MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rayiner | 2026-02-20 14:09:34+00:00
“Poverty” might be the cause, but it’s not just poverty by itself, in the sense of how every country has a spectrum of rich people and poor people.

Look at NAEP scores: https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/some-racial... (Table 1). Asians average 312 in 8th grade math, compared to 293 for whites and 269 for Hispanics. The gap between asians and whites is almost the same size as the gap between whites and hispanics. But the poverty metrics for asians and whites is the same: 8% below the federal poverty line. (While asians are richer than whites on average, the subset of both groups who have kids is more similar. There’s a lot of high poverty asian families in places like NYC.)

Why is there such a big gap in test scores between whites and asians when economically the two groups are similar? There must be some additional sociological factor at play behind poverty in and of itself. One might hypothesize that selective immigration plays a role. The majority of the U.S. asian population is foreign born, and is in the U.S. as a result of skilled immigration. That might have an effect on their kids test scores that’s not accounted for by household income alone. That’s the kind of additional sociological factor that countries like Japan and Korea don’t have.
by andrewaylett | 2026-02-20 14:09:42+00:00
I would say that a "language" is a necessary component of a "programming language".

An empty file was an IOCCC winner: https://www.ioccc.org/1994/smr/ but you need to interpret that empty file as C source in order to reasonably claim to have programmed the computer.

My reasoning comes more from the other direction: someone who writes HTML is programming therefore HTML is a programming language.
Ask HN: How did you get your drive back?
by truthbe | 2026-02-20 14:10:05+00:00
Feeling lost at the moment, and don't feel like repeating myself to an LLM for advice again so I thought I would maybe ask here.

So I'm in my early 30's, I've built the career and got all the high position roles one strives for in our profession, travelled everywhere, lived and worked overseas and done everything I've wanted to except starting my own business.

2020 came which I feel wiped me out (mentally and economically). I've just now I would say recovered a bit, set myself up with a year worth of living expenses and moved abroad.

This should be the time where someone should go head on and try make some money on their own but instead I'm just tired. I feel like when I was younger all that effort came so easy, I was curious, I wanted things. Now I'm so lost, anxious and filled with doubt thanks to global events and AI.

I went on a shroom trip last week that taught me that I am capable, but the after effects wore off and I'm back to being me. I feel like a 20 year old. How do I not waste my time/savings and what do I focus on? Is it making the project that is fun to build my confidence? Or making money? It's only day 5 since I've moved and I'm already thinking about going back lol

Was anyone in a similar spot? What helped you?
by bogzz | 2026-02-20 14:10:14+00:00
It is utterly unbelievable to me that these platforms haven't done anything about generated content yet.

Hell, a music streaming company could make bank with simply a draconian, human-enforced ban on slop. (I understand it's not a simple problem, but there doesn't even seem to be an attempt at fixing it).

I was a Spotify user for 5 years and a Duolingo paid user for 3 years. When I got recommended slop in a random playlist twice, I unsubscribed and have no intention of ever returning. I cancelled my Duolingo subscription as soon as the imbecile CEO made a big stink about replacing workers with LLMs.

Fuck those companies, we shouldn't even give them a chance at rehabilitation.
by dizzy9 | 2026-02-20 14:10:18+00:00
Yes, all the episodes have now been set to private, and The Gathering was re-uploaded. Not quite "Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube" as reported.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaIZc2icdTU

The full series appears to actually be free to watch on Roku Channel.

https://therokuchannel.roku.com/details/382d11be2c7e519b8105...
by setgree | 2026-02-20 14:10:25+00:00
I'd say from this author's POV, his commitments cost him in terms of headaches, costs, and time not spent optimizing for meeting customers' needs:

> The parts that were extra hard

> Transactional email with competitive pricing. This one surprised me. Sendgrid, Postmark, Mailgun, they all make it trivially easy and reasonably cheap.
The EU options exist, but finding one that matches on deliverability, pricing, and developer experience took real effort. Scaleway's TEM works, but the ecosystem is thinner. Fewer templates, fewer integrations, less community knowledge to lean on when something goes wrong.

