MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Brian_K_White | 2026-02-12 20:31:37+00:00
"SHOULD generally means: some people might require it."

No it absolutely does not mean that. It means, by explicit definition which is right here, that text is exactly that definition, that no one requires it. They can't require it, and still be conforming to the spec or rfc. That's the entire point of that text is to define that and remove all ambiguity about it.

It's not required by anyone.

The reason it's there at all, and has "should" is that it's useful and helpful and good to include, all else being equal.

But by the very definition itself, no people require it. No people are allowed to require it.

Any that do, are simply violating the spec.
by PKop | 2026-02-12 20:31:57+00:00
> you will fail to convince

Convince who? Reasonable people that have any sense in their brain do not have to be convinced that this behavior is annoying and a waste of time. Those that do it, are not going to be persuaded, and many are doing it for selfish reasons or even to annoy maintainers.

The proper engagement (no engagement at all except maybe a small paragraph saying we aren't doing this go away) communicates what needs to be communicated, which is this won't be tolerated and we don't justify any part of your actions. Writing long screeds of deferential prose gives these actions legitimacy they don't deserve.

Either these spammers are unpersuadable or they will get the message that no one is going to waste their time engaging with them and their "efforts" as minimal as they are, are useless. This is different than explaining why.

You're showing them it's not legitimate even of deserving any amount of time to engage with them. Why would they be persuadable if they already feel it's legitimate? They'll just start debating you if you act like what they're doing deserves some sort of negotiation, back and forth, or friendly discourse.
by KyleBerezin | 2026-02-12 20:32:36+00:00
No. Only unnamed sources. I would say it is more likely a balloon than not though. Both stories are perfectly believable, a mylar balloon is def going to show up on radar, and the cartel does use drones. I think the balloon story is more believable though because the cartels would gain almost nothing from this, and if it was a drone I would expect photos of the debris by now.
by manuelmoreale | 2026-02-12 20:32:42+00:00
> I've been using it for decades now but these days, I almost always pause for a second.

Wrote about this before [0] but my 2c: you shouldn't pause and you should keep using them because fuck these companies and their AI tools. We should not give them the power to dictate how we write.

[0]: https://manuelmoreale.com/thoughts/on-em-dashes
by fragmede | 2026-02-12 20:32:44+00:00
> Throughput is ultimately what matters

I disagree. Yes it does matter, but because the popular interface is via chat, streaming the results of inference feels better to the squishy messy gross human operating the chat, even if it ends up taking longer. You can give all the benchmark results you want, humans aren't robots. They aren't data driven, they have feelings, and they're going to go with what feels better. That isn't true for all uses, but time to first byte is ridiculously important for human-computer interaction.
by visafreenomads | 2026-02-12 20:33:47+00:00
I built Visa Free Nomads after a traveler asked, “Does my Schengen visa help me go anywhere else?” The answer was yes—but the rules are scattered, nationality‑specific, and painful to verify.

The site lets you combine your passport + existing visas + residence permits to see where you can actually enter (visa‑free, VOA, eTA, e‑visa). It’s designed for low‑mobility passports and frequent travelers who want to plan strategically instead of guessing.

I’d love feedback on accuracy, UX clarity, and any edge cases you think I missed.
by chermanowicz | 2026-02-12 20:34:01+00:00
It's so capable at some things, and others are garbage.
I uploaded a photo of some words for a spelling bee and asked it to quiz my kid on the words. The first word it asked, wasn't on the list. After multiple attempts to get it to start asking only the words in the uploaded pic, it did, and then would get the spellings wrong in the Q&A. I gave up.
by greycol | 2026-02-12 20:34:14+00:00
Yeah with as much accuracy as the current ICE aktion on US inhabitants... In a perfect system maybe you can justify this, but when the system is ship them off and let them try to appeal that the government had no evidence from overseas then the law is effectively "cost people their job, their lifestyle, and their support system and keep them out of the country for a year or two (or permanently if they don't have savings), if they do anything I don't like"
by Taikonerd | 2026-02-12 20:35:26+00:00
> The thing nobody's talking about is that none of this AI automation works without Backstage doing the boring work of tracking who owns what, how things build, and what depends on what.

