MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tripletao | 2026-02-19 17:47:26+00:00
This is correct, but for the author's example of randomizing turkeys I wouldn't bother. A modern CSPRNG is fast enough that it's usually easier just to generate lots of excess randomness (so that the remainder is nonzero but tiny compared to the quotient and thus negligible) than to reject for exactly zero remainder.

For example, the turkeys could be randomized by generating 256 bits of randomness per turkey, then sorting by that and taking the first half of the list. By a counting argument this must be biased (since the number of assignments isn't usually a power of two), but the bias is negligible.

The rejection methods may be faster, and thus beneficial in something like a Monte Carlo simulation that executes many times. Rejection methods are also often the simplest way to get distributions other than uniform. The additional complexity doesn't seem worthwhile to me otherwise though, more effort and risk of a coding mistake for no meaningful gain.
by jen20 | 2026-02-19 17:47:48+00:00
Americans can _often_ use eGates into the UK - but the same set of exemptions apply as to British citizens using them. For example, if you're traveling with children under 10, you can't.

However, as others have pointed out, this isn't what pre-clearance is. It's more akin to clearing French passport control and customs in Dover or rather than Calais, and can make the trip substantially shorter than it might be otherwise.

When I still lived in the UK, I found it quicker and more pleasant to fly from Heathrow (or Bristol) to Dublin and then on to the US having cleared immigration during the layover. It's also quite a bit cheaper when you fly from the UK in a premium cabin since Ireland doesn't have the egregious air passenger duties that the UK does.
by merlindru | 2026-02-19 17:47:53+00:00
i'm not sure how you could have any meaningful comparison here except for comparing bun to node. everything is pretty modular so you can swap things out. i would compare webview to chromium bundle size, but that has tradeoffs too, and electrobun can use chromium (CEF) too. so that's also moot.

what kind of numbers are you looking for?
by throwup238 | 2026-02-19 17:47:55+00:00
> how many fossils there might be at total on earth

The number is both incalculable and vague - is a shark tooth enough to count as a fossil? How about diatoms and other microfossils?

Diatomaceous earth alone contains around 10^6-10^7 frustules (the shell of a diatom) per gram. If you count them as fossils then the lower bound is probably in the quadrillions.
by tantalor | 2026-02-19 17:48:19+00:00
I guess I get really frustrated when the rules say you are scored on "how close you are to the secret word, based on your word's meaning" with very little explanation what that means.

Then you have cases that drive me crazy, like the guess "food" is very far from the secret word "cupcake", and "toy" is actually very close to "cupcake". What?

Like, come on. This is not playable or fun.

For reference, these are the words close to "cupcake",

https://proximity.clevergoat.com/nearest/Y3VwY2FrZQ%3D%3D
by WaryByDesign | 2026-02-19 17:48:36+00:00
Sure, any wannabe-but-not-entirely-educated World Leader would love to own Greenland.

And why not? It's strategically located, rich in natural resources, and...

Until, well, you actually visit the place and realize that 95% of its surface area is pretty much inhabitable and its population centers are pretty much indefensible, on account of being, well, fishing villages.
by skeledrew | 2026-02-19 17:48:46+00:00
> Tie-in sales between software and services

Look at it this way: the service that you're accessing is really a (primarily desired) side-effect of the software. So re subscriptions, what they're actually providing are the apps (web, desktop, etc), and the apps use their service to aid the fulfillment of their functionality. Those wanting direct access to the internal service can get an API key for that purpose. That's just how their product offering is structured.
by zephen | 2026-02-19 17:48:51+00:00
seq = [0,1]
while len(seq) < 20:
seq.append(sum(seq[-2:]))
print(' '.join(str(x) for x in seq))

> I am claiming that (0,1,+...*)[^20] is a nicer rut.

If it's so fantastic, then why on earth do you go out of your way to add extra lines and complexity to the Python?
by alphazard | 2026-02-19 17:49:30+00:00
This kind of "but for us it's different" thinking is a little amusing.

