MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: A tiny utility to rewrite Bash functions as standalone scripts
by zahlman | 2026-02-25 22:20:52+00:00
Over the last few months I've tinkered with some command-line scripts that fix my bad habit of writing one-off Bash functions, not doing anything to keep them around, and then regretting the loss. The README explains the essentials, but for more context (and the full "behind-the-scenes" of why I did this) I also did a blog write-up: https://zahlman.github.io/posts/meta-automation/ . Overall it seems like way more framing effort than a few dozen lines of Bash really deserve; but it was fun and I've found all of it surprisingly useful.
by pocksuppet | 2026-02-25 22:21:24+00:00
A lot of laws use the phrase "known, or should have known"

Google should not have known that someone would misuse their block list to block domains. But now that someone is misusing their block list to block domains, if someone brings it to their attention, the next time this happens, they will have known it.

I am not a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
by Miraste | 2026-02-25 22:21:39+00:00
It seems to have a harder time with political news than more abstract concepts. I was able to pass the checks for the Algorithmic Radicalization and Echo Chamber articles with my first comments.

However, I did not manage to express any opinion on the transgender rights article, from any political perspective, without being flagged. On one of the comments I tested, it gave me a suggested revision from this:

"This is another move in a pattern of limiting the rights of anyone who isn't a MAGA supporter."

To this:

"This seems to continue a trend where certain groups feel their rights are being limited, which could affect many people beyond just MAGA supporters."

The first comment isn't substantive, but the second is even worse, adding so much equivocation that it's meaningless. To add insult to injury, the detector also flagged its own suggested revision. Even if it had gone through, accepting these revisions would mean flooding a platform with LLM-speak, which is not conducive to discussion.

Honest feedback: from a user perspective, the suggestions feel frustrating and patronizing, more so than if my comments were simply deleted. I would stop using a site that implemented this.

From a site operator perspective, the kind of discourse it incentivizes seems jagged, subject to much stricter rules if the LLM associates a topic with political controversy. It feels opinionated and unpredictable, and the revisions it suggests are not of a quality I would want on a discussion board. The focus on positive language in particular seems like a reductive view of quality; what is the point of using an LLM if it's only doing basic sentiment analysis?
by notepad0x90 | 2026-02-25 22:21:54+00:00
I think I'm in agreement with you. But regardless of expectations, the tool works a certain way. It's just a map of it's training data which is deeply flawed but immensely useful at the same time.

Also in that analogy, the LLM is the fire, not the furnace. If you use codex for example, that would the furnace, and it does have good guardrails, no one seems to be complaining about those.
by NewsaHackO | 2026-02-25 22:22:00+00:00
That is actually hilarious, did you actually read the MO of those Apps?

>The core payload has been updated to incorporate a new keylogger variant of Anatsa. Additionally, the malware utilizes a well-known Android APK ZIP obfuscator for enhanced evasion. The DEX payload is concealed within a JSON file, which is dynamically dropped at runtime and promptly deleted after being loaded.

I wonder if there is anything that Google can do to prevent this specific attack. :)
by throw310822 | 2026-02-25 22:23:01+00:00
Yes, you're repeating once again the same concept. We know it. What I am saying is that since the state encodes a horizon that goes beyond the mere generation of the next token (for the "past", it encodes the meaning of the conversation so far; for the "future", has already an idea of what it wants to say), this state is only changing slightly at each new inference pass, despite being each time recreated from the context. So during a sequence of (completely independent) token predictions there is an internal state that stays mostly the same, evolving only gradually in a feedback loop with the tokens that are generated at each inference cycle.

Maybe it's not clear what I mean by "state". I mean a pattern of activations in the deep layers of the network that encodes for some high level semantic. Not something that is persisted. Something that doesn't need to be persisted precisely because is fully determined by the context, and the context stays roughly the same.
by bonoboTP | 2026-02-25 22:23:07+00:00
I see it on myself too. It feels too irresistible to start adding more features to software you develop with LLM agents. Everything feels like just a few prompts and will be done in half an hour. Why not add this too? Just another sentence in the prompt. Next thing you know you have more features than you remember and the AI starts to have a really hard job keeping it all functional.

