MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mikkupikku | 2026-02-17 11:10:55+00:00
The price jump between subscription tiers is so high that relatively few people will upgrade instead of waiting a few more hours, and even if somebody does upgrade to the next subscription level, Anthropic still has an incentive to provide satisfactory answers as quickly as possible, to minimize tokens used per subscription, and because there is plenty of competition so any frustrated users are potential lost customers.

I swear this whole conversation is motivated reasoning from AI holdouts who desperately want to believe everybody else is getting scammed by a gambling scheme, that they don't stop and think about the situation rationally. Insofar as Claude is dominant, it's only because Claude works the best. There is meaningful competition in this market, as soon as Anthropic drops the ball they'll be replaced.
by zadikian | 2026-02-17 11:11:34+00:00
Sometimes I wonder if the endgame is each person having their own XMPP server for their set of devices. S2S is your E2EE then. Your chain of trust is your existing CA, unlike Matrix which starts from scratch. Cause XMPP wasn't designed from the start for clients not to trust servers, plus the fragmentation of C2S extensions was always a pain.

It's not a bad solution if someone can make it easy, even if it's a managed service that just lets tech-savvy users export it to self-hosting if they want.
by bayindirh | 2026-02-17 11:11:36+00:00
Even though things go better than before, we discuss history with my life a lot, there are things going worse than before. The spectrum is widening and better is better than before and worse is worse than before.

"People love hearing negative things" is something in our nature, that's correct. However, putting them aside and chalking this as "business as usual" is not the correct thing to do.
by aadarshkumaredu | 2026-02-17 11:12:00+00:00
Exactly. Agents drift fast-internal state just can’t be trusted over long chains, and prompt rules degrade immediately.

Curious; have you seen drift follow a pattern, like step count or constraint complexity?

We’ve tried hybrid setups: ephemeral agent state plus external validation gates. Cuts down rollbacks while keeping control tight.

Would love to hear if anyone else has experimented with something similar.
by beng-nl | 2026-02-17 11:12:08+00:00
I share the instinct. but I think we might be wrong directionally.

Looking at history, every time a tool automated part of our work (I’m thinking of calculators, high-level languages, libraries, frameworks) people warned that skipping fundamentals would be fatal. But
None of those transitions made understanding obsolete.

If AI coding agents are different, and not knowing how it all works becomes an unrecoverable error, as you imply, that would be a first. So I am inclined to side with history and guess that a best of both worlds exists. In which, sadly, hand coding is practically gone (I don’t like it either).

We shouldn’t use agents as blindly as the prompt might invite of course. A new engineering discipline will likely emerge: one focused on supervising, validating, and shaping what the agents produce.

Believe me, i do have mixed feelings about all this. I love writing code with my hands. But we shouldn’t fight the tide; we should build a different boat.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-02-17 11:12:34+00:00
In Codona's Amusement Park in Aberdeen in the late 90s, there was a Ridge Racer "cabinet" with three massive rear projection screens and an ACTUAL REAL MAZDA MX5 TO SIT IN.

WHAAAAAAAAAT

Seriously insane levels of money-no-object zero-fucks-given design.
by wongarsu | 2026-02-17 11:12:57+00:00
The number of HDDs sold has been in decline for over a decade. I doubt there is massive appetite for expanding production capacity

On the other hand the total storage capacity shipped each year has risen, as a combination of HDDs getting larger and larger, and demand shifting from smaller consumer HDDs to larger data center, enterprise and NAS HDDs. I'm not sure how flexible those production lines are, but maybe the reaction will be shifting even more capacity to higher-capacity drives with cutting-edge technology
by jasode | 2026-02-17 11:13:09+00:00
>Looks very much like a format that should just have been gzipped JSON.

For application file formats that require storing binary blob data such as images, bitmaps, etc , many in the industry have settled on "SQLite db as a file format": (https://www.sqlite.org/appfileformat.html)

Examples include Mozilla using sqlite db for favicons, Apple iOS using sqlite to store camera photos, Kodi media player uses sqlite for binary data, Microsoft Visual C++ IDE stores source code browsing data in sqlite, etc.

