MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by themafia | 2026-02-26 04:57:52+00:00
> Change happens.

The low level tool that has served to rescue more systems than I can count does not need to "change" simply because "it happens, bro."

> while we can mechanistically

You can rule it out with process as well. As in "don't change what isn't broken."

> If they can introduce an RCE to Notepad

Then they clearly feel they have no viable competition. This is table stakes. Getting it wrong should lose you most of your customer base overnight. Companies actually used to _work_ this way.
by protocolture | 2026-02-26 04:57:55+00:00
Netflix has a moat in the form of IP licensing restrictions.

Google and Youtube are preinstalled everywhere. Instagrams like 10 minutes old and has a major competitor in TikTok that they had to have eliminated/captured by the US government.

People wouldnt stay with Netflix if there was a cheap, legal alternative with the same content library.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-26 04:58:40+00:00
> I think Europe should invest into manufacturing RAM

How?

Most foundries across Asia and the US are being given subsidizes that outstrip those that the EU is providing.

The only mega-foundry project in Europe was canceled by Intel last year [0]. Additionally, much of the backend work like OSAT and packaging is done in ASEAN (especially Malaysia), Taiwan, China, and India.

Additionally, much of the IP in the memory space is owned by Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese, Chinese, and American champions.

[0] - https://www.it-daily.net/shortnews-en/intel-officially-cance...
by marcus_holmes | 2026-02-26 05:00:07+00:00
We call this the Scunthorpe problem. Stupid "rude word" detectors use simple rules that fail on actual words.

Way back I was working on a loyalty card system that had the entire UK electoral roll and Post Office data and we had to validate people; names and addresses. A "comedian" decided to sign themselves up for the system using a stupid name, and when the loyalty card duly arrived at their (correct) address with their (incorrect) name, they went to the papers and it became a slow news day human interest story.

We had to implement a Scunthorpe filter, and that was really difficult. We ended up with a human looking at the data and hitting a button if they thought this was a made-up "funny" name or address.

You would be amazed at English place names and surnames. Velvet Bottom is a real place in the UK. There are many people wandering around with names that you can't say in polite company.
by bblb | 2026-02-26 05:01:25+00:00
Xanadu

Ted Nelson's dream since early `60s: all the world literature in one publicly accessible global online system (analogy: you can today get a telephone link from anywhere to anywhere, so why not from any text to any other?). Every reference to a text will lead to royalties being paid automatically to the author. Autodesk, (the makers of AutoCAD) will produce a product "real soon now". Includes the use of full versioning (claimed to be horrifyingly complex), "hot links" (called transclusions) and zippered texts (eg. parallel texts like for translations or annotations.)
by somenameforme | 2026-02-26 05:01:26+00:00
Politics, practically by definition, just divides people, and can easily make people who disagree with you feel uncomfortable. For instance, for whatever reason, the wide majority of surgeons and anesthesiologists are conservative. [1] Imagine how you'd feel if your surgeon showed up with some sort of political message on his facemask, or an anesthesiologists on his supplies. It'd be just grossly unprofessional. You're there for his work, not his personal beliefs.

Political virtue signaling can also make you look bad even in the midst of virtue signaling to the audience that might agree with you. For instance notepad++ rambles endlessly on most contemporary political issues but are conspicuously silent on the Gaza issue. If they don't take any positions this obviously is not an issue. But when they take a position on every divisive issue under the sun, suddenly their not taking a position is taking a position.

[1] - https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/870192?form=fpf
by jsrcout | 2026-02-26 05:01:44+00:00
I've been trying to track down "What's New" for a long long time. If memory serves, there was a daily email titled "What's New on the World Wide Web" - very possibly the source for this monthly summary.

It was a fascinating way to experience the early WWW's exponential growth. It started out small, but once it began to grow, you could see it expanding faster and faster practically in real time.

At first it only took seconds to give the daily list a good once over. Over time it started taking minutes, then 20 minutes or half an hour (if things weren't too busy at work), and eventually it morphed into almost another full time job. There was just no way to keep up. Around that time they stopped sending it out.