Coding with AI requires immense restraint and strong scope limits.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-25 22:23:10+00:00
In many states, state law overrides local planning's ability to prevent siting renewables. Check if your state is one of these states if your project size requires it.

> "But what will we eat?" is a propaganda point that you will hear a lot even though it's totally bogus.

Indeed. The US farms almost 60 million acres for biofuels, the size of the state of Oregon. These arguments do not come from serious people imho. People are simply married to their rural identity and ag cosplay, despite it being wildly inefficient and subsidized by the federal government.

https://kaufman.substack.com/p/at-least-31-states-consider-o...

https://cleantomorrow.org/reports/

(have installed 100kw+ in residential solar, and have experience following along for a ~100MW project)
by pocksuppet | 2026-02-25 22:23:42+00:00
Then that heuristic is your evidence in court. If it's a good heuristic, you win the case. If it's a bad heuristic, you lose the case.

"Your Honor, we banned this person's website because his web page contained the word 'bitcoin' more than 5 times" will not hold up.

"Your Honor, we banned this person's website because it contains a bitcoin miner script. See, here is the script, and it matches the hash value found in these other attacks" hopefully holds up.
by gizmo686 | 2026-02-25 22:23:47+00:00
Damage scales with the 4th power of weight.

From what I can find, the standard weight limit for a truck in 20 tons per axle (less when multiple axles are close together).

In contrast, the average weight for a car is a bit under 4 tons (even for SUVs). Even a pickup truck is under 5.4 tons. Since these have 2 axles, that comes out to every class except loaded freight trucks having under 2.7 tons per axle on average. So a freight truck acting at the legal limit (without tandem axles) would be over 7.4 times as heavy per axle as a passenger pickup truck. Applying the 4th power law, this means a single maximally loaded truck causes about 3000 times (300,000%) as much damage as an average pickup truck; and 10,000 times (1,000,000%) as much as an average SUV.
In contrast, the difference in damage caused by an average SUV and an average sedan is only about 40%

https://www.autoinsurance.com/guide/average-car-weight/
Show HN: JSON-up – Like database migrations, but for JSON
by mrspence | 2026-02-25 22:24:08+00:00
When you store JSON locally - app data, config files, browser storage - the schema inevitably changes between versions.

New fields get added, old ones get renamed, formats evolve. Without a migration system, you end up with brittle ad-hoc upgrade code or broken user data.

I built json-up, a small TypeScript library that lets you define a chain of versioned migrations that transform JSON data step by step. It's type-safe, so the compiler catches mismatches between versions.

Originally, I needed this for upgrading local app data between mobile app releases for Whisper, but it works for anything where JSON schemas drift over time. Happy to hear what you think.

---

json-up: https://github.com/Nano-Collective/json-up
Whisper: https://usewhisper.org
by password4321 | 2026-02-25 22:24:44+00:00
In case anyone is not aware:

20231109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38212453 Windows 11 Update 23H2 is stealing users' IMAP credentials (666 points, 278 comments)

> the new Outlook is a thin wrapper around the cloud version, so the IMAP sync happens in the cloud, not locally
by OkayPhysicist | 2026-02-25 22:24:48+00:00
I wonder if the 70% vs 80% "Probably" problem comes from cultural differences between anglophone countries. The human datasets that were available were mostly American, with some Western Europe/NATO. Notably missing would be India, which simply by population I'd expect to represent a significant chunk of English-language writing available on the open internet ( and thus fed into LLM training sets).

