MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by millie2conroy | 2026-02-17 16:28:00+00:00
Psychologically, we focus better when our immediate environment is clear. A dressing table with mirror and lights from Dream Home Store encourages this "clear desk" policy by giving every item a hidden home. The right-sliding mirror is the key to this habit; it’s easy to slide open, grab what you need, and slide shut. The 10 LED bulbs ensure the area is well-lit, making the space feel inviting rather than a chore to maintain. It is the ultimate suggestion for anyone in the UK looking to bring professional-level organisation into their private living space.
by jgwil2 | 2026-02-17 16:28:45+00:00
> If human labor really does become superfluous, that’s not a world where “ordinary people” are okay by default, but rather a world where the entire economic operating system needs to be redesigned. Oks treats this as a distant concern. I’d argue it’s the thing most worth worrying about, because policy needs to be built before we arrive there, not after.

I agree with this sentiment, but history shows that humans are absolutely terrible at planning for revolutionary systemic changes like this. Our current inability to address climate change in any systematic way is just the latest example. It seems to me that if and when human labor becomes superfluous it will most likely result in a lot of chaos before a new system emerges.
by Spivak | 2026-02-17 16:28:51+00:00
I think the point wound be to eliminate all borrowing for tuition. It would be drastic and universities would complain the whole time but band-aid has to be ripped off at some point. I don't think a solution other than welding shut the money font will have a meaningful effect.

* Eliminate the entire federal student loan program. Just gone. No more loans.

* Make it so that private loans for tuition and related expenses can be trivially discharged. Like just fill out a form and it's auto-approved. You can just decide to not pay your student loans with no repercussions whatsoever. There's probably a better way to accomplish this legally but make it so that they're toxic to private lenders.

Once the money officially dries up and less than 1% of families could pay out of pocket for current tuition rates then we watch as jobs stop requiring degrees, apprenticeships become popular, and schools belt-tighten to focus on student ROI. Watch magically as GE requirements evaporate and we find out they weren't ever necessary in the first place. Watch as high schools get pressured to teach actually useful things instead of being grade school the sequel.
by jzapletal | 2026-02-17 16:28:58+00:00
We built an open-source tool that screenshots your desktop and feeds summaries to Claude/Cursor via MCP.

What surprised us:

- Cost: $0.0002/screenshot (we budgeted 100x more), guess cloud vision APIs got cheap fast

- CPU: 5% (exp. 50%) and laptop stays cool

- Quality: night and day vs local models, we tried running vision locally first and it was mediocre

It works by triggering a screenshot on activity, sending it to a cloud vision model for summarization, then deleting the screenshot and storing only the text in local SQLite. You query it via MCP – "what was I working on before lunch?" and Claude actually knows.
by buellerbueller | 2026-02-17 16:29:27+00:00
Buy insurance for this type of situation. It's not like Silicon Valley lacks the funds to buy insurance. The rest of us are MANDATED to buy insurance for our cars and our healthcare, and many of us live paycheck to paycheck.

Silicon Valley, however, home to the world's greatest concentrations of private wealth? Oh no, thats a too much to ask that they play by the same rules.
by munk-a | 2026-02-17 16:29:29+00:00
That's true when the debt is taken it is taken by the company (at the direction of the acquiring firm)... and maybe the bigger issue is that banks should be a whole lot more judicious in extending that debt. But some firms have found a heck of a loophole in buying a company, running an extremely high debt line, paying the acquiring firm (themselves) handsomely and then innocently whistling when the business collapses and a bunch of real economic value is erased.

Doing that to a company isn't an activity that should be rewarded since you're destroying, rather than creating, economic value. It is absolutely an exploit or flaw in our system and no more than one person should have been able to get away with it.
by nostromo95 | 2026-02-17 16:29:42+00:00
Pension funds have a different time horizon / cash flow needs than individual investors (namely, they need to meet their liabilities every month) and so are going to have a more conservative asset mix (read: lower expected returns w/ lower volatility) than your average S&P500 index funds.