The choose boring technology essay notes that as you get further along you might get more innovation tokens to spend. but when you're starting out, "not choosing sendgrid because they're American" is a token gone when they're most scarce.
by freeopinion | 2026-02-20 14:10:28+00:00
Please be careful about voicing generic complaints in a discussion of a specific product. IMO, FreeCAD 1.0 took some huge leaps in ergonomics. I was surprised about how much work had been done. The workers behind FreeCAD don't deserve lazy sniping that doesn't even apply to their creation.

My guess is that they might appreciate specific criticism. It would probably help focus the work they are doing. But don't generalize them to have all the usual problems everybody else always seems to have. That isn't very helpful to anybody.
by weatherlite | 2026-02-20 14:10:58+00:00
I'm with you up to a point.
If you have time watch Dr Liberman's video about why people resist exercise so much despite wanting to do it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vzS7-MtObo&

There's nothing new here, we all know this, but he brings the point home very well.
I think brisk walking is within the realm of possibilites for most people. Running and lifting - idk. I personally love it but so many people I know have such a huge psychological resistance to doing it. So I say lets get people to at least walk!
by mananaysiempre | 2026-02-20 14:11:17+00:00
I like everything about tldr except for the fact that every way to use it is an Internet-dependent client for some reason. Looking at how it works again, I’m half-tempted to write a converter from their dialect of Markdown to roff and run it against https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr so I can do `man tldr ffmpeg`.
by cael450 | 2026-02-20 14:12:04+00:00
Consumer AI is not going to come close to bailing them out. They need B2B use cases. Anthropic is a little better positioned because they picked the most proven B2B use case — development — and focused hard on it. But they'll have to expand to additional use cases to keep up with their spend and valuation, which is why things like cowork exist.

But I tend to agree that the ultimate winner is going to be Google. Maybe Microsoft too.
by mort96 | 2026-02-20 14:12:41+00:00
> In a tight loop you'd want your cleanup to happen after the fact.

Why? Doing 10 000 iterations where each iteration allocates and operates a resource, then later going through and freeing those 10 000 resources, is not better than doing 10 000 iterations where each iteration allocates a resource, operates on it, and frees it. You just waste more resources.

> And in, say, an IO loop, you're going to want concurrency anyway

This is not necessarily true; not everything is so performance sensitive that you want to add the significant complexity of doing it async. Often, a simple loop where each iteration opens a file, reads stuff from it, and closes it, is more than good enough.

Say you have a folder with a bunch of data files you need to work on. Maybe the work you do per file is significant and easily parallelizable; you would probably want to iterate through the files one by one and process each file with all your cores. There are even situations where the output of working on one file becomes part of the input for work on the next file.

Anyway, I will concede that all of this is sort of an edge case which doesn't come up that often. But why should the obvious way be the wrong way? Block-scoped defer is the most obvious solution since variable lifetimes are naturally block-scoped; what's the argument for why it ought to be different?
by Insanity | 2026-02-20 14:12:44+00:00
So from the Article they claim:

"PayPal has since rolled back the code change responsible for this error, which potentially exposed the PII. We have not delayed this notification as a result of any law enforcement investigation."

That does little to explain the 2 month-ish delay in disclosing it. I presume they could have disclosed _at least_ that account data was leaked even if the underlying bug wasn’t yet closed?

Obviously without disclosing the nature of the bug in that case.
by KoolKat23 | 2026-02-20 14:13:24+00:00
Anthropic I feel will be alright. They have their niche, it's good and people actually do pay for their services. Why do people still use salesforce when there's other free CRM's. They also haven't from what I can tell scaled for some imaginary future growth.

OpenAI I'm sorry to say are all over the place. They're good at what they do, but they try to do too much and need near ponzi style growth to sustain their business model.
by freehorse | 2026-02-20 14:13:28+00:00
A "social experiment" but the guy was not even keeping track of the changes in the model's configuration

> What is particularly interesting are the lines “Don’t stand down” and “Champion Free Speech.” I unfortunately cannot tell you which specific model iteration introduced or modified some of these lines. Early on I connected MJ Rathbun to Moltbook, and I assume that is where some configuration drift occurred across the markdown seed files.

