MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by baggachipz | 2026-02-24 20:18:08+00:00
The actual context, which I think frames it rather well:

> The job of a search engine is to produce the most relevant search results, period. Kagi excels at this precisely because we remain unimpressed by world politics. The moment 'politics' becomes a factor in search results is the moment I stop working on a search engine.

Yandex represents about 2% of our total costs and is only one of dozens of sources we use. To put this in perspective: removing any single source would degrade search quality for all users while having minimal economic impact on any particular region.

We set out to fix search, not the world. A truly useful search engine must be impartial - the same way Wikipedia strives for neutrality, or how a library doesn't curate books based on current political winds. Users deserve access to the best possible information, not information filtered through our political lens.
by measurablefunc | 2026-02-24 20:18:31+00:00
People in technologically advanced societies have more than enough & the people who are not as advanced can not do anything that will have any effect on the people who own the fighter jets, missiles, robot factories, & "internet" satellites. The current system has no historical precedent. It is very close to an almost perfect panopticon w/ an associated media & police apparatus to keep everyone docile & complacent. Like I said, this time is different.
by shimman | 2026-02-24 20:18:47+00:00
It's not throwing in the towel, it's about doing things that we the people can actually do.

One thing, we the people can do, is pressure our politicians to break up Google along with the rest of big tech.

There are many primary challengers this cycle that are running anti-monopoly platforms. Help their cause, signing pointless petitions is just West Wing style fantasy that is extremely childish.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-24 20:19:14+00:00
If you go outside and see people buying tulips, it doesn't mean that tulips are great investments.

Another example is how Isaac Newton lost money on some other bubble as well: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/market-crash-cost-... [ The market crash which cost newton fortune]

So even if NEWTON, the legendary ISAAC NEWTON could lose money in bubble and was left holding umbrellas when there was no rain.

From the book Intelligent investor, I want to get a quote so here it goes (opened the book from my shelf, the page number is 13)

The great physicist muttered that he "could calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not hte madness of the people"

This quote seems soo applicable in today's world, I am gonna create a parent comment about it as well.

Also, For the rest of Newton's life, he forbade anyone to speak the words "South Sea" in his pressence.

Newton lost more than $3 Million in today's money because of the south sea company bubble.
by singpolyma3 | 2026-02-24 20:19:25+00:00
> There simply isn't a known solution to this problem. If you give users the ability to install unverified apps, then bad actors can trick them into installing bad ones that steal their auth codes and whatnot.

This is also true if they can only install verified apps, because no company on earth has the resources to have an actually functional verification process and stuff gets through every day.
by UncleMeat | 2026-02-24 20:19:42+00:00
Codes arrive via SMS, which is available to all apps with the READ_SMS permission. This isn't an OS vuln. It is a property of the fact that SMS messages are delivered to a phone number and not an app.

On the Play store there is a bunch of annoying checking for apps that request READ_SMS to prevent this very thing. Off Play such defense is impossible.
by teeray | 2026-02-24 20:20:09+00:00
The VC treadmill ruined what should be a simple, sustainable business. They’re not going to light the world on fire trying to pedal a password manager as the be all and end all IAM story for enterprises. It’s not the amount of the increase. It’s that they’re chasing enterprise for VC unicorn status and clearly intending to leave their original market behind. I don’t want my passwords in a product becoming more and more derelict since the org’s heart is in another place.
Show HN: MantleDB – Anonymous JSON storage for your side projects
by moonwizard | 2026-02-24 20:20:11+00:00
For years, I’ve been building small apps and prototypes that needed persistent cloud data, but I couldn't be bothered to set up a full database, manage an ORM, or deal with auth. Most of the projects were just too small to justify the overhead.

So I built MantleDB. It’s a simple JSON storage server designed for speed and zero-friction. There is no UI—even registration is handled via the API.

Get started instantly:

curl -s https://mantledb.sh/api/auth/register

You’ll get an AID (Admin ID) for reads/writes and an RID (Read ID) for public-facing reads.