Sqlite db would usually be a better choice rather than binary blobs encoded as Base64 and being stuffed into json.gzip files. One of the areas where the less efficient gzipped JSON might be better than Sqlite is web-server-to-web-browser data transfers because the client's Javascript engine has builtin gzip decompress and JSON manipulation functions.
by mort96 | 2026-02-17 11:13:12+00:00
Easier for the developer or easier for the computer?

Computers need to do it a bunch for every program launch for every single user of macOS for decades. The developer just needed to write a generator and a parser for the format once.

Would it have been a bit easier to write a parser for a format that's based around a zip file with a manifest.json? I don't know, maybe. You'd end up with some pretty huge dependencies (a zip file reader, a JSON parser), but maybe it'd be slightly easier. Is it worth it?
by iso1631 | 2026-02-17 11:14:05+00:00
> I’m just afraid that prices of $everything will go up soon and will not come down anymore, like they did after Covid.

Just like the price of labour. Your salary went up and doesn't come down

In the UK weekly earnings increased 34% from December 2019 to December 2025.

CPI went up 30% in the same period.

Obviously that CPI covers things which went up more, and things which went up less, and your personal inflation will be different to everyone elses. Petrol prices end of Jan 2020 were 128p a litre, end of Jan 2025 they are 132p a litre [0]. Indeed petrol prices were 132p in January 2013. If you drive 40,000 miles a year you will thus see far lower inflation than someone who doesn't drive.

[0] https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/fuel-watch/
by galangalalgol | 2026-02-17 11:14:12+00:00
Yeah, just need to decide where to start the fork. The larger problem is radio firmware. FCC regs were the initial excuse, for wifi and Bluetooth too, but we need to open up the source for all of these and allocate money for enforcement if we are truly worried people are going to start adding wifi channels etc. Open firmware phone radios would let you do things like truly turning off the radio when wifi was present, no gps ping even.
by dspillett | 2026-02-17 11:14:30+00:00
The problem with any of these tells is that an individual instance is often taken as proof on its own rather than an indicator. People do often use “it isn't X, it is Y” like constructs¹ and many, myself included sometimes, overuse “quotes”², or use m-dashes³, or are overly concerned about avoiding repeating words⁶, and so forth.

LLMs do these things because they are in the training data, which means that people do these things too.

It is sometimes difficult to not sound like an LLM-written or LLM-reworded comment… I've been called a bot a few times despite never using LLMs for writing English⁴.

--------

[1] particularly vapid space-filler articles/comments or those using whataboutism style redirection, which might be a significant chunk of model training data because of how many of them are out there.

[2] I overuse footnotes as well, which is apparently a smell in the output of some generative tools.

[3] A lot of pre-LLM style-checking tools would recommend this in place of hyphens, and some automated reformatters would make the change without access, so there are going to be many examples in training data.

[4] I think there is one at work in VS which I use in DayJob, when it is suggesting code completion options to save typing (literally Glorified Predictive Text) and I sometimes accept its suggestion, and some of the tools I use to check my Spanish⁵ may be LLM based, so I can't claim that I don't use them at all.

[5] I'm just learning, so automatic translators are useful to check what I'm written isn't gibberish. For anyone else doing the same: make sure you research any suggested changes preferably using pre-2023 sources, because the output of these tools can be quite wrong as you can see when translating into a language you are fluent in.

[6] Another common “LLM tell” because they often have weighting functions especially designed to avoid token repetition, largely to avoid getting stuck in loops, but many pre-LLM grammar checking tools will pick people up on repeated word use too, and people tend to fix the direct symptom with a thesaurus rather than improving the sentence structure overall.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-17 11:14:49+00:00
The Chinese have end-to-end production capacity for lower capacity, lower performance/reliability consumer HDDs, so these are quite safe. Maybe we'll even see enterprise architectures where that cheap bottom-of-the-barrel stuff is used as opportunistic nearline storage, and then you have a far lower volume of traditional enterprise drives providing a "single source of truth" where needed.
by monsuta | 2026-02-17 11:16:17+00:00
Disguise a Nostr event, ask the server to blindly sign, then unblind & post!

