MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by solatic | 2026-02-21 10:01:05+00:00
I sympathize with the author, and in principle I find myself nodding along with his prescriptions, but one of the benefits of Dependabot (and Renovate) are that they are language-agnostic. Depending on how many repositories, and how many languages, and upon whom the maintenance burden falls, there's a lot of value to be had. It may not really be feasible to add "the correct" CI workflows to every repository, and the alternative (nothing) inevitably ends up in repositories where dependencies have not been updated in years.

It's good optimization advice, if you have the time, or suffer enough from the described pain points, to apply it.
by 1718627440 | 2026-02-21 10:01:07+00:00
Blacklist and Whitelist come from the behaviour of light on coloured surfaces. A black surface absorbs all light, a white reflects it. There is also Graylist.

I don't know of any connotation of black meaning "evil, bad, or undesirable". If anything black means "missing or vanished". Maybe that is different in your culture, but I never heard of it until now. Tons of things in everyday life are black including the most letters, signs and a lot of devices. The only thing that comes to my mind is tooth decay or pestilence, but that is hardly anything connotated with the colour per se.
by Aldipower | 2026-02-21 10:01:11+00:00
I have a similar experience with OpenAI. Just want to apply with my MCP App, but the application process, a multi step automated form submission, is totally flawed, buggy and broken, so that the form for apps submissions is simply not working. Trying to report this bug just results in an AI response black hole on their support address. No real humans there. The whole OpenAI back end platform is unbelievably buggy, nothing works. No wonder, if you cannot report _their_ bugs. I cannot advertise a MCP App for ChatGPT to the users of my platform, if there isn't a minimum level of trust, between OpenAI and me. If I cannot talk to a real human I simply do not take the brand of my platform, where I put countless years of effort in, and throw it in some out-of-control venture company maelstrom.
by palata | 2026-02-21 10:02:31+00:00
IMO, the developers choose what software they want to write. If Microsoft Word decided to remove the "export to PDF" feature, that would be their right. And it would be your right to stop using Microsoft Word. If you want to be root on your system, you are free to install a system that gives you root access.

And that's the part that I believe should be a right: if you buy a smartphone, you own that piece of hardware, and you should be able to install the system you want. But if you are not the one developing that system, you don't get to decide what this system does. Just like you don't get to decide whether Microsoft Word can export to PDF or not.
by shakna | 2026-02-21 10:02:37+00:00
Reverse engineering the drivers, to permit you creating your own OS, for your own hardware, is already an area where people are accused of crimes. DMCA Section 1201 isn't something to so easily be worked around, to allow you to place your software in a working state onto undocumented hardware.

So, yes, there is a lot of things stopping you from coding your own OS.
by alexxozo2 | 2026-02-21 10:02:59+00:00
I was writing a Software Design Review and needed to include some UI examples. Our designer wasn't available and I had zero Figma skills.

I'd already made all the technical diagrams in Mermaid, so I thought: why not do the wireframes the same way? Turns out Mermaid doesn't support wireframes. There's a GitHub issue requesting it with no resolution, some projects tried it but seem discontinued (e.g. imageui).

So I built it for myself. Intentionally sketchy — meant to communicate intent, not replace a designer.

My actual workflow:
1. Screenshot a layout I want to reference (internal tool, Pinterest, whatever)
2. Feed it to an LLM to translate into Sketchdown syntax
3. Paste into the editor and tweak until it says what I mean

Happy to iterate if anyone finds it useful.

https://www.sketchdown.dev
by microtonal | 2026-02-21 10:03:05+00:00
Largely agreed, though I think on the desktop I’d also want AOSP in desktop mode with a traditional Linux distribution in a VM pretty much like Android 16’s Linux VM.

But then on desktop/laptop-class hardware, since the thermal constraints are different and it’s nice to have extensible storage and RAM. Of course, all this on the phone is also nice for when you only have your phone with you.

Then one could use fully sandboxed apps for banks, instant messaging, etc. and the VM for development.

