MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mark_l_watson | 2026-02-23 12:33:47+00:00
Use of Chinese models: If I had not got a discount for signing up for a full year of Gemini AI Pro for something like $14/month, I might have started just using a Chinese chat model for things where privacy is not an issue. Ironic that I am now paying for both Gemini AI Plus and also $20/month for Ollama Cloud (as a super easy way to experiment with many open models). I am also paying Proton $10/month to use their handy lumo+ private chat service built on Mistral models. I feel like I am spending too much money but I don’t want to feel locked into just a few vendors, and to be honest it is fun having alternatives. A year ago I used APIs for Chinese models (and Mistral in France) and the cost was really low.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-23 12:34:36+00:00
Now there are gallium nitride microwave transistors that can produce very high microwave power at very high efficiency. So that is no longer a limitation.

Microwave ovens with such transistors have been demonstrated, which have the advantage of modulating the microwaves in such a way as to achieve a more uniform heating throughout the oven, than can be achieved with the fixed-frequency magnetrons.

At least for now, such microwave ovens with transistors might be encountered only in some professional applications, because these transistors together with the associated control circuits remain much more expensive than magnetrons.
by input_sh | 2026-02-23 12:35:07+00:00
Because they're run by completely separate teams of moderators and Wikimedia (as in the organization) basically never interferes with other versions of Wikipedia?

Because every other language has far worse moderation, and you can pretty much guess how good the moderation is simply by asking yourself how relevant that version of Wikipedia even is in the first place?

I can understand 6 different versions of Wikipedia and my experience is the complete opposite of what you're insinuating, English version beats the other five 99.8% of the time even the topic at hand is completely local.
by somenameforme | 2026-02-23 12:36:58+00:00
Agreed. I'd also say that I think our habit of canonizing whoever happens to be perceived as the 'good guy' in history, and demonizing the 'bad guy' tends to make history much more difficult to learn from, because the people involved go from being real humans to actors in a very artificial Hollywood style story of good vs evil.

The real story here is one that has played out endlessly in history in various contexts. And is a great example of why The Golden Rule is something valuable to abide, even if you're completely self centered. It also emphasizes that all people, even the Pope, are human - and subject to the same insecurities, pettiness, and other weaknesses as every other human. And more. It's a tale of humanity that has and will continue to repeat indefinitely.

But when you turn it into a story of good vs evil, you lose all of this and instead get a pointless attack on one institution, which is largely incidental to what happened. For instance you can see the Galileo story clearly in the tale of Billy Mitchell [1] who went from suggesting that air forces would dominate the future of warfare (back in 1919!) to getting court martialed and 'retired' for his way of trying to argue for such. His views would go on to be shown to be 100% correct in 1937, the first time a plane downed a capital naval ship. However, he died in 1936.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell#
by ojagodzinski | 2026-02-23 12:37:12+00:00
- pick up phone (unlock done automatically via face/finger/location)

- swipe finger to the right to show weather OR swipe finger to the left to show callendar

Android widgets show me much more information about weather and calendar view than these monitors (and are free: weawow https://weawow.com/i/app-download + google callendar).
by vincentvandeth | 2026-02-23 12:37:13+00:00
Great list. I've been running a multi-agent orchestration system (11 specialized AI agents) in production for 6 months and your #2 and #5 resonate hard.

What I'd add:

6. Confidence without evidence. Agents will report "task complete" with high confidence when the output is plausible but wrong. Without automated validation gates, you won't catch it until production breaks.
7. Context drift in long sessions. After 50+ tool calls, agents start losing track of earlier decisions. They'll contradict their own architecture choices from 20 minutes ago. Session length is an underrated failure vector.
8. The "almost right" problem. Agents rarely fail catastrophically — they fail subtly. Code that passes tests but misses edge cases. Docs that look complete but have wrong cross-references. This is worse than obvious failures because you trust the output.

What fixed most of these for me:

Quality gates between agents — no agent's output moves forward without automated checks (tests, schema validation, consistency checks)
Evidence-based confidence scores — not "how sure are you?" but "what specific evidence supports this output?"

