MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by argee | 2026-02-14 17:49:15+00:00
Could you elaborate on this? I can’t tell whether you mean to say that open source projects run into user-initiated time sinks that detract from their productivity (which is arguably the case for any public facing project), or whether private repositories bypass this type of scrutiny by default which affords them an advantage, or whether this is about the Stoat/Revolt devs specifically and how they choose to spend their time.
by srik | 2026-02-14 17:49:56+00:00
> For over 30 years, Vim has been "Charityware," supporting children in Kibaale, Uganda. Following the passing of Bram Moolenaar, the ICCF Holland foundation was dissolved […] and its remaining funds were transferred to ensure continued support for the Kibaale project. […] Vim remains Charityware. We encourage users to continue supporting the needy children in Uganda through this new transition.

I settled on vim for its technical merits but Bram using his goodwill to fund a charity like this for so long always made me feel good about my choice.
by sho_hn | 2026-02-14 17:50:06+00:00
Buy some serial servo motors and program them.

Learn about how to battery-power projects, starting with a microcontroller board and your servo.

Learn power distribution circuitry - wire gauges for given loads, etc.

Learn some useful control/animation bits, e.g. play around with an IK library.

This is more or less what led to my own first robots (a simple walker, then a more ambitious hexapod, etc.)
by jitl | 2026-02-14 17:50:18+00:00
i’ve written probably north of a million lines of production js, maybe around 100,000 lines of production ruby, and about 300 lines of production lua. lua is a fun language and i think a much better fit than JS for technical reasons (who has a js engine that is both fast and embeds well? nobody), but i am certainly more productive in those other languages where i have more experience.

lua array index starting at 1 gets me at least once whenever i sit down to write a library for my nvim or wezterm.
by fudged71 | 2026-02-14 17:50:24+00:00
Thank you so much for this book! I'm finding the translation is very high quality.

I am a complete novice in training LLMs, and have been trying to train a novel architecture for Python code generation, using Apple Silicon.

I've been a bit frustrated to be honest that the data tools don't seem to have any focus on code, their modalities are generic text and images. And for synthetic data generation I would love to use EBNF-constrained outputs but SGlang is not available on MacOS. So I feel a bit stuck, downloading a large corpus of Python code, running into APFS issues, sharding, custom classifying, custom cleaning, custom mixing, etc. Maybe I've missed a tool but I'm surprised there aren't pre-tagged, pre-categorized, pre-filtered datasets for code where I can just tune the curriculum/filters to input into training.
by jasonwatkinspdx | 2026-02-14 17:50:27+00:00
I met him once when we were both in Seattle for a conference, and a group of us went out to eat. He definitely gave off an odd vibe, but at the time I attributed it to the typical not very socially adjusted nerd stuff.

But with the benefit of hindsight his conviction is not really that surprising now. Way back in the day he used to argue about age of consent laws on the forums a lot.

I never met her in person but I only had positive online interactions with his then wife. What a horrible thing for her.
by mxschumacher | 2026-02-14 17:51:05+00:00
if the unit economics are broken (strong competition from other proprietary model providers + open weight models; LLM token race to the bottom) it's not clear how high revenue growth translates to high profits. These companies are valued like monopolists, but the competitive dynamics make them more akin to tomato sauce makers. I understand that the technology is pretty amazing and can lead to significant productivity gains, but from a business perspective, the question is how much of that value Antrophic and others can capture over time.
by libertine | 2026-02-14 17:51:35+00:00
I don't think that was the framing, it was more of a political alternative - even with all it's flaws it was a more viable than the current collapsing regime.

Now look at what Russians are facing, the end of the federation at the hands of a corrupt elite with an accelerated demographic collapse and economic ruin... And they can't even back out of the war because it will crumble the rest.

The biggest tragedy is dragging Ukrainians into this...
by idiotsecant | 2026-02-14 17:51:39+00:00
Modern coal mining isn't that bad of a gig, especially surface mining (which a lot of coal is). I would certainly rather make a decent middle class wage hauling coal and support my family than work in an 'Air conditioned mcdonalds' and barely subsist in poverty.

You can make all the technical and environmental point you want. They are valid and they are largely irrelevant, at least for the purpose of achieving your stated outcome.

People want to be able to live a life with some amount of dignity and we've been so diligently eroding their ability to do so for the last 50 years that it's becoming an existential issue.

Jobs matter. If you want social progress, environmental progress, any kind of progress people need to be able to build a life where their children are better off than they were. Full stop.
by comfysocks | 2026-02-14 17:52:23+00:00
Lex’s position at MIT would make sense for a grad student or perhaps someone early in their career as an academic. But Lex is neither a student nor faculty member at MIT. So what’s he doing? This type of thing is usually unpaid or low paying for non-faculty.

