MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by foxandmouse | 2026-02-20 00:49:11+00:00
Exactly this. At a recent hackathon, I spent the bulk of my time actually engineering, building custom model architecture in Lua, wrangling a dataset, and waiting on training loops. The winning project? A slick UI wrapped around a basic LLM API call.

It’s incredibly frustrating. The incentive structure at these events has completely shifted away from actual technical complexity toward whoever can build the prettiest ChatGPT wrapper in 6 hours..
by mancerayder | 2026-02-20 00:49:26+00:00
One big problem is spending 10 years or more learning something that's completely obsolete - I experienced Unix and systems engineering, Perl and much much more becoming useless on my CV. Now, someone will point out how those foundational items prepare you for other things (i.e. Python is absolutely easy if you mastered Perl, deep unix systems knowledge is useful to grok containers, etc.). Problem is interviewing. No, I don't think I should have to learn Go, a zillion new SRE buzzwords used by salespeople, but more than that I feel like I have a right to not be punished in LeetCode interviews because supposedly all infrastructure is code. It's not.

So I went into consulting, and also management. The throwaway experience I had of my deep knowledge going obsolete in interviews has created a built in aversion to learning every new thing that comes out - something I loved in my 20s.

That's my issue with the field. I think developers are in a better spot - you're either a strong developer or you're not. Systems or ahem, "DevOps" suffers from this commodification of resume buzzwords over and against analytical, learning and adjacent mastery of skills.
by rpdillon | 2026-02-20 00:49:27+00:00
Pew does what they can:

> In 2023, the most recent year for which the FBI has published data, handguns were involved in 53% of the 13,529 U.S. gun murders and non-negligent manslaughters for which data is available. Rifles – the category that includes guns sometimes referred to as “assault weapons” – were involved in 4% of firearm murders. Shotguns were involved in 1%. The remainder of gun homicides and non-negligent manslaughters (42%) involved other kinds of firearms or those classified as “type not stated.”

Interesting findings:

Most gun deaths are suicides with handguns.

Assault weapons are used in less than 5% of deaths.

Handguns account for 53% of the deaths.

Shotguns are negligable.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/05/what-the-...
by layer8 | 2026-02-20 00:49:53+00:00
I don’t think so. With closed source, it depends on whether you trust the authors. As someone who grew up with shareware (which is generally closed source), you learned to trust authors based on their documentation and reputation. AI-generated code you simply can’t trust as-is. You have to trust whoever reviews it. Of course, with open source you can be the one who reviews it. But typically few people do, and usually almost no one does as thoroughly as the original authors and maintainers — except if they are an AI.
by rtpg | 2026-02-20 00:49:54+00:00
useMemo is definitely a scourge on my existence. Doesn't help that a bunch of people write articles like "don't bother with it!!" when memoisation results can cause actual real bugs when integrating with a third party lib.

Unmounting and then remounting the same component is actually a bad thing when you lose your component state in the process. And when you have enough useEffect's in your system that's exactly what happens unless you're liberally sprinkling useMemo
by cclth | 2026-02-20 00:50:16+00:00
Hi HN,

I recently did an experiment to see how far I could push AI code generation while strictly controlling the output quality. I wrote an article about building a functional E-commerce MVP using only 5 prompts.

The core idea I explored is what I call Requirement-Driven Development (RDD). Instead of just asking the AI to "build me a store," I structured the prompts to act as strict technical specifications (defining scope, data models, components, and state management beforehand).

I found that spending time writing a bulletproof requirement prompt drastically reduced the hallucination and "spaghetti code" AI usually spits out for complex apps.

I've detailed the exact prompts, the stack I used, and the trade-offs in the Medium article. I’m curious to know if anyone else here is adopting a similar "spec-first" approach when working with LLMs, or if you see potential pitfalls with this RDD concept at scale?

