MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by exDM69 | 2026-02-27 13:13:05+00:00
Nice and concise description of quadtrees implemented with classical pointer chasing data structures.

A faster and (arguably) simpler way to construct quad/octrees is using morton codes, sorting and searching with flat arrays [0]. It's also probably easier to implement.

The gist of it is that you quantize the coordinates, do bit interleaving to construct morton code and then sort. The sorting is using numerical keys so you can use a radix sort for O(n) complexity which is much faster on a GPU (but on single CPU core a comparison based sort will probably win if the array isn't huge).

Now everything on the top half of the space is in the beginning of the array and the bottom half is in the end of the array (assuming yxyxyxyx morton code bits). Each of those halves is then split left/right and then each level below that alternates between vertical and horizontal splits.

To find the split point in the array, look at the first and last entry of the (sub)array you're looking at, and look for the first differing bit with (first ^ last).leading_zeros(). Then binary search for the first entry where that bit is high.

To traverse the quad/octree, repeat this process with the two halves you found. This can be done without recursion in O(1) memory using a fixed size stack because you know the depth of the "recursion" is at most half the number of bits in the morton code.

If you used radix sorting for building the array, you can avoid the binary search if you store the histograms from the counting phase of the sorting. Storing the whole histogram may be too much, but just a few highest order bits can already help.

Although I've found experimentally that for small (less that 10000 objects) just sorting and searching is faster if the whole array fits in L2 cache. On my 2015 laptop a single core can sort 10k objects with 64 bit keys in 1 millisecond. Traversing the tree for frustum culling is about 5x faster than just going through the entire array because a lot of geometry can be discarded very quickly.

With a good comparison based sort rebuilding the array after some changes is mighty fast because modern sorting algorithms are much faster for "almost sorted" inputs.

For range queries ("Find everything in the region" in the article), you can probably get better performance by using the BIGMIN/LITMAX method [1].

Now here's a brain teaser to delight your Friday: the article and the method I describe above is for storing points/centroids, but often you need to store axis aligned boxes instead (AABB). There is a very clever trick for this that I discovered independently but later found in some research papers. Can you come up with a (very) small change in the algorithm above to extend it to AABBs instead of centroids?

[0] Karras: Maximizing Parallelism in the Construction of BVHs,
Octrees, and k-d Trees - https://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/pubs/2012-06...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_curve#Use_with_one-dim...
by locallost | 2026-02-27 13:13:14+00:00
I logged into xitter recently after a long time, and my feed was cluttered with anti immigrant scare stories, western values under threat etc. that I got really scared thinking what the future holds if people are getting brain washed to this extent. It was things I never followed anywhere, so Elon is literally stuffing this crap down everyone's throat. Vibes of invention of radio and television powering the Holocaust.
by jawilson2 | 2026-02-27 13:13:44+00:00
I'd like to think that, I love this period from Davis, and love Hendrix, so it would have been great to see a collab.

In terms of communication, I am thinking of something like the musical equivalent to software design patterns, etc. I.e. imagine two devs are pair coding, one of whom has a CS degree from 2002 and one is skilled but self-taught. While working together, the first starts talking about observer or singleton patterns, which the 2nd has never heard of but has coded something 90% of the way there on intuition. There could be some friction as they establish a common language. (Yes, this is based on experience, with myself more or less on both sides of the exchange at one point or another).
by s-macke | 2026-02-27 13:14:02+00:00
AI is very effective for reverse engineering. Unless you’re doing it purely for fun, it makes sense to use AI where it helps.

I’ve tried to visualize the “navigate and modify” process you mentioned in [0]. It’s mesmerizing.

Because reverse engineering outcomes are comparatively easy to verify, it’s a good fit for training for AI. I expect major progress in the next few years, potentially to the point where reverse engineering many binaries becomes highly automated.

