MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sanity | 2026-02-09 15:30:57+00:00
Hi, thanks for the thoughtful questions.

You’re right that data remains in Freenet only as long as people are actively interacting with or hosting it. After that, it may eventually be removed. The key point is that Freenet is a communication medium with caching, not a storage medium.

That said, it only takes a single peer to keep a contract alive by continuing to host it. We call this pinning. As long as someone maintains a subscription to the contract, its state remains available.

You’re also correct that if a contract disappears entirely and someone later reintroduces an older state, that older state becomes the state others retrieve. There is no global database preserving history independently of participants.

Happy to clarify further, especially if you’re planning to write about it.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-09 15:31:07+00:00
Fish is expensive, so I do not eat frequently fish, which is why I take fish oil.

The reports that I have seen about fish oil have found negligible contamination in comparison with the fish from which it had been extracted. Obviously oil extracted from cultured Schizochytrium would be strongly preferable, if only its price would drop to not much more than fish oil. If it were e.g. +50% or even +80% more expensive than fish oil, instead of being triple, I would immediately switch to it.

In Europe, some vegetables and fruits are expensive, but those are not needed in so great quantities as to make a large fraction of the food budget. Staple food, like maize, wheat, lentils, beans, sunflower, proteins from whey or milk, chicken meat, gelatin etc. is cheap.
Ask HN: What is this "boilerplate" of which you speak?
by qwesfaqsfg | 2026-02-09 15:31:12+00:00
A few times a week I see reference to using LLMs to automate creation of boilerplate code. What is it that people are doing that requires this? Our languages have a variety of tools for promoting code reuse at various levels, from functions and data structures up through entire module systems; some even have code generation facilities built in. Parsing and transforming structured representations has been well understood for a long time, so reliable translation from a terse specification to a verbose output is within the grasp of anyone who cares to do it. Our editors and IDEs have jump to definition, autocomplete, and quick lookup for documentation. We know how to write programs that transform or synthesize multiple files in coordinated ways. For many (most?) frameworks, we can often find and adapt existing example projects, or, failing that, hollow out an existing code base and work from there. Given the variety of tools at our disposal for emitting repetitive or stereotypical code in predictable ways, what value does an LLM really bring?
by vishnukool | 2026-02-09 15:31:18+00:00
I wanted to let a few friends get a hosted OpenClaw setup without each of them dealing with Docker, reverse proxy, SSL certs, etc. So I built a small toolkit that turns one Linux box into a multi-tenant hosting setup. Each person gets their own isolated instance on a unique subdomain.

What each person gets:

1. Their own OpenClaw dashboard.
2. A password-protected web terminal (HMAC tokens, 24h TTL)
3. Isolated CPU, memory, and PID limits so one person can't take down the box

Stack: Docker containers + Traefik for routing and auto SSL (Let’s Encrypt DNS-01) + a tiny forward-auth service (~90 lines of JS) for terminal token validation.

You can try it locally with one command, no server needed.

That spins up 2 instances on localhost using localtest.me. For real server deploys, there’s a provision script that sets up Docker + Traefik and a create-instance script to add more users and give them their own OpenClaws.

Rough sizing: each instance needs ~4 GB RAM, so an 8 GB VPS fits ~2, 16 GB fits ~4, etc. If you’ve already got a VPS sitting around, you just need a domain pointed at it (wildcard DNS A record) and the provision script handles the rest: installs Docker, sets up Traefik, automates SSL. Way cheaper than managed OpenClaw hosting and you actually own the infra.

Open to hearing feedback, anyone else self-hosting this vs using managed hosting?
by spenrose | 2026-02-09 15:31:34+00:00
“Finally, Bucciarelli is right that systems like telephony are so inherently complex, have been built on top of so many different layers in so many different places, that no one person can ever actually understand how the whole thing works. This is the fundamental nature of complex technologies: our knowledge of these systems will always be partial, at best. Yes, AI will make this situation worse. But it’s a situation that we’ve been in for a long time.”
by ryanbberger | 2026-02-09 15:32:09+00:00
Hey Marc, Ryan here. Tom may respond as well

There's two forms of interpolation going on here that I'm not sure you or Dr Dueschle are using. We interpolate a "band of sight" of single a degree for our azithmual projection, but uniquely we also rotate the DEM elevations around all the observers rather than the observer around to see all the elevations.

