MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by apothegm | 2026-02-15 14:07:13+00:00
Sell for cheap to big corporate farming conglomerates. At least until the market is so saturated that even the conglomerates have no use for more.

Meanwhile, a few here and there will be snatched up by people from coastal cities who have made enough to FIRE and have romanticized farming. They won’t grow significant crops but will raise a few chickens and goats and a garden full of cabbages and peppers.

If you had the right background and resources, you could probably make a killing buying up 80 acres for a pittance, carving it up into 5- or 10-acre plots with modern amenities (upgraded plumbing; solar; excellent internet) and pre-built facilities for small numbers of farm animals, and selling them off to that market with the value-add of instant community.
by Intermernet | 2026-02-15 14:07:56+00:00
This has been less true for the last 50 years. Archaeology as a field is very aware of this cultural bias, and the old school are mostly dead. Think of it like the doctors of 150 years ago prescribing "cucaine for ill humors". It's a pendulum, but it's settling.

These days it's seen as a dynamic decision tree. If such and such people had so and so technology, then the logical ways to achieve that are x, y and z methods. Let's look for evidence for those things and weigh up the probability of each. Importantly, let's not allow cultural bias to cloud that analysis by consulting with the closest living relatives of said people.

The problems are, amongst others, maintaining that lack of cultural bias, recognising that you have to allow for unknown paths to technology, and being aware that every deductive step exponentially expands the decision tree whilst simultaneously clouding the certainty.

This is why modern archaeology is actually highly averse to saying things are "true", but it's also very strong on saying other things are almost certainly "false".

Most things in this tree of dwindling probability are "false" , and it takes serious evidence, linking a bunch of deductive steps, to flip the consensus to "true".
by ivanjermakov | 2026-02-15 14:08:03+00:00
One day I decided to port my text editor to Windows. Since it depends on pcre2 and treesitter, these two libraries had to be provided by the system.

In the span of ~2hrs I didn't manage to find a way to please Zig compiler to notice "system" libraries to link against.

Perhaps I'm too spoiled by installing a system wide dependency in a single command. Or Windows took a wrong turn a couple of decades ago and is very hostile to both developers and regular users.
by guenthert | 2026-02-15 14:09:37+00:00
I was green with envy, when I saw how fast and smooth a C64 scrolled some text (iirc it was some machine code monitor). My Amstrad CPC464 had no text mode and the Z80A CPU was clearly overwhelmed with shifting the whopping 16KiB RAM of the graphics buffer or even just rendering a line of text.
by catapart | 2026-02-15 14:09:50+00:00
I completely hadn't considered the idea that QR codes could be made 3D (in fact, now I'm curious how much denser they can get, if you can both read and write them in 3D), but now that people have said it, it seems so obvious! I really like your follow up about using the error-correcting properties of it. A great feature that would be very unlikely to be realized in amateur 3d data implementation.
by clcaev | 2026-02-15 14:10:07+00:00
I choose to think our current political challenges are human nature and historic, but increasingly unmoored by modern social isolation and addictive media without the dampening love (and healthy stress) of community. Ubiquitous estrangement within families is tragic; poignantly, the recent TX home death of a UK daughter by her father raised few eyebrows, let alone atonement or a societal reckoning. The prevalence of school shootings are another modern symptom. This runs very deep, there have been legal restrictions against extended households for decades, contractions of public spaces (libraries, malls) and barriers to community environments. We don't connect with neighbors let alone strangers: Amazon delivers to the doorstep. Now we even have AI "friends" trained by far off people with maligned incentives as our closest companions. We have forgotten how to cooperate. This isolation is toxic to the soul, it cannot and will not end well.

We urgently need 180° pivot, towards vibrant human-centered community centers and surrounding commercial districts within a few short blocks or a few minute gratis bus ride. This isn't luddite -- modern technology needs to support a human world, not the inverse. These centers must become the foundation of a renewed civics and democratic revival.

