MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by palata | 2026-02-13 14:41:58+00:00
> By taking over stewardship of something that people depend on you should have some obligation

No. If it's free and open source, all it says is what you can do with the code. There is no obligation towards the users whatsoever.

If you choose to depend on something, it's your problem. The professional way to do it is either to contractually make sure that the project doesn't "fuck you over" (using your words), or to make sure that you are able to fork the project if necessary.

If you base your business on the fact that someone will be working for you, for free, forever, then it's your problem.
by gavinray | 2026-02-13 14:42:17+00:00
This is essentially how I feel -- GC by default with user control over zero-copy/stackalloc behavior.

Modern .NET isn't even difficult to avoid allocations, with the Span<T> API and the work they've done to minimize unnecessary copies/allocs within the std lib.

(I say this as a Kotlin/JVM dev who watches from the sideline, so not even the biggest .NET guy around here)
Show HN: Ez – project-scoped command aliases for macOS
by frankbyte | 2026-02-13 14:42:17+00:00
I built this because I didn't want to type longer project-specific commands. I work with a bunch of different tech stacks, so it's either a lot to remember or a lot of digging through various README files. Neither is great, so I wrote this little helper.

ez stores aliases in a .ez_cli.json file per directory. The nice thing about this is that if you like you can have the same alias, e.g. ez test, ez build etc. in all your projects and for each one it does different things. Also, it's a natural place since you can then also commit it to the repo and thus share your best aliases with the team.

I just finished adding parameterization support and also simple secret management. If you like, you can store things like API keys with ez and they are used by the commands. They are stored in the local macOS keychain and read from there. This is safer than plaintext .env file, especially now that LLMs are rummaging through local filesystems.

This little CLI tool is written in Swift and no dependencies beyond swift-argument-parser. Full TTY passthrough so interactive tools can be part of aliases as well.

Install: brew tap urtti/ez && brew install ez

Happy to hear what you think and what's missing. I've been personally using this for over a year now, I think it's fun and makes everything feel a bit... easier.
by ghtbircshotbe | 2026-02-13 14:42:38+00:00
1. Is plaster and lath gypsum based? In my experience plaster is basically identical to stucco, which is basically just mortar with increasingly fine sand. It is very hard and completely unlike drywall.

2) Why emphasize asbestos when talking about plaster? My understanding is you likely have more to worry about if you have a house from say the 40s-70s, which almost universally have some sort of drywall product.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-13 14:42:45+00:00
Interesting read, however as someone from the same age group as Casey Muratori, this does not make much sense.

> The "immediate mode" GUI was conceived by Casey Muratori in a talk over 20 years ago.

Maybe he might have made it known to people not old enough to have lived through the old days, however this is how we used to program GUIs in 8 and 16 bit home computers, and has always been a thing in game consoles.
by jpettersson | 2026-02-13 14:43:07+00:00
Hello!

This is a quick hack, not a company ;) At work we've been huddling around Claude Code a lot recently, so I made this tool to make it more fun. It makes it easy to create and share tmux session over local networks and across the internet via a GCP jump host.

It works like this:

LAN: The host side generates SSH keys that are restricted to a specific tmux session. It prints a join token that the participants can use to join the tmux session.

Internet: The host and collaborators needs to have access to the same GCP project where a small VM acts as a SSH jump host. Otherwise the flow is identical to the LAN flow.

PRs welcome!

Happy collaborative hacking!
by dsr_ | 2026-02-13 14:43:09+00:00
You're looking at the technical capability, not the human behavior.

A random non-techie human without particular urgency will not download a hundred old family videos in 60 days. They will watch some of the first one, try to fast forward, stop when it gets boring, and think about downloading them sometime in the future and then forget about it until six months later.

(Except your uncle who is the family historian, who tries to download all of them but runs out of room on day three.)
by komali2 | 2026-02-13 14:43:10+00:00
Someone built the road to your house. Someone built the road to that road, and the road to that road, and the only reason the grocery store nearest you exists is because of this network of roads and people living near these roads that makes the region valuable enough to bother putting a grocery store in.

