MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by electroly | 2026-02-19 14:17:28+00:00
I don't know about everyone else, but slow Julia compilation continues to cause me ongoing suffering to this day. I don't think they're ever going to "fix" this. On a standard GitHub Actions Windows worker, installing the public Julia packages I use, precompiling, and compiling the sysimage takes over an hour. That's not an exaggeration. I had to juice the worker up to a custom 4x sized worker to get the wall clock time to something reasonable.

It took me days to get that build to work; doing this compilation once in CI so you don't have to do it on every machine is trickier than it sounds in Julia. The "obvious" way (install packages in Docker, run container on target machine) does not work because Julia wants to see exactly the same machine that it was precompiled on. It ends up precompiling again every time you run the container on other machines. I nearly shed a tear the first time I got Julia not to precompile everything again on a new machine.

R and Python are done in five minutes on the standard worker and it was easy; it's just the amount of time it takes to download and extract the prebuilt binaries. Do that inside a Docker container and it's portable as expected. I maintain Linux and Windows environments for the three languages and Julia causes me the most headaches, by far. I absolutely do not care about the tiny improvement in performance from compiling for my particular microarch; I would opt into prebuilt x86_64 generic binaries if Julia had them. I'm very happy to take R's and Python's prebuilt binaries.
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-19 14:18:19+00:00
Well I dunno if we want to repeat the Web 2.0 playbook, I mean it seemed like a good idea at the time but now we have political Twitter, all the blonde women who DM me on Instagram, etc.

Recently though I've discovered a kind of hybrid real-world/social-media marketing that puts a zero on the right of all my KPIs -- I am not sure if it would work so well if I wasn't based on a college campus, but even on days when I spend only 20 minutes in public as a "foxographer"

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/115901190470904729

I might get approached by several people and hand them those "tokens" which get them to subscribe to my socials and tell other people which gets more people to approach me -- it's the kind of "Flywheel" that Jim Collins talks about. Of course it "doesn't scale", and how I introduce the character to the wider community and the tourists that are all of my town in tyhe summer is TBD.
by gruez | 2026-02-19 14:18:37+00:00
Not really. The specific policies seem like plausibly good things, so you can't really dismiss it as "broken clock twice a day".

>Three city programmes stand out.

>The first tackled absenteeism [...]

>Next, the district turned to preventing holiday learning loss [...]

>[...] “Birmingham Promise”, a programme that pays full tuition at many Alabama colleges for graduates of the city’s public schools. [...]
by nixon_why69 | 2026-02-19 14:19:21+00:00
To be fair to gruez, the chart was made by the economist and not by them.

To be less fair to the economist, "adjusted by poverty level" is a heck of a spin, we've had many generations as a developed nation now, your state poverty level is caused by your state education outcomes. And that's without even speculating about what "demographic factors" means or implies.
by jqpabc123 | 2026-02-19 14:19:41+00:00
There is no reason that EVs can't be built for less than comparable ICE vehicles. Systematically, they are much simpler.

The battery is the large, heavy, expensive part but breakthroughs are being made here too and more are on the way.

https://www.carscoops.com/2026/02/toyota-solid-state-battery...

If American manufacturers don't figure this out, China and Japan will bury them in the "free market" --- which increasingly means outside the USA.
by kovacivan | 2026-02-19 14:19:48+00:00
Wait, you are the Healthchecks.io founder? Big fan of your work!

You’re 100% right on the terminology. The pg_dump | gpg flow is definitely the correct way to achieve true E2EE.

The trade-off I made with Oops Backup was purely about eliminating the agent or script management. For many of the indie devs I'm targeting, setting up and maintaining that cron job/script is the hurdle that prevents them from having backups at all.

By handling the connection string on our end, we provide a 2-minute set and forget experience, even though it means we have access in-flight before the data is encrypted at rest.

Honestly, I built this because I was tired of managing custom backup scripts for my own side projects and just wanted a easy safety net.

I’m updating the site to remove the 'End-to-End' claim. I definitely don't want to mislead anyone on the architecture. It’s 'Zero-Knowledge' for the stored data only.

