MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by procflora | 2026-02-23 22:07:29+00:00
The cynic in me wants to say that most of the web these days is pushing H.264 frames from a CDN to proprietary phone apps and the rest is pushing Widevine video from the same CDN to proprietary browsers and we'll never cooperatively own any of that, even if we wanted to.

The idealist in me says we should still build a simple to use publishing and discovery system for hypertext that can be self-hosted and self-networked for the day the next generations realize they need it (authoritarian control of the Internet, collapse of social media, infrastructure instability, climate apocalypse, whatever). I suppose my idealism is still pretty pessimistic, but then it is Monday.
by tinfoilhatter | 2026-02-23 22:07:34+00:00
No actually, the meatgrinder began after a CIA-backed coup called Euromaidan in 2013. Either side could make the war stop at anytime, but neither wants to and there are complicated reasons for that. It's not as simple as Russia bad, Ukraine good.

[1] https://youtu.be/l4nbqndM34U
by Aurornis | 2026-02-23 22:08:45+00:00
You're assuming the leak was accidental, the person knows about it, and they didn't intend for others to use it.

What happens when someone sets up a marketplace where people can sell those blind signatures using their ID for $2 each? And then kids just pay $2 to have someone else blindly use their ID to validate the account, because supposedly the system is structured so that nobody can tell which ID was used or tie it back to the account?
by snowhale | 2026-02-23 22:08:53+00:00
tool description wording does matter, at least in my testing. models seem to use the description to reason about whether a tool "should" apply, not just whether it can. two things that helped: (1) explicit input format with an example, (2) a one-sentence note about what the tool does NOT handle. the negative case helps models avoid calling it on edge cases and then failing, which trains them (in context) to prefer it when it's actually the right fit.
Show HN: Closer A calibration game that measures how you perceive reality
by ryandervakos | 2026-02-23 22:08:56+00:00
Closer is a calibration game where you estimate real-world statistics and compete against AI or
friends in real-time. Every answer quietly feeds a dataset on human perception: what we overestimate, underestimate, and where our blind spots are.

200+ questions across 8 categories, ELO rankings, and an Insights page that surfaces patterns
across all players. Built with React & Supabase

Happy to hear feedback on the question design or ideas for the behavioral data.
by 9rx | 2026-02-23 22:09:12+00:00
> Interface defines an open class of types

But can also define a closed set of types, perfectly satisfying "sum types".

> This enables different syntax, like the match expression to be used, in which you exhaustively list all the variants.

Go does not provide this out of the box, but that is not prerequisite for sum types. The mathematical theory says nothing about "the compiler must produce an error if the user doesn't match call cases". There is sufficient information provided by the sum types if you wish to add this to your build chain yourself, of course.
by vintermann | 2026-02-23 22:09:18+00:00
There are degrees of integration. People from Älvdalen, should they choose to, could move to Stockholm and change their dialect (one of the ways you know it's a dialect, is that they understand you much better than you understand them). It's been that way for a long time.

And from what I understand Älvdalsmål is, like all dialects, getting rounded at the corners and getting more understandable to other Swedes.

Even dialects that sound incomprehensible at first, if you're a native speaker you'll get used to it quickly. The difficulty of Älvdalska is superficial, it's actually very close to what you're used to, so you'll learn to understand them and they already know how to understand you.

