MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bazoom42 | 2026-02-15 17:12:39+00:00
Shakespeare tended to re-use existing stories or plays. As the article mentions, there are only two of his plays (out of almost 40) where we don’t know of a pre-existing source. Of course it is possible he made the story up himself after getting inspired by a drawing, buy I find it a lot more plausible he based it on another story or play which just happens to be lost (which is the case for many plays of the age).
by jeffrallen | 2026-02-15 17:12:43+00:00
It is not yet illegal or dangerous to call for a general strike. Only by shutting down the ports, the rail, the trucks and the delivery services will people create enough economic disruption that the billionaires will call their political toadies to heel and get them to start fixing this shit.

We still have the power to panic the billionaires, and they have the power to get what they want. If what they want is temporarily in sync with what society needs, then so much the better.
by SergiuLeonard | 2026-02-15 17:12:59+00:00
I built this as an experiment after realizing that “editing PDFs” is fundamentally broken.
Instead of modifying PDF internals, DCP treats PDFs as immutable surfaces and applies deterministic visual deltas (whiteout + overlay) on top. The original PDF is never modified. All edits live in a JSON delta ledger.
Think: Git for 2D surfaces.
by jonathasrr | 2026-02-15 17:12:59+00:00
My mailbox is several walls away from my flat and has no power outlets nearby. I used a Zigbee motion sensor and flashed a Sonoff Dongle-E as a battery-powered router to extend the mesh.

One unexpected issue was the power bank shutting down due to low power draw, which I fixed using a small USB dummy load.

Full write-up with diagrams and setup: https://jonathas.com/how-i-made-my-physical-mailbox-send-me-...
by newsoftheday | 2026-02-15 17:13:19+00:00
I asked Gemini to verify this statement from the article, ver batim, "However, Article 8 permits secured creditors to seize customer assets pledged as collateral if a firm cannot pay its debts, even if the securities were improperly pledged." to which it replied in part, "That statement is disturbingly accurate in a very narrow, legal sense, but it describes a "worst-case scenario...". That, if accurate, would seem to refute your statement that the stocks can't be seized which supports the intent of the article.
by mindslight | 2026-02-15 17:14:18+00:00
The real problem isn't that it was undone by "the People", but rather that the surveillance industry effectively formed a fourth branch of government that grew and grew, then finally had enough sway over the People to convince them to undo it. To head off what we're currently staring down, we needed a US equivalent of the GDPR and enforcement against anti-competitive bundling 15+ years ago.
by kody | 2026-02-15 17:14:32+00:00
Coaxed into dead-end architecture is the exact issue I have had when trying agentic coding. I find that I have the greatest success when I plan everything out and document the implementation plan as precisely as possible before handing it off to the agent. At which point, the hard part is already done. Generating the code was not really the bottleneck.

Using LLMs to generate documentation for the code that I write, explaining data sheets to me, and writing boilerplate code does save me a lot of time, though.
by hermannj314 | 2026-02-15 17:14:41+00:00
We have a branch of government called Congress, here are some things they used to do that made it a crime to read your mail or listen to your phone calls.

1. Postal Service Act of 1792

2. Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986

Anyway, Facebook can read your DMs, Google can read your email, Ring can take photos from your camera.

We can very easily make those things a crime, but we don't seem to want to do it.
by orwin | 2026-02-15 17:15:06+00:00
> Ironically, AI tend to be better at securing code, because unlike the squishy human, it is much more cable of creating tons of tests and figuring out weaknesses.

Sentences like this make me think AI is honestly the best thing that happened for my imposter syndrome. AI is great for simulating test case, and that's it. If you leave it, it write the most basic, useless tests (i mean, half of them might be usefull when you refactor, but that's about it). It can't design reusable test components and have trouble with test double, which i would think is the easiest test case for AI. Even average devs like me write test double faster than AI, and i'm shit at writing tests.

AI is also extremely bad at understanding versionning, and will use a deprecated API for no reason except increasing the surface of attack.