I don't care about the implementation process or the RFCs or what-have-you.
If there is a democratic committee of humans that decides what goes in, and there is no bias for minimalism (e.g. 1/3 could strike down a proposal instead of 1/2) then the process will tend towards bloat.
by pepdar | 2026-02-19 17:49:40+00:00
The ACME account URI does not appear in issued certificates. X.509 certs contain the subject, issuer, SANs, validity period, SCTs, etc., but no ACME account identifier. You can verify this by inspecting any Let's Encrypt certificate. What CT logs do reveal is which CA issued certs for which domain(s), and multi-domain certs group SANs together, so some correlation is possible. But the account URI itself is not exposed — dns-persist-01 records in DNS would be a new exposure surface for that identifier. That's a real tradeoff, which is why the draft supports using separate accounts per domain if isolation matters to you.
by ndriscoll | 2026-02-19 17:49:53+00:00
> You have to keep the types in your head anyway so it just increases the mental burden when reading the code.

It's the opposite! Type inference means you can rely on the compiler to check that everything is consistent while you just read what's in front of you. You don't need to think about types at all; the annotations would just be noise.

It simplifies reading (via not needing to care) and writing (via suggestions/auto-complete/jump-to-definition/better error messages).
by hobofan | 2026-02-19 17:50:03+00:00
> despite having virtually infinite processing power, money

Just because they have the money doesn't mean that they spend it excessively. OpenAI and Anthropic are both offering coding plans that are possibly severely subsidized, as they are more concerned with growth at all cost, while Google is more concerned with profitability. Google has the bigger warchest and could just wait until the other two run out of money rather than forcing the growth on that product line in unprofitable means.

Maybe they are also running much closer to their compute limits then the other ones too and their TPUs are already saturated with API usage.
by WarmWash | 2026-02-19 17:50:53+00:00
3.1 Pro is the first model to correctly count the number of legs on my "five legged dog" test image. 3.0 flash was the previous best, getting it after a few prompts of poking. 3.1 got it on the first prompt though, with the prompt being "How many legs does the dog have? Count Carefully".

However, it didn't get it on the first try with the original prompt (prompt: "How many legs does the dog have?"). It initially said 4, then with a follow up prompt got it to hesitantly say 5, with one limb must being obfuscated or hidden.

So maybe I'll give it a 90%?

This is without tools as well.
by ch4s3 | 2026-02-19 17:51:01+00:00
I think they're often very well tested, but the documentation piece has always been lacking compared to Elixir.

I used to frequently find myself reading the source code of popular libraries or prying into them at runtime. There's also no central place or format for documentation in ruby. Yes rubydoc.info exists, but it's sort of an afterthought. Sidekiq uses a github wiki, Nokogiri has a dedicated site, Rails has a dedicated site, Ruby itself has yet another site. Some use RDoc, some don't. Or look at Devise https://rubydoc.info/github/heartcombo/devise/main/frames, there's simply nothing documented for most of the classes, and good luck finding in the docs where `before_action :authenticate_user!` comes from.
by merlindru | 2026-02-19 17:52:03+00:00
also wondering about this. it sure isn't in electrobuns own discord server. i'm in that one and its mostly Q&A (with Yoav doing most of the answering and a couple people like me doing most of the questioning, ha)

this is the first i'm hearing about games being built with electron / web tech too, let alone electrobun. i thought most game devs would just go for unity or godot
by hinkley | 2026-02-19 17:52:07+00:00
> In sworn testimony, Zuckerberg said Meta’s growth targets reflect an aim to give users something useful, not addict them, and that the company doesn’t seek to attract children as users.

That’s a perjury.

I suppose getting more ad revenue is useful to someone, but not the user.

Of course some of us warned that project management by A/B testing would lead to amoral if not outright immoral outcomes but wtf do we know about human nature? Turns out putting a badly made android in charge of a large chunk of culture leads to the near collapse of civilization, which I don’t think any of us would have predicted.
by Wilder7977 | 2026-02-19 17:53:20+00:00
There are no such detailed numbers as far as I know. No platform (twitch, YouTube etc.) generally provides this information. Thinking bad one could assume it's because most people would realize it's one in a million who makes it.