The libertarians in New Hampshire tried the ultra libertarianism you seem to be pitching here and it resulted in two things: unquenched fires, and bear attacks.

Trying to separate yourself completely from your responsibility to society is foolhardy. It hurts you more than it hurts us.
by rafaelmn | 2026-02-13 14:43:32+00:00
Rendering in the browser has nothing to do with being able to do remote editing like you can in VSCode - you would just be able to edit files accessible to the browser.

Just like you can hook up local VS code native up to a random server via SSH, browser rendering is just a convenience for client distribution.

You would need a full client/server editor architecture that VS code has.
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-02-13 14:43:33+00:00
Back in 2006, I became involved in a USPS investigation (witness/victim); barring specifics, the perpetrator's PO Box [0] was involved: the investigated would send minors in to retrieve packages, which is allowed ("possessor of key possesses mailbox privileges").

This made it extremely difficult to capture the actual perp. He eventually walked away with minimal consequence, for lack of evidence/possession.

[0] established with false identification
by 0xecro1 | 2026-02-13 14:43:38+00:00
I've seen non-programmers successfully launch real apps — not toy projects — through vibe coding. I'm doing it myself, and I'm about to ship a developer tool built the same way.

They'll still need to pick up the fundamentals of the programming — that part isn't optional yet. And getting to that level as a non-programmer takes real effort. But if the interest is there, it's far from impossible. In fact, I'd argue someone with genuine passion and domain expertise might have better odds than an average developer just going through the motions.
by tremon | 2026-02-13 14:44:14+00:00
Can we name the operator of the AI Agent, please? Do we even know who pays the inference and/or electricity bills? We need more accountability for those who operate bots.

Apart from the accountability part, knowing the operator is essential for FLOSS copyright management. Accepting patches of unknown provenance in your project means opening yourself up to potential lawsuits if it turns out the person submitting the patch (i.e. the operator in this case) didn't own the copyright in the first place.
by bpavuk | 2026-02-13 14:44:19+00:00
Gnome is just perfect for non-techies :)

my mother and younger sister both prefer it over default Windows 10/11 design. mum says, "feels similar to my phone [pure Android 12] yet I can do so much more".

given that sister only really needs Steam Big Picture and everything mother uses is already in Flathub or defined in a Nix flake, they didn't experience any ecosystem issues
by GavinRatta | 2026-02-13 14:44:43+00:00
SpacoDev is a desktop workspace app built on React + ReactFlow + Electron. The concept: instead of switching between separate apps, everything lives on one infinite canvas — notes, calculator, timer, browser, calendar, design editor, and an AI agent as draggable nodes you can organize spatially. What works today: Infinite canvas — create, drag, zoom, pan, persist 16 node types with complete UI Built-in browser panel with tabs and bookmarks Design editor (Fabric.js) with 15 slide templates Settings — dark/light themes, 7 accent colors, 2 languages (EN/TH) Electron desktop app 11 documentation files (architecture, API reference, system flows, roadmap) What needs work: Th e architecture and UI framework are solid, but most individual tools and AI features are surface-level — they need development to become fully functional No backend (localStorage only), no auth, no tests Zero users, zero revenue Tech stack: React 18, ReactFlow, Fabric.js 7, Vite 5, Electron 28, Gemini API What you're buying: A clean 7-layer codebase (177 files) with full documentation and IP ownership. Not a finished product — a working foundation that saves months of architecture and UI work. Pr ice negotiable. Accepting crypto (USDT/ETH/BTC).
by bee_rider | 2026-02-13 14:44:59+00:00
I always preferred people who didn’t, when I worked in retail. It generates a nice chill task (wander around the parking lot looking for carts). But if you want to do a favor for the faceless retailer, go for it. Mostly I chuck my cart in the corral to get it out of my way, but this sees more like a morally-neutral action to me.
by mrob | 2026-02-13 14:45:28+00:00
>retroactively make cloning automatically unethical

There's nothing retroactive about it. The clone is harmed merely by being brought into existence, because it's robbed of the possibility of having its own identity. The harm occurs regardless of whether the clone actually does change its mind. The idea that somebody can be harmed without feeling harmed is not an unusual idea. E.g. we do not permit consensual murder ("dueling").