Technology is a necessary scaffolding for a modern, human-centered revival, especially with communication, logistics, transportation, and certainly democratic deliberation. Even so, universal participation in a slow-moving and bottom-up representative government with anonymous paper ballots is essential to restore the consent of the governed and relative peace.
by throwup238 | 2026-02-15 14:10:46+00:00
Whats the deal with this artwork? I got into Pokemon as a kid in the late 90s* including all the Gameboy games through Sapphire/Ruby and I don’t remember any of this washed out art (like the Ditto example, it’s always been pink!).

Did I just miss this phenomenon entirely because I grew up right before it became big on the internet?

* I think I’ve still got a VHS tape of the promo material Nintendo used to originally introduce Pokemon to the US.
by UncleMeat | 2026-02-15 14:11:13+00:00
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when reading all of these "what is the big deal about being in the Epstein files" takes.

Like, there are people asking for Epstein's advice on how to fuck women that they have huge positions of authority and saying that she is "doomed" sleep with them. And these people haven't lost any material status yet! There are people asking Epstein for help suing feminists who sought to share stories of workplace sexual harassment. And there are tons of people who have publicly said "I was never friends with Epstein" all but making doe-eyes at him in their emails.

And suddenly we have a raft of "oh is it bad to have friends" and "don't all men want to fuck 16 year olds" articles coming from all corners. Insane.
by rawgreaze | 2026-02-15 14:11:22+00:00
>Defeating the dragon of the network effect would be a great victory for human empowerment in the 21st century.

Creating the network effect was the greatest loss we had in the 21st century. We used to be able to use XMPP to talk to Google Hangouts, Facebook Messenger and all sorts, and they took it away, just so you'd have to use their shitty little program instead.
by billyboy123 | 2026-02-15 14:11:48+00:00
File sharing using Scarepoint is incredible. Incredible bad, that is. Everything is stored in mssql server behind the scenes, in the most inefficient way you could imagine. Scarepoint is the opposite of seamless, number of wasted man-years on it must certainly be in the millions, if not billions. Its ”wiki” sucks. It’s bad software that not even ms themselves want to touch, that’s why many of their other server softwares have migrated away from using it.
by catapart | 2026-02-15 14:12:24+00:00
Wow! Now that's some outside the box thinking. That even seems to suggest that "watermarking" a print (or a small, hard to notice part of a print) would be possible.

I also think you could get denser storage that way? I guess depending upon how thick the "wire" is? But it's an interesting idea for both just printing the wire, and for the driver-teeth imprinting, separately. Very cool!
by vee-kay | 2026-02-15 14:12:34+00:00
You need to research better before forming and sharing wrong opinions about world's most popular payments system: UPI.

UPI will work even without a smartphone, it will work on even with a basic feature phone, using USSD codes! That's called UPI 123PAY.

https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/news/upi-without-smartphone-...

This feature allows rural populations, poor people, small merchants, etc., to send and receive UPI payments, even without a smartphone.

So UPI has no dependency on Google or Apple, it can work on any basic phone that supports USSD codes feature!
by luoxiaojian | 2026-02-15 14:13:09+00:00
Author here. Appreciate the context—just wanted to add some perspective on the 8K QPS figure: in the VectorDBBench setting we used (10M, 768d, on comparable hardware to the previous leader), we're seeing double their throughput—so it's far from trivial on that playing field.

That said, self-reported numbers only go so far—it'd be great to see USearch in more third-party benchmarks like VectorDBBench or ANN-Benchmarks. Those would make for a much more interesting comparison!

On the technical side, USearch has some impressive work, and you're right that SIMD and cache optimization are well-established techniques (definitely part of our toolbox too). Curious about your setup though—vector search has a pretty uniform compute pattern, so while 100+ custom kernels are great for adapting to different hardware (something we're also pursuing), I suspect most of the gain usually comes from a core set of techniques, especially when you're optimizing for peak QPS on a given machine and index type. Looking forward to seeing what your upcoming release brings!
by anvevoice | 2026-02-15 14:13:17+00:00
Cool project! MCP-based TTS is a neat approach for giving agents a voice output channel.

