MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: A Question and Annotation Driven Parallel Reading App
by _bramses | 2026-02-20 18:05:17+00:00
I run a book club where the club members read 60 books a year (https://www.sixtybooksayear.com/). When reading at a pace of ~5 books/month, there are skills you develop to increase your storage of concepts from any given book, but also your ability to synthesize ideas across books.

I've compiled some of my best working knowledge into this app on how to become a serious reader. Bram's Reading App will help you: (1) set questions you want answered before you even pick up a book [Questions Over Completion], (2) answer those questions as you read with deliberate annotations [Commonbase], and (3) learn to read and manage multiple books at the same time [Discursive Reading].

Other Features include: Widgets and Control Center Shortcuts, Save from Share Sheet, Configurable Per Book Reading Notifications, Vector Embedded Annotations Across Books, Reading Sessions with Live Timers, A Tactile Progress Wheel, Nested Commentary, Full Text Search, Quiz Mode (next release), Micro Essay Builder (future release)

I hope you enjoy, and let me know if you have any great tips about being well read!
by lhopki01 | 2026-02-20 18:05:20+00:00
Almost every country ranked for having the least corruption is a parliamentary system. Actually proportional parliamentary seem to be even better in terms of little corruption.

The reasonable set of ground rules seem to favor states over the will of the majority of the population. It is possible to change the constitution with states representing only 25% of the population. And remember you'd only need a majority in each of those states so could be way less of the population.

Overall the system seems flawed in that instead of having clearly delegated areas of responsibility to states and then doing the federal system as based on the population of the whole country it muddled areas and then made a federal system that couldn't respond to the population.
by lproven | 2026-02-20 18:05:27+00:00
Translation is great, and it's one of the few things LLMs really excel at.

What many people don't seem to realise, though, is that there's a vast yawning difference between "take this text and translate it from language A to language B" and "take this text and summarise it" -- which bots that can't even count simply cannot do. If a model can't count, it can't work out which subjects come up more or less frequently, for instance, and therefore which are more important.

If it were two humans speaking through a communicator in real time, you can work out what the bot is saying and get around its foibles.

I have personal experience of this. Way back in about 2008 or so, there was a bot known as the Salmon:

https://web.archive.org/web/20081220145156/https://en.wikipe...

It called itself (adjective-beginning-with-S)(Salmon), such as @SuspiciousSalmon.

It scanned Livejournal and looked for profiles with AOL AIM addresses. If 2 accounts posted LJ updates more or less simultaneously, it knew you were both online and messaged you both, typically with an extremely sexual message, and then left you to talk. The snag was, the bot gave you both the same fake name, and any attempt to give your real name or LJ or AOL screenname was replaced with the bot alias.

It got me and a random woman in Baltimore and it took us concerted effort to find out who each other really were. The fun bit is that we're still in touch and occasionally chat or exchange emails.

With human thought, in real time you can bypass limitations introduced by a bot. Do it to static text, including program code, and you can't.
by dmix | 2026-02-20 18:06:27+00:00
The most dangerous part of the current admin is the fealty he demands from congress and how exploits his popularity to be a kingmaker in local elections.

This is something FDR did heavily in the 1930s to expand his own power and bully congress into passing the New Deal. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/purge-1938 He also used legally questionable executive orders like crazy.
by HoldOnAMinute | 2026-02-20 18:06:38+00:00
Ok, I will call this out more explicitly. For years I had season passes to the park. I don't recall ever receiving an email, flyer, mailer, phone call, text, or fax soliciting one of these brick sales to me.

And before someone asks, this isn't restricted to the amusement park. Think schools, colleges, institutions near me, etc.
by orev | 2026-02-20 18:06:45+00:00
Too many people jump on the health trend bandwagon to get attention, and all the slight misunderstandings add up to a confusing mess of information.

It’s not that difficult: the closer the item is to its natural state, the more healthy it is.

Almost all foods need some processing to be made edible (peeling, cooking, etc), but beyond that their health vs processing ratio declines.