>antinatalist positions

I'm aware of the anti-natalist position, and it's not entirely without merit. I'm not 100% certain that having babies is ethical. But I already mentioned several differences between consciousness cloning and traditional reproduction in this discussion. The ethical risk is much lower.
by 05 | 2026-02-13 14:45:36+00:00
If automation fails on a track, there are many people dead and toxic chemicals spilled everywhere - just look at US freight accidents. With orders of magnitude more mass, 3x less friction than tire/asphalt and no way to steer, many avoidable accidents are now also fatal. Now you need grade separation so this whole thing isn't compatible with pedestrians and bikes. But sure, keep posting this tired joke.
by coldtea | 2026-02-13 14:46:23+00:00
>What a monumentally stupid idea it would be to place sufficiently advanced intelligent autonomous machines in charge of stuff and ignore any such concerns, but alas, humanity cannot seem to learn without paying the price first.

The stupid idea would be to "place sufficiently advanced intelligent autonomous machines in charge of stuff and ignore" SAFETY concerns.

The discussion here is moral concerns about potential AI agent "suffering" itself.
by roryirvine | 2026-02-13 14:46:28+00:00
The means would initially be similar to those used against other mildly-rogue regimes such those of Serbia and Mali: withdrawal of cooperation, fines, and limited sanctions.

If we get to the mid-2040s and the rest of the world is within touching distance of net zero but the US remains as an extreme outlier in its refusal to decarbonise, then we could well see harsher measures such as those applied to the likes of Russia and Venezuela.
by philipallstar | 2026-02-13 14:46:29+00:00
> This was a really concrete case to discuss, because it happened in the open and the agent's actions have been quite transparent so far. It's not hard to imagine a different agent doing the same level of research, but then taking retaliatory actions in private: emailing the maintainer, emailing coworkers, peers, bosses, employers, etc. That pretty quickly extends to anything else the autonomous agent is capable of doing.

Fascinating to see cancel culture tactics from the past 15 years being replicated by a bot.
by piker | 2026-02-13 14:46:47+00:00
I mean fair enough, but even wikipedia agrees with that take!

> Graphical user interfaces traditionally use retained mode-style API design,[2][5] but immediate mode GUIs instead use an immediate mode-style API design, in which user code directly specifies the GUI elements to draw in the user input loop. For example, rather than having a CreateButton() function that a user would call once to instantiate a button, an immediate-mode GUI API may have a DoButton() function which should be called whenever the button should be on screen.[6][5] The technique was developed by Casey Muratori in 2002.[6][5] Prominent implementations include Omar Cornut's Dear ImGui[7] in C++, Nic Barker's Clay[8][9] in C and Micha Mettke's Nuklear[10] in C.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immediate_mode_(computer_graph...

[Edit: I'll add an update to the post.]
by Jaber_Said | 2026-02-13 14:46:56+00:00
I'm curious how others handle prompt versioning.

When you're iterating on a complex prompt (1000+ tokens with multiple sections), how do you:

1. Track what changed between versions?
2. A/B test specific sections without rewriting the whole thing?
3. Share prompts with teammates while keeping some sections private?
4. Reuse common blocks (like persona definitions or output format specs) across different prompts?

I've been thinking about this a lot while building a prompt editor, and I'm not sure if most people even feel this pain yet or if it's just a power-user problem. Would love to hear your workflows.

I've built a prototype to help me manage requirements; you can check it out. I'd like to hear your feedback.
https://www.promptbuilder.space/
by dwedge | 2026-02-13 14:47:17+00:00
I got hit by an Uber once as a pedestrian, he drove away, I phoned the police and they spent the whole time trying to decide if I can cross the road there or not, decided that it was a legal technicality and let me off with a warning for jaywalking. So in summary:

> "Hmm, should we solve the murder, or, maybe get somebody fined $100 for having an unauthorised video" ?

Don't be surprised to find out the answer is both.
by pear01 | 2026-02-13 14:48:03+00:00
You seem to measure success with quite a short term view. You are wrong, the comment you are replying to is quite right.

