MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lambda | 2026-02-19 01:06:07+00:00
Sorry, I shouldn't have been that harsh about it; I apologize. Doesn't look like I can delet the comment, though.

Anyhow, I'm just a bit bitter about the onslaught of obviously vibe coded projects that very little effort has been put into. And OP did ask for feedback. But I shouldn't have been so mean about it. I know it can be fun to be able to whip up something quicker than you could before, but I really wish people would spend a tiny bit more effort on it before asking for feedback.
by reenorap | 2026-02-19 01:06:30+00:00
Right but presumably the OP had an existing bank account. You can't wire money into thin air. Assuming OP is a regular person with a regular bank account, then further KYC isn't necessary. KYC for every international wire transfer is in fact not true at all, only for the edge case where a person wants to receive money and he has no existing account to transfer it in.
by random3 | 2026-02-19 01:06:35+00:00
part of the network effects is building the graph. If you reuse the social graph that's already in your FB account you're merely replacing the messaging layer. This lays over on the presumed assumption that there's a problem to begin with

the other problem with the network effects is a business problem. There's is no business problem here though. If you maximize compatibility without caring to own anything several problems disappear.
by autoexec | 2026-02-19 01:07:28+00:00
I haven't seen those kinds of numbers, but I agree they'd be good to have.
I know that firefox makes a massive amount of money from Google (last I heard they made something like 400 million a year) and firefox was bringing in 90% of Mozilla's total income which means that the money firefox beings in isn't just going into firefox, but is holding up everything mozilla does. Even if a donation model was sufficient to support the browser, mozilla may not be happy about losing almost everything else they have going.

Looking around I find https://stateof.mozilla.org/ledger and https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202... which might help answer some of those questions.

As for competing with chrome, I don't think they need to. Most people's only computer these days is an android phone and chrome is always going to be a first class citizen there. We saw the same thing with IE when windows was the operating system most people used.

It's perfectly fine for Chrome to be the default browser for the common people leaving firefox to be the preferred choice of the computer savvy. Firefox could slowly gain an audience as people start to become more aware of how chrome violates their privacy or as they seek relief from the worsening cesspool of ads chrome is encouraging the internet to become, but firefox never has to be number 1 or anywhere close to that in order to be successful and valued.
by stockresearcher | 2026-02-19 01:07:34+00:00
That doesn’t really make sense though. I thought that they hired Lattner to work on LLVM/clang so they could have a non-gpl compiler and to make whatever extensions they wanted to C/Obj-C. Remember when they added (essentially) closures to C to serve their internal purposes?

So they already got what they wanted without inventing a new language. There must be some other reason.
by jcgrillo | 2026-02-19 01:07:48+00:00
This one is a fancy G4 instead of the normal G3. I still have the husk of my Ti PowerBook G4 which is the "macbook pro" analog of the era. It was a fantastic machine, I got about 12 solid years of use from it before it finally died. Weirdly, the failure mode that ultimately killed it was something causing some kind of memory (and thereby disk) corruption that increased in severity over a period of about a year eventually rendering it to the junk heap. I went through a couple disks and RAM modules before deciding whatever was going on was beyond my abilities.

I credit various Linux and *BSD PPC ports for making at least a third of that lifetime possible.

I'm hopeful that the more recent M{1,2,3,...} machines might be similarly long-lived.
by tzs | 2026-02-19 01:07:49+00:00
China is massively building solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear, and also has by far the largest network of UHV transmission lines (and are building many more) so that they can get electricity from the regions with the most solar and wind to the more northern heavy industrial areas.

They are also the leader in producing and exporting solar and wind equipment, and in driving the prices down, to make it easier for other countries to address climate change.

They are also the biggest producer of EVs in the world, and the biggest exporter of EVs.

