MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by joshuaisaact | 2026-02-16 14:15:47+00:00
I've been exploring Petri nets as a formalism for AI agent safety, specifically, proving properties like termination and human-gate enforcement exhaustively across every reachable state, rather than testing them on sample inputs. This post benchmarks the approach against n8n and ReAct on the same agent. Tomorrow I'm open-sourcing the engine as a declarative rules DSL.
by mistersquid | 2026-02-16 14:15:52+00:00
> Not sure if anyone has heard his interview on the Hard Fork podcast...

Made the same mistake. Pete Steinberger created Clawdbot > Moltbot > OpenClaw.

The creator of Moltbook is Matt Schlicht and his Hard Fork interview exposes Schlict as security-negligent. [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9vRCYtzYD8&t=2673s
by digiown | 2026-02-16 14:16:01+00:00
> don't see much possibility of actual widespread bans

Why do you think there would be regulation to honor the "underage signal", but not explicitly ban social media sites for "unverified" users?

> seems pointless to avoid using that capability

It's not pointless, because relying on it will soon make these locked down devices mandatory for everyone under 18, and they will keep using it past 18. Everyone will lose general purpose computing, along with adblocking and other mitigations that protect you from various harms. It also leads to widespread surveillance being possible as parents will want to be able to "audit" their teen's usage.

> put an additional system of control front and center

The problem should be controlled at the source, not the destination, if feasible.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-02-16 14:16:34+00:00
Stuff like that is wild to me. At least in the US, we have internal laws democratically elected that can force things to happen (Epstein transparency act for example).

In China, it can be illegal to even talk about changing the status quo.

When I see people on the internet saying things like: "Yeah screw the US, we just made a deal with China!" I wonder how oblivious they are to the domestic conditions in China.
Show HN: Palettepoint.com – AI color palettes from text descriptions or images
by latentio | 2026-02-16 14:17:10+00:00
I built this because choosing colors is one of those tasks that seems simple but ends up taking hours. You keep randomizing and nothing feels right, or you browse inspiration boards hoping something works. So I made a tool where you describe what you need.

Type "warm Japanese autumn" or "90s rave flyer" and pick a style (analogous, triadic, monochromatic, etc.) and how many colors (3-7). It returns a named palette with descriptions. It works with images too: upload a photo and it extracts a palette. You can combine both, so uploading a photo and adding "make it cooler" works. It runs on GPT-5.2 with vision.

You can export palettes as CSS variables, SCSS, Tailwind config, or JSON. Copy individual colors in hex, RGB, HSL, or CMYK. There's a live preview that shows the palette applied to buttons, cards, and UI components so you can evaluate it before committing.

There's also a gallery with curated palettes you can browse, filter by style, and favorite. Each palette has its own shareable link.

There's also a set of free tools :
- Color converter (paste a hex code, get every format)
- Contrast checker (WCAG AA/AAA)
- Color mixer
- Gradient generator
- Image color extractor
- Manual palette builder

I'd love to hear your thoughts. What's missing? What would make this your go-to color palette tool?

https://palettepoint.com
by zerkten | 2026-02-16 14:17:52+00:00
I don't believe that devs are the audience. They are pushing this to decision makers where they want them to think that the state of the art is further ahead than it is. These folks then think about how helpful it'd be to have 20% of that capability. When there is so much noise in the market, and everyone seems to be overtaking everyone else it, this kind of approach is the only one that gets attention.

Similarly, a lot of the AGI-hype comments exist to expand the scope of the space. It's not real, but it helps to position products and win arguments based on hypotheticals.
by xpe | 2026-02-16 14:18:02+00:00
> Normally this wouldn't be a problem: prices would go up, supply would eventually increase and everybody would be okay.

This sounds like economic dogma based on illusions of assuming equilibrium. Markets are dynamic systems, and tere are sub-fields of economics that recognize this. The message doesn't always get out unfortunately.

> But with AI being massively subsidized by nation-states and investors, there's no price that is too high for these supplies.

This feels like more dogma: find a convenient scape-goat: governments.