The effects of the first can be lessened by lowering the band of sight such that we only process half a degree at a time so that we make sure we get more coverage further away. We plan on running some more experiments by rotating to cover more points.

The algorithm is already fairly expensive to run against the whole world so we weren't particularly interested in that level of coverage for the full earth.

For total viewshed area, our algorithm comes in at roughly a percent or so difference which was what we used as our benchmark for correctness.

All this to say, no, we don't think you both are wrong, we've been looking at making ours more accurate. At a world scale that's quite computationally expensive, so we didn't use that methodology for our initial launch. We see our results as validation of yours, not as something we've disproved.

Edit: grammar
by mbitsnbites | 2026-02-09 15:32:15+00:00
I truly get that. That's also one of the reasons why I started from scratch once I got the idea, rather than researching all the available papers and implementations etc (because the latter is quite overwhelming, while the former took me about a week of spare time hacks).

My scope is also a bit unusual, I think, because one of the applications I'm thinking about is to "augment" luma-only codecs with chroma. One such codec is https://gitlab.com/llic/llic

But most of all, I wanted to learn.
by ezulabs | 2026-02-09 15:32:37+00:00
Building an AI debugger for embedded systems.

You know that feeling when your microcontroller crashes and you spend 3 hours staring at cryptic registers trying to figure out why? Yeah, I got tired of that.

So I built an MCP server that lets Claude talk directly to GDB.
Now instead of manually decoding CFSR registers, I just ask "why did it crash?" and get back "division by zero at line 142 in calculate_average()".

It's pretty satisfying to watch Claude diagnose a deadlock between two RP2040 cores in 10 seconds - something that would've ruined my entire afternoon.

Just shipped v0.1.0: https://github.com/ezulabs/embeddedgdbmcp
by hennell | 2026-02-09 15:32:46+00:00
Since when? You're quoting the timeframe not the period under study.

It's also not a study of just engineers, it's people across engineering, product, design, research, and operations. For a lot of none-code tasks Ai needs pasted context as it's not usually in a repo like code is.

(And their comments about intensifying engineering workload also aren't really changed by ai copy/paste vs context).
Show HN: ChatKeepsake – Turn iMessage Conversations into Printable Keepsakes
by ryan_gaudet | 2026-02-09 15:33:02+00:00
I built a small app that exports iMessage conversations into clean, printable PDFs.

It started as something personal — I wanted to turn a year of text messages into a printed keepsake — but I realized there wasn’t a simple, privacy-respecting way to do this.

ChatKeepsake runs entirely offline and works on macOS and Windows. No accounts, no cloud uploads.

Would appreciate any feedback.
by cwoolfe | 2026-02-09 15:33:50+00:00
Most parents I've met understand the internet can be a dangerous place for children but aren't sure what to do about it. Some avoid it altogether, but most give up and resign themselves to whatever happens.
What I wanted most was just to have some visibility into what my kids were experiencing, so I built LivingRoom App for iPhone and iPad. It sends occasional screenshots to parents. My hope is that when we shine a light on the online world, we will be free to use the internet as a tool for learning, creativity and connection. https://livingroomapp.com/
by wincy | 2026-02-09 15:34:29+00:00
Anecdotal, but since I’ve started Zepbound, I’ve lost 110 pounds. In that same time period, I’ve paid off and cancelled all my credit cards (except for one, which I pay off every month), filed taxes for the last five years, got a CPA on retainer, and have fixed several pressing issues around the house that I’d been studiously ignoring as they got worse.

A major part of this story I think is especially important, the last time this sort of thing happened was about a decade ago, when I lost 90 pounds without any medical intervention. At that time I learned to code, fixed up my credit, and went from being front line technical support to junior software engineer. Quite a transformative time in my life.

