MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hn_acker | 2026-02-21 00:12:46+00:00
> Don’t we have something similar with how pretty much all copiers/printers wont print currency?

The short answer is yes, but I'm not sure how similar.

Copiers/printers that refuse to print money detect a pattern designed in the original physical currency note (as with the EURion constellation [1], with emphasis on the fact that currency is printed by the government) or a digital watermark placed in digital images of money (as with the Counterfeit Deterrence System voluntarily developed by banks [2]).

18 U.S. Code § 474A makes controlling or possessing "any essentially identical feature or device adapted to the making of" counterfeit money a felony [3]. What happens if I make a single "simple" printer for my own use that prints anything I tell it to because I "simply" didn't include any scanning or blocking functions in the printer design, and I never intend to print copy/counterfeit money? Is such a printer "adapted to the making of" counterfeit money? I don't know. If I instead make or transfer such a printer for any purpose other than my own personal use, the answer might move toward yes, but maybe it was already yes. Does the US require all copiers and printers to include at least one feature that prevents copying or counterfeiting of money? I don't know.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Bank_Counterfeit_Deter...

[3] 18 U.S. Code § 474A - Deterrents to counterfeiting of obligations and securities - https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/474A
by justinhj | 2026-02-21 00:13:17+00:00
I have found that interactive visualizations are a great way to understand code and systems in general. Now you can have an AI make one in under a minute it's a very useful tool.

https://heyes-jones.com/externalsort/treeofwinners.html

Take this example. I can step through the algorithm, view the data structure and see a narration of each step.

A debugger is useful for debugging edge cases but it is very difficult to learn a complex system by stepping through it.
by krisoft | 2026-02-21 00:13:31+00:00
> we need strong legal protections for white-hat and even grey-hat security researchers or hackers.

I have a radical idea which goes even further: we should have legaly mandated bug bounties. A law which says that if someone makes a proper disclosure of an actual exploitable security problem then your company has to pay out. Ideally we could scale the payout based on the importance of the infrastructure in question. Vulnerabilities with little lasting consequence would pay little. Serious vulnerabilities with potential to society wide physical harm could pay out a few percents of the yearly revenue of the given company. For example hacking the high score in a game would pay only little, a vulnerability which can collapse the electric grid or remotely command a car would pay a king’s ransom. Enough to incentivise a cottage industry to find problems. Hopefully resulting in a situation where the companies in question find it more profitable to find and fix the problems themselves.

I’m sure there is a potential to a lot of unintended consequences. For example i’m not sure how could we handle insider threats. One one hand insider threats are real and the companies should be protecting against them as best as they could. On the other hand it would be perverse to force companies to pay developers for vulnerabilities the developers themselves intentionally created.
by abeyer | 2026-02-21 00:14:20+00:00
> Ban guns, or regulate them, and their owners?

Both, though I don't know the breakdown. I'm confident saying there's absolutely some people who seem to see onerous regulation as a path to a de facto ban, though.

I'd be more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to those pushing regulations if the regulations themselves seemed well thought out and drafted rather than leaning on kneejerk "guns bad, rules good" reactions from voters to get passed. Unfortunately the actual situation seems to be that left-leaning areas where it's easy to push anti-gun law lean farther and farther into restricting both first and second amendment rights without meaningful impact, while the right-leaning areas that actually could use some additional regulation over the perhaps overly lax federal level laws can't or won't do anything.
by whyenot | 2026-02-21 00:14:28+00:00
As a middle aged (gen x) woman, my facebook feed is pretty good. It's filled with posts from friends and interest groups that I am a part of. The reason I no longer use FB has nothing to do with the feed, it's because Mark Zuckerberg is an awful person, and I refuse to use his product. The cognitive dissonance is great here, because I still use WhatsApp; it's the best way to stay in contact with my relatives in Europe, and I still use IG, albeit mostly for work, and sparingly.
Show HN: Are – Rule engine for JavaScript, C#, and Dart with playground
by beratarpa | 2026-02-21 00:14:31+00:00
I built a rule engine called ARE (Action Rule Event) that follows a simple pipeline: Event → Middleware → Condition Evaluation → Rule Matching → Action Execution.