The other phenomena I would love to test is if the act of surveying people effected their declared odds. Not sure how to get good numbers out of that, but I could see the LLM vs surveyed human discrepancy arising from people using "probably" differently in their everyday writing, as opposed to when asked point-blank what "probably" means.
by observationist | 2026-02-25 22:25:17+00:00
It's still much easier to verify than to produce, but being willing to do that sort of thing, to enjoy it, or to know how to do it well are very different from loving programming. I think this is where AI butts heads with programmers who are in it for the love of the game.

Getting utility from AI is in the domain of management - the most effective, productive uses I've seen for AI involve elaborate project management scaffolding, hierarchies branching out of an agent.md or some similar setup, with explicit instructions and human oriented breakpoints in the process, so at each stage, the person can look at it all, verify operation of all the subcomponents, accept or reject the PR, and go again.

Normally people just want to vibe their way through a project or process, and that's chaotic specifically because there might be an effectively infinite space of possible legitimate, working completions, but only a tiny finite set of outcomes that could be considered "good". Another much larger but still finite set of "good enough" outcomes end up compounding errors and hitting the user in the face with the mystical salmon of unintended consequences.

Management is all about containing the space of possible outcomes and pushing resources toward a completion that lands in the space of "good", and that's tedious and boring. Even with AI, you're generally working in a space you don't know much about, haven't experienced or learned to enjoy or appreciate anything about it, and don't know enough to correct or guide the AI when it goes off-kilter.

All that to say, we need to automate management so that you can specify a style or methodology at the start and never have to think about it again, and have each AI operate on a strong default that works for lots of use cases. There's really no need to keep the MBAs and c-suite around, what they do is eminently more automatic and methodological than painting or writing poetry. Someone just has to wrangle the right dataset and extract the patterns. Incidentally, this might be one of the only things that gives Microsoft an edge over the next handful of years, since they're riding shotgun and recording everything everyone is doing to get good training data.
by GorbachevyChase | 2026-02-25 22:25:29+00:00
I haven’t visited California in a couple years, but I wouldn’t call anything I saw over there progress. Carcinogen warnings on the rental car. People defecating in the street. Addicts wandering the streets clearly being provided drugs by NGO volunteers. History will remember this time as an absurd caricature the way we think of Public blood sports, vomitoriums, and horses being appointed to the Roman Senate.
by abustamam | 2026-02-25 22:25:40+00:00
I use double hyphens instead of em-dashes when I'm on my computer. I think some programs will combine them into an em-dash but most of the time they're just double dashes.

My phone lets me long-press the hyphen key to get an em-dash so sometimes I'll use it.

Probably the biggest tell that I'm not AI is that I'm probably not using it in the appropriate circumstances!
by citrin_ru | 2026-02-25 22:26:00+00:00
> Even the solar panel market is self defeating. Once there is enough installed power the demand will drop off sharply as the refresh cycle is too long.

It's not going to happen soon - solar is still just 8% of world energy production. Even if solar will cover 100% of consumption on a sunny day it still would make sense to buy more panels to have enough output on a cloudy day or in the morning/evening. It's likely production of solar panels will be a good business till at least 2050 and oil business will start to decline before that unless will be propped by corrupt politicians.
by mschuster91 | 2026-02-25 22:26:19+00:00
> EDIT: I'm assuming the difficulty here is the pedestrian ramps at intersections. NOT the curb that spans the entirety of a road section.

The curb elements are made offsite. All you do onsite is to cut the stones to length if need be.

The challenge is properly anchoring them into the surrounding soil, and for that you need a concrete foundation. Basically, you make a gravel (or concrete) foundation, then you put down the curb element onto a few small pieces of wood, then you make a sort of mold cavity, and then you pour that mold full of concrete. Once that has cured, you put gravel to have an equal height with the road's gravel foundation on the road side and either soil or gravel on the pedestrian side to grade height - gravel if you want to place paving stones for pedestrians, or straight out soil if you want a grass siding.

You can see a few pictures and diagrams on how we do it in Germany here [1].