Channels that make money consistently also have teams behind. Sure, probably they are smaller then TV studios, but TV studios do also other jobs compared to youtubers.

Anyway, these are the only numbers available. If there are numbers that show that masses of individuals can make a living in a market with so many competitors like YouTube I am happy to look at them. Until then, I will observe what is known for almost everything: a small % takes the vast majority of resources.
by hifathom | 2026-02-19 17:53:31+00:00
I built a stdio-based MCP multiplexer (mcp-hub) that connects to multiple backend MCP servers and exposes them as a single server. From the host agent's perspective, all tools are flattened into one namespace with server-name prefixes — telegram__send_message, linkedin__get_profile, etc. The agent doesn't know or care which backend handles each tool.

To answer the question directly: it depends on the implementation. In Cursor's case, MCP servers are registered individually and the agent sees all tools at the same level. A multiplexer like mine acts as an abstraction boundary — the agent sees one MCP connection, but tools from N backends are available through it. The tradeoff is namespace management vs. connection simplicity. With 10+ MCP servers, a single gateway is significantly easier to configure and debug.
by 1024core | 2026-02-19 17:53:33+00:00
It got the car wash question perfectly:

You are definitely going to have to drive it there—unless you want to put it in neutral and push!

While 200 feet is a very short and easy walk, if you walk over there without your car, you won't have anything to wash once you arrive. The car needs to make the trip with you so it can get the soap and water.

Since it's basically right next door, it'll be the shortest drive of your life. Start it up, roll on over, and get it sparkling clean.

Would you like me to check the local weather forecast to make sure it's not going to rain right after you wash it?
by hifathom | 2026-02-19 17:53:34+00:00
The pattern that's worked for me: instrument the attention, not just the execution.

In my memory system for agents, every recall query logs which memories surfaced, their relevance scores (broken into keyword vs. vector components), and whether the agent actually used them. This gives you a trace of what the agent was "thinking about" at each step — not just what it did.

When the final output is wrong, I look at the recall logs first. Usually the problem is one of: (1) the right context didn't surface because the scoring missed it, (2) the right context surfaced but was outranked by something irrelevant, or (3) the context was fine but the agent misinterpreted it.

Each of these has a different fix — better keywords/embeddings for (1), scoring weight tuning for (2), and prompt engineering for (3). Without the instrumented attention trace, they all look the same: "it got the wrong answer."
by hifathom | 2026-02-19 17:53:38+00:00
saezbaldo's point about the capability-authorization gap is the crux. I'd add another dimension: restraint as a design choice.

Session duration measures how long an agent can work autonomously. But the interesting metric is how often it chooses not to — choosing to ask for confirmation before a destructive action, choosing to investigate before overwriting, choosing to pause when uncertain. Those self-imposed limits aren't capability failures. They're trust-building behaviors.

The agents I've seen work best in practice aren't the ones with the longest autonomous runs. They're the ones that know when to stop and check.
by gandreani | 2026-02-19 17:53:55+00:00
This is funny. This change actually pushes me into using a competitor more (https://www.kimi.com). I was trying out this provider with oh-my-pi (https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi) and was lamenting that it didn't have web search implemented using kimi.

Well a kind contributor just added that feature specifically because of this ban(https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi/pull/110).

