MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by microtonal | 2026-02-21 16:40:32+00:00
The EU always has been a scapegoat for incompetent politicians.

You also see this in countries still in the EU and it will happen as long as we will not have true integration, it is always easier to blame the EU for your own failings, since it is harder for the EU to fend for itself in national politics.

One recent example in my country is nitrogen deposition. Long ago, countries have committed to keeping certain nature reserves in good health (or improving them when necessary). Then many subsequent governments always chose the side of the farmers at the detriment of nature. Now many reserves' soil quality is in a terrible state and the courts have told the government to stop and fix the problem. Then we got a bunch of right-wing populist countries that have wasted many more years by blaming the EU and questioning scientific methods for measuring deposits - while it has been abundantly for a long time what actually needs to be done, buy out farmers.

At any rate, this constant undermining and blaming of the EU has the effect you'd expect it to - it destroys trust in the EU. Ironically, the saving grace now seems to be the agressor and the lost ally. More people realize that we can't act in an increasingly hostile world as small and mid-sized countries.
by unixfg | 2026-02-21 16:40:55+00:00
My favorite use so far has been giving it a copy of my Calibre library. After having it write a few scripts and a skill, I can ask it questions about any book I’m reading.

This week I had it order a series internally chronological.

I could use the search on my Kindle or open Calibre myself, but a Signal message is much faster when it’s already got the SQLite file right there.
by mhher | 2026-02-21 16:41:14+00:00
Most AI coding assistants are fundamentally broken. Tools like Claude Code and OpenCode eagerly load 10k+ tokens of monolithic system prompts into a single context window before you even type. This guarantees context amnesia and destroys local inference speeds.

I built late to fix this. It’s a single-binary Go/BubbleTea TUI built around a subagent orchestrator pattern. The main prompt is strictly ~100 lines. The orchestrator routes tasks to transient subagents with isolated context windows, explicitly preventing the "Debugging Decay" (https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18403) and context pollution seen in monolithic agents.

Architectural notes:

* Linux Native: Strictly respects XDG base directories. No Windows support. No padded Electron GUI.

* Execution Load: The rapid context switching breaks the mainline llama.cpp scheduler. You must compile the specific PR linked in the README (or just point it at any standard API via localhost:8080).

* Licensing: BSL 1.1 to keep the core orchestrator logic out of VC-backed wrappers.

I also open-sourced pure-go-sgd (AGPLv3) today for those interested in bare-metal Go infrastructure: https://github.com/mlhher/pure-go-sgd
by soulofmischief | 2026-02-21 16:41:49+00:00
These are possible solutions, but offering a VPS/VPN won't convince anyone who is already on the fence over privacy or security issues. They probably have their own already and don't want their browsing data running through someone's servers. HN clients should interact directly with HN as another normal client, and not proxy incoming traffic.

Even if it enables lots of other features, that's not why I come to Hacker News and such a feature would be an immediate pass. Maybe others feel differently, but the fact that HN's design and featureset have not followed other trends over the years is part of why many of us still come here.

Maybe there is a market for what you're thinking, but I'd continue to do more market research to make sure you understand your user demographics before making the wrong move early on.
by mrweasel | 2026-02-21 16:43:12+00:00
From experience: If you don't know Danish, please don't ever use machine translators to translate from English. Regardless of what some people may think, they make mistakes, so many mistakes.

I get why it's tempting, good translators are expensive, and few and far between. A friend of my is a professional translator and she's not exactly in need of work, but a lot of customers look at her prices and opt for machine translations instead and the result not always impressive. Errors range from wrong words, bad sentence structure to an inability to correctly translate cultural references.
by andrewaylett | 2026-02-21 16:44:07+00:00
Honestly, I don't think there's a bright line. What's the difference between "code" and "data"? It's as much about intent as anything. If my focus is on my content then I'm probably not programming. But if my focus is on getting the computer to do something then I probably am, even if the end result is identical.

