MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by k310 | 2026-02-25 04:45:39+00:00
> So when they finally closed, there were some people who were sad, but there were also people who were happy to see it go.

Good lord. The nearest Radio Shack (17 miles away) closed, so to get a resistor or cap, it's "order online". That's about as environmentally sound as nuclear testing above ground (perhaps a slight hyperbole there).

But not all that far-fetched. One time, I visited my daughter's place and found a broken wire in the thermostat, so I drove to the Shack, got a cheap iron and solder and fixed it. (When there WAS a Radio Shack)

I replaced my old Nikon F2 with a refurbished FM that cost less than the repairs. Go to buy some color slide or black and white film. Same store (and lucky to have one within 50 miles). "We don't carry those"

"America Online" ... indeed.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-02-25 04:46:50+00:00
This article is a coping mechanism. What it's really saying is this:

"The thing that LLMs are taking over is easy, we humans still have agency over the hard part."

That's what he's trying to say, and I can tell you, this is not true. Programming was the hard part. That's why we got paid so much. It's the easy jobs that are immune to AI: Gardening, construction work, blue collar jobs,... etc.

Mind you not easy in the sense that the work isn't hard, but easy in the sense that anyone can do it. Those are the jobs that are ironically safe.
by chii | 2026-02-25 04:47:31+00:00
> society can be engineered

and the hidden implication is that there's a correct trade off to be made (because engineering is about trade offs).

So what happens to those people whose gotten the bad end of the deal? If china builds a damn, the villages downstream gets moved (with small compensation that is not commensurate with the value of the dam being made).

It's also why the high speed rail in california is costing so much in the US vs something similar in china.
by Guvante | 2026-02-25 04:48:26+00:00
If investors expect Microsoft profitability that means their stock is worth 1/6th today what it will be in 5 years.

That is a cost of capital estimate of 40%.

Which points to investors not believing the company will be that profitable.

I am not saying investors don't think they will be profitable just they certainly don't believe that profitable.
by eviks | 2026-02-25 04:48:45+00:00
Are you not aware of cases where marks physically went to the bank, withdrew all cash and dropped it off to the criminals, also taking out loans and yelling at bank employees when they were trying to stop them? No app involved.

You'll always find individual cases where people do extremely dumb stuff, but using that as a justification is also dumb. If you want to significantly curtail that freedoms of a large group, it's on you to come up with a good evaluation of tradeoffs, so

> the community needs a better response to this problem than "nuh uh, everything's fine as it is."

They already have, but you choose to use a fake simplification as a representative
by vicchenai | 2026-02-25 04:49:20+00:00
The iteration speed advantage is real but context-specific. For agentic workloads where you're running loops over structured data -- say, validating outputs or exploring a dataset across many small calls -- the latency difference between a 50 tok/s model and a 1000+ tok/s one compounds fast. What would take 10 minutes wall-clock becomes under a minute, which changes how you prototype.

The open question for me is whether the quality ceiling is high enough for cases where the bottleneck is actually reasoning, not iteration speed. volodia's framing of it as a "fast agent" model (comparable tier to Haiku 4.5) is honest -- for the tasks that fit that tier, the 5x speed advantage is genuinely interesting.
by jasonjmcghee | 2026-02-25 04:49:45+00:00
I have to ask- I see this handy app running on Mac and you hold a key down and then it doesn't show until seemingly a while later.

The one built in is much faster, and you only have to toggle it on.

Are these so much more accurate? I definitely have to correct stuff, but pretty good experience.

Also use speech to text on my iphone which seems to be the same accuracy.
by bombcar | 2026-02-25 04:50:01+00:00
Walmart has you covered at least for cheap soldering irons: https://www.walmart.com/ip/EverStart-Soldering-Iron-Model-51...