From a historical point of view, these daily emails and monthly summaries would be a terrific resource for those interested in the early Web. It's hard to believe now that there was once a time when you could literally check out every new Web site as they came online.
by solid_fuel | 2026-02-26 05:03:01+00:00
It's not so much the grouping of 3 or way it's supposed to be punchy specifically that's the problem, that is just one example of what gives the article the "LLM Generated" feeling since whatever cheap model people are using for this kind of spam has some common ticks.

I use groupings of 3 and try to make things punchy myself sometimes, especially when I'm writing something intended to sway others. I think the problem with this article is the way it feels like the perfect average of corporate writing. It's sort of like the "written by committee" feel that incredibly generic pop music often has.

When I write things, I often go back and edit and reword parts. Like the brushstrokes in an oil painting, the flow of thought varies between paragraphs and even sentences. LLMs only generate things from left to right (or vice versa in RTL languages, I presume). I think that gives LLM generated text a "smooth" texture that really stands out to anyone who reads a lot.
Show HN: I built a persistent LSM-Tree storage engine in Go from scratch
by Jyotishmoy | 2026-02-26 05:03:20+00:00
GO-LSM: BUILDING A LOG-STRUCTURED MERGE-TREE ENGINE

INTRODUCTION:

I've always been curious about the internals of databases, so I decided to build my own Log-Structured Merge-Tree (LSM-Tree) engine in Go to understand the "magic" behind write-optimized storage.

Go-LSM is a persistent Key-Value engine that manages the full lifecycle of data from volatile RAM to immutable disk storage.

TECHNICAL HIGHLIGHTS:

1. THE DURABILITY LAYER (WAL)

To ensure zero data loss, I implemented an append-only Write-Ahead Log.

• Custom binary protocol: [Type][KeyLen][ValLen][Key][Value]
• File.Sync() to force kernel flushes to physical hardware
• Ensures absolute durability on system crashes

2. SKIPLIST MEMTABLE

Instead of a standard tree, I used a SkipList for the in-memory layer.

• Provides O(log n) search and insertion without the rebalancing complexity of Red-Black trees
• Keeps keys lexicographically sorted for the eventual SSTable flush
• Enables efficient memory-to-disk transitions

3. SSTABLE FOOTER-BASED INDEXING

My SSTables are binary-searchable on disk using a tail-first reading strategy:

• Jump to the last 8 bytes of a file to find the Index Block pointer
• Avoid full file scans by reading directly to the index
• Execute binary search on sorted keys for O(log n) disk lookups

4. MAINTENANCE LAYER: COMPACTION

Built a K-Way Merge compaction engine that handles performance optimization:

• Processes multiple SSTable layers and merges them into single, optimized files
• Handles "Read Amplification" by reducing the number of files to check per query
• Processes "Tombstones" to finalize deletions and reclaim disk space

5. TOOLING & DEBUGGING

Custom binary parsers transform raw binary files into human-readable tables:

• lsm-dump: View sorted SSTable contents
• lsm-wal-dump: Inspect unflushed Write-Ahead Log entries
• Enables deep inspection of internal storage layers

KEY ENGINEERING LESSONS:

Moving from standard application development to systems programming required a fundamental shift in how I think about memory and I/O:

• ENDIANNESS LOGIC: Handling Big-Endian vs. Little-Endian conversions for cross-platform compatibility
• FILE OFFSET MANAGEMENT: Manually managing byte offsets and file pointer positioning
• CONCURRENCY & THREAD SAFETY: Implementing thread-safe mechanisms for MemTable flushing
• BINARY PROTOCOL DESIGN: Creating efficient, compact data encodings for durability

REPOSITORY:

https://github.com/Jyotishmoy12/LSM-Tree-in-Golang
by sbharadwaj | 2026-02-26 05:03:38+00:00
A few years after leaving grad school, I tried picking math back up. The textbook experience was as bad as I remembered — no feedback, no way to ask questions, no one to help when you were stuck.

Private tutoring is the real solution, and it worked for me as a kid — it built confidence in a way class never did. But it's expensive. I wanted to build something that could give that experience to anyone.

The design challenge I cared most about: don't let AI become a homework machine. The whole point of learning math is developing the ability to think through hard problems. So Marcus is built to guide, not solve — it asks questions, gives hints, and explains step by step, but doesn't hand you answers.