I've created any number of empty files in my lifetime, and I wouldn't say that more than a couple of them were programming, but I don't think it's controversial to claim that the IOCCC submission I linked up-thread definitely was programming, and (maybe slightly more controversial) that my deliberate replication of the program when I first heard about it $mumble years ago was also programming?

In your specific example, if someone constructed an ASCII file which made use of the control codes to do something interesting (or even something boring!) then wouldn't that be programming? While typing ASCII into this text field isn't programming because the value of the information is in the human interpretation of the content rather than the machine having interpreted the content as code.
by twoodfin | 2026-02-21 16:44:13+00:00
Indeed, to the exclusion of the iPod or iPhone launches.

And it gets the core idea right, too, that NeXT was a commercial failure but built the core OS technology launchpad for the mobile revolution—after saving Apple, of course.

It’s told in a wildly ahistorical framing, but I find the stage play-like “your life passes before your eyes” structure to be much truer to Jobs’ story—and more entertaining—than the Isaacson book.

One of my favorite films of the last 20 years.
by tliltocatl | 2026-02-21 16:44:15+00:00
> wifi integrated into the SoC

I really wish we would stop sticking wireless in every device. The spectrum is limited and the security concerns are just not worth it. And if you try to sell it, certifying will be RPITA even in US (rightfully so!). Just had to redesign a little Modbus RTU sensor prototype for mass production, noticed the old version used BT MCU. So I immediately imagined the certification nightmare - and the sensor is deployed underwater, it's not like BT will be useful anyway. Why? Quote "but how do we update firmware without a wireless connection"… How do you update firmware on a device with RS-485 out, a puzzle indeed. In all fairness, the person who did it was by no means a professional programmer and wasn't supposed to know. But conditioning beginners to wireless on everything - that's just evil. /rant
by comex | 2026-02-21 16:44:23+00:00
Technically, it’s not just Scheme-like but literally a Scheme interpreter (TinyScheme). However, the Scheme isn’t being executed to make individual sandboxing decisions. It’s just executed once while parsing the config, to build up a binary sandbox definition which is what the kernel ultimately uses to make decisions (using a much more limited-purpose, non-Turing-complete execution engine).
by chasd00 | 2026-02-21 16:45:09+00:00
hasn't Ukraine already proved out autonomous weapons on the battlefield? There was a NYT podcast a couple years ago where the interviewed higher up in the Ukraine military and they said it's already in place with fpv drones, loitering, target identification, attack, the whole 9 yards.

You don't need an LLM to do autonomous weapons, a modern Tomahawk cruise missile is pretty autonomous. The only change to a modern tomahawk would be adding parameters of what the target looks like and tasking the missile with identifying a target. The missile pretty much does everything else already ( flying, routing, etc ).
by oggy | 2026-02-21 16:45:17+00:00
In my experience, finding the "correct" specification for a problem is usually very difficult for realistic systems. Generally it's unlikely that you'll be able to specify ALL the relevant properties formally. I think there's probably some facet of Kolmogorov complexity there; some properties probably cannot be significantly "compressed" in a way where the specification is significantly shorter and clearer than the solution.

But it's still usually possible to distill a few crucial properties that can be specified in an "obviously correct" manner. It takes A LOT of work (sometimes I'd be stuck for a couple of weeks trying to formalize a property). But in my experience the trade off can be worth it. One obvious benefit is that bugs can be pricey, depending on the system. But another benefit is that, even without formal verification, having a few clear properties can make it much easier to write a correct system, but crucially also make it easier to maintain the system as time goes by.
by notatoad | 2026-02-21 16:45:37+00:00
>It's all just a sprawling behemoth of a framework, because it tries to do everything.

it is, but at the same time, that's kind of great. it handles all the things. but you don't have to use them all. for me, the point of oauth is that there's this whole complicated mess of stuff that happens in the auth layer, but the end result is a bearer token and maybe a refresh token.

you can build that mess of auth yourself, or you can swap in any of a bunch of different third-party providers to do it for you, because they all just give you the same bearer and refresh token. then you can build your app in a way that doesn't care about auth, because it all gets handled inside that oauth box. are you currently serving a request that came from a client credentials grant, or an authorization code grant? was it a pkce client? it doesn't matter outside the client.
by quiet35 | 2026-02-21 16:45:55+00:00
I like the idea and even considered contributing to the list, but this stopped me:

> NAQ (Never Asked Questions)

> My website is on your list!

