MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by array_key_first | 2026-02-21 21:04:04+00:00
It is, just the existence of goto makes control flow significantly harder to understand. People complain about exceptions in C++ obfuscating control flow, but then they recreate exceptions using goto. The funny thing is that exceptions are just fancy goto, the assembly is almost the same.

The bigger picture of C as a language is not that it's simple, because it's not simple at all. It's inept. It doesn't give developers the tools to write simple code. So easy things become hard, and we sort of jank together solutions that kind of work but usually don't.

I like to compare it to building a shed with power tools versus only a screwdriver. Is a screwdriver simpler than a power saw and all that? Of course. Now think about building a shed. Is it simpler to do with a screwdriver? No. It's much, much more complex. You have to develop complex processes to make that work, and it's not intuitive at all.

C is a language that already makes use of implicit control flow A LOT. I don't see defer being a problem. The irony is that if C just supported these use cases out-of-the-box, it would be simpler and easier. As a concrete example, consider polymorphism in C versus C++. Both languages can do it, but one provides the tools and one doesn't. In C++ I can go to definition, I can concretely define what polymorphism is allowed and what isn't, and the type system gives me the tools to make it safe. In C, none of that is true, so when we do polymorphism with function pointers, it's much harder to understand what's actually going on, or what could be going on.
by mytailorisrich | 2026-02-21 21:04:14+00:00
My understandung is that the US Supreme Court is a "passive judicial body". It cannot take the initiative and must wait until a case is put before it like is usual for a court.

The new 15% tariffs are apparently according to the 1974 Trade Act which allows the President to increase tariffs up to 15% for up to 150 days.
Show HN: I scanned 50k radio streams and built an app for the ones that work
by meehow | 2026-02-21 21:04:56+00:00
I got tired of radio apps that make you hunt for working streams. Most directories are full of dead links, duplicates, and placeholder logos - so I built Receiver.

I scan ~50k streams from radio-browser.info, verify each one is actually reachable and streaming, deduplicate, fetch proper logos, and ship the result as a clean SQLite database with the app. What survives: ~30k stations, all working.

Built with Vala and GTK 4 - native GNOME app, no Electron. MPRIS integration, session persistence, 130 language translations. No sign-up, no ads, no tracking.

Available as Snap, .deb, and AppImage. Flathub submission in progress.

Happy to answer questions about the data pipeline, Vala/GTK 4 development, or packaging for Linux.
by conartist6 | 2026-02-21 21:05:15+00:00
It's not too hard to verify my central claim here which is that we're giving away what they charge money for. Their serialization format is secret, proprietary. Ours, CSTML, is open: https://docs.bablr.org/guides/cstml. Their free product make you re-parse the entire project with every code change you make. Ours is built with copy-on-write immutable data structures so that you can always build new things without losing old ones. Our way you can compose fragments of trees together with new code into new trees like you're playing with lego bricks.
by moltar | 2026-02-21 21:05:38+00:00
Yeah no chance. Quite the opposite. This framework makes the process more robust. AI is just an accelerator of what is. I work at a company without mature SDLC process and it’s chaotic and leads to sub standard outcomes. We are actually looking to adopt this SDLC process soon because of it.

My mental model on LLMs and agents is that they are force multipliers.
by pessimizer | 2026-02-21 21:05:48+00:00
I sort of agree, but federation is good. It's funny that you use bittorrent as an example because it involves every single user running servers for free.

If people can both be an origin for content and a relay for content, and modulate the extent to which they want to do either of those things, there's not really much of a difference between "federation" and "true" p2p. Some people will be all relay, and some people will be all content. Some content people might be paying relays, and some relays might be paying content people. Some relays will be private and some relays will be public. Some people will maintain all of their own content locally, and some people will leave it all on a specialized remote server as a service and not even care about holding a local copy.

Also, browsing would either have to be done through a commercial or public service (federation again), or through specialized software (no one will ever use this and operating systems will intentionally lock it out if they see it as a competitor.)

The problem with wishing this all into existence, though, is that bittorent (not dead) exists and is completely stagnant. There is often a lot of talk about improving the protocol, and the various software dealing with it, and none of it gets done. If bittorrent would just allow torrents to be updated (content added or removed), you could almost piggyback social media on it immediately. It's not getting done. Nobody is doing it, just writing specs that everybody ignores for decades.

