MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by von_lohengramm | 2026-02-28 14:18:44+00:00
Funny you say that. Ukrainian civilians are afraid to walk out in the streets due to the danger of "busification"[0] where armed men wearing balaclavas drive up in vans and abduct people off the street to draft them into the military. Just recently an MP in Zelensky's party was nearly Shanghai'd[1], presumably only saved by his status. I personally know Ukrainians still living in Ukraine who are afraid to go out alone due to risk of busification.

Then there's also the funny issue of elections. Due to their martial law, they've been postponed for almost two years now. Both the west and the east have been pressuring them to hold elections to no avail. I'm not entirely sure why they'd even be reluctant given that of the three declared candidates, one is Zelensky himself, one has calls out for his arrest[2], and one has pending charges of state treason[3].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busification

[1] https://t.me/kaptielov/95#

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleksii_Arestovych#Political_c...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petro_Poroshenko#Criminal_case
by Brajeshwar | 2026-02-28 14:20:23+00:00
This is interesting. I took the opposite path. I used to remember page numbers while reading books, just so I could come back without getting lost. That habit started in the School library. These days, I bought a simple, cheap, paintable bookmark, about 100 of them, which my daughters can paint. I have them lying around in books, as I tend to read multiple books at a time. My daughters keep painting them with whatever they want, from anime to their favorite characters, to just about anything. So, bookmarks for me everywhere. Sometimes, I tend to go back a few pages just to recollect the books I was reading a while ago.
by ChicagoDave | 2026-02-28 14:20:59+00:00
Here’s my take:

- when I saw Altman driving a multimillion dollar car while OpenAI was still a nonprofit, all of his scientists left to start rival firms, and the details of why they tried to fire him were legit, I dumped ChatGPT and moved to the new company - Anthropic.

- The Pro Max $200/month subscription has uncapped my workflow to where I’ve created several substantial and complex applications in compressed timeframes. (https://devarch.ai if you want to be productive)

- Anthropic has clearly evolved towards being a good corporate citizen and is staging itself to replace the market’s developer-first mentality from its past leaders (Microsoft, Google, Oracle).

- Claude Code in the last three months has finally made it possible to dump Windows and buy a loaded MacBook Pro. It’s been a week since I logged into my Surface Laptop 5.

- if Anthropic does break from its current evolutionary trajectory, I plan to build out my own at-home platform anyway. The open source models are extraordinarily effective.
by misiek08 | 2026-02-28 14:21:01+00:00
There is also point of view that remembers that always right behind US military there is a team building next oil pipeline.
US tried to used China as cheap labor, lost a lot of intelligence and now - look at how much oil Iran has and who is it exporting to and what is the percentage at the destination.
The numbers add up and only the funny (?) thing is - China is (going to) be most eco country, because they already use nuclear power a lot and were forced to work on that.

What a time to be alive, again!
And please, downvote me, comment that US is fighting for some country’s civilians freedom. It’s fun too.
by alexhans | 2026-02-28 14:21:03+00:00
I love emergent behaviour and story telling. Anyone who has played City builders like Sim City or roguelikes like Dwarf Fortress knows how interesting, fun and even informative they can be.

In a world where setting them up and letting rogue agents run rampant becomes relatively low cost and fast, I think focusing on the desired outcomes, the story telling and specially the UX for the human user, is key and maybe we can take some learnings from Will Wright on "Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games" [1].

I'm going to be unable to do much this weekend so I can't say I'll try check this out (yet?) but I'd be interested in your own experiences so far. Any surprises? Things you'd like to do next? What's most fun/challenging?

An actual report/writeup will probably resonate more than a repo for people who can't check it out easily or are not willing to.

- [1] https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...
Show HN: OpenPencil - Open-source vector design tool controlled by AI Agents
by finiking | 2026-02-28 14:21:23+00:00
Hey! I'm the creator of OpenPencil, and I'm super excited to share it with you today.
We are entering the era of AI Agents, but our design tools are still stuck in the GUI era. We are constantly downloading "final_v9.fig" and manually clicking to tweak UI elements. I wanted to change that.

