MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by budududuroiu | 2026-02-17 16:00:02+00:00
> Second, that capital is trapped in an institutional arrangement that charges enormous fees to match the performance of a simple index fund, while the money deployed through these intermediaries actively harms the communities pensioners live in: buying up their housing, closing their hospitals, bankrupting their local employers, gutting their newspapers.

This is the same argument that Ann Pettifor has about how the poor allocation of pension funds is because "it’s much easier to make money from gambling and speculating than it is from investing in the land on the one hand, in the broader sense of the word, or investing in labor"

https://annpettifor.substack.com/p/on-pensions-and-the-globa...
by jascha_eng | 2026-02-17 16:00:02+00:00
idk I haven't really hit the point with any llm that it comes up with useful abstractions on its own unless those abstractions have been in the training data.

E.g. imagine building a google docs clone where you have different formatting options.
Claude would happily build bold and italic for you but if afterwards you add headings, tables, colors, font size, etc.
It would just produce a huge if/else tree instead of building a somewhat sensible text formatting abstraction.

Tbf I wouldn't actually know how to build this myself but e.g. bold and italic work together but if you add a "code block" thing that should probably not work with font color and putting a table inside that also makes no sense.

Claude might get some of these interactions intuitively correct but at some point you'll have so many NxM interactions between features that it just forgets half of them and then the experience becomes sloppy and crashes on all edge cases.

The point of good software engineering is to simplify the matrix to something that you can keep arguing about e.g. classify formatting options into categories and then you only have to argue and think about how those categories interact.

This is the kind of thing LLMs just aren't really good at if the problem space isn't in the training data already => doing anything remotely novel. And I haven't seen it improve at this either over the releases.

Maybe this kind of engineering will eventually be dead because claude can just brute force the infinitely growing if/else tree and keep it all in context but that does not seem very likely to me. So far we still have to think of these abstraction levels ourselves and then for the sub-problems I can apply agentic coding again.

Just need to make sure that Claude doesn't breach these abstractions, which it also happily does to take short cuts btw.
by stinkbeetle | 2026-02-17 16:00:11+00:00
Right, so my question is why did those enormous unemployment surges happen without the same kind of tariffs that Trump has?

I think the true answer is that nobody really knows what pieces are in play let alone how they all interact -- very few economists predicted the housing crash. So when you see lists of things like this, who knows? It looks like throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks.
by ferguess_k | 2026-02-17 16:00:21+00:00
Being a grown up man with a family and a kid, I gradually care less and less about my economical "social identity". It is not exciting at all. I bring bread to the table for the family. I am among the backbone of the society i.e. people who pays the largest amount of tax proportional to their income, while receiving very little benefit from the government.

Why do I even want this identity? I have to wear this hat simply because we living in a modern feudal world.

Now come back to the "social identity" defined in the article -- "computer programmers". I do care about this identity, but as all identities, like tags, you gotta beautify it a bit -- you have to attach some meaning to it. Without the personal meaning, you handle the power of definition to other people, who naturally don't care about you.

The tag I created for myself is "Kernel Programmer", initials in capital letters. My motto is "There are programmers, and there are system programmers, and ultimately there are kernel programmers" and I want to put it on my table in print. Don't get me wrong though, my work has nothing to do with kernel programming. It is not system programming either. It is even more abstract (and boring) than your usual FE/BE programming. But I do kernel programming as a hobby, and as a hobby I'm my own master and I'm willing to apply the most stringent standard to myself, which I'll never do the same to my work BTW.

And who can say that I'm not a kernel programmer even when it is just the XV6 kernel? Who can say that I'm not serious about kernel programming when I'm ready to write as many tests as I can imagine for a very early Linux kernel?

Life is meaningless and I have to create meanings out of the void. That's it.
by gymbeaux | 2026-02-17 16:00:32+00:00
As with many systemic issues in the U.S., it boils down to "publicly traded company must have highest profit possible so line on chart goes up". As much as I dislike FAANG companies in general for all their anti-worker efforts, I can't honestly blame them for making decisions that look good on the balance sheet. If I am a company, and I can choose to hire 10 U.S. engineers for $200k a pop, or 10 H-1B engineers for $100k a pop, I'm going to pick the H-1B engineers. Every H-1B or green card engineer I've worked with in-office has been extremely skilled, so I wouldn't even feel like I was "getting what I paid for" hiring them over U.S. citizens.
by nradov | 2026-02-17 16:00:56+00:00
Ban companies from owning other companies? How would that work exactly?

