MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by iivyvii | 2026-02-19 08:29:09+00:00
The Story Behind NxCode: From Concept to Production

Building NxCode wasn't just another weekend hackathon project. It has been a journey of months of dedicated engineering focused on solving the "last mile" problem in AI development.

While generating a UI with AI is now trivial, making that UI a functional, revenue-generating business is incredibly hard. Our small team of senior engineers spent countless hours architecting a proprietary SDK that handles the heavy lifting—auth, payments, and database schemas—so users don't have to. We iterated on our core orchestration engine multiple times to ensure the code it generates is not just syntax-correct, but production-safe and scalable.

We didn't just wrap an API; we built a comprehensive AI-native IDE from the ground up. This platform represents our deep conviction that the future of software isn't just about writing code faster, but about *delivering complete, business-ready applications instantly.* We poured our hearts into this to empower every builder to ship.
by nake89 | 2026-02-19 08:29:10+00:00
That's crazy. I'm already barely willing to pay $10/month on Github Copilot. A product I love. Best value for money.

If they pump it up to $200 (or to $20). I'll simply use crappier local model. It won't be as good. But I already own my gaming PC that can run local models, and electricity is cheap.
by ksec | 2026-02-19 08:29:13+00:00
In the old days, think Gmail, or before the "unlimited" marketing scam. People genuinely are smart enough to know they are doing something that they are not suppose to be doing. Even Pirating software, say Windows or Adobe. I mean who can afford those when they were young?

Things get banned, but that is OK along as they give us weeks or days to prep for alternative solution. Users ( Not Customers ) are happy with it. Too bad, the good days are over.

Somewhere along the line, no just in software but even in politics, the whole world on entitlement. They somehow believe they deserve this, what they were doing were wrong but if it is allowed in the first place they should remain allowed to do so.

Judging from account opening time and comments we can also tell the age group and which camp they are on.
by balamatom | 2026-02-19 08:29:48+00:00
Font rendering with the same hinting as the system you grew up with. Whitespace in the same proportions.

Can't learn an evolution of the UI paradigm if you subconsciously feel your eyes are working wrong.

Hence, the person afraid of the computer changing who was described upthread.

(I was entirely surrounded by such cases when learning computing. So it was a moral and emotional battle at every step besides the sheer figuring things out - on dated, semi-functional miracles of engineering.

Now consider how, them people somewhere who "keep changing da computah", it's their job. It's us, in fact. And we're more knowledgeable, better organized, and make more than the average user. Plus chances are we're an entirely different part of the globe now where we follow an entirely different culture from our consumers, so things with the baseline mutual comprehensibility are so-so at best.

And... that's always been the case? And it's what's been giving our computerphobe friends all the right to be afraid. What reason does a FAANG dev even have, to care about your Grandma's eyesight, user experience, or sanity? Or yours? They gotz plenty to care about already, as exhibited by all the thoughtful comments poured into this site.)
by RGamma | 2026-02-19 08:30:10+00:00
> For example an electrician takes like 7 years to become qualified

Using a similar playbook for what happened to SE (loads of good ~free info, bootcampification) you can drastically reduce the time to be economically useful, but that can only go for so long due to saturation. Especially residential electric work (or other trades) is no witchcraft that would require anywhere near several years of education/practice. And yeah, the legal system would have to cooperate, which will only happen when the pressure becomes high enough (see e.g. debates around "Meisterpflicht" in Germany).
by don_esteban | 2026-02-19 08:31:16+00:00
Can I have the good stuff you are smoking?

Ukraine domestic defense production has the slight problem of being continuously bombed, lacking manpower, reliable (or any!) electricity. Are you sure it is growing? Perhaps explosively...

Their largest and most competent army is mostly dead and maimed, they rely on catching unwilling men on the streets and herding them to the front. You believe 35k Russian casualties each month, and at the same time you believe Ukrainian official figures of 55k casualties overall, right?

European powers taking responsibility for supporting Ukraine by continuously arguing where/how should they get emergency funds to 'lend' to Ukraine, so its finances do not collapse within the next 2 month.

