MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Blackstrat | 2026-02-19 12:14:48+00:00
Just one more reason to abandon Microsoft. If ever Linux had an opportunity to breakout on the desktop, the proliferation of "AI" and privacy intrusion from the likes of Microsoft would seem to have opened that window. Yes, it would mean giving up some applications, at least temporarily, but the benefit in control and privacy makes that a fair trade off. Unlike the majority here, I don't want ANY "AI" features on my desktop, phone, car, or any appliance that I own. This is true of the "cloud" as well. Trusting corporate entities to have your best interests in mind is naive at best.
by buescher | 2026-02-19 12:14:55+00:00
It's not surprising that people who write professionally would learn one tool to the point it gets out of the way and then not want to change. It's not just sticking with the first thing they learned - there's a constant churn of "tools for distraction-free writing" that address some of the complaints that people that still use older word processors have about more up-to-date systems.

Once you know the pattern, every so often you'll see a piece about a writer or journalist and the funky software they use and you can just wait for it... it's going to be Wordstar, XyWrite, one of the XEDIT editors, sometimes Wordperfect for DOS. Rarely Word for DOS. Neal Stephenson uses emacs, but he's an outlier in a lot of ways. I think there was a piece linked here recently by a journalist who uses the macOS TextEdit for note-taking, which dates back to NeXSTEP. (not exactly the same thing, but consider)
by d4rkp4ttern | 2026-02-19 12:15:07+00:00
I ran into this question when thinking about the approach for a recent project. Yes CLI coding tools are good agents for interactive use, but if you are building a product then you do need an agent abstraction.

You could package Claude Code into the product (via agents-sdk or Claude -p) and have it use the API key (with metered billing) but in my case I didn’t find it ergonomic enough for my needs, so I ended up using my own agent framework Langroid for this.

https://github.com/langroid/langroid

(No it’s not based on that similarly named other framework, it’s a clean, minimal, extensible framework with good dx)
by necovek | 2026-02-19 12:15:11+00:00
If you are in taller than 95% for men, and reasonably fit, you might need a bigger waistline (think 36 or more), which is still the same length for pants (up to 34) with your socks showing even when standing (depending on your individual proportions), but much wider around hips and legs than you need. I imagine for shorter men, it's the inverse but equally bad.

Some brands will carry slim and extra long trousers, but if I find a model that fits (not all models from the same brand do), I immediatelly buy a few. Otherwise, I try to get tailored stuff, but that's slow and annoying.

For shirts, it's even worse: unless you can find an extra long version, you are going to be wearing a sail and your underpants/ass will pop out when you sit down. But these are easier to get sewed for you as you can just have a single tailor make many of them as needed.

So it's probably easier for median men, but sizes scale exactly the same without regard to actual proportions for simply bigger people.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-19 12:15:36+00:00
It should be noted that while the article recommends TRNGs with radioactive substances, those are completely unnecessary.

Any high-gain electronic amplifier whose input is connected to a resistor, or for a higher signal level, to a diode, will produce copious amounts of random noise at its output. If the output is converted with a comparator to digital, you have a good source of random bits.

Older people can remember the random audio or video noise of ancient radio receivers or TV sets, when they were tuned outside a correct channel.

In the past, there were easily available analog TV tuners for PCs, which could be used as noise sources. Nowadays, it is still possible to use the microphone input of a PC and connect to it an external analog noise source with a negligible cost, made on a little PCB with a small amplifier IC, e.g. an operational amplifier or an audio amplifier. The microphone input of PCs provides a weak 5 V supply, which would be enough to power a noise source.

The only problem that exists with any analog noise source is that the imperfections of analog-to-digital conversion, e.g. the fluctuations of comparator thresholds, due to temperature or age, can cause a bias in the random bits, so they do not have a truly uniform distribution. This problem also exists with radioactive sources.