So I guess my belief is that "true p2p" is a meaningless term and target when it comes to creating recognizable social media. "True p2p" would be within a private circle of friends, on specialized software. Might as well be a fancy e.g. XMPP group chat; it's already available for anyone who wants it. Almost nobody wants it. Telegram, Whatsapp, and imessage are already good enough for that. They may not be totally private, but they're private enough for 99.9999% of people's purposes, and people are very suspicious of the 0.0001% who want something stronger.

I actually think you're using "true p2p" here to sort of handwave a business model into existence (trying to imply mutuality, or barter, or something.) Whereas I think the business model is the part that needs to be engineered carefully and the tech is easy.
by noelwelsh | 2026-02-21 21:06:04+00:00
If you have this attitude I hope you write everything in assembly. Except assembly is compiled into micro-ops, so hopefully you avoid that by using an 8080 (according to a quick search, the last Intel CPU to not have micro-ops.)

In other words, why is one particular abstraction (e.g. Javscript, or the web browser) ok, but another abstraction (e.g. React) not? This attitude doesn't make sense to me.
by everyone | 2026-02-21 21:06:16+00:00
This is the most fun I've had with Duke Nukem this century
https://www.moddb.com/mods/duke-nukem-alien-armageddon

It's a sort of duke roguelike with 100's of potential levels, you play through a a certain random number of them in a run. Also you unlock all sorts of power ups as you progress, enemies also get stronger and get random buffs. + Theyve added a load of mechanics, more weapons, enemies, more playable characters etc.
by cptroot | 2026-02-21 21:06:27+00:00
Aha, here's the syntax in case you're curious (using an example lifted from the playground)

[type Shape
[Circle f64]
[Rect f64 f64]
Point
]

[sig test_sig : Shape -> Float]
[fn test_sig [shape]
[match shape
[Circle r] [* 3.14159 [* r r]]
[Rect w h] [* w h]
Point 0.0
]
]

Unfortunately it seems like this doesn't currently work as expected when I use it in the playground, so I'm going to go file an issue
by FrasiertheLion | 2026-02-21 21:06:35+00:00
The verification is not happening locally only. The client SDKs fetch the measurement of the weights (+ system software, inference engine) that are pinned to Sigstore, then grabs the same measurement (aka remote attestation of the full, public system image) from the running enclave, and checks that the two are exactly equal. Our previous blog explains this in more detail: https://tinfoil.sh/blog/2025-01-13-how-tinfoil-builds-trust

Sorry it wasn’t clear from the post!
by dernett | 2026-02-21 21:06:42+00:00
Not sure about Idris, but in Lean `Fin n` is a struct that contains a value `i` and a proof that `i < n`. You can read in the value `n` from stdin and then you can do `if h : i < n` to have a compile-time proof `h` that you can use to construct a `Fin n` instance.
by vunderba | 2026-02-21 21:07:13+00:00
Duke Nukem 3D was probably one of the earlier FPS games that really encouraged modding because of Ken Silverman's Build Engine.

Even the enemy AI could be modified (albeit relatively limited) by editing the text CON files.

Anyone else remember playing over LAN with friends, dropping a Duke hologram in an elevator along with a bunch of pipe bombs hidden at its feet?
by daxfohl | 2026-02-21 21:07:45+00:00
Code review, tests, a planning step to make sure it's approaching things the right way, enough experience to understand the right size problems to give it, metrics that can detect potential problems, etc. Same as with a junior engineer.

If you want something fully automated, then I think more investment in automating and improving these capabilities is the way to go. If you want something fully automated and 100% provably bug free, I just don't think that's ever going to be a reality.

Formal specs are cryptic beyond even a small level of complexity, so it's hard to tell if you're even proving the right thing. And proving that an implementation meets those specs blows up even faster, to the point that a lot of stuff ends up being formally unprovable. It's also extremely fragile: one line code change or a small refactor or optimization can completely invalidate hundreds of proofs. AI doesn't change any of that.

So that's why I'm not really bullish on that approach. Maybe there will be some very specific cases where it becomes useful, but for general business logic, I don't see it having useful impact.
by Saline9515 | 2026-02-21 21:07:48+00:00
The law is just mere words if you don't have an army, the guns, and the will to back it up. It has never been different. Louis XIV's wrote "The last argument of kings" on his cannons, in the 17th century.

