MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Kalpaka | 2026-02-20 08:12:18+00:00
I think the framing itself might be the problem. Both sides argue about whether AI can "create" — but that assumes creation is the only interesting thing AI could do.

What if the structural shift isn't about AI generating novel things, but about AI noticing things humans can't? Not creativity, but perception at scale — seeing that two people who've never met, in different countries, independently need the same thing nobody's built yet.

The novelty still comes from humans. The AI's contribution is adjacency detection across contexts no single person could hold in their head.
by MikeTheGreat | 2026-02-20 08:15:32+00:00
The issue is the condition on the apology:

> If this “experiment” personally harmed you, I apologize

Essentially: the person isn't actually apologizing. They're sending you a lambda (or an async Promise, etc) that will apologize in the future but only if it actually turns out to be true that you were harmed.

It's the sort of thing you'd say if you don't really believe that you need to apologize but you understand that everyone else thinks you should, so you say something that's hopefully close enough to appease everyone else without actually having to apologize for real.
by VorpalWay | 2026-02-20 08:15:36+00:00
Parametric modelling is not the cause of the bad UI in FreeCAD, Fusion 360, Onshape, etc are also parametric. No, the main problems (last I tried it around 1.0) were that it had a clunky UI and that it was buggy. It would refuse to chamfer or bevel edges for no apparent reason that other CAD software wouldn't have issues with. There were occasionally crashes. Editing previous steps would destroy the later steps much more often than in other CAD software. Etc.

I would love to go back to FreeCAD, but for now I'm using Onshape (I run Linux, so Fusion isn't an option).
by coldtea | 2026-02-20 08:15:54+00:00
It's also valid for calculators vs pen and paper math.

Calculators make calculation much easier, but people doing math with them lose a sizable part of their mathematic skills.

To the point of kids not being able to do a simple addition or multiplication or percentage calculation (never mind division) with a calculator, even when someone used to pen and paper can trivially doing with just their mind.
Show HN: MatsuriMap – Free interactive map for events and festivals in Japan
by wrryyyy | 2026-02-20 08:16:00+00:00
I noticed that most local events and festivals are only advertised in Japanese on individual venue websites.
Note: The site is largely AI-powered — data collection, translation, and categorization are all automated. While I do my best to keep things accurate, there may be occasional errors in dates, locations, or details. Each event links to its official source page, so please double-check there before making plans!
Feedback welcome~
by jeroenhd | 2026-02-20 08:16:15+00:00
Europeans don't generally use .gov so if the US tries to pull that, they'll just block whatever .gov their VPN is hosted on.

Southern European countries are blocking whole Cloudflare IP ranges because of the massive grip on the government the sports licensing maffia has there. These countries also don't feature any direct flights to America as far as I can tell.

These blocks may cause (temporary) issues for American business relations and tourism, but such side effects may not be considered so problematic if the US leverages their government infrastructure to attack European legislators.
by harperlee | 2026-02-20 08:16:38+00:00
I'm mildly interested in keyboard ergonomics and efficiency, but every time I read threads like this I can't really see me spending $200+ on a keyboard when there are quite functional versions at $10 (and I know that the vast majority of the world is typing on either those or a laptop keyboard). To me it reads too much like an audiophile discussion about whether the materials of the cable affect sound, or just people "playing" (similar to cyberdecks). Not just trying to be provocative here, but those prices just seem crazy and just Silicon Valley posturing. Is there a post here that is not partially signalling "I'm rich enough to splurge in an unreasonably expensive set of keys"? Or am I being too harsh? The most grounded take seems to be easterncalculus's "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47083354" where he mentions that the best approach is to rest and exercise a little bit instead of having led-colored chording keyboards.

Sorry, I'll go get my coffee now :)
by ta20240528 | 2026-02-20 08:17:13+00:00
No need for a clearance, merely explain that

1. fibre-optic traffic is a beam of light

2. this beam can be passed through a glass prism…

3. the prism splits off say 20% of the light by intensity

4. this 20% is identical to the 80%

5. both the 20% and 80% component are 'bright' enough to be used

6. the 80% continues on its merry way, the 20% is redirected for 'other' uses.
by habinero | 2026-02-20 08:17:35+00:00
It can have anything you like in a training set, you still can't build specific human experiences.

