MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wongarsu | 2026-02-20 09:23:51+00:00
Notice how all the major AI companies (at least the ones that don't do open releases) stopped telling us how many parameters their models have. Parameter count was used as a measure for how great the proprietary models were until GPT3, then it suddenly stopped.

And how inference prices have come down a lot, despite increasing pressure to make money. Opus 4.6 is $25/MTok, Opus 4.1 was $75/MTok, the same as Opus 4 and Opus 3. OpenAI's o1 was $60/MTok, o1 pro $600/MTok, gpt-5.2 is $14/MTok and 5.2-pro is $168/MTok.

Also note how GPT-4 was rumored to be in the 1.8T realm, and now Chinese models in the 1T realm can match or surpass it. And I doubt the Chinese have a monopoly on those efficiency improvements

I doubt frontier models have actually substantially grown in size in the last 1.5 years, and potentially have a lot fewer parameters than the frontier models of old
by stroebs | 2026-02-20 09:23:55+00:00
The Bottlerocket issues really surprise me - not an experience I've shared even with heavy use. I use EKS with Bottlerocket + managed addons + Karpenter, and our security team is super happy that _nobody_ has access to the underlying nodes. Immutable OS is a key selling point, and Brupop "just works" to keep everything up to date without any input. Patching nodes is something I haven't had to think about in almost a year.
by gudzpoz | 2026-02-20 09:24:22+00:00
Unfortunately, many Qwerty typing guides group keys in left-leaning columns [1], requiring many to twist their left wrist. And this is why I hope the angle mod [2] from the Colemak community gets more mainstream recognition: instead of learning to twist your wrist, just shift the keys to let them adapt to you. This "un-kinks" the layout, allowing your left wrist to remain perfectly straight while your arm approaches the keyboard at a natural, relaxed angle like the person in the right side of the drawing.

[1] https://www.keybr.com/

[2] https://colemakmods.github.io/ergonomic-mods/angle.html
Show HN: Chowser – A lightweight macOS browser chooser
by bsreeram08 | 2026-02-20 09:24:33+00:00
Hey HN,

I vibed Chowser because I was tired of links always opening in my "default" browser when I wanted them in a specific session (work, personal, research, etc.).

Chowser is a lightweight macOS app that acts as your default browser. Instead of opening a link immediately, it pops up a sleek picker that lets you choose which browser to use for that specific link.

Key Features:
Lightweight & Native: Built with SwiftUI/AppKit. It lives in your menu bar and uses zero resources when idle.
Keyboard First: Press ⌘⇧1 through ⌘⇧9 to snap-select a browser instantly.
Set & Forget: Once it's set as your default browser, it stays out of your way until you click a link.
Open Source: Fully open source under MIT.
Tech Stack:
Swift, SwiftUI, and AppKit. I wanted something that felt like a native part of macOS, not a heavy web-wrapper.

Check it out:
GitHub: https://github.com/bsreeram08/chowser
Download (DMG): https://github.com/bsreeram08/chowser/releases

Thanks! sreeram
by rahulroy | 2026-02-20 09:25:05+00:00
In the meantime, I'm trying to update Antigravity to use the latest version, but it just wouldn't update itself, nor would it let me use 3.0 model. I restarted multiple times with the same result.

I tried telling this to agent, and it keeps repeating the same phrase "Gemini 3.1 Pro is not available on this version. Please upgrade to the latest version."

Congratulations on beating the benchmarks, but I wonder how much effort is devoted on improving DX?

Edit: It's updated now, I can confirm with "There are currently no updates available.". It still doesn't let me continue with the conversation. I'm able to create new session though.
by mort96 | 2026-02-20 09:25:20+00:00
C++ implementations of defer are either really ugly thanks to using lambdas and explicitly named variables which only exist to have scoped object, or they depend on macros which need to have either a long manually namespaced name or you risk stepping on the toes of a library. I had to rename my defer macro from DEFER to MYPOROGRAM_DEFER in a project due to a macro collision.

