MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by westurner | 2026-02-21 04:08:28+00:00
From "How core Git developers configure Git"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43179071 :

> skwp/git-workflows-book > .gitconfig appendix: https://github.com/skwp/git-workflows-book : > "Two useful aliases: unstage and uncommit": https://github.com/skwp/git-workflows-book#two-useful-aliase... :

[alias]
unstage = reset HEAD # remove files from index (tracking)
uncommit = reset --soft HEAD^ # go back before last commit, with files in uncommitted state
by efim_bushmanov | 2026-02-21 04:09:04+00:00
Reversing Biological Life as Closed Code
From the author of skype reversing and skype-open-source blog

Cells execute molecular programs in real time, but biology mostly studies them by breaking them apart.

This series proposes a different lens:

- DNA as self-executing code
- The cell as a black-box runtime
- Raman spectroscopy as a potential read-only probe
- Spectral decomposition as binary analysis

It’s a computational systems view of cell biology.

Treating DNA as executable code:

- The genome as a self-executing binary
- Molecular pathways as distributed computation
- Reverse-engineering methods applied to living systems

Early will includes discussion of using Raman spectroscopy as a potential non-invasive runtime probe.

Would love technical feedback. And looking for investors.

Curious what HN thinks.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-02-21 04:09:27+00:00
"archive.today" as used here means the collection of archive.tld domains, where .tld could be ".is", ".md", ".ph", etc.

"promoted" as used here means placing an archive.tld URL at the top of an HN thread so that many HN readers will
follow it, or placing these URLs elsewhere in threads
by AuryGlenz | 2026-02-21 04:09:39+00:00
Because the Texas redistricting hopes to bring the Democrats seats down from 13 to to 8, but a lot of those could still easily go either way. California made theirs to also pick up 5 but theirs are more sure. Virginia is the real whopper, where a purple state will move to all seats but one for Democrats instead of the reasonable almost down the middle split they now have.

I'm not defending what was done in Texas. Gerrymandering is gross. But I do hate how the discourse seems to be that Texas started it. They absolutely didn't. Neither party can be blamed for that, and this tit and tat back and forth is the wrong way to deal with it - so are so called "nonpartisan" committees, by the way. It's easy for a nonpartisan committee to quickly become quite partisan. What I wish would have happened is that there was a real dialogue about better fixes for the problem, but instead it became political mudslinging.

Easy part solution - put mathematical limits on the geometry. It wouldn't eliminate gerrymandering but it would certainly help.
by Affric | 2026-02-21 04:09:59+00:00
I have worked with chickens across industry (transport, breeders, layers, broilers, day-olds etc) and in homes as pets et cetera.

I abhor cruelty towards them and it isn’t justified by any traits they have. The race to the bottom with Chickens is somewhat terrifying.

BUT they do have a mean streak and they are stupid. If they were big they’d be terrifying.
by stingraycharles | 2026-02-21 04:10:45+00:00
It’s silly, it’s a 6 weeks old issue, and there aren’t even any actual facts in there, just screenshots.

I’ll believe it when I see actual facts, e.g. actual token counts (which is relatively easy to capture if you use mitmproxy or something like that).

For all I know this guy has a 5000 line CLAUDE.md
by gaigalas | 2026-02-21 04:10:46+00:00
This comparison is very typical. I've seen a lot of people trying to correlate performance in chess with performance in other tasks.

Chess is a closed, small system. Full of possibilities, sure, but still very small compared to the wide range of human abilities. The same applies to Go, StarCraft or any other system. Those were chosen as AI playgrounds specifically because they're very small, limited scenarios.

People are too caught up trying to predict the future. And there are several competing visions, each one absolutely sure they nailed it. To me, that's a sign of uncertainty in the technology. If it was that decided (like smartphones became from 2007->2010), we would have coalesced into a single vision by now.

Essentially, we're witnessing an ongoing unwillingly quagmarization of AI tech. At each bold prediction that fails, it looks worse.

That could easily be solved by taking the tech realistically (we know it's useful, just not a demigod), but people (especially AI companies) don't do that. That smells like fear.

