MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nightpool | 2026-02-26 18:51:25+00:00
What government programs in the US are stably funding open-source developers? I think most government-funded open source projects are very gunshy about looking for new funding because of the Trump administration completely politicizing grants and funding. I would not want to have to sign an anti-BDS pledge to get my open source project funded, and I would imagine that goes for many people in the community. Also, what "dismissive comments" are you referring to? The only one I saw was "Government support won't work for OSS at scale — it's too globally decentralized". Which is a fair criticism—open source projects are incredibly globalized, and getting e.g. New York State to fund an open source project that has contributors from Ukraine, India and China is a headache I don't think anyone would want to try and go through. There's just no benefit to the state administrators to fund that kind of project—they want to support parochial, home-grown projects with local ties.
by supernetworks | 2026-02-26 18:51:31+00:00
Yep, unfortunately fuzzy. For enterprise wifi deployments, one amusing thing to do when configuring 802.1X is to test ARP spoofing the upstream radius server after associating, and self-authenticate.

It might be interesting to go and apply some of the sneaky packet injection mechanisms in this paper actually to try to bypass ARP spoofing defenses.
by parliament32 | 2026-02-26 18:51:55+00:00
Note that watermarking (yes, including text) is a requirement[1] of the EU AI Act, and goes into effect in August 2026, so I suspect we'll see a lot more work in this space in the near future.

[1] Specifically, "...synthetic audio, image, video or text content, shall ensure that the outputs of the AI system are marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated", see https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/50/
by kvinogradov | 2026-02-26 18:52:04+00:00
We all - the OSE donors - are donating personal savings to make this work, and are directly interested to make this org as efficient as possible. Having skin in the game is best way to keep such nonprofits accountable. There is no leftovers or fees - all investment income from donations goes to open source, except for minimized operating expenses (e.g. accounting). It is run by the team of volunteers without salaries, and we require $1000+/year donations from all directors of this org.
by silveira | 2026-02-26 18:52:18+00:00
I still remember using Palm OS for the first time and having my little mind blown away because there was no save buttons (at least in the version and apps I was using). You edited a document and that's it, it was saved. Like writing on paper.

Nowadays a lot of applications behave like this but back then it was a very different from everything I had ever used.
by whit537 | 2026-02-26 18:52:46+00:00
Here are a couple salient portions of our IRS application to put your mind at ease. :^)

> In limited circumstances, the Foundation may make grants to organizations that are not described in IRC Section 501(c)(3), or to individual OSS developers, maintainers, researchers, and educators. These grants will support persons and organizations engaged in developing, maintaining, securing, documenting, or conducting research on free and open source software critical to public digital infrastructure.

> Any such grants will be made exclusively for charitable or educational purposes, with the Foundation retaining complete discretion and control over the use of funds consistent with Revenue Ruling 68-489.

[...]

> In addition to project-based grants, the Foundation will make recognition awards to individuals who have made extraordinary contributions to OSS serving as critical public digital infrastructure. These awards are analogous in structure and purpose to MacArthur Fellowships, the National Medal of Science, Pulitzer Prizes, and similar recognition programs administered by 501(c)(3) organizations.
by alwa | 2026-02-26 18:53:03+00:00
Then again, sophisticated manufactured electronics had long been cheap and available by the time somebody thought to create Arduino as a platform in the first place.

And people hack on assembly and ancient mainframe languages and demoscene demos and Atari ROMs and the like (mainly for fun but sometimes with the explicit intention of developing that flavor of judgment) today.

I predict with high confidence that not even Claude will stop tinkerers from tinkering.

And all of our technical wizardry will become anachronistic eventually. Here I stand, Ozymandius, titan of motorcycle repair, 16-bit assembly, and radio antennae bent by hand…
by taeric | 2026-02-26 18:54:09+00:00
I could see this as an argument for a heads up display. So, good for projecting directions onto a windshield or for having the glasses thing. But this? I don't see how a VR world helps anyone navigate the real world. That is, you seem to be saying the VR data is needed for AR usage. And I just don't see how those are helping each other too much.

I'm fully bought off on the "it would be fun" aspect. I don't see a value proposition for it, though.
by dd8601fn | 2026-02-26 18:54:15+00:00
I remember hearing “trek replicator” in things like pop mechanics, back in the 90s.

Then it was a lot of “self replicating printers” for quite a while, which never has been a real thing.

Certainly there’s utility in the technology, and much moreso if you’re making aircraft parts. And I love prototyping with my various machines.

But I agree, it has had far more than its fair share of hype at the home printer level.
by gopalv | 2026-02-26 18:54:31+00:00
> a clear explanation of a compression algorithm

The huffman tree, LZ77 and LZMA explanation is truly excellent for how concise the explanation is.