Sami is completely different. It takes a long time to learn. Go back 150 years, and very few Sami would be able to move to the capital and pass as Norwegian or Swedish, their accent would give them away even if they did know the majority language. Go back another 50 years, and they may simply not have been allowed to even try to pass in many places (as I recall, the first Sami priest in Norway, Anders Porsanger, was rejected by his Trondheim congregation. He was simply too weird for them, even though he was highly educated and of course spoke excellent Norwegian).
by tl2do | 2026-02-23 22:09:30+00:00
I was developing games on MSX/MSX2 about 40 years ago. It was already a fight with hardware resources, but the Apple II was an even stricter environment. Impressive work. Below is a quick comparison for those unfamiliar with the specs:
Macintosh (1989): 16-40MHz 68000, 1-4MB RAM, hardware acceleration, QuickDraw, non-blocking sound
Apple II (1979): 1MHz 6502, 64KB RAM, no hardware multiply/divide, race against CRT beam (4550 cycles), blocking sound only
* 10-year age gap, 16-40x slower CPU, 16-64x less RAM
Show HN: WorldCanvas – R/place, but with a real world map as the canvas
by recuerdame | 2026-02-23 22:09:58+00:00
I wanted to build a mipmap version of r/place — zoom out and you see the whole world, zoom in and you're placing individual pixels at real geographic coordinates.

The map is the canvas. Seoul, Tokyo, New York — pixels live at actual lat/lon positions and persist there. Watch others paint in real time as you explore.

A few things I focused on:
- WebGL-only renderer (dropped Canvas2D after profiling showed it was the zoom-out bottleneck)
- SSE updates scoped to your current viewport only
- Seeded pixel art in cities around the world to make it feel alive from day one

Free to use. Still early — curious what people think.
by hunterpayne | 2026-02-23 22:10:12+00:00
I raised kids. Never had to deal with anything like what is described. Sounds like someone read some questionable books on parenting, unfortunately followed the bad advice in those books and this is the result.

And this entire thing is about bad parenting. Its always easier to just give the kid a tablet and go back to whatever you were doing. Its always better to actually interact with the kid. That trade-off of time is important because if you mess up when they are young, you spend a lot more time handling issues later on. That time you gained by giving them a tablet will get payed back someday, usually with interest. That's what is happening here.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-23 22:10:32+00:00
You're only describing a half-blind system.

If the site you send your information to gets a uniquely identifying piece of information, that's not blind to your identity.

> - You can still check that user 1 and user 2 don't use the same key.

The systems described elsewhere in the thread give people a set of signatures that can't be traced back to their source.
Show HN: Musefy – Recreating video ads with AI
by tuye0305 | 2026-02-23 22:10:33+00:00
Hi HN, we built Musefy to recreate high performing Ads using AI.

The system analyzes winning organic and paid videos within a niche, decomposes them into structural elements (text hook, visual pattern, pacing, music), and generates new variants for your app.

We’ve been testing it with a few beta clients; reached ~5M views, 1000+ downloads over 8 weeks.
by carshodev | 2026-02-23 22:10:35+00:00
Yes but we should be reminded that this also allows people to be protected from government overreach.

If you say something the Chinese government does not agree with they can choose to take all your money and control of your company instantly. Not just oligarchs although those are the bigger targets due to the high value.

Even a small business owner could THEORETICALLY have their assets and equity seized for saying something which goes against the current ruling party, and this is not specific to China it could happen in any modern country.

Crypto allow someone to distribute their wealth in a way where they can be free to speak their mind and still protected even if the country which their business is based out of decides to take action against them.
by recuerdame | 2026-02-23 22:11:14+00:00
The "mipmap of r/place" framing is literally how I pitched it to myself when I started. Zoom level 1 = world overview, zoom level 12 = individual 1px cells, all backed by real Mercator coordinates.

Hardest part was keeping 60fps across zoom levels -- ended up going WebGL-only after profiling showed Canvas2D was the bottleneck during zoom-out. Happy to dig into the rendering architecture if anyone's curious.

Also genuinely curious: for those who've built r/place-style projects, what drove retention beyond the first day?
by righthand | 2026-02-23 22:11:17+00:00
The money being a red herring is a convenient excuse to say “surveillance capitalism is fine because there’s already a legal path to this dystopia and this idea fits right in”. These capital interests have shown even if there is a legal path to stop they will ignore it and try to circumvent it. So the money isn’t a red herring because the money is being used to bypass the legal pathway to stop the deployments.
by tptacek | 2026-02-23 22:11:18+00:00
Who are you talking about who likes the cameras? It isn't me. But if you're in a suburb of Chicagoland, my guess is your neighbors like them a bunch. They won't like Flock, because of the Trump administration and ICE press around Flock, but ALPRs are commodity technology now and you'll likely roll out some other vendor, like the munis surrounding Oak Park did.
by basilikum | 2026-02-23 22:11:27+00:00
Bitcoin ist pseudonymous. If you never attach your real identity to your Bitcoin you remain pseudonymous. Now that's a very big if and why states heavily try to enforce KYC for exchanges.

