MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwaway2037 | 2026-02-16 08:14:57+00:00
> way too many kids want to grow up to be ... YouTubers

What's wrong with wanting to be a YouTuber? At this point, it's really a very small TV channel. And YouTube essentially allows for an infinite number of these very small TV channels, unlike traditional TV.

> way too many kids want to grow up to be influencers

You can replace "influencers" with "wanting to be popular". That is as old as time. To me, if you look closely at (social media) influencers, they are nothing more than people who were popular in high school and managed to extend it for a few years with the use of social media.
Ask HN: Do LLM agents need a separate safety layer?
by amabito | 2026-02-16 08:15:35+00:00
LLM agents are good at deciding. They are bad at knowing when to stop.

VERONICA is a failsafe state machine that sits between strategy engines and external systems. It provides:
- Per-entity circuit breakers (task A failure doesn't block task B)
- SAFE_MODE manual halt that persists across crashes
- Atomic state persistence (survives SIGKILL)
- Signal-aware graceful shutdown (SIGINT/SIGTERM)
- Zero dependencies (pure Python stdlib)

Strategy engines can be replaced. Safety layers cannot.

30-day deployment (0 downtime). 12 crash-recovery events handled (100% state recovery). Avg load: 1.003 ops/sec.
Validation: 2,600-second high-load test at 1000 ops/sec sustained (2.6M operations).

Install via GitHub:
`pip install git+https://github.com/amabito/veronica-core@v0.1.0`

Repository:
https://github.com/amabito/veronica-core
Show HN: Turning web highlights into deterministic Markdown (Sigilla)
by northerndev | 2026-02-16 08:15:48+00:00
I got tired of “read later” lists turning into a graveyard, and especially how messy exports are when you want to move notes into Obsidian/Logseq.

So I built Sigilla as a buffer layer: save an article, read it in a clean view, highlight + add notes, then export only the useful parts in a predictable format.

Example export looks like this:

"Article Title"

Saved: 2026-02-16
Tags: research, infra

Highlights

“Quoted highlight…”
“Another highlight…”

Notes

My note linked to highlight 1

Another note

https://www.sigilla.net/

I’d love feedback on the export format/schema design. If you were piping this into your notes, what metadata would you want included by default (frontmatter, author, published date, content hash, etc.)?
by jcattle | 2026-02-16 08:16:50+00:00
I recently had a bug where I added some new logic which gave wrong output. I pasted the newly added code into various LLMs and told it the issue I was having.

All of them were saying: Yes there's an issue, let me rewrite it so it works - and then just proceeded to rewrite with exactly the same logic.

Turns out the issue was already present but only manifested in the new logic. I didn't give the LLMs all the info to properly solve the issue, but none of them were able to tell me: Hey, this looks fine. Let's look elsewhere.
by sergiolema | 2026-02-16 08:17:06+00:00
Stop using 50MB frameworks to manage one single instance of a Logger.

Most developers think they know how to write a Singleton. They read a blog post a decade ago and haven't checked if that information is still valid for the modern JVM. The result? Production code filled with thread-safety issues, memory leaks, and "Senior" implementations that are actually maintenance liabilities.

We’ve moved from "Singletons everywhere" to "DI frameworks for everything," but we’ve forgotten how to actually use the JVM.

In my latest post, I break down:
- The Reality of Failure: Why "Double-Checked Locking" is often just a sophisticated way to introduce bugs.
- The "Resume-Driven Development" Trap: Why we over-engineer simple patterns just to look smart.
- The 2026 Standard: Why the Enum Singleton remains the only truly bulletproof implementation.
- Testing Myths: Why "Singletons are hard to test" is usually a symptom of poor interface design, not the pattern itself.

Complexity is debt. Every line of extra code is something that can break at 3 AM. If you’re still writing ten lines of synchronized boilerplate for a task that requires one, you're building a liability, not a feature.
by tripgeo | 2026-02-16 08:19:11+00:00
I did something similar a couple of years ago (map no longer live). I did use the badwords list to try and stop some profanity https://github.com/MauriceButler/badwords. However I was also surprised by how well people mostly behaved and was expecting a lot more vandalism - especially in disputed territories. I like the idea of allowing people to challenge names and voting to prevent abuse. Also - 'Hide NZ' :)
by thisislife2 | 2026-02-16 08:19:33+00:00
> The rules mandate that platforms that allow users to create or share such [AI] material must clearly label it. Where possible, they must also add permanent markers to help trace where it came from. Companies will not be allowed to remove these labels once they are added.