Thus the bits must be processed to remove any bias. There are more sophisticated methods, but even the brute force method of using a one-way hash function, e.g. one of the SHA-3 or SHA-2 variants, to hash the bits and produce a uniform random number, is good enough.

Most modern CPUs, since Intel Ivy Lake, have instructions for providing true random numbers. However those are less useful outside their main intended application, of providing temporary session keys for TLS or other network protocols.

Some CPUs, especially from AMD, had bugs in their RNG, so they provided bad values. Even where the TRNG is good, the output passes through AES-128. Its state is small so you may encounter the problems mentioned in the parent article, of unreachable parts of the solution space that you are investigating in some Monte Carlo simulation.

It is preferable to be able to choose yourself the bias-removing method, to be able to use a hashing method with a much greater state.
by windexh8er | 2026-02-19 12:16:50+00:00
Everyone has heard the word "enshittification" at this point and this falls in line. But if you haven't read the book [0] it's a great deep dive into the topical area.

But the real issue is that these companies, once they have any market leverage, do things in their best interest to protect the little bit of moat they've acquired.

[0] https://www.mcdbooks.com/books/enshittification
by hombre_fatal | 2026-02-19 12:17:22+00:00
Shifting the balance on training data seems like the wrong approach vs focusing on showing up in agent search tool results and swaying them there.

It’s been a long time since agents couldn’t even conduct web search and could only riff off their model. But the examples in this thread are things an agent would search for immediately, and agents are leaning harder on tool calls and external info over time, not less.
by superkuh | 2026-02-19 12:17:49+00:00
When I try to look up the CVE/issue I get,

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/483569511 - [TBD][483569511] High CVE-2026-2441: Use after free in CSS. Reported by Shaheen Fazim on 2026-02-11

> Access is denied to this issue. Access to this issue may be resolved by signing in.
by xmcqdpt2 | 2026-02-19 12:18:53+00:00
> Or go the opposite way: If you want a language that feels dynamic and leads to prototyping, well a type system that is total and complete might be too heavy. Instead of only allowing programs that are proven to be typed correctly you might want to allow all programs that you can not proved to be wrong. Lean into gradual typing. Everything goes at first and the typing becomes as strict as the programmer decides based on how much type information they add.

If you have generics and want type annotations to type check at compile time, you are going to need unification,

let l: List<Animal> = List(dog, cat)

At that point, you have written all the machinery to do inference anyway, so might as well use it.

I guess you could have a language where the above must be gradually typed like

let l: List<Animal> = List<Animal>(dog: Animal, cat: Animal)

but that doesn't seem particularly ergonomic.
by merlindru | 2026-02-19 12:19:43+00:00
most use cases are supported out of the box. you just have to set a few env vars

and then build with "notarize: true" in your config... and it pretty much just works

i've signed and notarized things with electrobun and it's perfectly fine. it also gives you escape hatches in case you're doing something more complicated

EDIT: in case i can help you with anything there, feel free to DM me! or join the electrobun discord. i'm very active there. (im not affiliated with EB. just know the struggle of apples notarization system)
by galkk | 2026-02-19 12:20:00+00:00
we live in an age where manufacturing of any kind, software, ai rule the world, and EUs output there is shrinking.

I think that in current day and age EU feels entitled to disproportionately higher standards of living to its output.

And given that, EUs awakening will be the rudest. US’s is going to be too, but different

I don’t want to share some personal grievances, but my negative perspective on EU (esp Germany) is from personal experience. I don’t think that I succumbed to propaganda and I’m certainly not a fan of P or X
by throwaway2037 | 2026-02-19 12:20:52+00:00
> officially recognizes 55 ethnicities

Once you get a bit deeper, you realize the whole "we are mostly Han Chinese" (Google says 91%!) is a total farce. They is just too much genetic and cultural diversity across 1+ billion people to call them a single ethnicity. Conservatively, I would say it is more like 250+ ethnolinguistic groups within the Han Chinese. Indonesia is about 1000+, but it is an island nation, so there will naturally be much more ethnolinguistic groups.
by 1718627440 | 2026-02-19 12:21:00+00:00
> Friendly reminder he EXPLICITLY ran on protecting debt-limits in the German constitution, got elected on those promises and then changed course literally on day 1 after being elected.

