MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nobody9999 | 2026-02-16 16:20:53+00:00
>It sounds like the local ranked-choice implementation is unnecessarily complex and constrained. A simple "rank all candidates from 1 (most preferred) to n (least preferred)" for n candidates seems like the better solution.

I'm sure you're right. Unfortunately, I'm not the person you'd need to convince.

Here's contact information[0] for the relevant folks, and thanks for taking an interest. I'm sure my fellow townspeople will be grateful for your guidance. You have my thanks for stepping up to help us improve our voting systems!

For your reference, here's some background on the how the process came to be[1][2][3][4]

[0] https://www.vote.nyc/page/contact-us

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/New_York_City_Ballot_Question_1,_Ele...

[2] https://apnews.com/article/nyc-ranked-choice-voting-explaine...

[3] https://rankthevotenyc.org/history-of-rcv-in-nyc/

[4] https://rankthevotenyc.org/what-we-learned-from-new-york-cit...
by throway23423 | 2026-02-16 16:21:55+00:00
I doubt whatever facial recognition trained over 6 million odd Palestinians (plus 2 million Israeli Palestinians) would trump similar offerings from competitors like Hikvision trained on data of 1.4 billion Chinese.

edit : i think their tech is overhyped. Remember the signal-chats debacle last year where the National Security Advisor was photographed using a modified client of Signal by Israeli company TeleMessage. And immediately after, TeleMessage was hacked, and it was revealed that all the chats were transmitted and stored in plain-text. They still managed to get their backup-spyware installed at the highest levels of the US government and military. It looks like they have great sales teams.

https://archive.is/0qjVI
by just6979 | 2026-02-16 16:22:53+00:00
They even mentioned this in the article:

"However, the tester surmised that introducing the materials into the circuit is just like adding a resistor in series, and they’re unlikely to distort the audio too much, except by lowering the signal level."

It's really a terrible write-up (AI?), pure click bait.

The final sentence is just garbage:

"They then tried various materials like mud and banana, which, although they’re pretty poor conductors, still seemed to introduce imperceptible changes to the signal, at least for the average person."

What does that even mean? It's trash.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-16 16:24:46+00:00
> At the bare minimum the cost is enforcement plus the harm imposed by occasional false accusations and convictions.

Don't forget compliance costs. Those are some of the largest costs and they're largely hidden because they don't go into the government budget. You pass a law to prevent a million dollars in total harm and then a hundred thousand companies each spend $100 to comply with it, what did you get and what did you pay?

Compliance costs also have a specific type of cost because of their asymmetry. It's like adding a fixed amount of weight to a boat. If you add 1000 pounds of regulatory costs to a 200,000 ton container ship, it doesn't even notice. If you add the same amount of weight to a kayak, it sinks. But if you keep adding costs until you sink all the small boats, and then sink all the medium boats, you're not just failing to solve all the problems caused by market consolidation, you're actively making them worse.
by WorldMaker | 2026-02-16 16:24:59+00:00
RxJS is far more robust than signals (things like backpressure operators, scheduling operators, and more). Angular's move to signals is just another sign of what Angular was doing wrong with RxJS all along: Angular could have used the robustness of RxJS to make a better framework but at many decisions along the way chose to not trust RxJS to do its jobs, skipped operators for the sake of leaking imperative state back out into the world and/or treating RxJS like heavyweight Promises (which indeed they are heavy and unweildy in that context). Signals enshrine the imperative leaks as the preferred and final path forward, further crippling the robustness RxJS could have offered and yet also doesn't entirely eliminate RxJS as a dependency.

Angular was born broken in how it made use of RxJS. A lot of developers have a bad impression of RxJS simply because Angular led them to so many RxJS worst practices, bad performance, and taught them that RxJS was just "heavy Promises".
by quietbritishjim | 2026-02-16 16:25:00+00:00
I think I figured out that the parent meant:

> Flutter is not a great success; Fuchsia never made it big, and the Android team counter attacked with Kotlin's adoption, JetPack Compose, and Kotlin Multiplatform.

(Despite being much derided when output by LLMs, a semicolon would've really helped me here!)

