MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aorloff | 2026-02-19 02:20:28+00:00
Ah yes. The mythical brand value.

Let me give you the counterpoint that is increasingly hard to ignore :

You can reach the same users on search and social that the Superbowl will give you and if you can convert them more efficiently, where should your $10m go ?

The newfangled wisdom is that customers are at least as effective branding as the Superbowl
by slopinthebag | 2026-02-19 02:20:57+00:00
That there is variance in energy expenditure both within a population and within a person over time doesn't mean that a caloric deficit doesn't work. It just means that using a single scalar value (which is usually a gross estimate) to drive your caloric intake is a poor approach.

The body has means to regulate it's energy expenditure to maintain homeostasis, and in some people it can be a hundreds of kcal difference. But if you're trying to lose body fat on a 10% estimated deficit and fail, the conclusion shouldn't be that a 20% deficit will also fail.
by CalvinBuild | 2026-02-19 02:21:27+00:00
That’s a really good framing. I agree the driver was real-world operator endurance (military/industrial), not consumer preference. In those contexts, “fatigued operator misses something” is a real failure mode, so readability/comfort gets treated like performance.

Also +1 on photoreceptors. The rods/cones split and sensitivity shifts in low light are a big part of why certain wavelengths and lower absolute luminance can feel disproportionately readable at night. I’m less confident that “slow reaction” is the main fatigue reducer (persistence trades off smear vs flicker/visibility), but the broader point about temporal characteristics affecting comfort is spot on.
by karussell | 2026-02-19 02:21:52+00:00
That was a nice project. Gave GraphHopper some visibility :)

OpenCage did an interview with one of the creators Raphael Reimann:

https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/135637030948/open-geo-int...

btw: 2019 moovel kind of merged together with FreeNow (formerly mytaxi) which was recently aquired by Lyft...
by alexpotato | 2026-02-19 02:22:50+00:00
> but they managed to convince developers for their platform to stick to their guidelines rather than reinvent the wheel

This attention to detail and "one integrated system" leads me to my favorite MacOS story:

- Windows and Linux machines would always DHCP for IP addresses

- MacOS would see if you had connected to the network before and just reuse the old IP you had under the assumption that is was probably still valid

- This worked most of the time and if you turned on a Mac and Windows laptop at the same time, the Mac would have a working IP first

As someone pointed out, this was probably one of the reasons why MacOS users would often say it just "felt better" than Windows. The fact that Mac owned both hardware AND software and treated it as a holistic system led to an overall better user experience.
by pndy | 2026-02-19 02:23:54+00:00
Both Apple and Microsoft had interface guidelines documentation for years and while Cupertino was able to kept their software pretty much unified visually through the years, Redmond was and still is less consistent in applying such rules [1].
In period between Vista and 7 there was a really dedicated community (Aero and later Windows Taskforce) who tried to give Microsoft hints where polish the Windows environment only to see their efforts being largely disposed with Metro introduction.

Apple had to pursue the literal new shiny thing because their AI endeavors backfired - it's all a distraction which also didn't work as they expected. In the all of critical comments I liked one that replied to me here on HN, where user compared Liquid Glass to pouring a corn syrup over the interface.

Operating systems for mainstream users are mostly complete so companies have to focus on visual aspects of their products much more. This is obviously nothing new but watching that WWDC25 I was really amused how these people were disconnected from real world, how marketing side has dominated usability of Apple products. For me that was the actual reality distortion field in use.

Bulky, rounded interface become popular shortly after flat style become dominant in our digital life. Liquid Glass is really close to Gnome's Adwaita, Microsoft also tends to follow similar style. I can't bring the source but it was pointed out that rounded interface and graphics overall are giving some level of comfort, a sense of "safety" unlike than anything sharp and "spiky". This seems to be related to the bouba-kiki [2] effect.

[1] - https://full.pr0gramm.com/2024/08/23/7c0cbd6101844c44.png
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect?useskin=vect...
by 0xGhostInAJar | 2026-02-19 02:23:58+00:00
Java was chosen because it offers a strong balance for this project in terms of portability, ecosystem maturity, and development velocity.

