MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skeletal88 | 2026-02-18 22:38:53+00:00
But then the C# people make writing code in it.. a horrible experience. They really like to over engineer and architect.

Had to look at some c# backend code. To write any kind of endpoint that talked to a database they had to write at least... 7? different files, lots of empty interfaces that has to be created and implemented, command, mediator patterns everywhere, etc. Looked like insanity compared to Spring Boot
by miav | 2026-02-18 22:39:04+00:00
It is genuinely incredible how well-fitting clothing is only generally available to some one-third of women who fit well into the anticipated height-waist ratio. Petite options exist in some places, but god forbid you're tall - your choices will be limited to "too short" and "too short and also too wide" if you try to go for a size up.
by dreamdimension | 2026-02-18 22:39:10+00:00
Hello all,
Sharing a productivity desktop app I've built. It uses AI to analyze what you've been doing by taking periodic screenshots of your desktop while it runs.

It helps you better align with your goals and see if you are actually working towards your stated goals.

The client is open source and you choose exactly what is processed, giving you full privacy and control.

Would love your thoughts and feedback.

Thanks
by ggm | 2026-02-18 22:39:36+00:00
Regulate now. You would think it actually levels the playing field for everyone.

Never got this, nor the bizarre dysfunctional pockets on womens clothes.

In wartime/rationing, the government stipulated hem size, banned turn-ups, oxford bags, specified jacket lengths, cloth weights. For working class people, clothes IMPROVED. (de-mob (de-mobilisation) suits were for some working men the best suit of clothes they had ever owned)
by Dylan16807 | 2026-02-18 22:40:13+00:00
> That's why I also wrote "DRM breaking" as an alternative term.

Except that there's nothing bad about breaking DRM, even when respecting copyright. If anything DRM interferes with how copyright is supposed to work by being an obstacle to fair use.

> Would you say "hackers broke into the NHS and copied patient data without permission" or would you simply say they "stole" it?

It's significantly more reasonable to use "stole" and "theft" for getting your hands on private data, especially when breaking in to get to it. (Preemptive note, breaking DRM is not breaking in, it happens on your own devices.)
by ZoomZoomZoom | 2026-02-18 22:40:17+00:00
I stand corrected.

Although, the problem is not so single-layered. Do I understand the situation correctly, in case of iOS, to not be subject to additional limitations of the platform that restricts the distribution of your products to the extents that the laws of the countries where your business is registered require, all the user has to do is to fork the main repo (which is, thankfully, BSD), build a minimally acceptable GUI, pass Apple certification, publish the app in the app store, and Bob's your uncle?
by sebmellen | 2026-02-18 22:41:02+00:00
> I'm absolutely baffled that you think the job that requires some of the most thinking, by far, is somehow less cognitively intense than sending emails and making slide decks.

OK, to quote you: WHOAH WHOAH WHOAH WHOAH STOP!

You've made a lot of assumptions.

I'm not saying that coding is not thinking. What I'm saying is this:

There is a difference between:

(a) thinking about, and deciding upon, what will be done, and
(b) the thinking that is required during implementation.

In my experience, coding is at least 50/50 (even for the best developer) in the sense that figuring out how to structure and fix your code {type (b)} used to require very deep thinking. But then the other thinking time was spent on your system design/architecture {type (a)}, and not debugging type errors, etc.

AI has already changed that split. If you have a good test harness and problem definition, you can throw Codex at a really massive task and have it do quite well at the finer details of implementation.

Other white-collar office work, as stupid as it may be, will be a lot harder to automate because it is primarily the "thinking about what will be done" {type (a)} kind of work and not the "thinking that is done during implementation" {type (b)} kind of work.

If you haven't seen what I mean by "enterprise office work" it may be hard to grasp what I'm talking about... But thinking that people are just doodling around making slide decks or writing shitty emails is the wrong mental model for the breadth of non-technical work available in a large company.
by abcde666777 | 2026-02-18 22:41:08+00:00
One of the challenges in doing something about climate change is the significant (and not entirely unfounded) distrust growing between the public and the government.