AOSP is getting pretty close to this ideal.
by firtoz | 2026-02-21 10:03:52+00:00
I checked mine, and it's still got family news, and some friends etc. There were 1-2 items of slop but not that bad...

I was more surprised by how I didn't even realise or hear about one of my cousins getting pregnant, another cousin of mine getting married, and another one passing away. I have been living abroad for 18 years though so fair enough but still feels a little bit odd.
by gynvael | 2026-02-21 10:04:28+00:00
I don't think that's fully accurate (full-disclosure: I've done the technical review for this article).

First, as for "serialization" vs "deserialization", it can be argued that the word "serialization" can be used in two ways. One is on the "low level" to denote the specific action of taking the data and serializing it. The other one is "high level", where it's just a bag where you throw in anything related (serialization, deserialization, protocols, etc) - same as it's done on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serialization (note how the article is not called "Serialization and deserialization" for exactly these reasons). So yes, you can argue that the author could have written "deserialization", but you can also argue that the author used the "high level" interpretation of the word and therefore used it correctly.

As for insertion not happening and balancing stuff - my memory might be failing me, but I do remember it actually happening during serialization. I think there even was a "delete" option when constructing the "serialized buffer", but it had interesting limitations.

Anyway, not sure how deep did you go into how it works (beyond what's in the article), but it's a pretty cool and clever piece of work (and yes, it does have its limitations, but also I can see this having its applications - e.g. when sending data from a more powerful machine to a tiny embedded one).
by cyberrock | 2026-02-21 10:04:58+00:00
The EU directive doesn't even compel them to have those kinds of removable batteries in the EU, because being removable with commercially available tools is considered compliant [0]. The topic has been too obfuscated with hype pieces. Still, it would be nice to not have to break glass and melt glue to open up phones.

[0] https://repair.eu/news/making-batteries-removable-and-replac...
by jimnotgym | 2026-02-21 10:05:16+00:00
A lot of responses below talking about what a 'certified' or 'chartered' engineer should be able to do.

I thought it would be noteworthy to talk about another industry, accountancy. This is how it works in the UK, but it is similar in other countries. They are called 'Chartered Accountants' here, because their institute has a Royal Charter saying they are the good guys.

To become a Chartered Accountant has no prerequisites. You 'just' have to complete the qualification of the institute you want to join. There are stages to the exams that prior qualifications may gain you exemptions from. You also have to log practical experience proving you are working as an accountant with adequate supervision. It takes about 2-3 years to get the qualification for someone well supported by their employer and with sufficient free time. Interestingly many Accountants are not graduates, and instead took technician level qualifications first, often the Association of Accounting Technicians (AAT). The accounting graduates I have interviewed wasted 3 years of their lives...

There are several institutes that specialise in different areas. Some specialise in audit. One specialises in Management Accounting (being an accountant at a company really). The Management accountants one specifically prohibits you from doing audit without taking another conversion course. All the institutes have CPD requirements (and check) and all prohibit you from working in areas that you are not competent, but provide routes to competency.

There are standards to follow, Generally Accepted Accounting Practice GAAP, UK Financial Reporting Standards FRS and the International equivalent IFRS. These cover how Financial Statements are prepared. There are superate standards setting bodies for these. There are also a set of standards that cover how an audit must be done. Then there is tax law. You are expected to know them for any area you are working in. All of these are legally binding on various types of corporation. See how that switches things around? Accountants are now there to help the company navigate the legal codes. The directors sign the accounts and are liable for misstatements, that encourages them to have a director who is an accountant...an audit committee etc.

How does that translate to software?

There are lots of standards, NIST, GDPR, PCI, some of which are legally or contractually binding. But how do I as a business owner know that a software engineer is competent to follow them. Maybe I am a diving company that wants a website. How do I know this person or company is competent to build it? It requires software engineers with specific qualifications that say they can do it, and software engineers willing to say, 'I'm sorry I am not able to work in this field, unless I first study it'.
by drdaeman | 2026-02-21 10:05:24+00:00
> I'm of the opinion that having AI be a constant presence in your life and relying on it to assist you with every minor detail or major decision is dystopian in the extreme

Could that be because you're putting some extra substance in what you call an "AI"? Giving it some properties that it doesn't necessarily have?