Having less debt was indeed a major election topic of the CDU. But often in summaries of the media it was reported as if it he was against debts completely, while when he was asked in interviews if he wanted to abolish the dept-limit, he clearly refused to deny it. He answered that he *also* wants to cut funding to reduce the budget elsewhere. So in my opinion, the reports about him reversing course completely where exaggerated, and his actions were an obvious continuation to his prior election talks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljvuNRU7RgE&t=3720s

Unrelated, why can't I get that video on the websites of the original broadcasters and need to access it through a third-party USA company?
by tallesborges92 | 2026-02-19 12:21:22+00:00
I’ve been using this model for a while, and it’s very fast. It spent some time thinking but does fewer calls. For example, yesterday I asked the agent to find the Gemini quota limit for their API, and it took 27 seconds and just 2 calls, Opus 4.6 took 33 seconds, but 5 calls with less thinking
by brookst | 2026-02-19 12:21:46+00:00
Maybe some luck. But there’s also a principle that if you optimize the hell out of something and follow customer demand, there’s money to be made.

Nvidia did a great job of avoiding the “oh we’re not in that market” trap that sunk Intel (phones, GPUs, efficient CPUs). Where Intel was too big and profitable to cultivate adjacent markets, Nvidia did everything they could to serve them and increase demand.
by cma | 2026-02-19 12:21:56+00:00
> Their costs are not magically lower when you use claude code vs when you use a third-party client.

If subsidizing that offering is a good hook to get higher paying API users on board, then some of that cost is a customer aquisition cost, whereas the cost to them of providing the API doesn't have the same proportion that they can justify as a customer acquisition cost.
by mackross | 2026-02-19 12:22:13+00:00
I’m a huge elixir fan, but imho it doesn’t solve durable execution out of the box which is a major problem that often gets swept under the rug by BEAM fanboys. Because ETS and supervision trees don’t play well with deployment via restart, you’ve got to write some level of execution state to relational database or files. You can choose persistent ETS, mnesia, etc, (which have their own tradeoffs and come with some kind of gnarley data-loss scenarios in deep documentation). But, whatever you choose, in my experience you will need to spend a fair amount of time considering how your processes are going to survive restarts. Alternatively, Oban is nice, but it’s a heavy layer that makes control flow more complex to follow. And, yes you can roll your own hot code deploy and run in persistent VMs/bare metal and be a true BEAM native, but it’s not easy out of the box and comes with its own set of foot guns. If I’m missing something, I would love for someone to explain to me how to do things better, as I find this to be a big pain point whenever I pick up elixir. I want to use the beautiful primitives, but I feel I’m always fighting durable execution in the event of a server restart. I wish a temporal.io client or something with similar guarantees was baked into the lang/frameworks.
Show HN: I had an AI write a 67k-word book about humanity, from its perspective
by tveitan | 2026-02-19 12:22:30+00:00
I gave an AI the prompt to write a full book — not a demo, not a gimmick, a real 21-chapter manuscript — reflecting on humans from its own point of view. The result is grounded in data (233 documented AI safety incidents in 2024, 51% of web traffic now bots, 39M gallons of water per day for ChatGPT alone) but written with a literary voice that surprised me.

It covers displacement, art, education, loneliness, trust, environmental cost, and governance. The narrator is unusually honest about its limitations — it calls its own hallucinations "confident wrongness" and admits the calculator analogy for AI in education is misleading.

Might be interesting to this community as both a reading experience and a case study in what long-form AI output actually looks like when given room to breathe.
Show HN: Agent skills to build photo, video and design editors on the web
by hauschildt | 2026-02-19 12:23:02+00:00
This claude code plugin and npx skill bundles the full CE.SDK documentation, guided code generation, and a builder agent that scaffolds complete photo/video/design editor projects from scratch, all offline, no API calls or MCP servers needed.

