MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pseudohadamard | 2026-02-19 04:18:56+00:00
I think it's a circular problem, the gcc developers are very insular and respond to outside input with anything from ignoring it to getting into long lawyeristic arguments why, if you squint at the text just right, their way is the only right way, which strongly discourages outside contributions. There's only so many hours in the day and arguing till you're blue in the face that silently mutating a piece of code into unexpected different code that always segfaults when run based on a truly tortured interpretation of two sentences of text gets old fast. The gcc devs would make great lawyers for bypassing things like environmental law, they'd find some tortuous interpretation of an environmental protection law that let them dump refinery waste into a national park and then gleefully do it because their particular interpretation of the law didn't prohibit it.

Contrast this with Linus' famous "we do not break userspace" rant which is the polar opposite of the gcc devs "we love to break your code to show how much cleverererer than you we are". Just for reference the exact quote, https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75, is:

And you *still* haven't learnt the first rule of kernel maintenance? If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs. How hard can this be to understand? ... WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!

Ah, Happy Fun Linus. Can you imagine the gcc devs ever saying "if we break your code it's a problem with gcc" or "we never blame the user?".

This really seems to be gcc-specific problem. It doesn't affect other compilers like MSVC, Diab, IAR, Green Hills, it's only gcc and to a lesser extent clang. Admittedly this is from a rather small sample but the big difference between those two sets that jumps out is that the first one is commercial with responsibilities to customers and the second one isn't.
A short-duration wearable pulse-ox patch prototype
by babagajoush | 2026-02-19 04:19:40+00:00
Hi HN,

We’ve been prototyping a short-duration wearable patch designed for field or emergency response situations where quick physiological monitoring is useful. This was built in a few weeks using a collaborative hardware/firmware build environment that let us iterate logic visually before refining the firmware implementation. The goal of this early version is: can we build a small adhesive patch that activates immediately, measures pulse + SpO₂, and provides clear on-device feedback for ~30–180 minutes?

This is the current prototype:
- Adhesive-backed strip/oval form factor
- Reflective pulse oximeter sensor
- ~30 min to 3+ hour runtime (depending on configuration)
- LED indicators for status
- Audible alerts for abnormal readings
- Immediate activation when adhesive backing is removed (early units used a button)
- 5-unit prototype run using off-the-shelf components

The device gives local feedback only (light + sound. There iso cloud connectivity in this iteration.

Green LED > functioning + vitals within threshold
Red LED + audio > threshold exceeded or signal quality issue

We focused on:
a) Fast iteration on firmware thresholds
b) Basic motion tolerance testing
c) Power management for short operational windows
d) Adhesive-trigger activation mechanism
e) Rapid hardware + firmware iteration cycle

Would love feedback from anyone who’s worked on wearable pulse oximetry, motion artifact reduction, short-duration medical device validation, adhesive-based wearables

Lemme know if anyone has technical questions.
by pseudohadamard | 2026-02-19 04:21:17+00:00
VS2026 is even worse. And if you thought the CoPilot enshittification in 2022 was bad, wait'll you see 2026. We only use it for final builds now, so develop under a bloated but at least not enshittified yet version, then do release builds and testing with whatever the latest version is before shipping.
by righthand | 2026-02-19 04:21:38+00:00
I love your site design, but please consider that people may not take your content seriously because it is so expressive. It is cool looking but hard to concentrate on the actual content. This is distracting from the point you are making and makes it harder to circulate this to non-tech peoples.

An experience yes but one that is noisy to the information you’re trying to expose.

Deflecting criticism of the noisiness because you want to focus on the content is just creating another distraction to discuss instead of the content. The cat, the music, the lowercase text, low contrast color scheme all create a layer of “is this serious?”
by herbturbo | 2026-02-19 04:22:10+00:00
I think they are smart making a distinction between a D2C subscription which they control the interface to and eat the losses for vs B2B use where they pay for what they use.

Allows them to optimize their clients and use private APIs for exclusive features etc. and there’s really no reason to bootstrap other wannabe AI companies who just stick a facade experience in front of Anthropic’s paying customer.
by bfung | 2026-02-19 04:22:53+00:00
Hot take (?):

The random sizing today is great:

* If you want a better fit, go physically to a store instead of shopping online and try them on.