It's available on npm, NuGet, and pub.dev with the same API design across all three.

I also built a playground where you can experiment with three scenarios (RPG game, smart home, e-commerce) without installing anything. It includes a step-by-step rule debugger, a visual relationship graph, and an animated pipeline diagram.

Playground: https://are-playground.netlify.app
GitHub: https://github.com/BeratARPA/ARE
by galangalalgol | 2026-02-21 00:14:36+00:00
His argument seems to be that the night modes don't remove much blue. My initial assumption was that it was about physical filters. Yellow or amber 99%+ safety lenses are a thing and several of my coworkers wear them. Looking through them at those painfully bright blue leds makes them appear to be off. Yes everything looks strange, but they work. Likewise a different coworker manually removes all blue in the monitor settings themselves independent of the brightness setting. That also works. The author's assertion should be qualified amd narrowed a bit.
by thundergolfer | 2026-02-21 00:14:38+00:00
I agree with the core premise that the big AI companies are fundamentally driven towards advertising revenue and other antagonistic but profit-generating functionality.

Also agree with paxys that the social implications here are deep and troubling. Having ambient AI in a home, even if it's caged to the home, has tricky privacy problems.

I really like the explorations of this space done in Black Mirror's The Entire History of You[1] and Ted Chiang's The Truth of Fact short story[2].

My bet is that the home and other private spaces almost completely yield to computer surveillance, despite the obvious problems. We've already seen this happen with social media and home surveillance cameras.

Just as in Chiang's story spaces were 'invaded' by writing, AI will fill the world and those opting out will occupy the same marginal positions as those occupied by dumb phone users and people without home cameras or televisions.

Interesting times ahead.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...
Show HN: Murl – Curl for MCP Servers
by turlockmike | 2026-02-21 00:15:24+00:00
I built murl because interacting with MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers from the command line was way more painful than it needed to be. MCP uses JSON-RPC 2.0 over HTTP, so every request means hand-crafting payloads with method names, params objects, and id fields. I wanted something that felt like curl.

Given an MCP server at https://mcp.deepwiki.com/mcp, murl lets you append virtual paths like /tools or /tools/read_wiki_structure that map to MCP methods. These aren't real HTTP endpoints — murl translates them into the right JSON-RPC calls behind the scenes:

# List all tools on a server (NDJSON — one JSON object per line)
murl https://mcp.deepwiki.com/mcp/tools | jq -r '.name'

# Call a tool and extract the result
murl https://remote.mcpservers.org/fetch/mcp/tools/fetch -d url=https://example.com | jq -r '.text'

# Query a repo's wiki structure
murl https://mcp.deepwiki.com/mcp/tools/read_wiki_structure -d repoName=anthropics/claude-code | jq -r '.text'

The -d flags work like curl — key=value pairs get auto-coerced into typed JSON arguments. You can also pass raw JSON directly.

A few things beyond convenience:

MCP from plain Bash. Any agent with shell access can call MCP tools — no SDK, no client library, no MCP session management. Vercel recently wrote about replacing 80% of their agent's tools with bash and getting better results (https://vercel.com/blog/we-removed-80-percent-of-our-agents-...). murl makes MCP servers accessible in that same pattern.

OAuth built in. MCP servers behind OAuth (like Glean, or anything using RFC 7591 dynamic client registration) just work. First call opens the browser, tokens get cached and auto-refresh. --no-auth for public servers.

LLM-friendly by default. Compact NDJSON to stdout, structured JSON errors to stderr, semantic exit codes. -v for human-readable output.

Handles transport quirks. Streamable HTTP, session-based SSE (mcp-proxy), regular JSON responses — murl detects and handles them all.