Human-in-the-loop at decision points, not everywhere. You can't review everything, so you design the system to surface the right moments for human judgment
Small scoped tasks, agents working on 150-300 line PRs with clear acceptance criteria fail way less than agents given open-ended goals

Your #5 (implementation gap) is the one I see most people underestimate. The fix isn't better agents, it's better systems around the agents.

Happy to share more details about the architecture if anyone's interested
by antonyh | 2026-02-23 12:38:16+00:00
On one hand this is not good but predictable. I'm on longer-term commitments with OVH, so it will be interesting to see how they follow. I'm still keeping Hetzner on my shopping list, even with the increase the bare-metal offerings are within my budget, and now that prices have increases they should be stable for a while (also import for budget management).
by abuyalip | 2026-02-23 12:39:06+00:00
I still don’t buy this “safer more modern” mentality. Modern C++ pretty much solves the safety issues. People need to learn how to use tools properly.

If you ask me, Go is a better Rust. Rust is an ugly version of C++ with longer compile times and a band of zealous missionaries.

I mean the keywords mut and fn very annoying to read just get rid of them or spell the f*n thing function.
by harshreality | 2026-02-23 12:39:23+00:00
Those are lowball system requirements too.

You can easily play or spectate a low-unit count game of BAR on any decent 2010+ quad core.

Such a computer won't allow you to play 8v8 that goes into the late-game stage. Sometimes not even 4v4 or 2v2 with players scaling to high unit counts. Some players try anyway. Ignoring player disconnections, half the drama of large-scale games is the one player who's lagging because they're on a potato computer. If the sim doesn't lag, the game will at least be down to single-digit fps.

That means you can't really play multiplayer comfortably, at least not beyond 2-4 players.

For that, you need a recent ryzen or intel. I'd estimate recent as post-covid.

I don't know what combination of things is important; there's larger cpu caches, faster sustained CPU frequencies (TDP and cooling matter there), hardware mitigations for speculative execution bugs, faster ram, resizeable BAR support... but in my experience going from a 6-core skylake-era cpu to a ryzen 9xxx, with the same gpu, made a massive difference. I saw no massive improvement going from a 4-core 2010-era cpu to a 6-core skylake-era cpu; I'd classify both as potatoes for BAR purposes.
by stefanrows | 2026-02-23 12:40:02+00:00
Hey there!

I have recently created ProofSwap because I was really struggling to get social proof for the app that I have built prior to this one.

I am an introvert and I have a hard time cold DM'ing people asking for favors (even I always offered to return the favor, of course). It just doesn't feel right to me.

Therefore, I thought, why not creating an app that handles that initial connection automatically based on mutual interest.

You can just log in with X and create a listing - then you can choose what you want (Tweet, Backlink, Testimonial, Feedback, Other) and what you are able to give in exchange (same options).

After that your project is listed and can be viewed by other users - they can then post a Tweet for instance and share the link with you, you can then accept it or file for dispute if something is wrong or needs a review.

Then, of course, it's up to you to return the favor. I have implemented a merit system that allows you to earn credits, and I am in the process to implement a exchange rating system (basically star-ratings for users).

Users with a lot of credits and a good rating automatically get listed further up top and maybe eventually highlighted later on, so it will be easier to get exchanges.

There are still a lot of moving parts, but I really love how this is developing. If you want to check it out - it's completely free to use. I was planning to finance it entirely via Sponsor Ad Slots in the Sidebars (like Marc Lou's TrustMRR in the beginning).

It would be awesome if you check it out, or if you have some feedback / feature requests, I'm all ears!

Happy shipping!
by varispeed | 2026-02-23 12:40:04+00:00
The models used for apps like Codex, are they designed to mimic human behaviour - as in they deliberately create errors in code that then you have to spend time debugging and fixing or it is natural flaw and that humans also do it is a coincidence?

