MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by digitalPhonix | 2026-02-23 09:43:17+00:00
> Autopilots in airplanes are kind of dumb (keep heading, speed, and altitude, they won’t do much anything else)

That is absolutely false.

A 20 year old avionics suite in General Aviation (GTN 450) does much more than maintain altitude, speed & heading - you input a flight plan including an approach, it will fly the flight plan, capture the approach signals (VOR/localiser/whatever - which is far more complex than “keeping course”) all the way down to approach minimums.

It can go down to 200ft for an LPV approach.
by andai | 2026-02-23 09:44:14+00:00
So the argument here is like a harm reduction argument, as in the decriminalization/legalization of hard drugs?

That seems a little uncharitable, though it does get me wondering... Imagine if benevolent hackers took over The Algorithm. What might they achieve?

They could promote high quality educational content, as is done in certain other nations.

They could utilize the companies' infinite knowledge of Skinner box mechanics to discourage and even break screen addiction, rather than cultivate it.

The possibilities are endless.

Any volunteers? ;)
by vmilner | 2026-02-23 09:45:50+00:00
"The title is the same as that of a very well-known book by Professor
L. E. Dickson (with which ours has little in common). We proposed
at one time to change it to 'An introduction to arithmetic', a more novel
and in some ways a more appropriate title; but it was pointed out that
this might lead to misunderstandings about the content of the book."

G.H. Hardy and E. M. Wright "An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers"
by Grom_PE | 2026-02-23 09:46:05+00:00
I thought oxfmt would just be a faster drop-in replacement for "biome format"... It wasn't.

Let this be a warning: running oxfmt without any arguments recursively scans directory tree from the current directory for all *.js and *.ts files and silently reformats them.

Thanks to that, I got a few of my Allman-formatted JavaScript files I care about messed up with no option to format them back from K&R style.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-02-23 09:47:20+00:00
OK so in fact parents who want their kids to be able to communicate with them as needed, not parents who want their kids to be able to play video games when so desiring?

Of course the ability to do the first gives the ability to do the second, but I think we can agree that they don't as a general rule want their kids to play video games. Again, outliers always exist.

Now as to why parents want their kids to answer when texted that can vary, maybe a lot of reasons are stupid but I can easily construct familial situations where the kid not being able to answer a text is a major disaster and probably parents in that situation flip shit because stuff is way more difficult for them than it is for other people. Probably those parents should have notified the school though, and the school should allow exceptions, but lots of schools are not, in my experience, run by people able to see the need for exceptions.

So I sort of expect that flipping shit happens the more stress there is, some of that can be passive aggressive shit flipping to relieve stress from other places but I would expect, as it matches to my experience in the world, that when shit flipping over trivial stupid stuff happens it is probably because the relatively trivial situation that is being flipped over connects closely to some problematic situation, and thus the trivial situation for most people who flip shit over it is not as trivial as it might be for the general population.

In short I would expect that the tendency to flip shit over the kid not being able to answer calls or texts in class would be proportionate to how absolutely necessary it is for particular family to have the kid answer calls or texts.
by simoncion | 2026-02-23 09:47:40+00:00
From TFA:

They have also soft-deprecated the ability to have any layer 3 addresses on member interfaces which makes it behave like a real hardware switch. The net.link.bridge.member_ifaddrs sysctl controls this behavior and it will be removed in FreeBSD 16.0-RELEASE, same as if set to zero.

I'm a little bit uncertain. This means that the bridge may have one or more L3 addresses assigned to it, but the interfaces attached to that bridge may not, right?

If that's right, how does that interact with things like Linux's veth pairs? [0] Can the half of the pair that's not a member of the bridge have an IP address?

