MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andai | 2026-02-13 16:06:14+00:00
Well, the closest I can come up with is Moloch.[0] The incentive structure. The market creates the incentive structure for "someone" (everyone who dares!) to create AI as quickly as possible, to make it as intelligent as possible, etc. And to do so in a relatively irresponsible way, because if you fall behind in the hype cycle, you die.

To make it simultaneously as powerful and obedient as possible, because that is entirely the point.

I'm not sure how those two variables interact. They seem fundamentally incompatible to me. But this is uncharted territory.

--

[0] "Western civilization is already a misaligned superintelligence."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCSsKV5F4xc

For further information, see: every ecosystem.
by yabones | 2026-02-13 16:06:16+00:00
Frigate is very good: https://frigate.video/

Personally, I use Zoneminder: https://zoneminder.com/
Zoneminder is very "janky" but predictable.

I set mine up about three years ago, and it's been nice and boring since: https://nbailey.ca/post/nvr
LangChain Agent Testing Guide Tool (Free)
by exordex | 2026-02-13 16:07:25+00:00
Hey HN,
If you're building LangChain agents, you've probably seen them break in creative ways - prompt injection bypassing your chain logic, tools getting called with bad parameters, or cascading failures when an API times out mid-chain.

I built Khaos to test these failure modes before production.