The earlier Veritasium video on Markov Chains in itself is linked if you don't know what a markov chain is.

I expected Veritasium to tank when it got sold to private equity & Derek went to Australia, but been surprised to see the quality of the long form stuff churned out by Casper, Petr, Henry & Greg.
by ge96 | 2026-02-26 18:54:43+00:00
I watch stuff related to photography/cinematography, fishing (creeks), hobby electronics stuff, cars. That's most of it. Some makers like Hyperspace pirate. Travel videos like Japan Maibaru travel is good. Music recommendations, search a song and click on the "Song name + mix". The travel stuff I don't travel myself but the mood/atmosphere is great like Japanese towns near coast lines.

It's funny being a developer you don't watch much developer content like Primogen though I'm jealous these guys can just talk into a camera and make money. It is a skill to be likeable/mass appeal, being entertaining.

I already know the ad anyway, "this video is sponsored by SquareSpace". Bro I'm not going to use square space alright, I'm going to go into VS Code, make a SPA, host it on S3, buy a domain, connect the DNS, setup up ALB, CDN, setup RDS, cognito and then I'll have a website. Oh I also need github actions to do the build and push out the new changes.
by goldsteinq | 2026-02-26 18:54:51+00:00
It keeps missing the fact that BlueSky, as of today, is not decentralized in any meaningful way. If tomorrow bsky.app (and/or PLC registry) goes dark, the network is dead. There’re no public alternative AppViews. Most users use centralized PLC IDs, which depend on the centralized infra. An extreme minority of users uses external PDSes.

https://blue.mackuba.eu/stats/

https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/

> We need to finish moving PLC into an independent org

Does not make it decentralized; instead creates a second centralized failure point.

> large scale “appviews” — the aggregating backends of apps — are still a bit too expensive and a bit too difficult to write

Which is an architectural limitation, because AppViews must store the entire network, and will only get worse.

It’s really weird to say that BlueSky is an example of “practical decentralization” when all of its decentralization serves no practical purpose at all.
by alexgarden | 2026-02-26 18:54:55+00:00
We're building in this space so I'll share what we've learned rather than what we sell.

The fundamental problem with Article 50 compliance isn't knowing the obligations — it's operationalizing them continuously. You can read Article 50 once and understand you need to: (1) notify users they're interacting with AI, (2) mark AI-generated content machine-readably, (3) disclose how decisions are made, and (4) maintain audit trails.

The hard part is proving you actually did all four, consistently, across every agent interaction, in a way a regulator can independently verify. Documentation gets stale the moment you deploy. Logs can be edited. Self-attestation is just a trust claim.

What we've found developers actually need:

Fail-closed defaults. If your compliance check fails or times out, the agent shouldn't silently continue. That's the gap most teams miss.
Machine-readable marking that's actually machine-readable. Not a disclaimer in the chat window — structured metadata a regulator's tooling can parse programmatically.
Tamper-evident audit trails. Append-only, hash-chained, so you can prove nothing was deleted or reordered after the fact. This is the difference between "we logged it" and "we can prove we logged it."
Cross-regulation awareness. If you're in fintech, DORA and AI Act overlap. If you handle personal data, GDPR and AI Act overlap. The compliance surface is the union, not the intersection.

The teams I've seen doing this well treat it as an engineering problem from day one — SDK presets, CI/CD integration, automated conformity checks — not a quarterly legal review.

157 days isn't a lot of runway.
by lern_too_spel | 2026-02-26 18:54:55+00:00
> You don't know that, and it's not reasonable to assume that. They all mostly caved, hence the letters of regret and the Twitter files etc.

I do know that, and what's more, I assert that you know that too. Hence, why you wrote "mostly" and why you have so far been unable to show any punishment.

The Twitter files also did not show any threat of punishment. The letters of regret came from Zuckerberg, who, as we have already seen, did not claim any punishment was threatened.

> That's called 'arguing in bad faith' and it's highly discouraged here.

Pot calling the silverware black.
by Waterluvian | 2026-02-26 18:55:07+00:00
I did this recently, and you know what I really loved about it? It's a great entry-level baking activity where the upside is that you have a pie (something you can gift or just eat!) and the downside is that you have a sort of cobbler.
You really can't !@#$ up a pie. Omelette is another good one. At worse you have scrambled eggs.

