MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by advisedwang | 2026-02-18 19:28:34+00:00
> But then HN would still riot, because you would need to require all apps to be approved by a central authority (no unauthorized browsers) OR you need to lock down browser engines to those that respect the list somehow (maybe by killing JIT, limiting network connections).

I don't think you need to do that. You can pass a law without creating a technical mechanism that automatically enforces the law. The law doesn't even need to be perfect.

So what if you can still patch a browser yourself. Kids can steal cigarettes but laws against selling cigarettes to kids are still broadly effective.

So what if its technically possible for a vendor to ship a violating browser. Go after violaters with the legal system, not with the OS.

So what if there's a foreign vendor with a violating browser out of the reach of the law. You'd still have made the ecosystem vastly better even if there's gaps and loopholes.
by generj | 2026-02-18 19:28:35+00:00
The Nazis didn’t start by massacring ethnic (and political, sexual, and religious) minorities. They started by massacring mentally handicapped people.

But then they made noises about getting rid of undesirable people by shipping them out of the country. Prior to that plenty of dehumanizing rhetoric that Trump and others eerily echo. It was only after the forced deportations didn’t pan out that ghettos started. Then detention camps. And finally extermination centers.

It’s very reasonable to look events which appear similar to the start of genocides and decry them.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-18 19:29:02+00:00
I have a buddy who worked under the founder of Domino's when Domino's was first starting out.

If he had stayed there he would have ended up as one of the top executives and raked in the bucks as it went nationwide.

They hadn't expanded much yet, and he left to work on offshore rigs so he could rake in the bucks right then.

When he came back he started his own pizza company in Houston not much different than Domino's, delivery and pickup only, no dining.

I actually did some lab analysis on his ingredients back then even though I didn't have anything like a full nutritional lab, I could still test things like the salt content, water content, smoke point of oils, etc just fine with my industrial instruments.

His company didn't grow to that many locations before his 51% investor decided to cash out and sell the company, so he got an OK payout but never reached a fraction of the growth that was within reach from the established foundation, after all the work building it.

After it was sold, they never grew any more, it was typical founder-dependent growth, built upon a foundation that nobody else could recognize the value in, nor do anything about it.

Now he's a retired restaurant executive from major chains.

In later years the Papa John guy was one of the top people in Domino's, who decided to leave and start his own company one day.

He had large enough backing that he was never going to absolutely fail, and he was able to do it a little bit differently to start out.

With lower-salt lower-fat pizza and see if it flies off the shelf.

You just can't say that out loud or all kinds of people will run the other way.

So that was translated to "Better ingredients make better pizza."

Which it pretty much did, with less of the most habit-forming ingredients that had been gradually boosted everywhere else over the years.

Plus to really satisfy the customers who are trying to keep their weight up as much as possible, and keep them from thinking anything is missing at all, there's all the fat & salt that would otherwise be baked in, right there in the little cup of garlic sauce. And you can have more just for asking :)
by lysace | 2026-02-18 19:29:22+00:00
I still like to buy my cheap and esoteric Chinese stuff from Amazon. It's a good balance of not-too-slow-delivery and not-too-expensive for very specific stuff. And it's easy to return if it doesn't work.

Example last purchase: An optical SPDIF/TOSLINK to 3.5 mm DAC box (5V/USB-powered) to put behind the TV with a broken/very low quality audio output. It was about $15 including 25% VAT. Probably like $5 on Aliexpress, but I didn't want to wait 6-8 weeks.

Never really buy anything for more than $50 from them though. And never anything containing Li-Ion batteries.
by bluecoconut | 2026-02-18 19:29:39+00:00
Fun read.

One upside of the deterministic schemes is they include provenance/lineage. Can literally "trace up" the path the history back to the original ID giver.

Kinda has me curious about how much information is required to represent any arbitrary provenance tree/graph on a network of N-nodes/objects (entirely via the self-described ID)?