AI is great for writing CLI scripts, boilerplate and autocomplete. I use it for frontend because i'm shit at it (even though i have to clean its shit up behind), and to rewrite small functionalities of some libraries i want to avoid loading (which allowed us to remove legacy dependencies). It's good at writing prototypes (my main use nowadays), and a very good way to use it is to ask it a plan to improve/factorize your code (it's _very_ bad at factorizing, but as it recognize patterns, it is able to suggest interesting refactors. Half the time it's wrong, so use the "plan" mode)

I'm on a network security and cybersecurity tooling team, i guarantee you AI is shit at securing the code (and at understanding network).
by EarlKing | 2026-02-15 17:15:24+00:00
Point of information: By and large FORTHs did not use bytecode. Execution tokens (XTs) were usually stored as a function of the default word size, which typically was 16 bits. There were some FORTHs that went out of their way to use token threading so they could store programs in byte codes, but those were pretty rare. Rarer still were programs that mixed byte code with word-sized code (although one such scheme is described in an issue of Forth Dimensions).
by kube-system | 2026-02-15 17:15:54+00:00
Yeah, any doctor worth their salt is going to be diagnosing you based off of the MRI results and some other evidence.

But in the scenarios this article is talking about (Prenuvo, et al), these aren’t scans ordered by a doctor, and there is no other evidence. It is just a patient getting some MRI findings of unknown clinical significance dumped in their lap.

The problem isn’t an overdiagnosis by doctors. The problem is that there’s no doctor diagnosing anything in these instances.
by Zamoshi | 2026-02-15 17:16:00+00:00
OP here. Thank you all for taking the time to read this and beginning some conversations, even if some are harder to read.

I plan on sharing more of the story in future writings. During this particular story, I was on the tail end of a state of a psychosis, which I didn’t know at the time. I just thought what I thought. Truth to be told, I took too many psychedelics in 2024 and one day I woke up, and started experiencing a bunch of delusions that ripped me away from reality.

I had spent the majority of my life living in New York, Vegas directly before San Francisco- I was in Grass Valley.

I arrived in SF last January and didn’t know anyone close enough to reach out to. Plus my delusions were beginning to pick up, dramatically.

I threw away my cash and IDs, got rid of every item I owned, and was paranoid that my phone was tracking me. So I voluntarily got rid of it.

I was navigating all this chapter without a phone.

I obviously got out of the situation. I’m not in jail. I did successfully defend myself, pro se, against the felonies. I eventually got a job. Which connected me with people. I started volunteering on art and back in the homeless shelters. I found more and more jobs. I found a home. I started researching psychosis to try to understand what happened to me.

This was an intense experience. And at this particular moment in time, as many people in here have picked up on- one of my survival mechanisms was believing I was the hero of my own journey. I was isolated. I was lonely. My delusions were based on video games, and books, and movies, and AI, and predictions about the future. Being homeless in San Francisco- where there’s people bent over on fentanyl and an AI sign everywhere, everyplace promoting AI is sort of surreal. Especially if you are in the middle of psychosis. Jail and homelessness will compound that more.

There are many good people trying to help in this situation. Some from the HSA, the old ladies and other volunteers making food at the homeless shelter, the other hurting souls, the DA involved in my case, a wonderful woman from the shelter in Redwood City. My family. My mom. My brother. I will share some of those good stories. And there’ll be more context- as to why it was the way it was.

I suppose anything that splits people is a good thing. And I appreciate the level of insight on both sides that people give in this thread.
by anthonypasq96 | 2026-02-15 17:16:14+00:00
i agree, and its strange that this failure mode continually gets lumped onto AI. The whole point of longer term software engineering was to make it so that the context within a particular persons head should not impact the ability of a new employee to contribute to a codebase. turns out everything we do to make sure that is the case for a human also works for an agent.