Rust would absolutely be a strong candidate for a security-focused tool like this. However, Java provides mature cryptographic APIs and straightforward cross-platform distribution via a single JAR.

C and C++ offer performance and control, but they introduce additional complexity around manual memory management and long-term maintenance. For this project, working in a managed runtime helps reduce certain classes of memory-related bugs.

Python is very productive and has excellent libraries, but for a file-heavy encryption workflow the performance characteristics and stronger static typing of Java are preferable.
by xmcp123 | 2026-02-19 02:24:00+00:00
I have never had a non wtf moment talking to an apple software engineer at a bar.

I can recall one explaining to me in the mid 20 teens that the next iPhone would be literally impossible to jailbreak in any capacity with 100% confidence.

I could not understand how someone that capable(he was truly bright) could be that certain. That is pure 90s security arrogance. The only secure computer is one powered off in a vault, and even then I am not convinced.

Multiple exploits were eventually found anyway.

We never exchanged names. That’s the only way to interact with engineers like that and talk in real terms.
by gerdesj | 2026-02-19 02:24:01+00:00
My LE experience (post HTTP-01 and now DNS-01) - its a bit of a palava. I don't have to open port 80 which is nice for ... security audits but gains zero security benefit.

I have a PowerDNS server running locally with a static IPv4 address via NAT and I have created a DNS domain and enabled dynamic DNS updates from certain IPv4 addresses with a pre-shared key.

For each cert you need a DNS CNAME pointing to my DNS domain in a specific format. Then we have to get to grips with software to do the deed. acme.sh is superb for !Windows. simple-acme is fine for Windows. I still setup each one by hand instead of ansible/Zenworks/whatever because I'm a sucker for punishment and still small enough for now.

DNS-Persist-01 is not something I think I will ever need but clearly someone does.
by nz | 2026-02-19 02:24:24+00:00
Not only that, but in Russian, the equivalent word for verb "work" (as in "go work" or "do work"), is "rabotay", which is derived from the word "rab" which is the word "slave". So "to work" is literally "to slave", in Russian (and quite a few slavic languages). An English speaker may categorize this as a linguistic anachronism, but a slavic speaker would categorize this as linguistic honesty.
by raincole | 2026-02-19 02:24:46+00:00
You know multinational brands sell sweeter products in the US than in other countries?

It's not that all the rest of the world has sugar tax or something. It's customer profile.

[0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32576300/
[1]: https://www.itiger.com/news/1184332557
by LeFantome | 2026-02-19 02:25:26+00:00
>It’s truly remarkable they made something with such staying power

What has had the staying power is the API because that API is for an operating system that has had that staying power. As you hint, the macOS of today is simply the evolution of NeXTSTEP (released in 1989). And iOS is just a light version of it.

But 1989 is not all that remarkable. The Linux API (POSIX) was introduced in 1988 but started in 1984 and based on an API that emerged in the 70s. And the Windows API goes back to 1985. Apple is the newest API of the three.

As far as languages go, the Ladybird team is abandoning Swift to stick with C++ which was released back in 1979. And of course C++ is just an evolution of C which goes back to 1972 and which almost all of Linux is still written in.

And what is Ladybird even? It is an HTML interpretter. HTML was introduced in 1993. Guess what operating system HTML and the first web browser was created on. That is right...NeXTSTEP.
by fathermarz | 2026-02-19 02:25:37+00:00
I tried the demo session and said “tell me answer” and it gave me the solution to balancing a polynomial after repeating it a few times. Step by step it revealed the answer.

I do really like the feel of this though, and it’s an awesome idea. Maybe tighten up some short circuiting tricks that may fall under “tells me the answer”
by lurking_swe | 2026-02-19 02:27:34+00:00
Being able to read or write, if given an opportunity to learn, certainly IS a marker of intelligence. That’s not a very high bar to pass considering toddlers can usually read. But it’s obviously not the only way to measure intelligence!