Man, how can you believe this nonsense?

Time does not favour Ukraine. It does not favour Russia (or Europe) either, it favours mostly China.
by bingobang | 2026-02-19 08:32:08+00:00
>derived from ColorForth

Shame it didn't keep the coolest part of colorForth - the colors!
You change the meaning of word by changing their colors (is it a a 'runtime' function, macro or number? green, cyan or yellow), and the when you input the colors you also let the editor in a sense pre-compile the code so the interpreter becomes insanely fast.

The colors are in reality a byte prefix that acts as an index into a jump table so hardly any interpreting needs to happen, almost like a half-jit'ed language.

Also uses a weird encoding for text instead of ascii - it's a variable sized shannon encoding to make the most frequent english characters take fewer bits, from 4 to 7 bits.

This is imo the real spirit of Forth - simplify, simplify, simplify, make it an exact custom fit for your needs, screw standards.
by ben_w | 2026-02-19 08:32:20+00:00
I suspect that, given people in EU are used to EU car prices, there's not going to be much willingness on the EU side to budge on cars (though the Chinese side may ask for it, of course, and should the EU get them there will be no going back given how much cheaper Chinese cars are).

If things get trade-war-y, American cars are way down the list of things the EU will care about finding substitutes for:

2024 US exports to EU were about $370bn: https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/europe-middle-east/europe...

Of which cars were $8.8bn: https://www.globalfleet.com/en/manufacturers/global/analysis...
by quimztech | 2026-02-19 08:33:24+00:00
Built this after getting surprised by my own AWS bills.

It connects to your AWS account with read-only credentials
and finds:
- Idle EC2 instances (under 5% CPU for 14+ days)
- Unattached EBS volumes
- Unused Elastic IPs
- Old snapshots 90+ days

Returns actual resource IDs and dollar savings per finding.
Free tier available — 50 scans/month, no credit card.

Would love feedback on what other resources to scan next.
by ddxv | 2026-02-19 08:33:46+00:00
Yeah, I noticed the heavy editing of the gala this year too and it was very disappointing. Even in tons of performances / dances where they really shouldn't have needed to there were obvious cinematic shots were not 'live' from the same recording. While for the robots I can imagine the pressure might have lead to editing a few takes, it really took away from the regular dancing performances and made it feel a bit more like watching a heavily edited music video.
by lesostep | 2026-02-19 08:34:02+00:00
Because collecting and gatekeeping vulns so you can attack other countries is bad manners.
If you look up some of the Snowden testimonies, it's implied USA at least had access to some 0-days at the past, but nobody admitted to it, because it just bad national politics.

Even if USA is doing dog-shit in politics now, openly admitting to collecting cyber-weapons (instead of doing it silently) is just an open invitation to condemnation
by saithir | 2026-02-19 08:34:07+00:00
I just don't find remembering an exact list of all of them a worthy information to keep in my brain. Maybe if I had a dozen, but between me and my wife we do read much more than that. I also don't remember all of the contents of my steam games list, because what's the point? I can always look it up quickly.

I did eventually solve my duplicate book problem by making ourselves a searchable list I can access remotely, so now I can just look it up when I'm at the store.

Being deliberate about obtaining them isn't even remotely related to any of that.

I'd imagine this is also more specific to them being physical items, since it's much easier and obvious to look up an ebook if you just look at a list of files wherever you keep them.
by epolanski | 2026-02-19 08:35:31+00:00
I've been implementing row polymorphism in my fork of Elm in order to support proper sum and substraction operations on unions, and it's far from trivial.

Example usecase: an Effect may fail with 2 types, but actually you have handled one/catched one so you want to remove it.

Elm-like HM systems handle fine, as you say it, row polymorphism mostly over records.

I'm not an expert in all of this, started studying this recently, so take my words with a grain of salt.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-19 08:36:27+00:00
The problem is the misconception of what libc is.

In traditional UNIX, there is no libc per se, there is the stable OS API set of functions and that's it.