Lex got his PhD at Drexel over a decade ago. If he had pursued an academic career, he would most likely be an associate professor by now. Working as a researcher at a lab at a university that you aren’t a faculty member of is basically “failure to launch” at this stage.

But Lex is a successful podcaster. His dad is a successful academic and scientist (at Drexel.) Lex is not that, but he plays one on the internet.
by rep_lodsb | 2026-02-14 17:52:29+00:00
The low 8 bits of SI, DI, BP and SP weren't accessible before, but now they are in 64-bit mode.

The earliest ancestor of x86 was the CPU of the Datapoint 2200 terminal, implemented originally as a board of TTL logic chips and then by Intel in a single chip (the 8008). On that architecture, there was only a single addressing mode for memory: it used two 8-bit registers "H" and "L" to provide the high and low byte of the address to be accessed.

Next came the 8080, which provided some more convenient memory access instructions, but the HL register pair was still important for all the old instructions that took up most of the opcode space. And the 8086 was designed to be somewhat compatible with the 8080, allowing automatic translation of 8080 assembly code.

16-bit x86 didn't yet allow all GPRs to be used for addressing, only BX or BP as "base", and SI/DI as "index" (no scaling either). BP, SI and DI were 16-bit registers with no equivalent on the 8080, but BX took the place of the HL register pair, that's why it can be accessed as high and low byte.

Also the low 8 bits of the x86 flag register (Sign,Zero,always 0,AuxCarry,always 0,Parity,always 1,Carry) are exactly identical to those of the 8080 - that's why those reserved bits are there.
by ronsor | 2026-02-14 17:52:56+00:00
I don't actually care what the dev does. That's their prerogative, and it doesn't affect whether or not I'll use the software (I will if it's useful). I think that's the difference between here and a "mob", assuming other commenters think similarly.

I do think it's harmful to cave in, but that doesn't make me think less of the maintainer's character. On the other hand, some of the commenters in the issue might decry them as evil if they made the "wrong" decision.

It's fine to have opinions on the actions of others, but it's not fine to burn them at the stake.
by autoexec | 2026-02-14 17:53:25+00:00
This guy bought an internet connected sleep mask so it's not surprising that it was collecting all kinds of data, or that it was doing it insecurely (everyone should expect IoT anything to be a security nightmare) so to me the surprising thing about this is that the company actually bothered to worry about saving bandwidth/power and went through the trouble of using MQTT. Probably not the best choice, and they didn't bother to do it securely, but I'm genuinely impressed that they even tried to be efficient while sucking up people's personal data.
by intended | 2026-02-14 17:53:45+00:00
> - Good employees are hard to find. You don’t let good people go just because you can. Retraining a good employee from a redundant role into a needed role is often cheaper than trying to hire a new person.

Your best employees at a given price though.

Part of firm behavior is to let go of their most expensive workers when they decide to tighten belts.

Unless your employee is unable to negotiate, lacking the information and leverage to be paid the market rate for their ability. Your best employees will be your more expensive, senior employees.

Everything is at a certain price. Firing your best employee when you can get the job done with cheaper, or you can make do with cheaper, is also a common and rational move.

While I agree it’s unlikely that there won’t be a labour doomsday scenario, I think ann under employment scenario is highly likely. Offshoring ended up decimating many cities and local economies, as factory foremen found new roles as burger flipper.

Nor do people retrain into new domains and roles easily. The more senior you are, the harder it is to recover into a commensurately well paying role.

AI promises to reduce the demand for the people in the prime age to earn money, in the few high paying roles that remain.

Not the apocalypse as people fear, but not that great either.
by rzerowan | 2026-02-14 17:54:19+00:00
Not much is what im expecting - they will bend the knee as always , most people forget that very similar actions were being done under Biden - their targets were different : Covid and some anti grnocide protests.

The tools once there will be expanded and continu ding what the gov of the day wants - same reason ICE , Pathriot act ,FISA etc saw their largest expansions after Obama came into power.

Targets will change but the tools will remain , aftter some sanitization youll even have proICE dems boosting.
Secure Port Forwarding Without Exposing Internal Services
by brintha | 2026-02-14 17:54:21+00:00
Port forwarding is often the fastest way to access an internal service — a database, admin panel, or metrics endpoint.

But in many setups, that means opening a public port and relying on firewall rules or IP restrictions for safety. Those rules tend to accumulate over time.

I’ve been looking at how modern “brokered” port forwarding models work. Instead of exposing a service publicly, they rely on outbound-only connections and create identity-scoped tunnels that exist only for the duration of a session.

No persistent inbound ports. No long-lived firewall exceptions.