Write to a bucket. Note: Buckets are created on write.

curl -X POST https://mantledb.sh/api/b/YOUR_AID/<bucketname> -d '{"score": 42}'

Read the data back:

curl https://mantledb.sh/api/b/YOUR_RID/<bucketname>

How it works:

Ephemeral by default: To keep things lean, a "scavenger" cron runs daily. On the free tier, buckets with no activity for 72 hours are deleted. Accounts with no buckets are cleared after one week.

Pro Plan: Removes the scavenger, increases bucket limits, and adds atomic operations (Increment, Append, etc.).

Tech Stack: Node.js + SQLite (running on AWS Lightsail).

If the free tier feels too tight or the Pro version feels too pricey, let me know! I’m happy to hand out discount codes or adjust things based on feedback.

I’m mostly looking for people to try and break it or tell me what features would make this their go-to for the next weekend hackathon.
by dj_gitmo | 2026-02-24 20:20:24+00:00
If you are really into EVs, like the author clearly is, than what is happening to Tesla is just sad. Tesla is being run into the ground. It was, and could be, the great American EV success story. But now it's being destroyed by a guy who has clearly lost it.
And don't forget that taxpayers have foot the bill for Tesla to have this shot in the first place.
by ignoramous | 2026-02-24 20:20:33+00:00
> case seems pretty clear, especially since the soldiers tried

Even if the 'soldiers' didn't, it wouldn't have mattered as the governing apparatus usually goes out of its way to protect their own militants.

Ex A:

Detainees executed, unarmed civilians killed in their sleep, a child, handcuffed and shot, all covered up by the chain of command – this is the testimony of more than 30 eyewitnesses, former members of UK Special Forces ... Panorama – Special Forces: I Saw War Crimes ... reported a series of cold-blooded murders by UK military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan over a period of ten years, followed by years of official cover-up.

https://www.counterfire.org/article/cold-blooded-murder-and-...
by carefree-bob | 2026-02-24 20:20:34+00:00
This is a concern for me not only for the Tesla but for the new Chinese manufacturers. When I've talked to owners of these cars (in other countries), the consensus seems to be "you use it for 5 years and then throw it away". Not because the car has poor build quality, but because there aren't local mechanics that can service it, it's impossible to find documentation such as torque specs and service procedures for anything but trivial stuff you'd find in an owner's manual, and it is very hard to find parts.

It seems like an incredible waste to throw away a car after 5 years.

A big part of what I look for in a car is a long lasting manufacturer that publishes to end users technical and repair information, including part numbers and procedures, together with a healthy third party part supplier ecosystem and independent repair infrastructure.

That doesn't mean that information needs to be available for free or that the parts themselves are cheap -- Volvo parts are not cheap -- but they are available and the information, engine specifications, repair manuals and workshop manuals are available.

If you don't have that, I'm not interested in buying the car. A car is far too expensive to treat as a disposable consumer good. I'm worried that more and more, manufacturers are locking down their systems, putting information behind paywalls where you can't make your own backup copy, and doing things like adding DRM to their parts to prevent indy shops from working on them.
by ceejayoz | 2026-02-24 20:20:52+00:00
I remember when folks here were shilling the "Israel promises they'd never bomb a hospital" and "Hamas is lying about the death toll" lines.

All the hospitals are now rubble, and the IDF quietly let it slip that the death toll is legit recently. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2026-01-29/ty-article/.p...

There's damning video of this specific incident, recovered from the dead. I suspect subsequent massacres made a policy of finding and destroying all the phones. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...
by brendanmc6 | 2026-02-24 20:20:55+00:00
1password is by far my most recommended subscription to friends and family.

In a world where almost every single app or service I use has thrown me into a rage from enshittification or show-stopping bugs or both, where I can hardly even type this message because even iOS keyboards have regressed… 1password is actually a great service that makes my life objectively better.

I put them in an exclusive S-Tier with, surprisingly, Chase Mobile (in recent years), Signal, Google Sheets, and maybe an few others. They just work.