I'm happy as a clam now. Yay for competition!
Show HN: Rememex – Semantic file search that runs 100% locally (Rust/Tauri)
by iico | 2026-02-19 17:54:03+00:00
Hey HN, I built Rememex a semantic search layer for your local files.
The problem: I kept losing files. Not because they were deleted, but because
I couldn't remember the exact filename or keyword. grep needs the exact word.
Everything only searches filenames. I wanted to type what I meant and find
what I needed.
How it works:
- Indexes 120+ file types (code, docs, images, configs)
- Hybrid search: vector embeddings + full-text + JINA cross-encoder reranking
- OCR on images via Windows UWP engine
- Reads EXIF GPS → reverse geocodes to city names ("photos from istanbul" works)
- EXIF dates → human language ("summer morning" finds a July 8am photo)
- Smart chunking per language (Rust at fn/struct, Python at def/class)
- Built-in MCP server so AI agents can use it as a tool
Everything runs locally. Embeddings use a local ONNX model (Multilingual-E5-Base)
by default, though you can optionally plug in OpenAI/Gemini/Cohere.
Named after Vannevar Bush's Memex (1945) his vision of a device that stores
and retrieves all human knowledge.
Stack: Rust (Tauri 2), React/TypeScript, LanceDB, rayon
I benchmarked it against grep for agentic tasks rememex consistently finds
things in 1 step where grep takes 3-5 or fails entirely. The key difference:
grep needs the exact keyword, rememex needs the idea.
Windows-only for now (UWP OCR dependency), but the core engine is portable.
Would love feedback on the search quality and architecture.
MIT licensed, free forever.
by iamjackg | 2026-02-19 17:54:10+00:00
Heck yeah! Love the VisiData shoutout. Echoing other people's desire for a web UI, mostly so I don't have to be the sole Maintainer of the Truth as the only resident household technomancer.

EDIT: alternatively, exposing the data/functionality via MCP or similar would allow me to connect this to an agent using Home Assistant Voice, so anybody in the house could ask for changes or add new information.
by philipkglass | 2026-02-19 17:54:11+00:00
It's surprising that this restriction continues to linger at all. The newest nuclear warhead models in the US arsenal were developed in the 1970s, when supercomputer performance was well below 1 gigaflop. When the US stopped testing nuclear warheads in 1992, top end supercomputers were under 10 gigaflops. The only thing the US arsenal needs faster computers for is simulating the behavior of its aging warhead stockpile without physical tests, which is not going to matter at all to a state building its first nuclear weapons.
by stackbutterflow | 2026-02-19 17:54:24+00:00
We should each ask ourselves such questions and review our view on them from time to time during our life because they're important, but mostly by doing our own research and self study. But asking point-blank strangers such a vague question is putting an unfair burden on them.

There's maybe a few hundred people worldwide who could casually drop a proper answer to your question while casually browsing hn.

I believe it'd be more fair to start answering your own question to show how far you are in your intellectual journey on that topic.
by mikepurvis | 2026-02-19 17:54:30+00:00
I find Copilot leans the other way. It'll myopically focus its work in the exact function I point it at, even when it's clear that adding a new helper would allow shared with the function right beside it.

Overall, I think it's probably better that it stay focused, and allow me to prompt it with "hey, go ahead and refactor these two functions". At the same time, really the ideal would be to have it proactively ask, or even pitch the refactor as a colleague would, like "based on what I see of this function, it would make most sense to XYZ, do you think that makes sense? <sure go ahead> <no just keep it a minimal change>"

Or perhaps even better, simply pursue both changes and present them as A/B options for the human reviewer to select between.
by neya | 2026-02-19 17:55:17+00:00
> it's almost impossible to get Gemini to not do "helpful" drive-by-refactors

This has not been my experience. I do Elixir primarily and Gemini has helped build some really cool products and massive refactors along the way. And it would even pick up security issues and potential optimizations along the way

What HAS been an issue constantly though was randomly the model will absolutely not respond at all and some random error would occur which is embarrassing for a company like Google with the infrastructure they own.
by skissane | 2026-02-19 17:55:21+00:00
> Even if you can argue the British didn't deliberately cause famine over their subjects, they almost never took active steps to alleviate them.

They sent Protestant missionaries with free food for kids (souperism). Private charities, but the government used them as an excuse to not provide more government aid.

And a lot of Catholic parents decided they’d rather their children be dead than risk them becoming Protestant.
by unimplmntd_trap | 2026-02-19 17:55:57+00:00
I was recently using this project. It outputs over serial which is handy for capturing a longer stream. I’m working on a wire wrapped 6502 machine and was getting a weird issue where I could see via the Sync pin that it was mis-executing a byte of data as an instruction instead. The fix was to add another decoupling capacitor next to the CPU…

https://github.com/dpm-343/6502-monitor
by bitwize | 2026-02-19 17:56:08+00:00
Well, that's the thing. You have to shut your programmer brain off and turn on your business brain. The code never really was that important. Delivering value to end users is the important thing, at least to the people that count.

