MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ssl-3 | 2026-02-10 03:52:11+00:00
I've had mixed luck.

My current house, with low-E windows, aluminum siding, and a metal roof? It passionately hates everything about GPS.

But in more-typical (stick-framed, asphalt shingled, vinyl-sided, US-ish) houses? I haven't had any trouble with my very inexpensive u-blox (or perhaps clone) GPS board, a presumed-decent GPS antenna that we were throwing away at work, and dainty little [IIRC] u.FL to SMA adapter to connect the antenna with. (I put this all together just to play with making a GPS-backed, low-stratum NTP server -- which was a much more-rewarding process than it had any right to be.)

It was bizarrely good, in fact: While it certainly saw more birds and presumably had better accuracy when sitting in a window, I had real trouble getting it to cease to operate. It seemed to lock on well-enough to provide time and PPS until I put the antenna into a windowless closet.

That said: The antenna that came with this cheap receiver was trash -- at best, 1/10. It was hard to make it work even outdoors on a clear day. I eventually got sick of looking at that part and binned it.
by MarsIronPI | 2026-02-10 03:52:25+00:00
I'm sad to see XMPP missing from this list. I wonder if the author was simply unaware of it or simply ignored it.

IMO XMPP is technically superior to Matrix. It "only" needs a cross-platform high-quality, branded app àla Element. There's underlying protocol support for all the features: video/audio calls, group calls, threads and reactions. Maybe missing are custom emoji (I think?) and channel grouping (which is still in the works). And of course all these protocol features work fine with federation.
Show HN: Kore – Stack based language where compiler is the reward function
by processorx | 2026-02-10 03:53:07+00:00
I built a stack-based programming language in Rust with Cranelift JIT, SPIR-V GPU backend.

Kore has ~140 tokens and 142 opcodes. Programs are sequences of stack operations — push values, apply functions, compose by concatenation. There's a proof checker that statically verifies stack effects and a capability system that gates side effects.

How I got here: I wanted to explore whether a compiler could serve as the reward function for training an LLM to write code. Most code-gen benchmarks use test suites or human eval. But if the compiler can verify correctness before execution — accept or reject in microseconds — you don't need a test harness at all.

That meant I needed two things: a language small enough for an LLM to learn the full vocabulary, and a security model that makes generated programs safe by construction.

The security model (P4: capabilities attenuate): Every side effect in Kore is gated by a capability — io for print/rand, fs for file access, exec for shell commands. The compiler auto-detects what a program needs and tags the binary. At runtime, you grant permissions explicitly (--allow io) or it won't run. When you spawn a sandboxed child, it gets parent_caps & requested_caps — it can never escalate. Pure programs (no capabilities) are deterministic and run on any backend.

This matters because an AI agent writing Kore tools gets compile-time proof that the tool can't touch the filesystem or exec shell commands. Not sandboxing — the proof checker rejects it statically.

I fine-tuned DeepSeek-R1-14B (QLoRA, Unsloth) on 478 curriculum tasks, it worked pretty well. Will probably try a MCTS+RL experiment to see if it can learn to write programs to solve games and optimization problems. The ultimate goal would be having it write its own compiler and self-host.
by buzer | 2026-02-10 03:53:22+00:00
Personally I found Flowdock's thread model the best at least for small'ish teams (company size was <30). You can see it in action at https://web.archive.org/web/20210728031306/http://blog.flowd.... Unfortunately the company itself didn't survive. It was eventually acquired by CA which then killed it later.

(from my older comment) Essentially there is a default view which contains all messages as usual. Each message also has a symbol next to it. If it's grey message bubble, it's a message that is not tied to any thread (it can be replied to to start a new thread. Previously if no other messages have appeared on channel so far, it can be dragged & dropped to another thread). If it's colored message bubble, it's the first message in the thread. A colored arrow means it's part of the thread with that color.