Since the rest of them ignore my 1 star App Store reviews and my desperate, detailed bug reports, the only power I have left is to support good software and recommend it to friends.
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-24 20:21:26+00:00
I've been doing my own personal research on HRV and getting to the bottom of it.

The literature is bewildering because of course there are many ways to measure it. If you measure it over the course of the day it is influenced by things like the activities you do. Of course your HRV is going to be higher if you alternate intense activity that raises your heart rate with rest and since activity is so important in it I don't think it is fair to look at a whole day trace.

I think the most important phenomenon is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayer_waves

which are associated with the metric RMSSD as described here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_rate_variability

This is called "SD1" in my app

https://gen5.info/demo/biofeedback/

You can use that app to increase the amplitude of your Mayer wave, what you do is breathe in when you see the wave going down and breathe in when you see the wave going up. It is a little tricky if your Mayer waves are initially weak and you might feel light-headed and think "I can't breathe" but once it settles in it is a very strong effect.

I have read a number of patents for HRV biofeedback and they all involve much more complex things that you might think would work if you hadn't tried it but that I don't believe would work having tried it.

Funny I have been taking Nebivolol, another beta blocker, and found that it drastically lowers HRV-inferred stress as measured by my Garmin watch -- I can't really say how it affects my app because I wrote it after I started on the drug.
by thayne | 2026-02-24 20:21:30+00:00
> no matter how small the edit was, the entire file gets rewritten

SQLite doesn't fix this, because you would still need to encrypt the whole file (at least with standard sqlite). If you just encrypted the data in the cells of the table, then you would expose metadata in plaintext.

SQLCipher does provide that, but as mentioned by others, it isn't quite the same thing as sqlite, and is maintained by a different entity.

> The primary issue is that new features cannot be added natively to the XML tree without causing breaking changes for older clients or third-party clients which have not adopted the change yet.

That isn't a limitation of xml, and could also be an issue with sqlite. The real problem here is if clients fail if they encounter tags or attributes they don't recognize. The fix here is for clients to just ignore data it doesn't know about, whether that is xml or sqlite.

The complaints about compatibility between different implementations would be just as bad with sqlite. You would still have some implementations storing data in custom attributes, and others using builtin fields. In fact it could be even worse if separate implementations have diverging schemas for the tables.

> Governance Issues

None of this has anything to do with sqlite vs xml. It is a social issue that could be solved without switching the underlying format, or remain an issue even if it was changed.
by RajT88 | 2026-02-24 20:21:31+00:00
I've seen a lot of people sharing similar sentiments just because it's Microsoft executives.

These executives came up through engineering. These are not MBA's. Russinovich famously founded Winternals (now Sysinternals), and got bought by Microsoft. Building tools for the OS that the OS vendor didn't think to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sysinternals

Scott Hanselman is similarly prolific:

https://www.hanselman.com/about/

These are not faceless execs, if you follow the company. These are the people who advocate for the real and good stuff.
by softwaredoug | 2026-02-24 20:21:46+00:00
I'm a bit perplexed by the developer selection effects.

I get that developers want to use AI. But are they also claiming there's not still a no/low-AI population of developers? Or that their means of selection don't find these developers?

Are they worried that by splitting devs into groups of AI experience they might be measuring some confounder that causes people to choose AI / not AI in their careers?
by kylehotchkiss | 2026-02-24 20:21:46+00:00
MitX offers an intro to biology course that is timeless and impeccable totally free of cost: https://mitxonline.mit.edu/courses/course-v1:MITxT+7.00x/

If you don't care enough to listen to a few hours about biology fundamentals (you should have a long list of I Don't Knows at the end of this) using AI to cosplay as a doctor or biologist is silly. This has the spirit of self-prescribing ivermectin.