You can try it right now against public servers:

brew install turlockmike/murl/murl
murl https://mcp.deepwiki.com/mcp/tools | jq -r '.name'

https://github.com/turlockmike/murl
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2026-02-21 00:15:29+00:00
the difference between a prison and a concentration camp isn't the facility, but the prices by which people are brought there. Previous administrations deported people, but they deported people who were in the country illegally, as opposed to grad students who published op-eds disagreeing with the administration, refugees who entered the country legally and properly followed the asylum process, and US citizens.

Incarceration without process is not normal in the US or in any functioning democracy.
by mrighele | 2026-02-21 00:16:00+00:00
I still use Facebook. Not often, let say once or twice a month, but I live abroad and FB is the only way to contact some people.

My feed is far from good, but not horrible. Once you interact a minimum with it (like in clicking on some posts, not even putting a like), FB will adjust the content appropriately. Right now for some reason I regularly get problems from International Mathematical Olympiad, chess, and nerd stuff about engineering.

I am not surprised that those that access FB after many years find the timeline full of half-naked women, pseudo-porn and the like: it's probably what men (those still on FB at least) on average crave for.

rant incoming

It is sad. I think that the original FB, the one from middle 00's, was really peak social media: you see stuff from people you know, you interact with them, even playing games with them. You would get in contact with old classmates that you couldn't speak with for 20 years... wonderful.

The point of original FB was to use it as an aggregator for your RL; go to a party, meet some gal, and the following day you would have a new contact on FB that you could contact to go out together again. Think about getting their phone number, but one order of magnitute better.

Heck I remember somehow waking up with a terrible hangover after a party and having a number of new girls as a contact on FB and asking myself "who the heck are they?". Fun times.

Current social media (Tiktok, Instagram, etc) is about seeing how people that you don't know get a life much better than yours. Not necessarily true, but it gets under your skin. How do youngsters use social media without going mad?
by yourapostasy | 2026-02-21 00:16:14+00:00
> The underlying assumption is that most people don't know how to write high-performance concurrent code anyway, so why not just ask them to command the AI instead.

The data economics reflexivity of LLM input means that when you reduce the future volume of that input to the few experts who "know how to write X anyway", the LLM labs just lost one of the most important inputs. All those non-experts who voted with their judgement and left in the wake of their effort to use the expert-written code, grist for the LLM input weighing mill.

I find it is usually the non-experts that run into the sharp operational edges the experts didn't think of. When you throw the non-experts out of the marketplace of ideas, you're often left with hazardous tooling that would just as soon cut your hand off than help you. It would be a hoot if the LLM's and experts decided to output everything and training in Common Lisp, though.

If handed just Babbage's Difference Engine, or the PDP-11 Unix V7 source code and nothing else, LLM's could speed-run and eventually re-derive the analogs of Zig, ffmpeg, YouTube, and themselves, I'll grant that "just let them cook with the experts" is a valid strategy. The information imparted by the activity around the source code is deeply recursive, and absent that I'm not sure how the labs are going to escape a local minima they're digging themselves into by materially shrinking that activity. If my hypothesis is correct, then LLM labs are industrial-scale stripping away the very topsoil that their products rely upon, and it is a single-turn cheap game that gets enormously more expensive in further iterations to create synthetic topsoil.
by kshri24 | 2026-02-21 00:16:19+00:00
Tariffs are great for developing countries. It protects their nascent industries/businesses that are not even ready to compete with those from developed countries and specifically to prevent developed countries from dumping goods (look up anti-dumping laws). Tariffs suck for developed countries as it just raises tax on its own citizens without any benefits that are enjoyed by developing countries.

> being the devil when the US implements them, and being double-plus-good when the European Union implements them (or China or South America).

You can also flip the argument and say that it is "double-plus-good" when USD is reserve currency but is the devil when Euro, Yen, Yuan, Rubles, Rupee et all want to be reserve currency too. Why does US admin go bananas when the topic of a BRICS currency is brought up?

