MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Give anonymous, constructive feedback to colleagues on LinkedIn
by kgthegreat | 2026-02-21 15:54:35+00:00
FeedbackOK lets you send anonymous, constructive feedback to colleagues using just their LinkedIn URL. It uses AI to ensure insights stay professional and helpful, and recipients sign in to claim and view feedback securely. Built-in safety guardrails help keep things respectful and actionable.

Check it out and let me know what you think!
by monero-xmr | 2026-02-21 15:55:40+00:00
This may be hard to accept - but there are some people who can’t help themselves. They are career criminals and even when presented with honest work they still choose to commit crimes. There exist sociopaths who don’t feel empathy or remorse, and are driven by their own desires and needs regardless of the cost to other people and society. They cannot be rehabilitated. They need to be locked in a cage forever. Society has known about these people since civilization began
by kioshix | 2026-02-21 15:56:14+00:00
About a year ago I wanted to check out LinkedIn. Signed up with my real name, added my employer and past employers, verified my current work email address etc.

About 24 hours later, when logging in to pick up where I left off, I'm redirected to a page that tells me that my account has been locked. For the safety of my account, I needed to verify my identity to continue.

I refused to do so, for the same reasons this article highlights. So I wanted to delete my account and never return. Guess what? You can't delete your account without first verifying.

It took me a few frustrating months of trying to email their DPO (data protection officer) and filling out forms, constantly being routed to regular support with very unhelpful support staff. I actually contacted the Irish data protection agency thing (I'm not Irish, but european), and while waiting for them to process the case, I miraculously got a reply from LinkedIn that my account deletion was being processed.

Quite an infuriating experience.
by alexrezvov | 2026-02-21 15:56:15+00:00
I manage 18 microservices with heavy LLM usage and kept running into the same problem: when I talk to my teams about treating context as a scarce resource, there is no single term for what I mean. "Token efficiency" is a cost metric. I needed a design principle I could name, reference in code reviews, and enforce.

I wrote up what I'm calling the Principle of Parsimony in Context Engineering: https://blog.rezvov.com/principle-of-parsimony-in-context-en...

Core idea: a context is parsimonious when nothing in it can be removed without introducing ambiguity or degrading the result. The goal is not fewer tokens — it's conscious allocation of a finite budget between instructions and artifacts.

Does this distinction hold, or is it just a subset of token efficiency?
What existing formalisms would you apply here?
by bachmeier | 2026-02-21 15:56:40+00:00
This is a good example of why it's insane that nobody at Mozilla cares that they hire CEOs that have only a LinkedIn page. If you want to visit the website of the Mozilla CEO, you have to create an account and log in. No big deal if it's a CEO of a plastics manufacturing company, but when the mission is fighting against the behavior of companies like LinkedIn, it makes me wonder why Mozilla exists.
by bubblewand | 2026-02-21 15:57:11+00:00
> That's the real solution. I don't understand why people still store ssh keys on disk when hardware keys are simple, easy, and significantly more secure.

At work, every place big enough to maybe care about this was so “enterprisey” and “cloudy” that I almost never use/used ssh anyway, even with tons of Linux systems all over the place. Pretty much only to talk to GitHub.

I lose stuff all the time. The idea of these things gives me anxiety. The first time I lost 15 minutes figuring out where I put my hardware key, before I could ssh in to do 20 seconds of running commands, I’d back out of the whole project and return to using a file on disk, guaranteed.

Files on disk are free, hardware keys cost money.

25 years as a backend-heavy programmer, sysadmin, and devops-sort (sometimes all at once, lol). I’ve still never even touched one of these devices, and have only rarely seen one.
by troupo | 2026-02-21 15:57:18+00:00
> I agree that DPA:s, as they are written today, aren't good.

That is, multiple regulations already explicitly restrict the amount of data you can collect and pass on to third parties.