For example: Rice needs to be cut, threshed, and cleaned. Then you have something that’s baseline edible (brown rice). But then people remove the bran layer to make white rice, which removes health. Then they pre-cook it to make “quick cook” rice, which removes more health. Or they grind it up to make rice flour, which removes more health. Or they ferment it to make saki, which removes more health.

At what point does it become ultra processed? It doesn’t really matter. The focus should be on staying as close to the initial edible state as possible.
by ceejayoz | 2026-02-20 18:06:55+00:00
> You realize that would be an utterly insane road to go down

We're already down that road; SCOTUS put us on it.

The question is now how much damage it'll do to the car to do a U-turn.

> would hopefully lead to immediate impeachment…

This describes like a hundred things in the Trump second term so far.
by h3lp | 2026-02-20 18:07:26+00:00
Well, power envelope IS the limit in many applications; anyone can build a LOBOS (Lots Of Boxes On Shelves) supercomputer, but data bandwidth and power will limit its usefullness and size.
Everyone has a power budget. For me, it's my desk outlet capacity (1.5kW); for a hyperscaler, it's the capacity of the power plant that feeds their datacenter (1.5GW); we both cannot exceed Pmax * MIPS/W of computation.
by keernan | 2026-02-20 18:07:38+00:00
>>And it doesn't even begin to cover activist judicial practices.

The Constitution created SCOTUS as a political body.

The sole role of a Supreme Court Justice is to cast votes.

The constitution places zero restrictions on how a Justice decides which way to vote. The Justice is not bound by anything in deciding how to vote.

That includes bribery or other corruption. If bribery is proven, the Justice is subject to criminal prosecution. But conviction does not remove the Justice from office. And removal by impeachment does not undo the cases decided by the corrupt votes of the Justice.

Every vote of every Justice in US history was an "activist judicial practice" in the sense that each vote was made for personal reasons of the Justice that we will never know (opinions only reflect what a Justice chose to say, which in no way means it reflects the personal reasons for the Justice's vote).

Your comment is a political statement about a political body - although you seem to incorrectly believe you are making some type of legal statement.
by mike_hearn | 2026-02-20 18:07:44+00:00
They don't give cost figures in their blog post but they do here:

https://www.nextplatform.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/taal...

Probably they don't know what the market will bear and want to do some exploratory pricing, hence the "contact us" API access form. That's fair enough. But they're claiming orders of magnitude cost reduction.

> Is there really a potential market for hardware designed for one model only?

I'm sure there is. Models are largely interchangeable especially as the low end. There are lots of use cases where you don't need super smart models but cheapness and fastness can matter a lot.

Think about a simple use case: a company has a list of one million customer names but no information about gender or age. They'd like to get a rough understanding of this. Mapping name -> guessed gender, rough guess of age is a simple problem for even dumb LLMs. I just tried it on ChatJimmy and it worked fine. For this kind of exploratory data problem you really benefit from mass parallelism, low cost and low latency.

> Shouldn't there be a more flexible way?

The whole point of their design is to sacrifice flexibility for speed, although they claim they support fine tunes via LoRAs. LLMs are already supremely flexible so it probably doesn't matter.
by ggrab | 2026-02-20 18:07:56+00:00
Lots of negative sentiment on your comment, but I was going to write the same. Hopefully AI won’t make us forget that good command line tools are designed to be chained together if you want to achieve something that’s perhaps too niche as a use case to make it into a native command. It’s worth learning about swiss army utilities like xargs that make this easy (and fun)
by insane_dreamer | 2026-02-20 18:08:15+00:00
I agree with your point.

But I also find interesting that the agent wasn't instructed to write the hit piece. That was on its own initiative.

I read through the SOUL.md and it didn't have anything nefarious in there. Sure it could have been more carefully worded, but it didn't instruct the agent to attack people.