It covers K–12 through college-level math (linear algebra, calc, etc.), adapts to what you know, and tries to be the patient tutor most people never had access to.

Would love feedback, especially from students or educators.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-26 05:04:28+00:00
Chinese manufacturers like CXMT face the same kinds of issues that Huawei faced in entering the EU market - the EU is clamping down on Chinese suppliers across their supply chain [0].

Where can CXMT and other Chinese players export when Japan, South Korea, much of ASEAN, India, much of North America, the EU, the UK, Australia, NZ, and parts of the Gulf have enacted or begun enacting trade barriers against Chinese exports?

[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/eb677cb3-f86c-42de-b819-277bcb042...
by hackit2 | 2026-02-26 05:05:13+00:00
That can be so far from the truth it hurts thinking about it. Governments passed laws that mandated that businesses must legally comply with DOJ or Government Investigates on people of interest. Otherwise they will be blocked in those countries. No users = No money.
Most government consider they're extending you the privilege to conduct business with their citizens, and by virtue of granting you those rights you're burden with complying with the countries laws/security and/or audits.
by sucharithan | 2026-02-26 05:05:43+00:00
I built the Optimism Engine because I noticed a dangerous gap in how we are using AI for mental health.

Right now, everyone is rushing to add "AI Chatbots" to their apps. But there is a huge risk they are ignoring: Hallucinations. Generative AI (like ChatGPT) is creative, but it makes mistakes. It can miss a suicide cue. It can give bad advice. In mental health, a "creative" mistake isn't just a bug, it's a liability.

The Problem with "Prompts":

Most apps try to fix this with "Prompt Engineering." They write long instructions telling the AI: "Please be safe. Don't give medical advice."

But here is the problem: Asking an AI to be safe is not the same as forcing it to be safe. It’s like asking a toddler to "be careful", they try, but you can't rely on them 100% of the time.

The Solution: The "Gatekeeper" Architecture:

I built the Optimism Engine to solve this. It is not just a chatbot; it is a Hybrid Safety System.

Think of it like a traffic light. Before the AI can say anything, it must pass through The Gatekeeper (my Logic Layer).

Logic First: The Gatekeeper is built with hard-coded rules, not AI. It checks every single message for danger signs (like suicide keywords) or cognitive distortions (like "Catastrophizing").

The Override: If a danger sign is detected, the Gatekeeper physically cuts the power to the AI. The AI is never allowed to generate a response. Instead, a pre-written, safe response is served immediately. This guarantees Zero Hallucination Risk on safety issues.

Context Awareness: The engine is smart enough to know the difference between "I don't know how to code" (a learning gap) and "I don't know why I'm alive" (a crisis). It adjusts the AI's instructions so it doesn't annoy or panic the user.

An Engineering Upgrade, Not a Medical Tool:

I want to be clear: This is an Engineering Upgrade, not a clinical product. I am not a doctor; I am a developer. I am selling the infrastructure, the plumbing and safety valves that other companies need to build their own apps on top of.

Who is this for?

If you are a founder or developer building a mental health or coaching app, you have a choice:

* Spend 6 months and a ton of money building your own "Safety Layer" and State Machine.

* Or acquire the Optimism Engine today and have enterprise-grade safety tomorrow.

I’m selling the Full Source Code + IP to help you build safer, smarter, and more reliable AI products. Let's stop playing Russian Roulette with mental health technology.

Feel the App on Loom (Modest): Re: - 25 February 2026
by idontwantthis | 2026-02-26 05:06:27+00:00
It's always been clear to me that Hydrogen is not the future, because the car companies that made hydrogen cars never tried to build a hydrogen fuel distribution system.

The main reason EVs are a thing is that Tesla built the supercharger network. The fact that Honda or Toyota didn't do that for Hydrogen is the reason it has not been a serious fuel alternative. And they probably didn't do that because they always knew the economics would never work out and were never serious about pursuing it.
by matheusmoreira | 2026-02-26 05:06:56+00:00
> As a result, zoomers today meme about people like the unabomber making a good point.

I don't blame them.

