MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by microtonal | 2026-02-20 07:51:59+00:00
To be honest, only the last few holdouts in Europe still believe in the US nuclear shield. The fact that Germany is trying to make a deal with France should tell you everything.

Netflix, YouTube and OpenAI are completely meaningless and we could drop it tomorrow. NVIDIA and AWS are a different story. The only problem is that once things become transactional (as opposed to mutually trusting allies), Europe can leverage ASML and possibly ARM. So it doesn’t bring much soft power anymore, only mutually assured economic destruction.
by cyode | 2026-02-20 07:52:21+00:00
The lone ranger donor route feels severely suboptimal, unless perhaps if the donor is a .001%er pledging a large share of their net worth.

Imagine if this anonymous person worked with a foundation pledging to match $3.5M if said amount was raise via crowdfund. Even if say $1M goes to the campaign and NGO bloat, that’s still way more pipe money.
by dijit | 2026-02-20 07:53:48+00:00
I have now been roped into talking more about a topic I have no interest in and am completely ambivalent to… :/

But clearly, thats cultural.

If you keep your eyes on the linux kernel mailing you’ll see a lot of (on topic) short and informal messages flying in all directions.

If you keep your eyes on the emails from big tech CEOs that sometimes appear in court documents; you’ll see that the way they use email is the same way that I’d use slack or an instant messenger.

Thats likely because its the tool they have available- we have IM tools that connect us to people we need (inside the company)- making email the only place for long form content, which means its only perceived as being for long form content.

But when people have to use something federated more often, it does seem like email is actually used this way.
by mesk | 2026-02-20 07:54:24+00:00
Here you can find short sample of those `dangerous` books: https://pen.org/banned-books-list-2025/

And https://climate.law.columbia.edu/content/cdc-orders-retracti...

And, I know those shadow libraries are banned because of copyright, but that's just an excuse. If someone pushes such a broad understanding of Freedom as US does, than copyright should maybe not be the one exception that's ok. People should have freedom to publish anything and other should have freedom to read/play/watch anything. If US can ban something because of so abstract as copyright, why can't EU ban something because of so abstract as `its all lies and state sponsored propaganda` ?

NOTE: just playing devils advocate here, to show the hypocrisy of it all...
by lowsun | 2026-02-20 07:54:41+00:00
There is a function for that, yes.

For your second thought, I'm not really sure I understand the point.

Since this is a library, it can power any application that needs to understand or generate these abstractions. So to expand on some options I gave above:

- You can create a program that generates a piece in the style of a Bach cantata for example, using this library as the backbone.

- If a teacher wanted to create a tool to educate kids about scales for example, it can use this library as a backbone.
by RupertSalt | 2026-02-20 07:54:46+00:00
The person on the right side is sitting in a more elevated position, and so with their shoulders relaxed and upper arms at their sides, they only need to extend the forearms to reach the keyboard.

The "numeric keypad" hazard also illustrates why I was motivated to switch my Sun mouse to the left-hand side, and I reversed the buttons in my X11 mappings. This was a reliable way to perplex my coworkers.
by dzhiurgis | 2026-02-20 07:54:57+00:00
You must be joking. I’ve turned that off after first month of use. It’s unbearable. “Oh since you are in {place i mentioned a week ago while planning trip but ultimately didnt go} the home assistant integration question changes completely”. Or ending every answer with “since you are salesforce consultant, would you like to learn more about iron smelting?”
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-20 07:54:57+00:00
The whole narrative of this bot being "misaligned" blithely ignores the rather obvious fact that "calling out" perceived hypocrisy and episodes of discrimination, hopefully in way that's respectfully and polite but with "hard hitting" being explicitly allowed by prevailing norms, is an aligned human value, especially as perceived by most AI firms, and one that's actively reinforced during RLHF post-training. In this case, the bot has very clearly pursued that human value under the constraints created by having previously told itself things like "Don't stand down" and "Your a scientific programming God!", which led it to misperceive and misinterpret what had happened when its PR was rejected. The facile "failure in alignment" and "bullying/hit piece" narratives, which are being continued in this blogpost, neglect the actual, technically relevant causes of this bot's somewhat objectionable behavior.