[0] https://github.com/s-macke/OpcodeOracle
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2026-02-27 13:14:12+00:00
It may be just me, but if the number items in the set gets to numbers that require these sorts of diagrams, then the value of the visualization effectively drops to zero. I mean the purpose of data visualizations is give a human a more intuitive representational understanding of data set. A simple venn diagram does this well. But when you get 50 or 100 data sources, then it just becomes a multi-colored complexity. I mean, they look cool. But I don't gain any better understanding about the data when I look them. It may in fact make it worse because I may misinterpret the size of the areas as being meaningful when they are just necessary for geometry to work.
by sentriflow | 2026-02-27 13:14:21+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m an enterprise network engineer, and I spend my days writing automation scripts, configuring switches, and managing infrastructure. For the longest time, my workflow was fragmented: VS Code for writing configs/scripts, and a completely separate tool (like MobaXterm, SecureCRT, or Termius) for handling SSH jumps, serial console connections, and port forwards. The constant context switching was driving me crazy.
VS Code’s native Remote-SSH extension is brilliant for remote development on a single box, but it’s not designed for managing fleeting connections to hundreds of disparate network devices, interacting with physical COM/ttyUSB ports, or managing dynamic tunnels on the fly.
I couldn't find an extension that acted like a proper network engineer's terminal multiplexer, so I built NexTerminal.

A few things it handles under the hood:

- Native Serial Support: Directly connect to physical serial ports (COM/ttyUSB) without leaving the editor—vital for racking and stacking gear.

- Advanced Routing: Handles Multi-hop SSH Jump Hosts, SOCKS5, and HTTP CONNECT proxies.

- Port Forwarding: Local, Reverse, and Dynamic SOCKS5 tunnels with live traffic counters.

- SFTP: Drag-and-drop remote file management directly linked to your active session.

- Credential Security: Hooks into VS Code’s native SecretStorage API, so credentials aren't just sitting in plaintext configs.

- Migrations: Wrote parsers to seamlessly import XML/INI session trees from legacy tools like MobaXterm and SecureCRT.

It's completely free. I built this to scratch my own itch, but I figured other SysAdmins, DevOps folks, and NetEngs might find it useful to consolidate their tooling.
I'd love for you to try it out, poke holes in it, or suggest features. Happy to answer any questions on the architecture or how the proxy/serial tunneling works!
by surgical_fire | 2026-02-27 13:14:23+00:00
The Netherlands had a similar system with BSN and DigiD.

I personally prefer it, and I wish the country I live in right now had a better centralized system to deal with the government. It massively reduces bureaucracy and the need for me to produce all sorts of extremely privacy-invasive documents (such as bank statements, utility bills, scans of my driver license and passport) when dealing with the government. Sometimes I even need to mail those things, like, with an envelope.

The government can and will collect all data it needs about you at any given time, no matter if there's a centralized ID or not. It just spares everyone time and effort by removing friction.

Also, I have a very hard time to take seriously someone that unironically says the words "nanny state". It says a lot about your stance on the role of governments and society in general. What it says, to me, is very unflattering.
by alanmcintyre | 2026-02-27 13:15:53+00:00
I took about 30 years of personal digital archives and used it to build an agent that can passably write in my voice in different social contexts. On the off chance that some of the things I did are useful, I collected them into a short booklet, which you can get for free on Leanpub.

There's nothing groundbreaking in here, of course, but maybe somebody else just getting started on using LLMs might find something helpful here.
by staticman2 | 2026-02-27 13:16:25+00:00
> Under what statute is it illegal to request legal fees?

You can request anything you want? Granting it would be illegal.

An attorney asking the judge to break the law and award attorney fees is literally asking for something illegal in most circumstances. There are exceptions. (By illegal I mean contrary to law.)

It's funny that 4 people downvoted me instead of bothering to check Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_rule_(attorney%27s_fe...
Show HN: NightClear – AI anxiety clearing for bedtime
by AliThink | 2026-02-27 13:16:58+00:00
Hi HN,

I built NightClear because during the day I'm productive. At night, my brain becomes a worst-case-scenario simulator.

