MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by com2kid | 2026-02-21 03:19:42+00:00
> Microsoft has never been about "pure technical excellence". We had wonderful machines (Unx ones and then stuff like the Atari ST / Commodore Amiga / Archimedes) and amazing OSes (including Unx on workstations) and Microsoft nearly destroyed everything with the endless turds

Microsoft's goal was to make machines everyone could afford. Their mission statement was a desktop in every home and they pulled it off.

They didn't pull it off by making an OS that needed a boat load custom chips (Amiga), or that required a huge beefy system to run (OS2, Unix).

They did it by making compromises that kept costs down and made computers accessible. They pushed for multimedia standards when the technology was appropriately matured, and their consumer OSes evolved in maturity as Moore's law progressed. Even then everyone complained about "ever growing" system requirements, especially when the move to XP happened, and then again when Vista came out with its improved security model.

Those fancy slick Sun OS boxes cost a fortune compared to a Windows box of the same time. Sure the Windows box crashed, but as a kid growing up in a working poor family in the 90s I was able to afford Microsoft's imperfect OS, because they had purposefully built an entire ecosystem that was designed to be affordable.

Microsoft pitted every PC OEM against each other in a race to the bottom, until margins approached and then fell below 0 for a new PC.

I've used tons of different systems. Thanks to the efforts of Valve desktop Linux is now usable, but it still has a thousand stupid bugs, many of which I wouldn't have tolerated on Windows 20 years ago. MacOS is very black box-ish and despite daily driving it for 6 or so years now the machine doesn't feel like it is "mine" in the same way a Windows 7 or Windows 2000 machine did. The old 16bit graphic power house machines were sexy but those custom chips don't age well and there was no way they could compete with an open standard like the PC.

Perfect is the enemy of the good. Microsoft very much made software that was good enough, but the truth is good enough is also admirable. Good enough is affordable, it is quick to market, it is adaptable, it is usable by the masses in a way that perfect isn't.
by redwall_hp | 2026-02-21 03:20:01+00:00
Urban planning that separates pedestrians and vehicles.

Roads that are narrow in places where a lower speed is desirable.

Heavy taxation on vehicles with more mass and lower visibility.

Actual licensing standards other than driving down a couple of city streets and parking.

More crossings, with lights or bridges, instead of long four-lane arterial roads with nowhere to safely cross.
by kace91 | 2026-02-21 03:20:47+00:00
I think people in power have realized the impact of misinformation campaigns. And to be fair, western countries have proved to have the resilience of a wet paper bag against foreign influence and private interests.

I honestly can’t imagine a good solution here. A move back to the early 2000s internet would be the ideal middle ground, which requires separating social stuff from informational stuff, and both from engagement algorithms. I have no idea how we’re supposed to put that genie back in the bottle.

And to be clear I’m not saying this as vouching for the current push, I hate it as well.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-21 03:21:01+00:00
It's important to keep separate the parts of the security model mobile did well from the parts it got wrong. Declaring that app developers can decline end user access to app files is unacceptable. I get final say on my device. I get to run as root. Hell, I get to run as ring 0 if that's what I want to do.
by shablulman | 2026-02-21 03:21:37+00:00
It’s incredibly sad to hear this. People often forget how radical the "As Seen On Screen" concept was back in 2000. Griffiths and the founding team basically wrote the playbook for high-velocity fashion e-commerce, solving massive logistics and trust hurdles long before mobile shopping was a reality. He helped build the infrastructure for a shift in retail that we now take for granted. A truly tragic loss for the UK entrepreneurial community.
by everfrustrated | 2026-02-21 03:21:46+00:00
Generally large companies will have an existing vendor that they use to dispose their IT equipment through. They will shred parts like storage devices and anything that can reasonably be resold will be sold through various auction houses.

Sticks of ram will certainly be resold, custom aws motherboards - not so much.

I have seen custom (unpublished) intel cpu parts on ebay before which are almost certainly aws's custom ones.