Schnorr signatures let a signer prove they signed a message using their secret key. Blind signatures take this a step further -- you can sign a message without ever knowing the contents of what you are signing.

A user disguises their message, has the server sign the disguised message, then unblinds the result -- producing a valid signature that the server can't link back to the message it signed.

This is powerful for privacy: a server can act as an authority while remaining blind to the contents of the data it is authorizing.
by shafyy | 2026-02-17 11:16:25+00:00
You are right, I forgot how xenophobic my native Switzerland is. Unlike e.g. Germany, they don't really have something in the constitution regarding helping immigrants.

However, they do have Art. 7 (human dignity) and Art. 8 (equality before law), which applies not only to Swiss citizens, but to all humans. I don't know about you, but I would think that excluding refugees who need help because we already have 10M people in the country would be against their human dignity.
by fredilo | 2026-02-17 11:16:52+00:00
> Can't a textual description be infinitely long?

That's a good question. The usual answer is no.

The idea is that every book/description that has ever been written can be seen as string of finite length over a finite alphabet. For example, the PDF of the book is a file, i.e., a string of finite length over the byte-alphabet.

Another way to think about it, that every book/description has to have been written. Writing started some time in the past. Since then a finite amount of time has passed. Assuming one writes one character per second at most, one obtains an upper length on the number of characters in the book. This implies that it is finite in length.

That being said, one way to define the real numbers is to start with infinite sequences of rational numbers. Next, one defines when they converge against the same number. A real number x is then defined as the classes of sequences that converges against x. The set of infinite sequences of rational numbers is uncountable infinite. That's where the cardinality of the real numbers at the end of the day comes from.

The reason I bring this up is because one can view an "infinite sequence of rational numbers" as "infinitely long textual description". So your question really scratches the core of the problem.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2026-02-17 11:16:57+00:00
A lot! The majority, surely. The period from the 18th through the close of the 20th centuries was a time of tremendous upheaval, where nations were forged. German students, for instance, don't spend all of their time on the HRE; they tend to focus more on the nation-forming events of the 18th and 19th centuries, and then of course the 20th.

Of course, students also learn ancient and ancient-adjacent history -- the Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Charlemagne, etc. -- but this is general and isn't unique to any national tradition, but common to the entire continent.
by sixtyj | 2026-02-17 11:17:43+00:00
I have talked with some friends who are long-time programmers (20+ experience). Even they (all) admit that they use Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Google Antigravity or AI Studio - you name it.

So in future everything’s gonna be “agentic”, (un)fortunately.

Everytime I write about it, I feel like a doomsayer.

Anthropic admits that LLM use makes brain lazy.

So as we forgot remembering phone numbers after Google and mobile phones came, it will be probably with coding/programming.
by cobolexpert | 2026-02-17 11:17:45+00:00
Had a funny experience with this some weeks ago. I started developing a small side project and after a week I wondered if this existed already. To my surprise, someone had already built something relatively similar _with the exact same name_ (though I had chosen mine as a placeholder, still funny though) only 2 weeks before, and posted it in Show HN.

I took a look at the project and it was a 100k+ LoC vibe-coded repository. The project itself looked good, but it seemed quite excessive in terms of what it was solving. It made me think, I wonder if this exists because it is explicitly needed, or simply because it is so easy for it to exist?
by palata | 2026-02-17 11:18:14+00:00
> this also sort of defeats the purpose

Not really. On GrapheneOS, the Play Services/Play Store run as sandboxed apps, i.e. they are not system apps like on Android. They just run like a normal, unprivileged app. That's a lot better than on Android.

