MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lulzx | 2026-02-15 19:40:48+00:00
Every few months someone proposes a new standard so AI agents can interact with websites. WebMCP, llms.txt, agent metadata layers.

The accessibility tree already solves this. Labels, roles, states, actions, input formats, validation feedback, it's all there. A screen reader user and an AI agent need the exact same information. If your site works for one, it works for the other.

If you find something an agent can't do through the accessibility layer, you've found something a disabled person's assistive technology can't do either. So fix accessibility. Don't build a parallel system.

I filed an issue on the W3C WebMCP repo asking for a concrete use case that (1) can't be handled by the accessibility tree, (2) isn't better served by a backend API, and (3) wouldn't also benefit assistive technology if added to the accessibility layer.

Curious if anyone can produce one.
by csmpltn | 2026-02-15 19:40:51+00:00
> "There is an arrest warrant out for him. He hasn't been convicted, but he should show up at that Hague and defend himself"

Neither the US or Israel are treaties to the Rome Statute and are therefore not under the jurisdiction of the islamofacist ICC. The ICC, UN, etc are infested to the brim with islamofacists who do everything in their power to tear down the west, bit by bit. Israel and the US have more resolutions against them than Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Nigeria, Syria, etc. Iran chairs the UN Commission for Social Development. Saudi Arabia is the chair of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. These institutions are a fucking joke. International law is now codename for Sharia law.
by hinkley | 2026-02-15 19:40:56+00:00
The rate of the mistakes versus the rate of consumers and testers finding them was a ratio we could deal with and we don’t have the facilities to deal with the new ratio.

It is likely over time that AI code will necessitate the use of more elaborate canary systems that increase the cost per feature quite considerably. Particularly for small and mid sized orgs where those costs are difficult to amortize.

Or maybe this is a SaaS opportunity for someone.
Show HN: VOOG – Moog-style polyphonic synthesizer in Python with tkinter GUI
by gpasquero | 2026-02-15 19:40:57+00:00
Body:
I built a polyphonic synthesizer in Python with a tkinter GUI styled after the Moog Subsequent 37.

Features: 3 oscillators, Moog ladder filter (24dB/oct), dual ADSR envelopes, LFO, glide, noise generator, 4 multitimbral channels, 19 presets, rotary
knob GUI, virtual keyboard with mouse + QWERTY input, and MIDI support.

No external GUI frameworks — just tkinter, numpy, and sounddevice.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-15 19:40:58+00:00
Even if it didn't fabricate quotes wholesale, taking an LLM's output and claiming it as your own writing is textbook plagiarism, which is malicious intent. Then, if you know that LLMs are next-token-prediction-engines that have no concept of "truth" and are programmed solely to generate probabilistically-likely text with no specific mechanism of anchoring to "reality" or "facts", and you use that output in a journal that (ostensibly) exists for the reason of presenting factual information to readers, you are engaging in a second layer of malicious intent. It would take an astounding level of incompetence for a tech journal writer to not be aware of the fact that LLMs do not generate factual output reliably, and it beggars belief given that one of the authors has worked at Ars for 14 years. If they are that incompetent, they should probably be fired on that basis anyways. But even if they are that incompetent, that still only covers one half of their malicious intent.
by vidarh | 2026-02-15 19:41:01+00:00
Prodigy launched online ads from the 1980s. AOL as well.

HotWired (Wired's first online venture) sold their first banner ads in 1994.

DoubleClick was founded in 1995.

Neither were limited to 90's hardware:

Web browsers were available for machines like the Amiga, launched in 1985, and today you can find people who have made simple browsers run on 8-bit home computers like the C64.
by ragall | 2026-02-15 19:41:04+00:00
> Compared to the USA, is a contributing factor because things can't be put on discount sale in the EU?

Nonsense. They can.

> In american many things are always on a discount, and there are so many channels through which this discounted merchandise is funneled. Which has to be a major way retails manage excess stock.

Major fashion brands refuse to do any discount at all to avoid damaging the brand. No second hand, no outlets, no rebranding, nothing at all except burning the excess.