This keeps bothering me, why they need several iterations to arrive at correct solution instead of doing it first time. The prompts like "repeat solving it until it is correct" don't help.
by tsimionescu | 2026-02-23 12:40:07+00:00
No, cameras cannot create reliable distance measurements in real-world conditions. Parallax is not a great way to measure distance for fast, unpredictably moving objects (such as cars on the road). And dirt or misalignment can significantly reduce accuracy compared to lab conditions.

Note that humans do not rely strictly on our eyes as cameras to measure distances. There is a huge amount of inference about the world based on our internal world models that goes into vision. For example, if you put is in a false-perspective or otherwise highly artifical environment, our visual acuity goes down significantly; conversely, people with a single eye (so no parallax-based measurement ability) still have quite decent depth perception compared to what you'd naively expect. Not to mention, our eyes are kept very clean, and maintain their alignment to a very high degree of precision.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-02-23 12:40:26+00:00
"It was always shit everywhere" is revisionist history born out of the fantasy of statists looking to justify the modern (administrative) enforcement state.

While the lack of anonymity in small towns certainly puts a damper on one's ability to deviate too far from social norms, the list of things and subject that could get you subjected to government violence without creating a victimized party was infinity shorter. Things that get state or state deputized enforcers on your case today were matters of "yeah that's distasteful, he'll have to settle that with god" or it would come back to bite you when something happened 150+yr ago because society did not have the surplus to justify paying nearly as manny people to go around looking for deviance that could be leveraged to extract money. These people had way more practical day to day freedom to run and better their lives than we do now, if constrained by the fact that they had substantially less wealth to leverage to that effect.

> Modern Homeowners Associations prove that localized oversight is often the most intrusive form of management

And they almost exclusively deal in things that historical societies didn't even bother to regulate.

You're beyond delusional if you think running afoul of HOA is worse than running afoul of the local, state or federal government. Yeah they can screech and send you scary letter with scary numbers but they don't get the buddy treatment from courts that "real" governments do (to the great injustice of their victims) and their procedural avenues for screwing their victims on multiple axis are way more limited.

Seriously, go get in a pissing match with a municipality over just where the line for "requires permit" is and get back to me. Unless you want to do something that is more than petty cosmetic stuff and unambiguously in violation of the rules a HOA is a paper tiger for the most part (not to say that they don't suck).
by MITSardine | 2026-02-23 12:40:48+00:00
I'm only discovering Literate Programming today, but you seem very familiar so I might as well ask: what is the fundamental difference with abundant comments? Is it the linearity of it? I mean documentation type comments at the top of routines or at "checkpoints".

I'm particularly intrigued by your mention of keeping old code around. This is something I haven't found a solution for using git yet; I don't want to pollute the monorepo with "routine_old()"s but, at the same time, I'd like to keep track of why things changed (could be a benchmark).
by UltraSane | 2026-02-23 12:41:04+00:00
Waymo is the best current autonomous driving system and Waymo uses LIDAR. This is because LIDAR is an incredibly effective sensor for accurate range data. Vision and Radar range data is much less accurate and reliable.

Waymo used LIDAR in the realtime control loop. It combines LiDAR, camera, and radar data in real time to build a 3D representation of the environment, which is constantly updated.

I fundamentally don't trust any level 4 system that doesn't use LIDAR
by Havoc | 2026-02-23 12:41:08+00:00
> business types (think C-suite, sales, and product dev for any industry) have infinite amount of software they want built.

It may seem that way if you’re tasked with fulfilling such demands and are in the selling software business but it’s quite the opposite on end customers side ie buyer.

Software adds cost and complexity so absolutes minimum that still gets the job done is the aim. Software that enables some efficiency gain is good and worth the complexity of another system. But adding a second piece of something on same doesn’t have same favourable tradeoff. Nobody needs or wants two accounting systems. Or two ERPs. Or two slack clones.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-23 12:41:12+00:00
What people mostly see is the illusion of productivity. But the measure should be outcomes, not the amount of stuff made. If a factory produces 10x the product but it is only 1/3rd the quality of what it was before that is long term unsustainable and leaves the door open for a competitor to attack them on quality.