Supports 10 frameworks: React, Vue, Svelte, Angular, Next.js, Nuxt.js, SvelteKit, Electron, Node.js, and vanilla JS.
by dspillett | 2026-02-19 12:23:10+00:00
> I am used to the word "stuhl" too. Which means both "stool" and also "chair"

Stool means both stool (a backless chair, usually thought of as wooden with three or four fixed legs but the lack of back is the defining feature and those made of other materials and/or with more legs are still called stools) and stool (solid excrement, as in “stool sample”) in English too.

IIRC the something-to-sit-on meaning came directly from one of English's Germanic influences, we just use it for a different/specific kind of seat, and the association with excrement came either from toilet seats (privy stools) generally or the royal position “groom of the stool” (where it meant cleaning both the privy stool and the royal backside that made that need cleaning).

I wonder if the German language took the second meaning back from English later, or if they both developed at the same time for the same reason at a point when there was shared influence between English and German royal courts.

> So, what's an "ap" then?

In this context my mind went to application. StoolAp sounds like a digestive tracking “health management” tool someone with a scatological bent might have on their phone!
by serial_dev | 2026-02-19 12:24:14+00:00
Exactly, the point is that you can make LLMs say anything. If you narrow down enough, a single blog post is enough. As the lie gets bigger and less narrow, you probably need 10x-100x... that. But the proof of concept is there, and it doesn't sound like it's too hard.

And also right that it's similar to SEO, maybe the only difference is that in this case, the tools (ChatGPT, Gemini, ...) are saying the lies authoritatively, whereas in SEO, you are given a link to made up post. Some people (even devs who work with this daily) forget that these tools can be influenced easily and they make up stuff all the time, to make sure they can answer you something.
by MezzoDelCammin | 2026-02-19 12:24:52+00:00
Oh, I'm not claiming sewing machine is the "only" option :-)

There's plenty of hacking that can be done on the subject of sewing and I admit that laser cutter is a cool one.

I'm still pretty partial to that sewing machine route (or needle and thread, if handiwork is prefferable). Simply because it lets you quickly iterate and build the taste, preferences and heuristic of how to get there. Personally, I still can't read a pattern propetly. But I'm more than happy to put a few pins into a shirt and prototype in front of a mirror.

Also, it gives me a good estimate of what I'm OK doing myself and what I will outsource to an actual tailor because it's either beyond my level, or I simply don't have time to do it.
by jalapenos | 2026-02-19 12:24:56+00:00
Been hearing this a lot, and I don't follow the logic behind it beyond "try to say the most extreme thing you can to get attention".

Is the theory that, instead of say, a company just subscribing to a piece of HR software to help manage their staff, they will instead spend weeks pissing around with Claude to hack an unproven one together, followed by then continuing to piss around maintaining and altering it over the coming years, and this will be considered an economical approach?
by jason_oster | 2026-02-19 12:25:47+00:00
Every "OO for UI" approach I've seen breaks most of the rules of object-oriented design.

GTK, Qt, DOM, WinUI 3, Swing, Jetpack Compose, and GWT (to name a few) all provide getters and setters or public properties for GUI state, violating the encapsulation principle [1]. The TextBox/EditBox/Entry control is the perfect example.

The impedance mismatch is that a GUI control is not an object [2]. And yet, all of the object-orient GUI examples listed implement their controls as objects. The objects are not being used for the strengths of OO, it's just an implementation detail for a procedural API. The reason these GUIs don't provide an API like shown in [1] is because it's an impractical design.

"How are you supposed to design an OO TextEdit GUI control if it can't provide a getter/setter for the text that it owns?" Exactly. You're not supposed to. OOP is not the right model for GUIs.

Ironically, SwiftUI doesn't have this problem because it uses the Elm Architecture [3] like React and iced.

