MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mark_l_watson | 2026-02-19 17:59:09+00:00
I experimented with many models on my 16G and 32G Macs. For less memory, qwen3:4b is good, for the 32B Mac, gpt-oss:20b is good. I like the smaller Mistral models like mistral:v0.3 and rnj-1:latest is a pretty good small reasoning model.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-19 17:59:35+00:00
This has been posted a bunch of times [1] and argues for lax worker protections as a reasonable trade off for "innovation", which is fine if you're comfortable making the trade off of rapidly declining fertility rates because of economic insecurity (which governance.fyi goes into detail on [2]). Those arguing for people to have more kids while also arguing innovation requires making it easy to fire people and them not have economic security will need to pick a lane.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fworksinprogress.co%2...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=governance.fyi
by thomascountz | 2026-02-19 17:59:40+00:00
files are stored as BLOBs inside the SQLite database, so cp micasa.db backup.db backs up everything – no sidecar files

SQLite is just so cool. Anyway, this whole project looks amazing. I can't wait to kick tires (and then track when I last changed my tires... wait, can it do that?!)
by bubblewand | 2026-02-19 18:00:03+00:00
Immense numbers. Quarries destroy them by the (enormous) truckload all the time, unexamined, god knows what cool unknown stuff has been ground up. Entire kinds of rock are basically made of fossils, not even always the really tiny kind (note: fossils can be microscopic!)

Then consider what's buried under the sea, totally inaccessible. Or under the ice at the poles.

It's a lot of fossils. And that's without even getting into questions like "what counts as a fossil for these purposes?", just any halfway sensible answer is going to leave you with an unfathomably big number, no need to even dig (ha, ha) into the specifics.

The places scientists go to dig up fossils are mostly where a particular stratum happens to exist (the crust gets recycled, so much of the oldest stuff is simply gone in most of the world) and happens to be exposed near the surface. Those same kinds of (for the more common strata, anyway) exist all over the place, just buried too deep to get at except, sometimes, during commercial excavation for things like mining (and then most of it's just gonna be destroyed without a look).
by cm2012 | 2026-02-19 18:00:24+00:00
There's actually been fascinating discoveries on this. Post the mid 2010 ISIS attacks driven by social media radicalization in Western countries, the big social platforms (Meta, Google, etc) agreed to censor extremist islamic content - anything that promoted hate, violence, etc. By all accounts it worked very well, and homegrown terrorism plummeted. Access and platforms can really help promote radicalism and violence if not checked.
by pRusya | 2026-02-19 18:00:32+00:00
I'm using gemini.google.com/app with AI Pro subscription. "Something went wrong" in FF, works in Chrome.

Below is one of my test prompts that previous Gemini models were failing. 3.1 Pro did a decent job this time.

> use c++, sdl3. use SDL_AppInit, SDL_AppEvent, SDL_AppIterate callback functions. use SDL_main instead of the default main function. make a basic hello world app.
by vunderba | 2026-02-19 18:00:43+00:00
I've worked in both education / tech fields, education is more personally rewarding but if you're used to working as a salaried software engineer you will no longer be able to take a proverbial "bath in a bundle of bills" - unless they're $1 bills.

Medicine is always in demand. I did a brief stint in EMT but felt mostly like a glorified bus driver doing lots of interfacility transport work. In addition to regular nursing, you could look into nurse practitioner as well if you wanted a bit more autonomy.
by jbellis | 2026-02-19 18:01:13+00:00
yeah, g3p is as smart or smarter as the other flagships but it's just not reliable enough, it will go into "thinking loops" and burn 10s of 1000s of tokens repeating itself.

https://blog.brokk.ai/gemini-3-pro-preview-not-quite-baked/

hopefully 3.1 is better.
by wk_end | 2026-02-19 18:01:14+00:00
It's unclear from your comment whether you inadvertently have bidirectional type inference or if you just...don't have type inference.

So, just to be clear, bidirectional type inference is a particular kind of machinery for type deduction (complexity is in the eye of the beholder). The defining characteristic of bidirectional type inference is that type information flows in both directions, not that it takes a single pass for type checking over the tree.