Because when I'm thinking about "AI" all I'm giving to it is "a machine doing math at scale that allows us to have meaningful relation with human concepts as expressed in a natural language". I don't put anything extra in it, which allows me to say "AI can do good things while avoiding bad things". Surely, a machine can be made to crunch numbers and put words together in a way that helps me rather than harms me.

Oh, and if anything - I don't want "AI" to save me thinking. It cannot do that for me anyway, in principle. I want it to help me do things it machines finally start to do acceptably well: remember and relate things together. This said, yea, I guess I was generous with just a single requirement - now I can see that a personal "AI" also needs its classifications (interpretations) to match with the individual user's expectations as close as possible at all times.

> It's not going to happen.

I can wholeheartedly agree as far as "it is extremely unlikely to happen", but... to say "it is not going to happen", after last five years of "that wasn't on my bingo list"? How can you be so sure? How do we know there won't be some more weird twists of history? Call me naive but I rather want to imagine something nice would happen for a change. And it's not beyond fathomable that something crashes and the resulting waves, would possibly bring us towards a somewhat better world.

Touching grass is important, and it helps a lot, but as soon as you're back - nothing goes anywhere in the meanwhile. The society with all the mess doesn't disappear while we stop looking. So seeking an optimistic possibility is also important, even if it may seem utterly unrealistic. I guess one just have to have something to believe in?
by bertylicious | 2026-02-21 10:05:36+00:00
Because I find LLM-generated content very annoying to read. It's sloggish, bloated, and the speaker always has this cringe way of trying to connect to the audience.

I don't believe the story itself is made up by an LLM but I'd argue that if you have an LLM write your story then it's no problem for you to have it add a TL;DR at the top so we can skip the slop.
by Zardoz84 | 2026-02-21 10:06:31+00:00
we have a "release" branch and a "develop" branch. The release is trunked on the last released version and (in theory) only gets fixes. If we need to fix a more older version, we create a temporary branch on that version to fix it, and we cherry pick the fixes (or merge to) to release branch and then to develop branch.

The triple mortal loop, comes that we have two versions of the product. One with the old no responsive frontend and other with a modern responsive frontend. And we need to release and develop the two versions for sometime, before the direction decides to kill the old no responsive version. So we end with 4 branches: release, release_rwd, develop and develop_rwd. If we fix something in release, we need to do a diamond merge : release to release_rwd, release to develop, release_rwd to develop_rwd and develop to develop_rwd
by atoav | 2026-02-21 10:07:00+00:00
This is the role we need governments to take. If you want your government to work like a corporation for some reason, why not go to a country where the govnment is weak and corporations bribe it instead? Would give you some good image how well that works.

But I get it. This ideology has more to do with how much money these types can then extract from a government and if implemented fully you would have some sort of neo-feudalism where everybody needs to pay them to even exist. But that is not a real utopian vision of something that moves humanity forward (quite literally the opposite).
by kyusan0 | 2026-02-21 10:07:03+00:00
IANAL but the law in Germany is basically the same in this case, accessing data that's meant to be protected and not intended for you is is illegal. It depends somewhat on the interpretation of what "specifically protected" ("besonders gesichert") means. https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__202a.html
by edg5000 | 2026-02-21 10:07:58+00:00
It's really a cultural disease to accept this. From my other comment:

> I see this in people why have used antagonistic software for decades and have become zombified and shellshocked; the idea that software could be on your side is to alien to them. They['ve come to] hate software and technology and just want to get some work done. They tolerate the abuse because they can't fight Google alone; it's pointless to resist.

