MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bm3719 | 2026-02-19 20:39:31+00:00
It seems crazy and impossible now, but imagine this notion: Software should serve the needs of the user.

Software that does things the user doesn't want, like try to trick money out of him, waste his bandwidth, or fill his screen with unwanted ads used to have a name: Malware. We've redefined that term to mean when a non-BigTech firm does those things, but the definition used to be functional, not attributional.

RMS warned us of this day, and now it is here. You don't control your data or the code that operates upon it. That would've sucked in 1990, but since then, we've migrated our entire lives into that code/data. The degree to which it embodies your very existence is the degree to which you have lost control over your life, which for most of us is total. You lost that control but it didn't disappear; it is now owned by someone else, commoditized and exchanged, redirected and engineered. Enjoy the ride if you can, because you're just in the passenger seat.
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-19 20:39:44+00:00
It’s pressure from the anti gun obsessed nonprofits on the left like Everytown. Bloomberg has nowhere else to waste money and there are legislators willing to present bills authored by Everytown blindly. But in many cases gun control bills are known to be unconstitutional and pushed through anyways. It takes years for laws to be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and even if they are, states like Washington or California or Oregon will just pass the next Everytown authored unconstitutional bill with a slight variation.

The real fix is that we need to get rid of immunity for legislators. When they violate the civil rights of the constitutional rights of citizens through their actions, they must be held personally liable and must go to jail.
by samuelknight | 2026-02-19 20:39:45+00:00
https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

That info is from mid 2025, talking about models released in Oct 2024 and Feb 2025. It predates tools like Claude Code and Codex, Lovable was 1/3 current ARR, etc.

This might still be true but we desperately need new data.
Show HN: Emacs package that exports an org or md buffer as an ASCII tree
by Piprim | 2026-02-19 20:39:52+00:00
ascii-tree-export.el is a small package that exports an org-mode or markdown buffer as an ASCII tree into a dedicated buffer.
Useful for me to create a txt visual tree-structure directory (even it does not exist) with comments.

https://github.com/pivaldi/ascii-tree-export.el?tab=readme-o...
by halilhp | 2026-02-19 20:39:54+00:00
Every new Claude Code session starts from zero. Your AI doesn't remember
yesterday's 3-hour debugging session, the architecture decisions from last
week, or the approaches that already failed.

MemoTrail is an MCP server that gives your AI coding assistant persistent
memory. It automatically indexes every past conversation, embeds them locally
using sentence-transformers, and makes everything semantically searchable.

Setup is two commands:

pip install memotrail
claude mcp add memotrail -- memotrail serve

After that, you can ask things like "Why did we choose Redis?" and the AI
will find the relevant context from any past session — even months ago.

How it works:
- Reads Claude Code session logs from ~/.claude/
- Chunks conversations into meaningful segments
- Embeds with all-MiniLM-L6-v2 (~80MB, CPU only)
- Stores vectors in ChromaDB, metadata in SQLite
- Exposes 6 MCP tools (search_chats, get_decisions, save_memory, etc.)

Everything runs locally — no cloud, no API keys, no data leaves your machine.
MIT licensed.

Currently supports Claude Code. Cursor and Copilot collectors are on the roadmap.

I built this because I kept losing context between sessions. Would love feedback
on the approach and what features would be most useful.
by mullingitover | 2026-02-19 20:40:10+00:00
> hasn't done much to curb violent crime.

> they have to keep the boogeyman alive rather than admit that the policies have been a failure.