One thing I've been exploring in the voice AI space is going beyond just speech output — making the voice agent actually interactive and able to navigate context on a website in real-time. For example, having the voice agent understand what page the user is on and guide them through actions (like booking a demo or finding pricing), not just read text aloud.

The latency challenge is real though. We found that keeping end-to-end response under 500ms requires a pipeline approach: streaming STT → intent classification → pre-cached response segments → TTS. Buffering even 200ms of audio before playback makes a huge perceptual difference.

What's your latency like with the MCP speak tool? And are you thinking about bidirectional voice (listening + speaking) or mainly output?
by JPKab | 2026-02-15 14:13:37+00:00
"One sticking point, however, is who’s backing the company: Peter Thiel, the cofounder of ICE-approved surveillance firm Palantir."

This article is entirely motivated by left-wing politics. It's that simple. I just wish they would come out and say it instead of pretending it's about privacy.

If a company that wasn't owned by a guy that is associated as right-wing was doing the same thing, this article wouldn't be sitting here.

The Epstein guilt by association parts? Yeah, that creep was a hyper networker and leveraged that as a tactic.

And in SV, nobody is in those files more than Reid Hoffman.

He didn't just go to the island dozens of times he went to the ranch.

But he donates money to the Democratic Party and is anti-Trump so we don't see articles on HN smearing everything connected to him, do we?

It's all politics. All of this.

It is a constant stream of political activism masquerading as journalism. It's like this all over the SV tech space.
by anvevoice | 2026-02-15 14:13:45+00:00
Nice architecture choices — SQLite + sqlite-vec keeping things simple is underrated. The kernel/adapter pattern is smart for multi-channel support.

One area worth exploring: voice as a channel. We've been building voice AI agents for hospitality and service businesses, and the data is striking — voice interactions convert at ~47% higher rates than text chatbots for things like booking confirmations and upsells. Guests just prefer talking, especially for complex requests.

The escalation engine you describe (AI handles 80%, hands off 20%) maps perfectly to what we see. The key insight we found is that the handoff needs to carry full conversation context + detected intent + emotional tone. Otherwise the human agent starts from scratch and the guest gets frustrated.

Re: the security concern from @chrisjj — that's a real issue. We use a multi-agent approach where different agents handle different trust levels. The booking-modification agent requires identity verification through a separate flow before it can touch any reservation data. Worth considering a similar trust-tiered approach.

How are you handling the "AI confidence" threshold for escalation? Fixed rules or dynamic?
by anvevoice | 2026-02-15 14:14:07+00:00
Interesting approach — unifying identity across channels is a real pain point for AI agents. Most teams end up building custom integrations for each channel and the identity mapping becomes a mess.

Curious about the voice piece specifically: are you handling the full voice pipeline (STT/TTS/telephony) or more of an identity layer that sits on top of existing voice providers?

We've been working on voice AI agents that operate directly on websites — the identity challenge there is different but related. The agent needs to maintain context across a voice session while the user navigates between pages. We ended up using a session-based approach where the voice agent tracks user intent and page context simultaneously, which gives it enough "identity" to be useful without requiring login.

The multi-channel unification you're doing would be valuable for bridging that — e.g., a user starts a voice conversation on the website, then continues via Telegram later. That handoff is where most AI agent experiences break down.
by codingdave | 2026-02-15 14:14:10+00:00
80 acres sounds big to people who don't live in the country, but is fairly small potatoes when it come to agricultural land. Such parcels will get consolidated into nearby large operations/corporations. Sometimes that is a corporate farmer, sometimes a local family or two just hoovers up land as it becomes available. But there is no guessing needed - land ownership will consolidate.
by anvevoice | 2026-02-15 14:14:37+00:00
This latency discussion is incredibly relevant to real-time voice AI applications. When you're building a voice agent that needs to respond conversationally (not just generate text), the inference speed directly determines whether the interaction feels natural or robotic.

