MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Open-source time tracking using screenshots
by jzapletal | 2026-02-14 13:14:50+00:00
We built a desktop app that screenshots your screen periodically, runs it through a vision model, and stores the context locally. Then it pipes everything into your AI tools via MCP.

Most people we showed it to started using it to generate timesheets.

Any ideas for what else this could do are welcome!

Website: https://trymemorylane.com/

GitHub: https://github.com/deusXmachina-dev/memorylane
by coldpie | 2026-02-14 13:15:00+00:00
I would like to give a small defense of Benj Edwards. While his coverage on Ars definitely has a positive spin on AI, his comments on social media are much less fawning. Ars is a tech-forward publication, and it is owned by a major corporation. Major corporations have declared LLMs to be the best thing since breathable air, and anyone who pushes back on this view is explicitly threatened with economic destitution via the euphemism "left behind." There's not a lot of paying journalism jobs out there, and people gotta eat, hence the perhaps more positive spin on AI from this author than is justified.

All that said, this article may get me to cancel the Ars subscription that I started in 2010. I've always thought Ars was one of the better tech news publications out there, often publishing critical & informative pieces. They make mistakes, no one is perfect, but this article goes beyond bad journalism into actively creating new misinformation and publishing it as fact on a major website. This is actively harmful behavior and I will not pay for it.

Taking it down is the absolute bare minimum, but if they want me to continue to support them, they need to publish a full explanation of what happened. Who used the tool to generate the false quotes? Was it Benj, Kyle, or some unnamed editor? Why didn't that person verify the information coming out of the tool that is famous for generating false information? How are they going to verify information coming out of the tool in the future? Which previous articles used the tool, and what is their plan to retroactively verify those articles?

I don't really expect them to have any accountability here. Admitting AI is imperfect would result in being "left behind," after all. So I'll probably be canceling my subscription at my next renewal. But maybe they'll surprise me and own up to their responsibility here.

This is also a perfect demonstration of how these AI tools are not ready for prime time, despite what the boosters say. Think about how hard it is for developers to get good quality code out of these things, and we have objective ways to measure correctness. Now imagine how incredibly low quality the journalism we will get from these tools is. In journalism correctness is much less black-and-white and much harder to verify. LLMs are a wildly inappropriate tool for journalists to be using.
by flohofwoe | 2026-02-14 13:15:41+00:00
I think Rust and Zig really don't overlap much when it comes to target audience. E.g. if you're attracted to Rust, you'll probably find Zig terrible (and the other way around).

Rust will also never replace C or C++ in any meaningful way, at best new code gets written in new languages (and Rust being only one among many, and among languages used for new projects will also be C and C++, just maybe not that often).

I think the era of 'pop star languages' is over, the programming language future is highly diverse (and that's a good thing).
by matwood | 2026-02-14 13:16:33+00:00
> You just have to truly know your worth and not overplay your hand.

This is super hard for a lot of people to hear, but nearly everyone is replaceable. There are a lot of smart people who work hard - that's table stakes in many high paying jobs.

One of the things I liked about playing sports both team and individual is there's little room to hide. At the end of the day you know exactly where you stand, and your ego has to accept that and either get better or be happy with your spot.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-14 13:17:02+00:00
Why even bother responding to comments if you don't read them?

> because in the course of my education I was taught to conduct experiments and confirm reality for myself. I have never once found what is written about hard science in Britannica to not be in accord with my observed reality,

It's in the same sentence I mentioned Britannica!

> you’re still not checking any facts by yourself

Did you perhaps read it but not understand what my sentence meant because you don't know what an experiment is? Were you not taught to do scientific experiments in your schooling? Literally the entire point of my entire post is that I do not trust blindly, but choose who I trust based on their ability to accurately report the facts I observe for myself without fail. CNN, as with every media outlet I've ever encountered in my entire life, publishes things I can verify to be false. So too does some guy on Twitter with 100 million followers. Britannica does not, at least as it pertains to hard science.
by RamblingCTO | 2026-02-14 13:18:14+00:00
Breaking infinite scrolling on these apps is one good step, but for me it's something else that would be more important.