Of course, be your own advocate in the healthcare system, etc etc.
by RandomGerm4n | 2026-02-24 20:21:57+00:00
Users get way more out of it when the device is free. Even if they don't use this option, it makes it easier to set up competing services. This includes ones that would never be allowed in an official store because they're DRM-free alternatives to big streaming services but still offer all the same content. The existence of such alternatives, if they are easy to use, can force the big services to become more user-friendly. Just as happened back then with Napster.

Also every user is free to simply not use the option of installing things outside of the store.
by michaelbuckbee | 2026-02-24 20:22:09+00:00
I love using Kindle's as single purpose tablet/interfaces/displays. I'm the weirdo who actually prefers the LCD displays vs eInk and it's incredibly easy to set Kindle Fire's into dev mode which lets you display a webpage, never turn off while connected to power and never show ads.

You can regularly find the Kindle Fire HD10s for ~$40
by alephnerd | 2026-02-24 20:22:16+00:00
There are only ~440,000 Americans employed in computer-related work [0] compared to ~4,000,000 Americans employed in the automotive industry [1], ~1,700,000 Americans in the transportation manufacturing industry [2], and ~500,000 in electronic components manufacturing [3].

More American consumers would be negatively impacted by layoffs in well paid manufacturing industries like the automotive industry than software.

More bluntly, SWEs primarily live in single-party states like California, Washington, NY, and Texas; represent a fraction of employees Americans; and work in a politically irrelevant industry (if the tech industry was actually politically powerful the H1B rule would have never been proposed). In essence American SWEs are politically irrelevant and do not matter as they cannot swing elections.

[0] - https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes151299.htm#nat

[1] - https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iagauto.htm#emp_national

[2] - https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag336.htm

[3] - https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag335.htm
by chasd00 | 2026-02-24 20:22:30+00:00
> is there a mechanism to pin a version, or is it always HEAD? Skills that evolve can silently break downstream workflows.

don't forget these skills are just text that goes into the llm for it to read, interpret, and then produce text that then gets executed in bash. The more intricate and specific the skill definition the more likely the model is to miss something or not follow it exactly.
by raincole | 2026-02-24 20:22:44+00:00
> how does this not set off a severe chain reaction?

Just like you and me, Sam Altman can say anything he likes to say. To pump the investors' confidence, to make the US administration believe he's serious about AGI, or just to make himself feel good. It's not legally binding in any way.

You should never read it as "OpenAI committed to..." but as "Altman said these words..." and words mean very little today.
by Marsymars | 2026-02-24 20:22:45+00:00
> When you are investor and broadly choose to buy US companies (which is what most people do), you get Tesla in the list (e.g. QQQ) as part of the package, and this pushes price higher, no matter if you believe in Tesla specifically or not.

I actually short Tesla just enough to offset my long positions that come as part of my regular ETFs.
by rockostrich | 2026-02-24 20:23:16+00:00
> From my own experience, models are at the tipping point for being useful at prototypes in software

You must not have much experience using the new frontier models then. A lot of large tech companies are replacing their SDLC with agentic workflows. The tooling and frameworks are still ramping up, but the models have no problem producing production ready software given proper specifications.
by tptacek | 2026-02-24 20:24:03+00:00
OK. You seem pretty confident. Let's make it easy on you. Name a single police department in the United States from which you can present evidence from the past 10 years that they have an IQ or general cognitive cap on applicants.

Should be straightforward, since the root of this thread confidently asserts that police generally disqualify applicants based on high IQ.
by rickydroll | 2026-02-24 20:24:05+00:00
where you can get a job dictates what city you live near, how much you are paid determines how close you can live to that city, and how much distance you want to keep from your neighbors sets the density you can stand.

Moving to a smaller city changes your job, which changes how much you are paid, which changes how close you can live to the city, and your neighbors may still suck. It's likely that you'll end up in the same soul-sucking commute life that you just left.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-24 20:24:09+00:00
From another comment I wrote here but I am gonna paste a quote I found from Intelligent Investor (page 13) from Isaac Newton during the hottest stock of his time in his country, South Sea company.

The great physicist muttered that he "could calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people"

There seems to be a lot of madness happening in the world again as well. A lot of OpenAI claims make no sense except if we consider the world to have gone mad.