It's an exoskeleton. A bicycle for the mind. "People spirits". A copilot. A trusted companion. A very smart PhD that fails sometimes, etc. We don't need any of those predictions of "what it is", they are only detrimental. It sounds like people cargo culting Steve Jobs (and perhaps it is exactly that).
by musicale | 2026-02-21 04:11:00+00:00
I'm aware of Pizlix - it's a good project/idea that needs to go mainstream; as you mention, memory safety is currently limited to userland (still a huge improvement over traditional unsafe userland.)

Note also that it uses fil-c rather than clang with -fbounds-safety. I believe fil-c requires fewer code changes than -fbounds-safety.
by alfalfasprout | 2026-02-21 04:11:44+00:00
Cerebras is a totally different product though. They can (theoretically) run any frontier model provided it gets compiled a certain way. Like a wafer scale TPU.

This is using hardwired weights with on-die SRAM used for K/V for example. It's WAY more power efficient and faster. The tradeoff being it's hardwired.

Still, most frontier models are "good enough" where an obscenely fast version would be a major seller.
by econ | 2026-02-21 04:13:07+00:00
Just when you've asked if there are eggs the doorbell rings, the neighbor stands there in disbelief, it told me to bring you eggs? Give him the half bottle vodka, it's going to expire soon and his son will make a surprise visit tonight. An argument arises and it participates by encouraging both parties with extra talking points.

But this was only the beginning, after gathering a few TB worth of micro expressions it starts to complete sentences so successfully the conversation gradually dies out.

After a few days of silence... Narrator mode activated....
by GreenDolphinSys | 2026-02-21 04:13:20+00:00
That may apply to a vanilla account, but if your account is old, then that's just the kind of stuff you click like on, dwell on, bookmark, etc. We have to consider that these men may not be honest about their activity as well.

The search and reels page just shows you what you interact with, and in my experience it tends to overreact to recent input. Look at a couple cat reels for example, and the very next or so refresh will have more cat reels.
by musicale | 2026-02-21 04:13:23+00:00
As I and others noted below, it is included in Apple's clang version, which is what you get when you install the command line tools for Xcode. Try something like:

clang -g -Xclang -fbounds-safety program.c

Bounds check failures result in traps; in lldb you get a message like:

stop reason = Bounds check failed: Dereferencing above bounds
by RustSupremacist | 2026-02-21 04:13:25+00:00
The GUI situation for Rust is dire. We are still not GUI yet! Even if Rust isn't the best for GUI, the opportunity is still there. Qt is the best option. There isn't a second option. Don't let Go and Zig have bindings for Qt without Rust! Only Rust. Only Cargo. No QML. No C++. No markup. No immediate mode. No dead projects.
by shakna | 2026-02-21 04:13:25+00:00
You'll need to do a bit of work to make it the way it used to be. Editing any text on a page, or having your changes save persistently, needs a bit of a... Framework, to keep things together, rather than being the expected mode of interaction.

Sure, I can add a p to the tree. But if I refresh, its gone. I'll probably need plugins to keep my own stylesheets and JS changes around.
by wahern | 2026-02-21 04:13:27+00:00
Relatedly, a survey of array nomenclature was performed for the ISO C committee when choosing the name of the new countof operator: https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n3469.htm

It was originally proposed as lengthof, but the results of the public poll and the ambiguity convinced the committee to choose countof, instead.
by mayneack | 2026-02-21 04:13:28+00:00
I'd be shocked if international travel was the algorithmic tell, but in the book Careless People, the author discusses extensively that they (Facebook's political team) did a lot of manually curating the experience for politicians across the world to help push for Facebook's side in whatever issue was important on a given day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-21 04:13:35+00:00
And I’m 51 and far from a Luddite. I’ve moved with every technology transition since learning how to program in AppleSoft BASIC and 65C02 assembly. My 83 year old mother is less of Luddite some people commenting here.

She is a retired high school math teacher - been retired for 30 years - and she has used every popular word processor/suite from the original AppleWorks for the Apple //e and she was tutoring friends kids and helping them use GSuite and PowerPoint until 5 years ago.

