MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rkachowski | 2026-02-27 09:16:53+00:00
It's really jarring to see this wave of nostalgia for "the good old days" appear since ~2025. Suddenly these rose tinted glasses have dropped and everything before LLM usage became ubiquitous was a beautiful romantic era of human collaboration, understanding and craftsmanship.

I still acutely remember the gatekeeping and hostility of peak stack overflow, and the inanity of churning out jira tickets as fast as possible for misguided product initiatives. It's just wild yo
by shineDaPoker | 2026-02-27 09:17:40+00:00
I actually talked to someone in temporal about this recently. Temporal gives you the primitives to handle it (activities, configure retries, interceptors), but you still have to implement the deduplication logic yourself for each external integration.

His advice was: Temporal solves orchestration, but making the external API calls idempotent is on you. For simple cases, write observe activities manually. For complex cases, build abstraction.

That's what led me down this path - trying to figure out if the abstraction is worth building or if manual is good enough.

Have you used Temporal for this? How do you handle the idempotency of external calls?
by whstl | 2026-02-27 09:17:51+00:00
> Something I don't think is well understood on HN is how driven by ideals many folks at Anthropic are

After 20 years of everyone in this industry saying "we want to make the world a better place" and doing the opposite, the problem here is not really related to people's "understanding".

And before the default answer kicks in: this is not cynicism. Plenty of folks here on HN and elsewhere legitimately believe that it's possible to do good with tech. But a billion dollar behemoth with great PR isn't that.
by m-schuetz | 2026-02-27 09:18:19+00:00
Pretty much any non-web GUI framework I tried so far has either been terrible to set up, or terrible to deploy. Or both. Electron is stupidly simple.

ImGUI is the single exception that has been simple to set up, trivial to deploy (there is nothing to deploy, including it is all that's needed), and nice to use.
by shineDaPoker | 2026-02-27 09:18:40+00:00
This matches my thinking. The retrieval/lookup approach is exactly what I built - basically Option C with an observe-before-act pattern.

For APIs that support idempotency keys (Stripe, etc.), I use those. For ones that don't but have retrieval (most do), I check first before retrying.

The question I'm wrestling with: is the extra round-trip for the lookup worth it? Or should I just accept the edge cases where it duplicates?

What's your threshold for "critical enough to avoid duplicates"? Payments obviously yes, but what about notifications, reporting, analytics events?
by hypercube33 | 2026-02-27 09:18:51+00:00
I had two faster (Pentium 3) machines but firing up my dad's old Pentium 90 running redhat that I installed to use KDE to write C was just a beautiful feeling and really got me coding for a few years.

Even games were at least partially open (quake) or easily moddable (command and conquer, tribes, etc.) so I went down that rabbit hole soon after.

Also man I really miss BeOS.
by soderfoo | 2026-02-27 09:19:18+00:00
If you're referring to telcos sharing their tech with government there are a few examples of Ericsson working with the Swedish military:

> Brigadier-General Mattias Hanson, CIO, Swedish Armed Forces, says: “Strengthening Sweden’s militarily and acting as part of a collective defense requires us to increase our defensive capabilities. We need to utilize the latest technology and all the innovative power of the Swedish private sector. Sweden has unique skills and capabilities in both telecoms and defense technology..." [0]

This is just one quick example I could find.

[0] https://www.ericsson.com/en/news/2025/6/ericsson-5g-connecti...
by amunozo | 2026-02-27 09:20:47+00:00
I've never seen any other democracy use so extensively the kind of duality between the good guys and bad guys, as Americans like to say. There is a total lack of nuance and a very widespread message about how the US is special and best than anything else in the world, so everything is justified to assure its primacy. It's the kind of thing you hear from totalitarian and brainwashed countries.

I know this is not everybody in the US, and I say this as a foreign person that observes things from outside. I agree with the two statements you made, I just think they could be incomplete and that the countries that behave most similarly to the US are not democracies.
by bjackman | 2026-02-27 09:20:51+00:00
I'm aware this sounds like a "no true Scotsman" argument, but I said "would a football fan watch" and the people who would watch that are not football fans.

I don't mean to denigrate it though, what I'm saying is that media would be serving a totally different purpose than the one served by professional sport today.

I guess, people are very varied, there are probably SOME strange people who watch football today with a motivation that's compatible with AI.

Also, this doesn't mean AI football wouldn't be useless. And there could even be people who watch both, since they could scratch different itches. I said I "don't give a shit" about AI art but that's not really true, it's useful, I'm glad kebab shops get a cheap way to decorate their menus. I'm sure people are getting porn generated that matches their incredibly bizarre kinks and I'm glad they get to jerk off better than they used to.