* the vanity part is also fine, no need to cause outrage at raising the number and making people depressed cause they think they're even more "fat". It doesn't need to be "optimized"

* Only serves online retail to "standardize", but guess what, 15th standard also sucks... <cue xkcd comic about standards>.

Enjoyed the presentation of the site. :)
by muhaccount | 2026-02-19 04:23:13+00:00
Thanks for the explanation! Makes sense. Unreasonable? To me, no. Makes complete sense given the age. BUT it doesn't support, IMO, "Apple is the opposite of planned obsolescence". Yes, tech nerds can do tech nerd things to make it work...that's not a "plan".

I apologize if that came off harsh. I feel like your comment had a different angle/context than where I took it. Apologies if so.

Microsoft hate is easy to come by on HN (I get it), so I don't like seeing a Apple's coincidental victories magnified in one of the few areas Microsoft does well as a feature.
by mcmoor | 2026-02-19 04:23:17+00:00
From the article, it seems like even if we only consider one dimension, there'd be ~70% of pilots that are uncomfortable. I'd have thought to at least cover 1 standard deviation, thus covering 68% of "average" pilots. But with 10 dimension it'd still only cover measly 2% of them. If we go to 2 std (95%), the 10-power would be ~60%. Quite small but seems acceptable if the initial target is only ~30% of pilots.

But of course this assume all variables are independent. Seems like we could actually push the tolerance much lower than this raw math would suggest.
by sanex | 2026-02-19 04:24:02+00:00
Going to keep using the agents sdk with my pro subscription until I get banned.
It's not openclaw it's my own project. It started by just proxying requests to claude code though the command line, the sdk just made it easier. Not sure what difference it makes to them if I have a cron job to send Claude code requests or an agent sdk request. Maybe if it's just me and my toy they don't care. We'll see how the clarify tomorrow.
by lisper | 2026-02-19 04:26:20+00:00
> Plank units are not physical limits on reality itself

We don't actually know that. They might be. Planck units are what happens when GR meets QM and we just don't know yet what happens there.

But as a heuristic, they probably put pretty good bounds on what we can reasonably expect to be technologically achievable before humans go extinct.
by LeFantome | 2026-02-19 04:27:53+00:00
> What is this mythical subset of C++

Ladybird inherits its C++ from SerenityOS. Ladybird has an almost completely homegrown standard library including their own pointer classes and a couple of different string classes that do some interesting things with memory. But perhaps the most novel stuff are things like TRY and MUST:
https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/blob/master/Documenta...

You see this reflected all the way back to the main function. Here is the main entry function for the entire browser:

ErrorOr<int> ladybird_main(Main::Arguments arguments).

https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/blob/master/UI/Q...

If Ladybird is successful, I would not be surprised to see its standard library take off with other projects. Again, it is really the SerenityOS standard library but the SerenityOS founder left the project to focus on Ladybird. So, that is where this stuff evolves now.
by ribosometronome | 2026-02-19 04:28:03+00:00
>If you're under 25ish, you probably had a smartphone while still in diapers

Circa 2004, when 25 year olds would probably be migrated out of diapers, smartphones were palm treos and Sony Ericsson K700s. I don't think they would be great distractions for kids, there certainly wouldn't be any endless Spiderman/Elsa YouTube to lock them in.
by xethos | 2026-02-19 04:28:22+00:00
> Author analyzed the IRC and Matrix deficiencies as not being acceptable.

Which I have all kinds of questions for; my Synapse install is the FOSS community release, and pmap -d shows <1.5G of RAM usage even without the paid-org-optimizations. I thought maybe that was including postgres, but that shows only ~2M. This isn't a single-user instance either - I'm running half a dozen bridges, and use Matrix with my fiancee. Not much above single-user, but also less than half the claimed 4Gig at idle.

I do see ~3Gig mapped (still <4), but that hardly feels fair - any process will start to consume unused RAM, and it can be pushed out when under pressure.

