MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simonw | 2026-02-23 18:06:36+00:00
This is the first "chapter" in a not-quite-book I've started working on - I have an introductory post about that here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/23/agentic-engineering-pa...

The second chapter is more of a classic pattern, it describes how saying "Use red/green TDD" is a shortcut for kicking the coding agent into test-first development mode which tends to get really good results: https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-pattern...
by IAmBroom | 2026-02-23 18:06:36+00:00
JasonADrury: I mean fuck, the silly European me thought that Mexicans were mostly white. They sure as hell mostly look like Europeans to me.

djohnston: * Says Mexicans can't be POCs *

DJ really overstated it, but yes: you are a silly European. Most Mexicans have a substantial Native American heritage, and aren't considered "white" by most USians. The richer Mexicans you may have encountered traveling to Europe are more upperclass whitebre(a)d, mostly Spanish bloodlines.

djohnston: * Calls me a neo-nazi *

JasonADrury: > Is this some weird neo-Nazi trope you subscribe to?

You are guilty as charged.

DJ's reading comprehension is fine.
by artlessbfa | 2026-02-23 18:06:43+00:00
HN, I recently had to tie out hundreds of PDF documents to an Excel model while on vacation with my Mac. The industry standard for this is a tool called DataSnipper (recently valued at $1B+, costs thousands per seat, and is a heavy Windows-only COM add-in). Running it through Parallels sucks.

I looked for a lightweight, cross-platform alternative and realized there wasn't one. So I built CellSource on nights and weekends. Its been a long time since I was a compsci student so cursor and claude were super helpful.

The goal was to get 80% of the core functionality (snipping, referencing, instant search) without the enterprise bloat. A few technical decisions allow it to be cross-platform.

1) Modern Web Pane vs. COM Add-in: Instead of a heavy local installation, it runs entirely as a modern Office web add-in, which means it works natively on Mac, PC, and Excel for the Web.
2) Metadata over Overlay Shapes: we store the PDF snips and reference links directly in the cell metadata, keeping the workbook incredibly lightweight.

It’s currently live in the standard Excel Add-in store. It is definitely still in beta. If anyone here works with heavy data extraction or just hates bloated enterprise software, I’d love for you to give it a spin and tear apart the UX. Let me know what breaks!

thanks for checking it out
by simoncion | 2026-02-23 18:06:49+00:00
> ...i am also going to propose options that i feel like are less bad than what is being actively rolled out right now.

As I mentioned, what you propose is exactly as useful and protective as what we have now. What we have now has been roundly rejected by the authoritarians pushing this expansion of power and influence. Your time and energy are better spent resisting the expansion, rather than suggesting alternatives that those authoritarians will never accept (and tacitly accepting their premise in the process).
by jimnotgym | 2026-02-23 18:06:50+00:00
As well as the correlation/causation problem...

From what I hear, cannabis on sale today is rather stronger than when I was young. That sounds bad to me. Curiously I see this as a pro-legalization arguement, if it were available in a shop I could select a mild flavour, rather than the skunk that the criminals grew, and is all that is on offer
by selectodude | 2026-02-23 18:06:55+00:00
Problem with recreational marijuana is that it’s so insanely strong. It would be like giving a child 190 proof azeotropic grain alcohol and being shocked that they immediately vomit. I can’t smoke pot - it’s just too strong.

I’ll admit to feeling a bit dumber and foggier after a few weeks of ingesting cannabis nightly though. That’s a real thing.
by redclaw | 2026-02-23 18:07:01+00:00
We built a pure-Rust HDF5 implementation from scratch. No libhdf5, no C toolchain, no build scripts. Files round-trip with h5py.
HDF5 has had exactly one implementation for 30 years — the C library from The HDF Group. Every language binding (Python's h5py, Julia's HDF5.jl, the existing Rust hdf5 crate) wraps it. That creates a hard dependency on a C toolchain, breaks cross-compilation, and makes no_std use impossible.
rustyhdf5 replaces it entirely:

55× faster file open (377µs vs 20.9ms) via mmap — no global state init, no symbol table loading
Zero-copy contiguous reads — data served directly from OS page cache, no allocation
no_std support — rustyhdf5-format compiles without std, works in firmware/WASM/embedded
h5py compatible — full round-trip fidelity including chunked datasets, compressed data, compound types, variable-length strings
SHINES provenance — built-in SHA-256 content hashing + creator/timestamp metadata baked into the file

We also built EdgeHDF5 on top of it — a single-file agent memory store with adaptive vector search (Scalar → SIMD → BLAS → Accelerate → GPU → IVF-PQ), hybrid BM25+vector retrieval, and Product Quantization for 8× storage compression. The whole thing is one .h5 file, no daemon required.
GitHub:
https://github.com/rustystack/rustyhdf5
https://github.com/rustystack/edgehdf5
Happy to answer questions about the format implementation, the no_std approach, or the benchmark methodology.
by IAmBroom | 2026-02-23 18:07:01+00:00
> > The "kiki" sound has more high frequency content than the "bouba" sound

> And where did you get that from? In non-tonal languages the pitch conveys almost no information and people speak at very different ones (and for instance a male saying "kiki" will say it at lower frequencies than a woman saying "bouba" most of the time) so I find your affirmation very dubious.

You misunderstand the post. It has nothing to do with the voice of the speaker.

Long drawn-out sounds have lower frequency components than short-lasting sounds. A pin drop is REALLY high-pitched; a moan has at least some low-pitch components (but may still be high-pitched, too - more often called a "keening" than a moan). It's not about intonation; it's a mathematical consequence of the relationship between frequency and time-domain incidents, typically measured with Fourier transforms.
by j_w | 2026-02-23 18:07:14+00:00
It's not that you can remember a song and therefore copyright infringement when you sing.

For 99.999% of people that are singing a song, it's not a replacement for the original in any way shape or form, hard stop. Let's not pretend it could even get anywhere close.

For the last 0.001%, we would call it a cover and typically the individually doing a cover takes some liberties of their own, still making it not a replacement in any way. Artists are typically cool with covers.
by jdahlin | 2026-02-23 18:07:26+00:00
I don't know!

These are valid points, taken to the extreme we will have apps that cannot be supported.

In short term, we already have SQL/reports being automated. Lovable etc is experimenting with generating user interfaces from prompts, soon we will have complete working apps from a prompt. Why not have one core that you can expand via a prompt?

I am currently studying and depending heavily on Anki, its been amazing to use Claude Code to add new functionality on the fly. Its a holy mess of inconsistent/broken UX but it so clearly gives me value over the core version. Sometimes it breaks, but CC can usually fix it within a prompt or two.
by IAmBroom | 2026-02-23 18:07:41+00:00
> The right dose is ~0.3 mg,

I've heard this before, but the only metastudy I could find strongly supports a dose of 3 mg 3 hours before bedtime. Dose effectiveness effectively halves when taking less than ~2 mg or more than ~10 mg.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jpi.12985
Ask HN: Cool hardware blogs and new company's in the the hardware space
by monkmartinez | 2026-02-23 18:08:02+00:00
One of the top articles today is about a nifty eink project that was built for purpose. The comments are great, as usual, with a links and resources for others to build something similar with some being blogs of DIY projects. Others posted (new to me) companies selling similar products.

I am familiar with;

1. https://www.seeedstudio.com/
2. https://www.tindie.com/
3. https://www.adafruit.com/
4. https://www.sparkfun.com/
5. https://shop.pimoroni.com/en-us

Most people that have a passing interest in "arduino" or "raspberry pi" have heard of these shops or marketplaces... perhaps not.

Either way, I learned of two other companies that have very cool offerings like;

1. https://soldered.com/
2. https://shop.trmnl.com

There is also JLCPCB and PCBWAY which are not directly "blogs or shops" but more like platforms with manufacturing built in. The projects page: https://www.pcbway.com/project/shareproject/ offers people really cool projects to learn and take inspiration from.