I think curing my sleep apnea due to substantial weight loss means I sleep better, so I just feel more ready to tackle the things the world throws at me. Weight loss is a skill I had, but it required absolute commitment to avoiding sugary foods, eating right every single day, and as soon as I strayed the weight would creep back up over the course of a year or two.

It makes me think of the huge immeasurable economic costs that are happening in the shadows because of obesity, how many people like me are there other aren’t achieving our full potential because we’re just too tired and have too much brain fog to seize the day?
by gk1 | 2026-02-09 15:34:34+00:00
Exactly as happened with computer revolution... Expectations raised in line with productivity. In HN parlance, being a 10x engineer just becomes "being an engineer," and "100x engineer" is the new 10x engineer. And from what I can see in myself and others right now, being a 100x of anything, while exhilarating, is also mentally and physically taxing.
by gib444 | 2026-02-09 15:35:16+00:00
That's a choice, not automatic. The government subsides many, many things and that doesn't have to be an exception. They should just continue to advertise the absolute amazingness of the alternatives, train government backed installers, and use the carrot and stick method

Instead of just whacking people with the stick (and leave the installations entirely up to the private sector who have a terrible history of being conmen when it's the government providing grants to the businesses)
by causal | 2026-02-09 15:35:37+00:00
Yes. Programmers might be especially susceptible precisely because our advanced understanding makes us think we cannot be easily fooled.

But we are also easier to impress: only we understand how difficult it is to one-shot code a working app.

AI psychosis sets in when AI captures enough of your perception to alter your reality. Programmers might be "smarter", but we give AI a bigger set of tools to capture our perception with.

And then there's the fact that we want to be fooled.
by Majromax | 2026-02-09 15:36:12+00:00
> I know this is an anecdote, but try to break down the problem you have in simpler terms and it may work.

This is an expected outcome of how LLMs handle large problems. One of the "scaling" results is that the probability of success depends inversely on the problem size / length / duration (leading to headlines like "AI can now automate tasks that take humans [1 hour/etc]").

If the problem is broken down, however, then it's no longer a single problem but a series of sub-problems. If:

* The acceptance criteria are robust, so that success or failure can be reliably and automatically determined by the model itself,
* The specification is correct, in that the full system will work as-designed if the sub-parts are individually correct, and
* The parts are reasonably independent, so that complete components can be treated as a 'black box', without implementation detail polluting the model's context,

... then one can observe a much higher overall success rate by taking repeated high-probability shots (on small problems) rather than long-odds one-shots.

To be fair, this same basic intuition is also true for humans, but the boundaries are a lot fuzzier because we have genuine long-term memory and a lifetime of experience with conceptual chunking. Nobody is keeping a million-line codebase in their working memory.
by arvyy | 2026-02-09 15:36:46+00:00
CS undergrads write parsers for some toy lisps or other straight forward syntax. C isn't as trivial https://faultlore.com/blah/c-isnt-a-language/#you-cant-actua...

(a small remark, but to be clear I'm not terribly impressed by AI showcase of the c compiler, nor with browser before that, as it stands)
by rayiner | 2026-02-09 15:37:02+00:00
Ask Gemini why poor people are poor. You'll get a sanitized answer about "systemic" and "structural" barriers. But if you follow up by asking specific questions, such as the correlation between marriage rates and poverty, it will acknowledge the data: "Marriage is strongly negatively correlated with poverty, meaning married households generally have significantly lower poverty rates than single-parent or unmarried households. Married families benefit from shared finances, higher combined income potential, and economies of scale, often reducing the likelihood of poverty by 41 to 80 percent compared to single-parent homes."
by testing22321 | 2026-02-09 15:37:14+00:00
As an anecdote, I worked at a telco that is the only connectivity for around 50k people spread over a vast area.
We had a massive power outage at the CO, and the backup generator failed.
Everything, Even 911 was down (a VERY big deal) for basically everyone for most of a day. They stationed police and ambulances in the bigger cities and towns so people could directly ask for help.