The E2EE breaking for OP is something I haven't seen in somewhere between months and years either, which suggests the entire thing was last trialled before (or shortly after) one of the major performance improvement pushes

The point regarding Soatok's blog about the vuln is absolutely not a good look, though I'd want to dig into it a bit more to see if it's "a malicious admin can break the encryption", "a malicious actor can break the encryption", or "a malicious actor can access metadata". Not great whichever the case may be though.
by user205738 | 2026-02-19 04:29:32+00:00
Your question has already been answered, but you considered the option of specifying several ISBNs, a description of the book, a link to the website with this edition, the publisher, and a note with details of the book's format (hardcover, soft cover, etc.)

Personally, I have never had all these indicators match in any book. It also allows you to find a very specific publication using a semantic search, specifying a combination of tags/publisher/formats.
by somenameforme | 2026-02-19 04:29:33+00:00
I'd agree on this. I ended up picking up a Claude Pro sub and am very less than impressed at the volume allowance. I generally get about a dozen queries (including simple follow up/refinements/corrections) across a relatively small codebase, with prompts structured to minimize the parts of the code touched - and moving onto fresh contexts fairly rapidly, before getting cut off for their ~5 hour window. Doing that ~twice a day ends up getting cut off on the weekly limit with about a day or two left on it.

I don't entirely mind, and am just considering it an even better work:life balance, but if this is $200 worth of queries, then all I can say is LOL.
by malnourish | 2026-02-19 04:29:56+00:00
I agree with you.

I also think it's a matter of time before we start constructing virtual worlds in which we train AI. Meaning, representations of simulated world-like events, scenarios, scenery, even physics. This will begin with heavy HF, but will move to both synthetic content creation and curation over time.

People will do this because it's interesting and because there's potential to capitalize on the result.

I thought of this in jest, but I now see this as an eventuality.
by lambda | 2026-02-19 04:30:06+00:00
A piece of software that you write, in code, unless you use random numbers or multiple threads without synchronization, will operate in a deterministic way. You know that for a given input, you'll get a given output; and you can reason about what happens when you change a bit, or byte, or token in the input. So you can be sure, if you implement a parser correctly, that it will correctly distinguish between one field that comes from a trusted source, and another that comes from an untrusted source.

The same is not true of an LLM. You cannot predict, precisely, how they are going to work. They can behave unexpectedly in the face of specially crafted input. If you give an LLM two pieces of text, delimited with a marker indicating that one piece is trusted and the other is untrusted, even if that marker is a special token that can't be expressed in band, you can't be sure that it's not going to act on instructions in the untrusted section.

This is why even the leading providers have trouble with protecting against prompt injection; when they have instructions in multiple places in their context, it can be hard to make sure they follow the right instructions and not the wrong ones, since the models have been trained so heavily to follow instructions.
by aix1 | 2026-02-19 04:32:01+00:00
> It's not actually thinking, though.

That may well be, I genuinely don't know. However, consider the following thought experiment:

Ask a random stranger on the street[*] to "generate a random password" and observe their behaviour. Are they whipping out their Python interpreter or just giving you a string of characters?

Now ask yourself whether this random stranger is capable of thought.

I think it's pretty clear that the former is a poor test for the latter.

[*] someplace other than Silicon Valley :)
by MillionOClock | 2026-02-19 04:32:37+00:00
I am a bit worried that this is the situation I am in with my (unpublished) commercial app right now: one of the major pain points I have is that while I have no doubt the app provides value in itself, I am worried about how many potential users will actually accept paying inference per token...

As an independent dev I also unfortunately don't have investors backing me to subsidize inference for my subscription plan.
by rustyhancock | 2026-02-19 04:33:16+00:00
Similar to when Nvidia released LHR GPUs that nerfed performance for Ethereum mining.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 LHR which tried to hinder mining at the bios level.

The point wasn't to make the average person lose out by preventing them mining on their gaming GPU. But to make miners less inclined to buy gaming GPUs. They also released a series of crypto mining GPUs around the same time.

So fairly typical market segregation.

https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3060-anti-min...
by lambda | 2026-02-19 04:33:19+00:00
After some more testing, yikes, MiniMax M2.5 can get painfully slow on this setup.