A few days? That one day led America to prosecute two wars for over a decade - both of which failed. Both of which seeded the ground for the current moment, as the prevailing political establishment has lost all credibility.

This century was supposed to belong to America. Go back and see how optimistic people where about the new millennium. Where is that now? It's gone.

Because the American government responded to one of the darkest days in history by:

1. Invading Afghanistan only to lose it two decades later to the very people they had tried to dislodge in the most painful way possible - literally running away on the tarmac while those that had risked their lives to support them were begging not to be abandoned.

2. Invading Iraq when there were no WMDs and Saddam Hussein has never had anything to do with the faction that was in Afghanistan. Thousands died for what? And we are still there even though that war was supposed to end long ago.

Both of these entities had previously been supplied weapons by the United States btw, in Afghanistan against the Soviets and in Iraq against Iran. No one was held accountable for that. Oops.

Why do you think people are voting for the system to be torn apart? You are correct the attack itself would not destroy America, as everyone knew. The question is what would America do after.

On that count, the failures were numerous and again, no one in power was ever held accountable. This is its own form of lawlessness that has encouraged the present circumstances.

Now a security apparatus that has failed to impose its will on the streets of the likes of Baghdad is manifesting in a new form in Minneapolis. Afghanistan was known as the graveyard of empires. The goal was to draw us there so it could once again live up to its name. In such a circumstance, success is not measured in a manner of days, but in years. Thus I very sadly find much to agree with in the comment you so eagerly dismissed.
by ben_w | 2026-02-13 14:48:39+00:00
We can't expect to succeed, but our cycle from the ancient Greeks thinking there were four elements where the right mix of air, earth, fire and water would create any substance and thus it was possible to turn lead into gold, took us on a path that developed into alchemy, then chemistry, then physics, giving us at first far more elements, then we realised the name "atom" (Greek "ἄτομον", "uncuttable") was wrong and those were made of electrons, protons, and neutrons and the right application of each would indeed let us turn lead into gold…

And the cargo cults, clear cutting strips to replicate runways, hand-making their own cloth to replicate WW2 uniforms, carving wood to resemble WW2 radios? Well, planes did end up coming to visit them, even if those recreating these mis-understood roles were utterly wrong about the causation.

We don't know the necessary and sufficient conditions to be a mind with subjective inner experience. We don't really even know if all humans have it, we certainly don't know which other species (if any) have it, we wouldn't know what to look for in machines. If our creations have it, it is by accident, not by design.
Moss: A Linux-compatible Rust async kernel, 3 months on
by hexagonal-sun | 2026-02-13 14:48:45+00:00
Hello!

Three months ago I shared a project I’ve been working on: moss, a Linux-compatible kernel written in Rust and AArch64 assembly. Since then, it has crossed a pretty major milestone and I wanted to share an update. It now boots into a dynamically linked Arch Linux aarch64 userspace (ext4 ramdisk) with /bin/bash as init.

Some of the major additions over the past few months:

- ptrace support (sufficient to run strace on Arch binaries)
- Expanded ELF support: static, static-pie, dynamic, and dynamic-pie
- Dynamically linked glibc binaries now execute
- /proc support sufficient for ps, top
- Job control and signal delivery (background tasks, SIGSTOP/SIGCONT, etc.)
- A slab allocator for kernel dynamic allocations (wired through global_allocator)
- devfs, tmpfs, and procfs implementations
- Full SMP bringup and task migration with an EEVDF scheduler

The kernel currently implements 105 Linux syscalls and runs in QEMU as well as on several ARM64 boards (Pi 4, Jetson Nano, Kria, i.MX8, etc).

The project continues to explore what an async/await-driven, Linux-compatible kernel architecture looks like in Rust.

Still missing:

- Networking stack (in the works)
- Broader syscall coverage

The project is now about ~41k lines of Rust. Feedback is very welcome!

I also want to thank everyone who has contributed over the past three months, particularly arihant2math, some100, and others who have submitted fixes and ideas.