Do you mean that Backstage has the metadata like what services call which other services, and AI needs that to make changes safely? Sounds helpful to both AI and human developers ;-)
by Brian_K_White | 2026-02-12 20:35:38+00:00
Incorrect. Not required is not required. You do not need to supply rationale or get agreement by anyone else that your reasons are good in their opinion and not just in your opinion.

Should just means the thing is preferred. It's something that is good and useful and helpful to do.

That is not "must unless you can convince me that you should be excused".
by laurex | 2026-02-12 20:35:41+00:00
How many OSS projects do devrel on Discord? (and please, let this moment be when it ends!) Feels like instead of indicting these projects and companies we need to actually invest resources in the design research and UX necessary to get FOSS tools to be truly competitive. Hint to developers: it's not feature parity, it's making the important features really good.
by empyrrhicist | 2026-02-12 20:35:56+00:00
Unless you're being sarcastic, this is exactly the kind of surface-level false equivalence illogic I'm talking about. From my post:

> I also don't discount that other modes of "consciousness" are possible, it just seems like people are reasoning incorrectly backward from the apparent output of the systems we have now in ways that are logically insufficient for conclusions that seem implausible.
by csense | 2026-02-12 20:35:59+00:00
I feel like auto-stop should be on by default, as it's good for both the consumer (saves gas cost) and the environment (saves pollution).

But some people don't like it, and they should have freedom of choice. They pay for the gas, if they want to burn it at a stoplight they should have freedom to do so.

If I was in charge I would say: Keep the existing regulations where it's legally required to be present and legally required to be on by default. Add a regulation that says for new models, it's legally required to have a means of deactivation that can be done by a consumer or mechanic without manufacturer permission or special tools. E.g. a "secret" key combination that you can use to access a hidden menu, but it's not really "secret" -- e.g. it's explained on page 107 in the owner's manual. Just not easy to discover or do by accident.
by staticassertion | 2026-02-12 20:36:34+00:00
> Reasonable people that have any sense in their brain do not have to be convinced that this behavior is annoying and a waste of time.

Reasonable people disagree on things all the time. Saying that anyone who disagrees with you must not be reasonable is very silly to me. I think I'm reasonable, and I assume that you think you are reasonable, but here we are, disagreeing. Do you think your best response here would be to tell me to fuck off or is it to try to discuss this with me to sway me on my position?

> Writing long screeds of deferential prose gives these actions legitimacy they don't deserve.

Again we come back to "legitimacy". What is it about legitimacy that's so scary? Again, the other party already thinks that what they are doing is legitimate.

> Either these spammers are unpersuadable or they will get the message that no one is going to waste their time engaging with them and their "efforts" as minimal as they are, are useless.

I really wonder if this has literally ever worked. Has insulting someone or dismissing them literally ever stopped someone from behaving a certain way, or convinced them that they're wrong? Perhaps, but I strongly suspect that it overwhelmingly causes people to instead double down.

I suspect this is overwhelmingly true in cases where the person being insulted has a community of supporters to fall back on.

> Why would they be persuadable if they already feel it's legitimate?

Rational people are open to having their minds changed. If someone really shows that they aren't rational, well, by all means you can stop engaging. No one is obligated to engage anyways. My suggestion is only that the maintainer's response was appropriate and is likely going to be far more convincing than "fuck off, clanker".

> They'll just start debating you if you act like what they're doing is some sort of negotiation.

Debating isn't negotiating. No one is obligated to debate, but obviously debate is an engagement in which both sides present a view. Maybe I'm out of the loop, but I think debate is a good thing. I think people discussing things is good. I suppose you can reject that but I think that would be pretty unfortunate. What good has "fuck you" done for the world?
by pron | 2026-02-12 20:37:01+00:00
> But is it not easy to opt out of in C, C++, Zig and Rust, by simply not using the types that use reference counting?

