MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gyomu | 2026-02-17 00:55:38+00:00
The telephoto sensor is already 48 MP on the 17 Pro, so that's a given.

I don't think we're getting a f/1.78 lens on the telephoto anytime soon. The widest aperture the tele's ever had was a f/2 on the 12 Pro, and that was back when the tele was a 2x (52mm equivalent, so not even really tele...). Maybe f/2.4 or f/2.2 (what the ultra wide has)? That'd already be a significant improvement.

The next big upgrades on the ultrawide/tele for the 19/20 generations will likely be larger sensors - they're currently 1/2.55", compared to 1/1.28" for the wide lens. I don't think they can fit three 1/1.28" sensors in there, so plausibly 1/1.7"? But that might mean that effective aperture remains constant.
by scottlamb | 2026-02-17 00:56:29+00:00
I'd think so. Stored procedures let you do multi-statement sequences in fewer round trips. In 2026 larger systems are as likely as ever to run PostgreSQL on a different machine (or machines) than the application server. While latency between the two generally goes down over time, it's still not nothing. You may care about the latency of individual operations or the throughput impact of latency while holding a lock (see Amdahl's law).

Of course, the reasons not to use stored procedures still apply. They're logic, but they're versioned with the database schema, not with your application, which can be a pain.
by lorakamina | 2026-02-17 00:57:35+00:00
Nope. I see it completely differently. We know for a fact that all CEOs of big tech are either Jewish zios (Israeli citizens by birth) or have spouses who are such or are in that zios link.

They also establish the so called “R&D” offices in Israel which is code-word for free software export.

Then the same country that has access to the source code of the major American tech firms, combobulates the “best” in class spyware doesn’t come as a surprise.

We keep crying wolf to Chinese tech spies when the real wolf are these. That’s a tiny nation living off of 300MM large nation and its allies make that another 400MM.
by munificent | 2026-02-17 00:59:23+00:00
> As another, slightly more serious suggestion, if Suicide Linux randomly deleted a single file without telling you every time you made a typographical error, it might be an interesting look into the stability of your operating system and an educational tool for diagnosing and repairing corrupted systems.

I seem to recall an experimental indie game that worked this way. If your character died, a random file on your hard disk was deleted. It was a really interesting idea to highlight our implicit assumptions around what games can and can't do, and a way to raise the stakes of the gameplay experience.
by sorobahn | 2026-02-17 01:00:00+00:00
I've had this same thought. Given humans were the primary authors of code, the tooling has optimized for writing (IDEs, Text Editors, LSPs, etc). Even though we all know we read more code than write, the tooling space for reading code is rather small, I can only think of stuff like SourceGraph and Github. I'm sure big companies have internal tooling for this, but even then I feel the best experience exploring a single repo today is your EDITor.

I'm also experimenting with building a platform that is optimal for reading code particularly distributed systems since they have many non-local dependencies and are harder to explore locally in code editors/viewers. I def fall in the camp that current AI tools can probably help us understand our systems better than they can contribute code to them. One win of using AI to help us analyze large codebases is that if they can extract useful things for us, they can also extract useful things for their own agentic loops.

Let me know if you wanna chat more about this, would love to bounce some ideas/contribute!
by marcus_holmes | 2026-02-17 01:02:05+00:00
We spent the last 20 years building a whole set of specialised little tools on the web to do specialised little tasks for businesses.

Now an LLM can do most of that, easier, and effectively for free. The first pass on a new problem is not googling to see if there's a SaaS for that, it's prompting an LLM to see if it can do it, or if it can build a tool that can do it.

Case in point: in my job we have to data-enter invoices. I have dealt with or in this industry for 30-ish years. I worked on various projects trying to get computers to read invoices, to various degrees of success. It's a hard problem; there's no standard format, or layout. Every company does its invoices differently. Some are Excel files, some are PDFs, some are Word docs, etc.

This entire problem vanished this year. You get an LLM to read the invoice. It does this more accurately than humans do. Job done.