As far as i can tell, the only reason AI agents currently fail is because they dont have access to the undocumented context inside of peoples heads and if we can just properly put that in text somehwere there will be no problems.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-15 17:16:39+00:00
> presumably serious people think that giving a token prize to a narcissist

Unfortunately, I think reality is much worse than you seem to be under the impression of. Voter suppression and military violence against your own population isn't "narcissism", it's the introduction of authoritarianism. The flagrant narcissism is a symptom of that, not the actual issue.
by woeirua | 2026-02-15 17:16:56+00:00
Article closes with:

>The usefulness of AI agents is dominated by how few mistakes they make, not by their raw speed. Buying 6x the speed at the cost of 20% more mistakes is a bad bargain, because most of the user’s time is spent handling mistakes instead of waiting for the model6.

That might be true today. I think the OpenAI-Cerebras partnership ultimately is going to lead to a paradigm shift because it will be possible to scale these chips up to the point where a model like full Codex-5.3 can run on them and then you'll have a super fast model that makes relatively few errors. A Codex-5.3 model running at these speeds is more than sufficient to actually start replacing customer facing jobs.
by gottebp | 2026-02-15 17:17:26+00:00
Nostalgia and Claude Code makes some interesting hard things possible. Five of us wrote this as our ECE291 final project at UIUC in the summer of 2002. It's a Middle Earth space shooter in pure x86 assembly, fully software rendered. It has hand-tuned SSE memory ops, Mersenne Twister RNG, toroidal physics, 10,000 particles at 60fps. We were pretty rough after those two weeks and probably didn't smell great either.

The code sat on a CD-ROM for 24 years. I had Claude Code burn a bunch of tokens to port it from x86 asm to C to WebAssembly (via Emscripten), wrapped it in tests, and got it running cross-platform in the browser/mobile/desktop/everywhere. It's 98% faithful to the original, however I did tune the difficulty a bit; and by that I mean best of luck!

Playable Link: https://particlefield.com/projects/alan-parsons/game.html
by margalabargala | 2026-02-15 17:17:51+00:00
Snowden is currently more or less trapped in Russia, and therefore unable to expose overreach of authoritarian governments without immediately fearing for his life.

The US has lots of issues but at least it doesn't toss you out a window when you cross Fearless Leader. Maybe you get ICE'd, but Russia's kill rate of people Putin doesn't like is 1000x Trump.
by tonetegeatinst | 2026-02-15 17:18:38+00:00
Server hardening is good for anyone to learn.

I like to do it manually because I find myself changing stuff depending on what the VPS is doing, and I also feel that by making it more labor intensive and difficult I am forcing myself to stop and really think about everything.

But if you know you will use the same pattern for every server you harden then I see why you might automate the process.
by oefrha | 2026-02-15 17:19:40+00:00
If you’re being sarcastic, well, congratulate yourself for being better than shitholes I guess.

If you’re not, yes it is, unfortunately same can’t be said about the U.S., where my not very large social circle have experienced robbery at gun point at a gas station, street mugging, home break-in with everything stolen, smashed car window, all within the past decade. I was more fortunate but still got my bike stolen.
by SergiuLeonard | 2026-02-15 17:19:44+00:00
Hi HN! I built DCP after struggling with PDF corruption in a document workflow.

Instead of editing PDF internals (which breaks things), DCP treats the PDF as an immutable substrate and applies JSON-defined visual deltas on top.

Think of it as "Git for document surfaces" – you get:
- Deterministic rendering (same input = same pixels)
- Full audit trail (delta.json is human-readable)
- Zero risk of corrupting the original