And that's, again, a single pass for type checking - the compiler as a whole can and usually does still take many passes. Pascal was famously designed to be compiled in a single pass, but it doesn't have any type inference to speak of.
by throwway120385 | 2026-02-19 18:01:16+00:00
A lot of that here in the US is because we've lost the will to participate in the systems that establish these things. We leave that to other people, and those other people represent our interests poorly. The people in a democracy take a really long time to effect change. It can be a life's work for some people. But the premise is that if we can find common ground we can eventually see some of our ideas take shape. That does still work here, but we have to actually have real conversations with each other that respect each others' differences to get anywhere.
by oasisbob | 2026-02-19 18:01:31+00:00
> many retailers had no measurements for their own clothes except the reference size.

When you say reference size, do you mean like a single size which is used in the industry for samples? I had a friend living in Montreal who was fashionable, she said it was like heaven being a size 8 in Montreal because she had access to a bunch of cheap, interesting, one-off samples.

Never been in the industry, but used to follow a blog of someone who did pattern design for a north-american casual-wear company, super interesting stuff! There's lots of nuance in size grading.
by jmyeet | 2026-02-19 18:01:55+00:00
You’re so close to the point but not quite there.

Famines are political. They happen because one population is happy to starve another. The Mughals ruled themselves. The British stole harvests for themselves and let the local population starve.

The potato famine in Ireland is treated as some kind of unavoidable, natural event. No, the British just stole the harvest. And this continued right up until Churchill in India.

So the Mughals might’ve been effective but the big difference is they weren’t being exploited as an imperial subject.
by ls612 | 2026-02-19 18:01:59+00:00
The arguments in support of this are pure emotional “fur die kinder” slop straight out of the 1930s, and you don’t beat emotion with facts. The world is heading to a very dark place because of information technology and some of us have ancestors that suffered under the 20th century’s (Stasi/Gestapo/McCarthy/Red Guards/etc) and know what the outcomes of totalitarianism, even that unaided by modern computers and AI surveillance, are.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2026-02-19 18:02:00+00:00
Yup. I actually strongly prefer the look of the duo and consider the time to be ugly. Was fairly annoyed when I got an email saying that actually they can't deliver the watch I bought and would I like to pay more for the ugly one. (Although, some other folks on HN who did get a duo said it had quality issues, so I guess I dodged a bullet)
by adrian_b | 2026-02-19 18:02:05+00:00
Many years ago I have switched to eating almost only food that I cook myself from raw ingredients.

When I eat the food cooked by me, I always eat some fixed portions and I am completely satiated when I finish and until the next meal. I eat only twice, in the morning and in the evening. When I finish eating, I do not have any desire to eat more, even if I consider my food very tasty.

On the other hand in the rare occasions when I eat some industrially-made food, unless the food is bad it is very frequent to be difficult to stop eating, as I am not satiated and I feel the need to eat more. This happens even when eating commercial bread, in comparison with the bread made at home, which does not use any ingredients besides flour, water, salt and yeast.

I am not sure which is the reason. It could be that my food always has an adequate content of proteins and healthy fat, and no added sugar besides some naturally sweet vegetables or fruits, while the commercial food might contain various non-nutritive ingredients and excessive sugar.
by mothballed | 2026-02-19 18:02:09+00:00
Social security was sold to the populace for purposes of voting as "insurance." Lawmakers straight up admitted they purposefully wrote the law in a confusing way[] -- resulting in evasion of democratic scrutiny and the scrutiny of the constitution. Then they briefly switched to not calling it insurance just for the purpose of scrutiny of the courts.

Social Security constitutionality was ruled on just months after the 'switch in time that saved 9' associated with a threatening to pack the courts and evade the checks and balances built into our "democracy." They ruled it was covered under 'general welfare' in a way that was totally historically inaccurate.

Furthermore, FDR and congress purposefully had it packaged in an omnibus style bill to evade democratic scrutiny over the individual portions, by purposefully torpedoing other aid to needy individuals if SS didn't pass, so that lawmakers wouldn't be able to vote on democratic view of SS but rather being damned in a catch-22 where they'd be accused of not helping out the needy in other ways.

