MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vintagedave | 2026-02-19 11:16:18+00:00
This is neat. I did see one bug early in the conversation: "The submission shows an escaped/unfinished string: find . -name \." which looks like an error converting what the user chose back to an escaped string for the AI.

For feedback:

* Please change the colours. I can't read white text on light purple. By all means keep purple, just increase the contrast.

* Maybe keep it in a narrower column, again for readability especially since we're constantly switching sides left to right as we read the AI text and the 'You submitted' text. I also feel it's quite duplicated, I can visually see which option was chosen yet it's restated in 'You submitted'. Only show what's necessary.

* In the replay you shared I can still change active radio buttons. Make it static.

To more focused feedback:

* I really like the idea. Instead of an AI telling you the answer, you learn -- this is fantastic.

* Multiple choice questions are great, but eventually please move to freeform. An AI can evaluate that. (For example, after learning a bit via examples, it might prompt, 'How do you find all PDFs in your home folder?' and give a text entry field. In the past, you'd have to type exactly the string the app expected; with an AI, it can evaluate flexibly. So take advantage of this. It's an immense opportunity vs earlier learning platforms.) Also, people learn better at some point when you're not given answers (aka multiple choice) but need to write.

I think you're on to something. AI as thinking replacement is a worry. AI as a guided teacher is great. I look forward to what you do with it.
by znnajdla | 2026-02-19 11:16:24+00:00
> Even if you use heavyweight OS threads, I just don't believe this matters.

It matters a lot. How many OS threads can you run on 1 machine? With Elixir you can easily run thousands without breaking a sweat. But even if you need only a few agents on one machine, OS thread management is a headache if you have any shared state whatsoever (locks, mutexes, etc.). On Unix you can't even reliably kill dependent processes[1]. All those problems just disappear with Elixir.

[1] https://matklad.github.io/2023/10/11/unix-structured-concurr...
by nobody9999 | 2026-02-19 11:16:34+00:00
>My point was that if we never had section 230 to begin with, then we would have kept the strong incentive against setting up sites revolving around centralizing speech in the first place.

Where did you get that idea? Section 230 never provided any preference or privilege to large organizations over small ones.

In fact, it did exactly the opposite for reasons I discussed. You say that without Section 230:

...lots of small sites that would find themselves in an uncomfortable
position.

That doesn't even come close to covering it. Without Section 230, your aunt would take down her knitting pattern discussion website/chat room/mailing list/whatever within half a day, with whoever it was posting something objectionable (or just off topic) and when your aunt deletes it, file a lawsuit claiming censorship.

How long is your aunt going to keep the completely free and volunteer site up when she has to pay lawyers $5-10K every week? And if she doesn't delete it, continue to flood the site with garbage until it's unusable, turning a knitting discussion site into 4/8chan.

All while doing nothing to stop the big boys from creating a dystopian hellhole because they have legions of lawyers on staff.

In fact, without Section 230, $BigCorp and/or other bad actors wouldn't even need to buy out their competition or wage costly efforts to destroy them, just post oceans of objectionable/off topic stuff, sue if it's taken down or wait for it to go under because its awash in garbage they posted there to make it unusable.

If we never had, or got rid of Section 230, your preferred candidate or issue advocacy group could trivially be taken down through these tactics, stifling free expression. Think fake DMCA take downs, but without recourse except through $500/hour lawyers and the courts.

Not sure where you got the idea that Section 230 ever was some sort of "giveaway" to big companies to encourage centralization. It was not, and even today it primarily protects the little guy, just as it did 30 years ago.

Do you have your mind made up and no amount of actual evidence will change it?

If not, feel free to check out the following:

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R46751#_Toc155275791

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod....

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...

https://www.propublica.org/article/nsu-section-230

https://theconversation.com/law-that-built-the-internet-turn...

There's lots more of that to be found, but don't believe me. Check it out for yourself. Thanks to Section 230, among other things, you can.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-19 11:17:43+00:00
Yeah, but that was never Google, rather Rob Pike and his peers that never liked C++.