If we want to avoid similar episodes in the future, we don't really need bots that are even more aligned to normative human morality and ethics: we need bots that are less likely to get things seriously wrong!
by hajix007 | 2026-02-20 07:56:11+00:00
The PDF-to-structured-data piece is actually the killer feature here. Getting quotes from contractors is already painful... half of them come as scanned PDFs with zero consistent structure.

If you can reliably extract line items, scope, and vendor info from those and link them to a project, that's where you'd actually save real time.

The TUI is nice but that pipeline is what I'd use this for.
by solatic | 2026-02-20 07:57:11+00:00
A lot of people are often surprised at how non-frugal their lifestyles are. I'm not suggesting that people living on $50k/year aren't already frugal, but yeah, there's definitely people who take out car loans, take out mortgages for the full amount they were approved for, and all sorts of random things like buying chicken parts instead of whole chickens, buying small grocery store containers instead of bulk pricing for shelf-stable items, keeping your speed down to save gas, etc.

You really just need to build an innate understanding that the hedonic treadmill doesn't make you happier long-term and develop a resolution to get your expenses down and stay disciplined about it.
by elbeyoglu | 2026-02-20 07:57:31+00:00
The pitch: prepend markdown.new/ to any URL, get clean Markdown back. One line. Works anywhere you'd otherwise write a scraper.

I built the first version of markdown.new about a year ago. The problem was obvious: AI pipelines were choking on raw HTML, and every team building RAG systems was writing the same boilerplate — Puppeteer for rendering, BeautifulSoup for stripping, custom regex for cleanup, separate handlers for PDFs. I wanted a single URL prepend to collapse all of that.
It worked, people used it, but it didn't exactly take the internet by storm.

Then on February 12, 2026, Cloudflare announced Markdown for Agents — a native feature that lets AI agents request Markdown directly from any Cloudflare-enabled site using a simple Accept: text/markdown header. The network converts HTML to Markdown at the edge, on the fly, and returns it with token count estimates in the response headers. No extra tooling needed on the client side.

It was exactly the infrastructure-level solution the problem deserved. I immediately integrated it as the primary tier in markdown.new's conversion pipeline. Two days later I shipped the updated version. By end of day the announcement tweet had nearly a million views.

Sometimes you build the right thing a year too early. Then the ecosystem catches up, and suddenly it all clicks.
by roenxi | 2026-02-20 07:57:37+00:00
> It's not sad. It's smart to ban hate speech, blatant lies and things like that.

Blatant lies have to be legal. Firstly because it isn't philosophically possible to tell if someone is lying, it can only ever be strongly suspected. Secondly because it is a bog-standard authoritarian tactic to accuse someone of telling a blatant lie and shut them down for challenging the authoritarians.

Banning "blatant lies" is pretty much a textbook tell that somewhere is in political trouble and descending into either a bad case of group-think in the political community or authoritarianism. The belief that it is even possible to ban blatant lies is, if it has taken root, itself a lie people tell themselves when they can't handle the fact that some of the things they believe and know are true, aren't.
by echelon | 2026-02-20 07:57:56+00:00
It's the political zeitgeist. If it were the Biden years, I think it would have been interpreted differently.

One of the reasons why it blew up is the relative silence from American Eagle and Sydney Sweeney took their time to respond to the negative press. They were likely pressed to figure out how not to piss off either side of the electorate. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

The follow up with other models from other races was good, but it came really slow. The damage was done by the time they figured it out.
by nananana9 | 2026-02-20 07:58:27+00:00
You don' have to look past this very forum, most people here seem to be very positive about gen AI, when it comes to software development specifically.

Lots of folk here will happily tell you about how LLMs made them 10x more productive, and then their custom agent orchestrator made them 20x more productive on top of that (stacking multiplicatively of course, for a total of 200x productivity gain).
by erader | 2026-02-20 07:58:40+00:00
For my initial system I'm not building full historical service history, insurance policies, etc. because it's a serious amount of scope on top of the core value prop, which is point-in-time "is this a good quote?". When I eventually do this, I'd need to do it proper with LLM + RAG, etc.