> I'd rather break free from Google and Apple, not just (stock) Android and iOS

If you want to break free, you don't have to install the Play Services / Play Store on GrapheneOS, just like you don't have to install microG on LineageOS. There is a misconception that microG is better than sandboxed Play, but I disagree. With microG, your apps still connect to the Google servers, so you're not "breaking free".
by Borkdude | 2026-02-17 11:18:36+00:00
Author here. Babashka is a native Clojure interpreter for scripting, it starts in ~5-20ms instead of the usual JVM startup. This release adds JLine3 for building TUIs, a completely revamped console REPL, and a bunch of library compatibility improvements. The charm.clj counter example in the post is a single-file script you can run right away to get an idea of the new TUI capabilities. Have fun scripting!
by iamshs | 2026-02-17 11:19:12+00:00
Repairability, upgradability and standards compliance needs to be minimum in consumer products. No to proprietary connectors. No soldered SSD or RAM. For home use, allow relaxed licensing options for discarded enterprise products like switches, Wifi Access Points etc. (Juniper Mist APs are fantastic, but are a brick without their cloud).
Currently, I cannot put in a market bought SSD in my Macbook. I cannot put in a SSD in my Unifi router without buying their $20 SSD tray. I cannot put third party ECC-RAM and SSDs in my Synology NAS because the policy has only been lifted on HDDs but nothing else.
I fear opposite will happen. Only leveraged companies have access to DRAM and NAND and hence will use it to lock us into their ecosystem as consumers won't even get access to storage in the open market otherwise.
by captainbland | 2026-02-17 11:19:21+00:00
I think the particular problem is if AI is just producing large volumes of code which are unnecessary, because the LLM is simply not able to create a more concise solution. If this is the case it suggests these LLM generated solutions are likely bringing about a lot of tech debt faster than anyone is ever likely to be able to resolve it. Although maybe people are banking on LLMs themselves one day being sophisticated enough to do it, although that would also be the perfect time to price gouge them.
by hocuspocus | 2026-02-17 11:19:40+00:00
EPI initially wanted to become a card scheme but quickly gave up.

Plastic cards are yesterday's battle, many national schemes exist in large European countries (CB in France, Girocard in Germany, ...) and would be hard to overhaul.

Focusing on mobile payments makes sense. Once a critical mass is reached (Austria, Benelux, France, Germany) there's a clear incentive for other players to work on interoperability, even if the pricing structure might be very different.
by darkwater | 2026-02-17 11:20:20+00:00
Unless the next best thing makes you think you are already achieving the "perfect solution" for what you think you care about, but in truth does not.

I'm not a mobile phone security expert but my feeling is that in the case of GrapheneOS - which target is probably high-profile people at risk of state actors et similia attacks - a zero-day in the closed source firmware from Qualcomm will probably screw you anyway.

I understand that you are anyway reducing the attack surface (now they need to target the modem firmware specifically), I understand the concept of security in depth and I also understand that by using GrapheneOS you are already placing mitigations for many other known and unknown attack vectors. But still...
by roysting | 2026-02-17 11:20:39+00:00
It is one tiny sliver of silver lining that “storage/memory/compute is cheap” nonsense that has produced all kinds of outsourced human slop code. That mentality is clearly going to have to die.

It could even become a kind of renaissance of efficient code… if there is any need for code at all.

The five guys left online might even get efficient and fast loading websites.

Honorable mention of the NO-TECH and LOW-TECH magazine site because I liked the effort at exploring efficient use of technology, e.g., their ~500KB solar powered site.

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/
by nkrisc | 2026-02-17 11:21:04+00:00
> I don't mind much though - I love that programming is being democratized and no longer only for the arcane wizards of the back room.

Programming has long been democratized. It’s been decades now where you could learn to program without spending a dollar on a university degree or even a bootcamp.

Programming knowledge has been freely available for a long time to those who wanted to learn.
by SebastianKra | 2026-02-17 11:21:29+00:00
I felt so vindicated when Halide finally released Process Zero, years after the iPhone 13.

I still remember that 50-page community thread of people complaining about the ugly camera, and one guy swearing up and down that “it's fine, it's fine you're all wrong”.

> It's your *expectations* that are wrong, not the phone. If you go out and buy a "professional" $6000 DSLR and $6000 lens… you will have many of these same issues.

Then Process Zero comes and solves all of my issues...

I love your work. Keep doing what you do.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253181534?sortBy=rank&p...
by mr-leshiy | 2026-02-17 11:22:48+00:00
Running untrusted code, random tools from the internet, or AI agents directly on your machine is an increasingly real risk.