Guess who holds the guns that protect Europe right now? So yeah, either comply, leave (what I did), or create an alternative. The EU had Viadeo[0], it could have pushed it to have an alternative. It didn't.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viadeo
by fragmede | 2026-02-21 21:08:10+00:00
You're taking the Stockholm syndrome thing way too seriously. I wasn’t trying to imply terminal users are irrational or trapped, I'm just pointing out that some default behaviors are genuinely non-obvious to newcomers and feel rough around the edges at first. That’s more about historical ergonomics than user psychology.

Terminals optimize for keyboard-centric workflows and composability. Once that mental model clicks, a lot of the tradeoffs make sense. But the first-contact confusion is real and pretty universal, which is what I wanted to highlight.

I agree it’s not useful to escalate into meta arguments about tone. Different tools, different workflows, different preferences. The interesting part is how we lower the initial friction without losing the power that keeps people using them decades later.

Which, Ghostty added cl=line support in e06742b36ec9, so we're getting there!
by matltc | 2026-02-21 21:08:41+00:00
I get the sense that this is true for many enshittified services. See anything Microsoft. The FOSS movement seems to be gaining some traction again.

My guess is it's driven by very poor user experience coupled with worse product.

Technical leople who care about privacy/surveillance at least a little bit need take one look at the current state of tech and US govt to see how fucking fast dystopia is becoming reality. See discord/openai writeup that came out, ads literally everywhere, flock and ring cameras wide open and passively performing recon, routers doing the same... it's like snow crash out here

Makes perfect sense that those who know would say fuck this, im out. Convenience isn't worth it anymore
by audunw | 2026-02-21 21:08:57+00:00
The convenience of filling is only there if you have the fuel stations. Considering how expensive it is I’d argue that it’s far better to spend that money on EV charging infrastructure, you get a lot more bang for gour buck. And EVs are arguable significantly more convenient when you have the infrastructure. Would you buy a phone that lasted a week or two, but you had to go to a phone filling station to refill it?

And yes, EVs can be more convenient also for street parking. It’s just an infrastructure problem and by now there are dozens of different solutions for every parking situation imaginable.

It’s frankly absurd reading debates about this online from Norway. It’s over. Yeah Norway has money and cheap electricity, that’s what makes it possible to “speed run” the technology transition. But other than that it’s a worst case scenario for EVs. Lots of people with only street parking in Oslo. Winter that’s brutal on range. People who love to drive hours and hours to their cabin every weekend. With skis on the roof. Part of schengen so people drive all the way down to croatia in summer. We gave EVs and Hydrogen cars the same chance. Same benefits. EVs won. End of story. Though a hydrogen station near me blew up in a spectacularly loud explosion so maybe that makes me a bit biased.
by godelski | 2026-02-21 21:09:03+00:00
I'd assume they'd use something akin to a perceptual hash.

Btw, hashes aren't unique. I really do mean that an input doesn't have a unique output. If f(x)=y then there is some z such that f(z)=y.

Remember, a hash is a "one way function". It isn't invertible (that would defeat the purpose!). It is a surjective function. Meaning that reversing the function results in a non-unique output. In the hash style you're thinking of you try to make the output range so large that the likelihood of a collision is low (a salt making it even harder), but in a perceptual hash you want collisions, but only from certain subsets of the input.

In a typical hash your collision input should be in a random location (knowing x doesn't inform us about z). Knowledge of the input shouldn't give you knowledge of a valid collision. But in a perceptual hash you want collisions to be known. To exist in a localized region of the input (all z are near x. Perturbations of x).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_hashing
by everyone | 2026-02-21 21:09:51+00:00
If you havent played the Ashes 2063 mod series for DOOM I highly recommend it.
https://www.moddb.com/mods/ashes-2063

Ive played a lot of excellent doom and quake mods...

* brutal doom, hell on earth starter pack

* blade of agony

* Hedon

* quake brutalist jams 1 to 3

* Arcane Dimensions

* alien armageddon (for duke3d)

but that one really stand out.
by JCattheATM | 2026-02-21 21:10:31+00:00
> Do you seriously think progressives will come out on top, or even have much of a say at all, in a non-democratic system? I mean, really?

