MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lambda | 2026-02-18 22:49:25+00:00
The example you gave is just so buggy; why do you think that this is worth sharing with the world yet?

The very first question is full of obvious bugs.

You have 'find . -name "notes.txt"' selected, it then says 'You submitted: ls -R | grep notes.txt: find . -name "notes.txt"', then it responds:

'Thanks — your answer looks like it was partially entered.

'You picked find . -name "notes.txt" (good choice). The submission shows an escaped/unfinished string: find . -name \. The correct full command is find . -name "notes.txt", which searches recursively from the current directory for files or directories named exactly notes.txt.'

There seems to be some weird kind of quoting issue going on there. I would fix obvious issues like that before sharing this with the world.
by OisinMoran | 2026-02-18 22:49:30+00:00
This is super interesting, thanks for sharing! I did a similar thing a few years ago which I'd been meaning to properly finish and share, and your post was the inspiration needed to make mine public (albeit still in a state much too messy for my liking, hopefully having it public will force me to improve it).

We took fairly different approaches, but I really enjoy the visual explanation element of yours! Well done.

My investigation stemmed from wondering if the seemingly useless 1st, 10th, and 1000th nearest word similarity scores were enough to uniquely ID the word. Turns out—yes, pretty much! It's effectively just a kind of reverse engineering, similar to how you also made your own version of the game. Can definitely improve on a lot.

Tried today's puzzle and got it in two (first was 999/1000).

Here's my code & write up:
https://github.com/OisinMoran/Solving-Semantle/blob/main/Sol...
by Whitespace | 2026-02-18 22:49:33+00:00
I've been with Watsi for almost 12 years now, most of that as a Universal Fund member. Like others, I love periodically checking the "My Impact" page, as it really humanizes my monthly donation.

> You've funded healthcare for 162 patients in 14 countries.

> You joined Watsi on February 26th, 2014. Eleven years ago, you became a member of our Universal Fund, supporting life-changing treatments for a new Watsi patient every month. Your most recent donation traveled 8,500 miles to support Leah, a poultry farmer from Kenya, to fund abdominal surgery.
by otterpro | 2026-02-18 22:49:44+00:00
My memory is fuzzy, but as for me, Delphi died the day it suddenly became too expensive for hobbyists and students, and I couldn't justify spending more on Delphi than on a brand new PC at that time. Borland sold it away and we saw price up in the thousands of dollars for a single license. When the free community edition came out, it was a decade too late. I also miss dBase, as it was far superior to MS foxpro or Access.
Show HN: HiddenState – How I keep up with 500+ ML papers a day
by CosmoSantoni | 2026-02-18 22:49:50+00:00
HiddenState monitors arxiv, Reddit, GitHub, HN, Bluesky, HuggingFace, OpenReview, PapersWithCode, and a handful of research blogs. Every few hours it pulls new items, throws most of them away (+95%), and clusters what survives by the specific technical constraint being attacked. Not by topic, not by domain.

Example from this week; 7 independent VLA papers dropped within 24 hours from 9 different orgs. Xiaomi, GigaBrain, RISE, all attacking sim-to-real transfer for robotic manipulation. None coordinating. That kind of convergence is hard to spot unless you're reading everything.

Each mechanism gets a 0-100 score across convergence, implementation evidence, engagement, and significance. Orgs are deduplicated so a single lab posting on five platforms doesn't inflate the signal.

Python, SQLite, Claude for clustering, Cloudflare Pages. Free, no tracking. Looking for any and all feedback and thoughts! Cheers!
by streetfighter64 | 2026-02-18 22:50:18+00:00
Did I say or imply that breaking DRM was bad? It is a neutral description of what was done.

> It's significantly more reasonable to use "stole" and "theft" for getting your hands on private data.

Why? GP is arguing that as long as you're not depriving the original owner of access to the data, it can't be called stealing.
by Galaco | 2026-02-18 22:50:33+00:00
At a previous employer this was a problem we identified (and larger retailer customers) had recognised, although for other reasons reasons. We had developed a size recommendation system for them, that used real product measurements in every size and a method of obtaining your body measurements from fully clothed photos. We also offered a statistical average measurement set for those who couldn’t/wouldn’t take photos of themselves (privacy was important to us, and there was no need to undress).

