MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wolrah | 2026-02-20 06:33:21+00:00
> Almost everyone seems to think the one with "real-looking" knobs and front panel "sounds better", "sounds more like the real synth", "has better filters" and so on than the flat design one, even though the DSP code and control ranges are identical between the two.

I mean, you know that objectively there is no difference, so to me this would seem like a good filter for what part of your userbase isn't worth listening to their opinions on sound quality. Sort of like "audiophiles" who insist that their $4000 gold plated power cables make things sound better. If you're just trying to shamelessly sell them something you dive in full force, if you actually care about making an objectively better product you give their opinion the lack of respect it deserves.

> If you don't want to use knobs, what would you use instead?

Sliders. Spinners. Anything that can be cleanly interacted with using the inputs available on a computer. Knobs are wonderful in the real world. Virtual knobs I'm operating with a mouse or touch input (screen or pad) suck.

I love all the knobs on my eurorack gear but I hate having to interact with the virtual knobs on the emulated forms of them in VCV Rack. Especially if they don't have clear markers on them indicating position. I own multiple MIDI controllers that are more or less just a bank of knobs specifically to make these things usable.
by khafra | 2026-02-20 06:33:22+00:00
Rice's Theorem says you cannot predict or control the effects of nearly any program on your computer; for example, there's no way to guarantee that running a web browser on arbitrary input will not empty your bank account and donate it all to al-qaeda; but you're running a web browser on potentially attacker-supplied input right now.

I do agree that there's a quantitative difference in predictability between a web browser and a trillion-parameter mass of matrixes and nonlinear activations which is already smarter than most humans in most ways and which we have no idea how to ask what it really wants.

But that's more of an "unsafe at any speed" problem; it's silly to blame the person running the program. When the damage was caused by a toddler pulling a hydrogen bomb off the grocery store shelf, the solution is to get hydrogen bombs out of grocery stores (or, if you're worried about staying competitive with Chinese grocery stores, at least make our own carry adequate insurance for the catastrophes or something).
by zuntaruk | 2026-02-20 06:33:41+00:00
Yeah, and that's the take I assumed to hear based on what was said.

However, for something like ARM and the use case this particular device may have, in reality you would _want_ (my opinion) to be on a more rolling release distros to pick up the updates that make your system perform better.

I'd take a similar stance for devices that are built in a homelab for running LLMs.
by worthless-trash | 2026-02-20 06:34:31+00:00
I must be mixing up my details, but I did think it was one of the first gen cheese graters.

I did have it booting Linux before upstream officially supported it. I remember using patches from infradead

You may very well be correct, Maybe it wasn't EFI, however they absolutely did ship an update that broke my existing installs, until upstream linux shipped an update, so your memory aligns more than mine does.
by nandomrumber | 2026-02-20 06:34:36+00:00
> data that you share with Soundcloud.

I’m not in a position, nor do I have the skills, to fully validate exactly what I’m agreeing to. Let us assume that what I’m sharing is merely my app usage data: what I listen to, my likes, follows, comments, usage patterns, etc.

They share this data with 954 “partners” - what exactly does this mean? What other data do those organisations have? Who do they share it with?

I don’t think the average user has any chance of fully understanding what they’re agreeing to.
by sciencejerk | 2026-02-20 06:34:44+00:00
we have routers that you can monitor traffic on

Most traffic is encrypted with HTTPS unless you can root every single device you own

we have microphone use indicators on mobile, and I would imagine it would be pretty clear if an app was uploading audio with even very basic monitoring tools.

Complicated smartphone OS, firmware, drivers might have bugs allow overrides of visual indicators.

Companies have also been known to secretly eavesdrop and not tell users before (Apple + Siri https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-approves-95-million-app...)
by dasil003 | 2026-02-20 06:34:53+00:00
I sort of agree the random pontification and bad analogies aren't super useful, but I'm not sure why you would believe the intent of the AI CEOs has more bearing on outcomes than, you know, actual utility over time. I mean those guys are so far out over their skis in terms of investor expectations, it's the last opinion I would take seriously in terms of best-effort predictions.
by apublicfrog | 2026-02-20 06:36:52+00:00
> That was always kind of a cruel attitude, because real people's emotions were at stake.