Partly my confusion came from having heard of both Flutter and Fuschia but having no idea they were connected. In fact I only knew of Flutter working on Android (and other non-Google OSs).

Anyway, it's true that Flutter is not as widely used as an Android replacement would be (if Fuchsia had turned out to be that) but for a UI framework it's reasonably well used and pretty great at cross mobile/desktop development.
by pwg | 2026-02-16 16:25:04+00:00
> Why? Please elaborate.

Tk's GUI object model is sitting at a reasonable maxima between trivial to make use of vs. triggering the events necessary to make the GUI active.

Small example. You want a button on your GUI that triggers a procedure called "process" when it is clicked, this is the code you need (if you are fine with the remaining defaults) (and assuming you used 'pack' as the geometry manager):

button .process -text "Process Entries" -command process
pack .process -side top

And a fully active GUI button will now appear at the bottom of your Tk window, with a label of "Process Entries" and when you click it, a Tcl procedure named "process" will be executed.
by BoggleFiend | 2026-02-16 16:25:13+00:00
He was recently interviewed on Pragmatic Engineer, a podcast whose guests almost always have very impressive technical careers (the episode before him was Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, the VP of Data and Analytics at AWS and the episode after him is Brady Gooch, the Chief Scientist for Software Engineering at IBM)

I agree that summarizing Peter as a "vibe coder" is unfair and disingenuous. The podcast paints his career as being interesting because we went from an impressive software developer, to an entrepreneur, to taking a significant break, to kind of obsessively creating Clawdbot.

Worth a listen
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-creator-of-cl...
by turnsout | 2026-02-16 16:25:34+00:00
If you've ever tried to build something real with agentic AI, you know that it takes time. You can't (yet) snap your fingers and produce a fully market-viable clone of a SaaS product.

The specifics matter here. If you run a CRM for Dentists, can someone replicate your product in a weekend? I'm going to guess that dentists have some esoteric needs related to their CRM, and it's a little more complicated than an outsider might guess.

So what is the threat model? That a dentist is going to get fed up and try to DIY? I think you should encourage that, so they'll see what goes into it. That a 22 year old chooses "CRM for Dentists" as a thing to vibe-code over a weekend? Again, good luck with that.

I really dislike this SaaSocalypse fear mongering, because it's just not based in reality. Show me five examples of established SaaS companies being wiped out by vibe coding.
Show HN: Million Dollar Chat
by shrink | 2026-02-16 16:26:36+00:00
Inspired by the Million Dollar Homepage, this is the Million Dollar Chat. People fill the chat's one million character brain, one character at a time. The Million Dollar Homepage of the AI age.

My initial design used one million tokens but I quickly discovered that tokens are not made equal which made it very difficult to reason about. Eventually, I settled on one million characters.

The chat has a few different capabilities, for example, you can ask it to navigate to a position for you (e.g: "jump to the final character") and it can search within the context. I have more things to add, like the ability to play music from the songs included in its context.

Other visitor's cursors can be seen in real-time when they are adding to the chat's brain.

Despite the fact that this is an AI project, I built it by hand. I tried out Claude Code and Codex but neither produced code I was happy with.

The current model is openai/gpt-4.1-nano. I figure, people paying to add characters will subsidise chatter's free access to the model.
by exceptione | 2026-02-16 16:26:38+00:00
> Honestly don't know what people think they are gaining with a heavy frontend.

True, but (I repeat myself here), it depends on what kind of website we are talking about. For instance, a data-heavy SPA that workers use the whole day (like a CRM) is at least perceptually faster and more user friendly compared to the same thing but with traditional whole page reloads.
by BoxFour | 2026-02-16 16:26:46+00:00
Actually: There’s been a noticeable uptick in the last decade+ of better-made clothing for shoppers who are open to paying somewhat higher prices. Not boutique prices, but also more expensive than H&M.

For a long time the stereotypical “young professional” look was tied closely to just a few mainstream retailers (Banana Republic for example), but over the last ~15 years a wider range of smaller or more specialized brands has entered the space: Alex Mill, Spier and Mackay, etc.