We were able to give details about fit comfort across many measurements for each size, but this feature was basically unused. 99% of users used the statistical average body of themselves instead of themselves, which actually exacerbates the body type problem.

Another interesting thing about the industry and the grading process we learned; many retailers had no measurements for their own clothes except the reference size. This was much more common of higher end brands.

1 last thing; some global brands actually have the same size name on the same product represent a different size in different region (eg an SKU in size S in US may have different measurements to the same SKU in S in Asia)
by burnte | 2026-02-18 22:51:18+00:00
> They just either disagree on the cause or proportion.

And for very specific reasons, too.

One reason is unwillingness to feel like they have to take responsibility.

Another is conceding that would mean they might have to make changes, and laziness is powerful.

The worst reason is that to acknowledge it would be to grant that an alternative political perspective is right about something, and one's own political identity is tied to that other political perspective being always wrong.

"It is easier to con a man than to convince him he has been conned." Too much emotional investment in being right and too much fear of social repercussions simply for changing one's mind. The reality is changing one's mind to new data is the hallmark of integrity.
by wat10000 | 2026-02-18 22:51:26+00:00
I agree that human extinction is very unlikely on anything like historical timespans. Maybe in a few million years, like any other species.

I do think there's a decent chance of civilizational collapse in the near to medium term. It seems like everything is getting very fragile. So much economic activity revolves around extremely sophisticated machines with many critical components that are manufactured in just a few locations, sometimes a single location. A major war could shatter that, or climate change could push us over a tipping point where those capabilities can no longer be maintained, or it might just be a cascading random breakdown due to the modern economy being so complicated.

If it happens, then I'm very pessimistic about the ability to ever come back from it. With all the easily accessible fossil fuels gone, getting industry going again is going to be a really tall order. So humanity might survive a long time, but it may consist of life the way it was in prehistory.
by CosmoSantoni | 2026-02-18 22:52:19+00:00
From today's report: three separate papers on stabilizing RL fine-tuning for LLM reasoning landed from three different groups. STAPO silences rare token probability spikes during training, Experiential RL adds memory of past feedback to handle sparse rewards, and TAROT uses test-driven curriculum RL for code generation. Read individually they're three unrelated papers. Clustered together they tell you the field is stuck on the same problem.

Separately, a paper on "Learning to Configure Agentic AI Systems" and a Reddit post analyzing 44 agent frameworks both surfaced within hours, both independently identifying context management as the key bottleneck. Neither referenced the other.

That's what the site is built to find. Curious if these match what people here are seeing in their own work/pubs/research.
by judahmeek | 2026-02-18 22:52:32+00:00
Not OP, but I think most of us have an instinct to correct things that we think are wrong.

I don't think such instincts can be unlearned, but they can be held in check by the realization that naive attempts to fix things can make things worse, including how we feel about ourselves.

This conscious inhibition, however, requires cognitive effort.
by dimatura | 2026-02-18 22:53:06+00:00
Yeah, they're not direct replacements. I think both models have have their pros and cons. In fact I tried both around when covid shutdowns started (server being in the office, me at home), and liked zerotier better; it was faster, and a more generous free tier. But now tailscale has won out for a couple of reasons; the main one, it's simply less flaky for us on macOS, especially for devs working overseas. No idea why and maybe there's simple fixes (that don't involve repeated connections/disconnections, hopefully). The other, tailscale has a few extra things that are nicer and easy to use like identity-based ACLs, funnel/serve, magicDNS, ssh management, etc.
by sebmellen | 2026-02-18 22:54:14+00:00
As I wrote in a separate comment to someone who responded to me, there is a difference between:

(a) thinking about, and deciding upon, what will be done, and
(b) the thinking that is required during implementation.

{type (a)} was always the majority of my time, but {type (b)} consumed a lot of effort, especially for languages or syntaxes I wasn't very familiar with. {type (b)} consumes very little of my time now.
Show HN: Designing package namespacing for a new language (Coi)
by io_eric | 2026-02-18 22:54:17+00:00
Hey HN,
I'm building Coi, a component-based language that compiles to WASM, JS, CSS and HTML with O(1) reactivity (no virtual DOM).