The reality is a lot more messy. Different chains have different properties. Things like CoinJoins for Bitcoin or TornadoCash for Ethereum exist which aim to break the money trail. Mixers are a thing which are a trusted entity doing the same on a "trust me bro" basis.

Monero seeks to be untracable by design using zero knowledge proofs and ring signatures over multiple possible sources for every transaction.

Even with standard Bitcoin it's more complicated. One time change addresses make tracking harder. Say I send you 1 BTC in a transaction. Now you want to spend 0.5 of these Bitcoin. However with Bitcoin you can only ever use an incoming transaction in full. Every transaction has a number of inputs (a previous incoming transaction) that it spends and a number of outputs. An output can only be unspent or spent. The amount of the outputs must match the amount of inputs.
So what you do is you use that input of 1 BTC and create two output of 0.5 BTC each. One is to the recipient address and one is to an address of your own (the change address). If you create a new change address for every transaction nobody but the recipient can know which output belongs to the recipient and which is your change address.

In reality that is a weak defense and there are many usage patterns (e.g. one output being a round number and the other one not) that can give away which one the change address is.
by instig007 | 2026-02-23 22:11:39+00:00
You put them however you like, be it in a char or a vector of, but the bottom line is that your parsed items are part of the "sanitized" label that allows you to either tuple-unpack or pattern-match (as long as it's near or literally zero-cost) without performing the same validation ever again for the lifetime of the parsed object. The callees that exclusively expect 'a', 'b' and 'c', and for which they perform internal validation step, should be replaced with versions that permit the inputs with sanitized labels only. How you implement the labels depends on the language at hand, in case of Haskell they can be newtypes or labelled GADTs, but the crucial part is: the "validation" word is systematically pushed to the program boundaries, where it's made part of the parsing interface with `Alternative f` and sanitization labels acting on raw data. In other words you collapse validation into a process of parsing where the result value is already being assembled from a sequence of decisions to branch either with one of the possible successful options or with an error.
by pvtmert | 2026-02-23 22:11:50+00:00
Apache doesn't have it on by default but easy to turn it on. It's called usermod or mod_user. By default it's the ~/www directory. So, anyone with /home/<name>/www ends up being site.url/~<name>/

It is also possible to add .htaccess and other things there, like username/password challenge (WWW-Authenticate) into that on per-user basis.

Mostly universities had hosting setup the same way. ISPs would also offer a similar thing with an additional fee to your internet-subscription. They mostly provided FTP to upload files. Nowadays if anyone tries to, it will be a SFTP rather than FTP.
by JohnMakin | 2026-02-23 22:12:06+00:00
This seems to make the classic mistake that everyone makes when they conflate two things as the same - programming and business logic/knowledge (and I'd also throw in complex systems knowledge there too).

Often, understanding the code or modifying it is the easy part! I'm sure a decent amount of people on this website could master COBOL sufficiently to go through these systems to make changes to the code.

However, if I understand from my own career enough, knowing why those things are there, how it all fits together in the much broader (and vast) system, and the historical context behind all of that, is what knowledge is being lost, not the ability to literally write or understand COBOL.
by Insanity | 2026-02-23 22:12:22+00:00
That’s not how it works. Being trained a ton of human text doesn’t mean you can complete the next token for a program that needs to be logically coherent.

Imagine all your data is Reddit threads and now I ask you what follows “goto”, how would Reddit help you?