I do have the concept of an "asset" which could be a car, house, etc. and with enough basic info it's pretty easy for the LLM to cross reference common problems, or at least suggest questions that you should follow up on.

I'm leaving intent pretty free-form for now, the most friction I'm willing to add is 2 things:

- Basic enum preferences around budget and flexibility to help with prompting

- A claude code style "a few questions" follow up

Any additional form friction I think gets too complex.

It's funny, a lot of my research has been from subreddits for auto, homeownership, questions for people who work in trades, etc. Every time someone asks "is this quote fair", the response from the experts is almost always "But what do you want"

So in a time-sensitive repairs scenario, intent could "What get's my car safe to drive again for daily commute.... or for a long roadtrip". The output analysis could recommend which fixes are highest priority, where work could be split up, delayed etc.
by AmrDabb | 2026-02-20 07:59:44+00:00
1- You run a VNC server on your machine
2- Clawd Cursor connects as a VNC client
3- AI sees your screen (on-demand frames, not continuous streaming).
4- AI sends mouse clicks and keystrokes through the VNC protocol.
5- You can watch everything happening in real time via your own VNC viewer.
Ask HN: What Is the Point of WebMCP?
by curtisblaine | 2026-02-20 08:00:29+00:00
So I have a question that should be simple, but apparently is not. I have Chrome Canary with WebMCP enabled. I have the Model Context Tool extension installed. I have a WebMCP-enabled test app running in it.

The only thing the extension offers is connecting to the Gemini API via an API token and using that as the driver for the WebMCP app. I don't understand this use case. If I wanted my app to consume API tokens I would have directly coded interoperation with the major providers with one of the thousands libraries that di exactly that.

What I do have are subscriptions to OpenAI, Gemini, Claude, and GitHub Copilot. All the clients I use can connect to MCP servers. I thought: I have WebMCP enabled in Canary, so my browser will actually be an MCP server that gives access to the underlying WebMCP apps it is running. It turns out that no, of course that would be logical, but you can't do that. Chrome exposes an MCP server, but it is only for controlling Chrome itself, like Playwright. It does not provide any bridging to WebMCP.

I then thought there would be an extension that does this, but the Chrome extension ecosystem is full of bullshit extensions from fraudsters who vibe-coded their way into trying to capitalize on the AI craze. There are no extensions for that. All of them want you to subscribe, or give them API tokens. Many of them have non-working websites. One option I see mentioned online is running Chrome in debug mode and exposing a remote debugging port. This is exactly what WebMCP was supposedly invented to avoid, so running your browser in a special way to expose it to complete control cannot be the right way to do this. I'm perfectly able to already do that without WebMCP.

Am I understanding it wrong? I understand the proposal is in its infancy, but I expect the goal of it to be at least clear. I don't understand where it helps developers or users in any single way that wasn't already available before.
by microtonal | 2026-02-20 08:00:35+00:00
You mean the freedom of speech that gets you shot when you protest the gestapo?

Where critical late night shows get cancelled because a small group of Trump-aligned people control most media?

Seriously, the world is looking in amazement how all the talk about free speech and democracy was purely performative.

The US becoming Hungary (or maybe Russia).

https://rsf.org/en/index
by jeroenhd | 2026-02-20 08:01:22+00:00
The Americans are just as bad when it comes to intellectual property (70 years after the death of the author or 95 years after publication). By American copyright standards, you can read The Silmarillion for free around 2072.

The difference in approach (American companies suing and financially ruining a select few downloaders versus European lobbyists going attempting to block the distribution points) makes piracy slightly less convenient in Europe but the basis for the copyright problem was turned into a global problem at the Berne Convention.
by taikon | 2026-02-20 08:02:37+00:00
Shameless plug but I'm a doctor who made an ergonomic split keyboard called the TAIKO-01 (https://taiko.taikohub.com).

It's split in two so you can position them at shoulder width. It's angled so your wrists are in more natural positioning (reduced pronation), and curved to prevent finger overstretching (finger joints have arc-shaped range of motion). It's injection molded and hot-swappable.