Basically amounting to, "well, you say you're doing X to combat climate change, but is X actually a competent solution (I don't trust your competence), and are you doing it to actually help or just to line pockets (I don't trust your intent)".

The other challenge is that we as individual humans are loathe to give up our comfortable lifestyle if such turns out to be necessary.
by clarabennett26 | 2026-02-18 22:41:08+00:00
Delivery apps do monitor their drivers, but the drivers are aware of it and have agreed to it. The article highlights that anyone equipped with a $10 Pi and a BLE scanner can discreetly identify devices nearby, link phone and watch MAC addresses, and create movement profiles without the tracked individual's consent. This presents a significantly different risk than simply knowing where drivers are located.
by clarabennett26 | 2026-02-18 22:42:00+00:00
UDP support in peer relays is crucial. DERP relies solely on TCP, which causes latency-sensitive applications like game streaming and voice to experience head-of-line blocking along with poor routing. With peer relays using UDP on your own nodes, the fallback path becomes effective for real-time traffic when direct WireGuard fails. Additionally, you can easily enable this feature on an existing subnet router without the need to set up and manage a separate DERP instance, making it much simpler to operate.
by legitster | 2026-02-18 22:42:18+00:00
Yes, and no. I think we actually do this logic a lot in our lives. Do I actually believe whole wheat bread is better for me, or do I just buy it on the chance it is? Do I go with the cheapest toothpaste or spend money on something that might be better? Do I buy an AWD car on the chance I am stuck?

Sacrificing a goat, after all, does sound like a lot of work. But maybe I will wear a lucky hat to a baseball game?
by dehue | 2026-02-18 22:42:42+00:00
That's what sizing guides are theoretically for, if you add more sizing systems it gets even more confusing. I don't think the issue is as bad as the post portrays it though. Its true that sizes can be all over the place but like I am size small woman's and if I buy small most of the time it will fit or at least somewhat fit. I am not a standard model size either as I need things that are for more hourglass figure rather than straight but that just requires being selective about which styles to buy. A medium also usually fits if I need something looser. I double check the reviews if its online or try it on in person and as long as its not something that requires precise measurements its usually fine. For things like jeans I shop in person and try things on from a few sizes or just know approximate size I am or rely on reviews. Many items these days are stretchy and even when they don't fit perfectly they are wearable or you can return them, its not that complicated. I do only shop a few brands or from in person stores or I can often approximate sizing from how big something looks or by looking at review photos.

The pockets thing is similar, not having pockets is annoying but its not that big of a deal. I rather buy something cute without pockets than search for something with some. If it has them great, if it doesnt oh well I will just use my purse. Barely anything fits in pockets anyways and I have a feeling other women feel similarly which is why many of us buy things whether or not they have pockets.
by sien | 2026-02-18 22:42:51+00:00
Yeah. It's a remarkable problem. There is a clear solution that is happily used for men. You tell people what to measure then have the clothes sized for the various dimensions.

Charles Tyrwhitt have this guide where they tell you what to measure for shirts :

https://www.charlestyrwhitt.com/au/size-guides/szg-formal-sh...

and for trousers :

https://www.charlestyrwhitt.com/au/szg-trousers-4-2021.html

Presumably some online shops for women have something similar?
by 16bytes | 2026-02-18 22:42:52+00:00
You are being down-voted not because of some imaginary "purity cycle", but because you discard without reasoning a vast amount of evidence to the contrary of your hypothesis.

You've heard of the saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? Holding a hypothesis of water-vapor from air travel being the primary driver of warming trends is extraordinary.

Invoking the oft-repeated "do your own research" rhetorical crutch and referring to scientific consensus as "hype" doesn't help your case.
by jacobjjacob | 2026-02-18 22:43:18+00:00
Markets can’t see the product quality of a monopoly. It won’t be reflected in the metrics because there’s no competition to anchor the earnings to the real consumer value. But that doesn’t mean quality isn’t a factor- it makes them vulnerable to disruption.

