MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dgudkov | 2026-02-16 18:00:22+00:00
One of the mistakes in viewing Russia/USSR is applying similar social/cultural patterns typical for the Western civilization. But they are a very different culture and mentality.

Their space achievements are an impressive proof of how far one can go in faking progress at scale by massive technology theft, enslavement, and violence. You can really achieve a lot this way! Rockets and nuclear devices have been designed by captured Nazi scientists and imprisoned engineers (later designs by home-grown engineers have been largely based on those designs). Key technologies were not invented but stolen, copied, and reverse-engineered. Factories designed and built by US design bureaus (before WW2). Cheap labour provided by enslaved peasants who didn't even have the freedom to move to a big city. Borders closed to prevent brain outflow. And lots lots of violence against their own people just for the sake of "looking like a global power".

And since it was always fake, no major technology went out of the USSR and became widespread globally such as computers, networks, internet, software stacks, protocols, etc. Nothing major and widely useful came out of the USSR or post-USSR Russia.

So what you see with Russia happening now, is just the bubble popping. Long due.
by dvershinin | 2026-02-16 18:00:37+00:00
If you package software or maintain automated builds, you know the drill. You need the latest stable version of some upstream project, and you'd think it's a simple API call. It isn't.

Release tags are wildly inconsistent. Some projects tag `v1.2.3`, others do `release-1.2.3-final`. Quite a few forget to mark their release candidates as pre-releases on GitHub, so the API happily returns a beta as "the latest release". And then there are projects that switch versioning schemes entirely mid-history, going from `v20150121` to `v2.0.1`.

I deal with RPM packaging, so I hit this constantly. Every upstream project required its own script. So I wrote `lastversion` to handle the mess, and it's been in production use for about 7 years now.

$ lastversion nginx/nginx
1.26.3

$ lastversion php/php-src --major 8.2
8.2.27

$ lastversion format "mysqld Ver 5.6.51-91.0 for Linux"
5.6.51

$ lastversion rocky
9.5

That last one pulls Rocky Linux's version from Wikipedia — not everything has a GitHub repo. `lastversion` works with GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, PyPI, Mercurial, SourceForge, WordPress plugin directory, RSS feeds, Helm charts, and a few others.

The version parsing was the tricky part. Standard PEP 440 doesn't handle real-world formats like Java's `8u462-b08` or OpenSSL's `1.1.1b`, so I extended it. There's also heuristic detection for misfiled betas — when the micro version is suspiciously high (≥90) and it's not a date-based scheme, it's likely a pre-release.

You can also `lastversion download`, `extract`, or `install` releases directly. For CI scripts, the `-gt` flag gives you a non-zero exit code if no newer version exists. And if you maintain RPM specs, `lastversion update-spec nginx.spec` will update the version for you.

`pip install lastversion`. BSD licensed, ~400 GitHub stars.
by quux0r | 2026-02-16 18:00:52+00:00
It's not perfect, but in my personal experience it is still tough in languages like that due to the sheer volume of indirection and noise that makes it hard to follow. For example Go's calling convention is a little nutty compared to other languages, and you'll encounter a few *****ppppppppVar values that are otherworldly to make sense of, but the ability to recognize library functions and sys calls is for sure better.
by matt_s | 2026-02-16 18:01:06+00:00
I think even if AI can help developer productivity, there are a lot of other elements to software delivery and speeding up developers isn't necessarily going to speed up overall project delivery. A hard question to answer then is, what is the ROI if an organization is spending $10k/month on AI tools but project deliveries are mostly the same as before?

If the AI tool companies increase their rates 2x, 5x, 10x, is it worth it? They aren't going to lower prices.

Consumer AI tool usage isn't going to get a lot of adopters that will pay, people outside of a work environment will see it as a fun toy, much like social media and will be fine with being served ads and letting their loss of privacy be the cost.
by burmanm | 2026-02-16 18:01:31+00:00
It can run and the token generation is fast enough, but the prompt processing is so slow that it makes them next to useless. That is the case with my M3 Pro at least, compared to the RTX I have on my Windows machine.