With all hands on deck scrambling HARD, a week later we still didn’t have everything back up, because we didn’t know how. A ton of it had never been down since the 60s.

A mess indeed.
by superkuh | 2026-02-09 15:37:20+00:00
It's a relief to finally read that Discord is indirectly shutting down and getting rid of it's users. It was inevitable but dragged out far too long with all the VC money to burn. Hopefully everyone can figure out how to use XMPP and/or get back on IRC. It is a genuine shame how much culture and information will be lost inside their walled garden though.
by ravenstine | 2026-02-09 15:38:18+00:00
The difference with Reddit is it has way more persistent value. Everything on Discord is throwaway, but valuable posts on Reddit from years past are easily retrievable. The two aren't so comparable.

One of the unspoken reasons many people have for using Discord is they don't want what they say to easily be associated with them in perpetuity. Requiring ID really chips away at that, in spite of what Discord has to say about privacy around ID.

By no means am I saying that Discord will go extinct. I just haven't observed anything about it that's irreplaceable. Reddit, on the other hand, has a wealth of discussion dating back to the mid-to-late 00's.
by malfist | 2026-02-09 15:38:26+00:00
This is just the latest in a long trend of increasing spying on users. Why bother having to guess who your user is, or fingerprint a browser if you can just force them to show you their national ID?

This is transparently about spying on people, not "protecting children". The real world doesn't require you to show your ID to every business you frequent, or every advertiser you walk by. Someone can yell a swear word on the sidewalk, and not everyone within ear shot has to show ID.
by gruez | 2026-02-09 15:38:28+00:00
>and now the government has the shamelessness to grandstand about privacy and security? We need to elect better people.

Where's "the government [... grandstanding] about privacy and security"? It's getting blocked by the companies, not the government.

>She said Mandiant refused to provide the requested network security assessments, apparently at the direction of AT&T and Verizon.
by DannyPage | 2026-02-09 15:39:04+00:00
It's a great combination of physical and digital. Similar to vinyl records, having a resurgence, MiniDisc really stands out as a very good portable physical solution:

- MiniDiscs are easier to write/re-write than CDs if you have a NetMD capable device, just load up https://web.minidisc.wiki/ in your browser and MP3s will get converted for the disc.
- Smaller and more robust than CDs
- Feels very "RetroFuturistic" compared to cassettes and records, if MP3 players hadn't taken off, it could have easily been the next big format
by adrian_b | 2026-02-09 15:39:30+00:00
Electrodes are deposited on the crystal in vacuum, e.g. by metal evaporation or sputtering, in the same way as they are deposited on the semiconductor crystals used to make transistors or integrated circuits.

The electrodes may consist of multiple layers, a base layer that adheres strongly to quartz and a top layer that is solderable, e.g. made of nickel or silver.

The pins of the package that hosts the crystal resonator are soldered on the electrodes, in places well chosen so that they will not damp much the oscillations of the crystal.

When the mass of the crystal must be increased to shift the resonance frequency, excess solder may be deposited on the electrodes.
by mbitsnbites | 2026-02-09 15:39:32+00:00
Thanks for the feedback, and the interesting ideas. It's good to know that I was on to something and not completely off :-)

I'm mostly doing this for learning purposes, but a hidden agenda is to create a low-latency codec that can be used in conjunction with other codecs that deal primarily with luma information. AV1 and friends are usually too heavy in those settings, so I try to keep things simple.
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-02-09 15:39:52+00:00
Don't knock crystallized intelligence.

In my 20s, I could learn a programming language in a weekend by reading a book. I could write code fast. I could figure out bugs. I felt so fast and so smart.

In my 40s and 50s, I looked back at that guy with some amusement. Sure, I didn't type as fast. But I spent a lot less time debugging because I wrote it right the first time, because I could just see what the right thing do to was. Net result was that I produced working code in less time. 48 might have been my peak year.
by rafabulsing | 2026-02-09 15:40:10+00:00
> Well the person you're responding to didn't say anything like that. They're saying he's unqualified.