OpenPencil isn't just another design tool with a magic AI button. It is structurally built for AI.

Here is why it's different:

Agentic Design (MCP Server): You can connect Claude, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible agent directly to your design. Tell your AI IDE to "update the login screen to match the new dark mode theme," and it modifies the design file without you ever touching a mouse.

Design-as-Code: The .op format is pure JSON. Finally, you can Git commit, diff, and PR your design files just like your codebase.

100% Open Source (MIT): No subscriptions, no vendor lock-in. Build on top of it, fork it, make it yours.

I built this because I believe the future of design is Human creativity + Agent execution.

I'd love your feedback! Drop your questions below, and let me know what features you want to see next!
by senko | 2026-02-28 14:21:43+00:00
Yeah this was a few trees at the edge of the forest leaning over some houses, needed clearing. "Should be fine", but they're not keen on taking the (personal, physical) risk.

Thing is, you can't narrow it down to some acceptable level of risk. Mines are by definition stealthy, the only way to reduce the risk is to eliminate it by combing over everything, which is extremely hard, tedious, expensive, etc.
by gyomu | 2026-02-28 14:21:49+00:00
> Werld drops 30 agents onto a graph with NEAT neural networks that evolve their own topology, 64 sensory channels, continuous motor effectors, and 29 heritable genome traits. communication bandwidth, memory decay, aggression vs cooperation — all evolvable. No hardcoded behaviours, no reward functions. - they could evolve in any direction.

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.

"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe", Sussman replied.

"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.

"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.

Minsky then shut his eyes.

"Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher.

"So that the room will be empty."

At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
by verdverm | 2026-02-28 14:22:02+00:00
One of my early experiences with AI coding was actually away from the keyboard. I was looking for my keys and just wanted to ask my agent. Very valid use case, but sent dependency chills down my spine. I've been more conscious since and following Sherry Turkle

https://www.npr.org/2025/07/18/g-s1177-78041/what-to-do-when...
by jandrewrogers | 2026-02-28 14:22:32+00:00
The costs of the self-destructs and failsafes exceed the cost of the rest of the landmine. One of the reason mines are used is that they are exceedingly cheap and simple to build at scale. No batteries or electronics. Even a relatively primitive industrial base can produce them.

In practice, only wealthy countries are willing to pay for mines with reliable self-destruct and target discrimination technology.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-28 14:23:48+00:00
> Rockets can’t tell what citizenship you are

Sure. And yes, it's risky. But there are two million people in Gaza and half a dozen to a dozen, on average, being killed each day. If I, literally I, were teleported into Gaza, my primary operational concern would be avoiding Hamas. (My primary operational goal, getting to an internet-connected device.)

> no one is launching rockets onto North Korea

Correct, their security forces are undisrupted.
by azernik | 2026-02-28 14:23:58+00:00
That is not the ruling Likud ideology in Israel nor the allied national religious ideology; both refer to Israel+Palestine+Golan as "the Whole Land of Israel".

And in any case, the "most religious" (ie those whose politics are most totally driven by Judaism) bloc in Israel are at best ambivalent about the Israeli state and the settlement enterprise, and actively hostile to military service.

Israeli hostility to Iran is driven by a "defensive" paranoia, not a religious mission.
by xrd | 2026-02-28 14:24:03+00:00
Another recent concern on other posts here on HN is whether a private company should have veto power over the US government. Or, another way to look at it, whether the US government should be able to designate a company as a supply chain risk and ban them from most business in the host country.

If I squint at the conversation, it doesn't seem that different from a behemoth company taking an employee of a private company and forcing them to still stop working for arbitrary reasons.

I'm giving agents and coding tools wide berth here, but if AI is going to replace all employees, what guarantees do you have as the employer that your employees will do your bidding, and not the bidding of enterprises with a shifting moral landscape?

Once we have tooling wrapped around specific agents, it'll be hard to rehire. What will we do then when our "employees" are furloughed?