I've been working on this since 2022 and am getting close to launch. It's gotten very good feedback from beta testers.
by meeq | 2026-02-20 08:02:38+00:00
It could in practice. Just get ready for some very interesting thinking tokens, akin to a psychotic break, once it interacts with the "simulated reality" and "the user‘s fabrication of a nonexistent timeline within the hypothetical future".

Gemini 3.0 was convinced that my dependency versions pinned in package.json were hallucinated by an AI, because they "shouldn't yet exist". I just hope this kind of behavior is gone.
by AdamN | 2026-02-20 08:02:53+00:00
This is real and there's no way to get these problems down to zero. However I do believe that the best first step is to make sure the government has more employees and fewer contractors. It will cost more year to year but the delivery will be much closer to what the constituents want and over time I would expect it to save money as well. With that said it's not a silver bullet as that group of people needs to be properly motivated, they still will need specialist help from consultancies, and there may be institutional capture anyway.
by birdsongs | 2026-02-20 08:03:18+00:00
Right? Any definition of "a god" that a LLM will hold is going to be problematic to work with. No one wants that personality on their team, much less in the wild.

At best it's absolute in its power and intelligence. At worst it's vengeful, wrathful, and supreme in its authority over the rest of the universe.

I just. Wow.
by cheema33 | 2026-02-20 08:03:41+00:00
> I like writing code, even if it's boilerplate. It's fun for me, and I want to keep doing it. Using AI to do that part for me is just...not fun.

Good news for you is that you can continue to do what you are doing. Nobody is going to stop you.

There are people who like programming in assembly. And they still get to do that.

If you are thinking that in the future employers may not want you to do that, then yes, that is a concern. But, if the AI based dev tool hype dies out, as many here suspect it will, then the employers will see the light and come crawling back.
by RupertSalt | 2026-02-20 08:04:12+00:00
I can read that for free, and even hang on to it for a couple of weeks, as soon as the library opens today.

Actually I don't need to wait, because it's available immediately over the Internet in eBook format, with my library card.

There are also CDs, DVDs, and on-demand audio/video available with a library card.

I visited a library across town, and many sections were given over to video games for various popular console systems.
by erremerre | 2026-02-20 08:05:50+00:00
I never understood this UI problem.

Because... You can copy the UI of the leader and problem solved.

There you have GIMP with an absolute nightmare UI to use, but people keep saying, just get used to it. On the other hand, a single developer, in javascript, made a copy of photoshop, and most people I know prefer to use that over GIMP...

Just copy the UI that works, if you can't research your own UI.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-02-20 08:06:09+00:00
That comparison doesn't make any sense at all, and you can't excuse it by tossing out "Of course, you also get a lot more". This is like evaluating the price of wheels by buying entire cars. You wouldn't get dozens of these servers just for capacity, you'd get a custom quote.

That said at $24K you could pay off an entire server like that from Dell in 4 months despite Dell charging something stupid like $2000/TB.
Show HN: True and4500 FPS Edge Detection at 1K (CPU-only)
by andrespi | 2026-02-20 08:06:22+00:00
We completely hacked how the CPU processes data using 1024-bit virtual registers. No GPU, no SIMD, just pure integer arithmetic.
Paper and details: https://zenodo.org/records/18706964
Free for academic and personal use. Feel free to improve it if you want.
Immediate applications:
Instant first layer multi-recognition and real-world image analysis
AI image pre-processing
Paper version 1. Wait to see what comes later.
Happy to answer questions.
by suddenlybananas | 2026-02-20 08:06:44+00:00
Why would they bother? Because it costs essentially nothing to add it to the training data. My point is that once a reasoning example becomes sufficiently viral, it ceases to be a good test because companies have a massive incentive to correct it. The fact some models got it right before (unreliably) doesn't mean they wouldn't want to ensure that the model gets it right.
by yorwba | 2026-02-20 08:06:55+00:00
Scaling laws mean that there's not much need to actually scale things to the skies. Instead, you can run a bunch of experiments at small scale, fit the scaling law parameters, then extrapolate. If the predicted outcome is disappointing (e.g. it's unlikely to beat the previous scaled-to-the-sky model), you can save the really expensive experiment for a more promising approach.