Thanks for the catch and for keeping the bar high.
by kranner | 2026-02-19 14:20:07+00:00
From the Wikipedia article on the slogan [1]

> معلوم هم هست که مراد از «مرگ بر آمریکا»، مرگ بر ملّت آمریکا نیست، ملّت آمریکا هم مثل بقیّهٔ ملّتها [هستند]، یعنی مرگ بر سیاستهای آمریکا، مرگ بر استکبار؛ معنایش این است.

"It is also clear that 'Death to America' does not mean death to the American people; the American people are like other nations, meaning death to American policies, death to arrogance; this is what it means.

Translation by Claude; my Persian is only basic-to-intermediate but this seems correct to me.

[1] https://fa.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%85%D8%B1%DA%AF_%D8%A8%D8%B...
by Frieren | 2026-02-19 14:20:20+00:00
> The amendment follows outrage over the Elon Musk-owned chatbot Grok's willingness to generate nude or sexualized images of people, mainly women and girls, which forced a climbdown earlier this year.

Laws are reactive. When abuses of the system happen lawmakers need to find ways to minimize the damage. This is one of the reasons that Google used to follow the "do not do evil" doctrine. It was a smart way to minimize regulation. The new big tech has thrown any aparence of morality thru the windows and that creates a strong need to regulate their actions.
by infecto | 2026-02-19 14:20:26+00:00
Am I the only one perplexed why folks find this stunning or meaningful. While LLMs are novel and different in that the subscription gives you access to compute, it does not feel foreign from the subscription, free or paid, landscape. I cannot recall many (if any?) companies that would freely let you use compute, private internal APIs or anything similar just because you have a login. Maybe I come from a different era of tech but it seems both reasonable and not surprising.

Why now? It would not surprise me that this was simply an after thought and once it hit critical mass (opencode) they locked it down.
by throw0101a | 2026-02-19 14:21:10+00:00
> This is the macroscopic outcome that also play out in a company microcosm - people who _prevent_ disasters and fix problems _before_ they occur get no credit, and on the balance sheet it looks like they're just a waste of resources.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox

> On the big scale, like in gov't, the disasters that did not happen […]

Michael Lewis (of The Big Short fame) has two books on the things that government(s) do that no one else (often) can, either because they're too big, too expensive/unprofitable, or a co-ordination problem where it effects many actors simultaneously:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Risk

* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/788713/who-is-govern...
by ChicagoDave | 2026-02-19 14:21:11+00:00
A really good example of this is NotebookLM. Feed it anything complex and it will surface a few important points, but it will also spend half the time on the third sentence in the eigth paragraph of section five.

I tried to point it at my Sharpee repo and it wanted to focus on createRoom() as some technical marvel.

I eventually gave up though I was never super serious about using the results anyway.

If you want a summary, do it yourself. If you try to summarize someone else’s work, understand you will miss important points.
by nzach | 2026-02-19 14:21:23+00:00
> they make per-instance decisions with per-instance state

But this is a feature, not a bug. You seems to be assuming that people use circuit-breaks only on external requests, in this situation your approach seems reasonable.

If you have cbs between every service call your model doesn't seem a good idea. Where I work every network call is behind a cb (external services, downstream services, database, redis, s3, ...) and it's pretty common to see failures isolated in a single k8s node. In this situation we want to have independent cbs, they can open independently.

Your take on observability/operation seems interesting but it is pretty close to feature flags. And that is exactly how we handle these scenarios, we have a couple of feature flags we can enable to switch traffic around during outages. Switching to fallback is easy most of the time, but switching back to normal operation is harder to do.
by pjc50 | 2026-02-19 14:21:30+00:00
> Why on earth would it be 10% of their world wide income and not their UK-based income? These politicians really think they have more power than they really do.

Regardless of whether the actions of the British state are correct, I do not think it is a good position that a foreign tech company is more powerful than the British state.

