MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by edwardglush | 2026-02-13 18:46:25+00:00
Hey HN,

For the past 6 months, I've been investigating a weird pattern in e-commerce analytics: conversions showing up as "Direct" that clearly weren't direct visits. After digging into server logs across 47 stores ($120M combined revenue), I found the culprit: AI search engines.

ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini are driving 8-14% of e-commerce traffic, but they don't send proper referrer headers or set cookies consistently. GA4 categorizes them as "(not set)" or "Direct" which completely breaks attribution.

The interesting part: AI-referred traffic converts 23% higher than organic search. Makes sense—when someone asks ChatGPT "best espresso machines under $500" and clicks through, they're ready to buy, not browse.

*Technical approach:*
- Node.js middleware intercepts requests before they hit the application
- Custom fingerprinting (IP hash + UA + timestamp) instead of cookies
- Pattern matching on referrer strings + user-agent signatures
- Direct API calls to GA4 Measurement Protocol (bypasses client-side tracking)
- Fallback to server log analysis when headers are stripped

*Architecture:*
- Express middleware layer
- Redis for session management
- PostgreSQL for event logging
- Position-based attribution model (40% first touch, 40% last touch, 20% distributed)

*Results:*
- Recovered 13.6% of "invisible" traffic on average
- Found another 8% in "dark social" (WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord)
- Total: 21.6% of conversions were untrackable with standard tools
- Attribution accuracy went from ~68% to ~98%

The repo has the detection patterns and a sanitized dataset: [GitHub link]

Open questions I'm still working through:
1. GDPR implications of fingerprinting vs cookie consent
2. Distinguishing AI bots (indexing) from real users (searching)
3. How much credit should AI assist vs organic get in attribution?
4. Cross-device tracking without cookies is still hard

Would love feedback from anyone working on similar problems or thoughts on the privacy implications of fingerprinting.
Show HN: PhilosophMe – a minimal iOS app for daily philosophical thinking
by walon | 2026-02-13 18:46:34+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a small iOS app called PhilosophMe. It has a philosophy quantifier, then, it delivers one short philosophical prompt per day — designed to encourage reflection rather than productivity or motivation.

I noticed most “thinking” apps either oversimplify philosophy into quotes or gamify it heavily. This is intentionally slow and minimal.

I’m especially interested in feedback on:
• Whether the value proposition is clear
• If this feels like something you’d actually open daily
• Whether philosophy apps even make sense on mobile
• What to do w/onboarding

App Store link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/philosophme/id6758975792
by aydyn | 2026-02-13 18:46:42+00:00
> I'm not in a minority, this is something that's a new and common complaint among iPhone users.

This statement lacks perspective. Currently, there are 1.6 billion iphone users worldwide. People who make any complaints about iphone are already in a tiny minority.

Remember in the past, Apple got away with purposely slowing down old models with very little backlash. I dont know, maybe they still do that. So saying "its a common complaint" is completely missing the forest for the trees.
by latexr | 2026-02-13 18:46:49+00:00
So what you’re describing is a situation where the three of you are together and you want to cut the evening short for yourself because you don’t like one of the people? If that’s the case, I don’t think that was at all clear in your original post. Judging from the downvotes and the other responses, I think everyone assumed a situation like your friend calling you up and saying “hey, want to hang out with me and <person you dislike>?”.
by tedsanders | 2026-02-13 18:46:53+00:00
Amodei isn't a grifter; the difference is that he really believes powerful AI is imminent.

If you truly believe powerful AI is imminent, then it makes perfect sense to be worried about alignment failures. If a powerless 5 year old human mewls they're going to kill someone, we don't go ballistic because we know they have many years to grow up. But if a powerless 5 year old alien says they're going to kill someone, and in one year they'll be a powerful demigod, then it's quite logical to be extremely concerned about the currently harmless thoughts, because soon they could be quite harmful.