Developed countries have levers. Developing countries have levers too. That's how balance has been maintained all these years since the World order was established post-WW2. Now if US wants to undo this World order (which it itself help setup) and wants to behave like a developing country, then developing countries will encroach on areas US holds dear to it: USD as reserve currency, cross-border transactions through SWIFT, imposing sanctions etc. Remember that it is not US alone that holds all the cards. Everyone else has their own cards as well.
by ImJamal | 2026-02-21 00:16:21+00:00
If there is a direct call to action then they should be held responsible, but like I said I don't know what the context is or what was said in the Belfast situation.

The words the Nazis said were irrelevant. They directed people to kill and as such they were guilty.

I think someone who goes and attacks somebody is guilty. They cannot use the excuse they were following orders. The words didn't take control of them like a spell. They made the conscious choice to commit violence and as such the guilt is on them, not the bat.
by keyle | 2026-02-21 00:16:55+00:00
And yet, every 3-4 posts, Facebook will start interjecting posts that are outrageous, meant to create response. If she interacts with any of those, e.g. even open it wide, or stay on it a long time, BAM, more of those posts next visits.

And the cycle continues and grinds your account down to a complete hellish nightmare where you hate your city, your local councils etc. It's all a rigged platform for creating divide and hate. It drives clicks, it drives ads, it drives agendas.
by xorcist | 2026-02-21 00:16:59+00:00
> it seems like the were fulfilling their legal obligation (at the time)

Rather, their illegal obligation (at the time)?

It was clear from the start these import tariffs are illegal. Only congress can set them. It says so in the constitution! Hand waving at some pretend emergency doesn't give you the right to ignore constitutional law.

The logistics companies should probably have fought these clearly illegal tariffs from the start. Instead they played along and collected the fees. There's probably some interesting legal precedence here to be made, should this argument hold in court.
by aembleton | 2026-02-21 00:17:09+00:00
I can recommend using Social Fixer addon [1] on your laptop. On my phone, I use Nobook [2] which isn't quite as effective. They both do a good job though of removing loads of the useless stuff on Facebook.

1. https://socialfixer.com/

2. https://github.com/ycngmn/Nobook
by thot_experiment | 2026-02-21 00:17:10+00:00
Yeah, she's great. I don't know if I would say she's not slop, but it's the sort of slop that serves as a foundational block of the lexicon of memes I use to communicate with my friends. I don't think this is new, imagemacros/memes are also slop. Maybe I'm using the word wrong?

I guess to me it's kind of synonymous with "content" [mildly derogatory] as to differentiate it from effortposting. She primarily makes content, it's not always art but it doesn't have to be.
by AgentME | 2026-02-21 00:18:02+00:00
And Bluesky is better because you're not locked in and can export your posts, follows, and followers off of their infrastructure if they start being evil or you randomly feel like it. Companies like Twitter effectively wield network effects to stop people from leaving. All of one's activity on Twitter increases the sunk cost to keep them on Twitter in a way that's not true for Bluesky.
by kube-system | 2026-02-21 00:18:53+00:00
This is actually the scariest part of the article for me.

It's clear we've got to the point where at a glance it is hard for those who are otherwise unaware to tell the difference between AI slop and organic content.

If nerds on HN can't tell the difference between an AI slop influencer and a fairly well-regarded human influencer... how can we expect the rest of the public to tell the difference when it comes to science, health, civics, politics, etc???

We're at the cusp of a distrust and misinformation cliff that is going to be terrifying in magnitude.
by upboundspiral | 2026-02-21 00:19:33+00:00
There is actually, though I suspect it's a different one I found.

https://github.com/jopdorp/build123d-freecad (it also supports cadquery)

Set it up today and I am really liking build123d in general. I've always wanted something code-based for CAD and I can't believe I missed something this promising.

Frankly even the visualization tools that you can plugin like OCP Cad viewer mean that outside of complex assemblies you can do everything in your editor of choice.
by zokier | 2026-02-21 00:19:38+00:00
I do wonder how good results you could get with a good capture setup, good macro lens, and high-resolution DSLR. Of course combined with state-of-art software. By the specs something like Canon R5ii + 100mm 1.4x macro should get up to almost 3um per pixel resolution; intuitively that should result also very high detail 3d models. Managing depth of field might be a problem though.
by dinkelberg | 2026-02-21 00:20:45+00:00
Melatonin pills seem to have extremely bad quality control:

"Melatonin content varied from an egregious −83% to +478% of labeled melatonin and 70% had melatonin concentration ≤ 10% of what was claimed. Worse yet, the content of melatonin between lots of the same product varied by as much as 465%.