I mean, yes, at worse you burn your neighbourhood down and your dog runs away. But in terms of the more likely failure modes like screwing up the dough, breaking it, messing up how watery it is, etc. you can mostly just keep baking until it's done, mix it up, put into bowls, serve with ice cream, down the hatch.
by akramachamarei | 2026-02-26 18:55:29+00:00
> KF seems to have a vague goal of bullying bad people (in their view) off the internet

Has KF changed since I last checked? They had an explicit policy of "don't touch the poo"; that is, users mock and ridicule on the forum, but don't try to disturb the lolcows, unless they're committing crimes. That's what I saw; I lurked occasionally in the past. There's been a lot of misinformation about KiwiFarms since it became a minor news story, round about that time of the big DDoS attacks.
by ryandrake | 2026-02-26 18:55:50+00:00
For sure there would be a disincentive to "invest" in the area where you might lose the investment. That would be intentional. As a voter, I specifically don't want companies to be making those kinds of "investments" in my region. Go "invest" your dirty industry in China. If California's reputation for harshly regulating these things prevents these kinds of businesses from opening here in the first place, I consider that Working As Intended. We could make that reputation even stronger by not grandfathering things.
by blibble | 2026-02-26 18:55:51+00:00
> it's not technically difficult even if it is unethical.

kettle, pot, black?

I received the following spam last week from GitHub:

> Build AI agents with the new GitHub Copilot SDK

despite never granting consent for marketing material

(and yes, there's a GDPR complaint now working its way through the national regulator)
by famouswaffles | 2026-02-26 18:55:58+00:00
Customers stay at Netflix because it's cheap, what they're used to, and it has enough on the catalogue to keep people satisfied most of the time. And most of that catalogue is content they have no real ownership of, at least until the WB buyout is finalized. Netflix wasn't the first business internet forums were sure would be hit by ads, and it won't be the last.

This is just one of those things that is popular to say in these kinds of forums but has no bearing in real life. People are sticky with products they're satisfied with. They don't switch unless a competitor is:

- much cheaper

- much better

Neither of these is the case in the LLM consumer space. Nobody cares or notices that gemini topped the benchmarks for a couple months before being dethroned, and as far as new features and improvements is concerned, Open AI is the clear leader. All everyone did and still does is follow their lead, even down to the pricing model. Basically every single feature/model improvement you can think of in the LLM consumer space is something Open AI brought first and they get almost all the buzz from it.
by danorama | 2026-02-26 18:56:04+00:00
You can't scale up the Magic Kingdom, no. But Disney had a pattern going for a while where they opened a new Florida park every 10 years or so: 1971, 1982, 1989, 1998. That probably helped a lot. They've done some small expansions in the existing parks since then, but they're about 20 years behind in adding a new park. I think that's a huge part of the crowding issue now.

(Now Anaheim, there they're kind of hosed. No space to expand.)
by coryrc | 2026-02-26 18:56:06+00:00
Wider tires do not reduce axle weight.

Here in Seattle, the busy roads with older lanes used for buses are obvious, because they have two deep canyons while the lane next to them is fine. In fact King County Metro has to pay millions in fines to the state because the buses are excessively heavy.

No roads without bus traffic have the same type of damage.
by mjr00 | 2026-02-26 18:56:34+00:00
This is something I predicted when image/music/other creative art models first came out, as many were crying that art as a medium was dead thanks to Stable Diffusion. And it does seem like I've been right (so far).

The introduction of massive of low-quality creations has made high-quality art much more in demand. Low-quality AI art and music has become a huge blinking indicator that says "SLOP". Hand-made, uniquely styled, quality art now has a "luxury goods" vibe, and people are willing to pay a premium.
by an0malous | 2026-02-26 18:56:37+00:00
Ever wonder why YC has the "Describe a time you most successfully hacked some system to your advantage" question? It's because they select for founders that are willing to take advantage of legal gray areas. Airbnb repeatedly violated Craigslist terms of service and called it "growth hacking." Reddit stole content from Digg and faked users. OpenAI trains their models on copyrighted content.
by keiferski | 2026-02-26 18:56:40+00:00
1. I meant artists writ large, not specifically movies. My point being that community management, PR, having a brand, etc. are becoming a key element of an individual artist’s career. Examples of this abound – see the recent Markiplier film as a case in point. That movie did well because Mark’s audience wanted to help him, not because it’s such an original genius concept for a movie.

But even then – people obviously go watch movies because they like the actor/director involved. It’s not really clear why anyone would care about an AI actor. People want to watch people, not imitations of them.

The rest of your comments seem to be summarized as “it has gotten better and therefore it will eventually solve all problems it has now.” Which may be true in a technical sense, but again this is not taste.

A technical company like Space X really has nothing to do with this conversation, and I think you missed my point about it being uncool. It’s not about critics, it’s about culture at large.

At this point I think identifying a work as AI-created makes people instantly devalue it. We are rapidly approaching the point where no one wants to admit something is AI-created, because it comes with negative perceptions.

Originality comes from humans experiencing the world and interacting with it. What AI tool is a living being interacting with the world? None, of course. Hence the constant generic slop images of Impressionism or some other already-existing art style.