Containers are the obvious answer, but spinning up isolated shell sessions with raw Docker commands every time is painful enough that most people just don't bother.

So I built *Shell-Cell* — a lightweight CLI that lets you define your entire environment in a single YAML file and drop into an isolated containerised shell with one command.

I'm using it daily to run AI agents and compile untrusted code without handing them the keys to my actual machine.

Blogpost: https://mr-leshiy-blog.web.app/blog/shell-cell/
GitHub: https://github.com/Mr-Leshiy/shell-cell
Docs: https://mr-leshiy.github.io/shell-cell/

What do you think guys ?
by bondarchuk | 2026-02-17 11:22:55+00:00
But a cello is not a machine on which you press one button and then one sound comes out. You can't just press the button on both machines and then check which makes the better sound. Playing a cello is a feedback loop between the instrument, musculature, nerves/brains, emotions, culture.... It's not unthinkable to me that something like that would take a couple decades of work by highly skilled people to lead to an extraordinary outcome.
by zbraniecki | 2026-02-17 11:22:59+00:00
Definitely the former, apologies for making it confusing.

> What is the equivalent of xgettext.pl

There is no standard one, although people build their own.
The general consensus is that source strings should not be inlined into code. The closest analogy is to "style" vs "class" in HTML/CSS - the clean separation of concerns comes from the "id" being the contract.

You can read more about it here: https://github.com/projectfluent/fluent/wiki/Fluent-vs-gette...

There are attempts to "merge" those two philosophies, by extracting and "generating" slugs as ids.
Examples:
- https://formatjs.github.io/docs/getting-started/message-extr...
- https://lingui.dev/guides/message-extraction
- https://app.studyraid.com/en/read/15768/550728/setting-up-th...

I'm fairly skeptical of this approach.

> the file extension for the main catalog file `.po`

In MF1.0 world, the file format is JSON or XML. You encode id=>Message pairs.
In Fluent world there is a Fluent (FTL) file format.
In MF2.0 the format itself is, again, message scoped.
On top of it there's a proposal by Mozilla to create MessageResource - https://github.com/w3c/i18n-discuss/blob/gh-pages/explainers... and that may feed into DOM L10n - https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/blob/main/dom-localiza...

> the __ function?

see the (1) and links to "generated ids".

> How does gender work (small example)?

MF 1.0:

```
{GENDER, select,
male {He answered}
female {She answered}
other {They answered}
}
```

Fluent:
```
user-answered =
{ $gender ->
[male] He answered.
[female] She answered.
*[other] They answered.
}
```

> How does layering pt_BR on pt_PT work?

MF does not prescribe fallback behavior. It also more popular to treat each locale as "complete" and fill "gaps" at build time. So at runtime you have `pt-BR` which has pt-BR strings and missing ones "completed" from `pt` (parent locale).

Fluent has a "resource manager" (simple one like this: https://github.com/projectfluent/fluent-rs/tree/main/fluent-... or more complex like Mozilla L10nRegistry), which can fallback at runtime, allowing for what we call "partial locales" which can roll out to production with gaps and the resource manager will fetch the fallback strings from the parent locale.

> What is a compelling reason to switch?

If you and your users are happy with gettext, none!

If either of those groups complain, there may be many:
- https://github.com/projectfluent/fluent/wiki/Fluent-vs-gette...

Hope that helps!
by ggm | 2026-02-17 11:23:38+00:00
The new horniman remains super, but I miss the old dusty, "dolmech recorder collection in a case untouched in decades" horniman.

Museums have to renew. It's a massive improvement overall for community engagement but the old one was a place you could feel like you were discovering things, not being told things. The science museum London is the same: cleaned out the trash, made it less romantic and interesting.
by m4tthumphrey | 2026-02-17 11:24:16+00:00
I find this very interesting, but am I being dense here? https://www.arthurcnops.blog/images/hn-show-dead-one-point.s...

The legend says SHNs are getting worse, but surely if the % of SHN posts with 1 point is going DOWN (as per graph) then it's getting better? Either I am dense or the legends are the wrong way round no?