I haven't read War & Peace -- I don't have the patience for Russian literature -- but a much more accessible example is the Vorkosigan series by Lois Bujold. She uses a lot of Tolstoy lol.

While you can read them as fun military scifi, that's not why the series is so good and so famous. In her books, humanity invented two critical things: wormhole FTL travel and uterine replicators.

A lot of the series is exploring how people actually would use and abuse those two things. And then on another layer the books are about her thoughts on parenting, marriage, power, inheritance, and so on.

Good art isn't about accepting someone's opinion that it's good art. Good art impacts you. I think about things differently after those books.

You cannot write a good novel using the algorithmic mean of a lot of different stories.
by dracotomes | 2026-02-20 08:18:25+00:00
I switched from Fusion to FreeCAD when I bid Windows goodbye (this video inspired me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEfNRST_3x8).
Fusion does a LOT of stuff for you that FreeCAD doesn't - i.e. extrude a pad from two intersecting shapes in a sketch. While this is annoying at first I feel it forces me to design smarter.
I've had a few crashes and the constraint solver sometimes seems to behave weird and takes a ctrl+z and a second attempt at the same action to properly add a constraint but overall my experience has been pretty positive.
by tombert | 2026-02-20 08:18:53+00:00
I have two used external LTO-6 decks that I got used for $200 each on eBay. LTO-7 and later are absurdly expensive, but you can shop around and occasionally find LTO-6 ones for cheap. You have to be a bit vigilant on eBay and shop around for awhile but deals can be had.

I had to “repair” the first one I bought, but that literally ended up being fixed by tightening a screw on the SAS connector. The second one I bought worked out of the box.
by Deep-States | 2026-02-20 08:19:25+00:00
Agreed: The Dune3D developers made the wise decision to start from scratch implementing a parametric modeling UI. Extremely robust software; very fast, and almost intuitive (high praise for CAD).

The problem with FreeCAD, on the other hand, is that it's a "just two more weeks and it'll be great" solution.

The developers are clearly talented in a raw-math kind of way, but FreeCAD offers the eternal promise of usability in the next release; while never delivering it.

Those who are profoundly cynical might consider the possibility that the legacy CAD industry has infiltrated the FreeCAD development team and run Pied-Piper ops there to prevent a Blender-moment stealing their revenue.

This would perfectly explain why the FreeCAD experience is so consistently bizarre.
Show HN: Gatherly – E-signatures and doc collection for professional services
by ivannovazzi | 2026-02-20 08:19:30+00:00
I built this after hearing the same complaint from accountants, lawyers, and consultants: they spend more time chasing clients for documents than doing actual work.

The pattern repeats everywhere — send a PDF, follow up three times, client sends it unsigned, follow up again, client sends the wrong document. The billing clock stops but the frustration doesn't.

Gatherly lets firms send a Secure Link to a branded Client Portal where clients sign and upload everything in one place. No client account required. Automated reminders handle follow-up until completion.

A few design decisions worth noting:

- Signatures are eIDAS-qualified (the EU legal standard for electronic signatures), which matters for law firms and financial advisors who need agreements that hold up legally
- We combine e-signature with document collection in one workflow — so a client signs an engagement letter and immediately uploads supporting files in the same session, rather than two separate tools
- Zero friction for the client side — they get a link, sign, upload, done. No account creation, no app to install

The thing I'm still figuring out: pricing model. Currently flat per-month with a free trial. Curious whether usage-based (per document request sent) or seat-based makes more sense for this kind of workflow tool.

Happy to hear from anyone who's worked in or built for professional services firms.
by skwee357 | 2026-02-20 08:19:51+00:00
Author here.

I agree with you. Rust is rock-solid. I had zero crashes with Rust. But, having said that, I so-far have zero crashes with Node.js as well. Maybe because I'm a one man team, and I'm very pedantic, so everything is wrapped in try/catch, schema validations, and strict typescript/eslint rules.