This is a good move for political content as deepfake audio and video does have the potential to inflame people and cause violence - politically provoked riots are common in India.

But this is the real concerning part:

> "These impossibly short timelines eliminate any meaningful human review, forcing platforms toward automated over-removal," the group said in a statement.

This can be insidiously used to provide a backdoor to feed AI platform, that data used to profile users and censor them more effectively.
by echelon | 2026-02-16 08:19:37+00:00
I never had a use for crypto.

I'm making movies with VFX now. (I've been a photons on glass filmmaker for over a decade. This tech rocks.)

I'm basically automating my work and acting as a senior manager. Claude can write my code in my style 100x faster than me. I'm reviewing the code, making adjustments - that means I have to pay back the efficiency gain, but overall this is easily a doubling of my productivity.

I'm making music and images and I've never been able to do those things. I suck at graphics design - now I can actually do it.

Google search sucks. Complicated searches had become impossible. Now I can ask very obscure and hard questions and easily verify the LLM results.

We've effectively jumped 50 years in tech capability, it feels like. I feel like I'm living in the future. This is only the beginning, too.

I don't care if you use AI. In fact, I'm better off if you don't. That gives me even more of an edge.

Please stay away from AI. I'll keep using it.
by sjducb | 2026-02-16 08:19:47+00:00
MS Co-Pilot was so close.

If it’s a drive‑through wash where the car must be inside the machine, then of course you’ll need to drive it over.
If it’s a hand wash or a place where you leave the car with staff, walking is the clear winner.

It still blows my mind that this technology can write code despite unable to pass simple logic tests.
by potato-peeler | 2026-02-16 08:19:50+00:00
Not as a daily driver but to make sure a software has wide support, not all users update their phone frequently. Also, many web features do not require using the latest in browser features.

And just to be clear, I was poking fun at this so called “CTO”. That guy should have known better.

I see many web/ui frameworks posted in HN which don’t test in older browsers but still claim to be minimal or plain.
by troupo | 2026-02-16 08:20:19+00:00
There's nothing in Tailwind that makes the craftsmanship dead, and your proposed solution with scoped styles somehow a revival of said craftsmanship.

Note how your solution literally depends on a build tool (Vue) to work. Whereas Tailwind can work with no build tools (tailwind build tools removes unused classes, and that's mostly it).

And then you go:

--- start quote ---

Juniors still come along and just do margin: 13px. In tailwind, they do m-[13px]. No difference. At least with CSS its centralized.

--- end quote ---

When your scoped CSS example is literally decentralized per-file CSS that has `margin: 5px` in it. That gets compiled into a meaningless `class-678x8789g` by the build tool.

> The people I've seen who are most excited over tailwind are generally those that would view frontend as something they have to do, not something they want to do.

Tailwind is the product of its era: where even sites are composed out of components. That is, this separation of concerns: https://x.com/simonswiss/status/1664736786671869952

As a comparison, here's Youtube's expertly crafted CSS (which is actually an improvement over their original 6B file). Note how much endless repetition there is: https://www.youtube.com/s/_/ytmainappweb/_/ss/k=ytmainappweb...
by Closi | 2026-02-16 08:22:06+00:00
Let's not forget that Einstein almost got a (reasonably simple) trick question wrong:

https://fs.blog/einstein-wertheimer-car-problem/

And that many mathematicians got monty-hall wrong, despite it being intuitive for many kids.

And being at the top of your field (regardless of the PHD) does not make you immune to falling for YES / EYES.