Haven't tried different things like switching between Vulkan and ROCm yet.

But anyhow, that 17 tokens per second was on almost empty context. By the time I got to 30k tokens context or so, it was down in the 5-10 tokens per second, and even occasionally all the way down to 2 tokens per second.

Oh, and it looks like I'm filling up the KV cache sometimes, which is causing it to have to drop the cache and start over fresh. Yikes, that is why it's getting so slow.

Qwen3 Coder Next is much faster. MiniMax's thinking/planning seems stronger, but Qwen3 Coder Next is pretty good at just cranking through a bunch of tool calls and poking around through code and docs and just doing stuff. Also MiniMax seems to have gotten confused by a few things browsing around the project that I'm in that Qwen3 Coder Next picked up on, so it's not like it's universally stronger.
by fp64enjoyer | 2026-02-19 04:33:57+00:00
This is so interesting, especially given that it is in theory possible to emulate FP64 using FP32 operations.

I do think though that Nvidia generally didn't see much need for more FP64 in consumer GPUs since they wrote in the Ampere (RTX3090) white paper: "The small number of FP64 hardware units are included to ensure any programs with FP64 code operate correctly, including FP64 Tensor Core code."

I'll try adding an additional graph where I plot the APP values for all consumer GPUs up to 2023 (when the export control regime changed) to see if the argument of Adjusted Peak Performance for FP64 has merit.

Do you happen to know though if GPUs count as vector processors or not under these regulations since the weighing factor changes depending on the definition?

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/10/24/2018-22...
What I found so far is that under Note 7 it says: "A ‘vector processor’ is defined as a processor with built-in instructions that perform multiple calculations on floating-point vectors (one-dimensional arrays of 64-bit or larger numbers) simultaneously, having at least 2 vector functional units and at least 8 vector registers of at least 64 elements each."

Nvidia GPUs have only 32 threads per warp, so I suppose they don't count as a vector processor (which seems a bit weird but who knows)?
by triceratops | 2026-02-19 04:35:30+00:00
> Nuclear theoretically should be much, much cheaper than it is if it were not for the regulatory costs thrust upon it

Solar and wind theoretically would also be much, much cheaper if not for the regulatory costs. [1]

Everything is regulated and all regulations have costs. I'm not morally opposed to nuclear energy. Is there a comprehensive study on which specific safety regulations are unnecessary and the LCOE if they were removed?

1. https://www.volts.wtf/p/how-to-make-rooftop-solar-power-as
by xethos | 2026-02-19 04:36:08+00:00
You might be using old clients that are recommended against, as (AIUI) Jitsi stopped being the default with Matrix 2.0 (released ~late 2024 [0]).

Is it totally fair to blame users? Not entirely, as some features are still being pushed into ElementX. But it's a known problem, with a known solution (finish ElementX and/or wait for other clients to catch up), and a weakness of an open ecosystem.

Moxie wasn't wrong when he said that open ecosystems have to move slower, but I believe it's worth it in the long-run.

[0] https://matrix.org/blog/2024/10/29/matrix-2.0-is-here/#3-nat...
by kelseyfrog | 2026-02-19 04:36:08+00:00
The Dewey section and Elias omega encoding was fun, but it reminded me of Project Xanadu's tumblers[1] - a variable length dotted notion where each segment is unbounded.

Tumblers are modeled using transfinite numbers which makes me wonder: what are the similarities and differences between transfinite numbers and Elias omega encoding? I'm not well versed in either, so I expect it's either a question from ignorance or I may have a lot to learn. :)

1. https://www.artandpopularculture.com/Tumbler_%28Project_Xana...
by ggm | 2026-02-19 04:36:12+00:00
Since not everyone is experiencing this, I'd like to understand: Is there some mechanistic model of using reddit to boost income by some form of outside-reddit outcome? is this actually a business model?

Because I cannot understand how "pay to post" works unless you are somehow bypassing the "promoted" tag which shows inline adverts, and able to achieve advertising class outcomes by being in-flow inside a subreddit.

Help me understand. What did I miss?

