MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dhosek | 2026-02-26 15:28:43+00:00
If you read John Fante’s Ask the Dust, he has a number of dollar amounts in there for short story sales. Those numbers are better than pretty much every contemporary opportunity without adjusting for inflation. I would say that the 20s and 30s were the ideal time. Right now, it’s pretty grim for nearly all writers. Substack and other venues tend to be kind of peanut money and there are few writers who make a living from them, especially compared to the long tail of those who make nearly nothing. And most of those who earn significant money had big reputations before Substack.
by potus_kushner | 2026-02-26 15:28:56+00:00
bleh. i hate how everything gets rustified and more and more critical infrastructure is at the whims of the rust corporation. as a reminder, rust is a language without a spec, without a clear bootstrapping path (one has to trust binaries provided by them), and a history of breaking changes with almost every minor release. getting a rust compiler built from scratch on a new OS/Arch like the author's serenityOS is an almost impossible task.

i had high hopes for ladybird to become an alternative browser anyone with a working C++ compiler could build on whatever platform.
Show HN: ApplyFlow – Free Kanban job tracker with multi-tier Chrome capture
by santoshus | 2026-02-26 15:29:16+00:00
Hey HN,
I built a free job application tracker. Kanban board, Chrome extension, AI suggestions.
The Chrome extension uses a tiered extraction approach — it tries structured API-level extraction first (LinkedIn, Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby), falls back to platform-specific DOM selectors, then generic parsing as a last resort. Most of the interesting engineering work went into making that pipeline reliable across different ATS platforms.
Other features: visual Kanban pipeline, a "Chances" system where you assign a confidence score per application (useful for prioritizing follow-ups), and AI-powered suggestions.
It's free — not freemium. I run it on a donation model. I'm a Head of Engineering and I've spent years on the hiring side. Watched the layoff wave hit hard this past year and got frustrated that every decent job tracker charges $15-50/month for features that aren't that complex.
My wife works in Talent Acquisition and we're building coaching features (CV review, interview prep) next.
Solo project, definitely rough edges. Would love technical feedback and honest criticism.
applyflowtracker.com
by kraig911 | 2026-02-26 15:29:19+00:00
Engineering in general to me just means 'designed' by specification per an area study. Whether software or hardware/industrial application. I know UK is all about titles though as if they're 'worth' something. A lot of stuff we use in modern day was made by someone who claimed to be an engineer but was really a hobbyist on to something.

That said in the US there are some specifications of a license engineer that you have to earn. Electrical/Petroleum/Nuclear/Structural etc those areas do have licensing associated that is different state by state. The main issue with software engineering is it forgoes that completely there just wasn't time to make a process about it. It was/is always about time to market.
by lucius_verus | 2026-02-26 15:29:27+00:00
Culture:

- The Slate Culture Gabfest
- probably the most consistently fun podcast on my list. It's like sitting down at a table with your smartest friends from grad school to talk about movies, books, and music. The endorsements at the end are always good

- Switched on Pop

- If Books Could Kill

News/Current Events:

- Slate Political Gabfest

- Slate Money

- CBC World Report

- NPR Up First

History:

- Well, There's Your Problem - "a podcast about engineering disasters... with slides"

- The History of Rome

- Revolutions

- We're Not So Different

- The Fall of Civilizations
by ben7799 | 2026-02-26 15:29:46+00:00
The whole thing about people being defensive is interesting. I love techno, but anyone who has learned other styles of music recognizes the repetitiveness and quirks of a lot of techno and some other electronic genres.