(thinking in the comment: I guess if worst case linear chain, and you assume that the information of the full provenance should be accessible by the id, that scales as O(N x id_size), so its quite bad. But, assuming "best case" (that any node is expected to be log(N) steps from root, depth of log(N)) feels like global_id_size = log(N) x local_id_size is roughly the optimal limit? so effectively the size of the global_id grows as log(N)^2? Would that mean: from the 399 bit number, with lineage, would be a lower limit for a global_id_size be like (400 bit)^2 ~= 20 kB (because of carrying the ordered-local-id provenance information, and not relative to local shared knowledge)
by dolebirchwood | 2026-02-18 19:29:40+00:00
A big point of seeing a tailor is getting yourself fitted for custom clothing that is specifically made just for you. As someone who's bought $200 off-the-rack suits and $2,000 tailor-made suits, there's a world of difference between the two, especially when you have an atypical body type.

(Granted, to the main point, I still think a tailor could be automated in some distant future, but we'll need robots to perform physical interactions, not just software.)
by ekrsulov | 2026-02-18 19:30:43+00:00
First of all — I’ve seen Boxy before, and congratulations on the product you’ve built. It’s genuinely impressive, especially considering how much depth a serious SVG editor requires.

This result is actually the fourth iteration of VectorNest. In previous versions I would build something, then restart from scratch — but always reusing pieces and, more importantly, the learning from the prior attempts. The big leap happened in the last few months, mainly due to an architectural decision (moving to a plugin-based core) and the noticeable improvement in LLM precision, which made iteration much more reliable.

For me this is a side project, so I only dedicate a few hours per day. I started the first iteration less than a year ago, and the current iteration began about four months ago.

I completely understand the anxiety around what LLMs can now produce — but I also think building something robust and production-ready still requires a lot of architectural thinking and long-term iteration.
by mmh0000 | 2026-02-18 19:30:47+00:00
Hah! I learned of Anna's a few months ago. I posted a slightly snarky comment on the lack of an explainer and got downvoted to oblivion

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46169388

>> You know, it wouldn't kill them to add some fucking details to the main page rather than making you dig for it. The TL;DR:

WTF is a Anna's Archive: Hi, I’m Anna. I created Anna’s Archive, the world’s largest shadow library. This is my personal blog, in which I and my teammates write about piracy, digital preservation, and more.

WTF this post is about: Exclusive access for LLM companies to largest Chinese non-fiction book collection in the world.
by ZoomZoomZoom | 2026-02-18 19:31:03+00:00
If you're sold on Tailscale due to them "being open" (as they semi-officially support the development of Headscale), keep in mind, that at the same time some of their clients are closed source and proprietary, and thus totally controlled by them and the official distribution channels, like Apple. Some of the arguments given for this stance are just ridiculous:

> If users are comfortable running non-open operating systems or employers are comfortable with their employees running non-open operating systems, they should likewise be comfortable with Tailscale not being open on those platforms.

https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/13717

A solution like this can't really be relied in situations of limited connectivity and availability, even if technically it beats most of the competition. Don't ever forget it's just a business. Support free alternatives if you can, even if they underperform by some measures.
by spider-mario | 2026-02-18 19:31:08+00:00
https://brand.systemd.io/

> Yes, it is written systemd, not system D or System D, or even SystemD. And it isn't system d either. Why? Because it's a system daemon, and under Unix/Linux those are in lower case, and get suffixed with a lower case d. And since systemd manages the system, it's called systemd. It's that simple.
by pphysch | 2026-02-18 19:31:16+00:00
Even if it does, there will probably be a prolonged economic period where robots are doing dangerous/messy stuff like welding, plumbing but there is a human master guiding them from a few yards away, via prompts, controllers, etc. More of a semi-autonomous power tool than an fully autonomous master that is delivered by drone on-demand. Scalability is still a ways off.
by b65e8bee43c2ed0 | 2026-02-18 19:31:22+00:00
which 'wing' cheered loudly when every platform openly suppressed their political opponents during the last decade, and frothed in impotent rage when one of those platforms unexpectedly changed hands and ceased the censorship?

somehow, censorship is only bad when the wrong side does it. when the correct side does it, it's justified and necessary for your democracies to survive.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-02-18 19:31:37+00:00
I'm down to about one Walmart trip per year. It may have been as many as 3 years since I've been inside Target. Kmart is a dusty memory. On my last Walmart trip, it is a shabby caricature of what I remember from the early 2000s (maybe even on up into 2011 or 2012. I can't be sure, but I believe aisles have been made wider so they could fit fewer shelves and keep those looking fuller. What fills them is the cheapest looking junk I have ever seen, and I had no favorable opinion of Walmart's goods to start with. Truly much of it looks like the sort of trinkety crap you would have found at flea markets and gas stations years ago. Target was (3 years ago) still worse, I think they do most of their ordering off of Temu.