Would love to hear your thoughts or criticisms!
by gonzobonzo | 2026-02-20 00:50:35+00:00
True, after you visit a country where the cities are entirely safe and there aren't really any bad parts, it's disheartening to return to American cities where people say: "It's really safe! Just ignore these areas, don't go out late out night, keep an eye out when you walk around, and just ignore the crazy people yelling threats at you, they probably won't do anything."

Americans really put up with low standards in a lot of areas, and it becomes obvious the more you travel.
by rtpg | 2026-02-20 00:51:31+00:00
The thing you gotta make sure to do is basically return inside of switch statements. Typescript will gladly propagate a type that you think is never but is actually ThatOneCaseYouForgot if it's not ever used or referred to.

Every TS project I've worked on has an assertNever(val) thing specifically to check for this kinda stuff
by softwaredoug | 2026-02-20 00:51:35+00:00
My worry is if we treat code as "AI wrote it" we choose to not be responsible for what it does.

I'm worried we're going to see a serious safety issue at some point. Therac 25 sort of issue where something goes really bad with code that absolutely cannot fail. Would a human make mistakes? Of course. But if the culture goes even harder to "move fast break things", and organizational pressure to ship the slop increases, bad things will happen.
by nradov | 2026-02-20 00:51:44+00:00
Although we don't have a lot of hard evidence, there is reason to suspect that the high rate of poor vision in modern young people is more environmental than an evolutionary flaw. We spend too much time indoors staring at nearby objects under dim artificial light. People who spend most of their time outdoors are less likely to need vision correction, although there could be trade-offs later in life as the damage caused by natural UV light accumulates.
by piskov | 2026-02-20 00:51:50+00:00
You can have it as short as you want. For example check this minimal API

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/tutorials/min-...

—

But if you want it to be mockable, concerns-separated and what have you, you’ll end up with at least 3-5 files. But it ain’t got nothing to do with either C# or .NET in general.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-02-20 00:51:57+00:00
No.

Apple is a very different place than it was when I started in 1995. Over the decades since I started, I have seen numerous changes I dislike. Sadly many of the changes were seen across the whole industry though so I would be no better off anywhere else.

I'm happy to have retired though. The industry lost a lot of what used to be fun.
by salawat | 2026-02-20 00:52:02+00:00
Goes like the following:
Google/YouTube have a userbase to track accounts for; they go to a bank (licensed money transmitter, with OFAC/KYC/AML programs implemented). Google gets paid by people looking to advertise, and that money goes into Google's master account. Google's finance system translates views/impressions to money movements to creator accounts hosted at other banks (same deal, OFAC/KYC/AML program in place). The main thing is, every party that actually moves around money, operates in such a way that the entire transaction chain is followable. It's not point to point, it's hub and spoke. The hubs keep track of everything to keep the Osama Bin Laden's or Russian Oligarch's, or Cuban nationals out of the U.S. financial system.

"Micropayments" have always been something different. We technologists just figured there would be a way we could whip up some accounting software, or a spec, and allow people a way to store and transact without relying on a custodial holder, with all the extra regulation burden. Point is though, government and law enforcement don't want that, because with that, it becomes a great deal more difficult to follow the money, or to get away with things like mandating everyone report money movements over some amount to the tax authority; something easy to do when it's tacked on to the condition of maintaining your license to do business. Every money transmitter being well behaved and integrated with the state maximizes the risk for anyone attempting to utilize the financial system for illegal activity.

Ergo... What you think of as already solved isn't "micropayments". It's traditional finance in the U.S. What we refer to when we say Micropayments, is a way to store value, maintain accounts, and run point to point transactions "blessed" or recognized by the world et al without an intermediary.
by gus_massa | 2026-02-20 00:52:22+00:00
Imagine finding the highest point on Earth. The bounded space is easy to find. 5E8km^2.

How many points do you need to find it by brute force searching all of them? It looks like a 10m*10m square is good enough, perhaps 100m*100m is enough. That is 5E12 or 5E10 points.

