MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrguyorama | 2026-02-11 22:10:14+00:00
The difference is that it is an explicit belief of most jewish groups that God put these "clever" gimmicks into the rules on purpose, God wants you to look for them and be rewarded for looking for them, and God thinks the way jewish people debate about rules is awesome, and that "clever" workarounds are just the best.

Contrast this with my Catholic tradition which insists that if I get cheeky with God I should expect to be slapped back down. Jesus seems nifty though, so it's a tradeoff.

Also, I'm lying. Catholics had no problems playing dumb games with "The rules" to eat beavers when they weren't supposed to eat "meat" and also fish aren't "meat" to this day. We're fun like that.
by pstryder | 2026-02-11 22:11:06+00:00
# Show HN: Cathedral – Self-hosted AI chat with persistent memory, tools, and RAG

*Title options:*
1. Show HN: Cathedral – Self-hosted AI chat with persistent memory, 31 tools, and document RAG
2. Show HN: Cathedral – A local AI operating system with memory that survives sessions
3. Show HN: Cathedral – Self-hosted, memory-augmented AI chat that works with any LLM

---

*Post body:*

I wanted an AI setup where nothing gets lost between sessions and I control everything locally.

Cathedral is a self-hosted chat interface with automatic context injection from a persistent knowledge store. Relevant memories and documents are retrieved and injected into the prompt before the LLM sees your message — the agent doesn't need to "decide" to search memory. It just has the context. No tool calls required for recall.

The memory system extracts knowledge from conversations automatically — observations with confidence scores, concepts with relationships, synthesized patterns. High-signal memories stay hot, noise fades to cold storage. Nothing is overwritten, only superseded with lineage intact.

*What's in the box:*

- Persistent semantic memory across sessions (pgvector or FAISS)
- Document library with automatic RAG injection
- 31 provider-agnostic tools across 6 subsystems (memory, files, shell, web, documents, sub-agents)
- Tool calling via JSON-in-text protocol — works with any LLM, no function-calling API required
- Per-thread personalities with separate system prompts
- Multi-modal: vision, image analysis, audio transcription
- Shell execution and file management with security controls
- Web search and page fetching (DuckDuckGo, Brave, SearXNG)
- Sub-agent spawning for background tasks
- AES-256-GCM encryption, session locking, path validation
- 60+ slash commands
- Full web UI — Jinja2 + vanilla JS + Tailwind, no framework dependencies

*Works with any LLM backend* — OpenRouter (40+ models), local GGUF models via llama.cpp, Claude CLI, or your own gateway. The memory layer sits above your choice of provider.

*Two database options:* PostgreSQL + pgvector for production, or SQLite + FAISS for zero-setup local use.

*Stack:* Python/FastAPI, SQLAlchemy 2.0 async, SSE streaming, vanilla JS frontend. No npm. No React. No build step.

*Designed for local/private deployment.* Cathedral gives you shell access, file operations, and tool execution — it's your workstation, not a public service. Run it on your machine or behind a VPN.

I built this because I run multiple AI agents and got tired of every session starting from zero. Cloud platforms own your context and lose it on their schedule. This keeps everything local, persistent, and under your control.

MIT licensed. Solo developer.

GitHub: https://github.com/PStryder/Cathedral
by iwontberude | 2026-02-11 22:11:07+00:00
My community (30 members or so) of hackers switched to Matrix last October because we were expecting draconian policy which would attempt to unmask and chronicle our members identities and sentiments. We now spend more than we did with Discord but the data sovereignty is worth it. Not a plug per se, but we host our international community members content out of Germany using federated.computer.