It's a documented, empirical fact that there is a marked correlation between common-sense gun laws and reduced rates of gun deaths.[1]

[1] https://everytownresearch.org/rankings/
by rolph | 2026-02-19 20:40:33+00:00
i think it can go further than that, such as circular scenarios, what portion of the item, is the part to worry about.

if a printing or milling job, or some combination of both, is split into many portions, until each portion is such a jigsaw puzzle, [perhaps literally] that it cant be filtered as its so non specific in form, that it could be anything.
by mothballed | 2026-02-19 20:41:09+00:00
I have no idea about CA but this is absolutely the case in NYC.[] Dexter Taylor is sitting in jail for a decade for making personal use firearms without a license. No other alleged criminal activity and they never even left his house. During trial, the judge said "the second amendment isn't allowed in my courtroom."*

His lawyer knows they are going to lose all the appeals in New York but basically he has to sit in jail for 3-4 years through the state court system until it can hit federal courts where there is a good chance his case will eventually get overturned.

[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dexter_Taylor

* Response to below (my comments are throttled): The argument/reference in his defense, not actual guns.
by halilhp | 2026-02-19 20:41:12+00:00
Hi HN, I'm the author. I built MemoTrail because I was frustrated with
losing context between Claude Code sessions. Every new session starts
from scratch — the AI has no idea what you discussed yesterday.

MemoTrail runs as an MCP server, automatically indexes your past sessions,
and makes them semantically searchable. It's completely local — no cloud,
no API keys.

Currently it supports Claude Code only, but Cursor and Copilot collectors
are planned. Would love to hear what features you'd find most useful.

Happy to answer any questions!
by sshine | 2026-02-19 20:41:41+00:00
> Testing is the one thing you would never outsource to AI

That's not really true.

Making the AI write the code, the test, and the review of itself within the same session is YOLO.

There's a ton of scaffolding in testing that can be easily automated.

When I ask the AI to test, I typically provide a lot of equivalence classes.

And the AI still surprises me with finding more.

On the other hand, it's equally excellent at saying "it tested", and when you look at the tests, they can be extremely shallow. Or they can be fairly many unit tests of certain parts of the code, but when you run the whole program, it just breaks.

The most valuable testing when programming with AI (generated by AI, or otherwise) are near-realistic integration tests. That's true for human programmers, but we take for granted that casual use of the program we make as we develop it constitutes as a poor man's test. When people who generally don't write tests start using AI, there's just nothing but fingers crossed.

I'd rather say: If there's one thing you would never outsource to AI, it's final QA.
by incrudible | 2026-02-19 20:41:43+00:00
The cost of "perfecting" an idea here is ruining the broader ecosystem. It is much much better for an API to be kinda crappy (but stable) for historical reasons than dealing with the constant churn and fragmentation caused by, for example, the fifth revision of that URL routing library that everyone uses because everyone uses it. It only gets worse by the orthogonal but comorbid attitude of radically minimizing the scope of dependencies.
by Jordan-117 | 2026-02-19 20:41:44+00:00
Killing legislators or physically threatening them into overturning the results. But siccing the mob was just a last-ditch move.

The main plan was sending fake electors with fraudulent certifications and counting on Pence to derail the formal vote count and accept the false slate through a fog of procedural confusion. The fact that Pence refused to go along with the plan and Trump resorted to physically threatening him and Congress doesn't change the fact that their plan was an illegal and fraudulent interference with the verification of the election based on knowingly false claims.
by carlosjobim | 2026-02-19 20:41:45+00:00
Oh, but don't you know? If our newspaper is on the same subscription as another newspaper which we don't like, then that means we agree with them in all their radical and dangerous opinions? No, no, no, people want to read only one newspaper, which tells them what to think and how to feel on every subject matter.

That's why streaming services also failed. Imagine Beatles and gangster rap and heavy metal being on the same music platform? Fans would never accept that!
by 8note | 2026-02-19 20:42:04+00:00
id guess the time til forst being able to make useful changes has dropped to near zero, but the time to get mastery of the code base has gone towards infinity.

is that mastery still useful as time goes on though? its always felt a bit like its unhealthy for code to have people with mastery on it. its a sign of a bad bus factor. every effort ive ever seen around code quality and documentation improvement has been to make that code mastery and full understanding irrelevant.
by apparent | 2026-02-19 20:42:18+00:00
Sorry to see the timing slip once again, now from March to April. I get that hardware manufacturing involves uncertainty and risk, but they've been off launching new products instead of getting these out the door.