Note that even though C++ was born as UNIX language, as C sibling, at Bell Labs, Plan 9 and Inferno never supported it.

Here is the blog post from Rob Pike, https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti...
by martchat | 2026-02-19 11:18:08+00:00
Problem is that China had both cost advantage (both human capital and energy) and a large internal market.
If as a company you decided not to invest and build a factory in China, you were quickly losing vs your competitor.
The solution to this problem for EU and US however won't be as simple..

Once China built an industrial base, and has cheap energy sources, you cannot directly out compete it. You can only try to maintain your own industrial base by locking competitors out of your market. There is no other way. In the end that's the result of globalization - US&EU companies thought they can produce cheap, sell expensive. Instead they trained their own competition, and due to weak IP laws enabled this exodus of industry know-how to China.

Now, if China was a smaller country - let's say Japan or Turkey - this wouldn't be such a huge problem.
But for the global economy, having a single country that produces 80% of all consumer goods is also a huge problem. That was never the case before with the US (except maybe directly after WW2). US+Europe, Japan+Korea, Canada, Australia supply chain was much more diverse and distributed.

What happens now is dangerous because in the end the profits are not spread across the world, and economies of scale cause this monopoly to appear, which will be hard to mitigate.

Can countries "slow" down China and move production to diversified locations? For that to work, coordinated tariffs for advanced goods from China would have to be introduced, and production reallocated to multiple other countries - very difficult to execute..
by amiga386 | 2026-02-19 11:18:32+00:00
When digitising my collection and using MusicBrainz as the main source of metadata, I had to add about 50 albums nobody had entered before. It has a huge amount of stuff - it already had 95% of my collection - but it's not perfect.

The best way to distinguish an album (after barcode or name/artist, and medium) is number of tracks, and if that's not enough, release year/country. I got my metadata by using their Picard tagger and the CD TOC (as it contains the number and lengths of tracks, it's much less ambiguous), but of course opening every case and putting every CD in the drive is a lot more effort than barcode scanning.

You can use the advanced search syntax if you need to look up multiple fields at once. https://musicbrainz.org/search -> Type "Release", method "Indexed search with advanced query syntax"

For example: barcode:075596073820 and tracks:11 gives https://musicbrainz.org/search?query=barcode%3A075596073820+...

Docs: https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Indexed_Search_Syntax
by hexer292 | 2026-02-19 11:18:40+00:00
After seeing a post on an x86 kernel in zig (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47055262), I thought people might be interested in my project for an os for the original IBM PC.

I had built this project many years ago, and even got it to the point where it was "technically" self hosting. The architecture was as follows:

- The "kernel" is just a set of common routines for input, output and file handling.

- The file system was just an index number, corresponding to a sector on disk.

- A simple shell program had a table of strings and numbers to load a program from the disk.

- The text editor was line based, and I mean literally line based. You could only print or add one line at a time.

- I ported the hex program to assemble the files.

I got this to a point where it could assemble itself (I dont think assemble is the right word), but the process was incredibly tedious as you had to load the text file from one disk, assemble it, swap disks, and write it to the new disk. Repeat this for each file; it was per program so maybe 5-6.

It's been a while since I've had time to work on it, but I've recently changed jobs so I might get to this stage again soon.

P.S. - Assembly is Too High Level
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-02-19 11:18:50+00:00
I suspect that it was developed, in order to make native development more accessible. SwiftUI is also doing that.

They want native, partly as a “moat,” but also as a driver for hardware and services sales. They don’t want folks shrugging and saying “It doesn’t matter what you buy; they’re all the same.”

I hear exactly that, with regard to many hybrid apps.
by fsloth | 2026-02-19 11:19:29+00:00
"Why isn't there a successful company building and maintaining a suite of common alternative desktop applications?"

Sure there are but in other domains than "office".

For example CAD has few incumbent companies with their portfolios - Autodesk, Trimble, Nemetchek, Bentley. (etc)

For design - Adobe, Affinity (well it's all Canva now), then legion of smaller offerings like Clip Studio Paint.