But even ignoring that your analogy doesn’t quite fit since price plays a significant role in clothing purchasing decisions: Fast fashion succeeds largely because it is cheap.

If reasonably priced, higher-quality alternatives were accessible people would buy them. It’s partly why certain brands have grown in popularity (Carhartt, for example).
Show HN: Kuberoku, A CLI to treat vanilla Kubernetes like Heroku
by jainamankumar | 2026-02-16 16:26:50+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Kuberoku, a CLI that aims to bring a Heroku style workflow to vanilla Kubernetes.

I’ve used Heroku for years and still think the apps / deploy / logs / run DX is hard to beat. On the other hand, I like Kubernetes, but I don’t love how much of the day-to-day workflow becomes YAML and glue.

Right now, Kuberoku is still early, but kuberoku deploy works and handles the basic deployment workflow (build + apply + rollout) via Kubernetes primitives.

How it works:
Kuberoku is written in Python and interacts directly with the K8s API. It doesn't require a heavy server-side operator; it uses native Kubernetes primitives to handle the build-apply-rollout loop.

I’m currently working on:
- a git push-style workflow
- RBAC / multi-tenant safety so it’s usable by teams

I’d love feedback from K8s/platform folks on:
What’s the first edge case you’d try to break in a tool like this?
by karmakaze | 2026-02-16 16:27:44+00:00
I didn't catch the rename news at the time.

Wonder why they didn't pick a better name--probably constrained to start with a 'V' for continuity. I think "Laqer" would have been better as a high quality transparent layer vs something used to cover fiberboard. The latter also makes sense though, to improve the performance of a crappy implementation.
by gosub100 | 2026-02-16 16:28:19+00:00
I think the household names are perfectly able to start their own league and deprecate FIDE. Maybe they are already? This is a situation where the org needs the players more than the players need the org.

I think it was F1 auto racing that recently (10 or so) years ago went through a revolution that changed the rules (for fans, in that case) that dramatically increased the viewership of the sport, mainly because the previous owner was so out of touch with the times.
by mmaunder | 2026-02-16 16:28:24+00:00
Someone needs a hug. Honestly I've started writing only to realize how much code output will be wasted over the next hour or two, so I just go back to coding the amazing product I'm working on with amazing agents, that would simply not be possible if I didn't have access to the AI tools I'm using. It's going to make many humans profoundly more safe. I'm very excited. I hope you are excited about your project too.
by rascallbee | 2026-02-16 16:28:28+00:00
I went all in on xmpp to replace my traditional cell communications (text and calls) about a year ago, using Snikket on a VPS for the server, jmp.chat for an phone->xmpp gateway service, and a data-only esim for connectivity.

From my experience the biggest pain point gets the least amount of discussion in this post and that is the client landscape. I'm on iOS so I tried Monal and Siskin IM as my primary mobile clients and Movim/Dino as my desktop clients.

While I truly appreciate the effort the maintainers put into these tools I have to admit that the UX for Moanl and Siskin IM leave a lot to be desired and if you're used to something like Whatsapp or Signal it will prove a significant barrier to convincing friends and family to adopt your new platform.

I frequently encountered UI bugs and missing features using the iOS clients and for the life of me could never get notifications working reliably on mobile (a constant bug bear for users in the Siskin and Snikket user base).

For calls and texts on mobile, I don't think I ever managed to get a reliable notification unless the application was open on the screen on iOS. This meant that I frequently missed important calls or texts when out and about. On the desktop, Dino did manage to at least always alert me when a call or a text came through, but answering the calls on was always hit or miss on my laptop for reasons that allude me.

Interestingly the most full featured and reliable client turned out to be movim, which has the caveat of being a full featured formum/social network with an xmpp client embedded. On movim I would reliably get notifications for calls and texts and could "answer" calls in any browser connected to a microphone easily.

Another thing to note if you're looking to replace your phone service is that 3G/LTE radio is very tolerant to maintaining a reliable connection on the move, jumping between cell towers. The same cannot be said for an XMPP based call, and you will encounter significant latency and drop outs trying to hold a conversation driving or on transit.

