MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jamiecode | 2026-02-26 12:26:41+00:00
The divergence between static benchmarks and long-horizon performance isn't surprising if you've run anything multi-step in production. Benchmarks are short, isolated, well-specified. Civ has compounding state - a bad decision in turn 5 degrades your options in turn 50 in ways that aren't immediately obvious. It's a more honest signal than most standard evals.

The $1,200/match cost is the real constraint. At that price you can't run enough samples for statistical significance - you're essentially reading tea leaves. How are you handling context window management across 200 turns? Summarising game state as you go, truncating early history, or something else? The token accumulation over a full game must be substantial.

Also curious about the 90s timeout logistics. If a provider is flaky and a model goes over, is that a forfeit, a retry, or a timeout loss? Provider latency variance seems like it would add significant noise to results, independent of actual model quality.
Show HN: A minimal, no-signup, free text-to-speech tool
by devinda-dilshan | 2026-02-26 12:27:11+00:00
Hi HN,

I made a simple web tool called SonicFlow (https://voice.clevermock.com) for converting text to an MP3.

I've used other TTS tools, but was looking for something with zero friction - no sign-up, no feature-gating, no complicated SSML tags to learn. Just a text box and a download button.

So I built it. It's a clean front-end that pipes text to a TTS model and serves the audio file directly. Useful for quickly listening to articles, comments, or maybe generating placeholder audio for a project.

It's free. Hope it's useful. Feedback is welcome.
by kortilla | 2026-02-26 12:27:19+00:00
Your comment was better without that edit.

It’s an appeal to absurdity that falls flat because nuclear plants and oil refineries have been built near population centers in the US (including in California) without problem.

California had had more issues from under investment in industry (see it’s ancient electrical infra that lit the state on fire) than from collocation of industry and people.

Both of the largest ports are right in SoCal and that’s going pretty well. Building another one would never make it past the permitting stage in today’s California.
by a3w | 2026-02-26 12:27:45+00:00
I claim BS: labs can operate with these and more dangerous chemicals.

Top of the list is "sulfuric acid baths". The correct disposal of sulfuric acid is "dilute with water", or if about metal dissolved in it, yeah treat as waste to be cleaned up or compacted and stored into eternity at a cost. So even after skimming, this seems agenda driven, not a fact sheet.

This seems like a "we cannot do it cost efficiently, so we claim it is impossible since China underbids us"
by dcminter | 2026-02-26 12:28:32+00:00
Why should any special architecting be required given that I am an EU citizen with an EU passport. On the contrary, effort was expended to prevent me from obtaining an ETA to no purpose that has ever been justified.

Yes, I personally am not deeply inconvenienced by this, but that doesn't make it ok. Others are on much tighter budgets than me.
by KomoD | 2026-02-26 12:28:49+00:00
What is there to fix? It was designed this way.

Something that can be abused is if the key also has other Maps APIs enabled, like Places API, Routes API or Static APIs especially for scraping because those produce valuable info beyond just embedding a map.

The only suggestions I have are:

- If you want to totally hide the key, proxy all the requests through some server.

- Restrict the key to your website.

- Don't enable any API that you don't use, if you only use the Maps Javascript API to embed a map then don't enable any other Maps API for that key.
LibSQL/Hrana wrapper for CF D1. Access with any compatible client
by michaloo | 2026-02-26 12:28:50+00:00
Cloudflare Containers is a cool way of hosting any Dockerized app if you don't want separate infra and keep everything in one account.

The problem is that D1 can only be accessed via Worker binding or API.

Worker binding cannot be shared to Container (where the app runs) and using the API makes application vendor specific.

D1 is sqlite behind the scenes which doesn't expose any network access out of the box. Luckily there is LibSQL open-source alternative and Hrana protocol designed for network accessible sqlite-like database.

I wrote a small wrapper on Worker binding that expose D1 as LibSQL/Hrana so that any compatible client can talk to the D1.

As a result, you can deploy full Docker-based app with relatively standard persistence layer, so you can easily move somewhere else in the future.