The various "components, available" of Radio Shack was quite interesting; we still had (have?) one in town long after they mostly went away, and they still had a dusty old collection of various components.
by pankajdoharey | 2026-02-25 04:50:38+00:00
I understand that what Taalas is claiming. I was trying to actually describe that model on a hardware is some not something new Or unthought of The natural progression of FPGA is ASIC. Taalas process is more expensive And not really worth it because once you burn a model on the silicon, the silicon can only serve that model. speed improvement alone is not enough for the cost you will incur in the long run. GPU's are still general purpose, FPGA's are atleast reusable but wont have the same speed. But this alone cannot be a long term business. Turning a model to hardware in two months is too long. Models already take quite a long time to train. Anyone going down this strategy would leave wide open field to their competitors. Deployment planning of existing models already so complicated.
by binarysolo | 2026-02-25 04:51:02+00:00
So consider the alternative (because this happened to us): 5-6 years back, one of our brand stores sold a thing (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08DKG3NX7) that created an entire niche of products, and 6 months after our success, a buncha clones came out of the woodwork.

On Amazon, they created listings that imitated our copy and images. On AliExpress/Taobao/etc., they ripped off our images and pretended to be us. Deciding which product/listing is the original product is super nontrivial especially when there's international trademarking and IP law involved.
by ivanb | 2026-02-25 04:51:21+00:00
Hijacking the thread, the JetBrains plugin for Common Lisp had not been maintained since 2023. I forked it and vibed it back to life.

You don't need Emacs. Feel free to enjoy Common Lisp in your regular IDE.

https://github.com/ivanbulanov/SLT/releases
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2026-02-25 04:51:40+00:00
For a long time up until about a couple of years ago the project was stagnated and was missing some pretty critical features. I'd say it was only halfway usable until then and it doesn't have near the ecosystem that things like Hashicorp Vault does. But for my self hosted infra stuff it is perfect. It just really doesn't gel well with compliance frameworks and audits, mainly because the auditability of the solution goes out the window the second someone is able to decrypt the secret - its access patterns are untraceable. These auditors really prefer to see a situation where access to the secret is tightly controlled and audited on rotation and sops, by nature of how it works, cannot really easily offer that.
by jcranmer | 2026-02-25 04:52:31+00:00
When the first attack on an aid convoy to provoke outrage came out, I saw someone put it best: there is a difference between "war is chaos, and no matter how hard we try, some incidents regrettably occur" and "our rules of engagement are designed in such a manner to make these incidents almost certain." And the IDF... is pretty clearly in the latter category.

> I imagine most of the armchair critics here have never been in a situation where they have to make these sorts of calls. Being in an ambush in a war with an enemy that, let's say, uses "unconventional" tactics (aka war crimes) to try and kill you while vans are approaching you.

Attempting to use this as a defense requires conceding that the default assumption is that someone is a terrorist until proven otherwise, which is something that guarantees horrific civilian casualties. It's not actually requisite that soldiers have this mindset; instilling this requires training, and the fact that it seems to be so pervasive in the IDF is a sign that it's not just a criminal failure of a few soldiers but rather a core part of the IDF strategy that needs to be addressed.
by h4kunamata | 2026-02-25 04:52:38+00:00
Read: The USA as usual doesn't like when a company doesn't give what they want.

Awwwnnnn poor thing :)

It is like the USA big techs mad because the Chinese AI companies are stealing their data just like, wait for it, how the USA big techs stole the data from artists worldwide to train their models.

The sweet payback in the name of every single artist/company that have been affected by USA greedy.

Karma is a btch!
by defrost | 2026-02-25 04:53:36+00:00
> Isn't it delightful ..

That is very much the intent of:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

in: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> they accused sweetjuly ...

Strong wording there, from you .. do you suppose that was a vicuous stabbing accusation, or a playful rejoiner questioning the zip V ZIP ambiguity? People do get a bit playful.

> nor did I expect anyone to reply to it barely 3 minutes later,

There are a number of people, myself included, who watch https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments scroll by.