She uses her phone for everything and she has up to date computers a couple of printers on her network and two ISPs just in case one goes out. She kept the legacy DSL account that’s not available to new subscribers and she has cable internet.
by cptMayhem | 2026-02-21 04:13:55+00:00
> The deeper thing is this: the traditional economics of software - the idea that building software creates an asset - is breaking.

Was it ever an asset? I write software and I see my job as trying to write the least amount of software possible, because in reality, more lines of code means more time writing, reviewing, and maintaining. More bugs that may be possible, more work in general for features that people might never use. Software was never an asset, it's a liability. It's a means to an end. The real product is the service.

If a company has software engineers to take care of that, I can see them preferring an in-house solution. What I don't see are e.g. lawyers, accountants, or physicians, spending their time asking their LLM to solve a bug in their own platform instead of just hiring that service.
by kace91 | 2026-02-21 04:14:07+00:00
That’s a very good point, it’s another hole in the sieve.

This “fix” just routes people through official channels but those channels aren’t exactly proving to be worth the term walled garden. My YouTube adverts lately border the quality of early 2000s piracy sites, it’s honestly baffling how little they value their own product in their willingness to take anyone’s money.
by nickpsecurity | 2026-02-21 04:14:11+00:00
I'll cross link the last submission about this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009024

I feel like Chris way, way understates the prior art on C language. It's not just two compilers and some textbooks. That would actually be impressive.

If Internet trained, the training data probably has so much stuff about C compilation in it. Books, step by step articles with code, debugging, StackOverflow answers, mailing lists, blog posts, compiler results... endless. It's one of the most specified and pretrained things in existence for a multi-TB, Internet-trained LLM.

A real test for Claude Code Compiler would be something that had hardly any search results. Then, the few results it had were the language description, some examples, and maybe the existing compiler. Could it output a compiler for that? Can it do ZL (C++ in Scheme), Pony, Mercury, or Cray's Chapel?

Even easier, Lattner should try to have it write a LLVM-compatible compiler for Mojo. Then, lots of multithreaded, SIMD, and GPU implementations of business and ML algorithms in Mojo. That might not only be a good demonstrator but help the business, too.
by fluoridation | 2026-02-21 04:14:43+00:00
That's not what I mean. If we agree that harassment is wrong and that doxing is not harassment (because not all doxing is harassment), then it's incorrect to say that doxing is wrong. For example, the article from the blog, even if we agree that it is doxing, isn't harassment. The person being discussed is presented in a positive light:

>I for one will be buying Denis/Masha/whoever a well deserved cup of coffee.

Using one term when what is meant is actually the other serves nothing but to sow confusion.
by SabrinaJewson | 2026-02-21 04:14:49+00:00
In general in Rust, “length” refers to “count”. If you view strings as being sequences of Unicode scalar values, then it might seem odd that `str::len` counts bytes, but if you view strings as being a subset of byte slices it makes perfect sense that it gives the number of UTF-8 code units (and it is analoguous to, say, how Javascript uses `.length` to return the number of UTF-16 code units). So I think it depends on perspective.
by AuryGlenz | 2026-02-21 04:15:25+00:00
It's more like "Mom, he punched me after I punched him after he punched me after I punched him after he punched me after..."

Nobody would have cared about Texas' gerrymandering except for Trump (stupidly) called for it - pretty much every political party has done it in their state over the years, but it's generally been gently putting their finger on the scale. But now that someone that half of the country have been convinced is literally Hitler had a part in it they feel like they can go absolutely wild with it. Everyone should be mad when gerrymandering happens, whether it helps your side or not. Representatives that feel absolutely secure in their seats are bad at their jobs, whether they're on your side or not. Going so hogwild in 'retribution' isn't virtuous.
by kube-system | 2026-02-21 04:15:53+00:00
I know he said it was not AI, but he but still described it as “slop”, lumping it in with the other examples. And said it was a video “where a woman decides to intentionally start a fight with her boyfriend” which isn’t really an accurate description. She’s a well known comedian playing an obviously exaggerated character that pokes fun at relationship dynamics.