I think a superior system to the one we have now is one where progressive values are embedded in from the start. Objectively, they are superior positions that can be backed up by data.

> which suggests that if you can't lift up and convince "lower class" people, racist or otherwise, you should just get out of the way

These people routinely vote against their own interests. They shouldn't have a say.
by tokenless | 2026-02-21 21:10:32+00:00
The AI pilled view is coding is knitting and AI is an automated loom.

But it is not quite the case. The hand coded solution may be quicker than AI at reaching the business goal.

If there is an elegant crafted solution that stays in prod 10 years and just works it is better than an initially quicker AI coded solution that needs more maintenance and demands a team to maintain it.

If AI (and especially bad operators of AI) codes you a city tower when you need a shed, the tower works and looks great but now you have 500k/y in maintaining it.
by selridge | 2026-02-21 21:10:39+00:00
Yeah. Lots of busywork where if you had to assign it to a human you would need to find someone with deep technical expertise plus inordinate, unflagging attention to detail. You couldn’t pass it off to a batch of summer interns. It would have needed to be done by an engineer with some real experience. And there is no way in the world you could hire enough to do it, for almost any money.
by Zak | 2026-02-21 21:10:40+00:00
> If they lock things down, they lose less money to fraud.

[Citation Needed]

I see this kind of claim made often, but never backed up with evidence that remote attestation of consumer devices has any real-world impact on fraud. It sounds like it could be true because it would detect compromised devices, but it could just as easily be false because people with devices that don't pass are usually technically sophisticated.
by thenaturalist | 2026-02-21 21:10:44+00:00
I highly doubt that, and its in OPs article.

First, a vendor will have the best context on the inner workings and best practices of extending the current state of their software. The pressure on vendors to make this accessible and digestable to agents/ LLMs will increase, though.

Secondly, if you have coded with LLM assistance (not vibe coding), you will have experienced the limited ability of one shot stochastic approaches to build out well architected solutions that go beyond immediate functionality encapsulated in a prompt.

Thirdly, as the article mentions, opportunity cost will never make this a favorable term - unless the SaaS vendor was extorting prices before. The direct cost of mental overhead and time of an internal team member to hand-hold an agent/ write specs/ debug/ firefight some LLM assisted/ vibe coded solution will not outweigh the upside potential of expanding your core business unless you're a stagnant enterprise product on life support.
by ethmarks | 2026-02-21 21:10:50+00:00
Apparently the site itself is written in Loon. The HTML is just a static shell that loads a `boot.js` script[1] that runs some WASM that compiles and evals the Loon source files. I found the source code here[2].

Definitely cool in concept, but very performance-intensive and slow.

[1]: https://loonlang.com/boot.js

[2]: https://github.com/ecto/loon/tree/main/web
by ece | 2026-02-21 21:11:00+00:00
If signing apps is required, then self-signing with your own key should be an option, in addition to a virus scan. Signing authorities have gotten things wrong, which is forgivable as long as they are learning from mistakes, but not letting people run and auto update the apps they want on the device they bought because of device restrictions, scare screens, or other roadblocks is the main complaint here.
by bdelmas | 2026-02-21 21:11:07+00:00
You know what after digging more into the subject I can say that you are effectively right. So thank you for taking the time and commenting on that. I still think it should be a tool a US president can have. Congress is not fast enough to put pressure and removing it as much as the executive branch can do. I think that this and similar economic tools are critical just seeing how thing are unfolding and how the future is going to look like.

For DOJ ya I meant the judicial branch.
by kzahel | 2026-02-21 21:11:49+00:00
I made a basic "claw starter" that you could try. You can progressively go deeper. It starts with just a little "private data" folder that you scaffold and ask the agent to setup the SOUL and stuff, and then you can optionally add in the few builtin skills, or have your assistant start the scheduler/gateway thing if you want to talk to it over telegram.

If you've been shy with using openclaw, give this a try!

https://github.com/kzahel/claw-starter

[I also created https://yepanywhere.com/ - kind of the same philosophy - no custom harnesses, re-use claude/codex session history]
by billy-enrizky-1 | 2026-02-21 21:11:54+00:00
Your AI agent is burning 6x more tokens than it needs to just to browse the web.

