MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lproven | 2026-02-03 17:49:47+00:00
> The Mac didn't exist in Europe

That is absolutely not a valid generalisation.

I worked on Macs from the start of my career in 1988. They were the standard computer for state schools in education here in the Isle of Man in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The Isle of Man's national travel company ran on a Mac database, Omnis, and later moved to Windows to keep using Omnis.

It's still around:

https://www.omnis.net/

I supported dozens of Mac-using clients in London through the 1990s and they were the standard platform in some businesses. Windows NT Server had good MacOS support from the very first version, 3.1, and Macs could access Windows NT Server shares over the built-in Appleshare client, and store Mac files complete with their Resource Forks on NTFS volumes. From 1993 onwards this made mixed Mac/PC networks much easier.

I did subcontracted Mac support for a couple of friends of mine's consultancy businesses because they were Windows guys and didn't "speak Mac".

Yes, they were very strong in print, graphics, design, photography, etc. but not only in those markets. Richer types used them as home computers. I also worked on Macs in the music and dance businesses and other places.

Macs were always there.

Maybe you didn't notice but they always were. Knowing PC/Mac integration was a key career skill for me, and the rise of OS X made the classic MacOS knowledge segue into more general Unix/Windows integration work.

Some power users defected to Windows NT between 1993 and 2001 but then it reversed and grew much faster: from around 2001, PowerMacs started to become a credible desktop workstation for power users because of OS X. From 2006, Macintel boxes became more viable in general business use because the Intel chips meant you could run Windows in a VM at full speed for one or two essential Windows apps. They ran IE natively and WINE started to make OS X feasible for some apps with no need for a Windows licence.

In other words, the rise of OS X coincided with the rise of Linux as a viable server and GUI workstation.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-02-03 17:50:21+00:00
I mean this is essentially the same situation anyone is in when they have vendor lock in, they know it's a problem, but it is always just not worth it to get out, only this vendor lock in is all vendors from a country lock in and now it is not just worth it but imperative, absolutely necessary.

And of course once you have gotten out of vendor lock in, you never go back. If you do go back to that vendor that locked you in before, because of some sweetheart deal, you make sure to set up all sorts of escape hatches so if you need to bounce quickly you can.

The vendor lock in of the EU to the US for so many things is being dismantled.
by tyre | 2026-02-03 17:50:55+00:00
As an American, this is awesome to see.

We should pay penalties for our abandonment of good faith global engagement. And economic damage really is the key to the heart of these United States of Three Corporations in a Trench Coat.

We’ve seen companies and CEOs paying millions in bribes to be close to the president. Now this aligns their financial interests with shifting our foreign policy. Not how it ought to work, but it’s the world we have.
by mc32 | 2026-02-03 17:51:02+00:00
One thing that annoys me is:

Why don’t kilobyte continue to mean 1024 and introduce kilodebyte to mean 1000. Byte, to me implies a binary number system, and if you want to introduce a new nomenclature to reduce confusion, give the new one a new name and let the older of more prevalent one in its domain keep the old one…
by jsheard | 2026-02-03 17:51:26+00:00
Because it means the CDN makes routing decisions based on the location of the DNS server, instead of the location of the user, and the DNS server may override the CDNs load balancing and failover logic by caching resolved IP addresses beyond the intended TTL. It might work okay depending on the DNS providers geographic distribution and how they implement CNAME flattening, but it also might not, and that's completely out of the CDNs control so they usually blanket advise against it.
by rectang | 2026-02-03 17:51:26+00:00
It's not open source, but up until a few years ago I used whereby.com for videochats.

Unlike the alternatives at the time from Google, Apple, etc., it didn't require an account for participants — I could just give them the meeting room URL. So although it wasn't open source, it at least didn't lock you into a network.

(Unlike you, I wasn't up for self-hosting.)
by tabemann | 2026-02-03 17:51:27+00:00
Learn how to program without AI. Learn about software engineering, including algorithms, data structures, software architecture and design, the lot. Work on projects entirely without AI, and once you have completed some projects, work on some more, also without AI. Continue until you have mastered software engineering.