If there is something I might prefer to not wait on Amazon for, I will not find it at Walmart even if I remember Walmart once carrying that product. This is without fail. Each new (rare) trip to Walmart reinforces the lesson.

I have never been fond of Walmart's grocery department. I suspect (long ago) that they were able to sell produce 1 cent cheaper than anyone else by buying the least-wanted, unsold inventory from agricultural distributors, and the quality always reflected that theory. I could buy strawberries from Walmart, buy them again from the local grocery chain 10 minutes later, put them in the fridge simultaneously. And the Walmart-bought produce was slimy the next day, the grocery store produce not (unless I stacked the Walmart clamshell on the grocery store one... cross-contamination).

Worse still, they have reduced their personnel to skeleton crews, all shifts. The stores tend to look like they were looted after hurricanes. I do not know how anyone shops at Walmart, and it scares me that if my circumstances were less agreeable I might be forced to shop there too. Walmart might aim for stealing marketshare from Dollar General as a growth strategy, the overlap must be nearly absolute.
by Onavo | 2026-02-18 19:31:37+00:00
No. OP said they want to handle the database to their team. They didn't say anything about the auth, analytics, admin dashboards, real time change data management proxies, connection poolers to their team. Your modern backend as a service that's not pocketbase usually has a dozen moving parts.

Most enterprise teams have plug and play SQL databases ready to go, anything else would require more work with DevOps.
by KaiserPro | 2026-02-18 19:31:53+00:00
depending on what you are using them for they are quite good for planning 3d operations.

However the definition of "world models" is a bit nebulous. World labs looks kinda like sprites in a 3d world.

Which also leads me to suggest that in no way are they worth $1b, espcially as google are doing to destroy them (possibly meta, but I doubt they are going to be any good anytime soon)
by anthk | 2026-02-18 19:31:58+00:00
9front does that without emulating a terminal. Grep, cc, awk, walk (no find and magical incantations with -print0 there), functions instead of aliases on rc, better lists () in rc, and so on. And you can launch these command inside your graphical editor such as sam or better, Acme. And even as a pipe to selections.
by dfabulich | 2026-02-18 19:32:09+00:00
So, what's your counterproposal?

Each of these tools provides real value.

* Bundlers drastically improve runtime performance, but it's tricky to figure out what to bundle where and how.

* Linting tools and type-safety checkers detect bugs before they happen, but they can be arbitrarily complex, and benefit from type annotations. (TypeScript won the type-annotation war in the marketplace against other competing type annotations, including Meta's Flow and Google's Closure Compiler.)

* Code formatters automatically ensure consistent formatting.

* Package installers are really important and a hugely complex problem in a performance-sensitive and security-sensitive area. (Managing dependency conflicts/diamonds, caching, platform-specific builds…)

As long as developers benefit from using bundlers, linters, type checkers, code formatters, and package installers, and as long as it's possible to make these tools faster and/or better, someone's going to try.

And here you are, incredulous that anyone thinks this is OK…? Because we should just … not use these tools? Not make them faster? Not improve their DX? Standardize on one and then staunchly refuse to improve it…?
by ben_w | 2026-02-18 19:32:18+00:00
> Do Tesla shareholders think the rest of the auto industry are in a coma?

I have no idea what institutional investors think, and they're probably the relevant group here.

From the way I've observed individuals discussing it, defending it, on HN… it pattern-matches to my understanding of what people these days call "main character syndrome", i.e. that the other companies are just a supporting cast to provide an interesting challenge for the only one that's not an NPC.
by samschooler | 2026-02-18 19:32:32+00:00
I did a more aggressive internet search. This seems not possible given physics, as well as not documented (at least in the US) in the CDC Mine Accidents Database [0], which has been recording mine accidents since before the discovery + invention of AM radio.