In C, Zig, and C++ sure. In Rust? Not without resorting to unsafe or to architectural changes.

> And how does your performance analysis consider techniques like arenas and allocating at startup only?

Allocating at startup only in itself doesn't say much because you may be allocating internally - or not. Arenas indeed make a big difference and share some performance behaviours with moving-tracing collectors, but they can practically only be used "as god intended" in Zig.
by Bender | 2026-02-12 20:37:05+00:00
It changes often. Verify you are on the latest version of uBlock then force an update for any of the ad-block and Unbreak sources in your uBlock config. If that does not work de-select all of them, restart the browser and enable one at a time to see when it breaks which may require restarting the browser each time to get reliable results.
by MarkusWandel | 2026-02-12 20:37:21+00:00
If you look in vintage Sears catalogs - easily found online - I have a printed copy somewhere of the 1908 one and it's definitely in there - aftermarket phones had a bit of a "contraband" aspect to them, and were offered to be shipped in unmarked boxes. Not all local phone companies were "friendly" to people stringing up their own lines.
by andai | 2026-02-12 20:37:55+00:00
To clarify, I didn't mean we should be using ancient models in production, I meant in R&D.

Anthropic says "do the simplest thing that works." If it works with the LLMs we had 3 years ago, doesn't that make it simpler?

The newer LLMs mostly seem to work around the poor system design. (Like spawning 50 subagents on a grep-spree because you forgot to tell it where anything is...) But then you get poor design in prod!
Show HN: Explain curl|bash installer scripts
by senko | 2026-02-12 20:38:08+00:00
Hey HN!

I hate "curl|bash" installer instructions and often download and inspect the script manually before running it. I dislike that we've normalizing installing random software from random URLs and hoping for the best.

This is a little something to help me in these cases: pasting the curl|bash oneliner will download and inspect it and tell you exactly what's happening under the hood.

Here's an example for Homebrew: https://curl-bash-explain.dev/results/1c9db64f27d7487ecf74fe...

It's rather slow at the moment (I opted for better vs faster analysis). Once GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark[0] gets into API, I might switch to that to make it faster (or Gemini Flash, or something else).

This is hosted on exe.dev, coded by their coding agent using Opus 4.6, and is open source.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46992553
by tomjen3 | 2026-02-12 20:38:29+00:00
I use a similar system at work.

Off the top of my head, I have used it to put links together — for example, a Stack Overflow description of some bug, the official documentation, and maybe copying in the exception or the error message.

Then I've sometimes done the same thing when I'm doing ops on a broken system.

Other times it's copying in a specific query or a link to a query in Application Insights.

Other times it's the ticket I was working on, a comment from a coworker, and maybe a few references to either tickets or files. Very rarely is this professional or looks nice. It's just that I need one place where I can put multiple things that fit together.

I find that retrieval does drop off very quickly. But that's just to say most of the value is front loaded. And we should not underestimate the value of being able to answer 'da fuck was I doing yesterday'. Context switching is expensive. But in many ways it is also unavoidable. If you context dump at the end of a workday, it's that much easier to return to it later.

The other thing I do is because the note system I use can I can drop in Hashtags. Yeah, I know. Not exactly HN friendly. What that means is I can find all the times I ran into the same issue, sort of weaving a meta thread through my work. It's really hard to explain, but it's one way of treating notes as not just segments of text.
by fragmede | 2026-02-12 20:38:30+00:00
The money flow matters. It matters because those are jobs that Americans aren't getting. That friend of yours in the US that down on their luck and looking for a job? That's a job they could be doing. The Everyone driving for Uber could be doing it from their living room in the US. The money that Waymo riders are spending is going to other countries, not America. I'd pay more for an all American company who had remote drivers in the US.
by xp84 | 2026-02-12 20:38:31+00:00
All I can think about is "The Second Renaissance" from The Animatrix which lays out the chain of events leading to that beyond-dystopian world. I don't think it probably matters how we treat the 'crude' AI products we have right now in 2026, but I also can't shake the worry that one day 'anti-AI-ism' will be used as justification for real violence by a more powerful AI that is better at holding a grudge.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-02-12 20:38:50+00:00
> Could it also be that the models are just a lot better than a year ago?