Almost nothing will get used by consumers - enterprise server gear is designed for heat/air speed/noise/energy cost requirements which are incompatible with consumer requirements. It's recycled only in the sense that a smaller business might be interested in it because at the end of its economic life its now cheap to buy (but not cheap to run).

https://cloudninjas.com/

https://savemyserver.com/

https://unixsurplus.com/
by enixam | 2026-02-21 03:21:53+00:00
Hi HN, I built TabType. It's a macOS menu bar app for universal text completion — type ;; in any app and a popup appears with completions from your project context.

What sets it apart from TextExpander/Espanso:

• Project-aware — surfaces git branches, file paths, npm scripts,
Makefile targets, .env vars automatically. No manual setup.

• Scoped search — ;;@git for branches, ;;@f for files, ;;@npm for
scripts. Like a mini command palette in any text field.

• AI prompt templates — save and reuse prompts across ChatGPT,
Claude, Cursor, etc.

• Custom providers — pipe any shell command into the popup (Docker
containers, API lookups, bookmarks).

• Privacy-first — everything local, no cloud, no keylogging.
Accessibility permission only detects the ;; trigger.

Config is JSON (~/.config/tabtype/config.json) with per-project overrides. Requires macOS 15+. Happy to answer any questions!
by coldtea | 2026-02-21 03:22:00+00:00
>No AI can take it away from you, and the more powerful AI will get the more you will be able to harness it's potential.

The author is describing it, not necessarily ensorsing it.

But whether they really believe this or not, the point is that most wouldn't be given any opportunity to "harness is potential", whether they're "obscenely talented giga-nerds" or not, because they'd be economically redundant.
by mistrial9 | 2026-02-21 03:22:13+00:00
network users at that time already had software for ftp and other common tools. Gopher sort of linked logically to an ftp idea. Mosaic was often introduced in the same sentence as "uses a format called HTML" .. Mosaic seemed interesting but also it was obvious that pages in that format would have to become popular, to make more of them. There wasn't a big reason to switch your daily software to Mosaic since stable apps were better for their existing uses. It was a very rare thing to have access to a NeXT machine (maybe not on YNews).

From my point of view it was Netscape that made a big splash, a year+ later, with a lot of publicity and good graphic design. Mosaic itself was an awkward demo with an interesting nerdy story.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-02-21 03:23:10+00:00
China is great for visitors, especially lighter skinned visitors. You probably won’t go to jail in China unless you have a thing for drinking a lot in Chinese bars, even then you will probably be ok as long as you don’t pick any fights.

Illegal immigration really isn’t a thing in China beyond a few North Koreans in Dongbei and a few Laotians in Yunnan. So they just won’t assume you are an illegal immigrant.
by girvo | 2026-02-21 03:25:10+00:00
> Just because you don't want to gate every change in #1, doesn't mean you're just throwing shit via #2,

Right but in practice from what I've seen at work, it does.

You're right: it shouldn't inherently, but that's what I've been seeing.

> But I'm seemingly also one of the few developers who seem to take responsibility of the code I produce, even if AI happens to have coded it.

Pretty much what I'm getting at, yeah
by JoshTriplett | 2026-02-21 03:25:37+00:00
> I honestly can’t imagine a good solution here.

"just stop" is a good solution. Stop asking for ID, stop pushing for apps, just stop the general trend towards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification .

Yes, misinformation is a problem. Deanonymization is a bigger problem. If you can't say anything anonymously, it becomes much more difficult to fight entities bigger and more powerful than you.
by razingeden | 2026-02-21 03:28:36+00:00
I remember that. I had almost zero interest in www until geocities came along and then …it was something else to compose and publish a “website”

The whole thing was atrocious but at least introduced me to the concept.