For example, CaLPERS has ~45% of their assets under management in debt / real estate.
by onli | 2026-02-17 16:29:47+00:00
Take what I say with a grain of salt. There are many people that know more than me. But I'll try to answer to the best of my knowledge.

If a malicious app tries to alter the system in a bootloader relevant way, it would most likely fail. On those roms, apps don't have root rights, and users are even unable to activate a root account (part of why we need unlocked bootloaders in the first place to achieve user control over bought devices). But yes, as part of AVB system parts are hashed and a mismatch would be detected, see https://emteria.com/blog/android-verified-boot for a writeup.

For system apps, again two aspects. It's not that easy for an app to become a system app, it has to be moved to a specific place. Think about how the Gapps package is usually installed when you install a ROM, externally by the recovery system and not inside Android itself, that would be the reason. But yes, there are platform keys that the docs at https://source.android.com/docs/core/ota/sign_builds claim should be secret release keys.

About those release keys being also used for the system app verification, I think so. There are different keys on Android, like the release keys and the verity_key, but I think it follows from the docs that the release key is the one used to verify system apps (on modern Android versions).

It is debatable whether users not being able to exchange system apps then is a valid requirement for a FOSS Android distribution like /e/. But that position does exist, claiming users should build their ROM variants on their own with custom keys if they want to modify the system, to close this attack vector.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-17 16:29:59+00:00
The rules are arbitrary, the rules can be changed at any time. Finance is simply a construct on top of lower level primitives (primarily the legal framework around property ownership and corporate entity law). Totally fine for folks to ask which rules matter, which don't, and which can be changed and how long it will take. Be curious!

If the President can sign EOs banning private equity/institutional ownership of homes [1], OP's ask does not seem to be that out there imho; again, all of these rules are arbitrary and can change at any time. How do we change rules around ownership? We change laws or how they're applied.

[1] Congressional housing deal faces new hurdle as Trump pushes investor ban - https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/13/housing-deal-faces-... - February 13th, 2026

> What you don't see in the news are all the cases where PE saved companies that would have otherwise gone bankrupt.

Please provide citations of companies worth saving were saved by PE. I will start with the only one I know: Barnes & Noble.
by abustamam | 2026-02-17 16:30:52+00:00
I think we (whoever we is) should start normalizing the concept of passphrases; on sign-up screens they should show the benefits of a passphrase. I'm surprised that Googles PW generator does not use passphrases, and I don't know about ios because I haven't tried theirs yet.

I started using passphrases after I saw this xkcd https://xkcd.com/936/

When I'm trying to log into something on a device that has a terrible keyboard, like a TV or giant touchscreen, it's a lot easier to type words I know than gibberish.
by npilk | 2026-02-17 16:31:14+00:00
Curious how you generate the maps. OpenStreetMap turns out to have most golf course features mapped by volunteers, so it's possible to pull that data (see here for a fairly rudimentary example: https://github.com/npilk/hacker-yardage). But you may have a better source.

I see you mention looking for topographical data at a good resolution. I'll follow that with interest. There are US public datasets (IIRC) at more like 3m or 5m resolution... not bad but not really good enough for golf, especially greenside. I couldn't figure out how to pull that info programmatically in the past, though.

Overall this is super cool work, will be watching for more!
by dogline | 2026-02-17 16:31:16+00:00
You're right, and it's a good idea. The summary started out small, as a header to the actual daily pages, but then I realized I could have AI do a lot more work here, including silly things like collect weather references and assemble them together. My prompt kept getting bigger to find trends in the data. But, it takes away from the view-ability of the site, which is not good.

LLM's ability to take 7400+ handwritten entries and try to make a narrative out them is amazing. With all of the AI experiments on HN lately, we're figuring out the power of LLMs, but it most cases, it still needs a human refining touch, and we need to remember that. Or else it just looks like AI slop.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-02-17 16:31:32+00:00
Is this actually true?