This allows you to mostly just stay in default view with all of the channel's messages. As long as people are putting the messages in the thread itself, you could quickly use the colors to see which thread the message is on (color collisions did happen, but they were fairly rare). You would need to open the thread only if you needed more context or wanted to reply to it, though replying can also be done by writing to channel & dragging the message to thread.
by Garrett_Mack | 2026-02-10 03:53:25+00:00
You don't actually HAVE to use phi. That's just the default global scale factor. You're correct that it's kinda marketing spiel. I figured I needed an angle to stand out in the crowded design system world and now I'm paying the consequences in this absolute roastfest, lol.

The only real reason I use phi is because it's very useful in asymmetrical typography scaling. At small type levels, differences in font size are more visually apparent than at large sizes. In other words, 14px vs 16px looks more noticeable to me than 38px vs 40px. So, my goal was to find a rem coefficient that would provide large jumps at large sizes, but I could also use the square root of it to derive smaller increments. I tried phi on a whim one day and realized I liked it.

I also went to apple's HIG and looked at the type specs for MacOS and put them into a spreadsheet. I found that the proportions of line height to font size hovered around 1.272 (which is the sq root of 1.618, or phi). Then I found similar patterns in the ratios of difference font sizes to each other (I think. It was back in 2022).

I also did a bunch of personal tests where I'd try to eyeball line heights and padding and stuff without snapping or looking at the metrics, and my preferences kept landing around golden ratio proportions. Biased? 100%. But I haven't got access to focus groups, and every time I asked my boyfriend to try it for me he'd be all like "please get a job you promised you'd work on your resume today"

So then I looked into other research. I can't find the study because I unpublished the article where I linked it, like a dumbass, but studies have shown that laypeople can tell the difference between abstract art based on rules like fractal symmetry and the golden ratio versus art made by children or animals at a rate of about 60% accuracy. Im on my phone right now but if you're curious I'll gladly look it up for you. I took that to mean "well, if we're entering an age of AI generated interfaces, then eventually we'll need to distill the essence of what looks good into certain mathematical principles so that there's a quantifiable "baseline" for quality that models can rely on. Golden ratio!" (Note: I do not know how AI actually works)

Finally, I got obsessed with that damn material button. There were ads on BART for some Google thing showing a button and it just looked off center to me. It haunted me for weeks. I couldn't stop looking at it. So I thought I'd try finding a reliable way to achieve the correct optical offset, but programmatically, so a designer wouldn't just have to do eyeball every button every time.

So, it's not totally baseless. But it's not a magic number either.
by catgirlinspace | 2026-02-10 03:54:14+00:00
I’ve been self hosting Element Call and use it to call my girlfriend (and also used it with another friend a few nights ago). I’ve had a few problems where when starting the call it seems to not connect but just trying again works, and that’s really the only issue i’ve had that I can think of since setting up a TURN server (before that it would completely fail sometimes, but that’s not Element Call’s fault)
by Nevermark | 2026-02-10 03:54:15+00:00
I like the idea of in-language control of loose/strict typing.

A project or "main" or other entry point should be able to set minimum strictness for everything it composes/references.

Individual modules should be able to set their looseness, and be parsed and implemented accordingly, with runtime dispatching, template expansion, etc. instead of compile time.

When the two collide, we get an error, and the developer decides which one needs to give way at the current point of development. So both constraints are always clear and enforced.

Language highlighting of loose vs. strict would also be nice.
by sigseg1v | 2026-02-10 03:54:19+00:00
I feel that the devil is in the edge cases and this allows you to have the freedom to say "ok I want to try for 1.0 match between everything, I can accept 0.98 match, and files which have less of a match it can detail notes for and I can manually approve them". So for things where the languages differ too much for specific patterns such as maybe an event handing module, you can allow more leniency and tell it to use the target languages patterns more easily, without having to be so precise as to define every single transformation as you would with a transpiler.

In short: because it's faster and more flexible.
by tabbott | 2026-02-10 03:56:12+00:00
Moderation of self-hosted servers is entirely the responsibility of the server's owners (and perhaps hosting providers, if it's extreme enough). We have no way to know what's happening on self-hosted servers, and it's none of our business.