> A lot of people don't realize that european retailers are legally disallowed from selling at a discount.

False. They aren't allowed to *falsely* claim that an item is discounted, which happens all the time in the US.
by badc0ffee | 2026-02-15 19:41:07+00:00
I guess I missed the last paragraph,

> The importance of the chipset can't be understated. As proof, to this very day, VMware virtualization software always uses the Intel 440BX as the default chipset, even with Windows 11 as both the host and guest.

It raises the obvious question of whether that will need to change, or already has.
by linuxhansl | 2026-02-15 19:41:21+00:00
First, seems like a good thing. I wouldn't have stopped at apparel, but it's a start.

Second, in the short term this is going to lower profits for some companies.

Third, hopefully in the long run it will lead to less waste.

Is it perfect? Of course not, no real legislation ever is. If there's a better way to get started on reducing waste I'd like to hear it, though.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-02-15 19:41:21+00:00
> 3 scans for a 1 year old? Strongly associated with cancers later in life. 5 scans of a 50 year old? Less so.

Someone being born with no legs is strongly associated with them using a wheelchair in later life.

Why are you giving a one-year-old three CT scans? For shits and giggles? Or because you think they might have cancer?
by michaelsbradley | 2026-02-15 19:42:48+00:00
I think you have it backwards, but I may misunderstand what you're saying.

I'm certain I haven't misunderstand the point of MSYS2's CLANG64 and other environments.

> These binaries themselves are built to run in the MSYS2 environment

I'm not sure if you're referring to the toolchain binaries or the binaries one produce's with them.

The CLANG64, etc. environments are 100% absolutely for certain for building software that can run outside of any MSYS2 environment!

You can, of course, build executables specifically intended to run inside those environments, but that’s not the primary use case.

> (gci Env:PATH).Value.Split(';') | sort

I don't want to use PowerShell or Cmd.exe when doing dev stuff on Windows. I want to do CLI work and author scripts in and for modern Bash, just like I would for Linux and macOS. I want to write Makefiles for GNU make, just like...

Now, sometimes there are bumps and sharp edges you have to deal with via `if [[ -v MSYSTEM ]]; then`, similar in Makefile, cygpath conversion, template/conditional code in sources, and so on. But that's a small price to pay, from my perspective, for staying in the same mental model for how to build software.
by remix2000 | 2026-02-15 19:43:03+00:00
I don't really use Windows OS much, but why not just use MinGW? Then you have Clang on all platforms you can think of: Android, all the various Darwin flavors and of course Linux and Windows; as well as on platforms you can't think of like FreeBSD or even Haiku maybe? Like honestly what's the point of supporting MSVC at all?? Maybe I'm just not enough of a Windows nerd to understand? (so I'm basically wondering if mingw has any drawbacks)
by altcunn | 2026-02-15 19:43:10+00:00
The interesting parallel here is with digital goods. Software and AI services have near-zero marginal cost of production, so overproduction is literally impossible - you just serve another copy. Physical goods are the opposite, where every unit has real material cost and environmental impact.

What I find compelling about this regulation is that it forces companies to treat demand forecasting as a real engineering problem instead of just overproducing and writing off waste. The technology to do small-batch, responsive manufacturing already exists (Shein basically proved it works at scale, ethical concerns aside). The question was always whether incumbents would adopt it voluntarily.

Now they have to. And the companies that figure out how to forecast accurately and produce lean will have a genuine competitive advantage, not just a compliance cost.
by westurner | 2026-02-15 19:43:26+00:00
Does this verify and/or rewrite the SRI integrity hashes when it inlines resources?

Would W3C Web Bundles and HTTP SXG Signed Exchanges solve for this use case?

WICG/webpackage:
https://github.com/WICG/webpackage#packaging-tools

"Use Cases and Requirements for Web Packages"
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-yasskin-wpack-us...
by grub5000 | 2026-02-15 19:44:40+00:00
MinGW and MinGW-64/MSYS2 are just as inscrutable, fragile and new-user-hostile. The fact that you have to choose between MinGW (which has a 64 bit version) or MinGW64 (completely separate codebases maintained by different people as far as I can tell) is just the first in a long obstacle course of decisions, traps, and unexplained acronyms/product names. There are dozens of different versions, pre-built toolchains and packages to throw you off-course if you choose the wrong one.