The downside is that every call to the DB is another Worker call, so it's just a fun proof-of-concept.
by ozlikethewizard | 2026-02-26 12:29:27+00:00
Hey some minister signed off a multimillion pound deal to get that app developed (to a firm that definitely no one in his family or business circles has stakes in), so we better get our money's worth!

In all seriousness this is likely the exact scenario here. Same thing with covid track and trace and p much any current government it contract. Minister receives backhand to push through overpriced underbaked tech solution (when existing solution was ok, and probably just needed improving over replacing). Then to avoid ministerial embarrassment and too much financial scrutiny, civil service must bend over backwards to improve uptake of new solution. Love living in Victorian Britain tbh.
by pards | 2026-02-26 12:29:56+00:00
The 47 Lansdowne bus in Toronto has this problem with at least three locations (on the short section of the route that I take):

1. In the Dundas/College triangle, there are are 2 stops less than 100m apart.
2. At the Queen St turnaround, there are 4 stops all within 150m of each other
3. At Bloor St, there are 2 stops 100m apart

These are all within a single 2km section of the bus's 10km route.
by spockz | 2026-02-26 12:30:28+00:00
After writing my previous post I was wondering, do we actually need to instrument the barrier events and other code tied to a GC? Currently we benchmark our application with different GC at different settings and resource constraints and the we pick one sizing and settings combination that we like (read most work/totalcpu that is still fits within the allocation constraints of our clusters). What ultimately matters for production is how the app behaves in production.

This will not help directly when developing new (versions) or GC. On the other hand, if we can have a noop GC including omitting any of the barriers etc required for GC to function we can create a baseline for apps. Provided we have enough total memory to run the benchmark in.

Edit: I guess we can then also use perf to compare cache misses between runs with different GC implementations and settings. Not sure how this works out in real life as it will be very CPU, kernel, and other loads dependent.
by cannonpr | 2026-02-26 12:30:45+00:00
The problem is most data shows PTFE as having significant pyrolysis after 400-500c in reality it starts to break down enough to poison you around 260c.
In general though under those temperatures it’s not particularly problematic, ofcourse ideally we should just never make the stuff to begin with as it’s manufacture and its eventual breakdown are both horrible for everyone.
by ExoticPearTree | 2026-02-26 12:31:03+00:00
> That's leaving the most critical component still with a US company. Doesn't fly if the goal is what the Danish agency is trying to achieve.

Yes, because it is very hard to replace. I said that you could move to Okta or something similar (in this or in another comment), but this requires you have pretty modern apps that can integrate with SAML/OAuth/OIDC.

And, even staying with MS for a few more years while you migrate IAM to something else is not as bad as having the full Office stack. You can't just yank out everything overnight - I mean you could, but you have to spend a ton of money to have a 1:1 solution from the get-go.
by nneonneo | 2026-02-26 12:31:10+00:00
On the other hand, Korean ditched the ideographic Hanja (Chinese Character) writing system because it was too difficult to learn, in favour of a much simpler phonetic one. In Japan, the classical Kanji Chinese writing system was considered a prestige language and was customarily not taught to ordinary folks; the modern Hiragana script evolved as an easy-to-learn alternative, (initially) used heavily by women who were often not taught Kanji.

Of course, Chinese characters are not pictographic and haven't been for a few thousand years, but they are still largely ideographic.
Show HN: I built an offline-first, privacy-focused Blood Pressure tracker
by 1derfool | 2026-02-26 12:31:31+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a Blood Pressure tracker because I was tired of the existing apps requiring cloud accounts, subscriptions, or selling health data to advertisers.

BP Tracker Pro is a "Class I Data Logger" built with Capacitor and Vanilla JS. It runs 100% offline on your device.

Key Features:
- Gorgeous panel to visually track your blood pressure readings
- Zero Cloud Sync: Data lives in a local JSON store (encrypted at rest by Android OS). You can bacjup
- PDF Reports: Generates clinical reports for doctors using jsPDF (client-side).
- Morning Surge Detection: Analyzes AM vs PM readings to flag stroke risks.
- Family Mode: Track multiple profiles (e.g., aging parents) from one dashboard.