Regardless, there is no technical mechanism through which we could block access to a self-hosted Zulip server via the web application (which is hosted by the self-hosted server itself and designed to work on both desktop and mobile devices).

For Zulip Cloud, you can read https://zulip.com/policies/rules. One of the nice things about Zulip's model is that communities that we do not want to host can just migrate to self-hosting.
by RupertSalt | 2026-02-10 03:57:08+00:00
You do not have an atomic clock. Seiko does not manufacture “Atomic Clocks” for the $30 shelf in Target. You (and others here) don’t seem to know what an atomic clock is, or how it works, or what it costs!

Your Seiko is a radio clock. It’s probably got a crystal or some other normal timekeeping gadget, and the external WWV signal is decoded to properly set it.

No caesium atoms would be found in your Seiko, bro.
by kortilla | 2026-02-10 03:57:10+00:00
>Organizations with a software budget should be happier to pay a fair price for ethical, user-first software from a friendly vendor than for a closed-source product from a megacorp.

Yet we don’t pay for Linux, grep, vim, etc, etc. Why is your open source project the only one worthy of requiring payment?

IMO you should drop the doublespeak of claiming these are open source values while simultaneously charging money. It’s offensive to people who contribute to actual open source projects like matrix, clang, Linux, kubernetes, and on and on.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-02-10 03:57:34+00:00
There are no alternatives. My point is the whole concept was designed with flaws from the beginning.

>How does it deal with destructive changes to data (e.g. a table drop)?

How does type checking deal with this? What? I'm not talking about this. I'm talking something as simple as a typo in your sql query can bring your system down without testing or a giant orm that's synced with your database.

I'm not saying distributed systems are completely solved. I'm saying a huge portion of the problems exist because of preventable flaws. Why talk about the things that can't really be easily solved and why don't we talk about the things that can be solved?
by cryptonector | 2026-02-10 03:57:49+00:00
Terrible article. Nowhere in its litany of what one has to do to build systems that work is anything said about functional programming is incompatible with any of that, or even how the mindset of the functional programmer is incompatible with any of that.

The formula for this article was: truism about X followed by unrelated stuff about Y that the reader is supposed to come away thinking X is incompatible with.
by agentultra | 2026-02-10 03:58:14+00:00
I often recommend developers learn and use at least one model checking language for this purpose. They’re really good at helping us reason about global properties of systems.

This isn’t unique to Haskell or functional programming at all. I’ve seen programmers from JavaScript to C++ suffer the same fate: tied into the boundaries of a single process they try to verify the correctness of their systems informally. By writing documents and holding long meetings or convincing themselves by prototyping. It’s only a matter of time before the find the error in production.

Hopefully it’s of no real consequence. The error gets fixed and it’s a week or two of extra work. But some times it triggers an outage that causes SLO’s to overshoot and SLAs to trigger which cost the company money. That outage could have potentially been avoided.

But it’s tough getting developers to see the benefit in model checking or any kind of formal methods. The hubris is often too great. It’s not just functional programmers! Although it surprised me when I was working with Haskell developers that so many were resistant to the idea.

(If one has experience and understands functional programming, learning TLA should be rather straight forward)
by westurner | 2026-02-10 03:58:28+00:00
There is a theory that the star shafts of the Great Pyramid could have
been used as waveguides. They did contain copper rods. Perhaps they
were just lightning rods.

If so, then the pyramids (and other ancient megalithic structures with
quartz at 72 degree intervals) and Angkor Wat and Longyou caves and
Osireon may have been the longest (non-) line of sight communication
system back then in ancient times:
https://gemini.google.com/share/101970a04402

Observation of a salt-formed Hydrogen-tuned NV-center diamond might resolve some of these claims?
by dumpsterdiver | 2026-02-10 03:59:56+00:00
One weird skill I have is the ability to describe simple concepts as complex and confusing systems. I’ll take a go at that now.

When working with LLMs, one of my primary concerns is keeping tabs on their operating assumptions. I often catch them red-handed running with assumptions like they were scissors, and I’m forced to berate them.