Private equity is a convenient whipping boy for ignorant, low-information HN users who don't understand the basics of how finance works. You can certainly find examples of destructive or unethical behavior if you dig deep enough. What you don't see in the news are all the cases where PE saved companies that would have otherwise gone bankrupt.
by luke5441 | 2026-02-17 16:01:47+00:00
The correct analogy is IMO the railway mania.

LLM research will go back to (government funded) research labs with government funded supercomputers. All AI investment will need to be written off.

Running the LLMs the research generated will of course be possible, e.g. via AWS bedrock or alternatives. Initially there will be no "flat rate" subscriptions like currently, those will come once the prices are low enough further out.
Running the LLMs is a low-margin business not justifying high multiples.
by kolektiv | 2026-02-17 16:02:12+00:00
I think what leads to poor mental health is varied - poverty is definitely one cause, presumably one which is lessened in this case. I completely agree with you that there are more than two alternatives, but society seems unwilling/unable to consider any of the more radical.

You could frame those visitors to the Taj Mahal as victims, but that takes quite a narrow and short-term view of value to them. Would the Taj Mahal be as pleasant a place to visit if it were in an even more unequal and precarious society than it is? We all pay for things that don't directly benefit us through taxation (usually). The childless pay for schools, the car-less pay for roads, but we benefit from the society that having them creates. It seems hard to say that those visitors to the Taj Mahal would not benefit from being in a more prosperous and sustainable society.
by munk-a | 2026-02-17 16:03:06+00:00
It'd be difficult to ban what we commonly describe as private equity (a.k.a. PE firms) without banning the private (a.k.a. random people) from being able to hold equity. Someone smart might be able to ban the kind of investment vehicles that have become the bane of modern productivity but we do still need some mechanism to allow investment.
by sly010 | 2026-02-17 16:03:09+00:00
> chosen to use fear and intimidation to help sell the agenda of the big tech CEOs who, in turn, have somehow managed to use coal-fired GPUs to capture society’s output and sell it back to us, while converting a significant portion of the economy into an expanding envelope of hot gas

I work for a very big tech company and I have no one to share this with.
by nunez | 2026-02-17 16:03:25+00:00
I don't think an alternative exists. Reddit was very unique. The last great BBS (in a sense) that non-Internet natives "got".

Before astroturfing on Reddit at scale was possible, it was an extremely reliable place to get perspectives from real people about loads of things. It's still useful for this purpose, but the same level of trust isn't there.

Now that social networking a la short-form video is "it" right now, I'm not sure if something text-based will thrive again like Reddit did. (People have been trying to make Lemmy the thing, and it's less popular than Mastodon.)
Show HN: Kremis – Deterministic memory graph for AI agents (Rust)
by M2Dr3g0n | 2026-02-17 16:03:30+00:00
Hi HN — I built Kremis, an experimental deterministic memory substrate for AI agents.

I was tired of "black-box" memory where you can't trace why an agent "remembers" or "hallucinates" something. Kremis is an attempt to fix this by using a deterministic graph engine instead of probabilistic embeddings for core state.

Key features:

- Zero Hidden State: Every query result is a concrete path in a graph. You can audit exactly why the AI reached a conclusion.
- Strict Determinism: Same input leads to the same graph state. No randomness or floating-point drift in the core logic.
- ACID Reliable: Built on redb for crash-safe persistent storage.

How to use it:
It ships as a Rust library, a CLI/HTTP API, and an MCP Server. You can plug it directly into Claude Desktop or Cursor to give your AI assistants a verifiable memory.

Development was heavily AI-assisted, and I'm sharing it today to get technical feedback from the Rust and AI community on the architecture.

I'd value your thoughts on:
1. Does a deterministic graph feel like a viable path for long-term agent memory?
2. How can I improve the query ergonomics for complex traversals?