In fact, I had to spend like three days downloading Netscape to try it out because I didn’t even have a graphical browser yet.
by icedchai | 2026-02-21 03:31:22+00:00
It certainly was! I remember connecting to Tymnet and Sprintnet/Telenet as a teenager, probably around 1990 or 91. Someone on a local BBS gave me a username that let me connect to QSD and another European chat system. Someone on there had taken over the "system" account on a VAX and was giving out accounts that let you use it as PAD. This went on for weeks. The company must've freaked when they got their x.25 bill. Zero security in those days. The early Internet was just as bad.
by sriku | 2026-02-21 03:31:54+00:00
We built something like this by hand without much difficulty for a product concept. We'd initially used LangGraph but we ditched it and built our own out of revenge for LangGraph wasting our time with what could've simply been an ordinary python function.

Never again committing to any "framework", especially when something like Claude Code can write one for you from scratch exactly for what you want.

We have code on demand. Shallow libraries and frameworks are dead.
by intended | 2026-02-21 03:32:17+00:00
Platforms routinely underinvest in trust and safety.

T&S is markedly more capable in the dominant languages (English is ahead by far).

Platforms make absurd margins when compared to any other category of enterprise known to man.

They operate at scales where a 0.001% error rate is still far beyond human capability to manually review.

Customer support remains a cost center.

Firms should be profitable and have a job to do.

We do not owe them that job. Firms are vehicles to find the best strategies and tactics given societal resources and goals.

If rules to address harms result in current business models becoming unviable, then this is not a defense of the current business model.

Currently we are socializing costs and privatizing profit.

Having more customer support, more transparency, and more moderation will be a cost of doing business.

Our societies have more historical experience thinking about government capture than flooding the zone style private capture of speech.

America developed the FDA and every country has rules on how hygiene should be maintained in food.

People still can start small, and then create medium or large businesses. Regulation is framed for the size of the org.

Many firms fail - but failure and recreation are natural parts of the business cycle.
by dangus | 2026-02-21 03:32:55+00:00
I was about to point out two things:

1. This bit you just pointed out. Facebook suggesting Yoleendadong, that’s not weird, she’s wildly popular. Her inclusion in this piece discredits OP as someone who basically has no idea how social media works - which makes the article less insightful, like asking David Attenborough to work the play by play commentary of an NBA game.

2. I don’t think OP realizes how much he should not be admitting that this is what his feed looks like.

Facebook/Instagram pretty much show you exactly what you want to see. I deleted my Meta accounts about 6 months ago but when I used it regularly before that I never saw thirst slop like this.

I had a beautiful algorithm, a mix of mostly hilarious brain rot and actual high effort content involving my interests.

OP is basically accidentally admitting that he’s browsing this kind of stuff in a browser with set Facebook cookies. That’s why you can’t use Meta products without Facebook container.

OP is seeing AI titties because other websites that utilize Facebook’s analytics/marketing products are seeing OP search for AI titties.

Finally, it is very easy to guide Meta algorithms into showing you other stuff if you are seeing things you don’t like. It even has a button for you to tell it what you don’t like.
by _heimdall | 2026-02-21 03:33:52+00:00
I don't really care about how it would be framed though. What's being described is a central authority creating a scoring mechanism to rate us as individuals. That's bad regardless of framing in my opinion.

I don't think social credit scores have any dependence on involving money, for what its worth. Usually that's just a normal credit score rather than anything social.
by skybrian | 2026-02-21 03:33:59+00:00
The prediction market itself is a ouija board. You're given a number. You don't know who's moving the needle or why. You don't know what you're paying for. Maybe you're paying for information from people who are breaking someone's trust by giving it to you? Or maybe you're paying them to make it happen?

Although, sometimes a market provides incentive to publish information that's associated with the market being influenced. For example, someone can do an investigation, short the stock, then publish it.
by budududuroiu | 2026-02-21 03:34:33+00:00
The Italian digital ID wallet is already in fact banning GrapheneOS and other ROMs [1], the EU doesn't mandate that member states have to allow non-Android/iOS apps [2]

[1] https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-app-andro...