Time to wake up to what history has shown us! Markets naturally reflect boom and bust cycles, irrationality of people, and various other market failures. None of these are news to competent economists, by the way. Be careful from whence you get your economic "analysis".
by aurareturn | 2026-02-16 14:18:17+00:00
Apple and Qualcomm don't sublicense so they are not really Arm competitors. Plus, ARM was always a convenient way to mutualise development costs without the risk of collusion. I am not sure it's changing.

Apple and Qualcomm absolutely are Arm competitors. Otherwise, Arm wouldn't have sued Qualcomm over the Nuvia deal.

Arm makes far more money licensing their cores than their ISAs. If their entire business was reduced to just licensing their ISAs because their cores can't compete against their customers' custom cores, then they will be at a highly disadvantaged position.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-02-16 14:18:21+00:00
I come from the native desktop/mobile world more so than from web, but I’d strongly contest the idea that declarative/functional is always better than imperative/OOP.

My experience is that declarative starts getting mind-bendy and awkward past a certain point of complexity. It’s nice when it’s simple enough for everything to fit on a single screen without too much scrolling, but past that you need to start breaking it out into separate files. That’s not too bad initially, but eventually you end up with an infinite-Matryoshka-doll setup which sucks to navigate for anybody who doesn’t know the codebase because they have to jump through 7 files to drill down to the code they’re actually interested in and makes it more difficult to get a thousand-foot view of it all.

Also, the larger the project the more likely it is that you’re going to have to pull off acrobatics to get the desired behavior due to the model not cleanly fitting a number of situations.

Declarative is solid for small-to-medium projects, but for more “serious” desktop class software with complex views and lots of panes and such I’d be reaching for an imperative framework every time. Those require more boilerplate and have their own pitfalls, but scale much better on average for a dev team with a little discipline and proper code hygiene.
by JPKab | 2026-02-16 14:18:29+00:00
I work at a company with approximately $1 million in revenue per engineer and multiple 10+ year old codebases.

We use agents very aggressively, combined with beads, tons of tests, etc.

You treat them like any developer, and review the code in PRs, provide feedback, have the agents act, and merge when it's good.

We have gained tremendous velocity and have been able to tackle far more out of the backlog that we'd been forced to keep in the icebox before.

This idea of setting the bar at "agents work without code reviews" is nuts.
by Cyph0n | 2026-02-16 14:18:37+00:00
Surrounded by enemies of their own creation. It’s a beautiful cycle of aggression and self-victimization; a true ouroboros.

On the intelligence front, Mossad does a wonderful job performing extra-judicial killings using the dirtiest tricks you could think of. They’re also very good partners: almost every counter-intelligence outfit sings their praises.
by quietbritishjim | 2026-02-16 14:18:42+00:00
Agreed that Dart was an effort to do exactly this.

To be a bit pedantic... "relegated to transpiling to JS" makes it sound like that was something they had to do later, but in fact that was up front part of the transition plan. The idea was, write your code in Dart and it would work natively in browsers that (eventually) support it but would still work in everything else via JS transpilation. You're right that it was relegated to only working that way once it was rejected.

The problem was (if the Wikipedia article is to be believed) that developers took offense to one company unilaterally deciding on the future scripting language of the web. A little ironic given that's how JS evolved in the first place, but fair enough. Later, WASM was created instead, with the idea that no particular language had to be chosen (and frozen) as the JS replacement. Dart compilation to WASM followed.
by ivl | 2026-02-16 14:18:54+00:00
His claim there did not necessarily imply rigged explosives, but supply chain attacks either for surveillance or assassination purposes.

And his limiting it to "virtually every potential theater" would suggest that it's mostly present in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, most likely Iraq as well.

But let's be honest here, this isn't civilian equipment that's been compromised. It's supply chain attacks where the buyer is manipulated into buying goods that they've tampered with, or re-engineered. They weren't pagers anyone could pick up at Radio Shack. (Everyone who got hit was a target, or a direct relative of a target.)
by robinwhg | 2026-02-16 14:18:59+00:00
It's still absolutely fascinating to me that basically the whole modern tech industry and the economic growth from it rests on the shoulders of a single company that has all of their important factories on a single island that's under constant threat of invasion. On top of that they themselves are reliant on a single company that's able to produce the machine required to print the wafers.

