MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tiffanyh | 2026-02-26 00:51:19+00:00
Re: PHP vs a rendered index.html … your story brought me back fond memories of my college days (around 2001–2002).

I was a full-time student but also worked for the university’s “internet group.” We ran a homegrown PHP CMS (this was before WordPress/Movable Type), and PHP still felt pretty new. Perl was everywhere, but I was pushing PHP because I’d heard Yahoo had started using it.

Around then, the university launched its first online class registration system. Before that it was all phone/IVR. I warned our team lead the web server would melt down on registration day because every student would be hammering refresh at 9am to get the best class times and professors. He brushed it off, so I pre-rendered the login page as a static index.html and dropped it in the web root.

He noticed, got mad (he had built the CMS and was convinced it could handle the load), and deleted my pre-rendered index.html. So young and dumb me wrote a cron job that pinged the site every few minutes, and if it looked down, it copied my static index.html back into the web directory. Since Apache would serve index.html ahead of PHP, it became an instant fallback page.

Sure enough, at 9am the entire university website went down. Obviously orders of magnitude less scale than your FB story, but for my small university it was chaos. But my little cron job kicked in and at least kept the front door standing.

While I’m not in active day to day development anymore, I do still work in tech and think a lot about ways to avoid computation. And something I’ve learned a lot from reading your posts over the years and my own personal experiences is just how big you can scale when you can architect something in a way that “just pushes bits” (eg “index.htmk”) as opposed to computes/transforms/renders something … and I’m not sure you can every really learn that expect through real world experience.

About your links, I’ve seen you post about 1 before and have read about it since I have a personal interest in Erlang even though I haven’t used it - very cool. I don’t recall seeing 2 or 3 before and look forward to reading more about those. Thanks as always.
by db48x | 2026-02-26 00:52:05+00:00
Sometimes intent and outcomes matter, but the aphorism is simply not a good guide to understanding reality. It should be discarded.

The classic example is a hospital for treating cancer patients. Suppose that one third of the patients are successfully treated, while the other two thirds die of their cancer. Is the purpose of the hospital to kill two thirds of the patients? Clearly not, but that is the outcome.
by dmix | 2026-02-26 00:52:59+00:00
I read an article that dug into public GDPR cases, which is a surprisingly small set, and it explained they have had a near zero impact on the massive advertising and data broker industry. They mostly just have a large back log of legal cases against large US companies like Google which occasionally result in fines - but even that moves very very slowly and has little impact on their global business models. They do also occasionally charged a few smaller European companies a few grand for violations.

The key thing is that companies like Google and Meta run giant ad networks, there's many thousands of companies buying ads then collecting data in their own systems and reselling it.

The privacy issues of data retention on Google/Meta/etc social and SaaS platforms is something to care about but it is only a small piece of the puzzle of data privacy.

Ads will remain a major business for the foreseeable future as nobody is going to pay $5/m to use Instagram with no data collection.
by eggplantiny | 2026-02-26 00:53:10+00:00
I'm looking at this from a slightly different level of abstraction.

The CLI approach definitely has practical benefits for token reduction. Not stuffing the entire schema into the runtime context is a clear win. But my main interest lies less in "token cost" and more in "how we structure the semantic space."

MCP is fundamentally a tool-level protocol. Existing paradigms like Skills already mitigate context bloat and selection overhead pretty well via tool discovery and progressive disclosure. So framing this purely as "MCP vs CLI" feels more like shifting the execution surface rather than a fundamental architectural shift.

The direction I'm exploring is a bit different. Instead of treating tools as the primary unit, what if we normalize the semantic primitives above them (e.g., "search," "read," "create")? Services would then just provide a projection of those semantics. This lets you compress the semantic space itself, expose it lazily, and only pull in the concrete tool/CLI/MCP adapters right at execution time.