I follow the Hobby CNC space so people like Barton Dring (https://www.tindie.com/stores/33366583/ and his elecrow store: https://www.elecrow.com/store/BartDring) are book marked. Odrive (https://odriverobotics.com/) and Esk8news(https://forum.esk8.news/) and Foil.zone (electronics for e-foils) https://foil.zone/ are also places I visit frequently along with endless spere for ebikes....

My "ask hn" is where are the others? Post all the links to independent forums and electronics stores/blogs/resources!
by kristopolous | 2026-02-23 18:08:18+00:00
It's not really the same. The good guy/bad guy gun rhetoric has deeply racist roots.

But beyond that we can look at places similar things have been rolled out.

Facebook has a real name policy and is overflowing with fraudsters and ai slop

Although I can't figure out how to sign up for a second telegram account with their phone number restriction that hasn't stopped multiple scammers hitting me up every day on the service.

On YouTube, their demographics has ladies in their 30s watching nursery rhyme videos by the millions because mothers give their children their phone.

On social media, scammers tend to take over the accounts of dead people because the deceased don't update their passwords after a data breach. Your ID card policy, however strict, isn't going to stop the most common attack vector

So I don't know what you're trying to solve with id checks: parents hand their logged in devices to their children, scammers raid the accounts of the verified dead, existing systems clearly aren't working and strictly enforcing ineffective security theater isn't going to change this

Doing something that doesn't work isn't a solution
by agnim25 | 2026-02-23 18:08:44+00:00
Hi all, I built ReadInSync because I was frustrated with how fragmented news consumption has become. Between existing platforms, I often found myself reading the same story multiple times from slightly different angles, or falling into endless scroll loops.

ReadInSync is a media platform focused on structured discovery and discussion. Key features:
- News aggregation across sources – pulls coverage from multiple publishers (both RSS and custom web scraping) - Clustering by topic – related articles are grouped into a single story cluster. Within each cluster, discussions are hosted for conversation around the topic.
- Personalized topic selection – follow only the subjects you care about, receive recommendations based on other users/other trending discussions
- Email and audio digests – structured updates delivered on your schedule via email, or listening to a podcast-style digest generated from your subscriptions

The goal is to make information intake and discovery as efficient as possible - reducing repetition, surfacing context, and giving you a clear sense of being "caught up" - while still keeping engagement through focused discussions attached directly to each topic.

It’s still early, and I’d really value feedback on anything about the platform, and what it would take to make this part of your daily routine. Happy to answer technical or product questions.
by ghostoftiber | 2026-02-23 18:08:55+00:00
The answer is - it's both. There's also parallels in archers in Europe from the longbow period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_longbow#Training You can tell who was a professional archer by looking at their skeleton, and so naturally families who had bodies with more readily adaptable skeletons typically became archers. This married the morphology of an archer to social status and family line.
by torginus | 2026-02-23 18:09:05+00:00
Does the EU do anything right?

Example - the GDPR is so ridiculously easy to maliciously comply with - just say you need the data for security reasons, and you need all the data all the time - otherwise you can't catch the bad guys. There are several data harvesting companies built on this loophole.

At the same time if you were trying to comply with the spirit of it - meaning you can't reverse engineer customer identity based even on data sources, basically all standard logging practices - server logging, customer telemetry etc. is off limits, even properly anonymized, as you can reverse engineer what people were doing from time stamps, access patterns, and corellation ids.

Removing all these renders all logging useless. And the fun part of it is that even if we were hell-bent on complying with the GDPR, and dropped all logs, once some failure or security incident hit, we'd be on the hook for not doing at least due diligence logging to at least reassure customers or users that we know what went wrong and how to fix it.
by dash2 | 2026-02-23 18:09:32+00:00
I’m in two minds about this, on the one hand I spent a week with acute psychosis after smoking weed when I was a teenager, so I really think people have to be more aware of the risks. On the other hand, I think it’s clear that this is not a perfect research design, and there are obvious possible confounds.