This is basically the same argument for the US forced divestiture of TikTok.
by syumpx | 2026-02-19 14:21:45+00:00
Current approach is last-write-wins with version history - simple but doesn’t solve concurrent edits.

I don’t think auto-merge is the right default for prose/research (unlike code where Git’s merge works). When Agent A writes strategic memo concluding X while Agent B writes concluding NOT-X, merging both is worse than surfacing the conflict.

Thinking the right model is:
∙ Optimistic writes (current behavior) for most cases
∙ Explicit locks for high-stakes docs agents know they’re collaborating on
∙ Diff tooling for post-hoc resolution when conflicts do occur

thanks for asking a great question. whats your thoughts?
by oneeyedpigeon | 2026-02-19 14:22:08+00:00
> Bare in mind, this would have been used to stop the Epstein images of the former Prince Andrew from being viewed

(Bear, although your typo is awkwardly relevant...)

Would redacted images, and those that do not identify the victim, actually count?

> Why on earth would it be 10% of their world wide income and not their UK-based income? These politicians really think they have more power than they really do.

I mean, when it comes down to a fine or blocking access altogether, surely they can ask for whatever they want? They could've made it "one bajillion dollars" if they wanted. Actually collecting the fine is a whole other matter.

> Mastodon / BlueSky where they now share that content.

I regularly check Bluesky and occasionally check Mastodon, and I've never seen even 'tame' porn on either. I have absolutely seen porn on X, though.
by CGMthrowaway | 2026-02-19 14:22:19+00:00
>Their solution is that you must read at a 3rd grade level in order to get promoted to 4th grade

Can someone explain why we ever stopped doing that? It does seem like a lot of public school advocates these days push simply for graduate rate, to the exclusion of meeting common sense aptitude standards. To the point where it is having a downstream effect on universities having to tie up an unreasonable amount of resources on remedial education
Show HN: GuardRails – A new coding agent task tool inspired by Beads
by giancarlostoro | 2026-02-19 14:22:25+00:00
GitHub: https://github.com/Giancarlos/guardrails

Good morning from the east coast,

I've been architecting GuardRails for about a month if not longer now, finally checked in the code a week or so ago. Its a tool that lets you have your coding agent (I've been using it with Claude Code) use a ticketing system like Beads or for those unfamiliar, like Jira.

The reason I made a new tool as opposed to sticking to Beads is two primary reasons:

1) Beads is married to git, works with git hooks, needs them. I sometimes work with projects on other version control systems, on machines that don't even have git installed. This is not good for me, as much as I love Beads. The other related reason is that it bugs out sometimes.

2) In Beads the "bead" or task has no safetynet, or guard rail if you will to stop the AI agent from completing a task without validation.

In GuardRails I started from the bottom up. I designed it to be SQLite first, using Go, and I implemented a concept called gates. A gate is what prevents your AI model from completing a task. A gate can be as simple as "run unit tests" or "build the project to ensure no build issues are found" and even "ask the human for manual testing" whatever you want it to be, its just there to prevent your agent from just closing a task. Every task requires one gate. Gates can be re-used, and if you re-use one, this new copy must pass for your new task(s).

It is still early stages, and I'm still working out what features to add. I am definitely looking to add a web interface though I think as a separate tool so you can run it once and see the tasks and their statuses, as well as all your gates.

Another thing worth noting is currently it supports two-way synching for GitHub issues, so whether you want to pull down GitHub issues for your agent to work on, or sync up GitHub issues. Worth noting is that I implemented a "claim" system when you pull down a specific GitHub task, the agent will comment for you to signal to others that someone could potentially be working on a GitHub task. In the future I want to figure out a way to have the agent first check a project for its AI policies to ensure that it does not claim a task it shouldn't be working on (we all saw this happen on HN recently).

For those wondering, I definitely "vibe coded" this, though I hate that term because it takes away from all the work I put into designing and testing this tool. All of the tickets I have generated locally are up on the GitHub, you can see what's planned, what's been worked on, and what have you. I use it for all my personal projects, hoping to showcase those as well in the future.

I welcome any feedback.