*minor edit in brackets
by 5o1ecist | 2026-02-21 10:08:20+00:00
> They’re building a pocket-sized, screenless device with built-in cameras and microphones — “contextually aware,” designed to replace your phone.

"Contextually aware" means "complete surveillance".

Too many people speak of ads, not enough people speak about the normalization of the global surveillance machine, with Big Brother waiting around the corner.

Instead, MY FELLOW HUMANS are, or will be, programmed to accept and want their own little "Big Brother's little brother" in their pocket, because it's usefull and or makes them feel safe and happy.
by ahartmetz | 2026-02-21 10:08:53+00:00
Why in the world would you do squash merges? ...except to clean up messy mini-branches written by total noobs. I don't do separate commits for funzies. If you want separate commits for ease of review, why not for later reading of the code.

Assumption: above mentioned total noobs don't use git rebase -i or equivalent, everyone else does
by kg | 2026-02-21 10:09:15+00:00
> etcd is a strongly consistent, distributed key-value store, and that consistency comes at a cost: it is extraordinarily sensitive to I/O latency. etcd uses a write-ahead log and relies on fsync calls completing within tight time windows. When storage is slow, even intermittently, etcd starts missing its internal heartbeat and election deadlines. Leader elections fail. The cluster loses quorum. Pods that depend on the API server start dying.

This seems REALLY bad for reliability? I guess the idea is that it's better to have things not respond to requests than to lose data, but the outcome described in the article is pretty nasty.

It seems like the solution they arrived at was to "fix" this at the filesystem level by making fsync no longer deliver reliability, which seems like a pretty clumsy solution. I'm surprised they didn't find some way to make etcd more tolerant of slow storage. I'd be wary of turning off filesystem level reliability at the risk of later running postgres or something on the same system and experiencing data loss when what I wanted was just for kubernetes or whatever to stop falling over.
by jl6 | 2026-02-21 10:09:21+00:00
iPhone batteries are already replaceable, albeit most people have to pay Apple to do it. Does this count as replaceable under this mandate, or is there an expectation that batteries must be replaceable by end-consumers on their own? Any requirements for what level of skill and tooling end-consumers are expected to have access to, such as specialized screwdrivers and re-waterproofing adhesives?
by seanhly | 2026-02-21 10:09:53+00:00
There are some pretty robust browser addons for bypassing article paywalls, notably https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-fire...

This particular addon is blocked on most western git servers, but can still be installed from Russian git servers. It includes custom paywall-bypassing code for pretty much every news websites you could reasonably imagine, or at least those sites that use conditional paywalls (paywalls for humans, no paywalls for big search engines). It won't work on sites like Substack that use proper authenticated content pages, but these sorts of pages don't get picked up by archive.today either.

My guess would be that archive.today loads such an addon with its headless browser and thus bypasses paywalls that way. Even if publishers find a way to detect headless browsers, crawlers can also be written to operate with traditional web browsers where lots of anti-paywall addons can be installed.
by atoav | 2026-02-21 10:11:06+00:00
That is a solved issue and has mainly to do with a badly designed connector and has been resolved since the late 2000s. Glued in batteries don't use any other connector than batteries that are glued in. And if your case isn't designed like shit a drop should not open it.

Try it with a modern Fairphone for example. I had one for years and not a single time the back lid fell off or the battery disconnected. I had a couple of batteries die in phones tho. General point: If you argue with people who have more experience on an issue than you, bring the receipts and red-team your own statement before you make it. Everything else doesn't really shine a good light on you.
by SahAssar | 2026-02-21 10:11:45+00:00
Subprocessor usually just means that you use their products in a way that your personal data passes through them. For example, let's say you are using cloudflare and aws to host a site, then your subprocessors would be cloudflare and aws.

It can be some more nefarious use, but it can also just be that they (persona in this case) use their services to process/store your data.
Show HN: RealDeed PropPass – Own Indian Real Estate Digitally from INR 10k
by oxfpr555 | 2026-02-21 10:12:33+00:00
Hi YC / HN

I’m Malhar, founder of RealDeed PropPass — and We’re building what we believe is India’s first structured tokenized real estate marketplace enabling users to digitally own a fractional piece of Indian property starting from just ₹10,000.