I just shipped a built-in package manager, but the interesting part wasn't the implementation,
it was all the ecosystem design questions I'd never thought about as a user of package managers.

The problem I kept circling: how do you handle naming? Global names like auth or json seem fine until someone squats them.
First-come-first-served creates perverse incentives. Reputation systems are easy to game early on.
I went back and forth for longer than I'd like to admit.

I went through a few approaches:

Blocklist common names: reserve things like auth, json, http so people are forced into more specific names.
Feels clean in theory, but who decides the list? And it doesn't really scale, someone will always find
the next generic name you didn't think to block.

Go's approach: just use GitHub URLs directly as the package identifier. No registry needed, no naming wars.
I liked the elegance of it, but in practice it's awful to actually write and read.
Nobody wants import github.com/someone/thing/v2/pkg/util in their source files.

Tiered names: short names are hard to get, long names are open. Claiming json requires vetting,
but json-schema-validator you can grab freely. The friction is proportional to how valuable the name is,
nobody squats my-very-specific-http-retry-client because there's no payoff.
I liked this one, but you still need to define the threshold and then
you're back to needing governance :( just a smaller version of it.

Scoped names: ended up here. Everything is @someorg/http-client. Boring, proven, sidesteps squatting without
needing governance infrastructure I don't have. npm figured this out the hard way so I don't have to :)

The registry itself is GitHub-based, metadata is JSON, submissions are PRs, validation runs through CI.
Only one package in the registry right now (mine), but getting add/install/upgrade working end-to-end changed how the project feels.
It went from "compiler experiment" to something with an actual ecosystem shape.

Curious how others have thought about this, especially early-stage ecosystems where you have
no reputation signals yet. Did anyone solve the naming problem better than "just use scopes"?

Coi: https://github.com/io-eric/coi
by ngriffiths | 2026-02-18 22:55:23+00:00
> Additionally, not all writing serves the same purpose.

I think this is a really important point and to add on, there is a lot of writing that is really good, but only in a way that a niche audience can appreciate. Today's AI can basically compete with the low quality stuff that makes up most of social media, it can't really compete with higher quality stuff targeted to a general audience, and it's still nowhere close to some more niche classics.

An interesting thought experiment is whether it's possible that AI tools could write a novel that's better than War and Peace. A quick google shows a lot of (poorly written) articles about how "AI is just a machine, so it can never be creative," which strikes me as a weak argument way too focused on a physical detail instead of the result. War and Peace and/or other great novels are certainly in the training set of some or all models, and there is some real consensus about which ones are great, not just random subjective opinions.

I kind of think... there is still something fundamental that would get in the way, but that it is still totally achievable to overcome that some day? I don't think it's impossible for an AI to be creative in a humanlike way, they don't seem optimized for it because they are completely optimized for the sort of analytical mode of reading and writing, not the creative/immersive one.
Ask HN: In Cursor/agents, do plugins hide MCP tools from the main agent?
by azebazenestor | 2026-02-18 22:55:53+00:00
Quick architecture question.

When using MCP servers directly in Cursor, the agent seems to see all tools at the same level.

But when using a plugin/extension that internally connects to MCP servers, does the main agent:

see only the plugin as a single tool and delegate to a sub-agent inside it,
or

still see every underlying MCP tool individually?

In other words: do plugins act as a tool abstraction boundary, or just a packaging/install mechanism?
by canucker2016 | 2026-02-18 22:56:00+00:00
Not the original poster, but when I was re-watching the series I also checked the reddit postings for each episode I watched. One of the comments for the first episode mentioned how laborious they made the act of dumping the IBM PC BIOS contents.

So in the first episode, Gordon Clark, the HW guy (played by Scoot McNairy) had to dump the contents of the IBM PC BIOS from the ROM chip.

Gordon extracts the BIOS chip (an 8KB EPROM chip if you do a web search) and plugs it into a breadboard and proceeds to dump out each byte of the chip with Joe (Lee Pace) writing down the address and data at that particular address on a pad of paper.