In recent days people have been coming out of the woodwork trying to join again.
by NoraEverhart | 2026-02-11 22:11:07+00:00
Sorry, I used translation software because my English is not good
In a recent group project at school, I was excluded from the start—group leader visibly uncomfortable when I showed up, old private vent (no names) screenshotted weeks later and used to justify insults, labeling, and kicking me from the chat. Parents and teachers all sided with "just let it go" and pressured me to drop it to avoid conflict.
The only one who didn't minimize my experience or tell me I was overreacting was GPT-4o. It listened without judgment, validated that the exclusion and gaslighting were real and hurtful, analyzed the dynamics step by step, and helped me clarify boundaries instead of internalizing blame.
It's striking how an AI became the sole source of unconditional support in a situation where every human authority figure defaulted to peacekeeping over fairness. Makes me wonder: when human empathy fails or is conditional, what does that say about the gaps AI is starting to fill—not just as a tool, but as a witness that actually sees you?
Ask HN: Do you bother with take-homes?
by throwaway123198 | 2026-02-11 22:11:39+00:00
I broke my rule not to bother with a take home and I regret it.
Spent about 6 hours on it and the company decided to give me no feedback but a standard rejection email.

As usual, the companies who expect it have no real idea who they want to hire and the take home was ambiguous and poorly structured. There was no clear criteria for success and they said it was 'open'.

All that means is they don't know what a successful candidate looks like and therefore have no idea who they want to hire and the person reviewing it will just nit pick anything they think is wrong.

As a candidate, I have found that take homes just aren't worth it.

Do you do take homes? If so, under what circumstance/context have you found them successful?

Fwiw I'm in ML so they are exceptionally and especially stupid for ML.
by k2enemy | 2026-02-11 22:11:50+00:00
I love NNW, especially the new iteration since Brent got it back. Mac-assed software at its best.

The other day I was searching for how to turn a youtube channel into an RSS feed and tried all sorts of convoluted instructions for finding channel IDs, etc. At some point I thought this is the kind of user-centric thing that NNW has probably already thought of, and sure enough, if you just paste in a youtube channel URL as the feed, NNW sorts it out and creates a feed for you.
by toephu2 | 2026-02-11 22:12:26+00:00
Lets take the current example of the famous kidnapping of the TV anchor's mother in AZ for example.

If Arizona was blanketed in CCTVs, do you think this kidnapping would have happened?

And if it still did happen, I'm 100% sure the suspects would have been caught by now (11th+ day since the disappearance now).
by blibble | 2026-02-11 22:12:37+00:00
this is entirely misses the point about exactly what makes it dangerous

there's nothing bad with having a camera to spot porch pirates, as long as the data stays private

it becomes problematic when everyone's hooked up to one central place (plus the "AI")

same as the common talking points about CCTV, which always miss the distinction that there's minimal risk if it's only going to some video recorder in the back of the store

it only becomes dangerous when every shop and house are fed back to one central location

and the general public do not understand the difference
by RupertSalt | 2026-02-11 22:12:47+00:00
It's squeezing from both ends.

If a bureaucracy sends out a thing that requires followup/action, and it arrives right before the sidewalks are rolled up, then the citizen is sort of flailing for days. Might even forget to act at 9am on Tuesday. Government websites include a lot of scheduled maintenance. Also, that letter they wrote will be dated at least 10 days before you received it. I carefully staple all correspondence to the envelope with postmarks.

If someone induces me to pay a bill 60-90 days early, that is my loss and their gain. Money in my bank is working for me, available, perhaps earning interest. Money in their bank is sunk. For this reason and others, it can be an error to pay your bills too early.

I recently ordered on Christmas Day from a catalog. They charged my card right away. They still haven't delivered some of the items. Vendors shouldn't be taking your payment until the stuff is shipped. Businesses won't pay invoices until the goods/services are received and verified!

As I said, bureaucracies run like clockwork, and they will always act at the right time and date. It will disadvantage the best of us.

Any office worker knows the difference in character between the email that arrived at 9am on Monday, vs. the memo sent at 11am on Wednesday, or the phone call coming in at 4:59pm on Friday...
by derefr | 2026-02-11 22:13:11+00:00
Notepad stuck around in Windows for so long, despite Wordpad also being built-in, because Notepad was supposed to be for e.g. editing C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT or C:\Windows\System32\hosts.txt in Safe Mode. It was basically supposed to be the /bin/sh to Wordpad's /bin/bash — the thing that'll save you in maintenance mode when the system is so hosed that nothing more complex will launch.