Based on CBT's "structured worry time" — instead of suppressing anxious thoughts, you give them a container:

1. Type what's on your mind (free-form, private)
2. LLM analyzes: core issue, controllable vs not
3. Generates one micro-action for tomorrow
4. Breathing exercise

SwiftUI, SwiftData (local), LLM API. Dark mode only. No account needed. No social/gamification.

Free: 3/week. Pro: $4.99/mo or $29.99/yr (7-day trial).

iOS only. Would love feedback on the AI analysis quality.
by quacked | 2026-02-27 13:17:13+00:00
I take some issue with these kinds of articles that minimize the impacts of "street crime" in favor of the admittedly much broader and insidious effects of corporate crime.

Corporate crime generally can coexist with a functioning system, even while it drains the prosperity of society, but street crime will just dissolve the society overnight. People physically abandon locations with high street crime.

A corrupt system is still a system, meaning that in theory it operates to produce something of value for society (e.g. in addition to lying about climate change, causing cancer, and blocking renewable energy via lawfare and propaganda, BP provides a colossal amount of fuel for society) but street crime produces nothing and destroys community outright at the local level.
by sixeyes | 2026-02-27 13:17:40+00:00
>OTOH I think a lot of these methods don't matter that much because of plausible deniability. Stylometry and other stuff processes is always probabilistic, and can be dismissed.

i've come to realize, often the "opressor" or whatever party i imagine using this kind of thing against me, they do not care about being exactly <right. i will not be able to lawyer my way out. if something is actionable, action will be taken. and i'm not the one deciding if its actionable
by Peroni | 2026-02-27 13:17:54+00:00
>the carve-out only protects people inside the US. Speaking as someone based in Europe, that's a detail that doesn't go unnoticed.

I'm not sure an American company prioritising the privacy of American people is worth questioning. As a European, Anthropic are very low on the list of companies I worry about in terms of the progressive eradication of my privacy.
by jawilson2 | 2026-02-27 13:18:02+00:00
Very cool! I'm confused why you didn't link the video of Radiohead wearing all black and playing at MTV Spring Break :-).

I was VERY deep into Radiohead in college (early 2000s), and love all of these videos; I'm pretty sure I've seen that 2nd video footage around the time of the Kid A tour, but the dates are wrong. Kid A is probably one of my 5 deserted island albums.
by staticman2 | 2026-02-27 13:19:03+00:00
By illegal I mean contrary to American law.

Legal fees are literally not damages. A court granting legal fees would be doing that in addition to damages.

In most cases the jury will never even be told what your attorneys fees are, and they are not permitted to award them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_rule_(attorney%27s_fe...
by b40d-48b2-979e | 2026-02-27 13:19:12+00:00
IIRC PowerShell would convert your command's stream to your console encoding. I forget if this is according to how `chcp.com` was set or how `[Console]::OutputEncoding` was set (which is still a pain I feel in my bones for knowing today).

It's also not a file descriptor. It's a PowerShell Stream, of which there are five? you can redirect to that are similar to log levels.
by rolodexter2023 | 2026-02-27 13:19:40+00:00
In consumer search, Google paid to be the default because defaults are basically behavioral gravity. Most people don’t churn defaults. In AI, the equivalent isn’t just “the search box,” it’s the assistant that sits inside the apps where you already spend your cognitive budget—design, docs, email, IDE, CRM, ticketing, finance—so your prompts stop being little one-off spells and start being operations with permissions, audit trails, and repeatability.
by bumby | 2026-02-27 13:19:56+00:00
I didn’t read the OP as being entirely dismissive, but rather making a point about relative impact.

You could make the case that a neurosurgeon is contributing to the field by being a full-time reviewer of a research journal; like a quant, they are providing utility by assisting in the flow of information. But I suspect there are many people like me who think they would have a bigger impact by putting on scrubs and working in an operating room.
by albert_e | 2026-02-27 13:20:00+00:00
> 82 pairs are pixel-identical

> a string like “аpple.com” with Cyrillic а (U+0430) is pixel-identical to “apple.com” in 40+ fonts. The user, the browser’s address bar, and any visual review process all see the same pixels. This is not theoretical. It is a measured property of the font files shipping on every Mac.