I agree, but there was an implicit social agreement that most people understood. Everyone was anonymous, the internet wasn't real life, lie to people about who you are, there are no consequences.

You're right about the blend. 10 years ago I would have argued that it's very much a choice for people to break the social paradigm and expose themselves enough to get hurt, but I'm guessing the amount of online people in most first world countries is 90% or more.

With Facebook and the like spending the last 20 years pushing to deanonymise people and normalise hooking their identity to their online activity, my view may be entirely outdated.

There is still - in my view - a key distinction somewhere however between releasing something like this online and releasing it in the "real world". Were they punishable offensed, I would argue the former should hold less consequence due to this.
by Dig1t | 2026-02-20 06:37:29+00:00
Because they are an American company which benefits from all of the advantages of this country, and indeed would not exist at all without this country's people. They rely on the tax incentives, stable society, culture, cities, infrastructure, and PEOPLE of this country. It's a company founded by Americans in the USA, they have reaped the benefits of everything that comes from this country.

Do you think that Apple could or would have been founded in India? or China? Or Brazil? Obviously not. It's obviously the product of this country.

Is your argument that since Apple makes money in other countries that they should transcend nations and become their own super-national entity? That they should not have to follow the rules or even try to benefit their home country?

At the end of the day that is what's happening. These mega corps have basically usurped the power of nations and made their own rules. They have changed the immigration system to give themselves the power to import cheap labor at the expense of the country that allowed them to exist in the first place. We as workers are saying that we should use the power of government to push back against this practice.
by tasuki | 2026-02-20 06:40:21+00:00
Right, the agent published a hit piece on Scott. But I think Scott is getting overly dramatic. First, he published at least three hit pieces on the agent. Second, he actually managed to get the agent shut down.

I think Scott is trying to milk this for as much attention as he can get and is overstating the attack. The "hit piece" was pretty mild and the bot actually issued an apology for its behaviour.
by bigiain | 2026-02-20 06:41:18+00:00
I initially read this wrong as "Almost every infrastructure decision I make I regret after 4 years", and I nodded my head in agreement.

I've been working mostly at startups most of my career (for Sydney Australia values of "start up" which mostly means "small and new or new-ish business using technology", not the Silicon Valley VC money powered moonshot crapshoot meaning). Two of those roles (including the one I'm in now) have been longer that a decade.

And it's pretty much true that almost all infrastructure (and architecture) decisions are things that 4-5 years later become regrets. Some standouts from 30 years:

I didn't choose Macromind/Macromedia Director in '94 but that was someone else's decision I regretted 5 years later.

I shouldn't have chosen to run a web business on ISP web hosting and Perl4 in '95 (yay /cgi-bin).

I shouldn't have chosen globally colocated desktop pc linux machines and MySQL in '98/99 (although I got a lot of work trips and airline miles out of that).

I shouldn't have chosen Python2 in 2007, or even worse Angular2 in 2011.

I _probably_ shouldn't have chosen Arch Linux (and a custom/bastardised Pacman repo) for a hardware startup in 2013.

I didn't choose Groovy on Grails in 2014 but I regretted being recruited into being responsible for it by 2018 or so.

I shouldn't have chosen Java/MySQL in 2019 (or at least I should have kept a much tighter leash on the backend team and their enterprise architecture astronaut).

The other perspective on all those decisions though, each of them allowed a business to do the things they needed to take money off customers (I know I know, that's not the VC startup way...) Although I regretted each of those later, even in retrospect I think I made decent pragmatic choices at the time. And at this stage of my career I've become happy enough knowing that every decision is probably going to have regrets over a 4 or 5 year timeframe, but that most projects never last long enough for you to get there - either the business doesn't pass out and closes the project down, or a major ground up rewrite happens for reasons often unrelated to 5 year old infrastructure or architecture choices.
by gammalost | 2026-02-20 06:41:54+00:00
I do not buy the whole ergonomic portion for most split keyboards. It feels like a justification after the fact.