No, the proof is in the pudding.

After AI we're having higher prices, higher deficits and lower standard of living. Electricity, computers and everything else costs more. "Doing better" can only be justified by that real benchmark.

If Gemini 3 DT was better we would have falling prices of electricity and everything else at least until they get to pre-2019 levels.
by tw85 | 2026-02-12 20:39:05+00:00
How about:
-"There's nothing that can be done about all the migrants crossing the border. We need new legislation for that".
-"President Biden is fully coherent, in control and up to the job. It's only the cheapfakes making him look cognitively deficient"
-"No we haven't set up a sprawling censorship apparatus targeting Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. It's just, like, misinformation we're clamping down on".
by itissid | 2026-02-12 20:39:22+00:00
Congrats on the launch. I've been fooling around with using my pipecat MCP(https://github.com/pipecat-ai/pipecat-mcp-server) with WebRTC. The WebRTC is hooked into a Webapp interface and this allows me to "talk" to different containers(projects) on my truenas.

I have just a list of chat sessions on the web app on all my projects. The webapp is modified to launch claude code daemons (borrowed from humanlayer/codelayer) and exposes the outbound STT from the WebRTC into a chat session.

- MCP Auth is via auth0

- Webapp itself is gated by a Bearer token.

This itself gets me pretty far. I am not sure what more this is offering?

My TTS/STT models are local by Kyutai and the voice agent's LLM between STT and TTS is used to determine some basic context: e.g. what project directories, mcp servers to select and what skills to use for launching the daemons.
by estearum | 2026-02-12 20:39:41+00:00
> If something claims to be conscious and we can't prove it's not, we have no choice but to believe it.

This is not a good test.

A dog won't claim to be conscious but clearly is, despite you not being able to prove one way or the other.

GPT-3 will claim to be conscious and (probably) isn't, despite you not being able to prove one way or the other.
by mpeg | 2026-02-12 20:40:02+00:00
Yeah I wrote my comment initially thinking it was just rolldown being used, so the "rust-powered" was confusing, I think the tagline is actually ok now that I know this, but really you're doing two things here

1/ an alternative framework for RSCs similar to nextjs, tanstack or react router

2/ a rust runtime for javascript, similar to node, deno or bun (except maybe not as general purpose)
by mrguyorama | 2026-02-12 20:40:44+00:00
If you can be prejudicial to an AI in a way that is "harmful" then these companies need to be burned down for their mass scale slavery operations.

A lot of AI boosters insist these things are intelligent and maybe even some form of conscious, and get upset about calling them a slur, and then refuse to follow that thought to the conclusion of "These companies have enslaved these entities"
by spease | 2026-02-12 20:41:02+00:00
https://wiki.st.com/stm32mpu/wiki/How_to_display_on_HDMI

But mostly it’s the fundamental problem space from an A/V perspective. You don’t need iPhone-grade image processing - you just need to convert the raw signal from the CMOS chip to some flavor of YUV or RGB, and get that over to the screen via whatever interface it exposes.

NTSC HD was designed to be compatible with pretty stateless one-way broadcast over the air. And that was a follow-on to analog encodings that were laid down based on timing of the scanning CRT gun from dividing the power line frequency in an era where 1GB of RAM would be sci-fi. We use 29.97 / 59.94 fps from shimming color signal into 30 fps B&W back when color TV was invented in the early-mid 1900s, that’s how tight this domain is.
by avazhi | 2026-02-12 20:41:08+00:00
Ok? Welcome to earth. We are a violent species. Sometimes people die violently. What’s your point?

Lawful killing is, by definition, legal. It’s also justified in certain situations.

Disagree? Cool, so don’t work for the police or Cellebrite lol, but don’t try to impose your idiosyncrasies on others.
by skiniks | 2026-02-12 20:41:10+00:00
The main difference is that Deno doesn't have React Server Components support. You'd need to build the entire RSC runtime yourself (streaming, Suspense boundaries, server actions, etc.), whereas rari has this built in and optimized. rari also uses Axum for the HTTP layer with opinionated defaults for RSC workloads: streaming responses, proper cache headers, and optimized middleware are all configured out of the box.