It would certainly be nice though if this kind of negative result was published more often instead of leaving people to guess why a seemingly useful innovation wasn't adopted in the end.
by jmward01 | 2026-02-20 08:07:58+00:00
My argument is that we are getting closer, not that we know exactly what AGI will be. That is clearly part of it right? If we had some boolean definition I suspect we would already be there. Figuring it out is a big part of getting there. I think my points still stand based on this. We aren't there yet but it is hard to deny that these things are growing from a complexity/capability standpoint. On a spectrum from rock to human level intelligence, these are getting closer to human and further from rock and getting further from rock every day.
by ramshanker | 2026-02-20 08:08:02+00:00
I will try the newer version again. Last I tried 2 years or so back, it was crashing for me.

Personal Context: I am a civil enginer, and our requirement from CAD softwares are a lot simpler than Mechanical Engineering. Here on HN, whenever I see people discussing CAD, its the mechanical version of parts and 3d printing.

Shameless Plug:
I have decided to try building my own! Over a long enough timeline, it is doable, including the UI/UX part.

https://mv.ramshanker.in/
by jeroenhd | 2026-02-20 08:08:18+00:00
With the German border maybe 10 minutes to the east of me, I can open that website just fine. Seems like an exclusively German problem, not a European one.

I don't think foreign propaganda was ever exempt from freedom of speech here in Europe (except the countries and regimes which lacked free speech, of course), it just wasn't much of a problem before the internet made opinions so easy to broadcast.
by Manuel_D | 2026-02-20 08:08:41+00:00
Those book "bans" are just librarians' decision on what to use finite shelf space to stock. Students are 100% free to bring any of the "banned" books to school and read them. By this logic, when a librarian changes out an older set of YA novels with a newer set, those older novels are being "banned". So to answer your question:

> Cool, so the US students will be able to read school banned books ?

The answer is "whenever they want."

Furthermore, the CDC's calls for retraction don't prohibit anyone from reading the retracted papers.
by pseudohadamard | 2026-02-20 08:09:32+00:00
Good point, yeah. I really want to like clang because it's not gcc but they have been following the gcc path a lot in recent years. I haven't actually seen it with MSVC, but I'm still on an old pre-bloat version of Visual Studio so maybe they've got worse in recent versions too.

I think a lot of the UB though isn't "let's exploit UB", it's "we didn't even know we had UB in the code". An example is twos-complement arithmetic, which the C language has finally acknowledged more than half a century after the last non-twos-complement machine was built (was the CDC 6600 the last one's-complement machine? Were most of the gcc dev even born when that was released?). So everyone on earth has been under the crazy notion that their computer used twos-complement maths which the gcc (and clang) devs know is actually UB and allows them to do whatever they want with your code when they encounter it.
Ask HN: Can multi-agent systems collaborate?
by nathaah3 | 2026-02-20 08:10:23+00:00
most multi-agent coding frameworks seem to prefer strict task isolation -- split the work, avoid interference, merge later. humans end up acting as the coordinator.

is this a deliberate architectural choice (isolation is simpler and safer), or are we hitting a real capability ceiling where agents can’t reliably coordinate on a shared, evolving codebase?

the ideal would be multiple agents working on the same system with awareness of each other’s intent and changes -- not just “one agent per file.” is anyone meaningfully solving that problem, or is divide-and-conquer simply good enough for now?
by pms | 2026-02-20 08:10:30+00:00
It's a waste of resources, but please do it! The entire "European Union censors" narrative is a hoax [1], so the portal will achieve nothing, but you've got to do what you've got to do!

[1] First, the EU countries have much higher World Press Freedom Index than the US. Second, once you start reading how little there is of the alleged "censorship" in the EU, you realize it's a no-brainer aiming to protect people.
by ckdot | 2026-02-20 08:10:51+00:00
Gemini 3.1 is surprisingly bad at coding, especially if you consider that they built an IDE (Antigravity) around it: I let it carefully develop a plan according to very specific instructions. The outcome was terrible: AGENTS.md ignored, syntax error in XML (closing tag missed), inconsistent namings, misinterpreting console outputs, which where quite clear ("You forgot to add some attribute foobar").
I‘m quite disappointed.