This is why I'm personally waiting for M5/M6 to finally have some decent prompt processing performance, it makes a huge difference in all the agentic tools.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-02-16 18:02:09+00:00
> then you're stuck reading every line because it might've missed some edge case or broken something

This is what tests are for. Humans famously write crap code. They read it and assume they know what's going on, but actually they don't. Then they modify a line of code that looks like it should work, and it breaks 10 things. Tests are there to catch when it breaks so you can go back and fix it.

Agents are supposed to run tests as part of their coding loops, modifying the code until the tests pass. Of course reward hacking means the AI might modify the test to 'just pass' to get around this. So the tests need to be protected from the AI (in their own repo, a commit/merge filter, or whatever you want) and curated by humans. Initial creation by the AI based on user stories, but test modifications go through a PR process and are scrutinized. You should have many kinds of tests (unit, integration, end-to-end, regression, etc), and you can have different levels of scrutiny (maybe the AI can modify unit tests on the fly, and in PRs you only look at the test modifications to ensure they're sane). You can also have a different agent with a different prompt do a pre-review to focus only on looking for reward hacks.
by cush | 2026-02-16 18:02:45+00:00
I think your point has very little to do with tailwind and everything to do with CSS. Tailwind is optimized for modification and maintainability. We could replace your example with

<div class="hero-header hero-header--large">...

but now any time we want to modify hero-header, we're trolling through the whole site to find where else these classes might be used so we know what to test to avoid breaking anything

Sure it's easy to look at the element you shared and say it's too complex (it's really not, it's very declarative), but the complexity must live somewhere, and I'd choose Tailwind over any other prevailing system because it's isolated and safe to modify
by pphysch | 2026-02-16 18:03:00+00:00
Leet code interviews are in the spirit of filtering out charlatans who misrepresent having even basic programming fundamentals. Many interviewers take it too far, but the original motivation is essential to saving time in the hiring process. I was instantly converted after participating in the full hiring process for a junior dev, which didn't properly filter for programming skill.

Big companies may have separate hiring SWE departments where the initial interviewers don't even know what team or role you may land in, so they have to resort to something...
by chasing0entropy | 2026-02-16 18:03:24+00:00
I wonder if similar philosophy could be argued for encrypted containers given analysis of the binary would produce no dicernable file structures, names, or matching content at any scale.

Consider a software download site which only hosted fully encrypted container binaries. Those binaries use a time based key (say attempt to decrypt when the clock returns x value representing a future or past date reached naturally or manually...). Go a step further - a hidden container which always decrypts a partition with decoy content unless the clock returns a non-existent date (missing day in a leap year?)

IP ambivalence at its finest; aI tech bros would approve.
by patcon | 2026-02-16 18:03:42+00:00
My guess is that the company running this were found to be collaborating with contentious partners, and so the government is shutting down the collaboration as risk-mitigation, in order to internalize decisions within government.

Ministry of Justice in UK has always struck me as very savvy, from my work in the UK civic tech scene. They're quite self-aware, and I assume this is more pro-social than it might seem.
by azangru | 2026-02-16 18:03:53+00:00
RxJS has an intrinsic diamond problem (multiple events fired when several sources update simultaneously), which led to occasional glitches. Signals are guaranteed not to have that problem. This is a strong argument in their favor.

But yeah; I am amazed and amused by how, during the past couple of years, the interest to rxjs has plummeted. No more conference talks on this topic. And even though Observables have been released natively, there is no activity in the rxjs repo to update the library accordingly.
by jszymborski | 2026-02-16 18:03:59+00:00
The post is an opinion piece and not a technical article for sure, but I'm not sure the takeaway from that quote is that the article is inaccurate, but rather they aren't really looking to start a conversation but rather state their opinions. It seems they've made multiple edits where they believe there are inaccuracies.

FWIW, I personally think Henke is correct to state that creating "...a product based on XMPP+OMEMO that, exactly like Signal, can only communicate with other Signal users and always has encryption on." would largely address most of the critiques (or at least the ones that bother me most), but that Soatok is also correct in concluding that the XMPP ecosystem and the way OMEMO is used in clients today does not meet their definition of "Signal competitor"[0], which I think is still a useful way to frame things.