CAD is the only domain in which I have domain knowledge but I would be surprised if there are no others.
by BLKNSLVR | 2026-02-19 11:20:14+00:00
I also kinda have the question of: Who is the new Jeffrey Epstein?

Nature abhors a vacuum, and it seems the space that Epstein filled was large and branching and significantly profitable (in money, information, and influence). There's no way there isn't at least one other person that's started to fill the void.

Ideally, the ramifications of association with Epstein should shrink the size of the vacuum considerably, but the pursuit of those associates has really only just started and, as someone else has already pointed out, some countries / governments are protecting these associates rather than investigating / prosecuting. As such, there's not much discouragement yet.
by greatgib | 2026-02-19 11:20:26+00:00
Sadly it shows that there is really a kind of "world order" conspiracy, and it is not conspiracy theorists that are crazy as we always assumed.

Just have a look at Epstein files, you can see that a lot of "occidental" politics and business leaders were connected to him one way or another. You see that we don't have equal rights but some get privileged info about big financial changes that could help them grow their wealth.

Look at how hard we had to fight Microsoft contracts creeping in everywhere in public institutions and schools, when you see in background that Microsoft was spending billions organizing events, gifts, ... to "legally" bribe officials.

Now we can all see that there is a big dictatorial shift in the political leaders of occidental countries that used to be lands of freedom and rights.
Politics see that they are unpopular and there is an uproar of the population to have change, but on the other side they see that a lot of dictatorial countries are able to control their population and stay in power using liberty restriction regulations (China, N Korea, Russia, Arabian countries, ...). So they are going to do the same.

And the best way for them to support such reduction in freedom for populations is to bound together to do it together:
- One "western" country leader that would instigate censorship, and reducing freedom and privacy right would be seen too clearly as abusing and on a dictatorial trend.
- But if multiple of them push for that at the same time, it might more easily be seen as "for the greater good", because they are the "free countries"...

So sad that the second world war is so far away, almost everyone forgot what happened in the years before the Nazi took control of Germany and started the obvious horrors. But we are on the same path.

Putin's Russia is also a good example of how a country that was on the verge of freedom and liberty for its population, slowly but surely shifted to the current dictatorial state. All of that without a clear "revolution" or sudden shift. And officially it is still a "democratic" country...
by tamimio | 2026-02-19 11:20:49+00:00
> Caused by different densities of rock far beneath Earth's surface, these variations in gravity are small in absolute terms. But they can have particularly large effects on the oceans. Where gravity is weaker, the ocean surface can sit slightly lower relative to Earth's center because water flows away toward areas of stronger gravity. Due to its gravity hole, the sea-surface height around Antarctica is measurably lower than it would otherwise be.

Isn’t that just a result of earth rotation, and not some magical rocks far beneath earth’s surface!? Plus, that’s not how gravity works anyway, this sounds like some high school way to explain gravity.. in fact, no one knows what gravity is, even quantum physics can’t explain gravity.
by sssecasiu | 2026-02-19 11:21:14+00:00
Ganttdown turns GitHub-Flavored Markdown task lists into beautiful Gantt chart SVGs. No SaaS logins, no drag-and-drop, just write tasks in Markdown you already know, run one command, and get a presentation-ready chart. Single binary, zero dependencies, sub-second execution. Flexible parsing for dates, assignees, and dependencies. Color-coded task status. Dependency validation and arrows. Fully scriptable: pipes, redirects, and CI/CD ready.
by mickeyp | 2026-02-19 11:21:25+00:00
Sure it's $24/hour, but it'll crank through tens of thousands of tokens per second --- those beefy GPUs are meant for large amounts of parallel workflow. You'll never _get_ that many tokens for a single request. That's why the mathematics work when you get dozens or hundreds of people using it.

No. The sauce is in KV caching: when to evict, when to keep, how to pre-empt an active agent loop vs someone who are showing signs of inactivity at their pc, etc.
by ethbr1 | 2026-02-19 11:22:25+00:00
It probably doesn't help that the creator of OpenClaw just got hired by Anthropic's competitor.