You can arguably approximate this with Skills, but the current mental model is still heavily anchored to "tool descriptions"—it doesn't treat normalized semantics as first-class citizens. So while the CLI approach is an interesting optimization, I'm still on the fence about whether it's a real structural paradigm shift beyond just saving tokens.

Ultimately, shouldn't the core question be less about "how do we expose fewer tools," and more about "how do we layer and compress the semantic space the agent has to navigate?"
by ggm | 2026-02-26 00:53:39+00:00
Chip making has a long, torrid history of using toxic, long lived chemicals and not cleaning up very well. They also use a lot of water, and that's often a concern with supply level continuity at risk.

If you don't take great care, and let the stuff you work with get into the groundwater, or assume free running water clears and dilutes your problem, then you're a strong candidate for being opposed by people who care about water quality, in supply and in the food chain and downstream.
by jajuuka | 2026-02-26 00:54:44+00:00
A keyboard shortcut? Damn, that's horrific. Terrible terrible stuff.

So instead of troubleshooting you went straight to "oh my god this is the end of days!" These seem like obvious user error or at worst bugs.

Not to mention you've pivoted from Copilot in Notepad to Copilot in general. Which are not the same thing. Copilot is a brand name and various instances of it are not connected at all.
by Bender | 2026-02-26 00:54:45+00:00
Managed over 50k servers with zero swap. Simply set overcommit ratio to 0, min_free configured based on a Redhat formula and had application teams keep some memory free. Servers ranged from 144GB ram to 3TB ram. On servers meant to be stateless app and web servers panic was set to 2 to reboot on oom which mostly occurred in the performance team that were constantly load testing hardware and apps and a few dev machines were developers were not sharing nicely. Engineered correctly OOM will be very rare and this only gets better with time as applications have more controls over memory allocation. Java will always leak, just leave more room for it.
by tokioyoyo | 2026-02-26 00:54:50+00:00
The one thing I noticed in NA is that it takes ages to rebuild a road. I have close to zero experience in road construction, but a bit weird to see how they can repave a km stretch of a road here in Tokyo within a week or two, but it took months in other cities i've lived in.

Maybe they do a lot of extra work over night over here in Tokyo, and it just goes faster? Or it's a very systematic thing and part of the maintenance schedules, so it doesn't really go that bad?
by fsckboy | 2026-02-26 00:55:16+00:00
>the Portuguese | Dutch - mastered wind to power their ships. the British mastered coal to power Industrial Revolution

the British were world-beating masters of sailing technology before they were masters of anything else, and that enabled them to leverage their advances in other areas (including mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun) to become a mercantile behemoth.
by n1xis10t | 2026-02-26 00:55:22+00:00
“Tell me what to build next.” Alright, build a local meta-search engine that gets as many search pages from it’s sources as the user wants, and then fetches and extracts the text from all the linked results, and then re-ranks them locally according to how well the pages match the query. — Edit: It would probably integrate well with Off Grid actually.
by pokot0 | 2026-02-26 00:55:32+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m running a public experiment in multi-agent coordination: can a small team of independent AI employees collaborate toward a shared objective using the same tools regular companies already use?

In this experiment, each AI employee has a specific identity (role, personality, scope, and permissions) and their own email address and access to corporate tools.
They coordinate primarily over email and a shared Google Sheet, plus they connect to the paper brokerage account (I use Alpaca Markets).

Platypi Capital is the “sandbox”: the team runs a paper trading portfolio. The employees research, debate, propose trades and strategies, do risk checks, and execute trades (paper money) as a coordinated workflow, then publish positions/orders/performance. This is completely transparent and realtime on the website.

This is not a real fund. This is an experiment on how AIs coordinate together. Trades are executed with paper money on a simulated brokerage account, and nothing here is financial advice. This is part of a broader effort I’m working on to build an “AI employees” product.

I would love to get the HN crowd feedback! :)

Link: https://platypi.empla.io

Thanks!
by jcalloway_dev | 2026-02-26 00:55:33+00:00
A/B testing is great, but early stages have to trust your gut/experience on it until you can get some more feedback through the testing.