But I guess what I really am sure of is that AI can't REPLACE human art any more than it can replace football.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman)
by api | 2026-02-27 09:20:54+00:00
What this is really talking about is that we abandoned well engineered thought out platforms for piles of hacks, and superior clean languages for inferior but popular ones.

The problem with a lot of those beautiful systems is that they were neither free nor easy to use. The things that won were either or both of these.

For hardware the things that won, like the PC platform, had scale, and therefore won on price performance. A lot of the hardware mentioned here was priced for enterprise. Platforms that were only available in those price brackets and never fell in price either died or stayed extremely niche (s390x).

A second problem with the nice software is that a lot of it was not ported to the cheap hardware.

For software, free isn’t just about money. It’s also about virality. A free OS or language implementation can just be copied. You don’t have to ask permission.

The only non-free software that won was easy to use. Free is usually still unable to achieve that. People will pay for ease of use. The nice well engineered stuff, though, was usually still arcane.

I think “worse is better” can be explained by these things. Worse is not better for some non obvious systemic or evolutionary theoretic reason. Worse is cheaper, or free, and therefore has scale and can spread virally.

Linux was free. The web was free. C compilers were free and Java and JS were free. Windows and macOS and later phones were easy to use and still cheaper than those enterprise grade things.
by cam_l | 2026-02-27 09:23:03+00:00
The cost of doing more complex designs is analogous to the cost of doing more complex builds.

If you can afford the extra cost for someone to figure out how to build the blue sky designs that nano banana spits out, maybe you can afford something more thoughtful and interesting than a shitty mashup of other peoples mcmansions.

Clearly i am triggered..
by nielsbot | 2026-02-27 09:23:39+00:00
Sorry, but if honest coverage of Israel is considered bashing it, then it deserves to be “bashed“

Israel is still bombing people in tents and withholding aid.

Israel is doing to the Palestinians exactly what the US did to the Native Americans. I sadly expect Palestinians will end up on reservations and once their numbers and little remaining power are reduced enough they’ll finally be given some form of second class citizenship.

But tell me where I’m wrong.
by miroljub | 2026-02-27 09:23:52+00:00
> Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose?

We had Flash for exactly that purpose. For all its flaws, it was our best hope. A shame Apple and later Adobe decided to kill it in favor of HTML5.

The second best bet was Java Applets, but the technology came too early and was dead before it could fly off.

Some may mention WebAssembly, but I just don't see that as a viable alternative to the web mess that we already have.
by asdff | 2026-02-27 09:24:35+00:00
Maybe for fortnite players. If you just call/text/email whats the point in upgrading? At this point I pretty much just ride out whatever iphone se I happen upon on deep discount until Apple finally walls me off from the OS version I need to access my bank account (thanks to very helpful flow of bank website forcing app store redirect to their app for mobile users). Then it's on to the next se.

Now that I think on it maybe I ought to just pay attention to jailbreakable OS version numbers again. If I stuck on one of those OS versions I could just spoof my user agent for the bank website with a jailbroken phone.
by billylo | 2026-02-27 09:24:39+00:00
Thanks for a great write-up!

Production-quality software can now be made in weeks (instead of months and quarters.) I anticipate an exciting period of fast innovation in all industries, supported by lots of good product-engineers with different levels of experience. The areas I am the most excited about is healthcare (as we live longer) and sustainability. It will be fun to be a part of.
by Slaboli | 2026-02-27 09:25:29+00:00
Yeah, I receive rent from the apartment in Turkey. I also have some savings and similar income streams. They’re not amounts that make me rich, but they make me more or less comfortable. I live above average in my hometown. I worked in humanitarian aid NGOs for years, but with funding cuts, jobs are extinct.

I also want to start my own family (by finding someone first lol), so I have lots of conflicting criteria, which makes it difficult to come to a decision. Trying Portugal seems logical at first, but then again I ask myself how many years I would live with such (entry level basic) job opportunities and whether I would regret not being a CPA at age 50, for example. Thank you man!
by tpoacher | 2026-02-27 09:26:03+00:00
Mr Chat more or less covers it correctly.

If my memory serves correctly, in the book there's a bit more emphasis and nuance on the point that, for buy-in to exist in the first place, all team members who have a strong opinion prior to a decision, need to feel that they've been given an opportunity to give their opinion, their opinion has been heard, and its merits and demerits weighed earnestly against all other options on the table, before a decision has been made by the team (or in the case of a 'stalemate', by the ultimate decision-maker), and that there is a clear rationale for going with the final decision and rejecting all others. The rationale may well acknowledge the risk from not following other opinions, but cite other operational reasons for the decision.