My point here isn’t simply that “people can’t differentiate between AI and not AI” (although that is an issue for some) but that the prevalence of AI slop lowers the trust of ALL content even when they know it isn’t AI generated. This author was so fed up with the content they were being served that they were quick to dismiss other content along with it at a cursory glance.
by nradov | 2026-02-21 04:18:02+00:00
The value in enterprise SaaS offerings isn't just the application functionality but the IaaS substrate underneath. The vendor handles server operations, storage, scalability, backups, security, compliance, etc. It might be easier for companies to vibe code their own custom applications now but LLMs don't help nearly as much with keeping those applications running. Most companies are terrible at technical operations. I predict we'll see a new wave of IaaS startups that sell to those enterprise vibe coders and undercut the legacy SaaS vendors.
by replwoacause | 2026-02-21 04:18:12+00:00
I sometimes have to login to the Facebook app to use the marketplace, and my experience is the same as what is written in the article.

I see ragebait, clickbait, AI slop, tons of half-naked young looking girls (some AI, some real), and the marketplace is filled with what looks like obvious prostitution (e.g. beautiful girls selling clothes for like $3, but the clothes seemingly NEVER sell and get posted over and over and over again to the point where it's obvious its just a front for escort services).

It's a veritable cess pool. It should be illegal for any child to use IMO, nothing but pure brainrot.
by sathish316 | 2026-02-21 04:18:27+00:00
Historically, Claude code used sequential planning with linear dependencies using tools like TodoWrite, TodoRead. There are open source MCP equivalents of TodoWrite.

I’ve found both the open source TodoWrite and building your own TodoWrite with a backing store surprisingly effective for Planning and avoiding developer defined roles and developer defined plans/workflows that the author calls in the blog for AI-SRE usecases. It also stops the agent from looping indefinitely.

Cord is a clever model and protocol for tree-like dependencies using the Spawn and Fork model for clean context and prior context respectively.
by dchuk | 2026-02-21 04:22:18+00:00
If you’re able to articulate the issues this clearly, it would take like an hour to “vibe code” away all of these issues. That’s the actual superpower we all have now. If you know what good software looks like, you can rough something out so fast, then iterate and clean it up equally fast, and produce something great an order of magnitude faster than just a few months ago.

A few times a week I’m finding open source projects that either have a bunch of old issues and pull requests, or unfinished todos/roadmaps, and just blasting through all of that and leaving a PR for the maintainer while I use the fork. All tested, all clean best practice style code.

Don’t complain about the outputs of these tools, use the tools to produce good outputs.
by prabal97 | 2026-02-21 04:22:43+00:00
It should technically work (everything is being routed via LiteLLM under the wraps) with Mistral, but it's untested haha. I don't think Mistral's lost the race; it's just that it doesn't seem to be that popular relative to Gemini/Anthropic/OpenAI, so I didn't bother testing it.

Hope you got a chance to try this out!
by saulpw | 2026-02-21 04:23:02+00:00
I like that idea, and I agree. a 10x spread of $ between skill levels, and otherwise by hours of effort and years of tenure. Yes the flight attendant who's worked there for 30 years should have more ownership (and more influence) than an executive who started last month.

I have an idea I've been batting around: mandatory 1% annual tax on public corporations that is expected to be paid in their own stock, and either held in a sovereign wealth fund, or distributed equally to all citizens. This simultaneously dilutes the wealth of the majority owners hold, boosts public savings (tax advantage to holding rather than selling), and makes ordinary people automatically invested in their nation's economy.
by lucb1e | 2026-02-21 04:24:18+00:00
If the nontechnical team is refusing to forward it to whoever maintains the system, they apparently see no problem and you could disclose it to a journalist or the public. Or you could try it via the national CERT route, have them talk to this organization and tell them it's real. In some cases you could send a proof of concept exploit that you say you haven't run, but they can, to verify the bug. You can choose to retrieve only your own record, or that of someone who gave consent. You can ask the organization "since you think the vulnerability is not real, do you mind if I retrieve 1 record for the sole purpose of sending you this data and prove it is real?"