They do a great job with changing their timbre and tones but often ignore a bunch of other factors that make music interesting. Whether that is the rarity of time signatures other than 4/4, the way certain rhythms are locked into certain genres, the choices of keys used, the limited or missing chords, etc.. at some point you start hearing two electronic songs that sound totally different at a superficial level and you realize they're incredibly derivative of each other.
by mc32 | 2026-02-26 15:29:47+00:00
I don’t read the text but if you’re referring to the quoted text, it’s not clear from the text that the implication was they were building batteries in _Fremont_ and then wanted to expand or that they were building them elsewhere and wanted to expand and chose Nevada as the expansion site. The sentence is not written with clarity. It’s written as people would speak.
by gaigalas | 2026-02-26 15:29:52+00:00
This project runs on all shells, totally portable:

https://github.com/alganet/coral

busybox, bash, zsh, dash, you name it. If smells bourne, it runs. Here's the list: https://github.com/alganet/coral/blob/main/test/matrix#L50 (more than 20 years of compatibility, runs even on bash 3)

It's a great litmus test, that many have passed. Let me know when just-bash is able to run it.
by Ensorceled | 2026-02-26 15:29:56+00:00
> That would still be a strange use case for what gets called an "API key".

The problem that you, and many people are having in this thread, is that you are typing "API key" but, in your head, you're thinking "private API key". API keys can be secret or public, and many services have matching pairs of secret and public keys (Stripe, Chargify, etc. etc. etc.)
by dmit | 2026-02-26 15:30:03+00:00
No it won't? That's exactly the point -- each of those people will be viewing the code in their own preferred syntax. If there is semantic nuance in the writer's syntax, the reader will see it presented in the best way their preferred syntax's representation can provide.

Imagine all the hours saved that are currently spent on tired tabs vs spaces debates, or manicuring .prettierrc, etc etc. The color of the bike shed might matter (sometimes a lot) to some people, I know, but it's storing bikes away from the elements and thieves that is the goal, not obsessing over optimizing something that is demonstrably a subjective matter of taste.
by mercutio93 | 2026-02-26 15:30:49+00:00
Interesting. I've always thought the real solution to hallucinations
lies in neurosymbolic AI.

LLMs purely rely on statistical pattern matching with no grounding
in formal logic or symbolic reasoning. You can throw more compute
and data at the problem but you can't guarantee correctness ever.

The neurosymbolic approach combines neural networks for what they're
good at (language, pattern recognition) with symbolic systems for
what they're good at (formal reasoning, provable correctness). The
hallucination can't form in the first place because the symbolic
component enforces correctness at the reasoning level.

The Sovereign Engine sounds more like execution constraints;
Intercepting outputs after the fact rather than grounding the
reasoning process itself. That's still valuable but it's a
different problem. A determined attacker finds the edge case your
constraints don't cover.

Genuinely curious how it works under the hood is there a symbolic
reasoning layer or is the "determinism" coming from the constraint
layer alone?
by yowlingcat | 2026-02-26 15:30:55+00:00
It definitely does suck. I had the same feelings about a year ago and the unpleasantness has definitely increased. But glass half full, we didn't have Kimi K2.5, GLM5, Qwen3.5, MiniMax 2.5, Step Flash 3.5, etc available and the cambrian explosion is only continuing (DeepSeek V4 should be out pretty soon too).

The real moment of relief for me was the first time I used DeepSeek R1 to do a large task that I would've otherwise needed Claude/OpenAI for about 12 months ago and it just did it -- not just decently, but with less slop than Claude/OpenAI. Ever since that point, I've been continuing to eye local models and parallel testing them for workloads I'd otherwise use commercial frontier models for. It's never a perfect 1:1 replacement, but I've found that I've gotten close enough that I no longer feel that paranoia of my AI workloads not being something I can own and control. True, I do have to sacrifice some capability, but the tradeoff is I get something that lives on my metal, never leaks data or IP, doesn't change behavior or get worse under my feet, doesn't rate limit me, can be fine tuned and customized. It's all lead to a belief for me that the market competition is very much functioning and the cat is out of the bag, for the benefit of all of us as users.
by grey-area | 2026-02-26 15:31:05+00:00
I disagree on Vonnegut. Most human authors at least have a voice, even if you don't like it it's recognisable and theirs, and I would rarely think to criticise that, it makes the writing come alive. If you truly write like an LLM (there is little evidence here of that) it would not be the same.