Edit: The physics

- (lambda) = c / 1,620,000 Hz = 185 m :: 1.62 MHz is what I derived as a near max possible accidental frequency able to be produced by AM equipment

- 185 m / 2 = 92.6 m :: this is half a wave length

In order to resonate (let alone have enough power to "cook", which I didn't even look at because the wave can't even resonate), a tunnel must be at 92.6 m (fundamental) or 185 m wide or tall (2nd harmonic). Most tunnels are ~5m/3m wide/tall at most.

Dusted off my physics from my minor in college so someone feel free to correct me.

[0]: https://wwwn.cdc.gov/NIOSH-Mining/MMWC/MineDisasters/Table
Show HN: Code Scalpel – AST analyzer and security scanner (MCP server)
by digitalbyooki | 2026-02-18 19:32:32+00:00
I built Code Scalpel as an MCP server for code analysis. It parses
Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, and Java - builds control flow graphs
and catches security bugs using taint analysis and symbolic execution.

Security detection:
- 16+ vulnerability types (SQL/NoSQL/LDAP injection, XSS, command
injection, SSRF, CSRF, SSTI, prototype pollution, weak crypto, etc.)
- Taint tracking across files
- <10% false positive rate
- Z3 symbolic execution for path analysis

The MCP part exposes 23 tools that let AI agents analyze code:
- security_scan, cross_file_security_scan
- symbolic_execute (Z3-based path exploration)
- generate_unit_tests (test gen from symbolic paths)
- simulate_refactor (behavior preservation check)
- code_policy_check (compliance verification)

CLI works standalone too. No-install usage:
uvx codescalpel mcp

Or: pip install codescalpel

Testing was important - 7,297 test cases with 94.86% coverage.

What I'm curious about:
- Is <10% false positive rate good enough for AppSec teams?
- What other security checks would help?
- Interest in expanding to Go/Rust/C++?

Target users: Individual developers (cost reduction story), security
engineers (OWASP Top 10 evaluation), team leads (ROI analytics),
enterprise architects (SOC2/ISO compliance).

Repo: https://github.com/3D-Tech-Solutions/code-scalpel

MIT licensed, actively maintained. Feedback welcome!
by never_inline | 2026-02-18 19:32:59+00:00
Amazon has been quite useful for me as a single bachelor living in an Indian metropolitan city.

1. I get very useful items at very good prices, many of which I would have to wander the city for hours to find, or couldnt find at all:
- Eg: I got a pair of adjustable dumbbells at <2K INR. Some of you would call it a cheap knock. But it has been super useful and I would have not bought it if it cost 8k INR. I brought a whole bosch repair toolkit at good price and it has been invaluable for fixing electric/plumbing etc.. issues. I got a high volume travel bag - I didn't even know 40L travel bags existed and wouldnt have brought one if not for amazon. I could go on.

2. Amazon Fresh is usually cheaper for groceries and maintain consistent quality compared to local supermarkets. I will also avoid the need to walk long with the grocery bag.

3. Electronics are significantly cheaper on amazon and again the need to search.

Maybe all of this can be even better as you said. But bottom line is that their operations look pretty efficient to me. Their catalogue is pretty much unmatched. (They may be losing money on retail business - but that's not my position to care as a customer. As other commenter pointed out, it may not even matter much for stock price.)
Show HN: Chat with a 'humanoid robot' on 'Mars' with accurate time delay
by cryptoz | 2026-02-18 19:33:09+00:00
Hello!

This is a silly little thing. It uses the skyfield python library to get the current light travel time to Mars so we can make this as accurate as possible. It's meant to simulate a conversation between you and someone on Mars with the correct communication delay. (Yeah, it's vibecoded, but still very fun). Since there is nobody on Mars (yet), an LLM is backing the conversation on the other side posing as a humanoid robot.

Sorry for the login requirement, but I want to protect from out-of-control token costs. The model behind it is full gpt-5.2.