Only once you can engineer and develop whatever you want _well_ use AI, as you will have to direct said AI to follow your design, understand everything the AI spits out, and clean up after the mistakes it makes -- things that require you to be able to program _better_ than the AI in the first place. Never make the mistake of thinking that the AI can come up with a worthwhile design for you.

Always remember that what AI produces fundamentally cannot be trusted as is -- generative AI 'hallucinates' by its very nature -- and that unlike code you written before yourself you won't truly understand what it is 'trying' to do off the bat. Sure, you may have written natural language directions for the AI, but natural languages are often ambiguous and often do not fully signal intent, so the AI may not have done what you actually intended for it to do.

Never think that quantity equals quality -- while generative AI may easily spit out reams of code, those reams of code will lack the fundamental quality of code you have hand-written yourself. Think of what the AI generates as if it were the output of a beginning junior developer chronically high on meth, with everything that entails.
by cedilla | 2026-02-03 17:51:37+00:00
You've got it exactly the wrong way around. And that with such great confidence!

There was always a confusion about whether a kilobyte was 1000 or 1024 bytes. Early diskettes always used 1000, only when the 8 bit home computer era started was the 1024 convention firmly established.

Before that it made no sense to talk about kilo as 1024. Earlier computers measured space in records and words, and I guess you can see how in 1960, no one would use kilo to mean 1024 for a 13 bit computer with 40 byte records. A kiloword was, naturally, 1000 words, so why would a kilobyte be 1024?

1024 bearing near ubiquitous was only the case in the 90s or so - except for drive manufacturing and signal processing. Binary prefixes didn't invent the confusion, they were a partial solution. As you point out, while it's possible to clearly indicate binary prefixes, we have no unambiguous notation for decimal bytes.
by whatrocks | 2026-02-03 17:51:39+00:00
Folio | Backend / Product Engineers | REMOTE (US) | Full-time | https://folio.co

Hotel procurement's a $400B industry still running on spreadsheets and phone calls (and faxes!). We're bringing world-class AI search, web automations, and payment infra to this massive space. Folio is a first-of-its-kind marketplace connecting hotels + restaurants with their hundreds of suppliers using our AI-driven concierge-buying, invoice processing, and agentic payments.

Open Roles:

Our 16-person team hails from Plaid, Square, Persona, Slack, and Cruise. We're fully-remote with a hub in San Francisco, NYC, and Durham, and we meet up quarterly at one of our 300+ hotel partners.

- Software Engineer, Product (Full Stack) • Build the marketplace and payments experience that hotel buyers and suppliers love: https://folio.co/jobs/software-engineer-fullstack

- Software Engineer, Backend • Scale our marketplace infrastructure, search, and payment systems: https://folio.co/jobs/software-engineer-backend

Tech Stack: Rails, React, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, AWS, Elasticsearch, DBT, Snowflake

We're at your service: https://folio.co/careers
by WorldMaker | 2026-02-03 17:51:50+00:00
Also "brainwashing" generally implies an efficacy that we didn't see in real world results. The generation raised on shows like Captain Planet don't seem that much more "eco-conscious" than those before or after that period of children's programming. If anything, villains from that show being elected to the highest offices in the US decades later seems to directly refute that it was anything like "brainwashing".

(ETA: Not to mention that the biggest takeaways from such shows was that individual action was sometimes more important than corporate or regulatory action, a message itself designed by the oil companies to avoid responsibility. If there was propaganda in those shows, it may not have been the heroes winning, but the idea that all we need are a few magic heroes rather than government regulations.)
Show HN: Whilst – A Space for Writing on the Web
by JonnyB-Ire | 2026-02-03 17:52:12+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on a small writing tool called Whilst.

It’s a space for writing on the web, designed to get out of your way. People use it for journals, photo posts, essays, and simple personal homepages.

You can start writing with just an email address. It’s free to use.