LLMs serve up a sort of bland pap with sugary highs of excitement which resembles a cross between manic advertising copy and a breathless teenager who's just discovered whatever subject they're talking about. They also sometimes confabulate and generate text which is at best tangential and at worst completely misleading.

It's exhausting and if you haven't carefully read what they generate (which most people clearly have not), you should not expect another human to read it.

Just as an interesting taste, here is my copy above rewritten to sound even more EXCITING and ENGAGING.

"They deliver a horrifying concoction – a sickly sweet, manufactured echo of thought, a grotesque blend of relentless advertising whispers and the manic, unearned enthusiasm of a teenager just discovering a world they don't understand! But the truly chilling thing is this: they fabricate. They weave elaborate lies, constructing text that’s not just tangential, but actively, dangerously misleading!

It’s a psychic assault, a draining vortex of intellectual despair! And if you haven’t wrestled with every single word, dissected it, exposed its flaws – and frankly, I suspect most haven’t – then don’t dare expect anyone else to salvage this wreckage! This is not a passive observation; it’s a desperate plea against a future where genuine thought is suffocated by the cold, sterile logic of a machine! We must guard against this, or we risk losing everything!” -- gemma3:4b
by akamaka | 2026-02-26 15:31:12+00:00
It would be a stronger argument if you first tried looking at the cases where hydrogen has an advantage. The port example you brought up, where hydrogen is produced on site, is a good one to analyze. If you can look at cost projections of fuels cells and electrolyzers vs. batteries over the next 20 years and demonstrate that there’s no chance hydrogen will catch up, that would be a very strong argument, since it doesn’t rely on the hand-wavy “fueling infrastructure will never happen” argument.
by ben7799 | 2026-02-26 15:31:18+00:00
There are certainly guitarists who can play simultaneous melodies.

If you're limiting to a 6 string guitar the distance between the two melodies would be limited compared to a piano but guitars don't have to be limited to 6 strings.

Classical guitar is full of this kind of thing.

Having taken piano lessons but being more into guitar I think the thing is almost all people who play piano are introduced to this and it is a core concept in far more piano music than guitar music. But it is not impossible on guitar, and many works for piano that get adapted to guitar require the player to do so.

E.x. there are plenty of players who have studied and played the Well Tempered Clavier on guitar.
by xnorswap | 2026-02-26 15:31:22+00:00
Firstly, I have a good relationship with my employer, so I'm the one choosing my hours. It would have been legal for them to reduce my hours to zero, but I trusted them not to do that, and indeed they didn't do that.

Secondly, we have the NHS, so my access to healthcare is not tied to my employment nor my ability to pay.

I can only share my experience, and as I said, I recognise this isn't the norm for most zero-hours contractors out there, who are in much worse conditions and have uncertainty, which is why I support the changes in law around them.
Show HN: Self-contained offline knowledge cards with ULID-DNA and IDsEd25519
by tomneijman | 2026-02-26 15:31:30+00:00
I built an open format for self-contained knowledge cards.

Each card is a single directory:
- standalone HTML (no CDN, no external fonts)
- bundled CSS + assets
- print-ready PDF
- JSON-LD metadata

No account. No platform. No external dependencies.
The card itself is the product.

Goal: use LLMs to distill practical knowledge into small independent units — then make those units survive without the technology that created them.

"The best use of AI is not automation, but preservation — helping humans rebuild when machines are gone."

---

Identifier model:

Each card receives a 128-bit ULID.
The bits are mapped to A/C/G/T, producing a 64-character DNA-like sequence.

The first 9 characters map to three craft “codon” words from a fixed vocabulary (e.g. klei·vuur·rots).

Properties:
- Globally unique
- Chronologically sortable
- Bidirectionally decodable
- No central registry

The DNA appears in the URL, footer, and print version.

---

Integrity:

Each build generates a SHA-256 manifest of all cards, signed with Ed25519.
Verification happens client-side using the Web Crypto API (no server round-trip).

Verify here:
https://stoutenburger.com/verify/

---

Edition 1 is live (10 cards):
Water purification, fire, clay, basic metallurgy.