I would agree with you that *by default*, Rust makes it harder to write bad/bug prone code compared to others, but with discipline (which big teams in "fast moving environments" usually don't have), you can get similar assurances with Node/Typescript.
by avidiax | 2026-02-20 08:20:53+00:00
Goldtouch Elite is the gateway drug. It offers both a hinged split and tenting if you want it, while having the classic keyboard layout. Microsoft natural also requires very little learning curve, assuming that you don't use the wrong hand for some of the middle keys out of habit.

I use Kinesis Advantage2. I suppose they should be relatively cheap on eBay now. They still have a slight amount of ulnar deviation, but I find it's the best keyboard I've ever owned. I don't use all the macros and foot pedals and whatnot. You don't lose the ability to touch type on a standard keyboard, and it really only takes a day or two to have some proficiency, and maybe 2 weeks to get to full speed on the Kinesis. It helps greatly that all the letter keys are the same; it's just the thumb keys and the arrow keys that take some getting used to.

One massive advantage of the old Advantage2 is that there's a big empty space in the middle (with just the indicator lights). You can use museum wax to stick an Apple trackpad there, and then you hardly move your hands at all. I still have a trackball for large mouse movements or whatever, but most of the fine movements are done on the Apple trackpad at the center of the keyboard.

https://www.reddit.com/r/kinesisadvantage/comments/16994c7/t...
by Testinat0r | 2026-02-20 08:22:23+00:00
The Open Talent Protocol is an open, agent-to-agent data standard for representing a professional resume.

It defines a single JSON document format that any platform, tool, or autonomous agent can read, write, and reason over - without depending on a specific vendor or proprietary format.

Your career agent sends your OTP profile to a recruiter's hiring agent. No PDF parsing. No manual data entry.
by bob1029 | 2026-02-20 08:23:33+00:00
Diffusion models need to infer the causality of language from within a symmetric architecture (information can flow forward or backward). AR forces information to flow in a single direction and is substantially easier to control as a result. The 2nd sentence in a paragraph of English text often cannot come before the first or the statement wouldn't make sense. Sometimes this is not an issue (and I think these are cases where parallel generation makes sense), but the edge cases are where all the money lives.
by mesk | 2026-02-20 08:23:44+00:00
Sure, librarians wouldn't know how to do they work, if they didn't get a list on 'not approved' books from the school boards. /s

It's something else if something can't be bought or placed on the shelf because its on some school provided list, and if you (librarian) decide you don't buy it because of (whatever reason).

The same with research, if something is not published, or funding on research is stopped because `we know climate change doesn't exists`, that no one can read it, because its not even created.
But who cares, its useless debate...
by labcomputer | 2026-02-20 08:25:25+00:00
> Lastly, who creates the list of forbidden parts? How will it be curated? And most importantly, how will it be secured that it isn't a set of blueprints which are then used to make firearms?

My conspiracy theory is that these laws (there have been a rash of them lately, and that feels off) are being promoted by some of the cloud-based 3d printer manufacturers. In other words, an attempt at regulatory capture.

As you note, determining from gcode whether the print is a gun is effectively impossible, and hiding the blocklist is hard anyway. Thus, the only way that could possibly work technically is with those cloud printers that take a .STL as input, routed through the printer manufacturer's servers.

Discriminating between "gun" and "not gun" from the .STL is still hard, but vastly easier than inferring from gcode. The blocklist story becomes at least coherent, if still highly suspect, to anyone who knows anything about computer security.
by BrunoVT1992 | 2026-02-20 08:25:32+00:00
GUID / UUID v6 is a reordered time-based identifier designed to be lexicographically sortable by creation time. It is essentially v1 with the timestamp bytes reordered so that the most significant time bits come first, enabling simple string/byte comparisons for time-based sorting. This makes v6 ideal for database indexing and systems requiring time-ordered keys.
by goku12 | 2026-02-20 08:25:39+00:00
The solution for Topological Naming Problem (TNP) was merged just before the 1.0 release. A lot of other significant changes were also merged in at the same time. Some people have reported that the UX has improved a lot since then.