What about legalisation as a natural experiment? Has anyone done diff-in-diffs of US states and simply looked at eg mental health diagnoses or hospital admissions?
by levkk | 2026-02-23 18:09:35+00:00
Subms typically, yeah. We measured the average latency between nodes in the same AZ (e.g., AWS availability zone) to be less than one ms, so you need to account for one extra hop and processing time by PgDog, which is typically fast.

That being said if you don't currently use a connection pooler, you will notice some latency when adding one. It's usually table stakes for Postgres at scale since you need one anyway, but it can be surprising. This especially affects "chatty" apps - the ones that send 10+ queries to service one API request, and makes bugs like N+1s considerably worse.

TLDR: not a free lunch, but generally acceptable at scale.
by hellojesus | 2026-02-23 18:09:41+00:00
Parents should have an allowlist of devices to be able to join their network. And then they can require root certs or something for access outside of a narrow allow list. There's a host of ways to solve both problems. Just remember to check for hardware keyloggers on your (the parents') devices, as kids could use them or try evil maid attacks, etc. if they feel totally encaged.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-23 18:09:48+00:00
A raise is random noise, not signal, based a confidence game within the VC ecosystem. LP capital call->GP gamble based on waves arms around considering VC underperforms as an asset [1] [2] class even when accounting for the grand slam returns. It's 0DTE options gambling dressed up as skill and an art. But, you know [3] [4] [5], lottery still pays out sometimes.

TLDR A raise is not robust signal in this regard.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7260137

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/peterjameswalker_most-venture...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overconfidence_effect

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
by Dunedan | 2026-02-23 18:09:50+00:00
> I'd def be trying again since they've come out of alpha with this release.. a huge deal for a game that is so many years in development.

We're not calling it Alpha anymore, but we still don't consider it a polished major release. The announcement of the last Alpha, Alpha 27 had a section explaining the motivation for the change: https://play0ad.com/new-release-0-a-d-alpha-27-agni/

> Only for really huge end of game final battles with the screen packed with troops did it lag out for us, but being free and all, we'd often gather around one monitor and talk crap at each other while we waited for it to clear up.

I'm not sure when you last tried the game, but a27 notably improved performance and feedback so far suggests that r28 did as well.
by axus | 2026-02-23 18:09:54+00:00
I agree with owning the network devices, and lack of control here is a problem that still has solutions.

And self-hosting personal services makes sense and we're able to do that.

BUT, we don't own the connections. There's always going to be shared infrastructure for connecting these devices worldwide, and without an ideal state of Communism or utopian capitalism we're not going to own them or want to be responsible for them. Any kind of service that depends on a central database is not going to be communally owned.

Ownership is an economic problem, the technical aspect is merely interesting. Bitcoin might be a great example of this.
by jacobr1 | 2026-02-23 18:10:04+00:00
Yep.

ChatAI - show the top 50 online retailers by revenue in the US and note any that have credible new stories about quality control issues. Save all of them except StoreX and StoreY in your list you use for comparison shopping.

Or maybe another one, scan all my credit card purchases for all time that you have history and record all the stores.

Done. And plenty of third party sites (consumer reports, wirecutter, etc...) will do this kind of thing too. And you could perhaps transitively trust them - either view direct lists or just scraping the places they recommend.

And the average person doesn't need to figure this out ... skills encoding this will propagate.
by ok123456 | 2026-02-23 18:10:11+00:00
This is like rhetorically asking, "Are you saying that doom and marylin manson aren't harmful to children?"

The problem with social media isn't the inherent mixing of children and technology, as if web browsers and phones have some action-at-a-distance force that undermines society; it's the 20 years or so they spent weaponizing their products into an infinite Skinner box. Duck walk Zuckerburg.

This is all assuming good faith interest in "the children," which we cannot assume when what government will gain from this is a total, global surveillance state.
by taeric | 2026-02-23 18:10:35+00:00
I haven't used it much at all, to be clear. I just found it surprisingly fun the last few times I played with it.

The specific thing it made a lot easier was implementing algorithms the way that Knuth writes them down. Which is very much a set of steps with specific calls on what step to go to next.