When C was standardised, a subset of the UNIX API became the ISO C standard library, aka libc. When it was proven that wasn't enough for portable C code, the remaining UNIX API surface became POSIX.

Outside UNIX, libc is indeed a thing, because many of those OSes aren't even written in C, just like your language lists example, in those OSes libc ships with C compiler, not the OS per se, as you can check by diving into VMS documentation before it became OpenVMS, or IBM and Unisys systems, where libc is also irrelevant if using PL/I, NEWP, whatever.

Also on Windows, you are not supposed to depend on libc unless you are writing portable C code, there isn't one libc to start with. Just like everyone else, each compiler ships their own C runtime library, and nowadays there is also universal C runtime as well, plenty of libc choices.

If not writing portable C code, you aren't supposed to use memset(), rather FillMemory ().

Same applies to other non-UNIX OSes, you would not be calling memset(), rather the OS API for such service.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-19 08:36:36+00:00
In PRNGs there is a compromise between speed and the quality of their statistical properties.

So you must choose a PRNG wisely, depending on the intended purpose.

There are PRNGs good enough for any application, including those that use cryptographic mixing functions, but in many cases people prefer the fastest PRNGs.

The problems appear when the fastest PRNGs are used in applications for which they are not good enough, so the PRNG choice must be done carefully, whenever it is likely to matter.

With recent CPUs, the PRNG choice is much simpler than in the past. They can produce high quality random numbers by using AES at a rate only a few times lower than they can fill memory.

Because of this, the speed gap between the fastest PRNGs and good PRNGs has become much narrower than in the past. Therefore, if you choose a very good PRNG you do not lose much speed, so you can make this choice much more often.

Many kinds of non-cryptographic PRNGs have become obsolete, i.e. all those that are slower than the PRNGs using AES, SHA-2 or SHA-1, which use the dedicated hardware included in modern CPUs.

The non-cryptographic PRNGs that remain useful, due to superior speed, contain a linear congruential generator or a Galois field counter, which guarantee maximum period and allow sequence jumps and the ability to generate multiple independent random streams, together with some non-linear mixing function for the output, which improves the statistical properties.
by jansan | 2026-02-19 08:36:38+00:00
Of course the robots have been pre-trained and the movements are scripted, and nobody is claiming otherwise. But there must be a lot of autonomous balancing taking place. At one point you can see the robots adjusting their feet slightly different although they are all in sync, and that catapult does not look like its movement is exactly the same every time. It is just super impressive.

Does anyone remember when Honda's Asimo robot clumsily fell down the stairs during a demonstration[1] and we thought we were safe from a robot invasion by just moving to the upper floor? That was about 20 years ago.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mx6paHrnIE
by maxxmini | 2026-02-19 08:36:55+00:00
The Ebbinghaus decay approach is really interesting for agent memory. I've been working with a file-based memory system for a long-running AI agent (daily logs + curated long-term memory file), and the biggest challenge is exactly what you're tackling: knowing what to forget.

One thing I've found in practice: importance isn't always knowable at write time. Something that seems trivial today becomes critical context a week later. Have you considered a retrieval-based boost where accessing a memory resets or extends its half-life? That way naturally useful memories self-reinforce.

Also curious about the compression/merging strategy — how do you handle contradictory memories (e.g., "user prefers X" followed by "user now prefers Y")?
by maxxmini | 2026-02-19 08:37:00+00:00
Interesting concept. The gap between traditional SEO and AI visibility is real — I've noticed that structured, opinionated content with clear problem/solution framing tends to get cited by AI models much more than keyword-optimized content.

One signal I think matters a lot for GEO that traditional SEO ignores: specificity of claims. AI models seem to prefer content that makes concrete, verifiable statements over vague authority pages. Would be cool to see Potatometer check for that kind of content quality signal.
by souvlakee | 2026-02-19 08:37:07+00:00
For me personally, the question now is: when will I need to implement all the design solutions the OpenAI team has done, but for my personal pet project, which is on a completely different scale? I have FOMO. E.g, do I need that massive observability stack that any DevOps would be proud of, or are console logs okay? :/
by imtringued | 2026-02-19 08:37:45+00:00
The second video you've linked is fake in every aspect in regards to the robot.