> Cry about it.

That's quite a suspicious attitude. Clearly the maintainer believes he is infallible. I understand the emotions behind this, but this is not how a public blacklist should be maintained.
by klooj | 2026-02-21 16:46:20+00:00
This is pretty cool. The accessibility tree method makes a lot of sense, I think that's how a bunch of other newer browser use tools work as well, albeit using chrome dev tools MCP or something. I suspect your solution is lighter and faster but would be cool to see a comparison. I imagine that's a relevant comparison people would make over comparing to playwright and puppeteer. Neat project though, and your prompts are code methodology is super interesting
by Paradigma11 | 2026-02-21 16:46:28+00:00
Yes, the situation was different in the 50s and 70s. But for the last few decades it has been explicit chinese policy that any change of the status quo would lead to an invasion.

Somewhat similar to HongKong where China apologists always bring up that HK never had any democratic autonomy while conveniently not mentioning that China explicitly stated that such would instantly result in an invasion.

Putting a gun to someones head forcing him to say something and then using that against him.
by zdw | 2026-02-21 16:46:38+00:00
I first encountered djb's work back in the 90's with qmail and djbdns, where he took a very different and compartmentalized approach to the more common monolithic tooling for running email and DNS. I'd even opine that the structure of these programs are direct ancestors to modern microservice architectures, except using unix stdio and other unix isolation mechanisms.

He's definitely opinionated, and I can understand people being annoyed with someone who is vociferous in their disagreement and questioning the motives of others, but given the occasional bad faith and subversion we see by large organizations in the cryptography space, it's nice to have someone hypervigilant in that area.

I generally think that if djb thinks something is OK in terms of cryptograpy, it's passed a very high analytical bar.
by locknitpicker | 2026-02-21 16:47:43+00:00
> In 25 years of professional development I’ve never really had a situation where the commits on a branch would have helped me understand what was going on a year ago when the work was done.

My professional experience contrasts with yours. I've even worked at a company where commit history and PRs were so central to understand and explain changes that PRs were even used as the authoritative sources on how to implement features and use frameworks.
by ZeroGravitas | 2026-02-21 16:47:43+00:00
You can draw a fairly clear line from the corporate response to cigarettes being regulated through to the strategy for climate change and social media/crypto etc.

The Republicans are basically a coalition of corporate interests that want to get you addicted to stuff that will make you poor and unhealthy, and underling any collective attempt to help.

The previous vice-president claimed cigarettes don't give you cancer and the current president thinks wind turbine and the health problems caused by asbestos are both hoaxes. This is not a coincidence.

The two big times the Supreme Court flexed their powers were to shut down cigarette regulation by the FDA and Obama's Clean Power plan. Again, not a coincidence.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-21 16:48:14+00:00
Right, makes sense for Danes, or other population where English knowledge is basically ubiquitous. But I'm think it might look differently in other places, if the choice is between "Badly translated but I can understand 95% of it" and "In a language I don't understand at all, maybe 1% I could figure out", then the choice might be a bit different.
by digdugdirk | 2026-02-21 16:49:20+00:00
Can you please explain a bit more about why it's a difficult photogrammetry challenge, or point me in the direction of resources so I can learn more about it myself? This is an exact project on my projects list, so I'd love to have a better grounding in the topic when I get around to diving in to it.