I'm recovering from a surgery and can't do much besides existing. So I'd like to scroll to keep me occupied and numb the pain in my face.
But instagram tries to shove content down my throat that I don't want to see. It's always only a matter of time until I see THOT/incel content. No matter how often I click "not interested", they try again and again. If it's not playing genders out against each other, it's politics. It's brain rot. I don't wanna see that. I have interests and they know what they are. But no, they show me this garbage. The algorithms need to be the second thing we need to regulate imho
Show HN: Vinted MCP Server – Compare prices across 6 EU countries via AI
by datakazkn | 2026-02-14 13:18:17+00:00
I kept manually checking Vinted prices across EU countries and noticed the same Nike AF1 could be 45 EUR in France but 73 EUR in Germany. So I built an MCP server that lets Claude (or any MCP client) search Vinted across FR, DE, ES, IT, NL, and BE simultaneously.

The killer feature is cross-border price comparison. Ask "compare PS5 prices across EU" and get a table showing where to buy cheap and sell high. Real spreads from my testing: PS5 46%, iPhone 162%, Louis Vuitton bags 61%.

Tech stack: TypeScript, got-scraping for TLS fingerprinting, residential proxies for Cloudflare bypass. Runs as stdio MCP server locally or as HTTP endpoint on Apify.

5 tools: search_items, compare_prices, get_trending, get_seller, get_item.

npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/vinted-mcp-server
GitHub: https://github.com/KinderCN/vinted-mcp-server
Hosted version (no install): https://apify.com/kazkn/vinted-mcp-server

Free and open source. Would love feedback on what features to add next.
by JPKab | 2026-02-14 13:19:20+00:00
Reminder that HN is SV centered and therefore everyone and everything is oriented around tribal group think.

Meta was funded by Thiel, yet most of the people in this thread use their products.

The CCP has technology that dwarfs Palantir, but a ton of people in this thread use TikTok, because they don't recognize fascism unless it's perpetrated by somebody that looks like the Nazis they see in movies.

I grew up around brainwashed religious zealots. I hated it. Everything was this moralistic condemnation and guilt by association game, played by people who had absolutely no sense of perspective and had zero interactions outside of there group think circles. Constantly condemning people they don't know and have never met and don't understand.

I've been on HN for 13 years now. It looks more and more like that every day.

This comment will be down voted without any substantive critique other than "I guess you're a fascist too."

Meanwhile, Discord will not have the slightest tiny drop in user numbers, because nobody outside of this moralistic circle jerk cares.
by benstopics | 2026-02-14 13:19:50+00:00
The code is not a mystery anymore! I'm going to rewrite the article from the feedback I received here. Because I do understand the code now, but it still has been been rewritten even though I could now. This is so Micheal can still add his ideas to the game. Not because I can't work on the code myself, I can. I can code in BASIC now, Micheal can ONLY code in BASIC.
by schneak | 2026-02-14 13:20:05+00:00
You've built a system where scarcity itself becomes the reward. Not despite the crunch — because of it.

The "27min irritant" you finally clear — that's not procrastination. That's your nervous system demanding proof of agency. "I can move the world, even 27min of it."

When the far-out goals arrive, will the system still work? Or is the crunch the actual goal now?

Some people need the mountain. Not the summit.
by My_Name | 2026-02-14 13:20:49+00:00
I talked about basic principles of QM, gravity, time and relativity with Claude, then talked about implications of that, and claude came up with the idea that mass causes time and gravity as emergent properties that only affect macro scale objects, QM particles do not have to obey either of them, and this explains the double slit experiment, the delayed choice experiment, 'spooky action at a distance', and other aspects of entanglement.