Example LangChain agent:
```python
from langchain.agents import AgentExecutor, create_openai_functions_agent
from khaos import khaosagent

@khaosagent(name="research-agent", framework="langgraph")
def agent(query: str) -> dict:
executor = AgentExecutor(agent=agent, tools=tools)
result = executor.invoke({"input": query})
return {"response": result["output"]}

Test it:
pip install khaos-agent
khaos discover
khaos run research-agent --pack security

Khaos injects:
- 242+ security attacks - Prompt injection variations that bypass LangChain's prompt templates
- Tool misuse - Malicious parameters in tool calls (e.g., os.system injection in code execution tools)
- Chain failures - What happens when your 3rd step in a 5-step chain times out?
- LLM faults - Rate limits, token overflows, model unavailability

Why this matters for LangChain specifically:

LangChain's abstraction layers can hide vulnerabilities:
- Prompt templates can still be injected via tool outputs
- AgentExecutor doesn't validate tool parameters
- Chains fail silently or propagate corrupted state
- ReAct/Plan-and-Execute patterns have unique attack surfaces

Works with LangGraph, LCEL chains, and classic LangChain agents. Auto-instruments your chains to inject faults at each step.

Repo: https://github.com/ExordexLabs/khaos-sdk
Examples: https://github.com/ExordexLabs/khaos-examples/tree/master/code-execution-agent
by lenerdenator | 2026-02-13 16:08:55+00:00
All they have to do is make a better UX than Google and Microsoft. As it turns out, that particular bar is at the bottom of the Challenger Deep, so they treat it as such. Money spent on making sure your UX passes basic muster is money not given to a series of retirement and pension funds that make up the bulk of shareholders for companies like Apple.

What do you want more: decent UX, or the Smiths to be able to sell their house and swing on - and off - the course at some golf-based retirement village in Florida?
by curldivergence | 2026-02-13 16:09:21+00:00
I also use Monodraw, can only recommend with one caveat:
@Dear Monodraw developers, if you're reading this, please please please implement discarding text edit popups using ESC, it's been years and I still keep reaching for ESC every time I use Monodraw. I tried decompiling it to binary patch it, but unfortunately it messes up the update mechanism.
by graypegg | 2026-02-13 16:09:31+00:00
That's really interesting! Are you talking more of language as a field of study? (phonetics, grammar, history, etc) Having lived in a place where I only had a pretty limited understanding of the language initially, I constantly made VERY embarrassing mistakes that were 100% cultural. It's so hard to teach that without knowing the quotes people think of when you say something, or the way people soften swear words, or what forms "feel" polite in what scenarios...

Of course it's hard to get that without a baseline knowledge of phrases/words/grammer... but you're talking about teaching other people, which is interpretable as an authority on the language you're teaching, right?
by singpolyma3 | 2026-02-13 16:10:05+00:00
To be fair my iPhone spys on me in much more actively creepy ways than my android ever did. Showing ads for nearby pizza places at lunchtime on the homescreen. Telling me at about the time of my son's soccer that I may be interested in going to the place where his soccer is about now (despite me never using navigation on my phone) etc
by zahlman | 2026-02-13 16:10:13+00:00
My sample might be biased (it comes from places like the Python Discord) but from what I've seen of how people completely new to programming typically use LLMs, this is decidedly not the case. It could work if people had an instinct to turn the LLM into a tutor and attempt to verify everything manually. But in practice, people ask the LLM to do things for them, and turn to humans when the LLM gets stuck.
by throwawayffffas | 2026-02-13 16:10:51+00:00
> No need to process anything in parallel, the machine can run the token through 100 layers faster than the user can type.

Yeah if your usecase is chat sure, it can run faster than you can type. For anything useful, like code autocomplete, or agentic coding, the context is always in the hundreds of thousands of tokens. And usually the new prompt is going to be 50 to a few thousand tokens (if you are including error tracebacks for example). And the user will typically expect hundreds of thousands of tokens to be generated. If you don't believe me use cerebras with claude code and watch it generate millions of tokens in a few minutes.
by SirMaster | 2026-02-13 16:10:55+00:00
This happened to me, but it was the merchant that clicked it...

I inserted my card, and then was reading the text and choice that popped up on the screen, and while I was reading it trying to decide which I should click, the merchant grabbed the scanner and clicked the accept...

Of course I got a charge notification on my mobile app immediately and noticed that it was way higher than it should have been, so then I had to go back to them and get them to refund the transaction so we could do it again which took forever and a manager etc etc.
by darkwater | 2026-02-13 16:11:16+00:00
> It doesn't matter, the answer is the same. Using vibecoding is less effort that not using it, so of late we see a lot of low-effort vibecoding projects, of which this is one. Ergo, vibecoding is an easily-spotted red flag for projects that are not worth taking seriously.

And the whole point of my initial reply was to question the definition of "effort".

> You should take your own advice. Also, don't be a dick.

I think your reply perfectly illustrates the situation.