> humans without credentials are bad at basic algebra in a word problem, ergo the large language model must be substantially equivalent to a human without a credential

I'm not saying this - i'm saying the claim that 'AI's get this question wrong ergo they cannot be a senior software engineer' is wrong when senior software engineers will get analogous questions wrong. If you apply the same bar to software engineers, you get 'senior software engineers get this question wrong so they can't be senior software engineers' which is obviously wrong.
by mlegner | 2026-02-16 08:23:49+00:00
Researchers at ETH Zurich have analyzed security properties of popular cloud-based password managers. The linked page gives an overview of the work and links to the related research paper. Full title (had to shorten it for HN): "Zero Knowledge (About) Encryption:
A Comparative Security Analysis of Three Cloud-based Password Managers"

Overview from the linked page:

"Cloud-based password managers help users store and manage their credentials by encrypting them into a vault protected by a single master password. Leading vendors market this as Zero Knowledge Encryption, conveying the idea that the server storing the vault cannot learn anything about its contents – even if the server is compromised.

We put this to the test. Analysing the three leading password managers that make the Zero Knowledge Encryption claim – Bitwarden, LastPass, and Dashlane, collectively serving over 60 million users and holding approximately 23% market share – plus an additional analysis of 1Password, we find 27 distinct attacks that a malicious server can mount against their users. The attacks range in severity from integrity violations to the complete compromise of all vaults in an organisation. The majority of the attacks allow the recovery of passwords."
by Symbiote | 2026-02-16 08:24:13+00:00
Online grocery delivery was successful in the UK in the 1990s — Tesco started online ordering in the same year (1996) as Webvan, but could use their existing supermarkets as warehouses so avoided one of Webvan's main problems.

My parents used it occasionally, and I remember them/us demonstrating it to other parents. The software was supplied on a CD-ROM, and it connected to the internet only to download the stock list and place the order.
by Sentinel-gate | 2026-02-16 08:25:14+00:00
Fair point, if it's a true point-to-point VPN between just the two boxes, there's not much "in between" to worry about. TLS on top is mostly defense in depth at that point. What I had in mind was the more common setup where your app and DB sit on a shared network (VPC, corporate LAN). The traffic between them is unencrypted, and you're trusting every piece of infrastructure in that path (switches, hypervisors, sidecar containers) to not be compromised.
by praptak | 2026-02-16 08:25:50+00:00
I'm in EU and I'm 100% okay with being blacklisted from ever entering US. Just as I'd be okay with being blacklisted by 1933 Germany. To be honest I don't even think it's ethical to work for a US company anymore. (This is admittedly easy for me to say because I left Google some time ago for unrelated reasons. Call this "virtue signalling" if you want - I still believe it is good to discuss virtues and vices).
by chrisandchris | 2026-02-16 08:25:51+00:00
What I relly dislike about these LLM is how verbose they get even for such a short, simple question. Is it really necessary to have such a lobg answer and who's going to read that one anyway?

Maybe it's me and may character but when human gets that verbose for a question that can be answered with "drive, you need the car" I would like to just walk away halfway through the answer to not having to hear all the universes history just to get an answer. /s
by anonym29 | 2026-02-16 08:26:04+00:00
No doubt about it, and there's no reason to suspect this can only ever apply to embarassing minor queries, either.

Even beyond model alignment, it's not difficult to envision such capabilities being used for censorship, information operations, etc.

Every major inference provider more or less explicitly states in their consumer ToS that they comply with government orders and even share information with intelligence agencies.

Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, etc are all one national security letter and gag order away from telling you that no, the president is not in the Epstein files.

Remember, the NSA already engaged in an unconstitutional criminal conspiracy (as ruled by a federal judge) to illegally conduct mass surveillance on the entire country, lie about it to the American people, and lie about it to congress. The same organization that used your tax money to bribe RSA Security to standardize usage of a backdoored CSPRNG in what at the time was a widely used cryptographic library. What's the harm in a little bit of minor political censorship compared to the unconstitutional treason these predators are usually up to?