In practice, humans perceive conversational pauses >800ms as awkward. So for a voice pipeline (STT → LLM inference → TTS), you have maybe 400-500ms budget for the LLM portion. At typical Sonnet speeds (~80 tok/s), you get ~35 tokens in that window — barely enough for a sentence. At Cerebras/Groq speeds (1000+ tok/s), you get 400+ tokens, which changes what's architecturally possible.

This is why the small-model vs. big-model tradeoff matters so much for real-time applications. We've found that a well-tuned smaller model with domain-specific context can outperform a larger model for constrained tasks (like navigating a user through a website or answering product questions), while staying within the latency budget. The "council" approach — multiple specialized small agents instead of one large general agent — lets you get both speed and quality.

The speculative decoding point is underrated here. For voice AI specifically, you can predict likely response patterns (greetings, confirmations, common Q&A) and pre-generate TTS for those, then only hit the full inference pipeline for novel queries. Gets you sub-200ms for ~60% of interactions.
by phatfish | 2026-02-15 14:15:55+00:00
Doesn't everyone have a digital ID already?

My passport has biometrics, the government knows everything about me already through the tax system which is "digital". All my other interactions with the government are through digital services.

What exactly would a digital ID allow a government to do that it can't already? Apart from solve all the issues with having to provide scans of (my already digital) ID documents to every bank/solicitor/mortgage broker/estate agent/etc i interact with, where in many my personal ID documents probably sit on a company file share or some random persons One Drive.

A government digital ID with a one-time code to complete verification would solve all of this nonsense.

On control, again, what possible super power would a "digital ID" give a government that it doesn’t have already to control you?
by esperent | 2026-02-15 14:16:03+00:00
TL;DR the author is afraid their programming skills will atrophy.

Fair enough, but it's a specific part of programming that will atrophy: the actual writing of the code, which as every experienced programmer will tell you, is only one of many parts to being a software developer.

Meanwhile, other skills will develop more strongly: architectural thinking, and also how do set up strong guardrails to ensure your code keeps working while the agent goes to town on it.

I've learned more about automated testing in the last few months than I did in the past decade and I finally see why TDD and especially e2e tests are such a big deal - something which I'm sure every person who has managed a project with lots of contributors would understand already, but I was never in that position before.

So yes, my skills at writing code probably are in decline, just as any skill I'm not actively using. But that's fine, my overall, collective level of skills is as high as it's ever been.

And whenever I send an agent of to do a big task that'll take 15 minutes or more, that's a great time to go and read the Playwright docs, or study some articles on code architecture. Or go and take a walk or do some stretching. Honestly, I find (mostly) not having to write the code itself liberating.
by anvevoice | 2026-02-15 14:16:27+00:00
The observation about "automated coding but not software engineering" maps directly to what we're seeing in production AI systems beyond code generation.

We hit this exact wall building voice AI agents. A single monolithic agent handling conversation, navigation, and intent recognition was the "vibe coded" approach - it worked for demos but fell apart in production. The fix was the same architectural discipline the article describes: decomposing into specialized agents with clear boundaries and explicit handoff protocols.

What's interesting is that the "dark flow" phenomenon shows up in agent design too. You get a conversational agent that sounds great in testing, handles 80% of cases smoothly, and you ship it. Then you discover the remaining 20% creates cascading failures because the agent confidently handles things it shouldn't. The invisible failure modes are identical to what the accounting automation commenter described - no crash, just subtly wrong behavior.

The meta-lesson: whether you're generating code or building AI-powered products, the bottleneck was never typing speed or token generation. It's the architectural thinking, domain modeling, and failure mode analysis that makes systems actually work. The engineers who understand this are the ones building reliable AI products, not just impressive demos.
by jcgrillo | 2026-02-15 14:16:36+00:00
I've made bowdrills for fire starting with hand twisted hickory cordage. Soaking the bark makes it easy to separate the inner bark, which you then tear into long strips and twist into rope with a "reverse wrap"--basically twist until it curls back on itself then give the "bundle" a half twist back to lock it in. I'm sure many species of tree would work similarly.