And yet you're here saying "it's not that bad, we don't send eggregious amounts of data to all 17 data brokers at once, inly to 2 or 3 at a time, no big deal"

> In the end, your face is on every store's CCTV camera, your every friends phone

If you don't see how this is a problem already, and is now exacerbated by huge databases cross-referencing your entire life, you are a part of the problem
by jqpabc123 | 2026-02-21 15:57:23+00:00
Has MAGA bothered to consider that instead of creating US manufacturing jobs, Trump's tariffs raise the price of everything needed to manufacture in the USA?

Copper, steel, aluminum, wood, electronics --- and last but not least labor --- because when prices go up, people expect pay increases.

Aside from raw materials, manufacturing in the 21st century will be about two things --- robotics and low cost energy.

Trump's polices are 19 century economics applied to a 21st century world --- and his supporters are the one's being left out and left behind. The only real *winner* here is government --- $200 billion and counting.

https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/democrats/2026/2...
by daft_pink | 2026-02-21 15:57:27+00:00
It seems obvious that having Apple, Microsoft and Google collect and verify age anonymously is better than some weird third party service provider like Yoto.

Not saying I agree with this law. I think I would structure it that age regulated content requires this signal from the device provider in an anonymous format as an opt-in to age regulated content and not as a requirement for every single computing device.
by DANmode | 2026-02-21 15:57:44+00:00
> is this just something wacky with my algorithm?

Yes.

Your training data for algorithmically answering the question of “what will they engage habitually with next?” is ten years old.

They’re almost certainly not resting on this usecase,

coasting on you adding a new friend, or replying to some messages, or doing SOMETHING to steer the “recent context” part of the algorithm.

Which you’re probably not doing, right?

Anyway: coolest blog of the month award.
Love the different-design-per-post trend!
by Keekgette | 2026-02-21 15:57:46+00:00
> It would be interesting to run a semi-controlled experiment to test whether this was a fluke, or if they leaked, sold, or otherwise lost control of my data.

Too much time / energy on your hands? You gave them a unique email ID (which is always the most sensible thing), that's it.

The non-sensible thing was to sign up kn the first place. Nobody needs these narcisstic, BS spewing pseudo-networking places.
by mihaaly | 2026-02-21 15:58:43+00:00
During a property search for rentals in the UK I created a throwaway alias email (to my regular account) as I did not really trust them with my data.
This was not for those requiring me to provide credit check papers and name of children (!! yes, you read it right, name of children!) at the very first contact in their web form just to start conversation about if there is viewing ability or not, and then perhaps schedule one. No. Those were avoided completely (despite the desperate property market for renters, I am not that desperate: eventually we left the UK in a big part because of property troubles). Two of those were reported to the relevant authority (one case got confirmed after several months, but still pending after more than a year. The other sank, apparently. My trust in the UK institutions is not elevated). There were more than two requiring full set of data on the prospective viewing candidate.

The throwaway email was for the ""reliable"" ones. The trusted names. Or those without over-reaching data collection (one big name, Cheffin, one of the reported one, had over-reaching habit).

Having a throwaway alias proved benefitial. From zero spam to my email suddenly spam started to arrive with about 4 / week frequency. Kept coming until the alias got disabled. Cannot tell which was the culprit, only have a shortlist based on timing. But that never ever elsewhere used email somehow got to fraudster elements from the few UK property agent organizations I contacted. In very shor time (few weeks).
by pwdisswordfishs | 2026-02-21 15:58:50+00:00
> IETF is a community that is "all about enterprise use cases" and "not capable of simple". "What is now offered is a blueprint for an authorization protocol", he noted, "that is the enterprise way", providing a "whole new frontier to sell consulting services and integration solutions".

At the end of a talk about Oauth 2.0 at some indie or fediverse conference during lockdown, Aaron Parecki, who was then and still is employed at Okta, was asked if it might not be worth isolating the parts of the protocol/flow that actually requires a service (i.e. protocol-aware server in the loop) from those that don't, so that you could still get limited authentication/identity-tagging if your "provider" is your personal domain where you're just hosting static site. He immediately acted like he was addressing the dumbest person in the virtual room (it was a remote conference), telegraphing through his response that he might actually be on the verge of physical pain having to deal with such an imbecilic question.
by sealeck | 2026-02-21 15:58:51+00:00
> Its like going 70 mph in a sleepy subdivision because a road sign on the interstate says you can go 70 there.