This will be especially relevant when the big AI labs decide they need to enter a market to justify an obscene valuation. Or, when the sovereign wealth fund decides they don't like the direction of a business.

This is a good and honorable decision by Google. But it also brings up scary times ahead.
by filleduchaos | 2026-02-28 14:24:14+00:00
That's nice but doesn't actually answer the question that I asked, which is how this (i.e. requiring local user accounts to specify an age range on creation) is bad for a free society.

Simply stating something you apparently see as self-evidently true in the abstract doesn't really make much of a point. Especially when said something is unironically just "but the slippery slope!"
by varispeed | 2026-02-28 14:24:18+00:00
You wrote, in your second reply: "First off, IR35 does not apply to self-employed workers, it only applies to a worker contracting via a limited company." That is inaccurate, and it is what you wrote. Claiming now that you didn't say it does not change the record.

On the plumber: I did not agree with you. The plumber's company is in scope of IR35 precisely because the plumber owns it. That is the ownership trigger I have been describing throughout. Who they deliver services to determines whether they can self-declare their status or whether the client performs the determination. That is a procedural question about who makes the assessment, not about whether the regime applies. The regime applies because of ownership. A large plumbing company sending an employee to do the same job, at the same location, under the same conditions, never enters this framework at all.

These are not two opposing things. The ownership structure is what brings the regime into existence. The nature of the client determines who performs the status assessment. You are confusing the two and presenting that confusion as a contradiction in my argument.

You have now resorted to questioning my reading comprehension rather than answering the question. The question remains: why does this regime target worker-owned companies specifically, rather than applying a universal status test to all companies supplying labour in identical conditions?
by lofaszvanitt | 2026-02-28 14:25:25+00:00
It's a harrowing situation to watch simpleminded idiots in forums proclaim that artists, some even naming top talent, are going to be useless and that they can steal their handiwork just by naming them in prompts. And people actually dare to say this with such audacity. Those who create GenAI likely do not realize what lowlife impulses some of these individuals have.

No matter how good AI agents become, you still need a general understanding of what works and what doesn't. If you don't have years of experience in the field, all you will end up doing is copying what others do. It's the same dynamic you see on OnlyFans. Mindless zombie hordes copy the "pioneers" (who shove even bigger things in their back orifice for example) and push things further and further, chasing shock value because that's what once elevated someone into the top 0.1 percent.

It's the worst kind of race-to-the-bottom scenario.
by themacguffinman | 2026-02-28 14:25:40+00:00
The events are out of order, the bottom three events are:

- Feb 27, 2026, 02:13 PM: OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation

- Feb 27, 2026, 12:00 AM: Anthropic: Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth

- Feb 27, 2026, 10:14 PM: Dept. of War: Anthropic is a supply chain risk
by ryanmcl | 2026-02-28 14:26:17+00:00
There's a third category emerging that I think gets overlooked in these discussions = people who couldn't program at all before, who now can. Not replacing programmers, but creating new ones.

I started coding 8 months ago at 45 with zero experience. I now have a production app processing real payments. That was genuinely impossible for someone like me before AI assistance. Not because I lacked the ability to think through problems, but because the skill floor was too high to clear while also being a parent with no spare years to invest.

The spreadsheet analogy is apt. Most of those amateur spreadsheets aren't replacing finance teams; they're solving small problems that would otherwise go unsolved. That's closer to what's happening with AI-assisted development, I feel, than the "eliminate programmers" framing suggests.
by OgsyedIE | 2026-02-28 14:27:00+00:00
They have denied the incorporation of the firms that drill for various blends of Iranian Heavy into the global financial network. If they did, then they could be plugged into IMF and banking stuff that would gradually apply different kinds of incremental pressure to force them to sell to the Gulf Coast at a loss.

By their staying independent, the Gulf Coast refinery complexes are denied heavy crude to mix with the light crude they already have, causing the medium distillates made from them to have supply deficits. There are structural constraints on jet fuel and diesel, because the Iranians won't let the US buy up all of the ingredients.

