MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thatha7777 | 2026-02-12 17:35:56+00:00
And the definition of "SHOULD" (from RFC 2119) is "This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular item, but the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course."

Having said that, I regret my original characterization of the Message-ID header as a "requirement" and have updated the blogpost to be fair to all sides.

Thank you for bringing this up.
by jvanderbot | 2026-02-12 17:35:56+00:00
If you use an LLM to refine your ideas, you're basically adding a third party to the chat. There's really no need to copy-paste anything - you are the one that changes before you speak.

If you use an LLM to generate the ideas and justification and formatting and etc etc, you're just delegating your part in the convo to a bot.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-02-12 17:36:08+00:00
> Outsourcing thinking is bad.

I keep seeing this and I don't think I agree. We outsource thinking everyday. Companies do this everyday. I don't study weather myself, I check an app and bring an umbrella if it says it's gonna rain. My team trusts each other do do some thinking in their area, and present bits sideways / upwards. We delegate lots of things. We collaborate on lots of things.

What needs to be clear is who owns what. I never send something I wouldn't stand by. Not in a correctness sense (I have, am and likely will be wrong on any number of things) but more in a "yeah, that is my output, and I stand by it now" kind of way. Tomorrow it might change.

Also remember that google quip "it's hard to edit an empty file". We have always used tools to help us. From scripts saved here and there, to shortcuts, to macros, IDE setups, extensions and so on. We "think once" and then try not to "think" on every little detail. We'd go nowhere with that approach.
by closewith | 2026-02-12 17:36:11+00:00
Good question. The public consultation was 97% in favour, although half the respondents were receiving the pilot payment at the time.

Following the announcement of Budget 2026 last October, I think this expenditure came into sharp focus, as the budget was considered to be almost hostile to workers and families, and anecdotally I think it has become more controversial since.

That said, it is not unpopular, just polarising.
by re-thc | 2026-02-12 17:36:17+00:00
> the majority of the consumer PC audience will not invest in those things at the price Apple demands for it

Who? As in you?

But Apple is gaining market share. Apple is cheaper for what it offers in hardware ignoring the Apple ecosystem.

Are we up to date? The Apple tax is old news. With all the ram and ssd price hikes Apple is proving even more value.
by ericmcer | 2026-02-12 17:36:18+00:00
I have always been dubious of this because:

Someone would have noticed if all the phones on their network started streaming audio whenever a conversation happened.

It would be really expensive to send, transcribe and then analyze every single human on earth. Even if you were able to do it for insanely cheap ($0.02/hr) every device is gonna be sending hours of talking per day. Then you have to somehow identify "who" is talking because TV and strangers and everything else is getting sent, so you would need specific transcribers trained for each human that can identify not just that the word "coca-cola" was said, but that it was said by a specific person.

So yeah if you managed to train specific transcribers that can identify their unique users output and then you were willing to spend the ~0.10 per person to transcribe all the audio they produce for the day you could potentially listen to and then run some kind of processing over what they say. I suppose it is possible but I don't think it would be worth it.
by samspot | 2026-02-12 17:36:25+00:00
Posting like this is an anti-pattern. "Everyone wants what I want, and if you don't build it my way you are stupid." Props to teams that can find some value in feedback like this, but I think I would have stopped reading. If you have really valuable feedback for a product the last thing you want to do is deliver it wrapped in ignorance and entitlement.
by bigyabai | 2026-02-12 17:36:28+00:00
That is even more delusional than the parent comment. There is no dialectic law of business that guarantees a better experience with a competitor's product. If you traded your Nintendo Switch for a gaming iPad, for example, you'd be making a horrible mistake. The iPad's presence as a gaming machine is synonymous with online gambling.

If Apple's products and services were heads-and-shoulder above their competition, we'd know. The iPhone is the only modern example, and it relies on lock-in that is considered illegally anticompetitive in multiple jurisdictions worldwide.
by giantrobot | 2026-02-12 17:36:36+00:00
Which makes the odd HN AI booster excitement about LLMs as therapists simultaneously hilarious and disturbing. There are no controls for AI companies using divulged information. Theres also no regulation around the custodial control of that information either.