Thanks for any feedback!
by epistasis | 2026-02-17 16:03:47+00:00
> Larry Summers warned against “moral hazard lectures” and demanded SVB depositors be made whole immediately in 2023, months after calling student loan relief inflationary and unfair. Moral hazard for borrowers, bailouts for banks. Not lost on the public.

I can't believe I'm about to say something that could be construed as a defense of Larry Summers, but here goes: bank depositors are not engaging in risky behavior, they are putting cash in a bank. SVB did not get bailed out, it failed.

And as some of who supports the student loan forgiveness, yes, it is slightly inflationary but I think the benefits out weigh the inflationary effects.

Combine this with the "need" for nuclear (a perfectly cromulent but excessively expensive power source which has cheaper zero-carbon options), in the first paragraph, these comments that are not about the main topic severely undermine my ability to trust the rest of the essay.

The lesson to myself is to be narrow when I write, so as not to bring in a bunch of other positions that also need to be defended.
by ASalazarMX | 2026-02-17 16:04:02+00:00
I guess we can support open hardware projects like RISC-V, and homegrown chips. DIY chips will be expensive and very limited at first, so hopefully hobbysts will prioritize efficiency while they get better.

Fortunately we won't ever see a shortage of monitors and input devices, because then how would we consume the rent-a-remote-desktop services.
Show HN: Cai – AI actions on your clipboard, runs locally (macOS, open source)
by soyasis | 2026-02-17 16:04:13+00:00
I've spent a lot of time copy-pasting and switching between apps to summarize text, create events, proofread emails, look up addresses — always the same follow-up steps after copying.

So I built Cai. It sits in the menu bar. Press Option+C, it detects what you copied and shows relevant actions. Ships with llama-server (Ministral 3B) so it works out of the box, or connect Ollama/LM Studio if you already use them.

Free and open source. Would love feedback on what content types or actions to add next.
by ogimagemaker | 2026-02-17 16:04:28+00:00
What struck me most is the distinction between programming as an activity vs. programming as an identity.

I've been a programmer for 15+ years, now running engineering teams. The transition forced me to confront this exact identity crisis - am I still "a programmer" if I spend more time reviewing PRs, designing systems at the whiteboard, and coaching junior engineers than writing code?

What I've realized: the craft I fell in love with - understanding systems deeply, reasoning about tradeoffs, building elegant solutions - that doesn't require typing code. It's a way of thinking.

The social identity issue is real though. When I was actively coding, I had opinions on frameworks, war stories from production fires, and the satisfaction of shipped features. Now my "war stories" are about organizational design and hiring. Different tribe.

Maybe the healthier framing is: programming is something I do (and love), not something I am. That way, when the activity changes - whether due to AI, career evolution, or burnout - the core identity remains intact.

That said, I still sneak in side projects on weekends. The joy of making something work is irreplaceable.
by heisgone | 2026-02-17 16:04:42+00:00
I invite you to watch Mike Green videos. In short, the current market rely on inflow of money to substain itself. P/E ratio can't increase forever. There will be a tipping point and if most of the money is invested based on an algorithm, it can unravel rapidly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkL4oz8iEg4
by patcon | 2026-02-17 16:05:02+00:00
I love airloom[1], but since yours is open source, I'll try to make use of it next time, and contribute code or ideas :)

Fwiw, my use-case is simply throwing it on the TV as a screensaver of sorts for my nephews when someone they know is travelling. Just a way to make the world seem smaller!

It's led to some cute situations where their mom was flying almost directly over my dad living in our childhood home, and we video called him and directed him to the spot in the sky where my sister (his daughter) was flying over. Her kids were ecstatic. We live in interesting times

[1]: https://objectiveunclear.com/airloom.html
by delta_p_delta_x | 2026-02-17 16:05:25+00:00
Having more than just alphanumeric characters widens the domain of the password hash function, and this directly increases the difficulty of brute-force cracking. But having a such a small maximum password length is... puzzling, to say the least. I would accept passwords of up to 1 KiB in length.