[0] https://soatok.blog/2024/07/31/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-sig...
by jonjacky | 2026-02-16 18:04:02+00:00
I think after a day or two of full immersion in this environment, disassembling hex code would be mostly straightforward. Woz is said to have 6502 binary memorized. It doesn't really take much, you don't need to memorize it all. Knowing a dozen instructions can take you a long way.

It does. I am certainly no Woz, but I used to program a KIM-1 by hand assembling with pencil and paper from a programming card, then keying hex codes into its onboard keypad. After a few days you don't need to look at the card much. It's really quite practical - it's actually easier than dealing with editor and assembler tools. After fifty years, I still recall that A5 encodes LDA.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-16 18:04:11+00:00
We’ve already been through this cycle before SaaS. Why would every company want to go back to the days where you had to have an IT department to manage your apps?

Real businesses aren’t going to over optimize on something that cost $10 per seat.

If it’s “always proven wrong “, is this going to be “The year of Linux on the Desktop”? Is “the iPad going to fail because it doesn’t run Flash?”? Are we going to start browsing the internet on our TVs using set top boxes to get on the “Information Super highway”?

Oh yeah and let’s not forget that the iPod had “less space than the Nomad and no wireless” and was “lame”.

Or don’t forget that Dropbox was going to fail because “For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.”

I can go on about Dvorak’s comment in 1984 “The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a 'mouse'. There is no evidence that people want to use these things”

Or Michael Dell’s infamous “Apple should just shut down the company and give th money back to shareholders”
by Nabil_Bellaali | 2026-02-16 18:04:41+00:00
Hi HN!

I built Nothing as a Service as a satirical commentary on subscription culture and the modern SaaS industry.

It's exactly what it sounds like: you can pay to receive absolutely nothing. No product, no features, no emails, no tracking. Just the pure experience of spending money on nothing.

The concept:
- Three pricing tiers (Basic Nothing is free, Premium Nothing is $9.99, Enterprise Nothing requires contacting sales)
- Real payment processing via Stripe
- Customer testimonials like: "Finally, a service that does exactly what it promised. Nothing. 10/10 would buy nothing again."
- A comprehensive FAQ explaining the philosophy

I built it over a weekend using vanilla HTML/CSS/JS. The goal was both humorous and thought-provoking – a commentary on our relationship with digital products and subscriptions.

The response so far has been interesting. Some people appreciate the absurdist humor, others are genuinely curious about the minimalist philosophy, and a few actually want to purchase it.

Tech stack is intentionally minimal (just like the product itself). No frameworks, no analytics, no cookies. True to the "nothing" promise.

Happy to discuss the concept, answer technical questions, or philosophize about why people would pay for nothing!
by jlarcombe | 2026-02-16 18:04:57+00:00
I struggle to see anything good or interesting about any of this. "Here's a conversation I had with a large language model and here's the completely uninteresting artwork that resulted."

Reading through the comments, perhaps I'm missing something. It continues to fascinate me that 80% of people are just bowled over by this stuff as if it's something genuinely profound, and 20% are just left completely cold.
Show HN: I built OLTP in my memory system. Looking for opinions
by Mnexium | 2026-02-16 18:05:01+00:00
I've spent the past couple of months building Mnexium.com

Originally it was supposed to just be a memory management system (and it still is very much core).

I was thinking with all of the talk of AI replacing SaaS etc etc... How?

Most (if not all) AI systems do not have a way to manage, store & maintain records. I thought it would be an interesting project and problem to solve.

I built it into the overall project more details here (https://www.mnexium.com/blogs/introducing-records).

I've realized it is nearly impossible to get some kind of feedback on these types of projects.

I really just want people to lend their opinion.

This is needed? This is not needed? Needed but implemented incorrectly. etc

Happy to answer any questions -
by FeelTheAGI2 | 2026-02-16 18:05:08+00:00
Dynamic graph structures for multi-agent collab—agents as nodes on data chunks, edges as comms. Crushes long-context (2K tokens vs. 128K) and hits 89% on MMLU-Pro with fewer agents than fixed teams. Model-agnostic, emergent smarts from graph topology. ICML paper, no hype, pure efficiency hack.
Paper: arXiv:2509.21848
ICML: openreview.net/forum?id=34cANdsHKV
by adrian_b | 2026-02-16 18:05:11+00:00
There is some kind of reciprocity, e.g. when an atom absorbs light and it passes into a higher energy level, it will spontaneously emit light going back to the initial energy level, with about the same probability with which it has absorbed the light.