The delay from December to April is pretty sizable, and it makes me take all of their current estimates with a huge grain of salt. After all, they might decide to launch a necklace between now and then!
by cedws | 2026-02-19 20:42:24+00:00
I worked on a project recently to organise my music and came across MusicBrainz. I wanted a reliable API to enrich my music with the proper metadata, but unfortunately the majority of my tracks weren’t in their database at all. Maybe the Anna’s Archive Spotify data will help there.

To me it makes the most sense to index music by its fingerprint. Releases, EPs, etc should just be pointers to that.
by autoexec | 2026-02-19 20:42:27+00:00
> If I were king for a day I’d make it so the government agencies somewhat regularly (say, every 5-10 years or so) would be subjected to significant budget cuts

It'd be better to audit them to make sure that the money was being used smartly and that those agencies were accomplishing what there were created for. Arbitrary cuts would mean that agencies that were well functioning and lean would be suddenly unable to do the job we've been paying them for and it could encourage them to push for more funding than they need just so that they can survive the random cuts every 5-10 years.

We don't need to intentionally cause a crisis that will impact the lives of Americans who depend on the services their taxes fund. There are smarter ways to identify waste and hold accountable any people mismanaging funds. Government shouldn't be run like business, but honestly I'd also question the wisdom of companies who acted that way.
by llbbdd | 2026-02-19 20:42:29+00:00
It's even sillier after looking into it. Of the 4 people listed that died the same date as the insurrection attempt, 1 was shot (already mentioned), 1 died of overdosing on meth, and the other two both were over 50 and had heart attacks. Not to say being exceptionally out-of-shape or meth-addled has zero demographic connection to the riot, but...
by piva00 | 2026-02-19 20:42:48+00:00
The bottleneck at larger orgs is mostly always decision-making.

Getting code written and reviewed is the trivial part of the job in most cases, discovering the product needs, considering/uncovering edge-cases, defining business logic that is extensible or easily modifiable when conditions change, etc. are the parts that consume 80% of my time.

We in the engineering org at the company I work for have raised this flag many times during adoption of AI-assisting tools, now that the rollout is deeply in progress with most developers using the tools, changing workflows, it has become the sore thumb sticking out: yes, we can deliver more code if it's needed but for what exactly do you need it?

So far I haven't seen a speed up in decision-making, the same chain of approvals, prioritisation, definitions chugs along as it was and it is clearly the bottleneck.
by sidrag22 | 2026-02-19 20:43:05+00:00
Whenever I see this particular "feature" being blocked, all I can think of is my own past personal usage of this feature. It was purely to listen to podcasts or whatever while in the car. So by default this feature should just work, and it should be: turn on the source and listen.

Instead its disabled to try to extract more revenue out of users, so my personal use case becomes a potential road hazard for people who didn't give in and instead are fiddling with their phone to ensure that it keeps playing.

Can't imagine this is even a moment of discussion in 2026 when making the decision to block something like this.

my current flow for this if i ever have the misfortune of only having youtube as a source, is to turn on the video, and face the screen away from me in the cup holder. So personally I've found what i consider to be a safe alternative.

Can't imagine younger drivers are going to go through the same amount of caution to avoid grabbing their phone or looking at a video playing while they are driving.
by scottyah | 2026-02-19 20:43:25+00:00
After a bit it just comes down to motivation. Who wants to win more: 1. Someone who has everyone's best interests at heart so is unwilling to really run against anyone and is trying to balance out support for multiple conflicting groups all while learning the landscape and job or 2. Someone who knows they can use the position to get tens of millions of dollars, and are supported by a few large groups similarly motivated? This is how you get people like Va Lecia Adams Kellum and Karen Bass.
by EdiX | 2026-02-19 20:43:36+00:00
If you can use a criteria to finance academia [1] you can use the reverse to define what DEI is. Every major corporation had DEI departments and yet it doesn't exist, it's a ghost.