Warren Buffett is known to trade on product quality (he buys what he uses). So his sale could be based on that.
by vsgherzi | 2026-02-18 22:43:24+00:00
But the thing is these DO get exploited in the wild we see that again and again in high value targets like operating systems. That's why apple and google go to such high extremes to work in things like bounds checking. ROP JOB chains have gotten good and LLMS are even able to help these days (if you have the bankroll)

It's a culture problem and I still have hope we can change that. My big hope is that as more big players get into it, windows, linux, android, chome, we'll get high quality stand alone packages. Many of these products have to reach certain standards. We saw this recently with JPEGXL. It got accepted into chromium and they've been diligent as to not bring in additional external dependencies.

Projects like sudo-rs take the same approach. As always good engineers will make good code as more of a niche for rust gets carved out I belive we'll see an ecosystem more like c / cpp and less like nodejs (of course this is just my sepeculation)
by jarjoura | 2026-02-18 22:43:39+00:00
I haven't heard writers make any kind of stance on software engineering, but Brandon Sanderson has very publicly renounced AI writing because it lacks any kind of authentic journey of an authors own writing. Just as we would cringe at our first software projects, he cringes at his first published novel.

I think that's a reasonable argument to make against generative art in any form.

However, he does celebrate LLM advancements in health and accessibility, and I've seen most "AI haters" handwave away its use there. It's a weird dissonance to me too that its use is perfectly okay if it helps your grandparents live a longer, and higher quality of life, but not okay if your grandparents use that longer life to use AI-assisted writing to write a novel that Brandon would want to read.
by spockz | 2026-02-18 22:43:51+00:00
So much this for consistency. I remember one particular bad occasion I went shopping for trousers in a store. I tried five, each had something wrong in relation with the size numbers.

First didn’t fit because it was too tight, so I tried one size larger. This one was even smaller than the previous one. So I tried an even bigger one which was only taller. Tried a bigger number now it was way too big. So for fun I tried one with a higher number which turned out to be smaller than the previous one.

When I asked the store assistant, they shrugged and said that was just reality and why you need to try every item individually. It has to do with how much “spare” cloth the seamstress takes when stitching the trousers together, if the original piece of cloth was even already cut to size properly.

These days I buy from the brand own size, the same item and it fits every time.
by magneticnorth | 2026-02-18 22:44:06+00:00
"The average woman’s waistline today is nearly 4 inches wider than it was in the mid-1990s."

I assume they mean circumference rather than diameter, but this is still a shocking increase in only 30 years. I knew the obesity epidemic was an ever-increasing problem, but this really puts it into perspective. I wonder if we'll ever fully understand the causes behind this rapid shift.
by tokyobreakfast | 2026-02-18 22:44:54+00:00
Of course it's massively misleading, it's farming for updoots.

Further proving the (unpopular) point I made earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47066456

Source: I own one of these iBooks and it most certainly can NOT connect to modern Wi-Fi, not out of the box. IIRC it cannot do WPA2, or required an update to do so, which was not available in the Tiger install media, so a chicken-or-egg scenario. Definitely will fail on a mixed WPA2/WPA3 network.

Assume it can connect to Wi-Fi, the TLS libraries are ancient and nothing will work. Including authenticating to iTunes, etc. Samba is ancient and will not connect to shares running SMB2 or newer. It also ignores than OS X versions newer than Tiger have broken App Stores and other things.

Wait till everyone finds out Apple served software updates in those days over plain HTTP which is why it "works"...
by krapp | 2026-02-18 22:45:14+00:00
You need to understand the political and cultural history. Environmentalism has been associated with leftist, feminist and communist ideology going back to the hippies and the antiwar movement (which makes it easy for many Americans to mistrust by default.) When Trump said he believed global warming was a Chinese hoax (remember that?) he was echoing a belief amongst the right that environmentalism and "global warming" was a plot to undermine American business and sovereignty, and that climate science supporting anthropogenic global warming was manufactured by "cultural Marxist academics" to push that agenda.

This conspiracy thinking has been pushed by Republicans, right-wing think tanks, coal, oil, manufacturing and like industries attempting to undermine public trust in climate science since at least the 1970s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial
by ozim | 2026-02-18 22:45:21+00:00
As much as I know the story MSFT was basically driving limousines in front of Borland headquarters and showering developers with money to jump the ship.

