MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by somenameforme | 2026-02-17 04:32:57+00:00
The US was a large country with normal demographics in the era of Vietnam, fighting a war with low deaths - less than 60k over 15 years of war. Ukraine is a fraction of the size of the US, was already in a major demographic crisis before the war started, and is fighting a war where they are suffering high death rates.

This [1] is a population of pyramid from Ukraine 2 years ago. It's going to look dramatically worse now. They simply don't have many people below the age of 25. And you shouldn't just view those people as fodder. That is essentially the future of Ukraine. Send them off to die and you literally and figuratively send the future of Ukraine off to die.

So the two wars aren't especially comparable at all.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ukraine2024.jpg
by kldg | 2026-02-17 04:33:11+00:00
it all takes years. it takes years for permitting to open up the power plant to run the chips. at the scale the Big 3/4 (google, amazon, microsoft, and meta-ish) are going, we don't actually have the capacity to BUILD the capacity, despite a forecast of just 1% national electricity consumption growth this year, partly because we were expecting electricity demand to slow down and for an orderly shutdown of our fossil fuel plants. we couldn't even fill >100GW of gas/coal turbine orders over the next 5 years if we had to, and we might have to, because some of our grids (notably PJM's) are forecast to be under their safety margin of over-production in the following years.

meanwhile, regional grid operators are faced with Big Tech driving tens of % of total power into private contracts where there's only one customer; they are making the decisions normally reserved for nation-states, right? reopening Three Mile Island sounded like a pipe dream a few years ago. I hear They have something like 50 more experimental, small-scale NPPs they want to fire up across the country in the next few years, too (but despite sounding like a big boon for energy, they're ~meaningless short-term in the face of how much demand we're looking at). -so this power (uh, literally) gets wrested away from the grid authorities and from what was largely the domain of government, to now be managed by techbros and a select few partners who will be reliant on their money; I'm sure that will work out fine.

anyway, part of the reason it does make some sense in the US for the government to push for more coal/LNG turbines, is because they're already there and we need them now; the permitting to un-mothball, prevent mothballing, or expand facilities, is far less arduous than what a company'd have to go through for a new facility (tho again, we don't have capacity to build all the turbines we require inside 5 years anyway). I'm not saying it's a good idea to start sending up more GHGs, but it's maybe better than pricing out electricity for residences and "real" industry. hey, who knows? maybe they'll simply build natural gas pipelines that don't leak this time.

-oh, and then there's the problem with these new datacenters disrupting the traditional power demand curve, because they don't really do as much peak draw anymore; their peak draw is approaching base load, as LLM batching (when a company has a bunch of stuff they want processed and can wait a day for it to run in "off-hours") is sold, and if unsold, that time can be used as training time; so the modern datacenter is a 24/7/365 organ; the heart, powering our society, Moltbook. the importance of this is it makes solar less financially attractive, because now we need to be able to bank more energy since more demand's shifting to overnight. we might also want to consider just getting the moon really, really hot? then we can get a truly substantial haul of lunar light for our panels. you know, we decided against nuking hurricanes again recently; maybe we could build some new ones and nuke the moon, a lot.
Show HN: How do you reliably benchmark sub-100ns code paths in Rust
by yousef06 | 2026-02-17 04:33:26+00:00
Hi everyone,

I just finished coding the core version of this library called Cuttlefish written completely in rust. It’s a CRDT inspired framework that packs stuff like io_uring, SIMD, zero copy pipelines etc.. Here’s what it is:

So most distributed systems are strong consistency but the tradeoff is latency. Cuttlefish is a coordination-free state kernel that preserves invariants and constraints at the speed of your L1 cache.

Correctness here is defined by a property of algebra. So if your operations commute, you don’t need coordination. If they don’t, you know at admission time in nanoseconds, or at least it’s supposed to.