I myself don't think powerful AI is 1-2 years away, but I do take Amodei and others as genuine, and I think what they're saying does make logical sense if you believe powerful AI is imminent.
by red75prime | 2026-02-13 18:47:02+00:00
Read Electrek articles with a mouthful of salt. Fred Lambert’s “robotaxi is 10x worse than a human” estimate is based on his personal statistical reasoning, which somehow arrived at 200,000 miles per accident for humans. Minor accidents that Tesla reports for robotaxis (such as low-speed collisions with stationary objects) do not make it into publicly available statistics, so his estimate might be significantly off.
by timeinput | 2026-02-13 18:47:11+00:00
Many countries have minimum wages for many jobs [1].

There is a tacit agreement in polite society that people should be paid that minimum wage, and by tacit agreement I mean laws passed by the government that democratic countries voted for / approved of.

The gig economy found a way to ~~undermine that law~~ pay people (not employees, "gig workers") less than the minimum wage.

If you found a McDonalds paying people $1 per hour we would call it exploitative (even if those people are glad to earn $1 per hour at McDonalds, and would keep doing it, the theoretical company is violating the law). If you found someone delivering food for that McDonalds for $1 per hour we call them gig workers, and let them keep at it.

I mean yeah, it's not as bad as being tortured forever? I guess? What's your point?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_minimum_w...
by basilgohar | 2026-02-13 18:47:17+00:00
I am greatly saddened at this news. Ralph, or rillian as I mainly knew him through the Xiph-related IRC channels, was a stalwart "nice guy", always a kind word, a moderating beacon of gentle support and help, and just someone whose presence seemed to make any place a better place. He will be greatly missed.

Seeing the other folks from Xiph commenting here, I can tell that my take on him was not unique. We lost one of the good guys, for sure.
by viking123 | 2026-02-13 18:47:25+00:00
I have the issue that I run into some bug that it just cannot fix. Bear in mind I am developing an online game. And then I have to get into the weeds myself which feels such an gargantuan effort after having used the LLM, that I just want to close the IDE and go do something else. Yes, I have used Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3 and they cannot just solve some issues no matter how I twist it. Might be the language and the fact that it is a game with custom engine and not a react app.

I talked with my coworker today and asked which model he uses, he said Opus 4.6 but he said he doesn't use any AI stuff much anymore since he felt it makes him not learn and build the mental model which I tend to agree a bit with.
by nunez | 2026-02-13 18:47:44+00:00
I have autocorrext turned off on my keyboard and typed this without any corrections. These sre the issues i've faced with the stock keyboard:

- accidental periods when typing URLs in Safari

- key target inaccuracy (though turning off swipe-to-tect gas ikproved this a little, though not enough)

- key latnecy which causes letters innsome words to get swapped or extra unwated letters to appear (this could be a me-getting-older prblem, howeverg

- autocorrect suggesting words that I've never typed before (I turned on autocorrect for this list item to make sure i gave it a fair shake; it didn't suggest anything crazy this time, but the number of times it has in the past has led me to turning it off, even after iOS 18 wherein the keyboard supposedly used a small language model to improve suggestions)

I also type longform on my phone sometimes; the keyboard makes this much more exhausting than it needs to be.
by CurleighBraces | 2026-02-13 18:47:47+00:00
Not sure if it's just my age but pair programming seems to have a different meaning these days.

It used to mean that two developers would literally sit next to each other, one would type and one would review as the person typed, then they would repeat.

I guess in the world of remote working it's just not practical any more.

I certainly wouldn't call, one person reviewing another persons code during the merge process pair programming at all.
by longfacehorrace | 2026-02-13 18:47:50+00:00
It's not just the keyboard. My iPhone 15 is often so unresponsive I am tapping twice as much.

Example but the issue not limited to web browsing; Safari will do nothing, I tap again, it does the thing, then it does the thing again due to the second tap. I have to tap back to get to where I really wanted to go.
by tracker1 | 2026-02-13 18:48:03+00:00
Even on my 5.2 setup it's still not great for a lot of content that's coming down in stereo... the center channel is supposed to focus on the dialog, but often the mixdown/up being served doesn't do a good job of it. A large part of it imo is the mixing done for movies which are generally in very loud, controlled environments vs. say classic TV which was closed set stage performances... we're directing more for subtle nuance in acting today over being able to clearly hear what's going on.

