better documentation. Whether you're managing API docs or user manuals, make an informed choice that fits your workflow.
by codethief | 2026-02-20 01:56:52+00:00
I'm saying, there is a huge difference between a random utterance of the chancellor, which he'll likely already have forgotten about next week, and "Germany actively campaigning" e.g. at the EU or federal level, both of which would require both ruling parties to get behind the chancellor's demands, which – based on how similar discourses have turned out in the past – is completely unlikely.
by jacob_harris | 2026-02-20 01:56:53+00:00
It's very common for politicians to point to federal staffing levels as some sort of measure of waste and bloat, but those numbers have been increasingly deceptive since the era of Reagan. Essentially, government has grown in its budget and scope but staffing numbers have not matched that increase because many agencies have instead staffed projects and roles with contractors instead.

This is worst in all accounts: there is no accurate count of how many contractors work for the federal govt (vs. federal employees), they generally are more expensive to hire than staffers and they get trained up on the public's dime and then walk out the door to other projects meaning the agency doesn't benefit from their upskilling like they would if they were internal employees.

With 18F, USDS and digital services within agencies, the government had been trying to reverse its dependency on external contractors to ship code. DOGE eliminated many of those people – you could argue one of its goals was to make government more dependent on vendors and contractors. There is now a new Tech Force initiative, but it seems like it's mainly a way for companies like Palantir to embed junior staff within agencies to find new places to sell software.
by refulgentis | 2026-02-20 01:56:59+00:00
That's the thing man, there isn't anything. It was an odd thing to say that it's better OOP.

(source: iOS dev from jailbreak days, so like 8 years before Swift, till 2019. He did not mean dynamic dispatch and Swift has dynamic dispatch by way of "you can annotate a Swift method with @objc and we'll emit it as an ObjC method instead of Swift", not Smalltalk-ish, like, at all. if you're the poster who originally said "because of dynamic dispatch", I understand why you're frustrated but I have 0 idea why you think dynamic dispatch in Swift would matter, much less say it makes Swift much better at OOP than Rust. It's impolite to say "utterly baffling engineering decision" in public, so there's subtext in the conversation. Namely that both claims made 0 sense if you had practical familiarity with either)