Running a full benchmark suite triggered the following results:

Full admission cycle: ~40ns
Kernel admit: ~13 ns
Causal clock dominance: ~700 ps
Tiered hash verification: ~280 ns
Durable admission: ~5.2 ns
WAL hash: ~230 ns

On my CPU though (r5 7600x), I measure 40 ns full cycle including causality check, but I’m not sure of my benchmark setup because most of it was written by AI. How are other people measuring sub-100 ns rust code paths reliably?
Repo: https://github.com/abokhalill/cuttlefish
by refurb | 2026-02-17 04:34:06+00:00
Huh?

Article is about facial recognition.

Comments says "I'm scared to go to the US because of...<article>"

I response with a comment about the facial recognition and how every other country I've been to does it, but for some bizarre reason, it's not those countries OP is worried about, it's the US.

It's cognitive dissonance.
by dcrazy | 2026-02-17 04:34:14+00:00
I’m barely halfway through the post, but I am already compelled to advocate the author to start pitching the USGA on using this to replace manual course ratings. Also, OP runs a labor of love in golfcoursewiki that democratizes basic info like green contours that are usually locked away behind annual subscriptions. They deserve a shoutout.

Some info for non-golfers: every golf course has a “course rating” and a “slope.” Course rating is essentially the “true par” of the course for a “scratch golfer” (a golfer who normally shoots par). The “slope” is a measure of how much worse less-talented golfers score compared to a scratch golfer. These numbers are used to compute a golfer’s “handicap,” which lets them compete fairly against more- or less-skilled players in tournaments.

Course ratings are currently assigned by people measuring distances from the tee box to various points of trouble and then to the green. This makes course length the dominant factor by far in terms of course rating. If we adopted something like scoofy’s inverse strokes gained metric, course ratings would become far more accurate, and they would become much cheaper (asymptotically approaching free) for courses to obtain. (Currently courses must pay to have their course rated.)

My previous best idea for fixing this was just to use the scores reported by players every day to nudge the rating toward its “true” value. But that would be subject to a lot of conflation that this simulated approach is not.
by overgard | 2026-02-17 04:34:21+00:00
Unintentionally mean sounding statement but...

From my observation, the people that are the most excited about AI are low skilled/unskilled people in that domain. If said people treated AI as a learning tool, everything would be great (I think AI can be a really effective teacher if you're truly motivated to learn). The problem is those people think they "now have the skill", even though they don't. They essentially become walking examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect (the cognitive bias where people with limited knowledge or competence in a particular domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence)

The problem with being able to produce an artifact that superficially looks like a good product, without the struggle that comes with true learning, is you miss out on all the supporting knowledge that you actually need to judge the quality of the output and fix it, or even the taste to be able to guide the agent in good patterns vs poor patterns.

I'd encourage people that are obsessed with cutting edge AI and running 5000 Claude agents simultaneously to vibe code a website to take a step back and use the AI to teach them fundamentals. Because if all you can do is prompt, you're useless.
by ChristopherDrum | 2026-02-17 04:35:05+00:00
Author here, and thanks for reading. I'm glad to hear stories from a developer POV about those days. It's interesting uncovering subtle interface changes as I investigate various applications. It makes sense to me to not use Return for fields, especially when fields could gradually accommodate longer and longer blocks of text. Being able to naturally type multiple paragraphs, say for a "Notes" field in a database, would make sense.
by anvevoice | 2026-02-17 04:35:52+00:00
The latency bottleneck with local post-processing is interesting. Sending a screenshot to a vision LLM is expensive, but you don't actually need full image understanding for most context-aware corrections.

A lighter approach: use the accessibility API (NSAccessibility on macOS) to grab the focused app's text content — window title, selected text, nearby field labels, recipient names in mail composers. That gives you ~90% of the useful context as a small text prompt that a 1-3B parameter local model (like Qwen2.5-1.5B or Phi-3-mini) can process in under 500ms on Apple Silicon's Neural Engine.

The screenshot path is only really needed for non-standard UIs where text isn't programmatically accessible. Splitting the pipeline into a fast text-context path (common case) and a fallback vision path would get you sub-2s end-to-end locally, while still handling edge cases gracefully.