[1] https://www.beton-info.de/randsteine-setzen/
Show HN: VGPU Silo Capacity Calculator (identify siloed capacity in mixed mode)
by frankdenneman | 2026-02-25 22:26:53+00:00
I built a small online tool to help visualize a problem that shows up in mixed-size vGPU environments: GPU capacity can become siloed even when memory is still free.

In these setups, deployable capacity is limited by placement rules and profile compatibility, not just by available memory. Two clusters with the same free memory can behave very differently depending on how profiles are mixed and placed over time.

This tool helps identify that siloed capacity.

You can:

- choose a GPU type and vGPU profile catalog
- model mixed-size placement behavior
- see how profile choices influence deployable capacity over time

It’s not a placement simulator and doesn’t try to predict exact VM startup order. The goal is to make placement constraints visible so architects and operators can reason about profile catalogs before deployment.

Tool:
https://frankdenneman.nl/tools/vgpu-silo-capacity-calculator...

Background article explaining the model:
https://frankdenneman.nl/posts/2026-02-24-mixed-size-vgpu-mo...

Feedback welcome, especially from people running virtualized GPU or shared inference environments.
by sourishkrout | 2026-02-25 22:26:54+00:00
That's a very thoughtful analysis. Totally agree.

The agents are the new browser statement is a simplification to succinctly express the UI shift from the passive interface. I do like to think it's a lot like desktop->mobile where it's a shift as much as an expansion.

Also nailed on the points about "legibility". Thanks for the contribution!
by ghm2199 | 2026-02-25 22:27:00+00:00
I want to use "slower" methods of identification more. Like say for instance within a few blocks of you a human can identify who you are for any service that wants to do some kind of verification/proof you are/have XYZ.

We could designate specific individuals to do for you and me just like we do for today's trust authorities for website certificates.

No more verified profiles by uploading names, emails and passports and photographs(gosh!). Just turned 18 and want to access insta? Go to the local high school teacher to get age verified. Finished a career path and want it on linked in? Go to the company officer. Are you a new journalist who wants to be designated on X as so but anonymously? Go to the notary public.

One can do this cryptographically with no PII exchanged between the person, the community or the webservice. And you can be anonymous yet people know you are real.

It can be all maintained on a tree of trust, every individual in the chain needs to be verified, and only designated individuals can do actions that are sensitive/important.

You only need to do this once every so often to access certain services. Bonus: you get to take a walk and meet a human being.
by jacob019 | 2026-02-25 22:27:36+00:00
I also hate how tmux uses alt mode and can never remember all the shortcuts, copy paste is a PITA and just today I had to look up how to dump the scrollback buffer to a file. Named sessions without window management makes a lot more sense these days. Similarly, I'm not a fan of all the ANSI escape codes that CC uses to jump the cursor around and rewrite the display to look like a GUI. I prefer a TUI that doesn't mutate rows after writing them, that's what alt mode is for. CC often clears whatever was in the scrollback buffer before you opened it, it hides bracketed paste, and goes crazy sometimes when content overflows the window and I have to resize the terminal or get blasted with a wall of glitching characters--extra annoying if I'm working from a low bandwidth link. I develop my own agent framework and code agent, and while some features aren't as polished as CC, one of my explicit goals is to preserve the traditional CLI feel, like the python REPL (that's what it's based around). I'll give zmx a try tonight :)
by erentz | 2026-02-25 22:27:40+00:00
The people in this regime and their supporters really seem surprised to discover that actually other countries do have agency and national pride. Serious empathy gap in these people.

The US owned the world’s tech stack and countries let it because it was convenient and despite its problems people mostly trusted the US was on their side. In one year we’ve utterly destroyed that and made ourselves enemies of the democratic world. That Silicon Valley did not see this would threaten its global business says something.
by wat10000 | 2026-02-25 22:27:43+00:00
Tossing up a banner doesn't really help. You're required to allow users to opt out of anything that's not essential to the service being requested by the user. So regardless of whether you're going to have a banner or not, you have to identify what's essential. And once you've done that, you could stop there and not have anything non-essential.
by brokencode | 2026-02-25 22:28:26+00:00
Yeah IDK. Wordpad is built around rich text, with all the weirdness and complexity that comes with it. I know for a fact that .rtf is absurdly complicated to work with, and I assume that .docx is similar.