Not all the time, not obsessively, we overlap a lot and tend to catch and flag the worst of the worst .. bit like weeding the garden.
by Analemma_ | 2026-02-25 04:53:46+00:00
Submarine stories [0]. Altman is definitely pissed that he's lost the Mandate of Heaven and Claude is all anyone has been talking about since December. These days Claude moves markets where Chat-GPT doesn't [1].

It's not just his ego either: OpenAI needs to keep the hype train going so they can keep raising money on favorable terms. If influencers and the buzz are losing interest in them, it is an existential threat.

[0]: https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

[1]: https://xcancel.com/signulll/status/2026418330760782069#m
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2026-02-25 04:54:02+00:00
There's a lot of gotcha bundled into this statement. It is true what you say, but it also hides away the nightmare of shell escaping bullshit that comes with the .env format the second you have to have some sort of transformation on the data that is orthogonal to the normal decryption path. I think that now they have a better story around some of the edge cases but if you go into SOPS you will see several issues around how the .env file format is just a complete nightmare with crazy escaped values such as a Google Service Account JSON.

The way I got around this on my own stuff is just to have a policy that all sops secrets have to be base64 encoded before the encryption hits them. That seems to solve basically every piping issue you could hit. Works super well with kubernetes, who supports native base64 encoded secrets, so you just take the value and inject it in, using data: instead of stringData: in the manifest of the created secret.
by 112233 | 2026-02-25 04:54:21+00:00
Most natural numbers don't exist, for any useful definition of exist.

When you prove, say, by induction, that p(n) holds for any natural number n, and hear you teacher say that p(n) holds for all natural numbers, you start forming the idea that "all natural numbers" is a thing that exists. The set N, you think, surely by writing it, all natural numbers are called into existance.

And then, much later, you come upon problem, where actual existence of the number becomes better defined. Say, like finding a large prime. And suddenly "all numbers" becomes a confusing mental burden.
by Shank | 2026-02-25 04:56:12+00:00
I think that if things are bursting at the seams this is a good idea. But we’ve added Passkeys already, and the custom metadata ship has sailed. This is the kind of initiative I could see taking off as a solution to Passkeys, but it doesn’t represent a worthwhile investment for me now.

I’m at 1.6Mb, and with the frequency by which I update entries, the cost of data migration is relatively high compared to the data cost.
by ddtaylor | 2026-02-25 04:57:38+00:00
> Going to play devil's advocate and say that they make minimal to no revenue off of their website so it being down is not a huge deal.

How much revenue they make doesn't matter if it impacts users. Prospective users need to be able to see what they are getting and download and verify ISOs from the team.

I despise ZorinOS for what they are doing in many ways that violate software licenses, but one thing they got right is charging users and being somewhat accountable to their userbase.
by wtallis | 2026-02-25 04:58:07+00:00
I'm not sure the problem with card readers is that it's security theater, so much as it's a really inconvenient place to put the security check so the added security is not at all worthwhile. Putting the card readers on each floor so that you need to swipe immediately after exiting the elevator separates the security check from all the ordinary functions of an elevator, and splits up that security checking across a large number of floors instead of a smaller number of elevators. Everyone still needs to go through the same number of layers of security checks, but those checks aren't being imposed directly on top of what's already a bottleneck.

So the lesson that should be familiar to software developers is: retrofitting security (in the elevator) instead of planning for it from the start (with space for access controls between the elevator and the offices) will tend to make the security more painful than it could have been.
by newan09 | 2026-02-25 04:58:53+00:00
This is really fascinating, only if there was a way to make your dog receive feedback as the game develops. Like make it pick color by matching placement of treat based on the color shown on the screen.

Similarly, do it for story telling narratives, game textures etc. Although I do not think the dog understands natural language so all of it will likely be a dud.
by ianbutler | 2026-02-25 04:59:15+00:00
You're providing much too much credit to China's government, the dynamic is simpler:

China just hasn't calcified yet after workers press for better standards of safety and quality of life and maybe they won't because that's where being authoritarian comes into play. They will crush that in a way we have moved away from.