This is essentially the same pattern used in assistive technology — screen readers have solved the "what's on screen" problem without vision models for decades.
by UqWBcuFx6NV4r | 2026-02-17 04:36:28+00:00
Then it’s not the work of 100 people, is it?

You’re arguing semantics. OP is hypothesising a future where the quality of work is comparable to that of a human. If you don’t believe that that’s on the cards, just say it, but you’re intentionally misrepresenting the hypothetical.
by wqtz | 2026-02-17 04:36:48+00:00
I do not understand what bubble even means, and I do not think the developer influencers do either.

Was NFT or Crypto a bubble? The idea of a bubble means that it "pops" in a dramatic fashion. NFT prices in aggregate faded slowly, and the impact it has only applies to a handful of individuals. Moreover, the behavior we have seen with crypto and nft can largely be speculated that the purpose was largely illicit financial engineering.

If a handful of bad PRs "are destroying open source," Open Source as a concept is surprisingly in a vulnerable project. No project worth its salt ever integrates unverifiable PRs. No valid OSS ever integrates uninvited PRs in the first place. Every PR is driven by an issue or a very robust that is specific description. Any project that receives an "unsolicited" PR does not make the project maintainer yell "Oh, I am ruined."

I have stopped checking out these programming content videos for the last year or so. But I stupidly did it here. Every single channel has become like Coffeezilla with an agenda, being AI as a catalyst of great harm.
by anonymousiam | 2026-02-17 04:37:15+00:00
Within the past two years, I began leaving BT turned off on all of my devices unless I needed it. It means that I need to pause a moment to turn it on when I get in the car, use my headphones/airpods, or other BT devices.

For me, it's worth the extra trouble because I noticed a significant reduction in battery life on my mobile devices. The reduction coincided with the rollout of Apple's "Find My" service, which was followed by Google's "Find Hub" service. (I have devices in both ecosystems.)

I wish there was a separate way to opt out of the "Find" services, but AFAIK, even if you opt out, your device may still relay traffic from other nearby devices. So it seems that the only way to preserve device battery life is to just shut off the BT.
by majormajor | 2026-02-17 04:37:18+00:00
> People want better cars, and that costs more. The government demands lower emissions, that costs more. Safety costs more. There is no world where you get all that for the same percentage of income.

Hell, we did it with computers. Let's figure out how to do it in more places.

Isn't that supposed to be the main job of the economy? Increase productivity? So that we all get more for less? Make the pie bigger, don't just make your own slice bigger?

If there's "no world" where all that can happen, most of the "taxes will hurt innovation, actually" arguments fall EXTREMELY hollow. Let's connect a few dots:

- Streets are in disrepair

- You can't afford the lifestyle you used to (by "choice")

- It's far harder for people, especially the young, to find a job (many end up hiding on disability and such that didn't exist much several decades ago in the first place)

- The wealthy have more money, and proportionally more money, than any time in the last century

Maybe instead of choosing the more expensive car we should start choosing to put some of that money to use repairing our basic infrastructure and trying to increase whole-society productive output instead of bottom-line ROI.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-17 04:37:34+00:00
The silicon backplanes are also soldered on (advanced) PCB backplanes, so they are just interposers.

I do not think that using various kinds of silicon bridges warrants a change in name. It should be fine to call any such product that uses multiple chips as a MCM (multi-chip module). Even for consumer CPUs, MCMs have already a long history, e.g. with AMD Bulldozer variants, or with the earlier Pentium and Athlon that had the L2 cache memory on a separate chip.

The word "chiplet" is relatively new and its appearance is justified for naming a chip whose purpose is to be a part of a MCM, instead of being packaged separately. A modern chiplet should be designed specifically for this purpose, because its I/O buffers need very different characteristics for driving the internal interfaces of the MCM, in comparison with driving interfaces on a normal PCB, i.e. they can be smaller and faster.
by pavon | 2026-02-17 04:39:30+00:00
The BBC spent 5 years making a documentary and just finished. They had no idea that the US would in its current state when they started. That doesn't free them from criticism of the content, but the timing is a coincidence.