I think we can overcome this with better listening and playback options though... personally, I just turn on captions/subs where available.
by leptons | 2026-02-13 18:48:04+00:00
I'm going to call bullshit on that. They likely had stock on-hand that they purchased before the tariffs.

I have a hardware startup (parts imported from China, assembled on-shore), and I guarantee you that my customers are paying for every cent of the tariffs that make my product cost ~30% to 100% more (depending on the whims of an imbecile). No way am I paying it. I can't afford it. The parts cost what they cost, and there simply is no alternative part that can be purchased locally. If my customers can't swallow the extra cost, then I have less customers, which hurts my small business. If you were my customer, you would be paying for the tariffs.
by bikenaga | 2026-02-13 18:48:10+00:00
Abstract: "Space weather—fluctuations in solar wind and geomagnetic activity—affects multiple biological systems, but whether these effects extend to human behavior at population scales remains controversial. We examined relationships between solar activity and violent deaths in Uruguay and Australia, two countries at similar southern latitudes but fundamentally different electromagnetic environments. Uruguay sits within the South Atlantic Magnetic Anomaly (SAMA), where Earth's magnetic field weakens to 60% of normal strength; Australia experiences normal field conditions. Analyzing 60 years of mortality data (1964-2023), we found systematic correlation reversal: in Australia, increased solar wind pressure and proton density correlated with increased violence (r = +0.52 to +0.85, p < 0.001), while in Uruguay the same variables correlated with decreased violence (r = -0.40 to -0.60, p < 0.001). This geographic reversal—occurring precisely where Earth's magnetic field geometry changes and holding consistently across suicide, homicide, and combined violence—provides strong evidence that geomagnetic conditions mediate space weather influences on human behavior. Preliminary data from Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, located adjacent to Uruguay within SAMA, show temporal patterns consistent with our findings. Results suggest electromagnetic environment may be an overlooked factor in violence and mental health epidemiology."
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-13 18:48:17+00:00
Really? “The left” has never trusted the police. I can tell you as a person who studied the civil rights movement, whose still living parents grew up in the Jim Crow South and who personal knew some of the secondary people who made the history books during that time (I am 51), “the left” or at least a large part of never trusted any law enforcement.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-02-13 18:48:27+00:00
> If you make your project public, it means you want and expect people to use it.

This isn't true. For many people (myself included), making a project open source means "if you find it useful feel free to make use of it, if not I don't really mind". I don't care, at all, if one soul finds my code useful. It's a gift to the commons, not some kind of social obligation I'm agreeing to.
by illithid0 | 2026-02-13 18:48:36+00:00
Normally I'm pretty good at extending intellectual generosity. But for them, it's at the level of voting for a candidate who supports cuts to Medicaid and then wondering why it's suddenly infinitely harder for me to get through to anyone about assistance (not even for myself, for them) following staffing cuts.

"This isn't what I voted for" is a common utterance. They can't help themselves, so I do my best to help, while they undercut my options to help them.
by k310 | 2026-02-13 18:48:46+00:00
> Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson issued a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, reminding him of Apple’s obligations to its customers. The letter follows reports that Apple News systematically boosts left-wing sources and suppresses right-wing sources. The letter points out that if Apple misrepresents Apple News or violates its terms of service, it could be violating the FTC Act.

> The letter says: “Big Tech companies that suppress or promote news articles in their news aggregators or feeds based on the perceived ideological or political viewpoint of the article or publication may violate the FTC Act if that suppression or promotion (1) is inconsistent with the terms and conditions of service; (2) is contrary to consumers’ reasonable expectations such that failure to disclose the ideological favoritism is a material omission; or (3) when those practices cause substantial injury that is neither reasonably avoidable nor outweighed by countervailing benefits to consumers or competition.”