I think about my lab classes and typically these were separate credit hours. More money to the university. Outside chemistry, we were using outdated equipment that wasn't getting refreshed/bought new.

If what you are saying is true, Humanities needs to cut costs of their credit hours or double down. For entertainment degrees (art, music), its prohibitively expensive to casually obtain the education. For business/politics/psychology, there is at least some sort of return on investment to be expected.
by mthdadalto | 2026-02-17 16:31:35+00:00
We keep seeing the same bottleneck in diligence and audit-readiness work:
teams can't agree on what output is "decision-ready" vs just another scanner report.

In our experience, three things matter most:
- deterministic reruns (same input, same output),
- traceable claims (path/hash/line),
- explicit unknowns instead of hidden blind spots.

For teams that cannot share repo contents, we're also exploring offline/local execution models.

If you've run this process in practice:
1) What output format made reviewers trust the result?
2) What made reports stall or get ignored?
3) If you required local/offline execution, what constraints mattered most?

Context: I'm building in this space, so I'm looking for concrete operator feedback, not generic opinions.
by clover-s | 2026-02-17 16:31:52+00:00
Yes — I think the “scoreboard” framing is exactly the right way to think about it.

Optimization doesn’t inherently know what we intended. It only knows what the system makes visible and rewardable.

Once fast feedback, visibility, and ranking become dominant signals, optimizing for those signals naturally selects for the patterns that maximize them. This seems to be a general property of optimization, not something specific to any particular model.

That’s why slower feedback loops — where signals are delayed, contextual, and tied to longer-term interaction — may lead to very different behavioral equilibria.

In that sense, alignment may be less about correcting the agent itself, and more about designing the environment and feedback structure it operates within.
by davydm | 2026-02-17 16:32:15+00:00
Overly optimistic this relies entirely on the assumptions that you are able to architect and debug (two rather brain-powered things) better than writing plain code that at least a compiler would error on if it was completely bonkers wrong.

I think there's soon going to be an analogy to the dunning-kruger effect, but for vibe coders, that would reveal just what a self-deception this is.
by ASalazarMX | 2026-02-17 16:32:36+00:00
These kind of trick questions are variations of the tree falling when no one heard it. They aren't asking "did it generate soundwaves?", they're asking "if sound included perception, did it make a sound?". It's weird to ask questions like these outside quantum mechanics, where observation actually affects the result.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest_an...
by MisterTea | 2026-02-17 16:32:37+00:00
This is really upsetting because I wanted to double the RAM in my home server to 64GB. Thing is, I already have all four DIMMs populated with 8GB modules meaning I have to buy 4x 16GB sticks (Supermicro X11SSM-F.)

I looked up the price I paid for one of the 2x 8GB Kingston 9965684-040.A00G ECC kits I bought from Newegg: $40.06 bucks shipped. So ~$80 for the 32GB in the server right now.

I am also having a hard time finding the modules I need, never mind that a 32GB kit is well over $200 now. I don't want to spend upward of $500 for a measly 64GB of RAM.
by gsck | 2026-02-17 16:32:46+00:00
I kinda went through this when I joined my current employer. My boss's emails were (are) at worst unintelligible and best hard to follow, weirdly formatted and generally hard to grok. Usually they are just blocks of text that are one big garden path sentance. But it all magically goes away in client communications

Not sure why this is, but it never really bothered me. It took me a while to learn my boss's interpretation of the English language. I don't think its a case of being in a position where it doesn't matter, other department heads don't do this, I reckon its just down to necessity.

You aren't trying to portray an image of yourself to your team, you don't need to come across as a poet laureate for internal discussions.