That said I used to use a lily58 and for me it was great. I have a lot of papers, notes and books on my desk. A small easily movable keyboard meant that i could have something between the keyboard halves, writing and reading without issue
by oreally | 2026-02-20 06:41:58+00:00
The "slows progress" part has some bits of truth in it. This is coming from a from-young bilingual chinese/english speaker. Chinese is harder to learn, centus paribus, all things being equal (especially regarding exposure).

English has 26 characters you can put in a buttoned keyboard. You recurse upon these letters to create new words & meanings. Chinese has what, a thousand? And you'd have to create a stroke system first if you don't have hanyu pinyin. Recursing Chinese characters has problems too, the chinese word for 'good', when split to it's sub-characters represent different meanings.

There were also some Chinese historians that specifically pointed out the chinese language was part of the cause of their worst slices of history despite the chinese having invented gunpowder and whatnot first. They also noted chinese was confined to the elite, who made the language even more complex (in contrast to other civilizations), during certain dynastic periods. Today, the chinese government are trying to simplify the language.

I get that there is pride in people's native languages, but they'll repeat the same mistakes if they don't recognize the weaknesses. It's a bitter pill to swallow.
by MostlyStable | 2026-02-20 06:42:17+00:00
"there isn't a single source worth citing" is not my claim. It's that the field has a very high amount of highly politicized dreck and it can't be _generally_ trusted. I'm sure there are good citations. But one can't know if any particular citation is a good one without diving into the details (probably while having some degree of subject matter expertise), and any randomly selected article is more likely than not to be bad. As such, most people should not take the existence of a citation as proof of very much since it is more likely than not to be borderline useless. Especially given that the worst, most politically motivated articles (again: in both directions) are likely to be the ones that tell the strongest stories and have the least nuance and are therefore likely to be the most often cited.

This is an area where lay people should stay out of it, and should _definitely_ not be making strong claims like "documented, empirical fact" based on a shallow reading of someone else's summary of the literature.
by anonym29 | 2026-02-20 06:42:28+00:00
How confident or certain are you of what CSME or PSP or some code in TrustZone is doing? How certain are you that not a single piece of software on your machine, be it in the kernel, userland, drivers, is performing some type of surreptitious communication with CSME or PSP or program running in TrustZone?

Do you know for sure whether PSP or CSME has ever done DMA, or fingerprinted stack/heap allocation patterns and timing, or inspected the contents of your disk (after FDE was done being decrypted, of course), to evaluate whether common packet capture software is installed, or even whether it's currently running?

Detecting spyware is one thing. Detecting surreptitious nation-state spyware that behaves differently when it's being observed is a different challenge entirely.
by stinkbeetle | 2026-02-20 06:43:08+00:00
> The key thing to understand is that Europeans want clear rules around hate speech, online harassment and such.

Do they? Or is it being pushed upon them? And why is it "the key thing" here?

> Thus lawmakers are acting to find laws which encapsulate these.

I suspect it has been the reverse, the ruling class desperately wants those powers and if the common people are now in favor of them it is more than likely because of intensive campaigns from their governments and corporations to change their minds.

> In Germany, we have some simple ones surrounding using Nazi symbols and speech. These rules generally work well in our civil law context. Civil law usually is rather broad strokes and there might be cases where something injust happens which requires tuning laws.

Some laws existing does not mean some other laws won't be unjust. Or that legislated laws will always be right and not require "some tuning".

> If you come from a common law context the whole idea might seem strange.

The different systems of law don't seem all that strange to me at least, but the thread you are replying to is discussing censorship in the European nation of the UK.