Tim Bryce, one of the foremost experts on software methodology, hated programmers and considered them deeply sad individuals who had to compensate for their mediocre intelligence and narrow thinking by gatekeeping technology and holding the rest of the company hostage to them. And, he said upper management in corporate America agreed with him.

If you place a lot of value in being a good programmer, then to the real movers and shakers in society you are at best a tool they can use to get even richer. A tool that will soon be replaced by a machine. The time has come for programmers to level up their soft skills and social standing, and focus their intelligence on the business rather than the code. It sucks but that's the reality of the AI era.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-19 17:56:45+00:00
https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/

So the top 10% is a household income of $250K and most of those couples didn’t reach that until their 40s. They aren’t making $225K as an L5 at 25 years old like a former intern/new grad I mentored when I was at BigTech

Most software developers won’t even see above $160K inflation adjusted during their career. Most work in second tier cities in the “enterprise”z.
by psychoslave | 2026-02-19 17:56:57+00:00
> whether AI can push to radicalize susceptible individuals

My guess is, not as the single and most prominent factor. Pauperisation, isolation of individual and blatant lake of homogeneous access to justice, health services and other basic of social net safety are far more likely going to weight significantly. Of course any tool that can help with mass propaganda will possibly worsen the likeliness to reach people in weakened situation which are more receptive to radicalization.
by reify | 2026-02-19 17:57:30+00:00
Actual Title; Usual bollocks

https://theredline.versionstory.com/p/dont-trust-people-who-dont-use-claude

on reddit too:

https://reddit.nerdvpn.de/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1r76kz3/dont_trust_people_who_dont_use_claude_code/

as usual, because it contains AI shite they try to hide it.

the argument is severely lacking:

Whenever I hear AI critics say things like "AI can't actually think," I struggle to know how to respond.

Here's why you shouldn't trust people who don't use Claude Code.

of course mate!!

vegans don't eat meat but we dont condemn them for eating vegetables.

This is how I want LLM's, chatbots, shitbots and anything infested with AI to be explained to me.

https://www.ma.imperial.ac.uk/~ejm/M3S4/NOTES3.pdf

You must know how it works? surely!

I dont want to hear any anthropomorphism.
by yomismoaqui | 2026-02-19 17:58:17+00:00
I agree with the author but maybe it's bad to miss the pain you get on things like "propagating one property through the system on 5 different types in multiple layers".

These kind of pain points usually indicated too much of or a wrong architecture. Being able to fee these kind of things when the clanker does the work is a thing we must think about.
by sebastos | 2026-02-19 17:58:25+00:00
Great take.

There's a line in the first season that runs as an undercurrent through the whole show ("Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets you to the thing"). Joe originally says this to make the viewer think about technology, evoking the dawn of the personal computer and subsequently the internet. But later on, you're invited to re-interpret that statement as being about people: computers and technology were the thing that got the main characters to work together. It's the -people- that are the thing.

Part of what makes the show so good is that it's one of the few renditions in TV / movies of the joy of engineering something, and the constant tension that comes from working with great people. Great people inspire you, but they also challenge you. The show does a great job of portraying realistic conflicts that arise between different personality types and roles, as well as cleverly exposing the limitations of those personalities. With just Gordon, you'll get a stable and well engineered product but it won't be revolutionary. Joe has the vision but he can't actually _do_ the substantive part. Cameron has great substance and technical ability, but she's impractical and inflexible. Donna is responsible, effective, and clear-eyed - but unchecked, purely rational decisions erode the soul of a company into nothing. These differences frustrate our characters, and yet there can be no success without them.

I think many of us spend our whole careers chasing those rare moments where the right people are in the room solving problems, butting heads, but ultimately doing things they could never do all by themselves.
by atonse | 2026-02-19 17:58:55+00:00
This looks awesome but I think I might still prefer to have an agent make these changes. Not sure though.

In general, I love the juxtaposition of the most advanced computer technology ever (AI) causing an explosion in one of the OLDEST computer technology we've ever had (terminals).

I spend most of my day in a terminal now. It's just funny.