This sounds like engineering, finance, and legal got together and decided they were in an untenable position if OpenAI started nudging OpenClaw to burn even more tokens on Anthropic (or just never optimize) + continually updated workarounds to using subscription auth. But I'm sure OpenAI would never do something like that...

At the end of the day, it's the same 'fixed price plan for variable use on a constrained resource' cellular problem: profitability becomes directly linked to actual average usage.
by ahartmetz | 2026-02-19 11:22:50+00:00
Vulkan more or less also has that goal, but for then-current hardware 24 years later (2016). In this case (Intel HD Graphics 4400, Haswell?), there is unofficial support on Linux that can be enabled with some hacks, and it may or may not work. Similar support for my previous (desktop) AMD GPU generally worked fine. The situation for Haswell seems more iffy, though.
by tgv | 2026-02-19 11:23:24+00:00
From Dave Barry's Christmas Shopping: a Survivor's Guide (https://davebarry.com/misccol/christmas.htm)

Gifts for Women

Again, you should avoid buying clothes, but not because women don't like clothes. The problem is sizes. First of all, women's clothing sizes don't mean anything. Suppose you're looking at a dress, and the tag says it's a size 14. You could measure that dress with every known measuring instrument, checking for every known unit of measurement, and you would never find any dimension that was 14 anythings long. Not only that, but you would never find any dimension that corresponded to the same dimension on any other size-14 dress. Not only that, but chances are you would never find any woman in the entire world who would admit to being a size 14.
by cztomsik | 2026-02-19 11:23:58+00:00
Only few isolated parts were integrated into Firefox, everything else was simply thrown away and abandoned, and IMO it was for a good reason.

I've been programming in Rust for 5 years and I could barely understand the code in their repo. Not because it was somehow advanced but because it didn't make any sense. It felt like that with every decision they could make, they always chose the hardest way.

On the other hand, I have never done any C++ (besides few tutorials) in my life and yet I found both Serenity/Ladybird and also WebKit to be very readable and understandable.

BTW: If anyone wants to reply that Rust is different then yes, of course it is - but that's the point, if there is a language that maps nicely to your problem domain, it's also very fast, and well-understood then why the hell you'd use a language that is well-known to NOT map to OOP?
by Maro | 2026-02-19 11:24:28+00:00
I'm a big fan of Amazon (UAE), in the sense that I buy stuff from Amazon almost every week. Having said that, in the last year or so, I found myself returning items more and more often. I get books damaged in shipping, wrong color items, wrong size shoes, empty boxes without the actual item, all sorts of weird failure modes. Marketplace sellers are definitely a big factor. As a response, lately I find myself thinking defensively when ordering from Amazon, like "what can go wrong", and pondering whether I should go out and find this in a store, buy from the brand's online store, get it off Ebay, etc.
by solatic | 2026-02-19 11:24:41+00:00
The RFC wording is a little weird. If the zone has DNSSEC configured, then the wording should be stronger and use MUST wording, and not imply that CAs will be compliant if they choose to avoid verifying signatures despite the presence of signstures. Likewise, these TXT records for dns-persist-01 ideally "SHOULD NOT" be deployed when DNSSEC is not configured.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-02-19 11:25:07+00:00
It’s worse for women, than men, but all tweens/teens have this issue, and it drives parents nuts. Also, these kids are chronically insecure, and the need to be "fashionable" is intense. I remember hating JNCO pants, for my daughter. To be fair, at least they were baggy.

I have similar issues with shoes, and I’m in my 60s. My wife refuses to buy me shoes.

If I buy Clarks, I’m size 9. If I buy New Balance, I’m size 10.5. If I buy Hoka, I’m size 11. It’s crazy.
by Someone | 2026-02-19 11:25:12+00:00
Where instructions end up in this visualization depends heavily on the way instructions get encoded.

Because of that, I don’t think this visualization is useful for comparing instruction sets.

As an extreme example, take the ARM64 instruction set, but change the ordering of bits. That would completely change the visualization.

You might get something halfway informative by searching for the most similar image across all possible bit permutations in the instruction set. 64! is large, but that may be doable because hill climbing will (somewhat) work.