> Trump is taking an law that says "You can do X if Y" and saying "I can do X"

I think it's more like going 70mph downtown because there's a sign saying "if onn an interstate you can do 70mph" -- the "if on an interstate" is pretty important there!
Show HN: MQTT Topic Lab – MQTT client with buttons using command variables
by altug | 2026-02-21 15:59:34+00:00
Hi Hacker News,

I needed an MQTT client to repeatedly send some commands to devices I build, with Postman-like variable substitutions as I was testing different device IDs with similar commands. MQTT Explorer is nice, but I had to write the commands again and again, with different payloads, and I don't really use the visualization feature. I wanted to save the connection, have a client that opens instantly, parameterizes some common variables, and saves the commands I wrote, so here's MQTT Topic Lab.

MQTT Topic Lab allows you to save your most-used commands, send messages with repetition, and use variables to switch commands on the fly easily. It also has a message viewer so you can also see messages on the broker. After doing the hard work of building your commands, you can export it to share with colleagues so they can get started fast. Also supports keyboard shortcuts if you want to move around like that.

It's built with Tauri (Rust backend, React frontend), so it's cross-platform, and quite fast. Also binaries are quite small (6-7 MB). This is my daily driver so I am going to maintain and update it, and maybe add some features you might want to see in the app. It's coded with Claude, but it's not an "AI-slop" software. The code might be rough on some edges, but it's quite well on how it works.

Looking forward to hear your thoughts, you can check it out at https://github.com/alsoftbv/topic-lab and download built binaries for your device to test it out.
by written-beyond | 2026-02-21 16:00:15+00:00
Interesting, I was a mildly heavy cannabis user in my very early teens but stopped short right before starting my junior year of high school. My use was mostly motivated by teen angst and peer pressure, I never really enjoyed it I always felt uncomfortably anxious and hyper sensitive.

This study shows that anxiety was identified in many of the participants of the study, which is pretty close to how I feel now. I am in general and anxious individual and I wonder if this was because of the marijuana use. Well it could also be how anxiety is pretty rampant in my family so could just be in my genes.
by csmpltn | 2026-02-21 16:00:22+00:00
> "The most recent issue is the military question. Europe relied for decades on the "cheap" protection of the USA. Now the USA gave the middle finger to Europe and Europe acts shocked, but Europe is not so shocked when it comes to the military budget it did not spend on self defense during all the time the Americans provided protection."

Fully agree. Europe expects some kids from nowheresville Tennessee to die in a ditch defending Ukraine. The war will be over the second they need to draft 18 year-olds from anywhere in Europe to go defend "Europe". Nobody in France will die defending Poland, nobody in Greece will die defending Latvia. The EU is irrelevant.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-21 16:00:44+00:00
If your only value add was “I codez real gud” you have been a replaceable commodity for over a decade if you were a standard enterprise dev (no offense to enterprise devs - that’s what I was for 25 years until 2020 with various levels of responsibility). It’s finally caught up to BigTech.

Thr value I brought to companies has never been I can write for loops. It’s always been I can use my decade+ of experience with computers to either make the company more money or save the company more money than they are paying me.

Before anyone replies I didn’t have a decade of experience starting out, actually I did. I was hobbyist assembly language then C developer for a decade before graduating from college in 1996.
by hermanzegerman | 2026-02-21 16:01:13+00:00
It's running now with Fedora Linux, but it's still doing everything with 32GB RAM, and it's 2TB SSD what I need. (Editing Documents, doing some light coding, Python, R and browsing the Internet)
I also still get 10hrs battery life out of it.

I've thought already about replacing it, but it doesn't make any sense for me.
Especially that new ThinkPads in the T-Series have worse battery Life than I get right know due to their batteries being smaller and not anymore hot swappable.
by rdtsc | 2026-02-21 16:01:29+00:00
The idea was change the initial approach and not mention deadlines and just see if they’ll fix it. Point to the law indicating they should notify the authorities. Then if they don’t respond, give them a timeline tell them you’re notifying them. Like the original post said this is not Google, not a tech company, this looks like extortion of some sort to them. So it’s not that surprising what their response was.