However this reciprocity is frequently circumvented, because atoms and ions have a lot of energy levels. Instead of re-emitting the light, the atom may pass more quickly to another energy level, and from there it may emit light with a very different probability (and of a different frequency, i.e. this is fluorescence).

While in fluorescence light with a lower frequency is emitted, there is also the opposite case. In very intense light, e.g. from lasers, multi-photon absorption may happen. In that case there is also no reciprocity, because the atom has jumped an energy difference higher than that of the incoming photons. So it may re-emit light with a higher frequency.

With rubidium atoms, multi-photon absorption is very frequently used, for Doppler-effect-free spectroscopy (by absorbing photons that come from opposite directions, so that the effects of the movement of the atom will cancel). In comparison with other atoms, rubidium vapor cells are easy to procure, for spectroscopy experiments, or for use in frequency or wavelength standards, but they still are rather expensive, especially when enriched in only one of the two rubidium isotopes (e.g. if you want just rubidium 87, instead of natural rubidium, a Rb vapor cell may cost close to $1200).
by sunnydark | 2026-02-16 18:05:39+00:00
I built this because I wanted my architecture diagrams to look more visually distinct in docs and
presentations. It's a ~10 KB wrapper around Mermaid.js that applies an isometric SVG matrix
transform, adds floating drop shadows, and hooks up viewBox-based pan/zoom.

How it works: Mermaid renders a normal SVG, then mermaid-3d wraps everything in a <g
transform="matrix(0.707 -0.5 0.707 0.5 0 0)"> — pure SVG, no CSS 3D, stays vector-sharp at any zoom.
Shadows are an SVG filter (offset + gaussian blur + flood composite).

Usage is one import change:

- import mermaid from 'mermaid';
+ import mermaid from 'mermaid-3d';

Supports all diagram types — flowchart, sequence, class, state, ER, gantt, pie, git graph, mindmap,
timeline, journey. All five Mermaid themes work.

Live demo: https://sunnydark.github.io/mermaid-3d/

Would love feedback on the approach and what diagram types need polish.
by collingreen | 2026-02-16 18:05:49+00:00
Your point came through clearly to me. Shared tropes or setting do not make identical stories and, in fact, often enhance them as a counterbalance or familiar thing to compare against.

A wise friend of mine once said, in regard to "ideas are nothing; execution is everything": you can tell a thousand artists to paint a portrait of an Italian woman with a countryside landscape behind her but, good or bad, none of them are the mona lisa.
by bitcoinputer | 2026-02-16 18:06:08+00:00
I built Palindrome Pay – a non-custodial crypto escrow service using 2-of-3 multisig smart contracts. The contracts are open source.I cam to the idea because I got scammed several times and that's a problem. Many crypto projects copy each other, but in my opinion, they lack ideas for adoption and security. I think a crypto payment with escrow for individuals and businesses is the right way to go.

The problem: Real estate developers in Dubai, Oman and other crypto-friendly markets are getting inbound from buyers who want to pay in USDT/USDC. But there's no trustless way to escrow crypto during the due diligence period. Traditional escrow agents don't touch crypto. Existing crypto escrow services are custodial.

How it works:
- Buyer deposits USDT into a multisig escrow contract
- Funds are locked and visible on-chain during title search, inspections, etc.
- Buyer releases funds when conditions are met
- If there's a dispute, a pre-agreed arbiter (lawyer, third party) reviews – but the arbiter never has direct fund access, only dispute resolution rights
- If no arbiter is set, only mutual cancellation is possible

Tech: Solidity smart contracts on Base/Ethereum/BSC (any EVM chain). Non-custodial – we never hold funds. 1% platform fee. Gas-only on the contract level.