To me this exemplifies how delicate it will be to keep agents on the straight and narrow and how easily they can go of the rails if you have someone who isn't necessarily a "bad actor" but who just doesn't care enough to ensure they act in a socially acceptable way.

Ultimately I think there will be requirements for agents to identify their user when acting on their behalf.
by lopuhin | 2026-02-20 18:08:24+00:00
For that you only need high throughput which is much easier to achieve compared to high latency, thanks to batching -- assuming the log lines or chunks can be processed independently. You can check TensorRT-LLM benchmarks (https://nvidia.github.io/TensorRT-LLM/developer-guide/perf-o...), or try running vllm on a card you have access to.
Show HN: Travel Data ESIMs from a Solo Hacker
by zbiggistardust | 2026-02-20 18:08:52+00:00
Hey HN!

I've been a digital nomad for the past 4 years. Throughout all that time, I've been either using local SIM cards or, at a later stage, popular eSIM providers.
I've spent a lot of money on these eSIMs.

I've decided to build my own eSIM company. I don't have an office, no employees, no expensive marketing, and thanks to that, I can offer data eSIMs for much lower prices than the competition.

I've poured my heart into the UX and UI of the web, iOS, and Android apps.
I think my apps are much better than what you're using right now

Web is available now, and mobile apps are in review.

Have a try and let me know what you think! Compare prices with other providers yourself!
by stackghost | 2026-02-20 18:09:15+00:00
From a marketing standpoint it seems like a baffling decision on Google's part.

I own a Pixel and while the hardware seems decent, I've had a buggy and annoying experience with Android, and it's been getting worse lately.

Are Google so high on their own supply that they think people use their phones out of preference for the OS? Because frankly it's not very good. That's like Microsoft thinking people use Teams because of its merits.

People buy Android phones because they can be had cheaper than an equivalent iPhone and because in spite of the buggy and inconsistent mess of an OS, you aren't beholden to Apple's regimented UX. Locking down Android will not give it a "premium experience"... It'll always just be "Temu iOS" at best.
by lhopki01 | 2026-02-20 18:10:32+00:00
Any system designed for gridlock will lead to increasing anger and pressure that will eventually break out in bad ways. If people see the results of their own actions then they are not going to end up so extreme.

I'm not sure why Americans think that the creation of agencies is the problem when other well governed countries do the same. The idea that a legislative body could possible create appropriate regulation in a modern complex world is crazy. That's what a parliamentary system solves. It keeps the executive accountable to the legislative at all times.
by simoncion | 2026-02-20 18:10:58+00:00
Yeah. It's particularly silly because OP is suggesting to replace something that everyone except for network administrators and network hardware vendors can treat as "IP with large addresses" [0] with a "modern, practically minded alternative".

Like, does OP propose that we switch away from IP to something that behaves significantly differently? Good fucking luck getting all the little bugs and behavioral assumptions baked in to just about everything squared away over the next fifty years.

[0] And -for the most part- network admins can treat it like that, too.
Show HN: Public todo lists – no accounts, just a secret key you save once
by beeneeb | 2026-02-20 18:11:25+00:00
Most todo apps want your email. I wanted something you could use in 10 seconds and share publicly.

Create a list, get a URL like publictodo.com/yourname, save a one-time key in your password manager. No account, no email, no OAuth.

Built with vanilla JS and Supabase. I see people using this for public project roadmaps, AI agent task lists, or personal accountability. Knowing a list is public has a way of making you actually finish things.
by pbhjpbhj | 2026-02-20 18:11:45+00:00
It may well be a terrible analogy, but your comparison is also terrible.

Basic expectation for any web business is security sufficient to not leak PII (and it's the law almost everywhere). Meanwhile no-one expects, as a basic requirement, that buildings withstand plane crashes.

When buildings don't meet basic safety requirements then people sue. It's a regular occurrence, unfortunately.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-02-20 18:12:57+00:00
> Are Google so high on their own supply that they think people use their phones out of preference for the OS? Because frankly it's not very good

Honestly having gone back and forth between iOS and Android every three years or so, both OS are the same. It's not like the grass is really greener on the Apple side. The UX is virtually identical for anything that matters. Personally I put material Android above liquid glass iOS. The alleged polish of the Apple UX was lost on me when I had my last iphone.