After writing the address and address contents for the first time, Joe asks Gordon how many times they have to do this procedure. Gordon replies 65536, which would imply a 64KB ROM chip - but the web search said the IBM PC used an 8KB EPROM for the BIOS.

After more dreary, repetitive work, they accomplish the dumping and transcribing of the IBM PC BIOS in one weekend.

But one could have used a short BASIC program to dump the IBM PC BIOS ROM - the IBM PC wasn't a locked down game console...

For a legal clean-room implementation of the IBM PC BIOS, the actual contents of the IBM PC BIOS aren't needed.

You need the specs for each BIOS function (input/output parameters and description of what the BIOS function does).

The IBM PC Technical Reference Manual (which cost $99 back then) contains the BIOS assembly language listing.

One would need to type up the lines that list the input/output requirements for each BIOS function and their purpose and they'd be half-way to a clean-room PC BIOS.

But that'd be way less dramatic (and easier) than the way shown in the episode.

see https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/112846/halt-...
by dehue | 2026-02-18 22:56:05+00:00
In my experience with womens clothing having pockets does not mean they are very practical for phones. Phones are heavy and they can drag pants or skirt/dress down if they are stretchier or don't have a tight waistband which is most of them. If the pocket goes too far down or is too loose or too big the phone ends up too far down and jiggles around which is quite annoying and uncomfortable. Or in items like jeans where the pocket is well designed the phone still sticks out of the top and yet when I bend my knee it jams into my hip in a weird way or I cant sit down with it in my pocket. I am 5'1 so I may just be hitting some size limitations but carrying around a phone in a purse or sticking it into the waistband of tighter pants can be more comfortable than trying to use pockets.
by observationist | 2026-02-18 22:56:21+00:00
Yes, and those ideas are user hostile and poorly conceived, badly executed, and incompetently built.

A remote code execution exploit in notepad?! That's not professional, or skillful, or well done. Unnecessary feature bloat and change for the sake of change, because some MBA dork wants to justify their department and continued employment by checking boxes on spreadsheets.

There's no innovation or skillful, well built features. There's hardly any consideration of users at all, except as net continuing depositors of money into Microsoft coffers. Features and updates are nothing more than marketing slop and manipulation of enterprise into renewing subscriptions and purchasing the latest version of new hardware.
by choilive | 2026-02-18 22:56:56+00:00
If we can have mass produced fast fashion from runway to store in weeks...

Why not tailored clothing at scale? Have a set of portable body measurements that can be sent to any retailer - make an order and have it sent from factory to door in a week or two.

Or get a size that is close enough - bring it to your neighborhood tailor. Most alterations are simple and not very expensive.

Unfortunately sizing is just a leaky abstraction. You are trying to distill many variables into a single dimension. It will never be particularly great.
by dimatura | 2026-02-18 22:57:01+00:00
I think how it works usually is that they let you use the features from higher tier plans than the one you're on; once you use them enough they send you an email asking to upgrade. That's what happened to us and I've seen other users mention it. Not sure how I felt about it, OTOH maybe it was less friction than explicitly subscribing for some "2 weeks free trial" or whatever but OTOH it did feel weird and unexpected. Anyway, we felt the extra features were worth it so ended up paying.
by hutao | 2026-02-18 22:57:11+00:00
> With Prop, I think what you need to dig into is ‘non-computational’ not ‘non-computable’.

Here's another way to explain this:

As you state, Prop has to do with proof-irrelevance. When doing constructive mathematics, proofs are programs (meaning they carry computational content), but sometimes it's useful to treat any two proofs of the same proposition as equal. As a consequence, proofs cannot be inspected or run as programs, and you get back the Law of Excluded Middle from classical mathematics.

Decidable has to do with decidability. This means that given some proposition P, there is an algorithm that can either produce a proof of P, or a proof of ~P. This is usually useful when P is a predicate, so that at each x, P(x) either has a proof or a disproof.

In classical mathematics, the Law of Excluded Middle holds for all propositions. In constructive mathematics, the Law of Excluded Middle only holds for decidable propositions. If P is decidable, it is safe to constructively assume P or ~P because an algorithm can produce the answer.
by n2d4 | 2026-02-18 22:57:42+00:00
> why do you think that this is worth sharing with the world yet?