C++ would be a nicer language with native defer. Working directly with C APIs (which is one of the main reasons to use C++ over Rust or Zig these days) would greatly benefit from it.
by jbstack | 2026-02-20 09:25:43+00:00
If you don't already know about it, I recommend https://www.keybr.com/ for learning new keyboard layouts. It introduces letters one at a time and waits until you hit a threshold speed before introducing the next one. If you commit to doing 15-30 minutes a day consistently, you can get to an acceptable speed more quickly than if you try to learn in an ad hoc way.
by robinsonb5 | 2026-02-20 09:25:48+00:00
To be honest I have similar reservations.

The one huge advantage of C is its ubiquity - you can use it on the latest shiny computer / OS / compiler as well as some obscure embedded platform with a compiler that hasn't been updated since 2002. (That's a rare enough situation to be unimportant, right? /laughs in industrial control gear.)

I'm wary of anything which fragments the language and makes it inaccessible to subsections of its traditional strongholds.

While I'm not a huge fan of the "just use Rust" attitude that crops up so often these days, you could certainly make an argument that if you want modern language features you should be using a more modern language.

(And, for the record, I do still write software - albeit recreationally - for computers that have floppy drives.)
by ShowalkKama | 2026-02-20 09:28:04+00:00
how did grok gain access to this supposedly private information? Did it pilfer her private emails? Did it hack the producer's website and gained access to confidential files? Did it look through her computer?

Look, I hate grok just as much as the next person but if it was just crawled then by definition it is not private.

You may very well argue that people are harassing her (and that it's not ok), you may even argue that AI should not facilitate such harassment but to call publicly available information private is mental gymnastic.
by stackbutterflow | 2026-02-20 09:28:14+00:00
In conclusion from the `What you realistically can't avoid` section is that running entirely on non american services will never happen.

Unless some entity pours hundreds of billions (trillions?) of euros into solving this over multiple decades there will be no way to replace google ads and sign in with google/apple. The AI part seems to be the easiest thing to solve in the list, that says something.
by tovej | 2026-02-20 09:29:11+00:00
The premise of those comments, just like the premise in this thread, is ridiculous and fantastical.

The only way generative AI has changed the creative arts is that it's made it easier to produce low quality slop.

I would not call that a true transformation. I'd call that saving costs at the expense of quality.

The same is true of software. The difference is, unlike art, quality in software has very clear safety and security implications.

This gen AI hype is just the crypto hype all over again but with a sci-fi twist in the narrative. It's a worse form of work just like crypto was a worse form of money.
by Daegalus | 2026-02-20 09:30:20+00:00
Great post, I did a similar switch mid last year.

Hetzner was something I already used, so I just doubled down. I have a single OVH instance where I ma playing with Openclaw, but that was because I was having issues with Hetzner that day on their new instance page (was fixed the next day)

I use Bunny for my CDN, I just wish they have the capabilityt to route IPv4 and IPv6 traffic to IPv6 only origins. If your origin doesn't have IPv4, it wont route IPv4 to an IPv6 origin. Something Cloudflare could do. Still a shame its not a high priority.

For Domains, I am still on porkbun, but i have like 20 domains, and moving them to EU registrars would be pricey. I will do it, just not looking forward to it. Also there are few registrars tht handle all the TLDs i have, nothing like Porkbun. I use dot.bs to optimize my registrars and keep track of them.

I self-host a lot, but I haven't done github. I have a Forgejo instance with working CI/CD, but there are some painpoints mirroring 100s of repos and updating PATs. Also I minimize how much critical infra I host. I do it as my day job. Don't want to do it so much at home, and I still do some between NAS and self-hosted services I do run.

I do plan to try out Hanko and Nebius, those sound good. and Hit up scaleway to see if there is stuff I want to use there. I know Scaleway can be pricey.
by inglor_cz | 2026-02-20 09:31:33+00:00
You are really obsessed with my testicles. That is a weird comparison, but at least you know that you're not a bot. This would be too weird for a LLM to produce.

In general, I don't think your irony is as strong as you think. Shrinkage of various materials in the cold is the original basis for a thermometer.