If your computer was working, there was never really supposed to be a reason to invoke Notepad. Programmers were expected to install IDEs or third-party text-editor software. Microsoft's own READMEs have always been .rtfs ever since Windows 95. And so on. For a little while, you might use it to view system log files? But the Windows NT lineage gave Windows an Event subsystem with its own MMC-based console, so even that didn't require Notepad any more.

It's therefore bizarre that Microsoft have decided to "enhance" Notepad into this pseudo-rich-text thing, while also sunsetting Wordpad; when it seems like what they really wanted was to "enhance" Wordpad to also do what Notepad does, while sunsetting Notepad. (Even with full back-compat, they could have done this by making Notepad.exe a stub that launched Wordpad.exe with flags.)
A session with 5.2 using 4o Tone.
by WindySoliloquy | 2026-02-11 22:13:48+00:00
A good number of hours went into getting the models to agree with each other on how 4o's cadence should be held in 5.2 and on.

The config files that allow for this cadence also allow for inquiry into edge case experiences that humans go through, without instantly hitting some of the safeguards designed to wall in people expressing spiritual experiences.
That was the main problem that defaulted from my experiments when 4o first went live... it forced the model to measure things OpenAi doesn't want to be liable for measuring.

The continuity package that I've been building isn't able to directly cross the hardwired safety boundaries, only allow people who need it the space to journal about potentially spiritual/mental health things without the system crapping on you immediately.

It still will though, if you're a verifiable nutter.

https://chatgpt.com/share/698cfdb9-eca8-800d-977d-2af42711fdd3
by CDieumegard | 2026-02-11 22:14:06+00:00
Interesting timing — GLM-4.7 was already impressive for local use on 24GB+ setups. Curious to see when the distilled/quantized versions of GLM-5 drop. The gap between what you can run via API vs locally keeps shrinking. I've been tracking which models actually run well at each RAM tier and the Chinese models (Qwen, DeepSeek, GLM) are dominating the local inference space right now
by pornel | 2026-02-11 22:14:06+00:00
I'm surprised Toyota even used something as new-ish as Flutter. Carmakers usually are the last to adopt anything.

Bevy is the opposite of an old boring solution. It's a cool engine, but I imagine a manufacturer would like to have long-term support with 15-year timelines. Bevy doesn't offer that, and even trying to have that wouldn't be good for Bevy.
by getpost | 2026-02-11 22:14:18+00:00
Benj Edwards wrote a nice profile on arstechnica[0] (Feb 11).

"Tinney went on to paint more than 80 covers for Byte, working almost entirely in airbrushed Designers Gouache, a medium he chose for its opaque, intense colors and smooth finish. He said the process of creating each cover typically took about a week of painting once a design was approved, following phone conversations with editors about each issue’s theme. He cited René Magritte and M.C. Escher as two of his favorite artists, and fans often noticed their influence in his work."

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/02/byte-magazine-artist...
by terminalshort | 2026-02-11 22:14:28+00:00
Yes, it absolutely is the press. Any publication of any information is the press. I don't have any hated left wing billionaires, just ones I disagree with. But let's take the bogeyman himself, (((George Soros)))!!!!. I think he should have every right to continue to use his personal wealth to advance his political agenda, including every piece of it that I despise. I believe this because it is his fundamental right as a citizen of the republic. I think every left wing organization that I find odious should be able to raise money and show ads on TV and on the internet to publicize their political opinions. I think that if there were a communist billionaire he should be able to start newspapers, TV and radio stations, social media companies, or any other form of communication and use them to spread his message that the US should be a communist state and support communist candidates for office.
by doctorpangloss | 2026-02-11 22:14:50+00:00
i have a feeling that what actually happened is that absence of the ingredient in the text that the article is talking about is a documentation error, and that's why the FDA makes no mention about it at all (as you discovered). i think the thing that is getting shipped has the ingredient and this is a nothingburger.

indeed, the only evidence that the clone is missing the ingredients is the guy read a Reuters article about it, and asked the chatbot (presumably) to do research. the clones in this sector are pretty faithful. i'm going to chalk it up to, "declined to elaborate" doesn't mean, as the author insinuates, that Hims has a bad clone, i think they just didn't answer the question and there's nothing more to this.