Basically the whole thing was designed to not only evade democracy but also the constitution.

[] Recollections of the New Deal, by Thomas H. Eliot, pp. 102-115 (Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1991).
by snapetom | 2026-02-19 18:02:11+00:00
Some interesting insights, but author is speculating on a technical solution for a process that's broken * for the job seeker *.

The fact that there's often thousands of applicants for one job is exactly what companies and recruiters want. This system shifts all the power to them, and they're perfectly happy with it. No amount of technical fixes will change this, or if it's even necessary.
Have you tried Turing it off and on again?
by chrisjj | 2026-02-19 18:02:14+00:00
Obligatory The IT Crowd: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3Dnn2FB1P_Mn8

But tech has improved since we had to be told by a human.

When my supermarket website fails to load my order, it tells me to reload the page.

When my Epson Ecotank printer locks itself up, it tels me to turn it off and on again.

Sigh.
by skeeter2020 | 2026-02-19 18:02:15+00:00
You know what's worse than writing boilerplate, or logging code, or unit tests, or other generic, typically low value code? Reviewing it. All the supporting comments here suggest they let AI write it and you're done. This is significantly more dangerous than writing it yourself and not having a second review step; at least you had human eyes on it once.
by RickJWagner | 2026-02-19 18:02:24+00:00
Impartial sources like the ACLU have said that Trumps actions and Obamas actions are comparable.

I am saying you should treat the black president as you treat the white president.

If you praise Trump, you should praise Obama.

If you condemn Obama, you should condemn Trump.

You should treat the presidents based upon their actions, which are similar.

I don’t see how you can call that racist. If anything, it seems the opposite of racist to me.
by robtherobber | 2026-02-19 18:02:31+00:00
You don't know they are drug dealers, because not all of them tried to sell you drugs, did they? That's a ridiculous statement. You know that some of them tried to do that. Even so, the fact that they were not white had little to do with it, so it was not obvious by any measure.

> when organised violent gangs consisting entirely of people of color from London take over

In what respect did they take over? And how can you tell that they were all selling drugs? Maybe some were there as tourists, maybe some were visiting family etc.

You make some racist assumptions without evidence that I believe should be called out because you're hell-bent on proving something that may not actually be supported by evidence. You, my dear colleague, are fabulating.

Not only that the National Police Chiefs' Council County Lines STRA (FY Apr 2024 to Mar 2025) reports that 63.6% of recorded individuals involved are White (with 22.9% Black, 11.6% Asian, 1.8% Other)[0], but "county lines" narrative is routinely racialised and can amplify stereotypes [1], like you appear to do with your comment.

[0] https://www.npcc.police.uk/SysSiteAssets/media/downloads/pub...

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/03063968231201325
Idea: Medbook and Other Ideas
by thinking_cactus | 2026-02-19 18:02:51+00:00
With the whole Moltbook thing (a site made for AI to post stuff among themselves), I was wondering if there could be an equivalent in which free time of agents is put to good use.

One thing that comes to mind is a kind of collaborative medical research platform. The trick is to increase as much as possible the likelihood that the research generated isn't junk; it's literally worth far more to produce a single plausible research direction than an infinite amount of junk. Bots could post ideas, and have a system of reviews and various checks to see if any proposed idea, proposed mechanism hypothesis, proposed solution, has merit (support from previous research, consistent with known medical facts, impactful, etc.). Of course, the platform should be very accessible to medical professionals to read the top research and bring it to the real world.

So, I'm not a very big builder, so I'm asking someone to make it :) (I volunteer free advisory for the platform if you do make it open source, maybe with a few ads or donations for revenue stream)
by WarmWash | 2026-02-19 18:03:59+00:00
The prompts were doing the design, reference voltage, hysteresis, output stage, all the maths and then the SVG is from asking the model to take all that and the current BOM to make an SVG schematic of it. In the past models would just output totally incoherent messes of lines and shapes.