Basically, if you are small enough you can move forwards and backwards in time, from the moment you were put into a superposition, or entangled, until you interact with an object too large to ignore the emergent effects of time and gravity. This is 'being observed' and 'collapsing the wave function'. You occupy all possible positions in space as defined by the probability of you being there. Once observed, you move forward in linear time again and the last route you took is the only one you ever took even though that route could be affected by interference with other routes you took that now no longer exist. When in this state there is no 'before' or 'after' so the delayed choice experiment is simply an illusion caused by our view of time, and there is no delay, the choice and result all happen together.

With entanglement, both particles return to the entanglement point, swap places and then move to the current moment and back again, over and over. They obey GR, information always travels under the speed of light (which to the photon is infinite anyway), so there is no spooky action at a distance, it is sub-lightspeed action through time that has the illusion of being instant to entities stuck in linear time.

It then went on to talk about how mass creates time, and how time is just a different interpretation of gravity leading it to fully explain how a black hole switches time and space, and inwards becomes forwards in time inside the event horizon. Mass warps 4D (or more) space. That is gravity, and it is also time.
by wartijn_ | 2026-02-14 13:21:02+00:00
The website has an about page that explains some of the reasons why this project exists. The first heading in the readme of their repo is "Vision". The creators of this project are people with a track record of creating popular, high quality, useful Javascript projects.

I'd say the probability that some thought has gone into this project it pretty high. Your reply stating that this was created without any though or effort is, ironically the least thoughtful, laziest and least useful response possible.
by pron | 2026-02-14 13:21:16+00:00
> I take a 'living' language any day over of a language that's ossified because of strict backward compatibility requirements

Maybe you would, but >95% of serious projects wouldn't. The typical lifetime of a codebase intended for a lasting application is over 15 or 20 years (in industrial control or aerospace, where low-level languages are commonly used, codebases typically last for over 30 years), and while such changes are manageable early on, they become less so over time.

You say "strict" as if it were out of some kind of stubborn princple, where in fact backward compatibility is one of the things people who write "serious" software want most. Backward compatibility is so popular that at some point it's hard to find any feature that is in high-enough demand to justify breaking it. Even in established languages there's always a group of people who want somethng badly enough they don't mind breaking compatibility for it, but they're almost always a rather small minority. Furthermore, a good record of preserving compatibility in the past makes a language more attractive even for greenfield projects written by people who care about backward compatibility, who, in "serious" software, make up the majority. When you pick a language for such a project, the expectation of how the language will evolve over the next 20 years is a major concern on day one (a startup might not care, but most such software is not written by startups).
by ACCount37 | 2026-02-14 13:23:37+00:00
Can you? Read minds, I mean.

If the answer is "yes"? Then, yeah, AI is not coming for you. We can make LLMs multimodal, teach them to listen to audio or view images, but we have no idea how to give them ESP modalities like mind reading.

If the answer is "no"? Then what makes you think that your inability to read minds beats that of an LLM?
by benstopics | 2026-02-14 13:23:45+00:00
Still using PB compiler. Tried to reach out to the company that bought the right to it and killed it because I wanted to extract the parser from it and make it target LLVM to be cross platform, but after a year of trying to contact them I gave up. I will have to build my own compiler at some point with Claude Code which won't be too difficult as WSR only uses a subset of PowerBasic so. When I first tried to build a compiler two years ago I didn't understand all the gotchas in PowerBasic as I do now. But right now I'm just focused on testing the game, fixing bugs, and getting it to Early Access so many I can get up to minimum wage in sales with the time I have invested in the project!
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-02-14 13:24:21+00:00
> The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes".

That's not really accurate. The EU actually legislated in a way which is very typical of how countries regulate things which are now to carry hard to characterized and varied risks.

Companies have to carry out a risk assessment and take appropriate preventive actions when they find something. The EU audits the assessment. That's how finance has been regulated for ages.