They are doing better at doing something about climate change than any other country, both due to what they are currently doing for themselves and for the countries they export to and in their ability to make long term plans and reasonably stick to them.
by claytongulick | 2026-02-19 01:08:23+00:00
There's definitely a "both sides" argument here, but honestly that's boring and doesn't really move a conversation forward.

The problem isn't simple, and there don't seem to be obvious answers - civilizations have been struggling with it since recorded history.

I assume you're not trying to make the point that exceeding authority is a characteristic limited to the current administration are you?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

We've been asking this since at least 1st century Rome.

I think it's more important to evaluate systems, institutions and their effectiveness than specific politicians.
by rvz | 2026-02-19 01:08:41+00:00
I think we have seen enough since the best example of a Rust browser that is Servo, has taken them 14 years to reach v0.0.1.

So the approach of having a new language that requires a full rewrite (even with an LLM) is still a bad approach.

Fil-C likely can do the job without a massive rewrite and achieving safety for C and C++.

Job done.
by somat | 2026-02-19 01:08:43+00:00
I am a little sad that bare zero is not represented. This is my first exposure to Cistercian numbers but it looks like a unadorned staff would fit for the bare zero.

The whole thing is a lot of fun, feels like a Myst puzzle. Or more accuratly, I don't think Myst had a number puzzle but Riven did and I recently picked up Obduction and it had one, So probably fairer to say a Cyan type puzzle as they appear to love creating wierd numeric representations.
by crazygringo | 2026-02-19 01:09:58+00:00
I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing, maybe my use of "lower bar" was ambiguous, and I realize now it has a dual meaning.

What I'm saying is, you have to review code to get it out the door with a certain degree of quality. That's your core product. That's the minimum standard you have to pass, the lowest bar.

In contrast, reviewing documentation is usually less core. You do that after the code gets reviewed. If there's time. If it doesn't get done, that's not necessarily saying anything about code quality.

Even if it's easier to review documentation, that doesn't mean it's getting prioritized. So it's not a lower bar in the sense that lower bars get climbed first.
by brianleb | 2026-02-19 01:10:01+00:00
Similar to a sibling comment,

>>the advent of chemical non-sugar sweeteners, which in recent decades are turning out to be just as harmful as sugar, only differently.

requires citations. People lump sugar substitutes together as one class of drugs, but they very much are not. Some are sugar alcohols, some are glycosides, others are different molecules. Different molecules have different mechanisms of action and paths of metabolism.

Much like one might take a "blood pressure" medication, it is a large umbrella consisting of chemically distinct ACE-inhibitors, ARBs, thiazide diuretics, loop diuretics, calcium channel blockers (dihydropyridine and non-dihydropyridine distinctly), and more. These drugs generally do have class effects, but the class effects from an ACE inhibitor (bradykinin cough, angioedema, etc) are quite different from diuretics (hyponatremia, frequent urination, etc). One person's 'blood pressure medicine' is not the same as the next.

I agree that the prevalence of sugar substitutes in the western diet demands scrutiny, and I am concerned about their effects, however any current research lumping them all together without strict attention to pharmacological mechanisms supported by translational research is worse than useless - it is misleading.

In the sense of what we 'know' about modern medicine, we 'know' almost nothing about sugar substitutes. The body of evidence is vanishingly thin. I want more research into this topic, but right now, it's just not there.
by echelon | 2026-02-19 01:10:03+00:00
> At this point, Ladybird will likely reach 1.0 faster than Servo could, and the latter is not even remotely close to being usable even in 14 years of waiting.

When Servo is done, it's going to be a beast.

It's getting hundreds of commits per week:

https://github.com/servo/servo/graphs/commit-activity
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-19 01:10:23+00:00
When this was first discussed, the thread was…skeptical to say the least, but it has been proven to be a success.

We continue to reach combustion->EV tipping points country by country.