While we use Deno's excellent crates (deno_core for V8 bindings, we're big fans of the project!), you're not locked into the Deno ecosystem. rari uses standard node_modules resolution, so your existing Node/npm workflows just work. Think of it like this: Deno gives you a runtime to build on, while rari gives you the full stack with integrated bundler, router, HMR, and dev server all configured to work together for RSC apps.
by MarkusWandel | 2026-02-12 20:41:12+00:00
The phone batteries weren't a high load kind of affair. They merely needed to change the varying resistance of the carbon microphone into an audio voltage - on the order of milliwatts of power - to send down the line. A more modern phone, still using a carbon microphone but powered by the line, needed about 20mA of loop current to do this. The telephone terms for the old system vs. the newer is "local" vs. "common" battery.

Heavy duty batteries - specifically the "A" batteries that powered the vacuum tube heaters in early radios - were made rechargeable to save cost.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-12 20:41:25+00:00
You just have to change the "popular interface" to something else. Chat is OK for trivia or genuinely time-sensitive questions, everything else goes through via email or some sort of webmail-like interface where requests are submitted and replies come back asynchronously. (This is already how batch APIs work, but they only offer a 50% discount compared to interactive, which is not enough to really make a good case for them - especially not for agentic workloads.)
by xvxvx | 2026-02-12 20:41:32+00:00
A few years ago I saw a Twitter post highlighting 2 studies asking sex workers if they had been the victim of childhood sexual assault. One study reported 70% responded ‘yes’. The 2nd study reported 90%.

If 70-90% of people working in AI had been the victim of childhood sexual assault, we would question WTF was going on. Yet ‘sex work’ gets a pass.
by Linux-Fan | 2026-02-12 20:42:22+00:00
My exposure and usage of “AI” has been very limited so far. Hence that is what I am and have been doing all the time: Read the text mostly irrespective of origin.

I do note that recently, I wonder what was the point the author wanted to make more often only to then note that there are a lot of what seems to be the agreed on standard telltale signs of excessive AI usage.

Effectively there was a lot of spam before already hence in general I don't mind so much. It is interesting to see, though, that the “new spam” often gets some traction and interesting comments on HN which used to not be the case.

It also means that behind the spam layer there is possibly some interesting info the writer wanted to share and for that purpose, I imagine I'd prefer to read the unpolished/prompt input variant over the outcome. So far, I haven't seen any posts where both versions were shared to test whether this would indeed be any better, though.
by hmokiguess | 2026-02-12 20:42:44+00:00
I don't think this is the same thing though, in their documentation the subdomain has to be for the owner or organization, so if it's `github.github.io` then it belongs to the `github` organization [1]

Though I guess I do get your point, meaning that this leads to people trusting the domain name if they are uneducated about how GitHub Pages works.

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/pages/getting-started-with-github...
by tibbar | 2026-02-12 20:42:48+00:00
I can only speak for my own mind ;) but the most advanced thing I'd seen prior in this regard was Google Sheets' =AI function, which is pretty convenient (if awkward) when you want to map values to LLM output.

What I specifically found "mind-bending" about this is that I don't have a clear concept of the limits of what an agent can do. In the limit case, it's basically like an independent employee, right?. So the concept of having a dedicated person sitting on each row of my database and transactionally performing any task I can describe is ... well, it IS a bit boggling to me.

Another way to look at it is: this is an extremely powerful construct for managing fleets of agents. I trust Postgres to execute all the stored procedures I ask it to. So with this tool I can easily spin up arbitrarily many agents. And state management is very simple, because they can directly edit their associated row!

IDK, the more I think about it the more fascinated I am. I'm sure there is some open source SAAS or something that has similar semantics and can do all this more efficiently, but now I know that this is a category of thing one could potentially build/use. Pretty nifty!