I don't know much about the internal architecture of FreeCAD. As far as I know, FreeCAD does a lot of heavy lifting including managing TNP. It's supposed to be handled by the CAD kernel - OpenCASCADE in this case. I suspect that the reason why open source CAD lags behind their proprietary counterparts is really the CAD kernel. Many proprietary CAD software share the same kernel, in fact. For example, SolidWorks, Solid Edge and OnShape use Parasolid. It tells you how critical the kernel is.

Perhaps we should be focusing more on a more capable open source CAD kernel. There are a few projects around that are trying this. But they either have very limited scopes, or don't have enough support and momentum.
by _flux | 2026-02-20 08:25:56+00:00
FreeCAD relies on OpenCascade kernel to actually deal with the models, and yes, there's still room for improvement..

As I understand it, there are no other open source alternatives around. On the commercial side there are some, perhaps the foremost being the venerable Parasolid, which is used by Onshape, Solid Edge, Solid Works, Siemens NX, Shapr 3d and others.

Creating a solid 3d kernel is hard. Parasolid is from 1986.
Ask HN: Is it worth learning Vim in 2026?
by zekejohn | 2026-02-20 08:27:29+00:00
With everyone using Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and the other 100 AI coding agents that i missed, I’m wondering how much editor mastery still matters like w/ Vim

Being honest the real reason i wanna learn Vim is to boost my ego & assert my dominance, so i can tell people "i use vim btw", but also part of me thinks investing time could still pay off for speed, ergonomics, and working over SSH overall...

but a bigger part also suspects the marginal gains i would gain would disappear when more of the work is delegated to AI anyway, like why would i learn Vim if i'm just going to be prompting Opus all day?

For anyone who's been using Vim for while AND uses AI to code (i'm assuming everyone codes with AI to some degree) my question is: Does learning Vim still meaningfully improve your day to day productivity EVEN with AI, or is it mostly personal preference at this point?
by imtringued | 2026-02-20 08:28:04+00:00
>Those who are profoundly cynical might consider the possibility that the legacy CAD industry has infiltrated the FreeCAD development team and run Pied-Piper ops there to prevent a Blender-moment stealing their revenue.

If you've been around on the FreeCAD forums, you'll see that the majority of users essentially believe that all comparisons of FreeCAD with commercial CAD software is illegitimate and become incredibly defensive. They have developed a huge arsenal of coping strategies to avoid improving FreeCAD and the results speak for themselves.

It's like they've got the Steve Jobs attitude but without the good taste that justified it.
by impossiblefork | 2026-02-20 08:29:01+00:00
One appeal of it is for RL. If it ends up being a lot faster for generation, you'll be able to do a lot more RL.

If people can make RL scalable-- make it so that RL isn't just a final phase, but something which is as big as the supervised stuff, then diffusion models are going to have an advantage.

If not, I think autoregressive models will still be preferred. Diffusion models become fixed very fast, they can't actually refine their outputs, so we're not talking about some kind of refinement along the lines of: initial idea -> better idea -> something actually sound.
by Incipient | 2026-02-20 08:29:43+00:00
Despite likely to be labelled 'right wing'...isn't a governments first responsibility to its citizens?

I'd understand carve outs for foreign workers, etc...but if you're a foreign WORKer, you'd hope that the work could pay for housing?

Social housing is typically a safety net for those fallen on hard times, or people with various handicaps and unable to work?
by PeterStuer | 2026-02-20 08:29:53+00:00
I find the reactions to this interesting. Why are people so emotional about this?

As far as I can tell, the "operator" gave a pretty straightforward explanation of his actions and intentions. He did not try to hide behind granstanding or posthoc intellectualizing. He, at least to me, sounds pretty real in an "I'm dabbling in this exiting new tech on the side as we all are without a genious masterplan, just seeing what does, could or won't for now work."