With rainbow tables, even 11-character simple passwords like 'password123' can be trivially cracked, and as the number of password leaks show, not everyone is great at managing secrets and credentials.
by chrisjj | 2026-02-17 16:05:33+00:00
> This is a very appealing prospect. Like most folks I know, the barrage of emails is a vexing toad squatting on my life

An autoreplying parrot might seem like an attractive solution to email barrage ... until you realise it generates email barrage.

"Traveller's Rest" (1965) by David I. Masson.
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/travellers-rest/
by lotsofpulp | 2026-02-17 16:06:04+00:00
> bank depositors are not engaging in risky behavior,

Because the taxpayers (and all users of USD) repeatedly bail them out. I could define anything as not being risky if I knew taxpayers would bail it out.

More importantly, if there is no risk, what purpose does a bank serve? They’re a pretty bloated middleman if their sole purpose is to update a database to reflect incoming and outgoing cash flow. The government should be able to offer that service for free.
by nradov | 2026-02-17 16:06:08+00:00
Most pension funds aren't heavily invested in ETFs (or other mutual funds). They're usually large enough that it makes sense to invest directly in the underlying securities.

Everyone has a prediction about what will cause the next major financial panic. Personally I think it will be triggered by property and casualty insurers who have purchased a lot of bonds where the credit ratings don't accurately reflect the true default risk. But who knows, it could be something else.
by rKarpinski | 2026-02-17 16:06:08+00:00
> People tell me that I'm over training, which is ridiculous, because anything less would be easy and contravene the purpose of the workout.

This doesn't mean you aren't over training.

If it's strength training... Without knowing the specifics what you are describing sounds like too much volume (and training for hypertrophy). Lower reps (3-5) & higher weight will have more of a strength stimulus and be less taxing.

If it's cardio... you probably should be at a lower intensity and going for longer.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-02-17 16:06:14+00:00
> It's a bad approach, it can still see the / directory, and eventually you want to give it sudo privilege or act as the root user to get anything done. Yet I really wouldn't trust these things as far as I could throw them, there is no "undo" button in the terminal.

Nah, if it needs sudo then I need to be 100% involved. I'm running Claude in dangerous mode without any "protection" just bare metal, but it doesn't ever do sudo. Python solved this need by giving us virtual environments, which is just installing packages locally instead of system wide, so zero need for sudo.
by ForHackernews | 2026-02-17 16:06:25+00:00
I agree it's about trade-offs. I think MicroG - which provides dummy no-op implementations of Google Play tracking APIs, and allows you to select alternative Location Providers and notification backends - is a better option than running first-party Google software.

You're of course correct that we can't blame the system for choices made by users, but I do think GOS lulls users into complacency by focusing on the security angle only and encouraging users to install sandboxed GApps: https://grapheneos.org/usage#sandboxed-google-play
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-17 16:06:27+00:00
> However, they recently switched to investing in private equity funds and now they are getting much better returns, without all the pesky moral issues involved with it.

Investors Warn of 'Rot in Private Equity' as Funds Strike Circular Deals - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46380751 - December 2025

Once Wall Street’s High Flyer, Private Equity Loses Its Luster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364566 - December 2025

Private Equity’s Latest Financial Alchemy Is Worrying Investors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44891882 - August 2025

People Are Worried About Private Market Liquidity - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-06-10/peo... | https://archive.today/wJ3Uf - June 10th, 2025

Private Equity Fundraising Plunges Amid Struggle to Return Cash - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-27/private-e... | https://archive.today/hxvzb - May 27th, 2025

Private Equity Firms Hunt for Alternate Ways to Return Investor Cash - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-05-14/privat... | https://archive.today/6UzBk - May 14th, 2025

Unlocking a potential US$3.8 trillion opportunity for private equity firms - https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/financial-s... - December 16th, 2024
by juanisidoro | 2026-02-17 16:06:31+00:00
Hi HN, I built MAKO after watching Cloudflare's Markdown for Agents launch last week. They validated the problem — AI agents waste tokens on HTML bloat. But their approach is automatic conversion with no structure.

MAKO provides what's missing:

The Protocol:
HTTP content negotiation: agent sends `Accept: text/mako+markdown`, server responds with structured content. Standard HTTP, no new endpoints.