I don't know if TSMC has anything to do with hard drive production, but the reliance on very few players is also a problem in that industry.
by grog454 | 2026-02-16 14:19:05+00:00
> You would not start with "The car is functional [...]"

Nope, and a human might not respond with "drive". They would want to know why you are asking the question in the first place, since the question implies something hasn't been specified or that you have some motivation beyond a legitimate answer to your question (in this case, it was tricking an LLM).

Why the LLM doesn't respond "drive..?" I can't say for sure, but maybe it's been trained to be polite.
by randomtoast | 2026-02-16 14:19:17+00:00
"So instead of destroying those clothes in Europe, we'll just add an unnecessary shipping step to the process, producing tons of unnecessary CO2."

> The world being as it is you're likely correct and your cynicism makes sense, but I'd like to think somehow you're wrong.

I don't see any cynicism here, only pure realism. The real question is why EU law tries to create a utopia on paper while ignoring real-world situations. That's what has always frustrated people in the EU about the institution: its lack of decisions that are close to the people and grounded in reality. Yes of course, everyone gets the idea and the good intentions behind it, but good intentions alone are not worth the paper that they are written on.
by andsoitis | 2026-02-16 14:19:20+00:00
A true noncommand system doesn’t require the user to specify intent, because the computer acts as a side effect of the user’s normal actions. As an example, consider unlocking a car by pulling on the door handle: this is a noncommand unlock because the user would perform the same action whether the car is locked or unlocked. (In contrast, a car operated by voice-recognition could unlock the door as a result of the user stating “I want the car to be unlocked” which would be an intent-based outcome specification. And an old-fashioned car could be operated by the explicit command to unlock the door by inserting and twisting the key.)

Whether AI systems can achieve high usability within the intent-based outcome specification paradigm is unclear. I doubt it because I am a GUI bigot. Clicking things on a screen is an intuitive and essential aspect of user interaction that should not be overlooked. Thus, the 2nd UI paradigm will survive, albeit in a less dominant role. Future AI systems will likely have a hybrid user interface that combines elements of both intent-based and command-based interfaces while still retaining many GUI elements.

It also really depends on the nature of the app / service.

For instance, when you're browsing for visual entertainment like video, users are less likely to resort to "I want this...", even if that is a mode that they sometimes are in, because they don't know what they want.
by mellosouls | 2026-02-16 14:19:23+00:00
The title appears to be somewhat misleading.

The counter claim by the government is that this isn't "the source of truth" being deleted but rather a subset presented more accessibly by a third party (CourtsDesk) which has allegedly breached privacy rules and the service agreement by passing sensitive info to an AI service.

Coverage of the "urgent question" in parliament on the subject here:

House of Commons, Courtsdesk Data Platform Urgent Question

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002rg00
Show HN: J-RAY – A privacy-first JSON visualizer with two-way binding
by MauryWebDev | 2026-02-16 14:19:56+00:00
Hi HN,

I shared a very early prototype of this a couple of days ago, but I spent the weekend completely rewriting the core to make it 100% client-side, privacy-first, and open-source.

Like many of you, I deal with large, deeply nested JSON payloads from APIs daily. I’ve always felt uneasy pasting sensitive production data or API keys into random online JSON formatters that probably log everything.

So I built J-RAY to solve this for myself. It parses JSON and turns it into an interactive node graph using React Flow.

Some technical details:

Zero Server Processing: It’s fully client-side. No databases, no tracking cookies.

Two-Way Binding: You can double-click a node on the visual graph to edit its value, and the raw JSON text editor updates instantly (and vice versa).

Code Gen: It generates TypeScript interfaces on the fly based on the current JSON structure.

Open Source: The whole thing is MIT licensed.

I’m currently testing the limits of React Flow when rendering massive JSON files (the DOM nodes can get heavy), but for standard API payloads, it works smoothly.