Anyway, you need all of them to detect all the mountains and oceanic trenches.

Most of the times, the terrain is quite smooth and you can interpolate like in their example with the Gaussians. Well, except the Colorado Canyon, the Niagara Falls and a long list of sharp features.

Also, if you want to detect also buildings, you need like x100 more points.

And this is just a 2D problem. When you add dimensions, the problem grows like grid size ^ dimensions and the brute force approach is not feasible. There are a few ideas that are very nice in 1D, but in 100D they are just impossible in a sensible amount of time.
by keepamovin | 2026-02-20 00:52:35+00:00
Prompt: hello there new hotness. i feel like HN is dead. It is toxic, and can't appreciate the new. It's also only 40K MAU (posters and commenters, analyzed from the big query dataset). Suer there's a bigger audience of readers, from 40K is like a big youtube video comments section. I feel it's actually kind of irrelevent. YC too. Thoughts?
by petsfed | 2026-02-20 00:52:51+00:00
I've been saying this for years.

Yes, we have a gun violence problem. But notably, we do not have a heavy weapons problem. By and large, gun crimes are committed with guns that can be purchased legally somewhere inside the US.

So if the silver bullet to the gun violence problem is taking away all the guns (please do not misunderstand me, I DO NOT BELIEVE THAT TO BE THE CASE), then step 1 is to limit what guns can be purchased anywhere in the US.

But this whole 3d printer farse reveals something we sort of already knew: if people want to have guns (or have weapons in general), they're going to find a way. If you want to address the gun violence problem, you have to find a way to make people not want to kill, nor own guns, that's unrelated to how difficult/expensive it is to get guns. And you're going have to do that in the shadow of the constitution.
by fruitworks | 2026-02-20 00:53:01+00:00
The throughput is arbitrarialy limited by bitcoin's current block size, which hasn't been increased since satoshi's era.

Most cryptocurrencies have an adaptive block-size mechanism which allows the blocks to grow to a reasonable size which could facilitate such an onboarding of users. So it isn't a technical problem, it is just a question of bitcoin's current leadership, which is controlled by companies like blockstream.
by zmgsabst | 2026-02-20 00:53:23+00:00
Sure — but the UK or EU has to accept the constant rhetoric of “you clearly don’t support free speech, you block freedom.gov” when discussing with the US.

I don’t think it’s meant to be a perfect solution; I think it’s meant to be a political tool.

Also, the US does fund Tor — originally US Navy + DARPA, now through Dept of State. Entirely possible that they’ll eventually operate a Tor onion site for freedom.gov too.
by shimman | 2026-02-20 00:53:30+00:00
You're making a lot of assumptions: that providers are healthcare providers, that providers want to provide more healthcare, or that providers are incentivized to pay for better healthcare.

I'm sure the system you want would exist if healthcare providers had one customer to worry about: the US government. I can't think of a single doctor, the ones that actually want to help people and not cash a phat check, that likes the current system of filling out paperwork or begging to do surgeries for patients from insurance companies.

Most actually want to just provide care.

Get rid of the middle man, get rid of the profit motive, and you'll get a system that society can actually shape.
by WillAdams | 2026-02-20 00:53:40+00:00
The Elegoo Centauri Carbon (~$300) is the best value for single filament (their promised Filament Switching System has yet to be released despite being promised for Q3 last year), since DJI revenge-invested in them for the sake of the engineers who left that company to start Bambu Labs. It has an enclosure and heated bed which are helpful for printing specialty/engineering filaments.

Flashforge AD5X (also ~$300) is the best value for single extruder multi-filament since it forgoes the expense of material to enclose it which works well for PLA (an enclosure is easily fabricated and installed). Note that they had a recent social media gaffe where they claimed that they would report manufacture of weapons, but have since walked that back.

I own both of the above, and print from USB sticks w/o connecting to my network --- I'm pretty sure that's possible with most if not all printers.