Would love feedback on the protocol design (SPEC.md).
by xpltr7 | 2026-02-15 17:20:10+00:00
Ring camera spyware, Amazons....excuse me Department of Defence/War..whatever the name, they have contracts with Amazon, which had the Super Bowl ad reveiling a new feature called "search party"...which it uses AI face/pattern recognition under the guise "search for missing dogs" to scan all its cameras videos for the "missing dog"...
.Now this scans all Ring cameras, inside houses, outside houses, wherever theres a Ring camera....but its really to find people, dissenters, "criminals" in the eyes of the satanic surveillance system.
The minds involved always play on the emotions of people to bring this about, such as a child who lost their dog or an "illegal" immigrant who commited a crime...they spread the propaganda, stir up emotions, then get the results...more gullible Americans accepting more surveillance and spying on their neighbors like the psychos did with fake "covid" hysteria.
Part of their propaganda the so called missing lady Nancy Guthrie...how convenient, right around the time of Amazons search party, Google Nest has the psyop. With a sherrif saying the videos were not saved, she didnt have a Google Nest subscription..lol, see where thats going?
by bastawhiz | 2026-02-15 17:20:23+00:00
> What else can you do? Make a table that has every configuration value as a separate column and populate it with only a single row?

If the values are singletons, what you're describing is the most efficient. What the author is describing is a surprisingly common anti-pattern where someone has a table with three columns: entity id, property name, property value. Almost like a graph database. Fetching data for one entity (normally one row in a properly built db) is fine, but fetching the data for multiple entities is instantly a mess.

It's worth noting, though, that unless the configuration values are all the same type, you lose type safety with just one column for values. "I'll parse the data as JSON" means your service will fail hard at runtime if someone changes the configuration and uses invalid data.
by martinald | 2026-02-15 17:21:03+00:00
This was my assumption - GB200 memory bandwidth is 2.4x faster than H100, so I think personally that's all it is. Doesn't really make sense otherwise as yes there are tricks to get faster time to first token but not really for the same model in throughput terms (speculative decoding etc, but they already use that).

I'm happy to be wrong but I don't think it's batching improvements.
by djkurlander | 2026-02-15 17:22:41+00:00
Nice idea. The original VPS is in Los Angeles, but I installed the app more recently on VPS's in London, Tokyo, and Amsterdam. I've been noticing some interesting regional differences, but it may just be smaller sample of knocks for those sites so far. I'll set up that contrib directory so that we can share our dashboards. I would be interested in looking at others' dashboards to suss out patterns.
by wordsunite | 2026-02-15 17:22:55+00:00
The comments are fair. My post was quick and lacked details as I was frustrated in the ever increasing enshitification of the web.

What I meant to convey, from my personal experience, is that it seemed hard to get off of platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon Prime, Alexa, Ring, Google Photos, etc. but then I did it and didn’t miss them. These small moves by a lot of people, I believe, can still make a difference. It’s not perfect, but it’s something. Do I still use some services? Of course, I have Gmail and WhatsApp, and use a lot of Apple products. When I can, I choose intentionally what I use since there’s no perfect companies out there, but there are “better” ones (whatever that may be in one’s opinion). I chose cloudflare for hosting and Anthropic for vibe coding. Allowing people to use existing login info versus exposing them to more risk with self managed auth was a choice I made. There are tons of choices we make every day so trying to be more intentional is a good start.

Nobody is perfect, but we can try to improve each day in these choices we make.
by zabzonk | 2026-02-15 17:23:38+00:00
>I meant the work laptop you are given through working as a SWE.

Everywhere i've worked, i was not "given" a computer anymore than I was given a desk, a chair or a network connection. Perhaps "provided" would be better.

> And are you allowed to use your own personal computer (laptop)?

Never have been, and never have wanted to be.

>why are people OK with it

It's industry SOP, and people pay you to work that way.

> I cannot imagine being productive without my OS, WM, IDE, configurations and whatnot.

You need to improve your imaginative powers, and your technical knowledge.
by beepbooptheory | 2026-02-15 17:24:15+00:00
To anyone on Twitter in like 2016-2019, this is a rather funny sentiment to have about him. I can remember my respect for him dissolve day by day. I didn't even remember until now if he was pro- or anti- Trump, probably neither still. But I simply remember that he slowly turned into the worst caricature of a smug Twitter media guy. Just turned into "hot take" haver and seemed to lose his own plot.

If you know you know I guess, but even then, broken clocks and all that. There was a point where he was such a cool guy to me, and I grew up a little in a good way seeing him turn into whatever he did.