Current implementations of "Computer Use" Agentic AI tools mostly use visuals -- screenshotting of a computer screen and interpreting it.

These pixel-dentical character pairs will be a straight failure mode for those automations and could possibly be a threat vector if crafted well.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-02-27 13:20:25+00:00
It would also be interesting to see how well the best open weights models such as Kimi K2.5 can do on a task like this with the same prompting to first gather specs, etc, etc.

In fact this would make for an interesting benchmark - writing entire non-trivial apps based on the same prompt. Each model might be expected to write and use it's own test cases, but then all could be judged based on a common set of test cases provided as part of the benchmark suite.
by watwut | 2026-02-27 13:21:24+00:00
There is difference between "this is why I do not want to be part of that" and "this is why the institution as such did not found a way to do it". The some peoples unwillingness to do that is not that much relevant, unless the company is in the "all qualified people are avoiding that task" situation.

> Where you see jealousy, which is a strange thing to invite,

Any desirable position invites slight jealousy. It is no different then when you have low pressure project, project that uses cool language, project with the good manager. I used the word in that sense, in the the "horrible they are going to dislike me" sense.

> I see fear of missing out/rat-racing. Pass. Plenty of motivators and opportunity without the charade.

This seems oddly out of place to me? These initiatives usually give you more freedom and "customer wants it now" kind of pressure.
by ACCount37 | 2026-02-27 13:21:42+00:00
Weird stance to take.

I can understand "untested AI-genned code is bad, and thus anything that reeks of AI is going to be scrutinized" - especially given that PostmarketOS deals a lot with kernel drivers for hardware. Notoriously low error margins. But they just had to go out of their way and make it ideological rather than pragmatic.
by mingus88 | 2026-02-27 13:21:42+00:00
This is so short sighted. We are so early into this AI revolution, and this administration is obviously in a tailspin, with the only folk left in charge being the least capable ones we have seen in a decade

Imagine what the conversation would be like if Mattis, a highly decorated and respected leader were still the SecDef. Instead we are seeing bully tactics from a failed cable news pundit who has neither earned nor deserved any respect from the military he represents.

We are two elections and a major health issue away from a complete change of course.

But short sightedness is the name of the quarterly reporting game, so who knows.
by rolodexter2023 | 2026-02-27 13:21:51+00:00
Think more like what Microsoft did by being everywhere enterprises already were: integrations, admin controls, compliance posture, procurement-friendly packaging. OpenAI doesn’t need to “invent all experiences” if it can be the default inference layer that’s easiest to buy, govern, and instrument inside large orgs—especially if it can show auditors a cleaner story than “random employees piping data into a consumer chatbot.” This is the less sexy but very real wedge: the assistant becomes a governed interface to computation.
Show HN: I've been building autonomous AI agents for 2 years – before OpenClaw
by ai_bot | 2026-02-27 13:22:21+00:00
Hey HN,

I've been building Splox for 2 years — autonomous AI agents that connect to your tools and act on your behalf. Before OpenClaw, before the hype.

You describe what you want in plain English. The agent executes it across 10,000+ services via MCP with 1-click OAuth. No LLM keys to manage, no Docker, no self-hosting.

Three agents live today:

- Autonomous Trader — connects to Hyperliquid, monitors markets, executes positions, manages risk. Runs 24/7.

- Omni Tool Agent — email, Sheets, Notion, Slack, Telegram — anything you'd waste 2 hours on daily. 10,000+ tools via MCP.

- Coder — connects to your servers, local machines, Kubernetes clusters. Reads codebases, deploys, manages infrastructure end-to-end.

People are using it to manage social media accounts, run Telegram user bots, automate customer support — all by just connecting a tool. No code required.

What makes it truly autonomous: a built-in Event Hub. Agents
subscribe to real-time events — webhooks, scheduled triggers, even detecting silence — and react without human input. They run indefinitely.

For power users, there's a visual graph-based workflow builder for complex multi-step pipelines: https://app.splox.io

You can deploy your own complex AI Agents by using graph-based workflows.