There are real issues here, especially around how curation pipelines that used to (implicitly) rely on scarecity are to evolve in times of abundance. Should agents be forced to disclose they are? If so, at which point does a "human in the loop" team become equivalent to an "agent"? Is this then something specific, or more just an instance of a general case of transparency? Is "no clanckers" realy in essence different from e.g. "no corpos"? Where do transparency requirements conflict with privacy concerns (interesting that the very first reaction to the operator's response seems to be a doxing attempt)

Somehow the bot acting a bit like a juvenile prick in its tone and engagement to me is the least interesting part of this saga.
by lbostral | 2026-02-20 08:30:06+00:00
I've been writing a weekly streaming industry newsletter for 68 editions. Most of my time wasn't writing — it was information logistics: tracking sources, searching my own archive, remembering which expert I'd cited and when.
Bookmarking tools keep dying (RIP Pocket). If you write a newsletter, your sources are your most valuable asset and they live in tools you don't control. I built an MCP server to own that layer — sources, notes, briefs, article tracking. SQLite-backed, your data stays yours.

The design principle: the MCP handles everything around the writing (collecting, organizing, retrieving). It never generates content.

Caveat: I daily-drive a more advanced version (Supabase, custom schema, 50 tools) to build two paid industry reports (20K+ datapoints, 172 companies, 34 countries). inkwell-mcp is the extracted portable core. It type-checks, but I haven't battle-tested it with anyone else's workflow yet. Issues welcome.
25 years in streaming, built M6 Replay (50M+ users), several CTO roles.
Full write-up: Full write-up: https://streamingradar.substack.com/p/my-newsletter-has-50-a...
The newsletter: https://www.streaming-radar.com
The full MCP with 20K+ datapoints (bidirectional, 4 slots): https://lens.streaming-radar.com/mcp
Happy to answer questions about the architecture or MCP design decisions.
by kalterdev | 2026-02-20 08:30:44+00:00
The U.S. has a history of freedom, Europe does not. It’s not entirely the current events that determine the future, not in human affairs.

If one thinks that it’s right to violate property rights, the form of the violation is only a matter of time. Today infinite scrolling, tomorrow unpopular opinions.

> protect people

You probably meant consumers.

“There is no such thing as "consumers' rights," just as there can be no "rights" belonging to some special group or race and to no others.”
by carpe__diem | 2026-02-20 08:31:30+00:00
I think a useful framing is: AI raises throughput but can lower taste if you skip deliberation.

In my workflow the difference is whether I force a second pass where I delete half of the model output and rewrite the core argument in my own words. If I skip that pass, everything converges to the same polished-but-generic tone.

So for me AI is best as a draft generator and counterexample machine, not the final author.
by u_sama | 2026-02-20 08:31:47+00:00
That was my point tho, they are not conservative, Titanic is basically the story of a bouregois woman who on her deathbed remembers a one time fling she had when young, despite a whole life spent with another man. It can be categorizd as cheating of sorts, from a conservative POV, yet it is incredibly popular all around the world as a "romantic story". Similarly a lot of the American rom-coms involve some sort of cheating and they are wildly popular in other parts of the world.

Its not wokeism the issue, its the decrease in artistic quality of movies overall, helped partly by the ideology over craft spirit and the laziness from rentier and extractive studios.
by Liftyee | 2026-02-20 08:32:11+00:00
Neat article. I used to daily drive a ZSA Moonlander but it got unwieldy with desk space taking notes on my laptop as well. Recently tried it again, and some of my muscle memory is still here - though all the second layer shortcuts I've forgotten. In particular, what the lesser used keys on the thumb cluster map to.

If I was coming back to a smaller keyboard, I doubt I would even know where to find punctuation.
Show HN: Nvshmem from Scratch – RDMA, GPUDirect, and GPU Networking Demystified
by crazyguitar | 2026-02-20 08:32:15+00:00
I wrote a guide that walks through building a minimal GPU-initiated networking library from the ground up. It covers RDMA transport with libfabric on AWS EFA, PCIe topology-aware GPU-NIC placement, GPUDirect RDMA via DMA-BUF, CUDA IPC for intra-node NVLink transfers, and the symmetric memory model that ties it all together. Each section includes working code and benchmarks.