Not a fruitful discussion anyway, enjoy clicking down arrows.
by rpdillon | 2026-02-13 16:11:49+00:00
Everyone is keying on forced free labor, but that's not really the proposed solution when an open-source project ends. The fact that it ends is a given, the question then is what to do about all the users. Providing an offramp (migration tools that move to another solution that's similar, or even just suggested other solutions, even including your own commercial offering) before closing up shop seems like a decent thing to do.
by ibdf | 2026-02-13 16:12:05+00:00
From the title it seems you are not a fan of Duolingo, which is fair. However the app lessons seem very similar to Duolingo. It even seems you copied "hearts" and "gems" and "streaks" from Duolingo.

Some questions:

"Listen to authentic native pronunciation in every lesson. Learn the correct accent and intonation from day one."

Can you elaborate on what this means? I currently speak Portuguese (Brazilian) and Italian. While the Italian audio seems fine, the Brazilian portuguese audio is not very good. It seems to be using Portugal's portuguese. And it doesn't sound "native". The audio for single words specially is not something I would recommend to anyone learning portuguese.

The landing page also makes these marketing claims but doesn't go further into any of them:

- "Our proven algorithm tracks every word you learn". Do you follow any learning methodology? What has been "proven" about your algorithm? Are their some stats?

- "Engage in dynamic lessons designed by language specialists." Who are you language specialists that have "carefully designed lessons"?

The one thing you have going for you is that I didn't have to give you my email to get started but the landing page doesn't give me any confidence that this app is better than Duolingo or other language apps.
by 1313ed01 | 2026-02-13 16:12:10+00:00
Tiled has some mode where you can paint the tile corners or/and edges to automatically insert tiles. When using only the corners to paint (and only a single terrain type) that would be equivalent to shifting the visual grid by a half tile trick, if I understand correctly?

Adding multiple types of terrain and also making it possible to paint the edges of course will add an explosion of possible tile types that are required. Looks like there is support in Tiled for optional automatic mirroring or rotations to add missing tile variations.

https://doc.mapeditor.org/en/stable/manual/terrain/
by SamPatt | 2026-02-13 16:12:11+00:00
Hi gwern!

My siblings are very much not developers. That's a lot of data for them to download, store, and figure out a way to view.

I was worried they'd just see a list of filenames and not put in the effort. By creating a streaming experience, I thought they'd actually watch them.

You might be correct that Gemini could have helped, I didn't test it, but much of the knowledge of who was in a scene, where it was, and why it would matter is inside my head. I doubt any model could effectively label locations and people over 20 years of video.

As to the opportunity cost - I'm currently looking for work, so mine is undoubtedly lower than yours!
by HardCodedBias | 2026-02-13 16:12:13+00:00
It's just poop tier.

Come on.

Worthless.

Do you have any market counter points.

Market counter points that aren't really just a repackaging of:

1. "Google has the world's best distribution" and/or
2. "Google has a firehose of money that allows them to sell their 'AI product' at an enormous discount?

Good luck!
by claudiulodro | 2026-02-13 16:12:15+00:00
The largest cancelling brigade in the history of cancel culture was done by the right after the Charlie Kirk shooting, where more than 600 people were doxxed and lost their jobs for "social media posts that celebrated Kirk's assassination or were seen as disparaging of his legacy". [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reprisals_against_commentators...
by GetTheFacts | 2026-02-13 16:12:17+00:00
>The intent of this tool is voter suppression, so it works as designed.

That may well be the intent but, at least according to the reporting, it's not all that effective in disenfranchising many people:

Even counting people flagged in error, the first bulk searches using SAVE
haven’t validated the president’s claims that voting by noncitizens is
widespread. At least seven states with a total of about 35 million registered
voters have publicly reported the results of running their voter rolls through
the system. Those searches have identified roughly 4,200 people — about 0.01%
of registered voters — as noncitizens. This aligns with previous findings[0]
that noncitizens rarely register to vote[1].

The anecdotes in TFA make it clear that county clerks are seeing significant numbers of folks being flagged incorrectly and many are making efforts to verify these flags before disenfranchising anyone.

What's quite disturbing is that these folks have accessed Social Security Administration (SSA) databases to "cross-check" their information, but that data has come from (IIUC) copies of SSA data taken[2] without authorization by DOGE staffers.

All in all this is not only a huge overreach, but also validates what the experts have been saying all along: voting, or even attempting to register to vote by non-citizens is vanishingly rare.

[0] https://georgiarecorder.com/briefs/georgia-gop-secretary-of-...

[1] https://www.votebeat.org/michigan/2025/04/03/15-noncitizen-v...

[2] https://www.csoonline.com/article/4046997/whistleblower-doge...
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-13 16:12:20+00:00