It begins: Ethiopia set to become first country to ban internal combustion cars - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39243196 - February 2024 (69 comments)

https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales
by _alaya | 2026-02-19 01:11:15+00:00
> The more radical possibility is that source code as we know it could become a transient
artifact, generated on demand and never stored. The retreat was divided on this. Some
saw source code disappearing within a decade. Others argued that deterministic
validation requires a stable artifact to test against, and that artifact is effectively source
code regardless of what we call it.

Here’s a free idea I’ve had that I have no idea how to implement. I hope somebody much smarter than me will come along, think it’s a great idea, and steal it. I highly encourage you to do so, and I wish you well.

The idea is to have some kind of substrate—like a superpowered AST—that is the true code: the thing that actually gets compiled and run. Humans never look at this directly. Instead, we look at a representation of this code, and we can toggle between different representations of it.

I’m borrowing ideas from topology in mathematics here: if I look at a shape one way, I should be able to transform it into a different shape, but isomorphically, everything is still the same. That would let me look at the same thing in different ways, understand it from different angles, critique it more easily, and maintain it more easily.

Gemini tell me that this idea has already been tried in the past? Projectional Editing? Intentional Programming?
by stephc_int13 | 2026-02-19 01:11:19+00:00
I meant no Swift experts in the Ladybird team. Their expertise is C++, you may think the transition is easy, and it can be pretty painless at first, but true language expertise means knowing how to work around its flaws, and adapting your patterns to its strenghts. Cool for a hobby, but switching language in the middle of an herculean work is suicide.
by flyinghamster | 2026-02-19 01:11:35+00:00
My own experience with men's jeans in recent times has been that the waist size is accurate, but the fit type is critical. I won't fit into any type of "slim fit" and "regular fit" needs to be one waist size up. "Relaxed fit" or its newer cousin "athletic fit" each work for me perfectly. That has been the case for two brands of jeans, at least.
by pbohun | 2026-02-19 01:13:31+00:00
People are correct I didn't explain my position.

LLVM: Pretty much everyone who has created a programming language with it has complained about its design. gingerbill, Jon Blow, and Andrew Kelley have all complained about it. LLVM is a good idea, but it that idea was executed better by Ken Thompson with his C compiler for Plan 9, and then again with his Go compiler design. Ken decided to create his own "architecture agnostic" assembly, which is very similar to the IR idea with LLVM.

Swift: I was very excited with the first release of Swift. But it ultimately did not have a very focused vision outlined for it. Because of this, it has morphed into a mess. It tries to be everything for everyone, like C++, and winds up being mediocre, and slow to compile to top it off.

Mojo isn't doesn't exist for the public yet. I hope it turns out to be awesome, but I'm just not going to get my hopes up this time.
by dakolli | 2026-02-19 01:15:36+00:00
Token prices have literally gone up, where are you getting this information from.... Noone would have pay for a bespoke linux made by an stochastic llm when security is a concern, even if it was $10.00 which it will never be.

The hardware required to run these things has all ballooned in price, there are no efficiencies coming. To run Kimi2.5 4bit you're sitll spending 100k in hardware, and its not nearly as reliable as Claude. Also Agentic Tooling have made their token consumption go up to increase revenue, and models are becoming more verbose in their output (wonder why). You're smoking something.
by rob_c | 2026-02-19 01:16:20+00:00
I... There are parts of the world where certain developers don't understand the way the west tends to work with regard to copyright, or not blindly copying anything that is out there.

This however is a very, VERY poor situation when you end up placing your employer at risk because you think copyright doesn't matter and everything on the internet is fair game.

This is probably the most polite way I would describe this to most, UG. For the rest, jus stop acting like cheating through a situation to get a step up is the norm, it's just dirty behaviour.
by giobox | 2026-02-19 01:16:23+00:00
There's some wires getting crossed here. Sure, minor maintenance releases were delivered this way, but up until 10.7 the only way to upgrade to a new 10.x release (major) was the DVD purchased from Apple*. I have all my purchased boxed OS X releases from 10.0 through 10.6 still sitting on the shelf.