In jurisdictions like the one I'm most familiar with, it's official national policy not to prosecute when you did the minimum necessary. In a case where you're otherwise stuck, it's entirely reasonable to retrieve 1 record for the sake of a screenshot and preventing a bigger data leak. You could also consider doctoring a screenshot based on your own data. By the time they figured out the screenshot was fake, it landed on a technical person's desk who saw that the vulnerability is real

Lots of steps to go until it's necessary to dump the database as OP did, but I'll agree it can sometimes (never happened to me) be necessary to access at least one other person's data, and more frequently that it will happen by accident
by nilkn | 2026-02-21 04:24:21+00:00
If you'd been DCAing a fixed amount monthly into stocks for 10 years prior to the 2007 peak, then during the crash continued doing so without selling, the total value of your portfolio would've matched its pre-cash peak in just 3 years and exceeded it significantly by the time the market itself recovered in ~5.5 years.

3 years is really not a long time. So I'd say it comes down to emotional fortitude and probability of staying employed. If your time horizon is longer than 3 years, the calculation of whether to sell should essentially come down to calculating your odds of keeping your job. I bet it's possible to build a robust mathematical model that recommends a decision given your best personal estimate of your layoff probability during a severe market crash.
by replwoacause | 2026-02-21 04:24:44+00:00
The part of the story I believe is the part about basically half naked children on Facebook, whether real or AI. I haven't put anything on my profile for the algorithm to tailor content to, since it's used for only marketplace and I've seen some very disturbing content that looked like it slithered off of X. It was as suggestive and inappropriate as you could be about kids, without being full-on porn. And Facebook/Meta seem to have no problem with it. It's a trash heap of a site and everyone involved with it working at Meta should be ashamed.
by phil21 | 2026-02-21 04:24:45+00:00
Importer != Consumer. I think that's very obvious to anyone paying attention to this whole thing. In fact, it's a small minority of imports that are direct to consumer.

It absolutely is a mix of the importer (e.d. manufacturer, producer, wholesaler, retailer, etc.) absorbing some in their margin and the consumer picking up the bill via price increases for the rest.

It's quite obviously not 96% being paid by the consumer across the board just from looking at the CPI numbers.

All this study states is the obvious: foreign producers didn't lower their cost by much in response to tariff burden. They largely charged the same rate to a buyer in the US vs. a buyer in Germany.

This isn't to defend the tariff situation - just that this study gets trotted out a whole lot in an extremely disingenuous manner. Other data that exists is better that measures direct consumer impact.
by dekhn | 2026-02-21 04:25:50+00:00
I used to think this way, but after about 30 years in the field (including ML, MD, sequence alignment, homology modelling, drug discovery, and more) I've concluded grandiose visions like this have little to no chance of actually making any sort of impactful difference, either academically or industrially.

Don't get me wrong- I think many of the analogies are accurate, but thinking about it that way doesn't help you design an experiment that answers any clear question. If you want to pursue the idea of building better tools for interrogating life, have at it- make sure you read all the stuff George Church has published about DNA recorders and similar systems.

I don't know why you would want to focus on Raman spectroscopy. That's a useful analytic tool, but it's certainly not going to move the needle on any interesting biological processes. You would have a lot more luck using optical microscopy- it's one of the most mature and powerful readouts, highly flexible, and can be used with sequencing.

I can't really see a case for funding here. You need a well-defined, biomedically based argument and a technology that people think will actually work. You will get 3-5 years of runway and then have to meet some important milestone.
by f30e3dfed1c9 | 2026-02-21 04:25:58+00:00
Not clear to me why the author thinks he's the good guy in this scenario. His letter to the company might as well read "I am a busybody who downloaded private information about a person who is not me from your web site, ENTIRELY WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION from that person. Here, let me show it to you."

Why does he think he's entitled to do this? I get that his intentions are more or less good but don't see that as much excuse. What did he expect them to say? "Oh thank you wise and wonderful full-time Linux Platform Engineer"?

I appreciate that the web site in question seems to have absolutely pathetic security practices. Good reason not to do business with them. Not a good reason to do something that, in many jurisdictions at least, sounds like it constitutes a crime.