Tech Stack:
- Vanilla JS + Vite (No React/Vue overhead)
- Capacitor v8 (Bridge to Native)
- Chart.js for trends

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bloodpress...
by afpx | 2026-02-26 12:32:02+00:00
I'm trying to follow this but unclear of the root of the problem. Is it beacause building roads in L.A. is inherantly more expensive than elsewhere? I thought one of the selling points of cities was scale: costs are spread over more people. But, it sounds like road building is cheaper per resident in my small city. Sounds more like a corruption problem.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-02-26 12:32:07+00:00
Keeping track of which of your citizens are outside of the country. Ensuring the state knows you are a citizen and should be treated as such.

France had a weird issue recently about the media talking for ages about someone who committed a crime while the state had asked for him to be deported months before on the basis of his foreign passport and it took weeks for someone to finally notice that the guy was actually French. It made the police looks clownish.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2026-02-26 12:33:43+00:00
> I'm pretty sick of this reality where companies get to charge you whatever they want and it's designed to always be your fault

But have you considered it from the companies POV? Charging whatever you like and its always the customers fault is a pretty sweet deal. Up next in the innovation pipeline is charging customers extra fees for something or other. It'll be great!
by notpushkin | 2026-02-26 12:33:59+00:00
> I'm putting my email on GitHub precisely to give people a way to contact me.

They’re not only looking at the public email in your profile, they’re also looking at your committer email (git config user.email). You could argue that you’re not putting that out for people to contact you.

(I’ve used that trick a couple times to reach out to people, too, but never mass emailing.)
by 1derfool | 2026-02-26 12:34:05+00:00
OP here. I built this because I realized most health apps are just data vacuums for insurance companies and also look like they were build 20 years ago.

The hardest technical decision was not using a backend. I’m using the Android FileSystem API to store everything in a local encrypted JSON blob. It makes cross-device sync harder (I added a manual xml export to ensure you can save data for yourself and family), but it guarantees that if my server goes down (or I get hit by a bus), the app keeps working forever.
I also stuck to Vanilla JS + Vite instead of React/Flutter to keep the file size less.

I'd love feedback on the PDF report generation—I'm drawing charts to a hidden Canvas and then injecting them into jsPDF. Thoughts?
by RHSeeger | 2026-02-26 12:34:08+00:00
That was my first thought... Notepad is a plain text editor. Why add formatted text options when there's no good reason for it?

Plus, judging by the image, it doesn't look like there's controls to interact with the plain text markdown. It seems more like it's a "you can use markdown _codes_ to trigger text formatting. Jira has exactly this, and it's horrible.
by mFixman | 2026-02-26 12:34:20+00:00
My impression was that the EU did it to prevent people doing visa-free layovers from claiming asylum, while the UK did it to negotiate a dual exception with the EU in the future.

ETA is a visa to the entire world in all but name. I'm not looking forward to the future where every county implements is and visa-free travel becomes a thing of the past.
by pjc50 | 2026-02-26 12:35:52+00:00
> corruption+nepotism are unstoppable forces of nature

History suggests it's the other way round. They're awfully prevalent - what is a hereditary monarchy but nepotism - but the value of meritocracy over nepotism enables such better governance that it tends to win handily in proxy or actual conflicts. Similarly, if your society is too corrupt when you go to war you discover that someone has sold the tyres off all your stored vehicles, or suchlike.

You also can't have a complex society without a complex government. This goes all the way back to Qin dynasty vs. "barbarians".
by AznHisoka | 2026-02-26 12:36:03+00:00
Maybe I am missing something, but can’t you simply not show the email address in a git commit? (Sincere question, not saying this is trivial. i am dumb and like to ask dumb questions even if might be embarassing)

If someone wants to message someone, it goes through github notifications or github emails them