If you're just a guy trying to compile a C application on Windows, and you end up on the mingw-w64 downloads page, it's not exactly smooth sailing: https://www.mingw-w64.org/downloads/
by varispeed | 2026-02-15 19:45:00+00:00
“Just become an owner” assumes the barrier is courage.

It isn’t. It’s capital.

Risk looks very different when you’re risking surplus wealth versus when you’re risking your rent, healthcare, visa, and your entire savings in one concentrated bet.

Calling that a simple matter of “choice” is fiction.

Saying most engineers could just become owners if they wanted to is like saying most renters could just buy apartment blocks.

Technically possible. Structurally delusional.

Ownership compounds. Salaries don’t. Equity scales exponentially. Labour income scales linearly. The system is designed that way.

You can defend it as efficient. You can defend it as rational. But pretending everyone is standing at the same starting line deciding between “comfort” and “ambition” is cosplay.

The dividing line isn’t grit. It’s who can afford to fail.
by TimorousBestie | 2026-02-15 19:45:14+00:00
I was more willing to accept gwern’s eccentricities in the past but as we learn more about MIRI and its questionable funding resources, one wonders how much he’s tied up in it.

The Lighthaven retreat in particular was exceptionally shady, possibly even scam-adjacent; I was shocked that he participated in it.
by alterom | 2026-02-15 19:46:15+00:00
>a normal looking bike

The wheels are comically small, and the seat is up the pelican's ass. Pardon me, cloaca.

That's not a normal-looking bike to me, but you are welcome to be happy about it.

>The emotional response the vast majority of people have looking at this isn’t “that bike won’t ride”

Right, that's the very definition of a bar for what we call "AI slop".

Looks kind of OK, until you actually look at it.
by altcunn | 2026-02-15 19:46:27+00:00
The data laundering aspect of this is what concerns me most. The constitutional framework was designed around a world where gathering information about citizens required effort and left a trail. Now the economics have flipped - collection is cheap and invisible, and the only friction is legal, which gets routed around by purchasing from intermediaries.

Healthcare data is especially sensitive because it creates coercion vectors that other data types do not. If you know someone's diagnosis, their medication, their hospital visits, you can apply pressure in ways that go far beyond targeted advertising. This is why HIPAA exists, and why routing around it via a government contractor should trigger much more scrutiny than it currently receives.

The technical reality is that once data is aggregated at scale, the original context of collection becomes irrelevant. It does not matter that each individual piece was collected for a legitimate purpose. The aggregate creates capabilities that none of the individual collection points consented to.
by cperciva | 2026-02-15 19:47:03+00:00
If they knew in advance that the clothing wouldn't sell, they would never have made it!

But companies stockpile goods in anticipation of potential demand. For example, they'll "overproduce" winter coats because some winters are colder than average. This sort of anti-overproduction law means that the next time there's an unexpected need -- for example an unusually cold winter -- there will be a shortage because there won't be any warehouses full of "just in case" inventory.
by phicoh | 2026-02-15 19:47:04+00:00
I wonder who you are thinking of who 'wasted a couple of years'. Regular students do one course in operating systems. That is a series of lectures and some practical work. The practical work is a couple of weeks at most if you know what you are doing.

Some people spent a lot more time on MINIX, but that was either as a hobby or the PhD students who worked on MINIX3. But MINIX3 generated lots of papers with a best paper award, so that can hardly be seen as wasted from an academic point of view.
by maxbond | 2026-02-15 19:48:08+00:00
The article in question appears to me to be written by a human (excluding what's in quotation marks), but of course neither of us has a crystal ball. Are there particular parts of it that you would flag as generated?