It all depends on the goal. Is the goal for them to fix it most of all? To get them embarrassed? To make a blogpost and get internet points?
by agnivade | 2026-02-21 16:02:13+00:00
This idea sounds nice, but there's a high maintenance cost to this.

- How will you maintain multiple deployments across multiple regions in the world? Backups, security patches will start to take a toll.
- How granular is the right split? Not every country has a cloud provider. Then you need to start thinking about regions and office timings and then it starts to get all blurry.
by sleepychu | 2026-02-21 16:02:25+00:00
Simplistic tenant isolation and cost tracking :-)

I know there are other solutions to this particular problem but this model is extremely easy to reason about. When the application accesses tenant objects or delegates that access with pre-signed URLs it is doing so with ephemeral credentials that literally could not access the objects in another tenancy.

That and a similar DB isolation, allows most of our handlers to be very simple as far as tenant isolation goes.
by csmpltn | 2026-02-21 16:03:01+00:00
> I'm sure an EU alternative will come up now that the US is no longer a trustworthy partner. A lot of people like myself now have ethical issues with using american products (especially from big tech) and there's a lot of demand for EU-local stuff that wasn't there before.

This is all hot air. If it's so easy to build, it would've been built by now. I bet you that there won't be a single successful European LinkedIn competitor - not for the past 20 years, not now, and not for the next 20. Europe is fundamentally at a deep state of decay at every level. The only way anything might be built, is by banning the competition. At which point you as-well just forget about a social network for professionals, because you're probably working at a gulag and there's no job hopping to be done anyways :)
by doodaddy | 2026-02-21 16:03:36+00:00
These comments kill me. It sounds a lot like the “job creators” argument. If only these pesky regulations would go away I could create jobs and everyone would be rich. It’s a bogus argument either way.

Now for the more reasonable point: instead of being adversarial and disparaging those trying to do their job why not realize that, just like you, they have a certain viewpoint and are trying to do the best they can. There is no simple answer to the issues we’re dealing with and it will require compromise. That won’t happen if you see policy and security folks as “climbing out of their holes”.
by tim-tday | 2026-02-21 16:03:39+00:00
If you can replay motion capture easily robots can soon go anywhere, do anything, function in all jobs.

Currently robots are used in assembly line manufacturing. They’re fast and error resistant. They’re also bolted to the ground. If robots could walk they’d be able to do 10x as many assembly line jobs.

Robots can now walk.
They don’t yet have the specific skill attachments but now the two parts of the equation are both solved. Next step is combining them. You might see robots able to do one or two jobs in the next year.

You might see robots capable of doing basically any job in 5.

AI might eviscerate the white collar job market along the same timeline.
by ahofmann | 2026-02-21 16:03:41+00:00
I just tried the demo and I think, this is huge! If they manage to build a chip in 2 or 3 years, that can run something like Opus 4.6 or even Sonnet, at that speed, the disruption in the world of software development will be more than we saw in the last 3-5 years.
LLMs today are somewhat useful, but they are still too slow and expensive for a meaningful ralph loop. Being able to runs those loops (or if you want to call it "thinking") much faster, will enable a lot of stuff, that is not feasible today. Writing things like openclaw will not take weeks, but hours. Maybe even rewriting entire tools, kernels or OSes will be feasible because the LLM can run through almost endless tries.

Speed and cost wins over quality and this will also be true for LLMs.
by monero-xmr | 2026-02-21 16:03:48+00:00
Non-developed countries do not have functional law enforcement and they are highly corrupt, so any statistics outside of developed countries should be ignored.