Major OS upgrades weren't free until the release of 10.9. 10.7 was first version you could buy as a download through the App Store.

* 10.1 was an odd release, in that re-sellers got given a limited amount of free upgrade DVDs to hand out, but did eventually retail for 20 bucks IIRC. Regardless, DVD was still the only option.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-02-19 01:17:25+00:00
I've never written whole applications in ObjC but have had to dabble with it as part of Ardour (ardour.org) implementation details for macOS.

I think it's a great language! As long as you can tolerate dynamic dispatch, you really do get the best of C/C++ combined with its run-time manipulable object type system. I have no reason to use it for more code than I have to, but I never grimace if I know I'm going to have to deal with it. Method swizzling is such a neat trick!
by freehorse | 2026-02-19 01:17:28+00:00
And why does it matter in the context of randomly assigning participants in an experiment into groups? It is not plausible that any theoretical "gaps" in the pseudorandomness are related to the effect you are trying to measure, and unlikely that there is a "pattern" created in how the participants get assigned. You just do one assignment. You do not need to pick a true random configuration, just one random enough.

I assume that as long as p-values are concerned, the issue raised could very well be measured with simulations and permutations. I really doubt though that the distribution of p-values from pseudorandom assignments with gaps would not converge very fast to the "real" distribution you would get from all permuations due to some version of a law of large numbers. A lot of resampling/permutation techniques work by permuting a negligible fraction of all possible permutations, and the distribution of the statistics extracted converges pretty fast. As long as the way the gaps are formed are independent of the effects measured, it sounds implausible that the p-values one gets are problematic because of them.
by zamadatix | 2026-02-19 01:18:04+00:00
I think there has just been a bit of whiplash with "Show HN" here lately, it was recently discussed here https://www.arthurcnops.blog/death-of-show-hn/ with much good discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045804. That's no excuse for being overly harsh, but it's not really quite "anything is great to share!" either.

Show HNs never pleased everyone, and it'd be silly to try, but until recently there was a bit of a "it's not perfect... but the person has spent more time working on this than I have even spent thinking on the problem" kind of expectation whereas now many of them feel like the comments section ends up doing more thought about the submission than was put into refining it.

It'll be really interesting to see where this settles. In the meantime, erring on the side of kindness tends to work best!
by jacquesm | 2026-02-19 01:18:18+00:00
You can't just transfer money to a person that has no account. That's not an 'edge case' that just isn't how it works unless you want to use WU or something similar and even they have strict KYC requirements for larger sums.

If you want to move large amounts of money outside of the regular financial networks and oversight it is possible but (1) it will cost you (2) you will be breaking the law and (3) you may cause others to be breaking the law. Bitcoin would be one way to do it but even that is not nearly as anonymous as most of its users believe.

Banking is a regulated industry for a reason. There was a period (roughly until 2001, guess why) when banks were willing and able to bend the rules depending on who the customer was and how much money was involved. Those banks that continued to do this post 2001 have - if they're located in the West at least - had their ears bent in ways that they did not like one bit and even the Swiss now play ball.

Cash is becoming harder to use and harder to get. Money will most likely go digital in the West soon, the various governments don't like the unauditable and untaxable money streams that cash provides.
by randycupertino | 2026-02-19 01:18:26+00:00
archive link: https://archive.ph/FlniE

Moderna already canceled their manufacturing plant in US because of the current political climate. Even though they're now reviewing it, other vaccine researchers will be less likely to pursue and submit applications. Overall vaccine research is in a downturn due to this administration.

Vinay Prasad is way over his skis. One of the FDA statements to Moderna from the initial rejection as "they need to come back with some humility" which was reminscent of JD Vance previous whining when Zelensky didn't say please. These are supposed to be professionals and representatives, instead they are egomaniacs who just want their ring kissed!

