MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by josephg | 2026-02-28 07:20:08+00:00
> Programming Rust does not mean I have to: buy into their marketing hype

> give the same smug lectures about "safety"

I'm often confused reading articles like this, which take for granted the existence of some "rust evangelism strike force" which goes after people on the internet for not liking rust enough.

The way people talk, it sounds like there's some insanely effective marketing campaign going on to promote rust everywhere. But I haven't seen it. Certainly not any more than any other technology people get excited about for awhile, like Go. Or docker when that launched.

Where are these comments? Can anyone give some actual links to these sort of comments people say online, which don't get immediately downvoted? The way people talk, these comments must be made in such large volumes that it seems very odd I don't notice them?
by EdwardDiego | 2026-02-28 07:20:10+00:00
1. Is a very hard question to answer, airborne lead pollution isn't fatal, but it does impact cognition. Perhaps ask yourself how many people lead lower quality lives because of it, and the flow-on effects from that lower cognition.

The people who did Freakonomics claimed that the drop in violent crime in the US in the 90s could be correlated to the phasing out of leaded fuel, but I'm not a statistician so can't speak to the accuracy of that correlation.

2. How would you even measure that? How would you define a better life thanks to a vehicle?

I feel like you're ice skating uphill a little given the deleterious effects of leaded fuels are well studied, but the question you're asking isn't.
by 9dev | 2026-02-28 07:21:27+00:00
It is absolutely unsafe to depend upon American companies, and I can guarantee you that all over the world, people are actively looking for alternatives already. You never know what happens next, things that used to take years happen in a single Truth Social post now, and no matter how twisted your worst nightmare scenarios look, this ridiculous band of crooks in charge of the USA manages to one-up them.
by MostlyStable | 2026-02-28 07:21:53+00:00
Even this most-charitable-possible (to DoW) explanation does not even come close to justifying the supply chain risk designation. It is absolutely enough (and honestly more than enough) for a contract cancellation and a switch to a competitor. DoW could have done that for any reason at all, or no reason at all. If they had issues with Anthropics terms, they 100% should have done that.

Nothing in the quoted text comes anywhere close to the realm of justifying the retaliatory actions.
by thayne | 2026-02-28 07:22:35+00:00
What about Ubuntu? Its a combination of work by volunteers and paid employees, it is distributed by a commercial company, and said company sells support contracts, but the OS itself is free.

And there are developers who are paid to work on various components of linux from the kernel, to Gnome, does that make it professional?

Is Android not professional, because you don't pay for the OS itself, and it is primarily supported by ad revenue?
by segmondy | 2026-02-28 07:22:57+00:00
Your last statement is false. A shady merchant never gets to keep the stolen money. The card issuer/bank refunds you immediately because of consumer protection laws. But that charge is immediately charged to the processor. The processor then gets the merchant involved in a dispute process. If the merchant loses the processor charges the merchant. One way they do it is to immediately deduct it from their current processed transactions. If the merchant is no longer processing, they will usually go try to claw it back from their bank account if they have no held reserves, and if they can't get it, they send the merchant to collection. At the end the merchant must eat the cost or the processor. So in your case, the bank didn't eat the cost. OpenAI certainly ate the cost and the chargeback fees.
by imiric | 2026-02-28 07:23:15+00:00
This is not something I would ever use. The idea of giving a probabilistic model the permission to run commands with full access to my filesystem, and at the very least not reviewing and approving everything it does, is bonkers to me.

But I'm amused by the people asking for the source code. You trust a tool from a giant corporation with not only your local data, but with all your data on external services as well, yet trusting a single developer with a fraction of this is a concern? (:
by dylan604 | 2026-02-28 07:23:20+00:00
Well, luckily for me and at least a couple of other people, we seem to have better imaginations than you. Must be boring at your place if you think taking a walk on the moon or going for a drive to see the sights is uninteresting.