We used to build great things in the US and then we decided the blood price of 30 lives for the Brooklyn bridge or 100 for the hoover dam wasn't worth it. It's really not hard to build anything when you ignore any second order questions of impact. Why do you think certain people here want deregulation and for the EPA to go away.

A quick google shows China prioritizes speed over safety something we've decided here in the US is not acceptable.
by mej2020 | 2026-02-25 05:00:37+00:00
Full disclosure, this is a pitch, but we built Lava Spend Keys (https://lava.so/products/ai-spend) to solve exactly this problem!

Spend keys are API keys with built-in dollar limits. You set a cap per key, point your AI tools at our proxy (it's OpenAI-compatible, so it's a one-line config change in Claude Code, Cursor, etc.), and requests hard-stop when you hit the limit. No more waking up to a $300 bill. If you're using Cursor, you can use spend keys as your model API key directly, so you get per-key cost tracking and hard spend limits on every autocomplete and chat request without changing your workflow at all.

You get per-key spend tracking, request counts, and model-level breakdowns. Supports 28+ AI providers through a single endpoint. Keys can be revoked or limits adjusted in real time.

The key difference from Vigilo is that this is enforcement, not just observability. Vigilo tells you what happened (which is genuinely useful, especially the tool-level audit trail). Spend keys prevent the runaway bill from happening in the first place. They actually complement each other well: Vigilo for the detailed local audit log, Lava for the billing guardrails.

If you want to try it out, shoot me a message on X (@MitchJones_) and I'll throw you some free credits to test whatever models you're using!
by with | 2026-02-25 05:02:25+00:00
There are some extremely concerning security vulnerabilities in this project that even the weakest of hackers could exploit.

Is this product a ragebait/troll?

1) Account takeover of any user with just their email: POST /v1/account/recovery with any user's email, the API response gives you the plaintext recovery secret. Call PUT /v1/account/recovery with that secret + a new password. You now own their account. No email inbox access needed. Two curl commands.

2) Password hashes returned by the API: GET /v1/users with any API key returns every user's full argon2 hash, algorithm, and tuning parameters. tested and got $argon2id$v=19$m=65536,t=3,p=4$... for test@kraz.in.

3) CORS reflects any origin with credentials: Send Origin: https://evil.com to any endpoint — server responds with Access-Control-Allow-Origin: https://evil.com + Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true. Any website on the internet can silently read authenticated API responses from logged-in users

There is literally like 50 more of these though. The author probably didn't spend more than 5 minutes on security hardening.
by 6510 | 2026-02-25 05:03:28+00:00
Since I have no idea about the topic I've asked an llm: "could you make a list of useful medical devices that are possible to make but not on the market?"

A lot of entries suggested cheaper versions of existing devices. For less wealthy markets, for prevention, to bring diagnosis closer to the incident and for real time monitoring.

I imagine getting a device approved in a different country might create runway to scale to the domestic market?
by koolba | 2026-02-25 05:04:09+00:00
> KeePass has long been the gold standard and darling of the tech world, earned through its unrelenting commitment to security, stability, and data sovereignty.

Eh? I always thought of pass[1] in that role.

> Devising a new schema based on SQLite would allow for current features that are being jerry-rigged into the attributes to have their own real place in the database, rather than clogging the user-facing fields. It also ensures that if in the future, some weird authentication method were to come out, no breaking changes would be needed. You simply would add a table to accommodate it, and old clients would simply not support the feature and just load the database without it. Of course, a warning would be shown to the user if somehow their database uses new features on an old client.

Using a relational database does not solve this problem at all. It doesn’t even address it at all.

The original problem is you have multiple implementations defining their own data model. Whether the backend is a file, a database, or a post-it note, that doesn’t work.

Just as you can ignore tables in a database, you can ignore attributes in XML.

[1]: https://www.passwordstore.org/
by mikepurvis | 2026-02-25 05:04:31+00:00
A thunderbolt 3 connector is 4 PCIe lanes, isn't it? I know there can be compatibility gaps, but there are definitely TB-connected enclosure boxes available. NVMe connectors are also 4 PCIe lanes, and I believe any of those can be broken out and used for whatever (m.2 cellular data modems for example).