I can't see simple read-to-post ratio working as a filter to identify high posting users who are securing a benefit by using reddit for free. Nor, semantic analysis. It has to be something else.

Even wierder, since reddit is "if you host it they will come" the idea of asking content producers doing it for free to pay for the privilege of posting content.. I mean is that it?

I post random shit on reddit. When will I be asked to pay?

(I have nothing riding on this. I can post random shit here just fine, to meet my "post random shit" urge)
by da_chicken | 2026-02-19 04:36:30+00:00
Nah, it's much easier than that.

The total amount of computer data across all of humanity is less that 1 yottabyte. We're expected to reach 1 yottabyte within the next decade, and will probably do so before 2030. That's all data, everywhere, including nation-states.

The birthday paradox says that you'll reach a 50% chance of at least one collision (as a conservative first order approximation) at the square root of the domain size. sqrt(2^256) is 2^128.

Now, a 256 bit identifier takes up 32 bytes of storage. 2^128 * 32 bytes = 10^16 yottabytes. That's 10 quadrillion yottabytes just to store the keys. And it's even odds whether you'll have a collision or not.

And if the 50% number scares them, well, you'll have a 1% chance of a collision at around... 2^128 * 0.1. Yeah, so you don't reach a 1% over the whole life of the system until you get to a quadrillion yottabytes.

Because you're never getting anywhere near the square root of the size, the chances of any collision occurring are flatly astronomical.
by imachine1980_ | 2026-02-19 04:37:41+00:00
From what I understand, they make money per-token billing. Not enough for how much it costs to train, not accounting for marketing, subscription services, and research for new models, but if they are used, they lose less money.

Finance 101 tldr explanation:
The contribution margin (= price per token -variable cost per token ) this is positive

Profit (= contribution margin x cuantity- fix cost)
by JoshTriplett | 2026-02-19 04:37:46+00:00
Adaptation in energy expenditure includes both metabolic adaptation as well as "NEAT" ("non-exercise activity thermogenesis"); the latter includes subconscious changes in posture, fidgeting, and various other things that can increase/decrease the body's energy expenditure by a massive degree, in an effort to (as far as people can tell) maintain a "set point" in the body that is difficult to change. This set point resists both weight gain and weight loss, both attempting to resist the change in the first place and attempting to undo it if successful.

I'm not suggesting that it's impossible to lose weight through sufficiently large caloric restriction. I'm observing that it is not anywhere close to as simple as "CICO", because CO is heavily a function of CI, rather than the popular incorrect perception of CO being things like "exercise".
by tanin | 2026-02-19 04:37:50+00:00
I've built a similar framework called Java Electron (https://github.com/tanin47/java-electron).

Java as the backend, and JS as the frontend.

It actually uses WebView, not Chromium.

The most important feature is: Java Electron can be published on Apple App Store and Microsoft Store. This requires proper code-signing and etc.

Backdoor, a modern database tool, is a showcase for it: https://github.com/tanin47/backdoor
by airstrike | 2026-02-19 04:38:00+00:00
No, it's a confession they have no moat other than trying to hold onto the best model for a given use case.

I find that competitive edge unlikely to last meaningfully in the long term, but this is still a contrarian view.

More recently, people have started to wise up to the view that the value is in the application layer

https://www.iconiqcapital.com/growth/reports/2026-state-of-a...
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-02-19 04:38:57+00:00
The GFW is real and many people don’t bother trying to jump it anymore. Mostly people in China don’t really care what the rest of the world is thinking, they got 1.4 billion in their own world, it’s big enough. The USA has only 342 million people in comparison, and we have a whole country to the north of us that barely talks with a different accent. Heck, half of our movie stars are Canadian or Australian (it feels like it anyways).
by Gigachad | 2026-02-19 04:39:03+00:00
They probably are but I don’t think that’s what this confirms. Most consumer flat rate priced services restrict usage outside of the first party apps, because 3rd party and scripted users can generate orders of magnitude more usage than a single user using the app can.

So it makes sense to offer simple flat pricing for first party apps, and usage priced apis for other usage. It’s like the difference between Google Drive and S3.