Also banning an account doesnt seem like a heavy punishment, given they can simply move to gitlab, bitbucket etc
by gizmodo59 | 2026-02-26 12:36:31+00:00
If you haven’t used codex with gpt-5.3-codex (high or xhigh) you are missing out. Claude is still good at conversations but boy I can have codex go at a problem and it does better than Claude almost all the time. Front end and product UX Claude is slightly better but given the very very generous limits of codex, they are the best bang for buck
by ozlikethewizard | 2026-02-26 12:37:20+00:00
If (more likely when but gotta stay optimistic) the fascists do take power there will be people that fight. There already are so many people standing up. My recommendation for a non-brit would unfortunately be to avoid moving to anywhere that could be classified as Little England. I'm fortunate enough to live in the bubble that is the "UKs happiest city", and while you cant pretend racism / xenophobia are extinct here, people do stick up for eachother and mind their own businesses. The UK is great, even so for immigrants, its just finding those pockets of tolerance and kindness in an ever growing sea of shite. British people need to focus on rebuilding our strong local communities that were smashed by Thatcher, and then this too shall pass.
by asimovDev | 2026-02-26 12:37:25+00:00
>Trinet, the Otaniemi area campus network, was founded in 1986. Today, it provides Internet access to all student apartments and dormitories located in Otaniemi and owned by the Aalto University Student Union (AYY) and the Foundation for Student Housing in the Helsinki Region (HOAS). The network covers about 2500 student households and is connected to Funet, the Finnish national research and education network. This enables access to academic network services, along with fast and reliable general Internet connectivity.

[0] https://verkko.ayy.fi
by less_less | 2026-02-26 12:37:29+00:00
Yeah. It's especially relevant for the author's focus on shipbuilding. The old shipyard at Hunter's Point in San Francisco is horribly polluted, and they've been working to decontaminate it for more than three decades in order to reclaim the land for other uses (in particular, housing). Treasure Island and Yerba Buena Island also have a lot of pollution from the former naval base there. There is a cost to overregulation, and there is a cost to underregulation.

And OK, sure, there's a lot of industry that ought to happen somewhere. Someone has to build ships and electronics and whatever, and if California's code is too strict then it just becomes NIMBYism. But if some company moves their gigafactory to Reno for easier permitting, I don't whether (or more likely by how much) CA is too strict, or NV is too lax. And I know that CA has NIMBYish and overregulatory tendencies, but given the clear bullshit on this website, I'm not inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt either.

I'm especially doubtful when it says "THE classic example of what you can't do in CA" is auto paint shops ("Impossible"!) ... but then the detail it gives is that they're "effectively impossible" to permit in the Bay Area AQMD, that being only one of the state's 35 AQMDs (albeit one of the larger ones).
by jimishol | 2026-02-26 12:37:45+00:00
Thanks for digging that up! That blog post covers the early "from scratch" version—essentially a mind experiment.

Interestingly, Dmitri Tymoczko arrives at a similar prism structure (Figure 14b) in his paper "The Generalized Tonnetz" ( https://read.dukeupress.edu/journal-of-music-theory/article/... ).

I reached a similar shape (Figure 11 in my pdf: https://jimishol.github.io/thoughts_on_harmony_en.pdf#page=2... ), but the specific, even arbitrary, twisting I used to realize the torus topology gives it a unique advantage: it immediately reveals the "hinge note" of a scale.

I discuss that specific geometric comparison here:
https://github.com/jimishol/cholidean-harmony-structure/disc...

The new documentation in this repo ( https://github.com/jimishol/cholidean-harmony-structure ) represents the mature "Umbilic-Surface Grammar" that explains why those shapes happen.
by dtf | 2026-02-26 12:38:22+00:00
Some British women now find themselves in a Kafkaesque situation where the UK home office refuses to renew or grant them a UK passport, because their foreign passport is under a different name. (Greece and Spain are mentioned in [1], but I know people in France affected by this)

Where previously these women could at least travel to their birth country to visit dying relatives on their foreign passport, they are now locked out waiting two months for a £600 entitlement certificate. Meanwhile, non-British visitors can just pay £16 for an ETA on this whizzy app.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/16/border-rule...
by idanr3011 | 2026-02-26 12:38:33+00:00
Sigstore is a good pointer - I'll look at how they handle the transparency log. The append-and-sign pattern is probably the right starting point before going full Merkle tree.