Further, what we are discussing involves executive police powers (intimidation, arrests, compiling lists), as well as legislated laws, so it is not really just some quirk of common law at all.
Show HN: ESP32-S3 probe – a UART "flight recorder" with auto frame decoder
by octablock | 2026-02-20 06:43:20+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a small UART analyzer using an ESP32-S3 as a cheap probe.
It taps the target’s TX at 921600 baud and streams raw bytes to the PC over USB CDC.

To make it robust and easy to resync, the S3 wraps data into a tiny binary frame:
'A''N' | type | seq16 | timestamp32 | len16 | payload,
then COBS-encodes it with 0x00 delimiters.

On the PC side (Python/Tkinter), the UI shows:
- RAW hexdump + throughput graph + health stats (seq gap / overflow)
- LOG/TEXT views (extract printable ASCII runs)
- Record/Replay (.anlog) for offline reproduction
- AUTO parser: scans magic bytes and brute-forces CRC variants for unknown inner frames

This started as a personal debugging bridge between firmware and host,
and helped me catch dropped chunks, burst patterns, and protocol mistakes
without a logic analyzer.

Repo:
https://github.com/choihimchan/linkscope-bpu-uart-analyzer

I’d love feedback on framing, replay formats, or parsing heuristics.
Thanks!
by Wilder7977 | 2026-02-20 06:44:01+00:00
77.500 channels which make any money. Now plenty of those make a handful of dollars per month.
Also, 77k worldwide.

I am not going to deny that YouTube (and all social media) created new markets. But how is this not an argument that shows that when N people suddenly do some activity, only a tiny minority is successful and gains some market share?

If tomorrow a product that is made by 3 companies will see competitors by 10000 1-man operations, maybe you will have 30 different successful products, or 100. 9900 of those 10000 will still be out of luck.
I

YouTube is not an example of a market that being exposed to a flood of players gets shares somewhat equally between those players or that allows a significant number of the to survive with it. Nor is twitch or any of the other platforms.
by lll-o-lll | 2026-02-20 06:44:06+00:00
>> Almost nothing in the world is used globally.

??? I’ve worked in this software game for over 20 years. I’m yet to experience this “no need to worry about the globe”. I think you have the fallacy of thinking local experience is general experience.

There is a very large amount of b2b software out there that is serving multi-nationals of all types. Perhaps it is surprising, but there’s a large number of software solutions that aren’t that big, but still have customers in all the 4 corners.
by SkiFire13 | 2026-02-20 06:46:03+00:00
> Every organization I’ve ever witnessed eventually ends up with some kind of struggle with AWS’ insane organizations and accounts nightmare.

What are these struggles? The product I work on uses AWS and we have ~5 accounts (I hear they used to be more TBF) but nowadays all the infrastructure is on one of them and the other are for some niche stuff (tech support?). I could see how going overboard with many accounts could be an issue, but I don't really see issues having everything on one account.
by ggm | 2026-02-20 06:46:19+00:00
Build for battery swap.

Needs more info on the % of consumed energy contributing to forward flight fuel vs electric, and MTOPS limits for safe landing.

Does any of the fuel burn contribute thrust directly or is it all post turbine and the fan is the predominant thrust? (Not that it matters)

Fuel consumption in flight reduces landing weight. Battery weighs the same landing and take off. Harder landing costs.

What about an imputed hybrid ? Reduced fuel burn not no fuel burn?
by donatj | 2026-02-20 06:46:19+00:00
Back at a job I had in ~2008 we built a library to convert an Excel spreadsheet into a fully functional web based configurator. I've talked about it here previously[1].

I have always thought that it was a missed opportunity that we'd never reused it nor turned it into any sort of SaaS. It seems to me like such an obvious and easy way to let your clients define their own business logic without having to maintain it yourself.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20793043
by shswkna | 2026-02-20 06:46:55+00:00
I do not understand the downvotes.

It is a rational response to bureaucratic excesses worldwide in public procurement.

It is a plea to more common sense, to more down to earth thinking and decisive action in the public sphere.

This is not a call to ignore processes. But it is a call for civil servants to respect that they are exactly that. In service, and their ambition should be to do it well and efficiently.