It's the next step of progress. Did you suddenly become bored because you learned to walk after crawling? Sounds kind of like you did to me.
by Humanista75 | 2026-02-28 07:23:28+00:00
I call the 'enemy blocks' 'blocked cells', but I actually like 'enemy blocks' better! :)

Regarding changing the game dynamics by having power-ups appear as just another piece in the game, I think that would overcomplicate the gameplay and alter the flow of the game too much. I don't really see it as an option right now. I prefer the infinite game mode.

Thanks again!
by rvz | 2026-02-28 07:23:31+00:00
It's just a tool. But to some people, Rust is more like a religion than a tool and they let it define them to the point even the language maintainers disavow them.

At any point, if you provide any conterpoints or fair criticism towards the language objectively, just expect lots of fans to remind you that it is the best programming language ever created and yours is "unsafe" by default.
by epistasis | 2026-02-28 07:23:35+00:00
Such systems are nothing new, and are in fact the norm. The current system is perhaps even notable for how it has deviated from the past, and in particular Silicon Valley was a means for promoting some of the most selfless and poor into positions of great wealth and influence, especially going back to the Fairchild Semiconductor days. Always been greedy venal and immoral people here, but perhaps less than in other systems of power.

The stoics, people that Zuckerberg and others pretend to understand and follow, would have nothing but disdain for the lack of virtue that's apparent in those like Zuckerberg.
Show HN: Open Vernacular AI Kit – preprocessing for Indian code-mixed text
by sudhirgadhvi | 2026-02-28 07:24:47+00:00
Built an OSS toolkit to normalize mixed-script/mixed-language user text before LLM pipelines.
Focus is production use: API mode, Docker deploy path, language-pack interface, and evaluation snapshots.
Would appreciate feedback on data strategy, evaluation design, and integration patterns.
https://github.com/SudhirGadhvi/open-vernacular-ai-kit
by hvb2 | 2026-02-28 07:24:51+00:00
Do you want to put a dollar amount per kg to orbit on that? Because if you're spending orders of magnitude more, the expectations also go up, no?

And mind you, SLS isn't a new system. It's old space shuttle engines. It's old solid rocket boosters that were extended by a segment. So, it should be cheap and fast?

I think the point here is really that SLS should be a walk in the park. Mostly old tech, reused with not a lot of innovation.

Starship might not have put a real payload into orbit yet but it has already delivered vastly superior engine technology (full flow staged combustion), a new way to land rocket boosters to allow for reuse and many more smaller things.

If you're going to innovate, things will not be smooth because you're learning things. You should be celebrating those achievements, especially as it didn't cost you a dime
by Onavo | 2026-02-28 07:25:11+00:00
I will make it simpler to understand. There is only one thing that make or breaks package resolution: do you support diamond dependencies and when.

A diamond dependency is when you have package A depending on package B and C. B depends on package D@v1 while C depends on D@v2. V1 and V2 are incompatible versions of D. This is a classic dependency conflict problem and whether you can resolve it automatically and bundle both packages into the final codebase/binary is the most important architectural decision of the package manager.

Package managers/ecosystems that support diamond dependencies in most circumstances:

Npm (as long as it's not a peer dep), Golang, Rust, Java/.NET (with shading enabled, it's not turned on by default).

With diamond dependency support, in most circumstances you can have arbitrary depth /complexity of dependency resolution.

If you don't support diamond dependencies (basically the rest of the world, Python, Ruby, Dart, Elixir, most lisps in their default setup, statically linked C/C++ in default configurations, maybe Zig too, I am not sure about that one), your dependency tree size is severely limited and it becomes a pseudo SAT problem in some case if you want optimal dependency resolution.

This is the core algorithmic and architectural limit on package managers. Almost everything else is just implementation and engineering details. Stuff like centralized vs non centralized repos, package caching proxies, security hashes, chains of trust, vendoring, SLSA/SBOM etc. can all be bolted on as an after thought but supporting conflicting upstream dependencies simultaneously requires compliance on the bundler/transpiler/compiler level.

It's also why some languages lend themselves better to tools like Bazel that micromanages every single dependency you have while others do not.
by whyagaintango | 2026-02-28 07:25:48+00:00
It is conundrum that passkeys were designed to help the majority as they are frictionless (like passwordmanagers etc) but fail in reality.