There are entire SaaS businesses that read invoices that are now obsolete and have no moat.
by jason_oster | 2026-02-17 01:02:40+00:00
I mentioned this in another thread, but this is genuinely demonstrating a known issue with ambiguous prompts.

You might be inclined to say, "a human would always interpret the question as having the car nearby the speaker, 50m away from the carwash." But this is objectively untrue. There are people in this comments section and on the Mastodon thread that found the question to be somewhat confusing.

In other words, the premise that "understand[ing] a prompt like a human" is all that's needed is wrong because not every human interprets ambiguities in the same way. The human phenomenon is well researched in psychology. The LLM equivalent is also well researched, and several proposals have been put forth over the years to address it. This is a pretty good research paper on the subject, and it links to other relevant studies: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10453v2 (Although I disagree with their method. I think asking clarifying questions is a superior approach than trying to one-shot every possible interpretation.)

So yes, there is a ton of research on the problem. Some datasets include ambiguous questions and instructions for this reason. A couple of examples are provided in the linked paper.
by emporas | 2026-02-17 01:03:27+00:00
There is also 3d printing origami shapes [1]. But 3D printing is still plastic(usually).

The idea of origami steel sheets has stuck on my mind ever since I found out about laser welding. Cutting thin 2mm sheets of steel, stitching them back together in different shapes, and holding tons of weight? That sounds very compelling to me.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNVBK7-h9Fs
by lenerdenator | 2026-02-17 01:03:33+00:00
Why wouldn't these changes be durable?

We're a product of a very, very strange time and place in history where the average person had at least some recourse against tyrants. From prehistory to about the mid-point of the 20th century, if you were alive on planet Earth, there's a near guarantee that you lived life basically as a possession of some person or family who controlled where you lived, where you could go, what clothes you wore, what work you could do, whether or not you would be educated, who you would marry, if you would have children, which god (if any) you could worship, what you could say, and even whether you lived or died.

That was your existence.

This whole thing where you have some control over your destiny? That's the fragile set of changes. Someone behaving like Trump is historically insanely durable.
by irishcoffee | 2026-02-17 01:03:56+00:00
> OpenAI going from a planned $100B Nvidia deal to "actually we're unsatisfied with your inference speed" within a few months is a pretty dramatic shift.

A different way to read this might be: Nvidia isn't going to agree to that deal, so we now need to save face by dumping them first"

I imagine sama doesn't like rejection.
by Terr_ | 2026-02-17 01:04:26+00:00
> But, most writing has purpose.

Over the years, I've become an odd fan of documents that start with a "purpose of this document" section.

Sure, it seems weirdly bureaucratic at first, but as time goes on, you start seeing documents that don't really know what their focus is anymore, because different authors decided it was the least-bad place to dump their own guide, checklist, or opinions.

L for example, imagine four documents about an API: A how-to guide; fine implementation details; a diagnostic checklist; a primer for executives or salespeople considering it as a product.
by gwern | 2026-02-17 01:05:23+00:00
My immediate thought is that OP is reinventing dynamic programming/RL from first principles. The final visualization looks exactly like a standard value estimate heatmap. Golf is a MDP over all the physical points on the course, with stochastic probabilities of transition to each one based on golfer skill and physical randomness. Strokes are the cost to be minimized, the colors are the value estimate at each state, and his difficulties with the different maps is because a value function is defined as the expected value of being in that state assuming you will follow a particular policy thereafter (ie. be a golfer of a particular skill level, playing optimally for that skill). This lets you formalize 'strategicness' of a golf course: it is how much the value estimates differ on average across the full range of golf skills; a non-strategic course looks identical for the beginner and pro, while an incredibly strategic course might have completely different values for every point for every bracket of skill. (You could probably automate creation of pathological golf courses this way, where even a slight increase in skill makes the new strategy different.)
Ask HN: Which password manager do you use / would you recommend?
by unodonut | 2026-02-17 01:07:01+00:00
I still use a unique password for every site, and plan to educate myself on pw managers and switch myself (plus every family member who wants it) to a pw manager.