Link: https://whilst.app

Happy to answer any questions!
by giantg2 | 2026-02-03 17:52:17+00:00
How someone voted has almost no bearing on the dangers of tech. The dangers were there before the last election and none of the candidates had strong positions regarding tech privacy. Microsoft would still be doing what it has been doing regardless of the election outcome. I wouldnt hold my breath that a European Teams/Zoom replacement will have robust encryption and privacy protection based on all the backdoor stuff I've heard being pushed in some European countries.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-03 17:52:36+00:00
Edit: Almost done. I just wanted to see what LLM's might think of it. So wanted to see them (go wild?) [ie. without my bias of algolia api because I was (thinking?) of other ways too also a better thing was that I was procastinating with the implementation a bit] so pasted it.

It* decided that a better response was to lowercase the username fields and then lowercase the input.

I think I had overarchitected a solution and in hindsight, I thought that the idea of lowercasing usernames would've been slow but clickhouse is a beast too.

I think I was almost thinking the same thing too. Going to update the website with case sensitivity pretty quick.
by eknkc | 2026-02-03 17:53:13+00:00
They also banned me and honestly I can’t tell why. The only notable thing I did was to add codex as an mcp tool to claude code so I could ask it to run codex and have it review its code.

Nothing else. I did not use CC token in any other tool. Did not try to do weird stuff. Can’t tell what triggered the ban besides maybe that.
by avaer | 2026-02-03 17:53:15+00:00
> IMHO AI generated content should be treated the same way with how human generated content and I don't see the problem.

The problem is that AIs don't have rights. So you literally can't treat it the same.

If I "make" something in a way I'm not allowed to (e.g. copying), the law will go after me. If AI makes something I'm not allowed to, I can just say "whoopsie doodle", blame the AI, and there are no repercussions for anyone.
by pstrav | 2026-02-03 17:53:18+00:00
We are building AI agents for trades businesses (HVAC, electrical, plumbing).

We tested 13 providers on 100 real customer calls with:

- Background noise (vans, job sites, crying babies)

- UK regional accents (England North/South, Scotland, Ireland)

- Critical info: postcodes, addresses, phone numbers

- Variable turn length (1-5 words vs 16+)

Results: 2.5x performance gap

Best: Deepgram Flux (15.86% WER)
Worst: OpenAI Whisper (39.78% WER)

Interesting findings:

(1) Postcode recognition was hardest across ALL providers (50%+ WER).

(2) Regional variance was massive. Ireland accents destroyed most models (20-30% higher WER than Southern England).

(3) Short confirmations ("yeah", "ok") actually had worse WER than long explanations. Counter-intuitive but likely due to less context for the language model.

Full breakdown with graphs: https://x.com/pstrav/status/2018416957003866564

Context: We're Elyos AI (YC S23), handling 100k+ calls/month for trades businesses across the world.
by Ajedi32 | 2026-02-03 17:53:23+00:00
> How was it by accident?

I say by accident because high power capacity wasn't a design goal of Starlink, merely a side effect of deploying a communications network.

> My bad. So they're only short like 6 orders of magnitude instead of 9?

No, they're 1 order of magnitude off. (22 MW total capacity of the constellation vs your bar of 100 MW for a single DC.) Again, 3 years ago, using an inferior launch platform, without that even being a design goal.

> What's the latency like?

Starlink latency is quite good, about 30ms round trip for real-world customers on the ground connecting through the constellation to another site on the ground. Sun synchronous orbit would add another ms or two for speed of light delay.

Nobody has metrics on intra-satilite latency using the laser links but I have no reason to think it would be materially worse than a direct fiber connection provided the satellites aren't spread out too far. (Starlink sats are very spread out, but you obviously wouldn't do that for a data center.)
by Lerc | 2026-02-03 17:53:52+00:00
The main thing here would need standardisation is the environment in which the skill operates. The skill instructions are interpreted by the AI, any support scripts are. Interpreted by the environment.

You don't want to give an English description of how to compress LZMA and then let the AI do it token by token. Although that would be a pretty good arduous methodical benchmark task for an AI.
by nerdsniper | 2026-02-03 17:53:56+00:00
It doesn't, there's no singular optimal amount of over-provisioning. And that would make no sense, you'd have 28% over-provisioning for a 100/128GB drive, vs 6% over-provisioning for a 500/512GB drive, vs. 1.2% over-provisioning for a 1000/1024GB drive.