[0] I assume something like that exists in FreeBSD-land.
by dewey | 2026-02-23 09:48:27+00:00
> Instagram Reels being algorithmically hostile to small creators, and YouTube Shorts still feeling like an afterthought

The average consumer doesn't care about these things, they will go to the technically inferior product that they already use (YouTube) or use IG Reels that are basically identical to TT and share a lot of the popular creators already. If the platform is hostile to small creators isn't really something that people care about, as can be seen by the popularity of Spotify.
by TrackerFF | 2026-02-23 09:48:39+00:00
I was going to ask the other day, how long until people start getting banned left and right from the big services, after they start using / integrating openclaw? Seems like the other big issues, other than the security aspects. And knowing how kafkaesque it is to deal with companies like google, I don't hope the claw practitioners are too integrated with products from companies like google.
by IanCal | 2026-02-23 09:49:36+00:00
Sounds like the quality isn't all that great but LD06 sensors look like they're about $20 and someone who works on libraries about this suggested the STL27L which seems to be about $160 and here's an outdoor scan from it: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/pidar-scan-240901-0647-7997b...

Not sure if the ld06 is a scanner like this or if it's just a line (like you'd use for a cheaper robot vac).
by sva_ | 2026-02-23 09:50:09+00:00
Honestly, I think it was probably a few users abusing the system like crazy. I've been building with Gemini CLI the past few days and had an increasing amount of issues getting a request through.

The GH issue trackers were full of people bitching and moaning about it. I think it might be a worse thing to alienate your users who use your product in the intended way - through Google's tooling.

But I agree the 0 strike rule seems really excessive.

It is also a possible scenario that a single individual sets up 10+ AI Pro subscriptions to blast through tokens like crazy - not sure how the economics of the daily allowances compare to the API pricing here.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-23 09:50:14+00:00
The copyright lawsuit was the first moment in time when FreeBSD and the other *BSDs were left behind, while Linux was free to advance.

Nevertheless, after this initial setback they had recovered and almost a decade later, around 2003, they had become the best solution for many server applications, even if they were not so widely known as Linux, which had spread a lot during the years when *BSDs were tied in lawsuits.

The slowness of their evolution towards multi-threading, which was caused by having much less developers than Linux and less corporate support, was what has propelled again Linux in front of them and this handicap has never been recovered later.

The 2 points listed by you are of course correct, by they are linked to the continuous reduction of the number of FreeBSD users that has started in 2003 and which has lasted for several years, which was caused by the fact that even when you were already an experienced FreeBSD user and preferred it over Linux, it was pointless to install FreeBSD on any new state-of-the-art computer, because FreeBSD could not harness its power.
by squigz | 2026-02-23 09:50:26+00:00
We haven't been able to utilize solar to the degree we have been able to utilize oil for all that long, and since it has, our utilization has only grown.

"Commercial concentrated solar power plants were first developed in the 1980s. Since then, as the cost of solar panels has fallen, grid-connected solar PV systems' capacity and production have doubled about every three years. Three-quarters of new generation capacity is solar"

This says nothing of, say, hydro power, which we have been using for a while

> That's like saying "in any case, the future will be better". As humans have shown, worse comes before better in history. Howabout making the present better first?

Mate I said nothing about our future or present. It's just absurd to assume our past has any bearing on how super-advanced space-faring civilizations will utilize technology.
by graemep | 2026-02-23 09:50:43+00:00
No reason anyone would would feel social discomfort in my experience, which is mostly in Catholic and Anglican churches, and AFAIK money comes mostly from donations not made in public. I have not felt the least worried about what people would think when I have not had cash on me or about how much I put in.

Done the traditional way, no one can really see how much you put in the box and there is no reaction at all from anyone if you put nothing in. Only people right next to you can see anything at all.

Now churches in the UK offer envelopes on which you can write your name and postcode for tax reasons (they can reclaim part of the tax paid on the donation if you are a UK tax payer) so no one can see how much you put in if its in such an envelope.
by mfld | 2026-02-23 09:51:07+00:00
Agree. I used a color e-ink to display my son's school timetable (previously discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42408546), and it has been running reliably for 18 months, with charging needed every 4-5 months. I note that the author (cool project!) also earlier took the route of displaying websites as PNGs.
by defrost | 2026-02-23 09:51:39+00:00
While

While many approaches to religion exclude nontheism by definition, some inclusive definitions of religion show how religious practice and belief do not depend on the presence of a god or gods.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontheistic_religion

is a thing, it's also worth recalling that some out there do seemingly ascribe divine powers to piles of gold and silver.