Even those that have 2 devices they don't have them all the time.

Another overlooked issue is that some banks etc don't allow for 2 devices as login or 2FA. Even if it allowed one needs to keep the spare device always updated. Either Govt needs to build a common API that one can use directly through google pay or apple pay - so that only one app is needed to be kept up to date.

to be honest, I wouldn't mind if google/Apple can take all my private data and passkeys hold them - but at least then if I lose the phone - and I show my ID they should allow me to setup my new phone. But that is also not possible. (I am discounting the awful AI bans)
by stevekemp | 2026-02-28 07:26:00+00:00
He's done a lot of things, but for my money the "Scrapheap Challenge" show was his best.

(This is a show where two teams are left inside a scrapheap and given a day, or so, to build a contraption/device.)

He was just so enthusiastic about all the teams, and seemed genuinely interested in both the design, the building, and the performance of whatever it was they were being challenged to build.
by api | 2026-02-28 07:26:51+00:00
What a gift to the deeply unpopular Iranian regime. Nothing galvanizes support for whatever-you-have more than an external threat.

Think about it. If someone actually bombed or invaded the continental US you'd have woke libs cheering for Donald Trump.

The Iranian regime may fall, but it'll be like Iraq. We'll get something like ISIS out of it, or worse, and the place will be a complete basketcase of civil war for 25+ years. Or we'll be there for 25 years in another "forever war." Bravo.
by 18al | 2026-02-28 07:27:25+00:00
Depends on how the transformer has been trained. If it has seen 11 digit examples while training it might work, else the input will be out of distribution and it will respond with a nonsensical number.

For instance the current high score model (311 params [0]), when given 12345678900 + 1, responds with 96913456789.

An interesting experiment would be: what's the minimum number of parameters required to handle unbounded addition (without offloading it to tool calls).

Of course memory constraints would preclude such an experiment. And so a sensible proxy would be: what kind of neural-net architecture and training would allow a model to handle numbers lengths it hasn't been trained on. I suspect, this may be not be possible.

[0] https://github.com/rezabyt/digit-addition-311p
by dijit | 2026-02-28 07:27:49+00:00
I like Rust, though I’m not zealous about it.

Sometimes when you have a really good tool, you want to share it.

This was the case with Linux for many people over many years.

FWIW I agree that the community has some frustrating elements, and that its a lot of dogma in comments, though I actually think that’s a fringe element.
by wolframhempel | 2026-02-28 07:29:01+00:00
As a former soldier and as someone who married into a family from the now russian occupied parts of Ukraine i feel that this is a great mindset, but also somewhat of a luxury believe. I agree that ideally we'd stand up to aggression and weapon production and that all other citizens around the world would do the same, and we'd live in peaceful equilibrium.
But they don't- and so our best bet is to be so strong that no one wants to attack us. For that, we can't leave the cutting edge of military technology to others.
This mindset used to be anathema to the tech community, but then briefly changed after the Russian invasion of Ukraine as people briefly understood that there are in fact aggressive actors in the world and war might come to us. But it seems we went back on that.
by Paracompact | 2026-02-28 07:29:51+00:00
Fair enough. I disagree somewhat with your characterization of why the youth wants these things (for example, I have never, not once heard of an American advocating for child benefits in order to "be freed from the obligations of marriage"; it typically comes from people anxious that you cannot support a family on a single earner, and wanting to spend more time with kids), but I'll grant that individualism is alive and well in the US, and has been at least since the boomers.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-28 07:29:58+00:00
I disagree that the model is a moat; distillation of models is going to happen, and even without it all the current players have models that are virtually indistinguishable for the use-case.

Model capbilities have converged over time, and I don't see this trend reversing. OpenAI owns only the model.

The provider who does have a moat is Google - they own the entire vertical, from the hardware, to the training data, they have it all.

OpenAI has to buy GPUs, Google makes them.