Thanks,
Giancarlos
by nananana9 | 2026-02-19 14:22:35+00:00
template <typename T>
struct Slice {
T* data = nullptr;
size_t size = nullptr;

T& operator[](size_t index) {
if (index >= size) crash_the_program();
return data[index];
}
};

If you're considering this extension, just use C++ and 5 lines of standard, portable, no-weird-annotations code instead.
by alphawhisky | 2026-02-19 14:23:06+00:00
Being informed of what? Whatever their dad tells them? Although the pitfalls of social media are many, the answer lies with regulation and moderation, not banning a significant portion of the population from them. The diversity of perspective and opinion is what allows people to gain the exposure needed to develop informed opinions. What blows my mind is that governments have the world's biggest media market makers by the throat and they refuse to force regulation. If they removed AI, made the algos public/modifiable, and actually moderated content for age restricted stuff this wouldn't be an issue.
by akagr | 2026-02-19 14:23:09+00:00
Pebble was my first smartwatch, all the way back in 2015. It was fun and quirky back when it was first released. Then it stopped production for many years while smartwatch category grew. Now they're coming back with same/similar models as before.

For me, its value lies more in nostalgia than anything else. I don't expect it to ever compete with the likes of my Apple watch for smart features, or a Garmin for activity tracking.

That said, it's an e-paper display so battery life is pretty good. Plus it had (and probably will have) an active community of small apps and watchfaces, which kept (and probably will keep) it from becoming stale quickly.
by gruez | 2026-02-19 14:23:18+00:00
>You're either at a third grade level or not. This adjustment seems to have no purpose other than completing a narrative that does not help solve the problem.

How should you measure an education system? Should you measure purely based on the student's performance? What if the students are just better at reading, independent of the school? It's not hard to imagine that even with identical teachers, that inner cities schools would have worse test scores than wealthy suburban schools, especially if the latter are rich enough to afford tutors, the family environment is more conductive to learning, etc. Recognizing this fact, it's fairly obvious that "you're either at a third grade level or not" is a terrible way of assessing how good of a job an educational system is doing.
by saberience | 2026-02-19 14:23:33+00:00
Heh, I find Codex to be a far, far smarter model than Claude Code.

And there's a good reason the most "famous" vibe coders, including the OpenClaw creator all moved to Codex, it's just better.

Claude writes a lot more code to do anything, tons of redundent code, repeated code etc. Codex is only model I've seen which occasionally removes more code than it writes.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-02-19 14:23:37+00:00
Applies equaly to land mines and crack cocaine.

The tension between freedom and public health is obviously very real. That's why liberal democracies generally rely on public debate and expert opinions to decide what should be controlled and what should be widely available.

Turns out, the expert opinions on social media is not very good and very much in favour of a ban for minors. Also turns out that the public is apparently in support of the ban.
Show HN: Decks For Good – get fundraising advice when you give to charity
by rogerdickey | 2026-02-19 14:23:56+00:00
As an angel investor in ~15 unicorns and a bunch of other startups, I spend a lot of time reviewing decks for founders as a favor. I love to help but I wish my time had even more impact. So I built Decks For Good, a website where founders can get feedback on their deck and fundraising process from a VC or exited founder in exchange for a $250 donation to charity. We put together a great group of advisors and we're ready to help you out! Sign up and let's do some good together.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2026-02-19 14:24:12+00:00
It's also quite likely that the reincarnations of Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Jesus are sprinkled among the same idealistic helpers.

> the hatred of USAID seems to be tied into hatred of...

...foreigners, people of different races, and multiculturalism in general. There, I unraveled their primary thought process for you.

Remember, we're talking about administration officials who probably couldn't spell USAID, who say immigrants "poison our blood", and who have no problem spending billions on other countries when the money goes towards hurting them instead of helping them (see: Venezuela, Iran, etc.).
by randusername | 2026-02-19 14:24:30+00:00
> “The devil is in the details,” they say. And so is the beauty, the thinking, the “but …”. Maybe that’s why the phrase “elevator pitch” gives me a shiver.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately.