Is blockchain fervor another whirling of Dervishes?
by intellectronica | 2026-02-23 09:51:49+00:00
I'll accept your perspective and try to learn from it.

However I think that the comment is relevant, and you can see from the replies gathered before it was flagged that it did spark a relevant discussion.

Reminding that the speaker is a spiritual leader and not an authority on the use of technology is not a sneer and and not an ideological statement. In any context other than religion, which I understand is sensitive, a statement of that sort would be considered a contribution to the discussion, not an ideological battle. And that's precisely the problem - censoring a discussion about the relevance of religion to the matter is the ideological act.
by atomicfiredoll | 2026-02-23 09:52:03+00:00
I don't know why your dragging centralization/decentralization, business model, Fairphone, etc. into the conversation now. It sort of feels like you're overthinking this.

I often talk to people about Signal irl, most download the app but some folks do. Some people actually want a For You feed and will bounce off Loops, Mastodon, or whatever. That's all fine. These spaces can have content about cars or guns or whatever else without eating the entire world.

You said:

> I want loops/mastodon to be a diverse place that has content from all over the internet.

Again, I think lots of people who are already in the Fediverse want that. But, if everybody who likes cars decides they won't join in until somebody who shares content about cars does, that car community may never show up.

You seem to have interests that you feel are undeserved. Just... regularly share things about what you think is cool. Just do it for funsies.

If you really feel strongly about wanting to make a diverse space, cross promote your stuff in spaces with other people who have the same interests. Share a post, share a video, ask them to follow you. Maybe even start an instance dedicated to the topic if that's your vision.
by CodeCompost | 2026-02-23 09:52:39+00:00
I briefly hosted a Lemmy server on my machine just to see how it works and my god never again. The pictures that were automatically synced to my machine did not only make me lose faith in humanity, but it made me shut down and wipe my machine immediately because I was terrified that some of those images would land me some serious jail time.

So if you choose to host something like this, be very aware that there are some sick, sick people out there.
by michaloo | 2026-02-23 09:52:41+00:00
CLI tool that queries Cloudflare's GraphQL Analytics API to get usage statistics and cost estimates for:

- Workers (Durable Objects and Containers)
- Workers AI
- R2 buckets
- D1 databases
- KV namespaces
- Queues

Useful as you experiment more with their compute and storage to ensure you won't be surprised by the bill at the end of the month.
by dochtman | 2026-02-23 09:52:52+00:00
That's the policy, but we've been a bit more conservative in practice. `main` currently targets 1.88, but that's only because a security issue in the time crate has forced our hand (one reason I don't like the time crate all that much). Before that, it was 1.83 (from November 2024). Our last release targets 1.71 (from July 2023).
by servo_sausage | 2026-02-23 09:53:08+00:00
Useful but not at all required.
Camera + radar is sufficient for driving, and camera+ USS is fine for parking.

Radar is just cheaper than the number of cameras and compute, it's also not really a strict requirement.

Look at how the current cars fuck up, it's mostly navigation, context understanding, and tight manoeuvres. Lidar gives you very little in these areas
by Kael1 | 2026-02-23 09:53:32+00:00
The "long run" in tech is increasingly about moving up the abstraction stack while maintaining a deep understanding of the "leaky" parts of those abstractions. Here is how I see these three paths evolving by 2026:

Backend Dev: Traditional CRUD is being commoditized by AI agents. However, the "Backend Architect" is more valuable than ever. As we lean more on AI-generated code, we face a "complexity debt" crisis. The long-term winners here will be those who specialize in system reliability, data integrity, and complex state management—things AI still struggles to reason about holistically.