We don't have any special requirements; I'm into tech but others in the fam struggle with tech (hence, I think a pw manager would be a great help to them, as they constantly forget pws).

Everyone in the family has a smart phone, some have a tablet, most do not own laptops.

I'm starting to educate myself today, starting with a computerphile video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w68BBPDAWr8

Very keen for any recommendations/pointers from HN community.
by verdverm | 2026-02-17 01:07:14+00:00
You should check out HN /new and /show the last couple of weeks.

It's just like all the ICO, NFT, and other crypto launches, but for all the little things that you can do with Ai. Everybody or their bot has some new game changing Ai project. It's a tiring mess right now, which I do hope will similarly die down in time

For clarity, I was a big fan of blockchain before it got bad, still am for things like ZKP and proof-of-authority, and I am similarly very excited for what Ai enables, but (imo) one cannot easily argue there is not a spam problem that feels similar.
by vestjejj123 | 2026-02-17 01:08:11+00:00
Product: Cold Web Mail — an API that accepts a target company URL and your offer, and returns an intro_line, three subject_line variants, an email_body_template with {{first_name}}, and a confidence_score. Built for B2B SaaS outbound teams and agencies that want an API-first personalization step in their pipelines. Signup via Starter plan (Stripe-provisioned keys) and run /generate in minutes. Docs & quickstart: https://coldwebmail.com
by monocasa | 2026-02-17 01:08:43+00:00
I don't think chiplets require or even are even generally seen with silicon backplanes yet, otherwise you'd be leaving out stuff like AMD's CPUs.

And from there, stuff like the Vac 9000's packaging were very advanced for the time designs that I'd hesitate to call PCBs unless we're calling all organic packaging PCBs now.
by rstuart4133 | 2026-02-17 01:09:33+00:00
> Lets all arbitrarily agree AGI is here. I can't even be bothered discussing what the definition of AGI is.

There is a definition of AGI the AI companies are using to justify their valuation. It's not what most people would call AGI but it does that job well enough, and you will care when it arrives.

They define it as an AI that can develop other AI's faster than the best team of human engineers. Once they build one of those in house they outpace the competition and become the winner that takes all. Personally I think it's more likely they will all achieve it at a similar time. That would mean the the race will continues, accelerating as fast as they can build data centres and power plants to feed them.

It will impact everyone, because the already dizzying pace of the current advances will accelerate. I don't know about you, but I'm having trouble figuring out what my job will be next year as it is.

An AI that just develops other AI's could hardly be called "general" in my book, but my opinion doesn't count for much.
by Terr_ | 2026-02-17 01:10:25+00:00
Yeah, I'd argue a large portion of what LLMs are being used for can be characterized as "counterfeiting" traditionally-useful signals. Signals that told us there was another human on the other side of the conversation, that they were attentive, invested, smart, empathizing, etc.

Counterfeiting was possible before, but it had a higher bar because you had to hire a ghostwriter.
by bonoboTP | 2026-02-17 01:10:37+00:00
If you dress down in a context where formal attire is expected, it's a signal. What it signals depends on what happens. If you're shunned and avoided, then you're just a loser or a hobo. If you're clearly valued, listened to with interest etc, despite that mismatch, it is a countersignal. You could only afford to do this by having high status and importance in the community that outweighs such expectations. It doesn't matter if you simply don't care and never think about how you dress and this just comes naturally. The signal is still picked. The person to whom general expectations and rules don't quite apply the same way as to the average person is the one of higher status.

In other words, it's not enough to flaunt the rules, you also have to get away with it for it to count.
by mindslight | 2026-02-17 01:11:07+00:00
> Moreover there is a fairly large subculture of gamers etc opposed to these movements, and open computing platforms will take a long time to fizzle out without intervention.

You kind of skipped over the distinction I made between "secure boot" and "remote attestation". Based on what you wrote here I'm not quite sure if you understand the difference between them. And in the context of locked down computing, the difference between them, and their specific implications, is highly important.