If you are trying to craft an image of yourself to your team instead of doing your job well and letting your work build your image you are doing something wrong

Spend your time wisely, put effort into your emails where it matters, format everything nicely, double/triple check your grammar, but among colleagues you don't need to pretend
by cj | 2026-02-17 16:33:00+00:00
Allowing student data to be canceled during bankruptcy would be a good first step (possibly even better than canceling student debt across the board).

To your point, making it easy to cancel debt teaches borrowers that debt isn’t a serious thing.

Requiring someone go through bankruptcy (and all of the associated negatives on your credit score, etc) seems like a good tradeoff. Allows you to get out from under the debt (the entire purpose of bankruptcy in the first place..) while not letting everyone pretend the debt never existed (need to live with the impact of bankruptcy on your ability to borrow in the future)

I don’t know why we don’t hear more people lobbying for this. I guess it’s because the sound bite isn’t as sexy.
by aniviacat | 2026-02-17 16:34:31+00:00
You can use GrapheneOS with the Google Pixel lineup, or in particular the Pixel 10 Pro XL [1].

GrapheneOS supports Android's Quick Share, which (on the Pixel 10 family) is compatible with AirDrop [2].

[1] https://grapheneos.org/faq#supported-devices

[2] https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/android...
by Stefan-H | 2026-02-17 16:35:08+00:00
A runtime is notably NOT infrastructure, had you said instruction set you might have landed closer to making a compelling argument, but the whole point is that AWS (and other providers) abstract away the underlying infrastructure and allow the developers to as I said, have "little care of the infrastructure it runs on". There is often advanced networking that CAN be configured, as well as other infrastructure components developers can choose to configure.
by ndiddy | 2026-02-17 16:35:21+00:00
DR DOS was Digital Research's MS-DOS clone. For a while it had more features and ran better than MS-DOS. In the mid-90s, Caldera bought the rights to DR DOS so they could bundle it with their OpenLinux Linux distribution. They briefly released its source code (renamed to "OpenDOS"), but not as an open source license. The license only allowed free use for educational and evaluation purposes. You were required to buy a license from Caldera after 90 days for commercial entities or after a "reasonable period" for non-commercial entities. They then closed the source code again after a few months. The Enhanced DR-DOS project is based off this code release. They seem to have replaced the license in the repo with an email log that releases the code to CP/M as open source, but doesn't mention DR DOS at all. This is a bit sketchy but DR DOS has no commercial value so I doubt anyone will mind.

The biggest impact Caldera's purchase of DR DOS had was that they were able to sue Microsoft for not making Windows 95 compatible with other DOS's besides Microsoft's. Caldera were able to demonstrate Windows 95 booting on DR-DOS with the assistance of a small TSR, which helped the lawsuit (see https://msfn.org/board/topic/109018-windows-98-in-dr-dos/ ). This functionality was never released publicly. Microsoft ended up settling out of court and paying Caldera $280 million.
by FireBeyond | 2026-02-17 16:35:30+00:00
> When Peter Thiel started a bank run by telling all his investments to pull their funds, that exposed the SCB mismanagement.

I think he did more than that. He either has precognition Nostradamus would be proud of or he absolutely had insider information, and a good amount of it.

1. He knew that when the bank closure would be, because despite how the FDIC has very detailed and historically very successful efforts at keeping such plans highly confidential (for obvious reasons), like agents in hotels under fake names, etc., he told his investments on Wednesday night that "all funds must be out of SVB by COB Thursday". FDIC rolled into SVB 8am Friday morning.

2. He had also had instructed another of his companies to build a website and app that was able to handle applications for business bridge loans, and it "needed to be tested, and ready to go live, by noon on Friday".

Also, not for nothing, causing a bank run is a federal felony.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-17 16:35:30+00:00
> And as some of who supports the student loan forgiveness, yes, it is slightly inflationary but I think the benefits out weigh the inflationary effects.

Being slightly inflationary is a strawman concern. Student loan forgiveness has a major problem in that it’s a large reward the goes only to a specific slice of society who match some arbitrary criteria and who have useful degrees. It also fails to address the root cause of the problem, letting current generations accumulate debt in the same way.