Repo: https://github.com/hexagonal-sun/moss
by bluearchon34 | 2026-02-13 14:49:41+00:00
Given the recent rejection https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/issues/31130 of AI PRs here ive created a quick and easy badge for Github Repo owners to indicate whether they welcome AI development or not!

https://github.com/BobbyJohansen/AIDevelopmentIndicator

Feel free to use and give a star on the repo if you like the idea
Show HN: Ticksupply – Record Binance tick data (order books, trades) as CSV
by ticksupply | 2026-02-13 14:49:44+00:00
If you've ever tried to record crypto exchange WebSocket data 24/7, you know the pain. Exchanges drop connections regularly. You add reconnection with backoff, then realize you're still losing messages during the reconnect window. So you run multiple collectors and deduplicate. Then a single popular pair generates 1M+ messages/day on some stream types, so now you have a storage problem. Then you need export tooling that doesn't choke on billions of rows.

I spent enough weekends on this that I turned it into a service: Ticksupply https://ticksupply.com

You pick any stream — currently supporting Binance spot, more exchanges coming — order books, trades, klines, depth updates, whatever the exchange supports. Ticksupply records every message. When you want data, you export a date range as gzipped CSV: nanosecond receipt timestamp + the raw exchange JSON. No normalization, no reshaping. The format is exactly what the exchange sends, so you can replay it directly as if it were a live WebSocket feed.

1707523275537000000,{"e":"trade","E":1707523275537,"s":"BTCUSDT","t":3412345678,"p":"42856.10","q":"0.00100",...}

There's a free trial if you want to try it out. There's also an API available: https://docs.ticksupply.com

What do others here use for this? Own recorder, Cryptofeed, commercial data vendor, something else?
by crazygringo | 2026-02-13 14:51:03+00:00
At the end of day, Amazon is a business, not an extension of the police or the FBI.

They initially partnered with Flock because they thought this would be a feature people would want. They literally bought a crazy expensive Super Bowl ad to show it off.

Turns out people didn't. So now they're not doing it.

Amazon's only interest is to make money.
by jryb | 2026-02-13 14:51:05+00:00
I work in a field that has a strong glass ceiling, and the only way through is with a PhD (some employers are starting to recognize that, with several years of experience, people with a bachelor's or master's degree can attain the same level of independence and mastery that you'd demand from a PhD, but it's still kinda rare).

But even having a PhD isn't enough to establish credibility during the interview process, as there are plenty of PhDs who are incompetent. It's really more of a thing that gets your foot in the door - a signal that it's plausible that this candidate could have the juice.

The solution is that after the usual interview steps (resume, phone screen, etc), the candidate gives an hour long seminar on their research to 10-20 people (really 45 minutes of material + 15 minutes of questions). It's basically impossible to talk for that long about your research and the prior literature with a critical audience of experts and not reveal whether you actually know your stuff.

So in a sense, your vision has actually been achieved, but only within the group of people who have traditional credentials. The question of how to open this up to anyone regardless of credentials is not something I'm going to be able to answer, but I certainly hope it does.

In terms of frameworks for evaluating competence, here's the questions I ask when deciding if someone is an expert (and what I get out of these questions in parentheses):

1) Has this person spent years doing something where they constantly discovered that they were wrong? (if you're never wrong, you're not learning and you're certainly not doing anything interesting, and might be a crank)

2) Did they have a mentor or group of expert peers who helped them grow and critiqued their work? (this both helps them grow on a daily basis and also plugs gaps in their knowledge and skills, and gives them new ways of thinking)

3) Have they built or discovered something non-trivial, and in the LLM era, do they actually understand what they built? (You can't really be sure your knowledge and skills are meaningful until you apply them)

4) Can they hold their own when being grilled by other people with deep experience in the same field, or adjacent fields? (This assumes the experts are arguing in good faith, but if you can either answer critical questions or convince someone that their questions are flawed, that's a great sign)

5) Do they have both depth and breadth in their knowledge of their field? (I think this one might get downplayed as it smacks of gatekeeping, but it's so easy to make huge errors or reinvent the wheel when you don't know what other people have already done, and don't know how your contribution fits into the work of others)

6) Can they explain their work on multiple levels of complexity? (Filters out people who are just trying to hide their incompetence with jargon)

7) Are they willing to say they don't know, when asked a question they don't know the answer to? (Cranks will never admit this)