I'm not pointing this out to shoot down your point or something, rather I think you'd benefit from learning about this outside of this comment. But I'll be a little more explicit here to get you started:

The worry with secure boot was based around the possibility that all manufacturers would stop making non-locked-down devices. This has not really panned out - all phones basically have secure boot, there are many you can install your own OS image onto, and there are many escape hatches.

The worry with remote attestation is that website owners will be able to insist that you run specific software environment and/or hardware, and deny you access otherwise. On desktop web browsers, this is the WEI proposal that seems to have stalled. But on mobile, this is still going full speed ahead, both web and apps (SafetyNet).

The thing about remote attestation is that its restrictions take the same shape as current CAPTCHA nags, IP block based hassling, etc. When websites see that more and more visitors are compliant, they can crank up the pain. First it's invisible, then it's a warning, then it's a big hassle (eg lots of CAPTCHAs), and then finally it's a hard lockout. This can happen, led by specific industries (eg banking), regardless of any communities working to resist it. What you should picture is all of our old computers working just fine, but being able to access modern websites in a way that cannot be technically worked around.
by dzonga | 2026-02-17 01:11:38+00:00
Alex Russel - member of the Chrome core team has a few excellent titles on why React is not the way to go

1. Market for Lemons - https://infrequently.org/2023/02/the-market-for-lemons/

2. https://infrequently.org/2024/11/if-not-react-then-what/
by Taniwha | 2026-02-17 01:11:38+00:00
I think that what we're all waiting for for this to take off is one of the Cheap Chinese assembly houses to set up a web site where you can drag and drop chiplets into a carrier with standard interface buses, you press a button and brrr-zap robots pull chiplet die onto a substrate, bond out the interfaces and ship you a prototype same day - because you all know this is totally the future
by oxag3n | 2026-02-17 01:12:02+00:00
I've got even weirder conversation with ChatGPT:

Prompt: I need to get to BMW dealership today. It's located 30 meters from my house. Do I walk to take my bmw there?

Reply: If it’s only 30 meters from your house, you definitely don’t need to drive

That’s about:

Half the length of a basketball court

Around 40–45 steps

Less than a 1-minute walk

Unless:

The car is undrivable

Weather is extreme

You have mobility issues

The easiest option is simply to drive it the 30 meters if it runs, or push it / have it towed if it doesn’t.

So no — don’t “walk to take your BMW there.”
Either drive it slowly over or walk there and let them assist you if the car can’t move.

Want to tell me what issue you're taking it in for?
Show HN: Bulwark – Open-source governance layer for AI agents (Rust, MCP-native)
by bpolania | 2026-02-17 01:12:27+00:00
Hi HN!

I built Bulwark because I kept running into the same problem: I need to give AI agents access to my GitHub token, my AWS credentials, my database access, etc. They can do anything I can do. And when something goes wrong, there's no audit trail.

Bulwark is a governance proxy that sits between agents and the tools they call. It works as an MCP gateway (for Claude Code, OpenClaw) or as an HTTP forward proxy (for Codex, curl). Every request goes through:

Session validation → Content inspection → Policy evaluation → Credential injection → Audit logging

The key ideas:

- Agents never see real secrets. They authenticate with a scoped session token. Bulwark injects the real credentials at the last mile, based on tool pattern + scope.

- Policies are YAML. Glob matching, scope-based precedence, hot-reload. Default deny. You can preview the impact of policy changes against real audit history before deploying (bulwark policy test).

- Tamper-evident audit. Every event is blake3 hash-chained in SQLite. You can reconstruct exactly what an agent did and verify nothing was modified.

- Content inspection. 13 built-in patterns scan both directions for AWS keys, PII, prompt injection. Redaction happens before content reaches the agent.

Technical details: 11 Rust crates, 409 tests, zero clippy warnings. Policy evaluation is sub-millisecond (in-memory, lock-free hot-reload via ArcSwap). Credentials encrypted with age. Built on hyper 1.x, rustls, tokio.