It’s an idea that appeals to a subset of the voter base for whom a college graduate with loan debt represents the prototypical struggling young person, but ignores all of the young people who are even worse off and don’t have college degrees either.

Spending a huge amount of money to forgive student loans would be politically catastrophic in ways that a lot of people who live in highly educated middle class bubbles don’t realize. There are a lot of people struggling out there, but college graduates are not at the top of the list of people who need the most help.
by palmotea | 2026-02-17 16:36:44+00:00
> He also espoused pride in craftsmanship, quality, and analysis, things most American workers don't value as much as the Japanese

Is that American workers or American managers? Because in my experience, it's usually managers pushing against those values. It seems like American business culture sees quality craftsmanship as money left on the table that should be sent to the shareholders, and they're too quantitative, so there's always pressure on workers to cut corners.

Workers like "craftsmanship, quality, and analysis," not the least because they make their job more satisfying (no one enjoys pushing out low quality junk), but most aren't stubborn enough to keep pushing for them against management resistance.
by ookblah | 2026-02-17 16:36:59+00:00
i sometimes feel like a lot of these reflections are just people.. aging and not really reflective of what is happening being a direct effect. its like you hit the the 40s and with all of life's other responsibilities and your level of fucks to give this is the natural mindset that evolves.

i started hacking around in middle school, when dial-up opened a new world, it's been my hobby and basically life for decades and none of this resonates. maybe it will soon. we should poll the 60s+ programmers and see where this inflection point was for them.
by ComputerGuru | 2026-02-17 16:37:09+00:00
A supporting point and a counterpoint:

* Good database drivers will let you pipeline multiple queries concurrently (esp. in languages with async support), effectively eliminating the _N_x roundtrip cost (you can even execute them in parallel if you use multiple connections, not that I recommend doing that). But obviously this is only doable where the queries are independent of one another; I use this mainly to perform query splitting efficiently if the join key is already known.

* These days databases are often effectively versioned alongside the code anyway, at least for either smaller projects that "own" the database, eliminating the biggest issue with stored procedures.
by tristor | 2026-02-17 16:37:09+00:00
The answer to "why?" is fairly straightforward, in a way, but hard to see the causality of directly without seeing through all the steps to get there. This is a consequence of two economic factors: globalism and wealth inequality. When there is a strict and unbalanced economic hierarchy, parents will rightfully do anything they can to ensure their children move up the hierarchy or stay on top of the hierarchy. When you are on a hierarchy with everyone in the world instead of just those local to you, the contrasts that must exist to reinforce the hierarchy become larger to remain statistically significant over the larger population. When society had less economic inequality and was more geographically restricted in its entrants, the drive for competition was minimized and other priorities could come to the forefront.

We didn't get here overnight, but economic inequality dominates as a causal factor for nearly any socioeconomic phenomena you can identify in 2026. This is what happens when the top 10% of income earners comprise 50% of consumer spending, and you need to be in the top 15% of income earners to afford permanent housing. If you're a 30% parent (better off than 70% of households), the most important thing you can do for your children is to ensure that they end up in the top 15% or better yet the top 10%. Anything you can do that will help that end, is worth doing, and every moment becomes a competition to set things up as the earlier you do it the bigger the impact in the results.

There's a reason why home prices are correlated to with school district access, why every children's activity becomes a competition, and why in the wealthier (but more rat-racy) parts of the country people spend huge money on private tutoring, education, and training for their children almost from birth.
by downrightmike | 2026-02-17 16:37:11+00:00
Student loans currently carry no risk. They can't be discharged. Interest is the payment to the lender to accept risk. There is no risk in the current state of student loans. Therefore they should never-ever charge interest.

Also schools need to be reigned in, if GA et al can pay each student athlete $40,000 a month, they MUST be held accountable for burdening the students and the state with unscrupulous debt.