I think the reason I found it fun to play with was that I found that style of laying out what needed to be done was easier to work with than the standard breakdown that making everything a function or an object seems to require. For me, it was a lot easier.

Edit: I have one of the times I used this here: https://taeric.github.io/many_sums.html I did not put any effort into cleaning up that code, though. So it can probably work as an argument in either direction. :D
by Galanwe | 2026-02-23 18:10:58+00:00
Well there are technical solutions for this: blind signatures.

I could generate my own key, have the government blind sign it upon verifying my identity, and then use my key to prove I'm an adult citizen, without anyone (even the signing government) know which key is mine.

Any veryfying entity just need to know the government public key and check it signed my key.
by _alaya | 2026-02-23 18:11:04+00:00
> They're going to send the jobs where the wages are cheaper, and that's exactly what they're doing.

I read these sentiments, and I honestly don’t understand the tone. This kind of behavior is exactly what you’d expect after taking just a few introductory undergraduate economics courses.

Free markets are predicated on the free movement of capital and labor, and American companies being able to go overseas for cheaper labor is exactly what they're going to do unless there are laws preventing that. When we have laws keeping jobs in one place they get called "regulation."

Generally speaking, I’m really shocked at how uneducated people are — programmers in particular — about how the labor market works, how the economy works, or how anything in the real world works, really.

There's a reason studying humanities is valuable - history, philosophy, economics, etc. It clues you in that when someone wants to exploit you, it's usually based on well-established precedent.
by vablings | 2026-02-23 18:11:06+00:00
There are big pushes in pretty much every direction. The projects that really stand out to me are pyo3 (Replace c++ python modules with rust), Dioxus (react-like web framework), The ferrocine qualified compiler (automotive)

I think right now the ecosystem is pretty ripe and with DARPA TRACTOR there are only more and more reasons every day to put rust on your toolbelt.

I am secretly hoping that eventually we break free from the cycle of "hire a senior dev and he likes rust so the company switches" over to hey let's hire some good mid-level and junior rust developers
by orionsbelt | 2026-02-23 18:11:19+00:00
I don’t know what things are like in Amsterdam, but weed being “high quality” is not a good thing. The potency has skyrocketed over the past few decades. It’s like saying you went to Amsterdam to drink alcohol for the first time and had a bottle of tequila and passed out and puked; the fact that it was high quality tequila does not mean it’s better than a low quality glass of wine or beer. The issue is the doses are way too high.
by snowhale | 2026-02-23 18:11:25+00:00
the real problem isn't bad code getting merged, it's what happens after. when a human writes a module, they carry mental context that makes them the right person to fix subtle bugs 6 months later. AI-generated PRs have no owner in that sense -- they're orphaned at merge. the forge gatekeeping idea is interesting but i think the actual gap is who answers the pager at 2am for code nobody understands.
by encrux | 2026-02-23 18:11:35+00:00
I think this is actually the correct way to move forward.

We should be able to verify facts about people on the internet without compromising personal data. Giving platforms the ability to select specific demographics will, in my view, make the web a better place. It doesn’t just let us age restrict certain platforms, but can also make them more authentic. I think it’s really important to be able to know some things to be true about users, simply to avoid foreign election interference via trolling, preventing scams and so much more.

With this, enforcement would also be increasingly easy: Platforms just have to prove that they’re using this method, e.g. via audit.
by benakj | 2026-02-23 18:11:47+00:00
Plagiarizing other people's code has always been cheap. Willison cannot see the distinction, since his only claim to fame is inserting himself into early Django development. Perhaps he should work on real issues like Rob Pike.

You say this is a personal attack? No, he is a public figure and is increasingly cited as a source for "what programmers think". Which could not be further from the truth.
by in-silico | 2026-02-23 18:11:57+00:00
It's a good way to frame base models that have only been pretrained.

However, modern frontier models have undergone rounds of fine-tuning, RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback), and RLVR (RL from verifiable rewards) that turn them into something else. The compressed internet is still in there, but it's wrapped in problem-solving and people-pleasing circuitry.