Just look at the images in the link: this is the best they can do? A kangaroo at a cafe in Paris? Could anything be more devoid of good taste?
by sukinai | 2026-02-26 18:56:41+00:00
AI memory is starting to behave less like a static notes file and more like a runtime dependency. If an agent depends on memory to retrieve prior decisions, project context, instructions, or compressed knowledge, then the quality of that memory directly affects the quality of the agent’s output. The problem is that memory systems often do not fail loudly. They degrade quietly through stale entries, duplicate memories, broken sync with instruction files like CLAUDE.md, missing logs, weak key structure, or oversized context that reduces retrieval quality.

This release came from a simple systems question: if we monitor infrastructure, logs, APIs, and databases, should memory also have observability? I wanted to experiment with a health check layer that treats memory as something inspectable and maintainable rather than a black box. The goal is not just to store context, but to detect when memory becomes unreliable, noisy, or inefficient before that degradation starts affecting the agent.
by ragall | 2026-02-26 18:57:05+00:00
> What's the point in discourse if not to change the other person's mind?

That was a question made at one of those public debates that the Oxford University likes to organise, and I think the answer if right on point: the purpose of discourse is to let the audience (or readers) reflect on an opinion, which takes time. It's *almost never* to change the opinion of the person you're debating. It's a given that most people that do like to engage in debate or public discourse are the kind of people that are unlikely to change their minds, and if ever they do, it won't be on the spot.
by bartoszu_ | 2026-02-26 18:57:14+00:00
Tech notes:
- Three.js/WebGL, custom scene/terrain pipeline
- UI in React
- some Authoring tooling is currently gated (dev flag), but I’m considering making the editor more public later

Known limitations:
- Some parts are still work-in-progress (e.g., postprocessing tooling UI is a placeholder)
by ShaneCurcuru | 2026-02-26 18:57:23+00:00
Open Collective (really Open Finance Consortium Inc.) is a US 501(c)(6) nonprofit that runs a payments and accounting platform, providing fund acceptance and budget services to a ton of different community collectives and funding groups, making it easier to connect funders with groups that are often not incorporated.

Open Source Collective is a separate 501(c)(6) organization that actively supports funders wanting to support FOSS projects or communities specifically. They share some board members, and they simply use Open Collective to do all the finance work, while also offering some level of advice and other IP holding services: https://docs.oscollective.org/welcome-and-introduction-to-os...

Open Source Endowment is different, in that it's soliciting 501(c)(3) donations, which the OSE board and membership will use for the endowment to choose FOSS projects/communities to provide grants for.

This topic should be a FAQ page on the OSE site, especially for funders who just want to donate "to some good FOSS" without knowing where to find it. When you donate to OSC, you pick specific collectives to give to (and it's not tax deductible). When you donate to OSE, you're giving to the endowment, that the OSE Members setup policies for how/where/when to provide grants to projects/communities (and it could be tax deductible).
by aeldidi | 2026-02-26 18:57:27+00:00
I've had better experience with LLMs translating than any bespoke translation tool, oddly enough. LLMs seemingly have a very good handle on regional varieties. As an example, I've never found a good translator for Lebanese/Syrian Arabic dialects, but ChatGPT was able to easily translate for me, even getting right some lesser used rural accent quirks which I didn't even know how to translate (similar to something like "y'all" in english).

To be fair, I wasn't using it in the way the parent comment described, for me I said: "this person speaking Lebanese/Syrian Arabic said something that sounded like [try my best to replicate the sentence]. What did they most likely mean?" and got a pretty much spot-on answer.

I wonder if this ability translates to other languages, but I wouldn't be able to tell. My Arabic is "good enough" to tell that the translations I got were good, but I'd be interested to here from someone who knows more if, for example fuzhounese translation is any good.
by porphyra | 2026-02-26 18:57:33+00:00
When film photography came out in the 1830s, painters and intellectuals were really mad about it commoditizing and cheapening images compared to paintings.

* On first seeing a photograph around 1840, the influential French painter Paul Delaroche proclaimed, "From today, painting is dead!" [1]

* Charles Baudelaire, in 1859: "As the photographic industry was the refuge of all failed painters, too ill-equipped or too lazy to complete their studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the character of blindness and imbecility, but also the color of vengeance. [...] it is obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy" [2]

[1] https://www.barnesfoundation.org/whats-on/early-photography

[2] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/10/16/photo-mortal/
by waffletower | 2026-02-26 18:57:35+00:00
The author writes as if he didn't know 'aider' even existed. "Vibe coding skipped that phase entirely" is dead wrong. What may be different is that the cycle was incredibly short before Anthropic made it mainstream with Claude Code. Gemini, definitely a Claude Code imitator, existed long before The New York Times knew what Claude Code was. Openclaw -- a decidedly different agentic AI application -- is part of another period where weirdos are playing with tools. Wait a year, and we can see the author write once again as if this phase did not exist.