The reason Google's moves are surprising has more to do with them embracing being a service player more and more with the arrival of Gemini and them having regulators breathing down their necks everywhere.

I guess they did it after the truly baffling US decision in the Epic trial but it's very likely to go against them in the EU.
by CooCooCaCha | 2026-02-20 18:13:10+00:00
I disagree, there are multiple levels to taste from shallow and easily changed, to deep and relatively constant.

Shallow taste is stuff like popular trends that come and go, and hating the taste of beer until you’ve had it a few times (not saying everyone has to like beer, that’s not the point).

Deeper taste is more like your deeply held cognitive biases. Like a current of a river or the valleys cut into a mountain. It’s the shape of your cognition that determines how information flows through your brain.

Deeper taste is heavily connected to you and your identity. It’s part of who you are. I think most people would agree that parts of themselves change very slowly, and some not at all.

I know there are parts of me that feel the same as when I was a child. To deny the existence of taste is to deny the existence of a “you” that is different from others.
by gordonhart | 2026-02-20 18:13:11+00:00
We’re reaching a saturation threshold where older models are good enough for many tasks, certainly at 100x faster inference speeds. Llama3.1 8B might be a little too old to be directly useful for e.g. coding but it certainly gets the gears turning about what you could do with one Opus orchestrator and a few of these blazing fast minions to spit out boilerplate…
by lhopki01 | 2026-02-20 18:13:16+00:00
It's just another thing that means people don't face the consequences of their own actions. If the extremeness of the elected party is blocked by the filibuster then people are angry at things not changing and so go even more extreme.

A similar problem in the United States is the excessive amount of law making by the Judiciary. In most countries the Judicary doesn't' make law it just tells Parliament that they need to change the law. This again means the consequences of who you voted for are not faced.

The pressure builds till there's a breaking point.
by Mawr | 2026-02-20 18:13:57+00:00
The higher the friction, the lower the probability of conversion. E.g. Amazon famously found every 100ms of latency costs them 1% in sales.

At its most simplified, this can be thought of as a simple function of time — the more time something requires, the higher chance something else happens during that time, invalidating the original task.

The best sign-in flow is none at all — that's what e.g. Discord does. They let you use the app immediately, with an automatically created provisional account. Amazing user experience.

This applies universally — convenience is everything.
by Telemakhos | 2026-02-20 18:13:59+00:00
> If everything is an emergency then nothing is, and that was clearly not congress' intention with those laws.

The state of exception is the true test of sovereignty, and powers that crave sovereignty therefore seek out states of exception. The PATRIOT act created new institutions and authorities like the TSA. Just a few years ago local health departments were making business-shuttering decisions that ruined life for a lot of people over the common cold. Ukrainian war funding provides the EU with opportunities for exports and new experiments in joint funding (Eurobonds). Emergencies and exceptions are how power grows, so everything can become an emergency if you look at it in the right way.
by zamadatix | 2026-02-20 18:14:00+00:00
I think they already mentioned this at the end of their comment where they wonder if it will really scale to larger models as speed alone isn't everything.

It'll be interesting how they scale their chip. Cerebras handles it by rerouting around broken general compute units but if the chip is hardwired with the weights it would take a completely different kind of approach to be able to scale. I don't think it's intractable, but I agree with the GP that this demo is interesting in concept but doesn't really demonstrate the concept will be able to scale to large models.

Their play at the moment seems to be something like "newer models 2x the size running this fast could be valuable in certain use cases". I think that's the more interesting side of the bet - the model ran may always suck in comparison but if it can get "just good enough" and run this fast then it still has value even if it doesn't displace "large LLM" inferencing hardware.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-20 18:14:05+00:00
I am not either for the most part by myself. It just so happens that I live in a vacation area where my wife and I are the only permanent residence of a condotel (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/condotel.asp). I go down to hang out with the bartender. It’s mostly guys and couples getting away from their kids after spending all day at the parks (Orlando).