Five card types:
Knowledge (why), Instruction (how), Product (what), Maker (who), Network (connections).

Build pipeline:
Markdown + YAML → JSON Schema → Nunjucks → Puppeteer → signed manifest.

Cards are designed to roam: USB stick, any domain, or printed in a drawer.

The format is open.
https://stoutenburger.com
by re-thc | 2026-02-26 15:31:35+00:00
> But a short line "AGI is possible, powerful and perilous"

> At which point the question becomes: is it them who are deluded, or is it you?

No one. It is always "possible". Ask me 20 years ago after watching a sci-fi movie and I'd say the same.

Just like with software projects estimating time doesn't work reliably for R&D.

We'll still get full self-driving electric cars and robots next year too. This applies every year.
by kxbnb | 2026-02-26 15:31:39+00:00
Fair question. Those three are hosting services for stock OpenClaw — you sign up, they spin up an instance, you get a Telegram bot. That's it.

We built something different.

Every agent gets a real Chromium browser running on a virtual display. You can watch it work through a VNC viewer right in the dashboard. None of those services have this — they're text-in/text-out.

Each workspace runs up to 10 agents, each with its own browser and filesystem. Agents can spawn sub-agents to break up complex tasks. Every workspace is an isolated Docker container with dropped capabilities and security policies, not a shared Node process.

Those services give you a chatbot you talk to on Telegram. We give you an agent with a browser, a shell, a scheduler, and the ability to actually do things on the internet — and you can watch it do them.

More on what's under the hood: https://claw42.com/features

Docs if you want to dig in: https://claw42.com/docs
by schwartzworld | 2026-02-26 15:31:47+00:00
> have a fundamental problem with human expression.

How up to date is this opinion of yours? Expression on guitar is pretty intuitive, but modern electronic instrument manufacturers have been working on this problem and created modes of expression that definitely solve this problem.

For example, EWIs allow you to use breath control for expression with many of the same techniques available on actual wind instruments. Also many synths now have features like polyphonic aftertouch, pitch/mod wheels, which allow you to add expression to a note while it is playing. Apps and hardware exist which allow you to use novel methods of capturing motion or other forms of expression. And most modern synths/midi controllers allow you to decide what parameters are affected.

> Then on top of all that it is so incredibly physical

That's an affectation. I can stand on my tiptoes and close my eyes when bending up a note on the synth the same as I can on the guitar. Neither affects the sound, and both are a conscious decision to project an appearance of "I'm really shredding"

> With an electric guitar you get the physicality and dynamism of an acoustic instrument with the complex timbres and extended technique possibilities of an electric/electronic instrument.

That can apply to any instrument once you "electrify" it. What makes a guitar more expressive than a cello or trumpet with a pickup/mic running through effect processing? I play guitar, keys and trumpet, and while I agree that a casio keyboard has limited expression options, your opinion doesn't sound researched.
by cs702 | 2026-02-26 15:31:52+00:00
> i especially like the idea of iteratively making the inverse dynamics better

Same here.

The notion of inducing these models to "hypothesize" a distribution over the possible actions that could have produced each observed transition makes me think of "contrastive divergence," the method Hinton and others came up with for unsupervised training of Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs), in the prehistoric era of deep learning.

Given each training sample, an RBM would 1) execute a forward pass, 2) sample its output units, 3) "hypothesize" its input units, 4) execute another forward pass on the "hypothesized" input units to sample new output units, and (5) compute a type of contrastive error for local backpropagation. RMBs could be stacked, with output units from one becoming input units for the next one. Hinton called the input units "visible," and the output ones "hidden."

It's not the same, obviously, but the idea of modeling machine-generated inputs (or actions) given the outputs (or transitions) has always been appealing. It has a long history.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-02-26 15:32:15+00:00
Food collection, consumption is usually way too high at the outset of such a disaster and production later is in no way assured. Look at WWI, The Depression, The Dust Bowl, WWII. Many countries were effectively starving. Both rainfall and ground water assume you aren't having a drought.