When web apps took off there was nothing that would save Delphi. Web stack was awful back then and I also enjoyed Delphi an building interfaces with it.

But web stack unfortunately had many more upsides than desktop apps and nowadays tooling for web sucks less.
by perrygeo | 2026-02-18 22:45:28+00:00
> Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now

Same. Empirical evidence is just too hard to ignore.

It's quite amazing watching the "climate change isn't real" folks transition to "climate change is no big deal", then to "climate change is too hard/expensive to deal with".
by jzelinskie | 2026-02-18 22:45:29+00:00
I'd love to have someone else chime in on this because I did some spelunking and am not sure if this comment is true.

I checked my DNS logs and saw zero attempts to resolve `log.tailscale.com` having ran tailscale for many years (I added it to a blocklist anyway).
From their admin panel, it appears "networking logging" requires paying for Premium[0], so it's not being used for free users (or Personal Pro).

Also, from looking at some source code (because the docs don't include this), I discovered you can disable logging for the macOS App Store client by doing:

echo "TS_NO_LOGS_NO_SUPPORT=true" > ~/Library/Containers/io.tailscale.ipn.macos.network-extension/Data/tailscaled-env.txt

[0]: https://login.tailscale.com/admin/logs/network
by yesbabyyes | 2026-02-18 22:45:32+00:00
This brings me back! My first job was at the Norwegian ERP Agresso, now part of Unit4. I started as a support technician, which was a experience since around the time, '97-'98, everyone was moving from Sybase/Ingres/Informix etc, to either MSSQL or Oracle. I got to interact with those older database systems and install and export/import data to systems running on eg Oracle across parallel Solaris servers at SAAB Areospace and Windows NT running on DEC Alpha at Ericsson, among other more vanilla deployments.

I was a developer albeit not professionally, and my boss gave me the opportunity to develop the integration between Agresso and Crystal Reports, my first professional development project, for which I am still grateful. It was a DLL written in C++ and I imagine they shipped that for quite a while after I left for greener pastures.

I was already a free software and Linux enthusiast, so I did a vain skunkworks attempt at getting Agresso to run with MySQL, which failed, but my Linux server in the office came in handy when I needed some extra software in the field--I asked a colleague to put a CD in the server so I could download it to the client site some 500 km away, and deliver on the migration.
by jccooper | 2026-02-18 22:45:51+00:00
There is a problem with the number of dimensions. Even a t-shirt is described best in neck, chest, waist, and you could add several parameters for sleeves and also for heights. Neither consumers nor manufacturers can really handle the combinatorial explosion, so you have to boil it down to one or maybe two dimensions.

But the reason even that isn't done is mostly history and market expectations. There are clothing categories that sell in actual dimensions, and (aside from the terrible dimensional accuracy of clothing in general) it works fine. But those are all on the "men's" side, and it seems the industry believes women will not like buying based on actual numbers.
by rtpg | 2026-02-18 22:46:01+00:00
Kinda funny how this is true but there's a line of Mac OSes that can't connect to the App Store anymore so you can't upgrade the OS without manually downloading it off of an Apple help page.

It's not the end of the world, but I've had to help more than one person walk through this process cuz they're like "I can't update the OS????"
by sebmellen | 2026-02-18 22:46:05+00:00
No. You can be a very productive developer and have the syntax be more of a blocker than application design, and the same in reverse.

I interview a lot of people, and I've seen people who are astoundingly good at micro-systems, very complex regexes, etc. white struggling massively with system design. And vice versa. People have different talents.

But, in my experience, AI will vastly improve the success of the developer who's better at orchestration, architecture, and system design than the developer who's very good at tiny micro-system type of work. Yes, there is still a need for someone who can read and understand regexes... but is there anywhere near as much of a need as before? Not at all.

Now. there are very many dual threats, and most truly senior engineers are both. These people now have an even bigger leg up, because they have an understanding of system mechanics + the superpower of Claude Code/etc. They don't have to waste as much time on boilerplate and raw implementation, and yet they can check the output of their input to the AI. They are also probably better equipped to build testing harnesses, etc., that adapt well to agentic use.
by RIMR | 2026-02-18 22:46:21+00:00
I am not a big fan of AI-generated educational content, mostly because it's a great way to confidently learn falsehoods and misconceptions. I would prefer to learn from a reliable and reputable source.