[2] https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-doc-archi...
by behnamoh | 2026-02-21 03:35:19+00:00
set Anthropic base URL in CC to your proxy server and map each model to your preferred models (I keep opus↔opus but technically you can do opus↔gpt-5.3, etc.). then check the incoming messages for the string that triggers compaction (it's a system prompt btw) and modify that message before it hits the LLM server.
by johnnycash926 | 2026-02-21 03:36:25+00:00
Creator here. Solo developer, building in public.
Some context that didn’t fit above: we published the full benchmark data and the tool to reproduce it because we think the AI code gen space has a transparency problem. Everyone claims their tool is better, nobody shows data.
The “dev time” metric is the one I’m most proud of. It estimates how long you’d spend debugging the output before it’s production-ready. A model can score 95% but still hand you code with broken imports and failing tests — that’s 15 minutes of your time. The Loop’s goal is zero.
Website with more details: https://crtx-ai.com
Happy to answer questions about the benchmark methodology, the gap closing system, or the architecture. And if anyone runs crtx benchmark --quick with their own keys, I’d genuinely love to see the results.
by alsetmusic | 2026-02-21 03:36:41+00:00
I have a family member who once told me that their net worth was roughly halved in 2008. They probably recovered it if they stayed in the market after, but I don't know what they did.

I suppose the real question is whether you can weather the storm long enough for the market to recover. And beyond that, how cynical you are overall about everything taking completely before that can happen. I wonder a lot about that second one.
by gcollard- | 2026-02-21 03:37:06+00:00
Testing this hardware LLM (LLAMA 3.1 8B on a chip) I get ~16k tokens per second.

With frontier models plateauing, I’ve been convinced AI will end up like bitcoin mining, and that NVIDIA’s general-purpose GPUs will be replaced by model-specific chips.

Glad to see someone innovating in this space.
by superbowl | 2026-02-21 03:39:18+00:00
Yes. I'm an eng at a big tech co on a non-AI team. Money's tight. No hiring or promotions.

Senior folks are doing the work junior folks used to do, and getting negative performance reviews for it. Negative performance reviews are now leading to quicker dismissals.

Simultaneously, promotion requirements are going up. I feel like I need to be launching entirely new products to meet expectations, but at the same time, routine bugs need fixing. My team is also being picked for parts by our parent org.

I get the impression funding is more generous on AI-specific teams, but the pressure is higher, and there's a lot of competition to join those teams.
by Animats | 2026-02-21 03:39:36+00:00
This law firm seems to be on top of changes. The site just updated with Trump's latest proclamation.

Section 122: Implemented (effective Feb. 24, 2026) [1]

That's Trump's new 10% tariff applied to most countries. There are some exceptions. Most of the extreme per-country tariffs are gone. For now, anyway. Trump may add Section 201 tariffs later, but those are per product category. What Trump can do in this mode doesn't include most of his per-country "deals".

Amusingly, the new 10% tariff doesn't apply until Feb 24th, so you have a few days to avoid it. All this expires July 24th, because the law being invoked here has a time limit unless Congress extends it.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/02/impo...
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-21 03:39:59+00:00
> All it takes is a tiny drone with a stick attached, and at the end of that stick is a tiny sponge soaked with tempera paint

I haste Flock Safety cameras. If someone did this in my town, I’d want them arrested. They’re muddying the moral clarity of the messaging. And if they’re willing to damage that property, I’m not convinced they understand why they shouldn’t damage any other property.
by thrance | 2026-02-21 03:40:15+00:00
The original pledge was quite different, and indeed sounds more socialist:

> I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Also, did you know children had to do a "Bellamy Salute" to the flag? That was removed during WW2 for obvious reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellamy_salute
by budududuroiu | 2026-02-21 03:40:51+00:00
Maybe stupid question, we keep seeing "LLM figures out math problem humans couldn't, LLM finds security vulnerability by looking at hexdumps for 6 months straight. How hard or expensive would it be to let some LLMs loose on reverse engineering all the proprietary driver binary blobs?