I'd love to hear your feedback on the UX, how it handles your edge-case JSONs, or if you manage to break the parser.

Repo: https://github.com/MauryDevIta/J-Ray

Live app: https://j-ray.vercel.app/app

Thanks
by microtonal | 2026-02-16 14:20:20+00:00
This surveillance tech is a real problem--it's making everyone unsafe and should be regulated.

The other thing is that people willingly buy phones full of spyware. E.g. quite many Samsung models have the Israeli AppCloud installed (supposedly to recommend applications):

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/11/budget-samsun...

Even though AppCloud itself may be for recommendations it apparently mines a lot of data and each such background application, it is another potential attack vector, and I suppose that the Isreali government can compel the company to use their software for different purposes (not sure).

In contrast to what some news articles state, some Samsung models sold in Europe also have it and nobody seems to really care about it (nor the persistent Meta services, etc.).
by bhouston | 2026-02-16 14:20:36+00:00
FYI, apparently there was a data breach, but it would seem better to fix the issue and continue with this public service than to just shut it down completely. Here is the Journalist organization in the UK responding:

"The government has cited a significant data protection breach as the reason for its decision - an issue it clearly has a duty to take seriously."

https://www.nuj.org.uk/resource/nuj-responds-to-order-for-th...
Ask HN: Has Claude Code quality dropped recently for anyone else?
by vampiregrey | 2026-02-16 14:20:43+00:00
I’m a daily user of Claude Code (Pro subscription) and it’s been my primary tool for the last few months.

Over the past week or so, I’ve noticed:

More shallow reasoning

Ignoring parts of context

More confident-but-wrong answers

Slight regression in structured refactors

This is mostly in real-world coding tasks (mid-size projects, not toy prompts).

Could just be my workload getting more complex — but it feels different.

Has anyone else noticed a shift in quality recently?
Or is this just variance + perception bias on my end?

Would love to hear if others are seeing similar patterns (or not).
by dannersy | 2026-02-16 14:20:53+00:00
Whether you view the question as nonsensical, the most simple example of a riddle, or even an intentional "gotcha" doesn't really matter. The point is that people are asking the LLMs very complex questions where the details are buried even more than this simple example. The answers they get could be completely incorrect, flawed approaches/solutions/designs, or just mildly misguided advice. People are then taking this output and citing it as proof or even objectively correct. I think there are ton of reasons this could be but a particularly destructive reason is that responses are designed to be convincing.

You _could_ say humans output similar answers to questions, but I think that is being intellectually dishonest. Context, experience, observation, objectivity, and actual intelligence is clearly important and not something the LLM has.

It is increasingly frustrating to me why we cannot just use these tools for what they are good for. We have, yet again, allowed big tech to go balls deep into ham-fisting this technology irresponsibly into every facet of our lives the name of capital. Let us not even go into the finances of this shitshow.
by quietbritishjim | 2026-02-16 14:21:34+00:00
> And it isn't as if Flutter is a great success, Fuchsia never made it big, the Android team counter attacked with Kotlin's adoption, JetPack Compose, and Kotlin Multiplatform.

Sorry but I can't find my way through the double negatives in this (does "isn't as if" apply just to Flutter or the whole sentence?), and I'm not so familiar with that ecosystem that I know myself. Are you saying that Flutter isn't a great success and has instead been superseded by Kotlin? Or that it was a success and that's why Android team counter attacked?
by itsdandanlai | 2026-02-16 14:21:37+00:00
Hey HN — I built this because I wanted something between Notion and Apple Notes. Notion's formatting is great but it pulls you into building systems instead of writing. Apple Notes is simple but felt limiting.
Oatpad is local-only (notes stay on your machine, no account, no sync, no telemetry), has slash commands for formatting, and comes in under 10MB. Built with Tauri so it's Rust on the backend, web frontend, and launches fast.
Free for early users, $9.99 one-time after that. No subscription.
Happy to answer questions about the tech stack, design decisions, or anything else.
Show HN: Claude Battery – usage at a glance. A minimalist macOS menu bar widget
by Reebz | 2026-02-16 14:21:45+00:00
Hi HN, this is nothing fancy, but a tool I built for myself as a minimalist way to track usage. Also (and probably more importantly), colleagues who are marketers, writers, designers, and other non-engineering backgrounds who are/becoming power users of Claude Cowork or Claude Code and needed to keep better watch of usage.