For me, the meaning lies in the mental models. How I relate to the new thing, how it fits in with other things I know about. So the elevator pitch is the part that has the _most_ meaning. It changes the trajectory of if I engage and how. Then I'll dig in.

I'm still working to understand the headspace of those like OP. It's not a fixation on precision or correctness I think, just a reverse prioritization of how information is assimilated. It's like the meaning is discerned in the process of the reasoning first, not necessarily the outcome.

All my relationships will be the better for it if I can figure out the right mental models for this kind of translation between communication styles.
by tahigichigi | 2026-02-19 14:24:33+00:00
The best is when you use a speech to text app like Whispr Flow and just ramble to the AI about an idea or an experience, get your thoughts out and it returns a silhouette of an insight or article.

So when people say they never get a good output it's because they're trying to from

thought > article

instead of

thought > exploration > direction > structure > outline > article
by yoav | 2026-02-19 14:24:33+00:00
Hey HN, Electrobun creator here. Thanks for posting this.

We just hit v1 - stable which means I've locked down the architecture. If you run into any bugs or need specific apis that you miss from Electron or Tauri please open Github issues and I'll prioritize them. I shipped 50,000 lines of code changes stabilizing and polishing electrobun for v1 over the last month.

Here's a video demo of Colab (also open source) (a hybrid web browser + code editor + PTY terminal) that is built with Electrobun https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWTCqGmE86w

Electrobun uses the system webview by default, but a lot of the hello worlds feature the bundleCEF option. Because Electrobun is architected to be webview agnostic when servo and ladybird are ready they should be drop-in alternatives.

Electrobun apps also auto generate a zstd self-extraction wrapper and patch files with every release, so your initial download will be much smaller than if you'd used zip and your updates will be as small as 14KB so you can ship as often as you like without you or your users paying the bandwidth tax.
by geerlingguy | 2026-02-19 14:24:46+00:00
As a Catholic, the part discussing Mary's role in the story is quite at odds with what I read, both from medieval times and more modern.

I wonder if the perspective in the article comes more from a Protestant understanding of Mary?

In Catholic teaching at least, Mary's "fiat" ("Yes") was one of the most pivotal moments in salvation history, and Mary is regarded as the "Queen" of all saints, for her role and her personal decision to say yes.
by mysocialguard | 2026-02-19 14:25:18+00:00
You've hit the nail on the head regarding the biggest challenges for any reputation system.

On Libel/Defamation: This is why MySocialGuard doesn't act as a 'judge.' Instead of making definitive claims, we provide a platform for community-sourced signals. We are implementing a 'consensus threshold' model where data is only highlighted after multiple independent reports and evidence are provided, similar to how community-driven spam filters or 'Community Notes' work.

On Privacy (GDPR/CCPA): MySocialGuard is a live platform, and we are actively navigating these challenges. Our primary focus is on publicly used identifiers involved in transactions (like crypto wallets and business-related handles). However, balancing transparency with privacy is our top priority. We are currently building out 'Right to Dispute' mechanisms and strict data-handling policies to ensure we remain compliant as we scale globally.

I believe the 'public interest' in preventing financial fraud provides a strong baseline for this, but I'm fully committed to refining our legal framework as the platform grows.
by creatonez | 2026-02-19 14:25:22+00:00
It will be a while before JNI itself is dead, because far too much stuff still relies on it. The unsafe helpers in the Java standard library will die first because they are fundamentally incompatible with Valhalla, but it's likely the simple cases will last a while as there are vast swaths of glue code that needs to be rewritten.

IIRC Minecraft is still using entirely JNI and no FFM yet. That will probably start to change in the near future, though. Some modders have already been replacing their own natives with FFM versions.
by prodigycorp | 2026-02-19 14:26:11+00:00
Iirc Obama era policies actually made things worse. There was a plain English episode about it.

To my recollection, the gist of it was that although no child left behind forced administrators to overly index to a certain set of grades, the loosening of it led to the meaninglessness of grades entirely.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/plain-english-with-der...