The Snapmaker U1 (~$1,000) is the most striking value for multi-filament since it minimizes "poop" (extra filament extruded when changing colours).

If you want to support opensource, then one of Prusa's (they cover a wide range of price points) --- they have been pushing the "INDX" printhead technology which allows fast/efficient switching between different filaments.
by calmbonsai | 2026-02-20 00:53:42+00:00
I've had clients in asbestos remediation (data science / management side), dealt with two personal real estate properties (one rural and one urban) that had asbestos issues, and grand parents on both sides of the family tree with black lung.

Mesothelioma is not "solved", but akin to pneumoconiosis and pulmonary fibrosis its risk profiles are well-known.
by xenadu02 | 2026-02-20 00:54:02+00:00
Indeed. Uber Eats now makes you talk to an AI bot among other customer-hostile issues. I've largely abandoned them. The last straw was a driver leaving the food at some random house I could not even identify from the picture. It made me wait 5 minutes before I could do anything at all. Then it made me talk to a bot.

When I eventually got it to issue a refund I realized they kept the service fees and driver tip. For an order I didn't even receive!

If that's the best they can do I'll just go pick it up myself.
by tialaramex | 2026-02-20 00:54:18+00:00
The usual way people get here is that they didn't realise programs are for reading by humans. That's why we have formatting conventions (the compiler doesn't care but humans do) and so it's also why a single syntax is important.

If there are six syntaxes for a hypothetical language L, then either every L practitioner must learn all six syntaxes (ew, no thanks) or most L programmers can't read each other's programs and so it's basically unmaintainable.
by open592 | 2026-02-20 00:54:45+00:00
Sorry for the late reply, this was for when you're adding a renovation for instance and there is a section for "notes" - you can hit `ctrl+e` and it will open in an editor.

Looks like it doesn't register `$VISUAL` but does use `$EDITOR` not sure if that is a `xdg-open` behavior though.
by marojejian | 2026-02-20 00:55:38+00:00
Found this research via the excellent episode of "Not Another Politics Podcast" (and adapted the title from them):
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/do-dishonest-people-se...

I suggest listening to it.

Now of course, I am shocked, shocked that politicians lie a lot. But moving beyond the cliche, I think is evidence is fascinating and important.

This research follows on from a tradition which supports that dishonest people self select into public service, in countries where it is more corrupt (so the rewards seem larger):
e.g. India:
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20150029

And select out of of public service where it is trustworthy (e.g. Denmark):
2) https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20170688

I don't think this is specific to China at all (not to say there isn't cultural variance). It just happens to be a place where we have good data.

This research adds great data, and interesting insights:

- Plagiarism 15 years ago correlated with dishonesty today, and for a small payout. This is consistent with the theory that that some people are predictably dishonest, and even when the rewards are small.

- People who plagiarize are more likely to be promoted in 5 years.

- In the subset of judges in the sample, they could detect that the judgements of plagiarists were more friendly to the high-status litigants, but only if the trial had not been live-streamed to the internet.

Spillover effects:
- people who work for the "dishonest" Judges end up emulating their mentor's ruling patterns over time.

- "Dishonest" Lawyers secure higher win rates when they face "dishonest" judges.

The author concludes:
Institutions are only as good as the people inside them.

My experience supports this. There are always natural incentives to cheat, and thus it behooves society to construct costs to combat this. I don't think our modern society (private or public) does this well, and thus we are proportionally led by those who exploit the system, because they succeed by selection.
by blorenz | 2026-02-20 00:55:41+00:00
It isn't open sourced, just a private repo on GitHub. I built it as a pet project just throwing things at the wall seeing how far I could go in a short time as a means to an end. Currently, I cannot commit time to maintaining an open source project and it would be negligent of me to put something out there that would stagnate. As quickly as my app shaped up, I bet I could claude something from scratch and implement the features that have worked out for me. There are many rough edges that I just work around that you have a better grasp on, like notifications.
by rayiner | 2026-02-20 00:55:54+00:00
China’s pool is smaller than it seems. China has pursued a development trajectory that focuses on the leading provinces first. That is reasonable. Better to get Beijing and a few other key places to the leading edge first, instead of trying to incrementally move all 1.4 billion people together at the same pace.