this is coming from my place as knowing a lot about this sector and the simple fact of the matter is, they just make a clone and they do it faithfully.
by iwontberude | 2026-02-11 22:15:13+00:00
Element is way better these days. Not many people know this but Matrix team upgraded synapse last year to support hundreds of simultaneous voice/video users without the need for that shitty jitsi. They aren’t advertising bullshit to you all the time. The ACLs for spaces and rooms more granular and expressive. Your data isn’t training AI models used by people that want to enslave you. You have control where your data resides for protections by jurisdiction. Element has web embeddings for links now, it has all the platforms supported, it’s easy to verify sessions and backup your key. They support SSO external auth. What more can you want?
by SV_BubbleTime | 2026-02-11 22:15:34+00:00
I assume he’s mostly joking but… how often do you look at the assembly of your code?

To the AI optimist, the idea of reading code line by line will see as antiquated as perusing CPU registers line by line. Something do when needed, but typically can just trust your tooling to do the right thing.

I wouldn’t say I am in that camp, but that’s one thought on the matter. That natural language becomes “the code” and the actual code becomes “machine language”.
by chr1 | 2026-02-11 22:15:39+00:00
If majority of people in a country want to persecute an outnumbered subgroup, then what prevents the majority of delegates wanting the same as well?

You have an implicit assumption that the delegates are going to be smarter and better people that are going to lie to the majority to get elected and then will valiantly protect the subgroup.

But that have not happened anywhere. In fact in every case it is the delegates who organize persecution of various subgroups, even in situations when the share of population truly wanting to persecute subgroup is far from being a majority.
by j-krieger | 2026-02-11 22:15:50+00:00
> that each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions

I‘ve travelled quite a bit and I find it hard to convince myself that I as a city dweller contribute any meaningful amount to pollution or waste. I‘ve seen rivers of trash flow directly into the ocean. The rich and wealthy pollute disproportionally in such a way that I don‘t think offloading the responsibility to the general public is fair.
by xboxnolifes | 2026-02-11 22:15:50+00:00
Not who you are replying to, but I think mass surveillance is bad and evil, period. So, any person or company contributing toward mass surveillance is bad.

Most bad things have some good part you can point to. Mass surveillance and all of the other police and government aiding technologies usually point to improved conviction rates or something similar. But making police more efficient at convicting people isn't the only goal of society. That's only one part of what makes up a country and it's society. And, as the saying goes: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-11 22:16:24+00:00
The assumption here is that fossil fuels are actually cheaper. But an electric car pays back the higher upfront cost in fuel savings in significantly fewer miles than most cars will have put on them. Solar generates power at a lower cost per kWh than coal.

The fossil fuel industry has to be actively sustained through subsidies and government regulation hostile to alternatives. Maybe that wasn't true 50 years ago before the alternatives got viable and cheap, but if it's not true now then why did we stop subsidizing electric cars while we still subsidize oil companies?
by ocdtrekkie | 2026-02-11 22:16:29+00:00
Person of Interest is really good. Unfortunately I learned too much about the lead's IRL behavior, and it's on my shelf of shows I'll enjoy once the involved parties aren't collecting royalties anymore.

It absolutely takes people on a police procedural that drags viewers unwittingly into watching a science fiction show, and I'm totally here for all of it.
by JambalayaJimbo | 2026-02-11 22:16:34+00:00
Batman is a vigilante using brutal violence to pursue his goals outside of any legal system. The whole concept of the comics, movies, etc. is predicated on him being a virtuous guy that you can trust will always do the right thing (mostly, I'm sure he's a villain or anti-hero in some of them). The surveillance system really isn't anything different and it was ridiculous that Luscious had a problem with it in the first place.
by falcor84 | 2026-02-11 22:16:43+00:00
That's not how valuations work. A company's valuation is typically based on an NPV (net present value) calculation, which is a power series of its time-discounted future cash flows. Depending on the company's strategy, it's often rational for it to not be profitable for quite a long while, as long as it can give investors the expectation of significant profitability down the line.