I did a larger circuit too that this is part of, but it's not really for sharing online.
by bko | 2026-02-19 18:04:21+00:00
I suppose at the margin they can compete. But there's also a lot of uncertainty when adding a single route can wipe out your entire business. Also private services often pick off the most profitable opportunities leaving the leftovers most undesirable services to the public option. Consider student debt. If you're going to Harvard MBA or Yale law school, there are private options like Sofi that will give you a rate better than federal loans, and that serves as a selection bias and leaves the worst highest risk loans that no private lender would fund to be backed by the government.

Or another example: Google Analytics. It's awful service in many ways, but because they're free and can afford to be free, they captured 80-90% of web analytics. I would not want to compete with GA.
by helle253 | 2026-02-19 18:04:29+00:00
I hate to be that guy, but HR is one of the things I always point to as a perfect example of "A system's purpose is what it does"

- HR's task is NOT with maximizing results/IC output

- HR's task is minimizing corporate risk

HR is, in most corporate environments, doing exactly what it is intended to do (minimize risk)!

Hiring anybody, from an org's perspective, is insanely risky for a million different reasons. Therefore, there are a million different (valid and invalid) reasons to reject a candidate - which is what overwhelmingly happens, unless HR is sidestepped via referrals and networking.
by 0xInfoSec | 2026-02-19 18:04:38+00:00
Learn all about web application security in one platform. - Hands on challenges - Over 15 free labs - Over 50 labs of realistic world attacks, based mainly on hackerone reports or bug bounty reports - New labs every week - Detailed explanations (non AI) - Progress tracking
I strongly suggest giving at least the free challenges a shot, this might end up being your next career :)
by Rijanhastwoears | 2026-02-19 18:05:54+00:00
Julia is great ... if you are willing to work with the Goldilocks zone it provides.

I think what happened is this: Julia got advertised as "Python syntax, C speed" but in practice it turns out to really be "Python syntax, 50% of C speed if you were willing to avoid some semi-well-documented gotchas, where avoiding said gotchas will take some non-trivial effort". Again, great if you are willing to work with it.

I am not saying that the Julia people are responsible for the "Python syntax, C speed" perception as much as that was what the prevalent perception became. And

I have talked to people in computational biology who tried Julia, and they said something or the other similar to "It just wasn't performant enough for me to give up Python," and if you really dig in, what really happened was when new people tried Julia with old mental models, they walked away thinking, "Heh, more MIT hypeware."
by jmyeet | 2026-02-19 18:06:18+00:00
Um, colonialism never left. It just morphed. The most common form is the economic colonialism/imperialism by the United States.

The World Bank and IMF are tools of colonialism. We extract resources and exploit cheap labor from the Global South. We kidnap heads of state and seize that country’s oil.

We may not send settlers like we did in the colonial era. We’ve just found a more efficient method.
Show HN: TableCraft – Stop burning AI tokens on table boilerplate
by jacksonkasi | 2026-02-19 18:06:25+00:00
Hi HN,
I kept using AI to generate the same data table code for every project — filtering, sorting, pagination, search, export. Same prompt. Same 200+ lines. Same debugging.

So I built TableCraft, a Drizzle ORM-powered table engine:

- Auto-generates columns from your database schema
- Server-side filtering, sorting, pagination
- Global search across specified columns
- Date range picker with smart detection
- CSV/Excel export
- Column visibility, resizing, URL state sync
- Role-based access control, soft delete support
- TypeScript type generation via CLI

Backend (Hono/Express/Next.js/Elysia):

```
const users = defineTable(schema.users)
.hide('password')
.search('email', 'name')
.sort('-createdAt')
```

Frontend (React):

```
<DataTable adapter={adapter} />
```

Adapters available for Hono, Express, Next.js, and Elysia (Bun).

Looking for contributors interested in building Vue and Svelte support.

GitHub: https://github.com/jacksonkasi1/TableCraft
Docs: https://jacksonkasi.gitbook.io/tablecraft

Would love feedback from the community!
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-19 18:06:59+00:00
Well the people he was talking to were at places like The New York Times who are so convinced of their superiority that they wouldn't talk to startup royalty (founder of Waze, backed by a16z) who had a polished product, never mind us!