I haven't watched the video (linked from the article) and I certainly hope the current events caused them to reflect on whether pushing for DHS to have more power is wise, but the last line in the article doesn't give me much optimism.
Show HN: CodeGraph CLI – Chat with your codebase using graph-augmented RAG
by al1nasir | 2026-02-17 04:39:54+00:00
Hey HN!

I built CodeGraph CLI because I was tired of grep-ing through
massive codebases trying to understand how things work.

It combines three things:
- tree-sitter (AST parsing, error-tolerant)
- SQLite (dependency graph: nodes + edges)
- LanceDB (vector embeddings, disk-based)

The key insight: pure vector search misses structural
relationships. So I combined vector search with BFS graph
traversal — find semantically similar code, then expand
to dependencies/dependents.

Result: ask "how does authentication work?" and it finds
validate_token(), its caller login_handler(), AND the
dependency TokenStore — because it understands both
meaning AND structure.

Other features:
- Impact analysis (multi-hop BFS: what breaks before you change it)
- Multi-agent system via CrewAI (4 specialized agents)
- Visual code explorer (browser-based)
- Auto-generate docs/READMEs
- 100% local-first (works with Ollama, zero data leaves machine)
- 6 LLM providers (Ollama, OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, Gemini, OpenRouter)
- 5 embedding models (from zero-dependency hash to 1.5B code model)

Quick start:
pip install codegraph-cli
cg config setup
cg project index ./your-project
cg chat start

MIT licensed. Python 3.9+.

Happy to answer questions about the graph-augmented RAG
architecture or any technical decisions.
by kstenerud | 2026-02-17 04:40:29+00:00
Putin is a symptom, not the problem.

The problem is that Russia is the one surviving major imperialist state (as in annexing land) of the four that existed in the 1930s. We defeated the other three and rebuilt their constitutions, but we didn't have the manpower or the will to do this to Russia as well.

And so, Russia continued in its imperialist tradition: Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine, and next Moldova and Lithuania if they're not stopped.

The West naively believed that commerce would tame Russia, but an imperialist is never satisfied with riches and friends - only land gives them a true sense of status.

And so we must learn this painful lesson yet again.

Killing Putin would only make a temporary dent. The only way to stop this kind of beast is to destroy and rebuild like we did with Italy, Germany, and Japan.
by verdverm | 2026-02-17 04:40:33+00:00
Not sure about Rust, I assume it's going to be the same, my PhD advisor gave me an inline C assembly snippet I could use to do cycle accurate benchmarking.

It used counters on the CPU, something super basic like reading those registers into a var.

---

You can probably take the above to a coding agent or LLM and get what you need back.
by WillPostForFood | 2026-02-17 04:41:10+00:00
$9,000 salary in 1970 would be $75,000 today

That's actually in the range of what contractors make today.

Some sources:

GLassdoor: 67k https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/contractor-salary-SRCH_KO...

Finturf: 75k https://finturf.com/blog/how-much-do-contractors-make/

BLS: 91k https://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/construction-managers.htm...
by lelanthran | 2026-02-17 04:42:31+00:00
> A "contributor must show they've read the contributing guide" gate (like a small quiz or a required issue link) would filter out 90% of drive-by LLM PRs.

Having a no brown M&Ms rule will only work temporarily.

The LLM can read the guidelines too, after all.

Better might be to move to emailed PRs and ignore github completely. The friction is higher and email addresses are easier to detect and record as spammers than github accounts.
by cookiengineer | 2026-02-17 04:43:19+00:00
Note that within the European Union, no legal entities can have copyright, only natural persons can have it. See copyright directive (2001/29/EC and 2019/790) that introduced that law. Companies cannot have copyright either, only a perpetual license in exchange for salary/financial payment.

I just wanted to mention that because even contracts in Germany by German companies can be fought over this because of misperception of the law.