[...]

The last disturbing finding was more than a quarter of melatonin products contained serotonin, some at potentially significant doses."

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5263069/

"In products that contained melatonin, the actual quantity of melatonin ranged from 74% to 347% of the labeled quantity. Twenty-two of 25 products (88%) were inaccurately labeled, and only 3 products (12%) contained a quantity of melatonin that was within ±10% of the declared quantity. [...] Serotonin was not detected in any product."

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2804077

"Half of the products tested met the label’s claim for melatonin, which means they fell between 76 and 126 percent of the claimed amount. Of the products tested, 20 had between 0 and 76 percent of the labeled content, and 35 had between 126 and 667 percent."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2025/06/25/melatonin...
by RickJWagner | 2026-02-21 00:21:21+00:00
I remember when mp3 music first became available and sharing sites like Limewire popped up.

So many people were sharing music ( depriving artists of their pay ) that it looked like a real problem. How could they possibly deter all those music takers?

It turns out they only needed to catch a few, and fine the living daylights out of them. A fine of $100,000 was sufficient to scare everybody back to honesty.
by shablulman | 2026-02-21 00:21:48+00:00
It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of a fresh social graph, especially when the migration feels so organic. However, the author makes a poignant point about the inherent tension in building a protocol while simultaneously acting as its primary, VC-backed gatekeeper.

The real test for the AT Protocol will be whether it can truly decouple from Bluesky PBC before the pressures of monetization or an exit strategy kick in. Right now, we’re benefiting from the "honeymoon phase" of a platform that needs growth more than revenue, but history suggests that the bridge to true decentralization needs to be fully built before that dynamic inevitably shifts.
by bitwize | 2026-02-21 00:22:16+00:00
When I lived in the northeast, every time I saw an opportunity for embedded work, or traditional UI work (Qt, etc., almost invariably for things like screens on medical or scientific equipment and almost never for desktop applications) it paid 1/2 to 2/3 the going rate for a midlevel webshit engineer. Maybe I just wasn't looking in the right places.
by hurricanepootis | 2026-02-21 00:22:24+00:00
As someone who is an AUR maintainer with at least 150+ packages, I always dread seeing new AUR packages. A lot of people don't read the packaging guidelines, don't use tools like `namcap` and `extra-x86-64-build` to test their packages, nor do they read other PKGBUILDs to write their stuff. It's pure slop, and I have wasted too much of my time fixing shitty PKGBUILDs because I wanna use that piece of software
by perrygeo | 2026-02-21 00:22:24+00:00
Doing things "faster" and "easier" is an interesting way to put it. It places all of the value on one's personal experience of using the AI, and completely ignores the quality of the thing produced. Which explains why most stuff produced by LLMs is throwaway garbage! It only reinforces the parent comment - there is virtually no emphasis on making things "better".
by smcin | 2026-02-21 00:22:25+00:00
You're overlooking that sudden, unexplained or counterintuitive movements in the actual prediction market itself, well before the event occurs/market resolves can themselves convey information, about what apparent insiders think (or whales want to manipulate the market to think).

Obvious example: Polymarket now has 69(!) markets involving Iran: https://polymarket.com/predictions/iran

Consider the timing of those markets wrt 2026 national elections in US, Israel, also Sweden, legislative elections in France, Germany (as canaries for their next general elections) plus a possible change in UK PM, plus any possible Ukraine or Venezuela outcomes. And of course events in the stock market or energy markets make certain outcomes more/less likely.

Also, on Polymarket traders often buy and sell before a market resolves, to exploit patterns in other traders.

And consider what happens at major media e.g. CNN now they've partnered with Kalshi, wrt whether the broadcasting certain predictions/viewpoints/interviewees get boosted/suppressed.