The robot is floating above the ground.

The paddle is phasing in and out of existence.

The robot has a realistic human hand and uses it to hit the ball.

The robot randomly turns around mid-air near the end of the video.

The robot looks nothing like a Unitree robot.

Oh, how could I forget, the entire robot looks so obviously fake even when disregarding all of the above that I can't believe you're even trying to analyze anything in that video.
by uoaei | 2026-02-19 08:37:46+00:00
The thesis of this piece is effectively "causality is the inevitable destination of science" paired with the corrolary that "correlation is not causation". Statistics is a field with very limited insights. Once you apply causality to the mathematics of statistics (i.e. Pearl's do-calculus) you can actually make claims about the informational content expressed through recording events and facts of reality.
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-02-19 08:38:01+00:00
Ok, let's assume for today that age gating is the thing to to.

Requiring ID is not entirely the right approach here I think. You're forcing people to reveal PII for limited gain, and building systems you can't knock down later.

The EU is working on a zero knowledge proof system for exactly this purpose, but it doesn't quite seem to be ready for prime time yet.

https://ageverification.dev/Technical%20Specification/annexe...
by pro_methe5 | 2026-02-19 08:38:09+00:00
Use Claude Opus via Claude Code CLI (Anthropic's official tool) to build your own automation
assistant. You talk to Claude inside a Docker container — it writes scripts, sets up cron jobs,
posts to Slack. You disconnect, the scripts keep running. No API wrapping, no bot framework, no
TOS gray areas. For automated AI tasks, Claude generates scripts calling cheap models
(GPT-4o-mini). Zero pay-per-token Anthropic API costs — just your Max subscription used exactly
as intended.
by don_esteban | 2026-02-19 08:38:38+00:00
The EU as a whole is rich enough, the problem is that its the elites that are rich, not the ordinary citizens. However, the burden of support (via taxes and cutting welfare) will be places on ordinary citizens. Hence, the need to flame the war rhetoric. Still, there is no real support for forever war among EU citizenry.

Even if there is enough support for economic/material support of Ukraine, the matter of sending your man to die on the eastern front is an altogether different matter. Even Poland is not willing to do that. I mean, 'I am afraid of dying in a war, so I better go die in a war, to prevent that.'
by PLG88 | 2026-02-19 08:38:52+00:00
Embedding is an option, but tunnelers - https://netfoundry.io/docs/openziti/reference/tunnelers/ - and edge routers (which can front legacy services without modifying them) also exist.

The difference is architectural; Tailscale is a mesh VPN, whereas OpenZiti is an identity-first, zero trust overlay network. This makes OpenZiti service-centric and deny-by-default, not network-centric. Instead of “join a private network,” you get access only to explicitly authorised services — with no ambient reachability at all. Its also 100% open source. If you want a simple productised, SaaS experience, NetFoundry, the company behind OpenZiti provides that.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-19 08:39:42+00:00
Those kind of arguments is like posting news about people still dying while wearing seat belts and helmets, ignoring the lifes that were saved by having them on.

By the way, I am having these kind of arguments since Object Pascal, back when using languages safer than C was called straighjacket programming.

Ironically, most C wannabe replacements are Object Pascal/Modula-2 like in the safety they offer, except we know better 40 years later for the use cases they still had no answer for.
by decimalenough | 2026-02-19 08:39:44+00:00
China installed 295,000 industrial robots last year, more than the rest of the world combined, and has over 2M deployed total. China makes its own robots (57% indigenous) and its rate of robot deployment continues to grow year to year.

Meanwhile, the US installed 34,200, a decrease on the previous year, and virtually all of those were imported.

https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/global-robot-demand-...
by atoav | 2026-02-19 08:40:24+00:00
You could say how you produced the random numbers and which random numbers came out. What you can't do however, is then prove that you actually did that and only that and not for example re-rolled the dice till the results looked right to you.