And I am pulling a full-on boycott of Apple due to its leader's subservience to an extreme right-wing despot.
by mrguyorama | 2026-02-13 18:48:54+00:00
Yesterday I scrolled down the front page of my Youtube, and saw the "shorts" shelf. I clicked "Show me fewer shorts" like I have a hundred other times.

I did something else for a few minutes, then I scrolled down another page or so.

The shorts were right there again.

Google is evil. Anyone still working for them is enabling this.
by bakibab | 2026-02-13 18:49:24+00:00
One of my friends and I started building a PaaS for a niche tech stack, believing that we could use Claude for all sorts of code generation activities. We thought, if Anthropic and OpenAI are claiming that most of the code is written by LLMs in new product launches, we could start using it too.

Unsurprisingly, we were able to build a demo platform within a few days. But when we started building the actual platform, we realized that the code generated by Claude is hard to extend, and a lot of replanning and reworking needs to be done every time you try to add a major feature.

This brought our confidence level down. We still want to believe that Claude will help in generating code. But I no longer believe that Claude will be able to write complex software on its own.

Now we are treating Claude as a junior person on the team and give it well-defined, specific tasks to complete.
Show HN: Sentinel Core – Open-source AI video search and detection engine
by ab-abg | 2026-02-13 18:49:44+00:00
Sentinel Core is an open-source foundation layer of our AI-powered video intelligence stack.

It provides real-time object detection, semantic video search, and event indexing designed for on-premise and air-gapped deployments.

Core capabilities include:

• Real-time object detection (YOLO-based)
• Semantic search over recorded footage (CLIP-based embeddings)
• Multi-camera ingestion and indexing
• Configurable detection thresholds
• Designed for local deployment (no cloud dependency)

We’re releasing this as part of building an open ecosystem around reliable, real-world video intelligence systems.

Feedback, contributions, and technical discussion are welcome.
by glenstein | 2026-02-13 18:50:05+00:00
Having trouble parsing this one. Is it meant to be a WWII reference? If anything I would say consciousness research has expanded our understanding of living beings understood to be conscious.

And I don't think it's fair or appropriate to treat study of the subject matter of consciousness like it's equivalent to 20th century authoritarian regimes signing off on executions. There's a lot of steps in the middle before you get from one to the other that distinguish them to the extent necessary and I would hope that exercise shouldn't be necessary every time consciousness research gets discussed.
by palmotea | 2026-02-13 18:50:19+00:00
> Contrast eg Norway, where businesses operate inside of a formal 3-way agreement (Trepartssamarbeidet) between the government, employers associations, and trade unions.

> It's going to take probably a few rounds of fascism and many millions dead before Americans widely decide to change the fundamental nature of business.

I don't agree. I think what's needed is to break the delusion that every American is a capitalist-lord-in-waiting, so they delusionally think and vote in ways that harm their interests (see, software engineers excited about AI and advocating for its adoption).

Also cut down the noise. The "culture wars" (from both sides) are very effective at distracting people from more fundamental issues. I really think one party needs to drop all that, and focus narrowly on representing the common people as workers.
by adusal | 2026-02-13 18:50:23+00:00
Hey all,
If you grew up playing RTS games, you might have felt that the mental model is somewhat similar to the way we vibe-code with multiple agents. It's basically managing a bunch of async threads that occasionally require our input.

That’s why I built AgentCraft, an RTS interface for agent orchestration that feels like the games we grew up with. What you can do at the moment:
* Summon agents and watch them work on your tasks
* React the instant your attention is needed
* Stay focused with quest suggestions
* Have fun

Try it: npx @idosal/agentcraft

Demo and info can be found on the site: https://getagentcraft.com

It’s early and a bit rough, but improving fast. I’d love to hear your thoughts on:
* What’s stopping you from working with more agents today?
* What does AgentCraft do well? What can be improved? What’s missing?