The opposite is likely true - there isn’t a ton of publicly available cobol code compared to e.g React, so an LLM will degrade.
by rustyhancock | 2026-02-23 22:12:32+00:00
Much of the "cheap retro games" from Japan are just the games that were more popular there like Paper Mario 64.

It's hard to really properly track these things but over the three trips I've made to Japan over about 12 years. Id say the price rises have been entirely in line with currency and retrogaming inflation.

I.e. I'm not sure it was every as good value as people thought.

I did buy quite a bit over a decade ago but again those were Japan only carts (that wouldn't even run in PAL without a mod chip but would run NTSC-U).

That said it is so much more touristy now I'm sure any arbitrage opertunity would be sweeped away same evening.

Japan is now also making domestic only console versions (at least for switch 2 and I think with PS5 on the cards).

Again this might lead to people thinking consoles are cheap in Japan but these are Japanese only consoles designed to revive the economic doldrum they are in.
by roysting | 2026-02-23 22:12:33+00:00
I wish people would get more thoughtful, because fascism is the last thing any of this is, it’s something brand new and way worse, something from some sci-fi story of a tech-dystopian ruling class with suffocating and smothering domination over the masses. I think you would have to mash together a couple different novels and movies to accurately capture what this is.

Just alone note that not a single tyrant of the past could have even dreamt of the power and control over society that even just currently exists, let alone what is in the pipeline.

Do you remember Minority Report? That seems to be approaching things, but even that did not include many things that even already exist. Frankly, I think authors and directors didn’t include many aspects of things, simply because audiences of the past would have probably not found it believable that even just current things existed, because how could they, it would seem so utterly crushing and depressive that it would break the suspense when you can’t see any prospect for survival/success.
by Tuna-Fish | 2026-02-23 22:12:52+00:00
No.

Cobol is an extremely verbose programming language, and it was used in an era when the practice of programming was much less developed. Calls into libraries were often not used, and instead any re-used code was copied, essentially inlined by hand. (With all the obvious problems that caused.)

The combination of automating complex processes, requiring embarrassing amounts of code to do simple things, re-use by copy and the fact that it was dominant in it's field for such a long time (4 decades!), the amount of COBOL code that exists out there is just staggering.
by simianparrot | 2026-02-23 22:13:30+00:00
This site is turning into an echo chamber for antifa apologists. Reddit take 2. I think I’m done. The signal to noise ratio is so low with all the “AI” slop spam, far-left extreme political content where any dissent is flagged into oblivion, and generally just pointless fluff.

HN was special while it lasted o7
by butlike | 2026-02-23 22:14:10+00:00
Breaking an addiction is a personal journey not a problem to be solved at scale. I'd say it's potentially impossible to put the cat back into the bag. You can draw a corollary between obesity and social media. People will die fat because of their obesity disease, and I suspect the same might be true of their social media disease as well.

The alternative is you realizing social media is 'bad for you,' and taking steps to mitigate habitual dopamine release yourself, them smiling wryly at all the people compuslively checking their phones. It's all you can do, really.
by magicalhippo | 2026-02-23 22:14:17+00:00
As I understand it, primarly because due to the high energy level of x-rays, light x-ray interacts very differently with materials[1]. Primarily they get absorbed, so very difficult to make mirrors or lenses, which are crucial for litography to redirect and focus the light on a specific miniscule point on the wafer.

The primary method is to rely grazing angle reflection, but that per definition only allows you a tiny deflection at a time, nothing like a parabolic mirror or whatnot.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_optics
by b00ty4breakfast | 2026-02-23 22:14:40+00:00
I disagree. You can escape a disease, even during a global pandemic. And not every person that got COVID was on a ventilator or even felt that bad. Seeing the death toll statistics and even the direct effects through a screen is not visceral for many folks.