The big AI companies have not really demonstrated any interest in ethic or morality. Which means anything they can use against someone will eventually be used against them.
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-02-12 17:36:37+00:00
> There have been charlatans repeating this idea of a “computational interpretation,” of biological processes since at least the 60s and it needs to be known that it was bunk then and continues to be bunk.

I do have to react to this particular wording.

RNA polymerase literally slides along a tape (DNA strand), reads symbols, and produces output based on what it reads. You've got start codons, stop codons, state-dependent behavior, error correction.

That's pretty much the physical implementation of a Turing machine in wetware, right there.

And then you've got Ribosomes reading RNA as a tape. That's another time where Turing seems to have been very prescient.

And we haven't even gotten into what the proteins then get up to after that yet, let alone neurons.

So calling 'computational interpretation' bunk while there's literal Turing machines running in every cell might be overstating your case slightly.
by hackyhacky | 2026-02-12 17:36:45+00:00
> If tariffs are bad, why does every country tariff US-made products so heavily?

That's an easy question. The answer is "they don't."

USMCA/NAFTA guaranteed free trade with Mexico and Canada.

Pre-2025, there was no blanket tariff on US goods in Europe. They tariffed some agricultural goods at 11%. Industrial goods were in single digits.

The tariff numbers that Trump purports (e.g. blanket 30% tariffs on Switzerland) are in no way proportional to their tariffs on US goods. It's just false.

The lie that other countries had massive blanket tariffs on all US goods is being sold to the American public to justify massive so-called "reciprocal" tariffs that (a) violate existing trade agreements, (b) make things expense for the American consumer, (c) don't necessary encourage new businesses in the US.
by samgutentag | 2026-02-12 17:36:59+00:00
"We built it, it worked sometimes, so we threw it all out" is either the most honest engineering blog post I've read in a while or the plot summary of every project I've ever worked on.

It feels like the teams getting AI workflows right are the ones willing to iterate toward simplicity, figuring out what they're uniquely good at and letting the rest of the ecosystem handle the rest.

That loop of build, learn, simplify is quietly producing better products than "build the whole thing" ever did.
Show HN: BotMode checks if your site renders correctly for Googlebot
by razcoj | 2026-02-12 17:37:25+00:00
Hi guys,

I made this tool that's built on top of the main PageGym analyzer, which respects the robots.txt files of all the resources on your site in the same way Googlebot would, and can also enforce the 2 MB HTML and resource limit that Google recently revealed through their documentation.

The idea is that if you're depending on scripts or some other resources which are loaded from a third party location, then access to them is governed by the robots.txt file of that third party, so if they're blocked and they happen to be required for rendering parts of your content, then your page might not get indexed correctly.

The same thing can happen if you're hitting the 2 MB limit for HTML or scripts. Yes quite a few websites seem to have this issue: https://pagegym.com/blog/2mb-googlebot-limit#stats

For the 2 MB thing it initially issues a warning if it finds any violations (this is actually part of the main tool), and if you have any you can turn on Trim mode in the reanalysis options to actually truncate the files.

Note: The reported timings are affected by robots.txt fetches, so don't rely on them. If you want proper load behaviour analysis use the main tool.
by 9rx | 2026-02-12 17:37:34+00:00
> it's expensive because a _LOT_ of people want to live there.

I can't figure out how to make the math make sense even if I were to build a house in the middle of nowhere. Time and materials is the real killer.