Edit: I'm more focused on getting a dimensionally accurate/stable model, vs an esthetically pleasing one, if that matters. The hope is to be able to scan a broken chair and be able to design a jig in CAD that I could then 3d print for holding a specific piece in place while everything goes back together.
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-02-21 16:49:32+00:00
I don't think they're going to lose the House over just one thing. The economy feels fundamentally broken in some sense that doesn't seem to show up in statistics. (Affordability plus job mobility, maybe?) Tariffs are only a part of that. But there's also the brutality and thuggishness of the ICE crackdown. There's the rule by executive order, sidelining Congress. There's the constant trampling of norms and precedent (and even the Constitution). There's the rampant egomania and attention-seeking. There's the corruption and graft. There's the rambling, disjointed speech that makes one wonder if he's all there. There's Epstein. There's the "peace president" attacking Venezuela and threatening to go to war against Iran. There's the incompetence and buffoonery of the Cabinet.

It just goes on and on and on. Cutting tariffs is not going to be anywhere near enough to save the Republicans in the midterms.
by GTP | 2026-02-21 16:49:43+00:00
Problem is, even though a single LLM call is negligible, their aggregate is not. We ended up invoking an LLM for each web search, and there are people using them for tasks that could be trivially carried out by much less energy-hungry tools. Yes, using an LLM can be much more convinient than learning how to use 10 different tools, but this is killing a mosquito with a bazooka.

> We don't need complete automation of every complex task, AI can still be very helpful even if doesn't quite make that bar.

This is very true, but the direction we took now is to stuff AI everywhere. If this turns out to be a bubble, it will eventually pop and we will be back to a more balanced use of AI, but the only sign I saw of this maybe happening is Microsoft's evaluation dropping, allegedly due to their insistence at putting AI into Windows 11.

Regarding the HW prices being only a temporary increase, I'm not sure about it: I heard some manufacturers already have agreements that will make them sell most of their production to cloud providers for the next two-three years.
by TonyTrapp | 2026-02-21 16:50:23+00:00
Yuuup. My personal website has been inaccessible to a few friends, they thought my server was down. It turned out they had some blocklist (not related to AI) installed on their PiHole, and for whatever reason my website was on that list. It is, in fact, to this day, because my request to unblock it went completely unanswered. I still don't know why the website is on the list.
by andsoitis | 2026-02-21 16:50:34+00:00
> The problem we should be focused on is how dumb people are getting (or have been for all of eternity)

Over the arc of time, I’m not sure that an accurate characterization is that humans have been getting dumber and dumber. If that were true, we must have been super geniuses 3000 years ago!

I think what is true is that the human condition and age old questions are still with us and we’re still on the path to trying to figure out ourselves and the cosmos.
by chasd00 | 2026-02-21 16:50:37+00:00
> software to fly the drone into the person... and thats probably around somewhere out there as well.

ardupilot + waypoint nav would do it for fixed locations. The camera identifies a target, gets the gps cooridnates and sets a waypoint. I would be shocked if there wasn't extensions available (maybe not officially) for flying to a "moving location". I'm in the high power rocketry hobby and the knowledge to add control surfaces and processing to autonomously fly a rocket to a location is plenty available. No one does it because it's a bad look for a hobby that already raises eyebrows.
by xp84 | 2026-02-21 16:50:48+00:00
Interesting. Marshall Brain’s (RIP) Manna story had fast food restaurant management automated in this fashion, but I can see how customer service call centers fit the model quite well. We will probably see the “puppets” eliminated in 12-18 months when the voice models improve enough to be indistinguishable.

Government is actually a surprising place to see this, since in theory they’re supposed to care about serving the citizens, as opposed to for instance, American health insurers, who in general would rather deflect and deny, which AI is perfect for.
by dhayabaran | 2026-02-21 16:51:23+00:00
The false positive problem gets worse over time too. Domains get sold, sites pivot, old content gets removed. A blocklist with no removal process and a "cry about it" attitude in the FAQ is basically a one-way reputational blackhole. At minimum it needs an expiry or re-review mechanism. Even browser safe browsing lists re-check URLs periodically.
by hks0 | 2026-02-21 16:52:37+00:00
Proton let's me bring my own subdomain for those random emails and does a pretty good job of tracking which email is given to whom, and also supports hiding your email even if you want to initiate the email contact, not just reply (plus scheme in mail address doesn't allow this). Otherwise you can also use their domain too, to stay fully anonymous.