So my ideal “async agents” are agents that keep me informed not of the outcome of a task, but of the assumptions they hold as they work.

I’ve always been a little slow recognizing things that others find obvious, such as “good enough” actually being good enough. I obtusely disagree. My finish line isn’t “good enough”, it’s “correct”, and yes, I will die on that hill still working on the same product I started as a younger man.

Jokes aside, I really would like to see:

1. Periodic notifications informing me of important working assumptions.
2. The ability to interject and course correct - likely requiring a bit of backtracking.
3. In addition to periodic working assumption notifications, I’d also like periodic “mission statements” - worded in the context of the current task - as assurance that the agent still has its eye on the ball.
Show HN: A daily news app that helps kids build reading and thinking skills
by farstill | 2026-02-10 04:00:29+00:00
Hi HN,
I’ve been working on a web app that turns real-world news into a short daily learning experience for kids.
The idea came from watching how most “learning apps” either feel like test prep or oversimplify content. I wanted something that helps kids understand real news, build vocabulary, and think — without grades or pressure.
How it works:
* Each day, the app generates one age-appropriate news article
* Kids read the article and answer 5 simple questions
* The app highlights a small set of useful vocabulary words with explanations in context
* Progress is tracked via streaks, titles, and badges (Explorer → Thinker → Decoder → Scholar → Sage)
No leaderboards, no scores shown to kids, no “wrong answer” shaming.
Some design choices I made intentionally:
* Vocabulary focuses on usefulness, not memorization
* Progress is identity-based, not performance-based
This is still early-stage and I’m looking for feedback from:
* parents
* educators
* people who’ve built learning products
* anyone opinionated about how kids shouldn’t be taught

Demo: https://zaplearner.com/trial

Happy to answer technical or product questions. Feedback (positive or critical) is very welcome.
by Terretta | 2026-02-10 04:00:32+00:00
I'd like to imagine I know which of each example were better designed, but the handle going to the side opposite from the label was making me second guess. Move handle away from the label to reveal is how I took it, so hope that's what you intended.

OTOH, I'm on touch screen (iPad/iOS26/WebKit) and it didn't go up and down, it went side to side.

As other feedback, the dumpster fire and deprecation warnings in the docs make me want to try this. I find builder-to-builder candor refreshingly helpful, treating your doc reader like an actual partner instead of like a euphemism.

Chainlift > Agency Services > Team menu option seems inert.

I'm not on LinkedIn all that much but I'm there.
by melling | 2026-02-10 04:00:53+00:00
“The reversal targets the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which concluded that six greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare. The finding provided the legal underpinning for the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate rules, which limited emissions from power plants and tightened fuel-economy standards for vehicles under the Clean Air Act.”

What does it mean “if it works “?
by threethirtytwo | 2026-02-10 04:01:28+00:00
>That helps but is insufficient, since the set of concurrently deployed artifact versions can be different than any set of artifact versions seen by CI

Simple, although I only mentioned repos should be mono, I should've also said deployment should be mono as well. I thought that was a given.

>So you want to reimplement your own PostgreSQL-equivalent in another monorepo subdir too?

I'm too lazy to do this but in general I want an artifact that is built. All sql queries need to be compiled and built and the database runs that artifact. And of course all of this is part of a monorepo that is monodeployed.

>I don't understand how opting not to use modern RDBMSes is practical.

It's not practical. My point is there's some really stupid obvious flaws we live with because it's the only practical solution.
by jrochkind1 | 2026-02-10 04:02:01+00:00
I was confused what OP is talking about, becuase in all the screenshots I don't see any unlabelled icons, I just see icons next to words.

I was wondering... is OP in fact saying it should be just words, without the icons next to them? Which is an opinion you could have, I think it's not entirely unreasonable (although as you say Nielson contradicts), but I wasn't entirely confident it is the point OP is making... or are they just talking about unlabelled icons (few if any? I'm not sure?) in those screenshots?