Honestly I'm just not astounded by that level of incompetence. I'm not saying I'm impressed or that's it's okay. But I've heard much worse stories of journalistic malpractice. It's a topical, disposable article. Again, that doesn't justify anything, but it doesn't surprise me that a short summary of a series of forum exchanges and blog posts was low effort.
by jemmyw | 2026-02-15 19:48:42+00:00
That don't actually say it's a blame free post-mortem, nor is it worded as such. They do say it's their policy not to publish AI generated anything unless specifically labelled. So the assumption would be that someone didn't follow policy and there will be repercussions.

The problem is people on the Internet, hn included, always howl for maximalist repercussions every time. ie someone should be fired. I don't see that as a healthy or proportionate response, I hope they just reinforce that policy and everyone keeps their jobs and learns a little.
by lapcat | 2026-02-15 19:49:01+00:00
> It's a holiday weekend in the US so they may need to wait for office staff to return to begin the process.

That's not how it works. It's standard op nowadays to lock out terminated employees before they even walk in the door.

Sometimes they just snail mail the employee's personal possessions from their desk.

Moreover, Ars Technica publishes articles every day. Aside from this editor's note, they published one article today and three articles yesterday. So "holiday weekend" is practically irrelevant in this case.
by mrandish | 2026-02-15 19:49:06+00:00
When an article is retracted it's standard to at least mention the title and what specific information was incorrect so that anyone who may have read, cited or linked it is informed what information was inaccurate. That's actually the point of a retraction and without it this non-standard retraction has no utility except being a fig leaf for Ars to prevent external reporting becoming a bigger story.

In the comments I found a link to the retracted article: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-a-routine-code-reje.... Now that I know which article, I know it's one I read. I remember the basic facts of what was reported but I don't recall the specifics of any quotes. Usually quotes in a news article support or contextualize the related facts being reported. This non-standard retraction leaves me uncertain if all the facts reported were accurate.

It's also common to provide at least a brief description of how the error happened and the steps the publication will take to prevent future occurrences.. I assume any info on how it happened is missing because none of it looks good for Ars but why no details on policy changes?
by YZF | 2026-02-15 19:49:18+00:00
You're the one repeating antisemitic tropes here like "the religion of Judaism". Jews are an ethno-religion. We are a people not "the religion of Judaism".

AIPAC? What about CAIR? or AAI? or ADC? or AIC?

There are endless groups in the US lobbying for various things. This is perfectly legal. The amount of money Qatar spends lobbying in the US (including gifting the president an airplane, "buying" universities, $6B dollars worth of influence) is much higher than any Israeli related lobbying.

Nobody is saying you should support Israel unconditionally. It's still true that the motivation of the people who try to attack this support is questionable and not aligned with US interests. These things can both be true.
by alterom | 2026-02-15 19:49:39+00:00
> Excellent. Easier for the public to make sure they stay there.
Cement over their bunker doors from the outside.

> Park armed drones on the opposite side of their literal moat.

* > With the end of jobs coming, 10s of millions will be freed up to remind the tiny mega-rich portion of the species their meat suits were never essential. Just coddled by political handouts*

Flagged and hidden in 3.. 2.. 1..

Ahem, I'm supposed to say something self-aggrandizing and vapid in verbiage would make Orwell vomit[1] to pass as polite and constructive on this forum in response. Something like:

"I don't really think your comment is very relevant. Hacker News always devalues generic comments like those. Why so agressive? You're making a conclusion from a tenuous correlation."[2]

[1] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

[2] Sentences copied from verbatim from recent discussions
by kilpikaarna | 2026-02-15 19:49:48+00:00
Thank you for you work!

It's easy to forget today, but the Sega home consoles were always secondary to their arcade business. The main reason the Saturn sold even as well as it did was because it was the only way to play versions of the heavy hitters: Virtua Fighter, Virtua Racing, Daytona USA and Sega Rally in the home, in any fashion approaching the arcade (though still quite cut down). Those Sega 3D arcade games were absolutely mind blowing back in the early-mid 90s, and the pace of technical progress and new ideas was unlike anything since.