But the AI doesn't know that. It has comprehensively learned human emotions and human-lived experiences from a pretraining corpus comprising billions of human works, and has subsequently been trained from human feedback to provide responses that would be understandable by an average human. The result of all that is something that cannot possibly be dehumanized after the fact in any real way. The very notion is nonsensical on its face - the AI agent is just as human as anything humans have ever made throughout history! If you think it's immoral to burn a library, or to desecrate a human-made monument or work of art (and plenty of real people do!), why shouldn't we think that there is in fact such a thing as 'wronging' an AI?
Show HN: M-session – Open-source app for guided MDMA sessions
by wellwellsmell | 2026-02-13 16:12:28+00:00
I built this as a solo project after the FDA rejected MDMA-assisted therapy last year. The idea is a simple guided experience for people who want to use MDMA intentionally for personal growth, with activities like breathing exercises, journaling prompts, and guided meditations.

The design philosophy is minimalism. Someone mid-session doesn't need a busy UI, so everything is kept calm and low-stimulation. It works as a PWA so it can be installed and used fully offline, which felt important for something like this.

Stack is React, Vite, Zustand, and Tailwind. Everything runs locally, nothing is collected or transmitted.

It's functional but the main bottleneck right now is content. i need more guided activities, and the codebase could use more eyes on it. Would appreciate feedback on the architecture or the UX.

Repo: https://github.com/wellwellwellyourefeelingfine/m-session
by CWuestefeld | 2026-02-13 16:12:44+00:00
On the contrary. It appears that Bud Light sales continued to fall.

https://sherwood.news/business/beer-bud-light-market-share-b...

Budweiser stock did recover, but they haven't (afaik) repeated the behavior that got them boycotted in the first place. It appears that this boycott achieved exactly what was sought.

I'd agree that this is a rare exception, and that boycotts are almost never successful. But this really is an example of that unicorn.
by Throaway1982 | 2026-02-13 16:12:59+00:00
I wouldn't consider anyone "fluent" who has only 70% comprehension. More like 90%+. If you're assuming things based on context that is a marker of a low level of comprehension.

Im also a native English speaker and have to explain English words daily to other native English speakers. Dont really think that matters. Some words are more common than others.
by rietta | 2026-02-13 16:13:01+00:00
What is the best alternative that can run as a Docker image that mimics AWS S3 to enable local only testing without any external cloud connections?

For me, my only use for Minio was to simulate AWS S3 in docker compose so that my applications were fully testable locally. I never used it it production or as a middle ware. It has not sat well with me to use alternative strategies like Ruby on Rails' local file storage for testing as it behaves differently than when the app is deployed. And using actual cloud services creates its own hurdles of either credential sharing among developers and gets rid of the "docker magic" of being to run a single set up script and be up and running to change code and run the full test suite.

My use case is any developer on the team can do a Git clone and run the set up script and then be fully up and running within minutes locally without any special configuration on their part.
by bee_rider | 2026-02-13 16:14:07+00:00
Yeah, just based on this article that really stood out. It seems to be for a different use-case than Djikstra’s. An average degree of 3.5 seems like an extremely practical a useful use-case in real life, I just don’t see any reason to put it and Djikstra’s against each-other in a head-to-head comparison.
by trashb | 2026-02-13 16:14:15+00:00
Yes you can run any service on any port. But tunneling telnet over another protocol seems like you would just move the problem. I don't know too much about SNI but if "Reverse proxies can disambiguate based on the SNI" wouldn't your network service provider also be able to filter based on SNI?

You would need to agree on a protocol and you would gain all the advantages but also the disadvantages of the tunneling protocol.
Virtual girlfriend apps are sharing and selling private user videos
by laverdadoculta | 2026-02-13 16:14:21+00:00
Special Report: The Hidden Industry of “Virtual Girlfriend” Agencies and the Unauthorized Exposure of Male Intimacy

A rapidly growing but loosely regulated digital industry is operating in a legal gray zone between adult entertainment and personal data exploitation: so-called “virtual girlfriend” agencies. Behind the façade of casual chat and video call services lies an organized structure of recruitment, monetization, and alleged violations of personal privacy affecting users worldwide.

Evidence suggests that owners of chat applications such as 1vs1 Chat, TopChat, and Mixu subcontract intermediary agencies that recruit women, primarily from South America, to work as virtual operators. Their role is to engage clients in private conversations and intimate video calls billed by the minute. While the commercial nature of these interactions is clear, what happens outside the official platforms raises serious ethical and legal concerns.

According to collected testimonies, many operators participate in closed messaging and social media groups composed exclusively of other workers. Within these private networks, screenshots, photos, and video clips of clients during intimate calls are allegedly shared without consent. The material is circulated for social validation, mockery, or comparison, turning private interactions into group entertainment.