I can't find any NVMe's that are marketed as 512GB but actually have 500x10^9 bytes of usable space. I can, however, find some that are marketed as 500GB and have 500x10^9 bytes. I can also find 1TB NVMe's that are 10^12 bytes and others that are 2^40 bytes (Tebibyte).

500GB / 10^12 "TB" / 465 GiB: https://download.semiconductor.samsung.com/resources/data-sh...
by lenerdenator | 2026-02-03 17:54:04+00:00
1) Most US citizens don't care for what's happening right now. That's why there's people protesting while armed in major cities.

2) Continental Europe has shown a willingness to continue dependency on other countries in the face of far, far worse national behavior. NordStream 2 planned after the invasion of Georgia and was still under construction after Putin had invaded and annexed Crimea. Not "threatened" to do so, he had actually done it. There was a body count involved. So it's not too far off-base to think that despite all of the foolishness from the Trump administration, the US could seek some slack for its technology sector. It's not like you need Teams to keep your factories running and to avoid freezing to death in the winter, but that was the sort of integration with the Russians that Europeans were seeking to maintain while Putin was redrawing the map, at least until the Ukraine invasion, and even then, it took clandestine activity to permanently take NordStream offline.

People like Trump will almost certainly point at this and say that this shows Europeans to be allies of convenience, not true partners. People like him love to cry about double standards.
by marcuslima | 2026-02-03 17:54:05+00:00
Thanks! Yea it started as a bit of an anger management project. I am the absolute worst version of myself when forced to endure customer service calls.

1. The user (you) needs to provide it in the prompt for the call. I have ideas for being able to build memory context for each user so you wouldnt have to re-provide those details each time you want to make a call and instead pull it from memory bank, but thats not implemented yet.

2. So far I have actually never been called out for not being a human. I think thats in part because these people probably get a lot of pretty crazy calls and by comparison a slightly robotic over-the-phone voice has a lot of forgiveness. When you know, its easy to hear though. I did build it with Elevenlabs TTS to make the voice as natural as possible. Models have gotten much faster and so latency feels good, not outstanding

3. So this IS very interesting, I have to refine the system prompt extensively to get it to the right balance of objection handling without being weird and obviously non-human. It is very clearly on the side of the human, in fact in the NYT case it was initially told no but pressed ahead anyway. "I understand that, how do we move forward" "any other way we can resolve this" that kind of thing. Better still, customer service has a very high abr for hanging up the phone,so the persistency is very effective

Yes I think the API holds real potential. The space is busy, but I think there could be room for being the simplest possibel way to make a phone call programmatically. There would be less customization than a Vapi or Bland, but it would take 10 minutes to implement. Basically anywhere engineers experience automated workflows breaking because the real world requires a phone call. Voice probably wouldn't be core to these users business though, int hat case they'd want more control than we would offer.

Let me know if you have any issues trying it! Very curious to see how folks end up breaking it. We have a discord you can join here (https://discord.gg/2tn2ugXu) if you have any problems to troubleshoot (or email me!)
by happytoexplain | 2026-02-03 17:54:20+00:00
Good lord, arrogance and self-righteousness? You're blowing the article out of proportion. They don't say anything non-factual or unreasonable - why inject hostility where none is called for?

In fact, they practically say the same exact thing you have said: In a nutshell, base-10 prefixes were used for base-2 numbers, and now it's hard to undo that standard in practice. They didn't say anything about making assumptions. The only difference is that that the author wants to keep trying, and you don't think it's possible? Which is perfectly fine. It's just not as dramatic as your tone implies.
by euio757 | 2026-02-03 17:54:20+00:00
"built their own" wrapper yes (which is a very important piece of a end-to-end Zoom like product)

But you can see:

> Powered by [LiveKit](https://livekit.io/)

Fine since this is an open source product, but not full EU sovereignty of the software stack.

Livekit could at any time change their license and drop support for the free open-source version like so many products have done in the past.

If a EU entity forks it and maintains it, then that'd be end-to-end sovereignty IMO.
by firefoxd | 2026-02-03 17:54:31+00:00
After an acquisition, we are transitioning from google meet and slack, to Teams. I used to hate slack so much with their random features popping left and right and menus moving around. Oh I didn't know how good we had it.