I wrote a breakdown here, focusing on mechanics rather than product pitch:

https://www.lynxtrac.com/secure-port-forwarding-without-exposing-services

Curious how others here handle temporary service access in cloud environments.
by antisthenes | 2026-02-14 17:54:33+00:00
> How can the average 7zip user know which one it is?

I dunno, if you type "download 7zip" into Google, the top result is the official website.

Also, 7zip.com is nowhere on the first page, and the most common browsers show you explicitly it's a phishing website.

This is actually a pretty good case of the regular user being pretty safe from downloading malware.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2026-02-14 17:55:17+00:00
It's because lead has one of the lowest modulus of elasticity of the elements but also has a very high density. So at room temperature it doesn't have any resonant frequencies and has so much mass that it can effectively damp frequencies traveling through it. And you can see this with the lead bell experiment.

The only metals with a lower E are far more expensive or are extremely difficult to work with because they like to catch fire or explode when exposed to water or oxygen or react with any other element they touch. Or they are radioactive.

The "non problematic" elements better than lead are indium, thallium, and selenium. Selenium has toxicity issues (albeit less than lead) and indium and thallium both have low melting points and become increasingly soft/lose their form even at low industrial temperatures. And of course all three are far far more rare than lead and often are produced as byproducts of mining for lead and occasionally other metals.

And there are non-metal options that don't resonate near room temperature like many of the plastics and rubbers but they lack the density/mass to effectively damp vibrations from neighboring components.

-------

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFGlTGMlyqM

https://sciencedemonstrations.fas.harvard.edu/presentations/...
by adrian_b | 2026-02-14 17:55:46+00:00
The Seagate Expansion is made as an external drive by Seagate itself, so it was not put in some random enclosure.

If Seagate has chosen in 2025 to use some archaic bridge that does not pass the SMART commands, it is on them. That would be even more stupid than not implementing SMART in the HDD firmware.

As I have said, the previous external Seagate that I had bought in 2024 had SMART that worked fine over USB. I have a large number of external HDDs, most from WD. Some have been packaged by the HDD vendor as USB drives, others I have assembled myself into enclosures with SATA-to-USB bridges.

On all of them SMART works perfectly, except in this Seagate Expansion Desktop, where the drive replies that SMART is not supported.

Whenever I buy a HDD, I first run the long SMART self-test, to determine whether it can be used safely or I should return it immediately, even if the long self-test takes a couple of days on modern over 20 TB HDDs.

I started to use this procedure after I had some problems with a batch of WD drives, 2 decades ago, where all the drives had very frequent errors since the first few days of use. After running the SMART self-tests, which all failed, the seller could not deny an immediate replacement.
Show HN: Describe your Discord server in one sentence – AI builds it in 60s
by RobTheFrog | 2026-02-14 17:56:01+00:00
We kept seeing the same problem: someone wants a Discord server for their
community, game group, or project - and then spends hours setting up channels,
roles, permissions, bot configs. Most give up halfway and end up with a
half-broken server.

So we built an AI agent that does the entire thing. You type something like
"competitive gaming community with tournament brackets and rank progression"
and 60 seconds later you have a fully configured server with 30+ channels,
roles, permissions, welcome system, moderation, tickets - everything working.

It's not a template picker. The agent actually reasons about what your
community needs - a music production server gets different channels and
permissions than a study group or a startup team.

What surprised us: people don't just use it once. They keep coming back to
spin up servers for new projects, events, or clients. One user runs 5 servers
through it now.

The white-label tier lets you run it all under your own bot name and branding,
which turned out to be the feature nobody asked for but everyone wants once
they see it.

Free to try - no credit card needed.
by srcreigh | 2026-02-14 17:56:12+00:00
There's a relevant open issue[1] here about stack memory optimization. It would be nice to be able to use a [500]u8 in a block and another [500]u8 in another block, and have that only contribute 500 bytes to the stack frame, but Zig can't currently do this.

(The green threads coro stack stuff makes this more important.)

[1]: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/23475#issuecomment-279...
by nilamo | 2026-02-14 17:56:12+00:00
I wish I understood how that works. Retail investors are so small, compared with hedge funds and whatnot, that "average people" cannot move a stock price significantly. So, when Trump tweets about a company, how does the stock move? Who is actually doing all that selling to drive the price down?

And, since the price almost always recovers within a week... does it even matter?
by thesz | 2026-02-14 17:57:50+00:00
Arithmetic coding of a single bit preserves ordering of encoded bits, if CDF(1) > CDF(0). If byte's encoding process is going from higher bits to lower bits, arithmetic coding (even with dynamic model) will preserve ordering of individual bytes.

In the end, arithmetic coding preserves ordering of encoded strings. Thus, comparison operations can be performed on the compressed representation of strings (and big-endian representations of integers and even floating point values), without the need to decompress data until that decompressed strings are needed.