OpenAI has to rent data centers. Google owns them.

OpenAI has to scrape the web for all training data. Google's collection of user emails (not counting their Android data harvesting, ad data harvesting user-tracking, etc) alone gives them a ton of training data which will never be available to scrapers.

Google has billions of signed-in users, OpenAI has to market to and attract users (800m user count last I checked, but also last I checked that growth was asymptotic and flattening out).

Thats what a moat looks like. Better technology and/or results has never been, in my memory, a moat.
by antonvs | 2026-02-28 07:30:58+00:00
> Most errors are not type errors.

If you follow good strong typing principles, you can ensure that most errors are type errors. Yaron Minsky’s phrase, “Make illegal states unrepresentable”, captures this. But it doesn’t happen by accident just because you’re using a strongly typed language.

Also, if Cloudflare had run the standard Clippy linter on their Rust code, and taken the results seriously, it would have prevented the issue you referenced. Static checks don’t help if you ignore them.
by yonran | 2026-02-28 07:31:26+00:00
I don’t know how ReadableStream.tee() got specified to backpressure when the faster branch is not consumed, since this is the opposite of what nodejs does when multiple Writables attached via Readable.pipe() and also the opposite of what the requirements document (https://github.com/whatwg/streams/blob/e9355ce79925947e8eb49...) says: “letting the speed of the slowest output determine the speed of the tee”.

I like the idea of the more ergonomic, faster api in new-stream with no buffering except at Stream.push(). NodeJS and web streams put infinitely expandable queues at every ReadableStream and WritableStream so that you can synchronously res.write(chunk) as much as you want with abandon. This API basically forces you to use generators that yield instead of synchronously writing chunks.
by segmondy | 2026-02-28 07:31:57+00:00
This is a good time to promote running your own models. I have been running my own models locally and I would wager a local model will meet 85-95% of your needs if you really learn to use it. These models have gotten great. For anyone wanting to get into this, the smartest models to run recently that is consumer friendly was just released, checkout Qwen3.5 the 27B and 35B variants. They are small and I recommend running full Q8 quants. The easiest way to run these without dealing with complex GPU is to get a mac. For the example I gave, a 64gb mac will handle it well. If you are really cash strapped then you can manage with a 32gb but will have to run with less resolution quants. If you are not cashed strap, then get at least a 128gb and if possible a 256gb. The models are so good you will regret not getting a better system. You can join the r/LocalLlama community in reddit to learn some more. But this is pretty easy. Grab llama.cpp, grab a gguf quant from huggingface.co - the unsloth quants are great - https://huggingface.co/unsloth/models
by stevekemp | 2026-02-28 07:32:22+00:00
Poland withdrew from the Ottawa Convention last month, with the aim of being able to lay anti-personnel mines along its eastern border.

Whether it does or not is an open-question, and while I understand it of course, the idea we're increasing the use of mines is a sad day. They're so indiscriminate and will no doubt cause injuries far into the future.
by epsters | 2026-02-28 07:33:01+00:00
Trump launching bunker-busters on his midterm chances. Which depending on how bad it goes, potentially means impeachment and prison. Whatever it is the Israelis have on him, it must be good.

Works out great for Netanyahu though as is customary. He can be PM for a while longer and stave off his own impending trial and imprisonment. If this goes well for Israel, he might even get that pardon that Trump campaigned for tirelessly.
by Baljhin | 2026-02-28 07:33:19+00:00
"This is a list of privacy-respecting front-ends to popular online services, including social media, streaming and information services. All of the options are cross-platform webapps and should work on your device no matter the OS or hardware."