The bubbly nature of openAI and just doing whatever they think like doing with 0 regards to anything or everything including financials is a form of madness.

I was reading another comment and actually opened up the Intelligent Investor book to read the quote from there. I highly recommend that book although truth be told that I haven't read more than the first 50-100 pages as I quickly felt like passive investment is a great vehicle personally.
by johnfn | 2026-02-24 20:24:19+00:00
Think about what you are saying for a moment. Why would "bot armies" come to Hacker News of all places to flag pro-Palestine articles? Don't you think it's a much more reasonable conclusion that people read the site guidelines[1], which clearly say that political posts are off-topic, and then flagged for that reason instead?

There are a million places to discuss politics online. If I wanted to discuss politics, I would go to any one of them. Claiming any HN moderator is 'complicit' in atrocities is absurd.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by Guid_NewGuid | 2026-02-24 20:24:23+00:00
Indeed, and try suggesting there should be minimal accountability for flagging[0] and you'll likewise be flagged. Sure maybe the data says there's not some cartel flagging conspiracy but it starts to seem awful suspicious that even reasonable discussion of this misfeature gets flagged.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44962005
by snowhale | 2026-02-24 20:24:41+00:00
for systematic completeness at that scale, Semantic Scholar's API (semanticscholar.org/product/api) and OpenAlex (openalex.org) are worth knowing about. both have full-text search, citation graph traversal, and free bulk access -- Semantic Scholar covers 200M+ papers. you can query by keyword, field of study, even author affiliation, then follow citation chains to surface papers that cite your known key works. deep research tools are fine for discovery but won't give you completeness guarantees; a proper systematic review workflow usually combines S2/OpenAlex keyword search + snowballing through citation graphs + dedup by DOI.
by ToucanLoucan | 2026-02-24 20:24:43+00:00
I mean, is that a consequence of people being innately, for it's own sake, cheap to a point of farce? Or is that a consequence of fifty years of stagnant wages?

I'm sure it's a healthy blend of both, but IMO, if you want to see this actually change, the first thing to even make it tenable as a possibility is the owning classes need to let some money flow down the hierarchy. Like I'm sure we'll always have our misers, our people who refuse to spend a penny more for anything, but I think the vast majority of the time what drives people to shitty retailers selling crap-quality products is that most people are fucking broke.
by maleni69 | 2026-02-24 20:24:56+00:00
I built this after spending weeks manually checking whether SaaS brands show up when you ask AI tools for recommendations.

The pattern I kept seeing: strong Google SEO ≠ strong AI visibility. They're different signals entirely. Brands showing up in Perplexity results tend to have heavy third-party citation coverage (review sites, roundups, directories), not just on-page SEO.

The tool queries Claude and Perplexity directly with your domain + keywords, scores the results 0–100, and gives you specific actions. Free to check, no account needed.

Built in ~24h. Curious what scores HN folks see for their projects.
by hansmayer | 2026-02-24 20:25:10+00:00
I agree - the whole BS of "Hottest new programming language is English" is complete nonsense. There is something about writing the code directly from your mind that skips over the "language circuits" and makes it much more precise. Perhaps as humans with education we obtain an ability to think in programming language itself I suppose? It's probably similar to what happens in the mind of a composer or painter. This is why the natural language will never be the interface the big "AI" companies are making it to be.
by ceejayoz | 2026-02-24 20:25:11+00:00
Oh, come on.

> The Israeli military was forced to change its story about the ambush several times, following the discovery of the bodies in a mass grave, along with their flattened vehicles, and the emergence of video and audio recordings taken by the aid workers. An internal military inquiry ultimately did not recommend any criminal action against the army units responsible for the incident.

Unfortunately, the takeaway here will be "be better at destroying the evidence". The video is quite damning against their initial claims; it includes an uninterrupted view of their arrival, in marked emergency vehicles with lights on and uniformed personnel, and the gunfire beginning: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...