Of course it is better to use something better-observable like mercury. But in absence of an industrial civilization, you don't have mercury to measure.
by willy__ | 2026-02-20 09:31:39+00:00
I asked myself the same thing, trustpilot is pretty rough on them and a lot of people tell you online to stay away from them. I also had very good support experience so far. Their shared TEM IP had some deliverability issues at times, but they seem to have cracked down on this recently. I am on dedicated IP now, so I can't really judge if there have been improvements.
by mschuster91 | 2026-02-20 09:32:27+00:00
> Everyone has the same and equal meaningless vote.

There is one vote that is not meaningless: the primaries. A lot of the issues y'all have is that Democrats and Republicans alike don't bother to vote in the primaries. That is how you got people like MTG or Trump, that is how you get people like Chuck Schumer stuck in office for far too long.

AOC/The Squad and Mamdani both proved that it is possible to succeed in a primary and offer voters an actual alternative to the corporate owned shills.
by georgefrowny | 2026-02-20 09:32:54+00:00
It's always been like that. Waterfall development was worse and that's why the Agilists invented Agile.

YOLOing code into a huge pile at top speed is always faster than any other workflow at first.

The thing is, a gigantic YOLO'd code pile (fake it till you make it mode) used to be an asset as well as a liability. These days, the code pile is essentially free - anyone with some AI tools can shit out MSLoCs of code now. So it's only barely an asset, but the complexity of longer term maintenance is superlinear in code volume so the liability is larger.
by lejalv | 2026-02-20 09:32:57+00:00
Can you explain how you mean this? Obviously, it helps if the knowledge of the codebase is with a trusted partner. But taking as an example Grist (https://getgrist.org), which is developed by a NY-based US company and is part of the French La suite numérique (LSN). Should a geopolitical reason get in the way of Grist devs further collaborating with LSN, don't you think that France's sovereignty is safeguarded by the availability of the code?

Granted, it'd be a setback. But nothing a couple of dedicated French devs could not tackle.

What am I missing?
by anovikov | 2026-02-20 09:32:59+00:00
This is good. But because societies are democratic, and most voters are now economically irrelevant, something has to be done about possibility to create discontent simply to shake things and weaken countries - because there is nothing this discontent can achieve (you can't turn objectively irrelevant people, relevant again).

If top 10% of people create half of all spending and more of the spending on nonessentials, thus feeding majority of economy/creating majority of value, things will revolve around them. Something has to be done so that the other 90% won't be trying to break things down just for the sake of it. It's also that top 3% pay half of all federal taxes. Can we expect that the government will really care about others? It's also that same top 3% have a net worth of $5-6M and up - in the "never have to work again unless it's real fun" range.

If the majority of government funding and good half of corporate value comes from people who don't care anymore because they have arrived, can we expect anyone to be a responsible voter? We are firmly in 'bread and circuses' area.
by yoavm | 2026-02-20 09:33:06+00:00
Billions of euros over multiple decades? Why?

Seems to me like it's mainly regulation. The thing that makes people in China, or Russia, for example, not use Google - isn't that Yandex / Baidu got tons of investments. It is that people can't easily access Google. If the EU decides to pull the switch (or if the US decides to do so), we have enough competence people here to build a search engine.
by inglor_cz | 2026-02-20 09:33:17+00:00
"makes sense that marathoners get CRC because hunter-gatherers probably don't run that much"

That is a misinterpretation of what I wrote. Let me reformulate.

"Marathons are so much more extreme than what we used to do in the Stone Age, that some pathologies resulting from such long-term physical overload are to be expected." I don't see anything lala about that. You do extreme things, you reap some consequences, sooner or later.

I would say that marathons go beyond our design parameters, but my experience in HN is that the "design" metaphor always conjures some people who consider it a dog-whistle for intelligent design (as opposed to evolution), not just an imprecise metaphor, as metaphors usually are. So I avoid it in order not to attract a senseless fight.
by lioeters | 2026-02-20 09:33:52+00:00
Even within a single computer or program, there is need for communication protocols and shared understanding - such as types, data schema, function signatures. It's the interface between functions, programs, languages, machines.

It could also be argued that "reuse" doesn't necessarily mean reusing the actual code as material, but reusing the concepts and algorithms. In that sense, most code is reuse of some previous code, written differently every time but expressing the same ideas, building on prior art and history.