I really hope the backlash to this bullshit finally reaches europe.

Same song and dance for 14 years straight, there is no SJW you're just imagining them, it's just called being a decent human being, they say as they kick me repeatedly in the face.

[1] https://archive.is/UmkH3
by renewiltord | 2026-02-19 20:43:46+00:00
You're going to put all the work into finding the news and doing the leg work. I'm going to make a site called NewsTheft.info that just says "YourNewsSite.com is reporting that <your content rewritten by an LLM>" and it's going to be free and people are going to use my thing. Then I'm going to shut it down when you all go bust. I am a rapacious eater of worlds. You can't stop me and the people love me because, since it's free, I can give them a better experience than you.

Information wants to be free.
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-19 20:43:53+00:00
When you move to Vienna you become part of the system since you pay income + other taxes, just like the locals, except unlike the locals, you get rug-pulled at social housing.

Unless of course ... your comment was just an anti immigration dogwhsitle from the start, in which case you should just said THAT instead, and not waste people's time with cumbersome allegories masquerading as arguments.
by ls612 | 2026-02-19 20:44:01+00:00
I’ve come to conclude, albeit not emotionally accept, that totalitarian parties and states will outcompete (what a euphemism) more liberty minded systems because of the sea change in the technological environment that cheap compute, storage, and asymmetric encryption have caused. The only question will be how aligned the interests of those winners are to or against mine.

To translate it into your terms, I don’t think the people pushing this will be satisfied with anything less than a Chinese government level apparatus against the people and that that is the only solution they will accept regardless of any others that are put forth in good faith or otherwise. They have no incentive to pursue any other goal.

Vae Victus.
by post-it | 2026-02-19 20:44:13+00:00
I think the site is right about the "coins" method. If I had an automatic subscription of $10/month to refill my news wallet, and I could pay $0.05 out of it to read an article, I'd do it, especially if it was a use-it-or-lose it system.

In fact, if they charged $0.20 per story if you pay directly, or $0.05 per story if you pay out of your auto-reload wallet, I think that could incentivize users to subscribe.

Of course, it would have to be shared across every newspaper, and publishers hate that. Apple News is the closest it's gotten - the app sucks, but you can share articles into it to remove the paywall and that works great.
by jbott | 2026-02-19 20:44:19+00:00
This might be of interest to others: Last night I stumbled across Hornbeam, a library in a similar vein from the author of Gunicorn that handles WSGI / ASGI apps as well as a specific wrapper for ML inference

https://erlangforums.com/t/hornbeam-wsgi-asgi-server-for-run...
https://github.com/benoitc/hornbeam
by gopalv | 2026-02-19 20:44:33+00:00
> that's imposing these draconian rules on 3D printed guns

This is a bill with no votes - the first committee hearing is in March.

The purpose of the bill seems to be have some controversy & possibly raise the profile of the proposer.

The bill is written very similarly to how we enforce firmware for regular printers and EURion constellation detection.
by Sophyte | 2026-02-19 20:44:36+00:00
Hey guys, this is my first extension, and it was born out of a really annoying problem I had (annoying for me, at least). I use my YouTube likes as a repository of information I keep coming back to, and I always had to scroll through all the liked videos. So I made an extension that, through a keyboard shortcut, lets you search through your videos with a search overlay interface. Found this very useful, hope you guys do so also. There is a great free tier that will remain free forever, the paid one is only for crazy power users like me who have liked videos in the thousands. Enjoy!
by raptor99 | 2026-02-19 20:44:58+00:00
It's really odd that the speaker of the house and the mayor of DC declined the president at the times request to deploy 10k to 20k national guard troops there. Also weird that there were 250 or so plain clothes FBI officers inside the capitol at the time as well. Along with Capitol Police have been filmed opening gates and doors for people to go through and in. Its almost like a lot of what has been written about what happened on that day isnt what happened.
by kiernanmcgowan | 2026-02-19 20:44:58+00:00
My biggest road blocks as an engineer has almost never been the authorship of code but everything else around it.