When they said "It's the appearance of productivity, not actual productivity.", that does very much sound to me like an accusation that he is pretending or trying to deceive you into thinking he's a super productive person.

> And do they work? If he's failing or fooling himself then a big chunk of his podcasting is wasting everyone's time.

I'm afraid I'm not close enough to Mr Grey to be able to confidently say one way or another. Everything seems to indicate that he is a fairly successful individual, as a YouTuber with a big following and founder of at least two companies that seems to be going pretty well. So unless he is incredibly lucky and keeps failing upwards, if I had to guess, I'd say he has had at least some success in making himself work on stuff from time to time.

> I looked at a video from last year and one from eight years ago and they're pretty similar in production value. Lengths seem similar over time too

Really? I mean, let's look at some concrete examples. His latest video [1] features many unique drawings, extensive animations, even some 3d stuff with the rotating globes, and almost every scene has an actual drawn background layer.

Meanwhile, one of his biggest videos from 9 years ago [2] is pretty much just a slideshow, with no animations, and most of the video features a static generic white background.

The overarching style (i.e. stick figures, no elaborate textures) is the same, and I guess this is a partially a subjective point, but I think it's a bit crazy to say the visuals in these two videos are of similar quality.

For an example of stuff other than just the animation itself, he put out the Rock Paper Scissors video [3] two years ago, which had a pretty insane huge scope (though that might not be obvious at first glance)

> I can see he's done three members-only videos in the last two years, in addition to four and a half public videos. Is there anything else?

By definition, I'm not aware of stuff he's not made public. I just know that there is stuff that he chooses not to talk much about (he never once mentioned the Standard stuff on his podcast, for example). He also handles a good portion of the backend stuff for the Cortex Brand line of products (I think managing/planning logistics/inventory?). I'm not a member of his channel or his Patreon so I can't tell you how much he invests in exclusive videos, or if there is some other work he discloses over those channels that he doesn't in others.

[1] https://youtu.be/HSRmfNDk87s?si=lORnzazCWoe2X4Xa

[2] https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs?si=1_225YkqRact1Wgm

[3] https://youtu.be/PmWQmZXYd74?si=xEgxikMwCxNfinc3
by acjohnson55 | 2026-02-09 15:42:34+00:00
> But you miss a lot of experiences compared to when you’re actually in the code trenches reading, designing, and tinkering with code on your own.

Completely agree. Working with this tooling is a fundamentally different practice.

I'm not trying to suggest that agentic coding is superior in every way. I simply believe that in my own experience, the current gains exceed the drawbacks by a large margin for many applications, and that significantly higher gains are within close reach (e.g. weeks).

I spent years in management, and it's not dissimilar to that transition. In my first role as a manager, I found it very difficult to divest myself of the need to have fine-grained knowledge of and control over the team's code. That doesn't scale. I had to learn to set people up for success and manage from a place of uncertainty. I had to learn to think like a risk manager instead of an artisan.

I'll also say that when it comes to solution design, I have found it very helpful to ask the agent to give me options when it comes to solutions that look suboptimal. Often times, I can still find great refactor opportunities, and I can have agent draw up plans for those improvements and delegate them to parallel sessions, where the focus can be safely executing a feature-neutral refactor.

Separately from that, I would note that the business doesn't always need us to be making conceptual shifts. Great business value can be delivered with suboptimal architecture.

It is difficult to swallow, but I think that those of us whose market value is based on our ability to develop systems by manipulating code and getting feedback from the running product will find that businesses believe that machines can do this work more than good enough and at vastly higher scale.

For the foreseeable future, there will be places where hands-on coding is superior, but I see that becoming more the exception than the norm, especially in product engineering.
by arkh | 2026-02-09 15:42:53+00:00
One thing most of those lack is an easy way to share screen.

Now if anyone wants to differentiate their Discord alternative, they want to have most of discord functionalities and add the possibility to be in multiple voice chats (maybe with rights and a channel hierarchy + different push-to-talk binds). It's a missed feature when doing huge operations in games and using the Canary client is not always enough.