The downvotes are an expression of those that think civil servants should be protected from such sentiment.
by kuratkull | 2026-02-20 06:46:56+00:00
I'm a occasional hobbyist maker and i've used Autodesk Fusion, Solid Edge, OpenSCAD and other niche parametric programs, but always felt FreeCAD was too complex. But I really wanted it to work for me because it's FOSS and 100% offline. So with the new FreeCAD 1.1 RC I found an hour long tutorial and dove in.
(1.1 is supposedly much easier to work with)

After doing the tut I can say that 1.1 is very nice, i can uninstall Fusion and Solid Edge finally :)

The guide i followed, no relation to it whatsoverer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxxDahY1U6E
by khafra | 2026-02-20 06:47:16+00:00
It told him "this is what our religion says we should do" without any kind of weird prompting, role-playing, or persona-shifting beyond using a different language.
As a westerner, you may regard athiests with suspicion, or even contempt, but you've at least heard them speak publicly. From a culture where most haven't, hearing an authoritative voice which can perfectly cite support for any point it's making, how could it not have a huge potential for radicalization?
by polyglotfacto | 2026-02-20 06:47:37+00:00
> When a friend asked me to convert a large, thorny data set, I downloaded it, cleaned it up and made it pretty and easy to explore. In the past I would have charged $350,000

> (..) it implies a product manager, a designer, two engineers (one senior) and four to six months of design, coding and testing. Plus maintenance.

What I find interesting is that ten years ago the author could have written: our intern spent the weekend at the office and ended-up creating 350k of billable work.

Such as statement would have been instantly ridiculed as unprofessional, but somehow with AI it works.

Shows Jaron Lanier is right when saying that AI makes people adjust themselves to a lower level of intelligence(or something along these lines).

> People don’t judge A.I. code the same way they judge slop articles or glazed videos. They’re not looking for the human connection of art. They’re looking to achieve a goal. Code just has to work.

Yes indeed. And what the author leaves aside is that for code to work, it requires some level of conceptual integrity beyond that which vibe coding can offer.

He also forgets to mention that the future is not either we keep building slow software by hand, or we go full vibe code, but that there is also the option of ( a new kind of?) professionals using AI to be more productive, while ensuring output is up to standards.

> It might fail a company’s quality test, but it would meet every deadline.

This brings us back to the intern frantically coding over the weekend. This problem is as old as software itself, it is just compounded by AI being even faster than a frantic human coder, but it's not new. The industry could have thrown quality standard out of the window long before LLMs came around.

I also dislike how the author seems to imply that quality software requires all this bureaucracy. I mean, what about open source for example?

> the direct descendant of NeXT’s software is what’s running on Macs and iPhones in 2026. In software, sharp change is to be avoided at all costs. The risk is just too high.

I think here he got it backwards again. At least half of the reason people are willing to spend a premium on Apple products is because the software just works, and that is because it is based on a strong foundation going back all the way to when Jobs decided to spend all his cash on building the best computer.

Some additional thoughts at https://medium.com/@polyglot_factotum/on-what-ai-does-not-di...
by johnthedebs | 2026-02-20 06:47:56+00:00
IMO (re zoom behavior):
if you make a new tab, it should add a new tab as normal and stay zoomed in. the tab bar (of the currently zoomed in panel) would still be at the top while zoomed in, and workspaces still appear to the side

if you make a new split (or navigate splits), it would zoom you back out (contract the panel) and just split/navigate the way it normally would
by dasil003 | 2026-02-20 06:48:14+00:00
Yeah I think being annoyed by software is far more prevalent than wishing for more software. That said, I think there is still a lot of room for software growth as long as it's solving real problems and doesn't get in people's way. What I'm not sure about is what will the net effect of AI be overall when the dust settles.

On one hand it is very empowering to individuals, and many of those individuals will be able to achieve grander visions with less compromise and design-by-committee. On the other hand, it also enables an unprecedented level of slop that will certainly dilute the quality of software overall. What will be the dominant effect?