Once Opus 4.6 landed, I was quickly aware I needed to keep an eye on usage as I capped out session limits faster than ever. I got frustrated checking usage manually and then explored the other apps and widgets out there. They're really good, and some are great, but they're just so feature-heavy and complex with that ICP in mind I mentioned earlier.

Tokens just don't feel like anything to me.... I'd watch them tick over in the thousands and then millions. So I just ignored them as I was planning and then inverted the usage metrics that Claude provides (i.e. start at 100% and not 0%), which helped me land on a battery concept. This felt good and definitely made sense to the people I asked. Then I was focused on adding only the bare minimum features... or "Simplify, and add lightness" in the words of Colin Chapman.

Anyway, that's the story and yes, the app is largely vibe coded before folks start to go digging through commits. I quite enjoyed the process and I wouldn't have hand-coded something like this myself (the issue-pain wouldn't have met the effort-required threshold). If anyone is curious, my workflow and tools used were Claude Code, with ui-ux-pro-max for design, heavy usage of compound-engineering (plan > work > review > compound). Strongly recommend this plugin. I also used Condcutor on and off, but 80% of the work ended up just being done with CC in iTerm2. It handled the agent teams much better.

Let me know if you have any bugs or feedback.
by mpalmer | 2026-02-16 14:21:53+00:00
Originally called Retriever, based on the domain. Trademark issues?

So it's a bunch of tools that Gemini can call, but the tools involve low-level interactions with the page structure in the end-user's browser.

What is the moat? What is an "agent" when you take away the powerful LLM?

Rover lives inside your website

Rover does not just live "inside" my website, because you are using Gemini 3 Flash to do all the heavy lifting.

Who is the audience here? It sounds like you're addressing people who don't know how the technology works, but the cutesy concept is borderline misleading.

Also, can you back up this claim with a human-written response? (emphasis mine)

When rtrvr.ai interacts with a webpage, there is zero automation fingerprint:

No navigator.webdriver flag
No CDP-specific JavaScript objects
*No detectable automation patterns in network requests*
*Identical timing characteristics to human interaction*
by xpe | 2026-02-16 14:21:54+00:00
People with a control theory background are welcome in economics; the field is more diverse than some would recognize. Certain professions and subfields are more open than others. There are plenty of economists who care about things like resilience and dampening shocks.

I would love if more non-traditional economists got involved in the public sphere by which I mean: writing about economic trends, public policy, regulation, rate-adjustment, etc.
by w4der | 2026-02-16 14:22:00+00:00
Tcl's first "release" was in 1988 and Magic was released in 1984, but it seems like John Ousterhout then wrote Tcl to have a common interface across tools [https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/tclHistory.php]. It still is a big thing in EDA, because (in theory) it lets a chip designer run their designs by tools from different vendors
by aleph_minus_one | 2026-02-16 14:22:30+00:00
> AI generates code fast but then you're stuck reading every line because it might've missed some edge case or broken something three layers deep

If the abstraction that the code uses is "right", there will be hardly any edge cases, and something to break three layers deep.

Even though I am clearly an AI-hater, for this very specific problem I don't see the root cause in these AI models, but in the programmers who don't care about code quality and thus brutally reject code that is not of exceptional quality.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-02-16 14:23:07+00:00
Has android been hacked?

I only know pegasus broke iOS.

I find it interesting that Apple has spun Lockdown mode from a 'we are terrible at security' into a feature for marketing.

Now when someone gets hacked Apple can say: "Well they weren't in lockdown mode, its their own fault."

Gosh I wish I was as good at marketing as Apple. They really need to sell their marketing team as a service. If they did that, I'd buy their stock outright.