That's who these inference providers contractually disclose their absolute fealty to.
by sigmoid10 | 2026-02-16 08:26:13+00:00
Unfortunately it is not so easy. If rigorous tests at every step were able to guarantee that your program can't be exploited, we wouldn't need languages like Rust at all. But once you have a program in an unsafe language that is sufficiently complex, you will have memory corruption bugs. And once you have memory corruption bugs, you eventually will have code execution exploits. You might have to chain them more than in the good old days, but they will be there. SQLite even had single memory write bugs that allowed code execution which lay in the code for 20 years without anyone spotting them. Who knows how many hackers and three letter agencies had tapped into that by the time it was finally found by benevolent security researchers.
by TZubiri | 2026-02-16 08:26:36+00:00
I'm not sure, but I think that cached read costs are not the most accurately priced, if you consider your costs to be costs when consuming an API endpoint, then the answer will be 50k tokens, sure. But if you consider how much it costs the provider, cached tokens probably have a way higher margin than (the probably negative margin of ) input and output inference tokens.

Most caching is done without hints from the application at this point, but I think some APIs are starting to take hints or explicit controls for keeping state associated with specific input tokens in memory, so these costs will go down, in essence you really don't reprocess the input token at inference, if you own the hardware it's quite trivial to infer one output token at a time, there's no additional cost, if you have 50k input tokens, and you generate 1 output token, it's not like you have to "reinfer" the 50k input tokens before you output the second token.

To put it in simple terms, the time it takes to generate the Millionth output token is the same as the first output token.

This is relevant in an application I'm working on where I check the logprobs and not always choose the most likely token(for example by implementing a custom logit_bias mechanism client-side), so you can infer 1 output token at a time. This is not quite possible with most APIs, but if you control the hardware and use (virtually) 0 cost cached tokens, you can do it.

So bottomline, cached input tokens are almost virtually free naturally (unless you hold them for a loong period of time), the price of cached input APIs is probably due to the lack of API negotiation as to what inputs you want to cache. As APIs and self-hosted solutions evolve, we will likely see the cost of cached inputs masssively drop down to almost 0. With efficient application programming the only accounting should be for output tokens and system prompts. Your output tokens shouldn't be charged again as inputs, at least not more than once.
by kenty | 2026-02-16 08:27:33+00:00
This seems clickbait? Gemini answers:

Method,Logistical Requirement
Automatic/Tunnel,The vehicle must be present to be processed through the brushes or jets.
Self-Service Bay,The vehicle must be driven into the bay to access the high-pressure wands.
Hand Wash (at home),"If the ""car wash"" is a location where you buy supplies to bring back, walking is feasible."
Detailing Service,"If you are dropping the car off for others to clean, the car must be delivered to the site."
by totetsu | 2026-02-16 08:27:49+00:00
But what is it about this specific question that puts it at the edges of what LLM can do? .. That, it's semantically leading to a certain type of discussion, so statistically .. that discussion of weighing pros and cons .. will be generated with high chance.. and the need of a logical model of the world to see why that discussion is pointless.. that is implicitly so easy to grasp for most humans that it goes un-stated .. so that its statistically un-likely to be generated..
Show HN: A Toby alternative with vertical tabs and no forced new tab override
by tankhoa2308 | 2026-02-16 08:28:03+00:00
Hi HN,

I built OrgaNice after running into limitations with existing tab managers, especially forced new tab overrides, feature limits, and workflows that didn’t scale well with large numbers of tabs.

Here’s what it currently offers:

Unlimited nested folders, collections, and workspaces

Session history

Vertical tabs via the side panel

Optional new tab override (you can enable or disable it)

JSON export and import

Import from your browser bookmarks

I’m actively improving it and would really appreciate feedback.

Thanks
by Havoc | 2026-02-16 08:28:15+00:00
> Apps that need servers (sync, AI features, storage) will still have subscriptions

This makes me excited about what we will see in the self hosted space. Cause now many can both set up say a S3 backend entirely on their own and write/vibe the code that users it.

Now I just need to figure out the iPhone app ecosystem haha (and how to implement mTLS on it)
by ajxs | 2026-02-16 08:28:30+00:00
> On an (X86) PC you can tranfer your disk, as it is, to a new X86 architecture and it will run.