People mentioning forking Android is hard, how easy do LLMs make this?
by erelong | 2026-02-21 03:41:21+00:00
I've been seeing a lot of posts like this and I don't tend to agree with the "anti-AI sentiment", but I think some of the problems identified might be like this:

People may lack ideas of interesting projects to work on in the first place; so we need to think about how to help people to think of useful and interesting projects to work on

Related to that idea, people may need to develop skills for building more "complex" ideas and we may need to think about how to make that more possible in the era of AI usage... even if some AI agent can take care of a technical side of things, it still takes a kind of "complexity of thought" to dream up more complicated / useful / interesting projects (I get the impression that there may be a need for some kind of training of the mind necessary for asking for an "automobile" rather than a "faster horse", by analogy... and that conception was often found through manually tinkering with intermediate devices like the bicycle. Hence an AI could "one shot" something interesting but what that thing is is limited by the imagination of the user, which may be limited by technical inability - in other words, the user may need to develop more technical ability in order to be able to dream up more interesting things to create, even if this "technical ability" is a more "skilled usage of AI tools")

There needs to be some way to filter through "noise". That's not a new issue and... a lot of these questions or complaints often feel very "meta", as in - you could just ask AI how to make side projects more interesting or useful, or how to create good filters in the age of AI. In sports, there are hierarchical levels of competition - likewise here you might have forums that are more closed off to newcomers if you want to "gatekeep" things, and they have to compete in "local pools" of attention and if they "win" there, then their "qualified authority / leader" submits the project to a higher level, and so on. AI suggests using qualified curators to create newsfeeds or to act as filters of the "slop".
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-21 03:42:36+00:00
Yes, because “bigstrat2003” said so. I work for a 1000+ consulting company and no one uses email for internal communications. Even for company wide messages leadership uses Slack.

Heck even when we first start a project we either federate (or whatever you call it) the client’s Slack workgroup with ours or we ask to be on their Teams channel.

Before working where I worked now, I worked for the 2nd largest employer in the US, even there most communication happened over Chime or Slack.

On a personal level you actually email personal contacts - in 2026?
by kace91 | 2026-02-21 03:42:59+00:00
I agree, but that isn’t a good argument to offer to the entities bigger and more powerful than me.

Governments and companies feel a pressing threat of a trump-like populist overtake in each country. They need the bots, fake socials and slop stopped yesterday. An abstract degradation of freedom of speech isn’t going to cause pause.

There is a national security argument that I think is more likely to help, at least for non Americans. Do you want a foreign power to have control over your citizens phones being functional?
by agentifysh | 2026-02-21 03:43:04+00:00
Just wanted to add some context on this in case someone reads this thread down the road. I know many doctors from Korea, and their take on it was that Yoon's populist policy to increase caps on medical students wouldn't fix the actual issue at hand, which is that nobody wants to work in a low-paid, highly stressful environment. Unfortunately, those happen to be the exact fields of medicine that are lacking in doctors.

In fact, what they warned would happen is that it would just increase the number of new graduates heading towards highly lucrative, unregulated medical fields like dermatology and cosmetic surgery, and would only exacerbate the gaps in essential areas like pediatrics, OB/GYN, and emergency medicine, which face real shortages.

The root of the problem is twofold: First, South Korea's National Health Insurance heavily regulates and caps the prices for essential and lifesaving care, sometimes setting reimbursement rates so low that hospitals lose money on them. Meanwhile, non essential aesthetic procedures have no price caps.

Second, South Korea has an unusually high rate of prosecuting doctors criminally for medical malpractice. Doctors in high stakes environments like the ER or surgery face massive legal risks and the threat of actual prison time for unavoidable bad outcomes. Conversely, opening a skin clinic carries almost zero legal risk, no night shifts, and much higher pay.

The doctors' frustration was that Yoon's policy relied on a trickle down theory of medicine, the idea that if you simply flood the market by increasing the quota by a massive 65% overnight, the overflow of graduates will eventually be desperate enough to take the punishing essential jobs. While the medical association's optics and PR were undeniably terrible, their core grievance was that Yoon's draconian approach was a political bandaid that completely ignored the structural rot driving doctors away from saving lives in the first place