This is the key driver behind all those 'enshittification' problems that we see. Quantity over quality is almost always a balance and not a binary, if you start treating it as if one should always trump at the expense of the other then sooner or later it will catch up with you.
by FlamingMoe | 2026-02-23 12:41:40+00:00
I am confused why the announcement page says CCX33 in USA "Old price" is €59.49 but their main pricing page shows €50.49 for CCX33 in USA

Announcement page:
http://docs.hetzner.com/de/general/infrastructure-and-availa...

Pricing page:
https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/
by throwawayffffas | 2026-02-23 12:41:44+00:00
Yeah, that's the most impressive thing about this performance, the robots were safe enough to "interact" with children.

Even if we take into account the smaller size of the robots, it's still impressive, a bad input at the wrong time could easily cause of one of the robots to seriously injure someone, the fact this didn't happen and the producers and the company were confident that it wouldn't happen is the real breakthrough moment.
by saidinesh5 | 2026-02-23 12:41:56+00:00
> The more dynamic/animated an UI is, the less there's a difference between a retained- and immediate-mode API, since the UI needs to be redrawn each frame anyway. Immediate mode UIs might even be more efficient for highly dynamic UIs because they skip a lot of internal state update code - like creating/destroying/showing/hiding/moving widget objects).

That depends on the kind of animations - typically for user interfaces, it's just moving, scaling, playing with opacity etc.. that's just updating the matrices once.

So you describe the scene graph once (this rectangle here, upload that texture there, this border there) using DOM, QML etc..., and then just update the item properties on it.

As far as the end user/application developer is concerned , this is retained mode. As far as the GPU is considered it can be redrawing the whole UI every frame..
by woadwarrior01 | 2026-02-23 12:42:06+00:00
Yeah, that part doesn't make much sense to me. IMO, Swift has reasonably good C++ interop[1] and Swift's C interop has also significantly improved[2] since Swift 6.2.

[1]: https://www.swift.org/documentation/cxx-interop/

[2]: https://www.swift.org/blog/improving-usability-of-c-librarie...
Show HN: Pip_search revived: CAPTCHA-less challenge solver, significant speedup
by ink-splatters | 2026-02-23 12:43:27+00:00
As `pip search` has been dead for years, `pip_search` by @victorgarric filled that gap for me and despite doing PyPI web parsing, worked quite well.

The cat-and-mouse game between PyPI and the tool developer already lead to breakage of the tool in the past, and
recently it happened again: PyPI moved to a newer anti-bot flow using PAT (Private Access Tokens) by Fastly, beyond the earlier, simpler PoW checks.

I decided to give it a try and bring the tool back to life. And it worked out!

For reference: Fastly CAPTCHA-less login was presented at Apple WWDC in 2022 with follow-up article by Fastly themselves:

https://www.fastly.com/blog/private-access-tokens-stepping-i...

What I did:

- Deminified the challenge script and traced execution with headless Chromium (`zendriver`).

- Found that Chromium was being routed to a downgraded, solvable PoW with two postbacks.

- Reproduced that downgraded flow in pure Python by matching the relevant fingerprint behavior.

No Chromium dependency. (This would've been nasty!)

Codebase has increased in size, so, in order to make it manageable and maintain the quality, I significantly refactored it, introducing properly designed solver pipeline (PAT/PoW/metrics), stronger tests and modernizing project layout/tooling.

I also switched networking to `httpx` which, after some tuning, showed a fair speedup.

Feel free to give it a try:

uv tool install 'pip_search @ git+https://github.com/ink-splatters/pip_search'

I also submitted a PR and hope for the changes to be eventually upstreamed.

My final thoughts on this:

Honestly, it feels both rewarding and... weird that downgrading the challenge is a viable workaround tactics.

I would love feedback from people familiar with Fastly challenge internals!
by mark_l_watson | 2026-02-23 12:43:37+00:00
Excuse me giving you advice, unasked for: as part of your ‘digital life spring cleaning’ spend some time converting auth with Google/Apple/GitHub for services to logging in with your email (on your own domain) and some other second auth.