That might support GP's comment that "code reuse" is overemphasized, since the code itself is not what's valuable, what the user wants is the computation it represents. If you can speak to a computer and get the same result, then no code is even necessary as a medium. (But internally, code is being generated on the fly.)
by bambax | 2026-02-20 09:34:09+00:00
Good, honest write up! As users we need to make more efforts to move out of the American ecosystems. Cloudflare is just so convenient to take only one example.

OT, about the finished product (hank.parts): the French translation and tone is a little rude. For one, it uses "tu" instead of "vous", which does have become customary on Social networks but is still a little bit agressive on a regular website. And "bagnole" or "balance une photo" is more than casual.

Maybe the target are young people but I wouldn't bet on it. Average car ownership in Europe is 53, and 55 in France. Share of new vehicle registrations by adults aged 18-34 is below 10% in Europe.

My two cents.
by Misteur-Z | 2026-02-20 09:34:12+00:00
* Scaleway is totally painful/scary on data encryption at rest and in transit, does not feel like your infra/data is isolated from other customers

* OVHCloud is good if you deploy your production in HA fashion with higher tiers or do multi-region yourself using a vRack, real issue that they made the news with burning DCs, the fact that the customer base has been originally a gazillion cheap web servers does not help big companies going in, they are going somewhere on the SaaS

On most European cloud providers I feel like IAM is crap: workload identity is almost non-existent, API keys management is usually hellish. Same goes for encryption/isolation. I want to hear more technical feedback on most of them, devil is in the details !
by willis936 | 2026-02-20 09:34:42+00:00
The problem with openSCAD is that you cannot modify it easily. I had made a complex geometry several years ago in openSCAD and I have been waiting for a model that can actually convert it into a python script that generates freecad parametric sketches that recreate it in an editable way. All frontier models fail at this, some more spectacularly than others (gemini never spent 40 minutes / $4 trying and failing, but opus 4.6 did).

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4335532
by phicoh | 2026-02-20 09:36:31+00:00
In general it would help if you would spend some text on describing what features of C99 are missing in other languages. Giving some code and assume that the reader will figure it out is not very effective.

As far as I can tell, Rust can do what it is in your example (which different syntax of course) except for this particular way of initializing an array.

To me, that seems like a pretty minor syntax issue to that could be added to Rust if there would be a lot of demand for initializing arrays this way.
by GreenWatermelon | 2026-02-20 09:36:48+00:00
The first post this guy has written in years and it's LLM/AI Written.

> The AI rip-off was not just ugly. It was careless, blatantly amateuristic, and lacking any ambition, to put it gently. Microsoft unworthy. The carefully crafted visual language and layout of the original, the branch colors, the lane design, the dot and bubble alignment that made the original so readable—all of it had been muddled into a laughable form. Proper AI slop.

Here we see "not just x" pattern combined with 3-items list. The closing short quip, and an emdash despite the author never having used them in any of his older posts, even the one from 2021. I don't know of he told an LLM to generate a post for the irony effect, or if he just couldn't be bothered to write.

In his (or his LMM's) own words:

> obviously AI-slop-y enough

Proper AI slop.
by alanpearce | 2026-02-20 09:38:52+00:00
I used to work on for a company on a product that did exactly this, but the company stopped working on that product since it didn't go anywhere (API docs seem to still be online though :D https://docs.satoshipay.io/api/).
Some small publishers liked it, big ones wanted to force their customers to subscribe (whilst recording their data at the same time).

I really like the general idea though and hope it does make a comeback. I think it would be good for review/test sites especially.
by quietbritishjim | 2026-02-20 09:38:55+00:00
The point of the mythical man month is not that more people are necessarily worse for a project, it's just that adding them at the last minute doesn't work, because they take a while to get up to speed and existing project members are distracted while trying to help them.

It's true that a larger team, formed well in advance, is also less efficient per person, but they still can achieve more overall than small teams (sometimes).
by jeroenhd | 2026-02-20 09:39:37+00:00
If you're spending 170 euros on coffee then you're either abnormally rich or abnormally bad with money for a Dutchman.

Without the ability to upgrade either storage or RAM, a 256GB SSD with 16GB RAM is quite useless for a home server. Minisforum doesn't offer any options with that little RAM and storage it seems (you can pick between barebones and 1TB models).