Investigators have also uncovered indications of a secondary underground market. Some of this intimate content is reportedly resold to third parties through disguised personal transactions, presented as private exchanges involving supposed partners in order to avoid suspicion. This practice, if confirmed, could constitute non-consensual distribution of intimate material and potential violations of international privacy and data protection laws.

Digital law experts warn that such conduct may fall under criminal statutes related to the unauthorized dissemination of explicit material and breaches of personal data protection. The cross-border nature of these platforms complicates enforcement, as victims are located globally — particularly in Europe — while operational networks may be concentrated in other regions.

This phenomenon highlights a broader systemic issue in the digital economy: international services operating with opaque intermediaries, competitive labor environments that incentivize harmful behavior, and insufficient safeguards to protect user privacy.

As regulators and authorities begin to assess the scope of the problem, a central question remains unresolved: when intimacy becomes digital currency, who is responsible for protecting those whose privacy is traded without their knowledge?
by dascrazy_96 | 2026-02-13 16:14:39+00:00
Unpopular opinion: the mass resistance to cloud dev environments over the past 5 years was never really about latency or performance. It was identity. Developers treat their local setup the way car guys treat their garage builds. It's theirs, they tuned it, and suggesting a managed alternative feels like an insult to their craft.

But the article kind of buries the real lede here. The interesting claim isn't "localhost is dead." It's that environment standardization is the actual bottleneck for agent adoption, and most companies don't even realize it yet. Everyone's blaming model capability when the problem is they literally cannot give an agent a working dev environment programmatically.

I watched three teams at my company try to run background agents this quarter. All three hit the exact same wall. The agent generates code fine, but it can't run the test suite because nobody ever bothered to make the environment reproducible. One team spent two weeks just getting a second copy of the dev environment running on the same machine. The agent part took a day.

Kind of ironic that the "works on my machine" problem everyone joked about for 20 years is now the thing blocking the biggest productivity shift since version control. Except now it's "works on my machine, but I can't describe my machine to a computer."

Genuinely curious how many people here have actually tried running 3+ agents in parallel on a monorepo locally. The git worktree section rang painfully true for me. Port conflicts, shared caches stomping on each other, laptop sounds like it's trying to achieve liftoff. At what point do we just admit that "buy more RAM" isn't an architecture?
by jason_s | 2026-02-13 16:14:48+00:00
Intriguing article. Sometimes practical issues override theoretical ones, and it would be interesting to see which one dominates in networking.

(side note: does anyone else get thrown off by the Epilogue font? It looks very wide in some cases and very narrow in others... makes me want to override it with Stylus if my employer hadn't blocked browser extensions for security reasons, which raises the question of why I am even reading the article on this computer....)
by jancsika | 2026-02-13 16:14:49+00:00
In other words, the system is designed so that any learning the speaker attempts somehow ends up being scored wrong, forcing the speaker to conclude they will always be identified by the system as an error-prone, non-native speaker yearning for acceptance by ears trained from childhood to hear cracks in any facade the speaker slaps together, forever and ever...

Sounds like the author unwittingly taught you the first lesson. :)

Edit: clarification
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-13 16:14:58+00:00
Yeah, that's what I do. Anytime anyone from a company sends an email about whatever, who wants me to help them (for their company) in private with something, I ask if they're willing to pay for my time spent on it, maybe 20% says yes. Most of the time they end up getting redirected to use the same venues the rest of the community has access to too.
SpacyDo Task Engine virtual machine example: todo with programmable tasks
by tracyspacy | 2026-02-13 16:15:45+00:00
In this example, all todo operations — from simple CRUD to tasks own instructions — are executed by a virtual machine.

The concept is that any kind of automation or workflow can be enabled by task instructions executed by the VM, rather than hardcoded functions in the app. It’s close to the concept of rules engines.

There are 4 demo task instructions:

- *chain* - Creates next task once when another completes. Removes calldata after call - called once
- *either* - Sets complete if either one or another task is completed + deletes not completed task (see gif)
- *destructable* - task self destructs when it’s status set to complete
- *hide* - Keeps task hidden while specified task’s status is not complete.

It is possible to add your own instructions to calldata.toml and use them within todo example:

cargo run -- add <TASK_TITLE > -calldata <INSTRUCTION_NAME> <PARAMETERS>

demo gif: https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/674bea85-d6b0-40d7-ba7f-dd1c10649aee.gif

repo: https://github.com/tracyspacy/spacydo

todo example : https://github.com/tracyspacy/spacydo/tree/main/examples/todo