For developed countries, none but America have such high levels of immigration nor the racial diversity America has. It is much easier to convince society to promote high-trust empathetic solutions when society is racially homogenous and shares cultural background. It’s impossible to compare America to any European country, although soon it may be possible if immigration continues
by ruszki | 2026-02-21 16:03:48+00:00
My iPhone, when it was new, 3 and a half years ago, could handle two days, while I used it heavily, with hotspot on for hours at places where signal was terrible. GPS was almost always on. And I used it heavily because I was on the go a lot. Two years later it couldn’t handle 12 hours if I use hotspot the same way for half the time as before, because I travel less, and even for that I needed to optimize already some apps.

My watch could handle a day (about 22 hours) with occasional direct network access. Nowadays, that’s out of the question. I cannot use it for the night, only if I charge it twice per day. I bought the exact same time as the iPhone.

I bought a beefy laptop two years ago. I used it with some battery saving option, and never charged more than 80%. I could use it for about 4 hours on battery. At first. Then now, I already can use it an hour less than back then with the same usage.

All of these devices lie to me, that I lost less than 20% of battery health. Where in reality it’s somewhere between 25-50%, and when they wouldn’t pretend that maximum output is any way a good indicator of the real battery life, aka how long you can use a device.

And yeah, apps. If we pretend that I don’t have misbehaving apps all the time. The difference is, that when I bought these devices, I could ignore them completely.
by 8organicbits | 2026-02-21 16:04:16+00:00
A quick web search for "define black" and "etymology blacklist" readily finds "from black (adj.), here indicative of disgrace, censure, punishment (a sense attested from 1590s, in black book)" and several similar results. But I didn't immediately see an etymology based on absorbing light.

I'd be curious to see a regional reference that shows an absorb/reflect etymology.
by simonw | 2026-02-21 16:05:26+00:00
I'd have to setup a new VPS, which is fiddly to do from a phone. If I had a Claw that piece would be solved already.

Cron is also the perfect example of the kind of system I've been using for 20+ years where is still prefer to have an LLM configure it for me! Quick, off the top of your head what's the cron syntax for "run this at 8am and 4pm every day pacific time"?
by lonelyasacloud | 2026-02-21 16:05:35+00:00
Interesting take.

I'd assumed situation was other way around - largely based Apple's continued omission of desktop class functionality for macOS in SwiftUI e.g. tree view, multi-window, sensible undo support etc and addition of of overlapping capabilities to iPadOS e.g. Stage Manager, mouse support etc.

Looked very much like Apple were on reasonable path to replacing macOS's aging NeXTSTEP UI underpinnings by evolving iPadOS UI into a replacement strategy.

Hope article is right, it would be good to see Apple's give their desktop platform a bit of the love they've focused on their other platforms.
by blahgeek | 2026-02-21 16:05:39+00:00
Although macOS do provide many little known useful tools (besides this, there’s also dtrace, pf, etc), I still run a Linux VM in my MacBook for daily work. Thing is, the effort I spend on learning these tools is almost wasteful unless I’m doing iOS or macOS development. Skills about Linux tools however, is something people considered valuable because of its wider application. I think apple is missing opportunities by not doing more about macOS Server platform.
by philsnow | 2026-02-21 16:05:47+00:00
> In saying “every point,” we obviously have to turn a continuous problem into a discrete problem, and the choice of what level of resolution to use is non-trivial. Right now, when I set that resolution to only make a calculation for each two-yard by two-yard square, I can get the map done in a couple minutes. When I set the resolution at one foot by one foot, the process usually takes over an hour. TL;DR: I can make maps for shots from general areas on a hole pretty quickly, but as I get closer to mapping “every point” on a hole, it gets exponentially more time consuming.

Are you making an assumption that you need to have the same resolution at every point on the course? Maybe there are broad areas of fairway that have similar scores (so lower res is fine) and specific "sharp" areas (you'd probably need finer resolution on the hole-wards side of bunkers vs the side that's farther away from the hole?).

There's lots of techniques in computer graphics for figuring out when you can downsample, and you're going to have lots of opportunities to tune those techniques to the problem of golf course strategy analysis (trees, as you mention, probably cast "shadows" of uncertainty and those shadows would need better sampling).

(disclaimer: I golf <1x / year so I don't even know all the words you used in the article)