Another view: strings are compared by memcmp as if they are mantissas with the base 256. "hi!" is 'h'(1/256)+'i'(1/256)^2+'!'(1/256)^3+0(1/256)^4 and then there are zeroes to the infinity. Arithmetic encoding represents encoded strings as mantissas where base is 2. Range coding can utilize other bases such as 256.
by SilentM68 | 2026-02-14 17:57:55+00:00
Interesting project. Here's a thought which I've always had in the back of my mind, ever since I saw something similar in an episode of Buck Rogers (70s-80s)! Many people struggle with falling asleep due to persistent beta waves; natural theta predominance is needed but often delayed. Imagine an "INEXPENSIVE" smart sleep mask that facilitates sleep onset by inducing brain wave transitions from beta (wakeful, high-frequency) to alpha (8-13 Hz, relaxed) and then theta (4-8 Hz, stage 1 light sleep) via non-invasive stimulation. A solution could be a comfortable eye mask with integrated headphones (unintrusive) and EEG sensors.
It could use binaural beats or similar audio stimulation to "inject" alpha/theta frequencies externally, guiding the brain to a tipping point for abrupt sleep onset. Sensors would detect current waves; app-controlled audio ramps from alpha-inducing beats to theta, ensuring natural predominance. If it could be designed, it could accelerate sleep transition, improve quality, non-pharmacological.
by viking123 | 2026-02-14 17:58:11+00:00
Who cares about these journalists. My point is that Amodei is a complete ghoul and loves fear mongering normies and being racist towards Chinese while HIS company stole all the damn books in the world. I hope the Chinese steal all their data and keep doing public models. This guy can't even figure a solution for his balding head let alone making an AGI lmao. But let Anthropic keep tricking midwits along. Elon has 100x the backbone that these fraudsters have btw.

For God's sake these guys are selling the doubling of human life span to some desperate elderly investors. Really going for people's deepest fears there. Oh yes just invest in us so you can get double the life span and don't have to die!
by salawat | 2026-02-14 17:58:36+00:00
Ever watched Psycho-Pass? Great anime. Setting is a sort of an AI coordinated Panopticon in which the Psycho-Pass system equips it's enforcers with firearms capable of either paralyzing a "reformable" latent criminal, (namely someone with a psycho-pass measured to be >100, but <300, or eradicate the irredeemable (score >300). The series focuses around the dilemmas created by instilling in this system the sole monopoly on violence, and this magical firearm and Psycho-pass computing device. There is a poignant point made of the weapons design. In spite of the Psycho-Pass systems assumed infallibility, each weapon is equipped with a trigger, that must be pulled to fire it. The system itself is not given final say on whether to do so. It is left as a matter of the Enforcer's discretion.

Much the same dynamic can be inferred to be taking place with the U.S. legal system. The weapon and it's wielder is analogous to the judges; the Psycho-pass system to juries. The interesting consequence here with this analogy is that the wielders of these weapons for the Psycho-pass system are almost entirely latent criminals according to the judgement of the Psycho-Pass system itself.

Point being, the U.S. addresses things through common law with an adversarial criminal law system. The judge has a great deal of discretion to bring to bear on the cases they decide. There is as much, if not more controversy to be found when statutory punishment overrides any possibility of a judge applying discretion, leaving only executive clemency as a safety hatch.

Legal systems are not intended to be suicide pacts. Rather a collective effort of trying to seek the thing most resembling justice; a thing that is only measurable through the collective action of humanity, and which when responsibility for this measurement is delegated to fewer and fewer people, tends to morph away from what the entirety of us would probably converge upon being just. The arguments you're having with others highlights this very dynamic very strongly to me. Since it is difficult for a single party to manifest a full 360 perspective on the aspects of moral injury as endemic to the practice of justice, and the condition of injustice. Pragmatism, alas, is a bit of a bitch like that.
by philgyford | 2026-02-14 17:59:11+00:00
Thanks for the kind words. The source is user suggestions and my own searching and browsing.

I do sort of track outbound links, so that I can show which domains a blog links to most, which can sometimes give a sense of what the blog is about.

But, while I haven’t analysed the data, I suspect the links from one blog to another would be a very tiny percentage of the overall outbound links. It’s the kind of thing that might have been more interesting/useful in the olden days of blogging when more people linked to each other, and replied to each other, via blogs rather than social media.
by jitl | 2026-02-14 17:59:12+00:00
quickjs/mquickjs are good at embedding but nowhere close to luajit in terms of speed. (i have some experience with quickjs https://github.com/justjake/quickjs-emscripten)

as an aside i’m curious how quickjs/mquickjs compares to mruby in speed and size. something to ponder