So far I've been happy. I hope I'll stay happy.
by sdkfjhdsjk | 2026-02-21 16:52:50+00:00
I remember reading about that back in the 90s as a kid here in the USA, in Action Pursuit Games magazine. They said semi-automatic paintball guns were illegal in Australia. I was like what kind of hellhole dystopia is that? Meanwhile at the local paintball field I remember this hillbilly had a fully automatic Angel when they came out. (The first electronic paintball gun.) He walked over to the treeline and emptied a hopper full of Brass Eagle paintballs into a tree in like 5 seconds. They all hit the tree at the exact same spot and vaporized into pink mist. Freedom, baby.
by bdangubic | 2026-02-21 16:53:24+00:00
we want Presidents who step up when the shit hits the fan, not take our kids out of schools and lock everyone up in their homes and then add trillions of dollars of debt they will eventually have to pay up.

It is easy to be the President when shit's easy. I don't follow politics at all anymore, stopped right around the time someone like Donald was able to get a nomination for a political party in the United States so this isn't a liberal bashing Donald, these are just facts that he was about as worse of a President in his first four years as we've ever had. The jury is still out for these 4, we'll analyze that in 2029 :)
by logicprog | 2026-02-21 16:54:10+00:00
There's a reason I chose ZC to try first! Out of all of them, it does seem to be the best. I'm just not sure that claws, as an overall thing, are useful yet. at least with any model less capable than Opus 4.6 — and if you're using opus, then whew, that's expensive and wasteful.
by dhayabaran | 2026-02-21 16:54:52+00:00
The oauth2-proxy suggestion above is probably the easiest path for this. The main thing to watch out with nginx-level oauth is token expiry. If you set short-lived tokens (which you should), you need the proxy layer to handle refresh silently or your friends will keep getting kicked back to the login screen mid-session. If you just need Google or GitHub login for a few people, oauth2-proxy with an email allowlist is way less overhead than running a full identity provider.
by hunterpayne | 2026-02-21 16:56:29+00:00
The "app" is probably a web page written in JS. Rarely its a native app in either Kotlin or Swift but then you have to maintain 2 different apps in 2 different languages with 2 different OSes for the devs. So unless the app really specifically requires something special, its just a web page. Even (and especially) your banking app.
by api | 2026-02-21 16:57:34+00:00
Other than some very askew bizarro rationalists, I don’t think that many people take AI hard takeoff doomerism seriously at face value.

Much of the cheerleading for doomerism was large AI companies trying to get regulatory moats erected to shut down open weights AI and other competitors. It was an effort to scare politicians into allowing massive regulatory capture.

Turns out AI models do not have strong moats. Making models is more akin to the silicon fab business where your margin is an extreme power law function of how bleeding edge you are. Get a little behind and you are now commodity.

General wide breadth frontier models are at least partly interchangeable and if you have issues just adjust their prompts to make them behave as needed. The better the model is the more it can assist in its own commodification.
by Jordan-117 | 2026-02-21 16:58:00+00:00
Follow-up: maybe you're confusing Ars Technica with Wikipedia, whose admins did redact Nora's last name from discussions? If so, that's a weird equivalence to draw, since the change was disclosed and done to protect personal information, not attack someone else in the process. (Also, "Nora [redacted]" itself seems to be a name lifted from an unrelated person who had merely contacted Archive.today with a takedown request.)
by selridge | 2026-02-21 16:58:02+00:00
There’s not that much detail. A few comments in 2019 from a DTS person indicated that Apple didn’t really anticipate people shipping on this in volume. My guess is they want to dissuade people from using it.

They can’t immediately just do away with it because a bunch of their first party apps use it (entitlements don’t cut it). It’s a weird space.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-21 16:58:02+00:00
Another nice little "hidden" thing is that you can get people's public keys from just a GitHub username, and be kind of sure it is keys in active use, by doing http://github.com/$username.keys.

Adding access to a new user? `curl https://github.com/embedding-shapes.keys >> /home/user/.ssh/authorized_keys`