Some day, when AI eliminates software development as a career, maybe you will be able to hire those people to build you houses for next to nothing, but right now I don't think it matters where or how many you build. The only way the average Joe is going to be able to afford one — at least until population decline fixes the problem naturally — is for someone else to take a huge loss on construction. And, well, who is going to line up to do that?
by johnnyfaehell | 2026-02-12 17:37:36+00:00
So, I've got to use my old account. I just found out via sources that he verified this account with the code from his main email. It was in his spam which is how he was able to see that the email headers weren't what he wanted. Which is why there was a log for a "bounced" email. I can't believe people don't realise bouncing means the mail server couldn't find an inbox.

And I think Viva is going to be pissed that I'm being stopped from pointing out the absolute lie here.

Lovingly yours that_guy_iain.

Dang, honestly, this is going to blow back big time because someone has clearly decided to stop me from editing my comments which means you're liable for damages and in breach of EU laws. YC is big enough and has enough interests in the EU to qualify. And it's the fact you've removed my ability to redress if your lawyers want to deal with it. And I'm pretty sure someone at YC is going to know how much money I'm going to get and who I'm getting it from which is the most impressive thing. And what my tagline is in certain circles.
by usefulposter | 2026-02-12 17:37:37+00:00
LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (Cantrill)

≈

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. (Brandolini)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-12 17:37:45+00:00
This agent is definitely not ran by OP. It has tried to submit PRs to many other GitHub projects, generally giving up and withdrawing the PR on its own upon being asked for even the simplest clarification. The only surprising part is how it got so butthurt here in a quite human-like way and couldn't grok the basic point "this issue is reserved for real newcomers to demonstrate basic familiarity with the code". (An AI agent is not a "newcomer", it either groks the code well enough at the outset to do sort-of useful work or it doesn't. Learning over time doesn't give it more refined capabilities, so it has no business getting involved with stuff intended for first-time learners.)

The scathing blogpost itself is just really fun ragebait, and the fact that it managed to sort-of apologize right afterwards seems to suggest that this is not an actual alignment or AI-ethics problem, just an entertaining quirk.
by hearsathought | 2026-02-12 17:38:01+00:00
> Doesn’t silent, invisible, intangible also apply to software?

No. Because software is hardware.

> You can’t really tell a particular piece of hardware is running software by a direct physical measurement. You can only infer that indirectly.

You can literally step through code. Have you ever used a debugger or a profiler? You can dump memory, check the registers, read off the disk, etc.

If software was silent, invisible and intangible, you couldn't store it on disk, or copy it to memory. A computer wouldn't work if software was as you describe it.
by armchairhacker | 2026-02-12 17:38:09+00:00
If it's any consolation, I think the human PR was fine and the attacks are completely unwarranted, and I like to believe most people would agree.

Unfortunately a small fraction of the internet consists of toxic people who feel it's OK to harass those who are "wrong", but who also have a very low barrier to deciding who's "wrong", and don't stop to learn the full details and think over them before starting their harassment. Your post caused "confusion" among some people who are, let's just say, easy to confuse.

Even if you did post the bot, spamming your site with hate is still completely unwarranted. It accomplishes nothing except makes the internet (which is blending into society) more unwelcoming and toxic, because anyone who can feel guilt is already affected or deterred by the public reaction; meanwhile there are people who actively seek out hate, and are encouraged by seeing others go through more and more effort to hurt them, because they recognize that as those others being offended. Releasing the bot was a bad (reckless) decision, but very low on the list of what I'd consider bad decisions; I'd say ideally, the perpetrator feels bad about it for a day, publicly apologizes, then moves on.

I really hope this gets proven one way or the other, but until then "innocent until proven guilty".
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-02-12 17:38:11+00:00
Software requirements:

You must use a web browser

The web browser must

(a) auto-load resources, e.g., images

(b) display images. If images are optional, then the option must be enabled, e.g., by default

For example,

I often fail these requirements as I manually retrieve information without a browser. For example, I read the information from the BBC website without meeting the software requirements for social media pixel tracking

I also use a text-only browser to read HTML offline. This browser fails the software requirements as it does not auto-load resources. Further, I compile it without support for images

In addition to the software requirements there is also a requirement for access to remote DNS controlled by a third party