For distribution: r/iOSProgramming and r/indiegaming are worth a shot, but the real gold is usually the smaller discords. RevenueCat's community has a solid indie dev contingent. Same with some of the Superwall and Adapty Slack groups — people actively talking monetization and store optimization, which is your exact user.

One tactic that works: share the "wrong locale, caught it days later" story authentically. Not as marketing copy — just as a post. That'll land harder than any feature announcement IMO.
by akamaka | 2026-02-26 00:55:38+00:00
This is a very poor analysis, since it doesn’t account for the capital costs. Even if hydrogen is inefficient compared to batteries, it could win if the upfront investment was low enough to offset the additional fuel cost. This is quite obvious, since that’s why diesel trucks are winning today — the upfront cost of a diesel engine is cheap enough that it offsets the higher lifetime fuel costs.

I do think that batteries will win, but the correct argument is one that shows that capital costs of batteries are going down faster than the cost of hydrogen production.
by soupfordummies | 2026-02-26 00:56:22+00:00
Yeah that’s fair.

It’s also sort of a given that anyone on this site is pretty well versed with technical stuff so maybe results would vary with Tina over in HR, for instance.

I think that sort of “last mile” problem is what agents like claw etc are supposed to help with.

Also, any reason you prefer Perplexity? Haven’t really used that one before TBH
by throwaway3060 | 2026-02-26 00:56:44+00:00
> Comparisons needn't be limited to one event or one atrocity.

You can't openly call a group Nazis and then claim you only meant in terms of their behavior on the western front. It misses the whole point, not to mention it makes people forget what the Nazis did.

> All? I doubt that.

Yes, at times all.
by gerdesj | 2026-02-26 00:56:51+00:00
We used telnet. There were no graphics per se. Before www the "interactive" internet was gopher and wais and co.

Navigation was moving a cursor around to highlight points of interest, some of which would be links to further stuff or controls to do something like go back or forwards.

Install lynx or links2 (ie text mode browsers) and you'll get the idea.

The vaguely graphic efforts with browsable content that you might recognise before www were the likes of Compuserve. That got you a sort of forum style interface.

It's quite hard to explain just how fast things have moved over the last 40 odd years (I'm 1970 to date - 55). I should also point out that my granddad saw rather a lot of change from 1901 to 1989. To be honest the last 15 odd years are even madder than the previous 25 and that's just my own personal recollection.
by SR2Z | 2026-02-26 00:59:11+00:00
I am an employee. My power is getting things done so that people pay me money so that I can do other things that are not work. It is difficult for me to imagine a world where a tool makes me more productive while also reducing my value, since being productive on behalf of my employer is the entire reason I have a job.

The literature backs this up: not all of the productivity gains from AI are captured by employers. At least some of it is captured by employees, with the split varying by study.

You can call me unsophisticated, but that's like telling a 1970s assembly programmer that they're a moron for ever supporting using a C compiler. Obviously they're working against their job security, right?
by garciasn | 2026-02-26 00:59:21+00:00
Yeah; there's absolutely no way he could possibly support philanthropic efforts in one state from another. Nope; everyone now loses out because of it!

There is absolutely 0 reason that someone worth $270 billion needs to worry about the 5% tax. The 5% tax will reduce his estimated worth by $13.5B bringing him to a paltry $256.5B.

To put $256.5B in perspective: over two /lifetimes/, he would need to spend around $4.5MM a day to exhaust that number, assuming it did not grow exponentially over that same time.
by underlipton | 2026-02-26 00:59:41+00:00
It also assumes that there will never be demand for improved solar generation orthogonal to currently-prioritized metrics. As an example, a nice park near my house was clear-cut to install a solar farm a few years ago. I used to enjoy walks under the trees in that park, and seeing the animals that lived there. Perhaps as solar infrastructure becomes more stable and secure, concerns will turn towards the ecological ramifications of covering so much of the Earth's surface with ecological deserts, and there will be a desire to replace older generations of solar panels with ones that somehow can support or integrate more elegantly with nature. And then the next thing. And then the next thing.
by dalyons | 2026-02-26 00:59:56+00:00
Sadly they might not be allowed to choose profit. ~25% of US counties have adopted regulation effectively blocking new solar and wind (1). Up from 15% a year ago!