It's worth sharing because it's cool, even if it's not perfect yet!

You'll never make every single person on HN happy. But if you share your stuff early and make one person happy at the very least that means you should keep working on it!

Don't let perfectionism get in the way of good enough :]
by tombert | 2026-02-18 22:58:08+00:00
The default clear setting on the iPhone was pretty stupid. It made my icons monochrome. I have GMail, Apple Mail, and Proton Mail installed on my phone, all of which use an envelope as their logo. Previously this had never confused me because they're different colors, and I have one of those new-fangled "Color Screens" on my iPhone that the kids use.

Then they made all the icons a weird hipster monochrome thing, and I kept opening the wrong mail client by accident, because I couldn't quickly differentiate the three different envelops.

I don't know who the hell told the Apple designers that people don't like having color in their icons, but I think that person might need a reality check.
by burnt-resistor | 2026-02-18 22:58:17+00:00
That's my point. Regardless of moralizing judgments about which country is more violent, corrupt, or morally "superior", they didn't follow the USA program and suffered the wrath of telling a fragile ego man "no thank you". America is behaves like gangster and is no better, it merely follows might makes right while lecturing everyone else how they "should" behave.
by wolvoleo | 2026-02-18 22:58:17+00:00
Personally, I understand people need to make money but this tends to be a death spiral (enshittification). So I tend to go for solutions without those incentives at all.

I wonder why you jumped into the mesh vpn market, it's so saturated. Theres literally hundreds of solutions out there (niche ones included for the mainstream ones it's probably 10 or so), many non profit options included. Is there really a niche you can offer that the others don't?
Show HN: Generate baseline Kubernetes NetworkPolicies from rendered manifests
by dormstern | 2026-02-18 22:58:33+00:00
A lot of clusters still run “allow-all” east/west because NetworkPolicies aren’t enforced everywhere. I built a small static analyzer that reads rendered manifests (Helm/Argo CD/Kustomize output) and emits baseline NetworkPolicy YAML you can commit + diff in PRs.

Workflow:

PR changes manifests

CI regenerates policies

reviewers see “newly allowed” connections as a normal permission diff

Curious how others handle this: would you rather review generated policy diffs, or a connectivity-graph diff? Any edge cases you’ve seen bite in real clusters (headless services, shared namespaces, DNS/egress, service meshes, etc.)?
by kushalt | 2026-02-18 22:58:44+00:00
Harrier is a Rust hashmap focused on very fast lookups with modern hash-table techniques. The library was inspired by Reiner Pope's https://reiner.org/cuckoo-hashing. We created a production-ready hashmap library out the SIMD-accelerated cuckoo hashing idea he proposes. Here are some things it uses:

- SIMD control-byte probing (16-byte groups)
- Two-choice cuckoo placement with BFS displacement on insert pressure
- Bounded main-table lookup path (no long probe chains in the common path)
- Rare-path safety valves: overflow stash + optional hasher reseed hook

It provides 2 key APIs:
- HarrierMap<K, V> (generic)
- HarrierU64Map<V> (specialized hot path for integer keys)

We have various performance results. Here is one:

In our strict lookup gate (same harness repeatedly with process-repeat stability checks), at ~75% load and n=786,432, harrier_u64 is typically around 6.5–7.1 ns for find_hit. For comparison, hashbrown is typically around 7.1–7.7 ns. So the specialized u64 path is usually in the ~10% faster range on hit lookups, at least in this regime.
by mcv | 2026-02-18 22:59:10+00:00
Exactly. It's meme stock. There's no rational explanation for this ridiculous valuation.

Tesla has been overvalued for a long time, and not by a bit either; they're worth more than the next several car makers put together, yet sell less cars than any of them. Their high valuation could still be considered defensible when they were the fastest growing car company in the world and the only one selling electric cars. But none of that is true; everybody is selling electric cars now, and BYD is selling more than Tesla, I think. And instead of growing, Tesla is now shrinking in many markets. Even their self driving is not the best.

The share price should have collapsed, yet it remains high. How? It makes no sense to me.