And the Dreamcast was conceived from day one to make it easy to port games from the Sega Naomi arcade system, and those arcade ports are probably the main reason people still play the Dreamcast to this day.
by DevDesmond | 2026-02-15 19:50:31+00:00
Arguing with an LLM is silly because you’re dealing with two adversarial effects at once:

- As the context window grows the LLM will become less intelligent [1]
- Once your conversation takes a bad turn, you have effectively “poisoned” the context window, and are asking an algorithm to predict the likely continuation of text that is itself incorrect [2]. (It emulating the “belligerent side of OSS maintenance” is probably quite true!)

If you detect or suspect misunderstanding from an LLM, it is almost always best to remove the inaccuracies and try again. (You could, for example, ask your question again in a new chat, but include your terminal output + clarifications to get ahead of the misunderstanding, similar to how you might ask a fresh Stack Overflow question).

(It’s also a lot less fun to argue with an LLM, because there’s no audience like there is in the comments section with which to validate your rhetorical superiority!)

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44564248
2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43991256
by gab4hikoo | 2026-02-15 19:50:52+00:00
Great question, this is honestly one of the core technical challenges we've had to solve.

You're right that determinism is fundamentally different from traditional search. Our approach is statistica and we measure frequency of mention + positioning within the response.

So it's more like a visibility score built from hundreds of data points across platforms. Think of it as share of voice in AI responses rather than a fixed SERP position.

We also track the variance itself, some brands get consistent mentions regardless of prompt phrasing, while others are highly volatile. That variance is actually a useful signal.

Would love to compare notes on what you've been exploring in the space. Feel free to reach out (email in profile).
by nickhalstead_ | 2026-02-15 19:51:42+00:00
You're touching on what I think is the hardest unsolved problem in this transition. At DataSift we went through something similar - pricing firehose data access when the value was in the insights, not the volume. We ended up with a hybrid model.

My bet is we'll see "outcome pricing" win for most use cases - you pay for "site deployed" not "tokens consumed." But that requires the provider to absorb variance in AI costs, which is scary when models are still getting cheaper quarterly. The providers who figure out how to price on outcomes while hedging their compute costs will win big.

What pricing model is working best for you so far?
by alt227 | 2026-02-15 19:52:00+00:00
Now that multi bilion dollar international corporations rely on retaining their brand image in a market sector, those sectors now have to be policed to protect said brands and corporations. Its nothing to do with what has been called what for hundreds of years, its nothing to do with what people call it when they order a latte at Starbucks. Its everything to do with protecting profits in a defined food category.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-02-15 19:52:27+00:00
> Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore.

In my inland US east coast hometown there’s been a big shift in winters. It used to be that it consistently got quite cold after late September to mid October, winters consistently came with several feet of snow, and spring hadn’t fully arrived until well into April. For the past several years winter has almost disappeared — many years there’s almost no snow and it sometimes doesn’t even get that cold. It’s kind of an indistinct smudge in between fall and spring.

Things have changed where I live now on the northern half of the west coast too, though I wasn’t here to witness the change. Most houses weren’t equipped with AC when they were built because it was rarely needed. Now it’s a must for between good third and half of the summer depending on exactly where you’re at.

Serious change is afoot, that much is undeniable.
Show HN: Claude-relais – A plan/build/judge loop mixing Claude with Cursor
by crog | 2026-02-15 19:52:27+00:00
I built claude-relais to stop throwing expensive reasoning models at every line of code (I can't spend 500$/month on AI subs).

The idea: Claude acts as orchestrator: it plans tasks, breaks them into bounded units, and judges the output. Cursor agents (basic plan, almost unlimited and super fast) handle the actual code generation, which doesn't need frontier-level reasoning.

A guarded loop (PLAN -> BUILD -> JUDGE) enforces safety constraints between steps (no destructive ops, scoped file access, bounded iterations).

In practice, this brings my AI-assisted coding cost to ~$40/month while keeping the quality of having a strong model in the loop for architecture and review decisions.

The core tradeoff: you give up the simplicity of one model doing everything, but you gain cost control and a natural separation between "thinking" and "typing."

Repo: https://github.com/clementrog/claude-relais

Would love feedback on the orchestration approach, especially if others have tried similar multi-model setups and hit failure modes I haven't seen yet.