The whole bet on "AI" (LLM agents) is that it is considered fair use which is US specific law, that doesn't even apply to most countries.
by JSR_FDED | 2026-02-17 04:44:55+00:00
While I buy the idea that some of the high polygon work will shift to the LLMs, I have two problems:

1. For humans to take care of the pruning and managing of the AI output requires so much understanding and is so taxing on the human that this doesn’t really seem viable.

2. How is the next generation of developers going to develop these big picture skills? Unless they pay their dues doing development the traditional way.
by notpushkin | 2026-02-17 04:45:35+00:00
One benefit that FOSS provides is that there’s more eyeballs on the source code, so yeah, it’s a very strong trust signal. But sometimes priorities are a bit different, and ultimately you need to trust something.

IMO it still makes sense to personally vet browser extensions and trust the OS/browser:

1. It’s hard to create a new operating system or browser, so we don’t see many new ones. (Not taking into account Firefox forks / Chromium reskins here.) For browser extensions, the entry barrier is much lower, and the chance that one of them will be malicious is higher.

2. It’s also much harder to audit all of Linux, or Firefox/Chromium, especially if you’re not too familiar with the domain. For browser extensions on the other hand, it’s usually possible to go through them in one night.
by hedgehog | 2026-02-17 04:46:02+00:00
Most Ryzen 395 machines don't have a PCI-e slot for that so you're looking at an extension from an m.2 slot or Thunderbolt (not sure how well that will work, possibly ok at 10Gb). Minisforum has a couple newly announced products, and I think the Framework desktop's motherboard can do it if you put it in a different case, that's about it. Hopefully the next generation has Gen5 PCIe and a few more lanes.
by Treblemaker | 2026-02-17 04:46:35+00:00
Similar amount of experience with tcl here (since dc_shell-t was released). I love working in tcl. It can be expressive, redable, sufficiently performant, and makes it easy and fast to develop and test new features and functions in even very complex EDA design flows with 100k lines of code.

I find it curious that so many of the criticisms of tcl are that it doesn't have some feature or behavior of some other language. That has never stopped me from accomplishing what is needed with clear, elegant code.

Rule #10 in the Dodekalogue [0] explains why your preferred comment style is not supported: a command is not expected immediately after the last argument of the previous command. Terminate the command per rule #1 and it is perfectly fine:

puts "Hello" ;# A comment

Isn't that the same number of characters one would type to start a javascript comment? //

Almost any programming language can be beautiful in its simplicity if you work with it on its own terms. tcl doesn't deserve the hate.

[0] Dodekalogue is the common name for the twelve rules that define the syntax and semantics of Tcl. https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Dodekalogue
by appplication | 2026-02-17 04:48:18+00:00
The problem with this, and why SO’s downfall was completely self-inflicted, is that the correct answer from 2013 is only occasionally still the correct answer in 2018. There are a lot of other issues with SO’s general moderation policy but well and truly it was as idiotic and myopic as it was toxic.

They treated subjective questions about programming methods as if they were universal constants. It was completely antithetical to the actual pursuit of applied knowledge, or collecting and discussing best practices and patterns of software design. And it was painfully obvious for years this was as a huge problem, well before LLMs.

That said, I will say after being traumatized by having my threads repeatedly closed, I got so good at boiling down my problem to minimal reproducible examples that I almost never needed to actually post, because I’d solve it myself along the way.

So I guess it was great for training me to be a good engineer in the abstract sense. but absolutely shit at fostering any community or knowledge base.
by tombert | 2026-02-17 04:48:56+00:00
For now at least. Given Nintendo's efforts to get rid of Yuzu and Ryujinx I think it's likely that the legal days may be numbered. All they have to do is get it in front of the right judge(s) and the precedent by the Connectix and the Bleem lawsuits is undone.

Not that I particularly care if it's legal; I seriously doubt anyone is going to break into my house to seize my MiSTer as contraband, but I think it's entirely possible that emulation progress stalls because it's forced to move into the shadows.