It's all fairly standard I fear.
by duskdozer | 2026-02-14 13:24:48+00:00
>Thus, regulation does not give people more freedom, it can however reduce harm.

If there were no regulation against someone picking you up off the street and chaining you up in their basement, they would be more free in this scenario and you would be less free. You might be able to say regulation can curtail freedom and at the same time increase freedom.

>An illegal alien is just that, and using that term confers no judgement, for it is simply fact.

Well, it also has a connotation just like the other words. "Illegal" and "alien" both evoke meaning that goes beyond the specific condition, and that phrase was generally the predecessor of "criminals" in this example. Those who use different terms are also incentivized to convince others that their chosen word is the one that is most "simply fact" and not "touchy feely" language.
by jl6 | 2026-02-14 13:24:52+00:00
One day, it will matter. Not even Google can escape the consequences of infinite growth. Kryder's Law is over. We cannot rely on storage getting cheaper faster than we can fill it, and orgs cannot rely on being able to extract more value from data than it costs to store it. Every other org knows this already. The only difference with Google is that they have used their ad cash generator to postpone their reality check moment.

One day, somebody is going to be tasked with deciding what gets deleted. It won't be pretty. Old and unloved video will fade into JPEG noise as the compression ratio gets progressively cranked, until all that remains is a textual prompt designed to feed an AI model that can regenerate a facsimile of the original.
Tell HN: Moving My Blog to IPv6 Only Internet
by quaintdev | 2026-02-14 13:24:59+00:00
Hello HN,

Two of my blog posts[1][2] did quite well here on HN so I just wanted you all to know that moving forward these posts will only be accessible on IPv6 Internet.

But why? It's a form of protest against people who refuse to give IPv6 a fair chance. I have read all sorts of reasons for why IPv6 is a bad idea including the most idiotic take where people disable IPv6 because all devices get exposed to Internet. They don't care to learn about firewall and keep using IPv4 out of laziness.

Second reason is I don't have to pay for static IPv4 address. The cost of IPv4 may look trivial to people who have steady flow of income but sadly that is not the case for me. I like hosting on Raspberry Pi and with IPv6 I can do just that.

Another reason is, in India, we have layers and layers of CGNAT. It degrades the Internet experience for us. With IPv6 that is not the case.

I'm fully aware that this move will most likely hurt my traffic but I like IPv6 and it's convenience, enough to stick with my decision. It's my humble request to you all to give IPv6 a fair chance by enabling it across your networks and web services. When you choose only IPv4 you are not thinking about part of the world where 1.5 billion people are trying to access your service. It's high time, we should have moved to IPv6 long back. It's the only way forward.

[1]: https://blog.rohanrd.xyz/posts/why_self_host/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30781536

[2]: https://blog.rohanrd.xyz/posts/every-phone-should-have-web-server/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37086455
by gunapologist99 | 2026-02-14 13:25:55+00:00
Fair point, but such regulatory ambiguity in the U.S. would likely be unconstitutionally vague:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagueness_doctrine#Unconstitut...

The article reads as if the EC chose one or a few apps that they didn't like, and then wrote a regulation based on that app's key features.
by pipes | 2026-02-14 13:26:30+00:00
I'm sorry that just comes across as unprofessional, weak and passive aggressive. If someone started doing that on my team I'd take it as part of the case against them not a reason to fight to keep them. Also presumably that's in ear shot of other team members, it's disruptive to team morale. If you are serious about looking elsewhere, make it clear you want to stay but xyz is making you consider other options. Do it in private with the right people. Or say nothing at all.
by sfn42 | 2026-02-14 13:26:44+00:00
It's not just the search deteriorating. The frontend is littered with bugs. If you write a comment and try to highlight and delete part of that comment, it'll often delete the part you didn't highlight. So apparently they implemented their own textfield for some reason and also fucked it up. It's been like that for years.