You claim the smartest person you ever met couldn’t read or write. So what kind of smarts did this person have? Genuinely curious. A really good memory? Emotional intelligence? Extremely persuasive?
by techblueberry | 2026-02-19 02:27:55+00:00
Is Optimus real? I mean, Tesla FSD is inarguably pretty decent, but has Optimus even had like a public demo on the scale of almost anything Boston Robotics point out? Why is it so many robotics companies have robots flipping and dancing, and I think the last Optimus demo was like a year ago, it was serving drinks, and probably remote control operated?

Like even if it has had a demo, other companies have had like literally orders of magnitude more?
by crote | 2026-02-19 02:27:58+00:00
To an extent, yes.

However, men's clothing is generally rather shapeless, whereas women's clothing is usually quite figure-fitting.

Women also have a lot more variety in body shape: breasts are a thing, for starters, and there's a wide variety in which areas fat is primarily stored.

Is sizing an issue for men as well? Yeah, probably. But it is significantly worse for women.
by DrewADesign | 2026-02-19 02:29:25+00:00
Having a design background, I find it to be a hindrance to quickly creating work that meets industry standards for things like user flow, or communicating state or purpose of UI elements through placement. I’d likely find it quite useful doing low-level bare metal stuff because I don’t have much experience doing that, but my output would probably be substandard from an expert’s standpoint.

It’s really great at making us think we’re better and more productive than we really are.
by cyber_kinetist | 2026-02-19 02:30:10+00:00
Not a bad choice... since Minecraft Java edition only supports desktops, they don't have to deal with the abysmal Vulkan drivers on mobile.

Though I thought a company large as Microsoft would have the resources to build a cross-platform RHI with the most stable API available for each platform (DX12 for Windows and Metal for macOS)...
by skoocda | 2026-02-19 02:31:02+00:00
I have a degree in EE (2016) and am doing mostly ML engineering with a considerable amount of SWE tasks in my day-to-day.

Of my graduating class, very few are designing hardware. Most are writing code in one form or another. There were very few jobs available in EE that didn't underpay and lock you into an antiquated skillset, whether in renewables/MRI/nuclear/control etc.

We had enough exposure to emerging growth areas (computer vision, reinforcement learning, GPUs) to learn useful skills, and those all had free and open source systems to study after graduation, unlike chip design.

The company sponsoring this article is a contributor to that status quo. The complete lack of grassroots support for custom chips in North America, including a dearth of open source design tools or a community around them, has made it a complete non-starter for upskilling. Nobody graduates from an EE undergrad with real capability in the chip design field, so unless you did graduate studies, you probably just ended up learning more and more software skills.

But the relentless off-shoring of hardware manufacturing is likely the ultimate cause. These days, most interesting EE roles I see require fluency in Mandarin.
by bunderbunder | 2026-02-19 02:31:32+00:00
It is, and that’s part of what I loved about it. But it’s also the kind of trick that can quickly become a source of chaos on a project with many contributors and a lot of contributor churn, like we tend to get nowadays. Because - and this was the real point of Dijkstra’s famous paper; GOTO was just the most salient concrete example at the time - control flow mechanisms tend to be inscrutable in proportion to their power.

And, much like what happened to GOTO 40 years ago, language designers have invented less powerful language features that are perfectly acceptable 90% solutions. e.g. nowadays I’d generally pick higher order functions or the strategy pattern over method swizzling because they’re more amenable to static analysis and easier to trace with typical IDE tooling.
by caseyohara | 2026-02-19 02:31:53+00:00
> If it does that, it doesn't matter where it came from.

Personally, it matters to me quite a lot where art comes from, especially music. I have a hard time "separating the art from the artist". If I find out a musician is a creep/abuser/rapist, I can't enjoy their music anymore.

This belief obviously isn't widespread given artists like Michael Jackson, Chris Brown, R. Kelly, and Jimmy Page are still wildly popular. But I assume I'm not alone in this.

As for AI music, it's hard for me to imagine an "AI Musician" ever becoming very popular because I reckon most humans want some human-ness in their music. And I think if an existing artist ever put out AI music as their own, they'd lose some fans pretty quickly.
by cyrusradfar | 2026-02-19 02:33:06+00:00
I think we're relatively aligned. But you're sharing another chicken & egg problem of whether the algorithm (and engagement with it) is driving the design of the feeds or the other way around.