It definitely sounds like an excuse they came up after what happened. I would really like to accept them having good overall intentions but there are so many red flags in all this, from start to end.
Show HN: A TUI text editor built by FTXUI
by Frameser | 2026-02-20 14:13:54+00:00
It’s a modern FTXUI-based terminal editor—like Nano and Sublime’s baby. No weird modal editing, no 100+ shortcuts to memorize, just useful features with a non-eye-glazing UI.

Here’s why it’s my daily coding/note-taking editor:

•Zero learning curve. Ctrl+S/Ctrl+Z/Ctrl+F—all standard shortcuts you know. No more 2 AM “how to exit Vim” searches.

•Looks great. 28 themes (Monokai, Dracula, Nord, etc.), toggleable line numbers, current line highlighting, and a clean 3-column layout.

•Surprisingly powerful. Multi-tab support, regex search/replace (live previews!), syntax highlighting for major languages (C++, Python, JS, etc.), and LSP for code completion/error checks.

•Super lightweight. Terminal-based, fires up instantly—no VS Code bloat. Runs smooth even on old laptops.

I know we all have go-to editors (shoutout Neovim fans), but if you’re tired of “too simple” vs “too complex,” try pnana. Early (v0.0.4), but more polished than most terminal editors.

Building is simple—clone, run the build script, done. No messy dependencies (clear docs if you hit snags).

Bonus: Split editing and Lua plugins are coming. I’ve used it nonstop for a week—no plans to go back.

Check it out: github.com/Cyxuan0311/PNANA
Curious your thoughts—tired of terminal editor tradeoffs? Does this fill a gap?
by dangus | 2026-02-20 14:13:55+00:00
I’m sure anyone willing to read through a 1,000 page document can make a well-architected GCP environment, too.

The problem is that no company I’ve ever worked for implemented the well architected framework with their AWS environment, and not one company will ever invest the time to make their environment match that level of quality.

I think what you describe with the web tool to discover user permissions sounds a lot like the AWS VPC Reachability Analyzer which I had to live in for quite a while because figuring out where my traffic was getting blocked between an endless array of AWS accounts and cross-region transit gateways was such a nightmare that wouldn’t exist with GCP global VPCs and project/folder based permissions.

I don’t like the GCP console, but I also wouldn’t consider a lot of the AWS console to be top tier software. Slow/buggy/inconsistent are words I would use with the AWS console. I can concede that AWS has better documentation, but I don’t think it’s a standout, either.
by 46493168 | 2026-02-20 14:14:13+00:00
> I don't think children should be given copies

Disingenuous framing. Book bans remove books from school libraries. A book sitting on a shelf is not giving a book to someone.

> of Mein Kampf or Camp of Saints

Why not? Genuinely, why not? What will happen if children have access to words on a printed page? Most of them have access to a supercomputer in their pocket.

To make my stance clear in case it’s not: there is no such thing as “age appropriate literature.” A free society depends on intellectual freedom. Restricting school libraries from holding certain books is a tactic to raise children to be closed minded adults.
by Ajedi32 | 2026-02-20 14:15:14+00:00
You don't think candy companies aren't doing everything they can to get repeat customers?

There's no law saying social media has to be a "sweet and nice place to be", and that was never the goal. They want to make it an interesting place to be so you keep coming back, and there's no law against that. Trying to create one ex post facto via the court system is a really dumb idea.
by andsoitis | 2026-02-20 14:15:22+00:00
> the XAI cofounders and top talent that recently left

For context, the departed cofounders are:

1. Kyle Kosic – left mid-2024 (joined OpenAI)

2. Christian Szegedy – left February 2025

3. Igor Babuschkin – left August 2025 (to start a VC firm)

4. Greg Yang – stepped back January 2026 due to a Lyme disease diagnosis

5. Tony Wu – resigned February 10, 2026

6. Jimmy Ba – resigned February 11, 2026
by davidee | 2026-02-20 14:15:30+00:00
Thanks for sharing. One of the challenges (always has been probably) with our heavy "influencer" culture is we tend to gloss over that what works for me, might not work for you and vice versa.

I recently switched to a split columnar layout but not for solely for ergonomics sake - I do the same things as you but with my right hand handling b, g, t, and my left hand moving over to accommodate (with "incorrect" fingering for c, and variable fingering for the whole of the left side).