AI Dev: We are moving from "training models" to "orchestrating agents." If you mean "AI Research," the bar is extremely high (Ph.D. level math). If you mean "AI Engineering," it’s essentially becoming a subset of Software Engineering. The "moat" isn't knowing how to call an API, but knowing how to build evaluation frameworks, RAG pipelines, and cost-efficient inference loops.

DevOps: This is morphing into Platform Engineering. Companies no longer want someone to manually bash scripts; they want internal platforms that allow AI-augmented dev teams to deploy safely. With the rise of "AIOps," the long-term career here is about observability and security—being the person who knows why the "black box" system is failing at 3 AM.

My Take: Don't pick one. The most resilient career for the next decade is the "Systems-Thinking Generalist." Learn Backend to understand the logic, DevOps to understand the delivery, and AI as the "force multiplier" for your own productivity. The person who can architect a product, deploy it scaleably, and integrate LLMs intelligently will always be in the top 1% of earners.
by mgaunard | 2026-02-23 09:53:37+00:00
I do not have a microwave, but I remember having one, and never managed to intuitively use it to iterate on my cooking.

Meanwhile, throw stuff in the pan, move it around, adjust the temperature, add in some stuff as it goes, is a much more interactive type of cooking that is much more likely to take me where I want to go (tasty food).
by input_sh | 2026-02-23 09:54:23+00:00
I think an important distinction is that most of the awesome lists required an entry to have some sort of a sentence-long pitch about why something's awesome instead of a giant list of items with no way to distinguish between them without clicking. That's far more important than tags in my opinion.

That said, I am biased as I maintained quite a few of them years ago and am happy to see today's youngling maintain this tradition of low-effort contributions to make a source that's better than a search engine when looking for stuff in a specific niche.
by lioeters | 2026-02-23 09:54:43+00:00
Nothing, but it will happen anyway. Maybe improved memory safety and security, at least as a plausible excuse to get funding for it. Perhaps also improved enthusiasm of developers, since they seem to enjoy the newness of Rust over working with an existing C++ codebase.

Well, I don't mean to be cynical, there are probably many actual advantages to "rewrite it in Rust". I'm not in support of it, or against it, just making an observation that the cultural trend seems to be moving that way.
by ben_w | 2026-02-23 09:55:10+00:00
Even if you could actually prove Trump was an asset of a specific other nation (and given his total lack of shame about everything, I don't see how he'd be able to keep his mouth shut about it if he was), mere debt isn't what would count as such because the US has been arguing with itself about that for a very long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_debt_ceiling

That said, a president threatening war without Congressional approval is already bad, doing so with with a friendly nation is worse, doing so when US is bound to a mutual defence alliance with that nation by a treaty signed by Congress where Congress also passed an extra law to prevent the nation leaving that treaty* is "why have they not removed him from office yet?" territory.

* Section 1250A, National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/2670
by pu_pe | 2026-02-23 09:55:15+00:00
GPT-J was the one that made me really interested in LLMs, as I could run it on a 3090.

Some details on the timeline are not quite precise, and would benefit from linking to a source so that everyone can verify it. For example, HyperClOVA is listed as 204B parameters, but it seems it used 560B parameters (https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.274/).
by rk06 | 2026-02-23 09:55:34+00:00
> they are betting that JS-the-language is so broken that it cannot even host its own tools.

Evan wallace proved it by building esbuild. this is no longer bet.

> If their open platform were as powerful as it should be, it would be easy to use it to recreate the kinds of experiences they propose to sell.

you would be surprised to know that tech companies may find it cheaper to pay money than developer bandwidth for stuff beyong their core compentency.

dropbox was also considered to be trivially implementable, but end users rarely try to re-invent it.
by TrackerFF | 2026-02-23 09:55:42+00:00
Nothing new. 10 years ago my (now 20+ year) google account was compromised for a whole 5 minutes. It was used by shady bots, and instantly banned. No warnings, no nothing. Trying to figure out what had happened was a challenge in itself.

Getting through to customer support was impossible.

5 years later I tried to get my account opened up, filled out some forms, and by some miracle it was.