I made this because I've always wanted to make it but never really wanted to put in the effort. Luckily, stuff like this is a lot easier to make now, so I get to have fun making all my project ideas that I wouldn't have otherwise made.

Have fun chatting with a 'Martian robot' with actual time delay to Mars!
by kelseyfrog | 2026-02-18 19:33:31+00:00
No one is disputing the severity of Nazi brutality. However, there were several other types of camps we can compare the Dilly TX center to: Internierungslager, Durchgangslager, and Schutzhaftlager.

These are not concentration nor death camps, but Nazi camps all the same. It's important to be familiar with all of history and not dismiss a comparison because it doesn't fit the most extreme version that we know. How close do you think the Dilly TX center is in it's operation to these other types of Nazi camps? In which ways are they similar or different? Does that change anything?
by iririririr | 2026-02-18 19:33:34+00:00
Nice. Hopefully it will evolve into something as good as termux on android. It won't ever be as good, because ios is a toy with rubber on all corners.

Love that they copied the bar above the keyboard. Even with android custom keyboard that was a great feature, on IOS that's essential.

oh, it's closed source. and lazygit (the least terminal based of all cli tools) being their inapiration doesn't inspire much confidence in long term :(
by lisper | 2026-02-18 19:33:41+00:00
This analysis is not quite fair. It takes into account locality (i.e. the speed of light) when designing UUID schemes but not when computing the odds of a collision. Collisions only matter if the colliding UUIDs actually come into causal contact with each other after being generated. So just as you have to take locality into account when designing UUID trees, you also have to take it into account when computing the odds of an actual local collision. So a naive application of the birthday paradox is not applicable because that ignores locality. So an actual fair calculation of the required size of a random UUID is going to be a lot smaller than the ~800 bits the article comes up with. I haven't done the math, but I'd be surprised if the actual answer is more than 256 bits.

(Gotta say here that I love HN. It's one of the very few places where a comment that geeky and pedantic can nonetheless be on point. :-)
by sailfast | 2026-02-18 19:34:20+00:00
Not a doctor, but in Anthropic's case they bought actual books and scanned rather than using pirated versions. For digital versions from a vendor that were found to be in violation of the ToS they paid to settle the issue.
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5529404/anthropic-settl...
by lambda | 2026-02-18 19:35:49+00:00
I was responding to the person I was replying to, who confused LLVM with LLM, and who had brought up the slop term. I was surprised that they didn't think it was slop, because of the obvious tells (even with the fixed diagram formatting, there's a lot about that README and ASCII art that say that it was generated by or formatted by an LLM).

One of the reasons that slop gets such an immediate knee-jerk reaction, is that it has become so prolific online. It is really hard to read any programming message boards without someone posting something half baked, entirely generated by Claude, and asking you to spend more effort critiquing it than they ever did prompting for it.

I glanced through the code, but I will admit that the slop in the README put me off digging into it too deeply. It looked like even if it was human written, it's a very early days project.

Yeah, calling something slop is low effort. It's part of a defense mechanism against slop; it helps other folks evaluate if they want to spend the time to look at it. It's an imperfect metric, especially judging if it's slop based only on the README, but it's gotten really hard to participate in good faith in programming discussions when so many people just push stuff straight out of Claude without looking at it and then expect you to do so.
by overfeed | 2026-02-18 19:36:31+00:00
> we are talking about books

I would love for the authors of in-print books to be paid - even when it's usually not a lot. Buy books - they are cheap, or borrow them from libraries - they buy books. If you need books for not-reading, and at scale, you should still be paying - especially if you can afford to pad Nvidia's fat margins.

Even if you're self-interested, I would urge you to pick your crimes carefully, and to remember to commit one crime at a time. If distributing copyright material is your chosen hill - more power to you! Just don't sleep walk into it thinking it's harmless.
by kurthr | 2026-02-18 19:36:48+00:00
This is basically hilarious. Leaky Feeders are a few watts. and even a high powered multi-kW AM radio with 200m wavelength wouldn't resonate much in a rough walled tunnel multiple sq meters in cross section. It's both too large for there to be significant power density, and much less than a wavelength in diameter except in length where the tunnel passively attenuates the signal.