Venezuela, Greenland, Nigeria and Iran are the parts of the world where the rate of US diplomatic belligerence has increased, instead of the rate staying flat, for the same exact reason - shortages of the heavy crudes that are needed for mixing.

It's not a good vs evil thing on either side, though, this is just people under pressure to improve gas prices following the incentives they are faced with.
by cmiles74 | 2026-02-28 14:27:26+00:00
I can take a verbal description from a meeting with five to ten people and put together something they can interact with in two weeks. That is a lot slower than Claude Code! Yet everywhere I’ve worked, this is more than fast enough.

Over two more weeks I can work with those same five to ten people (who often disagree or have different goals) and get a first draft of a feature or small, targeted product together. In those latter two weeks, writing code isn’t what takes time; working through what people think they mean verses what they are actually saying, mediating one group of them to another when they disagree (or mostly agree) is the work. And then, after that, we introduce a customer. Along the way I learn to become something of an expert in whatever the thing is and continue to grow the product, handing chunks of responsibility to other developers at which point it turns into a real thing.

I work with AI tooling and leverage AI as part of products, where it makes sense. There are parts of this cycle where it is helpful and time saving, but it certainly can’t replace me. It can speed up coding in the first version but, today, I end up going back and rewriting chunks and, so far, that eats up the wins. The middle bit it clearly can’t do, and even at the end when changes are more directed it tends toward weirdly complicated solutions that aren’t really practical.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2026-02-28 14:27:34+00:00
I agree that we should remember historical traumas, but I don't agree they suffice to explain international politics.

Take the Greeks (that's my people! Us!) and the Turkish. I guess people in the West don't remember this but the Israelis are not the only people in the Middle East who have a word that means "disaster" (Shoah, for the Israelis; Καταστροφή- Catastrophe for us), that when anyone says it everyone knows exactly which disaster is spoken of. They are not the only people who lost the land their ancestors inhabited for thousands of years (Ionia, for us Greeks), who lost their greatest city (Constantinople, the City), who lost their greatest temple that was turned into a Mosque (the Hagia Sophia). Us, Greeks, too, have suffered these ignominies at the hand of the Turkish. Our common history with the Turkish is one of war, destruction, violence and blood. So much blood.

Genocide? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide Check. Ethnic cleansing? Check. Death marches through the deserts? Check, check, check.

And yet, since the Catastrophe, in 1922, we have been at peace with the Turkish, even through serious hot episodes in the Mediterrannean, like Cyprus. That's 100 years of peace, after 1500 years of history of war.

It can be done. The trauma can be overcome, if both sides agree to it. To quote none other than Moshe Dayan: if you want to make peace you talk to your enemies, not your friends.
by ozgung | 2026-02-28 14:27:49+00:00
Actually Google Gemini provides almost no control on the data you share. Same for Antigravity. No "opt-out" button, even as a lie. Even when you are a paying user. Only Google Workplace users have some control.

There is a setting in Gemini but it removes all your chat history. For Antigravity, I think there is nothing preventing them from use your code and data your agents upload in the background unless you are a workspace user.

Note: Canceled my ChatGPT subscription and deleted an account.
by packet_mover | 2026-02-28 14:27:50+00:00
Context: I posted a Show HN a while back about an offline maps stack (vector tiles + routing + geocoding) for edge/on-prem/air-gapped deployments, and one common question was about hardware requirements.

Original thread for background: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46478061

This post is a write-up of measurements across multiple regions on a consistent baseline (EC2 c6g.xlarge / Graviton2), including methodology + raw numbers (disk footprint, p95 RAM, and p95 endpoint latencies).

If you’ve deployed mapping/search/routing into constrained or secured environments, what would you want benchmarked to make a real go/no-go decision?

Examples: Raspberry Pi/NUC class hardware, cold-start, concurrency, update workflow, custom overlays/POIs, address quality, terrain/elevation (hillshade/contours/LOS).