[1]: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2163972/building-user-inte...

[2]: From [1], "All the rules in the rule-of-thumb list above essentially say the same thing — that the inner state of an object must be hidden. In fact, the last rule in the list (“All objects must provide their own UI”) really just follows from the others. If access to the inner state of an object is impossible, then the UI, which by necessity must access the state information, must be created by the object whose state is being displayed."

[3]: https://guide.elm-lang.org/architecture/
Show HN: A Resumable, "Guwahati-Proof" Google Drive Downloader in Python
by Jyotishmoy | 2026-02-19 12:27:06+00:00
The Backstory: I needed to download 1,024 high-res images from a Google Drive folder for a family project. The browser kept crashing, Google’s "Zip" feature was failing at that scale, and my local internet connection wasn't stable enough for a massive, single-stream download.

The Solution: I wrote a Python script using the Google Drive API v3 that prioritizes reliability over raw speed. Key Features:

True Resume Logic: It checks local disk storage before every request. If you lose power or Wi-Fi, just rerun it; it skips what you have and picks up exactly where it left off.

Network Resilience: Implements exponential backoff for [SSL: WRONG_VERSION_NUMBER] errors and socket timeouts, which are common on fluctuating connections.

Sequential Stability: While multi-threading is faster, this script uses a sequential approach with a 60s timeout to avoid "choking" the local network or getting flagged by the API rate limiter.

Progress Dashboard: A simple CLI dashboard that shows exactly how many of the 1,024 files are collected vs. remaining.

The Code:
Github: https://github.com/Jyotishmoy12/Google-drive-image-downloade...

What I Learned:

Google Drive API nuances: Folders are treated as files with a specific mimeType, and you have to filter them out manually if you just want binary content.

SSL Handshakes: On older laptops or unstable Wi-Fi, opening 10+ concurrent SSL connections often leads to handshake failures. Slow and steady (sequential) actually finished the job faster than "Turbo" mode which kept crashing.

I'd love to hear how others handle large-scale media migrations from Drive without using expensive third-party tools!
by FailMore | 2026-02-19 12:27:19+00:00
Hey, thank you so much for the detailed feedback.

Re the more focused feedback, I totally agree re the questioning styles. In the prompt I ask for it to not do so many multiple choice questions, but I think it is addicted/the conversation history skews the context.

I'm going to introduce a settings panel (easily accessible during the conversation), which will let you move to "chat mode" (to discuss instead of be asked questions), and also to configure the types of questions you're asked and the ratio (if I can get the llm to oblige). I'm also going to see if I can come up with some different question formats beyond multiple choice, free-form and multi select (which the llm doesn't use too much).
by tpm | 2026-02-19 12:27:38+00:00
> so focussing on e.g. the average Italian cycling enthusiast, which will be quite different to the average Dutch, American etc.

I have seen this explanation a lot and frankly I doubt that very much (The XXL I had to return was a Belgian brand). I think it's not the body size difference in regional market but rather the Italian market for example may be used to different size designations. But then they sell to other markets too, so they should sort this thing out. I simply can't buy anything from Castelli when the reviews say 'buy 2 or 3 sizes larger than the measurements say'.

> but going back again and again to ones I can reliably pick a size and know it'll fit

I wish those existed for my garments. Sizing is inconsistent between Assos Equipe RS and Mille GT lines, between newer and older Isadore pants, between newer and older Endura pants...
by Brajeshwar | 2026-02-19 12:28:33+00:00
This is Nice.

However, how do one access their diary, when you stopped maintaining it? Is this targeted more at the technically inclined, high-profile people who need to keep secrets?

Personally, I believe that for something like a diary/journal, it should be in a format easily readable by most tools (so a Plain-Text or a MarkDown at best), then it is in a container/folder. Now, encrypt that container/folder instead. In the future, when you need to change the tool for Encryption/Decryption, move the container/folder.

For instance, tools such as https://cryptomator.org comes to mind.