Slack is a delight compared to Teams. And I'm not even alone in this, everyone is still using slack until it gets pried off our hands. So help me God anyone mentions Copilot one more time...
by tyre | 2026-02-03 17:54:37+00:00
The US hegemony has been a tremendous boon to the world. Yes, the US has done terrible things (lots in South America, Vietnam, genocide in East Timor, failed nation building and war crimes in the Middle East, support for genocide in Palestine, etc.) This isn’t to minimize that.

But the reality is that the US benefits immensely from free democracies with rules-based open markets and international order. Again, do we break that when it suits us? Absolutely. But America being selfish has been a positive outcome compared to, for example, more war in Europe.

Polls consistently show that people recognize the benefits of US hegemony while acknowledging that the US does it purely from self-interest.
by The_Fox | 2026-02-03 17:54:43+00:00
Location: Kelowna area, BC, Canada

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Nope

Technologies: Linux, Kubernetes, Helm, Docker, Terraform, SaltStack, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, Nginx, Python, Django, apt packaging, iptables, VPNs, TCP congestion control algorithms (more than I ever wanted to know)

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/foxmatthew/

Email: matt@tansen.ca

I seek contract platform engineering projects. I can help early stage startups set up simple infrastructure and CICD so founders can focus on PMF, or help established software companies with old infrastructure adopt modern tools and practices.

I'm also open to a full-time role at the right company.

I have 15 years of experience in startup software development and DevOps across web apps, cloud, and Linux networking. Six years of leadership in teams of up to 7 people. I have built infrastructure using Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean, and Linode.

Here are a sample of my accomplishments:

* Built a platform for hosting web apps using Kubernetes at a major cloud provider and taught engineers to operate and improve it. Introduced Terraform, Helm, and incident management processes. It operates in 4 regions and has about 250 total CPUs.

* Led a B2B SaaS company through their first SOC 2 Type II audit.

* Published and maintained the community Apt package for Helm, the Kubernetes package manager, which is downloaded more than 200,000 times per month.

* Created a system to control calls in Asterisk with AI-trained voice commands ("hey asterisk, dial extension 1") https://github.com/mattfox/asterisk-voice-control
by tizzzzz | 2026-02-03 17:54:49+00:00
I completely agree with your assessment—outside of programming and scientific research, recent LLM progress has been disappointing, and in some cases even regressive. The creative writing capabilities, once a highlight, now feel increasingly bland and generic, with long-form and nuanced storytelling suffering the most.

Ironically, as these models become more “safe” and commercialized, they often lose the spark that made them valuable for creative exploration in the first place. The focus on enterprise and mass adoption seems to be driving them toward mediocrity, at the expense of individuality and depth.
by simonw | 2026-02-03 17:55:07+00:00
I buy the theory that Claude Code is engineered to use things like token caching efficiently, and their Claude Max plans were designed with those optimizations in mind.

If people start using the Claude Max plans with other agent harnesses that don't use the same kinds of optimizations the economics may no longer have worked out.

(But I also buy that they're going for horizontal control of the stack here and banning other agent harnesses was a competitive move to support that.)
Show HN: Nomad Tracker – a local-first iOS app to track visas and tax residency
by gotzonza | 2026-02-03 17:55:47+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m full stack developer (formerly iOS) and I just launched Nomad Tracker, a native iOS app to help digital nomads track physical presence across countries for visa limits and tax residency.

Key idea: everything runs on-device.
No accounts, no cloud sync, no analytics.

Features:

- Calendar-based day tracking per country.
- Schengen 90/180 and other visa “runways”.
- Fiscal residency day counts and alerts.
- Optional background location logging (battery-efficient, never overwrites manual data).
- Photo import using metadata only (no image access).
- On-device “Fiscal Oracle” using Apple’s Foundational Models to ask questions about your own data.

I created this because other apps felt limiting and didn’t do what I needed. This app is visual, user-focused, and designed to make tracking easy and clear.

Happy to answer questions or discuss the technical tradeoffs.