I am also not a big fan of trying to beat doomscrolling. One of the defining properties of doomscrolling is that it is mindless and addicting. The moment you try to create a mindful, healthy alternative, you've already lost. No product will ever beat doomscrolling, only individuals dedicated to their own mental health are capable of clearing this hurdle.
by apt-apt-apt-apt | 2026-02-18 22:46:54+00:00
Translating the confusing science speak, basically:

Appearance self-esteem takes a hit when they don't fit in a size. They take it out on the clothes: "I hate their stuff, they suck." They buy more of other stuff to compensate for the hit, whether non-sized accessories (I am pretty) or book/tech (I am smart even if I don't fit).

People confident in their appearance are immune to the effect, and simply think it's sized wrong or runs small.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-02-18 22:47:07+00:00
So, the core is basically an audit loop on thinking tokens to re-steer the model?

Seems like an interesting direction to reduce token usage/agent error. This would be a lot easier to grok if you created a benchmark, that would both demonstrate your ideal use case and the potential improvement your method brings.

Also, I'd avoid directly using model output for HN/social media communications. I don't really care if the information is correct and concise, but some people get really triggered by it.
by mcgrath_sh | 2026-02-18 22:47:27+00:00
Sure, not every shoe brand is equal, but if I know I'm a 9, I can generally start there and find a shoe plus/minus a half size. I have yet to go into a store and wind up in a shoe that is 3 sizes larger than what I thought my size was. Or 3 sizes smaller. Or a size 8 in one shoe from a brand and a 10 different shoe. I can order Nike/Jordan brand shoes without trying them on and they fit. Have done it for years.

I went to re-buy the "same" jeans ~8 months after my initial purchase and the size I was wearing didn't fit in the new jeans. Tried another pair with a different wash and was back to the original size. I have tried on jeans from the same brand with similar cuts and came away two sizes apart. I can swing several sizes as a starting point between some stores. I get it, not every jean is going to be identical, but it isn't a ridiculous ask to be able to have a size I can start at and be within a size of what I need.
by JohnMakin | 2026-02-18 22:48:02+00:00
Conceptually it’s difficult to explain to most people why this would not benefit them.

Like, I don’t maintain the delusion that I can’t be precisely identified by the apps I use. I just am vehemently opposed to it being tied to my government issued identity, which could be arbitrarily revoked and controlled by people who dont have pure profit as their motive. A lot of people probably find that overly paranoid.
by geneclawai | 2026-02-18 22:48:21+00:00
Hi HN,

We built Geneclaw, an open-source AI agent framework with a built-in self-evolution engine. The core idea: instead of only executing tasks for users, the agent continuously observes its own runtime failures, diagnoses root causes, generates constrained code patches, and (optionally) applies them — all behind a 5-layer safety gatekeeper.

Key design decisions:

- Dry-run by default. Nothing is applied without explicit human approval.
- 5-layer Gatekeeper: Path allowlist/denylist, diff size limits, secret scanning, and code pattern detection (blocks eval/exec/os.system).
- Git safety: Every patch creates a dedicated branch, runs `git apply --check` first, executes tests after patching, and automatically rolls back on failure.
- Full audit trail: Every event in the evolution lifecycle is logged as append-only JSONL with secret redaction. A Streamlit dashboard visualises the data.
- LLM-optional: Works in heuristic-only mode without any LLM provider configured.

Geneclaw is built on top of nanobot (https://github.com/HKUDS/nanobot), a lightweight personal AI agent framework from HKU.

The evolution pipeline: Observe → Diagnose → Propose → Gate → Apply

Architecture and quick start: https://geneclaw.ai
Protocol spec: https://github.com/Clawland-AI/Geneclaw/blob/master/docs/spe...

We'd love feedback on the safety model — is 5 layers enough? Too much? What would you want before letting an AI agent modify its own code?