The Problem

Real estate in India is:

High entry barrier (₹50L–₹5Cr+ tickets)

Illiquid

Paper-heavy

Hard to verify titles

Difficult for young investors or NRIs to participate

What We Built – PropPass by RealDeed

PropPass allows investors to:

Own fractional real estate digitally

Invest from ₹10,000

Receive structured ownership rights via SPV model

Access verified title documentation

Trade fractional ownership (24/7 liquidity enabled model)

Invest through escrow account mechanisms

Each property is:

Structured via an SPV (company/LLP model)

Digitally represented as land-area-backed units

Linked to verified property documentation

Managed through compliant banking rails and escrow segregation

We are working with regulated banking partners for escrow management and client fund segregation to ensure compliance-first infrastructure.

Compliance-First Approach

We are not a crypto speculation platform.

We are building structured, compliance-oriented rails including:

Escrow account segregation

KYC onboarding (Aadhaar / DigiLocker)

SPV-based ownership structure

Document verification integrations

Transparent disclosures

The goal: bring trust + transparency + liquidity to Indian real estate.

Why Tokenization?

Tokenization enables:

Lower entry barrier

Fractional diversification

Faster settlement

Transparent ownership tracking

Secondary liquidity potential

Instead of buying an entire flat, users can own measured land-area units digitally, backed by legal SPV structures.

Who It’s For

Young Indian investors & GenZ

NRIs wanting exposure to Indian property

Professionals diversifying beyond equity/FDs

Real estate developers seeking structured liquidity

Vision

Our long-term goal is to build:

India’s compliant real estate token exchange layer

A 24/7 fractional property liquidity marketplace

Digital property ownership rails integrated with banking systems

Looking for Feedback

We’d love feedback from:

Legal / securities experts

Blockchain engineers

Fintech founders
by rspoerri | 2026-02-21 10:12:54+00:00
i can show you my prompt. it's a mess and only listing the major prompts. but it's interesting to look at (for me at least).

archive:

https://github.com/ludos1978/ludos-vscode-markdown-kanban/bl...

in progress or undone:

https://github.com/ludos1978/ludos-vscode-markdown-kanban/bl...

and there is much improvement, because if often watch videos next to vibe coding the project and do it in minutes i have time. so history is a huge mess. but i started 6 months ago, with most work done in the last 4 months. i spent about 1000$ of ai budget on it.
by metalman | 2026-02-21 10:13:15+00:00
ok, simple facts, you dont get smooshy stuff cheap, without "pastisizers", which tend to be volitile, all on your head.
there has been wave after wave of plastisizers bieng banned from food containers, water bottles, and other human contact stuff.
but hey, it gets worse, as in certain products there is a requirement for soft smooshy stuff that is "fire resistant", which lead as a additive works to provide, without making the plastic too hard, the white dust from old crumbling plastic of these types is
lead oxide, bad mojo
by daem | 2026-02-21 10:13:15+00:00
My solution to spam emails is this: https://ahmedkaddoura.com/writing/hide-my-email

I create a unique iCloud Hide My Email anytime I need to give out an email. The issue here was I signed up for my 24 Hour Fitness membership in person at the gym where the cell service was bad and I couldn't get the WiFI to work, so I begrudgingly gave the guy my real email.

While I could have easily blocked their domain, I took it as a challenge to get the emails to stop.
by vb7132 | 2026-02-21 10:13:41+00:00
This is fantastic. The app is simple, useful and feels de-cluttered.

Two of my feature requests:
1. Allow cmd+f search on the whole app - I wanted to search your post on the app but I couldn't
2. A browser button to open the current page on an external browser.

Side note: I am trying to minimize my HN time via getting push notifications for relevant HN posts, and that's how I discovered your post. Would it be cool if one could write custom agents on top of an app? Maybe?