Arguably, the initial design was a shot in the dark and they're approaching some local maxima with data-driven design trying to improve metrics that we probably all agree aren't the best for our mental health or wellbeing.

Nice chat, apologies if my response was off-putting. It was intended to be self-deprecating humor.
by Cider9986 | 2026-02-19 02:33:15+00:00
It is an undeniable fact that the small bag of Trader Joe's Peanut Butter Cups are the best chocolates. The chocolate is dark and satisfying, the peanut butter tastes like real, salted roasted peanuts, and every bite has a perfect chocolate to peanut butter ratio.

One thing to note is that the large plastic container contains different cups than the less economical plastic bags. The bulk cups have less salt, have worse chocolate, and are a step down from the bags.
by kristianp | 2026-02-19 02:33:16+00:00
Recent model released a couple of weeks ago. "Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture, it selectively activates only 11B of its 196B parameters per token". Beats Kimi K2.5 and GLM 4.7 on more benchmarks than it loses to them.

Edit: there are 4 bit quants that can be run on an 128GB machine like a GB10 [1], AI Max+ 395, or mac studio.

[1] https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/running-step-3-5-flash...
by KomoD | 2026-02-19 02:33:50+00:00
No, it's not because of PayPal. You can verify with a card, and stolen (or virtual) cards are cheap and easy to get.

Even if you do the PayPal way and pay $5, that's still better specs and lasts longer than what you get with a $5 VPS, because the trial credit is $200 for a few months (or if you go the commonly abused method: GitHub student, you can get $200 for a year).
by strken | 2026-02-19 02:35:13+00:00
As a dude who is 6'7" with a 35" waist (34" in brands that do vanity sizing) and an inseam that can handle a 34" even if it's not quite long enough, I agree that it's tough. One of the more annoying problems is that the MT shirt size doesn't seem to exist where I shop and LT flares outwards at the bottom. At least it's pretty easy to get a shirt taken in.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-19 02:35:33+00:00
>As a person in that cohort,

Me too.

>We are the worst generation.

Nah.

>Pulled the ladder up on those after them.

It was only the ones that voted themselves infinite wealth and got it, IOW only a handful of boomers by comparison to all the rest.

When you do the math the vast majority of people over 65 have assets that are dwarfed by a halfway decent tech employee, after only about 5 years of employment.

Which is neither better nor worse, if everything went south right now you still couldn't say whether the retiree of 65 or the hard-working 25-year old would make it until they were 70 or not without running out of "runway".

This is by deign no matter how you vote.
by pndy | 2026-02-19 02:35:46+00:00
The early packages could really mess up Windows - especially on non-English versions. Later on there were some really good ones around like XPize or Vize for XP and Vista respectively.

Theming Windows was something I always appreciated but that ended by the time I've got 7. Instead I've opted for making workflow bit more smoother with some additional programs like Launchpad and small GKrellM-like sidebar.
by Gigachad | 2026-02-19 02:36:35+00:00
Its only a problem for online shopping. In store you can simply grab multiple sizes and see which one fits best. Many online stores try to give multiple measurements of the clothes but even then it's extremely difficult to predict how it will look on you.

Online shoppers seem to solve this issue by just buying multiple items and returning the ones that don't fit. After which the retailer throws these returns in the bin.
Show HN: Ottr – one-click human approval links for scripts, CI, and AI agents
by ed1ted | 2026-02-19 02:37:43+00:00
Automations, CI jobs, and AI agents often need a human “yes” at the last step. Most solutions require bots, dashboards, or auth flows that feel heavier than the problem.

I built Ottr to make this a primitive.

Ottr gives you a signed, expiring approval link you can generate from any script. When the link is clicked, the process continues. No accounts. No UI.

Flow:

• Script or agent requests approval → gets a one-time URL

• URL is sent to a human (email, Slack, SMS, etc.)