A healthy team then should proceed as if this was a team decision that they all commit to. But consensus isn't required, only buy-in. In a healthy team, all members should trust each other (in that, they are all working towards a common purpose), and not fear "creative conflict". This enables them to share their opinions in the first place, and the buy-in discussion helps everyone in the team to feel accountable for the joint decision, as well as hold each other accountable in a healthy way. If this doesn't happen, the usual outcome is that decisions are made, but people feel "I didn't agree with this decision and nobody asked me, so I won't really engage with it".

I really do recommend the book. It's a very light read, presented as a story (with a final chapter examining the concepts a bit more theoretically), with excellent insights. You can probably find it online for free if you must, but it's a good book to have on any bookshelf.
by anshumankmr | 2026-02-27 09:26:07+00:00
Theres a big difference between NOT truly open and opaque.Opus is downloadable and auditable. That’s not the same thing as undisclosed proprietary scraping.
If your standard is absolute purity test, then yeah no one in AI passes. But claiming Mozilla is indistinguishable from OpenAI because they used scraped data is disingenous.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-27 09:26:27+00:00
> I made 2 posts in this thread regarding why I think they have a moat. Was there anything ambiguous or that you disagreed with?

I'm afraid I don't see those posts; I see 2x posts from you asserting they have a moat, but not why you think they have a moat.

I distinguish between "They have a moat." and "This is why $FOO, $BAR and $BAZ forms a moat."

Maybe you think brand recognition is a moat, but that didn't work out for incumbents before (too many examples to list).
by Paracompact | 2026-02-27 09:26:55+00:00
The author cites Arendt a fair bit, whose claim to fame was that entirely ordinary people could become voluntary instruments of atrocity.

I think the belief of ordinary people most likely to dispose them to atrocity is that of prioritizing the ingroup. Once we believe that the members of one's own family, or company, or country, carry more moral value than others, we're doomed to a descent limited only by our ability to make these world-worsening trades.

When I was a child, my dad would sometimes engage in small acts of corruption to please me or my brother. Taking somebody else's spot, telling white lies to get more than his share of a rationed good, that sort of thing. It never sat right with me. "Family first" has a very ominous ring to me.
by hypercube33 | 2026-02-27 09:27:41+00:00
I feel like you missed out on the best part of Napster - finding someone's stash of music you like surrounded by things you've never heard of and then exploring it. My memory swears you could leave someone a message but that's a lifetime ago, but I know I connected with a few people who helped me absolutely get into metal music and that's changed my life for the good forever.

Other than that you'd go to a LAN party and find someone's file share of goodies, find again the things you were into and now you had a new friend who probably liked things you never knew of and now you two are sharing new things to each other on top of that.

It was really an age of connecting people and exploring the world for me, even as a young kid.
by wiseowise | 2026-02-27 09:28:38+00:00
I know they might sound superficially similar, if you're 12 years old, so let me breakdown a little bit why your analogy is a bad one.

Relationships are between two people, not between a human and a public entity like a company.

My partner doesn't have extremely disproportionate leverage over me, if tomorrow I leave – company will chug along just fine, if I'm laid off tomorrow – I might lose my home, relationship, well-being, never recover from the layoff (meaning I won't contribute back to economy and go on well-fare, and potentially start a revolution if there are millions of me) or ultimately die.

I know it's a difficult concept for 20 year old tech-bros who sucked VC money with the milk of their mother to grasp, but money does dry out. You might think you're invincible right now and that it's you and companies against them (lazy, stupid coworkers), but you're the same cattle to them as the rest of us. As you can see by the topic of the thread.

Back to the analogy: Main goal of a company is to produce value for society, not making money for VCs. It's a difficult pill to swallow, I know, tech bros been taught for decades that job security, health insurance, taxes, value creation – all of those are commie concepts aimed to undermine our God given right to make money, and we – temporary embarrassed millionaires – need to fight it with every ounce of our existence by working 60 hours a week.

Labor IS the main input that turns capital + IP into products and services. Without those people Block would be nowhere near the current position it is in. But when business is strong, though, VCs and C level get obscene bonuses while employee compensation stays flat. Go figure.

I could go on and on, talk about tax reliefs [0], that countries and companies exist for people and not the other way around, but this should be enough to understand that THIS IS NOTHING LIKE A RELATIONSHIP WITH A HUMAN BEING.

[0] https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/businesses?utm_source...
by Godofall | 2026-02-27 09:28:48+00:00
Problem

Mobile computing is controlled by centralized platforms. Developers are locked into app store policies. Users don’t own their devices in a meaningful sense. Kernel-level trust, distribution, identity, payments, and data are mediated by intermediaries.

Privacy is optional. Sovereignty is nonexistent. Platform risk is systemic.

Solution

The Mandalorian Project is building a sovereign mobile computing stack — starting at the system layer.