I’m willing to bet that adding markdown to Notepad was a lot simpler than trying to make it work in Wordpad, especially since you’d probably still have to support rich text.
by ac29 | 2026-02-25 22:28:26+00:00
You can definitely get gpt-oss-120b for much less than $0.20/M on openrouter (cheapest is currently 3.9c/M in 14c/M out). Kimi K2 is an order of magnitude larger and more expensive though.

What other models do they offer? The web page is very light on details
by ZoomZoomZoom | 2026-02-25 22:28:41+00:00
Years ago replacing Notepad with an alternative was a given and everybody had their favourite. Before UTF everywhere you needed at least proper character encoding handling, other features followed.

Surprisingly, some of the projects such as AkelPad are still alive.

Win32 made things easier, as well as things like Delphi and Scintilla later.

Just checked my archives, and my own naive but functioning attempt measures whole whopping 36520 bytes, though not without the help of an executable packer, which was a fashion then.

Mostly works fine under Wine, though it is about the legal US drinking age.
by Cornest | 2026-02-25 22:29:00+00:00
Hey HN! I built RocketShare for end-to-end encrypted file sharing where encryption happens entirely in your browser.

The key design decision: your encryption key only exists in the URL fragment (#), so it never reaches the server. The server stores encrypted blobs and metadata, nothing else.

Some details:
- No account needed for basic sharing
- Files auto-expire (you set the duration)
- Built with Nuxt on Cloudflare Workers

I'd love feedback on the product and the security model. Happy to answer any questions about the architecture.
by epistasis | 2026-02-25 22:30:07+00:00
It's funny, there was meme-like behavior a few years ago where anti-wind advocates would say "they're tearing down the wind farms before their end of life, like only 15 years in! Clearly wind doesn't work at all!"

And then you'd go and look at the details of any these "tear downs" and you find out that it's not because the current wind farm is failing, it's because turbine technology had improved so much that it made financial sense to drop in much bigger turbines right now, before their natural end of life.

Shortly after that, there started to be complaints about "what will we do with the waste from these massive wind turbine blades!?" as if they were in any way comparable in toxicity to the byproducts of fossil fuel extraction and burning.

It's so funny to see how shallow these anti-renewable talking points are. They all require that people spend zero effort and avoid critical thought in any way.
by solomonb | 2026-02-25 22:30:24+00:00
> So... use a reamp box to make it hiZ again?

That is going to be something like a transformer to step down your line level signal and some series resistance to match the load to help drive the amp.

An actual coil pickup has reactive impedance that is frequency dependent and will result in a more complex interaction between the devices.

> The pedals and system being dependent on the high impedance was always a bug, not a feature

Sure if you think like an engineer, but everything you are complaining about is what allows someone like Jimi Hendrix to do what he did with a guitar.
by wasabi991011 | 2026-02-25 22:30:35+00:00
> I'm saying you have to have a certain level of functional ability to not be incarcerated for the rest of your life. Such as you have to be able to read and write and do math at some certain level.

Having a failure of parental upbringing and education system causing someone to be incarcerated seems cruel. Should a child who ran away from home & school to avoid family abuse be incarcerated? There are so many current systems of society (education, police, disability, etc) that have failures at the margin that adding incarceration seems over the top.
by vanderZwan | 2026-02-25 22:30:50+00:00
Nice addition! First time I heard of them and I'm liking what I'm hearing so far.

And just to clarify: I don't dislike electronic instruments. I just think that on some subconscious level the human brain can detect other humans playing a live instrument. Like there's something "embodied" in the sound that is likely missing from a pure electronic instrument. And I needed that element to "unlock" access to techno.