Thanks! I’ll be available here, on X (@idosal1) and on the new Discord (https://discord.gg/nEaZAH7C7F)
by btown | 2026-02-13 18:50:59+00:00
If we're going there, we need to make the logging dynamically configurable with Log4J-style JNDI and LDAP. It's entirely secure as history has shown - and no matter what, it'll still be more secure than installing OpenClaw!

(Kidding aside, logging complexity is a slippery slope, and I think it's important, perhaps even at a societal level, for an organization like Anthropic to default to a posture that allows people to feel they have visibility into where their agentic workflows are getting their context from. To the extent that "___ puts you in control" becomes important as rogue agentic behavior is increasingly publicized, it's in keeping with, and arguably critical to, Claude's brand messaging.)
Show HN: OpenWhisper – free, local, and private voice-to-text macOS app
by rwu1997 | 2026-02-13 18:51:20+00:00
I wanted a voice-to-text app but didn't trust any of the proprietary ones with my privacy.

So I decided to see if I could vibe code it with 0 macOS app & Swift experience.

It uses a local binary of whisper.cpp (a fast implementation of OpenAI's Whisper voice-to-text model in C++).

Github: https://github.com/richardwu/openwhisper

I also decided to take this as an opportunity to compare 3 agentic coding harnesses:

Cursor w/ Opus 4.6:
- Best one-shot UI by far
- Didn't get permissioning correct
- Had issues making the "Cancel recording" hotkey being turned on all the time

Claude Code w/ Opus 4.6:
- Fewest turns to get main functionality right (recording, hotkeys, permissions)
- Was able to get a decent UI with a few more turns

Codex App w/ Codex 5.3 Extra-High:
- Worst one-shot UI
- None of the functionality worked without multiple subsequent prompts
by alexjplant | 2026-02-13 18:51:22+00:00
Some cultures believe that blood type has a bearing on personality [1]. I always thought "Type A" personalities were called so because A is the first letter in the alphabet. No idea whether I'm correct though the Wikipedia article says that BTPT is "not to be confused with" this so I'd imagine the overlap is coincidental.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_type_personality_theory
by lep_qq | 2026-02-13 18:51:24+00:00
Hi all.

To make different my Service Level Objective Operator for K8s I'm currently working on new api, SLOComposition:

apiVersion: observability.slok.io/v1alpha1
kind: SLOComposition
metadata:
name: example-app-slo-composition
namespace: default
spec:
target: 99.9
window: 30d
objectives:
- name: availability
namespace: test
- name: latency
namespace: test
composition:
type: AND_MIN
The SLI of this new API will calculate, creating a prometheusRule, with the composition of the two SLO link in the objectives array.

For the moment I'm working on the AND_MIN composition.
In roadmap there are:
WEIGHTED_ROUTES and HARD_SOFT

If you want to talk about their semantic reach in the comments.

Thank you for all the feedback!
by tetha | 2026-02-13 18:51:31+00:00
Someone once said: Abuse and expectations erode a culture of cooperation.

I am currently seeing this in real time at $work. A flagship product has been placed onto the platform we're building, and the entire sales/marketing/project culture is not adjusting at all. People are pushy, abusive, communicate badly and escalate everything to the C-Level. As a result, we in Platform Engineering are now channeling our inner old school sysadmins, put up support processes, tickets, rules, expectations and everything else can go die in a ditch.

Everyone suffers now, but we need to do this to manage our own sanity.

And to me at least, it feels like this is happening with a lot of OSS infrastructure projects. People are getting really pushy and pissy about something they need from these projects. I'd rather talk to my boss to setup a PR for something we need (and I'm decently successful with those), but other people are just very angry that OSS projects don't fullfil their very niche need.

And then you get into this area of anger, frustration, putting down boundaries that are harmful but necessary to the maintainers.

Even just "sending them to the CONTRIBUTING.md". Just with a few people at work, we are sending out dozens of reminders about the documentation and how to work with us effectively per week to just a few people. This is not something I would do on my free time for just a singular day and the pain-curbing salary is also looking slim so far.