But you have the same issue with a PRNG, just boiled down to the seed value. Disprove that I didn't chose seed 42 by random, you can't.

The only way to protect against this is registering the study with a third party beforehand and letting them dice out the numbers as soon as the hashed data is there.

By registering your plan beforehand, someone can check if you altered it to cherrypick or p-hack your results after the fact. By letting them chose the random numbers you protect against you rerolling the numbers when inconvenient. By letting them only see the hashed data you protect against them rerolling/altering based on their interest and against you swapping out data point indicies after the fact, since they can rehash the actual values and check if it matches their selection.

For many experimental designs this could be overkill, but registering studies is becoming more common in medical studies. I doubt they go as far as I described with the random numbers.
by kzahel | 2026-02-19 08:41:31+00:00
On Windows I noticed for my Tauri app I had to use this https://v2.tauri.app/distribute/windows-installer/#embedded-... (https://github.com/kzahel/jstorrent/commit/10cc1c53#diff-f61...) even on a new windows 11 install for the webview to work, but my app seems to work fine otherwise on all platforms (I only tested Ubuntu desktop though, ha).

Electrobun sounds really cool, glad to see there's more work done to enable cool desktop apps without Electron.
by whizzter | 2026-02-19 08:42:05+00:00
Structural subtyping yes, nominal subtyping is a bit pricklier.

As a developer I personally prefer structural subtyping, but structural subtyping is harder for a compiler to optimize runtime performance for.

Nominal sub-type hierarchies allows for members to be laid out linearly and member accesses becomes just an offset whereas a structural system always has the "diamond problem" to solve (it's hidden from users so not a "problem" but will still haunt compiler/runtime developers).

Now the kicker though, in practice nominal subtype polymorphism has other issues for performance on _modern_ computers since they create variable sized objects and cannot be packed linearly like monomorphic structures.

In the 90s when languages settled on nominal typing memory speeds weren't really an huge issue, but today we know that we should rather compose data to achieve data-polymorphic effects and singular types should be directed to packing.

Thus, most performance benefits of a nominal type system over a structural don't help much in real-life code and maintenance wise we would probably have been better off using structural types (iirc Go went there and interfaces in Java/C# achieves mostly the same effect in practice).
by 4gotunameagain | 2026-02-19 08:43:34+00:00
What is the most impressive is the robustness. Of course they are following a captured human routine, but they are facing so many disturbances from which they need to recover and keep following the desired trajectories, while under multiple constraints (movement ranges, not losing balance, etc).

You can see on the backflips that all robots landed quite differently, some with both knees on the ground, some with one, some with none. Yet all recovered gracefully and moved on to the next step of the choreography.

It is genuinely impressive, and scary.

Meanwhile in the west we are bickering like 10year olds.
by JR1427 | 2026-02-19 08:43:58+00:00
I'm a bit surprised about the fact that the somewhat related magnetic stirrer [1] never made it in to mainstream kitchens. I used these a lot during my PhD, and can imagine them being handy in the kitchen. I suppose one difference is that in the kitchen, liquids tend to be more viscous.

As I write this I realise that popping a small inedible magnetic bean in to food while cooking is a bit of a safety hazard, so that is probably why we don't see this at home. Although, you could have larger stirring beans, or other shapes, which wouldn't be a choking hazard.
--
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_stirrer
by jiggawatts | 2026-02-19 08:44:04+00:00
Literally just a join against a lookup table of alternate ISBNs. So the ISBNs in the reading list were first “expanded” with all possible titles, then they were matched to the books actually in the library.

The ISBN alternatives table was just groups with an integer ID shared by each group. My import process synthesised this from worldcat data, which was more messy.
by cedws | 2026-02-19 08:44:20+00:00
The reason I find this so egregious is because I don’t want to use Claude Code! It’s complete rubbish, completely sidelines security, and nobody seems to care. So I’m forced to use their slop if I want to use Claude models without getting a wallet emptying API bill? Forget it, I will use Codex or Gemini.

Claude Code is not the apex. We’re still collectively figuring out the best way to use models in software, this TOS change kills innovation.