Instead of treating sovereignty as an app-level feature, we approach it as an architectural principle:

Kernel-conscious security model

Platform-independent identity

Decentralized service integration

Developer-first extensibility

Open governance and open-source core

We aim to create a mobile environment where:

Users control data and execution context

Developers ship without centralized gatekeepers

Trust is rooted in verifiable systems, not policy promises

Why Now

Increasing global scrutiny on platform monopolies

Regulatory pressure around data protection

Growing demand for decentralized infrastructure

AI-driven applications requiring higher trust guarantees

Governments and enterprises seeking sovereign compute environments

The mobile OS layer remains the largest unchallenged control surface in computing.

Vision

To make sovereign mobile computing the default — not the exception.

We are not building another app.
We are redefining the trust boundary of the smartphone.

Looking to connect with:

Systems engineers

Security researchers

Kernel developers

Distributed systems architects

Early believers in sovereign infrastructure

If mobile is the primary computing interface for humanity, it must be sovereign.
by jpgenl | 2026-02-27 09:29:21+00:00
Funny thing going on in my corner of the world (legal AI): every major law firm is bragging publicly about adopting like four separate AI tools (and all of the tool building companies like Harvey and Legora are raising VC mega-rounds) but at the same time, almost every contract we review for our clients drafted by said law firms is riddled with typos that can be caught by the most basic LLM prompt. So either the law firms are lying about using AI or they don't understand how to use it...

We vibe-coded FindTheFuckup.com to embarrass lawyers into basic AI hygiene so that we don't have to keep finding these fuckups ourselves.
Ask HN: Have LLMs sapped your motivation for open source?
by anonnon | 2026-02-27 09:29:31+00:00
Not just the sense that an implicit social contract was broken by LLMs disregarding licenses, or the hassles of dealing with AI (especially agentic) contributions, but the fact that the reputational benefit for large contributions--especially large, largely one-person projects--isn't really there any more, since most people now, upon looking at it, instead of being impressed with what you've accomplished, will just ask:

> How much of this was AI-generated?

Especially if it resembles existing projects somewhat or involves some form of translation. And should you insist it wasn't AI, I can easily see people finding that less charmingly quaint and more foolish:

> Why would you bother doing this entirely by hand instead of heavily using agents and prompting? Do you still do long division as well?

It's evident that even most programmers don't really care how software was constructed and what the code looks like (assuming they don't have to deal with it), only how well it functions.
by Raviteja_ | 2026-02-27 09:29:33+00:00
This is Ravi, the developer who built this.
Few months back, I was building an AI app and realized my users data was going to OpenAI in plaintext. I searched for a local firewall something that would sit between my app and the LLM provider, inspect everything, and block threats. Nothing open-source existed that was complete. So I built Sentinel Protocol. It works like this:

1. You run one command: npx sentinel bootstrap --profile minimal
2. It starts a proxy at localhost:8787
3. You point your existing OpenAI SDK at localhost:8787 instead
4. Done.

Every prompt and response now goes through 81 security engines on YOUR machine.
What makes it different from LLM Guard / Rebuff / NeMo Guardrails: -
Runs 100% locally (they mostly require cloud) - 9 npm dependencies (they have 50–200+)
Formal verification with TLA+ and Alloy specs
Self-healing immune system that learns from attacks
Federated threat mesh - share threat signatures with peers.
The thing I'm most proud of is the self-healing engine. When it detects a new attack pattern it has never seen, it auto-generates a blocking rule for future attacks. It gets smarter every day.

Happy to answer any questions about the architecture, the security model, or specific engines.
by reacweb | 2026-02-27 09:31:06+00:00
Yes, before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

At that time, there was almost no spam because we could report them to abuse@domain...

There was no firewall in front of our campus and we were using rlogin to connect outside. I used export DISPLAY from Brest to Paris (to use xdvi that was not installed locally).

IMO, the security (ssh and killing rlogin) is the main change that is a really useful progress.
by bravetraveler | 2026-02-27 09:31:20+00:00
Some people sit in front of the class because they want to, others because they must. Many more choose elsewhere.

I don't find it strange. I've routinely tanked my own chance and social credit for initiatives... largely because I don't want a target on my back and, generally, remain satisfied. Experience isn't conditioned on... the experience, if that makes sense.

Where you see jealousy, I see fear of missing out. Of what? More rat race, if you ask me. Pass. Plenty of motivators and opportunity.
by Twisell | 2026-02-27 09:31:30+00:00
The key mistake you make is to believe that "first world" is sustainable by it's own. A lot of people are hired today because they are good at a physical tasks, globalized capitalism just decided that it's cheaper to manufacture it overseas (with all the environmental and societal downsides that hit us back in the face).

So don't worry if we lure ourlselves that it's ok to stop caring for "intelligence job" globalization will provide for every aspect where AI is lacking. And that's not just a figure of speech they are already plenty of "fake it until you make it" stories about AI actually run by overseas cheap laborers.