Countless damage has already been done much damage to investment in US science and innovation, we are losing ground to China despite it being a hotbed of research fraud.
by jcgrillo | 2026-02-19 01:18:34+00:00
For me it's the difference between "this is a computer" vs "this is a computer trying to be a cell phone". I think that's what everything from the last 15yr is trying to be--a phone. And not everything is a phone. On a computer we have a keyboard and a mouse, which are much, much more precise tools than vague gestures on a touchscreen.

EDIT: I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say this is basically everything that's wrong with the computer(-adjacent) industry. We can appreciate the problem statement by asking "why would anyone want to make a computer be a phone?" The answer is a terminal case of a particularly defensive form of groupthink. It goes something like this:

(1) "everyone is talking about the iPhone"
(2) "i need to feel relevant, ergo i must make phone noises too"

then they rub these two neurons together, and since it's the only two they got it isn't hard for them, and this process repeats a few generations and like a nuclear chain reaction soon enough the entire industry is trying to make everything be a fucking phone.

It shouldn't be like that.
by Desafinado | 2026-02-19 01:18:50+00:00
It goes away over time and with experience. As you become more situated in your current company your confidence will grow and you'll become more productive.

'Are you contributing enough' is a less important question than 'are you passionate about the field and do you like what you're doing'. If you're just in it for the money and uninterested in learning that'll make it much harder to reach a higher level of productivity.
by nobody9999 | 2026-02-19 01:19:04+00:00
>The point is that the moral hazard created by sec 230 is precisely what has allowed the centralized social media industry to grow to the point it has.

That's exactly the opposite of what Section 230 has done.

Section 230 doesn't stop anyone from suing folks who defame or otherwise break the law. Rather, it specifies that those who say such things are the proper target, not the platforms that host such third-party speech.

And that's the important point. Section 230 covers third-party speech. Because litigation is expensive. As such, it mostly protects the little guy who doesn't have the resources to fight tens, hundreds or thousands of lawsuits because some folks don't like the restaurant/movie reviews or opinions about the quality of book plots or political speech or the Epstein Files or a myriad of other things that folks don't like and wish people would shut up about.

Nothing stops an aggrieved part from suing an individual for the things that individual says. But Section 230 says you can't sue the platform (say the website, Matrix or XMPP server you personally host) for the speech of a third-party who uses that platform.

In the absence of Section 230, huge, deep-pocketed companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, et. al can pay for legions of lawyers to fight such lawsuits.

Do you have such deep pockets? Not all Internet content exists on those huge, deep-pocketed platforms. Many useful and interesting sites hosted by individuals or small businesses exist, but would be put out of business in a week if Section 230 didn't exist.

Getting rid of Section 230 would only cement the huge platforms' dominance and make them more unaccountable and powerful. Is that your goal? Not saying it is, but it's important to think through the impact of Section 230 beyond the (false and misleading) pronouncements of those who want to control you, your speech and the means of disseminating that speech.
by Barrin92 | 2026-02-19 01:19:26+00:00
Total household wealth in the US is about ~170 trillion dollars. Those 12 own about 1% of all US wealth. Not shabby for a dozen people but the main issue of American society isn't the handful of people who hit the news but mostly the top 19% below them. Richard Reeves wrote a good book on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_Hoarders

It's the upper middle class that fills educational institutions, prevents the construction of new property, hogs most of the old property and in general has impacted the upward mobility of the lower classes. Musk has a lot of issues, but he's not really getting in the way of people getting richer themselves.
by tzs | 2026-02-19 01:19:30+00:00
> Having said that, what should the penalty for overstaying a visa by ~7 years[1] be? Nothing? I'd love to see the Democrats propose an alternative approach here, but all I seem to hear is thought terminating cliches like "no one is illegal"

How about something like the plan from the "Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013" developed by 4 Democrat and 4 Republican senators (the Republicans were Jeff Flake, Lindsey Graham, John MacCain, and Marco Rubio), which passed the Senate 68-32?

It provided a pathway to citizenship for people who had been here long enough with no problems, after they paid some fines.