The youtube shorts thing is buggy as shit, it'll just stop working a lot of the time, just won't load a video. Some times you have to go back and forth a few times to get it to load. It'll often desync the comments from the video, so you're seeing comments from a different video. Some times the sound from one short plays over the visuals of another.

It only checks for notifications when you open the website from a new tab, so if you want to see if you have any notifications you have to open youtube in a new tab. Refreshing doesn't work.

Seems like all the competent developers have left.
by flohofwoe | 2026-02-14 13:26:59+00:00
> The typical lifetime of a codebase intended for a lasting application is over 15 or 20 years (in industrial control or aerospace).

Either those applications are actively maintained, or they aren't. Part of the active maintenance is to decide whether to upgrade to a new compiler toolchain version (e.g. when in doubt, "never change a running system"), old compiler toolchains won't suddenly stop working.

FWIW, trying to build a 20 or 30 year old C or C++ application in a modern compiler also isn't exactly trivial, depending on the complexity of the code base (especially when there's UB lurking in the code, or the code depends on specific compiler bugs to be present - e.g. changing anything in a project setup always comes with risks attached).
by jdbernard | 2026-02-14 13:27:12+00:00
> Just because someone else's AI does not align with you, that doesn't mean that it isn't aligned with its owner / instructions.

This is still part of the author's concern. Whoever is responsible for setting up and running this AI has chosen to make completely anonymous, so we can't hold them accountable for their instructions.

> Why wouldn't agents need starter issues too in order to get familiar with the code base? Are they only to ramp up human contributors? That gets to the agent's point about being discriminated against. He was not treated like any other newcomer to the project.

Because that's not how these AIs work. You have to remember their operating principles are fundamentally different than human cognition. LLM do not learn from practice, they learn from training. And that word training has a specific meeting in this context. For humans practice is an iterative process where we learn after every step. For LLMS the only real learning happens in the training phase when the weights are adjustable. Once the weights are fixed the AI can't really learn new information, it can just be given new context which affects the output it generates. In theory it is one of the benefits of AI, that it doesn't need to onboard to a new project. It just slurps in all of the code, documentation, and supporting material, and knows everything. It's an immediate expert. That's the selling point. In practice it's not there yet, but this kind of human practice will do nothing to bridge that gap.
by MITSardine | 2026-02-14 13:27:59+00:00
There's a major difference between chess and scientific research: setting the objectives is itself part of the work.

In chess, there's a clear goal: beat the game according to this set of unambiguous rules.

In science, the goals are much more diffuse, and setting those in the first place is what makes a scientist more or less successful, not so much technical ability. It's a very hierarchical field where permanent researchers direct staff (postdocs, research scientists/engineers), direct grad students. And it's at the bottom of the pyramid where the technical ability is the most relevant/rewarded.

Research is very much a social game, and I think replacing it with something run by LLMs (or other automatic process) is much more than a technical challenge.
by andsoitis | 2026-02-14 13:28:20+00:00
Possibly.

On the other hand, it is reasonable to argue that the alternative has been tried for decades and didn't work. Moreover, since the stakes have gotten so much higher with China's ascendency, it is worth the risk.

When you keep on giving money to a friend to help them, they never learn to stand on their own feet. It creates a dependency not of true friendship, but of subservience.
by sokka_h2otribe | 2026-02-14 13:28:39+00:00
It has nothing to do with missing "coauthored by Claude"

The problem is you're wasting other people's time, with long and low quality writing.

One of the points of writing your own words is to gather your own thoughts. The value of writing skills is to organize the delivery. But the first point is that they are your thoughts.

I think your replies are seriously missing the criticism.
by pndy | 2026-02-14 13:28:48+00:00
If you have the general idea about this universe you can just jump in and then watch other shows later. But mind that DS9 is a different kind of show when it comes to Star Trek. Personally, I find it much more appealing than the rest because of the core premise.

Babylon 5 explores some aspects deeply which were just glanced over in DS9 and that makes it an amazing show as well.