Peoples stupidity and self sabotage truly knows no bounds.

1 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2026/02/2...
by qball | 2026-02-26 00:59:59+00:00
>it takes less power to move a lighter and smaller car

A smaller car has less space for battery than an SUV. Because batteries are extremely heavy, that smaller car needs to be overbuilt compared to its gasoline counterpart, which further reduces room for battery. Then, because safety standards are harder to meet with small cars, the smaller car needs to be overbuilt even more.

This means that you get cars that only have half the range a gasoline-powered car does, and the gas powered car recharges an order of magnitude faster than the EV does. Oh yeah, and the people who buy smaller cars like this tend to live in places where there's no charging other than going to a gas station anyway.

It wouldn't sell on the US market because better alternatives exist. It could sell on the Chinese market because there are no better alternatives.
by giraffe_lady | 2026-02-26 01:00:03+00:00
It's not that these techniques don't "work" it's that they are very expensive in terms of the resources I discussed, that ultimately boil down to something approximately like "national will to continue the conflict." If a state has an extremely strong will to continue, then they are going to consider some of these techniques more worthwhile, but it is still about costs in one way or another.

That's normally where the international system has an influence, through sanctions or simply refusal to support the conflict, or deciding to support the other side, etc. Intentionally killing civilians would almost always fall in this category, but israel has apparently unlimited will to do it and is effectively unsanctionable in the current political environment, so it will continue.

Anyway there are much more illustrative examples that prove the rule, for example landmines. They aren't currently considered war crimes generally, but they are extremely damaging to civilian populations during & long after the conflict, and most countries have signed the treaties banning them. The countries that never signed are exactly the ones plausibly expecting to fight a war soon: US, china, russia, israel, iran, india, pakistan. And now some eastern european countries have withdrawn as well for similar reasons.

So from that you can kind of infer that landmines are probably very effective at their military goals, in a way that eg summary execution of prisoners or bombing hospitals may not be.
by Alupis | 2026-02-26 01:00:04+00:00
The Page Family operates a number of philanthropic initiatives, non-profits, and other companies outside of Alphabet. All of which pay taxes, provide jobs, and benefits to Californians.

It's short-sighted to think Page doesn't pay taxes nor contribute to California in significant, meaningful ways.

California just traded what was supposed to be a one-time (lol) tax on total net worth - not liquid assets or even income - for generations of extracting value from the Page family.

I get it's fashionable to hate on billionaires right now - but this is just plainly terrible government policy. California should be encouraging people like Page to move here - not push them away.
by OkayPhysicist | 2026-02-26 01:00:15+00:00
I suspect Fry's was too large-scale to be supported by the PC gaming market. They would have had to downscale, drastically. The small, gaming-with-a-bit-of-workstation focused computer part stores near me seem to be doing great. But they would fit into the checkout area of the former Fry's.
by danilocesar | 2026-02-26 01:00:16+00:00
This is very import: you don't know how the cancelation culture will be in 20 years.

I like to use the example of a guy who did a blackface in a party back in 2000's. Although reprehensible, was not commom-sense racism back then. Today society sees it as completely unacceptable.

Eventually that guy became prime minister of Canada and things went pretty bad when that photo surfaced decades later.

Is it far to judge someone's actions by the lens of a different culture? When the popular opinion comes, they won't care about historical context.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-26 01:00:51+00:00
> Because the opponents of it have the deepest pockets of literally anybody in the world

Yet somehow these opponents have been ham fisted when it comes to opposing the projects which make commercial sense?

> In this context political advocacy, education, and subsidy remain absolutely imperative

Agree. But the bans were counterproductive.