I eventually gave up on the venture after missing a few too many important notifications, but if I was to go defiantly go all in again I think I would focus on self hosting a movim instance as my base "client", as it was the most reliable and easy to use of all the ones I tried. For mobile, I did hear good things about Conversations on Android but never got around to trying that one.
Show HN: Meshcraft – Turn any photo into a 3D model in seconds
by otmardev | 2026-02-16 16:28:30+00:00
My 10-year-old son and I were building a Roblox game together. AI wrote the Lua code, generated concept art. But when we needed 3D models for the game, there was nothing usable.

AI can write code, generate images, compose music, make videos. But 3D? There's no "Midjourney for meshes" yet. So I built one.

The tech: TripoSR (open source by Stability AI + Tripo) deployed on a HuggingFace Space with a shared H200 GPU, wrapped in a Gradio web app. Upload any photo, it removes the background, runs the image through a vision transformer, predicts a 3D density grid, extracts the mesh via marching cubes, and gives you a downloadable .obj or .glb in under 5 seconds.

What works well: objects with clean silhouettes on contrasting backgrounds. A green Hot Wheels on a white surface came out great. A grey truck on grey carpet, not so much.

What it's NOT: this isn't replacing Blender or ZBrush. Vertex-colored meshes, no UV-mapped textures (that needs 16GB+ VRAM for baking). 256 marching cubes grid resolution. But for quick prototyping, reference meshes, or game jam assets, it gets the job done.

Stack: Python, Gradio, PyTorch, HuggingFace Spaces (ZeroGPU).

Live at https://meshcraft.xyz - beta access is $9.97/mo (unlimited generations). Happy to answer technical questions.

Solo dev, 20+ years experience. Idea to deployed product in about 48 hours.
by buffalobuffalo | 2026-02-16 16:28:53+00:00
There are two big advantages to using a 3rd party system.

1) There are a lot of cases where aggregated user data, even if anonymized, allows for insights that you can't get using just your own data.

2) The software is really just a stand in for a process. A way of doing something, like record keeping or tax filing, etc. A lot of times it makes sense to follow an already established process rather than creating your own. You are less likely to encounter unexpected pitfalls that way.

I don't see how you can overcome those just by having an AI that can build simple crud apps at will.
by y-curious | 2026-02-16 16:28:56+00:00
It’s really hard to get known positions in most of the 960 openings. I think there are general themes for development for the format as well as some positions where you can get instantly mated, and there’s a lot of energy to avoiding that.

I will inject my own opinion: it’s exhausting to watch this format at a high level. You need to be working as hard as the players to understand their plans and it’s not cozy vs standard chess
by fireflash38 | 2026-02-16 16:29:26+00:00
I see this response as the exact same one about tax cheating and how the rich will just move away or be better at cheating taxes.

Did we forget how to discover and punish bad actors? Do you think we should just do nothing and let casual bad behavior go because some people are gonna be abusive? No. I refuse to accept that. It is not your false dichotomy.

If people abuse the system, fine and punish them. More than they profit off of the bad actions.
by vardalab | 2026-02-16 16:29:27+00:00
Yeah but did he actually try to use the repurposed "verbose" mode?
I did, and it's way more verbose than I need, but the regular mode now is basically like mute mode. In addition, recently it started running a lot of stuff in the background and that causes some crazy flicker and Claude has become stubbornly autonomous. It just runs stuff in a flyby mode, asks me a question and then waits a couple seconds and proceeds with a default choice while I am still reading and considering options. I am left mashing Esc and that sometimes does not stop stuff either. Last couple updates have really annoyed me tbh.
by pmdulaney | 2026-02-16 16:29:36+00:00
When I got the shingles vaccine two years ago it was the worst I've had in terms of site pain and general malaise, but certainly wasn't as bad as some people here are recounting.

My pharmacist said he knew someone who had gone blind in one eye from shingles, so that was a vivid motivator for me to get vaccinated!
by tbrownaw | 2026-02-16 16:29:58+00:00
> rests on the shoulders of a single company that has all of their important factories on a single island

Isn't this just taking the oft-proposed explore vs exploit dichotomy to the logical conclusion of the "exploit" side?