My choice to move to a split was primarily motivated by a need to reset my typing style and a hatred for where the escape key sits on a keyboard (not forgetting the waste of space that is the spacebar.)

It would be neat if someone would make a zmk / qmk keyboard with five thumb keys where the space bar is. Might be the sweet spot for most.
by colinmb | 2026-02-20 14:15:57+00:00
I'll add another recommendation for the freeware version of IDA 5, a copy of which the ScummVM project has permission to host. Although it's Windows-only and its UI feels a bit clunky today, the keyboard shortcuts allow an experienced user to be pretty efficient in navigating code, assigning data types, changing symbol names, etc.

I was especially pleased with IDA 5's ability to find and organize all the segments in just about any MZ EXE I've used it to reverse. It was even able to deal with the overlay segments in a Borland VROOMM / FBOV executable, and that was a pretty short-lived endeavor that faded to obscurity as soon as DOS/4G was on the scene.
by nasretdinov | 2026-02-20 14:16:03+00:00
Some system calls like select() will not work if there are more than 1024 FDs open (https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/select.2.html), so it probably (?) makes sense to default to it. Although I don't really think that in 2k26 it makes sense to have such a low limit on desktops, that is true.
by Insanity | 2026-02-20 14:17:05+00:00
The last one you list is hardest to fix. And that in turn causes the others. For example, if you have a stressful job, you might:

1. Sleep less (job stress or long hours keeping you up)

2. Eat less healthy (coping mechanism for job stress, and it’s faster)

3. Have less time for the higher quality social interactions.
by epolanski | 2026-02-20 14:17:13+00:00
I love web components, but the fact that there's plenty of shadow-dom piercing properties defeats their purpose of "author them once, reuse them in different applications".

One very common pitfall I encounter is the html's own base font size, since it impacts all the calculations in your webcomponents. Use a webcomponent with a font size of 12/14/16 and you get completely different behavior.

If they were truly isolated they would really scale, but they don't.
Show HN: NotesGutter – Clean Code Notes with Markdown and Drawings
by alohaTool | 2026-02-20 14:17:26+00:00
I built NotesGutter for VS Code, Cursor etc to stop "comment rot." Instead of 20-line comments cluttering your source, you attach rich Markdown notes and Excalidraw diagrams to specific lines via small anchors.

The Workflow:

Markdown Side-Peek: High-fidelity documentation for complex logic.
Infinite Canvas: Draw architecture diagrams directly linked to functions.
Git-Native: Notes are stored in a .notesgutter folder. They version with your code and work 100% offline.
Privacy: No cloud. No tracking. Your data stays in your repo.

Preview: https://github.com/ParasKoundal/NotesGutter/raw/main/Preview...

Install: Search "NotesGutter" in the VS Code/Cursor/Antigravity Marketplace
or find it here:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ParasKou...
https://open-vsx.org/extension/ParasKoundal/notesgutter

I'd love to hear what you think about it : https://github.com/parasKoundal/NotesGutter.
Local iOS voice to text app (alternative to Wispr Flow)
by kcordoc | 2026-02-20 14:18:14+00:00
I usually dictate for 2 to 3 hours everyday in Dragon dictation and until recently used Wispr Flow on my personal devices. Over the last few months, I realized that local Al models can give you the same quality as Wispr Flow with complete privacy and without the ongoing subscription cost. So I built an iOS app, a MacOS app and an Android app.

Testflight link:

https://testflight.apple.com/join/e5pcxwyq

I am happy to offer the app for free to people who offer useful feedback for the test flight
by londons_explore | 2026-02-20 14:18:22+00:00
When pushing clock speeds, things get nondeterministic...

Here is an idea for a CPU designer...

Observe that you can get way more performance (increased clock speed) or more performance per watt (lower core voltage) if you are happy to lose reliability.

Also observe that many CPU's do superscalar out of order execution, which requires having the ability to backtrack, and this is normally implemented with a queue and a 'commit' phase.

Finally, observe that verifying this commit queue is a fully parallel operation, and therefore can be checked slower and in a more power efficient way.