But the flip side of that is that China’s talent pool is a lot smaller, in practice, than 1.4 billion. Because vast swaths of the country are still basically the third world. Tellingly, China does not participate in the international PISA assessment across the whole country: https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/are-chinas-students-re.... It released scores for four wealthy provinces back in 2018. They were very high, but there’s obviously a reason China doesn’t test and publish scores for the whole country.
by dexwiz | 2026-02-20 00:56:00+00:00
I once heard a linguistic explanation for this.

European languages have a future tense, which means people have different ideas of themselves in the present and future. You can even hear this in phrases like "that's a problem for future me."

While Chinese lacks the European styled future tense, ignoring time phrases, auxiliary verbs, etc. So people more clearly conceptualize their present and future selves as the same. Leading to things like increased saving.

This of course is rooted in linguist psychology, a very soft science. But still an interesting idea.
Show HN: Claude-Nonstop – Auto Account Switching and Slack Remote in Claude Code
by rchaz | 2026-02-20 00:56:24+00:00
I run Claude Code across multiple projects daily. Two problems kept getting in the way: being stuck in the terminal waiting for agents to finish, and burning through rate limits midweek while manually switching between accounts.

claude-nonstop fixes both. Every session gets a dedicated Slack channel with completion notifications and near real-time progress updates. When you hit a rate limit, it migrates the session to the next best account and resumes automatically.

Node.js, tmux, Claude Code hooks, Slack Socket Mode. No servers, no public URLs.
A lightweight Windows tool for surfacing unusual system activity
by EricAUS | 2026-02-20 00:57:22+00:00
I’ve been working on a small Windows tool to help surface unusual system behaviour — things like unexpected processes, odd outbound connections, or changes that might indicate something isn’t quite right.

The goal was to build something lightweight that explains activity in plain language, without the noise or complexity of full security suites. It currently highlights things like:

- unusual or suspicious processes
- unexpected outbound network activity
- changes to scheduled tasks
- security‑relevant system events

It also loosely maps some behaviours to common MITRE ATT&CK techniques to give a bit more context about what might be happening.

This is just a personal project I’ve been tinkering with, and I’d really appreciate feedback from anyone interested in Windows internals, visibility tooling, or lightweight monitoring approaches.

If you want to try it, here’s the link: www.sapience-tech.com
by madars | 2026-02-20 00:57:37+00:00
eCash is an answer to "can you move value privately?" (yes, with concessions). Radius is solving "can you execute a million conditional state transitions per second at sub-penny costs?" Blind signatures are still just value transfers and offer no expressivity. If your agent wants DvP with conditional logic, or trustless escrow that releases on programmatic conditions, Chaumian eCash doesn't help. LN gets you close to some forms of atomic exchange, but close-to-atomic isn't atomic, and neither gives you composability. You can move balances, but you can't orchestrate multi-step workflows that can't unwind in the middle.
by xenadu02 | 2026-02-20 00:58:04+00:00
There are two forces at work:

1. Rich cheats for whom complexity is the goal. Reduced enforcement benefits them without the guilt. They can construct nonsensical schemes but if no one ever audits them they get to feel like they are paying what they owe despite being freeloaders.

2. Strangle the baby types: they hate the federal government. They deliberately want to reduce its income to force cuts to government spending (programs and staff). If they can they will cut other parts of the government then use that to justify reducing taxes. Nothing else matters except shrinking the federal government as much as possible via any means possible. These types also enjoy taking any government service that works and people like and making it as terrible as possible to kill popular support thus making it easier to cut the program entirely.