I still am not totally sure what OP is arguing.
by EGreg | 2026-02-10 04:02:34+00:00
I've been building a decentralized, open source platform at https://github.com/Qbix/Platform before it was cool.

I don't think it's cool even now.

I mostly got hate on HN every time I posted about it LOL. I think something about "decentralized" gets some people really riled up (maybe it's the association with crypto / blockchain?) but frankly, it's the ONLY solution to extreme centralization.

Someone's got to build a platform with all the features of Discord, but make it decentralized and open source.

I've spent over $1M and 10 years on it. I have to package it so that it's easy to install. But I'm working on something to take care of that, in the next few months, that will also include actually safe AI agents inside.

It will look sort of like this: https://engageusers.ai/ecosystem.pdf

I'm happy to welcome anyone aboard who takes the time to learn the platform, but I won't lie, it's huge. As you would expect an open source decentralized clone of Facebook / Discord to be. I just hope it's architected well enough for developers to pick it up quickly. At the very least, I think it's a lot less spaghetti than Wordpress and Joomla :)

PS: In 2018 I launched something that HN hates even more... a Web3 company that released open source smart contracts at https://github.com/Intercoin . Why you ask? Because once a lot of value is at stake (whether it takes the form of money, votes, or even just community roles), it's better to have thousands of computers secure it than "just trust" the central site.

When founders of famous centralized messengers criticized decentralization, I had to write this:

https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram...

And history has proven me right... their only move is "withdrawing" from a country like Sweden. Well I guess the DSA would make them withdraw from all of Europe: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1ixrv14/signals_ce...

Don't forget, it's not just Discord. As of Jan 1, Texas is now requiring digital ID to download any app at all or visit many internet sites, and forcing Apple/Google to build it in "to protect the children" of course. And Utah is following suit soon too. The Supreme Court last year said that digital ID can be required by states.
by metalcrow | 2026-02-10 04:03:43+00:00
To pick one point out of the article for discussion, does anyone have any idea why the US is the leader in per-capita prison rates? The laws aren't all that different from other first world nations, and i doubt all the other nations have magically solved crime. What is going on? Is crime just lower in other nations? Do they not punish as many crimes with jail time?
by the-grump | 2026-02-10 04:03:51+00:00
With the AI. I read the whole thing and correct the model where it makes mistakes, fill the gaps where I find them.

I also always check that it explicitly states my rules (some from the global rules, some from the session up until that moment) so they're followed at implementation time.

In my experience opus is great at understanding what you want and putting it in a plan, and it's also great at sticking to the plan. So just read through the entire thing and make sure it's a plan that you feel confident about.

There will be some trial and error before you notice the kind of things the model gets wrong, and that will guide what you look for in the plan that it spits out.
by pests | 2026-02-10 04:03:57+00:00
I battled an online casino that did this. I had under a grand in balance but my account got locked and they needed verification for every payment method I had ever used over a 2 year period, and I had used A LOT. I would reply back immediately with all the information, etc. Took a good month and a trip to my bank to get documentation on ownership of old debit cards but by the end of it I was sending them basically a 20 page package of all the proof they needed with everything already laid out perfect. I had accumulated a bunch of internal support email addresses of various agents or systems and would CC everyone every time, by the end the email chain was 200+ messages and I had 15 people on CC. But I got it unlocked.
by easterncalculus | 2026-02-10 04:03:57+00:00
This is my problem with the alternatives, nothing has replicated simple voice channels (next to text ones) that you can see who's in and just jump in and out of, with screen share. This shouldn't be any harder to implement than video calling itself but almost nothing has done it. Even spacebar chat is more interested in keeping discord bots compatible than achieving feature parity.
by mmooss | 2026-02-10 04:04:15+00:00
Very good point, I did forget the context.

I still think you can have empathy on support calls; I'd even say it's important for the customer to be satisfied. They may be panicked, frustrated, exhausted, etc. Ignoring people's emotion gets bad results; it feels rude.

Of course there are limits, especially time; long stories are inappropriate. Still, I've had many empathetic, brief conversations with strangers on trains (literally) and elsewhere.