I don’t think it is desired, though. A good visualization starts with the question what you want to visualize, and chances are this isn’t the best way to visualize that answer.
by thatguy27 | 2026-02-19 11:25:30+00:00
So… Vouch?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46930961

https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2020252149117313349

https://nitter.net/mitchellh/status/2020252149117313349

https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/10559
by Brybry | 2026-02-19 11:26:29+00:00
https://archive.md/VQNcJ (sadly this isn't the updated version with the 18 wellbeing experts line)

But basically it's about Zuckerberg testimony and evidence in an ongoing court case in California. I believe case 23SMCV03371 but there's a number of coordinated cases. [0]

From reading other articles[1][2][3][4] about the testimony I think "18 wellbeing experts" is referring to external consultation funded by Meta/Instagram that appears to have overwhelmingly turned up concerns about the impact beauty filters could have on young girls (who weren't even supposed to be on the platform in the first place).

There's some stuff with internal Meta employees also raising concerns. I didn't see anything about internal Meta employees saying it was ok but of course it's hard to know without free access to actual court transcripts and exhibits.

Zuckerberg himself said they decided to allow the filters but not recommend them and that not allowing the filters would have been paternalistic.

[0] https://www.lacourt.ca.gov/pages/lp/access-a-case/tp/find-ca...

[1] https://www.wunc.org/2026-02-18/zuckerberg-grilled-about-met...

[2] https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-testifies-social...

[3] https://www.kten.com/news/business/takeaways-mark-zuckerberg...

[4] https://www.wandtv.com/news/national/zuckerberg-testifies-at...
by exDM69 | 2026-02-19 11:26:29+00:00
> notorious Vulkan shader compilation lag spikes.

Vulkan gives all the tools to avoid any "lag spikes" from shader compiling. In fact, causing them is much more difficult than OpenGL where they could happen in surprising places (and only on certain hardware).

The issue is two fold:
1. Some engines produce a lot of shader permutations. Some AAA titles can have 60000 different shaders compiled.
2. Some GPU rasterizer states (such as color blending) are implemented as shader epilogues.

In Vulkan 1.0 almost all of the pipeline state had to be pre-baked into a pipeline state object compiled ahead of time. This lead to a "shader permutation explosion" where different states need different pipelines.

This requires the game engine to either a) compile all the pipeline combinations ahead of time (slow loading time) or b) compile them as needed (lag spikes).

The core issue for this was solved years ago and now most of the pipeline states can be added to the command buffers ("dynamic states"). This solves the permutation explosion. But at the same time it opens the door for issue 2: some states (blending in particular) can cause a state-based recompile (like ye olde OpenGL days) at runtime.

The only solution to the second problem is not to use the dynamic states that trigger recompiling. That's basically only blending as far as I know. You can't even have dynamic blend state on all GPUs.

For maximum developer flexibility there's the shader object extension that allows mixing and matching shaders and pipeline states any way you want. This will cause state based recompiles at unpredictable times but it's an opt-in feature and easy to avoid if lag spikes are not wanted.

tl;dr: shader recompilation is easy to avoid in Vulkan but porting legacy engine code or art content may take you off the happy path.
by rodrigorcs | 2026-02-19 11:26:57+00:00
Great question. Openfuse has a "systems" concept for exactly this. Each system is an isolated unit within an environment with its own breaker state. So you'd have us-east/stripe and eu-west/stripe as separate breakers. If Stripe is unreachable from us-east but healthy from eu-west, only the us-east breaker trips. The state is coordinated across all instances within a system, not globally across everything. You scope it to match your actual failure domains.
by democracy | 2026-02-19 11:26:58+00:00
>> industry being unable to scale LLMs past their current point

100% bet - no way any "AI" will be able to generate you anything close to a complex piece of software like Ms Word within reasonable time and budget. Given infinite time and money - sure, anything is possible, just like a trilling monkeys randomly printing "War and Peace" once in a trillion years in some remote galaxy. I don't even understand your confidence given how much guidance and hand holding LLMs need at the moment to produce anything useful.