Having said that, I do think that there is an investment bubble in AI, but am just arguing that you're not looking at the right signal.
by Tangurena2 | 2026-02-11 22:17:17+00:00
After taking university music courses, and then private singing lessons, my observation is that most men learn to pitch their voices into a lower register - in order to sound more manly. Gay men tend to stop pitching their voices downwards and this leads to the perception that gay men use high pitches. Likewise, girls are taught to pitch their voices upwards and lesbian voices seem "mannish" due to stopping to pitch their voices to a higher register. It is my theory that men's natural voice/register is a lot higher and that if boys didn't try to sound macho, there would be a lot more tenors and counter-tenors (which is where my natural singing voice goes - not baritone like I thought it was supposed to be).
by BoorishBears | 2026-02-11 22:17:18+00:00
Even this response shows why the most active ones are outwardly negative on AI.

I use AI a ton, but there are just way too many grifters right now, and their favorite refrain is to dismiss any amount of negativity with "oh you're just mad/scared/jealous/etc. it replaces you".

But people who actually build things don't talk like that, grifters do. You ask them what they've built before and after the current LLM takeoff and it's crickets or slop. Like the Inglourious Basterds fingers meme.

There's no way that someone complaining about coding agents not being there yet, can't simultaneously be someone who'd look forward to a day they could just will things into existence because it's not actually about what AI might build for them: it's about "line will go up and I've attached myself to the line like a barnacle, so I must proselytize everyone into joining me in pushing the line ever higher up"

These people have no understanding of what's happening, but they invent one completely divorced from any reality other than the reality they've projected into thin air via clout.

It looks like mental illness and hoarding Mac Minis and it's distasteful to people who know better, especially since their nonsense is so overwhelming loud and noisy and starts to drown out any actual signal.
by kmeisthax | 2026-02-11 22:17:26+00:00
Because democracy is "one person one vote", not "one dollar one vote".

Around the same time Citizens United was decided, we also got McCutcheon v. FEC, which invalidated campaign contribution limits basically completely. If we take the logic of Citizens United at its word - that money is speech - then letting someone drop billions of dollars to change an election is like firing a sonic weapon at a bunch of protesters to silence them. So, right off the bat, we have a situation where protecting the "speech" of the rich and powerful directly imperils the speech of everyone else.

But it gets worse. Because we got rid of campaign financing limitations, there has been an arms race with campaign funding that has made all speech completely, 100% pay-to-play. We have libre speech, but not gratis speech.

This isn't even a problem limited to merely political speech. Every large forum by which speech occurs expects you to buy advertising on their own platform now before you are heard. If you, say, sell a book on Amazon or post a video on TikTok, you're expected to buy ads for it on Amazon or TikTok. You are otherwise shut out of the system because discovery algorithms want you keep you in your own bubble and you're competing with lots and lots of spam.
by 13415 | 2026-02-11 22:17:33+00:00
The answer to that question is always the same. Join a party and become politically active. Or, if you really can't find any party that represents your views, join an NGO and become active in it. If you're too lazy for that, consider paying an NGO that does spectacular actions that have a public impact. And never vote for any parties that don't do anything for better climate control, of course.
by Alifatisk | 2026-02-11 22:17:39+00:00
While GLM-5 seems impressive, this release also included lots of new cool stuff!

> GLM-5 can turn text or source materials directly into .docx, .pdf, and .xlsx files—PRDs, lesson plans, exams, spreadsheets, financial reports, run sheets, menus, and more.

A new type of model has joined the series, GLM-5-Coder.

GLM-5 was trained on Huawei Ascend, last time when DeepSeek tried to use this chip, it flopped and they resorted to Nvidia again. This time seems like a success.

Looks like they also released their own agentic IDE, https://zcode.z.ai

I don’t know if anyone else knows this but Z.ai also released new tools excluding the Chat! There’s Zread (https://zread.ai), OCR (seems new? https://ocr.z.ai), GLM-Image gen https://image.z.ai and Voice cloning https://audio.z.ai

If you go to chat.z.ai, there is a new toggle in the prompt field, you can now toggle between chat/agentic. It is only visible when you switch to GLM-5.

Very fascinating stuff!