Urban centers are not set up for large-scale rainwater collection. There literally isn't enough open space for all the people in cities to leave a pot outside to collect rain water, when it is raining, and it won't be enough water anyway. Even if every person in a city had a receptacle large enough to collect all the water they needed, many of them simply won't be able to haul it up and down stairs. It's completely infeasible.

What would actually happen is the military and national guard would be mobilized. They would use pumps and water trucks to visit acquifers and wells, and distribute water by truck neighborhood by neighborhood. A continuous stream of trucks constantly resupplying cities. If things got really bad they would get water from streams and boil it before distributing, but that wouldn't last long as it would take too much fuel and time. And they would need to completely secure the water supplies, both as a security concern, and to stop all removal of water except for what was absolutely necessary. Water isn't just for drinking and sanitation, it's also needed for a wide variety of processes, businesses, etc. Water really is a huge problem.

There is no way that gasoline, diesel, LPG, etc production/distribution would remain stable. It would be severely hampered and there would be shortages everywhere. Even during previous "normal" wars, fuel was a huge issue.

I don't know where you got the idea that heating wouldn't be necessary in winter? If you mean "humanity would survive", sure, but also a huge chunk of the population in cold places would die from cold and malnutrition over the first and second winter. Most people do not have a -20F sleeping bag, snow boots, wool underwear, etc even in cold places, because they have heating.
by delecti | 2026-02-26 15:32:20+00:00
A few cosmetic names for patch versions and political banners on websites seems pretty mild. I was a constant user of Notepad++ for more than a decade (until moving my last computer to Linux a few months ago), and never had any idea that they did any of the messaging listed on their Wikipedia.

If anything, I could stand for most things to be just a bit more political than them. Most things are way more political than that.
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-02-26 15:32:33+00:00
Decades ago (1995), when I was barely a decade old, I created a maintainence/repair website for a Motorola product (pre-iFixit). A fellow geek created his own similar website, focusing more on general product usage.

Neither of us webmasters took constructive feedback well, often lashing out at fellow usenet geeks who were just trying to be helpful. Tantrums, from us both.

Twenty years later we randomly met in-person @DEF-CON (recognized his unique name) — he ended up being a year younger than me! We exchanged chuckles about what big personalities us two little kids had been, blasting angst into the aether.

Motorola had linked to both our websites in their official documentation, despite our pottymouths =P

----

When I witness road rage (myself, included), I pretend the aggressor is a toddler. This makes it easier (and more effective!) to handle the rage that often passes through miscommunication(s).

----

I've been a forumjunkie since 1994, and HN is the only online forum I still participate within — mostly because of the techgenre, but also because the rules here prevent all sorts of perpetualSeptembers from scattering themselves among otherwise-constructive threads.

DanG&co: thanks for cultivating an exceptional online community

OP: Thanks for trying; I haven't used your product, but the premise seems noble... my main question to ya'll is: how do you prevent overbearing censorship (e.g. does karma influence how "tough" your product is on particular users, or are we all equally correctable)?
Show HN: Kadai –> AI friendly, discoverable project tools
by billybat | 2026-02-26 15:32:52+00:00
I kept building this for basically every project I built, so decided to make a standard version.

tl;dr:
- add actions to .kadai/actions in your repo
- run `bunx kadai`
- get a little CLI menu to run your actions

actions are also 'AI friendly', meaning there's an .mcp.json setup that points to kadai so AI's can discover any actions you add to kadai

basically you can share scripts/actions across your team and also expose them to AI at the same time
by PeterStuer | 2026-02-26 15:32:53+00:00
We wont push forward unless you push forward is textbook market collusion.

Even if it were ever done with good intentions, it is an open invitation for benefit hoarding and margin fixing.

Do you realy want to create this future where only a select few anointed companies and some governments have access to super advanced intelligent systems, where the rest of the planet is subjected to and your own ai access is limited to benign basal add pushing propaganda spewing chatbots as you bingewatch the latest "aw my ballz"?