Are you thinking of plugging in actual consumer expansion cards, or are you wanting the lanes broken out on some kind of riser where they can go to hardwired stuff on a carrier board?
by Windchaser | 2026-02-25 05:04:56+00:00
It's akin to saying "swinging a hammer is the easy part of creating a building". Or "inserting a needle into a vein is the easy part of medicine".

Both are somewhat true, and yet, I'll still be quite happy if we have AI that can do them.

I'm certainly not trying to trivialize the progress that LLMs are making. I'm trying to be realistic, noting both the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs, and what that means for the fields they touch.
by UltraSane | 2026-02-25 05:05:11+00:00
Epic the EMR company in Verona Wisconsin is pretty unique in that during work hours The entrances to all office buildings do not require RFID cards. The Epic campus is enormous with almost 14,000 people with relatively high turnover so a random non-employee isn't likely to be noticed. I even kept my ID card in my wallet and was never reprimanded. The RFID readers were all at perfect rear pocket height.
by iainctduncan | 2026-02-25 05:05:14+00:00
The thing that makes me crazy about this article, others like it (and so many of the comments in response to them ) is the naive assumption that whatever the author is used to is always the case.

It's just not. I've been a developer for 25+ years, and in technical diligence looking at companies getting investments for seven, and have done diligence on 100+ companies. It's ALL OVER THE PLACE. It depends on the product, the company, the team, the way the company is managed, the business domain, etc.

For some companies, products, and teams.. the code absolutely is the hard part, and building that insanely sophisticated software is worth millions. I've seen scientific software that sold for millions of dollars per copy.

For others, the code is essentially commodity plumbing around some operational knowledge of a domain that makes nice dough with minimal code complexity. I've also seen founders who were going to spend the rest of their days floating around the bahamas because they wrote the right PHP-ball-of-mud in the right domain at the right time, sigh.

The world of software is vastly broader than the vast majority of programmers think. And there are a lot of very, very different ways to make money in it.
by stevenhuang | 2026-02-25 05:05:41+00:00
People get into accidents not because they don't know with great accuracy how far away an object is.

They get into accidents because they make bad decisions and get distracted.

If AI makes better decisions and don't get distracted, the amount of accidents will already be greatly reduced compared to humans.

Having lidar in addition to cameras will be of marginal benefit (but a benefit to be sure) when you realize what is actually important: proper modeling of the environment. And for this, cameras are better at providing than lidar, so you still will want cameras anyways.

The focus on lidar is really a red herring. You merely push the computational budget you have to understanding a point cloud instead of vision. You're back to square 1 of "how can I properly model the environment given this sensory modality". This is the part that essentially needs human level understanding of the world that you're missing.

As the other commenter says, you deeply misunderstand the problem.
by gogopromptless | 2026-02-25 05:06:48+00:00
The literal writing of the code was hard. This revisionism about how we were all secretly shakespeare typing monkey scammers pulling the wool over the eyes of the economy drives me nuts. Choosing which words to put in the editor, how to express all these ideas in a limited syntax. That was the big skill.

Sure, writing a program that makes a machine kind of do something was easy. Lots of people can do that. But then you ship a mobile app to a billion users and discover that people are genuinely wired differently.

different cultures, different mental models, different expectations

Now you have to accommodate and express all of that complexity in a language whose only reader is a machine that tolerates zero ambiguity. And you have to do it in a way that other engineers can read, reason about, and build on top of without the whole thing exploding. That's not requirements gathering. Its literally writing it down

You're doing the thing where you read code like a fish breathes water and conclude it was easy to write. You can read a Nobel Prize novel in a weekend too. The readability is the achievement, not evidence it was trivial.

Edit: I got pretty heated about this and wrote up a proper rebuttal: https://promptless.ai/blog/technical/writing-code-was-hard-a...