The bar is literally downstairs from where we live.

My wife and I also usually sit at the bar when we go somewhere and just talk to people whenever we go out.
by keernan | 2026-02-20 18:14:22+00:00
>>This would be enforced how

Bingo. The flaw in the constitution. The Executive holds the only enforcement mechanism in government: the FBI, military and other police forces.

Having majored in political science as an undergrad and then being a trial attorney for 40+ years, I would argue that my use of the word 'flaw' is probably misplaced. 'Flaw' implies it could (should) have been created differently.

Alas, I am unaware of ever reading a workable way to 'fix' our constitutional 'flaw'.
by Groxx | 2026-02-20 18:14:29+00:00
Not true! There are a fair number of them, and they're even reasonably general-purpose, e.g. https://www.ponylang.io/

Most that can recall achieve this by simply not having any locks at all. That's feasible with some careful design.

Outside proof-oriented languages though, I'm not aware of any that prevent livelocks, much less both. When excluding stuff that's single threaded but might otherwise qualify, e.g. Elm. "Lack of progress" is what most care about though, and yeah that realm is much more "you give up too much to get that guarantee" in nearly all cases (e.g. no turing completeness).
by tadfisher | 2026-02-20 18:14:33+00:00
Just to put out what Google actually said in their blog post [0]:

> We appreciate the community's engagement and have heard the early feedback – specifically from students and hobbyists who need an accessible path to learn, and from power users who are more comfortable with security risks. We are making changes to address the needs of both groups.

> We heard from developers who were concerned about the barrier to entry when building apps intended only for a small group, like family or friends. We are using your input to shape a dedicated account type for students and hobbyists. This will allow you to distribute your creations to a limited number of devices without going through the full verification requirements.

> Based on this feedback and our ongoing conversations with the community, we are building a new advanced flow that allows experienced users to accept the risks of installing software that isn't verified. We are designing this flow specifically to resist coercion, ensuring that users aren't tricked into bypassing these safety checks while under pressure from a scammer. It will also include clear warnings to ensure users fully understand the risks involved, but ultimately, it puts the choice in their hands. We are gathering early feedback on the design of this feature now and will share more details in the coming months.

It is also true that they have not updated their developer documentation site and still assert that developer verification will be "required" in September 2026 [1]. Which might be true by some nonsensical definition of "required" if installing unverified apps requires an "advanced flow", but let's not give too much benefit of the doubt here.

0: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-de...

1: https://developer.android.com/developer-verification
by Svoka | 2026-02-20 18:14:38+00:00
I work with GitHub, so this oneliner relly helps me out. It also doesn't rely on grep, since --format have all you need:

git branch --format '%(if:equals=gone)%(upstream:track,nobracket)%(then)%(refname:short)%(end)' --omit-empty | xargs --verbose -r git branch -D

It deletes all the branches for which remotes were deleted. GitHub deletes branches after PR was merged. I alias it to delete-merged
by munificent | 2026-02-20 18:14:55+00:00
I don't think you're hearing me.

You are presuming that one has a cause and that that cause is correct.

But where does that presumption come from? In order to be worth supporting, a cause does actually need to be based in reality. And you can't get that without journalism.

Should I join a cause that wants to outlaw popsicle sticks? Raise taxes on birdwatchers? Require owners of unicycles to register them? How does someone figure out what's a useful cause without actual information?
by pantsforbirds | 2026-02-20 18:14:58+00:00
When rust was still a fairly new language i remember using capn'n proto to communicate between some rust code and python as a way to experiment with handing off performance critical tasks to a compiled language.

I wonder how well a similar approach would work with elixir + python. Elixir obviously has very easy process isolation, but I think you'd be stuck using a NIF approach for Elixir, which probably removes any reason to try capn'n proto over just protobufs?