If you share rough "region size + target hardware + usage pattern," I’m happy to add more rows.
by dgellow | 2026-02-28 14:28:07+00:00
I hope you’re right but not too confident that will be the case. I wish EU leadership wouldn’t be as spineless as it is. I’m afraid they will accept any opportunity to make things feel as if they are back to the old normal if they are given the opportunity. And that would of course backfire, but long term thinking hasn’t been our strength over the past 3 decades or so…
by mrshadowgoose | 2026-02-28 14:28:31+00:00
It's doom and gloom because the underlying game theory forces all state actors into an unbound and irresponsible arms race, consequences be damned.

AI development game theory is extremely similar to the game theory behind nuclear arms development, but worse (nuclear weaponry was born from Human General Intelligence, and is therefore a subset of the potential of AI development). Failing to be the most capable actor could put one in a position of permanent loss of autonomy/agency at the whims of more capable actors.
Show HN: Code-snippet flashcards for 600 programming cheat sheets
by twistorino | 2026-02-28 14:28:33+00:00
Today, I'm launching Flashcards across all 600+ topics on CheatSheet++ (cheatsheet-plus-plus.com).

Active recall is crucial for really learning and remembering concepts (especially for interview prep).

To make these actually useful for developers, I focused on a few key features:

Code Snippets Included: Standard flashcards are often too text-heavy. These flashcards feature syntax-highlighted code examples on the back alongside the conceptual explanations.
Progressive Difficulties: The decks scale from Beginner to Advanced, adjusting the depth of the questions and the complexity of the concepts accordingly.

This feature is designed to work alongside our existing Interview Q&A section for comprehensive prep.

Search the topic you are currently learning and try it: https://cheatsheet-plus-plus.com

Feedback and critique are incredibly welcome!
Seeking Advice on Improving OCR for Watermarked PDFs in My RAG Pipeline
by hundredtrillion | 2026-02-28 14:28:43+00:00
I’ve been developing a small RAG pipeline and ran into a specific technical issue involving OCR. I’m using PyMuPDF for extraction, and whenever a PDF contains a centered watermark on each page, the OCR becomes noisy—text breaks, artifacts show up, and the output degrades enough that it affects chunking and retrieval accuracy downstream.

The document is otherwise clean, so I’m trying to understand whether this is a known limitation of PyMuPDF or if there are better approaches for handling watermarked PDFs before OCR. I’m working with an RTX 4000 (8GB VRAM), so I’m also trying to stay within reasonable GPU constraints.

I’d really appreciate any ideas on:

more robust OCR libraries or models that handle watermarks well

preprocessing strategies to suppress watermark text

better extraction pipelines for RAG use cases

or any general advice on improving this part of the system

The project is open-source, and if anyone is interested in digging deeper, finding issues, or contributing improvements, here’s the repository:

GitHub: https://github.com/Hundred-Trillion/L88-Full

If you find it useful, starring the repo helps increase visibility so more people with domain expertise might notice it.

Thanks in advance for any insights.
by ceejayoz | 2026-02-28 14:28:57+00:00
> armed men wearing balaclavas drive up in vans and abduct people off the street to draft them into the military

Every country with conscription will do this if you refuse to show up.

> Both the west and the east have been pressuring them to hold elections to no avail.

Their own constitution and laws forbids it during martial law.

“Both Putin and Trump want Zelensky to violate the Ukrainian Constitution” is not the grand slam take you imagine it to be.
by ryanmcl | 2026-02-28 14:29:00+00:00
Coming at this from the opposite end...I started coding 8 months ago with no experience, so AI assistance isn't replacing skills I had, it's the reason I have any skills at all.

But I've noticed something similar to what you describe. When Claude writes a solution for me, I understand it about 70% of the time. That other 30% used to bother me and I'd dig in. Lately I catch myself just accepting it and moving on. The velocity is addictive but you're right that something is being traded away.

The cost I've started noticing most: I'm worse at holding the full architecture of my own app in my head than I should be 8 months in. I can describe what each piece does but I couldn't rebuild it from scratch without help. Not sure the version of me who learned without AI would have that problem.

Still wouldn't trade the tradeoff = I have a live production app that wouldn't exist otherwise. But it's an honest cost worth naming.