On rollout - fully self-hosted right now, intentionally. The core promise is local-only: your data never leaves your machine. curl | bash, single binary, vigilo setup handles the rest.
A managed offering for teams is the obvious next step if there's demand - but it's a fundamentally different product with different trust assumptions. I'd build it as a separate thing, not by compromising the local-first model.
by allanscar | 2026-02-26 12:38:45+00:00
Most dating apps show you everyone and let you figure out compatibility later. That leads to the #1 frustration in modern dating — great chemistry, completely wrong intentions, wasted months.
MyMintie fixes this with one simple but powerful idea: goal-aligned matching. You set your relationship goal once — serious relationship, casual dating, friendship first, or explore — and you only ever see singles who want the same thing. Every profile. Every swipe. Every match.
No more "what are we?" conversations three months in. No more ghosting after realising you're not on the same page. Just real connections with people already pointing in the same direction as you.
We launched in January 2026 and are live globally across 29 languages on iOS and Android.
What we've built:

- Goal-aligned matching engine — the core of everything we do
- Real-time chat with reactions and read receipts
- Super Likes, profile boosts, incognito mode, and see who likes you
- Three premium tiers: Spark, Flame, and Destiny
- Photo verification and community safety tools

The dating app market is massive and largely unsolved. The major dating apps have billions in revenue but a chronically frustrated user base. The opportunity is not to build another swipe app — it's to build the first one that respects your time by leading with intention.

MyMintie is that app.
by sevg | 2026-02-26 12:38:47+00:00
It’s important to be empathetic here to how difficult these things can be for less tech literate people.

Adding more guidance and nudges doesn’t prevent capable users from succeeding, it just annoys them. But it means the lowest common denominators have a higher chance to succeed, which is much more valuable than level of annoyance.

And that’s pretty the point of accessibility.
by Noaidi | 2026-02-26 12:39:13+00:00
There is no such thing as zero externalities in manufacturing. Unless these ‘eco conscious’ engineers ship all the waste to China these chemicals as by products will continue to harm the environment. And guess what, you are part of the environment. You all just want excuses to keep playing with these toys.

I cannot to move to California once all the billionaires move to Texas and Florida.
by dghf | 2026-02-26 12:39:48+00:00
This new rule might be problematic for those Northern Irish people who identify solely as Irish (as is their right under the Good Friday Agreement) and who only hold an Irish passport: unless things have changed since the DeSouza case [0], the UK Government and UK law treat everyone born in Northern Ireland (as long as at least one of their parents meets citizenship or residency requirements) as a British citizen, regardless of their opinions on the matter. The UK Government holds that this is compatible with the GFA because you can renounce your British citizenship; but you have to pay hundreds of pounds to do so.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_DeSouza
by A_Duck | 2026-02-26 12:39:49+00:00
Is this correct — HGVs can go faster on dual carriageways than motorways?

"UK speed limits for heavy vehicles are also more complex than most car drivers realise. Articulated trucks over 7.5 tonnes: 60 mph on dual carriageways, 50 mph on single carriageways, 56 mph (limiter) on motorways"

Not able to find a source that verifies that
by pjc50 | 2026-02-26 12:39:53+00:00
The UK fishing industry was cited a lot as a reason for Brexit, despite being just over 10k jobs ( https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-sea-fisheries-an... ) and less economically significant than Warhammer.

(see the "everything is gender now" thesis: fishing and coal mining are "manly" industries, which is why they get this preferential treatment from the right-wing)
by data-ottawa | 2026-02-26 12:40:24+00:00
I save $20/mo on my internet by having cable that I don’t watch. Why? So my telecom company can boast higher tv subscriber counts to shareholders and ad-networks.

It is entirely believable to me that a company like Google would do the same with AI use numbers. I suspect that all these AI use factors in corporate performance reviews are about the same thing.

This could be a standard oversight too, I find Google’s documentation on this stuff to be Byzantine.
by dzonga | 2026-02-26 12:40:40+00:00
this is well written. thank you - you broke down the economics nicely.

I do think maybe with a hub & spoke model - big trucks move loads to hubs -- then smaller electrified trucks cover the less than 200 miles from hub to spoke. electrified smaller trucks and vans are already economical today.

you get to benefit from using diesel for long haul routes - while also - better economics on the electrified front i.e a hybrid model