We built OpenBrowser MCP to fix that.

Most browser MCPs give the LLM dozens of tools: click, scroll, type, extract, navigate. Each call dumps the entire page accessibility tree into the context window. One Wikipedia page? 124K+ tokens. Every. Single. Call.

OpenBrowser works differently. It exposes one tool. Your agent writes Python code, and OpenBrowser executes it in a persistent runtime with full browser access. The agent controls what comes back. No bloated page dumps. No wasted tokens. Just the data your agent actually asked for.

The result? We benchmarked it against Playwright MCP (Microsoft) and Chrome DevTools MCP (Google) across 6 real-world tasks:

- 3.2x fewer tokens than Playwright MCP

- 6x fewer tokens than Chrome DevTools MCP

- 144x smaller response payloads

- 100% task success rate across all benchmarks

One tool. Full browser control. A fraction of the cost.

It works with any MCP-compatible client:

- Cursor

- VS Code

- Claude Code (marketplace plugin with MCP + Skills)

- Codex and OpenCode (community plugins)

- n8n, Cline, Roo Code, and more

Install the plugins here: https://lnkd.in/e9GVAUDn

It connects to any LLM provider: Claude, GPT 5.2, Gemini, DeepSeek, Groq, Ollama, and more. Fully open source under MIT license.

OpenBrowser MCP is the foundation for something bigger. We are building a cloud-hosted, general-purpose agentic platform where any AI agent can browse, interact with, and extract data from the web without managing infrastructure. The full platform is coming soon.

Join the waitlist at openbrowser.me to get free early access.

See the full benchmark methodology: https://lnkd.in/ewMp65yG

See the benchmark code: https://lnkd.in/eHK5qZ-i

Browse the source: https://lnkd.in/e2dBG53W

See the Demo: https://lnkd.in/em7WfyYK

#OpenSource #AI #MCP #BrowserAutomation #AIAgents #DevTools #LLM #GeneralPurposeAI #AgenticAI
by FrasiertheLion | 2026-02-21 21:12:15+00:00
The committed weights are open source and pinned to a transparency log, along with the full system image running in the enclave.

At runtime, the client SDK (also open source: https://docs.tinfoil.sh/sdk/overview) fetches the pinned measurement from Sigstore, and compares it to the attestation from the running enclave, and checks that they’re equal. This previous blog explains it in more detail: https://tinfoil.sh/blog/2025-01-13-how-tinfoil-builds-trust
by Animats | 2026-02-21 21:12:15+00:00
I went through national-security polygraph exams twice, and they were no big deal. Filling out SF-86 (which used to start "List all residences from birth"), now that's a hassle.

In my aerospace company days, almost everything I did was unclassified, but I was put through the mill of getting higher level security clearances so I could be assigned to classified projects. Fortunately, I never was.
Show HN: Supermemo – a single stream for notes with chat-style retrieval
by akrs | 2026-02-21 21:12:49+00:00
I’ve tried a lot of note systems and kept running into two problems:

Capture friction: before writing anything down, I had to decide where it belonged (which app, which doc, new vs existing).

Retrieval friction: when I needed something later, it was scattered across notebooks/docs, and the "real answer" often lived across multiple notes that evolved over time.

I didn’t want better folders or navigation. I wanted a better context engine. One place to capture continuously, and a way to ask questions that pull from the full stream. So I built Supermemo. It’s a single running stream for notes + an AI-powered way to query and synthesize across them.

If you try it, I’d love the feedback, especially on what feels right vs annoying, and what you wish it did.
by krackers | 2026-02-21 21:13:32+00:00
(function() {
const SKIP_PARENTS = new Set(["SCRIPT", "STYLE", "NOSCRIPT", "TEXTAREA"]);
const walker = document.createTreeWalker(
document.body,
NodeFilter.SHOW_TEXT,
{
acceptNode(node) {
const p = node.parentNode;
if (!p || SKIP_PARENTS.has(p.nodeName)) return NodeFilter.FILTER_REJECT;
if (p.nodeName === "INPUT") return NodeFilter.FILTER_REJECT;
return NodeFilter.FILTER_ACCEPT;
}
}
);

let node;
while ((node = walker.nextNode())) {
node.nodeValue = node.nodeValue.replace(/ſ/g, "s");
}
})()