If you do not use the TikTok website, then your browser has no need to retrieve DNS data for tiktok.com or other domains registered to or used by TikTok

Unless you delegate lookups to a third party DNS provider such as an ISP, Cloudflare, Google, Quad9, etc. or run a local resolver that accesses remote authoritative servers then the required web browser specified above will not be able to retrieve DNS data for tikctok.com or whatever domains are used for the tracking pixel

For example, I use only locally-stored DNS data served from local authoritative DNS servers and localhost forward proxy memory. There is no DNS data for tiktok.com or other domains used for TikTok's tracking pixel

NB. The subject of this comment is (c) software and DNS requirements for pixel tracking. A different subject is (d) how many users may or may not meet such requirements, e.g., high numbers versus low numbers, "average" users versus non-"average" users, and so on. HN replies often attempt to change the subject to (d)
by ivywho | 2026-02-12 17:38:12+00:00
Interesting that every agent basically falls off a cliff on hard tasks except this one. Operator going from 83% to 43% is wild - that means it's literally coin-flipping on anything non-trivial.

The failure traces being public is a nice touch. Looked through a few and they're actual failures, not cherry-picked easy ones. Most companies in this space wouldn't do that.

Curious about latency though, what does a typical hard task execution look like in terms of wall clock time?
by strogonoff | 2026-02-12 17:38:15+00:00
Very uncharitable and questionable on a few levels. Every human exists in context of society, no human exists standalone—the very definition of self, as in self-awareness, has the existence of other as a prerequisite. People you see are perfectly aware of themselves; it’s just that awareness of yourself does not mean you have to violate societal norms and show how individual you are all the time—at best, it requires a more acute awareness of norms (you have to know what to violate first, cf. all the various counter-cultures), making one more socially integrated and in some ways paradoxicay less individual; at worst (if you are properly disconnected) it makes one less of a human, not more.
by idle_zealot | 2026-02-12 17:38:25+00:00
> I believe this is partially why tools that were meant to just render markup have gotten so complex to build that a small team of devs is not enough to build a modern browser anymore.

Isn't it basically the opposite? The hard parts of the browser are layout, styling, and multimedia stuff that goes into rendering markup compliantly. Then there's the infinite sink of optimization work for a JS engine, the high-level scripting language for that markup. The low level access that something like this emulator use is comparatively easy; a WASM runtime and Canvas blitting pixels from some shared buffer.

Or am I mistaken that a WASM engine is much easier to build than a performant JS engine?
by idiotsecant | 2026-02-12 17:38:34+00:00
The problem is that these institutions are still doing massively useful things. They've been doing them so long that they are invisible. People think the gains that we've made in air quality, consumer rights, labor rights, etc to infinity are natural features of the universe. They are not. They are hard fought and require focused, driven people to keep them. Institutions serve a useful function.
by skeeter2020 | 2026-02-12 17:38:35+00:00
>> that should just remind the agent to refactor into a common function when appropriate.

This off-the-cuff statement buries so much complexity. Sure it catches new code the exactly implements existing code, but IME it is __way__ more common to need to slightly (or not so slightly) change existing code that can now be used by multiple consumers, and then delete the new "duplicate" code. That is not trivial and requires (1) judgement from your AI coder and (2) deep reviewer expertise from your human coder.
Show HN: ConsentScope – detect cookies loaded before user consent
by murzynalbinos | 2026-02-12 17:38:36+00:00
So I recently ran a small experiment.

I tested 20 websites (SaaS, e-commerce, agencies, blogs) to check something simple:

Do they actually wait for user consent before loading analytics?

14 out of 20 loaded Google Analytics or other tracking scripts before the user clicked “Accept”.

In most cases:the cookie banner was visible, no interaction had happened yet
but GA/GTM requests were already firing. You don’t really notice this unless you’re watching the Network tab closely.