It may just be Twitter's fault at the end of the day too!
by thedougd | 2026-02-15 17:24:45+00:00
What sort of tools did it use? I suppose the path mine took may have been a dead end. The Tuya app (I was also using decompiled APK) downloads the BLE definitions on-demand and weren't embedded in the app. It wanted me to capture traffic on a device with the app. I punted but plan to resume with an emulator setup or real device connected with adb.
by kingkongjaffa | 2026-02-15 17:25:41+00:00
> Model T to 2026 Camry was an amazing shift without really changing the combustion engine.

A lot of times the big jumps in internal combustion engine development have been down to materials science or manufacturing capability improvement.

The underlying thermodynamics and theoretical limits have not changed, but the individual parts and what we make it out of have steadily improved over time.

The other factor to this is the need for emissions reduction strategies as a overriding design factor.

The analogue to these two in LLMs are:

1. The harnesses and agentic systems-focused training has gotten better over time so performance has increased without a step change in the foundation models.

2. The requirements for guardrails and anti-prompt injection and other concepts to make LLMs palatable for use by consumers and businesses.
by kakacik | 2026-02-15 17:25:51+00:00
Its a nice outrage wave, but I have very hard time believing this will be a major topic in 2 weeks. People simply don't give a fuck en masse.

Accept that many folks are built differently than you and me and stuff like actual freedom you may be willing to lay your life for may be meaningless fart for others, especially when its not hurting them now. For example US folks voted current admin willingly second time and even after a full year of daily FUBARs the support is still largely there. If even pedophilia won't move some 'patriots' then reading some communication doesn't even register as a topic.

Also, anybody actually concerned about even slightest privacy would never, ever buy such products, not now not a decade earlier. Ie for my family I don't even see any added value of such devices, just stupid fragile something I have no control over, but it sees everything. Why?
by bastawhiz | 2026-02-15 17:26:04+00:00
This is the opposite of what I want. If I'm on my Mac, I don't want menus at the top of the window. I don't want an Office-style ribbon. I don't want buttons that don't look native, or UIs that don't obey the configuration I've set up at the OS level.

Each OS has its own idioms and design patterns. I don't want my experience to be more similar to what someone on Windows sees, I want it to look like the rest of the things on my computer.

Let's not pretend this is what users want. It's what developers want so they don't have to write their UI once for each platform.
by moogly | 2026-02-15 17:27:10+00:00
Indeed. As late as 2 hours ago I had to change the way I build a private Tauri 2.0 app (bundled as .AppImage) because it wouldn't work on latest Kubuntu, but worked on Fedora and EndeavourOS. So now I have to build it on Ubuntu 22.04 via Docker. Fun fun.

Had fewer issues on EndeavourOS (Arch) compared to Fedora overall though... I will stay on Arch from now on.
by benjiro | 2026-02-15 17:27:24+00:00
> Good riddance to software subscriptions.

Counter argument ... at what point is software still profitable to be sold?

I am running my Office 2007 still, and that thing is now almost 20 years old. That was a one time sale, with no other revenue for Microsoft.

I am not condoning subscriptions but one time selling software only works good, if your a small team with low overhead. The more you sell, the more support becomes a issue. And normal customers do not pay for support.

Making software now has become easier with LLMs but the same problem keeps existing in regards to support. Sure, you can outsource this to LLMs but lets just say that is problematic (being kind).

So unless you plan on making software that is not heavily supported/updated, and keep a low single/team cost...

If you sold a program for a one time fee of ... $39.

What if somebody now sells the same for $29 with LLMs. And the next guy in China does it even cheaper because his overhead is even smaller. Eventually you get into abandonware where software is made to just eat sales from the bigger guy and that is it.

Unless you focus on companies, and they have way less issue paying for subscriptions (if it includes support). You see the issue. People kind of overlook the cost of actually running a self employed job or a company (this is a MAJOR cost the moment you need to hire somebody).

So no, i do not see subscriptions going away because companies will pay for it. And on the normal consumer level, paid support as the solution?