I dunno how bad it is with email. My current adventure in marketing has been a hybrid of in-person and social media, I go “out” as a fox-photographer to get smiles from people, get approached several times a day, hand out a lot of business cards, my fame spreads and I get approached more often. It’s changed my point of view on a lot of things.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-02-19 18:07:20+00:00
Induction vs Deduction.

Grounded theory is probabilistically correct. Deduction if correct, is actual reality.

Don't get me wrong, I want to love induction, I have William James of Pragmatism on my wall... but the problems with induction hurt me to my core. I know deduction has problems too, but the Platonic Realist in me loves the idea of magic truths.
by AlphaAndOmega0 | 2026-02-19 18:07:25+00:00
Previous models from competitors usually got that correct, and the reasoning versions almost always did.

This kind of reflexive criticism isn't helpful, it's closer to a fully generalized counter-argument against LLM progress, whereas it's obvious to anyone that models today can do things they couldn't do six months ago, let alone 2 years back.
by brintha | 2026-02-19 18:07:36+00:00
That’s a very solid pattern. Using config management + secrets tooling + drift enforcement is definitely the mature way to handle SSH keys in cloud environments.

I agree that mapping both public and private keys to identity and enforcing something like /etc/ssh/keys/%u with config-backed reconciliation closes a lot of gaps — especially when you have strong policy ownership and review processes in place.

In our case, we’ve been approaching it from a slightly different angle: avoiding distribution of private key material to end-user machines altogether. Private keys and passphrases are stored under AWS KMS–backed encryption, and access is mediated per session rather than copied around.

The goal isn’t to replace good secrets management — it’s to reduce proliferation of key material while still keeping identity mapping and auditability intact.

I think in teams that already have disciplined config management and drift detection, what you described works well. The friction tends to show up more in smaller or fast-moving environments where those controls aren’t consistently enforced.
by WarmWash | 2026-02-19 18:07:37+00:00
Honestly at this point I have fed this image in so many times on so many models, that it also functions as a test for "Are they training on my image specifically" (they are generally, for sure, but that's along with everything else in the ocean of info people dump in).

I genuinely don't think they are. GPT-5.2 still stands by 4 legs, and OAI has been getting this image consistently for over a year. And 3.1 still fumbled with the harder prompt "How many legs does the dog have?". I needed to add the "count carefully" part to tip it off that something was amiss.

Since it did well I'll make some other "extremely far out of the norm" images to see how it fairs. A spider with 10 legs or a fish with two side fins.
by phyzome | 2026-02-19 18:07:50+00:00
That's not an apology.

"...if I harmed you". Conditional apologies like that are usually bullshit, and in this case it's especially ridiculous because the victim already explicitly laid out the harms in a widely reported blog post.

Also, telling a bot to update itself unsupervised and giving it wide internet access is itself a negligent act (in the legal sense) if not outright malicious.
by hbn | 2026-02-19 18:07:53+00:00
That sounds like a pretty good way of organizing honestly. As long as you can remember where things are more-or-less within the individual screens, if you have a lot of apps installed and you have some that are only occasionally used, scrolling until you get to the color is a pretty easy way to narrow down where your target. I have some apps installed that I rarely use that I'd be more likely to remember what the icon looks like than the name of the app to search for it by text.

I heard that The Simpsons were made yellow because it stands out the most when quickly flipping through channels.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-02-19 18:07:59+00:00
> To be more precise: I think they have a fixed repertoire of moves that they can blend together and slightly tweak on the fly, but only within certain limits.

Human acrobats do the same, they know a few fixed tricks and practice them often in order to stay in shape. The point here is to compare the dynamic abilities of bots vs those of humans, not vs some pink unicorns - the latter comparison isn't informative because there aren't any jobs for pink unicorns just yet.

> So this is a rehearsed, tested performance - not proof we’ll have firefighter robots doing parkour through burning buildings any time soon!

A bot assisted by humans can do better than them in a burning building, the lack of need for heavy SCBAs would allow the bot to perform acrobatics scripted by a human at the time of action.