My biggest takeaway from this (other than enabling 2FA) was that it is probably easier to get ahold of the scammers that control your account, than to get ahold of actual human customer support at google / alphabet.
by pjc50 | 2026-02-23 09:56:01+00:00
Both in the case of drugs and short form vertical video.

There's a lot of stuff which may loosely be termed "vices", e.g. alcohol and gambling, which have the property:

- many people never touch

- many people indulge without significant harm, getting enjoyment from the process

- some people over indulge messily

- a few people get their lives completely ruined, or ruin the lives of those around them

Then there's an uncomfortable, unreconcilable tension between the desire to punish/prevent the last group by banning the thing, versus the second group entirely reasonably saying that it's not a problem for them.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-23 09:56:58+00:00
> internally at Microsoft, pretty much all the developers I know have switched to using "Devbox", which means we use a remote desktop client to access our dev machine.

Everything old is new again, back to the days of using a single shared server for software development in timesharing setup.

Instead of Novell Netware, UNIX, VMS, AS/400,..., it is the cloud.
by UltraSane | 2026-02-23 09:57:04+00:00
This is very wrong.
LIDAR scanners have revolutionized surveying by
enabling rapid, high-precision 3D mapping of terrain and infrastructure, capturing millions of data points per second. LIDAR can penetrate dense vegetation, allowing accurate, ground-level, mapping in forested or obstructed areas. Drone mounted LIDAR has become very popular. Tripod mounted LIDAR scanners are very commonly used on construction sites.
by listic | 2026-02-23 09:57:26+00:00
Could you please explain exactly why you think no one you know uses Mastodon? I'm trying to figure it out. I, personally am hesitant to use it first and foremost because Mastodon (and many of its lesser known alternatives) is a variant of micro-blogging (I'm appalled how extending character limit beyond 500 apparently counts as a feature in Fediverse!)
by samiv | 2026-02-23 09:57:33+00:00
I'm nearly 30 years into my career and I feel like the tools today are so broken that if I was going to "fix" them that's all I would ever be doing.

I write a bunch of my code on Linux with Clio and for the last several years that "tool" has gotten buggier abd buggier. Sometimes there's a similar issue with breakpoints not breaking.

But I just can't be bothered anymore. If something doesn't work out of the box it doesn't work and I simply move on and find another way around the issue. Life's too short to fix other people's code too.
by BoxOfRain | 2026-02-23 09:58:50+00:00
The UK did more or less this for heroin addicts up until the 1960s, when a careless doctor and diplomatic pressure from the US who were pushing a moralised rather than medicalised model of drug legislation largely ended the programme. While you couldn't buy the stuff in shops (quite rightly) addicts were prescribed their drug of choice even if there was no hope of breaking their addiction, making the black market for these drugs less lucrative and reducing associated criminality.

It was so uncommon and successful it was called the 'British System' abroad, and when we adopted a more aggressively prohibitionist approach addiction rates actually increased markedly, because it necessarily creates a lucrative black market.
by account42 | 2026-02-23 09:59:05+00:00
In practice, it's necessary. While escrow should absolutely be a requirement to receive the benefits of copyright protection you'd also need to make sure that the escrowed artifact is actually complete and in a usable form and covers every version of the work. That means a lot more than dumping it onto the library of congress so even with that requirement we would benefit from independent archival.
by Zanfa | 2026-02-23 09:59:08+00:00
I'd say the numbers listed here prove the GPs point of poor enforcement. The largest fine is roughly 0.97% of Meta's 2023 revenue, the equivalent of a $600 fine for somebody making 60k / year. It's a tiny-tiny cost of doing business at best, definitely not a deterrent, given Meta's blatant disregard for GDPR since then.
by pjc50 | 2026-02-23 09:59:09+00:00
.. ah, yes, "completely unmoderated free speech system that supports images" does mean "may contain CSAM". Heck, even Instagram had a horrific "mirror world" incident where the moderation bit got flipped on a number of images which ordinary users were exposed to.

I wouldn't run any kind of publishing system for anons myself. It's potentially valuable for an actual social group though.