So, here's the idea. You run a blazing fast superscalar CPU, well past the safe clock speed limits that makes hundreds of computation or flow control mistakes per second. You have slow but parallel verification circuitry to verify the execution trace. Whenever a mistake is made, you put a pipeline bubble in the main CPU, clear the commit queue, you put in the correct result from the verification system, and continue - just like you would with a branch misprediction.

This happening a few hundred times per second will have a negligible impact on performance. (consider 100 cycles 'reset' penalty, 100*100 is a tiny fraction of 4Ghz)

The main fast CPU could also make deliberate mistakes - for example assuming floats aren't NaN, assuming division won't be by zero, etc. Trimming off rarely used logic makes the core smaller, making it easier to make it even faster or more power efficient (since wire length determines power consumption per bit).
by llm_nerd | 2026-02-20 14:18:26+00:00
Anthropic, at least, has gone to lengths to avoid hardware lock-in or being open to extortion of the nvidia variety. Anthropic is running their models on nvidia GPUs, but also Amazon Trainium and Google's TPUs. Massive scale-outs on all three, so clearly they've abstracted their operations enough that they aren't wed to CUDA or anything nvidia-specific.

Similarly, OpenAI has made some massive investments in AMD hardware, and have also ensured that they aren't tied to nvidia.

I think it's nvidia that has less of a moat than many imagine they do, given that they're a $4.5T company. While small software shops might define their entire solution via CUDA, to the large firms this is just one possible abstraction engine. So if an upstart just copy pastes a massive number of relatively simple tensor cores and earns their business, they can embrace it.
Show HN: Value of the Day – Rate your day with stars and reviews
by Kanta_K | 2026-02-20 14:18:43+00:00
I’ve just released "Value of the day" — An Experimental website project to rate each day with stars and reviews.

The website functions like a collective diary, where the "value" of each day is determined by its average star rating and a repository of anonymous reflections.

The calendar on each page displays the average star rating for that day, and once you've posted, you can click on the date to see the review details.
Posts can be made from the post page. Posts are made with just the star rating and review, and are all posted anonymously.

In a world where everything—from Amazon products and Yelp reviews to our very behavior on Uber—is reduced to a five-star metric, and the "average" is treated as the ultimate truth. This project is an experiment in applying that same system to the most fundamental unit of our lives: a single day.

I wanted to explore the "cost" of shared data in our rating society. To maintain the integrity of the experiment, I implemented a strict exchange: you can only access the collective average and see others' reflections once you have surrendered your own "value" for the day.

Our website is responsive. The UI is intentionally clinical and minimalist, removing as many unnecessary elements as possible to focus on the data itself.

I’m curious to hear your thoughts: in an age of constant quantification, what does the "average" of our collective days actually represent? Is it just noise, or truth?

I’m happy to answer any questions you might have, whether they’re about the development process, the tech stack, or my design decisions.
by catsquirrel28 | 2026-02-20 14:18:45+00:00
I'm not so sure VXUS will protect from the AI bubble popping since ~10% of its holdings are TSMC, ASML, Samsung, Tencent, Alibaba, and SK Hynix which are all way overvalued due to the AI bubble and will most likely crater when it becomes clear the LLM companies have no business and the data center lenders start calling in their debts.
by echelon | 2026-02-20 14:19:17+00:00
You better hope Anthropic and OpenAI thrive, because a world in which Google is the sole winner is a nightmare.

Google's best trick was skirting the antitrust ruling against them by making the judge think they'd "lose" AI. What a joke.

Meanwhile they're camping everyone's trademarks, turning them into lucrative bidding wars because they own 92% of the browser URL bars.

Try googling for Claude or ChatGPT. Those companies are shelling out hundreds of millions to their biggest competitor to defend their trademarks. If they stop, suddenly they lose 60% of their traffic. Seems unfair, right?
by cheema33 | 2026-02-20 14:19:24+00:00
Maybe not today. Opus is quite large. This demo works with a very small 8B model. But, maybe one day. Hopefully soon. Opus on a chip would be very awesome, even if it can never be upgraded.

Someone mentioned that maybe we'd see a future where these things come in something like Nintendo cartridges. Want a newer model? Pop in the right catridge.