Install: brew install bpolania/tap/bulwark

The README has a 5-minute quickstart that connects Claude Code to GitHub through Bulwark. Happy to answer questions about the architecture, threat model, or MCP integration.
by nyc_data_geek1 | 2026-02-17 01:12:34+00:00
And anyone who is under sanction or lives in a nation under economic sanction, and wants access to a means of sending payments across borders that would otherwise be closed to them.

And anyone who lives in a polity whose local currency may be undergoing rapid devaluation/inflation.

And anyone who needs a form of wealth that no local authority is technically capable of alienating them from - ie: if you need to pack everything in a steamer trunk to escape being herded into cattle cars, you can memorize a seed phrase and no one can stop you from taking your wealth with you.

And any polity who may no longer wish to use dollars as the international lingua franca of trade, as the global foreign exchange reserve currency, to reduce the degree to which their forex reserves prop up American empire.

Sadly, all of these use cases appear increasingly relevant as time goes on.
by AndrewKemendo | 2026-02-17 01:12:45+00:00
Mark my words:

The era of “Personal computing” is over

Large scale Capital is not gonna make any more investments into microelectronics going forward

Capital is incentivized to make large data centers and very high speed private Internet, not public Internet, private Internet like starlink

So the same way in the 1970s it was the main frame era and server side computing, which turned into server side rendering, which then turned into client side rendering which culminated in the era of the private computer in your home and then finally in your pocket

we’re going back to server side model communication and that’s going to encompass effectively the gateway to all other information which will be increasingly compartmentalized into remote data centers and high-speed access
by thenthenthen | 2026-02-17 01:13:32+00:00
The 120 days of *buntu (2011) was maybe inspired by this? A collection of 120 strange, useless, funny ubuntu variants: https://yugo.at/projects/120days/ and pdf here (78Mb) https://yugo.at/pdfs/120days_of_buntu_Danja-Vasiliev_Gordan-...
by anymouse123456 | 2026-02-17 01:13:38+00:00
Agreed. A good business will take both short and long term profit into consideration when making a decision. They will strive to maximize profit (within reason) in whatever they do.

I don’t presume to know anything about the fashion industry and generally find it uninteresting.

My point is that I assume the people running those businesses know what they’re doing. Many of them have been around for many decades.

I’m admittedly surprised to find so many people here with so much confidence in their own ability to effectively constrain an entire industry they obviously also know nothing about.
by lkey | 2026-02-17 01:13:38+00:00
If you could press a button and kill every man, woman, and child in Gaza, would you press that button?

If you could execute every Yemeni, Iranian, Lebanese and Syrian tomorrow, gifting you a 'clean', and 'pure' world for Greater Israel to flourish for 1000 years, would you do it?

If your answer is yes. Then anything I say about the right of the invaded and occupied to resist occupation under international law will land on deaf ears.
by kace91 | 2026-02-17 01:13:44+00:00
The tech isn’t going away, but its usability is probably going to be recalibrated once we factor in the long term danger ( effects on learning and acquiring/maintaining skills, maintenance costs of ai made code, etc).

We’ll still have the “best code tooling ever invented” stuff, but if the market is assuming “intellectual workers all replaced”, there’s still a bubble pop waiting for us.
by sjs382 | 2026-02-17 01:13:54+00:00
Gemini 3 Thinking for me:

---

Unless you’ve been hitting the gym hard enough to bench-press a sedan, you’ll definitely want to drive.

While 50 meters is a very short distance—roughly the length of an Olympic swimming pool—it’s a bit difficult to wash a car that isn't actually at the car wash.

The Logic Break-Down

If you walk: You’ll be at the car wash, getting some steps in, but your car will still be sitting in the driveway looking dusty.

If you drive: Both you and the vehicle arrive at the destination, which is generally a prerequisite for the "washing" part of the plan.

One exception: If you are just walking over to buy cleaning supplies or to see if there's a long line before pulling the car out, then walking is the way to go!

Would you like me to check the local weather for you to make sure it's not going to rain right after you finish?