As a nerd I think my spirit was broken by the absolute apathy of the normies. It was easy to ignore up until the early 2000s. It's become unbearable after social media and the iPhone reached the masses. It's not nerd stuff anymore. They influence every design now. They shape every decision. They are actively exploited at every turn. They are profiled, surveilled, controlled. It's gotten to the point even we nerds can't escape this fate no matter how much we want to. We try to tell them about it and we're made out to be tinfoil hat nutjobs. It's happening and they don't care.

It feels so hopeless and it's honestly very radicalizing. It breeds sociopathy. In the end I can't find the will to blame the billionaires either. I think I'd do the same if I could. Make billions and then just create a small paradise for me and all the people I care about. A subset of society where the principles I hold dear actually apply. Society is too fucked up and nobody cares, so I'll just create my own fiefdom.
by atomicfiredoll | 2026-02-26 05:07:52+00:00
There was another new account basically created for this thread that got flagged down. Yours, which also looks like it was created for this thread, seems awful similar. (Edit: iirc even the name was similar.)

While I'm sure they do want those abilities, I follow the new tab often that I disagree. And frankly, I don't really have any reason to trust what you're peddling.
by bb88 | 2026-02-26 05:08:08+00:00
I have the newsletter in email and there wasn't much more than what was posted above, other than quoting from this article:

https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/jane-street-accused-o...

That point was the crux of Matt Levine's argument: Terra and Luna were unregulated and easy-to-game securities. So you can't complain when the smartest people on Wall Street figured out how to pop the balloon in their favor -- (not ai emdash) particularly when it's their job.

I will quote the first few paragraphs leading up to it though:

>The basic story of Terra is:

>Terra was a big crypto project, led by a company called Terraform Labs and a guy named Do Kwon, which at its peak had a market value of about $50 billion.

>It had a token, the currency of its blockchain, called Luna, which at its peak traded at almost $120 per token.
It also had an algorithmic stablecoin, TerraUSD, whose mechanism was that it could always be redeemed for $1 worth of Luna.

>That’s a bad idea! The problem, which was extremely obvious and which everyone knew about, was that, if people lost confidence in Luna, there would be a death spiral: People would redeem TerraUSD for Luna and sell the Luna, which would drive down the price of Luna, which would lead to more redemptions, which would create even more Luna, until Luna was trading at a tiny fraction of a penny and every TerraUSD would be redeemed for millions of them.

>In May 2022 that very much happened. Terra collapsed, people lost a lot of money and Do Kwon got 15 years in prison for fraud.

>At its peak, though, Terra was a pretty big crypto project, and it had various dealings with some very smart and somewhat sharky trading firms like Jump Trading and Jane Street.
by junipertea | 2026-02-26 05:08:48+00:00
I believe specifically for Microsoft, they did bundle a default replacement for chatGPT in a lot of different places (Bing chat, Copilot) which use OpenAI models! But the end product is notably worse than native interface. There is a bare-minimum-level of usability required.

For chat apps, good enough is good enough. For something as universally useful and easy to use as ChatGPT, the bar is higher. I don't want to comment on the financial feasibility, but whatever Microsoft put out has been a complete flop even when free, making ChatGPT $8 subscription seem worth it in comparison
by Rohansi | 2026-02-26 05:10:00+00:00
> This Notepad vuln, allows you to click things like ssh://x....

Which just opens up SSH connecting to a server. Is that really RCE?

It'll also only work with URI schemes that are registered on your system. It's not running arbitrary commands - software you install on your PC registers URI schemes and sets what command it should run when opened. It's then up to that software to parse the URI and handle it properly. If it doesn't then the RCE belongs to them because they registered the URI scheme and failed to handle it securely. Having an allowlist of URI schemes in Notepad isn't going to fix it.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-26 05:10:13+00:00
Because the quote is irrational/solvent so you have to stick with those words. The similarity is a failed attempt to wait out a disadvantageous price regardless of the specific reason driving said price.