What Makes It Different:
- YAML frontmatter with metadata (type, entity, actions, semantic links)
- Optimized markdown body (not auto-converted — semantically curated)
- Embeddings in headers (CEF format, ~470 bytes) for pre-download relevance filtering
- Per-page granularity (vs llms.txt which is per-site)

The Numbers:
- E-commerce product: 47,000 HTML tokens → 320 MAKO tokens (93% reduction)
- Blog article: 35,000 → 670 tokens (98%)
- Landing page: 110,000 → 640 tokens (99%)

What's Included (Apache 2.0):
- Spec: https://github.com/juanisidoro/mako-spec
- JS SDK: `npm install @mako-spec/js` (parser, generator, validator, middleware)
- CLI: `npm install @mako-spec/cli`
- WordPress plugin (WooCommerce support)
- Free scoring tool: https://makospec.vercel.app/en/score

Complements Existing Standards:
- llms.txt (site-level guidance) → MAKO (page-level content)
- Cloudflare MD (auto-converted) → MAKO (semantically optimized)
- WebMCP (actions only) → MAKO (content + actions)
- Schema.org (for search engines) → MAKO (for AI agents)

Feedback welcome on the spec, scoring criteria, or anything else. Happy to answer questions.
by danans | 2026-02-17 16:07:00+00:00
> For me, it works like this: on the Owner user, because that’s the name of the main account created automatically with the system, I installed the Google Play Store along with Google Play services and GmsCompatConfig

Many people here might recoil at this: to go through the trouble of de-Googling your phone and then just install Google Play services and the Play Store, but the important part is that it is a choice they could make.

Pixels arguably the best choice option of mainstream phones (and iPhones have none), but both are a huge regression of choice compared to traditional personal computing platforms.
Show HN: Local Voice Assistant
by armcat | 2026-02-17 16:07:02+00:00
Several weeks ago I built a fully-local voice assistant demo with a FastAPI backend and a simple HTML front-end. All the models (ASR / LLM / TTS) are open weight and running locally, i.e. no data is being sent to the Internet nor any API. It's intended to demonstrate how easy it is to run a fully-local AI setup on affordable commodity hardware, while also demonstrating the uncanny valley and teasing out the ethical considerations of such a setup - it allows you to perform voice cloning.

Link: https://github.com/acatovic/ova

Models used:

ASR: NVIDIA parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3 600M
LLM: Mistral ministral-3 3b 4-bit quantized
TTS (Simple): Hexgrad Kokoro 82M
TTS (With Voice Cloning): Qwen3-TTS

It implements a classic ASR -> LLM -> TTS architecture:

1. Frontend captures user's audio and sends a blob of bytes to the backend /chat endpoint

2. Backend parses the bytes, extracts sample rate (SR) and channels, then:

2.1. Transcribes the audio to text using an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model

2.2. Sends the transcribed text to the LLM, i.e. "the brain"

2.3. Sends the LLM response to a text-to-speech (TTS) model

2.4. Performs normalization of TTS output, converts it to bytes, and sends the bytes back to frontend

3. The frontend plays the response audio back to the user

I've had a number of people try it out with great success and you can potentially take it any direction, e.g. give it more capabilities so it can offload "hard" tasks to larger models or agents, enable voice streaming, give it skills or knowledge, etc.

Enjoy!
by scuff3d | 2026-02-17 16:07:12+00:00
Ditto. In my experience it comes from our customer more then internally. They want all the risk reduction and stability provided by the old "waterfall" methods, but with the flexibility and speed of agile. But of course those two things don't mix. You need months if not years to plan a project the way they use to. We can't cram that amount of planning into a week.

Worse yet, once all those stories are made, they don't want us creating more. It takes a damn review board to get anything changed.
by epistasis | 2026-02-17 16:07:25+00:00
The point is that the ETF tracks its index, so what does it even mean to say ETF crash? Isn't that just the tracked stocks crashing? The ETF has little to do with it. But if there is some other risk that's warrants the ETF label, that's very very interesting and should be discussed! It would be little known or novel ETF mechanics.