BTW, I tend to only use Google for services I pay for (YouTube+, APIs, Gemini Plus, sometimes GCP).
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-23 12:44:09+00:00
I'd be curious why Amazon's Prime app has such horrible performance compared to literally every other streaming service, on WebOS at least (on a relatively recent LG OLED). They're all doing more or less the same thing, as far as I can tell as a user at least, yet just moving the focus around in Amazon's streaming app takes 0.5 second while it's instant in other apps. The bandwidth for actual streaming seems the same as the others, so videos start streaming much faster, but the UI is seemingly doing something very wrong, and I don't understand how they could have gotten it so wrong.
by tsimionescu | 2026-02-23 12:44:15+00:00
Human/animal vision uses way more than parallax to judge distances and bearings - it uses a world model that evolved over millions of years to model the environment. That's why we can get excellent 3D images from a 2D screen, and also why our depth perception can be easily tricked with objects of unexpected size. Put a human or animal in an abstract environment with no shadows and no familiar objects, and you'll see that depth perception based solely on parallax is actually very bad.
by ericpauley | 2026-02-23 12:44:27+00:00
This was the example that really drove home all the other points for me. Not only is Valetudo opinionated software, but you'll be accused of having "fictional budget concerns" for wanting a very reasonable feature.

I occasionally take my Roborock upstairs on weekends for a vacuum. Turns out it will also do a basic mop run with the water in the tank. Takes me 5 minutes of setup/tear down to get an extra floor for no extra cost. It would take me more time to babysit the extra base cleaning task of a second mop, so this saves me time and money.

To me, this demonstrates that Valetudo is intended to be hobby pursuit of maximal automation/freedom at all costs, resulting in a system that has worse features and takes more work than the base software. I applaud the creator for being so clear in this mission to the point of explicitly encouraging me not to use it.
by lioeters | 2026-02-23 12:45:36+00:00
True, I agree. It's a good thing to accept a language's limitations and areas of suitability, without any judgement about whether the language is good for all purposes - which is likely not a good goal for a language to have anyway. I like that example of Roc, how it's explicitly planned to be not self-hosting. It makes sense to use different languages to suit the context, as all tools have particular strengths and weaknesses.

Off topic but I wonder if this applies to human languages, whether some are more suited for particular purposes - like German to express rigorous scientific thinking with compound words created just-in-time; Spanish for romantic lyrical situations; or Chinese for dense ideographs. People say languages can expand or limit not only what you can express but what you can think. That's certainly true of programming languages.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-23 12:45:56+00:00
>>> a significant % of users are profitable to serve, especially the "chat" users who don't use dev tools and have short context window conversations.

> More limited features, like lack of model selection, more restricted use of “thinking” models.

Yeah, but... do the "chat" users actually care about any of that? Would they even notice a difference?

My point is that, if all you're doing is chat, there's no value in any of the subscription models - for chat they are more than sufficient, so even someone spending the whole day chatting about something isn't going to hit any limits.
by gck1 | 2026-02-23 12:46:00+00:00
This is likely just the first wave. If this component hoarding by AI continues, and it likely will, at some point, it will be just OpenAI and Anthropic who can afford to have compute.

This has affected SSDs first, then RAM, then HDD and it doesn't look like even HDD manufacturers are going to increase production. So unless groups of people suddenly learn how to manufacture all of this hardware and open factories quickly, it's going to be a very fun next few years.

People have been predicting SaaS will die for all the wrong reasons. It's not that anyone can ship a SaaS clone by prompting an AI, it's that nobody is going to have access to the hardware required.
by berenddeperend | 2026-02-23 12:46:20+00:00
Wouldn't that be easy to bypass by just adding one or two proxy accounts? Say person A invites me (a bad actor). I could invite a second throwaway account, with which I invite a third throwaway account. I do bad things on my third account. Could you reasonably punish person A for this? You'd first have to prove that the throwaway accounts all belong to me.