Every single arbitrarity-finely-divided thing "should" be handled by the single (group|process) that has the greatest relative advantage at that one thing.

And you end up with the total variety/detailedness of everything matching what the substrate of the economy (ie, people with specialized training or education) has capacity to support. So at the limit there is at most one person who knows how to do any one specific thing.

(And the global economic system becomes infinitely fragile, but eh who's counting.)
by runjake | 2026-02-16 16:30:30+00:00
According to Elon during his recent Dwarkesh podcast appearance[1], TSMC is limited by resource constraints (fab components, contractors, etc). His claim is that TSMC is building as fast as they can and they are unable to meet industry demand.

Seems legit to me. Nonetheless, I think it's a solvable problem.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYXbuik3dgA
by alberto-m | 2026-02-16 16:30:33+00:00
I tried radare2 with the official GUI Iaito. Iaito saves the project in a git repo, so whenever I got corruption (and I got it a lot, like every 4-5 saves) I was just a `git reset --hard` away from restoring a good state. Not the most efficient way of operation, but for me it was better this than tolerating Ghidra's tiny Courier New font.
by mytailorisrich | 2026-02-16 16:30:53+00:00
You may be tempted to conclude that. Then you find something else to ask that leads to an answer obviously nonsensical to a human being, or it hallucinates something, and you realise that, in fact, that's not the case.

IMHO 'understanding' in the usual human sense requires thinking and however good and fast improving LLMs are I don't think anyone would suggest that any of them has become sentient yet. They can infer things based on their training data set better and better but do not 'understand' anmything.

This is a deep and complex topic, and has been for decades.
by kkfx | 2026-02-16 16:30:57+00:00
I've very recently try on my NixOS homeserver both Matrix and XMPP, with the target of having family/few friends own video-calls with chats aside mostly meant as shared scrap of text more than real chats to waste time on them. Something like "remember the milk" than else.

The experience was unpleasant in both cases; in the end, I have a working setup for both, relatively working at least, but what's really missing is a single application, something you can 'go install', 'pip install', or 'cargo build', also easy for distro packagers, that features:

- a text-based configuration

- an admin WebUI (for eventual storage cleanup, moderation etc)

- a client WebUI for users

including:

- text chat with optional file uploads

- audio/video chat

- other bits on the side like long-form notes Nostr-style for a blog with comments under articles etc (yes, it's connected, it's just plain textual communication).

The core of it is just a simple snippet of text, we can transmit to some privately, or to anyone openly, and in that sense, Nostr has got it spot on: you can do chats, emails, blog posts, because everything is just a bit of text rendered with any attached media. Unfortunately, as it stands, Nostr feels like an ecosystem that lacks a clear direction; XMPP seems to be largely abandoned, with enough complexity to put most people off; Matrix looks to be heading towards a commercial future riddled with issues that keep most people away, and in the end, we don't have much. Hosting BBB or Jitsi is even worse. Hosting Asterisk or Yate to use with softphones or classic VoIP desk phones is also problematic.

There's a lot going on under the bonnet now, but why an app hasn't emerged yet that brings together features we've more or less had for decades is a bit of a mystery to me. It almost feels intentional, as if it's designed to deny free communication to the masses by making life difficult on purpose.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-16 16:31:04+00:00
By "existing OSes", that really means Microsoft Windows, other OSes would not have had any problems with the negligible update required to save and restore more registers.

During many decades, Intel has introduced a lot of awful workarounds in their CPUs for the only reason that Microsoft was too lazy to update their OS so the newer better CPUs had to be managed by the OS exactly in the same way as the old worse CPUs, even if that moved inside the CPUs various functions that can be done much more efficiently by the OS, so their place is not inside the CPU.

So the MMX registers were aliased over the FPU registers because in this way the existing MS Windows saved them automatically at thread switching. Eventually the limitations of MMX were too great, and due to competitive pressure from AMD (3DNow!) and Motorola (AltiVec), Intel and Microsoft were forced to transition to SSE in 1999, for which a couple of new save and restore instructions have been added and used by the OS, allowing an increase in the number and size of registers.