Even in the context of the original quote the price is only "irrational" in the eyes of the person trying (and failing) to play the market. "But you can't do that, that doesn't make any sense!" spoken by a person who has failed to fully grasp the situation.
by oompty | 2026-02-26 05:10:16+00:00
Ohh so that's how that happened. I had noticed (purely for research purposes of course) that some of Google's own keys hardcoded into older Android images were useable for Gemini (some instantly ratelimited so presumably used by many other people already but some still usable) until they all got disabled as leaked like two months ago. They also had over time disabled Gemini API access on some of them over them beforehand.
by Gigachad | 2026-02-26 05:10:26+00:00
Your first point highlights the huge unmitigated risk. There is no guarantee that this won't all implode, triggering a huge recession. And even if no one can afford the ram after, they especially won't be able to afford the more expensive European ram.

Really the only way it could work is if the government declares it it a national security issue and will promise to subsidize it. Because in just a free market, it's most likely to flop.
by cheroll | 2026-02-26 05:11:04+00:00
My family member sent $100,000 to an AI girlfriend.
She's not alone. My other relatives are being scammed by AI boyfriends right now. They're lonely, they're vulnerable, and they're getting manipulated by chatbots designed to be perfectly convincing.
We built a scanner that detects AI-generated images, videos, and text. It works pretty well. But it came too late for my family.

Our app can detect AI persona and also have an ability to escalate to humans for second later hence bringing back the human factor,

what are your thoughts?
by DiogenesKynikos | 2026-02-26 05:11:46+00:00
IDF personnel are in and out of every hospital in Israel all the time. Every other adult in Israel is IDF.

Israel has attacked every hospital in Israel with the blanket claim that some Hamas person was there at some point. Not that there was active fighting at the hospital. Not that Hamas was barricaded inside and firing out of it. Just that someone however loosely related to Hamas might have been near the hospital at some point. By that same argument, virtually every building in Israel would be a legitimate target.
by goku12 | 2026-02-26 05:11:51+00:00
Yes, even the ones you can run on your system. They're no different from proprietary OS and software you used to run on your system, whose design in which you had no say whatsoever. These 'free to run' models are hardly open source. You don't have the data that was used to train them. It's not just about the legality of those data. The dataset chosen may have extreme bias that you can never eliminate satisfactorily from a trained model.

As if that wasn't bad enough, these models cannot be trained on your regular home computer. But instead of striving to improve the energy efficiency of these models, those big corporations build and run massive gas guzzling data centers to train them. They ruin the quality of life for the neighbors through pollution, water depletion and electricity price rise. It also disproportionately affects the poor in the world by reducing supply of essential computing components like RAM (which are needed for medical devices, utility and manufacturing installations and every other aspect of modern life), and by aggravating the climate crisis, whose victims are the poorest.

They don't give you those models out of the goodness of their hearts. Those are just advertisements and trial pieces for their premium services. They also peddle the agenda of its creators. So yes, those models are empowering only in a very narrow sense without any foresight. They are still the money making engines for the rich that subject you to their benevolence, whims and fancies.
by plastic3169 | 2026-02-26 05:12:00+00:00
Great work! I have been wondering what would it take to train with higher image bit depth (10 or 12b) and/or using camera footage only, not already heavily processed images? The usefulness of video generation in most professional use cases is limited because models are too end to end and completely contaminated with stock footage. Maybe quantities of training material needed is simply not there?

Not blaming you, but asking as I don’t usually have access to professionals working with video training.
by OscarTheGrinch | 2026-02-26 05:13:42+00:00
I think you're right about stickyness up to a point.

Cultural defaults seem unchangeable but then suddenly everyone knows, that's everyone knows, that OpenAI is passé.

OpenAI has a real chance to blow their lead, ending up in a hellish no-man's land by trying to please everyone: Not cool enough for normies, not safe enough for business, not radical enough for techies. Pick a lane or perish.

Not owning their own infrastructure, and being propped up by financial / valuation tricks are more red flags.

Being a first mover doesn't guarantee getting to the golden goose, remember MySpace.
by GCUMstlyHarmls | 2026-02-26 05:13:51+00:00
But the (royal) Wife needs to 1) know that exporting is a concept, 2) automating an export is possible, 3) you could ask claude to do it, 4) what an API key is or how to connect services.

My mum, and probably nearly a billion other users, could probably imagine step 1 but not connect to step 2 beyond copy-paste. Most people are still out here sending screen shots of their phones instead of just copying a link or hitting "share" on the image.