• Human clicks → script resumes (via polling)

This is early and deliberately minimal. I’m trying to validate whether “approval links” are a useful building block, or if people already solve this in a better way.
Show HN: An asset management platform built with Kotlin, Ktor, and libvips
by dmaiken | 2026-02-19 02:37:59+00:00
I've seen throughout my career that asset management is full of separate tools but rarely a unified solution. Existing solutions focus on transforming content but not really other aspects of managing it or they're focused on marketing content. Content ends up in s3 or some block storage but massaging content, storing references and metadata are generally built in house or delegated to Cloudflare or Imgix. I built a self hosted dockerized platform that manages all of this for you.

Konifer provides a zero-state integration where the path is the key. No need to create a "profile_content_id" (although you can still do it that way), your client can just reference /users/123/profile. It has a powerful Path Configuration (in the docs) that lets you configure what each path can do, the variants it can generate, when they should be generated (on-demand or eagerly), LQIPs, allowed content types, redirect URL templating, cache control, and more.

It supports most major image formats with plans for SVG, TIFF and BMP (legacy format but I think libvips bundles the encoder for it).

I built the API and configuration to enable someone to mold Konifer to fit their domain model and query patterns (see query selectors in the docs).

Both the code and API is designed to be what Spring Boot is not. It's explicit and assumes nothing. I try to avoid meta programming and reflection. Any annotations I use are backed by a compiler plugin. I've marinated in the waters of Spring for way too long and I had to get out and see what Kotlin is like when you eschew Java conventions. Perhaps I'm just a child revolting and the adults in the room are chuckling at my petulence.

This is definitely pre 1.0. I have a large roadmap but unfortunately it's on paper at the moment. I'll work to get it into GH soon. I am currently working on some performance improvements that i hope to have done in the next week. I'm also going to get an ARM image built soon too.
by monooso | 2026-02-19 02:38:13+00:00
The specific agent is irrelevant. This is related to a broader personal opinion regarding LLMs and language choice.

Before we continue, the following opinion comes with several important caveats:

1. It only applies to paid professional work. If it's a hobby project, choose whatever makes you happy.

2. It ignores the strengths and weaknesses of different languages. These may outweigh any LLM-related concerns.

3. This is my opinion today. I _think_ it will survive longer than the next LLM cycle, but who knows these days.

4. May contain nuts.

Okay, that's the ass-covering dispensed with, on to the opinion:

If the choice is between a language which is "LLM friendly" (for want of a better phrase) and one which is not, it is irresponsible to choose the latter.
by crote | 2026-02-19 02:38:41+00:00
Lightweight rowing is pretty much dead, anyways.

It was originally introduced to give countries with shorter people a chance to compete (as rowing depends a lot on height), but in practice it mainly resulted in promising candidates who didn't quite make the cut for heavyweight being forced into eating disorders.

Lightweight rowing has been cut from the olympics already, so to a lot of organisations it has lost its relevance. There are still world championships, but I bet it is only a matter of time before it'll disappear there as well.
by alexgarden | 2026-02-19 02:39:29+00:00
Yep... fair question.

So AIP and AAP are protocols. You can implement them in a variety of ways.

They're implemented on our infrastructure via smoltbot, which is a hosted (or self-hosted) gateway that proxies LLM calls.

For AAP it's a sidecar observer running on a schedule. Zero drag on the model performance.

For AIP, it's an inline conscience observer and a nudge-based enforcement step that monitors the agent's thinking blocks. ~1 second latency penalty - worth it when you must have trust.

For both, they use Haiku-class models for intent summarization; actual verification is via the protocols.
by LeFantome | 2026-02-19 02:40:08+00:00
> Objective-C was created because using standards is contrary to the company culture

Objective-C was actually created by a company called Stepstone that wanted what they saw as the productivity benefits of Smalltalk (OOP) with the performance and portability of C. Originally, Objective-C was seen as a C "pre-compiler".

One of the companies that licensed Objective-C was NeXT. They also saw pervasive OOP as a more productive way to build GUI applications. That was the core value proposition of NeXT.

NeXT ended up basically taking over Objective-C and then it became of a core part of Apple when Apple bought NeXT to create the next-generation of macOS (the one we have now).

So, Objective-C was actually born attempting to "use standards" (C instead of Smalltalk) and really has nothing to do with Apple culture. Of course, Apple and NeXT were brought into the world by Steve Jobs