The bare minimum spec for the Mac Mini sits at an interesting price point, but if you use it for any more than the bare minimum it'll be pretty restrictive with how memory-hungry macOS has become. No Linux support to speak of also makes for a rather mediocre home server experience.

One interesting part I found out of Apple's European pricing is that after currency conversion and subtracting VAT, the European price is still equivalent to $700, which is $100 more than they charge within the US. Looks like a 1/6th price increase is all you need for consumer rights!
by pjmlp | 2026-02-20 09:40:04+00:00
Because they are all the consequence of holding it wrong, avoiding RAII solutions.

Working with native C APIs in C++ is akin to using unsafe in Rust, C#, Swift..., it should be wrapped in type safe functions or classes/structs, never used directly outside implementation code.

If folks actually followed this more often, there would be so much less CVE reports in C++ code caused by calling into C.
by paffdragon | 2026-02-20 09:40:28+00:00
I was kind of interested in the content, but I am so overloaded with AI slop by now, that reading this generated text gives me nausea.

I was looking to see why they landed on this stack, but there are no alternatives or evaluation criteria listed - given the generated article, I wonder how much of the infra was selected by an LLM.
by coverj | 2026-02-20 09:41:05+00:00
not possible:
- workloads over 15m for lambda last time I checked, unsure on other providers
- if you are looking to do anything stateful

possible but not ideal/inconveniences:
- cold starts can hamper latency sensitive apps (language dependant + there are things you can do)
- if you have consistent traffic its not very good value for money
- if you value local debugging
by elcapitan | 2026-02-20 09:41:21+00:00
I wish I had that much typing to do that I could rationalize the expense of such a fancy keyboard :D

Also, unfortunately for the high price point it's too hard to actually try those out somewhere. Maybe works if you have friends, but I'm not going to spend hundreds on sth only to find out it doesn't work for me after half an hour. There's probably an option to send sth back, but even that is going to be a nightmare with small vendors.
by espadrine | 2026-02-20 09:41:28+00:00
AI companies have two conflicting interests:

1. curating the default personality of the bot, to ensure it acts responsively;

2. letting it roleplay, which is not just for the parasocial people out there, but also a corporate requirement for company chatbots that must adhere to a tone of voice.

When in the second mode (which is the case here, since the model was given a personality file), the curation of its action space is effectively altered.

Conversely, this is also a lesson for agent authors: if you let your agent modify its own personality file, it will diverge to malice.
by jaen | 2026-02-20 09:41:51+00:00
Reminds me a bit of the fish anecdote told by DFW... they've only swam in water their entire life, so they don't even understand what water is.

Here are the mixed paradigms/styles in these Python snippets:

- Statements vs. expressions

- Eager list comprehensions vs. lazy generator expressions

- Mutable vs. immutable data structures / imperative reference vs. functional semantics

(note that the Raku version only picks _one_ side of those)

> seq.extend(sum(seq[-2:]) for _ in range(18))

I mean, this is the worst Python code yet. To explain what this does to a beginner, or even intermediate programmer.... oooooh boy.

You have the hidden inner iteration loop inside the `.extend` standard library method driving the lazy generator expression with _unspecified_ one-step-at-a-time semantics, which causes `seq[-2:]` to be evaluated at exactly the right time, and then `seq` is extended even _before_ the `.extend` finishes (which is very surprising!), causing the next generator iteration to read a _partially_ updated `seq`...

This is almost all the footguns of standard imperative programming condensed into a single expression. Like ~half of the "programming"-type bugs I see in code reviews are related to tricky temporal (execution order) logic, combined with mutability, that depend on unclearly specified semantics.

> It's about twisty stupid special symbol meanings.

Some people program in APL/J/K/Q just fine, and they prefer their symbols. Calling it "stupid" is showing your prejudice. (I don't and can't write APL but still respect it)

> What's not fine is to make up bogus comparisons and bogus implications about the people who don't like it.

That's a quite irrational take. I didn't make any bogus comparisons. I justified or can justify all my points. I did not imply anything about people who don't like Raku. I don't even use Raku myself...