Starvation isn't avoidable and you can't ride it out. There isn't any chance that starving to death could be less severe than getting a bad flu. Nobody can avoid not eating for an extended period of time. If there is not enough food, it will affect everyone directly.
by m463 | 2026-02-23 22:14:48+00:00
Blood factors transfer the benefits of exercise to the aged brain independent of physical activity. Here, we show that the liver-derived exercise factor (exerkine) glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI)-specific phospholipase D1 (GPLD1), a GPI-degrading enzyme, reverses aging- and Alzheimer's-related memory loss by targeting the brain vasculature.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41713415/
by bee_rider | 2026-02-23 22:15:30+00:00
It is actually kind of hard to look this up: I get lots of search results about the right to record police being protected constitutionally. And the lack of an inherent right to privacy, when in public. But, this doesn’t seem to preclude a locality from creating a law that disallows recording of public locations, right? You may not have a constitutional right to safe air, but as far as I know states can pass their own environmental regulations…

(All US specific)
by willyt | 2026-02-23 22:15:32+00:00
Your voting system is shit. It results in a two party state. If one party fails to present a coherent offering and the other one is infiltrated by nut jobs then the system breaks down. After all, if it was such a good system, why didn’t you impose it on Germany and Japan when you won WW2? (This comment is politically neutral; who the incoherents and the nut jobs are are left to the reader’s discretion)
by samaltmanfried | 2026-02-23 22:15:55+00:00
I'm so glad someone brought this up. It irks me when I hear Americans detail every minor fraction of their genetic makeup: 1/4 Italian, 1/8 German, 1/16... etc. But they don't speak any of these languages, they've never even visited these countries. It's such a matter of pride for a lot of Americans, but it's just a costume.

A quote I found here on HN, that I really liked:
"Americans will say they are Italian because their great grandma ate spaghetti once, but God forbid someone is American because he was born there" -
mvieira38 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43930642)
by dirasieb | 2026-02-23 22:16:12+00:00
how did you jump from property damage and arson to speech? non sequitur much? financial damage absolutely can be violence, you can ruin someone's life if you take away their job by burning down the place they work at and it could lead to something horrific like them taking their own lives or not being able to pay for their medication or not be able to pay for their child's education, etc as a direct consequence of your act of destroying that place. destroying infrastructure people rely on to stay healthy/safe/economically stable/etc should be considered by civilized people as a violent attack on them, you cannot pretend that disrupting someone's livelihood is not at all related to attacking their liberty and/or life

a case where you can argue speech can be violence would be a verbal threat to hurt or kill someone, but that has nothing to do with what we're talking about, i don't know why you're bringing up speech, are you trying to say that destroying these cameras is a form of expressing freedom of speech? (not accusing you of this btw, just genuinely curious what you meant by that)
Show HN: Inference Engineering
by philipkiely | 2026-02-23 22:16:30+00:00
There is a ton of demand for inference, but there are relatively few engineers working in the space. This leaves novel, interesting, and deeply technical challenges left to solve at every level of the stack.

To make it easier for more engineers to learn about inference, I wrote a book that provides a survey of the dozens of technologies that work together to make inference possible, along with an introduction to the primary techniques for inference optimization as well as commentary on how those techniques apply across various modalities.

This book is completely free to download digitally, and I'll have print copies with me at various conferences + available to purchase once Amazon decides to approve my account.

I hope you find Inference Engineering useful! Am around to answer any questions.
by boplicity | 2026-02-23 22:16:53+00:00
Redistributing copyrighted content is the literal definition of copyright infringement. Using it for your own purposes, without distribution, is another story.

This link was posted with intent to facilitate the distribution of copyrighted material. The person who posted it justified posting the link by saying some people don't have a subscription.

I understand that some people think copyright shouldn't exist, but it clearly is being circumvented here.
by snowhale | 2026-02-23 22:17:02+00:00
the failure pattern is interesting -- 'walk because it's only 50 meters and better for environment' is almost certainly what shows up most in training data for similar prompts. so models are pattern-matching to socially desirable answers rather than the actual spatial logic (you need a car at the destination to wash it). not really a reasoning failure, more a distribution shift: the training signal for 'short distance = walk' is way stronger than edge cases where the destination requires the vehicle.