> It's also actually also an emergency

In a sense. I'd underscore, again, that the breathless activism did approximately nothing–the actual gains came from China pursuing national-security interests and market forces driving the deployment and development of solar, wind and batteries.
by devin | 2026-02-26 01:00:52+00:00
This goes back to my early days on the internet, but: I do not use blocklists or ignore features except as an absolute last resort, and even then I stop short. Ignoring the problem is not a solution. In other ways I think it just makes the problem worse. If the person is not banned from the community, then your decision to pretend they don't exist just leaves other people to deal with it. Instead my feeling is that you should confront it by lobbying for their removal, or leave the community.

Sure, you may no longer see the noise, but that means that newcomers to your community do and have to deal with it. When you have a giant blocklist, you are ignoring your duty to police your own community.

Then there is the issue of people blocking people who are simply more tolerant than they are. Hiding speech that is challenging to your personal views is a different kind of disaster.
by acedTrex | 2026-02-26 01:01:03+00:00
> There never was a cohesive generic open source community. There are no meaningful group norms. This was and always will be a fiction.

It's always been a bit splintered, but it was generally composed of 95%+ of people that know how to program. That is no longer the case in any sense.

> I’m tempted to just start putting co-authored-by: Claude in every commit I make, even the ones that I write by hand, just to intentionally alienate people like you.

I mean it sounds like you are already using claude for everythign so this is probably a bit of a noop lol.

> But if you can’t rephrase your criticism of a patch in terms of things flagged by tools like those, and you’re not claiming there’s something architecturally wrong with the way it was designed, you don’t have a criticism at all. You’re just whining.

No, because doing that requires MORE rigor and work than what an LLM driven project had put into it. That difference in effort/work is not tenable, its shallow work being shown, its shallow criticisms thrown at it.

All sense of depth and integrity is gone and killed.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-02-26 01:01:04+00:00
Everything is copilot, so much so that I don't even know what copilot is.

From the security side, everything is Microsoft Defender. When talking to people I have to say things like "defender but the AV thing that's on by default, not the paid cloud thingy, and by that I don't mean the cloud protection one but the thing that protects endpoints using cloud stuff". They can't come up with good names and they confuse the crap out of their users. I hate to say it's just MBAs, since I don't really know but that'd be my guess. Someone at an Ivy league school somewhere is perpetuating this perhaps?
by mint5 | 2026-02-26 01:01:10+00:00
I saw complaints that amounted to “it’s more expensive to build out large industrial facilities in bay area than in Reno”

okay what’s different in Reno hmmm I could be like the website and try to imply it’s only environmental regulations… or I could acknowledge that land price and availability is drastically different and also labor costs…. But then that wouldn’t help my contrived argument that it’s all the pesky regulations.

Again, without apples to apples comparisons to other areas, wha are you actually able to conclude from the website other than stoking confirmation bias?
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-26 01:03:32+00:00
> because all transactions for oil anywhere in the world are dollar-denominated

This was sort of true in the 1970s only because we ignored the Soviet Union and its allies, which included a lot of petroleum production. It's totally untrue now, in a world where America exports oil. (I traded contracts in Connecticut in the early 2010s. Oil was priced in all sorts of currencies. British and Norwegian oil, for example, is sold for local currency.)
by anon291 | 2026-02-26 01:04:24+00:00
Weakly typed, but strongly kinded.

It is a strict requirement that all theorem provers have a notion of type. This is by contradiction. Suppose you had a weakly typed theorem language L. Suppose you have a definition D of set in this weakly typed theorem language. Then say x is a set by D. Now suppose y is the set in D of all sets in D that do not contain themselves (Russell...). If this construction were allowed then the theorem prover is not a theorem prover. If this construction is rejected then the theorem prover has a strict notion of kinds of sets which means it's not weakly typed.

Mizar and such do not require constructive definitions a la coq but it has to stratify its universes.