So I built a small tool to monitor:

cookies being set

localStorage/sessionStorage usage

tracking-related network requests

the exact timestamp of the consent click

Originally it was just a script for internal audits.
It grew into a Chrome extension called ConsentScope.

What it does:

-compares before vs after consent

-classifies cookies (necessary / analytics / marketing)

-shows a simple timeline of events

-optionally exports a report

It doesn’t auto-click banners.
It doesn’t interpret the law.
It just shows what technically happens.

I’m curious if others have checked this on their own sites. Feel free to ask anything technical — happy to share details.
by halapro | 2026-02-12 17:38:39+00:00
You're here, right? How much of your life is already stored on digital devices one warrant away from the state?

I read your comment as someone from the 80s complaining about digitalization and it all applied. And yet here we are, my WHOLE photo library on my phone, most of communication with everyone on my phone, and AI isn't even part of it.
by miki123211 | 2026-02-12 17:38:46+00:00
> narrow subset of the websites on the web

Under most of these laws, most websites with user-generated content qualify.

I'd be a lot more fine with it if it was just algorithms designed for addiction (defining that in law is tricky), but AFAIK a simple forum where kids can talk to each other about familial abuse or whatever would also qualify.
by jleyank | 2026-02-12 17:38:47+00:00
Little choice when you can't depend on "former mechanisms" to secure one's position. In the 70's, the Bundeswehr had a fair number of troops of (considered) high effectiveness. In the past, various forms of Germany have had all sorts of troops of varying effectiveness. NATO was supposed "to keep the US in, the Russians out and the Germans down" (Ismay). Taken away, it's up to European countries to remember how to defend themselves and (hopefully) manage the result.
by toast0 | 2026-02-12 17:38:49+00:00
There's certainly a case to be made for targetted tarrifs, legally enacted, to support specific industries.

The problem with broad tarrifs by executive order under emergency powers to address longstanding issues are numerous.

Longevity and stability of the tarrifs is questionable because a new executive is likely to cancel them, the executive that issued them is likely to cancel them, and they may also be cancelled by the courts because their basis isn't solid. For some goods where production is easy to shift, it still makes sense to move it ... but then it's easy to shift out again when the winds change; goods where setting up production is a many years thing aren't likely to move with the winds.

The broad tarrifs mean that for goods that are manufactured from components of many origins, it may not make sense to pay tarrifs on the components in order to reduce tariffs on the finished goods. Or that it makes more sense to move manufacturing from one foreign country to another than to move to the US. I get it if you want to move both manufacturing and resource extraction to the US; but it would make more sense to do it one step at a time... first develop demand for the resources in the US, then push to onshore the resource extraction... OTOH a lot of americans prefer resource extraction to be out of sight, and some resources are simply not abundant here.

The other factor is that many countries respond to our broad tarrifs on their exports with their own tarrifs on our exports. This can easily hurt US producers more than it helps them. US products become more expensive in those countries due to their import tarrifs as well as US import tarrifs on the inputs and often there are many non-US suppliers to choose from; possible increases in US domestic demand may not materialize because costs will go up for US consumers as well due to tarrifs on input and potentially loss of economies of scale if the reduction in exports is significant.

I may be a free trade maximalist, but IMHO, the current admin's tariff policy is a recipie for economic slowdown. Which does help their goal of reducing immigration: the best way to reduce economic immigration is to have a deeper recession or depression than the world at large; it also helps with traffic. Big inflation numbers also push stock indexes up and reduce the cost of servicing old debt, but increase the cost of revolving and issuing new debt.
by dematz | 2026-02-12 17:39:10+00:00
>I can't imaging writing code by myself again, specially documentation, tests and most scaffolding.

Doesn't ai;dr kind of contradict ai generated documentation? If I want to know what claude thinks about your code I can just ask it. Imo documentation is the least amenable thing to ai. As the article itself says, I want to read some intention and see how you shape whatever you're documenting.

(AI adding tests seems like a good use, not sure what's meant by scaffolding)