* Getting code reviewed

* Making sure its actually solving the problem

* Communicating to the rest of the team whats happening

* Getting tests to pass

* Getting it deployed

* Verifying that the fix is implemented in production

* Starting it all over when there is a misunderstanding

Slinging more code faster is great and getting unit testing more-or-less for free is awesome but the separation between a good and great engineer is one of communication and management.

AI is causing us to regress to thinking that code velocity is a good metric to use when comparing engineers.
by jandrewrogers | 2026-02-19 20:45:02+00:00
I know several people with normie jobs (not tech related or government) and normie lifestyles that saved up enough money to never need to work again by 50 while still maintaining their lifestyle. Most still work because they have no idea what to do with their time even though they don’t need to work anymore.

You can easily derive that this is possible from the median household finance statistics published by BLS, never mind the upper class. It isn’t that hard if you care to do it.
by chasd00 | 2026-02-19 20:45:10+00:00
Could you think of it as ClaudeCode is just a tool used by another agent and that other agent is instructed to use the ClaudeCode tool for everything? Makes sense, i don't see why we can't have agents use these agents for us, just like the AI companies are proposing to use their agents in place of everything else we currently use.

Also, why not distribute implementation documentation so claudecode can write OpenCode itself and use your oauth token. Now you have opencode for personal use, you didn't get it from anywhere your agent created it for you and only you.
by notahacker | 2026-02-19 20:45:24+00:00
Congresspeople either intimidated or emboldened into rejecting some or all of the state electors to annul the actual electoral result and declare Trump the 46th president. We know this was the outcome Donald Trump's wanted because he said so several times.

I assume the individuals that brought zip ties had more specific plans for the elected officials they didn't approve of.

It wasn't a well-planned insurrection but neither was Yong Suk Yeol's
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-02-19 20:45:27+00:00
How does US products liability law work (personal injury plaintiffs)

How does US public nuisance law work (local government/school district plaintiffs)

For example,

what are the claims

what do the plaintiffs have to prove to succeed

what about strict liability

what about causation

what about duty to warn

and so on

Here are the master complaints for

(a) the personal injury plaintiffs

https://dn710108.ca.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.cand.40...

(b) the local government/school district plaintiffs

https://dn710108.ca.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.cand.40...

The defendants have not had much success in dismissing any of the plaintiffs' claims nor in excluding plaintiffs' experts' testimony (so far)

e.g., https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.40...

In the Google antitrust litigation Google resorted to unusual, creative tactics to avoid a jury trial

Will a jury get to decide on the plaintiffs' claims here, or will the remaining defendants settle

We will know soon enough

Then HN can return to 100% "AI" topics

But a substantial portion of the evidence gathered in this litigation will live on in the public record; not everything is sealed

There was a time before so-called "social media" when personal websites did not have millions of pages, let alone millions of pages authored by other people which the public used to communicate with each other while being surveilled by the website's operator

The internet is still in its infancy. It's still evolving
by MostlyStable | 2026-02-19 20:45:29+00:00
"documented, empirical fact"

I won't try to make as strong a claim as the person you are responding to, but unfortunately, the politicized nature of the topic makes research on gun violence, especially as it relates to gun laws in the US, extremely fraught. The vast majority of research articles are plagued with issues. One should not just blanket trust the research (in either direction, and there are definitely peer reviewed journal articles pointing in different directions).

The claim you responded to was too strong, but for similar reasons, yours is also far far too confident.
by openasocket | 2026-02-19 20:45:54+00:00
> It indeed sucks for the honest workers like your friends who are losing funding because the CIA can't help itself.

So you find an organization filled with aid workers who are dedicating themselves to saving lives, with some instances of CIA infiltration. And the Trump administration, which is fully in charge of both the CIA and USAID, decides the right thing to do is ... get rid of the aid workers?

What do you think is the moral thing to do here?