Also @ https://codeberg.org/duyfken/alternative-front-ends

Updated from earlier efforts previously shared on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29662235

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29620275

There are also separate lists for Mobile, TV, and Desktop Front-ends.
by larusso | 2026-02-28 07:33:37+00:00
I for one might use these chats as an input for switching over to keep the learning process fast. For me it took a while for ChatGPT to get me. I know that other people delete memories because they want a clean slate experience with every chat. I use chatGPT mostly private (use claud code for work for instance) and I prefer that memories travel across chats.
by scarmig | 2026-02-28 07:33:59+00:00
> you'll never find altman saying anything like "our agreement specifically says chatgpt will never be used for fully autonomous weapons"

To be fair, Anthropic didn't say that either. Merely that autonomous weapons without a HITL aren't currently within Claude's capabilities; it isn't a moral stance so much as a pragmatic one. (The domestic surveillance point, on the other hand, is an ethical stance.)
by JuniperMesos | 2026-02-28 07:34:36+00:00
I actually don't think this is true. I do think that most programming errors are type errors, in the broader sense of one part of a system making one set of assumptions about the properties of some data, that aren't shared by another part of the system; and that would've been caught automatically by sufficiently sophisticated static correctness checking. I do not think that Rust has a maximally sophisticated type system (nor is it trying to), and while this is reasonable for Rust as a project to decide, I do expect that there will be languages in the future that do more complex things with type systems that might supplant Rust in some domains.

The Cloudflare incident was caused by a confluence of factors, of which code written in Rust was only one. I actually think that Rust code worked reasonably well given the other parts of the system that failed - a developer used unwrap() to immediately crash instead of handling an error condition they thought would never happen; when that error condition did happen the Rust program crashed immediately exactly as expected; and if Cloudflare decided that they wanted to ban not handling an error like this in their codebase, it's a pretty easy thing to lint for with automatic tooling.
by chrisfosterelli | 2026-02-28 07:34:49+00:00
I agree with what you're saying, but given the egos involved in the current admin there's a practical interpretation:

1. Department of War broadly uses Anthropic for general purposes

2. Minority interests in the Department of War would like to apply it to mass surveillance and/or autonomous weapons

3. Anthropic disagrees and it escalates

4. Anthropic goes public criticizing the whole Department of War

5. Trump sees a political reason to make an example of Anthropic and bans them

6. The entirety of the Department of War now has no AI for anything

7. Department of War makes agreement with another organization

If there was only a minority interest at the department of war to develop mass surveillance / autonomous weapons or it was seen as an unproven use case / unknown value compared to the more proven value from the rest of their organizational use of it, it would make sense that they'd be 1) in practice willing to agree to compromise on this, 2) now unable to do so with Anthropic in specific because of the political kerfuffle.

I imagine they'd rather not compromise, but if none of the AI companies are going to offer them it then there's only so much you can do as a short term strategy.
by arendtio | 2026-02-28 07:35:06+00:00
So now we are waiting for Anthropic to explain to us what Sam agreed to and what they rejected.

On the surface, it looks like both rejected 'domestic mass surveillance' and 'autonomous weapon systems', but there seem to be important differences in the fine print, since one company is being labeled a 'supply chain risk' while the other 'reached the patriotic and correct answer'.

One explanation would be that the DoW changed its demands, but I doubt that. Instead, I believe OpenAI found a loophole that allows those cases under certain conditions.
by Paracompact | 2026-02-28 07:35:26+00:00
> Would you agree it's less ominous, maybe even noble, when shit hits the fan though?

The "family first, others second" interpretation is, I think, even more problematic when shit hits the fan. In disasters, it never benefits a community to turn on itself. And in fact, I believe the natural human reaction to disaster is to become more altruistic rather than less; see "A Paradise Built in Hell" by Rebecca Solnit for more on this.

The actually noble interpretation of "family first" is "family first, my own priorities second," at least so long as it doesn't lead to unhealthy self-sacrifice.
by flyinglizard | 2026-02-28 07:35:45+00:00
One of the main reasons Iraq is like Iraq is the Iranian meddling and their proxy organizations which operate in Iraq with impunity. The Iraqi government is entirely subservient to the Iranians.

As the recent wave of protests in Iran came after the 12 days where Iranian regime was dealt a massive blow, I think your analysis is wrong. Iranians consider this an opportunity. Also, the scale of violence unleashed on the Iranian public by the regime is staggering; it’s not about the regime being simply “unpopular”.