That is to say there's nothing special about rope, you can make it with nothing but your bare hands.
by well_ackshually | 2026-02-15 14:17:04+00:00
> is there really a need for a native programs anymore

As long as you don't give a shit about the fact that your baseline memory consumption is now 500MB instead of 25MB, and that 80% of your CPU time is wasted on running javascript through a JIT and rendering HTML instead of doing logic, no.

If you don't give a shit about your users or their time, there's indeed no longer a need to write native programs.
by JPKab | 2026-02-15 14:17:21+00:00
Garry is a good person and smearing people over their church is a disgusting thing to do.

I am now going to sit here and listen to this talk because I guarantee it's not saying what you think it's saying. And I don't want to listen to it. It's not a topic that interests me. But I guarantee you are completely distorting what was stated in that topic for maximum effect, entirely motivated by left-wing politics.
by palata | 2026-02-15 14:19:24+00:00
> Get serious. Nobody's going to look into forks

At this point you just sound like you want to complain. I was saying that opening a PR is a nice way to share a patch, and all you get from it is an opportunity to complain about how difficult it may be to find a patch in a fork.

> Yeah, but if I have moral standards and care about not wasting those interested people's time

This has nothing to do with moral standards. I have benefitted multiple times from old, unmerged, outdated PRs. Because if someone fixes a bug, the valuable part is understanding what is going wrong and how to fix it. An outdated PR saves me that time.

> If I didn't do that, then I would be a hypocrite.

Not at all. You just have a very weird way to look at it.
by tgtweak | 2026-02-15 14:19:24+00:00
Toolchains on linux are not clear from dependency hell either - ever install an npm package that needs cmake underneath? glibc dependencies that can't be resolved because you need two different versions simultaneously in the same build somehow... python in another realm here as well. That shiny c++ project that needs a bleeding edge boost version that is about 6 months away from being included in your package manager. Remember patching openSSL when heartbleed came around (libssHELL).

Visual studio is a dog but at least it's one dog - the real hell on windows is .net framework. The sheer incongruency of what version of windows has which version of .net framework installed and which version of .net your app will run in when launched... the actual solution at scale for universal windows compatibility on your .net app is to build a c++ shim that checks for .net beforehand and executes it with the correct version in the event of multiple version conflict - you can literally have 5 fully unique runtimes sharing the same .net target.
by dredmorbius | 2026-02-15 14:19:30+00:00
Erosion, water damage, freeze-thaw cycles, foundation settlement (these are literally mountains of stone built on sand), vandalism and other intentional damage, floodplain evolution.

That last is particularly noteworthy as the Nile famously floods on an annual basis, and that itself is the basis for Egyptian civilisation as those floods created what is still one of the most fantastically productive breadbaskets of the world. Ancient Rome relied on Egypt for grain, and even today demographics data and more vividly night-time satellite light-pollution imagery reveal the Nile as a highly-populated ribbon within a sea of darkness and desolation.

The pyramids have withstood multiple risks for many thousands of years. Despite their simple and rugged overall architecture, that remains impressive.
by IgorPartola | 2026-02-15 14:20:15+00:00
I recently started looking into Zulip and while I can see that it is a complete product its mobile UI is so cluttered and funky I don’t understand how anyone could use it. The desktop web UI seems OK but try this on your phone: https://zulip.com/new/demo/

They have the iOS Safari problem with the keyboard and body scroll, tiny icons, super busy UI. I was hoping to help some folks move off Discord to something else and Zulip is not what I would volunteer to do support for when the users are not techies. Heck, as a techie my eyes glaze over looking at it. I really wish it was slicker and more usable but it simply isn’t.