This is because of a supporting set of standards (BIOS/UEFI/ACPI) that are well-supported on x86 systems, but technically independent of the x86 ISA. BIOS, and the general compatibility you're talking about, is a historical artefact of the IBM PC being so dominant in the market that other companies created compatible computers. UEFI and ACPI actually exist in the ARM ecosystem now. If ARM continues to grow outside of mobile devices, you could eventually see the kind of broad compatibility you're talking about. It's not super likely though. All signs point to the consumer computing ecosystem becoming more closed, rather than more open.
by Sesse__ | 2026-02-16 08:29:15+00:00
For reference: The last serious match between the top human player and an engine was Brains in Bahrain was Kramnik–Fritz 7, in 2002 (already that should tell you something). Well, actually a broken and buggy version of Fritz 7, but that's another story. It was a 4–4 tie. On the latest CCRL list, Stockfish 18 outranks Fritz 8 (the oldest Fritz version on the list) by 947 Elo points _on the same hardware_. (For comparison, Magnus Carlsen's peak rating is 65 points higher than Kramnik's peak rating.)

Add to that 24 years of hardware development, and you can imagine why no human player is particularly interested in playing full-strength engines in a non-odds match anymore. Even more so in FRC/Chess960 where you have absolutely zero chance of leading the game into some sort of super-drawish opening to try to hold on to half a point now and then.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-16 08:29:30+00:00
Unfortunely it is hard to avoid when doing backed development with SaaS, iPaaS products, where JavaScript is in many cases the only extension language for backend widgets.

I am kind of alright with Next.js, as it is quite similar to using SSR with more tradicionla backend stacks.

Also at least node's C++ AddOns give me an excuse to occasionally throw C++ into the mix.
by troupo | 2026-02-16 08:30:24+00:00
> That's what led to things like div + class soup that you get with the BEM naming convention or Tailwind.

You could try and think why people end up with BEM or Tailwind. And the answer isn't "because people are not educated about cascade". Both BEM and Tailwind came form people who are very much aware of the cascade.

The problem is that cascade is very much a hindrance in quite a few cases. Especially when you deal with components and design systems.

> To anyone outside the CSS space, this is the closest analogy I can find

All analogies are bullshit.

The truth is that CSS is designed for documents, and for a few decades people have been trying to use it to design/build components: https://x.com/simonswiss/status/1664736786671869952 Cascade is good for the former, and is death for the latter.

And browser vendors have been surprisingly stubborn when it comes to making any improvements to the DX in this area. That's why instead of locally scoped CSS, CSS nesting, CSS mixins (and a bunch of other improvements from SASS and various JS Frameworks) we first got 15 000 JS-only specs around web components, of which 14 999 can be covered by improvements to CSS.

> where developers don't know what the code they're reading/writing is actually going to do.

Lol. Tailwind has made people more aware of what CSS does, with better documentation, than decades of bullshit articles and millions of words of existing docs.
by jeroenhd | 2026-02-16 08:31:06+00:00
> I "feel" Italian and owe my country a lot and my happily go back at some point

Then that settles it, no? You're an Italian citizen who happens to work abroad, not Swedish citizen material.

> Swedish citizenship is useful

That's probably where the friction lies, countries see citizenship as something of greater importance than something to obtain because it's "useful".
by zh3 | 2026-02-16 08:31:28+00:00
Depends on the definition of slowly - thousands of photons per second upwards (and detectors are so sensitive these days that makes seeing easy). Lots of articles about on the subject, given the potential uses of this system.

https://www.cornishlabs.uk/tweezers

https://opg.optica.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-29-4-4858
by eshaham78 | 2026-02-16 08:31:49+00:00
This matches my experience running coding agents at scale. The cached token pricing is indeed somewhat artificial - in practice, for agent workflows with repeated context (like reading the same codebase across multiple tasks), you can achieve near-zero input costs through strategic caching. The real cost optimization isn't just token pricing but minimizing the total tokens flowing through the loop through better tool design.
by liendolucas | 2026-02-16 08:31:52+00:00
> You spend less time on your project because you’re too busy being a human-powered dependency resolver for a 50GB IDE.

Really? A 50GB IDE? How the heck one knows what goes in there?

My beloved FreeBSD 15.0 PLUS its Linux VM PLUS its docker env PLUS its dependencies and IDE are close to 26Gb and pretty sure I'm taking into account a lot of things I shouldn't, so the actual count is much less than that.

Developing software under a Windows platform is something that I cannot understand, since many many many years ago.