The contracts fit into existing legal workflows: lawyers, title companies and land registries still do their thing in fiat. The escrow just locks the crypto side until closing conditions are met. On-chain audit trail makes source-of-funds documentation straightforward for compliance.

Three integration options: no-code web app, SDK (TypeScript, React/Vue/Angular), or a checkout widget you embed in a few lines.

Would love feedback on our project. Contracts are on GitHub.
Show HN: Interactive Chord Finder, Free Piano Scale and Chord Explorer
by magikMaker | 2026-02-16 18:06:36+00:00
I built a free, browser-based tool for exploring scales, modes, and their diatonic chords. Pick any root note and scale (major, natural minor, all seven modes, and 70+ other scales) and instantly see which chords (triads, 7th, 9th, etc.) belong to that key.

It also includes a built-in sequencer so if you've found interesting chords for your scale, you can arrange them into a progression and hear how they flow together. No need to switch between a theory reference and a DAW just to test whether a ii–V–I sounds right in your preferred scale.

No signup, no ads, no paywall, just a tool I wished existed when I was learning music theory. There's also a growing collection of articles covering diatonic chords, seventh chords, modes, extended jazz harmony, and common progressions.

Built with Hugo as a static site. Would love feedback from fellow musicians and music theory nerds.
by lkey | 2026-02-16 18:06:37+00:00
Factually untrue in two regards.

The USA is the safest place on Earth for Jewish people, both by the numbers and in measured attitudes.

Israel is by far more dangerous. If you can only feel safe there, this is your feelings lying to you about the real state of the world. Perhaps this fear is what allows you to avoid looking inward at your personal acceptance of apartheid as a necessary evil?

Feeling safe is nice, but it's not a human right to feel unsafe and then insist that it is [the whole 'real' word]'s problem. You can not create real safety at the expense of your neighbor's safety.

'safety' is an argument that justifies every act. It's identical a white lady in the park calling the cops because she saw [minority] and 'felt unsafe'. It's firing a tall stocky cis women because seeing her enter the stall made 'real women' feel unsafe about the tr*nny 'invading their spaces'.

It's being anti-integration [not because you are racist!!!, but] because schools would be made 'unsafe'. etc etc etc...
by inetknght | 2026-02-16 18:06:42+00:00
> If you put the 50,000 lines into the context, they are now in the context.

And you can't revert back to a previous context, and then add in new context summarizing to something like "the file is too large" with how to filter "there are too many unrelated lines matching '...', so use grep"?

Using output-limiting stuff first won't tell you if you've limited too much. You should search again after changing something; and if you do search again then you need to remember which page you're on and how many there are. That's a bit more complex in my opinion, and agents don't handle that kind of complexity very well afaik.
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-02-16 18:07:02+00:00
Nice. For the “which session needs me” challenge I arrange windows spatially and use numbers for my worktree naming.

So the main repo is always the left-most, then worktree 1, and so on.

Rereading the Claude Code transcript is an excellent tool for getting back into the context of what I’m working on in a particular window.

I struggle to run more than 3 truly complex implementations at once, but can handle as many as 6 or 7 if I’m just fixing little bugs.
by parineum | 2026-02-16 18:07:16+00:00
> I use the term "LLM" and not "AI" because I notice that people have started attributing LLM related issues (like ripping off copyrighted material, excessive usage of natural resources, etc) to AI in general which is damaging for the future of AI.

I think you have that backwards.

The resource and copyright concerns stem from any of these "AI" technologies which require a training phase. Which, to my knowledge, is all of them.

LLMs are just the main targets because they are the most used. Diffusion models have the same concerns.
by GoatInGrey | 2026-02-16 18:07:21+00:00
Me:

I want to get my car's transmission fixed, the mechanic shop is 50 meters away. Would it be better to walk or to drive to a location 50 meters away from my front door?

-

Opus 4.6:

<thinking>
The user is asking whether to walk or drive 50 meters to a mechanic shop, but there's a key nuance here - their transmission needs fixing, so driving might not be wise.

Done
</thinking>

Walk, absolutely. Driving a car with a compromised transmission even 50 meters risks making the problem worse and turning a repair into a more expensive one. Plus, 50 meters is barely a minute on foot.