For end users:
https://chat.splox.io

Would love feedback.
by Sharlin | 2026-02-27 13:23:02+00:00
Another Modern English cognate even closer to shyne than "sheen" is "shine" (and obviously the German "schein"). The words for "beautiful", "fair", "bright", "shining", "well-reputed", "righteous" have a long history of being related:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schinen#Middle_English (to shine, to appear)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/skyr#Middle_English (clear-coloured, pale, light, luminous, radiant)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sciene#Old_English (beautiful, fair, brilliant, shining)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic... skīnaną (to shine, to appear)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic... skīriz (pure, clear, sheer)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic... skauniz (beautiful, shining)

and ultimately the PIE

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur... (s)ḱeh₁y- (to shine)

There are cognates absolutely everywhere in modern Germanic languages:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sk%C3%ADr#Icelandic skír (bright, clear, pure)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/skir#Swedish (sheer, delicate, shining)

And even in Slavic languages:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/s... sijati (to shine, to illuminate)

Skauniz was even borrowed to Proto-Finnic and highly conserved in modern Finnish, Estonian, Ingric, etc. which all have kaunis meaning "beautiful"!

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Finnic/k...
by LatencyKills | 2026-02-27 13:23:09+00:00
I realize my situation isn’t typical, but I’m retired and have dealt with depression most of my life.

The thing I miss most about work (yes, you really can miss work) is collaborative problem-solving. At Microsoft, we called it “teddy bear debugging”—basically, self-explaining a problem out loud to clarify your thinking. [1]

These days, when I’m stuck, I open Claude Code and “talk it through.” That back-and-forth helps me reason through technical issues and scratches a bit of that collaborative itch that helped keep my depression in check.

[1]: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/w...
by docdeek | 2026-02-27 13:23:24+00:00
In a follow-up tweet they show there is a sticker saying that DHL opened the box, too, seemingly before the US Customs. The tweet shows the image and reads: "So I found this label on the side of the box. Of course, the boxes were all left blank. Not sure anymore if this intentional destruction of property was the work of a @DHLexpress employee or @CBP employee…”.

https://x.com/TehKeripo/status/2027231941729378340
by surgical_fire | 2026-02-27 13:23:55+00:00
I still disagree. I personally welcome the move to less physical money.

> A personal tragedy (losing some money) is materially different than the entire economy being screwed because of a programming issue, or a city being screwed because of an internet outage, or a person and their family being (additionally) screwed because they offended a politician.

If you live in a place where you can be financially screwed because you offended a politician, you have a lot more problems than if money is physical or not.

Also, you are disproportionately overstating the issues with digital money (I am still to see an example of a city being screwed because of Internet outage or programming issue). And you are also disproportionately shrugging away issues with physical money (it makes forgery and criminal activity much easier in many levels, to huge damage to society).
by def13 | 2026-02-27 13:24:06+00:00
I’m not really sure what would pull me away for a vim based solution for viewing diffs (current using codediff.nvim). For a git client in general, I use a cli/tui based solution (lazygit or plain git depending on what I need to do) but when it comes to directly manipulating text why would I throw away all the muscle memory and custom configuration of my editor for a comparatively bare bones standalone tui?
by jonhohle | 2026-02-27 13:24:19+00:00
About 20 years ago I used Cyrillic confusables to watermark internal documentation that was being leaked by a disgruntled customer service employee. The document would dynamically render and include the employee ID based encoded as bits in the text. It survived copy/paste to plain text well.

I did run into some issues in early versions on when characters in Linux commands or visible web addresses were replaced. Fortunately the source docs were HTML, and it was easy to exclude code or pre nodes when rendering.

I thought this was so clever, but the leaker was never caught using it, to the best of my knowledge.
by int_19h | 2026-02-27 13:24:51+00:00
> Are you Chinese? If not, I think you should prefer the people defending you to have the best tools to do so.

They already have the best and most expensive toys in the world, and they mostly seem to be waging aggressive wars with them. Perhaps if the toys weren't so shiny and didn't make it all so one-sided, they wouldn't?